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I don't care. I think you'll like this. I think elections are, and we won't talk specifically about the camera a little bit. But I was thinking about it last night.
My dad, I used to play chess with my father, otherwise we bonded and he used to do these fun games with me. And he'd say, okay, this is a quarter, this is a nickel, this is a dime. What's the fastest way to get to 43 cents? And he would do all these kind of war games using chess board to try and talk about strategy.
And I was thinking about it. I was going back to my father. If you put a bunch of pieces on a flat surface and you color coded them by demographic groups, which I'm sure is going to outrage people, but say Mayor Pete was rainbow. Clobish are, Senator's clobish are worn.
We're pink. And then you tilt to the board to say, what does America want? Because Democrats are constantly accusing. And there's some, I think, justification here, Republican Party discriminating and being a bit racist.
We've had two major callings in the Democratic primary. The first was we took out all the people of color. Senator Harris, Booker, Andrew Yang. The next calling is we've taken out the gay guy.
And the next calling is about to be the women. If you just looked at pieces, what's happening here? I know you're going to say this does not come up any news. But if a statistician looked at all the pieces and says, what are these pieces all having common?
It's just why dudes are the only ones that make it through in the Democratic primary. We've got women and people of color. We've noticed that. Yeah.
It's depressing. It's depressing. But on a plus side, Hillary Clinton's going to have a podcast. Because we need a podcast.
You know what else is really fascinating? I'm showing out here, but just humor me. And I didn't realize this. And that is, you know, so Biden won South Carolina.
And what's really interesting, and I think people in the white community do this, and I think I'm guilty of it. We assume people of color just naturally cluster around similar values and ideals as it relates to politics. And I thought the most interesting thing from South Carolina and what looks like peer to be shaping up in California, Texas, is that the black community is actually trying to grow up the moderate side of the Democratic party, whereas the Latino bomb that we've been waiting for is finally detonating, and it's going much further left. And it looks like they're going to have the day with Sanders.
But it's just, and it seems obvious, but the black community and Latino community should no longer be grouped into kind of this in general. None of them should be grouped. As a monologist, I think this nobody should monolithly. You know, it's a more complex situation.
I think that's the difficulty is that if we sort of are reductive around people of color, you don't understand it. And again, everyone cares about health care and things like that. Like people have a lot of commonality of needs. Speaking of health care, the market, let's get into a big story Scott.
Obviously coronavirus. The markets keep tumbling. Coronavirus keeps spreading. The S&P had its worst week.
Federal Reserve Chairman Powell is trying to reaffirm that central bank will make efforts to fix this. Meanwhile, the Louvre in Paris is closing. The first person to test positive coronavirus in New York, or the Manhattan. Later tomorrow, I'll be talking to Ron Klain, who was the Ebola response coordinator during the Obama administration on recode decode about this.
But let's talk about what this means. Like, you know, for the economy. We're going to focus because we're a business show on the economy. There are political implications.
There's all kinds of implications. But, you know, we'll see what happens this week with the stock market. But this is continuing to be a real problem for the economy. At the same time, as people get sick across the country.
Yeah, it's extraordinary. And it's difficult to... I don't know about you, but sometimes you can go... This morning, for example, I did a meeting, a breakfast meeting, and no one wanted to shake hands, which I thought was extraordinary.
Everyone was talking about events being canceled. But then you look at the data, and I was like, there's comfort in data. And I think about 90,000 cases, about 3,000 deaths. They say that approximately the fatality rate outside of China is about 1%.
It's very agist, this virus, that if you're under the age of 40, the fatality rate basically plummets. So if I don't think there's been a single fatality of anyone under the age of 18. And if you look at, I mean, assume a couple million people... There's 90,000, I think, diagnosed cases right now.
If you say it goes to 10 million, and that ends up being 100,000 deaths, obviously every death is enormously tragic. But say it goes to 10 million cases. We'll lose 50,000 people this year from opioid overdoses. We'll lose...
But this comparison, I get that. I mean, people like to make these comparisons are going to die. This is a Trumpy thing. We're going to die more from the regular flu than this.
It's still... That hurts. I think that's a lot of the implications around everything. And one of the things that doesn't get enough attention is the gig economy.
