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Hi, this is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

This week, we did Pivot live in New York City at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit.

We came on right after Roxanne Gay, so I had to behave myself or risk an all-out war on Twitter.

Yeah, which you would lose, Scott.

Yeah, no kidding.

We're live in New York to talk at the Lesbians in Tech and Allies Summit.

Everybody say hello.

So,

how do you like being here?

Do you like being here?

And we're going to talk about all the different tech issues of the day?

Yes and yes, Kara.

All right, okay.

All right.

So one of the things that we did talk about is how you can be a better ally.

Yes, say more.

Said, Said say more.

And so, what I did is, what naturally, what I think is really important for you to wear is I brought you a t-shirt, says Lesbro.

Who wants to see a 54-year-old man change his shirt?

Oh, no.

Scott, no one's interested in you here.

Well, most places, actually.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Scott.

Okay.

All right, so we have a lot to talk about this week.

We're going to use Pivot.

You know, we use Pivot as a different platform, but it's really important that we use it to talk about the issues in tech that

affect all communities and try to push for more diversity.

So we're very excited to be here.

So speaking of sort of interesting things, I interviewed Marion Williamson this week, and tomorrow I'm going to interview Bill de Blasio.

So I'm going on the people who didn't get into the debate tour, essentially.

So it was a really interesting interview with Marion Williamson.

Yeah, and I'm actually hosting Michael Bennett, another guy I didn't make.

Right.

And it's interesting to think about kind of unexpected consequences.

And so the Democratic National Committee wanted to ensure that it was more inclusive.

They were accused of basically railroading

Hillary through, so they tried to be more inclusive, and they came up with all these rules.

And, you know, they're sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't, but the the notion that you have to get a certain number of donors.

Right.

And what's ended up happening is that people are paying 70 bucks to Facebook and Google to get a $1 donation, right?

Right.

And

it's also,

I mean, I feel as if we have some people on stage.

The big winners through all of this are the off-card people, the Andrew Yangs, the folks you're talking about, who've gotten incredible awareness.

And they're going to have to flip it back because you're going to literally see 100 people run for president in the next cycle.

The next cycle.

Yeah.

So what is.

Is is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Yes.

I think your

point is that it shouldn't just be people who've been politicians their whole life, but I think the DNC has an obligation to probably screen out earlier some people who shouldn't be on the stage.

I think it's taken a lot of oxygen away from people who have an important message.

I mean, that was an interesting discussion I had with Marion Williams, and she feels she's more in tune with Americans than she was saying she's in 2019 politics and most of of the candidates are in 1985 politics, which was kind of interesting.

And when actually you meet her in person, it is kind of interesting that the media sort of has to portray her.

Like it was really interesting.

David Brooks wrote a column where he called her a whackadoo, which and then agreed with everything she said, which was fascinating.

And, you know,

it's really interesting how she's portrayed because she's quite, you know, there's some controversy around what she said about vaccinations, which

she had a relatively good explanation for, but a lot of people still don't believe her.

She didn't say she was praying away the hurricane.

She was talking about prayer in general, which I think a man would be allowed to do very easily.

So it was a really interesting interview, and I was surprised, you know, one of the things she said, I think you'd like her too, I think a lot of people would like her in person.

She thinks that if we don't make a change, that young people are going to storm the Bastille.

And so that was the most interesting thing she was talking about.

And she was talking about how, you know, the populism in this country and

the hate that's growing is problematic for politics.

I think it's, well, one, there's a huge divisiveness, but typically throughout history, when we get to this level of income inequality,

it self-corrects and it self-corrects the war, famine, revolution.

And I think we're going through a soft revolution where people have just had it.

Just had it with wealthy people, most of whom are tech people.

Well, that the top 1% have doubled their income while the income of the bottom 50% have been half.

13 people are worth the same wealth as the southern hemisphere plus India.

And it's pretty basic logic.

At some point,

when 3.5 billion people go, the easiest way to double our wealth is to take away the wealth of these 13 people.

