All right, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, I'm your host, I'm your catherter, and I'm your guide to the next hour of conversation about the future of higher education. This brings together two very, very important developments that we've been working with. Over the past few years, we've talked about how income and wealth inequality has been rising in the United States and other nations. At the same time, we've been talking about how higher education has been producing more and more students. Gary Roth has written about these two problems, by bringing them together into a powerful, powerful book which I cannot recommend enough. The Educated Underclass, very short, incredibly accessible, ruthlessly researched, makes the argument that higher education is producing some pretty lousy outcomes for a disturbing number of people. If you haven't had a chance to read it, you should have a button on the bottom left of your screen. You can click that and be taken to the Pluto Press page for it so you can buy one right away. We're gonna be talking about this today. Gary is, among other things, an emeritus professor, former vice chancellor for academic programs and policies, and deaning in the graduate school at Rutgers University. He is, as well, a very, very humane, very direct, and I think a very, very powerful thought leader in this field. I would love to introduce you and get a sense of where he is headed in this program. Hang on one second. I'm having a browser glitch that I'm trying to solve, and I'll bring Gary up as soon as I get this fixed up. In the meantime, take to the chat box, make sure you've introduced yourself, and see about thinking about questions you'd like to ask Gary, ways of accidentally closing off the entire session. Sorry about that. Let me bring Professor Ross back up on stage. Hello. Hi, Brian. It's really good to see you, Gary. Yes, you too. Thank you so much for this invitation. Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. Your book is, as I said, very, very important. We have a lot to discuss, and I'd like to begin by asking you to introduce yourself by answering an unusual question, which is, what are you gonna be working on for the next year? What are the big projects and topics that are uppermost in your schedule and on your mind? Yeah, so I've stopped by your call on A1A. I'm hearing an echo, I don't know if that's from my end. You don't hear the echo? No, there's a little bit of background noise on your side, but it's okay. We can hear you. Oh yeah, okay, fine. Oh, it seems to have disappeared, so good. So anyway, I've started on a new writing project that picks up on themes that I started to develop in educated on the class. And so this relationship between social mobility and higher education is one that continues to interest me. And I kind of stumbled across this information about college graduates. Graduates of four-year colleges who wind up in jobs for which you don't need a college education. And this data is produced by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank. And they put together a fair amount of very useful information. But when I first came across their data, I mean, I'd always wondered, I spent most of my career as an administrator in higher ed and then the last decade, excuse me, turned to teaching. And I would teach occasionally along the way as well. And I always wondered what happened to students after they graduated. Because you would hear from students periodically, you might need a letter of reference for graduate school or for work. But otherwise, the bulk of students just kind of disappeared afterwards. And so when I ran into and uncovered this data from the Federal Reserve economists, it really kind of put into context some of what I had suspected anyway. So I want to pick up on that theme and the new work is tentatively titled, Access and Exclusion, College, Class and Social Mobility. And so situation, on the one hand, we have about one third of all college graduates. So, excuse me again, college graduates between, all college graduates between the ages of 22 and 65 wind up in jobs for which you do not need a college education. And it's just the number of graduates in that category is kind of staggering. And so I think it prompts then a rethinking of the value and the purpose of college education, how we think about the relationship between education and social mobility, and especially in terms of upward mobility. And college education in terms of upward mobility was until really the post-World War II era, no one spoke about upward mobility in terms of education. I mean, the purpose of higher education from really when the university and college system really kind of gets going in the late 1800s, right up until the post-World War II period, its function more or less was to provide lateral mobility for portions of the middle and upper middle and upper class. So it was a way in which families could more or less guarantee that their children would continue to live the kinds of lifestyles and have the type of status that they had grown up with. But starting in really the late 40s and then through the 1950s and 60s, higher education community expands greatly, much faster than population. So a bigger proportion of the population goes to college and for the first time, large numbers of students from working class backgrounds enter the university system, right? So really the first generation students is a phenomena really of the 50s and 60s. And this kind of socioeconomic reshuffling of social class, it's also accompanied at that time of big discussions of whether social classes are disappearing, of whether it's just one big middle class with pockets of the very wealthy and pockets of the very poor on either end, but more or less this universal middle class. And then, so and higher education does this by expanding enrollments. And then in the 1970s, it turns its attention as well to underrepresented minorities, African-Americans and Latinx students in particular. And so the multicultural agenda is added to its kind of socioeconomic agenda in terms of economic uplift. And then in the 90s, immigrants and the children of immigrants are included. So in this immediate last 70 years or so, we see this on the one hand, this very rapid transformation of society itself in terms of the social fabric and the role that higher ed plays in terms of educating groups that had educated before, but now also new groups as well. And so a very progressive social mission, but that at the same time it runs into economic barriers which undercut the level of success that it might have had otherwise. What are those economic barriers? The most job or a good portion of job creation these days happens at the very low end. The three biggest areas for job growth projected over the next 10 years are home care and personal aids, restaurant employees and hospitality and leisure employees. And those are the three biggest growth areas in terms of numbers of employees, all of which pay less than what's been accepted as the living wage of $15 an hour. And many of those positions besides a part time end without benefits. So there's a tremendous growth of kind of low wage work. And at the other end a lot of the work that's many of the positions that are developing are very high end in terms of technical computer scales or healthcare scales. But the high end and oftentimes involved not just a bachelor's degree, but a training in either sciences or in mathematics or in the technical fields of computerization and also a graduate degree. So we have a stratification happening both in society and also within higher education and higher education is making that stratification happen. Yes, and I think it's part of what I attempted to do an educated underclass was situate higher ed within those larger economic forces. It's higher ed isn't free to just decide on its own what it wants to do and what directions it plans to go in. And in fact, a lot of the enrollment growth was propelled because beginning in the 1970s when there was a major kind of economic meltdown and also reshuffling of the global economy, government support for education started to fall away. And it's been very erratic since that time and institutions of higher education have had to depend on themselves more and more. And so enrollment growth was one of the ways that they could compensate for the lack of government funding. And buying large enrollment growth is very easy to do because if you have, for instance, if you have planned a class already, you've already paid, counted for the instructor's salary, you have a classroom. And so then admitting additional students to that class is really just marginal costs. Yes, there's some more processing in terms of the registrar's functions and a bit more advising that needs to be done to get students into classes and so on. But it was a very kind of, yeah. And enrollment growth allowed higher education to accommodate all groups. It did not have to, for instance, reduce the number of white students coming into the university system in order to admit students from other backgrounds. It expanded so rapidly that all students, in a sense, could find a place within higher education. And so it was really, growth makes that kind of diversification process simple on that level. I mean, there are other issues that then come to bear. But in terms of a strategy which, you know, one universities and colleges had to follow in terms of raising revenues, but a strategy that simultaneously allowed it to have a very ambitious social mission and a very progressive one, it was really, in a sense, ideal circumstances. Let me pause just for one second.  Also, I wanted to make sure I welcome a few people who've come in lately, but also just to say, again, this is the Future Transform. We have our guest, Gary Roth. And I want to do a shout out to my friend, Don Charlis, who introduced me to Gary's work. Hi, Don. If you'd like to check out Don's own work, he runs the Higher Education Inquirer on blogspot.com. And I'll share that in the chat box. Don does really, really great work, passionate advocate, and I just wanted to give him a shout out right now. Also, if you're new to the forum or if you haven't been with us for a while, we've had programs that cover some of these topics in the past, including two sessions with Chris Newfield, who is the leading scholar of how state governments have defunded public higher education. Again, if you're new to the forum, now the floor is yours. If you have questions you would like to ask, please just use either the Q&A box to type them in so I can flash them on the screen or click the raise hand button to join us on the stage. I promise Gary and I are very nice and we're happy to have you on the side as well. And as I say this, there are already some questions and I want to share one of them from someone who's logged in under the pseudonym Overeducated. And she says, because I know who it is, is the only mission of institutions of higher education to prepare a future workforce. Well, no, I don't believe it is. And particularly if you're working in the humanities, most certainly it's not, you know, the kind of the idea that higher ed would prepare students for any kind of profession as you know, gives prompts quite a bit of discussion. But I think from student's point of view, yes, there's a, and family's point of view, there's a direct connection between education and the future. And the future means that you must, I mean, everyone basically, unless you're extremely wealthy or really very, very poor, everyone must work. And by and large, everyone does work unless they can find some alternate way of supporting themselves. So I don't think you can get around the issue of work. And, you know, and it's, you know, no matter what a student's major is, I think that issue of what they'll do after graduation always hangs over them. I got in an interesting Twitter fight with a much older professor who told me that I was overestimating the economic value. And I pointed out just the enormous costs of higher education right now. And he wasn't interested in that. We have questions that have come in all over the place, including from Charles Finley. So let me just flash this on the screen so you all can see it. And Charles asks, is the growth in new outreach for the survival institution to the detriment of newer groups of students who will not get jobs? Yes, I mean, that seems to be the irony of the situation.  