2021: Pivot's Year In Review

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Speaker 4 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 5 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 4 Today's a special day, Scott. We take a look at all the chaos and insanity of 2021, and there was a lot.

Speaker 4 From billionaires in space to hell on Earth, we're looking back at one of the wildest years in recent memory. And at the end, we'll pick the biggest pivot from the last 12 months.

Speaker 4 This is 2021, the year in review.

Speaker 4 This year's first news event may also have been its biggest, it was its biggest, the insurrection of January 6th.

Speaker 4 in the aftermath of the attack on the capitol a lot of americans were angry scott was among them

Speaker 3 the the physician for congress they have a physician i guess sent out a memo an email saying that there's a chance you should all get tested because there's a chance when you are all huddling on top of each other hiding and barricading yourself that you might have you might have contracted covet because certain members of congress yeah yeah certain members of congress refused to wear masks i know in the race that we have they were being banished by other people.

Speaker 3 People huddling are elected officials. And when you think about it, these people, they aren't elected officials.
They're America. They call it the U.S.
House of Representatives for a reason. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That we as a nation had to huddle on top of each other and barricade our doors with furniture because

Speaker 9 of these village idiots that showed up.

Speaker 4 Not just village idiots. We're going to talk about that more.
But by the way, the people, it doesn't get enough attention.

Speaker 3 I'm going with village idiots.

Speaker 4 People who, the representatives who refuse to wear masks, they can go fuck themselves. In this crisis situation,

Speaker 4 they've moved to ridiculous.

Speaker 4 They're an embarrassment to the United States government.

Speaker 4 Not just an embarrassment. They should be voted out of office.
They will be. I don't know if they'll be voted out of office, but let me just say, fuck them.

Speaker 10 After the insurrection, Facebook and Twitter clamped down on QAnon content and accounts, but one platform stood firm, Parlor. Kara interviewed then-CEO John Mates for the New York Times.

Speaker 10 He denied any responsibility soon after Google and Apple pulled the app from their stores and Amazon stopped hosting Parlor.

Speaker 3 Let's be clear.

Speaker 3 Jack Dorsey did not kick Trump off the platform. Mark Zuckerberg did not shut his account down.
Stacey Abrams did. Yeah.
All of a sudden, these people have woken up. And okay, I want to be clear.

Speaker 3 Let's give credit where credit is due. Jack Dorsey decided to stop hate polarization and insurrections 1,449 days into a 1,460-day tenure.
Way to go. Way to go, Jack.
And just personally, just...

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 We were talking about this this morning. Uh, if I come home after being on vacation for two weeks and I see my son vacuuming the living room,

Speaker 3 your first inclination should be, oh, that's great. He cares about the house and wants to be a good, a good guy.
No, he's not.

Speaker 14 No, he's not.

Speaker 3 He's thrown a rave and has been selling meth and Molly for the last two weeks out of the house and is trying to cover his tracks. Yeah.
And that's what these guys.

Speaker 4 There were a lot of tweets about that. Yeah.
Flushing drugs around the toilet when a new

Speaker 3 when a new this is Lorraine Bracco trying to like cover up the evidence.

Speaker 3 they deserve absolutely no credit so okay first off first off stacey abrams kicked trump off these platforms and not only that amazon by winning in georgia meaning the democrats have control sit back you're going to love this because it's about you

Speaker 3 amazon jeff bezos didn't kick parlor off aws kara swisher did because that interview with him that you did pointed out this guy is the newest addition to the menace economy.

Speaker 3 And people have realized that, wait, you know, Japan in Europe, they they decided that Nazis are a bad thing and they can lead us down and hate speech can lead us down a bad road.

Speaker 3 So they don't have the same First Amendment quote-unquote protections that we so dearly hold and have been totally perverted, which make absolutely no sense. And guess what?

Speaker 3 They still have a pretty free, open, progressive society where people get most of their viewpoints across. And everyone realizes that is just total bullshit.

Speaker 4 As we discussed free speech and social media, my son Louis brought up an important point, which is only more relevant today now that Trump's launching his own social network.

Speaker 4 He's probably going to go over there to other sites.

Speaker 4 Should there be a fully free speech platform?

Speaker 16 I mean, doesn't like 8chan exist?

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Like, I think that, well, there's already places for that.

Speaker 17 So I think, yes, I think people have the right to, you know, say what they want, but I don't think they have the right to be free of the consequences of what they say.

Speaker 17 There's always, there should, like, you know, even if you threaten someone, there should be consequences. Uh, if you speak ill of someone, you may have to speak to that person or something.

Speaker 17 But I think Trump is, there's always going to be a slot on Fox News for Donald Trump.

Speaker 17 So I think he'll find places to go, whether it's not, whether it's Fox, OAN, Breitbart, other platforms who will hear what he has to say,

Speaker 17 regardless of if he's banned from Twitter. But I think being on mainstream platforms and holding a mainstream, you know,

Speaker 17 standing on a box in the public square and

Speaker 1 like a respected box, you know,

Speaker 10 it gives him an elevated voice that i think he no longer deserves in the time since the insurrection trump has been removed from all social media platforms prosecutors have charged more than 650 people by the way remember that jamirokoy guy ends up he lived with his mother good news he's moving out into a fucking cell you piece of shit and at least 105 people have pleaded guilty a house committee continues to investigate as well also trump has announced that he will launch his own social network truth social i'm calling it the big short

Speaker 4 Facebook is no more. Well, kinda.
Facebook rebranded to Meta earlier this year as it hoped to escape its toxic reputation that's plagued it since well before 2021.

Speaker 4 But this year saw challenges unlike anything Facebook has ever faced.

Speaker 4 Facebook's first fumble of 2021 came immediately after the insurrection when Cheryl Sandberg claimed that the Stop the Steal event was planned on other platforms. The claim was quickly shot down.

Speaker 4 Many people think she was inaccurate. Scott, care to rant.

Speaker 18 Go Go for it. Well, yeah,

Speaker 18 as Ms. Samberberg.

Speaker 4 I want to yell. I need you to yell at first.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I'm not going to yell.

Speaker 25 As Ms. Sandberg claims that, you know, pats herself on the back, saying that because of her transparency, it wasn't her platform.

Speaker 15 No sooner does she say that than they are taking ads for military vests and basically combat wear right above content around the insurrection.

Speaker 28 It's like, what you missing?

Speaker 18 Planning to head back?

Speaker 18 Are you part of of the mob?

Speaker 15 Well, buy this military vest.

Speaker 27 I mean, that's, that is, for me, that sort of typified.

Speaker 4 More than that, there was lots of proof that they organized on Facebook, too.

Speaker 29 Of course there is.

Speaker 25 But the thing I'm uncomfortable with, and there's a lot to unpack here, is that when we have insurrection, when we have a potential coup,

Speaker 32 the way we meet out justice in our society now is that kayak and caviar cancel his account.

Speaker 27 That's how we

Speaker 33 beg our innovators.

Speaker 34 We beg our overlord.

Speaker 35 That's the position we're in.

Speaker 4 And in April, a massive trove of Facebook user data landed on the dark web.

Speaker 10 That same month, a new iPhone feature lets users opt out of tracking by Facebook and other apps.

Speaker 4 We're going to talk about this in a minute, but Facebook is at an all-time high, right? The stocks are at an all-time high.

