The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Bring Forgiveness

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, joins Scott to discuss effective altruism, virtue signaling, and existential risks to humanity. Scott also shares his thoughts on Walmart’s partnership with Shopify and his worries around the spikes in Covid-19 cases.   This week’s Office Hours: innovation themes that might come from this recession, Zuckerberg is, in fact, an arbiter of truth, and Scott’s advice to those who want to lean in and be a leader during this global crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the 14th episode of the Prop G Show. In Hinduism, the number of years of Rama's exile in the forest with Sita and Lakshman was 14. In a mythology, the number of pieces the body of Osiris was torn into by his fratricidal brother, Set, was 14 pieces. That's not very nice. We're going to be much better. We're going to cut up this world of news, this world of learning into 14 pieces. That's your French recital professor. This is a Prof G Show. In today's episode, we speak with Jeffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. We discuss effective altruism, virtue signaling, and a few existential risks to humanity you probably haven't thought about.

And of course, we'll do our office hours and wrap with an algebra of happiness. Let's get into today's episode. Let's talk a little bit about the news and let's taxonomize business concepts in the news. According to data from Faxat, the estimated earnings decline for the S&P 500 is 43 or basically 44% in Q2. If that's the actual decline for the quarter, it will mark the largest year-over-year decline in earnings reported by the index since 2008. So it looks as if we're headed into not just a recession, but potentially a depression, and yet the markets keep screaming forward. If you think about where the economy is, if you think about where unemployment is, and you think about the fact that the NASDAQ is up

and continues to go up, it just feels as if we've had a total disconnect. And what might be happening here, if you think about the stock market, it's effectively a reflection of our emotions and sentiment about forward-looking what we think the market's going to look like, not in one year, three years, but maybe five years. And I think that the market has essentially said, all right, this is an opportunity for the strongest, the biggest elephants to consolidate the market post-corona. So these things are somewhat misnomers. They're also dangerous because again, and we've talked about this, they mask kind of the underlying sickness in our economy. I think the biggest news, the biggest news is this relapse. And that is, it looks as if we have coronavirus or it doesn't look as if we are in fact seeing a spike across,

I think it's 24 states. You hear this narrative, oh, it's about agricultural infections or it's happening in nursing homes, whatever it might be. The fact is there's just more infection rates. And people would say, well, it's because we're testing more. So we'll see if there's a lag and if deaths begin to spike again. But it strikes me that we as Americans, or maybe it's our species, we develop a narrative. And the narrative around the novel coronavirus was that, okay, we were going to flatten the curve and then summer would come and that the virus would dissipate and then it would relapse in the fall.

And that seems to be kind of the narrative. And then by that time, we might have better therapies, maybe even a vaccine that we'd begin distributing to frontline workers. It's as if there's been a narrative developed. And it strikes me that we are not comfortable with accepting the unknown. And I wonder if we're in the midst of or on the precipice of just an absolute revolt, and that the disruption that has happened in movie theaters, restaurants, sporting events, basically any industry where you consume the product by sitting shoulder to shoulder with someone, i.e. education, has gone through just a massive, I don't even call it disruption, almost just a dramatic shock. But what's different about sports versus education is I do think sports will probably return to previous COVID levels. Will education?

Likely not. And that is people are going to realize, okay, I just don't need to go back to $7,000 per class, which is what a lot of universities charge. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens. And already the narrative is being blown up. It looks like the relapse is here. It looks like it's beginning to spike again because Americans don't seem to want to wear masks or don't seem to want to distance or have had trouble isolating and tracing. And we've had what I would describe as an

extraordinary lack of leadership. Okay, some other news. Some other news, Bloomberg reporting that Walmart is partnering with Shopify to create or substantially turbocharge their marketplace offer. Walmart will add 1,200 Shopify sellers this year on its third-party platform. I think Walmart and Disney are the only two companies that have effectively counterpunched against big tech, specifically counterpunched against Amazon and Netflix, respectively, that has the leadership, the access to capital, the support from their investors to do what's required regardless of how much it costs. Walmart has made a series of bad acquisitions which reflect how smart they've been. And that is they recognize that in order to catch up,