There's a, you know, a handful of academic studies that you can turn to to get information about the underemployed. But by and large, the interest has been in students up until the point that they graduate. So there's been lots of research in terms of the recruitment of college students and making sure that, you know, the entering classes are representative of the population as a whole. And then kind of quickly following that interest in the higher ed community was an interest in retention, given kind of historically low retention rates as you go down kind of the, you know, if you rank institutions of higher ed in terms of the socioeconomic background of the students that they attract, you know, graduation retention and graduation rates tend to get lower and lower, the kind of less wealthy that the student body is. And there's also then gender dimensions in terms of majors that students choose. And then there's the racial and ethnic and, you know, statuses of students as well. And so there's been lots and lots of focus on what happens to students while they're in college, how to retain them and how to make sure that they graduate. But kind of once you get to graduation and they leave the door, there's not much information about students. So one of the value of what the Federal Reserve economists has done is that they've taken a very good look at some of the relevant information. You rely heavily on that data, which is crucial data. That's really, really important to say. Thank you for that great answer, Gary. And Charles at Northeastern, thank you for a typically penetrating question. We have more questions coming in. And I wanna make sure we get a chance to for everyone to weigh in. This is from Gretchen Haskell, the University of Missouri, who asks, what experiences with students led you to research the overeducated underclass? Well, what really did it for me was that I began to teach an internship class for students. This is in the Department of Sociology or Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark. And some of the class, we only met once every other week and then otherwise students were placed into internships non-paying, for the most part, non-paying internships, so volunteer work, but a chance for them to take a look, mostly in social service agencies is where they wound up. And so we would spend the time together reading about the future of the economy, particularly in terms of technology and automation and what was coming down the road. But also we'd spend a lot of time talking about their experiences at their internships. And I was kind of taken aback by one, how little students understood about how to work, how to conduct themselves in a workplace, how to deal with situations at work. And then also, as they got, we spent a certain amount of time then trying to get them ready for applying for jobs, kind of how lost they were in that process of where to apply and how to apply. And so increasingly, I did this course for a few years, I re-oriented the course more towards practical skills just because it made me uncomfortable that they were as unprepared as they were. And this is at a time where there's a very good very understaffed career development center, which was increasingly offering services online. And that's, so it meant it was offering more things to students, but at the same time, the impersonality of it meant that students did not know fully how to take advantage of the situation and how really to kind of orient themselves. I mean, I think it's a lot about kind of internet experience in which you can just be overwhelmed by the amount, by the number of possibilities there. And so yes, so when I came across this data then about the underemployed, it clicked then also with what I was seeing in the classroom with students. Thank you for that deep answer. I love how your integration of research and your experience with students. Also, if you get a chance, everybody, the first introduction to this book offers an autobiographical introduction as well, which is really important. Thank you, Gretchen, for the question. That's a very good question. Indeed, indeed. We have a macro question from Chris Delarocas at Boston University, he's an associate provost. And Chris asks, one often hears that a society with more educated people is going to somehow generate more jobs requiring educated folks. Are there any examples of this happening anywhere in the world? Yes, that idea comes from supply side economics, yes. Oh, yes. It goes back to JB, the economist JB say in the late 1700s that supply will create its own demand. No, I think you're perfectly right. There's not any or not many examples of that happening. I will say though, what seems to be is that there are many employers who have job openings for positions which do not require a college education, but who will prefer to hire a college graduate anyway and will also pay that college graduate thousands more than they would pay a non-graduate even though they could hire a non-graduate for the job. So there's an employer preference and one person explained, the employer preference comes from the fact that the overwhelming majority of employers are themselves college educated. No, whether that's the reason or not, I mean, employers I think value a college education because it means that these future employees have spent more time in a classroom. They've had to be self reliant, self disciplined. They've learned how to work in teams. They've learned how to remove their ego from kind of business decisions and they can work on their own. They can read instructions and follow instructions. They know how to ask questions, that they don't necessarily see asking questions as a reflection on their own ability to work and so on the college environment. So they've had years of practice at these kinds of skills and it then makes them attractive as potential employees. This is a, first of all, I just have to say, Chris, that's a beautifully phrased question. And I think Gary, your work in macroeconomic history really plays out here, where this is, why this is a historic mistake. Let me see if I can beam another questioner up on the stage. Let's see if Judith can join us. Judith. Hello. Hello, I'm planning to listen, not talk. This is a wonderful talk. It's great to see you. It's great to see you. It's good to see you too. Gary, I just wanted to know if you have any data that you could speak to you about the shift from employers expecting to train their own staff to employers expecting higher education to train their staff. Because my question was to the point of my own mother who had a master's education really was onboarded at Wang at a point in her career when Wang expected to be able to do that and not fuel the rest of her career. My impression is that employers now don't want to do any onboarding, any training, any staff development. And I don't know if you have any data about that. I don't know that data. And I think it's a mixed bag in terms of employers. So certain areas, you're expected to have particular kinds of skills. For instance, if you're in a technical area, there's a whole level of technical skill that you can learn in school and employers expect that. In terms of if you're in manufacturing though, the manufacturing processes oftentimes are so specific that you must be trained on the job. So you can have the general skills in terms of the work being done. And with so-called white collar work, then there's a kind of a generic set of skills that one brings with you in terms of communication and teamwork and decision-making and so on. And again, those are things that educational institutions are expected to provide students with. So, and how that works out then in terms of the workforce, I think is very hard to determine periods in which employers squawk that college graduates aren't prepared and there's other periods in which don't prepare them too much because we'll train them once they get here. So, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I'm interested to see how your research in that area develops. I attended an interesting panel in Washington, DC some years back when manufacturing companies were complaining that our higher education, especially community colleges, were not graduating the types of people that they wanted to just go into their jobs with their own certification. So I think there's a lot of pressure there. Yes, and I think that situation over the last couple of decades has changed quite a bit too because at one point, the business world and parts of the political world were both criticizing higher ed for not teaching relevant skills for the workforce. And so part of what happened within higher ed was this kind of reshuffling of programmatic offerings. And so whenever there's kind of a perceived need for graduates in a particular area, higher ed institutions tend to be very nimble these days in terms of creating programs, both on undergraduate and even more so on the graduate level that cater to employer needs. So the gaps between kind of business needs and educational training has narrowed because institutions heard that criticism and then became much more versatile in terms of responding to those needs. Great answer. Judith, great question. Thank you so much. If you're new to the forum, that's an example of video question. You can see how easy it is to do. Just let me know by pressing that raised hand button if you'd like to join us on stage. We had a quick observation I just wanted to share from Joseph Robert Shaw in the chat. He mentions that Huntsville, Alabama is in the middle of such an economic swing, much like Silicon Valley and Seattle went through in the 80s and 90s respectively, thanks to the military industrial complex and of course the new interest in space. Good point, Joseph. Thank you for sharing that. We also have a question from Don Charlis and I want to make sure that he gets his question because I'm very grateful to him. And this has to do with employers from another side. What do you think about gainful employment rules for college programs? Obama had those regulations for for-profit colleges. Yeah, and first let me say, I am also a big fan of Doran's writing and follow his blog. And so very pleased that he's joined us and is posing this question. If I can, I'd like to pose that question within a wider context. I mean, one response to the knowledge that so many college graduates could have applied for their positions without graduating college is the idea to somehow rationalize the college experience. If there's too many, too many graduates are employed in jobs for which you don't need a college education, then in one way or another, then let's educate fewer students. That seems would be a very rational approach. The problem is, is how do you decide who gets excluded? And so through really up until the post-world war, well, up until certainly the late 1800s, higher education was all white and it was all male. And then late 1800s, special schools start to be founded for women students, special schools for African-Americans. So, and then