Blue Checks Live On (For Now), Adam Neumann of Arabia, and Guest Liz Hoffman

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

Scott, have you caught up in succession?

I did watch it, and I loved it.

I thought...

I love you, but you're not serious people.

I kind of thought about you when I heard that.

Go ahead.

Me saying it or not being a serious person?

No, me saying it to you.

I'm teasing.

I love you, Scott, but you're not a serious person.

I thought Cousin Greg had the best line when he was asked to describe Logan Roy on the floor of the journalist that is, you know, Fox News.

Yeah.

And he goes, it's like Jaws walking around, but if everyone worked for Jaws.

Yes, it was a great thought.

And it's also, it's like Santa with a hitman, except he's a hitman.

He had a bunch of them.

If Santa were a hitman.

You know, Murdoch did that.

He used to walk around and stand behind people's desks, and then he would get up on paper boxes and give speeches.

It was very funny.

Rupert Murdoch did that.

Yeah.

He used to like wander behind you.

See what you were up to.

It was creepy.

Anyway, how's things?

How's London?

You know, I was so busy this weekend stuffing trucker cock into my mouth at my favorite stop on the A3.

And you know what the weirdest thing about that statement is?

Is that I actually know the names of highways here in London now.

Do you drive around?

Oh my God, on the wrong side of the road.

That's a nightmare to think about.

That is one of my few skills I can drive on the wrong side of the road.

Yeah.

By the way, that statement, I want to apologize in advance.

That statement was highly truckerist.

Besides trucker cock, how's the

head of the London has gone?

Hey, I can't believe that came out of my mouth.

Don't criticize my hobbies.

Literally, our producer is like, okay, I have to cut that.

How do I break it to them?

You can't.

You can't cut it.

Anyways,

London has gone from literally one of the world's worst cities in the world to one of the best cities in the world.

And all that takes is something called sunshine.

Sunshine, yeah.

It is wonderful here right now.

Yeah, it is.

Spring is pretty wonderful.

And

I went to the Chelsea Austin Villa game on Saturday, which was wonderful.

So, your mood has lifted summary.

Oh my God.

Are you kidding?

Ask those truckers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You'll have 27 minutes of that.

But it is lovely there in the spring.

It really is.

It's lovely here in D.C.

It's going to be 79 degrees here today, and then it's going to be 50 in three days.

Who knows what's going on here?

Anyway, we have a lot to talk about.

We've got lots of things.

I just got back from finishing my book.

I did finish it.

I have one chapter.

You beat me.

I did.

I did.

It's just, I have one chapter.

I actually have two chapters left.

One is the Elon chapter I'm working on.

I'm just going to be taking it a little slow.

And then I'm going to have a final.

Need some help?

I could write it.

No, that's okay.

I'm good.

I'm going to have to read it.

I have no help.

I'm going to have you read it, though.

That's how you're going to help me.

I have to write a chapter in a couple of months about the future.

I just didn't want to write it now because things change so fast.

But I'm so glad to get it off my desk.

I have to tell you, except this last chapter, of course, there's one left.

It's about

7,000 words, and I'm about halfway through.

So

I have a lot to say about Elon.

I bet.

Yeah.

The future is a bad business because

if

it comes true, all the things leading up to it make it seem less bold.

Right.

But if you're wrong, people are like, oh my God, this person's an idiot.

And they discount everything you say.

So be careful with future.

Take it for me.

Predictions are terrible.

I am.

I'm not going to do predictive like you.

I'm going to do more of here are the trends I think are important.

I think I'll handle it pretty well.

I actually went back and read my AOL book back in the 90s, and I did pretty well.

I did pretty like that.

Let me get this.

You think you're going to be awesome based on your previous history?

I think I'm not going going to do it like you.

I'm not going to say this is going to happen.

I'm going to say, here's things that interest me.

And it'll be like,

it's going to be so hard for you when my book sells seven copies for every one of yours.

I will say.

It'll be so hard for you.

You know what?

Let me just tell you.

Vanity Fair.

Nice to meet you.

Oh, hello.

With a cat.

Anyway.

We have a lot to talk about.

There's a lot going on.

Twitter's legacy verified users live to tweet another day.

Is yours blue check on?

Mine's not.

Also, the business world reckons with repressive governments around the globe as one famous entrepreneur embraces Saudi Arabia.

And we'll talk with journalist and author Liz Hoffman about the COVID economy, what we gained, what we lost, and what we learned.

But first, by the time some listeners hear this, President Trump will likely have been arrested.

He is under indictment.

We're recording this on Monday, but on Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump is expected to walk into a Manhattan courtroom and plead not guilty to a list of charges that still have not been announced.

There's more we don't know, like whether cameras will be permitted.

Usually they're not in New York courtrooms, so probably they won't do that here.

But news outlets have asked the judge to make an exception.

Also, whether Trump will be handcuffed and perp walked.

Unlikely, according to a lot of people I have talked to.

We do know we won't see his mug shot unless he releases it himself.

In New York, mug shots are generally protected.

Of course, he'll release it.

Whatever the case, he's already capitalized on his impending arrest.

In the two days following his indictment, the Trump campaign says it raised $5 million.

He also has like sidelined all his foes into being supportive of him.

What do you expect to say Tuesday, Scott?

And talk about it from sort of a media perspective.

What do you, a branding perspective?

From an optics standpoint,

he's clearly decided to position this as his running mate.

Essentially, he raised $5 million off of it, but some things have come out.

Six and ten Americans think the indictment was fair.

Yeah.

Yep.

And also, I don't know if you've noticed this, but and this might be confirmation bias or just my bias in general.

I think he's a weak and weird person who's done real damage to the great experiment that is America.

So I have a tough time evaluating him objectively.

But I believe when I've listened to him at the rally, when I've listened to him post the indictment, I think you can hear in his voice that he is freaked out.

Oh, interesting.

That's what Maggie has written, actually, also, that he's much more freaked out.

When I heard him speaking the other day, his voice just sounds

rattled.

And I always thought that his superpower was his psychopathy and that he just didn't seem to be.

To be the president of the United States, so many people come after you so hard

and in so many semi-credible ways that I always thought, I remember thinking with Bill and Hillary Clinton, like, how do they sleep at night?

Yeah.

With all these people coming after them for sometimes things that are warranted criticism, like, how do they, in order to do that job, you have to be.

Disassociate.

You compartmentalize.

Interesting.

Oddly enough, I interviewed Brooke Shields today on On, and she talked about compartmentalization when there was all the oncoming with her being so young and stuff.

I think certain people, especially very famous, and she was one of the most famous people during the 80s.

If you, I mean, really worldwide famous

for Calvin Klein and Pretty Baby and stuff like that.

But I do think they compartmentalize in this way that is just very different.

Yeah, so by the way, just back to me, I sat next to Brooke Shields in college at the movie Gallipoli.

Do you remember that?

So I pretended we were on a date.

I'm like, just imagine I'm on a date with Brooke Field and wouldn't my fraternity brothers be impressed?

She's lovely.

And this documentary called Pretty Baby is wonderful.

It's really fascinating.

