Pivot - What happens post-Corona, marketing "defund the police", and predictions on SPACs

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Kara and Scott talk about an outage at AWS, Salesforce potentially buying Slack and Scott's new book Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. Send us your Listener Mail questions through our site, nymag.com/pivot and use Yappa to leave a video or audio message. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher, the bountiful. I'm Scott Galloway. Happy Thanksgiving, Cara. Happy Thanksgiving.

How's it going? You know, it's going. I think there's a weird Thanksgiving for everybody or a weird holiday for everybody, right? Yeah. Yeah. I got yelled at by one lady online because I'm not having my mom down. We were, you know, we're kidding about it. We're not bringing my mom down, obviously, because it's as the news started to mount

about everything, we decided to let her stay away from us and stay by herself, although she's been very quarantined. So she was grumpy about that. But it's going to be a very tiny little nothing. No family gatherings. It's weird. Everyone, there's all these weird headlines like that one, the Denver mayor flew, which I can't, flying is crazy as far as I'm concerned. Otherwise, I know a lot of people did it and I'm trying not to judge people who do that, but tons of, he flew after telling people not to fly.

And then another mayor did something. Anyway, it's just a really interesting time. There's Newsome Gate. What? There's Newsome Gate. Newsome Gate. He went to a dinner. That was a bad idea. That was a bad idea on his part. It's an interesting time. Anyway, it'll be nice. It'll be, it's weird. It's weird. It's interesting to think about what Thanksgiving

is, right? Of course, there's all the controversy around Thanksgiving itself. But it's an interesting talk. Oh, Jesus. So going up to Thanksgiving now? Yes. That's up for grabs? It's not going to be there now. It's been debated about it with indigenous people and stuff like that. It's good to debate these things, Scott.

Don't be like an old white guy who's like, I can't believe it. I am the old white guy. I think it's fine to debate these things and discuss our origins, all our origins. Okay, okay, okay. Anyways, LA law meets NPR. I know how to make Lucky happier, though.

Call Lucky today, Curtis and me, and say, you know, Scott used to be addicted to Thanksgiving leftovers. Yeah. But then he quit cold turkey. Call her and tell her that. Make her day. I don't think she's going to be happy about that. Make her day. She's not going to be happy. Dad jokes on Thanksgiving, absolutely. She has and tell her that. Make her day. I don't think she's going to be happy about it. Make her day. Dad jokes on Thanksgiving, absolutely.

She has been tested a lot. She does not have COVID. But I know she's been tested a lot. We test her quite a bit. And then my son is still in the basement. It's like parasite. Our home is like parasite. We have this separate basement that has a door and a back door.

It'd be like parasite if they were rich white people. No, it's true. Yeah, just like Parasite. Oh, my God. We're trying our best. We're testing. We're trying our best. It's not upstairs, downstairs there.

You hate that we're trying our best. It's upstairs, downstairs, fully plush carpeted basement with a plasma. It's really not that nice of a basement. That's what it is. It's not upstairs, downstairs. It's not a nice basement. It's a Swisher family. It's not that kind of basement.

That's your house, Scott Galloway. My house is just a kind of a moldy smelling basement. He's like, what am I going to do down here? I'm like, just open the door and I'll come near the door and say hi. Anyway, he's doing really well. He's staying, you know, for a while, as I told you. But more importantly, what did the cannibalistic teddy bear eat for Thanksgiving? Oh, no. Here we go. Stuffing. Stuffing, Kara. That's a good one. That's a good Thanksgiving humor That's good Thanksgiving humor. I'm going to use that one. Where did you get these? Like, from the dad book of bad jokes? That's where I get everything from the internet. That's all I do all day is look for things on the internet.

Well, speaking of the internet, Amazon Web Services had an outage this week. The consequences were far-reaching. Scott, you know, again, we depend on Amazon. on. So true, isn't it? And I know he's not your favorite and he's not my favorite on CNN, but Rick Santorum, Senator Santorum had, I thought, a really interesting take, one of his interesting takes. By the way, I don't know, you probably weren't like this, but when you're an eight or a 10-year-old boy and you always roll in a posse, it's not like today where we have everything programmed. I used to go six, seven hours at a time every day with nothing to do and no supervision. And so ultimately, we would kind of get in these Lord of the Flies group and we would decide who was the one we were going to pick on and mock all day long as normal kids do. Yeah.

Anyways, it's clearly— I'm curious to see where this is going. Well, Rick Santorum on CNN, they're like, okay, he's the kid we're going to pick on on the show. Oh, come on. He's well-paid and he's designed to be an asshole. That's his role on the show. That's his character. He says something and then they all just get all over him.

Let me just say, I have bones to pick with Rick Santorum around gay families. I'm not going into it with you. I don't doubt his views are totally fucked up in my head. No, no, he literally tried to get gay families not able to adopt children. It was just, he's an to get gay families not able to adopt children. It was just, he's an over, he shall never be forgiven by the switcher family. That doesn't age well.

Anyways, but he did say something about the elections. He said that one of the most interesting things about the election, or the best things about elections, is we have 50 different processes, infrastructures, protocols. Every state has their own method. Yeah. And you immediately think as a tech guy, you immediately go, well, that makes no sense. It should be all on one Android device and phone. And then he said something that reminded me that the difference between robust and fragile, when you have 50 different systems, no one can hack your entire elections, unless you're Facebook, of course, and you hack the media.

Right. It's influencing the elections. But I thought that was pretty interesting. And what this shows, I mean, do you realize, okay, supposedly AWS is divided into 23 different regions. And this was just one of the regions that went down. And just as one region went down, ShutDark, 1Password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital Gazette, Coinbase, Datacamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocket Radio Lab, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, Vonage, The Washington Post. Quite a lot of people. This is one of their 23 regions going down. Ships went down.

Yeah. And you think about just how incredibly, I mean, it's a lesson where there is a reason we have, and this for me, everything goes back to antitrust. More players that aren't competing, they aren't coordinating, they aren't blitzscaling like all tech wants, all pixios want. That's Reid Hoffman. They make more robust ecosystems. And that is if something goes wrong with one, the entire nation doesn't get shut down

well it is interesting I have a very tough column about Amazon tomorrow which I'm sure I would like to read it is I think it is

I think you'll be proud of me although you keep recommending the stock it's nothing to do with the stock but I agree I think it's interesting

there are a lot of competitors in this area but their influence over our world whether it's commerce or web services or et cetera, you know, or not as much entertainment. There's lots of choices there. But anyway, it's a real problem. It's a real problem. It's a real problem.

