Pivot - Uber and Lyft price surge, the Biden infrastructure bill and Friend of Pivot Casey Newton

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Kara and Scott talk about Uber and Lyft rideshare prices surging as the companies struggle to find contract drivers. They also discuss hold-ups from Republican Senators and the Biden infrastructure bill. Then All-Star Friend of Pivot and writer of the newsletter Platformer, Casey Newton comes on to talk about all things social media. 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. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. We're going to talk about this later, but I just want to say I was 100% right about the killer on Mayor of East Town. That's a shocker. No, no. That was very complex. I'm getting much kudos for it.

I should be a detective. I would be a good hard-boiled lady detective from outside of Philadelphia. I'll give you that you are a hard-boiled lady. I'll give you that. Okay. We'll talk about it later, but I literally just arrived from Knoxville, Tennessee, where I was at a wedding. How was it? How was the wedding?

It was wonderful. It was a beautiful wedding. It was it? How was the wedding? It was wonderful. It was a beautiful wedding. It was a lot of activities. It feels like I left three years ago. The drive was interesting. It was, you know, driving through. I haven't gone on a trip, like that kind of trip, in a long time. And so it was really, it was interesting to see the country again, sort of, and where people were masking, where they weren't masking, sort of attitudes.

But it was nice. What was most interesting, and we'll talk about this in our big story, was seeing all the people looking to hire people, especially at the restaurant jobs, which everywhere you went, there was a lot of people wanting to go out and not a lot of people working, having enough workers, which is interesting. But it was good. It was good. It was a nice trip. I drove like a banshee back here. But anyway, how was your weekend? It was good.

A lot of time with the family. Very, very low key in New York. New York does feel as if we've hit a tipping point. I mean, there's just a lot of wonderful news all around and it feels very lively and spring-like and just on the whole. Yeah, I like that cities are over. They're certainly not.

What else has been happening? It's been a pretty slow weekend, which is great. It's kind of nice. I think things are really going to start to heat up. But even though it seems like summer is supposed to be in the doldrums, the news never seems to stop. Like Twitter officially released Twitter Blue, its subscription product. But they've already paused on new Twitter verifications, they promised. So slowly moving out things. And this is, again, your continued refrain that they take too long

to do these great ideas of yours. And the stock remains sort of in the same place, essentially. Yeah, I sold my stock last week. I disclosed what I buy and what I sell. What? And yeah, I sold my Twitter position. Well, one, I have some opportunities to invest in some other private companies. I bought at 32, it hit 57. And also I'm trying to establish a new metric for return on investment. And that is the amount of time I spend stressing over an investment.

And one of the things I tell kids or when I coach young men, I ask to see their screen time and I'm like, first off, are you really better at managing your own money than someone else? And they'll say, no, they acknowledge that. I'm like, okay, now look at the amount of time you spend trading Bitcoin. What could you do with that time?

And the reality is, Kara, I realized with Twitter, the idea that they continue to have a part-time CEO, it drives me up the fucking wall. It does. Why does it drive you up the wall? What do you care? Oh, because you own the stock. Well, I own the stock.

I think it's an insult to governance. I think it's an insult to the opportunity. I love the product. I love the company. I think it's an insult to the people who work at Twitter and invest in Twitter. And I thought, you know what? I just don't need to be, I don't know,

for my own sanity, I'm like, I'm out. I do actually think the stock might go up from here. Yeah, because you sold it. Because you just sold it. That's probably why. Usually. That's a bicycle. But two, I just thought, I'm spending too much time thinking about Twitter's corporate governance and the board.

And I want to think about something else. And I wanted to free up the capital. I got long-term capital gains. The stock was up about 80% since I bought it. So I just punched out. You punched out. And do you have hope for it or is it just you wanted to take the gains?

You just were tired of- Oh my God. There's only two things standing between Twitter and greatness. The first is Jack. The second is Dorset. Oh, okay. As soon as he is gone

and they have someone, I don't know, working 40 hours a week and they have a product development innovation plan that is, let's say, a quarter of as robust as his other family at Square. This is a triple-digit stock. I mean, it's unbelievable, the potential, the unreliable. Look at everyone monetizing Twitter's ideas, Patreon, OnlyFans. I mean, there's so many people- They are sort of a font of ideas that- monetizing Twitter's ideas, Patreon, OnlyFans. Yeah. I mean, there's so many people-

They are sort of a font of ideas. Moving in to say TikTok. Yeah. I mean, TikTok was, what was the name of that thing? Vine? Yeah. I mean, literally, Twitter has been the mother of all garage doors

open for everybody else to monetize. So any sort of reasonable full-time management there, this thing is, I think, at the end of the day. All right, now that you're there, who would you pick as CEO? Give me a name of someone. You know this space better than I do who's great in product and tech. Well, it could be a media executive. It could be a tech executive.

It's got to be someone with a lot of— I think it needs to be a product person, a tech product person. So Evan Spiegel type of personality. Yeah, somebody who's just a real product gal or guy. Do you have any thoughts? I don't. There's been lots of names. I mean,

you could go one way or another way. You can go to an advertising person which they thought about for a little bit for two seconds. No, this is not an advertising story.

Yeah, it's a product story. I just don't know. You know, I don't know. Bring back Dick Costolo, I think. Yeah,

Dick hasn't done a bunch. The guy that supposedly the really talented executive that left was a guy named Adam Bain. Adam Bain. Well, he was an ad executive. He wasn't a product executive. Is that right? Yes, no.

He's just really nice. But he was a sales guy. You know what? Bring in the number two. Bring in the head of product from Square. They're punching out shit like there's no tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. You know, the person who runs.

That's a heavily, by the way, female executive team there. Is that right? Very much so, yeah. You know, the person who runs... That's a heavily, by the way, female executive team there. Is that right? Very much so, yeah. Yeah, so I think there's probably a lot of people who would do, or maybe just a good general manager who's going to, I don't know, show up at nine and leave at five. Call me crazy. Yeah.

Call me crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And focus their energy on one company. So we'll see. Right. You don't know who it's gonna be. I don't have a short list. I don't know.

Oh, interesting. So, but you're not, what would prompt you to buy it again? A new CEO. A new CEO. A full-time CEO. I can't believe I have to, I can't, this is why I sold my fucking stock. I can't even believe we talk about this shit.

Yeah. It's the, it's literally, there's 499 companies in the Fortune 500 or 500, that have one CEO that don't share a CEO with another company where that CEO has 91% of his or her wealth because no one would tolerate this bullshit. Yeah. Anyways, just put me to sleep. I'm done. Okay. All right. Yeah. Anyways, just put me to sleep. I'm done. Okay.

All right. Okay. Yeah. I'm just looking at the square leadership, and it's one, two, one, not counting Jack. It's two men and four women, diverse group of women. Anyway, it's a really interesting, there's all kinds of, it's a really interesting. But now, have you looked at Twitter Blue? I mean, we'll ask Casey about this.

I haven't. Do you understand it? No, because I would pay a subscription to Twitter, but I don't know what they're offering. Yeah, but if they said, if they said, if they said, Kara, we're going to, we're going to give you, I don't know, we're going to promote your, we're going to make your thought leadership much more present and we're going to manicure and present your stuff. Yeah, they've never offered me anything. They've never offered me a thing. And right now I'm like, okay, there's an undo button.

