Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway The Frothy Real Estate Market — with the cofounders of Esusu About this episode Samir 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.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Scott Galloway? Episode 162. The First Name's 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.
1:39 Speaker 03 Son, your ego is writing checks your body can't cash.
1:42 Scott Galloway? Go, go, go!
1:54 Scott Galloway? 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. It just is, 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?
2:37 Scott Galloway? 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'd 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 HeyJane, a digital abortion clinic. Kiki, welcome to the Prof G Pod.
3:05 Speaker 04 Thank you, very happy to be here.
3:07 Scott Galloway? So let's best write in. Can you give us your backstory and how you got to co-founding HeyJane?
3:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. Prior to founding HeyJane, 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 in particularly within women's health. The idea for HeyJane 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
3:57 Speaker 04 for safe, discreet, affordable abortion care?
4:01 Scott Galloway? And what's HeyJane's business model or value proposition? What states do you operate in? Who's your clientele?
4:08 Speaker 04 So HeyJane is a fully digital clinic for medication abortion care. Patients can come onto our site, learn more about what the abortion pill is, how it works with HeyJane, 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 the 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.
4:51 Scott Galloway? 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? You know, 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?
5:20 Speaker 04 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 US. It is safer and used, you know, longer term in other countries. But that does cover about 90% of abortions in the US today. So the vast majority would be eligible for this treatment.
6:03 Scott Galloway? 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?
6:18 Speaker 04 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. So while conservative states are becoming 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, you know, friendly to access. So prior to COVID, it was not necessarily obvious that these pills were legal to mail. 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.
6:59 Speaker 04 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.
7:16 Scott Galloway? 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 have, who terminated pregnancy already have children, and the majority of people who terminated pregnancies cite an unreliable partner as the reason for them deciding not to have, to carry the child to term. Are those accurate statements?
7:41 Speaker 04 Yep, that's all exactly right. And there's been some really interesting research coming out, one in particular called the Turn Away 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, where only a quarter is likely to graduate from high school, and only half is likely to graduate from college. So the ramifications from this are incredibly broad across society.
8:28 Scott Galloway? So HeyJane 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?
8:54 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. So we've sort of seen two really interesting learnings here in our little over year of operating. So one is that, like I mentioned, HeyJane offers a full suite of support. We have an emotional support and community support wraparound to this core, critical, stigmatized, you know, medical product. As a result of that, we've been seeing NPS from our patients of 92, that promoter score, you know, an indication of customer satisfaction. The healthcare average is nine, so we are about 10x that. And, you know, 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.
9:36 Speaker 04 We just launched birth control and have plans to expand into other primary care needs.
9:40 Scott Galloway? 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?
10:10 Speaker 04 That's right.
10:11 Scott Galloway? 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, you know, low-cost way of addressing the issue. Anyways, Kiki, we appreciate your time and your good work in helping us to break down
10:48 Scott Galloway? 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.
10:59 Speaker 04 Thank you, Scott. I really appreciate it.
11:03 Scott Galloway? Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with Samir Goyle and Abe Wemimo.
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13:35 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Samir Goyal and Abe Wemimo, the co-founders and co-CEOs of Isusu, 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.
13:59 Speaker 05 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. When we think from a transaction standpoint or 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 goes 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
14:43 Speaker 05 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 an 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.
15:17 Scott Galloway? 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 gotta be more than some inflation. It's gotta be a supply chain problem, I would think. What is, why is there not more housing stock coming online?
15:41 Speaker 06 Yes, Scott, that's a great question. One of the other things in addition to inflation, to your point, is just the rise in 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, LITC or affordable housing credits for development. And that's what's contributing to a big kind of missing middle of housing shortage.
16:24 Speaker 06 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.
16:39 Speaker 05 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, you know, compounded issue has to do with what Samir talked about from a construction standpoint.
17:20 Speaker 05 But we also have to deal with this inflationary environment, which is not making it easy for us to catch up from an, 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 happened sequel to 2008 financial crisis.
17:40 Scott Galloway? So tell us about how Aseuze tackles these challenges.
17:43 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. So taking a step back, you know, Abby and I started Aseuze 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 Aseuze. 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 Abby's story, which we'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
18:27 Speaker 06 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
19:07 Speaker 06 from our user base of renters and landlords. So I'll let Abby share a little about himself and kind of dig in as to how this intersects with the problems that you outlined.
19:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, thanks a lot, Samir. I'm 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 eighty degree weather in Lagos to negative twenty-two degrees in Minnesota. You know, during that transition, something important happened. Um, 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 four hundred percent interest rate from a prepaid loan lender.
20:01 Speaker 05 I think Samir gave you a good overview, but ultimately what we're trying to do at Isuzu is how do we leverage the data we have? Um, to bridge the racial wealth gap that we have in this country.
20:12 Scott Galloway? And what's the biggest, um, what kind of friction for the business? Is it capital, customers, awareness, uh, landlords that market your service? What's, what's the biggest obstacle to, to growing Isuzu?
20:27 Speaker 06 The biggest challenge that we're facing is, is frankly, our, uh, growth is outpacing our delivery and execution. And so we're actually in a great position where when we first launched Isuzu, we invested a lot of time building the plumbing, so to speak. Making sure we have the integrations in the platform to do what it is that we, 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 Isuzu.
21:13 Speaker 06 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 at a hundred, uh, of a hundred and thirty million dollars at a billion dollar valuation. At kind of the peak of the market. Um, and so those areas are fine. I think what we're dealing with is the problems of scale where we've grown from twenty people last year to about a hundred and fifty. Right. And that, 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.
21:46 Scott Galloway? And so what is the business model? Do these organizations pay you to create the infrastructure such that you can develop a different form of credit scoring?
