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Scott Galloway: Unfiltered lessons for business and life | Masters of Scale

Scott Galloway, creator of Prof G Media and NYU business school professor, joins Masters of Scale host Jeff Berman to answer your questions with his trademark wit and candor.

Scott GallowayguestGreat Minds Jeff Bermanhost

Oct 17, 202437mWatch on YouTube

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35 min read · 7,316 words

0:00 – 1:39
The number one source of retention
1. SGScott Galloway
  Everybody interviewed everybody, and we liked each other and we had fun. Um, and, you know, couldn't pull this off now, but we used to all take company trips, no spouses allowed, consumption of alcohol encouraged.
2. JBJeff Berman
  It's a pretty good bet you recognize that voice. That's business professor, best-selling author, and prolific podcaster Scott Galloway. He's reminiscing about how he built company culture early in his career.
3. SGScott Galloway
  I had read this study when I was younger saying the number one source of retention in any company is if the person has a friend.
4. JBJeff Berman
  Hmm.
5. SGScott Galloway
  If they have friends at the company, if they get that dopamine hit when they walk off the elevator and they see friends.
6. JBJeff Berman
  This week on Masters of Scale, we've asked Scott Galloway to answer your questions. Think of him as the slightly acerbic, sharp-witted friend at the office who's not shy about giving advice. It's a bit of a different episode for us, a great hang with Scott's typically unfiltered takes. We think you're going to enjoy this conversation. [gentle music] This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. Scott Galloway is the creator of a popular newsletter and podcasts under the moniker Prof G Media. He's also a business school professor at NYU and the author of best-selling books about our economy and culture. Scott agreed to tackle a wide range of topics with us, most of them inspired by questions from you. We're getting into issues like when CEOs should speak out on politics, the disruption caused by artificial intelligence, and building company culture. First, we wanted to hear about Scott's approach to scale in his own life and work. Scott, welcome to Masters of Scale.
7. SGScott Galloway
  Oh, thanks for having me,
1:39 – 5:09
How Scott Galloway scales his ideas
1. SGScott Galloway
  Jeff.
2. JBJeff Berman
  You've done an extraordinary job scaling the distribution of your, your ideas, um, your worldview. Um, uh, what, what has worked best for you on that front, and what, what can our audience take from that as they try to extend, uh, the reach and, and influence that they have?
3. SGScott Galloway
  People consistently come up to me and say, "I just think the amount of content you push out is remarkable. You must work eight hours a week." I'm fundamentally a lazy person. I work 30 to 40 hours a week. I'm really outstanding at doing nothing. Um, what I'm pretty good at... So my core competence is storytelling. My, my superpower, though, attracting and retaining talented people. I have 14 people at Prof G Media. If you wanna scale your content, you gotta focus on, what part of this content am I really good at? And then hopefully you have the resources to hire talented people to kinda build it out. That's the most obvious thing, and some people don't have those resources. I'm blessed. But if you find people who are good, you wanna hold onto them, give them a vested interest in ownership in your success. From a qualitative standpoint, and then I'll talk about channels, I'm in a very blessed position, and that is I have people who love me unconditionally and I have economic security, which gives me license to say pretty much whatever the [beep] I want.
4. JBJeff Berman
  Unfortunately, we don't have exactly that same license here. We bleep out those F-bombs mostly to avoid being blocked by the podcasting apps in certain parts of the world. Anyway...
5. SGScott Galloway
  But over the long term, your willingness to be kind of unfiltered, I think over the long term draws people in. So when I write my newsletter, I have a newsletter that goes out to half a million people every Friday, I write as if only my sons are gonna read it, and I want them to understand the world and I want them to understand me a little bit better in an entirely unfiltered, raw way. And I'm very vulnerable. I talk about things like... You know, I talk about sex. I talk about how... You know, my strained relationship with my father, how I'm a 59-year-old man that hasn't gotten over the death of his mother 20 years ago. I talk about stuff in a very kind of open, raw way. And from a marketing standpoint, the space I'm trying to fill or the opportunity I saw is that straight white men don't talk about their emotions, and people usually in my business are so busy kissing the ass of somebody who they want to invest in their next round or whatever, they don't say, "This company's stupid and the CEO's done a terrible job." So if you can be really kind of... I hate the word authentic, but if you can be a bit raw and unfiltered... I'm profane and vulgar. It turns off people. It turns off advertising. But I think people appreciate it and it's authentic. I'm generally a profane and vulgar person. It's not an act. So I would say try and be, if you're in a position of having some economic security, and most young people don't, but if you do and people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation to speak in an unfiltered manner. And then in terms of channel strategy, I always said, I always thought, "How do I get in front of the emerging medium?" So trying to be as unafraid around content as possible, I think that really resonates with people in a world where they, they feel as if media and content is so starched and so biased. And then I personally am trying to occupy this, this space of men my age who don't, you know, aren't really open or don't really talk a lot about their, uh, you know, their failures or their successes or their joys or their upsets in a, in a, in a really honest way.
