Earth Day with Jane Goodall: A Life, A Legacy, A Call to Act

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0:48Guy at GuyKawasaki.com This is Remarkable People. A lot of these women, again, because they have more economic agency than they ever have, are really saying, I'm not going to play that game. I'm just going to play my own game here on a parallel path. That's what Taylor is doing. That's what Beyonce is doing in some sense. That's what Reese Witherspoon did when she started up Hello Sunshine production companies and on and on. And so that, I think, is a very unique and fun trend to watch in terms of what's happening with women's economic agency today.

1:28Good morning, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast, and we have found another remarkable person for you. Her name is Misty Hagenes, and we're going to talk about, of all things, Taylor Swift and her impact on economics, and really, I think her impact on society beyond the music sense. So Misty is an economist and she's a professor at the University of Kansas. And I would have said, not that I know that much about Taylor Swift, but her book is fascinating. It's called Swiftinomics. And she's actually created a course called Swiftinomics 101. And then she created another course called the Economics of Taylor Swift.

2:21Have you ever met her face to face and said, I'm the professor that is like documenting your life? I haven't, but it's one of my goals in life. If she listens to this podcast, she's been calling you right up and flying you out to wherever she is and all that. So this is her book and she has created this curriculum and it is a very fascinating topic. So welcome to the show, Misty. Thank you for having me. Yes. Excited to be here. So first of all, just as a basis, tell us what is Swiftinomics? Yeah, so Swiftinomics for me is really an effort to recognize and value all of the economic contributions that women make in society, including Taylor Swift.

3:08And it is about understanding the way in which those contributions impact economic growth and development, equity and the like. would you distinguish Swiftinomics from the Swift Effect? Yeah, there's a documentary called The Swift Effect. I participated in that, so I'm interviewed in that. It's on the Peacock Plus. And the Swift Effect really is focusing on the economic contributions of Taylor Swift, but without really focusing in on why she is unique based on her gender. And Swiftinomics really at the core is our ability to understand the economic success of Taylor Swift and women throughout our economy that is specifically tied to their gender and how they maneuver in their careers, given the fact that they're women.

3:59Yeah. I want to make it perfectly clear to the listeners that if they hear the word Swiftinomics, they may think, oh, this is about Taylor Swift and how she has a concert and she makes billions of dollars and then she sells records and she sells t-shirts and just the economic impact. But this book is way beyond that. It is about the sociological impact. It is about the mental impact, the psychological impact. This is way more than just, yeah, she's a multi-billion dollar business. So let's just make that clear to everybody. So they buy the book. I think the thing that's interesting about Taylor is the fact that she has done what she has done, given the fact that she's a millennial woman.

4:40And is she kind of like in the words of Seth Godin, she's a purple cow or she's a black swan or is she indicative of an overall trend? I think it's a really important question to ask. And I'll say a couple of things about that. One is, I think when we look at Taylor, there is a tendency to say nobody could replicate that. She's the first one to do it just because her fame is so hard hitting and fast. But there are other women in the music industry who are prior generations of Taylor before there was social media, before there was like this rampant, accelerated speed with which we get information out into the world.

5:20You could look at Dolly Parton as an example. Madonna would be another example. I think what she does is replicable. But I think the thing that makes her really unique is that she grew up in an age where women were told they should go to college for career purposes instead of going to college to find a spouse. Millennial women were delayed marriage, delayed having children. And so they spent their entire 20s in this economic independence space where they just became avid consumers of things that give them joy. And Taylor was on the cusp of that, ready to give it to them. In that sense she's unique.

5:58She really fell into a space where there was like rabid demand for content and she really brought it to the table. But I do think that there are lessons to be learned from her that are replicable for other folks. So would you say that she is redefining the economic system that was really designed by and for men? I would say that she has given up on that system and just designed her own system. And in that sense, she's not alone. And I talk about this in the book, and I talk about other women in other spaces who have done the same thing. And so it's very common today that you see women losing patience with the patriarchy in some sense, losing patience and trying to fit in how they want to fit in into systems that were built really for the ease of men.

