Pivot - Coronavirus hits the global supply chain, the demise of at-home-trading and updates on the Saudi infiltration of Twitter

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

Kara and Scott talk about the spread of coronavirus and how it is affecting the global supply chain. They discuss Bernie Sanders' win in Nevada and what that means for the economy. Morgan Stanley bought E*Trade, so the hosts talk about the end of at home trading as we know it. Plus, they give updates on what we know about the Saudi moles who stole user information at Twitter. In Friend of Pivot, Kara and Scott get deeper insights into coronavirus from Professor Matt Frieman, who studies and teaches about coronaviruses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. shots. Have you gotten your flu shot this year? Of course, I get them in May. Whenever the first come out, I am first in line for a flu shot. That said, I got very sick this winter with the flu, which was interesting. But I do. I take care of myself. I consider wearing masks, but then I don't because my brother's doctor, he said they're useless. I read that. And everything else. But we're going to go to the big story because it's affecting the stock market right now.

And everything else. But we're going to go to the big story because it's affecting the stock market right now. Coronavirus is now really affecting the global supply chain. It's now being possibly moved into pandemic. There are cases of coronavirus in Italy, the first outbreak in the EU. And later we're going to have an expert coming in for Friends of Pivot to explain to us everything we need to know. But it is having a very big impact on stock, especially tech stocks, especially because of the global supply chain and markets and people moving around. So, do you have any thoughts on this? Well, it's interesting just the way you framed it at the opening of the show.

And I think it's indicative of where we've kind of come as a society and that, as you said, so the virus looks like it might be a pandemic. The number of cases reported outside the U.S. has doubled in the last four days, which is obviously a scary stat. And then the second thing you said is that it's having an impact on the markets. And it strikes me, I heard something funny. Someone said, you know, the worst thing that could happen or the worst thing that might happen if the coronavirus turned into a pandemic and wiped out the species is that it might affect the economy. So, we should be really scared. And that is, everything is X and Y, and the Y to everything is what's going to happen to the markets and the economy. And I don't know if you've noticed this change, or maybe I was just so clueless,

but when I was a younger man, much less than a kid. We didn't seem as obsessed. We didn't immediately attach. We would have gone to special interest stories around, you know, a young woman flying home to take care of her grandmother or something like that. We would have talked more about the human toll, and it just strikes me as we have gone full contact capitalist when everything, the analysis around everything is a function of what's going to happen in my 401k today. That's right. Yeah, that's a really good point.

That is an excellent point. But, I mean, it's really hard not to focus on that because the economy has been going great gangbusters, especially pushed by tech companies, I think is the great engine of this. And here we have this virus that, you know, the analog tends to overwhelm the digital in seconds, really, without a problem. And I agree with you. It's a more human story. But at the same time, it does have global implications, especially around this global supply chain, especially because our economies are so based on the movement of people and goods across the world now in an interrelated way.

Yeah, it'll be very interesting to see what happens around policies, around how you can restrict people's travel, individual freedoms, how people – I mean, I said – I asked you if you got a flu shot because what I was going to say is I've read over the weekend. It made a lot of sense. weekend, it made a lot of sense. Everyone should get a flu shot because what they don't want is the healthcare system being overwhelmed with people who have the traditional flu who think they have something else. And so it's especially important. And I'm someone who doesn't, I never, I didn't go to the doctor as a kid. I don't get flu shots. But anyways, I do think getting a flu shot seems especially important right now, such that you don't get confused or panicked, because it definitely feels as if there's two things here. There's the virus itself, then there's the impression or the perception

or, unfortunately, the panic and the fear that it might cause that starts to shape human behavior. Anyway. One of the things that you talked about, though, is early on, remember you said you thought it was overhyped? Do you think it's overhyped now? How's that common aging, Kara? How is that common aging? That's why I'm asking. But I'm saying, what do you

imagine now is going to happen? It's just dangerous with someone with no medical, as I'm learning, with absolutely no medical training to make estimates. What you have found traditionally in the past is that these things tend to be more hype than horror. But then just as we thought, and unfortunately, institutions matter and their credibility matters.

And what you have now is people aren't trusting information coming out of China. And then when you hear that South Korea and Italy are starting to report cases and then, you know, the first – there's like this drip, drip, drip of scary news. First case reported in Afghanistan. I mean, this thing is starting – and it makes for great media because it is sort of this Hollywood-like monster roaming the earth. monster roaming the earth. So, you know, the honest answer is I'm not going to, the last thing I want to do is try and slow talk this thing and in any way reduce people's precautions. But typically, if you look over the course of these outbreaks, they've, talking about the economy, they usually end up being buying opportunities, supposedly the market, we record on a Monday, the market's opening down 900 points today.

But the honest answer is I don't know, and I'm looking forward to hearing what our guest has to say. Absolutely. All right, next thing, Bernie Sanders winning big in the Nevada caucuses. We talked a lot about politics last episode. We're going to talk more about tech this time. But again, it looks like, speaking of that, he's marching right towards the nomination, which I think has got everybody, like, dementedly worried. I thought James Carville was going to have an aneurysm. Chris Matthews has embarrassed himself all over the Internet with the comparisons to the fall of France during the Nazi era, which was disturbing if it wasn't so demented. Yeah, that's a little much. But from a business perspective, is this, like, what do you imagine the impact will be from, you know, I don't even know the, I was thinking of Brandon Common,

what does Bernie think about big tech? Obviously, he thinks they're too big. That's all I pretty much have gotten from him. But, and same thing with media. But how do you look at this, sort of, are you surprised by it? I think everybody was surprised by, I don't know if you are, you're, I think you have better political instincts than I do. I was shocked at the scale of the win. Because usually, MSNBC does a breakdown and says, okay, college grads versus non-college grads. And it didn't matter which cohort, he won them all. He literally won. I think other than moderates over the age of 65 who had stayed, who had shirts saying, I hate Bernie Sanders. Like, he just

barely lost that group. Other than that, he won. He absolutely dominated. And he's had, to his credit, and I'm trying to rethink my thinking as opposed to just becoming intransigent and entering my bubble and get angrier and angrier. He has had the best line of the entire election. And that is said, we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everybody else. I said, we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everybody else. I thought that perfectly summarized his movement. What was interesting is on Friday, the markets, there was a lot of reports that the market, the stock market goes higher because the markets are going to assume that Trump's going to win and Trump's going to do whatever's required, even if it's borrowing against our kids' future,

to try and artificially pump the markets. You're right. Everyone is freaking out. The entire narrative is that, okay, we have a nation that elects 100 senators. We have decided over the course of our history to elect one socialist, which reflects poorly or is a negative forward-looking indicator on his ability to win, that the election will be couched as a socialist versus a capitalist. But to his credit and to give him his win, he does seem to have ignited a great deal of passion among his cohort.

