Kamala's Media Blitz, Elon's Giant Leap, and Guest Chris Urmson

Speaker 1 Support for the show comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Sacks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style.

Speaker 1 Follow us here, and you can invest in some new arrivals that you'll want to wear again and again, like a relaxed product blazer and Gucci loafers, which can take you from work to the weekend.

Speaker 1 Shopping from Saks feels totally customized, from the in-store stylist to a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you things that fit your style and taste.

Speaker 1 They'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in, or when that Brunello Cacchinelli sweater you've been eyeing is back in stock.

Speaker 1 So, if you're like me and you need shopping to be personalized and easy, head to Saks Fifth Avenue for the best follow rivals and style inspiration.

Speaker 12 Now Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat.

Speaker 13 It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Speaker 15 Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

Speaker 15 Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one.

Speaker 15 You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

Speaker 16 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 2 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 16 So, Scott, you're in LA.

Speaker 17 LA. Los Angeles.
Hello, ladies.

Speaker 16 Are you having a good time? Did you do your lonely bar dinner and everything already?

Speaker 17 I did. I did.
I go to the bar at the polo lounge and I do my favorite thing. I eat alone.

Speaker 16 Little chop salad.

Speaker 17 Well, you know how you can tell I like someone as I look at their shoes. I start their shoes instead of my own.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's great here. And I was down by the pool yesterday.

Speaker 16 Are you in Santa Monica?

Speaker 17 No, the Beverly Hills Hotel. I'm going to give you one guess where it is.

Speaker 16 Okay, it's in Beverly Hills. Got it.
There you go.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 they called me. So I went out Saturday night.
I've been out in a long time. I've been trying to drink a lot less.

Speaker 17 And my friend goes to these parties that a guy my age shouldn't be at, but I went anyways.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 2 I had, they had vodka and tequila.

Speaker 17 I don't drink either of those things. Tequila makes me anxious.
Vodka has no impact on me. And I don't drink for taste.
I drink to feel better about myself and everybody else.

Speaker 17 So they had these hard lemonades and I started sucking those things down. And it was one of those things where like two, three, nothing, and then four.
On the fourth one,

Speaker 17 I decided I needed to dance. And whenever I decide I need to dance, that's God's way of saying, you need to go home now.

Speaker 17 No one needs to see me on the dance. And I literally know that.
Whenever I'm like, whenever I start thinking, oh my God, it would be unfair not to share these groovy moves with the rest of the world.

Speaker 16 Oh, so you didn't dance.

Speaker 18 Oh, no, I dance, but

Speaker 17 regardless of how fucked I am, I have a safety mechanism that goes, must go home now. You are dancing.
Must go home now. And then I was so,

Speaker 17 I was so, I haven't been this hungover in a while. And so I woke up, I got a call at 10 in the morning in my room.
And they're like, Mr. Galloway? And I'm like, yeah.
And they were calling too early.

Speaker 17 And of course, I'm like, oh, no, no, what's up? And they're like, we really appreciate you being a friend of the Beverly Hills Hotel and that you mentioned us on the podcast.

Speaker 17 We've gotten a lot of calls. And would you like a cabana today?

Speaker 17 And so, of course, I go, I go, yes.

Speaker 17 And I wasn't entirely sure when I went down there that had actually happened or I had dreamt it.

Speaker 16 But you got a cabana?

Speaker 17 They gave me a cabana so I could buy like $900 worth of ice teas and white and rose, but I got the cabana for free.

Speaker 16 Oh, nice.

Speaker 17 Anyways, I absolutely love it here.

Speaker 2 I'll bring you here.

Speaker 17 We should come here. We should come here for lunch sometime.

Speaker 16 I know. I never get free shit like that.
This is exciting, all your cabana stories.

Speaker 16 But we've got a lot to get to today, including Elon Musk taking one giant leap into cringiness at Donald Trump's rally, why Google is losing the ground in search ad market.

Speaker 16 Plus, our friend at Pivot is Chris Irmson. I've known him for a long time, the founder and CEO of self-driving truck startup Aurora.
He also was the first Google car person way back when.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 when this episode airs, it'll be International Lesbian Day, just so you know. And so by law, you have to compliment me three times about my lesbianity.

Speaker 16 But I also want to note some of our listeners had a bone to pick about those lesbian divorce numbers you mentioned last week because they were inaccurate.

Speaker 16 You said the divorce rate among lesbian couples is 72%, according to data out of the UK.

Speaker 16 But our listeners pointed out that what the data actually said of the total same-sex divorces in the 2019 study, 72% were female. Wasn't they? They had a divorce rate of 72%.

Speaker 17 Yeah, but the question then, we were talking with the producer, is like, what percentage of gay marriages are two females versus two males? Am I going to say female versus male still? Anyways,

Speaker 17 so it actually,

Speaker 17 because I would assume that there are vastly more

Speaker 17 gay male marriages than gay female marriages, meaning that

Speaker 17 still

Speaker 17 lesbians are much more likely to get divorced than gay men. Would you agree?

Speaker 16 No, I wouldn't. That's what.
No, I wouldn't. See, that's why I was questioning it last week.

Speaker 17 And in fact, the number we need to know, though, is what percentage of total gay marriages

Speaker 2 are male versus female.

Speaker 16 Do we?

Speaker 17 We don't. We need to find that data.
That would be really good.

Speaker 16 We need to find that data. But nonetheless, since it's International Lesbian Day, I'd like you to pay me a compliment then.

Speaker 17 As atonement for my incorrect data, I'm going to a WNBA game.

Speaker 16 You are? Did that work out? Are you going to do that?

Speaker 2 We're trying to figure it out. I'm actually really excited about it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I know. You're going to sit right down on the court, by the way, FYI.
Those are courtside tickets you're going to get.

Speaker 17 Well, I think if a heterosexual white male goes, he should sit in the most expensive seats just to show that we still have advantage and privilege.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 16 Well, you'll be sitting around all lesbians, just so you know, and the owners, essentially.

Speaker 17 So depending on who you're seeing. I don't know if it has the same proportion or same draw of the gay community, but I've gotten into women's football, the Arsenal

Speaker 17 women's football team. Actually, Megan

Speaker 17 Rapino brought it up, and so I've been following the...

Speaker 16 Rapino.

Speaker 17 Actually, Megan Rapino brought it up.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Is she supporting Kamala?

Speaker 16 Anyways.

Speaker 17 Whatever.

Speaker 17 90% of lesbians get divorced.

Speaker 16 Listen, Scoot. Scoot Galaway.
That's her name. Oh, here we go.

Speaker 17 Aren't you gay?

Speaker 17 I was lucky. Anyways, but I've been going, I'm totally following Arsenal Women's now.
They're amazing. They have one of the best players in all of female history.

Speaker 16 They can kick a ball. Those ladies can kick a ball.
You'll like WMBA is really fun. I'm excited to go.
The arena is fun. There's a whole separate area.

Speaker 16 They're going to take you back where you get free candy. And there's a beautiful dining room with food.
Like they have it at most places. You'll like it a lot.
You should go.

Speaker 16 That's a really cool facility where Liberty plays.

Speaker 16 People like it. It's fun.
It's a fun, like they have all these people that come out and dance and stuff. You know, they have all the entertainment and everything else.

Speaker 17 Anyway.

Speaker 17 on Saturday night, one of the reasons I'm here is my good friends Eddie Baugh and David Freyd had their party. Yeah, I saw the party.
Their 50th birthday party. It was 80s theme.
It was so much fun.

Speaker 17 What'd you wear?

Speaker 18 Oh, well, I'm glad you asked.

Speaker 16 Topsiders, light 501 jeans, a polo shirt,

Speaker 17 Adidas superstars, which were the bomb back then. Varnaise.
Hello. Varna.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 17 I'm so good at this. And then the Cherry on the 80s top.
I mean, we're talking like safety dance, men without hats, Tom Petty, a members-only jacket.

Speaker 16 I saw those members-only. You all had them, it looked like.

Speaker 2 You all had them.

Speaker 16 Those are good jackets. I still like them.
I think, I don't know why they went out of style because they're great. They didn't really.
I think they're ironic.

Speaker 17 So it's International Lesbian Day. What do you know?

Speaker 16 Anyways.

Speaker 17 Yeah, members-only. It's making a comeback.
I know.

Speaker 16 You know, a lot of lesbians wear members-only jackets when they get married and don't get divorced as much as other people. Anyway, on to other news.

Speaker 16 Doc workers have returned to work after reaching a tentative deal.

Speaker 17 It's funny because it's true.

Speaker 16 It's true. With the U.S.
Maritime Alliance, the deal was reportedly brokered with the help of senior Biden administration officials and will last until January 15th.

