Scott Galloway: Professor, Author, Entrepreneur, and Investor

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. This episode's guest is probably the most outspoken person I've had on the show so far. His name is Scott Galloway. Scott is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern and the founder of Section 4. He was also the founder of the e commerce firm Red Envelope and the marketing firm Prophet. A previous guest, David Aker, is Vice chairman of Profit. I highly recommend his presentation on YouTube called the Algebra of Happiness. In it, he tells it like it is and tells it like he sees it and explains what makes people happy. Spoiler alert. It is not pursuing your passion. Scott served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, the New York Times Company, Gateway Computer, Urban Outfitters, and the Berkeley Haas School of Business. In this episode, he shreds Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg the thought that colleges should open back up in the middle of a pandemic and cluelessness in general. Guy I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here's Scott Galloway.

Generally speaking, the people that are the happiest are the ones that you would might logically assume would be the least happy. And that is across income levels, ethnicities, regional factors. The cohort that is the happiest are seniors. And generally they've decided that life is short. They start taking stock of their blessings. They typically are out of kind of their that stressful income earning and child rearing years. And they quite frankly, they just garner more perspective and they take things in stride. But across almost every cultural economic cohort, the happiest people are seniors.

But what if you're 25 years old and listening to this? I mean, the strategy can't be oh well, the cheetah happens to get old.

Yeah. Okay, so let's, let's cut across. Let's, let's, let's try and find the signal across all those demographic groups. The if there is a secret sauce and there's a bunch of them, there's no one thing. But the thing that the strongest Signal, according to most of the studies that have been done are it's really the depth and number of meaningful relationships at work. Do you feel respected and admired and do you respect and admire other people amongst your friends? Do you get a sense of joy and camaraderie? And do you know they feel a sense of joy and camaraderie from you? And then most importantly with your family, do you feel an intense level of support and love? And just as importantly, do you know, they know that they are intensely loved and supported? But the grand study, which is kind of the largest longitudinal study on happiness conducted over I think 80 years, all the principal scientists had to be swapped out because they kept dying. But basically they started with, with 419 year olds, tracked them for 80 years until the last one died, measured every, like just all manner of things and then, and then constantly surveyed them on how happy they are and then tried to figure out correlations and they found that like that's 400 page study write up. And the first sentence is the best opening line of any, of any academic study. And it reads the following, it says happiness is love, full stop. And I just. That's the best opening line for any. So look, it comes down, it comes down to relationships. Happiness is in the agency of others.

So what happens now in a pandemic where many relationships, particularly professional ones, are digital?

You know, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure I have a great answer. I believe COVID 19 is much more of an accelerant than a change agent. And that is if you took the three biggest trends in your business or in media or in income inequality or racial and justice, whatever it might be, you just take those lines out 10 years and that's kind of where we are now. The metaphor, or the best example is E Commerce grew approximately 1% a year as a percentage of total retail from 2000 to 2020, we were sitting at 18% of all retail was transacted through digital channels. And then in 12 weeks it jumped to 28%. So we literally had a decade in 10 weeks. And I think that's happening across almost every major trend or line we see. And so I would argue that same is true of your relationships. And that is, I think there's going to be more marriages and babies and second marriage and a lot of divorces. I think if you're in a good relationship, this, this reinforces it. I think if you're in an unhealthy relationship and you have kind of comorbidities for lack of a Better term, the relationship ends up in the icu. I don't know about you, but when I talk to my friends, my friends who are struggling with marriage or relationships, you look at it and you think, well, they weren't great to begin with going into the pandemic, right? And then the folks that are blessed with a strong partnership, it seems like that partnership is helping them through this. So I don't. And in terms of work, you know, that's a whole other ball of wax. I know you've done some thinking around this. The kind of remote. I think the whole remote thing is really interesting, but I wonder if at the end of the day a lot of it's going to hurt or increase income inequality because you live in Santa Cruz and you've figured it out, you have the brand equity to kind of work remotely. I think a lot of people need the advantage to show that they can show up to work, establish relationships, put on a suit, put on a dress, have the EQ to navigate the poly. I mean, if you have those skills being at hq, you're three times as likely to be the CEO. When you've spent the majority of your career at hq, you could run the European division and knock the socks off the COVID off the ball. But it's still, the CEOs are usually the guy or gal that's around HQ and making in person relationships with the key, key decision makers. Everyone's so excited about working from, from home, but if you move your job to Denver, they might just keep moving your job east and it might end up in New Delhi. So I think there's gonna be a lot of unintended consequences from working from home.

Well, I, I know that you use two by two matrices. So if we were to concoct the two by two matrix where it's, you know, skilled and unskilled contractor and employee, those four boxes, sort of like how you did that for colleges. The, the ones that are going to survive, the ones that are at risk, the ones that are going to die.

So much for that guy. You can't imagine how many people.

I love that matrix. I love that matrix.

The Chancellor of UMass Boston just called me. I just told me I had shoddy, irresponsible work. I mean, anyways, I pissed off a lot of important people. But anyways, go. I'm glad you liked it. I got one guy, he was.

So you must be doing something right. So, okay, so, so let's, let's take the four corners. So if you're a skilled employee, although you Just said a skilled employee may end up with his function or her function in Bangalore. So skilled employee, good or bad for vis a vis pandemic?

