Rebellion in Russia, Titan Fallout, and Guest Jason Del Rey

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Speaker 1 So your AI agents.

Speaker 3 They make the team that uses them more productive, right?

Speaker 3 But if they aren't connected to other agents or your data or your existing workflows, how productive can they really make your teams?

Speaker 1 Any business can add AI agents.

Speaker 3 IBM connects your agents across your company to change how you do business. Let's create small to business, IBM.

Speaker 4 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher, and I'm not in France. What about you, Scott? Where are you?

Speaker 5 I'm Scott Gallo, and I'm back in London after stopping in Abiza.

Speaker 4 Abiza. How was Abiza?

Speaker 8 I don't remember much.

Speaker 10 It involved DJs and mushroom chocolates,

Speaker 11 but I heard it was lovely.

Speaker 12 I heard it lovely. It was lovely.

Speaker 4 Oh my goodness. You go to a visa.
I like drag children home on flights across the world. We had to go to Zurich.
We had to go to like Newark. I had to pick up my car.

Speaker 4 I have a much less exciting life than you.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I don't know how to respond to that, but it's the joy of parenting small children when you're 105.

Speaker 5 You asked for it.

Speaker 4 Yes, I asked for it.

Speaker 12 You got it.

Speaker 12 You got it.

Speaker 4 But I miss Europe. I miss, we had a lovely time together, didn't we?

Speaker 5 That was nice. I did enjoy it.

Speaker 4 That was a sojourn for us, a European vacation. Let's do another one.

Speaker 12 Where should we go next?

Speaker 15 We should have had a recommitment ceremony.

Speaker 8 Isn't that what they call it?

Speaker 17 By the way, that is.

Speaker 19 What do they call it when people have the second commitment?

Speaker 12 What do they call it?

Speaker 4 Second wedding. Just a

Speaker 4 recommitment.

Speaker 19 That is definitely a clear blue flame signal they're about to get divorced.

Speaker 12 You think? You think?

Speaker 4 I always thought it was renovating the kitchen. I always thought renovating the kitchen was the sign.

Speaker 24 Yeah, no, it's whenever I hear that friends are inviting all of their friends to a recommitment ceremony, it it means one of them either cheated or they've decided they're

Speaker 12 going to be the one.

Speaker 4 So let's have one. Let's see.
Let's tempt faith.

Speaker 27 Well, we had one.

Speaker 4 This was it for us. That was it?

Speaker 12 We had lunch. Wasn't it wonderful?

Speaker 4 This was not a recommitment ceremony.

Speaker 8 I thought it was wonderful.

Speaker 4 I thought it was great. I thought we had a good time.
It was a good conference. We saw a lot of people.

Speaker 4 We chatted up with CMOs, which were advertisers for Vox. And we had a good time in general.

Speaker 4 And our event, our live event, I listened to it on the drive down in the middle of the night, and it was quite good.

Speaker 12 It was very good. Yeah, it wasn't bad, right?

Speaker 4 No, we did very well. We had a nice audience and everything else and we met lots of our fans, tons of our fans.

Speaker 4 So it was good. It was a nice trip.
What should we do next year? Where should we go next year?

Speaker 9 I suggest we go to Cannes.

Speaker 5 I'm going to do the exact same thing every year.

Speaker 8 I'm going to go to Cannes. Yeah.

Speaker 29 Because people are nice to me and come up to me and say nice things.

Speaker 21 And then after they say, where's Kara?

Speaker 6 And then I'm going to go to Ibiza.

Speaker 4 Can I come to Ibiza next time?

Speaker 32 You're always welcome to come anywhere I am.

Speaker 6 But I don't think you'd enjoy it.

Speaker 4 Because of the chocolates and stuff. It's mostly dancing in water.

Speaker 15 It's, I don't know how to, it's a lot of partying, a good DJs.

Speaker 35 It's, I don't know if you would enjoy Ibiza.

Speaker 15 I don't, this is, I haven't been there that often.

Speaker 17 And usually when I go there, I stay in a villa at a very quiet part of town.

Speaker 25 But now, because I'm going through this again, the next wave of my midlife crisis, I'm meeting a bunch of guys who, who are, you know, like me in this total arrested adolescence phase.

Speaker 36 And we, we went to this amazing party on Thursday night by, you know, shock or some 50-something-year-old billionaire who spends a million bucks on a party.

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 40 But it's very kind of hippy-dippy.

Speaker 13 It's very granola.

Speaker 4 What billionaire was it?

Speaker 8 Oh, I don't want to out him.

Speaker 12 Okay, all right.

Speaker 5 And it's, but it's, I don't know if it's your vibe.

Speaker 4 No, I don't think I never get invited to those things anyway.

Speaker 43 It doesn't matter.

Speaker 44 I think the vibe would be on the same part of the island, and you go for a four-hour lunch, but it's a really nice island.

Speaker 12 I've heard.

Speaker 4 I have lots of friends that go there. I just, it's not me.

Speaker 4 Anyway, today we have a lot to go on because a lot happened over the weekend while you were partying in a visa, the Wagner group mutiny against Vladimir Putin, for example, as well as lessons learned from the Doom Titan expedition that happened while we were in Europe.

Speaker 4 Our friend of Pivot is journalist Jason Del Rey, who used to work for me. He's written a new book about how Amazon and Walmart have been fighting for your online retail dollars.
Interesting book.

Speaker 4 I've read quite a bit of it, and it's quite good.

Speaker 4 In the area you like to talk about a lot. In any way, but first, some news that is somehow not from a parallel AI universe.
I do think we're in a simulation now.

Speaker 4 Scott, I will not be refereeing the cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 11 That would be hilarious.

Speaker 7 That's a great idea.

Speaker 4 I know. Wouldn't that be good?

Speaker 12 I'd totally.

Speaker 2 And as the referee,

Speaker 18 you just hope that

Speaker 44 the floor and the fists win.

Speaker 4 Yes, exactly. I just let it go on.

Speaker 12 I would let it go on. I would let it go.
I'm like, oh, what? Uncle, sorry, I can't hear you.

Speaker 12 What? I can't hear you. Oh, did you lose your nose?

Speaker 4 I'm so sorry. Last week, Elon tweeted he was out for a cage fight with Zuckerberg because he's arrested, speaking of arrested adolescents.

Speaker 4 Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of a tweet saying, send me location, which Musk replied, Vegas Octagon. They've been involved in a billionaire brat feud for years.

Speaker 4 In 2016, Zuckerberg criticized Musk after SpaceX rocket exploded and destroyed a Facebook satellite.

Speaker 4 They've sparred over their differing perspectives on AI.

Speaker 4 Personally, to me, Mark Zuckerberg asked me several times whether Elon was crazy, has done that to me. He's like, what is wrong with him, essentially?

Speaker 4 After the failure of Zuckerberg's metaverse, which seems to have gone sideways, he seems to be trying to be cool and relevant.

Speaker 4 Earlier this month, he also unveiled an upcoming Twitter competitor, a few employees, which is coming relatively soon. The whole thing is so stupid.

Speaker 4 I was texting with Facebook people, and they didn't know if it was going to come off or not, which I think it's bad for Mark, honestly.

Speaker 4 Mark is, I hate to say this, a better person in a lot of ways and would ruin Mark's reputation more than Elon's. What do you think?

Speaker 14 So I find this really fascinating.

Speaker 7 On a meta-level, it just further is sort of another

Speaker 36 example of the decline of Western civilization in the sense that you have two individuals who are incredibly blessed.

Speaker 34 Right.

Speaker 25 And when Jimmy Kimmel and Senator Ted Cruz have a bit of a beef and they do a one-on-one tournament and donate money to charity, I like that.

Speaker 5 I think that there's something about physicality and competition in the name of trying to

Speaker 17 settle your scores in a thoughtful,

Speaker 41 aggressive, masculine, let it, at the end of the day, it's about

Speaker 45 you're supposed to shake hands.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 17 I think there's something to that.

Speaker 19 When two men just

Speaker 24 despite their blessings from what are probably pretty remarkably similar

Speaker 17 environments that made them incredibly wealthy, specifically the United States and investments in technology that

Speaker 20 they have free-rided or drafted off of, you would think they would make an effort to show some decorum.

Speaker 38 And there's nothing competitive or fun about this.

Speaker 5 This is these guys don't like each other and they want to beat each other up.

Speaker 28 Right.

Speaker 49 Now I'll go to just looking at this more analytically.

Speaker 44 You have

Speaker 5 one guy is 6'2 ⁇ .

Speaker 36 I think he's 190, 200 pounds.

