The Future of Prof G Media, How We Make the Podcast, and Why Scott Became a Professor

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Welcome to Office Hours with Prop G.

It's Scott-Free August.

Oh, God, we all needed that.

Which means we're bringing you something a little different.

This is the first in a three-part series featuring some of our favorite Office Hours questions.

Today's theme, my favorite topic, me.

This episode is all about questions I've received about my life, my values and the company we're building prop gmedia let's bust right into it

hey scott this is barbarous from istanbul long time listener and reader

i have a question for you that you might not like answering but i think you would appreciate it

so the other day i was reading the corporate life cycle from aspartamodron which i got to know for your podcast thank you for that and he was talking about how long-lasting businesses usually have a succession plan in place.

They usually think about succession just in case and they end up, you know, lasting longer.

But then

I can't help but notice that the podcasts that you release, like profit markers, profit podcasts, yes, they're based on your personal branding, but

what happens if you decide to start one day or if you decide to pass it over, you know, to Ed and the team?

Does that mean you will have to rebrand?

or

do you have a succession plan that you wish to share

barbarous from istanbul that's a good question it would be relevant but i'm going to live forever yes that's right the midlife crisis arrested adolescence tour continues new dates announced okay enough of that yeah

This business is getting to the point where I need to be thoughtful about creating enterprise value.

When it's just a group of a small number of individuals, you don't have a business or an enterprise.

You have a practice, and people are too dependent upon one individual.

I think about this a lot.

Realistically, I'd like to think I have 20 good years in me.

I know I have 10 good years left in me, but okay, still, a lot of people are making good money here.

You want them to continue to make good money.

And any business that's just dependent upon one person business, you know, that's you need to be thinking the way you're thinking about succession strategies.

So what have I done?

One, you noticed I've brought in Ed Elson, and Ed is the co-host of Markets.

At some point soon, sooner, actually, I'd like it to be sooner.

I want Ed to start co-hosting with guest hosts that aren't me, such that over time, Prof G Markets is the brand, not Scott Galloway.

I'm focused on getting us to 20 or 30 million revenue with 15 million in EBITDA.

I think I can do that in the next three to four years, and then build a series of voices that I help foster, create good businesses, and slowly but surely reduce the dependence on my voice.

I always start a job thinking, all right, I either need to have an exit for people or build something where they could have 10, 20, 30 years of real solid earnings and help build economic security.

And this isn't an obvious company that you sell, although to a certain extent, every four years you sell the cash flows and you can actually make tens of millions of dollars now.

If you're in a, we have three top 100 podcasts right now, which is exceptional.

We're very good at what we do, and we've also been very fortunate.

So you can kind of every four years, we're in the midst of this now, renegotiate a deal.

And the way I try and build economic security is I give, and also just selfishly to keep everyone engaged and acting like an owner, is I give everyone, well, not everyone, but the majority of the full-time employees a percentage of our revenues.

And so the question is, how do you maintain those revenue flows after, you know, I start going Biden, if you will.

And by the way, I do not run the business.

My partner, Catherine Dillon, has been running the business for the last few years.

I have talented producers.

So the risk is that I'm kind of the front end of the talent end, and we're going to need to dilute and diversify away from that over the next three, five, 10 years.

And we have a plan for that.

But it's a correct question.

Thank you for asking.

A board strategy, a good fiduciary focuses on succession strategy.

And that is German companies demand that the CEO take at least four weeks off every year.

And if the company goes to shit when they're gone, they fire the CEO because they need an enterprise.

They don't need a practice.

Thanks for the question.

I'd love to learn more about how you produce all the podcasts from selecting guests, scheduling pre-production to post-production of each episode.

How is the team structured for ProfG, and how do you think about producing a high volume of content across brands?

Basically, when the recording session ends, what happens next?

Okay, so I'll go through some of the tactics and then I'll speak to more kind of big picture issues.

We put out, I don't put out.

I don't know, 12 or 14 podcasts a week.

Our podcast universe is Pivot,

which is with my co-host Kara Kara Swisher.

Vox owns the IP there, so we can't take it and go somewhere else.

And then I started a portfolio podcast.

There's ProfG, which is this.

So the adjuncts to ProfG are the following.

Prof G Conversations, which is generally a long-form interview.

ProfG Markets, which is with my co-host Ed Els, and we specifically talk about the markets and stocks.

Prof G Raging Moderates, which is a political podcast hosted with Jessica Tarloff.

Office Hours, which is my favorite, which is, you know, this, where people just write in and we try to give them unfiltered numerous nomalis advice or responses to their questions.

And then numerous no malice, which is George Hahn reading over my newsletter that I put out every Friday.

