Ironic Normcore Trifles
S1: This ad free podcast is part of your Slate plus membership.
S2: Hello, welcome to the ironic normcore playful episode of Slate Money or Guide to the Business and Finance.
S3: News of the Week. I am Felix Salmon of Axios. I am here with Emily Peck of Huff Post. Hello. I’m here with Anna Shamansky of Breakingviews. Hello. And rather excitingly, we are here with one of the most English people you will ever hear on this show and one of the smartest people you ever hear on this show, the great polymath, Mr. Ben Schott. Ben, introduce yourself. Who are you and what do you do?
S4: What? I am a writer and a designer, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and you know, a man about town when I’m allowed out.
S3: You’re also the second coming of P.G. Woodhouse.
S4: Ah, yes, this is true. I was granted permission by the White House state to carry on the Jeeves and Worcester novels, and volume two is out in just under a month, I think. Exciting.
S3: I can as someone who may have got a sneak peek of volume two, it’s fantastic. Ben has written a glorious piece of cultural criticism about the land. You will find out what it lands in Section three of this year podcast, which is one of the best sections we’ve recorded in many, many episodes. So stick around for that. We are also going to talk about Citigroup and how it’s doing. We’re also going to talk about Broeder was the parents vs. non parents fight that’s going on at Facebook and Twitter and more generally, what kind of responsibility companies have to their employees and especially the employees who are parents in these covid times. We have a slate plus all about Niccola, which winds up segueing into a disquisition on the nature of trust in institutions. It’s a jam packed episode, and I hope you will stick around for all of it. Coming up on Slate Money. Anna, yes, we had big news this week that good friend Mike Corbat, the CEO of Citigroup, has unexpectedly announced his retirement in February. There’s a whole bunch of stuff to talk about here. Where would you like to start?
S5: I suppose we should start where everyone else is starting, which is with his replacement, Jane Frazier, who is making news because she is the first woman to head a major US bank.
S3: It’s been a long time coming. There are like four or five, however you want to count it, major US banks and none of them have managed to find a woman to run them or even like probably top 10. To be honest, Jane Fraser is a Scot. She made her way up through the very standard kind of Harvard Business School and McKinsey, and we got into Goldman kind of channels. She was the one who came in and finally sort of. Managed to get control of Banamex, which is the biggest part of Citi Bank in terms of the number of projects, so twice as many Citigroup has twice as many bank branches in Mexico as it does in the United States. And it was always run as this kind of very independent fiefdom by Mexicans. And New York HQ had very little control over it, basically, until she came in and called and renamed Citi Banamex, which I’m not sure was a good idea. But she did show her sort of managerial chops there. And now she gets to run the whole bank.
S1: And it’s not surprising that she’s getting to run the whole bank. As this has been very clear for a while. It’s surprising that it happened this quickly. Most people did not expect that corporate was going to step down this early, and especially during a crisis. It’s often been said that women are brought in when something is failing. And there’s this perhaps may be another example of that happening, although I think we should start with that idea that this is good. I think we’re always complaining that there are no women in these positions. So I think when a woman is actually in one of these positions, we should say, yes, this is a plus.
S3: And I would push back on the idea that Citigroup is failing. Certainly its share price is kind of a bit miserable. But this is not like a woman being brought in to fix Wells Fargo. And the fix is obviously broken. Citigroup has made a couple of errors. And we talked about one of the biggest errors on the show a few weeks ago where they accidentally wired nine hundred million dollars to a bunch of bondholders of Revlon, which, according to reporting from CNBC, might have been the contributing factor actually to Mike Corbett’s departure on the grounds that apparently the Fed has been telling Citigroup for years that its IT systems aren’t really up to snuff and he hasn’t been doing anything about it. And now the Fed is like, well, we told you so. And he can’t really push back on that. So he’s like, OK, probably enough of my cost cutting. We should get someone in and someone else in.
S5: Yes. And I agree that Revlon is not Wells Fargo. This is not a total disaster. However, this is a very difficult environment for banks moving forward. This is probably going to be a difficult environment for banks. And and Citigroup has been a laggard. So she certainly does have our work cut out for her, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just the reality I do. I would like at some point to talk a little bit more about the Revlon issue, because I actually think that is perhaps a big reason why Corbett was pushed out or left at the moment that he is leaving.
S1: But I think that. Even though Frazier is being brought in at a time where succeeding is not going to be the easiest thing in the world, I think that if you look at her background, obviously she was, as you said, Central Banamex. She’s been involved in consumer banking, which is an area where Citigroup really, really needs to work on improving in order to get in line with a lot of their competitors. So I think that she’s a good choice. I think she’s well positioned. Is anyone going to be able to succeed? Well, at this moment, I don’t know.
S6: I think I was really struck to in the CNBC piece that the Revlon screw up was pivotal in moving up the timeline on Jane Fraser taking over. And I immediately, like Anna said, thought, oh, glass cliff, which is the term coined when a woman or a person of color is brought in to lead a company or a country at a time of crisis. So I was like, oh, OK. It’s like a glass cliff moment. And it is striking that this is the first woman to lead a big bank because only last year, I think it’s like six CEOs of the major banks, including Jamie Diamond, including Corbitt, the city CEO that Jane Fraser is taking over for, went before Congress and were asked to raise their hand if they thought that a woman or person of color would succeed them as CEO. And none of them raise their hands. And it is worth pointing out just how behind the times these banks are when it comes to gender equality and parity. I mean, you could see it in the coverage of Jane Frazier’s appointment. Like in The Times, there was a bank analyst who told Mike Mayo, Mike Mayo, she has gotten this role because of her merits and not merely because she is a woman, which is like. It’s just damning with faint praise, it sort of implies essentially that she did, in fact, get the job because she’s a woman.
S3: It’s just that she’s done theoretically that somehow women have an advantage in these situations, which usually they do not. If you look at these jobs in the book.
S6: Right, exactly. Like and there was a call and like, they’re just so like Jamie Diamond is also quoted in this New York New York Times fees as saying a few years ago, like it turns out, women do like to travel for work, like you need to ask them, which indicates that he had just always assumed they didn’t want to travel for work because they are moms. And he only said this a few years ago. And it just shows you how backwards the thinking still is on Wall Street, I think. So I feel like no one should be resting on the laurels of finally one woman becoming the CEO of a bank like I don’t think is actually I think it’s good, but it moves no needles here. Like this is a culture that needs a lot of of work and change. And and even in the way this woman, Jane Fraser, speaks, it just shows like an unwillingness, as Felix was saying earlier, like she’s out there saying, like women can have it all and like these very and antiquated and honestly, like misogynistic ways of like looking at the challenges women face on Wall Street as a logistical challenge of balancing work and parenting, when really the challenge is attitudes like Jamie Dimon has worries like women, they travel, they like to do work. Who knew? It’s like the whole system. They’re so messed up. This isn’t a doubt going to do much, although it’s good.