I don't think you need a matrices. The data here is pretty clear. And that is. Yeah, if you're making over $100,000 a year, it means there's a 60% likelihood you can work from home and only a 10% likelihood you've been laid off. If you're making less than 40,000 doll, only 10% of those people can work from home and over 40% have been laid off. So everything we feared, we've literally gone from an economy that had some very unhealthy attributes around income inequality to a Blade Runner dystopia overnight. So let me ask you this. All right? So I'm going to give you a thesis and you tell me if I think about your life. I don't know you well, but I know I have a sense for what you do professionally and your skills. You are in the top 1%, economically, spiritually, professionally. Brand equity, your presence in the marketplace over the last 12 weeks, you're living your best life. You're. I bet you're wealthier. I bet you have less reason to leave the beautiful place you leave you live. You have access to great health care. I would bet the last 12 to 16 weeks, other than obviously the empathy for what's going on and our fears that the people in the top 1% are doing better than ever, we're living our best life. And this has taken. We've literally moved from an economy that was unhealthy to this Blade Runner dystopia where the 1% billionaires have added more value to their wealth in the last 12 weeks than in any 12 week period previous. If you own tech stocks, if you have a job where you can do it over, zoom. If someone had said to us 12 weeks ago, you're gonna have to hang out, your stock portfolio is going to go up. You're not going to get on planes, you're going to hang out with your family. You know what kind of Netflix you'd.

Say, okay, I'm in, so sign me up.

Let me start right there. Distinctive, knowing what's going on outside of your neighborhood. How's your life been the last 12, 16 weeks?

Well, I would say that I agree and all that. I spend more time with my family, I exercise more, I surf more, I could focus on podcasting, which is my first love, et cetera, et cetera.

But.

But the bulk of my income came from speaking and speaking was getting on a plane. And so that has gone from a lot of money to, well, I went to zero for a long time and now it's slightly ticking up. But my experience is if you get X for making an in person speech, you get one fifth X for doing a virtual speech. All things being equal, the main part of my annual income is, is probably off by 80%.

So I've had a similar experience. My biggest revenue line is speaking. And my numbers aren't as dramatic. I've gone from charging X dollars to get on a plane and go speak at the Radisson in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I've been there.

When you think about it, you get on a plane the day before, you get in late, you have bad food, sleep in a strange bed, you get up in the morning, the CEO wants to have breakfast with you, which is fine, and then you get miked, you do your thing, you do speaking thing, you go back, there's a weather thing, you get rerouted through Dallas, you're home later that night anyway. So it's a two day, it's a two day tour on a minimum.

Yes.

And you get paid X. Now I get, I do these virtual fireside chats. I'm doing two or three this week. I get about a third of what I used to get, but I'm getting about twice as many. I have twice as many because the elasticity, instead of charging X, I charge one third X. So it's doubled my demand. So I've lost about a third of top line revenue. But if I'm speaking at noon, I literally roll out of my house at 11:45. I have a tech guy who lives with me and granted this is, I'm very privileged around this. I go to my guest house, he fires up the camera, the live set camera, the lighting and boom, I'm on. And then by 1:10 I'm back having lunch with my family. So for me the trade off there is just so worth it. It's just so that for me it's been a reduction in 1/3 salary, but it's been wildly accretive, kind of spiritually or economically. And I would, I would imagine the same thing will happen with you.

Yeah, I think it's a matter of time. And listen, I don't mind making, let's say I use your ratio. I don't mind making three speeches to make what I would have made in one speech that took two days. I'd make that trade off all day long. So ye, cool. So do you see any other E commerce is obvious. Any other opportunities that the pandemic has created?

Yeah, there's what I would call loosely speaking, and I'm thinking a lot about this. I'm finishing a book called Post Corona and trying to get it out as quickly as possible because most of it will probably be wrong and perishable. But the way I would loosely describe opportunities is position yourself around what I would call the great dispersion. And if you think about the two most disruptible industries, and I define disruptible as an industry that has raised its prices faster than inflation without any underlying increase in customer satisfaction or productivity or innovation. So let's think about tech, where you spent the majority of your life examining tech trends. Every year the product gets better and it gets cheaper. That's kind of the gangster cocktail. Most industries get a little bit better and a little bit more expensive. Healthcare and education have not gotten better. I mean, you could argue that the technology around healthcare has gotten better, but our life expectancy is going down. Most consumer satisfaction around healthcare is flat to declining, but the prices have skyrocketed. And then my industry, we've raised tuition 1,400% over the last 30 years while inflation's up 120%. So we have raised prices just astronomically. They've exploded. And if you walked into a class in 1990 and then one now, a lot of times it wouldn't look mill or feel any different. So I think healthcare and education are going through this incredible dispersion because 99% of the people who will contract, endure and develop the antibodies for the novel coronavirus will have never entered a doctor's office, much less a hospital. And because they swept aside a lot of the regulation, because we're coming up with interesting technologies and remote medicine and telemedicine, I'm coming out of college. I understand the intersection between technology and products to get into remote healthcare. Remote medicine to me seems like a great career. The same thing is happening in education. If we come out of this pandemic with 50% of classes online, and, you know, the dirty secret is the kids don't come to college. They come to college for community, but not necessarily the community that takes place in the classroom. And there's a lot of classes where you could probably match or nearly match the in class experience via Zoom or other technologies. And if you just take 50% of your classes online, you effectively double the capacity of the campus, potentially lower prices. I'm working with the University of California around trying to figure this out. So there might be this dramatic increase in capacity and innovation. So I think education is an extraordinary opportunity. I think a lot about where I would want to invest my most precious asset as a young person. That's my time, my human capital. I would be really interested in remote learning and remote health.

And let's take the extreme case. So is an online Harvard education worth 60 grand?

