Pivot - The China economy boom and a Friend of Pivot on cyber warfare and election disinformation

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Kara and Scott talk about the surge of the Chinese economy this quarter and what it means for the rest of the world. Then we are joined by New York Times national security correspondent, David Sanger, to discuss cyber warfare and disinformation leading up to the election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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hours of entertainment, 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 business can always be a pleasure. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. a COVID response for the White House now. He's been jamming out all the others who have not bathed themselves in glory by any stretch, but Pence has like left the building and doesn't seem to involve himself. And so now Atlas and his, which Twitter is the only one,

you know, chastising for the things he says and writes on Twitter, for example. So anyway. The COVID non-response? Yes, the COVID non-response. I did one of my favorite medical things this morning. What did you do? I got my teeth cleaned.

I go to this amazing dentist called Dr. Spodek, one of my favorite people in the world because she's so passionate about what she does. And she's so outstanding at it as a vet, my hygienist. She's an absolute delight. They ramp up. They dial up the nitrous. I listen to 80s music music and it's just amazing. Just amazing. Jeff, you have nitrous to get your teeth cleaned?

Oh, are you kidding? I'd have nitrous to do dishes. I love that shit. I mean, seriously, you have nitrous, really? Oh, my God. Listen, Michael Jackson, CVS is on a hiring spree to prepare for a spike in COVID and the flu season. And there's a lot of, there's some hiring going on in certain sectors.

So is the pandemic an opportunity for job growth? I mean the president keeps talking about a V-shaped curve. It's clearly not that. But there are certain right spots. Why don't you talk about that? Let's be a little positive because Nancy Pelosi says President Trump's deadline to negotiate a new pandemic deal with the Democrats is Tuesday, which is now. So tell me where you feel on where the economy is, because it doesn't look great. So I don't think it's an opportunity for job growth. I think it's an opportunity to reshape

certain sectors of the economy. And as we keep talking about, all this is an accelerant. So the opportunity to reduce emissions, the opportunity to reskill or retrain certain workers, the opportunity for remote. You know, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and I think one of the biggest dangers about the crisis, and I was talking to the dean of my school, NYU Stern, who's an incredibly impressive, high-character person, is that I was telling him I thought his biggest fear was the crisis wouldn't be deep enough to give him the cloud cover to make the changes he needs. Two-thirds of costs at universities are tied up in administrators, basically salary, and tenured professors. And the idea that we could reshape our universities by dramatically increasing admittance rates and supply with a mix of small and big tech and dramatically decreasing cost while increasing quality, I think every industry, just as kind of digital, unlocked this incredible wave of innovation and reshaped our economy, we have an opportunity here with respect to loosely what you

would call remote. You know, it just makes sense. You can be working harder right now and have more time with your family because of if you have the right remote technologies and the right skills. The thing we've got to keep in mind, though, is the economy will reshape on its own. The thing we have to be really careful of this time, if you think of this as the third big unlock, the first really big unlock was globalization, finding low-cost producers, comparative advantage. The second really big unlock was digital. globalization, find low-cost producers, comparative advantage. The second really big unlock was digital. But with neither of those unlocks, did we take the time to say, all right, where does the incredible increase in productivity and prosperity and gains go? And we said, the gains should all

go to the shareholders instead of carving up a slice of that and saying, okay, we need to redistribute some of those gains to the people left behind in the form of worker training, the form of education. Which we will not do again, I suspect. Yeah, you're probably right, unfortunately. Right. We'll just do it a different way and good luck, people of America. I mean, that's really the American way is to like, good luck, you're on your own. Well, it didn't always used to be. We've been pretty good. I'm not so sure about that. Carter, I mean, even tax rates, if you look at tax rates, they've been substantially higher until they've been on a pretty steady slope down.

We bought into the notion of redistributing income. But because we have continued to segregate ourselves by economic class, it reduces empathy. And people tell a story about, you know, they start revising their history about how hard they worked and not realizing that, you know what, it helps to have rich parents and be a white dude. And that unless you pay some of that back, we're going to end up with a nation barreling towards 3 million lords being served by 350 million serfs. Which we talk about a lot. And it's very clear that there is no plans afoot, at least by this administration, to help people who are down, and also the Democrats. The idea that job retraining should be at the forefront of this or figuring out where jobs are going in the first place.

Like if CVS is hiring, how do we train people to take those jobs? If certain job classes are doing better than others, if there's certain industries. But you don't hear a lot of that talk going on. We talk about relief, which is important for the short term, but the long-term ability to shift our country in ways, just like with digital, I'll tell you, there's just fewer jobs. That's what it was. It wasn't so much you could retrain everybody.

The same thing with this remote. There's going to be fewer jobs. When you walk downtown, when you walk to parking garages, when you walk to food places, it's just not the same thing. And every company in the forward position is saying this loud and clear. It's just that the people that have to figure out how to retrain everyone have not seemed to have gotten the memo on this one. Yeah, but I talked to, and this is, you set up another play date for me. I talked to the CEO of Airbnb on Friday, and he was asking for advice, and I said, you've got to bust the wheel. And the wheel is loosely speaking that a company like Airbnb could end up with 5,000 or 7,000 employees and a $100 billion market cap.

And I said, all right, don't make the mistake Uber did. Don't arbitrage this permanent underclass or this underclass that's developed. You're arbitraging properties and find the average renter or host is a woman in her 30s. The average renter or host is a woman in her 30s. I'm like, how do you convince your board to carve up some of that pre-IPO equity, give it to them, and create economic security for the engine? How do you fall back in love with the Remarkables instead of arbitraging them? He needs to be the white hat, the neosporin, the good guys in the share economy. Brian the Bountiful. I'm sorry?

Brian the Bountiful. I'm going to give him a name, Brian the Bountiful. But there's an opportunity here, right? We're advising to be bountiful. I agree. I agree. Why don't – I mean, it's too late for the cancer that is Uber, but why – if Uber had said early on, we're going to give 10% of the company to our 4 million driver partners, partners being Latin for people we're going to arbitrage. I mean, that's the thing about the share economy.