S5: Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would say is that. I think sometimes critiquing analysts for pointing out that she’s a woman is a little unfair, seeing as all the coverage of her is the fact that she’s the first female, like people have to mention it, they have to talk about it in some way. So I would say we might be a little unfair critiquing the fact that someone will say she got this on the merits and she also happens to be a woman.
S1: There’s not an easy way to make that story, because the reality is the fact of her being a woman in this specific instance probably did help, if we’re honest. Well, I mean, there was one other time.
S3: Just jump in the main. Let’s just be very clear about this. What the thing that helped is that there was this guy who was the heir apparent at Citigroup, Jamie Frazey, who left, and then she became the heir apparent, like it was like she got a kind of by default.
S1: Maybe I would just say that we are definitely at a moment where I think a lot of companies and this is a moment that is far overdue. I’m not saying that we have it and don’t continue to have a massive problem in terms of women in leadership roles. I’m just saying that to suggest that her gender probably played no role in how people thought about who they were going to appoint, I don’t think is true.
S6: But the thing is that every time someone else was appointed to be the CEO of a bank, gender played a role. Every man that was appointed to be a CEO of a bank was appointed because of his gender. Make no mistake. And no one ever, ever would say anything like that in a story no one ever say. Jamie Dimon, a man, was was chosen for this role because men are the ones who get chosen for the role. It’s just it’s it’s boring.
S3: Well, I mean, we do that. We have that this week with the new CEO of Sephora, which I believe the stuff for a ninety six percent female, but somehow they still managed to appoint a new CEO who was a guy. I mean, it’s amazing how the how the fashion industry does this, but I want to take advantage of the fact that we have been here. And you’ve been there were basically four big banks in America. There’s Citibank, Chase Manhattan. Wells Fargo, Bank of America. What’s your opinion of like those four in general and is the. Any kind of difference between them, like someone who looks a lot like how brands kind of like seen by the general public, like the way they present themselves here on this show, we talk a lot about, well, obviously Wells Fargo and JPMorgan are completely different things. Is that how normal people think or are they all considered to be basically exactly the same?
S4: I think I mean, speaking as a banking expert, I think people aren’t looking at the board of the bank. I think they may be looking at interest rates. They may be looking at branding. They’re probably looking at where is the local branch, where is the nearest ATM? I mean, it’s that banal and human that we all do. The thing that interests me about this story was actually it reminded me of another story that’s come out this week that has looked at how female leaders and male leaders are stacking up in their response to covid-19.
S7: And there’s some early preliminary research from University of Liverpool and reading that match, 19 countries led by women against their nearest neighbors and did some comparisons. And the ones that were run by women suffered half as many covid-19 deaths in the days leading up to May 19th. Now the data is is early and it hasn’t been peer reviewed. But what’s interesting about covid is you have a normally like with a bank or any company, you can’t have two CEOs at the same time and then compare them. But covid is going to be fascinating because you have literally a world of data. We will never know more about any disease because we have so many companies, so many on it, so many cases, so many governments studying it. And I think we will be able to look at male and female leadership in covid and it’ll be a unique test. And you’ll be able to compare, say, the leadership in New Zealand versus Trump and Boston and even Boris, that kind of macho male confidence as opposed to the probably the early leadership of female caution. And it’s a rare example, I think, that you can make sort of simultaneous comparisons of leadership styles.
S6: I’ve actually thought a lot about that. And I think one reason maybe that women leaders have done better on covid kind of relates back to what I was just saying, which is that men are elected on a curve like we elect. Idiot men like Trump because men get to be leaders, but in order for a woman to ascend to leadership, typically she has to be competent and better, like you’ll hear like Jane Fraser, even I think is quoted as saying, like, I feel like I have to be one hundred and twenty percent good at my job or something. So it’s like in order for a woman to get a position of power or a leadership role because of sexism, she has to be very, very, very good at what she does. Whereas no offense, in order for a man to get that role, it’s just like there’s more of there’s more of a curve. Like men are judged by potential more than accomplishments. So it’s more likely that they’re going to mess up at times like these because the ones that we allow to lead us maybe aren’t as competent instead of any kind of inherent character traits of men and women.
S1: Yeah, I agree with that because I tend to be a little wary of the stories about how women are so much better at men than doing things, because those are inherently relying on stereotypes about how women act versus how men act. But I think you’re right that while it’s not always the case frequently now, when you have women in positions of power, it is probably been a lot harder for them to get there. Now, that is not the case for all female leaders. I would just like to say, of course, like Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, I’m just saying not all female leaders are fantastic. But I think you’re right. I think that it’ll be it’ll be interesting. And I think we can go back a little bit to the corporate world as well, that when we look at female leaders is part of the reason that you see a number of female leaders potentially doing well. You see this with potential sometimes portfolio managers. It’s just because they have to be so much better to get into that role.
S6: The other thing I was going to say is the CNBC piece on Citibank and how it’s in trouble and pointed out the one thing Ben was talking about, which is that they haven’t built as many branches in places. So they’re there are struggling and like it is really this banal thing where it’s like if you want the bank to have business, you have to have a lot of banks all around because it’s a it’s about convenience. Like I used to have a Citibank account and it was such a pain in the butt because they could not find an ATM or a Citibank anywhere near my job or my apartment. And I finally just gave up and I saw, like with my eyes how many chase banks there were around. And I was like, oh, forget it. I’ll just do Chase Bank. Like, it’s that simple.