And it's a very good thing.

She seems very level-headed for a second.

This will surprise you, this documentary.

She has enormous amounts of

material that her mother kept in an archive.

So it's fascinating.

And to resee it again, it's really,

it's very good.

You know who made it?

George Stephanopoulos and his wife, Allie Wentworth, who are.

Jorge, Jorge Stephanopoulos.

Anyway, it was by ABC Productions.

Nonetheless, let me get back to Trunk.

What would you do?

What do you think is good here and what is bad from a marketing point of view?

What's bad?

What's bad about it, Kara, is that

this is an abuse of the system because this could happen to any of us, Kara, if we were former presidents who were also criminals.

So,

you know, this is an attack on every former president who's engaged in criminality.

Yeah, yeah.

I just.

At first, my view was put your wood behind Georgia, you know, put your wood behind the insurrection, that this is going to backfire on us.

And now I think I may have been wrong.

I'm definitely a bit of a, I don't have a sadister.

I want him and people who have supported the division of America and who, I want people to see all around the world that our institutions and our Constitution and the rule of law matter.

And so I'm enjoying this.

Yeah, I get it.

But he's using it for fundraising.

$5 million.

$4 million.

People think he should sell t-shirts with his mugshot.

He's going to totally use it as an opportunity.

Well, sure.

And they had free Martha t-shirts, but she still ended up going to prison.

That's true.

That's fair.

I don't know about you.

I have a severe fear of prison.

That's literally my worst nightmare.

And

it freaks me.

You're not worried about it.

Well, I don't want to go to prison, but I'm a lesbian.

You'd be the lady that would own the yard.

That's true.

Lesbians aren't scared of going to prison as much as other people.

Yes, of course I'd be scared.

I'm not going to touch that.

I am not going to.

By the way, that's just so you you know, that's my favorite genre of films, women's prisons film.

Oh, women's prison, yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, cat, come here.

And then the bad one who runs everything ends up, you know, electrified on the wall or something like that.

Yeah, I love those movies.

The only way this could get better for me is if he decides to represent himself.

That would be fantastic.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It'll see.

Setting aside the politics, the media circus around this is just.

nuts.

And I think the more he incites, the more they respond.

So we're back to the old, the old game with Trump and the media, right?

Like he sucks up all the oxygen.

No other candidate can get through.

They can't attack him.

And nobody can stop writing everything he says, even if it's like he was inaccurate about when he was getting indicted.

Praising the system, praising the grand jury.

I know, praising the grand jury.

You know, I just feel like we're still in the thrall of this idiot who should just go away, but of course he's not.

It would have been so much fun if they had decided to arrest him at Mar-a-Lago and he pulled a home alone and booby-trapped the whole place.

By the way,

that's from some guy named J.P.

Brammer on Twitter.

Yeah, this is my favorite Twitter.

This is from New York Times Pitch Bot, who I love.

Trump did nothing.

And if he did do something wrong, it wasn't illegal.

And if it was illegal, it's not something people are usually prosecuted for.

And if it's something people are usually prosecuted for, a former president still shouldn't be prosecuted for it.

That's exactly what the arguments continue to be.

It's just crazy.

And then Joe Manchin is like, no one's above the law, but we shouldn't target people by the law.

Like that was Joe Manchin's one.

Yeah.

And then you have this

governor

Lisa Hutchins saying,

I'm not pro-Trump, but I'm not anti-Trump.

I mean, every Republican's trying to threaten,

ridiculous.

I'm a non-Trump candidate, but I'm not anti-Trump.

It's like, you know what?

Grow a pair of bones.

You know what all of them are saying behind the scenes, except for maybe Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Hang them high.

That asshole.

Like, yeah, God.

Well, he can't die soon enough.

That's really what

they all say it.

All of them.

My junior senator literally snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

He was ahead of the Republican Senate campaign, and somehow the Democrats held on to the Senate with his shitty behavior.

Paul Ryan summarized it perfectly.

He's a loser.

Everything he touches, he's not going to use any of that money to help anyone but himself.

And he everyone,

I mean, it's interesting, what I read, and it made a lot of sense, it was in the Wall Street Journal, was that the Democratic Party said this is no lose for us because if he goes to prison for crimes, if the law does its job and he's guilty of crimes, it shows no one is above the law.

And if he, if people rally around him and find this reason to make him the nominee, we win again.

We want him to be the nominee.

Still worries me.

I don't know.

Because nothing gets him down, including his, as you remember, all the photographs of him and Jeffrey Epstein.

And speaking of associates of Jeffrey Epstein, four billionaires, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, have been subpoenaed in a civil suit against J.P.

Morgan over its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

The U.S.

Virgin Islands is suing the bank, saying it facilitated Epstein's alleged sex trafficking by helping him send money to victims.

The subpoenas request any communication and documents relating to the bank and Epstein.

The other billionaires are executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels, Thomas Pritzker, venture capitalist Michael Ovitz, also famous Hollywood agent, and owner of the U.S.

News and World Reporter Mort Zuckerman.

I haven't heard from him in 100 years.

Sergei is probably the one I know best.

I do know he went.

I think he went with his, they traveled there with his wife, I think, on some level.

I don't know.

But a lot of tech people visited that island.

They did.

They did.

Well, look, I don't, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that,

you know, older, wealthy men

like to go somewhere where there's a good party.

And this guy was throwing really good parties.

Unfortunately, there were criminal acts of a pretty heinous nature taking place at those parties.

But at what point, where's the line between guilt by association?

I don't,

you know, I mean, I remember people saying, oh, they found flight records.

You were on the same flight with them.

It's like, well, okay.

You know, he was at one point,

I don't want to excuse any of this.

If anyone conducted illegal activity or in any way abused anyone, especially

underage girls, they should pay the consequence or they should pay the price for that.

But he was positioning himself as a big philanthropist.

He was around a lot.

He had given money to MIT.

So you can see, at least theoretically, him calling Bill Gates and saying, I'm giving away millions of dollars and I want to hear more about your foundation.

Let's get to that.

That's what he tried to do.

A lot of people went to dinner parties, well-known people.

There's been lots of reports.

He invited me to his house in New York and I declined because I was put off by the Florida thing.

I told this PR person, I don't really go visit pedophiles, but at the time, you know, because of that, that conviction or whatever happened to him in Florida.

But yeah, I agree.

He was around.

He was at these TED events.

You could have saved a lot of men a lot of trouble because that would have killed that vibe at that party.

You showed up.

It wasn't a party.

I don't know.

It was a meeting.

We wanted to talk about tech.

He was very ingratiating himself in.

He was at TED.

Yeah, he was part of that circle.

Yeah.

No, I was at a dinner he was at, but it was hundreds of people.

And someone was like, Kara Suisha affiliated with Jeffrey Epstein.

I'm like,

200 people at this dinner, I guess.

I never even met him.

So, okay, sure.

But it's true.

He was there.

He was, he was around.

He was paying for dinners at big tech events.

He was

constantly around TED,

tech events, MIT, all this stuff.

And he was trying to ingratiate himself among that crowd.

