Pivot - Antitrust trouble for Facebook and Google, Friend of Pivot on Covid vaccines, and remembering Tony Hsieh

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Kara and Scott talk about new antitrust cases being prepared against Facebook and Google. They also talk about Amazon's hiring surge this year – the biggest employment growth in corporate America history. Then we are joined by Harvard epidemiologist, assistant professor, Dr. Michael Mina, about testing and vaccines to get the pandemic under control. In wins, Kara and Scott share memories of Tony Hsieh. Send us your Listener Mail questions through our site, nymag.com/pivot and use Yappa to leave a video or audio message. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. Hello, Scott. Bitcoin hit a record high this Monday. It's like up to a billion dollars back from not a billion dollars. What do you think is here? Everyone says it's here to stay this time. So I'm fascinated by Bitcoin. I don't own any.

Disclosure. Do you own any Bitcoin? I do. I have 10 Bitcoin and I lost it. I lost it. I lost the Bitcoin. You're rich. I lost it. I lost the bitcoin. You're poor. I put it, I did a story about it 100 years ago when it was first starting and I put it on a, whatever,

a hard drive, whatever. I lost it. I lost my bitcoin. So yes, I lost quite a bit of money now. It wasn't that much then. I was like, ah, who cares? It's back down again and now I'm annoyed again. So that's where I am with bitcoin. Yeah, that's... Is it here to stay? Well, that's... Is it here to stay? Well, that's the interesting thing is that it used to be sort of this... Speculative.

Anomalous, speculative thing that was trading. And what's happened is people now look at it, I would say the kind of tertiary analog is gold. And that is they look at a future where the market's at an all-time high, but we have probably the most serious crisis of the last, I don't know, 50 years, depending on how you look at it, maybe 100 years. And people are very insecure about the markets. And everyone's looking for diversification in a world where everything seems linked. And to a certain point, even Bitcoin. Bitcoin, it's no accident, hit $5,000 in the depths of the crisis from a market standpoint anyways. But people are now, it's a great asset class for the existing holders, unless, of course, you lose your thumb drive.

But because people aren't trading in and out of it, they're putting money in there and they're forgetting about it. And then you have, I think what's really taken the price up is there's been what I'll call newfound legitimacy. I think what's really taken the price up is there's been what I'll call newfound legitimacy. When you have companies ranging from MicroStrategy owned by Michael Saylor to Square controlled by Jack Dorsey taking huge amounts of capital and putting it into Bitcoin and saying this is going to be a static asset. and saying this is going to be a static asset. And then exchanges and organizations like J.P. Morgan saying they're going to develop investment vehicles and tracking. It's becoming, if you will, more than just a fiat currency, if you will. It's becoming legitimate. Or I guess it's technically a fiat currency, but it doesn't have the full faith and backing of a government, but it has the full faith and backing of people that others think are very smart. So you have buy and hold, and then you have new entrants, which is fantastic for any asset class.

I still think it's still, it still hasn't been used, like the whole idea of cyber currency. At some point, it will be more and more useful. And I think people are still confused about it in some fashion, but you're right. it in some fashion, but you're right. It's a diversification play from what I can understand from the people who own big chunks of it and safety, a kind of a safety play just to have it sit there. And it is sort of like gold, except I can sit on my pile of gold or move it around or have a giant safe of it or something like that. I don't know if you ever saw that scene in Billions where he has a safe where they have gold coins on strips and she starts putting them in a suitcase as they're thinking of escaping the country. Or their go bag.

Their go bag, whatever. Yeah. It was interesting. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see where it is here today. Speaking of money, things that are worth more than they may be worth, any thoughts and new insights about possible Salesforce Slack acquisition? It makes sense. Makes sense.

I think it makes a lot of sense. It's exciting. Slack was always kind of the best company that couldn't survive on its own. Yeah. Like when Rolling Stone was sold or when the best independent publishers were sold. And at some point, I think, you know, Vogue magazine will be sold. It's the best of its kind, but it didn't register that huge upswing and it just makes sense

having it attached to a company that has the capital, the distribution, the sales force, the credibility, the public market currency. Lots of people looked at Microsoft I'm wondering if others, Google looked at it for sure. There's always sort of like a wandering acquisition around there and the

founders, Stuart Butterfield, always denied it or said, he didn't deny that there was interest. He denied that he was going to sell it. What do you think has changed? Because they wanted to sort of make it on their own. I think that they lost quite a few executives. They didn't really have a video answer the way Zoom did for the pandemic. Although people use it just the same to communicate, but it wasn't a must. It was already being used in the same ways. Why now? Why at this moment? Because they just

couldn't do it or haven't been able to do it. Well, everything from Zoom to Asana to even Palantir, which chalk up another loss for Scott. I thought that was going to get cut in half after the IPO and it's tripled. But almost every SaaS company that plays off of the remote trend has accelerated, and Slack is not. It's still performing very well. But a lot of people would argue that given its positioning around productivity and collaboration, it should have registered the same usage increases that a lot of these other collaborative tools have registered, and it hasn't. In addition— Well, you use it the same, right?

You were using it before. There's nothing more to use with it in some fashion. I mean, more people sign up for it. More people sign up for it. I think, quite frankly, I think Microsoft has scared them into the arms of Mark Benioff, and that is, it's a pretty powerful sales call when you hear from your Microsoft sales representative who says, we have Teams. It's a great product.

It has very high N says, we have Teams. It's a great product. It has very high NPS. People like Teams. It's not just Darth Vader forcing the Death Star on you. It's a good product. And they have this very... IT is so much around fear in an age of hacking, in an age of cybersecurity and cyberterrorism, whatever you would want to call it. When the guy from Microsoft calls and says, okay, but keep in mind, you're opening yourself to security flaws when you don't go all enterprise with Microsoft. And these guys, most CTOs and CIOs, we like to think of this as forward-leaning, but I think that's one of those jobs, while in many companies it's strategic, in most companies the CTO is invisible until he fucks

up, and then everybody knows his or her name. And so that call from your Microsoft person saying it fits right into the Microsoft Office platform, into the enterprise platform, that's a really powerful call. And I think that the lack of exponential growth has probably said, if we don't maintain, if we don't hook up to a bigger platform. Yeah, they really didn't get the bump. They didn't get the bump, the others did. And they didn't have an answer. They hadn't developed, you know, they had this woman named April Underwood who was there, was a big executive left. They had a bunch of people leaving, which I thought was, I was fascinated, like really long, important executives leaving for lots of reasons,

you know, but it just seemed like they never could get, put it into high gear. And this is obviously the answer. I always thought this is where it was going to end up. You thought it would end up at Salesforce? It's one of them. Microsoft, Salesforce, Google. I don't know. Is there another purchaser?

No, it's got, Google, I think, would be blocked from it. Yeah, I agree. The only other would be Salesforce or Microsoft. And Microsoft wouldn't necessarily, they might be blocked from it, given it has Teams. But Microsoft moved on. Microsoft moved on with its activity. Interesting. And it's easy to do this. It's easy to do this in the abstract with a whiteboard, but Zoom, Slack, and Atlassian, which is sort of the hip office, that would have been a really interesting tie up. But unfortunately, when you're young and you have everyone around you and you're a recent billionaire, people are really fans of collaboration as long as they're in charge.

Yep. And, you know, everyone sees themselves. I used to work a lot with luxury brands. I meet with LVMH, Artemis, which is, you know, the Gucci empire, and then Richemont, which has all the best watches in the world, and said, if you really want to take on Amazon, the three of you, you don't even need to merge. You just need to have a unified front online. And they all thought it was a great idea as long as they were in charge. Right, exactly. Yeah, that last scene that's interesting.