Speaker 4 So it doesn't really matter what Tim Cook does or thinks about them because nobody seems to care. You know, until the government gets involved, even though they're going to do this,

Speaker 4 I think it's ATT, something transparency thing.

Speaker 4 Nothing's going to happen to them. And so Cook is just going to push ahead with this

Speaker 4 thing where you get to click that you're being tracked essentially or not.

Speaker 4 And I don't know how much it's going to affect Facebook. And he said he's not thinking about them at all.

Speaker 4 He thinks it's a flimsy argument to argue that it's anything but privacy matter, you know, that it's, he doesn't understand why there's so much pushback from them and others.

Speaker 4 So I, you know, I think they're just, and he also said they're not competitors. He doesn't consider them competitors.

Speaker 4 They are sort of like what I said on CNBC this morning, weird roommates that don't like each other.

Speaker 4 They have to sort of coexist because, you know, Facebook is one of the most popular apps on the iPhone. And at the same time, and so is Instagram and all the others.

Speaker 4 And then at the same time, they need Apple to be popular. Right.
So it's a weird. bad relationship between them.
But they're moving forward

Speaker 4 on this effort to make people say they want to be tracked, essentially, opt into it.

Speaker 4 And, you know,

Speaker 8 let me just press pause there.

Speaker 16 My sense is that

Speaker 15 he's in a room saying, we're going to put that motherfucker out of business.

Speaker 18 And that that's what they're doing.

Speaker 34 And that to de-cookie or whatever it is, such that Facebook cannot track people across multiple platforms is basically saying, okay,

Speaker 16 we're going to go in and we're going to take out your liver.

Speaker 18 And you can function as a human for a little while without a liver, but effectively, I mean, they've gone in.

Speaker 34 If they accomplish this, they take the most valuable consumer base in the world, which is iOS users, and they make them dramatically less valuable to Facebook.

Speaker 4 Yes, they do.

Speaker 10 In July, as coronavirus numbers surged, Facebook was once again accused of spreading misinformation, but this time by the President of the United States.

Speaker 4 Facebook and President Biden are facing off over vaccine misinformation.

Speaker 4 This past Friday, Biden was asked about the role of social media in influencing vaccinations, and his response was unusually strong.

Speaker 40 They're killing people.

Speaker 40 I mean, it really,

Speaker 40 look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.

Speaker 40 And that's, and they're killing people.

Speaker 4 Facebook fired back on Saturday in a blog post saying the Biden administration was, quote, finger-pointing, and that Facebook was not the reason Biden's goal of 70% vaccination was missed.

Speaker 4 On Monday, Biden reversed course and said Facebook isn't killing people.

Speaker 4 Though the president walked back to his most aggressive comment, he reiterated that he hopes Facebook does something about the misinformation. It was kind of fascinating.
He did push it too far.

Speaker 4 It was interesting. Let me just start.

Speaker 4 I interviewed Ron Klain, who started to raise this idea a couple of weeks ago in a podcast I did with him and saying Facebook's always the person the company mentioned when people talk about misinformation when they're doing their polling.

Speaker 4 Then Jennifer Saki said something, and then the surgeon general did. And then for some reason, Biden went out there and was doing the come on, man thing.
Like, come on, man, they're killing people.

Speaker 4 And so it may have been a little much. I wrote a comment saying it was probably a little much.

Speaker 4 But nonetheless, what do you think?

Speaker 11 Look, I've said this nine times, so I'll say it a tenth time, and I've been wrong every time.

Speaker 5 I think this is Facebook jumping the shark.

Speaker 11 Facebook basically said, first off, they found this VP of integrity.

Speaker 19 They strapped a bomb.

Speaker 35 He's been there.

Speaker 5 They strapped a bomb to his chest and said, hey, you're a hero.

Speaker 33 Go out there and say that the Biden administration, this is what they said about the Biden administration, that they were trying to find scapegoats because of their failed vaccine strategy.

Speaker 18 He said that.

Speaker 5 That is basically, that is telling the president of the United States and the U.S.

Speaker 9 government that on the most important issue they have and will face, they are failing six months into their presidency.

Speaker 27 I don't think they ever said anything that aggressive about Trump.

Speaker 9 I don't think they've accused President Xi of finding scapegoats.

Speaker 31 So the calculated decision here was they strapped a bomb to this kid's chest or put him in a kamikaze plane and said, go out there and

Speaker 27 clap back really hard at the administration.

Speaker 16 And for the life of me, Kara, I can't figure out how this was anything but a ridiculously stupid fucking move on the part of Facebook.

Speaker 10 Biden eventually wonked back those comments.

Speaker 4 In August, Facebook released a report showing its most viewed content. Instead of misinformation, much of it was innocuous.
But according to Casey Newton, things weren't quite what they seemed.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to dunk too hard. I appreciate when Facebook makes data available, but this is not the data that anyone was looking for.

Speaker 4 Oh, thank you, sir. Can I have some more? But go ahead.

Speaker 41 Yeah, well, it's like what we want to know is what stories are popular on Facebook right now. You can measure popularity different in a bunch of different ways.

Speaker 41 They bought a tool called CrowdTangle that lets you see the posts that are getting the most engagement.

Speaker 41 But they hate it because they say that the posts that are getting the most engagement are not the most popular. And that what you really want to know is, well, what posts were viewed the most.

Speaker 41 And so that was the point of yesterday's report. But whereas CrowdTangle is a real-time tool, this is going to be a once every four months.
months report.

Speaker 41 How much can we really learn by knowing that the most shared domain on Facebook over the past four months was youtube.com? They're not telling us individual YouTube videos.

Speaker 41 It's just sharing YouTube is popular on Facebook, which any of us could have guessed, right? You look at some of the other most popular links.

Speaker 41 They're basically spam, like people who were sharing popular memes and then attaching a URL to, in one case, a speakers bureau of former Green Bay Packers players.

Speaker 41 This is not helping me understand what is on Facebook.

Speaker 4 Well, I think it's done very clearly to show, look, we're not that. We're just silly.
We're just cat videos. It's sort of the cat video move, essentially.

Speaker 41 Yeah. And I mean, this sort of goes hand in hand with the other big tech company move, which is to only talk in terms of percentages, right?

Speaker 18 Where it's like, you know, Facebook and YouTube love to do this.

Speaker 41 Well, only 3% of views, you know, were of fascism. And like, okay, 3% of views is, you know, tens of millions of clicks.

Speaker 3 So again,

Speaker 41 you know, glad to see a little bit more data, but we need to keep pushing for the data that would actually be useful.

Speaker 4 We later learned that Facebook shelved an earlier version of that report because it showed vaccine misinformation was popular on the network.

Speaker 11 And if all of that wasn't bad enough, it is bad enough.

Speaker 10 In October, Facebook became the subject of the year's biggest tech story.

Speaker 15 What do you know?

Speaker 33 Again, the Facebook files.

Speaker 10 In a slew of damning stories, the Wall Street Journal reported on Facebook's lax rules for celebrities, its permissive behavior towards drug cartels, its push to get children onto the platform, and more, including teen depression and generally just not giving a good goddamn about anything regarding our Commonwealth.

Speaker 10 But I digress, but one story resonated above all.

Speaker 14 Facebook's own data reflected that Instagram was harming teen girls.

