Apple vs. the Trump Administration, CEO compensation broke records during COVID, and Friend of Pivot Caleb Scharf on space exploration 8:18

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Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Box Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

So, Scott, how's it going?

How'd you have a good weekend?

Yeah, a nice weekend.

I was with the boys at a water park, which provides perspective because it makes you appreciate that 99% of the world is not a water park.

Yeah.

So you walk away very grateful, sunburned and grateful, and Kieran.

I hate water parks.

Oh my gosh, they're rough.

That is rough.

Giardia or whatever the heck you call them.

They're rough, Carol.

Kids love them, though.

Kids love them.

I know.

They love them.

I had to stay at a hotel once that had a whole like lazy river.

And oh, geez.

Yeah.

I was like, bring me to the four seasons immediately and deliver my body up.

This was really.

Anyway, in any case, I'm glad you're back from your experience.

There is so much that's happened since you left.

You missed like in the water park.

You missed the fact that a bidder paid $28 million to join Jeff Bezos for his upcoming trip to space.

7,600 people from 159 countries competed for the seat on Blue Origin.

The bid money will go to Blue Origin's nonprofit whose mission is to encourage children to pursue, children to pursue careers in STEM and gain interest in space exploration.

No, seriously, $28 million is a lot of money.

What do you think about that?

What do you think about that much money?

Because you thought it was $2.9 million.

You thought it would be $2.

A man worth $150 billion that gets a $10 billion bailout for a space company

and pays no taxes, but auctions off to seat next to him for $28 million.

That pretty much sums up America to me.

Here's an idea.

Pay your fucking taxes.

Yeah.

Pay your fucking.

This whole thing is...

Americans don't get this money, by the way, FYI.

Yeah, it goes.

Oh, I love it.

It goes to, wait, hold on.

It goes to some sort of charity for STEM.

That $10 billion payout he got from the government for Blue Origin, that would pay for a lot of STEM.

That would pay for a lot of STEM.

I find this whole space thing weird.

I don't think, so just as an example, I think Elon Musk, which has the most viable, I think hauling things into space, I think is important work and profitable work.

But you know where Elon Musk, which company is going to have the most impact on society?

Yeah, who?

It's not space.

It's not electrifying the world.

It's the boring company.

If Elon Musk

will drill tunnels from the most congested areas in the world to others, he will unlock millions of hours that people can spend with their families and self-care, not sending people on a one-way journey to Mars.

Anyway, I find this.

I would like him just to do a transporter machine like on Star Trek.

Teleporter?

Teleporter, yeah.

Like Star Trek?

Yeah.

Go where no man has come.

Oh, no, okay.

That's enough.

You know what?

I'm staying away from target.

The G7 wrapped up on Sunday, okay, with a pledge to send a billion COVID vaccine doses.

Let's focus on something you think was important.

The U.S.

will provide half those doses, 500 million doses.

The caveat here is the World Health Organization said 11 billion doses are needed to vaccinate at least 70% of the world's population, but this is a nice dent in it, a billion.

What do you think?

In a word, this is wonderful.

We've been talking about this for a long time.

A lot of people say it should be more, but this is a start.

And America's back at the table.

There was some wonderful things accomplished at that G7 meeting, just the dialogue.

So

I think it's fantastic.

What do you think?

I think it's wonderful.

I think it's important.

I think everybody getting vaccinated brings us back to, you know, just even just this weekend, DC's got a very high, I think we're near herd immunity, if not past it.

I think we're very close to it.

It's just people are able to do things again.

That's all, you know what I mean?

They're able to return and have some fun and enjoy themselves.

Like I live in a neighborhood that's quite a party neighborhood and all night, all night.

And usually I get irritated, but now I was like, yay, parties.

Clara went to three parties this weekend.

So it was nice.

It It was very nice.

It was very nice.

I think it's important.

I think the whole world needs to be vaccinated.

We should give away as many as possible, up to 11 billion doses, whatever it takes.

But this is a good move in the right direction.

And you had suggested that it was a good idea.

By the way, last Friday, a group of bipartisan House members proposed a package of five antitrust bills, of which they're very different things, but they're all around the same things we always talk about, which are aimed at limiting big tech's monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.

The only one with real possibility of passing is the law to raise the merger fees that will give more money to antitrust

regulators and different regulators.

And that's the only one that is already passed in the Senate.

So that has a possibility.

Others are tough.

One is to limit mergers.

The other is not to gatekeep or not to get into businesses.

They're all real hard.

And the tech companies are going to come back hard on these things.

Yeah, but I think it's, I mean, I'm as good as anybody at seeing the glass half empty.

I think some wonderful things have happened in the last week.

Definitely.

We're pushing back against organizations that have overrun our government.

We've

embraced our brothers and sisters overseas in the greatest alliance in history to try and we've talked about setting new carbon goals.

We talked about a huge initiative to invest in developing nations and infrastructure.

We talked about the billion vaccines for the developing world.

I mean, it's just

And then we have a pushback on antitrust.

It's just

I can't get over how good it is.

What's important about this is it's Ken Buck and David Cicillini together discussing it, not arguing over conservative bias.

You know, the Republicans keep getting wrapped around that axle.

But first one of the bills is self-preferencing bill,

which directs existing users to a complimentary service like Apple's App Store and music and stuff like that.

The other

seeks to prohibit dominant platforms from acquiring smaller firms that pose a competitive risk.

That's going to be a tough one to pass.

That one's by Buck and the first one is Cicillini and GOP Lance Gooden.

The second one is Buck and Hakeem Jeffries.

Did that one together, the competitive risk?

Buck

certainly mentioned censoring speech and stuff like that, control how we see and understand the world.

But

it's a pretty

remarkable that he's here

in this bill.

The third and fourth bills are aimed at tactics that big tech, I'm reading from a news story, uses to prevent smaller firms from entering the market.

They would ban platforms from engaging in business where conflicts of interest exist.

And then the last one is this one that's close to what Amy Klobuchar talked about, this giving them more money.

So yeah, it is.

There's a lot going on here.

Cutting them up like this is a great idea.

It's just going to be hard to get some of the more important ones passed.

The changes of our antitrust laws, that's the critical part.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And what have you sensed as the vibe among the big tech community?