I wonder if there's other things being lobbed in here. Salesforce will be just fine. It'll be just fine. What do you have, though? You have a guy. The last scene would be good. Microsoft. You have a guy.

The last name would be good, Microsoft. And the executive team at Slack has not seen their stock go up in six and 12 months, whereas all their buddies have doubled or tripled their wealth. Salesforce is a great stock to own. And Mark Benioff has kind of got that Satya Nadella leader feel. Yep, so it's sort of like lying LinkedIn. Yeah, a lot of people think, a lot of probably very, what I'll call talented people at Slack think, I could work for that guy, right? So this just sort of just feels right as rain to me. How about you? Well, it's just late. I just thought they should have done it sooner. But maybe the price is better now. Who knows? I thought they were going to do it no matter what. And they always argue with me. And I said, yeah, call me when you get sold, which is interesting.

Call me when you find my Bitcoin hard drive. Call me when you find that. Somewhere. I had it. It was literally, whatever it started, 109 years ago, I literally just tried it out because you didn't have all the places to keep it. And you kept it on a fucking hard drive. It's just incredible. I'm so rich somewhere. Literally, that's not $190,000 you could have put to good use. Don't even think about it.

I don't. I don't. I forgot about it. I pretend. It was really inexpensive. Some dodo bird at a dinner party in Silicon Valley was all into it and was like, hey, try this. And I said, oh, it would be an interesting column. Anyway, in any case, last one, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is leaving his post.

Big shock. I don't want to talk about net neutrality, but they were supposed to look at Section 230. Now it's not going to happen. They were supposed to be ordered by the president, who is no longer going to be our president. So I don't know. We'll see who—it's going to be now a 2-2 thing until they get someone in, which is going to require Senate confirmation, which is going to be a big old ugly fight, depending on who controls the Senate. So who knows? I think the FCC is basically sidelined.

I'm sorry, you said FCC? FCC, not FTC. The FTC will get a Democratic chairman, probably. Yeah. Yeah, or a member, whatever. These appointments are really important. And so far, I think these appointments have been really important. I think Janet Yellen, a lot of people forget that Janet Yellen basically said to Wells Fargo, sorry, we are really taking you to the woodshed. You have abused consumers, and we need to send a signal. And there haven't been a lot of those, you're in trouble,

you have some explaining to do, or mom is angry. Mostly it's been, let the markets reign. And I think the FCC, I believe... FCC. I'm sorry. FCC. Excuse me. The FCC... FCC is different. Yeah, one's securities, one's communications. I got that.

Yeah. But in general, the FCC and I think most regulatory bodies have been underfunded. They've been, I mean, a lot. Well, some people think he is too moving around, moving things around. He has not been a popular, he's been controversial. Well, he's the odd duck with the big coffee cup, right? No, I don't think so. What are you talking about? Is that Serana? No, he's the one that's been pushing a whole bunch of different things.

But he was charged just recently with President Trump to reform Section 230, which nothing has happened there. I think he's just running away from it as fast as he can. Yeah, he's the guy. You're making me feel insecure. He's the guy with the big Reese's Cup mug. I need to look this up. Yeah. This is how you remember him?

I'm thinking of 5G. Visual metaphors are important. Okay. All right. In any case, a lot of these agencies are underfunded, and they will be stymied until there is some clarity in the Senate, I think. Yeah, but I would argue that he was a long list of people that was put in place to undermine the institution he was supposed to lead. Yes, indeed. Yes. And that to me is just, I don't even know. I don't even understand that, basically. It's not let's make it better. Let's make it more effective. Let's try and Trump wanted. And I think it's, well, it remains

to be seen, but I think it will end up being deadlocked. Deadlocked is what's going to happen. Deadlocked. Speaking of things that aren't deadlocked, let's get on to big stories. Okay, Scott, more antitrust lawsuits are being readied against Facebook and Google. Federal and legal authorities are reportedly readying as many as four more antitrust cases targeting Google or Facebook by the end of January. This comes weeks after the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google. The Wall Street Journal reports that officials are looking

into whether the companies abuse their power of Google in dominating search and advertising and Facebook and social media. If Facebook were sued, I think by the FTC in this case, it would mark the first government antitrust action against the social media titan. And of course, there are state's attorneys general, etc. So these are transitioning through the Biden administration. How do you think the transfer of power affected? Well, the Biden administration, the shadow of the Biden administration has already

had more impact on social media than anything that's happened in the last four years. It's just not an accident that all of a sudden Twitter and Facebook have decided to clean up their act around misinformation. It's just not an accident that all of a sudden it's getting better and better as Biden's polls went up. I think what you're going to see is I think these guys have such enormous egos that about the moment, the probability in their own mind that despite their hundreds of millions of dollars in retainers to legal firms getting ready to fight these suits, when the government effectively does decide to go after something like this and they commit to it, it's a pretty formidable foe. Absolutely, as you've discussed.

And so what I think you're going to see here in the next 12 months is I think you're likely going to see a spin of Google Cloud, WhatsApp, and possibly the gangster one would be AWS. But I think these companies are going to line up all their troops at the border, and then there's going to be a midnight mission between Chamberlain and Hitler, and let's hope it has a better outcome. But I think they're going to say, I think... How did we get to appeasement? Oh, you mean appeasement is what you're talking about. Well, appeasement is the wrong word. Let's think about something that staves off an 11th hour shooting match. But basically, I think they're going to get together and Google's going to say, okay, what if we spun Google Cloud?

Or what if we spun, which probably doesn't solve the problem. No. But I think you're going to see some prophylactic spins, for lack of a better term. The Federal Trade Commission is looking at the marketplace issues around Amazon, which is one thing. And the Justice Department, of course, has been examining Apple's use of App Store for anti-competitive. And what did Apple do? Look what Apple did. Yep, I know they did.

You're right, it probably did. But the first time Facebook were to be sued, and I'm not sure which group is going to be suing, whether it's the Justice Department. I thought the FTC was the one looking at this. But this is the first time that Facebook's been targeted. Yeah, and I think that one will be more violent and go faster.

I think Google is more complicated and not as hated. And I think Sundar Pichai is a very likable, very deft politically, whereas I think Facebook is going to be everybody's favorite target. But I think these guys have such big egos. I just don't think they're going to let anyone break them up. I think they're going to decide, no, it was my, I'm breaking up with you. Remember that in high school? No, I broke up with you. Oh, interesting.

This is going to be, this is, I think they're going to do it prophylactically. You know, it's interesting. chorus of elected officials is giving assurance to DOJ and the FTC that they have the political support they need to blunt the company's efforts to pressure the agencies to back off or water down their cases. So perhaps, maybe not. And then there's obviously California lawmakers are involved. There's all kinds of people from, you know, other states. But it's the FTC who will go against Facebook and they're nearing this approval of this antitrust suit. They're going to focus on whether Facebook stifled competition through acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. And the question is, apparently, whether to file in federal district court or the FTC's own administrative court. I know a little bit about this.

If it goes within the administrative court, the FTC has some advantages. And whether it should go into district court, it's complex. Someone was explaining it to me. But it certainly seems like that's where the next one would go. And then they would include state's attorney generals in the federal court. And New York has a kind of a leadership role in this, no? The New York attorney, AG? Yeah, the AGs do. Letitia James could file its own case in federal district court in December. So, and she's, of course, going to have her hands full with the Trumps and, and other things. So there's going to be a lot of activity here.