Speaker 16 The union has been pushing for a 77% raise increase over six years, reportedly tentatively accepted 62%. Obviously, automation is another big deal for them.

Speaker 16 Will Democrats get any credit for this win or just crisis aversion? We said this would happen. It would be settled toot to suite.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 17 It's either either neutral to positive for harris because so first off let's just let's just encourage the riders uh strike folks at wga

Speaker 17 to listen and learn you don't go on strike when your industry is getting the kicked out of it and you have no leverage at that moment so okay the industry is in structural decline and having an especially rough year and we have too many people who want to do our jobs and now we're going to strike.

Speaker 17 And what did they get? They got a 5% raise for an eventual 12% over three years. The longshoremen basically represent commerce.

Speaker 17 The economy is booming, and they pick a point of leverage very strategically before the holidays. I mean, this is a dirty secret of retail, and I learned this painfully.
China?

Speaker 16 That's right.

Speaker 17 No, it's an 11-year-old making my t-shirt somewhere in a region in China. That sounds so jinglist and awful.
Anyway,

Speaker 17 let's keep going.

Speaker 17 But, you know, 72% of lesbians get divorced.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 what you have is

Speaker 17 effectively,

Speaker 17 this is how you pull off a strike. To be clear, the WGA got a 5% raise in the first year for an eventual 12% over three years.
The dock workers got a tentative 62% over six years.

Speaker 17 So I'm happy about that. The majority at the ports of New York and New Jersey, about two-thirds of longshoremen make at least $100K, which I think is great.

Speaker 17 And these guys had a lot of leverage. Every day they were out, they were going to take the economy down by $5 billion.

Speaker 17 So this is,

Speaker 17 I'm happy for the longshoreman. I'm happy for the economy.
I'm happy for Harris because it takes one of the three October surprises off the table. It was the strike.
It was

Speaker 17 Iran slash Israel. And then the hurricane.
But where I was headed with this.

Speaker 16 There's another hurricane coming.

Speaker 17 When I was on the board of Red Envelope,

Speaker 17 there was a, we were coming into the holidays, and the dirty secret of retail where I was going here was that you lose money 44 weeks a year, and then the eight weeks leading up to the holidays is where you just print money.

Speaker 17 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 17 And at about the end of November, the longshoremen in Long Beach went on strike, and our entire inventory for the holiday, and you might ask, well, what shithead decided to put all of your holiday inventory on one boat, was stuck seven miles off of the Long Beach coast.

Speaker 17 And that, in combination with a credit crisis and a software mishap that sent 15,000 gifts to the wrong address, which is not a good thing, Kara, took the company from eight bucks a share to chapter 11 in about three weeks.

Speaker 17 Yep.

Speaker 16 Yep, I think so. It was good that it was gone.
I think you're right. It's a wash, but it's good that it's not there just hanging on.
100%. By the way, there is another hurricane coming.

Speaker 16 There's going to be a lot of them. I mean, you know, we'll get into that in a minute because it's not going to be a good idea.

Speaker 17 It's almost as if the climate is changing. Something's going on.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I know. I don't know what to think.
You know, of course, no climate change if you're a Republican.

Speaker 16 But speaking of things that are terrible for social media companies, three separate states have revealed lawsuits against social media in the last week.

Speaker 16 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is a really shady character, I think we can say, has sued TikTok for a while.

Speaker 17 Occasionally gets it right.

Speaker 16 Yeah, sued TikTok for violating the state's parental consent law. New Mexico's Attorney General unveiled a lawsuit who's a Democrat.

Speaker 16 I think he's a Democrat, unveiled a lawsuit against SNAP for ignoring reports of sextortion and failing to implement verifiable age verification.

Speaker 16 The Arkansas AG filed a lawsuit against Google, YouTube, and Alphabet for violating state deceptive trade practices. Meanwhile, the Kids Online Safety Act is stalled in the House.

Speaker 16 There's issues around how it's phrased, et cetera. But this is all around children's safety.
Again, a lot of it's around parental consent or abuse, sex abuse, or

Speaker 16 sort of those

Speaker 16 age kind of related things.

Speaker 17 Thoughts? 59 of teens aged 13 to 17 use instagram and according to a 2022 study 24

Speaker 17 one in four adolescents are social media addicts can you name any substance any activity that has a one in four

Speaker 17 addict ratio nope I mean, maybe nicotine, maybe cigarettes. And here's the thing.
I mean, if you were to say, how could you really fuck up America?

Speaker 17 Well, could we do something that gets people addicted, that polarizes them, that makes them more prone to conspiracy theory, makes them lack self-esteem, makes them more inclined to self-harm?

Speaker 17 And who would we do it against if we were really mendacious, if we were really evil?

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 17 13 to 17 year olds as their brains are getting wired so we can set up a future of addiction and massive need for DOPA hits. And here's the problem.

Speaker 17 Just as Meta delayed and obfuscated, we need to do better. We're proud of the progress we've made and have addicted a quarter of America's youth or 25% of 60%.

Speaker 17 So one in 17s are now addicted to this thing. Their stock has gone up 90%.
And that's the problem is there's so much fucking money in the business of addiction.

Speaker 16 There is. It's more than that.
It's also how they're fixing their race. There's a really great series.
Maybe we'll have the director on social studies on FX.

Speaker 16 Um, it's by the woman who did the queen of Versailles, which was a great documentary filmmaking.

Speaker 16 But let me just read this to you: limited series social studies, a groundbreaking character-driven documentary series, The Dallas and Lives of the First Generation of Digital Natives.

Speaker 16 And it was filmed in Los Angeles over a school year. Um, and I really want to see it.

Speaker 16 It's supposed to be really quite something, but it's, you know, you don't need the fact that we're sitting around arguing over this seems waiting for more information to come in.

Speaker 16 It's really kind of like we know what's going on. And we, by the way, we know it for ourselves, for adults, the same thing, the addiction issues around phones.

Speaker 16 It'll be interesting to see how we handle this, but it should be treated like cigarettes or anything else, especially around kids. Just, we keep saying this over and over again.

Speaker 16 It's not censorship to do so.

Speaker 17 The kids know it. The kids are the adults in the room.
One-third of respondents of kids 18 to 27 or young adults said they thought they wish Instagram had never been invented.

Speaker 17 And nearly half of that said, said the same for TikTok. It's the kids, even the young kids realize this is not.

Speaker 16 I can't resist it. It's irresistible.
I got on TikTok this weekend for a minute and it was an hour later. It was crazy.
Easy. Easy.
It was crazy.

Speaker 16 And then I threw the phone that I use for TikTok in a drawer and locked it. I was like, no, that must stay over there.
Because I just was, it was very pleasing. It was a lot of cooking.

Speaker 16 I get a lot of cooking stuff and I like watching. You get cooking?

Speaker 17 I was going to say, it says a lot of the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself.

Speaker 16 It does. I really like, and plantings.
And then I also like, there isn't something else that always comes up. Just plants and like, and hardware hacks.
Thank God, I'm such a lesbian.

Speaker 16 International Lesbian Day.

Speaker 16 Anyway, let's get to our first big story.

Speaker 16 With a month to go before the election, Vice President Kamala Harris is embarking on a media blitz this week.

Speaker 16 She kicked things off with an interview on the podcast called Her Daddy and is set to appear on 60 Minutes, The View, Stephen Colbert, and The Howard Stern over over the next few days.

Speaker 16 Governor Tim Waltz is also getting in on the action. He'll be on Jimmy Kimmel.
He's also recording an interview on Smartless podcast. He was also on Fox News, which was interesting.

Speaker 16 Most of these will be light and friendly interviews. Some will be more hard-hitting.
Is this a good idea? Is it too little, too late? Or what's the strategy, strategy here?

Speaker 17 Well, the thing that struck me about it is just how much the world has changed in four years where the...

Speaker 17 you know, the presidential candidates are kind of the big news event or the big media events is not that they're, oh, they're going on 60 Minutes tonight. It's they're going on this podcast.

Speaker 17 I mean, it really is, it speaks to how podcasts have become such an important medium.

Speaker 17 And the fact that she went on Caller Daddy, by the way, I don't know if you listened to it, it's really, it's really strong. And

Speaker 17 Alex Cooper is fantastic.

Speaker 16 She is good.

Speaker 17 Caller Daddy is one of the five most popular podcasts in the U.S.

Speaker 17 And, you know, they filled a sweet spot. They said, we're adults, we're women.

Speaker 17 We're going to talk about things that women aren't necessarily supposed to talk about in a very thoughtful, funny way, authentic, raw. And I thought it was a great move for her to go on.

Speaker 17 I thought she handled herself well. Trump's going on Manosphere podcasts.
It just, what I take away from it is it speaks to the medium.

