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Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to vanta.com. Hi everyone, this is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway, Rebecca Q, the cool in the gang. Get down, get down. Oh my god, it's Tuesday. It's not Friday.
What is going on? That's right. Too much of a good thing is cocaine, but it's also Pivot. Twice a week.
What stands between the tyranny of technology marching into the aisles, a Dover, and taking over Britain, a jungle cat, a journalist who wants to be the godmother of podcasting, and an angry bit of his queers, telling off the fucking track. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. One plus one doesn't equal to it, doesn't equal for three. It equals Pivot.
Pivot twice a week. That's not exactly the theme song that I was envisioning for our first second show. How exciting is this? How exciting is this?
I cannot believe how excited I am right now. I can't even tell you. You're welcome. You're welcome.
This is like ground up Cialis on a Chipotle burrito ball in that we will enjoy. Our listeners will enjoy it as they're consuming it. And then for the next 72 hours, blood will be rushing to a new organ to rain. Oh, Scott, really?
That's really how you want to play this one. How about this and this great that our listeners can hear us twice a week now, because that's the way it is, and that's what we appeal to their higher nature rather than their lower nature, but that's fine. Scott, that's fine. Scott, how was your Thanksgiving?
You know, same thing. Same as it is everywhere. Cracker Barrel and Mr. Club.
Okay. All right. Anyway. I just want to say, listen, listen, you got huge blowbacks, speaking of Thanksgiving people who are eating turkey.
They also get huge blowback for endorsing Bloomberg on CNN. Would you care to comment? That was a good segue. That was a good segue.
Yeah, I got enormous feedback both online. And I went on Michael Sumer Gakaneshu. I think it's wonderful. No, I don't go on CNN, but go ahead and move along.
He's like this rare species where they captured on film and say we thought it was extinct 2,000 years ago, but there's actually a lot of them in the forest. They're called moderate. And I just love them. I think it's thoughtful and interesting.
Anyways, I wrote that article urging Bloomberg to run, so he said, come on and talk about it. And I went and kind of went through my dance around why I think centrist is important, and they're Bloomberg running what is, would be the 12th largest economy in the world and that he was writing on most issues important too. Most important to everyone. I got wild blowback.
I mean, one of the wonderful, many wonderful things about this, podcast and what we do is I hear from people. And people were, were thoughtful to the point. We're really thoughtful, but generally they thought, okay, we don't need another billionaire. This is another example of crazy white billionaire privilege that people are really bothered by the stop and frisbee.
Yeah, that was just me too. That was just my feedback. But go ahead. Keep going.
Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people are with you. And then for him to kind of get in the race and use money to buy, I won't say buy as we on the stage because it's not going to be able to get on the debate state. But I would say it was running kind of three or four to one negative deposit.
And I can't figure out if it's a vocal minority or I have totally overestimated his potential for candidacy. I thought he would be much more welcomed into the race. No, not if he had done it earlier because he's such a choker. Maybe if he had like done a little work, a little spade work initially and not been such a coward, not to get in early.
He should have gotten in earlier. What was the problem with that? I think he probably looks at a poll and he doesn't like it. And then he changes his mind as billionaires are capricious.
Whenever anyone has offered a job with one, any time I'm always like, think hard because it's a very, even if it's a very nice person. I think Bloomberg's quite interesting and people like working for him, but it's capricious. And so he should have done it from the very beginning and done the work and the spade work that others did. And he should have addressed the stop-and-frisk thing a lot earlier, except I'm so sorry because now it looks simply, it doesn't look reflective.
It looks politically expedient. And so what, you know, I know you're saying people liked it. Like you don't want to appeal to that. I'm sorry.
It's not any way to govern. It's not any way to run for office. And I want Tia Leone to be our president as she is on the outgoing Madam Secretary now. I'm very excited about that.
That's hard to argue with. And I just want to be clear. I don't think people like stop-and-frisk. I think it's obviously aged very poorly.
