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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway, your quantum computing co-host.
Quantum. I'm going Quantum, Kara. You are so not Quantum. I'm so many.
We're back from California, actually. That's what we're back. I'm in New York, and God knows where you are. I don't even want to know.
I'm in the only place in the world that doesn't have a spectacular fall, Florida. Worst weather in the world during fall. All right. I'm so glad you're there.
Listen, you've got something to write about this week. Let's go for it. Take your lap, little dog. What's my lap?
I want you to call it out. I'm going to act humble here. I have no idea what you're talking about, Kara. It's the biggest story of the season, the stunning conclusion to the Adam Newman WeWork saga.
Yeah, but you know what? And trust me, I'm not someone to be humble here. Actually, and I appreciate it. I'm getting more credit than it's due.
I think his name's Elliott Brown, The Wall Street Journal. Yeah, amazing report. Shira Oviday. I don't know if I'm saying her name correctly.
Yes, you are. And the guy named Matt Levine at Bloomberg. Matt is amazing. Jesus.
Every time I read Shira and Matt, I'm so jealous and angry. I'm so pissed off I didn't write that. You must get that a lot. You must get that a lot.
No, I'm what? You're jealous? No, not usually. I'm usually up there when I was.
Those guys, I'm getting a ton of credit. It's earned, to be honest. But yeah. You take it, it's the commentary that really brought it.
It's a combination with the Uber story. There were a lot of reporters involved in that particular one. But let me go through it very quickly. SoftBank is paying Adam Neumann $1.7 billion to leave and leave the stock behind.
It includes a $185 million consulting fee. I'm not sure what he's going to consult on. Partying, I guess. The company needs the last-minute funding to afford the severance packages of 2,000 employees that plans to lay off in the 15,000-person workforce.
And they internally confirm layoffs that have not been announced publicly. Scott, go take this apart, please. So supposedly it's 4,000 employees. But think about this.
You had to give, I mean, he's the equivalent, and I'm going to get a ton of shit for this, but he's the equivalent of an information-age terrorist because he realizes he has controlling shares. So he basically said, and he also correctly, I mean, this guy is the smartest person in the room, Adam Neumann. He really is. He realized that the most important thing to Masayoshi Son was, one, saving face, and, two, giving Vision 1 fund any chance of recovering and potentially having a Vision 2 fund.
So he said, well, look, boss, you fucked up. You gave me control of this company in the form of super-voting shares, and I'm not going to improve the deal unless you convince me. So they came up with a buyout structure where they're going to repurchase $3 billion of people's existing shares, which is just stupid to begin with. And then they said, okay, Neumann's not going along.
He still controls the company. He's going to potentially opt for a package, a rescue package put together by his own personal banker, Jamie Dimon, who he gave $50 million to, regardless of whether or not they chose that package. So JP Morgan walks away with $50 million for creating a stocking horse bid. And he said, I'm not leaving the room.
I'm not leaving unless you give me X. And I said, okay, well, enough shareholders have agreed to sell at this ridiculous valuation of $8 billion because they want to get the hell out of Dodge and realize this thing's worth less than zero. But Adam said no, so they had to top it up with another $185 million consulting fee. So the smartest person in the room is Adam Neumann.
And Adam Neumann, the reporting has been that SoftBank has bent over backwards for Adam Neumann. No, SoftBank was bent over by Adam Neumann. I mean, we have never seen a founder. Think about this.
They put $15 or $17 billion into the company, and he's walking away with somewhere between $2,500 and $3 billion of that for taking a company up and down layoffs. Think of 2,000 people laid off. They had to pay Adam Neumann. Think about how crazy this is.
They had to pay Adam Neumann $850,000 per employee they're laying off such that they could secure the funding to then give those 2,000 people, what, $50,000 or $100,000 in severance? I mean, this will go down. The real loser here is... Saudis.
Okay, so this is my theory. I know I'm babbling on it. The real loser is Masiyoshi's on the SoftBank. They've just lost off their ability.
I'm convinced. I'm convinced. I'm going to be more of a conspiracy theorist as I get older. Oh, no.
