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Hi everyone, this is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm today's co-host, The Mandalorian. Oh my God, gangster.
My family was killed, and now I am the premier bounty hunter in the world. I never take my mask off. By the way, do you know who's underneath that mask? Federico Peña, who is a tall drink of, I don't know how you say lemonade in Spanish, which I'm sure is offending millions of people.
Although I can pretend I'm a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and mangle the Spanish language. Listen to me. Listen, you have a lot of man crushes. Do you know this guy?
He's the Prince of Dorne. No, I know him, yes, he's good looking. He's a good looking man. What a good looking guy too.
He's great, except that scene, I'm still recovering from that scene where they crush his head. I'm just like, I can't even, I didn't expect it. So what are you doing in LA? You were in LA, right?
I was in Los Angeles meeting with my agent, trying to figure out why I have an agent, and he still doesn't know. But I have... I don't have an agent because I don't understand it. I don't understand it, except them taking money from me.
I don't get it. Super smart. Are you going to be in a Disney Plus feature? We're going to talk about Disney Plus.
Breaking news. That's right. Yeah. Cap Green Eggs and Ham comes back to life.
Also, Lady and the Tramp and the things they put on it, because some of the Disney movies of yore were a little bit racist, sexist, et cetera, et cetera. The professor is a tramp. Now streaming. What a dog.
Scott is a tramp. The HR show should be called Lady and the Tramp. You are the tramp. That's exactly it.
I'm a lady. Anyway, another big announcement, breaking news, that we have decided to run for president on the, you guessed it, the Lesbro ticket. That's right. Everybody's getting in.
All those chickens who didn't, Deval Patrick, Bloomberg, they're all such chokers at the beginning, and now they're like jumping in the pool. It's fine now that they didn't have to do all the work that the others did. I find it offensive. What do you think of that?
I think it's, I'm not voting for them just because they didn't start at the beginning. I like people who get in and go for it. I'm sorry. You can't just like enter at the end and then just suck up all the oxygen.
I'm sorry. No, you may not. I don't care. It's just not.
You don't think we need it? You don't think it's a giant mess right now that no one's that excited? We need to pivot desperately to the center. No, I think we're just fine.
You know what? This too shall pass. We will discuss this later. Let's get into the story.
By the way, there was a big story about Scott and I on our predictions. My predictions are getting really good now at this point. But in Australia, we are still not recognized in this country as the geniuses we are. But Australians love us.
We're huge. Oh, my God. We're huge. And we will go there for a very small amount.
We're big in Australia. If you live in San Francisco, I'm a professor at NYU. You're thinking about running for mayor of San Francisco. But we're huge in Melbourne.
We're huge in Melbourne. That is a big. I love Melbourne. I love Sydney.
We are going to go there. If someone from Australia invites us and pays us a pile of money, we will come and perform for the Australians because we would like to do that together. Down under. Listen, let's talk about, listen, we're talking about big tech again.
So big tech wants to be your wallet. Google is the latest giant to make bold moves in consumer finance. These people cannot not get into everything. So this week, Google said they'd be offering checking accounts next year with a new project.
I think it's Cash Cache or Cachet. I can't understand it. They pair with Citigroup and Stanford Federal Credit Union. The company claims they won't be selling user data, financial data to advertisers.
Facebook announced Facebook Pay, the new payment system that will work across all their various and sundry properties. You'll be able to use it to send money to friends, shop, donate fundraisers. This is coming just weeks after several big payment companies abandoned Facebook's foray into cryptocurrency or that area, Libra. And of course, this spring, Apple launched its credit card called Apple Card in association with Goldman Sachs.
There were some controversies about that. We'll talk about that. And then, you know, Amazon's in talks with JPMorgan to start their own checking account. You know, this is they are all making big moves.
There's this fundamental shift in business strategy, and that is CK Prahalad, I hope I'm getting his name right, from the University of Michigan who passed away, I believe, kind of redefined business strategy or defined business strategy with the notion of core competence. And it was sort of taken as gospel in the corporate world that you find one attribute of your business and you become great at it. And then you either outsource everything else or you're at industry standards. So Nike's core competence is marketing.