Speaker 8 He's gotta be big guy.

Speaker 17 And then you have Zuckerberg, who is 5'7 ⁇ , 155 pounds.

Speaker 8 Mark is actually quite small or is a small person.

Speaker 20 But I think a lot about this stuff because

Speaker 31 I've been into physical fitness for a long time.

Speaker 5 I think the good money, should it happen, and it won't happen, and and I'll come back to this, but the good money would actually be on the Zuck because he's been training.

Speaker 4 He's been training with the top fighters.

Speaker 17 Well, not only that, he's actually a pretty accomplished, he's pretty accomplished in jiu-jitsu right now.

Speaker 38 And in addition, he does something called Murph, named after Lieutenant Murphy, a SEAL who perished in Afghanistan.

Speaker 17 And it's a hundred pull-ups.

Speaker 20 You run a mile, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 leg squats, and then you run another mile.

Speaker 17 I trained for a year when I was 49 to do this and did it in about 53 minutes and couldn't walk for two or three days.

Speaker 19 He did it with a 20-pound pack in 39 minutes.

Speaker 18 Mark Zuckerberg,

Speaker 38 I don't like the man. No, he's more than fit.

Speaker 33 He's in crazy shape right now.

Speaker 54 In addition, what you don't realize when you're 52 is that

Speaker 10 Your reflexes, your balance, your response time, your coordination all begin to atrophy.

Speaker 14 And the hard part is you anchor off of all of those things when you're in your late 30s.

Speaker 54 Because as humans, we didn't live past 30s or 40s.

Speaker 6 We have a tough time actually acknowledging the degradation in our physicality.

Speaker 14 And the reason this won't happen, though, is because

Speaker 36 actually, I think it's interesting your thoughts on does Zuck has more reputational risk here. I actually think Elon will decide not to do it.

Speaker 24 My impression of Elon is that over the short term, he has a lack of impulse control.

Speaker 25 His prefrontal cortex is not developed, and he makes very stupid, impulsive decisions.

Speaker 6 I'm going to buy buy this social media network for $45 billion.

Speaker 9 They're smarter than me on this issue.

Speaker 6 They realize I'm overpaying.

Speaker 38 They get me to sign an airtight contract.

Speaker 17 And then about 7, 10, 30 days later, I realize how badly I fucked up.

Speaker 8 And I try to do anything, including lying,

Speaker 6 intimidation, to get out of it.

Speaker 4 He's a bully. You're describing a bully.

Speaker 14 But he is a long-term thinker.

Speaker 27 You got to admit, the guy has the ability to see.

Speaker 16 He's a visionary.

Speaker 55 He's very smart in terms of his thinking over the long term.

Speaker 32 What he will recognize over the long term is that the visual image of him in a cage, at least initially, them two standing next to each other, it's going to look like a walrus is fighting an otter.

Speaker 4 He called himself a walrus.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 36 But it's going to look, from a size standpoint, it's going to look like, you know, Musk should kill him.

Speaker 16 And Zuckerberg would probably win because at 39, with his training and his speed and agility, he just needs to harass Musk until he runs out of steam.

Speaker 4 And those 52-year-old oxygen efficiencies, deficiencies start to kick in i have no question zuckerberg would win he's been training with top trainers and this and that and he's committed that way he's like that he's so intense he's such an intense 100 musk is just a lazy person and musk looks like he runs out of you know he runs out of breath on his way to krispy cream i mean he just yeah well he doesn't even try to be fit i don't think he's i've never heard him head out of the word exercise mark was always an exerciser um which is you know i and but to me the the bad part is mark looks like an idiot if he does this he looks like a dumbass Yeah, because he's like now in the in the bro troll school.

Speaker 4 Like that's he's too.

Speaker 34 It's too late.

Speaker 13 He's already done that, right? I guess.

Speaker 12 But if he got into a ring with them,

Speaker 8 if he got into a ring, the meme that would last mill, you know, millions of years would be Mark Zuckerberg taking down a person 40 pounds heavier than him.

Speaker 55 This is way more downside.

Speaker 4 Can I tell you what women think of this? What a bunch of assholes.

Speaker 12 How do these people rule the world, right?

Speaker 56 Right.

Speaker 32 They should correctly query that question.

Speaker 4 Just like you're kidding me. Of course, interestingly, Louis had a friend of his over last night, Ben, and Ben was like, Oh, can I get front row seats? And I'm like, it totally appeals to men.

Speaker 4 Like, and it completely does not appeal to women. Like, really, you bunch of tiny penises.
Like, what are you doing?

Speaker 8 Well, men are men are more violent.

Speaker 38 Yeah, I know, but some of that violence, some of that violence can come in handy.

Speaker 25 I think you want some of that big dick energy when Russians come over the border in Ukraine.

Speaker 33 In this instance, it's nothing.

Speaker 4 It's so dumb.

Speaker 35 It's stupid.

Speaker 14 It kind of feeds into this culture of dunking and cruelty.

Speaker 45 It's just very

Speaker 12 intrinsic, very stupid.

Speaker 4 Anyway, moving on, something that is worth something. You're talking about long-term.
SpaceX is reportedly looking to raise $750 million by selling insider shares.

Speaker 4 The sale would value the company at $150 billion, up from $137 billion valuation in January. Shares would sell at about $81 a piece, a jump from December valuation of $79.
It's moving up.

Speaker 4 Not much, but moving up. Elon Musk said he would estimate SpexX has spent around $2 billion on Starship Starship Rocket, which failed in its first test early this year and may spend another billion.

Speaker 4 It's a very expensive thing he's doing. That's a lot of money, $150 billion.
Now, you've been always down on Galactic and the rest of them, but this one you're positive about, right?

Speaker 4 And then he said he wouldn't speculate on a Starlink IPO. Starlink's been an important part of SpaceX, too.
Thoughts?

Speaker 34 Right.

Speaker 44 So the first is the private markets are really robust.

Speaker 21 And one of the reasons it's kind of, this is a company that's worth more than the vast majority of public companies.

Speaker 22 And in the private markets, when you can have this sort of visibility and raise money in this measured fashion and not be subject to the volatility and disclosure requirements and expenses and administrative complexity of the public markets,

Speaker 24 you know, this Spaces, SpaceX, I think, is the most valuable private or one of the most valuable private companies in the world and the most traded in these secondary market platforms like Forge and others.

Speaker 6 And it's kind of a lesson in why it might be good to stay private as long as possible because because they can manage sort of the perception.

Speaker 8 The company only gets marked

Speaker 39 only gets marked every six or 12 months when they raise money.

Speaker 23 But looking at space as a business, I trifurcate it.

Speaker 39 There's space exploration, there's space tourism, and there's space hauling.

Speaker 54 Space exploration is space execution.

Speaker 32 Whoever goes to Mars should not be allowed to go because it means they're insane and willing to kill themselves to sit in a container 30 feet below surface and slowly die a torturous death.

Speaker 4 So you'll not be doing it, in other words, correct?

Speaker 56 Go ahead, Stephen.

Speaker 33 You shouldn't trust anyone that agrees to do that.

Speaker 45 Yeah.

Speaker 48 That's just suicide.

Speaker 16 And then, I mean, it's 74 and beautiful here in London.

Speaker 53 It's minus 111 degrees on Mars right now.

Speaker 36 And there's not enough oxygen to sustain you.

Speaker 23 Anyways, that's just stupid.

Speaker 41 But there's space tourism, which

Speaker 17 was highlighted a few days ago, tragically, just how stupid that is.

Speaker 24 And an example of people having way too much money and a lack of regulation.

Speaker 18 That business will go away.

Speaker 36 We should not be sending people to the the bottom of the ocean to look at the Titanic.

Speaker 23 We should not be sending people tourists into space.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we'll get into that in a minute, so don't go too much into it.

Speaker 5 But the part of the business that makes a ton of sense and is an amazing business is space hauling.

Speaker 23 And that's what SpaceX is, in addition to space communication.

Speaker 4 So $150 billion, too much?

Speaker 40 I think that...

Speaker 25 Let me put it this way.

Speaker 57 One of my predictions, every year I make a prediction or a series of predictions.

Speaker 24 One of my predictions in November of last year was that by the end of 23, and I probably got the timing wrong, but I'll hold on to the prediction.

Speaker 17 I'll just extend it a year, that SpaceX would be worth more than Tesla.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Let me, let me interject, sorry, Andrew, for a second, because we've been talking for a bit.

Speaker 4 I think this is the kind of Elon companies. Now, it doesn't make money from what I understand yet, because the costs are so high at creating these.