And the other thing, and I want to get your sense, I'm wondering, have I just missed the boat here? Is this a pivot to a different mentality, a different view on the government's role, and he is that spark in igniting something. I actually don't think so. I think this is a disaster, but I want to take pause and say, is something going on

there? I have thought a lot about this. It's interesting. One of my sons was, which I talk to the young people, I like to talk to my young people, was like, oh, people just like— On the Twitter? On the Twitter. People just like angry old men yelling at people about how everything sucks.

So it's Trump, whether it's Trump or Sanders, people like this sort of complaint. I think they're both speaking. And I think Anand Girgar had a really interesting take, even though, you know, he pretty much goes to billionaires suck sideline all the time. But I think he had a very good point is that these middle parts, whether it was the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, there was this sort of standing class that sort of just assumes that they know best, right? And there's these other people who are like, just a second, like the way you've all been conducting things hasn't been good for a lot of people. And I do think whether you're on the Republican side or Bernie Sanders, and a lot of people who support Bernie Sanders then went to Trump,

which is interesting, seemed to like this message of the fixes in. And I think it has to do with big tech and big media and big everything that there's a fixes in for the elite versus you. And I think this is a bigger part. I think it'll have implications from a corporate point of view. You know, Trump chooses to attack the deep state. Bernie Sanders is attacking the deep corporate, right? And it's the same thing. It's the same thing in people's minds. It's like, everything's better. I don't feel better. I'm not doing better. You know, whether it's my housing isn't as good as it was or whatever, or healthcare is not as good as it was. Fr. You know, frustration.

And I think it does. And I think it does exemplify that this sort of love of, and I think tech is just the latest industry to be that, like, or tech and media, really. I'd put them together. People are tired. And I do think there's a hopefulness. It's like, we got to change things. And I don't think that's, I don't think they're that, they're different. Of course, Bernie Sanders is a decent human being, and Trump is not in that regard.

But I think it's this concept of things are not right, and you know it. And I think – I don't think it's fear-mongering. I think it's actually sort of saying it like it is, and I think people tend to like it. So we'll see. It'll be – implications on big tech for sure. But purely from a product momentum strategy. I mean, elections really are the most interesting. If you ever really want to understand marketing, you need to get involved in an election because you have two products or multiple products.

They have one day where everyone gets to buy, and whoever gets 51% wins everything and everyone else goes out of business. I mean, it is just full body contact of marketing. And right now we're in a situation where he has so much momentum. The only firewall, the only thing in between Senator Sanders and the nomination is Super Tuesday. And strategically, if these guys were run by boards that had fiduciaries that could sit the CEO down every once in a while and say, okay, enough's enough. What you have here is sort of the perfect storm of bad things for moderates in the race because basically Bernie has wrapped up and no one really saw it coming, the progressive side. And Senator Warren, who in my opinion has shown the most what I'll call blue flame thinking and consistency through this whole thing, for whatever reason, she has not inspired the far left as well as Bernie. And Bernie has basically soaked up all the oxygen and consolidated kind of

the far left. And the moderates, we actually have two very talented moderates in Buttigieg and Klobuchar, who then had to contend with a guy who came in and basically shocking on, carpet bombed with ads. So the moderate vote is being split up just perfectly enough for Bernie to come in. And because, and just going back to your guy, Clay Christensen, this notion of disruption is someone comes in and focuses on an overlooked niche. And the overlooked niche here was this Bernie bro, very left-wing, younger voter that nobody took seriously. Typically what happens in disruption is no one takes that small part of the market seriously. They say, oh, Netflix is not a threat, or this company is not a threat. And then before you know it,

you wake up, and nobody attacked Senator Sanders. No one has really gone after him the way they've gone after each other, because no one took him that seriously. And now they're waking up, and this little, this dog that was napping at, you know, nipping at your heels now has half your torso inside its mouth. It is. And it looks like it's too late. He's great, Christian. He's played it – this will go down as a great case study in disruption. And if any of these guys had boards or fiduciaries or there was a Democratic National Committee that had any sort of intelligence or authority or competence surrounding its brand, they would probably be in a room right now with the moderates saying,

okay, Bernie's the winner here. Senator Sanders is going to win unless one or two of you drop out. Mayor Bloomberg, you have the money. You need to support Klobuchar. Drop out right now and devote all your funds, put all your guns for Eric Hoverbrown, Mayor Pete or Amy. Something has to happen strategically with the pieces on the board. Specifically, some pieces have to come off the board. But here's the thing.

They all have a unique vision that only they feel they can— It has to be them. It has to be them. They're all for consolidation as long as it's around them. Them, exactly. It's not going to happen. Yeah, so this is— I think it's fascinating.

I think the new story is who is a perfect storm for Bernie. I think the new story is who does he pick as a vice president. It'll be interesting, the impact on corporate, because I think, you know, especially if there's a split government, not very much will happen. But it'll be interesting to see how he reacts to just big corporate. And big corporate these days is tech. You know, those are the biggest, most important companies. There's lots of them. What did you think of the story that he was briefed that it looks like the Russians are

helping him? I thought he handled it really well. I never believe anything. The Russians are always putting out so much. I think, I firmly believe, I mean, whatever Donald Trump says, he's lying about it. The Russians were, and his national security advisor should step down, but he won't because they're shameless. They've been trying to keep Trump in power forever. And I think that's just part of it they think that Bernie would not beat Trump but I think they should think hard really hard about that

I think there's oddly enough my mother was like Bernie makes a lot of sense Lucky? Lucky's in on Bernie? I don't think she's in on him but certainly he's appealing to her and it's the same sort of lizard brain thing that Trump appeals to her it's the same sort of lizard brain thing that Trump appeals to her. You know what I mean?

