Global corporate tax, Facebook's data breach and a Friend of Pivot on "cancel culture"

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Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Tim Cook.

No, you're not.

Tim Apple, you mean.

He's leaning into it.

So let me get this.

Okay.

Tim Cook.

Tim Cook was on.

I'm trying to think.

You have two podcasts.

I'm going to guess which one Tim Cook was on.

I'm Dwayne.

it'd be better banter with you and me, but you're trying to build a bunch of people.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the CEO of the most valuable company in the world in technology, which is supposedly the theme of this show.

I'm not sure it's Microsoft, I think, but go ahead, keep going.

He went on

more of an obvious fit for Pivot.

Yeah.

But he went on.

Yeah.

Let me think.

Let me think.

Sway.

God, Sway.

He was on.

I'm not even going to go there because it's getting a little tired.

But just so tell us about the interview you did with Tim Cook on.

You know what?

Listen to me.

Listen to me, Scott.

This, it was a natural place for me to go to.

Apple versus Facebook.

What are your thoughts there?

I think, look, we're going to talk about this in a minute, but Facebook is at an all-time high, right?

That stocks are at an all-time high.

So it doesn't really matter what Tim Cook does or thinks about them because nobody seems to care.

Until the government gets involved, even though they're going to do this,

I think it's ATT, something transparency

thing,

nothing's going to happen to them.

And so Cook is just going to push ahead with

this thing where you get to click that you're being tracked, essentially, or not.

And I don't know how much it's going to affect Facebook.

And he said he's not thinking about them at all.

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.

So I, you know, I think they're just, and he also said they're not competitors.

He doesn't consider them competitors.

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

They have to sort of coexist because, you know, Facebook's one of the most popular apps on the iPhone.

And at the same time, and so is Instagram and all the others.

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

on this effort to make people say they want to be tracked, essentially.

You opt into it.

So let me just press pause there.

My sense is that

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

And that that's what they're doing.

And that to de-cookie or whatever it is such that Facebook cannot track people across multiple platforms is basically saying, okay, we're going to go in and we're going to take out your liver.

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

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.

Yes, they do.

They do.

But there's still Google.

You know, there's still Android.

There's still across the world.

There's still all kinds of things that Facebook can do.

And I think, you know, Facebook, I think he sort of scoffed at Facebook's

idea that

they're there for small businesses.

You remember those ads they were doing?

We're here for small businesses.

Thank God.

the billionaires are protecting us from terrible, terrible Apple.

You know, it's interesting.

I think he's like, doesn't give a fuck.

That's my, that was my sense.

Well, one thing that was interesting is that he said he hoped to have Parler back on the platform at PubMed if they behave, like if they do their moderation.

Not if, I mean, behave wasn't the word he used.

But, you know, that was interesting.

It caused a lot of like, what?

And of course, he was like, look, if they follow moderation policies, they should be able to say what they want.

Even if it's, you know, and I was like, it's a pit of, you know, it can be a pit.

And, but he was sort of saying that they just wouldn't follow moderation policies, and that's it.

And he talked a lot about his fight with Epic, and of course, he had his point of view about safety and the linkage, and you couldn't, you couldn't sideload apps and thus and that, and said they're going to fight it.

And but I, he, I sensed in that part of the conversation that there's a lot of flexibility in what they're going to do with app developers, and I think they recognize that it's their problem.

They have a big problem there.

Well, one is when they, when they punch, when he punches, so first off, I think this is all a recognition of death.

I think he's finally figured out that distinct of captaining the most successful company in the last 10 years, he's going to die.

Yeah.

And that he's decided he's willing to take some risks that might have a social impact and leave the world a better place.

Because his complexion on these issues, most CEOs just stay out of this shit.

And I think he's decided, you know,

if they're going to build a statue for me, it's not going to be because I increased the value of Apple.

And it feels to me like he's more willing to put

shareholder risk at risk

to do what he believes is the right thing.

And also that right thing happens to be very advantageous to usually to his shareholders.

On Facebook, he realizes that it's a great punching bag and that Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath and that anything you do to get in the way of Facebook is probably good for humanity.

But Parler, I think that's, you know, that's a lot of nice rhetoric that we need voices on both sides.

We'll see.

I'd be shocked if Parlor ever ends up back in the app.

Yeah, I don't think they'll moderate correctly.

And then on Epic, he realizes he's the bad guy.

Yeah.

He realizes that he has become the enemy.

He is Circe, realizing that she's become the wheel instead of trying to break the wheel.

That when he goes after Epic, he's kind of all wet there.

He's the bad guy.

Yeah.

Yep.

I think that was

one of the things I thought was interesting was the car thing.

He acknowledged that he didn't speak to Elon and that

if they made a car, they would make the whole car, which was interesting.

Really?

That they would go vertical.

They would manage it.

100%.

He said, we would not just make the software.

No, if we were to be in cars.

And I said, so that's a yes.

And he's silent, essentially.

So I think they're there.

And AR was a big thing.

He was talking about when we were talking, that wouldn't it be great if he could put up graphs to show me things?

Like, you know, a lot of AR stuff, I think, is in the works.

And healthcare is still a big area of interest for him.

He didn't, I don't think I asked him about Peloton, but you know, healthcare is a big area for him.

And he said they're still interested in content.

I think it's a rounding era for them.

But he said he's interested in making great shows and it's an important part of their ecosystem.

So it was good.

I'll tell you, the moment he gets on stage with even if it's a cardboard cutout of an Apple car or a car, electric car with an Apple logo on it,

within 10 business days of that,

take $100 billion from Tesla and shift it over to Apple.

Well, we'll see.

We'll see.

He's got to make it.

Like, look, you know, we all, you know, everyone's, Tesla's up again, obviously, this week, today.

You know, it's hard to do what Elon's doing.

He acknowledged, he was quite effusive in his praise for Elon.

Maybe that's right before he sticks the knife in his back, but

it was, he was quite, he went out of his way to compliment Elon Musk.

I don't, I don't, I mean, you know, I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, but just like

over the last 36 months, to not acknowledge the extraordinary, you know, gray matter between Elon Musk's ears is to, I don't know, be in total denial.

That'll be, and what's interesting is all of a sudden overnight, I mean, literally in a year, the automobile market has gone from a low-margin shitty business to one of the most valuable

industries in the world because Tesla has turned it from 100, you know, the automobile manufacturing business from a $100 billion market to a near trillion-dollar market.

And that is entirely full stop why Apple is all of a sudden rethinking, getting into that.

What's interesting is they were supposedly going to partner with Volkswagen or Hyundai and outsource the kind of low-margin shitty part, the manufacturing, and try and meet the operating system.

It kind of makes sense they would go vertical, though, because

their strength, Apple's strength is it's the greatest intersection of hardware and software to date.

And so a car that is fully integrated, and also Apple's, people don't talk about this.

Apple has so many strengths, but a strength they don't talk about.

People always say it's their marketing, it's their branding.

Tim Cook has built arguably the most robust supply chain in the world, maybe with the exception of Apple.

And so if anyone can kind of pull off

the dance or the orchestra of parts coming into a factory from anywhere.

That's his area.

That's his thing, right?

It's his thing.

It's his thing.

I think it was interesting.

I think the AR stuff he's always been very excited about, which is interesting.

One of the things he also did is he, and let's get into the other thing, is he went, you know, he doubled down on this stuff in Arkansas and Georgia and other places,

you know, the voting stuff.

And he was like, you know what?

Essentially, what was really interesting about the conversation, he like dripping with disdain for Zuckerberg, liking Elon and stuff like that.

And then with this social stuff, he was, I asked him about the law, the gay and lesbian.

