Tech Stocks, Covid Sick Leave, The Winners of The Chip Shortage, and Guest Jonathan Greenblatt

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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.

So what's going on, Scott?

I'm in Las Vegas, Kara.

Why are you in Vegas?

Are you at CES?

Mostly for the prostitutes.

No, I'm speaking here today or I'm speaking in a gig that I committed to six months ago thinking, oh, Vegas, that'll be fun.

The pandemic will be over.

Wait, is CES still going on?

You didn't go to CES, correct?

No, I think CS was limited or cut down to two days.

Yeah.

I think CS is over.

Oh, I think so, too.

I was over for a while before the pandemic.

But

what are you speaking of in Vegas?

I'm doing my prediction stack for

a cast of 1,100 people.

I can't imagine 1,100 people coming to a conference in Vegas, much less to hear me talk about predictions.

But here we are.

Here we are.

Here we are.

What did you do for fun in Vegas?

What did I do?

I double masked, did remote check-in, came to my room, and watched the morning show.

I like the morning show.

Do you?

It's all about the pandemic, though, at the end.

I mean, it's really fun.

I got to admit it.

I didn't like it.

I was angry at how much money they spent and how marginal it was.

And it's totally sucked me in.

It's totally sucked me in.

Yeah.

But you watched it.

Yeah, I've watched both seasons now.

Let me just tell you, watch Yellowstone.

Get onto the Yellowstone train.

Yeah, people.

Get on the Yellowstone train.

I'm going to interview the creator.

I want to interview you.

Yeah, he's very good.

You know what?

It's, it's not like this whole thing about it being the Midwest.

It's not the Midwest.

It's like, so, it's so dynasty, it's dynasty over and over again, like, essentially.

And he's terrific, I have to say.

And they're like Kevin Costner?

Yeah, the woman who plays his daughter, Beth, who's really a hot, hot, hot mess.

She's fantastic.

She's fantastic.

Everybody is.

It's really good.

You'll like it.

Watch it.

You'll enjoy it.

You will not regret my recommendation.

But today, we're going to talk about the New York Times bet on sports and Tesla coding its way out of the chip shortage.

We'll speak to Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League about authoritarianism.

He has a new book out and why it may be here to stay.

I don't think it ever left.

But first, 2022 is off to a rocky start for tech shareholders.

Prices are down Monday morning following a week of sinking numbers.

This comes after CES, you just mentioned, where the industry tries to impress with big announcements.

It really is pointless at this point, actually.

Both GameStop and Samsung say they'll launch NFT marketplaces.

GameStop's stock briefly rose on the news, but it fell with other tech stocks on money.

It doesn't even deserve to go up.

Anyway, meanwhile, PayPal says it's exploring its own stablecoin backed by the US dollar.

There's a lot going on, but we talk about the stock market.

It's not my area of expertise.

It is yours comparatively.

Yeah, I wouldn't describe it as my area of expertise.

It's just something, you know, I play a stock expert on TV.

But anyways,

what people miss is that stock market, people always look for some sort of underlying cause.

I think it's two things.

And the thing they miss is that the bond market has a huge impact on stocks.

And bonds have had such terrible risk-adjusted returns.

I mean, you're basically getting negative rates if you factor in inflation.

And bond yields have been surging, which just makes them

more attractive relative to stocks that people have been reallocating out of stocks into bonds.

And then they think, well, what do I reallocate out of?

And I'm like, I know.

I'll pick stocks whose valuations, let me think, make absolutely no fucking sense.

And also have at all-time highs, right?

That's right.

And they just got so out in front of their skis, whether it was Virgin Galactic.

I mean, just in my proxy for whether the stock could go down 80 or 90 percent is

stocks, again, trade on fundamentals, the earnings or the growth accelerate or decelerate.

Technicals, sometimes a stock is oversold, overbought, or there's a short squeeze or a mob squeeze.

And then the third and the newer one is the notion that it represents some sort of movement

last week.

And the movement trade is unwinding like crazy.

The Robin Hood Traders are done or what?

And it's, it's, um, so you're just seeing these guys.

And not only that, I mean, GameStock,

120, but it's still GameStop could still go down another 80%.

There's still a lot of air that could be let out of this balloon.

Right.

And so that's what people are just like taking a moment.

Now, it's interesting because you talked about TechSox being still the best investment going forward.

So is that an opportunity to buy, as they say?

I mean,

what I said was when we were talking about last week, I think on a, if you're a venture capitalist or an investor, I think a diversified portfolio of tech investments at the seed stage and venture and growth stage,

those vintage funds are just likely going to perform better because you can have a snowflake that might go up 80x.

The tech trade, I mean, the other, if you're like me and you're old and you're boomer, you have certain truisms of the market.

And one of them is fundamentals that at some point companies, you are, a stock is meant to be an underlying ownership in an asset that is supposed to return cash flows.

And ultimately, it returns to that.

type of valuation or fundamentals.

The other truism is cyclicality.

And the U.S.

tech trade has been on fire for 12 or 13 years.

And I realize it's the future.

And there is tremendous innovation there.

But I, you know, and again, instead of giving recommendations, I'll just say what I'm doing.

I'm slowly but surely taking money off the table out of the tech trade, which has been the gift that keeps on giving for the last 13 years.

I'm putting money in real estate because I think it's a more enduring trade.

And just psychologically, it's less taxing because you don't get a scorecard every day.

And two, I'm investing in European and Latin American stocks because the thing we have learned through the markets is at some point, flows do return to other sectors and flow out of even the hottest sectors.

And the U.S.

tech trade at some point will run out of breath.

Does that mean they aren't great companies and won't do really well?

No.

What it means is they just might be overvalued at this point.

Yeah.

What do you think about all these coins?

Like Facebook Coin, do you think PayPal Coin, these moves into that, speaking of assets people are moving into?

Everywhere I go, like PayPal right now, I just was paying someone, a vendor, and a cleaning lady actually on PayPal.

And all of a sudden, I was like presented with please buy these coins.

And I was like, oh, hi, nice to see you it was interesting who I say more who was this is PayPal PayPal it was offering me there's a there's a whole section now to buy and trade and these and they have I think Ethereum was on there Bitcoin I forget what else was on there I didn't really look I was like huh okay sure like but I didn't but then I thought about it like I sure did think about it I mean I know a lot of people have little bits and pieces of of Bitcoin etc

Yeah, look, I think there's just so much human capital and financial capital going into crypto that there's going to be a lot of enduring innovation.

And

I like the fact that for the first time, the same proportion of people of color are investing.

They've been drawn into that market.

They like it.

Young people like it.

I think I made the mistake of infantilizing people who are investing in crypto early on.

But the boomer in me just emerges and says that

Bitcoin has established itself in terms of scarcity, credibility.

It might be sort of a new, if you will, store of value.

Ethereum is mentioned whenever you're talking about NFTs or smart contracts, it kind of reverse engineers to

Ethereum or Ethereum as the protocol or the coin or the technology for a lot of these new innovations.

I think the vast majority of these coins are going to zero.

And

it's the nightmare scenario here, Kara, is that the communities...

The communities that were incorporated into crypto and that everyone's advertising is this is a great egalitarian democratization of assets.

You know, my fear fear is a lot of the shit goes down 90%.