Everyone says you're arbitraging assets. No, you're arbitraging people, specifically their desperation or their need for flexibility. It's a easier word than arbitrage because I think the regular person using. Exploitation? What do you want to call it? Exploitation. Yeah, I like the word exploitation. All right, Scott, speaking of which, speaking of economies and how to bring them back,

let's get to the big stories. China's economy grew by nearly 5% in the recent quarter. This means China is likely to be the only major economy to expand this year. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund expects the world economy to contract 4%. By the way, here in the U.S., the budget deficit has soared to $3.1 trillion over the weekend. Also this week, Alibaba, China's biggest e-commerce company and Amazon's strongest global competitor, is buying China's largest box retailer, SunArt. SunArt is Walmart's biggest competitor. So there's a lot to unpack here, but China's doing great.

So talk about this. And what does that mean for competition? We really got them with our trade deal. I talk about this. And what does that mean for competition? We really got them with our trade deal. I can see that. I can see that they're really suffering from the blows we've put upon them. Well, first off, mind blown. I mean, just mind blown. I saw at the Motor and pointed this out. And I think it's so ironic that the real victims of a crisis are usually not where the crisis originates. The crisis originates in China, and wouldn't you know, China is going to run through it. They are going to accelerate.

They're basically the Amazon of geopolitics right now, and that is they're going to accelerate through the pandemic. That's a great way to put it. And there's a real lesson here, and the lesson is that, okay, what's the playbook? And we like to think we're exceptional, meaning we can't learn from anybody else because we have our head up our ass and think that anything we do, even if it's terrible, that we do it the right way. China, what is the key, you know, if you were to distill down to three things why China has been so successful at the way they have addressed the pandemic, the first is, and it's

the most important thing, they locked that shit down. There was no excuse. There was no bullshit about freedom. There was no complaints about tyranny. You did testing. You went into the economy and the people. Their economy contracted more severely than any economy in the world because they said, okay, we actually have this thing called epidemiology and respect for science. But, okay, we actually have this thing called epidemiology and respect for science. And as far as we can tell, until there's a vaccine, we've got to create these nodes of distribution and create distance between them. And they locked down more harshly than anyone. And stage two was once they felt they had control of the pandemic, they got their supply chain back up and humming.

They opened their factories and their supply chain first. And then phase three was to get their consumers back out spending money again. And you know what? It's worked. And here we are with a series of half measures and complaints and no coordinated strategy. And what do you know? Utah's had its worst week since the beginning of the pandemic. The lesson here, and nobody wants to hear it.

And we make these bullshit statements about Asia that, oh, but they're more compliant, which is our way of saying they're weak. Well, you know what? We were pretty fucking weak in World War II. We slowed down to 30 miles an hour. We bought war bonds. We didn't sit around waiting for a stimulus. We sacrificed hugely. We were very compliant, if you will. They have absolutely demonstrated a master class. And as Fareed Zakaria said, so is Taiwan. If you were to look at – there was a heat map showing – Oh, Taiwan's amazing.

I'm just writing a column about Audrey Tang, the head of digital there this week. She's just amazing what they've done there. But if you were to take – if you were to look at every country and say – and think of every country as a stock and say relative to where it is now, would you predict that the country as a stock will go up in value or down in value relative to its current place in the geopolitical world? And you could do a heat map. You'd say, well, the places most likely that are likely to shed from where they are now are parts of Western Europe and the U.S. There's just nationalism, narcissism. Things aren't—forward-looking indicator isn't very stronger. But that's—you want to say, well, we're not—you know, I'm not trying to be anti-Anglo-Saxon. I think New Zealand, Canada, Australia have done a pretty good job of trying to be more empathetic.

She just won a big victory there, too, because of her behavior. She won a big victory in New Zealand. She's fantastic. She's fantastic. Yeah. And by the way—and I'm back to youth, but, and then if you said, all right, Asia, let's be honest, if Asia was a stock and an ETF, you'd want to buy it. Yeah. If you did a map of your perception of which countries and which nations are going to thrive, it's like a heat map of coronavirus.

Coronavirus. Coronavirus and the way these nation states have handled COVID-19 is literally a forward-looking indicator of our position and power in society. And it's a very negative looking forward indicator. For us, I agree. These rallies and all the kinds of different—it was really interesting because I was noticing there's voting now in Florida, early voting. And people who are voting were six feet apart, standing in the rain with masks, like going to do their duty. Right. And they were not coalescing. They were not doing like dancing around, singing to Fortunate Son, which the guy who wrote Fortunate Son does not want them to be dancing to. And it was really it really is. And the numbers of viruses just soar. And you look at China and you're like, you can say China virus 20 times a day, but the fact of the matter is they've shut it down effectively.

And here we are indulging ourselves, being sloppy and being resistant. And we joke about Scott Atlas, but it's, I don't even know what to say about, he should be removed from the White House if Joe Biden wins this election, just removed and never allowed to come back in again. Because this is just, this is about the economy. This is about getting back to work. I would like to, everyone's got pandemic fatigue. I have pandemic fatigue. I want to go to a restaurant.

And this ridiculous indulgence that we've extended the life of this thing and not done everything we can to shut it down. And you see China returning to growth. And you know, you're going to see, they, by the way, had a backlash and then they handled it. They handled their backlash and they'll have another one into the fall, I'm sure. But it's just, it's something else when you look at it. So does that give companies like Alibaba a chance to become more powerful than Amazon? And if Biden does win, what would you do? You are now appointed to the Biden administration and you have to deal with the China situation, Scott. This will never happen, obviously. But what would you do? What would you do? Well, that goes back to our original statement.

