Pivot Schooled #5: The Psychology of Recovery, with Recode co-founder Walt Mossberg, Howard University's Dr. Wayne A.I. Frederick, and Los Angeles Superintendent Austin Beutner

Support for the show comes from Saks Fifth Avenue.

Sacks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style.

Follow us here, and you can invest in some new arrivals that you'll want to wear again and again, like a relaxed product blazer and Gucci loafers, which can take you from work to the weekend.

Shopping from Saks feels totally customized, from the in-store stylist to a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you things that fit your style and taste.

They'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in, or when that Brunella Cacchinelli sweater you've been eyeing is back in stock.

So, if you're like me and you need shopping to be personalized and easy, head to Saks Fifth Avenue for the best follow rivals and style inspiration.

Hi, everyone.

It's Scott.

Today on the podcast feed, we're going to share an edited version of the fifth and final episode of Pivot Schooled, our live video series.

This episode was originally broadcast on Wednesday, September 2nd, and the theme was the psychology of recovery.

Our guests were Howard University President, Dr.

Wayne A.I.

Frederick, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Austin Buetner, and CARA's longtime friend and co-founder, Walt Mosberg, who's now on the board of the News Literacy Project.

Later in the show, we'll also answer listener questions and make some predictions.

If you paid for a ticket to any or all episodes of Pivot Schooled, you can watch the video replays of all five episodes at pivotschooled.com.

But now, let's get to Pivot Schooled about the psychology of recovery.

Hello, everyone, and welcome.

Oh, there you are.

To Pivot Schooled.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

How are you, Kara?

Are you wearing a neckerchief?

Men wear a lot of neckerchiefs, I've noticed.

It's a man thing.

Otherwise, I just forgot it.

I just forgot on all that.

I sleep at this thing.

I sleep at this thing.

Do you?

Yeah, what's on it there?

What do you got on there?

Scott Skulls and Crossbow.

My friends, the Henderson down in Florida, gave it to me.

I love it.

I think I love it.

Very nice.

Who is that behind that necker?

Who is that?

Is it the dog?

Could he be our friend?

Would he like me too?

And then I go like,

never mind.

Never.

Nothing says friend likes skull and crossbones.

Nothing says welcome.

Never.

I think you have a nice nerve.

How about the rosette show on my nose?

Jesus.

All right, let's do that much.

How did I get so fucking up?

Seriously, how did I get so you were a little crazy on our first episode back from vacation?

Are you calmed down sufficiently or not?

Oh,

if that's wrong, we don't want to be right.

How much did you love that?

This is a topic where you rant a little bit about and I like it, this education topic.

This is the fifth and final episode of Pivot Schooled.

It's a live event, the psychology of recovery.

We have some amazing guests coming up, but first, let's talk about what's going on.

There's so much Zoom market cap, $133 billion higher than Cisco's market cap in 2011 when Eric left, the founder left to start Zoom.

What do you think of this?

What is this?

What is happening in this Zoom situation?

It looks like Zoom is here to stay, and that's one of the topics we'll be talking about with some of our guests.

There's all kinds of things going on.

There's bags of soup as terrorists for terrorism.

There's crazy, like, I was thinking the only person who rants more this week than you is President Trump around dark shadows and planes full of people in dark clothing, which is the plot of the expendables, as I pointed out on Twitter.

What's happened?

And then

all these splits for tech companies, all these giant splits for Tesla, for Apple, for possibly others i mean the biggest story or i think the most interesting story in the market is the acceleration of these companies that the market has just decided okay you're one of these companies and i don't know if it's a combination of the future being pulled forward or new new investors on the margin coming in from robinhood who don't know what they're doing and this all ends poorly I mean, Cisco, I don't know if you remember, Cisco at one point was the most valuable company in the world in 99.

And I think over the course of the next year lost 98% of its value or not, about 85%, maybe 90%.

But Zoom at these levels, it's just, it's really incredible.

The story I saw today, and I thought of you actually, was another illusionist trick.

Mark Zuckerberg

has pledged $300 million to try and

stave off or suppress election interference, which I think is just so incredibly disingenuous, hypocritical, and is nothing but a half a percent of his net worth to try and distract from the other 99.5% of his net worth that is derived from tearing of the fabric of our democracy.

I think it's incredibly disingenuous, and I hope no one is fooled by it.

It's almost as bad as putting out a book about the important topic of gender balance in the workforce and then going on to elect an illegitimate president who puts people on the Supreme Court that undermines a woman's right to choice.

It's just

you're surprised by this hypocrisy.

They create this.

What do you think?

I'll turn it back to you.

$300 million.

On the face of it, $300 million donation to stop election interference.

Sounds good, right?

I'd rather they just fix the platform so that it doesn't do that.

They just reported that there were problems on the platform from Russians, including they took down a fake news site where they used journalists, U.S.

journalists, to write anti-Biden stories.

It was from the Russians.

It just is like, it just pops up, whether it's QAnon or whatever.

It's the maintenance of this platform and telling us that it's too hard to maintain means you probably shouldn't be there.

And I think that,

you know, first they tried to minimize it and say it's not that big a deal.

And then they said, well, it's a big deal, but we can't control it.

You know, I think it's guilt money.

It's sort of like it reminds me of the Sacklers or, you know, that made all that money ruining people's lives through opiate addiction and selling it into the market in a way that was so aggressive where doctors prescribed it.

And this addictive and dangerous substances.

And then giving money to museums and trying to, it's just, it's not,

it's from the rich people's, the evil playbook i guess but it's certainly uh problematic i think it's just i just would rather they would fix the platform and he can give away money all he wants uh or whatever or better yet let's tax these people properly um but i think that it's just it's it's the same thing it's it's every day there's something fresh and i would like to get honestly i mean it sounds like coming from my mouth i'd love to get a positive story about facebook I really would.

I really would like to see something where they can add to the,

to better the world in a way that's significant.

I just don't know if it's possible.

I don't, I don't know.

And I think they're just going to get bigger.

I mean, first off, if they wanted to, if we wanted to solve this, it'd be easy.

It's just for every instance of election interference, you get fined a million dollars and they'd start racking up billions of dollars of fines every day.

They'd figure out a way to solve it.

You know, just speaking,

we're always pointing out corporations' poor behavior.

You know, what I thought was a really, really wonderful thing that came out yesterday is Old Navy announced that they're going to give their workers the day off to be pollsters.

I thought that was just smart,

good, the right thing to do.

I thought that was really, really neat.

So well done, Jeff.

Work on election sites.

Work, work on election sites.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Be poll.

What did they call it?

Be poll workers.

Poll workers.

Poll workers.

Thank you.

Poll workers.

Thank you.

Yes.

Paul brings up an entirely set of different images for you.

I know that.

I just saw that.

I saw you just went right to a strip club.

I saw that.

I watched it.

I watched it be like poll dancing.

I hate COVID.

That's really one of the downsides of COVID.

Okay.

By the way, I don't eat fast food or go to strip joints in the city I live.

I have standards.

I have standards.

That's

no and double no for me, just so you know.

More information that we needn't have learned about you.

Poll workers should, a lot of

tech companies are pushing for their younger employees to be poll workers because

for generations.

Well, that should be a national holiday.

I'm sorry.

That's always been, it's been one of those things that should be a national holiday.

And all companies, and the way we were going to get it done is if big companies, say the big tech companies would be perfect, give everybody that day off and just make it, make the businesses lead the way, as they often have in many of these issues around racial integration, gay rights, and things like that.

Uber giving 4 million drivers minimum wage, which is more than they make for the day off.

I don't think Google needs a day off.

Those folks are, they got plenty.

They work from home.

They have plenty of money.

It's a symbolic situation.

And also, you know,

help things.

And in the area we're going to talk about today, which is schools, also

help in that regard in terms of creating

an ability for parents and others to have a moment's rest.

And I think it just being able to vote, adding to the stress of COVID, would be a great thing.

