Tech meltdown in Iowa, Sheryl Sandberg’s engagement (Kara and Scott debate), One Medical and US healthcare disruption and a Tesla prediction

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And Kara, guess who I am?

This is my impression.

This is a podcast impression.

Listen closely.

Do you hear that?

Hold on.

I'll do it again.

I have no idea.

I'm tearing up paper.

I'm the speaker.

Oh, my.

Oh, my God.

Nancy Polo, say nice to me.

And we're all back.

Let's be honest, we're all basking in the warm glow of the majesty and honor of the Presidential Medal of Freedom being awarded to Rush Limbaugh.

That's right.

A man who calls women sluts because they advocate for government funding of birth control and refers to Obama as his favorite Negro.

Freedom!

Let freedom ring!

I can't even speak.

I don't even speak.

Back to Madam Speaker.

She has

what is arguably the most uncanny, either intuitive sense or the best advisors around recognizing opportunities for visual iconic moments?

Yeah.

She really

does it herself.

I asked her last time when she was tweaking about something, one of her 27 tweaks, and I said, Oh, who thought that up on your staff?

And she goes, Oh, I thought it up myself.

Like, she does think of them herself.

She's incredible.

It's interesting.

You know, it'd be many didn't

like it.

The 48% of America that's pro-Trump.

I mean,

it's pretty, I got a ton of pushback on it when I said I showed the film, said I wanted

the meme of

Speaker Pelosi tearing up the script, played it in my funeral, and I got huge playback.

You know what would be gangster, though, is if at the next State of the Union, she tore it up.

She socked pants.

She tore it up, and then slowly but surely, as the president was delivering his State of the Union, which hopefully never happens again, she just starts

it up and then slowly but surely starts eating the paper.

That would be gangster.

That would be gangster.

That would, no one would focus on what the president was saying.

Just bit by bit, just started eating the paper.

Our nation has degenerated into like a 13-year-old boy's bedroom.

It's just, this is just.

By the way, that was, I stole that joke from a woman named Bess Kolb.

I don't know what Bess does, but she's a genius.

Thank you, Bess Kolb.

I'd like that.

Oh, God.

Eats the paper.

What did you think of it?

By the way,

how old are we?

The State of the Union, I now find interesting viewing.

It was off 21%.

I thought it was really interesting.

What did you think of it?

Off.

I tweeted this thing.

You know, I'm the only person, as you know, that has watched all the apprentices.

This is exactly what happened with The Apprentice.

People got tired of the story, got tired of the narrative, the shittier, ever shittier narratives.

And

that's when it fell off.

This is exactly, this is what happens with him.

You get entertained.

He's a hot mess, but then the hot mess is like, this is exhausting, and I don't want to watch it anymore.

There was, let me ask you this: Beyond, there were two I found

incredibly offensive, upsetting moments.

What?

Which one?

Well, the first one was when the president, a man in his 70s, a man in Madam Speaker, a woman in her 70s, who both, regardless, put partisan politics aside, they're both important figures in the United States.

We're all Americans, when he basically rebuffed her hand.

I found that just

rattling, just sort of like, whoa.

Yeah, he learned that from Melania.

He got that.

There you go.

That's a good one.

The second was, and I don't know if anyone else noticed this,

but the whole reality, they show, there was a very moving moment and very upsetting.

It's all very emotionally manipulative when they showed a mother and

this beautiful young son who had lost.

her husband and father in his service in Iraq.

And it was very moving.

The son was trying to comfort the mother, who was obviously very upset.

And then a few minutes later, they had this bullshit reality TV moment where they bring one of the soldiers home and the wife and

the two kids weren't expecting it.

And the only thing I could think about was the other two who's like, dad wasn't going to come bursting through the door.

And I'm like, did anybody in the administration planning out these manipulative moments decide?

They don't care.

That might be kind of difficult

for the mother and the son to realize, well, they are crass.

Where's our dad?

Does our dad come out?

A lot of the military didn't like that.

A lot of people in the military didn't like that.

I thought it was very cheap.

You don't use them for that.

That's very cheap.

It's crass.

It's crass.

It's crass.

I'm sorry.

The whole thing was crass.

And Rush Limbo was the icing on the very toxic cake.

Anyway, Tesla's stock took a major tumble this week by nearly 18 percent.

Cars that were initially scheduled for delivery in early February were delayed due to the outbreak of the new coronavirus.

You know, this has been a stock that's been on a tear,

although the fact you didn't, you had been saying it was going to crash and it did not.

It went up further.

But coronavirus seems to be impacting it, along with other things.

Apple closed stores in China.

Obviously, there's a lot of high-level manufacturing being done there by Silicon Valley, especially Apple.

Any thoughts on this?

Sure, I mean, let's be fair, it's still up 100% in the last year.

And Tesla is a really, Tesla's an unusual phenomenon now.

Tesla is no longer an equity that represents a portion of ownership that trades based on fundamentals.

It's now become a currency.

And that is two groups of people get together and decide it has a certain value, and it's a currency, and it's not really based on any underlying fundamentals.

You had a two-day period this week where 60% of the float turned over, and 60% of owners don't decide the company is worth more or less in a 48-hour period.