Speaker 4 And he's working on several different rockets, one that just blew up, we just talked about.

Speaker 4 And so it's an expensive thing to do, which is why under the quietude of private, it's important to get to a point where he does own things. But there's no competitors.
You're right.

Speaker 4 There's very few competitors.

Speaker 21 NASA's thrown in the towel and is using them now.

Speaker 8 The European Space Agency.

Speaker 32 Yeah.

Speaker 15 The Falcon Heavy rocket is his iPhone.

Speaker 44 I think the Falcon Heavy rocket will go down in history as a more meaningful product than

Speaker 20 the Model Y or whatever the Tesla product is, because he effectively has no competition.

Speaker 10 The Starlink technology is amazing.

Speaker 24 People who use it say it's incredible.

Speaker 14 It's slowly but surely starting to take over maritime, GPS.

Speaker 6 It's being used on battlefields.

Speaker 54 But the Falcon Heavy rocket, his ability to get material into space for less money is a true innovation.

Speaker 25 And I think

Speaker 34 SpaceX will be the biggest IPO that year when it happens.

Speaker 4 Although everybody thinks the Starlink unit of it is the most important and it's worth about half of the current. private worth of star of SpaceX.

Speaker 4 And so there's a possibility of spinning off Starlink, which has been useful to lots and lots of people. But he's going vertical.

Speaker 44 He not only has this low orbit communications satellite-driven infrastructure, but he's the only one that has the rockets to get this shit into space right now.

Speaker 43 I mean, SpaceX really is, you know, as much as I hope the Fists win in this fight,

Speaker 12 and I've always thought Tesla as massively overvalued.

Speaker 17 SpaceX is really an incredible company.

Speaker 25 And just from a strategic point of view, the moats around SpaceX are much deeper and broader than the moats around Tesla.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yep.
And, but he's got the two units. And so I think

Speaker 4 it's good, Elon. This is good, Elon.
And we'll see what happens here. But it's certainly Clego Public and Starlink might be spun off.
Many people have talked about this, which is interesting.

Speaker 4 And again, another area that he's dominating and another area Zuckerberg tried to get into,

Speaker 4 but he has succeeded where Mark has not with his efforts to create low-Earth satellites for communications.

Speaker 4 And Meta now, Meta, on the other hand, is shutting down access to news in Canada after a country passed a law requiring platforms to pay fees for news from domestic media outlets.

Speaker 4 The company says it intends to, quote, end the availability of news content in Canada permanently following the passage of the bill.

Speaker 4 Australia passed a similar law last year, and Meta responded the same way, but came to a deal eventually with the Australian government.

Speaker 4 Within a week, lawmakers in California have also advanced a bipartisan bill requiring platforms with over 50 million active U.S. users to compensate news outlets.

Speaker 4 Meta says it would remove news in the state if the law passes.

Speaker 4 These are going to be all over the place. Any quick thoughts on that? This isn't a good thing for Facebook to do.

Speaker 49 Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that Facebook will continue a pattern of being liars and full of shit.

Speaker 12 So they'll strike a deal.

Speaker 32 They will strike a deal.

Speaker 31 And this is absolutely what these, essentially, these, all of these nations, Western nations, if you think about the pursuit of truth and a pillar of democracy, it's First Amendment, it's free speech, it's elections, it's free elections, and some

Speaker 35 pursuit of the truth.

Speaker 5 And one of those vehicles for getting closer to the truth is a free and robust media and these companies have effectively not only attacked media the veracity of media with misinformation and disinformation but they have gutted the classified section that essentially paid for journalism where there was fact checking so the idea that governments weigh in to prevent a tragedy of the commons and say let's let's be honest you have created you've got to pay some money here we've got to redistribute some money from your extraordinary gains back to you know, back to journalism or media companies.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it's overdue.

Speaker 21 And now specifically on this, you pointed out the right analog.

Speaker 57 That's Australia.

Speaker 9 They'll huff and they're puff and they'll stamp their legs and then they'll agree to a deal.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they'll agree to a deal. We'll see.
It's been going on for a while and we'll see if they do that, but they're going to face this all over the world. So they better come up with something.

Speaker 4 They'll have to pay on some level

Speaker 4 for the use of things. You know, it's interesting.
I interviewed Martha Stewart

Speaker 4 here last Thursday. And one of the things she said is the argument she had with Time was they wanted to put all of Martha Stewart Living for free.
And she's like, what? What are you talking about?

Speaker 4 I'm worth something. You can't, you have to charge for good content.
And she, one of the reasons she bought it back from them for $40 million

Speaker 4 was that she was like, I didn't even understand it then, and I don't understand it now.

Speaker 4 Like giving away valuable content, not every bit of content, but certainly stuff that's worth something to people.

Speaker 4 And it's still the same idea, the same question of what is worth something to pay for. And that's, you know, they've been getting it for free and then ruining the business, as you noted.

Speaker 4 So it's definitely something that's going to continue. I think eventually, including with AI, they need to be able to get together and negotiate with these big platforms.

Speaker 4 And it should be not illegal to do so

Speaker 4 on lots of issues, including publishing payments, including, they hadn't been able to do that.

Speaker 4 That's why, as they never, they used to, you know, catch them all by themselves in the savannah and pick them off one by one with stupid money deals and this and that. So we'll see.

Speaker 4 Anyway, let's get to our first big story.

Speaker 4 Obviously, the big story of this week was Vladimir Putin recovering from the weekend insurrection by his former ally from the Wagner Group or a mutiny. Different people are using different things.

Speaker 4 They don't think it's over. The Wagner Group is the paramilitary organization that was helping him fight the war in Ukraine.
He started off as a caterer, friend of Putin's, became very wealthy.

Speaker 4 Now he's running all kinds of paramilitary stuff in in Africa, all over the world, and was deployed in the Ukraine. Everyone is trying to figure out what this means to Putin's grasp on power.

Speaker 4 I've read so many stories about this, and most people are like, this is the first chapter, as well as the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 4 There is a social media role, the Wagner group itself, and then for the coverage of the entire situation, the Wagner group chief, Yegevny Progozhin.

Speaker 4 He uses the messaging app Telegram, where he has more than 600,000 followers. He uses it quite a bit to communicate.
He just did a little while ago.

Speaker 4 That's where he was announcing his every move as the rebellion unfolded.

Speaker 4 He said he was he was just recent, just now he said he was pointing out security problems in Russia that he was able to get so close to Moscow with his little troop of people.

Speaker 4 He also used it to accuse political rivals of corruption. And then just for people who don't know this, Progozhin is the real master of social media manipulation.

Speaker 4 He admitted to founding the Internet Research Agency, very famous, terrible thing, a troll farm that the U.S. sanctioned for 2016 election interference.

Speaker 4 The Wagner Group, again, is known from recruiting from Russian prisons.

Speaker 4 But they've also posted jobs on Facebook and Twitter. So let's start.
What do you think? We're not experts. We're not going to do the tech pro thing by talking about things.

Speaker 4 We're going to talk about the stuff we know. This all played out on all the social media sites and everything else.
And we'll get to the misinformation in a minute.

Speaker 4 But how do you look at what happened here and this guy's use of social media and his obvious expertise in it?

Speaker 32 I just have been totally

Speaker 13 blown away by this. I enraptured by it.

Speaker 25 I've been staring at my phone, trying to understand this.

Speaker 46 The notion that you have a mercenary army

Speaker 19 marching one way, and then Yevgeny Progozhin, who spent 10 years in prison, was then a caterer, high-end restaurateur who became friends with Putin and started playing larger and larger roles and then has this army for hire, would then flip around, reverse direction, and threaten to march on Moscow.

Speaker 39 And then the absolute most decimating thing in terms of loosening Putin's grip on power was that when they showed up in Rasta Vandan,

Speaker 8 they were welcomed,

Speaker 45 which is just striking.

Speaker 4 That was. That was striking.
Not just welcome, they were cheered.

Speaker 56 So the thought that,

Speaker 23 I mean, this has been

Speaker 39 literally overnight, Putin has become sort of

Speaker 15 more from arguably one of the most powerful people in the world to a total paper bear.

Speaker 29 And

Speaker 19 it's just amazing how fast this appears to be unraveling.

Speaker 55 Now, a lot of it we don't actually know what's going on, but I've just never, I don't think any analyst saw anything like this coming.

Speaker 4 Well, you know, there was some reports that U.S. intelligence did have some idea that this guy was going to continue to escalate.
I don't think anyone thought he would actually march.

Speaker 4 He just would yell on social media, which is what he was doing a lot of. He was yelling, he was defending his troops.