And I'm like, undo? How's that different than delete? And there's a thread thing and a text thing. And I'm like, I know this space and I can't figure it out. Maybe Casey will explain.

If we're having Casey Newton on, he's going to explain a lot of things for us. But let's get to the big story. Let's get to the big story. What is the big story? Let's get to it. Lyft and Uber prices are surging as demand for ride shares on the rise and workers are dwindling.

This is an issue across the country. I texted you a picture from an Arby's. They were on every single place we stopped, looking for workers $10 an hour. And I was like, that's not enough. You know what I mean? That's just not enough, as Stephanie was talking about. But at Uber and Lyft, same thing.

Both companies said their prices have gone up and the wait time is longer, but neither have provided anything more specific, according to recent research. In April, the cost for the ride

was up 40%. I can say that. Yes, absolutely. I've taken rides recently. Companies across industries have complained about the lack of workforce availability, but for companies like Lyft and Uber,

who treat their drivers as contractors, sourcing this workforce has been much more challenging. And everywhere, everywhere they're doing it is because some people, I mean, the ones who are paying better, $15 an hour, healthcare, regular schedules are sopping up all the workers that got thrown out of the, whether it's the retail industry or the restaurant industry or this industry where people can pick and choose when they want to work. Meanwhile, something you noted to us, CEOs are cashing in. Remember, WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, last week it was reported that WeWork in February gave Mr. Neumann an enhanced stock award worth roughly $245 million. And you have talked about this. So,

where do you want to start? The people who aren't getting paid enough at the bottom or the people are getting paid too much at the top? Well, they're linked. And that is our society has decided we no longer want to act like the wealthiest nation in the world. We've bought into this unhealthy version of a meritocracy where if people work full time and live in their cars, it's their fault. Because America has fallen into this weird perversion of a meritocracy that there's so much opportunity here that it's your fault and we should let supply and demand dictate minimum wage. And we've had minimum wage flat for 13 years. We've had the percentage of GDP of billionaires

go from 5% to 30%. We've had a 45% increase in productivity. And we've decided we're surprised, we're shocked, and we think there's something wrong with these people when they refuse to work 50 hours a week so they can live in their car. Yeah. I mean, America has become so non-American. We didn't used to be about turn the top 1% into billionaires. We used to be about give the bottom 90% a shot to be in the top 10%.

Yeah. out, give the bottom 90% a shot to be in the top 10%. So this is more reflection on some fucked up notion that everyone's shocked that people don't want to work full time to live in their cars. It says more about the CEOs. I'm sorry, go ahead. What's really interesting about this is I was at this wedding I was at, it was a lot of conservatives, some conservative people, and they were like, well, it's because the Biden people gave them money. I said, no, it's because the jobs are shitty and we're not paying them enough. And they were like, well, then businesses will go out of business. I said, then let them's because the jobs are shitty and we're not paying them enough. And they were like, well, then businesses will go out of business. I said, then let them go out of business if they don't take as much profit.

That's exactly right. Like, are you kidding me? Like, you're just sucking up all the profits at the expense of these people for years and years. And that's enough of that. That's enough of that. And they have choices. Like, Amazon comes in or, you know, one of my kids' friends is working for Starbucks this summer. And I was like, why'd you pick Starbucks?

There's so many jobs around. And he said, well, it was, I think, $17 an hour. It's something in that range, right? Or $15 to $70 an hour. If he wanted, he could have health care. He doesn't need it. He's a kid. He's got it on his college thing.

But he was like, there's all these benefits. There's all these, I know my thing. And it was interesting. I was like, oh, why didn't you want to do these, like, I know my thing. And it was interesting. I was like, oh, why didn't you want to do restaurants? He said, that sucks. He used to do restaurants. And he's like, it just sucked. I just was treated badly.

Never knew where my shifts were coming. There was this tipping thing, whether you got paid. Anyway, it just was such a better business decision for these people to do these other things. And in the case of people who get money from the government, that's not why they don't work. It's because the work is terrible and they don't get paid enough, I think. To your point, the Chicago Fed did a study. I was on Michael Smirconish, and I spoke before Larry Sumner's. And Professor Sumner, who I have a lot of respect for, said that we need to cut, and a lot of Republican governors have done this, unemployment benefits to get people back into the workforce. And that is such a dangerous

trope falsehood, because the Chicago Fed did a study last year and found that people who are collecting unemployment, their job search was actually more vigorous. And in addition to kicking low-wage employees in the gut over and over. We now have a new class of billionaire CEO. And typically- So talk about this, yeah. Well, there used to be outrage when a CEO added billions of dollars in shareholder value that he or she became a billionaire

because we were uncomfortable with the notion that someone, an individual would aggregate a billion dollars. I would argue that Mickey Drexler, who took a record store and figured out a way to have bleach blonde wood, great fragrance, oversized dressing rooms. The merchant prince created tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars

in shareholder value. He became a billionaire. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But people would get upset when they'd make way too much money given they didn't improve. Now we have a new class of CEO that actually destroys shareholder value and yet leaves with hundreds of millions of dollars. Randall Stevenson at AT&T, if you look at his performance, it underperformed the S&P, it underperformed, the stock went down, granted that's not including dividends, walked away with a quarter of a billion dollars. Marissa Mayer took

a $15 billion Yahoo, promptly turneder took a $15 billion Yahoo, promptly turned it into a $5 billion Yahoo, which is what they sold it for, walked away with a third of a billion dollars. And then the king here is Adam Neumann, who figured out a way to lose $11 billion and get a 10% commission on that and walk away with over a billion dollars.

So while we are figuring out a way to give people who not only don't make a lot of money, but destroy shareholder value a lot of money, we continue to come up with reasons and excuses for why we want to create a permanent underclass. And it just feels so un-American. Well, so what's the solution to this, this idea? Because some of these people did, like Jeff Bezos did create it out of nowhere Jeff Bezos did, create it out of nowhere. The Google guys did create it out of nowhere. You can point to them all, and they're all founders, right?

I just think they didn't innovate during this particular pandemic, particularly. They just were in a good place to take advantage of what they had invented. Well, earned income tax credit. Let people go into the workforce. Earned income tax credit. Let people go into the workforce. Figure out a way to start taxing endowments and demand that our public universities expand their admissions rates. Let's take minimum wage to at least $15 an hour federally and maybe even to $20 in certain high-cost states.

Let's start treating people with dignity. Let's reattach work to dignity and decide we are not comfortable with people living below the poverty line. When billionaires have made more money than in history, when productivity was up, when corporate profits were up, when the stock market stood at an all-time high, maybe the minimum wage shouldn't have been flat for the last 12 years. It is amazing. It's not rocket science. I've never seen this many signs. And we stopped several times. And it was all $10, $10. And I thought, again, it's not enough. Like, what are you doing? These are all big corporate, you know what I mean? And I was going to check like what the CEOs made and what their profits were. And again, maybe some of them should go out of business. Maybe people should shift to get all the choice workers, right, the best workers. And then they're going to they're going to they're going to, you know, come down to what they're going to be able to have in their stores and not be able to operate them.