But I think that one of the cohort in the middle, if you will, I think a little bit of political incorrectness, but someone who's not what I'll call full-woke appeals to that segment of the voting population, that may be the key cohort in terms of who stays or who gets into the White House. But anyways, I got a lot of pushback. I did not. It was anybody.
My thanks. It was excellent. It was on many pies and many Amanda Katz relatives. So it was quite something.
It was quite a lot of people. Big family. Me and my kids were in Japan. So it was good.
I'll be seeing them soon. We're going to do Thanksgiving with my kids, too. Anyway, Scott, time for our big story breakdown on our second show of the week. Let's talk streaming wars and how different players fared on the first big holiday weekend.
Why don't you give us your definition of streaming wars and the major players? And did you watch a lot this weekend? Yeah, I was watching a lot of TV because it was the weekend. But you have, sure, a lot of people say, well, if you really want to talk about the streaming wars, you need to find also include broadcast television, who have their own offerings and YouTube.
And movies and movie theaters. And movies theaters. Yeah, that's right. But you have what you obviously have, the Ten Ten Gorilla, you have Netflix.
You have everyone from Comcast getting in, HBO, Max, Disney. I mean, they're all lining up. It's very strange. But you found some data on actually movie people.
Yes, movie people. And it's reflected in my own life. I thought about going to movies about ten times. I didn't go once, which was really interesting because it was not just because I have a small baby, but it's inconvenient.
The weather was cold. So there was a 16% decline from last year in movie ticket sales this holiday weekend. And what was interesting is one of the movies I did want to see at the theater was The Irishman, which I then waited to see on Netflix. I did not like it, by the way.
But Disney's Frozen did very well. This is Disney's first major movie since launching Disney Plus. And I would have rather, I didn't go see it. I was going to go see it because I like Frozen.
And I didn't. My movie going has declined so precipitously. And it's largely because of it's sort of like the shopping thing. It's relatively inconvenient compared to when it's easier to get other things.
And I feel badly about this. And at the same time, movie theaters never done me any favors, unless it's sort of like a landmark theater or something like that. So one of the things with The Irishman, it was only in select theaters for 26 days, which major theater chains were furious about. It did pretty poorly at the box office.
But it seems like a success on the platform and getting Oscar buzz. You know, they don't, of course, release their numbers the way movie theaters release. But why even release movies to the theaters? I just watch it on a large television.
I just didn't, I didn't like it. That's a separate thing. But it just sort of changes behavior is changing rather rapidly. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of interesting things going on.
The first is an e-commerce is the right analogy. If you go into a mall and you spun yourself around, would you know that it's not 2005? The innovation around in-store shopping, there's some people who've done interesting things, restoration hardware, even Tesla's dealerships are sort of interesting in the mall. Apple, even Apple, if you think about the stores, you probably wouldn't know it wasn't 2009.
Whereas shopping online, the speeds have gotten faster. There's all different ways to pick up your stuff. You get it in five days, three days, 24 hours now, in some cities, 48 minutes with Amazon now. The same thing has happened to movie viewing, and that is if you were to walk into a movie theater, you might not know it wasn't 2005.
Whereas the home viewing experience, in terms of what's offered up online, that programming or that platform's ability to predict what it is you want to watch next. You have 4K now, 8K, TVs are wonderful. Content is great. Actually, the selection.
Unbelievable. I went through the Netflix like trailer thing. They do it really well. You can watch them for two seconds and get a sense of what the shows are.
What's great. I like picked from there, and I used mostly Netflix. I didn't use, even though I did get Disney Plus, I didn't use Disney Plus, because it's not on whatever system I had. It wasn't on the Comcast system, I don't think.
It was just interesting how easy it is, and you're right. The experience of getting up and going out is really different. I think the issue is why don't we get the numbers for these things? Will they ever release numbers these companies?
No, because I think the numbers on an individual basis are actually pretty thin, but all they care about is reporting. That's one thing that's happened across all of finance that I think is a bad thing. It's gotten to the point where companies can make up. They invent their own metrics, and whatever shows them in the best light.
