Marketplace produced by Public Radio International.
The following titles have
been broadcast.
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
MARKETPLACE INTERVIEW WITH Tim Bedore as BILL GATES and Tim Bedore as GUEST HOST-WALTER CRONKITE
WALTER CRONKITE
Hello, this is Walter Cronkite. Because of the importance of this story,
the settlement of the Microsoft anti-trust case, I have returned to do
this very special interview for Marketplace with Microsoft founder Bill
Gates. Bill, for you this was a tough day.
BILL GATES
Yeh', I'm hurt... and confused. Do you remember Sally Field accepting
the Oscar a few years ago... "You like me! You really like me!!" I so want
to be able to say that... but... I guess I don't know what people really
think of me.
WALTER CRONKITE
Can I suggest the phrase 'The Devil Incarnate.'
BILL GATES
Ouch. But yeh', that's the vibe I'm getting.
WALTER CRONKITE
How does this negative public-attitude manifest itself in your day-to-day
life?
BILL GATES
Some people avert their eyes. Others say they feel a draft when I am
in the room. Some make the sign of the cross and run.
WALTER CRONKITE
Perhaps these negative perceptions have something to do with the fact
you're worth 80 billion dollars and your Windows operating system still
crashes like a two-legged dog on Peyote?
BILL GATES
Maybe...
WALTER CRONKITE
This morning, your product, Windows 98, accused me, Walter Cronkite,
the most trusted man in America, of having performed an illegal operation.
I was just trying to print an envelope. Isn't the phrase, "illegal operation"
a little harsh?
BILL GATES
Maybe. But it makes people think system crashes are their fault, not
Windows... so, win, win for us.
WALTER CRONKITE
Perhaps people wouldn't feel the way they do about you if Windows worked
as flawlessly as, say, Linux.
BILL GATES
Linux! Linux! Linux! I hate that word... How can anybody love a product
that was free?
WALTER CRONKITE
Can 80 billion dollars really buy Bill Gates happiness?
BILL GATES
Have you seen the size of my house? A family of five could live in
my closet. But... you're right.
WALTER CRONKITE
Tell Uncle Walter, Bill, you'll feel better.
BILL GATES
As long as I'm around nobody ever offers to buy dinner? The check comes-
nobody reaches for their wallet and says, 'Hey, let me get this one Bill.'
Even though I'm the richest guy in the world... it would be nice just once
to hear... 'Hey Bill. Heard you gave a billion to charity again today.
Let me pick up lunch.'
WALTER CRONKITE
Bill, as the Beatles once said "The love you take is equal to the love
you make."
BILL GATES
Never liked the Beatles. I was a Monkees fan.
WALTER CRONKITE
Even as a child, instead of gravitating towards the inspired, unique
genius of the Beatles you were drawn to the watered down, mimicry of the
Monkees, a band whose very existence depended on the brilliant, bright
light radiating from the Fab Four- John, Paul, George and Ringo. Who coincidentally
owned a record label called Apple.
BILL GATES
Mmmmm... yeh'.
WALTER CRONKITE
Indeed, that says a little bit of me, and a little bit of you. And
that's the way it is, this is Walter Cronkite for Marketplace, good night.
During the last careening, gut-wrenching stock market tumble my wife reminded me that neither of us have a pension. I don’t know why, as our mini-portfolio took to negative territory like pigeons to a stray french fry, she felt plopping that cold reality on the table was helpful but she did.
One of her motivations I am sure is that like many comedians long range planning skills are not my forte’. In fact for many years my long range planning was knowing where I was going to play golf next week.
Karen pointed out that our parents worked for the same companies their whole careers and now get 30, 40, maybe 50%, of their final salary in pension benefits. They are getting paid to not work. That is so cool.
No wonder our parents could afford to buy speed boats and summer cottages and fondue pots. They didn’t have to worry so much about their retirement. So I said, where do you get one of those pensions, I want one. She said you have to work for someone for a long time. I said, Boy I don’t do anything like that, do I?
I work for myself and there is no Comedians Union. There’s probably a Rodeo Clowns Guild with a pension and great dental but nothing for us comedians.
So now I’m bummed but a comedian friend of mine said “Yes, we don’t have pensions but we love our work and don’t have to slave away year after year for a boss we hate.” I said “When you’re 84 and can’t afford socks remind yourself that you never got up at 6 A.M. and I had a single digit handicap. When I’m 89 and the bank comes to repossess my house, what can I say– I once had four pars in a row at Pebble Beach? At that point I’ll need money, not golf memories.
What’s my point? On behalf of all of us pensionless Americans out there please, please, please, leave your money in the stock market. So what if tech stocks are a big Ponzi scheme. If everybody plays, everybody wins... more or less, right? Be optimistic. Buy in the dips. Buy and hold. If the big runup of the past few years was emotional then the sell-off was emotional. And negative emotions are wrong. Ummmm, ummmm... as the poet once said, “Don’t worry, be happy...” And remember if you don’t buy a ticket you can’t win the lottery. The net is the future. A bird in the hand... forget that one... Please, don’t beat up my little portfolio by dumping tech stocks. I WANT A SPEEDBOAT!!!!! In Los Angeles, I’m Tim Bedore for Marketplace.