Is it resignation and to say, all right, let's get on with it and make sure that we're represented?

Or is it like line up the troops at the border and for the business?

They're going to pare it down.

They're going to try to pare it down, especially the ones that prevent them from doing purchases or getting into other businesses.

They're going to try to say it's anti-business.

And so I think

that's their thing is anti-business.

You can't stop innovation.

You know, can't stop the beat, innovation beat.

I think that's going to be their argument.

And I think they're going to let certain of them pass.

You know, they're going to put up with some of it, but they're going to try to shave down the edges, probably.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Five of them.

They can't hit them all.

Yeah,

it's a decade-long process.

Oh, yeah.

Changing antitrust law from, you know, it changed once in the past hundred some years.

It had the first one, which was much more robust.

Then there was the Borkian of it, the Borking of it, and then this now.

So it'll take a long time.

And that's all in tech's favor.

In any case, it's time to get to the big story.

A probe by the Trump administration caused Apple to unknowingly hand over phone data from two Democratic congressmen.

The New York Times reported.

In February 2018, Apple received a grand jury subpoena.

It was part of an investigation by the Trump administration into information leaks.

We're just hearing about this now because the gag order expired and they could tell people that they handed over the stuff.

The congressmen included Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.

Both were involved in committee looking at Trump's connections to Russia.

Apple said it was subjected to an NDA that had no information regarding the nature of the investigation.

So, you know, and then there was one with Don McGahn.

Like,

this is not a good look for Apple in that they turned over so much stuff.

But they also don't have a choice.

So it's kind of an interesting problem they have, but also that the Trump administration was doing.

You know, people look for leak stuff all the time, but they had already done this with New York Times reporters and others.

So

what do you think of this?

This is not good.

I think this is really discouraging.

And I think when Biden rolls in to meet with Putin, what moral authority does he have to tell Russia what to do when our DOJ has been weaponized?

I initially thought, well, I don't get it.

Apple refuses to unlock the phone of a terrorist, but it complies with this.

I initially had sort of a gag reflex or questions around Apple's behavior.

And then I spoke to a lawyer who said, well, they're different because they were asking Apple to do something to engineer a back door into the phone.

Whereas subpoenas for information

are very common.

So I think Apple, I don't know.

I think it rose from a couple hundred to a thousand.

There's like so many they're getting.

Like, and

most of them are just basic crimes, like, I don't know, child pornography or whatever.

But this was more sinister.

It felt more sinister.

But how do you go in with any moral authority in

any negotiation when you have a country where the richest people don't pay taxes and the president can weaponize his department of quote-unquote justice to go after their political enemies?

And the sad thing is this isn't, this is not only a ding on the Trump brand, it's an incredible ding on the brand of the U.S.

Because

we're supposed to have checks and balance in place that endure administrations.

Well, all these people said they didn't sign off on these subpoenas.

So, like, how did they get them?

Exactly.

So, it means they can just send them to these companies that companies don't check.

Like, that's what I who signed the subpoena?

They're all trying to say they didn't say it.

But by the way, on something big like that, when it's congresspeople, shouldn't someone very high up sign it?

I mean, I don't even understand.

I think the sorting out of whole- Or

right, right, right, right.

And then also

in 2018, the DOJ subpoenaed Apple for info on former White House counsel

Don McGahn.

So the Trump was

investigating his own people.

So this is just this.

Yeah, this feels very, this feels, it makes Nixon look cuddly.

I mean, this is just sort of.

And again, the damage done during that four years, I think will, will, we won't even begin to register some of the impact of that damage.

Right.

Who signed it?

Like, I just like who sent it.

This is interesting.

The Justice Department will bolster its procedures for, this is from the Wall Street Journal records from members of Congress.

The Attorney General, Mayor Garland, said Monday after emergency agency during the Trump administration secretly seized data on the communications of Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.

They also did a lot of people who weren't well known, like all the names of the people who work for them.

And so Apple, you know, Apple can't check everything.

They get so many of these requests.

That's right.

You know, they have to, when they're served with these subpoenas, I don't, I, I don't know what they could do.

I guess they could, I guess they could resist, but I don't think they can in this case.

And then Sessions and Barr both said they weren't aware in the leak case, which subpoenas were sought for information related to, it's just,

it's not clear.

So this guy, John Demers, is stepping down, expected departure, but who is the person who signed this?

It's like, it's just like, well, you're

your, your questions are, are really important in that as well.

Were the the mechanics and the people involved in getting to the subpoena?

But what is just as interesting is what did they do when they got the data?

Who reviewed it?

What assumptions did they make?

And what actions did they make

based on that data?

And who did they make those recommendations?

And Apple can't say who they asked for.

The minute they could tell the people that had been subpoenaed that they were, they did.

That's the only thing they can do here.

And then not just that, the department notified reporters at Washington, both CNN, and New York Times that under the Trump administration had sought to obtain their phone records for 2017.

And then Garland said he would no longer seek records of reporters' context when investing in government leaks.

There is a whole division at the Justice Department for leaks.

And so the whole thing is just the McGann thing could be related to the Robert Mueller probe, but nonetheless, it shows how much information these companies have on you.

That is what the key part is to understand.

And that they, it's not just consumer, these companies spying on you.

The government can then use the stuff the companies spy on you to spy on you.

So

this is, this is, and there's a key point of differentiation.

And one is to what extent are we comfortable with these organizations aggregating data on us and then attaching it to an identity, right?

Because if it's one place, A, it can be hacked by bad actors.

But I'm not, quite frankly, I'm not as worried about that.

And what I think is more important is that we have thoughtful people deciding when that type of information can be subpoenaed.

And there was clearly a breakdown here.

Right.

And yeah, okay, Apple has, we're going to find out Apple has some information on us or whatever that maybe we're not comfortable with, maybe we are, but I would argue most people are comfortable with it.

They just kind of turn a blind eye to it.

What's really disappointing is that we elect people to appoint judges that are supposed to protect our rights.

Right.

And this broke down.

And the Department of Justice, I mean, I think, I think, you know, I think a lot about brands.

I think the DOJ is one of the best brands in the world.

I think the American Department of Justice is a group of people who generally decide they want to serve in the agency of something greater than themselves.

And they're very skilled, and they take a huge cut in pay to work for Uncle Sam.

