The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Case for National Service, How to Avoid Burnout, and How Scott Galloway Became Prof G

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Scott Galloway answers listener questions on what he’d say to President Trump in a private off-the-record meeting and gives his advice on avoiding burnout. Finally, Scott reflects on his years in academia and why it’s one of the most rewarding things he’s ever done. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [e-mail], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Office Hours of Propgee. 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 at Proptummedia.com. Again, that's Office Hours of Proptumedia.com. or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode.

Our first question is from Smash Crispy on Reddit, they say. If you were given a private meeting with President Trump, no cameras off the record, what would you say to him or ask him? How would you use the time? I would try to be, I would try to put aside my indignance and my general disdain for the administration, and something I've struggled with my whole life

is a difference between being right and being effective. And if you have audience with the most powerful person in the world, you'd like to take advantage of that opportunity to try and get something done or influence him on what could potentially be a powerful public policy. I would say, so first off, the majority of my recommendations would be non-starters because the president's policies in view of the world

that's just so counter to mind. So I would try and find something where it was common ground that I think he would, would be receptive to that he might pick up and run with. And the one thing that comes to mind for me, what I would advocate for if I had five minutes for the president, would be mandatory national service. I think that there's so many young people who come out of high school who aren't quite ready for college are a little bit lost, and that young people would very much benefit from one or two years of serving in the agency of something bigger than themselves,

shoulder to shoulder with people from different ethnic, economic, sexual orientation backgrounds, different geographies. I think they would really enjoy it. I think if the program was well run, and it could be everything from military service, to working at a no-kill dog shelter, to being a smoke jumper, to working in a national park, to senior care, health care.

But I think the best thing we could do, or one of the best things we could do for young Americans right now, is to show them how wonderful other Americans are and try and restore some of the connective tissue. between Americans. One out of two people my age feel good or great about America. It's only one in 10 young people. And I think a way to create connective tissue would be national service. And I think we need to move back to the 50s and 60s where people didn't look at everything through the lens of their identity that they saw themselves as Americans first. And one of the reasons there was so much

great legislation in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the great society, civil rights, et cetera, women's right, is that they, many of the people, or most of the people, actually, elected representatives had served in the same uniform. They saw themselves as Americans first. Anyways, I would try to do something where I thought I had a chance of highlighting something that he might get passionate about and carry forward. And I think that probably that one thing would be mandatory national service. So I think that would be great for our young men and women in Israel and they have mandatory national service, and they have some of the lowest levels of young adult depression. They find friends, mentors, and mates in the IDF.

Anyway, mandatory national service. That's what I would try and talk to them about. Question number two comes from the relevant elephants on Reddit. I love these names. They say, hey, Prop.G, my question is, how to avoid burnout? I'm a partner of a small company that's been growing pretty rapidly last few months, and I haven't had a single day off since September 1st, and I'm writing this on November 3rd. Some days are shorter, but I've also had days that are 12 hours or longer.

It's causing me to fall behind in my personal life, whether it's not being able to get basic choice done, not getting to the gym as much, or not seeing friends or dating. I feel the work I'm doing is good and it's showing results, but I wanted to ask if there's anything you do in particular because I'm guessing you felt burned out before. Thanks for your time. So I don't come to you with a message of hope.

I was very economically motivated for the first, gosh, 25 years of my first. professional career. I didn't grow up with a lot of money, and it's always been a goal of mine to be economically secure in the one thing in my control. The market trumps individual performance, so you can be really smart, work really hard and not end up doing that well. You can also be just okay and end up doing really well, because a lot of it is luck. Can you do really well if you don't work that hard? Yeah, probably not. Anyways, my point is it comes at a cost. So the first is to forgive yourself and not and realize that if you're really committed to driving your agency and having to be number one, just burnout at some point or just sheer exhaustion, it's just going to be

part of the journey. I'm not suggesting that you accept that and accept a life of drudgery. What I do to try and restore myself is I always try to make space, take time for family. Is that true? Actually, you know what? That's not true. For fucking 20 years, I did nothing but work. What gives me energy is exercise. Once I had boys spending time with family, that crowded out a lot of time with friends and a lot of quote-unquote extracurricular stuff. The hacks aren't that exotic.