this kind of ongoing struggle of the higher education community over the last decades to eliminate those kinds of biases in how higher education functions. The problem though, so in part of the response to those kinds of gender or race or ethnicity-based prejudices was to turn to a merit system. The problem though is that merit systems also produce their biases and that system based on merit then produces a bias in terms of socioeconomic factors. So, the wealthy or the family situation of the college applicants, then the greatest degree to which adults have overseen and channeled their upbringing in terms of the kinds of skills and competencies that higher education prefer, particularly in terms of mathematics skills and then writing and speaking skills. And so, because there's that socioeconomic bias within merit system, then merit doesn't become a way to, merit itself is not a way to rationalize education. So, if education, if the idea is to shrink the number of college students, someone's going to suffer. And then the question becomes, who is it that's going to be targeted? You can do it socioeconomically through a merit system or you can do it in terms of cruder and gross, prejudices towards one group or another. That's a devilish question. And I'm really glad you put that in the table because that is one way forward. That is one way we may be added in fact. Yes, and if I could add just one more piece of that. I mean, it's also the case that since 2010, enrollments in colleges and universities has been more or less stagnant. So, for a decade now, and this is the first time since the early beginnings of the college and university system, that enrollments have stagnated for such a long period. There's been downturns before, but usually it's just one, two, three years and then enrollments back up. A bounce back and enrollments continue to grow. That's not the case now. They've been stagnant, the population continues to grow. So overall, then access is already shrinking during the last decade and two groups in particular have been affected. One group is black students, African Americans, and there's been fair amount of discussion about the factors behind that, rollback of affirmative action programs and the just general nature of racism in this society. But the second group that's already on the decline in terms of numbers of students enrolling in colleges and university is white students. And I haven't seen any discussion about that phenomenon in turn. I mean, there's lots of discussion about what's happening to, for instance, the white working class. But I haven't seen any discussion about why white college student enrollment is declining. So access for both those groups is already shrinking. And that's why the societal processes at work. True, true. I wanna make sure that everybody gets a chance to share their thoughts and there are a few more questions that have come in. A couple are more at the kind of almost philosophical or conceptual angle. And I wanna put these together because these are very important and they take us in a little bit of a different direction. Long time friend and supporter of the program, Tom Hames asks this, is there a question of quality versus quantity here? If students are not graduating with skill was to make them successful human beings, the degree is just paper. Is the degree a useful metric? Yeah, and it's not that the underemployed don't have skills, it's just that there's not jobs there. And so they tend, and the data that's been done, of the underemployed college graduates, about half of them wind up in jobs, which the Fed economists term good non-college jobs, meaning jobs which pay on average $45,000 a year or more. And so, you know, so income wise, those graduates aren't doing so badly. But there's a kind of ricochet effect then at work because the college graduates are taking jobs that non-college graduates would have taken otherwise. So there's a kind of downward pressure on the workforce in terms of, you know, who's getting what jobs? Because if the high end non-college jobs are being filled to a substantial degree by college graduates, it means that non-college graduates then have to, you know, dip lower in terms of the kinds of jobs, meaning the quality of the jobs, how interesting they are, versus how repetitive, whether the jobs that have a future attached to them or not, and in terms of the wage scale. So I think we hear a lot about the terrible economic pressure that the working poor are under. But inadvertently, I think that, you know, higher education's desire to educate as much of the population as possible has this kind of negative effect of actually contributing to the deterioration of employment conditions for people who don't have that education. Thank you. Tom always asks very, very powerful questions. And Gary, I really appreciate the answer there. The chat box is blowing up. People are arguing about how to arrange higher education and talking about different forms of critical thinking and economics. So if you're, folks, if you're not paying attention to the chat box, take a look, there's a lot there going on. And we have Ken who wants to join us on stage. Let me see if I can get his podium working. Hey! Yeah. Hold on, I'm getting my camera going here. I don't know why my camera's not working. Yeah, I can see your photo, but I can't, but I can hear your voice. So let's go with that for now. All right, thanks. Hey, I just want to ask, I know, I've been in this here for 40 years, started as a dorm director, moved my way up to university president. And the one thing that really frustrates me, and now I like to see myself recovering university president, one thing that really has bothered me for 40 years is the fact that we have a requirement, 120 semester hour requirement for bachelor's degree that was established in 1906 by a group of Ivy League institutions for the purpose of establishing a pension system has nothing to do with academic achievement. We sit around as quote experts and advocates for our profession and we talk about lowering costs, lowering costs, free this, why don't we have an honest and open conversation about the fact that the current 120 semester requirement is unsubstantiated, it is just a hodgepodge of stuff for many kids that means nothing that's not connected. The Brits have been doing a three year degree program for generations. And why can't we talk about a three year, 90 semester bachelor's degree moving forward and save people a lot of time and a lot of energy? I throw the question back to you. Just first, Ken, I want to thank you for that. You've got a bunch of fans in the chat box. So I just want to make sure you know that. Go ahead, Gary. Yeah, I'd just like to say good luck having that discussion with faculty. So I wish you, yes. It's not really a response. I mean, again, we have a commitment to educate the masses, but we have a system that was never set up to do that. And all we can talk about is cutting costs. Why don't we cut time that we can truly create if we can put a man on the moon, can we create a meaningful, the Brits have been doing it. I know there's issues with the unions, but it is about the kids, it is about our country. And so I'll stop and get off my soapbox, but I think ultimately if we don't do it, the pressures from outside state and federal will do it for us. Yes, I mean, I can just add something a little bit to that. I mean, at the school that I've worked at, there are general education requirements, which I'd say most undergraduates don't, you know, you have to take so many credits in social sciences and so many in the sciences and composition and math and so on and so forth. And many, you know, I'd say most undergraduates I've ever spoken to about the Gen Ed requirement do not like them, do not understand them. But one of the things that education does for people, I think, is that it makes them much more versatile intellectually. And so, you know, they're aware of so many different things that introduce to many, many people and types of people they're involved in different situations. And so it makes them kind of socially and intellectually much more versatile than they would be if they simply kind of grew up in a family and then transitioned from that family into the workplace.  It depends on the workplace, of course, but by and large, you know, one doesn't go to work in order to get an education. And so, you know, the general education requirements even, you know, that I think their rationale isn't very well explained to students or if it is, it's explained to them before they can really appreciate it. But so there's something to be said in turn, even though college education turns out to be somewhat chaotic in terms of the mix of causes that students are exposed to, nonetheless, and given how rapidly this economy and social life changes, you know, it seems to be on an ever-increasing treadmill, the college experience in that sense is quite useful to everyone who goes through it. Well, thank you. Ken, first of all, I'm glad you are the first forum participant to have identified yourself as a recovering president. And I'm also conscious that we only have about nine more minutes and we have a couple of great big questions that people would like to raise. And I wanna make sure that Gary has enough time to tackle them. You could see what I mean about the shift towards more conceptual or strategic questions. Here's another one that comes up from Brent Aurenheimer, California State Fresno, who asks, are we about to give up on the Jeffersonian ideal of a social compact of a liberally educated citizenry as necessary for democracy? Oh, that's a very ponderous question. And frankly, I'm not sure where to begin. I suspect a pint of a good quarter for everyone might be very helpful for us to respond to figure out that question. Well, I mean, this has come up before in previous sessions and one of the arguments is that if we assume universal access to K through 12, which we legally provide, is not sufficient for giving citizens a full education in order to participate in democracy, then it becomes the job of higher education to complete that education. The American Association of Colleges and Universities, ACNU has made that into a key point. And this came up after the 2016 election where a lot of people argued that this is one of the jobs of higher education to build a democracy. As Charles Finley just put in the chat, I feel like such a failure as an educator, sorry, I felt like such a failure as an educator after this election in 2016. So that's one argument, which is independent of the economic argument. Brent, we may have to return to that. It's a powerful question. We have a few more coming in and I wanna make sure that a couple of them get up here before we have to go. And this is from Chris Delarocas, who follows up with another killer question. If there are not enough jobs for college educated people and we should not limit access to college education, what is the solution you propose? Yes, I mean, that's precisely the dilemma. I don't see that there really is a solution to, you can either continue to educate as many people as you can, despite the outcome, or you can have some sort of a restrictive process in place to keep people out. And neither alternative is attractive. And I think that's exactly the kind of the dilemma that higher education is caught in. It's, yeah, there are no clear roads forward. Would, I mean, I'm just thinking out loud and would a massive expansion of federal and or state financial support to higher education then perhaps be one way forward because that might take some of the financial staying out of this and give people easier access to college education without having to go in debt and worrying about it changing their lives for the worse. Yes, I mean, certainly that if it reduces people's debt loads that would be very positive. Although keep in mind that the students who default on student loans most frequently are the students with the least amount of debt. So students with less than $5,000 worth of debt, oftentimes they went to for-profit schools or they didn't complete their degree or they received an associate degree that turned out to be not particularly useful. But yes, so federal funding for higher education would certainly allow higher education to continue on its mission of educating the population. But the other aspect then is what do people do when they graduate college or is a college education going to be seen as a kind of warehousing of young people as a means to keep them out of the workforce for as long as possible because the workforce can't absorb them. This is tricky. You're really hitting a terrible dilemma right now. Denet Long from Northern State has a question which touches on this in detail. Is ultimately, is it the accreditation groups that keep the number of hours in place? How do they impact the proposed change?  