"Woke" is the 2019 business strategy

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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher, back from Hawaii and now in frigid Washington, D.C.

And I'm Scott Galloway here to publicly disclose for the first time that I am in a relationship with Jeff Bezos.

It could happen, Kara. Hey, alive, girl.
It could happen.

By the way, I don't know what it means, but I think I've been upgraded to the next level of prime membership because I just got a picture of someone's junk. Oh, you know what?

As usual, you take a very delicate situation and make it horrible. Well, you're in Paris.
I'm only going to give you time off because you're in Paris right now. I'm so jelly.

Yeah, I am in, I'm in a basement somewhere in the city of lights. But by the way, just back to the whole, the whole Bezos.
We're going to be to Bezos. We're going to get to Bezos.
Okay, I'm sorry.

I'm so excited about that.

I can't hold back. I'm so ready.
What do you go for it? What have you heard? What's going on here?

Well, he's not a very good texter, right? Let's just be clear about that. Although, I'm going to get to that in a second.

I think, you know, I know,

I used to know them very well, and I haven't spent a lot of time with them since they both become gillionaires or any time.

But in the early days, I did. I spent a lot of time with them.
And Mackenzie Bezos is a wonderful and smart and very integral part of the beginning of Amazon, as I recall.

And she also, I don't see that she will be, this will be a very diff,

I'd be surprised if it burst out into a horrible fight.

It's not her nature, and it's not his nature either. They seem to have gotten ahead of it.

It looks like they just were married, and then he met someone else.

I don't want to go into the

who did what to whom, because I think marriages are complicated. We really don't know what happened.

But I think the focus for me is that I don't think it'll affect the business.

I think the issues I think probably anyone who's an investor is the focus, like where he needs his focus, where is his focus and stuff like that.

And so when you, anytime you have personal issues and he's got four kids and obviously a new relationship, there's going to be questions about where his focus is.

And I think the same thing happened with Sergey Bryn at Google, although he was not nearly, in fact, not at all, a part of the critical management staff at Google.

But, you know, you see these, this happened to VCs, to CEOs, and things like that. And I think the only thing business people think is, where's the focus?

How will it affect the stock? I don't think it will affect the stock at all or anything else. So that's how I come down.

Where are you, Scott?

It appears

they have mutual shared interest in that they don't want, they're both large shareholders of a company.

They don't want this to spill out into the public. I thought the press release was awfully strange, or the thing that he posted on his Facebook page.

Well, he did that to get ahead of the, you know, the national

story. But it was so, you kind of knew something was up because I don't know, I'm sure you read it, but there was a sentence in there saying, we look forward to new ventures and adventures together.

And I thought, that describes divorce perfectly. You know, that it's not.
They probably own a lot of stuff together. I'm guessing they do.
They probably have a lot of investments.

I know, but it's like. Well, you know, Sergei, Brennan, and Wajiski do.
They own like half a town, and they have investments all over the place.

So you have to stay, and they have children, obviously, besides, which is the best investment.

But

I think, yeah, I know. It was odd.
I think they were just rushing. I think that was a rush job.
You know what I mean? Like, what are we going to do?

What I found fascinating is that he didn't imagine that he was going to be the subject of scrutiny by Trump affiliated people, especially with the Washington Post ownership.

And sort of shocked, I think they were probably a little caught like, oh, they're following us.

And he, you know, he's not the subject of interest.

And that, and the fact that a man who puts echoes in everybody's home and, you know, listening devices in everyone's home doesn't realize he could be, you know, easily hacked in some way.

Yeah, and it just goes to show

everyone's human, right? And I don't want to make excuses for the guy, but I think we all sort of assume that Bezos was kind of the least human in that is he seemed somewhat infallible.

The story, the frame, the picture, it just all was pretty perfect. Yeah.

Very much so. And you know, you get, it's easy to be, it's easy to be glib about it.

And then you think about, well, they have four kids, and I know, I know you've been through it, I've been through it.

But that press release, they made it sound like their divorce wasn't terror, you know, wasn't a tragedy and a breakup of a family, but they were going on a Disney cruise to the Bahamas.