Have you ever been to a freak show?
It struck me as odd but a couple years ago at the Minnesota State Fair, right there on the midway, was a big sign that said "Welcome to the freak show."
This exhibition of human wonderment and oddities was set up so from the midway you couldn't see the amazing 3-headed 2-inch tall woman but you could see the faces of the people who paid to shuffle past the amazing 3-headed 2-inch tall woman. This being the Mid-West, the good hearted patrons did not callously laugh at or cruelly mock the amazing 3-headed 2-inch tall woman but instead tried to engage her in pleasant conversation. I even heard someone say "Are you enjoying Minnesota? You know, many of our ten thousands lakes are quite shallow." Alright, I made that part up.
What reminded me of that midway freak show was this Survivor show on CBS. What kind of people would eat a rat on national T.V.? If you answered "freaks" you move on to the lightening round.
If you don't know the rules, to win Survivor's million dollar prize you have to leave your family and friends, if you have any, for 6 weeks and live on this deserted island with a bunch of strangers. In all probability you will then, on national television, get voted off the island for having committed the sin of being yourself. Which to me is a freaky thing to choose to do with 6 weeks of your life. So to me, that means Survivor is Emotional Circus Geeks at a really bad Club Med. I mean, how dumb are you going to feel if you eat a rat on coast-to-coast television and come home with nothing but a bad sunburn?
In a short span of time American T.V. has gone from offering a million dollars for answering trivia questions to daring someone to eat a barbecued rodent. The next logical step is a show called Donner Party Challenge- Who has the Will To Live?
You can't blame CBS. Survivor is a ratings bonanza because more Americans would rather watch a woman in a bikini eat a rat than tell Regis Philbin who is buried in Grant's tomb.
What's my point "you can learn a lot about the current stock market by watching Survivor" seemingly normal people will do very odd things when there are very longs odds they can make a lot of money.
Carnivals and e-commerce web-sites
Now that I'm a father I look forward to the end of summer and the beginning of fall because in summer kids dive off railroad trestles into three feet of water, play tag with B.B. guns and see if 30 feet of surgical tubing can launch a water balloon from your backyard to the convent across the street. I can tell you from personal experience, amazingly, it can.
But the most dangerous thing America's kids do is go to one of these traveling carnivals. If you don't know what a traveling carnival is, it's a traveling band of recently paroled child pornographers, borderline psychotics, fired gym teachers and assorted other tattooed neer-do-wells, who show up on the edge of town and, for a fee, will risk your children's lives on mechanical contraptions optimistically known as thrill rides.
Every year it seems I read stories about kids flying off Tilt-a-Whirls into snow-cone stands, teenagers being catapulted off the Zipper into that ring-toss game no one ever wins or about a top heavy woman prematurely leaving the Octopus because the 80 year old safety bar snapped and launched her into a row of port-a-potties last cleaned during the Johnson administration.
You might find it unconscionable for these carnivals to be so unconcerned with safety but from a cold, hard business point of view, they were going to be leaving town on Monday anyway. By the time word gets around that little Tommy Johnson got amoebic dysentery just from standing near the cotton candy machine the carnival is three states away. And Tommy Johnson's parents could find an atheist working at the Vatican before they'll find a lawyer who would sue a business operating out of a Winnebago.
What's my point? Lots of these e-businesses and web-sites remind me of a traveling Carnival. You don't know who these web companies are or where they are going to be next week. How do you know they're not operating out of a Winnebago? Maybe I'm crazy but I feel more comfortable giving a 16 year old store clerk my credit card than typing my Visa number into a box on a website.
I could be stuck in the past or maybe I just have bad memories of throwing up on the Tilt-a-Whirl. But for me, e-business is the corn dog on a stick of American commerce; a sharp piece of wood inside a deep-fried meat by-product is not something I need...especially when we still have stores.
And for you parents, the worrying doesn't end with summer. There's Halloween and bobbing for apples coming up where some very competitive kids can stay under water too long. I've done that too.
Isn't it amazing that the majority of the American people don't want a tax cut?
It's astounding, “ we don't want money when politicians are willing to give it to us. This must be a singular moment in U.S. history. The American people are saying "Chocolate cake? Mmmmm.... Thank you, but no. Why don't you wrap the cake up and save it for when we really need it."
And as of yet I haven't heard a good explanation for why we're saying "no." I am sure some people think it's that our economy is so strong the middle class doesn't need the money. Are you kidding? Everybody out there who has too much money raise your hand... Unless you are driving, otherwise, raise your hands. See, not that many of you.
Of course people still love money– look at the popular T.V. shows, be a millionaire, marry a millionaire, walk around nude to be a millionaire; we want someone to give us money but not the government.
