The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Blue Flame Thinkers of The Prof G Pod

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Today, we’re recapping some of the best insights from the Prof G Pod’s Conversations in 2022.  Episodes in order of appearance: Super Fast Delivery – with Ralf Wenzel (CEO of JOKR). The Making of Silicon Valley – with Margaret O’Mara (Professor at Washington University). The Streaming Wars – with James Andrew Miller (Investigative Journalist). Economic Cycles, Investing in Education and Working through Grief with Ray Dalio (Investor). Startups vs. Big Corporations, Regulating Monolopies, and Tech Folly – with Noam Bardin (CEO of Post News). The Frothy Real Estate Market – with Abbey Wimemo and Samir Goel (Co-founders of Esusu). How Money Laundering Took Over London – with Oliver Bullough (Journalist and Author). Inside Davos + Understanding the Geopolitical Recession – with Ian Bremmer (Professor at NYU.) Your Mind on Psychedelics – with Michael Pollan (Professor at UC Berkeley School of Journalism.) China’s Surveillance State – with Liza Lin and Josh Chin (Wall Street Journal Reporters.) Rewriting the Rules of Capitalism – with Mariana Mazzucato (Professor at University College London.) Future of Cities, Work, and Office Space with – Dror Proleg (Economic Historian). Failing Young Men – with Richard Reeves (Senior Fellow at Brookings Institute). Scott opens by thanking YOU for supporting Prof G Pod in 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Welcome to the final episode of the Prop G Pod in 2022 can you believe it gosh i'm freaking out this show wouldn't be possible without our listeners so thank you for showing up every week to support us we've had dozens of great conversations with blue flame thinkers who join us on the show every thursday so for our final episode of 2022 we want you to sit back, relax, and listen to a mashup of the best insights that we heard all year. We've covered the war in Ukraine, failing young men, inflation, cybersecurity, even pornography, and so much more. I love interviewing people. It's something I'm not especially good at. I was sort of used to being the guest, not the interviewer, but occasionally I like to zero in on one point of insight and then repeat it such that I remember

it. So with that, the founder and CEO of Joker, a global platform for grocery delivery at a hyper-local scale. Talking about the business's value proposition brought me back to my college days when I thought ordering Domino's was as good as it got. Customers' requirements towards online propositions have become significantly more sophisticated. The customer itself has become more sensitive, more educated, and

there are overall more customers using online services and online propositions than ever before. Yahoo believed at one point of time that they're resolving on the online search proposition sufficiently up until Google came with different algorithms, with a better advertising product,

with different ancillary services and resolved on the need for people to search something online differently, more efficiently, with a better eye on the customer than other previous basically search engines out there. And I think also the awareness of

online entrepreneurs that the disruption, the technological disruption does not need to only happen on the user experience side, on the front end side, and it was about the application, the websites,

or basically the payment facility would enable. But the main disruption, and that's what we are focused on, needs to happen on the procurement and supply chain side. By how we procure, when we procure, how data-driven do we procure, how do we organize the replenishment of our warehouses,

how do we bring supply significantly closer to the demand, how can we disintermediate middlemen and as such also build a proposition that does not only adhere to customer requirements, but it also ensures economic and ecologic sustainability. Because I think also for me personally, these are two very important parameters that we want to ensure with this business that we're building now. Joker ended up shutting down its US operations back in June 2022, but we still remain quite bullish on

ultra-fast delivery options. Next up, we have our conversation with Margaret O'Meara, a professor of history at the University of Washington. We discussed diversity and the history of Silicon Valley, plus Professor O'Meara gave us her thoughts on the role of the metaverse in our society. Silicon Valley was kind of grew up off to the side of the main action of American and global capitalism. It was tightly connected to flows of capital coming out of Wall Street and old money. It was tightly connected to Washington because of the Cold War and the space race. But it was kind of, you know, it was a place that grew apricots and prunes and had about three restaurants that all closed around nine o'clock. And you were, it was a very small town.'clock. And it was a very small town.