I do think it's coming and you're right. We'll see what they do in response. Facebook just speaking of response, just bought a company for a billion dollars called a customer with a K. It specializes in customer service platforms and chat bots. So it's not stopping with buying things. I don't think that's quite in the area that people are looking into, but it certainly hasn't stopped it from buying. And so I think the mood from both sides will be there will be some action in the next few years against these companies. And I think the issue is what exactly they

grab and what are these companies. Their big argument is China, you know, that we need to be this big. I just heard it the other day from yet another media, I mean, internet executive. We need to be big to beat China. And I was like, oh, God. I think the first one, and when you think about it, the one that's most likely, though, to do this preemptive spin will likely be Google. And it all comes down, we always forget that it's humans running these companies, and almost every decision has a healthy dose of ego. And when you're the controlling shareholder or the founder, the idea of anyone telling you what to do with your child is really offensive. Whereas a guy like Sundar Pichai, when he leaves, he's no longer in control of the company. He's arguably not in control of the company now. It actually has, you know, Sergey

and Larry in control of the company. And so actually has, you know, Sergey and Larry in control of the company. And so his primary motivation is shareholder value, which is what it should be. He is technically, his incentives are aligned with shareholders. And I think he's the one that's most likely to go to Larry and Sergey. And I think he has the kind of credibility to say we should do this. And quite frankly, if they spend Google Cloud, the stock price goes up. So, they're going to want to- But the thing is, their thing is in search. Their issue is in search. It's YouTube that

would have to go. It would be YouTube. And DoubleClick, the old DoubleClick acquisition. Yeah, that's where the focus is on everything. So, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see whether they can win these cases. Obviously, especially the FTC, it's underfunded. I forget, $300 million? I think that's what they have. And everyone's supporting them, but they don't have the funding. But they'll outsource it.

They'll pull a NASA and they'll take— the Biden administration will say, okay, here's, I don't know, a billion dollars. Go get them. And also, they'll have a lawyer. They'll have a well-known lawyer involved. And they'll hire one of the best legal—they'll bulk up, too. And then I think if they're smart, they'll try and settle this in a quick and violent fashion. Well, I heard Rudy Gianni will be first. Yeah, there we go. You talk to these guys, though. Do you get a sense for the mood of the senior management at these companies, how they view this? Are they ginning up for a fight? Or what do they want here?

I think they should realize, I've also talked to a lot of the regulators, they're going to come after these companies. I think that they are, you're going to use the China argument, that they need to be big, they need to be big to be innovative. We are willing to make concession.

We want guardrails. I think they understand the inevitable. It's away from, once Donald Trump gets cleared out of the way, his noise around the conservative stuff or screaming on Twitter, which is all, so It's a way from, and once Donald Trump gets cleared out of the way, his noise around the conservative stuff or screaming on Twitter, which is all, so it's all been noise,

essentially, damaging noise, no question. But it's, I think when people can really look at it and stop their ridiculous baseless games they're playing, they're going to, it's going to be about power.

It's going to be about power and who has it, who has the power to determine. Because I mean, even the Republicans, who most of whom do not believe the conservative thing, if you talk to them off the record, it's really quite astonishing to hear. Same thing with Trump. They insult Trump off the record. It's really – I hate Washington. But I think they all realize power is the issue.

And if they have a power about conservative bias, that's how it's solved, that one company's not in power. And so I think that away from Parler or whatever the heck they're doing, they're worried about that. And I think that ultimately that's what it'll come down to. I think certain people like David Cicilline and others have done a very good job sort of outlining the problems. They really need, they have so much, like every other government institution that has suffered under the really poor leadership of the Trump administration. And when you really think about it, these organizations, if you want to talk about power and you want to talk about the algebra of deterrence, if you get a call from the DOJ, you return that call fast, you call your lawyer and you call your board. And the DOJ should and has been taken very seriously. Unfortunately, they're taken less seriously when they try and hold up the acquisition of Time Warner from AT&T, which has made no goddamn sense. Meanwhile, Android has two and a half billion people, iOS has a billion.

Yeah, that was a surprise. And they spent, they basically held up. Well, they live in that world, right? They were used to those for a long time. That's how it was done. It is slower. This is way too fast for them. And they just, they've let this Googles and go for far too long.

I think most people, even people at Google tend to agree with it. And with Facebook, it's more difficult, right? They own social media, but do they own social media? And, you know, they'll definitely, right? They own social media, but do they own social media? And, you know, they'll definitely, like Amazon draws out the argument, there's so much retail in this country, we're just a small portion of it. But they don't have that as well an argument after the pandemic with the hiring they've done, with the amount of market share they've grabbed. So, I mean, it's very obvious to one and all, the hiring was astonishing. I mean, it really is. It took Amazon 25 years to get to half a million workers.

It took them 12 months to get to a million. I mean, it took, it's just incredible. It took Apple. It's obvious. This has made obvious what is where we're going with this stuff. I wrote a pretty tough column on Amazon about their halo thing, the amount of information they suck up. And I think that people get it. I think people get it from all these companies within this pandemic.

And the political situation is how much influence these companies have and how much power. And it's all about power. That's really what it is. Agreed. In any case, we're going to go on a- Political power. Political power. I'm Jim Carville.

You don't bring a moose to a- He thought it was going to be a landslide, but it was not. You don't bring a moose to a water balloon fight. He thought it was going to be a landslide, but it was not. You don't bring a moose to a water balloon fight. That makes no sense. It's about political power. Carol, we're going to have us an election. We're going to have us an election. We're going to count some votes.

He was off on his guesses. I have to say. That guy has literally lost it, and he's fucking genius. I know. He is, but he was wrong. He is, but he was wrong. He was quite wrong about it. He was wrong.

He was wrong, wrong, wrong. Endorse my man, Michael Bennett. Remember he kept drinking his Pappy, whatever is Pappy, what is it called? Pappy, what's the whiskey? Pappy. You come over, we'll have us a dozen or so mint juleps. Pappy, what's the name of the whiskey? Anyway, anyway, all right, Scott, we're going to go on a quick break.

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Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Okay, Scott, we're back. The pandemic has pushed Amazon's workforce even bigger, as you notice. And as the holiday approaches, the number is only increasing. According to New York Times, Amazon added over 425,000 employees, not 42,700, 427,000 employees since the beginning of the year. That means they employ more than 1.2 million people globally, up from 50% a year ago. Most of these hires were warehouse employees. They've hired software engineers and hardware specialists. This is the fastest employee growth in the history of corporate America. Let me underscore that, the fastest

employee growth in the history of corporate America. Scott, speak more of this. It's staggering, and it's exciting. I've said for the last, I mean, if you look at my class, my brand strategy class, I always take a survey on where people are being recruited. And the number one recruiter 10 years ago was American Express. For a hot minute, it was Lehman and Goldman. And then it was McKinsey was the biggest recruiter. Now, by far, the biggest recruiter out of my class, hands down, is Amazon. And think about this. They're hiring 1,400 people a day. I mean, that's just a day. It's just incredible. So, what do you think of that? Well, look, I think it's exciting. I think they will

use it as an incredible—they'll use it as their defense shield. This will be a talking point over and over. What it is important to do— So we're providing jobs. Yeah, but what it's important to do, the other side of the coin is—and this is part of disruption and part of innovation, but what won't be mentioned is I am sure the destruction in jobs across the rest of retail is greater than 1,400 jobs a day. Right. And that is we are net losing jobs in the retail sector now. Now, if that's a function of competition, part of innovation is destroying jobs. Most entrepreneurs do destroy jobs. That's fine. You can't be a Luddite. But the question is, are they destroying jobs through anti-competitive behavior? Are they

destroying good jobs in good companies that otherwise would survive because they're pricing products below market, or they're making it difficult for other retailers to get any oxygen on their platform, or they own the rails? But there's another, look, it's exciting, good for them. I think Amazon is a good employer. So, for example, I think Uber is a menace and an awful employer, and those are employees regardless of what Prop 22 – Well, not everyone thinks they're a good employer, but go ahead. Well, I think on the whole – But look at the stuff that's going on about them spying on employees about labor unions and things like that. Okay, but minimum wage, $15 an hour.

