Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Derek Thompson of The Atlantic on the Post-Corona workforce

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

When the global economy came to a halt this spring, tens of millions of American workers found themselves working from home - and millions more found themselves unemployed. Derek explains the potential long term implications of an economy with a large “telepresence.”How might this shift out of offices and even out of cities affect America’s cultural and economic future? Dan and Derek sit down to discuss what a Post Corona world might look like. 

Welcome to Post-Corona, the show where we try to understand how COVID-19 will reshape our economies, cultures, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. With much of the electoral uncertainty in the U.S. behind us, we wanted to turn our attention to the long-term societal impact of the pandemic. There are lots of discussions these days about how COVID-19 is the defining crisis of our time. Governments have poured trillions of dollars into the global economy, hoping for a V-shaped recovery. But now, almost a year in, we know there will be no quick fixes, no simple prescriptions. Will we ever return to a pre-corona world, or will some changes outlive the pandemic itself? In each episode, I'll have a guest on to try to unlock how this crisis will transform an aspect of our lives, or transform

a different part of the world. Topics we will be looking at will include the future of work, education, digital health care, and even U.S.-China relations. I hope you will find these conversations as illuminating as I have. Today, we'll talk with Derek Thompson of The Atlantic about the future of the labor market. Just to set the table here, in the spring, the unemployment rate rocketed up to close to 15%. This all basically happened overnight as the global economy was instructed to shut down. At the same time, many workers kept their jobs but changed how they work. According to a Stanford University study, over 40% of workers flipped to work from home during the pandemic. And according to a Harvard Business School study, that change to remote work could be permanent for one in six workers. Think about that.

In every pod of six colleagues that you know, one of them might never return to an office. Again, all this happened in a historical blink of an eye. Were these changes temporary or will they be permanent? What are the second and third order implications of such dramatic changes to the way we work? This is Post-Corona. I'm pleased to welcome my friend Derek Thompson to this conversation, this inaugural conversation. I read everything he writes, but especially what he's been writing during this time for The Atlantic. And he is the author of the book, Hitmakers, How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction. And he is the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Crazy Genius, and has been thinking about all these issues that we are going to try to cover in this series. So Derek, thanks for being here.

It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So first off, before I jump into it, I'm thinking about the last time I saw you. And the last time I saw you was either at like a mid-day, mid-workday lunch in Midtown Manhattan, that I think may have been it, when you were writing about, I think, tax reform. How quaint, writing about tax reform. And then also at a conference where you came to a conversation I was having with Amnon Shashua from Mobileye, a conversation about driverless cars. Also a quaint notion, the idea that we could be thinking about autonomous vehicles, not a world of pandemics. But here we are.

So even though if we can't be in person at lunch or at a conference, it's good to be with you virtually. So one question before we jump into some substance, what about these last six months in your life has changed? Yeah, I think about this all the time. So I am, as you said, lucky to be among the approximately 30% of Americans whose job is easily moved to remote work, is telecommutable, I suppose. But there's been lots of challenges and sort of little opportunities for growth, I suppose, under lockdown. On the challenges front, you know, very personally, I was supposed to get married in September. So that did not happen. But as it turns out, in exactly 24 hours from now, I am going to be in a marriage ceremony over Webex with a judge in Washington, DC. And in 25 hours, I will be a married man. Wow. Yeah, I'm very, I guess I'm excited about it, but it's also like, you know, my fiance, almost wife and I have talked about this so much. Like it's so exciting, but also just so weirdly anticlimactic

to get married on a computer screen two weeks after you're supposed to have a ceremony with 150 of your best friends and family. Congratulations. It's very exciting. WebEx or not. Thank you. I'm dealing with something similar

because my son is supposed to be bar mitzvahed in a few months. Thank you. It was a big deal for us. And it's our first child, first son. And obviously, you know, bar mitzvah in January and the, you know, could be the throes of a second wave. Our initial vision for it is not what it's probably going to be. But a lot of people have pointed out that like weddings, bar mitzvahs, all these other events, it's stripped away a lot of the kind of craziness around these big events that have kind of gotten out of control. You know, people are doing smaller events, you know, smaller groups of people, more intimate, the people who really matter. I don't know. I've

been struck by how many people have pointed out that it's kind of nicer. Yeah, there's definitely like a back to basics element to it. And we're in this world that is simultaneously the 1830s and the 2030s. The 2030s in that we're so reliant on the virtual economy, whether it's Zoom or Amazon, obviously. But at the same time, you know, we're also thrust back into the 1830s into a world before you had a face-to-face service economy when everything was done at home, when childcare was at home and schooling was at home. And, you know, people grew their own vegetables and tended to their own animals and did all the cooking at home. There weren't really restaurants to speak of in any large number in the 1830s.

And so we're weirdly occupying, you know,'re weirdly occupying these two decades separated by 200 years. And there is loveliness to it. Finding joy in those quiet moments that don't rely on a massive face-to-face service economy can be beautiful. At the same time, though, and I should also say that the ability to see silver linings, the ability to see beauty even in a plague, I think is worth just, you know, pushing our finger down on and recognizing. But man, I also cannot wait to get back into the real world and to see, you know, these far flung people that I haven't seen in months. Right. Let's jump into a topic you have written about and framed it very well about what the labor force, the transformation the labor force is going to be going through.