And it was a single industry town. It was a company town that was built around tech. And in those early days, the engineering programs were entirely white and male. There wasn't significant inflows of immigration, you know, kind of meaningful immigration until the 1970s, which was transformative and critically important. But also it was just a very, it was, you know, where did the original, the OGs of the whole industry, where did they all come from? They didn't all come from elite programs necessarily, nor elite backgrounds, but they were coming from engineering environments,

MBA programs that, you know, then Harvard Business School didn't let women in, right? So these are incredibly homogenous places they're coming from. So this is the pattern. This is what Steve Jobs described as handing the baton down from one generation to the next, which again, incredibly generative and critical to understanding why Silicon Valley is able to do what it does. You have people who are executives, operators in one tech generation. They have a big exit. They become VCs in the next.

Then they pick the winners of the future generations. And it isn't just, as you know, and your listeners know, it's not just money. It's mentorship. It's showing people how to run a company. It's showing how a bunch of 22-year-olds who might be good at engineering but don't know anything else, it's being there, connecting them in with the right lawyers and the right marketing and PR people and all of the kind of wraparound services that you would need. All of these kind of qualitative factors are shaping these decisions in ways both conscious and often

unconscious. No one put a sign on the door saying no girls allowed, but effectively that did play out that way. All right, moving on. The final interview from QN featured James Andrew Miller, where we discussed HBO and the streaming wars. Full disclosure, I love HBO. It's had a huge impact on me. I remember six feet under and thinking, I love this show because it makes me feel. I remember Game of Thrones. I've watched Game of Thrones with my 15-year-old, and it was an incredible bonding experience.

I think Sopranos is arguably the best show ever on television. Succession is New York. I just love H to the B to the O. They do more with less. Anyways, we talked about the culture and economics behind the streaming juggernaut. From 1972 on, Scott, there was never a stock called HBO.

HBO was never on its own. It always had a parent. And so as a result, the dynamic between HBO and its parent company, starting with Time Inc., then we have a Time Warner merger, which was, I consider it to be a real disaster. Then you have Time Warner taking control of Turner. Then, of course, you have the Armageddon of AOL and eventually AT&T. I mean, all of those things were huge on the Richter scale. And what happens is I was very interested in tracing the pedigree of how HBO is able to navigate and somehow survive those incredibly turbulent waters that are going on around it. I mean, there was a lot of infighting between HBO and the Warner Brothers Studio. There were financial exigencies imposed on HBO because

of the AOL merger and what the AOL people wanted to do using HBO. I mean, it's like the game of chutes and ladders when we were younger. And yet, somehow, HBO is able to prevail. And we're looking at 50 years now of content. That's not to say that it didn't have a lot of potholes along the way. But I think the HBO story, for me, is noteworthy, not only because of the incredible success it had with content, but also because it is a network that had to endure many different challenges that a lot of other networks didn't. We discussed so much more about HBO's history

and what makes it such a great platform in that episode. I highly recommend James' book. It's a very insightful read. Ray Dalio is our next guest, known for his sort of iconic or titanic role in the professional world and his economic analysis. But what struck me about this episode was how he dealt with the grief of losing a son. I have a principle, pain plus reflection equals progress. And so we reflect, we talk about it, we help each other, we give others love. And the love that others gave us made a huge difference. It really helped me to know how to help others better. And then I chose, we chose, my wife and I and others, to keep him with us in our ways. My wife and I, each morning, we sit down and before we get going, we have a cup of tea together. And so what we did was we had a picture of him. We had some flowers and a candle, but we also then journaled memories of him. In other words, it's a bittersweet experience, the pain of losing him, and at the same time, the being with him in that way. We didn't want to take him, we didn't want to lose him, we didn't

want to not think about him. We wanted to think about him and we wanted to, so what? So we feel the discomfort and we feel the pain. And so we found ways of keeping him close to us and to his family. We do. And that over a period of time helped us. Somebody sent us a book on how to grieve. And it has a page every day that you would read, that we would read every day and had a lot of good advice in it. So we kind of went, it puts in perspective what matters. You know, you can get tripped up on something, you know, we all every day, there might be a scrape your knee or you lose some money or you do this and the other thing. that mattered of what we lost and mattered for what we have, to the ability to savor what we have. And very much, it's like the serenity prayer. You know, God, give me the serenity to accept what I can't control. There's life, and it happens to you, and you go through it. So I think that that's very much the case. And then that appreciation, that lesson that I learned about really what matters and what's most important and how to savor that. And again, relationships, such as savoring my grandchildren and all of that.

