Pivot - Dorsey moves to Africa and streaming platforms trump movie theaters

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

Welcome to Pivot 2x! Our first twice weekly episode. Kara and Scott talk about the future of Twitter as Jack Dorsey announces he's off to live in Africa. They discuss the streaming wars and how movies fared on on platform versus in movie theaters. In listener mail they talk about the failures of logistics companies (specifically FedEx). Prediction: Twitter loses value next year and an activist investor steps in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Pivot comes from Virgin Atlantic. Too many of us are so focused on getting to our destination that we forgot to embrace the journey. Well, when you fly Virgin Atlantic, that memorable trip begins right from the moment you check in. On board, you'll find everything you need to relax, recharge, or carry on working. Buy flat, private suites, fast Wi-Fi, hours of entertainment, delicious dining, and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. delicious dining and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. Check out virginatlantic.com for your next trip to London and beyond and see for yourself how traveling for 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. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway. Rebecca, cue the cool in the gang. Oh, my God. It's Tuesday. It's not Friday. What is going on? That's right. Too much of a good thing is cocaine, but it's also pivot twice a week. What stands between the tyranny of technology marching into the aisles of Dover and taking over Britain?

A jungle cat, a journalist who wants to be the godmother of podcasting and an angry professor whose career has come totally off the fucking track. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. One plus one doesn't equal two. It doesn't equal three. It equals Pivot. Pivot, twice a week, Carol. That is not exactly the theme song that I was envisioning for our first, second show.

How exciting is this? How exciting is this? I cannot believe how excited I am right now. I can't even tell you. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. This is like ground up Cialis on a Chipotle burrito bowl in that we will enjoy, our listeners will enjoy it as they're consuming it. And then for the next 72 hours, blood will be rushing to a new organ in their brain.

Oh, Scott, really? That's really how you want to play this one. How about this and this great that our listeners can hear us twice a week now because that's the way it is. That's right. We appeal to their higher nature rather than their lower nature. But that's fine, Scott. That's fine. Scott, how was your Thanksgiving?

You know, same thing, same as it is everywhere. Cracker Barrel and then a strip club. Okay. All right. Anyway. And by the way, I just want to say. Listen, you got huge blowback. Speaking of Thanksgiving, people were eating turkey. They also gave huge blowback for endorsing Bloomberg on CNN. Would you care to comment?

That was a good segue. That was a good segue. Yeah, I got enormous feedback, both online and I went on Michael Smirconish, who I think is wonderful. No, I don't. Do you know Michael? I don't go on CNN. But go ahead. Move along. He's like this rare species where they capture it on film and say, we thought it was extinct 2,000 years ago. But there's actually a lot of them in the forest. They're called moderates. And I just love him. I think he's thoughtful and interesting.

Anyways, I wrote that article urging Bloomberg to run. So he said, come on and talk about it. And I went in and kind of went through my dance around why I think a centrist is important and Mayor Bloomberg running what is, would be the 12th largest economy in the world. And that he was right on most issues important to most important to everyone. I got wild blowback. I mean, one of the wonderful, one of the many wonderful things about this podcast and what we do is I hear from people and people were, were thoughtful to the point, we're really thoughtful, but generally the thought, okay, we don't need another billionaire.

This is another example of crazy white billionaire privilege that people are really bothered by the stop and frisk policy. Yeah, that was just me too. That was just my feedback, but go ahead, keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a lot of people are with you. And that for him to kind of get in late in the race and use money to buy kind of, I won't say buy his way on the stage because he's not gonna be able to get on the debate stage. But I would say it was running kind of three or four to one negative to positive. And I can't figure out if it's a vocal minority or I have totally overestimated his potential for candidacy. I thought he would be much more welcomed into the race. No. If he had done it earlier, because he's such a choker, maybe if he had done the little work, the little spade work initially, and not been such a coward not to get in early. He should have gotten in earlier. What was the problem with that? I think he probably looks at a poll, and he doesn't like it, and then he changes his mind. Billionaires are capricious. Whenever anyone is offered a job with one, anytime I'm always like, think hard,

because even if it's a very nice person, I think Bloomberg's quite interesting and people like working for him, but it's capricious. And so he should have done it from the very beginning and done the work and the spade work that others did. And that's what it drips up. And he should have addressed the stop and frisk thing a lot earlier, except I'm so sorry, because now it looks simply, it doesn't look reflective.