FedEx core competence is probably operations, et cetera, et cetera. And essentially, Amazon and big tech over the last 20 or 30 years have blown that notion up and that construct up because what would Apple's core competence be? And it typically used to be companies stuck, kind of stayed in their own lane. You know, Apple, you make devices.
Google, you're in search. Facebook, you're in social. And now they all believe in their strategy is we want to be your operating system for your digital world across everything that's reduced to digits, which means they want to be in almost everything. And we've never and they have the cheap capital to do it.
So we've never seen this many armies fighting on this many fronts, going after each other in every territory. It's really now they all want to be in payments because payments is one of the few places that is growing fast. And I see companies ranging, you know, from Square to PayPal that now have these multi, you know, 50 and $80 billion market capitalizations. And they look at that and say, we're desperate for growth, so we got to get into payments.
So all of a sudden, payments is the new kind of streaming media that everybody's getting into. So what why is it the first of all, what are the implications for banks and other places? Because a lot of people, they're all like saying this is their little line, the great unbanked. All these people are unbanked.
Like they're doing it for good reasons. I think they're just coming for our money. That's what I think. But they use that.
That's the Facebook uses it. And I think it's a very laudable thing. A lot of people don't. A lot of young people don't have bank accounts anymore.
You know, people use credit cards, of course, but they're so full of possibilities of fraud and everything else. What can they do better and what are the problems with all these people? And then stack rank who you trust. I don't trust Apple except this card thing, which we'll talk about the controversy.
But who do you trust? I suppose Amazon and Apple is who I trust. I think that's right. But there's a ton of opportunities.
The unbanked or just transfer payments, a half a trillion dollar industry where where undocumented workers or immigrants send money home and they have to pay upwards of 7% fees just to get money across the border. That's a half a trillion dollar opportunity. Try to send wire money overseas. Young people are good at much better transferring money than us.
But why? Why does anyone need to go into a bank? I mean, there's a ton of opportunity here. Applying for a mortgage is difficult.
Getting credit is difficult. You know, the unbanked not having access to any sort of credit. There's a there's huge opportunities. But what what the banks have been really good at is they've set up regulatory hurdles and they have they've been, you know, such a lobbying force for Washington that it's unlikely any of these guys are going to be able to go around them.
So when you look at the Apple card, it includes Goldman Sachs and it also includes MasterCard, the processor or the network is what people tell me. So this might be this kind of cooperation with the big tech guys are in charge of technology in the front end of the marketing, but it's not like blockchain where they're trying to go around the opportunity to, quote unquote, disrupt the entire industry would probably be through a stable coin. Cryptocurrency. And I think the opportunity there is probably for someone like an Amazon or maybe maybe a WeChat.
But it's the Most people focus is the wrong focus, and that is they focus on cost savings. And I believe the real unlock in healthcare will be giving you back a couple years of your life. And when I think about what Facebook and Google and the streaming services and Netflix have done is that if I just watch Netflix and I don't watch broadcast television, I save between two and three weeks of my life watching advertising. So effectively, Don Draper is one of the biggest murderers in the history of mankind because he's stolen two to three years of your life watching ads for opioid-induced constipation treatments.
So the big unlock around healthcare, and I'm sure anyone listening to this has experienced this. I've had a cough for, and it's finally better for about four weeks. Immediately, my sister and my dad got freaked out and say, oh no, you never get sick with a cough. And to get an x-ray on my lungs took me eight hours by the time I got the prescription.
And here's the thing. There's a lot of people that are insured. There's a lot of people with money. I know we always talk about the uninsured and that's a huge problem.
But what we don't talk about is the amount, literally, of years or months of life that we're wasting in a bureaucracy. So if these guys can, and I think my understanding of Nightingales wants to use AI to get to a diagnosis faster and a treatment plan faster because I found out last night a friend of mine is sick and he's spending a ton of time trying to figure out a plan of attack. And if someone with Google's credibility came in and said, okay, here are your markers. Here's your background.
Here's, you know, they got all the right inputs. They could immediately kind of cut through at least the promise, cut through the noise to the signal and say, this is exactly the treatment plan. Who should deliver it? And oh, maybe we've even used Google Assistant to set up those appointments so that you could get on and have some peace of mind and save some time.