And just to lay out a few stats, a little over 40% of American workers are working from home now. One in six workers plan, expect that once we get out of COVID, whenever that may be, they're going to work from home permanently for at least two days a week. Obviously, the unemployment rate, which, while it goes up and down, is still staggeringly high, close to 8% to 10%. It is a time of tremendous tumult and potential transformation. You identify a few big trends that are worth monitoring because they're going to be potentially the big changes.

You say the telepresence revolution will reshape the US workforce. So first, what is the telepresence revolution? And why will it reshape our workforce? So the telepresence revolution is basically this idea that, you know, for I don't know, as long as the white collar economy has existed, as long as we've moved off of farms and stopped being an agrarian workforce. We've occupied two worlds. We've occupied one world where we are living in our house, and then we travel, we commute to work, and then we work at work, and then we go back to our house. So that's gone for this third of the workforce or 40% of the workforce. Instead, we have telepresence. It's people who are together in an office that exists in the cloud, but we are together from our own living rooms and second

bedrooms and first bedrooms and bathrooms. I don't even know where people are working. And so I think it's worth thinking through all the obvious and non-obvious implications of this telepresence revolution. So one just obvious implication would be, okay, well, if people are driving less, if they're commuting less and traveling less, well, then maybe that means that they're buying less gas, they're paying less for the subway or the metro. And so there are parts of those economies that are just reduced. But I talked to this economist, David Autor, co-chair of the MIT Task Force and the work of the future. And he had some really interesting, non-obvious implications of this telepresence

revolution. He said, okay, think about business travel. There's a lot of people, lawyers or salespeople, whatever, who might reduce their business travel by, let's say, 10 to 20%. And that might not seem huge, but think about what business travel pays for. It drives a lot of leisure and hospitality spending. Business travelers pay full freight at luxury hotels on weeknights, but basically nobody else does. They're the ones whose companies are paying for business class seats on airplanes. They're the ones who use their corporate credit cards to pay for limos or lavish meals. So what happens if business travel declines by 10 to 20 percent? It could have really important implications for the airlines, for hotels, and for restaurants

and limo drivers who rely on business travel spending. And so what will that do? Well, the analogy I want to draw is to retail spending. So in retail, about 10% to 15% of retail before the pandemic went online. It was Amazon or Walmart.com. Now, you could say, oh, well, online retail was only about 13% or 14% of total U.S. retail spending. It wasn't that big. It was just one-seventh. But that one-seventh had a huge impact on the

retail landscape. I mean, how many different companies in the retail world felt like their business models were changed because of Amazon or changed because of Jet or because of Warby Parker or Bonobos? like practically all of them. There were so many different retailers that were thinking about totally changing their business and their future because of this 13%. So even if business travel just declines by, let's say, 13%, it could still have an Amazon-style effect on the overall market. That's an analogy I'll be returning to a bit in the future as we talk about other changes to the economy and the workforce that aren't, you know, 100% to 0%, but more like a 13% change. So, you know, the other point I would make on that is that

in order to have a flourishing ecosystem, whether it is a flourishing ecosystem of restaurants, whether it's a flourishing ecosystem of hotels, flourishing ecosystem of theater, I mean, pick your – anywhere in hospitality and entertainment, you need so much traffic. You need so much activity to create that ecosystem. It's not like the ecosystem just gets a little smaller i think partly to your point it's that when you when you remove a considerable percentage of the of the revenue the whole ecosystem it doesn't collapse but it's like it's the difference between the restaurant scene in new york city and the restaurant scene in boston i mean the restaurant scene in boston isn't bad it's isn't bad. But it's not a thriving ecosystem. There's a whole restaurant scene in New York City. Every hot chef wants to open a

restaurant or work at a restaurant in New York City because there's typically just so much demand. And once you bring some of that demand down, it's not like the ecosystem shrinks proportionately. The ecosystem could collapse. Right. I think that's the ecosystem shrinks proportionately. The ecosystem could collapse. Right. I think that's the way to think about it. I mean, I'm not predicting anything this dramatic, but let's say, for example, that every single restaurant in America's margin or revenue declined by 15% permanently, right? So you had the same amount of spending, the same amount of labor costs and rent initially, but all the revenue declined by 15% on a semi-permanent basis. Just about every restaurant in America would have to shutter and go bankrupt. I mean,

they don't have 15% margins. So a 15% change actually takes you to zero, not to, you know, 0.85. And I think that's a really important point when you're talking about low margin businesses. But then to add on to everything that I said about business travel, okay, now let's also talk about ordinary people who might not be going to downtown areas. You know, I might not go to, you know, downtown New York if I'm living in Brooklyn. I might not go to downtown DC if I'm living in Bethesda, you know, on and on with every other city. Well, now you have less foot traffic in those areas, which means there are fewer people to just walk into that cava or that sweet green or that place that, you know, sells paper products. This change, this, you know, 10 to 20% change could still have

huge effects on the look and feel of downtown areas. It could change the streetscape. And I think we should be thinking about that as well. I also think it affects the security. I mean, when I talk to people at the NYPD over the last couple of decades, they would say a big part of the security strategy in New York City, NYPD can't be everywhere. So what they depend on in a lot of neighborhoods is a very dynamic, very vibrant pedestrian traffic scene. You walk through, pick a neighborhood, Soho, right? So Soho on any given day, especially weekends, at night, as much as during the day is booming, people walking everywhere, harder to commit a crime in a place where there's just lots of people walking the streets,

lots of eyeballs, lots of activity. So the NYPD didn't need as much of a footprint in some of those neighborhoods because they just said, what are the odds that crime is going to happen there? There's too many people for crime to happen there. But when you, to your point, start removing a lot of those people, if the NYPD can't be everywhere, what happens to some of these neighborhoods? So I think that and that has a downward spiral dynamic at play with regard to like how interesting is it for these stores to be open in neighborhoods where the streets used to be bustling, now they're empty, and now they actually don't even feel that safe. Yeah, I actually hadn't even thought about the crime aspect of it.

