663 - Scott Galloway on Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity

We have not yet experienced a winter with COVID-19. And loosely speaking, if you look at outbreaks, if you look at hot zones, one of the key drivers and the key signals is when people have to spend time indoors ... When the Northeast, when the Midwest, when the Rust Belt, when it starts to get cold up there, this could get really fucking ugly. I mean really world-class ugly.

We are losing more people per day right now [as of late November 2020 due to COVID-19] than we have lost in any crisis. We are losing more people per day right now than we lost in World War II, the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam conflict. We have never had this velocity of death in any crisis in America.

San Francisco, right now, is a hellscape ... It is an ad for what happens when [the] far left takes over a municipality ... San Francisco is just a lesson in how not to run a city right now.

We ignore the massive sacrifices that people have made such that we can say bullshit things like 'I'm not wearing my mask to Walmart because that's tyranny.' Jesus Christ, you want fucking tyranny? Go 70 years back and find yourself a 17-year-old boy in Germany, and then you're gonna find out what tyranny is.

Young, ambitious, creative people who want to make magic with their lives and their work go to a city ... Whether it was Louis Vuitton hiking into Paris barefoot; whether it was explorers going into Madrid or to Lisbon to raise money so they could get a ship, and take off, and try to conquer new worlds; the most talented people in the world are drawn to cities. And the best city in the world... is singular, and it's the city we're from: It's New York.

If you're blessed with good relationships, if you're blessed with some level of economic security, if you're at a point in the trajectory [of] your career where you're on the back nine as opposed to the front nine, you're living your best life.

If I look at the nine businesses I've started and I try to find the signals to distinguish the winners from the losers, the only thing I can discern is when I started companies in recession, they succeeded, and when I started companies in boom times, they failed.

If I were just an economic animal, I'd want to be in remote healthcare or telemedicine. I think that is going to admit the first trillionaire. I think the startups there are going to be huge.

We have been tracking savings rates, the percentage of income Americans save by household for, I think, 40 or 50 years. It hit a new record this last quarter [Q3 2020]. Americans have never saved as much money. We're in a crisis, and Americans have never saved as much. Our savings rate is at an all-time high.

Our economy was dysfunctional, and it's gone dystopian. When you have an acceleration in wealth of a quarter of a trillion dollars among the wealthiest eight people in America, and then you have a situation where you could have record evictions... One in three people, supposedly, are more than 30 days behind on their rent.

COVID-19 is more of an accelerant than a change agent. And, every year, we were seeing the two or three biggest players in every category garner more and more share. I don't care what industry it is... The biggest players that are best capitalized who can play offense when everyone's playing defense are garnering more and more share.

No company that engaged in share buybacks should get a single dollar of federal help. That's ridiculous in my opinion.