Twitter’s Reorg, Comedians v. Spotify, and Friends of Pivot Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Peterson

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Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher from Inside Scott Galloway's Lair in New York.

And did a male escort named Patrick show up with a bottle of jack, some starch, and some cough syrup?

Because if he did, just tell him next week.

I did.

I told him you'll be here later in the week to to deal with him he was lovely

i gotta have i know it's lovely thank you for letting us stay here we completely trash the place as i said all your house plants have died are you going johnny depp on me are you going johnny depp are you trashing the place i'm trash it's hard to trash it though it's it's a very it's a very lovely apartment it's so pretty i wouldn't want to do anything to it but i have to say uh claire's gotten very used to it that's all i have to say she likes living the the big life and she's enjoying it she's running around in circles throughout um she's decided your son's room is her room.

So we're not leaving.

We're going to squat.

We're squatting.

What do you think about that?

And also, there's nobody in this building.

It's just us.

No, no one lives there.

It's like one of those buildings in Mayfair where just literally no one's there.

No, the doormen are like, oh, look, people with children.

It's like, anyway, it's really fun.

Occasionally I wake up there and there's no one around and there's nothing.

And I'm like, did I overdose on ED drugs and I'm in heaven or hell right now?

Because there's literally just nobody.

Anyway, we're enjoying looking at your Netflix playlist and your other various playlists and things like that.

Yeah, I really like, you know, Eat, Pray, Love is pretty much on everyone.

And it's nice.

It's very

nice.

Down in Riverdale.

Riverdale.

No, Riverdale wasn't on there.

I just want to say not.

Well, no, it wasn't.

It was not in your playlist.

I very much enjoy this total violation of my privacy being shared across the Vox media podcast.

No problem.

I'm not going to talk about inside your closets.

I didn't actually go inside your closets.

Anyway, so today we have a lot to talk about.

We've got a lot to talk about.

There's things happening at Twitter.

We're going to speak about the future of work with Anne Helen Peterson and Charlie Wartzel.

And we're going to talk about comedians and all kinds of things.

But let's start first with what happened to Chris Cuomo very briefly.

Cuomo, Chris Cuomo, we should point out, has now been terminated here at CNN.

That's the latest breaking news.

He got fired, as I said he would.

They fired him after they found additional information.

You were right again.

You were right again.

Well, about this kind of stuff.

It's kind of obvious where this was headed.

But I think there was a wrench thrown in here.

that Jody Cantor and others had a story at the New York Times, a reference to accusations of sexual misconduct from a junior colleague at another network, presumably ABC, where he used to work.

And just

that it ended the way it ended.

There you have it.

Now it's the question of who's going to take over for him.

What do you think?

Well, you know who I got an ice honor greeting from yesterday was who I hope is Steve Young coming off the bench for Joe Montana is Michael Smirconish.

So supposedly he's, I don't know if he's taking over,

but anyways, I'm an enormous fan of Michael Smirconish.

I think he's one of those guys that kind of does the work.

And all I had, he broadcast from Philadelphia, which is kind of a game.

Interesting.

I suspect it's going to be Jake Tapper.

That would be Jake?

J.T.

Yeah.

J.

A handsome man to replace a handsome man.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

Jake is.

Jake is

Brian Stein.

I think it should be us.

I think they should put us in prime time.

Yeah.

What do you think?

Get us off of the plue.

Get you off a plue and move you right to the beat.

You want the plue.

You don't want advertising.

You don't want to be foisting opioid-induced constipation meds on America.

America.

And if we just want to go 10 minutes or 30 minutes, you literally.

So I'm bragging now.

I do think I had opportunities at the network and on Plus, and I so, so much prefer to be on streaming than on Ad Supporting.

I'm just saying, I think we would cause a massive storm and then we would be gone.

completely.

I think we would do something bad.

I think that's.

If you're going to go down, go down with all guns blazing.

Well, it couldn't be worse, right?

Could it be worse than some of the other anchors?

Come on.

We could keep up.

We'd be in Daily Mail all the time.

Okay, what happens at CNN

in a year happens at Fox?

We're not going to go with it.

We're not going to do comparisons.

I had a little argument with them.

They're like comparing to Fox.

I'm like, let's not just remove them from the experiment here because they're not normal.

They let them go on campaign rallies.

They have different rules over there at Fox.

So it's not the same thing.

These are normal rules that are going on there.

Anyway, nonetheless, I was correct.

Anyway, also, speaking of money, Donald Trump's media group says it raised a billion dollars from investors.

I question that's a lot of money.

The investors' identities have not been disclosed.

Probably most of Saudi Arabia would be my guess.

Also, this week, Trump's yet-to-launch social network True Social acknowledged its source code comes from another social network, not a surprise, called Mastodon, which is a disturbing one.

So Donald Trump's lied about his finances almost continually in his life.

And of course, there are repercussions for lying this time.

But do you think he raised this amount of money, Scott?

You raise money all the time.

That's a lot of money.

That's an enormous amount of money.

Yeah, I don't.

Well, one, one, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we found out that he's exaggerating slash lying.

That would be sort of in character.

But I'm also, I'm inclined to believe he could raise a billion dollars.

A guy like Donald Trump could be the anchor for a conservative social network.

People do like the idea or people are drawn to the notion that social media has become too consolidated and there's enough people who would be drawn to another network.

And if you were going to try and start a politically based social media network, he would be the premier get.

And he is.

And

he's trying to take advantage of that.

And he's raised a billion dollars.

My guess is the SPAC, I don't know if he's putting it into the SPAC or this new company.

He must be putting it into his existing SPAC.

If the stock runs up and we find out he's selling like a madman, I don't think

this is...

You know, I don't want to,

the pump and dump was sort of licensing to a certain extent what he does with buildings, puts his name on it, sells the condos, gets up.

So I don't,

the answer is, the answer is, I'm not shocked he's raised a billion dollars.

I think this is going to be a company that's not going to succeed because

he's just not known as a great operator.

What do you think?

I think it's just, he's just the front.

It's the licensing.

It's like Trump stakes, and it'll either go or I don't.

I think it's very hard to create.

I know this idea that Twitter is putting out, which is Blue Sky, which is to create lots of social networks, is kind of an interesting one.

I think these things tend to coalesce around one place, and this will all be conservatives yelling at each other, essentially.

And I think that's the problem, no matter whether it's this or getter or parlor.

It's not as fun when everybody's not there.

And I don't think everyone's going to join True Social, except for just looking at the traffic accident that is Donald Trump on the internet.

I think he has to get back on Twitter if maybe he has a chance.

You know, one of his big supporters is one of the big owners at Elliott, obviously.

So, I mean, that's where he has to go back to.

So I don't, it's going to be a lot of money being flushed out.

Elliot's not.

I mean, I don't, I know the guys in Elliot.

I don't think they're going to get anywhere near this, or maybe they are.

No, no, no, no, no.

Elliot's in Twitter.

Elliot's in Twitter.

But I think he's got to get back on Twitter.

That's really it.

That's the game.

It's the game.

And I think these things tend to coalesce around a single network as much as Twitter tries hard not to be that or is doing things that are trying to create more.

