An Inside Look at America’s Pandemic Response — with Andy Slavitt

Andy Slavitt, President Biden’s former White House senior advisor for the Covid team, updates us on COVID-19 and vaccine hesitancy. He also shares how to think about the various leadership responses we saw, and why certain countries handled the pandemic better than others. Follow him on Twitter, @ASlavitt. (18:22) Andy’s book, PREVENTABLE: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U. S. Coronavirus Response, is out now. Scott opens with a discussion on space tourism with Bloomberg aviation and aerospace reporter, Justin Bachman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 78, The Atomic Number of Platinum. The movie Grease was released in 1978. My dating life is like Pulp Fiction. I'm feeling good. I'm riding in my car, about to pick up Uma Thurman. The next moment, I'm getting [BLEEP] in the [BLEEP].

• 1:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:33Scott Galloway?

  Too much? Go, go, go!

• 1:40Scott Galloway?

  What do you think? What do you think?

• 1:45Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 78th episode of the Prop G Pod. We just have some PTSD and a very active dialogue with our producer on whether we're going to keep that opening or not. We'll see if it makes it through editing. Anyway, in today's episode, we speak with a role model of mine, someone who is super smart, super into his son. They do a podcast together and has, based on his competence, been invited in. To serve at the highest levels in the White House, that is Andy Slavitt. We discuss Andy's new book, Preventable, the inside story of how leadership failures, politics and selfishness doomed the US coronavirus response. Andy shares the latest on COVID-19, vaccine hesitancy and the transition of power between the Trump and Biden administrations.

• 2:28Scott Galloway?

  Okay, what's going on? What's going on today? We're looking at space, specifically the amount of capital flowing into tourism and exploration. I think it's more testosterone and human growth hormone and hair plugs flowing into space. I am so bearish on space. I think space is kind of the next wearables, 3D printing, I don't know, virtual reality. I think it's just so overhyped and going to end in tears for the majority of investors because it's being fueled entirely by ego. Live on Mars? Yeah, good luck with that. You basically die a slow, hideous death. And when I say slow, I mean over two or three weeks. To help us understand the state of play, that was a good segue. We're sitting down with Justin Bachman, a reporter at Bloomberg covering aviation

• 3:13Scott Galloway?

  and aerospace. Okay, Justin, bring in Justin. Justin, thank you for joining us.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's great to be here.

• 3:20Scott Galloway?

  Okay, so let's bust right into it. Morgan Stanley estimates that the global space industry could generate revenue of more than 1 trillion or more in 2040. That's up from where it stands now at 350 billion. In addition, over the past decade, there has been around 190 billion of equity investment across more than 1,400 companies in the space economy. Can you give us sort of the state of play here? Give us an overview of the industry and who are kind of the seminal players in it?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a very good question. I think the discussion usually starts with SpaceX, the big kahuna in this field, given their track record of both venture capital funding and their ability to actually produce, not on the timeframes that the CEO says, but they do tend to produce over time and kind of back up what they say they're going to do. You've got the space tourism people like Blue Origin from Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Both say they're going to be flying their founders this summer, actually, into space. And Beyond that, you have a large group of small and medium sized launch firms.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  I earlier today, thinking about this, made a list of just 10 companies off the top of my head that will launch your payload into space for you for various prices at various masses. So, you know, it's a burgeoning field and the the long term view is that there cannot be enough launch companies because so many things want to go into space and so many companies want to operate in space, be it manufacturing or real estate or pharmaceuticals. And I think that's an interesting notion, but it's also one that a lot of people could find reason to contest.

• 5:13Scott Galloway?

  So, talk to us about Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX and give us your sense of all three of them, their strengths and weaknesses and who who you're most or least optimistic about, or I don't want to say who, they're not people, which company is your most bullish or bearish on?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Well, they they all have a story that they've sold the market as, you know, their reason for being and, you know, SpaceX has probably the longest track record with the most colorful CEO and they have actually, you know, launched humans for NASA, NASA astronauts are at the space station because of SpaceX. That's not a small thing. That that is a very large achievement if you consider the history of NASA and all the protocols around safety and regulations and certifications and all that. Not a small hurdle to overcome. They are, you know, slowly moving into kind of the civilian business.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  His long term goal is to be at Mars, have a colony, a self sustaining settlement of some sort on Mars and thousands of these new futuristic starships that he's building in South Texas that can carry 100 people or, you know, 1,000 tons into orbit. That is not a small achievement if it happens and it it appears to be on the road to happening. Then you've got the other billionaires, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. They are planning to fly him and others this summer. Into, you know, their first sort of commercial operations in the sense of fly brands and then start selling tickets.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  And this becomes a, you know, adventure travel type excursion. Um, we will see if that happens there, you know, debate about whether they're ready or not. Uh, and then we've also, you know, seen moves in recent weeks from Blue Origin, which is going to fly Bezos. And July 20th is going to be the, the mother of all media spectacles out in, uh, West Texas. So we, we will see if that happens. I don't know if that's a business or if that's more of a media event at this point. Because we've not heard anything from them about their long-term views. And they don't need to raise capital the way other companies do, because it's, you know, it's funded by the founder who sells Amazon stock each year to keep that, keep that running as they need.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Uh, so it's not a financial situation so much for them is it's just what, what do they want to do? And, and what is Bezos' ultimate end game when it comes to space?

• 7:47Scott Galloway?

  So let me put forward some thesis and you respond. I think Virgin Galactic is a disaster. I don't buy that space tourism has anything but a very thin market. The, I wonder what, what is the total addressable market for people willing to pay a quarter of a million dollars to be dropped from the wing of a plane, rocket into kind of near space for whatever it is, 10 or 12 minutes and then float back. I just don't, it's hard for me to imagine, given the risk of space travel being incredibly expensive and incredibly dangerous. I remember growing up with, with, you know, the, the space shuttle disasters. Did this to me just feels like a terrible business proposition? So Virgin Galactic, a shitty business with a shitty future. Your turn.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it is, it is a publicly traded stock and people have made money if you get in and out of the right, at the right spots. Uh, it goes up and down wildly.

