S&P hits a low, Jack Dorsey faces activist investors at Twitter and election technology — Kevin Roose joins to discuss

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

And Kara, I want to know who's going to touch my face now?

Who is going to touch my face?

Seriously.

What are you talking about?

Well, we're not allowed to touch our own faces.

Like, who's going to touch?

That's right.

Who's going to touch the dog's face now?

As usual, you find the most selfish thing to do with this.

You know, it's very difficult.

Terrible coronavirus situation.

Joe Biden is now the young guy in the race.

He's the young guy.

He's the young guy.

He is.

He is.

A dark colour.

What did you think?

What do you think of the.

I mean, we're just like, he's now Buddha judges out.

You're dreaming.

Another dreamy one.

Weren't you a little sad?

I was a little sad when I heard that.

Not even sad.

Oh, really?

I don't care.

I don't care.

So

I think you'll like this.

I think elections are, and we won't talk specifically about the camp a little bit, but I was thinking about it last night.

My dad, I used to play chess with my father.

It was one of the ways we bonded.

And he used to do these fun games with me.

And he'd say, okay, this is a quarter.

This is a nickel.

This is a dime.

What's the fastest way to get to 43 cents?

And he would do all these kind of war games using chessboard to try and talk about strategy.

And I was thinking about it, I was going back to when I used to do with my father.

If you put a bunch of pieces on.

a flat surface and you color-coded them by demographic groups, which I'm sure is going to outrage people.

But say Mayor Pete was rainbow, Klobuchar, Senators Klobuchar and Warren were pink, and then you tilted the board to say, what does America want?

Because Democrats are constantly accusing, and there's some, I think, justification here, Republican Party discriminating and being a bit racist.

We've had two major cullings in the Democratic primary.

The first was we took out all the people of color, Senators Harris, Booker, Andrew Yang.

The next culling is we've taken out the gay guy, and the next culling is about to be the women.

If you just looked at pieces, what's happening here, and I know you're going to say this does not come of any news, but if a statistician looked at all the pieces and says, what do these pieces all have in common?

It's just white dudes are the only ones that make it through in the Democratic

women and people of color.

We've noticed that.

Yeah.

It's depressing.

It's depressing.

But on the plus side, Hillary Clinton's going to have a podcast.

Because we need another podcast.

You know what else is really fascinating?

I'm joining on here, but just humor me.

And I didn't realize this, and that is, you know, so Biden won South Carolina.

And what's really interesting, and I think people in the white community do this, and I think I'm guilty of it.

We assume people of color just naturally cluster around similar values and ideals as it relates to politics.

And I thought the most interesting thing from South Carolina,

what looks like Peer to be shaping up in California and Texas, is that the black community is actually trying to shore up the moderate side of the Democratic Party, whereas the Latino bomb that we've been waiting for is finally detonating and it's going much further left.

And it looks like

they're going to have the day with Sanders.

But it's just, and it seems obvious, but the black community and the Latino community should no longer be grouped into kind of this general.

None of them should be grouped.

As a monolith, gays think this.

Nobody should, monolith.

You know, it's a more complex situation.

I think that's the difficulty is that if we sort of are reductive around people of color, you don't understand.

Everyone has different needs.

And again, everyone cares about health care and things like that.

Like people have a lot of commonality of needs.

Speaking of health care, the market, let's get into the big story, Scott.

Obviously, coronavirus.

The markets keep tumbling.

Coronavirus keeps spreading.

The S ⁇ P had its worst week.

Federal Reserve Chair Jeremy Powell

is trying to reaffirm that the central bank will make efforts to fix this.

Meanwhile, the Louvre in Paris is closing.

The first person to test positive coronavirus in New York, reportedly in Manhattan.

Later tomorrow, I'll be talking to Ron Klain, who was the Ebola response coordinator during the Obama administration on Rico Decode, about this.

But let's talk about what this means.

Like, you know, for the economy, we're going to focus because we're a business show on the economy.

There are political implications, there's all kinds of implications.

But we'll see what happens this week with the stock market.

But this is continuing to be a real

problem for the economy at the same time as people

get sick across the country.

Yeah,

it's extraordinary and it's difficult to,

you know, you can, I don't know about you, but I, you can, sometimes you can go, this morning, for example, I did a meeting, a breakfast meeting, and no one wanted to shake hands, which I thought was extraordinary.

Everyone's talking about events being canceled.

But then

you look at the data and I always think there's comfort in data, and that is I think about 90,000 cases, about 3,000 deaths.

They say that approximately the fatality rate outside of

China is about 1%.

It's very ageist, this virus, that if you're under the age of 40, the fatality rates basically plummet.

So far, I don't think there's been a single fatality of anyone under the age of 18.

And if you look at, I mean,

assume a couple million people, there's 90,000, I think, diagnosed cases right now.

If it's, say, it goes to 10 million,

and that ends up being 100,000 deaths.

Obviously, every death is enormously tragic, but

say it goes to 10 million cases.

We'll lose 50,000 people this year from opioid overdoses.

We'll lose.

I know, but this comparison, I get that.

People like to make these comparisons.

We're going to die.

This is a Trumpy thing.

Like, we're going to die more from the regular flu than this thing.

It's still, it's still, sorry.

No, you know what I mean.

But it's, it's, look, it's still causing like repercussions around everything.

And one of the things that I think doesn't get enough attention is the gig economy.

And there was a great story,

I think it was the New York Times, I'm not sure, about people who just can't leave work, like baristas, Uber drivers, you know, the people that are waiting on people that are in this gig economy that don't have time off.

They don't have an ability to be sick, essentially.

And I think the way our economy has changed so dramatically, and back in the day, way long ago, that was the same thing.

People couldn't, there wasn't any kind of safety net for people who are working class people.

