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I'm tracking my movement. Sex and beast today. What's going on with you? Listen, before that, the reason I watch Stanley Tutsus, because I watch the Dylan Vero documentary, Alan vs.
Vero. Oh, here we go. We can only have bald, handsome, fun for 10 seconds before we got into males. I can't even do it.
I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. No, you haven't. This is devastating.
I have to say, in any case, I then have to say... I'm going to say it's one of my favorite movies, Hannah's Sisters. You can't watch it anymore after seeing it. Don't watch the documentary then.
That's all I have to say. Crimes and misdemeanors? Yeah, crimes is a good way to get into this issue, not misdemeanors. So we got to my back like...
We moved on to Stanley Tutsusus afterwards, because it was so heartbreaking. And then we were happy because he was eating seafoods. Italian food, right? Yeah.
Just like going from a wine... There's like, in Florence, there's holes in the wall they hand you wine out of. It's very likable, very handsome. I have to say.
We'll probably be accused of cultural appropriation or something. Yeah, we can't. By touring around Italy. Hello, Tutsi.
Swisher's Italian too, by the way. That sounds very Italian. I'm half Italian. I'm kind of Italian cleaning product.
Swisher's were full Italian. My mother was in the kitchen. We are people of Italy. We were born in my grandfather.
It was born in a town called Fili Tai. Yeah, that's fascinating. Anyway, back to me. So my statement, one...
What was this? That split on away from doing my own swimming pool in banks. That's a quote or that's a line from... Have you been watching WandaVision?
No, but I should. You really should. It's really interesting. You're one of these Marvel weirdos.
You like that whole thing? I have. I have. I have.
It's a Marvel. It's way too much to get to. Am I been watching it with my 10-year-old stunt? And I'm not exaggerating it.
We stop. I do what I hate when other people do. I pause it and I'm like, what's going on here? Who is that?
What's going on here? I hate when people do that. Like, just watch the goddamn program. You're not supposed to understand it all.
I've been pausing it. We never watch TV together. We should watch TV. What is this?
Are you kidding? We watch an hour at TV together every week, twice a week. We talk to ourselves. That's true.
But I'm talking about like a month. We are not going to watch a movie together. That's what we're going to do. A movie.
We're going to watch the thing. Not what we're just saying. But anyway, WandaVision, I think Disney has kind of a second big hit on its hands. I think it's really interesting.
It's very different. There's so much TV. There's so much good TV. I like cross-generational TV, too.
I like being able to watch TV with my voice. There's a ton of good television. There's nothing to be said about it. There's so much going on.
Anyways, WandaVision, watch it, Cara. OK, I shall. Now, enough with the TV recommendations. Big news to the Supreme Court denied Donald Trump's bid to block New York's prosecutors from accessing his taxes.
It's the Al Capone moment. Dominion Voting Systems is suing the MyPillow guy, which is a pleasure. Michael Endell, from more than $1.3 billion. I talked to the Dominion Systems Voting Systems CEO and he said he was going to do this and then he did.
And now, Merrick Garland is just not a good moment for the Trump people today. It's a bad Trump time. But there's a little bit of this aspirational or confirmation bias, but I think there really is a very strong sense of the immunity he's kicking in and talking about unification. I don't think after something like this, you can unify until you hold people accountable.
I think you have trials. They're still kicking, though. They're still kicking. I don't know.
I think there's a decent chance that the former president is in real legal jeopardy. Yeah, with this one. Everyone is saying, oh, he's going to run for president. I'm like, I don't know.
I think he's in real trouble. This one's bad. This one's bad. Tax fraud, I'll go pound down.
I'll go pound down. That's right. It's an interesting question of whether he's going to appear this week at CPAC today or tomorrow or something like that. So he's back, blabbing away.
He's going to do the same act. But you're right. Immunities are kicking in. By the way, Pfizer's COVID vaccine stopped 89.4% of transmissions in Israel.
That's a good one. This is the most important news story of year. And it's just so exciting. I've been thinking about this a lot because there is a narrative that is developed amongst college educated, wealthy, and middle-class households.
That, OK, so you know how 80% of people believe that they're better than average drivers? Which obviously makes no sense. I don't go ahead. Yeah, sorry.
OK, you're in the 20% of self-aware. But essentially, the majority of people have convinced themselves that, OK, I'm in decent shape. I take care of myself. I'm probably not going to get it.
But even if I did, and I know a bunch of people who have got in and said, oh, it wasn't a big deal. And then they hear the nonsense, John Science, that is amplified on Facebook. Less so on Google. On YouTube, I want to just give a shout out.
