Andreessen tells Silicon Valley it’s “time to build”, Facebook/Google’s ad market hit, Friend of Pivot Rebecca Traister on women’s leadership

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

How are you doing, Scott?

What did you do this weekend?

They're all sort of, they're a weekend.

They all sort of blend together, right?

Sundays.

I watched that one world together and also the Disney sing-along.

I watched it all, all of the online things.

And I have to say, I like them a lot.

I mean, I don't think I'd want to see dozens of them, but I thought it was great.

And I thought Lady Gaga singing with Celine Dion, singing with Andrew Bocelli,

it was just amazing.

That was, I like that a lot.

I like Jennifer British.

You enjoyed it.

I heard about it.

I didn't see it.

Why didn't you see it?

Why did I'm curious?

I just can't do anything Disney right now.

It might just be a lot.

No, that's not Disney.

It was like a big middle finger to Trump because it was in honor of the World Health Organization.

I thought you might want to make it.

Yeah, it's Global Citizen did it.

And so it was honor of World Health Organization.

And Michelle Obama appeared with Laura Bush.

Then there was Oprah was there.

You know, everybody was there pretty much.

It was hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert, who were the three co-hosts.

And then, which was, it just was like one big middle finger.

And then Gates came on, of course, and talked with his wife, Melinda Gates, about how great the World Health Organization is, essentially.

Was it a fundraiser?

I mean, literally in the book of the story.

I think so.

I think so.

But it was like every star.

the book.

Taylor Swift sang a beautiful song about her mother's cancer, which was about everybody being sick and stuff like that.

It was quite moving.

And

there was not as nary a mention of politics, but it was all about politics, which is interesting.

Yeah, something tells me they didn't ask Dick Cheney to come play the harmonica, right?

They did not.

But Laura Bush was there.

It wasn't overtaken.

Laura Bush.

You know what?

I'll take Laura Bush right now.

She's the least offensive person in history.

It'll be interesting to see to what extent that sticks, that people continue to film in remote locations or in their homes or in their basements versus going back to the studios.

You got to think it's just not a great time to own theaters and broadcast facilities right now on Soundstate.

Yeah, it's a pain to go to those things.

Whenever I do CMBC, it's like I have to go somewhere.

It takes me to the business.

It is a pain.

You know, everyone I know is buying those circle of lights thing, even if you're on the very crude scale.

And then I'm not doing anything, of course.

I want to look just like me.

But it's an interesting, I'll put a flashlight, I have Alex hold a flashlight over my head.

Anyway, anyway, it's just, it's just, it's, it is interesting, whether we're going to go downstream, I guess, or down scale or simplistic or Marie Kondo, our broadcasting, it'll be interesting.

Oh, you asked me what I did this weekend.

You know what happened this week?

I ran into, I thought, oh, this must be some sort of funeral or parade.

I ran into a long stream of American-made cars honking with flags hanging out of them.

And you know what it was?

Keep in mind, I live in Florida.

Yeah.

Yeah, i.e.

the land of the batshit crazy.

It was a reopened protest.

Yeah.

And I told you.

Was it a lot of people?

I believe it.

Was it a lot of it?

It must have been between 50 and 100 cars.

They were very animated.

That's like an Italian funeral, but go ahead.

And they had hashtag reopen, liberty, a lot of Trump 2020 flags, small business.

The most interesting one is a woman had written on her car, small business is essential.

And it really just goes, it really struck me, not only the strangeness of it and how I just don't agree with these people.

I'm sitting there in my car with my mask on.

And it struck me, I have absolutely no idea what America is about.

I mean, I'm, I hang out with you.

I read the New York Times.

Oh, there's different Americas.

There's two, like, oh my gosh.

There's different Americas.

These people live close to me.

I don't know any of these people.

And it just struck me.

There's two different pandemics happening, and there's two different reasons.

And that's right.

Let's let's talk about that.

Let's talk about that.

Because this week,

Mark Andreessen, who is always sort of gets in on the trend as it's happening, is typical of him, wrote a piece called, he's an iconic venture capitalist.

He created Netscape, the browser, and stuff.

He wrote an essay called, and he's been very quiet lately in general.

He's sort of been off to his own devices.

And he wrote an essay.

This is a guy who wrote Software Is Eating the World essay a couple years ago that sort of attracted people's attention.

It's called It's Time to Build.

It was a rallying cry for big tech over the weekend.

And he implored the lack of preparedness for coronavirus was due in part to a failure of imagination.

He critiques huge American issues in housing, education, manufacturing, transportation,

and says the problem is desire.

Do we need to want to do these things?

He said, quote, every step of the way to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?

So, you know, and it sort of dovetails with this reopen America is that we got to get back to work.

The reason, and then, of course, Mark is sort of the secret of Silicon Valley, like Mr.

Secret, like it's the only reason you're not successful because of you, which is a very typical mentality,

ignoring people's people's problems or educational levels.

But what do you think of this concept?

Both concepts dovetailing together because they really do in a lot of ways.

Well, there's a lot of venture firms and a lot of financial firms that sort of don't command the space they occupy.

And that is like a Hellman Freeman is probably the most successful private equity firm in the world.

But then you have private equity guys who make enough money where they decide the key to their life and I understand this is to have influence and to be famous.

