Amazon under scrutiny; Zoom security expert Alex Stamos explains it all (and talks Facebook), plus some special Wins and Fails

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

And Kara, I have not intentionally misled anyone.

Now, I've misled everybody.

I've lied to Congress.

I've lied to the press, but I haven't intentionally misled anybody because you can't see into my heart.

Can you believe this shit?

I'll tell you, they cannot pay Jay Carney,

who is, I mean, arguably probably the best compensated full-time liar in the world.

Yeah.

I love that.

I love that response when Amazon was accused of basically lying to Congress.

We didn't intentionally mislead anybody.

You can't look into our hearts.

It wasn't our intention to break the law.

Well,

it's not my intention to.

I just, I don't understand.

I don't get it.

Like this whole culture of lying, like essentially lying constantly, which I think, of course, course, Trump leads the parade.

Yeah, it's just an amazing.

I don't know how people do it.

I mean, I guess maybe it might be the scales have fallen off my eyes, but I just feel like people don't usually do that, but maybe they do.

Maybe that's just the way we do.

Well, I'll give you two billion reasons.

Cheryl Sandberg is worth $2 billion and has spent the majority of her career figuring out elegant ways to put lipstick over lies.

So why wouldn't you want to grow up and be a liar like Cheryl?

Well, come on.

Would you do that for the money?

I don't know if I could do that.

Let me think.

Yes.

I think you you would.

For a lot.

No, but seriously,

have you lied in your career a lot?

I have not.

I have not.

No, I would think the fib is as far as I've gone.

Like, actually, you know what?

It's not telling someone the absolute truth all immediately, just to inspire their feelings.

That's pretty much it.

Like when you manage people, you don't say, like, when you're getting rid of someone, you don't go, oh, you just suck.

You just say, well, you know, it's just not the right place or something like that.

That's very different than actual lymph.

I don't, I can't recall an actual like serious lie to get something to happen.

I think that it is very easy to make a series of incremental statements that are spin and to look at, you know, we, this wasn't, this wasn't a hack.

It was a breach.

Yeah.

We weren't hacked.

It was a breach from one of our partners.

And oh, we're disappointed.

We're disappointed in our partner.

And oh, wait, we're proud of the progress we've made.

It's like, well, are we really proud of the progress we've made?

You know, we need to do better.

I mean, it's just, you come up with a series of, you're so attacked all the time that you turn into more of a PR machine than somewhat a sentient being with rational, rational decisions around.

It's just because you don't have the pressure that you don't lie, but you would, you think?

You think you would?

Or do you, I just don't think if I got in those positions, I would stay at those companies.

That's even, you know, just the same thing with the, with like Dr.

Burke sitting there or anybody, just like, are you kidding me?

Like, I just don't think I could stay there.

They don't think they've lied, though.

They think they're just playing the game and they think that people lie to embarrass them.

And so truth,

truth becomes an amorphous thing around, you know, around shareholder value or lack thereof.

But yeah, I don't think I'd be above doing what they're doing if I could, if I could make millions of dollars.

Look, I want to go to the Academy Awards with a woman with lip injections.

That's how the dog would like to roll.

Well, those are lies you tell to yourself.

Like, I'm having

i got a lot of those who sent me pictures of all these russian models i don't know why they do this but they sent me pictures of all these russian models

they were like what do you think this is my latest date i said i'm sure they like you for your looks this guy was just not attractive it was like he was sort of a lovely person but it was very fun i love that do i lie to myself yeah every day when i say i like myself i'm just a psychopathic liar i like you and that's not a lie that's not a lie but it's true it's true it's a really it's interesting this culture of lying i mean and maybe it's just it creates such a cynicism around kids i don't know i just feel like you think it impacts kids yeah i do i just like my kids are like oh what's to believe anything like you know what i mean i think they're in that mode of quarantine like this and sex my son last night was like why am i studying it's meaningless and i was like it's pointless pointless really is meaningless is a word he used but i think he meant pointless um but it was really uh it was i was sort of like well just learning for learning's sakes and that only goes so far i just think it makes them it's a culture of cynicism around that i can't change i've heard that so much from young people, like not everybody, but but enough that it creates this sort of like,

you know, and the pandemic on top of it just creates, it's just, I don't know, maybe we're going for a beautiful spring at some point where it will be, everyone will turn around.

But it's an interesting, I think, once you start down that road and then act like you're victims, when people question you, like it's the press's fault or stuff like that, you get in a very dark place, Scott, a dark place.

I think to be a good, effective leader, you have to be,

it's very difficult.

You have to be 30 or 40%.

You have to be psychopath-ish

because

the day before you lay off 40% of your staff, you have to put on a good face and say, this is why the company is doing so well.

This is why you don't need to worry about layoffs.

It is very hard.

You can't always be truthful as a leader of a company.

You have to manage the narrative.

And so

it's like when you start lying all the time, I think you can, it just, it gets very difficult

or very easy to kind of lose your base around this stuff and the only guide around anything your truth becomes what's good for shareholder value because you can rationalize that that's what you're there for it's like being it's like being that guy remember that guy i forgot his name the the spokesperson for joe suzu oh iraq oh that guy yes yes we are turning them back at the airports we are beating them on the battlefield

that's right what was that the you turn in bag dad bag dad

bobby or whatever they had dolls with the guy that guy was awesome yeah exactly all right we're gonna move on okay big story breakdown we've talked speaking of Amazon, we talked a lot about how COVID-19 may make Amazon even more essential.

We talked about that a lot.

And we actually talked about that very early.

But it seems like Congress has been listening to Pivot and won't let COVID-19 deter them from breaking up Amazon.

So this is the thing.

So let's talk about

Senator Warren.

This is your invitation to be a best friend of Pivot.

I am actually talking to her, people.

So maybe we can get her on to talk to us about this.

Seven Democrats have been vocal about the antitrust violations.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal, as you know, reported that Congress had been taking data from third-party sellers to create their own Amazon brand products and sell them on the platform.

And actually, it's the same thing at Whole Foods.

I was looking at all the products they now have, and it's the only stuff on the shelves actually is Amazon Whole Food-branded products.

This has been a crux of a lot of arguments that Amazon is anti-competitive and should be broken up.

Back in July, Amazon testified to the House Judiciary Committee that they do not use third-party seller data.

to craft their own products, which is like,

not so much.

Amazon disputed the accuracy of the journal's account and said, as Scott noted, that it did not offer, quote, intentionally misleading testimony, but that it would said it would conduct an internal investigation into the report.

In response, Elizabeth Warren, who really should be vice president, said, this is exactly what happens when you let a giant company be both the umpire and the player in the game.

Ooh, a baseball metaphor.

Amazon needs to explain why it misled Congress.

We need to break up Amazon and big tech.

So she's not backing down.

And over in the House, Representative David Siciline, who is a terrific guy, I think he's really an interesting and smart man, who is the head of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, is pushing for a ban on mergers during COVID-19 outbreak as part of the next relief stimulus bill.

His proposal will allow mergers only if a company is already in bankruptcy or about to fail.