There's just one network and it's where everybody is.

And I just don't see, you can't make a party happen, right?

Like you can't make a, I don't know.

Unless the dog is there with his prostitute, Patrick.

Well, you know, he's become our new sitter for the kids.

It's very exciting.

Patrick?

Yeah, Patrick.

He's going to go.

He's great and very good looking.

In any case, I don't, I think this is going to go down, and he's going to grab some money.

It's a money grab by Donald Trump, and I don't think he cares one whit how he makes money.

You know, his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition Corps, you know, the SPACs traded about $10 to announce their target.

The thing announced what it was doing.

It ran to $175, and now it's at $45.

I mean,

this is just kind of crazy town.

By the way, SPACs are coming undone, but different story.

People want to own a piece of Donald Trump.

They can buy all the little MAGA people can buy a piece of it.

Whatever.

There's one born every minute, as they say.

So whatever.

Let's see if they make something.

I doubt it.

That would be my, I would bet against it becoming anything of substance.

But speaking of terrible stories, the parents of the Michigan school shooting suspect have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.

This parent, these parents are really quite horrible.

Police launched a manhunt when they failed to appear.

They went on the run for their arrangement.

I mean, hearing they're denying they did that, but they were found in a basement of some,

I don't know, storage room or whatever.

After After being arrested, parents both entered pleas of not guilty.

Prosecutors say the parents allowed their son free access to the gun used in the shooting.

It sounds like they ignored warnings from the school.

There were civil lawsuits against the shooter's parent in Columbine.

What do you think about this?

Seems particularly egregious.

This is so sad.

And

it feels preventable, but maybe not.

I don't know.

Yeah, I think every parent is sort of your worst nightmare, right?

Where I think we'll go, though, is the first order stories will be about

gun control, but I really think this brings up a host of other issues.

And one is

I think we have totally conflated our liberties with a lack of self, with a lack of citizenship and selfishness.

And I think this reflects an ongoing trend where a famous quarterback that people look up to has decided not to be honest about his

COVID status.

and takes away people's autonomy.

And when you're parents and you ignore, I mean, other than showing up with a fully loaded semi-automatic pistol and saying, I'm going to school to kill my classmates right now.

I mean, do you realize my understanding is that

when it hit the news that there was an active shooter,

his mother texted him

and said, don't do it.

Right.

So it sounds as if they knew the kid was not only, I mean, I mean, it's such an

at some point,

your dereliction of duty or responsibility to each other, at some point you become so derelict, it becomes reckless

endangerment of other people, and you are criminally liable.

Yeah.

And I think this is, I mean, it's going to raise a host of issues.

And that is, are we as Americans ignoring our responsibility to each other and just a basic citizenship in the pursuit of liberty, whether it's your right to own guns and be part of gun culture or your right to show up to a restaurant, even though you haven't been vaccinated or tested in the last 24 hours.

And then the other thing that's going to bring up, Kara, and we deal with this a lot, I've been on the board of my kids' school and just at NYU, is the balance between the rights of parents and students and the power that schools have and specifically teachers.

The teachers kind of felt powerless here.

Yeah, well, they tried.

They warned and they couldn't.

No one looked in his...

I suspect the teachers didn't want to do that, like didn't want to overstep with the parents there.

The parents didn't look in his backpack.

And then they allowed the parents to leave without taking the kid.

And they probably felt they couldn't force them into it.

They didn't want to get into a beef with these parents who sounded insane.

And so, yeah, you're right.

They've powerlessness.

And how are they to know?

I mean, there was a good article in the Times about

debating how are they to know that this kid was about to go off.

And it was an interesting article because some people said they should have known.

Other people said, you know, it's really hard.

A lot lot of people make threats and it's to nothing.

I think unfortunately, everyone's going to have to be on high alert every time now, right?

Like every, every possible.

But to me, if someone did a thing saying, I can't stop the thoughts and I want to shoot everybody and I just got a gun.

Yeah, and I'm searching for ammunition in class.

I mean, I'll tell you one thing.

And again, there's, it brings up so many issues.

There's such an incredible divide whose gulf is broadening between public and private schools.

And public schools just don't have the resources.

They're intimidated.

And not only that,

wealthy parents who have the resources to be more engaged in schools and can be more thoughtful around the nuance are all pulling their kids out of the public system and putting them to private schools.

And the key, there's been a lot of studies done on K through 12.

And what's a greater indicator of success in a school is not even resources, it's parental engagement.

And it's just, I think it brings up a host of really

unfortunate issues.

But

I have a bit of an emotional reaction here.

I hope the parents go to prison for a long time.

I hope that there's a signal said to not just people who are irresponsible.

And I want to be clear.

I'm not one of these Democrats who always has to preface anything with, well,

I own my gun and I love it, but

I want nowhere fucking near guns.

If there were a state that said, do what you want, but if you want to live here, you can't own a gun, I would seriously consider moving to that state because I understand that people have a right to guns.

I understand that hunting is important.

Europe, Europe, all out your own.

Or kind of Manhattan to a certain extent.

But the reality is there's a lot of us who would just rather not get no upside from it and just have all downside.

Just have to worry about our kids going to school with a mass shooter, have to worry about the guy who cuts you off pulling a gun out of his

glove box.

We just, there's a group of us who would just rather not be around guns and aren't caught up in this both side liberal,

liberal bullshit spineless of, well, I love guns, but, well, you know what?

Not that many.

But fucking hate guns.

Not many liberals say that.

Not many.

Well, they all start off with, well, I'm a proud gun owner, but I think we need sensible gun rights.

Nah, well, some politicians, that's because the pushback is so hard.

It's kind of ridiculous.

But nonetheless, this is, I hope they go to jail too.

This is really, and the running off on the kid.

Now, look, this kid's a murderer.

But boy, the parents running off.

And a lot of gun owners, I think, hope they go to jail.

I think a lot of responsible gun owners are like.

Yeah, what the hell?

Yeah.

They seem insane.

They seem insane.

So many families got ruined here.

Their family is done.

These four families have to bury a child.

I mean, it is just,

oh, God.

It's like,

it's just, it,

it's all, there's just nothing around it.

It's just awful.

I don't know what anyway.

All right, Scott, it's time for our first big story.

Twitter's new CEO isn't wasting any time, even though you say they're going to sell.

He's busy doing things.

On Friday, Perag Agrawal announced a massive reorg at the company.

Twitter will split into three new divisions, consumer, revenue, and core product.

The head of engineering and the chief design officer will step down as part of the restructuring.

You know, he's making moves.

He's making changes.

He's being a CEO.

Post said it was meant to bring together employees previously divided by job function.

You know, this always happens at companies.

They do bifunctional, then they change and they go back.

This happens a lot.

So

getting rid of two executive ones is a big move.

So what do you think?

Well,

so

I do have the opportunity to coach a lot of CEOs.

And what I tell new CEOs is the following.

I'm like, you have cloud cover to pretty much do anything you want right now.

You have kind of a six-month honeymoon period.

It's probably 12 months where you can make big changes and the board will, the board's not going to fire you or get in your way.