• 8:41Scott Galloway?

  Okay. As an investor, not a trader, what do you think of Virgin Galactic?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Well, I, I, it would make me nervous. How do you know when to get in and out? The thing is all over the place and can you be a long-term investor in a, in a stock like that? Because you don't know what's going to happen next and you really don't know where, you know, where that vehicle stands. Maybe it's safe. Maybe it goes, you know, up a thousand times and they have no incidents, but we don't know. Um, it, it's hard to say long-term. Your issue about the addressable market. I think that is interesting in the sense of.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  You know, it may be true, but it may also be the case where if they can demonstrate that this is no more dangerous than flying in an airplane. And you've got people who, you know, thrill seekers, adventure travelers who want to say, you know, $500,000 is nothing for them. But look at the videos and what they can tell their friends and the cocktail party chatter. Um, you know, I, I went last week, got to New Mexico and flew into space. What did you do? There, there's probably some interest in that. I don't know the size of that market. You know, it's probably smaller than Virgin would have you believe. Uh, but they think that people all over the world with resources would find that an interesting way to spend four days and, and have a story.

• 9:55Scott Galloway?

  Uh, so as bearish as I am on Virgin Galactic, I, I hate to say this because I'm not a big fan of Elon Musk destroying and creating small fortunes, 280 characters at a time, uh, with his tweets around crypto. But it strikes me that SpaceX is literally running circles around everyone else. Whether it's, uh, hitting milestones, getting astronauts to the space station, beating Boeing in, uh, a race to develop a launch vehicle, whatever it is, it strikes me that, you know, just as NASA got the smartest Nat Nazis versus the Russian government at World War II, that SpaceX has figured out a way to get smarter engineers and is delivering, uh, the, that SpaceX has the right stuff. Your thoughts?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  I think that's true. I mean, we, everybody talks about Elon Musk on a near daily, hourly basis. But if you think about that company and it working, think about the president, Gwen Shotwell, who runs, you know, day to day and gets that, that thing moving. Think about the fact that they do get the best people because they get things done. If you want to work on probably the most exciting project of your entire career as an aerospace engineer, you probably want to go to a tiny little town, the tip of Texas on the Mexican border and work on what they're doing because nobody else is, is doing that kind of work right now. And it's exciting and it's, you know, potentially, you know, life altering if you believe that thousands of these will be flying to and from Mars at some point.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  So I do think that they're ahead in the sense that the best people want to work there and they, they set goals and they get there eventually. Not quickly, but you know, if it's a goal, it's probably going to happen.

• 11:36Scott Galloway?

  And then Blue Origin sounds more like a vanity project than a viable enterprise. I wonder if any of this is meant to be a public company, any of these things. But anyways, Blue Origin.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would tend to agree with what we've seen so far. It's just such a closed system in the sense that we don't really know as much about them as the others. We don't know the pace and there have been some books written. You know, Brad Stone at Bloomberg has dug into that. But really, like, what is, what is the ultimate goal? What, what does Jeff Bezos want out of that company? And I feel like we don't know the answer to that. And that's why it's a bit murkier.

• 12:18Scott Galloway?

  So a sector that from just a consumer standpoint, I'm hugely bullish on, and I'd love to get your take is supersonic travel. I've always thought that the worst thing that happened, or one of the worst things that happened to my lifestyle was the disaster around the Concorde. That I spent so much time on planes and international travel that if, say, say the Concorde had gone a different route, that it had been less, less expensive, less, less prone to maintenance delays and a bunch of companies invested in supersonic travel and I could get to London in two and a half hours from Miami and two hours from New York, that just would have been a game changer for me. And it strikes me, there are a ton of people in the 1% who will pay $25,000 to get to London in two and a half hours versus six and a half.

• 13:03Scott Galloway?

  Or that's, that, I'm very bullish on supersonic. What are your thoughts?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Well, I'm bullish on the size of that market. I think you're right about people who would love to get to London in three hours and would pay for it. I think that it's a bigger technical challenge than a lot of people would have us believe. Just because, you know, there's been, you know, that big order, United just placed an order for Boom Supersonic. And they want to fly it basically Newark to London in three hours and three and a half hours. And that's, that is a very compelling product, but that's nine years away. I mean, I don't think we have confidence yet that just because we have all these amazing materials and computer processing advancements and you throw all these smart people together and say, here, this is a thing. Make the Concorde economical and efficient and work.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  You know, that's

• 13:56Scott Galloway?

  What are the technical challenges though?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Well.

• 13:59Scott Galloway?

  What are the, what are the hurdles though? Is it the sonic booms? Is it the way the he, the wing heats? What, what is it?

• 14:03Speaker 03

  It's really the engine and how much, when you want to go fast, you're burning a lot of fuel. And when you're burning a lot of fuel, then the price of everything goes up and it's, it's not ecological. And I don't think you can fly in the late 2020s or 2030s with an airplane that guzzles gas and emits fumes the way the Concorde did. It's just not gonna, it's not gonna be commercially viable because of the look. The public optics are, are not good. Uh, but if all that could be overcome, I mean, you know, and, and boom makes a very strong case that, that there is nothing, you know, magical here in the, the engineering. It just needs to be done. Um, you know, then you've got United by, then you've got Delta that wants that and Virgin and every other airline says, I have to have the same thing.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  And then you've got a nice product for the business traveler who values time over money. You know, we're, we have to have a healthy skepticism that, that all those things can come together because there is no free lunch.

• 15:00Scott Galloway?