Oh, 100%. It's probably worth more than that because Harvard, I think it's about a 350 or $380,000 ticket for the full four years. It's worth exponentially more than that. And also you got to keep in mind, and this is even more incremental quality work. Kids who go to Harvard and Yale probably pay less tuition than kids who go to tier two schools because they have such extraordinary endowments that while their sticker price is $58,000 a year, except for the international students who pay full freight, the majority of the kids don't pay that. They get all kinds of scholarships. And so the net tuition is much different than the sticker price. And the most well funded institutions often have lower, have actually lower tuition over time as they get more and more endowments and financial aid and things like that. But the certification, which is really where the value is, the certification that Harvard provides an individual over the course of their lifetime is still much greater than $380,000. Now when you start going into tier two schools and tier three schools where we have convinced, we've preyed on the hopes and dreams of the middle class and convinced parents that you have to send your kid to college no matter what the cost and they don't get into a tier one school, they get waitlisted at a tier two and they end up at a tier three school at the same price, that's probably not worth it. But we continue to kind of promote this cartel where a lot of middle class households end up paying for mostly in debt, a Mercedes and get a Hyundai. But if you get into Harvard, if you get into a tier one school and mit, oh yeah, it's still a fantastic value. What might be interesting is that if that's true, if it's really the certification, and the certification is more a function of getting in, I can see an environment where people apply to these schools, get in and then don't go and just put in on the resume, admitted to Harvard, mit, but didn't graduate, didn't go really.

And you think that's a proxy enough for recruiters.

Four years later, some of the most successful people in the world, Harvard dropouts, the Key isn't the education you get at Harvard, the key is getting in. Because what these universities really are is they're the world's most fine tuned rigorous HR departments in the world. If you can get into Harvard, it means one of two things. It means you're like freakishly productive from the age of 15 to 17 or you have rich parents and both are forward looking indicators of your success and your ability to add value to a firm. Whether you're going into private wealth management for Goldman Sachs, if you went to Harvard and you have really rich parents or your father's an oligarch or the sultan of something, you're going to be able to find a lot of capital for them and you have the right connections. Or you're so freakishly remarkable at a young age that you will work 17 hours a day and be incredibly creative. I just did some business with Goldman and it just struck me that I dealt with two young women there and I'm like, these kids and their kids, like 24 are just so goddamn impressive. And they all have the same credentials. They went to Ivy League schools, they were athletes. And so look, these schools, at the end of the day, what we're really doing, the value we're adding is we have the finest filter in the world of human capital. We run a crawl check on you, we make sure you take all kinds of tests you have to write, you get references. I mean the screening process is just so out of control, but that I wonder if we move to a place where it's the certification and the certification is a function of getting in, not even going, wow, wow.

So that's the way to save 380 grand. But I would make the case. So for my career experience, I got my job at Apple because of a classmate at Stanford.

Yep.

And if Stanford, you know, at that time were purely virtual, I would have never met him. If I would have never met him, I would have never gotten into Apple. So it's not just that I got into Stanford, it's also that I met him.

The networking. Yeah.

And that might go away, right?

Oh yeah. Look, and not only that, I mean, if we really want to get kind of meta on this, I needed four years and for me it was five years to kind of marinate and get some maturity and get some intellectual curiosity and get inspired and row crew and push myself harder than I'd ever pushed myself before and fall in love and get my heart broken and establish resilience and build some tough skin around my heart and find that, wow, I really Do I'm not meant to be a doctor. When you fail chemistry, it's pretty obvious you're not going to be a doctor. So look, that experience, that great liberal arts experience that you and I both experienced is priceless from a what? Just, I don't know, an interpersonal or experiential standpoint. But if we're just talking straight economics and roi, I mean, what's the kind of prototype, if we were to build someone out of central casting to go raise $100 million for the next great tech company, it'd probably be someone who got into Harvard, went a year, dropped out, went to work for a hedge fund and then quit after 18 months and then started raising money for their startup.

You mean Jeff Bezos?

Yeah, or Zuckerberg or Gates. There's a profile here.

So what's your opinion of, while we're on the college topic, so many schools say they're going to reopen.

Right.

And I think that's ludicrous. So have they basically sold their souls? I mean, are they doing it just because they need the tuition?

Yeah, it's a mix of arrogance and self aggrandizement to believe that whenever you hear a university president saying we have a national responsibility to open our campuses, that's Latin for parents sending your tuition because, and I'm being very serious, if you're a, if you're a liberal arts institution charging $60,000 a year in tuition, you have 20,000 students in the next 12 to 15 days, you're expecting $600 million in tuition or 300 or 400 million if you take out financial aid. And these are institutions, these are businesses that have very high fixed costs and are totally genetically incapable of cutting costs. So they're facing, they're staring down the barrel of financial crisis. Think about what other business has been able to expect cash flows within a two week period consistently for 40 years, except they increase them 3 to 4% every year. There's no business, there's no, there's no better business in history than education. And all of a sudden they're faced with 5, 10, 30% of the kids not showing up. And if you're tier one, that's fine, you just go into your waiting list. Well then tier 2, all of a sudden there's real demand destruction there because all the kids who are going to come to your school because they didn't get into Stanford, they're getting into Stanford because a bunch of kids are saying, well, I'm not going to go. So Stanford goes into their waiting list and it waterfalls down until you get to a tier three school. And I don't say names anymore because I was here from that school. They reach into their waiting list and they don't have one. And then all of a sudden, overnight their revenues are down 20 or 30% and they can't, they can't survive that. And you don't want to be the dean of a school that oversees its rapid demise. You don't want to be the guy or gal that kind of lost the school. And so they're all making, they're on this consensual hallucination between their CFOs and parents that, yeah, we look forward to welcoming you back. It's outrageous. This is the equivalent of saying, okay, we invite your 18 year old to go to a movie theater with windows that don't open 12 times a week. You know, what could go wrong? This is insane. And I want to be, I want to be clear, guy. I think people make the mistake of conflating the argument around K12 versus the argument around opening universities. It's a totally different argument. A nine year old at home who's not in school with developmental disability, it can bring the household down. It's a single mother who can't go to work. It's nutrition, it's all kinds of things. The majority of kids who end up in college are middle class and upper income kids. Your 19 year old stuck at home for 12 weeks is a nuisance. It's not a profound tragedy or threat to the household. So for me it's easy calculus. We can't risk the types of outbreaks that we see happen when people cluster. And all these meetings, these crazy task forces trying to come up with protocols around AB classes, plexiglass, putting me in a hazmat suit when I teach in front of the class, none of that makes means anything unless these students were to practice the same protocols off campus. And I don't know about you, but when I got around alcohol at ucla, my sole focus was to not distance and this, the notion that. So these decisions are being made by people in their 60s who quite frankly weren't very social in college. And they're under the impression that these students are going to maintain these protocols while off campus. So in my opinion, and some universities have done this, the University of Massachusetts has announced this, Cal State has announced this. I think Harvard's announced this, or some hybrid, they've said, look, we're the warriors against the virus. Our research labs are going to help figure out this thing. We're not the spreaders, we're not the enablers. And they're going to let people live on campus if they want, but they're going all remote. And anything, any university present right now that's saying we're going to have anything resembling a normal experience is just saying please send in your tuition.