I get it, but that's just – come on. They're spying on employees. Even if a small amount, they have a history of doing this, Jason Del Rey. Well, say more about that because, quite frankly, I didn't – Because a lot of people have written about this issue. I thought that was sensationalism, the spying on employees, even if a small amount. They have a history of doing this, Jason. Well, say more about that because, quite frankly, I didn't— Because a lot of people have written about this issue. I thought that was sensationalism, the spying on employees. Yes, but Jason's written about this sort of opposition to labor organization. They're hardball.

Yeah, agreed. At the very least, they're hardball tactics when they sit around saying they're for the people. So this is a company that has been well-known for riding its employees rough, let's just say. And, you know, what's interesting is what they are correct about is there was all these ideas that all these jobs are going to move away as warehouse automation does. But it has a lot of physical jobs. I mean, ultimately, it would replace them if it could. And a lot of their warehouses, you can see how automation will take over. But they certainly goes hand in glove with being bigger as an employee base, too, because they need all kinds of people as they get bigger and bigger and bigger. I just think it gives them

enormous political power because of job hiring. And I think that politicians are more predisposed to them, especially after the pandemic. They're the ones that are hiring. It'll be interesting to see how the Biden administration handles it. He hasn't picked a labor secretary yet and how they should look at this job search and everything and how to deal, who's equipped to deal with Amazon given the utility of Amazon, how much people like them, how much political power they have. I mean, I'm not of the Trump camp where you link the Washington Post to him,

but he does also own the Washington Post, not a small thing. Soft power, yeah. Yeah. So I think it sort of plays into, again, speaking of power, he has a lot of it, and most of the cards are in his hands. And he's collecting more and more information by creating products people really like. So you said a lot there. And like most of those things,

it's more fun to reduce it down to good and bad. And I'm not a fan of Amazon on the whole. If you talk about, you used the term, you know, riding rough or rough riding on employees. I think, I don't want to say I'm a fan of that, but so for example, the CEO of Away got in a lot of hot water for being tough on employees. I think a culture of writing rough or rough writing or whatever the term is, full-body contact employee where it's difficult, we move people out. I think that's fine as long as you pay them well. And as long as there's – I think Disney is a very difficult or used to be a very difficult place to work. And I think Amazon, I think if they go to $15 an hour, I think when they're trying to give people bonuses, I think that compensates for

some of it. Now, now, when you start using... Well, I mean, of course, we're pilloried many years ago for warehouse conditions, the heated warehouses. You know, in the beginning of the pandemic, they were sort of whacked a lot for people getting sick. These are delivery people. I know people that work in their warehouse and work at headquarters, and I would argue that they are, from an employee standpoint, a pretty decent employer. Decent to good. That's the impression I get. And two, but when you own the Washington Post and you have cool parties at your house in Calorama and you purposely gamify municipalities to affect a transfer of wealth from municipal fire, school, and police districts to shareholders and say you're going to not allow

union representatives into the warehouse in the most unionized city in the world, Queens, I think that reflects a lack of character and code, not on the people who determine employee practices, but the people at the board level who've decided they don't give a flying fuck about the Commonwealth and just want to move their share price up. It's a complex situation, but as it relates to employee relations, I think Amazon has actually made a decision, and it's a smart one, to try and, I don't want to say starch their hat white, but remove some of the darkness of it. I think they're a good employer, and I just don't think there's any getting around it. Why should they avoid unionization? Tell me the negatives. No excuse. Well, you know why they're avoiding it, because it's expensive.

Yes. But I agree with you. Union membership has been cut in half. There's a direct relationship between the erosion of the middle class and minimum wage, not keeping pace with inflation, the attack on unions. On that, I agree with you, it's bad. On the whole, if you look at the fact that they preemptively, I think they were the first large organization in the world. And Walmart, who I love, has not raised minimum wages to $15. Yeah, but that was – to me, I think they want all the power. This guy wants all the power.

He just does. Well, they all do. And he's good at it. He's good at it. Like, okay, great. Yeah, he's just better at it. I agree with you. He's just good at it.

And I think he does. The minimum wage thing, although, you know, they sort of tried to wrap themselves in a white hat for that. Even Bernie Sanders was like, that's too much, even though he welcomed it. You know, they used his quotes and everything. But I think that's the kind of stuff they have to do. Raise minimum wage, show that warehouse conditions are good, and or, you know, promote employee power, but not give them real power. And I think that's the whole point. Well, the thing I'm most worried about, have you seen all these sprinter vans?

You know, they try and position it as entrepreneurship and it has an Uber feel around it. Oh, you get to own your own business, which means we want you to buy the goddamn van. We want you to buy your own insurance. This is what I'll call distributed workforce, which is Latin for avoiding minimum wage and health insurance and payroll taxes. I think that is a very dangerous attribute, and I hope that goes nowhere. But, you know, Amazon's hiring. It's a tough culture. And I think there's nothing wrong with that as long as you're rewarded for it. I mean, there's this hallmark vision of what company cultures and startups are supposed to be like. And as someone

who started companies and buys big companies, work is meant to be a rough and tumble place. That doesn't mean you can't be generous with your employees, but it is not. If you're looking for justice, you're not going to find it in the corporate world. If you're looking for a soft, cuddly place where you can bring your dogs to work, I'm sure that company exists in Brooklyn. If you're looking for a soft, cuddly place where you can bring your dogs to work, I'm sure that company exists in Brooklyn. I'm not investing. But I think we like to think there's this image of a soft, friendly, cuddly place to go to work. And I just don't think that's America.

Well, Google was for some of the people, others not so much. You know, they had two classes of workers there. That's a fair point. You know, kind of thing. I think what it is is it puts enormous amounts of power in the hands of one company, and this is the way they're going to play. They should absolutely be broken up. Well, what was interesting to me I was going to get to when he was testifying was around the idea of some of the slippage between the marketplace, you know, the information slippage. They just have too much power in their hands and too much information in their hands not to slip up, you know, and there was there, I bet there's one email after the next showing this evidence of this kind of stuff. You mean when you said,

I can't confirm that we didn't do that? Well, it might have happened. That was elegant. I can't confirm it didn't happen. It's a cultural idea of when it all costs, like, and so you can see it, you know, even the best of intentions, they're as aggressive and good as they are at their business. It just doesn't, it's unfettered power. And without worker power

at the same time, by the way, bring in good ideas, bring in all kinds of stuff. Mutants are not demons. And the humans, as you've talked about, have to rethink how they are presenting themselves and how effective they are.

