Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread, it's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it, calm clients.
Get it? Showing the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust, go to V-A-N-T-A dot com slash calm. Hi everyone, this is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network, I'm Cara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway.
So Scott is a pretty slow news week this week, what do you think? Yeah, just sort of sit back, pull the lazy boy back, crack open, Mike's hard lemonade, and let's examine the shit show that is our life and the world that surrounds it. It's amazing. This is like every week, only a couple days was it, Ukraine great, and now we have shooting immigrants in the legs.
Just in the legs of Cara. So much stuff, so much stuff. And we work obviously, continues. Yeah, just in the leg.
I mean, we're not, we're humanitarian people, Cara, just in the leg. We don't want to kill them. We just want to name them. I'm very firm for the rest because they're, you know, they're doing so well already in their lives.
We want to just give them that extra little horror show that they can take away from the United States of America. All right, so much to do. But first of all, the big story breakdown, obviously, is we're going to do a little something different. On Tuesday, friend of the show, Casey Newton, who you call Schmacey, from the Verge broke a big story.
Someone inside Facebook secretly recorded Mark Zuckerberg talking to employees for two hours about Elizabeth Warren TikTok and his refusal to testify in several countries among other topics. Scott, you and I are definitely going to have some things to say about this. But first, we're going to play a mini interview I did with Casey on Tuesday right after he broke the story. And let's take a listen.
Cara, thank you so much for having me back on pivot. Yeah. So tell me, tell us what you did today. You had an astonishing, so by the way, you've had amazing scoops all year around social media, including around content moderators on Facebook that were just devastating as far as I was concerned and beautifully reported.
But today, boom. Well, thank you. So the story today was somebody shared with me two hours of leaked audio from internal Facebook meetings where Mark Zuckerberg held a Q&A with his employees. They could kind of come up to the mic, ask whatever they wanted, and in them, he makes a variety of newsworthy comments about his plan to sue the government and the event that Elizabeth Warren gets elected and tries to break them up, how they plan on crushing competitors like TikTok and all sorts of other things.
So there was a lot in there. So let's unpack a couple of the first ones. Go through the main ones. The first one is suing the government.
Yeah. So, you know, someone asks, listen, what are we going to do in the event of an attempt at a breakup and basically how seriously are we taking this? And Zuckerberg says that in the event that Warren wins, he predicts that there will be a case where they try to break up Facebook and Zuckerberg predicts that they will win. He says that they just have a better case and that if you broke up Facebook, they wouldn't be as good at fighting election interference and all sorts of other things.
Yeah. They've been so good so far. Yeah. Well, I mean, his argument is because we are big and because we have so much money, we can actually invest in fighting this stuff.
And the dig that he takes a Twitter is, you know, he says, this is why Twitter isn't as good at fighting election interference. They can't invest as much as we can. The amount of money we've invested in security is larger than the revenue of their whole company. So that's going to be it.
Let me just say in the words, Matthew McConaughey and that fine movie that he did, I don't know how to lose a man in 15 days or whatever, bullshit. What do you think? You don't have to have an opinion. But it's really an astonishing claim given their poor record, even if they've improved the situation.
I see it from both sides because, you know, when Facebook was really small and was limited to college dorms, it was also really good at fighting election interference, right? Because nobody tried because it was small. Like, I think there's a good case to be made for a small size. And I think that sort of the more social networks you have, the more communication platforms it is or that there are, the more friction there is if you're a bad actor, if you're a Russian agent and you want to swing the election, all of a sudden, you know, what if you have 40 places you had to go attack, you know, instead of three or four?
So I think that's a big factor that often gets left out of the size discussion. Oh, great. I think innovation in small companies, which Facebook sits over, like, lard on a chicken soup is the problem, that there's not enough of these things to be able to do this. And I think to claim otherwise that bigness is great is shocking from a company that's trying to be innovative.
Yeah. It sounds like Microsoft actually. And you see this sort of over and over again where there will be some upstart competitor and Facebook takes apart figures about how it works, clones it, you know, launches it in some of the country, perfects it, and then it takes over the world and we saw it with Instagram stories and I'm sure we'll see it again. And another part of the story is where he talks about TikTok.
Somebody says, hey, TikTok, it's, you know, up and coming, like, what are we going to do about it? And so Zuckerberg talks through how well, you know, we built an app called Lasso, and now we're taking it to countries where TikTok isn't already big, and we're going to perfect it there. And then we're going to take it to places where TikTok is big and we're going to compete with it directly. So really interesting insight into how they handle these threads tactically.
Well, I call it shoplifting. I mean, why don't think of this in the first place? I mean, that's really, you know, look, you know, I have my teens, Louie, and I don't use space with these Instagrams sometimes, but I have to say, like come up with a product as good like TikTok might be a start, but you can't because you're too big. So they have a division called like it's like new product experimentation, and he, I think it's called and they are trying to do that.
