The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Case for Moving Money and Life to Europe, and the Future of Podcast Ads

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Scott Galloway assesses whether the "make it in America, spend it in Europe" thesis still holds, unpacks the metrics behind podcast ad dollars, and shares his views on the economics of higher ed and how to build a career in academia. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [e-mail], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Plus, you can now call or text Scott a question at our new Office Hours hotline: ‪[phone]‬. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from KPMG. In any organization, disruption is inevitable, but struggling through it doesn't have to be. The KPMG Adaptability Index is your blueprint for building capabilities to handle what comes next. It uses real data to look at how your culture, strategy, and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive. Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit KPMG.com slash U.S. slash adaptability to explore the adaptability index and pulse surveys today. Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level?

This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. Summer vacation has gotten very expensive. flights, hotels, food, why bother? And so a lot of people, I think, just this summer, kind of looking around and saying, like, I want to go on vacation, but also,

is this going to be a really expensive disaster? This week, Unexplained it to me, how to make the most of that precious PTO. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Office Hours with Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind.

If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to office hours ofprofitjimedia.com. Again, that's office hours ofprochummedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Okay, question number one. Hey, Scott, this is Wade from Austin, Texas. I have this theory that since all of the American foreign policy lately

has been serving to alienate us from the rest of the world. And Europe seems to be partnering up with Canada and maybe the rest of the quote unquote middle powers and starting to spend more money on defense, loosening some of its regulations and spending a lot more money at the governmental level, that there will be a boom over there. I know you've previously said that United States is the best place to make money and Europe is the best place to spend it, but I'm sort of curious if that thesis will continue to hold going forward. It also seems like Europe has some great boons for folks,

including better family policy, generally safer in a lot of cities, and just good vibes. It feels like every time I'm there and it seems like you had the same on your recent trip. So curious to know what you think about pivoting from the U.S. to Europe considering recent events. Thanks, God. Thanks for the thoughtful question.

And I'm a little bit biased here because I did move to Europe four years ago. I didn't do it because I was leaving America. I did it because America had offered us so much prosperity that we had the opportunity to move our family to Europe for a few years. And I've really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to coming back to the U.S. because I still think, I don't know. There's nothing that makes you realize how American you are than living abroad. But anyway, for the first time, even since I moved there, I'm hearing from a lot of people saying I'm thinking of moving to London or somewhere in Europe.

And generally, the wages are lower if you're working, but when you factor in the fact that you don't have to pay for health insurance, oftentimes there's universal pre-K, oftentimes you feel comfortable sending your kid to a public school because people, I think some people would argue that the public schooling system is better in certain countries in Europe than the average public school. the United States, then, and also just a, I don't know, a greater comity of man. Spend some time in Northern Europe and they just all seem to like each other more or have more, you know, empathy for one another. Anyways, I think that there is something to the notion that there'll be an arbitrage, especially, it seems that Trump is hell-bent on getting people out of the U.S., even if it's getting some of the most talented people or people who are willing to pick our crops or take care of grandma for less money than,

or build our homes than less money than domestic workers would do, which is inflationary. Last month, Trump imposed new 10 and 12.5% tariffs on goods from 60 trading partners, including the EU. And the administration also announced 50% tariffs on approximately 20 million of Canadian products. Jesus Christ, what the fuck is he thinking? By the way, all that does is increase the cost of our products

that we consume from Canada and shrinks our market because they're not going to just lay down and play dead. they're going to put reciprocal tariffs on our products. In response, Europe and Canada are building partnerships to reduce their dependence on the U.S. This year, Canada proposed a global defense bank backed by 10 countries so far to bolster the defense of like-minded allied nations.

There's new security and economic partnerships. Canada and five Nordic countries agreed to deepen cooperation on military procurement and other areas. In terms of equities or thinking about this as an investment standpoint, I'm investing in European Index Fund, one because I'm at a stage where diversification is my call sign for investing. I don't want to get rich. I just don't want to get poor.

And when you're young, you make a lot of money through concentration, specifically concentration of your human capital going 110% all in on something. And you can afford to be a little bit more concentrated in terms of your portfolio and take some bigger swings, although I still am a fan of low-cost index funds and just putting them away automatic savings, never thinking about them. The younger you start, the less you need to put away. But I'm at a stage where I want to be very diversified. And investing in SPY or S&P index funds is not that diversified, 10 companies, 40% of the S&P. So the reason I like investing in Europe is Europe's

kind of been left for dead, which says to me that there's opportunity here. In terms of the equity markets, the rotation, you know, words already out. In 2025, European stocks beat the S&P 500 for only the second time in a decade. And for a U.S. investor, it wasn't even close. The Eurostocks 50 returned about 38% in dollar terms. You know, it's very hard for us to keep pace when the dollar has lost 28% of its value in 2020. And it was 18% for the S&P versus 38%. Again, a good chunk of that,