6:47At least that's how I describe it. And a lot of these women, again, because they have more economic agency than they ever have, are really saying, I'm not going to play that game. I'm just going to play my own game here on a parallel path. That's what Taylor is doing. That's what Beyonce is doing in some sense. That's what Reese Witherspoon did when she started up Hello Sunshine production companies, and on and on. And so that I think is a very unique and fun trend to watch in terms of what's happening with women's economic agency today. Would you say that Caitlin Clark is the Taylor Swift of basketball in that sense?

7:23Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yes. And I love what's going on with women in sports today. It is so fun to watch. Yeah. Sometimes I just lose hours and I just go from one Caitlin Clark highlight to the next. It's so fun. And I really love to see women who are deciding that they're not going to be told where their place belongs and they're just going to live in the joy of the creativity and the talent that they have. It's so fun to watch. The teammate of Caitlin Clark, and I cannot remember her name, the blonde woman, the one that is like the enforcer for Caitlin. I love her even more. She just kicks ass.

8:06I just love her. All right. So do you think this is evidence of cultural power, not just economic power? Which comes first? You get cultural power so you can achieve economic power, or you get economic power so you can achieve cultural power. This is a fascinating question. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? The way that I think about this is really in a circular motion. Maybe think about a tornado. At the bottom of the tornado, it's really small and tight, and then it keeps on winding around. And as it goes up, it gets wider and bigger, meaning taking up more space, more influence. And I think women don't get cultural clout and cultural equality without having economic power.

8:51But I also think women acquire more economic power the more and more they get social and structural clout. And so it's like this two steps forward, one step back. We see women advancing. We see challenges that look like we're being set back. and then women figure out an alternative way to get around those challenges. And women have been doing this the entire existence of humanity, as far as I know. It's one of the ways in which women thrive economically. And we don't document it in history books. We don't see it blatantly in dominant press and dominant media, but it's there. And it behooves people to pay attention to it, because if not, you might get a little bit shocked or surprised when something unexpected happens.

9:39Well, in your book, you even point out that it's not the contribution of women is not even really appreciated in your own field of economics, right? Yeah, completely. So this book is generally about women and the economy and looking at the modern woman. One of the reasons why I wanted to write the book is because I feel like my field of economics really struggles to understand what's going on with women today. And part of the The reason why it struggles is because the field is dominated by men who have perceptions about women, but also even the women in my field have traditional perceptions about the roles that women play that blinds them from really understanding modern trends.

10:19So it's an issue. And just like Taylor is in this music industry that's very male dominated and misogynistic, I would argue that economics tends to be the same as well. Well, I have to tell you that as I was reading your book, I came very close to rolling on the floor and laughing out loud when you told the story of Adam Smith and how Adam doesn't quite get the big picture with his mother. So anyway, before I butcher the story anymore, tell that great Adam Smith story. Yeah, there's a book called Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner. So Adam Smith was an economist in England. He developed this theory that became very popular in modern economics, neoclassical economics called the invisible hand.

11:16And the invisible hand theory is basically states that we don't need government intervention for the butcher to prepare the meat to sell. We don't need government intervention to make the baker bake bread. That these people, you know, independently out of selfish motivation will do these activities and sell their product because that'll give them resources and income to survive. So it was just this whole argument that the market in and of itself, when it functions at efficient levels and doesn't really need a lot of intervention and we should not intervene with policy. But the point that this book is making and the point that I bring up in Swiftinomics is that Adam Smith really never documented the economic activities of women.

12:04So he only focused on what's the economic activities going on outside the home, downtown, or where the boats are being made, or all of this activity outside of our homes that we can quantify because somebody pays a price for the product that you make. and he really just ignored the household. And the problem with that is while Adam was off on his own motivation, not forced by government to write these economic models, he was able to do that because there was somebody taking care of him. There was somebody who was cooking his meals, washing his clothes, making his bed. And it turns out that was Adam's mom.

12:43And so Adam never married and didn't have kids and he lived with his mom until she passed away. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about this theory of the market's going to clear, people are going to be self-invested to do things that aren't motivating for them, is that whether it's the state or whether it's your family, there's always somebody, there's always something that needs to be there to help make sure that humans don't die and have food and all of these things. And it behooves us. It's really short-sighted not to really highlight those aspects of the economy when we're talking about the economy.

