Pivot - Social networks' minimum effort to be less toxic, Listener Mail from Australia, and fails at CES

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Kara and Scott talk about Facebook's decision not to change their political ad policies. They also discuss Facebook banning "deep fakes" and Teen Vogue's confusion over a Facebook sponsored content article. Kara has a rant for Facebook VP, Andrew Bosworth, about his Lord of the Rings reference and op-ed. In Listener Mail we hear from an Australian asking about big tech's response to natural disasters such as the on-going fires in his country. Overall CES is a fail, but inviting Ivanka Trump to speak was next level fail. In predictions, Scott has some thoughts on the future of cyber attacks and hacks. 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. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway.

And first off, thank you, Kara. For what? I got home and there was a box from Kara Swisher. And it was strange. It had two things in it. It had a book written by Edward Snowden called— Which you wanted. Not really. You got it for me because—

You told me you wanted to read it to understand him better, but go ahead, move along. And a rabbit. So can you—I haven't—I don't—it's, you know, it's not that often that I receive a small furry animal in the mail from a coworkerworker. But I'm still, is the rabbit. Here's the deal. Okay. Here's the deal. You wanted a rabbit coat. I'm not getting you a rabbit coat, but I got you a very soft stuffed rabbit because I have 400 of them as a new parent now.

And I felt like it was a nice, it was sort of a comfort rabbit for you. It's very soft. Is that correct? It's very. Yeah, it's very nice. I give it to my nine-year-old and he has it in the zoo that is his bed every night. Fantastic. Well, that's your rabbit, Scott. You really need to like talk to it. It's the thing you give before you give a rabbit coat, which you keep demanding from me for some reason, something to do with your

parents and a rabbit coat and everything else. And I thought I would start off by giving you a rabbit to start with. I thought about a live rabbit. I thought about a live rabbit. I thought about a boiled rabbit, like if we were in Fatal Attraction. I thought about a lot of rabbit situations. I just had a gangster idea. I'm one of the jerks that's abusing the FAA system and has turned my Vichla into a comfort dog,

and I have this special harness that says comfort dog. I'm going to put it on that toy little stuffed rabbit and take it on a plane with big Jackie Onassis glasses petting my stuffed rabbit. That will be my comfort rabbit. Listen to me. I don't believe you do that with your dog. Are you kidding me? They're not on to your ridiculous scam. You're not. Oh, God. No, no. It's JetBlue. You're not on to your ridiculous scam. They're not.

Oh, God. Yeah, no. It's JetBlue. You don't have to pay them, right? Unfortunately, because of you, I'm being recognized on planes now. I like to get on planes last. And people go, hey, man, love the podcast. And I'm like, do not talk to me in public.

If you hold the rabbit, they won't. I do not deal well with praise. You like being famous. If it wasn't there, you'd be so sad. Yeah. There's a lot going on. There's a lot to talk about.'t there, you'd be so sad. Yeah. There's a lot going on. There's a lot to talk about. There's a lot going on.

It never stops. It never freaking stops. This is like a crazy, like I literally slept all day yesterday. But here's the deal. Here's the deal. There's a couple of things. I was going to talk about Ivanka Trump on the stage at CES, which was just horrifying on so many levels. But then Facebook drops news, you know, as usual, on a day where no one's going to pay attention, which they're not going to, trying to say they're for ad

transparency, and they released a whole bunch of stuff around giving people control over ads, political ads. They saw what they didn't say, which was they're not changing their ad policy about lying politicians. So this morning, they obviously gave the story to both the New York Times and Washington Post, but Facebook, as written by Mike Isaac, said on Thursday it would not make any major changes to its political advertising policies, which allows lies and ads despite pressure from lawmakers who say the company is abdicating responsibility for what appears on the platform. It was part of a bigger announcement they made about how they're going to manage political ads on their platforms. Yeah, that's right. What do we think about this?

Well, it's just to think the most powerful network in the world with the greatest reach has decided that it's now a war of disinformation, that we have truly become kind of Kremlin-style propaganda. And this is indefensible. I believe that every movement, absolutely every narrative, every word, every action, every coffee or latte that's poured at Facebook headquarters is all headed towards one direction, and that is how do we make Facebook shareholders wealthier regardless of the teen depression, the damage to the commonwealth, or how it tears at the fabric of our society.

And to a certain extent, I get it, and that's why I own their stock. But we have a serious, you know, feckless administration, lawmakers, FTC, DOJ, that won't step in and say, look, you know, there's been a fairness in advertising, political advertising act on the Senate floor for a long time. And because of the Freedom Caucus, we can't get just like basic IQ legislation through. So I think it's really disappointing. Can you talk also a little bit about, I mean, when they announce what a shocker, they're not going to do anything that gets in the way of them making another nickel. The controversy around Vogue, did you see what happened with the Facebook post on Vogue? What happened?