But you're totally right. I wrote a little bit about some about de-policing issues over the summer. And, you know, one thing that Patrick Sharkey, one of the top researchers on this point told me, he said, you know, you need to think about crime as an ecosystem. You know, when you have an area that's dangerous become an area that's safe. It's not just a matter of you had a crime issue, and then the police came in, and they rooted out the crime, and that's the end of the story. What you have instead is this dynamic where you have an area that has a certain amount of crime.

For a variety of reasons, police intervene and crime begins to decline. As crime declines, people feel more comfortable going out in the streets. Maybe you put more street lights up. Maybe businesses stay open a little bit longer from midnight to 2 to 4. More people come out to the streets, you have this virtuous cycle, to the point where you don't have crime in a place like, you know, I don't know, around the alphabet city near Tompkins Square Park in 2019, like you might have had in 1979, 40 years earlier. You know, not because there are so many police that area, but because there are so many people, and you're not going to try to commit a crime on a really crowded street on Avenue C when

it's filled with people. And so what happens when these places might depopulate to a certain extent? That's an interesting implication that I actually hadn't thought about. Jumping to post-corona, are you hearing any creative ideas coming out of the restaurant industry? I'm picking that as an example. How do you redesign the restaurant in a world in which people in a kitchen can't be on top of each other? The kitchens in a lot of these restaurants are tiny anywhere, not just New York City.

You need some version of kind of plexiglass or something between tables. You need proper spacing in these restaurants when the margins are already low and the rents are already high. If we're in this model for a while, how do you redesign? Yeah. So I'm going to break the answer down into two categories. The first category being what happens in a world that's sort of post now but pre-vaccine, and then what the world looks like after the vaccine. So I think that between now and a vaccine, what you're going to see is, is frankly, a lot of what you have seen, if you've been out to a restaurant, and you, I mean, you, Dan, and you, anybody who's listening, you see as much pushed outside as possible. A lot of indoor dining tends to be

socially distanced. And at least in Washington, DC, you tend to have, you know, touchless ordering where people are essentially, you know, scanning some QR code and pulling up the menu on their phone and then ordering through a website in their phone. I frankly think, brief aside, that's a bit of overkill given the science of COVID transmission. It's much more likely that people are getting sick via aerosolized spray from talking and coughing than from touching things. That said, it's probably safer than having everyone touch the exact same menu. So you're seeing restaurants go to touchless. And then you're also seeing, obviously, restaurants expand into delivery. Already in 2020, I wrote an article about a year ago that predicted that 2020 would be the first year where a majority of restaurant spending would be off premise rather than inside of restaurants. That was because you were seeing, you know, this growth of the Grubhubs and the Seamless and,

you know, Uber Eats was just rising much faster than on premise spending was rising. Now, obviously, 2020 will, in fact, be very clearly the first year where off premise spending in restaurants is higher than on-premise. But that's because of a plague. The point, though, of that prediction is that this was already happening. This is a way in which the pandemic was accelerating change and not just inventing it. So you're going to have an increase in off-premise spending and restaurants will be more distributed than they were previously. I guess that's a little bit like the rest of retail. On post-vaccine, I do think that we will get back to a world

where people want to eat at Applebee's and Arby's and 11 Madison Park and all these kinds of places. They'll want to have that touch come back into their life. If they loved it in 2017 and 2018 and 2019, they'll love it in 2021, 22, 23. But they'll need some security, whether that comes from a trusted vaccine or from something else. So I do think that over a long enough time horizon, restaurants, indoor restaurant experiences will be pretty similar to what they were in 2019, maybe with a little bit of extra hygiene thrown in there.

Um, but I do think that this has accelerated the expansion of off premise dining, uh, restaurant deliveries, and that that expansion will continue for the next decade because lots of people who love restaurants also love being, you could say, convenienced or you could say lazy. They love staying at home and booting up Netflix and not changing out of their PJs and sweatpants, just having the food brought to them. Never bet against convenience in the American consumer market and delivered food is convenient food. So that infrastructure that's being built out right now will definitely be put to use in the next few years.