I think people know. Remember when AOL shut down for that 16-hour thing? You've got mail. Gosh, AOL. Remember that? Do you remember when it shut down? It was like a national emergency because everybody went crazy. It was like 16-hour thing. You've got mail. Gosh, AOL. Remember that? Do you remember when it shut down? It was like a national emergency because everybody went crazy. It was like 19-hour shutdown.

I was with Steve Case when it started, and he was like, oh. I bet you it was Steve Case. I was. And he goes, because I was working on a book. And he goes, it's no big deal. And I go, oh, no, this is a big deal. It was a big deal. And because everybody wasn't able.

Everyone was on AOL, which was interesting. And it was literally a national crisis. It caused all kinds of problems for him at that time. The other interesting story in tech is Wall Street Journal is reporting that Salesforce is looking to buy Slack. What do you make of this? I don't know. I got to make some calls.

I have not made calls, but a lot of people have tried to buy Slack. Microsoft, Google, there's others. People have been sniffing around Slack for a while. They've always had an uphill battle to try to beat the big guys. And I think Salesforce has long been interested in it. I don't know. There's been a lot of Slack buying rumors, and then they don't happen.

And maybe now is the time. I've always thought they should be bought. But what do you think? This one was clearly both. Probably Salesforce leaked this to see how their stock would respond. And their stock was down 5%. Slack was up 30%. Slack is one of the few SaaS companies that are in that category that hasn't had a pandemic boost.

They haven't scaled. Their business hasn't gone crazy. They didn't have video, right? They didn't have Zoom. That's right, they don't have video. hasn't gone crazy. They didn't have video, right? They didn't have Zoom. That's right, they don't have video.

They say this will put Salesforce directly squarely in competition with Microsoft, which I thought was interesting. Microsoft has productivity tools, and they all now have productivity and collaboration tools, and they'll start going at each other. Well, Microsoft really did want to buy,

I think it was Peggy Johnson, she's not there anymore, really wanted to buy Slack early on. And then Google was looking, there was a whole bunch, and I think Salesforce was in there too. There was a whole, a couple of years ago, there was a big, who's going to buy Salesforce thing?

And then the founder did not want to. He's a really interesting entrepreneur. And he did not want to, and the company did not want to, and it was growing. But I can't imagine how difficult it is to scale that thing. And it dovetails so nicely into so many

companies. And as much, you know, the guy who founded Stuart Butterfield, he also founded Flickr with his ex-wife. And they sold that, and then he sold something else. You know, he's just, he wanted to really run this. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You know, just a quick note. You got me thinking. I know you wrote a book on AOL. And I was thinking about, I kind of came to a professional age in the 90s with AOL. I found AOL to be the absolute worst partner I've ever dealt with.

That's what many people thought. They were, you know, I started or was one of the co-founders of Red Envelope, another company called Aardvark, a pet supplies company. And basically, if you think of Amazon has 30% share, right? Or you think of companies that are known for being really difficult to deal with. AOL at one point, if you wanted to sell anything on the internet, you had to sell it on AOL's marketplace. And one of the guys who ran AOL marketplace or co-ran it ended up becoming one of my closest friends. Who was that, Mark Walsh? No, a guy named Greg Shove.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He's now the CEO of Section 4, and godfather to his daughter. Anyways, wonderful guy. Canadian, Canadian, that says it all. Okay. But it was dealing with the level of arrogance, the level of what I'll call monopoly abuse.

People don't realize how powerful AOL was. Yeah, it was, yeah. It was just because everybody thought if you put your credit card on the internet, you know, Ukrainian crime gangs would steal it. So, everyone thought you had to be in a safe, closed environment of you've got mail. You know, it was incredible. It's sort of an argument. It kind of flies in the face of my whole break them up thing because things tend to fall naturally. Or that's the argument we would make.

AOL is like the case study of what happens when a monopoly behaves that way and it doesn't work out. Well, you know, they were less than monopoly than the only game in town. And then everyone else caught up. I think, you know what I mean? Like, there was no barrier to entry for a lot of people. So, I think that's really what happened with it. It was the only one around with a consumer product that had it. But you're right. You're 100% right. Steve K is smart. He sold that company for 20 times more than it was worth.

He certainly did. He worked for Pizza Hut. I don't know if you know that. Steve did? Actually, I met him through you, the book party you did. He's actually a very thoughtful, decent guy. Yes, I like Steve. I hope he's not listening because I like anything he says. You don't want him to know? No, we have this thing. We have this thing. We have a thing.

Like you and I, we have a thing. He and I really have a thing. We always insult each other. His wife, on the other hand, is wonderful. Steve is also. Steve's brilliant. And so are a lot of these. Ted Leonsis has done really well.

Ted owns The Wizards, right? He owns a lot of these. Ted Leonsis has done really well. Ted owns the Wizards, right? He owns a lot of stuff. He owns all the sports teams. In any case, it's an interesting time. All right, Scott, we're going to get on to big stories. Big stories here on this. I'm spending Thanksgiving with Scott Calloway from a distance. It kind of says everything about 2020, don't you think?

Yeah, it says everything about our life. And it's not good. It's not good. It's not good. It's not good. It's not a good reflection. The thing that should be running through your mind right now is what series of bad decisions led me to here right now? In any case, let's get on to big stories. Big stories.

For the second straight week, unemployment claims are jumping. IBM is the latest company to announce it's letting go of 10,000 jobs in Europe. Which brings me to, Scott. Yeah. Your newest book is being sold at social distance today. It's called Post-Corona. I've got a copy right here. Thank you.

Right here. Post-Corona. It's a scary looking book. You can see it. Nobody else can. It's orange. Yeah, it is orange. It's a slim little book. It's good. It's like scary-looking book. You can see it. Nobody else can. It's orange. Yeah, it is orange. It's a slim little book.

It's good. It's like one of your books. So tell me about it. We're going to talk about that. It's called Post-Corona, From Crisis to Opportunity. Of course, you have to leave them on a high note, I'm assuming. There you go. Well, I'm so cheery.

Yes. By the way, your publisher, Penguin Random House, bought Simon & Schuster, which is my publisher this week. I don't even know what that means in any way whatsoever. So let's sum it up. Talk about, I was reading through it. I literally just got it last night. It arrived finally. Yeah, right, here we go.

More reasons why you don't engage in my relationship. Don't invest in our relationship. But anyways, go ahead. Talk to me about the overall thing, because it literally reads like the last 20 episodes of the show. But go ahead. Yeah, I'm not, we are sort of the show. By the way, the way I produced the book

was I printed out all of my blog posts, printed out all the transcripts from this show, and then found the common themes. And there were three common themes, the markets, education, and society. Right. And then tried to bucket them and write into prose and then go through

and edit the whole thing. And I worked with Maria Petrova and Jason Stavers and a bunch of smart people on my team and my agent, Jim Levine, and tried to do this a different way.