And in one place, it was like, we can't serve you very quickly because we're understaffed. Right. And it had nothing to do with the pandemic. There were plenty of people wanting to buy. It just was they didn't have enough people wanting these shitty jobs, even teens, which was interesting. But there needs to be a fundamental shift, and it starts with, I think it kind of starts all at Harvard and Stanford, who make up 40% of all venture capitalists, and venture capital makes up the majority of the dominant companies now. And there's this notion of exclusivity of both these schools, where they get 55,000 apps for 1,400 seats, and then their total job is how do we take technology,

not to enable, not to liberate people, not to put them on the moon, not to find vaccines, but to find out who really understands software so we can fuck everybody else by replacing them with technology, as opposed to flipping the script and saying, maybe there's other stakeholders here. And we use technology to enhance the lives,

not only of our consumers, but of our employees. And maybe we can make our employees more productive. Maybe we can figure out a way, as Bank of America is doing, as Better Mortgage is trying to do, to say the minimum wage here is going to be 30 bucks an hour. And we're going to use technology to upskill and retrain and make our frontline workers warriors as opposed to costs or nuisances or people who are desperate. Not just costs, but I think they're just fodder is what I look, how they think of them. You know, this idea of essential workers that everyone was like tweeting about and clapping for, they didn't. I just- Essential worker, whenever you hear a CEO, I'm sorry I'm interrupting, whenever you hear a CEO running a commercial talking about essential workers, that means we

pay them eight bucks an hour. It does. I always call them, you know, they're disposable workers, really. I think that's how they look at the mill. That's exactly right. And we have an opportunity with technology. To B of A's credit, the CEO there said, okay, if I'm going to make $15 million a year, I can't pay my tellers $9 an hour. I just shouldn't do that. And they're trying to raise their minimum wage to $30 an hour. That is what it means to be Bank of America.

He's actually looking at the name of his company. I would agree. And they work harder. I have to say my son, here in D.C., the minimum wage I think is $15 an hour. My son's earning that in his job. He's working as a butcher, a butcher's assistant. And I think it makes – he works all the time and he loves work. And so it's a really interesting,

you know, and he's kind of happy he's making $15. You know what I mean? He doesn't feel like he's being taken advantage of. He doesn't, you know,

I'm sure he'd like to earn more. He's a young guy, but it's just interesting. It's just, it treats, when you pay someone $7.25 an hour, you are saying they're not worth anything

and give them no healthcare. You're saying to them, please be disgruntled. Please, you are worth nothing to me. So- But it's a bad strategy. It is. I'm going to, as I do with everything, I'm going to turn it to me. When I went to UCLA, I would run up my fraternity house bill. I'd be $2,000 or $3,000 in debt by the end of the year. They were very generous with me and they said, fine. And then I knew I had 14 weeks between Memorial Day and a few weeks after Labor Day to get out there and

make 3,000 bucks or I wasn't coming back, work and save 3,000 bucks or I wasn't coming back to UCLA. And you know what? I was able to do it. And then between that and Pell Grants, I was able to work my way through college because when I was a pool boy at the Mondrian, when I was parking cars at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I could make like a reason, I could make 80 or 100 bucks, but kids from the lower middle class who are willing to work their ass off could put themselves through a great college, a great college, and then get a job at Morgan Stanley and then lie their way into business school and then to start an upward spiral of losing other people's money and then lie their way into business school and then to start an upward spiral of losing other people's money and then finally making people money

and having a nice life. Can kids do that now? Can kids do that? I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what Louie does. He doesn't want to take any money from his parents. He's just declared to us at the wedding

and he's going to use that money to buy himself a pickup truck. So obviously the time was well spent. He should get a Trans Am. That's what I would get. He should get a Trans Am. He wants an old pickup truck. He's going to put his knives in the back, his chef knives.

By the way, we went to a gun and knife store. I'm sorry, a truck with knives in the back? Well, chef's knives. Chef's knives. He's a cook. He's going to have a knife. Although we went to the world's biggest, besides going to Dollywood, which we haven't discussed, which we'll get to later, which was wonderful. We went to the world's biggest knife store along with guns and everything else.

And it was a frightening situation. But Louis bought a beautiful knife there, a kitchen knife. Isn't that bass? What do they call it? Bass. No, this was just not that. This was a step into another time. There was all kinds of things going on.

You mean a step into present time where you don't live? You know, let me just make this point. And we're going to get to our other things. I like that. There were all these lovely people at Dollywood. And, you know, she has a fan base, although it's quite diverse compared to everyone else around there. That county she's in is like 90% white, but Dollywood is lovely and charming. Did you enjoy it?

Yes, I loved it. I thought it was charming. And it's really nice in there, and everything is just, everyone's getting along. Because of Dolly. She's like Saint Dolly, whatever. All these different these different people trust me it was like all kinds of different people everybody of which is getting along doing the rise going to the dolly museum looking at her dolly stuff and and then uh and then you got to a knife and gun store and it was it literally looked like the outfitters for the capital riot i I have to say, the Capitol attack.

It was crazy. And everybody was frantically buying up guns. It was something else to say. Ammo and guns, like piles and piles and piles. And so I sort of ran out in fear, I have to say. Well, gun sales in 2020 up 40%. I know. We should talk about that. And murders up 30%.

See a correlation? It was literally like it was donuts. It was like time to buy everyone inside. It was, I did not buy a gun though, just so you know. In any case, any case, we are going to take a quick break. We should pay workers more. That is the whole point. Scott, we're going to go on a quick break.

We'll be back to talk about the Republicans holding up the Biden administration's infrastructure bill and our close friend of Pivot, Casey Newton. Fox Creative. infrastructure bill and our close friend of Pivot, Casey Newton. 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. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists, and they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal

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That's anthropic.com slash clawed. Okay, Scott, we're back. Let's talk about the holdups on President Biden's infrastructure bill. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says that Republicans need to come to a consensus on how much to fund Biden's proposed infrastructure bill by the time they come back after the Memorial Day break, a threat from Mayor Pete, which I don't think probably they're very scared of. Biden's plan had proposed $1.7 trillion, which had come down from a number they had higher. But Republican senators last week outlined a $928 billion infrastructure proposal as a counteroffer. Now, it's still one of the biggest infrastructure bills.

I think it is the biggest one going, but nonetheless, it's a lot smaller. They also said they would not go along with his plan to raise the corporate tax from 21% to 28%. They also sucked out all the stuff about EVs. And, you know, there was a lot in the Biden infrastructure bill around EVs, a lot. So what do you think is going to happen here? Is it not too much money? Is this going to do like a lot of other things like the January 6th commission, all this stuff? Because it doesn't look like the filibuster is going to be being lifted anytime soon, inexplicably. I think so. My sense is something is going to happen because now usually the Republicans say, you know, dead on arrival, we're not voting for it. Right. And they're basically now negotiating over a number. And that that says to me something's

going to get done. And there's a lot of Republican districts with collapsing bridges. What was interesting about this infrastructure bill is let's be honest, it includes a lot of UBI. And so the fact that Republicans are even entertaining that shifts, I think marks a very positive shift in a recognition that there's just a cohort in America that needs more help.