If the Central Intelligence Agency decided that the best way to investigate the power of the Gulf was to bankrupt them, and what they did was they said, okay, Masiyoshi, they got something on Masasan, and they said, you're going to convince the Saudis to, because of this incredibly lucky, biggest, best investment in history, your investment in Alibaba, for $20 million, you got, like, I don't know, something like $100 billion. You're going to convince them to give you $45 billion. We're going to play. We're going to leverage the Jesus complex, the total lack of self-awareness and tone-deaf demeanor of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, and you are literally going to burn $40 billion of their money.
You're going to create war and agita within the families in the empire, in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, because of one thing, you know. Okay, that's a concise thing where you're going. And basically, it's worth it. Masiyoshi Son.
Masiyoshi Son is an asset. He's an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency. All right, okay. All right.
Chris Anderson, he's not an asset. Chris Anderson, former Wired editor, goes, but if you think of WeWork as a massive transfer of wealth from Saudi Arabia to an Israeli entrepreneur via an ethnic Korean Japanese visionary, it's really a heartwarming story of cross-cultural trade worthy of Model UN. That was the best tweet. That was absolutely the best tweet of the week.
That was fantastic. So where's it going to go from here? We're going to get to Google Quant and computing in a minute. Where's it go from here?
He just takes his money and becomes the most, like, he's sort of the wandering Travis Kalanick, the next version of, like, having all this money and walking away with it. What happens to him? He just has his money and he does something else. Oh, he's about to get some serious hate.
I mean, at least the people at Uber got to cash out something. It's still a company incredibly overvalued. I mean, to a certain extent, Uber is the reason that we got it. Uber was a fire that breached the firewall.
Investors got burned, and they saw this other blazing firestorm coming. They said, no, we're not. Close the doors. We're not letting this happen.
I don't know what happens to him, although I think it involves lawsuits, but he's played this, I mean, beyond perfect. There'll be case studies on what a disaster this was and how he shows a certain level of crazy and bravado to get the best deal in the history of business. But the big, okay, so what do you have here? You have a company, if they can cut costs fast enough, it'll be a nice differentiated co-working company worth $3 to $5 billion, maybe $7.
So it's not going to get their money back. This is the most expensive face-saving move in history. This is the most expensive kicking the can down the road because this thing still could involve restructuring in Q4 of 21. Obviously, the losers here, the people being laid off at one, you know, one four thousandth of a severance payment that your leader got.
You're going to have every private market unicorn over a billion dollars has lost 30% to 70% of its value in the last 45 days. But the good news that might come out of this is what this really is is a cautionary tale around dual-class shareholder companies. Because effectively, the investors... I just keep banging against it.
I keep banging against this idea of why they need to have total control. Well, dual-class shareholder companies don't matter until they matter. As long as everything's fine, they're fine. But the problem is when you get one individual total control, he can be someone who's responsible for the destruction of value.
He can be someone who's... They always matter, Scott. I don't think it matters until it matters. I think it always matters because it always...
Like, look, with Facebook this week, and he just flummoxed it in Congress. We'll get to that in a second. But, you know, they get to do anything they want, and then they get to do anything they want. Yeah, including Brenda Dillich to save it and show up and say, I'm crazy, and I've got a bomb strapped to my vest, and I'm going to blow up the whole thing unless you can make exactly what I want.
Let's move on from the terrorist company. I want you too much homeland. Yeah, I'm going to get a lot of shit about that. Okay, all right.
We're going to move on to the next story. Google unveils its quantum computer, the big brain strikes them. What does that mean? Let me explain.
The Sycamore solved a 10,000-year problem in seconds. So, Ndark Pichai, the CEO, will compare the achievement to building the first rocket to leave the Earth's atmosphere and touch the edge of space. So, what does it mean? What does it mean?
What is it opened up to? The quantum machine could one day drive big advances in areas like artificial intelligence and make even the most powerful supercomputer look like toys. They could compute everything. There's so much data in this world.
They could just compute the hell out of things. Yeah, but what my question for you is, as a tech journalist, is I understand it's a big deal. I understand the notion of faster processing speeds, and everyone says, oh, the ultimate test here is the ability to predict the weather because no one can do that. But what does that mean?