And they generally try to do the right thing, and they put up with a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of bullshit.

But they generally try to be, the ones I've met, they try to be apolitical.

And when that system breaks down, it's like, my God, that's just so discouraging.

And you see, well, that was really, I want to know.

I mean,

everything you said, who ordered it, who was involved, who signed off on it.

And then what did they do with that information?

How was that information used?

Did they decide PR strategies against Representative Schiff?

What did they do with the data once they had it?

Yep.

Well, that's the thing.

Listen, the Justice Department spent a broad request in February 2019 as far as investigation.

And it was 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses.

It's just target counts beginning with these people looking for this leak.

This is

these leak things that go on and on and on.

Obviously, you know, Trump was,

you know, obsessed with hunting leaks and stuff like that.

And that's really the issue is that they were hunting these leaks more than they were doing anything else to try to shut people down.

But these non-disclosures that Apple could not notify people that their data was subpoenaed until the gag order is lifted.

And then it tells them.

But then it can't tell them why or what they wanted.

And Apple can't know.

They can't check.

It's just, they get thousands of these, thousands and thousands and thousands.

And so it's got to be investigated.

But

Trump was doing this.

I think, are good ideas.

I think when people are trafficking in child porn and they want to know what's on their devices, I think and a thoughtful judge looks at that person's rights and decides to issue a subpoena, I think a society is better off.

Yeah.

And in this case,

it ends up, it just takes us to a very...

a terrible place.

And a lot of people have taken, I think a lot of people have taken our government for granted and just how exceptional our government was.

And all we needed was a really bad government for about 48 months to realize how important government is.

Yeah.

So this is something Microsoft said, which I think most of the tech companies agree with.

In 2017, Microsoft received a subpoena related to a personal email account.

And as we've said before, we believe customers have a constitutional right to know when the government requests their email or documents.

And we have a right to tell them.

In this case, we were prevented from notifying the customer for more than two years because of a gag order.

As soon as the gag order was expired, we were notified the customer who told us they were a congressional staffer.

Then we provided a briefing to the representative staff following the notice.

We will continue to aggressively seek reform that imposes reasonable limits on government secrecy in cases like this.

Most of the times there are these fishing additions, fishing expeditions, and that's really a problem.

That's really a problem.

So yeah, look,

this will play out over the next one or two years.

You're going to have to DOJ investigating the DOJ.

It's just going to be very strange.

Cops investigating cops.

It's like a show of law.

Internal affairs.

What is there?

Law and order leak.

Leak unit or whatever.

All right, Scott, let's take a quick break.

We'll be back to talk about the widening pay gap between workers and CEOs.

And friend of Pivot, Caleb Scharf, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University, joins us to talk about space exploration.

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Scott, we're back.

The pay gap between workers and CEOs grew even further during the pandemic, with some executives receiving the largest compensation packages on record.

This is just every week, it's something else.

The New York Times looked at the survey of the 200 highest-paid CEOs of public companies and found that 68% of companies with the largest pay packages had wider gaps between executives and employee pay after the pandemic.

In addition, eight of the top-earning executives got compensation in 2020 worth more than $100 million.

What's more is that DoorDash, Palantir, open door all reported net losses yet the ceos of these companies made four hundred and thirteen million one point one billion and three hundred and seventy million respectively now this is stock base too this is nothing new according to the economic policy institute ceo take-home pay grew by around 1200 percent from 1978 to 2019 meanwhile the compensation for a typical worster grew by 13.7 percent so this is on top of what we talked about last week and then the week before one was about no paying of taxes the other is corporate uh global corporate tax rate.

Scott, what the heck?

Trevor Burrus: And it comes down to this, and it's the mechanics of it.

You have to understand the mechanics to address a solution.

In Germany,

at least a third, sometimes half of your board of directors has to be representatives of a union or workers.

And so they spend a lot of time talking about how they share profits with the people on the factory floor.

And what do you know?

Income inequality in Germany isn't as frightening as it is here in the U.S.

And this is what we do

on the boards boards of public corporations in the U.S.

Generally speaking, the CEO of any company is the most likable person you're ever going to meet.

That's how you become a CEO.

A, they're really hardworking, they're really smart, and guess what?

They were chairman of the social committee or the rush chairman at their fraternity or sorority.

They are really likable people.

And then at the end of the year, the compensation committee that evaluates the CEO's pay and determines the CEO's pay hires for $120,000 Towers Perrin to come in and say, all right, this is a $5 billion quick service restaurant and CEOs from 0 to 100%, 100% the highest paid, 0 the lowest paid in this category of this size company made X at 50%.

You go, okay, the person, the very senator, the very center made $7 million.

But you go, but Bob or Sally are really nice and they're working really hard and they're doing a good job.

We're not going to pay them 50%.

We're going to pay them 70 or 80%, even if they're doing just a mediocre job.

Because the people at 50 aren't exactly hacks.

The people in the middle of Fortune 500 company CEOs are really good.

What does that do?

Why is it so crazy?

It has an exponential effect.

Because if you're increasing the pay of a CEO 10% every year, that means every seven years it's doubling.

And meanwhile,

there's no one in the board meeting going going, fuck that.

We got to pay.

We got to increase the pay of the people.

We talk about supply and demand at people at the worker level.

And what amazes me, Kiera, is all these conversations in the media where everyone's acts so surprised that people aren't returning to work.

And it's like, how can CEOs that are making this kind of money be shocked that people don't want to come to work for them for $13 an hour?

That's the story.

You're really surprised?

That's really a shocker to you.

And then, by the way, once they get this compensation, the CEO of Palantir, who made $1.1 billion, who's now taking shareholder money to invest in other SPACs in exchange for them buying Palantir services.

So basically total bullshit, inorganic juicing of my company.

That's an AOL trick.

That sounds good.

That's right.

You wrote a book on it.

And then I have $1.1 billion.

And by the way, I will never pay taxes because I will borrow $25 million a year against that $1 billion at an interest rate of 1%.

And I will let that $1.1 billion grow rather than cashing out and getting $600 or $700 billion.

If I grow 8% of $1.1 billion in 30 years or 20 years, I end up with $3 billion and owe $200 million in margin.

That's fine, though.