We get a lot of inbound inquiry to be on the show because we've aggregated a fairly large audience and we tend to hit young, wealthy men

who are impossible to reach because they're all avoiding commercials by being on Netflix and Spotify.

So the great white rhino of the consumer economy and then the election is our audience.

Our audience is the average is a 34-year-old male who makes $150,000 a year.

That is, quite frankly, a baller.

That is somebody the brands want to reach because they're in their mating years and spending money on stupid shit like coffee and watches and shoes and I don't know, SaaS-based software because they want to be more attractive to mates or get promoted or scale their business.

We're pretty, are we ruthless around guests?

We want to find guests that are,

we like famous people, yes, but more than that, we're trying to find people that other people haven't heard of before.

So I really, I love when we find an interesting young person who

so Kyla Scanlon, the economist on TikTok, this, I think she's like 26, reminds me of Ed.

I think she's fantastic.

So we bring her on regularly.

Alice Han, this China analyst from Green Mantle, I think she's just a huge find.

We've had her on three times now.

So Aswat DeModoran, who's probably been on more than anyone else.

I just think he's fascinating.

And

I don't know if you know Aswat.

He's a colleague at NYU, but he's the best, hands down, the best teacher there, maybe one of the best teachers in the world.

So I would rather find someone that people don't know than

when people come on, some famous CEO comes on, I'm like, okay, boss, you're fucking everywhere.

What are you going to tell me you haven't said everywhere in the last 48 hours?

So we try to thread the needle between someone that people are interested in hearing from and someone who's not just whoring themselves out everywhere, which is hard because people don't want to come on their podcast unless they're in whore stage, if you will.

A lot of effort goes into gas.

Now, people think that I am someone who works around the clock and produces just a ton of content on my own.

The key to all of this and the key in business is a very simple statement: greatness is in the agency of others.

Prof G is, I think, 14 or 16 full-time people and probably six or eight contractors, video producers, or video editors, podcast producers, data analysts.

Catherine Dylan runs the business,

editors, fact checkers, finance people.

I have a tech guy who follows me around the world and makes sure that everything sounds good and is well lit.

So we have a ton of people,

much less the co-hosts.

So these people give our stuff scale and make it professional.

So we also have to coordinate with the other pods.

I'm always traveling.

We try to record the same time each week and punch out a bunch of stuff.

So, usually, I'll sit down and five hours later for Prof G and office hours.

I have a bunch of stuff that will trickle out during the week, and then we throw it over the wall to our video team that slices and dices it.

And then they throw it over the wall to our social media team that then just snakes it through all the different channels.

I work a lot less hard than people think.

I'm very good at not working.

I worked pretty much

around the clock for, I don't know, 25 years of my life, call it 25 to 50.

And I decided to kind of get off that hamster wheel and now have a team of people that does all this.

So, what you're listening to now, I started recording about two minutes after I sat down.

And two minutes after it's over, I will leave.

Not because I have work after for two minutes, but I like to make everyone laugh.

And I don't know, I try to tell a bunch of bad jokes for a couple of minutes after the show ends.

And then everyone else starts the work.

We're even talking about having a producer here on London, such that when the production teams end at midnight in the U.S., we go, you know, it's 5 a.m.

here.

Someone wakes up here and can begin working.

And with Prof G Markets, we're going to daily.

So we're really going to have a lot of content, if you will.

I'm thinking about launching two more podcasts.

I'd like to do a Prof G China podcast.

I'd like to do a Prof G economics podcast because we're good at this.

We have an infrastructure.

I find it interesting.

And while I thought I was just going to have sort of some fun with this, it's turning into a real business.

The total portfolio does, and and I was, I'm open about money.

I think it's important people know how to make money and understand it.

If you want to be wealthy, you got to become financially literate and start talking about money.

Anyway, the whole portfolio will probably do about, I don't know, $17 or $20 million this year.

It's a very profitable business.

It's very much a winner-take-all business.

It takes years to build these things.

And just 10 podcasts are responsible or capture a third of all listenership.

And I bet the top 100 capture two-thirds.

So the 1.6 million podcasts, 600,000 put out content every week.

So 5,999,900 are fighting over one-third of the listener base.

That's how difficult it is.

I think it's probably easier to become an NBA player than it is to have a successful podcast at this point.

But if you're blessed with having a successful podcast, it's a very lucrative business because the means of production here, I did an analysis for every one person we have, we get about 50,000 downloads or listeners.

And I did the same analysis across

Comcast and Disney, and they're getting about 10 or 15,000 views or listens for every one person or employee they have.

So the means of production are more efficient here.