And so that's how we have been going through it. And, you know, that's where we are. There are many elements of life which are joyous, exciting, and so on. And you can feel those at the same time. Don't worry so much about the displeasure or the pain. You know, you just go into it and over a period of time, it becomes more sweet than bitter. This conversation with Ray really moved our team, and it remains one of our favorite interviews. Next up, we highlight Noam Bardeen, the founder of Waze and former VP of product at Google. Noam is launching a Twitter competitor called Post. Full disclosure, I'm an investor in Post.

In this interview, Noam explained a term I love, tech folly. What I was consistently surprised on in Silicon Valley is how many, or you know what, let me define it differently. Folly, in Barbara Tuchman's book, was defined as a mistake that at the time people doing it knew they were making

the mistake. And she wrote about countries and military and things like that. But to me, you see the same thing in tech. You see large tech companies going at a project that from day one, it's obvious they have no skills or ability to achieve anything in it, but they'll do it anyway. And to me that if you think about, you know, building a phone, right? Amazon building a phone or Facebook thinking about building a phone at the time, Google today running a phone, like, why does that phone exist? Why do you think you have skills to build this and to compete in this space? And no one seems to ask those questions very much.

And I think we're seeing that over and over again. And this is the opportunity for startups, right? Startups are specialists and the large tech platforms are generalists. And today, I believe, at least especially in mobile, you have to be a specialist in something narrow, but you are the best at it. And money is not really a tool anymore since the playing field is more or less leveled

around capital. So the fact that a company like Google or Amazon or Facebook has the money to go after building a phone does not mean they're going to be good at building a phone. That self-awareness is missing a lot of times on companies that have been very successful in one area, and then obviously assume they can apply that success to anywhere else. Next up, we have the co-founders of Asusu, Abby Wamemo, and Samir Gol on how their unicorn company is trying to help renters improve their credit score with rental payments.

We talked about the state of play in real estate, and I think you'll enjoy hearing about the good work they do around building credit. Our core ethos has always been, no matter where you come from, the color of your skin or your financial identity, it shouldn't determine where you end up in life. And how that intersects with the real estate industry is we built a platform where we partner

with large owners and operators of multifamily or single family real estate. And we do three things for them. The first is that when renters pay rent on time, we report that data into the credit bureau so that renters can build and establish credit while landlords get on-time payments. The second is when renters fall behind on rent, we pair them with zero interest loans paid directly to the landlord, which helps keep people in their homes and keeps our landlord's cash flow healthy. And then finally, we kind of tie it all together with an analytics platform, really tracking the ESG impact our partners are having. And so through that platform, we now cover about 2.5 million rental units across all 50

states. And so we're able to see a lot of these trends around supply and demand, inflation, rent increases firsthand from our user base of renters and landlords. So I'll let Abhi share a little about himself and kind of dig in as to how this intersects with the problems that you outlined. Yeah, thanks a lot, Samir. Scott, my story started in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria. One thing my mother fundamentally believed in was the importance of education. So she afforded my school fees to one of the finest high schools in the land, which essentially opened my eyes and led me to negative 22 degrees in Minnesota. You know, during that transition, something important happened. I did not have a credit score, walked into one of the biggest financial institutions in Minneapolis to borrow money,

was turned away and had to go borrow money at over 400% interest rate from a payday loan lender. I think Samir gave you a good overview, but ultimately what we're trying to do at Isuzu is how do we leverage the data we have to bridge the racial wealth gap that we have in this country. I know you paying your rent is probably the least exciting thing in the world, but Abby and Samir's company is one worth paying attention to now. Two things that are very exciting are money laundering and soccer, two things that Oliver

Bulla made a connection between when we spoke to him back in May. The key difference between the U.S. and the U.K. is that the U.S. has a very robust enforcement apparatus, the FBI and other agencies that will actually investigate financial crime and prosecute in a way that is vanishingly rare. Here, these agencies are incredibly under-resourced in the UK, and that has been a strategic choice by successive governments to essentially under-regulate the system to attract more money here for precisely the reason that you state. The calculation has been that this is essentially free money.

