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I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. I just want to point out that your recent announcement that UTA has picked you up as a client is clearly just a naked attempt for them to get closer to the dog. You are being used.
You are being used. It is unfair. Uta, by the way. So you have UTA take cranberry pills to clear that right up.
Listen to. Get it. Get it. You know, as someone who has had urinary tract infections many times, they don't work.
You have to go right to the antibiotics. Just so you know. Listen to me. In every single meeting, they didn't mention you once.
No, they did. They loved hippothy. Thank you. They did.
They did. They didn't. They did. So you're with uta, I'm with wme.
I hope that they bring this same sense of. By the way, I don't know how they got use a client. You know how I got them use a client? How?
This guy, David Wirshafter, who's a big, you know, the baller at wme, showed up in my office and took me in and said, we want to represent you. I said, I'm an academic. I'm not interested in representation. And he looked at me and he said, we think you are a genius.
You know what I said? Sign me up. You're hired. You're hired.
You, my friend, have cleared. That's all it takes. Oh, it was so nitty and it was so. I think you're a genius.
You're so smart. You're like Donald Trump. You need constant praise. It's so effective.
The guy, literally, he just said, we think you're a genius. I like the cut of your job. They are paid. I'M like a terrorist.
I dig into details and I drive. I'm a genius. You're hired. I am, like, on their asses.
I like. I did due diligence on all of the people who approached me. So who's your agent? Let's do some inside baseball.
I have several. I have many. I have a team. Some for scripted, some for unscripted, some for speaking, some for thought leadership.
I have a thought leadership person. I got a social media person. I got a book agent. I got.
I got a podcast. I got everything. I got it all. So an agent, an agent walks into a bar and says, hey, I'm an agent.
And the woman at the bar says, really? Who you represent? And he says, caris Switcher. And the woman says, okay.
Nice to meet you. Oh, thanks. No, thank you. That's the worst.
That's pretty hard to sell, honey. We signed Karis, you know, you'll see. Just wait till all the other shoes drop. We turned away Al Pacino, but we signed up the jungle cat.
Listen, I tell you, have no idea what's about to happen to you in your world. Listen to me. Listen. I said a month ago that we never.
A couple months ago that I would never hire an agent. And now I have. So I have to say I was. I was.
Greatness is in the agency of others. I changed my mind. I needed help. I needed some help.
So that's what I did. I reached out for help. We all need to reach out for help, Scott. Just so you know, in general.
But anyway, let's move along from this Asian thing. There's all kinds of things. There's so many things. Like there's the unemployment claims, obviously, are huge this week because of coronavirus, which we're going to talk about a little.
We're talking about zoom a little bit. We're talking about all kinds of things. But one thing I want to note that women led countries seem to be flattening the curve better than other countries. That's one.
New Zealand, Germany, they have the most successful. Just pointing out also some states the same thing. Bernie Sanders drop down the race. We have that to discuss.
And also, Gavin Newson has become really dreamy. You know, in a lot of ways, I'm surprised you haven't glommed on to him as the next thing, as the next big thing. So I have a story back in the. Was that the early 90s, when I started believing I was going to be rich from Internet companies, I was starting.
I thought, well, if I'm going to be wealthy, I'M a white guy and I have outdoor plumbing, which means I should run for office. So I started going to all these. I joined the Potrell Hill Democratic Club, which, by the way, a quick shout out to them. They're just fucking crazy.
And I don't especially hope any of them are doing really well. But anyways, quick shout out to Potrero Hill Democratic Club. And I started going to. I started meeting with political consultants.
On top of my run for congressman, I know I'll run for supervisor. And I met this young. This guy who's like six four and handsome and he's also running for supervisor. Was supervisor.
And his name is Gavin News. And I introduced myself, I start talking to him. I was with my close friend Leotus. And we walked out of the room.
I'm like, I have absolutely no chance. Like, if that guy is the guy, if that's the person who. Supervisor in San Francisco, I have no business ever even filling out a resume. Mayor.
And then he is. I think his breakout moment, though, was actually when he decided to defy federal law and start marrying same sex people. You know, that was a big moment for him. I was within that group because they called me and my partner at the time to get married because they wanted more people come down who were better known and to have pictures and good pictures.
They have agents that are represented. Agents. They just called. And so one of the things that was, you know, we were getting married anyway, but.
But it was really an interesting time. Let me just say, Gabby, since, you know, everyone has their criticism about various people. That moment to me was such an important moment from a leadership perspective, political leadership. He got killed for doing that.
Like politically. He was on the upswing. And. And a very prominent political person said to me, like a mistake what he did and everything else.