13:25You're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. So listen, I love the example of Taylor Swift. I love the example of Caitlin Clark and Beyonce and Dolly Parton and all that. And there's a line in your book where you say that you believe that the day of a woman being the president of the United States is inevitable. I just want to revisit that because obviously Hillary didn't win, Kamala didn't win. Do you still think it's inevitable? When will it happen? Why hasn't it happened yet? I'll answer the last question first is why it hasn't happened yet. I think as a society, we are very uncomfortable with veering from traditional dynamics of power.

14:08And society, I think both men and women are most comfortable when you have your typical older man, usually white, at the head of making really important decisions that affect our economy and affect all of us. You know, this will sidetrack us completely, but like whether we go to war, all of these things. And I think people just inherently, there's a subconscious, call it implicit bias, call it whatever you want, but there's a subconscious space where people are really uncomfortable with women leading. And we don't like to talk about it. We don't like to admit it. But Hillary, she was one of the most qualified candidates ever.

14:49It was the most qualified person against the least qualified person. Yeah. Yeah. And there you go. And that's where you see these gendered expectations we have in society. And one way that we keep this dynamic of power in place is that we start rumors about the people we're threatened by. And so I think with Hillary, she faced a lot of people would say constantly, I just don't like her. I don't know what it is. I just don't like her. And it's this idea that we're uncomfortable with competent women just generally. And the other example I like to use is Janet Yellen. So this is from my field of economics.

15:30She was Fed chair and Jay's doing like fabulous. I mean, he's been an amazing chair of the Fed, but there was really no reason to take Janet out and replace her with her second in command because she was beyond competent. She even had a better CV or resume than Jay did at the time. And so it just always happens. And And at some point, and this is also why I wrote this book, because I want us to get out of that trigger mode and this circular talk that we do with each other about feeling just something in our gut that makes us really concerned about having a female leader to the extent that we're willing to bring in one of probably the most unqualified or questionable resume ever to exist as a leader.

16:18And I'm really hopeful. and I want us to focus on the positive, but also I want us to really start talking about some of these societal things that we do that really shoot all of us in the foot at the end of the day. If you were just objective, I think you'd have to say that we have given men the opportunity to run the world for about 2 ,000 years and they pretty much blown it. So why don't we just let women run everything for a while and see what happens? literally what is the downside of that there is no downside so yeah just to follow up on that i think if you look at women like taylor she said i'm just gonna run it myself anyway whether you want me to or not i'm just gonna create my own systems and be my own boss and do the things the way i want to do them it's been working for her so far i would vote for her for president yeah i would too all right so since we're dissing on men let's just continue in that theme what exactly is the economic man what is this concept yeah and i'll just say i'm not dissing on men i'm dissing on the patriarchy it's the patriarchy okay which can travel through both men and women but but yeah what is this concept of economic man so it is again something that's that comes up in my field.

17:46And it started with wanting to describe just a very generic economic agent, quote unquote, who was trepsing around in the world and making economic decisions. And that was just a general way of trying to understand economics from a person perspective. And then that translated into people started calling this generic human agent, they started calling it economic man. And then that got, I think it was like in the 90s or something that got like super criticized because there was an assumption that the agent would be a man. And so I just, I kind of riff on that a little bit in the book because it's again, this idea that when we're not clear about what our subconscious is telling us, we kind of default to these certain assumptions.

18:35And it might not sound like a big deal to be in an economics class and have somebody talking about whether economic man is going to make widgets or coffee filters. I don't know. But it does matter. And if you want to be in a more inclusive discipline, again, it behooves you to really think hard about the implicit stuff and make economics more attractive to other communities. And talking about the economic man and his widgets just doesn't do it. So is the economic man as a concept, is it neutral and it's all about optimization and widgets and all that kind of stuff? Or has it now crossed over and it's negative that it's the economic man doesn't consider the contribution of women, the role of women?

