The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Frothy Real Estate Market — with the cofounders of Esusu
Episode Date: May 12, 2022Samir Goel and Abbey Wemimo, the cofounders and co-CEOs of Esusu, a fintech platform that captures rental data and reports it to credit bureaus to help renters build their credit scores, join Scott to... discuss why real estate prices are through the roof and how their company is dismantling a few of the roadblocks that many renters face. Follow Abbey and Samir on Twitter, @Wemimo11 @Samir077. Scott opens with a conversation with the cofounder and CEO of Hey Jane, a digital abortion clinic, to hear about innovation in this space. Algebra of Happiness: take responsibility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Episode 162. The first James Bond film, Dr. No, premiered in 1962. People born in 1962,
Jim Carrey, Jon Bon Jovi, and Tom Cruise. I call big Ed and the twins, no joke, Tom Cruise. They
do all their own stunts, are totally unpredictable,
and I use a camera to make them seem bigger.
Son, your ego is writing checks your body can't cash.
Go, go, go!
Welcome to the 162nd episode of The Prop G-Pod.
Total genitalia humor, Top Gun 2, Tom Cruise.
We're just off to a really solid start.
This is going well. In today's episode, we speak with Samir Goyal and Abe Wemimo,
the co-founders and co-CEOs of Asusu,
a fintech platform that captures rental payments data and reports it to credit bureaus to help
renters build their credit scores. We discuss with Samir and Abe the roles credit and homeownership
play in wealth creation, how Asusu is building equitable solutions for financial inclusion and
housing access, and the state of play regarding the Rental Real Estate Ecosystem.
Okay, what's happening?
So everyone here, as I imagine a lot of people, are very concerned and rattled by the recent leak of the draft opinion for the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade.
And we thought it would be a good opportunity to bring in someone from the innovation space that is helping address or helping women find access to family planning.
So we're going to bring in Kiki Friedman, the co-founder and CEO of Hey Jane, a digital abortion clinic.
Kiki, welcome to the Prof G pod.
Thank you. Very happy to be here.
So let's bust right in. Can you give us your backstory and how you got to co-founding Hey Jane?
Yeah, absolutely. Prior to founding Hey Jane,
I was an early employee at Uber, so gained some experience scaling a business with regulatory
complexity, but always really did want to use that knowledge to advance something in the healthcare
space and particularly within women's health. The idea for Hey Jane kind of came about in the
summer of 2019.
I was chatting with some friends from undergrad. I'd gone to school in St. Louis, Missouri.
Missouri is currently one of six states that has one abortion clinic left in the entire state.
And that summer it was nearly shut down. And at the same time, telemedicine was really
exploding as a way to bring more access to stigmatized health products, particularly in
the men's space. So I just started thinking, is this a model that could be applied for safe, discreet,
affordable abortion care? And what's Hey Jane's business model or value proposition? What states
do you operate in? Who's your clientele? So Hey Jane is a fully digital clinic for medication
abortion care. Patients can come onto our site and learn more
about what the abortion pill is, how it works with hygiene, and submit a consult 24-7 anytime
that's convenient for them, where we collect information about their medical history,
their pregnancy, potential contraindications. They're then able to chat with a prescriber
at their own time. Typically, they'll get their prescription confirmed, if they're eligible,
in under 24 hours, which we're finding is much, much faster than alternatives
today. They get the pill sent to their doorstep, no need to visit a clinic to walk through,
you know, potentially protesters or anything like that, and they could take the medications
wherever they choose on their own time. So, medication abortions are increasingly a
preferred method for terminating pregnancies, and as of 2020 So medication abortions are increasingly a preferred method for terminating
pregnancies. And as of 2020, medication abortions account for more than half of all abortions,
and it's pretty easy to understand. Can you just walk us through a bit of the semantics
of this type of treatment, kind of the timing or the limits on when it's no longer an option,
and walk us through a little bit about comparing and
contrasting it to traditional forms of pregnancy termination? Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned,
it's become increasingly common. It's now more than half of treatments, but we are still really
trying to get the word out on it. Only one in five people know that abortion pills are an option today.