And, and he. And they said, you know, maybe America's just not ready for gay marriage. And I said, it's called leadership and you should learn how to do it, because he does. And he did it again here in California.
I'm not surprised that he's doing such a good job. You know, there's a lot of controversy, had some personal problems, drinking problem, everything else that he's talked about. But let's watch over that. He was banging his campaign manager way.
How do I care? I have a moving story. One quick question. Did he preside over your divorce?
So inappropriate. So inappropriate. No. Well, I like your ex.
Me, we're having Easter on Sunday. Please get along. Don't even try. Three problems.
What are you talking about? You Hannity and Lindsey Graham. You guys are all thru now. You're all thru.
Oh, man. He would not survive unless he had bar for you in five seconds. Hannity would, of course. Anyway, listen, we're gonna move along to my personal life anyway.
Gavin Newsom's great and I think a lot of. By the way, my brother was a Fanta, his first kid's first wife. He has a 103 kid. We have to bring him back to talk about.
He said that the moves by Governor Newsom and Mayor Bree in San Francisco has created a real flattening that curve. He was really. It just was good. Yeah, because he's like the early.
I think Mayor Reed was the earliest mayor to do something about it. And so he's like this, it's made the world of difference. It's going to be seized upon like, look, it wasn't that bad. But these moves early by some of these people, early moves to let it spread out has been really a lifesaver.
Well, he had, he had the gangster movement communication strategy and that is. He announced that the California had secured I think 150 million mass. And the way he. 200 million.
But the way he positioned it, which was genius and a wonderful positioning, was he said, we secured this for California for more than that. We secured these mass for America. And he said the California economy, which I count on is on the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The nation state in the world has said, okay, we're in this together and we're using our, our capital, we're using our resourcefulness, we're using our kind of cultural innovation to do what the federal government has been unable to do and how to secure protective equipment for America and not create this Hunger Games, ebay like bullshit.
If you don't like me, okay, okay, DeSantis in Florida. You get more ventilators in Cuomo because you like me. So he's acting, you know, him, him and Trump walk into a bar. One, one acts presidential, the other is president, you know, so he's, he's setting himself up really well.
He's a fantastic job. 100%. 100%. I would gladly vote for him.
He's going to be amazing. Sort of like the president of New York and the president of California, which is interesting. Speaking of great moves, Jack Dorsey pledged a billion dollars to fight COVID 19. That's the biggest financial contribution we've seen from a tech CEO so far.
He's obviously not the only one pointing out resources. Mark Banff, one of the things he's doing is if you notice he's taking pictures of him delivering a lot of these supplies to health care workers. And one person close to him told me he's doing it just so that it doesn't get seized by the government and it can get directly into the hands of people who need it. But anyway, the questions are we depending too much on the ultra world to get us out of public healthcare?
Even though a lot of this stuff has been amazing. Dorsey announced he's putting 28% of his wealth in the form of shares of his company Square into an LLC called Start Small. He says the expenditure will be recorded in an open go document, the first donation to America's Food Fund, according to Spreadsheet. Meanwhile, Apple has donated 20 million maps.
Kim Cook said there's a company wide effort to bring together product designers, engineers, operations, packaging teams and suppliers, design producers and ship face shields for health workers, which will probably be stunningly beautiful. Bill Gates says his foundation will spend billions to fund construction factories. This is critically important for developing promising vaccines to combat COVID 19. And Zuckerberg donated $25 million.
So Teddy Schleifer, a Recode reporter, said these efforts often imbued with unaccountable, transparent, undemocratic influence. What does it mean? And why does why does the square stock versus Twitter stock? Scott and you know, what do you think of this?
Teddy had a great story about that two things can exist at once, that these are good things and at the same time should be relying on rich people to pull us out of the drink when the government should be doing it. What do you think? Yeah, when the rich guy on the black shows up with the best hose to put out your fire, it doesn't mean it's not saying he's not a wonderful man, but what it says is we need to fund the fire department. And when you're dependent upon wealthy people with big hoses, I don't worry about the hose metaphor.
But look, billionaires are a lot of billionaires and especially on tech leadership are stepping into the void here and whether it's Bill Gates who's become kind of other than Dr. Fauci, the voice of sort of credibility and reason here, whether it's Tim Cook and his masks, whether it's Jack Dorsey and kind of post Corona philanthropy, tech billionaires are sort of stepping into the void. The fear is that there's two things here. There's philanthropy and philanthropy is generosity and giving without any sense or any expectation of anything in return.
And then there's what I would Call going and buying Chanel Rouge Allure Velvet luminous matte lip color in La Romanesque. And that's 28. And it's. You spend some money to make, to make you look better.