Anyway, let's get on with the show.

We have a lot going on.

Bingo, by the way, you do look rather natty there in your New York apartment.

It's so fancy.

It's fancy.

I see you're fancy.

Natty, natty.

Just look at you.

You look like an eight-year-old boy about to to get beaten up by somebody.

Let's look at a chart.

Or form.

Or beat someone else up.

No, I decided to give up on dressing.

I am going to the beach after this, and so I'm dressed for the beach.

This says Brooklyn on it.

And

I like eight-year-old boy.

For a long time now, and I still have

all my sons.

Thank you.

I have all my sons' t-shirts that I wear when they were eight years old, and I enjoy them to this day.

I was going to wear an Angry Booms t-shirt, but I thought, yeah, they fit me.

That's very nice.

And I'll be wearing Clara's clothes at some point, you know, not the months right now.

They're kind of small, but I like wearing children's clothes.

And I often shop in the children's section because I'm a wee little thing.

Anyway, let's go through things.

I'm we.

You're a giant.

I'm a giant.

I'm a giant.

It's anyway.

You talked about your kids, Gustav.

Oh, hush, hush, hush.

You asked me about it.

You said I would look like an eight-year-old child.

And it is, in fact, the t-shirt of an eight-year-old child.

We have a special announcement to make.

Pivot School is donating $60,000 to two hunger nonprofits, $30,000 to City Harvest in New York City, and Frontline Foods, which feeds essential workers in impacted communities across the country.

$20 of each ticket we sold went into the donation as we promised.

And we mean literally, we couldn't have done it without you.

We hope that we'll be able to raise more in the future.

But thank you so much for your

audience.

And we're glad to donate this amount.

I think it's critically important.

You see a lot of these food lines.

Maybe the next one will be getting people internet access because you see a lot of school kids having to do school in front of like Taco Bells or places where there's internet access.

But this is a nice thing.

We're not going to say it's our doing, it's all your doing, and we appreciate it.

Let's bring in some friends and pivots to talk about education.

So, first, let's talk to the president of Howard University, which is just a son-show from where I am, Dr.

Wayne A.I.

Frederick.

He is here to talk to us about what's happening at Howard

and

other schools like it.

Hi.

Hi, how are you?

Thank you so much for coming on.

So, talk a little bit about your experience at Howard, what Howard's doing this year, virtual versus in-person classes.

Is there a date by which you're aiming to have everyone on campus?

Talk a little bit about your decision-making around what you've been doing.

Yeah, so first, I want to thank you for having me, and I appreciated

Professor Galloway's presentation.

We put together a task force, looked at the health and safety issues primarily, and we initially made a decision to bring a limited number of students to campus.

I think one of the things that you heard in the prior presentation is that there are students at risk.

And at Howard University, although we are a private institution, we actually have a high number of students who have food insecurity and housing insecurity.

46% of my undergrad students are Pell Grant eligible, and our endowment is less than a billion.

So, we do have students, for instance, students who are in foster care and emancipated, and they really plan their living circumstances when they're in college around,

you know, obviously when the semesters, etc.

The city, DC, then made a decision that if you came from 29 hotspots, you had to quarantine for a minimum of 14 days.

And we felt that that would not be something that we could navigate well,

as well as the high level of contact tracing that would be necessary.

So we decided to go completely online.

As we go forward, we're going to make a decision, especially because we have vulnerable population, a high percentage of our faculty and staff are in the vulnerable populations.

African Americans obviously have been disproportionately impacted.

And so we employ more African American faculty at Howard University than any other higher end institution, residential.

And so we felt that that would be a risk as well and something that we would have to gauge as we go forward as well.

So you made this decision early.

You made it much earlier, and not bringing the students back and doing it quickly.

What has been the reaction from students, professors, the DC community?

Yeah, I think people have been understanding.

We do have students who,

as you can imagine, and coping as well because they are in home situations where domestic violence has increased.

Some

significant numbers don't have reliable Wi-Fi, or just as was described,

they have other family members who are also using

that Internet access, et cetera.

And so they have some difficulty with that.

But I would say overall, I'd say the majority of people were satisfied with the decision to stay away, recognizing the health and safety concerns.

I really want to commend you

for your leadership around this issue.

I think if there's any university that could have made excuses for why they were having a hybrid model and try to wipe Vaseline over the decision to try and excuse the higher, you know, decent tuition,

it would have been Howard.

And you just did the calculus and said, you know,

we're going online and we don't want people back on campus.

My question is about graduation rates.

And my understanding is based on my information, your graduation rates are about 59%.

Is that right?

59% of the people who start actually end up graduating.

And at Georgetown, I think it's 94%.

At George Washington, it's 84%.

At Harvard, it's like 96%.

If you could say anything to high schools, lawmakers,

to say, I need to get my graduate, we're fulfilling against our mission.

We have great kids.

We need to get our

graduation rates up.

What would you like to see happen such that you could take that number up?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Actually, when I started, the graduation rate was 38%.

38.

And we moved it to,

that's correct.

That's absolutely correct.

And we moved it to 57%, the four-year graduation rate.

And it was something that I have been very focused on from the beginning.

The number one barrier to students graduating at Howard was finances, students who would not persist, not because of academic fortitude, but because of financial circumstances.

We have significant numbers of students who end up with unpaid balances well north of $25,000.

Our AR

going into the year after school starts typically is above $50 million.

This year has been one of the lowest.

It's below $25 million this year.

And so the financial resources, I would say, is the number one issue.

And you have to remember the

two schools you just cited in the DC area, their tuition is almost twice our tuition.

And yet still our students struggle because their Pell Grant populations are less than 20%, I believe.

And as I said, ours is 46%.

So it's a combination of factors that makes that difficult.

So if I could speak to lawmakers and say, you know, what would change this?

I mean, one of my goals at Howard is ultimately to allow every Pell Grant student to attend for free.

A few years ago, I went to the Board of Trustees and I said, every student who had an expected family contribution is zero, gets a maximum Pell Grant.

Let's start something called the GRACE Grant.

And the GRACE is a pseudonym for basically retention and access.

And what we did there was we filled their package completely

after their Pell Grant.

And sure enough, what we saw was a graduation rate of 89% in that group.

Those students who did not get the same had the graduation rate that you quoted about 59%.

So clearly, taking away the financial barrier completely changed those students' circumstances.

And why is that?

Someone may say, well, how does that affect their performance?

Those students end up working.

So they end up taking classes and at the same time trying to work and do that.

They end up incurring significant debt, which I think causes stress, getting bills from us consistently.

And to a point that you made earlier,

we have a rule that we don't provide a transcript if you have a balance with us.

So the other thing that worries me about the circumstance as well is that the students then end up completing, they may have a 4.0

at the end of the sophomore semester, can't get a transcript from us because they owe us $25,000.

And so it is a broken system and one that we're trying to fix.

So if we can fill it, and there's unspent Pell in the billions of dollars, not every year, but especially when the country is in economic,

you know, in better economic circumstances.

So I've proposed that we use the unspent Pell

in a proportionate manner to enhance the ability for those students to pay their bills and also for schools like Howard that are committed to getting to taking in a large number of Pell Grant students to help with the infrastructure and support systems around housing and so on for those students and food insecurity.

So first off, I really relate to what you're saying.

I was a Pell Grant recipient all five years at UCLA and I wouldn't have made it through college without it.

The other side of the equation is that my tuition at UCLA was $1,200 a year.

Tuition at Howard is $27,000 a year, is that right?

So we're still lower than most, but that's still, I would imagine if you're like most universities, tuition has grown much faster than inflation.

And you don't have to address this specifically at Howard because I don't want you to freak out your faculty or various cohorts.

But speaking as someone who's a leader in the university community, the other side of that equation is we have to reduce costs.

Costs have just exploded at universities, and most of that cost has been passed on to kids in the form of debt.

What are the immovable costs here that have driven up tuition so dramatically?