So the sort of key headlines are it is extraordinarily safe and effective. It has an adverse reaction rate of 0.1%, which is actually lower than Tylenols, and it's about 98%
effective for pregnancies up to 11 weeks. That's what it's approved for in the U.S. It is safer
and used, you know, longer term in other countries, but that does cover about 90% of
abortions in the U.S. today.
So the vast majority would be eligible for this treatment.
So it's safe.
It's effective.
You get to do this in the privacy of your own home.
So are the barriers a lack of awareness?
Is it that it is illegal to have this shipped into certain states?
What's in the way here?
Yeah, great question.
So there's been some really interesting regulatory developments over the past couple of years.
There's been sort of bifurcation of policy across the country. more and more hostile to abortion access. At a federal level, abortion pills have recently been
deregulated to really catch up with the science on the matter in a way that is much more friendly
to access. So prior to COVID, it was not necessarily obvious that these pills were
legal to male. They did create a COVID exemption that allowed for telemedicine abortion. So this is
somewhat new, but there'd been substantial
science and research on it for years in the past, proving its safety and effectiveness.
Finally, just last December, the FDA did permanently allow this model to be available
at the federal level. Now, unfortunately, states can still choose to override that,
and there are 18 states today that have banned telemedicine abortion,
despite all of the science in its favor. And just are 18 states today that have banned telemedicine abortion, despite all of the
science in its favor. And just to review some statistics, just to make sure I have them right,
the vast majority of pregnancies that are terminated are terminated before 12 weeks.
The majority of people who terminate a pregnancy already have children, and the majority of people
who terminate a pregnancy cite an unreliable partner as the reason for them deciding not to have to carry the child to term.
Are those accurate statements? Yeah, that's all exactly right. And there's been some really
interesting research coming out, one in particular called the Turnaway Study, that's really
measured the impact of turning away people from access to care.
We're seeing that they're three times more likely to be unemployed, four times more likely to have
a household income that's below the federal poverty level. And I saw another recent study,
too, just calling out that this does affect people across the gender spectrum who may not
be able to get pregnant themselves. There was some data that showed young men under the age of 20
whose partner was denied
an abortion for an unintended pregnancy were only a quarter as likely to graduate from high school
and only half as likely to graduate from college. So the ramifications from this are incredibly
broad across society. So Hey Jane has raised $3.6 million in seed funding so far.
And I think to myself, this feels like a good
business and it feels like there's financial assistance, great value proposition. I guess
the question is, is there other, are there other, I'm talking about the business now,
are there other adjacents you could go into such that you could turn those customers into
kind of greater lifetime value or more consistent customers? Yes, absolutely. So we've sort of seen two really interesting learnings here in our little
over a year of operating. So one is that, like I mentioned, Haging offers a full suite of support.
We have an emotional support and community support wraparound to this core critical stigmatized medical product. As a result of that,
we've been seeing NPS from our patients of 92 net promoter score, an indication of customer
satisfaction. The healthcare average is nine. So we are about 10x that. And some of the leading
existing telemedicine digital clinics are in the 70s. Of course, there are a number of services that we're considering offering to them.
We just launched birth control and have plans to expand into other primary care needs.
So we have a lot of young men who listen to the podcast, Kiki, and I just want to sort of review here that this type of medication abortion is fairly inexpensive. If somebody can't afford it, there's financial assistance that even
if they live in a state where they're not allowed to take delivery, they can get consulting on how
they can find access to a medication abortion. It can be done in the privacy of your own home.
It's safer than Tylenol. And you said it's 98% effective? That's right.
One of the things we talk about is that men, specifically
young men who are in the business of pregnancy, need to take more responsibility for this. And
that this is a great way to do that. And that is to spread the word about options available to women
should they become pregnant. And this sounds like a fantastic, practical, low-cost way
of addressing the issue. Anyways, Kiki, we appreciate your time and your good work
in helping us to break down how we go about this. Kiki Friedman is the co-founder and CEO of Hey
Jane, a digital abortion clinic.
I can't tell you how much I hope that you and this firm are successful, Kiki.
Thank you, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
Stay with us.
We'll be right back for our conversation with Samir Goyal and Abe Wamimo.