Yeah, you could argue that the greatest competition, the greatest competitive threat to restaurants pre-COVID were the streaming services. And obviously COVID has just accelerated that. I think you wrote or mentioned that the highest margins goods in restaurants are alcohol and desserts. And they're the least likely

items to be ordered for takeout. Right. So, and this is one of the issues with restaurants moving too quickly to a delivery future. The meals most likely to be delivered, the dishes most likely to be delivered are entrees. But entrees are often the least profitable dish. Appetizers, desserts, and booze are where restaurants really make their money, but those are all the least likely to be delivered. And so this is why you see the delivery market, at least as of late 2019, early 2020, be completely dominated by basically two cuisines, pizza and Chinese food account for, I believe, two-thirds

of the delivery market in terms of orders. That's astonishing. And it goes to two things. One, obviously, Chinese restaurants have done a lot of work building out the delivery infrastructure in the US. Two, it turns out that hot cheese on bread travels very well in cars. But three, the implication of number two is that not everything travels as efficiently as everything else. You know, I love old fashioned French food. And indeed, tomorrow, we're going to an old fashioned French restaurant to celebrate the WebEx wedding. E wedding. Yeah. I mean, do I want foie gras that is being delivered from 45 minutes away? Uh, no, you can definitely keep that, uh, that chili room temperature, uh, piece of

liver. Um, I don't want to put it in the microwave. Um, especially if I'm having to pay $42 for it. Um, some stuff just doesn't travel, uh travel particularly well. And that means that a future where the restaurant market is moving into delivery more than it is holding onto on-premise margins is also a future where food that travels has an advantage over food that doesn't travel. And that I think is just another thing to think about. If you're an entrepreneur looking to start, you know, a new restaurant business, or if you're just a foodie who's interested in the

future of restaurants, you know, the travelability, transportability, portability, I worked my way to an actual word there, of food is going to be a really important part of the restaurant future. And I just want to add, because I love little historical examples, the decade of prohibition in the US destroyed a lot of restaurants in the 1920s. A lot of restaurants were destroyed because they relied on booze to make their margin. And when booze went away, the restaurants went away. And as a result, what happened was that the restaurant industry sort of nudged toward diner style food, you know, milkshakes and hamburgers and hot dogs and basically food that was fit for a kid because restaurants had to become kid friendly when the booze went away. And so what happened to American cuisine over the next 30 years?

Well, it became dominated by like McDonald's, like every restaurant became like a diner and a sort of McDonald's equivalent. I don't want that to happen again, but it did happen in the middle of the 20th century. And I think it set American culinary progress, culinary innovation back 40 years. Like Europe just lapped the US in terms of culinary innovation in the middle of the 20th century.

And we only got it back at the end of the 20th century, early 21st century. We can't let that happen again. We have to find some way to keep restaurants alive and keep culinary diversity alive and not just become slaves to portability. I won't hold you to this, but during the trans-corona period, this period that we're in now until we find some kind of vaccine, let's just say during what could be a second wave, do you see a way in which any of these restaurants can really stay in business unless

there's another kind of CARES Act or some other stimulus to keep these restaurants open, which are all basically small and medium-sized businesses? Do you see any way? How does the New York restaurant scene get in the next six months not get totally decimated? The truth is, I don't know. I agree that without a new CARES Act or a new PPP plan or without something else that essentially bails out restaurants again, I think a lot more are going to fail over the winter because you don't have the option of outdoor dining unless I suppose you line New York streets and Boston streets and Concord, New Hampshire streets with those overhead heater machines. I think a lot of restaurants are going to die. Early on in the pandemic, restaurateurs I talked to said as many as 50% of America's restaurants could perish.

That may be an accurate prediction. I have equated this effect to a forest fire for two reasons. First, a forest fire destroys everything. Second, stuff grows after a forest fire. And sometimes in the ashes of a forest fire, what grows actually has even more fauna diversity or flora diversity, I should say. I always get this mixed up. Biological diversity, I'll say, to be safer than what pre-existed the fire. I think that, for example, you could imagine a 2022, just to be safe, where commercial rents have fallen a bit in New York. You have a lot of empty spaces in ground floor retail. And you have huge demand for among New Yorkers to eat out. They've saved a lot of money over the previous 18 to 24 months. They haven't spent on restaurants. They haven't spent

on bars or on vacations or on clothes. They've got money burning to spent on restaurants. They haven't spent on bars or on vacations or on clothes. They've got money burning to spend on restaurants. And so what opens? Well, a new crop of restauranteurs comes in and takes advantage of lower commercial rents in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. And this thrilling new generation of restaurants grows where the previous generation of restaurants died. That is the forest fire that I think could happen in New York and really across the country. And so if you're pessimistic about it, you should be. The next 12 months could suck, but you could also be optimistic about it and take the 24-month perspective and say, you know, we are pre-dawn,

we are before the dawn of what could potentially be an amazing restaurant revolution in America. Right, a real rebirth. Okay, let's move on to the next area you focus on in your article. Remote work will increase free agent entrepreneurship. So are you saying we're going to see during this, I guess during this period we're in, let's take the trans-corona, the muddling through the next few months. Are you already seeing people being more entrepreneurial and more spending time thinking about solving problems that they otherwise may not have the time or interest to try and solve that only kind of an entrepreneurial mindset could have? Are you seeing more of that already? So three layers here. One layer is that you have seen an increase in 1099 applications.

That could be a result of bankruptcies. It could be a result of freelance work. But it could also be the result of what I call here free agent nation, that you could just see more people using remote work to start new stuff. It's a possibility. Number two, this is definitely happening in media, the industry that we are at least tangentially contributing to. You've seen this explosion in Substack newsletters, for example. Substack is a newsletter technology that essentially

gives people the opportunity to publish and distribute their content via newsletters with a really, really simple interface. Makes it easy to sign up. It's amazing. It's amazing. Look at your, yeah. I have found as a consumer, as a news consumer, I have found so many writers. Yeah. Really interesting heterodox voices too. Yeah.