And I think it just, I don't know, I just feel like, ay-yi-yi, this guy is this guy. All roads lead back to the same place. A really robust DOJ supported by really thoughtful economists that recognize great antitrust, unlock shareholder value, also respects employees as stakeholders, also respects municipal fire and police districts. And thoughtfully, and we've got to stop looking. We always fall into this trap of talking about antitrust and breakups as if it's some sort of punishment. The people who worked in the seven bells

that were split up from an original AT&T, they did really well. As a matter of fact, they did better than if AT&T had stayed as one. And same with Amazon employees. And instead, they want to couch it as, we're a net good for society, leave us alone. That's not the point. The point is when a company, in order to embrace full body contact competition, you occasionally have to oxygenate the marketplace. It's like the NFL draft. The reason the NFL is the most successful league in the world is because they say, all right, we're going to like the NFL draft. The reason the NFL is the most successful league in the world is because they say, all right, we're going to give the top draft picks to the worst teams in

the league. And every team, and I'm not saying every company should have a shot, but they purposely oxygenate the marketplace so no one company puts the rest out of business forever. No one team dominates 10 Super Bowls in a row. When I was testing the Halo, the fact that they did the tone thing and then the body thing. That bothered you? And then the drone thing. I'm like, these guys just think they own the fucking world. That's all I get. Like, wow, to do this.

You know, they just continue to press aggression. And I admire a lot of what they do. I do. I really think it's the products. I use them all the time. But it's just you sort of go, wow, these guys just don't have a stopping point, do they? And so the government is the stopping point. Speaking of which, we're going to talk about health now.

We're going to talk about vaccines. So today we're bringing on our friend of Pivot, someone who I've admired. I do not know, but I admired him upon the Twitter and like a lot of what he's written. His name is Michael Mina. He's assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Department of Epidemiology. He's an actual expert. I'm so excited to have you here. Is it Dr. Mina? Dr. Mina or preferably Michael.

All right, Michael. Michael, Dr. Mina. Michael,. All right, Michael. Michael, Dr. Mina. Michael, welcome, Michael. Welcome. So I'm going to name drop because that's what Scott likes, but I interviewed this morning the founders of BioNTech and had a really interesting, they were talking about how they made the vaccine,

but I want to talk to you, and one of the questions I asked was inspired by you, which was putting all our eggs in the vaccine basket and what we have to do. And they answered it really well. But I wanted you to talk about this article you wrote for Time called How We Can Stop the Spread of COVID-19 by Christmas. Why don't you summarize your take? And then let's talk about that idea of this focus on the vaccine as the end all, which it is, but the difficulties of doing that. So the idea of what I wrote in time really is born from a lot of the research that we've been doing in my laboratory at Harvard. And it's how can we use the tools that we have available to us

today to actually induce vaccine-like effects at the population level. So this would be vaccines, for example, create what we call herd immunity. And that's where we don't need to actually have as many, we don't have to have the whole population vaccinated, for example, to get the virus to stop spreading through the population. It's about 60 to 70%, right? Yeah, it will be somewhere. It could be, you know, it really depends on that. That's sort of like the basic number people have thrown around. It might be as low as, say, 40% if we include things like heterogeneity and how people contact each other. And so if we use strategy, we can vaccinate efficiently. In the same way, we can use testing and strategy surrounding testing to get similar effects. And this sounds

strange, but vaccines and immunity aren't the only way to stop people from spreading the virus onwards. Of course, vaccines are an easy way to do it. If you can get a vaccine built, and you can give that vaccine to somebody so that they become immune, then by the time they get exposed, the virus won't grow in them and they won't transmit it onwards. But the other option is to give people knowledge on a regular basis of whether or not they have the virus in them to allow them to not spread it onwards. This is essentially like letting people know their status. And so there's really simple tools that we have at our disposal should we choose to use them. And these are rapid antigen tests. Of course, testing has

been this massive problem ever since February when the CDC had its first blunders of getting the CDC test out for PCR testing. And this is an approach right now, the PCR test takes anywhere from a day, but more often three, four, five days to get back. It's too late. People are already getting tested too late. Most people, by the time they get a swab stuck in their nose, if they've had symptoms, they're already on the downside of their exposure. indefinitely by the time they get the result. Most people are done, if not weeks past the time that they were spreading. So the idea that I was writing about in time

is that we can actually take rapid paper strip tests. These are little tests that look like little pieces of paper, which is why I call them paper strip tests. But they are actually, they're really more like a pregnancy test. They're a piece of paper with a little invisible line on them that can catch virus if the virus flows over it from a nasal swab that's then dipped into sort of a solution, a liquid, and then you drop the paper strip into it. It pulls the liquid across the paper. And if there's any virus, the line will turn dark, very much like a pregnancy

test. So one line means negative, two lines mean positive kind of thing. And these tests can be made very, very cheaply and at the tens of millions per day. If we wanted to do that, it would not be very hard as a country, given the resources we have. We could get these out to people's homes and we could ask people to take these tests twice a week. And unlike a PCR test that ends up being delayed three or four days after you get the swab, these would give you results practically immediately. Within five to 15 minutes, people would know when they take the test, do they have transmissible virus in them? And that's the key. These are tests that look for, I sometimes call them contagiousness indicators.

They tell you, are you infectious? Are you at risk to others? So Scott will have a question saying, but why hasn't this happened? Obviously, you had Elon Musk, and that's where I also noticed you actually got him to stand down, which was shocking to me. You know, he's got opinions, and he's not, you know, he does a lot of studying and stuff like that, and he has a lot of weight, whatever he says. And he made the point that he took these particular rapid tests, I don't know which ones he took, and two were positive, two were negative. And then you were trying to explain it to him. Explain what you explained to him of why, Because people are worried that these are not accurate. It's sort of gotten out there in the population that they're not accurate. Yeah, it has. Unfortunately, I take

some responsibility for that, I think. I started talking about these many months ago, and one of the first ways that I described them was, you know, crappy tests could help us solve this problem. You know, I really shouldn't have started out calling them crappy tests could help us solve this problem. I really shouldn't have started out calling them crappy tests because they're really not. They are exceptionally accurate when you need them to be accurate, which is when you're infectious. So I would say we know enough now to know that the concern about whether they're accurate enough is just no longer a concern.

They will turn positive around 95 to 100% of the time that PCR is positive when people have enough virus to transmit to others. There is a concern that they can sometimes miss people or they can have false positives. These issues tend to happen. Elon Musk got two positives and two negatives. So what that probably meant is that he was either at the beginning or the end of his infectious period. And now knowing that he actually was positive suggests that he probably was on the fringes of one of those. So he didn't have a ton of, if he had a ton of virus.

Scott? First off, Professor Mina, I think you should absolutely start tweeting and pontificating about autonomous vehicles because if Elon Musk is talking about COVID-19, that makes you an expert

in self-driving automobiles. Anyways, fucking ridiculous that we listen to people like that. Talk about not staying in our lane. We have a nice epidemiologist here. Anyways, I'm sorry. So I'm going to put forward a thesis and I want to get your view. I wonder if the promise of a vaccine has been a negative for our society because it's created a level of complacency. We don't sacrifice the way we should and that the ultimate vaccine

would be what Taiwan has implemented. And that's a combination of technology, citizenship, discipline, testing, and tracing. That just as in World War II, we did have 120,000 people working on a vaccine to split the VAT. And we were looking for a technology solution that would end the war. But we didn't stop producing tanks. We didn't stop sending young men and women into harm's way. It strikes me that the promise of a vaccine in our society has only let us off the hook for the type of sacrifice that's required here. I cannot agree more. In many ways, I really worry that

the vaccine has always been a month away. Since May, the vaccine has been a month away. And I think that it's been, it's been a thing that every politician could say, oh, we're doing it enough. We have Project Warp Speed or Operation Warp Speed. We're doing enough. We're doing enough. Like, meanwhile, we've had a quarter of a million people die. I mean, what, you know, like there is no urgency. I've never seen, you know, by any metric, this is the impact that this virus is having on the United States is as bad as any war we've ever fought. It's destroying, you know, in some ways it's worse because it's worse. It's separating even the people, you know, you don't have like some people overseas dying

