The FTC and DOJ are Stayin' Alive, and YouTube backtracks on bigotry

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This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Gallery.

Kara asks me what my mood is.

What's your mood?

Kara?

What?

My mood is not good.

What?

It's not great.

It's disco, Kara.

That's right.

Those monopolies, those job-destroying sociopaths and their billion-dollar beards.

Well, guess what?

The greatest source of good in the history of mankind, last name Sam, first man uncle, is coming for their bitch asses.

As Tony Montagna said,

say hello to my little friend.

That's right.

What is his little friend?

As Robin Williams.

As Robin Williams said to Robert De Niro in Awakening, it's fantastic.

Oh my God, we're going to get all the movies.

When he woke up from a coma, when he woke up from a coma, welcome back, FTC and DOJ.

Welcome back.

As Jeff Ehrenberg said to me in the shower in the ninth grade after P, when he pointed down and he said, what are those?

And I said, testicles.

And he said, well, why don't you use them?

Fantastic.

The FTC and the DOJ have looked at each other and they've said, I don't know what are those.

Let's use them.

Oh, my.

Welcome back, DOJ.

You know, it's just

you have to compare it to a penis.

Okay, all right.

It's just a law, antitrust law.

So exciting.

All kinds of investigatory subpoenas.

And I know that you're going to make some word thing with that.

But it's not a subpoenas.

It's a subpoena.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You're learning.

Thank you.

You're learning.

You're learning.

You drag me down into the

dirt.

I'm so classy.

How pathetic is it that that is the best thing that happened to me this week?

Oh my God.

No, we had a book party for you, Scott.

I traveled to New York to go to your book party and have lunch with you.

It was nice.

That was very nice.

I appreciate that.

But back to

this.

Sorry, regulation.

Explain for the people what's happening.

And I wrote a column you insulted.

You did.

You did.

Well, first off, not a lot has happened.

This is strange, right?

The DOJ and the FTC have gone on background, as far as I can tell, to basically say, all right, this is how we're dividing and conquering.

The FDC is going to take on Facebook and Amazon, and the DOJ is going to go after Google.

And then you wrote an article and summarize what kind of your basic points there.

You're sort of not a, I don't want to say you're not a fan of this, but you have some concerns.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Because they've been in a coma.

So why now?

It's like all the politicians jump on now.

It's a good, you know, soundbite thing.

And I was like wondering what they've been doing while these companies have gathered power.

And I found a column I wrote a decade ago warning them of this.

So I'm sort of like wondering why they suddenly are paying attention and it worries me that they're going to be too draconian or not do it right.

And I don't mean to say there shouldn't be regulation at all.

So there's a big difference, though, between regulation and antitrust, right?

Right.

Antitrust is a form of regulation.

But antitrust would, you know, in my view, we've talked a lot about this, solve a lot of the problems, right?

So I think the way you solve a lot of the privacy, a lot of the weaponization of these platforms, a lot of the job destruction is by turning Google into its own entity.

And in the first strategy meeting of Google as an independent or YouTube as an independent company, they say, I know, let's get into search.

And overnight, we have another player, maybe 20 or 30% share.

In the same meeting at Google, they say, I know, let's get into video.

And maybe one of them decides as a means of differentiating from the other, we're going to go ahead and make this a safe place for your teenagers.

We're going to go ahead and decide and come out of the closet as what we've been all along in that as a media company.

And we're going to, in fact, have some editorial discretion and decide when people start calling people fags or when they start saying things like someone that white nationalists aren't that bad, that we're just going to go ahead and pull that content down and deal with the ramifications.

And so, this, I think, a lot of the answers, not all of them, but 60 to 70 percent, come from competition.

And the DOJ and FTC, it's their job to ensure that happens.

So

I'm actually really optimistic around that.

You gave an argument yesterday when you were on the Twitter about why more breaking these things up.

I'm a little bit nervous about that too.

You're on the Elizabeth Warren train on that one.

No, she's on my train, boss.

All right.

She's literally on my train.

No, she's not.

Literally, like a small portion of her brain is smarter than the both of us put together.

But move along.

That's a fair point.