they're going to have to overpay and acquire some stuff that just doesn't work out. I was a big credit of the Jet.com acquisition at $3 billion and described it as a $3 billion hair transplant on a midlife crisis Walmart. But it took them up dramatically in terms of the percentage of sales done online. And in the marketplace, a $300 billion market cap company, which it was at the time, that goes from 6% of their sales to 16% online, that is worth more than $3 billion. So actually, I did not see that. The Doug did not see that. I did not see that if you could take or substantially or double the percentage of sales you're doing online,

was worth more than $3 billion, even though in isolation, Jet.com wasn't likely worth $3 billion. I think Jet.com's founders and investors played a game of chicken. And I just admire how big their balls were because that thing was going to, I think it was losing about $50 million a month. At some point, that thing was going to crash into a wall and just have a fiery death. But Walmart or the market kind of blinked first, if you will. Retail sales were up more than 17% in May. Granted, that's off a pretty impaired base, but that was a heck of a lot more than the markets were thinking that estimates were going to be 8%. And the markets this morning spiked and then came back because there's just such incredible volatility in the marketplace.

The most underreported business story in my view of the week is the fact that Mnuchin has announced that they're not going to release the names of the businesses that they have given PPP loans to. And the initial thought was they stated that there would be total transparency except for who actually gets the loans. Basically, this was nothing but a giveaway to America's wealthiest cohort and that of small business owners. We took 20, maybe 30%, maybe 40% of it and got it to the people who really needed it. And that was small business people who had this incredible trope like shock and didn't want to lay off people and needed to get through to the other side.

Okay, we get it. But for the majority of this capital, I think any analysis, forensic analysis is going to show that we did nothing. But as we do with every government program in the United States or nearly every huge expenditure program, we just flatten the curve for rich people. If we were honest, we would call these bailout programs a hate crime against future generations. Okay, okay, let's leave or let's end on the notion of an economic hate crime. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy?

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the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. welcome back here's our conversation with evolutionary psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the university of new mexico jeffrey miller professor miller jeffrey where does this find you you you found me in albuquerque new mexico where it's always sunny and where there's not too much coronavirus hanging around. Yeah, that's our sense in the Southwest that you guys are still living your best life. So let's talk. You're doing something, you're working on something. It's effective altruism. Say more. Effective altruism is this

new social movement. It's only about 10 or 12 years old. And it's rapidly become kind of a cutting edge movement in terms of doing evidence-based attempts to do more good in the world. And it really started out trying to do more quantitative charity evaluation, asking what really works in terms of charities, and not just which charities have the lowest overhead, but which charities actually deliver the most bang for the buck in terms of human welfare. And then from there, it kind of branched out into identifying certain cause areas, as they call them, like animal welfare, or reducing existential risks to humanity, or reducing global poverty, producing more global public health.

So, it's a fascinating window into human psychology and all the ways that we're deeply irrational about ways that we try to do good, including, for example, virtue signaling. Talk more about virtue signaling. I've never, I use the term a lot, but ground it in some kind of context and instinct for us. Virtue signaling is this term that became popular, I think, mostly during the 2016 election. And it was a way of derogating your political opponents, where if somebody you disagree with is making a lot of noise about some cause that they think is important, but they're not actually doing anything productive.

They're not really investing much time or energy or money in solving the problem. You might just go, oh, you're just virtue signaling. Meaning, yeah, you got a bumper sticker, but are you actually giving any significant money to this cause? But I view it as a more neutral thing. I think virtue signaling is a human universal. Everybody does it to some degree. And I think it can be a huge force for good. I mean, I think some of the best things about human altruism actually come out of virtue signaling, where you're trying to show off your moral virtues, your good qualities, your ethical priorities to others. And if you do that in a way that's impressive to others, like you get social status for it or you attract mates with it, it creates this amazing incentive in humans to actually do good sometimes and to attract friends and mates through doing good. Talk to us a little bit about sort of these existential risks to humanity that have fallen under this effective altruism movement where they've been looking at some of