So I'm not surprised they visited him.

He's served real utility in my life because now at every conference and Q ⁇ A, people assume, assume, you know, that I'm some sort of oracle that has domain expertise into everything.

And occasionally someone will ask me something about, actually quite frequently, on something I know nothing about.

And my answer is, Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.

And it just stills the crowd.

It just stills the crowd.

Oh, let's not go down that lane.

It's a pretty good plan B answer.

Oh, good God.

Okay.

On that note, stocks of Virgin Orbit.

Your favorite truck stops.

I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

Stocks of Virgin Orbit are crashing to Earth.

The price is down to 20 cents a share.

After news, the company will lay off 85% of its staff and halt operations for the foreseeable future.

Okay, CEO Dan Hart told employees the company has not been able to secure funding to provide a clear path forward for the company.

Virgin Orbit focused on more affordable options for launching satellites into orbit, or as I like to call it, not SpaceX.

The company's latest quarterly earnings report revealed over $50 million in operating losses.

It spun out of Virgin Galactic, went public with a disappointing SPAC in 2021.

I know you don't love them virgin specs, but do you want to say I told you so?

You can, please do.

Well, I was the original Virgin hater.

I mean, if you just go 5,000 feet up, when I go to, I no longer go to Telluride.

Telluride was my favorite ski resort in the world.

I love a place you can get a great meal and someone rolls up on a horse.

It was just a fantastic ski resort.

I used to take my kids every holiday.

And I can no longer go there because the altitude makes me sick.

That is just one mile.

You can run around a track four times, but if you run up, you start feeling sick.

If you go just three miles up to the top, you know, to 15,000 feet, it's difficult to survive.

And if you go up just six miles, the distance between, I don't know, the top of Manhattan and the bottom of Manhattan, or, you know, the Statue of Liberty to Central Park, almost nothing can survive.

And so the moment you get up above 50 or 60 miles and you get into anything resembling the Carmen line or space, it becomes wildly inhospitable for everything.

And here's the thing: space is correctly named.

It doesn't want anything.

That's why it's called space.

And what's clear about this is that, and I love our optimism, I love capitalism, I love venture capital, but space is not impressed with brand.

Space doesn't give a flying fuck how charismatic the founder is.

It doesn't care how cool the logo is.

It doesn't care that the founder started record companies and has consumers care about brand.

Investors care about brand.

Space, space don't care.

And without massive capital,

massive capital, and government subsidies, which you could argue SpaceX has gotten a lot of, this is a business, this is a technology that falls under the auspices of

probably requires non-ROI focused investors, specifically the U.S.

government.

I mean, NASA, what is NASA's budget?

It's less than $30 billion.

Yeah.

It doesn't really make any money.

What SpaceX, Elon's Credit, has done is that will probably likely be the only private company that gets that, that goes vertical as opposed to horizontal.

There's a lot of business and revenue in going horizontal.

The car industry is a huge business.

The airline industry is an enormous business.

Going vertical, there's really only one private company working now.

Yeah.

This was zero to zero to

650 miles an hour to zero again, faster than most companies.

Yeah, it was ridiculous to have to fund this through

public, the public.

It's just not going to work

it's just ridiculous and again spacex is private just remember space is not public that's a great point that's a great point he does have a good proclivity not to take things well to and you know what the next zero is what well i'll give you a hint virgin orbital or virgin galactic 100

that business makes no fucking sense and it never did yep and by the way i just want to point out go two three years back to code when i was presenting yeah i'm like this is a stupid business yep when bob from accounting gets immolated on the launch pad, this thing goes to zero.

Space is a dangerous business.

I got you that for your birthday.

Oh, well.

You're sending me into space?

You sent it.

Say goodbye, Scott.

All right.

We got to get to our first big story.

Scott, we still have our blue checks.

I just checked mine just a second ago.

I was just seeing.

Oh, by the way, can you check mine?

I'm not exaggerating.

I have not been able to log in for the last seven days to not pay for my blue check mark.

Don't say that out loud because he'll take it away.

You know what, everybody, have at it.

Yes, you still do.

You still have it right here.

I still have it.

Yep.

But let me ask you this.

It's in confidence that I haven't been able to get in for seven days, not a conspiracy, right?

I have no idea.

I don't know.

He just sends poop emojis back when you ask questions.

Seven days.

Can't get on.

Yeah.

Twitter users with legacy blue checks expected to lose them on April 1st.

But the Washington Post reports that technical issues issues may make it a slow process.

So instead, Twitter seems to have further blurred the line between verified users and blue subscribers.

New wording in the app makes it hard to tell which is which.

But many power users are speaking up, saying they won't pay for Twitter Blue.

So far, the list includes LeBron James, Deion Warwick, Dan Rather, Chrissy Teigen, the New York Times, which did lose its blue check because they said so so loudly.

The White House, also I think CNN is not paying for it, Los Angeles Times, et cetera.

Last week, the Times reported that Twitter would let their most followed news publishers keep their checks, whether or not they pay.

But Musk doesn't seem to be sticking to the plan.

Shortly after, the New York Times announced they wouldn't pay for the blue check, nor would they pay for their reporters to have blue checks.

Its check mark disappeared.

The havoc seems to be hurting the company's valuation.

Fidelity reports that it's marked down its investments in Twitter again, this time by nearly 8%.

That brings Fidelity's total right down to more than 60%.

I don't know what they're waiting for.

They need to take it down to the equity to the bottom.

But so I don't even, it's so confusing.

And nobody's signing up.

One of the things is I think 3% of blue checks decided to take him up on the offer to buy it.

So 97% of the people said, no, I don't, I won't pay you $7.

Think about that.

And of course, now there's a lot of scammers impersonating as a New York Times now since they lost their blue check.

What do you think, sir?

So New York nightlife is very elitist, and it's all about, it's not about who's inside the club that makes it aspirational.

It's about who's not inside.

And typically the life cycle of a club in New York is it's really really hot.

They bring together this alchemy of music, vibe, people, and the right crowd and the right lighting and the right decor.

And it takes off and it becomes the it place and celebrities show up.

And then, and all New Yorkers say weekend is amateur, you know, hardcore New Yorkers will claim they don't go out on weekends because it's amateur hour and they call it the bridge and tunnel crowd, right?

The people from the boroughs come in and they're not, you know, supposedly as cool.

And then what happens is ultimately the cool crowd, who is very fickle, moves on to the next hot place.

Yeah.

And so the club, in order to make money, lets in everyone and says, all right, we have, you know, it's like being a soccer player or an athlete.

You're like, let's just ride this out.

Even if I have to go play for the galaxy,

you know, if I'm Beckham or Pele with the Cosmos, I just need to ride this out because eventually it's going to end.

All nightlife, all clubs eventually end.

So you let in everyone at some point.

And the thing just literally, that's that's the death rattle.

With this,

it's sort of similar in that is essentially

the blue check is cool.

It's exclusive.

That's the value.

The value of the blue check isn't who has it, it's who doesn't have it.

Yeah.

So when he's gone bridge and tunnel and let said,

there's now like 40 blue check New York Times accounts.