And exactly the wrong people at exactly the wrong moment get hurt the hardest.

And my colleague Aswat DeMotorin would say, well, Scott, life lessons are the best regulators.

And I'm like, I get it, but

I just think that you're going to have a lot of young people and a lot of communities that are under the impression that you use leverage in these.

One thing I'm comfortable saying, never use leverage or margin to buy cryptocurrency.

Also, don't be drunk.

There's a study out there.

59% of Gen Z investors trade well.

Tell us about that article.

I know that was weird.

It was, yeah, 59% of Gen Z investors say they've traded well.

And it's one of these.

I don't know if it's true.

And it widened out to all investors.

The number only drops to 32%.

So people trade well drunk.

I don't know.

I'm not sure.

Well, it's the same reason that people mate while they're drunk.

And that is alcohol is a social lubricant, and it lowers your inhibitions.

So you'll go up and talk to that.

guy or gal you're attracted to and there's some benefit to that yeah but should you be lowering your inhibitions when you're trading stocks?

I don't know if that goes one of these.

Speaking of which, nowhere good.

Amazon workers now only get seven days of paid leave down from 10 days.

A policy change follows new guidance from the CDC.

Obviously, Amazon's been hiring so many people.

This comes as the U.S.

has averaged around 650,000 new known cases per day, and 5 million U.S.

workers were forced to stay homeless.

It was crazy.

Like my kids' school,

my Clara's school is three kids were there.

And like they're, there's all, they're sort of,

it's really interesting everywhere you go whether it's a garbage pickup or whatever this week it's people are out kind of thing this you know and you know we had it in our family now it's done i guess we'll see um but um they have they say they have additional leave options in place for those who remain symptomatic but they're sort of cutting the time to keep people working so this is a really interesting challenge like walmart all the restaurants are suffering um you know every every city you'll see a story about restaurant workers or whatever so what do you think about this?

It probably will burn itself out in a short amount of time.

Well, we all fall into a narrative that makes us feel better.

And kind of the first narrative was, oh, it was going to take the summer off,

small surge and fall and then be gone.

And here we are two years later.

And the narrative, and I've adopted it, and I'm really hoping, is that when you see infections up three and a half fold, but you see deaths flat or down, and true, there is a lag.

You're hoping that the virus does what a lot of viruses do towards the quote-unquote burnout phase, and that is they're becoming more contagious but less lethal.

Yeah.

And we're, in a certain way, you know, we're giving, I don't want to say we're giving people a lot of immunities, but I'm just very hopeful that we'll look back.

You know, it's interesting.

I said the same thing to my brother.

I said, oh, I'm so sick.

I'm just going to like, what the hell?

It's just deaths are down.

If you're vaccinated, you're safer, et cetera.

And he goes, Carrie, you're not thinking of, you know, young children, but they are certainly going in the hospital, not at rates compared to.

And then he he said

immunocompromised people.

He made me feel bad.

Dr.

Swisher made me feel bad.

Oh, there's no doubt about it.

I really thought about it, and I wasn't a good citizen.

I went out this, for the first time in a while.

I went out this weekend, and I remember just being in certain situations thinking, I'm just not being a good citizen

being here.

I do think that there's something around.

I think when something becomes so contagious that the kind of Chinese lockdown doesn't work, and at the same time, it doesn't appear as lethal, I do think that there is some credence to the notion that we need to rethink the calculus around lockdowns.

Yeah.

And

we even had a doctor, we have a really talented doctor

who's on the board of our school where my kids go.

And she said, I don't think we should be testing.

And I said, gosh, tell me more about what you, why you think that.

And she said that the lockdowns and the hysteria around kids is doing more damage than having kids infect each other.

And I'm like, wow, walk me through that math.

And this is not, this is thoughtful.

That sounds very DeSantis to me, but go ahead.

Yeah.

Well, but and I don't, I'm not a fan of DeSantis, but it is true that when you, when, when the data changes, you need to change your calculus around what it means to have a lockdown.

Anyways, like Ian Bremer, the, uh, the, the geopolitical kind of rock star, he's, he's basically said that the Chinese extreme lockdown was the right way to go, and now it's absolutely the wrong way to go.

Yeah.

Um, anyways, it, but record, I mean, there's just no getting around it.

And it's just so kind of like

I think you're seeing more

what Amazon is doing.

Like, look, just get back to work, doesn't matter.

Like, I think there's very little patience now for

because there's a vaccination.

Let me just tell you, everyone that was doing this before there was a vaccination, I'm still saying, fuck you, you know, saying this, get back to work.

But now there's a vaccination.

People who can take it can take it.

So I think that it's a really interesting moment, like, because teachers aren't getting the same amount of like gratitude from people at this moment over if they don't go to school.

There's a big fight in Chicago.

Some people who I did not expect to tweet about, I think it's Nicole Hannah Jones, was like, just because we're saying you need to go back to something like that with school or not, this and that.

It was really interesting.

Like people are coming down, especially people with kids are like, wait a minute, we're vaccinated.

We did everything right.

I recommend Dr.

Wachter on,

there's several articles about it.

He's from San Francisco.

I think it's UCSF.

He did a whole thing on his own son getting sick and what he did.

It was really interesting.

He's been a prominent tweeter on this topic.

Anyway, it's going to, we'll see.

I think most people will follow Amazon.

I think people are like, look, if you're vaccinated, I think the Jared Paulus thing is with people who are vaccinated.

If you're unvaccinated, you are in very,

do not do that.

Do not do that to yourself and do not do that to other people.

But very tough.

How is your family?

Most importantly, how is your family?

Oh, they're good.

They're out of prison.

They're out of COVID prison.

And Claire and I and Louie continue to, we did test.

She has to test for school negative.

So, you know, we'll see.

We're pretty careful, but you know, not like demented.

Like, there's, there's a, there's definitely a strain of too far on the careful side, I think, that is problematic, but not as bad as the crazy unvaccinated people.

Anyway, time for our first big story.

2022 is already looking like a big year for media.

This is an interesting buy, which was long rumored.

The New York Times will buy the Athletic for $550 million.

The Athletic had 1.2 million subscribers as of November.

Still, the Athletic is not profitable.

I have some insight information on this, not from the Times, actually,

from other buyers.

I talked to a bunch of other buyers.

It previously pegged 2023 as the year that would change.

In other news, Reddit may go public by March.

It's seeking a $15 billion valuation.

I've always liked that site.

I thought it was fascinating.

And Parler, who I just interviewed, this new CEO, George Farmer, has raised $20 million in new funding

in that competitive space of sort of free speech/slash conservative.

It's conservative.

It is.

He was trying to pretend it wasn't, but it's all conservatives that are attached to it.

So, what do you think about this athletic purchase?

You were on the board of the New York Times.

What they want to do is as a subscription service in sports.

They want to get to local sports.

The question is whether these subscribers are very sticky, is a good question, and how much they, you know, they came in on these discount rates and what the Times can do for that.

And then also,

what's going to happen to the company?

Because there's a lot of people there that are sort of, you know, they have two sets of marketing people, two sets of this, two sets of that.

What do you think about this?

Well, there's a lot here.

And I think both of us know too much.

It's hard to read the label from inside of the bottle.

But the New York Times are terrible acquirers.

They acquired the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion.

Yep.