We talked a little bit about his being coming out a few years ago, but he's on his 10th anniversary as CEO.

And that company has gone from $350 billion to $200 trillion.

He's added more shareholder value than any individual in his life.

Indeed, it's really interesting.

So I think he's in that place, like, forget it.

And so he doesn't care about the pressure about, you know, saying anything about voting rights, which is interesting because a lot of companies, well, they're getting, they're facing threats of pressure and boycotts.

I don't think these companies care.

Like the Republicans have decided to call them woke companies and publicly oppose election legislation, those that publicly oppose election legislation in Georgia and other states.

Tim could not care less what these Republicans think.

That's my impression of talking to him.

He's like, fear of death again.

You know, not just that, but there's lots of corporations.

So CEOs from more than 100 companies, including Target, Snapchat, Uber, issued a public statement opposing any measures that deny eligible voters the right to cast ballots.

Major League Baseball says it will no longer hold its all-star game in Atlanta because of the controversy.

Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, both companies headquartered in Georgia, are facing backlash from Republicans for speaking out against the new restrictive laws.

What do you imagine?

And then the Republicans go in full hull hog.

You know, McConnell just whined about it, saying, you know, how dare they?

How dare they, you know, cancel us and this and that.

We're going to be talking about cancel later.

But what do you, I think it's crazy what the Republicans are doing here.

Maybe I'm misreading it.

Well, boycotts are ineffective.

They just typically speaking, they just don't work.

But what is effective is that the boycott, when the all-star game withdraws or leaves Atlanta,

it inspires a new cycle of more scrutiny on just

how strange and unfortunate and quite frankly, just how un-American

this

voter

restriction legislation, which is premised on a lie.

We need to expand.

They're trying to position as we're expanding voter access.

It's like, well, no, there was no voter fraud.

It's just the whole thing, anything that brings more scrutiny to it weakens it.

And while the boycotts themselves aren't going to have any impact or near no impact, what does have impact is that when the All-Star game and Delta Airlines keep it in the news cycle, the additional, it's like the Derek Chauvin trial.

The reason why the trial is so important is not only because this might have been a murder and a crime and there needs to be punishment it out

but you see what happened here and it reminds us that it just puts us back it puts it back in our face again that this is just so awful yeah and this is where america is and again i don't it's not the boycotts but it's the additional scrutiny of what is an incredibly or i kind of i can't imagine a more un-american legislation than this.

It's the scrutiny, not the boycotts, that have an impact.

So what do you imagine?

I mean, what do you think of the Republicans doing this?

Then we need to get to the big story, story, doing this, saying like that these are woke.

They're using terms like woke companies.

Mitch O'Connell said something inane.

How dare they do this?

It's effective.

I think that there is a backlash amongst or a, I think

there's a real feeling that the Democratic Party has rather than focusing on everyday problems that face real Americans have decided that their mission and their resources should be focused on being a self-appointed police force for cultural issues.

And that moderates and conservatives find this really unappealing.

So I think to go to the corporations doing it.

Yeah, but basically what conservatives are saying is that you have these big corporations that have been weaponized or intimidated by woesters.

I'm talking the Republican talk track.

I'm not saying that I believe this.

I'm saying this is their playbook, and I think it's an effective one.

I do not.

I think people like the corporations.

And so I think people like corporations more than they like Republicans.

And they trust the things they use.

I think this will,

and especially they decided not to take any money from them.

That's crazy.

Like this is like, this creates a real, you know, they could try for the populist thing, but most of them are not populist.

So it'll be interesting.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

All right.

So you adopted a dog, right?

That's right.

Tell us very briefly, and then we got to get to Janet Yellen.

Did you call the dog Janet Yellen?

We're either going to call her Aleia

or

Cersei

or Daenerys.

We've got a bunch of, we're still tossing them in.

Anyways, we got when I was eight years old and my parents split up, I used to come home and there was the most frightening animal next door named Thor.

And it was a great Dane, a male great Dane.

And this thing ended up being, as the breed is, just the sweetest and most loving

breed in the world.

And literally, Kara, I'm not exaggerating.

For four decades, I have wanted a great Dane.

And they don't make sense.

They're too big.

They don't live long.

Don't apologize for a great day.

They have bad hips.

I've always gotten rescue dogs, never a pure breed.

And I thought, you know what?

I'm going to be dead soon.

What do I want more than anything?

Are you dying soon?

We're all dying fast.

I understand.

Time goes faster than we all think.

I'm probably dying faster than you.

Motivated.

Okay, good.

Anyways, but I thought, what do I want most in the world?

Get Dane.

In terms of something I can buy, if you will.

I want to steal Blue Great dane, and I went to Kentucky.

Steel blue.

Which, by the way, dog breeders in Kentucky,

they and I have a lot in common.

We really hung out and we really got to know each other.

Wow.

But I went and got something I've wanted for 40 years.

I went and bought a steel blue great dane.

Steel Blue?

Great Dane.

I can't wait to.

You know, I just made, I'm going down to see Scott in Florida.

Everybody.

You're coming to the dog now.

I'm coming to the dog.

That's right.

Come to Florida.

You better have a nice place.

I don't like it.

The pictures on Airbnb look very nice.

I got to fix the smoke alarms.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

I can do that.

Lesbians are coming.

We can handle that for you.

That might not be very nice.

I want to meet the dog.

I want to meet.

I'm very excited.

Oh, you will.

I want to be.

How many dogs do you have?

Oh, just two.

Okay.

Bring in Clara.

All right.

Your swimming in your pool.

We're doing et cetera, et cetera.

She may pee in your pool.

You like that idea?

So do I.

Bring her in.

Okay.

All right.

We're going to get on to big stories.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will call for a global minimum corporate rate tax to prevent companies from going overseas.

Yellen says she and the Biden administration will work with G20 nations to agree to implement this tax rate in order to create a more level playing field.

Her plan comes as President Joe Biden's looking to raise the corporate tax rate as a way to pay for the $2 trillion infrastructure improvement plan.

Under the administration proposal, the corporate tax rate would climb to 28% from 21.

The increase would come just four years after former President Donald Trump slashed the rate from 35%,

which at the time was the highest in the world.

What thinks you on this, Scott?

Very bold move by Janet Yellen.

Well, they had to have it because basically the Republicans say, you know, our most productive citizens will leave the country or our job creators will leave the country.

And so there needs to be some sort of bilateral agreement on taxes.

Otherwise, it just becomes a race to the bottom where Apple ends up incorporating in the Isle of Man, which they have done.

So we need to, we need to, we can't enforce taxes unless unless we have some sort of bilateral or multilateral G20

agreement.

But this is, it's really interesting.

The legislation is really fascinating.

I think the Biden administration is so smart because they could have gone after, and I'm parroting the Meet the Press episode this weekend.

But who, by the way, is parroting us like maniacs.

All of a sudden, they're taking an interest in virgins.

Who talked about that?

And young men who haven't had sex?

Oh my God, who talked about that this week?

We are literally dictating the media coverage.

They're the most thoughtful people in the world.

Anyway, anyway, enough of us.

But you have, you have, he could have gone after guns.

Yep.

He could have gone after immigration.

And he said, no, our signature legislation has to be something that can get done.

And this is, a lot of parts of this are popular with Republicans.

But okay, if we're going to do a big thing, we have to pay for it.

Well, how do we pay for it?

Let's go after the least popular.

entity and that is corporations.

There were some numbers out this week.

Nike, FedEx, and Amazon don't pay any taxes.

So this feels to me like really smart legislation.

It's not, it's, it's kind of, it's basically redefined or dramatically expanded the term infrastructure.

Infrastructure now, I guess, includes caring for our seniors.

Yeah, everything.