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Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Samir Goyal and Abe Wamimo, the co-founders and co-CEOs of Isuzu, a fintech platform that helps renters get their rent reported to help build their credit scores.
All right, let's bust right into it. The real estate market seems dangerously frothy right now, and rents are skyrocketing. Walk us through what you see as the state of play in housing.
Thanks a lot for having us, Scott. When you look at the housing market right now, the biggest driver is just inflation. We have record 40-year high inflation that we have to contend with.
And when you think from a transaction standpoint and a deal perspective, that drives up interest rates. So when our property managers
and asset managers are going into deals on different parts of the spectrum, either from
the government-sponsored entities like Freddie and Fannie or from traditional financing,
when rates go up, the spread becomes really, really wide and it becomes very, very difficult
for different parties to
make money. So that's really the root cause of what we are seeing in the marketplace of a frothy
real estate market. And then the downside pressure we're seeing is obviously increase in rent.
In New York City, we had a 2% to 4% proposal on rent increase that we have to contend with. It's just a derivative of a high
inflationary environment, which is expected. But due to the inelastic nature of rent,
we need to find other ways to make sure we keep people in their homes and at the same time,
continue to generate returns for investors from a real estate perspective.
Yeah, I saw, I think I read somewhere that
one and two bedroom rental units are up 20 and 28% on average nationally, which is just
extraordinary. It feels as if, I mean, it's a perfect storm. So it's got to be more than
inflation. It's got to be a supply chain problem, I would think. Why is there not more housing stock coming online?
Yeah, Scott, that's a great question.
One of the other things in addition to inflation, to your point, is just the rising cost of
real estate construction and development.
So a lot of the materials used in that process are expensive, right?
The cost of all those construction materials have skyrocketed, especially in tier one and
tier two cities.
And so what we're finding in real estate is a lot of developers are focusing on only class
A or luxury developments because that's where that kind of cost of construction can be met
with higher rents.
And as a result, there's more and more pressure being put on kind of public housing, LIHTC
or affordable
housing credits for development. And that's what's contributing to a big kind of missing
middle of housing shortage. And then we've also just deferred kind of construction and
development and kind of markets outside of our tier one cities like New York, LA and
San Francisco. And so across the nation, we're seeing a housing shortage, especially with
all the kind of movement that happened during the pandemic the past year or two.
Yeah, I think one thing I would also add, Scott,
is if we go down memory lane,
since sequel to the 2008 financial crisis,
we sort of had the shock of not building
as much as we did prior to the financial crisis.
So you look at demand and supply,
we are short of 4 million rental units
or housing in the United States. And that's been sort of compounded since the financial
crisis. So the law of demand and supply, you know, I demand low supply of housing. And
this compounding issue has to do with what samir talked about from a construction
standpoint but we also have to deal with this inflationary environment which is not making it
easy for us to catch up from an uh from a housing stock perspective so it's a plethora of issues the
pandemic has a lot to play with it but the root cause we have to actually talk about is inflation
and what happens to quote 2008 financial crisis.
So tell us about how Isuzu tackles these challenges.
Yeah, absolutely. So taking a step back, you know, Abby and I started Isuzu maybe four years ago now
after spending some time in corporate America. And to just tell you a little bit about what we do,
I think it's important that we share our stories and what led us to build Isuzu. And so for me, I grew up in an immigrant family from New Delhi, India. And a lot of my
upbringing was watching my parents work miracles with no credit and limited access to financial
resources so that I could have some of the opportunities I've been afforded. And so inspired
by that and Abhay's story, which you'll hear in a minute, 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 landlords'
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.
I was born there. My mother raised me and I lost my father at the age of two. 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 this magical place called America.
I immigrated from 80 degree weather in Lagos
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 Asus
is how do we leverage the data we have to bridge the racial wealth gap that we have
in this country?
And what's the biggest, what kind of friction for the business?