6. JBJeff Berman
  Yeah, and, and thank you for doing that. I mean, the- there's precious little of that being role modeled by business leaders. Um,
5:09 – 8:12
Should business leaders speak out politically?
1. JBJeff Berman
  o- on the political side of it, you know, to the extent there ever was neutral, and I'd argue there, there never was neutral, there's certainly no, no more neutral. Um, and we know historically in countries that have faced threats to their democracy, business leaders are the last bulwark. Um, they're, they're the last line of defense. Um, and yet there remains this extraordinary fear about speaking out. Um, go back to Michael Jordan, Republicans buy sneakers too.
2. SGScott Galloway
  Mm-hmm.
3. JBJeff Berman
  Um, what do you say to business leaders who are struggling with when to take that public position, um, or even internally with their team when to say something about, um, an issue that is going to inflame passions on one side or the other, if not both?
4. SGScott Galloway
  So I've been on the board of seven public companies, I think 17 or 18 private companies, and generally speaking, I tell them not to, and that is- [sighs] For the most part, like if you're Ben & Jerry's or, you know, Hobby Lobby or whatever and, and part of your identity or your REI is a political position, fine. But for the most part, I think the American corporation is meant to be a platform to help people garner economic security for them and their families. And I feel like the tech sector got a little out over its skis and that as CEOs started virtue signaling and trying to appeal to their younger employees by emoting and articulating these fairly progressive values that sometimes are disingenuous, and that is that when really push came to shove, they weren't just honest. I, I, I'm, I like a CEO who says, "I'm here to make money and, and create shareholder value that you'll share in, and we're gonna be good citizens, we're gonna be ethical people, we're gonna be respectful of one another, but we don't have to take a political stand on everything, and I don't need to weigh in on George Floyd as the CEO of a company just because it happened." And I, I don't... I, I like kind of the rap of trying to, unless it's part of your identity, stay out of it. And at the same time, I think government and citizens make the mistake of believing that we've personified companies. Companies are for-profit. They are so good at making money. US corporations make more money in a year than, you know, whatever, 150 of the 190 nations in the world make in a decade. They're so good at making money, they shouldn't be trusted to do anything else. And unfortunately, they've done a great job of personifying themselves, and we believe them, and we believe that they're actually trying to connect the world, you know, make the world a better place. No, they're not. They're trying to increase the value of their shares such that the CEO can, can exercise his or her options and buy their second Gulfstream. That is their entire [beep] focus, and to believe anything else is just naive. But for 99% of CEOs, my suggestion would be just avoid it at all costs and say, "We're gonna try and create economic security for you and your family such that on weekends, whatever you wanna do politically, recreationally, if you wanna be a DJ or you wanna go to a, a, you know, save the whales rally, that's your business and we respect your viewpoint, but that's not why we're here."
8:12 – 14:48
When scale becomes detrimental to society
1. JBJeff Berman
  Masters of Scale focuses on the positive lens of scale, on how to get there, you know, uh, the entrepreneurial journey to make it happen. Um, but there's a concern that we don't talk enough about when a company's influence, um, uh, goes beyond what's healthy for society or for even the business itself long term. And you know, y- you talk a lot about the, the quasi-monopolistic companies in our universe and, um, that they're great investments. I'm, I'm curious at what point or, or how you think that scale is actually bad for society.