And what general thoughts or advice do you have for us and for universities?

What are we going to need to do to bring down those costs?

Yeah, I'll touch the removable cost.

But before I touch that, I also want to mention that unfortunately my faculty

were paid about 25 to 33 percent less than the average when I took over.

They now were at about 20 percent less.

So part of the issue here as well, especially when you employ

more African-American faculty than anyone else, is I feel that we do have a moral obligation to try to help when you talk about generational wealth, et cetera, with respect to my faculty as well.

In terms of the immovable course,

one of the things I think that all universities do, and I think Howard is no different, and we have to change, and this is one of the areas where I'm committed to, is being all things to

everyone.

I think that's one of the things that we have to stop.

We have 13 schools and colleges.

We have a hospital, we have a radio station, a TV station, and every single thing is a sacred call.

I'm a surgeon by practice.

I still practice medicine.

And so there's suspicion if I show up and I say, well, why exactly do we need to have a TV station?

Right.

Or why exactly do we need to, if we do program prioritization,

you know, why do we have to do XYZ?

And that becomes a problem.

We have four students take Chinese

over a four-year period, but yet still we would have two or three full-time faculty members in those areas.

We belong to the consortium in D.C.

You could take those classes at the other universities in D.C.

So some of those practical things, I think, are things that we have to do as an institution.

Howard is not one of those institutions where you'll come and see a very big gym, fancy gym, you're not going to come and see Sona, you're not going to get pesto in the cafeteria.

That's right, no pesto.

That's not what we're spending our money on.

We're spending our money on too many programs.

All right, let me ask you, I know you've got to have a heart out in just a second, but I want to ask two more, I think, important because then we have one or two questions from the audience, if you don't mind staying for a second.

Do you think virtual learning will always be a part of Howard's curriculum going forward?

With Professor Galloway's talking about expanding the student body and then cutting the costs, I mean, essentially, so you give more opportunity even after it could you see that as a permanent facet of all universities?

And then I'd love you to talk about, you know, Howard is a historically backed university.

As we all know,

black Americans are dying of COVID at twice the rate of white people.

How do you think about recovery differently from non-HB CUs?

And then there's a question from the audience about that.

How is Howard University going to do business different with BLM insights?

How do you see that happening?

The first one first is, are you going to stay in virtual?

Yeah, on the first question, absolutely.

I think that we will have more virtual offerings.

That was part of our strategic plan in order to be able to expand the opportunity.

And some of the proof is in the pudding.

The pandemic came, we went to virtual fairly quickly.

And as soon as we got to virtual,

we saw what we thought would be a decrease in enrollment actually going the opposite direction.

We had 9,400 students enrolled in the fall.

As of this morning, we have 10,863 students enrolled.

So, because students don't have the cost of housing and some of those other things, our retention and persistence has been higher.

And so, to Scott's earlier point, one of the crazy things about this is we may end up with a higher graduation rate as a result of the pandemic, which is not something that most people would intuitively potentially think about.

So, I think there would be some of that.

And, yes, Howard is an HBCU.

We have to think about the pandemic differently.

And I think that there are three factors.

One is

you look in DC.

If you are a black male who lives in Ward 7 and 8, which is 95%

black, your expected life expectancy is about 67 years.

If you're a white male who lives in Ward 3, where the life expectancy for a white male, where it's 95%

white, is probably about 87 years, or almost 20-year difference.

There's something very broken in our society and our healthcare system.

I see patients with GI cancers all the time, and I see that wide difference in terms of their access.

So, what we have done is try to be out in the community doing testing.

When When we look at recovery and coming back, we recognize that access to a vaccine or any other treatment is also going to disproportionately affect us.

So

I wrote a draft of an op-ed that I have shared now with the other

three

black HBCU medical school presidents, and we intend to publish an op-ed to promote the fact that vaccine trials need to accrue more African Americans.

And the best way to do that is to engage us in both the science and the clinical aspect of it.

And I think, unfortunately, that has been a blind spot in this fight.

Only 4%

accrual of African Americans at this rate.

And then on the Black Lives Matter, you know, Howard is one of these institutions for 153 years.

We've been on a journey towards social justice.

We are in a very pregnant moment in our country where many are joining that caravan, and we're very grateful for that.

The reality is, just like with the civil rights movements and other movements, people will leave that caravan.

We're committed to getting all the way to the destination.

So, we're going to continue to do what we need to do.

I don't think that there's anything different

per se that we need to do in this moment.

We've been doing the things, and that is making sure we graduate people who can bring about policy change.

So, Kamala Harris, being an alum,

is an example of that.

Chadwick Bozeman, as you just spoke about, healthcare disparities, when we lose a 43-year-old special human being to colon cancer, and we have guidelines in this country that

recommend screening at 45, that leaves him out.

Ibrahim Kendi, who I spoke to this morning, was diagnosed at the age of 36 with state four colon cancer.

This is not an exception.

This is becoming the rule.

And I think that we have to make major changes.

So what Howard needs to do is to continue to talk about the things

that are important, to do research and to recommend policies, and most importantly, to graduate the young people that will go out and bring these issues to the forefront and hopefully bring about policy changes.

And right now, a lot of that hope is invested in Kamala House, but we have 80,000 alum who are doing the blocking and tackling every day around these issues.

How important is the physical presence of people being at Howard?

I really miss the students here.

Like, you know,

I can get into Uzanaz really quickly, for example, but what is that important?

If you have, if your mission is social justice, not having a physical gathering is much more important, I would assume.

And it's important not just so they can party or whatever.

It's that it's, to me, it's very important to physically have a Howard operating.

I hope Scott will allow me this bit of leeway, but I actually think at an institution like Howard, it's critical.

The most important thing we do here is instill confidence in young people.

And some of that socialization that Scott described in K-12, you have to remember because of our public school system and the disadvantages that African-American students face, they do not come to college with those same advantages because they don't grow up in systems that necessarily promote that and promote that in them.

And when they come to Howard, I think we have the ability to instill confidence in them and they leave here

better because of the socialization.

They spend about 10 to 20% of their time in the classroom, but a lot of, I think, the secret source that occurs here occurs because Stokely Carmichael could run into somebody else in the hallway, or

a Chadwick Boseman could go make a movie with a Susan Kaletchi Watson when they both were here, and a Bradford Young shooting it.

That just can't happen in a virtual environment.

And that's why getting students to interact here is important.

We're not going to do it in an unsafe manner, but I do want to be clear that for an institution like Howard, even going online and giving more opportunities virtually,

ultimately, I still think our secret source is going to be that socialization that does approach.

Let me just say, people who haven't seen Howard, it's a beautiful campus.

It's really lovely and very, it's a gorgeous place.

I enjoy going to visit it in my neighborhood.

And it should be.

I can't wait to see the students there.

President Frederick, do you have kids?

I do.

I have a 16-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, a rising junior and a rising freshman.

So a surgeon who's now the president of Howard, I can't imagine how much, how obnoxious your parents are when they go together with other parents bragging about you and you have kids.

Can you give us just one piece of parenting advice that you've registered after being raised in obviously an environment that,

you know, it worked out very well for you and now having your own children?

What one piece of advice would you give to parents for raising successful kids?

You know,

yesterday would have been my father's 74th birthday, but he died a month short of my third birthday.

He was a police officer, mounted branch police officer in Trinidad and Tobago, where I was born.

I was born with sickle-sol.

My mom was a nurse working in a public healthcare system.

I am the beneficiary of an incredible public system that worked well in Trinidad and Tobago, run by a prime minister who was a political science professor here at Harvard.

What I have seen, especially during the pandemic and my two kids, is that I think this generation is more altruistic.

They have a lot more information about what is happening.

And I think what we need to do is to recognize that they still need our direction and love because they have information that's not exactly formulated in a manner that makes sense.

You can't get a lot of information in 40 characters on a tweet.

And so while they have a lot of information, that's a good kernel to start a conversation.