  So let's talk about one investment strategy and that is not to invest in the sexy stuff, but to invest in the picks and the shovels. Are there any companies or infrastructure plays that should benefit from this interest in space?

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Anybody who's in the, you know, advanced materials, uh, fluid dynamics, computing, the kind of design work and fabrication work that gets you the type of performance that these companies need. Uh, where you are the, you know, sort of the supplier, infrastructure, but you make a very, very important widget that they need. Now, a lot of it is vertically, vertically integrated in the sense that, you know, SpaceX is building whatever tools they need to build it and whatever parts they need. But that's not going to be the long term. The long term, if, if these things happen, is going to be that you see a supply chain where like a Boeing or an Airbus, they're going to have suppliers that are very, very valuable.

• 16:04Scott Galloway?

  Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with Andy Slavitt.

• 16:09Scott Galloway?

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• 17:12Scott Galloway?

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• 18:32Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Andy Slavitt, the author of Preventable, the inside story of how leadership failures, politics, and selfishness doomed the US coronavirus response. Andy, where does this podcast find you?

• 18:44Speaker 04

  California.

• 18:45Scott Galloway?

  Can you be more specific?

• 18:47Speaker 04

  I'd love to, Scott, but you know, I'm not sure I should. No, I'm in Pasadena. We just moved out here. In fact, we were moving out here when I got called into the White House and my wife finished the move and I just joined her in early June.

• 19:02Scott Galloway?

  So, okay, so let's, let's, my impression, and I don't know, well, I'd like to think, the perception is that there's sort of a government response, pre-Biden and then post-Biden. And it feels as if things have just gotten, I mean, a lot of this is timing, but what is different about the way the Biden administration is approaching the pandemic versus the Trump administration? How would you distinguish the playbook between the two coaches, if you will?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Well, besides the fact that Biden's not a complete madman, an egomaniac.

• 19:38Scott Galloway?

  There's that.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:39Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  But, you know, in more specifics, you know, I think Trump spent a year trying to run away from the pandemic in every way possible. Tried to disown it, tried to quash any sense that it was real, tried to make people believe that it was overblown. If there was any scientific dissent, he threw, he threw cold water on it or intimidated those folks. And so, he didn't think it would stick to him if he did that, and he was obviously wrong. You know, I think Biden was elected in part because he took a different approach and said, you know, I'm accountable, I'm an experienced hand, you know, I'm going to fix this. And indeed, that's the way he governs. And there's actually, in my new

• 20:22Speaker 04

  book, there's a preface where I'm sitting in the Oval with Biden and he says, you know, I don't want anybody to worry about making me look good. I want to just give the public the information it needs. And I will say that like there were no fights with governors, no blaming China, no blaming the manufacturers, no distractions. It was just very single minded and focused on getting the job done. And he brought in very experienced people who were, you know, not interested in playing games. It was a scary moment when he took it seriously. By the way, I'd like to think that it was Trump's response that was unique, not Biden's. I'd like to think that if, you know, Mitt Romney were president, he would have approached

• 21:04Speaker 04

  things very much the same way, or, you know, Barack Obama or George W. Bush. So, you know, I don't, I think what Joe Biden did was the kind of leadership we should expect.

• 21:15Scott Galloway?

  It just feels almost alien to hear about decisions around COVID and other policy and go, oh, that makes sense. I mean, it just feels almost alien just to find yourself nodding when you see a press release coming out of the White House or an announcement. What, give us the state of play where, you know, we grab information crisply and try and process it as quickly as possible. In the general sense, I think, no, I'm not speaking for the public. General sense I have is that we are crushing the curve and that things are getting much better and that there's a lot of, you know, a lot of room for optimism and for the first time, we can actually consider playing offense and that is helping some of our allies and people in developing nations. What, give us your

• 21:58Scott Galloway?

  view of the state of play and add a little bit more texture or color to the fight against COVID-19.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  So, for example, everything you said is correct. I would agree with it wholeheartedly. I think the country has gone through in the last four to five months, maybe the largest transformation in the health and wellbeing of a nation that's probably ever occurred in a shorter period of time. You know, if we put yourself back to our shoes, the shoes we sat in in early January. Not only were thousands of people dying every day, we had no vaccines, nobody trusted the government, none of the vaccines that were getting sent out were getting to where they needed to go. Less than half of them were, only 40% of people said they would take the vaccine even if offered it, but no one could get an appointment. And trusted government was at such a low point. And we sit here today and I would describe COVID-19

• 22:48Speaker 04

  in the bucket of manageable challenge. And Scott, as you know, we have lots of manageable challenges in our life. Life is filled with manageable challenges. And this is now, I think officially, just another one. It's not gone, but it doesn't have to be gone for us to be able to manage it. And that transformation occurred for a lot of reasons. And a lot of people get a lot of credit. But that fact means that if you've been vaccinated, my number one piece of advice is go grab back the parts of your life that you feel like you lost during the pandemic. Don't put anything above that. You have far greater risks in your life than getting COVID-19 if you've been vaccinated. My number one advice, piece of

• 23:31Speaker 04

  advice, if you haven't been vaccinated, is to strongly consider getting vaccinated because there are more aggressive strains of the bug that it's easy, it's twice as easy to get infected in 2020 as in 2021 as it will be in 2020.

• 23:45Scott Galloway?

  Hmm. So basically, the variants aren't more lethal than more contagious. Is that accurate?

• 23:51Speaker 04

  That's right. So I mean, the simplest way to think about it is if you could walk into a room for five minutes and get COVID-19 before, now if you walk into a room for two and a half minutes, you'd get the same exposure.

• 24:03Scott Galloway?

  And how do you think, coming out of this, so I do a lot of, whenever I go on television or I'm asked to speak somewhere, they always want to say, what will be different, what will stay the same post-COVID? And how do you think, and we tend to, people ask me about business, how do you think healthcare is going to change post-COVID in America?

