Zoom stock surpasses airlines; MLB, NBA, Olympics are on pause — what happens to the media that covers them? And a Listener Mail about relief package guardrails.

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

Scott, we're still in quarantine, aren't we?

We are.

Yeah, we're sheltering at home, although

this is really a time.

It really does.

You really do develop a lot of empathy for other people.

You can develop empathy for people who are unfortunately struggling with loved ones who are sick.

You develop empathy for people who have to to stay at home and take care of kids.

And more than anything, I've developed a lot of empathy for those women who just get in a minivan and drive their entire families into a lake.

Oh, no, don't say that.

I understand them now.

I understand them now.

And they always do it in a minivan.

Every time I go to the bathroom,

I say minivan.

It's not happening.

Minivan.

No, I'm going to put a stop to this.

Listen to me.

Just because you have to spend a lot of time with your kids, you're not going to go right to that spot if you don't.

Oh, they're awful, Kara.

Have you met my kids?

they're awful i ordered a ping pong table today

that is what they have driven me to i am now going to own a ping pong table oh scott what is wrong with your children my kids are great my kids are great i know i know i know you got it all figured out

what's the problem they're very demanding they're very demanding they want attention they want to engage with me

yeah it's but you know what we're doing we're watching moments of engagement which my book agent jim levine taught me to do my youngest son and i have decided to watch the simpsons and we're on

31 seasons.

We're on season two.

If we're still watching season seven, I think that means about half the world's population has been wiped out.

Oh, Jesus.

God, Scott, Scott, Scott.

You're not in a good place then.

In other words, this is what's happening now.

You were in a very happy upbeat place last week.

You were very, people were tearing up about your different speeches that you were giving last week, but now you're in a darker place right now.

Yeah, the glass is half empty right now, Kara.

Anyways, how are you doing?

You're back in D.C.?

I am, indeed.

I'm sheltering in place in my home here.

And it's, you know, it's, I would like to leave.

I would like to leave.

I would like to have my life back.

But so would everybody else.

But there's, you know, with all these people dying, it's hard to complain.

You really can't.

I mean, you start to see, you know,

the reports from New York, which sound horrifying at the hospitals there.

It's sort of the future.

for the rest of us, I think, in a lot of ways.

And maybe not in quite that intensity, given the density of that city.

But there was a piece in the New York Times by a woman who worked for the New York Times magazine about taking care of her husband, who was quite sick, but not hospitalization sick.

And it sounded, it was a wonderful piece that I hate to compliment someone on sort of dystopian writing, but it was really disturbing.

And the last line was, you know, people are sort of still walking around touching doors and things like that.

And she's coming back with her husband from one of the doctor's appointments.

And she's like, we're like ghosts and we're like your future and you can't see us.

You know what I mean?

Like we're visiting from the future.

And so it was really, it's really getting difficult.

But there's a lot.

There's certainly a lot going on, including the stimulus bill.

And people are trying to get their hands around all the issues around testing, around ventilators, around all kinds of things that they need.

I never thought I'd know this much about ventilators in my life.

And I hope never to learn more about them again.

But let's get to the big stories trending as everything is changing so rapidly.

I wrote a column this week.

Zoom is worth more than United Delta American and JetBlue combined.

Is Zoom, the new superpower business.

In 2019, Zoom's market cap was $18.8 billion, which we all thought was too much, while airlines' 2019 market cap was at $78.1 billion.

Now, Zoom market cap is around $44 billion.

Airlines running a current market cap of $27 billion.

Zoom filed to go public last year.

I think its stock is up from $62 to, I think, $150, somewhere in that.

The first-time installations of the mobile app were up 213% last week compared to a a week, the week before that.

Zoom's mobile app is installed 3.7 times more than Skype's and 8.6 times more than Google Hangouts.

This is, I hate to say, but the greatest branding situation in history, I think, which is really interesting.

Scott, what do you think about this?

And should people buy Zoom stock?

This seems crazy.

I called it insane,

what was happening, but how do you look at it?

Well, so, and granted, we've gotten a lot of stock calls wrong in the last several weeks, but we did say Zoom was a decent offensive

play when

it was at about $100.

Look,

in terms of the valuation here,

you referenced that

it's now worth more than the entire U.S.

airline industry.

It's now this video conferencing app is now worth more than General Motors.

The PE ratio is 1800, which is

no, yeah, it's like 20, it's 20 times revenues.

On any traditional metric, it's crazily overvalued.

So the question is, what do you do if you're a shareholder, an employee, the firm itself?

I would argue that, and we never talk about employees, if you're an employee, what I've finally learned as I got older is when things are going really well, your tendency is to hold on.

I can just imagine everyone's holding on to their stock.

The employees there should be selling their vested shares like there's no tomorrow and hope you're wrong, but you should absolutely be getting some liquidity.

And what I tell every employee at a tech company that's doing well is until you have a million dollars of liquidity and you can ensure your kids will be able to

go to college, ensure that you'll be financially secure, always be on a path to sell and hope you're wrong.

The company itself should be doing a couple of things.

One, they should be doing a secondary and raising one to $3 billion in cash.

We're seeing now that when the tide goes out, you want to have cash wrapped around you.

And this is an opportunity, just as it was an opportunity that Tesla missed when it was at 900 bucks a share.

But this is absolutely an opportunity for Zoom to bulk up and build a gigantic cash war chest.

The The other thing they should be thinking about strategically is they should have every middle market investment bank searching for acquisitions for them right now, and they should be thinking about what other services they can think about getting into it offering.

I mean, I would love Zoom plugins where I could see CNN streaming or CNBC tickers streaming across the top.

I could see this company getting into some sort of video on demand, B2B video on demand.

They should be thinking about, they should assume, all right, we have a window here to get into other things.

And traditional business strategy, courtesy of CK Prahalla is stay focused.

When you have cheap stock like this and you have this currency, you absolutely want to start making a bunch of different bets on different things.