The whole thing just sounded like that. That's interesting.

When Gwyneth Paltrow started doing them, remember? Oh, conscious uncoupling. Conscious uncoupling, whatever the hell that was.
Yeah, you know, ups and downs.

But

another thing that was interesting was the focus on the text and how it became a Twitter meme, obviously. It was kind of crazy.

And it was interesting.

I ran into someone yesterday who said I wish I could text like that like that I was in love with so much that I texted like that even though it was super awkward the hey alive girl whatever that meant and things like that

I think he's sexy I think it's romantic I thought it was very sweet it was very nice

I think he's really

someone was like if I was the world's richest man I would be like have like 93 super model girlfriends and it was it was interesting it was very sweet I thought it was very sweet yeah so there you have it

there you have

to all of them.

Love is a constantly turning

something.

There you go, Kara.

There you go. But you're right.
He becomes human. He becomes more human, for sure.
Yeah. Also, I'm curious on your take.

My sense is that the media has actually shown a great deal of restraint and is being pretty, I don't know, old school about this and not. Yeah.
What are you going to do? What are you going to do?

Oh, my gosh.

I mean, it's not like Harvey.

It's not like, you know, it's just, you know, it's so not, given how all the much revelations this year, I mean, including at Amazon with its own executives, you know, Roy Price and the whole thing like that.

That's like, that's different. That's malevolent.
This is just human beings' relationships. This is just

midlife crisis. Yeah, or someone.
You know, the bulking up might have been a sign, I suppose. But

we'll,

it's just, or the rise, I don't know.

I just think it's, I think as a reporter, you're like, oh, we, we had, let me very briefly tell you, we were, when we were covering what happened with Sergei Brin,

I was very, when they called to talk,

they essentially told us what was going on. And

when I, at first, I was like, no, thank you. We're not writing about this because it's not our area of people breaking up.
And the only thing of interest was the stock, right?

That there was, he had a certain amount of stock that was controlling shareholder stock. And so that was of interest.

And then the second shoe dropped is that he was seeing someone who had literally, I had just been

seen with another executive at Google who was going out with another executive at Google. So and that guy left, Hugo Berra, who's now at Facebook.

And it was at that one, then it was like, oh, great, this is like invade. It's a whole workplace thing.
And so then we did write about it. But it was definitely,

it was hard to do. We felt we had to think about what was important.

And in that case, a major executive who was running its Android division left because of this romance drama that was going on at Google. And then there were issues of things in the workplace.

This guy was, you know what I mean? And stuff like that. But that was more after the Yugo thing happened.
I think that was, it became pertinent. It became much more pertinent.
So yeah.

Don't love writing these. I can't, I tell you, I don't like, I don't really care what people do.

Unless it affects their business. But yeah, you're right.
People are very prim and proper and stuff about it. And people don't like to judge.

People try not I mean, even though the press seems super judgy, they don't like to judge.

But speaking of judging, tell us us your virtue signaling thing turned out to be here we have a big thing this week. Yeah,

we talked about this, Kara, before you

went to Kauai. By the way, how was Hawaii?

It was beautiful. Was it nice?

Oh, it was beautiful. There's some flooding in Hanalai where I was.

But it was beautiful.

It's gorgeous. I love Hawaii.
It's one of my favorite places on earth. I did a lot of hiking, some stand-up paddle boarding.

I don't like to swim, but I even went into the ocean and did some

boogie bar, whatever they're called. Boogie board.
So yes, it was great. And the food was great.
And the pineapples, obviously, were delicious. So it was great.
Good for you.

I enjoyed your podcast with

it. Yeah, I did like it.

Although I'm a little bit jealous. Let me just say that.
Were you jealous?

For listeners who didn't catch it, let me just summarize it. So you would say, John, are there going to, who is the Democratic nominee going to be?

And he would say something like, well, I really don't know. I'm not in the business of predictions.
And you would go, oh, my God, you're so thoughtful. Can I rub your feet?

I mean, I thought you guys were going to start making out. No worries.
That was ridiculous. That was totally ridiculous.

Not that there's anything wrong with two gay people getting together, but oh my gosh. I've never even heard of that.