Delta comes from the falling U.S. dollar as we become politically reckless and spend $7 trillion on $5 trillion receipts. And also, there's just no getting around it. U.S. valuations are stretched. The S&P's Schiller Index, a measure how pricey stocks are by compounding prices to 10 years of earnings, or by comparing prices to 10 years of earnings, is sitting around 41, which is the second highest reading in 140 years behind only

guess when, the dot-com peak, the historical average is about 17. Get it, it's a 41 historically, it's about 17. And European equities trade at roughly half the multiple for similar sector exposure. At some price, every stock is a good buy, unless it's going to zero, which most stocks aren't. And at some price, every stock is a bad buy, no matter how great the company is. The valuations can get ahead of its skis. The falling dollar has done a lot of the work here. The dollar dropped about 9% in 2025. It's worst year since 2017.

And the euro rose from a buck 4 to a buck 18. For an American, a stronger euro means your European holdings are worth more than when you brought the money home or when you bring the money home. So you get a double boost. At the same time, it's getting, you know, that makes Europe a little. bit more expensive, but Europe is still cheaper the stocks, because quite frankly, has less exposure to AI and hasn't registered the run-up. And that's really the trend that's driving returns across, even the small stock index indices are catching up. If you follow where the money is actually going, investors are adding Europe on top of their U.S. holdings, not selling America

to buy it. So look, there's two things here. There's lifestyle. I do think that I think you constantly you want to be looking at lifestyle arbitrages. I think Europe is a great arbitrage, quality of life there, it's lower pace, kind of a greater, less, I don't know, less, it feels like it's less polarized, but maybe I'm just not as in touch with it. I think it's a good move here. And I don't, I've seen, heard from more people who are thinking about moving to Europe. Although having said that, look, it all comes down to the same reductive statement. When you're in your income earning years, I find the U.S. is still the best place. People in the U.S. start from a position of yes.

How do we make money together? How do we do stuff together? And Europe is the best place to spend it. That's not to say you won't be successful as a young person in Europe. I just think it'll take longer. And from a lifestyle standpoint, I think you constantly want to be thinking about a lifestyle arbitrage. It's situational, but I wouldn't be afraid in this day and age to take advantage of the greatest or one of the greatest innovations in history, and that is jet transportation. and your ability to go somewhere else.

I think it's an incredible opportunity, gives you better perspective, makes you better, I think, at what you do. It is situational, but yes, geographic arbitrage, intra-country, and then international, if you're blessed with that type of opportunity, I think it's an interesting,

an idea opportunity, but I do believe that just based on valuations, people need to be very thoughtfully thinking about diversifying out of the U.S. Appreciate the question. Question number two comes from a listener who emailed us. Hi, dog, love all your stuff. I listen to about 40 hours of podcasts a week.

Jesus. Stop that. Get outside. Or, I don't know. That's a lot. During that time, I listen to nearly zero minutes of ads because I can skip through them. Additionally, I don't listen to about 100 podcasts per month that automatically download. Other than premium subscriptions, these two things make up nearly all of podcasting revenue.

Have advertisers discovered new metrics? to account for these variables. Thanks, David. Okay, so recently, Megaphone, a hosting platform we used at ProvG, changed how it plays on Spotify or counted. They're getting hip to this. We now get a play each time someone watches or listens to an episode for at least 30 seconds. And still, about half of podcasters use downloads as their main metrics for measuring success, followed by listens and then consumption rate. So if your podcast episodes gets around 25 to 30 downloads in the first week after release, you've already in the top 50% of podcasters. So ad dollars continue to grow. I mean, this is, this medium is going faster than any ad-supported

medium, quote-unquote, the creator economy, it's growing faster, granted off a smaller base than meta or alphabet revenues right now. It's expected to be an $18 billion business, podcast revenues by 2030, and nearly half of weekly podcast listeners have purchased a product or service after hearing an ad on podcast. So there's two things. There's a measurement here. The dirty secret of the ad ecosystem is that once someone subscribes to your podcast, when it's downloaded, the podcast gets automatically downloaded off the RSS feed. And some agencies will try and use that as a listen.