Ended up selling it for $70 million.

We acquired About.com for $400 million.

Oh, that was terrible.

Yeah.

That was terrible.

Sold it for a lot less than that.

We acquired under the auspices of this makes no fucking sense.

This is when you were on the board.

Well, it was before.

I mean, the reason I went on the board was like, these things made no sense, divest them.

Yeah.

We essentially bought the seventh tallest building in America.

What the hell was the New York Times doing owning the seventh largest

tallest building in America?

So, anyways, they're not, it's a very strong culture.

And the thing about wirecutter, we did well.

That was a good first time.

Did it?

Yeah, I think it's doing a good thing.

Yeah, I just don't know.

I mean, there's probably some examples.

The thing that just that

triggered a memory for me was when you go on the board, the first thing you do is they send you down to something called a page one meeting that doesn't exist any longer.

And all the editors of the sections go around the table and pitch their idea for top of the fold page one.

And they're like, Hillary Clinton, African.

And then someone else saying, you know, new legislation.

And then I remember the sports guy trying to pitch his thing and everyone just rolling their eyes like they were going to laugh at him.

Like, finally, like, I mean, it just sports.

Sports did not get a lot of love at the New York City.

It does now.

It does.

They do great sports thing.

But you know what?

I kind of like this one because it's interesting.

Newspapers used to, they were the bundlers.

Now they're unbundling because what they recognize is that news and politics or current events can't get that much money, but finance can, crypto can, sports can.

And a move to subscription, again, is the way to go with niche deep offerings.

So you were just doing a backhanded compliment there.

You like this deal.

I do because one, I'm just...

That was sort of shocking.

That's almost a lot of their capital.

Well, you know what?

The New York Times, which came dangerously close to bankruptcy in 2008, has a billion dollars in cash on their balance sheet.

So they would either have to increase the dividend, do a stock buyback,

but they get on their toes.

And

they buy it for like, I don't know, whatever it is, like $500 a subscriber.

Yeah.

But I mean, there's some scary stuff here.

It's

$50 or $60 million in revenue, $50 million in losses, which is real.

They're going to have to increase it.

I always thought my big idea, one of my ideas when I was on the board was I'm like, take deal book, put some more heft behind it, and make it charge $1,000 a year to basically be kind of a thinking man's idea.

A thinking man's Bloomberg.

But the idea of unbundling niche offerings, subscription, value-added services, events, and charge people more.

I just, the New York Times and sports, we'll see.

I wonder what the public is.

Well, they've done it in podcasting.

They've made some very significant purchases, cereal and some others.

Cereal.

But we don't know how.

Vox is buying one.

New York Times is buying other.

It's interesting.

I know Vox was interested.

I know Vox looked at this one.

But

it's we couldn't afford it.

Or didn't want to afford it, right?

Maybe there's other things to afford.

That would have been a big, big bet the ranch bite for us.

Yeah, yeah.

In any case, you like this one.

And just because you make bad purchases later doesn't mean you can't make good purchases now.

So you like this one overall.

I think I heard that in this great show called Yellowstone.

We're going to buy those cattle.

We're going to buy those steer.

The steer moves around a lot in that show.

There's a lot of steel.

Yellowstone.

That's about like this resort in Montana where the biggest douchebags in the world go for Christmas.

Well, you know what?

There is a whole douchebag, rich people making resorts.

There's a whole stream of that.

There's a character who does that.

But get back to this.

You think this could be a good deal?

What would have to happen to make it a good deal?

If the New York Times can become the premier place that gets large margin subscriptions based on unbundled, focused niche offerings, whether it's deal books.

They do it with their crossword puzzle.

They do it with their, I think, their cooking.

And then if they can establish credibility around sports, and I like this.

I think the founders of the athletic were really bold.

They went out, they hired a ton of sports journalists.

They spent a ton of money thinking there's a market in this.

And you know what?

They were playing chicken with the market because when you're losing 50 million bucks a year,

that's pretty scary.

And so I'm good for them.

I love it when entrepreneurs get taken out that are journalists that went out and said,

we're going to get the three best journalists covering the Green Bay Packers, and we're going to pay them well, and people are willing to pay for this.

I think the New York Times,

when they do their quarterly earnings call, can say,

we're the most robust subscription company in the world of aspirational, thoughtful, fact-checked, non-conspiratorial content.

I think that's a good wrap.

Whether or not they're able to

retention, the percentage of members that renew, and dollar renewal.

Are they able to increase rates or layer on more services, tickets, whatever?

We see the purchase of a lot more of these kinds of things.

I think it's a great idea.

I think it's an interesting move.

It's the first big move by Meredith Levian, who is the CEO.

Maybe we'll be talking to her somewhere live with warm weather at some point soon.

But hello.

You know, it's a big move by her, and I'd love to hear more of their thinking about this and how they're going to do it.

Execution is really the big deal here and changing a culture like the New York Times.

It is a much slower-moving moving culture.

It has been in the past, as you know, and I know.

But it's an interesting move.

It certainly is.

And I think they kind of had to do it.

I think they have to do stuff like this.

I think they got us to.

What about Reddit going public?

I'm just an enormous fan of Reddit, and I can't wait to read that

as one because any company, any content company that's able to exit the stranglehold of Google or Facebook is exciting.

And Reddit has gotten so much attention

over the last year, whether it's meme stocks, it's, you know, I love to know that people call it the front page of the internet.

I would just love to see the numbers in terms of their revenue and their advertising.

But for me, my first thought was when I heard Reddit, 15 billion, I immediately thought, that sounds cheap.

It seems to me that that's a.

I like that CEO, Steve Huffman.

I think he's terrific.

I think he's, I mean, he's, some people don't, but I do.

I think he's really, he's always been a really interesting thinker there.

I've always enjoyed interviewing him.

I've interviewed him several times.

And then Parler raising the money.

I know nothing about that.

What do do you think?

I think they had to raise the money.

It's fine.

There's not enough people there.

Like I said, you got to get everybody, everyone's got to be at this messy party.

It's got to be a hot mess.

And none of them are.

But we'll see.

We'll see if they can offer something to their constituency.

I just think young people aren't going to jump on these things, including Trump's True Social, which is expected to launch on President's Day.

It's going to be a lot of Marjorie Taylor Greene screaming at each other, and that's no fun.

Right.

So we'll see.

I mean, what's going to

happen is there's going to be, I think there's going to be a lot more of these fundings and and acquisitions in the media.

This is the media space, no matter how you slice it, right?

Parlor is the media space.

So is Reddit, right?

So I think there'll be cuts, you know, cuts in staff.

I think they're going to lay off people.

I think they're going to have to, like, you don't know if you're bringing these things together, if they work, but you're going to see a lot more equity strengths in this.

We'll see.

We'll see if people will use it.

I don't think young people are using conservatives are using these things.

I think they're using Twitter, if they're using it at all.

So we'll see.

There's a lot of them.

There's a whole lot of them.