But ultimately, what they want is for us to still be parents and to still be present, to listen, but at the same time to cajole and to push them in certain directions.

And this pandemic has taught me that I've spent more time with my kids in their 16 and 14 years in the past six months than I did their entire lives.

And I'm ashamed of that.

You know, but I think it's time they want us.

Wow.

They want you, Scott.

Thank you.

That's very inspiring.

That's wonderful.

That's fine.

Thank you so much.

And good luck at Howard.

I can't wait to see you all back on campus, but good luck with this semester.

And thank you so much.

You're an amazing leader.

Education.

Education.

thank you and i appreciate all that both of you do thank you very very much all right now that was amazing i feel i'm that was very it's an amazing and inspiring it's an amazing inspiring it's an amazing school i will take you on a tour of howard when you come visit me in my here in dc you always promise me that stuff

well you haven't come here you haven't come not taking you for golf there's no golf course here anyway hey it's scott we're listening to the fifth episode of pivot school which was broadcast live on wednesday september 2nd we're going to take a quick break now but we'll be right back after this.

Thumbtack presents.

Uncertainty strikes.

I was surrounded.

The aisle and the options were closing in.

There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

There were too many choices.

What if I never got my living room painted?

What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use?

What if

I just used Thumbtack?

I can hire a top-rated pro in the Bay Area that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

This is Pivot School.

Let's get back to the show and our second friend of Pivot interview, the Superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District, Austin Buetner.

Now, for a different perspective, let's bring in our second friend of Pivot, the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Very, I think it's the largest in the country, Austin Buetner.

Austin?

Good morning.

Thanks.

Hi.

Thank you so much for coming.

Thanks for joining us.

Wow, there's so much to talk about here.

That was an amazing discussion about colleges.

But let's talk about the demographics and size of your school district and how it impacts remote education, how big it is, the income breakdown, the racial gap.

You have one of the most complex jobs around right now.

Yeah, so we serve the needs of about 700,000 students spread across a diverse set of communities,

more than 700 square miles.

About 80 some odd percent of students we serve come from families living in poverty.

85 plus percent are kids of color, black and Latino.

More than two-thirds of families we serve have had someone in the family lose work due to COVID.

So the simplest way to think about it is we serve a community with great needs.

And

for many students,

a great public education is a path out of poverty.

For all of them, this is the foundation of opportunity for the rest of their lives.

And that's the work that we try and do every day.

And how significant is the broadband gap and the at-home technology gap?

And what are you doing to address it?

That's sort of the first basic building block of what's going on.

And talk a little bit about what you're doing right now.

Yeah, so go back to March.

Before March, so let's say February, we do three things.

We help students learn.

We provide a safety net for students and families.

And we take care of our employees.

We've got 75,000 employees who take care of the 700,000 students.

And we have tried to do those same three things,

starting first with a low-tech solution.

So we reached out to PBS, we created a set of student-centered learning shows, now watched by more than 200,000 people each week in Los Angeles, and have been adopted by school districts in 30 other states.

We set about connecting or reconnecting every student with their school community because we wanted to maintain that connection like you and I have here today.

So every one of our students has been provided with a computer and internet access.

That wasn't where we started.

We have a real challenge with adequacy and funding.

State of California invests about $17,000 a year in a student.

State of New York, New York City invests about $30,000 a year, K-12.

And that lack of adequacy we would have seen before if you and I had gone to a classroom and said, wow, there are too many kids in the class.

Or how come this school library doesn't have a librarian?

We would have also asked the question, why doesn't a child have a device and how are they connected?

So we provided devices to all and we took that extra step to make sure we provided internet access not something a school district would typically do but the digital divide many of us think of must be that great expanse between montana and wyoming or something where it doesn't physically exist it exists in communities we serve because people can't afford it so we have provided that connectivity to students and their families.

We've trained 35,000 educators in how to teach online without missing a day of school.

We offered summer school for all, first time ever in our school district, and we brought in a bunch of partners.

Love to unpack this a little bit from Fender to have a guitar class.

We sent guitars to 1,000 kids.

We're doing 2,000 this fall.

And we created a book club together with Snapchat.

So Alicia Keys on Snapchat talking about a book and encouraging students to participate and download the book for free.

James Cameron worked with our teachers to create a voyage in the Titanic.

So engagement becomes important once students aren't a captive audience in a physical place.

We started the school year in a better place than we were in March.

96% of students within the first week of school have been connected.

Still a few more to go.

We're going to get there.

We're going to get back to 100%.

And I hope we also can talk about what we're doing to bring students back, which will be health practices at schools as well as testing for the virus and tracing those who may have come in contact.

So lots of work.

But the frame is...

Normally we're focused on reading, write, and arithmetic, and you can see so many of the challenges society faces nest themselves in schools.

Internet access, for instance, where one would have thought, and I'm a little older than both of you, but I grew up with the old rotary phone.

Everybody had one.

There was no digital phenomenon.

We were all.

I'm old.

All right.

Yeah.

But how did we get to this place with broadband and wireless where we didn't bring everybody along?

That's a real challenge.

Shouldn't it manifest itself in schools, but it's really a challenge for policymakers at the state or

even federal level to say that shouldn't exist.

But we're finding ways to solve it right now.

So Superintendent Buener, first off, I'm a proud alum of LAUSD all the way through, Fairbairn

Elementary School.

And my question, and this is a bit of a setup,

my elementary school was all white.

And then I went to Emerson Junior High School, and it was integrated, busing, and quite frankly, it was a difficult experience.

A lot of tension, a lot of violence.

And then by the time we got to university high school, something wonderful happened.

We were getting along.

And I would say the student body back then kind of looked, smelt, and felt like Los Angeles.

And there were rich white kids that

made me want to go to Brown

or Stanford.

There were

kids, my friend Ronnie Drake from Crenshaw, his only way to college was

to get a football scholarship.

And I think I developed empathy.

So aspiration and empathy through racial diversity and income diversity.

And then as a lot of people do when they're back in their hometown, I went back to university high school.

And it's, I think, now 88% Latino.

And we've lost these upper income households, which seems to me to be bad for everyone.

Traditionally, I don't know, we call it wide flight.

But what do we do to create school systems?

that create, or LAUSD, back to a point where there's both empathy and aspiration.

Do we start taxing private schools?

I mean, it just feels like LAUSD just feels like, how do we get back to public schools, America kind of investing in public schools such that

there are two parts to that?

No, I agree with the premise.

And by the way, if we went to uni today, that high school actually has the largest portion of students who are experiencing homelessness of any of our high schools.

To give you some sense of the demographic that is shifted uni high.

It wouldn't butch you what you think.

By the way, there are students living in the high school smack dab in the center, pretty much of like Westwood, Bel Air, Santa Monica.

Right.

But let's think of schools again as reflecting society.

We have a society of haves and have-nots.

Let's have that conversation

because I don't know that it's necessarily defined around race.

It has become reflective of race in our schools, but it's really a demographic challenge, which is we serve the have-nots, 80-plus percent living in poverty.

And by poverty, I mean about a third of our families are trying to get by on a household income of less than $25,000 in Los Angeles.

Household income, less than $25,000 in Los Angeles.

That doesn't work.

And because of that, we've seen a shift in a generation or a generation and a half since you were at uni.

California schools used to lead the nation, used to lead the nation in student outcomes, used to lead the nation in investment, measured as, let's say, per capita investment in students.

We've gone from top of the pack to bottom of the pack, generation, generation and a half, and community haves and have-nots, convincing the haves

that this was the journey we were on.

I'm a public school kid, but for my public education, I wouldn't have the privilege of sharing this conversation with the two of you today.

And we have to recreate that opportunity for all in society, and we're not.

And that's a hard conversation to have.

You see it in schools, but Los Angeles, one of the most diverse communities in the country, tremendous affluence, tremendous poverty, and everything in between.

But somehow the public school system now serves those who don't have, and that's not right.

We have to begin to address it.