and then people who are at home at least get to be with their family. You just have, it's like the worst of all worlds right now. And what this means is that, you know, we should be dealing with this with the urgency of a war. There's no question about it. And, you know, there are tools to do that. We would never say, hey, we're getting bombs dropped on us today, but I'm pretty sure that new F-22 Raptor is going to be done next year. Let's just wait. Let's let these bombs keep falling and wait until next year when the new jet is done. Like, you know, this is insane. So how do we get to, can we do this, put out these tests? This would make sure that we're not contagious with each other and so that

contagious people could stay away from, if they would, honestly. You know, that's another issue because I think people don't. It's been an argument around masks and social distancing and not actually finding out who's contagious and who's not by assuming everybody is contagious. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, I think what we need to do is we need, well, I mean, I can offer some things, but to tell you how I really feel, I think we're just totally screwed. I mean, we have completely failed to have any ability to budge. You know, the FDA hasn't budged. I've talked to them tremendous numbers of times now at the highest levels. I've talked to the highest levels of the NIH and the CDC and the federal government, Trump's administration.

And we have yet to act on the tools that are sitting in front of us. And it's because, you know, I think part of it's because we have this amazing medical establishment that makes tons of money. Like why is it legal in this country right now for a test to be sold for $200 when it costs $6? Why is it legal for the few rapid tests that are coming out to be sold for $20 when they cost 50 cents to make? You know, there's so much money involved here. And I don't think that the policymakers are making money off of this. I really don't. But I just think we can't get out of our own way. We have devalued public health so incredibly much in this country for so many decades. And we've devalued any sense of centralization or government type of healthcare, anything, that we don't even have a language, no less a law or authorization process to even consider a test as a public health good.

process to even consider a test as a public health good, something that, you know, somebody would take for public health that they're not responsible for paying for, that they can have access to whether they're rich or poor. You know, we just don't even have, we don't have a framework for thinking about it. We don't have a framework for thinking, hey, you know, maybe the metrics of a test aren't all about medicine, but public health and should be optimized for public health and to stop an outbreak versus optimized for identifying somebody who shows up in the hospital as positive. We literally don't have a language for it. And I think it's, you know, I was really hoping and I've been trying and I'll keep trying at least for another few weeks before I completely burn out, you know, to get the country at the very least to understand, hey, there's tools sitting in front of us that are true public health tools

that are not medical tools. This is not a bunch of small medical problems that we can claw back to fight a public health problem. It has to be the other way around. We have to fight the public health problem first, and then the medical problems resolve. You know, there's no other way to do it. Which is around contagiousness is what you're talking about. Scott? Well, first off, I can't say enough about how important I think your efforts are, and I hope you don't burn out. Because when I think about, you know, it's difficult to be the Debbie Downer all the time.

But when you think about Amazon and Walmart are in our driveways every day, if you think about what if we had figured out a way to industrialize or nationalize the supply chain to just start testing everyone every 48 hours, it feels like we could have been out of this darkness. And you talk about capitalism overrunning healthcare or a tragedy that a common is unfolding. If I type in Moderna or if I type in Pfizer, I see stories about their stock prices. And I'm leaning into my question here. based on the limited research I've done, is that there's been a lot about the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine not being as effective. But what I see is that the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines are great for the people on this podcast, but for 95% of the world's population, it might as well be about talking public transportation with a Ferrari, that our cold chain distribution is just not going to support those types of vaccines, that the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine that doesn't require the same level of isn't as fragile

is much more important to the world. Isn't that vaccine really going to be a game changer if we're really going to talk not only about the health of our nation, but the health of our world? Absolutely. I think that the cold chain, you know, it has gotten some media attention, but, you know, it's going to absolutely prevent large swaths of the world from being able to have access to it. I mean, frankly, if we were really thinking as a globe and certainly as a country about this as a public health crisis, for example, we went into the vaccine trials with a two-dose regimen in mind. And that was all based on how can we get the best efficacy for the individual who actually gets the vaccine into them? What about the one dose and doubling the

number of people that can get the vaccine in the same amount of time? You know? 100%. Isn't it true that HPV, when it's two doses, two-thirds don't end up with a second dose? Isn't a one dose 70% just much more effective than a two dose at 90%? That's exactly right. And yes. And, you know, had we been thinking about this, not as a speed thing, well, speed thing, well, we've been thinking of it as an individual level thing. It's the same thing as the test. If you get the test, if you get the vaccine, what's the best thing for you? But that's because we are so focused, in this case, on just the individual. And we are still living in this world where,

in America anyway, we're not used to having to make any compromises whatsoever. And even if it's at the expense, frankly, of the fact that we have a whole huge fraction of the population that's starving now in America and the wealthiest country in the world, when we are making decisions as policymakers, we keep living in this la-la land of thinking, you know, we can optimize everything. And we haven't come to grips yet with the fact that this is a pandemic that's fucking tearing us apart, right? The seams and we have, we just continue to operate as though this is business as usual, trying to optimize everything given, you know, as though everything as though we

have room to, to have the best thing, but we don't, you know, in though everything, as though we have room to have the best thing, but we don't. You know, and other countries have gotten much more acquainted with this over the years because they've been disenfranchised. You know, countries understand that, hey, you know, for public health or to just get things done, sometimes you have to make compromise. It's not the Ferrari, but you know what? The Ford Fiesta is going to get us where we need to go. So in that vein, why not then let companies like Amazon and Walmart get these things out? Why not have it, like as Scott said, like last night I ordered tweezers at 11 p.m. at my house at 4 a.m. Like tweezers, like these really particular tweezers for my son. And I was sort of like, why can't, why, what is the, what would it take?

Is it going to take these corporations vaccinating their employees or where does, where do we get back that idea of public health as an important group activity for the nation? Or we don't at all. We just, you know, just like with the gun lobby, we just accept that many deaths and we accept that many deaths in this case. Yeah, I think I worry that we're going in the direction of just saying it's acceptable. You know, why? It's too hard. You know, it's, you know, we just have too many dissenting views, but we unfortunately have too many people that don't know what the hell they're talking about. And the problem with this pandemic is, you know, so pre-COVID, I work a lot on vaccines as my normal vaccine immunology. And so normally when I'm having discussions with the public,

it's oftentimes like the battles that I have, if you will, are a lot of times with the anti-vaccine people or even just vaccine hesitant people, but I don't, are a lot of times with the anti-vaccine people or even just vaccine hesitant people, but I don't battle with them. I battle with the anti-vaccine people, you know, try to try to undo the bad, the bad information that they're putting out into the world. But the interesting thing there is that that's what people who don't know what they're talking about. You know, they're not scientists, they're not physicians generally, they're, they're just conspiracy theorists. And they're being facilitated by social media. Yeah. And, and, but the really Mm-hmm. colleagues, you know, they're, but they're, they are people who I don't want to speak badly about, you know, about different sectors. But essentially, we have, we have so many voices in this pandemic

now from people who are usually just kind of tangentially involved with public health, who don't actually do anything having to do public health, but maybe test, you know, they do viral PCR testing in hospitals. But because they're doing that, they feel like they have a voice in public health. They think that they have an expertise in public health. And it's been actually some of the hardest minds to change. And unfortunately, it's like physicians a lot of times are really hard to get to see things not through a medical lens, but to see it through a public health lens. And they think, unfortunately, because they read a lot of papers, that they are public health infectious disease epidemiologists. But my

