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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And Kara, this is Preet Bharara.
Bharara? Bharara? What's his name? Preet Bharara.
Oh, my God. He's joining Vox. He is. What do you think about it?
Bharara, what are you talking about? Why am I? Oh, God. Bharara.
Preet Bharara. I think, what do I think, honestly? I think there are a few people who have fallen further faster, as evidenced by he's now on Vox. No, no.
Manhattan DA to a podcaster to Vox. Oh, come on. I mean, something's gone wrong. Why can't you look at this?
We're building a powerhouse brand here, huh? A powerhouse brand. That's what's going on. That's what's going on.
That guy is seriously classing up to join. He has heavy-duty brain. He's got a lot of brain matter going on. But also, just so you can listen to his voice, and I can now say this, that he's joined the illegitimate world of podcasting.
I think he would be a very gentle lover. I imagine him, that voice, after a bout of lovemaking, saying, honey, honey, I'll make some Hot Pockets and break out the Lancer's wine. I just think he'd be a very gentle lover. I'm not going to go into the history of some lawyers in New York, but there's quite a few that have issues.
That guy's got a brain the size of a fox. He's huge. I mean, he's seriously. I don't know what we're paying him, but he basically classed up to join.
Classed up to join. That's a big deal for us. Back off. We're going to be hanging with Preet quite a bit.
He's coming on. I'm going to bring him on next week, and you're going to be your best behavior. You can be nice to him when he comes on and discusses it. Oh, no, no.
I've already decided he and I are going to be very close friends. Mm-hmm. Okay. He's wonderful.
He's really great, and he knows where all the bodies are buried. He's Mr. Legal Expert and all kinds of stuff. And he's actually, he's a really, he has many interests beyond just legal.
I think he's really kind of enjoyed getting fired by Trump. Well, he made a career out of it. Well, yes, but he also is a very good legal person. Anyway, all right.
Well, the Southern District. I mean, that's actually the Southern District. If you could SPAC that thing. Yes, I know.
That's one of the best brands in the world. Do they pay the Billions guy on him? They may have. That's interesting.
That's interesting. Because you know what my other opening was going to be? No. I'm Scott Gallo, and I just matched on Tinder with the Queen of England.
Is it too early for her to date? Is it too soon? Is it too soon? Is it too soon?
I got to be honest. I got to be honest. Older women love me. Women my age and younger women want nothing to do with the dog.
Do you imagine if he's in love with you? That's like a movie. I can see it. I can see it.
And then he can do an Oprah interview together. I'll tell you one thing, though. That Princeville guy, he's another hottie. That guy was hottie.
That guy was hottie. You see that guy in the kilt? That guy was a tall drink of lemonade. And he was a class act.
Rest in peace. Not every time. Look at his life as a movie. Don't focus in on the few frames that weren't great.
That guy was a class act. There were quite a few of those frames. Anyway, you know what? Rest in peace, Princeville.
Call me. Queen England, call me. Okay. Microsoft is acquiring speech recognition.
Good segue. I don't know how to segue from that statement. But nonetheless, it's a $16 million deal, and nobody's paying attention. Everyone's focused on whether it's success for the world or not.
Healthcare. Healthcare. Cloud products for healthcare. Well, thanks for that thoughtful analysis of the situation.
We're all getting into the big business of healthcare. It's a speech recognition. It's a cloud and healthcare. So people will call nuances of speech recognition.
It's a long time of speech recognition company. So it's like, I'm feeling sick or tone of voice or things like that. It's really going to be important. Telehealth is a big deal.
Even though my brother gets all mad about it, telehealth is a big deal. And how it's not going to be doctors. It's going to be more computerized. It's 100% the way it's going to be.
So pre-pandemic, what percentage of visits were virtual? Oh, statistics. I do. Okay, then give me.
Well, guess. What percent of doctors' visits were virtual pre-pandemic? Huh. Between, I have no fucking idea and I don't care.
Correct. Okay, what is it? 0.8% of visits were virtual. Do you know what they were during the pandemic?
What? 30%. Wow. And so this is, I mean, again, largest.
I always get hit hard because of the consumer industry, but I would argue the largest encapsulated industry in the world is healthcare. We've never seen a channel shift like that. I don't know in any. I mean, okay, so theaters went from 5 billion a year to zero, but that's $5 billion.
30% of healthcare is arguably, you figure two-thirds of the 3 trillion are services that can be done outside of doctors' office of potential markets to 2 trillion. And so you have what was effectively a $600 billion transition in channels. I mean, we've never seen anything like that. I know.
It's going to be a big deal. So everyone's got to get their tech going correctly, not just their, you know, following HIPAA laws, but just how tech is going to work and how people are going to do this. And so there's going to be a couple of players, Amazon, Microsoft, Google to try, and it's not as aggressive in this area now, and Apple. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.
So Siri was the sale thing sitting on top of an iPhone. I wonder if they'll incorporate voice. I said a few years ago, I thought, wearables, AR, 3D printing were all stupid virtual reality. But the technology I've always been bullish on that I thought was the most important technology in the next 10 years was voice.
And I wonder if they're going to incorporate this into Office, and they'll have niche, like Office for Hospitals or Office for Healthcare, and incorporate it into them. Because that to me seems like, you know, Microsoft Office is kind of their iPhone, and I wonder if they're going to build around that. Say that again. That was really smart.
Well, I'll say it in a deep Glaswegian voice. It was, yeah, I think Office is their, all these guys have kind of one thing that is their gangster movie, Amazon's Prime, Apple's the iPhone, and I think, obviously, Microsoft Office is the strongest recurring revenue relationship in the history of the business. Right. All right.
So Nuance calls itself conversational AI, just remember. So it's voice, you know, it's not just healthcare, but it's financial services, too. But healthcare is where it's really done deeply. Nadal, very smart.
He's a very canny man, I have to say. He is canny. And Microsoft's been in speech systems for years. A hundred years ago, there was another one, Dragon Systems.