Like, it's the same stuff. Anyway, we're going to move on from politics. Morgan Stanley bought E-Trade, biggest takeover since the 2008 financial crisis. You know, at-home trade services. Remember that was a thing? It's a $13 billion deal. It's still a big company. It brings 5 million retail customers, $360 billion in assets.

The CEO, Michael Pizzi, will stay with the company. E-Trade will keep its brand, a handful of retail storefronts and a buzzy and well-funded ad campaign. I spent $2,000 at E-Trade when it was the hottest company at the time because of Y2K,

if you remember Y2K. But to see what would happen, everyone was deployed to a different company. I went to E-Trade in Yahoo that night. You know, it was a hot company and everyone was doing trading at home and everyone thought it would grow to the moon and there were all kinds of different things.

And now, of course, this bank comes in and buys it. It's just sort of, do you think it's the end of that idea or just that it's just now so integrated we don't need these separate companies? It has largely probably signals that the sun has passed midday on these kind of independent trading platforms. And I think there's a lot here because this type of investing or trading stocks used to be both investing and consumption. It was meant to be a responsible way to accrete wealth.

And also, it was fun. Trading stocks is fun. Now it's become clear that it's just consumption, that the guys, this entire industry called Alternative Investments, who supposedly had some unique insight into dislocation and alpha, they have underperformed the S&P throwing darts at stocks by the amount of their fees. One of the greatest kind of hoaxes in history was these guys, and they're all white guys in their 40s and 50s, that clipped billions of dollars.

And any sort of analysis looks like they have probably, after getting lucky the first few years, raising tens of billions in assets, and they have likely lost more money than they've gained. And they've underperformed the market because nobody is going to pay XYZ hedge fund 2 and 20 to buy Netflix. And there's seven stocks that have been responsible for somewhere between

20 and 30 percent of the gains. So they have been locked out. They have to beat the market with a less robust part of the market because all the gains have accreted to a small number of tech companies who run unfettered and have monopoly power unregulated, so they capture all the gains. So, there's been a massive reallocation of capital from active investing to passive, which reduces fees, which creates lower commission structures. Schwab made a big purchase, I think it was of Ameritrade, but basically these guys are all getting sold for about $2,500 in account. It also reflects that the big banks have wised up and realized their traders are no smarter than anybody else. And they don't want to be in this roller coaster game of

trading capital, which is expensive and hard. And wealth management is where it's at. The top 10% have massively grown their wealth. They need help. They need tax planning. They need to navigate all these taxes. They need to understand estate planning. And so, the best part of the financial sector right now is wealth management. It doesn't matter if it's J.P. Morgan. It doesn't matter if it's Goldman Sachs. In addition, the only way you get multiple expansion is to position yourself, Kara, as consumer tech. So, you have Goldman getting into markets, Goldman getting into credit cards, and now Morgan Stanley is effectively a consumer firm

that brings on, I think, an additional $5 billion in assets. I can't remember what it is. No, it was $5 million retail customers. This one's $360 billion in assets. Oh, excuse me, $360 billion. They paid $13 billion or about $2,500 a person. So they're all becoming consumer banks because they realize the trading.

And the other thing this indicates is, again, the greater consolidation of power among a few players in every industry because the FTC and the DOJ are asleep at the switch. It's going to be so hard to be a small financial services firm. How do you compete with the likes? And where does the innovation come from? Because these were the innovative companies at the time. Obviously, there's now the SoFias, there's all kinds of, you know, in each area, lemonade and insurance and things like that. But definitely, you know, that eventually they waited them out. And, you know, you remember the days when everybody was trading, was a home trader. I mean, that was exciting for a moment and weird and strange

and sports. Yeah, exactly. But it really doesn't play itself out. In the end, people just get exhausted and just like, here, take my money and be part of an index fund and this and that. And you can't do any better unless you just made a great trade at the right – like my brother bought Apple very early when it was about to go bankrupt and he just forgot he had it essentially. And that makes him a genius. And so it's a really interesting time. It definitely signals the end of an era to me. And you're right about this consolidation of this, of the excitement around these companies like Ameritrade and E-Trade, and the idea that financial services were really getting disrupted by the internet, when in fact, not so much.

I'm curious, how does Kara Swisher invest? What do you do with your cabbage? How do you invest? What do you buy? I have a banker. You have a banker. You have someone to help you. You have someone to help you. A lot of tax stuff. A lot of tax stuff.

A lot of tax. I talk about taxes quite a bit. But, you know, I don't. I'm not interested. I'm not that interested in money as you might be, Scott. Yeah. I just, I've never cared that much to think about it. And I don't think I can beat the market.

I never got interested. Oh, my God. If there was ever white privilege, summarize in a sentence. I just don't care that much about money. No, but even I just don't like, I just don't, I just don't, I don't find it interesting. It's like, you know why? Because finance became sports. Finance became sports, and I hate sports.

So that's why I got back. You know what I mean? Everyone was like talking about stocks. And, you know, one of the, I think, I think maybe it was Bernie Sanders who said this, or one of them, everything now Bernie Sanders says is brilliant. It's not. When he said that the stock market is not the economy, and it's not, right? It's not the economy. And so I'm more interested in other things. And so I think we tend to equate, Trump definitely does this, the stock market as the economy, see the stock this, the stock market as the economy. See the stock market,

he talks about it a lot. When in fact, it only represents, as you talk about, a very small group of people who are benefiting and it has nothing to do with the economy. But you just said something very interesting there.

And that is one of the, in my second and my last class at NYU, I talk about life strategies. And one of those life strategies is that you want to figure out, if you can make the jump to light speed and get good at something, key to going from good to great is focus. And that is focusing the capital that is most precious at your stage of life, and that is your time and your intention. And to get great at anything, you have to almost be maniacally focused on it.

And part of that is figuring out what you're going to outsource. And if you have the money to outsource different parts of your life so that you can focus more on work, and I know how terrible that sounds, it's key to being great at anything. And I think a lot of young men spend way too much time thinking about the markets and trading stocks when it's not their core competence. And a decent way to free up two, four, eight. I mean, I know a lot of young guys who buy options, buy Tesla, buy Bitcoin, watch it go up, watch it go down. Some beat the market, some don't. They talk to you on Twitter.