And I think a lot of this philanthropy is not philanthropy. It's lipstick. I think when. Let's think about the scale here.
So one of the wonderful things about this reporting is it Valley reported the number that reported the percentage of his wealth. And any individual who gives 28 of their wealth, which is what Jack Dorsi is doing, should be commended for giving hurts. We've noted that before. The amount that you should give the amount.
Let's talk about this. When Jeff Bezos gives gives a million dollars to defend wildlife post the wildfires in Australia, it's equivalent of the average household giving approximately somewhere between two and six dollars to that effort. When, when you tip somebody and when you go to the Olive Garden and you have a nice dinner, as one does at the Olive Garden with you and your family and you say you spend 100 bucks and you're feeling like a baller and you give a 20% tip that it's 20 bucks, that's the equivalent of Jeff Bezos giving. Say that family has a million dollars in assets that four times as well as the average household.
That's equivalent of Jeff bezos deleting a $3 million tip. So when, when individuals, we need to start reporting what percentage of their wealth because we think it's not wonderful. But the bottom line is if you're putting out a press release to give the equivalent of $6 away of your household total net worth, does it really warrant a press release? I would love to see a certain IRS metric that says we evaluate different types of income, let's evaluate different types of philanthropy.
And if it's less than 0.1% of your net income and you're putting out press releases, it should be tax deductible. So there's, there's, there's philanthropy and then there's lipstick. And in this instance, I think Mr. Dorsey is clearly philanthropy.
Anyway, he gives away 28%. But a lot of these tech people are doing that when they get away 0.01% of the net worth, it's not philanthropy, it's lipstick. Well, it's also some of the things that I'm taking point. I think this line was really great.
He goes, but two things can be true at once. Tech billionaires can be doing good while simultaneously revealing their power and entrenching it for the long ha struggles and Safety net crumbles. Tech laners are reaching their apex of their influence. Influence that may not recede once so easily when we do manage to survive this pandemic, which I think was a really good point, is like you think about Rockefeller during the Great Depression or Carnegie and others, it's not something new, by the way.
These just happen to be the people with the money. And Teddy also wrote a follow story about the 10 other tech titans with the power to shape, shape this response. Jack Dorsey being one of them. Bill Gates that you had mentioned, but also Larry Ellison, who's been sort of wandering around the White House in some way inside of Trump, spraying Mark Benioff, Lorraine Powell jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, who was a Facebook executive.
So they do have enormous resources. And so the question is how to put them to use without giving them enormous power. And I think that's hard in our country. Yeah.
But on an individual level, it's wonderful. Taken as a trend, it's dangerous because what you have here. Let's look at Jack. I can't wait.
Numbers. Numbers are, they are informative, but they're not. They don't. It's hard to get a sense of proportion around a number.
And just again, let's go back to proportions. Jack Dorsey's donated a billion dollars for aid post Corona. And that's wonderful. Okay, so if every individual, if every employee at Pinterest they have 2000 people.
If every employee at SNAP they have 2800. If either of those terms, if every employee gave a billion dollars to try and restart the economy, it would still not be as great as the bailout, as the rescue package. Governments, governments have to be funded well enough such that they can make these sort of tectonic moves. No amount of, no amount of billion dollar donations is going to help us around income inequality or climate change, or we're figuring out a way to fund the agencies we need to ensure this pandemic doesn't relapse.
So to a certain extent it's a bit of cold comfort. And it also, when we're dependent upon guys in the midlife crisis instead of NASA to put us on Mars, when we get hope from these weird projects from eccentric billionaires and they're going to cure death, it's again a very dangerous reflection that we're no longer hand in hand. We're finding idols and individuals and we're being atomized by each other such that we're trying to find idols as opposed to a competitive man and joining hands around what is the greatest organization in history. Mankind.
That's us. The U.S. government. And we keep defunding.
The U.S. government talks about this all the time. But what's interesting, what you said, there's an intense story you quoted David Callahan, who has a newsletter called Inside Philanthrop. He's prominent, he writes a lot about the subject.
If anyone can afford to give more response to Pandemic, it's the richest of the rich. With far greater assets than private foundations. In recent years, though, giving by billionaire donors is magic. Only a tiny sliver of their wealth and many billionaires barely give it all.
There are no signs that this crisis will change that. So like I said, there can be two things at once. These things that Mark is doing, Mark Benioff is doing, or Jack is doing are very important signs that they do this. But you're right, the government really is the biggest gangster among these people.