2. SGScott Galloway
  Societies, basically economies kind of go through a similar cycle, and that is there's a group of talented, hardworking, and lucky people that garner a disproportionate amount of wealth. They tend to become exceptionally influential on government and policies, and they encourage policy makers to create policies that further enrich them. Not that they don't love their country, but no, do away with the import tax on my input, whatever it is, right? Give me favorable tax status, tax corporations at the lowest rate since 1939, which is where we are with, in the US. And then income inequality skyrockets, and the bottom 99% at some point decide the fastest way to double their income is to either kill or get rid of the 1%, and we have a revolution and we start over. The same could be said for companies, and that is companies, uh, scale, and in this environment with kind of network effects and access to s- to capital being such a weapon, that once you get to a certain point, if you have relationships with 93% of the global corporate workforce, you know, Microsoft, if you have 90% of the search market, Google, if you have two-thirds str- uh, share of all social media globally, Meta, can anyone catch up? And then you have so much power and so much wealth, and you have a government that with Citizens United can take your money, um, do you just end up with companies that are sort of impossible to topple, impossible to disrupt, distinctive the product quality? And I think that happens, and the reason why antitrust has been such a powerful... we have such a proud legacy of antitrust until, like, the last 30 years, is that there are a few breakups we look back on and think that we screwed up. When we broke up the AT&T into the baby Bells, all seven of those companies were more valuable than the original, uh, AT&T on their own within about a decade, and things like fiber and analytics and cell, uh, and broadband were all lying fallow in Bell Labs because, uh, AT&T didn't wanna disrupt itself. So yeah, these companies get so big, and the, the reason that antitrust has been sort of asleep for 20 or 30 years is, one, because these companies have weaponized or taken advantage of the fact that politi- or money can just wash over government to an even greater extent than it ever has. I think too big to fail or whatever the term you wanna use, concentration of power, I think the best thing we could do for inflation would be a series of breaking up everything from b- Big Chicken to Big Pharma to Big Tech. So yeah, I think these companies get too big, and whether it's Teddy Roosevelt and trust busting, breaking up the aluminum companies, oil companies, uh, I think we have a proud legacy of antitrust that we've sort of shelved, and I think we're paying the price for it.
3. JBJeff Berman
  Well, and, and, you know, o- often these companies are getting fined, and the fines are just a rounding error when you're talking about trillion-dollar companies paying a billion-dollar fine. So, you know, l- Lina Khan has come in with a different perspective on how to approach this and has been demonized for it. Um, although I saw this morning even Bill Gurley was, was praising her for how she's approaching, um, some of the, the, the gaming of the pharmaceut- pharmaceutical world. Um, what, what's, what's the answer?
4. SGScott Galloway
  Well, I mean, okay, so on a macro level, I think you empower Lina Khan and, and Jonathan Kanter, and we need new laws that... Or not new laws, but maybe apply the Brandesian test where it's more around market channel power, and we need to start breaking up companies. And there's evidence that that's already happening, because quite frankly, the worm has turned. Consumers see, you know, uh, they hear stories about several houses on the block where their daughters are self-cutting, and they think, "Well, why is Instagram even allowed, uh, uh, uh, for a fourteen-year-old girl?" And it's impossible to opt out. I'm, I'm fairly sophisticated with technology, and I've tried to figure out parental control. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't it be really difficult to figure out a way for Instagram to be on my fourteen-year-old's phone? And so I think consumers are just fed up. And so the consumer support has stiffened the backbone of regulators and legislators and lawmakers, despite the fact they've had forty hearings on child safety and social media and passed zero laws. It does feel as if we're on the precipice, the decision to break up or the decision that Google is found guilty of monopoly maintenance. I think people are getting a little bit sick of thinking that Apple is, um, totally, I don't know, in no way complicit with this when it would be pretty easy for them to age gate all of their devices. And I think consumers are starting to feel it, uh, or companies are starting to feel it dealing with these companies. They just feel as if, okay, they're starching all the margin out of the ecosystem here. And even in the marketplace, when you have seven companies responsible for a quarter of the market gains, it means four hundred and ninety-three of the S&P are actually just not doing that well. So these guys are feeling it. Parents are feeling it. And what can we do about it? I think the most immediate thing is antitrust. Um, and then I would remove Section 230 for all algorithmically elevated content. I just don't understand why these companies wouldn't be held to the same standards as old media. If News Corp paid a seven hundred and fifty million dollar fine for circulating misinformation around Dominion voting machines, that was a dumpster fire compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud that was on Meta. They're off Scott three. So I would remove Section 230 content for all algorithmically elevated content. New additional regulation and more aggressive antitrust would probably be where I would start.
