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

Support for the show comes from Saks Fifth Avenue.

Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style.

Follow us here, and you can invest in some new arrivals that you'll want to wear again and again, like a relaxed product blazer and Gucci loafers, which can take you from work to the weekend.

Shopping from Saks feels totally customized, from the in-store stylist to a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you things that fit your style and taste.

They'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in, or when that Brunella Cuccinelli sweater you've been eyeing is back in stock.

So, if you're like me and you need shopping to be personalized and easy, head to Sacks Fifth Avenue for the best fall arrivals and style inspiration.

Thumbtack presents.

Uncertainty strikes.

I was surrounded.

The aisle and the options were closing in.

There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

There were too many choices.

What if I never got my living room painted?

What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use?

What if

I just used thumbtack?

I can hire a top-rated pro in the Bay Area that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher, the bountiful.

I'm Scott Galloway.

Happy Thanksgiving, Kara.

Happy Thanksgiving.

How's it going?

You know, it's going.

I think there's a weird Thanksgiving for everybody or a weird holiday for everybody, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I got yelled at by one lady online because I'm not having my mom down.

We were, you know, we were kidding about it.

We're not bringing my mom down, obviously, because it's as the news started to mount about everything, we decided to let her stay away from us and stay by herself.

Although she's been very quarantined.

So she was grumpy about that.

But it's going to be a very tiny little nothing.

No, no family gatherings.

It's weird.

Everyone, there's all these weird headlines like that one, the Denver mayor flew, which I can't flying is crazy as far as I'm concerned.

Otherwise, I know a lot of people did it, and I'm trying not to judge people that do that, but tons of he flew after telling people not to fly.

And then another mayor did something.

Anyway, it's just a really interesting thing.

Newsome Gate.

What?

There's Newsome Gate.

Newsome Gate.

He went to it.

That was a bad idea.

That was a bad idea on his part.

It's an interesting time.

Anyway, it'd be nice.

It's weird.

It's weird.

It's interesting to think about what Thanksgiving is, right?

Of course, there's all the controversy around Thanksgiving itself,

but it's a good thing.

Oh, Jesus.

You're going after Thanksgiving now?

Yeah.

No, it's not what I mean there now.

It's been like been debated about with Indigenous people and stuff like that.

It's good to debate these things, Scott.

Don't be like an old white guy who's like, oh, I can't believe we're going to be.

I am the old white guy.

I am the, but you know, something that's not.

We can try to debate these things and discuss our origins all over.

Okay, okay.

Okay.

Anyways, LA Law meets NPR.

I know how to make Lucky happier, though.

Call Lucky today, courtesy me and say, you know,

Scott used to be addicted to Thanksgiving leftovers yeah but then he quit cold turkey call her and tell her that make her think she's going to be happy about that make her day she's not good dad jokes on thanksgiving absolutely she has been tested a lot she does not have covered she's been but i know like she's been tested a lot we we test her quite a bit and then my son is is still in the basement it's like parasite our phone our home is like parasite we have this separate basement that has a door and a back door like parasite if they were rich white people no it's true yeah just like parasite Oh, my God.

We're trying our best.

We're testing.

We're trying our best.

It's not upstairs, downstairs.

You hate that we're trying our best.

It's upstairs, downstairs, fully plush, carpeted basement with a plasma.

That's what it is.

It's not upstairs, downstairs, it's a Swiss family.

It's not that kind of base.

That's your house, Scott Galloway.

My house is a lot of house.

You don't have a basement.

It's kind of a moldy-smelling basement.

He's like, what am I going to do down here?

I'm like, just open the door and I'll come near the door and say hi.

Anyway, he's doing really well.

He's staying, you know, for a while, as I told you.

But more importantly, what did the cannibalistic teddy bear eat for Thanksgiving?

Oh, no.

Here we go.

All right.

Stuffing.

Stuffing, Kara.

That's a good one.

That's good.

I'm going to use that one.

Where did you get these?

Like, from the dad book of bad jokes?

That's where I get everything from the internet.

That's all I do all day.

Speaking of the internet, Amazon Web Services had an outage this week.

The consequences were far-reaching.

Scott, you know, again, we depend on Amazon.

So true, isn't it?

And I know he's not your favorite and he's not my favorite on CNN, but

Rick Santorum, Senator Santorum, had, I thought, a really interesting take.

Well, one of his interesting takes, by the way, I don't know, you probably weren't like this, but when you're an eight or a 10-year-old boy and you always roll on a posse, it's not like today where we have everything programmed.

I used to go six, seven hours at a time every day with nothing to do and no supervision.

And so ultimately, we would kind of get in these Lord of the Flies group and we would decide who was

the one we were going to pick on and mock all day long

as normal kids do.

Anyways, it's clearly.

I'm curious to see where this is going.

Well, Rick Santorum on CNN, they're like, okay, he's the kid we're going to pick on.

No, he's, oh, come on.

He's well paid, and

he's designed to be an asshole.

That's his character.

Yeah, that's my point.

That's his character.

He says something.

Let me just say, I have the bones to pick with Rick Santorum around gay families.

I'm not going into it.

I don't doubt his views are totally different.

No, no, no.

He literally tried to get gay families not able to adopt children.

It was just,

He shall never be forgiven against your family.

That doesn't age well.

Anyways, but he did say something about the elections.

He said that one of the most interesting things about the election, or the best things about elections, is we have 50 different processes, infrastructures, protocols.

Every state has their own method.

And you immediately think of the tech guy.

You immediately go, well, that makes no sense.

It should be all on one Android device and phone.

And then he said something that reminded me that the difference between robust and fragile.

When you have 50 different systems, no one can hack your entire elections.

Unless you're Facebook, of course, and you hack the media.

It's influencing the elections.

But I thought that was pretty interesting.

And what this shows, I mean, do you realize, okay, supposedly AWS is divided into 23 different regions.

And this was just one of the regions that went down.

And just as one region went down, shut dark, one password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital, Gazette, Coinbase, Data Camp, GetAround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Inquirer, Pocket Radio Lab, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, Vonnage, The Washington Post.

Quite a lot of people.

This is one of their 23 regions going down.

Ships went down.

And you think about just how incredibly, I mean,

it's a lesson where

there is a reason we have, and this for me everything

goes back to antitrust.

More players that aren't competing, they aren't coordinating, they aren't blitz scaling like like all tech wants, all tech SEOs want.

That's Fried Hoffman.

They make more robust ecosystems, and that is if something goes wrong with one, the entire nation doesn't get shut down.

Well, it is interesting.

I have a very tough column about Amazon tomorrow, which I'm sure I would like to read.

It is.

I think it is.

I think you'll be proud of me.

I'm also proud.

But although you keep recommending the stock, it's nothing to do with the stock.

I agree.

I think it's interesting.

There are a lot of competitors in this area, but their influence over our world, whether it's commerce or web services or etc., you know, or not, not as much entertainment.