But in terms of an investor, a shareholder, you know, I would, I would be very careful here because even if this thing normalizes, even if it lives up, it's so priced to perfection.

It's not even priced to perfection.

It's priced to mania.

And those are difficult stocks because if the stock got cut in half, it would still look expensive by traditional metrics.

Right.

It was expensive back in 62.

It was expensive.

It's really, I mean, I think it was $170 million in revenue in one of the quarters.

It was very small.

And so, you know, obviously that's going to go up two things.

They've got to keep it.

tight in terms of delivering on the promise of what they're doing because these other competitors, it's really interesting that it's more popular than Skype or Google Hangouts, which are very good and very robust services and have been around forever, which I found interesting.

So it's interesting why people pick Zoom versus those, because they're very similar.

And those are from Microsoft, Skype, and Google Hangouts from obviously Alphabet, that they're doing, the brand is doing so much better.

And that's an interesting, kind of unusual.

trend I find.

And then secondly, just this, the numbers just don't add up.

And even if they execute perfectly, like last week, I was doing a Zoom thing with Jessica Lesson at the information about women in tech.

And we got Zoom bombed, which which was annoying.

I heard about this.

Describe that.

Describe exactly what happened.

I was talking exactly.

Describe

graphic detail what happened.

First of all, if you're going to bother me, there is no such thing as bad porn.

There's just porn that doesn't work for you.

I don't use as much porn as you, Scott Galloway, I'm guessing, by a factor of 103.

But I have to say,

a guy had

a hard time.

There's a guy that had an entire arm up someone's ass.

That's really one of them that I recall.

A unique genre.

It was beyond that.

No, I'm not moving down this road.

That's as far down this road as I'm going as.

REM, U2, and Fisting Porn.

What a great decade.

What a great decade.

Listen to me.

That's enough.

That's enough.

Sorry.

Sorry.

But it was like,

how did that happen?

And if there's all these kids using it, I just was thinking if there's these public Zooms, this is, and it's happened all over, people have all at the New York Times wrote a story about it.

It's called Zoom bombing.

So that was one.

It's like execution.

This stuff has to work while people are using it.

And I think it has, for the most part, kept up.

And people are sort of

comfortable with a little bit of glitchiness right now because they figure it's overwhelmed.

But the numbers, you know, it'll be interesting to see if

two things.

One, if people will continue to do more at-home working after this is over.

And of course, this company stands to benefit.

And if they don't, what happens to what they're doing?

And I think you're right.

This is the time to make hay.

I hate to say that about someone, a company,

they have to make hay while the coronavirus goes on.

But hold on.

Let's be in the moment.

First off, I get about 11 emails a day from Jessica Lesson at the information, even though I'm not a subscriber and I will.

It seems like every day it's a new offer and a new opportunity to subscribe.

And they do a great job of teasing you.

And I think my, I get the sense.

Well, I know.

I'm getting there.

I'm getting there.

My God.

Anyway, so I get an email saying that join us for a podcast or whatever it is, live webinar with Kara Swisher to talk about women in tech or some such.

And my first emotion is, oh, it's a little bit of jealousy.

Like, why don't they invite the dog?

Okay, fine, whatever.

I'm happy for it.

Obviously, from the last.

And then I get a follow-up email, like email 14 the next day from Jessica saying, you know, and the assholes who who zoom porn or zoom bombed and inserted porn into my discussion with Kara, what do you think my emotion was right there?

You were thrilled.

Joy.

Pure joy.

Oh my God.

That was literally one of the best things that happened to me this week, hearing that your, your webinar with Jessica Lesson on women in tech was porn bombed.

I mean, that is wonderful.

Life, life is worth living.

Schadenfreude is you.

Life is worth living.

Your nickname should be Schadenfreude.

Anyway, Gestell.

Gestell, like, what do they have?

They say they have to like make it work, but I do think this is going.

I mean, four weeks, five weeks when people aren't using this as much, or whenever this sort of

goes down, and I think there'll be a resurgence, but I don't know if people will return to stay in the work at home mode as much as people think.

You know, I think people are fine with it.

I don't think everybody likes it.

And they prefer to be at the office.

I still think that's going to be a tough one to shake, even though there's all these predictions of that case.

I think people are not, do not like it, do not like being on these things.

I think my kids really hate it.

They don't like doing school on on it.

So I don't know.

We'll see.

But in the bigger picture, big tech, I think my column is that is going to come out just fine.

They have oodles of cash.

They've got, they're going to shake out, as you said, the herd is going to be culled of their rivals.

And anybody, and then when this moves on, they're going to be in a position to take advantage of it.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine they don't come out stronger.

And I also think that if there's a winner here, and I don't want to say there's a winner, but of

the big tech firms, I think Amazon's reputation is going to come out of this the most burnished.

And I have a lot of friends at Amazon.

I have a lot of former students.

The largest recruiter out of my class is Amazon.

And

I'm a critic of Amazon, specifically Jeff Bezos, and believe that they need to be broken up for the health of the economy as any company that gets this powerful

should be broken up.

But there's just no getting around it.

Amazon employees have really risen to this occasion.

And whether it's the folks

in the trucks delivering, the people in the the warehouses, the decision-making they've made around moving to essentials to ensure their supply chain remains robust around key items.

I think Amazon has shown really a lot of grit and fortitude.

And the employees there and the management there should be recognized for the risks they're taking.

And it's important that people get stuff.

And I think they've shown a lot of leadership here.

I think right now, if people said, well, who do we put in charge of this global pandemic?

People would say,

Dr.

Fauci sitting on top of Amazon would be a pretty good cocktail.

They're going to come out of this stronger than ever.

You know, there are stories, of course, of people being infected in the warehouses and things like that.

And you're right, the risk is among delivery people.

What's amazing is these delivery people who do any of the delivery people who are doing all these kind of things or people in restaurants and hardware stores and things like that.

do not get enough, you know, except the people, obviously healthcare workers on the front line are the most heroic here, but they it definitely is interesting like to be able to keep working.