There's Parlor, there's getter there's trump social there's rumble there's there's others i forget there's signal there's there's i can't remember all of them it's a lot it's the tension and the these are networks and how do you get to that kind of network tipping a point so it'll be interesting to see what they're i'm i'm really interested to see what happens like day one of the of the the trump thing yeah just we're gonna

get going on there you and i are gonna do it we're gonna wade right in there we're doing it yeah we're doing we're going behind enemy lines what's your name what's your name gonna be i'm grandmaster flash no come on something dirty i don't know

yes to see if they knock us off no i you know what they do first off they'd be really nice to us it's like i don't know they'll be really they'll be really cool to us that would be my guess we should go on okay we're signing up full names we're gonna go on i'm on i'm on parlor and and getter and i'm not on rumble because it's super noisy there's a secret dirty part of you that likes ultra conservatives you kind of

occasionally i can can sense it with you.

There's like a weird

percent.

I speak to them as opposed to other people because I want to hear what they're saying.

You know, I used to like always read

when

Focus on Family was attacking gay people.

I read everything they did.

I want to know what they're up to.

All right, we're going to take a quick break.

And when we come back, we'll discuss Tesla and the chip shortage.

And then we'll talk to a friend of Pivot about authoritarianism.

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Scott, we're back with our second big story.

2021's chip shortage made some surprising winners and losers.

Toyota was America's top-selling automaker in 2021, taking the title from GM.

Toyota's success is credited to a large stockpile of semiconductors, which helped it weather supply chain issues that hit the automotive industry last year.

Meanwhile, Tesla

adapted to the chip shortage by rewriting its software so it could run on different chips.

Elon Musk has done a soup-to-nuts kind of supply chain at Tesla, which a lot of people thought was terrible, and it turned out to be a good thing during this supply chain shortage.

It manufactures its own chips, writes its own software, something that people used to make fun of.

So, and the idea of having vendors was another thing.

People make fun that they didn't have enough vendors.

So what do you think about all this?

It's not like it's perfectly good news from us.

There was actually a complimentary story in the New York Times, but he also had to recall a half a million vehicles.

And some other stuff that was happening.

A showcase tunnel beneath Vegas was clogged with traffic during CES, for example.

But this was a win by him.

So what do you think, Scott?

Yeah, as much as I'd like to criticize someone who criticizes me, I just don't think you can get around it.

I think what they've pulled off here is remarkable and visionary.

And

I just always go back to this, this, what was supposed to be an absolute business strategy.

And that was the notion promoted by Sikhiprahala, University of Michigan, and that was core competence.

And that is you do one thing really well and you outsource everything else.

And the last 20 or 30 years, the most impressive companies in the world have been in a lesson in why that is absolutely not true.

And

even Apple kicking out Intel, everyone

totally questioned that.

And they started producing their own microprocessors.

And they're like, our point of differentiation and our user interface and the way we interact with software is so unique that we need to process the brain here.

And to outsource the brain means our differentiation will be commoditized.

And if you look at the Wintel environment in terms of the margins they get versus the company that made the quote-unquote business crazy strategy of going total vertical, it's just increased verticalization.

And the notion that they weren't as subject to this chip shortage because they were able to go into other chips and reprogram them to supplant or basically to plug holes in other chip shortages.

I mean, there's just not going around it.

It's fucking genius.

Yeah, this story in the times is really interesting.

And this is a key line, I thought.

Just a few years ago, analysts saw Elon Musk's insistence on having Tesla do more things on its own as one of the main reasons the company was struggling to increase production.

And Musk did talk about that.

He talked about me in an interview lots of places.

Now his strategy appears to have been vindicated.

And then one quote, Tesla controlled its destiny.

I think on critical things it did.

And

he's a perfectionist in a lot of the ways that Steve Jobs was.

It's interesting.

Like they have to do it this way.

And this is the way we do it.

It's a common trait which can be much pilloried.

And, you know, the whole idea of this whole vendor, they sell the cars themselves.

There's not like, they don't have to deal with,

you know, franchises and this and that.

And And this, just everything they do is, we are making the entire biscuit right here.

And I think it's an interesting,

and, you know, it may switch.

A lot of people in my comments said, and then it's going to

switch back, you know, where vendors will be better.

But one of the person who was responding said he's been playing chess while most of us were playing checkers.

I commend Elon Musk for having a boatload of foresight.

There's not getting right.

If you look at the automobile manufacturers, they're really not manufacturers.

They're assemblers.

assemblers.

And that has really come to haunt them in a supply chain,

you know, in a supply chain crisis.

And if you look at the most successful retailers, they've also gone fully vertical, whether it's Lululemon, which has its own,

has it, makes its own materials and has its own stores, its own distribution.

If you look at Amazon, they've gone vertical in what appeared to be crazy, and that is they've forward integrated into the actual fulfillment and delivery and last mile.

If you look at the other side of retail that's just done exceptionally well at the high end, the luxury end.

So Gucci acquired or purchased a Python farm so they could control the quality of their bags.

But that's where it's going.

The firms that want to maintain differentiation and margin are going vertical.

And then the ability to control your destiny and not be subject to the whims of supply chain interruption.

I'm blown away, Kara.

I'm blown away.

I'm a reticulated Python of IQ right now.

Regardless of how we feel about him, personally, one has to admit the guy thinks and solves problems differently.

Oh, no doubt.

So, what others thought

perhaps we shouldn't be surprised?

Clayton Christensen argued in one of his earlier papers that when performance was not yet good enough, the integrated manufacturer had the advantage.

And it's true, this was the early times of these cars.

So, I think it's just interesting.

I think it was, I got a lot of really interesting responses.

Someone called the New York Times piece, a grudging vindication.

Is this a grudging vindication from you?

I think it was your phrasing.

No, it's not a grudging indication.

I just don't get it.

Look, the definition of intelligence is your ability to hold two contrary thoughts in your mind at the same time.

Brilliant man, amazing company, fucking wildly overvalued stock, and at some point his inner child will develop an outer man.

I can hold all of those thoughts in my head at the same time, and so can you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Last thing I'm going to read.

These comments were so good.

Vertical integration is very hard and bloody expensive to set up, but once it's there, you have full control and can adjust to changes very quickly.

It's a complex, but comparable version of having feature teams in Agile.

So anyway, interesting time.

And then Toyota, let's not leave out Toyota.

They were also, it's an Agile company.

It's an Agile company, and it's still the top selling.

I mean, compared to Tesla, it's so much bigger.

So

both companies, and actually, I almost bought a Toyota because they were available too, because everyone was trying to buy cars.

And at the same time, their cars were great, both at the same time.

You have very strange taste in cars.

I do.

I'm not down with your tasting cars.

You have very strange tasting cars.

I'm going to drive the Kia down to your house in Florida and just park it out front and embarrass you.

That's what I do.

I park it right out front, the Kia.

You know what I did?

I'm so angry.

I am so angry that Elon Musk got to my 11-year-old who asked me what a numb skull meant.

I have a Tesla and I banged up the front, the front, the front fender in a small parking mishap.

And I'm not going to fix it.

I'm going to put like duct tape on it like teenagers do with no money.

Like when I had no money and I bang up my my car, I just put like a sticker over it or something.

I've got one of those, I've ordered one of those roof signs from Hooters.

I'm going to put it on my Tesla.

I'm going to, I'm going to take that brown, bran down single-handedly, Tara.

Actually, one thing a friend of mine who has a Tesla, who loves Tesla, said the service stuff is harder, found it harder at the time.

Maybe this is because it was Silicon Valley and everybody's got one, but she was having issues around that.

Anyway, interesting times.

