Overtime – Episode #657: Scott Galloway, Don Lemon

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welcome to an hbo podcast from the hbo late night series real time with bill ma

all right here we are he is the author of the new book the algebra of wealth scott galloway and he's an award-winning journalist who hosts the don lemon show podcast on lemon

um okay

Scott, why is it more important to find your talent than your passion, as you suggest in your book? Oh, yes, what a great interesting point.

Find your talent over your passion.

Anyone who tells you to

follow your passion is already rich.

This is true. That's true.
That's good, right?

And the guy telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron ore smelting.

This is your job. Your job is to find your talent and then develop mastery.
And in an industry that has a 90 plus percent employment rate, you want to be a model, an athlete, an actor.

Just keep in mind, if you don't get bright signals from a very early stage that you're in the 0.1%, which Don is, find an industry that's boring, that you can develop mastery.

You know what you're going to become passionate about? Making a shit ton of money so you can take care of your kids and your parents.

It is terrible advice for young people. They're amazing industries.
We're going to have five people leave vocational programming and only two are going into it.

The two-thirds of kids who don't have an opportunity to go to college have real opportunities as long as we stop shaming kids who don't go to an elite college and end up in a romance industry.

Or in a tent.

Find your talent. Find out what you're good at.

And if you become a ninja master at something, the accoutrements of that, being relevant, making money, having a larger selection set of mates than you deserve will make you passionate about whatever that thing is.

Yes.

But you can have both. Sometimes you find your passion, which is your talent.

I feel like I've done that, and yours is making money to say that I'm rich. Look who's talking.
I mean, come on. Okay, go.

Yeah. But you're in.
Oh, you're rich? You're in the 0.1%.

You guys literally, how many, let me ask you this, how many comedians do you know that are outstanding but don't make a very good living?

None. None?

Outstanding?

I think eventually talent outs. Yeah.
Now, that's not to say that anybody mediocre can have a few good years, but long careers, generally, I mean, show business is full of bullshit, full of it.

But the one thing it does adore is talent. And it usually gets that right.
I mean, Spielberg isn't Spielberg because, you know, he.

Okay, Spielberg. There's 180,000.

Sorry, go ahead. But even in comedy, like, who do you think is a big phony?

Oh, I'm not going to call anyone a big phony. What I'm going to use is data.
180,000 of the most talented creatives in the world are in SAG AFTRA. It's not easy to get into the union.

And last year, 87% of them didn't get health insurance because they didn't make over $23,000.

The return on your invested capital, and when you're a young person, you're really owning the capital as your time, is going to be inversely correlated to how sexy the industry is.

The romance industries are just harder. I mean, I take your point.
I mean, I remember doing an editorial. I think it's probably in my book.

But this comedian said, well, so I do out May 21st. By the way, you set him up for a joke and you missed it.
I said, you should have considered

a bill.

You said how many people are phonies. I mean, mean, this is.
Oh, yeah.

Oh, I got that out. But there was one in there that is very adjacent to it.

A long time ago, I talked about the fact that whenever you see people, especially at award shows and so forth, and very often their speech that's always so inspirational is about, kids, follow your dream.

But the dream is always show business. That's right.
Like, it's the only dream

or sports. Like, follow your dream.
But that's,

and to your point, like, don't follow it unless you really know that you're made for it because competition is so intense, especially in these kind of fields, that

if you veer from anything that you're not innately very suited for, you will fail. You have to be perfectly suited for it, and you're right, I think

that's great advice for kids. Yeah, but the top 50% of tax accountants have a pretty good life.
The top 50% of basketball players play JV in high school. Right.

It's just, there's just a different, it's like Florida real estate. When everybody wants it, it gets bid up to prices that are unsustainable.

And when no one wants it, that's the opportunity to invest.

Quite frankly, you want to invest in industries that aren't sexy because it's just much, you're just going to bang your head against a wall unless you are outstanding in the industries that the two of you are in.

You need plumbers, I need a new roof right now, and it's going to cost me a half a year's salary. What happened to your roof? It's old.

I mean, roofers make a lot of money is what I'm saying. If the lawn folks make a lot of money, plumbers make a lot of money.

But I mean, I could see somebody watching this and going, you guys don't want to get on a roof.

No, you don't want to, but.

I know. But it's easy for us to master.
Get on the roof.

Come on.

Somebody's got to do it, Bill. I know.