19:25Is all of that loaded into this concept at this point? I don't think so. So if you were to ask the top economists in my field, which, by the way, are like mostly men, they would tell you they would tell you that economic man, it's a neutral concept. It's not meant to be a man. And they would dismiss any of the kind of complaints that, you know, whether or not this economic agent is a man or woman would mean that they would make different choices. but obviously they would make different choices. We grow up, and this is again, one of the critiques I have in my field is we grow up in an environment that is very structured towards the way that humans in that environment see themselves and the people around them and their families and their communities and their jobs and the expectations they have on all of those different entities.

20:19And those expectations influence how we treat each other. They influence what we expect of person A versus person B. And so it's really impossible to say that there's some economic agent A who's just gender neutral that's living in a reality that's not reality. And I think when we do that with our economic models, it doesn't help anyone. I don't want to sound too negative and too pessimistic, but that's kind of like asking an alcoholic to run a liquor store. I don't see it as a neutral term. So, agree. But, you know, in my book, I talk about economic man. I criticize economic man. And then I talk about economic woman, who clearly is superior.

21:03Just kidding. But, you know, economic woman. Come out of your shell, Misty. Come out of here. Just let it rip. What's going to happen? You're already tenured. I guess that's true. Economic woman really understands the invisible labor and the way and the value and the necessity of community and social policy. And she understands it because if it's not there, she ends up being, you know, quote unquote, worse off. She ends up not getting as far as economic man gets, because she is expected to pick up all of that invisible labor. I think the concept, I'll just stop there, but I would vote for economic woman in a presidential race.

21:51Let me tell you that. Yeah. What I don't understand is based on my past in business, the gating item of most organizations is talent. And it would seem to me that it would be very stupid and suboptimal and against the arguments of an economic man that you would not treat women equally and hire purely on merit because it's so hard to find good people. Why would you wipe off half of the candidates? I do not understand that. I think that happens because choices are hard and humans, even though we think of ourselves as very complex, we're actually very simple beings. And so if you've got a candidate pool of 100 candidates and you're trying to figure out which ones are the most talented, maybe part of the talent that you're looking for comes from characteristics that aren't really observable on the surface.

22:50Maybe it's easier then to just say, okay, I'm going to shrink this pool by focusing on characteristics that I have experienced in the past who have had the talent. And so maybe that's people who look like me, have my same gender, my same skin tone, my same hair color, whatever it is. And I think that is a part of the human brain when we don't stop and actually think. And I think that's why that happens. But it's true. We shoot ourselves in the foot all the time because we don't figure out ways to really hire based on pure talent. And we don't figure out ways to believe in women's ability in the same way that we believe in men's ability.

23:37I swear, if you took resumes, and I don't know if you need to wipe out the name so you can't guess the gender, but I swear, if you just put the resumes into an LLM and said, pick the candidates that I should interview, the LLM would do a better job than most males. I swear to God, I bet you that all day long that they would make a better choice. Maybe not grok, but any other LLM. I might tend to agree with you with the cautionary tale that LLM is also going to be based on information from the past where there was a larger tendency to hire off a male. So take out the surname, take out the first name, whatever.

24:19But all right. So you introduced two concepts that I want to get an explanation of. The first is mastermind. What is masterminding? Yeah. Okay. So there are two concepts. and at the end, if you want to ask me whether, what are the three characteristics that I think Taylor has that really give her a lot of success and the rest of us could do, I'm happy to tell you. All right. Mastermind is one of them. So masterminding, I love it. I love it because it's a glass half full type of mentality and Taylor's full of glass half full. I don't know who bubble wrapped her as a child, but like she is so resilient and masterminding is when you have a barrier in front of you.

24:59Okay, let's go back to the labor market again and talk about bosses and employees. So I'm an employee and my boss really gives me evaluations that are just average. I really want to excel and become a leader and a manager and a boss in this space. But my current boss has shown no evidence that he or she thinks I have the talent to do that. And I'm not going to get to where I want to go, where I believe I should be able to go if my boss is still my boss in the long run and because my boss doesn't believe in me. So what are your options? Get super grumpy and just become miserable and complain all the time at work, which I think we've all been in that space once or twice.