And especially with some of these people, the shitty pay they get from these companies.

I think Amazon got to step up and start paying a lot of these delivery people and people in the stores more in these warehouses more

for what they do.

I just, I've always thought they do take, I think all these companies take advantage of these people's

people's livelihoods.

And now with when there's going to be less employment, they're going to get a better deal.

Like their numbers are good.

Same thing with Uber.

Everybody else is going to get a better deal now with people desperate to make some money.

You know, despite the fact we're getting this massive stimulus.

But let's go over to the live sports industry.

It's at an unprecedented crossroads.

This is something that is so analog with the cancellations and postponements.

It's also leaving a media that covers them reeling in the wake.

I don't know what Bill Simmons is going to do all day.

Thursday was Major League Baseball's opening day, which of course was not happening.

And earlier this week, the 2020 Summer Olympics were postponed.

The NBA season was canceled.

NASCAR was postponed.

March Madness was canceled.

Back to the Olympics.

It's the first time in modern Olympic history the games will be postponed.

And I think probably to 2021, they were talking about NBC and Discovery, who paid more than $1 billion to show the 2020 Games, left a schedule, thrown into chaos, really.

NBC Universal was counting Olympics to promote and subscriptions to Peacock, the company's direct-to-consumer streaming service that is scheduled to launch in July, which is probably not launching in July.

Meanwhile, the NFL plans to stick with its April schedule for this year's draft, despite conflict on how to proceed between team general managers and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

This is a big, big area of business,

both analog and from an advertising point of view, and

everywhere.

This reaches everywhere.

Yeah, it's a huge industry.

And

the thing that's just new about all of this, or that we didn't model out, is that a recession, revenues go down 40%, but you can reduce costs 20%.

So you lose you know, 200 million on a billion in business.

Certain businesses have just gone from, you know,

running at full capacity to zero.

Right.

And no one, the NHL, the Premier League, no one modeled for this.

And so you're seeing, I mean, there's really triage right now in some of these businesses.

And if you look at how it ripples through the supply chain, whether it's

StubHub or Live Nation or the vendors or the bonds that back the facilities, the lease-back bonds that back the venues.

I mean, it's just the people who have the concession contracts, the people who work in the parking to go from full capacity to zero just overnight.

And then what do you do in terms of scheduling?

I'm not a sports fan, so I literally haven't noticed it.

But when we did one of those family meetings and we decided, I read somewhere you're supposed to communicate openly with your kids about what's going on.

And they just sort of nodded their heads.

They didn't really get it.

You know, they wanted, they got a little scared when I said, we have to be, we can't go see Bob Shen Jaja because they're more vulnerable.

And they wanted to know what I meant by the word vulnerable.

But, and then I told them that every live events are being canceled.

And about two minutes later, my son said, does the Premier League games, are they being canceled?

And I said, most likely.

And that's when he lost it and began to cry.

It's like, don't take away his Byron Munich versus FC Barcelona game.

Sports matter.

They give people, you know, it's a collective shared experience getting together.

But that industry, it'll be very interesting to see.

I was, there's a company called Fivo that is a startup that does social.

It's a, it's a means of creating social groups where you say, all right, Karen and I, you and I want to go to the, I don't know, the wizards game.

And we announce it on our social networks and we get a group of people to buy tickets and groups so we can sit together.

It's a cute idea.

I mean, imagine that social app for live events.

Imagine that business right now.

I know, but I mean, it's, it's beyond that.

I mean, just think about,

you know, the ringer, Espination, Fox Zones, Leecher Report, Barstool Sports, ESPN.

I mean, you know,

Bill Simmons was smart for having sold before.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my God.

Can you imagine?

No, he's, I can't.

He's lucky him.

He's the second luckiest guy in the world.

The luckiest guy in the world is this kid, Richard Phallip.

Him and his wife are an inspiration.

He was a student of mine.

And literally, I love this guy.

He's a classic entrepreneur.

He started buying $5,000 worth of cotton and and then sending it to Israel and milling it and bringing over to Brooklyn and then selling sheets and bedding packages.

And it's called Brooklyn.

And he sold it clothes three weeks ago on selling his company.

Right.

I mean, if you look at Time Warner, it looks like if,

I mean, it's really knowing when to sell is definitely, it's probably more luck than an art, but I'll tell you, it's interesting to look at it until Twitter getting its money, the billion dollars from

their group.

100%.

Yeah.

Their stock's off 20 or 30 percent, and they wouldn't have got and not only that, quite frankly, this is probably saved Jack Dorsey.

No one's really worried about activism right now.

Activism is sort of a luxury we don't have right now.

But also, if you look at uh, Disney was the best performing media stock of the last 10 years, other than big tech, I think it was up 700%.

But now that it's come down, it's up 500%.

And Time Warner, having sold at the peak two years ago, was up 600%.

So now, actually, Time Warner is the best performing media stock because they sold.

Yeah, which is interesting.

So what do you do?

What do you just like write off a year?

You write off a year, right?

It'll come back, obviously.

I think people still will want, once it starts up again, they'll want to pay attention.

But I don't think that's going to suddenly we're not going to go, oh, we don't need sports.

But like, if you're NBC Universal and Peacock, how do you get people watching it?

If you're, how do you, how do you make up for what's happened?

Well, a lot of these companies just won't.

I mean, they just won't.

It's not, it's not like people say, okay,

I haven't eaten a mcdonald's in all of april i'm gonna eat twice as many burgers in may some of this is just lost demand that just real true demand destruction the broader question is a crisis is a terrible thing to to waste and on all the calls i'm on we spend the first half of the probably two-thirds of the call talking about how do we triage and just cut costs and this is this is a difficult time because you're going to see in the unemployment numbers i believe our unemployment or job numbers just came up they're up from 200 000 to 3.5 million Yeah.

So it's striking, but I, you know, my viewpoint is you can't protect jobs, you can protect people.

And what I'm telling entrepreneurs and the companies that I work with is that you got to be fairly Darwinian and harsh around job cuts.