When I talk about my book, Post-Corona, on YouTube, they take it down because we don't want anyone talking about corona. And I respect that. But anyways, on Facebook, where they continue to spread, or where anti-vax content continues to run a mock, and they have done a little better. Anyways, the bottom line is, people have bought into this narrative that, oh, in a cost-benefit trade-off, I'm going to wait.
Because even if I get it, it's probably not. I'm probably 0.01% fatality rate. I'm in that group. And what this shows, what this shows, is the question you should be asking yourself.
Is not, are you worried about getting COVID? The question you should be asking yourself is, are you worried about someone you love getting COVID? And if you are, if you are, even if you've talked yourself into believing, you'll be fine. Doesn't matter.
You need to get this vaccine. This is about not being a fiber in the web of death that is snaring our most vulnerable. 89% of the time. Some people think the Biden administration is too negative, and it's causing more of that anti-vax.
Too negative. Well, they're being like, be careful, it's not working. We're still in trouble. The problem is, they've got to keep warning people not to.
Yeah, they don't want anyone to get relaxed. Relax. And at the same time, they want, they're encouraging. And they're making it possible, 1.7 million vaccines, way above what they said they were going to do.
So it's a real interesting question. I mean, David, leave it alone. 14, something like 14, 15% of Americans are going to be vaccinated. No, no, I met 1.7 million a day.
That's the number they're doing a week. I think it's a week. Sorry. But one of the things that's really interesting is that Fauci was on the thing, keep your mask on.
You have that mask to 2002. And then they're saying things are going getting better. And then the herd immunity is getting closer. I think it's a threat of needle.
35% of people are immune because they had COVID. Another 12 to 14% have had the vaccine. So they got to get to it. 85%.
Anyway, you do feel like today is freezing in DC. But the temperature is rising today. And all this week, it's going to be in the 50s. And I have a feeling, I just cannot take it anymore this winter and this COVID and everything else.
I think people are at that moment. So they've got to keep the control of the face masks and things like that at the same time feel hopefulness, at least, and want to take the vaccine in order to move that along faster. This is so exciting, though. If you think about it, it's not only, you know, I mean, my biggest fear has been my kids, grandparents, one of them is immunocompromised.
And I thought, OK, this is how she dies. One of us gets it. We got flu. OK, we're fine.
A headache, a flu, whatever. And then there's always a non-zero probability of being a long collar. I know some young people who have contracted this and still dealing with it. But the majority of the people I know have gotten through it.
But then you give it to somebody, my friend's father, a close friend, David Lister, father was a pediatric surgeon, lived a fantastic life and passed away from this and probably had a few more good years. So this is not only about, again, the question isn't about do you want to get COVID. The question is, do you want anyone you love to get COVID? And this shows, this shows that the narcissist, what I call playbook of, well, I'm going to wait.
Well, that should, that doesn't happen. Do not wait. Do not wait. Get in line.
It's so interesting because there's a whole, you know, who gets in line and stuff like that. I still obviously haven't gotten mine because I'm not up yet. But the idea of line waiting is really kind of, I think it's frustrating to a lot of people. At the same time, you have to wait in line.
As I told you, I have some relatives that jumped on and I just don't want to speak to them. I just don't want to speak to them. I'm not fair. And then other people are guilty because there was a friend of mine who was eligible for the line and was thinking about not taking it.
It was, I forget why they were eligible. It was either they were a teacher or something that was totally legit, whatever state they're in. But then they're like, well, my grandfather hasn't gotten it. And I'm like, well, you're in the line, whatever the line rules are.
Get it, get it, get it, get it's quickly as possible. And then you're being fair. And take your vacation if you're a vaccine tourist or you jump in the line unfairly, you're an asshole. And take pictures of you getting it to make people like you more comfortable with it.
The number of people who claim they're going to get it is gonna cause what's happened is now that 55 million people have received a vaccine. And there's been very, very few. I mean, like no instance, I mean, this is like odds are not only great or being eaten by a shark or struck by lightning. You're odds are about the same.
Good vaccine. Struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark. All right, speaking of immunity, speaking of gonna try stories, big stories. The UK's Supreme Court has ruled that Uber drivers are not self-employed.
The ruling essentially means that the UK Uber drivers need to be treated like employees and not gig workers. That includes paid time off and minimum wage. Uber's share price is dipping in United States falling in news. It's unclear how the UK ruling will affect Uber's business model overall.
When Uber listed its shares in the United States in 2019, it's filing the Securities Exchange Commission, included the section on the risks. They would have to classify drivers as employees in compensating them. So Scott, is this like GDPR for gig workers or not? That was the law that changed things around privacy, et cetera, in the US, globally.
But what do you think is gonna happen? I think this is, again, I think this is directly related to the Facebook Australia. And I think the rest of the world, their immunities are kicking in sooner because they don't, they get all of the downside of big tech and a fraction of the upside. And the notion that also reflects well in the UK where money hasn't perverted politics as much as it has in the US, where a proposition in the US.