There are systemic issues, there are systemic issues in how zoning has led to underfunded public schools.

Zoning has created disparities where communities of color have less funding than other communities, right?

But foundationally, yes, we have to get the haves and the have-nots to have a conversation about adequate investment in public education.

But more tactically, what would you say to an alumni of LAUSD that wanted to help right away?

What would be your call to action?

How can we help?

Huge beneficiary of the LAUSD wanted to continue to be a springboard for

young men and women, boys and girls.

What could we do?

What can we do?

I'll give you the

high, not the high, the broader systemic, and then I'll give you something you could do tomorrow.

The systemic is continue to be a voice for the need to rebuild public education.

And that costs dollars and cents.

That's what it all starts with.

We have people people who do work in schools, and we need more people doing more work in schools.

That's fundamentally what happens every day.

So continue to be a voice for the lack of adequacy and the importance of adequacy in funding public education.

The second, tomorrow, join us, take the journey James Cameron did, and let's figure out a way to create a class in this online setting where we teach each of our students how to create their own podcast and to share their voice because ultimately it's

giving students a sense of their own agency is part of what we do.

And And by the time they're at uni, we hope students have found a way to share their story and their voice.

And it might be in a podcast or some other form of journalism.

But what we've done with James Cameron, we can do with you, Scott, if you're willing.

And we'd love to think about that.

Yes, Scott.

Yes, Scott with students.

I'm not so sure you're going to.

I'll check with my co-host and see if she's up to it.

Yes.

Of course.

What are you talking about?

I don't need to protect them from you.

But more to the point, when you're thinking about what's lost, though, you have,

from the pandemic, you've gone virtual.

The costs are lower.

But they're also, there's this idea of a lost year.

I was talking with one of my sons about it, a lost year of what's happening.

And he is a very privileged kid, still feels adrift having,

he keeps using the word meaningless.

Like, this is, is this meaningless, which of course is typical for a lot of kids feeling that way.

What have you lost here?

And what do you think has been,

what have you looked at and thought this is maybe this is some changes we need to make in our education system like Scott talks about because one of the things he talked about was the importance of physically being with each other, that there's this socialization part, there's this other part of the world.

Without questioning,

we want to be back in schools.

That's where learning best happens.

And let me just recalibrate one comment you made.

It actually costs more in online and even more in hybrid.

We can come back to that.

But we know for certain types of students in particular,

they are missing the most.

It's now six months, six months since students have been in schools, the longest in modern history.

I've never seen anybody learn to read read online.

Don't know how that's going to work.

Are students learning English, students with differences and disabilities, students who might have been struggling before?

Online isn't the best way to help that student catch up, let alone make progress or accelerate the pace of progress.

We're doing some things online to try to address that.

A Zoom, a group Zoom, it's pretty hard to provide individualized attention.

So we're providing one-on-one tutoring.

in ways we've never done before, things like that.

But no question, students are going to learn best in a classroom setting and not just learn best, the socialization, the other

non-school learnings that you might think of in a school setting, we're missing out on.

Students miss their friends, teachers miss their students, that mentorship that comes from a classroom setting with a great teacher leading a group of young men and women and so on.

All those are missing.

And we have students in isolation.

And it's important that we don't think of what a home setting looks like by any of the three of us.

We've got nice roofs over our head.

We know our next meal is coming from.

That's not necessarily the case for so many of our families.

And so the shift to online where the burden is on the family to be the mentor, the proctor, the homework helper,

where even finding a quiet place to do work is really, really hard to do, we want back in school as soon as we can do so in a way that's safe and appropriate for all who are in school.

Scott, and then we have a couple questions from the audience.

The calculus around bringing kids,

I think it's a different calculus, the calculus to bring back kids, even a different calculus from my K through five versus sixth grade to 12th grade versus higher ed.

Just walk us through in your mind what was the calculus around your decision to open or hybrid or not open.

Sure.

We closed in March with no incidents in schools.

None.

This was a new and

obviously toxic disease.

We wanted to make sure we kept the safety and health of all in the school community first, Paramount.

Back in July, we made the decision to stay online because the overall health factors in the community weren't right.

There's still way too much COVID in Los Angeles area.

And the community has to be right before you can think about going back to school.

So we're still online.

When we go back, it will be hybrid, not because we're choosing hybrid over all back or online, it's because

Hybrid is a compromise between what you'll need to do for health practices.

Less students in a classroom means more space, or more space means less students.

We don't have extra teachers.

We don't have extra buildings.

So the constraints around health practice lead us to some sort of hybrid model where students will be at a school part-time and not at a school part-time.

So that continuity of learning will have online continuing

for the better part of the school year.

Now we've...

are building a testing and tracing effort to be back as soon as we can do so safely and to keep students there.

So we have three universities, two labs, two health insurers, a tech giant, a partridge and a pear tree.

The whole group is together to try to build this foundation.

And the importance of it is not just the information we'll have, but the ability to isolate and trace.

And go back to March, head of the World Health Organization, said test, test, test.

If you want to get control of this, you have to test, trace, and isolate.

And connecting that to schools, you know, not far down the road from uni, the rival Hamilton High School, about 3,000 students come from all over Los Angeles.

They connect between siblings and children of those who work in the school.

They connect to 100,000 people every day.

That's a Petri dish.

So if you can't connect them with the presence or absence of the virus, you're going to recreate a Petri dish, which we do not want to do.

So we need community health factors right, health practices in schools, testing, tracing that takes us back to school and hopefully keeps students in school.

And so do you have any timeline?

Because, you know, you're nearing the people ending, nearing the end of high school.

It has this disruptor for college, for admissions process, job training, et cetera.

Sort of stops everyone and preserves them in amber, essentially.

Yeah, no, unfortunately, at every level of a K-12 journey, even our earliest learners and our early ed centers, we want to be back when we can do so safely.

So we're putting in the foundation to do so safely and to keep students there.

I think one of the things that's not discussed as much as it might be is the

need to make sure we can isolate and and trace out a school.

We've seen the example in Indiana in a middle school.

Someone becomes ill, the word gets out, everybody rushes out of the school, the school becomes a haunted house, no one has the information to figure out, can you go back safely?

Well, we need that information.

That's what we're trying to do is build the baseline.

We're not a week or two away.

It's further out than that.

And we'll be guided first by what the overall health factors are, second, what our science partners say, and that's the foundation on which we're doing all of this.

And then watching other school systems.

Okay, a couple quick questions, if you could answer them.

How can schools proactively monitor their students for mental health concerns and intervene as necessary?

You already had that issue, but now it's sort of tripled and tripled and quickly.

We talked a little about the health crisis,

and the system more or less rose to the occasion.

There are ventilators where there needs to be a ventilator, if you will.

The health crisis is becoming an education crisis.

And my hope is the federal response and the state response is similar and robust.

So the adequacy of funding and all the tools and support is there.

If we're not careful, the next echo will be a mental health crisis.

We, before all of this, had great needs in our schools.

That will come back to schools.

The child who's from a family where someone may become sick or, God forbid, worse than that.

The child from a family where someone has lost work, all that stress and trauma is going to come back.

We're going to need more mental health support in schools.

Until then, we're continuing to provide a safety net.

We have a hotline.

Any student, any family can call.

We've got counselors on standby to have that conversation, refer them for help.

But we know it's coming back to school when we're back at school, so we have to be ready for it.

All right.

Do you plan to conduct summative testing this year?

If not, how will you identify and remediate 18 months of an unstable learning environment and huge learning loss?

Yeah, it's defined for the audience, formative and summative.

So summative for us is a state annual test.

The state did not do those last year, will not, to our understanding, be requiring this year.

We are doing formative evaluations, which a teacher might customize to her group of 10 or 32 students in a classroom to get a sense of, okay, Kare, where are you?

Haven't seen you for three months.

What's your level?

What can I do to help you provide you feedback, provide your family feedback?

So low-stakes formative assessment being done.