And they brought in some founders of like social companies that, you know, had initial success and they're going to try to create a home grown success, but they haven't been able to do it at a large scale in a long time. It's very Microsoft. And it's like, why don't we just open Snapchat and copy whatever they're doing. That's what it feels like.
So in terms of the tonality of this, I think that was what I was struck with sort of it. I have seen it. And I know what I keep telling people is he had just been up on Capitol Hill wearing a suit and tie visiting president Trump being super earnest, Senator, I'm here to really cooperate with you. You know, I'm interested in regulation.
I'm interested in this. And he just got off with a great, easy, fine from the FTC, $5 billion, which should have been 10 times the amount. So why have this attitude? Like, I guess he can't hide it, like right, like underneath the disdain for Washington and any kind of control on their nonstop party of Silicon Valley, they're victimized if they don't do that.
That's what I felt, the victimization or little me, that kind of stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think that like in the, in the transcript, there are many places where he is deferential to the government and talks about wanting to work with the government. And of course, it's easy to say that because usually government regulation winds up benefiting the entrenched powers, right?
So there's actually very good self-interested reasons to want regulation. And I think Zuckerberg wants them. I think, you know, when you're hearing him say, we're going to go to the mat and fight, part of the job being a CEO is to be a cheerleader. And when the troops are restless, you stand up and you say, don't worry about it.
We got this. We're putting together a team. You know, we're going to go fight them. So I think this is exactly what you would expect somebody in Zuckerberg's position to say.
Oh, you're so kind. That's why this piece is so good. It just lays it out there. It's like he let it, let's hear from Mark Zuckerberg, which I think is important.
I think that's true too. He lets it out sometimes interviews with me by accident trips. And then you see, but I think it's really fascinating to hear his voice. You really do get his, it really did get his point of view that I am familiar with.
And I think you. Yeah. And I think that's why he shared it on his own Facebook page. You know, like in part, like I do think they fell a little bit back into a corner because it sort of looks like he was, you know, talking about the government behind its backs and they wanted to get out in front of it.
But also like the story really does. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yes.
Zuckerberg posted it on his own page and said like this, this conversation was supposed to be public. But now it is. Go take a look. The dog eats itself.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we do appreciate the link from Zuckerberg there.
Thanks. But yeah, they want to kind of take ownership back on there. Where does it go from here? What do you think the impact is going to be?
The Washington is all like, uh, you know, the tractors are like, uh, and then the protect roads are like, so what? So what big deal? Yeah. I mean, the, you know, my mentions have mostly been Elizabeth Warren Stan saying, yes, queen, but there have also been a lot of Silicon Valley tech people saying like what a, what a smart and thoughtful leader.
And honestly, like to me, that doesn't make me feel good as a reporter, like in a case like this, like who cares about my opinion, just like read it and like think about it and reflect on the size of power of this company and what it means and see how the CEO thinks about it and watch him talk about it more candidly than he usually does in public. I mean, that's the value of it. So Scott. Yeah.
Schmacey. What do you think? So, well, I want to ask you, what do you think is the most newsworthy item in that story? What do you think is most surprising or?
I think you get a viewpoint of him. I think overall a lot of the stuff, you know, I think the Warren things, it's not a surprise, of course, but he hasn't said it publicly. So that's interesting. Like the disdain of Warren.
I think the, the fear of TikTok, which he, we know they have to have, but he says it, like obviously it's sort of his bluster about them because they're real good. I think that, you know, I think it's a very typical meeting that a lot of people are in Silicon Valley, but at the same time nobody gets to hear it. And so he puts on his best, you know, big boy pants and tie and comes to Washington and it's all nothing burgers. And this is an actually interesting discussion.
That's my, that's my takeaway from that. Yeah. I thought the thing that kind of struck me as someone who, you know, has, I've never managed a big company, but I managed small and medium sized companies is that people are recording as conversations and then turning it over to Casey Newton. Right.
It just creates, I would, that would send a chill over me every time. I mean, I don't know how big or how small these meetings were, but it kind of, you know, it's reminiscent of people, everyone deciding to blow a whistle on Mark Zuckerberg. I thought the interesting thing. You were right.
The big winner here is Senator Warren. He's kind of identified her as, as the most likely candidate to win the nomination. The other thing that was sort of interesting was their strategy to take on TikTok because if you look at Lasso, kind of their response to TikTok, which is direct rip off, it doesn't look like they've been putting the resources into it that they put into other products and I was under the impression that they were just going to, you know, as you would put it adopt or shop with some of the features of TikTok into Instagram and then use their billion users and Instagram versus their 500 million on TikTok to try and overwhelm it. And I wonder, I also wonder if just in the last month if TikTok has lost any, any momentum.