You know, it's not worth, yesterday it wasn't worth 20% less than it was the day before.

The company is not worth 86% more than it was, I think, three or four months ago.

It has officially detached from how traditional equities are valued.

It's now become basically a speculative currency.

And it's strange, but it's also, there's really two stocks that have been able to detach from any previous valuations that somehow anchored or tethered the sector, and that is Amazon and then Netflix.

And now Tesla is the third.

And it's really interesting.

All around compelling founders, all around compelling.

CEO God Complex.

Also, very talented founders, each of them.

No doubt about it.

Each of those people are not like, oh, what a blowhard.

They're all really talented, each of them.

Yeah, it's the idolatry of innovators.

And what's interesting is it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy because now, I mean, Tesla is now worth more than the entire U.S.

auto industry.

And because they have access to such extraordinarily cheap capital, they can now probably make the types of investments that other auto companies can't make.

And it may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy where they're able to pull away from everybody else.

100%.

They've got to get it.

They ultimately have to get a business that works, such as Amazon did with AWS.

Ultimately, you can't keep doing it, but you could do it for a long time.

You certainly can.

And you're right.

The cheap capital gives them lots of opportunity.

And he's a very clever man, and so he will take advantage of this, absolutely.

But with coronavirus, very quickly, so I want to get to the shadow app.

When is this going to, what's going to do to investments?

People are really starting to focus on that now.

So in what could be argued will be the mother of all poorly aging comments.

I think coronavirus is wildly overinflated in terms of its impact on Americans.

We'll have 15 million people have the flu in the last 12 months, 8,000 died from it.

And I believe there's been nine identified cases of coronavirus in the United States.

And

when you have the administration making these bold announcements and saying the jobs are going to come back, and I don't want to,

it's almost hard to overreact to something like this because key is public education and maintaining it.

And, you know, everyone get away from the beach, evacuate when hurricanes come.

I get it.

But this to me seems, I think data does not foot to the media's hysteria over this.

And if you look at, if you actually look at coronavirus, it's quite infectious on a spectrum, but it has a low fatality rate.

And the bottom line is the people who die are old.

The median age of people who die from coronavirus so far is 70.

So if you're under the age of 60, it's not really a threat to you.

Not to say that that doesn't make it a threat, but it's not, I just, I just think it's, I think it's more hype than horror.

All right.

This is Scott's Culling of the Herd argument.

All right.

We'll move on.

There you go.

There you go.

Scott.

Sorry, Nana.

Sorry, Nana.

Next time.

I've had my cold for four weeks now.

This is like now today.

You're feeling good.

You You sound back in action right now.

No, it's just every day.

It's very like, I want to get on my Peloton and I cannot speak.

We'll get to Peloton later in a second.

But first, let's go to Shadow App, the Iowa caucus debacle.

I wrote a big column on it, obviously, where tech meets politics in this 2020 race.

The Iowa Democratic Party, for those who don't know it, used an app called Shadow to count votes.

It was so glitchy that the results of the caucus were not calculated until well into the next day.

Actually, I think they're still counting them.

Obviously, Republicans use the moment to tout conspiracy theories about rigged results.

And it turned out it was owned, although they tried to sort of distance themselves from it by another group called Acronym, which was a group of we're going to beat Brad Parcell, Democrats, a lot of them from Obama and Clinton administrations, and we're going to get back.

We're going to do our digital thing.

And obviously, they did not do their digital thing.

A lot of it had to do with connectivity.

It's not clear, but the app just didn't work, and now it's been removed from Nevada races and everything else.

So

this is really fascinating.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit about

the mix between tech and politics, because I do think we should be voting on phones.

We should probably be more digitized with lots of backup systems, but this puts a black eye on that for sure, especially when the prospect of hacking hangs over everything.

But I don't know much about acronym.

Can you explain?

First off, do you think this is good or bad?

Do you think this is shadowy or it's about time the Democrats actually started hitting back with their own gangster digital underhanded?

Well, they aren't.

You know, this acronym is a progressive nonprofit.

There was lots of stories about it.

There's a lot of previous Hillary Clinton staffers.

There's some Obama people.

It's this idea that, first of all, these names are just like someone who's like, they're like villains in a Marvel movie.

You put money into this nonprofit, and it was supposed to be doing all kinds of things to hit back at the Trump machine.

They tried to distance themselves, saying that they were merely an investor, although

other things on their website that were saved

show that they had a lot more linkage to this group.

In any case, it's the Democrats being ⁇ and I wrote a column saying, look, it's a myth that Democrats are better at tech than Republicans.

Republicans are great at tech.

And I was talking

20 years ago, 15 years ago, I interviewed Ralph Reed because he was using email and other things more effectively than the conservatives and the evangelicals because they were outside the mainstream media.

They learned how to use these tools.

And

whatever you think of Brad Parcell, who runs the Trump campaign, they're good at this, even through nefarious means, anything you can do, but they're very good at targeting, micro-targeting, lying, putting in like lots of messaging that is very effective.

And the Democrats just sort of sit there looking as if they are internet-y, but they're not.

They're not as much.

So, you know, the mother of all terrible brand moves, I always say the worst brand move of the year, and there's one of the tops, is the Democratic National Committee for Iowa, or the Iowa Democrats.