Yeah, it needs to be more efficient. It's so crazy non-efficient. I spend more time on the phone making doctor's appointments than anything that I waste time with. And there was an ex-Google employee who was doing this thing called Forward in San Francisco where they would do this.
It just, I don't think it went very far because it was aiming at people who aren't really sick, which are younger people. But it was sort of this concierge doctor idea, but trying to get it a little more, you know, trying to take the, do things early, everything that the doctor was in the room with you and would speak and the computer would take down what they were saying with all kinds of bells and whistles and that kind of stuff, nice outfits and stuff like that. And all kinds of tests, but, and everything on an app. I just, if someone's going to unlock this and become very wealthy, and it's just, it's a really interesting thing for Google to get into it with, you know, they bought Fitbit, obviously they're pushing into healthcare.
Apple has sort of pushed into healthcare, health business, and Amazon is. So again, just like with money, can the money works pretty well, but healthcare is definitely an area that is, I don't know, it's an interesting thing. I hope you're okay, Scott. Are you all right?
Thank you. Thank you for asking. It's nice to know you care about me. You just rolled around in all that dirty money when you were in California.
You just want to go to Australia. I want your ticket to Melbourne. No, you are my ticket. We're going to go to Germany.
We're going to be so... You and I on the road. Dino and Sammy. Wait, Dino and Jerry Lewis.
Whatever we are, we're taking it on the road. Oh my God. Nobody understands that reference, Scott. Nobody.
Nobody. Except the French. We can go to France. Let's go see Macron.
He's dreamy. Macron. Macron. I love Paris.
By the way, I think Paris is super hot city. We should go. We'll go visit Angela Merkel. We could do a whole thing.
Hottest city in the world right now is Mexico City. We should go to Mexico City. I don't think we have any fans in Mexico, though. At least we don't hear from them.
I'm sure we have... Mexican fans, please write us on Twitter. All right, Scott. We're going to take a break now.
When we get back, we're going to have listener mail. We have crazy amounts of listener mail. We have a lot of things. You love talking about us.
I love that you love talking about us. I'm just saying. No, I really don't. I have an entire giant menagerie family.
I'm like the Mormons. I'm so glad you said that. That's so sweet. Well, let's run you as an independent.
shave off a few points and take back the White House. Just call me Mitt Romney. Anyway, when we get back, we'll have listener mail, wins and fails, and predictions. We're here with Pivot.
I'm a Seth Herndon, and this is America Actually. We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong, what did we not see. I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego.
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 Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But, you know, for me, it's not a 2028 question.
It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America Actually, we ask Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington, his plans for immigration reform, and more. This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm raking down the institutions 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 prices spiral 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 yourrichbff. Welcome back to all our dozens and dozens of fans south of the border.
By the way, you brought up Mormons. I just want to say, and this is an incredibly oxymoronic thing, I fucking love Mormons. I grew up with Mormons. And my closest friend, Brett Jarvis, in the Jarvis family, I was raised by a single mother who was working a lot and they totally opened their arms and took me into their family.
They used to take me to athletic events. The Church of Latter-day Saints in Westwood was incredibly generous. And I used to go to the dances there. Yeah, I got some issues with Mormons from the old days.
I got to tell you, they were very anti-gay for a long time. And I acknowledge, and anti-black, and for some reason God never decided to speak to black people or women and they couldn't get rise to the highest level of whatever called the Grand Poobah. But I'm just telling you in terms of people, Mormons were absolutely wonderful to a 16 and 17-year-old Jewish kid. They just couldn't have been more warm and loving people.
So I love Mormons. That's good. I think you can't make a determination on the entire class of people. When the missionaries come by, I always invite the missionaries in.
Have you ever had missionaries come by? You know that Mormon, what is it, Book of Mormon is the funniest show on Broadway. You have to see it. It's been there a long time, but it's hilarious.
And actually one of the Mormons go, which is interesting. All right, listener questions. This week's Pivot listener mail comes from Zawar Naseer. He's a student at Davidson College.
And he wants to know about the dynamics between Amazon versus Alibaba. He says he knows they're operating in completely separate markets, but he's wondering if maybe they're headed for a collision in the next five to eight years. I know that Alibaba went on the Hong Kong markets this week. So what do you think?