Although this is unprecedented, this is like 10 Rockefellers, like essentially the numbers, their wealth is unprecedented. It's not, it's just, I mean, okay, so let's talk about Dorsey. A billion dollars, 20%. This is wonderful.
This, this, this is a testament to his character and his code as a person. Let's just full stop now. But when you're worth $4 billion giving away a billion, it's just not your lifestyle. I'm not gonna say it's not giving, but he's not doing anything that's gonna get in the way of his, of his chat or his lifestyle.
You don't need it. You're saying he don't need it. It just doesn't in any way impact his lifestyle. Where the average household in the US, the average white household is worth 220,000, the average black Latin household for about 50, 60 grand.
When they give 100 bucks, it changes the way they live their lives. So philanthropy comes in different shapes. The other thing is that these, these tech billionaires, it's never, they want something returned. So the Twitter PR folks have been hard at work talking about, you know, putting out tons of press releases.
I think anytime people press release after your flank page should immediately not become tax deductible. And there's all of a sudden I'm getting, people are tweeting me because I've been saying that we shouldn't have a part time CEO moving to Africa. The Jack should step down. And people are tweeting at me saying, how do you feel now?
I'm like, I feel exactly the fucking same. Giving Giving a billion dollars. Of course you feel this thing giving a billion dollars to post prona 8 is a wonderful thing. But Mother Teresa shouldn't be the co CEO of Twitter either.
It has nothing to do with being a good fiduciary for shareholder value. It doesn't in any way make him a better product manager that's going to figure out how to monetize the 20% incremental increase in traffic that they do. Like that you stick by your. Everyone is pretty amazing.
Well, what do you think now? Should you step down the CEO, like, absolutely. What does this have to do with anything? Doubling down.
But you see my point. This has nothing to do with your ability to serve as a good fisher who had been repeatedly kicking the nuts for the last five years. It certainly does. That's the problem.
That's the problem. All of a sudden he no longer is subject to the same screen as every other CEO because unlike most CEOs, he has a billion dollars to give away. So you want to like him. So these guys wrap themselves.
I think the question is, are these donations a new tax? Like instead of taxing them, this is how they're taxed. Yeah, it's not a tax because they get to put their names on shit and they get to decide what they get to do. It's not, I mean, a tax.
The very definition of tax is that you are redistributing income and you don't get to decide where it goes. It goes to the 6th Fleet in the Gulf. And you're against wars in the Middle East. Too damn bad.
You have signed up. You have joined hands together 350 million Americans and elect somebody different. To a certain extent, this type of philanthropy is bypassing our democracy in our elections and our ability to make big decisions. Because now these guys make these.
And they are guys. Which means they're all dudes. Other than Lauren Powell Jobs buying the Atlantic, it's basically dudes. So essentially these guys are doing an unrun around government, around public policy, around foreign policy.
So every individual effort is a good thing. On the whole, this reflects an underlying sense of our. I'm going to put out one thing though. I do think in some cases the government doesn't act.
I do like that Bill Gates is building these factories because the government's not doing it, you know, and maybe, you know, I think we need to have them built now instead of arguing about it. And so I'm fine with this foundation spending billions dollars factories again. But you're right, you're sort of giving in to like now he's a different case. All his money is going away, it's getting given away.
And it's an interesting thing that he's doing. I think he really genuinely is engaged on this topic and has been for many years on pandemic issues and vaccines and healthcare. But in that case, what do you do? Like the government isn't building these factories or isn't thinking ahead and he is.
So again, it's a very. As you can think two opposing thoughts in your head at the very same time. Yeah, but the thought I think that we need to be left with is do we want to be, do we want to be dependent upon the generosity of tech billionaires or do we want to employ the same standards and progressive tax structure with billionaires? Billionaires in the 60s paid 40% of their taxes.
In the 70s they paid 60%. Now they pay 21. And do we want to create the void that they need to step into or do we want to close the void and decide that it's NASA, it's the CDC that put people on Mars and that are our front lines of defense against these pandemics. Because if you want to talk about a good ROI, the CDC gets about $11 billion.
Well, what if we had taxed big tech and incremental 10% and then taken 10% of that in front of the CDC to the tune of 50 or $100 billion? Would we have, would we be talking about 50, 80% of people going on ventilators die? Would we be talking about the fact that despite the fact we had more heads up here, that we've handled this the worse and everybody wants a fucking Hallmark Channel movie about our unique American exceptionalism and how we've insp. How people responding.
There's just no getting around us. We fucked up big time here. And if we had not made proactive, you know, if we had made more forward leaning investments, if we had been less narcissistic, if we hadn't defunded the cdc, less people would be dead. And we have to face those hard truths.