The debacle in Iowa, think about this, to some of the most important people in the world shaping legislation around vets, seniors,

sitting in on confidential intelligence briefings, have probably spent more time in Iowa over the last 12 months.

I mean, Marco Rubio is already starting to go to Iowa in hopes that 2024, someone will decide he should finally be a contender for president.

These people have spent so much time eating fried Snickers bars and

all they're trying to do, and they've probably spent, I don't know, somewhere between $100 million and a quarter of a billion billion dollars they have spent more time in Iowa than probably anywhere in the world outside of their home states or D.C.

such that they can get momentum and an early indicator that they should be the next president yeah and Iowa literally when I'm doing math with my nine-year-old when things get tough occasionally he pulls out his fingers and he looks at the sky and he starts using his fingers I'm suggesting my nine-year-old should should should run the Iowa caucuses in four years because it couldn't be much worse than what has happened.

The way it's set up is so just not, you know, this is why Bloomberg is interesting, whether he can sweep in and just knock them all out on Super Tuesday.

A lot of people think he can, a lot of people think he can't, but he's certainly ripe for disruption the way this is done.

And they always do it.

This is the way it's done.

We have to go to these like pancake breakfasts.

And I think retail politics is important in going to give speeches.

And I think actually more interesting is what Trump's done in these rallies.

You know, not everyone can do these.

That's an interesting thing, an old-timey kind of thing to do and works.

Have you been to Iowa?

I have.

I've driven through it.

Okay, I'm sorry.

That's that is summarizes Iowa's role in the United States.

I've driven through it.

I've been to Iowa.

I've been to Iowa.

You want to know, again, everything we do in our society.

Des Moines is very lovely, but go ahead, sorry.

Everything we do in this society is rigged such as there's a transfer of stakeholder value and power from the young and people of color to old white people.

So let's talk about the caucuses.

Iowa, Iowa, population of Chicago, 90%

white,

skews older.

And you can't help it if you're a presidential candidate.

But when you spend all this time in town halls with older white people, you start talking about the fact that Social Security is sacrosanct.

No, it isn't.

Social Security is the largest transfer of stakeholder, of money to the wealthiest generation in history, and that's senior U.S.

citizens.

We should absolutely be means testing

and raising the age.

You're like very much ice, put them on the iceberg kind of thing and ice flow.

I'm very much about, call me crazy, but young people are the future.

We need to stop robbing from them.

Anyways, I hope so.

Okay, so that's where everyone is focused.

That's where every presidential candidate is listening and being influenced.

And then where do they go next?

To the second oldest state in the union.

New Hampshire, which also happens to be 92% white.

And then what do you know?

Our policies, our legislation, the shaping of the narrative around U.S.

politics is what do you know all about old white people?

Iowa, you are so fucking done.

You are so overdue to not have the influence you have in our national politics.

Mississippi has the same population.

So technically it's just as important.

And 58% of Mississippi is white.

62% of America is white.

Mississippi would be a much better place to start shaping the narrative around what America needs in terms of its policy than fucking Iowa.

Anyways, that's my Iowa rant.

Something tells me I'm not welcome at Hawkeye Games.

I see that, Iowa, old people,

you have a war on old people, Scott Galloway.

Well, there's been a war on normal and young people.

Someone's got to punch back.

Fair.

Yeah, yeah.

Because both of us are the youngest of people there are.

Listen to me.

We had an argument.

Speaking of arguments, I don't agree with you on all of this.

I think some of it needs to change.

We're going to talk about it.

Facebook's 16th birthday this week.

We had an argument about Cheryl Sandberg's engagement announcement.

Yeah, so go ahead.

She made an engagement announcement in People magazine.

She's getting married to this guy that she's met.

He seems lovely, by the way.

He seems lovely.

Scott, you tweeted, Cheryl Sandberg is in.

He is lovely.

I've met him once or twice.

Scott, you tweeted, Cheryl Sandberg is engaged, seems like a nice guy.

Everyone deserves a moment of joy and privacy.

Okay, moment over.

Guess they won't be honeymooning in Canada where she has a standing summons.

Scott, could you just say that?

Okay, so make your point.

When you're in the middle of the day,

my point is, let us focus on what she's done as a business person and not bleed into her personal life.

You know how I am with this.

When Bill Maher went after Mark Zuckerberg's sweatshirt and his haircut, that it makes him look like whatever.

They think he looks like a Roman emperor or whatever.

I just think it's not, like, let's focus on him.

When we start to take these little digs at their personal lives,

it diminishes our argument, which needs to be made about their shitty behavior as business people.

And so

I think that that's why I just like, just don't.

Like, there's so much more to attack them on and fairly that it does, you don't need to also drag in this guy and everything else.

Now, you make your argument.

Well, I think that's a fair point.

I apologize, and I'm learning from it.

Just kidding.

Just kidding.

What?

Just kidding.

Well, let me ask you this.

When you coordinate, when 30 or 90 of your 900-person PR comms team coordinate with People Magazine a photo essay using your engagement as a means of fabric softener for the harm you and your boss continue to levy against the U.S., you don't think that's fair game?

I don't think it's linked.