They have been, they had Cortana, if you remember, all kinds of things. It's not an area they don't know about, but I think it's just tech applications and healthcare is going to be a big, big business, and especially artificial intelligence. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, you really went out on there.
It's very profound what they're doing here. They're buying smart things. They're buying smart things. Now, Netflix, interesting, will be the first U.S.
streaming home for Sony Pictures theatrical releases. This is now a big shift by these big studios. But meanwhile, Warner Brothers, you acknowledge, starting this next year, the company's biggest movie will debut in theaters before moving to the streaming service. I need to move very fast to the streaming service, though.
So it's sort of a little pap to the filmmakers for four seconds, but it's not going to be any 90-day kind of window. Yeah, look, I just watched it. I just watched it. I was forced to watch it.
I have Bro Night with my 10- and 13-year-old boys on Friday night. Yeah, and I said, what do you want to watch? And of course, it was got to be on King Kong. I had to go last weekend.
Oh, my God. It's like, it's literally, why would they even make a different movie? It's the same goddamn movie that first time. It's the same plot line.
He said it's the most intense movie about wireless charging he's ever seen. It's just, I don't, it's like they said, okay, how do we spend a quarter of a billion dollars so that we can justify people having to take their time? I literally don't get that movie being done. You know, I liked it a lot better than I thought.
But we saw, there is a class of movies, a kind of blockbuster, basically movies that appeal to 15-year-old boys that can stop, do a drive-by to this dying complex of a movie theater and pick up a half a billion to a billion dollars. And it's like, it kind of reminds me of the office argument. The fastest way to process information is binary. There's zero ones, and we want to categorize everything as well.
All can go back to the office, and none of us are. The reality is 98% of the movies are going to be somewhere between. And what you're going to see in movies is that you will still have first-run movies that stop by the movie theater for a four- to 12-week window. But the world has shifted dramatically, and you're going to see a lot more films.
The power has ceded dramatically to the streamers. You're going to see a lot more films go straight to... Well, I watched Thunder Force this weekend, which is Melissa McCarthy and Octate Spencer, which was clearly for these. It was a kind of a satiric superhero movie, essentially, of buddies.
And I know it felt like one of those movies that Melissa McCarthy just goes out and moves around and goes okay. And it was fine. It's exactly where I wanted to see it, on my screen. Well, yeah, that's the equivalent of straight-to-video for visual aid.
But it wasn't straight-to-video. It was a little better than that. You know what I mean? I just think this is just inevitable.
The move to the theaters is only for very big films, like the next Black Panther or whatever, which you do want to see in that way. But most of these movies do much better. Whether they go to Netflix or Sony Pictures, everyone sees their writing on the wall. Oh, this is going.
I think that's right. Anyway, Scott, you're on the cover of New York Magazine this week. Hello. Tell us more.
Well, finally, New York Magazine has decided to do their own Sexist Man Alive, 2021. It was a toss-up between me and George Clooney and Michael Jordan. No, I'm talking about... By the way, if I were the Sexist Man Alive, would I be like Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt or George Clooney would go on to win it twice and be worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
Oh, you know who I'd be the Sexist Man Alive with people? Nick Nolte. Like, some are talented, but probably should have never been on the cover and have some serious fucking demons to deal with. I am the Nick Nolte of New York Magazine.
Anyway. Anyway, I get to big stories. What is the thing? I'm sorry.
I haven't eaten. I'm like literally losing it right now. I see that you did CrossFit and I'm eating, but I had a lovely lunch. Very nice.
So we talk about... I'm fascinated by the idea of volatility. And volatility as embrace is directly correlated to how shitty your life is. And essentially, I think America is breaking down because for the first time in our nation's history of an extended period of time, a 30-year-old's life is shittier than his or her parents was at 30.
And I think that is the root of the incendiary underneath the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter, the GameStop movement, these mass shootings. I think it makes everything worse. And what happens if you're in a supermax prison in a life sentence, you want volatility. You would opt for a nuclear strike on your city if you're sitting in isolation in supermax.
And when your expectations and your desires and your hopes for a better future go down, you want volatility. And so we're embracing cryptocurrencies. We're embracing mob squeezes in the stock market. We're embracing, to a lesser extent, but we're embracing conspiracy theories because of volatility.
All we have done, all we have done in the last 20 years is the shareholder class that speaks to their senator on average once a month and the controls and has weaponized the government. All they have done is effectively try to suppress volatility. So in 2008, it was almost a financial crisis. We spent $700 billion to make sure that we didn't go into depression.
But baby boomers have now decided they not only won't tolerate a depression, they won't tolerate a recession. So we have issued $6 trillion in stimulus to make sure that there's this champagne and cocaine party keeps going, even if the hangover is going to get much, much fucking worse. And so we have this massive suppression of volatility. And unless you let the gale forces of creative disruption blow, young people never get a shot.
So what we want to do is keep existing businesses in business owned by baby boomers such that young people can't come in and release that restaurant for 50 cents in a dollar. Right, which we talked about here. This is something you brought together in this piece. This is called the Unified Monetary Theory of Beeple and Biden.
And it's got all kinds of good hearts, Scott. I just got to tell you. It's a very sexy looking story. Yeah, it's a very sexy looking story.
Yeah, it's a very sexy looking story. And even one of my colleagues at NYU said it wasn't awful. That's what he wrote. This isn't awful for you.
Anyway, for you. Oh my God, that's so funny. But I think there's something here. I think that if we're not careful, whether it's your ability, it all comes down to this one thing.
The general compact in our society has to be that our 30-year-olds do as well as we get 30. If that's not working, full stop, don't pass go. How do we have more protection of people on low cluster wages and minimum wage? How do we have occasional on-ramps for the two-thirds of young people that don't get a college degree?