S3: And this is something where I think is a reasonable criticism of Mike Corbett. I think the thing which he really excelled at, the thing where he massively outperformed everybody’s expectations and did incredibly well was when Citibank so Citigroup basically split in two after the or in the middle of the financial crisis in 2009 and split itself into a good bank and a bad bank. And the good bank was what was being kept as the core Citigroup. And then the bad bank was all of the nuclear waste that they decided they really couldn’t even with anymore. And they just needed to get off their balance sheet. And the idea was that the bad bank probably had negative value, but they just needed to bite the bullet and get rid of it. And they put Mike Corbett in charge of getting rid of all of that nuclear waste, the lowest possible cost to Citigroup. And he did such a good job at it, he actually made a substantial profit on that. And ever since then, he’s really been operating from a point of efficiency and saving money. And that’s why he hasn’t been opening branches and that’s why he hasn’t been investing in technology. And that’s why, you know, probably the Revlon mistake happened is because he’s still in that kind of be safe, save money kind of mindset rather than the like. We need to go out there and grow and and start competing more aggressively mindset. So presumably that’s Gene Fraser’s job now going forward is to really start competing rather than just not falling into the sort of horrible morass the city bank in its various incarnations over the decades has fallen into many times. It’s one of the most serious. It’s like the Argentina of banking. It has failed so many times that maybe maybe now is the time to be hopeful again. So I want to go back to what Ben was saying about the way in which leaders display concern and responsibility for the people that they are responsible for, because there’s a big fight at Facebook right now between, I guess you would say, the breeders and the non nonreaders and in general and then case on its very own. Mom and dad are fighting, had a little rant about how he thinks that companies should really just not be worrying about making money this year and should really just concern themselves with looking after their employees and especially the parents during what is clearly like the toughest time for parents that anyone can remember. And as this kind of. I don’t want to say in loco parentis role that CEOs have, but there is this idea that, like on some level, a company should look after its employees. Emily, explain what the terms of this debate and is it even a debate?
S6: It’s a debate among a very privileged sect of workers. And so The New York Times had a piece this weekend about fights taking place inside Facebook and also Twitter, to an extent, over parents getting extra benefits right now to deal with the fact that kids are at home all the time and schools are a shit show. So at Facebook, they’re giving parents 10 weeks, paid time off to deal with child care issues. And I mean, they’re also giving 10 weeks for if you need to take care of a family member or you have someone home from a nursing home and stuff like that, anyway, this has engendered a lot of ill will between the parents and the non parents. The non parents or the childfree people feel like they’re working really, really, really, really hard while the parents are working not as hard because they have all these pressures at home and there’s all this resentment, apparently at Facebook in particular about this. So, you know, people are like parents get all these benefits and we don’t get any. And again, this is among probably the most entitled and privileged class of workers in the United States that are making like six figures plus in salary that are getting their full bonus this year, even if performance isn’t good and are even getting a thousand dollars a stipend to buy stuff so they can work from home comfortably. Like, it’s crazy to me that these people there’s resentment among these people, but just goes to show you something, something I don’t know what to say about that. And so the piece came out this weekend. And one thing it doesn’t get into is the gender aspect here, because you have to imagine that if Facebook and these tech companies, it’s when we say parents, most of the time we’re probably talking about mothers or the fathers are under a lot of pressure, too. But from what I’ve been seeing and in my reporting, it’s it’s it’s women who are bearing the brunt of this basic childcare crisis. You can see it in the jobs numbers, too. So I wanted to talk about it because I have kids that I know Felix and Ana don’t. And I wondered if they were feeling the resentment or what they what they thought about that, if it’s the justified feeling. And Anna said that this was a great topic and she wanted to talk about it.
S1: Well, I do think it’s interesting.
S5: I think there’s a difference between, to a certain extent, covid time in noncommitted time in this topic, because I think in coded time, most reasonable people that I know, whether they are parents or whether they are not parents, understand that no matter what situation you are in, in time, it’s tough, you know, whether you’re alone by yourself in a 450 studio all the time or whether you’re surrounded by kids and have to balance all of these different things, that they’re both hard in different ways. And when people are not online and they’re talking about this amongst themselves, they tend to be reasonable when they are online talking about these things. They tend to be crazy people. And to a certain extent, I think it’s because we all going crazy during covid and we have all of this anger that we need to express towards someone. And it’s very easy to express it towards whoever we think is having an easier time of it. So I think that is probably somewhat of what is happening here. And as you said, it is a little bit hard to feel sorry for any of these people because they are the world’s most privileged people. And the fact that they are complaining is slightly ridiculous when you have all of these people losing their jobs. Now, I would say that as a single person, it is fairly obvious to me that in this moment it is harder to have kids like it just is. Having two jobs is harder than one job. Like them’s the facts, you know, outside of covid times. I think that’s a slightly different conversation sometimes where if you are a childless, especially childless woman, sometimes it’s expected that you will be able to do things and that you’re outside of work. Activities don’t matter in the way that they do for you. There are people who have children, even sometimes single men. But I would say in bad times, it is incumbent upon single people to understand that we do probably have a little bit easier.
S3: My point of view here is the resentment comes when the non parents are asked to do a lot of extra work to pick up the slack, whatever they’re saying, when the parents can’t do it. And there are two different things the companies can do to try and deal with the chaos that is covid. One of them is to try and help parents as much as they can by giving them leave and support and allowing them to maybe contribute a little bit less professionally. A little of the chaos is going on. And then the second one is like. To simply hire people, people to come in and fill that empty space and I think what some of the complaints are, is basically people saying you’re perfectly happy allowing the parents to do less work, but you’re not hiring anyone to make up for it and you’re making everyone else just do more work. And that what you should be doing is, I guess, more what Dan Coats was saying on among those voting, which is don’t put the burden on the non parents. Just you know, there’s a lot of unemployed people out there right now. Just go out and hire people to do that extra work. And I do know companies that have done that.
S5: I do get the feeling that that isn’t happening quite as much, probably depending on the type of job, though, it’s not like you can just go out there and hire a bunch of software engineers that are just hanging out unemployed. I, I would say that, yes, what you’re saying is correct in certain areas, but it’s not always that simple. If you’re in the middle of a project, you can’t just be like, OK, we’ll just hire somebody else and then they’ll do it like no, it’s already involved in ways that simple, but it’s not always that complicated.
S3: Like we have decades of experience with parental leave, which is a similar situation, and companies know how to deal with parental leave and often they hire people to step in for the person who’s on parental leave rather than just making everyone do more work. It does happen. Are you sure about that? I as someone who works for a company which is hiring a bunch of people for exactly that purpose. Yeah, but, Ben, what’s your what will you think of this?
S4: I think it’s fascinating and it’s sort of odd that companies know whether you have children or not. I mean, why does a company know? Why does a company know whether you have inherited wealth? Why does a company. No, I mean, it strikes me there’s a similarity between physical disease and mental illness that not to compare having children with the disease, but this notion of some things are obvious that children are things, but people live all sorts of strange and complex lives with ill relatives or mental health issues or caring for others that we don’t necessarily structure into work. But children are there and they’re obvious. So we do structure that. So I essentially think it’s none of your employer’s business whether you have children or not, and everyone should be treated pretty much identically. And if the system doesn’t work like that, then the system is broken. But Emily’s point about about these jobs and the the the kind of the one percent less of it, the the kind of bigger picture for me is these jobs are all going to disappear anyway. So this is like dancing as the Titanic falls. I think so many of these white collar jobs aren’t going to exist. This is the sort of last hurrah for many, many, many people who work in these large companies who are just going to go away or that Facebook is just going to go away again. I think a lot of the jobs are going to go away. I think huge amounts of jobs are going to be automated. And a lot of people said this is essentially a white collar debate. The blue collar people have been working through childcare and no one really cares. You have a shift. You do. You sure. If you don’t sign up, you don’t get paid. I think we’re about to see a tsunami of white collar unemployment, which will render a lot of it’s not all of it, but some significant proportion of this moot for lots.