And that all goes back to the system where we've decided the new idols and the new kind of arbiters of truth and vision moving forward are tech billionaires or people who divide us like the current president. And that shit has just got to stop here. It's got to stop. All right, guys, I like this whole thing.
I think you should run for supervisor in San Francisco. Now. The problem is he's moved on to bigger things. Anyone quite as handsome with one of the supervisor thing, I don't recall.
I agree with you, but it's going to be harder for you and I to attack. It's not attack to criticize. They're going for the redemption tour and that's what. Of course that's what they're doing.
Anyway, we'll take a quick break. We'll be back with one more big story. And listen, I think similar to that Silent Retreat, when he gets a billion dollars away, he should keep it to himself and not put out press releases. All right, we'll be right back.
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Hire the right pro today. Okay, Scott, we're back. I want to do some quick updates about what's going with Zoom's privacy issues. We've been contacted by the company that they thought we did not understand them properly, but it has.
We're going to have hopefully the CEO on Rico Dico and other. We're going to we talk about it more because a lot of people are still using this and there's still these privacy issues. But Zoom brought on Alex Samos, someone I know very well. He's a former chief of security for Facebook.
He previously worked for Yahoo as an advisor. To improve their privacy and security, they've added, they've quickly added some stuff to the, to the app for sure. About around securities very prominently placed. Alex Samos left Facebook in 2018 of the company's response to troubles around the data security election interference.
Tuesday's show we talked about the University of Toronto's research. They found that many of their videos have problems with all kinds of issues of security and everything else and that they had some servers in China Zoom reach out to us an email to clarify a few things in their opinion. In the blog post they responded on the ramp up in China we added server capacity and deployed quickly starting in China when the outbreak began. In that process we failed to fully implement our usual geofencing best practices.
We have since corrected this and on the Washington Post story about meetings being recorded, Zoom meetings are only recorded at the host choice, either locally, on the host machine or in the Zoom cloud. So they're moving, the CEO Eric Yawn is moving and they're trying to do things but you know, people are still worried. Brian Chan wrote a great story in the New York Times. A lot of people feel that you know about these issues and how you shouldn't use Zoom and was recommending Web, WebEx and some others.
Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, things like that. But you know, I think they're trying this is a company trying hard to fix things but sort of got caught sort of flat within. And some of their weaknesses have been shown rather quickly through the heavy usage. What do you think of these responses?
I think I've got it mostly right. He's acknowledged the problem. He, the top guy is taking responsibility and I think they're attempting to overcorrect. But back to the notion of a single data point reflects a more dangerous trend and that is they've said publicly there's just no way we could have anticipated this happening.
We didn't, we didn't see this coming. But they see their earnings calls coming, they see their 13, they see their defiling companies so they can sell stock. They see every increase in daily active users coming in to put up press releases. Anything, anything that might involve them getting liquidity and getting money into their hands and getting, getting any sort of transfer of wealth from shareholders into their pockets.
They see that actually coming for miles. But anything that might do damage to Commonwealth of Privacy they don't see coming. And the reason they don't see it coming is our government has failed in the sense that and by the way, I'm not suggesting Zoom should be the poster child here. It should be Facebook.
But when they don't see the GRU coming, they should be fined not $5 billion but 1 5, 10, 30% of the market capitalization. And then all of a sudden they're gonna start to see this shit, they're gonna start to anticipate it. Because right now the incentives aren't to anticipate it. The incentives are to ignore it.
The incentives are to turn, turn away from it and hope that even in their mission, it says they're trying to provide frictionless communication. And no one raised their hand and said, all right, that's a great tagline. That's gonna get us a great multiple on revenues. But are there downsides to the term in the gestalt of frictionless and technology?
Haven't we seen the frictionless equals security risks. And they're saying, well, but we don't get paid for that kind of, we don't get paid for that kind of consternation. And what we need to do is start paying them to have that kind of forward looking insecurity or fears. And the way we pay them for it is we need to begin slapping the shit out of companies that don't, that don't forward look into this type of friction or this type of risk they're presenting when they don't put in place certain security measures.
So we need to start paying people who do pay attention by finding the. Out of the companies that don't. I hate to say Zoom should be a poster child here. It should have been Facebook.
But somebody's got to step in and make it worthwhile to make the investments to ensure that a fifth grade class doesn't get bombed by pornographers that start saying aggressive, violent things. It's also not just that. It's these technologies my son was telling me about. Like other kids in his class gave the links.
You know, it's giving out the. Someone's like, oh, it's just stupid people giving out links. But it's designed to not protect. Like, it should know that people might do that.