I think where the negotiation will be is on the other side, on the revenue side. And that is Republicans have embraced Democratic big government spending. They're now down with that. The Republicans used to be the adults in the room saying, we can't do this unless we pay for it. All of a sudden, they turned into the biggest spenders. So I don't think the negotiation, that won't be the easiest part, but they'll both figure out a way to spend a lot of money. And they'll come to agreement. Where the Republicans, what the Republicans will hold hostage to get the deal done is they will reduce and water down the tax increases

on the wealthiest Americans. And that is, like Biden said, supposedly said, look, doing away with long-term capital gains, which would take capital gains from 23% to like 41%, it's going to be retroactive and it's already too late to do it. Whatever you've done after April, the Republicans will negotiate that out. The Republicans will water down the increase in corporate taxes. So the negotiation here, the action is gonna be on the revenue side because the only thing that, and again,

again, the only thing that passes for bipartisan action in Washington is an agreement to hold hands and levy trillions of dollars in debt on future generations. That's the only thing we can come together around and that's what will happen here. We'll agree to spend a lot of money. We'll just reduce the income side of it.

Yeah, I think they also will be reducing the EV side of it. They stripped out most of the climate change stuff, which I think was important to some Democrats, certainly, and Elon Musk also, including putting all kinds of electric stations, charging stations, and all kinds of research money and things like that. It seems like that's out of it.

But we'll see if they'll put it back in or not. We'll see. We'll see. It'll be interesting to see what they'll do. But you're right. This is going to be one of the biggest infrastructure bills. It's probably somewhere in the middle, although Biden's certainly come down a lot. You know, I think at some point this is one of the bills that will pass.

But Stephanie Ruhl said it. I mean, his first year, he'll have hopefully knocked touchwood, beat COVID, and get an infrastructure bill done. That's going to, quite frankly, that makes his presidency, you know, he's off to a good start. Off to a good start. Where should he focus next? If he does. That's a great question. You know, I would argue that, oh gosh, I don't know. There's so many things we have to address. I believe the biggest opportunity, and we've talked about this, would be to go on offense and start acting like Americans

and decide that we're going to ship billions of the best vaccine in the world and storm the beaches of nations that need our help and save millions of lives and reestablish our leadership as the most empathetic, strongest, most skilled nation in the world. I think that's what would be the next thing.

I think he should focus here. I think he should focus here because of Trump. Fair point, a lot of people have said world. I think that's what would be the next thing. I think he should focus here. I think he should focus here because of Trump. Fair point. A lot of people have said that. I think he's got to focus on crime. He's got to, you know, there's been a lot more violent crime. You think crime's a big issue. So when you say crime, what do you mean?

I just think there's been a lot of, there's like this Atlanta's wealthiest suburb is thinking about being its own city because of the surge in violent crime. I think a lot of people feel this summer there's going to be a lot of violent crime. But does that mean refund the police? What does that mean? No, I this summer there's going to be a lot of violent crime. But does that mean refund the police?

What does that mean? No, I just think he's going to have to find a way to thread this needle, you know, whether it's not somewhere between reform the police

and get the police, just like, you know, getting the police to do things that are nonviolent, to do a lot of their jobs and keep a very small force or reforming the police.

I think he's got to thread this needle here. Here's the problem with that. The care from a brand standpoint, Biden and anything around the term crime bill brings up a ghost. They don't want to revisit. I agree. But I think that,

you know, there's a great story in the Washington post today about this. The officials worry about the rise in violent crime, portents, bloody summer. It's trauma on top of trauma. I think this could stay, you know,

this is a Republican talking about a Republican. They can't, they can go, can't go very far on trans, you know, they can go for so far and they, everyone's like, Oh, you know, this is a Republican talking about a Republican. They can't go very far on trans. You know, they can go for so far and everyone's like, oh, you know, you sort of can debate that, but that's not an issue that will really resonate. This crime thing will resonate with a lot more people. quote people don't vote for what offends them they vote for what affects them that's right crime we became i don't want in new york i never thought about crime till till just recently and there's been a few instances where i've looked around so i gotta keep i gotta keep aware which is probably how most women feel all the time yes it is but it's it's it's um you're right if and you know you'll see you'll see an uptick in republican mayors because republicans are seen as usually

more lifestyle uh crime fighting mayors yeah anyway i seen as usually more lifestyle crime-fighting mayors. Yeah. Anyway, I think he's got to – there's a lot of focuses, but one is – but I think climate change is unfortunately going to be pushed by the wayside here. Although I think corporate taxes will be his biggest – I think they're pushing, you know, all through the world about corporate taxes and who's going to pay for this. And I think we talked about that, who's going to pay for all this. So, this global minimum tax on corporate profits is something I think they're going to push for. Anyway, we'll see where it goes.

We'll see where it goes. But now let's bring on our friend of Pivot. Casey Newton, you may know him for his hit newsletter platform. He's been on Pivot before. He's many times. And I know him as my favorite tenant in my San Francisco house. Welcome back to Pivot, Casey. We have so many questions for you, Casey.

There's so many. Talk about Twitter Blue, because Scott doesn't understand it. And it prompted him to sell all his shares in Twitter just last week to move on to greener pastures. Well, I mean, I think Twitter's idea is diversification, right? They have this ad business. We know that Google and Facebook take 90% of every incremental ad dollar spent on the internet. So if you're Twitter, you want to find something else to do. And Twitter has a vocal contingent of power users that is probably in the tens of millions.

And if you can charge them three bucks a month for extremely cheap features, why not take that money? Except what do you think? Mr. Press release? What is it? What is it? Well,

actually we haven't seen a press release. Come out of the garage. We haven't seen the press release. Well, here's well, well, according to, uh,

Jane Manchin Wong, who's a researcher who sort of like disassembled the app and, and saw what was in it. Um, you know, there are some, uh, you know,

cosmetic things. You can change the color of the app. I'm in. Yeah. I'm in. there are some, you know, cosmetic things. You can change the color of the app. Yeah, change the color of the app. I'm in. I'm in. There's, you can like create collections of highlights, I think. I'll be honest, like I don't think the bundle of features that has been discovered so far is super interesting. I think the feature that people would be really excited to pay for is ad-free Twitter. I'd pay them five bucks a month for that. But they're not offering that, right?

But they're not offering that to our knowledge. But again, I mean, we're talking about unreleased software. Twitter has said nothing about it. We're basing this entire conversation on screenshots. So I'm at least willing to see what they say when they come forward. Yeah, but to be fair, you can buy crypto now and you can find different ways to save money.

Oh, wait, that's Square. That's Square. He thinks Square is more interesting. He thinks Jack has two families and he's ignoring one. Okay, so I'm going to ask you straight up. This just seems like a big fucking nothing burger.

I mean, I agree that what we've seen in the screenshots is not super exciting. But is there a set of features that Twitter users would be willing to pay for? Yes, like Twitter has power users. There's a whole third-party infrastructure of apps that build tools would be willing to pay for it? Yes, like the Twitter has power users. There's a whole like third party infrastructure of apps

that build tools for marketers, for example, who want to, I don't know, schedule their tweets, get detailed analytics. It's easy to imagine them building some suite of features. It may also be the case that they release a nothing burger at first, but then they build more features into it over time and the bundle becomes more valuable.

