Internet’s Luigi Obsession, Biden Pardons, and Guest R.J. Cutler  ## Metadata - Author: [[Pivot]] - Full Title: Internet’s Luigi Obsession, Biden Pardons, and Guest R.J. Cutler - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/4d6a46e4-89b0-4e73-b300-6c0b4fc5ac73 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Benihana Birthday** - Kara Swisher celebrated her birthday at Benihana, a restaurant both she and her children enjoy. - The predictable and comforting experience is a key reason for her preference. Transcript: Kara Swisher So it's working out very well, I think. Anyway, it's delicious. Where are you now? You're in London still, right? Scott Galloway Yeah, I'm in London. Yeah, I'm going to Riyadh on Monday or Tuesday, and then I'm going to South Africa. I'm going to Cape Town for the holidays. ([Time 0:03:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/baa9a3e2-4450-47db-b9cd-c42e2f9d1727)) - **Lifestyle Arbitrage** - Consider lifestyle arbitrage, moving to a lower-cost area with a high quality of life. - Scott Galloway recommends Mexico City, Madrid, and Cape Town. Transcript: Kara Swisher Wow. Why did you pick Cape Town? It's beautiful there, I'm told. I've never been there. Scott Galloway I've only been there once, and it was in the middle of COVID, which was fine, but it kind of put a strain on it, especially when my son started not feeling well. So I immediately started freaking out about some sort of crazy scenario, trying to get my son into a hospital in South Africa. So it kind of put a little bit of a crimp. I remember we went on. Kara Swisher You know, it's a modern country. It's a modern country, but go ahead. Scott Galloway I know, but when you're a parent, you don't think that way. Yeah, I know. So we went on a game drive, rode a safari, and he ended up, he had, I think it was salmonella. Anyways, he was having stomach problems. So he would say, Dad, pull the Jeep over. I need to go to the bathroom. And he'd be like, he'd be walking into the bush, and he'd say, give me some privacy. And I'm like, privacy? There's lions around here. I wouldn't let him go bathroom in the savannah. Yeah, I'm like, boss, there's a, no, I'm not going anywhere. Anyway, these are what you call high-class problems. But Cape Town reminds me of what I've imagined California was like in the 60s. I think it's one of the most beautiful cities I've ever been to. Kara Swisher I've heard. And you're going there because why? Scott Galloway Well, because my sister is turning 40, 50. And we're going to take her and her family and the cousins are at a great age, same age as my kids. And so just super excited. And I was just so taken with the country when I was there the last time. I mean, Cape Town is one of those places, just the raw beauty, like the wildness of it all, the ocean and the hills. And it's an extraordinary, beautiful place. And also the food is really good. The people are really friendly. And just drawing it to a conclusion that people not as crazy fortunate and privileged as me can appreciate is I do think there's some incredible, I love the idea of a lifestyle arbitrage. And that is sometimes in your life, you're blessed with the ability to work remotely or a lack of roots, which is both good and a bad thing. But I always ask people, are you in the midst of a period in your life where you could engage in a lifestyle arbitrage? And my three favorite lifestyle arbitrages, which is a fancy way of saying moving to a lower cost place, are Mexico City, which is still inexpensive and has an amazing art and food scene. Madrid, which is like the best of Europe at 60 to 80 percent of the price of Munich or London. Also, if you're really blessed with the ability to conduct remote work, I think Cape Town offers an extraordinary quality of life, especially if you can figure out a way to make money In dollars because of the weakness of the rand. Anyways. ([Time 0:03:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/586360e5-aa13-4c9b-b7d5-d950e91a355c)) - **Presidential Pardons** - Presidential pardons should be used for non-violent offenders and injustices. - Avoid using them for political allies or personal gain. Transcript: Kara Swisher Plus, our friend of Pivot is filmmaker R.J. Cutler, whose latest documentaries on Martha Stewart and Elton John have a lot of people talking, particularly Martha herself. But first, President Biden is commuting the sentences of 1,500 people and pardoning 39 people's largest clemency grant by an American president in a day. The commutations are geared toward individuals who've been placed on home confinement for at least a year under the COVID-19 CARES Act. All recipients are nonviolent. The Biden administration reportedly still considering whether to use a blanket pardons for some of President-elect Trump's public enemies, which both of us think is not a particularly Good idea. I'm not sure what he'll do there, if he'll