When the markets were valuing companies purely on subscriber growth, they ignored their profitability and said this is how many subscribers were adding, and then they had different terms for EBITDA. They don't have any incentive right now to release their numbers. In terms of your home viewing patterns, what do you find yourself watching the most, and what is it at the cost? I was watching that four weddings.
One of the new ones by Mindy Kaling, I grazed around to watch a CBS, which I didn't want to buy, but I ended up watching it through Comcast, which was my Comcast XFINITY account. The Irishman, obviously, which took 14 years because it was so long. Some other things, but I graze. I graze a lot.
I don't pick or choose one. I guess it's owning, as I said, a lot of magazine subscriptions. We're going to move on this for a second, but what can get people in theaters, do you think? I'm going to go see the new James Bond movie in theaters, for sure.
I don't know why, but I really like to see that movie in a big theater, and I don't even think the home experience is good enough in that regard. Just as the only time people... See, we were talking about TV. The one thing that people don't talk enough about that is the comment through all of this.
The one thing they're watching is they're not watching commercials. If you look at all television, what it has in common is that, as I've said for a long time, advertising has become the text that the technologically literate and the poor have to pay, and everybody else just watches ad-free TV now. The only time people get off their bus and actually get excited to go into a movie, I think it's either for a kids film because kids programming is so important to just kind of get them doing something or get them off your back, and also these big-budget $200, $300, $300,000,000 Marvel superhero films. Star Wars.
The scary part, that's right, but the scary part around all of this is that I think one of the things that's tearing our nation apart, in addition to algorithms that put you in one poll or another run by unethical people, I think there's a re-segregation of our society, and that is through the 80s and the 90s. There were a lot of efforts, and my school was integrated with busing. We did a good job of introducing different socioeconomic and ethnic groups to each other, and I think it was a wonderful thing because my two best friends, one was a Mormon kid going to Stanford, and I thought, okay, he's smarter and harder working than me, but he's not that much smarter and harder working than me. Maybe I could go to a good school.
And then my other friend, Ronnie Drake, was a black kid from Crenshaw, whose only way of college was football. And it provided those different economic and ethnic groups, not only aspiration, but it gave me empathy. And as a society, we're re-segregating. I generally believe people don't like to go to the mall or the movies anymore because they're scared of each other.
And for the most part, just want to hang out in their own economic and in their own ethnic classes. That's a really, actually a very wise thing, after your opening of Cialis and cocaine, you suddenly won't. But whatever. I'll take that.
Not in any way. But listen, speaking of that, speaking of woke, I'm going to move on to another topic. I want to stop it there. I want to ask you something.
Quickly, let's get to Jack Doris. When I go to the movies there, I go to the mall. I don't. I think to myself, OK.
Unless I can go to I-Pick. Unless I can be around, you know, these general, like, massive movie theaters to me, and maybe because I'm old and I see all these young people, I think, OK, is this where I want to be? Am I becoming part of the problem? And then we pull our kids out of public school so they can be around people in their own economic weight class.
I think it's really dangerous that we're kind of self-casting. All right. We'll use that term. Speaking of self-casting.
You're wrong. But you're right. Very wise. These are very wise thoughts.
Jack Doris says he's moving to Africa for part of 2020. He announced we had to be in China for three to six months in 2020. He said, after we'll define the future, especially the Bitcoin one, he was traveling around and he met Bitcoin owners in Ghana. And it was sort of an interesting, I'm not sure.
I sort of contacted Twitter and I'll try to understand this and also Square because he's CEO of two companies. Any thoughts upon this? Well, sure. The problem is that Jack Doris is going to Africa, so he's going to come back.
This is, so I got contacted by CNBC this morning and they said, what do you think of the corporate governance of a CEO leaving and spending two or three months in a market that accounts for, I would have had less than one percent or so. And I'm like, the only board that would tolerate this is a board that would tolerate a guy being CEOs of two companies. And what do you know? It's the same board.