Thanks, Zawar. Scott, go ahead. All right, so I think Rebecca Sonanis is coming for our job. Did you listen to that read?
All the like charming inflection and up and down. I think someone's gunning for our job. I think she's getting a little. I think she wants to be front of the mic.
I feel very threatened. We must Machiavelli. You think so? I would like to give young women an opportunity to do better.
That's usually want to crush their spirit. Listen to me. Okay, what do you think about Amazon and Alibaba? Zawar Naseer asked a question.
Would you please answer it? So my initial answer is I don't know, but my sense is the xenophobia in the U.S. demonstrated by our leadership has led Alibaba to re-check their expansion plans in the U.S. and focus on other markets.
And so the two, Amazon and Alibaba, in my view, thus far, aren't on a collision course. Because if you're Alibaba to be the number one player across e-commerce and other things in the fastest growing economy recently when they bought makers and stuff. They've been sort of stumbling around. They thought about buying BuzzFeed.
They thought about buying Vice and stuff. I gotta say, this is, they finally figured out what they do well is make great content and they just need to deliver it in a way that's attractive to people. It's just, it's taken them a long time to lose their, we need to be like techies and they need to be like Disney with better tech is what they need to be. But if you look at Hulu, if you look at Peacock, if you look at Amazon Prime, if you look at Netflix, I don't think anyone has had the successful launch that Disney Plus has had.
It's the content. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because it is a content, it's a distribution. What is distribution?
Is there distribution at theme parks and the retail stores? And what's really interesting is you could argue, you could argue, I'm thinking a lot about the streaming wars because I just think it's just fascinating, the war that's broken out this quickly with this level of armament. with the winners, somebody asked me yesterday, who are the winners, who are the losers here? And if I had to pick one theme, it would be who can monetize the goodwill and the loyalty you get from media across other high margin categories.
So McKinney bought some good shows. They bought some good shows. The Mandalorian, they're going to sell. If you look at the Mandalorian, there's also, I think they bought one in the South Park, one Family Guy, one of them.
They bought a couple of shows that were friends. They bought a few. But here's how to increase market cap. Is they're going to sell a bunch of Mandalorian action figures over Christmas at 85 points of gross margin.
You wouldn't pay for Mandalorian. You're like, that should just gangster. It's gangster. It's really good.
All right, calm down now. Listen to me. We need a fail, though. I have to say, this is a real coup for BuzzFeed.
We didn't talk about this. And I guess you and I have the same fail. No, I haven't. I have several, but go ahead.
Dara. All right, you talk about that. Well, look, okay. It's, it's, these interviews are important and the best are, I think one of the best things that you've done professionally where you've had the most impact is when you have these unscripted moments on stage when it's a human asking another human for the response.
Let's be fair. So let's go to a tape from Axios who interviewed Dara Khosrowshahi. I think that government said that they made a mistake. Well, they made a mistake and somebody's dead.
Listen, it's, it's a serious mistake. We've made mistakes too, right? With self-driving and we stopped driving and we're recovering from that mistake. So I think that people make mistakes.
It doesn't mean that they can never be forgiven. I think they've taken it seriously. Let's be fair. The CIA didn't suggest that they made a mistake and it was an oversight with the self-driving.
That was basically a bad sensor, correct? This was, the CIA suggested that the crown prince had a role in ordering assassination. Whoa. And he came back pretty quickly.
From what I understand, insiders like immediately, you know, his PR people, just their heads blew off and, and he started backtracking and saying he was sorry and he misspoke and this and that. So, you know, and again, the Saudis are, I wrote a big column on this in the Times this week. Saudis are Uber's fifth largest investor. They've been a big investor through PIF, their public investment fund.
And one of the, one of the people, the person who runs that fund is on the board. I would remove that person immediately. I mean, they've got to figure out what to do without looking like they're trying to whitewash this thing. Well, here's what's going on.
So the gentleman who serves on the board who represents PIF, this is what happens with a CEO. The guys who are on your board, you want to become friends with because they get to decide how much money you make. First off, they decide if you survive. So the board right now could figure out a way to justify firing Dara Khosrowshahi.
They could say, it's the wrong strategy so far. The IPO was a disaster. You're out. They could also decide to pay him $100 million.