S3: And when you are fully signed up member of the robot apocalypse, like, no, I’m a signed up member of you have.
S4: And I think it’s going to be very interesting. I think it’s going to think it’s going to accelerate. A lot of people, lots of H.R. departments are going to be taken over by people using H.R. Rapp’s. I think I’m not saying this is mass necessarily mass robotic vacation, but I’m saying a lot of these jobs in, you know, lawyers jobs and sales, I mean, are going to be either automated out or just people, you know, once you have a Department of 100 people and you follow them and you think, well, am I going to hire all 100 people back? Do I need exactly one of the systems I’ve worked out over the last six months? Maybe they’re better, maybe only 20. And that changes everything.
S3: I just read the new Reed Hastings book, The CEO of Netflix, don’t ask me why do not take this as a recommendation. But he has this story, which is like his sort of aha moment, his light bulb going off moment where he is running Netflix and it’s doing it’s having cash problems and he has to fire a bunch of people. And then he discovers that after he fired a bunch of people, like suddenly the whole business does better and it’s much more productive. And he’s like, what you should do is just keep on firing because this is all he’s ever done for the rest of his career. It’s just becoming just like firing machine. And then he just fires people willy nilly all the time for any other reason. And I think you’re right there on some level, people when there are layoffs, sometimes they are genuinely harmful. And it is obvious what the harm to the company has been. Sometimes it’s not so obviously harmful. And the managers are like, yeah, why would we ever go back to having lots of employees again? I do think both things happen.
S4: No, I’m just I just think you rarely get an opportunity to start. So I was talking to a friend who owns nine restaurants, and they’ve obviously all been shut for covid and they’re sort of struggling with, you know, all the obvious things, eating outside and take out and delivering this kind of thing. And I said, are you going to open up all night? It’s like, you’ve got to be kidding. You really get a chance to start from scratch again. And would you have closed three restaurants? No, probably not. They took too long, but would you reopen them? Absolutely not. And I think what we’re going to see with the the layoffs and the furloughs is, well, you wouldn’t necessarily fire these people and could you and, you know, huge amounts of problems, not to mention corporate morale and this kind of thing, but rehiring people is a completely different mindset. And I don’t know. I mean, I hope I’m wrong, but I think this is going to accelerate a trend that was already happening, you know, in a huge way.
S6: Just to go back to one thing you said, Ben, which was you think all companies should treat all workers the same. And if that doesn’t work, then there’s something wrong. I feel like I don’t agree. I think all all employees are people. And throughout their lives, they’re going to have personal issues, like you said, like someone might have killed someone else, might have a sick parent. Then you might yourself get sick. You can’t always keep that from your employer because you’re going to need that cushion or that time to step away from the workforce.
S4: I mean, I’m not saying that everyone should be treated equally badly. I’m saying he wants to be treated equally well. And this notion that I do think it’s akin to physical and mental health, it’s very easy to have sympathy with someone with a broken leg. It’s because there it is. It’s in a cast and they can’t work. And I’ve got to be wheeled around. I can they come up to a meeting and can they go to Davos? Who knows? But someone who’s going through depression or even someone who’s going through, I don’t know, cycles of IVF. You know, these things are subtle and complex and difficult. And I think it’s it’s it’s incumbent upon companies while they still have employees to treat them all with decency and dignity and to maybe realize that there are all sorts of hidden struggles that are not as obvious as the struggles, which I totally acknowledge of having kids in a time of covid or having kids, period.
S6: And I’m also thinking about the kind of contradiction between the damn take that companies should just be nice to their employer employees right now and like give them a break. And the idea that, you know, for a lot of parents, like doing a good job is just not on the menu right now at work concurrent with the idea of like, well, come is going to lay a lot of people off, like they’re going to see they don’t need as many of you so that the ones that maybe get laid off or don’t get to come back after a furlough are the ones that are struggling the most right now.
S4: So it’s kind of sad, you know what I mean?
S3: It is. And and there is there is an absolutely fun because we live in a country where companies really are responsible for the. Employees livelihoods in a way that it’s not just like a contractual exchange of labor for money, right. Like most obviously this is this shows up in the fact that it’s very difficult to get health insurance if you’re not employed. So if you fire someone, that often means they lose health insurance. If you fire someone who’s here on a visa who’s an immigrant, that might mean they get deported. Like there’s real like huge implications to losing your job, which go well beyond just, oh, I now I’m not getting paid by this person. I should have to go off and get paid by someone else sort of thing. And I don’t know very many companies that have really grappled successfully with that because on the one hand, they do employ people purely for the services they provide and the contribution they can make to profits. And on the other hand, like once you started doing that, you’re responsible for those people’s families on a real, real level.
S6: I think these are the social safety net. And the United States, your employer, is your social safety net and it’s so fragile.
S4: And if there’s one silver lining which is in this cloud, is that America may realize that with 30, 40 million people are losing their health care. And that also means children up to the age of, what, twenty one? Twenty five? I think it depends. You know, this is a completely untenable way of running a society. You simply just just will not work.
S3: So, Ben, I don’t know how many podcasts you listen to, but I can tell you that the global podcasting industrial complex is built on a bunch of ads from direct to consumer companies and coupon codes. And I don’t know where podcasting would be without the early support of Blue Apron and MailChimp. You have just come out with the most spectacular piece of cultural criticism in Bloomberg opinion, all about what you call Blands, which are basically these direct to consumer companies and a few others. What is your take and should they exist? And if they don’t exist as podcasting doomed?