Speaker 17 They're not dying to go on CNN or Fox. I mean, they do that stuff.
But

Speaker 17 the thing I've noticed more than anything about the impact we have. is the people we help the most, that want to come on the most, are people with a book.

Speaker 17 If someone comes on our show and talks about their new book, you will tangibly see a market increase in book sales that day.

Speaker 17 And I would think, I would think that the same people who buy books disproportionately vote. So I think it's a great medium for those folks.
I do too.

Speaker 17 The thing I thought about is four years ago, I don't think these candidates were going on these pods.

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 you know, Obama went on mine a long time ago.

Speaker 16 I think they were aware of it.

Speaker 17 Oh, there it is. I'll let that go because I'm international lesbian.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying, I'm saying,

Speaker 16 And Vice President Harris has been on my podcast. But

Speaker 16 I think it's a very different, I would agree. I think she should go on Joe Rogan.
Like, I was like, don't go on Joe Sergan. 100%.

Speaker 16 I think she should go on Joe Rogan. And he would be good.
Howard Stern makes sense. That makes sense to do.

Speaker 16 That's a great one to do, too. Colbert is good.
The View is excellent. But

Speaker 16 will it matter for her? Because no matter how many she does, it's not enough for the press. And the fact that she's not doing a big New York Times interview, I think, is really interesting.

Speaker 16 That to me is the most interesting is that what they're not doing, offense.

Speaker 17 She's getting her footing. And, okay, it will never be enough for the people who just don't like her, but she should be out there.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 the thing that really, in my opinion, kind of highlighted that

Speaker 17 Secretary Clinton didn't run a great campaign, her best media appearance, hands down, was on Howard Stern. She was likable.
She was funny. The problem was she went on after the election.

Speaker 17 The bottom line is, you can't play defense in a race this close. You got to play offense and you got to take some risks.
And you just said what I think, if I,

Speaker 17 and you know that, you know, the people at the Harris campaign, I don't. If there's any one thing I would suggest to her right now is Rogan.
Because if you actually listen to Rogan, which I don't.

Speaker 16 He's a little positive towards her.

Speaker 17 He's very impressed with her. And he gets the assignment.

Speaker 17 He's not going to try and call her out and embarrass her. He's going to be excited about her being there.

Speaker 17 It'll be, and generally speaking, you know, he doesn't push back on anyone, including if they're, if they're, you know, distributing or spreading conspiracy theory that mRNA vaccines alter your DNA.

Speaker 17 That would be a great move for her. And that manosphere right now, I believe, is still one of the few groups that is up for grabs.
She should absolutely go on Rogan.

Speaker 16 Rogan would be the place to go, Rogan, or trying to think what else. No, Rogan.
She should go on Rogan. Yeah.
I like Caller Her Daddy too. That's a good, that's the ladies, essentially.

Speaker 16 Yeah, great move. Yeah.
She should come on our podcast. That's what really she should do.

Speaker 16 Speaking of strange media appearances, former President Donald Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of his first assassination attempt for a rally.

Speaker 16 This weekend, Trump was joined on stage by Elon Musk, who literally jumped in the air a moment, captured a photo that launched many memes. I have to know what you thought of this display.

Speaker 16 I saw some of your threads, and I wrote on threads, Elon's Tummy just beat out Dukakis in a tank.

Speaker 16 He said he was the same thing with Howard Dean. It was so embarrassing.
It was so awkward. He called himself Dark MAGA.
A lot of people are calling him Dork MAGA.

Speaker 16 Another nickname for him was PayPal Peteen because he had that weird look in another picture. It was full of weird Elon.
I can't imagine Trump being happy about any of this, but

Speaker 16 what do you think of this? Also, Trump, by the way, gave a speech, and I noted this on Chris Walls this weekend. His cognitive difficulties are so apparent.

Speaker 16 And the New York Times finally wrote a big story about it this week. I've been saying this for a while, the cognitive

Speaker 16 exchange. It's worse.
I mean, he says crazy things all the time. This is a whole new level of cognitive failure on his part.
Your thoughts on the Elon Jump, whatever it was? Well, let's go.

Speaker 17 There was a lot there. Let's go in reverse order.
With respect to his cognitive function or dysfunction,

Speaker 17 both of us said this early and often to

Speaker 17 the bother of many of our listeners, and that is, Biden was just too fucking old. Biology says, hold my beer around what you think or what you're hoping is going to happen.

Speaker 17 If Trump is re-elected, he will be older than Biden was when he was too old to run for president, except Trump has supposedly a history of mental impairment or dementia.

Speaker 16 His father had dementia.

Speaker 17 He refuses to release the records of his cognitive tests, and he's obese. So, folks, I mean,

Speaker 17 Biden was too old, and

Speaker 17 this guy is way too old. Now, as it relates to Trump

Speaker 17 and Musk, or as I say,

Speaker 17 Sissy SpaceX, he's literally,

Speaker 17 look, the reality is for the campaign, for their core constituents, it was probably a good move. A lot of people really admire, for a lot of understandable reasons, Musk.

Speaker 17 To me, there's a, it represents the two of them on stage and how much love and adulation they get represents something deeper and darker.

Speaker 17 And that is the aspirational vision of masculinity represented by these guys has turned so coarse, so vile, being such, you know, between the two of them, they have 17 kids

Speaker 17 by six different women.

Speaker 17 With Musk, you have a guy who, when he gets to a position of power, accuses his workers of sex crimes falsely such that they have to leave their home, does not pay contracted, legally obligated severance, dead names, says his daughter is dead to him, dead to him.

Speaker 17 And yet we have VCs, including those that come on our podcasts, and make all sorts of fucking excuses for the guy.

Speaker 17 And what I have found is that, generally speaking, it represents this dark peanut butter and chocolate zeitgeist in our society.

Speaker 17 where we have conflated masculinity with coarseness, with cruelty, and some fucked up vision that as long as you're rich, you can treat women like shit. You can be a shitty dad, a shitty employer.

Speaker 17 I mean, these guys, it was literally like the parade of poor role models for young men.

Speaker 16 Yep, it really was.

Speaker 17 It's just so upsetting that, and it reflects something that

Speaker 17 over the last 40 years, people have gotten so sick of politicians grin fucking them, never saying anything impolite, never actually saying what might be going on, trying to please everyone, lying to everybody, being PG-13 at best.

Speaker 17 They were just so ready for someone to come in and quite frankly, just be really coarse. And these two are literally the fret and ginger of, in my view, what it means to not be a real man.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I would agree.

Speaker 16 I would, it's interesting because I do think, I agree, there's a lot of people who really do revere Elon Musk, but boy, did he look dorky. Boy, did he, that was weird.

Speaker 16 And I, Trump's face, I thought was interesting several times. I don't think he liked it much at all, actually.
I think he was like, what is he doing taking up all my fucking oxygen?

Speaker 16 It's like two like desperate, people desperate for attention sponges fighting with each other kind of things with the jumping and the weirdness and, you know, who knows what he was on. You know,

Speaker 16 it just was very, I thought it was embarrassing, actually. It was embarrassing.

Speaker 17 It's like my first marriage, our first home. We had one vanity in the bathroom.
It got ugly. It just got ugly.
Wait, I need to look at me. No, I need to look at me.

Speaker 16 He seemed uncomfortable in several of the pictures.

Speaker 16 It was like Elon needs the attention more. And it's embarrassed.
It's like a desperate, like, he makes Trump look humble by comparison. I have to say, it was, it was weird.

Speaker 16 Although Trump was meandering all over the place.

Speaker 17 But just to circle back, I think it's good for Trump.

Speaker 17 I just think there's this that they both, Trump and Musk have this,

Speaker 17 I don't know the zealot-like

Speaker 17 evangelist, you know, this cultish, religious-like following, and it's kind of the same, it's a little bit of the same person.

Speaker 16 It's kind of the, I think there can be, this is Highlander to me, there can be only one. I think they're going to have such a falling out.
It's going to be delicious to watch when it comes.

Speaker 16 Yeah, maybe after the election. Yeah, maybe.
We'll see. We'll see.
Well, we'll see who wins.

Speaker 16 But by the way, speaking of who wins, well, Elon is all in on Trump. Some people in big tech are hedging their bets.
This was interesting.

Speaker 16 Ben Horitz and his wife, Felicia, plan on making a significant donation to Kamala Harris's campaign.

Speaker 16 Horowitz announced his decision in an email to Andreessen Horowitz employees last week, saying he's encouraged by conversations with Harris around the, quote, little tech agenda.

Speaker 16 I have no idea what that means.