So when you're the CEO, when you're Dara Khosrowshahi, you find ways to really like your board members and say nice things about them, even when an Axios interviewer makes you look like a total ass, which this interviewer did. So the CEO has a habit of really liking his board members because, A, he usually does and they're usually very charming, smart people. And B, because it's in his or her best interest to say really nice things about them. But the fact that this individual on the board, and the fact is on the board is probably wrong.
I agree with you. I think the nominating committee, the chair of the nominating committee should probably say, maybe you should roll off naturally and we'll come up with some excuse similar to what Susan Desmond Hellman said, that, oh, I'm leaving for X, Y, and Z reasons. But to conflate a mistake, like I left the garage door open. That's a mistake.
To conflate a mistake with the state sponsored murder of an American journalist kind of says one thing to Dara Khosrowshahi has really poor fucking judgment. I mean, this was literally like, let's be clear, Dara, that wasn't a mistake. That was a huge tell that you probably shouldn't be running a company as large as... I was a fan of Dara Khosrowshahi.
I said, he's the new lipstick on cancer. Sheryl Sandberg has graduated to just a cancer. And so he's the new lipstick on cancer. But boss, that was just, if you really believe what you said.
And then my favorite thing is, and I know how much you hate this. He decided to clarify his comments when he realized how badly he had fucked up. And here's the thing. When anyone clarifies their comments, they might as well say that was the real me and I got to put that shit back in a box.
Well, I think he's going to come on my podcast. So if you'd like to join, I'd be happy to. I agree. I think they can't make any moves.
They can't like give money to like the press. I think they're struggling to figure out how to do this because they're dealing with other actual issues too that were already problematic. This is just a terrible, it's not even a mistake. You're right.
It's something worse than a mistake. But they were, they're already dealing with the sell-offs. They're dealing with the stock. They're dealing with the business plan.
What's your fail? I think this is probably it. I think, you know, I think the thing related, Facebook had deemed Breitbart a credible news source. It's news tab.
And of course leaked emails from Stephen Miller of the White House, email Breitbart to tout eugenics and white nationalist conspiracy theories and offer tips how to cover immigration, amplify stories about black and Hispanic crime. I mean, like the two things, Garza has to throw this guy off the board, the PIF guy, to do it, like, just say, I'm do something more than a clarification. And then Facebook should throw Breitbart off of its credible news source tab. They can distribute it all at once, but I don't know.
Just while we're there, should we also say the white nationalists out of Washington, D.C.? Can you believe this? Can you believe we have a white nationalist? And you've got to love AOC.
I mean, I don't love her policies. And I can't, I'm angry that she would be, in my opinion, strategically dumb enough to get in wars with Nancy Pelosi or shouting matches. But she was awesome saying, well, let me get this. We have a white nationalist in the administration.
We have an admitted white nationalist with Stephen Miller. Anyways, we're not supposed to talk about politics. Let's move on. Okay, my win is I think there's some wonderful, I love this idea of unlocks just vis-a-vis talking about things and acknowledging the issue.
And I've noticed, and I don't know if you've noticed this or I'm just more attuned to it. This Veterans Day, there's been a lot of really open, honest, and wonderful conversations about the fact that suicide will take 20 veterans' lives each day and that right now suicide is the enemy combatant. It is taking more lives of our brave young men and women. And the notion that we're talking about it, I think is, I turned on Stephanie Rule's show on MSNBC today.
I was listening to the BBC last night, and they were talking about suicide among American servicemen and servicewomen. But it feels like more than just having halftime flyovers and as most sports leagues do, wrap themselves in an American and veteran's flag when in my view, it's mostly just show and bullshit. But it does seem like we're talking about a very uncomfortable topic and that is when our young men and women return. They're having trouble integrating into society and that the largest enemy right now is suicide.
And to think that more people are dying from suicide than actual fighting in battle really highlights the issue here. Anyways, my win is that I think there's a lot of women and men in the service and generals. There was a great article from a guy who runs the Air Force base down in San Antonio this week talking about it in an open, honest conversation for Veterans Day. I think it's really productive and really wonderful that we're actually having an open, honest conversation about it.
Good. And same thing