And there was a great story, I think it was a New York Times, I'm not sure, about people who just can't leave work, like baristas, Uber drivers, the people that are waiting on people that are in this gig economy that can't don't have time off, they don't have an ability to be sick, essentially. And I think the way our economy has changed so dramatically. And back in the day, way long ago, that was the same thing. There wasn't any kind of safety net for people who are working-class people, but it's still the same problem, is that there's a limit to how much we can quarantine ourselves obviously, the thing you should do.
But people tend to not think, they think they put a mask on and these people can go to work, but this is not the case. And that, I think, is really going to be studied later. But we're in this direction. And then, of course, there's a stock market, which everybody's mood is about.
And the stock market tumble really does affect people's thinking about their lives, even though it probably shouldn't, but it certainly does. Are you concerned about the stock market tumble? What is the area of concern you have when you're thinking about economic downturn or economic contraction? If they cancel, say, South by Southwest, which we're supposed to go to, that's enormous amounts of money for Austin.
If they cancel all kinds of events, you see the repercussions everywhere. There's no doubt about it, but a couple of things. One, it really is a scale of it has shocked me. I was in a board call last week, and in an abundance of caution, the management recommended that we quarantine the products that we have manufacturing in China, and they decided that they would isolate the products to ensure that absolutely no bacteria survives on any of the products.
I never heard that before. I thought, wow, that's taking it to a new level. But use Austin as an example. Austin will take a short-term hit, but the city of Austin is awesome.
South by Southwest is awesome. And I don't think, while it may impact them in the next three, six, 12 months, however long it takes to play this out, I think it comes back as strong or stronger. I wrote a piece saying that I believe Carnival Cruise Line is going to be fine. I think there's companies that take a step down because people realize they stop going to movies and they realize they don't really miss them.
But I think everything else is larger-term. In terms of the stock market going down, Kara, markets are supposed to go up and they're supposed to go down. And what bothers me about this administration and the general viewpoint of baby boomers is that we have decided that the all-important, sacrosanct initiative that everyone is supposed to be fighting for is to keep the markets higher, basically to keep baby boomers rich, because Rebecca Sinanis deserves an opportunity to buy into Amazon at less than 50 times earnings, or to buy an apartment in Brooklyn for less than $2,000 a square foot. And the reason why people of our generation have some wealth, hopefully, is because they have the opportunity to buy Netflix at $12 a share.
They had an opportunity to buy a house in the Castro for $800 a square foot, not $2,500 a square foot. So yeah, who benefits, who gets hurt when the markets go down? All the people controlling all the media, basically baby boomers who think they deserve to stay rich, so they want to artificially play the markets. Who benefits from the markets going down?
Young people. So burn baby burn. Oh my God, that's a fascinating argument for the end of the stock market. But I like it.
I like your dystopian way of making young people rich, suddenly. That's a really interesting thing. But we'll see. This is going to have lots of repercussions.
We'll be talking about a lot of it in the next couple weeks. One of the bigger stories also is activist investors buying a big chunk of Twitter. Now Jack Dorsey's job may be at stake. Elliot Management, the hedge fund that bought the stake is nominated for, Director's the Board.
As I may just say, I did say I thought activist investors were going to get involved here, because I've been hearing from a lot of them. So it only has one class of stock. He's not protected. He has no voting control, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.
Since he's been a return to CEO in 2015, the company shares have fallen 6.2% while Facebook's again more than 121% during that time. He also has another job at Square. What do you think the strategy is? Can you explain the strategy?
Hold on. Hold on. This is literally like when Ryan O'Neill and Farrah Fawcett were married and said, let me get this. You're taking credit for the activism at Twitter?
No, I said it was coming. Come on. Come on. Elliot basically showed up and signed my December 12 letter with a $2 billion pen.
You don't even acknowledge that? Yes, you're right. You're right. Okay.
Go ahead. Come on. Wow. Okay.
You wrote this letter. Can you update us on the letter? We're going to go to tape. Is that right?
We're going to go to tape on this thing. When he announced he was going to be moving to Africa for part of the year. The letter speaks for itself. I think Twitter needs to start commanding the space it occupies.
