Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

Yuval currently wears three hats:At the American Enterprise Institute think tank, he’s the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies.He’s the editor-in-chief of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, and political thought. He’s also authored numerous books. In addition to “A Time To Build”, I also highly recommend “The Fractured Republic”, and also “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left”.Yuval served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He earned his masters and PhD from the University of Chicago.

Many have been surprised that areas of the real estate market are booming, Post Corona. So what do we know about the pandemic’s impact on an exodus from some cities, and the growth of other cities? One of the ways that I have learned on this limited series podcast is from our top flight guests, but also from our listeners. A business practitioner - an operator or investor - will hear one of our experts on the pod and get a hold of me with an alternative analysis; it’s like I get to crowdsource ideas from our listeners. Well today, we’re bringing one of those subscribers on the show. Jonathan Pollack is a Senior Managing Director at the Blackstone Group and Blackshone’s Global Head of the Real Estate Debt Strategies group. Blackstone is one of the largest owners of real estate in the world. Jon, who is based in New York, manages a large team, overseeing Blackstone’s real estate debt investment strategy. He’s also a member of the firm’s real estate investment committee, and serves on the board of Blackstone Mortgage Trust. Prior to joining Blackstone, he was a Managing Director and Global Head of Commercial Real Estate, as well as Head of Risk for Structured Finance, at Deutsche Bank. To call Jonathan Pollack a “New York Bull” may be overstating it, but let’s just say he’s a skeptic of some of the skeptics we have featured on Post Corona. So is real estate in New York and other big cities coming back? And what does it tell us about the future of cities? Or - did the Pandemic set them back in ways that will take too long to recover from?

We thank the 92nd Street Y for hosting us then, and for this podcast episode now. You can subscribe to the 92Y podcast here:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/92y-talks/id905112228

One piece that we reference throughout both discussions is by former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade that he published on Medium. Here is the link to Wade’s piece: https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

Danny is also a columnist for Bloomberg View and he's the author of more than ten books. Here are three that I highly recommend: his history of the State of Israel, entitled Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, his biography of Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul, and more recently We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel.You can find his newsletter here: https://danielgordis.substack.com

News just out of the CDC has created fresh opportunities for normal, communal time together, indoors — just like we did pre-Corona. One of the rituals I have missed over the past year has been attending synagogue. But long before the Covid-19 pandemic, participation in organized religion - across all walks of religious life - was on the decline. Americans had become less engaged in religious institutions, whether it was regular attendance or membership and donations to their local congregation. Did the pandemic arrest these trends? Did virtual platforms provide new opportunities for religious and communal engagement? Joel Kotkin is a professor and bestselling author. He has been described by The New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer.” He has authored numerous books, including The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, and also The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. He is also a regular contributor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Joel recently authored an essay for Quillette that got me thinking more about all of this. It’s titled “God and the Pandemic” and it’s what I wanted to unpack with him today. Will coronavirus have further isolated Americans from organized religion, or drawn them closer to religion in a durable way?

Social links:Amit Aronsohn on InstagramYonatan Sagiv on TwitterYaara Keydar on InstagramDanna Stern on Twitter

Josh Rogin is a long-time foreign affairs journalist, currently a columnist for the Global Opinions Section of the Washington Post. He’s also a Political Analyst for CNN.

That phrase - going to the movies - that shared experience in a movie theater full of strangers already makes me nostalgic, like listening to vinyl records. Before the pandemic, the movie theater business was an 11-billion dollar industry in the US alone. In 2020, there were approximately 40,000 screens in 5,798 theaters that employed over 115,000 people. Then, of course, in March of 2020, like all communal entertainment experiences, they were all shut down. Netflix, Amazon and Disney, which were already increasing their market share of the movie experience, replaced movie theaters overnight. But as we crawl out of the pandemic to a post-corona world, will the tension build to return to the movies? Right now, we are seeing early signs of a market for the sanctity of the movie theater experience. To help us understand the history of the film business and where it goes from here, post-corona, John Podhoretz returns to our conversation. He’s been a prolific film critic for over four decades. John is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s award-winning daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, a book author, and was film critic for the Weekly Standard and television critic for the New York Post. Are movies as we’ve watched them for the past century — over? Were movie theaters already in decline and the pandemic simply accelerated the race to the inevitable? Or are we itching to get back out… to go to movies?

The price of college has been skyrocketing over the past few decades, escalating far higher and faster than the rate of inflation. According to one study, the cost of tuition at many schools is up by well over 1000% in less than a half century. For what? What about the product offering has actually changed? That’s a question that came into sharp focus as millions of students last March flocked to Zoom University...overnight.As recently as three years ago, one of my favorite business school professors, the late Clay Christensen, predicted half of all colleges in the US would close some time this decade...that their business models would be unsustainable and would be disrupted. And, then, of course, there was the pandemic. So, was Clay Christensen right?

Before joining The Times, Maggie was a reporter at Politico, The New York Post and The New York Daily News. She’s a lifelong New Yorker. According to a profile piece about Maggie, she’s written or co-written more than a story a day, and stories with her byline have accounted for hundreds of millions of page views last year alone. That’s more than anyone else at The Times.

To learn more about 'Vaccination Nation' visit startupnationcentral.org

Jim is the former editor of Popular Mechanics, where he helped reposition that century-old brand to become a major voice on contemporary tech issues. He currently co-hosts the How Do We Fix It? podcast and is working on a book about man-made disasters. Previously, Jim was executive editor at National Geographic Adventure. He’s the monthly tech columnist for Commentary Magazine and is with the Manhattan Institute, the most important urban policy think tank in the U.S.