And they start Ray Dalio, it appears to me, is no longer a hedge fund manager, but a commentator.

And he says a lot of interesting things.

He's part of the dialogue.

There's nothing wrong with that.

Strikes me that Andreessen Horowis commands more of the space than they occupy.

That there's they have some really interesting thought leadership there.

But I think I just read an article that says that their performance has been pretty underwhelming the last several years.

Yeah.

But, anyways, I didn't think there was anything that new in it.

I thought it was well written.

The piece that resonates with me that he's clearly parroting from everything I've said is that universities that have a $36 billion endowment and aren't growing their freshman class,

you know, that is immoral?

That we, again,

the interesting thing there is the concept that the most important things in society, healthcare, housing, and education, the things that create a society that feels comfortable, that reduces the deaths of despair, which has become a health crisis, is a function not only of what you have, but not having a fear that something's going to be taken away from you, that you're going to have access to these things.

And we not only need to flatten the curve around the virus, we need to flatten the curve around the escalation in prices across all these things so why wouldn't harvard using technology decide and say a billion dollars of that 36 billion dollars to quintuple their frustration that's what he was making the point he was making a different point in terms of focus using that money you're right a hundred a hundred percent a hundred percent but why wouldn't they well because a lot of these venture capitalists don't think you need to go to college but that's another Oh, that's the only venture capitalist that suggests you don't go to college is a guy with a fucking graduate degree from Stanford.

They are so full of shit.

They all decide that not going to college is a great idea for your kid.

It's a great idea for your kid.

Meanwhile, I'm going to consistently give money to Stanford and MIT and get Joey Marginal, who happens to have the same last name as me, into school.

Boom.

That's America right now.

Anyway,

the reason why is people like myself, and I'm part of the problem.

It is really fun to be a luxury brand.

I have 100, and I'm bragging right now.

I have 170 kids enrolled in my class for fall.

300 or 400 kids want to take the class.

NYU is going to admit, you know, 2,200 kids into their freshman class at Stern.

We should admit 22,000.

But the illusion of scarcity is the only thing that allows us to charge $7,000 per class at 95 points a margin.

And if we started building a company where demand, supply meant demand, we have to start operating this like a business.

And academics have absolutely no desire to run an organization like a business because it means we actually have to get our heads out of our ass and think about costs and think about value and

think about, okay, what are are we delivering for this money?

Instead, we just massively choke supply, prey on the hopes and dreams of middle-class parents and create luxury brands.

We are no longer public servants.

Is that, is that, oh, okay.

All right.

Okay.

That's a lot to unpack.

But is that really what would solve it?

Because right now I think they're going to have a problem getting people to go.

Like I was talking about this the other day.

Someone was asking me, you know, would you, would you send your son to school?

Not if he's doing online classes.

Not if he's, do you know what I mean?

Like the prices have to come down.

It has to be a better product.

You're right.

In some ways.

But do you think it might get

it might get tougher going forward for them to enroll people and have that

supply constraint?

You think there's plenty of people that will go?

The demand for the experience is going to substantially decline if all of a sudden the experience doesn't involve campus leaves and the quad and football games.

No doubt about it.

But the demand that will likely stay the same and perhaps even increase in a digital world is the real thing that that people pay for and the real reason they take out a quarter of a million dollars in loans and that is they don't go for education they don't go for matriculation they don't go for experience they go for certification and that is by the time you graduate if your son graduates from two lane it immediately says he is certified as a responsible socialized kid who got in you know who who figured out a way to let him get admissions to let him in which means that he is certified and really what we're there the kids and families are are paying for is certification.

And the boom you're going to see in education if the experience goes down to try and fill that void of margin that people no longer be able to

will no longer be willing to pay is

firms that certify people that say, okay, we have tested this person from every angle and figured out and done all sorts of examinations of them and checked their background.

Unfortunately, what we don't talk about anymore, universities now run crawl checks on every admitted applicant.

There are going to be all kinds of businesses other than universities that come in and certify and say, you know what, this kid is in the top 1% as it relates to STEM skills, or this person has unbelievable EQ.

Because essentially all we are right now is certifiers.

We're not educators.

A lot of the education is not, it's okay.

It's not great.

But if all of a sudden we're going to take the socialization and the experience out of the equation, and it doesn't help that all these kids are home and the jig is up.

Everyone is so shocked at how bad these Zoom classes is.

The interesting thing is, what no one's talking about is they're not that much worse than the real thing.

It's just all of a sudden parents are seeing what actually is going on in these classes.

And it's not what they had hoped.

Yeah.

Yep.

That's true.

Although some of them are.

I mean, it's just, I do think the way it's done, though, is a problem too.

I think the format is a problem.

And so that's, it just doesn't work.

As in-person does matter a great deal in education in lots of ways, in some ways.

I agree that there's other ways to do it, but there is some efficacy to being together.