How do we transfer wealth back to renters and homeowners and get rid of this ridiculous mortgage interest rate tax deduction? How do we help people who make money through their salary out of younger people by not charging lower taxes on current income versus investment income? We need a serious retransfer. And it's no longer about doing the right thing.
It's about self-preservation. Because at some point, when the bottom 40% of America and young people see the two men are worth more than they are, they will figure out a way to take their wealth away. That is the basis of economic history. At some point, when the bottom half figures out the fastest way to double our wealth is to volatility, whether it's violence, under the auspices of another worthwhile movement, whatever it might be, under the auspices of going on Reddit, the hostility, the justified hostility is created a desire for volatility because our government won't let the markets be volatile on their own.
All right, okay, all right. Everybody read it. Scott on volatility. What a shock.
Anyway, it's an excellent article. It's not as bad as it could have been. It was less... They're like, hey, my president's like, I can never hear from this guy.
And he's kind of my rock star. I don't know. He's like, this wasn't awful for you. Okay, this was not awful for you.
This was not awful for you. All right, big stories. We're going to big stories. Amazon workers now have a warehouse that voted against unionizing.
This is one of the biggest efforts in an organized labor movement in Amazon's history. Workers cast nearly 1,800 votes against the union, giving Amazon enough to defeat the effort. Ballots and bear the union were fewer than 30% of the votes. Now, it wasn't all the people there.
I think about half, a little bit more than half voted. It seems like a small loss, but this is the biggest movement to unionize Amazon, garning interest all the way up to President Biden. But Amazon has gone on an aggressive campaign to squash the efforts of arguing workers have access to rewarding jobs without needing involving a union. Amazon has 1.3 million people now.
It's hired about half a million in the past year. And now has the freedom to handle those employees by its own wealth. What do you think? What do you think?
You said this. You said this. This is your correct prediction. Yeah, this is a big deal.
And what you have is an organization that's the second largest employer and the only organization in the history of the United States to hire half a million people, maybe even the world in just 12 months. So arguably, it represents, there's always a tension between capital and labor. So Amazon is capital. Labor, there's really issues here.
There's a lot of stories coming out of the warehouses, essential workers. This has literally put on stage the biggest issues around the tension between capital and labor and in between the role that unions play. And by a vote of two to one from workers in Bessemer, the crisp answer is they don't play a role. I think this is basically, it's that notion of how do I go bankrupt slowly and then suddenly.
We're in the suddenly phase for unions. I mean, keep in mind, in almost any vote, you win by a few points, they got the shit kicked out of them. They did. Let me just push back on something.
I think in other parts of the country, it's going to be different. I think in New York, they're going to start organizing in New York, a JFK. Queens, biggest union town in America. Yeah, that's what I mean.
I think it's going to be different everywhere. This is by no means over for... I'm sorry, that's the court. Yeah, Queens is JFK.
Anyway, this is going to be a long-term effort by the unions in other parts of the country. This is not the most perfect. Like you said, people have been elevated through Amazon through these parts of the country. Other parts of the country are much more union-oriented and don't have more things.
So I think it's going to just continue. These skirmishes all over the country. This is going to be their number one issue. Besides the marketplace issue that they have, I think that's a significant problem.
This is going to be their issue going forward, just like it is for anyone. You know what was my eye-opening move? I have a long, I don't know, history with unions. I was a 16-year-old box boy and then a box boy my freshman year at UCLA.
And the reason I was able to pay for my fraternity bill and my tuition is because a union made sure that a box boy of San Vicente Foods made $8.50 an hour instead of $4. And it was life-changing for me. And then I could afford to go to UCLA. And by the way, San Vicente Foods did just fine overcharging for food to sell the people in Brentwood.
And so I've always had a very strong connection to unions. But at the same time, I remember when I went on the board of the New York Times, I thought, gosh, these have got to be the most pro-union people in the world. And it became apparent in about a hot minute that the shareholders, the board, the controlling family had nothing but contempt for the union. Nothing but contempt.
And I thought, well, what's wrong here? And the reality is unions have done a terrible job managing their brand among the public. And no 25-year-old who has their shit together comes home and says, mom, dad, great news, I'm going to work for the union. They've just managed their brand terribly.
The brand means it has these terrible associations of corruption, of not upskilling the workers at the same pace. They try and leverage situations and increase their compensation through exogenous situations as opposed to upskilling their members. So I just look, and I always worry, I worry that unions give us cold comfort. We need other, we need, we need antitrust.
We need minimum wage. Unions aren't doing their job. How do unions get organized going forward to appeal to young people where it would work in Bessemer? I'm not so sure it would work in Bessemer.
Good luck with that. Good luck with that. There's ways to do it. They do it in other parts of the world where unionization is much better.