I'm sorry.

So, what was the point you asked?

You were talking about breaking them up creates economic opportunity for these companies and their investors.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, the markets got it wrong.

When this was announced earlier in the week, the big tech combined shed about somewhere between $70 and I don't know, $90 billion of market capitalization.

And if you were to look empirically at what happens when these companies get busted up, we inherently almost always find that in Bell Labs, when ATT got broken up, they were suppressing and sequestering data and optics and sell from the core business because they didn't need to because they were a monopoly.

So PayPal is now worth a lot more than eBay.

The aluminum companies were worth a lot more separated than they were as these small, you know, kind of duopolies or oligopolies.

So the market's got it wrong.

The greatest, I think one of the greatest creations in shareholder value is going to happen over the next, and I'm already skipping my prediction, but I think over the next 90 to 180 days, smart analysts are going to start to get their pencils out and realize that the sum of the hole here is less than the sum of its parts.

And that AWS on its own is one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world.

YouTube gets more innovative.

That Instagram and WhatsApp are going to be incredibly valuable companies.

And the shareholders of the recently broken up companies will own large components of these businesses.

So you think it's economically a good idea to break them all up.

But the focus is mostly on Google and Facebook, correct?

Yeah.

Jason Del Rey Enrico had a nice scoop about exactly what the FTC was pursuing with regards to Amazon, which are three lines of questioning, whether it leads to anything, who knows, about

fulfillment, which we've talked about, competing against its own sellers, and the prime bundling, which are, you know,

Amazon has the argument that they're not the biggest retailer by any stretch,

by if you put the whole market together.

So talk a little bit about Amazon, because that's a company

you do hold hold in high regard, but you also have worries about.

Yeah, the number one recruiter out of my class, super smart people.

I've owned their stock for 10 years, but absolutely should be broken up.

The question is whether or not, so AWS is

an obvious one.

That's an easy spin.

And I think Jeff Bezos, who's sort of, you know, along the lines of Elizabeth Warren, going to forget more about business strategy than any of us are ever going to know.

I think he'll prophylactically spin AWS and be able to say, look, I'm breaking myself up hands off.

I think that probably the better thing for competition would be as you referenced, and actually this is Roger McNamee's notion, is that they need to get out of the private label business, that they shouldn't be competing with their partners.

Even though Macy's, JCPenney, Sears have all done this.

Just no one does it as well as Amazon.

It can swap someone out of a brand once they figure it out with their data.

You want Energizer Duracell batteries?

No, we're going to run a conquest out above that telling you buy Amazon basics or elements batteries for a third of the price.

That's a a big part of their business.

I do that Whole Foods too.

They give you cheaper prices on the Whole Food brands, you know, and their copies right next to the brand you might buy.

But I think what they, I think the more effective spin, or if the DOJ FTC were going to try and restore competition, would be probably to force them to spin or create a separate company of Amazon fulfillment.

So logistics.

Yeah, overnight they become a competitor of FedEx and UPS.

Which they are right now.

Or they're getting it.

They are and they're moving that way.

And then because effectively, you know, what you have is you have a company that is kind of full funnel, has the rails, has the train cars, and now has the end retailer and is using all of those things to their advantage and killing everyone else along the way.

Right.

Amazon will be interesting.

And then you brought up yesterday that it probably doesn't work for Apple.

It probably should be regulation, not antitrust, because the

elegant antitrust is that you oxygenate the marketplace, you create a more competitive marketplace, but you unleash shareholder value.

And that is post-the breakup,

at least in the medium and the long term, the shareholders' benefit.

That's the best type of antitrust.

Really, the only losers here, shareholders win, employees win, BC-backed startups win, there's more MA.

The markets win, there's more competition, there's more innovation.

The only ones that lose here are the CEOs who are no longer reigning over the seven realms.

They're just reigning over Westeros.

Right.

But you call them a conglomerate.

They're all, they're not quite the way we think of conglomerates because like Gulf and Astern own like nine different businesses or, you know, any of these things were constructed differently.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, but they're getting there.