Yeah, Twitter Blue has, just so people know, 180,000 U.S.

subscribers.

There are 420,000 legacy verified accounts.

Fewer than that, fewer than 7,000 have signed up for Twitter Blue, according to the researcher Travis Brown.

Also, on Twitter, a former employee detailed how high-profile verified users drive engagement because other users know they're interacting with the real Kim Kardashian, for example, and they take it away.

You're right.

This is literally, this business strategy makes no sense.

He's selling tickets to a pool, and then once people get inside, he's paving over the pool.

He's, by virtue of what he's doing, he's destroying the value he's trying to monetize.

This is the shoot yourself in the foot business strategy.

It just makes, it makes absolutely no sense.

And I don't get it.

He's so bright.

I don't know if he's listening to

this joy bag of donuts bad news bear weirdo advisory council has put together, but he's decided I'm not only going to not create a good business model here, I'm going to fuck up all the value that was built around blue checks.

It just makes no sense.

Yeah.

No, it's interesting.

Now, some high-profile users say they're on the fence about it.

Our friend of Pivot, Ben Siller, said he's not sure what he'll do.

Walt Mossberg said he paid for the subscription as long as it included identity verification and other features, although he's already verified.

That's right.

It doesn't.

There's some evidence they could include it, but I wouldn't give them my license.

Are you kidding?

That guy, I would not give it to him again.

I'm already verified.

The most interesting thing, sorry to interrupt you about what you just said, is that Ben Stiller being on the fence on the check mark is news.

We've decided that's worth reporting on.

Yeah, I agree.

By the way, we love Ben Stiller.

We do love Ben Stiller.

But I mean, ultimately, some writers like Jaron Lanier and David Douglas Rushkoff have proposed that users should pay for some social media and they should also get paid by social media.

The advertising model is still, I think,

Elon's running away from the advertising model.

He's obviously down, I think, two billion.

No, advertisers are running from him.

Running from him.

That's what I mean.

But he's also, I think he knows it's too difficult to sustain.

Users don't really want to pay until they get value, right?

That's how I look at it in every transaction I make.

I just don't think there's value there.

That's all.

But it's not even there's no value there.

It's not him.

He's diminishing the value.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

That's what I mean.

It's like the business strategy is so nonsensical.

You think, is there some genius there that we're not seeing?

And I don't think we are.

Yeah, I don't at all.

And I can't log on.

You can't log on.

So that's good.

It's good for your health.

A number of ads against Scott has gotten every other, and they're shitty ads.

They're weird little companies.

Every other tweet is an ad.

It's really, they're just jamming it in there.

And you're like, it's as if Google just spammed the Google results page and then you couldn't find what you were looking for.

You always say that, but you know how some people are colorblind?

I'm Twitter ad-blind.

I could not name an ad I've ever seen on Twitter.

I'm also hookerblind.

I've never seen a hooker in my life.

I've only seen women who return my eye contact, and then my friends tell me that they're hookers.

But hookers, ads on Twitter, I just, I can't, there's something about my brain.

I can't process them visually.

I never recognize them.

Okay, I don't know how to move on from that, except to say some people don't want to meet up with Elon.

The chief Twit reportedly requested a meeting with the FTC's Lena Kahn and was denied.

The agency is investigating whether Twitter's mass layoffs have put it in breach of a 2011 consent decree around user privacy.

Probably.

She's not meeting with him.

She's a badass.

Why should she?

She doesn't have to.

Yeah, but this isn't Lena Kahn deciding not to meet with Elon Musk.

This is Biden.

This is Biden.

There's no way she made that decision without the West Wing.

And this is them saying, sorry, boss.

We don't find you that special.

Yeah, maybe so.

They remember that's what Pete Buttigieg said.

Everybody is special in their own way.

Do you remember?

He totally trashed him.

Had code.

I don't usually mention the names of auto company CEOs.

Sure, but they're special.

You know, yes, very special.

We're all special in our way.

And that has.

Yeah, there you go.

You're not paying for it, right?

If you ever get back on again, probably you won't.

I would have.

Oh, interesting.

If it had been verify your identity.

Yeah.

And then as a function of you verifying your identity.

give you greater reach, give you additional features.

If it had been a true membership, I love the membership subscription model.

I think it makes a lot of sense.

But instead, this feels like pay us or, you know, we kill your dog.

This is them not adding value.

This is them threatening to take away value.

So wait, you would or you wouldn't pay?

That's why I wouldn't.

No, I'm out.

I'm out.

This guy, this guy to me,

I mean, when you mock the disabled, when you accuse your coworkers of sex crimes that there's no evidence of,

you know, I'm addicted to the thing, so I'll still log on.

I am am not giving any money to these folks.

Yeah, that's true.

And that's not why I'm not.

I don't find it useful.

I just don't find it useful.

Yeah, it makes no sense.

Utility is what I pay for.

Anyway, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, the U.S.

government talks to Bob Iger about China, and we'll speak with friend of Pivot, Liz Hoffman, about the COVID economy.

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off.

Scott, we're back.

Repressive governments are making business hard around the world among the business elite.

There's no unified response.

First, in Russia, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gerskovich has been detained by the government on espionage charges.

The journal steadfastly denies the accusations, and the Biden administration has condemned the arrest.

The U.S.

State Department has told Americans not to travel to Russia, but other business leaders seem happy to work with strongmen.

Bloomberg reports that Adam Newman's new real estate venture, Flow, could launch in Saudi Arabia.

Last week, Newman appeared on stage with backer Mark Andreessen at a Miami conference with financial ties to the Saudi sovereign fund, PIP.

And there they were just at one point they called, I think it was either Ben Horowitz or Mark Andreessen, called it the

Saudi startup.

It was crazy.

It was like Saudi's the startup place and talking about the government versus the U.S.

government, they mocked the U.S.

government and then they said Saudis are the startup place.

They love

companies.

They've got a ton of money, so that's why they're there.

They're going to go get that money if they need to.

They're going to line up.

I've heard from a lot of people that the Saudis are going to not do a lot of funds, but invest in directing companies.

But they were there singing for their Saudi supper.

So what do you think about that?

Those two things.

So do you want to talk about the Wall Street Journal reporter first?

Yeah, please do.

So look, this is going to be an unpopular view.

I think we fucked up in terms of, I think the State Department handled the release of Brittany Griner poorly, and I think this is a direct result of that.

I think that it's no accident that they have unfairly jailed someone who works for a high-profile magazine or a high-profile media outlet.

There's going to be a ton of news, a ton of pressure, release them, and they will get a high-profile trade here because we have told them that that's how we operate, that we give them a merchant of death when they take somebody who will inflame a lot of protest.

I think this is the price we paid for a poorly negotiated deal around Britney Griner.

All right.

Okay.

Okay.

What do you think?

It's bullshit.

Fair enough.

Bullshit.

Why is it bullshit?

We have to really come down hard on this.

They already probably think we're tough enough for helping Ukraine, but we have to really come down hard in ways maybe we don't even know about

to stop this kind of behavior.

I wouldn't go to Russia right now.