Speaker 16 Horowitz and Mark Andreessen had endorsed Trump back in July for the firm. As someone on threads put it, the seed investment didn't work out.
So the growth fund invested in a competitor. So thoughts?

Speaker 16 This was interesting.

Speaker 17 Breaking news.

Speaker 17 Breaking news. VC covers his ass.
Yeah. Let me get this.
I mean, these guys were so stupid to come out in favor of either candidate as aggressively as they did. That was just so

Speaker 17 it shocks me when Sequoia Capital or Andreessen Horowitz say, okay, at the end of the day, we're just about money. Fine.
I get it, but just admit it.

Speaker 17 And we're under the impression that Trump, if we support him, will basically say, oh, these guys give me a lot of money.

Speaker 17 So if they want me to put $10 billion into a stable coin or into crypto, I'll do it. So they saw their chance to make a lot of money more, more likely with Trump than Harris.
But you do it quietly.

Speaker 17 You don't come out because when Sequoia Capital andreessen Horowitz endorsed Trump, which they did,

Speaker 17 Ben, be clear, we were all listening when you did that.

Speaker 17 And if you're the state pension, their largest investors are institutional investors and pension funds.

Speaker 17 And when Michigan State Teachers Fund

Speaker 17 says, okay, let me get this.

Speaker 17 We send you money and pay you money. Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 17 We overpay you.

Speaker 17 You're some of the wealthiest people in the world. Fine.
And then you take some of that money to endorse a candidate.

Speaker 17 that may not share the political views of our teachers who are 74% women, young young women, who are really kind of into this thing called bodily autonomy.

Speaker 17 I can't imagine the letters they got from their investors saying, This is why I pay you? And boss, be clear, there are a lot of VC funds looking for our money who are not taking political stands.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it was weird.

Speaker 17 I thought it was weird. These guys, you know what happened here, Kara? They got so much shit and they thought, oh my God, if she wins, we are fucked.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 17 Let's pretend that somehow we like her as well, just in case. This is a very expensive insurance policy.

Speaker 17 It's like trying to get health insurance when the MRI comes back and says there's a growth on your lung. I just find this,

Speaker 17 I don't think this, I don't think it helps them. You know, Ben, we remember Andreessen Horowitz coming out very hard for Trump.
And now that it's a toss-up.

Speaker 16 Yeah, let me just give you the quote. I wish we didn't have to pick a side, said Horowitz, who acknowledged his political choice would upset many friends and even his mother.

Speaker 16 We literally believe the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake. I mean, this is when Biden was still in FYI, but still, that was pretty firm.

Speaker 16 We wish we didn't have to pick a side. Then you shouldn't have picked a side, boy.
You know, and now, of course, picking another side is the same difference.

Speaker 17 You know, for-profit companies, including a venture capital firm, which is for-profit all-in-caps, they're so outstanding and making money. The U.S.

Speaker 17 corporation makes more money than any entity ever invested in history. It's an amazing thing.
It pays for our Navy. It pays for unemployment insurance.
It pays for child services.

Speaker 17 It's a wonderful part of what is wonderful in America. They're so good at it, though.

Speaker 17 You shouldn't be trusted to do anything else, nor should you do anything else other than be really good citizens, good to your employees, good to the environment, good to the community.

Speaker 17 But for God's sakes, stay the fuck out of politics.

Speaker 16 I want them all to stay out. Like, I'm like so tired of them.
Like, go and wait.

Speaker 17 Stay out on the left, too.

Speaker 16 Yeah, get out. Go.
I don't want to hear what you think of Ukraine. Go.

Speaker 17 Pull the curtain, vote for whoever you want. Give money.
Give money.

Speaker 16 Fine. Fine.

Speaker 17 That's fine. But don't put your, but don't put anything on corporate letterhead.
That's not, that's not why the U.S. corporation exists.

Speaker 16 I seldom say stay in your lane, but stay in your fucking lane. I seldom say that.
Like, just quietly, if you want to do it, that's the whole thing. Anyway.
Good luck, Ben. We'll see.

Speaker 16 I think she'll take your money, but still, it's kind of gross. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
And we come back. Google's ad search dominant slips.
Not a surprise to us.

Speaker 16 And we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Chris Ermson, about getting driverless trucks on the road. I've talked to him before, really interesting guy.

Speaker 3 Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new.

Speaker 4 Show me all the things PDFs can do.

Speaker 6 Do your work with ease and speed.

Speaker 7 PDF spaces is all you need.

Speaker 5 Do hours of research in an instant.

Speaker 8 Key insights from an AI assistant.

Speaker 9 Pick a template with a click.

Speaker 10 Now your prezo looks super slick.

Speaker 11 Close that deal, yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done.

Speaker 12 Now you can do that, do that, with Acrobat. Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat.

Speaker 13 It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Speaker 20 Support for Pivot comes from LinkedIn. From talking about sports, discussing the latest movies, everyone is looking for a real connection to the people around them.

Speaker 20 But it's not just person to person, it's the same connection that's needed in business. And it can be the hardest part about B2B marketing, finding the right people, making the right connections.

Speaker 20 But instead of spending hours and hours scavenging social media feeds, you can just tap LinkedIn ads to reach the right professionals.

Speaker 20 According to LinkedIn, they have grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, making it stand apart from other ad buys.

Speaker 20 You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, and company revenue, giving you all the professionals you need to reach in one place.

Speaker 20 So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right professionals only on LinkedIn ads.

Speaker 20 LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it for yourself. Just go to linkedin.com/slash pivot pod.
That's linkedin.com/slash pivot pod. Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 20 Only on LinkedIn ads.

Speaker 3 Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new.

Speaker 4 Show me all the things PDFs can do.

Speaker 6 Do your work with ease and speed.

Speaker 7 PDF spaces is all you need.

Speaker 5 Do hours of research in an instant.

Speaker 8 Key insights from an AI assistant.

Speaker 9 Pick a template with a click.

Speaker 10 your Prezo looks super slick. Close that deal, yeah, you won.

Speaker 11 Do that, doing that, did that, done.

Speaker 12 Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat.

Speaker 3 Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat.

Speaker 13 It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Speaker 16 Scott, we're back. Google is finally facing some actual competition when it comes to nearly $300 billion search ad business.

Speaker 16 Companies like TikTok, the AI search startup Perplexity, have begun to challenge Google's dominance with targeted ad initiatives for brands.

Speaker 16 Amazon is also gaining ground, has been for a while with consumers going directly to the e-commerce platform for product searches. That's where I do all of them now.
Google's share of the U.S.

Speaker 16 search ad market expected to drop below 50% next year, the first time in over a decade, according to the research firm eMarketer.

Speaker 16 Google is trying to use AI to its advantage, rolling out ads alongside those AI-generated summaries they now have there.

Speaker 16 They've been under pressure, obviously, still in courts to prove it's not unfair to competitors in recent recent antitrust trials. But, you know, having rivals is a good thing for them in this regard.

Speaker 16 Talk a little bit about things because perplexity is reportedly in talks with Nike and Marriott tied to its new admils, allows companies to bid for a sponsored question.

Speaker 16 What do you think about this? I think search is kind of over. We've talked about this idea of where search is going.

Speaker 17 Well, there's anecdotal evidence, and then a metaphor I would make. The anecdotal evidence is that I now, my default search engines are now ChatGPT and Claude.

Speaker 17 I just type in, I type in questions and I get a more thoughtful, interesting response. And then I can, with Google, I can't follow up and go,

Speaker 17 why did you say that? Or please support, please provide more data on your answer. Or this component of your answer seems off to me.
What is the source here? I can't do that with Google.

Speaker 17 And the analogy, and I think it's a good one, is retail. And that is the early big winners that really drove a ton of shareholder value.

Speaker 17 The best performing stock in the 1980s was a company that took every electronic device and put it all in one big box called Circuit City, where services state of the art, I think was the term.

Speaker 17 Then it was Best Buy. Before that, Walmart was the stock to own, right? And before that, it was department stores, Sears and JC Penny's.

Speaker 17 And then over the last, really the last 20 to 30 years, the majority of the shareholder gains in retail have been in specialty retail. Consumers don't want more choice.

Speaker 17 They want to be more confident in the choices presented. And that is the point, especially retail.
William Sonoma says, we're not going to give you 50 toasters to choose from.

Speaker 17 We're going to pick the best two because we have better taste in kitchen appliances than you do. By the way, Dualito, Electrolux, hands down, best toasters.

Speaker 17 And then Sephora said, we're not going to be Macy's with all these different counters and people. We're going to pick these emerging brands.
They're edited.

Speaker 17 And you know, when you're looking for whatever it is, lip balm, we have the two or three best lip balms.