TikTok is really interesting. I mean, it's clearly, it's sort of at that point where it's either going to, it's either going to, you know, bump up against the Titanic or the big ship, the mothership that is Facebook and bounce off of it or it's going to actually ram it and start, you know, show that there is the, you know, the disruptor can be disrupted. But I didn't find, you know, it's sort of, it's like pornography, it's been Silicon Valley pornography to hear something that you weren't supposed to hear, but it was sort of like, it wasn't really anything. I would argue that surprised me.
I thought you were an insider. I mean, here's the thing. I mean, here's the thing. People's obsession with the leaker.
Like, listen to what he's saying. Like the freak cares who leaked on him. Like, there's a million people in these things. It happened to Tim Armstrong many years ago.
I don't know if you remember with a pregnant thing. Like, every day, it's happened to Bush. It happened to Romney or whatever. I mean, this is something everyone's got.
They're on, they're on, they're on all the time and courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg, everybody's on all the time. It's too bad. I don't care. Like, it's a typical insider media obsession with that.
I don't care. I think it's just a really, he actually spoke like he actually speaks and he's got to understand that everybody's listening at all times and maybe he didn't get that lesson. I'm not sure why he didn't, but everything he says is, you know, this is a man that covers up his camera. Like, he's got to know people are listening.
And so I do think there's just, the tonality is very, very defensive, you know, it feels like, I've been in like a Google, all hands like this and they're like, they were even more sort of out there trash talking to people. I thought the most interesting part, there's so many interesting parts of this, but the interesting part I thought was sort of the trashing of Twitter from what's the point. Like, that was petty. It was so Gaetzian.
It was so Gaetzian to me. Who was his mentor? So I just, he seemed very vulnerable for someone who, who it shouldn't be vulnerable in any way. I thought that was what was interesting about it.
Yeah, the Twitter, the Twitter comment was sort of telling, I'm convinced that they keep Twitter in business so they can claim to have a competitor that they could crush them at any moment. So the notion, this kind of national champions argument that we're the only ones that can solve the problems of our own making, that size matters, yeah, they are building, and there's, there is an argument that there, that the amount of R&D they're investing, they're kind of making this nation state like investments in quote unquote cyber security or whatever you want to call it, elections hacking. But there's some pretty simple solutions here, one, if they refuse to take any political advertising and implement a mandatory identification for people on the platform, which would substantially slow their supernova business model. But that's, you know, that there are some, I don't want to call them easy fixes, or if they did what, you know, it's going to probably happen to them be broken up.
But if they're too big, if they're too big to fail, if they're too big to be broken up and their size creates natural monopoly, like benefits, like a power company, like a utility where it makes sense to have one big player as he is arguing, then we regulate those companies. We call them natural monopolies and we put in regulators and we say, okay, we're going to see everything you do. We're going to make sure that you're not swashing competition. We're going to make sure that you're not enabling bad actors.
So it's kind of one of the other boss, either, either you're too big to be broken up and or you're the only one with the natural monopoly argument and need to be regulated or you're going to be broken up. Yeah, commentary or something like that. I'm going to talk a little bit about Trump on Twitter in the next point, but I do think that they, I think they were super defensive. One thing that continues to strike me about Facebook is, you know, he never talks about products.
Like he talks about copying other people's products, talks about fighting back to the government. Where's the talk about things they're making? Like, this has always been a company that is not as interested in the product as they should be. And that's why they have to use these, like, muscly things.
And I think if he focuses more on product and he'd be better off, his own product, that he thinks of himself, not that he copies from other people, this has been an ongoing story at Facebook. He's always scared of something and then they copy it and they're either successful, whether it's a phone, whether it's a, whatever, whatever is the hot thing of the day. You know, he's sort of in the only the paranoid, survived mentality, but I really wish he would just use his creativity and maybe make something fresh and original and that's my disappointment with Facebook. It's like, it's just dull.
It's just a dull company and I wish he would, I just wish they would focus on that and maybe it's just not this company. It's a copycat. It's a really good copycat. And look, Walmart did that a lot.
A lot of companies do that. They have one good idea and then they copy the rest of their lives. So I don't know. One question I have for you.
So does this make Elizabeth Warren likeable because Facebook is so unlikable, someone on Twitter yesterday was tweeting, here's how Mark and stop Elizabeth Warren support her. Well, first off, I don't think it's fair that it's to say they're not being innovative around new products. I mean, haven't you gone out and purchased a portal TV? They have now, you know, they now have a product where you turn, no, not actual portal.
They now have a product where you can turn your home television into the monitor for portal TV and you put sort of a sound bar above it. Anyways, does it make Elizabeth more likable? No, it makes it more formidable. And I think if you, you know, you get asked for predictions a lot, I got to ask a lot for predictions around 2020 all the time.
And my current prediction and subject to change is it's Warren losing to Trump. I just don't think I don't, you know, she hands down his round the best campaign by far of the Democrats. She has so much momentum right now. She does look right now.