There is the socialization element there's all kinds of things i think what's interesting about what you're talking about because you're doing the sort of the same take as mark is doing it's like we're not good at what we're supposed to be good at right and so i think what mark's argument is that why haven't we i mean he's he's he's simplifying something that's extraordinarily complex in terms of a global ecosystem but it's an approach yes an approach exactly he's trying to say yep go he's trying to say he's trying to say why is china making our stuff he's sort of doing the trump version smarter essentially um or why is why do we not make things and i think it's it's sort of an it's an adjunct to his software is eating the world because what's interesting is he was like software is going to ruin your job anyways and and then he's saying now we should make things which is kind of an interesting shift

But there's

a lot of it is approach and the way the way we think we're big we're big fans of winners and losers and creating a competition and a hunger games here where the top 1% and maybe even isn't even the one per top 1% of kids immediately got identified as the winners.

And we create a slope of trajectory such that they come off the flat top of the aircraft carrier, about to hit the speed of sound.

Whereas in Germany and Canada, there really aren't that many amazing universities.

But if you're a decent student, you get to go to the university near you and it's free.

Whereas in the U.S., we've decided to stratisfy the market for universities and create these aspirational universities.

that are choke supply, are excellent, have unbelievable resources, essentially the Ivy League and then some some smattering of other schools, and then create that luxury brand status to attract people from all over the world.

I mean, literally 17 of the top 20 universities from a stature standpoint are in the U.S.

because we have choke supply.

We love it.

We're drunk on it.

But should it be more like Germany?

I've been to Germany a lot.

I've spoken to several universities there, and they're shitty facilities.

They don't have a brand new gym named after the local venture capitalists, but they let in a lot more kids.

And it's the kids in that part of Germany that get to go.

So more kids get a good education and they don't immediately start stratifying and casting America or Germany's youth.

It's like you go to college, there's good schools, there's great schools, but pretty much everybody goes to what's considered an okay school.

Where in the U.S., the hunger games begins in your junior year of high school.

It's like, okay, where are you going to go, kid?

And the trajectory you get out of college is just so important.

And I'm not, I'm not entirely sure that's the answer, the German or the Canadian way, but we have chosen an absolutely different system.

We begin this triathlon, this apprentice-like model of competition at a very young age.

I also wonder how much it just the amount of stress it causes.

I see how much stress it causes for my friends and their kids going through this process.

It's really

staggering.

Well, we'll see.

Now, I want you to respond very quickly, and I want to get to something that you talked about in No Mercy Mo Mouse about Google and Facebook.

But how do you respond to Mark's idea that we have to make things here in this country?

Like his overall premise is that it shows that we don't make things.

You know, he's trying very desperately to keep politics out of it.

Like we've been incompetent.

Essentially, we've been incompetent for a very long time

was his essential argument.

And here's what we need to do.

What do you think about that idea?

Well, I think there's different ways to look at it.

If it's onshoring around manufacturing, making things and manufacturing jobs have shown themselves to be especially good places to invest long-term in terms of employment in a middle class.

I think what he was trying to say is across those

really

key components of our society, again, healthcare,

education, and housing, that we need to take, I think what he was arguing for was a little bit with socialism, this notion that all of a sudden people are going to wake up and say, I'm a builder.

No, they're not.

We're capitalists and they're going to figure out a way to

allocate capital to a project and get more money back.

So I don't know the call to build is going to do much.

I think the only thing you could do is say, all right, the government is going to figure out a tax incentive such that we massively

increase the number of new housing starts.

We massively increase the number of freshmen's seats at universities by taxing their endowment if they don't increase the number of seats.

We're going to massively increase with technology access to health care such that we can bring the cost down and create legislation that makes it less expensive.

But I don't know exactly what he means by this mentality.

We all wake up one morning and decide to get a lot of money.

It's like a silicon, like we're makers here.

They love to call themselves makers, like when in fact, many of them just are

riders upon other people's success.

But it's an interesting, you know, it's interesting because his attitude is quite widespread.

One is you forget how much more conservative Silicon Valley people are and willing to make.

all kinds of compromises, whoever's in office, one.

And two is that they like the idea is going around Silicon Valley that

the virus was built in China in a lab that escaped from a lab.

They're just, they're a lot less

forward than you think.

Like I just, you know what I mean?

Like people are always like, like, it's so liberal.

I'm like, it's really not in any way liberal as a group of people.

It's just interesting.

It's an interesting idea of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps kind of mentality that they have there.

It's good he did.

Catalyzing conversation.

He did.

Now, by the way, Mark Andreessen did come from, did pull himself up, you know, but not everybody.

The Illini, University of Illinois, right?

Yes, he did.

And it's, it's just, it's interesting.

It's interesting for the mentality of Silicon Valley.

In any case,

let's talk about something you got right.

You wrote it, we talked about it on no mercy, no malice.

Before we have a friend of Pivot coming, it's it's going to be interesting google and facebook's share of the digital ad market has taken a hit as we talked about and then on your blog this week you talked about search term being down we talked about this last week uh but their share of the market is predicted still at 61 percent um no major layoffs uh uh Suner Pachai said hiring would be slowed, but not no layoffs.

I think they're probably trying to figure out where to recalibrate, as Sunir Pachai said.

Meanwhile, media companies, as we talked about last week, which are fighting for ad dollars, are facing massive layoffs.

You know, Vox Media furloughed 9% of its staff last week.

Condé Nast and Viacom also for furloughed workers.

It's being reported that NPR between sponsorship hit and extra costs because of the pandemic, Outlet is facing a $16 to $25 million deficit.