healthier i think that brand has the same resonance with young people as sears and blockbuster at this point all right but i do still think the employee initiatives are not going for amazon they have too many people i agree i just yeah it is a big vulnerability for them and also an asset now they can also lead the lobbying on minimum wage getting up to 15 dollars um they could lead on all kinds of health benefits and as you said instead of tweeting obnoxious things they could just be a leader in this area take it take it take it okay here's the negative and turn it into a positive i agree i i think they will they will they will lip sync to increasing the minimum wage but there are no union dues involved in minimum wage yeah and so i don't think they're going to be a warrior for minimum wage and i think i also think the biggest hit to unions that's happened the last decade is unfairly or fairly they were seen as trying to exploit the pandemic to increase the compensation of their teachers instead of putting it first that's a broken relationship and i think that that just if you're a parent and you hear from a union that we're not sending our teachers back who average age primary school teachers average age is 33 i mean they're not exactly a vulnerable group i thought i thought unions really handle that poorly really and it's hard to categorize it's hard to generalize and stereotype unions because there's just you know there's several hundred and some are outstanding and some are corrupt but i literally think this was a seminal moment i think this was i don't want to call the last nail in the coffin of unions but this is turnout i think the fat lady is on the stage here for unions and i think it's an opportunity for them it's good to lose it's good they've been losing a lot they've had a lot of good the last 30 years i got it but there's a way to win there's a way to have a winning argument to workers look who's taken workers rights it's the republicans with populism you know what i mean like there's an opportunity to win back it was interesting i don't think biden lost anything by doing this saying he's for the workers oh no doubt no downside but why isn't why is the united states senate the strongest union in the world representing all workers that's what i understand yeah yeah all right well interesting it's a big win for amazon i don't think it's over scott it does think it's over so for unions i don't think it's over by any stretch um i think i'll double down a lot in various you're kissing the ass of your masters in fine arts book club i know how smart you are no i'm not i was in a union i was in a newspaper union once i'm not anymore i'm still in the union are you yeah ufw for uh my classification at uh at stern oh yeah what is the ufw uh no i said ua w you know somehow united autoworkers ended up representing a certain classification of academics or professors at stern and i pay dues or use pay dues wow i think i'm in sag because i was on bill marlinson you might be in sag i think there was like enter you into something so you can join sag i've done a bunch of tv stuff but otherwise i'm not i don't believe i'm in the unions um and i have mixed feelings on them but mostly positive if they're done correctly all right scott let's go on a quick break and we'll be back to talk about alibaba's first big antitrust find in china and have a friend of pivot best-selling author walter isaacson i'm maria sharapova and i'm hosting a new podcast called pretty tough every week i'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition work ethic and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness we'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives actors entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey follow pretty tough wherever you get your podcasts so we are 250 years into this american experiment and i say it's going okay i give us like a c plus there is no perfect past but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are gonna human that's what we do i think the story of america is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of america to expand those principles to include more people what's going to determine the next 250 years of america and how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve okay so i'm just gonna be a jerk here because i'm a historian so we have to have a prologue explaining you know we the people okay you know i just don't remember from school house rock we the people are going to form a perfect union i established justice what is it ensures domestic tranquility so you're talking about a foundational document so i'm building a document that will protect american democracy that's this week on america actually we are back let's talk about alibaba's first major antitrust fine in china over the weekend chinese regulators hit the asian e-commerce giant with a 2.8 billion antitrust fine it's official said alibaba had broken the country's anti-monopoly law by preventing merchants from selling their goods on other shopping platforms tuned into context alibaba reported profits of more than 12 billion dollars in the last three months of 2020 alone then the ant group and affiliate financial affiliate behind alibaba announced a sweeping overhaul of its business in response to demands from chinese government uh as part of a rectification plan which sounds scary for in a communist country the company said it would apply to set up as a financial holding company which would bring closer supervision requirements and also said it would change the way it collects and uses personal information improve data security reviews the company says it will improve corporate governance better here to rules about fair competition gosh sounds like things we maybe we should do in this country but china just decided it tell i don't know you know there's stuff behind the behind the scenes stuff here but interesting moves what do you think well we did do this in this country and that is we find the fdc find facebook 5 billion in july of 19 it was the largest in history and distinctly the fact was barely and this is the scale of things now the previous biggest fine was 22 million so this you know this was literally 500 times the size but it was less than one percent of facebook's market cap and the stock went up three percent a day the day they announced the fine because the market hates did you see what happened alibaba stock today up eight percent so we've been to this movie before and quite frankly if i were and i'm thinking about this i don't you know i only like to buy stocks i'm going to own at least think i'm going over five years alibaba is going to i think i think similar to facebook the year after uh the year after um uh they cleared out this insecurity the market it's announced i think this thing is up 20 to 30 percent by the end of the year if you look there right now it's trading multiple earnings that looks like a meddling internet company in the u.s it's i think alibaba relative to its performance right now is the cheapest internet stock i think people are nervous about what china could do any one time i think that's the and more effectively than antitrust people here or you know how slow we move around these things i see i would argue that that's a bit of a american i would argue we're more volatile and have our head way up where our ass much more other than being you know a communist autocracy and i'll give you that we have a better system as it relates to the internet and antitrust we've got nothing on them nothing and answers a juggernaut alibaba everybody we're so and i'm guilty of this we're so narcissistic we think that all innovation takes place within seven mile radius of sfo alibaba is more innovative than any uh finance delivery grocery payments they are everywhere they're all internet companies much together in one cloud it's just like they kind of dominate in their house and if eight can manage to put this behind them and jack ma doesn't end up behind bars and there's some there's some what i'll call greenfield to say okay we put this behind us that stock goes to multiple revenues versus multiple evita so i'm just very bullish on alibaba and we've been to this movie before once the the quote-unquote fine is put behind them the stock the stock tends to trend up so there's a big story they come to an understanding the government and alibaba suspect including you know it's also just the ownership of the chinese companies there's a lot of data leakage going back and forth between the government and the companies but it's interesting that the chinese government got made a made a they're making a statement here by controlling ma in some way well the government is supposed to regulate these guys when they get too big um but this was this was an equivalent what i'll call slap on the wrist their stock's up eight percent today so what is a fine supposed to do you know when you get a parking ticket you don't come home and celebrate right or you get a speeding ticket you don't come on go we just got richer everybody i got a parking ticket but when we find a big tech company you come home and they're richer uh they're wealthier so i think this is like i think this is really interesting and alibaba is a juggernaut in my view alibaba is the least the best value internet talking about by the way charlie munger made his first public stock purchase in seven years today or a friday alibaba yeah i would agree he's quite a character jack mom maybe we'll get him to come over to the u.s talk to us about things i like code yeah he was wonderful he talked so fast nobody he was he was so excited about all the various things he had uh done and he's really quite a he's a fascinating character um can we leave