She looks like she's going to be the nominee, you know, the, the, and this sounds awful and I'll vote for her on campus for it, but the incredibly impressive older white woman substantive who's not likable. We've tried that and it was a disaster. She's kind of Angela Merkel minus the charm. And I just think that doesn't, that doesn't work, but she right now has the most momentum.
It's no doubt about it. She's the one that he sort of is anointed her, you know, with the brightest people in the world is that she's going to be the nominee. So she, if anyone came out of that conversation as a winner, hands down, it was Senator Warren and by the way, she had 12,000 people there at Union Square last week. I think you're interesting.
You might be right. You know, I'm not underestimating her. I think you're overestimating the US public and the rot in the Trump administration right now. It's pretty ugly.
It's been late. Look at the piece on the, we're not joking about these shootings. Everybody's dropping a dime. I covered, I covered, as a reporter, this is going nowhere but down.
Like everyone's going to like drop a dime and he doesn't have control of it and he's got really shitty people around him. Like that's, you know what I mean? They're not like killers. It's like it's not like it's, you know, Lee Atwater and company around him.
This is like the, it does feel like the B league. Yeah. I mean, it's just a lot of his stuff is just a mistake. Everything he's doing.
And again, as someone who's watching every episode of the Apprentice, this is the moment everybody got tired of him. Like everybody got tired of him and I remember that moment and the ratings went down. His ratings are about to dip rather significantly. Well, it'd be interesting.
It'd be also interesting. I've always believed it's all about the economy. If we go into, you know, if we hit, quote unquote, his growth agenda and juicing the marketplace with $2 trillion in debt results in Q1 and Q2 of next year, unleashing growth and there's an argument for it. Or if we go into recession.
Let me just read a quote from that New York magazine. Thank you for mentioning me in that article and I appreciate it. Did I not? No, it's okay.
And CNBC wants to be friends with Jamie Dimon and Masiyoshi Son. It's hard to believe that the prom queen is addicted to diet pills and a heroin addict. The fall from grace here has been so dramatic and yet so fucking obvious. That was a great quote.
Thanks for that. Thanks for that. Yeah. How do you feel about this?
Like it's a distressed asset. That's what you wrote. Yeah. So this is, I mean, there's just going to be so much.
This is so interesting because I don't think in the history of business we've seen, we've seen falls this great. We've never seen falls this precipitous or happen this fast. So 24 days ago, Goldman was quoting that we're saying estimating this company was going public at 60 to 90 billion. And you know, so now it's not only zero.
I believe if you let's play this out, right? So you're the two guys, you're Sebastian and Gunter Sebastian and no, Martin, that's the third one. Anyways, they're great. You're the new co-CEOs and you have basically six months.
They run out of money. They have two and a half billion dollars in cash. You have to get half a billion dollars in reserve because of loan covenants. So you got two billion dollars to play with, but you're burning 60 million a week or 700 million dollars a quarter, which means you hit a wall, a flaming wall at the end of Q1 and stop bank is the only one that will put money into this.
And there's nothing worse than losing 12 billion dollars than losing, you know, except for losing 14 billion. And guys, basically have to come back with this such an incredible triage plan that says, we're firing 500 people a week, we're closing 40 we work offices, we're in negotiations with people everywhere, HR lawyers everywhere, avoiding lawsuits everywhere, and they have to come back with a plan to Massasan to say, look, if you put another one to two billion in which they will need some additional capital, in two years, if we execute perfectly, if we execute perfectly, this thing might be worth three to five billion. And I think the whole hard calculus, it begins to emerge or distill or come into view for soft bank and Massasan was the only source of capital at this point in their only life for F will be, you know what, we should just rip the band aid off now to declare chapter 11 and then we can blame it on Adam Newman because in three months they're going to own this. If it goes, the age, the kind of risk adjusted upside here is going to be much less than the risk adjusted downside given all the risks.
And I think there's a good chance in the next four to eight weeks, we see we decide, you know what, it was Adam's fall, we didn't realize it would have gone on here and they declare bankruptcy through the whole thing. And then they cherry pick out one or two hundred offices and restructure the thing or it might be a pre-pack. The other interesting question here is on that was $700 million of sales, not all of them were sales, some of them were lines of credit, a lot of them were mortgages on big buildings for Adam Newman. My question is, and the really interesting question here, and he is absolutely going to have to go into the unicorn protection program, there's going to be such anger towards him.
And I'll come back to it. Keep all the money, it's not clear. Well, that's the correct question because if it was lines of credit and any sort of debt, the question is was it secured by his stock at which point the people who are screwed are JP Morgan and the people who lent him that money guaranteed by the stock, which is worthless because he'll just say, okay, boss, here's your stock, if you can't pay them back, what will be really interesting is did he sign personal guarantees? Because if he signed personal guarantees, there's a chance we might see two bankruptcies here, a corporate bankruptcy and a personal bankruptcy.