I think if you were to look at any company that has the equivalent reach or influence, the company trading at 20 to 40 X the valuation. I think there's no company in the world who's opportunity relative to its performance is this out of whack. So I'm giving you credit. You were very angry about the after situation.
Can we listen to me? We're both right. How about that? We're both right.
So I have some disclosures to make. I bought a Twitter stock this morning and I am in dialogue with a bunch of the investors including Elliot. So with that. And you like to be like, you like to do this kind of thing.
You've been involved in these kinds of things. None of governance matters. This is a lie. This is a mother of all obvious changes at a corporate governance level.
We have a company that is exceptionally important in the midst of an election that does not command the space it occupies that trades at a fraction of the value of any company with near the reach or influence that has underperformed the market and the S&P. So I know what's the solution. Let's get a part-time CEO who spends his afternoon at a company rating 9% of his wealth. And if that's not enough, he should piece out and go 10 time zones away.
This is the literally the most obvious IQ test in the history of corporate governance. Jack Dorsey will be out within 30 days. The board will come to an agreement with Elliot within the next 10. What do you think happens?
He thinks 30 days. He's out. Probably us. I think that's general.
Really? They've shown up with a howitzer. They own about $2 million of the stock. I imagine every investor they're calling and talking every shareholder is nodding their head, rolling their eyes and saying, I agree.
The last 48 hours was a bunch of investor relations, proxy solicitors, corporate governance lawyers, a general counsel of Twitter, and they had to do these calls in the morning because Jack is in Namibia, wherever he is. And basically, all the board members are coming to the conclusion that they need to be be Felicity Huffman and Coppa Deal now and give up all three board seats and let Jack go or they can be Aunt Becky and go to Reputational Prison and be the board members who made the WeWork board look responsible. This is over before it started. It is ridiculous.
It reflects our idolatry of innovators unless I expect the board to either give up three board seats in the next 10 days or demonstrate evidence that Jack Dorsey is Jesus Christ and not subject to the same space time continuum as the rest of us. This is in a word or in a term fucking ridiculous. This is a corporate governance layup. Stock is going to scream.
This is a company that has unbelievable potential that is down. Talk about the unbelievable potential. This is fascinating. Talk about the unbelievable potential.
And then what could go wrong for these activist shareholders? If the board does decide to stick with them, what could happen? Well, okay. So how I learned about coronavirus.
I've gained this outstot it. It's not a basic level. What logos of any company in the world are spread across every other media company 24 by 7. I mean, this company has such incredible reach and it's so important amongst the most influential people in the world.
There's been a striking lack of innovation. Yeah, political people, entertainment. Yep. So I think this has tremendous, not only I think at some point you have some safety on the downside because I think if the stock went down someone would probably step in and acquire it.
But any sort of product innovation here, I think advertisers are looking desperately looking for an option to Facebook and Google. 100%. 100%. One of the things I'm thinking about is how good the ads on Instagram are.
For example, I was just spending a lot of time looking at them. And that was going to be Twitter. Twitter was going to be doing a lot of that. If you remember, I mean, going to con, they talked about it in out of vain was there.
And that was sort of the game. And then it just went away. They have a lot of product development. Yeah.
No, no. No, no. No. No.
No. No. No. No.
No. No. No. No.
No. No. There may have been one before that, but there he was the critical CFO of Google forever. There's Jack.
There's Martha Lane Fox, who is, who is, I don't know a lot about her background, but she was put there by Jack. There's all kinds of people like Brett Taylor, who was, who was a president, he works at Salesforce. He's also an insider, Dave Rosenbud. These are a lot of insiders of internet, they're internet friends, do you know what I mean?
And so I wonder what, who's going to be the mover on this group? Because I don't know which one will, will do something. I don't think I'm sorry. I don't care.
Okay. Let's assume they love Jack and I think he's the right CEO. You know what they love more? Money.
Yeah. And every day that they put up a fight here, and this isn't a dialogue. This isn't even an issue. It's an IQ test.
It's okay. No matter what you think. By the way, Jack, there's a lot of credit. A remarkable innovator.
He's garnered several billion dollars in exchange for that innovation. The question is, is what has gotten us here today going to get us where we need to be? Does this company, question one, does this company warrant a full-time CEO? Should the CEO of Twitter, in addition to focusing his professional energies 100% on this company, be within nine-time zones of HQ?