But it's still the same problem is that there's a limit to how much we can quarantine ourselves and

wash our hands is obviously the thing you should do.

But people tend to not think, they think that put a mask on and these people can go to work, but this is not the case.

And that, I think, is a really going to be, should be studied later.

But

we're in this situation.

And then, of course, there's the stock market, which everybody's mood is about.

And this stock market tumble really does affect people's thinking about their lives,

even though it probably shouldn't, but it certainly does.

Are you concerned about the Scott market tumble?

What is the area of concern you have when you're thinking about

the economic downturn or economic contraction?

If they cancel, say, South by Southwest, which we're supposed to go to, that's enormous amounts of money for Austin if they cancel all kinds of events.

You see the repercussions everywhere.

There's no doubt about it, but a couple of things.

One, it really is.

The scale of it has shocked me.

I was in a board call last week, and in in an abundance of caution, the management recommended that we quarantine the products that we have manufacturing in China and they decided that they would isolate the products to ensure that absolutely no bacteria survives on any of the products.

I'd never heard that before.

I thought, wow, that's taking it to a new level.

But use Austin as an example.

Austin will take a short-term hit, but the city of Austin is awesome.

South by Southwest is awesome.

And I don't think while it may impact them in the next three, six, twelve months, however long it takes to play this out.

I think it comes back as strong or stronger.

I wrote a piece saying that I believe Carnival Cruise Lines is going to be fine.

I think there's companies that take a step down because people realize they stop going to movies and they realize they don't really miss them.

But I think everything else is largely temporary.

In terms of the stock market going down, Kara, markets are supposed to go up and they're supposed to go down.

And what bothers me about this administration and the general viewpoint of baby boomers is that we have decided that the all-important sacrosanct initiative that everyone is supposed to be fighting for is to keep the markets high or basically to keep baby boomers rich because Rebecca Senanis deserves an opportunity to buy into Amazon at less than 50 times earnings or to buy an apartment in Brooklyn for less than $2,000 a square foot.

And the reason why people of our generation have some wealth, hopefully, is because they had the opportunity to buy Netflix at $12 a share.

They had an opportunity to buy a house in the Castro for $800 a square foot, not $2,500 a square foot.

So yeah, who benefits?

Who gets hurt when the markets go down?

All the people controlling all the media, basically baby boomers who think they deserve to stay rich.

So they want to artificially inflate the markets.

Who benefits from the markets going down?

Young people.

So burn, baby, burn.

Oh, my God.

That's a fascinating argument for the end of the stock market.

But I like it.

I like it, Scott.

I like your dystopian way of making poor young people rich, suddenly.

That's a really interesting thing.

But we'll see.

This is going to have lots of repercussions.

We'll be talking about a lot over the next couple of weeks.

But one of the bigger stories also is activist investors buying a big chunk of Twitter.

And now Jack Dorsey's job may be at stake.

Elliott Management, the hedge fund that bought the stake, has nominated four directors to the board.

As I, may I just say, I did say I thought activist investors were going to get involved here because I've been hearing from a lot of them.

So it only has one class of stock.

He's not protected.

He has no voting control like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

Since he's been returned as CEO in 2015, the company's shares have fallen 6.2%, while Facebook's have gained more than 121% during that time.

He also has another job at Square as CEO.

What do you think the strategy is?

Can you explain the strategy to Elliott Manny?

Hold on, hold on.

This is literally like when Ryan O'Neill and Farah Fawcett were married, and each of them fighting for the mirror.

Let me get this.

You're taking credit for the activism at Twitter.

No, I said it was coming.

Come on.

Oh, God.

Come on.

Elliot basically showed up and signed my December 12th letter with a $2 billion pen.

And you don't even acknowledge that?

Yes, you're right.

You're right.

Okay, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Make apologies.

Come on.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, you wrote this letter.

Can you update us on the letter?

And

we're going to go to tape.

Is that right, Rebecca?

We're going to go to tape on this thing.

When he announced he was going to be moving to Africa for part of the year.

The letter speaks for itself.

I think Twitter needs to start commanding the space it occupies.

I think if you were to look at any company that has the equivalent reach or influence, it's a company trading at 20 to 40x the valuation.

I think there's no company in the world whose opportunity relative to its performance is this out of whack.

So I'm giving you credit.

You were very angry about the Africa situation.

Can we listen to me?

We're both right.

How about that?

We're both right.

So I have some disclosures to make.

I bought a bunch of Twitter stock this morning, and I am in dialogue with a bunch of the investors, including Elliott.

So with that.

And you like to be like, you like to do this kind of thing.

You've been involved in these kinds of things.

Money governance matters.

This is a layer.

This is the mother of all obvious changes at a corporate governance level.

We have a company that is exceptionally important in the midst of an election that does not command the space it occupies, that trades at a fraction of the value of any company with near-the-reach or influence that has underperformed the market and the SP.

So I know what's the solution.

Let's get a part-time CEO who spends his afternoon at a company where 89% of his wealth is.

And if that's not enough, he should peace out and go 10 time zones away.

This is literally the most obvious IQ test in the history of corporate governance.

Jack Dorsey will be out within 30 days.

The board will come to an agreement with Elliott within the next 10.

What do you think happens?

You think 30 days he's out?

Wow, that's probably less.

I think that's generous.

Really?

Explain how that's going to work for the people who don't understand

activist investors.

It's very easy.

But not all activist investors have been successful.

And in Twitter, they've come at them before.

Let me be clear.

I showed up to a gunfight with a squirt gun.

They've shown up with a howitzer.

They own about $2 million of the stock.

I imagine every investor they're calling and talking.

Every shareholder is nodding their head, rolling their eyes and saying, I agree.

The last 48 hours was a bunch of investor relations,

proxy solicitors, corporate governance lawyers, the general counsel of Twitter, and they had to do these calls in the morning because Jack is in Namibia or wherever he is.