concern is that generally, they are not understanding the bigger picture. It's really hard to get a doctor to not think about the individual, because they're like, that's their job, you know, I'm a doctor, but I have to really conscientiously take off my doctor hat when I'm working on epidemics like this, you know, and then put my doctor hat back on when I'm in the hospital. If you don't have the luxury of taking on and off two different hats, because you're really just a doctor in your 95% of your life, what has happened is we've had this abundance of experts who aren't actually experts in this domain, but think they are. And that's become, you know, and I don't want to criticize people, and there might be some of them who listen to this. But I think it's really important to recognize that infectious disease

epidemiology and how to tackle pandemics has nothing to do with how well you can do PCR on a virus. And you have to think really differently to think through the public health lens versus the medical hospital diagnostic lens. And that one piece, I think, has actually been almost central to the reason we don't have, I mean, besides the whole political lack of strategy. So essentially what you're saying is the perfect has become the enemy of the good. That's exactly right. Scott, last question. Well, Professor, I think you said that we're in La La Land. I think La La, the delusion, has been a purposeful strategy. And just as we figured out as a society to create a pandemic that benefits the top 1%, more Netflix,

more time at home, less commuting, stocks up, stocks at record high, their house at a record high. We have figured out a way to come up now with a health strategy and a vaccine strategy that, and I don't think it's La La Land. I think it's purposely like everything else we do in this country. It's designed for rich people who have access to healthcare, have access to childcare so they can go and get that second dose, have access to good information, have access to transportation. So basically, we're going to come up with the ultimate vaccine for the top 10% at the expense of the other 90%. It strikes me as actually quite deliberate that we've decided this is a world of 350 million serfs serving 3 million lords. The lords are going to get a 90% effective vaccine, wealthier than ever. And quite frankly, the other 90%, they got to duke it out.

We call that meritocracy, but it strikes me that this is deliberate and that if we don't have people like you sounding the alarm, I mean, this has just turned into such a tragedy of the common. So, this is more of a statement. I really hope you don't run out of steam because this stuff is exhausting to constantly be reminding people and not playing into this American bullshit narrative that we have to be optimists all the time. This is ugly. The Axis, you talked about World War II. This thing is killing Americans three times faster than the Axis power. Yet we're waiting for everyone to split the atom,

thinking it's going to solve everything. Anyways, keep fighting the good fight, my brother. We do. We appreciate it, Dr. Mina. We need you. And that's why I wanted you on here, because I want a point of view is that we have to, again, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and get out to more people. So can I ask you one last thing?

One step that we can take now. I know you think we're fucked, I think, essentially, is what you said. Yeah, what do we do? What is the one step we can take now, I know you think we're fucked, I think essentially is what you said. But what is the one step we can take? I think what we can take, the step that we can take is to apply whatever political pressure we can. You know, there was a lot of activity back in July around this. And daily I was getting senators calling me and asking me, you know, what they can do. And that was largely because people were writing to them. People were making noise, front page of the Atlantic,

the New York Times, things like that. And it's gaining steam again now, largely because of the change in the election. I think that what we can do today, you know, if anyone's listening and has, you know, if there, I think we need to get celebrities talking about it. We need to get the average person talking about it and writing to their, to their congressmen and senators and whoever, like we need to apply more political pressure that can, it can go far if we just keep, I mean, but, but it's hard, you know, I don't honestly know. I don't know how much it ends up doing. I think that, you know, I've been talking to the highest people in the land, you know, about this, and they are well aware of it. And so on the one hand, I think, you know, we can really put political pressure on. are truly in charge, know all about this and are still failing to act. You know, I don't, but that's where I think if they have the impetus, if they have just a massive movement of people to just say, we want to just demand that they want to be able to know their transmissibility status. They

don't, nobody wants to go get their family member killed or nobody wants to infect their mom when they go over for Friday night dinner. You know, we have this paternalism in public health and in medicine that's saying people can't handle these tests. Like, screw that. You know, we need to give people access. I think people should be outraged that right now we have tools that everyone could have access to that we're holding back and we're not allowing, we're using this paternalistic argument to say, you can't handle knowing your status if you don't have the government or a doctor telling it to you. Yep. 100%.

I'm sorry. I do have one last question. You're the CEO of a biotech company that's been funded. You have 2000 employees. Would you mandate that they get vaccinated, your employees? Private companies can do that. I would probably give them some choice. I'd say you either show up and take a paper strip test every day or you get vaccinated or you work from home. But they would need to offer some evidence that they are negative, that they're not. Yeah. And I mean, the thing is, even with vaccines, you know, one of the things that really frustrates me is there's all this argument against, you know, are they accurate enough? Is it really going to stop everyone from transmitting if you use these tests? But then they're willing

to say things like, the moment you're vaccinated, you can go back to work. Like, that's complete insanity. Like, the vaccines will probably have a much lower efficacy to stop somebody from transmitting than if you're doing daily tests, you know, and. And it takes 28 days too. That's people, the other part that people don't realize. Well, plus the six months or seven months before the average person actually has access to it. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, this is so helpful. You've made us very depressed. But anyway, Michael Meen is an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the Department of Epidemiology.

He wrote an article you should read in time, How We Can Stop the Spread of COVID-19 by Christmas. Although I don't, maybe not. Maybe not, Dr. Meena. That's under the best case scenario. If we started when that paper got published, we could do it. Maybe next Christmas.

And then we'll probably all be clear by then anyway. Time goes fast. Anyway, we goes fast. It's never too late to do the right thing. Thank you so much. We truly appreciate you being on. Keep fighting the good fight. Keep doing it. Don't get tired. Keep yelling at Fauci, etc. Okay, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees. And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you.

Tells you which leads are worth knowing. And makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere and you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos,

and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Okay, Scott, wins and fails. Wasn't that guy impressive? I love that piece. I thought it was great. And I loved how he took on Elon, but he actually did it in a way that Elon listened, which I thought was great too. Yeah, what do you know? Well, any innovator in tech knows everything about everyone. We should just listen to them. So, okay, my win, just the life of Tony Hsieh, I thought that was a tragic death. That was very unusual, 46, a young man.

But in addition to being a successful business person, it's just so admirable and important when people take their, you know, demonstrate courage, their creativity, and their capital to do big things. And he tried to revitalize. I think more impressive than Zappos or the company he originally sold to Microsoft was that he said, I want to try and revitalize an urban center that isn't doing well. And I think that's sort of big, bold, creative thinking when people say, I have capital, I'm smarter than your average bear, I have great contacts, and they try and do big things like that, they're going to benefit a lot of people that you're never even going to meet. You need people like that. So, it's not only a tragedy for obviously him and his family, you know, obviously a 46-year-old man, but it's a tragedy. It is a real loss. Yeah, he really was a very – first of all, he was a very gentle soul and also very much – he was so quirky and interesting. I interviewed him at least a dozen times and visited Zappos and did videos there with him quite a lot.

And he actually was attending a code all the time, and he's a great poker player. He was like a superb poker player but also a brilliant computer technologist and won all kinds of awards very early on in his life. He didn't really brag about that too much. And one of the things that I really was amazed by is how he did get along with everybody. He sort of didn't have a nasty bone. And, you know, he had a lot of the tech kind of mentality, but in the good parts, the good way that it was sort of shoot for the moon and try different things and think outside the box. And I think I visited that when he was doing in Vegas and

it wasn't totally successful, but the fact that he tried it was really interesting to me. I was really sort of amazed. Again, it wasn't without its stumbles for sure, but he was always sort of thinking in an interesting, I just always enjoyed talking to him and what he did at Zappos was really innovative and changed sort of retail. He was sort of the sweet Jeff Bezos and of course

Jeff Bezos ended up buying it. But the idea around customer service and about things, how workplaces are created, even though it felt a little culty when I was there, I did a very funny video wandering around with the mayor of Zappos and looking at all their sort of rah-rah signs

and everything else. But I just, he was a lovely guy. And let me just say one memory of him is we did an interview in Vegas, actually, at Code Commerce many years ago. And just after he sold to Amazon, which made him a fortune, and so did the one before that.