This isn't, I can't imagine a single shareholder said, no, we're going to stick with the part-time guy in Africa. Yeah. I'm going to evaluate a company on its fiduciaries for the firefighters, the police, the wealthy families they represent. It's supposed to be shareholder return, and this company is massively underperformed.
This is over before it started. All right. Okay. I'm going to call this 10 days.
And who's the CEO? Who's the CEO? Who's the actual CEO? Oh, I don't know.
But think about this. This could be... There's several former corporate executives. The top Morgan fell.
The CFO of Pinterest. I've gotten to know him. He's a very thoughtful guy. Dick Costello, who gets a lot of grief and was kind of...
His image was tarnished. You realize when he joined Twitter, it was 78 cents a share private market, and then he grew it to $38 a share. Adam Bain is considered a fantastic operating executive. Put together a list of the 25 most impressive people to run this company, they all return the call.
They may not take the job, but this is an incredible opportunity for a CEO. It's not who do you pick to be CEO. It's who do you not pick. This is going to be a fantastic assignment for...
Well, the only thing, the only issue is, I have to say, is getting into the Trumpiness of it. Making these big decisions on political advertising, one of the reasons a lot of this company hasn't gotten bought yet, which many people thought it would, that Google would move in or Apple or anybody. There's all kinds of owners of this. Salesforce have looked at it.
It's a great element. There could be a purchaser. It was every single person I talked to was like, Twitter. You know what I mean?
Like fixing the mess that is. Like, not so much product mess, but the toxicity. And again, everyone thought about the product mess, but that's easily fixed, updating Twitter for the next... What do you think?
You know this stuff as well as I do. Let me ask you straight up. Should Jack Dorsey be replaced with the CEO of Twitter? I believe he should.
I have thought that for a while. I've talked about the lack of product innovation. I've talked about the nobody's home kind of thing. I think they've got some great executives in cave on.
Becca is lovely as a product. They've had a lot of product man. It heads there. And then, Vijigade has tried her best.
Very smart. She's the C.L.O. and has been doing a lot of the behind the scenes decision making and stuff like that. But it is a weird corporate environment.
I think there's individually, some very good executives there. But the leadership of Jack has been... He's hard to... It's not like he's a pain in the neck or anything like that.
It's that he's absent in Godlike. You know what I mean? Like he may speak to you at some point. He may not speak to you.
And to me, it's been the biggest... This is one of the greatest media properties ever in the most fun to run and the most full of controversy and so many difficult questions. But I would love to see an active CEO in there who's really pushing, pushing, advertising. You know, there's all kinds of things.
I have a hundred ideas for Twitter. Like, you know what I mean? You could do this. And you know I'm a big user of it.
I love it. There's something great. But it's fun. The paid products, niche products and reality.
We don't even need to go about that rabbit hole. We just need to find the right guy. I pay for it. I pay for it.
I pay for it. I pay real cabbage for that. I would because I really like it. And there's also not just the toxicity.
And I agree there's a lot of toxicity on it. But there's also a lot of delight. And there's so much potential to be a great media property and to, you know, what Instagram, I don't use Instagram the same way. And it's like they could take some, they could just grab so much stuff from Instagram and put it in there.
And I think it's because I don't know why it's not happening there. It's just, it's been one of those companies. It has. We have an idea.
I have an idea and keeping with the boards approach to corporate governance and leadership. You and I will be co-CEOs. I'll move to Rwanda and you become the CEO of a payments company and we'll run it. We'll run it.
The jungle cat and the dog are taking over to take a quick break. But what would you, what would be, if you were the CEO, Scott Galloway is the CEO and obviously you're on the other side, you're fighting. Thank you for disclosing that. I own no Twitter stock.
I have no dog in this hunt or whatever that express the manly church. Oh, your dog's in this hunt jungle cat. No, my dog's in this hunt. Your dog's in this hunt.
Twitter to innovate. I would like Twitter to innovate. That's what I like. 100%.
And I think the stock's too low for what it is. I don't get punches below. Word and word. My sister.