Speaker 4 He used as the reason he did it is because he said the Russian defense ministry attacked his troops from behind.

Speaker 4 And that was, there wasn't proof of that, again, but that was his, the incident, he said, set it off. And so he was trying to teach him a thing or two.

Speaker 4 He certainly did, because a lot of what happens in Russia is a perception game and how people look strong rather than are strong.

Speaker 4 And this guy uses social media, which is very popular in Russia, to do so, even though he himself, let me just be clear, to vote for either of them or to pick either of them is picking,

Speaker 4 shall we have the murderous thug or the murderous thug, right? I mean, it's not like this guy isn't any cleaner, but he does have a more appealing social media presence and uses it quite heavily.

Speaker 4 And that's what's interesting and has gained enormous fan base online.

Speaker 4 And especially since he's talking about corruption, which is endemic to the country.

Speaker 31 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, if you look at this as a battle between state-controlled media and social media, social media has won.

Speaker 55 And the perception of Progozhin right now, I mean, his star, he's now one of the three people probably in the running for, you know, Times Person of the Year.

Speaker 4 Or unless Putin kills him.

Speaker 4 Here's a lovely office with a window.

Speaker 52 Even if he kills him, basically Putin has gone from...

Speaker 42 This bulwark.

Speaker 31 I mean, there are so many second order effects here, not the least of which is China kind of doubled down on Russia.

Speaker 15 You're going to see China start to withdraw from Russia because all of a sudden they're like, we backed a loser.

Speaker 8 We thought this was a bulwark, a great example of someone not afraid or unafraid of America, someone who is showing the ability to punch back, was taken seriously, was retaking or asserting not only their strength politically and internationally and economically, but actually invading neighbors and retaking land despite resistance from the West.

Speaker 21 And now China's like, we bet on the wrong cowboy.

Speaker 38 This guy, his own people might kill him.

Speaker 23 I mean, you're talking about, a lot of people would argue that Russia isn't even really a government or a society.

Speaker 39 It's a series of criminal gangs who are loosely strung together to sort of molest and exploit the economy and people and their resources there. And then a new set of criminals kind of come in.

Speaker 4 Although this criminal is pointing out the other criminals, geriatric nature, the kleptocracy,

Speaker 4 he's very populist. He's like, look, you're all meat for these rich people.

Speaker 33 Using social media.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And he's been feeding meat to these rich people, by the way.
This guy has seen it up close and personal. And so he's really playing into that idea of, you know,

Speaker 4 you're killing most of Russia for the advantage of the elites. So playing the elites versus the thing.
And he does it masterfully.

Speaker 4 If you watch him on social media, I got to say, this guy is very gifted. Obviously, he ran the internet research group, so he'd know a thing or two about the manipulation of media.

Speaker 4 One of the things this whole incident revealed is how unequipped social media, of course, is covering breaking news. Misinformation ran rampant over the weekend.

Speaker 4 Telegram posts made their way to the English-speaking world via Twitter, and neither platform had any content moderation, I could see.

Speaker 4 One BBC journalist tweeted, It's probably not good that during a major breaking news event, the ongoing Wagner mutiny in Russia, the majority of viral, false, and misleading claims from accounts from Twitter blew subscription, whose posts are promoted by Twitter's algorithms.

Speaker 4 And rather than point his followers to reliable sources of information on the subject, Elon endorsed tweets from Mario Noffel, a crypto guy who hosts, quote, Twitter's largest spaces.

Speaker 4 And of course, the bros had to weigh in because we just need to know what the tech bros think of what's happening in Russia.

Speaker 4 We already know it's unreliable, but the ability to use these platforms for confusion and propaganda is so massive now. It never gets fixed.

Speaker 4 This never has gotten fixed, but now it's sort of out of control.

Speaker 5 But I had one of those moments.

Speaker 25 Twitter has kind of been my go-to for breaking news.

Speaker 55 And you know what was interesting?

Speaker 14 I found over the weekend, I had trouble getting what I felt was reliable, updated broadcast news from the BBC or CNN.

Speaker 56 I found they were just very slow and flat-footed.

Speaker 50 And some of that might have been there like, look, all of these sources are bullshit and we can't verify them.

Speaker 5 So they might have just been waiting, which is what they're supposed to do.

Speaker 54 But I had such this thirst that wasn't sated over the weekend.

Speaker 38 I went on Twitter.

Speaker 41 I found Twitter so noisy, so weird, I just couldn't discern anything.

Speaker 8 You know where I ended up?

Speaker 4 Newspapers. So did I.
Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Seattle.

Speaker 51 I actually know. I ended up somewhere else.

Speaker 8 I ended up on TikTok.

Speaker 12 Oh, interesting. I ended up on TikTok watching 60

Speaker 34 one and three minute videos from people who are pretty credible in geopolitics.

Speaker 56 And I found that the best source of information for what I was looking for immediately.

Speaker 8 And the algorithm, you know what? The algorithm, it was so funny.

Speaker 22 It was like the algorithm figured out I was looking for it.

Speaker 31 Started serving up.

Speaker 10 Started serving up all these former people who served in the Defense Department saying this is what they think is going on, former heads of Russia experts.

Speaker 25 And And it just struck me, wow, it's gone from my, the evolution for me in terms of my go-tos has gone CNN, Twitter, and now TikTok.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I didn't use Twitter at all. It was useless, except for a couple of people I follow who I think are smart.
I found

Speaker 56 some good Twitter spaces.

Speaker 34 There were good, I gotta give it to him.

Speaker 45 There were some good Twitter spaces.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. It's just, but it's just like books on the library floor.
Like, I just was like, I don't have time for this. And I immediately went.

Speaker 12 On the library floor.

Speaker 2 You're poet.

Speaker 12 Is that a haiku?

Speaker 4 No, it's just like, you know, you're like, where's the information? I don't have time for this bullshit. And so I found individual people.

Speaker 4 I used a lot of regular news sources, the Post, Reuters, Bloomberg, et cetera. And then I did watch what they were saying, what Progozhin was saying himself.
Right now,

Speaker 4 the reason he said, he's still defiant, by the way, he's resurfaced again. And he said mercenaries were going to operate from Belarus, his own army.

Speaker 4 And he didn't want, what was happening, and this is something that was interesting, was the militia was being subsumed into the Russian military, and he didn't want that to happen.

Speaker 4 But he said

Speaker 4 he rebelled to fight the absorption, which was they were trying to quiet him for a long time because he was complaining. And so that's what they were trying to take power away from him.

Speaker 4 So they're going to be back in Belarus, which, of course, is an ally of Putin's, the guy who runs Belarus. The whole thing, this guy plays

Speaker 4 social media beautifully, I have to say, even though he's a terrible thug, murderous thug. But we'll see what happens.

Speaker 4 But finding information, that's interesting. Use TikTok.
Wow. I went right to newspapers.
I was like, that's enough. I can't, I can't, I can't.

Speaker 13 And I did

Speaker 42 Molly Jong Fast.

Speaker 34 Is that her name?

Speaker 13 I really like her, by the way.

Speaker 53 I don't know her, but...

Speaker 23 She was very generous with me.

Speaker 17 She heard I was looking for information, and she sent me a link to a Twitter space that's being held by the Brookings Institution.

Speaker 11 And I listened to it, and it was really, it was really good. Yeah.

Speaker 26 But it does feel,

Speaker 25 I mean, this is, these crises are a tectonic shift in where the media deck is thrown up in the air and you don't know where it's going to land in terms of consumption.

Speaker 53 And I'm not sure, but I think this moment belongs to TikTok and then validated by fact-checked reporting at the newspapers and institutions you're talking about.

Speaker 4 And CNN did a very good job, too. I have to say, they were doing a pretty good job.

Speaker 25 You know, I wanted to immediately wanted to hear what Frid Zakari had to say because I find he's very measured.

Speaker 6 He has an ability to kind of step out of the moment.

Speaker 4 I think what's really interesting is because of the noise level and everybody's sort of communicating in different ways, nobody quite knows what to do. So it's a very confusing media moment.

Speaker 4 You know, I was like, this is terrible. Is it? What? Huh? And I think people still don't know.
You have even people like Blinken going, well, chapter one, like, you know, that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 We'll see.

Speaker 12 We'll see.

Speaker 43 Very disciplined. The Biden administration didn't say anything.

Speaker 33 They were very disciplined. Can you mention Trump during this shift?

Speaker 4 Yeah, he would have been like, Go Putin, or I like the other guy. Like, who knows what he would have said? He thinks everything is a wrestling match.

Speaker 4 So it's interesting to see

Speaker 4 what's happening. I certainly didn't listen to the tech bros on this one.

