The Future of Work with Senator Bob Kerrey – Navy SEAL, Former Senator and Govenor

1Huddle Podcast Episode #14

On this Bring It In podcast episode, 1Huddle’s CEO and Founder Sam Caucci sat down with Senator Bob Kerrey, the former Governor of Nebraska and United States Senator of Nebraska. Prior to embarking on his political career, Senator Kerrey was a Navy SEAL officer in the Vietnam War, where he was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in combat. 

He currently sits on the board at Issue One, a nonprofit focused on campaign finance reform and getting money out of politics. Senator Kerrey is also the president of The New School, a university in New York City. On this episode of Bring It In season one, Senator Kerrey sat down with 1Huddle’s CEO Sam Caucci, and provided insight on lawmaking interactions in the business world, the downfalls of safety net programs, and the value of freedom.

Audio available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. 

TOP 3 HIGHLIGHTS

Below are some of the insights Senator Kerrey shared during our chat, edited for length and clarity. You can find more Bring It In podcast episodes here.

• “You have to have wide [economic] distribution, and we don’t have that today.”
• “3 most important things someone can have is intelligence, energy, and character…and character is completely under your control.”
• “We need to continue to build workplaces where people feel good about coming to work, where their effort and their commitment to their job are rewarded, not just for pay, but with obviously decent respect that all human beings deserve.”

FULL TRANSCRIPTION

Sam: From your seat with your tremendous experience as a governor and a Senator, the president of the New School. What do you think of when you hear about the future of work? 

Senator Kerrey: I think that the larger question, not so much the future of work, but how do we adjust our laws and our trade policies to make certain that if somebody is actually willing to go to work and they find themselves without a job, that there are public adjustments that make that transition easier, because I think there’s going to be more of that. I mean, it’s not possible for it not to be the case and what we’ve designed is a safety net. The most important part of which is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which was designed in the 1960s. And you know, social security wasn’t designed in the 1960s, but it really became a substantial part of our safety net program, following the second World War. Its original design was a thousand dollars, you could get it if you stopped working. The whole idea was to get older people out of their workforce so younger people could come in. So we have a safety net that’s been built for an old manufacturing era, and I think we need something different because otherwise you’re simply gonna find yourself in a situation where you say, you know, I’ve got to wait until I’m 62, 63, 64, 65 before the safety net kicks in, or I can quit work and go on Medicaid. And you know, basically prove that I’m poor and promise to stay poor in order to get the benefit of the program, which is hardly the correct way of doing things. So I think it’s as important to think about what kind of safety net programs, and it’s, it’s a terrible word in some ways, but that’s the common way of describing it, are we gonna have. Should it be guaranteed minimum income? Should there be a non-means tested transfer program that basically says you’re in the workforce and we’re going to provide this amount of income for you because maybe the job goes away. And if it goes away, we want to make certain that you don’t find yourself, you know, basically a terrible economic state. So, I mean, I’m citing one example, but there’s other examples like that where in addition to talking about the future of work we have to talk about what kind of laws do we want as we do what we’ve been doing for 30 or 40 years, which is try to make a union more perfect. In this case, you know, I think the future of work is in many ways going to be dependent on the kind of safety that we would create, and the problem is the people that are writing laws, don’t understand the business, typically, and the people that are in business don’t understand the importance of the laws. And so we have a bit of a disconnect going on, to put it mildly. 

Sam: Right, I was going to ask you, I’m glad you brought up the last point too, because one of the questions I always have is what is the responsibility that the government has to ensure that it’s citizens have access to the right jobs and the right skills for those jobs? Where is that? What is the, in your opinion, expectation of the government’s responsibility on that front? 