BuzzFeed and Yelp, on and on and on.

Now, listen, will Google and Facebook start buying up pledging media companies?

And also, should there be a government bailout of media companies?

Well,

yeah, so two things.

I'm going to make that noise again.

Oh, here we go.

I don't think

Amazon and Google, I think big tech is rightfully still worried about any trust, and they have substantially reduced

their business development efforts, as far as I can tell.

And acquisitions are down.

So we're in the worst of all worlds.

We have companies that are monopolies that are not acquiring other companies.

So there's no M ⁇ A.

In terms of a bailout, I actually think

PPP was a bad idea.

I think we're going to find out that there's been a ton of abuse.

I'm in the camp.

I feel the same way when a company is laying off people or was in tough straits.

And that is, you can't protect jobs, you can protect people.

And I just think we're going to find out there is massive abuse of these programs.

And the best thing that we could have done, like that $250 billion PPP package that was gone in like seven seconds, there's 100 million households.

By virtue of math,

50 million of them or 50% of them make less than the average annual income.

That's 50 million households

times 250 billion.

That's $5,000.

I just would have given $5,000 to every household that makes less than the median.

Instead, they're giving it to the small, but I was on a Zoom call with a bunch of my fraternity brothers from UCLA.

All of us are millionaires, and I was the only one on the phone that isn't getting PPP.

And

I understand they want to get hold on to employees.

We want to flatten the curve in terms of unemployment.

But you know what?

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

And to be blunt, a lot of these businesses have had 11 years of champagne and cocaine, and they should be laying off people.

The question is, how do we protect those people?

So this bastardized this.

It is a blunt instrument.

That's right.

Open to start.

And, you know, look, Shake Shack gave back money.

Well, how did Shake Shack get money?

That was, it was an interesting.

Columbia's getting money.

I mean,

there's just, we're going to see that too.

Of course, if you're one of those companies, like I wrote a columnist, why not get the money if the money is going to be?

That's the attitude.

Everyone's like, well, free money.

Get your application in.

Do we really need it maybe maybe not everyone can i thought about it i have a venture-backed business and i thought well i get about it somewhere between 125 and a quarter million like well if the government's giving it away it feels like ubi let's get ours and they think well okay hold on do we really need it right there are some strictures to it and it's confusing but i think a lot of people find the entire process confusing and by the way what there was an interesting map of where the money went it went to all these states that are not heavy employers.

It was in a lot of Trumpy kind of states.

It was interesting.

There was all kinds of, it was, you know, it's not going to be done well if everyone's rushing to the door with their application.

And that it should be done in a systemic way.

And that's what it looked like.

It looked like a crazy rush to grab money.

Like, you know, when they throw like meals ready to eat off the back of a truck in the middle of a, that's what it looked like to me.

They, I mean, they could have, A, they should have put more criteria on it, in my viewpoint.

And two, they also, the government, I don't believe in, I think bailouts are really unhealthy.

It should be some sort of very, very incredibly easy terms bailout.

I'm not saying not bailout, loans.

And that is, you would have seen a lot less applications like, well, this isn't a handout.

It's a hand up and you got to pay it back at some point.

And you can pay it back over 10 years.

It can be interest-free.

And they're trying to structure the loan saying, as long as you don't fire people.

But you know what?

And this is the thing.

And I understand the basic notion here.

But the reason America hires more people is we make it easier to fire people.

And people don't want to talk about firing because it disrupts people's lives, but it's one of our great competences competences as a nation: we're not afraid to fire people.

And I think this was a big opportunity, quite frankly, to reduce a lot of staff.

This is a real, that was, that was it.

You're right.

Other countries aren't like that.

You're right.

100%.

Do you think the government bailouts for media companies, though?

Do you think there should be?

Should Jim Bankoff or anybody else who has these problems

go and say we would like some money or what?

No, Bankoff's rich.

He's a talented guy from AOL.

He's rich.

And the majority of people work at Bankoff.

All right, but just like, should government bailouts for media companies?

100%.

No, they should maybe provide some funding to NPR.

They probably shouldn't even find that, but they should form, they should force all of us.

I'm in the media business, and this is, let's be honest, this is a fucking nightmare.

They should force all of us to do something uniquely American, and that is we figure shit out.

And you have the inside.

And Mark Andreessen have the same attitude.

That's what he was saying.

Yeah, but he's taught.

I think I'm taking the other side.

I'm taking the side of this that people don't want to hear and that they think is hard and cold-hearted.

I think every one of these small businesses should be firing people and saying,

we need to build an organization and entities that are soldiers and warriors.

And if we were smart and we kept the money and we saved money for a rainy day, which most good businesses do, we can hold on to the most of the people.

And some of the people, maybe the bottom 10%, maybe the bottom third, we need to furlough.

And those people will be okay because the government is protecting people and ensuring they have a check.

I think that's what we should have done.

This was an opportunity.

missed for every business in America to get in fighting shape, Kara, to get in fucking fighting shape.

Because guess what?

This shit's coming back.

And you better bulk up and get strong.

This shit is coming back.

What shit?

Of the many shits, what shit is coming back?

Crises.

We have been in an 11-year absence of a bull market and crisis.