It looks politically expedient. And so what, you know, and I know you're saying people liked it. Like, you don't want to appeal to that. I'm sorry. It's just, that's not any way to govern. It's not any way to run for office. And I want Tia Leone to be our president, as she is on the outgoing Madam Secretary now. I'm very excited about that. That's hard to argue with. And I just want to be clear,

I don't think people liked stop and frisk. And I think it's obviously aged very poorly. But I think people, I think that one of the one of the this, this cohort in the middle, if you will, I think a little bit of I don't want to call it political incorrectness, but someone who's not what I'll call full woke appeals to that segment of the voting population that may be the key cohort in terms of who stays or who gets into the White House. But anyways, I got a lot of pushback. How was your Thanksgiving? I did not endorse anybody. My Thanksgiving was excellent. It was on many pies and many Amanda Katz relatives. So it was quite something. It was quite a lot of people, big family.

Meanwhile, my kids were in Japan, so it was good. I'll be seeing them soon. We're going to do Thanksgiving with my kids too. Anyway, Scott, time for our big story breakdown on our second show of the week. Let's talk streaming wars and how different players fared on the first big holiday weekend. Why don't you give us your definition of streaming wars and the major players? And did you watch a lot this weekend? Yeah, I always watch a lot of TV because it was the weekend. But you have, sure, a lot of people say, well, if you really want to talk about the streaming wars, you need to define, also include broadcast television who have their own offerings and YouTube, but I would say and movie theaters. Yeah, that's right.

But you have what you obviously have the 10, 10 gorilla, you have Netflix, you have everyone from Comcast getting in HBO max Disney. I mean, they're all, they're all lining up. It's, it's, it's very strange, but you found some data on actual movie going. Yes, movie going. And, you know, it's reflected in my own life. I thought about going to the movies about 10 times. I didn't go once, which was really interesting. And because it was not just because I have a small baby, but it just was – it's inconvenient.

The weather was cold. So there was a 16 percent decline from last year in movie ticket sales this holiday weekend. And what was interesting is one of the movies I did want to see at the theater was The Irishman, which I then waited to see on Netflix. I did not like it, by the way. But Disney's Frozen did very well. You know, this is Disney's first major movie since launching Disney+. And I would have rather I didn't go see it. I was going to go see it because I like Frozen. But I didn't.

And my movie going has declined so precipitously. And it's largely because it's sort of like the shopping thing. It's relatively inconvenient compared to when it's easier to get other things. And I feel badly about this. And at the same time, movie theater has never done me any favors unless it's sort of like a landmark theater or something like that. So one of the things with The Irishman, it was only in select theaters for 26 days, which major theater chains were furious about. It did pretty poorly at the box office. But it seems like a success on the platform and getting Oscar buzz.

You know, they don't, of course, release their numbers the way movie theaters release. But why even release movies to the theaters? I just watch online. And I watched it on a large television, but I just didn't, I didn't like it. That's a separate thing. But it just sort of changes. Behavior is changing rather rapidly. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of interesting things going on. The first is, and e-commerce is the right analogy. If you go into a mall and you spun yourself around, would you know that it's not 2005? The innovation around in-store shopping, there's some people who've done interesting things, Restoration Hardware or Sephora, or even Tesla's dealerships are sort of interesting in the mall. Apple, even Apple, if you think about the stores, you probably wouldn't know it wasn't 2009.

Whereas shopping online, the speeds have gotten faster. There's all different ways to pick up your stuff. You get it in five days, three days, 24 hours. Now in some cities, 48 minutes with Amazon now. The same thing has happened to movie viewing. And that is if you were to walk into a movie theater, you might not know it wasn in 2005. Whereas the home viewing experience in terms of what's offered up online, that programming or that platform's ability to predict what it is you want to watch next, you have 4K, now 8K, TVs are wonderful. Content is great, actually, the selection. Unbelievable. I went through the Netflix trailer thing. And they do it really well. You can watch them for two seconds and get a sense of what the shows are.