Now let's suppose that you are the dean or the president of a college in that struggle or perish quadrant. What would you do then?

I do what every other organization is doing. I'd cut costs. I'd have an open and honest transparent conversation. I would immediately start furloughing people and laying off people and cutting costs and I'd right size the business I'd use. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. I would invest massively, all this energy, all this bullshit and these protocols to avoid a pandemic that hopefully will be over in a few months or at least it will have crushed the curve. And I would move to online and I'd come out and I would cut my tuition by half. I'd have an onus conversation with the students and the parents and saying we're going online, it sucks. It's going to be an impaired experience. So we're going to, in recognition of that, we're going to cut your tuition in half. I'd cut costs by 20% immediately. And I'd reach out to my alumni and say we're in a difficult situation here and if you want us to continue to fulfill our mission, we need your help. And I'd also lobby my state elected official to say, all right, you've bailed out the largest cohort of wealthy people in the world and that is the owners of small businesses in the US you need to help us. So denial is very expensive. I think you could see hundreds of universities basically start a death march. What department stores are to retail, tier three universities are to education. Right now they're about to go from the sixth or seventh inning to the ninth inning in about 30 days.

And the net outcome of that, don't you think, is less educated kids and isn't that a terrible outcome?

Okay, so it's a complicated question. I think in the short term there's all sorts of bad things that might happen. And I think that. Let me back up, I think it could end up being a net good. I think that this notion that all kids need to go to college, this construct we've invented as academics that I've been doing a bunch of research administrators. Have you. Most universities, good universities, have kept their Enrollments flat. They're not educating any more kids, despite your college. Stanford has triple the applications it did 30 years ago. It hasn't increased freshman seats at almost at all, which means it's nearly impossible to get into. And alumni generally like that because it makes the value of their certification. But is that. Does that mean they're still serving their mission? Their tuition has exploded, costs have exploded. We need to figure out a way to use technology to dramatically lower the cost, expand the capacity, such that we can take American public universities, which educate two thirds of the kids in this, universities like mine, UCLA and Berkeley, back to the admissions levels where they were when I applied, where they let in a third of applicants, not 13 or 8%, because this generally represents a very unhealthy gestalt in our society. And that is we have fallen out of love with the unremarkables. The title, your podcast, Remarkable People. I say, and this isn't a humble graduation brag, I was remarkably unremarkable. I had a 3.1 GPA. I was like in the 80th percentile. I didn't have good grades, but I didn't test well either. And I applied to UCLA and I got rejected. And I appealed. And the truth has a nice ring to it. I said, look, I'm the son of a single immigrant mother. My household income is $38,000, and if you don't let me in because I can't afford to go to college where I can't live at home, I'm going to be installing shelving, and this is my job. I'm going to make 17 bucks an hour, which is a good living, but that's where I'm headed. And they called me back and they said, you're not qualified, but you're a native son of California, and we like your story. And they let me in, and that's why I'm here speaking to you. And if we don't get back to admissions rates that give, that give the admissions directors the license and the bandwidth to let in unremarkable kids, we're just going to end up where we are now. And that is the children of rich kids and remarkable kids get all the spoils. But 99% of us are not in the top 1%. And I can prove this mathematically. We need to move back to a situation where America falls back in love with kids who are unremarkable but might have remarkable futures if we give them one of the greatest gifts in the history of mankind, and that is opportunities to get A fantastic education at a reasonable price. We need to move back to falling in love with the unremarkables.

I can just imagine what you think of standardized testing then.

Well, that's just part of the industrial. The testing industrialized. The industrial testing complex is largely, again, just to accrete more opportunity to wealthy people who can pay for people to take the test for them or for. Which is. We've heard about some of that. Realistically, tutors, testing, prep. It just shows. It's not. It's. It is it. I. There's probably some sort of testing, but I don't. I think on the whole, I think most. The really thoughtful universe. I believe the administration, like the Chancellor of Berkeley, has decided that they're probably not going to continue. They're going to try and change the format of these tests. What do you think, Guy? What do you think of these tests?

I. I think they're no correlation to success, intelligence, anything.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

It's just, you know, who can get the best tutors. So do you think that without a vaccine or treatment that it is conceivable for business or schools to open? Because I don't. I don't see how it can be done.

