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Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. Introducing Odo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.
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So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com So not feeling well, let's be honest, is Latin for cocaine-filled orgy. I want details.
This is such bullshit. This is so you're going on probation as an employee of OX. I got a picture from Carol last night where she was out partying with a bunch of her friends. I think things got a little dirty, and now she's nursing the mother of all hangovers, and she tells you to step in.
I think this is total bullshit. What was she really up to last night? I mean, Scott, let's be honest, you're projecting. That's more you than Carol.
I'm just angry. If you have the photo, I implore you to post it. Otherwise, I know that Carol, she doesn't get sick often. So let's be nice to Carol, or do you want to troll?
Well, we'll soon know as I sent her a video to download on WhatsApp, so I'll soon know everything about the end of the day. So that's some political humor. So now that she's out, let's do what we should do best, and now to talk about Carol behind her back. I think Carol is the type of person that remodels a home just so she can drive up in a pickup truck and yell at everybody.
Your turn. Well, I think Carol, I don't know, man. It's so hard. I can't talk shit about my boss, Scott.
That's right. She's your boss. She doesn't get mad, but she's direct. Oh, she gets even.
Yeah, she gets even. It's been a good year working for her. I started a year ago, and we've had some fun experiences going on the set of Silicon Valley, and I insisted that I'm on her rider and get to go and trailer with her and eat all the food. But the reality of that situation was she didn't want to run her lines before the show, so I had to sit her down and prep her.
But no, to be honest, she's such a pro. She's fun to work with. And you were at Twitter and Google before taking this job, right? Yeah.
I think my career has been a bit of a, I don't know, it's been all over the place, but actually very specific. I'm obsessed with media and mostly really interesting strategies. So my work with Carol is combining those two things. Like how do we take this ecosystem that cares built for herself, which is the column, the podcast, the appearances on CNBC, and make her bigger.
And it's part editorial strategy and it's part business and partnership. So yeah, we kind of do it all together. It's really fun. Yeah, actually, Cara's enabled me to bring two of my favorite things together from a professional aspect.
And Dignity and Anger, she's helped me me meld those two things. So let's get on. What's the news today? A lot of news, Erica.
Yeah, there is. Let's talk about Bezos. So last year, Scott, as you remember, Jeff Bezos had his phone hacked and some embarrassing pictures came out. Well, it turns out now the story that's unfolding is how the hack happened.
And spoiler alert, we are back to the Saudis. So this week, reports came out that Jeff Bezos had his phone hacked by the Saudi Crown Prince months before the assassination of the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. In 2018, Jeff Bezos had a running WhatsApp conversation with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and MBS sent Bezos a corrupt video file, which then got a lot of information on Bezos' phone. And Saudi Arabia denies that the claim that they were behind this hack, but experts at the UN say that they have a medium to high confidence that the phone was hacked by the Crown Prince's corrupted video file sent through WhatsApp.
And the UN also concluded that the hack likely led to the leak of personal pictures of Jeff Bezos later leaked to the National Enquirer. So the National Enquirer has also denied having any connection to MBS. But I guess before I talk to you, as part of the UN statement, they added, at a time when Saudi Arabia was supposedly investigating the killing of Mr Khashoggi and prosecuting those esteemed responsible, it was waging a massive online campaign against Mr. Bezos and Amazon targeting him principally as the owner of the Washington Post.
What do you think about that? So it reminds me of when Karen and I were talking about Davos. I remember the first time I was at Davos, they had Thomas Friedman speak at a dinner and he talked about the emergence, and this is a 1999 of these super nationals or individuals that would take on nation state like complexions in the sense that they would become so wealthy and so powerful. And because Capitol can permeate geographic boundaries that they would take on sort of this nation state feel.
And it strikes me that in the geopolitical tension between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the US, they've co-opted us mostly by saying, all right, did the guy in charge, I'll finance your next 10 karat display of garishness in Lisbon or in Riyadh. If I'm going to be a source of money for you, I've kind of won you over. It's kind of sickening how silent the administration would apologize for the Kingdom administration event. And now they've essentially decided that this nation state they're going to war with is Bezos, who has tremendous economic power and also owns the Washington Post, who they clearly see is an adversary to their interests.
And so they decide to egg kill journalists and be trying to discredit Bezos. And this is, I mean, this is pretty, this is pretty full body contact geopolitical adversarial, I don't know what its term is, you know, this is this is this is thunderdom, right? And what strikes me is that one of the many things that have weakened us as a nation is the administration's actions emboldened people to do things including killing journalists, including going after our citizens. And does anybody actually think the US is going to do anything?