• 24:28Speaker 04

  What's really important in answering that question is answering one fundamental question first, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you this question, but it's, it is, will COVID-19 feel more like the crack epidemic or the opioid epidemic? And here's what I mean by that. The crack epidemic was this epidemic that happened to other people who were bad and ill-intended and corrupt, and they were other.

• 24:56Scott Galloway?

  And deserved it.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  And deserved it. And we had no sympathy, and we put people in jail because it wasn't happening to us. The opioid epidemic is the one we viewed as happening to all of us, and so we treated it with a different type of compassion, not necessarily effectively, I'm not saying that, but we felt it in every community. And so, we started talking about addiction as a problem, we started talking about mental health, we started talking about root causes, we didn't talk about criminalization. And I think the question about COVID-19 will be, will it go down to something that happened to these other people largely, and therefore, wow, we're just so relieved that, you know, we want to get back to, step back to life as quickly as possible and put it all over our head?

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Or will we feel like, wow, that was something that really hit us, and we really ought to take some lessons and transform it?

• 25:49Scott Galloway?

  Hmm. So to your question, though, which was a follow-up to my question, how do you think, if and how do you think 18% of our economy, healthcare, is there a silver lining here? Have we learned anything? Will we be able, will healthcare experience a step change in innovation and accessibility? Or is it going to get worse? Is it going to continue to be more expensive for worse outcomes?

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Well, here's what we know. I don't have to guess. The American Rescue Plan, which had in it expanded subsidies to give more people coverage, which had more protections in it, which had a child tax credit, so that if you had children, you could afford to, this isn't healthcare, but it's very similar, you could afford to take care of your kids while you go to work. That passed, that's great news, but it passed with only Democratic votes, and it passed with no Republican votes. It was supported by the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans in the country. So, it kind of happened almost exactly as we kind of figured it would happen, which is, our response will be just as politicized as the pandemic was.

• 26:54Scott Galloway?

  And you, in your book Preventable, I mean, just the title is somewhat controversial because implicit in the title of your book is the notion that if it had not been stopped, it could have been much less damaging. What were the factors? You know, if you could, if you could say, all right, I have a finite number of, of things I can do. I got a time machine. I can go back 15 months and have a finite number of very concrete actions I could take that would result in deaths of 60,000, not 600,000. What would, what would those things be?

• 27:27Speaker 04

  So let's look at it this way. If the pandemic itself was going to come here, and I'll also posit that managing a pandemic is not easy, that there's no way to get it perfectly right. And I am very generous at forgiving honest mistakes. So if somebody, you know, in the fog of war, thought one thing and they made a decision, but they, but they really were trying and they had empathy, it's a, I, I, I think that's the kind of thing we gotta, we gotta put in the category of preventable. But I'm not so forgiving of our dishonest mistakes. And that's where I'll point to, to three things that the Trump presidency, which I would probably say are the, are the three deadliest sins, where one

• 28:11Speaker 04

  is his, um, his almost unbelievable ability to deny a reality. That usually works for him. He's usually able to shape the reality by saying, no, this isn't happening. No, this isn't true. This is my version of reality. And people follow him. He tried to do that with the pandemic. We know that he knew in January that thousands and even tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people were likely to die. And he went to sleep every night like a baby, slept like a baby, until such day as the NBA blew up and that caused the stock market to decline and that forced Trump to address it. But imagine. If all Trump had to do in January is say, you know what? We have a problem and this is going to potentially be a very serious problem.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  We would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives without question. The second deadly sin in my, my view is how much he quashed any dissenting voice. So at a time when we needed to learn about what was going on, anybody in his administration that had a different narrative was summarily quashed. The, the most glaring example that comes out of the book was Alex Azar was the Health of Human Services Secretary, was about to go on Fox and Friends and he had his talking points and one of the talking points was, things are fine, but could change rapidly. Now, first of all, things weren't fine, but put that aside. The White House saw the script that things could change rapidly, pulled him from Fox and Friends and told the Health, Department of Health and Human Services that for the

• 29:39Speaker 04

  next 45 days, they were not permitted to speak to the media or the public. Okay. So here we are, we have a, we have a global pandemic in this country and our Department of Health and Human Services is not permitted to talk to the public that whole time. And that was consistent throughout. If anybody, whether it was Deborah Birx or Nancy Messine or anybody in the White House said that they were, believed in anything other than Trump's narrative, which is that this is overblown, they were, they were summarily silenced. And I think if he hadn't done that, we would have been in a very different place because otherwise we're left to, to observe this phenomenon that nobody could understand asymptomatic

• 30:22Speaker 04

  spread, exponential growth, all these things are happening and no scientist was, from the government was permitted to talk about it. And then the third thing is I think he just basically overly politicized something that didn't have to be politicized to the point where, you know, a populist and a pandemic are not a good combination. And this is where, as a pandemic requires tough decisions and instead I think he played to his own crowd, things like mask wearing and others, which just changed the debate to the point where it became almost hard to talk about the pandemic.

• 30:52Scott Galloway?

  Talk specifically, you're, you're, we're, we've been talking about Trump's response and Biden's response. Any thoughts on how DeSantis handled Florida? Because a lot of people in Florida feel like we got it right. That relative to the damage and the depression and the financial strain of closing businesses. That that he managed that risk return really well. What are your thoughts?

• 31:16Speaker 04

  So my thoughts are with almost without exception, most governors really were trying to figure it out and get the balance right. And he almost had 50 different like lab experiments, right? Going on. And and and and you point to something, we were all, all of us are too quick to judge.