S4: OK, well, let’s start from the beginning. So the idea of Blands is this notion that there is this identikit army of supposedly disruptive, direct to consumer startups. Now, the vanguard of which you’ve got like companies like CASPA and Oska, Warby Parker, the Harrys away, and there’s a vast infantry behind them of wannabes and copycats. So I mean, quips. The subscription toothbrush now has at least half a dozen wannabe quips, including one called Hum, to just been launched by Coalgate. So what you have is you have these companies who all pretend to have this unique, disruptive one off, absolutely independent take on the world. And they all follow this absolutely rigid formula of look and feel and tone of voice and sensibility. And that’s what interests me. And weirdly, since you mentioned podcast, it doesn’t feature in this article, but podcast of actually all. You could write a very similar article about podcast from the happy, cheerful music to the tone of voice to the way the segments are split up. I mean, podcasts also have their own bland genre. In fact, maybe that’s the next article. And the fact that they are sort of interconnected is maybe no mistake. Also, they appeal to a they both appeal initially before they sort of went mainstream. They both appeal to a sort of millennial GenZE audience who felt themselves to be somehow immune and above marketing, that the normal tricks of marketing didn’t appeal to them. And somehow you communicated them by pretending there was no marketing about these incredibly polished, neutral pastel consumer, recycled brown box companies. And so there is something similar in the look, in the feel and the tone of voice, actually, interestingly, between brands and also podcasts.
S3: Right. I mean, one on one level, you can draw the distinction in terms of the look and feel and the copywriting, which is something you do really well in your piece. On another level, you can just draw the distinction in terms of is this a brand that advertises on television or is this a brand that advertises on like the New York City subway and Instagram and podcasts so that more it’s actually so it’s interesting.
S4: I mean, one of the key things about brands, about brands, rather, is most of them are hugely venture capital backed. They have vast, vast, almost incomprehensible sums of money behind them, often for the most flaky and absurd ideas. I mean, Jusu had like hundred thirty five million dollars for a pulp extraction machine until Bloomberg pointed out that you could squeeze the pulp from their sashayed your hands, therefore negating the point of the 600 dollar machine.
S3: Your hands are bad at reading a QR code.
S4: Then, you know when you have you have to so that you have to move them really fast to get the screen to recognise them. And actually in the piece I compare my pillows with some of these brands because in some ways my pillows. I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with this remarkable blann is is a brand. It’s direct to consumer. They sell a single product. They advertise relentlessly and aggressively on television as it happens. But the reason why it’s not a bland is because it’s look and feel is very sort of, I would say sort of almost deliberately ugly. I mean, it’s very sort of old school branding. It’s got a kind of cursive logo. You’ve got Lindale hugging it, you know, hugging his pillow. And of course, he’s he said that President Trump was chosen by God to become president. And this notion of a very politically active CEO is antithetical to the uniformly liberal, bland political views that brands have to espouse or brands, intra-community or brand to pro environment or brands. You know, the look and feel have a huge mix of age and race and ethnicity and ability. And the idea of taking any stand politically would sort of instantly emulate their founders. So it does it plays into the whole sort of gestalt of what it means to be neutral in this very, very partisan and.
S5: It is this really, though, any different than any other period, isn’t it always that if you look at any period in history and you look at advertising and you look at the way companies market themselves, there is a there’s a pattern. There are something that people respond to. And when they respond to it and certain companies that other companies eat that. And you can tell when things are great in the early 60s versus the later 60s versus the later. Absolutely.
S4: So absolutely sorry. I’m not saying the brands have created advertising. I’m just saying that this is what they’ve done is is, I suppose, to slight differences with parity products. There was always a sense of Coke versus Pepsi. There was always a sense of oasis versus blood, sort of a sense of. But each brand, although they are absolutely slavishly following this formula, sort of there’s a kind of Soviet totalitarian story postapocalyptic. There is only one mattress company. There is only one disposable razor. There is only one chef, great dog food, and that their promise is total uniqueness. It’s like no one’s ever thought of this before. And of course, you step back and you realize there are literally dozens of all of these, each pretending to be unique and the only one for you. So, yes, all advertising has fashions. This one, I think, is particularly interesting because it pretends not to be.
S3: The thing which interests me is the is the. Sense in which. When this started, you could almost believe them when they were like, we’re selling direct to consumer, we are cutting out the middleman, we have super high quality. We have an origin story. You know, you are finding us directly on the Internet. You don’t need to believe in you don’t need to worry about the retailers or, you know, all of this kind of stuff. And then we entered the world of, you know, drop shipper’s on Instagram who don’t make anything. But you’ve all exactly the same language and by your, you know, handmade leather shoes or whatever, and they have the same language, even though all they’re doing is just providing a very thin veneer over like a backhand which orders shoes from China and India. And it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to really tell the difference anymore. And it makes is created, I think, on some level, this sort of crisis of trust, like if I see 14 different kitchen knives and they’re all direct to consumer and all telling me how unique and special they are, at some point I’m like the I have no way of I just can’t believe any of them anymore.
S4: I think there’s also the sense that they all have this gloss of community environment, public service, and many of them are based on essentially slave labor, either incredibly cheap production in the Far East or gig economy workers. I mean, it’s all very tenuous and it’s it feels like sort of the last hurrah of something, the idea that everything can be cheap but also perfect. Everything can be glossy and very, very convenient. And on the whole, the convenience for the consumers is based on massive inconvenience for those who actually supply and makes these products.
S3: There was a great line you had in your piece, Ben, which I have forgotten, but basically said like that they’re like ironic normcore trifle. I can I have it for you. I have it if you want to bring it.
S4: OK, for the rich brands are unironic. Normcore trifle for the aspiring middle plans offer a fitting facsimile of prosperity and for the poor plans or rather the products they make or the services they provide.
S6: Yeah, I love that part about affordable luxuries and premium mediocre, like it’s a sign of how far we’ve all fallen that for luxury now it’s like avocado toast or a pair of of of denim jeans from Evelin or something. That’s all we can afford. And we pretend it’s fancy. Whereas in the days of Coke and Pepsi, it was like, here are brands that everyone can afford all together. Like this is these are American companies selling stuff for everyone.
S3: And now it’s kind of like these are fancy companies selling fake fancy stuff for only a few people or more to the point that fancy companies selling real fancy stuff, but like trying to persuade us that it’s cheap. I think what we see a lot of is, you know, you find some disruptive, artisanal cast iron skillet company, you know, and they’re like, you can buy this disruptive, almost cast iron skillet for a mere eighty five dollars. And everyone’s like, wow, that will last me a lifetime. Maybe five dollars is cheap without realizing that you can buy a very good cast iron skillet for like ten bucks. And there is this sense that I think especially among the the ironic normcore rich, they just don’t know how much skillets and sheets and knives actually cost. And they believe the marketing when the marketing tells them that it’s cheap, even when it’s expensive.
S4: I think one of the things that interests me is I wrote this was this notion that each brand implies the next. So it would almost be hypocritical to use your cool quip toothbrush, whether you know it, Colgate toothpaste, when you could be using, you know, Mintern match from this new hipster startup called Hello, quote, things just got interesting quote.