So the term we work, Adam Newman and bankruptcy, are going to be bandied around more in the next in the next few weeks. But this is it. I'm obsessed with this. Do I feel guilty?
Yeah. I feel it's your fault. I do, but not for this. There's a lot of things in my life that I guilty for.
We as not one of them. Yeah, the problem is the business. You're right. You're just pointing it out.
You're just pointing it out. There's an enormous silver lining here, and that is that Adam Newman, Softbank, and unfortunately will come back to them. Employees are the ones that incurred $50 billion of notional losses, had the consensual hallucination gone on for another 30 days, then it would have been retail investors that would have lost $50 billion. They would have incurred the downside here.
Yeah. So I actually think this is probably the biggest victory for the markets, although it's already queered the IPO class for 2019. Remember our prediction in the beginning of the year that the IPO class would lose more money than it made? We're about to get there.
It got off to a strong start, not almost two-thirds of them lost money, so on a gross basis, the IPO class is probably going to be a net loser by the end of the year. Everyone's saying, we're going out later in the year. Airbnb looks at the shit show that is these IPOs and says, we're going to do a direct listing. I mean, there's so many ramifications, and the NYC and the NASDAQ are going to get hurt.
Thanks, they're going to lose IPO fees. There's a whole ecosystem of lawyers. The whole entire IPO has been threatened by this notion. Yes, Scott.
Oh, because of you. Yes. That's right. That's right.
You're going to take Trump down. There's a bunch of hounds, but there's only one dog that's a grande pharaoh. Here he is. Look at him.
He's just back to the groomer. Oh my God. There's going to be no living with you anymore. Anyway, it's time to take a break.
We'll get back. We'll talk about wins and fails and our predictions this week. We'll be back after this. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread.
It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos, call it compliance, or call it calm clients. Get it?
Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to vanta.com.com. Okay. We're back now.
We talked about Facebook. We talked a little bit about your Wii, your Wii situation. We got Scott. There's a lot going on this week.
What is your first win or fail? Well, first off, Kara, and you don't know much about me because you continue not to make the requisite investments in our relationship, but we always got a new puppy. We got a dog. Is a fail or a win?
Well, I don't know. We'll see. That's a big commitment. It is a big commitment to join our...
We have a dog, a 13-year-old Vichla, Hungarian Vichla who's just been kind of an enormous source of joy for us, and we got about the same time, our old son was born, but anyways, I really wanted a steel blue great day, and I grew up with a great day, and I think they're just such gentle giants. I've just dreamt. You're a great dean. That's your dog?
I want two things. I want two material things in life. I want a steel blue great day, and I want to bombard you a Challenger 300 with a Divan 10-seat configuration. To put the steel blue great day on, for some of them.
Think about travel again. If I say to people, hey, let's go to Vegas, I'm not going to Vegas with that guy, but if I say, hey, let's go to Vegas and my Challenger 300, they're like, yeah, I'll go with that guy. He's interesting. So anyways, that's not going to happen.
So I kind of defer to the steel blue great day, and totally indulgent, way too big a dog. And of course... It's a huge friggin dog. I have a rescue dog.
I have a rescue dog. Okay, so that's the story. That's the story. So my family, of course, comes home with a rescue dog from Puerto Rico that we think is a doxant.
I'm not sure it could be a doberman as far as we know, but I was thinking care. I think it's nice. I was thinking about the fact that I get overwritten so much as a function that I have attached to people and that I'm no longer in control of my life. It's in the short term, it's sometimes frustrating, but it's a good thing that there are people that have taken away a lot of my decisions, if you will.
So you can get this dog. You don't have this dog. We have a tiny little... We think it's a doxant.
I don't know what it is. I mean, he's a lovely little guy. What's the dog's name? Well, that's the name contest on Twitter.
And everyone, the two biggest names are Newman and Gangster. And so, of course, I love Gangster. I did my best job on my 9-12 year-olds, I'm like, we're calling it Gangster. And they said, they thought it was hilarious.
I'm like, no, we want to call it Felix. So, Kara, we settled that. Felix. Oh, my God.
So, Felix, the rescue dog is now in the Galloway household. Felix is a cat. The wonderful, wonderful cat. Oh, that hurts.
What's the cat name, Felix? He should have stuck with Gangster. And that one, you shouldn't have had to take out the name. I don't get the jet.
I don't get the great Dane. I get the rescue Puerto Rican mother. Some day. I'm going to get you a great Dane some day.
I appreciate that. I'm going to get you a great Dane. I'm going to feel slightly bad about that. Yeah, those things get hip-to-splage.
I'm going to get hip-to-splage. Probably not. The two of you can have bad hips together. I probably wouldn't feel bad.