You've got money flowing in here. Fees are being earned for moving it around. It's easy, it's easy work. And essentially, you know, you can, you can attract money into your economy, which that can then be used to build roads and hospitals and schools and all the good things that, that we want. Um, as you say, there is a moral point, which has been insufficiently understood by politicians, that essentially it's not free money at all. Someone is paying for it just at the other end. If money is being sent here and being used to build schools and hospitals and roads in this country, often that money has been stolen from schools, roads, and hospitals in Nigeria or Angola or Venezuela or Russia or Ukraine or wherever. And that's one point. And the second

point, which I think is as important in the long term for why this is a bad business model, is that you end up with a sort of crowding effect in the economy that it becomes so profitable to move money around, to serve the needs of the oligarchs, to be a butler in my term, whether that's a lawyer fighting their legal battles or a reputation manager fighting the press or an investment manager dealing with their money or whatever, that you end up attracting many of the brightest and the best citizens of your country into the butlering profession. And you end up essentially with a brain drain away from other segments. You have ended up with this, and the soccer pyramid is a pretty nice metaphor for it, with essentially this incredibly wealthy

clique of clubs at the top of the game and everyone else sort of scrabbling around for the various crumbs that might fall out of their windows. And that's, again, the sort of structure of the British economy, that this butlering industry benefits hugely a pretty small number of very well-connected people. Next is a guest we love talking to here at PropG, Ian Bremmer. Ian returned to the pod three times this year and delivered such insight every time. In June, we discussed the global economy, a time when inflation was getting pretty bad and the war in Ukraine was all over the headlines. So I want to touch on your book, The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and Our Response

Will Change the World. You talk about the notion that we are wildly underprepared to deal with additional global health emergencies, transformative climate change, and the next technological revolution. So how did we end up here? And if and what can be done such that we can have more coordinated global responses to these huge existential threats. So, Scott, we ended up here because we're in a geopolitical recession, right? And it's a term that doesn't really exist, but should, because, you know, people recognize boom and bust cycles in economics. And when you have a bust cycle, we have a playbook and we know what we need to do with

response. We have both the monetary and the fiscal tools and central bankers get together and treasury secretaries, finance ministers get together, say, let's give this a shot. Geopolitics has cycles too, but because they happen infrequently, because they're long cycles, we don't recognize them as such. But it's actually a very simple process. What happens is you create institutions. And when you create them in architecture, they reflect the balance of power that exists in the world at the time. Now, over time, the balance of power shifts dramatically. But the institutions are sticky. They don't move. So just a few weeks ago, you had the Secretary General of the UN say that the Security Council was broken. Why is it broken? Well, because Germany and Japan, the two economies that are most committed to multilateralism and rule of law, can't be kicked off because they won. That's a really

stupid reason not to reform the Security Council. And yet it means it's broken. Well, that's not just true of the UN. It's true of so much of our international architecture. It's true of NATO. It's true of the World Trade Organization. It's true of NAFTA, on and on and on. So what happens is in a geopolitical recession, your institutions are so far removed. They've become so obsolete and delegitimized from the existing balance of power, from the priorities and desires that the governments that matter on the global stage, that dominate international relations now want. And so they break. They start to break. And when that happens, you get a lot more crises. And you don't like those crises, but the purpose, the point of my book is to say that in a geopolitical recession,