Any other deals would be on hold, at least until the national pandemic declaration is lifted.

But, you know, they weren't going to be able to do it before this and probably not after it.

So what do you think?

What do you think about not just Amazon Line?

We discussed that already, but the mergers in big tech.

Now, Facebook put an investment into an Indian company last week we talked about.

What do you think about this?

We're in sort of the stasis or the worst of both worlds, and that is the big tech, there's a chill over acquisitions by big tech that are some of the most, other than Apple, are some of the most acquisitive companies in the world and are fantastic exits for shareholders and for employees that startup companies.

So they're freaked out about

raising any red flags.

And at the same time, you still have companies that are so large and so powerful that small companies can't get out of the crib.

So the fastest growing parts of our economy

are in a stage of stasis where they basically aren't

you can't you can't have both a chill around acquisitions and those companies suppressing innovation.

So

you have a lack of exits and you have a lack of startups.

So

it's absolutely the worst of both worlds.

I am heartened by the fact that Congress is going to or is contemplating bringing these guys up.

And what I've noticed is, and I think this is true across all industries, when, so I interviewed

Senator Michael Bennett, kind of my, you know, my hero.

He is indeed

last week.

And he's at home and all these senators are at home.

And quite frankly, it's just given them a lot of additional time to sort of dig into their work because they're not running around and giving interviews to whoever it is they give interviews to or shuttling in between places or going to dinners or not only that they're not spending you know they're probably not spending nearly as much time fundraising I think a lot of them are getting a lot of work done and this is

in my opinion if you were to say all right what are the two best investments that our economy could make right now or that our government could make right now to

long term keep uh uh get the markets recovered, I would argue that

one, and I I wrote about this last week, a huge investment in an organization like AmeriCorps or creating a core of tracers to ensure that the Apex,

it's all about the slope or the Apex of the relapse now in terms of our economy reopening in fall.

That is the only metric, quite frankly, I think we should be focused on.

So any investments around reducing the Apex would be great ROI.

The second thing is I believe if you tripled the budget of the DOJ and the FTC, that people like me who are Amazon and Apple shareholders would benefit greatly because I think these companies are worth more broken up than they are as one.

So the DOJ and the FTC have been emasculated.

They also politically.

Previous to this, previous to this.

100%.

100%.

But that would be those companies, it's like the IRS.

For every buck you invest in the IRS, you get eight back as the government.

The DOJ and the FTC have now become underinvested, like an asset class that has been abandoned.

And so any investment there is going to pay huge dividends because in every industry, and it's not just big tech,

there's been a concentration of power among the biggest two or three companies, which is really unhealthy for the economy.

So

do you think it will happen?

It's interesting that they're bringing it up.

And of course, they're doing it on the face of

lies, but as we've talked about, this gives them a chance.

This pandemic gives these companies a chance to be bigger and more powerful going forward.

Is there going to be the political will to do that?

Because again, they're going to want to turn to a lot of these companies, not just for donations

and essential services, like Amazon Amazon with delivery, Google with information, Apple's made, Google and Apple are making

the contact tracing app.

They want to be at cross purposes with these companies right now, if they're going to be this things that are going to be the engine of return.

I mean, that's, you know, and if you want this kind of recovery, you may have to trade what they want, which is to get bigger.

Yeah, you know, I'm hopeful.

A lot of people take the attitude of, you know, this is the world we live in.

And my attitude is the world is what we make of it.

And if we had the fortitude and the backbone to break up the oil companies, the aluminum companies, we absolutely can break these guys up.

And also coming out of this, I think some people are going to realize that it's dangerous to come out of a crisis with companies that are too big to fail.

And we're coming out of this crisis with Amazon and admittedly probably Walmart have now become too big to fail.

And the reason why France can stick up the middle finger to Amazon and warehouse workers is it looks as if their supply chain is more diverse than ours and they're not dependent and they don't have to be kind of obsequious to Amazon.

So because they've been favoring smaller companies there, always.

Europeans do, you know, and so, although in China, which had been favoring smaller companies, of course, allowed

their giant companies to get larger, like Alibaba and others.

But, you know, it's an interesting thing.

I don't think they have the will.

I think Elizabeth Warren is incredibly articulate.

I think David Ciceline is also, but I don't know if they have.

Senator Warner.

Senator.

Senator Warner.

Senator Warren.

Senator Warren.

Warren and Warner.

Yeah, they are, but I just don't know if they have, like, this is not what the public is going to be focusing on.

Like, let's break up Amazon.

You know, I just don't, I, I think they've got, they've all gotten a pass here, which I, I, I, I, I, I don't know what to say.

I think they've gotten a pass for at least a couple of years, which will allow them to get bigger and more.

And they may not be able to buy big things, but they can certainly go around the world like Facebook buying into things.

But I just think, I think this is going to be not a time where even if Elizabeth Warren says we need to to break them up, that she's going to get a lot of traction on these things.

She's impressive.

And I met with Senator

Warner from Virginia, and he seemed pretty honest about it.

Although his aides were just when I said, you need identity, you need identity, you need antitrust.

They were just rolling around like, okay, if we can hire 11,000 legislative aides because Google, Facebook, I mean, all of these companies have such armies of lobbyists now that they've been overrun.

They're kind of outgun.

So it's going to take.

I had a top Justice department person tell me this exact same thing like it's going to by the time we get to it get our pants on and get it going it's already everything's changed in the technology and that's the fast rate of technology combined with their lobbying power combined with now a need for companies to save America I think is going to be I just don't see Uncle Joe if he gets in doing anything and I don't think Trump will either you know He just won't do anything, absolutely, even if it's Amazon, although he's trying to mess around with the post office.

But first, when we get back, we're going to keep talking about about Amazon and go to the other side of the Atlantic, which you uh which you prefaced around France.

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Okay, Scott, we're back.

We're still talking about Amazon, but now we are doing it in French.

Okay, French unions continue.

That's my French accent in case you're interested.

French unions continue to win against Amazon in French courts.

A French appeals court upheld a ruling from last week that forced Amazon to shut down its six fulfillment centers around France for a week and put 10,000 workers on paid furlough while the company addressed workers' safety concerns.

The court said Amazon would be fined the equivalent of $108,000 for every delivery not meeting the requirement.

In a tweet response to the court's decision, Amazon said it was perplexed by the decision, but they are, quote, currently assessing the implications for our sites as well as for our employees and customers in France.

Amazon told French customers that their orders would be fulfilled by warehouses in Germany, Belgium, and other European countries.

Of course, they did.

So, what is this?

This is what you're just saying, that the French Appeals Court,

I think they will not get these kind of rulings here in this country.

What do you think of the French?

You know, I would do anything to be in Paris right now.

I would love to be on a sidewalk cafe smoking clubs in a beret with the cat.

You look good in a beret.

Yeah.

There's very 3D things I looked at.

And anything that generally covers up my face is an improvement.

But there is like France,

it all comes down to one thing, and that is we have a hierarchy hierarchy in the United States.

If you generally bucket our society or our populace into three groups, and that is workers, shareholders, and consumers, the consumer reigns king here.