There you go. They're always talking to you on Twitter. There you go. I just honestly, it's a waste of my time. That's exactly right. I am lucky enough to have had a good education. I will make money most of my life. I'm worrying about making an extra.

I just can't do it. But if you give your money to an ETF, diversified, low-cost fee, and then take that two or four hours a week and focus on what you know you're good at, you can register a substantial increase in your excellence, thereby bringing more money. Or I could sleep. There you go. I could sleep. Because it's like I can't even look at the stock market anymore.

It just gives me a headache. All right, last story, and then we're going to get to coronavirus, something happy with our expert, is Saudi Arabia. There was a story, another story about, it was more detail in BuzzFeed about the people who had worked for Twitter and that they had infiltrated Twitter. Two employees, they turned into moles from 2013 to 2015, these two men. One was an engineer. One worked in the media team, stole identities of about 6,000 users who were critical of the Saudi government. And, of course, it was just more detail about this idea of being, you know, infiltrating these companies and how this personal data was very easy to find and track down. And that you could really track someone by when they sign onto Twitter or things like that. And so I think one of the, it just, again,

we talked about this before, but there's got to be spies all over Silicon Valley. And I wonder what they're doing to stop that, whether it's YouTube, Facebook, Google. But governments do understand that, you know, the reason they're robbing from banks is because that's where the money is. The reason they're movingbing from banks is because that's where the money is. The reason they're moving themselves into these companies and trying to influence them is because that's where the information is and that's the wealth these days. Well, if it's any indication, you know, how much they give a shit about teen depression or our elections, the notion that they do anything seriously to ensure that their human capital hasn't been weaponized. I mean, these are organizations that don't want to talk about, don't want to acknowledge anything that gets in the way of their blitz, you know,

blitz scale business model or threatens, you know, bad PR. So— Blitz scale. That was a book. Right. Is that—who wrote that, blitz scale? Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman, yeah. That's the LinkedIn guy, right? Yeah. So, look, we're going to find out, I think, in 10 or 20 years when these documents are unsealed and either we become a lesser power or someone takes over Russia and things are unsealed,

have effectively become the most innovative act of the last 10 years has been the weaponization of these platforms that we financed for the use of governments that are one-seventeenth the size of ours. The most innovative act of the last 10 years is detonating this weapon called Facebook in our face. Someone else shows up, steals our F-15s, commandeers the aircraft carriers we've paid for times 100. And I think it continues to take place. People say I'm crazy, I am paranoid. I may be both those things, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. I now believe I have either agents of the Russian government or Tesla bulls showing up on my blog, showing up in my Twitter feed every day trying to create a narrative or undermine my viewpoint around certain things that are counter to their interests. Because why wouldn't you?

For the cost of an F-15, you can hire 30,000 people in Albania to create a list of every entity and person that is counter to your interests and start, in a very meticulous, methodical way, start undermining your credibility. If I go on your Twitter feed, Kara, whenever you talk about these issues and I see people who are, it's always the same thing. They try to come across reasonable, but say you're wrong on this topic, or they make a personal insult, or they find something that you're vulnerable around and start trying to create a fire around those issues. And I look at these people, and usually 80% or 90% of them have 10 followers, 15 followers. You can't find out who they are.

You are being stalked, Scott. Oh, I think we all are. I think our nation is being stalked. Only the paranoid survive. Who said that? That was Andy Grove. That's right, yeah. Anyways, the notion that these firms aren't being weaponized, as a species, and this is very dangerous and it's a vulnerability about our species, as a species, we are easier to fool than convince we've been fooled.

This is true. nation, one-seventeenth the size of ours, Russia, has weaponized almost every platform that we look to for innovation and as our poster child for America. It's so offensive to us that we would rather continue to be weaponized and fooled than acknowledge we've been fooled. And I think Twitter is clearly has very little regard for the commonwealth and the toxicity on Twitter. So what would you do if you were these companies? And then we're going to go to break and get back and talk about coronavirus. But what would you do if all these people you're hiring like crazy, right? You're always looking for good people and you're expanding across the globe. In this case, the engineer was working on their Middle Eastern strategies that they were expanding there.

And the other person there was dealing with getting prominent Saudis to come onto Twitter. This guy worked on the media team. How do you vet people? How do you know what to do when you're hiring at such a speed and you can't monitor everyone? Is there a solution of this is, you know, this is where the information is and this is where these governments want to be? And, you know, you're going to get pressure from these governments no matter what because because it makes sense for them to do that. Well, I think the verse says you have verified identities. I think a lot of this problem gets swept up. This is the people on the sites, but I'm talking about employees. I would invite the FBI in and say, we want your help. This is

an issue of national security, and we want your help screening and vetting employees. And then you do a couple perp walks, and you have people leaving handcuffs. I think you got to scare the shit out of them. Yeah. But I don't think you can prevent it. And then you do a couple perp walks and you have people leaving handcuffs. I think you got to scare the shit out of them. Yeah. But I don't think you can prevent it. And then online to have verified identities. This would like cripple their businesses, you know, to have to do this. Well, okay. If it does cripple their business, what it means is their business is being run on lies and falsehoods. So bring on the cripple. All right. All right.

Well, that's a very—that's a point of view. That's a point of view, Scott. I'm so sorry the Russians are attacking you. I have a blue checkmark next to mine. Don't you? Why can't they do that for everybody? Well, there's a long story behind that. We need a bigger boat. We need a bigger boat.

It's expensive. It's expensive and difficult, and they messed up. What do you think they should do? I don't think—I think it's unavoidable that there are spies all over Silicon Valley. There's got to be. 100%. Like, right? I've heard stories at Google, at YouTube, at Facebook, like, oh, did you know that person was thought to be a Russian?