All right. But what would the first thing you would do since you are, you are, you started this off with your mean letter about Jack in Africa, what, what were, what was, what would you do the first three things and then we're going to break. So the first thing I would do is fire me and bring in a CEO and tell him or her that it's up to him or her to understand and listen to everyone in the company and then come to their own conclusions around what needs to be done and as a board member support them. So I know that.
I don't mean that to be a cop out. If you're going to force me for tactical issues. Yes. I think verified identity.
I think two thirds of the toxicity goes away when people actually have to behave and say things based on who they actually are. And then I think a series of pilot programs around niche paid products, whether it's financial services or politics that encourage people like us to get more engaged and pay for something that is better, uses AI to screen our filters and maybe gives our voices more enhanced coverage. I think there's a ton of opportunity here. All right.
Okay. Anyway, Scott. That's great. This will be fascinating.
We're going to hold them 10 days, 10 days, right? Oh, shit. It's about to get real care of 10. Wait, what are you saying?
10 days for? 10 days? I believe within 10 days the board is going to come to an agreement. They've lost.
This is over. Okay. Okay. Okay.
So the board is going to cut a deal with Elliot and we're going to see Jack is Jack is going to step down. This is just gone. Is there anything to the fact that Elliot's a big Trump supporter or anything like that? Is there anything of that?
So just to be clear. Just be clear. This is a guy named Jesse Cohen. He's a Democrat.
And unless they I don't know them well, but I know them unless they've totally fooled me. They have $40 billion under management. And if they were doing. This is about money.
You're right. This is about a product that is not doing this. They don't look red. They don't look blue.
They look green. And if they started. If it came out that there was any political motivation here that was in any way putting their limited return at rest, they would go from 40 billion to 10 billion. And the thing that gives Paul Singer his political power is money since Citizens United.
And the way he makes money is being focused on one thing. And that is returns for his limited politics has nothing to do with this at all. Okay. Just want to bring it out there.
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German-engineered for all. Okay. We're back. We have a friend of Pivot, the New York Times report Kevin Ruse who also has fantastic hair in the studio.
He covers technology. He's about to publish his book called Future Proof, which I must say I'm the inspiration for. Super Tuesday is upon us. So let's have it out on our elections about whether they should be analog or digital.
What's going on? Kevin writes a ton about this. Kevin, welcome. Thanks.
I think this is the first time we've ever been on a podcast together. How is that possible? Not the last. Let me just say.
Good. Let me just say. Good. So you're an expert on you write a lot about election security and especially the social media impact of it.
Talk a little bit about where we are. I mean, after Iowa obviously was a digital disaster. Bring us up to speed, which apps are being used for Super Tuesday? How do you affect the election or not at all or anything else?
Right. Well, so we know that Iowa was a total disaster. Yeah. And the big part of why that was was because there was this app that was tallying the votes and recording them and sending them to the state Democratic Party.
I mean, the word the word app in relation to, you know, the Iowa caucuses. My whole sort of like insides kind of shriveled up because this is the doomsday scenario, right? This is the thing that every election security expert is worried about is that we'll introduce some new piece of technology. Which we should have.
Which we should have. Well, possibly. Yeah. So basically it's really interesting.
When you talk to people in tech about basically any element of society, their solution involves like putting more tech into it. More tech equals better. When you talk to people who deal with elections, they say the exact opposite thing. Like they think that in order to be secure, our elections should be as low tech as possible.
Like basically there should be paper ballots. Like I went back and did some research. The ancient Greeks actually used to throw pebbles into earnings to count the votes. And like that's basically what they're saying we should do.
Not so far as rocks, but paper ballots, no sort of connected voting machines in a lot of states. So now using these sort of internet connected voting machines, they say terrible idea. Those can get hacked. So basically the people who know the most about this subject have been yelling for years that this move to upgrade our technology, our voting technology may actually be making our elections more vulnerable.
Huh. Well, that's interesting. What do you think about that rocks? You know, it's interesting because I think there is a Gestalt in the US where software is supposed to be the answer to everything.
And if you look at what happened in Iowa, everything can be reverse engineered to technology. Even old technology is much less an app that wasn't beta tested. But the telephone lines, as soon as the telephone number got out, my understanding is these outside bad actors started crashing the phone lines. And so, you know, get a group of high school students and an abacus.