the panel you suggested at the beginning of the call uh no we haven't asked yet oh come on no come on let's let's just say the name of the dog's belly no no no we gotta ask we gotta ask you can find out scott wants to do a panel of code which is coming in the end of the title of the panel yeah aggrieved white males yeah that's gonna be the best i can see what i can do there's a lot of us out there you can see great ones out there there's plenty of those people all right let's bring on a friend of pivot walter isaacson someone i've known forever is the author of a new book called codebreaker he's also the best-selling author of so many things including the book steed jobs and walter welcome i feel like you've got so many things behind your name that i don't know which one to pick but we've known each other for decades i guess i think friend of cara is probably the most important and somebody who when i go to the gym listens to both of you all the time very nice so walter's from the south so this is this is a very uh polite way of saying such nice things about us anyway let's talk about you in this new book um and i do want to get back to sort of where we are with apple at some point at the end since you wrote that massive book on steve jobs um so tell us about jennifer down i did an interview with her also on sway but talk about why you chose her as a subject and where does she fit into the other narratives you've written you and i grew up in the digital revolution you know the steve jobs and the bill gates and it produced amazing things that brought you know microchips into our homes with our personal computers and iphones became platform and i thought that's totally transformative but as i'm looking at the beginning of the 21st century starting with the sequencing of the human genome and of course climaxing the gene editing tools and for that matter rna vaccines that we can program i realized that you know molecules are the new microchip and the first half of this century will truly be a biotech revolution just like you and i live through the digital revolution and jennifer dowda is as you know because i've heard her on your podcast but also i've spent the past four or five years hanging out with her is a perfect entree into that because she discovers the structure of rna just the way lotson and crick helped discover was rosalyn franklin that of dna and she and her advisor figure out how rna can replicate and be the source of life on this planet then how it can be a guide for gene editing tools and now we're using it as a messenger to create a vaccine rna messenger rna to create vaccines and of course she's thrown herself into the moral and ethical issues so there's a lot of colorful characters in my book but like any writer it's good to have a central character that i can hold their hand and the reader can hold our hands and we go step by step through discovery scott's gonna get gonna have a question but can you generally explain crisper for those who don't know what it is it's very briefly yeah it's simple it's something bacteria have been doing for a billion years they have clustered repeated sequences known as crispers in their genetic material that takes mug shots of any virus that attacks it so if the virus attacks again they cut it up using a guide rna uh and that's pretty useful in this day and age of us getting attacked by viruses what jennifer dowden and emmanuel sharp and jay and others discovered was a way to repurpose this to recode that guide so it would cut our own dna at a targeted spot so we could say cut out this genetic flaw or cut out this gene or fix this and so they repurpose the crisper system of bacteria to be a gene editing tool for us scott so in any exciting technology that hits sort of this parabolic increase or in outcomes there's externalities and when you obviously you really got to know this field what do you see as the two or three biggest uh risks we face uh with this explosion or this you know um envisioned explosive uh explosion in biotech if you will i think that first we should say it's gonna be a godsend in so many ways people who are blind have sickle cell anemia huntingtons taste sacks yeah cancer all these things having said that the two biggest things i worry about are a if it's this sort of genetic supermarket isn't free and it won't be the rich could buy better genes and we could exacerbate the inequality we have in our society not just exacerbate it but encode it into our species the way in brave new world or they have children that are six inches taller than the rest or they decide with all due respect to scott that i want a full head of blonde hair for my you know and i don't you know and they edit their own children and they buy better genes for their children and eventually could even be things like memory or intelligence or height or muscle mass or eye color or anything secondly i think if we let this just be a free market thing that it could end up being what i would call a free market eugenics now eugenics we think about the nazis or even cold spring harbor in the early days of the united states 20th century where the government mandates certain master racing right i'm not worried about that i'm worried about individual choices where people edit out the diversity of our species behind me you can see on your little squad cast thing you know these big doors behind me that open to a balcony on royals street i remember walking with your two sons and they were visiting once and royal street is filled with all sorts of characters short and tall and fat and skinny and creole colored and black and white and gay and straight and trans and deaf and hearing and able and that's what makes our species so cool and so great and creative and resilient right and if we allow people to say i want to edit out anything that's i call the deviation from typical that's a bad thing too depending what typical is correct i use typical because whenever i use normal people say well that's a normative term so i'm trying to figure out typical for me on height is say whatever i am you know five foot seven uh but uh you know somebody's being born at four foot six you might say if that's a genetic condition we should fix it and they can be typical species height but if somebody's gonna be born like i am at five foot seven then that's an enhancement if you give me another eight inches you wouldn't correct us it's your genes you this is not to for existing people it's your children right right although even um with muscle mass that can be regulated we have myostatin that's a genetically controlled uh in our body and in theory you could especially in younger children have greater muscle mass but height is something you probably uh yeah uh no no i i won't go into your twitter feed but i know the child doesn't need no muscle mass even Walter Isaacson is talking to me by the way Walter when i read your stuff you definitely sound five foot eight just so you know yeah you're taller than you look on a podcast that's a nice thing to say go ahead scott well just around the fears on income inequality are we already there zolgesma is this drug a knockout drug for muscular atrophy that basically cures an incurable disease but you need 2.1 million dollars for two doses and i just gotta go fund me for it from a couple in holland trying to raise money for their daughter uh and i don't think they're gonna make it and i think it's gonna die i mean are we already there i'm hearing these things you know one of the things people say well we shouldn't use crisper i get 12 i'm not kidding i can scroll through my phone here 12 a day at least people saying i want to show you the picture of my four-year-old son or my 12-year-old granddaughter and he has this or she has that can you get me in touch with dr doudna can you help fix it and as you say that's heart-rending so that's why i don't want to stop research into this because we can fix genetic diseases secondly jennifer doudna has taken the problem that's got you illustrated which is it can cost a million dollars to fix sickle cell in the patient i got cured last year how do you bring that cost down there are a couple ways of doing it one is that you can do it in the body so it doesn't mean taking out stem cells you know there are ways to make this much cheaper but the other way to do it is to do it in the sperm or the egg or the early stage embryo so it's inheritable and it uh means that you wipe out sickle cell once and for all for one quick edit and that's cheaper but that's a line we have to be careful about crossing making inheritable edits let me ask you because one of the things you know you and i and also scott's watched sort of the internet sort of morph into something pretty ugly when everyone had this hopefulness around it and it's like you know when you get into gene editing it's even more like the idea there's been a million sci-fi movies like i can't there's dozens and dozens where people do it's not just right in the world but you know so many of it when i was a kid there was a not a kid a young person there was a play called twilight of the golds if you remember which was editing it was terrifying to me as a gay person you could edit out the child this couple who's a gene editor um what do you um jennifer talks a lot about the ethics of this because she had issue with the Chinese doctor who was using the technology to clone. Is that correct? What were they doing? It's an interesting question because what the Chinese doctor did was make inheritable edits in very early stage embryos to eliminate one of the receptors for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
There was a shock. Everybody was upset. That wasn't really necessary. You shouldn't make inheritable edits.