So, is this law, is this legal? This is judges? Yeah, $150 million to the AB5 and then $3 million against which ballot, which side won. But I think, look, there's just not getting around it.
Until we, if we wanna wait for the government to catch up and have a new classification of work, fine. But until then, until then, we wanna err on the side. Billionaires have increased their wealth from 1.9 trillion to 4 trillion in the last 10 years. Minimum wage has exploded from 725 to 725.
And yet we have a company that's figured out a way to skirt even those minimum wage laws with software called Uber, called Lyft. The gig economy is, there's a cancerous part of it. And if we're gonna err, if we're gonna err, and maybe it's clumsy and maybe we need a new classification, fine. But the fact that a guy or a gal turning on software to drive people in the back might make at least minimum wage, I mean, is that really a threat to capitalism?
Is that really? It's not really a threat to their business. I mean, I mean, it has iterations throughout to like to doordash to everything else. There's a real struggle between things that consumers really like, like fast delivery or cars on demand and stuff like that.
And what it actually cost. And when Uber was initially, when they were doing those $4 across the city, things I don't remember when you take it and it was like $6. And I was like, I literally was like, I just paid $4. It did not cost $4.
It did not, it cost me $4, but not society, not the driver. This is just bullshit. Like someone somewhere is paying for my right. Or did that little black dress from H&M and decide how much that's costing is not allowed?
I think about a lot of that. We have fetishized the consumer in our society. We've decided whatever the consumer wants, whatever the un-consumer wants, and it's like, no, we have people who are thoughtful, who are looking at the supply chain, who are looking at missions, who are looking at carbon, who are looking at child labor, who are looking at minimum wage laws, and we'll step in when there's externalities, there rise and unfortunately, unfortunately big tech is very smart, very well researched and steps in with charming individuals and lobbyists to suppress those, that intervention called regulation around externalities. Capitalism is not an organic state.
If it doesn't sit on a bed of empathy, you end up as a Central American nation with a rich. You're full of them to fetishize consumers, bed of empathy. It's the other ones. It's the sleep on bed of empathy.
No, I slept on Annabel's and I think I'm still tripping a little bit. But essentially, if we don't have people in all this bullshit narrative that, oh, you're against capitalism, the whole point of capitalism is we intervene to adjust around externalities and a huge externality around a class of people called Uber drivers, and not all of them. A large portion, maybe even the majority of the drivers, when we talk to them, like it. They say they like it, they provide flexibility, but there's a percentage of them that should be making more money and they should be passing those costs onto the consumer, even if it makes it a smaller business, even if Uber isn't worth more, and Ford and General Motors, that's okay.
That's okay, that's our job. To make sure that capitalism, we continue to do well by doing good. Come on, go, you can't. Go, United Kingdom.
Go, United Kingdom. God save the clear. But say you're shareholder of Uber, how would you play this? The situation of beds of empathy and fetishizing.
I would get out ahead of it. And you know what, Dara Kastrashahi, it should be credited with what was probably the most strategic and deft acquisition of last year. Their acquisition of the food delivery company was a Postmates, who did they acquire? One of them, Postmates, yeah.
Postmates, yeah. Look, he has pivoted his business, and diversified it, and said, okay, instead of the novel coronavirus taking wind out of my sale, I'm gonna put more wind in my sale, and he took an inflated currency, and I think Uber's dramatically overvalued. And use that. And what do you mean when you have a fully?
Well, you probably, I guess they wouldn't be considered. Delivery people really aren't, thought it was employees, are they? It's interesting. That was a great move.
So I think that was probably one of their acquisitions. If I were Dara, I would try and get out ahead of it. And I would say we're going to, I mean, quite frankly, she should pull a Brian Chesky, where I'm a shareholder, and say, we're gonna get out ahead of this. And position the company around it's stakeholder.
There's a face the music issue on employees, and a face the music issue on advertising. And you know, interesting, Corey Dotto had a really amazing thread on Twitter. I recommend it. I was gonna read the first part.
There's an old Irish joke whose punchline goes, if you want to get there, I wouldn't start from here. That's basically how I feel about the so-called Australian link text and Facebook's retaliation. Let's start with the fact that it's not a link text, and then they talk about the arbitration and stuff like that. They design their system, so publishers leak intelligence to them, then they exploit the leakage to gouge the publishers further.
It hurts advertisers, readers, and publishers, and so the legal, colusive, corrupt, ad technology duopoly. And the existence of an advertising duopoly means a result of it lacks antitrust enforcement. Facebook and Google were permitted to execute a long string of anti-commanding mergers in addition to producing the hyper-constrated market we see today. The obvious remedy to this situation is to break up the monopolies that is off the table for now.