And so while these are small business, $20 million isn't a big business, it's very, very profitable.

It's growing 20% to 30% a year.

And I think that, and now my greed glands are going again.

I'm starting to think about launching new podcasts, packaging it all.

And we're very, we're a disciplined company.

You know, we try to make great content.

We try to be fearless.

We try to be entertaining.

One of our cultural standards is we overcompensate people.

People never think they're overcompensated, but they are, at least here at ProfG.

We are, to a certain extent, monetizing my brand and background.

We get exceptional advertiser rates.

If you just run ads on

an ad network or on AdSense, you're getting $2 or $3 CPMs.

We get between $30 and $50 CPMs because see above.

We get this incredibly attractive audience and we make really good money.

And I don't want to go through the hassle of hiring and firing and upskilling.

So we hire good people I've worked with for a long time or that come highly recommended.

We pay them 30 to 50% above market and they don't leave.

And I find that's just an easier, more enjoyable way to run a business and your life, so to speak.

So I don't do it to be a good, oh, I do it.

I try to do it to be grateful and put money back into the economy.

But it's also, I think, a business strategy that works if you're blessed with a company that's really profitable.

And it's all a bit of a flywheel.

The podcast create speaking opportunities.

I I make about $4 million a year speaking.

I charge an average of about $125,000, $150,000 a speaking gig.

I do about $30,000 a year, $25,000 a year.

The books, I make about a million, a million, two on each book.

Is that right?

Maybe a million and a half, including international.

And obviously the podcasts.

The podcast and the speaking support, the books.

And then the newsletter that goes out every week, we don't monetize.

We've just started monetizing.

We're making about $8,000 or $10,000 a newsletter doing a getting an advertiser sponsor.

That goes out to about 300,000, 350,000 people.

It used to be half a million, and then we cleaned out the people who weren't, hadn't opened in a month, a lot of bots.

And it all is sort of a flywheel, right?

The downloads inspire more book sales.

The book sales inspire more speaking gigs.

The speaking gigs, you know, inspire more newsletter, newsletter, more downloads, and the wheel flies, right?

So we're trying to create a kind of a content flywheel that supports it.

But yeah, it's a nice business.

It's a media business.

And once you hit a certain scale, it's very profitable.

But no, again, let me just finish where I started.

Greatness is in the agency of others.

What you're seeing or what you're hearing is about an hour and a half of my time.

And I would bet every episode is somewhere between 20 and 40 hours of someone else's time.

Even the person who runs this company, Catherine, tends to listen to almost everything.

There's video editors involved, sound engineers, the producer who lined up the guests, who got the questions from Reddit.

As you can imagine, it's a decent lift.

But like anything, the only really rewarding things, the only way you make a lot of money, the only way you have really interesting life is pretty much directly correlated to just how fucking hard something is.

And

this is that.

Thanks for the question.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Hey Scott, this is Sean Kong from the Sunshine State of Florida.

I'm a huge fan of you and all of your shows.

While I've heard you speak about many, many things, and this show is called Office Hours, I've somehow missed you discuss your life working in academia.

I began adjunct teaching on the side while working in the clinical world of healthcare.

I realized I absolutely love teaching, and more importantly, I loved helping students discover their potential career path in healthcare, despite the fact that I still have much to learn in my mid-30s.

This year, I accepted a full-time position as a teaching professor at a university in Florida, which has been an amazing experience thus far.

My question for you is, what originally got you motivated to teach?

And did your feelings change about teaching as the years went on?

Like you, I'm not coming from a PhD background, but rather from working in the clinical world.

I fear there will eventually be some sort of ceiling effect for me, both financially and just the idea of teaching the same thing year after year.

I'm grateful for what I'm doing and I'm enjoying what I'm doing, but I also like looking at the crystal ball and I'm just eager to continuously grow as both a person and a professional, which is why I love all your shows.

Thanks for your answer, and thanks for all that you do.

Wow, Sean from Florida.

We're going to need a bigger boat.

So let's bring this back to me.

My whole life, I've wanted to be a teacher, I thought I would really enjoy it, and I'd be good at it.

And I contemplated when I was in business school, applying to the PhD program and getting my PhD and pursuing a career in academia.

And a couple things happened.

One, my mom got very sick, and I knew that I would need to start making money, that I just didn't have the kind of the capacity to take on another three years of student debt or or not be making money in a PhD program.

And also some of it is less noble.

I just thought I'd really like to get out there and start making real bank.

And I didn't see how I was going to do that as a prof, at least initially.

So I went out, I gave myself 10 years before I would go back to teaching.