It was great. I picked from there. And I used mostly Netflix. Even though I did get Disney+, I didn't use Disney+, because it's not on whatever system I had. It wasn't on the Comcast system, I don't think. But it was just interesting how easy it system, I don't think. But it was, it was, it was just, it was, it's just interesting how you, how easy it is. And you're right, the experience is, of getting up and going out is really different. But I think the issue is, why don't we get the numbers for these things? I mean, do, will they ever release numbers,

these companies? No, because I think the numbers on an individual basis are actually pretty, pretty thin. But all they care about is reporting. I mean, that's one thing that's happened across all of finance that I think is a bad thing is that it's gotten to the point where companies can make up. They invent their own metrics and whatever shows them in the best light. You know, when the markets were valuing companies purely on subscriber growth, they kind of ignored their profitability and said, this is how many subscribers we're adding. And then they had different terms for EBITDA. But they don't have any incentive right now to release their numbers. Do you find, in terms of your home viewing patterns, what do you find yourself watching the most and least of?

And what is it at the cost of? I sort of graze. I graze. I was watching that four weddings and a funeral one of the the uh the new one by mindy kaling i grazed around to watch a cbs which i didn't want to buy but i ended up watching it through comcast which was you know my comcast xfinity account um i watched um the um uh the irishman obviously which took 14 years because it was so long. And some other things, but I graze.

I graze a lot. And I don't pick or choose one. I guess it's sort of like owning, as I said, a lot of magazine subscriptions. We're going to move on this for a second, but what can get people in theaters, do you think? I'm going to go see the new James Bond movie in theaters for sure. I don't know why, but I really like to see that movie in a big theater. And I don't even think the home experience is is good enough in that regard. Well, just as the only the only time people see we were talking about TV.

The one thing that people don't talk enough about that is the common the common thread through all of this is the one thing they're watching is they're not watching commercials. If you look at all television, what it has in common is that, as I've said for a long time, advertising has become the tax that the technologically illiterate and the poor have to pay. And everybody else just watches ad-free TV now. The only time people get off their butts and actually get excited to go into a movie, I think it's either for a kid's film because kids programming is so important to just kind of like get them doing something or get them off your back. And also these big budget, 200, $300 million Marvel superhero films. The scary part, that's right. But the scary part around all of this is that I think one of the, one of the things that's tearing our nation apart, you know, in addition to algorithms that put you in one pole

or another run by unethical people, I think there's a resegregation of our society. And that is through the 80s and the 90s, there were a lot of efforts and my school was integrated with busing. We did a good job of introducing different socioeconomic and different ethnic groups to each other. And I think it was a wonderful thing because my two best friends, one was a Mormon kid going to Stanford. And I thought, okay, he's smarter and harder working than me, but he's not that much smarter and harder working than me. Maybe I could go to a good school. And then

my other friend, Ronnie Drake, was a black kid from Crenshaw whose only way to college was football. friend, Ronnie Drake, was a black kid from Crenshaw whose only way to college was football. And it provided kind of those different economic and ethnic groups gave me not only aspiration, but it gave me empathy. And as a society, we're resegregating. And I generally believe people don't like to go to the mall or to the movies anymore because they're scared of each other. And they, for the most part, just want to hang out in their own economic and in their own ethnic classes that we are. You're right. You're right.

I think that's a that's a very that's a really actually a very wise thing. After your opening of Cialis and cocaine, you suddenly become woke. But whatever. I'll take it. I'm back on your good side. I'm back. Not in any way. But listen, listen, speaking of that, speaking of woke, I'm going to move on to another topic.

But I think I just want to I want to another topic. I want to stop there. I want to ask you something. Quick, quick. I need to get to Jack Dorsey in Africa. But when I go to the movie theater, I go to the mall, I think to myself, okay, unless I can go to IPIC, unless I can be these general like massive movie theaters to me, and maybe it's because I'm old and I see all these young people, I think, okay, is this where I want to be? Am I becoming part of the problem? And then we pull our kids out of public school so they can be around people in their own economic weight class. I think it's really dangerous that we're kind of

self-casting. Self-casting. All right. We'll use that term. Speaking of self-casting, I'm going to switch the topic so we've got to get to things. It's a tight, tight show. I'm rolling over you, but you're right. I like, very wise. These are very wise thoughts. Jack Dorsey says