I mean, if you look at, you know, YouTube, Google, Ways, you know, Waymo or whatever it is, some of their efforts, if you look at the different businesses Amazon is getting into, Facebook owns arguably the three largest communications backgrounds in the world.

And these are multi, you know, multi-brand, multi, and all of these companies are bigger than some, you know,

you could take these four companies and spin them into 10 or 11, and those 10 or 11 would probably be 10 or 11 or 11.

That's a lot of CEOs.

Maybe some women could become CEOs.

That would be nice.

Yeah, but Alphabet kind of did it to themselves as a retention strategy.

They said, oh, let's make

call him CEO of Google so we can retain him and then he doesn't go somewhere else.

So actually, you end up holding on to people because the other thing that's really killing innovation here.

is these companies acquire a company, and the best thing is that it works out.

But the second best thing is it dies and they cauterize that branch that could have become a competitor.

And then Jan Kuhn and Kevin Systrom, because of these onerous non-competes and non-solicits that they were paid up a ton of money for, that line of innovation of a young person who has another 30 to 40 years of driving economic value, he's basically dead and gone from the corporate world.

It is very hard for them to do anything.

So I think this is an all-around win.

I'm really hopeful if they don't, I mean, don't break my heart after

DOJ.

You think they're going to break our hearts?

Don't break their heart.

they are you don't think anything's gonna happen i think they're just they're just i just wonder what caused them right now to do it that's i want to i want i'd like some great reporting done by whoever covers the ftc like what happened now when they've been so slow and you know most of the stuff they did around facebook around the consent degree they didn't it's just it didn't work so they might have to be pumped drastic i think

i think that's one of those calls where you can only call your mother when you're promoted on the desk covering the ftc you're like mom i just got a new assignment.

I'm covering the FTC.

Oh, that's great, honey.

What's the FTC?

But, anyways,

by the way, there hasn't been a lot of news there.

The tech people, there was a good story in the Times today about how they're loading up on lobbyists, which they already were.

Well, it's nothing new, but they're really loading up.

The chief of staff of Nancy Pelosi is now Facebook's North America policy person here in Washington.

He was sitting right behind Mark at one of the hearings.

So they're really loading up on power lobbyists, essentially.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, Amazon's about to cross triple digits in terms of their lobbyists.

Their fastest growing expense line

in terms of growth isn't cloud, it isn't R ⁇ D, it's lobbying.

Yeah.

So that'll be an interesting battle of

lobbying people.

Jeff's house is coming along very nicely, by the way.

Indeed, that's good to know.

Well, he just spent $60 million on a total man cave bachelor pad here in New York.

Man, well, he can do that.

Good for him.

Good for him.

Good for him.

Two more.

One was Trump.

He suggested a boycott of one of the country's largest telecommunications firms, AT ⁇ T, because of CNN, which he hates, fake news, blah, blah, blah.

And then AT ⁇ T and stock did very well, so it didn't seem to work.

Yeah, it doesn't.

It's

over, right?

He's overusing it.

Yeah, these attacks on individual companies.

are not only inappropriate and effective, they're socialist.

And that is...

Oh, tell them that you had that rant yesterday.

Talk about your socialist.

You think he's a socialist.

Well, there's all this.

So I went on Fox.

I told you a couple of weeks ago, and they were having socialism versus capitalism week, which I think is hilarious.

And by the way, I didn't get the final results, but something tells me capitalism worked.

And they like to paint the left as socialists.

But the reality is socialism is, you know, the state controls the means of production and then divvies up the spoil.

So when Donald Trump is bullying a company or an air conditioning company into creating more jobs or bringing jobs back to

Michigan, that's socialism.

Child labor laws are socialism.

Minimum wage is socialism.

Everybody is on a spectrum.

Every economy is on a spectrum.

And what you have the worst with Trump is you have the worst kind of socialism, and that is you have cronyism.

Tariffs are highly socialist.

I mean, that is, okay, we're going to punish certain industries and not other.

But yeah,

he's definitely wading into those waters.

And the notion that we can start telling companies how to behave, and quite frankly, I didn't think it was appropriate for Bernie Sanders to show up at the Walmart annual shareholder meeting.