Otherwise, I would have had a billion and a billion and a half.

So everything here is,

we have been totally overrun by the shareholder class.

And I consider myself part of that class.

And it's like, okay.

At what point does it stop?

Where do we hit a wall here and say, okay, we can only print so much money.

We can only charge our grandkids credit cards so much money.

And all roads lead to the same place.

We're not going to reduce government spending.

We've never been able to.

It always averages between 21 and 24 percent of GDP

unless there's some sort of crisis.

The only cohort, the only place to go is corporations and the super wealthy or some sort of other transaction tax.

It's really,

it's really, it's just, it's become crazy, town.

It's so crazy, I worry that people aren't that alarmed by it any longer.

Well, it's just like, once again, it's sort of a troika here.

Like you've got the corporate tax rates, which need to be reformed.

You've got people not paying taxes and then you have this compensation of which you can't get taxes out of them.

So they're richer than ever without paying more than ever.

And then the corporations don't pay.

Someone at some point who is making money has to pay for things.

Like that is, that fact that this has been lost as a, as a, as something in our society.

And again, it's the number for a typical worker, 13%

in those years, while the other is 1,200%.

Anyone, you don't need to be a math expert to understand what that means at all.

And it's all stock-based compensation, by the way, in this case, I'm guessing.

But at the same time, it's just, it's just, it doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense.

And I think anybody, you know, more populism is what's going to happen.

And of course, the lack of strength of unions is another thing.

But someone is going to have to stop paying themselves quite so much and pretending that the center of innovation rests with them because it doesn't.

It just doesn't.

It's got to be fairly mandated because

if you put yourself in the shoes,

like we talked previously, like, oh, you don't want we don't want to be told what to do by government that's the thing well but the thing is no CEO a lot of CEOs will say all right I'm going to become philanthropic but what do you end up with you end up with whatever you end up with basically people deciding what government and public policy is based on rich people's priorities and by the way rich people have not had the same experience and American experience as a lot of America so they're not the ones that should be deciding it's the people we elect yeah but the notion though it's just naive to think that this will happen unless there is government action.

And this is going to be my fail.

On the far left.

Don't do it yet.

No, I'm sorry.

Don't do it yet.

I'm sorry.

These are all tech companies, too, by the way.

A lot of them are tech companies that are developing.

Well, they've experienced the greatest wealth.

Wherever there's incredible stock-based increase in compensation, you're going to find absolutely extraordinary CEO-level and executive-level compensation.

And it's all a racket.

The directors get stock-based compensation, and it's all sort of go-along, get-along.

And there's no representation of the front-line worker on these boards.

And that's, I think actually the German model is really interesting.

That you say,

what if we put, I think things always start at the board level.

What if we put two or three or just one, said, okay, this person represents.

They're a fiduciary for your lowest paid employees.

That's what they're there for.

Yep.

Yep.

Agreed.

Agreed with Scott Galloway.

All right, Scott.

And we're going to have what's going to happen next week.

Let's see.

We have corporate taxes, no taxes.

They get paid too much.

What?

They're going to start hunting people, right?

I think they're drinking the blood of

putting a seat in space that we gave them kind of money for.

Okay, got it.

All right.

And also we invented the internet.

Taxpayers came through the internet.

Okay, then.

All right, then.

And he's taking his family members.

He's taking his brother.

That's okay.

He can take his brother.

Whatever.

I don't mind about that.

Although I didn't like the whole scene between them.

It felt like I was in a real Kardashian show.

And they were hugging.

It just was like, oh, no, no, no, no, do not.

I think they're very sensitive people.

I think we should get more tax cuts.

No.

They're nice.

His brother looked pretty good, though.

I have to say.

His brother's handsome.

He is.

He looks like he hasn't.

Yeah.

He got the look.

Jeff got the $150 billion.

I'll take Bezos.

I'll take Bezos.

He looks sweet.

Anyway, let's bring on our friend of Pivot.

We are joined by Caleb Scharf.

Caleb is the Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University and author of The Ascent of Information, Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm.

Oh goodness, Caleb, Professor Scharf, thank you for coming on to the show.

We have talked before.

How are you doing?

Pretty good.

How are you?

Good.

So much activity in the space race going on since we last talked.

We talked about living on Mars sucking, essentially.

Why don't you fill Scott in on our last discussion about how we really aren't going to live on Mars, then we'll get to where we are today.

Well, I guess our last discussion was about the difficulty of putting humans on a planet like Mars and the incredible hardships that you're going to encounter both getting there.

And when you're trying to set up shop on the surface, there's a lot of stuff that wants to kill you, whether it's radiation, the lack of atmosphere, the low gravity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think we also talked about how we just don't know.

what that's going to do to us, but all the signs point towards it being unbelievably difficult, no matter what anyone says.

You basically said we'd have to live underground, right?

Or else we're going to get stupid and what?

Yeah, so you're going to have to...

Our bones are going to break.

You're going to have to put yourself underground to try to protect yourself from radiation.

And that means putting yourself pretty deep underground because you're in a completely different environment on Mars than you are here on Earth.

And there's evidence that long-term radiation damage to our neurons literally damages our cognitive abilities.

And that's going to happen on the way to Mars unless you shield yourself unbelievably well.

And it's going to happen when you're on on Mars.

So

what a double whammy, right?

You not only have to try to sustain yourself on another planet, you're getting stupider as you're trying to do that.

So it's, yeah, it's not an easy task.

All right.

So now give us the state of play.

So that's basically Scott on any given weekend.

Anyway, given the state of play.

So basically you're saying going to Mars is like being at a water park.

Like that's how they're going to train the Mars, the Martians.

They're going to make them be at a water park.

They're going stupid and otter and everything.

All right.

Let's talk about where we are right now with Space Travel because there's so much activity now.

It feels like there's a lot of rocket testing and some of the misconceptions about space traveler living, you know, on alternate planets.

Where are we right now in this cycle, would you say?

Well, I think we're in a really interesting place.

You know, for the first time ever, we now have alternate launch systems, such as SpaceX, such as stuff that...

Bezos is developing and so on that are getting to be really good, right?

And NASA is obviously paying attention to that and handing out massive contracts to some

elements of that

group.

So we're in this interesting place where we went from this massively accelerated development back in the 1960s, right?