Speaker 4 But they have found internal Facebook research that showed that 32% of teen girls said that they felt bad about their bodies. Instagram made them feel worse.
Facebook knows this.

Speaker 4 Mark Zuckerberg reportedly learned it about it in 2020, although we've been talking about it for a long time.

Speaker 4 Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, issued a statement saying the story focuses on a limited set of findings and casts them in a negative light. That's right, Adam.
It does, because it's negative.

Speaker 4 The comments from him are just appalling as far as I'm concerned. He made several times.

Speaker 32 Well, he's taking a page out of Cheryl Sandberg.

Speaker 42 I'm proud of the progress he tried to

Speaker 10 do this gymnastic move.

Speaker 4 This is too long to understand this. Scott, I'm going to let you rant here.
Please go.

Speaker 33 Well, a society, Peter Jucker said that an economy exists to create a middle class, and that's the balance of an economy economically.

Speaker 43 But from an

Speaker 21 anthropological or from a spiritual or from an instinctual standpoint, the most rewarding things in our lives are our ability to provide a safe and loving environment for our children.

Speaker 21 And when that does not happen, when

Speaker 33 one in eight UK girls who are contemplating suicide highlight Instagram as the primary reason they have started contemplating suicide,

Speaker 33 Facebook hasn't failed.

Speaker 18 We have all failed.

Speaker 18 I mean, this is

Speaker 18 what could be what could be more serious

Speaker 32 than an uptick in teen depression, self-harm, and suicide that can be reverse engineered to a corporation, and we haven't done anything about it, that we've let this happen.

Speaker 4 We haven't stopped Facebook, is what you're saying.

Speaker 25 We haven't moved in.

Speaker 42 I think at some point, you got to start holding ourselves responsible and our elected leaders responsible.

Speaker 4 Let's focus on Facebook for a minute.

Speaker 8 They knew this research.

Speaker 4 Look, this is research that's been out, and a lot of people are suggesting that everybody knows it. But here they are just doubling down on it.

Speaker 4 They're supposed to put Instagram for kids out. They aren't acknowledging.

Speaker 18 Can you believe that?

Speaker 4 Yes. Yes, I can.

Speaker 45 You got to admire their gumption.

Speaker 4 I can. They write everything down because they're proud of it.

Speaker 46 And 44 states have asked them not to.

Speaker 32 And that's where we are. States ask Facebook not to do something.

Speaker 4 Right. So this obviously could apply to other people, not just teen girls, but teen girls are very vulnerable.

Speaker 4 Instagram already does warn users who view tags like anorexia and directs them to seek help. But I think one of the things you've talked about a lot is envy and depression are just built into this.

Speaker 4 It's not fixable. It's not the way it is.

Speaker 4 I asked my kids about this last night, actually, and they're like,

Speaker 4 I see people on there and it makes me feel bad about myself. Like, you know what I mean? Like, they're pretty confident as people, but it's.

Speaker 26 A third of girls under the age of 22 and 40% of the users under the age of 22 cite that it makes them feel worse about their bodies.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yes, that's what one of my kids was saying that.

Speaker 32 I just find it so

Speaker 32 I agree with you that Mark Zuckerberg is ultimately responsible, but they have deployed Cheryl Sandberg around this notion around saying she has incredible gravitas,

Speaker 26 and a lot of it is deserved around being presented and built by 900 people in their communications department as a real champion for women.

Speaker 42 And then she talks about personal loss.

Speaker 43 And the comment I thought that ran through my mind was, and I like the stuff she said about her kids and dealing with grief, is they need a safe space.

Speaker 44 to grieve.

Speaker 26 And I thought, where is our children's safe space from her and Mark Zuckerberg?

Speaker 4 The documents behind the journal's stories soon made their way to other publishers, thanks to whistleblower Francis Haugen.

Speaker 4 Further reporting showed Facebook struggling to moderate content overseas, employee dissent, and greater failures around January 6th.

Speaker 10 As the bad press mounted, Facebook pulled a Hail Mary.

Speaker 14 They rebranded to, what a coincidence, Meta.

Speaker 4 We're not going to play a clip from that episode because it's a cosmetic change. Giving it any more attention is exactly what they'd like.

Speaker 4 The issues remain unresolved, and we're still going to call it Facebook from time to time.

Speaker 14 Ha, that'll show them.

Speaker 8 That'll show them.

Speaker 4 2021 was a big year for billionaires. We'll talk about Elon Musk later, but in some ways, this was the year of Jeff Bezos.
In February, he announced that he was stepping down as Amazon's CEO.

Speaker 4 Scott and I considered his legacy.

Speaker 20 So before we even get to that, though, I do think it warrants a moment of recognition that

Speaker 24 Jeff Bezos, his career.

Speaker 8 Look,

Speaker 47 no one man in history has taken a company from zero to $1.7 trillion.

Speaker 20 No one person

Speaker 2 has established a recurring revenue relationship with 82 percent of households. No one person has had a company hire a half a million people in one year.

Speaker 47 No one person has revolutionized e-commerce, revolutionized cloud, revolutionized voice.

Speaker 2 This is, as he stands here today, and there is a dignity and discipline to leave in the stage while people are clapping.

Speaker 24 He goes out or leaves the CO role as the bluest, you know, the bluest flame thinker in the history of business.

Speaker 30 And also, I have been very critical.

Speaker 47 I don't think they can equip themselves well, gamifying the Commonwealth, some of the things you just read about.

Speaker 24 But the reality is,

Speaker 47 I've owned stock in Amazon since 2007. They're the largest recruiter of young men and women out of my class.
It's given them an enormous, a wonderful start to building economic security.

Speaker 24 You know,

Speaker 47 you just got to recognize what he has done.

Speaker 18 Oh, I do.

Speaker 47 It is just staggering what he has accomplished.

Speaker 2 Now, now, the most exciting thing, the most exciting thing, and there's an analogy here or a metaphor or a correlation, whatever it is, a reference to Bill Gates.

Speaker 30 Bill Gates, when he retired, was not that well liked.

Speaker 2 People saw him as someone who really threw around his elbows in business.

Speaker 47 Up until the point he retired, he was not very philanthropic.

Speaker 24 The last 25 years for Jeff Bezos have been meaningful for our society, but the next 25 years could be profound.

Speaker 10 And because we're brilliant, we predicted Jeff Bezos in space months before he ever announced he would go

Speaker 4 what's really fascinating is the two richest people in the world in this world in history of the world want to get off the planet they consider it important that we get off the planet in some fashion and both are worried about these existential crises i don't think they're going i i don't think that's i think they want to be you know i think i think elon that's how he's going to go i will never see him again i think he's going to get on i don't know about bezos but i think elon's getting

Speaker 4 to mars how's that for a prediction we almost got it four months later jeff Bezos announced that he would fly to space via Blue Origin, his rocket company. Could you be a stowaway?

Speaker 18 Bill Gate, when you're doing it. You can be so good for this podcast.

Speaker 47 For $2.8 million, we should do a GoFundMe, and I get to sit next to Bezos going into space.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God, can we please?

Speaker 14 Yeah, that would be pretty good, right? Let's do it.

Speaker 4 Because if you going into space with Bezos, the two bald guys taking him to Cuban.

Speaker 26 I'm scared.

Speaker 35 I am so scared.

Speaker 28 If I got on that seat next to you, I could do it.