Is this like an Oscar thank you thing? Well, go ahead. Keep going. Yes. Thank you. At number 27 in behavioral sciences on Amazon. No, but it was...

Let me start. Let me... If I can, if I try to distill it down to two things for me, it's that everyone wants to talk about what people would take away or what they would learn. Anyway, so I think there's two kind of call signs. And the first is capitalism or what I hope we embrace. And that is a lot of young people are turned off of capitalism, but I think what we've been experiencing through this pandemic and the last few years is not capitalism. It's rugged individualism called capitalism on the way up to justify taking more of the gains than we should. And then cronyism and socialism on the way down, which is cronyism. And I think that capitalism, the key to capitalism and successful applications of capitalism are that we have what I would call a hardcore, full-body, successful applications of capitalism are that we have what I would call a hardcore, full-body, violent ecosystem around corporations and business. And then we let businesses fail. We let them go at it. We let them make a shit ton of money if they're better than the other one. We let people get fired. We let people get laid off. And then we use that violence between IBM

and mainframe computers, or we let Sun Microsystems go out of business, this incredible competition. And the fur flies create tremendous prosperity such that we can be more empathetic and loving to seniors and fund Social Security and take senior poverty from 38% to 11%. And what I think the problem with this pandemic and what's happened over the last 10 or 20 years because of idolatry of innovators and corporations, basically overrunning government institutions that have been defunded. So to say that again, idolatry of innovators. This is something you talk about a lot. We personify companies.

We've flipped the model here. We've decided that we need to be empathetic and loving towards corporations and very harsh and use words like meritocratic for individuals. I think we have totally flipped capitalism upside down and that capitalism, we need to recognize it's not a natural state. It's not an organic state. It doesn't survive

on its own. And unless it sits on a bed of empathy, recognizing a lot of people can't compete in a full body contact corporate America, it just doesn't work. And I think it's been collapsing on itself. And then kind of the second big thing is this notion of camaraderie. Unless we find a way, I don't know if there's churches or national service. It used to be through crisis, but this crisis seems to be dividing us, not uniting us. We're going to have to figure out a way to express more camaraderie towards our old allies. I think the greatest damage over the last four years is the fraying of the greatest relationship in history in the North Atlantic Treaty.

I think we need to, whether it's approaching China, whether it's figuring out best practices around how to handle a pandemic, we need to absolutely develop greater sense of camaraderie with our allies again. And also amongst each other. I just, I think the biggest- Okay, it's interesting because today,

Joe Biden gave a speech or yesterday it was pretty like that just what you're talking about you know and several articles it was really interesting was like is he weak you know for trying to get along like he was that's the question when he was i thought it was like this is leadership but immediately it was is he weak well we've I think there's a certain level of toxic masculinity that's been injected into our politics and how we want to be, that are reflected in our spending priorities. Right. We like big macho companies and we'll give them money. Whereas an individual who's food insecure has screwed up and is weak.

There's a certain level of, and that we can go it alone. And we don't need, we're so much bigger and badder than Britain. We don't need their intelligence. We don't need to, it's this kind of. Is this a new thing or is it just taken to extreme? Because these are, you know, these rugged individuals, you know, I got mine jack kind of idea is not new. But what's happened to it? Because it really does feel like it's gone, you know, that's always been in our culture, for sure.

I think World War II was this fantastic lesson on cooperation. And that is, if the British, the Russians, and the Americans could come together to arrest tyranny, I think that taught us the importance of alliances. And we decided to invest a massive amount of money in our enemies from last month, right? We turned around and said, all right, we're going to rebuild you. And I think that that lasted a long time. And a lot

of our leaders served in the same uniform. They didn't think about red or blue. They thought about khaki or the United States. And I think over the last 20 or 30 years, people see they don't, they have trouble attributing global cooperation, global trade and these treaties to anything in their life. If there's one thing we fail to do in a liberal democracy is demonstrate to people

that they have gained from global trade. And a lot of that is because we've decided to let the spoils of global trade go to the kind of information age workers as opposed to letting it trickle down. And all people see is their factories getting closed. You know, that's something you can attribute to something pretty easily, but they don't see that every day, you know, their prices have stayed lower, right? Or that there's more opportunity or more shareholder

growth. I think we failed there. Those are hard to make given how complex it is. So who is the book for? And I want to go through some specific things in it. Who is it for, from your perspective? And what group do you think has the biggest opportunities during these times? my most precious capital, and that's my human capital. Like what industries, what would be my approach to trying to create economic security for me and my family? Like I want to understand, I want people to, if they read something or take my class, I want them to feel like they come out of that class or that book a little bit sharper of a weapon in terms of heading into the jungle of capitalism.

Like what industries, I think there are, you know, kind of three huge shifts in capital that create tremendous opportunity for businesses and young people. And those three are in order. 17% of GDP that represents healthcare is about to be thrown up and land in different places. The novel coronavirus has upended regulation,

consumer behavior, people are now getting tested and fighting diseases at home. The amount of money invested in telemedicine and remote health, there's going to be more over the next 20 months than the last 20 years. The second is my industry, $750 billion in the U.S., several trillion globally. Education is no longer going to be dispersed solely through university campuses. Remote learning is going to absolutely explode. And not only that, different types of certification. And then the third is the absolute incredible reallocation of capital out of what is, I think, the third or fourth largest asset class, and that is commercial real estate, into what I think is the second largest asset class, and that is residential. And that sounds small, but that affects everything from AWS to grocery delivery.

But if I were young, to put myself in between the intersection between technology and what I'll call residential, healthcare or education, those are the places that a lot of people would say it's climate. I didn't write about climate, but I think those are the areas where you're going to see just incredible stakeholder value. You talked about this idea. From the bestselling author and NYU Business School professor Scott Galloway comes an insightful analysis, who stands to win and lose in the post-pandemic world. So you're using the guide for people to know what to do. How are you – and then you go over a couple of companies, which I thought was interesting, Warby Parker, WeWork, and things like that. But what – how do you feel in this post-corona time? Here we are,

not focusing on the vast majority of people to focus in on those who are obscenely wealthy, like Jeff Bezos, or who's going to get to be a billionaire. You would think the pandemic was one of those moments of opportunity to shift that mentality. It doesn't seem like it has. We're arguing over Thanksgiving. We still have the Kraken lady still going at it with her misspelled legal things. We've got differences like the Supreme Court today with religious gatherings and everything. So it feels like, and everybody's saying, Biden, who's saying we need to get together and beat this thing, there's enough people going, ah, you know, whatever, we're going to keep fighting.