• 31:34Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  And but I also think we're all too quick to kind of create these false cause and effects scenarios. So there's, there's nothing which says that because of the way DeSantis handled things and things turned out that way. It's, it's not that simple. It's not that clean. Unfortunately, like we'll never know why we had such a massive outbreak in New York, but it very much could have been the wrong person got off the wrong plane in the wrong city and went into the wrong bar at the wrong time. And that necessarily follow, that person could have landed in Miami Beach and been a super spreader. And there's so much randomness, if you looked at this under a lab, that, that I think we have to kind of, again, this is

• 32:17Speaker 04

  my point, but we ought to be generous with honest mistakes. So where I would criticize DeSantis or others are only the occasions when they played politics, not the occasions when they were trying to figure it out and balance a very hard thing, which is, how do I keep my, how do I keep my economy moving, keep businesses moving, keep people safe and healthy? If someone's trying to do that, and they've got a different view, we have to acknowledge that nobody knew the answer. And by the way, if I started a, if I opened a bar in 2010, and it was my life's dream, and I saved for 10 years to open it, and it closed during the pandemic, that's real suffering. I mean, that's, that's real suffering. It's not the same as a loss of life necessarily, but I don't think we have to compare.

• 33:00Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. But if you turn to opioids, it is, I mean, there's deaths of despair on the other side of this, right?

• 33:06Speaker 04

  There's all kinds, exactly. There's all kinds of loss. And I would encourage us to be as generous as possible with one another about the kind of losses people experience, about the kind of stress people were under, about the fact that, you know, people weren't always their best selves during the pandemic. And to be forgiving and to be open-hearted about this, because I think recovering from this pandemic, all the relationships that got broken, right, in the process and all of those strongly held views within families, not just friends, within families, with people who just felt very differently about the pandemic. I hope people find a way to get past all that stuff.

• 33:52Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 33:56Scott Galloway?

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• 35:04Speaker 05

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• 35:49Scott Galloway?

  Let's go back to the federal level. You had some interaction or exposure to the Trump administration. You called and offered your help. Tell us more about that and what happened.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, so early on, when in March, when Trump said he was going to open the country on Easter Sunday, I don't know if you remember this, but it's an event that in the book we refer to as the Easter Sunday massacre because had he done it, it was certain that a lot of churchgoers, older people, et cetera, would have gotten COVID, would have spread this and it would have gotten much, much worse.

• 36:22Scott Galloway?

  So it feels like a plot from a Bond movie that someone would actually, if they thought, what's the easiest way to kill 50,000 Americans in a weekend?

• 36:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:32Scott Galloway?

  I mean, it literally, it feels malicious and clandestine and all those things. Anyway, sorry, go ahead, Andy.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Insane. And so I felt that at the time. So I picked up the phone and called Jared Kushner, who I did not know, but we knew of each other. And, you know, he was gracious enough to take my call. And I said, you know, I'm here to help. I know this is hard. It's a pandemic. The color of our T-shirt shouldn't matter. I'm still going to hold you publicly accountable. I'm still going to hold your father-in-law publicly accountable, but first order of business, we got to stop this Easter Sunday thing from happening. It's a giant mistake. And he said, what can you do to help me? Can you send me some things that will help me? And that began a process with both him and I also talked to Deborah Birx and Tony Fauci and others.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  And all of this is almost completely verbatim outlined in the book. What was going on, you know, behind the scenes? And I try very hard not to draw any of these people as caricatures, but to draw them is in the kind of complex reality of who they are and who they were and how I found them in my interactions. And, you know, ultimately, all of them were shaped by the man they worked for. So at the end of the day, you know, I found Jared would be helpful when it would cost, it wouldn't require his father-in-law to risk taking accountability for anything.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  I found him, as soon as it became, as Jared confided in me, his father-in-law essentially had a thought the right political strategy was going to be to open the country in April and then shift responsibility to all the state governors and say, from here on in, anything bad that happens is their fault. And Jared believed that was a brilliant political strategy. I told him it was a stupid public health strategy and ultimately not even a good political strategy.

• 38:29Scott Galloway?

  And was your sense that the people around Trump were supportive of this strategy or that they were frustrated that they couldn't talk sense into him? It just feels like some, I mean, I look at Dr. Birx and I think that she was this sort of tragic figure. And like so many people is, and I don't know much about her, but my sense is has lived an honorable life and is a competent professional and just did not know how to handle being, talk about being caught between the mother of all rocks and hard places. That's why I think it's just incredible. I think Dr. Fauci and Nikki Haley are probably the only two people that touched the Fukushima meets Chernobyl nuclear power plant of reputation, which is Donald Trump and escaped alive.

• 39:14Scott Galloway?

  Was your sense that you'd call them and say, boss, our hands are tied? Or no, dear leader wants us to do this and we bought into it?

• 39:23Speaker 04

  So people who people who didn't like Deborah Birx hadn't yet met Scott Atlas.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Deborah Birx, you know, in the book, you know, the last scene in the book is Deborah Birx and I, one week before the election, in person, talking face to face. And we talked about her entire journey, which goes throughout this book, which goes a little bit like, it's a little Shakespearean, right? Like, as you say, it's a little bit like this sort of AIDS researcher gets handed the ball to save the country. She thinks she puts together a plan, but she's she's got this great proximity to power. And she's in the Oval every day, and the Oval only wants to hear good news. And as soon as cases start dropping, she drinks a bit of the Kool-Aid and says, this thing is going to end. They like her even more. It's very satisfying. She says, if we roll out this plan and stick to it, things will work.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Trump says, yeah, fine, whatever. She rolls out a plan to open up the country. The very next day, Trump tweets, liberate Michigan, liberate Minnesota, in direct violation of her plan. She's caught completely off guard. She tries to work the ref, as you, as we saw unsuccessfully. She then decides that this is all too much. And like many of the other scientists, she draws her line. She drives too late, in my opinion. And she gets replaced by Scott Atlas and then decides to spend the last six months, literally on the road, driving from state to state, meeting with governors, showing them the data and showing them the dangers of COVID while she's forbidden from talking to the press. A fascinating story.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  But if you've decided to stay working for Donald Trump, you've sort of made your decision. You know, you may tell yourself that you're you're going to be more helpful inside than outside. And maybe that's even true. But your hands are so tied by making the trying to make the president look good, that you have almost nowhere else to go.