I don't think she used 30 people.

I think she has her own PR.

This is a personal thing.

I don't think it was a face.

There wasn't that much mentioned about Facebook.

It was about her husband dying.

Let me just be clear.

He was a very good friend of mine.

So I think that it wasn't by Facebook.

I don't think it had a lot to do with Facebook.

But I understand.

You're seeing she's trying to like soften up her image because of the other stuff.

And that's a good question.

Why is she doing that?

What is going on here?

I wouldn't, maybe people knew about it and she wanted to get ahead of it.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I think there was a note out that I'm getting married.

I hadn't put a note out that I had married.

I wasn't doing it for PR.

You're getting married soon.

And if you had invited Vogan to do a photo essay on your wedding the same day you also tried to hide a Facebook update posting saying that privacy was never your intention, the same day that the Epoch Times got circulation on Facebook saying there was voter fraud in Iowa to create, again,

more insecurity and more corruption around our elections.

And people mocked the vogue of what you talked about in Vogue after you coordinated with them at your wedding.

It wouldn't be about your divorce.

It would be,

in my view, this has nothing to do with her personal tragedy of several years ago.

This is about her coordinating, This is about her coordinating a PR orgy to try and soften the damage she's leving every day.

And her boss, you're right.

But I don't, I don't, this is public consumption.

To be honest, I think your argument would be more piercing if you had said to me, Scott, when you mock Jeff Bezos around his personal things around

his girlfriend's brother suing him for defamation.

That's a lawsuit that's impacting his business.

This is like this is

because he.

Yes.

Yes, I get that.

But I don't

people.

I can't imagine they were sitting in a room saying, okay, everyone hates Facebook.

What do we do?

Let's put Cheryl's back in the face.

That's exactly what they do every day.

No, they do.

That's exactly what they do.

I don't know.

Maybe I'm just, I just don't think that would be.

Who would agree to have their personal so if she had that I don't know hold on hold on if she something else is afoot maybe maybe something else well this is a theory and I want you to go on but first if she had said if she had said, or her PR people had called media outlets and said, Look, Cheryl's been through a lot, and we want to keep her personal life and her engagement and her wedding kind out of the press, I think everyone would have respected that.

She's not Rihanna, she's not that interesting.

But instead, they say, Let's do a photo essay.

Did you read that People magazine article that went into detail about how, on their engagement trip, they took both sets of parents and their five kids to a refugee camp in Greece and then announced a $2.5 million?

I mean, it was just, make them stop, Kara.

Make them stop.

I have no control.

You

are, I think you are

very loyal, and you have this earned and warranted and important position as the left tackle protecting a group of people who have.

No, are you kidding?

Have you read My New York Times?

I literally smack Facebook regularly.

I'm not talking about Facebook.

I'm talking about women in tech.

It's important that people, that you have.

I literally was.

You have a gag reflex because I didn't know you cared about her ex.

I didn't even know you know him.

You have a fairly good idea.

Here's where I have a

person who actually took Marissa Mayer down.

So, and I got endless shit for it because she's one of the few.

I was hard.

That's not true.

That is not true.

In this case, I think Cheryl needs absolute criticism for she and Mark together about what has happened at Facebook.

I don't care about her engagement.

I don't think it should be a subject of discussion.

We're going to discuss it.

And I just tell her that.

Tell her that.

Keep it to yourself, Cheryl.

We're happy for you.

Keep it to yourself.

Well, you know what?

That's her decision.

I don't, again, that's not my business.

And the question is, are you as hard on Zuckerberg as you are personally on Samberg?

You did not talk about his haircut.

You did not talk about his.

I don't attack you.

I think that's off limits.

I don't think you make fun of people's physical attributes.

I've never made fun of you.

Remember when he was doing the PR around his baby and speaking Chinese?

I didn't hear you pipe up.

Oh, but you did hear me.

When you invited me to code, I got on a stage

at your event.

And what did I do?

i took people through an argument based on his statements accusing him of being a sociopath i am not a licensed clinician

so i called him i called him i laid out an argument in public on video which got i don't know 200 000 views such that more people continue to pay twelve thousand dollars to come to the ultimate concave of white people called code which i'm happy to go to

And I called him a sociopath, but that didn't bother you.

That didn't bother you.

No, because you're talking about his business.

You're talking about his business.

No, No, I'm not.

I just

talked about his wife and baby.

You have never, nor should you.

And if you do, I'm going to have to speak to you very strongly.

He has the good judgment not to invite People Magazine to do photo essays on you.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

There was one.

Wrong, you would be.

They did.

They did a whole thing.

There was a baby.

I mocked the Halloween outfits that he had, that he published with him and his daughter.

It's just so weird to be trying to convince you that I've been cruel to other people.

Look, we're going to disagree on this, but let me get to what Zuckerberg said this week when he was announcing

that he still is wrapping himself in free expression and stuff like that.

And this is a quote that this needs to be attacked.

This is a new approach.

I think we're going to piss a lot of people off, but frankly, the old approach was pissing a lot of people off, too.

Let's try something different.

We're going to be honest.

I just, my head blew off.

I'm serious.

Somebody.

Say more.

I just am like, what are you talking about?