And basically, all the board members are coming to the conclusion they can either be Felicity Huffman and cop a deal now and give up all three board seats and let Jack go, or they can be Aunt Becky and go to reputational prison and be the board members who made the WeWork board look responsible.

This is over before it started.

It is ridiculous.

It reflects our idolatry of innovators.

And I expect the board to either give up three board seats in the next 10 days or demonstrate evidence that Jack Dorsey is Jesus Christ and not subject to the same space-time continuum as the rest of us.

This is, in a word or in a term, fucking ridiculous.

This is a corporate governance layup.

Stock is going to scream.

This is a company that has unbelievable potential, that is down.

So we talk about the unbelievable potential.

This is fascinating.

So talk about the unbelievable potential.

And then what could go wrong for these activist shareholders?

If the board does decide to stick with him,

what could happen?

Well, okay.

So how I learned about Corona was...

Game this out, Scottish.

Okay, just on a basic level,

what logos of any company in the world are spread across every other media company 24 by 7?

I mean,

this company has such incredible reach and is so important amongst the most influential people in the world.

There's been a striking lack of mediation.

Political people, entertainment.

Yep.

So look, I think this has tremendous, not only I think at some point, you have some safety on the downside, because I think if the stock went down, someone would probably step in and acquire it.

But any sort of product innovation here, I think advertisers, Kara, are looking, desperately looking for an option to Facebook and Google.

100%.

100%.

One of the things I'm thinking about is how good the ads on Instagram are, for example.

I was just spending a lot of time looking at them.

And that was going to be

Twitter.

Twitter was going to be doing a lot of that.

And they were, if you remember, I mean, going to Khan, they talked about it, and Adam Bain was there.

And that was sort of the game.

And then it just went away.

Like,

there's product development.

Their new product guy is gone in the afternoons, and now he's gone to Africa.

And if you think about,

I mean, essentially, this company really hasn't had,

I think it looks, smells, and feels the same as it did five years ago.

And also, there is a core group of people who are really arguably the most influential people in the world, whether it's actors, influencers, media, journalists, politicians, who are obsessed and addicted to Twitter.

And that addiction should translate to margin, which should translate to shareholder value.

And this is a company, any other company that has a fraction of the reach and influence of Twitter trades at 10 to 25 times more.

You know how they say something punches above their weight?

They punch below.

Which is interesting.

But I'm looking at the board right now.

Omit Cordesani, Google exec, former Google executive know him really well.

He's not going to turn on him.

Patrick Pachette, same thing, former Google exec.

He was the first, he was the first CFO of Google, the first really,

there may have been one before that, but he was the critical CFO of Google forever.

There's Jack.

There's Martha Lane Fox, who is, who is,

I don't know a lot about her background, but she was put there by Jack.

um there's all kinds of people like brett taylor who was who's a president and uh he works at salesforce um he's also an insider david rosenbaud these are a lot of insiders of

internet they're internet friends do you know what i mean like and so i wonder what who's going to be the mover on this group because i i don't know which one will will do something i don't think a meet will

carry these okay let's assume okay they'll turn him on our let's assume let's assume they love jack and they think he's the right ceo you know what they love more?

Money.

Their reputations.

Yep.

And every day that they put up a fight here, and this isn't a dialogue.

This isn't even an issue.

It's an IQ test.

It's okay, no matter what you think.

By the way, Jack deserves a lot of credit.

A remarkable innovator.

He's garnered several billion dollars in exchange for that innovation.

The question is, is what has gotten us here today going to get us where we need to be?

And does this company...

Question one, does this company warrant a full-time CEO?

Should the CEO of Twitter, in addition to focusing his professional energies 100% on this company, be within nine time zones of HQ?

This isn't every, I can't imagine a single shareholder said, no, we're going to stick with the part-time guy in Africa.

Yeah.

I just don't.

And every single metric that shareholders are supposed to

evaluate a company on as fiduciaries for the firefighters, the police, the wealthy families they represent is supposed to be shareholder return.

And this company is massively underperformed.

This is over before it started.

All right.

Okay.

So 10, I'm going to hold it, 10 days.

And

who's the CEO?

Who's an actual CEO?

Oh, I don't know, but think about this.

This could be.

There's several former corporate executives.

Todd Morganfell, the CFO of Pinterest.

I've gotten to know him.

He's a very thoughtful guy.

Dick Costello, who gets a lot of grief and was kind of his image was tarnished.

Do you realize when he joined Twitter, it was 78 cents a share in the private market?

And now it's

and then he grew it to $38 a share.

Adam Bain is considered a fantastic operating executive.

Put together a list of the 25 most impressive people to run this company.

They all return the call.

They may not take the job, but this is an incredible opportunity for a CEO.

It's not who do you pick to be CEO?

It's who do you not pick.

This is going to be a fantastic thing.

The only thing is, the only issue is, I have to say, is getting into the Trumpist of it, the Trumpiness of it, like making these big decisions on political advertising,

it's one of the reasons a lot of this company hasn't gotten bought yet, which many people thought it would, that Google would move in or Apple or anybody.

There's all kinds of owners of this.

Salesforce had looked at it.

There's that element.

There could be a purchaser.

Was every single person I talked to was like, ugh, Twitter.

You know what I mean?

Like fixing the mess that is.

And not so much the product mess, but the toxicity.

And again, everyone thought about the product mess, but that's easily fixed,

updating Twitter for the next.

What do you think?

You know this stuff as well as I do.

Let me ask you straight up.

Should Jack Dorsey be replaced as CEO of Twitter?

I believe he should.

I have thought that for a while.

You know, I've talked about the lack of product innovation.

I've talked about

the nobody's home kind of thing.