Or usually, I mean, they can't hire you and say, we don't agree with your strategy.

You're out of here.

They give you a lot of rope and they expect you to make changes.

And

you get more license.

You get licensed to fire people and hire people and reorg and make, you know, kind of develop your own strategy, put your own.

your own signature on things before the board starts heckling from the cheap seats based on the performance of the company.

So I think this is absolutely, you know, he's obviously, he's obviously been thinking about this for a while.

I think he has to do something.

The sharks are circling here.

The stock is down.

Hiring an internal candidate was a little bit risky.

He doesn't have the same rope everyone else has because the question is, well, you were there and this hasn't worked.

He might have been powerless.

Speaking of powerless, he might have been powerless, right?

Supposedly, Jack gave his employees a lot of autonomy.

I think it's hard not to when you're not there, but

he has basically six months to like make shit happen

or yeah, regardless, he has to get the stock up in three to six months, or

this thing attracts just a ton of sharks, which will be hugely distracting for him.

What do you think about the changing it into these groups?

It's just a lot of times you see these shake-ups happen and they do this.

I mean, I remember Yahoo's been reorganized 100 times and it didn't really matter.

And then it's some sometimes it's cross-functionality, sometimes it's individual, autonomous, you know, just whatever.

I'm always like, uh-huh.

But this is consumer revenue and core product.

I don't quite understand it, but of course that's meant that way.

What do you think needs to happen here?

If this wasn't going to sell, what kind of thing would you be doing here?

So I don't think, so look, one of my many weaknesses as a manager is organizational strategy.

I just, I'm not good at it.

I don't understand it.

I've always thought that the key is having direct lines of accountability and hard metrics

to hold people accountable.

But so that's my way of kind of abdicating any sort of thoughtful input on org strategy.

I think Twitter's challenge and what they're not doing, what they should be doing, is I think they need a fundamental shift in business model.

And

regardless of how many times you re-org, the bottom line is Twitter is sub-scale in a market that's increasingly consolidated and has not been able to offer a product or an audience that advertisers are willing to pay a premium for.

And the result is they just have a sub-standard business model.

And

the place that this company commands or occupies is so much greater than

the space it commands, so to speak.

In other words, its influence is so much greater than its revenue that that says to me, it's not about organizational structure.

It's about fundamental shift in business model.

They need to get out of this ad-driven digital market.

They are sub-scale.

They cannot compete with Google and Facebook.

They have proven for the last decade

they can't compete against Google or Facebook, nor have they kind of carved out these elegant niches that Pinterest and Snap have.

So, and I, you know, this is my go-to, Kara, but I think it's right.

They need to start charging people or they need a subscription.

I agree.

The more I think about it, I totally would pay.

I'd pay for it.

I'd pay for it.

I pay for lots of things.

Well, because when I initially brought it up, you said, ah, no, no.

9-9.

I'm saving my money from Patrick.

I'm changing my mind, and that's what we do here at Pivot.

You're evolving.

I'm evolving on this.

And because I actually would pay for, but they'd have to have better stuff.

They'd have to give me better stuff if I'm paying, right so like i get all the value i think i get out of netflix i certainly use it a lot like i think about what value i get out of things i pay for like recently i told you i just uh subscribed to the los angeles times and san francisco chronicle and boy the stories are a lot better than they used to be i feel like i'm getting good value they are good i think the all the times has a great job the chronicle has gotten a lot better it's like i read a lot of their stories now and so uh and i didn't and i find them worthwhile and so uh and worth paying for and so you're right this is something i have not paid for ever and i get so much worth out of it already.

Every Sunday, I used to walk to I Enjoy Bagels on Westwood Boulevard, pick up bagels and schmear for me and my mom, and we'd read the calendar section of the LA Times.

Yeah.

Anyways,

little majestic history.

But look,

it is a nice memory.

We'll see.

I think it's good that he's making moves like this.

Let's see what it

happens.

But this is a company that's been a lot of people that are not powerful because Jack ultimately had the last say.

So now they have a real live CEO.

And let's see how that goes.

That should help.

Yeah, it should help.

I've been doing a lot of interviews, you know, because people love to call a critic.

What do you think of this new CEO's chances?

I'm like, well, let's assume he's half as talented as Jack.

If he's there full-time,

he'll be five times as good because Jack was there 10%.

And if this guy's not half as good, but he's there 100%, that means he'll be five times as good.

And just to give you, just to whet your appetite and shareholders and management and the board around what could actually happen here, every corporation in America, every corporation globally over $100 million has a Twitter account, which slowly but surely they use as their vehicle for communicating to the broader world.

And what if you said to them, hey, Reuters, hey, Fiat,

hey, Petrobross?

You're going to get to continue to use this, but we're going to provide you with these analytics that tell you the engagement around stories, what regions people are interested in, how people clearly feel, what type of people liked, didn't like this type of information or press release on your new legacy 450 jet or your Disreuter story, but you're going to pay $1,000, $2,000, or $5,000 a month.

That's nothing for these guys.

Yep, 100%.

Yeah, they really do undersell themselves.

They really have wildly underselled themselves.

In their first earnings call, they go, okay, the first earnings call, they go, 30% of the Fortune 10,000 are now

paying us a monthly subscription.

And the stock doubles.

Because the market's going to go, finally,

this company is commanding the space it occupies.

It's moving to recurring revenue, which would be differentiated from Google and Facebook.

And the stock goes fucking crazy.

Right now, it trades at like, I think, four to six times revenues, and the other guys trade at 15 to 20.

So I'm just kind of, I'm just like, enough already.

Don't reorder.

It's very precious.

It's been a very precious company.

Someone who just left there told me it's such a precious company.

And so they're so precious about everything.

And they just have to stop thinking small.

That's what they do.

They think small, precious.

Stop being precious.

That's a good way to think about it.

You're powerful.

Anyway, we're going on a quick break.

When we come back, we'll talk about Spotify's PowerPlay, which it is making.

And then we'll talk to friends of Pivot Charlie Wurzel and Anne Helen Peterson about remote work.

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

Comedians want more money from streaming platforms, but Spotify isn't laughing.

The streaming network removed the work of hundreds of comics, including Kevin Hart and Jim Gaffigan.

After negotiations over royalty payments broke down, there's a really interesting new company called Spoken Giants, a rights management group representing comics, wanting a royalty on copyright for its clients.

Current streaming deals pay comics as performers of their work, not as writers.

This whole economy of Hollywood is shifting rather dramatically.

No one's got their hands out at these companies.

Obviously, the music people were the first to go at people like Spotify.

This has been going on

for a week.

We saw a similar complaint in 2007 Writers Guild strike.

Writers said they weren't getting royalties from DVDs and streaming.

This is not a new thing.

Writers have always sort of been at the back of the line in these things, and it's a big hardball move that Spotify removes them.

So what do you think?

Well, most importantly, have you noticed that in my house, there's no food, just alcohol?

Yes, I have.

It's not a problem.

You have noticed that?

I just wanted to get that out there.

I know it's a little weird, but I'm glad it's on the bottom.

It's really nice.

We looked up all the cost of all the champagne.

We're bored.