Instead of make America great again, I think the right call sign for the Biden-Harris or hopefully the Biden-Harris administration is America again. And I think countries that trade together are just less likely to go to war with each other. And I think that it's important that we understand China. I just don't think there's any getting around it. Just as everything's been accelerated 10 years, China was supposed to overtake the U.S. in terms of geopolitical power in 10 years. We don't like to admit it. I think it's happened in the last 10 weeks. I think just as we would draw from the World Health Organization, they filled that vacuum and they go in.

So I think our relationship with China is really important. I'd love to see, personally, I would love to see, if I were Joe Biden, I would go to Barack Obama and say, boss, I was a good soldier for you for eight years. I need you to be secretary of state for the next 24 months and go on the world's biggest repair tour. Just as the Rolling Stones went on the Steel Wheels tour, I need you to go on the repair tour. It's a 24-month world tour. Who else has thought up for secretary of state besides Obama? I mean, I have never heard of Obama, but who's the person? Well, even a guy. I do think there's a call or an opportunity for bipartisanship. I think John Huntsman is a very decent man and was very good. And he was the ambassador to China before.

Mitt Romney, finally make him Secretary of State, although, you know. I would love to see Mitt involved in something. I think he's a decent man and he's a smart man. And you know, like that. Don't make him go to dinner, an embarrassing dinner either. Well, it's not. And not only that, when you're talking about China, you are talking about business and supply chain. You know, you could see a guy like Doug McMillan. You could see a guy, I don't know if Tim Cook has any aspirations. And I want to be clear,

I think we probably need less business people in government and more government people in government. But China is a special case. It really is about business and economics there. It's also about human rights, I agree. But our ability to have influence over China is, I think, our ability to continue to be very integrated. And the way we integrate with them is around our supply chain and economics. I'd like to think there's an opportunity. And just as we always get let down, every administration thinks that they're going to change Putin and he doesn't change. We should learn from that. He's our enemy. I think China's our competitor. I think China's our competitor, not our enemy. And we have to be smart and we have to be strategic.

But I think we should think about how we can understand them better and get closer to China. We should also think about the Verge publisher feature about the Foxconn Wisconsin project, which has been sort of a disaster of all time. And it's a great piece if you haven't read it. They had a reporter on it for four months. Trump called it the eighth wonder of the world and promised huge investments from Foxconn. It's now sitting empty. It's really quite an amazing story.

I urge everyone to go to it, but this idea that we're going to return manufacturing to this country is just not going to happen. We have to be more creative if we want to grow, and not just the idea that we're going to move every single thing from China, because these supply chains are really very difficult to move and very expensive, unless you're willing

to pay $3,000 for an iPhone, which is already close to $2,000, I think, in some of them. I forget, what's the cost of an iPhone? The new one's quite expensive. But in any case, much more expensive. That story, that whole idea of sort of touting that we were going to bring back this, if you remember every one of those meetings, they're all with different Chinese, different various people.

We're going to come here and then none of them have panned out, not one of them. It was just a whole lot of nonsense. Well, they're, I mean, the term you use that I love is they've kind of slow rolled us. They look concerned and they just wait us out. They're like, we're just going to keep this whole economic engine firing on all 12,000 cylinders and make investments overseas and make investments in Africa and say to Thailand, if we get a vaccine first, we're going to distribute it for free to you. And they are filling the void of global leadership that has been the incompetence, the infection. Totally. And the incarceration.

Let's talk about what we do. Let's assume a Trump loss. I should assume both. Assume a Trump loss. You bring Barack Obama, but what do you do from a business point of view? You make everybody mask up, right? And get tested.

I personally, and they don't want to say this because they're worried about alienating moderates. I think you make everybody mask up, right? And get tested. And they don't want to say this because they're worried about alienating moderates. I think the strategy once Biden is elected is two words. First word, lock. Second word, down. We're bringing America back. D-Day was a huge sacrifice for us. We have made, Americans in the past have made sacrifices the likes of which anyone alive in America has a difficult time understanding unless it's the slow sacrifice of the erosion of the poverty that we've levied on the bottom half of America. That's more like a slow imposed sacrifice. It is time for Americans to find their sense of patriotism. The fastest means the greatest return on patriots, the greatest ROP right now would be for all of America to join hands and get rid of this politicization and this bullshit around masks and say, we are severely locking down. And we're going to all take responsibility for households that need help.

We're all going to adopt households, maybe where there's a single mother around remote learning. We're going to all make sure that our elderly feel loved and contacted, but we are literally going to lock down for 30 days. And no excuses. We're going to use technology so people can have walks. We're going to have remote learning. We're going to have remote scheduling so kids can have playdates. Dropping the hammer on the United States of America. I would also put us in charge of talking to the tech companies to go around and force them not to have anti-vax things and everything. Go listen, kids. They're trying. You've noticed this. I'll give them this.

They're trying. Do you think they're trying around misinformation around the virus? You don't think they're doing a very good job? Pity pat steps. They've got to come down like a hammer on these things no matter what. Why would May rally? If the Maytag company can within three weeks be producing B-24 Superfortresses instead of washing machines— They don't like each other. Yeah, but for God's sakes, don't they like the flag more?

Remember? It was, like, three months ago where Mark Zuckerberg was insulting Jack Dorsey over this stuff. Remember? And then suddenly now he's doing it? Come on. Remember? You don't remember. I remember every day.

The problem is—again, the problem is if it was— He was insulting him over his coronavirus response. If it was a brown dude in a turban that worshiped a different god, we'd all rally together. But the problem is no one can see the viruses are anyway. No one sees it as a formidable enemy. And everyone's waiting— It's because it's our invisible enemy. There you go.

It's our invisible enemy. Anyways, I'd like to think— It's un-invisible. I'd like to think that a renewed sense of patriotism and sacrifice begins in early January with inauguration. And I think Joe Biden should not be shy about asking Americans to say, all right, buck up, motherfuckers. We're Americans, and we are walking down. He should say, buck up, motherfucker. Well, I'll tell you what.