For example. And my kids gave other kids from other schools and they came in and they made up all kinds of names, you know, like, like Mo, Lester, like that kind of things. Like they signed in with those names and they all had a big old laugh about it. Or there was a couple, you know, those dumb names that you make up and things like that.
And, and so, you know, they should anticipate human behavior in the design of their, whatever they're making. And that's 1, 2. When things like this happen, I do think they've responded pretty well. Zoom has done a good job.
I think it's been not Victimy. It's been very much. We made a mistake. They're not, you know that one quote about them, like, this is what happened in China.
But in the first place, when they did it, they should have thought about it. Like, that's. That's the anticipation of consistent. What they're trying to do is.
Is protect Frictionless more than anything. And that's the problem, is that they want to protect the one thing that's the selling point, which is that it's easy to use. And easy to use often means insecure and not private. So I would argue that, Eric, you want to send higher.
Alex Stamos is a really strong move. It's probably more optics. I don't know. You know, Alex gets it.
You know, what if Alex leaves? That's not. Alex has been known to leave up Yahoo when Versamara wasn't doing enough around it. So it's a dangerous move to hire Alex and then do nothing.
That's a good point. That's a really good point. Yeah. You don't.
You're. That's. I had considered that when you hire Alex Stamos, it means you're serious. It means that, you know shit's about to get real around that stuff.
Because if it doesn't, you. Right. He'll embarrass the company. Yeah, he's willing to do that.
Well done. You can get representation. My upward trajectory to the top echelons of media, that's really what you're jealous of. You're on a rocket ship to several conferences that will be canceled in the fall.
No, they're not. You know what? We're coming back. Says Bill Barr, the epidemiologist expert who's running the Justice Department.
What an OPHI continues to be. Anyway, listen to mail. Let's move on to listener mail. Roll tape.
You got. Can't believe I'm gonna be a mailman. You got mail. Hey, Kara and Scott, this is Stephanie from Wellesley, Massachusetts.
And I have a question about the video gaming industry. Global revenues were almost 138 billion in 2018, and that is way more than the worldwide movie and music industries combined. So why is it that we never hear about what is happening in gaming from mainstream media? Are we so PC that we can't admit to playing Candy Crush on our phones?
And how or will the video industry change in a post COVID 19 world? Thanks so much. Love your show. Yeah, Wealthy Mass.
I love that place. Thank you so much, Stephanie. Listen, there's a huge near time story today about gamers who play where Other gamers watch and how big their business has gotten. I do think, I do think the mainstream media industry does cover gamers.
And I think there's probably almost no impact except that people are gonna be using games more. This is an industry that is sort of home, stay at home and play on your video game. So I suspect it's going to do well and even better going forward. Scott, do you have a different point of view?
Well, she's right in the sense that relative to the size of the industry, I think a total US domestic box office take. So think of all movie theaters is something like, I think it's 5 or $7 billion. It's just not. And then this industry is 130.
I think radio is 20 or 25 billion, or music and radio 17. And then video games are 130. So it's a staggering industry. I think there's a generation of people who control the editorial desk just aren't in video games.
So it's. She's absolutely right. It doesn't get the coverage it deserves. I was offered a chance to buy the local team in Florida.
There's now video game teams. There's league. They're fascinating. You could buy a team to see yourself in the industry.
You could buy team two years ago for about 5 million bucks. Now they're about 50 or 60 million. Some Korean guy stepped in and bought a bunch of teams. But when you think about it, it's incredibly well positioned.
There's just some industries that are gonna do really well during come out of Corona with additional win behind the backs because you can't, you can't go see a basketball game, but you can watch a video competition online. So it just strikes me the industry only comes out of the stronger the players. Whether it's Activision or, or Microsoft. The benefits from video games.
But are your kids, you have two teenage boys. Are your kids gamers? They are, they are. They haven't played as much as they're back on online school and stuff like that, but yes, absolutely they are.
And they play not quite as much as they used to, which is interesting. But still it's an important part of their entertainment diet. Just to give you some context. And Amazon course acquired Twitch, the video game streaming platform that helps cultivate a massive game community.
And there's a lot of competition, people watching things. And usage has been up 31%. The numbers of hours daily watched on Twitch rose by 10 million. Amazon is going to produce its own video games and they're making a cloud game streaming service project Tempo that will make it possible for gamers to play across mobile phones, laptops, desktops without gaming hardware.
And don't forget last year Google launched its own cloud gaming platform called Stadia. So there's a lot going on. Obviously. Obviously the players that know the business know the business.