But in it for doing that, what you should do is compensate and try and provide as much severance as possible.

But every company, and this is harsh, especially with small companies, I think you have to go over every expense line and say,

we either got to cut it or negotiate it right now.

But coming out of this,

I do think there's a lot of silver linings kind of post-Corona.

You're going to see a lot of great businesses started kind of as we come out of this because everything will be less expensive.

People will be more open to innovation.

But it's really an opportunity for larger companies to rethink their business.

And that is, if we had a clean sheet here,

how would we change the way we go to market?

What cost would we keep?

Where would we invest?

What bigger bets would we make?

How do we right-size?

What is the right size of our labor force?

Looking at their compensation strategies.

It is, it, you know,

I was talking about this with several CEOs.

In fact, I interviewed Stuart Butterfield from Slack, and he said that's exactly what they're doing, even though they're doing rather well during this time things are up.

He's like, I can now look at everything.

I'm spending a lot of time within the cost structure of our company and what we're doing and what we're and getting rid of stuff.

You know, when you sort of stuff we're on the bubble, they're not on the bubble anymore.

They're off the bubble.

They're off.

They're gone.

And so I think it does make, and you can say, ah, coronavirus, I'm going to to get rid of that you know you haven't you got cloud cover you got cloud cover to make big decisions take a hit to earnings because most it's unfortunate most big decisions and big investments require a hit to earnings whether it's it's it's doing away with your dividend or spending stuff but it gives you the cloud cover to make some big bold cuts two things where does this advertising money go to what is it just sitting there quietly like holding their powder what where does the advertising money does it go somewhere else does uh you know because several people told me companies like quibby and netflix are still spending because they're

they want to have stuff.

Where does the advertising money go to?

Where does the media money go to?

Well,

it depends what we're talking about.

In the case of Netflix and Quibi that have access to incredibly cheap capital, they keep spending because they're on the verge of launch and they don't suffer from an absence of capital.

The steady state companies typically, the money goes back to, they just pull back because they go into survival mode.

But it's an interesting question because if you look at periods when there's there's been a dramatic reshuffling in market share amongst players in a sector, it's typically because of one of two things.

The first is extreme product innovation, where Tide comes out with Tide Pods or Pepsi comes up with Bubbly, and there's an incredible,

they capture lightning in a bottle and they just come in and grab share.

The other time you see a dramatic shift in share is in a period of chaos, one company kind of has the capital and the leadership to make a huge, continue making big investments in marketing and supporting their brand.

So a seminal moment in Dryers, and this is sort of a weird CPG history, was in the recession in 91.

Unilever and all the other ice cream companies pulled back on marketing and dryers decided to increase their marketing spend and they grabbed a dramatic amount of share.

So the bottom line is just as it's a great time to have cash right now and start thinking about offense in terms of the stocks you buy in the market.

It's a great time to be a company that has the resources to say, how could we play offense?

And as everyone else is retreating, can we decide to maintain our marketing or rethink our marketing or

make some big bets?

But the companies that are in triage right now, it's not like they're just saving their marketing money and they're going to double their investments in advertising and radio.

A lot of that money probably does not come back.

Does not come back.

Yes, I agree with you.

I think it just starts again.

And you're right.

They start to think really hard.

But very quickly before we go to break, WeWork is at it again while everyone else is shuddering.

We work paying people to come into the office.

No one's going into into co-working offices.

We work.

What is, I mean, this is the talk about putting the fork in this company.

Like, wow, wow, wow.

This is a hit that is.

The hits keep on coming, as they say.

We work website said only two of its co-working offices in North America were closed and none were closed.

In Europe, we work as allowed employees who normally staff locations to work from home.

But this week, it started to entice them with $100 a day bonuses.

I mean, I don't know what to say.

Yeah.

Turning up the shutter in place.

I mean, DC just had a shutter in place, and most of the governors are ignoring Trump's April surprise, you know, thing, whatever, the resurrection of the United States.

What an incredibly inappropriate way to compare it to.

But,

Scott, go ahead.

Well, we were,

think about the good old days when the spectacle or the shit show that was the collision of hubris,

third-base venture capitalists, people who mistake their good luck for talent and the charismatic 30-something Jesus-like figure who raised $7 billion or billions of dollars out of the Middle East only to take it in the street and burn it.

It all seems very quaint now, right?

The whole world has much bigger fish to fry.

But if you've been following the story, we made this prediction last year that WeWork, even after the bailout, was eventually going to be a bankruptcy, that they were just kicking the can down the road.

And I don't know if you noticed this, but SoftBank quietly decided to reneg on their deal and it cite extraordinary force to majeure.

circumstances and they're not going through with the buyback of employee and investor shares they had agreed to.

And they're trying to use this as cloud cover.

But again, this company, it's done.

They brought in a new CEO, very intelligent guy.

My guess is they guaranteed him 25 or 50 million bucks, regardless of what happens here.

But this company is going to be one of those companies that gets swept off the decks here.

SoftBank will have the opportunity to cast it as they can now say face.

Oh, it was Corona.

This was one of the many companies taken down by Corona.

But WeWork as we know it is now the walking debt.

And that is they're going to, I mean, think about,

think about mismatch durations.

You buy long, you buy 10-year leases,

but their customers on most of them on 24 hours notice can stop renting their space.

And who the hell is going to go into a WeWork right now?

I know.

It seems very dirty.

It just is.

So you're going to see announcements.

I would bet in the next 30 days from WeWork that they're going to start either filing individual property bankruptcies based on how these things are set up.

But that whole space, for obvious reasons, is going to get absolutely wrecked.

But

is it 100% going to be

that way?

Is it going to absolutely have to have no places like that?

Because the people like working at those places or just the business is gone.

No, the concept works and it'll come back.

It'll just be right-sized.

Most of the equity will be wiped out.

A lot of the spaces will be given back.

There'll be chapter 11s across.