he's moving to Africa for part of 2020. He announced via tweet he'd be moving to Ghana for three to six months in 2020. He said Africa will define the future, especially the Bitcoin one. He was traveling around

and he met Bitcoin owners in Ghana. And it was sort of an interesting, I'm not sure, I sort of contacted Twitter and trying to understand this and also Square because he's CEO of two companies. Any thoughts upon this? Well, sure. The problem isn't that Jack Dorsey is going to Africa. It's that he's going to come back. This is, so I got contacted by CNBC this morning and they said, what do you think of the corporate governance of a CEO leaving and spending two or three months in a market that accounts for probably, I would have bet less than 1% of his revenue. I'm like, the only board that

would tolerate this is a board that would tolerate a guy being CEO of two companies. And what do you know? It's the same board. And this is, in my view, and I realize I sound like a scolding an old man here, but this is just fucking ridiculous. It is, you want to talk about the mother of all paid time off. He's decided he wants to live in Africa for two to three months while Twitter

continues to subterfuge our economy and be a real negative and a real flashpoint for our elections. He's decided, I'm going to go roll in Africa for 12 weeks. And the guy, a CEO of two companies, going into Africa, this is just so borderline ridiculous. And it continues this notion of this idolatry of innovators that the CEO of Ford Motor said, I'm going to go to Iceland for three months because the future is around ecological tourism or sustainability or clean energy. Right. The board of Ford would go, well, that's all fine and cute. And then the and then the the nominating committee would have a special committee and they'd start looking for a new CEO. It is ridiculous. And you know, it's going to you know, it's finally, I think, going to going to put a bullet in Jack Dorsey's Twitter career. Is that Amazon over the last four years, Jack Dorsey kind of rejoined Twitter exactly four years ago.

And in that time, I think Twitter stock was at 20 bucks when he joined. It's at like 30 now. It's flat. Amazon has tripled. Apple has doubled. Facebook has doubled. Google has doubled. So his tenure since kind of trying to pull a Steve Jobs, it just hasn't worked.

And it's one thing to be CEO of two companies. It's one thing to be CEO of two companies. It's one thing to be CEO of two companies and decide you want to go hang out with rhinos, you know, for 12 weeks. I mean, I think the implications, I think you're right. I think you're right on this. I think you should just quit and have another CEO if he wants to do that. But one of the concerns is sort of the way that tech people visited the Midwest. It's sort of weird colonizing kind of thing. That said, there's a lot going on in Africa. There are these active tech hubs.

Everything is, you know, it's a continent that is finally using tech to move forward. And it's actually a great place to invest from a lot of people I know who do that investing. But you're right, he should do it as another job. He should do it as another job. That's a great idea. If he'd said, I'm worth $4 billion. This has been a great run. Thanks

very much. Peace out. I'm starting a VC located in Tanzania or wherever. That would be amazing. Africa is the future. You can see it's going to come online. And not only that, I get a lot of pushback. I got a lot of pushback. I got so much pushback online this week for using just the term africa that someone accused me of being a racist by by yeah grouping a continent that it's a group of individual and individual cohorts and cultures and and so fair enough you know where wherever he decided to go in the african continent but this is ridiculous that this the cut of c of Twitter is not going to be an advocate for 10 months. Where are you going to go? I'm ready.

I was thinking Antarctica. Floripa, Florianapolis, south of Brazil. I'll get you a Canada goose coat like I bought this weekend, speaking of which, I went to a mall to buy one. But you're absolutely right. It's problematic. I'm trying to find out more, and I will try to report back later this week. So we're going to take a quick break now, but we'll be right back after this with more pivot on our first, second day, first day thing. All right.

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This week's Pivot listener question comes from Renzo Santillan. He thinks it would be cool if you guys could talk about the tech companies that are disrupting the logistics industry. He's talking about Flexport, Next Trucking, Envoy, Happy Returns, and any other company that is disrupting this archaic

industry. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks, Renzo. Alright, I'm going on here, Scott. You know I had a FedEx issue this week. Here we go. Here we go. I saw this. I saw this Let me know your thoughts. Thanks, Renzo. I had something delivered from Amazon and something delivered from FedEx, and I made a change of it. I'm not going to go into it in detail, but I paid to have the address move to where I was at Thanksgiving. I paid a lot of money to do that. And they didn't deliver it on time when they were supposed to. When it absolutely positively has to be there overnight, well, they didn't do that. And they promised it would be there a certain time.