Shareholders are a close to, and workers are a distant number three.

And the general, when you look at the difference between Europe and the U.S.

in general, it's that the it's that the consumer is not number one there.

And anyone who's ever tried to have their cable connected or get their check in a hurry in Paris realizes the consumer does not come first there.

And it's just an entirely different gestalt, if you will.

They're not,

you don't realize how spoiled you get as a consumer.

You can be, as long as you have your seven, you know, or your four Euro or your five bucks for your double cap, you know, latte, you are king for that moment.

You can complain.

You can be rude to the worker.

You can get angry if it takes more than 90 seconds in line.

We are a People people just don't realize how

we have canonized saints or consumers in this country.

And the majority of Europe's just not like that.

And so they would say, look, if you can't get your shit within 48 hours or your espresso pods have to be fulfilled out of Frankfurt, you know, we're willing to live with that.

And the unions are much more powerful there.

And it brings up a really...

a question, and I'll ask it to you.

I don't understand in the U.S.

while unions haven't taken more advantage of this situation because I don't understand why they haven't.

Like, there isn't a Jimmy Hoffa or a Cesar Chavez that has emerged that has said, look, it is time that people,

we need, we're fed up with people calling us essential and then treating us like chumps and paying us nine bucks an hour.

Yeah, I don't, people are saying the unions, this might give an opportunity for unions to get stronger.

I haven't seen it.

Have you seen it?

No, no.

And in fact, I find, I find them more less smart.

I don't, you know what I mean?

Like they're more not savvy in terms of how they need to deal with it.

What would be interesting, though, in Europe is if other European countries, which do have similar situations to France, I think France is probably among the strongest of the unions, follow suit.

If Amazon can't deliver from Belgium or, I mean, they'll find a way as usual.

Amazon always tries to find a way.

Maybe they'll airdrop them by drones from the United States or something.

But I don't know why our unions do not.

come back in a really smart and savvy way.

I do think it's because the government is sort of stacked.

Even if Donald Trump can't stand Jeff Bezos, he's on his side from a giant business point of view.

And so is most of Congress.

And so I think it's even more than the consumer.

It's that corporations come first and corporate interests come first and shareholder interests come first.

And I don't, I don't, you know, I don't, there's no other countervailing force to that kind of stuff here in this country.

I don't know.

I just immediately go back to you and me on the champs de la Say, and I look at you and I say, I say, Kara, don't eat the French fish.

It's Poisson.

and you roll and you roll your hands and you're not having romantic sojourn we're not we're not gonna have a romantic in the spring with the dog do you know Amanda speaks French let me just tell you listen to me Amanda speaks French fluently

fluently you know you're not coming yes let's bring her and then you leave you at home anyway well France we had we had a lovely time right before the baby was born I speak the language of all nations I have an American Express black card oh well then you can come okay well France is mounting big fines for big tech U.S.

judge approved the five, the

parking ticket, $5 billion Facebook settlement with the FTC for privacy issues.

The deal had been reached last summer.

The fine amounts to 7% of Mark Zuckerberg's net worth.

The deal included tight restrictions on how Facebook treats user privacy.

Both FTC and Facebook have been eager to get the deal pushed through, but advocates say the deal does not go far enough.

The judge who approved the deal said it calls into question the adequacy of laws governing how technology companies that collect and monetize Americans' personal information must treat that information.

The judge doesn't even like it, but the court had to defer to the FTC discretion for appropriate punishment.

Now, in a statement, Facebook said the decision, quote, brings new levels of accountability and ensures the privacy is everyone's responsibility at Facebook.

That's one of your favorite lies right there.

Why did they need to wait for the FTC settlement to start implementing better privacy protection?

Is a good question.

And what would be enough to hold Facebook accountable here?

They're starting a privacy oversight board, and that's very soon.

I think they're naming members to it still.

What do you think has happened here?

I think they got away with it.

That's my, again, well, yesterday, my youngest took a Nerf gun

and went up short range and shot us.

Why did you give someone a Nerf gun in a pandemic?

But go ahead, move on.

Oh, we'll do anything to just get them away from us right now.

Anything.

No, I'd give him a Glock if he'd, if he'd go.

No, no, no.

Anyways, so.

Anyways, he decided to take this thing and go immediately go over, load it up, admire it, and then go over to his older brother and shoot him at close range in the face.

And

this is tantamount to if I'd said, okay, here's your iPad, play six hours of Minecraft in exchange for shooting your brother in the face.

And that is, it's not going to motivate the right behaviors.

And when you charge Facebook 11 weeks of cash flow or 11 days of top line revenue for letting their platform be weaponized, for disregarding the Commonwealth, all you're saying to big tech is go shoot your brother in the face.

And the opportunity here, this judge had such a big opportunity because my understanding is that judges, they don't have discretion, right?

Yeah, discretion.

They don't have the ability to overturn the punishment, but they have the ability to put the brakes on and say, I'm uncomfortable with this.

Right.

It needs to be, it needs to be.

If someone kills somebody and they get two years in prison, the judge has the right to say, no, I don't, I'm not comfortable with this sentencing.

And also on the other side, if they think that they, you're right, they have discretion.

This judge, the opportunity here and the the the the absolute best thing that could have happened for i think for

um the commonwealth as it relates to uh facebook would have been if they'd find them 50 billion because you don't want to put them out of business it is an economic engine it is a ton of innovation it's an issue

that now again the pandemic cover they have i think 53 billion dollars in cash they they wouldn't even i mean this is what would happen the company the next day would be the same company ex except all of big tech, every CEO would have gotten a room and said, okay, shit just got real.

This might actually impact whether I can get a Gulfstream 650 or a Bombardier Global Express.

So we got to really look at this.

Instead, it's just become, okay, give some more money to the lawyers.

Keep the delay and obfuscation engine humming on all 12,000 cylinders.

This was absolutely the worst thing ever because it gave them the sense that we can pay, we can absolutely buy our way out of anything, Anything.

So the judge, I think the judge.

But why did the judge do anything?

Why do these judges defer?

I don't know enough about the legal system.

I guess it's because there's laws and they have to respect the FTC.

What do you think?

I don't know.

I think they can.

They can do anything they want.

I think they can absolutely do anything they want.

And I don't, I don't, I just, I think this fine, if even if he had doubled it or tripled it, it would have made a big difference.

But it's just, it just, it doesn't send any kind of signal.

And I know people in the FTC felt, they felt like they couldn't, because they didn't have the legal firepower, fight it.

That was what you hear from inside when they're being deadly.

A couple of them were public about it, the Democratic ones.

The others were much more like, well, this is the best we can do.

We figure it out.

And I'm sure that probably was the, you know, the feeling when they did sort of the risk analysis of doing this is we can't fight them in court.

We can't win.

But I can't believe this judge couldn't do something about it.

Say, you know what, this is crap.

Because he, of course, then he goes out of the way to make a statement about it, but then doesn't put any, you know, Nerf gun behind it, essentially.

He doesn't say, no, I calls it a question, therefore I'm tripling the fine and they can take me to court.