the bigger risks. So a lot of the effective altruism movement, people have kind of converged on this view that the number one priority is simply not to go extinct in this century. And the usual concern about extinction risk is people talk about climate change as if it's an existential risk or X risk. It's not. It's not an X risk. It's a global catastrophic risk, which means it might be bad news for hundreds of millions of people, but climate change itself is not going to drive every last human extinct. What could do that? Well, nuclear war plus nuclear winter could potentially do that. A genetically engineered bioweapon like coronavirus on steroids could potentially drive everybody extinct. Artificial general intelligence is also widely considered a major possible threat.

So it's basically bad nukes, bad bugs, bad AI. Those seem to be the three big X risks that we're facing at the moment. As someone who likes to, you try to, my sense of you, Jeffrey, is you try to take yourself out of your own emotions and your own kind of media echo chamber and say, rationally, what are the risks? What is the bus we don't see coming? If you were to, and this is hard to do, but if you were to pick one, you pick three right there, what do you think, as a scientist, presents the greatest risk right now that we're not allocating enough capital to, not preparing for, not funding government agencies in defense of, not thinking about how do we ensure this doesn't happen? I think all three of these risks that I mentioned are massively underfunded. I mean,

the estimates I've seen are that the coronavirus pandemic is wiping maybe 30% off gross world product this year. Gross world product is $100 trillion, so we're losing $30 trillion in the economy, arguably, this year. And yet, the amount of funding that was allocated to preventing and planning for pandemics is globally only a few billion dollars a year maximum. So the return on investment, if we had prepared for pandemics as well as Bill Gates had argued that we should be, would have been colossal. Likewise, if you read Daniel Ellsberg's amazing book, The Doomsday Machine, about the risk of nuclear war, that's still not a solved problem. We still have 1,750 active strategic nuclear warheads. Russia still has a big arsenal. Several other countries have significant arsenals.

And you get these little flashpoints like Pakistan versus India that could easily escalate into nuclear war. But there again, the number of papers that are serious analyses of, would we get a nuclear winter that exterminates a lot of humans after nuclear war? Only about a thousandth as many papers on that as on climate change. Let's talk a little bit about AI because I've always felt that the risks from AI, and it's probably because I don't understand it that well, I've always been overblown that at the end of the day, the machines are indifferent and it's the people programming the machine. So that AI is just, at the end of the day, these things aren't sentient and make decisions,

don't have emotion, they're totally indifferent, and they're really just weapons, that they're another form of weapons to make decisions the way a guidance system on a nuclear bomb decides to steer left, steer right, steer down to hit a metro. What is the threat around AI that I'm not seeing? The version of it that most effective altruists are worried about is getting into a situation where you have a kind of rapid takeoff of intelligence because you get an AI system that's capable of improving itself, not just at the software level, but also at the hardware level, either through taking over a significant amount of cloud computing power or combining that with kind of adaptive machine learning. So it gets smarter and smarter kind of playing itself the way that AlphaGo did. And then you could potentially get a sort of not necessarily

a malevolent AI, but an AI that's optimizing for the wrong things that kind of incidentally causes a lot of human suffering. I think that's probably at least 20 or 30 years away, but I think it's a significant enough issue that we should be devoting a few tens of billions of dollars a year to taking it seriously. And then I think the second level of danger is things like basically autonomous weapons and AI-driven new technology that could lead to things like, let's say, much easier assassination drones that could take out heads of state with minimal risk to the people launching the drone. I think that could be quite geopolitically destabilizing, and I think that could amplify other X risks like increase the

risk of nuclear war. Talk a little bit about politics and where you see the state of America right now. And do you see things changing because of COVID or generally speaking, as you watch our nation evolve, if you will, any observations around the current political environment? Well, yeah, we're both pretty active on Twitter. And it's astonishing how Americans excel at making everything into a partisan issue. And on a lot of those issues, I could have imagined it going kind of either way. Until a few months ago, the standard kind of dogma in social psychology and evolutionary psychology was that conservatives, political conservatives, are more wary