Okay. All right.
In my next life, I'll be a roofer. Don,

what do you.

No, I feel very fortunate.

What do you think of the hubbub, Don, over NPR's alleged

liberal bias, the NPR flap. That was the big story last week.
What do you think about that?

Someone who's had his tussles with media. I think there's always room for improvement.

And it's unfortunate. I don't listen to NPR as much as I'm sure many people do.
I don't get to listen to it. But yes, it does have a liberal bend.

But I think a lot of media companies need to do some self-examination about what's happening inside the company.

DEI is, look, there are some great things about DEI, but it's not all, you know, roses. And I think we need to take a look at it and we need to sort of do some rejiggering because it's gone too far.

It's become a religion. And if you don't abide by the religion,

then

you get kicked out of the church.

Look,

NPR should return the 1% of funding they get from the government so they can just be naked and unafraid about their bias, like the rest of media.

They don't, when you take money from the public, you have a responsibility, as Harvard does, which is 98% Democrat versus 2% Republican, to have some semblance of a balanced scorecard.

I don't think it's worth it for them to take any money from the government. They can just have the bias they want.

But see, what you just said, which I think is absolutely true and completely reasonable, and I think Normies,

who I try to speak for,

would not have a problem with that. That is the exact kind of thing.
If you said that on NPR, they'd fire you.

And you've been fired enough, haven't you?

I'm going to get a figure for that. I'm going to get a lot of shit from liberals for saying what I said.

I do have a book coming out, and I write about that. I write about that.
I like DEI, but when it becomes a religion,

it can be used as a conversation. They take everything too far.
Yeah.

I mean, if I had to write one book about the liberals, do you take everything too far? It started, it's fine. It's still on your side.

It started fine. 60 years ago, there were 12 blacks at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard combined.
51% of this year's freshman class at Harvard is non-white. That's a tremendous victory.

The question is, where do we move from here? And the bottom line is, affirmative action is wonderful, but it shouldn't be based on visible characteristics.

That causes more trouble than it solves right now. It's not needed.
What we need is affirmative action.

I'm not done yet.

What we need is... Burn him, heretic! Monsters! What we need is affirmative action based on color called green.

Poor kids deserve more help.

This is a sign of victory in our nation. You would rather be born gay or non-white than poor.
So let's help the poor kids out.

Letting in the Indian daughter of a private equity billionaire isn't diversity.

I'd rather be born rich, I'm just saying.

Me too.

Yeah, but it was actually more fun getting rich.

If you're born rich, you don't ever appreciate it. And they're up on the roof

trying to feel like a regular guy.

What does the panel think about Harvey Weinstein's case being overturned? Oh my gosh.

I did not see that.

I did not see that coming. I had this question last night at the Time 100.

You can't win with this because

he's guilty, but still in Los Angeles. He's been proven guilty.
He's not going to get out of prison. But there were some issues with the trial, right?

The judge did apparently allowed some testimony in that was prejudicial instead of probative. All right, so, but I feel awful for the victims.

But I think that just like anyone else, Donald Trump is facing the music in a courtroom in New York City. Harvey Weinstein, he deserves a fair trial.

Harvey Weinstein, whether you think he's a monster or not, he deserves a fair trial. That is our legal system.

Now, is it a setback, what I was asked last night, is it a setback for the Me Too movement? No, I don't think it's a setback. I don't think women will allow that to happen.

I just think it's another test.

But, you know, under our legal system,

you're supposed to get a fair trial. Everyone's supposed to be treated equally.

It seems like the prosecution blows the case so many times. Like, did they need to bring those women?

I mean, the reason why this got thrown out is they brought women who were not like absolutely in his case. And they could have just brought those just as character.

And we all knew that he did it a thousand times. Exactly.
But technically, that's what's going to get him off.

And by the way, he could go free because then the lawyer in California is going to say, well,

this case is predicated on the one in New York, and that one's out. I don't think he's going to go.
I agree with you. That could happen.
It could happen. I could be wrong.

I don't think that's going to happen. Well, look,

he's never going to win the Oscar again, I'll tell you that.

All right.

Occasionally, when you have a construct that you try to scale, occasionally they're going to get wrong. By the way, I don't know if you heard O.J.
Simpson died a few weeks ago.

All right, guys. Thanks for coming aboard.
Thank you very much, Ross. You were great.

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