You know what I mean?

Huge missed opportunity.

I don't.

But again, it might be this atmosphere.

It might be that nobody wants to, I think you're going to see a lot of these signs is them slipping out of one thing after the next.

And they aren't going to, I don't know, it's the, it's the money that holds them accountable because shame doesn't do it.

You know, these things, they always have an excuse for why the privacy protections weren't better.

And money doesn't, there's not enough money.

I mean, I guess maybe just, is money the only thing that would hold them accountable?

Or would you have anything else, any other idea from the court of pivot, which you could do?

Well, I'm curious to hear your idea, but you know, my go-to.

My go-to is antitrust.

Antitrust spray.

But you see, does that really create, does that stop them?

Like, where is the antitrust argument here?

Is that they aren't going to be private because they're too big a company.

And so if you break them up, each individual company would would

care more.

YouTube is radicalizing young men and doesn't put in place the requisite investment to ensure they aren't because they have no incentive to because they're the only game in town.

And when the largest search engine in the world and the largest video search engine in the world are coordinating and cooperating as opposed to competing, you have few options for advertisers.

And as a result, they have to invest in platforms or advertise on platforms that destroy the Commonwealth, create teen depression.

So if the FTC said, okay, I'm sorry, Google, you have to spend YouTube.

And the first corporate strategy meeting of YouTube, they say, I know, let's get into tax-based search.

And in the first corporate strategy of a Google without YouTube, they go, let's get into video search.

And overnight, you have two competitors.

And one of those competitors, in an effort to capture more dollars from PNG, goes, here's an idea.

Let's put in place a requisite investment such that we don't route.

Except they're the same people.

They're the same people who used to work for each other.

Yeah, but they have different incentives now.

Now they look at the guy next to them and they're the enemy because every dollar you make is a dollar less I have to be king of the world.

Look, I generally think that these people competition.

Yeah, competition.

And also, we live in a capitalist society.

And for every additional dollar you have, you become more noble.

Your kids get more opportunity.

You get a greater selection set of mates.

You have better health care.

So that there's no, and we keep, it's amazing.

We keep inventing reasons why it is better to have 3 billion than 2 billion.

I remember when I was in, the first time I went to Hungary in like 1987,

and I got this pile for 100 euros or not 100 euros, 100 Deutsche Marks at the time.

It was pre-Euro, I got this pile of currency, and I thought, oh, I'm rich going to Hungary.

And there was nothing to buy.

There was no reason to be rich.

There was literally nothing to buy.

And the amazing thing about America is: okay, there's premium economy, and then there's economy plus, and then there's business class, and then there's flying private, then there's jet smarter, then there's fractional ownership, then there's having your own plane, then there's having a Cessna, then a Bombardier, then speaking of France, a DeSoul Falcon 2000 LXS.

Not that I think about it every day.

And then

think about it it at all.

Why do you think about flying right now?

Oh, I forgot about flying.

You understand?

I'm an interesting guy, but with a Falcon 2000 LXS, I'm fucking fascinating.

With me in a private jet, I'm fascinating.

It's never going to happen.

Do you think it's going to happen?

He's so interesting.

The only way you're getting on a private jet is with me and one of my billionaire friends, but go ahead.

I'm in.

Literally.

I go from awkward looking.

They're not my friends.

I go from awkward looking to sexy, literally, with a jet.

A jet is such a good accoutrement on me.

Can I just, I'm going to take it aside here.

The people I cover, they're not none of my, some, a few are my friends, but most of them are not in any way my friends.

Um, so I'm not going to get you on the jet, but it's interesting.

They either really want to meet you or they really think you're an asshole.

It's really interesting.

I think

the answer is yes.

The answer is yes.

Come meet the other guy.

They hate you.

They like hate you.

They don't hate you in the Anand Giergardos way.

They're just like that guy.

Because I think you get at them in some way.

Like they can, they can dismiss, say, Anand, oh, he's a communist or something like that, whatever their ridiculous arguments about him are.

But you get under their skin, like the ones that dislike you really dislike you, and the others really want to spend time with you in their jets, I guess.

I don't know.

I like it.

I'll just put, I'll just, I'll just make, anyway, back to Facebook.

Listen, we're going to have someone on as a friend of pivot who can address this issue in a second, but let's just agree.

The fine was meager and the judge was the only way this was going to happen in this instance that it was going to be like, no,

this shall not stand.

And it did not happen.

Right.

So

that's going to be that.

And they're going to get off.

And in five years or 10 years, just like they did this time, they're going to come back and they're going to have done it again.

And they won't.

And the money they made in the interim will be so massive that it won't have mattered that they violated people's privacy again.

Would you agree with me?

It goes back to the same point, Kara.

When it's raining money outside, it's easy for your vision to be blurred.

And I don't, I don't, look, I think Mark Zuckerberg is as anyone, or it'd be easy for a guy if you drop out of school at 19 and

you become kind of this mini Jesus Christ of our economy.

And, you know, it's easy to see how, I don't know if you saw the WeWork documentary on Showtime last night.

No.

But if with young men, especially, when people tell you you're Jesus Christ in your 20s or 30s, you're inclined to believe them.

And it's the reason, again, we pay 23 cents.

They're not screwing up.

We are.

And the fact that we haven't been able to elect people that have the backbone to do what every other leader has done in the past and break up companies when they become more powerful.

And it's not just economy, it's not, it's not just money.

The world heads to very dark places when private power is no longer co-ops government instead of government being a countervailing force.

It just leads to very, very ugly dark places.

And I find it heartening.

I really do.

I was encouraged because, like you, I thought they were going to use this pandemic as cloud cover to come out stronger and not only that more immune from antitrust.

And the fact that the government and our elected officials, led by Elizabeth Warren, who I just think is so

boss.

Yeah, she's she's just

back in the running again.

She really is the thought leader of the of the Democratic Party.

Scott, speaking of privacy, because I'd like to have the exact right person here to you to ask questions of, we have the ultimate friend of pivot expert on the topic with us, Alex Stamos.

He is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University.

He is also the former chief security officer at Facebook.

You now are working for Zoom, right?

Correct?

What are you doing precisely?

Yeah, so I, you know, when zoom started having some uh big public security issues i tweeted about it about this being a a need for zoom to to focus on a security turnaround and i got a call from the ceo actually he got my phone number eric eric yuan yeah and uh and so now i'm i'm consulting with him on the kind of structure of their security team the kinds of projects they need to be taking on and helping them staff up to meet the needs that they have of uh you know going from 10 million to 300 million users in a very short period of time

all right so why did they go with you?

I mean, is it just like getting like trying to cover?

I don't mean to be rude, but you're like a guy.

People are like, oh, trusted guy.

So now they're really serious.

How did you, what, what was your, were there any strictures you put in place?

Like, if you don't do this, I'm cover for you.

I'm coming at you afterwards.

Or what was the, was there any deal?

It's nothing like that.

I mean, the reason I took it was, you know, we had this initial phone conversation for something like an hour.

And I sent him this big email of all the things I think they should consider.