5. JBJeff Berman
  We wanted to share with Scott some questions from our Masters of Scale community on a wide variety of issues. Not only is Scott game to tackle pretty much any question in any area of business or life, but we also thought lobbing a set of wild cards his way would make this more entertaining both for him and for you.
14:48 – 22:03
Assessing company culture from the board level
1. JBJeff Berman
  You referenced, uh, the, the, the dozens of board seats you've held. Um, uh, Sally from our audience wanted to know, as a board member, Scott, h-how do you assess whether a company has a strong company culture, whether it is a healthy company culture? Um, is it something you, you even are caring about and are trying to figure out? And is it a forward-looking financial indicator for you when you're sitting on a board?
2. SGScott Galloway
  Yeah, but generally it's hard for the board because the board doesn't spend that much time in the company, and the, the company's, everything about the company is filtered through the CEO. When you've, when you terminate a CEO, I'm going through this right now on one of my boards, you find out all this stuff about the CEO because all of a sudden you're forced to speak to the people below that person. And generally, when you deal with the CEO of a public company, you're generally dealing with the rushed chairman or the rushed chairwoman, and that is the most popular person in his or her fraternity or sorority. And they become very good friends with the board because the board's in charge of their compensation, and they edit and manicure kind of the messaging that the board gets. And I demand or I ask of every board member that at least two or three of his or her reports or other people in the company come in and present something because we just want to get to know these people. Generally speaking, the way a board... The, kind of the board gets very few indications of culture. They can go on Glassdoor. But generally, the way we evaluate culture through a shareholder lens, quite frankly, is retention. And that is you should have eight to twelve percent turnover a year. And if you have a lot more than that, something's wrong with the culture or the compensation. We don't know how much we don't know. We don't know how in the dark we are. And it's also difficult because if you start talking to too many people in the company, it makes the CEO insecure, and you ha- you want to respect their ability to get [censored] done. And so it's difficult. I, I would, I would say that for bigger public companies, you have more of an idea because there's more liquidity around messaging and employees bubbling up. I know more of it. I, I feel like I'm better at building a culture as a CEO than I am, uh, and I've never built a big company, but than I am observing or assessing a culture from a board level. You know, boards basically are there for two things. They're there to, to hire and fire the guy or gal running the company. They're there also to decide if and when to sell the company. That's about it. And maybe make sure the chairman of the audit committee is smart enough to know if there's fraud. But other than that, we're just kind of heckling from the cheap seats. It's the CEO that makes most of these decisions. And so for the, the board to start making comments about culture, what's right and what's wrong with it, I don't know. That, that's, that's gonna be an upward... I would say if you're really, really having issues with the culture and they bubble up to the board level, that means you, you should have fired the CEO about six months ago. What I try and do as a CEO, when I used to do all hands, especially in small companies, I used to try and imprint values from the beginning. I used to start off every all hands with, "I'm Scott Galloway. I'm the CEO of Prophet Brand Strategy. We are about a passion for brand and attention to detail and camaraderie." And, you know, couldn't pull this off now, but we used to all take company trips, no spouses allowed, consumption of alcohol encouraged. I mean, all the [censored] that makes HR people go crazy now because I had read this study when I was younger saying the number one source of retention in any company is if the person has a friend, if they have friends at the company, if they get that dopamine hit when they walk off the elevator and they see friends. And so I thought, and I do that now with Prof G Media, which is fourteen people, I tell them anytime four of you are together, you have my credit card. And I'm not exaggerating, Jeff. They've sent pictures t- uh, to me from Tulum We all got on a plane today and went to Tulum. It's like a Tuesday. And I've said this to them. Any four of them together at any time, I don't care what they're doing, they've got my credit card. So I feel better about my ability to create a culture than I do assessing it from a board level. Board, board directors, I don't... Jeff, have you served on many boards?
3. JBJeff Berman
  Yeah. And, uh, I mean, I, I'd served on the board of Buddy Media, which was founded by our mutual friends-
4. SGScott Galloway
  Oh, yeah
5. JBJeff Berman
  ... Mike and Cass Lazaro.