First of all, stop wrapping yourself in this free expression thing and conflating all kinds of things.

The second thing is going to be honest now.

Like we're going to be like they aren't, but they're fundamentally dishonest as a company and then piss a lot of people off, but frankly, it was pissing a lot of people.

I'm like, that's the attitude that you have?

Like, no, no, no.

You have like, you don't have to be in constant frustration of I'm sorry, but just like, it's such an obnoxious, it's such an obnoxious silica.

I'm surprised because I've never seen that.

It's such a victimization attitude where he's not.

Which is a key component of sociopathy.

I'm the victim.

Well,

I'm the victim.

Only, and I can save us, and you don't understand me.

And I mean, it's just literally,

and I was deeply disappointed.

He's decided to do the brazen it out approach, which I think works for some people.

And I don't think it's going to work for him.

It works for Trump.

He's a big hot mess.

He makes a mess.

But there's very few people this works for.

And I don't, I just couldn't see an adult like Tim Cook do this or Reed Hastings or Jeff Bezos.

You know what I mean?

I liked when Jeff punched back at the National Enquirer, but that was appropriate.

So in other words, just back off of Cheryl's fiancé.

Just back off of him.

Just come.

I'm angry and broken.

We just disagree.

We just disagree.

I think you have an incredible ability to have insight into things, and I think it takes away from your insights.

I think people, you open yourself up to attacks when you do this, and you needn't because you have so much fodder, so much stuff you can throw.

You don't need to throw that.

That's just my thing.

I'm trying to obfuscate the argument with compliments.

Okay.

You're so insightful and deep.

I think there's something else going on here.

Maybe she's thinking of leaving the company.

I don't know.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You have a theory.

You have a theory that this part, this is part of the idea

that she's going to leave.

I think she's trying to carve out an image.

I don't know.

Maybe not.

She said, she's told me directly she's going to stay until it's fixed.

So I don't know.

You know, and she said that publicly.

I don't know.

I agree with you.

I think she's going to declare victory on leave.

I think she's very focused on her manicuring

her own brand.

I think she has political ambitions.

And she's...

Well, no, I think her brand's been hurt rather.

Oh, it'll never happen, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have ambitions.

Like I said, Senator Rubin.

I don't think she did.

I've been the one that said she does not.

She wasn't going to run for politics, but that was me.

I was the only one that was saying that.

But we'll see.

We'll see.

Anyway, we're going to first go, we can talk about Huawei, but let's not do that because we don't have enough time here.

We've talked enough about it.

We've sucked it up with Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg's personal lives.

All right, Scott, we've got to take a quick break.

We'll be right back with listener mail and wins and fails and predictions.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

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 Sober, he's going to tell 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.

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all right we're back i'm here with scott galloway on pivot let's get into some listener mail scott you got you got i can't believe i'm gonna be a mailman you you got mail

hello karen scott my name is brian calling in from toronto my question is about one medical the alphabet backed patient care disruptor what are your thoughts about the company and the ipo debut Do you believe the business model is sustainable and scalable?

And what's your assessment of the concierge medicine industry?

Thank you very much.

Love the podcast.

Cheers.

So Scott, what do you think about this one medical thing?

Now, I just went to one of those places.

It wasn't one medical, and I think they're great.

I actually find them very helpful.

But what do you think about this business?

Because it's a really interesting, you can see, and you know, this is Alphabet, this is Google here, Amazon's opposite is getting in the healthcare business.

It definitely needs to be streamlined, especially on things like flu or very easy things to solve.

So what do you think?

What do you think about this disruption?

Well,

I think

it's a gangster idea.

And what I've come to believe around business is that even more important than the execution of the company itself is the industry it's disrupting.

And the two most disruptible industries in the world right now are number two is education, my industry where we have become drunk on luxury brands, have a small series of monopolies, and are basically preying on the hopes and dreams of parents such that we charge them 95% gross margin

to hopefully certify their children to have the same opportunities we all had for a fraction of the money.

But, anyways, the most disruptible industry in the world, hands down, is U.S.

healthcare.

And what's interesting, though, is the question around healthcare is: will the same thing happen to healthcare that has happened to the media industry and is now happening to shipping and fulfillment?

And in that, as it becomes featurized, and what I mean by that is that a big player, a series of big players, including Google, Apple, Amazon, come in and start offering healthcare services at a kind of break-even or even a loss, such that they can increase the MPS, increase the loyalty, and increase another business that drives more shareholder value.

So

sell other things, right?

100%.

So Apple can go into original scripted television and spend $4.5 billion so they can sell more iPhones.

Amazon spends $9 billion on original scripted television such that more people

so it goes from 72% of homes to 77%.

In addition, renewal rates, renewal rates at Amazon Prime since they launched Prime Video have gone from 78% to 92%, which has probably added $100 billion in market cap.

So

could the healthcare industry become the new feature of another business industry?

So healthcare as marketing ham.

Interesting.

Healthcare as marketing ham.

That's right.

Healthcare as a service.

What do you think?

No, it's true.

I think it's true.

I remember talking to Jill Soloway once, and

she was talking about her experience at Amazon to me.

We were just chatting about her stuff, why she went there and things like that.