Speaker 4 Anyway, it's an interesting thing, and it's still ongoing, and it looks like this is not going to stop. And

Speaker 4 people are trying to do the metaphorical Akins. It's sort of like

Speaker 4 the, is it what's the group, Blackwater, deciding to march on Washington with its mercenary group?

Speaker 17 Or the Coast Guard of the Navy or Northam Grumman, who fights for us, who we pay a lot of money to, saying, no, we're pissed off.

Speaker 5 We think you're incompetent.

Speaker 49 And they start marching towards Washington.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, we did have an insurrection.
Hey, hey, we're good at this.

Speaker 18 You know what, though?

Speaker 48 Really?

Speaker 49 This is this is the insurrection was a small, arguably speaking, a small number of people

Speaker 4 who just got going.

Speaker 53 Who got whipped up by misinformation and a corrupt criminal president egging them on.

Speaker 39 This is a, you know, a 50,000-person armed gang mercenary force turning around and marching on Moscow potentially.

Speaker 48 And then Putin, who says, who accuses him of treason, cuts a deal because he realizes he's fucked.

Speaker 5 At least that's what we know.

Speaker 24 And the intermediary, Lukashenko from

Speaker 41 Belorussia, is someone he doesn't like who he was forced to bring in.

Speaker 24 At every turn here, from day one, from day one, at every turn,

Speaker 10 Putin appears more and more flaccid.

Speaker 16 I mean, it's just striking.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 54 He is so substantially weakened.

Speaker 34 And a a lot of this was a giant facade that there is literally the emperor has no clothes here.

Speaker 4 He called it a march for justice

Speaker 4 because they were trying to break up the Wagner group. Anyway, he was quite defiant.

Speaker 52 But bringing it back, like you said, we're trying to stay in our lane.

Speaker 57 The other big winner here in terms of tech is absolutely Telegram.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Telegram.

Speaker 12 Yeah, definitely this guy.

Speaker 6 It's got that inside credibility, you know, kind of street credit.

Speaker 12 They're there. They're there.

Speaker 4 I don't know how much is credible. It's being used as propaganda, but yes, we don't know what's going going to happen, but we are listening to the experts and we suggest you do too.

Speaker 4 But it's certainly perceptually

Speaker 12 and us.

Speaker 4 No, well, from it, so we can look at it from a social media perspective. He looks weak.
This guy is using social media to make Putin look weak, and it's working, it seems like.

Speaker 4 Anyway, let's go on a quick break. We come back what the Ocean Gate tragedy means for the future of space tourism.

Speaker 4 And we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Jason Del Rey, about the decades-long battle between Walmart and Amazon.

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Speaker 4 Scott, we're back.

Speaker 4 Let's talk about the U.S. Coast Guard is leading the international investigation into the Titan submersible implosion.
We haven't talked a lot about this. It was sort of a huge news story.

Speaker 4 Recommendations could include new regulations or criminal charges. Meanwhile, there is an obvious parallel between this and the similarly unregulated industry of private space travel.

Speaker 4 UBS estimates that the industry will be worth $3 billion by 2030 after costing $29 billion, I'm sure. The big players here are, of course, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic.

Speaker 4 Virgin Galactic plans to launch its first official commercial flight this week to offer monthly space tourism flights later in the summer.

Speaker 4 Do you think the bad press will affect their bottom line?

Speaker 4 Scott, you've always said space wants to kill us, but note that so far private space travel hasn't experienced a disaster on the same scale as the Titan submersible.

Speaker 4 In fact, submersibles haven't until this one. The only fatality so far occurred in 2014 when one Virgin Galactic pilot was killed and another was injured during a test flight of Spaceship Two.

Speaker 4 Terms of regulation, the FAA isn't allowed to regulate private space travel right now, thanks to the so-called learning period set by Congress. That ends in October.

Speaker 4 How involved do the government should be in regulating these startup industries and any lessons?

Speaker 4 that you can see?

Speaker 26 Well, first off, I would push back a little bit.

Speaker 13 I think there's a lot of evidence that space travel is still very dangerous.

Speaker 49 It's got a 2% mortality rate.

Speaker 39 Base jumping has something like a point.

Speaker 45 You would be stupid to opt for space travel over base jumping.

Speaker 7 That's how dangerous this is.

Speaker 10 And when you don't have regulation, and the reason that Titan was dropped from a Canadian vessel in international waters, there was no regulation.

Speaker 38 And what we're finding out is that regulation matters.

Speaker 52 And I'm conflicted because I think people should have the right to kill themselves.

Speaker 42 But at the same time, if it's going to potentially potentially cost taxpayers tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then regulation should play a role here.

Speaker 25 And that is, we just don't need, we don't want to have to come save your dumb rich ass.

Speaker 27 This also brings up a lot of philosophical questions.

Speaker 25 And that is the amount of coverage this has received versus the migrants who die trying to get across these bodies of water in much less romantic

Speaker 35 fashion.

Speaker 19 So this whole thing and then a bunch of people warning about the physics of it.

Speaker 42 I think a lot of people are rethinking, is this why I'm rich?

Speaker 48 If you're the husband of a woman, if you're a private equity billionaire and as a gift, you gave your 22-year-old daughter a $400,000 ticket on Virgin Galactic.

Speaker 52 I mean, they've already had someone die.

Speaker 12 They had a test pilot die.

Speaker 32 That person probably had a wife and kids. Right.

Speaker 4 I think one of the things is that this guy went down.

Speaker 4 And obviously, a lot of people, including James Cameron, who's been a very active in the submersible and deep sea diving, they all knew it was a problem, this carbon fiber hull.

Speaker 4 I know more about carbon fiber hulls, but they all were like, this, we had worn them and worn them and worn them again. And this guy was like, you know, I'm going to be the Elon of submersibles.

Speaker 4 I'm going to make it cheaper. And they were like, there's no way physics can make it cheaper.
And he was like, that's what people told Elon.

Speaker 4 You know, the saint, they brought Elon, he brought Elon's name up quite a bit with him. And they were like, I don't care what you do.
Physics is physics. And that's going to,

Speaker 4 what happened was implode because of the huge pressures. And I think the same thing here is: who's testing these things for safety?

Speaker 4 Why don't they have to be

Speaker 4 a third party? A third party should be looking at this stuff, even if it slows down innovation, if you're going to sell it to regular people. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like if it's all these people who want to do it themselves, spend their money, want to kill themselves, that's their business.

Speaker 4 But when they're starting to make a business out of it, it's like selling tainted meat. Like we don't know if it's clean or not.
And that's really, that to me is the part.

Speaker 4 When they cross over into making it travel for consumers, they need to have safety rules. And fuck you on innovation.
Go innovate yourself.

Speaker 4 Go do it yourself till it's absolutely 100% safe, which it wasn't otherwise.

Speaker 21 Well, it's a manifestation of this move fast and break things.

Speaker 32 And I have total stamp regulation.

Speaker 8 And the individual, the CEO of the company, is on record as saying the reason why he doesn't have Navy commanders captaining these vessels is he said literally, 55-year-old white guys are not innovative.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 38 So

Speaker 38 he didn't want people who are trained

Speaker 32 in, who actually have spent time in

Speaker 39 underwater thousands of feet to command these vessels?

Speaker 17 This is just a manifestation of this arrogance.

Speaker 19 I mean, and quite frankly, when I heard about this, Kara, I was a little bit relieved when I found out it was a massive implosion because I had,

Speaker 25 I don't know if you have this, sometimes I get fixated on something and it bothers me and I have trouble sleeping.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm sitting down there while you were sleeping.

Speaker 12 100.

Speaker 4 That's what I did. Percent.
You know, I think one of the issues is the coverage. You just mentioned it really briefly.
Do you think it could have been less coverage?

Speaker 4 It's still, it was quite a riveting story. I don't quite know how it could have been less.
It was so riveting.

Speaker 25 You can't, it's like, you can scream at instinct, but it's not going to listen.

Speaker 26 And our instincts are we are drawn to stories about rich people and this type of, this had everything for a great story, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 42 It was really wealthy people, new technology, the Titanic.

Speaker 45 It's just a drama.

Speaker 13 Are they down there?

Speaker 44 The search is on.

Speaker 25 So you can wave your finger at media and say, all right, we should be covering maritime deaths among migrants.

Speaker 6 I get it.

Speaker 15 And we should think about that philosophically, what that means in terms of how we value one life versus the other.

Speaker 16 But at the end of the day, the media is going to cover what's going to get attention.

Speaker 56 And this was a riveting story. I was riveted by it.