He had so much money and everything. And we argued about something, and I can't remember what it was, but we argued about something. And then when he got off stage, I said, oh, I'm sorry about that. I really like you. I'm sorry to give you such a hard time.

I don't usually say that to people. And he said, oh, don't worry, Cara. It's all a simulation. This didn't really happen. We're in the matrix. I love that he's the first person who did that. Elon later did, but Tony was the first one. And I was like, what?

And he goes, this is all not real. This is probably a computer game being played by future beings. And I was like, okay. Good to see you. I think the thing he'll be remembered for in the world of business is actually he had this immediate kind of severance policy where within a month of starting at Zappos, if you didn't like it, they would give you severance to leave. And I thought that was pretty innovative because I think there is a lot of stuff like that. There's a non-zero probability when you show up somewhere, you go, I screwed up,

and this is the wrong fit, and better to fold your tent early. And I thought that was very, like you said, very innovative. Yeah, they knew it right away. They had a very strict, you know, how they had a book, you know, a book of like the way they behaved within the company. It was very clear. And I said, do a lot of people zero out? And he goes, they know right from the start if they don't fit in. They don't, you know what I mean? Because it definitely had a different tone and everything.

And one of the things that didn't work out so well was this holacracy, which I still don't understand. He had a, you know, this was a, this is a way to manage, which was, I didn't ever understand it properly, but it was, he was always thinking of new ways to do it. And some people criticize him for holacracy, but I was like, oh, he's trying something interesting, you know, on some level. And he had the money and means to do it. So it was kind of a, he was a fascinating character and again, very sweet. And one of the things, uh, which I was joking on this morning on CNBC and it doesn't sound great in this year in sexual harassment times, but it wasn't this, he liked to hug people. He was a hugger, you know,

and he, and I hate hugging. And so he always, he knew that. And he always tried to hug me. And I'm like, you get near me, I'm going to break your arms. And he'd like, come in for a hug. And it was just, he was so sweet. It never offended me, not even once. And I just, he was just a sweet man. And the fact that way he died is just so sad. I'm sorry I won't be seeing him again because it was always a delight to see him. And I don't say that about many tech people, I'll tell you that. Yeah. So rest in peace. Rest in peace, Tony. My fail is there was a study that my friend Todd Benson forwarded to me from the Robin Hood Foundation, which is a nonprofit, not to be confused with the online trading menace that is addicting young men and ignoring the well-being of people, but the actual charity in New York.

And they found that 32% of New Yorkers had been to a food bank because of food insecurity since the pandemic opened. And it struck me that here we are in a nation where we have, going back to Professor Minas, I think we have absolutely the ruling shareholder class and their bitches, specifically Congress and Senate and the people who make our laws, have orchestrated a pandemic that has just been champagne and cocaine for the top 10%. The two biggest asset classes, real estate and stocks, are at all-time highs. So the wealth and 80% are owned by the top 10%. So the top 10% have never had it better, unless, of course, they've been struck by tragedy.

But most have not. And at the same time, if you are in New York and you are walking down a street and you grab 100 average New Yorkers, they are just as likely to have needed to go to a food bank than have graduated from college. That is the wealthiest nation in the world right now. Yes, indeed. We have figured out a way. We have fine-tuned a pandemic through fiscal policy, through a lack of empathy, through stimulus. Celebration of the stock market,

the non-caring about the deaths. A stimulus that flattens the curve of the richest cohort in America, small business owners, such that we can take the top 10% and move them further up the prosperity with no progress and absolute and a third of New Yorkers have had to go to a food bank. We have literally, we have lost the script. We have decided capitalism has to be harsh on corporations and it has to be loving and empathetic to people and we have flipped. We have now decided the corporations to serve our empathy and that we're going to be harsh on corporations, and it has to be loving and empathetic to people, and we have flipped. We have now decided that corporations deserve our empathy,

and that we're going to be Darwinistic and harsh on people. We have flipped everything upside down. Capitalism has been totally perverted. I agree, Scott. I could not. I never agree with you. I could not agree with you more. And I think that we have to think, one of the things that is good about this vaccine, there are a lot of candidates that aren't just, it's not just the top two are in front because they're using new technology that's faster. Both the Pfizer-BioNTech one and the Moderna one use something called mRNA technology, which is faster. But the others are coming too.

But you're right, you're 100% right. I think that is my fail this week. I think the continued labeling of Donald Trump has got to just be much more. Like a lot of people have written me about this, a lot of the stuff that he's spewing. At this point, I don't know what to do with it. I mean, I think getting rid of them or dinging him for constant, persistent lies over and over again, which are so,

maybe they're damaging no matter what. And they have to, these are disputed or not, this is not true. It should be at least, at the very least, they should label it accurately. I'm sorry, who are you talking about? Who should label it? Twitter. Twitter should. Twitter and Facebook should label these accurately or take them down or these particular tweets. I don't mean kicking him off, but at some point, this is, today was another one that was just shocking. But let me ask you this. Why on earth? I understand an exception to their terms of service for the president. I get it. I think that is an exception. Oh, he's broken the rules a million times again.

What about on January 20th, they kick him off? Why wouldn't they? He's violated the terms of service dozens of times. Well, yeah, I don't know. What is the turn? When does he get treated? He's not, he's still not being treated like everybody else, know with these these are disputed it should at the very least say these are lies these are untrue we these are the you know this is a fixed election this is that this is untrue i think it does have an effect but it has to be even stronger and and and at a point you have to suspend people off the platform. You do, for violations. I think that's just at this point.

I'm loathe to kick him off because they just raise ideas of censorship. But this is just gamed by a liar, essentially. Lying liars, including Rand Paul, including a whole lot of them. They really just need to go over to Parler where nobody will find them ever again. Anyway, Scott, we made it to December. We did. As a reminder, listener mail questions. And I thought Dr. Mina was great.

I agree. Getting tests is difficult, even for people with means. It's confusing and difficult and should be so easy to find out if you're transmissible. It's absolutely a critical part of the whole equation. Anyway, as a reminder, we love listener mail questions. We're trying something new. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for the Pivot podcast. The link is also in our show notes.

Scott, read us out. Today's show is produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Fernando Finote engineered this episode. Erica Anderson is Pivot's executive producer. Thanks also to Hannah Rosen and Drew Burrows. Make sure you've subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts. or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify. If you'd like the show or you like the show, please recommend it to a friend. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for

another breakdown of all things tech and business. Your own vaccine is simple. It's a function of testing. It's a function of discipline. It's a function of empathy. Let's all be our own vaccine. Cara, I'll see you later in the week. Thank you. Very nice, Scott. That was a really nice sentence. I love that. comes from Anthropic. It's not always easy to harness the power and potential of AI. For all the talk around its revolutionary potential, a lot of AI systems feel like they're designed for specific tasks performed by a select few. Well, Claude by Anthropic is AI for everyone. The latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, offers groundbreaking intelligence at an everyday price. Claude's Sonnet can generate code, help with writing, and reason through hard problems better than any model before. You can discover how Claude can transform your business at anthropic.com slash Claude. Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. Did you know that almost 90% of executives see

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