Let me ask you this, Kevin. Does your friends call you hanging Chad? Is that your nickname? Depends what's wrong.
I hope not. I hope not. I mean, yeah, as you mentioned, like we all remember hanging Chad's from the 2000 election. There are problems with paper ballots too.
But the problems with paper ballots are, at least you can go back and look at what happened. You can go back and re-examine the paper ballot and say is that Chad hanging too much? Is it not hanging? Like you can do sort of recounts and investigations.
With paperless voting systems, these e-voting systems, that gets a lot harder. I had a life-changing experience on this. I went a couple years ago to the security conference in Vegas with all these hackers. And they did this thing.
They bought up a bunch of old voting machines on eBay that were actually used in previous voting elections, a couple hundred bucks a piece. They put them in a room and they told the hackers, like, go at it. Like, see how long it takes to crack these machines. This is what passes for fun at security conferences.
And they expected, you know, it might take them a couple days to start breaking in. And then they got to the other state of the art things. Within a day, like, all of them had gotten hacked. Some of them had gotten hacked in less than an hour.
So it was really startling. And what did they do? Just change votes. They changed votes.
Someone actually rigged it up so they could like, you know, you could play music on one of the voting apps. I don't know how they did that. And these were all decommissioned. But these kind of machines are still in use all over the country.
Right. And so what is the answer then? Because the idea is that you do vote on your phone because you want to bring more voting to people. And this would be a way, aside from making everybody, giving it a holiday, making voting a holiday, which I think would go a long way towards more people voting.
You do everything else on your phone. Voting would be nice if everyone was able to vote, especially young people. For sure. And I think the recommendations around voting machines sort of fly counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom in tech, which is that friction is bad and we should reduce it.
Right. Make it as easy as possible to do everything, including voting. With voting, you actually want a little bit of friction in there. You don't want voter ID.
You don't want poll taxes. That's a different kind of friction as voter suppression. But in the actual technology itself, you actually want a little bit of friction there to prevent people from exploiting it. To prevent hackers from overseas from breaking into our machines and changing vote totals.
It's a lot harder to do that if these are paper ballots than if they're all connected computers. And what about voter lists, too? That's what I understand is very vulnerable. The idea that who can vote and the voter list changing addresses slightly and things like that?
Yeah, because those parts are all administered locally. I mean, it's not like we have one database of all the voters in America. States, counties, election officials at the local level keep track of all those. And those are not always the most technically sophisticated people.
A lot of them skew older. They haven't grown up in an atmosphere of cybersecurity training. They're just not equipped to do the kind of work that you would want them to be able to do to protect against interference. It's a really paper.
Scott, again, what do you imagine? Do you think people should vote on apps or not? I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. I've come full circle since I was a Democrat and as someone who's in technology, I was immediately a huge proponent of, it should all be on our phone.
And we want to expand the participation and make it as easy as possible for people to be represented in our democracy. And the easiest way to do that is an app on Android or Apple. And in a partisan way, I thought that that would help my democratic causes because I thought it might reach into the community. That's a benefit.
In my reach into the communities that I think might skew Democrats or Republicans try and make it harder to vote. And there's definitely a balance there. But after Iowa, I actually am coming to believe that technology, whether it's Netflix or our phones or Instagram, are slowly but surely sequestering us from interacting with each other. And I think that there would be nothing better than, as you said, Cara, like for her corporation gives people it's a holiday for election day, than to encourage people to get out and meet their brothers and sisters and their fellow citizens and go behind a curtain.
And in my faculty housing in the lobby, we're a pollster at a voting station. And you know what? It's wonderful. You walk through there.
You feel American. There's a comity of man and woman. I wonder if we should go the other way, because it's very hard to hack a piece of paper. And if we should make our election days, one of those moments where we all get together, touch, smell, and feel each other and just recognize how wonderful it is to be American.
Well, think about this. But companies aren't investing in election technology. What are the key trends right now in that? Yeah, so a couple of trends.
One is there are some people developing these apps that you mentioned, like I got pitched this blockchain voting app thing. Oh, God. Can you say blockchain voting? I just want to cry.
And you know, I think the people who make this stuff like their well intention, they want to increase civic participation. I just think it's a horrible idea. I just think that we should absolutely not. Kevin loves my idea, Cara.