His bird box rant was fantastic. Come on.

It was very good. I admit it.
It was good. Oh, you're just jealous.
A little bit.

Let's get to virtue signaling. I'm giving you a cool compliment here.
I'm trying to give you a compliment. Other than success,

other than success, looks, and intelligence. that guy has nothing on me.
He has nothing on me. Okay, virtue signaling.
So we talked about... Yes, okay.
Yeah.

We're going to see, we made a prediction that 19, we're going to see a lot of virtue signaling or a lot of woke as a business strategy.

So explain what that means for the people who don't understand virtue signaling. Sure.
So 70% of our elected officials in the Senate, at least,

represent 30% of the population, that a lot of red states don't have a big population. So politically, conservative values are overrepresented.
But economically,

kind of progressives are capturing the majority of the income. So there's a very smart, if you just do the math,

there's a solid shareholder-driven business strategy in promoting and being very open about your progressive values, because the bottom line is that audience is the one that's captured the majority of the income gains over the last 10 years.

So you see Dick's banning assault rifles. You see

What's the big one?

Gosh, I'm missing.

Oh, Nike, the big one with Colin kaepernak and then most recently just um just a few days ago literally the gillette ad bullying the me too movement against sexual harassment masculinity

is this the best a man can get

uh you know the best uh yeah

basically saying you know really calling out men on some of these issues and i'm kidding have you seen the ad sexual harassment is taking over it's been going on far too long

we can't laugh it off

Who's the daddy?

What I actually think she's trying to say. Making the same old excuses.

Yes, I love it. I gave it to, I made my sons watch it.
One of them, who seems to

argued with me about it, saying it was man-bashing, and the other loved it. My older son loved it.

I thought it was great. I actually watched it again because I wanted to, when I had this debate with my son, I was like, it actually wasn't.
It said, we believe

men are great. They did say it several times.
I think people only saw the the guys on the

guys on the barbecue saying boys will be boys, that part.

But

every depiction of the good men, you know what it was? It was bad men bashing. It certainly was that.

And that's okay. I'm good with that.
And I think most men should be good with that.

Or all men should be good with bad men bashing.

But I think most of the men depicted were good, like the guy who was talking to his daughter, the guy who rescued the kid from the bully in front of his son, or the father who pulled the two people apart.

There's so every example is a man doing something laudable

in the thing. I loved it.
I know it was manipulative to sell, I know it's to sell to women. Women loved it, which was fascinating.

When I tweeted about it, I said, I know this is marketing, but and I know that I'm being manipulated, but it's not since you know, the Kodak commercial, which is uh, the Paul Anka song, um, Good Morning Yesterday.

You remember that song? Yep, uh, The Time of Your Life. Uh, or I had not been so moved by it by it, by an ad.
So wow, that's

sons. I have sons.
I think about it a lot. Yeah,

it's been, it's caused a ton of controversy. And I was

has it caused a ton of control? Because like there was a good story

in the Daily Beast that showed the people that were saying there was controversy had like four followers and linked to things. Like, I have a feeling it's not.

I think it's just a couple of loud, bad men on Twitter, essentially, versus, but then my son had the reaction. So I can see.
What did you think? Did you like Insulted as a Man?

I was conflicted by it because

I think the dialogue is an important one. I like PNG.
I love it when companies take risks like this. I think it shows a willingness to move outside their comfort zone.
It wasn't a safe thing to run.

So I think it's, you know, hats off to them. I didn't like the execution on it.

Because why? It felt a little,

I don't know, a little hitting you over the head with it. I felt it was a little passe.
And I worry that, I don't worry that, but in every, it feels like

white heterosexual men have become the generally accepted oppressors in our society. And I wonder if that's...
Which is factually accurate. Which

you think is accurate? Okay.

And they feel bad when we point it out now. See, people are pointing it out now.
And

the, I feel bad. things.

I'm sorry. It's always the people with the gun to the head of society that say they're the victims, but go ahead.

Yeah.

I'm not sure, though. I'm not sure.
What do you think it does? So in terms of moving the debate forward, you think the progress is that your sons see it and it educates them?