There's lots of choices there.

But anyway, it's a real, it's a real, it's a real problem.

It's a real problem.

It's a real problem.

I think people know.

Remember when AOL shut down for that 16-hour thing?

You've got, mail.

Gosh, AOL.

Do you remember when it shut down?

It was like a national emergency because everybody went crazy.

It was like 19-hour shutdown.

I was with Steve Case when it started, and he was like, I bet you were with Steve Case.

He goes, he goes, because I was working on a book and he goes, it's no big deal.

And I go, oh, no, this is a big deal.

It's a big deal.

And because everybody wasn't able, everyone was on AOL, which was interesting.

And it was literally a national crisis, caused all kinds of problems for him at that time.

The other interesting story in tech is Wall Street Journal is reporting that Salesforce is looking to buy Slack.

What do you make of this?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I got to make some calls.

I have not made calls, but

a lot of people have tried to buy Slack.

Microsoft, Google, there's others.

People have been sniffing around Slack for a while.

You know, they've always had an uphill battle to try to beat the big guys.

And I think Salesforce has long been interested in it.

You know, I don't know.

There's been a lot of Slack buying rumors, and then they don't happen.

And maybe now's the time.

I've always thought they should be bought, but what do you think?

This one was clearly

both

probably Salesforce leaked this to see how their stock would respond.

And their stock was down 5%.

Slack was up 30%.

Slack is one of the few SaaS companies that aren't had a pandemic boost.

They haven't scaled.

Their business hasn't gone crazy.

They didn't have video, right?

They didn't.

That's right.

They don't have video.

They say this will put Salesforce directly squarely in competition with Microsoft, which I thought was interesting.

Microsoft has productivity tools, and they all now have productivity and collaboration tools, and they'll start going at each other.

Well, Microsoft really did want to buy, I think it was Peggy Johnson, she's not there anymore, really wanted to buy Slack early on.

And then Google was looking, there was a whole bunch, and I think Salesforce was in there too.

There was a whole, a couple of years ago, there was a big who's going to buy Salesforce thing.

And then the founder did not want to.

He's a really

interesting entrepreneur.

And he did not want to, and the company did not want to.

And it was growing.

But I can't imagine how difficult it is to scale that thing.

And

it dovetails so nicely into so many companies.

And as much, you know, Stuart, the guy who founded Stuart Butterfield, he also founded Flickr with his ex-wife.

And they sold sold that.

And then he sold something else.

He wanted to really run this.

So I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

You know, just a quick note, you got me thinking.

I know you read a book on AOL.

And I was thinking about, I kind of came a professional age in the 90s with AOL.

I found AOL to be the absolute worst partner I've ever dealt with.

That's what many people thought.

They were, you know, I started or was one of the co-founders of Red Envelope, another company called Aardvark, a pet supplies company.

And basically, if you think of Amazon has 30% share, right?

Or if you think of companies that are known for being really difficult to deal with,

AOL at one point, if you wanted to sell anything on the internet,

you had to sell it on AOL's Marketplace.

And one of the guys who ran AOL Marketplace or co-ran it ended up becoming one of my closest friends.

But who was that?

Who was Mark Walsh?

No, I named Greg Shove.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Now I'm the CEO of Section 4, but

and godfather to his daughter.

Anyways,

wonderful guy, Canadian, Canadian, that says it all.

Okay.

So, but it was dealing with the level of arrogance, the level of what I'll call monopoly abuse.

People don't realize how powerful AOL was.

Yeah, it was.

It was just because everybody thought if you put your credit card on the internet, you know, Ukrainian crime gangs would steal it.

So everyone thought you had to be in a safe, closed environment of you've got mail.

It's just, it was incredible.

It's sort of an argument.

It kind of flies in the face of my whole break them up thing because things tend to fall naturally, or that's the argument we would make.

AOL is like the case study of what happens when a monopoly behaves that way and it doesn't work out.

Well, you know, they were less than monopoly than the only game in town, and then everyone else caught up.

I think you know what I mean?

Like, there was no barrier to entry for a lot of people, so I think that's really what happened with it.

It was the only one around with it, with a consumer product that had it.

But you're right, you're 100% right.

Steve Kay's smart, he sold that company for 20 times more than it was worth.

He certainly did.

He worked for Pizza Hut.

I don't know know if you know that.

Steve did.

He also, I've actually, I met him through you, the book party you did.

He starts with a very thoughtful, decent guy.

Yes, I like Steve.

I hope he's not listening because I like

it.

You want him to know?

No, we have this thing.

We have this thing.

We have a thing.

Like you and I, we have a thing.

He and I really have a thing.

Like we always insult each other.

His wife, on the other hand, is wonderful.

G case.

Steve is also.

Steve's brilliant.

And so are a lot of these.

Ted Leon's.

This is done really well.

Ted owns the wizard.

he owns a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff.

Leon's all the sports champions

in any case.

Um, uh, there it's an interesting time.

All right, Scott, we're gonna get on to big stories.

Big stories here on this Thanksgiving.

I'm spending Thanksgiving with Scott Galloway from a distance.

It kind of says everything about 2020, don't you know?

Yeah, no, it says everything about our life, and it's not good, it's not good.

It's not good, it's not good, it's not a good reflection.

What series?

The thing that should be running through your mind right now is what series of bad decisions led me to here right now.

In any case, let's get on to big stories.

Big stories.

For the second straight week, unemployment claims are jumping.

IBM is the latest company to announce it's letting go of 10,000 jobs in Europe, which brings me to, Scott.

Yeah.

Your newest book is being sold at social distance today.

It's called Post-Corona.

I've got a copy right here.

It's making you right here.

Post-Corona.

It's a scary looking book.

You can see it.

Nobody else can.

It's orange.

It's very, it's, it's, it's a slim little, but it's good.

It's like one of your books.

So tell me about it, we're going to talk about that.

It's called Post-Corona from Crisis to Opportunity.

Of course, you have to leave them on a high note.

I'm assuming.

There you go.

Well, I'm so cheery.

Yes.

By the way, your publisher, Penguin Random House, bought Simon Schuster, which is my publisher this week.

I don't even know what that means in any way whatsoever.

So let's sum it up.

Talk about,

I was reading through it.

I literally just got it last night.

It arrived.

All right, here we go.

More reasons why you don't engage in my relationship.

Don't invest in our relationship.

But anyways, go ahead.

Talk to me about the overall thing because it literally reads like the last 20 episodes of this show.

But go ahead.

Yeah, I'm not,

we are sort of the show.

By the way, the way I produced the book was I printed out all of my blog posts,

printed out all the transcripts from this show, and then found the common themes.

And there were three common themes, the markets, education, and society.

Right.

And then tried to bucket them and write into prose and then go through and edit the whole thing.

And I worked with Maria Petrova and Jason Stavers and Miel Severa, a bunch of smart people on my team and my agent Jim Levine and tried to do this.