That is not the way the economy works, as far as I can tell.

That is not.

So, look, I don't, this sounds harsh.

Some businesses would just be swept off the decks.

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

But what I see PPP doing is wallpapering over a lot of businesses that only survive in a bull market.

And guess what?

That's not the way the economy works.

We've got to get off this drip crack cocaine of our kids, a future of debt fueled by future that future generations will have to pay back.

And

let a lot of these companies go out of business.

They'll come back.

Neiman Marcus just filed for bankruptcy.

Did you see Neiman Marcus?

Neiman Marcus just filed for bankruptcy.

And guess what?

They should.

They should.

And there is a bright side to this.

I don't, and again, I think everybody should have enough money.

I'm starting to become a UBI guy, but UBI as needed, not UBI always.

I think we need UBI now during a crisis.

But about a third of everyone that walks into a department store on Monday morning says, you know what, I'd really like to do something else with my life.

And there is something about shedding skin.

Neiman Marcus should be bankrupt, but guess what?

It's not going to, the reason it's bankrupt is not because it's a bad business.

It's because private equity guys levered it up.

And Neiman Marcus isn't going to go away.

The brand is going to stick around.

Well, we'll see about that.

Brands, lots of brands like that have gone away.

That's not actually.

Neiman Marcus won't go away.

It won't go away.

They might use it just to license other products, but it won't go away.

All right.

Someone'll buy it.

You know what, you know what I used to call it when I covered retail?

Needless markup.

Yes, exactly.

There you go.

There you go.

All right, Scott.

I like this like, you know, doggy dog kind of attitude you have today.

When we get back, we're going to have a friend of pivot.

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All right, Scott, I want to introduce you to our our new colleague, Rebecca Tracer, who is senior writer at New York Magazine.

She is the author of the book, Good and Mad, The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.

Rebecca, welcome to Pivot.

Thank you for coming.

I'm so glad to be here.

Hi, everybody.

So, you recently wrote an article that I love for New York Magazine called, and by the way, Vox Media owns New York Magazine, called Enough with the Dick Swinging, which you make a perfect pivot.

It's perfect for Pivot.

Tell us how you really feel about male leadership in this country.

So, and I just want to point out reports are coming out saying that some of the countries with the most success at stemming the spread of COVID-19 are women-led, Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan.

So let's start with the dick swinging problem that you see.

Well, so I want to be clear that I don't think that male leadership is inherently like rooted in biology worse than women's leadership.

And I think that women, you know, female leaders are just as capable of, you know, being dick swingers.

Yeah.

Were they given the power if they had the same levels of power?

This is a particular, I was, in that piece, I was reacting to a very particular strain of male leadership that was

the sort of the power grabbing.

And I think that the behaviors that I was, that make me so livid about this

strain of male leadership are born of...

having had so much power for so long, right?

So that the accumulation of protection of reinforcement of power becomes the goal rather than the service of the people that you're representing or actual effective leadership and representation.

And that's what I was so livid about when I read that call.

When I wrote my call.

So, what is a dick swinger precisely?

What is just, can you define?

And that's Scott, I'd like you to weigh in on dick swinging in a second, but go ahead.

I'm standing up.

No, you were.

You were coming in.

That was bad.

That was bad.

Sorry, go ahead.

I mean,

you know, I think we know what a dick swinger is.

It's the guy who

conversationally or in terms of, you know, how he might legislate or communicate his power, is basically suggesting that he wants to put his dick on the table and measure it compared to whichever guy he's arguing with.

And that, I mean, I saw it in particular.

I live in New York City.

Give me examples.

I'm a public school parent in New York City.

And in New York City, we've got two major dick swingers who are screwing us around right now.

There is Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo.

And the thing that prompted this column was a particular squabble that they had about whether or not the public schools in New York City are going to stay closed for the rest of the year.

The answer presumably is yes.

But what happened is that Bill de Blasio, the mayor,

made an announcement about 10 days ago that the schools were going to stay closed for the rest of the year and was promptly contradicted by the state's governor, Andrew Cuomo, who said that's his opinion.

He doesn't have the power to close the schools.

Well, that A is news to me.

And B, I don't care which one of you has the power to make this call.

I care whether or not the schools are going to be open.

And I care about that because, especially, because the New York City schools, which are 1.1 million students,

750,000 of them low-income families,

More than 100,000 of them homeless.

The question of whether or not schools are open every day for the next two and a half months, they've already been closed for over a month.

That affects everything

about how those students, their families, plus the teachers, the cafeteria workers, the janitors.

This is life-shifting.

And I do not care which of these two guys, both of whom wield an enormous amount of political power over our daily lives.

I don't care which one of them has more authority.

What I want from them is a kind of leadership that's just going to tell us how we who are affected by these decisions

need to proceed and what we can expect in this horrifying time when people are sick, broke, they're seeing their livelihoods and their possibility for economic stability go out the window.

There's child care.

All forms of child care are sort of falling apart at the seams.

These are actually daily struggles.

And I don't care which one of you has the authority.

I don't care.

Scott, please jump in.

There's a lot of, and you've written about it.