Well, after this year of the pandemic, the notion of doing edits that might make us less susceptible to viruses, you have to remind me, okay, what was wrong with that? Obviously, it was wrong because we're not ready. It wasn't safe. He was a sloppy doctor.
But if we could safely edit out receptors for certain viruses and know that we didn't have unintended consequences, it'll take a while before we can know all that. So who has to decide? That's the thing. I mean, the internet started to run like us and you see where we are.
There's nobody getting to decide any of this stuff. Or it's just grown up without decision making. So who's on the front lines? I know she's talked a lot about this, but who gets to pick what's in?
Because it's a big wide world with lots of people with money, lots of different opinions on humanity. How do you figure that out once this medicine is out into the public? Well, I think we have to have some social consensus. And by we, I mean, you and me and Scott and everybody listening to this, we shouldn't just give it to the politicians or the scientists and say, you figure it out.
And that's why I wrote this book. Because the science isn't all that hard. But the moral issues are, and we should all have a right to chip in. Whether you're in the disabled community or differently abled community or you have a child with genetic disease or you don't want us messing with mother nature.
We should all talk about this. The biggest issue, and I deal with it in the book, it's somewhat complex, but you all have talked about this on your podcast before, is to what extent it should be regulated by government and society as a whole? And to what extent should it be individual choice? And on a lot of reproductive decisions, of course, we like leaving it to individual choice.
That's what we do in a free market system. But if you left everything about gene editing to individual choice, you would have this problem of editing out the diversity. You would have this problem of the rich buying better genes. And so maybe it's like vaccine distribution.
Some people will, by the way, to the head of the queue, but not many people actually did. Because we had a social consensus of here's how we're going to distribute this new vaccine. And I think we need to develop that with CRISPR as well. But who likes it?
I mean, we already have two groups working on it. Jennifer has gathered all what I call the National Academies, which is the Chinese Academy. There's a character in my book named Dong Qingpei who's been working on it. And they put the doctor who did that early stage embryo into jail because they decided it was a violation.
The Royal Academy in Britain, Europe, the United States, National Academy of Sciences, and Jennifer and David Baltimore and other people you know Peggy Hamburg are part of that process. The WHO is doing a parallel process, and we do have to try to get it. But it's like basically the regulatory agencies. It's not that hard.
Like the FDA, you know, people can get off-labeled drugs or do treatments the FDA hasn't approved, but not much. I mean, most people don't. And if we get a consensus of the FDA's around the world, we can keep this genie or this gene in the bottle to some extent. Yeah, my question is more.
I'm interested to get into the head of Walter Isaacson. I read Andrew Roberts' biography of Churchill, and I had the same feeling when I finished that book and when I finished one of your books. And that is, you know, you know these people. And more than anyone maybe who's alive today, you know better the most successful people or the most impactful people in the history of our society.
And so my question to you would be, of all of these people that you know really well, a few questions. One, who in your view was the most self-actualized or led the most rewarding life, just personally? Who was the most tortured? And then my third, and I'll repeat them again if you need it, is if you decided, and I'm not saying this is the right decision, but if you decided you wanted to raise young men and young women, they might have a chance to have that kind of impact on the world.
Do you see any commonalities in terms of how they were raised or their upbringing? So let's start with happiest, most tortured, and then any insights as a parent? Well, when it comes to most happy and driven, you also get the most tortured because he's one of the great people with, it contains multitudes, and that was Steve Jobs. I mean, he really was self-actualized.
He really invented himself at, as Kara and I have talked about many times, a reality distortion field that sometimes worked. But he also had a lot of demons that caused him to be a pretty rough character. Jennifer is a much more happy person, but she too has insecurities. They come from being a young woman until girls don't do science, and being an outsider in Hilo, Hawaii, where everybody else was Polynesian.
So I think most of the people in my books have, to some extent, been outsiders, especially Leonardo being born out of wedlock, gay, left-handed, and having to go to Florence. We get accepted, but he keeps asking, how do we fit in? And Jennifer's always asking, how do I fit in? And Steve Jobs always asking, as an adopted child in this weird environment, how do I fit into the cosmos?
The other thing that they share is this amazing curiosity that's a basic curiosity. I call it the tongue of the woodpecker because Leonardo wrote one day in the margin of his notebook and the ten things he wanted to know that day. Describe the tongue of the woodpecker. I mean, you have to get a woodpecker, open his mouth.
But he was just basic curiosity on that. And he writes, why is the sky blue? And I realized Einstein had that in his notebook. Jennifer, I thought about that as a child.
I'm looking outside these windows. I see a blue sky. I've outgrown my wonder years. I quit asking so many stupid questions that the grown-ups would tell me, don't ask them.
But they all refrain from outgrowing their wonder years. And they not only have a passionate curiosity about basic things like blue skies, why water swirls when it passes a rock, they also have a curiosity about all aspects of nature. They're able to see patterns that ripple across nature. As you know with Steve Jobs, he loved calligraphy and dance and music and theater when he's at Reed College, but also coding.