I think it was interesting that one thought it was great and he understood he was being manipulated. He also was like, yeah, I was one of those manipulative ad, but he liked it.

He liked the messaging and it and he, and he thought it was good. He was well done.

And my other son was wary of it. Like, why are they picking on men? Why are they doing this? And I said,

I want him to watch it again because when I watched watched it again, I didn't, I actually thought, no, they really aren't. They are.
But it's how you see something. But I do like that Gilettas do it.

Like, I love ads like this.

They,

you know, they engage you. They make you feel something and they make you talk about something.
So I loved, I had this amazing debate and discussion with my son about it. So in that way, it was great.

And I don't know if it was quite as gorgeous as Nike's Colin

Kaepernick ad, but

it wasn't as beautifully wrought as that one, but it was pretty good. It was, I don't know.
I don't know. I'm not an ad person.
You're more, that's more your area.

It's spilling over, though, into tech. So Saud Unadella announces that they're going to allocate a half a billion dollars to try and help.

with housing affordability and donate a bunch of money to homeless causes in the Seattle area.

And again, we have another company kind of, I think, pressing on the soft tissue of Amazon, who fought the tax in Seattle such that was going to help fund some low-income housing.

But these guys, essentially, they're kind of pulling out, they're battling with their conscience. You know, they're saying we're the good guys.
There was the Facebook with the 300 million.

I didn't think that was very much money at all, actually.

You're an impressive thing.

I like 500 million Microsoft, but I'd like a billion. Like, I want everyone to start with a billion and then we can go up from there.
That's my feeling.

I think it's great that Sachi did this.

I'm not sure what I think of the Facebook thing yet because I'm sure what they're up to.

And it seems like there's a lot, it's very hooky into Facebook.

But I would like them, you know, I have an expression, you're so poor, all you have is money.

And

I think it's

a, we'll talk later about the column I wrote about Alexandria Casio, but she's managed to get people to start talking about this issue of the really rich people grabbing for everything that I think is really catching fire.

And I think in a way, she's doing it in exactly the right way.

Speaking of really rich people, so I'm headed to the conference. I think we're actually

in Munich.

You're going to Davos after that?

No, I haven't been invited to Davos since I was 30. I peaked when I was very young, and I got invited when I was 29, 30, and 31, and I'm invited by David.
I hate that place. I hate that place.

It's rich people licking each other up and down

in the frigid cold weather. But go ahead.
Or I like the analogy when your guest said that it's a fire safety convention that just invites a bunch of arsonists. Hey, everybody,

to solve the world's problems, let's get all the people who have fucked it up together in one place in the mountains. It's funny.
But anyway, so I'm doing the keynote on Monday.

I recognize I'm boasting, and you know who's doing it on Sunday? Who? It's Cheryl Sandberg. Oh, will you sit in the front row for me and videotape that, please?

And the theme of the conference is optimism and courage. So I'm titling my talk, Pessimism and Cowardice.
What do you think?

I love it. Oh, good, good.

I need you to go to the Cheryl Sandberg.

I want to hear about it. I want your thoughts.
I want to talk about it next week. All right.
You have to do that. It'll be interesting.
She's been getting out a lot more. I've been hearing.

She was at CES, I think. And so it's interesting.

But before we finish this section, William Barr, you wanted to talk about it because

of,

not because of the whole Mueller thing, because he talked about that a lot. And he was trying to seem like he wasn't crazy.

That seemed to be, I am not crazy, and I will be strong kind of thing, although who knows, who knows with these people.

But talk about why you think this is important.

Well, we thought that, so everyone was sort of expecting a lot of questions around protecting Mueller. And he essentially said, yeah, I think this investigation should come to its,

you know, should be protected and should kind of go where it goes.

So the thing that came out of it that was sort of unexpected was that three senators, Republican senators, all brought up the issue and asked for his viewpoint on whether tech had gotten too big and that the concentration of power was detrimental to competition and privacy.

And his viewpoint was clearly that this is something that warrants additional scrutiny, most likely from the FTC. And everyone's been talking about the DOJ.

And the FTC, in some ways, for reasons I don't entirely understand, might have more teeth around doing something here expeditiously.