Oh, no, I have several million dollars in champagne.

The dog likes the bubbles.

By the way, when you have strange people over your house, if you say, would you like champagne?

It's always a yes.

It's always a yes.

No one ever says no to yes.

Sorry to tell you, we did that with the two small children.

Help yourself.

Help yourself.

Anyways, I'm sorry, Spotify.

You're right.

I had some of your nut butter.

That's what I heart took in.

I had some nut butter.

Nut butter?

Yeah, your nut butter in little packets.

Everything is adorable.

I did not know that.

Patrick must have left that.

Hmm.

Who knows where that butter's been?

I rolled around in your cashmere, and that was it.

That was the entire e-I love that.

You love that term, cashmere.

Cashmere.

It's alpaca.

It's alpaca.

Anyways.

Very soft.

Get back to Spotify.

What does this have to do with paying comedians on Spotify, etc.

So you're right.

The way the ecosystem and compensation is played is that they will actually pay talent more up front.

Yes, that's how they're doing it.

But they want all the rights on the back end.

And there's, this is just who has more leverage.

And comedians, I think of the world of comedy, it's a bit fragmented.

And I would imagine Spotify has just said, look, we've made huge investments in upfront content, and we want the downstream royalties.

And the people who represent the comedians,

it all kind of centered around this one rights group that kept charging or asking for rights.

And they'll work it out and they'll settle.

But there's,

I think talent, for the most part, I do think this is a great era for talent because of just the insatiable appetite of deep-pocketed players trying to use content to increase loyalty across Amazon Prime or Apple or what have you.

But the fundamental compensation metric has changed.

And only the most powerful, a guy like

David Chappelle, has the power to get downstream economics.

But typically, the way it's changed is it's no longer the Seinfeld model where you get paid X per episode and then all sorts of royalties on the back end.

I mean,

the stars of Seinfeld, I think, have gotten somewhere between half a billion and a billion in back end royalties.

Yeah, some of them are.

Now you no longer get...

The Simpsons Marge person is like a billionaire.

There's some crazy amount of money.

Or the Matt Groening.

They, by the way, they deserve it.

Yeah.

Instead, it's, we'll pay you real cabbage up front, but boss, once it's ours, it's ours, period.

And anything that comes for that.

And the next, the really, the real battle here, Kara, is going to be over

intellectual property as it relates to NFTs around the IP.

And this is the thing with Quentin Tarantino, pictures of him writing the script of pulp fiction or that iconic image.

Like, who owns that?

Right, right.

And the same thing when Oculus starts, when they start doing these Oculus, I think what's really happening is the way it's been done is just not the way it's going to do it.

And other people are sort of copying the Netflix model, Disney and others.

They wouldn't have gotten into that beef with Charlotte Johansson quite that way if they didn't want things to change rather dramatically because they don't want to keep, it is a complex way to pay people and only the people at the top get paid.

And it seems,

nobody understands it.

There's always lawsuits of who didn't get paid where.

It needs to be cleaner, but you're going to see everyone sort of trying to grab a piece, especially in this case, writers.

But there's so many pieces to Hollywood that it's going to be an interesting time.

And the next,

who gets the most economic benefit from whatever they make?

I don't know who's going to win or lose, but I suspect.

Yeah, and then there's

the middle people or middle women, middle men, the agents taking their 8% and causing them to be mad.

Yeah.

And at some point, do you decentralize?

I have a wonderful book agent, and I actually give him more than he asks because he gets involved in the content.

But, you know, what happens to agents?

What happens to,

you know, the just just the, so for example, in books, right, you get an advance, and they always say your agent's no good.

And then you get royalties on the back end if your book, if your book outsells the initial advance.

And people typically say you have a shitty agent if you ever get royalties because the idea is you're supposed to get an enormous upfront advance.

Yep.

Yep.

And unless it's a runaway hit.

Yeah.

And that just seems like I get these royalty statements every month saying, oh, we're exceeding expectations in Bulgaria.

Here's a check for $345.

And it just feels very inefficient.

It does.

It does.

I don't even understand it.

It feels like the blockchain.

There's something to do with the blockchain that's going to happen here.

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

It'll be interesting to see who owns.

I mean, the idea of owner, as we said, if you're an IP lawyer right now, what a great thing to go into.

My nephew's going into IP.

He's at Harvard, and he's going into IP.

Oh, he's at Harvard.

He's at Harvard.

A white guy from a Cole family at Harvard.

That's a shocker.

He picked IP.

He's interested in IP.

I'm just saying he's interested in.

That's a shocker.

He's such a shockwave.

Who says,

my aunt is a lesbian at the New York Times for his street cred.

He's just not.

At Harvard.

I feel you.

Swishers are hardworking people, no matter what.

I'm just telling you, we are.

Group of overachievers.

Lucky did something right.

Yeah, well, you know, I had dinner with Lucky at your apartment.

She said she thinks you're still gay, by the way.

No, she said he could be.

He said he could be.

Or he could be one of those straight people.

No, no, it was very funny.

She's like, maybe not.

She wasn't sure.

She wasn't sure.

She's not sure.

But she thought you had fantastic days.

And I said, he does, indeed.

He does.

She approved of your apartment.

Anyway, I fed her.

That's one of my hobbies.

I'm Never Explorer.

I love furniture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's really, she loved.

She thought it was quite comfortable also at the same time.

Lucky, I loved it when Lucky was in the house.

That nice.

She was, yeah.

She wandered down here.

Anyway, I think this is an area that's going to cause a lot more problems, including for us.

You know what I mean?

Like, what do we get paid?

Through every facet of anything that has IP, this is going to be an area that's changing rather drastically.

And people, you know, either whether going to Substack or owning a piece of it or renegotiating deals, and then on the other side, platforms having power too.

Who wins in this equation?

So we'll see.

I don't know if people get mad about knocking these comedians on off or not.

We'll see.

Yeah, it's it's I mean we're going through we go through a lot of our negotiations and you know which is very stressful for me because I realize I have got to make you very rich with your your 17 children.

Yeah, I do.

So, but there's all sorts of look, the compensation here is strange, but what happens every year is what's happening in tech, and that is whenever there's a digitization of anything, there's a consolidation.

And we're seeing that, I mean, I would bet the top 1% of podcasters make 130% of the revenue.

And what do I mean by that?

I think 99.5% of podcasters lose money.

Yeah, I bet.

And then, and then I would bet

well

that's my point.

I would bet that the top 50 podcasters make all of the profits.

It's so consolidated because what Spotify has done, which is just remarkable and it doesn't get the credit it deserves, Spotify has taken an entire medium, audio, and distilled it down to one icon on your smartphone.

No one else has been able to do that.

It's searchable.

It's easy.

And they have

tremendous power.

They do.

You know, the New York Times just launched an app today, I think it was, around, and they have a lot of partners.

I think New York Magazine is on there.

I think Pivot's on there.

So they're trying to do the same thing is create an app where there's a centralization of this stuff.

So you'll see a lot more of that.

Oh, really?

Yeah, we're on.

It's very exciting.

It's very exciting.

All right, we're going to move on to our friends of Pivot.