And he's the one who and Kara's been to so many of those, when he launched a product, the last slide was always that intersection of two streets, the liberal arts and technology. Well, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man is that exact same intersection. He's standing there naked self-portrait in the science and the humanities of our cosmos. So people who see patterns across nature, because of their curiosity, tend to be the most creative.
Oh, that's great. That's a fantastic answer. I'm going to ask one more question about Jennifer herself. When you're thinking about a character like Jennifer Dona, who won the Nobel Prize this year, my funniest encounter was her.
She said, I didn't get to have a ceremony. And then I said, well, you get one next year. She goes, no, we don't get any, you know, go to Sweden and do the whole thing. But one of the things is, what is she focusing on now?
Is it pandemic stuff? Because we talked a little bit about it. So looking out at what's happened over the last year, we've been taken down, digital and advanced as we are, we're editing genes, this and that. We've been taken down by a virus, essentially, just like that, because we're so physical.
But what is her outlook on that? Almost exactly a year ago, early March of last year, she sent her son, Andy, to Fresno by train to be in one of Dean Kamen's, you know him, first robotics robot building competition. And at 2 a.m., Jennifer wakes up, nudges her husband, Jamie, and says, we've got to go pick up Andy, you know, because this pandemic seems to be spreading their clothing. So Andy's an only child.
So when they arrive, you can imagine, he's not happy. But they convince him to come along, and just as they're leaving the parking lot, they get a text saying, robot competition, cancel. And so Jennifer, when she gets back to Berkeley at about 7 a.m., summons scientists, 50 of them, to meeting as partly in person, partly by Zoom, to say, how are we going to pivot and repurpose what we're doing to fight the coronavirus? So for the past year, she's been using CRISPR to make home detection kits, which you'll get in a few months.
They'll be, they'll be in emergency authorized, but it's not yet manufactured. Where you can just, like a pregnancy test, have saliva, put it in the machine. Do I have COVID? Do I have, my kid have strep throat?
Is that tumor resurfacing? People, it'll be like Steve Jobs' iPhone. It'll be a platform that people build their own. Yeah, and the platform will be able to say, I can use this machine to study your gut microbiome, to see if you're eating the wrong yogurt or something.
So this will bring biology into our homes, the way the first personal computers in the 1970s brought microchips into our home. And so she's working on these home detection tools. She's working on a very advanced way of looking at just using CRISPR to kill viruses, rather than stimulate our immune system. And she's working on testing technologies.
She's also doing what Scott asked about, which is, all right, we've used CRISPR to cure sickle cell. It costs more than a million dollars. How do we get it down to at least $10,000, or maybe insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid can afford it? Scott, last question.
So you're limited to one more person you can do a biography on. Well, I'm going to have to consult with you all. I actually, you know, if I don't go back in the way back machine, there are three or four people around today that have that curiosity across disciplines. Obviously, Bezos is very interesting.
Elon Musk is interesting, but perhaps we're still in the middle of the story. I want to see how we're old enough to know, you know, how this movie ends, what's the next reel of this movie. I am deeply fascinated by Bill Gates, somebody I admire, and in some ways has been a subject of controversies that are unsure. But he has that interest across so many different fields.
He bought Leonardo's scientific notebook, which is the Codex Lester, because, you know, he understands the beauty of Leonardo being an interesting thing. So with Bill Gates, whether it's climate change or vaccines, but also creating personal computers, being one of the people who did it, but now doing nuclear energy, it gives me a chance to look at many different things. I haven't decided yet, and I've probably gone too far. I've got another one.
Dolly Parton. No, what? It's a joke, but man. It's not a joke.
I'm playing her songs now. We missed Mardi Gras here, because it was closed down. So instead of having floats, people decorated their homes as floats, and people drove by them. And my favorite, on St.
Charles Avenue, was a shrine home float to Dolly Parton, with all of her music, and a big, big picture of her, and the vaccines she had helped to fund. Dolly Parton. You know, it shows that the human species, even in times of a pandemic crisis, can rise to this challenge. I've got Dolly Parton riveting as a creator, and, you know, the best-selling songs of all time.
And so she feels the same of you. No, I doubt it. I don't know if she knows him, but she's the best-selling songs of all time. People aren't really writing.
Really? Yes. I will always love you. Yeah.
She's so rich to be able to give all that money to Moderna. Scott, any last questions? Which one of those? What do you think of those three?
Are you asking me? Yeah. Oh, hands down, Bill Gates. Hands down, Bill Gates.
All right, Scott. That means that if I do this, you will have me back. Okay. He's so good, isn't he?
He's such a charmer. And I will put you in the acknowledgement. Oh, my God. He's such a charmer.
I truly agree with you. I just think we can get into anything. Climate change. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Musk isn't over it. We could be in for the Howard Hughes portion of this. You know, Howard Hughes was just brilliant. Howard Hughes.
No, I'm not going to do Howard Hughes. There's one moment. Definitely Bill Gates. I'm glad we reached that picture.
And that's why Musk will be the one. But don't tell anybody. All right. Well, thank you so much.
We will be down in New Orleans as soon as we can. No, love it. Love it. All right.
Thanks, Walter. Bye. Bye-bye. All right, Scott.
One more quick break. That was so amazing. We'll be back for Wins and Fails. This week on Network and Shell, I'm joined by Tank Sinatra, the meme king, with over 15 million followers across Tank's good news, influencers in the wild, and his personal account.
Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single-sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes, and how meme culture, think preparation age, starter packs, and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value. Get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll, make your rethink what going viral is really worth, and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. Okay, Scott.
Wins and Fails, and try to be as intelligent as Walter Isaacson if you can. That would be impossible, and plus, that guy is so charming. Isn't he charming? He's charming.
Oh, my gosh. Charming guy. They were saying he was going to run for Louisiana, mayor of New Orleans, but I don't think he did. That's got to be an awful job.