of infectious disease. They're more risk-averse. They would be more sensitive to pandemics, and they would be more worried about getting ill. And instead, we've seen the exact opposite. So I think it's basically the dynamics of social media turning everyone into kind of a partisan virtue signaling junkie. And that leaves people like me, who are self-described centrists, just kind of very amused and despairing. Maybe next year after the election, things will kind of calm down, but I kind of doubt it. And I think there's going to be a massive recalibration of not just a bunch of industries, but in terms of citizens in general, kind of being much warier about public life and of each other for at least several years in the future. And what are your thoughts around what can be done here? I think it's important to talk

about the risks. There's some basic things, capital allocation, pandemics and pestilence have killed more people than wars and violence. We spend $700 billion on a military, 6 billion on the CDC at things like, okay, we need to reallocate capital. Is there anything else as an evolutionary anthropologist you think should be our go-to moves in terms of what we want to communicate to our children or how we want to change our norms or viewpoints? What are the one or two things you would tell us to teach our children? Well, I think at the policy level, we need to game out the pandemics as seriously What are the second or third waves of coronavirus. What happens if bad actors or terrorist cells actually deliberately unleash

the next pandemic at multiple airports on multiple continents? This is just not something that is attracting the best and the brightest to think about and to run the game theory and the strategy and figure out all the implications. I think for parents who are concerned about families and kids, man, what I'd be worried about is how do you create a kind of educational track and career track for your kids that's relatively resistant to the most likely kinds of catastrophes and shocks that they might face. This is not going to be the last global pandemic. There are going to be others in the future. So how do you equip teenagers to think about, hey, what kind of skills could I develop? What could I do that would still be viable, even if large sectors of the economy shut down?

Is there any one thing that has had the most profound impact on your behavior, your view coming out of COVID-19? Hopefully coming out, I should say. Before COVID-19, I sort of knew abstractly that civilization won't collapse all at once. It's not going to be like you see in science fiction movies where it's like before the apocalypse and then there's after the apocalypse and there's a short, sharp shock like nuclear war. That could happen. But the people I knew in the prepper community emphasized, no, civilization kind of collapses patchwork in stages. Maybe the federal government collapses. That doesn't necessarily mean state governments collapse. Maybe telecoms goes down, but the electric grid stays up.

Maybe this sector of the economy fails, but these other sectors do okay. And I've kind of realized certain aspects of civilization are just remarkably fragile. Like if you prohibit public gatherings of more than 50 people, oh my God, there's whole sets of goods and services that are no longer possible. And yet lots of other stuff can stay relatively the same. So I think that notion that civilization is kind of fragile around the edges, but it's got defense and depth. It's got a bunch of layers, some of which are actually remarkably resilient. So that's an optimistic view.

You're saying that we're a robust society, that even if we can't have classes, I'm supposed to have 170 kids show up on September 1 to brand strategy, and they're going to put me in a room where the windows don't open. I personally don't think that's going to happen. I think, as you said, any environment or any industry dependent upon, or as a feature of, has people sitting shoulder to shoulder, that is severely impaired. But at the same time, life is absolutely going on. We're still finding ways to learn. We're still finding ways to communicate. We're still finding ways to date, as you pointed out. We're still finding ways to communicate. We're still finding ways to date, as you pointed out. We're still finding ways to raise our kids. But yeah, I like that. Let's end there. Let's hope we're anti-fragile. Is that the term? I'm willing to use that on occasion, despite my

occasional tensions with Nassim. Sure. Why not? Jeffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist best known for his books, The Mating Mind, Mating Intelligence, Spent, and Mate. He is a tenured associate professor at the University of New Mexico. Jeffrey, stay safe. You too, Scott. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Indeed. If you need to hire, you may need Indeed. Indeed is a matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Listeners of this show can get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more

visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. In business, disruption brings not only challenges, but opportunities. As artificial intelligence powers pivotal moments of change, Alex Partners is the consulting firm chief executives can rely on. Alex Partners is dedicated to making sure your company knows what really matters when it comes to AI. As part of their 2024 tech sector report, Alex Partners spoke with nearly 350 tech executives from across North America and Europe to dig deeper into how tech companies are responding to these changing headwinds. And in their 2024 Digital Disruption Report,

Alex Partners found that 88% of executives report seeing potential for growth from digital disruption, with 37% seeing significant or even extremely high positive impact on revenue growth. You can read both reports and learn how to convert digital disruption into revenue growth at www.alexpartners.com slash box. That's www.alexpartners.com slash V-O-X. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. Okay, it's time for our office hours. As a reminder, you can ask us anything.