40 years of neoliberal orthodoxies as monopolies are efficient breakups to work. So we're left yanking on other policy levers. Anyway, these are the two areas, I think, this idea of owning markets and how to deal with employees that are gonna be the big ones for tech to deal with. Yeah, and I think there's an investment strategy here.
For the first time, my investment advice for the last 10 years has been, don't buy anything that's not an unregulated monopoly. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, there's no need to buy anything else. And I'm actually personally about to make two investments, and I make usually one to two investments a year. And I think there is a, my big thing is dispersion, but I also think that content in a healthier web ecosystem is a great place to invest right now, because I think a lot of people, including consumers, their elected representatives, have decided, okay, we need a less toxic web.
And also, I think I'm a decent place to invest right now, and I'll talk more about this once the investment's closed, because I like to disclose. I think content and news and local news are about to have their day in the sun after getting a shick kicked out of them for the last one or three years. I like that, I like to hear about where you're going with this. Okay, anyway, so what would you buy over?
If you didn't go on a meta-economy and they not lying on a bed of empathy, what would you do? I don't, I haven't looked at, I just, I look at the stock and I think, wow, this is really fully valued. I think Dara is a really talented strategic executive and I think it was a great acquisition. I would want to be on the side of a gig economy company that still has employees working for less than minimum wage.
Even if it's only 10% of them, I just would want to, it's actually feels really offensive. Minimum wage should be what they should be paying $15 an hour. How about you, would you buy over? I don't buy any of those, I don't really have to worry about my, you know, but you know, I have a very small, foam-agreed thing going on, so I go, oh, I should have taken that job at Google and I'm like, oh, those assholes.
You know what I mean? That's what happens. It happens with all of them, I was offered jobs at all. Now, I'm my yacht.
You and Fiji, out of yachts. I'm just saying, that would happen. I could have, I was offered jobs, I would have been very wealthy. And then like...
I know, that's not what you would do with your money, that's ridiculous. You're right, I would attack. But in any case, every time I do that, and I realized that I really was there and had the, and actually not just was there, but I had the offer. And then I didn't take it, and it doesn't times it's happened.
I'm like, I don't want to work for those assholes. Like it's just kicks in. I don't want to work for those assholes. It's stronger than my greed and foam about money.
I just can't, I just can't sustain interest in it. And anyway, I have plenty of money. Anyway, Scott, we're going to take a quick break. And when we're back, you'll be joined by New York Times best-selling author, Nicole Peralrath, to talk to cybersecurity.
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That's ODOO.com. Moving on, we have a friend of Pivot, Nicole Pearlroth, is the New York Times cybersecurity reporter and the New York Times bestselling author of This is How They Tell Me the World Ends. It's about cybersecurity weapons race, essentially. Nicole, welcome.
Thanks for having me. So one of the things we talk before many times about this, and you write a lot of stories, it happens, talk about why you decided to write the book, because we're in the middle of a huge attack, the solar winds attack. We'll get to that in a minute. And the role of FireEye and Microsoft in this.
But talk to me about why you decided to write this book. So the short answer is I had been covering these major attacks and I kept seeing my name in the footnotes of other people writing books. And I just had to kind of give myself a pep talk and say, you know these attacks better than anyone, except for the people on the ground, write a book. So that's why I wrote the book.
And I crammed everything in from the last seven to 10 years of reporting. And then I sent it in, and then this giant solar winds attack happened. So in some ways, it's the prelude to solar winds. But why I chose to focus specifically on the cyber weapons market is I had seen over and over again that regulation was not going to get us out of this.
Businesses were just incentivized to get their product to market. Government was incentivized to keep a lot of the software vulnerable so they could preserve their espionage advantage and their battlefield preparations. And as individuals, security is so annoying. We don't like turning on two-factor authentication.
So I wanted to focus on the incentive models and see what the incentive structures were and how they could possibly pull us out of this. So you're saying that they want to get the software out to serve people who don't want to deal with issues of security. And then the government likes that US government, especially lets this sort of gray market go on and attack these software programs we all use every day. Yes.
And I had heard murmurings of this gray market, but it still blew me away that the US government, these agencies charged with keeping us safe, were paying hackers, some of them all over the world, in Europe and Israel as young as 16 or 15 years old, to turn over a vulnerability in software that we all rely on and then never tell a soul, lock them up in NDAs and then increasingly classification levels. And maybe that was OK two decades ago when Russia was using one piece of software and we were using another. But we all use the same software now. Whether you know it or not, we all use Microsoft Windows.
And so I was fascinated by this idea that our own government would preserve a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows so it could spy on Iran or so it could get into around centrifuges and take them out one day. And increasingly we're rolling all that software into our things and into our power grid and into our water treatment facilities. And so it seemed like the stakes were getting higher and higher, but no one even knew that this secret market for vulnerabilities existed. Right.