He's way too smart for that. Way too smart. Yes. So my win is there's a consortium of CEOs getting together with direction, or shepherding from Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who I think is becoming the most influential academic in the world, to talk about actions they can take, or to at least maintain in the news cycle these ridiculous photosuppression laws in Georgia.
And I think it's really a, everyone talks about companies should be politicized, but I think these are Ken Frazier and Ken Chennault who, reek of integrity, have a vested interest, and have decided they want to use their blessings and their hard work and their success to ensure that the people behind them have an easier time than they did getting to the top of corporate America. And I think it's just a wonderful thing. It's a win. These guys, it represents risk for them.
It represents damage to shareholder value in some ways. It would be easier for them just to not do this stuff. It's not easy to coordinate as much as CEOs and get on the same page as everything. And Georgia has managed to unify competitors and get them on call.
I'm fascinated the Republican Party is giving up. This group of people is going to do what they want to, and they are not going to listen. Mitch McConnell's statement about political politics is like, screw you, Mitch, in terms of that. I think you're right.
I think you're right. All right. What's your fail? Well, I just, there's something around the brain, I think, once it hits 50.
I don't know about you. I think I understand cryptocurrencies better than 99% of the public, and I don't understand cryptocurrencies. That's about right. And I think that basically bank CEOs have so badly missed crypto, and Coinbase is supposed to go public on Wednesday.
I think it's a direct listing. We'll talk about that Thursday, I think. It's a direct listing, which means they try and pair the demand by coming out of the first trade that better calibrates the actual demand. Regardless, I think the stock is up.
I think it's a monster. And I think a decent question in the boardrooms of Credit Suisse or UBS or JP Morgan or BAML or Goldman Sachs is, how the fuck did we let Coinbase happen? I mean, Coinbase is basically an exchange in a trading desk of a financial asset that on the day of the IPO is going to be worth more than Goldman Sachs. And these banks, granted, they're hamstrung in terms of, they're hamstrung in terms of- Yeah, they pooh-poohed it.
I was around, remember? They pooh-poohed it years ago. I did the same thing. I'm like, it's going to zero, which is after me saying, I don't want to put in the time to understand.
Yep, I agree. I'm glad you've come to that conclusion. Hasn't agreed by now? I just as well.
But anyways, my loss is, I think the bank CEOs and boards will have to ask themselves some questions. This is now a $2 trillion asset class, and people want to trade in it. And now we have Stripe, PayPal, and Coinbase- And there's only transactions in it. There will be transactions.
Are all worth more than the traditional banks. And so if you're on the board of one of these companies, you're like, okay, what the actual fuck? Isn't this a business we're in? Do you know what?
A grieved person? I agree with you. I'm going to do very two quick wins and fails wins. I think the prosecution in the trial, in the Derek Chauvin trial, I think he's doing a great job.
Great job. They could just have not done as good a job. I think they're doing an excellent job. Making sure it will be very hard for this jury not to convict.
I know this has been a history, but I know this could happen again. And again, it keeps happening again where cops get off for egregious behavior. But I've been watching a lot of it. I'm very impressed by it.
Well, the blue wall has been breached here. Cops generally have a paternal order of not speaking ill of each other, and they've all said what happened here was- The prosecution's very sharp. I've been watching them, and I don't do- Not just because Marsha Clark, remember her? I love it.
They got bonuses, and then someone said, other than letting a murderer off scot-free, what did you decide they should get bonuses for? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the case. And then my- Didn't you want to, like, Inside Hollywood or something? I'm like, oh, gosh.
That's my win. And ultimately, the fail is this thing this weekend that got so much play, the Bible video, of the officer shooting, pepper spraying the black- army officer who was in the car just he was trying to get out safely of the car um and this officer just escalated beyond belief what could have been a very simple stop it shouldn't have been a stop it was a new car but the video itself was so astonishing the kind of behavior the aggressive behavior by the cop that was it cannot be explained away by you don't understand what it's like it was really um it was really eye-opening this officer's been fired virginia's looking into it but i thought this guy this uh this lieutenant handed himself in a very it would have been a dangerous decision for him beautifully and really it was uh was calm cool trying his hardest to de-escalate and the cop was just just problematic on every level thank you there you go there you go so two things um so uh so anyway so we have a lot to come with there's a lot going on this week there's gonna be a lot about the pandemic i just i just had a great interview with uh dr michelle williams who runs harvard's chance school um and we're gonna talk about opening uh opening the country up because the federal reserve chairman jerome powell says the u.s coming is about to start growing much more quickly but he also said that he's worried and the outlook is brightened substantially but at the same time he warned against reopening economy too soon and then the new spike in cases so maybe we'll talk about that on thursday how we're gonna open um as you know i have my i don't know if you read my twitter feed but i have my first giant lesbian outdoor dinner party and we were all so excited to see each other again thank you yeah it sounded uh you called it saucy it was saucy we hadn't seen each other in like a year it was we were all vaccinated and we still live outside but it was really i feel triggered i don't like to identify social events by heterosexuality well sexual orientation and you want to do a panel called a greed white man okay great okay i'm not a greed white heterosexual man okay and in fact that's who it is which is all redundant that is all redundant all right scott that's the show we'll be back friday for more uh go to nyman.com slash pivot to submit your question to the podcast links also shows and please read scott's excellent cover story that's right new york magazine nick nolte nick nolte sexiest man alive 1997 volatility scott read us out today's show was produced by rebecca sanani's internet engineer this episode thanks also to hannah rosen and rebrows make sure you subscribe to the show on apple podcast or an android user check us out on spotify where you listen podcast if you like our show please recommend it to a friend thanks for listening to pivot from new york magazine and box media the home of kareet barara you know we should have him on we should have him on with brett fabara brett fabara and kareet barara by the way he and i come back check out the friendship that is going to develop between the dog and kareet check it out we'll see you friday have a great week