So what do you look at this post-corona, when you talk about post-corona, are you worried about it, or are you like, here's the way we get out of this thing? Well, people always like to say the Chinese word for crisis is opportunity and risk. It's actually risk and a critical juncture. And I would argue we are just at a critical juncture. And there's a lot of comorbidities that are negative forward-looking indicators. Oh, dear. Okay. Well, we just don't, we don't appear. It feels to me like even in our bailout packages, our fiscal priorities, it seems to me, again, we're very focused on taking our innovators and turning them into billionaires. We seem to have lost a sense of national sacrifice. And also it feels as if capitalism, which needs to sit on a bed of empathy, has decided now we're going full tilt. It does feel like that.

And the company's private power basically uses socialism as a call sign to get bailouts. private power basically uses socialism as a call sign to get bailouts. So, I'm not, you know, the silver lining, if you will, there are a lot of hopeful things here. And the first and foremost is, are your kids and a younger generation looking at our generation and do they say, okay, cooperation is really important. Funding our public institutions is really important. A certain level of empathy, separating people from their political ideology and having a civil conversation with them, investing in forward-leaning things like climate and healthcare. And then they look at America and think, okay, one in five households with children are food insecure. It's costing us trillions of dollars. Wouldn't it just be economically smart to make more forward-leaning investments? So you got to hope that we're

maturing a generation of leaders that just have a different approach than us. I have some hope when I do talk to my kids. I have to say, like, we had dinner last night. We were outside in the back and it was cold and everything. We were just dealing with it. But one of the discussions at the table was not silly things. My kids were talking about dairy subsidies. Like, they're like, why do we do this? Why are we eating meat? They've been trying to eat less meat and talking about the meat footprint and everything else.

And they're not doing it in this sort of San Francisco-y way. It was sort of like, this doesn't make any sense for the planet, and here's why. And it was really interesting. My son knew all about dairy subsidies, and he's like, why don't we shift those to, say,, which is this, you know, he had like ideas about what to do. And, and they, he's, you know, he's only 15, but he was already like thinking of innovative, it was interesting to watch. And then my other son was starting with this, and this is how you

do it. And this is how it was really, I was sort of happy. And I had nothing to do with these ideas. I had never talked to him about them. But they sort of were sort of leaning into not creating, you know, I'm not going to eat meat. Meat sucks. It was like, people like me. Here's how we do it. This is how we shift people. This is the imprint.

And it was nice to hear, I have to say. I was sort of pleasantly surprised that my children are actually thoughtful. It was nice. I don't think we're going to suffer from really interesting, unique ideas. I think the biggest threat right now is that, or one of the biggest threats, is we don't separate people from ideology. And we've been taught to tolerate people who don't look like us and embrace them. But we've been taught to dislike people who don't think like us. Yeah.

And it's created no middle ground for making any progress. We have to, again, decide there is a truth. I would argue the closest thing to truth is science. And I think the repudiation of science is really frightening. So how do you deal with that? Like, you know, I know it sounds dumb, but when you see this, like Sidney, whatever, Powell put together this ridiculous bullshit around elections or Donald Trump having something like really doing this, how do you like go, oh, let's try to find common ground because it's, it's, it's not, there's nothing, there's no common ground in discussing things with people who deny science or ledge fraud without evidence, et cetera. How do you think you get to it? What you have,

your last paragraph is called what we must do. How do you get to that common ground from your perspective? From a from a bit? Is it businesses that are just going to have to do it or what? Well, look, there's no silver bullet. I think it's a variety of things that create a climate of where we share prosperity. Prosperity turns into progress. We've had enormous prosperity over the last 30 years. We haven't had a lot of progress.

We've had enormous prosperity over the last 30 years. We haven't had a lot of progress. If you look at the fact that 90% of the stocks are owned by white people and 80% of the stocks are owned by college grads, it's just we haven't made a lot of, and then the top 1% own 80 get two thirds of our news from platforms whose algorithms have figured out that there's huge shareholder value in dividing us. I think I don't I think when we look back, we're going to say, wow, that was really bad, really bad for the nation. I think we're going to have to figure out a way to be more thoughtful, to share capitalist prosperity, capitalism's prosperity with everybody, whether it's redistribution of income. I also think we're going to have to, I think a great thing would be some sort of national service. I think we've got to put people in some sort of uniform or religious institution or spiritual, I don't know what it is that gives us all some sort of attachment to the flag instead of attachment to a political party.

A hundred percent. It's gotten so, it's really interesting. You try to figure out your way out of it. I got this text by someone, a well-known person yesterday, out of the blue, out of the blue. Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch have done more harm than any two single figures in a modern history. Soulless men living in a bubble, knowingly counter-answering the propagation of evil each day, tolerated by polite society. They shouldn't be. That's my thought for the day. I was like, okay, thanks. I would add Jack Dorsey to that. If you really think about the way people address each other and treat each other, that haven't even met each other, and the way that ideas are pitted against each other, not to create better ideas, but to call each other out.

I think all of media has decided that it's a rage machine meant to alarm us, to pit us against each other, and we've just lost a sense of national purpose. Except that some ideas should be called out. What's that? This constant election attacks need to be called out. I don't know what to say. Like, how do you not call that stuff out? And is there candidates who decide they want to run for senator or president deserve to go at it? They've been doing that for a long time.

What we shouldn't do is go online and have Bernie bros attacking people they've never met and saying hideous things about them. And then that creates, there's a profit incentive. It's interesting you picked Bernie Bros first because I get attacked by the right wing. Okay, Proud Boys, whatever it is. I'm just saying these platforms that people communicate on are basically like, remember when you were a kid and someone said bad words and they'd shove you to and start screaming, fight, fight, fight. The most successful companies in history are basically saying to every citizen in our nation, getting behind us, shoving us into a square and saying, starting screaming,

fight, fight, fight. That individual just said, I think we're going to look back on this and think the amount of damage these individuals did. If we don't have a civil discord, if we don't have a truth, if we're not interested in solving a tragedy that comments, if we don't have a civil discord, if we don't have a truth, if we're not interested in solving a tragedy that comments, if we don't have a certain level of empathy, technology's separating us, we're no longer going to movie theaters, we're no longer going to malls,

we're segregating. Yeah. So there's a lot of really ugly things. And they make it easy for us to do that. You know, I was just thinking this, literally, I didn't realize until like Thanksgiving today, because we usually do do a big family something, at least 10 people, right? And this now today is like four four people it's a dinner like like

last night essentially it's dinner last night um and and you don't i have spent an enormous amount of time alone even though i have a nice family but you know what i mean like not you know it's interesting like what does that do to your psyche and And you can do it pretty, we've all kind of adapted pretty easily to it because we've got our Netflixes, we've got our phones, we've got our Zooms and stuff like that. So it's easy to adapt given these technological tools that we have now. It's easy to become these loner. Everyone becomes the loner in some way, in some fashion. Or it's much easier to do so. Like my mom's by herself and she's okay.