Yeah, that was a strange. Well, in this case, I don't blame Facebook. Look, all these companies try to buy those infomercials, essentially. It's called SponCon, which is sponsored content. I don't know where that word came from, but whatever. What happened was they put it up like it was a real article. It was interviews with women who work on their elections team, including Katie Harbeth and some others. Very lovely picture of them, one of those Vogue kind of pictures. Yeah. And then a story that was largely laudatory about their incredibly extreme efforts to work for our people. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. Which was, look, if it's editorial content that Facebook buys, I don't fault Facebook for doing that.

I fault Condé Nast for not labeling it correctly. And then, you know, it's interesting to see that Facebook's trying to look nicer in the press, essentially. But that's an interesting thing. But what a surprise. They think they put a thing on it and then took a thing off of it saying what it was. And then it disappeared after people like Sheryl Sandberg had tweeted it, which, again, I don't fault her for tweeting it either. Like, you know, it is what it is. It's a positive story about Facebook.

And so, anyway, it just looked— it's a positive story about facebook and so um so anyway it just looked it was a bad look on cunningness but you know the fact that we think some of these magazine companies and things like that don't do this constantly is kind of on us but they do and so they had to sort of apologize and teen vogue which had sort of a real uh blooming for a while there under their editor who left, is now just online. Remember, they closed down. It was a project of Anna Wintour to start it in the first place, and now it's just an online publication. Anyway, it was just like, it was just another, well, oh, well, you know, just the constant degrading of our standards pretty much.

Yeah, it reminds me, I was interviewing Josh Brown, who I think is really impressive. He's the president or CEO maybe of Ritholtz Management. And I was just indignant about all the internet analysts from these investment banks that were about to write a buy on WeWork at a valuation of $48 billion. And he said, Scott, get over it. Everybody who knows anything knows that these companies aren't in the business of honest analysis. They're in the business of pumping and marketing these stocks. And to a certain extent, when you're reading Vogue, I mean, they're not in the business of journalism, right? Do you remember when they did this fascinating story with this spread, this kind of glamorama shot of Marissa Mayer?

And then what do you know? It was announced a few weeks later or a few weeks before that Yahoo was sponsoring the Met Ball to the tune of $3 million. So, the notion that there's a wall between journalists and advertisers, no, there's not. There never has been. It's not even a curb. And the reality is it's pay-to-play. About the moment Net-a-Porter went into competition with these guys and launched their own magazine, Porter, which I actually think is a pretty well-done magazine, they stopped writing puff pieces on Natalie Massonet about what an impressive female leader she is. So, yeah, I kind of agree with you. Shame on us.

But the notion, it just seems especially brazen to have an article. I mean, some editor really had to close their eyes and put their hands over their ears and say, okay, we're going to talk about how Facebook is helping protect us. Right. And then the second thing they did was announce this whole deepfake videos, which they were yesterday, too. There's a lot of announcements out of Facebook this week. Facebook also said it's banning deepfakes, which allow videos to use AI to change what figures in a video are saying. You know, they came under fire for that manipulated video of Speaker Pelosi that made her appear like she was drunk and slurring, unlike the speech that Trump gave the other day, where he looked like he was on Adderall,

which is what the internet was talking about. But it still was the minimum they can do, and it wouldn't have pulled that video off because it went through a fact-checking process, and then they labeled it. And so, this minimum effort by Facebook and maximum effort on your part to figure it out is part of their plan. That, to me, is the most depressing part of this. But the deepfake thing, they will, I'm pretty sure, and they're already doing it, they'll announce that deepfakes are a threat to our democracy and we're going to run some shitty software that catches 3% of them. But what it is is the following. When an illusionist is on stage, he or she will create a distraction such that you don't see

that they're about to fool you with the right hand, right? And that's what the deep fake, the deep fake, quote unquote, fix from Facebook is. And that is an illusionist trick, a distraction from the fact that politicians can lie. And whoever has kind of the backbone or the lack of moral clarity or whatever bad actor has decided to lie on behalf of someone else on this platform and leverage kind of what's scary that a lot of the content you get from Facebook is from other people you trust. So if something's forwarded to you from your mom, right, and it's an ad and it says this is a political ad that looks like it has some production quality. You're just sort of inclined to believe it. Even if you know it's fake, a little bit of the message will stick. That's the real damage here. That's the real, you know, again, that's why, again, Facebook plays a different set of rules than some of the other

folks who we lean on for information and why Facebook. I mean, it's emblematic of how just incredibly damaging Facebook is. And again, buttresses this notion that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg will go down in history as the people who've done the most damage while making the most money in the history of modern business. You know, interesting. Someone was debating that. There was a story in The Times about Rupert Murdoch's publications in Australia trying to, you know, not to blame arsonists and something, I don't know, whatever matches for the problem

in Australia, the terrible, obviously, climate change-induced problems in Australia. And I was trying to, I think I tweeted something like, I think the most damaging person is this man, like, who continues to, like, everywhere he goes, spews hate, disinformation, and damage, real damage. Rupert, your old boss? Yeah. It was just sort of like, it was going to be my fail. But to me, they're the most damaging because they do it on purpose. And with such person, this is something else that is so disturbing because they do think they're right about what they're doing.