There you go. All right. So, your win is your dog. I have two fails.
Do you have any fails? No, go ahead. Go for it. Right.
So, the first is, I think that there are in every cohort, if you will. There are laws that we're all subject to, but every cohort kind of has its own code. And that is a certain set of rules that they abide by. And academia, for the most part, like venture capitalists, we don't say critical, or we try to to avoid saying outright critical things of each other.
There's peer review where you actually question each other's research, but as a whole, you don't see a Harvard economist calling a university, a Chicago economist, an ass or an idiot. VCs have venture capitalists. It's full-body content competition, but they have kind of this white guy, cashmere club, where they don't say never anything negative about each other. World leaders have a code, and that is they don't assassinate each other.
They've decided if we start killing each other, it's just generally bad. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Yeah, but for the most part, we're really fond of this thing called life. So, as a general rule, we don't assassinate world leaders. And we also, as a rule, the mob has a rule, and that is they don't go after families, don't go to families, because they're all fond of their families, and they sort of have an un-written package. We don't have to families.
Yeah. I would be, if I was Donald or Ivanka, or what's the other one, the one that's on S.O. Eric. Eric Trump.
I'd be very worried right now, because what basically what Donald Trump has said is that it's okay to go after kids, and he's, when he and this foreign government's to kind of go after Hunter Biden and basically accuse him of things that he could end up in jail for and use the office to attack the children. That's not true, according to every single report, but go ahead. Yeah, if they were, well, according to Fox, there's real credibility there, so I believe anyway. At some point, there's going to be another president, and at some point, that president's going to have political allies across the geopolitical spectrum, and what if that president decides to go after, you know, Don Jr., I bet there's a, it just, he just doesn't get it.
He doesn't realize, look, you don't go after people's kids with these BS accusations and China lists foreign governments to go after people's children. Yes, he'd never do that, because he never does anything like that. Come on, this is like his whole jam is just talking about society. It is so short-sighted, and it shows such a lack of perspective around his own family.
It's just, it's a total break of code. Toxic narcissist. How else would he do this? He doesn't care about his kids.
Narcissist. And my other loss is that people, or I don't think the media's been focusing around we on what is kind of, in my view, one of the more interesting stories, and that is just 30 days ago, there were 3,000 to 5,000 new millionaires, and that is the employees that had been at we longer than two or three years, probably all had at least a million dollars in equity value based on the valuation they were certain they were going public at. And I've been in the, I've been in these shoes before when I was in my early 30s and read envelope was supposed to go public at a $600 million valuation. It is impossible when you get near the goal line not to start counting your money.
It's impossible. Oh, yeah. I heard from someone from WME this week about that. They're like, I was buying a house.
Well, it's impossible. Not buying a house now. It's impossible for your husband not to be looking at bigger houses. It's impossible not to call your parents and say, hey, let's start looking into that family cruise and reunion we always wanted.
It's impossible to think, wouldn't it be great to get a two bedroom and think about another kid? And you can imagine 3,000 to 5,000 people have literally gone from say $1 to $10 million in wealth they had to zero. And it's like, well, okay, it's easy to be cynical, it couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. But you know what?
That's a lot of heartache. And you're about to see an amount, a level of animosity. Unleash, think about this. I'm a nice person.
I work hard. I make $130,000 as a VP of operations at this cool company called We, which after taxes isn't a lot of money to barely enough money to think about a kid living in Hoboken or Brooklyn. And all of a sudden, oh, boy, I have $3 million in we and I've worked my ass off for the last three years and listened to all this Jesus talk, but it's finally paying off. I'm finally going to have an estate here.
Oh, wait, am I going to have health insurance? I mean, that's the question now. Am I going to have to apply for Cobra to have health insurance? So there's, I think the real toll here, everyone's talking about soft bank, who gives a fuck?
They're going to be fine. It's the real tragedy here. If there is a tragedy is the employees of we who are really, I would imagine, really have ruined the Brooklyn real estate market. Do you think?
Single hand. Do you think? I feel great because I can buy there now. But here's the deal.
It's such as that. It's also like I've heard from people at William Morris and some of the other companies, you know, that have seen real clients. We never talked about WME. We never talked about that.
It was a collection of great assets that aren't profitable. So I was, I was, how does this thing get out, that's kind of adventures, Hollywood adventures in private equity and rolling up, it'll be interesting to see there's actually a clause in there. If I read the S1 correctly that their core asset, which is the UFC, you know, the cage fighting is if they didn't get a public, it reverts back to KKR, I think, and that's kind of the crown jewel. So it's going to be very interesting what happens there over the next several months.
Yeah, they've got to pay the agents more, there's a lot more, there's a lot more investment just like with the way, you know, these agents can go anywhere. I think they're nervous. And by the way, this is not a group of people that likes to, you know, will just tuck their tails in and be sad, you know, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn that they didn't get to have the house they wanted, the apartment they wanted. This is a group of people who are super aggressive, that don't like this.