I think they need to just bring in really serious detective work when they're doing hiring, and I think they've been hiring at an unprecedented rate and not doing enough vetting. I just think vetting is critical for these companies. These are like, you know, the way they vet defense department contractors and things like that. I think they've got to vet themselves. They're like any other business that are part of national security, and I think it's really, they don't think of it like that because they're making, you know, apps for dating or whatever they're doing, but these companies, when people have this much access to this much data, there has to be more vetting happening at these companies. And it all falls back again to this other unfortunate narrative

that the biggest issues facing our world, whether it's crumbling infrastructure or income inequality or climate change, or quite frankly, the weaponization of these, the perversion of our democracies at the hands of these platforms. And what do we do? We start cutting budgets across all of the resources and governmental departments

that need them when we need them most, such that we can cut taxes on corporations and rich people. And the wheel spins, Cara. And the wheel spins. On this depressing episode of Pivot, we're going to talk about coronavirus when we get back.

Yes, I think we both agree that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Anyway, we're going to take time for a quick break. We'll be right back with a friend of Pivot, Matthew Freeman. He is going to break down what is actually happening with the spread of coronavirus, and then we'll do wins and fails if we survive this year. Say goodbye. Say goodbye. It was good while it lasted. I'm just glad I was here for Chipotle. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer,

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awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash Zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic. You already know that AI is transforming the world around us, but lost in all the enthusiasm and excitement is a really important question.

How can AI actually work for you? And where should you even start? Claude from Anthropic may be the answer. Claude is a next-generation AI assistant, built to help you work more efficiently without sacrificing safety or reliability. Anthropic's latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, can help you organize thoughts, solve tricky problems, analyze data, and more. Whether you're brainstorming alone or working on a team with thousands of people, all at a price that works for just about any use case. If you're

trying to crack a problem involving advanced reasoning, need to distill the essence of complex images or graphs, or generate heaps of secure code, Clawed is a great way to save time and money. Plus, you can rest assured knowing that Anthropic built Clawed with an emphasis on safety. The leadership team founded the company with a commitment to an ethical approach that puts humanity first. To learn more, visit anthropic.com slash Claude. That's anthropic.com slash Claude. Okay, we're back and we have Matt Freeman here in the studio. He is an associate professor at the University of Maryland.

He specializes in microbiology and specifically in emerging coronaviruses, which is good timing, I guess, for him. He joined us at the Code Conference last year to talk on a panel called Pandemic Response Preparing for the Unplannable, which was kind of interesting that we were ahead of that idea. So it makes him the perfect person to teach us about what's going on with coronavirus. So, Matt, why don't you start by giving us the latest update? Because it seemed like it was calm for a minute and then a spate of headlines today affecting the stock market, affecting everything.

Sure. So as of this morning, it's around 75,000, 79,000 people infected, a little over 2,600 deaths spreading now to 29 countries. little over 2,600 deaths spreading now to 29 countries. And the really worrying part now is that while a lot of the cases are in China, there is emergence of cases in other countries around the world, including Iran, Italy, now cases in Singapore, and really spreading into epicenters around the world. So tell us what we know about the virus and how it is spreading, how it's spreading. So this virus is similar to the standard coronaviruses that we know of that cause a common cold. So every winter, you don't know it, but there's four other human coronaviruses that give you a cold. Around 10 to 30 percent of the colds are coronaviruses. They give you

runny nose, sore throat, cough, and that's it. And they go away. And this virus is in the same family as the two other human coronaviruses that we know of, SARS and MERS. It's really similar to SARS, which emerged in 2003 in China, except it's not as lethal as SARS. SARS was about 10% lethal, but it only spread to 8,000 people that we know of. So this is spreading at a much higher rate than the previous virus. But now the casetality rate is about 2.5% as we know of it right now. So it's spreading basically by coughs and sneezes. There seems to be potentially a fecal transmission route as well, which makes it a little scarier. And we're, it's spreading like a really bad cold virus. What is the danger here? Is the danger, obviously, you know, two and a half percent sounds low, but two and a half percent of several million people gets pretty, pretty scary, pretty fast. What is, what is the doomsday scenario? How does this turn into

something? How does the sum of all fears happen here? How have you modeled this out if things go really bad? So there's a lot of scenarios that can happen. I would say the worst case scenario is that it spreads around the world like a common cold. It's a new virus that we haven't seen before. There's no immunity. And it now spreads to a billion people. And so that 2% case fatality rate is probably not going to stay that high. That number is really high inside Hubei province in Wuhan in China. Outside of Wuhan, it's not that high at the moment.

But we don't know the denominator. We don't know actually how many cases there are because 80% of the cases are either mild or asymptomatic cases. So we're probably only seeing the tip of that iceberg in those 79,000 cases. So it goes to a billion people, and it may not be, the deaths may not be as high, but more people get it and the potential for that. Right. And even outside of that, there's a massive worry about the hospital system and healthcare system being overwhelmed. And so what is being used now outside of China

is basically mitigation practices. So this virus is out. It is going around countries. The second wave of the virus is now happening in countries around the world. The US has been able to hold off this outbreak at the moment. And what the ideal scenario would be

is that we mitigate and lessen the peak of the virus as it comes and it spreads out over multiple months so that while there can be more mild cases, the healthcare system isn't overwhelmed. And so, like you said in the beginning, get your flu shot, do everything you can to not get sick over the next several months so that you can mitigate and not have to go to the hospital. So when it turns into a pandemic, explain the difference between epidemic and pandemic. And that was the headlines, I think, which are affecting the stock market and everything else. The word pandemic is a

frightening word. Absolutely. And so this is basically semantics of what's going on. But pandemic generally means that the virus has now had sustained spread in countries around the world. And so where you have basically cases that are unlinked to their origin, so unlinked to China, but now you have person-to-person spread in countries that are outside of this epicenter in Wuhan. And so that's what we're seeing now in Iran, probably. That's what we're seeing in Italy, Singapore, and really many countries around the world. And there's no vaccine. There's no way to solve this, correct, at this point? Correct. So we don't have a vaccine. Many are being developed right now as fast as possible. There's many therapeutics that are being tested and other types of antibodies and drugs that are being tested in labs around the world.

