Article contributed by Neil Erickson

In yet another remarkable podcast, Guy Kawasaki brings on his “most outspoken” guest to date. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern and founder of section4, provides energy and logic to all things pandemic. Galloway fights the clueless attempts to bring back in-person education, as well as outlines the perks that a select few can gain while working remotely. 

The pandemic has obviously hit America with a curve ball, but some hit that curve ball out of the park. 

“At the end of the day, it’s going to hurt or increase income equality”, Galloway explains. Galloway uses Kawasaki as an example as someone who can hit that curve ball. 

“You live in Santa Cruz and you've figured it out: you have the brand equity and ability to work remotely. I think a lot of people need the advantage to show that they can show up to work and establish relationships,” Galloway adds. 

It’s a lot easier to hit that curveball with a steel bat, rather than a broken weathered-down wooden bat. 

Kawasaki has spent his life creating and maintaining hundreds of business relationships and crafting a brand for himself. Staying afloat during the pandemic is a significantly easier task than say a graduate student looking for work. Kawasaki has still experienced revenue loss; however, the trade off of shredding waves at Pleasure Point and spending time with his family is not too shabby. 

But what about the people without a handsome stock portfolio, the capability to work remotely, and connections to keep them from drowning? 

“If you’re making over $100,000 a year there is a 60% chance that you can work from home and only a ten percent likelihood that you’ve been laid off. If you’re making less than 40,000 a year only ten percent of those people can work from home, and over 40 percent of them laid off,” Galloway explains.

“People in the top one percent are living their best life.”

The financial divide is deeper than ever in the “blade runner dystopia” COVID-19 has sent us into. But for those top guys like Kawasaki and Galloway, are they living their best life?  

“If someone had said to us, 12 weeks ago you’re going to have to hang out, your stock portfolio is going to go up, you’re not going to get on planes, you’re gonna hang out with your family, you’re going to watch Netflix you’d say okay I’m in,” Galloway said. 

The conversation then evolved into remote learning, and schools reopening in the fall. 

“Whenever you hear university presidents saying we have a national responsibility to open our campuses, that’s Latin for ‘parents, send in your tuition,’” Galloway said while Kawasaki chuckles in the background. 

“There’s no better business in history than education,” Galloway explains. “These are businesses that have a very high fixed cost”. 

For the last forty years colleges have had an extremely high fixed cost of somewhere between 300-600 million dollars in tuition fees in the first two weeks of school. But for the first time ever, some people just aren’t going. 

“5, 10, 30 percent of the kids are not showing up, and if you're tier one that’s fine — you just go onto your waiting list.” Galloway explains. “With tier two - all of a sudden - there's real demand there. Because all of the kids who were going to go to your school because they didn’t get into Stanford, they’re getting into Stanford because a bunch of kids are thinking well I’m not gonna go to Stanford and it waterfalls down until you get to a tier three school, and they reach into their waiting list and they don’t have one.” 

When those tier three schools don’t have the remote learning tuition they need, the gates swing open and it’s their “national responsibility” to open up their campuses for in-person learning. And so the contagion increases.

Galloway cuts deep and keeps it real in this podcast. If you want to hear more from the fascinating brain of Scott Galloway, you can find the full podcast in the link below. 

https://guykawasaki.com/scott-galloway/