And again, you know, they're going to have problems.

They did have to recall things on, there's a couple of little things that were problematic.

And obviously, he's still going to struggle with accidents that happen once people move into autonomous.

But I have to say, impressive, impressive, impressive, as I say.

No getting around it.

It says I'm too nice to it.

Hold on.

Stocks so wildly overvalued.

Sorry, can't help it.

Can't help it.

Numbskull.

Can't help it.

Insufferable.

Insufferable.

You insufferable numbskull.

Okay, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Jonathan Greenblatt is the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.

He previously served as special assistant to President Obama and the director of the Office of Social Innovation, whatever that is.

He can explain that.

His new book, It Could Happen Here, Why America is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable and How We Can Stop It, is out now.

Tell us what you're thinking about with this terrible title.

Well, I don't mean terrible bad.

I mean,

no, I mean, I think, look, we are in a, I think we have reached a perilous moment in our country's history.

You know, the ADL has been fighting hate for over 100 years, and yet I don't think we've ever seen a time quite like this.

I think oftentimes we talk about anti-Semitism as the canary in the coal mine for society, and it's a sign of decay.

And indeed, in the last few years, there have been multiple symptoms of a kind of social decay that I think have reached an alarming crescendo.

And to be speaking now, kind of in the shadow of the one-year anniversary of January 6th, is just no accident.

So explain what unthinkable is.

Explain what you, what is unthinkable?

Because hate is bad enough, right?

And that's something we've spent a lot of time, and you and I have talked about in the past.

We have.

So

what's the difference from hate to the unthinkable?

I think the unthinkable for me speaks to

the total breach of our social fabric.

It is the unraveling of what we know today.

And, you know, there's been talk

by the experts, like we interviewed Greg Stanton for the book.

I spoke to him.

He's an expert in genocide who says that all the indicators are telling us that this country is at a place where it never has been vis-a-vis the risk to marginalized communities.

I spoke to Barbara Walter, a professor out on the West Coast,

who talks about the fact that all the indicators suggest that we might be closer to a kind of civil war than we've seen in the past.

And it doesn't need to look like the North versus the South, and I don't think it would.

It might look a lot more like the troubles in Northern Northern Ireland.

And I talk to folks in St.

Louis from the Bosnian-American community who talk about what happened to them.

I mean, keep in mind that before Yugoslavia dissolved, it was a very successful, you know, pluralistic society where you had different ethnicities and different religions living side by side for hundreds and hundreds of years.

But, you know, Kara, for me personally, these issues hit home much closer to that.

So I'm the grandson of a Holocaust survivor from Germany who spoke to me before he passed, my grandfather, who I dedicated the book to, about the fact that when he was a young man growing up in Germany, it was the only country he had ever known.

His family traced their lineage back generations.

My great-grandfather fought in the First World War, and he never could have imagined that, again, his homeland would turn on him, destroy everything that he ever loved, slaughter almost all of his family and friends, and send him fleeing to this country.

And I am the husband of a political refugee from Iran, also Jewish, whose family traced their lineage back hundreds, they would say thousands of years to the Babylonian exile.

And they never would have imagined before the Islamic Revolution that the only country they ever knew would turn on them, regard them as enemies of the state, and force my wife to flee.

and her family to flee and come to this country.

So I think my wife's experience, my grandfather's experience tells me that

all this,

the only thing we have ever known, there is no natural law that tells us it will last forever.

So the American experiment is the American experiment.

And look, I will be honest, like I am someone who believes in American exceptionalism.

I think this country for its first 250 some odd years has been a light unto the world.

And we haven't gotten everything right, but the ability to iterate and evolve is unique in human history.

But, you know, again, all the indicators that I see from ADL, doubling of anti-Semitic incidents, steady increase in hate across the board, the coarsening of the public conversation,

deepening gridlock in DC, which I've seen up close and personal, all suggest to me that, again, we've reached a really perilous moment.

Yeah, it's so nice to meet you.

I really do appreciate all your work, Jonathan.

It's such important work.

And we have this cold comfort that it couldn't happen here.

And if you look at, which is absolutely not true, if you look at Germany, pre-World War II, it was this incredibly advanced, cosmopolitan, science-driven, educated.

There was this formidable gay rights movement in Germany pre-World War II.

And then it digresses fast.

And there's always a playbook, right?

It's a strong man propped up by conservatives who usually think they're going to be able to control this person.

And then it gets out of hand.

And we go to very dark places.

The thing I don't think gets enough attention, and this really is a question and a comment, is that the incendiary here is income inequality and specifically young men who aren't doing well, not attaching to relationships, not attaching to school, not attaching to work, that are prone to conspiracy theory.

And then a strong man comes along and says, this isn't your fault, rise up.

Have you thought about in America,

relatively speaking, that young men are just doing so poorly relative to past cohorts that that is a huge existential crisis, that that could lead us to a very dark place?

Well, I think it's certainly true that persistent economic inequities and the kind of inability to fulfill this long-held notion of the American dream, at least in the conventional way in which it's been thought about and sort of mythologicized, contribute to

a kind of animus that is growing, Scott.

and that's building.

I would actually say, though, I don't think it's unique to young men.

I mean, the reality is if you look at, for example, the people who, and by the way, neither not young men nor necessarily like the unemployed.

If you look at the people who were marauding through the Capitol a year ago, there were a large number of small businessmen and kind of people with criminal records.

No criminal records.

Middle class and married.

We found at ADL that 21% of them had known white supremacist ties of the people who were arrested, which is kind of galling, by the way, you'd see such a critical mass of them show up in public.

But the more frightening thing is the 80%

who had no extremist ties whatsoever.

I mean, so there's a radicalization that I think is happening, and it's not delimited to one subset of the population.

I think it's a working class issue.

I think it is a geographically distributed issue.

But I think a lot of the people who watch Fox and a lot of the people who believe this baloney

don't necessarily fit to the stereotypical way that we've thought about those who are prone to radicalization.

So you mentioned Fox, and the perception is it's Fox and then Trump that's just arrived.

Is that accurate or where do you see the sources?

And obviously you and I have talked a lot about social media, which has been a problem.

That's been the recent thing that's sort of set people off to the edge.

So can you, where do you imagine it comes from?

Also, we have been authoritarian in the past.

It just has been more effective for the people in power than anything else.

So I think there are a couple of things on that.

I mean, number one, vis-a-vis what's driving this.

Again, the economic inequities, but I do think our our media culture, all right, can fuel the fire.

And we certainly see that here.

We've talked about Fox before.

I've been very public in my back and forth with Lachlan Murdoch.

I mean, freedom of speech, you know, as our mutual friend Sasha Baron Cohen talks about, never equated in American history to freedom of reach.

And so, you know, iHeartRadio and Bob Pittman have a lot of podcasts,

but when they choose to privilege Steve Steve Bannon, you know, with their platform, they are making an editorial decision.

Steve Bannon can say whatever he wants.

The question is, where does he find sustenance?

Same with Terry Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, and the Ilk.

I think Fox, we will look back in history and see Fox as our provider.

But the problem is that it is indeed Facebook, which is a kind of accelerant for all of this anti-Semitism, racism, and bigotry.

And it has done more to fuel the fire than I think anything else.

And, you know, that's not uniquely an American phenomenon.