Rupert Murdoch knows just what he's doing, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? Like, and so it's just an insidious situation. I don't know what to say because I agree with the stuff that Facebook is doing is just as bad in lots of ways. You know, but it didn't prevent a government from doing anything about fires, like, that are actually hurting, killing billions of animals or millions of animals in Australia. It's interesting because you're hopeful about big tech. In a weird way, I'm kind of hopeful about Fox because I've gotten to know some of the people there, and I like them, and I think at some point they occasionally throw up their arms.

What Tucker said about the bombing in Iran, I thought that was a moment of integrity. I think Neil Cavuto has tremendous integrity as a journalist. I'm more hopeful, I think, about Fox than you are, but you know them better. You work for them. I didn't. The problem with an administration, there's an attention graph, and attention arguably is our most valuable resource. And unfortunately, we're allocating too much of the most valuable resource in the world to these dumpster fires from an administration that just wants to be in the headlines every

day and such that we can't focus on things like income inequality. We can't focus on trying to put inequality. We can't focus on, you know, trying to put a man or a woman on Mars. We can't focus on how we solve global hunger or malaria. We have to focus on what stupid thing the administration has done in the last hour. And one of the things I did last night was I went online to read a little bit more about,

I mean, we have a continent that's on fire right now. And what's interesting is it's climate change, but it's also weather variability. It's like the mother of all bad things that have happened to Australia. The winds from the Antarctic are late this year. The monsoon rains came early. So, not only is the place dry, it's not wet. It is climate change, but it's also the perfect storm of kind of bad natural things that have lit this country on fire. And I have a bit of a rant here, and this is just because I want to cause a lot. I want to have more people hate me on Twitter. Oh, good.

But I think about 40 people have died, 40 humans. Let's call them 40 species of the human have died. And they estimate approximately a billion animals have died, right? So, what's the difference among these species that, you know, where a billion dies and only 40 million? And it's largely because we as a species have access to more resources and more information than animals who get caught and, you know, burn alive, right? And I'm convinced that effectively what we have is our society run now by baby boomer generation, the most selfish generation in history across Western society, has effectively decided that they're kind of they're comfortable middle income have decided that climate change will impact the people with the fewest resources and options among our species. And that you and I, Kara, and again, this may be wrong, but I generally believe it. I think

climate change is going to be on a massive level for the next 50 years, but I think you and I are going to be just fine because we have resources. When a hurricane hits Florida, I call my family. I'm like, no, don't think about it. Just get out, and they're fine. And then Katrina hits. Who gets hit hardest? The poor. So I think we've made a conscious decision globally that we're down with climate change because fossil fuels are incredible, incredibly accretive in terms of shareholder value.

I don't agree with you. I think you're completely wrong. I think young people. Let me finish. All right. We're going to get to this. We have a listener mail about this. Yeah, but that—

Agree, but it's nothing but a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and from the young to the old who, A, have to, malaria, diarrhea, whatever it is. We're down with that as long as the three billion who are the wealthiest can continue this incredible arb around fossil fuels. And what I don't like about Democrats is this bullshit narrative that all the requisite investment we need to make to move to a carbon neutral world is going to create jobs and be economically accretive. No, it's not. It's going to be expensive and it should be because it's important. But anyways, another massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. You like that transfer of the rich to the poor. That's my big narrative. You know, it's been going on since the beginning of fucking time.

But okay, all right, fine. Whatever. There you go. Where don't the rich do well? I mean, honestly, every place, every – oh, please. Listen to me. We're going to throw it to the break after this, but I just want to mention one last thing about the – I'm going back to Facebook. There was an essay by – a memo by Andrew Bosworth, who also in this area, about saying how much he wanted Trump to lose, but that we shouldn't stop him from winning this time, Facebook.

And he was talking about not wanting to do anything possible to make him lose, and yet he would not do it because – and he compared it – let me just read this quote because it was too much, to Lord of the Ring. He goes, I desperately find myself wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand? This guy thinks he's a writer. Whatever. I find myself thinking, what stays my hand? Thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically, when Frodo offers the ring to Galadriel, I don't watch this that well, and imagines using the power righteously at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her.