And this is, in my view, and I realize I sound like a school man here, but this is just, this is just fucking ridiculous. It is, you want to talk about the mother of all paid time off. He's decided he wants to live in Africa for two to three months while Twitter continues to subject to future economy and be a real negative and a real flashpoint for our elections. He's decided I'm going to go, I'm going to go roll in Africa for 12 weeks.
And the guy at CO2 companies going into Africa, it is, this is just so borderline ridiculous. And it continues this notion of this idolatry of innovators that the CEO of Ford Motor said, I'm going to go to Iceland for three months because the future is around ecological tourism or sustainability or clean energy, right? The board of Ford would go, well, that's all fine and cute. And then the nominee committee would have a special committee and they'd start looking for a new CEO.
It is ridiculous. Finally, I think going to put a bullet in Jack Dorsey's Twitter career is that Amazon, over the last four years, Jack Dorsey kind of rejoined Twitter exactly four years ago. And in that time, I think Twitter stock was 20 bucks when he joined. It's at like 30 now.
It's flat. Amazon has tripled. Apple has doubled. Facebook has doubled.
Google has doubled. So his tenure since kind of trying to pull his new jobs, it just hasn't worked. And it's one thing to be CEO of two companies. It's one thing to be CEO of two companies and decide you want to go hang out with rhinos, you know, for 12 weeks.
I think you're right. I think you're right. I think you should just quit and have another CEO if he wants to do that. But one of the concerns is sort of the way that tech people visited the Midwest.
It's sort of weird, colonizing kind of thing. That said, there's a lot going on in Africa, these active tech hubs, everything. It's a continent that is finally using tech to move forward. And it's actually a great place to invest from a lot of people I know who do that investing.
But you're right. He should do it as another job. He should do it as another job. That's a great idea.
Pete said, I'm worth $4 billion. This has been a great run. Thanks very much. Peace out.
I'm starting a VC located in Tanzania or wherever. That would be amazing. Africa is the future. You can see it's going to come online.
And I get a lot of pushback. I got so much pushback online this week for using just the term Africa. Yeah. Someone accused me of being a racist by grouping a continent.
It's a group of individual cohorts and cultures. And so fair enough, wherever he decided to go in the African continent. But this is ridiculous. Where are we going to send you Scott?
That's what I really want to say. What's that? Where are you going to go? I'm ready.
I was thinking in North Africa. I'll get you a Canada goose coat like I bought this weekend speaking, which I went to a mall to buy one. But it is, you're absolutely right. It's problematic.
I'm trying to find out more. And I will try to report back later this week. So we're going to take a quick break now. But we'll be right back after this with more pivot on our first, second day, first day.
All right. See you soon, Scott. I'm Estelle Herndon. And this is America, actually.
We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, DC this week to interview Ruben Gaiago. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona.
And he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently running to some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swallow. I have to learn from this. And I will learn from this.
But for me, it's not a 20-28 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gaiago about predatory behavior in Washington. His plans for immigration reform and more.
This week on Network and Chill, I'm breaking down the institution everyone's talking about right now, but nobody actually understands the federal reserve. With all the drama happening between Trump and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, you're probably seeing headlines and wondering what any of this has to do with your money. Spoiler alert, it's everything. I'll explain what the Fed actually is, why it exists, and how this one institution controls the interest rates on your mortgage, credit cards, student loans, and more.
We're diving into why raising or cutting rates isn't just boring policy talk. It's the difference between affording a house or watching prices spiral out of control. Plus, I'm breaking down the current controversy over firing Fed board members and why both Republicans and Democrats are freaking out about it because this fight isn't just political theater. It could mean real chaos for your wallet.
Listen, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. Okay, welcome back to Pivot. Let's take some listener mail. This week's Pivot listener question comes from Renzo Santelan.
He thinks it would be cool if you guys could talk about the tech companies that are disrupting the logistics industry. He's talking about Flexport, next trucking, Envoy, Happy Returns, and any other company that is disrupting this archaic industry. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks, Renzo.