So it's kind of...

It kind of does.

So it could be, you could have called this UBI to a certain extent.

But it'll be really interesting to see what happens here.

I'm excited about it.

I love infrastructure, even though I would say only about half of this is what most people think traditionally of infrastructure.

And then going after going, taking the tax rate to a happy medium, not back to the

38 or 37, but going back to the 3000.

Do you think other countries are going to sign on to this?

I mean, who wouldn't, would and would not?

Well, we have a pretty big hammer, just as we have a default currency.

If we could say to them, look, if you don't do this, we're going to be, we're going to, this won't pass.

We're going to be lower than you, and you're going to have inversions.

I mean, everybody runs the same risk.

And we, we show up with the biggest stick.

So

I think it just makes sense.

Who this hurts is places like Ireland or all these tax havens.

And no one's really fond of those guys.

No one's saying, oh, we need to,

or Amsterdam or wherever people start to headquarter.

So I think this is a great move and it kind of backstops an argument here.

Yellen's a smart one.

That's what I think.

I think they're doing everything.

I'm not sure at Berkeley.

Yeah, I think they're doing it in a very coordinated way.

This is sort of like, then this, then this, then this.

100%.

And so I think it's really, and I think it's stuff that's very hard for Republicans to fight back on.

Makes it harder.

It's hard to get a piece of him.

You know what I mean?

Like, you know, they were desperately trying this weekend with

Jill Biden's outfit.

She was wearing fishnet stockings.

She was, she got off a plane wearing really cool fishnet stockings and looking real hot.

And they were like, how dare she?

And I was like, hello, Melania.

Like, what are you talking about?

This is what Melania wore?

You know, no, this was Jill.

Jill Biden.

You got to see this picture.

She looks fantastic.

Good for her.

In any case, it was like sort of, and then they went crazy on her.

It's nutty.

I did not see that.

It's a nutty, like, I was like, really, you need to move along.

And by the way, I, you know, the only thing that offended me about Melania Trump is when she wore that jacket that was so obnoxious.

Um, and

every a lot of stuff offended me there.

Her clothing.

Well, let me go out on a limb here.

Worst first lady in history.

It's just like somewhat of George Conway.

You stick her next to their partner, and she seems more likable or less unlikable.

Worst first lady in history.

I agree.

But I think her clothes, I didn't care what she wore.

I don't care if she looks like, you know, whatever she wants to look like.

She can wear whatever she wants.

The jacket bugged me.

Most of her tenure bugged me.

But I don't, this, this Republican outreach, this, this bill, really, these bills really are hard for Republicans to slap back at.

We'll see if they can

make hay with this woke, woke, woke companies and Jill Biden

looks like a tramp kind of thing.

But I don't think it holds.

And trans, I think they got to go for some better stuff than that.

I don't think it sticks.

I don't think people want to get to work.

People want to get back to work.

Seems like a lame argument.

Yeah, people want to get back to work.

All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.

We'll be back to talk about Facebook data leaks and a friend of Pivot on cancel culture, your favorite topic.

Here we go.

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Okay, we're back with our second big story.

Half a billion Facebook user information has been posted on a hacking website.

This is from a previous hack that happened several years ago, according to cybersecurity experts, but it's now resurfacing.

There are records, including names, phone numbers, birthdays, location, more than 32 million accounts in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom, and 6 million in India.

Facebook spoke people said it's old information they had fixed in August 2019,

but did not say if they had notified users at the time.

Meanwhile, the company stock is at an all-time high.

The stock has ridden 120% since the end of 2019.

So through these very difficult times, people, the investors keep going for it.

And this breach is not a breach.

It happened, just to make it clear to people, but it's just this resurfacing in these dark parts of the web for sale and things like that.

Again, it's just another reminder that you give a lot of information to Facebook and they grab a lot.

Scott, what do you think?

I don't know.

Does anyone care anymore?

It just,

you can't trust Facebook.

Yeah.

I mean, okay, they take your data.

They don't protect it.

If there's a hack, they will minimize.

I mean, it's like add this to the list of, oh, advertiser, you're getting a billion video impressions and it's worth what you're paying.

Oh, just kidding, you're not getting a fraction of that, but we're not going to refund you.

Facebook is very smart.

And like, if we just keep abusing data sets and hiring more lobbyists such that we don't actually get in trouble other than fines, which we can afford to pay, and we flood the zone with misinformation and information, and

we keep violating people's trust, then we can get away with it.

We're now in a shareholder-driven economy where the shareholder class is overrun government.

And as long as the stock keeps going up.

So tell me why it's unscathed.

Explain for the people why the stock remains unscathed.

Because this is something you talked about, that the stock was going to be higher.

I said the stock market was going to boom, and it's doing that right now

overall.

Why do you think the stock remains unscathed?

Explain.

Well, specifically, we made a prediction when the stock was at 160 18 months ago that it would hit 250.

And then I got a ton of shit for owning it.

And people said, you're a hypocrite.

And there was some legitimacy to that.

And so I sold my stock.

And now the stock's over 300.

It's an amazing business.

The bottom line is the best business model in the world.

It's being an unregulated monopoly.

They have fantastic engineers.

They essentially are now

two-thirds of all social media is on one platform.

Anybody, they have They massively abuse their monopoly power.

Anyone that's a threat to them, they put out a business.

It's a complicated business, so they're able to show up and confuse lawmakers.

They now spend more on lobbying than big tech does, than any industry in history.

And they've deployed fantastic lipstick on cancer with very charming executives to run around and talk about gender balance and personal loss to totally delay and obfuscate the damage.

They continue.

It's an amazing business.

Unregulated monopolies are the best businesses in the world.

And this is a company that's doing, you know, has 90 or 95 percent gross margins and can tell you, if you're an advertiser selling, if you're a Geico, they can say, we can identify households in New Jersey where someone just turned 16 and then using other assets, we can track them around the digital world and just keep running Geico ads and then do lookalikes on that.

I mean, it's just an amazing business and amazing product.

What's interesting is that Mark Zuckerberg feels like...

You know, MBS right now or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where they're desperately trying to diversify away from one platform, oil versus data, and get into other businesses.

Their weak point, their weak point, and people don't see this yet, but it's really playing out with Apple, is that Facebook recognizes they're not an operating system as they'd like to think.

They're an app.

And as long as that app has to go on someone else's rails, be it Android or iOS, they're vulnerable.

And so what is Facebook doing under the radar that almost no one is talking about?

Tell me.

They have 10,000 people developing a hardware device.

Yeah.

They've tried it.

Big bad.

Well, bad, bad, bad.

I know, but 10,000 people.

Yeah.

So they realize, and this is one of the key attributes of any company that wants to be a trillion dollars, you have to be vertical.

And at the end of the day, and this is Netflix's challenge right now.

This is Disney's challenge.

At the end of the day, if there's someone in front of you who is the guardian or the gatekeeper or the distribution, you are vulnerable.

And Mark Zuckerberg wakes up every morning and says, that...

God damn it, that Tim Cook.

And there's nothing he can do about it because Tim Cook owns the rails.

And so essentially, Facebook is trying to build the biggest railroad, and it's the biggest railroad history and project.

They have 10,000 people trying to figure out whether it's an AR or a VR headset.

They could be working on a phone.

Let's assess the things they've done.

They bought Oculus and sort of been quiet off to the side.

And I think that's not coming soon for people.

It's just even the glasses.

And, you know, Apple's going to move heavily into AR, too.

This is where they do clash.

Cook was like,

Cook was saying we're not competitors, but they will be when AR.

They all say they're not competitors.