Bring it down to you and me. Does it mean better autonomous driving? Does it mean sign-in? Yes, that's a very good example.
We don't know. Here's a lot of examples of the calculations. Quantum computing needs to be used. I did a really good interview with the CTO.
If you're going to have autonomous vehicles all over the place, it's a massive computing problem. It's so complex and so many variables. You need quantum computing to be able to make the calculations necessary for those systems to work. That's a highly complex that people are applying it to.
But there's all kinds of cancer research. Weather is another thing. All kinds of things. It has lots of inputs of data.
They're random and stuff. And so it can make these calculations in ways that are heretofore not like toys like they are. Again, it's the further downgrading of humanity. That's what I say.
It's the upgrading of computers and the downgrading of humanity. My question for you is I have a view on this, but a lot of people think at some point processing speed and quantum computing that turns into artificial intelligence that there might be an actual point where these machines become sentient and they make a decision about a billionth of a second that other than in and out or breaking bad, the species has no value and it turns on us. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't turn on us.
Here's what I have interviewed Elon Musk about this and many other people. He compares it to, I just saw the new Terminator with Linda Hamilton and it's so good. What it is, he called it, they treat us like house cats. They don't want to kill us.
It's not a Terminator-like future. It's more that we're like house cats and that's why he's moving into this putting computers in your brains and things like that. Recently when I saw him, he compared it more towards if we're building a highway and we run over an anthill, we don't really pay attention to the anthill, but we don't purposely go let's run over that anthill. It just is in the way.
Anything in the way is what we do, but then becoming these robotic Terminator things seems far-fetched. That made absolutely no fucking sense what you just said there. I'm more confused. You're like an anthill.
When you walk over an anthill, you don't think about it. It's in your way. It depends if I just got out of my yoga class. You might seek out an anthill, I'm guessing, but most people when they're building a highway they just plow on through and they don't think of the answer.
Because it will plow on through. It won't think, oh, I'm going to get the humans. Humans aren't a problem to the computer until they're a problem. I'm literally more worried.
Your explanation is scared the shit out of me. They don't care. They'll either feed us and if we don't feel like feed us, they don't care. They don't care about you.
What they don't have, my understanding is what they don't have and no amount of processing power can provide is intention. Somebody programming it has to have an intention. They don't care. What they always will have and never have is they have no intention and what they are is they're indifferent.
I'll just do what the program tells me. Indifferent. The way I feel about you sometimes. Oh, come on.
Come on. All right, listen. We're moving on to Elon Musk. We're moving fast this week.
All right, Tesla with the earnings report. The release marks the first financial report from the company without co-founder and former CTO J.B. Strobel as hell with Musk. This quarter showed revenue of 6.3 billion versus an expected 6.33 billion.
Back in April, you said it was about to become undone and fall apart, especially because a bunch of key players of the company. But what do you think? Where are you with Tesla? This is a prediction you made back in April.
There's just no getting around it. I got this wildly wrong. In March of this year, South by Southwest, I said that this was the year that Tesla was going to come undone. The stock was at 300 and immediately dubbed at 200 and I thought the dog was about to earn a pig's ear.
I thought I got this one right. And then all of a sudden, the stock started recovering and their earnings yesterday, there's just no doubt about it, it blew away everything except for production metrics. Their profitability was up. It looks like they're getting scale.
So there's just no getting around it. I got this one wrong. Congratulations to Tesla. So where do you think it's going?
So I have just been so wrong on Tesla. But you know what it is? It's confirmation bias. And that is, as someone I do value corporate governance and I feel like the corporate governance is so bad here, I keep kind of hoping it'll catch up to them and so far it hasn't.
And I'm reconnecting with an old mentor of mine from San Francisco, a guy named Paul Stevens who's founded the investment by Robert Stevens and is just a very decent man and is one of these guys I really benefited from as a young man who for whatever reason took an interest in me. But he always said to me, he's been listening to my bearish views on Tesla and he said, Scott, never bet against a company that has a great product. And that kind of stuck with me. He told me that about a month ago.
He's right. He does have a great product. He does have a great brand. I still think the company is wildly overvalued.
But they're just like, this is their day. They blew away the earnings. The millions of fake Twitter accounts all being run by Tesla longs. I'm going to hear from them and they're rubbing my face and to a certain extent I deserve it.