Charlie Wurzel and Ann Helen Peterson, reporters and authors of the new book, Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home.

All right.

Welcome, Charlie and Ann.

So let's just get right into it.

Your dog just barked and interrupted the beginning of our show.

So what kind of dog do you have, Ann?

Let's get to the important stuff.

That particular dog is an English setter mix.

Ah, very regal.

Very regal.

Very noisy and noisy.

So

let's get into working from home.

That's a typical thing is people

have kids or dogs or whatever.

But that's sort of the top line of everything.

But a lot of people are changing how they're working completely and thinking about work going forward, especially mostly information workers, not people that actually have to show up in stores, et cetera.

So talk a little bit about sort of your premise of the big problem and the bigger promise.

What are each of you just sort of weigh in on that?

So

I think we're at a really interesting moment and an inflection point here.

And the way that I've been thinking about it lately, what I think is powerful about it is for years, knowledge workers wanted more flexibility, have wanted more flexibility.

They've wanted to take Friday and work from home.

They've wanted, you know, they've had a family emergency and they've needed to, you know, go and spend a couple of months taking care of their parents or whatever it is.

And they've always been met by employers with this idea of if we leave the nucleus of the office,

there's something dangerous that's going to happen there.

Productivity will go down.

The company culture will start to fray.

The fabric of the organization will fall apart.

And so they were denied a lot of that flexibility for years.

And now we have a situation where we were all forced into this experiment.

There's been difficulties, obviously, and we're doing this during a pandemic, but some of the broader things have worked, right?

The system has held together in whatever way.

Things haven't fallen apart completely.

And we're realizing that, you know, we can do this thing that we've been told that we couldn't do because it was this, you know, it was this red line.

And so I think a lot of workers are...

coming to this idea that like

what else were we told that was bs what else is there about the way that we work that we're just doing because it makes a certain group of people, you know, feel more comfortable?

And that is, you know, executives or, you know, management who likes butts and seats because they can see people around.

And so I think that is sort of like the

nugget there.

That is the main thing that is kind of unlocked in a lot of people's brains, that there is this possibility.

And what is the negative part of that, though, is that, you know, people are, many companies are attached to this in-office model.

And there is a lot of studies showing people work too much when they're remote, when they're online all the time.

So talk a little bit about the negative aspects of this shift.

I mean, the negative is you just work all the time.

And I was well practiced in that before the pandemic because I was an academic.

And, you know, academics have had a lot of flexibility with their schedules.

This depends a little bit whether you're in the sciences or the humanities.

But, you know, when I was in grad school and then I was a professor, I made most of my hours, especially besides those that I was teaching.

And what that meant is that all hours of my week were open to be colonized by work.

And that's where I really learned a lot of my worst tendencies in terms of like how I think of how I use my time, like whether or not I feel like I've had a good week, all of those things.

And I think when people started working from home for the first time during the pandemic, there wasn't a lot else to even do, right?

Why not work?

So you roll over in the morning and you start working.

It's 8 p.m.

You just keep working, you know?

Scott?

Yeah, I'm curious.

So it strikes me we're just going to learn a lot here because we're coming up on two years where essentially we've been working from home.

What have you found?

Getting a little deeper, it does strike me that some job functions and some industries are better suited for remote work than others.

Have you done any analysis or have any theses around the types of industries that are hurt least and most by the movement to remote work?

Well, I think the immediate answer is people are like, oh, well, tech is much more suitable to this, right?

They're just more nimble in the way that they think about work and experimenting.

They're not terrified by the idea of asynchronous working.

A lot of tech companies were already experimenting with this before the pandemic.

But I actually think that the companies that benefit most from this are the companies that we don't associate with nimbleness, right?

So, like law firms, accountancy firms, nonprofits, things that are like very state or normal or traditional in the fact that they used to be, we are in the office for these certain hours and this is how we work.

Just opening the door to thinking about, well, what if we work a slightly different way?

What if we actually think about whether we need a receptionist and what, you know, if we're going to have an extra person, what will their role be?

What if we start to even reconsider the billable hour?

Like those are those are larger paradigm shifts that I think are really important right now.

Now, people do want to go into the office, Charlie.

For example, men and people over 50 support returning to the office most.

Do offices work better for some people than others?

Because Scott has a premise that young people should be in an office setting for

not just dating, but just socialization, et cetera, et cetera.

So, you know, I know having kids in school, physical school is better.

It just is.

There's no question over remote.

So is there some reason why there's this difference?

And do some people benefit from being in the office?

Yeah, I mean, is, this is, this is the main thing.

Like the conversation gets very binary very quickly, right?

And where it's just like, are we all going to be in the office?

Are we all going to be dragged back in or whatever?

And it's just, it's not the case, right?

Like everyone works differently.

There are reasons,

you know, everyone's brain is

different.

And I think that there are plenty of people who, you know, who want to be in there, who, who benefit from it.

And

I'm one of those people, right?

I really like, I start to feel detached from an organization if I am away from, you know, the nerve center for too long.

And it actually starts to affect my performance a little bit because I start to feel like I'm, you know, I'm not a part of that organization and it can be a little dangerous for me professionally.

So I would, you know, when I was at the times with you, like, like, I would come into, you know, the headquarters somewhat, you know, once a quarter or something like that, in order to have that.

I think that's important.

I think if we just, you know, if we adopt this binary mentality, it's going to be, it's going to be

even more painful because

everyone works differently.

I would say, though, that

you're right, that the culture benefits a very

specific type of person.

We're there because there is a person at the top whose job is probably the most fuzzy in terms of output.

It's very

some management is just very

hands-on.

It's hard to say what the tangible product is at the end of the day outside of

the bottom line.

And some of that product is the way you relate with employees.

And so those people, there's, it's, I, I feel for them.

It's a little bit scary, right?

Like your job completely changes.

Yeah.

They don't know what to do with themselves.

I would love to put forward a couple hypotheses and you guys confirm or nullify or validate them based on your research.

So if you think about putting on a, you know, putting on makeup, blow-drying your hair, putting on a pantsuit or a suit, commuting on the Long Island Railroad, you're talking potentially about 10 hours a week.

You're also talking about, I think the average cost to put someone in a steel tower or

this amalgam of steel, glass, and asbestos, it costs between $25,000 and $30,000 a year to figure out security, the building,

and

snacks.

So, okay, $30,000 per employee, 10 hours a week.

We keep looking at this through the lens of reduced productivity.

Isn't this the most accretive productivity tool in history that we have decided to make everyone?

I mean, if I start from additional 10 hours, an additional $25,000 for me to split with all my employees have gone remote, don't we start from the position of strength here?

Isn't this an unbelievable unlock?

Yeah, you just made the argument.

I mean, we can quote you

in the end of the book where we have this letter to employers that's basically like,

why not do this now, right?

Like, what are you losing?

I mean, the one thing is that within that scenario, you do have the capacity for

employers to look at that money saved and say, we're not going to funnel this back into like supplying our workers with any sort of ergonomical setup at home.

We're not going to help fund third spaces so that people can get out of their homes, right?

So they can get some of that space.

Instead, we're just going to cut it from our budget and use it to save money and then also start surveilling.

employees on their computers, right?