S7: And so this this this notion that, you know, you wake up on your on your Caspa, you throw back your Brooklyn and you chug a Soylent, you log on to slack, you, GrubHub, your sweet green. And and then suddenly, you know, that’s your day. You become this homo glanders, the Swiss Army knife of Blands and each one in place the next and somehow not to then have a bland product. It’s sort of like, wow, I’m not part of the military industrial complex, even though they are all part of the military industrial complex because they all find each other. I mean, you know, the sweet green people we’re investing in. But there will be Parker people, sweet green then invested in the small door. There is this whole ecosystem. I didn’t get into this this piece for Bloomberg. It could have it could have been four times as long I became obsessed with it and then I love it is when they then open up shops, they’re like, hey, we’re direct to consumer about the low overhead. We’re all about keeping. Oh, I’m actually yeah, we have got shops everywhere also. Don’t worry about the overhead. That’s fine. But then the shops have to then look like the Instagram post that they then inspire. So then you are taking photographs of your Instagram in a shop that was designed to look like an Instagram post.
S4: The whole thing is just these are the kind of the overview that makes it fascinating to me is it was all designed really for people who thought themselves not only sort of immune, but somehow allergic to marketing. I mean, I don’t know whose red pattern recognition, the William Gibson book, there’s a character, the female character, who is literally allergic to branding and brands bring her in. And if she has a visceral, sort of horrific reaction to a brand, they won’t use it because she’s got she’s so sort of sensitive. And there’s an entire generation who think themselves case from William Gibson’s pattern recognition. And of course, they’re all buying identical things and they’re feeling happy and secure with it.
S6: Has this ever been good for Blands?
S4: I think it has probably been good for some. I mean, it’s interesting. So the bricks and mortar, the brands who have gone through bricks and mortar, I think are going to it’s going to be interesting to see if they suffer. I mean, rent the runway, I think has just pivoted from shops to drop boxes. So I think that’s going to be interesting. I think it probably has. I think, you know, don’t forget a lot of people who haven’t lost their jobs, who now have a lot of money because they haven’t spent anything and they’re going online and they’re using their I think they’re sort of flexing their credit cards because they’re not going to restaurants and they’re not travelling.
S3: So I think more to the point, they’re not going to shops that there has been also that huge. The one thing that Blands really do have in common is that they all. Based in e-commerce. Well, if nobody’s been good for e-commerce, then, well, I mean, even even the ones with brick and mortar stores, I mean, I remember when Bonobo’s opened up their brick and mortar stores and you could go in there and you could try on a pair of trousers, but you couldn’t buy a pair of trousers. And they were that they would bring out an iPad and they would be like, we will ship. You observed what?
S7: And they said, this line is they’ll leave the shop empty handed is like a selling point of interest.
S3: The but the the you’re absolutely right. But the point of the stores is to basically be physical Instagram ads. And the reason they open up these stores is because the stores are actually cheaper than Instagram ads. Instagram, that’s a horrendously expensive and and so insofar as we have now started really embracing e-commerce, we’ve sort of leapt forwards four or five years in terms of e-commerce in the space of just a few months. That’s going to be good for any brand is mostly based in e-commerce rather than people walking into an old fashioned shopping mall and buying a thing and putting it in that car and driving it home.
S4: I think what’s tough is these brands. So these brands are they’re in it to exit. I mean, very few of them want to are in it for the long haul. What they want to do is accelerate customer acquisition to like launch velocity before launching an IPO or being bought out basically by one of the targets of their disruption. A friend of mine said it’s essentially blackmail. Right. You set up a you know, a company that creates cheap raises. You grow it to a size where the big race of people have to buy it out from you because you’ve stolen all of their people. So there’s this sort of there is it’s pure capitalism. But the problem at that is customer acquisition, which is why when Kasper’s IPO documents came out, someone calculated that losing one hundred and sixty dollars a mattress because it just costs so much to get customers now also returns and starts. But, you know, as soon as you see a one of these brands taking over a subway car, you know, they’re in trouble because the customer acquisition costs have just accelerated beyond any kind of logic. So in a sense, the more the advertise, the tougher it is.
S5: I was just going to say, though, Billy Razor is really are better than any other racer that’s putting the.
S3: The thing is interesting, because there are only if you look at the successful exits, Ben’s absolutely right that all of these people are in there for the exit. There have only been two billion dollar exits in this entire category of Blands, and both of them have been raises and one of them is under antitrust scrutiny right now. It might not happen. Raises seemed to have been the one category of all of these millions of categories that has successfully done this sort of black male business model correctly. The rest of them have mostly failed precisely because of what Ben is talking about, because the barriers to entry are so low and because there’s so much competition and because, you know, customer acquisition is so expensive. Very few of the other ones have been able to really make a success of it or to exit. The CASPA IPO has been down into the right for a while and it’s trading well below the valuations that it had before it went public. So while they have certainly taken over New York City subway cars, we’ve talked about this on state money in the past. The real winners here are Shopify and Stripe and the and the companies providing sort of the backend services to these plans.
S6: An addendum to Anna’s point about the Raiser’s and Felix is your point about the only company successful are the razor companies. The razor business really was ripe for disrupting by the are in a store was a pain in the butt, like they locked them up behind a case. It was annoying. It’s too expensive. I was ready for disruption.
S4: Except, I mean, they’ve been absolutely screwed by Crozet because no one’s going into work and no one shaving.
S6: That’s a good point, too.
S4: So, I mean, what disruption gives disruption takes away.
S3: All right, let’s have a numbers round then shot. Did we tell you about the numbers around, you know, about the number and all about the numbers round?
S4: I am the numbers round.
S3: All right. What’s your number then?
S4: So my number is actually from twenty seventeen and it’s 140 dollars and 140 dollars was the cost of a rack of lamb at the Beatrice in when I ate there in twenty seventeen. And I remember looking at this and I looked around the room and you know that thing in poker, which is if you look around the table and you can’t spot the schmuck, it’s you. I looked around the restaurant and thought I’m the only person not on an expense account paying with actual post-tax income and I’m the idiot. And that was when I thought, this cannot last. New York is basically just waiting for the music to stop. And what we discovered in the last three or four months is the music has stopped. And I think a lot about that one hundred and forty dollar rack of lamb, because that struck me as just being a moment of madness and everything that I think is going to happen to New York was summed up by that single menu item for me.
S6: Are you saying New York is over? Ben, are you one of those people?