So the way hotels are usually set up is they're set up in separate LLCs that you can actually declare bankruptcy

on one property without taking the whole company down.

It's not guaranteed by the whole company.

And I would imagine that WeWork probably did the same thing, but WeWork as a concept.

I mean, they're going to go from 500 locations, I would bet, to 100 to 200.

There's going to be some sort of reorg here.

I got to imagine the revenues have gone to zero.

SoftBank has already said, basically said, all right, we're out.

Going back on this deal, which they announced a week or two weeks ago, is basically said, okay,

we're peace out, we're done.

And SoftBank, to their credit, is selling some assets, including, I believe, shares in Alibaba.

They're showing up their balance sheet and such that they can begin to play offense.

And the day they announced, they were increasing their liquidity and kind of

culling back to the core.

The stock, I think, was up 14% that day.

So SoftBank, which is in my view, a well-run company,

is probably going to try and, I don't want to say get out of the business of the Vision Fund, but this gives them, again, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

This gives them the cloud cover to make some hard decisions that would have been a loss of face if they had closed WeWork down a few weeks ago.

So they can just do that.

They could just say goodbye, goodbye out of it.

That's right.

Peace out.

Helicopter off of the MS.

The most unlucky company this year, I would say WeWork, correct?

I think that's.

Oh, no, those are self-inflicted wounds.

They're not unlucky.

Right.

There's a lot of companies that are, that are just incredibly, you know, I don't know.

Some people, some good companies that were measured and smart.

I mean, you know,

every retailer I've talked to, every retailer I've talked to has stopped paying rent.

Yeah.

And that's today, April, I mean, next week, April 1st, which I think is coming around.

All right.

When we get back, we're going to have listener mail hold, please, and we'll be back.

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Okay, Scott, we're back on pivot.

Let's dig into a listener mail question.

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

You, you've got mail.

Hi, Scott and Kara.

Given the fact that Congress just passed a relief package to help with the economic fallout from the COVID pandemic, what are some legal mechanisms which should be put in place to prevent corporate opportunism?

Examples include a stipulation of no executive bonuses for a certain number of years, requirement to appoint an employee rep on the board, and a prohibition on stock buybacks.

Already I've I seen at least one story of a CEO attempting to secure corporate benefit by using employees as leverage.

I'm wondering if it also could be realistic to implement some of these mechanisms going forward to prevent further wealth transfer from the bottom to the top.

Thanks.

Keep doing what you do, Mike.

Mike, I'm sorry to tell you, Mike.

Yeah, I think it's already done, correct?

I mean, I haven't gotten into the bill, but it looks like they've gotten this Inspector General and Oversight Committee.

The Trumps can't benefit, although somehow they will.

Somehow they'll get get something in there.

And there's the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee to oversee the loans.

But this looks pretty happy towards corporations.

This is a bailout, right?

I mean,

although Americans will be getting checks, the amount of money is going largely to businesses.

Yeah, I actually think this is pretty good legislation.

It was, A, it was done quickly and it was bipartisan, which is something we haven't seen a lot of.

I think people want their governments in situations like this to intervene.

Every country has done something sort sort of similar.

It does put cash in most people's pocket.

Unfortunately, if you don't have a bank account on file, it could take up to four months.

It's like, you know, government has to rear its bureaucratic head and there's a lot of people who aren't going to get money for a while.

And the notion is not to, it's kind of strange this time.

We're not encouraging people to seek work.

We're encouraging people, we're encouraging companies to keep jobs.

So the idea is that there's aid to small business as long as you don't furlough people.

I do think there's some interesting interesting things in here, the fact that the Trumps can't benefit.

Can you think about it?

But it's not just the Trumps.

It's the Congress heads of

any elected and their children.

Yeah.

And their children.

Which I think is really good.

And spouses.

And the other thing that was shocking, I was thinking the other day, I work at a venture-backed company.

I'm like, would it be ethical for us to take advantage of these small business stipulations?

And there is something in the bill that says that venture-backed companies can't take advantage of it, which I think is the right thing to do.

I think it makes sense that it's income adjusted, that if I think if you make over $90,000 a year, you're not going to get a check, which is absolutely the right thing to do.

So I actually think this is given the situation that we're in, given the speed with which they acted, given the size of it, I think it was bold.

It feels to me like bold, smart legislation.

I think the government's doing what it was supposed to do.

What's interesting is focusing on business.

Obviously, you want to focus on businesses to keep people working, like not to lay people off.

And I think that's the idea is, as we were just talking about, making, hey, while the coronavirus rages is something that we just said people should do.

But in this case,

businesses could sort of fix problems, right?

You can use them as cover.

And that's the danger of this, they'll be like, well, you know, I was going to do that anyway, or I was going to do that.

And so I think that's really what it is.

I do think that there should have been

more focused on workers more than anything else and giving relief.

But, you know, they're going to do that.

But what I think is interesting here is the government, you know, instead of doing loans, there was one Congress senator I never agree with, Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, because it was, he was like, these should be loans and not bailouts, essentially.

You know, they're grants is what they are.

And I kind of am in that camp.

Like, I think it worked in the last time, but this may be an unprecedented situation that we can't do that.

But, but I agree with you.

They did it very quickly.

And except for the wrangling that went back and forth, it was relatively calm.

There was just a little bit of.

insulting going back and forth, just a tiny bit.

And even in the insulting, when the Republicans tried to make hay out of this Kennedy Center grant, Trump was like, oh, I like the Kennedy Center, for goodness sake.

Let's not focus on that.

And I was like, a moment of clarity from Donald Trump, which was amazing.

So I agree with you that it was overall, but it does still feel like bailout versus in more creative ways.

But I don't think they have time.

They had to, the Wall Street had to hear this.

And so did the global financial and credit markets.

Yeah, it's in to our listener's question, there's sort of short term.

You don't want perfect to be the enemy of good.

And in these types of environments, the key here is speed.