I know, but right now they're not in the social media business and so um he didn't say he wasn't competitors with amazon and content or spotify or any

they they don't have as many points of conflict except that they have to live together essentially so what would they how do you beat an apple or a google in the phone business they haven't been i have a facebook home still i still have it in a drawer somewhere um and microsoft couldn't do it so what do they what what way do they get in from a device point of view headsets are just not happening yet That's an outstanding question.

I don't know.

I think whose handset division could they buy?

They couldn't buy Samsung's handset division.

That's too expensive.

Samsung wouldn't sell it.

I think people don't want to wear ⁇

I think people don't want to wear a VR and AR.

That takes the virginity rate down from 27% or takes it up to 50% when all young men start wearing headsets.

So I just know wearable has the only wearable that has ever worked is the Apple Watch, and that's because they put billions behind it.

Wearables are one of the biggest technology

headfakes of the last 10 years.

So I don't know if they are going to be in the phone business, the smart speaker business.

They tried Portal, but

they have a smart speaker.

Way behind, but they have 10,000 people working on it.

No, but what do you see one?

And I actually threw it out, one of their portals.

I was like, no way am I putting this in my near mind?

Yeah, I don't plug it in.

I'm not taking it out of the way.

It's supposedly a good product, too.

Well,

I just, I hardly want the Amazon one in there or the Apple.

And Apple's sort of gotten out of the business.

But so where do they go, though?

What do they do?

It's a very difficult.

The phone from Facebook is probably the least

appealing thing to many, many people unless they buy some other phone maker.

I don't know because there's only so many entry points unless there's something we think of.

There's wearables, which it feels like that's where they have the most progress or traction.

And that's what they published or publicly said they're going after.

But that,

to your point and my point, that just so far has been a big thud.

There's the gaming gaming industry as a portal, but that's crowded.

Smart speakers, Amazon has more open job listings in their voice group now than Google has across their entire company.

Amazon's making an unparalleled investment in voice, which I think is kind of the technology of the next decade.

Right.

And then, so

is it interface with cars?

You don't see face.

I don't see Facebook.

Too many competitors there.

Is it a phone?

If Google can't figure out a phone, can Facebook?

And by the way, the Pixel is supposed to be a great product.

We still couldn't get it right.

So I don't, the honest answer is I don't know.

they're not good in any industry they have to compete in or have to be innovative in sorry they just don't take it they can buy and they can copy like they just did the other day again with uh another thing they whatever did they borrow borrow from from clubhouse or whatever they just can't do anything innovative i just don't know what how they can get to consumers in in a similar way and then

you know, face the barrage of criticism if they, if they have a device.

Why would you trust a Facebook device at this point?

Especially that's getting back to the data.

I just, there is nothing I would put on a, on a Facebook account.

People I don't like, I would put on it, I guess.

I don't know.

When I see these data, even though this is an old one, just more, just the amount of information they have and the ability.

And then when you add on the disinformation stuff and misinformation stuff on top of it, it just gets like no thank you.

Like, yeah, I don't know.

It's going to be hard.

I think it's, and I agree.

It's at its all-time high.

If you want to get to people this way, and if this system stays in place of social media, by all means, buy Facebook.

I just, I don't know.

I have a feeling like they've got a lot of, like the next five years is going to be a lot harder for Facebook than the last five years.

I think you're right.

I think Facebook is

the most vulnerable of all of them

because they don't control the end-consumer experience.

And they have the most people gunning for them.

And they have to go into competitive, really competitive markets unless they can come up with, again, you look at someone like Microsoft, which wasn't considered innovative, and they've done a great job.

If they stay in social media and do something innovative, they certainly can shift around their fortunes the way Microsoft did.

But I don't know.

I just feel like, I think, look, if you're an investor, you should buy it because it's going up.

And if you're an advertiser, you have no choice but to go to Facebook.

I mean, you really, you have limited choice.

And it's all problematic everywhere you go.

And I suppose it's the least problematic.

It's the best choice for you.

And so every single person who advertises on Facebook says we have no choice.

We hate them.

We have no choice.

That is.

Or Google.

Yeah.

They just don't feel like they have any choice.

Anyway, this is a fascinating area.

Nonetheless, the stock is up.

Do you feel bad about selling it?

I mean,

I'd rather have held on to stocks that have gone up.

But no,

it's like when people say, Scott, you can't criticize Amazon or

Apple.

I'm like, you know, I think they're net goods for the world.

I'm comfortable.

I'm a capitalist.

I'm comfortable owning them.

Facebook really bothered me.

I think Facebook is a net negative for society.

So I kind of gave into my better angels and sold that stock.

And I really don't regret it.

All right.

Well, we're going to move on.

Did you notice how Amazon kind of apologized for its pee tweets?

Oh, did it?

I didn't see that.

What they say.

We're so sorry.

There is peeing going on.

We apologize to the congressman who raised the issue.

People are urinating.

I was like, so when they did it, I was like, oh my God, cue the 50 reporters who are going to have pictures of bags of pee and

excrement.

And that I was sort of like, don't bring us.

Don't we we all end up peeing in a bag?

Isn't that where we're all headed?

Oh my God, what is going on?

You just bought a dog.

You believe in life enough to have a dog.

Oh, my God.

The dogs live 17 years.

Scotts, you're going to be around at least that long, for goodness sake.

People who buy dogs do not believe in the end of life.

I'm sorry.

I'm saying.

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

We're joined by John McWhorter.

He is a professor of linguistics at Columbia and the host of the podcast Lexicon Valley and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

John, thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

So we have a lot to talk about.

We've seen a lot of recent cancel culture never seems to go away.

Some people are calling it consequence culture, the opposite side.

How do you view what's happening right now?

There's the Matt Gates controversy versus Condé Nass and the firing of the Teen Bogue editor.

There's these Republicans saying that corporations who are against voter restriction laws are part of woke culture or woke corporations.

So give us a lay of the land right now in the cancel culture debate.

Well, I think that there is a tendency, especially from the left, to say that objections to cancel culture are really just well-fed, obnoxious people who are pushing back against being held responsible for undeniably questionable or nasty behavior.

I think more is going on than that.

We've reached a point where we're calling something cancel culture because a critical mass of, I think, reasonable people are beginning to think that an awful lot of figures are being punished for things that it's not clear they deserve to be punished for.

So, for example, you know, Matt Gatz is one thing.

You know, it would seem that there are certainly some things that we might need to be concerned about in terms of his conduct.

But when you see professors being dismissed or suspended for what wouldn't have been considered offensive in any way just a year before, when you're seeing people being fired from their jobs for things that they tweeted 10 years ago often at a different stage of their lives something different is going on where we've gone from criticizing people basically policing the culture in the way that any healthy culture does to spraying for heresy the idea being that if you have a certain stink on you you are to be dismissed from polite society.

And where do you draw the line?

Of course, that's the issue, but I think that we've gone way over it.

And that's what has gotten this labeled something called cancel culture among people who feel like something unnecessary and harmful is going on.

All right.

What about the corporations?

You know, this is the

Georgia Senator,

Governor Brian Camp, said that the corporations talking about voter restriction laws in Georgia were part of woke culture.

We won't be cancel cultured in our legislation.

You used to just debate things and then people were on one side or the other.

And if corporations didn't agree with you, that was fine.

Why are they using it?

Because it feels like they're using the word like fake news, which got out of hand in that regard.

It was everything was fake news when it's not.

Yeah, it's inevitable that terms like this are going to overgeneralize and start being used as weapons by people who don't understand that there really might be an issue at stake, such as the issue with voting laws.

Or another example of that is playing the race card.

There is a such thing as bringing race race into something where it really has no business, no real relationship.

And you could say that, yes, racism exists, but why did you have to make this racial?