the crises are also the tools that you use to strengthen, reform, and build new institutions. And we see that most obviously with the Russia war in Ukraine, but we also see that with climate change. And we have an opportunity for that with disruptive technologies. We largely failed with the pandemic. And we can get into all of that if you like, but that's the basic architecture of the book. What would this institution or institutions look like if we were going to try and address those things and make real progress and get in great fighting shape, get ready for the next big global disaster? You know what? We have to just get in great fighting shape because the enemies come in. We're going to dig the right trenches, we're going to get our armaments, the right technology,

the right, we're ready, we're going to get ready this time. What would that look like? Well, it's not one global government and it's not one big institution. And fortunately, it doesn't need to be. I mean, I think what we're seeing is that there needs to be a lot more flexible geometry in our institutions in terms of which actors and doing what. That a response to climate change requires institutions with actors that are relevant for that, which is very different than a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So I'll give you an example. Well, first of all, let me tell you what can't happen. So I start, this book is not meant to be some idealist, let's all come together and

it's going to be fine. We just need to recognize that we have these problems because you've read my book. No, not at all. I start the book with a recognition, number one, that the United States is deeply politically divided and dysfunctional. We're the most powerful country in the world for all the reasons you and I just talked about. And in the next 10 years, we're not going to fix that. Like, I have a lot of things that I know that if we did the following things, we could become much better off as a government.

We're not going to do those in the next 10 years. So let's take that off the table. Secondly, the US-China relationship is the most important globally in the world, and it is completely devoid of trust. That is not going to be fixed in the next 10 years. I can tell you things we could do that would make it more trusting. It's not going to happen. So let's take that off the table too. What I'm saying in this book is that even given a persistence of a deeply dysfunctional US political system andS.-China relationship,

we can get this stuff right. Next up, we keep our focus on China, revisiting the conversation we had with Lisa Lin and Josh Chin on China's surveillance state from back in September. We discussed TikTok, how China violates its citizens' privacy, and how China's surveillance state and Apple intersect. Apple's a really fascinating company in China. I mean, they are one of the most popular phone makers and device makers in China. And they also produce, they source the production of a lot of their devices in China. They're invested in the country in a way that very few other American tech companies are. They're required by Chinese law to store Chinese customer data

inside China. And they do that on servers that are controlled by a state-run company. And so Apple says that that data is encrypted. They're not handing it over willy-nilly to the government, but it's still nevertheless stored on servers that they don't ultimately control. And so if you are an Apple user, a Chinese Apple user, your level of privacy protection is much, much lower than an Apple user anywhere else in the world. That said, Apple's products are still popular amongst dissidents because an iPhone is difficult to crack. It still has some of the best, probably the best security in a consumer device. And so in Xinjiang, the police there have these handheld scanning devices and they'll sort of wave people down on the sidewalk and just randomly plug smartphones

into these scanning devices. And a lot of those devices actually just don't work with Apple. So if you're a Uyghur and you have the money and you want to protect your data, you'll still go for an iPhone. Lisa? Sure. I'll talk about it from the supply chain perspective. Apple walks a very fine line in China between not wanting to anger the Chinese government and trying to continue to do business with China. And the reason why I say this is because it's got very strong supply chain links to China. China is by far the best place in the world to produce smartphones. And you can tell because Apple produces most of its smartphones through Foxconn in places like Zhengzhou in China.

And any sort of gadget or component, any tiny, obscure gadget that you're looking for for your phone, you can definitely find in China. And that's the reason why it's been very difficult for Apple to actually move its supply chain relationship away from the country despite all that pressure from the u.s government and from advocates to try and diversify its supply chain and you know the second thing i probably would point out is apple has huge consumer base in china even though and and this has continued even though chinese smartphone brands have fast become some of the best-selling brands in the planet. Things like brands like Oppo, Vivo, Huawei at a certain point in time as well. And Apple was able to do this because it's got the cachet. And people are still willing to pay for Apple products.