There's a couple of countries I wouldn't go.

I wouldn't go to Saudi Arabia.

I wouldn't go to Russia.

I'd feel nervous being there.

I think half of that is right.

But yeah, go ahead.

You wouldn't be nervous or not?

Oh, I've been to Russia several times.

I don't think I will ever go again.

Me neither.

Me neither.

I wasn't comfortable when I was there the first two or three times.

I don't, I don't, A, I don't want to give a murderous autocrat money.

And two, I have a lot of close Russian friends, wonderful friends.

And I actually like,

I actually enjoy Russian culture.

I went to the World Cup there.

I took my oldest son there.

I went to St.

Petersburg, one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

I will never go there again.

No.

And

that's the second part that's not well, Saudi Arabia.

I was just in Riyadh.

And I have found one of the reasons, one of the things I enjoy about living in London is I wanted to explore different areas.

And I've been to the Gulf several times in the last few months.

And I find in general, and this is a stereotype, but I have found so far the people I've met in the Gulf to be very warm.

And Riyadh,

it is

just

striking, overwhelming the amount of capital they are deploying across projects and investments.

Effectively,

what you have is the most profitable business substance in history.

You know, Saudi Aramco just reported more profits than any company in history, and it's running out in 30 years.

And they know this, and they're smart people, and they're like, we have to pivot an entire economy away from fossil fuels.

And so they are investing like there's no one's business.

I personally feel that I understand there are really good arguments on both sides.

What I would tell, I'm on the board of a lot of companies raising money.

And if they came to me and said, we have an opportunity to take money from PIF,

I would say take it.

And I think that the more capital Americans can get and lower our cost of capital,

as long as they don't have influence over what I'll call

sensitive technologies.

I'm sort of, I 100% understand the concerns around this.

All right, but what's the difference between Russia Russia and Saudi Arabia?

Murderous, anti-gay, anti-women?

Saudi Arabia isn't invading Europe.

Oh, come on.

Don't even.

They have been so linked to so much terrorism.

Are you talking about Yemen?

All over the place.

All over the place.

They have all kinds of.

I just feel like this is just.

I was on the board of a company that a Russian investor from an oligarchy.

Agreed.

Agreed.

I wrote a whole column about this years ago.

It was about, I was at a dinner party where they were stack ranking money from different places.

And one person's like, I'd never take Saudi money.

Another person was like, well, I wouldn't take Russian money.

What about Chinese money?

And they all decided Singapore money was okay.

Well, okay.

But at some point, do our companies have the most expensive cost of capital?

Because it's a little bit like ESG investing.

The problem is who gets to draw the line.

I would draw the line at Saudi Arabia, I got to tell you.

You know what?

I respect that view.

I understand it.

I think they have so much money and so much capital.

You're going to see when I was in Riyadh, a bunch of people kind of outlined some of the projects they had planned.

And I met all of these young entrepreneurs.

And the path of those entrepreneurs where they had started businesses in Norway and London and Morocco.

And they all moved to Dubai because that's what a money.

And now they're all moving to Riyadh.

And basically, like, for example, that, I forget what it's called, the line, basically this 80.

It's basically 80 kilometer long cruise ship that'll be stationary, this massive smart city that's a big line, they will essentially fund any smart glass company in the world and take all of your smart glass because there's not enough smart glass to even build this thing right now.

So you're going to see this massive immigration of entrepreneurs to Riyadh.

And there's so much capital to decide not to, as an American company, to not take their capital, I think puts you at a disadvantage, just as when you decide not to invest, when you say, I'm only going to invest in ESG-friendly companies.

So I get the conflict here.

I think there's only a few countries that you can say that to.

I understand.

And that makes your list.

That makes your black list of Saudi Arabia.

100%.

Murderous thugs.

I don't know what else to say.

I just,

I don't know.

I feel like it's like really dirty money.

It's also

oil money, too.

I mean, I just, there's, look, we all can decide.

I'm not taking money from any of these people, but Russia and Saudi Arabia would be top of my list.

Top of my list in that regard.

And that's who has the oil money also.

Anyway, interestingly, a congressional delegation will meet with leaders from Silicon Valley and Hollywood to discuss U.S.

approach to China.

This is interesting.

They'll speak with Tim Cook and Bob Iger, among others, both of whom have interests there, selling movies and obviously making and selling products.

Among other things, topics will include phasing out forced labor from supply chains.

Cook recently traveled to China and appeared at a conference organized by the Chinese government.

I think that's probably a heads-up kind of thing because they're going to have to reckon with their China ties soon.

Apple is already moving production out of China into India and Vietnam.

So Congress is telling them probably what's going to happen.

Correct, I would assume.

That's what it's getting, giving them information and trading it back and forth.

I think you're going to see a real thaw in the relationship or an attempt at...

We talked about this last week.

I think Xi and his staff are going on the closest thing they can come up with to a charm tour.

Yeah, the maw thing is a big deal.

You're right.

I think you're going to see a lot of companies doing ribbon cuttings over there because the market is very exciting.

You know, Estee Lauder has an enormous business in China.

The Northface, it took the Northface 30 years to get to a billion dollars and its first year in China got to a billion dollars.

So there's going to be, you know, people's greed glands are going to get going.

And I think he said, I think the CCP has said, okay, it's time to turn on the capitalism charm.

I think you're going to see a lot of them.

And also, I work with a lot of companies that have really deep supply chain, which is almost any big American company in China.

And what they've said is at the ground level, it's not nearly as frosty as it is at a geopolitical level, that they're still working with each other, you know, that there's a lot of entrepreneurs over there that have great relationships, manufacturing, and they're still, you know, the gears are still turning.

But they have clearly said, okay, we've made our point.

The key people have fallen in line.

And we can't have.

We can't have the world withdraw from our supply chain.

It would hurt us more than it would hurt them.

That's my sense.

What are your thoughts?

I just, I think we're going to have to figure out a way to deal with China.

They're the other big economy in this world.

And, you know, again, all kinds of issues there, sure, but we have to, this is not an avoidable country in terms of our future and their future.

As both a market and as a market maker and also a manufacturing thing, I think it would be very hard to, I think we should be moving some things out.

just to show that we have an ability to do so.

But we really can't get into a conflict with China.

Not right now.

Not at this moment in time, maybe ever.

We can't get into Taiwanese conflict.

We can't get into

raising the temperature right now with them

and them raising the temperature with us is a problem.

I think that's probably the message a lot of these,

and I'm sure Cook and Iger will say those things.

I just think they are loath to have a really disputatious relationship with China.

I think a thaw in U.S.

Senator relations would be really good for both and the world.

Yep, 100%.

I do think they've been very aggressive.

They've been aggressive for a very long time.

And, you know, you talk about Russia and Brittany Griner.

They've been moving all over the world in an aggressive manner.

And U.S.

government officials have determined that Chinese spy balloons successfully gathered intel in U.S.

military locations.

They got their shoulder into trying to be dominant.

They haven't bombed and invaded any countries in the Middle East.

They don't have to.

They have a different way of doing it.