Speaker 17 And then Lululemon became worth more than retailers 10 times the size. And that's the analogy here.
Google is Walmart. It's fucking everything.

Speaker 17 You type in best podcasts in America, and it'll give you articles on trends and media. It'll give you deep dives into Joe Rogan.
And you have to sort through

Speaker 17 all the different toasters and try and figure out which one to buy. Whereas when you go into the Sephora of that or the William Sonoma of that, which is Chat GPT, it says, you know what?

Speaker 17 We're better at giving you the right answer and we're going to try and just give you one answer that would be better on average than any one of the 5,300 returns given to you in 0.005 seconds.

Speaker 17 It's specialty retail and it's going to create a ton of shareholder value. Does that mean Google's going to go away? No.

Speaker 17 But the majority of incremental shareholder value from quote unquote search is going to go to the specialty retailers that edit, that merchandise the answer, which is the AI guys.

Speaker 16 Yeah. When I started doing commerce search on Amazon, I hadn't gone back to Google to do commerce because it was such, it was like all the library books on the floor, right? It's like, where is it?

Speaker 16 Where am I looking for? What am I? I mean, I try it, but then I always seem to find what I want on Amazon or somewhere else. I think we will use artificial intelligence for search.

Speaker 16 That's the end of it. And especially with Apple getting ready to roll out Apple Intelligence at the end of this month, we'll see how they deploy it.
They announced it back in June.

Speaker 16 When they're officially in the game, I suspect they'll do a good job at bringing it on. It's not just, would you like to rewrite this email?

Speaker 16 I don't think that's just, because that's so irritating on Google right now. Would you like to rewrite this email? But there's other things that you will use it for.

Speaker 16 And you're right, you get a better answer. And it's as if search came to you versus you finding search, right?

Speaker 16 And I do think that Google has to think hard because they have not been, one of the problems of them being the dominant search engine, they haven't been innovative because they haven't had to be.

Speaker 16 They haven't been pressured by competitors who are putting out better.

Speaker 16 You know, we talked about the various attempts to compete with Google, but they really haven't had competition in decades.

Speaker 16 And that just makes you, they've owned it and it's made you, they've never innovated. They have not innovated search.

Speaker 17 Haven't needed to.

Speaker 16 They haven't needed to.

Speaker 17 They didn't need to roll out cell or fiber optic or data analytics, which was stuck in Bell Labs because AT ⁇ T is like, I remember when my mom and dad got divorced and my dad moved to Columbus, Ohio to work for OM Scott's and then he moved to Chicago to work for the other fertilizer company, Vigaro.

Speaker 17 Anyways, we lived in Glen Ellen, Chicago, and when I would go there during the summers, on the weekend on a Saturday, he and I would take a train for 40 minutes to downtown Chicago.

Speaker 17 I remember he was into speedwalking, and I'd have to run behind him. And then he'd stop and he'd talk.

Speaker 16 It's a new piece of insight, but go ahead. It's moving too fast.
He doesn't wait for you.

Speaker 17 Around understanding why I'm so fucked up on the head.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was

Speaker 17 right there. At the same point, the same corner, he'd stop and he'd point up.
He wouldn't even say anything and he'd point to the Sears Tower and he'd look at me and go, tallest building in the world.

Speaker 17 Isn't that funny? Tallest building in the world was called the Sears Tower back in the 70s.

Speaker 17 Anyways, the reason we trapes downtown on a train for 40 minutes to his office on a Saturday was so I could use the Watts line to call my mom.

Speaker 17 Because calling my mom in California costs like a buck a minute.

Speaker 17 I could run up a $30 phone tab and my dad being Scottish and having literally being broken around money and so deeply cheap, we would spend our Saturday morning going to the office to use a Watts line.

Speaker 17 I mean, it was just so, they had such a lock on the market and they didn't innovate. And Google has not innovated.
I will give them this. They are innovating.

Speaker 17 When you do those Google searches now, now the top query is kind of this AI generated attempt to get.

Speaker 17 It's not as good, but at least they're trying.

Speaker 16 Yeah, but trying isn't good enough. If you're dominant and you make all the money, they can't just try.
They have to lead. And, you know, I feel like they don't lead.
They just respond.

Speaker 17 Have you tried the new, have you tried their AI offering?

Speaker 16 No, the new notebook where you can make podcasts out of them, right? That one?

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's, but, and it is pretty specialized and pretty interesting. But there's just, this will be.

Speaker 16 But they're competing in AI because there's competition, right? That's why they're competing in AI. 100%.
Talking about search.

Speaker 17 And it might be a day late and a dollar short. This will be exhibit A.

Speaker 17 When any professor across strategy talks about the innovator's dilemma, they're going to talk about how Google basically invented, drove AI, but had such a big business they didn't want to threaten that they sat on their hands.

Speaker 17 And someone came in very small, started nipping at their heels, and basically they woke up and they had a great white shark that had taken them up to their mid-size and their torso in its jaws.

Speaker 17 This will be exhibit one for the Innovator's Dilemma.

Speaker 16 I do not do Google search anymore as much. I mean, it's definitely, it's like me going to the movies.
It's like decline. What do you use? Amazon for commerce.

Speaker 16 That's where I do most of my searching is on stuff I'm looking for. And occasionally I use Google, but it's so frustrating now.
It's so cluttered.

Speaker 16 It doesn't give me the answers I want anymore that I started.

Speaker 17 It takes you somewhere that can make more money.

Speaker 16 Yes, exactly. And I can feel it.
It's so cluttered. Cluttered would be the anyway, we'll see.
I think they're in much bigger trouble.

Speaker 16 And it'd be interesting to see what happens to their lawsuit, the unfair advantage, whether it continues. You know, that's the problem with these things.
There's now rivals.

Speaker 16 I don't know if it'll change the fact of what they did, but it certainly informs what they're going to do going forward.

Speaker 16 I love rivalry. I think it's the best thing for consumers, but we'll see.
Anyway, let's bring in a friend of Pivot.

Speaker 16 Chris Ermson is the founder and CEO of Aurora, a company focusing on autonomous trucking technology. We've talked many times before about it, and I met Chris back when he was doing the...

Speaker 16 the autonomous cars at Google. Welcome, Chris.

Speaker 2 Oh, thanks for having me.

Speaker 16 So you founded Aurora back in 2017. As I said, before that, you were running Google's self-driving car project.
You were the first person who put me in a self-driving car.

Speaker 16 Can you talk a little bit about where Aurora is now? We've talked in the interim about where it's going, and I've seen some of your trucks. I've come to where you were making them.

Speaker 16 You talked a lot about shortages in our country.

Speaker 16 I think we're down 60K to 78K trucks and stuff like that. So talk a little bit about why you went into it and where we are today.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So we're focused on building this technology to drive trucks safely down the road.

Speaker 2 Over the next decade, we expect we're going to need another million people willing to drive trucks.

Speaker 2 And it's a really important job, but it's a really difficult job that we just can't get enough people who want to do that.

Speaker 2 And as you know, you know, the ability to move goods and the logistics chain is just fundamental to the U.S. economy operating.
And we see a huge opportunity to make that whole on-road driving safer.

Speaker 2 And so for us, we've been working with a number of great partners, including Volvo and PACAR, who make about half the trucks sold in the U.S.

Speaker 2 And we're working to safely get the first driverless trucks on the road.

Speaker 16 So you have them on the road, correct? Correct at this point.

Speaker 2 Yeah, if you write, drive between Dallas and Houston or between Fort Worth and El Paso, you can see our trucks on the road.

Speaker 2 Now, today, we have people on board who are monitoring those trucks, but almost all of the time, they're driving themselves.

Speaker 2 And what we're pushing to is get to the point where we can safely take those operators out of the the vehicles and really have them go, the trucks go do the work.

Speaker 16 Go do the work.

Speaker 16 Now, some of the factors of trying to get people out of them is an aging workforce, underrepresentation of women, and obviously challenging work conditions of sleeping and everything else.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it is like if you look around the room you're in, everything in that room moved on a truck at some point.

Speaker 2 And so I'm incredibly thankful for the people who want to do this job, but it's hard, right? It's days or weeks away from home.

Speaker 2 It

Speaker 2 leads to lots of long-term health problems.

Speaker 2 In fact, if you are a truck driver, you're 10 times as likely to die on the job as the average American. And so that means that over time, people don't want to do the job.

Speaker 2 You know, back when I was at the university, we used to talk about dull, dirty, and dangerous

Speaker 2 as the places where you could see automation or robotics really helping society. And that's kind of what we have with trucking.
And that's why we're so excited about moving it forward.

Speaker 16 But when you think about that, the idea of automation and everything else, look, obviously the longshoremen just settled, but one of the, because they're getting more money, et cetera, their strike.