So again, we're talking about screenshots here. Can we ask you what's taken so long? Because it seems as if they're a little slow on the uptake. Oh, I mean, Twitter is like a historically slow company. Talk to anybody who ever left there to work somewhere else and they'll tell you the number one thing that they notice is just that wherever they've gone is faster. But to Twitter's credit, they've shipped more, I would say, in the past year than they probably

shipped in the previous two or three combined. New board members. New board members. Sorry, Casey. Yeah. Well, they were under a lot of pressure because they did have some activist board members. Jack's job was in jeopardy there for a hot minute. I'm a big fan of their head of product, Kayvon Bakepoor, who has done enormous work to kind of get that product organization in a position where it can actually ship things. So I think those two things combined to help them move a little bit faster. I think they've also just kind of found their footing. They figured out what they are. They're not competing with Facebook. They're their own thing and they're kind of building around it. But I have a question for you because you're in this world. Could they subsume Substack, Patreon, OnlyFans? Could they

start, they purchase review. Could they come up with some sort of omnibus subscription offering that gives creators an opportunity to do different things on Twitter? Would you ever move to Twitter or take your Substack to Twitter? My expectation is that I will not be bouncing from platform to platform. If I go anywhere, my expectation is that it would be to the open web. I write all day about platforms being middlemen and creators getting mad at them. So I don't know why I would want to swap Substack for Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Facebook, yeah. If you do that, I'm going to evict you, but go ahead. Well, yeah. I mean, it wouldn't make any sense for me to do it,

but Facebook is going to come in. They're going to take a 0% cut of creators' revenue. Substack's taking a 10% cut. So Substack is going to be under pressure. I think Twitter is taking a 5% cut. So we have competition in this marketplace, which is great for people like me. But to Scott's point, could Twitter do a really cool kind of roll up

of the creator economy and build those features? Yes, they could. But in my experience, they are just not grand vision people. They're just now starting to be able to execute on those kind of nuts and bolts of like, let's fix the product up. Let's maybe do a major product launch

with Twitter Spaces. We've started to see them do some of those things, but rolling up Patreon and Substack, I don't see it. You don't see it. I subscribed to your Substack, Casey. Thank you, Scott. I enjoy your newsletter as well.

In fact, I was with friends this weekend and my friend brought up your newsletter from this week and he was talking about how interesting it was. Go on. Mine's free. Yours is what, 10 bucks a month? Yeah, that's right. And by the way, it's outstanding.

I think it's worth like 10.50. At least. I'd pay 10.50. But do you begrudge giving Substack that money? Not at this point. But not at this point. But yeah, I mean, I think there is a certain threshold you hit where whatever money you're giving Substack, like you could take that money and hire a junior web developer and just build yourself a really nice website, right?

So that's where you see it going. I think, here's my, like, if I were Substack, I would start thinking of themselves a little bit more as a hospitality business. I would start looking at their top writers and start giving them Substack elite premium status. Maybe they set up some WeWorks, give them access to that office, give them shiny colored badges, fly them out to annual conferences. I would treat it as a hospitality business. And I think that that's how they're going to keep their creators because writers are all pathetic and they want to feel special. They want to have their ego stroked constantly. Like Substack could do that.

And it's actually pretty cheap. Will they do that though? I mean, what would you do if you were Heather Cox Richardson, who has the big thing? What would you do? Like, what do I need you for?

Sure. So, I mean, that's true. There is this set of creators on the platform who I think honestly just don't care. I mean, Heather Cox Richardson is a tenured professor. This was all play money to her anyway. I don't

think she cares that she's giving 10% to the Substack folks. But at the same time, they do have this kind of leaky funnel at the top where they're just going to start losing some of their top creators. But they're also hyper aware of this. I mean, I think that this was probably pointed out to them the first time they presented a pitch deck to a venture capital firm, right? Like this is the big known risk about Substack. All right. So how's it going for you? Like last time we spoke to you, you had, you were making a good living, maybe even a better living than you were at Vox. How's, what have you noticed about the economics of being, I would put you, if you're not in the top 1%, you're in the top 0.1% of people on Substack. Try and be as transparent as you're comfortable around.

How is your business going? The business is going great. I mean, a couple of things I would say you can sort of extrapolate from. In the eight months since I left Vox, my free list has gone from 24,000 to 48,000. So it doubled in eight months. And the product was three years old when I moved, right?

So like the product that you're getting today is not that much different. And yet it's grown. And I've been able to So like the product that you're getting today, you know, is not that much different. And yet it's grown. And I've been able to convert a percentage of that growth. And so I am now making comfortably more than I was making for Box Media. You know, my thought going into this was I had just crossed 100,000 Twitter followers

when I made the move. I thought if I can get 1% of these people to pay me, I'll have a good job. 2% it's a great job. And 3% it's a better job than anyone in journalism will give me. So the economics are just incredible. Where did it net out? Can I ask you? Where did that number net out? Oh, I'm beyond that now. I'm over my 3%.

That's fantastic. Good for you, Casey. What is your biggest worry, though? What is your biggest like, oh, geez. What is my biggest worry? I mean, it's a media product. It has to be good every day. That's the thing. It has to be good every day, right? People will unsubscribe if you're producing crap. So it's all on you. So if you get sick or you get the flu or you feel bad.

It's all on me, but also like I have control, right? Like I, you know, I love working at The Verge. You know, I'm not speaking about them, but I've just worked at other places that kind of got old and lazy, right? They were just established in their market. And so they just kind of had this slow decline. The product wasn't really good. So, you know, the thing I like about a newsletter is it can easily be reinvented, right? Like I can just change the sections. I can do different kinds of things within the newsletter, but you know, and I get

this from you, Kara, this is what I learned from you from osmosis is you do have to always be reinventing yourself. Media does not stand still. Change. I shift all the time. Yeah. Now a detective on TV, um, because I was correct on the mayor of East town. Um, but, but shift all the time. Yeah. Now a detective on TV. Yeah. Because I was correct on the mayor of East Town. But here's the deal. What do you, when you think about all these people, they're sort of adding other writers to their thing. I think that's just they were lazy that week and didn't want to write.

And so, like, they're putting on, right, I've noticed that happening a lot. Oh, like the bundling thing? No, no, no. They're like, they put them on their newsletters as guest writers. Oh, who is doing that? Lots of people. I've noticed a ton of people. Yeah, look, it is a grind for a lot of people.

Like I'm somebody who likes to be in the mix. I like to spend my day analyzing what happened and doing reporting. And so I'm happy to show up and do that four days a week. A lot of people try and they hate it and they give up. But I mean, honestly, that's my opportunity. Actually, you want my sub stack hot take? I spent about, I don't know, I spent the last eight months talking to

so many talented writers, big name writers with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers at every major media publication. And I thought so many more of them were going to make the leap than actually did. A lot of them just lost their nerve. They weren't confident that they could put together a product that would sell in the market.