I'm just saying, they're not non-aggressive, but nonetheless, a lot of companies are quite exposed in china even though you know most of our companies especially the tech ones can't get in there or can't sell to them both both at the same time anyway interesting times you're i think you're right we do have to calm calm the things down with china but there's a lot of uh politicians who want to up the ante unfortunately anyway let's bring in our friend of pivot

Liz Hoffman is the business and finance editor for Semaphore and author of Crash Landing, the inside story of how the world's biggest companies survived an economy on the brink, which chronicles the business world's response to COVID-19.

Welcome, Liz.

Thanks for having me.

No problem.

So you said that you started out writing a book about the pandemic, but the book's focus changed to something larger.

Talk about what it's about.

Obviously, this has been one of the biggest disruptions to the economy in decades and decades, presumably.

I mean, you have to go back.

When I started this project in the spring of 2020, I thought, like most people, that it would be over by the end of the year.

And that I was kind of aiming for some, some very clear endpoint.

And it never came.

And so the longer this story dragged on, I wanted it to be more than just, you know, a day-by-day accounting of a time that I wasn't even sure at the time people wanted to go back and relive.

And so I was, I was kind of looking for this.

clear endpoint that just never came.

And so the longer the project went on, I wanted it to be more than just kind of a tick-by-tick account of a period that, frankly, I wasn't sure if people would want to go back and sit with and live with.

But to kind of kick it forward and say, like, how does this change the job of a CEO?

How does this, what does this say about the trade-off in any economy between resilience and efficiency?

You know, how do market forces interact with the government's role as really the backstop here?

What should CEOs learn from the trials of the pandemic?

This is like a sort of a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

I'd love to know what you think, who did it right and what did they do that was right versus what was wrong.

One is just very basic balance sheet management, which is we learn this lesson every 10 years from one direction or another, which is that you're never as liquid as you think.

And so, you know, one story there, Hilton became the first big blue chip company to pull its bank loans to say, I want every dollar that I'm contractually entitled to.

And the CEO told the bankers, listen, if I have to pay it back, pay a little interest, that's fine.

And they got, you know, almost $2 billion in liquidity in March of 2020.

And at the time, it was a big news story.

I mean, they took some heat for kind of inciting a panic.

And someone had sent the CEO, Chris Neseta, a news article about the fact that they'd done this.

And he was like, just wait a week.

This isn't even worth writing about.

And so, you know, being early on just the kind of blocking and tackling of management.

The other is like, I guess my takeaway is make a lot of decisions and make them quickly.

You know, you guys will know that CEOs can like murder board a decision to death, but ultimately,

these guys and they're mostly guys got to where they are because they're pretty good at this and make a lot of decisions.

That if you bat 60, 40 or 70, 30, you know, over time, you'll iterate the company in a positive direction.

So, like, cut deeply, get liquidity when you can.

You know, I'm talking about Airbnb, but you know, they raised a bunch of money in April of 2020 in an incredibly humbling capital raising process, huge valuation cut, and it got them through.

So, just a thesis: American business comes out of this stronger.

And I'm obviously at a huge cost of

personal toll and a lot of death and disability.

So, I don't in any way want to diminish that.

But America, best vaccines, our food supply chain, the internet worked here, technology companies ripped.

It feels as if on many levels, the U.S.

comes out of this stronger than before.

What are your thoughts?

I completely agree.

I mean, it's easy to look at the kind of the tough moment that we're in now and kind of freak out a little bit.

But, you know, if you wound back the clock to 2008, this time period out, we were still in this kind of deep economic funk that was, you know, it was very hard to restart an economy that had sort of ground slowly to a halt.

And I know it feels sort of scary and weird now, but you know, labor market's incredibly healthy.

I do think the Fed will get a handle on inflation.

And I think we're headed for, you know, some version of the roaring 20s coming out of the 1918 pandemic here.

Say more about that?

Yeah, that's exciting.

Well, I mean, you look back at past pandemics and they have always

fundamentally changed the economy in, you know, not always good ways, but you know, go back to the, I write about this in the book, go back to the Black Death in Europe,

really ushered in the modern labor market.

Before that, it was a feudal system built on patronage.

And the upshot is that so many workers died that there became an active market for their labor.

And, you know, the Fed actually has stats on this.

The average wages for British peasants like doubled over the next 50 years.

So you can't have that kind of massive

unrest and upset without kind of resetting the relative value that we assign to different things.

And that's where you're seeing the, you know, the hot labor market that we're in right now.

Especially wages at the lower end.

I hadn't connected those dots before, but we've seen a massive acceleration.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, 2021 and 2022, I mean, at every income level, this is true up and down the ladder.

People came out of the pandemic wealthier than they went into it.

And you're starting, I think 2022 was the first year on record that the wealth of the top 1% fell and the bottom 50% increased.

Absolutely.

Scott, you talk about that a lot.

So it does prove capitalism's resilience, but what are the flaws?

Part of the U.S.

government's response included suspending debt payments and sending cash to Americans, which was not exactly capitalism, right?

And some people, these PPP programs, they were government-issued loans meant to prevent layoffs, you write.

Whether or not it ultimately viewed a success, the paycheck protection program is perhaps the clearest sign of the federal government's determination not to let the economy crack.

Now, we know only about a quarter of those, that money went to protecting jobs, arrests, disproportionately benefited wealthier households.

Talk a little bit about that.

Was that a flaw or a necessary waste of money?

There's always a trade-off between getting money exactly where it needs to go and getting it out the door quickly.

I actually am ultimately kind of a defender of the paycheck protection program.

I think it was a pretty well-designed government program.

It sort of estimated the need to within a couple billion dollars and kind of nailed it.

You know, if you're asking for like mistakes, clearly the spigot was open too wide for too long.

On the stimulus side, I think that last round of checks was like probably pretty clearly unnecessary and really added fuel to the consumption fire that we saw coming out of the pandemic.

And then on the monetary side, like the Fed was pretty clearly slow to start raising interest rates, not by a lot, but by a couple of months, which means they had to hike faster and farther, which just made everything more volatile.

And, you know, as we saw in the last couple of weeks, like there are knock-on effects of that in in the financial system.

So I'm always a little hesitant to Monday morning quarterback, but like clearly the punch bowl was spiked a little too much for a little too long.

As was Powell's, you know, the interest rates, the interest rate part.

I mean, they should have started raising at the end of 21 and they didn't start raising until the spring of last year.

And, you know, there's a cost to that, which is that your actions when you're playing catch up just have to be more dramatic.

And that injects a lot of volatility that we've seen the last couple of weeks.

I'm just fascinated by this notion that you brought up that pandemics or these major exogenous shocks or health crises lead to boom times.

Because everyone's predicted, I mean, it seems like we've been waiting for a recession to come next month for 18 months now.

You think the economy could do really well.

Do you see specifically any industries?

that might really boom here in a post-pandemic world.

And Scott is getting out his spats.

He's very excited for the roaring 20s, the roaring 20s.

I'm just ready to party.

I'm just listening.

It sounds like fun.

They're headed back.

Coming back.