I mean, if you remember two months ago, we didn't have any cases. Right. And now there's 79,000 plus. And that is a remarkable increase in speed. And so now that the labs around the world and healthcare centers around the world are getting online and testing therapeutics against this virus, we'll be able to hopefully in the very near future get something on the shelf, whether it's FDA-approved drugs or similar things that can be tested in the lab and then really put into the clinic for use. So this is the first major outbreak since 2003 and since China's become a global superpower. They're obviously linked to the global supply chain. And again, the market was affected. I hate to bring in business things,

but the effect of what happens, this massive quarantine in China, Facebook canceling its, for example, lots of companies' annual marketing conference it was planning to host in San Francisco next month over concerns where 5,000 people were expected to attend. Is this the right thing to do? Because China's so linked to the global supply chain, not just in making things and manufacturing,

which people aren't going to work, but in terms of gatherings. And is that the responsible thing to do? Is that the correct thing to do? So there's definitely two angles to this. And I'm definitely not an economist. I'm a virologist. So bear with me. But I think from the standpoint of the virus and trying to mitigate and lessen the amount

of spread, closing these meetings and canceling these massive Facebook meeting, which do we really need another massive Facebook meeting? I don't know. A funny virologist. Can we – we can get away with those things now. And the more that if you're sick and you don't have to go to work and you can work from home, you know, this is the time for those companies to start planning those events, right? That's what I talked about at the Code Conference was that when this thing happens, the companies should have secondary ways of communicating with their personnel, getting business done. When you're a factory in China, that's really hard. And so just today, the Chinese government is allowing companies to start bringing back

employees that have been away in their hometowns for the Chinese New Year. Which is when this hit. Which is when this hit, right? So one of the big worries is that now that people come back into these factories from outside Hubei, will they now be a new susceptible population? And so while the Chinese economy is obviously critical for the global supply chain, whether it's just widgets for your doodad or whether it's other things that we need to have around the world. I think it's a really hard call. And I'm glad I'm not the one making those calls because I don't know what the downside of delaying this for a couple more weeks in China is. All right. Well, that's manufacturing. What about gathering? You know, there was a lot of different ideas. When you do these gatherings,

when there's a lot of networking happening all over the world, is that just the best thing?. government recommend is to eliminate these mass gatherings, whether it's churches, whether it's sporting events, whether it's concerts, whatever it is, to really reduce the spread of this virus. And even still, most American workers, when they're sick, they still go to work, right? We're really bad at that. And that's why flu spreads so well and cold spreads so well. So if you do have an illness, you should stay home. Most of the time, it's not hospital. You don't need to go to the hospital, especially with this virus. 80% are mild cases. But if you have a cold, you should stay home. You should wash your hands more. You should have social distancing, which is this idea of being away from people that are sick. And that's the way to mitigate the spread so you can really lessen the effect on the healthcare system.

So, Dr. Freeman, I'm curious. So, stay at home when you're not feeling well. That seems to be just sound advice. What about in a few weeks, I'm supposed to go to Vienna, and a few weeks after that, I'm supposed to go to Sao Paulo. Would you advise corporations and individuals just to cut back on international travel for a while? So I really think it probably depends on the country you're going to, but clearly there's international spread of this virus. In Italy now, in northern Italy around the Lombardi region, around Milan and Lake Como, so hopefully Georgia and Amala are okay. They're telling everyone to stay inside. There's an outbreak there. They have something around 100 cases so far and six or seven deaths. And the denominator there is probably much larger than we know. So, you know, whether Vienna is going to be spared in the coming weeks, that's a big question. And I would watch your State Department travel advisories closely to know.

There doesn't seem to be much in South America, whether that's because of testing or lack of testing or whether it's because there's viruses in there yet is another question. But, you know, I don't think we're at the need to block total international travel yet. That's not really what the CDC or the government is recommending. But I think that in the coming weeks to months, you could see these recommendations really broadening to other countries. And what advice would you have for elected officials and governments who distinctive the short-term tactics to try and push back on this specific coronavirus? What kind of long-term investments or actions do you think we need to take to be better prepared for something like this moving forward? So there definitely has to be control of the healthcare system. So that is where the money should be going to prop it up to get PPE, so all the protective material they need to make sure that the healthcare system is taken care of.

Hospitals have all the equipment they need and all the protection they need to make sure that the health care system is taken care of. Hospitals have all the equipment they need and all the protection they need to protect the doctors and nurses and other staff. Because if the hospital workers get infected and they are sick, then it's a really hard thing for us to do. And so that's a really hard thing for the U.S. to handle. That's why as much as you can do now to not get infected, to not get sick, and to really lengthen the process of this virus coming to the U.S. is the better that we can do. And in terms of, you know, we make predictions on pivot, but how do you game this in a typical, you know, epidemic, pandemic way? There are patterns of these things going, correct, or not? What are some of the scenarios you see over the next couple of months? Right. So I think the coming scenarios are really kind of several fold. One idea is that the virus

does have this large burst in China, that the other countries around the world can contain the cases they have, and we get localized spread and that's it. Right. That's a great scenario as we are right now. A couple of weeks ago, I would have said we want to keep everything in China, one or two cases around the world, and that's it. And we clearly have gone through that. That scenario is over. So maybe all these countries around the world can really contain this. I think that it's questionable that countries in even developed countries are really able to control the virus from spreading in the community. The big worry now is that it spreads to large population centers like Africa, multiple countries in Africa or India, where you really can have this rampant spread and you get these large bursts. The other scenario is that the populations of

the countries are able to control the virus a bit, but then we still get this spread around the world, especially because the incubation period seems to be five or six days before you're infected. There's evidence that you can spread during your asymptomatic period, some evidence that that's true. And so now people are traveling around the world and bringing the virus with them and they don't know they're sick. And that's a big problem and a big worry about these kinds of respiratory viruses. And if this virus gets to the US and the Western Hemisphere in large numbers, then the genie's out of the bag. And that's where the ability to control the virus is really at the community and local level. The government needs to give supplies to everybody that they can to

control this outbreak. And I think that the CDC will call in a lot of the epidemic response capabilities that they have, which includes, you know, potentially closing schools, closing businesses, telling people to work from home. I mean, that's long term, right? This is downstream scenario. But I think that's, you know, scenario four or five down the list. And in most cases, these have not borne out like SARS. 100%. Absolutely.