Speaker 16 But one of their issues was automation coming to docks, for example. There is a perception that you're going to kill people's jobs.

Speaker 16 Explain, you know, but there's a shortage of drivers at the same time or people willing to do this job.

Speaker 2 That's right. And I would say my expectation is that if you are driving a truck today and you want to retire driving a truck, you're going to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 But in the interim, what we're going to see is more automation come in to support the logistic industry.

Speaker 2 And that over time, there'll be less and less people that actually do this job because in the same way we have fewer and fewer saddle makers than we had way back in the day.

Speaker 2 And if you look at, there was a study by the Department of Transportation, and they see that this technology is actually going to grow the U.S. economy.

Speaker 2 And I think a relevant metaphor is if you think about what happened with the automated teller in banks, that originally there was this concern, okay, that's going to kill

Speaker 2 the banking industry. There won't be people to work there.

Speaker 2 And the automated teller actually came in, and what it did was it allowed the, it reduced the cost of operating a bank to the point where they could open more branches.

Speaker 2 And it moved the people that were the tellers from basically a cost center to a profit center.

Speaker 2 Instead of standing there to count out your dollar bills, they were now offering, you know, helping customers with new financial services.

Speaker 2 And so we expect there's a whole bunch of new jobs that will come around this. And as we make moving goods more efficient to support,

Speaker 2 you know, the increasing demands for what you need now,

Speaker 2 that there'll be all kinds of exciting jobs in the logistics space.

Speaker 17 It's nice to meet you. So

Speaker 17 a couple of things. One, this just makes so much sense.
If someone had said, based on trends around

Speaker 17 just economic trends around which part of automation makes the most sense, I think almost anyone would have lined up and looked at the data and said, okay, they can drive late at night, backbone of our economy, not a great job.

Speaker 17 It just seems like automated driving for long-haul trucking in the middle of the night when there's no traffic just makes all sorts of sense. And yet it really hasn't got

Speaker 17 the same traction as EVs, or at least it doesn't get the attention that I can tell is the obsession. with automated consumer vehicles.

Speaker 17 What has gotten in the way of the type of adoption I I would imagine you and your investors are expecting?

Speaker 17 Is it unions? Is it the technology? Is it regulation? What is the friction here getting in the way of adoption?

Speaker 2 So I think the first part is that

Speaker 2 the imagination is caught more viscerally by the robot taxi space, right?

Speaker 2 It's where I worked for a long time and kind of people can connect with that in a way that they don't really connect with long-haul trucking since we don't make Smoking the Bandit anymore or any of of those kind of movies.

Speaker 2 And then the second part is that at some point we realized that making the self-driving cars was hard.

Speaker 2 And so there were a bunch of companies actually that jumped into the space and like, oh, we'll just go do trucking.

Speaker 2 That's so much easier because, you know, freeways are straight and there's not much happens there. And it turns out they were ill-informed, right?

Speaker 2 It turns out that when you're driving a car around the city, yeah, there's more stuff you have to interact with. But when you're moving at 15 miles an hour, you can stop within, you know, 15 feet.

Speaker 2 Whereas if you're driving down the freeway, you can't just stop for one thing. And, you know, it takes you 150 meters, 200 meters to stop.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, the kinetic energy involved with a 70,000-pound truck at 70 miles an hour is just completely different. And so people underestimated how hard the technological problem would be.

Speaker 2 And so we saw.

Speaker 2 a flourishing of companies in the space and they all kind of died out because they they didn't really understand the strategic investment you'd have to make and things like we have this special kind of LIDAR, which is laser radar, that allows us to see much further than you can see or any of that we think the robotaxi folks can see.

Speaker 2 And that gives us the confidence that we can respond safely to things that are on the road.

Speaker 16 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So when you're thinking about where it's going, one of the things is this idea of what regulation is coming for these.

Speaker 16 One of the, there's been some statewide regulation for autonomous vehicles, nothing on a federal level.

Speaker 16 Would you support national regulation? There have been several self-driving companies are currently facing federal investigations, as you said, about multiple crashes.

Speaker 16 These are largely the Waymos or the GMs, et cetera,

Speaker 16 in the Robo-Tax area.

Speaker 16 How do you look at whether there should be, or is this should be a state-by-state? Because you're operating in Texas, which presumably is more amenable than other states to this, correct?

Speaker 16 That's why you're there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and so there's a little bit of a misnomer. So one is in most of the states today, we could operate, I think 44 of the 50 U.S.

Speaker 2 states, either by explicit law or implicitly, we're able to operate self-driving trucks on the road if we are confident in the safety of it.

Speaker 2 The federal government generally is responsible for the regulation of the safety of the vehicle.

Speaker 2 And I think that they've been really thoughtful. So they've,

Speaker 2 over time, they've put out guidelines that kind of say, here are best practices that you should be following and that, you know, we generally adhere to.

Speaker 2 And I think that's the right kind of mindset for them to have been in, right, is this is an evolving technology.

Speaker 2 We want to be careful that we don't create regulation that prevents its adoption and sees the U.S. benefit from the safety, the

Speaker 2 sustainability benefits, the economic benefits of this. As this becomes real and we start to understand what the challenges are and

Speaker 2 what the right kind of regulation is, absolutely. We'd love to see a federal standard.

Speaker 16 Safety or on

Speaker 16 what, or driving on highways themselves, which are federally correct?

Speaker 2 Well, you know,

Speaker 2 we look at this as an interstate commerce kind of challenge, right? You know, we're driving trucks today within Texas, but soon to Phoenix and then ultimately across the United States.

Speaker 2 And so having consistent regulation across the United States would be valuable and simplify some of what we do. But there's already significant oversight.

Speaker 2 I think this is something that's missed, is that at the state level, we work closely with Texas DOT and Department of Public Safety.

Speaker 2 We've been working hand in hand with them, helping them understand the technology, helping them make sure that they are in a position to regulate as they see fit.

Speaker 2 And similarly with the federal government, and in both cases, they can intercede even without further jurisdiction, right? That they can say...

Speaker 16 But presumably, Texas is nicer than New York, for example, in terms of these things.

Speaker 2 Well, Texas is a better market for us. And the good people of Texas have been very welcoming of the technology.

Speaker 16 Well, they're welcome of everybody, they seem. But one of the things that you noted is the robo-taxis all suck up all the oxygen, right?

Speaker 16 So Elon Musk has his big robo-taxi event in L.A. this week.
What's your take on the robo-taxi industry as a whole?

Speaker 16 And I will point out that Musk doesn't have any robo-taxis on the road, and there are many efforts by Google with Waymo and GM with Cruise, although they've had a rockier road.

Speaker 16 But Waymo seems to be proceeding pretty

Speaker 16 smartly.

Speaker 16 despite issues.

Speaker 16 They've been testing these cars for a long, long time.

Speaker 16 Talk about the industry as a whole and what you expect from this Musk event.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the industry, I think it's exciting that we've kind of ridden the Gartner hype curve, right? That in 2016, everybody in the dog was going to have a self-driving car tomorrow.

Speaker 2 And that didn't happen. And then we kind of crashed through the valley of disillusionment where is this ever going to work?

Speaker 2 And now you stand on a street corner in San Francisco and you'll likely see two

Speaker 2 Waymo cars drive by with nobody in the driver's seat, right? So it's happening. And from what I hear, people really love the experience.

Speaker 16 I do. I use it a lot.

Speaker 2 It seems like a great product. I think the business is challenging, right? The economics of just building and deploying that and scaling that, I think, is going to be hard.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think it has the possibility and the opportunity to really

Speaker 2 re-democratize transportation, right? If you think about,

Speaker 2 I know you're a bolt owner,

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 95% of that time, that car is sat parked somewhere.

Speaker 2 And so there's a lot of resource that's tied up in that that if it could drive itself, could be more efficiently serving the community and help people get around.

Speaker 2 Now, whether the technological approach that the Tesla folks are taking is going to get there,

Speaker 2 I have significant doubts.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the overarching arc of this is that this technology is going to be huge for improving safety and making it easier for people to get around.

Speaker 16 What's the challenge that you were just referring to from your perspective, an economic challenge? Just lots of money or people use it?

Speaker 2 So that

Speaker 2 one of the reasons that we think trucking is a great first market is that we value driving a truck about three times as much as we value driving a car.

Speaker 2 And so when you think about introducing a new technology, the place you want to enter is somewhere where

Speaker 2 both the unit economics are large enough that they can support introduction of a new technology. It's going to be more expensive initially.
And that the market size is gigantic.

Speaker 2 So if you think about trucking in the United States, it's about a trillion-dollar market today.