So it's creating, it could also lead to a sense of chaos where you have people worth $150 billion or worth the GDP of Norway decide to take matters into their own hands. He has his own security experts now, his own security team. He has his own propaganda, you know, I don't want to call a propaganda machine, but he has his own vehicle for his own side of the story in the form of one of the great media companies in the world, Washington Post. So it's, it's turning into, we now have three nation states going at it.
We have the Kingdom Saudi Arabia, we have the United States, and we have, you know, Bezos, the country, a nation. It just, it's so ripe with what tells for our, our time in our era, but the notion, I mean, you're going to see a lot of people refusing to open files, that's the most immediate thing. It's also brings up a notion that this very shadowy industry around hacks is not regulated. And supposedly this wasn't, they don't think this is a government action, but you can pay people.
And there's a lot of firms, a lot of them located in Israel to basically extract information from almost any phone in the very shadowy industry that requires more scrutiny and more regulation. But it'll be interesting to see how this plays out, whether or not the administration actually acknowledges anything went wrong here, if they continue to be an apologist for, for Saudi Arabia, or if they just ask them to buy another destroyer or finance another hotel, not coincidentally, both Jared and his brother Josh were in Saudi Arabia recently. So this is, this is really ugly. And unfortunately, when you look at the attention graph, we're all focused on this impeachment.
So we're missing things like, yeah, continents on fire, and we're missing things like geopolitical actions by adversaries that were used to be our allies or claim to be our allies. And we're not punching back. We seem to be, we seem to be fabulous. What I was just thinking about, as you were saying, this is such a great angle is like, geopolitical conflicts are now being waged through corporations.
The fact is that as these companies are global, and they have a footprint around the world, and they rely on trade, that they depend on other countries, and one of the ways much government's kind of fucking with each other is through these companies. We have Y-Way in the US with Trump kind of making it difficult for Y-Way to get semiconductors from US manufacturers this year. There's just a lot of like, it's not so subtle anymore, but these big companies are becoming really important tools for these geopolitical chess moves, I guess. Well, it comes down to money, right?
If you have an individual, again, with a GDP of a small Northern European nation, we're about to see war break out, and it won't be a direct war. It won't be a shooting war. It'll be how worse are found now, and it was proxy wars using third parties and cyber attacks. I just can't imagine.
I mean, quite frankly, they factored the wrong cowboy. This is an individual, has tremendous resources, is probably more, has more access to, I mean, think about it. The technology has access to, the resources he has access to, I don't think Bezos is the kind of guy that scares easily, and he's not, typically, if an individual was attacked, or their security was compromised, or they were abused or threatened by a foreign nation, the government would step in and say, okay, we got this. Instead, he's just going to ignore them or ignore their, realize that they are going to be apologists, and he's going to go around them and start fighting its own proxy wars.
When you think about it, we now only have geopolitics between nations. We have politics between nations and very wealthy individuals. It's a strange situation. I know.
Remember Bezos? Remember his response last year to the leaked photos, the National Enquirer, where he basically didn't hold back, and he's basically like, he threatened me. I'm going to come at you. That's also interesting that he's the target, but the thing I want to say before we move on is, what do you think Facebook's response should be to this?
What's up? They own it. Do you think they're going to do anything? Do you think they care?
So I'm always one looking for reasons to be angry at Facebook, but if you are, in this instance, if the file is transmitted over a technology and that file isn't downloaded, knowingly by the person in the file contains malware, I mean, an opportunity is it supposedly Apple is better or it's not as easy to send malware over iOS as it is across other platforms or Android. So it's an opportunity for an organization to say, all right, we're better at screening stuff or checking it or you get those alerts saying we weren't able to check this, be downloaded at your own risk. But I don't, at least immediately, I don't see how Facebook here is guilty. A lot of people immediately came out on Twitter and said, oh, this is about encryption.
I'm like, well, this is now this is about cyber attacks and about nation states, as individuals, it's not really about encryption. It's about malware and cyber attacks. I don't think, I mean, at least on the face of it, I don't think you can really hold Facebook or WhatsApp accountable here. What are your views?
Am I missing something? Well, no, I mean, I think that's a good point. I mean, there's a few issues here. One is that these tools, like, you know, what's up and chatting with people is they are as care of, say, being used as exactly as they were meant to.
