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Download the Uter app at eterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Dalloway. Hey Scott, how you doing? I'm good Cara, how are you? Yeah, good.
A little tired. A little tired. One sick child this weekend. I'm exhausted.
And a baby. So a new baby. You have to keep the baby and clair apart, which means we each sort of split them up to conquer. And you know...
Don't babies come out chock full of immunities? Not exactly. The doctor was like, do not bring the toxic stew child who's in preschool near the baby for a little bit. Doctors always say that though, right?
They always say that kind of thing. Nonetheless, she wasn't eating sick. There was projectile vomiting, et cetera, et cetera. But now it's all so...
Really? Yes. It was turned out to be an ear infection. I went to one of those clinics that are now popping up.
There's all these things, some of these called PM Pediatrics. They're actually... You want an urgent and all that? Well, kind of.
It's just an interesting business. I was thinking about it as a business that was going in. Actually did a great job. And thank God.
They do a great job. I like this thing a lot. And like many people have insurance. So inefficient.
They're not all children get sick on Friday at 5 PM. Just so you know. So you're sort of... That's one of that happens.
Yeah, exactly. It's always happens. But nonetheless, anyway. So we have a lot to do today.
We're going to discuss how one tech giant left its users date it in the alerts. The latest changes the Biden's agenda. And we'll take a listener question about responsible disclosure. So first off, interestingly, I just got the book.
I think we're going to have them on Pivot called Out of Office by Charlie Orzel and Helen Peterson. It's all about the big problem and promise from working at home. But Apple said they're going to have employees go back to the office in February. You know, it had been moved and moved and moved again.
And then New Possible eventually have employees commuting to work three days a week only if they wanted to. Apple had to change its previous backed office plan after employee backlash, which I think is really interesting. Similarly, Disney had to pause its vaccine mandate for workers in Florida as it complies with new ban in state. I suspect they had a lot of problems.
And obviously they really rely on their workers quite heavily. So what do you think of this? What do you think about this? Well, if you want to get a group of people in denial together, a group of commercial real estate owners together, I'm supposedly the narrative is we can't wait to get back into the office and they always publicize how Jamie Diamond or somebody says, you know, we're going back to work.
Apple, if Apple is a proxy for what's going to happen, you know, we want to process information into zeros and ones. So the argument is whether we're going to be back to the office business as usual or we're going to be all remote. And the answer is 90% of companies are going to be somewhere in the middle. But what we have done here with incredible innovation, the change in lifestyle, what you call the great reassessment, which I really like has resulted in if Apple is a proxy for more largely what might happen, where people go into the office three days a week, not five days a week, that effectively is probably a net destruction in office demand of somewhere between 20 and 40%.
So assuming we're going to want more office space per person, you still at a minimum are going to lose 20% of the demand, maybe as much as 40%. And when you look at office buildings as an asset class, depending on how you calculate it in North America, there's somewhere between six and $12 trillion asset class or enormous. Are they the proxy though? Why are they the proxy necessarily?
Well, to me, that just sounds kind of infinitely reasonable. And the majority of the companies I talk to are saying that we want people back in the office. At the same time, we recognize the remote technologies and the needs of our workers likely mean we have learned how to not demand you're in the office at 9am until 6pm. I think there's just a general recognition that the traditional way of doing work that we can innovate around it.
We have gotten used to being productive remotely. And there's value to being in the office. But we are thinking the unthinkable now, the notion that you can start a job and not come into the office, the majority of companies just wouldn't have allowed you to do that. So if you're talking about a destruction of 20% to 40% of the Man which seems conservative, you're talking about an asset class that somewhere between six and 12 trillion dollars, you're talking about two to $4 trillion of the GDP of Germany dispersing from one asset class commercial real estate to another asset class, which is residential.
So, you know, Williamson, Elmer Restoration, Hardware, Sub-Zero, you know, Coulter, all these home builders. I think you're just going to see a massive destruction and stakeholder value around the office industrial complex and an increase in value. Some of the good, some of the not so good because housing is going to be more and more expensive to residential. But if it costs you 25 to $35,000 employee, which it does to put them in this structure of steel, glass and asbestos, and you say to them, okay, you can work at home.
We're going to decrease dramatically the amount of money we say. I've saved them. My ed tech startup second for it. We've saved a million dollars in office costs over the last 12 months.
Yeah, I think I travel, not just that travel and office costs. In business travel? Sure. There was a very good story.
I think it was a column in the New York Times about how starting your job at over zoom was really not great for young people, especially your first job. And that was an interesting piece. I mean, it sort of stated the obvious that you don't really get to meet people, network, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you work that out to create office culture or company culture, really?