S4: I’m saying I don’t think New York is tenable, I think and not in a sort of Daily Mail postapocalyptic. You know, I’m just saying I think if you take, you know, parking fines, toll money, business rates, tax take, I think, you know, restaurants are not going to be able to survive. The winter sets another four or five months, I think, with no cinemas, with no restaurants, with no bars, with no theater, with no museums, with no tourism for six to eight months. I just don’t see an economic way forward. And what’s always happened in the past in New York is that there have been areas that people have gone into the arts, this whole thing over in the 70s, the artists came in, they took over the loss. There are no laws, there is no space, everything is owned, everything is expensive. And what worries me about New York is that there’s no, like, hinterland for people to regenerate. It’s just ossified and stuck and it’s stuck at a very expensive level.
S3: I’m going to take the other side of this one man, which I’m saying I’m going to say that the hinterland is is midtown Manhattan. The hinterland is rents that are coming down very quickly, both in terms of residential and even more in terms of commercial and especially for restaurant spaces. I think that this is an amazing. Event that has is going to be the event that brings down the rents that forces the restaurants to charge one hundred and forty dollars for a rack of lamb and the vibrant restaurant scene in particular, and certainly a vibrant theater scene and various other things is all predicated on the idea that you can have workers who aren’t paying too much in rent for the for where they live, that you’re going to have restaurants that aren’t paying too much in rent for where they’re based. And all of that went away over the past couple of decades as New York became ridiculously expensive. If those rents come down substantially, which it looks like they are doing, then that means that we have an incredible opportunity to bring people back, to bring businesses back. They don’t need to charge one hundred and forty dollars for a rack of lamb. That is a lot of money. Emily, what’s your number?
S6: My number is speaking of lamb, my number is thirteen thousand four hundred and ninety four dollars. That is the amount that Smithfield Foods was fined for failing to protect its workers at its meat processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where more than a thousand people tested positive for covid and four died and a bunch were hospitalized. This is a very small amount of money. If it’s not clear to you already. This company makes 14 billion dollars every year in revenue and the fine again was thirteen thousand dollars. And the fine came months after the all the workers got sick and the workers died. And it’s just kind of it’s a good indication of how most workers were treated as expendable in this crisis. Trump issued an executive order keeping the meat processing plants open when there were outbreaks of covid in them, endangering the lives of so many people and showing that the government, federal and at the state level, too, there are stories of different states doing bad stuff as well. Prioritized meat, not just rack of lamb. That’s very expensive, but like all kinds of meat prioritized over the lives of human beings who processed the meat.
S3: One of the things that I’ve noticed when I’ve been talking to business owners, mostly small and medium sized business owners, is there is this incredible worry they all seem to have about what if someone gets covered and sues me and I. Always just look at them and go like that. There are lots of things to worry about right now, but I don’t think the litigation risk is in your top like three hundred things to worry about.
S6: Yeah, it’s incredible. And Mitch McConnell was hyper focused on protection from litigation for companies for covid. And it’s like just just just tell companies that they have to protect their workers and they will. And I think there’s an some people will still die of of covid. But I think the litigation risk would be mitigated if people saw that companies were actually taking care to protect their workers. And one of the aspects of this fine is that OSHA didn’t create any new rules around covid regulators didn’t come in and say, you must do social distancing or you must you have to close down. If there is X, Y, Z number of cases like there were no new regulations around this at all order. There was no care put into just issuing a few rules to say like to keep workers safe. There was only this rush to protect companies from litigation, which, as you said, isn’t even that big of a risk.
S3: It’s almost as though the federal response to covid with somehow subpar. That’s weird. And I was going no.
S5: Well, so my no actually kind of jumps off of Emily’s no. So my number is three hundred and fourteen plus seven. So three hundred and fourteen are the number of Pemex workers who’ve died of covid and then seven contract workers. It’s actually the most of any company in the world from one company, and it’s actually more than the combined of all other major energy companies put together, which if you know anything about how Pemex, the state run Mexican oil company, is run, this shouldn’t be overly surprising. But it was still a little surprising. Just Mexico is obviously done a very poor job in their handling of the coronavirus crisis. And this there’s a long story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek about this and just how poorly this was handled, especially workers were basically on these kind of like, you know, tankers out at sea in essentially like cruise ships, almost, you know, environments. And just how many of them have died. It’s really pretty shocking, as you said it was for at this us. And that’s horrible here. It’s a three hundred and fourteen. And you can imagine that it’s probably actually quite a bit more than that. If you look at a lot of the Mexican covid statistics, which you always have to say, well, this is the number, it’s probably three times more than that.
S6: That was just for workers at the one planned South Dakota. I think industry wide, it’s more like one hundred, but still not that Pemex. You blew me away with that.
S3: My number is a little bit of a teaser. It’s thirty seven percent, which is the amount that Niccola stock fell between Tuesday afternoon and Friday morning. Niccola being this. Company that makes electric trucks or says that it will make like trucks, but they eventually Babbs. Which went public by its back, it’s an amazing story, and I think that’s what we’re going to talk about on this week’s Slate Plus. So if you are into Niccola, which had a lot of news this week, we’re going to talk about Niccola on Slate plus. Otherwise, thank you so much for listening to state money. Thank you so much to Ben for coming on and ranting in a particularly eloquent way about Blands. I can’t wait for the subsequent installment about podcasts. And thank you everyone for writing in. We love your emails. Sleep money at Slate Dotcom. Finally, thank you to Jessamine Molly for producing.
S2: If I sound particularly good this week, it is because I am in her studio thinking about it in Brooklyn. It’s all due to her. And with that we’ll wrap up the main show. Hope you stick around for Slate plus. And thanks for listening to sleep money.
S3: Anna Nicole, it went up and it went down. What’s going on?
S5: It did. So, Nicole, a lot of news this week. So first you had this news that basically GM was buying a large stake in Nicolau, that it was very odd because it didn’t seem like GM was getting much out of this. They were basically creating all the technology while still giving money to Niccola to essentially be able to use their froth.
S1: Essentially, their market for is seem to be the most that Nagler had to offer. And then we get this report from a short seller. And yes, obviously, this is a short seller, although it a fairly. Fascinating report, if you kind of look through it, just going through what a fraud it turns out Nicola might be. And granted, if you really looked at Nicola, it’s not shocking that it may turn out to be a fraud, that this wasn’t just a company that didn’t have profits. No companies, essentially a profit to be more profits are very 1990s. But this company really had any revenue, like it certainly doesn’t have any products.
S3: My favorite my favorite bit about this report was when there was this video that Niccola put out of this truck, like steaming down the road and then was like, oh, look at that truck going down the road. This is an amazing product. It turns out that what they did was they towed the truck up to the top of a hill and then just let it go downhill. And they filmed it.