What happened? There are people who theorize that over the last eight years the government put subliminal messages into T.V. broadcasts and we the people are now hypnotized. People that think that are called Republicans... who must be so frustrated because tax cuts were the sure-fire red meat they could always throw to the masses. But something has changed since the 80's when all we wanted from the government was raw beef and lots of it.
I think you can narrow it down to two things. Drugs and children. As a group baby-boomers stopped doing one and started doing the other. Or our kids started doing drugs and so now we want more cops and better schools and all that takes more money and so you can keep the tax cut and the surplus and get a cop down here quick and some more teachers and clean up the air while you're at it- my kids are breathin' this stuff.
What a turn-around that would be if us baby boomers catch up to our parents generation and do something as smart as invest in the future, especially after decades earlier having shown so much interest in bell bottoms and heroin.
I think during presidential elections every major T.V. network and cable outfit should be required to have a CPA or somebody who actually knows something on hand to act as a truth barometer. And when the campaign ads and talking head surrogates start yappin' the Truth Barometer can hit a buzzer and drowned out what they are saying until the talking head or candidate or ad gets somewhere close to reality.
As any reasonable person who can operate a radio, which includes you, knows there aren't vegetarians working at the butcher shop and campaign advertising is iffy truth-wise. But now the T.V. news programs are just as iffy they bring in someone wearing a suit from the right and someone wearing a suit from the left and they each say the other guy is lying and the moderator says that's all the time we have and we are no closer to knowing anything more than we knew before.
This much I have been able to figure out Al Gore couldn't be more stiff if he was hiding a redwood up his environmentally sensitive area. And when George Bush said "Families is where American wings take dream," he is not someone who should have passed English. (I also suspect the Reagan administration tried to do away with the Department of Education to get us ready for the Bush family.)
But what I am certain of is that there are too many important issues at stake for we the people to be getting so little usable, real information to take into the voting booth. For example, are we dumb or what? Is our schools doing the job? Our public education system are the most important research and development project this nation got. Before you vote I think it really important to know how dumb we is.
And the policy question isn't just if we're spending too little money on education. Do we have a dumb pop culture? I think that Horse with No Name song by America was the turning point. Our teachers were trying to get us to diagram sentences while the biggest song on the radio had the lyric "In the desert you can't remember your name cuz' there ain't no one for to give you no pain." When an entire generation of Americans heard that song go to number one and make millions for the guy who wrote it, I think we gave up caring about education and said to our teachers "You can take your dangling participle and shove it cuz' it don't care where my American wings take dream."
Now you may be saying, 'Hey, Tim! What you just said doesn't mean anything, it started off O.K. but then got sidetracked with a quote from a goof-ball song and in the end, it was an uninformative waste of time.' Well, then I guess I'm ready for television.
If They Could Vote with Their Minds
I was at a dinner party last week and all we could talk about was the election... and for a moment whether flan is a pudding or a custard, but mostly the election.
A guy wearing jeans and 800 dollar Italian loafers said "If people in Palm County screwed up and voted for Pat Buchanan, tough nuts." But someone in a stylishly un-constructed sport coat responded, "Should Bush win because a bunch of elderly Jews mistakenly voted for a Nazi? They feel horrible. Let 'em re-vote. If they could vote with their minds instead of a punch card Gore would win." The guy with the shoes said, "If Palm county voted with their mind a potato knish would win.
I was wearing Rockports and said, "You know who wins? The media. We're watching live coverage of people counting votes by hand. This story is Dan Rather's wet dream. He's hoppin' around like a west Texas puppy on a hot plate."
Then a guy with cocktail sauce on his sleeve said "Gore annoys me. Intellectually, he's just so full of himself." And then his wife said, "And, Bush intellectually... is not full. And Honey, get your sleeve out of the dip."
The host said "Let's not get into a food fight here. We're one country. There shouldn't be rioting in the streets." I said, "Rioting in the streets? It's Gore and Bush. Who could get that excited?"
A woman wearing really expensive peasant clothing, like Stevie Nicks, said she was going to chop down a redwood tree just to tick off Ralph Nader.
And then a philosophical, poetic, writer type, with a goatee and over-priced little wire rim glasses, tried to sum it all up, proclaiming "Oh what a tangled web we have woven, when we try to determine what the people have spoken." And everyone thought for a moment... and started arguing again. I said, you know what sums this whole thing up for me? I know people who, before the election, got pre-recorded calls from Clinton and Bob Dole. Although the T.V. was on loud so I'm not sure, but I think I got a call from Sonny Bono. (I didn't get a call from the former Sonny Bono but a few people believed me)
This I am certain of we need to get this election straightened out fairly soon or the holiday dinner season is going to be a mess. Last year my brother-in-law nearly hit me with a gravy ladle and we were just discussing Monica Lewinsky. I don't want to debate something important like whether the Presidency was stolen while he's holding an electric carving knife.
And oddly enough, depending on which way the stock market goes the smartest career move for Gore or Bush might be to concede the election and leave the other guy holding the chad bag.
Vague But True®
Vague But True is a registered trademark
copyright 2000 Tim Bedore --- all rights reserved