Not office culture, more than company culture. Well, as proximity bias, but I can tell you what, I think a lot of startups are doing this and that is we're going to have smaller office space. It's going to be nicer. It's going to be more like a place to recruit and inspire.
But what we're also doing, and there's more nuance around the travel argument, is that we're going to be doing more off sites and the off sites are going to be over the top. When we get people together, we just did a Thanksgiving dinner and we go somewhere really nice and we give back to everybody. We're probably going to do an off site. All these sort of what I call fat off site resorts that are sort of optimized for nice corporate retreats, they're just going to kill it.
With me or things or where? That's a really interesting question. So I can tell you firsthand in New York, if you have a restaurant that has private rooms, you're never been busier. Because when people get together, they want to do really nice things.
They want to get a really nice place. But I also think destination resorts for retreats are just going to do incredibly well. So we're going to spend, I think the actual gross demand for office space will go down by probably 40%. But the destruction and actual expenditures, I think we'll go down $20 for Square Foot.
Because I think we're going to spend more on the few feet we decide to keep to make it more inspirational. It'll be less great grab cubes. It'll be more in nice conference rooms, more coffee, places that people create connections. And then the off sites are just going to be over the top because they're going to want people to be inspired, meet.
What's interesting is it has all these second order effects. And we don't like to talk about it because we immediately go to like Matt Lauer or something. But one in three relationships begin to work. And it used to be loosely speaking, one in three at work, one in three at school, and one in three online.
It's now gone to two in three online. And because people are going to work, so they're not meeting mates, there's very few places that have a more curated selection of like-minded potential mates than either college or your workplace. And the workplace is kind of going away as a place to meet every company I've started. We end up having waddocks, people meet and get married from work.
So it'll be just interesting to see what it means for marriages and mating and relationships. And now two in three relationships are beginning online, which has a third order effect, and that is there's huge mating and equality online. Yeah, absolutely. So then you have the Walt Disney Company, Pozzing Coronavirus Vaccine Manate.
There were one of you who talked about this, that they pushed the state legislature around and the governor of DeSantis, but not so. They could be facing fines. They decided after the Republican-controlled legislature got up a bill blocking COVID-19 vaccine mandates that was signed into law, protecting them in all kinds of ways. Even though the Biden administration has ordered vaccinations to workers in large companies across the federal workforce, there's resistance everywhere.
And Florida has challenged that. So now Disney World previously struck a deal with employees to require theme park workers. This is according to New York Times, we fully vaccinated against coronavirus, keep their jobs, the company, defend the rule in a statement Saturday. I'm going to read the statement in the Times.
We believe that our approach to mandatory vaccines has right when we continue to focus on safety well being of our cast members and guests. And they've said more than 90% of its active cast members have been verified as vaccinated. So it's an interesting, like why bother fighting them, presumably? I don't know.
What do you think? We did one of these friends' givings over the weekend. It was really nice. And it's basically the Thanksgiving everybody wants.
It's sort of this wonderful holiday, minus the downside of holiday, specifically your family. And so friends' givings are everywhere in the wonderful. Now we're around. We all went around and said what we're thankful for.
And I said I was thankful for science. And the moment I said it, I merely felt like a certain amount of guilt that I turned Thanksgiving political because there's live in Florida. And Florida, kind of where I live, looks a lot like America. It's not red.
It's not blue. It's kind of purple. And I thought, you know what? Fuck that.
Science never used to be political. And I find that we suffer on the left from this both-sideism where we shouldn't. And they're just as in my view, no excuse for government officials all pandering to evangelicals or ultra-white wingers in Iowa. And are reducing our safety.
Disney World draws people from all over the world, including Europe, which is seeing an enormous spike in COVID-19. So this, what I'll call irrational spread of death, disease, and disability by politicians who are all jonesing to get one more straw and pull in Iowa in 18 months. I find it repugnant. And I think Disney's kind of caught in the middle.
It's nice to see that they're 90 plus percent. I think it's a good organization. But I think Florida, a lot of people will say Florida is going to come out of this looking really good because you have had a balance of life and there's a balance between quality of life and taking precautions. But it's just so sad that we have taken, it just seems to be pretty reasonable that when you're bringing millions of people to a small, dense area and putting them on rides, sitting shoulder to shoulder, that you would decide to opt for the conservative.
And not only that, Disney is willing to take the financial burden here. They're not asking the state to bail them out to have additional, the state is coming in and say, no, we want you to loosen your restrictions. And pay for testing if you have the people that decide not to, because apparently that's reasonable. I think the test is reasonable.
And the vaccine, I don't know, it's just interesting. It doesn't make any go down. It doesn't. It doesn't.
It's just, you know, it's this whole change in workers though. I have to say, there's just, it's really, it's really interesting. I'm excited to talk to Charlie and Ann about this because I think it's a really interesting time around the workplace. For a lot of people, not everybody, but certainly for a lot of us, definitely knowledge workers, et cetera.