It's like an Oscar thank you thing.

But go ahead.

Keep going.

Yes.

Thank you.

Number 27, a behavioral sciences on Amazon.

No, but it was

the, let me start.

Let me, if I can, if I try to distill it down to two things for me, it's that everyone wants to talk about what people would take away or what they would learn.

Anyway, so I think there's two kind of call signs.

And the first is capitalism, or what I hope we embrace, and that is a lot of young people are turned off at capitalism.

But I think what we've been experiencing through this pandemic and the last few years is not capitalism.

It's rugged individualism called capitalism on the way up to justify taking more of the gains than we should.

And then cronyism and socialism on the way down, which is cronyism.

And I think that capitalism, the key to capitalism and

successful applications of capitalism are that we have what I would call a hardcore, full-body, violent ecosystem around corporations and business.

And that we let businesses fail.

We let them go at it.

We let them make a shit ton of money if they're better than the other one.

We let people get fired.

We let people get laid off.

And then we use that violence between IBM and mainframe computers or or we let sun microsystems go out of business, this incredible competition.

And the fur flies create tremendous prosperity such that we can be more empathetic and loving to seniors and fund Social Security and take senior poverty from 38% to 11%.

And what I think the problem with this pandemic and what's happened over the last 10 or 20 years because of idolatry of innovators and corporations basically overrunning government institutions that have been

idolatry of innovators.

That's something you talk about a lot.

We personify companies.

We've flipped the model here.

We've decided that we need to be empathetic and loving towards corporations and very harsh and use words like meritocratic for individuals.

I think we have totally flipped capitalism upside down and that capitalism, we need to recognize it's not a natural state.

It's not an organic state.

It doesn't survive on its own.

And unless it sits on a bed of empathy, recognizing a lot of people can't compete in a full-body contact

corporate America, it just doesn't work.

And I think it's been collapsing on itself.

And then the last, and then kind of the second big theme is this notion of camaraderie.

Unless we find a way, I don't know if there's churches, through national service,

It used to be through crisis, but this crisis seems to be

dividing us, not uniting us.

We're going to have to figure out a way to express more camaraderie towards our old allies.

I think the greatest damage over the last four years is the fraying of the greatest relationship in history, the North Atlantic Treaty.

I think we need to,

whether it's approaching China, whether it's figuring out best practices around how to handle a pandemic, we need to absolutely develop greater sense of camaraderie with our allies again.

And also,

amongst each other, I just, I think.

It's interesting because today Joe Biden gave a speech or yesterday.

It was pretty pretty like that, just what you're talking about.

You know, and several articles, it was really interesting.

It was like, is he weak?

You know, for trying to get along.

Like, he was, that's the question when he was, I thought it was like, this is leadership.

But immediately it was, is he weak?

Well, we've, I think there's a certain level of toxic masculinity that's been injected into our politics and how we want to be that are reflected in our spending priorities.

Right.

We like big macho companies and we'll give them money, whereas an individual who's food insecure has screwed up and is weak,

there's a certain level of, and that we can go it alone.

And we don't need, we're so much bigger and better than Britain.

We don't need their intelligence.

We don't need to,

it's, it's, it's, it's this kind of.

Is this a new thing or is it just taken to extreme?

Because this, these are, you know, this rugged individualism, you know, I got mine jack kind of idea is is that new, but what's happened to it?

Because it really does feel like it's gone, you know,

that's always been in our culture for sure i think world war ii was this fantastic lesson on cooperation and that is

if the british the russians and the americans could come together to arrest tyranny um

that I think that taught us the importance of alliances.

And we decided to invest a massive amount of money in our enemies from last month, right?

We turned around and said, all right, we're going to rebuild you.

And I think that that lasted a long time.

And a lot of our leaders served in the same uniform.

They didn't think about red or blue.

They thought about khaki or the United States.

And I think over the last 20 or 30 years, people see

they don't, they have trouble attributing global cooperation, global trade in these treaties to anything in their life.

If there's one thing we've failed to do in a liberal democracy is demonstrate to people that they have gained from global trade.

And a lot of that is because we've decided to let the spoils of global trade go to the kind of information age workers as opposed to letting it trickle down.

And all people see is their factories getting closed.

You know, that's something you can attribute to something pretty easily, but they don't see that every day, you know, their prices have stayed lower, right?

Or that there's more opportunity or more shareholder growth.

I think we're going to

fail there.

Those are hard to make,

given how complex it is.

So who is the book for?

And I want to go through some specific things in it.

Who is it for from your perspective?

And

what group do you think has the biggest opportunities during these times?

I write pretty much everything, at least from a business.

If I'm a young man or woman trying to figure out what I do with my most precious capital, and that's my human capital, like what industries, what would be my approach to trying to create economic security for me and my family?

Like I want to understand.

I want people to, if they read something or take my class, I want them to feel like they come out of that class or that book a little bit sharper of a weapon in terms of heading into the jungle of capitalism.

Like what industries, I think there are kind of three huge shifts in capital that create tremendous opportunity for businesses and young people.

And those three are in order.

17% of GDP that represents health care is about to be thrown up and land in different places.

The novel coronavirus has upended regulation, consumer behavior.

People are now getting tested and fighting diseases at home.

The amount of money invested in telemedicine and remote health, there's going to be more over the next 20 months.

There's been the last 20 years.

The second is my industry, $750 billion in the U.S., several trillion globally.

Education is no longer going to be dispersed solely through university campuses.

Remote learning is going to absolutely explode.

And not only had different types of certification.

And then the third is

the absolute

incredible reallocation of capital out of what is, I think, the third or fourth largest asset class, and that is commercial real estate, into what I think is the second largest asset class, and that is residential.

And that sounds small, but that affects everything from AWS to grocery delivery.

But if I were young to put myself in between the intersection between technology and what I'll call residential, healthcare, or education are just, those are the places that a lot of people would say it's climate.

I didn't write about climate, but I think those are the areas where you're going to see just incredible stakeholder value.

You talked about this, this idea from the best-selling author, an NYU business school professor, Scott Galloway, comes an insightful analysis, who stands to win and lose in the post-pandemic world.

So you're using the guide for people to know what to do.

How are you, you?

And then you go over a couple of companies, which I thought was interesting.

Moreby Parker, we work and things like that.

But what,

how do you feel in this post-Corona time?

Here we are,

not focusing on the vast majority of people to focus in on those who are obscenely wealthy, like Jeff Bezos or, you know, who's going to get to be a billionaire.

You would think the pandemic was one of those moments of opportunity to shift that.

mentality.

It doesn't seem like it has.

We're arguing over Thanksgiving.

We're still, we have, we still have the Kraken lady still going at it with her misspelled legal things.

We've got differences like the Supreme Court today with

religious gatherings and everything.

So it feels like, and everybody's saying, Biden, who's saying we need to get together and beat this thing,

there's enough people going, you know, whatever, we're going to keep fighting.