• 41:17Scott Galloway?

  And you just stepped down as a senior advisor to Biden on Wednesday. Give us a sense. What did you? What did you do? On a day to day basis, how did they evaluate your success? And what was your mission? What was your charge?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Well, because I got paid nothing, they really weren't allowed to evaluate me, in my opinion.

• 41:38Scott Galloway?

  I find the less you get paid, the harder the work. That's the capital of it.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  You know, I was like, fire me at any moment, please. No, I mean, I came in as part of a small group of people, including, you know, Ron Klain, the chief of staff, Jeff Science, the Fovitz are, Rochelle Walensky, Tony Fauci, myself, a couple of other people. And, you know, it was a, it was the ultimate mission. You know, the ultimate mission was do everything humanly possible to vaccinate the country as quickly as possible. And we had the freedom of a boss who basically said, just get it done. And we had the freedom of working on the most important thing. And those are, those are real advantages. When you're working on a, a challenge, it's the second crisis I've, I've managed of, of significant scale.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  And, you know, I, I took on a number of things, you know, in addition to being a part of the overall team, in particular, being charged with communicating with the public and rebuilding public trust. So I led, you know, three times a week, press conferences with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky from CDC. And really tried to reestablish the, the ability to talk about the truth to the public. Now, my work was really split between, other than that, between doing everything we could to increase supply and everything we could to increase demand for the vaccine. And, and that was a lot of the public communication effort is that wasn't going to happen if we couldn't build our reputation for trust and for getting things done.

• 43:10Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I heard you on CNBC talking about how some dating apps were now creating, had created a new feature that you could, you could ask that if you swipe right, find out if someone was vaccinated or not. What do you think of these? I am, well, I, I know what you think. So what are some of the more, what can we do? I saw in the MTA is now doing vaccinations or was in subways in New York, which I thought was incredible. What do you think is required to ensure, you know, success is, I would say, success is in the last 10%. How are we successful in the last 10% and ensure we don't get lazy or make assumptions that are dangerous and get this across the goal line and ensure that it's now a demand problem, not a supply problem? How do we increase demand for vaccinations?

• 43:55Scott Galloway?

  What needs to happen?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Well, so start with level setting. You know, high 80% of people over 65 have taken the vaccine. If we even drop all the way down to 30. Years old, over 70% of people have taken the vaccine. Even if you drop down to 25 or 26, you've got pretty good numbers. But it's 18 to 25 group. And then you've got, of course, some really strong regional pockets because that's evenly spread. You've got Arkansas at 50% and Vermont at close to 90%.

• 44:28Scott Galloway?

  Isn't it hardcore Republicans that are holding on?

• 44:31Speaker 04

  You know, I, I, I wouldn't describe it that way. I think they probably are Republicans, but I think if you were going to do kind of an, an R squared and you're kind of marketing class, you'd find it related to college, non-college and age. And, and I think it so happens to be that those people happen to also be Republican, but I don't think that's the cause. Um, I think that's a bit of a red herring that people identify, but it, but yes, it's described often as a blue state, red state issue, uh, because there's those consistencies are there. The here, here's the, here's what I, here's what I would tell you about the people who haven't been vaccinated. The vast majority of them have the, have taken their other vaccine shots. So they're not anti-vaccine. So they fall into a couple of different categories of why they haven't gotten the shot.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Uh, one is that it's just not that high a priority for them. If you're 24, 25, now that the incident rate is down as low as it is, it's just not that high a priority. If someone walked into your dorm room or into your bar or wherever you were and said, hey, do you want the vaccine? You'd probably say, sure, I'll take it, but you wouldn't go out of your way to get it. And that's why there are all these contests and dating apps and all those things where, where, where an attempt to try to get the, get those folks to pay attention. Second reason you might not take it is because you've got some questions about it. You're worried that it was rushed. You're worried that, you know, you're, you know, that it makes you infertile if you're a young female. You're, you know, there, there could be plenty of questions.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  And what we can't do is we can't make the mistake of treating those people as if they're weird and vaccine hesitant or anti-vax. We have to treat that process of getting those questions answered very legitimately and with a lot of respect. And say, hey, you know what? Maybe it's a process that takes you six months to decide whether you want to be vaccinated or not. Took me, you know, six minutes, but that's okay. It doesn't mean my process is right and your process is wrong. What we have to do, the fight we have to fight, and I think you'll appreciate this, is it's, it's basically a battle against Facebook. Because if you are that person and you go onto Facebook to decide whether or not to get vaccinated or not, Facebook will serve you up exactly the wrong information because

• 46:42Speaker 04

  they know that you're a doubter. But if you go to someone you trust, like a local physician or a pharmacist, or you ask people you know, like clergy person, other people who've been vaccinated, you're going to get a really good answer about the vaccines because the vaccines are indeed have a great record. So it's a misinformation, disinformation campaign, and it's a little bit of fighting against lethargy, and it's a little bit about getting young people to care.

• 47:07Scott Galloway?

  Do you think that bad actors and foreign governments purposely leverage or weaponize these platforms to try and create more doubt around vaccinations, knowing that it would create havoc and damage to our Commonwealth and to our health?