If you ask it of me, I will give you the one ring. You offer it to me freely. I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired this. And he apparently spelled the name of this character with an A, not an E. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I'm confident we must never do that and we become what we fear.

Now, listen to me, Mr. Bosworth. You don't have to have fair things. You don't have to, like, push it towards Trump. But what you can't do is you create a situation where it advantages him. This is my rant. This is just like Mark's free speech speech. This is bullshit, Andrew Bosworth. This is ridiculous.

Your thoughts for 2020, to me, are all about someone who just doesn't have any kind of, can't think critically. It's just astonishing. And you can talk all you want about the shortcomings of Facebook, and you've been late to do this, but the fact of the matter is you didn't do your jobs in keeping your network clean.

It has nothing to do with you intervening in the election because you have this ridiculous Jesus complex of power that you don't have. It's just, it reveals so much about Facebook and the people who run it more than it does about anything else. And so, I have to call bullshit on this ridiculous essay. I like Andrew Bosworth, but it's just, it's just, ugh. I like Andrew Bosworth, but it's just – I like Andrew Bosworth, too. I'm disappointed.

You know, after a great college career as a linebacker, he failed in the NFL and then went on to be a mediocre film star. Oh, wait, that's a different Bosworth. But you know what? Pop references are very important. And you know what? are very important. And you know what? We're going to go.

You and I have been paid a handsome bounty by Trinet and Mack Weldon underwear to go after people, total bitches that are full of shit. So Mr. Bosworth, the Mandadogians, Kara and Scott are coming for you. Mack Weldon does his job. My kids love those underwears. Keeping the universe safe and protecting baby Yoda.

Let's just say Mack Weldon's underwears are excellent. Facebook's efforts here are not. And any reference to Lord of the Rings makes me want to just—I just really want to lose—I lose it when they start that bullshit. It brought us Vito Morganson. That guy's a movie star. Eastern Promises. Great movie. Okay.

All right. We're going to take a break. We'll be right back with Listener Mail. It's about us. Thank you for the rabbits. I'm here with my rabbits. Just pet the rabbits, Scott. And then some wins, fails, and predictions.

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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. Scott, we're back, and we're going to go right to listener mail because of a listener question from someone in Australia.

So let's take a listen. You've got, you've got, I can't believe I'm going to be a mailman. You've got mail. Hi, my name is Rob. I am in Sydney, Australia. As you might have seen in the media, Australia is fighting some of the worst fires that we've ever seen. Around 40 people have died or are missing. Millions of animals unique to Australia have died and 50,000 square miles have gone. We also have a climate change denying government who have dragged their feet in response to this catastrophe. Given we are more likely to see natural disasters in the future, is there a place for tech in responding to them? Well, that is a good question. I like your accent too, Rob and Sydney. Doesn't he sound dreamy?

He sounds sad and dreamy. Don't you want to comfort him? Send him a rabbit. Send him a rabbit. Listen to me. This is a serious situation. Yes, I do think, as I wrote recently in the New York Times, I do think there is a lot of, not just the right thing to do,

but there's a lot of money to be made in whoever figures out this climate tech issues. And so there's all kinds of different technologies. Right now, a lot of the tech is around cleaning up, you know, essentially removing carbon from the atmosphere that's already there, cleaning the oceans, things like that. So a lot of it is stuff that's, to me, not really the point. I think the stuff we have to focus on is, you talked about using fossil fuels, is these technologies that do not use that and have different ways of creating the kind of things we want. The other thing is the ability of certain tech to sort of watch and know what's going to happen and AI to pattern it. There's all kinds of different things going on with materials.

There's all kinds of solutions from tech, none of which is sort of the silver bullet, but there's not a lot of money put to this. And the only two people that are really investing from a big point of view would be Bill Gates and Elon Musk. So, yes, absolutely. I think that beyond the stuff of, you know, Facebook's doing crisis check-in and things like that, there's all kinds of things that tech could do

and is not doing to make this a better planet. Yeah, I worry, Kara, that falling back to a capitalist solution and waiting for the next Elon Musk to address the world's most urgent problems creates cold comfort and creates a gestalt that is dangerous. And that is that if we just expect that we're going to find a company, an individual to come up with a great idea that will create trillions in shareholder value and we'll come up with some elegant, easy solution to it, I think it creates a certain level of dangerous complacency. And I think around climate change, there's just no getting around it. It's going to be really expensive and we need our leaders to stop irresponsibly allocating capital and essentially creating a policy that reflates asset prices with incredible debt

that is nothing but a transfer of time with families and loved ones from our grandkids to us, and to behave more responsibly and have an adult conversation that, you know, hey, if somebody, if some kid from MIT shows up and comes with a solution to clear the plastic out of the oceans, fantastic. Make him or her a trillionaire. But until then, let's assume this shit is going to be hard and expensive and that we're going to have to pay for it. And the government is the one. Just as they arrested the AIDS virus or helped with that, they invented the Internet with a massive investment in technology through DARPA. Just as they made a massive investment to turn back Hitler.