Let's nod. Let's nod, okay, to the people buried in Normandy. Let's do a nod to all the people who decided to go sweat in Southeast Vietnam and fight for us in what was a ridiculously— let's nod to all the people who sacrificed, all the families who sent their kids over to ridiculously ill-thought-out wars in the Middle East. Let's, like, just a brief nod to them and lock down for 30 days. Yeah, I agree with you. Now, here's the thing. I'm still waiting for infrastructure week.

That's what I would like to have happen. Yeah, yeah. There we go. There we go. We do need infrastructure. The thing is we do need infrastructure week. The things that are going to start getting going is really investment led by companies, led by VCs and things like that, but helped with the government where we encourage this idea

of made America in a wholly different way than has been the old style way of doing it, which is let's take from China. Let's instead start there's all kinds of things we could do. It's really kind of fascinating how not how easy it is to fix this because it's not going to be in any way, along with the $3.1 trillion budget deficit, which has kept us on a, you know, a contact high for a long time, which is going to be very painful coming off of that. You know, honestly, getting this, inheriting this disaster with the COVID and the deficit is going to be a heavy lift for this, whoever takes over. You know what I mean? Whoever is running the country for the next few years. Well, if you just think about a company and its balance sheet, the more debt it takes on,

the market perceives that the enterprise value hasn't changed, and it starts decreasing the equity. So, at some point, the world wakes up and goes, this place has just too much debt. Now, granted, we're in a little bit of the catbird seat because we have the reserve currency and could technically try and inflate our way out of it. But at some point, the world as an investor says, this company has too much debt on the balance sheet. And it kind of goes back to our lack of willingness to sacrifice. We'd rather borrow prosperity. What is money? Money is the transfer of time and work from other people. And so, we've decided we want our kids and grandkids to spend less time with their families so we can spend more time with our families and not sacrifice. I think the debt, you know, the reckless spending, we talk about, you know, this recurring thing of accelerant.

We are now spending, the government is now spending where it was supposed to spend. Its projected spend was supposed to be in 24 years. I mean, granted, it's going to come back down, but the level, the only thing that passes for bipartisanship in America is reckless spending. I think, and you brought up Nancy Pelosi, I want to be bipartisan in my depression and anger here. I think she's playing politics. I think she should get a deal done. And there are a lot of people hurting. The problem is they really are apart. They're really far apart on this stuff. Yeah, and I don't know if she's negotiating or if she's just trying to make the president look bad.

But we need a deal. There's a lot of people out there who are really hurting. And I think her going on Wolf Blitzer and attacking the media feels very Trumpian to me. And it's like, okay, just in case you were wondering if the far left wasn't fresh out of crazy, we're not. And I don't think she is behaving. I don't think she's being a leader right now. I think one of the bigger problems is you've got the Democrats, you've got the Republicans, and you've got Trump saying something totally different, which, you know, he keeps saying, I'd live more. And then everyone's like—it throws a wrench in the entire process when he does that. And I think, you know, everyone thinks I always win them, but this is, even the Republicans are like, no.

Like, when your own side is saying, no, we're not going to do this, and then you have the Democrats. It's just there's too many sides here, and that's the difficulty of getting to an answer. And they won't ever agree on giving money to cities. They won't ever give, you know, the idea. Because they're blue. Yes, exactly. And so that's one of the big sticking points, I think. And the other is how the money is delivered. There was some really interesting, of all the places on Shark Tank last week, there were some very interesting ways of giving back the money. Some were unemployment benefits increased so you don't give it to people without jobs. You give it to people with jobs. You give it to people without jobs. There was a couple of really interesting and creative ways to deal with it. And all of them were interesting, and none of them seemed to be being discussed.

What were your favorite one or two? Do you remember? I think the unemployment insurance. I thought that was like, give it to the people who don't have jobs, not to the people that do have jobs. And give it to individuals over corporations. I mean, I think that's really... Oh, 100%. Protect people, not companies. For the short term. And, you know, Mark Cuban has one where you give it for 18 months. There's all different things, but there are a lot of great ideas in this thing. And mostly I tend to go with the give it to individual people who are suffering. And anyway, we'll go down more. All right, Scott,

let's go on a quick break and talk to a friend of Pivot, David Sanger of the New York Times. He's an expert in cybersecurity issues and all the like about a host of stories around the election and disinformation when we get back. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.

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David, welcome to Pivot. Great to be with you, Karen. So there's so much going on this week. I mean, this morning my Twitter was like jammed with back and forth with the National Security Advisor saying things, no one believes him, and this and that. But let's talk about right now, you've covered national security for a long time. How would you define the era we're in compared to past administrations and national security issues? Because now it seems like just a Twitter war is going on rather than actual information, and this stuff used to be quite held very closely.

Well, there is a Twitter war going on, but in the space that you and I watch the most, which is the cyber space of this, there is a constant, daily, low-level cyber conflict underway among many different countries, but the United States, China, Russia, to a lesser degree Iran and North Korea are major players. Just before we came on to record this, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against a number of Russian officers who were responsible for cyber attacks that were around the world. The French elections against the Olympic committees, many others. This is the same unit that did the 2016 election. And it's no surprise that we're seeing indictments now, action by the NSA, action by Microsoft and others, against Russian actors.

They're trying to throw them off their game before the election in a mere two weeks. in a mere two weeks. And the good news about this is that there's a much higher level of awareness and understanding now than there was in 2016. Radar is on at Facebook, at Twitter, at the NSA. We're beginning to push back against them preemptively. But to say that it is a coordinated campaign right now, that would be a wild overstatement.

A coordinated campaign by the Russians, you mean? A coordinated campaign by the United States to disrupt the Russian. They're coordinated. They're coordinated. Because all I'm hearing about is Hunter Biden's laptop, which I don't even want to hear about at this moment. I want to hear about the cyber warfare.