There's a lot of interesting pieces around female leadership around the nation and how, as it relates to gun control, as it relates to handling the pandemic that the countries that have handled the pandemic the best whether it's germany with fantastic testing and the lowest mortality rate or new zealand and it just never got that bad is is female leadership and uh also by the way there's some just awful female leaders christina fernandez and artists

leaders but the question i have is the following i have two questions one

Is it something genetic?

There is research showing that, quite frankly, is that women value relationships more, are better at consensus building.

And by the way, when you say that, that's not sexist.

But when you say men are more aggressive, which results in bigger, loftier goals, then you're a sexist and a misogynist.

So one, is it in fact that it's not a function of men and women being different, but the skills that women need to survive in a political environment where very little, few women are allowed to rise to the top?

And two, can we have an open conversation that says, all right, biology is sexist.

Men and women generally bring different attributes or they're predisposed to different attributes.

Not to say that a lot of women don't have very masculine qualities, and a lot of men don't have very feminine qualities, but we don't seem to want to have an open conversation around the difference between men and women unless we're constantly praising women and saying, guys are fucking idiots.

That's the only acceptable narrative.

So, my view is very much that it's not inherent or biological.

But, of course, this is all theoretical because the reality is we live in a world, you know, and we're talking about this country and its sort of political and financial leadership.

We're talking about all these different kinds of power.

We live in a world in which the institutions and the systems were built by and around white male straight power.

And so everything that has

happened here.

Publicly straight.

Publicly straight, right.

So everything that has happened here has happens in reaction to or within those systems.

If women had a disproportionate grip on power, anything like the disproportionate grip that men and especially white men have had on power in this country, you would see all the same kinds of corruption and ill behavior because how you treat power depends in part on your relationship to it.

Power corrupts.

And so

power corrupts.

And also, once you assume that you have a right to it, then you fight with other people for it.

Whereas if you're on the outside of it, you need to develop all kinds of skills, conciliatory skills, working together skills.

I mean, this is, you can see this not just around gender, you can see it everywhere.

If you look at organizing,

you know, why does organizing happen when it comes to labor movement, a civil rights movement, a women's movement, a gay rights movement?

Organizing happens when people who are shut out from power

from one angle or another work together to gain more power.

You can't be a powerless person who just goes charging forward and throws your dick on the table, metaphorically, right?

Because nobody cares.

But if you're the person who has power, then you're constantly working to protect it and stave off any challenge to it.

So I'm going to shift to Biden.

He's the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.

Not as much of a dick swinger, I think.

I think we can agree.

No, not as much.

Not as much.

Right, right.

Not as much.

But

I'm not a swear.

More of a swear.

No.

Oh, thank you, Scott.

No, I am my eyes.

Listen.

All right.

So one of the things was he's promised to have a vice presidential candidate who's a woman, which several people recently have said that was a mistake on his part.

He should have waited.

But

what do you think about that?

And

when you, and the accusations that emerge that he sexually assaulted a staffer in the 1990s,

how do you look at this race in terms of a topic you write about a lot, which is women's leadership?

Well,

I mean, I'd be lying if I said I was anything other than pretty depressed about it.

I have been a long time

critic of Joe Biden on feminist grounds for reasons really having to do with gender.

And

first, let me speak about preceding

his gaining the nomination.

I wrote a really long piece about a year ago about all of my reservations around Joe Biden.

I have a lot of feminist anxiety about Joe Biden and not just Joe Biden in particular, but the kind of politician that he is.

That That said, he's going to be the nominee running against Donald Trump.

And so what do we do with this situation?

Now,

he said he's going to nominate a woman.

Here's my wish.

Right?

Like, I think everybody should nominate a woman.

We have never elected a woman vice president or president in this country.

And that is an utter embarrassment.

It's a travesty.

It's ridiculous.

We should be furious about it every day, as well as all the other kinds of people we've never elected to executive office in this country or at representational rates.

Terrific.

But don't just say, I'm going to nominate.

Actually, nominate a woman, not pick a woman, a specific woman, because it makes a lot of difference whether the woman, like which woman, what are you communicating to us other than, hey, I've got a great idea.

Let me pick a member of a gender that's never been vice president before.

Which one?

Is it Amy Klobuchar?

Because that's a very different woman from, say, Barbara Lee.

You know, who

is it going to be Gretchen Whitmer or is it going to be Kamala Harris?

Is it going to be Stacey Abrams or is it going to be Elizabeth Warren?

I mean, I'm talking about all kinds of people who are being discussed for this job.

Those people are so different in terms of who they are,

what their priorities are, what their politics are, where they are ideologically and politically.

And to me, the frustrating thing about him saying, I'm going to pick a woman is like, well, how I feel about that woman is going to depend very much on actually which woman she is because women come in a variety of ways.

Yeah, wasn't that a mistake?

Wasn't it even, even if it's true, even if it's like they're overdue and it just made sense for a lot of reasons, wasn't it a mistake to say, I'm going to pick a woman?

Shouldn't he have picked somebody and talked about her character, her leadership, her competence, and not mention the fact that she was a woman?

It just, aren't we playing into the worst instincts around identity politics and sexism that we've been complaining about forever?

It's like, what if some guy had said, don't worry, I don't don't know who my VP is, but I know it's going to be a white dude.

How is this any different?