Speaking of unusual and surprising things, Jeff Bezos donated a cool hundred million dollars to the Obama Foundation. He asked at the museum, I guess, it's coming to be renamed on our John Lewis, but they probably would have done anyway. According to press release, it seems like not very much money compared to his wife. That's all I had.
That's all I thought. I don't know. Yeah, the whole thing just, the dollars are becoming, I mean, didn't you give $100 million of Anne Jones? Something like that.
Yeah. I'm not very much. He's so rich. It's like giving 25 bucks.
I don't know. He gave out all these like hero awards or something like that. In a weird way, I don't think he can be, I think it's nice. I think it's good when people get money.
I don't, I'm not one of these people that's like, I understand the structural problems that philanthropy and how it indicates a larger problem that we shouldn't just be, you know, depending on the grace and generosity of billionaires to fund our, our essentials. I get the argument, but I think it's hard to criticize people for giving, giving me away. That's it. The, the, what it does do though is that, and I like to think of myself as a philanthropic person.
And what I've been thinking of lately, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, is I'm like, when there's guys giving us much money away, does my money make any difference? I mean, you know what does and you continue to do it, but it's like, what's a lot of money for most givers? You then look at these donations and it's like, okay, sweat off his brow, $100 million bucks. You know, what is my ex going to do?
I wonder, I wonder what's happened to small dollar donations when they see these guys, and it's almost those guys kind of rolling up and saying, okay, you know, $100 million bucks. And by the way, that is, what is it worth? $150 billion? She's like nothing.
I mean, literally nothing. Good for him, Obama foundation. I don't know what that means, but it's good. All their parties.
I guess that's where it happens. You know, whatever, I think it's why it's doing better job. That's all I have to say, but whatever. Mackenzie.
Yeah. I mean, Mackenzie's a baller. Baller. I mean, Mackenzie, Mackenzie, like put out a billion dollars overnight.
Yeah. I love how she does it. Doesn't put out a press release. Doesn't.
Doesn't. She gives it to non-cool places that need the money, like Cal State Fullerton. Yeah. Yeah.
Or places that need more money. And then I'll health counseling for trans kids. She's just like, this seems worthwhile. Cut them a check.
No press release. Yeah. No name on it. I'm like in her way of doing it.
I have to say I still do. I don't like to compare divorced people, but I'm on team Mackenzie on this one. Oh, she's on this one. So lastly, surprise witness testified that Elizabeth Holmes' trial on Friday.
Who do you think that was? I have not been following it. Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes.
Elizabeth Holmes. That she will never supposed to take the stand. Have you been following? I know.
Well, she has. Yes, it's fascinating. I'm sort of trying to, in the lines apparently around the block, John Kerry wrote, you know, showed a picture of what was happening. But she said she believed a company's blood testing machine could work.
She's testifying right now. It's really quite something that she's doing this. After all the testimony previously, which was like, she thought it wouldn't work. She kind of has to get on the stand and say she believed it.
And trying to use her powers of persuasion. I don't really understand it. I guess that she has no choice. I don't know what.
That means that her counsel did a risk-adjusted assessment and said, you're fucked. We got to throw a Hail Mary. It's not my understanding. We should ask for you about this.
But I understand it because you never want to take the stand. So the fact that they put her on the stand means, and... Not always. No, sometimes it's like, I want to tell my...
I'm not guilty. I'm going to tell my story. But what she's saying is essentially that she didn't do anything. She thought she believed in it.
There's something legally. Someone was explaining to me. If she believed it, it's not illegal. Right?
I think that's what she's trying to establish here. Yeah, but I actually think, and to a certain extent, I don't like all this courtroom drama. I think that you should just let the courts do their job. But I think she's cut because they've been playing audio or voicemails from her, where she is clearly...
She knew that the company did not have a contract from the military to do rapid blood testing on helicopters in Afghanistan. She knew that was not the case. And she was claiming that. Right.
She was not exaggerating. She was lying about the state of the business to investors into the media. And they have what's really damning. It's because it's very emotional.
These are people who make these decisions on the jury. They have her voice. They basically say, this was not happening. She knew it was not happening.
These emails validate she knew this wasn't happening. And this is her on a call. We have over our first doors and have patients coming in live. Every day, which we expand opportunity that we have created.
I think this is pretty correct. And my understanding is that almost always your counsel will say, OK, you're a megalomaniac and you're thinking, you're going to get up there and tell a great story. But guess what? There's someone who's going to get to cross-examine you.
And it's going to be really fucking ugly. So we're not going to have to take the stand. Well, I don't know. This is what this is according again to the Times.