And one of the things I said is you should get more money because you're helping them sell more toilet paper.

Like, do you understand?

Like, you should get a VIG of the toilet paper.

And she was laughing.

I'm like, no, really.

This is not about your programming.

It's about selling toilet paper.

It's like it's having a, they're having a relationship with a customer and you're just an added plus kind of stuff, which I thought was, and she had never thought of it that way, but it was, I was like, you hardly matter.

Like, you, they're happy to have it.

And it's good for people who like your wonderful entertainment.

But it's really about that.

And so, yeah, this, these, these, these, they've been sort of bumping along all these things.

You know, Steve Case was involved in one of these minute clinics that were in Walgreens.

And you know, you'd think the pharmacy industry would own this area.

And they do.

They have these minute clinics, but they're not very good.

But these standalone one medicals and CityMed, I think there's a CityMed MD or something like that.

I had such a good experience.

And

all I wanted wanted to do was find out if I had strep throat so I could take the right drugs.

And it was simple, it was fast, it was easy.

It was not, you know, it really was.

And I was like,

there's lots of these things happening.

It's just that none of them has been backed by a, like, it hasn't been big yet.

Do you know what I mean?

This is how people get it.

Although, I think the whole trend is a good one for consumers because you do get, like, most illnesses are small, like a strep or a flu, and easily fixed.

And the whole system, what happens is you get so sick, sick, you go to the hospital and that's like a horrible

situation.

But I do think it's an interesting,

once like an Amazon gets in here or a Google, crazy.

It's kind of crazy.

That could be interesting.

And then, of course, the data, the data, the data, the data.

Well, here's the thing.

There's good and there's bad.

The good news is, you know, never have a group of people stuck their chin out further than the U.S.

healthcare industry, the insurance industry,

the drug industry.

So it's sort of like we welcome the disruption.

It's a a cat industry with Uber, right?

Yeah, the bad news, though, is that the majority of the shareholder value that's going to, you're going to hear this enormous sucking sound out of the healthcare industry, which is one of the most valuable industries in the world.

And that's a good thing.

They need to be disrupted.

Consumers will probably recognize some of

that disruptive value transition.

But all of that value, that shareholder value, is going to go to the same people it's always going to.

It's going to go to the big tech guys.

Just the same way if you'd said, who's going to create the most value through

the witcher and a show called the mandalorian you wouldn't say disney and apple you wouldn't say that the coolest new comedy fleabag who would that accreted value to 10 years ago you wouldn't say oh amazon you would have said wait isn't amazon gonna buy macy's or something so you have entire industries being disrupted which you could argue is a good thing we need we need job destruction for innovators we need to reinvent industries but all that value is going to the same small number of companies that by the way don't pay their taxes by the way overrun Washington,

by the way, let their platforms be weaponized.

So there's good and bad here, and we need smart people to step in and figure out where the externalities are.

They're coming in.

This is exactly what I would do if I was each of those three kinds.

It would be Apple, Amazon, and Google, really.

Facebook doesn't seem to be wandering around this area, but

it certainly could.

Wins and fails.

Wins and fails.

I'm going to

do mine first.

Spotify buying Bill Simmons the ringer, largely because it's good for Kara and Scott.

Do you know what the purchase price was?

I have heard $100 million, but I don't know.

Yeah, I heard $90 or $100 million, too.

Yeah.

It's the Spotify's fourth major podcast acquisition.

They'll do the best.

Do they offer health insurance?

They do.

Hello, Spotify.

Kara and Scott are for sale.

So that was great for Bill.

We had talked about this.

You know, I think he had some issues around that company.

There was a union thing going on.

I suspect he didn't like running things.

I know that feeling.

And so this puts me, it'll be interesting to see how they manage.

My issue is, look, it could be, again, a hot mess inside Spotify with all these different pods, like if they don't organize them correctly.

But it makes sense on Spotify's part to try to buy up different things to differentiate themselves.

But I hope they organize it properly because I can just see like Gimlet.

I think Simmons thing is going to be separate from Gimlet.

It just, it feels a little bit like, oh, is this could be a problematic

mess inside the company.

But otherwise, I think it's great for Bill Sims.

I think his products are great.

And so it's interesting that he started this just a few years ago and he's selling, I think it's 40 to 50, I forget how many podcasts he has, but he has a lot.

And they're all in sports, a lot of sports-oriented stuff.

And my fail is, it's not my fail, is Peloton did really well,

which is a plus, but that it seemed to have affected SoulCycle's profits.

And you know, as you know, I have this now.

I love SoulCycle and

the idiot who owned it, gave all this money to Trump, and I stopped using it.

But it had its biggest year-over-year sales decline on record,

especially in December because of the people buying Pelotons and stuff.

And

you could see that coming.

So that's my two.

It's a fail for CellCycle not to have sold a bike, for example, and done this.

And you do both.

You have a CellCycle.

Have you found your own?

No, I don't go to CellCycle at all.

I refuse to give that guy money.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, but even distinctive to that,

do you personally see that trend moving to in-home Peloton versus I do?

I think they're really good.

I think these things are interesting for people who can afford them, obviously.

Not everyone can do it.

I also joined the Y this week because I think the Y is great and I want my kids to go there.