Speaker 4 You're right. The Titanic part of it.
Titanic always rips people's attention right to itself, which was,

Speaker 4 you know, that is a story of technology and arrogance, too, as Cameron noted.

Speaker 12 And again,

Speaker 9 110 years later, arrogance and the Titanic claim more lives.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: If you're bringing people in and selling as a business, you better be 100% sure.

Speaker 4 Accidents do happen, obviously, but this seemed like you could see it coming.

Speaker 4 If you talk to all the experts, they did see it coming. So these things should be regulated.

Speaker 4 The safety of anything you're using to transport people and sell tickets to, you can't be unsafe in this way.

Speaker 4 Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Speaker 4 Jason Del Rey is a longtime tech and business journalist. In fact, he worked for me for a long time.

Speaker 4 He joins us today to talk about his new book, Winner Sells All, Amazon Walmart and the Battle for Our Wallets.

Speaker 4 Jason, you were covering that for Recode and then All Things D and then Recode for many years.

Speaker 4 This is what you started covering. You've been covering it for a very long time.

Speaker 4 But you call this rivalry, quote, the defining business clash of this generation, at least in e-commerce.

Speaker 4 Two biggest companies by revenue in the United States and the two largest private sector employees, big important companies.

Speaker 4 But Amazon's market cap is over three times bigger than Walmart's, 1.3 trillion to 400 billion respectively. So talk about the winner.

Speaker 4 It seems like Amazon has won here, but talk a little bit about your premise for putting these two together.

Speaker 47 Sure.

Speaker 47 There's been some great books that have looked at Amazon, mostly in a vacuum, you know, Bradstone's two great books.

Speaker 47 But you learn so much about these companies when you explore the rivalry because you learn about ambition and motivations of the two.

Speaker 47 And I really learned over the years that they've been really intertwined. Obviously, at different points in their histories, Amazon considered Walmart more of a competitor than it does now.

Speaker 47 But Walmart, you know, in recent years, really has just talked about Amazon internally every single day and trying to, you mentioned the market caps, trying to develop into a more modern business that has different revenue streams.

Speaker 47 Scott would talk about the Rundle, develop a Rundle.

Speaker 47 And so, you know, I really, if you want to know where these two companies are going, my take is you have to look at how each has influenced the other. And I think they have in a variety of ways.

Speaker 4 Okay. One of the things for people who don't realize, Walmart, for many years, I covered Walmart as a retail reporter for the Washington Post.
This is back in the 1990s, I guess, or 1980s, too.

Speaker 4 And Walmart at the time was the Amazon of retail, right? It came into communities. It killed off downtowns.
It used technology rather effectively.

Speaker 4 That was its biggest, that was one of its biggest advantages is understanding data and using it. So they had a chance to stop it.

Speaker 4 They had all the pieces. They were everywhere.
They had the data. They had the information.
They had the power.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 talk about that.

Speaker 47 Yeah. So when I used to think about the history of Walmart, I just assumed that they kind of just missed it back in the 90s.
Like they weren't paying attention.

Speaker 47 But it turns out I learned in reporting this book, they actually had a really smart team working on e-commerce in the mid-90s.

Speaker 47 And, you know, one guy in particular, this guy named Robert Davis, I found through my reporting, and he never talked about this before this book, but he basically said he had, you know, he really was just looking for a little bit more of a commitment from Walmart's CEO, that they saw Amazon coming.

Speaker 47 They felt like they had all the pieces. He just needed like the warehousing team and the trucking team to not laugh at him when he asked them for a big request.

Speaker 47 And Walmart CEO at the time, guy named David Glass, you know, smart in a lot of ways, said, like, this is going to be the size of a Sam's Club, which is obviously owned by Walmart. And

Speaker 47 maybe one Sam's Club's worth of annual sales. And so Davis, like a couple of other Walmart leaders, he ends up saying, okay, well, I'm going to go to this.
Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 47 I'm going to go work for Amazon.

Speaker 47 And he and a bunch of former Walmart staff end up playing a pretty key role in that first decade of growth when really Walmart did have a chance to snuff out this company before they even got rolling.

Speaker 12 Scott?

Speaker 32 Hi, Jason. Good to see you.

Speaker 12 Hi, Scott.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Karen, did you know Jason and I are good, good friends?

Speaker 12 No, I didn't know that.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he doesn't know that either, but we're going to be.

Speaker 47 Scott, it's been too long.

Speaker 59 It has been too long.

Speaker 8 So my sense of,

Speaker 8 and I come at this as someone, I'm interested every year where my kids, when I say my kids, my students go to work.

Speaker 25 And it used to be all Amazon and occasionally, and then all of a sudden Walmart started picking off a few.

Speaker 5 You would hear a kid go, oh, I'm going to Walmart.

Speaker 33 But it still doesn't have the ability to attract the same type of human capital as Amazon.

Speaker 8 Doesn't it? I mean, at the end of the day, isn't it about

Speaker 10 who can attract the best and brightest?

Speaker 14 And who do you think is winning that war?

Speaker 47 I think you're right. I think it's still Amazon.
But I will say, I think in the last couple of years, Walmart has made up a little bit of ground.

Speaker 47 They've hired a couple of people in some of their their new business lines with deep Amazon expertise. Guy named Seth Delaire, who ran the advanced group.

Speaker 12 Is that Amazon Media Group?

Speaker 8 Is that the guy doing media now for the chief revenue officer of Walmart?

Speaker 47 Correct. So he's now running Walmart Plus, but also

Speaker 47 their ad business.

Speaker 47 I'm blanking on a few. They now have.

Speaker 19 By the way, he's a former Sterngrad, just so you know.

Speaker 12 Or ran why you Sterngrad. Anyways, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 47 You taught him everything he knows. There you go.

Speaker 12 Thank you.

Speaker 47 So they are getting better. And the most interesting thing to me is they're building this $350 million campus in Bentonville.

Speaker 47 And I've talked to some Walmart execs, longtimers who have left recently who said, like,

Speaker 47 I understand why they're doing it, trying to attract a different talent set, but like. That is not our DNA.

Speaker 47 Like actually having Windows in the office, like, no, like we have to work in the dark and we have to prove to vendors that like we are frugal.

Speaker 47 And so I'm really interested, you know, that that's just just starting to open over the next couple years i am interested what that does talent wise um i will say bentonville is kind of a pretty beautiful place i mean the rush i ate at some great restaurants there last year when i went to interview the ceo has a super modern museum uh the walton family walton family walton family but they did it because they realized that young single people do you realize that town used to be dry I mean, until recently, and the family realized we can't get young talented people down here without cool bars and cool, some sort of reasonable lifestyle.

Speaker 47 So to your point, I think there still is a talent disparity, but I think they've done a pretty good job in recent years. And we'll see what the new campus does.

Speaker 4 But one of the things is the cultures of the companies. Walmart used to be seen as super tough, right? Super tough and frugal.

Speaker 4 And Amazon is not known as a pleasant place to work either, probably less so than Walmart.

Speaker 4 But one of the things that's interesting is you just mentioned the CEO, the current CEO, Doug. You spent some time with him, Doug McMillan there, who I've interviewed many times.

Speaker 4 Really terrific guy to interview. He's really interesting and he's willing to learn for sure.

Speaker 4 And one of the things he said to me that really struck me many years ago in an interview was maybe, and no one paid attention.

Speaker 4 He said, I was talking about the box store, which was sort of their big innovation, the big box, 100,000 square foot stores. He goes, maybe we won't have those.
No one paid attention.

Speaker 4 I was like, what? Like when he said that, you know, maybe we'll have smaller stores and people pick and then they do it online, which to me was a sacrilege to everything that came before him.

Speaker 4 He's not as well known, but I've always found him to be kind of a learning organism. Talk a little bit about him.

Speaker 4 He started off in the produce aisle, right? Is that correct?

Speaker 47 Yeah, he, well, in high school, he, so he moved to Bentonville, I think, in high school, and started in the warehouse as an intern and then quickly, you know, found his way.

Speaker 47 I think his first job may have been either the candy section as a manager, merchandising, or tackle.

Speaker 47 And just, you know, i've i've been told that pretty early on they had identified him as a potential big future leader and some people who were ambitious at the company and wanted that ceo role they saw once they put him in uh ceo of international role then they moved him to sam's club like the walton family was developing him and he's really interesting because they look at him as sort of he he is a bridge between a couple of generations.

Speaker 47 He has the Walmart DNA, but was in his, I believe his early 40s or mid 40s when he became CEO. And so a little more digital savvy.
You know, he talks about an early adopter.