So

what do you look at this post-Corona when you talk about post-corona?

Are you worried about it?

Are you like, here's the way we get out of this thing?

Well, people always like to say the Chinese word for crisis is opportunity and risk.

It's actually risk in a critical juncture.

And I would argue we are just at a critical juncture.

And there's a lot of comorbidities

that are negative forward-looking indicators.

Oh, dear.

Okay.

Well, we just don't.

We don't appear.

It feels to me like even in our bailout packages, our fiscal priorities, it seems to me, again, we're very focused on taking our innovators and turning them into billionaires.

We seem to have lost a sense of national sacrifice.

And also, it feels as if

capitalism, which needs to sit on a bed of empathy, has decided now we're going full tilt.

And it's

companies, private power basically uses socialism as a call sign to get bailouts.

So I'm not, you know,

the silver lining, if you will, there are a lot of hopeful things here.

And first and foremost is, are your kids and a younger generation looking at our generation?

And do they say, okay, cooperation is really important, funding our public institutions is really important, a certain level of empathy, seeing separating people from their political ideology and having a civil conversation with them,

investing in forward-leaning things like climate and healthcare.

And then they look at America and think, okay, one in five households with children are food insecure.

It's costing us trillions of dollars.

Wouldn't it just be economically smart to make more forward-leaning investments?

So you've got to hope that we're maturing a generation of leaders that just have a different approach than us.

I have some hope when I do talk to my kids.

I have to say, like we had

dinner last night.

We were outside in the back and it was cold and everything.

We were just dealing with it.

But one of the discussions at the table was

not silly things.

My kids were talking about dairy subsidies.

Like they're like, why do we do this?

Why are we eating meat?

You know, they've been trying to eat.

less meat and talking about the meat footprint and everything else.

And they're not doing it in this sort of San Francisco-y way.

It was sort of like, this doesn't make any sense for the planet.

And here's why.

Like, and it was really interesting.

And they were, my son knew all about dairy subsidies.

And he's like, why don't we shift those to say solar subsidies, which is this, you know, he had like ideas about what to do.

And they, he's, you know, he's only 15, but he was already like thinking of innovative.

It was interesting to watch.

And then my other son was talking about this.

And this is how you do it.

And this is how it was really.

I was sort of happy.

And I, I had nothing to do with these ideas.

I had never talked to him about them.

But they sort of were sort of leaning into not creating, you know, I'm not going to eat meat, meat sucks.

It was like, people like me, here's how we do it.

This is how we shift people.

This is the imprint.

And it was nice to hear.

I have to say, I was sort of pleasantly surprised that my children are actually thoughtful.

It was nice.

I don't think we're going to suffer from really

interesting, unique ideas.

I think the biggest threat right now is that,

or one of the biggest threats is

we don't separate people from ideology.

And we've been taught to tolerate people who don't look like us and embrace it, but we've been taught to dislike people who don't think like us.

Yeah.

And I just don't, it's created no middle ground for making any progress.

We have to, again, decide there is a truth.

I would argue the closest thing to truth is science.

And I think the repudiation of science is really frightening.

So how do you deal with that?

Like, you know, I know it sounds dumb, but when you see this, like, Sidney, whatever Powell put together this ridiculous bullshit around elections or Donald Trump having something like really doing this, how do you like go, oh, let's let's try to find common ground?

Because it's, it's, it's not, there's nothing, there's no common ground in discussing things with people who deny science or allege fraud without evidence, et cetera.

How do you think you get to it?

What you have, your last paragraph is called what we must do.

How do you get to that common ground from your perspective?

Is it businesses that are just going to have to do it or what?

Well,

there's no silver bullet.

I think it's a variety of things that create a climate

of where we share prosperity.

Prosperity turns into progress.

We've had enormous prosperity over the last 30 years.

We haven't had a lot of progress.

If you look at the fact that 90% of the stocks are owned by white people and 80% of the stocks are owned by college grads, it's just we haven't made a lot of, and then the top 1% own 80 or 90% of the wealth, you argue.

Okay, tremendous prosperity, not a lot of progress.

But I think it's a bunch of things.

One, I think social media

figuring out when we get two-thirds of our news from platforms whose algorithms have figured out that there's huge shareholder value in dividing us.

I think when we look back, we're going to say, wow, that was really bad,

really bad for the nation.

I think we're going to have to figure out a way to be more thoughtful, to share

capitalist prosperity, capitalism's prosperity with everybody,

whether it's redistribution,

redistribution of income.

I also think we're going to have to I think a great thing would be some sort of national service.

I think we've got to put people in some sort of uniform or religious institution or spiritual, I don't know what it is that gives us all some sort of attachment to the flag instead of attachment to a political party.

100%.

It's gotten so.

It's really interesting.

You try to figure out your way out of it.

I got this text by someone, a well-known person, yesterday, out of the blue, out of the blue.

Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch have done more harm than any two single figures in modern history.

Soulless men living in a bubble, knowingly

counterancing the propagation of evil each day, tolerated by polite society, and they shouldn't be.

That's my thought for the day.

I was like, okay, thanks.

I would add, I would add

Dorsey to that.

I think if you really think about the way people address each other and treat each other, that haven't even met each other and the way that ideas are pitted against each other, not to create better ideas, but to call each other out.

I think all of media has decided that it's a rage machine meant to alarm us, to pit us against each other.

And we've just lost a sense of

some ideas should be called out.

Like this constant election attacks need to be called out.

I don't know what to say.

Like how do you not call that stuff out?

And sir, candidates who decide they want to run for senator or president deserve to go at it.

They've been doing that for a long time.

What we shouldn't do is go online and have Bernie bros attacking people they've never met and saying hideous things about them.

And that that creates there's a problem.

It's interesting you pick Bernie Bros first because i i get attacked crowd boys whatever it is

i'm i'm i'm just saying these these these platforms that people communicate on are basically like remember when you were a kid and someone said bad words and they'd shove you to and start screaming fight fight fight the most successful companies in history are basically saying to every citizen in our nation getting behind us shoving us into yeah shove shoving us into a square and saying starting screaming fight fight fight that's just i i what you're that individual just said

i think we're going to look back on this and think the amount of damage these individuals did, if we don't have a civil discord,

if we don't have a truth, if we're not interested in solving a tragedy of the comments, if we don't have a certain level of empathy, regard, technology is separating us, we're no longer going to movie theaters, we're no longer going to malls, we're segregating.

So there's a lot of really ugly things.

And they make it easy for us to do that.

You know, I was just thinking this, literally, I didn't realize until like Thanksgiving today, because we usually do do a big family something, at least 10 people, right?

And this is now today is

like four, four people.

It's a dinner, like last night, essentially.

It's dinner last night.

And, and you don't, I have spent an enormous amount of time alone, even though I have a nice family, but you know what I mean?

Like, not, you know, it's interesting.

Like, what does that do to your psyche?