have some dramatic—I thought he should have waited the Hunter one till the last day. Even one of his former top aides, Anita Dunn, is saying that the timing was really just awful. ([Time 0:07:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/62018c80-266d-4bea-9e9c-b4b993b2d585)) - **Privatized Prisons' Impact** - Injecting profit motives into prisons creates perverse incentives, like lobbying for harsher sentences. - This leads to increased incarceration rates, disproportionately affecting specific demographics. Transcript: Kara Swisher He seems to have disappeared into the hedges, I guess. His stores have gone. Scott Galloway Yeah, as should anyone in public life at that age. And by the way, my sense of this, whether you agree with the pardons or not, this is what they're supposed to be for. Kara Swisher Yeah, exactly. Not your friends or people who pay you. Scott Galloway You're supposed to take the time to be really thoughtful and have a great staff. Look at where whenever you systemize or routinize a process, there's going to be inefficiencies and injustice. Whether it's veteran affairs or the prison system or, you know, how you evaluate affirmative action. Whenever you try and routinize and get something scale, things are going to fall through the cracks here. And when you have, unfortunately, I think this is somewhat, or I don't know, it's unfortunate, somewhat related to what we're going to talk about with the CEO shooting. When you inject a for-profit motive into prisons, you have lobbying groups trying to get legislators to pass three strikes you're out, such that the population of people incarcerated Goes up because they have a profit motive in getting more people in prison. Kara Swisher We have the most incarcerated public society in the world, hands down. Scott Galloway Hands down, on almost every dimension. And then it gets really frightening when you start looking at the demographics of the people locked up. But I don't. And I love this. At the low end, it bothers me that there are certain municipalities mostly run by Democrats who have decided to not enforce the law at all. I think there's a problem there. Time, there are just so many people, in my view, who are in prison, who through work programs or monitoring or whatever, that unfortunately have very powerful lobbies trying to keep Them locked up such that their for-profit prison system can garner another 30 to 50 grand a year. So I like this. I think this is what pardons were initially intended for. Kara Swisher Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think there's a question whether we should redo the presidential pardoning system. There should be a board that approves them. So it's not this like grab for power or lobbying on behalf of some like nonsensical person who's related to someone. And, you know, like these people come in and try to get pardons by carrying favor and stuff like that. And so they presidential pardon system feels a little king-like to me. And I don't mind the commuting part, but I think there should maybe be a group that overlooks them, rather than the president just getting to do it. Anyway, we'll see. This is a story that's really interesting. ([Time 0:08:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1ca63951-f208-4d4a-b95a-3e17ea6272f3)) - **Murdoch Family Power Struggle** - Rupert Murdoch's attempted trust alteration wasn't about money. - It aimed to give his politically aligned son, Lachlan, control over the family's media empire. Transcript: Kara Swisher A Nevada commissioner has ruled against Rupert Murdoch's attempt to alter his family trust. What a sneaky old crocodile he is, but it didn't work. To give his son, Lachlan Murdoch, sole control of his meaty empire. The decision means all of Murdoch's children who are not politically aligned with him, although I don't think they're that far off, will have equal control. The commissioner argued Rupert and Lachlan were acting in bad faith with the crest. Of course, they were. Rupert reportedly plans to appeal. It can go to the next group, and I'm not sure where it goes from there. But, you know, this is just, it was just a round the edge attempt to control things beyond his death. You know, it'll be interesting to see what happens to these. He's in his 90s, mid 90s, I think. What happens to this company? But he was trying to, they'll probably do a deal. So Lachlan, they'll take some money or something, I guess. That would be my guess. So Lachlan can keep running it. I think that's where they probably are right now. But one of the interesting things was they were talking about succession, the family itself, because they had watched the show where Logan Roy dies. And they said, we have to have a succession plan in place, which was, and they called it that, the succession memo. So, which just makes me laugh hard. They all pretended it wasn't about them. And then of course now it was. So any