I just thought that was plain and simple, grandstanding.

Yeah.

But look, this is socialism when the president and the senator from Vermont start deciding to pick individual companies to go after.

What they're supposed to do is govern and create laws, you know, that create a more robust ecosystem for all of us.

But yeah, anyways, I think that is socialist socialism.

Socialist.

Socialist.

I was just noticing that

Nancy Pelosi is telling the Democrats she wants to see Trump in prison.

So she's

stepping up her thing.

It's going to get very pretty in the next thing.

But then how could you discern his hair from his outfit?

That's true.

But he was also attacking Bette Midler from London after he visited the Queen.

The whole thing is.

Midler?

Who doesn't like Bette Middler?

He went off on her on the Twitter because she made a mistake,

some dumb mistake.

I think she's an excellent Twitterer, by the way, Bette Midler.

She's really funny.

What's the movie where her friend dies?

Oh, my God.

Oh,

the wings.

Oh.

Wings, hearts, souls.

Yes, it's a good movie.

She's good in everything she does.

I love her.

Her piano player when she started out?

What?

Oh, at a gay bar.

Gay bass.

No, gay bass.

No, no, no.

One of the great, like one of the most underrated stars, incredible touring performer.

Gary Manilow.

That's right.

That's right.

He was her pianist.

So it was a very good pair of them doing that.

The gays are in front of everything, just so you know.

Just to know, Scott.

Good to know.

Good to know.

Good to know.

Define everything.

Everything.

And now the lesbians are in charge of everything.

There you go.

All right.

So we're going to take an ad break, and then we're going to get back with wins and fails.

There's quite a few of them this week and then your predictions.

I want you to go into that more.

I want to hear a rant about that.

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So, a little insight on how odd Kara Swisher is.

You come into my house, you barely say hi.

The first thing you do, you go to my refrigerator, you open my refrigerator, then you open all my cabinets as if you are going to get, I don't know, some sort of vision into my soul.

I did.

I was like, first of all, you didn't buy anything.

And it just was fascinating.

It was all like the elite, expensive foods that I expected to be there.

Yeah.

And then she brings the food out and starts playing with all of it.

I did.

Just

a duck, Kara Swisher.

I was just trying to unnerve you.

That's all.

You have a beautiful apartment.

It was a very nice lunch.

Let's get to our wins and fails.

I thought that was a win on my part, frankly, that I invaded your space and made you feel uncomfortable.

That was my goal.

I was comfortable.

I was just odd.

I know.

Something weird going on there, Kara.

I know.

Anyway, in any case, what are your wins and losses?

What's a win for you this week?

Yours is more interesting.

You start.

All right.

I have a win and a fail together, which is YouTube.

We're going to have Susan Wojski, who's the CEO of YouTube at Code in a few days, which you're coming to, on Monday.

We're going to do an interview.

Peter Kafka is going to do it.

And they had several controversies, but one of the things is they moved a lot of extremist stuff off the platform, which you think is in response to this federal investigations and stuff like that.

Because YouTube is really the...

one of the bigger problems for Google.

And then they had a back and forth with a Vox employee, Carlos Maza.

He has been badly treated by this channel by Stephen Crowder,

where

he was just harassing.

He was harassing him personally.

Carlos is gay and just was making all kinds of horrible remarks.

I show them to you.

He also wears a t-shirt that says socialism is for fags t-shirt and many of his videos and his followers have doxxed Maza in the past.

And so Maza complained.

It rose to the level of Susan, I think.

And so first they decided to back Crowder and say what he was doing was offensive but not against their rules.

And then they decided to demonetize him.

And then they weren't clear about it because he was making a lot of his monies from these t-shirts that he was selling, all the merch, essentially.

And so they then pulled that until he changes his ways, essentially.

And they weren't very clear on that.

So it was a really, it was a win and a fail because it shows how hard it is to deal with these things.

And at the same time, they have real live.

repercussions because a lot of Crowder's followers jumped to Twitter to give him death threats and things like that.

So now Susan Wajisi is not in charge of Twitter.

That's Jack Dorsey.

But these things bleed all over the place.

And so, you know,

this is going to happen again and again with these companies.