They figure out a way to do that.

I mean, it's kind of happened over and over in Central America and different economies where if you don't have some level of empathy or redistribution, and all the wealth and all the spoils and all the good stuff aggregates to fewer and fewer people, at some point everybody else says, all right, we've had it.

And when you see all these very wealthy people talking about

we need higher taxes, it's not that they're being progressive,

it's self-preservation.

They recognize at some point people are just going to show up with land, you know.

And you point out this week at Co-Commerce that Amazon, you were specifically talking about Amazon, didn't pay any taxes or paid very low taxes given how much money they make.

So, since 2008, or approximately over the last 10 years, Walmart has paid $64 billion in corporate income tax.

Amazon has paid $1.4 billion.

And a huge, a huge, our economy is just not used to a company being this successful and never paying taxes because it's not profitable.

Typically, the markets demand a company becomes profitable at some point, and our taxation system is based off of profits.

In addition, you have this genius, and Bezos is a genius who's figured out a way to perfectly game the system.

where he never pays taxes.

So remember, and we talked about this at Code.

In the 1980s, this was basically this racist whistle call where Reagan had this caricature of what he called a welfare queen, right?

The mother of all welfare queens in our society is Jeff Bezos

because

he owns approximately

He owns approximately 17 or 20 percent of Amazon.

Amazon extracts billions of dollars in tax subsidies by gamifying the process to put their data center here.

He makes it irresistible for a municipal official who wants to be the one to detonate a prosperity bomb in their city not to fork over tons of benefits and tax subsidies.

So, say two to three billion dollars gets transferred from the city of Phoenix or Denver to Amazon to put their new data center there.

That's technically a transfer from all of us who are taxpayers to Jeff Bezos of approximately a half a billion dollars.

In addition, he himself never pays taxes because anyone who's worth that kind of money just borrows against his holdings at a low interest rate of 2%.

But he's worth $164 billion.

He's the richest man in the world.

And he is

a net debtor or taker.

So the National Park Service, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Navy, and Jeff Bezos are taking money out of the Treasury, not putting it in.

So hands down, mother of all welfare queens for the ages, the wealthiest man in the world.

Alexis, this is a good thing.

So we're going to move into actual news this week because we do news, we do predictions and everything else, and we have questions from you guys.

I'm going to put on AR glasses,

which are from Focal.

They're at Lisa Zane's in the audience.

And what's augmented right now?

What's happening?

There is a screen right here that I'm looking at and getting some information about you, Scott.

And it comes with this, it's really interesting.

I just think it was interesting because I'm kind of fascinated where AR is going and where these glasses, because as you know, Google Glass, while it

was not a hit,

I think technically it was the right thing.

It was the idea that we're going to have glasses on our face.

I think these are pretty attractive.

And what you do is you wear this ring.

It kind of looks...

No?

No, not yet.

That's not a wearable.

It's a prophylactic.

All right.

No, not quite yet.

Oh, that's nice.

But let me listen to me.

I like these better.

I think eventually these are going to get amazing.

What happens is you use this as a joystick, and I can see time

right now.

Yeah.

You want to touch my joystick?

All right.

Okay.

And so what happens?

So what happens?

I get all kinds of information right now.

I'm looking at Spotify, whether I want to turn it on and play it.

I've got messages.

I can see it in this little eye thing here.

And then you can just, oh, it's on.

I don't know if it's on.

But anyway, so it goes the time, messages, all kinds of stuff that your calendar,

just pretty much all I think.

And I can call an Uber on it, which is interesting, and actually send out texts, which is kind of, and my calendar, and things like that.

So it's coming in.

Eventually, this will have a lot of information on it.

There are technologies you want to overinvest in.

There are technologies you want to under-invest in.

This is absolutely one you want to underinvest in.

I think you're wrong.

I think you're utterly wrong.

You know who's in this?

Intel and Amazon.

Well and Mark Zuckerberg said it was going to unlock new worlds.

No, it hasn't.