So just going back to another prediction, in addition to kind of woke as a business strategy, we talked about that 2019 might actually be the year that the breakup of big tech happens.

And it looks like the Attorney General is kind of on board with that. And this might be a rare bipartisan issue because

let's listen to newbie senator josh holly from uh missouri he is the former uh a g of missouri and he beat out claire mccaskill let me ask you more broadly about the question of antitrust and mergers and you you gestured towards this earlier in your testimony

i'm increasingly worried that the department is is not enforcing vigorously the antitrust statutes

in many sectors of the economy, not just technology. We see, again, as you've alluded to, we see growing concentration of power in various sectors held by just a few firms.

And if you look at recent trends in the Department's scrutiny of proposed mergers, it's at record lows.

Last year, for instance, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division scrutinized mergers through second requests for information in less than 1 percent of all eligible cases.

That is, I believe, the lowest level of merger scrutiny recorded since the FTC started tracking those statistics back in 1981.

And just for comparison purposes, in 1981, that review was five times higher than it was in 2018. My question is, do you think that this record low level of merger scrutiny is appropriate?

And if you are confirmed as Attorney General, what might you do to ensure that the Antitrust Division faithfully and vigorously enforces the law?

Well, I am for vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws to preserve competition. And as I said, this is going to be an area I'm going to want to get into.

Okay, what he's saying that he's going to push very hard on this. This was one of his topics for sure.
And you think the AG will be with them and Democrats, too. Democrats, for sure.

You know, you have Corey Booker and others

sort of interested in this. Yeah, they're angry for different reasons.
So the Democrats believe that

these guys basically

helped manipulate the elections to an outcome they didn't like in 2016.

But I've always felt that actually the people who are really going to go a gangster on big tech are these red state senators who have seen their few ad agencies, their corner store,

their newspapers, their media companies have really gotten hollowed out. Hollowed out.
Hollowed out.

If you think about this, these companies have been incredible vessels of the transfer of wealth from the rest of the world to the U.S. and then from the middle of the U.S.
to the coasts.

So Kansas and Mississippi and Iowa, you know, big tech hasn't done much for them.

I mean, granted, they can do their searches in 0.055 seconds, but in terms of actual economic growth and what it's done for the state and employment and the tax base, it's probably net net negative.

Yeah. Yeah.
Although, really, is that their job? They should think of something. I'm sorry.
That's not really. You think so? Yeah.
Like, think of, take Kansas, figure it out yourself. Like,

come on, can do, right? Can do Kansas or whatever. Or Oklahoma, okay.
Oklahoma, okay. Okay, Oklahoma.
Make something. Can do Kansas.

I'm just now I'll get all these messages from Kansas and I don't care. Make something if you want to stop complaining.
Make something.

Anyway, we're going to take a short break when we get back to talk wins and fails and hamburgers.

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Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odo comes in.

It's the only business software you'll ever need. ODU is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything.
That means CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odu for free at odu.com.
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Back to our show, hamburgers. There's so many things to talk about.

I'm going to give

you there's so many fails. There's hamburgers, which was the Trump thing he tweeted.
This is the new shutdown cuisine. There's the shutdown.

There's Iowa Representative Stephen King for being the horrible racist that took so long to be chastised for this.

And he's the one also in

one of the hearings he did with

Sundar Pichai. He didn't know who makes the iPhone.

But I think I'm going to do a win. this week.
I'm going to do Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who gets a lot of attention, obviously. But I wrote a column about how she's really owning,

extremely online. I said she was extremely online, and she is really causing,

creating, controlling, and pushing forward narratives that she's interested in, including

pay inequity and income inequity and all kinds of things. And she manages to shut down her critics, the right-wing.
They just, they cannot stop her. And she's, she's, it's a really interesting way.

She, she actually's never aggrieved. She's just very funny and very strong-minded and also serious.

And one of my favorites was when Joe, from her own side of the aisle, Joe Lieberman, who's sort of a conservative senator, but he said she wasn't the future.

This is a, I don't know how old he is, but he's been around the block for lots of blocks for many years.