I'm with you. I'm scheduled to teach 400 kids September 15th. This is. This is kind of how I laid out. My class is usually 160 kids. And it's. It's 160 because the classroom will hold. Only hold 160. And we've said okay, by the way, the people running NYU and running Stern are some of the most thoughtful, decent people I know. And I'm out there, like, making life hard for everybody. So I want to acknowledge that right now. And they're doing their best and they're coming up with all these protocols to try and keep faculty safe and students safe. But, you know, I've already stated I'm not going back on campus until there's a vaccine. And I think a lot of faculty feel that way. We want to be good citizens, we want to be supportive, but I just don't think you're going to have. Would we. What happens to these small towns? What happens to Lynchburg, Virginia, when the population swells from 20,000 to 40,000 and a bunch of bartenders and janitors overwhelm the ICU locally? I mean, it's just a bunch of people who are proven to be super spreaders coming to a dense area, going into rooms where the windows don't open. It reads like the opening scene of Contagion too. So we absolutely shouldn't have universities opening until there's a vaccine. And I'm also guy, the more I think about it, I'm scared. I worry that the term vaccine gives us cold comfort that we shouldn't be attacking the enemy in what I'll call with NPI's non pharmaceutical intervention, because we all fall back on this notion that we're going to have this magic bullet. Americans love science and a magic bullet of a vaccine. And we were in a race towards splitting the atom at the end of World War II. And we knew that whoever got the nuclear bomb was going to basically get to decide to end the war. But that didn't mean we didn't do D day. It didn't mean that we didn't continue drafting people and putting them in harm's way and building super fortresses and building Sherman tanks and fighting the war and fighting the enemy. Here it feels we've fallen into this a little bit in this cold comfort that the vaccine will solve everything. And when you read the surveys, the research, only 50% of America has said they'll take the vaccine. We can't get to herd immunity, according to Fauci, unless we get to somewhere between 70 and 85%. So even if you realistically, if you can distribute and administer to 70% of the populace that's willing to take it, you end up with 35, a third of America as the vaccine. So I worry that we've fallen into this notion that if we find a vaccine in a lab, we're done. And I don't think we are.

I interviewed Jerome Kim, who's in charge of the International Vaccine Institute, and he kind of has said the same thing. I mean, it's not as simple as.

Anyway, okay, yeah, it's done. Yeah, everything's fine now.

Yeah, last question about the pandemic. So if Dr. Fauci called you up and said, Scott, what the hell do I do? What would you tell him?

I tell him you need, you need better sources of information. Look, I'm a fan of war history. My mother towards during the Blitzkrieg, was taken by her father and her four sisters and her brother to a makeshift tube station where they would spend the night. And on the way, one day, during an alarm, a bombing alarm, her oldest sister was run over by a truck. I mean, that's the kind of sacrifices people were making to defend against the tyranny of the Axis powers. And we get asked to put on a mask in Walmart and people start bitching and moaning and so my sense is a, we lack national leadership. But what's not discussed enough is a lack of citizenship and the ability or the willingness to sacrifice. So what I would suggest, what I would want to see from our leadership and from our citizens is what I would call the great distancing. And that is companies adopt a certain number of households. Those of us who are economically secure and think of ourselves as being competent, organized people adopt households. And every One of these 105 million US households is adopted. And we plan testing, distancing, the right food, the right space, the right adequate childcare. And we scheduled a mother of all lockdowns where you aren't delivered anything. You're giving your groceries for 14 days, your Netflix, your online counseling if your kid's struggling. And we shut this shit down for 14 days. And you can take scheduled walks where there's no, you will run into absolutely no one twice a day. And for 14 days we severely distant and we put a nail in this motherfucking coffin. And that is, is my, my small knowledge of epidemiology is if we can stay away from each other for 14 days, more than six feet, this thing goes away. Instead we have the mother of all slow band aid rip, you know, rip offs taking place where we keep waiting around for the silver bullet of a vaccine. So I would like to see what I would call national leadership and the resources to do the great distancing where we all decide to those of us who are fortunate enough to be in the top quartile adopt households. Single mother with two kids in a small house. We're going to move you to a bigger living space. We're going to get you the groceries, we are going to set you up such that you can live some reasonable lifestyle for 14 days. We test the shit out of everybody and everybody massively distances for 14 days. That's what I would want to see. Otherwise I just think we're just in a forest fire. Americans have not shown an ability thus far to demonstrate the requisite citizenship. We cannot count on federal leadership. It just isn't there. Anyways, the great distancing, that's what I would like to see.

Guy, is it really only 14 days or is it more like six to eight weeks?

That's a fair question. I'm not an epidemiologist. My understanding is with the right amount of testing, if you can do rapid tests and ensure that people don't catch it in those two weeks that the 14 days. But I want to be clear, I have no domain expertise around the epidemiology of this. So I don't, I don't want to give anyone. That's a long winded way of saying, I don't know, you might be right.

But whether it's two weeks or six weeks or eight weeks, the concept is that it's a matter of personal responsibilities, citizenship, making sacrifices, wearing masks, all that stuff. It's not because we want the economy to pick up again and it's not because we want to be reelected.

Yeah. And people mistake liberty with lack of sacrifice. And what we're doing now, the absolute best way to reopen the economy is to get rid of this thing. Yeah. And until it's done, we're not going to have a full scale opening of the economy and Americans, our superpower is sort of a. Our optimism. Our superpower as a nation is our optimism. And it's ended up. It's a comorbidity, it's a preexisting condition. And now I worry that that optimism is moving towards this silver bullet idea of a vaccine, not recognizing that, practically speaking, it's probably not going to solve the problem.

So let's talk about Facebook and social media, et al. So first of all, do you believe that companies have a moral responsibility at all?