Speaker 4 I could raise the money. I could do it.

Speaker 34 I would just, you know what I would do?

Speaker 8 I would just inappropriately flirt with him, like grab grab his hand, grab his hand a lot and just stare at him and wink.

Speaker 15 Come on, that'd be good.

Speaker 36 And then in July, Bezos actually flew.

Speaker 8 I want to thank

Speaker 49 every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this.

Speaker 11 Sunday morning or broadcast morning television shows spent more time covering the Blue Origins, Bezos, Dickens Base.

Speaker 4 It's about to be irresistible for TV. Hold on.

Speaker 25 It looks like it's a bad thing.

Speaker 11 But in one day, in one day, they spent more time, more hours covering the Bezos launch than they did covering climate change in all of 2020.

Speaker 18 I know. I know.

Speaker 11 And at some point, the editors or whoever it is at these stations has to go, okay,

Speaker 46 are we a big part of the problem?

Speaker 11 And when they send all these reporters and journalists down there to act breathless, I mean, think about this launch.

Speaker 11 And by the way, I was on MSNBC yesterday and I felt intimidated not to be that cynical.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I just couldn't help it.

Speaker 15 They went 100 kilometers to the carnival.

Speaker 4 Say what you said because I thought it was quite interesting.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 22 It would have been cheaper if Jeff Bezos had crashed his Canary Yellow T-Top Corvette into a hair plugs clinic.

Speaker 42 What is the achievement here?

Speaker 19 They went up 60 miles and floated back down.

Speaker 29 50 years ago,

Speaker 37 we sent three brave people into orbit.

Speaker 38 We sent them 400 times as far.

Speaker 27 No, I'm sorry, 4,000 times as far.

Speaker 11 We sent them a quarter of a million miles, had them land on basically a big asteroid rotating at tens of thousands of miles an hour.

Speaker 20 We weren't even sure what was going to happen when we landed on the goddamn thing.

Speaker 4 And this was in an era, which was the anniversary, but go ahead.

Speaker 39 This was in an era where the majority of homes in the United States didn't have air conditioning.

Speaker 13 A third of homes in certain regions didn't have indoor plumbing.

Speaker 31 And then we brought these men back safely to Earth.

Speaker 11 And now we're pretending this is some sort of achievement.

Speaker 4 Other notable space tourists this year, Richard Branson and William Shatner. Blue Origin has since announced plans for a space station.
We'll see how that goes.

Speaker 10 Speaking of sending things into space, in January, traders on Robinhood sent shares of GameStop and AMC Soaring.

Speaker 11 In the Reddit forum, Wall Street Bets, users framed the run-ups as revenge for the 2008 financial crisis.

Speaker 10 Yeah, right.

Speaker 30 Kara and I didn't think that framing fit.

Speaker 4 That someone will be left holding this bag. And in a lot of ways, it's the companies.
Because right now, GameStop, everyone's like, now they can buy things. I'm like, no one's taking their stock.

Speaker 4 No one's taking their stock. Not one person will be taking their stock.
Or they could get bought. And I'm like, no one will be buying.
No way. They can't.

Speaker 4 They can't.

Speaker 4 They have frozen this company in a way that is that.

Speaker 6 It has nothing to do with the company. People are treating it like cryptocurrency right now.

Speaker 39 It's right.

Speaker 4 Exactly. And so that's what I'm like, oh, there's people working for this company, including AMC theaters.

Speaker 4 AMC theaters got to revive as a business, not as a speculative game for people, whoever they are, whether they're hedge fund people, hidden as these people, or these people, which I think they're very dedicated.

Speaker 4 But it gets to that idea of democratization of the stock market. And I think, you know, we have had issues with Robin Hood and how they do that, but this idea of like, we're not stupid.

Speaker 4 It's so interesting when you hear, and I'm not comparing to the Capitol people, but a lot of people who are disgruntled and want went run to Trump is no one's hearing us.

Speaker 4 We will be heard.

Speaker 4 And it has the same sort of tone of we're tired of Wall Street screwing us. And I think this is part of what happened when the banks didn't get.
Nobody went to jail in the banking crisis.

Speaker 4 Nobody went to jail in the mortgage crisis. They're 100%

Speaker 4 right that this is a silly game. And they're showing, to me, what they're showing is what a silly friggin game this is.

Speaker 4 As prices spiked, Robin Hood restricted the trading of GameStop and other meme stocks, leading to a fierce backlash from its users. Their anger reverberated from Reddit all the way to Congress.

Speaker 8 So there's a lot to unpack.

Speaker 11 And let me be clear, I think Robin Hood is a menace that treats their consumers as the product and ultimately, I think, leads to dark places.

Speaker 16 I've made that clear.

Speaker 24 But AOC and Senator Warren in this instance and the class action suit filed against Robinhood really missed the mark.

Speaker 35 And that is...

Speaker 9 Well, okay, so Robin Hood is guilty of

Speaker 2 not envisioning a scenario where 50% of their account holders would own one stock that ran to volatility of 50% or 50% down because the people who clear your trades and the people who provide financing for your margin are constantly looking at the likelihood that the market could have some sort of wild ride one day.

Speaker 2 And then the money that people borrowed on margin, the stock crash more.

Speaker 48 Say you buy $100 worth of GameStop stock.

Speaker 10 and someone finances $100 in margin.

Speaker 16 So you buy $200 worth and it crashes more than 50% in a given day.

Speaker 9 What they say is, okay, if GameStock is only 1% of the stock that a brokerage is doing, then we're not that worried.

Speaker 2 But when all of a sudden half your account holders own GameStop stock, the clearance guys and the people financing your margin just basically call you and say, you can no longer trade in this stock.

Speaker 3 So the notion that Citadel conspired

Speaker 24 with Robin Hood to support another hedge fund just isn't true.

Speaker 48 This has happened before. They got caught in a capital squeeze.

Speaker 27 The more interesting thing here is who's bailing them out?

Speaker 2 And their existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia,

Speaker 9 I think NEA, have all come in, not for $1.5 billion.

Speaker 14 I heard about this piece of paper circulating Thursday night where they're raising another $3.5 billion.

Speaker 9 And it feeds to this bigger narrative around who is making money here.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 48 So

Speaker 16 who is going to make tens of billions of dollars here? We all think, oh,

Speaker 27 they stuck it to the man because this hedge fund lost $3 billion.

Speaker 20 The people who are going to make tens of billions of dollars are the people, quite frank, the investors in Reddit.

Speaker 35 I'm sorry, the investors in Robinhood.

Speaker 6 Robinhood signed up a million new accounts on Thursday.

Speaker 4 They did more than that.

Speaker 2 All of this craziness that, oh, they did something wrong.

Speaker 35 No, they do something wrong every day, but

Speaker 2 them having their clearance and their margin financiers pull stocks down for not letting them trade in certain stocks, that was poor scenario planning.

Speaker 9 But they didn't, I would argue, they really didn't do anything wrong. Who else is making money here?

Speaker 6 Who else is making money?

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 36 What about the Winklevoss twins, billionaires from Harvard who say, let's go into silver?

Speaker 6 All right, that's your movement. The wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk,

Speaker 27 and a guy who made all his money at Facebook.

Speaker 8 Those are our William Wallacees

Speaker 8 around this movement.