Speaker 47 And he's been there now nine years as CEO.

Speaker 47 Recently, there was some good reporting that he'll probably stay on a few more years.

Speaker 47 And I think that's because when I met with him, he was he was happy about some of the transformation, but he was like, man, we still just do not move fast enough.

Speaker 4 And they've made some mistakes, you know, some of his purchases. Talk about those.

Speaker 47 Yeah, I mean, you know, big, big one in my book and is now a seven-year-old deal, which I think it depends how you look at success.

Speaker 46 Were you going to say Jet?

Speaker 47 Was the Jet acquisition or the

Speaker 47 Aqua hire of Mark Laurie? Now the acquisition.

Speaker 43 See, Cara, Jason and I finished each other's sentences.

Speaker 12 I see that.

Speaker 4 I can see your relationship is developing in real time. Go ahead, Jason.

Speaker 41 I mean, it's,

Speaker 47 it's a long, long festering friendship.

Speaker 47 The Jet deal, listen, I think it did help change the narrative of the company in the digital world, at least.

Speaker 47 I think prior, they were kind of a complete laughing stock and their metabolism did speed up.

Speaker 47 But if you want to look at some of the actual execution of acquisitions that that team did, we're talking about digital brands like bonobos and other fashion brands.

Speaker 47 They ended up selling all those off. But in any event, you know, yes, it has not all been pretty.
They've lost out some big acquisitions to Amazon. We can talk about healthcare.

Speaker 4 Yeah, let's talk about healthcare.

Speaker 47 Yeah, Walmart wanted this company called Pill Pack, an online pharmacy. I have a whole chapter about healthcare in the book and that fight.

Speaker 47 And they've lost, you know, maybe as more than they've won in the digital space. But Doug is, you know, he's a big champion of the company and people really believe in him.

Speaker 47 And even folks who've left the company under not great conditions will say he's been a great champion for the company and helped transform them more than the past few CEOs at least.

Speaker 12 Scott?

Speaker 25 Who do you think has the wind at their back, the wind in their face between the two organizations and the challenges they face right now?

Speaker 47 I think Amazon's absolutely at an inflection point, not just with the transition in the last two years to Andy Jassy, but the cost cutting, the pullback on some investments, having a really challenging time in the physical retail space where I think some executives thought they would walk in and just be the smartest men and women in the room and just figure it out.

Speaker 47 I think they have a lot of challenges ahead of them. That said,

Speaker 47 Prime is really sticky. No matter what happens with this FTC case,

Speaker 47 Prime is really sticky. And so they're tough.

Speaker 47 But I will say, Walmart, the whole idea of being omni-channel, of really having customers be able to return wherever they want, pick up wherever they want, get delivery, get pickup.

Speaker 47 They're doing it pretty well right now.

Speaker 47 I'm just still skeptical about the long-term execution

Speaker 47 in digital for them. I think they've gotten a lot better.

Speaker 12 For Walmart.

Speaker 47 For Walmart. For Walmart, yeah.

Speaker 4 But where's Amazon's negatives? I mean, there was rumors of Bezos having to come back, this FTC case that you just mentioned, which was allegedly tricking people to sign up for Amazon Prime.

Speaker 4 You've obviously got other government investigations going on.

Speaker 4 Where are they vulnerable?

Speaker 12 Listen,

Speaker 47 I think they haven't learned.

Speaker 47 One thing I mentioned in the book, Walmart,

Speaker 47 in its history, kind of went on a listening tour of their critics, like tried to at least pretend to take their critics seriously, both environmental, regulatory,

Speaker 47 journalistic critics.

Speaker 47 And Amazon, you know, the lack of self-awareness at the top of the company, the arrogance dealing with DC, I think potentially will one day impact them negatively in a really big way.

Speaker 47 I think it has already. But I think physical retail for them, they're trying their own bookstores that failed, trying their own grocery stores, Amazon Fresh, that's kind of failed.
It has.

Speaker 47 I think they'll keep at it.

Speaker 4 Whole Foods, which was Scott's big

Speaker 12 amazing.

Speaker 47 I don't know. You tell me about the Whole Foods experience.

Speaker 47 Unless you like swiping your palms, which maybe some people do, I don't think it's a better experience today than it was before they bought it. And a lot of people would say it's worse.

Speaker 12 I would agree.

Speaker 47 But looking forward, healthcare, I think both companies are making big bets there. I think the Walton family absolutely wants them to be a big player.

Speaker 47 I think they can do a lot in terms of accessibility in large swaths of this country with their Walmart clinics. They're essentially super centers of healthcare.

Speaker 47 The question is, can they keep focus there and can they keep talent? They've churned through, I think, nine or 10 healthcare leaders at Walmart in the past decade.

Speaker 47 And so as one of their executives told me, Walmart's biggest barrier to succeeding in healthcare is themselves.

Speaker 4 But Amazon, how are they doing?

Speaker 47 So in healthcare, you know, they made the big one medical acquisition, which is essentially, I don't know if either of you are members of one i use it i love it patients love it okay love it okay so that's a big deal their other attempts have not worked yet they had amazon care internally but instead they went out like they can do and spent four billion dollars to correct that mistake the pharmacy space will people trust them and move their pharmacy spending to amazon that's you know they've been trying for a couple years they made the pill pack deal i think they'll keep at it i think they're going to succeed in the space at some point whether it's four or five years from now or 10.

Speaker 47 I think we'll be talking about both of them in the space. And I hope for the better.
I mean, I hope it's because they've either made things more accessible or brought prices down.

Speaker 47 But they both know how unwelcoming the industry is to newcomers and non-incumbents.

Speaker 17 Talk a little bit about their forays into media.

Speaker 20 I mean, Amazon Prime Video, I think, is mostly considered a success because it's part, it's another reason not to cancel Prime.

Speaker 60 But Walmart has tried.

Speaker 46 They have Voodoo.

Speaker 26 I think you would argue that's been less successful.

Speaker 49 They just don't have, it appears, the DNA for media or the cheap capital.

Speaker 60 But they're both, I mean, they're sort of the B2B media side, which is hugely lucrative for both of them, especially Amazon, Amazon, you know, the Amazon Media Group and then what they're trying to do at Walmart.

Speaker 17 But talk on the consumer side about their forays into media.

Speaker 47 Yeah, so

Speaker 47 video at Amazon, obviously, like the big reason for it historically was to try to make Prime more sticky.

Speaker 47 And I think in that way, it's been successful, although they've spent so much damn money that it often looks like an ego project too. And I think for Bezos was, you know, for many years.

Speaker 47 Walmart, yeah, they sold off Voodoo. They had another, you know, joint venture company most people probably haven't heard of called Echo EKO that was doing sort of interactive commerce video.

Speaker 47 One thing I, you know, on the Walmart side, you know, they were rumored to be, and they had announced they were going to invest in TikTok years ago when, when Trump was still president, right before the election, a lot of people thought that sounded absurd.

Speaker 47 I don't know.

Speaker 47 Like, I was excited about the idea, at least for Walmart, you know, for once not chasing Amazon from behind and looking ahead to social commerce and live video commerce, which we know is huge in Asia, but just has not

Speaker 47 yet caught on here.

Speaker 47 I still look at that TikTok and Walmart, and and I know there's a lot there, geopolitical,

Speaker 47 but I can't help but think that there might be something there depending on the outcome of TikTok and whether they have to sell.

Speaker 4 It would be good for TikTok to affiliate with an American company like that. And there's no.

Speaker 47 We'll see how Bentonville feels about that relationship. But they were serious about it three years ago, and so I wouldn't rule it out.

Speaker 47 No prediction like Scott, but that's as close as close as I'm going to make you make a prediction.

Speaker 4 Does Jeff Bezos have to come back to Amazon? Or does he enjoy his yacht in the French Riviera?

Speaker 47 I mean, he's become, as some people say, an Instagram husband now, just taking photos of his new wife.

Speaker 12 Oh, that was worth it.

Speaker 4 The whole interview was worth it just for that.

Speaker 47 I don't see him coming back. I mean, I

Speaker 47 that I guess that would be a provocative call, so maybe I should make it. But I think Jassy is, I think there's still a lot of faith in him inside that building.

Speaker 47 But we'll see. We'll see.
It feels like clocks ticking already.

Speaker 9 I found that Doug is literally impossible not to like and be impressed by.

Speaker 53 I mean, he was one of the most

Speaker 34 subtly, quietly

Speaker 20 impressive leaders I have met.

Speaker 52 And not going through a midlife crisis, married for 30 years, went, got his MBA at Tulsa.