We have to make a massive investment as a society. And it's going to mean we're not going to have as many Hershey bars to be able to get a stake, which is what happened during World War II, to address this war on climate change. But I worry, and I'm not accusing you of anything, but I think we have to be very careful to believe that technology and some and shareholder value and capitalism is going to fix this so i'm trying to appeal to anything their greed is something i'd like to appeal to i'd like to make more investments here to make breakthroughs and things like that because i don't think the greatest minds are being applied to these issues as they should that's that's what i mean it's that look if you're not going to do it because it's the right thing if our government's

not going to do it maybe you'll do it because you're greedy. Like in material sciences or, you know, there's all kinds of ways to handle this. It does get to a point where we have to, like, live a certain way. You're right. You have to change the way you actually live unless there are technologies. And we didn't think there would be technologies of trains, of planes, of anything else long ago. So I just think there's stuff we can't imagine that we should start to imagine. And that's what I'd like to see. That's why I'd like to see it, you know, as research projects and things like that.

I think it's long past time that major tech people should get deeply involved in this issue. And they're not. They're just not. They're not there in a way that they need to be. That's my, that was my point. And I was trying to appeal to their feeling of being the world's first trillionaire. Anyway, thank you very much from Sydney. Rob, we really appreciate it. Thank you, Rob. And best of trying to appeal to their feeling of being the world's first trillionaire. Anyway, thank you very much from Sydney.

Rob, we really appreciate it. Thank you, Rob, and best of luck to you. By the way, we stand with our Australian. Have you been to Australia? Yes, many times. It is. Talk about an interesting, maverick, fun, impressive people in a place of just incredible natural beauty. Every time you go to Australia, within 48 hours, you're like, okay, I want to move here. I want to live here. And then within a week, you're like, it's just too damn far.

We would all live in Australia if it wasn't literally on the other side of the world. My nephew lives there, and I love it there. And I've visited him in Melbourne. Now he lives in Sydney. It's wonderful. All right, we're going to wins and fails. You know, one that we left behind was CES. My fail is obviously the Consumer Electronics Association with Ivanka Trump talking about tech. I just... Did you hear anything about the speech? I haven't heard anything about it. It just was...

Nothing. Nothing. If they wanted to talk about, actually address this issue around STEM and everything else, they should bring in someone who actually was the expert. You know, someone's daughter talking about things, like whatever topic she wants to, it's just the president's daughter is just not, she's not qualified to talk about this.

And it was one, she was talking about retraining and this and that, which is one of her areas. I just, there's so much nepotism and lack of qualification. I don't know where to begin. And it's just typical. The CES, I was there for a very brief second, not even at any of the CES events,

doing something with Snapchat. But it just is really – it was just another step that this is the most irrelevant gathering around, and nothing really much happens there. It used to be a big deal. Yeah, so you think CES has lost some of its value or luster? Yeah, lost, completely lost. Things don't come out that way. People don't make announcements. It's such an old, antiquated way of doing things. I'm sort of like, you know, let's get the wagon out

of the, it's just not the way people do announcements anymore. And they do some of them, but it's all like, it's all stuff you already knew. None of the really important companies go there and they don't make their important announcements. They save those when they want to make them, right? Instead of waiting for one time a year. And then just being in Vegas with all those people at the one time. They do get player. I mean, so my question is, I've only been once and it was 10 or 12 years ago. And every year I say I'm going to go because I need to learn more about specific technologies. And I want to go because the dog likes to roll in Vegas. He's a lot of fun in a craps table. But anyways, on Seven Makers and Ginger,

baby needs new shoes. We would have so much fun in Vegas. Think about it. Anyways, but they must be doing something right in their defense because they get a lot of players. I know a lot of people that go to Vegas and you see the biggest names or some of the biggest names in tech go there. So what are they doing right? They go there for advertisers. No, I just think it's a gathering. There's certain quiet gatherings off to the side are the really helpful ones, I guess. But no, there's absolutely nothing happening in tech there,

as far as I can tell. They did have a really interesting discussion. They had some FTC commissioners and others sort of going back and forth on regulation, but that happens all year round. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is not a particular place to do it. I think it's a place to meet advertisers

and to, you know, if you're selling certain things, you know, certain electronics, it's fine. But in terms of being the must, the place where things, the big announcements are being made, it's just not. It used to be that. It definitely did.