Is it capital, customers, awareness, landlords that market your service? What's the biggest obstacle to growing Isuzu? execution. And so we're actually in a great position where when we first launched Asusu,
we invested a lot of time building the plumbing, so to speak, making sure we have the
integrations and the platform to do what it is that we set out to do. But now we're seeing a
ton of momentum in the real estate industry that's been driven by a few factors. One is
the pandemic, where a lot of landlords realize they need to come up with new ways to interact
with their residents and their renters. The second is on the public policy standpoint. We recently announced a
partnership with Freddie Mac, whereby they're providing closing cost credits or incentives,
similar to how you might get a tax rebate when you buy a Tesla. You can get a rebate on a financing
by implementing a SUSU. And then the third is just more consumer demand from renters as well. And
landlords are seeing this as a marketable opportunity.
And so we've seen a lot of customer growth that drove us to be able to raise our most
recent financing of $130 million at a billion-dollar valuation at the peak of the market.
And so those areas are fine.
I think what we're dealing with is the problems of scale, where we've grown from 20 people
last year to about 150,
right? And that kind of takes a toll on every element of the business. And so it's really that
delivery piece that we're playing catch up on. And so what is the business model? Do these
organizations pay you to create the infrastructure so that you can develop a different form of credit
scoring? Correct, Scott. So our property managers and asset managers
pay us $2 per unit per month
and a $3,500 setup fee.
So that cost essentially covers the platform
for reporting rental data,
providing access to this microloans
for their residents,
and then giving them a platform
they can use to substantiate their ESG
initiatives. Got it. And just going back to some of the macro factors we were discussing, it feels
as if a homeless bomb is about to detonate. If you have rents up 20 and 28 percent, despite all the
hair on fire in the media that frontline workers are getting 10 and 12 percent raises,
they're purchasing power and housing, as far as I can tell, is going down. Aren't we just going to see homeless
encampments across America? This is exactly what we're concerned about. And this is particularly
challenging because it costs a lot of taxpayer dollars to help rehabilitate people that are
homeless. Because in a city like New York, it can cost about $100,000, right?
And there's potential lifelong impact that can happen
just from experiencing homelessness.
And so one of the reasons why initiatives
like the rent relief that the government provided
were important, but we need to do more.
You know, we haven't necessarily gotten ourselves
out of the pandemic and we're facing
this potentially long, cold recession.
And we need to make sure that we have both
kind of private market solutions and public policy solutions to create that safety net.
At Asusu, that's one of the reasons we're seeing such a big uptick in our
engagement is because we have that 0% interest loan program, right? It's not a handout,
but it gives someone a fighting chance if they have a job loss, a health emergency,
or some other sort of unexpected life event to kind of keep a roof over their heads.
So that's what we're trying to do.
But we need kind of all hands on deck to really make sure we don't have this crisis.
And give us the backstory.
I heard a little bit about where you guys were born and raised.
Talk a little bit about your professional backgrounds that led you to Isuzu.
Absolutely, Scott.
So my professional background when I came to the United States,
started my journey as an entrepreneur building affordable water infrastructure in developing
countries. Came to New York University for my master's and that's where I met Samir.
We actually met at a Clinton Global Initiative conference. And then I went to Goldman Sachs
and PwC really focused on mergers and acquisition.
So I did buy-side, sell-side deals for over $50 billion in deal value.
And Samia and I met up one day at Max Brenner's in Union Square and said, we were sick and tired of the corporate America.
We could stay there. We're successful getting promoted, but we wanted to do something bigger than ourself
that could have impact from the communities
that we come from.
So we decided to quit and start Isuzu in 2018 full-time
and the rest is true.
Seeing a tremendous era of growth,
but that's a little bit about our professional experience.
I'll pass it to Simia to share a little bit more
about this also.
Thanks a lot, Abbey.
Scott, from my professional background, I started out working in the public sector over at the UN.
And that was an enjoyable experience, but I realized I hated bureaucracy.
So I sort of ran in the opposite direction.
Ended up building a company in the food tech world.
And that's during when Abbey and I originally met at the conference that he mentioned.
And then following that, spent some time in the private sector, mostly working over at LinkedIn, ultimately
leading their sales strategy and operations for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And so during
that time, we started building Asusu, put all our paychecks into getting it off the ground. And we
saw some traction quite at the start of 2018 to focus on this full-time. Now, where do you think this goes?