Speaker 10 In September, court documents reflected that Citadel executives had been in touch with Robinhood management as the trade restrictions went into place.

Speaker 10 Traders claimed that this proved a conspiracy between the two firms.

Speaker 10 Both Robinhood and Citadel deny any wrongdoing, but the stock is off 80% since it's 52-week high, mostly because they're mendacious fucks.

Speaker 4 All right. Meme stock traders weren't the only people trying to overturn the finance.
Apple cart in 2021. Cryptocurrency had a rip-roaring year, buoyed by the rise of NFTs and U.S.
inflation.

Speaker 10 Bitcoin hit a new high shortly after New Year's. A month later, Tesla announced that it would accept payment in Bitcoin and revealed it had $1.5 billion worth on the books.

Speaker 10 But in May, Tesla did an about face and said that it would no longer accept Bitcoin. Elon Musk cited its environmental cost.

Speaker 11 So let's acknowledge there are environmental issues, and there's a really interesting discussion, a worthwhile discussion around the electricity consumption of mining for crypto.

Speaker 11 But they didn't seem to want to have that conversation in February.

Speaker 13 These issues were present in February when they purchased $1.5 billion and then put in his profile the term Bitcoin.

Speaker 18 And then before the earnings,

Speaker 11 when they were going to miss earnings, decided to sell some of those gains that he had catalyzed by being a big promoter of Bitcoin, beat his earnings, and now all of a sudden, after selling and showing $100 million plus profit, he's decided that he's uncomfortable with the environmental impact of Bitcoin.

Speaker 5 And what you have here, I think this is a big deal because

Speaker 39 This is an individual who 18 months ago put out a tweet that said, I have funding secured to take the company private at $420 a share and the stock shot up.

Speaker 11 It ended up, there was no truth to that.

Speaker 31 That is probably the most textbook case of market manipulation I've ever seen.

Speaker 11 And the SEC decided it's important that we have innovators.

Speaker 46 He's creating a lot of value.

Speaker 8 He's doing important work.

Speaker 15 Let's slap him on the wrist with a $10 million fine and hope that it doesn't happen again.

Speaker 8 Well, guess what?

Speaker 10 He is now saying, to the moon with Dogecoin.

Speaker 8 And then on SNL saying it's a hustle and it loses a third of its value.

Speaker 30 And then saying, putting Bitcoin in his profile and Bitcoin shoots up, and then saying, I'm uncomfortable, and then putting out thoughtful statements after he sells it,

Speaker 11 saying, I'm worried about the environment.

Speaker 8 You are now talking about thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who are losing sleep at night, wondering, what the fuck is this guy going to tweet in the morning?

Speaker 4 Yeah, the thing is, this is interesting. Dieterbone from Verge said, are crypto markets too prone to massive multi-multi-billion dollar swings in value based on seemingly tiny pressures?

Speaker 4 Or is Elon Musk too influential in those markets? Yes.

Speaker 18 I think that's

Speaker 4 another one, someone wrote, good morning to everyone except Elon Musk, which I thought was funny.

Speaker 4 But there's all kinds of reaction. It's another person's Elon Musk comment about Bitcoin is like saying a Tesla uses way too much energy rather than just ride a donkey instead.

Speaker 4 People are losing their 11 minds, but they like, they hung on his every word on the way up. You know what I mean? Which is, I think, sort of like.
too bad boys.

Speaker 4 You know, you were thrilled when you were like going, go, Elon. And then he does this.
You shouldn't rely on him.

Speaker 4 And it shouldn't have this much thing because it begins to look like sort of this pump and dump thing, which I think is what you're essentially saying.

Speaker 4 In September, a remarkable first for Bitcoin in Latin America. The government of El Salvador purchased 400 Bitcoin one day after it became official currency in the nation.

Speaker 4 That's nearly $21 million at the time of purchase. So the president's all into the Bitcoin.
What's going on? He wants to be the Bitcoin country. So is everyone moving to El Salvador?

Speaker 38 Look, I think it's actually really big for Bitcoin.

Speaker 20 And there were were a lot of stories about it's kind of the hiccups in the rollout, but I would argue there was less hiccups in the rollout than the rollout of Obamacare or Windows 8, I think a Bloomberg article pointed out.

Speaker 38 But the remittance,

Speaker 38 it could reduce substantially commissions around remittance. The GDP of Italy is transferred from

Speaker 20 in between the Americas, from workers back to residents back into countries such as El Salvador, which is the poorest country in Central America.

Speaker 38 And it's great for Bitcoin.

Speaker 18 It's an interesting gambit for that. Yeah, it is really interesting.

Speaker 39 But people like Bitcoin for different reasons.

Speaker 38 Investors like it for the volatility.

Speaker 12 Some people like it for the technology.

Speaker 12 And then that's why people are worried.

Speaker 38 They're worried about the instability of it.

Speaker 20 But ATMs that convert to Bitcoin, Starbucks and McDonald's taking it.

Speaker 20 It crashed on Tuesday, but I actually would argue it's probably a buying opportunity. I think it's fantastic for Bitcoin to have a sovereign nation saying this is our new default currency.

Speaker 38 Who the big loser is existentially through all of this is that if the USD gets replaced as the default currency, we're going to lose one of the most powerful armies we've, you know, in the world.

Speaker 18 And that is our ability to win.

Speaker 4 Correct. I mean, although the Bitcoin people say no, it's a long time.
Right now, the US dollar is the currency in the world.

Speaker 8 Adopting it as a legal currency, I think it's a big deal.

Speaker 11 And in October, another first.

Speaker 10 A Bitcoin Futures ETF launched after years of failed attempts. At the time of recording, Bitcoin has more than doubled in price since January 1st in 2022.
Anything could happen.

Speaker 10 Well, that's a bold statement. Anything could happen.

Speaker 4 let's go on a quick break when we come back we'll look at elon musk's year and pick the biggest pivot of 2021

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Speaker 3 All lowercase.

Speaker 4 Support for Pivot comes from Groons.

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Speaker 4 We're back with our year in review. 2021 began with a muted hope for the end of the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaker 4 Instead of a raucous New Year's parties, many Americans rang in the year with small gatherings where they wondered how soon they could get a COVID vaccine. That turned out to be a while.

Speaker 4 The initial vaccine rollout was plagued with problems. Scott and I wondered how to fix it in January.

Speaker 4 I have been trying to get my mom a vaccine there. Your system is so screwed in Florida.
Now, she's going to have to fly to New York where she is on a list that is much more organized.

Speaker 4 The DC list is really organized. I feel like I can reach them.
I can look at all the information. Florida, it took me like hours.
They had shitty websites, shitty information. Awful.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I was on the phone with them. Let me just say, Governor DeSantis, you suck in terms of what you're doing.

Speaker 33 Well, here's where we are, and it speaks to a larger problem.

Speaker 4 I don't care care if you don't have enough of them. Your systems suck.
Even if you're telling me no, you're not explaining how I can get on a list.

Speaker 52 But this is part of a 40-year screed started by Reagan where government is incompetent, so let's defund them.

Speaker 22 which leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy about ineffective government.

Speaker 22 And this whole notion that we're going to decentralize everything and leave it up to the hospitals is nothing but similar to Facebook abdicating responsibility.

Speaker 36 And Governor DeSantis is, you know, this big, we're going to let the hospitals figure out the vaccination websites.

