Scott Newman: A Road Less Traveled
Choosing to follow his passions and walk the path less taken, Scott Newman has worn many hats since he graduated from Princeton University in 2021. Transitioning from an Associate to Contributing editor for Quillette, an Australian-based magazine with millions of monthly readers, he founded 27 Rouge, a media house that produces a podcast of the same name. Interviewing memorable figures such as Matt Taibbi, a prolific author and investigative reporter, Ed Latimore, an author and retired professional boxer and Masaaki Kudo, a film director—Newman has created a unique podcast which ranks in the top ten percent out of over three million globally.
His attendance as an executive at the 2023 Business Today International Conference was particularly significant to him, as he had previously attended as a staff member in 2018 while he was a Princeton student. In his executive seminar, he imparted professional advice to the student attendees, reminding them not to become tunnel-visioned by the idea of “shoulds” and “shouldn'ts” when considering a prospective career. Newman opened up about his journey by offering insight regarding his path and how he came to listen to his inner voice rather than external guidance.
Admittedly becoming disillusioned by the initial allure of investment banking and consulting, which he believed wouldn’t truly fulfill him, he took the opportunity to study abroad at the University of Sydney in Australia in 2020 for his junior year. The exposure to meeting a wide range of people with different values outside a perceived mold of expectations enticed him to be bold, and coupled with the disruption of his studies by COVID, he entered a period of exploration. Making friends in new places informed him of insights that became the basis for his debut book, The Night Before the Morning After, which he completed in his senior year. Graduating as an award-winning young author, he entered a career in journalism for the Australian magazine, Quillette.
In reflecting on the contrasting experience of once being a student and now an executive at the conference, Newman states, “I enjoy the mentorship aspect of being able to shed whatever light I can on the questions that the students have.” He went on to recognize that college is “a precious time in [students] lives. Some [students] are further along in college than others, but they’re faced with a lot of hard questions about who they are and what they want to do with their lives personally [and] professionally.”
In his perspective, many students at elite schools face external pressure to enter one of five fields, finance, consulting, law, technology, or medicine, without the exposure to the wider world that may help them develop their interests and define their passions. He emphasized that while enticing, prestige is a bad guide in life when determining what work will personally fulfill you and serve your soul. He encourages students to think for themselves and see their career as a journey, not a destination and wholeheartedly advocates for them to live on their terms. A caveat of additional advice he offered students interested in entering a career in the creative fields is to start by utilizing and reaching out to their university alumni network and talking to professionals who are doing or in the field the student desires to enter.
On the other end of the spectrum, his love for podcasting derives from his ability to create intellectual content that fits into the transient time of his listeners. He developed an interest in podcasting to meet a wide variety of people. He says, “There was a number of people who I wanted to talk to, and I was thinking, what are the forms or avenues by which I could interview these people? […] The podcast was a wonderful excuse to talk to the people I wanted to talk to anyway.” However, Newman agrees that producing his work has not been without its challenges. “When you run your own company and work your own hours,” he says, “you have to provide structure to your own life.” He understands that “there is no one formula or one template for it, but you have to get really good at managing your own time and also [learn] to know when to stop work. […] It’s the ultimate time management exercise when there’s little to no structure at all.”
Like any creative process, appreciating the product is very different from creating it. For Newman, the behind-the-scenes element of podcasts is “totally different” from being a passive listener. He says, “[There is] the consume-create dichotomy. When you’re creating something, there’s a lot more concern and thought that goes into it than when you’re consuming it. It’s also more fun to create. I very much enjoy creating; I enjoy creating a lot more than I enjoy consuming.” His writing background aids him in podcast production, which he believes is “just a similar kind of skill set. When you’re writing, you’re asking yourself questions; when you’re podcasting, you’re asking other people questions.”
Above all, his podcast 27 Rogue is a form of intellectual entertainment that introduces his listeners to a wide variety of interesting topics that inform the overall theme of the shows. Newman says, “I interview people who I’m interested in across the political spectrum [and] across the spectrum of jobs and academic disciplines. I try to get a broad collection of perspectives such that it takes me in, you know, all kinds of interesting directions and places.”