You don't. But you know, I thought it was sort of interesting. If you think about the amount of news that we heard, Cara, four years ago about the DNC hack and everybody publishing that data, and while some of it was newsworthy, it was disconnected from the thought that Vladimir Putin wants you to be reading this. And the difference is when the New York Post came and did the Hunter Biden laptop last week, everybody sort of slowed down and said, is this disinformation? Where did this come from?

Where are these documents from? Everybody except the New York Post. And so I think it shows that in our industry, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Carrie, and you and I can cite a lot of it, we are capable of learning. All right. So, Scott? Well, I have a kind of a meta question and then a more specific tactical question. The panzers rolled into Poland in whatever, I think it was 1939. The Polish decided to fight them based on this very esteemed means of warfare that they had been very successful with, and that is they addressed the of basically fighting on horseback. And that is we still

spend two-thirds of a trillion dollars on tanks and submarines. And I can't imagine a higher ROI effort than massively investing in cyber capabilities. It just strikes me as something that is so—the impact and the capabilities are so much greater than the investment right now. And I wonder if America's gotten that—I mean, Russia—it appears to me that Russia's just smarter than we are. They're like, we can't win in terms of trying to produce submarines and aircraft carriers, so we'll take a fraction of that capital and we'll outspend them in cyber. Isn't cyber the most underinvested weapon in the world right now? It is.

It's a good question about if we invested more, would we know how to invest it smartly? But we'll get to that in a moment. I think there is a growing recognition of this. It's not a recognition that seems to permeate the Trump administration very deeply. President Trump keeps talking about how he's increased the amount of very deeply. President Trump keeps talking about how he's increased the amount of defense spending. But when you ask him what that means, he's talking as if we're still stuck in the 1950s.

The number of ships we're going to have out at sea, the number of hypersonic missiles we're going to have. Those may be useful if you're in an all-out war, but they are not at all useful in the day-to-day cyber conflict we see in which our adversaries carefully calibrate everything they're doing to make sure that they don't go over that invisible red line that would lead them to be attacked by the U.S. military. So, you know, the documentary walks you through these.

The Sony hack was a political hack to stop a movie that, of course, envisioned the assassination of Kim Jong-un. But the Obama administration tied itself into knots on, is this an act of war? Is this an act of sabotage? tied itself into knots on is this an act of war? Is this an act of sabotage? Is it digital graffiti, which Obama later told me that was a phrase he regretted using? We saw that in the Sands Casino hack. We saw it in the response or non-response to the Office of Personnel Management when the Chinese got 22 million security clearance files.

I think we're doing a little bit better. If you want to give Obama credit, if you want to give President Trump credit for one thing, it was the summer of 2018 order that gives the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command and their commander, the authority without presidential approval to go into foreign networks and begin to push back abroad on all of this. But you're absolutely right. We are stuck investing in legacy systems when that money should be going into cyber, protecting against bioweapons that could replicate this pandemic, the range of things that you would put on a list

that would be much more likely if we were attacked. So what prevents that? Now, you talk about the rise of cyber warfare, and this is not something that's been slow. I always think of the Russians. Exactly. I think think of the Russians. I think the Russians have lost the Cold War, but they're winning this one, or it feels like they're winning this one. Give us a quick timeline for the run-up to this moment. And especially, you know, talk about the hacking operations that have come up in this election so far.

So, the timeline of the past decade is that when we did Olympic Games, which was the codename for what most people think of as the Stuxnet attack, we were using a cyber weapon state on state for the first time to achieve a major military and intelligence objective, in that case, paralyzing the Iranian nuclear program. intelligence objective, in that case paralyzing the Iranian nuclear program. But President Obama said at that time to his staff, look, when the word gets out about this, every country that's attacking us anyway is going to use it as an excuse to turn around and accelerate their attacks, which is exactly what the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans all did. In 2016, it's not that we had our radar off. We hadn't even built the radar. I mean, Facebook had no idea what was happening to it. Twitter, we never reconstructed this until after the election. We knew about the DNC hacks, but we didn't understand the influence operations. This year, it's been interesting.

The Russians have not used the Internet Research Agency in the way that they did in 2016. They weren't creating a character who was supposed to be Kara's next-door neighbor, suggesting that she should sign up for a declaration that Texas should secede from the union, right, or organize a protest. Instead, what they have done is they've done a much better job of getting their information through third parties into the heads of Americans who they knew could repeat it and that the NSA could do nothing about it because those Americans were exercising their First Amendment rights. So turning ourselves against ourselves, essentially, just kind of through QAnon or anti-vax or various things. And boy, did we help them because they're not creating these divisions

in American society. They're just amplifying them. And so when the president comes out, and this has been the most active one, I've written a fair bit about this in the Times, when the president comes out and says, there is no way that I will lose this election unless they cheat, right? That this election is rigged. He's doing half of Putin's work for him. And when he comes out and he says that mail-in ballots are going to lead to fraud. What is the first thing the Russians do? They take the president's own line and amplify it. And so we've actually made this cycle a little bit easier for them. So what to do?

What do you think the big companies have done at dispelling and taking down disinformation? Obviously, Facebook has suddenly found God in some fashion or found cyber God. Is it real or is it just, oh, God, oh, my God, I can't rely on the Trump administration anymore? It is stumbling along to a solution. I would not call it a national strategy. You have to think of this in two separate categories. There's the hacking of infrastructure and the hacking of brains. Okay?

So for the next two weeks, we're actually more worried about the hacking of infrastructure. The reason you're seeing TrickBot being attacked by Microsoft and the NSA and others is to get rid of a major source or disrupt a major source of ransomware at the exact time that we are concerned they could get into registration systems, e-poll books, make them be on the defense instead of on the offense. That's good. Facebook and others, they are trying to stumble their way towards some standards. But all you had to do was look at Twitter blocking the New York Post story and the documents

and then reversing itself over the weekend and allowing them to tell you that they hadn't really thought through a strategy here. No, we've noticed that. We've noticed that. Yeah. It's not a strategy. It's a list. What if you, let me ask you this, executive order under the guise of national security, if I think of really innovative acts, it's weaponizing someone else's assets to your own advantage. Right.