I'm going to ask one more question. And Scott will jump in. SolarWinds, explain it to people. This is the biggest attack that has happened on the United States government and companies.
Yes. So SolarWinds is probably the most pervasive attack we've seen on our systems. And we only learned about it. And this is the part I think really is key.
We only learned about it, not from our government, not from the NSA, not from cyber command. We learned about it because FireEye, a security firm, was itself hacked. And then unwinding its own attack, it realized that these hackers have come in through technology made by SolarWinds, an American company that makes software that just allows IT administrators to see what's on their network. And that software, that visibility software, was used by more than 400 of the Fortune 500 and some of our most sensitive government agencies like the Department of Energy, which oversees our nuclear labs, Treasury, Commerce, State, Justice, and Homeland Security, the very agency charged with keeping us safe.
The problem is that they've been in our systems for so long. We think since at least March of 2020, that they had vast opportunities to plant more backdoors and more applications. And it will be a very long time before we uncover every single one of those. So essentially what's happened here is, the Biden administration just inherited a communication system it cannot trust.
Now the good news is we think this was espionage. We think they were after emails, strategy planning documents. The bad news is Russian actors, not the one we think was guilty here at the SVR, but other Russian actors have used the same technique for much darker purposes, like wiping data, paralyzing networks. The same one case.
Yes. And in one case, shutting off the power in Ukraine. In Ukraine, all right, Scott. So just, I had never really looked at that.
I think that's fascinating that companies and people are not only competing against bad actors, we're competing against the government. That's such an interesting insight. So thank you for that. The question I have is, can you give us a state of play around competence if you think of every nation state that has its own cyber warfare and cyber defense resources?
Give us a sense for Handicap the League, who's kind of best at worst among call it the G20 or non G20. Who are the Tom Brady's and the people who just don't know what they're doing? Such a good question. So we, I think, remain the world's top cyber superpower.
What we did with Stuxnet, where us being the NSA and Israel hacked into an Iranian nuclear facility 10 years ago, jumped from the Windows systems into the industrial controls and spun those centrifuges in some cases so fast that it destroyed the uranium. And in some cases, slowed them down to a trickle. And did it in a way that it looked like a natural accident? No one has ever come close to that.
That is still to this day, 10 years later, the most sophisticated cyber attack we've ever seen. Other countries who are capable of doing that include Israel because we did it with them. And then I would say just below them, if not tied, are Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and maybe France or Germany. But then below that is this huge wide gap.
And then you have the actors who really want to do harm or really want to exploit financial systems for profit like North Korea. And 10 years ago, they were way behind us. They had the intent to do harm, but they didn't have the capabilities. And what this market has done, the one that I'm writing about, about purchasing these capabilities from hackers and these vulnerabilities in code that you can use for espionage, but also destruction, what that market has done is closed this capability scap substantially.
So Iran is not where the NSA is. But what they've learned is they can do just as much damage with rudimentary code that just wipes out the data at Saudi Aramco, which they did a few years ago, where they replaced it with an image of a burning American flat. And so the gap is closing. And the other thing I would say is, yes, we are the most advanced cyber superpower, but we are also among the most targeted nation states on Earth because we have systems of most interest.
And we are the most vulnerable because we're the most wired. And we don't seem to understand that this philosophy at Facebook of move fast and break things, get as much out there as possible, be first to market. It has really harmed us when it comes to security. So we have some work to do on fun defense, but we are still way far ahead on offense.
Just offense alone doesn't work. Right, so defense, you're essentially saying, we're a reason why Rob is because that's where the money is. That's where ransomware attacks, or if you're trying to do malevolent things, like what happened in Florida on a grid, because there's all kinds of flavors of this. There's malevolent, there's just money, there's just espionage, and then there's just wreaking havoc.
Like misinformation, which is a whole nother, misinformation and disinformation campaigns by the Soviet Union, I mean Russia and others. Talk about defense, because this is one of the issues you and I have spoken about. We have in the Biden administration, there is now Ann Newberger who is leading the way in terms of dealing with this, but it's an emergency level. And I wrote a column recently about this, which I also quoted you in, where they missed it in the Trump administration.
I think one of them called me and said, we didn't miss it, I don't think you didn't miss it. You maybe knew about it, you didn't tell anybody, I don't know. But how did that happen? How did our defense fall so badly?
And is this the solution to do it on emergency basis every time rather than have a central command? Like, because there's so many different players who are not gonna sell me, there's this, there's this person, this person, what do we have to do to have better defense? Well, it's a really good question with a really hard answer. I mean, what Russia did with SolarWinds is they got our number.