The stock is back to you. All right, good. Oh, so you're taking your list. Yeah, I deserve it on this one.
Well, here's the deal. You're right. The corporate governance thing is just incredible. And I do hear from, I ran into someone at our event at Stanford who worked there and he's like, quite a piece of work there.
At the same time, it's a great product. People love it. My brother has one. He drove it down to Stanford.
So it's really, it's a great product. You're right. And so the question is, can you keep it on track really? That's really, but it's tough.
You know what we should do? You and me and Elon should go see Porsche vs. Ford. I told you, I'm done.
My new motto is, because I know you, I keep getting contacted by what I'll affectionately call all these powerful old white men who want to meet with me because I'm saying negative things about them. So they think, well, if I could just meet Scott, he would love me and stop trashing me. I've decided I've spent too much of my life meeting with powerful white men. I'm going to start, I'm spending all my time meeting with young and the possible.
I am done meeting with the old and the powerful. So no, I have no desire to hang out with Elon. I'll do that for you. All right.
Okay, fine. It's just a movie for goodness sake. It's a movie with some popcorn. It's fine.
Oh, by the way, because I know you, just literally because I know you, I got invited to the premiere of that new Apple Tackles Me Too series with Jennifer Aniston. Oh, yeah. Good, good, yeah. Good.
You're going to that? You should go to that. Oh, yeah, I'll go. Definitely.
The dog likes to put on his nice outfit every once in a while. It's going to be, I'm excited. You know, the thing you do now is you don't go to them after you're invited. Let me just, I'm going to teach you now.
Oh, you're telling me what it's like to be like really important? I'm sort of new money? I'm new money important? Is that what you're saying?
I'm new money important? Yeah, exactly. You'll go. You'll show up and be eager at these parties.
So here's, I'm going to teach you a little thing and then we're going to go break. You're going to teach you a little thing. When you invite to important things, you go like this. You go, no.
No. You go, no. That sounds like I wrote a book. Yeah, you go, no.
And then they're like, oh, are you busy? And you go, no. And they go, you don't want to come? And you go, uh-huh.
Like that, okay. We'll be right back with more Pivot. I can take a break in Florida. There you go.
I'm Maria Sharapova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to Pivot. Scott, we're going to hear from a Pivot friend. We have some smart Pivot friends before we get to wins and fails. So by this time next week, November 1st, Apple have launched its own streaming service.
They're debuting with their own content with some megastars like Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. This is the set part you're going to. Please try to leave them alone, Scott, when you go. We asked Peter Koff, a senior reporter of Recode and host of the Recode podcast, Recode Media, to sum up the state of streaming wars as things start to ramp up.
Everyone is chasing Netflix. Netflix, they're not ahead of the pack. They've lapped the pack. They're just around the track many times.
They're at 160 million subscribers worldwide right in front of the big media companies and they have an answer back. This is the year they're doing it. This is the year that Disney says, all right, we're changing our business model and we're going to compete directly with Netflix. This is the year that Apple, who's been dancing around TV for years and unsuccessfully trying to get into it, all starts and stops.
All right, we're going to try it too. And by the way, even for Apple, it's kind of a toe in the water. It's billions of dollars, but it's just a toe in the water for them. So if it's chasing them, everyone's trying to compete with them, they're so far ahead.
Even though they're under a lot of pressure, it's going to be a long time before we actually see any sort of effect from Apple and Disney, et cetera, going after them. Karen, Scott, you guys are smart people. You're also people who like to watch TV, like to watch videos. Where are you going to spend your money and who do you think is going to win?
Wow. So you start, Karen. I'm going to start. I spend it everywhere.
I do it on the show. I do get HBO because I love Succession. I tried Watchmen, which I didn't like as much as I thought, but I'm going to stick with it because I love Regina King. I watch Hulu if the thing's on Hulu.
I don't watch Hulu. think about it at all. Like, I just don't think about it at all. Like, I'm not brand sensitive to it.
And I think I will buy each of the individuals. I have a Hulu account, I have a Netflix account, I have a HBO, and I might have a Disney if they have the movies I want. But if they happen to be on Comcast for free, where I can get the content is where I get them. So that's how I feel about it.