Well,

I resist inverse comparisons like that

because I just think the circumstances are so different.

Inverse comparisons.

You're swinging your dick right now.

You're swinging your dick.

I didn't even know what that meant, but go ahead.

It's very difficult.

Well, then, just the

if you did this with a white man, because the whole valent, right?

You know, it would be, yes,

it would be bad, but for a different set of reasons.

Because if you said,

I'm going to pick a white man, then it's like, oh, just like every white man who came before you, right?

And whereas if you say, I'm going to pick a woman, then you're signaling

an intention to disrupt.

He needs to do it.

We were talking about this last week, Kara, that we got a lot of reaction.

We said he just needs to pick.

All right.

Just get on with it and get him or her, ideally, her out there and start pushing back.

Start.

Yeah.

Start.

Anyways.

So who is your pick, Rebecca?

Who is your pick?

Speaking of women come in all flavors, and it matters who he picks.

Well, you know, there's a reason I'm not a political strategist.

So who is your pick?

Let me do two things.

We're going to finish out.

Who is your pick and who would you think he will pick?

Well, I don't have a clue who would pick.

I'll tell you, the women, the politicians

I would like to see

put in charge of this are, for example, I mean, I named a couple of them.

Barbara Lee, certainly,

you know,

who's a member of Congress from California, who has long been sort of the most progressive

member of the House of Representatives and is just an excellent politician.

I love Barbara Lee.

She would be among my top choices.

Elizabeth Warren, who I think would be

really perfect for this moment and this crisis,

you know, having the kind of experience and knowledge she does about economic recovery

and having,

you know, supervised elements of the 2008 recovery, I think Warren would be a great pick.

You know,

my politics tend to lean left.

So those are sort of

one of my Stacey Abrams, who I Stacey Abrams is an extraordinary extraordinary politician who's

absolutely driven to address

voter suppression, which of course is one of the sort of emergency situations as we move into 2020 and beyond.

And, you know, with a Republican Party and a court system that is every day working to disenfranchise people, this has been Stacey Abrams' passion well in advance of her gubernatorial run.

And I think Stacey would, and I think she's also just an excellent politician.

So Stacy is also one of my top choices, I think.

All right, Rebecca, everybody should read her piece, Rebecca Traister.

It's called Enough with the Dick Swinging.

We really appreciate you being on.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back next for Wins and Fails.

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All right, Scott, we're back.

What did you think of Rebecca Traister?

Isn't she on bag of donuts making a bag of donuts?

Bag of donuts.

Yeah, that's our new colleague, our new work colleague over at New York Magazine.

Yes, they're sassy over there.

They're sassy.

They're like us.

You know what I mean?

They're very sassy people.

Okay, wins and fails.

What are they for you?

My win is a,

this is more of a rant than it is win and fail.

I think that it's really interesting over the last 72 hours that this reopen movement has gained so much momentum.

And it's sort of supposedly South Carolina is on the verge of reopening.

Texas is going to be next.

And I work with or have worked with about a third of the 100 largest consumer organizations, CMOs.

That's what I used to do, was advise CMOs.

And they would always say the same thing, and that is, how do I get more authority?

This is an invented job.

I have no authority.

And I'm like, it's not about authority.

It's about credibility.

And you want to be the guy or the gal that shows up with so much data that there's a pull into every conversation.

And they constantly use you and your data as rationalization for their actions and their capital allocation.

And what we have here in my loss is what I call the new proxy war.

And proxy wars are effectively in the 20th century, a direct confrontation between Russia and the U.S.

might result in nuclear holocaust.

So we started backing belligerents, whether it was the North or the South, Vietnamese,

or different entities in Afghanistan.

And it ended up scarring our nation.

It ended up bankrupting Russia.

And these proxy wars can go on longer because you're not forced.

You can hide behind a car when you throw water balloons.

And they can go on longer and end up doing more damage.

And what we have now is a proxy war, unfortunately, with governors who are on the ground and don't want to reopen.

And they're using their belligerence, our CNN.

Literally, CNN is the walking governor talk show of people who don't want to reopen.

And now the belligerents on behalf of Trump are him organizing on Facebook these far-right organizations to

conduct these protests, which embarrass the governors.

And these proxy wars can not only end up going longer, they're dangerous and they're unproductive.

So we have just the worst type of proxy war taking place right now.

And what they should do, the win of the opportunity is a governor should say, Let's get together all 50 governors and we need to create two lines.

The first line is the line of structural damage as time on the X-axis, structural damage to the economy on the Y-axis, and figure out at what point does the structural long-term damage to the economy become just really bad?

Is it asymptotic?

Has it leveled off?

Does it decline

for some reason, 85 days?

Does it really start to descend and get really bad for the economy?

What does the line look like?

And then let's look at the line, examining the apex of the relapse.

And that is, if we go 10 days too early, if we open 10 days too early, does that mean in November the relapse is much worse than it could be now if you didn't?

You take those two lines, you meet with all 50 governors, you meet with the smartest people in the room around economics, around health and human services.

And then the federal government, let's go back to W.

If Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, who was maybe, you know, you maybe didn't like his politics, but he was a competent guy, and Hank Paulson and the director of health and human services Services all showed up to all these states and said, these are our lines.

What are your lines?