They exploited our red tape brilliantly, because what they did was they got into these into SolarWinds, which is an American company software. They got into SolarWinds clients through their software update mechanism, but where they set up their command and control was in New Jersey using servers from GoDaddy and from Amazon, and that's where the NSA can't look. The NSA cannot look into these domestic systems. That's how we are set up.
So in a lot of ways, Russia just used our constitution against us like they have with misinformation and disinformation where they've used our first amendment against us. So this is a really hard problem to solve for. One of the things that the Trump administration did is they rolled out this executive order, which basically says companies like Amazon and GoDaddy have to report which foreigners are registered under their systems, in part because clearly we were blinded by this attack by Russia. I don't know if that's going to be enough, and I don't know what the American tolerance is for going any further, especially after all the discussions we had with Snowden, at first Snowden, the contractor who leaked the NSA documents.
So it's a really hard question to solve for, which is why in the book I say, let's just start with baby steps here. Let's take inventory of what's in our systems. Let's know what software touches our systems. Let's know how much of it is American made.
In the case of SolarWinds, a lot of that software was built in places like Belarus, where we just don't have the same visibility or maybe the same level of security. A lot of the victims didn't even know they used SolarWinds. A lot of the tools that make it its way into software like SolarWinds is open source. These open source protocols that are often just one dude sitting on his couch, operating on a volunteer budget.
So let's take inventory of how much software is making its way into these critical and sensitive systems. And then let's talk about how to secure it, whether it's making sure it has a multi-factor authentication, making sure we're doing code audits and penetration tests, making sure individuals understand that it should be mandatory to have to turn on two-factor authentication and to use different passwords because they're all gone. We're just, there's no point in even in some ways discussing the higher up things when we can't even get the basics right. And the basics would wipe out 70% of the threat.
It wouldn't stop SolarWinds, but it would get us to a much better place than we are right now, where hospitals are getting rants and weird all the time, schools are getting walked up and taken offline. Everyone's using fishing for fraud scams and that kind of thing. But Nicole, and this is my theme, that everything is essentially a transfer of wealth from the port of the rich, the young to the old and to small and medium sized businesses to large businesses. My understanding of espionage is that there's political and geo, kind of geopolitical espionage and then there's corporate espionage, which is basically China planning spies inside companies and saying, hey, send us the IP for this company and we're gonna figure out a way to knock it off.
And my understanding is that the resources allocated to corporate espionage has grown, has exploded exponentially because money is very powerful in terms of geopolitical power. And when you see this, when you see this ransomware, at the end of the day, isn't there an entire industrial complex dependent upon smaller, medium sized businesses remaining to be vulnerable such that big companies and big tech can cash the register or ring the register or go public? And there's a disincentive to protect small and medium sized businesses because this is an enormously lucrative industry for big tech. Yeah, it's such a good question.
Karen and I have talked about this before. Where this is all going is mom and pop businesses, small and medium sized businesses do not have the resources to hire the top security engineers. They don't have the money to put in place the intrusion detection tools and the network monitoring tools and all of the fancy stuff you can buy from ViRi and CrowdStrike. So that's not the case at Amazon and Google, right?
Most of their security teams these days are like many intelligence agencies. Yeah, they're all foreign. NSA, CIA, Australia, UK, GCHQ, analysts, and operators and hackers, they have huge intelligence agencies within their businesses looking for this stuff, which means you are better off as a medium, small, medium sized business in using Amazon Web Services or the Google Cloud, then you are trying to manage all your data with some server in the back office. And what that means is it's precisely what you just said, Scott, which is the business is drifting to the big players because the small players just don't have the resources to protect their data.
And in a lot of cases, that is why ransomware is hitting these small, medium sized businesses not just businesses, but municipalities, small, mediums, towns that just oversee these tangled webs of outdated software and they don't monitor who's accessing why and they don't have two-factor authentication on, so they're really ripe, easy targets for ransomware. I want to talk specifically about a platform. And I want to tell you that I would say I'm paranoid, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. And you tell me if I have a tin foil hat on or there's any logic to my fears here.
When I started being very openly critical on Twitter of Putin, I started finding that a lot of people came into my feed with a very basic, Scott, love your work, it's always the same thing, love your work, but on this one, you have it wrong. And then slowly but surely. And then when I also, and the threat as an internal, started criticizing the septic tank, which is a portfolio of some of these seasons San Francisco, all of these bots started showing up, or if I say Tesla is overvalued, and now my feed is littered with accounts where they say very, very disparaging things and it's seeming a methodical way to be attacking my credibility, quite frankly. And I click on them, low follower account and can't find a person here.