And he said she wasn't the future of the Democratic Party. And she

tweeted back at him. She tweeted back at the story.
And she goes, yeah,

new Congress, who dis?

Yeah, she's outstanding. What is it about her Twitter?

I heard she was giving lessons to her colleagues on how to use Twitter.

You can't give lessons in this.

I compared her to Trump.

Trump, I think, is very effective. She's not afraid.

She's not interested in party hierarchy.

You can imagine Pelosi and Schumer or whoever it is sit her down and say, or Stanny Horror say, this is how we get things done. Your time will come.
Play ball. And she's just not having any of it.

No, but everybody is talking about income. And by the way they agree with her and the way she's explaining it, she's doing something,

you were going to talk, like it is like, you know, Kennedy and television.

How do you look at that? Like she knows how to, there's something different in how she's using it compared to everybody else, I think.

Well, typically these seminal leaders have always figured out a way to master new medium.

And, you know, unfortunately, some very damaging leaders in the middle of the 20th century were really good with radio. But,

you know, Kennedy and TV, we talked about this. Some people have mastered the in-person medium, but she is definitely somebody who's kind of on a rocket ship.
I mean, what is she? What does she care?

She's 29?

Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

It's just the performance is, I mean, and she also messes up in a really good way. I just, it's a really interesting, I think, you know, everyone's sort of waiting for the fall.

Like, this is going to fall, but I don't know. She's, I just, the, the, the, I find the Twitter, just the Twitter performance is so flawless.
It's like she lands it with a 10. She sticks it.
Yeah.

I think. she's fantastic.
It's going to be very

and you're watching the next six months.

My kid loves her, who's voting in the next election. He was like, she's amazing.
She's like, he was, he's never been excited about a politician, trust me.

Although I do think Nancy Pelosi is doing great, too. Is this the one that likes the Gillette ad or the one that dots? Yes, the one who likes the Gillette ad.

But she also, you know, but Nancy Pelosi is also not doing bad herself. Her all the way.
She's had a great

sides and then not disinviting him and stuff. I think

she's doing a good job too. The ladies are in charge.
Scott, what are your wins and fails?

So actually, I agree with you. I think Pelosi has really kind of, I don't know, reinvigorated or burnished her reputation as a real leader.
I think she comes out of this looking good.

I think the Democratic Party, you know, we're great at sort of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And it feels as if around the shutdown that it has squarely landed on the president's desk.

And as much as you hate to see it, what's going on, I do think that it's every day, I just think it gets a little bit worse for the president and the Republicans.

Giuliani, what happened with Giuliani?

Maybe there was collude. Wait, no collusion, no collusion.
All right, maybe a little collusion off to the left. A tiny bit.
There was a collection.

There was collude no jungle. You know how that mold is, that collusion is.
It just gets in and you just can't get it out.

What was he said? He said, I never said the campaign didn't collude. No, but they did.

But they did. like it's just astounding they don't think we like have tape it's just the weirdest thing it's it's

where

what else do you what else do you think is a win or a fail

uh so i'm trying to think what what else did we have and oh i uh fail or prediction government shut down the everything

there's a lot going on i i'm i'm trying to bring this back to big tech i don't know if you saw i think that and this is both a

snapchat a lose and um a prediction for 2019 it ends up that the CEO of WeWork has investment interests and properties that they've been leasing or that WeWork has been leasing from. And

as long as it was disclosed and his investors knew about it, it's fine. But my prediction is 19 is going to be a very bad year for WeWork.
Oh, interesting.

And if you saw what happened with the limiteds of SoftBank, including some of the Middle Eastern sovereigns funds, who actually stepped in and blocked this massive investment that SoftBank was about to make in WeWork.

When your limited partners step in and actually block an investment,

say to the general partnership, the guys allocating the capital, no, we're not comfortable with this, that is pretty extraordinary. You don't see that a lot.
And

if you look at the economics of WeWork, valuation of $48 billion, and yet Regis, kind of a similar but lamer potted plants, bad cherry wood version of WeWork, has twice as many desks, but trades at 1 16th the value.

And while WeWork's created a great brand and

they don't have kombucha on tap. Yeah, they don't have pale ale.
No, they have pale ale or whatever.