And very like other, you know, any other time would be just considered narrow and kind of down their own rabbit hole. And you could never imagine them joining a major platform or publisher because there just wouldn't be an odd, there wouldn't be a general news audience for it. But they have, they have a follower of five or 10 or 15,000 people who are actually really interested in some narrow topic. They can really, you know, be entrepreneurial and build a brand around. Right. And originally it was people who were outside of the traditional media ecosystem that were doing this, that were sort of, you know, growing organically from the soil and discovering this huge audience. And that's a fantastic story

when it happens. But what you're seeing increasingly, or at least in an accelerated way in the last week, is established journalists leaving established media companies in order to start their or continue their careers with Substack, essentially going solo and using the Substack infrastructure to forge an independent one-to-one relationship with paid subscribers. Casey Newton from The Verge just did this. Anne Ellen Peterson from BuzzFeed, a great culture writer, did this as well. Andrew Sullivan probably is the biggest fish here who left New York Magazine and brought his daily or weekly dish of some term to Substack.

These are heavy hitters, and it's really exciting. And that is also a part of the free agent entrepreneurship that I predicted. The third layer, though, which really might be the foundational prediction or observation that I'm making, is that remote work is remote. It is lonely. It is, if not lonely, certainly alone. People who are working from their kitchen counters, as I do, or from their offices at home, look around and are around nobody. Their office is their dog. And they are as close, phenomenologically, as close to their colleagues as they are to anyone else in the world, because their colleagues exist as icons on Slack, but anyone else in the world

just exists as an icon on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or TikTok or Snapchat or whatever, Discord. And as a result, as the connections and relationships within companies weaken a little bit and our connection to the outside world expands, people might find that their connection to the office attenuates and they feel more interested to start new stuff. That they essentially look around and say, well, I'm alone. I am alone. And I might as well monetize the fact of my independence by starting some new projects

that are just me working with someone else outside the world. So you could see, for example, from a media standpoint where I'm obviously an expert because I'm only really an expert in my own life, I become more interested in, you know, writing a book where I'm reaching out to writing a new book where I'm reaching out to people across the science and tech industry about this new book project that I have. And that feels, I don't want to say easier, but, you know, I'm never underwater in the atmosphere and culture of the office. I'm always in the same spot on a couch or at my kitchen table. And the projects outside of The Atlantic feel as close to me as work at The Atlantic.

I don't want my boss, Jeffrey Goldberg, to listen to this and say, oh my God, Derek isn't doing his work. I would direct him to my author page of The Atlantic where I hope I've been relatively productive. You've been very active. Don't worry. Thank you for that vote of confidence. But I do think that this is going to happen. I think that you're going to see remote work lead to more people feeling independent and monetizing the fact of their independence. And not to mention the digital tools that are available to people, which I will tell you, you know, my day job, I work in a large fund. Before COVID, we would hear talk, oh, the world's heading towards work from home.

People are going to, you know, migrate towards these technology tools. And it all seemed preposterous to me because I just thought this technology is going to be hard to use. It's not going to be user-friendly. It's not going to be secure. It's not going to be cheap. There's no way. And so the inertia was all just kind of the status quo and not accelerating work from home. And then basically over the course of one weekend in middle March, the entire world was basically told to stop working. And so everyone flipped to these digital tools. And turns out they are inexpensive. They're basically secure. There's some problems. And they're easy to use. And so now it's like the inertia flips. Now the harder part is like

letting go of them and showing back up at the office. Yeah, the flipping of the inertia is a nice way to think about it. It's funny, just a really brief story. In February this year, just before the world fell apart, I walked into my editor Don Peck's office, the magazine editor, and I said, hey, Don, I have a really great idea for a business column for a spring or early summer issue of The Atlantic. He said, okay, cool, Derek, what is it? I said, well, so for the last 20 years, internet people have been

predicting the so-called death of distance. They said that remote work was ready to take off. And because the internet allowed us to work from wherever you were going to see, like everyone just like, you know, move to Boise and work for companies that were theoretically based or legally based in San Francisco or New York. And for 20 years, that just didn't happen. Remote work wasn't meaningfully increasing. And then all of a sudden in 2018, 2019, the Federal Reserve published some studies that seemed to indicate that, huh, yeah, remote work really is taking off. And I said, Don, I think this is a big piece. I think I'm on top of this idea before other people are really noticing it. We are at an inflection point in remote work. And then the pandemic happened, and it totally scooped me. I had this idea. I had this prediction. And it was directionally

accurate. And it just became the most obvious thing in the world to predict that remote work was the future three weeks later. So it's, again, another example, kind of like a food delivery, where the pandemic accelerated a trend that I was already beginning to notice. It just put the trend on steroids. And yeah, it's become a bit of a cliche, but the pandemic is not an inventor so much as it is an accelerant for all these tiny little things that were beginning to sprout in January, February of 2020. Yeah, Marc Andreessen has this great line where he says, whenever you hear about whiz-bang technology, some great innovation, flying cars, whatever it's going to be, it's easy

to say they won't happen. He says, the truth is they all will happen. And the fact is every great innovation, all these tools we take for granted now, you know, someone predicted them long before they came about. It's so, so these things will all inevitably happen. The hard part is just getting the timing right. And who could have envisioned a, you know, a pandemic to, to serve as an accelerant. One other point before we move off entrepreneurship, in terms of high growth, entrepreneurs backing high growth startups, Adam Grant, who someone else we're interviewing for this podcast at Wharton, in his book, The Originals, he looks at a lot of these, what he calls nonconformists. He says there's this myth, which I had never realized, there's this myth that these entrepreneurs