She's, she's adapted, but you wonder what the, what the price is. Like I think like so many people are by themselves much more so than they used to be. Yeah. And well, there's isolation and short-term effect effects, and it kind of depends on your type. Like I think you and I are fine. I'm an introvert. I don't know how you are. No, I get it. But I'm saying people, the tools have made it easy to play into this idea of not being part of a community. But the hard part is when you're never exposed, when you just have a short commute to your kid's private school where everyone looks, smells, and feels the same, when you're online and everyone you're Zooming with looks, smells, and feels the same, and you can get, you don't even have to go to Publix

and be exposed to the public because you get Amazon and Whole Foods to deliver your food. I think you just develop less empathy. You never think, there by the grace of God go I. And you should be thinking that several times. We should start a church, Scott.

Maybe I should start a church. Let's start the Cotton Cara church. We do have a church. People write, have you noticed, people are like, I listen, I walk and I listen to Scott and Kara. We got a lot of them. That's what they need. That's what they need.

That's what they need. All right, last question. What is your, very briefly, what is your advice to a young person who's first jumping to adulthood was the pandemic? I think a lot, that with my kids, for sure. I just hope they, I hope they look at everything we've done wrong and commit to being getting involved civically and trying to figure out a way uh the thing i don't like or the thing i think is really dangerous among young people and i see this just on campus is they feel that there's there's reward or compensation or merit and calling other people out that there's virtue points calling out i don't think that's their biggest problem i'm gonna push back push back on you. I think they don't. I think you are dealing with a college campus.

I don't think people do that. And calling out is not our biggest social crisis. It's inequality of opportunity. I worry that college, so I'm exposed to college kids. I'm worried that college kids are not as empathetic towards, I don't know what you call it, the middle of the country, that there's definitely a kind of an ideological narrative. And if you don't sign up for that narrative, you lack worth. I think there actually are pretty judgmental around a certain ideology. I think people in the middle of the country are very judgmental. I am subject to it

almost constantly. I'm not subjected to that as much. It's that idea that we have to understand the other person better than they should understand us. And I think that's really where it's lost. You know, on some level, I do want to understand some of the Trump voters. Others, I don't. I get it. I hear it. And it's all of us, not just whatever. I think what Joe Biden's saying is really powerful.

And I hope it – I've been watching his speeches very carefully. There's nothing weak about what he's saying, not even a bit. There's something very weak. And I, you know, when you talk about young people and calling out, you know, who's let us down? The older people, the older people are just like wallowed in this bullshit for too long. That's my feeling. Yeah. There's, I don't think there's, so look, the hope for our next generation is they learn from our mistakes and return to some of the things that worked and haven't worked. And then most of what I write about is how they can benefit economically. What are they going to be the most exciting industries to be in? What are the skills to be in those industries? All right, name three very quickly.

Well, I said them. I think call it home or residential. You're going to see more capital and innovation around your home than you've seen in, you know, decades. And then healthcare and education. All my investments are basically, I'm moving everything into one of those three things. I think that's going to be the, you know, the most prosperous or create the most stakeholder value over the next 10 years. So the industries that people should be focused on, go through them very quickly. The industries that people should be focused on, go through them very quickly. Simply put, healthcare. And that is the dispersion of $3 trillion away from hospitals and doctor's offices to the home.

That's going to create an enormous opportunity. The other, and the call sign here is the word is dispersion. The dispersion of capital or the $750 billion that flows through universities. That'll also go remote. And then the third or the 10 to 20 hours a week of our time that's going to disperse from spending time in a commercial office to your home. So just getting in the way of those flows, if you will. And there's just so many, whether it's cold storage to deliver perishables, whether it's an office set up in your home and all the, you know, noise padding, you know, I mean, just for whatever it might be. I would want, if I were a young person, I'd want to be between the intersection of technology and those industries. Those are all jobs of taking us apart. What are the trends of getting together? Are there opportunities like that?

I would like to see a Corona Corps. I think that, first off, I think a gap year should be the norm, not the exception. And I think it would be great to say, all right, we have a lot of diseases or pandemic. If we have a pandemic right now or we have a lot of people who are struggling, who need a ride to their doctor, whatever it might be. I think a civil service Corona Corps, similar to what the Latter-day Saints do, or the Peace Corps, or AmeriCorps, where kids are given opportunities to earn money for college, pay off student debt, make some money, get a feeder into universities to say, if you spend two years in this, we're going to take

a harder look at you in terms of a job, but basically create a national service core that creates some unity and gives some kids some skills. Because I think 18, I don't know about you, but you were 18 was just too young for me to go to college. I just got too drunk and just hung out and barely made it to my freshman year. Several of Louie's friends did not go. They're just traveling, but they can't go anywhere. You know, they wanted to go to Europe. They wanted to go, they wanted to just drive around, but you just can't.

They're, you know, they're safe-minded kids in general. So it's not, and there's not opportunities either, by the way, to do that. Some sort of national service that gives them a shared identity, additional skills, and also empathy, empathy for other Americans and a shared pride of all having served in the same uniform such that they maybe cooperate with each other

when they're business leaders. Yeah, I've always thought the National Military Service that does things like fix roads and stuff like that would be really great using the military that way. But, you know, people are, that's a very controversial thing, obviously. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next administration.

I am really hoping that this pandemic has not made us better, and you would think it would have. You would think it would have, but it has not. And on that un-Thanksgiving note, but there are ways to come together, because what's happened is we've come together over politics, which is always going to be

a nasty, you know, snake pit. No matter, it's always been a snake pit. It's always going to be. And so we don't have a commonality that is, which has been our strength, the lack of the differences that we have has been our strength and now it's our weakness. Anyway, Scott, let's go to a quick break.

Again, read Scott's book. It's called Post-Corona, From Crisis to Opportunity. He is apparently a New York Times bestselling author. You know, it's orange, so you'll notice it when you go and buy it and buy it online. And did you do an audio copy, Scott? I did an audible, yeah. Good. I used my voice this time this year, so you get to hear the—

Well, that's what I'm going to be doing. What a thrill. That's what you need more of. Play it over, Alexa, through Thanksgiving. I sure will. And then go into the garage, turn on the car, close the garage door, and just think about better things. You know what? I have to say my sons are your biggest fans. They were all excited when it came. They're like, Scott has a book? Yay. Despite your efforts? That's nice.