And then the next day he announced that he was implementing a bunch of those.

So, you know, he was the fact that like within 24 hours, he was taking my advice.

Working with CEOs that care that much about fixing security problems, it's actually somewhat of a unique position for me.

They usually ignore you, right?

And then you get in a fight and CISO.

That's a, I think, an oversimplification.

I think it's hard being a CISO, right?

Like it's a really rough job because you're the highest up person in the company whose entire job it is to be a Cassandra.

right to go around and say oh my god here's the risks that we're taking on um and then to try to you're the ultimate cost owner.

Yeah, and right.

You're complete, you're all L, you're no P.

And it's a critical job, but it's also not a very liked one.

So, Alex, I have a question.

I'm just, we talk so much about Facebook and

to a certain extent,

we're sort of heckling from the cheap seats.

You were at the company, and you've had a chance to be, you were at different companies before and after and at great companies.

Can you try and distill what is unique about the Facebook culture and

if and why that culture has led to them maybe getting in more trouble than the majority of tech companies?

Yeah, that's a leading question.

So you can disagree with the court.

And it's the backdrop of the settlement being approved by the court.

And the court sort of slapped them on the way out, but still allowed them to get away with that settlement.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I have some opinions on the settlement.

I think the FTC is actually aiming totally at the wrong.

If they want to punish Facebook, they went the wrong direction.

But to Scott's issue, I mean, Scott's question, excuse me.

Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, right?

So I think to a much greater extent than almost any other large tech company, it is still a founder-led company.

And so as a result, it can move rather quickly when he really wants to do something, right?

As you know, Scott, like business is all about kind of organized capital, right?

It's about the ability for people to do lots of things together in a coordinated fashion and to apply their resources very, very quickly.

if you want to be successful.

And Facebook can do that because Mark is the center of everything.

The flip side is something that was really interesting.

I got there, is it's actually a shockingly small C conservative company.

And that the people at the top, when I got there, at least, the people at the top had not changed for eight, nine years, right?

It was this, yeah, and they thought it was great.

They celebrated it, right?

Right.

Well, and they had been through, you know, when many of these executives had joined, they were part of kind of the adult supervision that Mark had brought, right?

Cheryl Sandberg, Mike Schrepp, Jay Perik,

you know, a bunch of folks and product, right?

These were the adult supervision of like Mark bringing on, I need help to build this company.

And they went through round and round of people saying that they're going to fail, right?

They went through, you know, people saying, oh, this thing's so stupid.

Oh, you'll never monetize.

You'll, you know, they have this bad IPO.

MySpace will crush you.

Right.

MySpace will crush you.

Google Plus will crush you.

You'll never move.

You'll never figure out a way to make money on mobile.

Right.

And so every one of these terms.

Yeah.

Everyone.

Yeah.

And buying Instagram is a bad idea.

Right.

This is what Mark was told.

And this group of people went and they succeeded.

And the result is, I think there's a little bit of, you know, like Napoleon won all his battles and still he started losing, right?

You end up with a situation where if the same group of people is successful, they look back at their decisions and it's hard for them to separate out the decisions that were actually critical to success and the decisions that weren't.

And then what are things that are no longer relevant?

And I think that's like a core, that was for a while a core problem at Facebook, which is there's this real, again, small C conservatism, this

looking at the past and, oh, the company was so much better back then.

It was

a smaller company and it was great.

And we, we made all these right decisions.

And so as a result, the circle of people around Zuck is very, very

seated and it's fixed.

And it's very hard to get those people to kind of re-question the decisions they made.

And if you look at the issues that I was involved in around safety and security, misuse of the product, Most of the decisions that were made in 2009, 2010, 2011 were fine at the time when Facebook was like this fun thing that you played Zynga games on and that you super poked people and stuff like that, right?

But those decisions were no longer relevant in 2015 by the time it had become the world's most important media platform.

And that, like, it's very hard to get people to revisit decisions that they have personally made, even if the situation has changed.

And I think that's what we're doing.

Therefore, it's up to the government.

And so when when they have these fines, what happens when they hear a fine like that?

Do they go, oh, we deserve that?

Or do they know in their hearts that they got off cheat?

Well, okay.

So if we're going to talk about the FTC fine, I specifically

FTC.

So one, like, I mean, yes, $5 billion is not a big deal for Facebook.

But the key thing there is the consent decree, right?

Like, it's not about the fine.

It's about what are you legally obligated to do from here on out.

Right.

And this is, this is where I think the FTC made a big mistake, which is the, you know, effectively, the rules that the FTC have put in place are that Facebook can no longer build APIs that allow people to get to data, right?

It's all based on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

So I'm going to say something that I think you guys are going to be angry at, but I absolutely think it's true.

And I think it really goes to the root of the miss regulation here, which is the Cambridge Anna Lake scandal is the most overblown, most kind of media-centric fake scandal in the world.

If you look at like privacy issues that have ever happened, it is not impactful at all on people's lives.

And it obscures a core fact, which the core problem here is that Facebook is incredibly powerful and has, and owns people's social graph, right?

And Cambridge Analytica came out of the fact that for a short period of time, Facebook allowed other people to build on their social graph.

And there's lots of interesting and difficult security issues there.

And I don't think they made the right decisions.

That was all fixed.

That all happened before.

Well, they did that to get as big as they are.

They did that for a reason.

No, and that's not true.

See, this is the funny thing, isn't it?

Okay.

The Cambridge Analytica.

Oh, I love that he disagrees with that.

That's okay.

I love it, Alex.

Go.

Tell her why she's wrong.

No, but they allowed, what I'm saying is they allowed the third party in order to build the company into a larger entity.

It was part of, there's really, and this is what you go back.

Like, I know you're probably not a big Antonio fan, you know, but he.

I am.

Okay, so he wrote a book about this.

And it was from, again, these decisions are made before my time, and Cambridge Analytica was fixed before my time.

So I can't take credit either for the mistake or for the fix, right?

But he talks about the fact that when Facebook was trying to figure out how how to make money, there are two directions they could go.

And one was to become a platform, which would have made them equivalent to the mobile platforms, right?

So one way is like, okay, we want to be like Apple or Google.

We want to allow tons of commerce and we'll take a percentage off the top.

The other was, oh, well, that's crazy.

Let's just take all this data, hold on to it and sell ads against it.

And in the long run, the let's be a data monopolist and sell ads against the data that we have was the decision that made the most money for Facebook.

But they didn't kill the old API because they're making something and such.

And so it it was basically running these two businesses.

And so it wasn't a big deal to close the API they allowed for Cambridge Analytica because at that point, they were making all their revenue from ads.

And so back to the FTC consent decree, effectively, the FTC consent decree is telling Facebook, you are never, ever, ever allowed again to create any API that allows somebody to compete with you on the social graph.

You don't have to be in a business you don't want to be in any way, is what you're saying.

Essentially, it's a get out of jail free letter.

Like the real risk to Facebook is competition.

It's not regulation, right?

It's one of the big motivations of Mark at all times, he does not want to become MySpace, right?