I think they've got some great executives in Kayvon.

Beckber is lovely.

They've had a lot of product heads there.

I think Vijagade has tried her best,

very smart.

She's the

CLO

and has been doing a lot of the behind the scenes decision-making and stuff like that.

But it is a weird corporate environment.

You know what I mean?

I think there's individually, some very good executives there.

But the leadership of Jack has been, he's hard.

He's not, you know, it's not like he's a pain in the neck or anything like that.

It's that he's he's absent and godlike.

You know what I mean?

Like he may speak to you at some point, he may not speak to you.

And it just, to me, it's been the biggest, this is one of the greatest media properties ever and the most fun to run and the most full of controversy and so many difficult questions.

And I would love to see an active CEO in there who's really pushing, pushing advertising.

You know, there's all kinds of things.

I have a hundred ideas for Twitter.

Like, you know what I mean?

Like, you could do this.

And you know, I'm a big user of it.

And I love,

there's something

great.

Yeah.

We are addicted to it.

We love it.

But it's fun.

Paid product, niche products.

And the reality is, we don't even need to go back to a rabbit hole.

We just need to find the right guy or gallery.

I'd pay for Twitter.

i'd pay for twitter

i'd pay real cabbage for that i'd real pay i would because i really like it and there's also not just the toxicity and i agree there's a lot of toxicity on it but the is the delight in it there's also a lot of delight and there's so much potential there to be a great media property and to to you know what instagram i don't use instagram the same way and it's like they could take so they could just grab so much stuff from instagram and put it in there and i think it's because i don't know why it's not happening there it just it's been one of those companies that has wait i have an idea i have an idea in keeping with the board's approach to corporate governance and leadership, you and I will be co-CEOs.

I'll move to Rwanda and you become the CEO of a payments company.

And we'll run it.

We'll run it.

The jungle cat and the dog are taking over.

I'm just going to take a quick break.

But what would you, what would be if you were the CEO, Scott Galloway is the CEO, and obviously you're on the other side.

You're fighting.

Thank you for disclosing that.

I own no Twitter stock.

I have no dog in this hunt or whatever the expression, the manly expression.

Oh, your dog's in this hunt, jungle cat.

No, my dog's innocent.

I just would like Twitter to innovate.

I would like Twitter to innovate.

That's what I would like.

100%.

And I think the stock's too low for what it is.

I do get punches below its.

Word and word, my sister.

Word and word.

All right.

But what would the first thing you would do since

you started this off with your main letter about Jack and Africa?

What would you do the first three things?

And then we're going to go to break.

So the first thing I would do is fire me and bring in a CEO and tell him or her that it's up to him or her to understand and listen to everyone in the company and then come come to their own conclusions around what needs to be done and as a board member support them.

So I know that, I don't mean that to be a cop-out.

If you're going to force me for tactical issues, I think you age gate the thing,

verified identity.

I think two-thirds of the toxicity goes away when people actually have to behave and say things based on who they actually are.

And then I think a series of pilot programs around niche paid products, whether it's financial services or politics, that encourage people like us to get more engaged and pay for something that is better, uses AI to screen our filters and maybe gives our voices more enhanced coverage.

I think there's a ton of opportunity here.

All right.

Okay.

And the edit button.

That would be

the edit button.

Anyway, Scott, that's great.

This will be fascinating.

We're going to hold 10 days, 10 days, right?

Oh, shit's about to get real, Kara.

Wait, what are you saying?

10 days for him.

Within 10 days.

I believe within 10 days, the board is going to come to an agreement.

They've lost.

This is over.

This is Felicity Huffman going, this is Felicity Huffman's lawyer going to Felicity, you need to cut a deal yesterday.

Okay.

So the board is going to cut a deal with Elliott, and we're going to see

Jack is going to step down.

This has just gone on, this is just, this is going to work.

Is there anything to the fact that Elliot's a big Trump supporter or anything like that?

Is there anything to that?

So just to be clear, just to be clear, the guy running this is a guy named Jesse Cohen.

He's a Democrat.

And unless they've, I don't know them well, but I know them.

Unless they've totally totally fooled me, they have $40 billion under management.

And if they were.

This is about money.

You're right.

This is about a product that is not doing that.

They don't look red.

They don't look blue.

They look green.

And if they started,

if it came out that there was any political motivation here that was in any way putting their limiteds return at risk, they would go from $40 billion in management to $10 billion.

And the thing that gives Paul Singer his political power is money since Citizens United.

And the way he makes money is being focused on one thing, and that is returns for his limiteds.

Politics has nothing to do with this at all.

I just want to bring it out, sorry, I'm just bringing it up.

Anyway, it's time for a quick break.

We'll be right back with a friend of Pivot, New York Times reporter Kevin Roos, and wins and fails.

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Okay, we're back.

We have a friend of Pivot, the New York Times reporter Kevin Roos, who also has fantastic hair in the studio.

He covers technology.

He's about to publish his book called Future Proof, which I must say I am the inspiration for.

Super Tuesday is upon us.

So let's have it out on our elections about whether they should be analog or digital.

What's going on?

Kevin writes a ton about this.

So Kevin, welcome.

Thanks.

I think this is the first time we've ever been on a podcast together.

How is that possible?

Not the last, let me just say.

Let me just say.

So you're an expert on, you write a lot about election security and especially the social media impact of it.

Talk a little bit about where we are.

I mean, after Iowa obviously was a digital disaster, bring us up to speed.

Which apps are being used for Super Tuesday, how they're likely to affect the election, or not at all, or anything else.

Well, so we know that Iowa was a total disaster, right?

And a big part of why that was was because there was this app that was, you know, tallying the votes and recording them and sending them to the State Democratic Party.

And when I heard the word app in relation to, you know, the Iowa caucuses, my whole sort of like, insides kind of shriveled up because this is the doomsday scenario, right?