And you'd rather have legislation that is 60 or 80 percent of what you want ideally, but done early and quickly, because there are a lot of people that it's a matter of days before they're kind of living in their car or taking unnecessary risks or really feeling tremendous amount of stress, or companies deciding to lay off 3,000 people instead of 1,000 because they're worried.

I mean, the airlines just could have gone away in the next four to six weeks.

So

you'd rather, I think you have to be a little bit ready-fire aim here.

Some of the things she's talking about about inequality and wealth, it's very hard to restrict stock buybacks because they're a form of dividends.

It's hard to get, when the government gets involved in setting compensation limits, I think that's dangerous.

I'm on the board of a company, and obviously we're thinking about, okay, management, management and the board need to show some grit here and take an executive cut in compensation.

But at the same time, if none of your executive team is going to make any money in terms of options, are you going to potentially lose them to other people when the markets come back?

So

you end up with some inefficiencies.

You end up with some injustice.

And if you're seeking justice, you're not going to find it in the corporate world.

But in general, I think it's very dangerous.

Most attempts at goodwill and equity through legislation around compensation, around

forms of capital structure, end up failing.

you'd rather put up, let the New York Times go after some people and talk about the anomalies and talk about the insurance

agreed.

They will.

If they do anything egregious, I think they'll get caught for one.

And there was a really good story, I think it was in the Washington Post, about most of the people that are getting bailouts are people who've acted badly over the past couple of years in terms of employees and everything else.

So anyway, so it's an interesting time.

I mean, I think they will get caught if they misbehave for sure.

And I think that's really, this just, you're waiting for that story a year from now of someone who did that.

And then the second part is that they, they really,

you know, they really, a lot of these air, like the airline industry, all kinds of industries have been doing things that benefits the top echelons, and they are getting a break here.

But I do think this is an unusual situation where we just have to just suck it up and say, yeah, they acted badly and we're going to still have to save them.

You know, we're going to have to like pull the shitty person into the lifeboat.

They just have to be.

They have to be pulled into the lifeboat.

One thing he referenced, it's sort of interesting.

I don't know if we're going to think this way, but in Germany, which really never had a recession, which still has a, they have inequality, but not to the same extent we do.

It's mandated there that somewhere between a third and half of the directors are represented by employees.

I think that's a big, great idea.

I've always thought that.

I'm just perplexed why that doesn't happen in this country more.

Yeah, it would definitely shift power.

It would be what it, what that effectively does at the end of the day, it's a transfer from shareholders to employees.

It's a transfer of wealth from one stakeholder to the other.

In the U.S., we have always opted for shareholders.

It's kind of, it goes shareholders first.

Well, actually, it goes consumer first, then shareholders, then employees in terms of the pecking order.

And I think people are starting to rethink that balance that just because you can pay your people minimum wage doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Right.

So I think we're going to rethink uh you know there's going to be so many interesting things we rethink coming out of this it look at the you know collective versus capitalism can you have is is a society such as ours really set up to handle such such as this global cross-border cooperation we're just we're just going to look at a lot we're going to look at a lot of things if you think about i i did a interview yesterday with professor jonathan heidt who's sort of my my role model as an academic and he was talking about he said that and i didn't know this that pestilence and plagues and pathogens have killed multiple more people than wars or violence.

And if you think, well, if a government's job and a liberal democracy, meaning institutions are really here as management and they're meant to allocate capital effectively, what that means is that technically speaking, the CDC should have a $580 billion budget and the Defense Department should have a $3 billion budget.

And I think you're going to see

that.

Yeah, you're going to see a reshifting.

You're going to see a reshifting, I would think, in budgets.

You got to think the CDC and there'll be something like Interpol, a global CDC that will probably be better funded.

And it's also going to make, I think it's going to make us realize that a democracy demo means people, that it's dangerous.

It's got, people, if you ask people, they will always vote for in the short term, more benefits to me, my group, and lower taxes.

But if you defund the institutions that are responsible for climate change,

upgrading our decaying infrastructure.

I'm not with you on this one, Scott.

I think people are like, we're like

the grasshopper you know we're just going to play our little music when this goes on and get end up right back in the same place i just don't

i'm actually you're usually the optimistic one i think this could be the mother of all vaccines where uh uh hopefully this is my hopeful diatribe and that is hopefully we learn from this we we realize that in the u.s believing you're going to be rich and will never get sick is not perhaps the best way to live your life that global cooperation is important that being rich doesn't immunize you against things that are more important than money, and that this generation coming up that was subject to social media and incredible indulgence from their parents might actually take from this the cooperation and comity of man is more important.

I'm hoping we're so you are a very hopeful man.

I don't think that at all.

I think it's the opposite.

I think people get worse.

I think it's, I think, you know, some of the things, and again, it's some of them just the media coverage.

And for example, what's happening in New York right now, I think a lot of people are like, oh, it's New York, like whatever.

What I think they should do, which is interesting,

because they do show these things.

Europe, you saw the bodies, you saw the numbers, you saw these refrigerators.

Like there was a piece on the Times of showing a refrigerated truck where they're going to put bodies in these places.

And it was a really incredible video with a doctor there who just brought her camera.

And it was like, fuck this, because the people who I'm working with are saying everything's fine and it's not fine.

And I'm going to show you why it's not fine.

I think we have to show.

I agree.

Show it.

I think it's really, we are very, we're very antiseptic in this country in terms of showing death.

And this has got to be shown.

Like, what's going to happen in New York?

And then it'll iterate around large cities.

To your point, one of the things that got us out of Vietnam was the first time photojournalists were allowed onto the front lines censored.

And you know what?

We decided to do away with that shit in Iraq.

Bush said, no, we're going to censor the imagery coming out of.

So we didn't see what 550,000 Iraqi citizens dead looked like.

And I agree with you.

I think maybe just having some live cams in the emergency admittance rooms in New York and in Milan or wherever it is, northern Italy, might give people a certain wake-up call around the severity here.

But I do think this might be going back to the moment of optimism, the mother of all vaccinations, that this might, I think

I'm hoping that we come back from this stronger and more thoughtful about the importance of institutions and global cooperation.