I think some of the, you know, there was this sense in the pandemic that it's sort of, we got 10 years of growth, particularly in sort of digital and technology industries and, you know, about a year.

I think some of that is a little overblown.

Like if you look at, for example, the percent of retail that's e-commerce or that's brick and mortar, like it, it dipped sharply in 2020 and then picks back up and is now basically about where it would have been, right?

100%.

So I think some of that just gets pulled forward.

And I wouldn't say that like tech, despite being the reason that we got through the pandemic, I don't think they're particularly a huge winner on the back of it.

No, I think it was a pretty good test for the financial system, which I think did quite well.

I mean, when I started this, I was a, I'm a Wall Street reporter at heart.

I spent nine years at the Wall Street Journal.

And I started this thinking that we might have a financial crisis.

And instead, it turned out to be a crisis in the real economy.

And say what you will about dodd-frank and regulation and whichever side of the fence you come down on on that the biggest banks the ones that we were worried about held up incredibly well and and did a very good job getting capital where it needed to go so as a follow-up to that it's it strikes me that the most enduring structural change is remote work have you thought about a do you agree with that and b how that reshapes the economy

I think one thing to really keep an eye on here is the balance of power between management and labor.

You see it in two places.

One is the kind of green shoots we're seeing on the union organizing side.

And Scott, I know how you feel about unions.

Certainly not nearly enough to make a dent in the decline of union jobs and cloud over the last 40 years.

But the other is this tug of war between management who wants butts and seats and employees who, and listen, I'm one of them, but really came to enjoy the flexibility that they got.

And I think there is a little bit of professional self-indulgence that's been baked in.

I'm a little sympathetic to CEOs on this front.

And, you know, having journalism is an apprentice business, I learned how to do it by sitting next to people who were really good at it.

And, you know, so much of the economy is that.

And I think, and you guys have talked about this, but I do think these are cohorts that are worth studying, people who came back and people who didn't and where they are in five to 10 years, because I think there's real value that is lost.

Most of the economy, they have come back, right?

It's just, it's just in certain cities and areas because around the country, it's back to normal levels from what I've seen.

I mean, around the country, most people never left.

Most people didn't have that option.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I don't really understand the hand-wringing here.

I don't think most white-collar employees will be expected to come in five days a week forever, ever again.

And if we're fighting about which three or four, that feels a little silly to me.

But I see a lot of value in being in person.

And I'm a little sympathetic to CEOs who, for a lot of the pandemic, and I tell the story in the book of David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was like out in the Hamptons at a weekday lunch.

And, you know, a Goldman banker, a young, a young woman comes up to him and says, I work for you.

A bunch of my colleagues were over at the table.

We took the day off.

We came to the beach.

And like, he's fuming about this because, you know, these CEOs are walking through New York City for a lot of the pandemic and seeing the bars full on Saturday and Sunday and seeing their offices empty on Monday.

So, yeah, I think you have ultimately working.

The bosses are going to win in this.

So, when you have to think about the industries, what does the best change the economy?

Is it that?

And what's the biggest economic loss from COVID?

I think it was a real missed opportunity.

If you remember, and I tried in the book to really go back to the beginning and kind of like recreate that kind of emotional stew a little bit, because stuff was like weird and scary and strangely earnest.

And we banged pots out of windows and we talked about essential work.

And like, you know, there was some hope that on the back end that would be recognized in a meaningful way.

Absolutely has not been.

So that's, I think, a lost opportunity, a fail, if you will, in Pivot Speak.

But

no, I think certainly the flexibility,

people kind of reassessing what they want.

And for some people, that means, yeah, I want to go back to work and get back to my life.

But, you know, the great resignation is real.

There are millions of missing workers.

We don't quite know where they are.

I think some of that, by the way, will change as people spend on those savings and realize they have to go back to work.

But, you know, if you're a two-family household and you were spending $40,000 a year on childcare and the second income was only $60,000 a year, you might say, well, what's my trade-off here?

So I think that stuff is healthy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Scott.

Stop absorbing all of this.

I teach second-year MBA students.

What do you think are the major takeaways from the pandemic?

And what advice would you give to someone starting their career

that might be different than the advice you would have given them in a pre-pandemic world?

I think,

and I started my career as a sports reporter.

So, like, you talk about the value of a replacement player, right?

I think for a lot of the 2010s in corporate management, the value of a replacement was really low.

It just wasn't really low.

Wait, hold on, hold on.

You started as a sports reporter?

Yeah, in college.

Jesus Christ, you are the perfect woman.

Jesus, you let me, I'm being funny.

I mean this seriously, Le Liz, and I'll get back to your question.

I think you are so fucking impressive.

I have loved this interview.

I think you are so eloquent, so hard-hitting.

Anyways, I'm sorry, back to you.

Thank you, Scott.

That's awfully nice of you.

Okay, that was the crushed part.

Okay.

The job just wasn't that hard for a lot of the 2010s, right?

Debt was cheap.

Stocks went up.

You had this incredibly benign backdrop.

You might have been faced with one or two strategic decisions.

I think that era is fundamentally over.

Like, again, we've talked, I think the economy will rebound, but this idea,

you know, this, this sort of like this steady liberal march towards like a global borderless economy, right, is just totally on.

And geopolitics are going to be a huge part of the job going forward.

Domestic politics are incredibly fractured.

We're seeing, you know, the sort of culture wars that CEOs are grappling with now.

I think the DNA of that is firmly in the pandemic.

Yeah, you saw it with the Disney move.

Exactly.

They just cut their head off.

Totally.

There was this huge vacuum of public sector leadership and CEOs, I mean, you know this, like they're all kind of living this sort of great man of history lifetime movie in their heads all the time.

And for mostly admirable, but also a lot of ego-related reasons, kind of stepped into that breach.

And, you know, I think we're at the bottom of that.

I hope we're at the bottom, somewhere on that slippery slope,

which is, you know, that, yes, like a Disney situation where, you know, he lost his job over it.

And also, though, now they've stepped in and taken care of Ron DeSantis in the problem they had with him.

Maybe they haven't finished playing, but I think they did outplay him in many, many ways.

And so they, or Tim Cook stepping in to deal with advertising or someone else when our government doesn't.

Actually, I do have one more question.

Why did you leave the journal for semaphore?

Well, you know my boss, Ben Smith, very well.

Yes, very well.

He makes a very good pitch.

No, listen, I loved the journal.

I have a lot of respect for legacy media.

I think personally, I was at a place in my career where I'd been doing it long enough that it wasn't insane to take a risk and see if I could do it outside of the umbrella.

Also, you know, that's a weird moment in media.

There's declining trust in institutions of all kinds, but sort of an increasing affinity for individuals and lots of ways to tell stories.

And it sounded like fun, and it has been a total blast.

Isn't it fun?

Getting out?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I said, I don't like mama telling me what to do.

It's a really different world, isn't it?

It's kind of cool and challenging and risky, too.

That is absolutely working very hard.

Good.

Well, this book is fantastic.

It's called Cran Scott Loves You, apparently.

I suspect that's a good idea.

I'm still stunned that that you work for Ben Smith.

That makes no sense to me.