S1: Going downhill is looking like it was like gravity, man, like it’s the holster. My favorite detail, the story was the use of the NASA expense account to procure the services of prostitutes. That that was my favorite little detail.
S4: This boldly go where no man has gone before.
S3: Yes, exactly. So my question for you is, what kind of diligence do you think that GM did on Nicollet before making this investment because GM is a large company?
S1: Yeah, no, I mean, I agree. And that, of course, does make you have to step back and say, OK, is it possible that the short seller report is perhaps, you know, exaggerating? I don’t know, though, because it’s interesting that what GM seems to be purchasing is simply the energy around Niccola because it’s seen as the next Tesla. They aren’t purchasing technology. So if the fact that Necla didn’t actually have any technology while GM probably saw that they didn’t because they didn’t and that’s not what they bought. So, yes, I do think that I would be shocked if GM knew that they apparently were just sending cars rolling down hills. But it also seems to me that. While they certainly did due diligence, some type of due diligence, I also wonder if they frankly didn’t care as much about some of the aspects of what came out in this because that just simply wasn’t what they were buying.
S3: My theory is that GM is to Niccola as Walgreens is to Theranos. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah.
S1: That’s actually a very similar thought when I was reading this, because, like, when you read that book there, Theranos Babila, which is a fantastic book, there are all of these large companies, these investors who have a very well known who were just bowled over by this company even though they had nothing. And this seems like it could be a very similar thing, that the reality is GM is so anxious to get into this game. They so I think they believed what they wanted to believe, which is that Niccola was offering them something and so they went with it. But I think the question then, of course, now is what happens moving forward? Because while I as I’ve said, I do think that they understood that they weren’t buying any technology. I don’t think they thought they were buying like a public fraud. I would hope I would hope that that wasn’t in their plan.
S6: So you see that a lot, right? They buy something that they think people think is cool and has no value at all. Like that’s not just a Theranos Walgreens thing or a Tesla GM thing. Like this is a pattern you see over and over again. There are some companies that maybe did that. Yes. Walmart. I mean, I feel like we could really find a lot of examples of this at the Time Warner AOL thing. Yeah, there’s a lot I mean, it’s a common pattern.
S4: Isn’t the concern for me is on a sort of wider level, this notion of if, quote unquote, some of the smartest guys in the room or gals in the room can be taken by what is clearly an obvious fraud, say Theranos, that this notion of the black box is too good to be true. We’re at a moment now where five billion people are going to be asked to take a vaccine that, again, feels like a black box. And it’s like you have no idea. There’ll be dozens of competing vaccines. There will be different countries with different state interests. There’ll be pharmaceutical companies with pharmaceutical interests. And this all sort of strikes at the heart of confidence. And I think this is going to be a really, really big issue. And I think the kind of mindset that means people are happy to invest in things that sound good but don’t work in the black box. And the black Ronak is just not enough. And I mean that that concerns me at this given moment.
S1: I also think it’s interesting, this story right now, because it’s it just seems to be emblematic of all of these strange trends we have now. Like, it is part of a bought up by a spaak. It is connected with this electrical vehicles, which is connected with Tesla, which we’re also seeing like their share price rise clearly was quite artificial and seems to have been mostly gameplay. This is a moment where we what we’re seeing in the markets makes very little sense. People and you hear when people talk about it, they don’t believe it. They don’t buy what they’re seeing. And I think that we’re seeing that in many different areas. And I do think moving forward, it’s while it’s probably would be good if people don’t buy what they’re saying in terms of Mikhaela, that could have some more dangerous consequences if, as you say, when people moving forward don’t necessarily.
S3: I mean, I wrote in my newsletter this week about how we’ve entered the age of the postmodern stock market. Yes. The whole thing is basically just completely ironic. And it doesn’t really represent capital allocation in any way anymore, except for sometimes it does, like Tesla just issued five billion dollars in stock and that’s real money that it got outstrip the. But, yeah, the crisis of institutions and of institutional legitimacy that Ben is talking about is exactly the right thing to be worried about, because it’s what got Trump elected. It’s what people think about when you think about companies and corporations. And in a world where we really do need 70 percent of the population to vaccinate themselves on a voluntary basis, it’s hard to see how we’re going to get to that world in, you know, when the way we have always done that in the past is by basically saying, trust us, this is good for you. And when the government comes around or a big company comes around and says, trust us, this is good for you, it’s easy to see how a lot of people are just not going to trust them.
S4: And I think on one hand, you have companies investing vast sums of money into meaningless black boxes. And then during Brexit, you have Michael Gove saying people have had enough of experts. And I think the two of us are deeply concerning trend. And this kind of it took hundreds of years for the Enlightenment project to essentially trust facts. And that you have in fact, you have a hypothesis. It gets tested. Get. Retested and then the new floor in which knowledge is built appears to be unraveling in real time, that my fact is equal to your opinion. You know what, though?
S6: Governments and experts for decades really abuse the trust that people gave to them. I was thinking of this because I was visiting with my aunt this weekend and she was talking about when the polio vaccine came out. She was around back during polio scare and originally the first polio vaccines. She was saying, I hope this is true, killed people because they use live polio virus. And it was it was a bad. But people still went and took the next the next round. They still went for it because of trust or like I was just listening to this great podcast called You’re Wrong About. And it was all about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment where medical, quote unquote, experts didn’t tell black men that they had syphilis and just monitored their progress or their demise as they slowly died from the disease and didn’t treat them in any treatment that they gave them was actually just not treatment and just made them worse again. And these men trusted these experts. I feel like a lot of this the fact that there’s less trust now is because experts and bureaucrats and politicians burn through a lot of the trust.
S1: So and now we reap the reward, which I think that’s something that’s totally because I think that you often hear people now talking about lack of trust in institutions or lack of trust in government. It’s like, oh, it’s social media. Yes, certainly that’s definitely not helping. But like I mean, in the US, this is going back to Vietnam. Yeah, going back to Watergate. These are very, very long building lynching.
S3: I mean, it’s never been a I trust much more recently we had the situation where when the U.S. military was trying to locate Osama bin Laden, they went around backwards, Pakistan and Afghanistan, basically. Posing as health inspectors and saying we need to come into your house and make sure that everyone’s been vaccinated and, you know, you do that once and no one is ever going to trust a health inspector again or even, frankly, the CDC saying, guess what, none of you should wear masks, then be like, guess what?
S1: You all need to wear masks. Like, it confuses people.
S6: Yeah, yeah. I feel like the athletes are at work like an experts are like no one trusts us anymore. And it’s like, well, why don’t you grapple with the fact that you screw up sometimes and the trust gets misplaced. Like why don’t you just be upfront about this stuff. Something to think about.