6. SGScott Galloway
  Mike, yeah.
7. JBJeff Berman
  And, um, you know, uh, they did an exceptional job managing the board in part by, by answering the questions before they got asked.
8. SGScott Galloway
  Mm-hmm.
9. JBJeff Berman
  They were proactive in messaging to the board, and they came up with their own metrics for managing culture. And to your point, if part, you know, half of a board's job is to decide when to hire or fire a CEO, to be proactively messaging, things are good, or hey, things aren't great, but here's what we're doing to fix what isn't working.
10. SGScott Galloway
  Yeah, look, the, the best CEOs are the ones that say, "This is what I'm worried about." Um, you know, they, they, they signal problems. I find boards don't mind bad news. What they hate is surprises, and that is, "Okay, you've had a problem with our operations in China for nine months, and I mean, how long have you known about this?" It's just... Or what, there are 17 lawsuits all around discrimination, and the chief legal counsel is now forcing you to tell us about this? I mean, so, uh, I've always said as a g- a good CEO over communicates during bad times and under communicates in good times. And I've always tried to practice that as a CEO. I always say to people, "If you don't hear from me, it means you're doing really well. When you're in my office a lot, it means something's wrong." And, uh, I think, you know, good CEOs, uh, especially during bad times, over communicate with the board. We have a problem here. I'm gonna look into it. This is what's going on. This is my plan. This is how we're gonna try and fix it here. But, you know, you should know this quarter's we're probably gonna shit the bed in terms of earnings. You, you wanna, you kinda li- I think good CEOs tend to over- underpromise and overdeliver and are very transparent and also willing to make mistakes. It's interesting to go to all hands and just look at the body language of everyone. You know, you can learn a lot if they... I love going to all hands if they'll, you know, I'd say, "Hey, I'd love to come to an all hands sometime." And I just think it's really interesting to just... You can just see the body language in the room of how people are reacting to what they're saying. Um, but it's so important now because there's so much transparency, and young people are so mobile now, and they change careers so quickly. The biggest structural change from COVID is probably remote work, and it's especially acute in the U.S. 70% to 90% of office space is re-leased in Europe. It's like 40% to 60% in the U.S. And so trying to, you know, trying to create a culture without everyone in the same place at the same time is especially challenging. I think that's kind of, that's probably the biggest challenge I think facing these guys right now, is how to, how to maintain and cement... And by the way, it's not all sunshine and daisies. I mean, the culture at Morgan Stanley when I started there, it's the only real job I ever had, was we own your ass. You have no life. You're gonna be emotionally and mentally taxed, uh, physically unfit, and you're gonna make more money than your parents did by the time you're 28. Do you want that? I mean, if you don't want it, if you want, if you want balance, and you wanna be a DJ, and you wanna get into great shape, and you wanna work out and make sure you're home for family time and dinner, you know, go somewhere else. That's a culture. Some people want that. And then I worked very closely with Levi Strauss & Company. They would give everyone summer Fridays. You know? Spend time with your kids. Oh, you're coaching Little League, we're gonna give you another four hours a week. It was very, it was a very maternal culture. So I, I think th- there's all sorts of cultures that work, and as long as you're just kinda clear and you can articulate not only who would do well at this company, but who it's not
22:03 – 23:34
How Scott approaches talent retention
1. SGScott Galloway
  for.
2. JBJeff Berman
  Up next, I ask Scott how he approaches talent retention in his own company.
3. SGScott Galloway
  I wanna be the most influential thought leader in the history of business, and I wanna create a ton of economic value. I wanna create economic security. I wanna get wealthier, but what w- what, uh, you know, almo-- I don't know, maybe I'm too much virtue signaling, but a close second, I wanna create economic security for people I work with. When I was younger, I wanted to pay people less than market such that I could grow shareholder value, give them options, then we'd all get rich. Now I wanna overcompensate people 'cause I don't wanna take outside capital, and my goal is to pay people somewhere between 30% and 80% more than they would get on the, you know, at a com- uh, in the market. That's one of my goals is... And I saw, I got the idea from Netflix. They said they wanted to be the best compensated employees in that deck, and I thought, that's so, so unusual to say, to purposely say, "We want to overpay people." And I thought, I like that. I am gonna try and do the same thing. But I think just being very straight and very honest, what are your objectives? 'Cause if you're the founder CEO of a company, your objectives are gonna bubble up no matter what. You, you know, you get to make these decisions. And then imprinting that DNA very early in the company so people... You know, it's like conceiving a child. The, the company's gonna look, smell, and feel like you. And that's why it's so rewarding and so disappointing because next to having children, it's the thing you care most about if you're a driven person. My companies before my kids were, were literally my children. They looked, smelt, and felt like me. They disappointed me. They enthralled me. And I was up late at night worried about them every night.