This is the thing that every election security expert is worried about is that we'll introduce some new piece of technology into the voting process.

Which we should have.

Well,

possibly, yeah.

So basically, it's really interesting.

When you talk to people in tech about basically any

element of society, their solution involves like putting more tech into it.

More tech equals better.

When you talk to people who deal with elections, they say the exact opposite thing.

Like they think that in order to be secure, our elections should be as low-tech as possible.

I see.

Basically, there should be paper ballots.

Like, I went back and did some research.

The ancient Greeks actually used to throw pebbles into earth

to count the votes.

And, like, that's basically what they're saying we should do.

Not so far as rocks, but paper ballots, no sort of connected voting machines.

And a lot of states are now using these sort of internet-connected voting machines.

They say terrible idea, those can get hacked.

So, basically, the people who know the most about this subject have been yelling for years that this move to upgrade our technology, our voting technology, may actually be making our elections more vulnerable.

Huh.

Well, that's interesting.

Scott, what do you think about that, Rox?

You know, it's interesting because I think there is a gestalt in the U.S.

where software is supposed to be the answer to everything.

And if you look at what happened in Iowa, everything can be reverse engineered to technology, even old technologies, much less an app that wasn't beta tested.

But the telephone lines, as soon as the telephone number got out, my understanding is these outside bad actors started crashing the phone lines.

And so, you know, get a group of high school students and an abacus.

And let me ask you this, Kevin.

Do your friends call you Hanging Chad?

Is that your nickname?

It depends which one's.

I hope not.

I hope not.

I mean, yeah, so as you mentioned, like we all remember hanging Chads from the 2000 election, there are problems with paper ballots too.

But the problems with paper ballots are at least you can go back and look at what happened.

You can go back and re-examine the paper ballot and say is that Chad hanging too much?

Is it not hanging?

Like you can do sort of recounts and investigations.

With paperless voting systems, these e-voting systems, that gets a lot harder.

I had a life-changing experience on this.

I went a couple years ago to this security conference in Vegas with all these hackers, and they did this thing.

They bought up a bunch of old voting machines on eBay that were actually used in previous voting elections, you know, a couple hundred bucks a piece.

They put them in a room and they told the hackers, like, go at it.

Like, see how long it takes you to crack these machines.

This is what passes for fun at security conferences.

And they expected, you know, it might take them a couple days to start breaking in.

These are state-of-the-art things.

Within a day, like, all of them had gotten hacked.

Some of them had got hacked in, like, less than an hour.

Wow.

So it was really.

And what did they do?

Just change votes.

Just change?

They changed votes.

Someone actually rigged it up so that they could, like, you know, you could play music on one of the voting apps.

I don't know how they did that.

Right.

And these were all decommissioned, but these kind of machines are still in use all over the country.

Right.

And so how do you, what is the answer then?

Because the idea is that you do vote on your phone because you want to bring more voting to people.

And this would be a way, aside from making everybody, giving it a holiday, making voting a holiday, which I think would go a long way towards more people voting.

But the idea of doing, you do everything else on your phone, voting would be nice if everyone was able to vote, especially young people.

Aaron Powell, for sure.

And I think the sort of recommendations around voting machines sort of fly counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom in tech, which is that friction is bad and we should reduce it, right?

Make it as easy as possible to do everything, including voting.

With voting, you actually, you want a little bit of friction in there.

You don't want, you know, voter ID.

You don't want poll taxes.

Like, that's a different kind of friction than voter suppression.

But in the actual technology of itself, you actually want...

a little bit of friction there to prevent people from exploiting it, to prevent hackers from overseas from breaking into our machines and changing vote totals.

It's a lot harder to do that if these are paper ballots than if they're all connected computers.

And what about

voter lists, too?

That's what I understand is very vulnerable, the idea that who can vote and the voter list, changing addresses slightly and things like that.

Yeah, because those parts are all administered locally.

I mean, it's not like we have one database of all the voters in America.

Like states, counties, election officials at the local level keep track of all those.

And those are not always the most technically sophisticated people.

A lot of them

skew older.

They haven't grown up in an atmosphere of cybersecurity training.

They're just not equipped to do the kind of work that you would want them to be able to do to protect against interference.

So it's a really paper.

Scott, again,

what do you imagine?

Do you think people should vote on apps or not?

I'm curious to get your thoughts on this.

I've come full circle since Iowa.

As a Democrat and as someone who's in technology, I was immediately just a huge proponent of it should all be on our phone and we want to expand the participation and make it as easy as possible for people to be represented in our democracy.

And the easiest way to do that is an app on Android or Apple.

And in a partisan way, I thought that that would help my Democratic causes because I thought it might reach in a community.

It might benefit.

It might reach into the communities that I think might skew Democratics.

So Republicans try and make it harder to vote.

And there's definitely a balance there.

But after Iowa, I actually am coming to believe that technology, whether it's Netflix or our phones or Instagram, are slowly but surely sequestering us from interacting with each other.

And I think that there would be nothing better than, as you said, Carol, like for Hearst Corporation gives people, it's a holiday for Election Day, than to encourage people to get out and meet their brothers and sisters and their fellow citizens and go behind a curtain.

And in my, in faculty housing, in the lobby,

we're a pollst voting station.

And it's, you know what?

It's wonderful.

You walk through there, you feel American.

There's a comedy of man and woman.

And I wonder if we should go the other way, because it's very hard to hack a piece of paper.

And if we should make our election days one of those moments where we all get together, touch, smell, and feel each other, and just recognize how wonderful it is to be American.

Well,

think about this, but companies are investing in election technology.

What are the key key trends right now in that?

Yes, there are a couple trends.

One is there are some people developing these apps that you mentioned.

