What's Behind the Internet's Fascination with Luigi Mangione? | Pivot

1. KSKara Swisher0:00

   Anyway, let's get to our first big story. One of the biggest stories this week, obviously, Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Bryan 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 one of the best story I read was about him being kind of a typical tech bro. If- 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 was... He worked for TrueCar. I think he was a video game aficionado. Um, he did have health issue over the last years on Reddit. He talked about this back problem he had and struggled with brain fog. John Hermon wrote in New York Magazine, "What's most striking about the... Mangione's, uh, extensive online dossier is that had it been studied before the shooting took place, it wouldn't have raised much alarm." Uh, very difficult to characterize. Um, what do you... Ta- talk about that first, then we'll talk about the reaction from people.

2. SGScott Galloway1:06

   Well, okay, so first reaction is, in my opinion, and, you know, let me be arrogant here, I think the correct reaction is to feel, um, sympathy for the family of this man who was murdered. And then, 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, um, this is justified, uh, 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 'cause 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, your li- and, 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.

3. KSKara Swisher2:00

   That's right.

4. SGScott Galloway2:00

   We have no fucking idea.

5. KSKara Swisher2:01

   No idea.

6. SGScott Galloway2:01

   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, 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, I can tell you how someone feels about this based on, with 70 or 80% accuracy, based on one thing. Can you afford, pretty easily, health insurance? Because here's some data. Um, 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, people oftentimes compare healthcare to how I would describe San Francisco, expensive but bad, in the US, or healthcare in the US. And you have, 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 what you end up with is, despite the fact that 70% of America supports price caps and universal healthcare, it doesn't happen.

7. KSKara Swisher3:25

   Yeah. It's like gun, it's like gun control.

8. SGScott Galloway3:27

   Because of the whores better known as our elected representatives keep letting the pharmaceutical and the healthcare 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.

9. KSKara Swisher3:50

   Yeah.

10. SGScott Galloway3:50

    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 gonna re-examine their ethics-

11. KSKara Swisher4:02

    Right. No.

12. SGScott Galloway4:02

    What... Don't hold your br- breath, folks.

13. KSKara Swisher4:04

    No.

14. SGScott Galloway4:04

    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 healthcare in this country.

15. KSKara Swisher4:15

    Yeah, but, but, what was interesting too is, I think, this reaction, and I think this, it's borne out from what you're saying, um, it's snowballed since the police captured him too. The, this reaction to this young man, this troubled, very troubled young man. Uh, people have been writing fan fiction. Etsy is full of merchandise. There's, they call him Robin Hoodie. There's been Spotify, uh, playlists and crypto coins. His lawyer told CNN he's gotten offers from members of the public to pay the le- his legal fees. Um, uh, you know, this is a, 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 that, and then laughing or making fun or being, uh, less than empathetic as, to a murder victim is really, uh, terrible. But at the same time, the, that man doesn't, doesn't... isn't a person anymore. He's the insurance industry, right? That's what he represents.

16. SGScott Galloway5:04

    Right.

17. KSKara Swisher5:04

    And perhaps he is in some ways. So, uh, and just so you know, major insurance stocks, including UnitedHealthcare, have fallen more than 6% since their clo- closing prices the day before the shooting. There may be some Wall Street anticipation of moves. There's, there's some moves to... UnitedHealthcare for... I don't know how, got ahold of pharmacies. They loan them money and then... in a usury, usury way, and then took control of them. They're, there's a bipartisan effort to not... They should not be owning pharmacies. They should not be owning hospitals. They put people out of business. Um, that's an astonishing thing I didn't know about. Um, so talk about the justific... Like, giving this guy a lot of attention and, you know, um, making him, kind of, as I said, this folk hero who's not a folk hero, um, is sort of an unfortunate folk hero, and what's gonna happen to the insurance industry?

18. SGScott Galloway5:54

    Well, okay, so in my opinion, this is all reverse engineering to the same place. And that is, when a nation...... gets to this point of income inequality, you have a self-correction, and that's the good news. It o- 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 Matters movements, which both had righteous components of them, but the thing all of these things have in common is the following, they're going after the 1%. And effectively what happens is people decide if, if (laughs) there are, 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-

19. KSKara Swisher6:49

    Mm-hmm.

20. SGScott Galloway6:49

    ... 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 gonna be bankrupt two years later, they start to get enraged. This is a form of revolution in the support for this person.

21. KSKara Swisher7:16

    Can, can I make a comparison though?

22. SGScott Galloway7:17

    Go ahead.

23. KSKara Swisher7:17

    I'd love you to. 'Cause like look, this happens with the shootings, all the gun c- We, everyone in America wants gun control, except for a small loud-

24. SGScott Galloway7:24

    It's minority rule.

25. KSKara Swisher7:25

    Mino- Uh, t- the tyranny of minority rule, right?

26. SGScott Galloway7:27

    It's, it's capture of our government by rich people, 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, and as long as we have elected representatives that continue to soak the bottom 90 or the bottom 99-

27. KSKara Swisher8:06

    Mm-hmm.

28. SGScott Galloway8:06

    I mean, do you realize how insane our healthcare system is right now?

29. KSKara Swisher8:10

    It, it really is. I, I, I just had, I just, I d- Scott knows this. I, when I, part of being in San Francisco is that my doctors are all there, and I had my annual everything. And there were a few things that needed special tests, and, uh, the struggle I had with the insurance (laughs) company was insane, and the doctors just shrugged. They're like, "We, this is how you get arou-" Literally it was like, I felt like I was in Russia, like remember in the old days, this is how you get around and get the meat for your table, right? I was like, "What in the world? This makes no sense." These are aw- You know, you know, and I'm sure there's, there's abuse of course, and they're trying to protect against abuse, and, and people trying to trick them, but most people are just there to get tests, right? Like basic... Uh, it's j- It was so-

30. SGScott Galloway8:48

    They have a-

Episode duration: 11:31