Yeah, it's the accreditation groups but it's also financial aid requirements which have those accreditation requirements built into them. So it's kind of the structure of higher ed is built around the notion of four, even though most students don't graduate college in four years, it's still a four year model that's in place. An institutional change is very difficult in education. I mean, there's been these kind of big efforts to go around the higher ed institutions themselves. Charter schools, big effort to transform public K-12 education and then massive funding by foundations on the college and university seemed to see what was possible there. And I think higher education institutions have shown themselves to be quite flexible but there's limits and kind of the humanistic model is as much as humanists complain about the job focus of students and how the humanistic mission of institutions have been replaced by business motives and so on. That core remains pretty much intact and it's what distinguishes the higher education situation from other aspects of society. I just wanted to handle a good friend of mine, Ruben Plentadoura who says that we should support a pint of porter for everybody everybody in the forum. Joseph Robert Shaw from UAH has another question, a very precise question about this from the K-12 side. Is there a correlation between a K-12 emphasis on STEM and the growth of the overeducated class? I don't think so. I mean, the kind of math deficits and math phobia that's pervasive through K-12 education and then is also true for higher education institutions is certainly one that all the STEM programs push back against. Right. So, and students who major in STEM fields tend to do better job wise than students, for instance, in social sciences or the humanities or the kind of the worst parts of the curriculum in terms of under-employment tend to be non-technical, pre-professional majors like criminal justice, business management, public policy. I mean, in those fields, the level, if you look at under-employment and unemployment of graduates, the anywhere between 60 to 80% of graduates in those fields wind up in jobs for which you didn't need a college education. That's a huge number. We have time for one last question and this is from Don and I think I understand the question but I may be interpreting it incorrectly. So let me give you a shot at this again. How about spreading labor hours like requiring overtime for salary managers? Yes, I mean, certainly one of the trends over the last really 50 years has been this big intensification of work and part of that happened by transforming hourly employees who entitled then to overtime into salaried employees in which there's no limit in terms of the amount of time that they need to spend at the job, either pre-pandemic, it was at the work site but then when you weren't at work, then evenings, mornings, weekends, you were expected to be accessible through email and texting and technology. And so a conversion away from salaried employees back towards hourly employment would be a very good thing for the workforce but yes, it's another proposal that one has to say, well, yes, good luck with that proposal. It's difficult enough even just to get Uber drivers acknowledged as employees rather than independent contractors. One thing some of us in the futures community have been talking about is mandating smaller hours per week, down to 30 or 25 or something. But speaking of smaller hours, I'm afraid we are at the end of hours today. This has been a fantastic discussion, Gary. I'm really, really grateful. Yes, thank you very much for inviting me, yeah. Oh, my thanks to everybody for terrific questions. Before we go, Gary, what's the best way for people to follow up on your new project and on your thinking as a whole? Well, hopefully at some point it will be published. So stay tuned. I'll be glad to spread the word on that. And once again, Gary, thank you for this research. Thank you for your time and keep up a fantastic work. Yes, great. Thanks for the conversation. My pleasure. Don't go away, friends. We have to tell you about what's happening for the next few weeks. So I want to make sure that you all get to see that. But once again, thank you for fantastic questions and fantastic comments. This has been, I think we ended up on an incredible dilemma that we need to follow up on, where we can take higher education. In a question that Gary didn't get to ask, he asked, where does this take us? The timeline is not good for this. Looking ahead, we're hitting some other issues, including equity, active learning, academic mergers, open access, rethinking teaching. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues, please just use the hashtag FTTE on Twitter or anywhere else you'd like. You can always tweet at me at Brian Alexander or at Shindig events. If you'd like to go into the past and take a look at our previous sessions on job placement, careers, economics, just head to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. We have a whole stack of sessions and the recording for this one will join them shortly. In the meantime, once again, thank you all for your thoughts. This has been a terrific, terrific discussion. I hope you all keep thinking about this and I hope you keep thinking about them with us. In the meantime, stay safe, take care as the fall semester comes close and we'll see you online. Thanks again to Sam Houston State for letting us use their network at office. Bye-bye.


So a spot in the top six goes on the line tonight as Weston Sidney host Weston United Weston United leading the head-to-head between these two sides just the fifth meeting utilizing Lockie Wales Calva returns it to Wales ball in got all the way through to Berisha Now for Yitzar I scored this season Duzelle those sides asking plenty of questions inside the opening seven minutes as Rinkit goes the way of the home side Troisi and now Russell Beating in Bruce Camau Neat cutback Camau Just bends it beyond the far post that was so close for Wanderers Sanchez Wales again, it's been a focal point Calva back post run was from Connor Payne, but Ziggy Gordon over again in the midfield Troisi Troisi There's the goal that Western Sidney Wanderers have deserved for all their pressure in the opening 20 minutes and It's James Troisi with his fourth of the season Now Duke feeding Troisi could he grab a quick fire double great save from Ryan Scott Mark Natter keeping an eye on him Bending it high to Payne Weston United just asking the question Whether a penalty could be granted there Sanchez keeps his feet Ticks out Troisi Much can he use the speed of Aqualina look at him burn across the turf He's got Duke alongside him will he go all the way Aqualina How good was that from the 20-year-old from Camden as Troisi taking out Gordon? Or can you believe that Ziggy Gordon with just his second a lead goal? Looking to start this Second half a little brighter than they did the first Western United Locky Wales heavy touch pounced on by Ziggy Gordon Touched straight into the path of gerante Perishas living over Wales arriving, but who's there putting his body on the line once again It's Ziggy Gordon scored one tonight Prevented situations developing on a number of occasions Troisi Looks up sees Mitch Duke good run central from Doran's Duke goes himself off the post and Camel It's a corner for Wanderis. What a hit that was from Duke You Garkiewicz had many sessions with his new teammates Ticks out Aqualina there nicely Rolling it into the path of Troisi Camel easy as you like He's now Western Sydney Wanderers outright leading goalscorer Bruce Camel and he has five goals in Six he is in some form Juke just holding off players and now Troisi Looked like he tackled in my and the free kick is going against him I free kick here for Wanderers Doran's is bending it towards Duke Ryan Scott Flying and now Troisi cutting it across and that just sums up the night for Western United 4-0 Elz Now in the middle for Western United Going along the head of Abini A five-star performance from Western Sydney Wanderers And Bernie Abini And it's back-to-back wins for the men in red and black tonight They just pranked that Derby win last week with another three points this week And the momentum is building for Western Sydney


Hi everyone, I have for you here eight examples of how to use the chain rule for finding derivatives. So maybe after the first few problems you could pause this video as you watch it to try the problem on your own before you start it again to see how it works out. So remember the whole idea with the chain rule is you essentially start on the outside and work your way in taking derivatives as you go. So in the first one the outermost function is the part that's raising that 7x plus 8 to the fourth power. So that's where we start. That's almost like applying the power rule. So the four goes to the front, we keep the 7x plus 8. That part's really important, that's actually the part a lot of people do wrong is they take too many derivatives at once, one derivative at a time. Remember that, one derivative at a time. So that's the first part of the chain rule. Now we're going to go inside and multiply by the derivative of the 7x plus 8. So that's just going to be 7. And then we just simplify as we're able. So here we can multiply the 4 and the 7 together to make 28. And we have 28 times the quantity 7x plus 8 cubed and that would be our answer. Now for this next one we're going to want to think of the square root function as being raised to the one half power. And then it's very similar to the first problem we looked at. So once again we start on the outside and work our way in. So the one half goes to the front and remember it's one derivative at a time so we're going to keep this argument here for now. And now it's going to be raised to the negative one half because remember you need to take one away from that exponent. Now we're going to go inside and multiply by the derivative of this. And we do need that in parentheses because it is the entire quantity that we want to multiply by. So we can really just leave our answer as that. If you want to rewrite it you're welcome to. You could have 6x minus 1. We could take that square root quantity to the denominator if you'd like. But otherwise simply leaving it as we had it is perfectly acceptable. So let's look at some more. So this is another one we will want to rewrite. Since we have a radical of a quantity raised to a power we can think of this as 3x squared plus 2 raised to the three fifths. And then once again it's very very similar to the earlier problems. So starting on the outside