Anyways, that's my hope.

I would hope so.

And we're, of course, next week, on Monday, we're going to talk about

corona divorce and corona babies because we're having Esther Perel on to talk about relationships.

I think relationships will be an interesting thing, just what you're talking about.

We're going to take one more quick break.

We'll be back for your prediction, Scott, because we need a prediction, Mr.

Hopeful, when we get back.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

How are recent moves by the White House from the attempted removal of a Federal Reserve governor to the government's equity stake in Intel impacting the U.S.

economy and institutions?

In the context of a Supreme Court that has vastly expanded presidential powers, that should alarm everybody.

I'm Preet Barara, and this week, Nobel Prize-winning economist Darren Asimoglu joins me on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet, to discuss how institutional strength affects prosperity for individuals and society as a whole.

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We're back, Scott.

What can you predict for us?

What is in your official ball?

We usually end with a prediction, right?

No, no, that's on Monday.

We're going to do it today as predictions.

Oh, I have a win and fail, though, and a prediction.

Can I do all of them?

Quickly.

Okay, okay.

Yes, go ahead.

Go right at it.

So, my fail is this back-to-work movement being sponsored by the president and Fox.

And this Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick trying to position this as seniors

that seniors are caring.

That if you want to express love for your children and your grandchildren, you should go back to work because it's more important.

The risk to your health is compensated by ensuring that

Johnny and Jenny have a 401k.

I just find that so insane.

He can go right ahead and die.

That's

my mother.

I read it to my mother, who's Miss Fox News still, and she's like, I'm not dying.

What an idiot.

He's crazy.

Like, that's not going to put a stress on us.

So dad's dying,

but my Zoom stock is up.

Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck said the same thing.

And you know what?

It's not just them.

I have a lot of friends who are who are business owners and private equity guys saying that we should think about certain people getting back to work sooner if if you had dracula come into town and start killing people and hopefully and this hasn't even happened yet we still haven't flattened the curve but let's assume we flattened the curve let's assume we injured dracula and you saw him leaving town you wouldn't just say okay let's wait till he gets back you'd hunt his You'd hunt his ass down and put a stake through his heart.

So we absolutely, this, the notion that some people should go back to work under the auspices of some bullshit, protective, paternal notion of the economic well-being of our grandkids.

You know what our kids want?

They want us to be alive.

They don't, I mean, that is just so insane.

And I would say that.

He's a big Trump supporter.

And even the governor of Texas, this guy's the lieutenant governor, is sort of backing away from killing.

Oh, my God.

Also,

they're killing off their constituents, which is amazing.

This is like the Fox News group.

But, you know,

this was the new message after Fox has, let me just say, Fox News really needs to think hard about what its culpability in this whole thing.

And now they're double, now they sort of got okay for five minutes, just like the president, and now they're moving into this ridiculous narrative.

It's just, I, I, you know, Tucker Carlson for five seconds was, was decent.

Um, and so now he's not, he's indecent in this regard, bringing this guy on.

It was on the Tucker Carlson show.

So I need a prediction from you, Scott.

Well, I'm sorry, I'm not done.

I'm not done.

All right, Bobby, keep going.

Keep going.

Keep going.

What a shocker Kara's disappointed in Fox News.

Oh, come on.

But think about this.

Think about this, right?

Let's assume we flatten the curve and keep socially distancing.

If this thing comes back, it goes from being a pandemic to a plague.

Think about most of us have had cancer in our lives, and it's meaningful when someone gets cancer.

What's profound is when it recurs.

That's when you go, okay, we got to really start thinking about what this means.

And if this thing goes away and comes back because

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick convinces some old people, the most vulnerable amongst our population, to go back to work.

That could go from a pandemic to a plague.

That could go from tragic to absolutely devastating on

a global level.

I just think that is the height of recklessness and irresponsibility.

Anyway, Dan Patrick, you certainly can die for the rest of us, Dan.

You know what I said?

Dan Patrick, and I make this offer now, just such you can get in touch with the risk-adjusted risks you are asking people to take here.

Go on a ventilator for an hour and just check out how much fun that that is and whether you think this is worth the risk.

But anyways, that's a bit incendiary.

My win is the Netflix series.

This is a hard segue.

My win is the Netflix series Tiger King.

Have you seen this thing?

No.

Oh my God.

It's a, it's genius.

It's this guy.

He is a gay polygamist who carries a gun and has one of these big cat zoos.

This guy is living his best life.

Quick fun fact, there are more big cats in captivity in in the U.S.

than there are in the wild.

It's a very strange segment of people.

Also, people that own monkeys are weird, but people that own big cats are mean.

I'm learning that now.

But it's on Netflix.

It's this fantastic series about just how strange America is.

Anyways, that's my win, Tiger King on Netflix.

My loses is back to work.

You want a prediction, right?

Yes, I want a prediction.

Okay, a prediction.

So.

What companies are going to give me some companies?

I'll go bigger than that.

You said Carnival before.

I'm thinking maybe maybe you're wrong on that i i'll go bigger than that i'm going meta here the markets never form a v if you look at all economic crises in the past we usually bounce across the bottom go up a little and then retest the retest the lows and then about three to five months later typically you have the market revert to its 20-week average that happened in 08 it happened in the 70s it happened in the great depression

this two-day run we've had for the first time since February, we've had two back-to-back upsessions.

This is a head fake, Kara.

We're going to test new lows.

It just feels

when you start to see some of the footage that's about to come from the surge, unfortunately, and some of the employment numbers and the recognition that government stimulus can only do so much.

I think this is, I think the markets are going to test new lows here.

This is a head fake.

We don't have a V here.

We're going to have something bounce along the bottom and then go down again, and then the markets will begin to recover.

So anyways, and it's a terrible, I don't like this prediction, but I think we're going to test new lows in the Dow and the SP over the next new lows.

Over the next 15 to 13 years.

Okay.