Kevin's on my side. Apple pie and baseball. That's right. Oh, God.
Exactly. You got your conversation care? Where do you go? Or do you vote by mail?
I'm going to go tomorrow. I'm going to go tomorrow. No, I didn't vote by mail. I like to walk in.
I like to walk into the garage with the people I see once every year and say hello to those. I like to not care. I hate you. No, they do not.
I think I'm not famous in voting. I go to my mail and the only bad thing about that is you don't get the sticker. I like the sticker. I like the whole thing.
It's like when you get the flu shot. But then there are also efforts within government to sort of mandate safer elections. You can look at it in case of a recount. But so far Republicans are blocking a lot of times.
And why are they blocking that? Your guess is as good as that. I like your guess. I don't know.
Your guess is better, Kevin. I don't know. I mean, not much is getting passed with bipartisan support. But that's, I mean, I think that there are people for whom the current election system works fine.
Works fine. All right. So let's go to Facebook. You've been written a lot about Facebook's impact on elections.
That's one of the things. Are they prepared for 2020? What's changed since 2016-18? Well, I've been doing a lot of reporting on this in the past couple of weeks.
And my takeaway is basically the Facebook and all the other platforms, they're very prepared for the election of 2016. Like they are ready to get those Russians out. They are ready to secure the platform against WikiLeaks and hacks. And they are ready to fight the last war, but they are not ready.
I've heard they're coordinating with the Mondale campaign, which gives me a lot. Tell me why. What do you mean? What is that?
Well, the threats have just changed so much since 2016. I mean, we don't see so far, you know, knock wood, the kind of like wide-scale Russian trolling campaigns and things like that. So that's not so much of an issue. But now you have all these domestic bad actors, these people in the US, who are imitating the tactics of the Russians.
So, such as? Well, such as a lot of the sort of hyper-partisan Facebook pages, some of the YouTube channels, like they're doing the same thing, but they're doing it from inside the US, so there's not that much to do. So they've seen what the Russians did. Exactly.
And they're redoing it. And the platforms are, you know, for better or for worse, much more hesitant to take action against those people than they, if they can pin it on Russia. So they can do the same thing? So they can do essentially this?
So what are they preparing for? What are they preparing for? Just Russia, to give Iranians a Russian. I think from everyone that I've talked to, the platforms are way better prepared for like Russia hacking, other foreign state actors getting into trolling campaigns and influence operations and things like that.
But they've actually like spent a lot of money and taken a lot of thought and care to sort of protect themselves against. But then there are all these new, weird ways. What's the weirdest and newest? I think the Bloomberg campaign has been a really interesting challenge for Facebook specifically.
That's not favorite. Because they've been doing all this meme stuff. They've been paying these influencers to make the sponsor content and they just didn't have policies for that kind of thing. They didn't see it coming.
They didn't think like some billionaire is going to pay meme accounts to post fake text messages on their accounts. And so they've just kind of scrambled to figure out what to do about this. What are they doing? Well, they're doing some new disclosure stuff around like if there's an influencer who gets paid by Bloomberg to say Mike Bloomberg is the coolest candidate in the world, they have to say like sponsored by Mike Bloomberg on there.
But some of these accounts are private. So Facebook really has no way of tracking what's going on in them. And it's become a real problem for them. I mean, they've had tons of meetings about it.
There's been a lot of hand-ringing internally about what to do about this. These are just the kind of things that they didn't see coming. And then what are the Trump people doing? What are they up to?
Well, they're putting out a ton of ads. I mean, they are flooding social media with millions of ads, spending a ton of money doing it and by all accounts, doing it pretty effectively. So they're doing basically 2016 on steroids. And people who study this kind of thing are on the Democratic side are really worried about it.
What are the Democrats doing? I mean, they're spending a lot on digital advertising. I think they're starting to catch up in terms of how much money they're spending on Facebook and Twitter and not Twitter. They don't allow political ads anymore, but on YouTube.
But I think they realize that they have some way to catch up. And in some cases, the Trump campaign has an easier time because they already got that huge audience. They know which kind of messages work. And they don't have to spend their money, their time raising small dollar donations to get into the debates and things like that.