The problem is that there are unintentional consequences that occur, which this is one of them and this is a malicious attack to your point and it's dangerous. I think one of the biggest issues is the literacy of people who are using these tools and that don't really have, let's say, they're at five or sixes where they should be at tens in terms of how understanding how to use this technology. So Jeff Bezos is like, probably should have known better not to download something, but I get emails all the time from my family member sending me a file saying, you know, download it. This is so funny.
This is the thing that these companies tend to pass that off. They say, well, it's not our job to like teach society how to use these tools and maybe they'll invest some money in, you know, literacy efforts or training people on things. But there's a gap. A lot of people just don't understand the severity of their actions using these tools.
And I think that's a concern. I think they'll continue to be an issue for these companies. The other just to put a dot on the information point here about how potentially damaging this is, one of my colleagues at NYU, Professor Paul Romer, Nobel Prize winner, just such an incredible thinker and he sort of pioneered, he was into cities before it was cool. He was talking about the power of cities that all the economic growth would go to cities.
And I don't know if he coined the term, but when ideas have sex and that is people bumping off each other and close proximity creates a tremendous amount of innovation and new ideas. And one of the most harmful things amongst many other things around some of these terrorist attacks involved aircraft is that when people are scared and don't travel, ideas don't travel, ideas don't bump off each other, global commerce comes to halt. And ideation and people being in the same room comes to halt in the economy and the global economy becomes less innovative and less productive. And the same is true of if all of a sudden data gets scared or we get scared to transfer or let data travel, you're just going to have less innovation and less ideas.
If all of a sudden we're very reticent to download data, we're very reticent to communicate with people online. We're very, you know, we're cautious about the business we can track online and all of a sudden the global travel of zeros and ones gets slowed. And there's more restrictions put in place. Fewer ideas are going to have sex.
This is not only a threat to innovation. That's interesting. I mean, I think that we have gone from like zero to a thousand in terms of, you know, in the last 20 years of sharing ideas and information and traveling across borders. So especially for those people who are privileged enough to do it.
But I don't know. I don't know if it's a bad thing that there's a little bit of correction, you know, in the other direction. My sense of WhatsApp though is it's primarily where it's really on traction is among a lot of the global middle class or people who couldn't afford traditional long distance rates across telco. I mean, it's just got such, and again, I'm always been selling like a Facebook apologist, but I do think WhatsApp has been an incredible boon for people in terms of some of the owners long distance started as they were having to pay through their own local monopolies.
But anyways, we shall see. Yeah, we shall see. So listen, the next one I want to talk about is speaking of privacy and data. So we're continuing to follow the balance between user privacy with tools like encryption and a government's right to access that information through things like Backdoors.
And in this area, we have Apple encryption part two. So this is a story that rotors came out with a few days ago. It basically said that Apple had been working on encryption system that would allow iPhone users to fully encrypt all of their iCloud data. And rotors reported that the company halted these efforts after pressure from the FBI to keep that information accessible.
So what do you think? This happened a few years ago that Apple sources who were not named in the story said that it probably one or two reasons why this feature of this plan got killed. One is the legal team killed it for various reasons that they didn't disclose. The second is that actually users would get super confused and lock themselves out of their iCloud data if this encryption occurred.
As a side note, Scott, we should have people on encryption experts with you and Cara since we got hundreds of emails about this from listeners. But what's your take on this move from Apple? They're saying, look, it's just not true that we're not cooperating with the government. We've done this around iCloud.
I also think that they're coming to the realization slowly, but surely that encryption poses a lot of downsides. That there's a lot of low probability high-severity scenarios that Apple could come under tremendous fire. It's sort of that Jack Bauer moment where we say we don't ever want to torture anybody. We need to put in place an absolute that we don't torture people, but you find a guy, you find out that there's six new groups about to go off and you say, okay, it's that Jack Bauer moment.
And are there going to be certain moments if we decide to build a fail-set box? And I got a couple quotes here. First off, I want to apologize to the Daniel Kahneman fans or disciples. And Nobel Prize winner talked about wrote a script book around Fast and Slow Thinking.
And I misquoted in last week saying that people were subject to slow thinking. Slow thinking is actually the good part when you rely on the better notions of your instincts or your brain to slow down and really think through stuff and offer some nuance. And I'm worried about the encryption debate that immediately people go to Fast Thinking and go, okay, encryption is Apple, who we like and Tim Cook is a seems like a thoughtful, likable guy. And the backdoor solution is Trump and Bill Barr.