Very quickly, though, just playing the race card became to bring race up at all, even when it was relevant and often when it was really the only thing relevant.

That's going to happen.

And so that's also happening with cancel culture, where it's often people on the right or even from the middle who call it cancel culture whenever anybody on the left has anything to say about what they're doing at all.

We can't avoid that, unfortunately.

And we're going to have to come up with maybe a new term after a while.

But the phenomenon itself, I think, is genuine.

There is a such thing as undue, overzealous cancellation, even if people are going to start using the term to refer to things that don't deserve it.

Normal things.

Like, corporations can be for or against these voting.

They used to do it all the time.

Yeah, that was considered quite normal.

Now, one way to push back, if you don't like the way it goes, is to give it that label.

Yeah.

Scott?

Nice to meet you, Professor.

You too.

So

I really appreciate, and it struck a chord when you were saying, there is a difference between being accused of trafficking a 17-year-old and a 17-year-old putting out racist tweets.

There's just a big difference.

And we seem to have, I don't know if because we're busy, just grouped it all into one.

It's almost dangerous that we have one term to describe all of this because

they're not even shades of gray.

They're shades of just entirely different situations.

I've always thought, and I want to hear your view, that there's two underlying, two things driving this.

The first is a total lack of trust in our institutions.

We used to say, all right, there are civil and criminal procedures for when people do something terrible, and that we trust those institutions to either fire that person or put that person in prison or fine them.

And we've just lost trust in those institutions.

So we've moved to new institutions, whether it's Twitter or media, to try and police ourselves.

And the second is that income inequality has become so severe that this is a method of going after what I'll call the white patriarchy or the establishment.

Your thoughts on those two things being kind of the underlying fuel for cancel culture, for lack of a better term?

You know, I think that those things are relevant to this, but in a way, I'm a little less sophisticated about it than you are.

I think that there's some more basal impulses going on here.

I think that a lot of this is it's a religion in every single way.

And anthropologists would notice this as a religion growing.

And what the religion is, and it's not that wokeness is a religion, it's this particular development since about June of last year.

It's a religion where what a person gets out of it is that you feel good about yourself by showing that you know that there are inequalities, and especially ones that are based on race.

I think an awful lot of people really get off on showing that they understand what systemic racism is.

And that's a good thing in some ways, but I think that it's gone overboard where people are competing to show how good they are.

And the term for this is, of course, virtue signaling.

And it could even be just, you know, somebody showing off that they have a bigger car than someone else.

This is a natural human impulse.

I think quite mundanely that part of the reason we're talking about it now is because of the pandemic and the fact that starting about a year ago, all of us were bored and lonely and indoors.

And I think that all of this gives people a sense of togetherness.

I don't think this would have happened.

happened if there hadn't been a pandemic, but I think that's what it is.

It's people feeling good about themselves.

And then this is even harder for me to say, because when I say that, I'm talking mostly about white people.

But when I talk about black people, I have to say that a lot of it is because one way to feel like you matter.

is to play the role of a victim beyond what reality actually specifies.

And that's not to say that there aren't hideous things that happen to people.

I need not mention George Floyd.

But I think all of us deep down understand that there's a certain amount of exaggeration that happens, and that has really magnified over the past year.

Any human being has times when they're insecure and they seek to feel significant.

There are all sorts of ways that we can assuage that.

One way that a black person can is by playing this victim role.

And we're encouraged to do it.

And it plays into white people who are waiting to be the people who acknowledge your pain.

And so there ends up being a kind of a dance.

And I think that's what we're in when it comes to the racial aspect of this.

Does it end up

undermining our efforts, though, to have a more just world?

Yeah.

When we end up taking agency away from women or black people and assume that anytime someone accuses someone of someone else or is offended, it means they're right and it means they're a survivor.

As opposed to having some sort of construct or organization to vet these things, it just feels as if we've decided that one group are always the perpetrators and one group are always the victim, and that's who accuses the other first.

Isn't it?

Doesn't it don't aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot here to a certain extent?

I think that all of this is so brutally condescending to, for example, black people.

I am dismayed at what children we are treated as as the result of this etiquette that we develop.

And unfortunately, a lot of black people aren't in a position to see it.

There's a sense that somehow the rules are supposed to be different for us because of our history, but that can be taken too far.

And yeah, I think that the whole thesis of, say, a book like White Fragility is infantilizing of people.

Not to mention that it makes white people into devils in a way that's vastly oversimplified, despite the nastiness of history.

So, yeah, it creates a really hostile, not to mention just mendacious situation between all of us.

All of us are doing this weird minuet where none of us really believe anything that we're saying.

And we're told that this is somehow progress.

It's scary, really.

So let me push back on both of you, actually, because there is a line.

I want to

draw the line between what is canceled culture and what is actual accountability.

Because most of the damage does come from certain groups that you know what i mean most of i mean as a gay person i i i don't want to be a victim but i can tell you i just had to adopt my own child again you know in a really ridiculous way and so at some point groups whatever group you have to be part of it's like enough why do i have like there is a feeling of being not victimized but like that you can't um you know when i heard brian kemp do that i was like you're kidding me like corporations should be like you're you're taking this term which you're right The woman at Connie Nast, it feels a little much.

It seems like overkill kind of thing.

But in some cases, it's not overkill.

It's accountability for behaviors.

And so, how do you, where is the line that you think through these things of what should be used?

Just again, it reminds me a lot of fake news in that it's overused, you know, all the time.

Like, I can't, I'm so tired of people going, oh, fake news.

I'm like, stop, please stop, because it's not fake news.

It's actually good news.

Exactly.

Yeah.

These are, you know, the line is not a line.

We're talking about something that shades from one thing into another.

But I think there are cases where you don't even have to wonder.

So, for example, let's say there's a white male law professor, and he has on one of his exams that's it's there's a question about employment discrimination.

And in the question that he gives, or he gives the information necessary to decide on this case in the exam, he writes N and then five asterisks.

So he doesn't actually write the word that was in the document, but he writes that so you know what it is.

And a group of black students decide that that hurts them, even to see it written there like that.

And one of them claims to have had heart palpitations to see that on the piece of paper.

And they make it so that this man can no longer work on campus and is taken away from all of his administrative duties.

And that softened a little bit because this hits social media, but still, they're still trying to make his life a living hell.

That's one where I would say that it's not black people saying we've had enough.

That is black people being encouraged to put on a certain kind of act.

And the sad thing is that that story, if that were 10 years ago, it would be an outlier.

But since last summer, that sort of thing has been happening all the time.

I have unwittingly become with my sparring partner on Blogging Heads, Glenn Lowry, kind of a clearinghouse for these things.

I'm not completely sure why it's now thought that anything like this that happens, you're supposed to send John McWhorter an email.

But that is what happens.

And the volume of it is crushing.

And it shows that there's something that's gone off the rails, despite, Carol, what you're saying, which is that there are times when something real has happened.

And it can even create a certain oversensitivity.

I'm not saying that you were, but that's where we were, say, last year.

But something weird has happened since last summer.

All right.

So what's the solution to moving it back to normalcy where there is certain things that do get canceled unfairly?

And the other is you deserve exactly what you're getting.

I mean, what's the reason for it getting worse?

Is it Twitter?

Is it the ability of people, everybody to speak in a blog or on Clubhouse or wherever?

Is there any way to turn that back so that people do feel like their voices are being heard?

Because some of it is about not being heard, I think.

It's not victimization.

It's not being heard.

Yeah, I think it's about honesty, really, because what creates this is not only the pandemic, but social media as it's existed for about the past 10 years.

And what scares a lot of people is being called dirty names on Twitter.

That can be genuinely chilling.