First I said, Mrs. Holmes. They're trying to... This is their theory.
As first they have said, Mrs. Holmes was a hard-working entrepreneur who believed her claims that Theranos technology was a revolution and whose failure was not a crime. So, oh, I tried to make it and didn't happen. Second, other Theranos employees, executive investors should have known better.
That might not work. And third, Mrs. Holmes was manipulated. If that doesn't work by Ramesh Balwani, who is known as Sunny and who is formerly Theranos, as chief operating officer and his home's boyfriend.
Yeah, she's got a whole bunch going in. She's got... This is what she's going to do. Although it looks like her emails are like, I will cut you.
That kind of thing. You know what I mean? It's really... It's funny.
What do you think is going to happen here? Everyone's going to do that on the stuff. I think they're going to... She's this idea of being a hard-working entrepreneur that didn't...
Just tried her best. It's not going to work, I suspect. There's too much email and stories of her threatening people. I think people are on to her.
I think it doesn't help that she's a woman. Honestly, there's lots of men who've done stuff like this in Silicon Valley. So I think saying, oops, I didn't know it would work. It's not going to work.
I don't think so. Yeah, it's going to be very interesting. I wonder if it'll send a chill through the tech community. People say that.
Probably not. I don't care. She really went very far in pushing the limit. You have all kinds of hyperbolic claims.
And I think that's what people say, oh, now you can't be hyperbolic. And so I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so.
You don't have emails showing that you've threatened people for exposing you. You're not as big. I don't think there's very few and far between of those people. I think there's a whole lot of liars and something like that.
That's very different. But they call themselves the hopeful. They're hopeful. And I think that's why she's doing it.
But I don't know. She can't rely on all these. She can't be stupid, bad at business. Everyone else should have known that maybe it would mark and my boyfriend made me do it.
It's just way too much data for the things. Anyway, all right. Let's go on to our big story. Amazon left its customer data completely exposed inside the company, according to reports from Wired and Reveal.
These reports say Amazon employees abuse lack securities. New fund purchases of celebrities and accepted bribes from sellers trying to get an edge on the competition. The situation was allegedly so chaotic Amazon's own security teams couldn't map the flow of data who was accessing it. Oh, this is so typical of the inside Facebook and other places Uber.
These problems occurred on the retail side of the company. Amazon Web Services runs its own data security. It's not part of the problem, which is what it's a new CEO, Andy Jassy, Randy Ws. So I guess not surprised a lot of the data ended up being in China and India.
We'll see where it goes. But apparently, Amazon employees looked into Kanye West purchases and the Avengers Actors. But they could look up to anyone. This happened on Uber.
It happened in Facebook in the very early days. So what thinks you of this? To be blind, I think it's a big nothing burger. I don't.
Interesting. Yeah, I don't. Because when you're talking about a bunch of people making 15 bucks an hour who are naturally curious to see what Kanye is buying, I don't want to say we empathize. But we can kind of understand it.
And I think it happens informally all over the corporate world. People are fascinated by celebrities and everything they do. And also the downside of this is maybe some sellers on Amazon got an edge or it was inappropriate or it was just unprofessional. But I think there's a big difference between that and weaponizing elections and violating election laws.
No, that makes me uncomfortable. No, I'm not going to buy. I guess. OK.
Go ahead. Keep going. Yeah, your purchase is much more probably much more interesting than that. Diapers, diapers, diapers.
There you go. Yeah. So I don't think, and Amazon for the most part has such a reservoir of trust and kind of executional confidence. I think they roll right over this.
I don't think it's a big deal. OK. Well, what do you think? It's, I think they've got, I think governments are a little less kind about so well.
People like to look at Kanye's purchases. It's kind of like, you don't have trust in a company. You're doing, you assume data leakage all the time, but not. I remember when this happened to Facebook and Uber.
It made me super nervous about their data. Now, of course, I'm like, I don't care where I go. I go to work and back. Like, who cares?
Right. But I think in this case, this is a lot of data that's quite, you know, personal. I think it's not that personal, but it is. And a lot of people, again, people should be able to buy what they want in secrecy if they feel like it.
So their former chief information security, I had information security, said it was put together by tape and bubble gum. So, you know, this is the problem is when they have all this data and they're not protecting it. He said it was an afterthought. It was shocking to me.
Launches were shot at most security and employees are giving us down amounts of access to practically everything. Now, of course, they need access to a lot of stuff, but the data breaches should be limited. I think that's what happened to a lot of these other companies is they limited the amount of access. And that the group of people in InfoSec was too small.
It was too small. It drained money from other things. And so I could see them being sloppy in this way. And that's how leakage happens across things.
But it leads it open to, like, in this case, the Chinese, other sellers, etc., etc. And that they're expanding to fast. This is what happened to Robinhood too, right? Expansion too fast.