And it's strange that when we were talking about this, if you do a heat map of iOS versus Android, basically iOS is Democrat and Android is Red State. But if you look at a city, concentration around a city and where there's wealth, it lights up iOS with the wealthy areas and it lights up Android for the lesser wealthy areas, because the general compact with people around Android is will molester data. And in exchange for that, we'll give you cheaper phone, cheaper data. And iOS is said, you deserve privacy.
Privacy is now a luxury item. You'll have to pay more, but we'll only pull 80 to 120 data points. But where that heads is, one of the places it goes is that people immediately assume this debate, they take a shortcut because they're busy and they go, okay, encryption bad because it equals Trump and Barr. But if you look back at what Obama said, we should be able to find a solution and to, you know, to go to immediately to an absolute as to fetishize the phone.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both said there should be some compromise here, there should be some middle ground. And so I hope this debate moves from attaching it to Tim Cook and and or Dom Trump to actually the issue. And then we do it, Mr. Kahneman suggested and take advantage of our frontal lobe and cortex and have some slow thinking around this.
I think I think slow thinking is right. I mean, I think what Kara was saying in the episode last week was like, there just has to be a public debate on this. It can't happen behind closed doors. And it's interesting to be about this being completely politicized.
I think, you know, on your point on Android versus iOS, you know, Android has historically had lower price points. And that was the whole the reason that they scaled pretty quickly. But you know, they just come out that pixel, which I was trying to get into that market, which is the same price point as the Apple iPhone. But listen, I think that it's really interesting.
I think from an optics standpoint, we have Trump tweeting last week that, you know, Apple should kind of get on board and help the government. And then it's kind of like the right hand, maybe not knowing what the left hand is doing, the other side of the government working closely with Apple. But the reality is like, I don't know if it's that Trump might know all of this. It's just the fact that like he's building a narrative, he's building kind of an else versus that narrative, which, you know, is the great creativity and the great, I think, thing to watch of this administration is they know how to build narratives.
And you know, a lot of people follow them. So wait, I found the quote. I found Obama's code. He said, you cannot take an absolutist view on encryption.
If your view is strong encryption, no matter what, that does not strike a balance that we've lived with for two to three hundred years. And it's fetishizing our phones above every other value that can't be the right answer. Go on, Barack. Go on.
You crazy young man who managed to leave Washington with your reputation pretty much intact. Yeah. Did you see, did you see his photos of, you know, Barack and Michelle that he posted for her birthday? I did not.
Yeah. She's like the wonderful husband. Yeah. Wonderful.
Heavy. The internet loved it. Yeah. It really sweet.
All right. It's time for a quick break. We'll be right back with listener mail wins and fails. I'm a said Herndon and this is America actually.
We're all talking to each other to see what do we do wrong? What do we not see? I'm in Washington, DC this week to interview Ruben Geigo. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona.
And he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congress. Merrick's wall. I have to learn from this and I will learn from this.
But, you know, for me, it's not a 20, 28 question. It's about what it means that to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America actually, we asked Geigo about predatory behavior in Washington. His plans for immigration reform and more.
This week on net worth and chill, I'm breaking down the institution everyone's talking about right now, but nobody actually understands the federal reserve. With all the drama happening between Trump and Fed chair Jerome Powell, you're probably seeing headlines and wondering what any of this has to do with your money. Spoiler alert, it's everything. I'll explain what the Fed actually is, why it exists, and how this one institution controls the interest rates on your mortgage, credit cards, student loans, and more.
We're diving into why raising or cutting rates isn't just boring policy talk. It's the difference between affording a house or watching crisis viral out of control. Plus, I'm breaking down the current controversy over firing Fed board members and why both Republicans and Democrats are freaking out about it because this fight isn't just political theater. It could mean real chaos for your wallet.
Listen, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash your rich BFF. All right, Scott, we're back. So let's dig into some listener mail, shall we? You've got you've got to keep the leaf out of your mail mail.
You've got mail. Hey, this is I'm from India, former NYU student. Cara and Scott, I had a question for you around Jeff Bezos's recent trip to India. It seems like a pull you out to where he's promised a billion dollars, a lot of jobs, and has been viewing a lot of businessmen as well as small and medium business owners who he's a promising a lot of employment to.
Very curious what you think about what he's actually trying to achieve with this, especially given how Amazon India now competes with essentially Walmart own Flipkart and where this e-commerce wall is headed in India. So Scott, this is an NYU alum, so I want you to start us off. But let me let me just give a little context. Obviously Jeff Bezos announced last week that he would have been investing a billion dollars into India over the next five years.