25:42But other options are recognize really quickly that your boss isn't going to be your path to where you want to get to go. And then think about what are alternative paths that I can use to get to that leadership role I want. Maybe I look for a mentor. Maybe I start applying for other jobs so that I do have a boss who believes in me and will invest in me and develop me. And it's through those other mechanisms that you're going to get to where you want to go. And so masterminding is you have a long-term goal. You have some obstacles in front of you. And it's not about eliminating those obstacles, but it's about how you're going to work around those obstacles so they don't hold you back.

26:22And I think Taylor is the queen of this. I think the whole episode with her first six albums being bought away from her and her doing re-records of all at least four of the six are out now, re-records. Supposedly debut is coming later this year, which would be really cool. But she re-recorded those and called them Taylor's version and she added in some songs from the vault and she did some really interesting concepts there. She got her fans to follow her with the Taylor's versions. She got radio stations to play the songs from Taylor's versions, basically devaluing her initial catalog of her first six albums.

27:00And then she went on the Eros tour and made a boatload of money. I'm happy to talk about the dynamics of the things she did there that were really unique. But after that, she was able to go to the organization that owned her first six albums, which had been sold along the way. she sent her mom and her brother to ask what can we do here to make a deal and for Taylor it wasn't about the money it was about her legacy and she wanted to be able to give that catalog to her kids the master of masterminds right she ends up buying back her first six albums from her cat now she owns her entire catalog and that happened over the span of probably at least a decade but if you would have asked her right when her first six albums were sold to Scooter Braun like oh, you know, are you just going to sit here and sulk and be upset about it?

27:51Or are you going to put your best mastermind hat on and figure out a path? And she didn't know in that precise moment that she would be able to ever buy them back. But she worked really hard to set up pathways that would allow her to get closer to it until she finally did it. Queen of masterminding. And we all have that ability within us, right? I feel like I haven't convinced you of the mastermind. No, no, no, no, no. I'm trying to get all three. Okay. Okay. Reinvention. Okay. Reinvention is in the moment. So I define reinvention as human existence. Okay. And in my book, I'm focused on this really heavily for women because lots of times, again, the workplace and the society outside of our homes designed for the ease of men and people with lots of care privilege or people who able-bodied adults who have other people caring for them, taking care of the care needs.

28:47Adam Smith, he had his mom, so he had care privilege. And so reinvention is essentially what we do when we have to hop from basically one era to another. I studied social work and Spanish, and then I ended up doing my PhD in economics. That's a reinvention. Taylor moved from country music into pop with her album 1989, reinvention. And the thing that I think is important to know about reinvention is that everybody does it. So we did a survey at the University of Kansas, nationally representative, 90 % of men and women reinvent in their career at least once. Still nine out of 10 of us do it. The gender difference is that women reinvent more and they reinvent more because of family, motherhood etc so the point is own your reinvention don't feel shamed like oh i've failed now i've got to go start this other thing just lean into it and own it so part of your mastermind could be reinvention yes absolutely in fact it probably most likely always is yeah okay and what's number three of taylor swift authenticity so i think lots of times we struggle to figure out what am I supposed to do when I become an adult?

30:04What am I supposed to do as I move forward in life? And I think the surprising thing that many of us don't realize is that it's in us all along. When I think about, do I want to do A or B? Which of those is more exciting for me to think about doing A or doing B? If it's A, then A is the path that you should take. And that's being authentic with yourself. Taylor has always been really authentic with herself. She's done things at high risk within the music industry that most people would probably advise her not to do, but she did it because that was what spoke to her in the moment, and it has enormously paid off for her.

30:40And she's also very authentic with her fans and connects deeply with them, and that's also been a very successful strategy for her. There's a lot of Silicon Valley bros, and they're always talking about being open and transparent and authentic. And whenever I hear them say that, I always want to ask them this question, which is, what if you are an asshole? So being authentic is being an asshole. Then what do you do? Listen, I think being an asshole is when you don't know where your authenticity resides. You haven't really sat down or you haven't had support systems in your life growing up. And you're stuck in this kind of ego space of wanting what somebody else has.