Well, talk about that.

Talk about the surveilling because this is really before, you know, I remember, you remember Bloomberg, they sort of, they plugged in and out and they'd have to always say where they were.

And I found that really disturbing.

Now computers can really follow what people are doing, but keystroke by keystroke, essentially.

You know, the remote work divide is going to be very real.

And you mentioned at the beginning of the program, right?

If you're a chef or whatever, like you can't work remotely as a chef.

You got to be in the office.

So there is an inequality right there.

But then within the knowledge workers, the people who get to work remotely, there's going to be a serious inequality that's going to have to be

actually monitored or codified in some kind of way because you're going to get the crappy bosses who don't trust their employees who install keyboard you know monitoring software and you know you have people even more chained to their desk and less sort of free during their workdays than than they were before.

But I will say, going back to just like the point before about unlocking

productivity, unlocking more hours, whatever,

one of the big things too is if you like long term, it is such a benefit for companies to have their employees

happier or feel like they have more of that flexibility in their lives.

It's just, it's kind of, it's kind of ridiculous to me that people don't see the long-term value of employees not being miserable all the time at work.

I have two more kind of hypotheses I want your response to.

So if you want to get a group of people in denial together, get the owners of office buildings together.

Supposedly, we all can't wait to get back to the office.

And you're talking about an asset class, a multi-trillion dollar asset class, and there's this narrative that we want to get back.

I read somewhere that we're like at 34% back in the office.

Tell me how this isn't one of the greatest destructions in demand and value of one of the largest asset classes in the world, and that is commercial real estate.

I just, how on earth does this space, other than the really top shelf space that Google wants, just not get absolutely the shit kicked out of it.

Totally.

You know, I was on a podcast, I don't know, six months ago with someone who was making the case really to go back in the office.

This is the CEO.

And he just kept talking about like,

but what about the people who own this real estate?

They're going to get totally screwed, right?

Like that was his case to try to get workers back in the office.

We're worried about them.

We care about them.

Yeah.

Well, you would worry about the people in the stores and in the sandwich places, etc., etc.

That's what I think.

Yeah, yeah, it trickles down.

And I think that this is, and we address this in the book, this is where you need municipalities and also people who own these buildings to start thinking in innovative and imaginative ways about what the home forward is, right?

Homes, right?

Yeah, I was thinking homes.

Well, and there's lots of discussion about like what can you do actually with one of these buildings?

Is it transferable?

Can you turn them into like co-working spaces, right?

Can they be more like a we work than something that is owned and leased by the companies?

But right now, I think that people are so stuck in this idea of like, we have to wedge people back into the old way of doing things

instead of actually trying to think about anything interesting.

And the second order effect that I'm most fascinated with, and people don't want to talk about it because they immediately go to like some horrific situations of abusive power, but one in three relationships begin at work.

And

when we don't have that, when people aren't meeting that way, aren't we going to see

everything from

decline in birth rates to delays in household formation to a massive increase in online dating, which leads to an increase in what I call mating inequality?

It strikes me that we don't want to talk about it because people don't like to admit that

they met their wife or husband at work because everyone kind of like raises their eyebrows like, oh, was someone, you know, 99% of relationships that begin in work don't involve something predatory or terrible, right?

It is still, it's school, it's work, and then it's online are the kind of three buckets where people meet others.

Isn't

where did it, what happens?

I love this question.

First of all, because Charlie and I met at work when we were at BuzzFeed, right?

Okay.

And that was also a time in my life where I had no other friends outside of BuzzFeed.

Yeah, socialization.

You meet friends.

I have a lot of my friends today are from work.

Yeah.

And

this also, it absolutely happens when I was in academia.

Like I remember trying to date when I was in grad school and online dating closing that bucket to just people who were also in grad school at the University of Texas because I was like, no one else can understand my life.

Right.

Because that's part of the reason that you start dating someone at work.

It's an it's an opportunity to meet someone, first of all, but it's also that like the rhythms of your day and the expectations of your profession, it's easier.

to understand that when it's someone working alongside you.

I will say though that this was not how it used to be, right?

Like people primarily met their partners, their spouses through groups outside of work.

And that was in part because women weren't in the workplace.

But

it was church and they're not coming back.

These communities, these zagors aren't coming back.

Well, and this is the primary argument of the book is that one of the reasons why we don't meet anyone else outside of our workplaces and we don't have friends outside of our workplaces is because we work all the time.

And so the only way to rebuild these kind of locies, loci, of collectivism are to stop working all the time, right?

To stop actually having our bodies in the workspace, but also to stop devoting all of our time to those two principal time consumers for middle-class bourgeois people, which are your job and parenting.

Right.

Right.

No, absolutely.

Okay, last question.

You both went remote years before the pandemic.

So did I.

I have not been in the office forever.

I don't like, in fact, Charlie, I don't even think I went at the New York Times maybe once.

It's a nice building.

So far, so far?

Fine.

I don't think that's a good thing.

Yeah, but let's be honest.

That's their choice.

They're like, yeah, no problem.

No problem.

Anyway, do you recognize any of the struggles everyone went through the last two years?

Or what's your, each of you, give us a piece of advice to pay attention to as this moves forward?

Because I think this is done.

I think people are not going to be going back into work.

Even though a lot of people actually have called me from the Times, like, I kind of like being in the office.

Like, it's nice being, and that's sort of a newspaper environment.

But

talk about what advice each of you would give.

Charlie, you start.

I think one of the biggest things here is to, if you're going to actually commit to having a remote work environment, then use it.

The thing that I did in 2017 is I just, I worked all the time because I was worried about losing the privilege of working remotely.

So all I did was just have a longer work day from home.

And so actually using a flexible work environment means

changing your day fundamentally.

Figure out the things in your day that that you need, that you want to do that make that make it, you know,

better,

you know, more precious, just the rhythms of your life that you need, right?

For me, is working out in the middle of the day.

It just helps center everything.

So I build the whole day around preserving a small block of time in the middle of it that if I was in an office, that would be impossible.

Charlie, could you take your shirt off?

Is that inappropriate, Kara?

Yes, Chris Cuomo.

Listen.

I'm sorry, Charlie.

Go ahead.

I have a chest for radio.

Sorry.

This is what I deal with.

Thank God we're not in the office because right now I'd be in HR.

No,

I mean, honestly, it's just about figuring out how to protect your time.

And your workday, if you're actually making use of a remote thing, remote lifestyle, should be fundamentally different than it is in the office.

Otherwise, you're not really gaining the benefits of it.

You're just kind of porting your job over to your house.

So whether it's kids or working out or whatever, there's something that, or I want to paint my office.

Spend, say, I want to, the big thing I want to do with my day is I need to be there every morning at drop off or pick up with the kids and like that is how you arrange the day around something like that that's that would be my first piece of advice

all right and

my big piece of advice is that whatever you were doing the last two years that's not the future of flexible work you know like i get a lot of people who respond to a piece they're like i'm totally on board with everything you're saying here but i'm so lonely at home and i'm like you know what this pandemic is eventually going to end and you're going going to be able to, you know, work at your friend's kitchen table.