And I, you know, I just think it's a good, I like community-based things like that.

So,

you know, it's of a certain thing.

I like to go out and do things with people.

So

I think it's definitely a trend then, for sure.

Especially they do a beautiful job.

Peloton.

Let's all go to Scotts and beat them with a hammer.

Get on my Peloton.

Here, Scott, sit on my Peloton.

Let me put it up to 50.

So

anyway, so yes, I do think it's a trend, but we can talk about another day.

What are your wins and fails?

My win was, I watched, did you see this in a New Hampshire town hall?

Yes, I did last night.

Yes.

I thought there was some really, I thought there were two powerful moments.

First off, I appreciate that Andrew Yang is calling out Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg per year comments.

I've been disappointed that thus far there really hasn't been a lot of focus on big tech.

And I think they're so busy that it's difficult to learn and be nuanced.

And they're also scared to kind of poke the bear.

These companies are very powerful and have a lot of money.

So I appreciate Andrew Yang calling out.

Someone else did.

Oh, did they?

I just saw the Yang one.

The other one for me was Senator Warren, I thought, had a very powerful moment that didn't get that much attention.

And

she talked about

She talked about the AIDS crisis in the context of the opioid crisis and created and said that there was a lot we could learn from the AIDS crisis and that is similar to opioids, that part of of the reason the government hadn't intervened and provided the funding and the education and kind of the heft and the mojo

to push back on these tragedies.

And you need government intervention here.

You need the full heft and might and dignity of the greatest fighting force in history, and that's the U.S.

government.

And the reason it had taken too long with opioids was similar to AIDS, and that is there's a stigma around both of these things.

And she brought up how a young man named Ryan White changed everything.

And it immediately took me back to when I first heard about and learned about Ryan White and just how it really like what a dignified young man he was.

Punched you in the gut and it kind of changed everything.

And I thought as a kid, I mean, they should have been doing it longer.

There was just no, there was just regardless of your religion, regardless of whatever bigoted fucked up in the head reasons you had to not feel sorry for certain.

certain cohorts that were getting ravaged by this plague, you just couldn't ignore Ryan White.

You just couldn't ignore it.

You couldn't turn away from it.

And that's when things change in the Ryan White Act.

And

we have pushed back in a big way.

The warm hand of science has lifted a lot of people up

from HIV, and it's been a huge, a huge victory, albeit too late.

And Senator Warren said we tend to be a dollar short and a day late on these things.

And last year, more people died from opioids than died during the peak of the AIDS crisis in the mid-90s.

And she used data, compassion.

compassion, she has a plan.

She's fantastic.

She's improved so drastically.

She's so qualified to be president.

You sit there and you're like,

she has incredible blue flame thinking.

She's a leader.

She's thoughtful.

She's like Jeb Bartlett.

I'm like, she's a lady Jeb Bartlett.

She's an impressive woman.

Super.

She is.

And it's just depressing that people just have to focus on what they don't like about her.

She's really quite a brilliant person.

I think she's jammed too far over to the left.

She shouldn't have because she's really not actually as left.

Open borders and Medicare for all have killed it.

She's

really should have

not because she's really quite a coward.

Healthcare.

You know what I mean?

She should have been true to herself.

She's the smartest person in the room.

She reminds me a little bit.

I mean, obviously, a different, kind of a different character in moral fabric, but she reminds me of Bill Clinton.

I think when Elizabeth Warren shows up, it goes into any room.

There's a good chance she knows more about the topic than anyone else in the room.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But

I went to those two.

Speaking of which, I'm going to do very quick fail, which was the Barnes ⁇ Noble diverse editions for young people.

I do want to mention, this was depressing to see.

They used AI to scan the inside of books where there was a specific reference repress being white, and they didn't change that, but

they literally put people of color on the front.

And it was just ridiculous.

It was ridiculous for Black History Month, and it was

just insane not to just

get more people of color as writers, publish more, put them on stores, feature them.

It was like, this was just, they they should be elevating narratives that reflect these stories.

And they just put, it just was depressing.

I was sort of like, who in the, what room, what did that happen in, where they thought this was a good idea?

It was just, I was just, I was shocked by how in this day and age, someone would do something as dumb and pap as that.

So thank you.

I'm going to just, it was really sad.

Yeah, that seemed like,

how did that get through?

I want to be in that room where I would have been like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

My fail, my fail is, I love the the term.

You have the straight term.

You called, Pete Buddhist using a non-carbonated gay, which I always use the term non-carbonated or the Diaco version of.

Casper is pricing today.

I think Casper is sort of the non-carbonated, I don't want to call it WeWork.

It's more like the non-carbonated Blue Apron.

Do you remember when Blue Apron went public?

It was a cute brand, kind of a nice business, aspirational.

Business made no sense.

So Casper, Casper is going public.

They initially said they were going to price it $17 to $19 a share.

They're saying they're pricing at $12 a share, which gives it a market cap of $500 million.

Its last round was at $1.1 billion.

And it's becoming a bit of a poster child for how the froth around taking a bad business, putting a bright young management team on top of it, putting VCs behind it, calling it disruptive, using the term technology 130 times

makes a great company or a company worth over a billion dollars.