We know what their, what their platform and their products have done in places like India, Myanmar, other parts of Europe have been well documented.

But here in particular, Facebook, again, today, we could literally share a screen and we could find examples of armed militia groups who they're continuing to algorithmically amplify in ways that boggle the mind.

And I think the lack of any government oversight.

And I say this as somebody who, as we've talked about care, like, look, I come from the industry.

I worked in this space.

And I'm someone who believes in self-regulation almost reflexively.

But Mark Zuckerberg has proven to me again and again and again and again that that no longer works when you have a company that puts, in his own words, you know, company over country.

And you guys but you guys tried, right?

You tried with your effort with other groups, with color change.

We tried and we tried.

Well, look, there's a couple of things with with our interaction with facebook like we initially tried to be very embracing and inclusive because again i think you got to work with industry if we're relying on these senators with their hot mail email addresses to regulate you know quantum computing and crypto god help us

And yet, you know, although we tried to be inclusive in the conversation with Facebook, they failed again and again and again and just seemed to be...

When Mark made his comments about the fact that he thinks there's a legitimate perspective that maybe the Holocaust didn't happen,

that was a bit of a sort of, that was a bit of a tell.

He was on with some hack journalist when he said that.

I know what he was talking about.

John called me almost immediately.

Look at Kara smiling.

Look at Kara smiling.

I'm not smiling.

You gave him the chance to walk it back.

Oh, you're like, oh, is that really what you meant to say?

But all that being said, you know, that's why we launched Stop 8 for Profit, you know, with the NAACP and Color of Change.

Did you consider that successful in any way?

I did consider that successful because what we did there, look, we never thought we were going to get businesses to pull off the most sophisticated targeting platform in the history of advertising.

What we wanted to do was bring to bear reputational pressure, and that worked.

And I think that sort of for the first time set them back on their heels.

And they did classify Holocaust denialism as hate speech after that.

They did take down a lot of white supremacist groups.

They did agree to work with the World Federation of Advertisers on a bit of an audit for the first time.

So they made some concessions, but they're, you know, trillions of dollars later.

You know, I mean, their last quarter was, I think, 29 billion in counting.

So

they are so big.

They are such a behemoth that we've got to do more if we really want to put a dent in the issue.

I would argue, and I say this collectively, like I use the term we as a collective that see the problem here are threatened by it.

I don't think it's working.

I think these advertiser boycotts, the Facebook advertiser base of three or five million is the most elastic, resilient business advertising base in history.

And while some will signal stuff and say they're getting off for 30 days, it's a monopoly.

They don't have a choice.

My sense is Facebook will do just enough to get you to complement them and other organizations short term.

But I don't see anything resembling long-term intention to change.

I think it's actually getting worse.

And so what I'll is,

what will be required to have sustained change, not stuff that feels like window dressing?

Is it identity like LinkedIn?

My sense is there's not nearly as much of this hateful speech on LinkedIn because it enforces identity.

Is it, and by the way, it's not just Facebook.

Twitter's pretty bad around this stuff, too.

Is it terrible?

Is it reconnecting as we do with every other media company, liability that if there's a hate crime, the media platform that inspired it bears some responsibility?

What are the solutions?

Because so far, I would argue what we're doing isn't working.

So, I think there are a few things I would suggest.

So, I'll give you three kind of tactical things and then a big strategic thing.

Tactically, number one, I do think anonymity, while it provides so much good in so many ways to that, you know, that

young person questioning their sexual identity and afraid to be open about it, right?

Or to that domestic abuse person who needs an outlet.

On the other hand, anonymity has allowed the worst elements in society, and not even just people, trolls, and I mean, the software bots that drive it, a kind of shield they never had before.

And I do think, Scott, that has coarsened the conversation dramatically and contributed to the situation.

So, number one, if you were smart about how you removed anonymity, it could help dramatically.

I think, number two, I am a big proponent of reforming Section 230.

I think the lack of liability is part of the reason why the companies behave the way they do.

And I think I've used the example with you before, Kara.

Look, if you look at the way J and J handled the aspirin crisis, right?

That was the Tyanol crisis.

Tyanol crisis.

Right.

Like, we know what they did after a few bottles were tampered with because they were liable.

And we know,

I mean, I often use the Odwalla example.

Odwalla was a small juice company in the Bay Area, right?

They had a situation where a young toddler died because their product was not flash pasteurized.

They took every bottle off every shelf in America and reformulated their production process because they were libel.

Like, I don't want to say that Greg Stelton, Paul, and I don't want to say that the JNJ leadership didn't have some moral compass,

but they were libel.

James Burke was a fantastic CEO, too, like who had a lot of moral background.

There is a moral background.

So, so you know, let me give you, if I might, let me give you the third thing I think we really need to do, and this runs counter to what we've been believed, again, we think this is some natural law of the internet.

I think we need to slow it down.

Like, why is it that when I hit post, the post immediately goes up?

Like,

there's a six-second delay or seven-second delay on broadcast television for a reason.

And I think even delaying it, you know, we had the person who rampaged through the mosques in Christchurch was live streaming it.

This is crazy.

And I don't think there's any need for that.

So I think if you slowed it down, if you made them liable, if you removed the shield of anonymity, but ultimately, I also think a lot about what my friend Roger McDami talks about, which I think you got to break them up.

I mean, I think they are so big.

And I worry deeply about Mark's vision of an encrypted back end across WhatsApp and Oculus, let alone Messenger.

I think you got to break it up.

Because if they were smaller, they didn't have so much dominance.

It'd be much harder for them to do what they do.

Yeah.

But hey, don't you want to get in the metaverse or try supernatural?

Come on.

What's wrong with you?

If you like to change the subject.

So talk about the bigger thing.

Obviously, you and I and Scott all are in violent agreement about this idea of what social media does.

But what is some of the

give me the worst case scenario if, say, Trump gets back in office, or he doesn't even have to at this point, I think, in a lot of ways.

I think he's just a sort of

not a figurehead precisely, but you know.

what's the worst case scenario?

What's the best case scenario from your perspective?

And then Scott might have a final question.

I think the best case scenario would be the Democrats are able to sway some

kind of Republicans with a moral conscience to

pass some legislation that would stop the voter suppression and would enable a more open democratic system to persist and prevail, because that's not where we are right now.

I think you would reform big tech.

I think

you would literally make it easier for people to vote.

And I think that would avert what could be a catastrophic situation.

I also think a lot about Supreme Court justice reform, whether it's term limits or expanding the court.

What's the worst case situation?

Kara, I think it's pretty bad.

I don't think it's crazy to imagine that whether it's Trump or one of his kind of acolytes, I always worry about Tucker Carlson and some of the others who are far more sophisticated and just smart than former President Trump.

But I think they win.

I think certain kinds of speech, like this kind of speech, could suddenly become too dangerous.

It could become illegal.

I think

you could have martial law light imposed, make it difficult for people to assemble if they're deemed to be doing something dangerous to the public good.

I think

it's like this is not so crazy.

And I also think you could make it

the gerrymandering that we've seen.

You could institute some of that more permanently.

So you could make it difficult, as we've seen Victor Orban do very effectively in Hungary.

Hungary is still ostensibly a democracy, but he's shut down certain press outlets saying they're dangerous to the public interest.