And before that, Comdex for computers, but it's not anymore. It's not. It's just, Comdex for computers. But it's not anymore. It's not. It's just not. It's just not. But, you know, bringing up Ivanka Trump is so cynical. And this is a group of people that many years ago did this thing to get women interested in tech. They had a display of pink-colored technologies.

And I just wanted to kill myself. Kill somebody? I literally was like, I'm going to run through this with one of the companies. By the way, because I'm so bored with this, I'm thinking about other things right now. I want to say thank you. I like this notion of turning on the lights when you're talking about a problem. This is a total segue, or not even a segue, a non-segue. But you kind of illuminated or got me thinking about two different issues I hadn't been thinking about.

And I like that. The dog likes to be thoughtful every once in a while. So, but when we were talking, remember when I was doing my win last week on Lost in Space? Yeah. And you talked about, I forget it, the professor who was sort of the evil guy of the show. And you immediately said, oh, you mean the gay guy. And you had brought up a few weeks ago, this movie I haven't seen called The Celluloid Closet, talking about how media- Did you watch it? I haven't seen called The Celluloid Closet, talking about how media— Did you watch it? I haven't seen it. I want to.

Of course not. I will see it. Just don't send it to me with a stuffed animal. Anyway, so— It's coming. You had basically said, and I was aware of this, but not to the extent that you kind of highlighted it, that as young people, young straight people, we were basically trained to think that there was something wrong with the gay community. straight people, we were basically trained to think that there was something wrong with the gay community. And then I look back to that show, and that guy was clearly, I mean, put an ask on

him, and he was Charles Nelson Reilly. He was clearly gay, right? But when I was watching it at the age of nine— No, it was gay-seeming. It wasn't gay. It's these qualities of—it was also so subversive, but it wasn't. It was apparent and subversive at the same time, where gay people always end up sort of either evil or silly or dead. Right, 100%. The stereotypical effects of a gay man are associated with someone who's devious, can't be trusted, is bottom line evil. And I was thinking, I was watching that shit at the age of 8, 9, and 10, along with my favorite show, where a beautiful woman was asked to go to her bottle bottle and then would occasionally come out of the bottle and say, yes, master. That's what I grew up on. And I didn't – you kind of – you brought to light for me just how insidious that kind of stuff is.

And the second thing you brought up, when we're looking at problems, we have a tendency, I think, the analogy I would use. We're in a room with a flashlight trying to find answers. And I've been thinking a lot about AB5. And you sort of turned on the lights when you said, I think it was last week or a couple weeks, you said, this is all about healthcare. And that is, if we were to figure out a way to get people access to healthcare that didn't bankrupt them or keep them healthy, we wouldn't be talking about the need for different classification of workers. And that was sort of an unlock for me. Anyways, Kara, you've turned on the lights in a couple of rooms for me.

You're a woke-a-rotty, as some dumb writer wrote. A woke-a-rotty. All right. I need your wins and fails. That was my fail. And the win is Harvey Weinstein going into trial. With the walker? He's obviously—

Whatever. Just shove that guy into prison as far as I can tell. I can't win. You ready for the big house for Harvey? With the walker? writers. There's a book I'm reading that is irritating me to no end about this idea of things going too far. And I just think it's great that this has happened. Sorry, I just feel good about it. That's my win. What's your win and fail? My win is my favorite comedian is Michelle Wolfe, and she has a new show on Netflix called Joke Show. You love her. You love her. And I think she's a genius. And I think a lot about how do you disarticulate what genius is. Is it practice, commitment? Malcolm Gladwell did an interesting book on genius.

And I think also a key component of genius is being literally unafraid. Like you just never look in the mirror and worry about what you look like. And what I mean by that is Lenny Bruce said very offensive things. I think Richard Pryor was massively offensive at the time. And he was just, these people were just unafraid. And I think Michelle Wolf talks about

in a very vulgar way, and I'm a vulgar person, so I relate to her, some of these issues that people don't want to talk about out loud. And I think she's hilarious. I think her comedic timing. I think she's an incredibly impressive,

not only an impressive comedian, but I do think she qualifies as a genius because she's just unafraid. So it's on Netflix. It's called Joke Show. I think it's fantastic. And another quick shout-out to another strong, courageous, fiery woman. Stephanie Ruhl just got promoted at NBC. She's going to be on the Today Show, which is kind of the hall of lame every morning, but it is the Super Bowl of broadcast-supported TV.

And she's going to be doing more business reporting for NBC Nightly News. I met Stephanie 12 or 14 years ago. And of course, I'm turning this back to me. I got called. They accidentally called the marketing department at NYU and said, we need someone to come on and talk about Facebook. And I went on with Pim Foxx, who I love, and Deirdre Bolton, who I adore.