Try and prioritize sleep, try and make sure you get at least seven hours. And for me, my kind of ultimate hack has always been fitness. If I can work out, I feel as if I get the hour back. If I spend an hour working out, And now I spent only 20 or 30 minutes. I do these kind of high-intensity workouts for 20 or 30 minutes.

I find that I get that time back because I'm more productive, I have more energy. And in general, it's like a freebie. It might cost me 20 or 30 minutes, but I'm at least a half an hour more productive, easier time getting to sleep. I want to eat better, happier, more productive. And then, look, the ultimate hack is the following. If you're at an agency and you're working that hard, I don't think there's a way to avoid it in the beginning,

but the only way in agency scales and the only way you're going to have some semblance of a life is to incorporate what has been my core competence. Actually, my core comment's been storytelling, but my superpower is the ability to attract and retain good people. At some point, your ability to grow your agency and be economically secure without killing yourself is going to be a function of finding good people

and then making the owners, paying them well, giving them both economic and psychological compensation such that they stay with you and help scale you in this company. That's kind of the whole shooting match. And that is, people think I work much harder than I do. I do go in spurts. I do have periods where I work pretty hard. I'm very productive. But I don't work as hard as people think. They see all the content that we put out here at Prop to you and think, wow, you must work around the clock. I don't. What I do is that I'm able to attract and retain really talented people that help scale my efforts such that I have a lot of balance in my life. I take a lot of vacation because I have

attracted really good people who are able to leverage the 40 to 50 hours I work a week. And sometimes it's 30 to 40. It used to be 60 to 70 and I'm not sure there's a way to avoid that if you're very ambitious when you're young. In sum, try and prioritize sleep. Make sure you get at least seven hours. See if you can carve out a half an hour a day for exercise. Forgive yourself recognizing that you're going to be stressed, you're going to have to work hard in a competitive economy if you're ambitious. But over time, the superpower to being both economically successful and having some balance in your life comes down to one word, others. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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That's LinkedIn.com slash prof to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back on to our final question from user Evil Doggy, they say. Hi Scott, in your most recent episode, you started eloquently described your academia stint at NYU, but then you abruptly stopped yourself. You didn't sound overly enthusiastic about it. Assuming it wasn't your favorite job, can you explore why this was a less than fab experience?

Is it academia in general? Thank you for your time and insights. I don't remember that. The only thing I knew I wanted to do my pretty much since the age of like 22 is I thought at some point I'd really like to be a teacher. Initially I thought I wanted to make a much of money and then go back and be a substitute teacher in math and high school. And then I realized that's real work putting up with high school students all day. And I thought, okay, maybe I'd like to be a professor. So I gave myself 10 years to make some money and then I thought I'm going to try and

go be a professor. And I did that. Almost exactly 10 years after I graduated from business school, I got a job as an adjunct at NYU, and I went from adjunct to associate adjunct, to associate a lecture, to lecture, to clinical associate, to a clinical, and now they just call me professor of marketing. And academia, promotions, they take titles away from you, and at some point just call you a professor of marketing. It has been exceptional. I'll give you the upsides and downsides, for me at least. It is really a wonderful attribute of our society that you take a very, very narrow part of the world and try and understand everything about it. And your job is to be one of the top thought leaders or teachers in that field. And your job is to try and damage young

people's muscle in between their ears such that it grows back stronger and they become more critical thinkers and can provide economic security for them and their families and add to society. It's just a wonderful component of a modern society. Campus environment is wonderful. It's really nice to be around young people. I've had about 4,500 students. I generally can't go more than two or three days in New York without someone coming up to me and saying, hey, I was in Brand Strategy, fall 2007, and they're lovely and nice people, and it's interesting to hear what they've been up to. You know, it calls on some really wonderful kind of paternal instincts. You do learn a lot about the subject matter, because if you're talking about search in a class, and

And I might have three or four kids in my class that work at Google, because I teach second-year MBAs, and some of them are part-time. So you have to bring it. You can't just show up and start telling war stories. You have to actually learn about the shit. I mean, there's something to be said that the teacher is just the best student in the class. The environment is really nice. I've made some wonderful friends at NYU.