You're going to be able to go to a coffee shop.

You're going to have third spaces and you're going to go into the office when and if that's appropriate.

So, you know, this, these last two weeks and also, I will add, we will also have more accessible and reliable child care because that is a huge thing that has made working from home difficult.

So hopefully we can change that.

with systemic changes.

But otherwise, you know,

there's a whole lot of exciting changes that are possible, but we have to be able to imagine them.

I'm absolutely fascinated by this topic.

And I wonder,

I think of just all of these incredible

second order effects.

We talk a lot about burnout or you, you,

and when the pre-reading, we were talking about burnout amongst young people.

Isn't some of it just leading up to these jobs?

The kids are...

people enter work burned out that and this is a little bit outside of your domain but you seem like thoughtful people so i'm going to ask it anyways And I'm also very good at pivoting every question to a story about me.

My 14-year-old is working all the goddamn time between studying for the SSAT or the pre-SAT, trying to figure out a way to get into the right high school so we can get them to the right college.

It's just out of control.

And I wonder if by the time that people show up at work, they're kind of already burned out.

And that is, it's not that they're burned out after two or three years at Morgan Stanley or McKenzie.

They're burned out

about being on this hamster wheel since the age of 12.

Have you seen anyone take advantage of the remote work kind of trend or unlock to try and figure out a way to decrease this burnout among young people?

Are young people just complainers?

Like, what is the relationship between remote work and the burnout phenomena?

Well, I mean, I can just speak, I can speak personally that

this is what happened to me, right?

I was on the hamster wheel very early,

very like competitive.

high school and all the all that all that stuff.

And the one thing that I'll say that I'm seeing from

younger people and the way that remote work can play into this is when you come into an office and you've never met anyone you sort of have a different relationship to the space you can kind of see some of some of the the the the bs for for what it really is and i think there's a lot of people who are looking at all of this The thing that I'm sort of most heartened by with

Gen Z coming into the workforce is there's this real skepticism of careers in general, saying like, okay, so I give everything that I have all the time to this organization for, or organizations for 40 years.

And then afterward, I get 10 years to myself to do the things that I want to do that I put off this whole time after being on the hamster wheel and studying for the PSATs or whatever, you know, stuff and learning how to play the oboe because it's good for, you know, some college admissions thing.

There's, they're like, that's a bad deal.

And I really like that idea because it's that, that's how you kind of take a little bit of that power back is you start to question the fundamental deal at the heart of you know the the yeah exactly so I would say remote work it's not the trade the genesis of that necessarily I think it's a generational thing but I also think that it helps sort of see the office and see you know your workplace for what it is which is a you know a collection of people kind of like groping around in the dark trying to figure out what to do Dan last word

yeah I'd say that a lot of millennials kind of kept that that feeling of like what you know

what is going on is this the rest of my life that existential crisis at bay longer right because the

recession forced us to just like put our heads down and work and i think a lot of people that's just what they do right you put your heads down head down and work because precarity forces you to

and

Millennials are experiencing that come to Jesus, for lack of a better word.

I think in part because of the pandemic now in their late 30s, and especially because they're dealing with the intersection of these work thoughts with parenting as well and the overwhelming work and exhaustion of contemporary parenting.

Whereas I think Gen Z is coming to this realization a little bit younger.

I'm really interested to see where it goes.

Yeah, I think it's fascinating, including with UBI.

All kinds of trends are all sort of happening all at the same time.

It is a really fascinating time.

We should all work less, except for me.

I like to work.

I happen to like it.

And I like parenting.

So here I am for the rest of my life.

Anyway,

the book is called Out of Office.

It's a terrific book.

Ann and Charlie, thank you so much.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

All right, Scott, that was fascinating.

Should we work less?

We work kind of hard, don't we?

I think there's a population of people, and I would include both of us in this population, that decide to work a lot because we either...

I love it.

Well, A, you love it.

I do it because I want, you know, I want to be more relevant and attractive to other people and have like bling.

But whatever your reason, there's a group of people that just want to work a lot.

And I don't, I think remote work unlocks a lot of opportunities for self-care and

caring others, but I also think it's an unlock if you want to be more productive and work a lot.

I have a, more importantly, I have a I have a story about the University of Texas where the professor went.

Do you want to hear my story about the University of Texas?

Go ahead.

I applied to nine business schools.

I got into three and UT gave me a conditional acceptance.

And I was so excited because being the responsible young man I was, I wanted basically to go back to graduate school for arrested adolescents.

I wanted to go for football and partying.

So I thought, I'm going to go to the University of Texas.

And I enrolled at the University of Texas Macomb School.

And I fell in love, Kara.

And I said to

my girlfriend or the woman of my dreams, I said, look, I'm going to the University of Texas.

You should apply there.

And she said, I'm going to Berkeley for graduate school.

And I said, well, I'm going to UT.

And she said, well, I'm going to Berkeley.

And I said, well, I'm going to Berkeley.

Anyways, I followed her.

I followed her.

I was supposed to go to the University of Texas and I ended up following her to Berkeley.

You missed that party mode.

You missed that, yeah.

Hook'em horns.

Hook'em horns.

And now love the Haas School.

Absolutely love the Haas School.

You never know where life is going to take you, Kiera.

You never know.

You're in a loft with sharp objects, with several.

I know, that's true.

I know exactly where I'm going at all times.

Anyway,

but in any case, that was really interesting.

What's happening with work is very interesting.

It's fascinating.

It's fascinating.

It really is interesting.

It's going to have a lot of second-order effects.

I'm telling you, people aren't thinking about the implications on society.

Third order.

That's a third.

fourth order, fifth order.

Yeah, yeah.

It's going to be really interesting.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for wins and fails.

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Okay, Scott, wins and fails.

You start.

So my win is a distinguished life of honor and service that is Senator Bob Dole, born in Kansas,

was recruited to the Jayhawks on scholarships, forget this, football, baseball, and basketball, an incredible athlete, and then signed up for the Army and was severely injured in Italy.

The shell lodged in his shoulder and then exploded and shattered his spine, never really reclaimed use of his left arm and claims or credits his surgeon, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, with telling him, You can't focus on what you've lost.

You have to focus on what you have.

And supposedly, he credits him with having a greater influence on his life than any one of his family members, went went on to be a great senator, the Republican nominee for president in 1996, and really, and was always partisan, but he was blunt, he was humorous, and he was always willing to reach across the aisle to try and get things done.

And when you think about how the Republican Party has morphed, this is a guy who was very conservative.

Yeah.

But in 1964 and 1968, voted for the Civil Rights Acts, voted for the Voter Rights Act.

This is, he was what Republicans were supposed to be, about freedom and about liberty for everybody.

And I think the Republican Party has lost a lot of real heroes.

I mean, lately, John McCain, George Bush, and Bob Dole.

And I was thinking about, you know, what I like so much about these

leaders, because I disagree with almost every one of their policies.

And it was

the thing that we've really lost here is that I think what these three individuals had was John McCain was shot down

in Vietnam and tortured.

And not that, you know,

anyways, I'll just leave that.