And you can do it pretty, we've all kind of adapted pretty easily to it because we've got our Netflixes, we've got our phones, we've got our Zooms and stuff like that.

So it's, it's easy to adapt given these technological tools that we have now.

It's easy to become these loner.

Everyone becomes the lone, the loner in some way, in some fashion, or it's much easier to do so.

Like my mom's by herself, and she's okay.

She's adapted, but you wonder what the price is.

Like, I think

so many people are by themselves, much more so than they used to be.

Yeah.

And well, there's isolation and short-term effects, and it kind of depends on your type.

Like, I think you and I are fine.

I'm an introvert.

I don't know how you are.

No, I get it.

But I'm saying people, the tools have made it easy to play into this idea of not being part of a community.

But the hard part is when you're never exposed, when you just have a short commute to your kids' private school where everyone looks, smells and feels the same, when you're online and everyone you're Zooming with looks, smells and feels the same.

And

you don't even have to go to Publix and be exposed to the public because you get Amazon and Whole Foods to deliver your food.

I think you just develop less empathy.

Yeah.

You just don't, you never think, there by the grace of God, go I.

And you should be thinking that several times.

Church, Scott.

I should start

the cotton carrot.

We tell you, church.

People are right.

Have you noticed people are like, I listen, I walk and I listen to Scott and Kara.

We got to go.

That's what they need.

That's what they need.

All right.

Last question.

What is your, very briefly, what is your advice to a young person whose first jump into adulthood was the pandemic?

I think a lot that with my kids for sure.

I just hope they hope they look at everything we've done wrong and commit to

getting involved civically and trying to figure out a way.

The thing I don't like, or the thing I think is really dangerous among young people, and I see this just on campus, is they feel that there's reward or compensation or merit in calling other people out, that there's virtue in that.

I don't think that's their biggest problem.

I'm going to push back on you.

I think they don't.

I think you are dealing with a college campus.

I don't think people do that.

And calling out is not our biggest social crisis.

It's inequality.

There's, I think,

I worry that college, so I'm exposed to college kids.

I'm worried that college kids

are not as empathetic towards, I don't know what you call it, the middle of the country, that there's definitely a kind of an ideological narrative.

And if you don't sign up for that narrative,

you lack worth.

I think they actually are pretty judgmental around a certain ideology.

I think people in the middle of the country are very judgmental.

I am subject to it.

I'm not conscious.

I'm not subject to it.

It's that idea that we have to understand the other person better than they should understand us.

And I I think that's really where it's lost.

You know, on some level, I do want to understand some of the Trump voters.

Others, I don't.

I get it.

I hear it.

And

it's all of us, not just whatever.

I think what Joe Biden's saying is really powerful.

And I hope it, I've been watching his speeches very carefully.

There's nothing weak about what he's saying, not even a bit.

There's something very weak.

And when you talk about young people and calling out, you know who's let us down?

The older people.

The older people are just like wallowed in this bullshit for too long.

That's my feeling.

Yeah, there's, I don't think there's, so look, the hope for a next generation is they learn from our mistakes and return to some of the things that worked and haven't worked.

And then most of most of what I write about is how they can benefit economically.

What are they going to be the most exciting industries to be in?

What are the skills to be in those industries?

All right, game three very quickly.

Well, exactly.

I think call it home or residential.

You're going to see more capital and innovation around your home than you've seen in decades.

And then healthcare and education.

All my investments are basically, I'm moving everything into one of those three things.

I think that's going to be

the most prosperous or create the most stakeholder value

over the next 10 years.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: So the industries that people should be focused on, go through them very quickly.

Simply put, healthcare.

And that is the dispersion of $3 trillion away from hospitals and doctors' offices to the home.

That's going to create enormous opportunity.

The other, in the call sign here, that's the word is dispersion, the dispersion of capital or the $750 billion that flows through universities, that'll also go remote.

And then the third or the 10 to 20 hours a week of our time that's going to disperse from spending time in a commercial office to your home.

So just getting in the way of those flows, if you will.

And there's just so many, whether it's cold storage to deliver perishables, whether it's an office set up in your home and all the

noise padding.

for whatever it might be,

I would want, if I were a young person, I'd want to be between the intersection of technology and those industries.

Those are all jobs of

taking us apart.

What are the

trends of getting together?

Are there opportunities like that?

I would like to see a corona core.

I think that, first off, I think a gap year should be the norm, not the exception.

And I think it would be great to say, all right, we have a lot of diseases or pandemic.

If we have a pandemic right now, or we have a lot of people who are struggling, who need a ride to their doctor, whatever it might be.

I think a civil service Corona Corps, similar to what the Latter-day Saints do, or the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, where kids are given opportunities to earn money for college, pay off student debt, make some money, get have feeder into universities to say, if you spend two years in this, we're going to take a harder look at you in terms of a job.

but basically create a national service corps that creates immunity and gives some kids some skills because i think 18 i don't know about you what were you doing 18 was just too young for me to go to college i just got i just got too drunk and just hung out and buried

myself his friends did not go They're just traveling around, but they can't go anywhere.

You know, they wanted to go to Europe.

They wanted to go.

They wanted to just drive around, but you just can't.

They're safe-minded kids in general.

So it's not, and there's not opportunities either, by the way, to do that.

Some sort of national service that gives them a shared identity, additional skills, and also empathy, empathy for other Americans and

a shared pride of all having served in the same uniform, such that they maybe cooperate with each other.

I've always thought the national

military service that does things like fix roads and stuff like that would be really great using the military that way.

But, you know, people are, that's a very controversial thing, obviously.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next administration.

I am really hoping that this pandemic has not made us us better.

And you would think it would have.

No.

You would think it would have.

You would think it would have, but it has not.

And on that un Thanksgiving note, but there are ways to come together because what's happened is we've come together over politics, which is always going to be a nasty, you know,

snake pit.

No matter who, it's always been a snake pit.

It's always going to be.

And so we don't have a commonality that is

been our strength, the lack of the differences that we have has been our strength, and now it's our weakness.

Anyway, Scott, let's go to a quick break.

Again, read Scott's book.

It's called Post-Corona, From Crisis to Opportunity.

He is apparently a New York Times best-selling author.

You know, it's orange, so you'll notice it when you go and buy it and buy it online.

And did you do an audio copy with Scott?

I did an audible.

Yeah, I did.

I used my voice this time this year, so you get to hear that.

That's what I'm going to be doing.

What a thrill.

That's what you need more of.

Play it over, Alexa, through Thanksgiving.

And then go into the garage,

turn on the car, close the garage door, and just think about better things.

You know what?

I have to say, my sons are your biggest fans.

They were all so

came.

They're like, Scott has a book?

Yay.

Despite your efforts?

That's nice.

That makes me fucking.

They did.

They were

yay.

You just chuck it down to the basement.

I'm going to.

I'm going to chuck it down to the basement today.