We think that's the most valuable.

That's where the educator in the classroom can use to guide a student, provide feedback, and provide feedback to the family.

I think we're a ways away from summative tests, the standardized meaning much in this environment, when the focus has got to be on helping students catch back up and accelerate the pace of progress.

Okay, last question.

Do political forces like gerrymandering make it difficult to effectively govern a school system where there can be stark differences in resources between schools?

We are the largest school system in the country with an elected school board, so politics enters schools.

That can be tricky to navigate.

We try to keep the focus on students, and if that's our North Star, I think we're going to do just fine.

The disparity of resource,

we're as a school district all on the side of the have-nots, unfortunately.

So the disparity between Los Angeles Unified and other more affluent school districts might be where that tension comes in politically, maybe at a state level or even at a federal level.

But Los Angeles Unified, we're working and fighting on behalf of students, more than 80% of whom live in poverty.

So we're fighting for the have-nots to make sure there's adequacy and appropriate funding in public schools.

All right, this is great.

What tech giant are you working with?

I'm sorry, besides Snap and you mentioned some others?

Microsoft.

So Microsoft is providing a foundation.

They're building an app, which is actually, we're adapting the Microsoft Return to Work app.

So you would have your device, you would do a self-check for your health factors.

That becomes the place in which the testing gets layered on top of ultimately ending in a QR code which says, come on in today, if it's green or if it's red, gosh, we need to get you a test, or maybe if it's more urgent than that, make sure to connect you with a healthcare provider.

So Microsoft's providing that foundation.

All the data will be in the systems they've created for us because we'll be gathering data from health insurers on what the impacts of COVID are in the community, what happens from our tests, how we schedule nurses to provide the tests.

So Microsoft has built an end-to-end system to help manage, but the interface...

all of those are in schools will see is the app that's on a device of some sort, which allows us to make sure that we're communicating carefully with the community about what the health needs needs and the health impacts in a school are, and to make sure as we bring people back, we've set up ways to mitigate the risk as best as possible.

All right, Superintendent Buitner, thank you so much for coming on.

And good luck with schools have started, have started already.

Have they begun?

We started back on August 18th

online.

And

so we've got a couple of weeks.

So far,

we're doing all right.

I mean, we need to continue to make it better.

Absolutely.

We learned something since March, we learned something in summer, and we're applying it every

But 96% of kids connected in the first week is a good start.

It's the foundation on which we can build.

Great.

Thank you.

Superintendent.

We really appreciate it.

I'll follow up with you offline.

I would like to get involved in some way in University High School.

Scott will become a teacher.

Okay.

All right.

Call me if you need any help with him.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Teacher, Scott.

Oh, no.

That's a disturbing situation.

I better.

Okay, so University High School.

Talk about a piece of information.

The high school I went to has now the largest homeless population of any public school in LA.

Think about that.

Really?

I mean, it's just 85% of the students in LA USD

are dealing, are technically living in poverty.

I mean, it's just

like our.

Schools have inherited all of society's problems.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah, it's very, it's very difficult.

It has very dangerous.

Oddly enough, may I give you a little point of thing you don't know about me?

My

thesis at Columbia Journalism School was about kids living in homeless shelters trying to go to school.

That was my story.

So I know a lot about this.

It's a really difficult way to conduct education.

It's almost impossible to do a good job.

These students are really struggling.

But speaking of which, let's bring our friend Walt Mossberg, who's going to help us answer some questions from the audience and share his expertise on education and tech.

Walt Mossberg.

Hey, Mossberg.

Expertise in education.

Hey, Swisher.

Hey, how are you doing?

How's it going?

I went to various schools, but I didn't run any.

No, I know you didn't, but you're working on some stuff.

Yeah, I am.

And

I just, before I talk about that, I just for a second want to comment on Scott's slides, which I think were terrific and I agree with.

I'll tell you, Scott, that I was actually a trustee of an expensive Northeast private

university, Brandeis University, where I graduated for about four years.

And

it was a very large board of trustees.

It had about 40 people on it.

And in the last vote in which I participated, I refused to vote for the budget.

I was the only one.

And I refused to vote for it because it had a, I think, a 3% or 2.7% tuition increase.

This is about eight years ago.

And

I just, they said, well, why won't you vote for this?

I was already the most, the least popular trustee because I asked too many questions.

And

I said, because it's immoral and unsustainable.

And

I'm just not going to vote for the, you know, for the budget.

Yeah.

And so that's the way I went out as a college trustee.

Well done, Los Angeles.

And so

I was primed for your slides.

Excellent.

Let me give some background.

Walt and I started All Things D and Recode together.

We worked together for 17 years.

Walt is my mentor.

He's also the former personal technology economist for the Wall Street Journal.

He's now on the board of the News Literacy Project.

And as he said, he was formerly on the board of trustees for Brandis.

Talk about the News Literacy Project because it's relevant for the coming elections and more.

And

so talk a little bit about it and why you focused on this after after you retired.

Well, it's a big reason I did retire, actually, was to put my time and effort into it.

The News Literacy Project is an organization.

It's 12 years old.

It did not just start after the 2016 election.

And it has been focused and is focused primarily on K-12, actually middle and high schools.

students and it has a digital curriculum which can be used in any class by any teacher, although it's primarily social studies in English.

And we teach,

it's kind of the demand side of

disinformation and misinformation.

We teach

students who still have malleable minds

how to do critical thinking about stuff they see online and how to stop and think before they share something that may agree with what they believe but be false,

may

come from their best friend who they trust but may be false.

And we have lessons that

teachers you can use in the classroom that teach them how to distinguish what's a hoax and what's conspiracy theory versus what are facts.

We also teach what journalism is, what journalists do.

We have the students,

there are units where they have to be a reporter.

We give them a situation.

It's not a national political situation, but we give them a news situation and they have to be a reporter and they learn kind of what it is like to try to be a reporter

and what goes into that.

how people lie or how people unwittingly don't have the facts.

And we also teach them about the First Amendment.

Right, which is critical.

So that brings us to Facebook, I guess.

And you were one of the first people to really start focusing in, as I recall, when you called, when I was starting to cover Facebook, you turned to me and you hadn't done a whole lot on it.

You said, Mark Zuckerberg is an information thief.

And that was the nicest thing you said.

And it was the beginning.

And you had spent your whole nicest thing.

And you spent your career, you know, talking to the big wigs of tech and watching the growth of it.

And you're considered probably the most well-known tech journalist who really did pioneer the sector.

When you look across this and you're working on the news literacy project and you're thinking about education and

young people's minds,

and the impact of COVID, it's like all on top of each other.

And you have the president tweeting.

How do you look at the landscape?

If you were sort of commentating right now, if you were writing, what would you focus on?

What do you think is important to focus on in tech and media?

I think we are desperately in in need of,

and I know how ridiculous this sounds given the situation right now, but we are desperately in need of federal laws that set some guardrails and some principles and regulatory regimes for the web,

for social media in particular.

And I think we actually also need a new agency.

It could be a court.

It doesn't have to be a regulatory agency.

I actually wrote a column before I retired three years ago calling for a specialized court that could build up a body of precedence, but not micromanage

the web.

But there's a number of ways to do it

where we

force these guys

to

enforce

their own terms of service or what is in the statute.

And look,

Mark Zuckerberg can get rid of a lot of this bad stuff proactively, much more quickly than he's doing and much more broadly than he's doing.

And he just doesn't care.

I don't think he has

he, I don't think, I think Facebook is irredeemable without a government intervention.

And, you know, this

bullshit that he is able to do what he wants because of the First Amendment is bullshit because the First Amendment does not require him to

carry any content.

It's also, I think, it's getting very tricky to call Facebook or Twitter just a neutral platform.

I think, in particular, Facebook.

They are essentially a publisher.

I would argue that having an algorithm organize what you can see in your feed.

You know, you may not see what all of your friends have posted because the algorithm organizes that.