I'm under the belief or the notion that if I were in the GRU, that the most cost effective weapon would be to identify a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand people who are anti-Russia and just slowly but surely attack their credibility. And so my question is, is that going on to the extent I think it is and two, what do you think, I think Twitter should have identity? And I think this first amendment to cloud cover bullshit that what about the journalist in the Gulf reporting on human rights? I'm like, you know what, I think we could probably figure that out.
It's pretty easy to see when someone is reporting legitimate news and when they aren't, is the problem is absolutely out of control? Is I think it is specifically on Twitter and what do you believe should be done around identity or forcing identity on these platforms? Well, one caveat here I would say is there's a lot of enthusiastic Tesla. That's a terrible thing.
Yeah, I don't know if that's the Russians, but I agree with you. I think Twitter has vastly underestimated what we call sophisticated chatbots these days. They're much more sophisticated than they were in 2016. They recognize natural language and they can respond in natural language and they're taught to search for keywords or tweets critical of Putin and come after you.
That is very, very real. I have talked to former Twitter security folks who say that is one of the reason they quit because Twitter was not adequately addressing the bot problem. And they come a long way but they're nowhere near where they need to be. Also, I have the same problem.
I've had things where I've said anything critical of Russia or tried to attribute a Russian disinformation campaign. And next thing I know people are tweeting out cartoons with my face on it walking into a gas chamber. I mean, really heinous, anti-Semitic stuff. This is a great story.
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, yes, I agree with you. It's the same trade-off that we always talk, be careful what you wish for, but yes, my knee-jerk reaction is we need better identity on Twitter. I don't see the same level of vitriol or bots or disinformation on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a mess.
100%. Yes. It's not an ad driven model, subscription identity. I'm sorry to talk about it.
No, it's true. I've just noticed it just with my book coming out. The conversations on LinkedIn are nuanced, they're pleasant. They're thought provoking Twitter.
They're civil. Yeah, they're exactly. But then I don't know what to do about the journalists in the Middle East and how to solve for that. But Saudi Arabia, we caught them clanting spies at Twitter, literally planting employees at Twitter.
So they're working their way around it anyway. Well, also Twitter has a profit motive. You keep it going. Yeah.
Yeah, one of the things people have said is let's get rid of trending topics because that really drives a lot of these bots. And in Facebook, and in Facebook, so that rules around groups, which is the same thing. All right, I have one last question for you. This is how they tell me the world.
How does the world end for us from a side point? Do you have the worst case scenario for you? What is it? Well, the worst case scenario is sort of where we already are.
Oh, dear. You know, we're in the last one minute to midnight. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You and I should roll.
You and I are the same. How do you being more educated and more credible? We have the same view of the world. Yeah.
So they're out to get off. I'm like the glass half empty kind of gas. All right, go on my sister rock on. Yeah.
OK, I'm gone. No, I mean, we are Russia's in our government networks. They're in our grid. They've gotten into the power the power plants.
We've seen them break into nuclear plants. Our hospitals are getting rants and where China is making off with our intellectual property. And our water treatment facilities are now getting hacked. The reason the worst case scenario is just one more minute away is because no one has actually used these accesses to turn off the power yet.
But it doesn't mean it's two clicks away. So that's why this is how they tell me the world ends. It's time to just really wake up. Because what are we waiting for?
Are we waiting for them to turn off our lights? Are we waiting for this geopolitical trigger? Or do we want to do something right now? And I think the answer is we probably should start doing something right now.
So Ted Cruz may be a victim. No kidding. He's not at all. Oh, God.
Why? No, it seems to be the weather in that case. Oh, right. Yeah.
I mean, how interesting. I mean, I've been talking about what would be the threat if the power got turned off or the drinking water supply was contaminated. And it turns out it wasn't a cyber attack. It was just this under investment in winterizing.
But yeah. Yeah. That's what it would look like. Yeah, 100%.
Anyway, Nicole, thank you so much. Her book is This is How They Tell Me The World End. It's so worth it. It reads like a thriller.
Is there any movie? There's a TV show. I can say that now. There's this will be my big announcement.
Oh, wow. So telling us. Yeah. That's Fx optioned it.
So it'll be a TV show. So who's going to star as you? I don't think I can even even be in it. They're making a question.
It's interesting. OK. I love her. I love her.
Jessica Chastain. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she's in a lot of space. She's okay.
All right. Oh, God. I don't see you listen to call. She's just a very impressive film.
You're like a Scott Lady. It's terrible with a lot better hair. In any case, Nicole, thank you so much for coming on to this. Thank you.
So fun talking to you guys. Likewise. That was Nicole Pearl Roth. Scott, I knew you would like her.
I did. She's a cyber brilliant reporter. I'm going to get back. And she reinforces my paranoia, which I like.
Oh, great. Perfect. All right. They are out to get you, Scott.
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OK, Scott, wins and fails. What? Do you have any? Do you have any?