I think the Indian retail market is $1.3 trillion, so it's a bit of money. But there are obviously a lot of challenges, but I want to hear your take. What do you think about this move? Well, committing a billion dollars or Amazon or Jeff Bezos committing a billion dollars to investments in India is tantamount to the world's wealthiest man committing $961,000 to fight the fires in Australia.
It's just ridiculous. Oh, wait, he did that. He did that. This is pretty much insignificant.
It's just doesn't, that's a drop in the bucket. India's going to be on the news a lot more around sort of the innovation or obsession with the innovation economy. So I went on the board to Gateway Computer, which I always like to talk about the boards. It makes me feel better about myself and signals just how ridiculously fucking impressive I am.
Right. Right. Yeah, that's right. Go on.
Go on. Same more. 30 years ago or 20 years ago, there was Gateway Computer and there was Dell. And there was, they were neck and neck.
And Gateway decided to go after consumer and Dell went after small and medium sized business focusing on supply chain. Fast forward 10 years later, Dell is one of the 10 most valuable companies in America. And Gateway is on the verge of bankruptcy. And we have to basically sell it, not for scrap, but we sold it for literally it was a shadow of itself.
And if you will back 30 years ago, China and India were seen as being somewhat neck and neck. They had these incredible emerging middle classes and incredible consumer economy emerging. Everybody knew something big was happening about these nations. And a lot of people, it wasn't entirely clear who was going to win or emerge as the next superpower.
And you had China, which had unbelievable manufacturing processes already in place, the ability to create infrastructure investments. You had India where more PhDs than anywhere in the world, more English speakers. And also the thing we love was that it was a democracy. But at that part of it ended up being a bug not feature and that it ends up autocracy or central planning around moving towns to run a bullet train through it or moving whole relocating people to focus on how you allocate capital around manufacturing ended up being a feature not a bug.
And then 30 years later, China has absolutely on every dimension economically, absolutely buried India. And so now people are looking to India and saying, all right, with this massive population of young people, a decent or an opportunity, there is a fairly impressive education system, my most impressive colleagues in my view at NYU, I went to the same university in India, now people are turning eyes turning to India. What's interesting, though, is that we have to go all the way around the world to see kind of Amazon versus Walmart part two. It's just interesting how it's shaping up to be the same battle here.
The other thing that's interesting is the pushback they've received from small shop owners. And I know you had some thoughts on this, but effectively, we're net gainers in the US and we have an obsession with innovators and the consumer. That's not necessarily true in other nations. They've looked at big tech and said, well, I'm not sure nations outside of the US have been net gainers from big tech.
And the idea that Amazon's going to come in, and it might be good for Indian consumers, but it's basically going to decimate the retail market, decimate tax collection, create anti-competitive behavior. I think they're sort of like, do we want to be other nations that let big tech come in and start to kind of suck all the oxygen out of the room? So I'm not sure that India is as fascinated with Amazon as Amazon is with itself. It's going to be interesting to see the extent to which they embrace or don't embrace Amazon.
Well, it doesn't seem like they're embracing Amazon. I mean, aside from some great photos that came out of the event, and obviously Jeff Bezos probably had a great time over there with kind of the 1%. But I think what I've noticed, I think those are all great points, is your point about the shopkeepers. You kind of have to win over the shopkeepers in order to make Amazon India successful.
And one of the challenges in India is there's like a zillion shopkeepers selling a zillion products. And they so far haven't really been on board. I think there's a lot of fear of what this means for them and their ability to sell. And maybe they are not seeing the big picture of the pitch, obviously, the scale and access to your products more people.
But that's going to be some tension to watch of what happens between the shopkeepers and the government and if the shopkeepers are able to sway the government one way or the other. The other issue is that I've been to India like four or five times. I went when I was 11 years old, left Indiana, went on a trip to India. My uncle had moved over there.
It's a really interesting experience in the 90s at the beginning of US multinationals going over there. And the interesting point is India is totally organized chaos, which is logistically antithetical to Amazon's business. I mean, you know, you order something from Amazon, India, and it comes broken, which is an experience that a family member of mine had India recently. So it's like a hard market for so many reasons to get right.
So it's kind of obvious that Bezos wants to go to India and love your point about competing with Walmart and Flipkart over there. But it's a hard market to get right. I had about two or three years ago, just as Amazon was showing up on the shores of Australia. I had the CEO of the Australian conglomerate, asked to come speak to me and they owned, I think either the second or third largest retailer in Australia.