And it's at the point where this may be a quickside of cope, but I think a lot of people are going to need to start standing up to that and enduring being called names by people when they know that they don't deserve to be called that name.

And just to let it blow over and let a certain kind of person see, and I'm not talking about only black people, I'm talking about all the people who participate in this kind of witch hunting, see that they don't have the power that they started to have roughly last summer, that you can't get anything anything you want by calling somebody a racist or something else issed loudly and cleverly on social media.

If people don't start standing up to it, then there's no reason why this sort of hyper-woke person is going to change their behavior.

We just need more honesty, I think.

Oh, my God.

I love this guy.

I love this guy.

I got to be honest.

I got to be honest, Professor.

For having all my speakers on sway.

Kara had Tim Cook on her other podcast.

You are, you're still number two, but you're close to.

You're literally just behind Tim Cook.

The question I have is, you're at Columbia, I'm at NYU.

Don't we play a big role in this?

And that is somewhere between 1% and 4% of our faculty identify as conservative.

And it seems to me that we have decided our job is to graduate woesters when we should be graduating warriors.

And what I mean by warriors is the people that can respect and hold two contradictory thoughts in their brain, discuss them, and then figure out, all right, gay rights are important.

The laws that CARA has to endure are total bullshit and we become more effective at doing away or putting in place the right laws.

Aren't we part of the problem?

I have seen a serious uptick.

I've had, I've used the term, of course, I'm very good at turning all this back to me.

I've used the term on a Zoom class that I said that Facebook's testicles haven't descended or something.

And I had someone reach out to me.

I've seen this three times a week on this show, but okay.

But I had a student reach out to me saying, this is an elective over Zoom.

I don't feel safe around you.

And I don't know how to respond to that.

I'm like, okay, well, tell me, help me understand why you don't feel safe over Zoom when I use a term like that.

And I appreciate it.

I probably shouldn't use terms that indicate genitalia because it's probably, it's just, I can be effective without doing that.

But it feels like we have decided that our collective job as universities is to produce wokesters.

And aren't we doing a disservice to the dialogue?

Yes,

that is definitely true.

I don't think it was true 30 years ago when there was all that hand-wringing about tenured radicals.

I thought then that a fringe of people who were actually putting forth some interesting ideas were getting a bad rap.

But something really has happened once again.

And I do feel that

there are a great many professors who very innocently think that they're teaching students truth when they're actually teaching students how to be leftists.

I think a lot of them really don't understand that the leftist catechism is not the truth because they only spend time with each other.

They don't have any reason to think out of the box.

But I myself try very hard.

Most people don't know that I don't teach this stuff

at Columbia.

I'm a linguistics professor.

I teach about verbs, et cetera.

But where societal issues do come in, I try very hard to go down the middle.

And I've actually frustrated some students who know about my kind of other life where I'm the quote-unquote contrarian about race, where they're waiting for me to play that role.

And I tell them, no, no, my job is to teach you guys to think and to teach you guys to figure out where you come down on something.

I'm not going to preach what I wrote in The Atlantic last week in this class.

You can read it, you can bring it up, but that's not what I'm going to do here.

And in general, yeah, I think that it would be nice to see universities change on that score.

I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, though.

I think that the epicenter of this way of thinking, unfortunately, has been the university.

And I think it's going to be the last place to change.

But, Scott, don't you get the feeling that the faculty are further to the left than students?

My sense is that there are some students who are hyperworksters, but most of the students understand that there is a larger truth than what's in, you know, Mother Jones and the nation.

I'm less worried about the students than about the faculty.

Again, I'm going to push back on you two agreeing in violent agreement with each other.

You know, you have someone like

Josh Hawley.

I'm so canceled.

He had plenty of time to talk to people.

One of the things I always say is the people who talk about how they've been canceled never shut the fuck up, really, honestly.

And they have lots of opportunities to talk.

And again, they're abusing this term

on the other side rather.

And there's a whole like industry of anti-cancel culture people that exhaust me, often the privileged people, often people with lots of platforms,

often white.

And

it feels like they, you know, if you say something offensive and people are offended, too bad.

That's my feeling on a lot of these stuff.

So how do you push like on that?

Like Josh Hawley, give me an example of how you look at something like that.

Do we for a second think he has been canceled, even though he claims it and then just whines and

gnashes his teeth about it?

I find it that just as offensive in terms of, you know, how dare you question my idiotic statements.

We're so intermediate on that right now.

I mean, the linguist in me says that words, meanings change and words like that change quickly.

When he shakes his fist and says, I'm being canceled, you know, loudly where everybody can see it and books, et cetera.

What he means is books, but books, cable, he's online, the media, everywhere.

Right.

Yeah, Yeah.

He's not being canceled at all.

What he means is I'm being criticized unfairly, that people are wishing I wouldn't say things that I should not be being criticized for.

I don't know whether he actually thinks he's being muzzled in any particular way.

He knows that that word hits a certain button.

But yeah, obviously he can say anything he wants and be heard by everybody on earth.

He's not being canceled in any sense.

But he means there those people go again.

Kind of the way people use playing the race card to mean mentioning racism at all.

Yeah.

It's sloppy sloppy usage and maybe manipulative in that if he says cancel, he knows it whips up his base.

That's the intermediate place.

Again, how do we get to a point?

Because sometimes you just say, maybe you're just, someone was saying that to me the other day.

They were like,

they're being canceled.

I said, no, I'm just calling them an asshole.

That's it.

That's like the end of the, I don't know what else to say.

So how do you get back to a civil conversation where everybody's not either offended?

or they can't deal with the fact that they're offensive and they're getting feedback, which is what it used to be called back in the day.

So how do you get to a center point of that?

What do you think?

You're a linguistics professor.

How does it sort itself out?

This is how this needs to be sorted out.

There's a certain kind of person these days, generally under 40, in my experience, who is part of a genuine desire to cancel certain people, where the new idea is that you don't just get called an asshole, which is fine.

You know, you used to be, you would be called an asshole in very creative ways.

I have suffered that regularly for 25 years.

But now the idea is that it's not only that you call somebody an asshole but you try to strip them of their epaulets in some way they have to be sanctioned or their livelihood or their their livelihood the idea is that if you say something that's offensive not not only are we going to make fun of you but we're going to we're going to destroy your life to some extent that assumption is unjust and we need a few good humans to stand up and start questioning it and start having a kind of an I am Spartacus ending to the movie, in which case some people will deserve to be canceled, of course.

But I think we should go back to just being abusive as opposed to the idea that if you don't like what somebody said, they should be eliminated.

We can do that.

Yeah.

Now, in some cases, though, in cases of sexual harassment, like with Matt Gates and many others, there's a lot of like the Charlie Roses, the Harvey Weinsteins.

There's actual, like, look at that.

And then, of course, they, some of them were claiming cancel culture.

And I was like, you shouldn't have grabbed the intern, I guess.

Those are are actual crimes, though, huh?

Yeah, right.

But some of them aren't crime.

Some of them are just like certain things people say that are problematic.

What do we do if people on television, like there's been a million of those sort of edge cases?

And then it unveils like a lot of behaviors, like which I'm sure is going to happen with Matt Gates.

Like there's going to be a lot, you know, as they pull back the...

his filthy covers.

Societal mores change.

And sometimes it's messy.

Not every case is going to be perfect.

But we are in a society where the sorts of things that Charlie Rose thought of as perfectly normal are now considered utterly beyond the pale.

And he lost his job for it.

And you can put yourself in his head and imagine that he feels like too much happened to him for something that he thought of as so minor.

But unfortunately, no, we have to classify that as a dinosaur.