And so, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things I could say about that. I think it creates more opportunity for me. I think it's a problem for Substack because Substack wants to prove that it can make it easy for people like that. But I think we've sort of, we're hitting kind of a plateau

where the people who were going to make that early leap have already left. And the people who were thinking about it have said, not right now. Yeah, I think that's, you're right. I think that's right. I want to move to other things. Last week, Instagram announced

that users could hide how many people liked their posts. What, what, huh? So this is kind of an interesting one. That's my question, why? There, you know, a couple of years ago, there was this big conversation around art or is teens' mental health declining because they spent all day looking at Instagram

and seeing beautifully posed photos and that sort of thing. And so the head of Instagram, Adam Masseri said, well, why don't we just test hiding all of the like counts? So you browse Instagram, and you can see how many people liked your things, but it's not going to be publicly visible to other people. They did this massive test over two years, all these countries, and it just turned out it's really polarizing because it turns out when you try to create one platform

for the entire world with one set of rules, it makes everybody miserable. And so I think they actually took a sensible middle step and they said, look, you want to turn off the likes? You can, and if you don't, you can leave them on, but they will be on by default. And so that experiment is over. Okay, what do you think, Scott?

Seems to me that the people that are most prone to a lack of self-esteem and that kind of shame are the kind of people who turn to Instagram for some sort of affirmation and are the least likely to actually turn it off. It strikes me that if they really were concerned about people, they would say, okay, under the age of 18, there are no likes. We're just not going to get into that game.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I would like to see that too. As you probably have discussed, they're building this Instagram for kids app, which is extremely shameful. I thought that was an onion headline. That's really true. That's true. Yeah, it's really true.

Shameful. But at the same time, like kids are so, like they're so happy to lie just to use these apps. And so all of these apps have this problem now where they have so many kids and it's not just the 13 year olds, by the way,

it's like the eight, nine, 10 and 11 year olds that are figuring out how to use these apps. In fact, I make sure Claire doesn't have an account, Kara. Claire is not having an account, although she took my mother's on the drive. I just got back from Knoxville, and she took my mother's phone and texted me and then called me. It was great. It was very exciting. So, Casey, I have a prediction. I think this is where Casey Newton goes, and that is I think there's's going to be a consolidation and that is you're going to connect with someone like a Jessica Yellen. Do you know Jessica? She does those

fantastic Instagram kind of newsy reviews of Washington and business. I think she's fantastic. And then you'll do a guy like Ben Thompson, or you'll find somebody who does good video, and you'll do a multi-channel offering. Well, they are. Explain what you're doing, Casey. Yeah, so we started something called Side Channel. It is a Discord server that is shared between me and some other independent journalists. If you pay for any of our newsletters, you get access to a whole community. It's like the Aspen All-Mountain Pass. That's exactly right. Yeah. I'm sorry. Go ahead. And what's interesting about it is, I think the obvious move is, well, we'll just sell a bundle of our newsletters. But I was just never convinced that anybody wanted even three or four of those

eight newsletters for the most part. It just didn't seem like a compelling offering. Whereas telling people, hey, you could actually come into essentially our virtual newsroom, hang out with us all day, send us links, tell us jokes, and we'll do live interviews with people who are interesting. That felt really compelling to me. So we're kind of off to the races with that. Over 4,000 people have signed up. It's been a lot of fun.

Oh, great. Aspen All Mountain. Do I sound privileged? Yeah, you do. Do I sound privileged? I wasn't going to say anything about that. Do I sound privileged? But will you add the other things he's talking about?

Yeah, I mean, so when I started Platformer, I didn't say like, I want to be solo forever. I said, I'm starting a tiny media company and I meant it. Like I want to do like small scale media things that reach an elite premium audience and kind of see where it can go. So I think that involves probably something in audio. Video is super hard. I mean, everything is super hard.

That's the thing. Everything is super hard. And like, if you're going to go into it, you have to dive with both feet. And there's just been nothing going to go into it, you have to dive with both feet. And there's just been nothing in like audio or video I wanted to jump into with both feet. Yeah, but everything changes. All right, I have one more question on this

that I want to ask about Russia. But are you lonely? I mean, do you feel like the pandemic is one thing. Everybody's lonely. Casey's lonely? No, with that hair? I want to know. With that hair?

Yeah, I mean, yes has been the answer. I never went in the office. Like, I hated the office. Oh, yeah, I see what you're saying. I mean, look, yes, I was lonely, but that made it easier to leave because it was like, no matter whether I had a real job or I was working by myself,

I was going to be waking up in this college and writing a newsletter. So that aspect of it has been lonely. I'll be interested to see how much that changes. You know, I just got my second vaccine like a little over a week ago. So like, I'm just starting to come out of this kind of COVID funk.

And I do think I'm going to have some fear of missing out when all my friends are back working in offices. But again, I think sub-sacs will just get WeWorks and let me work out of them. Right. So that's what you want. You want hospitality. Would you like a massage?

That'd be wonderful. Yeah, maybe some cucumber spa water. Yeah, okay. So let's talk about Russia and other global governments trying to quash free speech on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. What do you think? Yeah. Okay. So here's my, this is like probably what I'm going to write in my column tomorrow, but I think the big story of the Trump years was how did we get here? And the platforms are hugely culpable because they didn't take down enough bad stuff, the misinformation, the hate speech,

right? You look at what's happening in Israel, Gaza right now, and that narrative has been stood on its head. All of the complaints right now are look at the censorship that is happening on these platforms. I'm posting to my Facebook. I'm posting to my Instagram. None of that is getting anywhere. And at the same time, there are these sincere efforts by governments like Russia and India to quash free speech whenever it is critical of the ruling party. And so I think the narrative is shifting from you got to take down all that bad stuff to, hey, you need to put more of that stuff up. So meaning? Meaning that like, I read outraged news articles every day

about what the platforms are doing wrong. And I'm just telling you, like within the past two weeks, the entire narrative has been stood on its head. It used to be, how dare you spread this misinformation? And now it's, how dare you not show all of my posts

to as many people as I'm entitled to? What happened? I mean, my possibly naive hope is that we come to an understanding as users of the internet that we have to find a middle path here. And that if we're committed to free speech on the internet, it is gonna mean putting up with a lot of horrible speech.

My other hope is that we start building spaces on the internet that are not essentially corporate shopping malls and conduct all of our political discourse there since it's clearly making so many of us miserable. Put it on the blockchain, maybe. Put it on the blockchain. Scott? Well, just a couple of things. Just hearing you talk about it,

I think there's a huge opportunity for, I don't know, Twitter to say, we're going to be the platform that hosts a network where we take Casey's newsletters, his video product from Jessica, the podcast from the woman he rents the garage from, and basically starts these mini media companies. And they're the only one that has the technology and the scale. And they say, we'll take your tweets and we'll figure out which one should be free and which one should be behind the wall because we're better at algorithms. And we're going to create a series of media companies. But I think you're going to get to a point where a bunch of people are going to come together and say, all right, it's 10 bucks for these five people. And you'll get more than

5X the number of subscribers. And then the world is multi-channel, no consumer. People are going to want Casey's voice, video, and newsletters. The winners are ultimately William Sonoma, the multi-channel. They have stores, they have catalogs, and they have internet. That's where it's going. The thing I don't, we were talking about Russia, the thing that I think we miss, and I'd love to get Casey's response to this, is that if we just had basic terms of service around hate speech and forced identity. So many really awful things come from people who are purposely hiding behind an anonymous account and trying to divide us. I believe a lot of it is from bad actors foreign and then put a lot of it behind a paywall.