three fifths comes to the front. To keep the 3x squared plus 2 we need to subtract 1 from the exponent. So that gives us an exponent now of negative two fifths. So now we want to go inside and we're going to multiply by the derivative of the 3x squared plus 2. So that would be 6x. Again we can simplify it just to make it look nice. So we could say it's 18 over 5x. And we can leave that quantity as raised to a negative exponent that's perfectly fine. If you feel better bringing it to the denominator so as to rewrite it with a positive exponent that's fine as well. So as long as you remember a few guidelines the chain rule really isn't that hard. You want to remember one derivative at a time and just start on the outside and work your way in. Now this is another one that you looking at it as it is you might think to use the quotient rule which you very much could do here in this case. But let's talk about how you could rewrite it if we wanted to turn it into a chain rule problem. What we could do is bring that denominator quantity up to the numerator. And in doing so we now have it raised to the negative third exponent. So now it becomes essentially a classic chain rule problem. So we have the negative three exponent times the negative four in the front. That makes 12. Remember keep the 4x minus one, one derivative at a time. Take away one from the exponent and now we have negative four. Now we go inside and multiply by the derivative of the 4x minus one, which would be 4. We can multiply together the 12 and the 4 to make 48. And once again it's perfectly acceptable to leave this answer as having a negative exponent. However if you wish to bring that quantity to the denominator making it a positive four exponent that's fine as well. Now we have a couple more trig functions. So let's talk about this first one. We have sine squared of x. Now getting started now and being new to using the chain rule. You want to remember what sine squared of x means. It really means that we have sine of x that quantity squared. You might find it helpful to rewrite it like this the first few times while you're still getting used to using the chain rule. Now that it's rewritten like this it again becomes a classic chain rule problem. So taking one derivative at a time we're going to start with the outside squared function that comes to the front. Keep the sine of x and now it's essentially raised to the first power. If you find it helpful to put it there you can otherwise you can just kind of omit it that's fine. And now we need to multiply by the derivative of the inside function, derivative of sine, which of course is cosine. Now looking at that hopefully it hits you in the head. This is a double angle identity, which is sine of 2x. Again, double angle identities and knowing those definitely comes in handy. So let's look at number six, another trig one. This is a great example of a composite function. The inside function being the negative 2x to the fifth. The outside function being the cosine. Alright so we're going to start with by taking the derivative of the cosine part which we know is to be negative sine. Now remember though we take only one derivative at a time. So we're going to leave it as negative 2x to the fifth. Now we need to multiply that by the derivative of the negative 2x to the fifth. Which is negative 10x to the fourth. Alright so we can make it a little bit better. We have a negative times a negative. So that makes positive. We can throw this 10x to the front and we would have sine of negative 2x to the fifth. And that would be our answer. Let's look at a couple of other examples of trig equations. So once again the outside function is cosine and this one has three functions. We have a cosine, we have a sine and a 4x. So many embedded functions here but still we're going to start on the outside. Derivative of cosine is negative sine. And for now we keep the sine of 4x. Remember our rule, one derivative at a time. And now we're going to take the derivative of the sine part. Alright and we know derivative of sine is cosine. And we just keep the 4x, the argument 4x. Now we have one more to do. And now we have to do the derivative of the 4x, which is just 4. Alright so we can multiply it to just clean it up a little bit. We can put the 4 coefficient in the very front with the negative. It doesn't really matter whether the sine goes first or the cosine. Some people like to do cosine first, doesn't really matter. And this is how our final answer would look. Again you want to remember our guidelines. One derivative at a time working from the outside in. So our last example, yet another trig function. And this is another one we're going to rewrite because it's secant to the fourth. So think of this as secant of 2x squared. That entire quantity to the fourth power. Alright so really we have three embedded functions. The very outermost function being raised to the fourth power. And then we have the secant and we have the 2x squared. So we're going to start on the outside and work our way in. So the four comes to the front. We're going to keep the argument secant 2x squared. And we have to take one away from that exponent. So that's just the first part of the chain rule. Now we're going to go inside and do derivative of secant. Now remember derivative of secant is secant times tangent. We're going to keep the 2x squared argument as we do that. So we have secant 2x squared tangent 2x squared. Now finally we need the derivative of the 2x squared part which is simply 4x. Now if you like putting these in parentheses to offset them please do feel free. A lot of people find that helpful. So let's see what we can do to clean this up a little bit. We have a 4 times 4 to make 16. We can put that x in the very front with it. Notice how many secants we have. We seem to have four of them because we have that secant cubed but then we have times another secant. So what we really have is secant to the fourth of 2x squared. And then we have that tangent of 2x squared. Now if you prefer to write this part, if it just seems to help you out a little bit more. As like the quantity to the fourth power that's perfectly acceptable as well. So hopefully this gives you some really good idea of how to work with the chain rule in order to find derivatives of functions.


Hi, my name is Serena Kakely-Nickles. I'm a Developer Tools Product Manager and Distinguished Engineer here at Red Hat. Today, I'll be discussing what's coming next. Red Hat is working on a secure supply chain, public cloud service that will enable more secure, filled in deployment of applications in the cloud and help achieve faster time to value. Red Hat is also working on a developer portal focused on improving developer productivity. Let me dive into the developer portal offering. We are working in this open source community called Janus on an IDP internal developer platform based on the open source backstage project. We plan to bring that to market in six to 12 months. But like any roadmap, these are subject to change. Let's dig into some of the details associated with this offering. One area of focus is improving the experience for the platform engineers, also known as DevOps engineers at many companies who build and maintain the IDP. Our Red Hat offering will start with our opinionated set of plugins and will provide portal customization, including zero or low code configuration management and code customizations. These changes will decrease the cognitive load for your platform engineering teams running your IDP. The other main area of focus is providing a single pane of glass with access to all tools needed for a unified user experience via a web-based console. Specific benefits of the platform include so many things, reduction of individual systems for users to work, tailored experiences for many personas, aggregating all necessary data into a single view. For example, product managers who wanna be able to see the GitHub issues and pull requests associated with a specific service only need to go into the catalog, click their service, in the overview page they can do the GitHub repo, they can see technical documentation, they can see a list of all the GitHub issues or the pull requests associated with something. Now, this specific one is on GitHub. If you are utilizing BitBucket, GitLab, you can also satisfy those needs. It provides a consistent experience with applications that are deployed in a multi-cloud hybrid environment. It provides automation and standardization of environments and processes through golden path templates, easy onboarding, and last but not least, self-service. Golden paths play a significant role in our solution. Backstage offers a software templating capability, enabling platform engineers to give the developers a curated flow with guardrails and some ability to make choices. You take a look at this, this is your golden path templates are available on the create page. We're gonna be offering many opinionated golden path templates, but let's take an onboarding and node app for example, the Git repo will be created with sample code, the application will be managed by Argo using GitHub actions. This path ensures quick and easy onboarding of a new application aligned with the organization's needs and minutes. Application developers no longer need to understand the underlying tool chain and applications will be onboarded consistently and with security from their inception. And we're not stopping with golden paths. We're also curating a number of backstage plugins into our chain as community, which will also be product test. The topology plugin will enable developers to visualize the real-time deployment status of your services with a consistent experience, regardless of what flavor of Kubernetes that service is running on. Of course, for OpenShift opinionated experiences, developers can jump directly into OpenShift Dev spaces, enabling pair programming in the context of their service for the developer platform. But again, as I mentioned, for developers that are deploying to many flavors of Kubernetes, you're gonna have the same great experience, regardless. We'll also provide a key quote plugin which ingest key quote users and groups into the backstage catalog. That will provide tremendous value and benefits for organizations using multiple authentication providers, simplifying the ability to apply access RBAC to the backstage entities. We'll also have a Pareto's plugin which will provide user access to onboarding, migration, and upgrade workflows powered by a custom workflow engine. These workflows will resonate with TicketOps heavy organizations, not yet using GitOps. Our web terminal plugin will also allow developers easy access to a terminal UI experience within the console. The Polaris plugin will be able to provide visibility and traceability across the complete software delivery value stream and standard operational metrics to measure the workflow. Many of our Red Hat products will have plugins, including three scale cluster manager and more providing discoverability and access to all of those entities through the backstage catalog. Our Red Hat develop a platform solution helps scale the platform beyond a single Kubernetes, supporting the management of a multi-cloud platform while maintaining consistency across all of the software teams. Benefits of our solution included a decrease in developer friction, improved onboarding, and overall experience for its users. It unlocks developer productivity, thereby increasing developer velocity and deeply resonating the business. This community work in Janus is our path to Red Hat productization of our developer platform based on backstage. Stay tuned for our progress, the offering's final scope and availability dates are subject to change. Thank you.