So we talked about that.

It was really

problematic on lots of levels, especially for Carlos.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Yeah, and there's

what's interesting is that

the timing here in terms of YouTube's all of a sudden newfound concern around this.

And that is as opposed to throwing up their arms and saying it's a platform and people have a right to be offensive, et cetera, and we're not a media company.

And that is Gary Rieback, the lawyer who led the antitrust action against Microsoft in the 90s, said that it's not the actual antitrust action, but the public scrutiny of the company once antitrust is set in motion.

And that's largely an excuse because I don't think he got it across the goal line and Microsoft was never actually broken up.

But there is some value there.

And I don't think it's any accident that 48 hours after.

Well, they were working on this very complex change in their policies.

But go ahead.

I think it's a change.

I'm not sure it's that complex.

I think we've been co-opted into believing this is much more difficult than it is.

And I think there's some basic rules that if someone is being mocked, it could potentially result in violence.

And

this kind of mockery can spin up violence, in my view, and it's based on something that they can't control, their ethnicity, their sexuality.

You just don't engage in that.

And you overcorrect, or I don't know what the term is, you err on the side of caution.

And this notion that we need free speech, I'm not sure that's really adding to the dialogue.

That's not discourse around provoking interesting thought or moving us forward.

This isn't, I don't see what's so complex about this call.

Well, you know, it goes into the free speechers.

They have to be able to say anything.

And he was kidding.

He's very interesting.

I was watching a lot of them and they're totally offensive.

But he cues to like that he's a comic.

I think he is a comic, but it's a really interesting,

he's very clever.

You know, he's not like Alex Jones was so bad at it.

You could see him violating the rules.

But this guy is really clever.

He's just totally offensive and harassing, but he doesn't,

it just is, he's, he makes, he's a people like him are a problem for YouTube to figure out, even though they have real life repercussions on someone like Carlos.

And so

it's so, what they're doing is these people are gaming the system as it's built.

And so it's very hard for anybody to get relief when this is happening.

And it happened with Milo, whatever his name is,

with Leslie Jones.

And what they have to do is they make these one-off decisions that may be high-profile, but how do you have a rule?

Because I've heard dozens of different things.

Each of one, you could have a whole ethics seminar on

what to do.

But here's the thing.

The best processor or decision framework for this is something very expensive, and it's called human nuance.

And these companies don't want to invest in that.

Right.

And the New York Times makes these calls all the time.

Fox makes these calls all the the time, and they get them wrong all the time.

But they mostly get them right and they don't throw up their arms and say, oh, we're a platform.

Right.

And it's...

You made the point about them being smaller, too, because someone wrote a piece about something I said, which was take down the Pelosi.

I said essentially that in a column two weeks ago, I guess, in the Times.

And someone wrote a piece saying, you know, Fox News got away with a Pelosi video and was saying, so I made the point that most media companies wouldn't do this.

And they said Fox got away with it.

there would be repercussions.

But you made an excellent point.

I wish I was as smart as you, that they're so much smaller.

You know, these TV networks, as big as they seem, are so much smaller than the big social networks like Facebook.

And it doesn't really matter what they do compared to a Facebook.

Well, even if you look at the election,

basically, if you look at the people on Twitter and you look at MSNBC and Fox, that's about 11 or 12 million people who are sort of controlling the debate around politics right now.

We have 350 million people in this country.

If you look at what it was a fair point logically, or the tautology around the argument makes sense, and that is, well, Fox mocks Pelosi, runs the same video.

Very similar.

Why aren't they held to the same standards?

And so that is a fair point.

But when Fox puts it out, it's immediately in public view.

And usually there's some sort of pushback that affects them from advertisers, and it's sort of screened and starched, or not starched, fairly quickly.

And Fox, the most viewed network in America, reaches 2.4 million people.

Average age 67, a 30-year-old accidentally turns on Fox, that means someone 104 is watching.

But anyways,

let's look at the damage there.

2.4 million people.

When Facebook runs a doctored video of Pelosi showing that she is potentially impaired, it goes to 1.4 billion monthly active users or daily.