All right, I'm going on here, Scott. You know, I had a FedEx issue. There we go. There we go.
I saw this on Twitter. Oh, my God. They suck. Let me just say, Fred Smith.
I'm glad you're getting no taxes, but whatever. But let me just tell you, it was such a lesson. I had something delivered from Amazon and something delivered from FedEx, and I made a change of it. I'm going to go into it in detail, but I paid to have the address move to where I was at Thanksgiving.
I paid a lot of money to do that. And they didn't deliver it on time when they were supposed to, you know, when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. Well, they didn't do that. And they promised it would be there a certain time.
And then on the app, they said it was going to be there. And then it wasn't there. And then they suddenly changed the time without telling me or contacting me or anything else. This was very important papers.
And then trying to get through to them. I was on the phone for hours with FedEx arguing. I tweeted at them. You know, I had Bill Garley tweet me saying, I was trying to be famous.
Help me. I wasn't trying to help me. I paid money. I would like to know what happened to it.
I think Twitter has become a common system. It was an astonishing display of like total disaster. Meanwhile, Amazon delivered something perfectly. It was so easy.
And it was no questions. It was easy to understand. They were like, if you want to refund, you have to go to our refund department. We can't stop it because it's in a container and we can't turn it around.
It was like literally they're going to get killed by Amazon. If Amazon decides just to go into the logistics business, thank you very much. That is my grant. Scott?
Okay. You're about to have your revenge because Amazon is going into this business. And all you need to do is look at S1s under the investment section for about 10 years. They talked about how much money they spent on fulfillment.
And then a few years ago, they moved their verbage and investment disclosures from the investment section to the competition section. And that is they're now saying that FedEx and UPS are competitors. The same way they did with AWS. So they're about to go into this business in a big way.
FedEx made the mistake of becoming a profitable company returning profits to the company. The other big mistake that FedEx made where I would argue is it's similar to General Electric. Rather than focusing the CEO's attention on operations and innovation, he's been totally focused on tax avoidance. Yeah.
And if you look at, I mean, it looks as if the Trump Tax Act to reduce corporate taxes from 35 to 21% was largely orchestrated by Fred Smith and FedEx under the auspices that if you let companies hold on to their, to more of their money, even despite the fact that it's going to increase the deficit by a trillion dollars a year, that you will unleash this massive amount of investment and plant property equipment, new jobs, that will literally result in a nuclear-like explosion pent up demand and investment from corporations. And this is what happened. Every company took that money and bought back stock. Or places like this.
It's market, whatever. Yep. But took the stocks up, which has a ripple effect. It's good.
They can do things with that stock, but 80% of the stock is not by the top 10%. All this was a chaser on income inequality, even FedEx did exactly that. They went out. They didn't increase their cap back.
So this, and what have we done here at the end of the day with this Fred Smith-backed tax plan, as we've said, all right, let's pull prosperity forward from our kids and grandkids in the form of books, below international debt, so we can take stocks up, which largely benefit the wealthy. I mean, like every policy in America, like every corporate lobbyist, it does one thing. It takes money from every cohort in America and transfers it to the wealthiest cohort in history, old people in America who own shares. Yeah.
Speaking of old people in America. Everything we do is about trying to make those people rich. I agree. Speaking of someone who is an older entrepreneur, Fred Smith, who really did pioneer this area, is literally the app is terrible, their customer service is terrible.
Like literally, I felt like I was, the contrast between them and Amazon. By the way, UPS actually works pretty well comparatively, but this is such a wide open space to grab back from FedEx. Like I would never use FedEx again, like astonishingly. Like the experience I had was so bad, and it was so non-innovative.
Like they literally was back in 10 years ago. I felt like I was with 10 years ago with them. So let me just say, I know there's controversy about Amazon and delivering vans, and I saw them all over by the way this weekend everywhere, Amazon Vans, Amazon branded vans. They do, they need to work out their issues around.