And he said, how do we prepare for Amazon showing up on Australia's shores? And I said, well, what's your objective here? Do you want to talk about employment? Do you want to talk about national interest?
Or do you just want to talk simply about shareholder value? And he said, let's approach it from a shareholder value standpoint. And I said, okay, you're a conglomerate, meaning you can sell any division into kind of do what you want. You're not dependent upon, you don't have a hundred years.
It's not your family. It's not your legacy. It's not, you know, kind of the family name. You're not the norangest company.
He said, no, we're not. We look at these things very, I don't want to say in a darn winning way, but a very shareholder driven way, we get industries and add industries. I think there were insurance and much other industries. And I said, well, if you're truly shareholder driven with Amazon showing up on your shores, you should do the following.
You should sell your retail unit and take those proceeds and buy Amazon stock. Because if you were to look at Amazon's entry into almost any market, it's generally, there's a transfer or reshuffling a stakeholder value. And that is consumers benefit and Amazon shareholders benefit, but jobs and businesses and the market capitalization of that specific market as the retail evaluation gets crushed. I mean, even just on the day that Amazon announced it was coming into Australia, you saw the Australian retail sector shed billions of dollars.
So this has become, again, back to kind of Bezos, the level of the implication, the impact these companies have on a global economy where frictionless flow of capital and a company's ability to scare entire industries in other nations. It's just, in my opinion, it's more evidence that Amazon, in my view, has become too big and too powerful. And a lot of nations, we're not gainers from Amazon in the US and which isn't, which isn't an excuse for not regulating them or not breaking them up. But on the whole, we're not gainers.
I wonder if you do the hard analysis in a place like Australia or India, if they're coming to the conclusion that when you take everything into account here, we're net losers and they don't have the same fetishization of Steve Jobs and all innovators and the need to fulfill this religious and spiritual void that's been created by a decline in church attendance and lack of dependence on a suit of being that we have now filled with people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. I don't think they suffer from that same- That uniquely American issue. Right. Well, and you're right.
I mean, Bezos said that he was going to bring jobs to India, but sure, they bring jobs in terms of building, constructing jobs, building logistics centers, et cetera, but long term, I feel like that's probably doubtful. Oh, Amazon, like most innovators, he'll be a job destroyer. I mean, they'll be, Amazon will grow a lot of jobs. But if you do, you're going to see, you would see massive, just in the US, you've seen a massive hemorrhaging of jobs.
And a lot of people would say, well, that's a function of innovation and productivity. And there's some truth there. It's just again, going back to Daniel Kahneman, we need to think this through. So India.
So last thing before we move on from India, because there's a through line here of Bezos, one of India's government officials after this visit came out and made a comment to Jeff Bezos about the Washington Post's coverage of India. And I just find it hilarious. This is also, you know, what's happening with MBS and not liking the Washington Post's coverage of Saudi Arabia. I just have to say, my perspective is this is insane.
Like from what I understand, Jeff Bezos has no role in the day-to-day running of the Washington Post editorial newsroom. It's like, there's always a bit of a church in state or should be between the owner of a newspaper and their editorial staff. But it just felt like a cheap shot to me, like kind of irrelevant, like, you know, to say, yeah, bring your business to India, but stop covering us in a negative way. I just think that's insane.
But that's my two cents. So again, and it feels weird to be defending Bezos, but it's, I think it's hard to argue that Bezos hasn't been a wonderful shepherd and steward for what is a national treasure in the form of the Washington Post. He's not Rupert Murdoch, you know, creating talking points and essentially creating a narrative that not only attacks, I mean, now that it cares not here, I think the first time I ever questioned going on Fox, I thought, you know what? I'm not going to go on Fox anymore as Fox does these, News Court does these coordinated attacks on strong emerging progressive female voices across the Wall Street Journal, the Post and Fox.
And I'm like, okay, how was that good for America? When one quote unquote, and I put this in quotes, journalistic institution starts attacking has a preponderance or over-indexes around attacking other journalists that happen to be liberal, emerging, you know, powerful female voices. And it's happened to some other really strong emerging female journalists. And Cara was in their in their sights.
And that was the first time I thought, you know, this really isn't, this is just bad for everyone involved. That doesn't happen. Bezos has been, or you look at Shelton, he uses his media. Bezos has been a very responsible hands-off.