Like, I got pitched this blockchain voting app thing.

Oh, God.

When you say blockchain voting, I just want to

broad.

And, you know, I think the people who make this stuff, like, they're well-intentioned.

They want to increase civic participation.

I just think it's a horrible idea.

Like, I just think that we should absolutely not.

Kevin loves my idea, Kara.

Kevin's on my side.

Apple pie and baseball.

That's right.

Oh, God.

Did you go to your colleagues?

Where do you go?

Or do you vote by mail?

I'm going to go tomorrow.

I'm going to go tomorrow.

Did you vote by mail?

No, I didn't vote by mail.

I like to walk in.

I like to walk into the garage of the people I see once every year and say hello to them.

They vote care.

They care.

No, they do not.

I'm not famous in voting.

I voted by mail, and the only bad thing about that is you don't get the sticker.

I like the sticker.

I like the whole thing.

It's like when you get the flu shot.

But then there are also efforts within government to sort of mandate safer elections.

And a lot of bills have been passed.

There was this bill that passed in the House called the SAFE Act, which would have made it mandatory for every vote to have a paper backup that you could look at in case of a recount.

But so far, Republicans are blocking a lot of that.

And why are they blocking that?

Your guess is as good as mine.

I would like your guess.

I don't know.

Well, your guess is better, Kevin.

I don't know.

I mean, not much is getting passed with bipartisan support.

But that's, I mean, I think that there are people for whom the current election system works fine.

Works fine.

All right.

So let's go to

Facebook.

You've been written a lot about Facebook's impact on elections.

That's one of the things.

Are they prepared for 2020?

What's changed since 2016, 18?

Well, I've been doing a lot of reporting on this over the past couple of weeks.

And my takeaway is basically that Facebook and all the other tech platforms, they're very prepared for the election of 2016.

Like they are ready to get those Russians out.

They are ready to secure the platform against WikiLeaks and hacks.

And they are ready to fight the last war.

Right.

But they are not ready.

I've heard they're coordinating with the Mondale campaign, which gives me a lot of reassurance.

Tell me why.

What do you mean by that?

What is that?

Well, the threats have just changed so much since 2016.

I mean, we don't see so far, you know, Knockwood, the kind of like wide-scale Russian trolling campaigns and things like that.

So that's not so much of an issue.

But now you have all these domestic bad actors, these people in the U.S., who are imitating the tactics of the Russians.

So who, such as?

Well, such as a lot of the sort of hyper-partisan Facebook pages, some of the YouTube channels, like they're doing the same thing, but they're doing it from inside the U.S.

So there's not that much to do.

So they've seen what the Russians did.

Exactly.

And they're redoing it.

And the platforms are, you know.

for better or for worse, like much more hesitant to take action against those people than if they can pin it on Russia.

So they can do the same thing.

So they can do essentially the same thing.

So what are they preparing for?

What have they prepared?

Just Russia to get rid of Iranians or Russia.

I think from everyone that I've talked to, the platforms are way better prepared for like Russia hacking, other foreign state actors getting into trolling campaigns and influence operations and things like that.

So that's the stuff that they've actually spent a lot of money and taken a lot of thought and care to sort of protect themselves against.

But then there are all these new weird ways.

What's the weirdest and newest?

Well, I think the Bloomberg campaign has been a really interesting challenge for Facebook specifically.

Because Because they've been doing all this meme stuff.

They've been paying these influencers to make this sponsored content.

And they just didn't have policies for that kind of thing.

They didn't see it coming.

They didn't think like, you know, some billionaire is going to pay meme accounts to post, you know, fake text messages on their accounts.

And so they just, they've had to kind of scramble to figure out like what to do about this.

What are they doing?

Well, they're doing some new disclosure stuff around like if, you know, there's an influencer who gets paid by Bloomberg to, you know, say Mike Bloomberg is the, you know, the coolest candidate in the world, world, they have to say like sponsored by Mike Bloomberg on there.

But some of these accounts are private.

So Facebook really has no way of tracking what's going on on them.

And it's become a real problem for them.

I mean they've had tons of meetings about it.

There's been a lot of hand-wringing internally about what to do about this.

These are just the kinds of things that they didn't see coming.

And then what are the Trump people doing?

What are they up to?

Well, they're putting out a ton of ads.

I mean, they are flooding social media with millions of ads, spending a ton of money doing it and by all accounts like doing it pretty effectively.

So they're doing basically 2016 on steroids

and you know people who study this kind of thing are on the Democratic side are really worried about it.

What are the Democrats doing?

I mean, they're spending a lot on digital advertising.

I think they're starting to catch up in terms of how much money they're spending on Facebook and Twitter and not Twitter.

They don't allow political ads anymore, but on YouTube.

I'm going to ask you.

But I think they realize that they have some way to catch up.

And in some cases, the Trump campaign has

an easier time because they already got that huge audience.

They know which kind of messages work.

And they don't have to spend their money, their time raising small dollar donations to get into the debates and things like that.

Kevin, what's your view on political advertising on these platforms?

I think that I don't buy the sort of suggestion that this is sort of a, that ads are our voice and that we can't, you know, if we if we say that you can't lie in your ads, that that's tantamount to, you know, telling you who to vote for or something like that, that that's swinging elections.

I actually am more, I'm less worried about the advertising.

I'm more worried about the organic side, the stuff that people

explain that.

Explain.

Well, because for advertising, there's, you know, there's transparency now.

Facebook allows you to search, you know, who's running which ads on which platforms.

And there are, you know, sort of limits to how much stuff can spread through advertising.

There are limits to the effectiveness there.

The organic side is kind of still the Wild West.

I mean, that is still where you get people sort of doing these engagement hacks to get more shares and likes and clicks on their stories.

That's where you get the sort of partisan media organizations doing their thing.