Not enough customer service. You know, it's the same. But the harm, but I do think there's a distinction. And Robinhood, which is my, you know, favorite punching bag.
When Robinhood doesn't make the requisite investments in customer service, you end up with people who think they're down $700,000 on their not. And they can't get anyone on the phone to explain them. No, you're not. You don't owe us $700,000.
And that can lead to much uglier places than a certain reseller getting access to information they shouldn't have or the fact that Kanye buys a certain type of Nespresso pods. The harm here, I do think that the downside, if you will, when Amazon is weaponized or hacked, it doesn't present nearly the threat that if Google were to be hacked. If Google or all of a sudden, I think the ultimate hack that creates social chaos would be, and it just goes to how much we trust Google, if there was a hack and your name and your picture were above every search you'd ever conducted chronologically, I think it would create social chaos. Yeah, I was seeing that on Twitter.
And Google to their credit, I think has people who are thinking, unlike Amazon and definitely unlike Facebook, I think Google does a decent job, at least of the core search of saying, well, what if this happened? Right. And they have, because as far as I can tell, search query data from individuals has never been hacked. And you want to talk about some embarrassing shit that would lead to like, what's your most embarrassing thing, you search?
Oh, what's my least embarrassing thing? Come on. Anything that pops into my mind. I'm like, oh, what's my girlfriend up to these days?
Yeah, right. Yeah. Look, Google knows if you're contemplating divorce, if you're contemplating getting engaged, it knows your sexual fetishes, it knows who's you're obsessing over, it knows who you're about to quit your job, it knows who's thinking of terminating a pregnancy, it knows if you're worried, if you've exposed yourself to HIV, it knows if you go, I mean, it just knows everything about you. Yeah.
And this, that hack would cause chaos, whereas if Kanye's purchase patterns are somehow revealed on a website somewhere, okay, that's meaningful, but it's not profound. Really, but a lot of scientists with me, it would be like paper towels, interesting. Interesting. It's a lot of paper towels.
That kind of thing. You can be honest, you're a freak, it's a free show over there. You can be honest. I'm looking up right now, we're talking about, you're right.
I think you're even searching on Twitter, I just, the other day, I literally was like, what if someone could see what I'm looking for on Twitter? Not good. Like, how, how protected is this, right? Because you know, you have, you're sitting up late at night, just bored out of your mind, kind of thing.
And so I'm actually never bored, but you know what I mean? It creates an interest in you that I think you, you, it would be dangerous for people to have, right? As opposed to Amazon, which is your stuff, it depends on what you buy, right? So here's, I bought, I bought a lamp, I bought some light bulbs, I bought track lighting, I bought a mock turtleneck.
And I bought a pants and a gag ball. I know, I bought some power strips that are cool looking, I bought some shampoo, I'm going through it just to give everyone my, I bought an oxo, top bottle drying rack. That was great. I bought something to the time row retainer for my Bosch, dishwasher, it's really old and it needs it.
I bought some diapers, I bought a potty seat. I mean, it just goes on, like you could see, this was easy, but you'd also listen to me. I bought face masks, which for my son who's working, I bought. Does this get more interesting?
No, I don't think I think I've got that, I get this point, I know that I'm reading it for you. Hey, interrupt is fascinating narrative. The, the, I've always thought really dangerous, really dangerous hack or would be, if someone hacked Uber and then put a layer of intelligence on top of it, you could absolutely track or figure out, okay, infidelity. Yeah.
What is this woman leaving for apartment at 1am, three times a week and going to the same apartment? What, you're planning to terminate a pregnancy, you are, have diabetes, you have, they could, with a small layer of artificial intelligence, layered on top of your travel patterns, where you're taking cars to and from, this person is clearly an alcoholic, this person is clearly buying drugs three or four times a week. I mean, with a thin layer of AI placed on top of Uber data, you could, you could find out some, you could really violate people or somebody else could violate people's drivers. Although honestly, I think people are using Uber's less because they cost so much now, but yeah, that's absolutely true.
100%. I agree. That's what I'm saying. I'm not as nervous that, that I bought a three foot inflatable pumpkin on October 21st.
It's just something that's not big a deal. I was just trying to think what it says about me. I'd like you to re-yores out like that. I, I leave the clean lot.
I use Amazon a lot. I use Amazon a lot. I embarrass them. One, one relationship I have that I embarrass by.
Anyway, it's, you're right. I think you're right. It's going to be a big nothing for them, but they need to clean it up. They said they cleaned it up.
Amazon said they cleaned it up and this was passed, but they should keep cleaning it. They should not, you know, clean it up. Clean it up. I don't, I don't agree.