Speaker 2 And in right-hailing, it's about a $60 to $80 billion market. And the way that you expand the right-hailing market is you drive costs down.
And so that becomes

Speaker 2 challenging for a business. Whereas where we're introducing in the trucking market, the idea will be that you'll buy a truck, you'll pay us to drive the truck for you.

Speaker 2 And so it fits exactly into the market structure today.

Speaker 2 So the combination of much bigger market that you don't have to change customer behavior for and much better unit economics mean that we can be building a business and profitable and have the privilege to continue to pursue our business while you're going to have to continue to be

Speaker 2 cost cutting on the other side and investing heavily to make it happen.

Speaker 17 So do you think that the constant overpromising

Speaker 17 and under delivering around robo-taxis,

Speaker 17 mostly at the the feet of one person.

Speaker 17 Do you think it's made people cynical and ultimately has hurt the industry as we're all sort of rolling our eyes? Anyone begins to talk about

Speaker 17 or ventures to guess when this is actually going to be rolled out and have widespread adoption? Hasn't this industry kind of become known for over-promising and under-delivering?

Speaker 2 I think that's fair. And I think...

Speaker 2 But I think that's true of almost any new technology that comes to market, that there's a period of time where people are like, this is exciting, right?

Speaker 2 And this is why Gartner has the hype curve model.

Speaker 2 But I think what's happened with this is we spent a decade where the thing we got was

Speaker 2 144 character tweets and some things that didn't feel like big new technology steps.

Speaker 2 And as this kind of got onto the stage, one, we had to develop in public because we're on the public roads and there was a responsibility to kind of help be transparent about that.

Speaker 2 But the others, it captured the imagination.

Speaker 2 And so I think it really, you know, it had all the normal hype curve, but with it, you know, accelerated even more so or amplified because of how visceral and exciting it is for folks.

Speaker 17 And just real quick, you're married with children?

Speaker 2 I am, yeah.

Speaker 17 Live with your kids?

Speaker 2 My kids are both at college, actually. So one's at UC Davis and one's at University of Rochester.

Speaker 17 And how long have you been married?

Speaker 2 25 years.

Speaker 17 So let me get this:

Speaker 17 an innovator trying to change the world uh married for 25 years two kids on good terms with your kids uh yep uh really enjoyable listen up young men listen up this is the inner these are the innovators who also happen to be men yeah you you also didn't jump up and down at a trump rally this weekend did you on the stage

Speaker 16 no i i didn't jump up and down a trump rally okay all right just asking no asking for a friend sorry i didn't mean to use you as a proctor but i did yes a little bit but couldn't couldn't be more different scott i've known them both.

Speaker 16 I could not be more different as people in general.

Speaker 16 You know, you have this big to get these driver's trucks enrolled in Texas, and you have to have them between states because Texas isn't the only place you want to deliver stuff, right? Within Texas.

Speaker 16 But you shared back in August that Aurora raised $483 million by selling additional shares of the company. That's top of $1 billion in liquidity back in June.

Speaker 16 You talked about how expensive it is to get there. You feel this is the one area that will, in autonomy, become profitable profitable before the other.
You're right.

Speaker 16 The other is a race to the bottom in some way, for a while at least.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we see the path to build the business, to go and deliver a valuable product to customers in the trucking space, build that up, use that to drive up scale. That'll help us drive down costs.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, fundamentally, the technology to drive a truck is very similar to the technology to drive the car.

Speaker 2 And so we see ourselves ultimately going and working in that space as well, but doing that from...

Speaker 2 absolutely. And if you think about the intelligence we're building to understand the built world, right, the driving world, that's going to be really interesting.

Speaker 2 And there's going to be lots of places over time that we can apply that. But right now, the job is let's get this product out in the market.

Speaker 2 Let's go make sure customers find it valuable, that we deliver on our promises there, and then we can go build a business in other places as well.

Speaker 16 You know, that would be a bus or things like that?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I think people will want different solutions, right? If you look at at the automotive market, they're masters at segmenting that space. And so I do actually believe the long-term robotaxi vision.

Speaker 2 I also think there's an opportunity to augment public transportation, right? So today we kind of packetize

Speaker 2 the people moving into these 50-person buses.

Speaker 2 And we've all been there where we've seen this bus go by with two people on it or nobody on it.

Speaker 2 Imagine that, and those buses, by the way, are restricted to certain lanes because uh that's where we can afford to have them and they're kind of gerrymandered imagine you can because you don't have to have a driver in each vehicle you can have a six-person vehicle and then that can be called through the public transit authority and it can route dynamically over time you can really provide a valuable public service through that over the long term as you drive the cost down.

Speaker 2 So I think there's going to be, like,

Speaker 2 we are going through this phase that never happens as quickly in the near term as you expect of transforming for the first time in 100 years what it means to move around in cities. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's incredibly exciting.

Speaker 16 It is indeed. Anyway, thank you, Chris Urmson of Aurora.
Good luck. You're also Canadian, just so you know, Scott.
I just read that.

Speaker 17 It explains everything.

Speaker 16 Totally explains everything. Hold on.

Speaker 17 University of Manitoba, PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Dude, you're the innovator we need right now looking at all this.

Speaker 16 Which is hence why I brought him, Scott, so you could have a better vision of these Robo-Taxi fellas.

Speaker 2 That's very kind of you to say. Thank you.

Speaker 16 Thank you so much, Chris.

Speaker 2 There you go. Thanks so much.
There you go.

Speaker 17 Thanks for your good work.

Speaker 16 Scott, I'd like to bring you Nice Man. I know all the nice ones in tech.

Speaker 17 I was cheated, though. You brought on a Canadian.
That's redundant.

Speaker 16 No, no, no, no. He's really great.
I met him when he was at Google, and I tried out his first cars. He was always so enthusiastic and a really good guy.

Speaker 16 And I appreciate, you know, he's worked. It's a tough business that he's in, right? Because he was at the pioneering part of this.

Speaker 16 Um, and he's just worked really hard and not, he's not a hand waver, he doesn't make things up like this robo-tech event that Elon's doing is such fucking nonsense.

Speaker 16 They haven't had a mile on the road. I mean, maybe they've, I don't know, tried it out, but you know, Waymo's been at it, but they haven't.
And he's just going to wave his hands and look at me.

Speaker 16 And the same thing, it's a total difference in people. And he's, and Chris is the one I would focus in on.
Anyway, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.

Speaker 21 Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

Speaker 22 Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.

Speaker 22 It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.

Speaker 23 Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms.

Speaker 23 Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition.

Speaker 23 Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck, and injection side pain, fatigue, and headache.

Speaker 23 Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection.

Speaker 23 Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

Speaker 21 Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxchronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

Speaker 24 At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Speaker 24 Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

Speaker 24 From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Speaker 24 Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.
CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships.

Speaker 24 Instead, it's shorthand for customer rage machine. Your CRM can't explain why a customer's package took five detours, reboot your inner piece, and scream into a pillow.

Speaker 2 It's okay.

Speaker 24 On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better. AI agents don't just track issues, they resolve them, transforming the entire customer experience.

Speaker 2 So breathe in and breathe out.

Speaker 24 Bad CRM was then. This is ServiceNow.

Speaker 16 Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. You go first.

Speaker 17 Well, I'll just start with my fail.

Speaker 17 I would be remiss if I didn't highlight we're recording on the one-year anniversary

Speaker 18 where

Speaker 17 approximately 1,200 people were killed,

Speaker 17 attacked by Hamas.

Speaker 17 Approximately 210, I believe, were taken hostage. 97 hostages are still being held in Gaza following their abduction by Hamas during the attacks.

Speaker 17 This includes 33 confirmed deceased whose bodies remain in Gaza. The number of hostages still alive is believed to be fewer than 70.

Speaker 17 And estimates suggest

Speaker 17 many have not survived the ongoing conflict. Some of the people taken hostages included

Speaker 17 a 10-month-old who has reportedly been killed, a five-year-old, a 10-year-old. And anyways, just

Speaker 17 I think it's important that we don't forget that

Speaker 17 there are still a lot of people being held in terrible conditions underground that absolutely could be released that are not combatants. These are civilians, elderly, young people.

Speaker 17 So anyways, today marks that one year anniversary.

Speaker 17 That's my fail.

Speaker 16 They should not be there.

Speaker 17 My win is something much more hopeful. I had a wonderful weekend.
I think I told you. I saw about 11 guys from my fraternity at UCLA.
When I showed up to UCLA, I was 17.

Speaker 17 It was back in the space race where any, especially a boy who showed any academic promise was like told to skip a grade.

Speaker 17 And my friend Mike Baruch, who I've been hanging out with this weekend, when I met him freshman orientation at UCLA, he was 16. Can you imagine a 16-year-old going to UCLA?

