Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Econ 101

Scott Galloway offers the funniest – and most stinging – assessment of the higher education bubble in this New York interview on universities and COVID-19. The best part is his economic analysis of college econ courses:

I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. 

2. Not-So-Friendly Skies

Travel industry watcher Gary Leff reveals the madness of FAA regulation in the midst of COVID-19. Case in point: when American Airlines wanted to provide hand sanitizer to passengers:

Americans wanted permission to provide “personal use quantities of hand sanitizer gel and sanitizing wipes to customers prior to boarding and/or distributed during flight.” That means there would be hand sanitizer on the aircraft, and that falls within the FAA’s jurisdiction.

Before writing for permission, a team from American Airlines held two separate meetings with FAA inspectors, from two separate FAA offices – the airline’s direct regulators in their certificate management office, and also with the Office of Hazardous Materials Safety. The purpose of these meetings was “to discuss the 14 CFR part 5 required safety risk assessment” required to have hand sanitizer on board.

3. Remember the Alamo Bowl!

Spencer Hall and Jason Kirk take turns sharing faux memories about the little things they can recall about professional sports. Each observation is memorable, but this one is incisive:

The thing I remember most about sports: all the spreadsheets, piling longer and longer forever. Spreadsheets of injuries and transactions, each line sliding across the bottom of a TV screen’s spreadsheet. This happened during a game in which the period-by-period scoreboard looked like a spreadsheet. The results went into a different spreadsheet for the season as a whole. That season went into a historical archive spreadsheet. Nerds pored over all of them to create their own spreadsheets, which they sold to people who looked at Las Vegas’s spreadsheets. Sports were a perfect engine of meaningless data creation.

4. How to Pitch a Book

Kate McKean writes a lively blog offering advice to aspiring writers. In a recent post, she talks about pitching non-fiction to literary agents. Her point applies to any business presentation:

When you’re writing non-fiction… you need to tell the reader your thesis. Don’t get freaked out if you hated writing papers in high school. I mean, it’s kinda like that but less fraught, imho. Your book has to have a point. In the middle 2-3 (MAX) paragraphs in your query letter, tell the reader what your point is. What will your book show or prove or illuminate? If you’re writing a history or memoir, it’s likely your summary will read like a novel. Things happened to people, so tell me what happened to them. If you’re writing something more prescriptive, you need to tell the reader what they’re going to be able to do by the end of the book and how you’re going to get them there.

5. The Peril of Short Attention Spans

Adam Garfinkle’s lament about how technology has “eroded” serious thinking is no neo-Luddite manifesto. It’s a brutal assessment on the risks of short attention spans:

If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists. Fully immerse yourself in digital "life," and timelines will flatten into unconnected dots, rendering a person present-oriented and unable to either remember or plan well. That permanently "zoned out" person will become easy prey for the next demagogue with an attractive promise and a mesmerizing spectacle.

6. The Race Is On

It is probably safe to say that JR Hildebrand is the only lecturer at Stanford who is also a professional IndyCar driver. Writing as a guest contributor on the blog Why Is This Interesting?, Hildebrand contends that, unlike NBA2K or Madden NFL, racing video games have come to replicate the experience of professional racing in every way. And now, “with the real thing suddenly on hold,” a new sports model is emerging:

NASCAR and F1 both began hosting eSports championships in parallel to their real-life product, and Formula E hosted a big-money virtual e-Prix in Las Vegas pitting the best gamers and sim-racers against their real drivers. Sanctioning bodies, however, have been very careful not to take attention away from “the real thing.” But with the real thing suddenly on hold, that hesitation went out the window and these two worlds accelerated toward each other quickly, bracing for impact.