are all kind of like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates types, you know, who quit college, put all their chips on their company, you know, I'm risking it all, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna be uniform, you know, unifocused on this particular project. He says, the truth is, the data shows, most of these high growth startups don't fall into that category. They're mostly started by people who are actually pretty risk averse, or pretty good at managing risk. So most of these companies, if they're founded by students, they're not students who quit being in an elite college. I say, no, I'm going to stay in my elite college experience or my elite business school because

this is good insurance. But while I'm here, I'm going to try to start the company. I'm not going to quit school. Or I'm going to stay in my day job and then on the side, try to develop this idea. But I don't want to give up my day job. I don't want to stop working at the investment bank or the management consulting company. If he's right, then this environment is tailor-made for that because people will have found a lot of time, found a lot of independence. They're working on their own schedules. So like you said, this idea of the book you want to write, you have the time to think

about it. There's a whole generation of entrepreneurs who may decide to pursue things that they otherwise may not have because they have the benefit, the security of having their day job and the time and space to think about other problems that are not directly related to their day job. I think that's very well said. And I would add one more layer, which, I do believe that the 21st century could very well be seen in retrospect as the century of biology. The line from Freeman Mason is the 20th century was the century of physics and the 21st century will be the century of biology. And if you think about it, what event could you possibly imagine that would more accelerate interest in the relationship between the biology of our bodies and the biology of the outside world than the most

global biological event in human history? There's really never been anything like this. This is a single global pathological pulse that the entire world recognizes simultaneously to be the most important story in the world. I don't know this has ever happened before. Smallpox killed way more people, but there was never some moment in 1655 where if you polled 1,000 people around the world and said, what's the most important issue in the world? They would all say smallpox. I don't think that's the case. But if you polled 1,000 people, 10,000 around the world and said, what's the most important issue in the world? They would all say smallpox. I don't think that's the case. But if you polled a thousand people, 10,000 around the world and said, what's

the most important issue in the world right now? I think the majority would say COVID-19. I think this is going to get a lot more people interested in biology and in science and in maybe jump starting technological progress. And small curtain raiser, that's kind of what my book is about, about how we use this moment as a trampoline to get unstuck from the doldrums of progress that a lot of people have seen in the last few decades. What are the next scientific and technological breakthroughs that are in our grasp?

And how do we speed up the time between now and that breakthrough. I have been really motivated by that charge because I've been so interested in writing about this horrible disease and how we can learn quickly about it and manage our way out of it. I think there's a lot of other people. I'm pretty basic guy, to be honest. I listen to Coldplay and drink basic Colombian coffee, and my tastes are extremely average. I think a lot of people, I think, will come out of this experience more interested in and motivated by sciences and biology. Bringing it closer to home, I will tell you, I just learned last night from my son, who's 12, that at his school, they have introduced for the first time a class. It's a science class, but it's called health science.

And they have a public health teacher, science teacher, this science statistician teaching the class. And I looked at the curriculum. I'd like to take this class. It's all about the history of pandemics. It's all about the history of pandemics. It's all about the history of vaccines. It's all about how pathogens spread, how it affects world events. But it's like all the science of it. Yeah.

And I mean, and he's riveted by it. Multiply that across schools, young people, old people. It gives people a frame for, you know, tackling big issues, this moment. And it's shared, to your point, it's like everywhere in the world. Yeah, it's, well, the introduction of the book proposal is about Edward Jenner, the guy who came up with the first vaccine for cowpox. And what's so interesting about that story is, you know, Edward Jenner is considered the father of vaccines. He is probably the first person to ever come up with that, which we call a vaccine. The word vaccine comes from Edward

Jenner because it's an allusion to cowpox, vacca. But he only discovered it. You know, Britain only, or a British man only discovered vaccines because the wife of the Turkish ambassador, Lady Montague, learned from the Near East, from I believe the Ottoman Empire, that it might be possible to variolate individuals, to take material from a smallpox pustule and purposely infect someone with that small amount of cowpox, which would essentially inoculate them from that disease going forward. And it's only because he learned from some local milkmaids that they were doing the same with cowpox that he came up with this idea of essentially inoculating smallpox with cowpox. But it suggests in a beautiful way to me that the

process of the story of progress is not just the story of individual scientists and technologists who exist on a cloud or wait under an apple tree for the apple to fall on Newton's head. And then he's like, Eureka, gravity. They exist within this lattice, this network, almost this committee of world changers that include communicators like Lady Montague that take ideas from one place to another, and nameless sometimes, nameless experimenters like the milkmaids of England that taught Edward Jenner how cowpox could inoculate. What I would hope that people take from this experience, from this world, and what I've certainly taken from it, is that I'm not a scientist,

I'm not an inventor, but I do think that there's articles that I've written that have pushed forward a progress a little bit. I'm not saving the world all on my own, but they push forward progress just a little bit. And that people who exist outside of the world of science technology, even if they don't want to be computer scientists or life scientists, biologists, they can still participate in this committee work to save the world. Fascinating. Let me ask you about just for people who aren't going to go the entrepreneurial route, the people who work for companies,

do you see the workforce being dominated post-corona? This is like catalyze a transition to basically employment for large companies. If you're going to work for another company, it'll be very hard for small players to compete post-corona. Maybe it's more like the death of the middle than the death of the small guy. Okay. Or maybe another way to say that is, you know, because that's a true cliche in other sectors

of US economics that you see sort of this death of the middle. The big guys succeed and the niche guys succeed, but it's the middle where you get killed. It's certainly true in entertainment. You either succeed in niche or you get huge with everything. What if we imagine the future of a lot of different industries as everything stores versus one amazing thing stores? So Amazon, obviously, is an everything store. It even had that book by Brad Stone called The Everything Store. Walmart is an everything store. What's a one thing store? Well, like Peloton. Peloton just like sells one thing, right? Like they're the bike company. They got a bike and it's hooked up to the internet and you do the bike thing.