I think you would clean up so much. And also to say to these algorithms, we're going to start, do what Open Web does. We're going to amplify benign positive content. And also to say to these algorithms, we're going to start and do it. Open web does we're going to, we're going to amplify benign, positive content. We're not going to amplify ugly divisive content. We, we always, we, we create problems where I don't think they, they, they, the solutions to me don't aren't that difficult. I don't think it's first amendment. No. Well, I mean, the, the solutions are super difficult because, you know, it's easier for us to say in a podcast, well, we should just have some common sense rules about hate speech and enforce them. And then we wash our hands of it. And then you actually try to get in there and do it.

And it's like, well, was this hate speech or was he kidding? And all of a sudden, you know, we're in the realm of the philosophers. So that stuff gets super tricky. But when it comes to are there things that they could do around identity that would clean up the networks? Absolutely. One of my big frustrations with Twitter over the past few years has been how hard it is to get verified. Like, you literally had to know someone at Twitter to get verified over the past couple of years.

They just paused that, too. They just paused that, right? And then they reopened it. And then eight days later, they paused it, because they said, we've been overwhelmed. I believe that verification should be self-serve. I think that anybody who wants to say, yeah, I want to be verified, if you're willing to contribute

maybe some sort of various forms of identification, that would help to build more trust in the network. You know, now I also want to say there are good reasons to have anonymous accounts, right? Activists, dissidents, journalists in foreign countries, right? Like these are positive forces on the internet. We want to offer them protection. But for those folks who aren't in that situation and want verification, I think we can build up trust in networks like Twitter. You know, and also, I would also point out, Scott, that Facebook has a real ID requirement and it hasn't saved us from any of this stuff, right?

Like we have, you know, probably even more problems over there just because the network is so much bigger. So it's a tool, but it's not a cure-all. That's a good point. All right. Any other questions for him? What do you,

how do you imagine us going into the next session of regulatory session? You had Matt Gaetz weirdly attacking tech companies with the Second Amendment. He said people, I think, should shoot them, which I thought was... I hope that's not where it's going. I know, but it was fascinating to have him say that, even though he's a clown. It's also frightening. But there is a lot of increased activity.

We've interviewed Senator Klobuchar. Where do you imagine any of this going? Because there's so little getting done in Congress except for minimizing voting across the country and attacking trans athletes. But otherwise, there's very little getting passed. I'm a total pessimist on this because I think what Congress has figured out

is that if you just hold semi-regular hearings and try to humiliate the CEOs and then turn that into a clip that you can share on social media for fundraising purposes to your constituents, it will feel as if you have regulated the titans, right? I've spent the past four years covering this proposal, that proposal. None of them get close to the finish line. The Democrats can't even pass a voting rights bill, and we expect that they're going to get in there and discuss the finer points of Section 230. So I'm really

close to being a nihilist about all of this. I just don't think anything that interesting is going to happen in the next year or two. So it's a good year for Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, like so many of the past several years. Yeah. Scott, last question? Not a question. Casey, I generally think you're an inspiration.

You took a big risk, and you're killing it. You're working your ass off, and you're making Benjamins, my brother. Good for you. You're an inspiration. And by the way, the only reason I'm kissing his ass is I think there's a decent chance at some point I'll need a job from Casey. Yeah, I think you will. Pucker up, dog.

Pucker up. You're nice to this, but what I appreciate about both of you is that you are real entrepreneurs. You have done this thing. And I've drawn so much inspiration. I've gotten so much help from the both of you. So thank you for having me on. Oh, it's a love fest. You know, people did love us at the wedding, Scott. So, so thank you for having me on. Oh, it's a love fest. It's a, you know,

people, people did love us the wedding, Scott. People asked me all about you at the wedding. It's like, we're dating. I was like, I hate that guy.

We are sort of dating. You can hate who you're dating. No, I don't know. I, I have, I have in the past, but not.

That has happened. That has happened. Anyway. All right. And Casey's been around for a lot of it. Anyway, Casey, thank you so much.

Anything else we should pay attention to that you think we should pay attention over the next couple of weeks? Oh, man. I mean, look, I'm just coming out of Memorial Day. I've spent the past, you know, three days in the woods. So it's time for me to go read a bunch of news stories and figure that out. All right.

Okay. Thank you so much. And we'll talk on Twitter Spaces this week. Casey Noon, inspiration. Thank you, Casey. Bye. All right, bye. Okay, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for wins and fails. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind.

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Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates 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. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Okay, Scott wins and fails. I feel like I should go first. You should absolutely go first.

I am the winner. The end of Mayor of Easttown. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. I correctly guessed the killer and how it would go down last week. I put it on the record on the Twitter. And it was correct. And the minute it happened, everyone was like, how did you know?

I'm just saying. Just so you know. But what people were mad about is that there was a breakdown of HBO Max, a technical break. It worked for me where I was, but it slowed people down. So they were waiting for this show. By the way, it was a beautiful show. I have to say it really ended with great beauty. You know, we're at an interesting, forgiveness and kindness and community for all these fucked up people in this town, this fictional town who literally couldn't be

more of a disaster as a group of people. This last homily at the end by the preacher was something else, the creepy preacher. So anyway, so I'm just, I wanna say, Kara Swisher, win. Win for figuring out the killer, but go ahead. So my win is somewhat related, and that's HBO. Fail for HBO Max, by the way.

But that show, I love that show too. And I think that really what it was about, it wasn't about crime. I don't even think, it was a little bit about the dispossessed kind of lower middle white, you know, white class, if you will, and how difficult America is in terms of opioid addiction and violence, kind of the destruction of the nucleus of family, but really what the show was about, it was about what is really the most enduring bond,

I think, in the world. And that is the mother-son relationship and the mother-child relationship. Yeah, that's what it was for me. I thought the most touching moments were the moments between the main character and her mother and feeling these mothers, plural, pain about what it means to have this irrational passion. And the secret sauce of evolution is mothers with their irrational passion for their children.

Yeah, each of them. Each of the characters had issues, especially the two main friends, which is Juliet Nicholson, who I thought was superb. Fantastic. Fantastic. And Kate Winslet. Their scenes together were amazing superb. Fantastic. Fantastic. And Kate Winslet. Their scenes together were amazing. The scenes between Jean Smart and Kate Winslet were- She's a scene stealer.

I think Jean Smart was a scene stealer. And the daughter, her daughter, who is this actress who's from Australia, who's amazing, who played Siobhan. That one scene at the end when they're at like a Chuck E. Cheese, I don't know. It was really, wow. Yeah, very, very powerful. Very subtle. But my win is HBO. And that is, we don't talk a lot about culture. And when you have a fantastic culture, and you recognize this, if you've ever been in a small

business where people trust each other and hold each other accountable, and you kind of hit your stride. I always use the term swing. And a crew used to say that if all eight people in the boat are rowing in perfect harmony, you can move a shell through the water at a rate that supercomputers can't rationalize. And hopefully at some point you're with a firm and there's just a great culture and you produce unbelievable work on fewer resources. And HBO has had that swing for two or three decades. They managed to push out- Yeah, they have. They're like SNL, right? Sort of not more hits than misses. They managed to push out the best content

on a third or even a fifth of the budget of these other places. And so what does that mean? It means something about HBO and their culture. I was even thinking about it. I've been talking to a lot of networks about turning my books into movies or being a consulting producer on stuff.