And then they worked together to say, all right, let's come up with a 10 or a 15-day window around reopening.

And we're going to give you some resources to help you reopen responsibly.

We could have a fantastic, we could have, you know, what America is supposed to be, that we come together and craft better solutions.

Instead, we have a proxy war.

And the governors, the call to the governors right now, what they should do is they should announce this meeting and they should invite the president.

And then the president should have the same meeting and invite the governors and then they are forced to no longer have a proxy war and come out in a press conference and say to America the American people we figured this out and this is how we're working together or not but instead they're having these bullshit proxy wars anyways my my fail is proxy you're operating with a different you're operating with a different personality at the top at the top it's not going to happen

there's no amount of power Trump will grab if he can get it and his people I just they see it as an opportunity but what if the governors got ahead of him and just said all 50 of us are meeting to talk about reopening the president's?

You're not going to get, there's not going to, that crazy from North Dakota.

You're not going to get together.

Okay, 47 of them.

Don't you think most of them?

My sense is the governors are coming together.

That's how you do it.

I do.

I do.

I do.

I sense they are.

I just think wrangling 50 people is hard.

And I think that that's

even in a crisis.

Zoom, even in a crisis.

So I do think that getting this together is really who takes the lead, which one's the lead.

You know, I don't like him.

I just,

I find it, it's a perfect situation for one person messing up everything.

It plays into the virus's hand.

Like my fail this week, which is Candace Owen's ridiculous tweet about going to Whole Foods, which is also my Whole Foods.

And she doesn't want, she got kicked out because she wasn't wearing a mask and having a fit about it.

And I was like, you didn't get your kombucha?

I'm sorry.

You know what I mean?

Apparently, she just does.

What it was amazing was the idea that just like you were saying with these people who want to get back to work, there's nobody who doesn't want to get back to work.

It's the idea of making other people sick.

And so her concern was not that she had to wear a mask.

Isn't this America?

It was that there's people in the store, including workers that would get sick if you are not wearing it.

And they're asking you to.

And the science is very like some of it works, some of it doesn't, but it certainly mitigates it to the positive going forward.

And the idea that you can't just do that for other people is just so symptomatic of this Republican Party, which is, I got mine, give me, you know, grab, you know, there's money at the trough.

Same thing with the grabbing of the the PPP.

It's the same thing.

It's the same concept.

So it's a real, it's a real, people, it's easy to make fun of Kenzoan because she's such a ridiculous ass clown.

But it's just,

you just have to, you have to, it's symptomatic of a larger issue, which is like, are you not thinking of other people?

And, you know, all of us have our selfishness, but it's astonishing that there's people who stop in their selfishness and think about the broader group.

So that would be my fail.

But I agree with you.

I think they should get together.

That would be nice.

I think the governors, I think they could force the president to the table.

My sense is the governors, and they're on both sides of the aisle, which is really nice to see.

The governor from Rhode Island, there's DeWine strikes me as incredibly reasonable.

I think there's a big opportunity for the governors here to basically shame the federal government into coming to the table and to craft a joint solution.

I think they've.

Yeah, for this, around testing, around this.

The fact seeing pictures of Korea and Germany going back to work was just so galling.

Was so not that they did it.

I'm proud for them to have done it, but they're out in cafes.

They're doing things.

It just was galling.

I feel like we live in a third world country.

If you're on the right, if you're on the right, and of course they won't use this argument, but the best argument they could have around reopening, but they won't do it because part of American exceptionalism is to somehow think that nothing out of Europe is any good.

The best argument for reopening is Sweden.

I don't know if you've seen what Sweden's done, but basically Sweden never really shut down.

But what they've done is they've done exceptional distancing distinctive of a shutdown.

And it looks as if, in terms of infections and deaths, that they've managed what they've managed better than anyone else, an ability to thread the needle between not a total shutdown that creates structural damage to the economy and still maintaining pretty decent public health, it looks like.

But the Republicans and the reopeners, I'll call them, don't ever want to acknowledge that we might get a good idea from Europe.

You know, we escape from Europe.

Anything they can do, we can do better.

But it's actually very interesting how Sweden has approached this.

Yeah, I mean, these mask deniers and COVID-its are just like COVID.

I hadn't heard that.

They really do not know how they want something and they don't want to do what it takes to make it happen.

It's just, I, I just, it's just an astonishing situation we find ourselves in in 2020.

All right.

Win.

Win, Scott.

Okay.

I bought my kids a Nerf gun and we've been shooting at each other like a crazy thing.

Oh, Nerf guns are fun.

They're fun.

I'm trying to think of a win, a win, a win, a win, a win.

Uh, no, there aren't any wins this week.

We're going to have no wins.

Any good TV?

Sorry, bro.

Any good TV in your life?

Homeland, The End of Homeland is so good.

Mandy Potinkin is so good.

And the guy, Ben Savage, played him.

The End of Homeland is.

Don't spoil it.

I'm on episode eight.

It's really good, huh?

So good.

I will see you later this week.

Try not to have too much fun in the meantime.

And don't forget, if there's a story in the news that 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 Drew Burroughs and Rebecca Castro.

If you like what you heard, please download or subscribe.

And we'll see you later in the week for a breakdown of all things tech and business.

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