And then I started going on with Stephanie Ruhl and Eric Schatzker. He's like this super handsome, nice Canadian guy who fishes. I'm coming back as him in my next life. But anyways, Stephanie took me with her to MSNBC, and I do a bunch of stuff with her. And I just love the way talking about courage and fearlessness and not watching yourself. I think Stephanie is part of a dying group of people, what I call raging moderates. And she's unafraid and takes a lot of risks. And it's just nice to see her career maintain that kind of trajectory.

We will have her along with you at the Code Conference. There you go. We're both going to be there together. Anyways, congratulations to Stephanie. We're going to watch Joke Show with Michelle Wolf. All right. Fail, please. Anyways, congratulations to Stephanie Ruhl on Watch Joke Show with Michelle Wolfe. All right. Fail, please. So, look, my continued fail, I've been thinking a lot about this, is this concerted decision we've made.

I did a post last week on my blog, numeracynumeralis, or profgalloway.com, called The Unremarkables. Remarkables. And I think about back when I was in graduate school, the tuition was $1,400, and I got a job at $90,000, yielding kind of, if you will, a quick ratio ROI of MBA of 60. And now kids are getting out of the high school, making somewhere between $125,000 and $145,000, which is an amazing living. But their tuition is $62,000, creating an ROI of two. And if you look at what's happened very kind of loosely or crudely across the decisions we've decided to make, or the voters or the people in power, again, baby boomers across our central banks, is we've decided in a global coordinated effort to massively reflate the economy at the expense of future generations with massive debt. And what you have right now is more debt. If you took away the amount of debt we're making exceeds the positive kind of GDP growth. So, without this artificially inflated economy with debt, we'd probably already be in recession because we've decided that we need to massively inflate current assets, which benefits who? Old people.

Meanwhile, we've let wage growth stagnate and we let tuition increase. So, we basically said as a public policy across Western nations, you know what, young people? Fuck you. I have mine and I want to hold on to it. So, the continued feudalism, the continued sharecropping of our leadership, we have decided to totally disinvest from future generations in the form of massive, massive increases in the cost of education despite the fact the wages are the same. Another ratio, when I got out of business school, a house in San Francisco was $285,000. I got a job for like $90,000, although I decided to start my own company, Profit. So, you had a three-to-one ratio. Again, now it's, let's assume, $140,000. The average price of a home

in San Francisco is 10x. So, everything that kind of gets in the way of young people starting families, starting businesses is essentially, we have literally declared war. It's like Andrew Yang's book, The War on Normal People. We have a decision around, in terms of how we create monetary and fiscal policy, around what generations do the best and the worst. The reality is you can be very ageist, and we have decided literally, again, to just continue to transfer more wealth from our young people. Anyways, that's my rant. That's my fail, the feudalism of the current leadership.

I think you're right. I think about the young people, although I give everything to my children. I think you do too. Whenever they eat even a sandwich, they eat all my sandwiches, everything else. But yes, I agree with you. I agree with you on this completely. You know, what really struck me,

this, I did a podcast with my whole family this week, which was sort of a fascinating little insight into my world. On Rico Deco? Yes, on Rico Deco. That was the whole Swisher family. And one of the, besides Lucky going on and on about, you know, you got a vision into someone who Trump has manipulated, and so has Fox News. My son talking about worrying, he's about to turn 18 years old, worrying about being drafted. It was, it came out of nowhere. It was really like—

He's worried about being drafted. Yeah, because of the Iran thing. He was like, well, maybe I'll be drafted. And I was like, whoa, whoa. You know, the fact that this weighs on him for this ridiculous, whatever happened last week between Trump and Iran, this whole, you know, this ridiculous playing games with something that's so serious was brought into stark relief for me. And when he mentioned that, I have to say. All right, Scott, you didn't do predictions on Tuesday so that you could dazzle us with your brilliance on Friday. No pressure.

What's your prediction? Yeah, I do have a prediction. So, I think what you're going to see is, you know, there are massive inbound attacks, cyber attacks on the U.S. and attempts to hack different databases or different kind of digital reservoirs, if you were, digital caches in the U.S. And I think you're about to see just an explosion in cyber attacks and hacks. Because if I were the GRU or the Mossad or I were the intelligence arm of the North Korean government, I'd be thinking, okay, it's not open season, but almost any cyber attack of any real danger or credibility, let's leave some breadcrumbs behind. Let's execute the attack through a VPN that runs through Iran. And every national security agency, domestic security