And I think that we don't like to admit it because it's easier to convince – it's easier to fool someone than convince them they've been fooled. So, we don't like to admit that the object of our affection, Facebook, was detonated in our face. What do you – how would you feel about an executive order to say Facebook, Google, and Twitter, you just haven't figured this out. You are the primary means vehicle for weaponization for bad actors. We're shutting you down today, and you're not open again until November 10th, all three of you. The cybersecurity side of me would say, okay, I understand why we're doing that. The First Amendment side of me, as a journalist, would say, we can't live like that. That's not the way this society operates. harmful speech, false speech, were also taking down a major way in which Americans in the run-up to a democratic election communicate with each other. And I wouldn't want to do that any more

than if it was 1788 and it was the first presidential election, or if it was Jefferson versus Adams, I wouldn't want to see what Adams was doing with the Alien and Sedition Acts, right? Where you're trying to outlaw a certain type of speech. So it's got a nice, easy, clean solution side to it, but I think it runs fundamentally contrary to our values. How does it compare to what happened in France, which they did do that, correct?

Because they don't have the same. In France, what they do is they close all political speech off for, I think, 48 or 72 hours prior to the election. But it's a different thing because they've done that for years. They announce it in advance. So you know that if you're going to get your message out, you've got to do it before the blackout period. And they also don't have the First Amendment. Yeah. And that's the second point. You know, the First Amendment is unique among democracies. The British don't have it. The Australians don't have it. If I worked in either of those countries, Cara, you'd be the first to say I'd be spending a lot of time in jail right now, right?

You would. Because I end up writing about a lot of classified U.S. operations. We can do that because the First Amendment gives us a level of protection that you don't get if you're in Britain under the Official Secrets Act. You certainly don't get in Australia. And none of us would argue that those aren't real democracies. Of course they are. But we give a premium to free speech. So they could shut themselves down.

That's really what they'd have to do. Or they'd have to do something rather drastic to themselves. Well, that's kind of what they're doing in saying we're not going to take political ads at a certain time. Well, some of them are, not Facebook. Some of them. But Facebook is not. That's right.

Yeah, that's right. But is there a middle ground? Could you go to verified identity only for a couple weeks? You might be able to do that. Here's my problem with verified identity. In general, I think it's a great solution because, Scott, if you're the one who's taking out my computer system, I can see it's Scott who was in there. The problem with verified identity is that it's exactly the solution that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping want you to go to, because they want to go to completely verified identity on the internet so they can find every individual dissident who's coming after them and throw them in jail.

Mm-hmm. And that's a big problem for us. Verified identity generally would be a solution to a huge number of cybersecurity problems. It would also be the autocrat's dream. But what if it was temporary? I agree with you. The argument you always get on verified identity is there's a lot of journalists who would no longer be alive if they weren't able to publish information or do the reporting anonymously. But we're in an unusual time for the next 17 days. And it strikes me that the, this 17 days has never been more fragile, or at least in my lifetime, it feels very fragile. We're used to elections just being fairly rote, almost boring. And we, you know, we get an outcome and this one feels like it's, it's fraught with insecurity and fragility, or

it's not, you know, it's not robust, if you will. And that if we went to verified identity for, I don't know, two weeks, two and a half weeks, it wouldn't give the autocrats time to track everybody down or they might have to go quiet. That you're absolutely right. It would also create the precedent that even the world's most vibrant democracy is willing to go to verified identity. I hate it when people push back on me with thoughtful arguments. Get this guy out of here. All right, last question, David.

I want a silver bullet. There's no silver bullet. There's lots of voting. Voting is a silver bullet. You and your nuance, Sanger. You and your nuance. All right, David, the perfect weapon, what is, and what is the perfect weapon against the perfect weapon?

There is no perfect weapon against the perfect weapon except the education of a populist to understand exactly what's happening to it. And, you know, I think one of the things we— We're screwed. Go ahead. director of the documentary, did so brilliantly was bring this to a human scale so that you are seeing through the eyes of the people at Sony what it felt like to be hacked by the North Koreans. That you are understanding why the Iranians took down the Sands Casino, not because they care about casino operations, but because Sheldon adelson suggested bombing iran with a nuclear weapon that you understand um so well what it is that we missed in 2016 and we may be missing now i tell you what worries me for the next couple of days and scott's a little bit different than

what you had in mind because i don't think another perfect vanity would solve it. Another worry? Okay. Another worry. I'll give you one more to keep you awake tonight, Cara. It's the perception hack on Election Day. A perception hack is a hack where you get into just a few individual districts in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or whatever. You successfully get into their registration systems. Cara goes to vote and they say, oh, wait a minute, we think you're living back out in Silicon Valley now. Your registration's been changed. Scott, you go to vote and they say, you took off the rolls a year or two ago. And you begin to think that if this individual precinct was hacked,

it must be the entire state. And what more does Donald Trump need to be able to stand up and say, see, I told you the whole thing was rigged. Yeah, the ballots in the river isn't working so well. I'm sorry? The ballots in the river isn't working as well as he'd hoped. No, it isn't. But if you wake up, if you see on CNN that, you know, people can't vote in Kenosha because they get to the— So they'll hack themselves.

They'll hack their side. That's interesting. This is like—I think this was a plot of scandal. I'm pretty certain it was. I'm certain it was. Yeah. I'm certain it was. All that President Trump seems to want, if you believe what he said at one of the rallies, is throw this into either the courts or the Congress. And to do that, he's got to be able to prove that there's fraud in enough key states that he might have won. All right. Well, gosh, David, Scott, anything else? It is an interesting thought, though. We don't demand 100% purity across any process, except

an incredible tactic of the Trump administration is to say that if there isn't 0.01%, if there's a 0.01% impurity here, it contaminates the entire process. That's right. And that's just not true. That's just not accurate. And, you know, we've had 0.01% impurities in elections since 1788. It's even more than that. It's even smaller. There's humans involved. How can there not be?