I mean, if you look at the organic side of Facebook, I'd be terrified if I was a Democrat.

I look at the top 10 list every day of which stories are performing best on Facebook, and it's like, you know, Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Daily Caller,

Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Daily.

It's like, it's all, almost all right-wing news every day.

But let me ask you, is that a function of that's where America is, or that those entities

are just better at

misleading users of the platform?

I think it's a couple things.

One, I think it reflects who's on Facebook, right?

They tend to be older.

Maybe they tend to be wider than other platforms.

So I think since 2016, you know, who's on Facebook has changed.

But I also think it's because these organizations have gotten really good at sort of hacking the news feed and getting their messages out and picking the stories that are going to aggravate people or

make them angry at someone.

Kevin,

engagement is enragement.

You would make a great social media manager.

Anyway, so what are they going to do?

So what's going to happen?

What's party leadership doing to

obviously the Republicans love this, and they're doing a good job in sort of letting Brad Parcell do everything he wants.

So that's in his hands.

But is there anything that can happen to make this more fair or that these companies can do?

Yeah, I mean, I think they could do a lot.

They don't have to allow political advertising.

There's no reason that there's no law saying if you're a platform, you have to let people pay you money to spread

political messages.

Google was in the middle, and then Facebook's as the outlier, I guess, or not the outlier, whatever, the other side.

Totally.

I mean, I think they could do

sort of more on the organic side to sort of prevent misinformation from going viral.

They now have these third-party fact-checkers at Facebook, but there are only

a couple dozen of them.

It's kind of slow.

They're overworked.

They have too few staff and too few resources to do what they need.

And by the time they get to fact-checking something, usually millions of people have already seen it.

So I think that there are a lot that they could do on that side, but that would require sort of rethinking the whole model.

All right, my last question.

Bloomberg, do you think it's a good thing what he's doing or not?

Or just that he's just living the life that we live now, essentially, or playing playing to that.

I think it's fascinating.

I mean, what a, what a, I don't think people quite understood how rich Mike Bloomberg is.

Because there are like tiers of really rich guy, right?

There's Tom Steyer, who's a billionaire, but not a 60 billionaire.

And for Mike Bloomberg, I mean, we've never had someone in U.S.

electoral politics who can spend a billion dollars like that and not miss it.

And so what I think is we're seeing effectively like a subsidy for every anyone that runs advertising in the United States is having a great quarter because of the Bloomberg campaign.

But I also think we're going to see if there is a limit to the effectiveness of digital advertising.

If you spend $500 million in six months running ads on social media, does that move the needle?

Can you actually convince people to do something that they wouldn't have otherwise done?

Yeah, can you bring a wallet to a gunfight?

And it's so interesting what you said about Michael Bloomberg, just in terms of proportions.

LeBron James will make $50 million this year in salary and endorsements.

So if he plays basketball another 1,200 years, he'll catch up to Michael Bloomberg.

Oh, my God.

Exactly.

Sports.

Of course, sports.

In any case, Kevin, we really appreciate being showing your book, Future Proof.

We're going to get you're coming on the Rico Deco podcast to talk about it.

Anytime.

It's called Future Proof, right?

Is that the right way?

Yeah, you have to say it like that.

Okay, exactly.

All right.

So it's about how to proof yourself from the future, which will be great.

Good.

All right.

Thank you so much, Kevin Ruse from the New York Times.

He's a wonderful columnist.

Read his things.

Thank you for coming.

Thanks for

eliminating us.

Thanks, Scott.

Okay, scott wins and fails obviously you win for the letter writing to remove dorsey as ceo but we already knew that you get all the credit i get a tiny bit of credit saying i thought the hedge fund people would come in like i've been hearing from them all right but you get all the credit for removing him from office so you're two ceos desperate for your approval

i am desperate for your approval

what you are is attacking ceos with excellent hair i see that's what's going on here and i would worry i'm trying to think who has really good hair who has good hair none of let me think of, well, no, not Zuckerberg.

So you're not going to.

Newman's gone.

Newman's gone.

Yeah.

We'll have to.

Newman.

Anyone with good hair, you're in big trouble because Kot Gallery's coming your way.

Anyway, win and fail.

Give me some wins and fails.

So I'll start with my win, and I'm always loath to give the Trump administration any credit, but I think the peace agreement with the Taliban and our exit from this 18-year war is

a win.

I think we overlook the incredible sacrifice of the 2,500 men and and women who gave their lives, the 3,500 of our coalition forces,

the 30,000 men and women who were severely injured in this 18-year war, the 170,000 Afghanis who've died, including 40,000 civilians.

I wonder that, I worry that we get into these forever wars because unlike any other past wars, we've outsourced it economically and from a tragedy standpoint.

And that is, in World War II, you knew people people who died, you knew people who lost their sons, you weren't able to get a Hershey bar or a steak, and you paid higher taxes, and we made Maytag stop producing washing machines and produce B-17 Super Fortresses.

And I worry, because we're dependent upon debt, because we've outsourced military honor and service to a group of military families and certain demographic groups, that we no longer feel the pain of wars and we're willing to endure them because we don't really feel them.

With you, 199%.

I think this is right.

It's also the plot of Homeland this season.

I know.

I know.

I love Homeland.

Oh, my gosh.

I love that show.

I love that show so much.

I'm going to tell you.

It's the last season, I think.

I have to say, it's exactly the plot, which is interesting.

It's not going so well for the Homeland people, but it's a really interesting thing.

I agree with you.

This forever wars urges.

But 18-year wars, and people immediately leap to, and they should be asking questions: what happens to women's rights?

What happens?

Are they really going to hold true and not fund Al-Qaeda?

But you know what?

As you get older, what I've come to the conclusion of, there just is no moral clarity around geopolitics.

And we have been there 18 years.