About 1 in 4 women will eventually suffer from fibroids. Most commonly manifesting is excessively heavy periods in pain or pressure. Why might you feel pressure? Because you may be carrying around 26 pounds of tumors in your uterus. Fibroids are the most common reason women get hysterectomies, having their uterus removed completely, a major surgery associated with disability and death. But all surgery carries risk. The chances of dying within a month of surgery may only be about 1 in 1200, which makes it among our safest surgeries, safer than getting your gallbladder removed, for example. But of course you lose the ability to bear children and cost billions of dollars a year. Yet despite the high prevalence, significant pain and suffering and huge economic impact, relatively little is understood about the cause and disease process that lead to fibroid tumors. Avoiding atomic bomb blasts whenever you can is probably a good idea in terms of decreasing fibroid's risk. What about more easily modifiable risk factors? Well, alcohol consumption is associated with increased risk, particularly beer, and whenever you hear that, whenever you hear beer specifically, you think of the hormonal effects specific to beer, specifically the powerful phytoestrogen found in hops. Well, if that phytoestrogen is increasing fibroid's risk, what about the phytoestrogens in soy? Well, this was looked at in the Black Women's Health Study. Fibroids are two to three times more prevalent among African-American women, so they thought maybe dairy intake might be contributing to the disparity, given their higher levels of lactose intolerance. And indeed, dairy consumption was associated with reduced risk. They figured it was the calcium content, or maybe the vitamin D, but perhaps the women were drinking soy milk instead, and that was increasing their risk? No, soy intake was found to be unrelated. Same finding in a group of predominantly white women, though they did note a protective association with the amount of lignans flowing through their bodies. Lignans are another class of phytoestrogens found predominantly in flax seeds, but throughout the plant kingdom. Hard to make any generalizations about soy phytoestrogens, though, as soy consumption was rather low across the board. This was done in Washington state. If you go to Japan, where they have the highest per capita soy consumption in the world, you get a bigger spread of intakes. The researchers had previously found that soy intake was inversely associated with the risk of hysterectomy, meaning women who ate more soy had lower hysterectomy rates, suggesting a potentially protective effect of soy against uterine fibroids. Since that's the main reason women have their uterus removed, this would be consistent with in vitro studies that found that the main soy phytoestrogens seemed to inhibit fibroid tissue proliferation in a petri dish, but when they specifically looked, there was no evidence of a linked soy at all, protective or otherwise. The same was found in one study out of China. Fruit and vegetable intake was associated with significantly lower risk of fibroids, but soy food consumption was not. But a second study out of China published the same year, found a significant association between soy milk intake and fibroids. That's consistent with the three alarming case reports of women with symptomatic fibroids reporting an unusually high intake of soy milk, or regularly consuming excessive amounts of soy, or extremely high intakes of soy every day for decades. It's hard to take these cases seriously when nowhere do they actually say how much they were consuming. The only quantitative mention was 40 grams of isoflavones, which roughly translates to 400 gallons of soy milk every day. That would be excessive, but also impossible. The only way to know for sure is to put it to the test, not just a population study or anecdotal reports, but randomized women to two years of soy phytoestrogens, the amount found in three to five cups of soy milk a day, and no significant effect on the frequency or growth of fibroids was found.


All right, welcome. I'm Henri Mäkivirta, head of Schloss's year-round product node by Schloss. I'm honored to moderate this session with the absolute superstar Rahul Voora, the co-founder and CEO of Superhuman. Building a strong brand is crucial for attracting customers and setting your company for long-term success. But for early-stage startups with limited resources, the many choices can be overwhelming. Among options like community building, performance marketing, PR, the key question remains, which ones are the right for your business? Enter Superhuman, an email app adored to the point of being labeled evangelical. When you get an email signed with Centvia Superhuman, you know that this person is serious about their email game. It's a signal for speed and productivity. In our fireside chat, Rahul will share hands-on advice and best practices for you to shape a compelling brand identity for your startup. Within the hearts and minds of your customers is no small feat. But to hear, to help you with the journey, we have Rahul Voora. Let's jump into it. Why is building a brand important? And why is this something that founders in their very early stage should worry about? Building a brand is one of the most important things a founder can do. And that is because it is critical to growth. Now, that may seem odd when we talk about growth. We normally talk about things like content marketing, virality, SEO. We don't usually think about brand. But it is actually brand that powers all of those things. And I learned this firsthand after selling my last company to LinkedIn. I got to report to our head of growth who scaled LinkedIn from 20 million members to north of 250 million members. And I vividly remember my first one-on-one with him. I sat down and I said, Hey, can you tell me everything there is to know about virality? And he said, Rahul, virality doesn't exist. And I said, well, what about Facebook? What about Instagram, Twitter, even LinkedIn? And he said, well, the best viral features have a viral factor of around 0.2. Even at LinkedIn, our address book import had a viral factor of 0.4. Even Facebook had a viral factor of at most 0.7, and that was for less than a year. And so confused, I asked. Well, how did these companies reach scale? And he said, every consumer internet company that has reached a massive scale has done so based on word of mouth. It is the virality you can't see. It is brand. And as a startup, how do you build a brand? Well, it can be tempting to jump into names and fonts and logos and colors and so on. And those things are important. But you shouldn't start there. You should start with the foundation. And for me, the foundation boils down to three things. Number one, your ideal. Number two, your positioning. And number three, your brand attributes. Once you have those three, you can then jump into the other things. If we double click on those, so your ideal, your positioning and your brand attribute starting with your ideal, how do you define your ideal for the startup? So your ideal is not your slogan. It isn't your tagline. What it is is a short and memorable phrase that describes how your product or company makes the world a better place. And Agilvi, one of the most acclaimed ad agencies in the world, actually has a formula to help you figure this out. So your ideal is going to boil down to the intersection of two things. Number one, some kind of cultural tension. And number two, your product or your company at its best. So let's take the personal care brand Dove. In 2004, Dove found that only 4% of women consider themselves to be beautiful. And so the critical tension here is anxiety around appearance in an age where almost every image is digitally altered. And their solution is a real genuine to soap that actually provides real care. And so putting it together, you can see the ideal. Dove believes that the world would be a better place if women could feel great about their appearance. So to take my own company as an example, Superhuman, we make the fastest email experience in the world. And there's roughly a billion professionals in the world, and on average we spend three hours a day reading and writing email. That's three billion hours every single day or north of a trillion hours every single year. The cultural tension here is that workplace communication is very stressful and takes way too much time. And Superhuman at its best is software that helps you realize your potential. So putting those two things together, our ideal is that we believe the world would be a better place if professionals could end every day feeling happier, more productive, and closer to achieving their potential. Now people often wonder how long an ideal should last. How durable should it be? You should aim for about ten years. In other words, if the ideal would still seem worthy ten years from now, you've got it at the right level. All right, so we got the ideal from the example with Dom. How do you figure out the positioning? So when we were figuring out our positioning, we actually worked with Ariel Jackson, who was one of the first product marketing managers who launched Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, many of the great products, and she has this great article positioning your startup as vital here's how to nail it. In that article she advises that you use a formula. It goes something like this. For your target market who has a particular need, your product has this benefit, and unlike competing alternatives, your product has this key differentiation. In the article she gives an example of Harley Davidson. So the example is for macho guys and macho wannabes who live in an era of decreasing personal freedom and who want to join a gang of cowboys, Harley Davidson is the only motorcycle manufacturer that makes big, loud motorcycles. It's a great example. So we met up with Ariel, who is amazing by the way. We did some further reading, especially the book positioning the battle for your mind was very useful, and we started to ask ourselves these questions. Are we the Ford of email? No. Are we the Mercedes of email? Well, kind of. Are we the Tesla of email? Well now we're guessing there. And with that in 2015, we came up with our first position. And it goes like this. For founders and CEOs of high growth technology companies who feel like their work is mostly email, superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. Unlike Gmail, superhuman is meticulously crafted and everything happens in 100 milliseconds or less. You might be thinking, that is ridiculously niche. We're talking founders and CEOs of high tech companies and even then only those that use Gmail. Isn't that market tiny? And the answer is, of course, yes. But you want your position to start narrow so you can speak directly to the people for whom your product is best for. Then as you expand the market, you can widen your position over time. Today our position would be more like this. For high performing professionals on high performing teams, superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. They respond faster to what matters most and save hours every single week. Superhuman is what Gmail and Outlook could be if they were built today instead of decades ago. So that's our position today. All right. So we got the idea with an example with Dao and an example with Tesla. We figured out the positioning. How do you figure out the brand attributes? So again, it can be tempting at this point now that you have the ideal and the positioning to jump into what is the company name, what are our fonts and so on, but don't do that.  