He is always looking over his shoulder at who the competitor is coming up from behind.

And that's, of all the things he's good at, that is the thing that he is best at.

So, therefore, therefore, and I want to get to a couple more questions, but therefore, break up.

We were just talking about this.

Is breakup the way to do that?

Or how do you push more competition into the marketplace?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is too big as a structure.

I mean, I think you could definitely argue to break up WhatsApp and Instagram from Facebook, right?

Which they're going very hard the other direction.

I mean,

it would be tough.

It wouldn't not be easy.

And I've spoken to some government regulators who have asked me, well, how would you do that?

And especially Instagram, like pulling Instagram out of Facebook would be inequality.

And they've more integrated it more.

It's like breaking up AT ⁇ T, right?

Like it's, it's not,

it, you know, when Instagram was bought, it was tiny.

It, you know, what Instagram is now is not anything like when Mark bought it.

But I think, I mean, that is one thing you could do.

The flip side is each one of those networks is still a humongous network.

And now they've got this FTC letter that basically says, well, you don't have to then share your data with other companies, which I think makes it a lot harder to compete with them.

Do you think

if Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are three separate companies?

And by the way, all the companies, all the baby bells that spawned from the breakup of AT ⁇ T ended up being worth substantially more than the core AT ⁇ T.

So, my question is: put your shareholder hat on.

They break it up

into the core platform, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Do you think shareholders

are better off in five years or worse off?

Talk about it purely as a capitalist.

Yeah, I mean, purely as a capitalist, I think it is probably better.

But the funny thing there is that the baby bells are all popped back together, right?

Like we've got Verizon and ATT.

Reaggregating.

Yeah, my grandfather worked for ATT, then he worked for Pacific Bell, then he worked for SBC, and then he worked for ATT again, then retired, right?

But those 30 years, just to be fair, those 30 years unleashed tremendous shareholder value and innovation, right?

That's true.

And that's where perhaps things like a competitive mobile environment and such were existed because AT ⁇ T had been broken up.

I mean, Facebook is not as powerful as AT ⁇ T.

That's one thing, right?

Like AT ⁇ T owned the actual wires.

Facebook is still competing for,

you know, they are always, always looking over their shoulder at companies like Apple and Google that control the equivalent to the wires, right?

Of the real underlying systems upon which the value is.

It's interesting you say that, though, because I would push back on that and say that ATT could nudge people into

voting one way or another.

I mean, it could shut down the infrastructure, but it couldn't start creating algorithms that might go to the highest bidder and enter into these unholy alliances with certain political leanings or ideologies because they find that those ideologies, whether it's anti-vax or white nationalism, result in more shareholder value.

That ATT, even if it decided one political ideology was more beneficial than the other, they couldn't nudge them.

A big media company, in my view, is more powerful than a big telco.

But you see AT ⁇ T as having been more powerful?

I guess

let me put out a premise.

I think Facebook is the most powerful and the most dangerous organization, private company in the world.

Or

tell me where I'm right and wrong in that statement.

So I'm comparing to AT ⁇ T as from like an actual monopoly perspective.

Like the number of companies that Facebook can squash is actually quite small, whereas AT ⁇ T could, you know, in 1975, could have cut off the outside to any company.

But from an influence perspective, yes.

I mean,

you know, one of the metaphors I used with my team internally when I, when we talked about like why this was important is I said, I don't think there's been a organization since,

you know, honestly, the, either the, the Catholic church, the Christian church breaking into the Catholic and Orthodox churches or the Protestant Reformation, you know, they invented the printing press.

Since then, there hasn't been an organization that has controlled so much speech and information that's going to so many people since the church, right?

Since Gutenberg broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church.

And

that is an incredible power.

But to push back a little bit, Often,

I listen to you guys every week.

You guys are generally pushing for them to use that power more.

Like the complaint that most people in the media have about Facebook is that it doesn't use that power to control speech and censor it enough.

And I think we are now seeing this fascinating flip where because of coronavirus, Facebook is being much more aggressive about doing things like deciding what is legitimate truth.

And

we're about to see what happens when the company is activated like that.

We have to wrap up soon, but let's talk about now Zoom.

There's a series of these privacy issues, and you agreed to do this.

What are the critical issues?

And I know, and I don't want to hear like, they didn't know this would happen.

It's happened and here we are.

So what are the lessons you're taking from your time at Facebook to Zoom?

Cooperative is one thing.

That's great.

But what are the key issues regular consumers need to understand about using this platform?

Because it's only being used more and more and more.

Right.

So there's Zoom really has two totally different classes of issues.

The first are the classic security issues, and they just did not properly invest in this area, which is that that's where you have the problems around cryptography and bugs in the software that people can exploit and stuff.

That area is about hiring the right people, investing the right amount, getting stuff fixed.

And that is something I'm helping advise on.

But it's honestly, that's something that a lot of companies have done.

And the equivalent here is really the Microsoft turnaround from 2002 to 2007, which I got to see as a consultant, is they need to do the same kind of thing, except they don't have five years.

They've got to do it in three months, four months.

The other class of issues is the really interesting one, which is because of coronavirus, people went from using this as an enterprise video conferencing bridge to becoming a core part of their lives in a way that it was never designed, right?

Right.

Whether it's cocktail parties or school or yoga.

All kinds of use cases.

Yeah.

And those use cases, the really interesting part is in many cases, you're inviting strangers in.

And so this is where I think my experience at Facebook is relevant in that, you know, a lot of Facebook safety issues are about the fact that strangers are able to find each other and to interact in ways that are sometimes harmful.

And so in that area, they have to figure out how do you...

you know, they have to build the same kind of capability you have at a YouTube or a Facebook or Twitter, right?

Which is the trust and safety side, which is the people who make the rules about behavior and then enforce those rules.

But then they have to balance that against the privacy concerns of large enterprises, right?

Like they cannot regulate the Zoom network in the same way Facebook did because it's a enterprise company.

Like the big banks that use Zoom are not going to be okay with them watching all the chats and watching all the videos and such.

And so we have to try to find out, one, tooling that empowers hosts to make sure only the right people are in.

And then if people do bad things, that they are punished.

But then second, try to do detection of people who are using it in really harmful ways.

And so there's a bunch of of work that has to happen there.

And we're actually going to have some announcements pretty soon of what's going on there.

So, Alex, you're blessed.

You're a mix of talent.

Good luck, whatever it is.

Your problem professionally is not what to do, it's what not to do.

Five, ten years out, what is your dream job?

What does Alex Stamos want to be doing?

That's a good question.

So I'm not sure I'm lucky.

I just keep on taking jobs where there's like significant security problems.

I have to jump around.

Oh, trust me, brother.

Anyone on this call is very lucky.

That's true.

We are all for that.

Yeah, you know, it's weird because our profession is really new.

There's There's not, you know, there's very few people I can look up to.

There's no 65-year-olds where I'm like, oh, wow, that's a person who really had a great time.

But you want to stay in this career.

You don't want to run for office.

You don't want to start a family office.

You don't want to go to nonprofits.

This is what you want to be doing.