Now advertisers are hip to that, and the CPMs reflect that, okay, maybe only half the people who the podcast is automatically downwerect. under the iPhone will actually get listened to. But what you have is, this is what podcasting is going for it. The people at the New York Times think they're too precious to read their own ads. Okay. They think it's a conflict. Fine. When you hear my voice read an ad, supposedly you're more likely to listen to the ad and more likely to trust the advertiser as opposed to when you're watching CNN or Fox and the ads come up, your screen of like, okay, do I really have less restless leg syndrome and who is this ethnically ambiguous person telling me about opioid-induced constipation medication. In addition, the podcast medium itself is more powerful for advertisers because

physically, I'm in your ears, like physically, because people listen to it on their AirPods. And also, you're doing something intimate, so it feels like we're friends. And there's just a greater affinity. So the host readover is one of the greatest innovations in advertising, if you will. So more intimate, host readover, the 30-second spot. The biggest trend I see, so a lot of people are assessed with subscriptions, and we have subscription on podcast, but you have to offer a lot, right? There's more people than you would think willing to endure the ads for free. That's still the biggest ad model.

Subscription is for your hardcore fans that don't want to listen to ads, want inclusive content, want to feel like they're getting something special, and that's a supplement. We've invested a lot in that because if we can grow the subscription business faster than our core business, it'll increase the multiple on the business. And I'm constantly thinking about enterprise value. What the biggest next trend I think is going to be is what I'll call strategic or what I think of as NASCAR deals or F1 deals. What do I mean by that? So I drink beer. I love beer. So I'm talking to a brewer right now. I'm about saying, okay, they called me and said, all right, we see you drinking our beer. We'd like. to do a deal with you. We have data partnerships where we highlight the data from a certain company or I'll talk about a specific, you know, there's certain AI platforms that I like and others that I don't. And they say, okay, if you disclose that you can disclose that this is a paid partnership, but talk about how you use our AI platform in an organic way such that it doesn't feel like a direct ad. Those deals bust out of the cost per thousand downward spiral.

CPM is essentially, our ads get $40 to $45 CPMs. That's cost per thousand people you reach. So for every thousand people that an ad would reach on Prop G, we get about 40 or 45 bucks. By the way, CNN gets about 13 because advertisers have figured out that we have a young, wealthy male listener on average. That is the white whale or the unicorn of advertising. And everybody wants to reach that person because the majority of them are listening to Spotify and watching Netflix.

and don't see ads. So they're willing to pay a much higher CPM. Where you get even much bigger CPMs is in a strategic deal where I might say, okay, you know, I drive X car and I'm going to talk about it a lot. Maybe I even do some videos from the car. I mean, this is the whole influencer thing, right?

And these direct deals, if you think about some of the bigger podcaster, I just interviewed the guys from, I think it was TBPM, the guys who got sold for a crazy amount of money to OpenAI. They've taken an F1 NASCAR. They have logos. They talk about the products they use and why. It does feel somewhat authentic, and they're able to bust out of the CPM.

The CPM downward spiral is places like the trading desk or firms will go searching for that customer and find the least expensive place to find it, and it puts downward pressure on CPMs, which is good for advertisers, bad for the content creators. So finding a more strategic thoughtful deal where you talk about stuff you use, you can get, quite frankly, much higher CPMs, and the brand likes it and you like it. But I do think you're seeing a pretty significant flow out of cable news, magazines, well, that's probably already over,

even local news into podcasting, because this is where the audience is going. And for us, it's multiple revenue streams. It's advertising. It's subscription revenue via a substack, and it's these direct deals. which I'm actually really excited about because there's brands I just talk about organically, and I'm like, how do we do this a more thoughtful way and get paid for it?

Anyways, appreciate the question. It's an interesting time in the ecosystem. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Odu. If your business runs on five different apps, 12 browser tabs, and one spreadsheet that everyone's afraid to touch, it's probably time for Odu. Odu is an all-on-one business management software that connects every part of your business

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Whether you're a small business or managing a large operation, Odu gives you one flexible platform built to grow with you. Try today for free. Odo.com slash prop G. That's ODOO.com slash prop G. Support for the show comes from Lisa. The day-to-day of summer can be full of chaos. Between travel, family activities, and work commitments, it can feel like there's no time to truly unwind. That's why it's important to make your bet as comfortable as possible, so you can relax and recharge. For that, check out Lisa. Lisa has a line of a beautifully crafted mattresses

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Hey, Profi. My name is Jacob. I am from Lakeland, Florida, in the central Florida area. I kind of have two questions. My first one is, as somebody who works in higher education and eventually hopes to move

into the academic side of higher education, I am just curious how you feel that as economics of higher ed stand, how we can be serving the next generation

and especially the young men in the world. As a young man myself, I'm very passionate about that, and I can see that there is a need. So I love your thoughts there. The second one is more about how young people aspiring to go into academia, like yourself, can get to those positions, especially at elite institutions. I am looking currently for PhDs and,

political science to go down a political theory route. And I'm just curious what insights and thoughts that you might have there to get to that point. Anyway, love what you do and so grateful to learn from you. Yeah, we're going to need a bigger boat, but I'll try and summarize. I've a lot of thoughts on higher ed. As a basic thesis, if you had a drug that made you less likely to be obese, kill yourself, less likely to get divorced, more likely to vote, more likely to have a much greater income, more likely to have children, more likely to eventually be in public service, would you hoard that drug? And I worry that as a general rule, higher education no longer sees themselves as public servants, but as luxury brands that is weaponized scarcity to create margin power.