But I do like Netflix, and I'm always interested in the shows they put up. And whenever I see something cool, it always turns out to be a Netflix thing. That's interesting. Yeah, so first off, with respect to the Watchmen, it's just cool to see DJ.
That's why I call him Don Johnson working again. I know him. Do you know him? I get the sense he's a nice guy.
Is he a nice guy? He's a lovely guy. He was a parent of friends of mine. They were all in school together, and I've been to several parent-type things with him.
He's just fantastic. That's nice. That's so nice to hear. I may give you his email.
And you know what? I think he's also a good actor. Anyway, so you're right. I think a lot of this is additive.
People will, for five bucks, is some of the big-name high-production value you can expect from Apple. I think a lot of people will add on. Everyone's saying that Netflix is going to be the big loser here, but what people fail to realize is the majority of Netflix is going to live and die by their international growth because the reality is domestically everybody already has Netflix, and it's unlikely you're going to swap out Netflix or Apple or Hulu or Amazon Prime. The bigger picture story here, and arguably Tim Cook, who's at $600 million in market value, he's taken a ton of barrage for not coming up with the iPhone, but the reality is the iPhone 11 is just a different product than the iPhone was five years ago, so I would argue he's innovative like crazy, but what they're doing here is if you think Netflix has 150 million members, I think Amazon Prime, I don't know how many Amazon Prime, it's 77% of households.
I don't know what that is in terms of people, but potentially with Apple TV, it's not an attempt to go into the streaming wars as much as it is an attempt to change the complexion of their business and move from a transactional company to a recurring revenue company, and if they take Arcade, Apple Plus, their news clipping service, not iTunes, excuse me, Apple Music, that killed iTunes, and then they add an Apple Plus and figure out a way to give it to everybody for a year, which they're doing with every purchase of an iPhone and make up people to renew, they could have the mother of all recurring, what's the word? What's the word, Kara? Rundle, Rundle. There's my girl.
They could have a corporate membership program with a half a billion people, and that would be second only to the ultimate Rundle, which is Microsoft Office, which has even more than that, so what is Tim Cook, probably the smartest operator in the world right now, saying, you know what? We're at a point where everyone has an iPhone, we've tapped out on all the globally affluence, so we're going to take the same level of top-line revenue with modest growth, and we're going to transition from transactional business to recurring revenue business, and we're going to increase the stock price to 50%. By the way, Thang, not performing that well except for the Apple. Apple is up like crazy this year.
I think Apple's up 56% this year, so Tim Cook, Apple TV Plus is not a streaming thing. That's the small picture. The big picture here is another piece of the puzzle to move to the second largest Rundle in history just behind Microsoft Office from Apple. All right, but it doesn't depend on the content.
I think one of the things we have to think about is the actual content and where content creators want to go. So Netflix attracted John Rhimes, has attracted Ryan Murphy, all kinds of people. So I think it's where the content is created, and look, Amazon has Jennifer Salty there, who they are from NBC. They've got their stuff.
You have all kinds, and Google sort of, YouTube has not really entered the picture in any significant way, although they've certainly tried around the edges. I just don't think they've jumped in in quite the way that others have. I think it's still going to be hard to beat Netflix at this point, although Disney certainly, I think Bob Biker's super aggressive in these efforts. I think this is super important to him.
And I do agree with you on Apple. I just, again, their culture, even though they've hired some really interesting people to do this stuff, is not interested in this stuff. That's the only thing I would say. But the delivery system is great, and you certainly would use it if it was there.
But I do want to give kudos to Netflix for constantly innovating and being just, like Peter said, everyone is chasing them, and they deserve the kudos they get for what they've created. I think Reed Haystings is one of my, I really admire what they've done there. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. And you said, where does the talent go?
The talent goes to two places. It goes to Benjamin's, in other words, it goes to the Highest Fitter, or it goes to HBO. What HBO has done that's so impressive is a fraction of the budget that continue to attract the best talent, because it's almost like what PBS used to be. People used to do stuff that PBS for a lot less money because of the prestige factor.