Right. out like SARS? 100 percent. Absolutely. So even 2009 H1N1 epidemic, the flu epidemic in 2009, the swine flu epidemic, you know, there wasn't schools closed. There wasn't this this plan that that happened. But that is, you know, we're planning for basically a combination, you know, middle ground between SARS and flu. And that is what the CDC is trying to understand and model. And I will leave it to them to figure out what the right scenario is in the future. I'm going to ask one more question. Scott, I have one more. Are we eventually going to have something that is not controllable? I mean, when you study microbiology or biologists, is that sort of the great worry? It's sort of like nuclear proliferation, that kind of thing. Is there a feeling that that is where we're headed eventually?

As a human race? Yes. I think that the immune response in people are remarkably resilient to these kind of infections. And so whether it's this infection or any other infection. And so we won't have, you know, massive billion people dead. That's not the scenario at all. We won't have massive billion people dead. That's not the scenario at all.

I will say that the population that has severe cases from this is 60 and older. So is there a more severe outbreak in elderly and comorbid and immunocompromised? Absolutely. Where this goes in the future, who knows? I think when SARS emerged in 2003, when we started working on it then, it was a new thing. It was the first epidemic or outbreak of the 20th century or 21st century. And then MERS, another related virus, emerged in Saudi Arabia. It's still spreading. It emerged in 2012. And everything we predicted for SARS, when we said, maybe this will happen in the future

again, we should really study it, happened in 2012. And after MERS, we said, hmm, okay, well, it doesn't transmit that well, but it's 35% lethal. We should still study this too and really understand and develop therapeutics as fast as we can. And we still don't have anything on the shelf to give anyone. And now again, now in 2019, there's now three emerging coronaviruses in 18 years. This isn't going away, and it'll just keep coming. And so what we do know is that we learn more and more from every one of these outbreaks. And so that's the good thing that we learn in the lab. That's the good thing we learn in the clinic.

And hopefully, this outbreak will develop therapeutics that prepares for the next one that we don't even know occurs. Yeah, that was going to be my next question is, do we – everything we're talking about is a reaction to an outbreak. How do we start to play offense instead of defense? And that is go to the very source of where these viruses are manifested. Is there anything we can do to just ensure these things never happen? So it's impossible to, I think, game Mother Nature and to make sure they never happen. But these viruses that we know of, especially SARS and SARS-2 or whatever we're calling this new virus, COVID-19.

It's COVID-19. COVID-19 is the disease the WHO calls it. Yeah, I was obsessively Googling it this weekend, but go ahead. So both of them emerged, probably emerged from animal sources. So these are bat viruses that have spilled over into people. And whether they've gone through an animal intermediate, like it did for SARS, went through civicats, we don't know the animal intermediate for this one. But it looks like it came from an animal and all, most coronaviruses have been tracked back to bats at some level. And so there is, yes. That's a whole, you need another hour for that. But there is a interaction between animals and humans. And the more interaction there is, the more of these spillover events that can occur.

And so there's a lot of people that work on that animal side, trying to track these viruses to understand where they come from and how they get to people and how often this happens. And what the data shows is that this happens all the time. And most of the time they're dead ends. But every once in a while, you get the wrong virus with the wrong mutation in the wrong person, and then they spread. And that's it. And so that's what we have. Amazing. And from bats— Go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm just curious. From bats to animals to humans, is it bites? Is it fecal matter? How does it make the jump? bites? Is it fecal matter? How does it make the jump? Yeah, so nobody really understands,

even for SARS, how it went from bats to civet cats to humans or bats potentially to this, whatever the intermediate is for this one, to humans. You know, it potentially is fecal matter, potentially it's saliva. If you watch Contagion, the last two minutes of Contagion have a great scenario of basically Nipah virus, which is bats eating a piece of fruit. They drop in the pig pen. The farmer picks the pig up, sends it to market, and then Gwyneth Paltrow dies, right? So that's a scenario of where this goes. Is that on Netflix? Stop.

Is that on Netflix? You can watch it this weekend. Contagion. I like the Dustin Hoffman movie. Outbreak? I'm going to ask you the weirdest question, and then we've got to go. I watch, you know, I'm a plague-obsessed person. I watch all of them.

Which of the many? Outbreak, yes, of course, where Dustin Hoffman's with the helicopter with Cuba. Yeah, Cuba Gooding Jr. saves the world with one monkey in a van. Right, exactly. And they put money. So what, is there any of them that are really good where you're like, okay, that's. So Contagion was really good. Yeah.

I mean, there's there's about a 45 second scene where the. I'm blanking on her name, where there's an explanation of the are not, which is the transmissibility factor. And that's a beautiful way of explaining this to general public of how viruses spread from person to person and how we characterize that. And I think that the speed of that movie is quite rapid about how it spreads and spreads. And it's a combination of viruses that are shown there or they're displayed in the movie. But I think the last two minutes of that movie where they show the interaction between bats

and animals and humans is completely realistic and completely legitimate. And I think that contagion is a great way of understanding, you know, potentially how the worst case scenario goes. All right. Oh, goodness sake. Some beautiful enjoyment for your week, for your entertainment week.

It actually is a great movie. It is a terrific movie. It all comes back to Netflix. It doesn't matter what we're talking about. It all comes back to Netflix. Stay home and watch Netflix so you do not get the virus, right? Yeah. So, you know, from a business perspective. Netflix and and watch Netflix so you do not get the virus, right? Yeah, so, you know,

from a business perspective, Netflix and chill. Netflix, Disney+, you know, if you have kids, I don't know. God, the tech industry is going to do something good for once. We can talk on Slack. It's so nice to have someone on the program that is actually adding value to the world. Dr. Freeman, you are a gangster. Thanks so much for your

good and important work. We really appreciate it. This is Matt Freeman. He's an associate professor at the University of Maryland. He specializes in microbiology. Thank you so much for coming on. No problem. Thanks, Doctor. Okay, Scott, how do you feel now? What's the temperature, so to speak?

I just listen to that guy, and I start to feel faint. Don't you? Don't you start to feel like— He shook my hand, so that's a good sign. That is a good sign. He didn't like – there was no mask wearing. There was no non-hand shaking and stuff like that. My nose is running.