I think 1.4 billion people across our networks now log on daily.

So you literally have 50 times the potential harm.

But we couple that with less regulation and scrutiny than is applied to our traditional media companies.

So, what do we have here, Kara?

We have exponentially more damage, much less the fact that it goes to people individually and they can spread it faster and farther.

So, you have 50x the damage with what, 10% of the scrutiny.

The algorithms here, or the ratio of discretion and justice, are totally out of proportion.

And then, Carlos, someone like Carlos has no, like these dot, this doxing, this death threats, this is just, you know, and the problem is that they can do that.

They move like a mob.

And I don't buy into the total mob mentality of it, but in this case, there's no way to adjudicate between them.

So it's an interesting problem.

We'll talk about it with Susan.

What is your wins and fails?

So just to finish up on this, I think this stuff is hard, but something I tell my kids, when I say my kids, I mean my students, I think every organization and every person has to have a code around this stuff.

And I

hummer it.

I go after people professionally, but it begins to leak into personal because I'm angry and inappropriate, right?

So I'm guilty of this.

I attack people personally.

And what I've decided is I need a code around this.

And my code is the following.

And you know what my code is around personal attacks?

Because some of these attacks do feel personal, let's be honest, is they have to be more powerful than me.

And when those guys start going after this individual and they go after him in unison and they're using their network and they're jumping platforms, they are going after someone who is less powerful than them.

And that means, in my opinion, that they lack code.

I I don't think personal attacks should be off-limits.

We're individuals.

I think people should be shamed.

But everyone has to have a code around this stuff.

And a decent place to start is you don't attack people less powerful than you.

Yep, that's true.

I think you're right.

All right.

Win and fail for you.

Any?

Okay, so my win.

FTC and DOJ, I know I've harped on this, but there used to be on average 20 to 30 antitrust actions in the 80s.

Now there's two or three a year.

I think that it's very easy to be cynical about government employees.

Some of the finest legal minds in the world go to work at the DOJ and the FTC.

And I think there are so many of them, and I think they are of so much character and expertise that they will outlast any administration.

And

a lot of them have left.

But, you know, welcome back.

And I really, and again, don't break my heart.

I hope this really amounts to something.

It's already having a positive impact.

So

that's my win.

All right.

What do you have a fail?

Yeah, my fail was I thought Bernie Sanders' grandstanding at the Walmart meeting was a bit of a fail.

And that is if Bernie and the rest of the Senate want to do something that would have a more effective change, and that is to federal regulation and a law around substantially increasing minimum wage.

Bernie Sanders' grandstanding.

That just goes together.

What a shocker, right?

That's redundant.

That's redundant.

He'll maniac that guy.

I'm sorry.

You have a great impression of Bernie Sanders.

How are you doing?

Yeah, I can't do it right now, but I'll let you know.

That sounds like Barney Frank.

Walmart, but

I have to practice.

He's just, I'm sorry.

You're not a big burner.

Elizabeth Warren has taken his area.

She's moving in fast.

She's so smart.

No, she's the

Lady Geek is what she is.

No, no, no.

She's the Lady Gaga.

Literally, Madonna sits around, and whenever she sees Lady Gaga, she's like, that bitch.

Lady Gaga literally came in and said, I'm going to be Madonna times three.

I'm going to be more outrageous.

I'm going to super hotter people.

Fact, not Madonna now, but that's that's like Elvis older and Elvis younger.

Madonna broke so many amazing barriers for people and did so much astonishment.

I'm not going to insult the Madonna.

She was.

Vogue.

Oh, my God.

I just, literally, I go home, I listen to Madonna, I put on those bad dance moves, and I am happy.

No, I'm just telling you, Madonna does not deserve your insults.

I'm sorry.

No, Lady Gaga just basically came in and Elizabeth Warren.

She's on the shoulders of the large shoulders because she was wearing shoulder pads, or

those military outfits that she liked.

Metaphor.

I'm just saying.

But anyways, Walmart, back to Walmart.

Walmart's in a bit of a tough spot.

Most labor is largely driven on supply and demand dynamics.