I think they have to clean it. Anyway, let's go. There's going to be a lot of jobs in cybersecurity. We're way down for all of those things.
That would be a great job for anybody to go into cybersecurity. And then you could also hack people too. Anyway, let's go on a quick break. We come back.
We'll talk about the Biden agenda and take a listener question. I'm just going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world, then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying.
Maybe an actor. They go coming to them and going too far. You go, why? Does the Sadie Hawkins dance?
Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged to spare him. I just got to hang out and try to do so. It's not the charm line.
It could be a politician, basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio, so yes, you can watch it on YouTube, or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot.
Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This week on Network In Chill, I'm joined by Tanks and Audra, the meme king with over 50 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 you 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 your rich BFF. Scott, we're back with our second big story, the House of Representatives, passed the Build Back Better Bill on Friday. That doesn't mean it's through, because it's got to change a lot. The Bill Fund's universal pre-K, renewable energy, Medicare expansion, four weeks of paid parental leave up from zero and a lot more.
The total cost, $1.75 trillion. It's not out of the ones that said it goes to the Senate. It's going to be revised by President Joe Manchin and Vice President Kristin Sinema. Joe Manchin doesn't like the paid family leave, because why would he?
Bernie Sanders spoke against the increased assault deduction. It's going to get mangled. Then, of course, Alex, your cousin Cortez, who does speak up, talks to the New York Times, doesn't really talk that much threatening off to her on the progressive side. Said we've already made enough compromises.
Then, of course, a lot of people focused on things like tree equity, which you can make fun of, but people in poor areas don't have trees, and it might be nice to give them some trees. Anyway, because we give rich people things all the time. What do you think, after a year? I won't get family leave.
Look, I really hope this happens. I'm just so fed up hearing about Joe Manchin and Kristin Sinema. Getting lots of money from Republicans. Just saying, don't do it.
I used to think, well, their moderates are legislating, they're doing what they're supposed to do. I know I feel as if they were just drunk on their own. They're literally at this point, supposedly writing their legislation. Biden's basically throwing up his arms, saying, okay, what will you pass?
Let's be honest, you have all the power here. Well done. What will you pass? It all comes down to this.
The middle class is not organic. The greatest ballast in the history of Mount Kine has been the American middle class in World War II to now. It's fought. It's turned back Hitler.
It's found the cure for polio. It's spread democracy and women's rights all the way to the world. We get a lot wrong, but we get things less wrong than anyone in the world, I believe. The thing that's been the ballast for that, the source of that incredible good has been the American middle class.
The thing is, it's not an organic thing. It's not self-sustaining because of network technology, because of capital, because of certification from universities. It's largely sequestered to freakishly remarkable and the children are rich people. You are going to have the top 1% and the top 10% pull away if you don't intervene.
Unless you redistribute investing in bridges, which have no short-term payoff, but have a minst long-term payoff, unless you invest in the middle class, you don't have a ballast for the greatest experiment in the history of Mount Kine, the US. Republicans will say that it happens on its own. The way you unleash the middle class of prosperity is by letting the market take over. That is absolutely not true.
If you look through economic history, the middle class in any nation is something that has to be fed and cared for and invested in. This investment is long overdue. I really hope we come together and pass this. It's enormously important and it's key to America's prosperity.
It would be interesting to see you. It's interesting because of the rest of it. The rest of it is making a big mistake. We had it even promised.
Let's talk about the real things. I think it's going to pass, but they'll take away the trees for poor people and give rich people the salt deduction. No tax increases. We're going to restore the tax deduction for salt.
There were a couple of small, I guess, people in trees. Everyone should be like, I interviewed a few people who were historian who yelled at the rich people at Davos and had a fight with Tucker Carlson. He's a new book called Human Kind, which is saying that people are decent. He also previously had a UBI book a long time ago.
Instead of looking at it like... I had one of those. I took an antibiotics for it. Oh wait, UBI, not UTI.
I'm sorry. Sorry. Anyway, he was saying the way it's been calling it income allows people to feel like it's a gimme kind of thing when you should think of it as a dividend for people who, for our country, and that it's called a venture capital for the for the for the for regular people, essentially. This is UBI, essentially.
But the same time, giving things like that to people is like a good thing. Like, you know, I don't know. It's just we are so mean to poor people, like in terms of cutting them off. And I'm not, I would say if I had to put myself anywhere in a political thing, I suppose I'd be centrist, I guess.
Not anymore. I feel like I've been shoved pretty far over the left. But it's really interesting that that two people are sort of running the show here and there's just no choice whatsoever. And then once the Republicans take over, which seems likely, it's they're going to get a whole lot of nothing.
Or maybe they're positioning themselves well in a Republican-led Congress. Who knows? Seems to be... Yeah, I think things look really bad for us quite frankly right now.