4. JBJeff Berman
  As we sit here
23:34 – 26:37
Leveraging AI in everyday life and business
1. JBJeff Berman
  in now the fall of 2024, I think, uh, legally we're not allowed to have a pod- a business podcast without talking about AI. So, um, a couple of AI questions.
2. SGScott Galloway
  Mm-hmm.
3. JBJeff Berman
  Uh, one from Shelly, who emailed us, um, uh, asking us to ask you, aside from upskilling, up- upskilling with AI, what should white collar workers be doing to change their approach to both their jobs and the job market?
4. SGScott Galloway
  I use AI a lot, and what I've said is AI's not gonna take your job. Someone who understands AI is gonna take your job. So I've used AI for every component of my job, and I find it can't replace anything. When I first started playing with AI, I thought, "Oh, I just got a seven-figure book deal for, to write a book called The Algebra of Masculinity. I'm gonna have... I wanna write the first chapter and the last chapter, and I want the middle 10 chapters written by AI with really thoughtful prompts." And it is what it is. It comes back very anodyne. It comes back like a GPU wrote it. It's just not gonna work. But I can type in, "Give me ten, uh, rites of passage from boyhood to manhood across different cultures," and seven of them I knew, and but three of them I didn't, and then I'll go do a deep dive on the three. Or, um, it can't produce a board deck for me to present to a board of a company I'm running, but after I do the deck, I can feed it into AI and say, "Pretend you're a tier one VC who is a bit of a, you know, is a bit of a hard ass w- and, and is very focused on shareholder value through technologic- technical innovation. What are likely the questions I'm gonna get from this person?" And you upload... So I think of it, the way, the way I use AI is as a thought partner. What I would say is, is just start using it, and your, your own mind will start figuring out ways you can incorporate it. You're the warrior. This is a weapon, but you're the warrior, and so you just wanna become masterful with this weapon, and you wanna be... You wanna make sure you don't show up on horseback when everyone else is in Panzer tanks. And so, uh, but I don't, you know, I don't have any blinding insight around what components of your job. It's, you know, people, sure, let, let it use it to write stupid or fairly innocuous emails. Um, don't get used to it though because it does write like a, you know, a computer. But I would say try to take fifteen, thirty, sixty minutes a day, even if it's spending time with your kids, to try and time sneaker drops, which I'm doing with my fourteen-year-old using AI, and you just get competent with it.
5. JBJeff Berman
  My fourteen-year-old, fourteen-year-old and I planned a spring ski trip, uh, by asking, uh, an AI to compare the last ten years of weather data to the, to last year and, uh, project where we were likely to have the best skiing conditions in the western half of the United States. Um, I, I love that personal example of, uh... And it worked out. It, it worked out great. Um, uh, and I love the ex-example of doing it with your kids, uh, getting them comfortable with, with the tools when, when their schools are largely banning the use of them.
26:37 – 28:07
Why healthcare is poised to be disrupted by AI
1. JBJeff Berman
  Um, Scott, the, the other AI question that we wanted to ask came in from, uh, an audience member named Julie on LinkedIn who was curious about your take on AI and, and agentic future, uh, for the business of marketing, um, the challenges and opportunities of using AI agents when it comes to, to brands. Curious for your take on that.
2. SGScott Galloway
  I, I would say the biggest role for, and I'm, I'm related to hospitality, I think that AI, the biggest impact AI will have around industry, and I guess this has to do with chatbots, is gonna be around healthcare. And when I think about my litmus test for evaluating the disruptable, how disruptable an industry is, is I look at its price increases relative to inflation and whether there's been the underlying innovation to support that increase. And the, the two sectors I think I see are most disruptable by those metrics are healthcare and education. In healthcare, seventeen percent of our GDP, m-um, mother whose child suffers from diabetes spends five months of her life managing that child's, uh, healthcare, and it strikes me that AI and chatbots should be able to help her navigate the health insurance, the referrals, the prescriptions, the delivery of the, the medicine, you know, if and when she should actually go to the doctor, uh, y- you know, home glucose monitoring, all that stuff, give her back two, three, four months of her life. I don't think AI is gonna reduce healthcare costs. I think what it's gonna do is give people back time, which I think is probably even more valuable.