Yeah. But the thing you said that really stuck out there was that Amazon is now going into video games because some of these games cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, whenever you sit down and actually watch these games, if you're not a gamer, and I'm not, it is breathtaking. The lifelike graphics, how robust the animation and the process, I mean the genius and the resources of going to these games is staggering.
And now a lot of video games require a greater investment than the initial work that inspired it. Whether it's the initial Harry Potter film budget that video games that follow on under Star wars is a multiple of that. And when you, what you said that I found that's super interesting was that. And there are very few companies that can go private label or vertical and use their rails to encourage people to buy their video games and make, have the capital, make the requisite investment.
The only way I can think of the one you just mentioned, which is Amazon, I wonder if Apple's gonna get into their business. Before you know it, Amazon will do what they've done in media and that is they can spend $5 billion to produce what it would take HBO a billion dollars to produce in terms of content, because they don't have those cultures. But it doesn't matter because they can then turn on their algorithms across their platform and start and start putting their own video games, their own private label head of the video games produced by third parties. Further evidence abusive monopoly power owning the Rails.
And that's what I asking. Look, it's Bobby Kick who runs Activision going to start realizing these got to get some political heft around Amazon getting in here. Would you invest in those companies? Activision makes games essentially.
And then there's a whole genre of business of people watching people play games or how to play games. And then there's a whole nother genre of serving up these games in some way. So would you, where would you invest in the video game industry right now? So look, these are incredible businesses.
They're well managed, it has the wind at its back. But hands down, the only video game company you should invest in is Amazon. Because Amazon, you always want to invest, you always want to go with the unregulated monopoly. And because Amazon has cheaper, this is where Amazon is Amazon.
We're worth a trillion dollars. We need to get to 2 trillion in five years. All right, how are we gonna do that? Well, maybe the economy goes 2 to 3%.
Maybe now it's gonna go grow negative 2% which means we gotta take a trillion dollars from somewhere else. Trillion dollars. A lot of market capitalization graph from other people we have soaked. We the Amazon vampire have Dr.
Of the corpus of retail. Unless we're go after Walmart, which we probably can't do. We have to find new industries to disrupt or simply put kick the shit out of. So but we just don't want to kick the shit out of any industry because some industries just aren't big enough.
We need to find big, big pools of money. We need to go after industries that are huge. So the biggest industry in the world, US healthcare and going after that. But they've also identified as $130 billion global video game industry and said well what if we started producing games because we can, we can voice a shittier game on Amazon prime members and where we control 70% of US households and 1/3 of all clicks online come through our algorithms.
We can begin foisting on the public our shittier content at a higher price. And it doesn't matter because we'll start the old Microsoft. That's right. And that's why we stepped in 99 the DOJ got author assis and stepped in.
So I think I'm gonna push back a little bit. I think gaming, I think that like Spotify is better than of course they're getting like as a big players they're gonna do a product that's gonna be competitive. But in this area it does matter a lot of who has the best designers and the best creativity. I don't think you can just voice crappy shows on people the same way you can't voice crappy games.
I think these gamers are quite discerning. And you know, my kids know a lot. They're like no, that's bad this way. They're very.
I don't think they would take bad games just to play games. I just don't. I think there's a little bit of creativity that doesn't rain here. But you know, be really interesting to have Bobby Kotak talk about this because I think they're, you know, Amazon's coming for him and others because they're just in the creative business and eventually, you know, they own Twitch.
That's, that also creates excitement around games because people watch people play games and things like that, so it's, it is, it is a question when they're buying every piece of the, of the system. They're buying the watching of the games, they're buying the distribution of the games, the selling and now they're gonna make the games. So you're right. I mean that is, that is the financial play here.
Even if it's pretty frightening for a lot of these companies. You're absolutely right. So the community wants to have a bad game. But that's, I put forward the wrong, I look at this through the wrong rubbish.
Let me ask you a different way. Would the gaming community take 80% of the best game for free with their prime membership? Would the gaming community take, take a game that's 80% as good as the best game for free? That's also by the way, incredibly easy to play and download because they already have interface with Amazon across all these and they already have a credit card and maybe we can even order it with voice.
Maybe we come home and your Amazon, your Alexa says try the latest Star wars game or NBA game or whatever it is from Amazon Games, say tell me more. Say, say start Amazon games right now. They just. The example I use is the morning show and that is Apple took Game of Thrones like budget to produce Murphy Brown.
Any other entertainment firm, traditional entertainment firm that would be written up in Variety as one of the biggest disasters in the history of media, they would say, okay, These guys spent $130 million per episode for Reese Witherspoon to reanimate Reese Witherspoon as a plucky young reporter. And Jennifer Aniston and Steve Crow, by the way, they're all great in it. It's a good show. It's not a great show.