Speaker 22 You know what?

Speaker 42 We need scale. We need the federal government.

Speaker 9 The federal government is really good at some things. They are really good at defending our borders.

Speaker 2 They are really good at ensuring that you can't segregate schools. The federal government is outstanding at a lot of things.

Speaker 6 And guess what?

Speaker 8 This needs to be federalized.

Speaker 10 By June, there were signs that the vaccines were working. COVID rates around the country plunged.

Speaker 7 But as vaccine availability grew, so too did vaccine hesitancy.

Speaker 10 Case numbers rose steeply through July and patients for anti-vaxxers wore thin.

Speaker 29 It just struck me that I think all of the nation is dealing with the pain and unnecessary sacrifice being levied on this nation because people have conflated an absence of oppression being an absence of responsibility.

Speaker 33 And in the 60s, we asked young men to go to Southeast Asia.

Speaker 29 and fight a war to protect against this theory called the domino theory of communism. And a lot of them rightfully said, I don't want to go.

Speaker 29 And we either force them to flee to Canada or we put them in jail.

Speaker 29 If you live in San Francisco or New York and you work your ass off and your partner works their ass off and you make really good money, the government shows up and takes more than half of it in the form of taxes.

Speaker 29 And if you say, no, I want to opt out of this responsibility, we fine you. And if you still opt out, we put your ass in jail.

Speaker 29 And the notion that we are asking people if and when they go into public places, if they go to the movies, if they go to schools, if they get on a plane, if they work for the government, I mean, for fuck's sake, Kara, have you heard that 40% of hospital employees are not vaccinated?

Speaker 14 40% of hospital employees are not vaccinated.

Speaker 29 The nation has had enough.

Speaker 11 It is time for our leaders.

Speaker 37 And I do think...

Speaker 4 Astonishing. That's astonishing, I think.
Don't you? Like 40%.

Speaker 29 I swallowed my tongue. I'm like, you're dealing with sick people and you're not vaccinated?

Speaker 4 Even among those who embrace the vaccine, there were concerns about one possible side effect. Well, I have to go back to the the office.
I discussed that with guest host, Casey Newton.

Speaker 4 Do you think one of the things that's interesting is these workplaces, people go back, everyone's been moved back.

Speaker 4 I know Vox has been moved back to October or something like that, unspecified, actually. But many of the tech workplaces have been moved back.
What do you make of what's happened?

Speaker 4 They were bringing people back, and I think wanting to bring people back.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, it has been an absolute seesaw. I think employees are really frustrated.

Speaker 41 And so are the employers. I think the employers are desperate to bring everyone back or at least make it available to the people who want it.

Speaker 41 But now the Delta variant is on the rise and nobody feels like they can safely do it.

Speaker 41 I saw a great tweet from a Facebook product manager today who said that they need to analyze the effects of the fact that for the past year and a half, everyone's work life has had to be things that they're comfortable with their families overhearing because it's all been on Zoom.

Speaker 41 But like, think about that.

Speaker 18 That is so strange.

Speaker 4 It's true. It's absolutely true.
So one of the things that's interesting is that tech companies have sort of leaned into no workplace kind of attitudes, especially Facebook, right?

Speaker 4 And others where people could, what impact do you think that's going to have?

Speaker 4 And how do companies that have benefited from this, like Zoom, and then there's lots of virtual meeting companies like Hopin and all those? There's a whole gang of them that have been funded.

Speaker 4 What happens to that?

Speaker 4 What happens to that idea of what a workplace is for at least tech companies or social media companies?

Speaker 41 I think it's hard to say from the middle of it. I mean, if you want to look at, you know, are these companies suffering and are they falling apart? Like, no, you know, their profits are all up.

Speaker 41 They're continuing to grow.

Speaker 41 I don't think we've seen a credible story about a big or even a medium-sized tech company that has really, really struggled with the move, which isn't to say that it hasn't been super hard.

Speaker 41 It's just been that they've mostly been able to muddle through.

Speaker 41 I mean, I think the lasting lesson is that tech workers and people who have options for where they can work want more flexibility than they've been given. And

Speaker 41 this does kind of feel like a one-way door where after they've been told, you don't have to come in two days a week. They're never going to go in two days a week ever again.

Speaker 10 Over the months that followed, more businesses and local governments added or extended their vaccine mandates.

Speaker 10 And in October, the Biden administration rolled out a pair of mandates that it said would cover 100 million Americans. Those are set to take effect in January 2022.

Speaker 4 One man's name was on everyone's lips this year, from tweets and Teslas to feuds and fuselages.

Speaker 4 It felt like there wasn't a week in 2021 that didn't involve elon musk or his companies his new streak started in january when he became the world's richest man elon musk is now the richest man in the world that call continues to suck he surpassed jeff bezos last week with a whopping 190 billion dollars

Speaker 4 when are we going to see the world's first if he becomes the world's first trillionaire i don't know what you should do scott galloway something something

Speaker 2 yeah i don't know um return my tesla

Speaker 10 in the spring space won a NASA contract and almost instantly got into a legal argument with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Musk also got in a Twitter spat with Senator Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 7 It wouldn't be his last.

Speaker 4 In one corner, Bernie Sanders used Elon Musk's outsized wealth, along with Jeff Bezos and others, to highlight wealth inequality in the U.S., which is pretty easy to do for Mr. Senator Sanders.

Speaker 4 On the other hand, Elon Musk said he's using his fortune for good, that he's going to... bring it to move us to other planets.
That's what he's spending his money. Honestly.

Speaker 4 And then the bros went no sense.

Speaker 18 First, he's going to invest invest in edibles.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Anyways, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Kara.

Speaker 4 What do we think? I think it's ridiculous. Bernie Sanders is making a very good point.

Speaker 4 And he is like, no, my money will be used for good. He's like, what is he? Andrew Carnegie? And he's giving everybody a library.
I don't know.

Speaker 32 I mean,

Speaker 18 okay, he's right.

Speaker 2 Capitalism is just not about having someone worth $170 billion and paying the lowest tax rate.

Speaker 4 Somehow, in between tweets, Musk found time to host Saturday Night Live. In May, his appearance was expected to get a bump in Dogecoin, one of his favorite cryptocurrencies.

Speaker 4 That didn't go quite as expected.

Speaker 4 And the internet watched as Elon Musk hosted SNL and his beloved cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, took a tumble. Among the moments on the show, Elon called the cryptocurrency a hustle.

Speaker 1 My question is, what is Dogecoin?

Speaker 23 I'm glad you asked. It's a good question.

Speaker 51 Well, it's the future of currency. It's an unstoppable financial vehicle that's going to take over the world.

Speaker 8 I get that, but what is it, man?

Speaker 51 I keep telling you, it's a cryptocurrency you can trade for conventional money.

Speaker 3 Oh, so it's a hustle.

Speaker 23 Yeah, it's a hustle.

Speaker 4 That sent the steadily climbing stock tumbling, crashing by 30%, although the crypto token is still up more than 10,000% in price this year.

Speaker 4 Almost immediately after Elon Musk made his first appearance, Robin Hood was forced to pause all crypto trading order updates.

Speaker 4 As a reminder, Robin Hood had to make a similar pause back during the GameStop frenzy.