But if you look at WeWork, WeWork is now, by a lot of analyses, the floor they own in a large building is technically worth more than the building itself that it leases that floor from.

And it's hard to see what kind of network effects or technology.

Yeah, it just doesn't.

I think WeWork is going to be in the news for all the wrong reasons in 2000 and

2019. Okay, what about Snap, given the changes? I was in the Snapchat

I was at Snapchat yes two days ago.

Do you know the CFO there? Do you know, do you have any backstory there? I do not. I need to find out.
I do need to find out.

They did they did add some really good people also, like Julie Henderson from Fox, who I have great regard for.

I don't know. I'm not clear what's going on.
There's definitely, I mean, they're definitely having a hard time competing

with what was a very innovative product. And again, my kid still uses it, and both of them do.

But

it's just hard. I think it's a really hard go.
And this management, the inability of Evan to keep this management team together is something you definitely have to look at.

So this is a broader topic, but I want to talk a little bit about isms, right? So whenever there's a movement or there's a polemic that we discuss in our society, I oftentimes think

it's too late. So in the 70s and 80s, we talked a lot about how people of color, specifically African Americans, had a much more difficult time in the workplace.
And that was a worthwhile discussion.

But I always felt as the son of a single mother who could either be a travel agent or a secretary, that was literally the choices for a woman in the 70s. That it was really that

the cohort that was most discriminated against was in fact women. And since then, women with college educations have actually closed the gap.

It's women with children that are still having a tough time in the workplace that the corporate America just hasn't figured out a role for them.

But I would argue the next cohort that's going to get more attention and what actually doesn't get enough attention now is ageism, especially in tech.

And I think it's going to become a big issue in 2019.

I think if you walk into a conference room or a meeting at a technology firm and you're over the age of 45 and you're not a billionaire, you're kind of seen as a loser.

And I think there's a pretty big wait, that's richism, but go ahead. Well, you know what I'm saying.

I think that if you're not, if you haven't really killed it by the time you're 40 or 45 in tech, I think there's an inherent assumption that you're just not very good at what you do.

And I think these cultures are pretty ageist. And I think that's going to start getting more attention.
That'll be, there's some laws, there's lawsuits, there's been lawsuits and things like that.

You know, someone who talks about this a lot is Dan Lyons, who has a new book out

about, he did it in his last book, talking about ageism and things like that. But I agree.
It's a really interesting issue,

being a really old person, although I don't suffer from that because I'm better than they are.

It's true, though. That was easy.
Come on, it's not even hard.

But tying this back to Evan and even Mark Zuckerberg, I think something else that's going to get a lot of scrutiny is that these two-class shareholder stocks,

these two-class shareholder stocks protect

these managers. So I believe the reason Shel Sandberg hasn't been fired is because they can't fire, or they don't think they can fire Mark Zuckerberg because of this two-class shareholder system.

Snap has the same two-class shareholder system. You have a young man who's already a billionaire.
And if it wasn't a two-class shareholder company, I think they probably would have done something.

I think they probably would have sold by now. And this is the problem with two-class shareholder stocks is right now, he doesn't really need to be a fiduciary for other shareholders.

He's banked his billion bucks. He's off to the races.
He thinks he has a viewpoint or a vision, which he has been totally unable to articulate what it is exactly they're going to do here.

You know, the redesign didn't work. They're getting killed.
Well, he had a very good vision initially, right? It's a really fresh vision. Everyone stole it.
Oh, sure. It's a great company.

And I find, I have to say, of a lot of the people I talk to, I really enjoy talking to him because I always have a really,

he's a, I wouldn't, visionary is a good word. He actually, you're always like, oh, I didn't thought of it that way.
But you're right. It's the execution.
Visionary. Vision can only get you so far.

And so that's what

he really has the issues with around PR. Not just every, every part of it is problematic, has been problematic for them.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: With the CFO leaving, it kind kind of punctures another prediction we had a few months ago where I thought that Amazon was a likely acquirer because the CFO was a 20-year veteran of Amazon.