So it's not the rental market,
but I'm sort of involved in the residential market or the, I don't know what you call it,
single family housing or ownership market
in Southern Florida,
just by virtue of the fact that's where I live.
I've never seen a market this frothy.
I'd just be curious what you guys project.
And I realize it's regional,
but the houses have doubled and tripled in Florida. And I see homeownerships gone from
64% to 66% or 67%. And usually when you get up around 67% or 68%, that means a bubble is about
to burst. Do you guys see a collapse in the housing market?
That's a thoughtful question. And you're the king of predicting collapses and a lot of things.
I get it wrong a lot though. If king means you keep making them despite the fact you get them wrong, yeah, I'm definitely the king. But two, three years out, where do you see the housing market? And let's pick markets because I know it's very regional,
but New York, Florida, California, where do you see these markets? Because I live in a house that
has, it's been my best investment act through no fault of my own. It's just gone up. I thought it
was overpriced. I didn't want to buy it five years ago. It's probably doubled or tripled in value. I'm like, who are these people paying for this
right now? So let's start there. Florida, Southern Florida, massively frothy. Do you think it just
keeps going up? Or do you think we're in the midst of, are all the moons lining up around another
kind of boom and bust around housing? I think we're going to see a correction.
It's not going to be as bad as 2008's financial crisis.
I think in 2008, we got a little bit greedy.
Our underwriting wasn't as solid.
And we were very, very careless
when we thought about the best asset class
since the inception of this country.
It's been your home. But predictions on a go-forward basis when we thought about the best asset class since the inception of this country.
It's been, you know, your home.
But predictions on a go-forward basis,
Scott, at the end of the day,
we have 4 million homes short compared to the demand we have in the marketplace.
Number two, like you've alluded to,
you don't see a concomitant relationship
between wage and the prices of rent, which is disturbing.
To that end, what we are going to see is people cannot afford what they are investing in.
And there's going to be a correction, especially with layoffs coming with different companies.
We're seeing a massive correction in the stock market, which means you're going to have layoffs and people cannot afford to pay their mortgage.
So these issues are compounding. And to be very, very precise and answer your question, I think we're at a breaking point, but it's not going to be as bad as 2008 financial
crisis because we talked to the underwriters, also the lenders. We are not seeing a lot of
risky behavior like we saw in 2008. And that gives us hope. Yeah. The only other thing I'd
add is it's just been a great capital raising environment for a long time and that's changing. So I know in multifamily
and probably to some extent, single family as well, we're just seeing cost of capital be so low
for all these foreign funds. So there's a ton of capital being poured into multifamily markets and
single family markets, right? After 08, you had kind of the big financial institutions,
the blackstones of the world
that would kind of go into that space.
But right now, cost of capital is so low
that a lot of new funds,
a lot of non-traditional investors are also piling in.
And that macro is changing,
especially because other markets like Europe and Asia
have been hit by supply chain issues and energy issues, right?
And so we're seeing kind of that slowdown
and just capital being poured into the market too. And so that'll slowly right? And so we're seeing kind of that slowdown in just capital
being poured into the market too. And so that'll slowly reduce the premiums we're seeing in addition
to everything that Abby just outlined. What do you think the government's role in this?
Should we have, you know, what, it feels like this problem doesn't get solved without the
balance sheet of the government or some sort of real,
you know, concerted approach to creating affordable housing. What would you like to
see if you were advising the Biden administration? What would you like to see happen?
It's a terrific question because we do have a lot of pointed guidance for the Biden administration.
Number one, we need more capital put into true affordable housing.
There's 4 million housing stock right now.
Shortage, we need to try as much as possible to give people in the interim solution housing choice vouchers so they can go to different development, not constrained by their income. Scott, if I want to go get an affordable unit
right now, I need to be earning below a certain amount of money. And if I go above that
monthly sort of income, I get kicked out of my affordable unit. We need to rejigger that system
because it's not working for anyone and it perpetuates and leaves poor people poor.
There's no incentive to get out of, you know, there's no incentive for you to earn more because you want to keep a roof over your head. And when you earn more, you're
kicked out. Number two, investing via the, you know, the government-sponsored entities,
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, loosening guidance so they can essentially compete with the banks that have
easier balance sheets capital in the market. In an high interest rate environment, the banks
will definitely outperform the GSEs. We need more leeway from the government so they can essentially
play and compete so there's more investments in affordable housing. Number three is we need to start having
more pathways to make sure we're not solving homelessness backwards, Scott.