I think there's a lot of time for the 22. But I think this is really important. Infrastructure used to be something that was fairly bipartisan. But anyways, I'm hopeful that I just want something to pass and get through.
And I can never need to hear the terms mentioned in cinema again. Yeah, I can't believe paid family leave is anything controversial. Universal basic health care should be that and same thing with paid family leave when you have kids, honestly. It's crazy.
It's just crazy that you have to rely on states like California. You know, it's discouraging data, and this is going to be my failed a day. Young people aren't having kids. And when you present, when you present a family with these options, like, all right, housing's becoming more expensive.
Oh, and if and when you decide to have kids, your company isn't obligated to give you family leave. What are they? Oh, and by the way, it's a percentage of GDP, the wealth of people under the 40, we decided to cut it from 20% to 9%. So it's like, okay, young people, we're not going to give as much money.
We're not going to give any protection to have kids, but we want you to have kids. I mean, people are just, they're not having children. And if you look at the birth there's the cross Japan and Italy, it's really bad for an economy. And then you decide to militarize the board or not anybody.
And it's like, okay, who's going to make our shit? Who's going to actually support all these seniors? Who's going to support pop up and nano's crews on crystal? If all of a sudden it's no longer five people supporting every retiree, it's three than two than one.
It's very discouraging that we don't want to put in place incentives. If you look at something with COVID, the great resignation is really zero in on it. It's like Jonathan Hites' work shows that depression in social media, you really got a zero in on teenage girls. That's worth the ground zero for it.
If you really want to zero on a great resignation, it's women who don't have in place the support system from the government or from their corporation to make it viable for them to work. And that is bad for the economy. The American economy hummed. They're the kind of the great growth we had through kind of the 60s to the 80s, which is because we created an ecosystem where women could enter the workforce and we decided to go back.
It's just dumb. I feel like if they don't pass it here, Biden's got a pull out the IOC interview, like pull out the executive orders a little bit. You know, once people get paid family, they're going to like it, it's going to be very hard to take back by Republicans, you know, and we're going to give you money. But paid family leave just not just to take care of kids, but to care for real family members, et cetera, et cetera.
It's just crazy that this has just, it's for it throughout the land. I mean, it's in certain states. But it's, you know, I can tell you just having all the kids I have, I have money and it's exhausting, like, which is not like, oh, no, Carol, but Jesus Christ, paid family should be just everybody should have this. It's not, it's not a social safety item that's good for the economy.
It's good for the economy for people. It's not a gimme. It's not, you know, everyone talks about it that way, any of these things. It's when they're given to poor people, they're talked about like they're, have their hand out.
And when it's given to rich people, it's because they're going to use it to help the economy. Yeah, it's like, well, it is, it is, it is pretty rational to believe that the greatest investment you can make is in kids. And the most important thing for kids is that they have a secure loving, I mean, the resting blood pressure for kids in poverty is significantly higher than the resting blood pressure for kids who live in homes that are not, not low income. So it's like, okay, how do we get children to not have high blood pressure?
You know, it is, there's some kind of basics here. We think, well, for the wealthiest society in the world, we need to start acting like it. There's just some basics that, and what I was so excited about was the child tax credit. There's just few things, few programs in history that could do more to eliminate child poverty.
I mean, you think it'd be a bipartisan issue. Most people, on either side of the aisle go, child poverty is a bad thing that we should address. Yeah, it's interesting because one of the leading proponents, Kirsten Gillibrand, is being apologetic about it, to try to get it to pass, she's saying all nice things about mansion, et cetera. And this is, we know if it's parent apparently parents, mothers are 40% more likely to get back to work if they paid leave, which goes to center mansions concerning things, wants to strengthen our social safety nets, he wants to strengthen Social Security.
That's what paid leave does. It gets people back to work, allows people to stay in the workforce, even when there's a family emergency. Like, apologizing for this, I'd be like, listen, you, you Yahoo, the passes, I know she's saying that in the back of her head. So who knows?
Yeah, we'll see. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. We'll see what happens.
I'm not anything that helps women manage children seems to be not positive thing. We'll see work goes, but I think of all the things, both universal pre-K and four weeks at the very least, paid family, it should be eight weeks seems things that should be absolutely, I can't believe people aren't for them. It's really, it's really shocking. And the people that needed the most are probably the ones that are being convinced they don't need it, which is ridiculous.
Okay, let's take a listener question about responsible disclosure. You've got, you've got to keep the leave. I'm gonna be a mailman. You've got mail.
All right, this came in via email from Madison Cancer. Yeah, K-N-T-Z-E-R. You want to read it, you've got? Because you're eating.