Poor poor son is sitting down there by himself.

Anyway, all right, Scott, let's go to a quick break.

When we come back, we'll have a listener question.

Support for this show comes from Robin Robinhood.

Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform?

With Robinhood, not only can you trade individual stocks and ETFs, you can also seamlessly buy and sell crypto at low costs.

Trade all in one place.

Get started now on Robinhood.

Trading crypto involves significant risk.

Crypto trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto LLC.

Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services.

Crypto held through Robinhood Crypto is not FDIC insured or SIPIC protected.

Investing involves risk, including loss of principal.

Securities trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Financial LLC, member SIPIC, a registered broker dealer.

Support for Pivot comes from LinkedIn.

From talking about sports, discussing the latest movies, everyone is looking for a real connection to the people around them.

But it's not just person to person, it's the same connection that's needed in business.

And it can be the hardest part about B2B marketing, finding the right people, making the right connections.

But instead of spending hours and hours scavenging social media feeds, you can just tap LinkedIn ads to reach the right professionals.

According to LinkedIn, they have grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, making it stand apart from other ad buys.

You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, and company revenue, giving you all the professionals you need to reach in one place.

So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right professionals only on LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it for yourself.

Just go to linkedin.com slash pivot pod.

That's linkedin.com slash pivot pod.

Terms and conditions apply.

Only on LinkedIn ads.

All right, we're back.

Let's take a listener mail question.

You have to top Bob from Brooklyn, but good luck.

You got, you got, I can't believe I'm going to be a mailman.

You got mail.

Hey, Scott and Kara, Alex from Texas here.

You said in the past that defund

After all, Martin Luther King only had like 40% approval at his peak, along with the freedom marches.

But we can all agree that minorities like Kara and myself definitely deserve equal protections under the law.

Apologies for the rambling question, and thanks for all the hard work.

Gosh, Scott, we have such smart listener males and the people who are giving us these questions.

So let's talk about this.

Let's take away from the politics of it

and talk about this idea of the word defund the police

as a marketing person.

I hate to pull it away from very serious social and issues that we have around this issue, but let's talk about it as a marketing.

How would you restructure the campaign?

So I just want to acknowledge that one of the things I did when Black Lives Matter was sort of, I don't know, getting the news more,

I brought on

some people who were just more thoughtful about it than me.

And one of them was my former dean, Peter Henry.

And I remember, I mean, I knew it, but I didn't know it.

But I remember him telling me his biggest, one of his biggest fears is having his sons in what he called an uncontrolled interaction environment with a police officer.

Yeah.

And it just really opened my eyes to like, it's just a different,

you know, it's just a different world for

people of color.

And

so let's go, let's go beyond what needs to happen.

Let's go to how

you guys make progress.

The difference between being right and being effective.

I think defund the police almost cost us the election.

I think if that narrative, if Biden had

decided to take the momentum there, and it was very tempting

and adopt that, or Or if he hadn't repudiated, I think that could have cost the Democrats the election.

Because I think if you talk about the 4,500 different police departments, different cohorts have different relationships and a different level of respect for the police.

I think that, and to your listeners or to the listeners'

point, you know, being just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it's going to be,

that it doesn't have worth, that it's not going to be the narrative.

The fringe becomes a narrative at some point, as long as the fringe is right or has, you know, the righteous on their side.

I think civic reform

or

using data here, because what we've asked the police to do is to deal with mental health, to deal with homeless, to deal with drug addiction.

And you don't deal with those three things where your primary tools are a certain amount of EQ, authority, but also a gun in a cage.

That's just not how you approach addiction or mental illness.

And I think a lot of policemen also don't want to

feel as if they've been given almost an impossible task in terms of the things that they're supposed to deal with.

I mean, I'd be very curious how the police force in San Francisco feels about all of this.

Anyway, so I think it's more around civic reform and talking about mental illness and talking about police.

I think reform is a much better word than defund the police.

Because the moment you started having a conversation, which no one wanted, no one wanted, and maybe now they're ready to have the conversation, but they didn't want to have a data-driven conversation that defund the police was just going to lead to wealthy areas having their own militias that were accountable to anyone in terms of how they treated people.

And then you were going to have an increase in crime in the areas that need police the most.

So I feel like it was a really, I don't know what the term is.

It also gives the Sean Hannities of the world and Laura Ingersold a ridiculous, reductive argument.

You know, it is.

And they're so, I don't want to call them stupid because they're not stupid.

They take any opportunity to create division.

Green Green deal, no air travel, and no lawnmowers.

It's like, well, that's not really what it said, right?

Yeah, right.

Well, that's well, no matter what you do with them, they'll take anything and twist it into something crazy.

But we did, but when I say we, there were people that D.C.

Mayor writes Defund the Police along an avenue.

And that,

so it's easy for them to take that and say, okay, the left is saying defund the police.

What do you think?

How do you think they should approach it?

It's one of these issues.

It's the same thing

with mask wearing and stuff like that.

On some level,

you do want to be very aggressive to people about it.

At the same time,

you have to understand there's all these other,

not with masks, because masks should be like a stop it, stop it right now, like kind of thing.

And not being like a martinette about it.

I mean, like, if no one's around, you can probably pull you down your mask for five seconds, like outside, like whatever.

That's, it's not being like that kind of like scold to people.

I think it's really hard to acknowledge people's sadness and grieving.

I think Esther Perell talked about this.

There's a lot of grieving going on we're not acknowledging of lots of people.

And even though it seems

at the moment really

it's hard to let people grieve right now.

And I think we have to understand at the very basis where Defund the Police comes from and why

these different groups of people have been so badly abused and murdered.

And we want to just move on and fix something.

I think, you know, it's sort of when

it's not exactly the right comparison, but when I was talking to Margaret Zeger about all the issues around the social speech and the actual real life things that happen, including deaths and riots and things like that.

And he was like, let's just fix it.

And I was like, there's got to be a moment of acknowledgement of what

and continue because it continues to happen, right?

It hasn't stopped.

And I think what happens is a lot is among especially groups,

it happens with white guys who really run things, say, yeah, I hear you now.

Now let's move on and like want to ignore what they've done.

And so I think that's the difficult part and that's part.

And why should you get forgiveness given the behavior?

And then at the same time,

acknowledging how many amazing

public servants there are all over the place.

And so they all feel like lumped in with the bad ones, essentially, and a bad system.

And so it's really,

I think

it's hard to say do kindness after being abused for so long.

But on one side, it has to be do kindness.

The other side has to acknowledge the lack of kindness and the abuse that has been perpetrated in their names.

And so I don't know.

I don't, again, it's what we were talking about at the beginning in your book, like, right?

That's what we talked about, you know.

I'm a little bit more foxy on this.

I'm seeing all these videos of young people getting back in police officers' face, like, sir, can I see your ID?

No, you can't see my ID.

Get out of here.

And they start verbally abusing the police officers.