The space race, the excitement, the thrill, never done it before, the competition between the Soviet Union and the Western world and so on.

And then it kind of petered out.

I mean, it kept going and there were commercial launches launches for telecommunications and so on, but we've never really seen this kind of explosive, and I shouldn't use that word when we're talking about rocket launches, this explosive growth in launch capability of putting mass into space.

And I think we're getting to a really interesting place where the cost is less about getting from the ground into space and more about the things you build to put into space.

And that's kind of a transition point because now we can, for science, we can begin to think about more and more interesting scientific missions.

But then it really does open up the possibility of extended human presence in space, but also extended exploration with robotics and looking for resources in our solar system, for example.

So, yeah,

it feels like we're on the cusp of something.

big, but exactly what that is, I hesitate to say.

Scott?

I'm curious your thoughts about this as a business.

I

trifurcate into sort of B2B or launch capacity to get satellites and things into space.

To me, that seems like it would be a good business, expensive, hard, and

kind of almost like a

military-industrial complex.

There'll be a small number of very profitable companies.

Then there's exploration, and then there's tourism.

I find the last two would just, and I want you to push back or tell me where you agree, to be terrible businesses that we're trying to pretend might be good businesses uh that the idea that that people have spent a quarter of a million dollars to do an 11-minute ride in space i agree there's a market i bet we're going to rip through that market really quickly and one unfortunate incident is going to put a real chill on all that and then space exploration what you've been talking about It's just incredibly hard, incredibly far, and incredibly expensive.

It strikes me that there's one component of these businesses that work, and the rest are not commercial businesses.

Long-winded question.

I would love your thoughts.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm a scientist, not a business person, so it's harder for me to comment.

But yeah, look, tourism, like we talked about with Mars,

you can make it sound like it's going to be easy, but it's not, right?

Just putting people up on a regular basis is going to involve failures.

I mean, right now, rocket launches, there's no getting around the fact that it's an explosive thing.

You have this massive tower of high energy compounds you're combusting in a few minutes to push yourself into space.

Stuff is going to go wrong.

Okay, and even if it's one in a hundred, one in a 200 time something goes catastrophically wrong, the first time that happens and you kill a family of people on their way to low Earth orbit or to the moon, it's going to change people's perception of this.

It is way, way more riskier than getting on a plane or crossing the streets.

So I think tourism, I just don't see how that's going to play out.

Things like exploration, perhaps part of exploration is this idea of looking for resources in the solar system.

There are asteroids out there filled with

asteroid miners and platinum and rare earth elements.

But think about the infrastructure necessary.

to do something useful with that.

I mean, you just have to look here on Earth at a strip mine or any kind of large refinery.

These are not trivial small enterprises.

And it's not like the asteroids are just sitting there saying, here's a piece of platinum, please come and take it and bring it back to Earth.

And so there's enormous infrastructure necessary there.

And I'm not sure we know how to do that.

If you add up the total amount of mass that we've actually lofted into space across the entire history of space evolution, space exploration, it's not much.

I often use the comparison of a supertanker, right?

A supertanker is a significant piece of industrial hardware.

That's kind of the scale of stuff you need to make an impact on a global economy.

What we've lofted into space, if you add up absolutely everything, it's like the set of lifeboats that go with that supertanker.

So not much.

No, it's not.

And

resource exploration, it's interesting.

Scientists love it because we like to figure out how things are made.

What's that asteroid made of?

But there's also the the question of if you succeeded, right?

Suppose you find your quadrillion dollar platinum asteroid.

So now you have this thing that stands to completely disrupt the market.

And platinum is no longer a rare element.

Right, right.

So when you think about that idea of spending that much money, you know, obviously the people who are here on Earth are like, we have lots of things to do on Earth.

Obviously, it's being dominated by private interests at this point.

Not that it wasn't before, but it's much more so than ever.

You have essentially three people.

I would count Richard Branson as much less so, but two trying to really do significant, whether it's a moon base or things like that.

Is it good to have these private people doing this, or is it something the government should be doing?

Like a moon base would seem something like a global government should be doing together, not Elon and Jeff, essentially.

Yeah, it kind of feels like

the development of the technology and the infrastructure does benefit from commercial involvement, right?

You have that competition.

You have

people

trying to make things more efficient.

But as soon as you get to anything that has a potential geopolitical impact, it feels incredibly dangerous to start having individuals or companies making decisions.

Right, right.

I mean, you know, China and the US have tensions already around the possibility of exploiting the lunar environment, for example.

You know, setting up base in the south lunar pole, who's going to get there first.

There are certain areas there that you want to be at because they divide the line between areas of permanent darkness and sunlight, right?

And you don't want to be in permanent darkness, but you kind of want to be on the edge of that because in the areas of permanent darkness are where resources like water might be on the moon.

So there's a relatively narrow geographical area on the moon that's going to be of intense interest to nations.

Yes.

So, what happens if

Jeff Bates gets it?

Right.

Goes and plonks down, you know, the

package sorting facility on the moon, you know, in a place that's going to make a lot of people very uncomfortable in terms of the geopolitics.

So, I feel there has to be

encouragement for the development of the technology and the hardware because that seems to work really well when you hand some of that over.

Although, of course, it's based on a lot lot of experience coming out of government-funded work around the world.

Right, but it's always the government leading versus these guys, which is.

Yeah, the government kind of does this hard, dirty work where it looks like, oh, they didn't really do so well.

You know, oh, they only got to the moon once.

Right.

Right.

But of course, they figured it out.

They figured out the fundamentals.

And then you can come back and be

aggregated

everything to them, actually.

So I'm going to move on to another.

You told NBC News that UFOs, this is another thing that's all this stuff is getting declassified had have a site scientific interest not because we're necessarily thinking we're going to find aliens but maybe because there's unknown phenomena or collection of phenomena that are giving rise to some of these sightings i mean these these even i i'm not a ufo person but i was like that is what is that what is i mean i i want to know what it is so does the broader

broader public interest in space already mean for for this what was your reaction to the defense department declassifying these things and actually just to me even more declassification

I mean, I kind of shrugged.

Yeah.

This stuff,

you know, we've seen this kind of stuff for years and years.

And as a scientist, you look at it and go, well, okay, first of all, a lot of it just looks like weird optics and

you can analyze it that way.