I mean, you'd like to think you could call on their better angels. I think if you were running Facebook, it would probably be a different company. But their primary responsibility is shareholder, to increase shareholder value. In capitalism, we have this incredible agent called a for profit corporation. And at the end of the day there you'd like to think it's not shareholders, it's stakeholders. And I get that. But, but they're sort of doing their job. I think the real failure. Now, look, I think Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath. I think he'll go down as one of the most damaging figures in history. And I think his number two is a $2 billion beard who will say anything to try and enhance her reputation or hold on to her wealth. I think they're terrible for humanity and for America. So I don't, I don't in any way want to let these folks off the hook. But there's a very valid argument that they are doing their jobs and their job is to do delay and obfuscation great innovation around products to increase shareholder value. And they have done that in spades. Who has not done their jobs is we as citizens. We have not elected representatives who hold these companies to the same scrutiny as we've held every other corporation in history. We've let them grow Way too powerful. We've let them pervert our elections, engage in activities that depress our teens and encourage suicide rates and self harm, erode our tax base by not paying their fair share of taxes. You know, there's just on and on and on. So I would argue, look, we would like, we would like them to behave, have more regard for the commonwealth, show more character and more code. But if you're waiting for, for them to call on their better angels, I don't think that's a good strategy. I think we need elected officials to hold these firms accountable like they've held every other firm. And so who's at fault? We're at fault. We need to elect people who have the domain expertise and the will to do the same things we've done with petroleum companies, tobacco companies and other firms that create a lot of economic value but have exceptionally damaging externalities.

But don't you think it's somewhat letting people off the hook by saying, well, as the CEO, that's their fiduciary responsibility. That's what they should be doing. You know, that's what they're supposed to be doing. So we can't hold them to a higher moral ground.

I'm with you, brother. I just haven't found it works. I don't know how Mark Zuckerberg sleeps at night, but he does. And I don't think he's going to change. I think that if he figured out a way to, if he figured out algorithms to garner more Chobani ads and the result was genocide in Myanmar, I think he would try and delay that information. I think he would try and avoid that scrutiny. I think he would threaten to sue the newspaper report. Wait, they've done all that? They've done all that. So the history just shows right now, to date, their actions, you know, judgment by their words, not their actions. They don't. They're concerned for people's safety. They're concerned for our, the sanctity of our elections. I mean, think about it. Four years ago we found out, or four years ago it appears that Facebook had not made the requisite investment such that their platform couldn't be weaponized by people, outside forces who were trying to suppress the vote in key swing districts. And we might have an illegitimate president. At a minimum, we have. The sanctity of our elections have been damaged dramatically. And a lot of people would argue we have an illegitimate president who is putting people on the Supreme Court who are slowly but surely eroding a woman's right to choice. So is sheryl Sandberg, this inspiring woman talking about the important debate of gender equality in the workplace. Or is she the worst thing to happen to women in the last hundred years? And yet I get the sense she sleeps fine. I get to say she's not, you know, she's down with her actions. I don't, you know, we need to do better. That's all I've heard in terms of her taking responsibility. And so I don't. I think I'd like to think what you're saying is right. I'm just not waiting on it.

So if you are a. An entrepreneur, a small businessman, let's face it, you know, one of the reasons why Facebook does so well is because if you are a real estate broker and you want to target people looking for houses in Santa Cruz, Facebook is the way. And there's not a lot of good alternatives. So what does Joe Blow or Jane.

Doe do they advertise on Facebook? I don't. Look, yeah, Florida Power and Light has a monopoly. I don't. They use natural gas, but let's assume they use coal, which is putting emissions in the air. I still turn on my lights. I mean, they're a monopoly or a duopoly. Facebook, small business, call me and say, I've heard your stuff, but it's a really effective tool for us. What do you think? I'm like, advertise on Facebook but vote for someone to break them up. Moral clarity is hard when you live in a capitalist society and your kids have access to health care based on how much money you have. And so I don't. I don't fault small business for using Facebook. And by the way, Facebook, it's incredible. And from a small business perspective, I mean, it is just incredible. If you order a little black dress from fast fashion for 999, somewhere in that supply chain, there's just bad shit going down. But I don't expect people to stop ordering that little black dress for 999. I expect us to put in place regulations that ensure that our supply chain has. Doesn't allow child labor or that we don't offshore all of our pollution. So, look, I don't. I don't fault small businesses. I think I was really inspired by some of the boycotts around Facebook. I found it sort of surprising Facebook will replace those advertisers overnight. I mean, not even overnight. In a minute. They have 8 million advertisers. It's just. It's the most elastic supplier or the most elastic revenue source in the history of modern business. The Facebook advertising business, it just fills in just another. Another company sees the opportunity to buy by placement and words and targeting and advertising at a lower fee, and they just fill in that void right away.

So what do you think when you see Tim Cook showing Donald Trump the quote, unquote, new factory that Donald Trump brought back to America? Are you saying for Tim Cook? Well, that's his role. Fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of Apple. So he should be paddling around with Donald Trump if that means that Apple's not affected by the trade war.

Yeah, he's smart. He realizes we have this, like, crazy weirdo narcissist, and then if you show up and do a photo op with him and tell him he's handsome and, and, and stay out of his way, he'll leave you alone. And I, I mean, loosely speaking, Mark Zuckerberg is the most successful oligarch in history. An oligarch is someone who uses their proximity to power to earn money in a corrupt way. I believe they've struck an unholy alliance. They've met two times, maybe three that we know of. And it appears that Donald Trump never says anything negative about Facebook. I think they've entered into this unholy alliance where he says, I can weaponize your platform and put out lies and outrageous content, which I'm very good at, or my agents are very good at, and it'll get me reelected and I'll leave you the hell alone. I'm not going to push on the DOJ to break you up. I think that's basically the implicit or explicit deal they have. And when Tim Cook says, okay, everyone in my company, we're not unethical people, but I think compensation drives behavior. I think every action these guys take is on one thing, and that's getting the stock price up. And I don't. Look, I'd like to think that they are be more focused on other things, but that's kind of their job. And, and so I don't, I don't fault Tim Cook for doing that. Okay.