And the fact that someone who was at Amazon for 20 years, you could hardly describe this person as a flake or someone who just kind of goes off half-cocked, leaves SNAP after six months, is a very negative, forward-looking indicator.

Because this is the individual, I always see the CFO in any company as the source of truth.

If I'm ever in a board meeting and I hear talk and I don't know what's going on, I sequester the CFO for 10 minutes. I'm like, okay, what's going on here?

And they basically, you know, they take the entire board meeting and they put Wonder Woman's Golden Lasso on it and they say, this is the truth. This is what's going on.

And when the person who knows the truth after six months at SNAP decides, I'm out of here, I'm sorry, eight months,

I think that's more, you know, kind of trouble in my girl. Definitely.
I will look into it. If you will go see Sheryl Sandberg in Germany, in Munich, I will go find out about this.

You know what I'm doing before that, Kara? You're in Paris. Don't okay, I'm in Paris.
Hold on, hold on. No, this is going to have snails on the Seine.
What? This is the worst flex in the world.

I'm meeting a buddy of mine, and we decided to go to Vienna, and we're seeing those dancing horses. So this is how old and pathetic I am.
Yeah, the Lipenstags. Yeah, whatever.
Dancing horses.

Lippensogs.

Lipinsides? Lip and something. Lipsides.
10 years ago, last time we got together, he and I went to Stockholm. We went to some rave and I tried experimental drugs.
Now we go see dancing horses.

We might as well go to Denny's and get the Grand Slam special and go to the house. Like the river dance of like

Austria. Isn't that like first I need first we need to sterilize our castle.
Isn't that like going to like Guy Fairies, Broadway, whatever? That's you're going to see horses dance. All right.

We're going to see horses. I don't know how we ended up there.
How did I get so old?

How did I get so old, Kara? I'd go looking for alt-right people in Austria.

They're all over the place again.

The family von Trapp. The von Trapp family singers.
the family von trapped remember that scene

wow you sound very relaxed you sound

you sound very chill kakuna matata baby or whatever what is nice i was in the town lilo and stitched was set in lovely hana peepee or something like that it was great it was lovely yeah yeah good for you yeah anyway well i'm here in dc for a long long time for the freezing cold weather uh for the next couple of weeks so we'll be talking from here so i will go around and see how badly the government is shut down.

I'm going to see a senator very soon. I'm going to get on the metro right now and go visit Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado.
I love Senator Bennett. Do you? Does he

close? I met with him.

I can finally flex back. I met with Senator Bennett about six weeks ago to talk about antitrust.
Well, good. Anyone who asked me? What?

He said to me, he said, give me 10 ideas to restore the middle class. Oh, all right.
He's like right there. He's like, give me 10 ideas to restore the middle class.
This guy.

Talk about the kind of guy you want as an elected official. You know, you did before.
He was a superintendent of schools. Well,

I am so excited. He reached out to me and said, can we meet? So

he's making the rounds, I guess, of smart people. He's a very decent man.

I was really.

I'm excited. I'm excited.
I'm meeting all the politicians.

I'm going to do that in the next few weeks. I'm going to meet all the politicians.
And then this afternoon, I'm going to be doing a podcast with the CEO of Landa Lakes, Beth Ford.

She's openly, she's a lesbian, very open. And she's running this thing.
And she was the, they were the first company, one of the companies to push back on King and take away his money and stuff.

And so we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the technology beyond, agricultural.
It should be interesting. There's all kinds.

And we're reaching out to the real people, Scott, aren't we?

Yeah, we're keeping it real. We're keeping it real in Paris and D.C.

All right. Go enjoy Paris, the city of lights.

Thanks very much. It's one of my favorite places.
Next week, we'll talk about all kinds of things.

I want to eat some stories from there and stuff that was talked to at DLD and stuff like that I'm excited to hear

what what went on there and what the big topics were

anyway

enjoy yourself Rebecca Sinanis produces this show Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio thanks also to Eric Johnson thanks for listening to pivot from Vox Media we'll be back next week for more of a breakdown of all things tech and business and welcome back Scott I did not leave you for John Lovett it was just a short affair and I know you saw it somewhere too if you like what you've heard please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.

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