I think that's really not that much different than the editor of the Washington Post and his sub-editors sitting down and making a decision.

Scott, he's speaking your language.

Yeah, I mean, Walt,

I am Walt, minus the credibility and history and domain expertise.

But anyways,

we're brothers.

We are brothers from another mother here,

including the refusal to endorse the budget.

I was on the board of the hospital, although anyway, I won't even go into it.

But if I had called you at the outset and

when I just started working with Kara and said, look, give me an

unfiltered advice on working with Kara Swisher, what would you have told me?

Oh, my God.

All right, fine.

I'll allow it.

Oh, geez.

Remember, I did 17 years, and I know you guys are close and you do a great job, but I did 17 years, and I talk quite long.

So

I did 17 years.

Kara Swisher is a genius.

She's the best natural

journalist I know.

And we

were different people, but we bonded quickly.

We're still bonded.

And I just would have told you that she has fantastic instincts and it's good to trust them, but it's also good to push back sometimes because sometimes she wants to change things for the sake of changing things, for instance, or whatever.

And you have to be in there with her, and she will listen to you.

But she has phenomenal instincts, and I adore her.

I actually walked her down the aisle at

one of her many weddings.

There's one coming up.

There's a new one coming up that you're going to better get ready ready for.

Anyway, so let's ask the questions from the audience here.

We've got a few minutes, then we're going to get to some other questions.

What are the challenges young people face in understanding and trusting information on the web?

Well, I think there's a natural instinct to believe what you read,

whether it's, you know, in the old days in print or now

on the web.

And I think the other big challenge is there's a natural instinct to believe

what people you trust and like have liked.

There's always peer pressure for young people.

And there's also just, you know, Kara's my friend.

Kara shared this with me.

Should I go on and reshare it to a bunch of other people?

And it's kind of like the pandemic.

I mean, you know, it goes on and on until it goes viral, but it wasn't true.

It was a stock photo from three years ago and some completely different situation, but it appears to show that, you know, Kenosha is

cinders and

there are no buildings left there.

And so I think those are the challenges, and that's what we are trying to do.

All right.

I'm going to stop you because I have another question.

What's the biggest change you've seen covering tech from 10 to 20 years ago to today?

Well, first of all, there's way more

tech companies than there were 10 to 20 years ago.

Secondly,

we have a definite five-company oligarchy, which is it annoys me when people use the word tech because I think even these five companies in the oligarchy are different one from the other, and they all have different flaws and strengths.

But the oligarchy snaps up small companies and doesn't let them have a chance to grow to become big.

I mean, you know, Apple was little, Google was little.

I mean, Kara, I remember you and I going to a cheap Chinese lunch with Larry and Sergei before they could afford a jet.

They were very little at one point.

And

so,

you know, I think today we have fewer companies that either want to or get the opportunity to grow into something competitive to the big guys.

And that's a different world.

Okay.

Can I just say something?

I mean, just as an example,

I did the first review ever of Zoom when it had nothing.

Right.

And that was in 2012.

And I wonder today if Zoom wouldn't have just sold to one of the big guys if it started today.

That's a really good question.

That's an excellent question.

So we're going to, Walt, you're going to stay with us.

It's time for listener mail.

First, we have a video question from Roman Rubenstein.

Scott, you separated the value of colleges into three broad categories of credentials, experience, and education.

The first two, credentials and experience, can be measured in real time or immediately upon graduation.

But measuring measuring the value of education takes decades.

You've used 30-year NPV to measure the monetary benefits.

This could also be extended to societal benefits and personal self-actualization.

All of this makes it really hard to measure impact of new innovations in education ex-ante.

Instead, professors, students, and parents fall back on centuries of proven data and approaches.

So the question is, how can innovators in the space break out of this conundrum?

Okay, quick answer from both of you.

Scott?

Walt, you go first.

Give him the hard answer.

I think it's

thanks, Scott.

You're learning.

I honestly think

you don't know the value of your education until you're maybe 30.

I don't know what the metrics are that would allow you to justify that.

Do you justify it by income?

I don't think so.

I mean, it's part of it, but it's not most of it.

Do you justify it by what job title you have?

I mean, I just think you have to look at what kind of person has been turned out and how the part of that person that is represented by education

factors into their life and work.

All right, Scott.

Yeah,

one of my favorite books, The Little Prince, says the essential is invisible to the eye.

The curiosity.

The empathy, falling in love for the first time, getting your heart broken, having your heart grow back stronger, realizing you'll be okay, the resilience, testing your limits.

You know, all of these things.

What is essential is invisible to the eye.

There's an impossible to measure, joyous exploration in a safe place that is college.

And

I don't want to pretend that we're going to replace that virtually.

The question is,

can we expand

access to that incredibly joyous experience, even if it's less leafy or less Rolexified to more and more kids.

How do we give more?

You know, I just want to go back to the future.

I want to go back to the shitty buildings of UCLA where I could afford to go for 400 bucks.

But he's right.

That stuff is really difficult to measure, and I don't want to underestimate how important it is.

All right.

Next video question was sent in by, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, Louis Swisher in New York.

Uh-oh.

Hello, Professor Galloway.

I'm here in my dorm at NYU.

I just completed my quarantine.

I'm very excited to be over with it.

I have been wondering, it's been hard for me to focus on my schoolwork, mostly because my mind's just in an absent space during this quarantine.

But going forward with online education and distance learning and all these measures that are just so new to us, what advice can you give someone like me who just has a bit of an attention problem

and like

who has trouble being engaged in stuff like this?

I just, I really want to get the most out of my education.

Sometimes I find it hard too.

So I'm just wondering any advice you have going forward.

Thank you.

Hope all is well.

Fantastic hair from Swisher.

Go ahead.

Go ahead, Scott.

Literally,

all I could think about, I could barely listen to what he was saying.

All I could think about is like, Jesus Christ, look at that hair.

Look at that hair.

He's a cross between.

He's a cross between Cher and AC Grain from Oregon, who went on to be an amazing basketball player.

God, if I had that hair, I'd literally have it out to here.

I would look like he'll lend you some.

He's getting it cut this week.

Go ahead.

I don't know.

How does he focus?

Well, boss, it sucks to be a grown-up.

You're at NYU.

You're going to have to learn how hard it is to focus.

Other than that, get some ADHD drugs and call me back.

Learning how to focus and do shit you don't want to do, that's called being an adult.

Suck it up.

We're talking about online, online, online.

It's a very different experience.

A lot of kids are, you know, having trouble.

You haven't been in my class.

It's not easy to focus in my class.

I'm sorry.

Go ahead, Walt.

Let me just say, first of all, on the crappy buildings,

my first building, my my first dorm was just a cinder block.

It was like a prison cell, but I loved it because

I wasn't living with my parents.

Secondly, Louie, who I will tell you I first saw the day she brought him home from the hospital, Louie looks like all the other students when I went to college in the 60s.

Yeah.

That's when I went to college for the Scottish in the 60s, not the 80s.

High-dye is a thing.

High-dye and long.

Sorry.

Left care, I just gotta say, that hair, that guy is not distancing.

That guy is not.

That is groovy hair.

That guy is not distancing.

Oh, no way.

Stop.

No way.

I know you're jealous of the hair.

Give him, give students.

He's a great kid.

He's a good guy.

He's a great guy.

He seems like a great kid.

What do you do if we're moving to a virtual education?

We're not moving there.

It'll be hybrid.

All right.

Okay.

So it doesn't matter because Austin Mueller was saying you can't learn to read in a virtual environment.

I'm trying to get you you to get it.

That's K to 12.

That's a much more serious problem.

Yeah.

College students should be able to handle it unless it goes on forever.

Mark my words.

Within six months, I will bump into a place that neither of us should be at.

I will bump into Louis at some ridiculous underground bar where neither of us should be

within six months.

He'll be fine.

All right.

You two are useless having these.

Okay, so don't go to class.

It doesn't matter.