Speaker 4 But then the next morning, Elon tweeted that his space exploration company, SpaceX, which has contracts with NASA, is still launching a satellite called Doge One on a mission paid for with Dogecoin.

Speaker 4 By the way, this month, the House passed a bill, which is backed by crypto lobbyists to create a working group to regulate digital assets, which they should be doing. I don't really care who backs it.

Speaker 4 So what do you think, Scott? He was somewhat funny, correct? You were expecting disaster as we can go to our tape.

Speaker 14 No, I wasn't expecting a disaster.

Speaker 8 Look,

Speaker 10 I think it's a huge win for him.

Speaker 4 Yeah, talk about why you think this, because

Speaker 18 you were critical of this appearance.

Speaker 4 You were.

Speaker 46 Look, if you had Annie Leibowitz photograph your daughter's bot mitzvah, little Rachel is going to look gorgeous.

Speaker 33 It's going to be great for the family.

Speaker 9 And Annie Leibowitz's reputation goes down.

Speaker 34 So in this instance, Rachel is Elon Musk.

Speaker 11 Elon might not have been laughing in June.

Speaker 10 That month, the SEC announced that two of his older tweets had violated a 2018 settlement.

Speaker 4 So after a year of lawsuits and rockets in the SEC, I sat down with Elon at Code in the fall. Here's what he had to say about Blue Origin's challenge to his NASA contract.

Speaker 23 I think he should put more of his energy into

Speaker 23 getting to orbit

Speaker 23 than lawsuits.

Speaker 23 You cannot sue your way to the moon. Okay.

Speaker 23 You know how good your lawyers are. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Elon didn't slow down after that.

Speaker 4 In the last quarter of the year, he sowed confusion over an alleged deal between Tesla and Hertz, asked his Twitter followers to vote on his selling Tesla shares, tweeted outrageous things at U.S.

Speaker 4 senators, including Bernie Sanders, again, and he called Scott a numbskull. That's not true.

Speaker 10 He called me an insufferable numbskull.

Speaker 4 Let's drill down on that last part.

Speaker 28 And it's his stock. He's entitled to sell it.
Okay.

Speaker 19 But instead of taking responsibility for saying I want to diversify, I need to pay some taxes.

Speaker 37 And he has said this, the stock is fully valued.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he said he's going to pay taxes.

Speaker 33 He says, Twitter, you tell me what to do.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I know. Over the weekend, he put out a Twitter poll asking me he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.

Speaker 4 Scott, you tweeted he's using the Twitter results as a cloud cover to monetize Tesla at prices that he knows aren't sustainable without Atrud telling the market he's lost faith in its valuation.

Speaker 4 Although he has said that somewhat. He has to say.

Speaker 4 And then he has said, then he did you. This has happened before.
I've seen it happen before many times.

Speaker 19 So Lara pointed out, and let's just call out the elephant in the room.

Speaker 33 The sexual tension between the two of us is palpable. It's palpable.

Speaker 19 And I got to be honest, last night I did have a sex dream about Elon.

Speaker 45 We were in a, I was, I was running my hands through his chest hair.

Speaker 42 We were in a hermetically sealed container

Speaker 33 30 feet below the Martian surface,

Speaker 33 recognizing that we were about to die a horrific death, either from asteroids or increased radiation or gravitational pull that was melting our bones and neuro and neurons.

Speaker 45 But you know what?

Speaker 37 We had each other, Kara.

Speaker 4 And to cap it all off, in December, Time magazine named Elon its person of the year.

Speaker 4 It's a safe bet that in 2022, Elon will continue to be one of the most influential men in the world unless he leaves for Mars.

Speaker 10 We didn't mention Elon moving to Texas because that happened before this year, but the Lone Star State had its own share of news in 2021. First, in February, the state was hit by a deep freeze.

Speaker 10 As its power grid failed, millions of Texans fought the bitter cold with blankets and fires.

Speaker 4 And someone said, they said,

Speaker 4 they said the problem is if Ted Cruz went to Cancun in the middle of a Texas weather crisis, energy crisis and weather crisis, it's only the second worst thing he's done this year,

Speaker 4 which is, of course, backing the insurrection, which was a nice thing.

Speaker 33 Refusing to certify the vote.

Speaker 4 Does he not want to get elected again? Beto O'Rourke is busy calling seniors and bringing seniors warm soup. Like that's what he's been doing the whole time.

Speaker 4 And Jose Andres is making food for everybody. Like,

Speaker 4 do they want to turn Texas blue? Is that what their goal is here? What is the deal? And Abbott, like, blaming wind energy? Like, he's friggin' Donald Trump? What is going on?

Speaker 4 Continuing on a theme of systemic failures, Texas Governor Greg Abbott positioned himself as one of the country's greatest combatants against pandemic measures.

Speaker 4 In May, he issued an executive order banning government mask mandates. By August, he'd lost.

Speaker 10 In October, he pulled the same move again, this time banning vaccine mandates via executive order.

Speaker 24 Big business was quick to fire back.

Speaker 4 Southwest and American Airlines said this week that they'll comply with the federal government's vaccine mandate for large companies.

Speaker 4 This puts them in conflict with the Texas governor, who tried to ban vaccine mandates via executive order. Both airlines have said federal law supersedes state law, and they are correct.

Speaker 4 So there'll be lots of lawsuits all over the place, but I love, I think they're right. These are forward-facing companies with customers, and that's how they have to think about the public health.

Speaker 4 Greg Abbott is going to lose this one, correct? From, I mean, he's using it as a political thing.

Speaker 3 I fucking love this.

Speaker 47 The cruise lines. Yeah.

Speaker 54 These are not liberal. These are not bastions of progressive oak people.

Speaker 45 The cruise lines and the airlines are saying, hey, governor, while you're over there, you know,

Speaker 37 absolutely prostrating yourself to the far-right old white evangelicals in Iowa.

Speaker 47 A lot of stereotypes there, a lot of identity politics in that statement. We're going to focus on what's good for the economy.

Speaker 4 And our business, yeah.

Speaker 31 And our businesses.

Speaker 6 And stop playing politics with our businesses.

Speaker 4 And after a year of arguing that governments and businesses can't tell people what to do with their bodies, Governor Abbott took his hypocrisy to new heights when he signed the most restrictive abortion law in the nation.

Speaker 4 I was lucky to have guest host George Hahn with me to discuss it.

Speaker 55 The Supreme Court, as I understand it, felt that Texas's laws or whatever regarding abortion violated a woman's constitutional right to to privacy. This is about privacy.

Speaker 55 So, what is it about this new situation that is also not a violation of privacy? Is it the state saying, well, we can't legally do it, but you citizens, we're going to empower you.

Speaker 55 Listen, do a little dirty work for us, violate a woman's privacy for us. We'll give you 10K

Speaker 55 and we'll cover your legal expenses.

Speaker 18 Like, am I wrong?

Speaker 4 Well, you know, I think it's just this constant chipping away of Roe versus Wade over the years. And it's been,

Speaker 4 for whatever you think about what they're doing, it's rather clever way to sort of chip away and chip away and chip away Roe versus Way without overturning it because that was not possible.

Speaker 4 And so they make it difficult for

Speaker 4 these places to operate. They make it difficult to get there.
They make it difficult. They make them smaller and smaller.
And so they keep continuing to sort of chip away at the ability to do this.