And then on the app, they said it was going to be there, and then it wasn't there. And then they suddenly changed the time without telling me or contacting me or anything else. This was very important papers. And then trying to get through to them. I was on the phone for hours with FedEx arguing. I tweeted at them. You know, I had Bill Gurley tweeting me saying I was trying to be famous. Help me. I wasn't trying to help me. I paid money. I would like to know what happened to it. I think Twitter has become a comment system. It was an astonishing display of total disaster. Meanwhile, Amazon delivered something perfectly. And then I had to return that thing because it wasn't the right thing. And I already sent it off today. I did it all online, all on the app. It was so easy.

And it was no questions. It was easy to understand. FedEx, they were a little like, if you want a refund, you have to go to our refund department. We can't stop it because it's in a container and we can't turn it around. It was like, literally, they're going to get killed by Amazon if Amazon decides just to go into the logistics business. Thank you very much. That is my rant. Scott? Okay. You're about to have your revenge because Amazon, well, Amazon's going into this business. And all you need to do is look at S1. So under the investment section for about 10 years, they talked about how much money they spent on fulfillment. And then a few years ago, they moved their verbiage and investment disclosures from the investment section and the CapEx section to the competition section. And that is they're now saying that FedEx and UPS are competitors. Yeah, in DHL. The same way they did with AWS. So they're about to go into this business in a big way. FedEx made the mistake of becoming a profitable company, returning profits to the company. The other big mistake that FedEx made, or I would argue, is it's similar to General Electric. Rather than focusing the CEO's attention on operations and innovation, he's been totally focused on tax avoidance. And if you look at, I mean, it looks as if the Trump

Tax Act to reduce corporate taxes from 35 to 21% was largely orchestrated by Fred Smith and FedEx under the auspices that if you let companies hold on to more of their money, even despite the fact that it's going to increase the deficit by a trillion dollars a year, that you will unleash this massive amount of investment and plant property, equipment, new jobs that will literally result in a nuclear-like explosion, a pent-up demand and investment from corporations. And this is what happened. Every company took that money and bought back stock, which took the stock market up, but took the stocks up, which has a ripple effect. It's good. They can do things with that stock, but 80% of the stock is owned by the top

10%. All this was, was a chaser on income inequality. Even FedEx did exactly that. They went out, they didn't increase their CapEx. And what have we done here at the end of the day with this Fred Smith-backed tax plan is we've said, all right, let's pull prosperity forward from our kids and grandkids in the form of exploiting our national debt so we can take stocks up, which largely benefit the wealthy. I mean, like every policy in America, like every corporate lobbyist, it does one thing. It takes money from every cohort in America and transfers it to the wealthiest cohort in history, old people in America who own shares and own houses. Speaking of old people in America. Everything we do is about trying to make those people richer.

I agree. of old people in America. Everything we do is about trying to make those people richer. I agree. Speaking of someone who is an older entrepreneur, Fred Smith, who really did pioneer this area, is literally, the app is terrible. Their customer service is terrible. Literally, I felt like I was, the contrast between them and Amazon, and by the way, UPS actually works pretty well comparatively, but this is such a wide open space to grab back from FedEx. Like I would never use FedEx again, like astonishingly. Like I really – like the experience I had was so bad and it was so non-innovative. Like you could – they literally was back in 10 years ago.

I felt like I was with 10 years ago with them. So let me just say I know there's controversy about Amazon and delivery vans. And I saw them all over, by the way, this week, weekend, everywhere, Amazon vans, Amazon-branded vans. They do – they need to work out their issues around all kinds of too speedy, everything else. But, boy, their technology part of their equation is flawless, like flawless. is flawless, like flawless. And one last thing I'll say is Amanda, who hates Amazon, who my girlfriend,

is like, I can't stand that it works so well, but it's astonishing. Like, it's an astonishing, because she's for years tried to use local retailers, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, but in the logistics space, someone's got to dominate and it's certainly not going to be FedEx. Anyway, wins and fails. Well, that's failed to dominate, and it's certainly not going to be FedEx. Anyway, wins and fails.