These are your brand attributes and I've come across three ways to do this super effectively. Number one is emotions. How should your brand make people feel? And personally, I like to use an emotion wheel to do this so you avoid the obvious emotions. And in my opinion, the best emotion wheel is by the Hunter Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. They have over a hundred nuanced emotions that you can pick from. The second way is personality. If you were to meet your brand at a party, what would their personality be like? It can be helpful to think of a well-known celebrity and try and describe them. And then the third way is empty spaces. In your category of product, your industry, what is an attribute that isn't used? Because those things will be more memorable and therefore more powerful. So in 2015, we ran this exercise for Superhuman and we came up with the following five brand attributes. Number one, Zen. Superhuman should feel minimal and calm. Number two, elegant. It should feel thoughtfully designed. Number three, premium. It should feel like you're using a really well-made product. Number four, powerful. You should feel like Superhuman gives you superpowers and number five, exclusive. Using Superhuman should feel special because not everybody has it. Superhuman will last for 10 years, but your positioning should last around 18 months, so too should your brand attributes. And over time, as we've expanded our market, we've had to redefine our brand attributes. Exclusive is no longer helpful. We're now many years on from that. So recently we revisited these and we came up with the following four. Number one, remarkable. Superhuman should be striking, worthy of attention and literally cause conversation. Number two, delightful. Superhuman should elicit nuanced emotion across joy, love and surprise. Number three, still powerful. Superhuman should still feel like it gives you superpowers and number four, avant garde. Superhuman shouldn't follow trends. It should set trends. So those are our four today. All right. You were talking about this wheel. How can people find the wheel? What was the name of the wheel? The Hunter Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. So that's JUNTO. If you Google that, you will easily find the wheel. And then there's a separate talk I've done with A16Z which is how to build software like it's a game. I actually walk through using the emotional wheel in quite some detail. All right. So we now have the ideal, the positioning and the brand attributes. Is this where you came up with the name? How did you came up with the name Superhuman for Superhuman? Yes, absolutely. So this is the best point to come up with your name. And you basically have two choices. You can either pick a name that has relevance to your position and your brand attributes. Or you can pick a name that maybe it has some other meaning but it doesn't yet have any relevance to those two things. We chose path number one. Although Superhuman doesn't speak to email or productivity, it does resonate a lot with the position and the brand attributes that I just outlined. Now once you have a name, you want to consider it through multiple lenses. The first lens is, well, how easy is it to spell? Superhuman is obviously very easy to spell. The second lens is what does the name look like, especially when somebody new to the brand will first see it. Now for Superhuman, that's usually our sent via Superhuman viral signature. And that was top of mind for me when picking the name. Sent via Superhuman sounds intriguing, exciting, aspirational. You're much more likely to click that than something boring like sent with mail. So you have how easy is it to spell? You have how does it look like when it's first seen? Then of course, is the domain name available? Is the trademark available? And what about the social handles? And for us, that was much trickier. The domain was not available and neither were most of the social handles. Yeah, I could imagine that if the domain name is not available and it's super something, superwoman, superman, superhuman. How did you acquire the domain if it was not available? Well, it was tough. And like I said, it wasn't available. And actually even worse, it was owned by a professional domain squatter. But the good news is that it wasn't actually in use for anything at the time. So I felt like I had a fighting chance. Now if you're trying to buy a premium domain like that, the most important thing is that you do not reach out as yourself. Instead, find a domain broker and find a very good one. If you don't have a good one, ask your founder friends until you get an intro to a good one. Now what a good domain broker will do is they'll figure out who the owner is, they'll look at their recent transactions, they'll see if they have friends in common and if necessary, they'll create fake personas so that it isn't obviously you or them trying to buy the domain. This may sound crazy, but buying a premium domain is pretty brutal. Superhuman ended up costing us around $175,000. And that may seem like a huge amount, and it was because at the time I'd only raised $750,000 for the company. So this was more than 20% of all the money we had and actually the very first dollars I spent from the company. That sounds like insane. It certainly was a decision, but I was very confident in the decision because I knew how important a great brand would be to at the time investors and then eventually customers and then eventually as we were scaling the company future employees. So we negotiated the deal and best of all I found a way to make it feel nearly free. See it turns out the owner didn't want upfront cash. What they wanted was cash flow. So we ended up negotiating a seven year zero interest at least to own deal, which is roughly if you do the math, about $1,700 per month. Two years later we raised a full seed round and then a year after that we raised our series A. So it ended up feeling nearly free. And what was the story behind your social handles? Were they available? How did you acquire them? Well they were all almost unavailable. Obviously we wanted superhuman as our handle, but that wasn't available, so we chose superhuman co as in the superhuman company on almost every platform we could. It's not fantastic, but it got us off the ground. We then went back to our position and we asked, well, we're trying to get to founders and CEOs of high tech companies where are they? They're obviously all on Twitter, that's the best place to be. And at the time Twitter had a policy where if the username had not logged in for a long period of time and also if you had the trademark you could file a claim. And so we started the long process of getting the superhuman trademark. A few years later we had it, we filed the claim, but it turns out that wasn't enough. It didn't automatically happen. We then had to network our way into Twitter, find our way to the chief technology officer who fortunately happens to be an avid user of superhuman. He then pulls some strings internally and we were able to get the superhuman Twitter handle. But from start to finish, that was a three to four year journey. So you put a lot of effort into the domains and the handles. I guess when there's a superlative and a word super, it needs to be spot on. That's right. All right, moving on to the content side of branding. Superhuman is well known for the product market fit engine. How does building a brand relate to finding a product market fit? Well, you have to do these things at the same time. I often hear founders say, well, I want to focus on product first or I want to get to products market fit first, then I'll worry about the brand. That's actually a bad idea for four reasons. First of all, if you have a strong brand, that can actually help you with products market fit. It can put you in front of the right people in the right market. Second, if you have a weak brand, then it can become a blind spot. Let's say you pick a company name that isn't great, it's just fine. Well, over time, because you're seeing it every single day, you'll forget that it's not great and just fine. And then eventually, you may even become attached to this not great company name. The third thing is, brand assets actually become more expensive over time. Let's say I wanted to buy superhuman.com today. Could I buy it for $175,000? Absolutely not. Because there exists a company, Superhuman, that is well known and has publicly raised over $100 million. Even if I could convince the owner that I wasn't affiliated with the company, the very fact that the company exists massively increases the price. And then number four, actually searching for products market fits can help inform the brand. We're not here today to talk about products market fits, but as a founder, it's one of the most important things that we need to do, and if this is something that you're doing, check out the superhuman products market fit engine, because it gives you an algorithm, a way to define products market fits, a metric to measure it, and a methodology to increase it. Now as part of this algorithm, you end up surveying your users and you ask the question, who do you think this product is best for? And here's the magic. It turns out happy customers will always describe themselves using the words that matter most to them. You can then turn those words into your position and into your brand attributes. So it turns out to be a very cyclical thing. In other words, do your brand early and do it well. All right, so we've now defined the brand. How do you actually grow it? Well, you grow the brand the same way you grow a company. Pick three, four, maybe five channels that you can do well and which compound on one another. And the best book, by the way, that I've found on this topic is Traction by Gabrielle Weinberg and Justin Mez. In Traction, they define over 23 different channels