Look, so I'm at Stanford.

I'm loving teaching.

I'm actually around my kids.

That's right.

Like, this is, you know, being with the students is great and it's helping me bend the curve.

I'm writing a book on a bunch of this stuff.

You know, we have this new class, Trust and Safety Engineering.

And so we're writing a textbook that goes with it.

And so that can help me bend bend the curve, right?

So we can no longer graduate Stanford, you know, CS students who have no idea that any of this stuff happens when they build products.

You know, maybe, maybe I'll do some work in the government, but not like elected.

There's some really hardworking people in the Trump administration who are effectively holding things together with duct tape and bailing wire.

And

I'm not even going to name their names because in some cases they're effectively hiding from the White House because they're doing things like trying to keep the election secure.

And I think our country's in such a bad place.

That's heartening.

That's heartening.

It's heartening.

It's also scary when you think,

because normally the White House plays this really important role in the executive branch of making sure everybody's going the same direction.

And now effectively, there is a set of people at the like undersecretary level, at the assistant director level, at a bunch of agencies who, without the White House knowing, are working together to try to make things better.

And that's, you know, the government is in such a bad place now, especially on cyber.

Like we were already in a bad place during the Obama administration, but we have really lost the thread while countries like, especially the People's Republic of China, but also the Russians, the Vietnamese, India, like there's a lot of countries that are now using cyber, offensive cyber as a big part of their growth strategy.

And the U.S.

has lost ground while everybody else is gaining ground.

And so maybe, maybe doing some government work eventually, if the right position brings itself.

Well, you came to the right place.

If you're looking to be an academic who writes books or you want to know someone whose ex-wife is the chief technology officer of the united states everyone's on the line here we're here for you right we're here for you i didn't know this was a job interview so so i very last question though what what should people do on zoom to make sure they're feeling safe what three things and then we'll get going yeah so the the biggest i mean when i tell people about zoom like The thing you got to think about is you got to think about what's the metaphor you're trying to replicate with when you configure the product, right?

Like you can use it for the equivalent of a super private conversation between a couple of people in a physical office where you don't just invite strangers into your office, right?

You can also use it for webinars for like a concert for 50,000 people.

And so make sure to set your settings as paranoid as possible for what you're doing.

So having invite only, make sure to set a password.

Don't use the personal meeting link unless you absolutely have to.

There's people who are setting

meeting IDs and then using them over and over again.

Then people can get in.

Turn on the waiting room feature.

And then once your event starts and and you've got all the people there, go and lock the room or turn waiting room on if it wasn't so people can't pop in.

But the key thing is just be careful about who can get access to those invites.

And if you're doing something like, I'm going to throw this out on Twitter, then you should be turning off people's cameras, turning off the share screen, and then inviting people up, or use the webinar feature, right?

So you can set up a Zoom webinar instead of a meeting.

And I think that's where a lot of kind of the really public events have been.

The dumb mistakes.

So they have to be more.

It's not dumb.

I mean, again, Zoom didn't make this super easy, right?

It's an enterprise product.

And so, you know, enterprise IT teams love fiddly bits.

They love to have these admin interfaces that have 55 little fiddly bits.

Is that a technical term?

That's exactly a technical term.

Yeah.

That's what we call those UX.

Like they love to hit the little buttons.

And that's not what Mrs.

Smith needs when she teaches her 10th grade class.

And it's not what you or Casey needs if you're going to run a discussion with strangers.

And so that's one of the things they're trying to work on is to make it easy to click a button and get all those settings.

But for now, you got to go through and just make sure to turn on all the security features.

Waiting room, super important.

Invite only is super important.

And to be careful who you send your link to.

All right.

But they should, they should make these easier too.

If they're going to, they're now become this.

And it should also be, should they charge?

Well, so

this is one of the funny things here is that Eric basically did this to himself by raising, by making the free accounts for education and getting rid of their limitations, right?

So you end up with that, I mean, to me, the really the stuff as a parent, the stuff that I really don't like to see is the kids being disrupted and people going in and showing naked pictures or yelling cuss words.

I was porn bombed classes.

I was porn bombed.

Yeah, well, I don't mind about you so much, but like I'm talking about for you.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

This is why I like you and I hate you at the same time.

It's perfect.

It's a perfect relate.

No, I like, I think Alex is great.

Alex, we really appreciate you here.

We could talk to you for

it's really helpful.

Keep fixing the Zoom so the kids can be safe.

All right.

All right.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for being here.

Yeah.

Thanks, Scott.

All right, Kara, break time.

We'll We'll be right back with wins and fails.

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Okay, Scott, how's that?

That's my next co-host.

He's so smart.

Isn't he like that?

I think he's great.

He's really good.

You know what?

He pushes back on reporters.

Unlike the Facebook people, he pushes back intelligently and tells everyone and tries to be educational and decent.

And the other ones, they're like, how dare you say that to me?

Like, he has never been like that.

And by the way, I met him a long time ago when he was at Yahoo, when he was pushing really hard back on Marissa Mayer and others there because they weren't taking the

email hacking seriously enough that was going on.

And he was, you know, he left there over that.

He's, he sort of stalks out angrily.

Anyway, we're going to get back to wins and fails.

Obviously, Alex is a win.

But what are your wins and fails?

I'll start with my fail I think zoom stock is going to get cut in half in the next 180 days on Friday it breached the value of Airbus so zoom a video conferencing technology now has a greater market capitalization than the second largest manufacturer of commercial airliners.

And I think that,

by the way, if they go to 23 billion instead of 45, it's still an incredible win.

But the stock's gotten ahead of itself because there's a pretty large cohort of investors who are are all trying to figure out.

By the way, we said this stock was going to go up when it was about 100.

But what I'm saying now, and it's dangerous to be a trader, I think this thing at 160 bucks is overvalued.

One, because it's inspired just a massive number of competitors.

I've gotten calls just in the last seven days from VCs who've asked me to help them evaluate video conferencing competitors.

We're using Squadcast instead of Zoom.

You're going to see competitors around education, different verticals,

different concerts.

Zoom doesn't scale that well beyond a thousand people.

They have, there's going to be ultra secure versions of Zoom.

So basically they've inspired a ton of competition, including who announced last week a Zoom competitor, Kara?

Oh, give me a hint, Alex Damos worked there.

Facebook, yes.

Facebook, you know, of course, because they couldn't think of themselves.

But also, you know, there's other, there's tons of people doing this.

There's Microsoft, there's other Google, obviously, Cisco has WebEx.

You know, everyone's going to double down.

That said, nobody has, nobody's got sort of the, this has been the biggest consumer marketing event for a company of all.

I think it's going to acquire.

That's, that would be my guess.

That would be, you know what?

There's only a handful of companies.

It's a great name.

Yeah, but there's only a whole lot of it at $45 billion.

That means you have to pay $60 to $70.

They're not going to pay for it.

Right.

It's going to go down and then someone's going to buy it.

You think it'll be acquired.

Well, it's sort of like there's two companies, Slack and Zoom, that have sort of outrun, even though their struggle comparatively, they've outrun them in terms of consumer liking them, liking the product.