And it's kind of anecdotal evidence and so on.

And in science, anecdotal evidence is super difficult to deal with.

because it's uncontrolled and it's therefore very hard to pin down exactly what was going on in given circumstance and so on.

And

it strikes me always with the discussion of UFOs that

there may be interesting phenomena going on in Earth's atmosphere or in places where there aren't many people.

Do I think it's to do with aliens?

No, I don't.

And part of the reason is that

we wouldn't be talking about UFOs and aliens if there weren't this history of science fiction and

sort of conspiracy theories over the last many decades.

we would just be going, oh, that's kind of strange and interesting.

Maybe we should investigate that.

And so I kind of land in that place where I think,

you know, not to totally dismiss everything, but we don't have a thorough way of analyzing any of this information.

We don't have a coherent approach to this.

But there's potentially the opportunity of doing more thorough monitoring of our environment, which we kind of need to do anyway.

Right.

We want to to see what's happening on the planet.

And,

you know, so maybe there's room for a coherent scientific effort to put cameras on planes, to look at satellite imagery in a different way, to put ground stations around the world.

So we can know better what it is.

Well, we know what it is.

It's their cut.

Yeah, well, just to say that, you know,

stuff happens.

And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I've seen some crazy shit, said Kara Swisher.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know what it is.

What is it?

It It must be a UFO.

It's not must-be, but what was, if you looked at what they released, what did you think it was?

Most of it looked like optical effects to me and things to do with cameras on gimbals, tracking,

tracking objects, infrared imaging.

Infrared images look different than images in visible light.

So if you have the

exhaust from a distant plane on the horizon, you'll pick that up in your infrared camera and you'll just see this weird blob, right?

And if you have a gimbaled camera on a plane, it'll lock into that and it'll track it.

So it will look like it's moving.

So it's a bad camera.

Well, yeah, undoubtedly a lot of it is.

It's just called Ghostbusters.

I have a question, Professor.

Okay, go ahead.

So what aspect of

a tremendous amount of capital is being allocated to loosely broadly explained space?

I love the way you said that there's been sort of a trough that it's sort of petered out.

There's renewed vigor, which has resulted in a tremendous amount of capital and IQ going into space.

Where do you think the capital would be best spent?

Is it trying to figure out alternative means of energy production?

Is it in mining?

Is it to map the Earth?

Is it

different research around biotechnology and zero gravity environments?

If you could say, guys, gals, well, no, it's guys.

Let's be honest.

It's all just guys.

Well, there's one gal.

Actually, increasingly, there are many, many women engineers heavily involved in this space.

I meant the guys going up into space.

Oh, yeah.

Anyways,

the woman who runs SpaceX, acts she's sort of the most senior person in space isn't she yep she is um uh and there's some fairly there's some anyways i'm backpadding now yeah senior women at nasa um what would you advocate for in terms of a focus of capital around space

oh that's a good question um

you know i think actually it may sound a little strange but earth monitoring

is such an important thing.

Our understanding of the functioning of our own planet has been transformed by being able to study it from space.

That began in the 60s with the first satellites, first weather stations from space, first weather satellites and monitoring systems.

And a lot of what we could do in terms of monitoring exquisite details, not just about the state of the natural planetary environment, but about human activity.

We do that from space.

Things like the

Landsat series of satellites have just transformed our understanding understanding of land use.

You can see what some farmer in sub-Saharan Africa is planting that year, right?

I mean, talk about data, right?

Unbelievable.

But a lot of that has been kind of gutted in recent years.

The launch of new monitoring systems by NASA and other agencies around the world,

because of political inclination to deny what's going on with our planet, some of that has been put on kind of permanent hold.

And that's And actually, Google is doing that.

Google and others are doing that more

and keeping it for themselves.

Exactly.

And I think, so that would be really high on my list.

If I got to make this list, that would be really high up there.

As a scientist who's interested in the universe beyond the Earth, I wouldn't say there's a tremendous amount we can learn by looking outwards.

But in terms of things like performing experiments in microgravity, I think there are some things you can definitely do in space.

We know that the capacity to grow things like protein crystals in zero-G or microgravity has some distinct advantages and so on.

I've never yet seen the kind of killer app, if you will, for that sort of work.

You know, it's the kind of work done on the International Space Station and so on.

Nothing has really been that compelling to me.

After Tang, it was all things down the hill from there, I guess.

Yeah, yeah.

So Gwynne Shotwell is the president of Soysex, just so you know, she runs, and she's a very good executive.

So let me ask about your book, The Ascent of Information.

It explores how our relationship with data will affect ongoing evolution as a species.

Can you expand on that for us?

Why should we be concerned about how it relates to our evolution?

This is a topic near and dear to Scott's heart.

Yeah, so thank you.

My book, The Ascent of Information, is

a big idea.

It focuses on a very big and and kind of strange and provocative idea, which is that if we look at us as a species, what is so interesting about us is that we generate and utilize and propagate all of this information that's not encoded in our DNA, but it follows us through time.

It's this other thing that we coexist with.

And in the book, I try to make an argument for calling it the data ohm, just like a genome or even a microbiome.

Data ohm, I like that.

That there really is this externalized information that the more you look at it, the more you expect it from different directions, the more it looks like an alternate living system here on Earth.

Now, that's a pretty outrageous kind of statement to make.

And so, obviously, in my book, I go to a lot of lengths to draw together the arguments to support that hypothesis.

But what's interesting about that is that when you start to look at the world this way, that we coexist with this entity this data om

and we're reliant on it just as it is reliant on us we're in a symbiotic relationship with it a deeply symbiotic relationship and the interesting thing about that is by drawing parallels to what we see in biological life, it begins to explain a lot of what's going on for us, in fact.

100%.

Because when you have symbiotic organisms, their interests are not always alike.

And so there'll be times when what one thing does is detrimental to what the other thing does and vice versa.

But in the overall span of things, in the wash, it kind of works out.

There's a balance.

But I'll give you a cheeky example.

Let's look at Facebook.

No less.

So I would say Facebook is something that has emerged out of this human data-ohm symbiosis.

Okay.

And

it's pretty apparent that there are a lot of aspects to what goes on with Facebook that are kind of detrimental to humans.