If you still remember, Apple introduced the gold iPhone in China years ago. That was predominantly for the Chinese market. It knew its position. Again, that was Josh Chen and Lisa Lin, the authors of Surveillance State, inside China's quest to launch a new era of social control. We'll be right back after a quick break. Stay with us. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates 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. Pub 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, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to a year in review of the PropG Pods conversations. We'll now hear from Michael Pollan. This was by far one of the most interesting episodes we've ever done because it's about, you guessed it, magic mushrooms and how they affect your mind. What's amazing about psychedelics is that they don't just do one thing,

that they do very different things. And this is not true of all drugs. I mean, if you take cocaine or an opiate, you have a pretty predictable set of physiological effects and mood that you can kind of count on. Psych psychedelics on any given day could produce a completely different experience, even in the same person. And there's no imagery in the molecule. There's no spiritual experience or therapeutic experience in the molecule. It's a catalyst. And it brings all sorts of interesting material into your conscious awareness from your subconscious. So I think that the intention that someone brings to it has a decisive effect. I mean, Timothy Leary understood this.

He talked a lot about set and setting. Setting is obvious. It's the physical setting, but set is your mindset. So if you're looking for a spiritual experience, if that's your orientation, if you want to make contact spiritual experience, if that's your orientation, if you want to make contact with something larger than yourself, which is kind of how I define a spiritual experience, there's a good chance that that's what you'll have. If instead you want to work on your relationship with your mother or deal with some issue in your life, you're setting priorities,

you have a big decision, there's a good chance that you'll end up dealing with that. And then if you just want to go to a concert and have a good time, that might happen, or you might have a cataclysmic experience and realize you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. So it's, there are many different paths that psychedelics can take you on. And a lot of them has to do with your intention. Although I should say too, that it doesn't guarantee anything. You can go in with one intention and come out with another. Will 2023 be the year the dog finally does a guided trip? I've done trips where they haven't

been guided. I could have used a guide. I don't know. For now, I'm sticking to edibles. Anyway, let's switch gears to revisit our interview with Mariana Matsukato, a professor at the University College in London, where we discussed how capitalism varies on a global scale. The word capitalism is thrown around a lot, and we sometimes forget just how many different types of capitalisms there are. There's a variety of capitalisms. And in some countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, we have a very

dysfunctional form of capitalism. And by that, I mean, we have a business sector, which is overly financialized, something like $5 trillion have been spent just on companies buying back their own shares to boost stock prices, stock options, and executive pay. There's nothing inevitable about that. That's an outcome of specific decisions that have been made from my companies in terms of just maximizing their shares as opposed to maximizing perhaps something else that we could call stakeholder, not just shareholder value. But similarly, we have governments that are governed in very problematic ways, at best just fixing market failures when they happen. So filling the gap of the lack of private sector funding and some things that are good and correcting for the bads, you know, through carbon taxes, for example. And their

relationship is problematic. You know, anytime you use the word ecosystem with a biologist, they might catch you and ask you what you're actually talking about because a biologist knows what economists often don't know, which is that ecosystems can be predator-prey, they can be parasitic, or they can be mutualistic and symbiotic. So I believe that in the dysfunctional parts of the world, we have very problematic parasitic forms of partnerships and ecosystems between these different actors, public and private. And so, you know, my work has basically said we can do much, much better. We can also learn from other parts of the capitalist world, for example, how they govern companies, how they govern government. But the main thing is that with the current status quo globally, with this form of capitalism, we're not going to be able to tackle the biggest problems of our time,

whether they be around health, whether they be around the digital divide, and especially around climate change, which is, you know, basically, the clock is ticking. We're big fans of Professor Matsukata's work, and we recommend you check out the rest of this episode. Moving on. If you know us, you know we love cities. New York City is the greatest city in the world, and London, where my family now lives, is a close second. Jor Polig had a lot to say about the future of cities and brought some light to how international labor markets have changed for workers. So the industry that Jamie Dimon and David Solomon represent has been losing employees for about a decade now. It's much less important than it was pre-2008

or even around 2012. Here in New York even, tech is now a bigger employer than banking and finance. And even within finance, some of those banks, they employ 30, 40, 50,000 software engineers. Now, so that means a whole cultural shift internally.