And I think, okay, you're a call with Netflix, smart people. You do a call with Amazon, smart people. HBO calls, anything they ask me to do, I would say yes. HBO has such an incredible reputation that anything that makes it through the filter at HBO, people are going to want to watch and it's just going to be likely a better quality. They have created a culture there

that in my opinion is so strong. And I worried that that culture had been blown up by AT&T. And I think Mare, I think this show quite frankly, shows that they still have some secret sauce there, that they're able to produce. Oh, agreed. I mean, for example, Amazon, I did this analysis, it costs Amazon $350 million in production budget

to get an Emmy, it costs Amazon $350 million in production budget to get an Emmy. It costs HBO $70 million. So technically, if you look at quality content, HBO's professionals are five times more productive. Anyways, my winner is HBO, my loser, Memorial Day. And again, I always find the darkness in everything. But Veterans Day, we honor our veterans. Memorial Day is meant to demonstrate the memory or reflect on the memory of the people who've made the ultimate sacrifice. And I've been thinking a lot about COVID and we're now at a point where it's gonna have claimed

more American lives in every conflict with the exception of the Civil War. And you think, okay, how do you memorialize these people? And you think that one obvious step would be that when they were called, they answered. I remember when I lived in Tustin and I was like six, one of the first kind of weird emotions I remember having was Sandy Denny who lived next door,

her husband wasn't around. She had three sons, imagine what that's like, a single mother, three sons. And I remember finding out that her husband, Roger, and he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marines, was MIA in Vietnam. And it was a very awkward, weird thing. If they were killed, you had the ceremony,

but MIA was like sort of hope, but not really. And you think, okay, how do we honor these people? And I think a lot of it comes down to, well, if you were called in some fashion, you would answer the call. And I think about COVID, and I think about the call that went out, and a lot of our frontline workers

in the medical industry answered that call. You know, we really did, I think the pharmaceutical industry answered the call, but I don't think in large part, I think a lot of Americans didn't answer the call. We didn't ask them to go fight in the jungles of Iwo Jima. We didn't ask them to storm the beaches of Dunkirk. We asked them to put on a fucking mask and get vaccinated.

And somehow people decided to answer this call by claiming that their liberties were being violated. And they wouldn't do very basic things. And I wonder if Memorial Day really warrants more scrutiny around, has our nation become obese spiritually? Are we not willing? Do we conflate liberty with selfishness? Do we actually memorialize sacrifice? I so i find this anyways my lose is i think memorial day has lost a lot of meaning i don't think people are really paying are really nodding their head to the people who have answered the call yeah that is a fair point my dad was a veteran so. So yes, until he died. Until he died. I mean, he just left the military

actually when he died. I would agree. We need to know. Tell me about the wedding. Tell me about the wedding. HBO, let me say about HBO. They have a lot of great things coming

including a 1980s era Los Angeles Lakers drama series to start. It looks fantastic. Gotta like sports for that. They've got a new season in treatment with an amazing cast coming up.

They've got tons of stuff coming up. But yes, you're right. I think what they did is they seeded everybody else. Like they were sort of, you know how sort of Tesla got everybody else going on electric cars, really, if you wanted to pick one? They have seeded everyone else. I think Netflix owes a great debt to HBO, even though they sort of ran circles around HBO for many years in terms of it. Well, they started it. And created a lot of quality shows.

Let me say, I think Netflix has done a good job. You know, even Amazon, look, I was thinking, but what am I going to watch next? I'm watching Call Your Agent on Netflix. It's going to take a while because it's a long series. I'm watching The Nevers on HBO, which hasn't done as well, but I love it. I think it's weird and quirky.

But one of the things I was thinking of is Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead's book is on Prime. There's just so much of a plethora of so many good things to watch and so many interesting and clever and diverse things to watch, which I think is nice. That's my favorite part of all this, is that there's so much, like all across the world,

not just here in this country. And you're right. I think, you know, you're right. I think we don't, I had an encounter. The wedding was wonderful. Everybody was great. I think it was really lovely to see the family and everything, even though I have a weird, quirky family,

and we don't always get along on everything. But it was nice for everyone to be together. That was a nice thing. And they did it really well, the family. My nephews married into, they did it very well. They were very cognizant of COVID at the same time. You know, we had worries because this is the first big thing we went to. So that was kind of nice to get together in a community kind of thing after all this time.

I think everyone was sort of a little bit like, oh, look, socialization. Like everyone was kind of uncomfortable with socializing, which was interesting. And you're right. I think people are, everyone's very bruised from this experience. And we didn't act as well as we could, I have to say, during this whole time. And we continue not to act. And when you see a lot of stuff that was going on in the Texas state legislature over voting and the continued Trump stuff, it's just like, and Matt Gaetz andie you're like oh my god really stop like stop there is some and that's why i know it sounds dumb i like mirror of easton because it was like that last thing these people have beaten the crap out of each other and killed each other really in a lot of ways and betrayed each other but that last moment of of the two last moments of the show where they and i know this is just tv but wasn't. It was really moving where she and her friend reconciled.

They didn't say much, and it was really, you knew it was going to be hard going forward. And then that last scene, and I'm not going to say what happened, where she returns to something that she didn't want to face. I would love, they're thinking of doing another one, although I kind of don't want them to do one. Like they're thinking of doing a second season or something. I kind of don't want them to do one like they're thinking of doing a second season or something I kind of don't want them to because I don't I'm assuming she's going to get better right kind of thing from what she did there and that was

incredibly brave doing I would never be able to do something like that if that happened to me what happened to her and so I thought that was very moving fiction is better than reality these days unfortunately sadly sadly and that is a sad note too oh my god Scott we have to start drinking very moving. Fiction is better than reality these days, unfortunately. Sadly. Sadly. And that is a sad note, too! Oh my god! Scott, we have to start drinking, and early. Anyway, uh... You don't have to ask me twice. Anyway, thank you for coming on

late tonight. I appreciate it. Someone had to drive back from Dollywood. We will talk about happier things on Thursday. Oh, let me end on Dolly. Everybody must go listen. Dollywood was wonderful. She's everything. She really is.

It's a beautiful place and I have to say, I thought it was really well done. You know, it's still theme park but it's such a simple theme park and it's so, like,

people really enjoying themselves and behaving and everybody was getting along which was really nice. Everyone's being polite to each other. It was really sweet. As I was thinking when I was there, as I was worried about all kinds of things,

like even though she's become this iconic saint-like figure for America, one of the things, if you do listen to her, she does talk about community. She talks about getting together. She's just so reasonable about everything and like always has the right answer. And if you had to listen to any song of hers

and every one of them is fantastic, I would say go listen to Light of a Clear Blue Morning. And see how she handled a lot of her grief. And I thought that was a really great song and she's a, she's a legend. And so let's hope it's all Dolly and Mare. That's all I have to say. That works for me. All right, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Friday for more.

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for the Pivot podcast. The link is also in our show notes. Scott, please read us out. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Ernie Andertodt engineered the episode. 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 liked our 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. Today, it's Monday. This isn't playing until Wednesday, but today we honor the hundreds of thousands of young men and women who answered the call and made the ultimate sacrifice. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic.

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