But unfortunately, in our economy, when you outsource the decisions around your labor wages to supply and demand, you end up with 33% of American children live in a household that's on food stamps.

And, you know, so there's something wrong here.

And Henry Ford decided, even though I have a line around the block for people who will work for $2 an hour, I'm going to pay them $5 because I have to support the middle class.

But Walmart has such an enormous company and they're the largest private employer in the world, that any 10 cent increase in their wage substantially hits earnings, and they worry about going into a death spiral in terms of their stock and not having the capital to compete with Amazon.

Doug McMillan, who I think is an incredibly talented and empathetic executive, has said, look, raise the minimum wage.

That way our customers have more money and we can afford to pay our people more.

And we can't disarm unilaterally.

We just can't.

Bernie, you're coming down here, but are you going to show up at every shareholder meeting and try and shame them?

Because these guys, again, don't want to disarm unilaterally and raise their costs faster than other discount retailers.

So I thought Senator Sanders is my lose.

Raise the minimum wage, boss.

You're in the Senate.

Do what all the states have done.

He'll never do anything.

He doesn't have any legislation to his.

Is that right?

He's not considered legislative.

legislatively effective.

He just talks a lot.

You know what who's his lady gaga?

Is AOC.

She's an excellent grandstander.

She does it beautifully.

She did it several times this week on a number of things with an FDI agent.

She took him apart, and she did it on something else.

She's excellent at it.

She asks just the right questions.

Yeah, she's very good.

She's a lady gaga.

By the way, I have a story about AOC and Anand.

Okay.

So I was at that fancy Vox dinner that you guys threw at South by Southwest.

She wasn't that fancy.

I'm like, oh my gosh, I saw her and him sitting next to each other.

I'm like, I've got to go meet them.

And I started walking towards them and they're both so hot, it was like shark repellent, and I couldn't get near them.

I'm like, I can't infect them with my ugly.

I literally got so intimidated by his hair and her perfect skin, I couldn't get near them.

I'll somehow make the introduction, okay?

Oh my God, they're beautiful.

I'm going to make the, I have things up my sleeve, so I'll make the introduction.

That is crazy.

Okay.

We'll talk about layer

prediction.

Take Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

You're about to see a $30 to $100 billion increase in market cap over the next 90 days as analysts begin doing a hard, serious analysis of a breakup and a sum of the parts analysis, which is actually greater in terms of valuation than they are now.

So the market's got it wrong.

Look at these stocks to go up somewhere between 5% and 12% over the next 90 days.

Once well-regarded analysts, you know, the Mark Mahanys of the world start coming out and saying, you know what?

They get broken up.

The shareholders benefit.

Well, that is a, I like that.

It's very smart, Scott.

I'm going to compliment you this morning.

It's Elizabeth Warnish.

It's very, I'm glad you're away from Pete Buttigage and you're back to the smart lady, although he's very smart, too.

So Michael Bennett.

You like all the smart ones.

IQ is the new black.

IQ is the new black.

What is?

IQ.

IQ is the new black.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

There you go.

All right.

I'm so glad we started on the nether regions of Scott Galloway and moved on to something more intelligent, but it's time to go.

In a few days, we'll be together at the Code Conference, and we're going going to do a live pivot, which is going to be fun.

So I'll see you there in Arizona, where it's 104.

Okay.

Is it really 104?

But it's a dry heat.

Yeah.

Good thing you have no hair.

That'd be good.

Thank God.

Thank God.

Anyway.

All right, Carol.

I'll see you in the southwest.

Is Megan McCain coming?

Is Megan McCain coming?

No.

No.

I think of Arizona.

I think of her.

No.

Sorry.

Okay.

She lives in New York.

I want a McCain there.

You want a what?

I want a McCain there.

Bring a McCain.

I have no McCain.

That's the only thing I know about Arizona.

I'm going to sail in the USS John McCain so Trump doesn't show up.

Anyway, Camila Salazar produced our show today.

Nishad Kurawa is Pivot's executive producer.

Thanks also to Eric Johnson.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media.

We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business live from the Code Conference.

Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast so you can listen to that great episode.

And if you like this week's episode, leave us a review.

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

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

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

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

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