thoughts? I think this will be interesting to see. There's a lot of assets there in News Corp. ([Time 0:10:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5faaa3ee-fc5d-4ae0-a2bf-30cc1d76a126)) - **Focus on Healthcare, Not Speculation** - Speculation about the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter's motives is irrelevant. - Focus on societal issues like healthcare costs and access, which fueled public reactions. Transcript: Kara Swisher One of the biggest stories this week, obviously, Luigi Mangione, the 26-year man charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. There's a lot of information out there about his online presence. Everyone's digging for clues. There's been stories about whether that means anything or not. I think the best story I read was about him being kind of a typical tech pro. If he hadn't shot this guy, he would have seemed relatively normal in his interests. What was your first reaction when you started hearing about this guy? He stopped communicating with friends and family about six months ago and really went offline. He was quite an active online person, like a lot of people his age in his sector, in the tech sector. I think he worked for True Car. I think he was a video game aficionado. He did have health issue over the last years on Ready. He talked about this back problem he had and struggled with brain fog. John Herman wrote in New York Magazine, what's most striking about Mangione's extensive online dossier is that had it been studied before the shooting took place, it wouldn't have Raised much alarm. Very difficult to characterize. Talk about that first, then we'll talk about the reaction from people. Well, okay. Scott Galloway So first reaction is, in my opinion, and let me be arrogant here, I think the correct reaction is to feel sympathy for the family of this man who was murdered. And then what I immediately registered was everybody decided that they would use this event to speculate on what happened to confirm their current beliefs. So people immediately went to, this is justified because this is an uprising or this is, you know, the most shocking thing about this isn't about the murderer. I mean, that's a tragedy because when you're a young high school valedictorian with an engineering and computer science degree and master's degree respectively from an Ivy League University and you're handsome and in great shape, and your life is over. That's a tragedy as well. But the reality is any speculation around what was going through his head, you're just getting lost in the soup. We have no fucking idea. We don't know if he had a schizophrenic break. We don't know if he was a Ted Kaczynski-like character who was a genius but came off the rail. We don't know. And you know what? It doesn't really matter, in my opinion, as much. What matters, or the most interesting thing here, is how society has responded. And I can tell you how someone feels about this based on, with 70 or 80 percent accuracy, based on one thing. Can you afford, pretty easily, health insurance? Because here's some data. 60% of bankruptcies are related to medical debt. And the largest source of bankruptcy is medical debt. We pay $1,500 per person for pharmaceuticals versus $500 elsewhere, despite the fact that we manufacture and distribute them. We spend $13,000 a year on healthcare, despite the fact that everyone else pays $6,500 and we have lower health expectancies. People oftentimes compare healthcare to how I would describe San Francisco, expensive but bad in the U.S. Or healthcare in the U.S. And you have essentially, again, going back to the prison system, when we have injected a for-profit motive where the largest lobbying groups in Washington aren't big tech, they aren't The defense industry, they are the healthcare industry, which spends three quarters of a billion dollars. And by the way, two-thirds of lobbyists are former government officials. What you end up with is despite the fact that 70% of America supports price caps and universal health care, it doesn't happen. Because of the horrors, better known as our elected representatives, keep letting the pharmaceutical and the health care industrial complex maintain this mendacious fuckery duopoly Of sugary, shitty food from the food industrial complex that gets you obese and then hands you over to the diabetes industrial complex, which has created regulatory capture and charges Too much money to people to die slowly. This is, everyone is obsessed with this guy. That's wrong. Everyone is angry at CEOs. These CEOs of these companies are doing what they're supposed to do. And the thought that they're all of a sudden going to reexamine their ethics, what? Don't hold your breath, folks. The people who are at fault here are voters who have failed to find elected representatives who have a backbone and start thinking about the tragedy of the commons that is health care In this country. ([Time 0:19:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/059f85d1-e42e-431d-8b96-3b781f1fe0c0)) - **Revolution in Healthcare** - Public support for the shooter reflects anger at the healthcare industry. - CEOs are not solely to blame; voters and representatives failing to address healthcare issues share responsibility. Transcript: Kara Swisher Yeah, but what was interesting, too, is I think this reaction, and I think it's borne out from what you're saying. It snowballed since the police captured him, too, this reaction to this young man, this troubled, very troubled young man. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro spoke about this. Let's listen. R.J. Cutler I have no tolerance, nor should anyone, for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most. In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice. In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this. He is no hero. Kara Swisher So it's interesting because I don't think it's in the dark corners. I think it's everywhere. People have been writing fan fiction. Etsy is full of merchandise. They call him Robin Hoodie. There's been Spotify playlists and crypto coins. His lawyer told CNN he's gotten offers from members of the public to pay his legal fees. You know, this is just such a snapshot of where people are. They just have sort of had it. I don't know what else to say. And then laughing or making fun or being less than empathetic to a murder victim is really terrible. But at the same time, that man isn't a person anymore. He's the insurance industry, right? That's what he he represents. And perhaps he is in some ways. So just so you know, major insurance stocks, including UnitedHealthcare, have fallen more than 6% since their closing crisis the day before the shooting. There may be some Wall Street anticipation of moves. There's some moves to UnitedHealthcare, I don't know how, got a hold of pharmacies. They loaned the money in a usury way and then took control of them. There's a bipartisan effort. They should not be owning pharmacies. They should not be owning hospitals. They put people out of business. That's an astonishing thing I didn't know about. So talk about the justice of giving this guy a lot of attention and making him kind of, as you said, this folk hero who's not a folk hero, sort of an unfortunate folk hero, and what's going To happen to the insurance industry? Well, okay. Scott Galloway So in my opinion, the solid reverse engineers are the same place. And that is when a nation gets to this point of income inequality, where six people control as much wealth and the wealthiest nation in the world as the bottom half, you have a self-correction. And that's the good news. Income inequality always self-corrects. The bad news is that the means or the vehicles of self-correction are war, famine, or revolution. And I would argue this is a form of revolution. I believe the Me Too movements and the Black Lives Matter movements, which both had righteous components of them, but all of these things have in common is the following. They're going after the 1%. And effectively what happens is people decide if the 1% is making more money than the bottom 99, at some point the bottom 99 figures out the best way to double their wealth is to either Show up and kill these people, tell them to move out of the country or to shame them. This is what has happened in Central America and nations all over the world throughout modern history. And this is a form of revolution. When people decide, when they see that insurance companies have a profit motive in denying claims, when they see insurance companies and their shareholders consistently getting Richer, and they also know somebody whose wife got lung cancer, which meant they were going to be bankrupt two years later, they start to get enraged. This is a form of revolution in the support for this person. Kara Swisher Can I make a comparison? No, I'd love you. Because, like, look, this happens with the shootings. All the gun, everyone in America wants gun control, except for a small, loud. It's minority rule. The tyranny of minority rule, right? It's capture of our government by rich people. Scott Galloway Yeah, yeah. And this is what happens in democracies without stronger institutions, is rich people who don't see themselves as bad people, and they usually aren't, say, let's vote for people that Will put in place regulations and put in place subsidies that we get richer and richer and richer. And at some point, people wake up and go, you know what? I've had it. And they grab their torches. And this is a form of that. This is a form of revolution. As long as we have elected representatives that continue to soak the bottom 90 or the bottom 99, I mean, do you realize how insane our health care system is right now? ([Time 0:23:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b98a37b-8b46-4d0d-a9c6-f32b149af9cc))