And

I find the lack of respect that I think that

I just think police deserve more respect than that.

And I believe that when they murder people, they should be stuck in prison for the rest of their lives.

But it seems to me that there definitely is an unhealthy narrative that anyone in a police uniform is looking at.

But why is that, Scott?

Why is that?

Why do you think that is?

Why do you think it is undeserved given like, we see video after video after video

where it's clear what's happening?

And we still have to be like, well, let's give them another break.

And I think I agree with you.

There's a lot of great public servants.

It's just that it shouldn't be any surprise given the enormous amount of evidence of systemic racism in this country.

And

I just think you have to allow a...

You're asking people to forgive that have constantly are being asked to forgive.

That's a fair point.

You know, like I, I, in my very small way of being able to do that, these aren't usually kids of color yelling at the police.

It's white kids posting it on TikTok.

Agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed.

But young people grab onto all kinds of like anti-war thing, whatever it is.

But I mean, even in, it's not even close to being close, but you know, when I used to take endless shit for being gay, it doesn't happen anymore as much.

It does definitely happen.

And at some point, it was like, no, I'm not going to be nice.

I'm not going to let people understand me.

I don't care if you understand.

I mean, you get this, like, why do you have to be the better person all the time?

And that's exhausting.

And I think that everyone's got to take a hard look at themselves and their responsibilities.

And just because you didn't do it as a police officer, you do have to understand, just like with reporters, I don't take responsibility for all the shitty reporters, but I do worry for the profession as a whole, right?

Like, and so I'm responsible.

I didn't do it.

I've already defunded journalism.

Defund journalism.

It's already done, basically.

There are 50% fewer journalists than there were 30 years ago.

We have defunded journalism it really is I I urge you to listen to Joe Biden's speech I think and and and pushback when people talk about it being weak pushback on people being super ridiculously hypocritically aggressive you know what I mean like I gave Marco Ruby a real hard slap deservedly

you know to just immediately your first thing at the gate is a punch and you have to push back on people like that and get us to a place where we can disagree and get something done together

right?

Because

we're all in the beginning of the process versus the actual problem.

We're discussing the process all the time now.

But shouldn't every high school student, I mean, just as an example, I think intimacy or respect as a function of proximity and contact.

You know, is there a program as part of the social service program where you spend time with the police and police spend time with you?

Yep.

Just

local policing to get kids involved in that and to get local police more involved with kids.

It just strikes me.

That has worked on many occasions, this neighborhood policing.

There's all kinds of great ideas.

All I'm saying is there's all kinds of innovative ideas to deal with this and to figure out to weed out real sociopaths that go in.

We need to demilitarize the police.

I occasionally see one of these assault vehicles and Jesus talk about toxic masculinity gun fucking apeship.

Yeah, stuff like that.

There are lots of

great ideas.

Go ahead.

I get it with their assault rifles and their battleware.

And it's like, okay, these are board cops in in an overfunded district that want to play G.I.

Joe.

I mean, that just can't be a healthy.

No, no, it's mentally.

I think I've had more bad encounters with the police than you, I suspect.

I've had many.

I've had many, many, many.

And how does it,

a longer show?

I'm just wondering how that plays out for you.

And you think it's because,

well, I'll ask you,

what are those bad experiences?

I question.

things.

He was

at one point

he was really really giving these two young African-American men a hard time.

And I was, this was long ago.

And I was like, what are you doing?

Because I felt like I had, you know, that he wouldn't, but he came at me.

I'll tell you that.

And

in that case, it didn't, it was, I mean, nothing happened, but it was, I was just sort of like, I see what you're doing.

I think that's all I was doing.

Another case, I, I questioned something.

I questioned for the most minor thing.

And I got,

I was put in jail.

I was like questioned.

I don't know what else to say.

I was like, question, and I wasn't rude.

I was just,

why do you think you can do that?

Right.

You know, and I was cuffed and put in jail.

That was it.

And what was the charge?

They just resisting arrest.

I really didn't.

I was just like, this is ridiculous.

It's a long story.

I won't go into it, but it was, it was stupid.

It was so dumb.

In any case, it's a very good time to start to take a breath today while you're by yourself at home with your tiny jerkies.

I agree.

But it's a really good time to take your breath and be, but I think pushing back on people who are continuing to punch is, you really have to start to keep doing that.

Anyway,

good question.

Thank you, Alex from Texas.

I think we have a long way to go in this country

and to get to our better angels for sure.

And this, nothing, nothing says that like the holiday season, I guess.

I don't think that's true.

We should do it all year round.

By the way, for the month of December, we're partnering with Yappa to get more listener mail questions.

Yappa, go to newnymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for the Pivot podcast.

These questions have been incredibly thoughtful every week and different and we really appreciate them.

And we like talking about them, obviously.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for predictions.

I would like a great dazzling prediction from you.

Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start?

Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is?

With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

You just have to hire one.

You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app.

Download today.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

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

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

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

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

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

Okay, Scott, predictions?

Dazzle us for the holiday weekend.

Please, you've had so many good ones lately.

This one's sort of boring, but I'm fascinated by the whole SPAC phenomena, special purpose acquisition core corporations.

And basically, it's you never underestimate the market's ability to find products for people who have cash in their hand.

And because investment banks and the SEC

have a certain amount of lag and filter and friction around getting public, and the market's appetite for IPOs is greater,

you're seeing SPACs.

And it's basically teams go out and they act almost like a desk at an investment bank or investment bankers who say, no, I'll evaluate a company.

I'll come up with a price.

I already get through the logistics of the SEC approval, get this company public, and then boom, just add water IPO.

And it's basically typically this year, SPACs have vastly outperformed the rest of the market.

But over the medium and long-term, SPACs have generally underperformed because they're evidence of the hand going deeper and deeper into the barrel to try and find.

to try and find companies and sometimes of lesser quality.

And there's a reason why some companies don't get through that process in normal times.

Anyways,

if you look at right now,

there are about 255 SPACs.

And I got this from Terry Kawages when he did a SPAC Loom Escape, which I thought was really interesting.

And 70 of them have found a target, meaning that they've actually purchased a company and other publicly traded companies across six verticals.

But 185 are still looking for a target.

And they are armed with $65 billion in cash.

Typically, that cash gets deployed into the company and then they lever up.

So you have about 200 billion dollars in capital right now look at 200 billion dollars in capital has a gun to its head if you don't deploy this capital two years right is that correct yeah in 18 to 24 months you have to return it to your investors and that's a no-no your investors didn't give you the money to hold on to it for two years and then return it so you have two hundred billion dollars with a gun to its head right now trying to find uh private companies that might be ready for prime time and uh you could say well these things are going to underperform it means there's a a bidding war.

True, but the market also won't take a company just because you overpaid for it and let it trade at that.

So

there is some sanity to it.

Yes, there's a government.

What I think this means is, and it's a boring prediction.