HBO is now the new PBS, and people will take a huge cut in salary. They'll always show up. Al Pacino isn't going to Netflix. I don't care how much they pay him.
He'll do something with HBO, though. I don't know. There's a lot of people over at Netflix. You'd be surprised how many people over at Netflix.
In any case, it's a good time for content makers. We should have a show. It's a good time for content consumers. Consumers, yeah, 100%.
I know we're bragging out. You and I have an approach about doing a TV show which shows how much money is out there and how many leads they're chasing down. We're like the WeWork of content, though. That's going to go down.
There you go. There's going to be parties. I just don't have read about these sex parties. Someone mentioned it, Stanford.
Yeah, I haven't heard about that either. I didn't either. Yeah, we're not doing those. Anyway, by the way, Peter Kafka is hosting his annual Code Media Conference in Los Angeles in November.
We have a link to tickets in our show notes. Now, let's get back to Wins and Fates. That guy, Peter Kafka, is going to be, I'm going to be found in a hot tub with my Kabbalah spiritual advisor and that person will be Peter Kafka. That guy just makes me feel more calm.
Every time I talk to him, I feel like, I just feel more zen about everything. He's so calming. Seriously. That guy's like a giant foot rub collided with a priest.
Oh, I've never heard of Peter Kafka that way, but okay, okay. I'm glad it's nice. I find you very calm. I'm relaxing.
All right, good. Well, you know what? We all find our people. You know, that's a really important thing.
I'll see him. I'll be like, Scott, I love your work. How are you, buddy? And I'm like, oh, Peter.
Hold me, Peter. Wins and loses. Wins and go to his office. That's great people.
John Stanky is there. Tig Notaro is there. There's all kinds of really cool people he's brought together in Los Angeles. Anyway, listen.
Wins, I'm going to go first with Wins. Women of Congress, I'm going to say the ladies, but Representative Katie Porter, AOC, asking Zuckerberg stuff at the event. I just have to say, it's a huge win. And he really got owned by Representative Ocasio and Representative Porter.
Let's play each of them. Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements? Well, Congresswoman, I think lying is bad. And I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad.
That's different from it being, in our position, the right thing to do to prevent your constituents or people in the election from seeing that you had lied. So we can, so you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think it's just a pretty simple yes or no. And now here's our Representative Katie Porter, asking Zuckerberg if you would spend one hour a week moderating content on Facebook.
Would you be willing to commit to spending one hour a day for the next year watching these videos and acting as a content monitor and only accessing the same benefits available to your workers? Congresswoman, we work hard to make sure that we give good benefits to all the folks who are doing this. Mr. Zuckerberg, I would appreciate a yes or no.
Would you be willing to act as a content monitor and have that life experience? I'm not sure that would best serve our community for me to spend that much time. So I think this was just, these were really great questions. I think they zoned in very quickly on the problems and he was unable to answer.
I found him incredibly unprepared for this hearing because I think he thought it was going to be about Lieber, which he couldn't talk about and he was going to stay out of there like last time and he could, you know, these people were prepared and ready to rumble and I thought it was great. Yeah, and here's the thing. It wasn't that he did poorly. It's that there is no right answer for doing something that is blatantly wrong and that is their argument is that by allowing people to post false advertisements with misinformation and misinformation has ramifications.
Their argument is they're creating discourse and that's just a ridiculous argument. What they're creating is discourse that is unproductive, false, misleading and divisive and it's indefensible given their history that they would not and she absolutely kind of saw this this open gashing wound of hypocrisy and inconsistency and here's the bottom line. Every decision, every narrative, every talking point, we want to give people voice, we want to create discourse is created by a corporate communications department of 750 people with one objective and that is say whatever we need to say such that we can continue to cash anybody's check. That's all it is.
And by the way, the other interview that got kind of overshadowed by this was Katie Couric's interview of Sheryl Sandberg. You make that your win then. Well, she promoted, Sheryl Sandberg promoted this junk science that said when people go on Facebook, they end up being exposed more to both sides of 24% of the content they see from both sides. That is such junk science.