Speaker 17 I mean, my boy is 17 and he's a wonderful young man, but the thought that he would be my agent at UCLA right now is just insane. Anyways,

Speaker 17 my win and my advice after like hanging out with all these wonderful men and their kids and just how much joy

Speaker 17 and reward we have

Speaker 17 registered from each other over the last 40 plus years.

Speaker 17 My advice to any young person, but especially young men who aren't as good at kind of weaving a social fabric, is you need to find your fraternity. You need to find your people.

Speaker 17 When you get out of high school or maybe in high school, the moment you turn 18, one of the things you need to do to set up success in your life and mental well-being is to find your fraternity.

Speaker 17 I mean, find your tribe. I don't care if through it's a church group, if it's through a nonprofit, if it's through a group on campus, if it's a fraternity or sorority.

Speaker 17 You really do need to be thoughtful and say, my life is largely going to be driven by a series of things that are outside of my control.

Speaker 17 When and where you are born determines the majority of your success or lack thereof, unfortunately. But there are some things you can control.

Speaker 17 And you want to find a good group of people that are smart, that are kind, that are ambitious. And right away, find your fraternity.
Find a group and start investing in those guys because

Speaker 17 or women. And the reason I focus on young men is young men just aren't as good at it.

Speaker 17 And there are, I think, one of the biggest threats in our society right now is there's just increasingly a huge cohort of young men that, quote unquote, aren't finding their fraternity.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 when you find it when you're 18, there's just a group of guys, quite frankly, we don't have a ton in common other than we liked each other and we came together at a young age.

Speaker 17 And what that means is you run into them,

Speaker 17 you know, 10, 20, 40 years later, and you have real affection for each other. And that, you know, it's so wonderful.
Yep. Anyways, my, my, my,

Speaker 17 my, my win and advice to young men, find your, find your tribe.

Speaker 16 Oh, sweet. That's gotta.
I always love when you talk like this. Do you know that? It's a very touching.
It's very touching the friendships you've made.

Speaker 16 That was one of the great things about going to your birthday party was seeing all your different

Speaker 16 friendships over the many years, you know, and especially the ones from like fourth grade and stuff like that.

Speaker 17 But when you just think about how many young people, especially young men, aren't finding that. I agree.
You know, not going into work, not going to college, not joining the army.

Speaker 17 Where do they find their tribe?

Speaker 16 That's right. That's right.
Well, you've got definitely got a tribe. You got a tribe.
There you go. Scott Galloway has a tribe.
It's very touching when you talk about it.

Speaker 16 I'm excited for your book about this topic. I think it's really important when people are showing such bad signs of masculinity to have a counter narrative is critically important.

Speaker 16 I think my fail, it's not a fail. This Hurricane Milton is reaching category five strength as it approaches Florida.

Speaker 16 I think we have to, it's, there's, you know, we just had this terrible storm that really did devastating amounts of devastation in North Carolina and Georgia. And this is heading towards Tampa.

Speaker 16 This is the west coast of Florida. This is a flood-prone area as it is.

Speaker 16 We have to really think about how to structurally deal with these things because everywhere is Florida now, someone was saying. We are all living in Florida at this point.

Speaker 16 You know, obviously it's more dangerous to be in Florida when it comes to hurricane seasons. We have to all think about the devastation of climate change again and again.

Speaker 16 And the fact that there's a party that pretends it doesn't exist is,

Speaker 16 I feel like we're in that movie, like, and we're about to see some really devastating things. And so you really need to wake up.

Speaker 16 It's not just a climate disaster of the moment, but we have to think about it from a systemic way and how to deal with it and

Speaker 16 either not live in these places or find a way to live in them that keeps people safer. But these tropical alerts from the weather service, which by the way, the Trump administration wants to cut,

Speaker 16 the future in their Project 2025 are disturbing to say the least. And so our heart goes out to the people there.

Speaker 16 And at the same time, we have to be able to plan for these things in a much better way going forward. It's like we forget every single year that these are going to happen and they're getting worse.

Speaker 16 So that's my fail.

Speaker 16 My positive, I think the family thing, Scott, I think that's true. We had a really wonderful weekend.
It's Clara's birthday.

Speaker 16 And we did. I hope she's five.
Do you believe it? I know, right? I know. We've known each other a long time.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 We just had such a lovely weekend, not on the phones, not on our, you know, not doing, not doing things separately, but as a group.

Speaker 16 Amanda's brother and sister-in-law came in and their son um and it's just really you guys have to get out like you have to get out with family and groups of people and in communities more it's something we should all try i thought about it a lot uh over the past couple of weeks like the idea of doing more stuff with with family or or friends or whatever um but it was a beautiful party it was fantastic she dressed as a princess tiana in this case usually is elsa or anna but um but it was really nice to see all these kids playing with each other.

Speaker 16 It's just kids really play. I was really watching my son Saul play with his cousin Oscar, and they just like play.
Like, you know what I mean? Like, they don't need a lot of shit to do that.

Speaker 16 They just need to run around. And so I agree with you.
I think it's really important to find your groups of people and get out of your head. And,

Speaker 16 and, and, you know, it's a difficult time over the next 30 days with this election. And so you need some, everybody needs to calm the fuck down.

Speaker 17 And kids keep you young, don't you think? I agree.

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 I keep you old.

Speaker 17 Let me ask you, when you're around your kids, don't you feel 61 again?

Speaker 18 That's good.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 That's good.

Speaker 16 Oh, you're funny, Scott. Anyway, also, by the way, everybody, get your vaccines.
This is our anti-RFK announcement. I got both my COVID and

Speaker 16 flu vaccines.

Speaker 17 Free whale's head if you get a vaccine.

Speaker 16 Get them. I didn't feel terrific all weekend, but I didn't feel bad.

Speaker 16 And so I urge you, this is going to be a tough season.

Speaker 17 Well, that's an ad for vaccines. I didn't feel terrible.

Speaker 16 It's the facts. You don't feel good when you get vaccinated.

Speaker 17 By the way, back to me, I'm doing this NAD treatment. I'm going to be so young and youthful.
What is that?

Speaker 16 Have you heard of this? No. What?

Speaker 17 Something that repairs your mitochondria. It's basically what rich people do thinking they're going to live forever.

Speaker 16 You're not going to live forever. No matter what you do, Carmine, you're going to die.
Anyway, that's from Moonstruck. Moonstruck, yeah.

Speaker 16 Anyway,

Speaker 16 that's that thing. Get your vaccines and hang out with your friends.

Speaker 17 That's what I say. Hold on.

Speaker 17 You brought up a movie. Okay.
Moonstruck, my favorite moment in the movie. The phone rings at two in the morning, and she Olympia Dukakis just wakes up and goes, who's dead?

Speaker 16 Who's dead?

Speaker 16 She's so great. Olympia Dukakis.
She is good. She's so great.
Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

Speaker 16 Go to nymag.com slash pivot, pivot, submit a question for the show or call 8-55-51-PIT. Okay, Scott, that is the show.
We'll be back on Friday with more. You're going to be in L.A.
till when?

Speaker 2 I'll see you next week, but you're there all week?

Speaker 17 Yeah, I think I'm there all week. I go back to New York.

Speaker 16 Did you do the thing in the writer's room yet?

Speaker 1 No, not you.

Speaker 17 I had AI show up with me just to piss everybody off.

Speaker 16 I sent a bot. Did you? Okay.
All right. Well, we're very excited to hear that story.

Speaker 17 I'm meeting with a couple of Hollywood executives from Netflix at the Cabana here at the Beverly. I just explode.
I'm so fucking Hollywood Hollywood right now. Cabana.

Speaker 16 Where your Varnays? Where your Varnays.

Speaker 16 Read us out.

Speaker 17 Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Ratat engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burroughs and Mia Silverio.

Speaker 17 Nishak Kara is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Mag and Vox Media.

Speaker 17 You can subscribe to the magazine at nmymag.com/slash pod. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.
Cara, have a great start to the week.

Speaker 24 Happy birthday, Claire.

Speaker 17 That's very exciting.

Speaker 3 Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new.

Speaker 4 Show me all the things PDFs can do.

Speaker 6 Do your work with ease and speed.

Speaker 7 PDF spaces is all you need.

Speaker 5 Do hours of research in an instant.

Speaker 8 With key insights from an AI assistant.

Speaker 9 Pick a template with a click.

Speaker 10 Now your prezzo looks super slick.

Speaker 11 Close that deal, yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done.

Speaker 12 Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat.

Speaker 3 Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat.

Speaker 13 It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Speaker 19 Your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did.
The sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5.

Speaker 19 Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

Speaker 17 Prices and participation may vary.