Kevin, what's your view on political advertising on these platforms? I think that I don't buy the suggestion that this is our voice and that we can't lie in your ads, that that's tantamount to telling you who to vote for or something like that, that's swinging elections. I'm less worried about the advertising. I'm more worried about the organic side, the stuff that people are paying for.
Well, because for advertising, there's transparency now, Facebook allows you to search who's running which ads on which platforms. And there are limits to how much stuff can spread through advertising. There are limits to the effectiveness there. The organic side is kind of still about West.
I mean, that is still where you get people doing these engagement hacks to get more shares and likes and clicks on their stories. That's where you get the sort of partisan media organizations doing their thing. I mean, if you look at the organic side of Facebook, I'd be terrified if I was a Democrat. I look at the top 10 list every day of which stories are performing best on Facebook.
And it's like, Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Daily Caller, Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Daily. It's almost all right-wing news every day. But let me ask you, is that a function of that's where America is or that those entities are just better at misleading users of the platform? I think it's a couple of things.
One, I think it reflects who's on Facebook, right? They tend to be older. Maybe they tend to be wider than other platforms. So I think since 2016, you know, who's on Facebook has changed.
But I also think it's because these organizations have gotten really good at sort of hacking the news feed and getting their messages out and picking the stories that are going to aggravate people or, you know, make them angry at someone. And engagement is engagement. Engagement is engagement. You would make a great social media manager.
Anyway, so what are they going to do? So what's going to happen? What's part of leadership doing to it? Obviously the Republicans love this and they're doing a good job in sort of letting Brad Parcel do everything he wants.
So that's in his hands. Is there anything that can happen to make this more fair or that these companies can do? Yeah. I mean, I think they could do a lot.
They don't have to allow political advertising. There's no, you know, there's no, you know, reason that there's no lossing. If you're a platform, you have to let people pay you money to spread political messages. Which is Google was in the middle and then Facebook's as the outlier, I guess, or not the outlier, whatever, the other side.
Totally. I mean, I think they could do, you know, sort of more on the organic side to sort of prevent misinformation from going viral. They now have these third party fact checkers at Facebook, but they're only, you know, a couple dozen of them. They're kind of slow.
They're overworked. They do staff and do a few resources to do what they need. And by the time they get to fact checking something, usually millions of people have already seen it. So I think that there's, there are a lot that they could do on that side, but that would require, like, sort of rethinking the whole, the whole model.
Right. My last question. Bloomberg, do you think it's a good thing what he's doing or not, or just that he's just living the life that we live in now, essentially, or playing to that? I think it's fascinating.
I mean, what a, what a, I don't think people quite understood how rich Mike Bloomberg is because there are like tears of really rich guy, right? There's Tom Steyer, who's a billionaire, but not a 60 billionaire. And for Mike Bloomberg, I mean, we've never had someone in US electoral politics who can spend a billion dollars like that and not miss it. And so what I think is we're seeing effectively like a subsidy for every anyone that runs advertising in the United States is, is having a great quarter because of the Bloomberg campaign.
But I also think we're going to see if there is a limit to the effectiveness of digital advertising. If you spend $500 million in six months running ads on social media, like, does that move the needle? Can you actually convince people to do something that they wouldn't have otherwise done? Yeah.
Can you bring a wallet to a gunfight? And it's so interesting we said about Michael Bloomberg, just in terms of proportions, LeBron James will make $50 million this year in salary and endorsement. So if he plays basketball another 1200 years, I'll catch up to Michael Bloomberg. Exactly.
Of course. Sports. In any case, Kevin, we really appreciate being on your book, Future Poop. We're going to get it.
You're coming on the Rico Deco podcast. Talk about it. It's called Future Poop, right? Yeah, you have to say it like that.
Okay. Exactly. All right. So it's about how to prove yourself from the future, which will be great.
Good hair. Good hair. Thank you so much, Kevin. Ruth from the New York Times.
A wonderful columnist. Read his thing. Thank you for coming. Thanks, Kevin.
Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Kevin. Okay, Scott wins and fails. Obviously you win for the letter writing to remove Dorsey as CEO.
We already knew that. You get all the credit. I am desperate for your approval. You are attacking CEOs with excellent hair.