Every piece of academic research shows the more time you spend on Facebook, the more polarized you get, the more you enter into your own filter bubble even if it's false information and the algorithms recognize you don't want discourse that were tribal that you want to go to one pole or the other so that you get angrier and angrier and it's terrible for society. And my win, it's literally as if you kind of read my mind on this. My win is Representative Maxine Waters the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and also a shout out to the ranking member Patrick McHenry from North Carolina. But I thought the hearing was exactly what it was supposed to be.
I thought it was respectful. I thought it's interesting. Republicans kind of took the side of the ideology of innovators. Lee Malone, he's an innovator although most of them can't actually describe what innovation is.
In my opinion, there needs to be more innovation at the Department of Justice and the FTC. And I thought these, like you said, this hearing did exactly what it was supposed to do. And also, I thought Mark Zuckerberg did as good a job as he could given that he has to lie and he has to support a corrupt organization. I think, yes, he did as good as he could but the fact of the matter is these people only.
He couldn't answer. That's exactly what I have a compliment right now in the New York Times talking about they think in a binary term which is they cannot, that's why that speech last week drove me so crazy that he did at Georgetown. It was like either free speech or China or free speech or chaos. And like it's so complex and what they did which I think Porter did when she was talking about content moderators, AOC, when she was talking about ads, Maxine Waters, any of them.
And it was fascinating with all three women doing most of the really hard questions. They were pointing out how complex this is. And the same thing last week with Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King. Mark used a quote by Martin Luther King in his speech and she was like, oh no, my friend, that is not what my father said and that is not what he meant and he was very hurt by disinformation from other politicians.
So I think the complexity is what's hard for these people making it because binary is the way they like. Reductive and twitchy is what they like. And so, you know, that's what's hard here is it is complex and they have been hiding in the complexity by saying, well, if you go this way, if you go that way, we can just make simple decisions and just pick a lane and this is the way we're going to be. And so that's what they were pointing out.
I thought that was great. Yeah, I thought it was. So this feeds right into my fail. What is your, that's your fail?
Well, I just want to highlight. We always talk about Mark Zuckerberg and Shel Sandberg, but this company has a board of directors. So Peggy Alford recently joined, I believe, the board of directors. So Peggy, your refusal, your continued enabling of this company's perversion of our democracy that you have clearly benefited from, you see above here on the board of Facebook.
Mark Andreessen, you are in fact attacking a ripping of the fabric of our society by enabling these two. Ken Chanal, who I know and I think is a very decent man, Ken, I'm incredibly disappointed that you have not done anything to encourage these people and the organization to take this cycle off given the fact that we already see a perversion and damage of our democracy happening again. Susan Desmond Hellman, what are you thinking, Susan? Not enabling or continuing to be a co-conspirator in the slow erosion of our democracy by enabling these two to continue to take money for false ads.
Peter Thiel, I don't even know what to say to Peter, apart from the course here. Jeffrey Zinz, I don't know who you are, Jeffrey, but you are on the board of the company, former Obama person. Way to go, folks. You are in fact going to, we know what's going to happen, it's already happening.
They're going to find out that either voter suppression or misleading ads and what you know, it was a net negative for what is a key component of our society that all of you have benefited from and that is safe and fair elections. We know it's not going to go well and rather than sitting out this election cycle, you decided to cash that check so you can get a little bit richer and I think all of these people are absolutely complicit in what is one of the most outrageous infractions of justice, something that at some point in retrospect will be seen as a crime by sitting on your hands and then they all throw up their arms and say, well, we couldn't do anything. Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg had super voting shares.
All it takes is one of you to say, I'm leaving the board unless we decide to not take political ads. I think that's what happened. What they do is they go quiet. I think René Sting and Erskine Bowles.
Just laugh. What they do is they try to do this and we got to then wrap up for another ad and then get back with predictions. What they try to do when I just did an interview with Gary Cohn is like, you don't know what was said in the room. I didn't say something I was talking about Charlesville and he's like, maybe hypothetically I said something in another private room and I'm sort of like, I'm done with private rooms.
Like saying, being angry Mark Zuckerberg in a private room. I think public is the way to go. Anyway, we have to take a break. We'll be back after this with predictions.
So we are 250 years into this American experiment and I say it's going okay. I give us like a C plus. There is no perfect past but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are human. That's what we do.