That makes me feel good. They did. They said yay. You just chuck it down to the basement. I'm going to. I'm going to chuck it down to the basement today. Poor, poor son is sitting down there by himself. Anyway. All right, Scott, let's go to a quick break. When we come back, we'll have a listener question. 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. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter.

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Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. All right, we're back. Let's take a listener mail question. You have to top Bob from Brooklyn, but good luck. You've got, you've got, I can't believe I'm going to be a mailman. You've got mail. Hey, Scott and Kara. Alex from Texas here. You said in the past that defund the police is bad marketing. How would you change that? I'd like police reform to happen, but all the peaceful protests and task force under that banner haven't really done much in the past few years. I've been pulled over and accused of running drugs across state lines on the way to interviews.

Someone nearby was tased recently for having a dirty license plate and so on. Or should we just keep the name? After all, Martin Luther King only had like 40% approval at his peak along with the freedom marches. But we can all agree the minorities like Karen and myself definitely deserve equal protections under the law. Apologies for the rambling question and thanks for all the hard work. Gosh, Scott, we have such smart listener males and the people who are giving us these questions. So let's talk about this. Let's take away from the politics of it and talk about this idea of the word defund the police.

As a marketing person, I hate to pull it away from very serious social and issues that we have around this issue. But let's talk about as a marketing, how would you restructure the campaign? around this issue. But let's talk about as a market leader, how would you restructure the campaign? So I just want to acknowledge that one of the things I did when Black Lives Matter was sort of, I don't know, getting the news more. I brought on some people who are just more thoughtful about it than me. And one of them was my former dean, Peter Henry. And I remember, I mean, I knew it, but I didn't know it. But I remember him telling me his biggest, one of his biggest fears is having his sons in what he called an uncontrolled interaction environment with a police officer. Yeah.

And it just really opened my eyes to like, it's just a different, you know, it's just a different world for people of color. And so let's go beyond what needs to happen. Let's go to how you guys make progress. The difference between being right and being effective. I think defund the police almost cost us the election. I think if that narrative, if Biden had decided to take the momentum there and it was very tempting and adopt that. Or if he hadn't repeated it, I think that could have cost the Democrats the election. Because I think if you talk about the 4,500 different police departments, different cohorts have different relationships and a different level of respect for the police. police. I think that, and to your listeners or to the listeners point, you know, being, just because something is unpopular, it doesn't mean it's going to be, that it doesn't have worth that it's not going to be the narrative. The fringe becomes a narrative at some point,

as long as the fringe is right or has, you know, the righteous on their side. I think civic reform or using data here, because what we've asked the police to do is to deal with mental health, to deal with homeless, to deal with drug addiction. And you don't deal with those three things where your primary tools are a certain amount of EQ, authority, but also a gun in a cage. It's just not how you approach addiction or mental illness. And I think a lot of policemen also don't feel as if they've been given almost an impossible task in terms of the things that they're supposed to deal with. I mean, I'd be very curious, like, how the police force in San Francisco feels about all of this. Anyway,

so I think it's more around civic reform and talking about mental illness and talking about I think reform is a much better word than defund the police. Because the moment you had started having a conversation, which no one wanted, no one wanted, and maybe now they're ready to have the conversation, but they didn't want to have a data-driven conversation that defund the police was just going to lead to wealthy areas having their own militias that weren't accountable to anyone in terms of how they treated people. And then you were going to have an increase in crime in the areas that need police the most. So I feel like it was a really, I don't know what the term is.

It also gives the Sean Hannity's of the world and Laura Ingalls a ridiculous reductive argument. You know, it is. And they're so, I don't want to call them stupid because they're not stupid. They take any opportunity to create division. A green deal, no air travel and no lawnmowers. It's like, well, that's not really what it said, right? Yeah, right. Well, no matter what you do with them, they'll take anything and twist it into something crazy. But we did, but when I say we, there were people that, the DC mayor writes defund the police along an avenue. And that, so it's easy for them to take that and say,

okay, the left is saying defund the police. What do you think? How do you think they should approach it? It's one of these issues that's, it's the same thing with mask wearing and stuff like that. On some level, you do wanna like be very aggressive to people about it. At the same time, you have to understand there's all these other,

not with masks, because masks should be like a stop it, stop it right now kind of thing. And not being like a martinet about it. I mean, if no one's around, you can probably pull your mask for five seconds outside, whatever. It's not being that kind like a scold to people. I think it's really hard to acknowledge people's sadness and grieving. I think Esther Perel talked about this. There's a lot of grieving going on we're not acknowledging of lots of people. And even though it seems at the moment really, it's hard to let people grieve right now. And I think we have to understand at the very basis where defund the police comes from and why, why the, these,

these different groups of people have been so badly abused and murdered. And, and we want to just move on and like fix something. I think, you know, it's sort of when it's not exactly the right comparison, but when I was talking to Mark Zuckerberg about all the issues around the social speech and the actual real life things that happen, including deaths and riots and things like that. And he was like, let's just fix it. And I was like, there's got to be a moment of acknowledgement of what, and continue, because it continues to happen, right? It doesn't stop. And I think what happens is a lot is among especially groups, it happens with white guys who really run things say, yeah, I hear you now.

Now let's move on and like want to ignore what they've done. And so I think that's the difficult part and that's part. And why should you get forgiveness given the behavior? And that's part. And why should you get forgiveness given the behavior? And then at the same time, acknowledging how many amazing public servants there are all over the place. And so they all feel like lumped in with the bad ones, essentially, and a bad system. And so it's really, I think it's hard to say do kindness after being abused for so long. But on one side, it has to be do kindness.

The other side has to acknowledge the lack of kindness and the abuse that has been perpetrated in their names. And so I don't know. I don't, again, it's what we were talking about at the beginning in your book, like, right? That's what we talked about, you know. I'm a little bit more foxy on this. I'm seeing all these videos of young people

getting back in police officers' face. Like, sir, can I see your ID? No, you can't see my ID. Get out of here. And they start verbally abusing the police officers. more respect than that. And I believe that when they murder people, they should be stuck in prison for the rest of their lives. But it seems to me that there definitely is an unhealthy narrative that anyone in a police uniform is- But why is that, Scott? Why do you think that is? Do you think it is undeserved given, like we see video after video after video where it's clear what's happening and we still have to be like, well, let's give them another break. And I think I agree with you. There's a lot of great public servants. It's just that it shouldn't be any surprise,

given the enormous amount of evidence of systemic racism in this country. And I just think you have to allow, you're asking people to forgive that constantly are being asked to forgive. That's a fair point. You know, like in my very small way of being gay. But by the way, these aren't usually kids of color yelling at the police. It's white kids posting it on TikTok.

Agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed. But young people grab onto all kinds of like anti-war thing, whatever it is. But I mean, even, it's not even close to being close, but you know, when I used to take endless shit for being gay, it doesn't happen anymore as much. It does definitely happen. And at some point it was like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to be nice. I'm not going to let people understand me.

I don't care if you understand. I mean, you get this, like, why do you have to be the better person all the time? And that's exhausting. And I think that everyone's got to take a hard look at themselves and their responsibilities. And just because you didn't do it as a police officer, you do have to understand just like with reporters, I don't take responsibility for all the shitty

reporters, but I do worry for the profession as a whole, right? And so I didn't do it. We have defunded journalism. It's already done. There are 50% fewer journalists than there were 30 years ago. We have defunded journalism. Itund journalism. It's already done. They're 50% fewer journalists than they were 30 years ago. We have defunded journalism. It really is.

I urge you to listen to Joe Biden's speech, I think, and push back when people talk about it being weak. Push back on people being super ridiculously, hypocritically aggressive. You know what I mean? Like, I gave Marco Rubio a real hard slap, deservedly, you know, to just immediately, your first thing at the gate is a punch and you have to push back on people like that and get us to a place where we can disagree and get something done together. Right? Because we're all in the beginning of the process versus the actual problem. We're discussing the process all the time now. But shouldn't every high school student, I mean, just as an example, I think intimacy or respect is a function of proximity and contact. You know, is there a program as part of the social service

program where you spend time with the police and police spend time with you? Yep. Just local policing to get kids involved in that and to get local police more involved with kids. It just strikes me. That has worked on many occasions as neighborhood policing. And there's all kinds of great ideas. All I'm saying is there's all kinds of innovative ideas to deal with this and to figure out, to weed out real sociopaths that go into policing. We need to demilitarize the police.

I occasionally see one of these assault vehicles. Yeah, me too. Talk about toxic masculinity gone fucking apeshit. Yeah. Stuff like that. There are lots of great ideas. Go ahead, sorry. With their assault rifles and their battle wear. And it's like, okay, these are board cops in an overfunded district that want to play G.I. Joe. I mean, that just can't be healthy. No. No, it's mentally. I think I've had more bad encounters with the police than you, I suspect. I've had many. I've had many, many, many. And how does a longer show, I'm just wondering how that plays out for you.

And you think it's because, well, I'll ask you, what are those bad experiences? I question things. experiences i i question things i would actually he was one at one point um he was really giving these two young african-american men a hard time and i was this was long ago and i was like what are you doing like and because i felt like i had you know that he wouldn't but he came at me i'll tell you that uh and uh in that case uh didn't I mean, nothing happened, but it was, I was just sort of like, I see what you're doing. I think that's all I was doing. Another case,

I, I questioned something. I questioned for, for the most minor thing. And I got, I put, I was put in jail. I was,

I questioned. I don't know what else to say. I was like, I was questioned. And I wasn't rude. I was just, why do you think you can do that? Right.

You know, and I was cuffed and put in jail. And what was the charge? Resisting arrest. I really didn't. I was just like, this is ridiculous. It's a long story. I won't go into it, but it was stupid.

It was so dumb. In any case, it's a very good time to start to take a breath today while you're by yourself at home with your tiny turkeys. Agreed. But it's a really good time to take your breath today while you're by yourself at home with your tiny turkeys. Agreed. But it's a really good time to take your breath and be, but I think pushing back on people who are continuing to punch is, you really have to start to keep doing that. Anyway, good question. Thank you, Alex from Texas.

I think we have a long way to go in this country and to get to our better angels for sure. And nothing says that like the holiday season, I guess. I don't think that's true. We should do it all year round. By the way, for the month of December, we're partnering with YAPA to get more listener mail questions. YAPA. Go to newyorknymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for the Pivot podcast.

These questions have been incredibly thoughtful every week and different, and we really appreciate them. And we like talking about them, obviously. All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions. I would like a great, dazzling prediction from you. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic. You already know that AI is transforming

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Okay, Scott, predictions dazzle us for the holiday weekend. Please. You've had so many good ones lately. This one's sort of boring, but I'm fascinated by the whole SPAC phenomena, Special Purpose Acquisition Corps, corporations. And basically, you never underestimate the market's ability to find products for people who have cash in their hand. And because investment banks in the SEC have a certain amount of lag and filter and friction around getting public, and the market's appetite for IPOs is greater, your sinks back. And it's basically teams go out and they act almost like a desk in an investment bank or investment bankers who say, no, I'll evaluate a company. I'll come up with

the price. I already get through the logistics of the SEC approval, get this company public, and then boom, just add water IPO. And it's basically, typically this year, SPACs have vastly outperformed the rest of the market, but over the medium and long-term SPACs have generally underperformed because they're evidence of the hand going deeper and deeper into the barrel to try and find companies and sometimes of lesser quality. And there's a reason why some companies don't get through that process in normal times. Anyways, if you look at right now, there are about 255 SPACs. And I got this from Terry Kawaj's when he did a SPAC loom escape, which I thought was really interesting. And 70 of them have found a target, meaning that they've actually purchased a company and other publicly traded companies

across six verticals. But 185 are still looking for a target. And they are armed with $65 billion in cash. Typically, that cash gets deployed into the company and then they lever up. So you have about $200 billion in capital right now. And that $200 billion in capital has a gun to its head. If you don't deploy this capital. Two years, right? Yeah, in 18 to 24 months, you have to return it to your investors. And that's a no-no.

Your investors didn't give you the money to hold onto it for two years and then return it. So you have $200 billion with a gun to its head right now trying to find private companies that might be ready for prime time. And you could say, well, these things are going to underperform. It means there's a bidding war.

True, but the market also won't take a company just because you overpaid for it and let it trade at that. So there is some sanity to it. Yes, there's a governance. But you have, what I think this means isn't this a boring prediction. I think that this year's returns

and the first half of 2021 for venture capitalists are going to be probably record returns because you have companies that were gonna go public in two or three years potentially, go public in Q4, Q1, or Q2. This is a complex and interesting prediction. Oh, I don't know about that. It is complex.