Well, that's fail to me. But wins and fails, sir. What are your wins and fails? So my win is, speaking of movies, there's a wonderful new movie called Knives Out, starting Daniel Craig of James Bond fame. Oh, yes. I heard that was great. And it's nice. The thing that struck me about it was kids can kids can watch it it's not for

young kids but i took my nine and my 12 year old boys it's kind of a throwback to the agatha christie genre it's cute there's not a lot of violence it's got some wonderful actors i think daniel craig is an underappreciated actor i think it's been uh he's very he's a solid actor and he's really he puts on a Southern accent here and he does it flawlessly. Ana de Armas, I think I got her name right, is just wonderful in it. Toni Collette, who's the star of my favorite movie in history, The Sixth Sense, is in it. It's just a wonderful movie. Jamie Lee Curtis gave a great interview.

She's in it. Yeah, she was great. She's great. She's fantastic. So you're doing a movie review. Anyways, my winner's Knives Out. All right, okay. Knives great. She's fantastic. So you're doing a movie review. Anyways, my winner's Knives Out. All right. Okay. Knives Out.

What's your win? I don't have any wins this week. I don't have any wins. I'm mad. I'm also mad about— What's your loss? What's your fail? Okay, my fail this week. It's not exactly a fail, but Apple got a lot of heat for changing map lines to include Crimea in Russia. Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory in 2014 under a lot of controversy. Now Apple is reviewing how it deals with international borders on its maps. And so I think everyone's got to think about this mapping thing because it's been controversial forever, the idea about maps. But these companies change them when they're operating in those areas.

Now, to be fair, they're only showing them to Russian viewers, these maps. So they're letting the lie perpetrate in Russia. And so that's – I don't know what to say. They are following the laws of those areas. But at the same time, it's somewhat – and then using other maps for other people. So I don't know what I would do. Again, this is another area where these big tech companies, which have taken over mapping, that would essentially be Apple and Google and some others, are really caught in these bigger social issues. But I don't know what I would do.

I don't know if it's a fail, but it's certainly a, oh, God, another big, giant issue for Apple and others and Facebook and others. So I would say that was my fail. and others and Facebook and others. So I would say that was my fail. Yeah, but it's like if they if if Apple's identified Senator, I think it's John Kennedy, the senator from Louisiana, as being a useful idiot, idiot and an agent of the KGB, that would be disappointing, but accurate. And the way I see this is that was a bit of a dig and a joke. The way I would see in just in case anyone hasn't seen, Senator Kennedy has now decided to basically propagate a lie that has been fueled by the Russian government that the Ukrainians meddled in our election such that to conflate it and somehow create this false comparison between Ukrainian and Russian interference to lessen the pressure on the president's criminality. and rushing interference to lessen the pressure on the president's criminality. Agreed. Agreed.

But speaking of Senator Kennedy, that guy, that guy is a Russian plant or an asset. I don't know what he is or a useful idiot. Yeah, exactly. He's not an idiot, by the way. I've heard from lots of people. He's quite clever. More fail in that regard is to meet the press for bringing him on the show and not being prepared for that lie to cut him off.

That was the worst. Everyone's like, oh, he tried. I thought Chuck Todd did go after him. I thought Chuck Todd got... No, because this guy had done it before. You do not let him repeat lies over and over again. And it doesn't matter

how much you challenge him. You just don't. You cut off the mic in that case. I cut him off. He is a U.S. senator. I don't care. I'm sorry. Well, he is a U.S. Senator. I don't care. I don't care. You're lying.

If you want to see. You're a Russian plant. Sorry, no. Come on. If you want to see interviews for dummies, did you see 60 Minutes last night with Susan Wojcicki? Yes, I did. It was very nice to Susan.