21:55 Speaker 05 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 micro loans for their residents, and then giving them a platform they can use to substantiate their ESG initiatives.
22:20 Scott Galloway? 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%, despite all the hair on fire in the media that frontline workers are getting 10 and 12% raises, their purchasing power in housing, as far as I can tell, is going down. Aren't we just going to see homeless encampments across America?
22:46 Speaker 06 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 ASUS, 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.
23:29 Speaker 06 But 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 all hands on deck to really make sure we don't have this crisis.
23:45 Scott Galloway? And give us the backstory. I heard a little bit about how you, where you guys were born and raised. Talk a little bit about your professional backgrounds that led you to Asuzu.
23:54 Speaker 05 Absolutely, Scott. So my professional background, when I came to the United States, started my journey as an entrepreneur building, you know, affordable water infrastructure and developing countries. Came to New York University for my masters and that's where I met Samir. We actually met at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference. And then I went to Goldman Sachs and P W C really focused on mergers and acquisition. So they buy side, sell side deals for over $50 billion in deal value. And Samir and I, you know, met up one day at Max Brenner's in Union Square. And said, we were sick and tired of, you know, the corporate America. We could stay there.
24:35 Speaker 05 We're successful getting promoted, but we wanted to do something bigger than ourselves that could have impact from the communities that we come from. So we decided to quit and start Asuzu in 2018 full time. And the rest is true, seen a tremendous era of growth. But you know, that's, that's a little bit of our professional experience. I'll pass it to Samir to share a little bit more about it also.
24:59 Speaker 06 Thanks a lot, Abby. Scott, for my professional background, I started out working in the public sector over at the U N. 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 Abby 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 Asuzu, put all our, you know, paychecks into getting it off the ground. And when we saw some traction, quit at the start of 2018 to focus on this full time.
25:36 Scott Galloway? Now, where do you think this goes? So it's not the rental market, but I'm sort of involved in the residential market.
25:45 Scott Galloway? 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, what you guys project, and I realize it's regional. But, you know, the houses have doubled and tripled in Florida. And, and I see homeownership's gone from kind of sixty-four to sixty-six or sixty-seven percent. And usually when you get up around sixty-seven or sixty-eight, that means a bubble is about to burst. Do you guys see a collapse in the housing market?
26:18 Speaker 05 That's a thoughtful question. And, you know, you're the, you're the king of predicting collapses and, you know, a lot of things.
26:28 Scott Galloway? I get it wrong a lot, though. If king makes, 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 say, let's pick markets, because I know it's very regional, but New York, Florida, California, where, you know, where do you see these markets? Because I, 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 didn't, I thought it was overpriced. I didn't want to buy it five years ago. It's probably doubled or tripled in value. And I'm like, who are these people paying for this right now? So let's start there. Florida, Southern Florida massively like 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
27:13 Scott Galloway? of boom and bust around housing?
27:16 Speaker 05 I think we're, we're going to see a correction. It's not going to be as bad as two thousand and eight's financial crisis. I think in two thousand and eight, 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, you know, your home. But predictions on a go-forward basis, Scott, at the end of the day, we are four 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.
28:00 Speaker 05 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 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 two thousand and eight financial crisis because we talked to the underwriters, also the lenders. We are not seeing a lot of risky behavior like we saw in two thousand and eight and that gives us hope.
28:36 Speaker 06 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 oh eight, 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 that macro is changing, especially because, you know, 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.
29:20 Speaker 06 And so that'll slowly reduce the premiums we're seeing in addition to everything that Abby just outlined.
29:27 Scott Galloway? What do you think the government's role in this? Should 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 what would you like to see if you were advising the Biden administration? What would you like to see happen?
29:47 Speaker 05 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 four million, you know, housing stock right now. Shortage, we need to try as much as possible to give people in the interim interim solution, housing choice vouchers so they can go to different development. Not constrained by their income. Scott, if I want to go, you know, get an affordable unit right now, I need to be earning it below a certain amount of money. And if I go above that um monthly um sort of income, I get kicked out of my affordable unit. We need
30:32 Speaker 05 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 um, you know, the government sponsored entities, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loosening guidance um so they can essentially compete with the banks that have easier balance sheets capital um in the market. In a in a high interest rates 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
31:14 Speaker 05 more um investments in affordable housing. Number three is, we need to start having more pathways to make sure we're not solving homelessness backwards, Scott.
31:25 Scott Galloway? Guys, I appreciate so much the work you're doing. Samir Goyle and Abe Wemimo are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Asezu, a fintech platform that captures rental payment data and reports it to credit bureaus to help renters build their credit scores. Prior to Asezu, 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 Transfer Nation, a nationally recognized nonprofit that uses technology to ensure that excess food goes toward underserved communities across New York City. They joined us from their office in New York. Are you guys in New York?
32:02 Speaker 05 Yes.
32:03 Scott Galloway? Yes, nice, in the city. Well, gentlemen, again, thanks for your good work. I appreciate your time.
32:08 Speaker 05 Thank you so much, Scott. Deeply appreciated. Thanks for having us on.
32:13 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
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33:32 Speaker 02 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
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34:00 Scott Galloway? 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.
34:41 Scott Galloway? 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, this is not only not protecting and advocating for our most vulnerable,
35:25 Scott Galloway? 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 going 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 and 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.
36:09 Scott Galloway? It's a, 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 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?
36:53 Scott Galloway? 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, you know, 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?
37:38 Scott Galloway? 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.
38:02 Scott Galloway? Our producers are Caroline Shager 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 Monday and Thursday.
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Previous Office Hours: The Hectic Housing Market, Funding Scholarships, and Building Your Personal Brand Next Office Hours: Should I Work for Meta? + Why Unions are Failing, and Engaging an Audience Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