I think that this year's returns and the first half of 2021 for venture capitalists are going to be probably record returns because you have companies that were going to go public in two or three years, potentially, go public in Q4, Q1, 200.

It's a complex and interesting prediction.

I don't know.

It is complex.

What you're doing is you're saying, look, venture capitalists were going to go public in two years and had to be sitting on these assets.

Now they can get them out the door and take the money and run, essentially.

Even if you say you have a $30 to $50 million or $100 million a year recurring revenue company, you're thinking, once we get to 200, we'll call the bankers.

You've had a dozen SPACs call you and say, we're ready to go.

We can be trading in 30 days.

Is it smart for these companies to be public this young?

Well,

what you've you've seen in the marketplace is access to cheap capital is kind of the core competence.

And you identify yourself.

IPOs, the reason these guys aren't stupid, the reason they still do traditional IPOs and give 7% to the underwriter is it's basically a giant signal saying we're the disruptor, we're the leader in the space.

And then all of a sudden, this capital, stocks are two components, narrative and numbers.

And now that the narrative is 70% and the numbers are 30%, whereas it used to be flipped, anything that identifies you or signals that you're going to have access to cheaper capital, you're the disruptor, which leads to access to cheaper capital, which means you can make more forward-leaning investments in your peer group.

You know, there's definitely something to an advantage.

If you're good, unless it's a lot of bullshit stuff, which specs in the past, that's sort of been

the rap on them when it wasn't so trendy, right?

That they were big.

That's right.

They were awkward teenagers that hadn't shown they had the ability to kind of compete in the big leagues.

So they were AAA.

You're drafting, basically you're drafting AAA ball players into the majors and hoping that they can grow into it because all of a sudden baseball,

the number of teams are expanding.

The number of people are.

So here's a million dollars.

Figure something out, right?

Kind of thing.

But you have, I mean, there are so many companies now.

I've invested in a couple of privates recently in EdTech.

So you're hoping for a SPAC?

Your people, your company?

I don't know enough about it.

I'm one of those people that I think you're better off, maybe, maybe, I think better off waiting, but smarter people than me get to make those decisions.

But I invested a year ago in EdTech in a fintech company, one one an online mortgage company called better.com and another

health tech company called 98.6.

They get a call a day from us back saying we're ready to go.

And so if you think about all of these companies that are kind of late-stage growth companies, their value has skyrocketed because all of a sudden everybody's calling them the capital.

Yeah.

So I think it's going to translate to venture capital for

venture capital as an asset class over the last 20 or 30 30 years has underperformed other asset classes.

The majority of the returns are not only sequestered to a small number of venture capitalists, but a small number, or a small number of venture capital firms, but a small number of venture capitalists within those firms.

Yes, indeed.

But this,

I think the returns of this vintage, if you will.

So now everyone looks like a genius for false reasons.

100%, because all of these companies, and some of them are great companies, but most of them are good companies that have some momentum, are all of a sudden big time.

Yeah.

I agree.

I expect

that.

I'm a trouble ahead, but this is not going to end well for most of these guys.

That's what's factors.

Public investors are going to pay the price.

And it was really interesting.

One time, a million years ago, I think I've told this story.

I don't think I've told you.

One of the Goldman Sachs banker was telling me about this company.

They were going to take the public.

And they said they're pre, they told me they were pre-revenue.

I'll never forget this.

We're pre-revenue.

And I was like, what?

And he goes, well, it's a pre-revenue company, Carrie.

I really think you should write a piece because they wanted pieces in the journal to like gin up these excitement around these companies.

And I was like, you know, I'm looking out my window right now and there's an old lady walking down the street.

Why don't you just go mug her rather than take shareholder money?

This is ridiculous, this bullshit narrative you're spinning up on these companies that aren't ready for prime time.

And so I'll never forget the word pre-revenue.

I was sort of like fascinated by that.

And so I do think it has,

it's going to be sloppily enforced.

Maybe it'll change under the Biden administration.

And we're going to see a lot of turkeys, speaking of turkeys, amid all the

promising companies.

And when there's too much money sloshing around out there, everybody gets sloppy.

100%.

We're in what I would call,

you're seeing a lot of what I would call the feces round, and that is maintain momentum so we can fling unicorn feces at tourists at a zoo.

Right.

But there's there's pre-revenue companies now that are pub.

Virgin Galactic is pre-revenue.

Yes, I got that.

You know, there are, there are a lot of them, and some of them will go on to be amazing companies.

Exactly.

But there's only one Amazon among among the group.

Like, there's not seven.

There's not, maybe there's seven.

Who knows?

I don't know how many are going poke.

So that's, he did 150 of them.

That's, there's already 150 of them.

Well, no, there's 165 right now out there, just among these seven verticals that have capital and are looking for companies to acquire.

Do you have a SPAC secretly, Scott?

I do not.

I've been contacted.

I'm sure you have too.

I've been contacted about going on the board of SPACs, but

the whole space kind of scares me.

They want your name.

The whole thing just sort of scares me.

It's this sort of, um it does feel very frothy and the thing about froth is that by the time when you start calling something frothy that usually means it's going to get even frothier for another 24 months yeah so it's hard to be the the debbie downer because oftentimes things keep going and there will be some amazing companies that started as spax yeah right um uh and there already are some great companies that that got public via visa vis-a-vis via

real bad outcomes which is already already which is what i think is interesting is it's speaking of reform, it's trying to reform the IPO system, right?

This is where it's a reaction by, you know, you saw that big Bill Gurley essay about it, like, oh, they leave too much.

And instead of just reforming the IPO system, this is the answer, which means too much froth, I think.

We'll see where it goes, but it is interesting and we will keep watching it.

That is a good and complex prediction, Scott.

That's

really, really good.

Do you have any predictions, Kara?

I do not.

I do not.

I predict that we are going to have a great 2021, Scott, you and I together.

And that's nice.

Thank you for saying that.

We'll be spending Thanksgiving next year together.

Maybe we will.

We will, because we're such losers.

Here we are.

We like doing this.

We like to bring content to our people.

All right.

So that is the show.

I don't have a prediction for today, but I will think of one for next week.

How about that?

Okay, that's the show.

As a reminder, we love listener mail questions.

So we're trying something new.

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for the pivot podcast.

The link is also in our show notes.

Scott, happy Thanksgiving.

Likewise, Carol.

From the Swisher Swisher family, including Louis in the basement.

I hope you have a beautiful time with your beautiful family.

Thank you for saying that, likewise.

Please read us out.

Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis.

Fernanda Finite engineered this episode.

Erica Anderson is Pivot's executive producer.

Thanks also to Hannah Rosen and Drew Burroughs.

Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

Or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify or frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you liked our show, please recommend it to a friend.

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

We'll We'll be back next week for a breakdown of all things tech and business.

We hope that you are giving thanks with people that you love immensely, or not with people, unfortunately,

or not with people.

Why?

Because you love them immensely.

We will see you next week.