Yeah, I always have them. And I literally develop them as I'm talking to you. Here's a fascinating win. This is not really a winner of fail.
I just discovered all these girl singers. I'm aware of Selena Gomez and the rest of them and Britney Spears, et cetera, like things like that. But I'm thinking of you. So I'm trying to think about whether it's her thing, JoJo Siwa, who is this.
She wears a piece on dance moms. She wears a thing in her hair, a bow in her hair all the time. She's really kind of crazily a capitalistic something. She's selling shampoo.
Well, she just came out as a lesbian. And she's doing it with the same cheerleading enthusiasm she does in selling shampoo or dancing her dances. And so I'm fascinated by her. And I just think she's a win on some weird level because she's got my attention.
I can't even say that. I have absolutely no comment on that. I know that. Well, she's in that genre of Britney Spears, but different.
Like different. What's her name again? I'm sorry. JoJo Siwa.
And if you just read something. How did you sell last name? S-I-W-A. And recently a rapper attacked her.
This guy named Debaby. Debaby. When you say attacked what he meant? He's had some line in one of his songs that attacked her.
It's just fascinating. I love all this pop stuff. I'm very interested in the pop stuff. Faele, John Corrin just did it at the hearings from Eric Garland bringing up the steel dossies again.
I mean, honestly, these people. It's like someone said it's like the mix tapes of the right wing. It's Hillary's emails, Hunter Biden, the steel dossie. Like, they got to get a new act.
And if Trump comes back tomorrow and doesn't have some new material, I think we need to move along. OK. Thank you. What are yours?
So my win is the news around not only the news that 89% of people who are, I thought it was a reduction of 89% of transmission once you had the vaccine. Yeah, 99% is really. So that is incredibly. That's just wonderful news that further supports it.
Our numbers are plummeting, too, since people have been getting it. Well, that's my actual win. Is that distinctive all the well-documented and deserved problem-oriented deficiencies in how we've handled the novel coronavirus? We are, as a percentage of the population, vaccinating, really the vaccinations as well are better than every nation in the world, except for five.
Better than Canada, better than Japan. There's just a small number of nations, including Israel and UAE and a few others that are doing a better job. And a lot of it is, A, we have tremendous manufacturing capability, Pfizer and Moderna are producing. The vaccines here in the US, you do have to give Operation Warp Speed and the previous administration some credit for committing $1 billion to these companies.
So they bought a ton of vaccine early. And then our health care workers, the frontline workers. So our win is we are, I don't know, say we're not getting ahead of this thing, but we are vaccinating at a great rate. Americans are embracing their brothers and sisters and getting their brothers and sisters off this beach of death, if you will.
So I think the vaccine rollout, credit where credits do, is really starting to get momentum. And I think, according to a lot of people, you're going to see the infrastructure every day, not only if people loosely break it down and it's vaccines and then the distribution system that actually inoculates or vaccinates people, each of those things is getting better every day. So I'm going to stop you. So 500,000 deaths we passed.
I mean, so unnecessary the amount when you compare it, this is going to be looked at the study forever. Like who didn't get it and why? The other countries like us just didn't die at the rates we did. And so therefore, either we're a sickly group of people here in the United States or a bunch of assholes.
Like the answer is yes. And the reality is we are overweight and we are, but it wasn't our physiology that really hurt us. It was our arrogance and anyways, in our confidence. But we've spent a lot of time talking about that.
The vaccine rollout in America is on a relative basis, is actually going really well. That's my win. And then my fail is, I think they continue to warn the poor as evidence are manifested in what's happening in Texas with these utilities that are demand priced. And they sign up people and there's instances where it's taken out of your checking account and there's senior citizens who've seen their electricity bill go to $7,500 a week.
And what choice do you have? It's like, well, I could either freeze to death. It's a 75 year old retired cross-carve. You have people.
And so you've had these seniors and low and middle income people literally wiped out. Little kids. Because essentially it's just the same war. And that is we wanted to disparage government and infrastructure.
Why? Because if you can't afford heat but you're rich, you can get heated by the Ritz Carlton and Cacun. You can go by that heat, right? So any reduction in disparagement and government.
And the Ted Cruz reference for people who hadn't been paying attention to that. Fachios, Poppinger. Thank you for that. When you cut funding, and granted, I actually think the crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
I think I'm not in favor of getting states and local governments bailouts unless it goes directly to schools because I do think a lot of states, including California, including New York, have to have some tough conversations with how they spend people specifically unions. I do think there just needs to be more efficiency. But having said that, generally when you disparage an under fun and start the street against government, and not only that, investment in public infrastructure, that really is just a transfer of wealth from the port of the rich. Because it's poor people that need a train running every 15 minutes to get to work.