I think that the analogy between Me Too starting circa 2016 and cancel culture starting in June 2020 is a little off because,

for example, I think Al Franken was a bit much.

And I think I'm not alone in that.

But for the most part, with the Me Too cases, I always thought, yeah, this is how it needs to be.

It's time to change that.

It's just that we're modeling upon that what really doesn't seem to many reasonable people to be a constructive approach.

to running a society, which is that you fire somebody, you fire a white man for saying that it would be reverse racism for him as the head curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to no longer consider white artists for the collection.

He says, I'm going to spread out and look at a more diverse range of artists, but I'm not going to completely disregard white artists because that would be reverse racism.

He was made to resign just for saying the word reverse racism.

There's a difference between Charlie Rose and that man.

Fair.

That's the thing that the kind of thing that worries me.

In some ways, I feel like a lot of, in that case, he's probably paying for years of ignoring, right?

I can see that.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Like a lot of these years and years of making the exact choices that he's, you know, it's, you're paying something else for anything.

All right.

I have a last question.

Is there another word?

Can we stop using this word?

It's like fake news.

I can't.

Cancel culture.

Yeah.

Do you have another word, Mr.

Professor of Linux?

Just make one up.

Yeah.

Hmm.

That's hard on the fly, but instead of it being cancel culture, we could say, well, we could say that if you feel that you shouldn't be criticized like this, then you could say that you are being persecuted by what you could call a member of the elect.

That's what I thought I was going to title my next book, but I don't think it's going to be called that.

But it's this, these, these Calvinists, it's these people who have elected themselves to chase certain people out of society without most people even agreeing with what they're doing.

So the idea is, you know, I've been, I've been, I've run into some elect people.

You know, I'm being elected or something like that.

That's literally literally the way I think of it because cancel culture, you're right, doesn't make sense the way it's being used and it's being used manipulatively.

I think people should have a right to say, I don't feel that I deserve this criticism, even if they're wrong.

But yeah, it's awkward for them to say

this outcome probably is, not the criticism necessarily.

Right, yeah.

The outcome.

Yeah.

Scott, last question.

I want to go more meta.

So you strike me as a very thoughtful person.

You also teach philosophy.

I do.

Do you have any thoughts about where we are as a society and what are really kind of the big existential threats in our society right now as Americans?

Yeah.

Our problem right now is that a small group of people

based on a very interesting idea called critical race theory are under the genuine impression that they have found the truth.

So you teach a philosophy class and you're going to start with Plato and you're going to drag the students through Kant and you're going to get up to John Rawls, et cetera.

And nobody knows what the truth is.

Nobody can tell you what justice is.

The end of a good philosophy class is that you teach the students that it was all for nothing.

It's an unending series of questions.

The CRT people, the people who are getting people fired, etc., these days, think that they have found what justice is.

All these other people didn't quite get it.

Kant didn't quite get it, but some law professors figured it out.

a few decades ago.

I find that arrogant on my bad days, but on most days, I just find it very naive.

And I think it's time for us to start telling people like that.

Your take on what truth and justice is is interesting.

It's challenging.

It's worth being at the table, but you haven't figured it all out.

And we can't rule our society based on the tenets of your beliefs.

I don't think most people, if it were put that way to them, would have a real answer.

And then we could move on to the more constructive mess that real life is supposed to be.

Can you just talk a little bit about the manifestation of CRT thinking and why you think it's a negative?

Because I don't think most people are familiar with it.

Critical race theory is an idea.

Well, there are various ideas in it, but one of the main ones that's informing what's going on today is that we are a society in which there are whites who are on top, whose structure who cause us who are the source of a structural racism that's embedded in all structures of society, and that this makes non-white people quintessentially victims.

We are sub-alterns.

The definition of being a black person is living within the constructs of all of this white supremacy by which we are oppressed by whites.

Our identity must be against that of this white oppression and contempt and disregard.

And so if that's the way society is, and you know, You can make an argument that that is the way it works.

That's not crazy, but the imperative based on that is that we we must battle power differentials as the central focus of our being.

Intellectual activity has to be about battling power differentials.

Your art has to be about that.

The way you talk has to be about that.

Legal theory has to be centered upon that.

Notice today the whole idea that your local bakery puts out a statement about George Floyd and you're thinking, well, what does one thing have to do with another?

It's because of this idea that we must be committed to overturning power differentials.

Now, I think anybody would say that power differentials are a major problem, but the hyper focus, the laser focus on it that we're being taught is necessary, that you must do the work, that if you're white, you will always have this white privilege that stains you like original sin.

All of that is based on originally this critical race theory idea.

And it's an interesting idea, but you don't run a society upon the basis of such a narrow conception of what it is to act as a person.

Battling power differentials alone is not what most most of us would think of as the focus of any worthwhile existence.

There are some people who will live that way, but a lot of the rest of us have other things to do as well.

That's the problem that we're faced with these days.

It's a very narrow and punitive ideology that we're being told we're supposed to live under.

And at the same time, when someone like Donald Trump's saying nonsense, it creates a, it adds the layer of white supremacy onto it.

Like that, that is

being pushed as completely ridiculous by people who are problematic, at the very least, in their attitudes towards people of color.

Because they're using critical race theory as a stand-in for basically anything they don't want to hear, which is not what the theory was supposed to be.

Once again, the term, well, there, it's not the term evolving.

It's ignorant people misusing it or using it to evil ends.

Yes, that was very disappointing to see.

Because I mean it, the critical race theory is not ridiculous in itself.

It's just what's being done with it these days.

And I'm questioning a certain aspect of it.

And then you have people on the right who are are saying, stop talking about race, stop talking about identity, get rid of this critical race theory.

That's completely not what I mean.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

This is fascinating.

I'm sure we'll do lots of canceling for it.

It's all right.

It's fine.

We'll take it.

We can take it.

We can take it.

Anyway, Professor McMahon.

I am Spartacus.

Are you Spartacus?

Are you Spartacus?

No.

No.

I'm still like those assholes.

Those assholes in Georgia calling more corporations can go fuck themselves don't pass bad laws if you don't want there's the linguist in you coming out

bad laws if you want to pass bad laws that makes the MLB pull out of Georgia too friggin bad for you it's called

I don't know consequence you know you there's the other word is consequence culture uh which you've heard of course I'm gonna keep that

no but I think it's Roxanne Gay she's consequence culture so but it's as if there's only two choices and there's more than two that's really the whole point that's what I think it's complex it's complex culture is what it is we got going on here.

Darn it.

Anyway, we really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for coming.

And Scott is all smiling right now.

Thank you, Professor.

Thank you, folks.

Made my note.

Thank you.

All right, Scott.

One more quick break.

We'll be back for Wins and Fails.

Are you happy right now?

You got your cancel culture friend now?

I thought that guy was fantastic.

He is.

He's great.

Like to bring him out.

I'm telling you, that guy, I can tell you right now, gets an endless stream of shit from his colleagues at Columbia.

It's lucky he's tenured.

Yeah, he'll be fine.

Okay, Scott, we'll be back.

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Okay, Scott, wins and fails.

So what do you got?

What do you got?

There's so many.

It's funny I was thinking about this morning.

I had trouble coming up with them.

So fail, I think AOC coming out and saying that the stimulus or the

infrastructure bill isn't big enough and then using the number 10 trillion.

I think that undermines our efforts on the left to get something done.

I think that's a ridiculous number.

I think it's unrealistic and kind of paints us as progressives, as people that just want to,

we've kind of lost touch with the economic reality of what it means to create that sort of inflationary pressure.

We couldn't put $10 trillion to work responsibly.

It just, so I love AOC.

I think she's courageous.

You know, I just think she's a gangster.

I love AOC.