Speaker 12 No yacht with his girlfriend on the front. Started loading pallets,

Speaker 34 a straightforward shooter.

Speaker 17 Yeah, he just sees something at a central casting for your guy you want running the largest employer.

Speaker 25 And my story, when I was down there, he

Speaker 52 was spending some time with me and he immediately, all their associates were down there.

Speaker 41 And it's all these 60 and 70-year-old somethings.

Speaker 25 And he went down the line and spent two hours shaking everyone's hand and asking them questions.

Speaker 47 No, he's pretty, he's, he's, uh, everyone will say he's an unbelievable leader. He's, he is hard not to like.

Speaker 47 Uh, and actually, in our interview, I had just recently learned his dad passed during the pandemic, not from COVID, from a quick battle with cancer. And I asked him about lessons from his dad.

Speaker 47 And, you know, he immediately, I think I caught him off guard a little bit, immediately welled up,

Speaker 47 hard to fake that and then gave a really thoughtful response on what he learned from his dad's life of service. And

Speaker 47 yeah, I mean, in terms of if you can, I say in the book, if you wanted to artificially concoct a great ambassador for that company, I mean, it's hard to do better than W.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and they're also not facing the same sort of thing. Walmart was evil for a long time, right? And now it's Amazon with unions and everything else.
Is that to me?

Speaker 4 I'm sorry, I have one last question. Is that going to be the big problem there with Amazon unions? And

Speaker 12 Walmart

Speaker 4 threw that ringer.

Speaker 47 I would have said two years ago that I, you know, or a year ago that I thought unions were, you know, they had a lot of momentum, less momentum now, but the Teamsters are still going at them.

Speaker 47 You know, I report that Jassy inside of Amazon, he's really been annoyed that Walmart is no longer getting any scrutiny. And his executives, you know, had to say to him, like, their day's gone.

Speaker 47 It's us now. Like, we just need to deal with this.
And so

Speaker 47 I think it's not going away. And Walmart, for a variety of reasons, just does not have that issue right now to, you know, to hold them back.

Speaker 4 Yeah, 100%. Well, Jason, I recommend everybody read it.
Jason was a wonderful, speaking of lovely guys, wonderful reporter, wonderful person to work with for many, many years.

Speaker 4 And Yashrita's book, Winner, Sells All, Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets. Thank you, Jason.

Speaker 47 Thanks, Cara, and Scott, my best friend.

Speaker 12 All right.

Speaker 4 One more quick break. We'll be back for Wins and Fails.

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Speaker 4 Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. But before we start, a correction from listener Peter Mumford.
Scott, it was a peregrine falcon you saw at the swanky hotel that was going after seagulls.

Speaker 4 Hawks don't hunt that way. Look up falconry.
Peter Mumford is schooling you. You got the wrong bird, my friend.

Speaker 12 Didn't I say peregrine? I didn't say it. No, you said hawk.

Speaker 30 I said hawk. Hawk.

Speaker 4 Let me just say, they weren't there, so it didn't matter. There were ceramic owls.

Speaker 4 So it didn't really matter. The disappointment was huge with my children who I had gotten excited.
Anyway, wins and fails. Very quick, very quick.

Speaker 9 So, my fails are all these people on the far right and these libertarians who, as far as I can tell, are just far right, but also don't want to pay taxes.

Speaker 26 All their

Speaker 38 Neville Chamberlain-like apologist behavior around Putin and positioning him as a powerful reality that we have to deal with and admiring his strength and admiring his masculinity and constantly making excuses for why we should enter into negotiations with Russia and acknowledge the reality of the situation.

Speaker 31 They should, you know, we should give up Crimea,

Speaker 2 we should

Speaker 40 settle this,

Speaker 31 defer to the expansionary reality of Russia.

Speaker 5 And the reality is they couldn't have been more wrong.

Speaker 23 That this was an individual who is overextended.

Speaker 5 This is a murderous autocrat who has learned that when we bind together, when we're resolute, that the West should not be trifled with.

Speaker 32 And that these individuals could not have been geopolitically more wrong about Putin's power.

Speaker 17 And this guy is a paper bear.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 20 they were fooled by this propaganda.

Speaker 31 They were fooled by this misinformation.

Speaker 55 And fortunately, no one that meant, that had any power to decide about munitions or support, the U.S.

Speaker 24 has donated more money or provided more capital than every other nation combined.

Speaker 5 And it was absolutely the right thing to do.

Speaker 36 And this is a wonderful moment at the West.

Speaker 36 This is a wonderful moment for the West.

Speaker 40 And fortunately, the leaders in the West did not listen to a word.

Speaker 39 of this trif coming out of some of these these tech bros and far-right wingers mouths.

Speaker 20 This is a huge victory for the West because we realize that we should push back on a murderous autocrat and

Speaker 19 not appease this kind of behavior.

Speaker 5 Anyways, that's

Speaker 20 my losses, these individuals who were fooled by his false power.

Speaker 36 My win is I just wanted to bring up, while everyone's talking about this cage match,

Speaker 20 we brought up this MRF challenge.

Speaker 38 And I just wanted to acknowledge that the MRF challenge, it was a really nice moment at CrossFit.

Speaker 8 Every year we used to do, or trying to do MRF, and it's it's meant to honor a fallen hero a guy named Michael Murphy who was after graduating from Penn State

Speaker 22 had several opportunities to go to law school and instead decided to join the Navy SEALs

Speaker 15 he was accepted he went to the

Speaker 25 he was he was in the United States Merchant Marine Academy and he ended up in Afghanistan and there was actually a movie made about his encounter they encountered some some goat herders.

Speaker 15 They decided to let them go.

Speaker 9 It ended up, they ended up surrounded by Taliban in an effort to

Speaker 33 reestablish communications.

Speaker 25 He put his own life at risk, and he was shot and killed.

Speaker 36 But this Murph challenge that everyone's talking about with Mark Zuckerberg is after, is actually

Speaker 7 named after this fallen hero.

Speaker 38 Anyways, I just wanted to bring up a win, and that is Lieutenant Murph Mikey the Protector, who was a Navy SEAL and gave his life fighting for his country in Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 And that is when people talk about Murph, that's who they're referring to.

Speaker 32 They are.

Speaker 4 They are.

Speaker 4 Okay, my fail was:

Speaker 4 I think you'll like this one.

Speaker 4 Spotify had dumped Megan and Harry, and now it looks like Netflix is unlikely to renew their $100 million deal. Very good story in semaphore, metaphor.
They should have called it that.

Speaker 4 Called Hollywood is leaving podcasting to podcasters.

Speaker 4 There's a quote from Jeremy Zimmer at UTA, United Talents Agency, where I am signed, where the head of it, CEO, Jeremy Zimmer, said, Turns out Megan Markle was not a great audio talent or necessarily any other kind of talent.

Speaker 4 And you know, just because you're famous doesn't make you great at something. I think the headline of the story was Hollywood is leaving podcasting to podcasters.

Speaker 4 Huge fail on all these companies' parts, especially Spotify and Netflix, to just sign these things up without, you know, especially in the podcast space, signing up of famous people.

Speaker 4 It's worked in some cases. My friend Sean Hayes has a great show

Speaker 4 with a group of his friends and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 But in general, professional podcasters have really shown that they really know how to create safe products and good products for Joe Rogan aside, who I think is also very successful.

Speaker 4 I think he's a natural podcaster, but that's back to

Speaker 4 these prices are back to normalcy, which is probably good for everybody in the space. And so that's a fail and in many ways a win.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Speaker 10 Well, we can just acknowledge finally some truths.

Speaker 29 And that is one,

Speaker 35 crypto is a leopard Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 10 Two, headsets don't work.

Speaker 9 And three, Megan and Harry are talentless fox.

Speaker 31 So those are some basic truths. So I agree with you.

Speaker 5 Those are the three pillars of truth in technology and media over the last 12 months. I'm glad to see you coming around.

Speaker 4 I'm not coming around on the headset. We'll see where that goes.
Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

Speaker 4 Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Okay, Scott, that's the show.
We'll be back on Friday for more. Will you read us out?

Speaker 9 Today's show is produced by Larry Naiman, Travis Larchuk, and Taylor Griffin.

Speaker 6 Ernie Intertot engineered this episode.

Speaker 57 Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Neil Severio.

Speaker 30 Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 57 Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 30 We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business care.

Speaker 45 Have a great rest of the week.

Speaker 63 This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness. We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Speaker 63 Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers. But what does it actually mean to be well? Why do we want that so badly?

Speaker 63 And is all this money really making us healthier and happier? That's this month on Explain It to Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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