My fiance, again, will be wife in now 23 hours, just bought a Peloton, adores it. It's her favorite thing in the world. If we bought it a year ago, it would have canceled off the wedding and she would have just married the Peloton. That'd be out in the street. She just adores it. It's truly her favorite consumer product that we've ever bought. They do one thing very, very well. And I feel like if you're thinking about retail and the future of businesses, if you can't be an everything store, the only way to compete is to be a one great thing store. And one implication of this notion that we're bifurcating into everythings and one great things is, well, think about education, higher ed.

A university is kind of like an everything store. It's kind of like an Amazon for knowledge. And it'd be impossible for someone trying to get in on the ground floor of education to compete with Harvard or Ohio State by trying to recreate Harvard, Ohio State. But maybe, maybe just maybe you could come up with a better writing program, or you could come up with a better way to teach the history of vaccines. And maybe, and what I've seen a little bit on the internet with a lot of sort of education entrepreneurs is a lot of people thinking really creatively about like, how do I create the best online writing education possible? And they specialize in that. Or how do I create the very best history of progress, history of science education possible?

And they focus on that. Again, you're seeing one great thing, stores, compete with everything, stores, in higher ed. And I feel like you could see that shape, that dynamic play out in a lot of different sectors. By the way, the Peloton is a sore subject because John Foley, who founded it, is a classmate of mine from business school. And I'll tell you about a decade ago, when he was running around to our friends, classmates with his business plan, most people were scratching their head saying, what? You're going to invest all this

money and all this infrastructure, physical hardware? You can create stationary bikes for people's homes? To most people, it sounded so crazy. And obviously, the company's been successful for a number of reasons. But certainly, going public during a pandemic for an exercise product that your fiance can speak to in terms of being able to do it on your own time, in your own home is kind of like-

It is really difficult to imagine an external event that is more felicitous to their business model. I mean, yeah, we are happy Equinox customers and I have not been in a gym for, I suppose, what is it, seven months? I bought a pull-up bar. That's my Peloton. It's a $15 pull-up bar.

That business model has not quite taken off, it seems. Let me just wrap with the third trend you speak to, which is sort of the political fallout. When you have these electorates is these, this sort of the political fallout when you have these electorates in these various, you know, superstar cities, I think you call them, sort of cracking up because people are, are less tethered to big urban centers and what the political fallout of that scramble could be. Yeah. So this is a prediction that I've made in a couple different places. And I think it could be accelerated by the pandemic. I think we're in the process of seeing a once in a 50 years shift in the American electoral map. The US

electoral map obviously changed the 1960s with the South going red and the Northeast going deep, deep blue. I think we're seeing another thing happening now, which is the bluing of the Sun Belt. If you look at the vote totals of the major metro areas of Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix, even Las Vegas, what you see essentially is Democrats lead in those metros just absolutely explode in the last eight years. And a lot, and while we might not necessarily think of it, these Southern states are more metropolitan, more urban than a lot of northern states where Democrats have typically dominated. So as Democrats become more synonymous with density, you should expect them to become very competitive in the Sun Belt. And I think

that's going to be potentially sped up by the Great Recession. As you see already what's happening in California, a lot of people are talking about leaving. They're talking about going to Idaho so fast, in fact, that a lot of cities in Idaho have anti-California, not rules, but anti-California messages like keep out the Californians, build a wall. They're moving, I guess, to a certain extent to Oregon and Washington, which won't necessarily change the political map, but they're also moving in droves to Arizona and Texas, which could build on the growth of the left-leaning Hispanic populations there to turn those states blue. You're already seeing Arizona polling, I don't know what the average is right now, about plus four for Biden. And Texas has,

the Democrats' disadvantage in Texas has narrowed dramatically in the last eight to 12 years. And so I think you're looking at a near-term future where Democrats are really competitive along the Sun Belt, and that that dynamic is accelerated by the exodus from places like San Francisco, to a certain extent, Los Angeles, and even places like New York. Yeah. So two questions on that. One, aren't the people, at least initially, who are most mobile to actually pick up, able to pick up and move, are the people with considerable resources? And many of those people tend to be more libertarian in their politics.

So they're going to go to these places. And while some of them may be socially moderate or socially liberal in economics, they're gonna be pretty conservative. And it's one of the, because of their conservative economics is one of the reasons they're leaving places like New York City and Los Angeles. Yeah, so this is, this is a great challenge to my thesis. Here's what I know. I have not seen compelling information that says the people moving to, say, from L.A. or Houston to Dallas, I can't tell you what their electoral breakdown is. is that there is a very, very clear demographic migration trend, as pointed out to me by William Fry at Brookings Institute. Brookings, yeah.