Sure. Okay, another engineering discipline. You need to do impact analysis before you start work. You can't build a building unless you've done a full study on impact on local wildlife and water runoff analysis.
You have to do safety studies where you can put humans in a car or on a rocket ship. Why shouldn't software and algo boys be treated the same? To do a full rollout of the new model, you need to do an impact study and publish it. You don't need to publish how you do it.
Does it tend to make people happier or sadder? Does it tend to increase or decrease violent behaviors? Does it reward or punish false claims? If you don't have the resources to build a bridge safely, you don't have the resources to build a bridge.
If you don't have the resources to test a model, you don't have the resources to deploy it. It comes down to one word in that is attribution. And that is, if you're riding a Matterhorn at Disneyland and you get thrown out of your bobsled and you die, they know that it was a lack of safety standards and protocols that killed you. That Disney is responsible for work as they charge people and give them some inherent guarantee of safety when they ride their rides.
When you program a company to connect people or algorithms that connect people and then slowly be sure that you start to tell the algorithms to spread content that engages people and ends up the algorithm and starts saying, okay, the stuff that engages people is rage and misinformation. It's really difficult to reverse engineer specific content back to specific self harm. It's really difficult to reverse engineer teen depression to specific causes. It's a variety of things.
So software and the interaction and human behavior around software, it's very hard to reinfence it and isolate it and not end up on Twitter with a bunch of self-appointed statisticians saying shit like, well, correlation is in causation. When in fact, when you take out every other cause, you can say, well, in fact, it is correlation. So that's the problem. It's attribution.
So, so, okay, yes or no, you shouldn't be able. You can't, you're not able to do it in other words. Well, I think it's, I think it's difficult. What I would argue is instead of over regulating the development of software and asking for them to do all sorts of testing, so the FDA does this.
Yes. If you want to put out a product or a drug with technology, I would argue it's not like a big thing. You do. That's why I'm asking technology.
Well, technology has created as only so much utility and shareholder value. I think that the idea of a little bit of a wild west mentality around regulation is important. Where I would address it is that I think that they should be more legally liable. I almost say let the travelers lose.
And that's the thing I hate about 230 is that, okay, if you're if you're willing to take the risk that your organization might end up circumventing minimum wage laws, you should be liable for violating minimum wage laws. If that ends up happening, if it ends up that they can prove that about the time social went to mobile, that young girls started engaging in self-harm, then that organization and across and then other organizations, including other social media platforms, should be liable. I think it's, I think it's on the back end because a lot of times they can stop it. They can say, okay, there are unintended consequences.
We did not initially say, I don't think the people initially built Facebook so I can tell you they didn't. No, he was so far too helpful. Hopeful is what I would say, like, naively hopeful. And I, of course, it's like people are shitty.
I think he had this mentality that there wasn't, it wasn't going to be used for bad. I think there is a question. I talk about this anticipation of consequences a lot, and they certainly get a lot better. But I agree, there's no way to measure it until it's out.
And this is not like a drug. This is not like a car. It's very hard to bridge. You know, it's just, of course, all these things, it's very, when bridges do collapse, it's rare, right?
And at least in sort of higher levels of site, you know, in post-catch it with more money, you don't see buildings, I mean, the whole thing around the Miami collapse was it was shocking, right? It was shocking. That doesn't happen without a earthquake or flood, et cetera. And so I just think that you can't, I don't think you can do it, Madison.
Okay, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. Okay, Scott, we're going to do wins and fails. I'm going to start with a win.
I'll tell you what my win is. It's going to surprise you. It's going to, that Spotify removes shuffle play as a default option on all albums for premium users. So tracks play an order intended, you know, who requested this?
Adele. Yeah. So it doesn't, I hate shuffle play. I mean, I like it if I want it, but it's always like it suddenly goes to songs that I want.
I like it. And Adele, of course, this was the, said in Twitter is the only request I had in our ever changing industry. We don't create albums so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells the story and our story should be listened to as we intended.
Thank you for Spotify for listening. I think that's great. You shouldn't be default. It should be people want to do it.
They can do it. That's what I like. I love Adele. She's the best.
Thank you. That is my win. Go Adele. Let me do it fail very quickly.
I think the language surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse and those trials and sort of attacks on the media are the fail. This is a jury trial. This was decided. I think we have to, it was a jury trial, whatever you think of the jury.
It was done. I think the prosecution had a very weak case as I noted to you, I think several weeks ago and have enough doubt in there. So that's what it is. And then whether whatever side you happen to agree with, that is what it is.
It was a jury trial that seems unfair to many, seems completely ridiculous that he was on trial too many. And not both sides of this thing, but it is what it is. And so what I didn't like is all this, there was the dunking on the media for doing it wrong. I actually looked over a lot of the coverage and except for like pundits, it was fine.