There's some really outstanding people there. And also, it's been an amazing platform. I'm not sure. I'm not sure people would pay me what they pay me for my books and my talks or take me as seriously and be as inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt on the things I'm saying. I kind of have an open heart and an open mind when I say stuff if they didn't say NYU professor after my title. I think I'm not sure people, I think people, right now I'm that provocative, obnoxious professor. Without that,

I would just be provocative and obnoxious, and I'm not sure my career would have had the traction it's had. Also, the focus on data and academic integrity has informed me. I do, I do catch myself saying things and thinking, okay, before I say this, I need to find out if, in fact, this data is correct. I do fact check myself a lot more than I would otherwise because I take the responsibility to kind of academic integrity and rigor pretty seriously. In my most recent book notes, I'm being a man, I've got 15 pages of research notes and citation. So that's been helpful to me. It's been a tremendous platform. It's also, I think, a pretty good career for people. Unfortunately, there's too many

old people who won't leave, like Congress, and so there's not as much opportunity for young people who might be more talented than that 75-year-old professor, if you name it, who refuses to leave because of tenure. But I think it's an outstanding way to make a living. And you get a lot of freedom in terms of your time, get to be around a great environment, great students. So those are the upsides? What are the downsides? I have found that the moment I leave the classroom and I'm on campus or in the department that my career went sideways or down. And that is the administrative state of universities, the politics are just total negative value. That the people who end up in administration and the environment outside of a classroom is unproductive.

Not cutthroat, but fairly, like, I think it was Kissinger that said, why is academia so cutthroat? Because they're so little at stake. And I found that my career absolutely took off when I just, when I would do nothing on campus but teach, and then I would leave. I think I work with one of the best faculties in the world, but a third of them should be put on an ice flow. I think this construct of tenure makes sense in certain departments. It makes no sense in a business school. It just results in massive bloat. and people who aren't pulling their weights and we make them department chairs or administrators so they can wreak havoc at a leadership level. And you're never going to find the range of talent you're going to find in a

university. There are some of the most, literally some of the most talented people in the world. And then some of the least talented, terrible managers, obstructive, just the range of the quality. you'll never find a greater range than on the faculty of an elite school.

Some of the most impressive and some of the least impressive people you'll ever meet in the same building. And I found that, I know, frustrating is the right word. I'll just say it. As soon as I left campus unless I was teaching, my career just took off and focused on other environments. And maybe that just means I don't have the skills to be successful in kind of the academic environment. But it's a wonderful career, I think, for somebody who's interested, who's a bit of a lone wolf likes their own schedule and wants to be an expert in a topic

and use it as a platform to develop thought leadership, credibility, and also income streams. I don't think any business school professor is that good unless they're making seven figures. And 15, 20% of that I'll come from the school. But if you're really good at what you do, you should be getting all sorts of offers for books, speaking gigs, consulting gigs,

and you might turn it down. But for God's sake, the business school, if you're good at what you do, you should have all sorts of opportunities. And I think that's true across different departments, too. Heather Cox Richardson is a, I think, a history professor, and I'm pretty sure she makes 10 or 15 million bucks a year on her substack. Now, again, money isn't the only metric here, but I think it's a tremendous platform to develop other ways and means of economic security. But the administrative state, the bloat, sometimes I think we're not, have not having our feet held to the fire of what I'd call competitive market dynamics leads

to a lot of energy that goes into things that are totally irrelevant with people pushing paper to each other. So it's a mixed bag, but on the whole, I would say it's a great career for young people, and it's been remarkable for me. I've carried an NYU business card. I'm just saying metaphorically for 23 years now, and I've never liked to be associated or affiliated with anything for longer than 10 years. And so it has, at the end of the day, what do I do? When people ask me, I teach. And I think it's incredibly rewarding on a lot of levels, but yeah, it's a mixed bag.

But I'm disappointed. I didn't sound more enthusiastic. I am actually quite grateful to NYU. I give a lot of money back to NYU. I try to be as helpful as possible. I returned all my compensation that I had aggregated over 15 years back to them about seven years ago because I realized that I was in a position to do that. that and I was getting more out of the university than maybe I was giving back to it or that's my

goal. But yeah, anyways, a bit of a word salad there, but it's a mixed bag, but on the whole, I think it's an outstanding way to spend your, you know, to make a living, if you will. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to office hours of proptu-media.com. Again, that's office hours of proptumedia.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit. And we just might feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Jinnair.

Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropGPot from PropG Media. Prop. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. Introducing O-DU.

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Thank you.