But, anyways, go ahead.

Give us time.

Give us time.

Ben is very good on the picking.

Crash Landing, the inside story of how the world's biggest companies survived an economy on the brink.

It's a terrific book.

I read it last night coming back from my trip, my own book trip, and it was excellent.

It gave me some ideas.

And I made a little tweaks as I was reading it and stuff like that.

Anyway, Liz Hoffman, thank you so much.

Congrats, Liz.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, guys.

Anyway, Scott, I'm glad I found your new co-host.

Here is Pivot with Scott Galloway and Liz Hoffman.

And what I like about it is her name's H, which means I'll be first.

I'll be first.

What an impressive woman.

She is.

She is.

I love the way she thinks.

Yeah, she's really impressive.

She's an impressive, yeah.

They're doing some really good stuff at Semaphore.

I mean, it's really hard to make a, both Puck and Semaphore, I read regularly and get a lot of wisdom from both of them and information.

Jessica Lessons one.

I get a lot of, I get a lot of, that's something I pay for, for example.

I will pay a ton ton of, I pay a lot of money for the Justicles.

I think it's $300 a year or something like that.

But I won't pay $7 for Twitter.

See, that's the whole thing.

I get value out of it.

If I got value out of it, I'd pay for it.

Anyway, Liz is really great.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for wins and fails.

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Okay, Scott, let's do some wins and fails.

I'm going to go first.

Okay.

Win.

Speaking of Disney, they have a movie called, it's going to be a big hit called Prom Pact.

They've updated the 80s teen movie about proms and stuff.

Like, what's the Molly Ringwold movie?

Oh, I'm going to blank.

16 Candles?

16 Candles.

They have done a version of that.

And they actually.

What, wildly racist?

No, no.

They throw back to it.

No, no, no.

It's so good.

It's so diverse.

It's crazy diverse.

But you know, it's because it's quite, it goes there with several different cultural issues, too.

And I was surprised.

I thought, in a good way, sort of whacking all around.

And I thought it was, it's called Prom Pact.

It's been a big hit on Disney Channel.

I love those movies i loved all the john hughes movies and it really updates it in a really fresh and interesting way with a really fun and margaret cho is in it which she she plays as student counselor but i just was really like i was like god disney knows how to make shit i just was like they really are good fantastic good at what they do and obviously the fail is all this this continued attacks on our institutions by donald trump it just and they they just keep going with them you know what i mean down down down um into the bottom of the barrel Oh, I feel like the institutions are hitting back.

Yeah, they are.

But nonetheless, it's just grotesque.

It's just grotesque.

At some point,

these Republicans have had every off-ramp they could with this guy, and they just don't.

So

it's a damaged and dying party in that regard.

So anyway, I just feel that's my feel.

But watch PromPack because it's totally enjoyable, and there's great costumes and palm dresses.

Nice.

Yeah.

Scott, go ahead.

Okay, so my win is the Tartan Army.

And that is, of course, the Scottish national football team, or as you call it, soccer, who

stunned the Spanish national team in the Euro and the qualifications or qualifying round for the Euro.

Okay.

The Euro's 2-zip.

And I mean, the Spanish national team is ranked third

to win the World Cup.

The Scottish team, national team didn't make, didn't qualify for the World Cup.

So for Scotland to go clean sheet and go 2-0 against Spain.

And this guy, Scott McTominay, who plays for Manchester United, he's a midfielder.

He was a striker for Scotland.

This is, I can't tell you how much this means to Scots.

And it was a great game, super exciting.

The same guy, Scott McTominay, scored,

had another two goals against Cyprus in another game.

This is huge.

So this is an enormous victory for the national team.

It was a great game, and it was just super exciting to watch.

And this young man is just incredible.

incredible and I don't know, just a ton of fun.

I've been watching it with my boys.

We got so much joy from it.

Anyways, my

win is the Tartan Army's victory over the Spanish national team.

My loss, my fail isn't nearly as much fun, but I'm fascinated with demographics.

And people are living longer as long as they make it to 40.

And that is in America, one in 25 American five-year-olds will die before their 40th birthday.

So 4% mortality rate of a five-year-old before they get to 40

in our peer countries, in other OECD countries, only one in 65 die before the 40th birthday.

And the reason why, as you might imagine, is number one, the number one cause of death of children and teens in the U.S.

is firearms.

So, basically, guns and deaths of despair have made the mortality rate of America's youth substantially higher than other OECD nations.

And that to me,

that data is so chilling that

we are

one of the most dangerous.

I mean, there's nothing less empathetic, there's nothing less successful, there's nothing less loving than creating a society where young people die sooner than other societies.

And I'm not talking about dying in wars.

I'm talking about dying at the hands of other Americans or as a function of

either the way we raise kids, social media, the fact that we have unfettered access to weapons of war.

But I mean, this stat is crazy.

One in 25, again, I'll repeat it, five-year-olds die before their 40th birthday.

That's 4%.

Meaning, if you're in a neighborhood with 50 kids, two are going to die before they hit 40.

And if you're in that same neighborhood in Europe, it's only going to be one.

I mean, it's just, it's just nuts.

And we always talk about firearms, and it's something that warrants warrants a lot of attention, but the problems go

even deeper.

We in our nation, and I think it comes back to the following, the average age of Americans is 38.

The average age of our elected representatives is 64.

Citizens United has let technology and pharmaceutical companies and guns manufacturers totally run over Washington.

And we don't have, we have minority rule.

Most Americans believe in some sort of gun control.

Most Americans believe that social media companies should be regulated.

And as a result, though, because money has literally perverted Washington, we don't have the will of the people.

And it's taking an enormous toll on our, obviously, our most valuable asset, our youth.

So my fail is that America fails to address what is really a real stain on the American story.

And that is our young people die at a faster rate than in our peer countries.

Yep.

You need those AR-15s.

It's ridiculous.

I would recommend a piece in the

Washington Post.

They've been doing a series of investigations and they're really fantastic about AR-15s and ownership of them.

It's not just overall gun.

They targeted this one gun particularly and it's really, they did an amazing job.

And it makes you realize the sickness at the heart of our country.

Something you suggested in the last episode I thought was really powerful and I had never thought of it.

And it's macabre and I think it would be really effective

is

Show them what it's like.

Show the bodies.

I think it would be really powerful, really powerful.

Or we could get inured to it.

I'd like to understand what would happen, but because people could be like, kind of want to look at it, but I don't think most people would, I think, especially if it's children.

I think it's

children is what you have to see, what it does to a child's body.

It rips it apart.

I mean, just like it's sickening.

Anyway, that was a very good fail, even though it was horrible.

Anyway, we want to hear from you.

Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 85551-Pivot.

Okay, Scott, that's the show.

And now you have your new co-host, Liz Hoffman.

So excited to bring you two together.

We're very excited about your upcoming podcast.

We'll be back on Friday for more.

Today's show was produced by Larry Naman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie Endertott engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burroughs and Miel Silverio.

Meo found me that great data on

youth mortality in the United States.

Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

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

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

If I don't see you sooner on the A3.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter junk.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.