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Well, we know that that's happened to some degree, but we also know that there are people here domestically who are a small but very vocal anti-vax- anti-vaccination group, including, by the way, you know, Robert Kennedy III, right? I mean, you know, it's not, there's, there's people that are boldly doing it, not, not even anonymously doing it. And he's, and Tucker Carlson, I mean, you watch Tucker Carlson on, on any given day, you know, he's, in the way, by the way, the, the, the way the smart people try to get you not to take a vaccine is not to say, you know, something outrageous, it's to plant these small doubts in your head. Like, why do we all of a sudden have more people that

• 48:02Speaker 04

  are complaining of, you know, frostbite? This is weird. Just when we started vaccinating, those, those small doubts are like, I wonder what it was like when, when there was asbestos and people didn't know and they thought it was safe and everybody was going to these buildings. This feels very similar, you know? And so all this like circumstantial kind of doubts that are planted by people like Tucker Carlson and others. So I don't think it's just the Russians.

• 48:34Scott Galloway?

  And zoom out even further. You've seen, you've been a student of America's response and what's happened, both, you know, arguably didn't get it, didn't get it right for seven innings, better in the eighth, and hopefully the ninth week come out as looking really strong. When you look around the globe, what nations do you think are really, you see, you see this nation, you think, oh, gosh, it's just going to get so ugly there. I mean, it's probably already ugly, and I think I know what you're going to say, but who should we as global citizens be most worried about?

• 49:11Speaker 04

  So I found something really interesting when putting this book together, that there were two factors that caused people to do really well in the COVID response. One of them is experience with a pandemic before or with a global health crisis before. So that that's one of the reasons why the East Asian countries did very well. If you've been through this before, you know, you've got a routine, we were, we were, I think, sort of this precious island nation who felt we were immune from the world's problems and our wealth would rescue us and the CDC should rescue us. And once it, once it broke those barriers and our line of defense was ourselves, which is what it really is in a public health crisis, each other, we cratered because we didn't have experience. The second

• 49:55Speaker 04

  is actually, if you can picture, Scott, like this is an imperfectly graph, but it's the kind of thing you do very well, is on one end of the spectrum, high common good, high egalitarian society. On the other end, high individualistic, big differences in wealth and poverty. So if you put Brazil and the US and Russia on one end of the spectrum, and you put places like Denmark, Japan, societies where people are, where people put the common good ahead of their own individual needs, you know, certainly, Taiwan, Thailand, et cetera. Those two things almost perfectly explain your response. If you've got a, if

• 50:38Speaker 04

  you've got really very little commitment to the common good and very high individual, individualistic, you tended to do really poorly, like four to five times worse on a debt per capita basis in terms of people died. Now, COVID will eventually, you know, could eventually strike everywhere, but the things we, thing we know is if you're willing to essentially say, I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  For everybody, that it's much easier to defeat this pandemic.

• 51:08Scott Galloway?

  So, yeah, I remember, and it affects all of us, right? I remember seeing Japanese people on planes going back and forth with Asia and several would be masked. And my response, my incorrect response was to think, what paranoid weirdos? I judge them, right? And the reality is, no, they were being empathetic and showing, demonstrating citizenship and good manners. Because it wasn't that person was overly concerned with their own well being, but most likely they weren't feeling well and felt an obligation for the broader good to wear a mask and to not affect other people.

• 51:49Scott Galloway?

  And it's just, it's just so, I love what you said earlier, that we all just need to be a little bit more generous with each other. So, in your book Preventable, there's a lot of kind of lessons. I think of it almost as a book on leadership as opposed to just about the pandemic. What do you think business leaders or just leaders of organizations can take away from the pandemic in terms of how they might want to? What types of behaviors they want to be more thoughtful about or decisions or the lens through which they evaluate crises?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  You know, one lesson that's shown through here from a leader, Steve Beshear, who's the governor of Kentucky, sort of talks about in the book, is it's much harder to ask people to do nothing than to do something. And telling people, stay home, don't do anything.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  And, and then having them watch was a far bigger challenge than we, you told people, we need masks. Can you sew some masks? So, you know, you can really enlist the power of the people that are most challenged to be part of the solution. And I think an incredible leadership lesson is here. You know, I got into the White House, January 20th. One of the things they put me in charge of was all the external business relationships with all the CEOs in the country. From the, from my first day, my phone was ringing from the largest companies in the country saying, hey, how can I help? Or I have this asset or this resource, et cetera. And what I realized was that one of the byproducts of Trump saying, hey, this is no big deal.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  This is overblown is he couldn't accept help and he couldn't ask for help and he couldn't engage the country, except if people might have done it very surreptitiously. And so, you know, I made a decision. I said to the team, we're going to say yes to as many people as we can. It's some part because we have to show the public that this isn't a government effort. This is a full country effort and that everybody's engaged. Also, they're gonna, if we say no, they're gonna come back and say, I told them in January that if they did X and Y, they'd solve this problem. So let's find a way to get people engaged at every level.

• 54:02Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, invested in the cure, invested in the battle.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  Exactly. And then, you know, I'd have conversations where, you know, it's just like, hey, you know how you're like, your, your annoying aunt comes over for Thanksgiving dinner and you're like, you have to give her a job or she's gonna be in everybody's way. So you're like, can you make sure that all the dishes are stacked, you know, over on the left side of, you know, could you rearrange the wine in the cellar? It's like, you know, everybody has a job. Everybody feels part of it. Everybody feels invested in it. And then you could be gracious. Then you could go out and just thank everybody constantly for what they're doing. And as you're doing that, more companies will call and ask to do more. And I'd say with the exception of a couple of companies who are real assholes, everybody, I was very impressed with kind of the fact that people could pull together and do stuff.

• 54:47Scott Galloway?

  And so let's come back to Andy Slavitt. So you strike me as exceptionally competent and a very decent man. I think you're a wonderful role model. What are you gonna do next? Like what, how does, you're, I always feel like your mission is to find, is to command the space you occupy. Like, do you want to run for public office? Do you want to run a company? Do you want to be in public service? Do you want to be a teacher? Like, I'm just gonna be so rip shit angry if you don't do something really fucking impactful, Andy. What do you do next?