And I heard her say that, and I just cringed, and I thought, oh, you're just doing us all a disservice.

You're making it less likely we're going to get anything done when you say it's not big enough.

It needs to be 10 trillion.

That's my loss.

I think you're actually against how much money we've spent on the military over the many years.

I think that's where it's from.

She talks about that quite a bit in her.

And my win is I have a weird win.

I've been trying to wrap my head around crypto.

China came up with their own cryptocurrency today or announced some sort of coin, or I'm not entirely sure what it is, which seems to be totally oxymoronic to the point of crypto that

there's no central bank or no source of information, that there's a lack of transparency, if you will.

So, the idea that the Chinese security apparatus would understand money flows seems just totally contrained to the notion of crypto.

And then you have, like any digitization of any sector, you have power to a few currencies.

And it feels like we're going to, I think, go to the yuan, go to the euro, go to the dollar, maybe the yen, but things like the real,

I think other kind of tier two currencies are just going to get hammered.

And then Bitcoin or Ethereum or

I mean, there's a couple others that might

that are showing some promise that I'm trying to wrap my head around.

But a long-winded way of saying, I think the winner here might be India.

And the reason why is just as Joe mansions a swing vote,

if there's this war lining up between American and Chinese currencies or cryptocurrencies, the swing vote will be India.

And if India decides to embrace Bitcoin, you could see Bitcoin go to skyrocket.

If you see India decide, no, this is the default currency.

But it strikes me that India is shaping up to be the

swing vote.

And what will be the default currency, the default crypto?

But I'm still trying to wrap my head around this shit.

Do you understand this stuff?

I can't tell you that.

A little bit.

I need to study it more.

I can't say I'm an expert.

I all feel that way.

I've dabbled around in it.

Anyways,

that was a weird win.

That's all right.

That's all right.

I'm going to win.

Do you have any?

Yes, I do.

I was saying the stock market is going to continue.

That's not a prediction, but it's this, they're all at all-time highs, Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft.

They're just going up and up and up.

All the whole stock market's going to go up, up, up, up.

But the weird thing about that, though, is I agree with you.

But the weird thing is that don't underestimate the market's ability to disarticulate itself in the real economy.

I'm very confident the real economy, unless there's some sort of variant that shows up that that can

sneak around the vaccine, which is why we all need to get vaccinated sooner rather than later.

But other than that, the real economy is going to boom.

But the stock market doesn't always reflect the real economy.

You can see the stock market starting to go, uh-oh, there's inflationary pressures, and then start to creep around the corner.

Well, what happens?

when we run out of stimulus, what does the world look like?

You could see a market where the GDP goes up 8%, consumer spending is at all-time high, and the market corrects 20%.

Those could happen.

Yeah.

Yep.

And And then the fail is, I mean, it's kind of a win-fail for Amazon.

The National Labor Relations Board just said that Amazon illegally retaliated against two of its most prominent internal critics when it fired them last year.

These two employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, had pushed the company publicly to reduce its impact on climate change and address concerns of its warehouse workers.

And so I'm reading from the New York Times story here.

And the agency said it would accuse

the company of unfair labor practices.

I think that's a really interesting case.

We'll see.

Have you heard anything?

What's going on now?

I thought we were going to have the results by now, have you?

Not yet.

No, it's going to take a longer time.

I had a spaces with Jason Delray, and he filled this in.

It could take a while.

And then Amazon can either decide to go into negotiations with the union if they win, or

they can question every vote.

Each side can question every vote.

So even if it's a couple thousand votes, it can take forever.

And so they expect Amazon to push back on every single vote and say, you know what I mean?

And so it can take like a very long time, apparently, if that's the case, if that if that happens.

And so we'll see.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Could they just leave Bessemer?

They could.

That was another thing we talked about.

They could leave Bessemer.

That would be a pretty tough thing to do because they just opened a new plant there and it's a new fulfillment center.

So that would be hard because they've invested quite a lot of money there, but you never know.

They pulled, you know, they're like.

So on my way to this breeder yesterday,

I was asking

the driver, I said, what's going on in this area of Kentucky?

And he said, it's booming because there's a new Amazon plant.

And we went by the Kentucky, the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky airport.

That's where we flew in and out of.

And there were this row of Amazon prime planes with a smile on it.

I'm like, wow, the economy is just...

is really reconfiguring before our eyes.

They cannot pull out of everywhere is my feeling.

I think they're going to be losing these things at the National Labor Relations Board and lots of places.

They need, as I said many times, employment is going to be their biggest

opportunity and vulnerability, and they have to focus on it.

And they can't just be obstreperous across the nation.

It's coming.

No, as my oldest son will attest, pulling out doesn't always work.

Come on, that's good.

Cancel me.

Cancel me.

Concept plans call chart.

I don't feel safe around you.

I feel unsafe.

I don't feel safe around you.

I don't feel, nobody feels safe around you.

I don't know who that student is, but nobody feels unsafe around you.

Just for a piece of news.

Stand too close to my flame, you might get burnt.

God, I can't believe I'm coming to Florida.

I'm going to have to bring my weapon.

We're going to have such a nice time.

I'm going to bring my weaponry.

We're going to have such a nice time.

I wonder if I can get on the

first time I've flown, and it's for Scott Galloway.

Let me just say.

What do you think about that?

That's right.

What do you think about that?

We're excited.

Most people want to see your wife.

She seems really like in the emails.

The text, Scott is insane and doesn't know anything.

And his wife gets in and she breaks it down, right?

Like there's a word for that, German.

Anyway, she's.

I'm not allowed to talk to her.

That's part of of her real non-supposed to talk to her on the show.

Let me just say she operates this place like a Panzer tank division.

Let me just say she's great.

Thank you so much.

Just, you know, quick news: Supreme Court, we'll talk about it.

Maybe Thursday ruled six to two in Google's favor in a copyright dispute with Oracle, which has been going on forever over Java APIs.

Anyway, they overturned Oracle's win.

And I've written so many stories about this or edited so many stories.

So we'll talk about it maybe on Thursday, but that's just news, just in.

Anyway, Scott, this has been a great show.

I'm so glad you liked our guest.

I knew you would.

I knew you would.

I knew you would.

And it's just, I think it's time to get to a more

cogent discussion, although not forgetting problems of the past.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, but

I apologize.

That was going to be a good wind out.

I think we need stronger institutions.

I think we need better infrastructure, corporations, and more responsible governments, such that real time we can deal with these things before they turn into.

I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if clueless men in their 50s or 60s were told, you know what, this behavior just doesn't wash.

Stop it.

And arrest it for everyone's good, arrested them.

It kind of

before these things turned into terrible, I don't know, there's got to be our institutions are weak.

It is.

It's absolutely true.

Although there's not, you know, watching the George Floyd thing, there's not anyone that's going to say, stand down, everybody.

Don't worry about racism anymore.

I just, that is not awful.

Horror.

Horrific.

Just horrific.

He was exactly where he was because of who he was.

And that is just so clear in that case, at least.

Anyway.

Okay, Scott, that's the show.

Come to Florida.

I will be in Florida.

Come to the land of crazy.

We could broadcast from Florida, couldn't we?

No, we will broadcast from Florida.

Broadcast live.

No, we're not going to broadcast.

We'll do the Fontainebleau.

We'll do a TikTok dance in front of Scott's incredibly expensive pool.

Okay, we'll be back on Friday for more.

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit your questions, the pivot podcast, and also link.

Also, the link is in our show notes.

Read us out, Scott.

Today's show is produced by Rebecca Sinana, Serne Andrew Todd, engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Hannah Rosen and Drew Burroughs.

Make Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

We're in Android user, check us out on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Box Media.

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

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