I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand those principles to include more people. What's going to determine the next 250 years of America? And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve? Okay, so I'm just going to be a jerk here because I'm a historian so we have to have a prologue explaining, you know, we the people.
You know, I just can't remember from Schoolhouse Rock. We the people are going to form a more perfect union and establish justice. What is it? Ensure domestic tranquility?
So you're talking about a foundational document so I'm building a document that will protect American democracy. That's this week on America Actually. This week on Network and Shell I'm joined by Tank Sinatra, the meme king with over 15 million followers across Tank's big news, influencers in the wild and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how meme culture, think preparation age, starter packs and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value.
Get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll, make you rethink what going viral is really worth and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on youtube.com slash you're rich VFF. Okay, we're back. Let's get to predictions.
Scott, obviously, we could get a whole lot about we work. What else have you got? What have you done for us lately, Scott? Now that you have this vaunted position as a predictor.
I'm going to be wrong. But yeah, you're right. Go ahead. I'm doubling down.
You have 50 points of share between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and I think that that is all going to go somewhere else in the next 60 days. So I'm doubling down. I think in the next 30 days, I don't know if it's going to be, it'll probably be more, but I think there's a decent chance that the front runner in the Democratic primary is going to be a name we're not talking about a lot. And I said the same thing in our podcast last week or earlier this week, but I think Mayor Pete is about to surge and or we're going to have a new entrant.
I mean, even Hillary Clinton is talking about getting back in the race, Mayor Bloomberg or an unknown. But this thing is a lot more wide open than people think because the reality is a lot of us watch the Democratic debates and we just sort of go, meh, it's just, you know, there's a lot of... So who are those people? You discussed this last week.
I want you a person. I want a prediction. Who's going to enter if you had to pick one and I will pick one and we'll see who's correct? So the reality is I don't know.
That's not an answer. I need you to make one. My prediction is the biggest winner of the next 30 days is going to be Mayor Pete. Okay.
And then who would enter if you had to pick? So I'm going with other. I don't think Hillary, I think Secretary Clinton, I think she's going to get... Oh, gosh.
Or someone even said Al Gore. I'm going to flip this to you. You're obviously pregnant. You're pregnant with a prediction.
Pregnant with a prediction. I told you, I already made mine with Bloomberg, but I think he's going to choke. He's a choker. When you say choker, you mean someone decides not to do it, right?
Yeah. He does, he like mulls, mulls, he does polls and then he doesn't do it. Yeah, you're right. He did it so.
On the other hand, I don't know if it's a choker to be worth $60 billion, to be 77, to spend half your year in London and decide, you know what, I don't need this choker. Yeah, but he was Mayor of New York. He loved it. It was the best time of his life.
He'd have a great time to be president. I hope you're right. Okay, so who do you think is going in? Nobody.
I think you're wrong, and I think nobody is. This is the field we have, and so I think Biden is going to have a surge. That's what I think. Do you think Biden is going to have a surge?
Biden. I'm going with a Biden surge, yes. Yeah, that's just because lucky your mom likes Joe, right? No, no, I just have a feeling that Biden is going to have a surge.
That's all I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. So we should revisit that, because I think he's going to give up a lot of share. You think he's going to gain shares, so we should timestamp that.
I think it's going to be Biden-Klobuchar. Thank you. Wow, Amy, Senator Klobuchar. There you go.
Okay, we're going to go. We've got to go and get a look from the producer. I just dropped it right now. You want to give us an email at pivot at voxmedia.com, and we're hiring a new producer for Pivot also, and you don't have to interview with Scott.
That's the most important part of that. Well, you don't have to qualify. Please apply at voxmedia.com slash careers. If you think you're the right person to join this crazy team, there's all kinds of fun.
We are a fun gang, and Scott really is a quiet, intersected person. All the Chipotle you can eat. All the Chipotle you can eat. Anyway, Scott, please read the credits.
Yeah, we have credits. There's other people involved in this. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sanonis and Eric Johnson. Erica Anderson is Pivot's executive producer.
Thanks also to Rebecca Castro, Drew Burrows, and Nishat Curwa. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. And if you like this week's episode, leave us a review. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media.
We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.