He has a lot of my senses. He has a lot of respect for the separation between ownership and editorial. And it totally came back to his benefit because when that whole, you know, profile or amateur photography of Big Ed and the twins got out, the media was so inclined to come to his defense because they do appreciate, they want to like Jeff Bezos around that kind of stuff because he does, he has been seen as a great steward of the Washington Post. Well, let's, okay.
The thing about Fox, though, is that a lot of what we're talking about is entertainment. It's not news. I actually think like news gets a bad name when you consider Fox News to be all news. Like the majority of the stuff that's super salacious, like they don't have any editorial standards.
They're just like going all out, you know, doing whatever they need to do for their agenda. And it's not just attacking female journalists, it's attacking, you know, legitimate ideas and facts, like facts are under attack at Fox News. And it's actually really destructive. But listen, let's go to wins and fail.
So Scott, you first. Yeah. Okay. All right, I'll go first.
Well, you know what, my win is my win is Cara taking a day off, Scott. Just fuck that. Not for that. Not for that.
Whether it was her binge last night or the fact that she's legitimately sick, Cara, thanks for forcing me out of the nest and onto the mic. But there are three, there are three naked prostitutes on her couch that she's about to kick out. Come on, get on with it. Couldn't be further from Cara, but I love this fantasy.
So actually I don't. All right. So listen, my win is Britain's new privacy legislation that would protect miners data. It will require platforms like YouTube and Instagram to turn on the highest possible privacy settings for default for miners and turn off by default data mining practices like targeted advertising and location tracking.
So, so good for Britain on the privacy legislation. I'm happy to hear about that. Yeah. And Britain's also threatening taxes on big tech.
And basically is to try and incentivize the OECD to get their act together and create a kind of a pan-European approach to taxation around big tech is again, going back to this notion that other countries aren't as in love with big tech as we are in real is that they can't continue to have these companies transfer billions of dollars of capital outside of their country and not leave any behind in the form of taxes. But yeah, I agree, Britain, Italy, that was a strong move and a nice win. So my win is Michael Bloomberg, who has placed fourth in the new Monmouth National Democratic poll, but I came at 30%, Sanders of 23, worn at 14. And Bloomberg actually came in ahead of Buttigieg at 9%.
Bloomberg looks as if he's about to reach double digits. And I think the gangster move from the mayor here and something I thought was just the right thing to do and be an incredible brand move is that he has announced that regardless of whether he's a nominee, he's going to maintain his staff. And it just sits in such stark contrast to these other billionaires who claim to be very concerned about the nation and say their number one priority is to get Donald Trump out. But only as far as spending their own money on their unique vision and their unique role as commander in chief.
And I wonder is Howard Schultz continuing to fund moderate candidates? He claimed it was such a need for moderates, but now that he's no longer in the race, and he said he was willing to fund, I think up to a couple hundred million dollars. So he decided that there's still such a need for moderate cities funding continues to fund moderates, or was it only his unique special vision? I assume Tom Steyer and to his credit, he's continued to do this.
And I trust it wasn't political messaging is going to continue to be a warrior for the environment. But I think Bloomberg, my win is Bloomberg, a obviously coming up in polls would be committing that he is about getting Trump out of office as opposed to being about him being president. And I think that there's a path, you can see Iowa, New Hampshire, the Democratic front runners beat the shit out of each other, and then show up to Super Tuesday where there's Michael and his $250 million that he's already spent driving up the prices of political ads, basically 20 to 25% all on his own, which raises a host of issues we need to address around money in politics. But my winner is Mayor Bloomberg.
Wow. Wow. Okay. I wasn't expecting that.
But that's great. Who's your loser? I mean, that's so many losers. But I know I'm a beat for that.
I think my fail is actually my fail would probably be Netflix because I think it was Reed Hastings earlier this week acknowledged that Disney plus me have taken a bite out of their subscriber growth during the last quarter of 2019. So as a consumer, I'm overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to subscribe to now to see great content. But yeah, fail for Netflix that they're starting to see a cut in their business and I'll be curious to see how that actually plays out. Yeah, it's hard to imagine.
So Netflix largely will live and die by international growth or lack thereof because they kind of have everybody in the US and there's a decent argument that people aren't swapping out Netflix. Netflix is kind of a car and Hulu is whether you want leather seats and Apple TV plus is whether you want, you know, steering wheel or heated steering or whatever. Everything else is kind of an accessory to the car, which is Netflix. But it's hard to imagine that this sort of massive investment in the category doesn't begin to drive margins down or drive growth down.