28:07 – 30:46
How to increase voting in the U.S.
1. JBJeff Berman
  Noah Kagan, entrepreneur from Austin, um, w- wanted to know as we sit here, you and I are talking, I believe, forty-three days out from the election, um, and roughly half of eligible Americans are not going to vote in this election. Um, how do you think about leveraging technology to get more Americans both to register to vote and actually to cast a ballot?
2. SGScott Galloway
  Well, it's easy. Put it on phones. And Bradley Tusk just wrote an entire book on this, voting on phones. But it's not gonna happen because it would, it would be detrimental. It would benefit Democrats, uh, because when the, when the number of people voting goes up, it's good for Democratic candidates, when the number of people going voting goes down, it's good for Republicans 'cause old, old people who tend to be more Republican tend to be very good at voting. And so there's too many people that would just find reasons for why, you know, voter fraud or whatever it is. But if you wanted to get eighty, ninety percent of people voting, just make it easy and put a... have Apple design an interface, put it on Spotify or whatever, and oh, you know, and, and elevate it every day in people's algorithm. Wanna vote? Just, you know, click here for yes. Uh, so I don't, uh, you know, make it more, make it more accessible. Uh, but I don't, I, I don't know if... I mean, or, and at the same time, is it natural selection? Are the fifty percent who aren't voting, should they not vote? I don't... It's like I just can't... It just... I find it so weird that media's constantly talking about undecided voters, and the media and candidates as a general cardinal rule never say anything negative about voters. I think anyone who's an undecided vo- undec... To say you're an undecided voter at this point is, in my opinion, saying I'm a village idiot. If at this point you haven't figured out enough to make up a decision between these two, whatever way you're gonna... I just don't get it. What, do you drink gasoline for breakfast? Like, who on earth is an un... I just can't figure. They're so close. They're, they're so close. I can't figure. It's so close for me. It's like, uh, uh, come again. So this undecided, I just, I think it's hilarious, but I don't know if it's peop- these people want attention or are pretending to be more thoughtful than they are. I don't know. I, I can't understand. I just can't imagine at this point anyone's an undecided voter. I think the majority of people are like me in my twenties. I didn't, I wasn't obsessed with politics. I didn't think about it till the week before the election, and sometimes I voted, and sometimes I didn't. If it was convenient for me, it wasn't.
3. JBJeff Berman
  Yeah. And, and, uh, I've got Bradley's book teed up, uh, to read, so a great recommendation. He's a He's a creative thinker.
30:46 – 34:26
Responding to an entrepreneurial dillema
1. JBJeff Berman
  Um, uh, Scott, l- l- last question from, from an audience member and, and, uh, I'm conscious that this may be a hard one to answer with, with the amount of information they offer, but I think it's an important one. Um, David emailed, and he said, "I own a fifth-generation business. We're well-established and respected. We're over 100 years old." Um, and he's been running it for the last 10 years. He's been trying to grow it organically through acquisition, broadening services, but they've plateaued and, and even regressed. Um, there's a lot of long-standing workflow, institutional norms, et cetera, that are making it very hard for them to break through, and at times he just wants to replace most of the team and restructure the entire company, but he's concerned about doing that in a company this old with this many loyal employees. Um, I know that there's a... They probably have 100 questions before you could give him, you know, specific advice, but what, what steps do you think David should be taking to figure out what to do with his company at this point?