Senator Kerrey: Well, first of all, the government can do no more or less than what the people themselves want to do. So it’s up to people to decide what kind of basically foundational program do you want to have in place. And just again, back on Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted in 1965. And in 1965, and you could, with a high school degree, you could go out and you can be practically illiterate and get a manufacturing job that paid you enough to support your entire family, that provided healthcare post-employment health care and a pension. A defined contribution, defined benefit pension in 1965. You know, we had the draft going on as well, so you served a couple years and that was what your job was when you came back. That was what was going on in 1965. So, obviously those days are gone, so now, you know, I just keep coming back to it, you look at Medicaid. Just take Medicaid as one example. Medicaid was initially it still is the law, the federal state program. So the state’s opt in, all 50 states have opted in, but all 50 states are different. So if you lose your job in New York and you see a job opportunity in Texas and you’re on Medicaid, this is just an incentive to move because the healthcare benefits in Texas are substantially lower than the healthcare benefits in New York. So you have this impediment, this mobility. And mobility is hard under any circumstances. It is difficult to pick up your family and move, but if you’ve got a law that provides a disincentive to move, it makes it even more difficult. So, you know, I think it’s a given that you’re going to find yourself in a situation where there’s a job opportunity for you and it’s not in your hometown any longer. And the question is, is there an incentive for you to take that job opportunity to move? It’s easier for me to say it, but right now the federal programs are written that it’s a distance in it. Except once you get on Medicare, the majority on Medicare. And the reason that lots of people argue Medicare for all is in part because it’s a hundred percent mobile. We have met Medicare beneficiaries living in New Mexico. You can live anywhere in the United States. The Medicare benefit in Texas is the same as the Medicare benefit in New York or Omaha or Albuquerque. Doesn’t matter where you are, it’s the same Medicare benefit. You know, you can say the quality of health care might be different in your location. If you move to a mountain where there aren’t any doctors, don’t be surprised if you’re going to have trouble getting access to health care. But for the most part, the benefit package is the same. And that it’s not surprising therefore, that you see people moving around a lot more than say once they become eligible for Medicare.

Sam: Sure. I’d be interested to hear, you know, specifically as an example, I mentioned to you, I have a technology company and one of the things that happened during COVID was, so many companies realized immediately “Uh-oh, we need to be ready for remote work.” And, you know, I don’t know if it was so much as companies weren’t aware that that was a trend that was coming anyway, but there was definitely a major shift where companies had to figure out how to rethink the technology they use and how they operate. One of the things that has always bothered me over the years is when we work with a company, they generally give job training and access to education within the workforce. There’s a lot of inequalities there, with who gets it, who gets access to it. When you look at a frontline worker who in many ways can grow within an organization someday, be in management or be a long-term contributor, some companies look at the risk of investing in a frontline worker being too much. Do you think that COVID has changed or accelerated certain things that we need to be aware of right now when we think about making sure that all workers and all corners of the workforce, if they’re willing to wake up and work hard, have access to the tools to do that. What are your thoughts on that? 

Senator Kerrey: Well, it’s a really good question. First of all, again, it’s back to the rules and regulations, they have to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the change because oftentimes at the federal level, but even at the state level, the rules and regs get written for incumbent companies and to protect that incumbent company and make it easier for it because they’re going to have more money to hire the people necessary to get the rules written in there. Maybe the best example is higher education. Higher education is a protected industry. If you want to open a college or university that grants regional accreditation, and that’s where the value is, because if you run a university and I run a university and one of your students transfers to my university, I get to decide whether or not to accept those credits. And the average cost per credit hour in America, for us, for a well accredited, liberal arts college, you know, $400 or $500 a credit. So it was real money, I got income. Especially in an environment where, you know, we have a student loan program where I, as a university or college, have no liability, it’s no skin off my nose if the student graduates and doesn’t get a job, I can lament it but there’s no financial cost to me. And there should be, I should bear at least half of the responsibility for that debt, if it gets defaulted. And so there’s a regulatory structure that you constantly have to look at because oftentimes it doesn’t favor a new entrance. Because you know this from your business. When you start a new business, your cost of regulation as a fraction of your business is much greater than an incumbent who, you know, you get too good at it and Facebook will buy and put you out of business. So, yeah, I think you constantly have to look at those rules and regulations, especially in the education environment, and particularly in higher education. And the last thing I’d say is that it’s just we have got to recognize that the upper mobility that existed when I graduated from college in 1965 hasn’t disappeared, but it is nowhere near like it was before.