Do you think that people just don't give a. About being on the right side of history? Because 20 years from now, it's going to be hard to look back and say, oh, they were just doing their job.

Yeah. But we sort of suffer from, in our society, we kind of suffer from this, what the Pope called this gross idolatry of the dollar. And our heroes, you know, Israel, the heroes are military leaders. In Britain, the heroes are typically government officials. In the US Used to be athletes and celebrities. And I think it's transitioned to billionaires. My sense is that you're a married man that's sending out dick pics and somehow you turn into a hero. That's Jeff Bezos. You know, the media decides he's a hero because he, he turned around to this bully. You know, how'd that happen? And, or, or you call someone a pedophile, or you commit securities fraud and say that you're taking your company private at $420 a share and the funding secured when that was a lie. But as long as you're an innovator, as long as you're a billionaire, we're down with you. I think that they have figured out, they've connected the dots and say as long as I'm a billionaire, I'll be perceived as an innovator and I will be loved. I will be universally allotted. I will be able to get away with almost anything. Young kids are going to want to hang out with me and CNBC is going to want to want to interview me and I'm going to get to go to the Academy Awards with someone better looking and younger than me. I think the society's decided that it's just really about money.

Geez.

Do I got that? Do I have that wrong?

No. So do you have any reason for optimism? Any reason?

I'm not quite a message of hope.

No, you're not.

Now look. Hey, there's. Let's look at the glasses. Half full. We might be maturing.

Yeah, let's.

We might be maturing a generation of young people. How old are your kids, guy?

27, 25, 18 and 16.

You're in the thick of it. So. And you tell me. But I have 9 and 12 year olds. I started late. But maybe we're hopefully we're maturing a generation of young people who are observing what's going on and realize that our superpower is cooperation and they're developing some grit. They've had to sacrifice a lot. I think if you're at college right now, you've had to sacrifice a lot. I think if you're a young person, you're supposed to be making friendships and potential finding mates. You've had to sacrifice a tremendous amount here. And so maybe we're hopefully maturing a generation of future leadership that will realize our power as a species is cooperation. They'll realize that you can't just shut down borders, that we have to cooperate with our brothers and sisters, that the greatest alliance in history was the North Atlantic Treaty, that we have to adopt Best practices that we have to show more comity of man. That if we let people, the bottom half of America, if we put them in a situation where they can't literally can't afford to go six weeks without a paycheck, they end up putting themselves in dangerous places. I'm hopeful that we're maturing a generation of leaders that will repair the incredible death, disease and disability that you and me have levied on this country through poor short term decision making. How's that?

Is that as optimistic as you get?

I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. Guy. Sorry about this. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not just realistically. We're, we're. We like to think of ourselves as exceptional. We're the wealthiest nation in the world. We spend more money on healthcare. We like to think of ourselves as the most innovative in the world. We have 4% of the world's population and 25% of the infections and 25% of the death. Czechoslovakia is flattened the curve and we have, we're. The company we're keeping right now is Brazil and Russia in terms of a response. And we're the, we're the shortest midget among those three. Canada, just north of us thinks they're living above a meth lab. I mean they've managed to crush the curve. They're not that different than us. How did we. American exceptionalism is a makeshift Mack truck that's a refrigerated morgue right now. How did we get this so wrong? How did we. How can we've ceded the mantle of global superpower to China. China is now the most respected nation in the world. We've shown an absolute disregard for people who are an economic economically disadvantaged. We've taken every bad trend around income inequality and racial injustice and just absolutely exploded it. And we have a leadership that doesn't want people to wear masks until about six days ago. So look, I don't, you know, I, I hope this is a real reckoning. I hope America looks in the mirror and says, okay, what the is going on here?

Well, I, I was at Apple when Apple nearly died. And one of the lessons that I learned in my life is that if you go through a near death experience but don't die, it's often the best thing that ever happened to you. Yeah. So I mean you would not sit down and say, okay, our strategy is to nearly die. That's what's going to fix the problem. But I swear that's what happens. The near death experience for Apple was a good event in looking back and it enabled Apple to become a trillion dollar company.

But I would argue the difference is I bet you and your colleagues didn't hate each other other you didn't divide into red and blue. I, I think without some sort of national service or something that creates, you know, in the 1560s when we came together as a nation to pass great legislation, it was because a lot of our leaders had served in the same uniform and they saw America as being more important than their political ideology and because our young people don't really, I think, have any sort of social service. Because I think we've outsourced war. I think because you or my generation is never really, really been asked to serve. I would argue I don't think you're old enough for Vietnam. I know I'm not. I just worry that we don't, we haven't, we've almost lost the ability to come together as Americans. It's, you'd like to think Canada, they've come together. I mean there's some up there, but they've managed to come together. Nations have managed to come together. But it feels like a lot of, you know, Britain and the US haven't figured out a way to come together around this. So I wonder, I hope we. Yeah, I hope we do. I hope we do.

Well, maybe it's not clear it can, but maybe the pandemic ultimately will force us to come together because the virus doesn't give a shit.

That's right.

Party or what race you are Right.

So we'll see what's your, Are you hopeful around this? Do you think, do you see us coming together on this?

I mean, I'm, I'm a three quarter full glass kind of guy. I mean, it's just, that's in my DNA and I like to believe it, but I think it, it may be, it may be natural selection. I mean, you know.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

I don't know.

Well, now that I've bummed your listeners out, next week on Remarkable People, Mary Poppins.

But I, I have to, I watched your videos and I read your stuff and man, I, I your, your YouTube video about the algebra of happiness or the math of happiness.

That makes no sense.