And by the way, very time I'm full disclosure, I'm represented by WME. If you are wondering why on earth, a guy like me has representation, trust your instincts, but it's kind of, it makes sense. They represent Oprah, Adele, and a dog, and a dog. They had meetings.
There you go, WME. I had meetings with them. I'm not represented by anybody. I've had meetings with all of them.
I don't want to be represented by them. Oh, you have scary representation. And her name is Cara Swisher. That's right.
Every time I'm in these meetings, I'm like, I'm smarter than you. Like, I don't know. They like that. You don't think they bring you special drinks and stuff like that.
They're actually super smart people. I know they are, but I do. You know, they see. I like the WME people.
I do. I like the Irishmen. I like the Irishmen. I want to see that movie so badly.
That's my way. Okay, so you say, not Cara Swisher. In any case, my fail the week, I wrote a column in the New York Times about Mr. Dromp on Twitter.
Now, interestingly, I didn't say for them to kick them off, but everybody took it that way, which was fascinating. I just suggested that he's a dangerous. It is. It is.
You wrote that, summarize for the people out there. I'm going to represent you. I'm going to pretend I'm Erica who fights for you every day. Tell us about that article.
Tell us about that. That seminal piece that's created all this stir. I was just making the point that he's continually violating it, and he does this one that he did sort of halfway with the pastor, you know, using his talking about civil wars, was dangerous. And like, think about it.
Think about what you're allowing your platform to be used for. And then last night, he did it that it's a coup, a regular impeachment inquiry, which is completely normal, exactly normal, but it's not out of bounds of this country. It's done in the correct process. It's like the whistleblower has been doing things the correct way.
He's saying words like coup on Twitter, the president is just saying this is, we're in a different zone and maybe you should, maybe we should think hard about what this means. And everybody came in. There wasn't a lot. There was also support of it.
It's really interesting. Kamala Harris, for example, was like, kick him off Twitter. But other people had good ideas, maybe limit his likes, maybe not retweets, maybe do something to indicate that this kind of language, like the president says, saying something is a coup that is dangerous and it goes, you can just look at any of the rules of Twitter that he's, you know, he's done. And, you know, I'm not saying it's an easy situation and I wrote it, they'd be daunted by the incredible responsibility.
And so I just, I just want people to think about what is happening here, because essentially they're, they're, it's been hijacked by those who want to take, as I said, advantage of its porous and sloppy rules and poorly enforced rules. And so it's just an interesting situation and it's scary. And I wanted to point it out. And then everyone's got on their high horse whether they're like, first amendment, which I'm like, it doesn't apply to Twitter.
Like I just sit there and explain people what the first amendment is, which is exhausting. And then free speech. I'm like, not so much. It's not really a thing, actually.
And then you have others that say, knock them off on Twitter. I just want to hear all the things. Which I think I did. So you, you right now remind me of Toronto, Denver, and Columbus, Ohio, when they submitted, when they submitted their RFP, their proposal to be the HQ of Amazon.
And it's just so adorable that you think that you have any chance this is going to happen. Oh, I don't think it's going to happen. No, I do not think it's going to happen. I need a stock chart of Twitter from the IPO to Donald Trump's election.
It's basically gets cut in half. And since the day he was elected, it's doubled in value. Yeah. Look what happened when I started suggesting regulation four years ago.
Donald Trump has given Jack Doris a half a billion dollars. Every employee of Twitter is going to go into that voting booth and they're going to pull Trump. I'm going to tell you, I want them to feel that. I want them to feel terrible.
I want them to feel awful about what's happening on the thing. And that's my job. I'm going to point it out. I am so addicted to Twitter.
You're not addicted to Twitter. I hate myself for it. But that's okay. If it went away tomorrow, be fine.
I don't care. I like it. It's like I like a lot of things. And so I think that they, I think it's just an interesting thing.
Just say, you're like hypersynical. I think there are. And once you start like, I can suggest to them. I have people fighting for me, Carol.
No, I'm suggesting we work math was off and look what happened. I suggested a couple of years ago that maybe tech responsibility is something we should think about and continue to bang on that job and look where we are. I think we do. We're fucking nowhere.
Yeah. Look where we are. Bang louder. You're wrong.
You're wrong. You need representatives banging with you. No. There's actually an agent.
Oh, God. Why would I pay him? I hate to do it. Unless I have to, like a lawyer.
Unless I have to. I have smart people who work with me. That's what I am. That's what I am.
That's not to say. I don't have smart people who work with me. Everybody needs to rest them up and down all day. That's what you need.
Yeah. That's what you need. I'm the one trick pony here. In the next 60 days, we have a bankruptcy at we.
Okay. And so 60 days, bankruptcy. All right. And then what is the next Jesus founder that's going to be ousted?