Yeah, that's exactly what Beau Bridges said last night to Carrie Matheson.

Like this is eight, in fact, there were 18 years of this.

It's just like, it was really interesting because he was talking about the idea of the sacrifice over that much time.

I would agree with you.

I think that's good.

What about a fail?

What's your fail?

So my fail is I think there's tremendous opportunity here.

I think the real fear or the real tragedy around the coronavirus is not the real danger, the real risk isn't contracting coronavirus.

The real fear is that you contract it and then pass it on to someone who's vulnerable.

And that is the vast majority of the population would survive.

And there's even a large portion of the population that wouldn't know they would have it.

So the question is, how do we rally the resources and the acumen and the kind of leadership to ensure that A, we can get cheap testing kits out.

And I think there's an opportunity.

Unfortunately, our tech companies have become more like nation states and they have the most IQ, the most capital.

And what I'll say is my fail is an opportunity, and that is I would love to see a Mark Benioff, a Sacha Nadella say, how do we use Android, Apple, CRM technology, manufacturing, supply chain technology?

to, if people are willing, find out if potentially they've been exposed, get them a cheap testing kit as quickly as possible.

If they're worried about testing, put them on an Amazon show using Amazon Alexa and Salesforce.

And in a moment of alliance, a moment that brought together the British, the Russians, and the Americans, said big tech is going to figure out a way to coordinate with the CDC and try and cuterize this.

I think there's a big opportunity for the technology players to come in and push back on a existential threat that could be really ugly.

And I haven't seen a lot of discussion.

or all the discussion has been around what does it do for our stock price?

What's it going to do for our supply chain?

Well, you know what?

Pretend we're in a war.

Pretend that the Commonwealth comes before shareholder value.

What is it you are going to do?

That's true.

I agree with you.

I like when you're like this, but you were just talking about shareholders.

Like, you got to clean this up for shareholder value.

They don't care about politics.

And there's an opportunity.

So, Mark Benioff, Satya Nadella, there are some incredibly impressive leaders here who are civic-minded.

There is an opportunity to get everyone in a room and say, what could we do?

What could we do to flex our muscles and put our shoulder down into this thing?

And just as splitting the atom arrested the march of Hitler, how can science and technology and the resources these companies have cauterize this thing?

Yeah, I like it.

I like that.

That's very nice.

That's really good.

My win was my brother and the Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who asked people to stop buying surgical masks during the Jerome Drive.

Dr.

Swisher had got really whacked on Twitter that he was, he did a whole long stream about that you shouldn't, these masks, even N95 masks, do not help.

And then he explained it.

Like, he's a doctor and he's like, this doesn't, these don't get in.

And this is why you shouldn't do it.

This is the things you do, which is basically wash your hands and stay home if you're sick or you seem sick.

And it was, and Jerome Adams said the same things: people are buying up these surgical masks and causing kinds of, they need to be there for healthcare workers.

And so they had to get more, but people in their hoardy ways, you know, everyone's going to the store and buying beans and stuff like that here in San Francisco and elsewhere.

The idea, Surgeon General Jerome Adams said this, stop buying surgical masks during coronavirus scares because they're not going to help and they need them for

healthcare workers.

And it's critically important.

And I thought that was a win.

And it's a fail on the part of people.

I get panic, but you have to really think, you have to not fall prey to scare tactics.

And I think a lot of people are scared.

Like they,

it seems it's really interesting.

And then I think a fail, I don't really have a fail this week.

I think it's,

I think Jack Dorsey has to think really hard about what he's done there and what to do.

And I agree with you.

It probably isn't going to save his job.

But

I think it's too bad because there's a property that really,

a lot of opportunity there, especially right now when it's so, everyone's using it so heavily.

And it's been a fail for that board.

I'd say the board is at failure more than anybody else.

100%.

He might lack self-awareness, but the gross negligence here has been on the part of the board.

I'm sorry, I was interrupting your fail.

That's okay.

That's my fail.

That's my fail.

You're right.

You're right.

Gross negligence on the part of the board.

Well, we'll see what happens, Scott Galloway.

See if you can get another scalp of yours.

Let's hope the stock market, even though you don't think it's the proxy for everything, it is important to a lot of people.

The global coronavirus outbreak and elections have all sorted themselves out.

There'll be Super Tuesday, and we'll see what happens in that by the time we next talk.

Oh, can we have a bonus one?

Okay, go ahead, win it, go ahead.

First openly gay man to win the Iowa Peca Caucus to win a state primary.

Forged a new path, made it easier for number two and three youngest man.

Do you realize

he can run for president the next 10 elections and still be younger than Bernie Sanders?

Yep, he's not done.

And I think, look,

he brought decency, intellect, a lack of identity politics, in my view, public service.

And everyone said, I just,

you said earlier in a piece that Bloomberg was my favorite candidate.

Mayor Pete was my favorite candidate.

I just think Bloomberg has the best chance of winning.

But I think Mayor Pete demonstrates so much about what's wonderful about America and some of the progress we're making.

And I think he ran a wonderful campaign.

And there is a real dignity, and we've talked a lot about this, to leaving the stage while people are applauding versus too late.

He is the first person that's done that in this campaign.

You're 100% right.

And you didn't say anything about Tom Steyer.

I can't believe it.

He left too.

Yeah.

Whatever.

Anyway, remember, we love your questions.

He has a really nice tie.

If you have a question about a story you're hearing in the news, please email us at pivot at Voxmedia to be featured on the show.

Go for the credits, Scott Galloway.

Our producer is Rebecca Sinanis.

Our executive producer is Erica Anderson.

Special thanks to Rebecca Castro and Drew Burroughs.

If you like what you've heard, please download the podcast and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

And remember, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems.

We'll see you later this week for a breakdown of all things tech and business.

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