And it doesn't.

And I think this company, if it gets out, and I guess it is going to get out,

it's going to be down 40% in the next six months.

This business makes absolutely no sense.

You did predict it wasn't going to go public, but it's going for it, Scott.

It's saying, screw you.

We'll see.

I said if it did, to be fair, I said if it gets public, it's off 50% in the first 12 months.

You're going to know that by our next show.

But until then, what is it?

Well, not on the first week.

Hold on.

Hold on.

I want to put my timing around this stuff.

I don't think.

Should we move to predictions?

Anyways, Casper, Casper's a loss.

No, Casper is not a prediction.

So you think it's going to go out at a much less and then drop precipitously?

It might hold because Goldman will do a good job of marketing.

Goldman's now running around institutions and saying, I'll get you in Casper, but you can't sell.

They're going to try and find people who won't sell for a while.

They're going to constrict the float to try and create

artificial demand and keep it artificially up.

But once the lockup on those things come out, everyone of Casper, all the employees are going, yay, yay.

And then calling the burger and going, when is my lockup done here?

When can I sell it?

There's a lot of companies like Casper.

There's so many.

Jewel, there was a good story in BuzzFeed about Jewel today.

All the mess that is now in terms of valuations.

All right, what's your prediction?

So this is, you like these quizzes we were doing.

I'm going to give you a quiz, and it's a little bit, it kind of moves your prediction about Tesla.

And it's sort of a, I think it's sort of a Inspector Clusau or a Clue quiz.

How could Tesla, and this is my prediction, how could Tesla be the catalyst?

Or a product, I'll give you a hint, a product from Tesla.

How could a product from Tesla ultimately be the catalyst or the spark of an economic crisis?

What?

What is this?

I don't know.

You don't know.

No, I don't know.

Tell me.

Please illuminate me.

Okay, this is my prediction.

In the next, I don't know,

I'm usually pretty good with predictions.

It's a timing where I get it off.

But I think in the next two to five years, Tesla launches a coin.

Because if you look at the people who are responsible and are attracted to Tesla stock, it's the same crypto weirdos.

It is literally the same demographic.

My brother has a Tesla, but okay.

All right.

I have a Tesla too.

So Elon Musk is a visionary, super intelligent, and he is unafraid, and he is going to launch a Tesla coin.

And the Tesla coin is going to become this crazy speculative currency.

And I used to think that Amazon was going to launch a stable coin.

Now I believe that Tesla is going to wade into the waters and launch their own coin.

It's going to become the speculative asset, the likes of which we've never seen before, which will be good for Tesla and the initial initial issuers of the coin.

And I still don't entirely understand the dynamics behind issuing a coin and how they limit supply.

And some coins are based on a right to purchase a product, which would obviously foot well to Tesla.

But if Tesla launched a coin and every coin gave you the opportunity to be first in line for their upcoming products and created a currency, if you will, which is just when two people agree that a certain fiat vehicle has value, the Tesla coin could go after the monopoly that is now controlled by Bitcoin.

So my prediction is Tesla in the next several years is going to launch a coin.

That is a crazy prediction, Scott.

I like it.

Not Amazon.

Not Amazon.

That's right.

Well, the stable coin from Amazon would be really interesting, too.

I think it could be Amazon, a stable coin, but I think...

What do you get for your Amazon coin?

Well, here's the thing.

You can't, if it represents in any way ownership, it has to go through the SEC.

And the SEC has said 90% of all coins are fraud, and places like Coinbase are basically trading in fraud other than Bitcoin.

The only one that's survived and people can get their money out of has been Bitcoin, and every other coin has ended up being just a pump and dump.

fraud.

So they're very, very worried about these coins.

So it can't represent ownership in an asset because then technically it becomes a security subject to regulation.

And Facebook

tried to make it subject to regulation and make it backed by a currency, a basket of currencies, a genius idea, a regulatory body.

They did everything right, except unfortunately it's from people you can't trust who

prostitute their personal events and in People magazine to soften their danger.

But anyway, sorry about that.

Sorry about that.

Back to the Tesla coin.

Tesla could potentially say, all right, in exchange for a coin, you get to be front of the line on any upcoming products, which would just be an excuse to create some sort of initial value.

And then traders would come in on both sides, and you could see this coin turn into a global, basically a default currency.

And he's the guy that could probably, he's not only smart smart enough and visionary to do it, he's got kind of the, he's got the backbone and the sack to do it.

This would be pretty, I think Amazon's board might go, I don't know, this could be scary.

You know, Tesla's board is Elon Musk and Elon Musk.

So

anyways, I think the Tesla coin is coming our way.

All right, Tesla.

That's a big prediction, Scott Gallery.

I like, speaking of a sack, that was a really big prediction.

Big prediction.

Big prediction.

The dog was not fixed.

The owner said, let let him roll.

Let him run.

He runs to the park on his own.

You did not fix him.

You have been given another week before I come up there and hurt you so that you have a catastrophic illness.

Anyway, Scott,

you need to read our credits.

You need to read our colours.

Rebecca Sinanis is our producer.

Our executive producer is Erica Anderson.

Special thanks to Drew Burroughs and Rebecca Castro.

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