If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at section4.com. Roll question one. Hi, Professor Galloway. This is Rob Murray, and I'm a second-year MBA student at Stern. Like you, I'm a firm believer that this crisis and the recovery from it will present incredible opportunities for startups to solve many new problems and address changing consumer behaviors. During the last economic crisis and recovery, we saw new themes like the sharing economy, the experience economy, and a Cambrian explosion of B2B SaaS companies be a driving force behind the creation of many highly successful startups. What new themes do you think entrepreneurs should be looking out for in the COVID and post-COVID economic environment?

Rob, a thoughtful question. Cambrian, I like that. It's a great word. Okay, so where is there going to be opportunity? So looking at a more meta, I believe that the best time to start a business is in the midst of a recession. And unfortunately, this looks like it might turn into a depression and all bets are off. I have never experienced a depression, so I don't know if it's a good time to start a business in a depression. I can't imagine it's a good time to do anything in a depression. But anyways, let's assume that we're able to coordinate globally with central banks, helicopter so much money that we avoid a depression and just stick in a recession and kick the can down the road such that future generations can endure the depression and not us. So starting a business, I've started nine businesses.

And the only thing I can indicate that signals their success is part of the economic cycle I started the business in. And the ones that were started in recessions did well. The ones started in boom times less well. Case in point, we have office space at Section 4 on Spring Street in Soho. Lovely, bright office space. It cost $74 a square foot, I think, when we moved in a year ago. And now I'm pretty sure, I think I heard that someone

is doing a sublease in that same building at $25 a square foot. And by the way, that's the offer price. I don't think they've actually even leased it. So think about this. Office space has been cut by two-thirds. There are good people probably available now who would like to work from home, who don't want to get on a train into the city or a city who are willing to trade off flexibility for compensation. And so the cost structure, the DNA you can imprint on a company right now, and this is important, the DNA gets imprinted early, is wonderful. And that is, as an entrepreneur, one of the keys to success is throwing out around nickels like they're manhole covers. So I think this is a great time to start a business. As it relates to specific areas,

the theme I have in my mind is this great dispersion or specifically how geography is no longer a component of creating a cartel or maintaining margin. And the two industries that have leveraged geography to their advantage by creating these sort of artificial cartels are healthcare and education, which also happen to be the two most disruptible industries in the world. So everything from remote health to telemedicine to online learning, I think are going to boom and be great areas. Wired Magazine also highlighted some interesting things. Obviously, artificial intelligence. I wonder if that's going to be overinvested, quite frankly. Robotics, supply chain, trying to figure out a way to have, quite frankly, reduce the number

of asymptomatic carriers. That is humans. that has some long-term and short-term social ramifications. But you got to think robotics are going to be an interesting place. Agritech, what was the one thing we didn't stop consuming? Food, right? So everything from cold storage of food delivery, when we go from 1.6% of grocery shopping done online to 15 or 20, there's just going to be so many opportunities there. So supply chain, vaccination of supply chain, obviously it feels like payments are going to continue to grow. You could probably take the fastest growing industries and just extrapolate them out 10

years and have a pretty decent idea of where we're headed and where the opportunity is. Thanks for the question. Next question. Hi, Scott. My name is Eric, and I'm a marketing analytics student at Northeastern University. It's been an absolutely crazy week in the world. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts in this time of uncertainty, not unlike the uncertainty I feel deciding whether to catch up on my $1,000 Zoom lecture or sell my soul to the Zuck. My question is on just that. Zuck came out saying Facebook won't be an arbiter of truth after Trump took action. Who do you see holding that power of defining truth in the years to come? Thank you, and hope

you gifted some of those blue light glasses to the film crew. Wouldn't want eye damage from the reflection off the dog's dome. The dog's dome. That hurts. That hurts. Eric, thank you for the question. So, if you think about Facebook, they've claimed they don't want to be the arbiter of truth. Initially, all the platforms said we want to provide voice to the unheard, which was total bullshit. None of them had any background in First Amendment. What they wanted was to skirt any obligation around the damage they were causing. And now they've moved to this notion that we don't want to be the arbiter of truth. Well, actually, you know what? It's again, that is just total bullshit. Facebook has decided they're very comfortable being an arbiter. It's the truth they have a problem with, or specifically they are comfortable with Facebook

being the arbiter or specifically anyone who will pay Facebook becomes the arbiter of what our truths are. And that is voices or facts or non-facts get elevated based on who has a credit card at the end of it. And this is incredibly damaging. These rage machines give false information that's incendiary, more oxygen than it deserves on its own. It's not First Amendment. It's Second Gulf Stream.

And that is that every decision Facebook makes is around how Zuck and his direct reports get their second, third, and 40th Gulf Stream. First Amendment, give me a fucking break. Anyways, you also have what is really interesting, and that is the politicization of social media platforms. And I wrote about this on Friday. Just as the environment became politicized, it used to be a bipartisan issue. And then all of a sudden, we decided Democrats care about the environment and Republicans care about coal. Neither of those is 100% true, but they seem to bifurcate and

immediately start having this reflex or gag reflex around things that were seen as pro-environment or anti-environment based on your political party. Mass have now been politicized. This seems to have become a Democrat-Republican issue. And the latest thing or the next thing that'll be politicized, I think, is social media platforms who have tried to stay neutral such that they could appeal to everybody, but it's too late. And I think the politicization of social media platforms is now underway. Specifically, Mark Zuckerberg has outed himself as the biggest oligarch in history. And an oligarch, the definition of an oligarch, is leveraging their proximity to power to further corruption such that they enrich themselves. That

kind of perfectly defines this arc right now. And obviously, it's his proximity to Trump. This has not gone unnoticed. Democrats are outraged. This is an opportunity for Twitter to go blue and be the iOS. The whole world is Android or iOS. And that is Android effectively says, okay, to the masses, we'll molest your privacy. We won't protect your data. In exchange, you get a free phone. And by the way, for a lot of people, that's a great deal. And then iOS says, okay, we'll only pull 200 data points a day instead of 1200 from your phone. And we'll let you signal your wealth in exchange for paying the household income or one month's household income in Turkey for $400 worth of chipsets and sensors. That's iOS. iOS is Democrats

that want to signal their worth as a mate and value their privacy more. Although I think it's more about signaling. And Android says, we'll give you something cheaper to the masses, but hey, all bets are off in terms of our behavior around that data set. That's where social media is headed. Facebook's going to be the Android for the masses that is abused or your actions, your data set will be abused. And Twitter potentially has the opportunity to say, we're going to start kicking people off the platform who engage in hate speech, actually enforce their terms of service. I believe they should move to a subscription program and sort of starch their hat blue, if you will. I think that's the opportunity for Twitter. And I think regardless of whether they

seize that opportunity, social media is becoming red and blue. But be clear, my brother, be clear, Eric. The arbiter of our truths is Mark Zuckerberg. And the arbiter of his decision around what our truths are is money. Full stop. Thanks for the question, Eric. Next question. Hey, Professor. I'll be here from Manhattan. Appreciate your office hours as I just graduated last May and coming up on my year one anniversary full-time in corporate America. Yes, professor, I did in fact sell my soul, but that was only after meeting a Fortune 50 CEO when I was 16. Anyways, question around being a young person, working in a Fortune 500 company, and very interested in leadership.

One, how do you take this crisis as a learning opportunity? I'm sitting over here taking notes on how leadership at every level has been acting and reacting. What else can I do to learn? And how can a curious person like myself live into this global case study and what good leadership looks like? Secondly, how can a young person step up and lean in at a time like this? How can I accelerate at work based on my drive and determination versus job level or title? Appreciate your insights. Thanks for taking the question. Thanks, LB. You seem frighteningly ambitious and smart and together for someone your age. First off, I don't think you sold your soul. I think corporate America or the U.S. corporation is the greatest platform for wealth creation

and stakeholder value creation. I think the U.S. corporation is one of the greatest sources of good in history. They converted their factories from building washing machines to B-24 flying super fortresses. They employed and created a middle class. I think the US corporation is vastly underrated and entrepreneurship is overrated. I say that as an entrepreneur. Ain't nothing wrong with the big company. Anyways, leadership is something that's talked a lot about. And I'll start with a question of what you can do. I think this is a tremendous time, especially at your age, to really turn on the jets. And that is while everyone else is in the

pits, and we've discussed this before, if you're fortunate enough to work in a company that's provided you with the ability to work and continue to be productive, I would pretty much work around the clock right now because this is a crisis. There's a ton of opportunity. There's a ton of chaos. And so senior management is so distracted that if you can be one of the people that's helping make sure the trains run on time, make sure that the product evolves, put your shoulder down and make their lives easier as they deal with probably more stress than they've had to deal with in a long time,

you're going to have tremendous opportunity. And whenever there's change, there's opportunity. And specifically, there's usually a lot of changes. Change tends to be better for young people and worse for older people because older people, especially in corporate America, have figured out hopefully a decent way to kind of go on cruise control and don't want a lot of change, whereas young people change is a good thing as it creates gaps and upward opportunity for them. So the first is, and this sounds very trite, but just work exceptionally hard. It sounds as if you have senior level sponsorship. So asking people to be your mentor, I think is a wonderful thing.

And it sounds like you have that there. Also, I find that great leaders are. And it sounds like you have that there. Also, I find that great leaders are great entrepreneurs typically have a few things in common. And the first is they have to demonstrate excellence. I think people want to follow others that are just great at what they do. So find an area of the company or find a competence or a skill and just say, I'm just going to own this. I'm going to try and be the best in my company at this one thing and commit to becoming great at something. And that can be a variety of things, whether it's domain expertise around a specific topic, if you're the best at pulling together a presentation or you're the best with pivot tables on Excel, whatever it might be, you're the best at welcoming new employees into the company, but commit to something that you've already shown some

aptitude at and say, I'm going to become the best in the world. The second is, I would hold yourself and other people accountable that you work with. And that is, I wouldn't be afraid to ask people to hit certain deadlines. You may not be in a management position yet, but when you do, people want others who hold themselves and other people accountable. And there's this hallmark channel vision of how we're supposed to behave at work, but work is about being productive and getting a greater return on capital than your peer group, which is both a greater return on invested capital through good decisions, but also getting more out of yourself and more out of your team. And there's just no getting around that. You need to hold yourself and others accountable. And then finally, I think that there's empathy or

recognizing that greatness is in the agency of others and really trying to understand what motivates other people. When I was your age, I thought that everyone just wanted to do what I wanted to do. And that was be ridiculously fucking rich and be ridiculously fucking awesome. And that everybody else should just trust that if they worked really hard with and for me that they would get that. And that's what we all wanted. And then as I got older, I realized that different people value different things. Some people want the opportunity to manage others.

Some people want the opportunity to have more flexibility. Some people want the opportunity to really want public recognition, but trying to understand what makes people tick and also highlight other people's achievement. So one, demonstrating excellence, two, holding your team accountable, and three, demonstrating empathy, recognizing that greatness is achieved in the agency of others, I think are all decent places to start, but it sounds like you're on already an incredible slope. Congratulations, Elby, and thanks for the question. Keep sending in your questions. Again, if you'd like to submit one, please email a voice recording to officehours Decades and Weeks.

Lennon, great quote, and it's a key theme to the show and a lot of the work that I'm doing right now, both professionally and personally. And that is, again, and I love this metric. I mean, you're going to get sick of hearing it, but e-commerce has gone from 18% of retail to 28% in eight weeks. It was growing 1% a year, or it had gone up 10% in 10 years, and then it went up, exploded 10% in eight weeks. So we've had, as Lennon said, decades happen in weeks. And the most interesting thing to do professionally, I think, is to take the two or three most dominant trends in your industry, take them out 10 years, and then realize that that's where your company is now. And then look at your human capital, your skills, your strategy,

your ratio of stores to digital, whatever it might be, and realize you're there now. I'm also going to ask you to do this personally. And that is imagine where your relationship with your parents would be in 10 years. If you forwarded a decade and said, okay, my parents are 65 now. When they're 75, I would expect to be more involved in their lives, pivoting from being the child to the parent, taking care of them, being more forgiving, spending more time thinking about them and helping them logistically. And then think about how can I do that now? Because surviving a pandemic as a, and 65 isn't senior, but surviving a pandemic,

if you're more vulnerable, is going to take their risks and perhaps even their health forward 10 years. And the opportunity around this is to say, what is the relationship I would want with my parents or what would I expect it to be in 10 years? And then to start behaving that way now. If I'm in a relationship with a partner or a spouse, where would I want that relationship to be in 10 years? Is it headed in the wrong direction? Is it bringing out the worst of us? Would we expect a correct or is it just on a bad track? And this isn't a Hallmark channel. I think it's time to think about ending relationships. Where would you hope your friendships would be? Where would you hope that your relationship with your spouse would be?

And assume you're there and make the requisite adjustments. Would you hope that you would be more involved in their lives around certain things? Your relationship with your kids, what is it you hope for? I know with, I have this vision of the kind of dad I want to be. And then what I need to think about is, okay, I have a nine and a 12 year old. What would I want their relationship with me to be like? And I would hope that it would be obviously for them that they would be entering or leaving a good school and optimistic and have the skillset to be productive adults. But I would want them to look back and think the last 10 years were about a great deal of time with my father, a great deal of, I don't believe in quality time.

I think that's a bullshit notion to forgive people who focus on work and don't allocate time for their kids. I don't think there is any such thing as quality time. There's just time. I would want them to look back and say that dad worked hard, dad provided, but more than anything, we were first. And I would want them to think that dad was really affectionate. I would want them to think that dad made the investment in discipline. And it's an investment. I'm the good cop around the household. And quite frankly, it's because I'm lazy. And that is, I want to be the guy who gets to watch TV, take them boogie boarding, try and be a peacemaker. But the reality is putting up

guardrails and constantly being in their face and reminding them when they're not behaving correctly, reminding them that they need to get their homework done, reminding them that they need to look out for the younger brother. It's exhausting, but you'd want to be, as they were adults, look back and say, yeah, he made that effort to discipline when it was hard and when I wasn't open to it. And I've decided, okay, I need to do that now. I need to be that guy now. If I want them to think that way when they're 19 and when they're 22, I need to stop envisioning the dad I want to be and just start being that dude. And there's just no getting around it. It's a certain amount of time. It's a certain amount of hard decisions. But take your relationships forward 10 years and think to

yourself, where would I want them to be in a decade? With my parents, with my friends, with my spouse, with my kids. And determine that if you're going to get there in 10 years, what would that mean now? Also decide the relationship you want to have with yourself. Would you hope after 10 years that you had achieved enough that you were a little less hard on yourself? I'm not saying don't work your ass off. I'm not saying don't have high expectations, but are you too hard on yourself? Do you think that maybe in 10 years you would look back and say, I wish I hadn't been so hard on myself? Well, then not only bring forgiveness to your relationships, bring forgiveness to yourself.

The one regret, the biggest regret old people have around their younger selves is they wish they hadn't been so hard on themselves. Cut yourself some slack. Cut yourself some slack. Bring forgiveness. Forgive yourself. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week with another episode of the Prof G Show from Section 4 and the Westwood One Podcast Network. That's not very nice.