Who says that the group that is two to three times more likely to do long distance interstate moves than any other group is the age cohort between about 25 and 39. That's millennials. What we know- They're moving in part, in your view, because of remote workability? It's just easier- They're moving for all sorts of reasons.

Right now, you could say maybe they're moving for remote workability or they're moving because moves that they were planning for two to three years from now, they said, you know what, screw it, let's get the hell out of Brooklyn. And so they moved to Austin, let's say, for example. But what you also saw happening before the pandemic started was that these Southern metros were booming in terms of internal migration because they were just cheaper. There was just more space. You can buy a lot more lawn and a lot more bathrooms in Plano than you can for the same amount of money in Brooklyn Heights. And so people who wanted those bathrooms and wanted that lawn space were more likely, all things equal, to move to Plano.

And because this demographic that is in its prime moving years has been, since Obama, the most Democratic voting demographic in American history, the demographic that votes for Democrats over Republicans in general election years, more than any other in US history, that it stands to reason that it's probably not a conservative migration, that it is probably at least a moderately liberal migration trend. Now, you're totally right that if someone, when people say to me, well, I know a conservative who moved from LA because he had just had it with California politics and he moved to Dallas, so that disproves your theory. I'll grant, I'm sure there are tens, hundreds of thousands of

people just like that person who moved from LA to Dallas, who's a conservative Romney libertarian, let's say. But given the age cohort that is in its prime moving years, I find it, and given the fact that the states that are accepting the most people tend to be places like Texas, Nevada, and Arizona, I find it really, really hard to believe that it's like only the millennial Republicans that are moving. Well, yeah. Or another way to think about it is many of those people who are tired of high taxes in these blue states and the stay in Midtown Manhattan or stay in Los Angeles, meaning working those places, who are suddenly untethered and are open to moving places that they couldn't have imagined five or 10 years ago thinking about moving to. Yeah, that's fair. I think maybe one way to study this more closely is to look at

margins of college-educated whites in Texas metros versus California. So under the theory that the people who are moving tend to be, say, Romney Republicans, what you would see is California becoming much more liberal as the remaining Californian base was more likely to be Democratic. And you would see Texas resist its leftward lurch, despite the growth of the Hispanic population there, because the people in tech, because the people moving from California were pulling them, you know, toward the Republican Party. is just a mere Trump effect. I think you do see white college educated voters in large metros in Texas be net Biden right now in this election. So yeah, it's hard to disentangle what is a Trump effect versus what is a more long term effect because maybe they essentially are Romney fans, let's say, for example, who are just so disgusted by Donald Trump that they're like, of course, I'll hold my nose and vote for Biden. But also maybe they're just center left, you know, high income center left former Californians who just said, you know what, for all sorts of reasons, I would just rather live in Austin.

Right. Before we go, we try to end every episode by asking our guest, what is one part of your life that you think will be forever changed by the pandemic that you don't think is being really talked about? And you can't talk about webex weddings yeah but what what is something where you said like wow this is a big change and i'm kind of surprised more people aren't focused on it um i think that i i suppose i'll go back to coffee um as small as that is but i'll i'll broaden it to make it seem like a more significant point.

I used to just not make coffee for myself very often. And now I clearly make coffee for myself every day, several times a day with my pour over and my AeroPress. And I love it. I love learning about coffee brands. I love making coffee. There's a beautiful manual tradition in the morning of boiling the water and grinding the beans and doing the pour over. I've really enjoyed those, those sort of three minutes. And I think that the reason that that is, that that reflects on a larger trend is that people have been forced in the last few months, I think, to learn some things for themselves, whatever it is, learn how to entertain yourself when you can't go to the, when you can't like hang out with your friends, learn how to, you know, make cocktails by yourself, learn how to entertain yourself when you can't go to the, when you can't like hang out with your friends, learn how to, you know, make cocktails by yourself, learn how to

make your own coffee. And that autarkic instinct, I think, might not go away, that people might enjoy, you know, cooking fancy meals for themselves and preparing a certain sliver of life for themselves in a way that they didn't in February, January of 2020. And that's just a life skill that they'll carry forward with them, even when the cafes are open and the restaurants are open. Well, I would keep you on because there's obviously a lot of ground to cover. And I would love to have you back, but I do not want to stand in the way of your last day as a bachelor before you tie the knot. So Derek, I really appreciate this.

I highly encourage our listeners to read whatever you write at The Atlantic, especially the piece that inspired this episode. The workforce is about to change dramatically, but he's got a ton of other stuff. He just wrote a piece recently about the great urban comeback, which is also inspiring, given his way of storytelling with nuggets from history that maybe we'll have you back to talk about. But anyways, this is a fantastic conversation. It's generally a depressing topic, but there's little shots of inspiration during this moment.

And you've illuminated me, at least, on some of them. So thanks so much and good luck tomorrow. Thank you very, very much. Yeah, glad to be a bearer of green shoes. There we go. Take care. Thanks, you too. That's our show for today.

I highly recommend you keep an eye out for Derek Thompson's work. You can follow him on Twitter. His handle is at DK Tom. That's at DK T-H-O-M-P. Before we wrap, I want to invite you, our listeners, to send in your thoughts or suggestions and your questions about what the post-corona world might look like. Please record a voice memo on your phone and just email it to me, dan at unlocked.fm. That way I can share it on future podcasts. Post-Corona was produced by Ilan Benatar. Our researcher is Sophie Pollack. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.