All kinds of too speedy, everything else. But boy, their technology part of their equation is flawless. Like flawless. And the last thing I'll say is Amanda, who hates Amazon, who I'm my girlfriend, is like, I can't stand that it works so well, but it's astonishing.
Like it's astonishing, because she used to use local retailers, et cetera, et cetera. But in the logistics space, someone's got to dominate, and it's certainly not going to be FedEx. Anyway, wins and fails. Well, that's fail to me, but wins and fails, sir.
What are your wins and fails? So my win is, speaking of movies, there's a wonderful new movie called Knives Out, starting Daniel Craig of James Bond fan. Oh, yes, I heard that was great. And it's nice.
The thing that struck me about it was kids can watch it. It's not for young kids, but I took my nine of my 12 year boys. It's kind of a throwback to the Agatha Christie genre. It's cute.
There's not a lot of violence. It's got some wonderful actors. I think Daniel Craig is an under-appreciated actor. I think he's been, he's a solid actor.
He really is. And he puts on a southern accent here, and he does it flawlessly. Ana de Armas, I think I got her name right, is just wonderful in it. Tony Collette, who's the star of my favorite movie in history, The Sixth Sense, is in it.
It's just a wonderful movie. She's a great interview. She was great. She's great.
She's fantastic. You're doing a movie right now. My winner is Knives Out. Alright, okay.
What's your win? I already wins this week. I don't have any wins. I'm mad.
I'm also mad at that. It's not exactly a fail, but Apple changed a lot of heat for changing map lines to include Crimea in Russia. Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory in 2014 under a lot of controversy. Now Apple is reviewing how it deals with international borders on its maps.
And so I think that everyone's got to think about this mapping thing, because it's always been controversial forever. The idea about maps with these companies changed them when they're operating in those areas. And to be fair, they're only showing them to Russian viewers, these maps. So they're letting the lie perpetrate in Russia.
And so that's, I don't know what to say. They are following the laws of those areas, but at the same time it's somewhat ridiculous and then using other maps for other people. So I don't know what I would do. Again, this is another area where these big tech companies, which have taken over mapping that would essentially be Apple and Google and some others, are really caught in these bigger social issues.
But I don't know what I would do. I don't know if it's a fail, but it's certainly another big giant issue for Apple and others and Facebook and others. So I would say that was my fail. If Apple's identified Senator, I think it's John Kennedy, the Senator from Louisiana, as being a useful idiot and agent of the KGB, that would be disappointing but accurate.
And the way I see this is, that was a bit of a dig in a joke, the way I would see, just in case anyone happens, Senator Kennedy has now decided to basically propagate a lie that has been fueled by the Russian government, that the Ukrainians meddled in our election such that to conflate it and somehow create this false comparison between Ukrainian and Russian interference to lessen the pressure on the president's criminality. Agreed. But speaking of Senator Kennedy, that guy. That guy is a Russian plant or an asset.
I don't know what he is or a useful idiot. Exactly. He's not an idiot, by the way. I've heard from lots of people.
He's quite clever. I more fail in that regard is, is, is, is to meet the press for letting him, bringing him on the show and then not being prepared for that lie to cut him off. Like that was the worst. Everyone's like, oh, he tried.
I got chucked. I got chucked. I got chucked. I got chucked.
Did go after him. I got chucked. No, because it's kind of done it before. You do not let him repeat lies over and over and over again.
And it doesn't matter how much you challenge him. You just don't, you cut off the mic in that case. I don't care. I don't care.
You're lying. You're a Russian plant. Come on. If you want to see interviews for dummies.
Did you see 60 minutes last night with Susan? Yes, I did. It was very nice to Susan. She did her job.
She did her job. She did her job. She did her job. They were 60 minutes was literally so played.
I mean, of course I said they threw out that she had the garage and she has five kids. And they asked, I thought at some point Leslie Stella was going to say, can you show me how to use this microwave to heat up my soup? It was literally like, okay, you know, Susan did her job. Susan did her job.