It's a good show. But Heaven's Gate was a good movie. But it was worth $200 million. It was a disaster.
And so from any other media company this would have been a disaster. But because it's from Apple and all they need to do is sell a few more phones and because a billion dollars is a rounding error, they can come in and produce ridiculously non economic content, which puts incredible pressure on an entire industry that hires caterers, gaffers, creative directors, and that is the definition of anti competitive behavior. Anyway. So yeah, the video game industry, they should be rightfully terrified that Amazon is getting into this business and they should be contacting their lobbyists and saying, hey, are you going to let, are you going to let what happened to retail happen to this industry?
Because we employ a lot of People and we employ a lot of people. If the gaming industry goes away to Amazon, you're literally going to have millions of kids not moving out of their parents basement. It's like okay, he dropped out of college and he's in our basement but he got a job with some gaming company. Whenever Amazon moves in, it destroys jobs.
Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that's also, it's also more in their, in their wheelhouse. It's game, it's, it's software, it's software making software distributed and so and technology. Of all the industries gaming is most, you know, it's closer to tech than any other.
And you're right. So Stephanie from Wellesley, Massachusetts, this is a great question. I'm going to have Bobby Cody on Rico Ego to talk about this. I think it's a great question.
All right Scott, we'll take one more break. We'll be back for predictions. Support for the show comes from Ojoo. Running a business is hard enough so why make it harder?
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okay Scott, we're back. Last week you made the incredible prediction that universities wouldn't be reopening for the fall semester. Which I told my son and he was beside himself. Do you have another prediction this week?
My prediction is more boring but I think more important. And that is you're about to see a concerted multi prong attack on the World Health Organization from the current administration. And that is they realize how badly they fucked up. They realize there are more people who will never get off the battle area.
They realize there's more fear, there's more panic, there's more economic destruction because of their incompetence, competence and their inability to invest in their inability to lead. So the American brand comes out of this as incompetently or dangerously incompetent. When I say dangerous, I mean more people are. We now have more infections than China, Italy and Spain combined anyway, so they need, they need to blame somebody.
And Donald Trump is the master that pivot to blame. And his new target is going to be a World Health Organization. And you already see evidence of this. He's already started.
Oh, yeah, it's going to get worse. And the big winner here is the virus, because a key to any war is atomizing, dividing your enemies. The reason World War II. The turning point in World War II wasn't D Day, wasn't the Battle of the Bulge.
It wasn't even dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The key turning point in World War II, where would it turn out much differently, was when was when the Germans and the Russians split apart and declared and Hitler and Germany declared war on Russia and the virus. President Trump is playing into the virus, our enemy's hands right now by instead of, instead of figuring out a way to grab hands and unify through global institutions that can serve to connect us and have a unified treaty and a unified front against this enemy. He's dividing us.
And he's complaining about the same playbook, but it is literally playing into the hands of this enemy. The enemy wants this. The enemy, the virus, wants us to be divided. And a few things.
We do have infrastructure and systems and structures in place to try and fight this thing on a global level. One of those infrastructures and systems and organizations is a World Health Organization, which, by the way, way we gave $58 million to. Too bad we didn't give him $58 billion. Right?
This was a huge opportunity missed in terms of giving the World Health Organization more legitimacy and more funding. And what he's going to do now, he's going to basically say, all right, let's further divide us. Let's further emasculate and neuter our response as an army. This is just, it's a terrible move.
It reflects the narcissism, the ignorance and incompetence of this administration and unfortunately, more generally of our society right now. But the World Health Organization is about to die. I have an idea. Why doesn't some billionaire give the World Health Organization a pile of money?
There you go. Like, hello, you know, just like if Bill gets stuck up, then here's $500 million. Trump is wrong. That would be, like, beautiful.
Yeah, I hear you. That's. But I mean, it's sad that that's where we are. Yeah, it's sad that that's over.
Anyways, World Health Organization is about to take a bunch of ridiculous incoming fire. That damage is all of us. The blame game, like he blamed the governor's. He blamed.
His blame game is really lost his mind, like, in terms of how he finds. You know what? He's probably. I.
I used to think this was gonna end his presidency. I don't know. We're talking a little about the Sanders dropping out. You know what?
Trump is bad as he looks right now. He looks stronger than Biden, who's just hiding in his basement basement talking to his grandkids through a window. I've been polling my conservative relatives, and they're not happy with Trump. Yeah, it's not.
It's not that. Here's the thing. Think about Biden right now. Where's.