That's right. And you know what? In any given election, you're going to have what happened in Virginia the other day when somebody cut through a telecommunications line and suddenly you couldn't register to vote on the last day of registration. You'll have mistakes like were made in the Iowa caucuses where they were trying out a new app on the first night and remember what a chaos it was. I forgot about that, David. I'll pass that. But what was everybody thinking? They were thinking this was the Russians. It wasn't the Russians. It was somebody who hadn't thought about what they were doing.

Yeah. And you're going to have some of that. And the trick here on election night and beyond is going to be separate out the normal idiotic mistakes we make every single day from the malicious ones that our adversaries would like to impose upon us. David, that's why we have you. That's why. And I know you're getting to the bottom of Hunter Biden's photographs, but please don't. I'm looking at every email in there. Please don't do that.

Please, God. For God. Look at the big ones. Thank you, David. You do all the time. Anyway, thank you so much. This is The Perfect Weapon. It's now out on HBO.

It's a documentary around David's book, The Perfect Weapon. He's the national security correspondent for the New York Times. David, we assume you will be on the job on that day and making sure that everything is reported correctly as we move forward. I will be there. Whether I can make everything reported correctly is another question.

Well, you better. The whole world depends on you. Anyway, thank you so much, David. We appreciate it. All right, Scott, isn't he smart? I like to bring smarty pants for you to meet all the time. I know, right? He knows how to get all the spies.

I heard he has a podcast called Sway. Oh, wait. No. Oh, wait. I should bring him on Sway. Anyway, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact.

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their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. find their next great idea. Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Alright, Scott. Wins and fails.

One fail is that neither of us are as smart as David Sanger, but nonetheless. Do you have any? Let me, you know, Jacinda Ardern, who is the the prime minister of new zealand i thought she was she had a huge win and she's run that country beautifully with a lot of empathy with a lot of class uh there's a lot there's problems in new zealand like anywhere else and i you hear from people who don't like her as much but i got to tell you she

had a landslide victory for being a decent uh leader being a really strong leader through covid and and telling it like it is to the people in a way that it's not Donald Trump telling like it is. It's really being honest with her citizens about stuff. So I'd say she was a win for, she's always a win. I'm trying to get her to come on the Sway podcast, but we'll see. Nonetheless, I have great admiration for her. And a fail, huh, there's a couple of them.

I think this whole Hunter Biden thing is ridiculous. And I thought the New York Times had a great article about reporters who wanted their bylines taken off of it. And in the fail is the national security advisor who has lied about other things before politicizing it again. I would just like them to do their jobs and figure out, you know, if something happened. But I think this is just a feint for the,

it looks like such, with Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon involved, I'm sorry, and this, and a lot of these administration officials who have done politicization, I'm just not going to take their word for it until they have actual proof of something. But they don't. So, so far, they don't. I like it. I like it. So, my win is the Netflix TV series, Mindhunter. It's an American psychological crime thriller. Oh, sure. You like that? My son likes that. Yeah. Oh, it's outstanding. It's about... Is it?

Yeah, it's about... I love stuff about the FBI. I think the FBI is a gangster organization. I like that they're sort of just, you know, white shirt pressed, very by the book. I think it's one of the most impressive groups of people ever brought together. Yeah, I don't like serial killer stories. I don't like them. You know, it's not so much about serial killers. It's about trying to... The thing I love about it is I think it's a story about research and academic research and how you try and... Yes. Yeah, but it's about serial killers. How you try and distill something as intangible and something as qualitative as the mind of a serial killer into some sort of structured data set such that you can help solve crimes and perhaps even get involved in, I mean, even little things.

The first thing you get out of the first episode is, unfortunately, it all kind of comes down to the mother. It's always the mother's fault. It's always the mom that screwed these kids up. Anyways, and there's more than that it's always the mother's fault. It's always the mom that screwed these kids up. Anyways, and there's more than that, but it is really well done. The set design is just unconscious. Yeah, it's the 60s, right? It's the 70s. You look at the cars, and I'm like,

oh my God, the Ford Granada. I'd forgotten about that car. That's that actor, John... Oh, I can't remember his name. He's great. He was in Hamilton. He was the king in Hamilton. He played King George. Really? Does he play the partner? The main guy, the main serial killer psychologist. Yeah.

Oh, really? Anyways, it's fantastic. It's really well done. Nice. The vow finished up this week. Is it Jonathan Groff or Holt McElhinney? Groff, yeah, Groff. Groff, yeah.

Anyways, these guys, great performances, fantastic set design. I watched the first one. I had a whole serial killer period, Scott, and I did not like it. I read all the Manson books. Like, I was 14, 13, and it was a bad— That sounds like you. That sounds like you. Didn't like it.

My son is into the serial. Everyone goes through their little serial killer period. And then I listened to I'll Be Alone in the Dark, which is also a documentary now. I'll See You in the Dark. Whatever. It's the one with the woman who's married to Patton Oswalt who found the – I can't remember. There's so many different killers. In any case, I stay away from all these. I stay away from the house, the Bly House, Manor.

I just don't go to horror. I can't do horror movies right now because our public life is so horrible. I snuck into The Exorcist when I was 13, and I've never seen a horror movie since. Oh, good. That's a good one to go in. But The Vow, which you recommended, it's going for another season. And that last episode, I'm not going to give away, but it was quite something. It's quite something.