Suck it up, Louie.

That is sucking up all you college students.

Just a question.

Well, just a comment.

What Walt said hit it right on the head.

When I went to UCLA, the buildings were falling apart.

When I went to Berkeley, the Has School of Business was a terrible building.

And you know what?

These beautiful buildings aren't there for the students.

They're there for alumni and for donors and for recruiters.

We went there to learn.

We went there to socialize.

We went there to spill into adulthood.

And it didn't, we didn't need

refracted wood.

And the food sucked.

And that was okay.

I lived on chop ramen.

it all sucked fine because i i had good hair like louie and daddy was getting it done on on top ramen yeah right walt had mutton chops i just didn't want it anyway okay i i i had i had hair and i had long here yeah okay this meeting of my exit my ex and my current whatever is is ending now okay walt this is not this was a mistake obviously

all right i appreciate it waltz thank you so much for all the work you're doing.

Thanks, Walt.

We appreciate it.

You're welcome, Kara.

All right.

Have a great day.

I'll talk

soon.

We'll talk soon.

We'll have a lovely socially distanced dinner very soon.

I'm sure we will.

Okay.

All right.

Bye, sir.

Oh, my God, Scott.

That was really a mistake on my part.

Okay, one more thing to do before we wrap up today's show, and that's for Scott.

Sure, that's why you're here with me.

I am to you what you were to him.

My sense is that you draft off of his brand, and I'm drafting off of yours.

That's right.

And you're moving along.

Okay, so anyway, special guests to make some predictions.

Okay, predictions.

It's our final episode and it's our final thing here.

I know we've kept people here a long time, but too bad.

It's good stuff.

Okay,

before we get to your predictions, Professor Galley, we have another special guest who sent in a video with their prediction.

Let's play it.

There's been a lot of discussion about the implications of remote education for the underserved communities in dense urban areas that can't afford laptops and Zoom and to be able to, internet connections, to be able to do this sort of thing from home.

I think the bigger intermediate and long-term implication for K through 12 education in the United States is that as the workforce in this country realizes that it can be productive from anywhere and there's a move out of dense urban locations to more remote locations in the country, such as where I am right now,

the tax base base in

states like California and New York, whose education systems rely so heavily on public funding, are really going to come under even more pressure than they've been under.

They're already under intense pressure because of the funding, the pensions, and so forth.

But that's going to be a real problem, I think, in the intermediate term that we're going to have to solve at the national level.

Man, that was a serious one.

I'm expecting a joke from Dick Costelow.

He's the former CEO of Twitter and my second favorite bald white man in tech.

Scott, that's an interesting prediction that he made there.

That's a very serious one.

And of course, we've talked about it.

We've got a crossroads here.

People are constantly asking what happens to New York.

And

you can see that if wealthy people continue to leave, become tax pets in Florida or Texas, and as a result, social services get cut.

There's already been a noticeable uptick in homelessness.

Crime hasn't risen,

but homicides have increased dramatically in New York.

You can see it basically a downward spiral where we go back to New York in the 70s.

At the same time, at the same time, if New York becomes more affordable, if some of those midtown offices are converted to condos and kids can start moving to New York again without their parents putting them through New York, and New York gets younger and it becomes a place where you only have to make a good living versus an outrageous living, you could see it being another golden age.

And typically, cities do really well post-pandemic.

So it's a really interesting, we're at a really interesting crossroads here.

I think New York, and I'm just talking about New York, becomes, you know, it's such a singular city, and I'm biased.

But the bottom line is the migration of the U.S.

can be described very simply.

And Dick spoke to this, and it was a very thoughtful question.

Basically, low taxes and sunshine are getting people, and high taxes and cold are losing people.

And it feels like we're going to need some sort of federal legislation because some of these states are just going to get, they're on a downward spiral.

When one man, David Tepper, leaves, moves from Short Hills, New Jersey to Miami, and

the treasurer of New Jersey has to call an emergency meeting because they have a $110 million hole in their budget, which means closing schools and food banks.

It's a real issue.

The bottom line is

I don't have an answer.

It's a thoughtful question.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the last 12 months.

All right.

So your prediction.

We're going to end on your prediction, Scott Galloway.

Okay, so

I was thinking, I'm just fascinated.

By the way, TikTok was supposed to announce who they were going to be acquired by yesterday.

Do you see how that came and went, Kara?

It didn't happen?

Yeah, I did.

You are correct.

We discussed that.

If you think about what's happening, essentially, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are sequestering the entire consumer world into one of three buckets.

And that is, every retailer, every services company is going to be denied oxygen from these three companies that are developing such strong vertical integration that they capture the consumer.

And

if you want them to download your app, or you want them to buy your product, or you want them to see your ad, you have to go through these arbiters of all commerce media.

And the company that it probably realizes this and has the currency to go do something about it is number two, is Twitter.

But number one, and it's the least talked about company that'll probably make the most dramatic acquisition or play because I think these guys not only have the currency, but they have the vision, is Shopify.

And I think it's $120 million markup.

I think Shopify is either going to get into the content business.

I'll stop there.

I think they're going to get into the media business because they see over time, Amazon will continue to sequester consumers.

And unless they can offer their customers, which are mom and pop retailers who don't want to enter the ecosystem, the strangle, you know, the strangulation relationship, the partnership where they're the virus and you're the host, a relationship that any retailer enters into with Amazon, they're going to have to figure out a way, a funnel to move consumers to their small and medium-sized retailers.

So I think Shopify has the currency and the will and the vision to go make a big acquisition in media or something around customer acquisition.

So anyway, Shopify, a dramatic acquisition no one is expecting by the end of the year.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

Did you have any choice for the TikTok purchase or you think it's going to be the slow roll of China as you discussed?

I love what you said and I hadn't thought about it.

They announced something and it never closes.

Yeah.

Never closes.

Non-deal.

Okay.

That's what's going to happen.

Anyway, Scott, as usual, this is all the time we have for today's pivot school.

This was my favorite.

This was my favorite.

Absolutely.

Me too.

They're all good.

All our children they are lovely.

Listen, we're gonna come back and do more pivot schools live as soon as we get this vaccine.

I think we're gonna do a lot of hair.

My God, Louise,

he's gonna give you some.

I'm gonna have him put some in a bag and send it to you, deliver it to your lovely home.

And you can put, you can paste it on.

It's beautiful hair at the same time, it's gorgeous.

Definitely start a call.

That's hair lives.

Anyway,

that's it.

You can't have my son's hair.

That's that.

That's where we are in our relationship.

Anyway, this is listen.

Listen, Rapunzel.

That's the end of this.

I want to thank our amazing editorial and events team for putting the series together.

Shannon Thompson, Erica Anderson, Michelle Berg, Eric Johnson, Devin Briskey, Adam Tao, Drew Burroughs, Mia Silvario, Rebecca Castro, and so many more.

We couldn't do this great work without you.

Scott, any final words of wisdom before we turn off the lights?

Greatness is in the agency of others.

I didn't think this was going to work.

And there are so many people behind the scenes making us look better than we deserve.

This was an online conference.

There's a ton of innovation from crisis to opportunity conferences, online learning, the opportunity to lower costs in education.

All we need is a lot more empathy, a lot more concern for the bottom 50% of our population that find themselves in the wealthiest country vulnerable.

But I think the people behind the scenes here, I did not think this was going to work.

It's worked.

did something different.

We donated a decent amount of cash.

Granted, it wasn't $300 million, but at least what we're doing is not a fucking lie.

We're actually trying to help people.

So, look, thanks to everyone behind the scenes.

Thank you, Kara, for having the vision to do this.

I didn't want to do this.

So, and thanks, everyone, for showing up and listening.

Thanks so much to everyone who joined us live for Pivot Schooled.

Remember that if you paid for a ticket to the live show, you can watch the video replays of all five episodes at pivotschooled.com.

You can also buy Pivot Schooled swag at pivotschooled.com/slash shop.