What you're doing is you're saying, look, venture capitalists, we're going to go public in two years and had to be sitting on these assets. Now they can get them out the door and take the money and run, essentially. You can. Say you have a $30 to $50 million or $100 million a year recurring revenue company and you're thinking, once we get to $200, we'll call the bankers. Yeah. You've had a dozen SPACs call you and say, we're ready to go.

We can be trading in 30 days. Is this smart for these companies to be public this young? Well, what you've seen in the marketplace is access to cheap capital is kind of the core competence. And you identify yourself. IPOs, the reason these guys aren't stupid, the reason they do still do traditional IPOs and give 7% to the owner-rider is it's basically a giant signal saying we're the disruptor, we're the leader in the space. And then all of a sudden,

this capital stocks are two components, narrative and numbers. And now that the narrative is 70% and the numbers are 30%, whereas it used to be flipped, anything that identifies you or signals that you're going to have access to cheaper capital, you're the disruptor, which leads to access to cheaper capital, which means you can make more forward-leaning investments in your peer group. You know, there's definitely something to an advantage. If you're good, unless it's a lot of bullshit stuff, which, you know,

SPACs in the past, that's sort of been the wrap on them when it wasn't so trendy, right? Shitty companies. That's right. They were awkward teenagers that hadn't shown they had the ability to kind of the rap on them when it wasn't so trendy, right? That they were basically... Shitty companies. That's right. They were awkward teenagers that hadn't shown they had the ability to kind of compete in the big leagues. So they were AAA.

You're drafting, basically you're drafting AAA ballplayers into the majors and hoping that they can grow into it because all of a sudden baseball... Well, yeah, it's like... The number of teams are expanding. The number of teams overnight... Here's a million dollars, figure something out, right? Kind of thing. But you have, I mean, there are it's like here. The number of teams are expanding. Here, Louie, here's a million dollars. Figure something out, right? Kind of thing. But you have, I mean, there are so many companies now.

I've invested in a couple privates recently in ed tech. So, you're hoping for a SPAC? Your people, your companies? I don't know enough about it. I'm one of those people that I think you're better off maybe, maybe, I think better off waiting. But smarter people than me get to make those decisions. better off waiting, but it's smarter people than me to get to make those decisions. But I invested a year ago in ed tech and a fintech company, one, an online mortgage company called better.com and another health tech company called 98.6. They get a call a day from us back saying we're ready to go.

And so if you think about all of these companies that are kind of late stage growth companies, their value has skyrocketed because all of a sudden everybody's calling them a capital. Yeah. So I think it's going to translate to venture capital. Venture capital is an asset class over the last 20 or 30 years, has underperformed other asset classes. The majority of the returns are not only sequestered to a small number of venture capitalists, but a small number of venture capital firms, but a small number of venture capitalists within those firms. Yes, indeed. But I think the returns of this vintage, if you will.

So now everyone looks like a genius for false reasons. A hundred percent, because all of these companies, and some of them are great companies, but most of them are good companies that have some momentum, are all of a sudden big time. Yeah, I agree. And getting extraordinary valuations. I'm a trouble ahead,

but this is not going to end well for most of these guys. That's what SPACs usually mean. And public investors are going to pay the price. And it was really interesting. 100%. A million years ago, I think I've told this story. I don't think I've told you. One of the Goldman Sachs banker

was telling me about this company they were going to take public. And they said they're pre, they told me they were pre-revenue. I'll never forget this. We're pre-revenue. And I was like, what? And he goes, well, it's a pre-revenue company, Carrie. I really think you should write a piece. Cause they wanted pieces in the journal to like gin up these excitement around these companies. And I was like, you know, I'm looking out my window right now and

there's an old lady walking down the street. Why don't you just go mug her rather than take shareholder money? This is ridiculous. This bullshit narrative you're spinning up on these companies that aren't ready for prime time. And so I'll never forget the word pre-revenue. I was sort of like fascinated by that. And so I do think it has, it's going to be sloppily enforced. Maybe it'll change under the Biden administration.

And we're going to see a lot of turkeys, speaking of turkeys, amid all the promising companies. And when there's too much money sloshing around out there, everybody gets sloppy. 100%. We're in what I would call, you're seeing a lot of what I would call the feces round, and that is maintain momentum so we can fling unicorn feces at tourists at a zoo. Right. But there's pre-revenue companies now that are pub. Virgin Galactic is pre-revenue.

Yes, I got that. You know, there are a lot of them. And some of them will go on to be amazing companies. Exactly. But it's... But there's only one Amazon among the group. Like, there's not seven. There's not...

Maybe there's seven. Who knows? I don't know how many are going public. So that's... He did 150 of them? There's already 150 of them well no there's 165 right now out there just among these seven verticals that have capital and are looking for companies to acquire do you have a spec secretly scott i do not i've been contacted i'm sure you have too i've been contacted about going on the

board of specs but i don't the whole space kind of scares me you want they want your name the whole space kind of scares me. They want your name. The whole thing just sort of scares me. It's just sort of, it does feel very frothy. And the thing about froth is that by the time when you start calling something frothy, that usually means it's going to get even frothier for another 24 months. So it's hard to be the Debbie Downer because oftentimes things keep going

and there will be some amazing companies that started as SPACs, right? And there already are some great companies that got public visa via SPAC. And a couple of real bad outcomes, which is already, which is, what I think is interesting is it's speaking of reform, it's trying to reform the IPO system, right? This is where it's the reaction by, you know, you saw that big Bill Gurley essay about it and like, oh, they leave too much. And instead of just reforming the IPO system, you know, you saw that Bill Gurley essay about it, like, oh, they leave too much. And instead of just reforming the IPO system, this is the answer, which means too much fraud, I think.

We'll see where it goes, but it is interesting, and we will keep watching it. That is a good and complex prediction, Scott. We'll see. That was really, really good. Do you have any predictions, Kara? I do not. I do not. I predict that we are going to have a great 2021, Scott, you and I together.

That's nice. Thank you for saying that. We will not be spending Thanksgiving next year together. Maybe we will. We will because we're such losers. Here we are. We like doing this. We like to bring content to our people.

All right. So that is the show. I don't have a prediction for today, but I will think of one for next week. How about that? Okay. That's the show. As a reminder, we love listener mail questions, so if we're trying something new, go to

nymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for the Pivot podcast. The link is also in our show notes. Scott, happy Thanksgiving. Likewise, Cara. From the Swisher family, including Louie in the basement. I hope you have a beautiful time with your beautiful family. Thank you for saying that, likewise.

Please read us out. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis, Fernanda Finite, engineer of this episode. Erica Anderson is Pivot's executive producer. Thanks also to Hannah Rosen and Drew Burrows. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify, or frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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