You know, that's a really, I read that in the script. I don't know. I mean, I've been so focused on this is, you know, right now, there really is only one Jesus and he's in, you know, the unicorn protection program we haven't seen or heard much from him. You know these people better than I do.
Is there anyone that kind of is guilty? I call it the yoga babble index. Is there any company or individual who you think is kind of off the Richter scale in terms of their level of ratio of bullshit? You know what?
You used to have numbers in the narrative. So someone, someone accused Mark Benioff of this yoga babble in talking about society. But when you, when you deliver the numbers first, you have the right to engage in some yoga babble. And it's actually a good thing.
It's numbers and narrative. And what a lot of young CEOs in the unicorn era have, have, have flipped is they think they can skip the numbers part and move right to the narrative around improving the world. But do you see that ratio of yoga babble bullshit? Who are you looking at now?
Yoga babble or not? Which one are you like, no, no, no, no. What's your? So the company I would love to see numbers on is Palantir.
Yeah. That's interesting. I would be very curious to see what that looks like. I would love to see the S1 on that.
We will. WME didn't get out. I didn't think that was, I didn't think that was yoga babble. I thought that was just a collection of assets that they were trying to pull a WPP where they smooth out a bunch of great assets.
But the problem was WPP was very profitable. And WME wasn't. I just couldn't figure that out. Palaton is probably going to get pelted, kind of the, it's a great company.
It's wildly overvalued. But I don't see, I'm trying to think if there's another company that's engaging in this sort of yoga babble. And I don't, I haven't identified it. I haven't seen the next one.
And also, I want to. Well, Uber, you've been whacking it over. Well, that's old news. I'm going to play Adam Newman in the movie and one of our producers, Eric Johnson, said it should be Adam Driver, who plays Kylie.
That's perfect, isn't it? That's perfect. You like that? I like it.
Although I'm absolutely, I'm throwing my hat in. I'm going to play Rebecca Newman. Don't you think I'd be an awesome Rebecca Newman? Seriously, look at me.
Imagine me with black hair and like a dress, by the way. I have more legs and a bucket of chicken as a woman. I have perfect legs for a woman. Anyways, and I just want to be in this scene where she meets with people for five minutes and says, I don't like your energy.
You're fired. I like that. Oh my God. You do that already.
I think you do that already. But I'm going to talk to your employees and see what they have to say. Chipotle, after hours of Little Cialis. That's about it.
That's about it. Who's going to play? Who's going to play Scott Galloway in the movie? If you could pick.
And it's not Scott Galloway. Bruce Dern. We're bringing back Bruce Dern. Oh my God.
Of course I do. That's perfect. Coming home. Yeah, I know.
Everyone said this. Either him or we're bringing back under a ten star Ivan Lindell. Either Ivan Lindell or Bruce Dern. The big dog story.
Ivan Lindell? Yeah, and by the way, not that I'm obsessed with. Remember him? Yes.
Let's get creative. You need a representative to be creative. He's a funny guy. I'm thinking of bringing him back to code this year because he was so crazy when he was there.
But I think maybe not so much. He's going to want to talk right this year. I like the idea of the two of you next to each other. That's definitely a charm.
You're going to see that one. Oh, yeah. That's right. This is scary.
Let's get out of you. What are you up to? What are you up to? We're talking about code codes like seven months off and you're already pimping it.
I'm already pimping it. I'm working on that. I'm doing lots of stuff. I'm going to have a baby soon.
That's crazy. I just think that's crazy. I'm doing tons and tons of interviews. We've got a live pivot in New York in two weeks, I think.
We've got a live pivot in San Francisco. It's pretty much Scott Galloway and the baby. That is really my life at this point. It's a sad situation.
That means people warm all over when you said that. That was nice. Thank you. Only one of them is whiny crying and spit several times.
There you go. They're both adorable though. They're both adorable. That's exciting.
That's exciting for you. That's exciting for you. That's what you tell the dog and Scott Galloway. Sit.
All right. Enough of us. I'm sick of us and I love us. We've got to put a piece out here.
Wrap it up. Bring it home. Got to be a civil war 2020 bunker. Anyway, I will talk to you next week.
I'm so excited for you and your dog and everything else. And really, you do a great job on WeWork. I kid all much, but it's a public service. Wait.
You're pointing out. Right. Music. And that's it.
I think you're doing fantastic, thank you. Thanks. Calloway. I salute you.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Today's show was produced by Erica Anderson and Eric Johnson. Thanks also to Rebecca Cazro drew burrows and the shot per one.
Make sure you subscribe to The Show on Apple Podcast. If you like this week's episode, leave us a review. If you have suggestions for what you want to hear us talk about on the future show, send us an e-mail. We've got to bring back some reader mail soon.
Thanks for listening to Pivot from Box Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.