Right.

Fake information, endless pictures of your lunchtime sandwich or your cat or whatever.

Apologies if you have cats or dots.

A lot of stuff is generated.

In fact, a vast amount of stuff is generated that you know doesn't seem to have sort of real meaning for us as species.

It's not going to aid our survival as a species.

But from the point of view of the data ohm, it's fantastic because the data om does what everything

does that's under the umbrella of Darwinian evolution.

It persists into the future, it expands, it fills in new niches, it just takes over.

Darwinian evolution is not thinking, it just is.

If something works and continues to work into the future, it will persist.

So that's one kind of example that, you know, we may look at Facebook and go, oh, you know, isn't it doing all these awful things to us?

And sure.

But in this bigger picture from a higher platform, you can see it as part of this extraordinary symbiosis that's been going on between us and our externalized information.

And really no other species on the planet does it like this or to this extent.

So the book is really an exploration of that basic idea.

And it digs deep into information theory, into evolutionary biology, and just into the physics of information.

Professor, I don't know if you read any Jeffrey Mitchell, but we talk a lot about the externalities of that.

And I agree with you that the durability or the ability to inherit information such that it becomes part of your instinct, you know when to plant the crops, or you know, you know,

you know to take care of children and just, you know, how to certain things just become a known.

And that we have decided that storytellers that increase that ability should have more, greater selection set of mates, and that's why rock stars are so popular.

And I wonder if our fetishization of these tech leaders is wired into us to say that that bio, you know, that advance in our evolutionary capability is so powerful and that we should, that we're just drawn to these people because they enhance that.

they enhance that ability.

And we talk a lot about whether that's unhealthy or not, that we're so drawn to them.

And you're connecting it to our ability to prosper as a species.

Yeah.

And I think that's a a really interesting point.

And it's also, you could say that it's, you know, the data ohm is making us do that in effect.

It's creating that sense of awe and hero worship for all these

people because that is advantageous to it in the long run,

which is, again, kind of an outrageous way to think about this.

But the more you look at it, the more I think it makes absolute sense to look at the world this way.

And a corollary to this is that

people talk about

future transcendence, the singularity, right?

We're on some path to some extraordinary transformation.

I would argue that actually that's all wrong.

It already happened 200,000 years ago when Homo sapiens popped out and started generating this externalized information, started producing this data ohm.

And yeah, and it's not always a healthy relationship because in any symbiosis, there are these.

So, what happens to the data ohm?

What does that do?

The externalized information owns us eventually, or

we just become, we evolve.

Well, yeah,

it's an interesting question.

Where does this go?

And I think

any kind of symbiotic relationship has a risk of severe dysfunction.

Again, in the Darwinian picture, nothing's a guarantee, guarantee, right?

Nothing says for sure.

Oh, you're going to be here in a thousand years' time.

There's always fluctuation.

I think we're in the middle of fluctuation right now.

We see exponential growth in

externalized data, in actually the energy that we devote to supporting all of that externalized information.

And at the same time, we see deterioration of our planetary environment that produced us, squishy, warm biological things, right?

And

it's not clear whether that's a stable equilibrium or not.

The one ray of hope, I think, and again, I talk about it in the book, is that humans are novelty engines.

If there's one thing we can do is produce endless novelty, we are remarkably creative.

And in computation, there's this problem of open-endedness.

Nobody has yet solved the question of open-endedness in machine learning, in AI, in robotics.

So machines that can continually produce novelty and not only solve problems, but figure out the next problem to solve, whereas humans can do that.

So there may be an advantage for the data to keep us around

as these engines of novelty and creativity, which is kind of lovely.

You know, Elon Musk called us house cats, getting back to him.

Called us, we're going to be like house cats.

They're not going to kill us.

We're just amusing to them and possibly novel, which is interesting.

I just have one last quick question.

Then we got to go.

And Scott may have one more.

You recently wrote a piece titled A Wrinkle in Nature Could Lead to Alien Life.

Can you just very briefly say what you mean by that, the idea

that we could make alien life from this wrinkle in nature?

Yeah, what that piece was really about was trying to extend our ideas of alien.

So I'm an astrobiologist.

I'm interested in looking for life elsewhere in the universe, but we tend to use the template of what we understand of life today.

Of course, what we understand of life is very limited, in fact.

And that's also why the data om is interesting.

So in that piece, what I looked at was

the fact that the universe has not always been the way it is today.

So if you turn the clock back sort of four or five billion years, we were at a period of time in the universe's history where its fundamental behavior was different.

So right now, the universe is expanding.

You've heard of the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, and that expansion is now accelerating.

Back a few billion years ago, that wasn't the case.

In fact, the universe was kind of coasting at that point.

And something changed that we don't yet fully understand.

So it turns out if you were a species, say, seven billion years ago,

your outlook on the universe would have been very different.

You could literally access more of the universe during your existence than you can today, because the universe, as it accelerates expansion, gets harder and harder to get to.

Right.

Gets harder and harder to access.

So there's a fundamental difference between early life, if it existed in the universe, and life now, a fundamentally different outlook.

But you can also extend that to the real wrinkle, which is we don't know for sure that all of the fundamental parameters describing physical reality have been constant throughout the last 13.8 billion years or into the future.

There's the possibility that things that determine, for example, how strongly molecules are bound together, it's a possibility that fundamental aspects of the universe change a little bit over time, tiny, tiny amounts.

And so one of the things I speculated on is, well,

what if

back in the past or in the future, another species exists in almost an alternate universe, even though it's our universe, because things have drifted, things have changed.

How alien would that be?

So it's very speculative, kind of crazy.

Alternate universe.

Multiverse.

That's right.

If space never ends, everything has already happened.

I learned that from modern family.

I learned that from modern family.

Now you're going to fuck us up here, Professor Sarah.

Sharon the Hendersons.

Sorry.

Anyway, this is all really fascinating.

Can I ask you, last time I asked you, would you go to Mars?

And you said no, right?

Is that correct?

I believe that was my response.

And now,

would you have paid $28 million to go with Jeff Bezos in near, like wherever Earth he's going to?

For that, for that ride, no.

I mean,

that's the worst

cost to mileage ratio imaginable.

Scott wanted to go with him.

I did.