So many good things on TV. There's a ton of great TV. And my loss is there's so many dumpster fires that we're ignoring that I think we may have experienced what is one of the greatest falls from grace in political history. And that is, if you went back 17 or 18 years and look for a true American hero, I think if everyone had to vote for a true American hero, I think the winner far and away would be Rudy Giuliani. And to think that he has now become the definition of the term useful idiot. Dotard. He's a dotard. It was so easy for the Russians just to feed him misinformation while he was on this fishing expedition in Eastern Europe trying to dig up dirt against his political enemies. So, they're like, oh my God, this is just too easy. Let's just feed this guy a bunch of half-truths and he'll run back to the administration

and create chaos and undermine the media and undermine the administration. But Rudy Giuliani has gone from American hero to the textbook definition of useful idiot in the agency of a foreign adversary. Yeah. He has fallen farther than Nixon. I think he's probably maybe even fallen farther than Trump because Trump started out a reality TV star and is going down as basically corrupt. But Rudy Giuliani was a hero. He was an American hero. And he has become a menace.

His daughter just did an ad against saying, don't vote for me. My dad does. Did you notice that this weekend? I love the kids. I know the kids. There is no household that's immune from the kids. I love the whole—it's like the time of reunion, like, Mary Trump. There's, like, kids from all of these people that are like, yeah, don't vote for dad.

Don't vote for dad. Whatever. I think we should—we need to lower the age limits to run for office on both ends. I'm sorry. No one over the age of 70 should be allowed to run for president. And also, we need to lower the age limit such that Claudia Cowan can run for Congress. No, no way. I think a 15-year-old should be able to run for Congress. The kids are all right.

Oh, the kids are all right. That's perfect. The kids are all right. That is perfect. The kids are all right. Speaking of which, I hilarious. The kids are all right. That's perfect. Kids are all right. That is perfect. The kids are all right. Speaking of which, I'm going to give you one more thing that I thought was a win if you can do it. On HBO Max, I know you make fun of them, but they did the West Wing reunion. I know it's only for a certain class of people. It was Aaron Sorkin and all the cast. They won awards at their school newspaper.

I think the West Wing. Listen to me. There has never been a wider show. Why don't you get a pumpkin spice latte on your West Wing? I know that. It was a really white show, but they did their Hartsford Landing one, which, of course, is like a bunch of white people in New Hampshire voting. I love that show. Why don't you get a pumpkin spice latte on your West Wing? I know that. It was a really white show, but they did their Hartsford Landing one, which of course is like a bunch of white people in New Hampshire voting. But it was, to see them at it again, they did a beautiful job. Who's your favorite character? All of them. There's not one that I don't like. And they

all came back. And by the way, you know how when you go away and TV people look terrible when you see them again, 10 years, 20 years. They've all looked fantastic. Like, Allison Janney is hot as can be. Everyone, every single person on that show looks great, including Martin Sheen, who is really good. He's aged very well. Rob Lowe, the whole gang of them, Bradley Whitford, every single one of these people looks superb and is a terrific actor still. But what they did, what was interesting, is in between they had little ads about voting that were very innovative and fun.

They had Lin Manuel Miranda and they, they had him talking to one of the characters on West wing. They had the guy who plays the assistant to the president who was amazing. They, they replaced I'm going to, I shouldn't John Spencer who died. He played Leo McGarry on the show. They had Sterling K. Brown take his spot.

Superb. So I'm just saying, anyone who's able to watch it, it's a wonder. I don't know how many people will get this thing. They should have made it more widely available. It's wonderful because there's so many wonderful actors that came off that show. And I really, really enjoyed it. So that's what I would say. Speaking of PSAs on voting, you've got to see Judd Apatow interview Representative Adam Schiff.

It's really good. Schiff's a little trouble. I think Schiff should like not make accusations about whether the Hunter Biden thing is Russian too, by the way. People will be surprised. But I think he should have the proof if he's going to say it. Same thing. I don't like the National Security Advisor lying. And I don't know where the – I want to see the proof of this.

I don't care about this Hunter Biden thing. But if they're going to do it, I want to see the proof from both sides. But Adam Schiff is hysterical on that video. It's really funny. Hysterical. Singing and dancing, and then you see his midsection. Yeah, he's good. He's kind of fit. He was looking very fit. It's interesting. Judd Apatow is excellent. He's another guy. He's really terrific. Anyway, it's been a good week for videos and stuff like that. That's right. Okay, Scott, listeners should be paying to what?

Paying attention to what? What do you think? Hey, look, people are tired and they don't want to hear it. What next? And look, I think the novel coronavirus is still, it's like, you know, are we tired of the Nazis? I mean, it's like no one said that. I'm tired of the Nazis. I have a suggestion.

I have a suggestion. Go ahead. What is your best way of, what is the most fun, not fun, what's the most adaptable thing you've seen done by someone through this coronavirus from a business? I think that would be interesting. I've seen a lot of incredible adaptability and entrepreneurship around this. And every time I see it, I'm very proud of people. That's how I feel. There's a guy who goes out on a fishing trawler just off of the coast here and he catches fish and then he emails, just emails a list while he's on the boat of what he's caught. He used to have a fish market and he had to close it down. And now he texts, he emails you from his boat what he just caught and you put in your orders and he drops it

in a cold storage igloo on your front doorstep. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant adaptability. I really love to see that in this difficult time. So what are you doing that's adaptable? Let's have some examples or questions about what people can do. All right? That's going to be our thing.

Email us at pivot at voxmedia.com. We're going to be forward thinking because we're going to get through this. It's like, what is it? War? War bonds? That's right. Are you going to dance for the people and stuff like that? Help us soften the blow.

Yeah, soften the blow. Sorry. Sorry. Email us at pivot at voxmedia.com to be featured on the show. Scott, please read us out. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Fernando Finite engineered this episode. Erica Anderson is Pivot's executive producer.

Thanks also to 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. If you like the show, please recommend it to a friend. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine

and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. I just don't get it. Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey, y'all.

I'm John Blenhill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works. You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found. We'll bring you the answers you need every Wednesday starting September 18th. So follow Explain It To Me, presented by Klaviyo.

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