Wow, that's a friggin' bummer after a little hopeful thing.

Anyway, before we end the show,

I'm just, you know what?

I'm not going to watch it.

I'm just going to wait.

20 years from now, I'll look again.

That's what I'm going to do when I need to actually retire.

I'm going to just look in 20 years.

That's my plan.

That's my pandemic plan.

It's like, hopefully, we'll be better in 20 years when I need to sell out.

Anyway,

before we end the show, I want to talk about an interview I did with Deepak Chopra for Recode Decode about the global pandemic.

It is out today, and it's about how it is impacting society and what we can do.

Let's give it a listen.

I think what is not being addressed right now

is the pandemic of

extreme fear,

perception of helplessness, panic, and stress.

And what is not being addressed is that this pandemic does not,

the pandemic of panic does not respect

social-physical distancing.

And it is much more dangerous because

stress and helplessness and panic also create irrational behavior, but they also turn our biology into chaos.

Are you in chaos, Scott?

This is it.

It was a different interview.

It was a little scary sometimes.

Sometimes he suggests everyone, what everyone can do to get through the good times, get good sleep, manage stress through anything, music, poetry, dance, meditation.

Scott, please don't dance.

Nutrition and investing in intimate relationships.

Scott, I need you to listen to this.

Yeah, I do.

And as long as we're now like whoring out our other podcasts, I interviewed Jonathan Height yesterday, and he had.

We're not whoring out.

Jesus Christ.

What did you talk about?

What did you talk about?

You're such a pimp.

If I ever need money, I'm just going to have you pimp me out.

My God.

Listen to me.

Just, what did Jonathan Haig say?

You mentioned him earlier, FYM.

I've had something interesting, and that is if you look throughout history, as a species, we're very good at recovery in terms of our groups rallying and cooperating when

there's an enemy, an enemy that sort of looks like us, invade us, we rally together, you know, war or invasion or aliens showing up.

You know, what Reagan said about the notion that if aliens invaded, or what he said to Gobrchev, we'd all be friends.

I wish aliens would invade.

What they don't do is with pestilence or pathogens, they tend to get very feral and selfish.

So this is kind of the worst of all worlds.

And that is we are not, our initial instinct here is not a positive one because when a pathogen comes along, we not only don't come together or unite sometimes instinctively, we in fact are afraid of each other.

And what's really tragic on a human level, I was speaking to a friend whose son is being diagnosed with COVID and has some underlying health issues.

And you could just hear in this guy's voice just how upset he is.

And it goes against every instinct because if your son is not doing well, if one of your kids isn't doing well, your initial,

just your absolute reflex instinct is to go be with them and wrap your arms around them.

And he can't do that.

This guy's in his 60s.

He has to distance from them.

So it's just...

It's kind of like tragedy on top of a counter, you know, counterintuition to your most basic instincts.

But we have never had, at least as far as I can tell in a while, this type of.

Okay, hold on.

I seriously hear someone doing dishes in the background.

Alex, I know.

Alex, Alex, you have to stop.

You have to stop for a second.

We're almost done.

It's my son.

He's cooking.

He's not listening to me when I pull him out.

You're going to have to stop for five minutes and I'll be done.

It's not going to stop.

Can you just take it off the thing?

Can you get my thing?

I already just turned off the heat.

Okay, all right.

Okay.

Just don't move for five minutes, okay?

We'll be done in five minutes.

Sorry about that, Scott.

Go ahead.

Oh, I hope we're recording this.

I hope we're recording this.

We are.

Big hitter, Karis Fisher, can't get her son to turn off the dish.

Can't get her son to stop watching dishes.

You know what?

My son is cooking his own food, Mr.

Oneworth.

Minivan.

Drive them all into Orlando.

All into Orlando.

He's cooking his own food.

My son is a great cook.

Both my sons are great cooks, and they can take care of themselves because that's the kind of men they are.

So you better start growing your own that way.

I do need to grow up here.

I agree.

Anyway, so

what we were talking about, I totally lost my train of thought.

You sing Jonathan Hayne on your show.

Listen, just listen.

Okay, so being, you can't be with them.

And that is a scary situation.

Yeah, that's very, it's just counter.

It's obviously counter to all our natural instincts.

But I just want to leave with a message.

You know, I don't, I've been saying to everybody where I've been loud and proud saying, okay, 14 days, six feet.

It ends up that it's probably going to be longer than 14 days.

And just this notion that

this notion that we're thinking about back to work, I really find that that scary.

And the best thing we can do for the economy, the best thing we can do such that we don't have in a situation that is totally counter to our instincts would be to continue to distance.

And I hope that everybody recognizes every time they don't.

They don't embrace someone physically, but embrace them digitally, that's a form of love here.

We need to love people we have not met yet by ensuring this thing, we need to hunt down Dracula and put a stake in its fucking heart and make sure that the sun comes up and this thing turns to dust.

That's my thesis.

Absolutely.

I think so.

And you should listen to that on Prof G, which is his new podcast that he's cheating on me with.

Anyway, don't forget if you have a story in the news and you're curious about what you want to hear opinion on, email us at pivot at voxmedia.com.

Do you feature on the show?

Scott, please read us out.

Prof G, please lead it.

Today's episode was produced by Rebecca Sinanis.

Erica Anderson is our executive producer.

Special thanks to Drew Burroughs and Rebecca Castro.

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

This is such an important time.

This is our generation's test.

Let's live up to the, let's live up to the memory of so many people who made such bigger, more dramatic sacrifices than us, such that we could have the freedoms and the opportunities to be, to live this wonderful life in such a wonderful country.

Your parents were called or your grandparents were called to Vietnam or World War II.

We've been called to sit on our couch and reach out to people via Zoom.

We've got this, Kara.

We've got this.

All right.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from Fox Media.

We'll be back next week with another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Okay, stop talking now.

Okay, go ahead.

Sorry.

You are so much more patient than me.

I'd be like, who pays for that fucking cereal, jackass?

Shut it up.