In addition to 60 Minutes, John recently published his third book, the New York Times Best-Seller The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. John’s a long-time and award-winning television and print journalist. He was previously co-anchor of CBS This Morning. Before that, he was the anchor of “Face The Nation”. John is also a contributing writer to The Atlantic and co-host of Slate’s “Political Gabfest” podcast and host of the Whistlestop podcast. John has also moderated presidential debates. And was a long-time correspondent for Time Magazine, where he covered the White House.

Bret is a Pulitzer Prize winner and an op ed columnist for the Times, where his column appears Thursdays and Saturdays.Bret is the author of "America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder". He was raised in Mexico City, he has studied at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. In recent years he and his family were splitting their time living between New York City and Hamburg.

As we post this podcast, the US has vaccinated about 7.6 percent of our population, The UK is at 11.7%. Canada and Germany are hovering around 2.5 percent, France is at 1.7 percent, and Israel is at Over 50%.Scott and I have been talking, and he has laid out a pretty interesting take on how we’ll quickly hit a tipping point on vaccinations, when we won’t have a vaccine supply problem, but a consumer demand problem, meaning not enough people lining up for the vaccine. Scott also has insights into the new variants, what a gradual post-corona return to normalcy could look like, and perhaps most concerning - what we have learned about future national security risks from viruses as bio-weapons?

We’ve had a public health shock, followed by an economic shock, followed by a civic and societal shock. An emerging crisis in public security looms over the Coronavirus era… here in New York City, and in cities across the country.Is the connection between the breakdown in public health and the breakdown in public safety causation or correlation? Was this crime wave inevitable and Covid simply accelerated it? What do we need to do to bring basic safety back to our cities?

As we post this podcast, the US has vaccinated about 2 percent of its population, Canada is at 0.5 percent, France is at 0.001 percent, and Israel? 20 percent. By the end of this week, Israel will have vaccinated two-thirds of its population over 60 years old and most of the country’s medical staff, at which point they will all be called back for their second vaccination.According to international studies, Israel’s healthcare system has been ranked among the most efficient in the world. And due to big data and AI, the Israeli health system is certainly one of the most digitally advanced.What will we learn from Israel about a key stage of Post-Corona once it gets there?

To call 2021 a historic year is an understatement. But what’s less obvious is how to put the pandemic of 2020 in a historical context. What lessons can be learned about our response to past public health crises? Can these lessons be applied to the one we’re living through now, and what may lie ahead, post-Corona?As we transition from this most unusual year, Dan checks in with Niall Ferguson. Niall is a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and he’s the managing director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm. Niall is also the author of 15 books including The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. From the earliest days of the pandemic, Niall assembled a slide deck to chronicle everything he was learning about the crisis as it unfolded and provided historical context for his analysis. Almost weekly, he’d update the deck and share it with friends and colleagues, which came to be known as the “Monster Deck” -- now close to a thousand slides. It came to inform a lot of Dan's thinking about Covid 19 and much of it can be found in a book he’s been working on during the pandemic, called Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.In today’s conversation, we’ll look back at 2020, as we look ahead to 2021.

Is New York over? It’s a question that’s hotly debated these days. We will return to this question from time to time over a number of episodes in the months ahead. Last week we hosted two experts from the Manhattan Institute to look at the future of subways. On this episode, we take a look at Broadway. The industry of live theater and arguably the beating heart of midtown Manhattan, Broadway has become big business -- and a big employer; it’s central to New York City’s economy. But on March 12, the lights on Broadway went dark. The ecosystem of employees and employers that populate this live theater ecosystem scattered.To help us understand the short history of Broadway’s economic boom and where it goes from here, post-Corona, is a writer, public intellectual, and culture critic, John Podhoretz. John is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s award-winning daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, a book author, and was a film critic for the Weekly Standard. When will Broadway return? What would it take to bring it back? And what will Broadway look like when we get out of this mess?

Is New York over? It’s a question that’s widely debated these days. We will return to this question from time to time in a number of episodes. On this episode, we look at subways. During the pandemic, subway ridership has been down as much as 90%.While we’re focused on NYC, this topic matters to everyone living or working in megacities around the world. NYC is a Microcosm.What’s the state of our subways? Will they come back? What do we need to do to save and transform public transportation?On this episode Dan welcomes:-Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow for the infrastructure economy at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and a columnist for the NY Post. @nicolegelinas-Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, bestselling author, and contributing editor at The Atlantic and National Affairs. @Reihan

Dan sits down with Billy Beane, who became famous outside the world of sports when Brad Pitt portrayed him in the film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s bestselling book, Moneyball. Since March, Billy has been thinking a lot about how the Coronavirus will change sports. Why does this matter? Well, global sports is estimated to be a half-a-trillion dollar industry and growing. That’s until Covid 19 made its debut, earlier this year. What has the sports industry learned from this unprecedented time? How will sports be transformed?

After a macro conversation on the societal effects of shifts in the workforce, Dan sits down with Adam Grant to understand the implications of remote work on individuals. As a professor of organizational psychology at Wharton, Adam dives into the potential long-lasting effects of a new work from home culture. What are some of the benefits of remote work that we’d want to continue after the pandemic is over? How will the fusion of personal and professional life affect our habits, identity, and culture?In this episode, Dan and Adam discuss the potential boom of entrepreneurship and creativity in a Post Corona world.

When the global economy came to a halt this spring, tens of millions of American workers found themselves working from home - and millions more found themselves unemployed. Derek explains the potential long term implications of an economy with a large “telepresence.”How might this shift out of offices and even out of cities affect America’s cultural and economic future? Dan and Derek sit down to discuss what a Post Corona world might look like.