George Bush was shot down in a fighter bomber and had a submarine rescue him out of the water.

Bob Dole, obviously a war hero, when he was shot, he was so badly injured.

And then, in the fog of war, the medics got to him and they're like, We can't get this guy out of here.

He's paralyzed.

We can't carry him.

You know what they did?

They said, What's the maximum amount of morphine we could give him to be comfortable before he dies?

And then they, in his own blood, they marked on his forehead

M for morphine so someone someone wouldn't show up and give him a second fatal dose.

That's how badly injured he was.

And I think the thing that we really are going to miss about these individuals, including Bob Dole, was that when you're fighting for your life alongside somebody, you don't see them as a Republican or Democrat.

You see them as an American.

And I think the three of them always saw themselves and all of us as Americans first before they saw themselves as Democrats or Republicans.

Well, that would be nice.

Although, let me just say, of the two that you mentioned, we're not pro-Trump and were scared of what happened with Donald Donald Trump.

And Bob Dole did embrace Trump rather significantly at the end of his life.

I think it was a surprise to a lot of people.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Anyways, my win is

the incredible public service and heroics of Senator Bob Dole.

And I think we're going to miss people who.

I think the lesson, if there is a lesson here, is that I do think we need some sort of public service that restores the connective tissue as Americans.

When a third of us on both parties through the other party, people in the other party is our mortal enemy, we have lost the script around what it means to be Americans.

That is fair.

And I think these three individuals never lost that script.

Yeah.

Anyways, my win is Bob Dole.

My fail.

Cara is the messaging and poor strategy of the Democratic Party.

We let the Republicans grab critical race theory, something that they use very effectively and scared the shit out of parents.

They're separating parents from influence over schools.

They're starting, they're trying to fight racism with more racism.

They were very effective around messaging.

When the reality was, critical race theory really isn't that big or prevalent a deal in schools right now.

If you really look to try and find out how many teachers and how many schools are teaching critical race theory, they have been masterful at taking something, making a caricature of it, and then using it to be very effective.

And at the same time, on the Democratic side, there is a credible threat that Roe v.

Wade may be overturned.

And the Democrats can't figure out a way to get their heads out of their asses and rally people to fight what is probably the greatest assault on liberties in a long time.

And here's the opportunity and what they are missing.

They will position it as the war on women.

And that is absolutely true.

But the way they should position it, and it's true, is this is a war on poor people.

Because rich white women are going to have no problem getting on a plane to go terminate a pregnancy in Chicago, wherever they need to go.

This is a war on the poor.

A single mother living in the South is going to have no options to terminate a pregnancy.

Yes, indeed.

And if they were to effectively message to rural and low-income and middle-income communities who have defected from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party because they feel like Democrats have become out of touch or they like this macho of the Republican Party, I still don't understand why these low and middle income cohorts have defected to the Republican Party.

We need to get them back.

And the way you get them back is saying the Republican Party has decided that this right is going to be sequestered just to rich white people in big cities, and they are coming after you.

And even if they are pro, even if they are pro-life, I think they will see the problem with that.

And Democrats are terrible at messaging and strategy.

That sounds like a historical thing, isn't it?

That's sort of the way Democrats do it.

There's no reason we can't change it.

Well, there's also a bridge too far that they won't do.

They won't quite go as cynical as critical race.

They won't like, you know, it was George Bush, by the way, who you said was a hero there who did the Willie Horton stuff.

It was, you know, Lee Atwater.

They are willing to do those things to create sick of being right and not effective.

Yeah, I get it.

I get it.

But it's very hard for them to go that far.

Anyways, I think our fail.

Our fail is the Democratic Party, when there are real assaults on our freedoms, can't figure out a way to message effectively around it.

All right, okay.

And I do think the opportunity to describe this not only as a war on women, but a war on the poor and a war on rural states is an opportunity for us to try and reclaim some of our lost brothers and sisters in the lower and middle income groups.

Anyways, that's very political, My wins and fails.

What are your wins and fails, Carol?

My win is Scott Galloway for letting me stay.

I'm going to be saying it a lot, just so you know.

I'm just keeping you up.

This is my new place in New York.

I'm really excited.

I'm glad someone's using it.

I'm never there.

Yeah, it's really nice.

And then

I think the fail is this, this, what happened at the school.

It's so like,

it's as a parent, you're sort of like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You just sit there and go, I think a lot about parenting these days, and it's really the things we're teaching our kids about, sacrifice and

honor, really.

Like, there are troubled kids, and this kid was clearly troubled.

There's no question, but the fact that one, he couldn't get help, that this is, you know, that he, that he, he did communicate.

Like, look, these people aren't born.

Some people are born evil, I guess, but you know, it's, it's made.

It's made.

It's so made in this way.

And, and it's sad.

It's sad.

I don't know what happened to him at the school.

I don't know what occurred, but

it brought me a great deal of sadness for every every single, except for those parents who I literally would like slap silly if I met.

And even them, I guess you had

no empathy for them.

Their lives are over.

I don't know.

Yeah, I get it.

I just

was such a fail of, I don't know what.

I don't know what that they think this is like the way to conduct your life.

And I guess I'm always surprised when something like this happens.

And them leaving, taking off on their kid.

It just is like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Like, what, what was the goal there?

You know what I mean?

Of running?

I just don't understand it.

I don't, that to me was

not taking seriously these things, doing LOL to your kid.

Oh, you didn't get caught, like that bullshit.

And then taking off on their kid, that poor kid.

Like, and I think this is a murderer.

It's just still like leaving your kid who has already done something truly horrible and should also be in jail.

Just really, just the whole thing.

Oh, we talk about this.

Citizenship, it brings up power of schools, but the core issue kind of remains the same.

And that is we do not have a mental, we do not have a monopoly on bad parenting.

We do not have a monopoly on juvenile mental illness.

What we have is a monopoly on bad parents with kids suffering from mental illness and access to weapons of war.

That's the thing we do really well.

And then these families, then these families whose kids got,

these families, the kids got killed.

And then, you know, it reminds you of Alex Jones and all that and this guy.

And, you know, just like, are you kidding?

These parents are just suffered the worst thing ever.

Just the worst thing ever.

And just for going to school.

Like, it's just ridiculous.

It's so random and sad and possibly preventable.

Like, not completely preventable.

Boy, is it more preventable?

Anyway, that was my fail.

And when, of course, Scott.

So

it felt like a little sad this week.

It felt very, that really made me very sad and deeply sad.

In any case, there's things to look up for.

New York is coming back, Scott.

I have to say, it was passed.

Was it?

Yeah, it's on fire, especially down where you are.

It's like Disneyland.

It's on fire.

Yes.

It feels like that.

Essentially, there's a lot of trash and a lot of rats.

But last night night I went out to get some formula and

rats are plenty.

Anyway,

but I guess they're doing well too.

All right.

So that is the show.

We'll be back on Friday for more.

And Scott, can you please read us out?

Today's show is produced by Larry Naiman, Evan Angle, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie and Dutch engineered this episode.

Thanks to Drew Burroughs.

Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

Wherever you listen to podcasts, thank you 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.

Gun control, teen depression at the hands of big tech.

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