So that's your fail.

What's your win?

So my win is I spent a lot of time last weekend thinking about,

I think there's a bunch of moons lining up, and that is this is going to be the mother of all gap years across America and probably across Europe too, as people recognize that $68,000 tuition.

at a university is hard, is a jagged little pill to swallow that's been washed down by certification and a four-year experience.

And when that four-year experience turns into a bunch of shitty Zoom calls, a lot of people, and I'm getting a lot of these calls, are going to decide, them and their parents are going to decide that they should take a gap year.

And

my win, if you will, is the Latter-day Saints mission program, the Peace Corps, and AmeriCorps that take young people and help them serve in the...

in the agency of others.

And I always say greatness is in the agency of others.

It helps them at a young age develop grit, work hard.

You know, the missionaries, I love missionaries.

They work six days a week, 12 hours a day, focused on something bigger than themselves.

I think the Peace Corps is a wonderful thing.

AmeriCorps is fantastic.

And I think there's a huge opportunity given that the key to our economy moving forward and our society's superpower, America's superpower, and that is maintaining our optimism is all about now the apex of the relapse.

And the key to flattening that curve, if you will, is simple algebra.

It's

testing, tracing, and then isolation.

And it looks to me like the weak point in that now is tracing.

We only have 2,500 tracers around the United States, which are mostly focused on foodborne illnesses and STDs.

And I think there's an opportunity to take all those gap year

18-year-olds and put them to work in what I would call some sort of AmeriCorps-like army of people to trace and using handheld technology, ask them to work exceptionally hard and give them the opportunity to serve in the agency of something greater.

And what would you have?

You know, young people, we send 19-year-olds to the front lines in Kandahar and all sorts of hotspots around the world.

They're not immune to bullets, but to a certain extent, this army of super soldiers would be immune to this virus.

And I don't want to, I'm not an epidemiologist, so I'll only report what I've read, but my understanding is the mortality rates and the severity of the disease is much lower among people who are under the age of 25, that this is in fact an Aegis disease.

So the idea.

of tracers

an army of tracers and giving them the opportunity to go to work and do something bigger than themselves because part of the reason we had such fantastic leadership and legislation and bipartisan cooperation in the 50s and 60s is that the majority of our elected leaders had served in uniform and they they felt they were all there in the agency of something bigger than their party i agree we need to

we need to reestablish that sense of empathy and cooperation i think we need

a massive effort and if you were to give all of them say 25 to 100 percent remittance on tuition posts similar to what the armed services do post their service in what i'll call the corona Corps or AmeriCorps, you would have a reduction in cost of college for a lot of middle-class kids.

And

we might emerge or generate a series of a generation of leaders that understand the importance of cooperation.

That would be like a great program if our leaders had the ability to do that.

Well, here's the thing, do the math.

I figured the math, 500,000 people, 30,000 bucks for two years, 25 to 100% off their tuition that costs $50 billion.

And the way to think of it is it's a 2% insurance policy on the $2.5 trillion stimulus to ensure we don't have to pay it again.

So I'm really trying to promote this idea of a volunteer corps of young people that take advantage of the insufficient education we're going to have for the next 12 to 24 months at the university level and an opportunity to establish a generation of people who are more cooperative and think bigger than themselves.

So anyways, my winners are AmeriCorps, missionaries from the Latter-day Saints are the Peace Corps.

By the way, Peace Corps, including the wrestler China and Reed Hastings from Netflix, both Peace Corps volunteers.

I like that.

And I wanted to be in the military, just so you know.

uh was not allowed because of the gay thing but let me tell you my win and fail same thing

clorox

disinfectant i love disinfectant thank you clorox and lysol and all the other disinfectants

because i heard what the president said thank you for them for saying that the fact that they had to say it is appalling and obviously the fail is the ridiculous and then pretending they didn't mean it this is just this administration is out of friggin control out of that is just like i i know we say that all the time but like drink disinfect like no injected

and i was kid and then i was kidding like what i was being sarcastic

let me just tell you he's crazy enough but the the the the right wing media that has continued to back this stuff is literally i just don't even know what to think breitbart had a story that was so appalling right afterwards um fact you know he didn't say that i was like he did and then when he then he then he turned on them both his press secretary defended him and then he said no i was kidding and then he she looked she he hung her out to drive like the the amount of people he throws under buses on a daily basis because his lunacy is really quite amazing look but they deserve it they deserve it

viewers want to take the ultimate tide pod challenge i just think that's natural selection in darwin all right go for it guys all right okay nonetheless thank you clorox for putting out a statement that people shouldn't drink you good idea i appreciate that speaking of marketing we didn't intentionally want you to take our Clorox.

Anyway, I appreciate it from them.

And I can't believe I appreciate that statement.

Anyway, Scott, what's on tap for you the rest of this week?

We're going to have a lot to say.

It's going to be a busy week, I think.

Busy week.

I got a lot going on.

I'm filming my first TV show premiering on Vice, May the 7th.

Yes, we got to get you on the podcast to talk about it.

That's right.

And, you know, just, you know, everything's kind of blending.

There isn't really a next week.

Everything's just sort of blending.

What are you up to?

Your life's much more interesting.

I have an interview with Joe Walsh.

I've got an interview with Randall.

He ran for, no, he ran for president.

You know, the one who used to be really conservative and then he became not as conservative.

He ran against Trump.

Oh, the guy who hated, who loved Trump and now hates him?

Yes, that guy.

I'm going to talk to him.

I'm talking to him.

Ask him how he became such a bitch.

Okay, I'll tell that's exactly how I'll ask him.

It's shocking that people don't like me, isn't it?

Isn't it shocking?

I know, I know.

And then I'm interviewing Ryan Murphy.

He's the Canadian actor.

Oh, no.

No, that's no, I'd love to interview Ryan Reynolds.

No, Ryan Murphy.

Joe Walsh saying you can leave your hat on, right?

I've got that right.

Listen to me.

Ryan Murphy was, it created glee.

He created American horror story.

He does this.

He has a news series called Hollywood, which

looks fantastic.

He's a really fat, he's a really great creator of TV shows.

He did that big, ink, that big deal with Netflix.

Shonda Rhimes did one and he did one, Ryan Murphy.

And he actually claimed to fame.

He and I were interns together at the Washington Post.

And so we hung out like one summer all together just he was he's an amazingly interesting guy so uh he is now a sort of one of the most premier producers in hollywood so we're going to talk about all that stuff and how it what it's like to be at netflix and stuff like that so that sounds good it's going to be fun i will bring back stories for you anyway uh Don't forget, if you have a story you're curious about and want to hear our opinion on, email us at pivot at Voxmedia.com to be featured on the show.

Scott, please read us out.

Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Sinanis.

Our executive producer is Erica Anderson.

Special thanks to Rebecca Castro and Drew Burroughs.

If you liked what you heard, please hit the subscribe button.

Send in your questions.

Hope you have a wonderful week, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the end of the week for a breakdown of all things tech and business.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

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That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

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

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

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

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

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia made to travel.