He's made it difficult for people to assemble and exercise freedom of expression.

And he has also kind of hardened the electoral laws to make it difficult for the opposition to mount any kind of challenge to him.

By the way, that's also Erdogan's playbook in Turkey.

I think those are very reasonable outcomes.

And then the third thing I also think is real is what you saw happen in Israel under Bibi Netanyahu,

impugning and intimidating the judiciary, making it impossible for judges to do their job.

So I think all that's very real.

On that, on that happiness, Scott gets the last question.

Yeah, well, I'm not going any happier.

I went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, and the thing that struck me was that there are just few things

that we as a society or we as a species are better at than genocide.

You know, we talk about the middle of the 20th century, but it just happens every 10 or 20 years.

No matter how evolved we think we are, we talk about

coming together and not letting stuff happen again.

It just happens over and over.

And the question I would have for you as someone who's very knowledgeable on the topic, is there a prophylactic?

Is there a way to vaccinate against genocide against this that just keeps happening it's a hard question yeah because i don't think there's any silver bullet yeah that may be the most difficult realization of all like i think many of us would like to entertain the fantasy that democracy is a silver bullet it's not yeah agreed and democracy is a is a Democracy is not a spectator sport that you can watch from the bleacher seats, you know, from the and just from the bleachers and the cheap seats be like, yeah, everything will work out fine.

Democracy requires all of us to get engaged and get involved.

It's not education either.

There's these tropes that it isn't.

So I think we have to be involved, Scott,

whether you're voting or volunteering or running for dog catcher.

I mean, I think you got, like that old lotto commercial, you got to be in it to win it.

And

I think our civic muscles have atrophied.

Right.

You know, Tip O'Neill used to say all politics are local.

Now it's like as if all politics were national.

And I watch what Jesse Waters is saying and I somehow believe it to be true.

I mean, as crazy as that sounds.

Right.

So the reality is, is

local matters.

Rolling up your sleeves and engaging matters.

And I think if people don't get, don't play that, participate, don't realize that it's a contact sport democracy and it happens around the corner from where you live, then

I think that's the only way we can.

You forget, because you're safe where you are.

It's absolutely true.

And then the comfortable stay comfortable and the less comfortable become extraordinarily less comfortable.

But I will say that's really why I wrote the book, because, I mean, we've seen this happen to your point in Africa, in Europe, in the Middle East in the last 50, 60, 70 years.

It's not a history lesson.

It's present day.

Look at, again, what happened to the Rohingya and the Yazidi in the last five years.

So I think it's incumbent upon us to engage.

And there are strategies and there are tactics that we can use to stop hate when it happens here at home.

Last Last thing I'll say, dehumanization, which we see happening now, this is one of the things that Trump has really imported into the public conversation.

We all can stop that.

We, you, me, can push back on that when it happens at the water cooler, in the locker room, at the dinner table.

And I think that's the first step

to kind of, you know, reverse that.

That was one of the key steps of Nazism.

It was.

Dehumanization was right up at the top in lots of ways in cartoons and public, the way you call people,

don't have a sense of humor, you know, that kind of, and then it makes you feel bad.

Some things people could have a sense of humor on, but not stuff like that.

Anyway, Jonathan, you're a depressing man.

But everybody should read it.

It's doing important work.

Work.

The ADL is doing important work.

It's one of the first groups that really had contacted me about these issues around Facebook was the ADL.

And in fact, I went to, I used the ADL as an example when I went to YouTube to complain about the anti-Semitic videos on there,

you know, how it was just rising and you could see it happening.

In any case, you're doing great work.

Keep at it.

Keep at it, Jonathan.

And again, his book is called It Could Happen Here: Why America is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable and How We Can Stop It.

So let's stop it.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

Boy, what do you think of that interview, huh?

I'm bummed again.

Jeez.

He's exactly right, though.

Just this notion that it couldn't happen here,

you know, we kind of did

genocide's a terrible word.

So I won't, but we locked up, we imprisoned behind barbed wire thoughtful, law-abiding citizens that were Japanese only 75 years ago.

We put them in camps.

What if the Japanese had split the atom first and they started drawing atom bombs?

Wouldn't we have moved to genocide pretty quickly?

So the notion that

it can happen here, if you look at the worst genocides in history,

they tend to have a lot in common with what America looks like now.

Exceptional, exceptional nationalism, income inequality,

propping up strong men, a dissatisfied underclass from income inequality or economic underclass, a consolidation of media.

I mean, there's just a lot of conservatives believing that they can control a strong man for economic interests.

There's a lot of things lining up that just feel very uncomfortable.

And we should remove any notion, and Jonathan, I think, does this really effectively of thinking that it can't happen here.

Oh, yeah, it can.

And it's happened in very similar societies.

Yeah, yep, I agreed.

Agreed.

That was quite the fucking speech.

And I'm in Vegas.

Yeah, in Vegas.

Did I mention I'm in Vegas?

That's what I feel like.

Here with Jerry Lewis and seven prostitutes.

Hello, Vegas.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for wins and fails.

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All right, Scott, let's go to Wins and Fails.

Scott, I'm going to go first Bob Sagett.

Oh my God, I love Bob Sagitt.

You like, tell me about it.

I was really shocked at the outpouring of affection for Bob.

Because he's fun.

I love when he was like, I watched that show.

I secretly.

I didn't secretly.

I love the Olson twins.

I like everything about them.

And I also like the other Olson, who's the Elizabeth Olson, who's so, so manifestly talented.

I always liked him.

I always liked him.

And then I liked when he went dirty.

I liked he had a whole thing with the aristocrats or whatever.

And I just liked his whole vibe.

And let me just tell you, I've never seen such an outpouring of.

So many different people who do not agree on anything, agreeing on the kindness of him from Jon Stewart to Kathy Griffin, to like, it was dozens and dozens of comics that all were very different people and don't get along, I would say, all like Bob Sagitt.

And, you know, the suddenness and of course the fucking ghouls of vaccination, anti-vaxxers are coming out saying he said he got a booster.

He was joking about it on one of his podcast things or whatever, blaming it on the booster and then linking it to Betty White getting a booster.

I just literally like, go get away from Bob Sagett, you people.

I literally like, get your, your,

that's what happened.

Diseased mitts off of Bob Sagett.

Like, anyway, people are dropping dead in CVS.

They're like, coincidence?

He got a booster three weeks ago.

I was like, coincidence, he had water.

Like, what are you, what is wrong with you to take this guy's like lovely comic legacy and um and do that.

I really liked Bob Saget, I have to say, and very funny when he, when he went blue.

Oh, man, was he funny?

Was he funny?

Anyway, Bob Sagett, rest in peace.

Rest in peace.

When?

Oh, I watched Cobra Kai.

It was fantastic.

So good.

The guy who plays Johnny is so funny.

So funny.

I am so pleased with the Cobra Kai this new season.

I can't even tell you.

It's wonderful.

They're all wonderful.

Every one of them.

Thank you.

That's great.

Who do you watch Cobra Kai with?

Amanda loves it.

Amanda, who is like real fancy on her literature fancy person.

Amanda hates that you've said that.

I know, but she is fancy, but she likes this a lot.

She loves Cobra.

There was one line they did, and she's like, that was perfect.

You come down to my place.

I want to watch Cobra Kai instead.