And exactly 10 years later in 2002, after graduating from Haas in 1992, I joined the faculty at NYU.

And one of the motivations for joining was I thought I was going to be rich and that I could leave and just go focus on teaching.

And I took a job paying $12,000 a year as an adjunct professor at NYU.

And as, you know, you have your plans and then God laughs.

My company read envelope did go public and on paper I was worth a lot of money.

And then I wasn't when the dot-bomb

implosion happened.

So I kind of woke up and realized I was an adjunct professor making $12,000 a year.

Now, having said that, I think academia is a wonderful career.

It's definitely a caste system.

It's definitely some of the most discriminatory business in the world.

Essentially, the people in charge hire their PhD buddies.

They write bullshit bullshit research, which is 98% of

peer-reviewed academic research.

It's just bullshit to give each other citations such that they can qualify.

They can get tenure, which is guaranteed lifetime employment, which translates to student debt.

As two-thirds of these individuals within 20 years are totally unproductive and overpaid.

And tenure is this kind of this grift where because Galileo said the world might be round and we thought we need to protect academics, we've decided that the guy who came up with Gap 1 accounting in 1985 deserves lifetime employment.

It's just fucking stupid.

The result is a crowding at the top of the pyramid, and young academics who are really outstanding have trouble moving up because these people will not leave.

And most of this quote-unquote tenure is nothing but a guild and a tax on young people, which translates to student debt.

The administrative state is out of control at universities.

My department chair, or one of my department chairs in marketing, was essentially a pretty weak academic who was a functioning or semi-functioning alcoholic.

So I know.

Let's give her an administrative role.

Look, you're going in as a practicing professor.

Here are some tips.

One, this is a business.

And the way you increase your compensation is by putting butts in seats.

You're probably not going to do great peer-reviewed research.

I was thinking about doing peer-reviewed research and then I read it.

I'm like, this is stupid.

None of this shit has any relevance to anything.

And so I started doing a lot of research, but I did it on the guise of a private company called L2.

And I got way more press and kind of private sector impact than any, almost any of the peer-reviewed research, maybe with the exception of some of the peer-reviewed research that the finance department does which bubbles up guys like david yermak and aswat the motor and his his is in peer-reviewed research but it's just so powerful but anyways what i found is that the key to a currency and there's four or five of these people essentially at nyu stern we have four or five ringers and that is someone a professor that everyone feels like they got to take a glenn oaken or a sonia marciano at nyu they are clinicals they don't have phds they're practicing professors but they're outstanding teachers.

And because it's a business, they have to have a certain number of classes that everyone, if they take three or four of these, they feel like they got their money's worth.

Those people have real currency and power.

I became one of those people.

I became one of their ringers.

And so I could put 500 butts and seats every year, which at $7,000 per class, which is what we charge at NYU Stern, you're technically generating $3.5 million in income.

They're paying you a lot less than that, but you have some currency.

So the key for you, my friend, is just becoming outstanding at teaching and getting more butts and seeds.

Some of the, I would avoid the administrative state, you know, if it's a means of helping out, fine.

But for the most part, I think it's mostly a waste of time.

I find that most of the administration and kind of program stuff at on campus is just people pushing paper to each other.

And my career took off when I decided I was going to do nothing.

I was never going to spend any time on campus unless I was teaching.

to do a market check.

And what you do is you quit every three to five years without quitting.

Every three to five years, I would interview at another university.

I'd get called by a Cornell or a Wardener or Columbia.

I'd interview, I'd find out what the offer would be, and then I'd go to the dean or my department chair and say, I don't want to leave.

I'd be transparent, but this is my current value in the marketplace.

I knew I had some currency because, fortunately, for me, the marketing department was not very strong in terms of in-room teaching.

And they would match it.

And so, you know, you got to recognize that the leadership of universities generally sees adjuncts and clinicals as sort of, I don't know, like Russian soldiers that they just kind of throw into the meat grinder.

And that is, oh, it's your calling.

You don't actually need health benefits or money.

We save that for the tenured faculty.

So you have to create your own currency through butts and seats, and then you have to leverage it by occasionally interviewing with another university.

That's kind of the politics of how the sausage is made.

Having said that, You generally are in an environment where people are not assholes.

They fight over every little thing because there's so little at risk or there's so little to be gained.

But generally speaking, the people are pretty nice.

The best academics are some of the most inspiring people you ever run across.

Being on campus is incredibly inspiring.

You do feel as if you're adding value.

Being around young people is just incredibly, I don't know, invigorating.

But let me finish where I started.

A lot there, lot there.

A lot of trauma, a lot of PTSD, but a lot of reward too.

Thanks for the question, Sean.

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