That's all. Oh, they got played. So it's got played by the 1100 person corporate communications department and a very likable Susan, which is very likable. She did a very likable and she did a job.
I'm not going to fault her for doing that interview. I think she did a good job. All right, my fail. You're fail quick because we got to get to predictions and get out of here.
I know you're going to get a pedicure with Nancy Pelosi or something. So my fear is, and there was a great article in the New York Times about this, but I think we're studying to the wrong test. I think we're talking about the wrong numbers, the Dow unemployment, and New York Times had this incredible article called Deaths of the Spare. And this plays into my favorite thing in the cover, but for the first time in our history, our life expectancy is down three years in a row.
Yes, it's on. And no one ever talks about that. Our life expectancy is now kind of rivals Cuba, and that's not a good thing. And people blame or immediately think, well, people are dying sooner, and it's not that.
People are living longer. It's just that there's more deaths, a natural deaths between the ages of 25 and 60 than ever before. Yeah. And they're largely alcohol, opioids, and also suicide, which is skyrocketed.
And I wonder how much of it is we're going to find is a combination of income inequality, incredible frustration and anxiety because of, for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old is not doing as well as his parents. And what I've discovered because I coach a lot of young men is that it's as hard on the parents as it is on the kids when the kids aren't doing well. And I think the shame, I think the shame people are feeling, I think the embarrassment and also not only the income inequality, but this kind of dislike we have in our society now, where everyone's convinced that because we're a meritocracy, because you're constantly having success thrown in your face, that if you aren't successful, if you aren't part of the Google Instagram economy, it's your fault. You fucked up.
So I think there's so much frustration, there's so much inequality that leads to these deaths of despair. And the question I would ask at the next presidential debate is, what are you going to do to stop and to reverse the life expectancy to climb? Hope. Hope.
Hope is the point of all of this. A town called Hope. We don't have to. Anyway, so my loss is again, I think we continue to study to the wrong test.
I think these deaths of despair and the amount of anxiety and pain and from loneliness, from shame, from economic anxiety is such a failure of our society. It means that we as a society. It means whatever this is, this experiment is no longer working as well as it used to. Well, we should use those statistics to be aware of them.
A friend of mine was an artist and she put a camera on the Golden Gate Bridge to show how many more suicides were happening than people thought there at the Golden Gate Bridge. It was an art installation. We should have a national suicide number so that people, rather than any of the other numbers we used to decide what success is, I thought it was really interesting. It was many, many years ago.
It was interesting. But I think you're 100% right. I'm going to have to cut you off, unfortunately, and make you feel despairing. But what is your prediction?
Your very quick prediction of maybe spending this time of year to make us feel better about our despairing lives. What is your prediction this week's got going? My prediction is Twitter goes below $25 a share an activist steps in. Okay.
All right. What activist is that? They don't have dual stock as I wrote about. They do not have dual stock.
So that is a right. They've been around the basket before. I've heard from lots of these people a couple years ago. You've got a media platform that's trading at an old media like multiple.
You've got a CEO who's the CEO of another company who's deciding to go hang out in Africa for three months. And you have a platform that has become a national iconic means of communication and governing because we have a very strange president. This is just incredibly right for an activist. 2020.
2020, look for a Dan Loeb, a Jana partners, look for an activist to come in. Yeah, Loeb is perfect. Loeb is very tuned. Take a run at Twitter.
Interesting. All right, Scott. That's a really good prediction. I mean, you'll veer from being crazy to being so wise.
It's really, you're like the wise men. You know what I mean? But in any case, it's time for us to go. We'll be back later this week to talk more about this for another episode.
Also tweeted us at hashtag pivot podcast and email us at pivot at Voxmedia.com Scott. This has been an exciting two times a week. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes. Come on twice a week.
All right. Read the credits. Get us out of here. I have the credits in front of me.
I'm trying to hold in my studio. The show was produced by Rebecca Sinon as Eric Anderson as pivots executive producer. Thanks also to Rebecca Castro and Drew Burrows. Make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcast.
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