Anyway, is it? I've been sick all winter. I've had a cold and flu all winter. That's just because you're really old. That's just aging. That's true. That's just aging. I'm getting close to that.

That's a virus called aging. Of the dying people. I do not joke about viruses. That's a virus called aging. Of the dying people. I do not joke about viruses. I do have an obsession with them, though. Anyway, so wins and fails. Obviously, Matt wins. But wins and fails of this week. Would you like to go first?

So my gangster colleague, Professor Adam Alter, talks about how in periods of stress, rom-coms do really well. And then when the economy is good, depressing movies about whatever, about the wars or something do really well. So I'm not going to have a fail because I feel like it feels kind of scary out there right now. My win is Diary of a Future President. I wrote a post every Friday. I wrote a post on No Mercy, No Malice at profgalloway.com. Thank you very much. And this last week I wrote about moments of engagement with my sons. And one of the ways we have moments of engagement as a family, and again, it all comes back to Netflix, is we find we all vote on a program that we want to watch and then we all watch it together and it's nice. And the program we're watching now is Diary of a Future President.

And it's on Disney+. And it's nice. And the program we're watching now is Diary of a Future President and it's on Disney Plus and it's really wonderful. It's about a single mom, so obviously it tugs at my heart, but it touches on a lot of, I think it's actually quite, for Disney Plus, it touches on a lot of a fairly uncomfortable or it's pretty open and honest about what it's like to be a girl, I think. Not that I know too much about this in junior high school. And I think it's, I just think it's a lovely show and my sons are learning a lot and I think they do a great job and we're bonding over it.

So kudos to Tess Romero, who is a lovely young actress and does a great job. The woman who plays a single mother is great. Yeah, I've heard this. It's amazing. I want to see it. It's about a single mother in I think a Cuban-American household

raising her son and her daughter. And I think it works on a lot of levels. Anyways, my win is Diary of a Future President. It's a good choice. I like that you watch sort of teen. That's aimed at the teen market, you know. Yeah. That's aimed at...

But I like that you're a teen market watcher of stuff. I do, too. I watch that. I watch that stuff. That stuff. What are your wins and fails, Kara? There was just a recent interview with Warren Buffett that I just loved. I think everyone should – two things.

Two things you should watch. Wins is John Oliver did an amazing first show about Medicare for All and stuff like that. I thought it was great. I think it was interesting. All the young people I know watched it and talked about it quite a bit. My kids and their friends and other kids I've talked to have talked about that. I thought that was great. And then Warren Buffett gave an interview today saying he's never going to own cryptocurrency.

He talked about Apple being great. He talked about coronavirus. I just like listening to him go on. Oh, on CNBC. He did an interview on CNBC. Yeah, I thought it was great. I thought it was really great. And I like, one of the things he said is, I'm a Democrat, but I'm not a card-carrying Democrat. It is, however, card-carrying Capitals. We'll see what happens. It sounds like he's not

too happy with Bernie Sanders. So anyway, I thought that was, I think they're both very entertaining in their own way. So I like those. And then fail is, you know, the slowness of these companies still putting out warnings. The stuff that the national security advisor was talking about this weekend about how he had not seen any analysis of the Russians interfering with the elections, I thought was malpractice

on the part of a national security advisor. Maybe he didn't read them or didn't look at them, but these appointments of people like him and Richard, I think it's Richard Grinnell, who is totally incompetent to the job and seems like a son of a bitch. I think putting these people in these things is the ultimate danger to our world. And it's really important that we have competent people acting and telling the truth about things that are going on, even if it's not to their interest. And the situation with national security right now, which is critical in this point with coronavirus, all these big issues facing the world and false statements and things. I think we're leaving it to these companies to battle this stuff. Now Twitter's experimenting with putting labels, red labels, orange labels,

under false statements. That's really, it's the fig leaf of what we need to have happen here. And the fact that this is the best we have is little labels saying this is a lie is just depressing to me in the extreme. Thank you very much. There you go. What are you doing this week? What are you up to this week? What's a jungle cat doing this week?

I am going to Miami tomorrow. Oh, nice. And then at the Knight Foundation situation, there's an event there. And then I'm going to San Francisco. I'm going to San Francisco. And I'm doing a lot of things in San Francisco. I'm doing a lot of interviews. I am

spending some time there. I am going all around the place and interviewing Mark Benioff next week, for example. Nice. All kinds of stuff. So I'm going back to see what's going on in San Francisco. I just did an amazing interview

with Connor Doherty. He wrote a book called Golden Gates. It's about the fight for housing in America. And I'm interested in checking in with a lot of tech people there. I bet. Well, good.

Safe travels. What are you doing? So I go back to New York tomorrow night, and then next week I'm going to L.A. for a reunion with my fraternity brothers from UCLA, and then I'm speaking at a friend's high school, which I'm excited about. Oh, that's so nice. Isn't that nice? Well, wash your hands, Scott.

Isn't that nice? Wash your hands, as Dr. Friedman says. There you go. Wash your hands and be careful when you travel and make sure that you isolate yourself the minute you feel sick. Thank you. Did you say isolate yourself the moment you feel what? Sexy? Sick.

That happens all the time. No. Have you seen me? How can I not feel sexy all the time? You're not making a sex joke out of coronavirus. It's not happening on this show. You're going to be grave all the time. No. Have you seen me? How can I not feel sexy all the time? You're not making a sex joke out of coronavirus. It's not happening on this show. You're going to be grave about the situation. You're going to have grave warnings for people.

It's a very serious issue. You should all be concerned about. There's no sex jokes here. Do you understand that? No, seriously. Okay, we're going to have a shout out today to Siyu Yang. I think that's correct the way I pronounce it, who sent us a very thoughtful and personal email

about how she was comforting her friends in China struggling through the quarantine and coronavirus outbreak. Our listeners' personal insights generally do make the show stronger, so keep your emails coming and email us at pivot at voxmedia.com

to be featured on the show or just tell us what you think of what we're doing. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Erica Anderson is Pivot's executive producer. Thanks also to Rebecca Castro and Drew Burrows. Make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts,

or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify, or frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us later in the week when we'll break down all things tech and business. Stay safe out there, Kara. Stay safe, Scott. 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?

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