There are now 510 original scripted television programs 10 years ago. That was 220. We're going to spend more on original scripted television this year than I think was allocated in the entire decade of the 90s. So it's hard to imagine just economically how that one doesn't drive down margins and increase competition and two doesn't start to give the market a little bit of a chill around the prospect for Netflix stocks.
So yeah, I agree with you. That's that'll be it's going to be very interesting. My lose or loss or failure is a lot more serious and weird. I've been thinking a lot about family planning and it's always the stuff you're not focused on.
I think that kind of the two biggest issues is the shit you don't see coming that really hurts you or that you're not talking about. And we were talking about the deficit a lot six or seven years ago. Now we're no longer talking about it. I think our deficit has become not only a moral issue but a real threat to our economy given just just the incredible reckless spending that we've engaged in with deficit spending.
The notion that the Republicans can claim that we have a strong economy when effectively I would argue in recession if you take out that trillion dollars a year in sugar high stimulus in a form of debt in record low unemployment and it's I think it's incredibly dangerous. The deficit is getting to dangerous levels and we're not even talking about it. The other thing we don't talk a lot about and is family planning and and choice. And I think that there's a bit of a misnomer or misperception.
We always tend to couch choice in the context of it's a woman's choice. And I saw your tweet yesterday. Tell us about this. Well, it's it's it is a woman's choice.
I get that and it should be a woman's choice. But it's deeper than that. And that is the number one reason cited for women deciding to terminate a pregnancy is finances. Access.
Access. And then the number two is their partner or specifically their lack of a partner. And while we like to think that we want to afford women this choice, oftentimes women don't really have a choice because they lack the financial means to support another child. The majority of pregnancies terminated are terminated by a woman who already has kids.
So it's not that she's it's not that she doesn't want kids doesn't love children doesn't want to have a family. It's that four out of five men when they get pregnant do not end up marrying the mother of their of their child. It's that young men and young women don't have the financial wherewithal because of this systematic transfer of wealth from young people to old people that's taken place across America over the last 30 years. And the notion that that women aren't massively influenced their choices are getting more and more limited around how do you responsibly raise a child and bring a child into this world because of the poor choices and the poor responsibility.
A lot of men exhibit in this process. You're so woke. Yeah, I mean, it's got you. Free tuna for the dog.
Early deep. Okay, we should talk more about this, but we've got to just do a quick prediction and we're getting kicked out of studios. So Scott, what do you have? From abortion to to stocks.
I mean, some stockings. So next week is earnings. We're going to see Uber ship the bed. It's stock off five to 10% within 48 hours of the earnings release.
And we're going to see Facebook announced monster earnings and all time high off the back of Instagram commerce. So tech marches on right hailing a shitty business. It'll be interesting. Uber has now gone full into what I call frauds, blaming.
And they're starting to report this bastardized form of Eva, called segment based Eva, where basically they take a bunch of costs out and pretend that those costs are for some reason, at some point, going to go away. They're not. They will begin to downplay Uber Eats as they will either exit that business or sell it to Grubhub as it's, it makes right hailing look like a good business and right hailing is a shitty business. So my prediction, Facebook, on the back of earnings, all time high, we'd like to think that they're gross negligence and they're tearing up the fabric of American depression will show up in the numbers, it will not.
And we're going to see Uber's decline resume in earnings next week. My predictions. All right, cool. We'll be back next week to talk about it.
Got it. It was a pleasure. Thanks for letting me sit in. I hope I had no say in this.
Yeah. I had no say that they're going along with it, Scott. Oh my gosh. That's it.
You know what he's saying, Scott? If you had to say you wouldn't allow this to happen, I'm up for any. We need, we absolutely need new blood. I mean, Kara, it's not enough already.
Let's bring in the class. He's not going away, Scott. She's not going away. We're stuck with her care.
We hope you we hope you feel better. Clean up that apartment. Get get Javier and Louisa. I was trying to come up with ethnically ambiguous names and I failed there.
Done. Out of your apartment. Oh, go away. Put away the meth.
Put away the meth. Come back. We need you. I mean, all right.
All right, Scott. So she's a little minx. What do you think she's doing last night? All right.
Remember to all of our listeners, we love your questions. If you have a question about a story you're hearing in the news, email us at pivot at boxmedia.com to be featured on the show. Thank you so much for our listener question. Today.
Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sonones, Eric Anderson. That's me as your executive producer and stand and host. Thanks also to Rebecca Castro and Drew Burrows. Make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts or if you're an android user, check us out on Spotify or frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Thanks Erica. Well done. Thanks, Scott.