2. SGScott Galloway
  It's so situational 'cause, uh, I just don't know the s- it could be a group of employees who are very good at what they do, and they're h- they're facing... Market dynamics are bigger than individual performance, and he might be in an industry where there's just headwinds, and there's very little they can do about it other than potentially cut costs. He might have a bad culture with this group of employees that have become where he just needs new people that are overpriced and not very good. Uh, what I would suggest is someone like this needs a kitchen cabinet or a really talented board of directors who have a vested interest in their success, but are, quite frankly, a little bit rapacious, are just gonna look at the numbers, just look at the growth rejections, look at the value of the company, and are gonna have enough experience to know your compensation costs are out of line. Your vendor relationships are not strong. You're too reliant on a small number of consumers. You're in an industry that sucks. We need to either figure out a way to cut costs or raise the capital to try and d- you know, invest in growth categories in your industry. There's just... It's so hard to read the label from inside of the bottle, and one of the big mistakes I made as a young entrepreneur was feeling that leadership was me figuring it all out, that I, I needed to understand, I needed to portray this image that I knew it all and made the right decision, and once I made a decision, I was more interested in convincing other people that I was right than actually being right. And where my companies did much better as I matured as a manager is when I brought in people who just had a lot more experience than me or could look at the company dispassionately and say, "You've spent too much money here. This isn't working. Kill the product. Kill the thing. It's just not working." Or, "Yeah, you're not investing enough in technology. It's pretty clear here," or, "You're undercompensating your people in this space," or, "Why don't you have any salespeople?" Or, "We're in for a rough ride. You need to cut costs, and I'll help you figure that out, but there's just no getting around this." And it's just very hard to do that in isolation of without external voices, so I don't wanna give... I'm worried that if I made any suggestions on what I think might be going on without knowing the industry or the culture, that he or she might listen to me. What I would suggest is you need a board of people who are, uh, uh, emotionally or financially invested in the success of the company, but have enough distance from it to say, "Boss, you're the problem. Eventually you get a bad king. You need to bring in a professional CEO," right? Uh, you know, William Lauder ran Estée Lauder, and the family said, "Okay, we need to bring in an outsider." So, uh, with a family-run business, I think it's especially important you have a kitchen cabinet or a board of, a board of directors or advisors that can give you no mercy, no malice advice.
3. JBJeff Berman
  Great.
34:26 – 37:03
Book recommendations from Scott
1. JBJeff Berman
  Last question, Scott. Um, uh, one book that everyone should read other than one of your own.
2. SGScott Galloway
  Man, that's boring. Strunk & White, Elements of Style. Um, you need to be able to write well. If, if you wanna be... You need to be a great communicator, and the basis, the underlying operating system for communicating well is the ability to write well, and you start with the basics, Strunk & White. Um, that's not very good. Um-
3. JBJeff Berman
  Well, let me, let me ask you a more specific question-
4. SGScott Galloway
  Yeah
5. JBJeff Berman
  ... because you talked about being open and vulnerable, um, uh, especially as a white man in this world.
6. SGScott Galloway
  Mm-hmm.
7. JBJeff Berman
  Is there something that you've read that has inspired you to, to rethink your life or to talk more openly about, about what's going on in the, in the real stuff?
8. SGScott Galloway
  You know, books... So I had, there was some seminal books growing up. I read The Winds of War, and I thought about World War II, and the Diary of Anne Frank, and it was the first time I'd had any sort of connection to my Jewish faith. And, um, but the book, the books, the author that has really kind of, I don't know, like made me just feel much better about the world was John Irving, and he wrote these books about such strange people, and it's like, wow, I'm not as [beep] up in the head as I thought I was. Like everyone's weird. And it gave me, as a young man, I was so insecure about, I was so insecure about my attractiveness or I was so insecure about sex. I was so insecure about how weird my family was. And then you read about, you know, a home for unwed mothers that provides abortions, or you read about a guy whose life changes because he's hit by a baseball and, or as this man who has his dog, his ear bitten off by a dog, and his mother gets assassinated. And you're like, "Wow, I'm, I, I'm not as weird as I thought." That, that he... You know, I, I should have done this. I feel like I should have written him a letter saying, "You, you made me just feel more comfortable in my own skin, recognizing my skin is no less or more strange than anybody else's."
9. JBJeff Berman
  [upbeat music] Perfect place to wrap. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate you being on.
10. SGScott Galloway
  Thank you, Jeff.
11. JBJeff Berman
  There's a reason that Scott is one of the most popular podcast hosts and guests in America. You may not always agree with him, but his unvarnished and deeply researched takes help us expand our own ways of seeing the world. Scott is a unique and prolific voice in the business media ecosystem, and you can find his shows, The Prof G Pod and Pivot, wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.