for you to consider. At the start of Superhuman, we all read this book and we wrote down every idea we had per channel and we scored each channel based on confidence and cost. That's how we got to our first four channels, which were press, influencers, thought leadership and virality. And once we knew what the channels were, we spent roughly half of our time working on the products and then the other half of our time on the channels themselves. All right, so press, thought leadership, influencers and virality. How did you approach press? Well, I get asked this question all the time. How can a startup with few resources achieve press? Well, the answer is very simple. Inject yourself into the news cycle. Eventually, something interesting will happen in your space. Attach yourself to it. For us, this first happened in 2016. Mailbox had acquired, sorry, Dropbox had acquired Mailbox, an email app for $100 million and then shut it down a short while later. In the meantime, I'd sold my last company to LinkedIn, also an email company, and it survived the acquisition by 10 years. So I felt very qualified to write an article on how to make that kind of an acquisition successful. I wrote the article, we syndicated it to qz.com and a top medium publication, and that drove the first tens of thousands of visitors to our site, which gave us the first several thousand signups. Was that like a one-hit wonder, or did you do multiple injections to the news cycle? Was there like a PR agency involved in this, or how did you go about it? There was no PR agency involved in this. I think we were perhaps five people. And yep, that was a one-hit wonder for that particular news cycle. But there are always going to be news cycles. I did the same thing with, for example, when COVID hit and we were heading into a very sharp recession. I wrote an article for Angel List on how to run your startup during a recession. Now, when it comes to PR agencies, it took us a while to hire one. We didn't hire one until after our series B because we decided that media broadcast, i.e. television, was going to be a key part of what we were doing. That's when you should hire a PR agency. And with that, we got onto CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, and a few other media channels. But since then, it's no longer an important part of our media strategy, and so now we don't have a PR agency. Instead, we have a single in-house head of communications who runs all of our communication strategy. All right. Then you mentioned thought leadership. How should you approach this? And if the founder doesn't want to do the thought leadership, how should the startup approach this? How do you approach thought leadership? Well, if you don't want to do it, I don't know what to tell you, it's one of the easiest things you can possibly do. I'll give you our example. In our case, we wanted to create something that every single founder and every single CEO and actually even beyond that, most people in technology should be aware of and ideally it's required reading. So I thought, well, what if I could push the state of the art on product market fit? It's something every single startup has to figure out and actually there's not that much that's been written about it. So I set out to write the best article I possibly could and it turned out way more effective than I ever thought it would. This article, the Superhuman Products Market Fit Engine, is now the most shared article on first round review and it is the default way that founders measure and improve products market fit. So simply ask yourself, what is your equivalent of that article? What is required reading for your ideal target market? All right. If you'd have to pick either like influencers or like trying to win the lottery on virality, like which one would you go for and how would you approach that? So influencers takes an incredible amount of work but for a brand like Superhuman, it's immensely powerful. We wanted to win the hearts of minds of Silicon Valley and our belief was if we could identify influential entrepreneurs and thought leaders and then one-on-one onboard them onto Superhuman, not only are they more likely to love the product but they'll help spread the word and it turns out that it was remarkably effective, it absolutely worked and for that reason we extended the one-on-one onboarding to almost everyone, whether you were influential or not. However, if I were to choose, I would choose virality even though the two synergize really well and the reason is virality is one of the few channels that is scalable. Unlike influencer marketing where you're putting in the time or performance marketing where you're paying dollars, virality actually works for free. Now the caveat is not every product is a good fit for virality. Superhuman is the perfect fit because we make a communication product. Almost all of our users corresponds with hundreds, if not thousands of other people and they send out emails that often include the viral signature sent via Superhuman and that is still shockingly effective. It ruins the number one driver of traffic to our website and is responsible for north of 40% of all of our site visits. That's a great topic to go deeper into after the Q&A, after the session. Final question. What would be the one thing that you would like the audience to remember from this chat? If I could pick one thing for everyone here to remember, I would say it's this. Remember that conversation I had with my boss, the head of growth at LinkedIn. This is now 10 years ago. Word of mouth. Every consumer app or company that has ever reached massive internet scale got there off the back of word of mouth. It's the virality that you cannot see. It is ultimately a brand. Word of mouth. Thank you so much Rahola. It's been amazing. Thank you.


One piece, the classic navy blazer and three ways to wear it for spring. Look number one is simple, fresh and classic. I've got the navy blazer here paired with a denim shirt which is one way that I'm dressing it down. And then the other way of course is with the white jeans. These are by J Crew in the 484 fit. I like white jeans a lot as a casual alternative to something like chinos. They've got a sporty vibe but still feel dressier than even a lighter colored pair of jeans. As I like to do when I wear loafers in the spring with a look like this, go ahead and discuss socks versus no socks in the comments. I do a single roll on the hem of the jeans.  For look number two, I'm keeping it relatively classic and very simple.  You could easily add a tie to this look to dress it up a bit but I wanted to keep it a little more casual so I decided not to wear the tie. Anytime I have a business casual look like this, I do like to wear loafers over lace up shoes. I think it just kind of plays into the overall more casual feel. And these particular penny loafers are by Alan Edmonds. And then I just went with a simple white pocket square to finish it off. Look number three now, can you tell him feeling the blazer and jeans thing lately? You know, that's really one of the great parts about owning a classic navy blazer like this because it is one of those jackets that's very easy to style with jeans. I decided to go a little seasonal here with the pink shirt to add in a little color and make it a little more interesting. The light jeans I'm wearing again are by J Crew, the 484 fit with the roll on the hem and some common projects sneakers. Breaking out one of my favorite warm weather watches, the Tag Heuer Carrera that was the rake magazine's first limited edition. And then you know if you want you could add a hat to make it just a little sportier. This particular navy blazer is brand new in the shop and right now I want to walk you through all of its details. So I really wanted to be able to offer a super classic navy blazer because there's just so much that you can do with it. We chose to make it in a Rata Super 110's traceable wool. It's a lovely four season fabric with wonderful texture. To be as classic as possible, it's two button with a notch lapel and flap pockets and you can see the pig stitching that it has on the lapel as well as on the flap. It's a half canvas construction with a double vent and tone on tone lining and then we went with a classic brass button for that very traditional feel with working button holes on the sleeve. As styled here it is the most classic iteration of a navy blazer though of course any of these details can be completely customized if you like. To check out this jacket as well as some other spring pieces we've recently added to the shop click on the link right over there and if you have any questions let me know in the comments.


And tell myself I can make it on my own slowly Twist and I'm turning, I'm crashing and I'm burning So reach out your hand I swear to the n***a scheme, plug in fellas Don't want you to spread your wings and do better I've been chasing out the dreams in a shadow And I know after me, she'll do better Everything ain't what it seems, I know better I've been chasing out the dreams in a shadow And I know after me, she'll do better Cause I know after me, she'll do better I've been grinding since forever Waiting on my moment like forever Memo I've been broken since forever I know I need to get my shit together Get back up, I know I gotta pull myself together I know after me, she'll do better Looking in the stars for forever Hoping to see my fans cause there's some things I wanna tell them They're one for my true support and they could just tell me what you think Seen like everything got lost, disappear before I blame Damn, man I need a drink Taste your dream, make sure you stay in your lane Make sure you stay in your lane In the skin, plug in feathers Don't want you to spread your wings and do better I've been chasing out the dreams in a shadow And I know after me, she'll do better Everything ain't what it seems, I know better I've been chasing out the dreams in a shadow And it's all I wanna leave, I'ma let her Cause I know after me, she'll do better Lying to myself saying, I can make it on my own I just don't wanna be lonely Nobody wanna be lonely She don't say she love me but she don't Saying she'll stick around when she want Man, don't know why I'm always second guessing Don't know why they sound so down to present And I'm still always getting wet Waste my time trying to prove my loyalty to these niggas Waste my time trying to prove my loyalty to these women Waste my time, now waste your time cause I swear These niggas skin, plug in feathers Don't want you to spread your wings and do better I've been chasing out the dreams in a shadow And I know after me, she'll do better I've been chasing out the dreams in a shadow And it's all I wanna leave, I'ma let her Cause I know after me, she'll do better