And Mars, no,

I like existing too much

to go with that.

Are you going to go with this whole life thing?

You're going to keep this whole non-suffering, non-torturous atmosphere with the right amount of gravity and oxygen thing going for a little while.

You're going to see how that plays out.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, what the heck.

All right.

Caleb Sharp is always a delight.

This is so fascinating.

My head is.

Thank you, Professor.

He's a director of astrobiology at Columbia University.

And the book you should read is The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm.

In other words, it's going to keep going.

Keep reaching for the stars, Troph.

Keep reaching for the stars.

Anyway, Professor Sharp, thank you so much.

We appreciate it.

Take care.

My pleasure.

Okay, we'll be back for Wins and Fails.

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Okay, Scott, wins and fails.

What are your, you said, I stopped you.

I, I, I, I, I stifled you.

Tell me what your fails.

Well, it's not easy to be angry and depressed this week.

I'll manage.

I'll get through it.

But there's some really wonderful things happening.

Um,

government is the immunity response has kicked in and they've decided antitrust and regulation.

The G7 getting together and talking about important things, wealthy countries sharing their vaccines, coming up with infrastructure investment, carbon goals.

It's just wonderful to see that our species has decided to re-embrace its superpower and that's cooperation.

And I'm really excited about, I was really proud, I should say, to hear about, I don't know if you saw, I'm sure you saw us, the Justice Department found and recovered the majority of the payment that Colonial sent to Darkseid.

Yeah, that was great.

Originally, Colonial paid 75 Bitcoins, around $4 million to Darkseide, and Federal investigators tracked the ransom as it moved literally through a maze of about a couple dozen different electronic accounts before landing in one that a federal judge allowed them to break into.

And get this, CARA.

The project was used to intercept over 20 million messages in 45 languages and resulted in the arrest of 800-plus people.

The operations conducted in the past days in 16 countries led to 700 house searches, the seizure of tons of drugs, 250 firearms, 55 electric vehicles, and 50 million

in currencies and crypto.

And what I would ask is, who else could do this but the U.S.

government?

No one, you know,

Netflix can't do this.

Them's right.

Them's right.

And so I think this has been a great, I think it's been a great week, despite the, obviously, the DOJ stuff for the good old USFA.

And then my fail is defund the police.

And on the far left,

and we gave the shit, we gave shit to progressives for wanting to to defund the police

and the far right or when you think about poor people or you think about low-income neighborhoods there they have more crime and we talk about police and and then there's this ridiculous argument over defunding the police and then you also have crime in high-income neighborhoods but it's a different type of crime and that is it's usually white white collar crime And that crime is policed by the IRS.

And just as the left is hapless and comes up with stupid ideas and never get any traction, i.e.

defund the police, what's more insidious and dangerous is the far right comes up with more effective but equally insidious ideas to defund the police specifically to defund the IRS, which they have done slowly but surely over the last 20 years.

And what we have is one in three IRS investigators has left.

So essentially the police force that polices financial crime has been reduced by a third

while they get more and more sophisticated.

So defund the police is a bad idea on both sides of the spectrum.

And we need to acknowledge that defunding the IRS over the last 20 years has led to a level of overrun.

And we no longer have the money now to pay for our police

in places where we need it and places where it can be effective.

So, my loss is this ridiculous notion of defunding the police from both the far left and the far right who have been more effective at defunding the police in the former.

I like that.

That's a big thinking thing.

That's a thinky thing.

It's the prof.

It's prof Caleb.

I have prof.

He's

both of us come on oh my gosh isn't it like he's thinking about like different lives that i don't even understand

like i just want like an alien guy in a little a little fast-moving vehicle that's all

i love your conspiracy thing well i don't know i've seen some crazy

i don't know i want you know it could be just like china doing it or we're doing it i just want to know what it is what is it is is it the camera then tell me it's the camera just let me see some proof okay so i have just one i thought i I know this was PR flexing, but Google, Facebook, Amazon, and

others, Intel, urged the SEC to mandate regular climate reports from companies.

And Salesforce was involved, eBay, Facebook.

Even though they're flexing because they do it, I um and they've been vocal on climate issues.

I like that they are sort of asking, uh, requiring business directly to disclose climate-related matters to their shareholders.

I like that trend.

I like that trend a lot.

You know, yeah, why not?

Why not?

It's a PR flex, but whatever.

Yeah, as long as Elite's against virtue signaling, but there's nothing wrong with that.

And what they're doing in that area, I think companies will be judged by this over time, and they should be.

And so I like that.

I'm giving that a good thing.

I give that a good thing.

Fail, I just, this, this, this, this Apple thing is just really disturbing.

Like,

the power,

we're already worried about these companies having so much power and then the government using it badly is really, it's, you know, not surprised in any way whatsoever,

but still disturbing.

You know, you're like, oh, they did it.

And so that was, that was, it was like, oh, they're going to, of course, they're going to do it.

And they're going to, and once we get another power like that, and we have to do something to stop it.

I don't think we can.

I don't actually think we can.

So that is my fail.

Nice.

Okay.

Nice.

Scott.

That's the smart, brainy show we've had here.

There's lots of stuff for you to chew on.

By the way, I've been listening to our shows on drives.

I've been doing a lot of drives.

And you let me guess, you love us.

I love us.

You love us.

You love us.

We're good.

We're really good.

Sometimes

I'm enjoying listening to us.

And I don't, you know, I'm just saying nothing.

Focus on the bad bits.

I'm like, oh, I can't believe I said that.

Oh, I don't know.

Well, sometimes I can't believe you said that.

Anyway, that is the show.

We'll be back on Friday for more.

It starts after the show.

You're not going to space with Jeff Bezos.

You're not dating Jeff Bezos, anything else.

And try to read this cleanly.

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for the Pivot podcast.

The link is also in our show notes.

Read us out, Scott.

Today's show was produced by Caroline Shager and Ernie Andrew Todd.

Engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burroughs.

Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

If you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify.

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 Vox Media.

We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

What was that?

It must be a UFO.

Yeah, right, Kier.

Yeah, there we go.

You know what?

There we go.

When they come for you, you're just gonna say, Kara was right.

That's right.

Christ, I hope so.

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.

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?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It to Me, presented by Pureleaf.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.