Speaker 4 And now this new law, where anyone in the United States can sue these abortion providers or anyone who helps them, adds, you don't know who to attack.

Speaker 4 Before it was between government and these abortion clinics, now anybody can sue them. So it creates a legal liability here that's really, you could start to do this on a lot of things.

Speaker 4 And from what I understand,

Speaker 4 but it's really this way to violate this right established under Roe versus Wade

Speaker 4 and then not. Like there's,

Speaker 4 if you're willing to do anything, and I think a lot of people said this, that the right has come to play and the left is sort of, or the

Speaker 4 liberal side is like

Speaker 4 letting this happen over and over again and doesn't have a lot of good tools to stop it.

Speaker 10 Governor Abbott will run for re-election next year. If he defeats primary challengers, he'll likely face off against Betto O'Rourke.

Speaker 4 A few other stories from 2021 we should mention. Netflix came under fire for airing a Dave Chappelle special that many viewers found misogynistic and transphobic.

Speaker 4 Netflix employees walked out in protest. The closer remains on Netflix.

Speaker 10 2021 was a good year for labor. 10,000 John Deere workers won better pay and conditions after going on strike.
Workers in other industries from healthcare to transit went on strike as well.

Speaker 10 And wages for workers in industries including dining and entertainment were up as labor shortages continued.

Speaker 4 And speaking of shortages, supply chain interruptions rattled commerce. A chip shortage caused disruptions in auto manufacturing and consumer goods like the Nintendo Switch.

Speaker 10 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned after being accused of sexual harassment. His brother Chris Cuomo was fired from CNN later in the year when his role in the scandal came to light.

Speaker 4 Also, that big boat got stuck in the canal. Remember that?

Speaker 8 Yeah, I do.

Speaker 4 All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for the year's biggest pivot.

Speaker 4 Support for this show comes from IBM. Is your AI built for everyone or is it built to work with the tools your business relies on?

Speaker 4 IBM's AI agents are tailored to your business and can easily integrate with the tools you're already using so they can work across your business, not just some parts of it.

Speaker 4 Get started with AIAgents at iBM.com. That's IBM.com.
The AI Built for Business, IBM.

Speaker 4 Support for Pivot comes from Groons.

Speaker 4 If you've ever done a deep internet dive trying to discover different nutrition solutions, you've likely had the thought, surely there's a way to improve my skin, gut health, immunity, brain fog without offending my taste buds.

Speaker 4 Well, there is. It's called Groons.
Groons are a convenient, comprehensive formula packed into a daily snack pack of gummies. It's not a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or a prebiotic.

Speaker 4 It's all of those things and then some for a fraction of the price.

Speaker 4 In a Groons daily snack pack, you get more than 20 vitamins and minerals, six grams of prebiotic fiber, plus more than 60 ingredients.

Speaker 4 They include nutrient dense and whole foods, all of which will help you out in different ways. For example, Groons has six times the gut health ingredients compared to the leading greens powders.

Speaker 4 It contains biotin and niacinamide, which helps with thicker hair, nails, and skin health. They also contain mushrooms, which can help with brain function.

Speaker 4 And of course, you're probably familiar with vitamin C and how great it's for your immune system. On top of all, groons are vegan and free of dairy, nuts, and gluten.

Speaker 4 Get up to 52% off when you go to groons.co and use the code PIVOT. That's G-R-U-N-S.co,

Speaker 4 using the code PIVOT for 52%

Speaker 4 off.

Speaker 4 Okay, Scott, we're back. We asked our Twitter followers to vote for the biggest pivot of 2021.
Here's what they said. In fourth place, Tesla drops Bitcoin.

Speaker 4 In May, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as payment. He cited environmental concerns.

Speaker 4 Only three months earlier, Tesla began accepting the cryptocurrency and revealed its Bitcoin future. Any thoughts, Scott?

Speaker 14 Any final?

Speaker 12 I don't even remember that episode.

Speaker 7 Do you remember it?

Speaker 34 Yeah, I don't remember what I had for breakfast, but I don't remember that.

Speaker 4 I think you insulted the whole thing and said it wasn't about environmental concerns.

Speaker 18 That's how it feels.

Speaker 8 There you go.

Speaker 4 At number three, Andrew Cuomo resigns. In August, the New York governor stepped down as he was facing an impeachment inquiry.

Speaker 4 He had become a pandemic hero among many Democrats, but it turned out he was just a creepy groper.

Speaker 3 Scott.

Speaker 34 Yeah,

Speaker 12 I was shocked that people, I don't know if it was, it could have been a lot of things, but people turned to us for political commentary.

Speaker 10 And then people then turned to our Twitter and tell us to stay on our lane.

Speaker 6 I'm so confused.

Speaker 4 I'm so confused. We don't.
We have all the lanes, Scott.

Speaker 8 Just keep that in the middle.

Speaker 8 Our lane is whatever the fuck we want to talk about. What the fuck we want.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 8 That's exactly right.

Speaker 4 That's exactly right. The second biggest pivot: Facebook changes its name to Meta.
I thought this would be number one, but it wasn't. Yeah, me too.

Speaker 4 Zuckerberg rolled out the name change in October, but so far it seems to be the only change at the company. So there you have it.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's called Meta.

Speaker 34 Do you think that's it?

Speaker 7 What's interesting is it barely beat out the episode where Mark and Cheryl have changed their names to Sackler.

Speaker 8 That's good. That's good.

Speaker 4 And the biggest pivot of 2021 was,

Speaker 4 shockingly, OnlyFans banning sexually explicit content. In August, OnlyFans confused its creators and usually when it announced that it was getting out of the adult content business.

Speaker 4 It reversed course less than a week later after getting assurances from its bankers that it can continue as is.

Speaker 39 My OnlyFans has racked up 11 bucks, but people thought it's called the dog.

Speaker 10 People thought it was a side on bestiality and they asked for a refund.

Speaker 14 But I'm hopeful.

Speaker 8 I'm hopeful, Gara.

Speaker 4 I didn't think we did the bestiality, but here we are. Okay.
All right then.

Speaker 18 And some runner-ups.

Speaker 4 11 Madison goes vegan. Facebook scraps, Instagram for kids, and Jack Dorsey stepping down.

Speaker 46 Well,

Speaker 11 what about the episode where we talk about me getting a Bezos action figure and sticking it up my ass where no man has gone before?

Speaker 6 How did that do?

Speaker 8 How did that do?

Speaker 48 From the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 4 Okay, Scott, that is the show. I want to thank all of our listeners for joining us for this crazy year.
But here's hoping for a healthy, happy, and productive 2022.

Speaker 4 Scott, another year around the sun with you and I, and I am so thrilled to be doing it with you.

Speaker 16 Amen, sister. Right back at you.

Speaker 4 Read us out.

Speaker 12 Today's show was produced by Larry Naaman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin.

Speaker 10 Ernie Andretat engineered this episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 10 Or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify or, frankly wherever you listen to podcasts if you liked our show please recommend it to a friend thanks for listening to pivot from New York magazine and box media 2021

Speaker 10 adios amigo bring it on bring on 2022 for more science more empathy more connective tissue as Americans

Speaker 4 This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness. We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Speaker 4 Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers. But what does it actually mean to be well? Why do we want that so badly?

Speaker 4 And is all this money really making us healthier and happier? That's this month on Explain It to Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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