And that is, I was pick on Dartmouth. They've got, I think, an $8 or a $10 billion endowment, the middle of nowhere, let in, I think, I don't want to let in like 800 kids with a good Starbucks serves on a weekend. They could let in 8,000 and not sacrifice any quality of students. They're in the middle of fucking nowhere. They have the faculty. They have the infrastructure. They have the capital. But they've decided they're a luxury brand. Fine. They're a private institution. They get to do that, but they shouldn't have be subsidized by taxpayers with grants and taxary status. The issue is there's a lot of things around affordability. Now, when it comes to affordability, while tuition is up 100% at public four-year institutions over the last 30 years

and 74% of private nonprofit colleges over the last 30 years, it's vastly, I mean, that's after inflation, right? And during the 24 and 25 school year, students and parents borrowed a total of 102 billion in loans. By the way, student loans are one of a small number of types of debt that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, which is totally morally corrupted. There's anyone we should be forgiving and giving a do-over in the form of bankruptcy, which is, I think, a feature, not a bug of our economy. It should absolutely be students. So as of Q1, 2020-26, approximately 43 million borrowers collectively owed roughly $1.7 trillion of federal student loan debt. By the way, I'm not for debt forgiveness. I think there should be targeted industries that are a social good, whether it's a

high school teacher or a health care professional where they should have student loan reduction, we should use the balance sheet of America to lower interest rates. But until until students start really shopping around and holding their university accountable for issuing them debt on degrees that just don't pay off, you're never going to see costs come down. There is a gender gap. Women hire college enrollment. It's about, you know, 44% of women age 18 to 24 were enrolled in college. it was 34% for men, and the gender gap happens before college. Part of the gap is the growing gap in academic preparation during high school. By the end of high school, female students increasingly outperform male students

in the academic measures that predict college enrollment and completion. So what to do? It's a nuanced argument, because while tuition has gone up, the reality is most students don't pay full freight. So the question is, how do we find us give us many unremarkable kids and remarkable opportunity? The top 1%, the freakishly remarkable and the rich kids that we led into college right now are the ones that need it the least. Now, in terms of your own desire to get into it, you're looking, it sounds like, to go the tenured route and get a PhD and then try and get a faculty position and work towards tenure. If you're super passionate and want to be an expert in that field and are passionate about it and just want to be one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet because of your love of the subject material,

I'd say go for it. If you're thinking that's your ticket to a great career, you know, I just don't know, boss. I think that tenure is going to come under attack. Also, the same thing that infects our global politics, infects academia, and that is old people won't fucking leave. and it creates a lack of opportunity for young academics. I think it's an incredible career to consider. I just don't know of going about it through the tenure track as the way to go. Unless, assume you don't get a job in academia,

are you doing it for because you think you'd be great at having a doctorate? And there's other things you might do, because I wonder what's going to happen to tenure track. I think AI is going to kick the shit out of the research. Research is about to become much more rigorous and creative and differentiated. And also, you're going to have to be an outstanding teacher because I think the students who are now paying a ton of money want to actually learn something and God help you for not any good and they're paying $7,000 for the class.

But I think it's an outstanding profession. I think you want to start to do a lot of research, a lot of writing. Go direct to consumer boss. find the domain you think you want to be an expert in and start writing about it and posting about it on all these different mediums. There's a theme here that you want to take advantage of and you want to be cognizant of. Institutions are leaking power to individuals. So rather than needing to go to MS now to get your viewpoints out on politics or become a creator, you can start a substack and get a decent following if you're good at what you do. It's a long-winded way of saying, I think academia is an outstanding environment and career.

I was fortunate to do it because I already had some money. I think the tenure track is going to come under fire. So make sure you're committed and see other benefits to getting a PhD other than just necessarily getting on the tenure track. If you want to have influence and teach, start right now. Start posting content and go direct to consumer. The institution, the middleware is becoming less important. quality is becoming more important. Think about how you become a thought leader without the PhD,

how you become really insightful around the domain, maybe without the necessary or requisite certification, and universities will find you because students are demanding that they just get the best and brightest to stand in front of them and actually justify the enormous tuition they're paying. A lot there, a lot there. Anyways, best of luck to you. That's all for this episode.

If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to office hours ofproptuMedia.com. Again, that's office hours ofproptuemedia.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Jinnar. Cameric is our social producer. Brad Williams is our editor. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropGie pod from ProVGMedia.

Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level? This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow.