The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Office Hours: NFTs, Bullish Investments, and Empathy

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Welcome to our first solo Office Hours episode. Scott answers a question about whether he could create a Prof G coin and build his own rundle. He also tells us the investment opportunities he likes in the Edtech and Telehealth spaces, shares resources for learning more about finance, and explains why business leaders need to practice empathy. Have a question for Scott? Email a voice recording to [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. Welcome to the first edition of the Prop G Show's Office H hours on a Monday. Oh my God, so exciting. I need to pee. Anyways, more like a piddle, more like my dog that gets very excited and he piddles. The dog is piddling and it's so cute. It's not gross.

It's not a 56 year old whose prostate has become the size of a basketball and needs to pee 14 times a day. It's adorable. I'm excited and I'm piddling. This is the part of the show where we answer your question about the business world, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at profgmedia.com. First question.

Hi, Prof G. This is Hunter from Dallas, Texas. I was listening to your most recent show on NFTs and thinking about the conversations you have about both that, dispersion and rundles, and was wondering if the NFT is a mechanism for the intersection of all of those. So perhaps there is a ProfG coin that you issue. In connection with that, you get money up front. The coin owner gets exclusive Prof G content, pivot content, section four content, your NYU lectures. You only issue five more or 10 more a year. So there's scarcity in it. It goes up in value. You have a recurring revenue model. I'm curious as to your reactions to that or if I'm mixing and matching concepts. Thanks so much for all your work.

Hunter from Dallas. So I'd like to offer, officially offer you a job to come run my life. I think that makes a lot of sense. I was thinking about something similar. So first off, anyone who creates intellectual property or likes to think that, you know, they're in the business of content creation and we all inflate the value of our content, is asking themselves one question, can I get rich off NFTs? So where I went with NFTs is similar to what you're talking about. I think about it in terms of education. One of the things that threatens the business

model of universities is that it's episodic. So we find people at a specific point of their life, whether they're 18 for undergrad or 24 for grad school, and they have to be in a certain demographic. One, 66% of the populace has been prohibited from pursuing graduate education because they don't have an undergraduate degree. The reality is probably two-thirds of the population, even of 18-year-olds, is probably college probably just isn't a realistic option anymore because of the costs or because of their current circumstances. So the question is, how do we move away from an episodic marketplace where the addressable market is limited because of the construct or the offering, if you will, and move it to something that has broader opportunities for a broader demographic set.

A 45-year-old single mother that wants to access education or learning. A 28-year-old who doesn't have a ton of money but finally has some money and wants that certification so they can on-ramp into a better economic future. And I wonder if the way we do that as universities establish some sort of coin-based program where they say, okay, you buy a coin. And maybe if you're from a low-income household, the government spends 30, 50, 80%, or finances 30, 50, 80% of the value of that coin. And the coin entitles you to lifelong learning and career services. So you get a coin at the University of California, San Diego, which has fantastic sciences. But it's not only a four-year education in La Jolla. It's access to that education where if you finish a certain amount of coursework whenever you get that certification, you also get career services. You also get access to a

job board around the sciences. You get membership in a lifelong community that's focused on University of California, San Diego, helping out the local community, helping each other. Could we have – could education become coin-based and it would provide us with access perhaps to better finance, smooth out the revenue and the earnings of universities, and perhaps create a more egalitarian or a less discriminatory university system. We talk about how college has become so expensive that it's effectively a caste system now. And it is. It's become the enforcer of the caste system as opposed to the greatest upward lubricant for the middle class, which is what it was when I applied to UCLA in the mid-90s. Actually, I applied in the late 80s, but let's just go with the mid-90s. Anyway, the notion that creating scarcity, and that's what NFTs are. NFTs are essentially saying, as a tribal species,

we like to... Actually, that's not true. It's not a tribal species. As a species that tries to attract mates, survival is our first instinct. Number two is propagation. And the way you become more attractive to a potential mate is through resources. And one way you signal that you have resources is that you own or are in possession of scarce things. So someone walks into your living room and they see a Picasso on the wall and they think, I'd like to have sex with this person because this person appreciates art and this person has enough resources to acquire something that is this scarce. So NFTs play on our need for scarcity and we become obsessed with things that are scarce. For example, when we don't have food,

we very rationally become obsessed with it. When we don't have opportunities to mate, we become obsessed with finding a mate because every fiber in our being is telling us we need to A, survive, and then B, propagate. So scarcity creates obsession. So NFTs are really tapping into one of the most powerful instincts, and that is scarcity. Scarcity results in obsession such that we can survive. NFTs, scarcity, coin-based education, a coin for the prof, I don't know. I worry that 30% of their, or 80% of their future

revenues via coin, that I wonder if that might end up being, I don't know, have some negative externalities as you get older and you realize that you owe 30% of your earnings to people that you sold it to 20 years ago. They did something similar with David Bowie's catalog where they basically securitized it. So I think there's a lot here. I also think there's going to be a need for regulation to ensure that young people don't make really stupid decisions that they'd end up regretting the rest of their life. But a thoughtful question, Hunter from Dallas. Next question. Hey, Prof G. This is Julio in St. Louis. You recently talked about the dispersion that's

happening in the healthcare industry, corporate headquarters, and higher education. And you specifically mentioned you like Sonos and restoration hardware for the dispersion happening in headquarters. Curious, who do you like in the next one to three years in the healthcare and higher education? Thank you for your time. Love your show. Julio and St. Louis, St. Louis, a city that I think is going to boom. Why? Why? What is the key? What is the epicenter of economic growth? You think, well, it's a place with great weather. No, well, it's a place that has great density of population. That's part of it.

More than anything, more than anything, Julio, the key to economic growth in any geography is a world-class university, specifically a world-class engineering university because software is the union of the world. And what does Saint-Louis have? Wash U. Probably the university, I would argue, maybe the exception of, I don't know, Carnegie Mellon that has come further faster in the last 20 years. No one had heard of Wash U, and now it is one of the premier universities in the nation. from the engineering school are going to decide to start a business in St. Louis because they like it there. It's going to be successful. They're going to sell it for a shit ton of money, and they're going to decide to stay there and live their lives there. And then they're going to start angel funds and venture capital funds and the ecosystem of innovation. The disruption

epicenter or a new disruption epicenter will be in St. Louis, and they will be fueled by the fact that the traditional epicenters, the San Francisco's, the Boston's, and to a lesser extent, the New York's have become so expensive yet bad, especially San Francisco, that that will fuel what I'll call the tier, not even the tier two cities, but the tier one A. And some I'm very bullish on St. Louis, but that's not why you called in. Okay. According to research by Mercom Capital Group, venture funding in the digital health sector was up 66% in 2020, with a record $14.8 billion raised in 637 deals. That's compared to $8.9 billion across 615 deals in 2019. Telemedicine funding reached $4.3 billion in 2020. Companies I like, Disclosure, 98.6,

I invested in. It's actually one of the biggest investments I've ever made. Raised $118 million in its Series E funding round in October 2020, including the Series E. 98.6 has raised a total of $250 million since its founding in 2015. And they're trying to take what I'll call and play offense around healthcare. And that is access primary care through your phone for, I don't know, something like 40 or 50 cents a month per employee selling into the enterprise such that they can pull up their phone and through a series of AI-driven questions get to the right professional. And instead of having disease or healthcare be a disease-driven defensive gestalt or zeitgeist, make it offensive and more about healthcare and addressing that rash before it becomes an infection and you end up in the emergency room. I think telemedicine is absolutely going to boom. What you're seeing is this interesting dynamic where the remote guys or the telemedicine guys have new competition from the legacy players who are forced to

incorporate new technologies as a function of COVID. But I think this is a fantastic space. I've also invested, and I'm talking my own book, but I'm boating with my feed, in a company called Measured. It's a seed investment. And I'm trying to think about, over the last 12 months, my wealth has increased substantially. And I have some guilt around that, in that there is so much suffering, specifically half a million households in America have lost someone, and then the top 10% are living their best lives. And I thought, okay, other than just the guilt,

what can I do about it? And one of the things I'm trying to do about it is do some seed stage investing, because I think it's going to be an incredible opportunity for startups. And I hate seed stage investing. I hate every new idea. I don't get it. I'm not good at it. I don't like young CEOs. I find them like infants, annoying yet very needy. But I think it's just good for the ecosystem to take some capital and invest it in early seed stage companies. One of those companies is a company called Measured. It's a weight loss platform that combines personalized meal plans, behavioral change, and one-on-one guidance from registered dieticians. And it's a nice kid running it.

And then let's talk about the big guys, where I'm also a shareholder because I love investing in unregulated monopolies, Amazon. The Associated Press reported Amazon jumps into healthcare with telemedicine initiative. The company recently announced that this summer it will begin offering its Amazon Care telemedicine program to all Amazon employees and to private employers across the U.S. who want to join. Amazon, oh my gosh. Talk about a ninja warrior move. What other company has taken their biggest expenses, whether it's fulfillment, healthcare, processing power, and turned each of those things into businesses that are probably on their own one of the 10 or 20 most valuable companies in the world? No one has ever done that. No one has ever done that. No one has ever done it. It's like, take the biggest expenses in your house, whether it's food

or rent, and figuring out a way to start a restaurant and a hotel out of your house and turn it into companies or small businesses that are worth more than the original house. That is what Amazon has done. It's as if the founder there was a genius worth $170 billion. Oh my God, he is. And yet he still gets into pissing matches with senators, still prone and sending out dick pics, still prone to huge mistakes. All of us put on our pants one leg at a time, one leg at a time. Anyways, Walmart launched its first ever Walmart health center in Dallas, Georgia in 2019. That threw me off. Dallas, Georgia? You may want to think about a name change there, you in 2019. That threw me off. Dallas, Georgia? Hmm. You may want to think about a name change there, you Georgians. You Georgians, as you're surprising the vote,

change the name of that city called Dallas. There's one Dallas, and it's a fairly kind of mundane city in Texas, although people love Dallas. People love Dallas. In September 2020, Walmart piloted drone delivery of COVID-19 at-home tests. I think that's mostly for a press release, but it's an interesting idea. We'll see. Okay. Okay. What other fields? What other fields? Where do we want to invest in education? According to the New York Times, a report from CB Insights found that venture and equity financing for ed tech startups reached $13 billion globally in 2020. That's up from 4.8 billion in 2019. Companies and opportunities. I think Google career certifications is really interesting.

We talked about this on the pod the other week. These are opening massive opportunity for employers to accept candidates without certification from a higher ed institution. We tend to focus on the problems with colleges, but probably the biggest problem is how drunk and in love with the graduates of elite institutions that corporations are. The US corporation is still the greatest wealth creator in the history of mankind. And unfortunately, they have become total snobs and only want to hire people from Cornell because they went to Cornell, which just perpetuates this cycle of income inequality. So a Google certificate is not only a powerful idea, but what's even more powerful than that is Google has said that the

graduates or the people who earn these certificates, they will perceive them, they will evaluate them in the same context in terms of opportunities and compensation as they would someone with a college degree. Who is the gangster here? Coursera, which recently filed for its IPO, is reportedly valued at $5 billion. That's going to kind of set the tone for ed tech. I'm pulling for Coursera. They're the original gangster. They got into it before it was cool. They have, I think, about $300 million in revenues. And what's interesting is their consumer business is actually bigger than I'd anticipated. I thought it was always going to be an enterprise business, but this is a company that is a third of a billion dollars, growing fast. COVID put wind in their sails. If this company comes out at a 10 or 15 billion, I think this is going to be a

great IPO. I think it's going to be really successful. It'll ignite a flame. It was like, who's the head of the wildlings? I'm watching Game of Thrones again with my son, my 13-year-old son, totally inappropriate. And that's why we like it. That's why we like it. Anyway, the head of the wildlings says, I'm going to light a fire the likes of which the realm has never seen. If Coursera does well in its IPO, and I'm going to try and buy stock in this thing, it's going to light a fire which the education realm has never seen. This is very exciting. And of course, section four, that's my higher ed startup trying to democratize elite business education. We just raised 30 million. I feel inadequate. I feel inadequate only raising $30 million. I heard Outlier has a deck

out right now, and they're trying to raise 50 million at a pre-money of 130 million on 600,000 in revenues. Outlier basically says, okay, calculus has been taught the same way for 500 years. Let's find the best calculus teacher and let's take the one and a half billion dollar business, which is how much young people spend on calculus courses and tuition across universities. And let's charge $300 for it because let's find the best calculus teacher and just teach it the way it's supposed to be taught. And supposedly they didn't have much revenue and they raised money at 130 million. So I'm thinking, oh my God, teach it the way it's supposed to be taught. And supposedly, they didn't have much revenue and they raised money at $130 million. So I'm thinking, oh my God, I didn't raise enough money at a high enough valuation.

But anyways, we taught 10,000 students last year. Our market is mid-market professionals. Because when you think about this, think about this. What is the most common attribute among global business leaders, much less just global leaders? The American MBA. It's got recognized value. It is transformational. We take human capital that's making $70,000 a year, and we turn it into human capital that can charge $140,000 a year to be rented by a corporation.

That is transformational. We can do that in 18 to 24 months. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Who is eligible to get an MBA? First off, two-thirds of the US is not eligible because they don't have a college degree. If you're a single mother with a kid, you're not getting an MBA. You can't afford that sort of debt. You can't afford that sort of time commitment. If you're not between the ages of 24 and 30, you're kind of shit out of luck. If you don't have a half a million dollars of the capacity to forego a half a million dollars and take on debt or forego opportunity costs in terms of earnings you'd give up,

you can't get an MBA. So basically the total addressable market, think about this, a globally recognized product. And what is the total output across top 20 business schools? What is it, 8,000 students, 10,000? Think about this. What other product in the world

has this type of recognition globally, this type of value, this type of transformative value, and its total customer base is 8,000 or 10,000 people a year? So anyways, we're trying to democratize elite business education by getting the best professors in the United States. We charge $700. The basic call sign, if you will, the basic tagline is elite MBA instruction and learning for 10% of the price and 1% of the friction. Don't have to apply. We give out scholarships. And so far, we've educated about 12,000 students from 27 countries. are just such exciting places to allocate your financial capital if you're a little bit older and if you're a little bit younger to allocate your human capital. I am very bullish.

Ed tech, health tech, and then remote. Those are the three big areas of dispersion and where you want to invest your finite resources. Thanks for the question, Julio. We have one quick break before our final two questions. Stay with us. their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc.

Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform can help your businesses stand out, stay top of mind, and see big results. Sell more, raise more, and build more genuine relationships with your audience

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Hi, Scott. This is Anna Kochan from Des Moines, Iowa. I've only recently become interested in economics, finance, and investment. My academic training is in rhetoric and later law, so I've not had any formal introduction into these topics. Can you suggest any books or sources that might give someone just learning about these things a good base for comprehension? Thanks for your help. Subscribe to Newsletters, Dealbook by NYT, Morning Brew, Bloomberg's Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day. Start just reading up on this stuff. Subscribe to various news sites, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times. My favorite is The Financial Times. That salmon bitch, I love that thing. Barron's, a little

dense, but interesting in terms of specific stocks. Follow journalists and professors on Twitter who cover these topics. I think the gangster here, I think the absolute gangster here, the best teacher in the world in my view is my colleague Aswath Damodaran, who literally wrote the book on valuation. He has put all of his courses online on YouTube. I would start reading his blog. Once you feel like you have the basics, and I would also take his course online, which you can take for free or you can take through Stern. I would say 60% of what I know about finance or valuation or my true beliefs or the pillars of what I believe about stocks and the markets come from Professor DeMotorin. I think he's just outstanding. I think Andrew Ross Sorkin and Dealbook are fantastic,

is a fantastic blog. And I think he is a great journalist. I love the book Too Big to Fail, although I don't know if it really is a finance book more than it is kind of a soap opera, but I love Andrew's work. Anyways, and also Investopedia is a great resource for understanding the investment space. And also, buy a few stocks and then just track them and read all the news on them and try and understand market movements and get into the markets. I love the markets. I check my stocks every day just because I enjoy seeing what's going on and trying to understand. I make predictions around stocks. I get a lot of them wrong, but I think it's fun to build up and say, okay, this is why I think

this stock is going to go up or go down. But there's a ton of resources out there. But more than anything, you have what's required, and that is you seem curious and interested. Start setting up those alerts on your phone, those daily newsletters. Go online and take that class from Aswath Damodaran, and then subscribe to some great, great financial journalism out there. Question number four. Hi, Professor G. My name is Dietz. I'm 20 years old, and I am currently an undergrad student at NYU. My question for you is, what do you think the space is, if

there is space, for humility and empathy in successful business? And how do you think empathetic leadership can drive corporations to success? Thank you very much. I really enjoy your show. Have a great day. Dieteds, thanks for the thoughtful question. And welcome to NYU. So I think capitalism is really the ultimate cocktail of full body contact violence in terms of competition and trying to innovate and create a ton of friction and violence that creates prosperity for the company that results in tax revenue so we can be more empathetic with our seniors and more empathetic with our parks and our Navy

and ensure that homeless people have access to housing and that food insecure households have access to food. I also think there's a ton of room for empathy within the organization. I think Mark Benioff, David Solomon are all empathetic people that want their employees to do well. I think there's a nice role for a certain maternal or paternal approach to work where you see your employees as, I don't want to say kids, but family. I think that's nice. And you see the community as your church and you want to contribute. And I think successful companies have a lot of empathy, not only for their employees, but for their community.

And I think there's evidence of it everywhere. They can be very philanthropic. I've always had, and by the way, this is new for me. When I was under the age of 40, I kind of bought into the Ayn Rand sort of Darwinistic capitalist hunger games philosophy. And every person that walked off the elevator into one of my companies had two bubbles. One bubble over the head was how much value they were adding. And the second bubble was how much they were costing the

company. And if the second bubble became bigger than the first, I would sit them down and say, this is what you need to do. And if the cost bubble stayed higher than the value-add bubble, I fired them. And I was fairly rapacious about it. And kind of the way I made myself feel better or rationalized it was I was always generous with people on the way out. And I still think there's some value to that. I think that you have to be a capitalist first with your own company or a for-profit company. Having said that, having said that, I do feel that it's okay for a company, or I think it's nice for a company to take a, I don't know what the term is, empathetic approach to its employees and try and put in place benefits and systems and a culture that is generous with people. I've always had a couple of people in my companies that I've always thought were a few bad decisions away from living in their car. And it's okay to overpay people, specifically administrative people. I've always felt that if you just straight supply and demand, the majority of CEOs or a lot of CEOs will say that labor should be based on supply and demand.

I think that's true of a senior level parts of a company. Those folks have the skills and the certification to command or extract a lot of rent for their services. But our marketplace has resulted in one in five households with kids or food insecure. secure. And I think at the administrative level, I think corporations, I don't want to say have a responsibility, but have the opportunity to step into a void through ridiculously fucking stupid economic, fiscal, and legislative policies that have been weaponized by the shareholder class to basically erode the middle class and create a permanent underclass where you have a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Trillionaires or billionaires have gone from 1.9 trillion in wealth to 4 trillion over the last 10 years. And we've exploded minimum wage from

7.25 to 7.25. So I think there's an opportunity to be empathetic. I think there's a huge opportunity as a manager to be empathetic as a means of being a great manager to try and understand people's objectives. Loyalty is a function of appreciation, and a function of appreciation is how empathetic you are to really understand the people you work with who work for you and understand what their priorities are, how they want, what is important to them. But in addition, I think corporations, unfortunately, have had to fill some of the void, and some have, and some haven't, and some are part of the problem. But I don't think I've gone from being very Darwinistic about employees to feeling, especially at the administrative level, that it's okay to overpay that segment of your company. It's okay to give people perhaps more runway than I used to as a young man.

So, look, capitalism, full body contact at a corporate level, but that friction and that tension that creates profits and great products, it has to sit on a bed of empathy. And I think that's the biggest danger to our society right now because the ugly cousin, the ugly, fucked up, drug addicted, violent cousin to dispersion or to COVID is that when we all withdraw to our homes or apartments, we don't have as much contact with people and we lose empathy. There's great studies out of the UK showing that when a population or a certain demographic increases in size and you don't live around them, you begin resenting them. And I worry that if we don't see the homeless vet, the single mom, people of different races at the movie theater or at the mall, we just lose empathy. So we all need an empathy practice. We need it at home.

I'm an atheist. I don't pray, but I ask my sons to grab my hand at dinner and talk about what they're grateful for, and then to talk about other people that they have empathy for or that they worry about them. I think that's a good practice. I don't think it's something that just naturally happens to you. I think you need to have an empathy practice. And I also think we need an empathy practice at work, if you will. Anyways, empathy is the key component. It's the chaser, the mixer, the glycerin to the nitro that is competitiveness in a capitalist economy. Capitalism is all about friction and violence at a corporate level that sits on a bed of

empathy. Thanks for the question. Apologies for the long-winded answer. And welcome to NYU, New York University. Thanks for your questions. That's all for this episode. Again, if you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording

to officehours at propgmedia.com. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Prop G Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you on Thursday. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions.

What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, 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, we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate and plan for the future?

In this three part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.