She's up to Great Boston Art Heist.

And I'm like, really?

That's what we're in for here.

We'll find something good.

That's what we're in for here.

Anyway, Cobra Kai.

I love Cobra Kai.

Please watch the next season.

It's really good.

It's really, I thought they might falter, but they have not.

Because you run out of like hijinks for these kids.

But they've introduced this adorable young kid who's getting beaten up by Daniel's son, actually, at school.

So it's very ironic.

And this kid is just so winning and fantastic.

Anyway.

Was Elizabeth Shu back?

She was.

I don't know if she's coming back.

She hasn't.

I'm doing them slowly, like fine wine.

I'm doing them once a night.

And I'm not binging it.

Anyway, go ahead, Scott.

I'm not sure fine wine and Cobra Kai have been using the same sentence for the day.

I believe Amanda was drinking fine wine when we were watching it.

Anyway.

Well, there we go.

My wind is someone I've made or been critical of, but I just can't help it.

I just love

Jack Dorsey's tweets.

Oh, yeah.

And I think they're really insightful about on Web3.

He wrote, the VCs and their LPs

will never escape their incentives.

It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.

Know what you're getting into.

And I've been thinking a lot about this.

Whenever you have overvalued companies or these great new orthodoxies, whether it's democratization,

which is nothing but I'm going to figure out a way to depress young men or

the new one is decentralization.

And it's such bullshit.

It plays into this idea of like, you have your own fate.

It plays into this sort of crazy nationalism in a weird way.

Well, and it's a weird form of libertarian.

When VCs are talking about decentralization, what they want to say is

we want to shift the shareholder value from JPMorgan to us, and we want regulatory arbitrage, and we don't want to be constrained by Sarbanes-Oxley.

And when you're talking about decentralization, you're talking about technology that is largely financed and influenced by people whom 40% of come from two universities, Stanford and Harvard.

I could not.

70% of their capital allocation is from people with the same mentality and the same reason why

concierge medical services are overfunded, but we can't get prenatal care funded.

And this notion that it's somehow libertarian.

No, it's not.

It's a bunch of guys.

Elon Musk moves markets.

That's centralization.

When the majority of stable coins have a disproportionate amount of insiders who still, or not stable coins, the majority of crypto has a disproportionate amount of insiders controlling these coins.

This is the opposite of decentralization.

It's centralization to a bunch of people who want to create this myth that somehow they're empowered to the people.

You know what?

Honestly,

let me just say, I know all these people.

You're better off with Jamie Dimon.

I can't, you know, or black people.

And Jamie Dimon is regulated.

Whenever you hear the term decentralization, it's a bunch of white guys that look, smell, and feel more like, more like any organizations in the world, more centralization of thought, who are looking to become billionaires by creating shit that cannot be, it is not regulated and want to centralize power.

This is the opposite.

Let me just say, though, there is a really good essay that people should read by Moxie Marlinspike, who is the

who is the founder of the Signal app, who wrote a really good,

really, it's very technical.

And again, I got lost several times.

It's called My First Impressions of Web 3.

And I thought it was really interesting.

And he

just listen,

we'll talk about it next week, maybe, because I think it was really interesting.

He's sort of in the Jack Dora.

Jack, I look, I found it via Jack, actually, which I thought was interesting.

So, yes, you're right.

I think Jack is really, he's really become untethered now that he can do what he wants.

He was always like that when you encountered him before.

He was always very I love his stuff.

I think it's really insightful.

It's catalyzed a lot of my thinking around this isn't decentralization.

It's centralization of a bunch of white guys that want more power and more money under the fake myth of decentralization.

Anyways,

that's my win.

Jack's tweets.

My fail is: I've been thinking a lot about unlocks, and I'll position it as a fail, but I do think it's a huge opportunity:

just our fetishization, our continued fetishization of incarceration.

The U.S.

spends about $90 billion a year on prisons, more than we spend on the DOJ, the IRS, the EPA, and NASA combined.

In most G7 nations, they average between 50 and 200 people per 100,000 incarcerated.

We're at 700, we're up there with the worst autocracies in the world.

Agreed.

About half of the people incarcerated in state prisons in 2015 were convicted of nonviolent drug, property, or other public order crimes.

And there's just a huge opportunity.

When states reduce their prison populations, crime rates actually fall faster than the national average.

Between 1999 and 2012, New York and New Jersey downsized their prisons populations, prison populations by 26%, and violent crime dropped 31% and 30%, respectively.

COVID spread four times faster in prisons than it did in cruise ships, so we released 20% of our federal prisoners.

And when I think, I've been thinking a lot about young men feeling, I think we need to put more nonviolent men back in low-income households.

When I look at the money we spend, when I look at what a poor reflection is on our society, it's the for-profit motive that we've put into prisons has resulted in incredible damage to certain communities.

And I think it's a huge opportunity to take.

And who agrees with you?

The Koch brothers.

Gigantor.

Oh, White LeBron, Vanilla Bron?

Vanilla Bron.

This is an issue he talks about with me all the time.

Well, it's just,

it's an exciting opportunity.

And I want to be clear: you can't just let these guys out into society.

But if you want to talk about what you would do with those savings, put it into vocational programming,

we need more trained workers.

We need, you know,

what John McMortar got me thinking, you need to, in my view, discourage but decriminalize drugs so you reduce the economic incentive for people who don't have great opportunities to get into these industries.

And also, you know, we just need, we need more men back in these communities.

And I'm not suggesting we put violent men back into households, but the level of incarceration in our household means that either Americans are just born criminal

or something's come off the tracks here.

And I think a huge unlock, and if you look at what they did with releasing these prisoners because of code at the federal level, and when you've had mass, when you've had programs to let out nonviolent criminals, A lot of good things happen.

And I hope that this is something that we take as an opportunity coming out of COVID that we need to

rethink incarceration, decriminalize

the reason so many of them are in prison.

But I think it could be a huge unlock for low-income communities, a reduction in federal spending.

And just quite frankly,

a righteous movement.

And we keep talking about it, but it doesn't happen on a major level.

Anyways, my fail is America's continued fetishization with incarceration, but I think it could be a huge opportunity for us coming out of of COVID.

Scott Galloway, that's a very serious one.

Well, you and Gigantor can discuss it when we come down and stay with you.

Let's go to something lighter like genocide.

Genocide.

Well, you know what?

Soon

we'll be down in Miami, and then I'm bringing the whole family down there.

So we'll have a whole show down there with them.

Anyway, let's bring your whole family.

I'm going to, we're coming.

We just, this weather here, I tit it this morning.

I was like, that's friggin' enough with this freezing cold weather in our, in our house.

These aren't conferences.

They're Swisher vacations where you bring in interesting things.

And we're going to come another time, too.

You don't understand.

We're coming down for the month.

We're ready.

We're already planning it.

Okay.

We're ready.

All right, Scott, that's the show.

We'll be back on Friday for more.

There's so much news going on.

Can you please read us out?

Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie Intertod Engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burroughs.

Make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts or if you're an Android user.

Check us out on Spotify or frankly wherever you listen to podcasts.

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.

It could never happen here as lazy thinking.

It could absolutely happen here.

We need empathy.

We need understanding.

We need an intolerance of intolerance.

Have a good rest of the week, Carol.