Guys, I appreciate so much the work you're doing. Samir Goyal and Abe Wemimo are the co-founders
and co-CEOs of Asuzu, a fintech platform that captures rental payment data and reports it to
credit bureaus to help renters build their credit scores.
Prior to Isuzu, Abe founded Clean Water for Everyone, a global social venture providing affordable access to clean water for a quarter of a million people in six countries.
And Samir co-founded TransferNation, a nationally recognized nonprofit that uses technology to ensure that excess food goes toward underserved communities across New York City.
They join us from their office in New York. Are you guys in New York?
Yes.
Yes. Nice. In the city. Well, gentlemen, again, thanks for your good work. I appreciate your time.
Thank you so much, Scott. Deeply appreciate it. Thanks for having us on.
We'll be right back.
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Algebra of happiness. So what does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to be a man?
I've been thinking a lot about masculinity and loosely speaking, I think masculinity is your ability to garner skills and strengths such that you can protect and advocate for others. That's kind of in my
mind, that's the best definition I can come up with. Also, I don't think it's solely the domain
of men. I think a lot of women demonstrate really wonderful masculine qualities. And I think that
masculinity like femininity is a wonderful thing. It's a societal construct,
but they're both wonderful things.
And I think part of embracing your masculinity
as a young man is taking responsibility for your actions,
specifically recognizing that if you engage
in unprotected sex,
that you have a certain level of responsibility
to not only be thoughtful and protect that person
and help them work through issues around choice,
but also to protect other people.
And the notion that where we're headed
is a situation that takes our most vulnerable,
specifically women of color,
living in conservative, low-income regions of America,
and we're making life harder for them,
I can't think of anything that better embodies
the notion of little dick energy on a national scale.
This is not only not protecting
and advocating for our most vulnerable,
it is really deciding.
I know, I know if you're a nice white woman
in California or Illinois or New York,
don't worry about it, you're fine. This isn't to change. Who this is really going to make life much harder for
are the people who are the most vulnerable in our society. And I think men need to take a
greater role, specifically young men. And we have a lot of invested interest around this.
If a lot of women are taken out of the workforce, the prospects for our economy,
because they have to take care of a kid of the workforce, the prospects for our economy, because they have to take care of a kid, an unwanted child, the prospects for our economy are not going to be as great.
If we have an entirely new generation of unwanted children, guess what?
We're going to have bigger prisons.
We're going to have more crime.
We're going to have more violence.
If you are interested in having sex, sex is a wonderful thing.
It's not only a step to the most elemental foundation of our
society, relationships, it's also just a lot of fun, even if it doesn't end up in a long-term
relationship. And most men I know want to engage in that activity recreationally at some point in
their life. And that is going to go away if women feel there's a non-zero probability that they could get pregnant and then have to carry the
kid to term. And also, let's be honest, all right? I know take off the condom said no woman ever.
It is men. It is men who pressure women or create scenarios that result in a much higher incidence
of pregnancy. And so, what does it mean to be a man? And what
is the role that young men can play in this? And that is not only wave your arms about this
decision and be firmly pro-choice, but it's to take an active role in communicating to sexual
partners, potential sexual partners and friends about how to make it easier for them to terminate a pregnancy,
as we talked about with Hey Jane, or being more supportive of bringing this out of
talking about the responsibility of a man. What does it mean to be a man? Does it mean getting
a vasectomy at a young age and having it reversed? I think that's going to become a more viable
option. Why on earth have women taken 100% of the responsibility, okay, 98% of the responsibility for birth control?
So as a young man, I think it is important to think about, well, what does it mean to be a man?
And do I aspire to those things? And one of them is protecting others. And women specifically,
our most vulnerable women are under attack right now. And I think men and young men play a big
role in this. And it's more than just putting out a black square on your fucking Instagram feed
saying that you're pro-choice. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller
is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe.
Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
We will catch you next week on, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday. Thank you. Every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM.
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