• 55:22Speaker 04

  It's just so nice of you to say that. Um, you know, I've found. That my calling is to be a helper.

• 55:30Scott Galloway?

  Hmm.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  Wherever I can. So it's that old Fred Rogers thing. I, I, look, I, I'm not gonna lie. I've been incredibly fortunate. I'm in a position where I can help. I don't have to, you know, I don't have to worry about surviving. And, and so because I'm in that position. Then, you know, the, my greatest moments are if someone says, hey, you know, we need help. You know, big thing, small thing. Can you come to the White House? Can you do this? Can you do that? And, you know, and I get a sense of calm and, and therapy and good feelings and everything else for being

• 56:14Speaker 04

  part of something like that. And increasingly, you know, now that I'm not as young as I once was. You know, I, I'm gonna try to do that more in the context of helping people that are younger than myself. Develop in ways where they can, you know, become the person that makes a giant contribution to whatever they're doing. And, you know, I get, I, I get a, get a kick out of that. I happen to be doing a lot of stuff. Most, on a most regular basis. I'm trying to help communities that have access to crappy healthcare. Because they're poor, because they're people of color, because they're rural, whatever. Equal, equal the playing field out and using both innovation as a means and using, using policy as a means.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  But, you know, that's, that's kind of a, that's kind of my core, but I'm a curious person. So I, I say yes to a lot of things. I don't think I'll run for office. There's plenty of people that are wired for that. I don't think I'm wired that way.

• 57:12Scott Galloway?

  And so do you think of yourself as ultimately will end up on the faculty somewhere, running an NGO, doing special projects or healthcare organizations or some mix of all of that?

• 57:23Speaker 04

  Well, today I, I, I chair a nonprofit that I founded and I, and I chair an investment fund that invests in underserved communities and I do a lot of, and I sit on some different policy. Things and, you know, I help the White House informally and I help, you know, other, other people who ask. So I feel like I've got my own platform and I've got the, I've got my podcast, I've got my book. So, you know, I've, I've got, I'm not, I'm not lacking for a title or recognition or anything. I'm looking for places to help. I, you know, it's, you, it's an interesting question about academic, I mean, I probably would like to teach at some point or do something related to that. That might be part of the next chapter.

• 58:04Scott Galloway?

  Andy Slavitt was President Biden's White House Senior Advisor for the COVID response at the beginning of his term, where he oversaw direct communication with the public on the pandemic. Andy has led many of the nation's most important healthcare initiatives, serving as President Obama's head of Medicare and Medicaid and overseeing the turnaround, implementation and defense of the Affordable Care Act. He is also the host of the award winning In the Bubble podcast. His book Preventable, The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response is out now. He joins us from his home in Pasadena. Andy, stay safe and we're looking forward to what's next.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  Thank you, Scott.

• 58:56Scott Galloway?

  Alter of Happiness, Andy Slavitt said something that resonated and that is, we all need to be a little bit more generous with each other. I believe one of the most insidious, dark components of social media and one of the reasons that these individuals have done so much damage is that slowly but surely they have trained us all to be less generous with each other. And that is the reward system and the incentive system on social media is to create a caricature of someone's comments, or maybe they screw up and they say something that could be interpreted as politically incorrect or dumb or whatever. And you have the opportunity to weigh in and impress the algorithms and get a lot of likes by dunking

• 59:36Scott Galloway?

  on someone. And one of the things that I've tried to do a better job holding on to is to the advice of registering someone's gestures with the intention that it was given.

• 59:51Scott Galloway?

  And to keep in mind, okay, what did this person, was this person really trying to be offensive? Or was this person really being, you know, is this an opportunity for you to have a discussion? Or do you see it as an opportunity to try and make them look stupid such that you can dunk on them and get ridiculously empty calories from some fucking algorithm or bots who enjoy seeing the violence and activity like a Tyrannosaurus Rex of shame and shaming people? It has just slowly but surely made us a more coarse society. The other piece of advice, or, and I won't give it as advice, I'll tell you what I'm trying to do, is that I constantly saw everything from a consumer level and as a transaction.

• 1:00:36Scott Galloway?

  And that is if I was, you know, 1K on Delta, unless everything went really smoothly, unless there was no line for me, unless I was upgraded, I was always willing to remind them that I was 1K and, you know, basically be an asshole. And never let anyone get away with being rude to me, right? If there's somebody, a delivery person, or someone I'm interacting with on the phone, or a customer service representative, or whoever it was, wasn't giving me the level of service that I thought, never let anyone get away with anything on the road, right? Someone cuts you off, make sure to honk at them. Well, guess what? Guess what? What does it mean to be, you know, what does it mean to be generous? Do you aspire to be generous? That's the first thing. And what does it mean to be generous?

• 1:01:21Scott Galloway?

  It means recognizing that affronts, or small gestures that aren't as respectful as they could be, it's not about you. Maybe that person is having a bad time. Maybe that person is having a bad day. Maybe that person has a kid who's struggling. And so generosity is not only a function of the people close to you, it's easy to be generous, or easier I should say, to be generous to the people close to you, because you get that back right away. What is true generosity? It's being forgiving, it's leaving some currency of what's right or what's fair on the table with people you're never gonna meet again. You're in the line and someone cuts you, you know, cuts in line at Starbucks, or whatever

• 1:02:04Scott Galloway?

  bullshit little instances, or someone takes your parking spot, or someone, whatever it might be. I'm not suggesting anyone be allowed, you ever let anyone to walk all over you? But are you a generous person? Are you a generous person? Then it's about leaving a little bit on the table. It's about realizing it's not about you and saying, okay, maybe that person is having a bad day. I'm just going to let it go. Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

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• 1:03:22Speaker 06

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