When I was running the New School, I could basically tell you what your SAT scores are going to be based upon your household income. And the SAT and the ACT scores determined whether or not you’d get into the best of these colleges. And so you have this vicious cycle of people who are doing well, tend to do well when it comes to applying and going to the best colleges, which is not good for the country. Because it’s both from the standpoint of governing the country and from the standpoint of broad-based economic development, you have to have a wide distribution. And, we don’t have that today. The college debt is a problem for a college graduate today, is college debt where the student didn’t complete the work. So if you, if you graduate from college, and you’ve got debt, the likelihood is you’re going to be able to pay it off. If you don’t graduate, the likelihood is you won’t. We have 200,000 social security beneficiaries that have their monthly checks reduced to pay off their student debt. So, you know, so I think you have to look at that regulatory structure, but I also think you have to ask our universities and colleges to bear more responsibility for that debt. And I think you’ve got to make it easier for non-incumbents to enter that space, and get to a point where they can offer regionally accredited content as well. So that you’ve got competitive alternatives or lower costs, than what we currently have. And you know this, if I said to you: we agree that you and I are both going to learn. We want to learn German, we want to learn how to read, write, and speak German. It is unlikely that what we’re going to do is choose to sign up for a program where we’ve got to sit in a classroom and wait for a teacher to come and teach us. We just aren’t going to do it. We don’t have to. Because there’s plenty of offerings on the internet that are much much lower cost, much more convenient and much more effective. So, and what I’m saying is the current incumbent in the higher education market has a massive investment in capital that’s being directed to build classrooms, which is not how students learn. And my guess is you walk into most universities and say, gee, I’ve got this great program where you’re using games to teach, and it’ll freak them out. They say, well, that can’t possibly work, even though the evidence probably shows that it does. So I think you, there’s a lot of things that a lot of things tucked into the answer.

Sam: This is my favorite time of year because of college, whether it’s high school or college students taking on a summer internship. I guess what do you say to the young person that maybe just graduated from college or the one who’s, you know, considering what they do going into the fall semester? Or when it comes to preparing for whatever the future of work might look like, what would you say to them? 

Senator Kerrey: Well, what would I say? I would say, there’s a couple of things that are really important to you. Let’s presume that you’re just turned 18 and are leaving your home, leaving your parents and going off into being on your own. The first and most important one is this is the first time in your life you’ve been free. And you get to decide what time to get up in the morning, you get to decide what you do. You get to decide how you’re going to play that hand. And you don’t always draw your cards and say, gee, I got a straight flush. You don’t get a straight flush every time. Sometimes you get lousy cards and get to play the cards, but you have freedom and you get to decide and very much connected to that, understand that you’ve got another six or seven years before your prefrontal cortex is fully developed. And you’re going to make a lot of your decisions from the base of your brain, which is called the amygdala. And it’s unreliable. It may have enabled us to survive as a species, but it’s an unreliable source of decision-making, except in those dramatic situations where your life is at risk, which isn’t going to happen. Again, referencing this book in poker, they call it tilt when you become so emotional, you make a stupid decision. Oftentimes your opponent wants you to tilt, is trying to get you to tilt, to increase the chances you’re going to do something dumb. So recognize that in our country, you are now free. You get to decide. You want to have a family, you want to join the military. You know, we have laws, unfortunately say you can’t drink or smoke, which is kind of stupid, but it is what it is. And that part of your brain, that you’ve been using an awful lot, isn’t terribly reliable. So be very careful. Again, referencing the book of this guy, Erik Seidel, who was her teacher. So the most important thing in poker and it’s also the most important thing in life is two words, advice, pay attention. I think it’s really important for an 18-year-old to assess their radically changed situation correctly, you know, otherwise not only would they make mistakes, but they won’t be able to comprehend it. That’s part of the deal, we get to make mistakes. You know, I got a Jack high hand, you got a full house. I lose, I can’t blame the cards. It’s just that’s where it happened. So time to play another hand.

Sam: Sure, I love the poker analogies. One last question, I know you gotta run. I ask everybody this last question. What is your hope for the future of work? I think it’s super important given the campaign year and COVID and all the chaos that’s happening. What’s your hope for the future of work? 

Senator Kerrey: Well, my hope is that our leadership, our elected leadership will write laws that continue to reward work. And that we continue to build workplaces where people feel good about coming to work, where their effort and their commitment to their job are rewarded, not just for pay, but with obviously decent respect that all human beings deserve. 

Sam: Great. Senator, thank you for joining us. 

Senator Kerrey: You’re welcome. Good luck!

Topics Discussed: Leadership, Government, Politics, Economy, Future of Work, Jobs, Workforce