agency is going to immediately default to, well, it must be Iran attacking us, which has the double negative of I think it's going to embolden a lot of other foreign governments to step up and become more brazen in their attacks on the U.S. So that's the first thing that's going to happen. The result is there's going to be a couple attacks that will work, that will get a lot of press, and you're going to see the stocks take a basket of Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare, none of which I have a position in. They're going to be up 20 to 30 percent this year as these cyber attacks committed by governments and bad actors that are emboldened by our shit for brains, catastrophic geopolitical decision called the White House. And you're going to see the stocks of cybersecurity companies go up 20 to 30 percent in the next six

to nine months. That's a good one, Scott. That's good. It has money and it has bigger world implications on it. That's a really substantive one. You're always so supportive around my predictions and I thank you. Thank you. I have one. I have one. I want you to think about it. We're going to talk about it on Monday. Twitter in play. Twitter in play. Say more. And by the way, full disclosure, I'm a shareholder. I hear things. I just hear things. Really? Are you starting something? You talked about it being the lower than. I don't know. I just feel like. Really? Yeah. Are you starting something? You know, you talked about it being the lower than.

I don't know. I just feel like a lot of investors are looking at it, looking at it hard. Well, so I can validate. I can confirm your thesis here, Kara. Okay. All right. Yeah. And so, say more, because I feel funny talking about this, but I want you to talk about it.

I'm just saying. Hard. People are looking at that company hard, especially given how the stock is not performing and the big value around it that people feel that they have, you know, in terms of being the news distribution. I'm just going to take the ball and run with it a little bit here.

But if you were to talk about any other media company that has anything regarding the reach and influence of Twitter, it trades at 20 to 40 times the valuation. Right. Well, just a lot of noise. You and I love Twitter, don trades at 20 to 40 times the valuation. Right. Well, just a lot of noise. You and I love Twitter, don't we? I know.

We do, but I'm just saying, I'm hearing a lot of investor noise suddenly. Yeah. No, I think you're right, as evidenced by I'm voting with my wallet here. But what do you think of this idea of them banning or making it such that you can't reply unless that person is following you. I like it. Yeah, I like it too. I like it.

It cleans up the – I like they're doing – they still should be doing so many more things. They have not worked on that product at all for a long time. And I do think that they should be doing more and be more creative. I think the – I'm writing about innovation and where it comes from this week, and I find them to be like – they could do so much more on the platform. 100%. And, you know, like Snapchat has evolved. Everybody's evolved their things. Even Facebook's Twitter feels very 2016.

Yes. They need to do something about it. Yes. Anyway, that's my prediction. We'll see what happens because I've had some good luck on the predictions. I'm getting good because of adjacency to you. Anyway, I'm just thinking harder. Adjacency to me. That's the sexiest thing you've said to the dog. That's as close as I'm getting. That's right.

Adjacent on up to the dog. That's right. He's just come from the groomer. That's right. You need to be groomed if I'm going to be adjacent to you. I get it. I get it. I'm glad you're finally in touch with your emotions. A little hot for daddy.

I get it. A little hot for doggie. No, God, Jesus. Honestly, you can't. You take any good moment and turn it into that. I showered this morning. I did shower this morning. Okay.

It's time to go. Obviously, it's time to go. You've obviously woken up. And we'll be back together in New York on Monday. Are you going to be here physically in person speaking to Jason? I am. I'm coming back to New York. We're doing it together? We're in the same studio?

I'm in New York. Yes, I'm in New York. Because I have to talk to Paul Ryan next week, which I'm just— You're talking to Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin guy? Well, I just don't. It'll have happened when I see you, maybe. So, yes. For Recode Decode? No, it's some event, the NRF event, and we're going to be on stage together. I don't know how I'm going to whisper strain myself. That means mommy's making

some cabbage. You've totally been paid for that. No, I'm not. I didn't get paid for it. I'm doing it for whatever reason. Don't even ask me. But I'm just going to, I just am not going to be able to hold back. This guy makes one sideways glance at me in a way that like, hey, I had nothing to do with it. I'm really going to pounce. It's going to have to, I'm sorry, Paul Ryan, I'm warning you in advance. Very likable. That Paul Ryan is very likable. Oh, no, no. No? You don't think he's likable? I think he's very likable. No, no. And anyway, I'm also interviewing Ben Silberman. I've got a lot going on

next week, but I will be here for you. Ben from Pinterest? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, Ben's nice. Ben's a nice guy. He's really nice. Anyway, we're going to be together in the same decode. I'm very excited. So I'm excited to see you. Thank you. Likewise.

Sort of. Anyway, I would love you to read your line that you're supposed to read, but I showed it for you. As always, if you have questions about a story you're hearing in the news, for us to answer next week, questions pivot at voxmedia.com. Please send us anything you want to talk about, and we will be happy to respond if it's a really good one. Good. And 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've 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.

If you like the show, please recommend it to a friend. Did I just repeat you, Cara? No, you didn't. Okay, good. Finally, I got that right. You got it right, except you missed. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown

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