She did her job. Oh, my God. She did her job. She did her job. She did her job. They were, 60 Minutes was literally so played. I mean, of course, they said, they threw out that she had the garage and she has

five kids. I thought at some point Leslie Stahl was going to say, can you show me how to use this microwave to heat up my soup? It was literally like, okay. You know, Susan did her job. Susan did her job. That's all. They got played. 60 Minutes and The Nation

as always got played by the 1,100person corporate communications department and the very likable Susan Wojcicki. She's very likable. She is very likable. And she did her job. I'm not going to fault her for doing that interview. I think she did a good job. All right, my fail. We've got some Tessie.

Your fail, quick, because we've got to get to predictions and get out of here. Yeah, I know. You're going to get a pedicure with Nancy Pelosi or something. So my fear is, and there was a great article in the New York Times about this, but I think we're studying to the wrong test. I think we're talking about the wrong numbers, the Dow, unemployment, and the New York Times had this incredible article called Deaths of Despair. And this plays into my favorite thing, Macabre Tar Bucks. But for the first time in our history, our life expectancy is down three years in a row. Yes, I saw that.

And no one ever talks about that. Our life expectancy is now kind of rivals Cuba. And that's not a good thing. And people blame or immediately think, well, people are dying sooner. And it's not that. People are living longer. It's just that there's more deaths,

unnatural deaths between the ages of 25 and 60 than ever before. And they're largely alcohol, opioids, and also suicide of, for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old is not doing as well as his parents. And what I've discovered, because I coach a lot of young men, is that it's as hard on the parents as it is on the kids when the kids aren't doing well. And I think the shame people are feeling, I think the embarrassment, and also not only the income inequality, but this kind of this gestalt we have in our society now where everyone's convinced that because we're a meritocracy, because you're constantly having success thrown in your face, that if you aren't successful, if you aren't part of a Google, Instagram economy, it's your fault. You fucked up. So I think there's just so much shame. There's so much frustration.

There's so much inequality that leads to these deaths of despair. And the question I would ask at the next presidential debate is, what are you going to do to stop, to reverse the life expectancy decline? Hope! Hope!

What's the point of all of this? A town called hope. We don't have that. Anyway, so my loss is, again, I think we continue to study to the wrong test. I think these deaths of despair and the amount of anxiety and pain from loneliness, from shame, from economic anxiety is such a failure of our society. It means that we as a society, it means whatever this is, this experiment is no longer working as well as it used to. Or we should use those statistics, be aware of them. A friend of mine was an artist and she did,

she put a heat camera on the Golden Gate Bridge to show how many more suicides were happening than people thought there at the Golden Gate Bridge. It was an art installation. And she thought we should have a national suicide number so that people, rather than, you know, any of the other numbers we use to decide what success is. I thought that was a really interesting, it was many, many years ago, it was interesting,

but I think you're 100% right. I'm going to have to cut you off, unfortunately, and make you feel despairing. But what is your prediction, your very quick prediction, of maybe spending this time of year to make us feel better about our despairing lives? What is your prediction this week, Scott Galloway? My prediction is Twitter goes below $25 a share and an activist steps in. Okay, all right.

What activist is that? That's right, they don't have dual stock, as I wrote about. That's right. They do not have dual stock. So that is a ripe, that is... They've been around. They've been around the basket before.

I've heard from lots of these people a couple years ago. You've got a media platform that's trading at a old media-like multiple. You've got a CEO who's the CEO of another company who's deciding to go hang out in Africa for three months. And you have a platform that has become a national iconic means of communication and governing because we have a very strange president. This is just incredibly ripe for an activist. So 2020, look for a Dan Loeb, a Jana Partners. governing because we have a very strange president. This is just incredibly ripe for an activist. So 2020, look for a Dan Loeb, a Jana Partners, look for an activist to come in. Loeb is perfect. Loeb is very attuned. And take a run at Twitter.

Interesting. All right, Scott, that's a really good prediction. You veer from being crazy to being so wise. You're like the wise men. You know what I mean? Thanks. Thanks for saying that. But in any case, it's time for us to go. We'll be back later this week to talk more about this for another episode. Also, tweet at us at hashtag pivot podcast and email us at pivot at

voxmedia.com. Scott, this has been an exciting time. Two times a week. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes. Come on. Twice a week. All right. Read the credits. Get us out of here.

I don't have the credits in front of me. I'm totally at home in my studio. You read them. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Eric 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. If you liked our show, please recommend it to a friend.

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