I sent it to about 10 parents who said, you got to tell your kids, okay? So to cap it off, the piece of advice that I loved in that was that basically the career path for young people is contrary to the bullshit about do what you love and the money will come. Basically you said, find something you're good at and work your Ass off, right? And I tell people that, listen, if you went to work for a startup and you really didn't care about dogs and cats and pets, but you went to work for a startup that was gonna sell dog food and pet food online, maybe you were a PHP programmer or whatever, right? But you went to this startup and all of a sudden you're selling a million cans of dog food per day. Trust me when I tell you you will love dogs and cats.

Talk a little bit about the notion you bring up and then I. I'm going to try. I will end on a happy note here. So, okay, so first off, we have two types of speakers at Stern. We have speakers three times a week and they're one, they're from one or two cohorts. They're either really impressive, substantive people or they're billionaires. We've decided that billionaires have just incredible perspective on life and they always end with the bullshit advice of follow your passion. And the guy on stage telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron ore smelting. And what I tell the kids, as you said, is, okay, passion connotes this notion that if you don't love what you're doing, it must not be your passion and you should give up and leave that job. And most of us decide that our passions at a young age are sports or opening a restaurant or a club or going to work for Vogue. And generally speaking, those industries are over invested with a human capital which drives down returns. So you better be cursed and get incredible psychic income from those fields because you're going to get a lower return on investment relative to other industries. Your job is not to find your passion, if you will, but it's to find something you're really good at. There are a lot of tax lawyers in this nation that fly private, get great health care, have access to a selection set of mates that is much more interesting and attractive than they are, which makes them love tax accounting. And that is if you are good at something and you're willing to put up with the bullshit, the grit, the perseverance, the political jockeying in a company to just become great at it, become best in the world at it, whatever it is, the accoutrements of that will make you love whatever that is. So that's your job. Find something you're great at and it doesn't have to be. I wanted to make my life in professional sports and I got to UCLA and realized real fast I just wasn't very good at it. And so I found, okay, I'M better at things like, you know, marketing and accounting and kind of this business stuff, which seemed really dry and awful at the time. But I thought maybe someday I could be. I can be great at this. And then the thing I'll end on. And this is from. I've been thinking a lot about the pandemic. Coming back to the pandemic, what the opportunity is. You asked me what the opportunity is professionally. I think there's a meaningful opportunity professionally to lap the competition. What do I mean by that? I'm not a workaholic, but as a matter of fact, I love not working. And I want to spend more time the rest of my life not working. And in order to do that, I try and apply what I call functional speed. So you're in the Bay Area. Jerry Rice, hall of Fame wide receiver. Never the fastest guy, but they had what people called functional speed. He could accelerate and decelerate faster than any receiver got open more and more touchdowns. I think you got to pick your punches and know when to really accelerate. And if you're blessed with the ability to work from home right now and make some progress, you should be working 24 by 7, because there's a lot of big swaths of the economy are shut down and a lot of people can't work at full capacity. And that's the time when you really turn on the jets. Because despite what TV will show you with NASCAR, the races are one in the pits. If you can shave two seconds off your time in the pits going 220 miles an hour, that's an eighth of a mile advantage. While a lot of the economy is in the pits. If you can work, go 24 by 7. I said to my family about 16 weeks ago, for the next 12 weeks, I'm just going to work around the clock seven days a week, because I see a big opportunity here because I can do what I do regardless. While everyone else is closing their studios, not writing whatever it might be, I'm going to go really hard because I want to work less when we come out of it. So there's a meaningful opportunity to lap the competition. Now. The profound opportunity, guy. The profound opportunity. And this goes back to the notion of Lenin had this great quote, that sometimes decades happen and decades go by, nothing happens. And then you can have weeks where decades happen. And I think the profound opportunity is sort of the repair and the cementing of key relationships. And that is, I think a lot of people are struggling emotionally, financially, professionally. And I think if you can bring real grace and generosity and reach out to people and offer a hand. Stop keeping score like did you let your friendships wane because of perceived slights or bullshit competitiveness? Are you not the kid to your parents that you want to be? Do you? If you had to say goodbye to your siblings over FaceTime because one of them got really sick, is the relationship where you would want it to be? If you can demonstrate real grace and generosity and reach out to people, there's a profound opportunity to cement and strengthen relationships. The meaningful opportunities to lap the competition professionally, the profound opportunity presented in COVID 19 is the opportunity to repair and cement our key relationships.

Hallelujah. Now that is the way to.

That'S better.

Okay everybody, it's review time. Delightful and insightful. Rahul USA the journey of becoming a remarkable person is fascinating and inspiring. Guys, an engaging conversationalist and talented interview. This is one podcast I really enjoy. Thank you Rahul. And last but not least, Guy has great editors. Josh Reppin Guy's interview with Karen Malarkey might be one of the best individual episodes I have ever listened to on any subject in any series. Wow. That made my day. Ms. Malarkey is truly a national and global treasure, and Guy did a great job surfacing her incredible stories and insights. What I notice in this episode is that Guy's editors are getting really good at the perfect insert of a bit of music. Their skill with this type of narrative artistry is growing, in my humble opinion. I'm a podcaster myself, so these types of flourishes are something I strive for. Great job, remarkable people. Team. Listen to this one all the way through twice. Let's just say I concur. I have great people working with me on this podcast, namely Jeff fc who does the sound editing, and Peg Fitzpatrick who does all the marketing and all the promotion. Back to Scott Galloway. Tell me something. Have you ever heard anyone rip into Facebook and stupid decisions of politicians like Scott just did? Clearly he's not trying to win any popularity contests and that's one factor that makes him such a remarkable person. He is a data point for all of us to tell it like it is. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. Thanks to Elliot Grossbaard for making this interview happen. I say this at the end of every episode, but remember, wear a mask, don't go into crowded places, wash your hands and generally listen to doctors and scientists, not politicians. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.