These are no longer these, you know, traders who are coming to like sweat on each other on the trading floor. These are coders and they have their own habits and they have their own options as well in terms of where they can work. And if you want to hire them and you want to have the best people, you will probably have to adjust to whatever it is that they're interested in, or you'll have to hire other people that are not the best, which is probably what the banks are doing now. So a couple, and I sound like a boomer when I say this, but I want you to respond to two theses around remote work.

One is if your job can be moved to Boulder, it can be moved to Bangalore. So there's some risk. And I think ultimately people who end up with remote, totally remote work will have less leverage in terms of compensation. And two, that young people especially really miss out when they don't get into an office on a regular basis in terms of connecting and forming new relationships. Your thoughts? I think that to a certain extent, if your job can be moved to Bangalore, you know, yes, it will not remain in Boulder.

However, if that can happen, it will happen regardless of whether you go to the office and insist on, you know, doing your job from there. So the factory workers in Michigan, you know, if they keep coming to the Ford factory, that's not going to bring back the jobs from China or from Mexico. Yeah, that's a good point. So I think, unfortunately, the way our economy works, if something is doable, then it will be done. A silver lining here is that for a lot of the knowledge-intensive jobs, I think moving them overseas is a little harder than it seems because of cultural reasons, because the best talent is still in America.

And a lot of it is because in-person interaction still matters, but it doesn't matter on a nine-to- five basis every day. So, you know, these teams still meet, maybe it's once a week, maybe it's once a month, but proximity still matters to them. So there's that. But I think overall, we will see more and more knowledge work and even service work, things that we didn't think could even be outsourced, like fitness instructors or some types of medical professionals or other kind of very hands-on things suddenly move overseas and being done remotely, at least to a certain extent. And that's going to happen whether we like it or not. For our final guest clip, I want to end on something that I am really passionate about and invested in, which is guiding young men to be better people and understanding how our nation has failed this cohort. Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, shares the same passion. And in our episode, he discussed an interesting idea on how to close the academic gap between girls and boys.

Well, one of the things I think we should really consider is starting boys in school a year later than girls to account for this developmental gap. Less because of the gap at five, there is a gap at five, but more because of the gap at 15. So build that in and actually just create, that would actually create more of a level playing field, right? Boys being a year older chronologically would be closer developmentally to the girls in their classroom. And so I think that's something that school districts, administrators should consider, if not as an act of policy, at least allowing that or encouraging that. Interestingly, private schools do that. I got the data from one very well-known private K-12 school on the East Coast, and 30% of their graduating senior boys were a year old for their year.

At some point point they'd had that extra year so this is like an open secret in elite circles that it's not a bad idea to give boys an extra year so why not do that more generally and then some of this stuff i think is obvious to parents but not always to policymakers start school later have more recess have more exercise much more phys ed more more extracurricular, more coaches, more men in the classroom, and some messaging in the school, which is as empowering to boys as it is to girls about the importance of educational success. Right now, the messaging in schools, walking through the corridors of my kid's high school, there was poster after poster

about girls' college night, girls on the run, you go girl, black girl magic. I love all that. Nothing on the other side, nothing about boys. The presumption that the boys are just going to be okay is false empirically and is now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in these educational institutions. So this cultural messaging about educational success is also hugely important. And then as parents, look, I don't need to tell most parents this, the school system assumes your son has a prefrontal cortex. He doesn't. You're going to have to be the substitute prefrontal cortex for a few years. In fact, that's virtually the definition of parenting a boy, being a substitute prefrontal cortex for a few years. And that's what everyone's doing. So you are going to invest more in your son

than in your daughter. And that's not because you're sexist. It's because he needs more help. This episode was produced by the PropG Media's intern, Adonis Fryer. Special thanks to our producers, Caroline Chagrin and Drew Burrows. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We had a wonderful time in 2022, and we're excited to be back in your years again in 2023. What a great time to be alive. What a great time. How could we be more fortunate than to live in America? How could we be more fortunate

to live in the time we live in? Simple, to live in this time in America. We'll see you in 2023. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools 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.

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