It hasn't done anything.

Yes, but because it's early.

You're wrong.

You're 100% wrong.

Everyone's going to have something on their face that is going to, that's going to have to.

Yeah, ray bands.

In any case, everyone's going to have these.

And as you move through them, I agree.

Google Glass was the first iteration of it.

But eventually, this is how we're going to get our information.

We're not going to be looking down at phones or doing, you know, and staring and wandering around the streets.

I think you're going to have a heads-up display and you're going to look at it.

And this one is getting there.

This is absolutely getting there.

It's really interesting that Amazon and Intel would put this amount of money.

And I think a lot of people do believe that.

Supposedly, Apple's coming out with their own pair, right?

I'm sorry?

Supposedly, Apple's coming out with their own pair.

Yes, Apple's coming out with their, which will probably be super attractive.

So eventually this will get really interesting.

It'll not be as heavy on the side.

But this is a quantum leap from Google Glass.

Is it?

Yes, 100%.

And what's the name of the company?

This is Focal.

They're from Canada, so they're very nice.

So I'm really, I'm really, I, you know, I don't, don't, if they make ray-bands, I may wear them, which will be great.

But I think it's really interesting that this is kind of the new kind of investments that are being made in these kind of things, in food, in agriculture, and stuff like that.

But let's get to the news of the day, a big story breakdown.

Speaking of large, state AGs go after Google and Facebook, 50 state AGs.

So basically all of them, including DC and Puerto Rico, are joining in an antitrust probe of Google, spearheaded by Texas state AG.

California and Alabama are out.

Go Go figure.

They'll probably do it on their own.

Last week, Letitia James

announced that she would lead a similar probe into Facebook.

Antitrust probes might be the thing that brings Republicans and Democrats together in this country, which is amazing because they can't agree on lunch.

And it's, you know, it was sort of spearheaded by Elizabeth Warren.

She was talking about it earlier.

What do you think about what's happened, what has occurred here this week?

So I'm really finally the thing is dropped or whatever.

I'm really hopeful, right?

That there's finally a bipartisan issue, that people, now they're going after tech for different reasons, the red states and the blue states.

I think it's really exciting.

And that the fact that they're coming together,

it's well overdue.

It'll take a while, but it's similar to tobacco, where they said, look, we're sick of waiting on DC, we're going to do it ourselves.

Right.

So it looks like the states

are coming for Google.

And we said this was a...

But do you think something will actually happen?

What would you predict would happen, would actually occur?

How long will it take and how long can they agree to it?

It'll be years, no doubt about it.

But at some point, there'll be a grand bargain, either for an enormous fine or prophylactically Google will break itself up and come to some sort of deal.

So what do you think they're going to do?

Break off YouTube, presumably.

Well, you talked about this.

You predicted this.

You think it's going to be a spin of YouTube.

What's interesting is they're going after the ad part, the kind of the double-click part.

Right.

But something, the breakup has started.

And what the markets get wrong is that the stock is going to skyrocket once people start doing that.

And why is that?

Well, we make the mistake of believing that antitrust is bad for companies when they get broken up, that it's some sort sort of punishment.

And what I believe we have to do is not look at it through the rubric of they're bad, so we're punishing them.

But a natural part of our economic cycle is that when a company becomes an invasive species and kills small companies and prematurely euthanizes big companies, that it's healthy for the economy to go in and break them up.

And when we broke up AT ⁇ T within 10 years, each one of those nine companies was worth more than the original company that was broken up into nine pieces.

When eBay spun PayPal, PayPal is now worth five or ten times what eBay is.

So you're going to see a massive unlock in shareholder value.

So

breaking up Google, pulling off YouTube or the ads off of Google, or taking Instagram off of Facebook, which it seems to be integrating even further with Facebook dating.

Are you using Facebook dating?

Just curious.

Not yet.

Okay.

Not yet.

Ever?

Would you ever use Facebook dating?

If you weren't married, would you use Facebook dating?

I'd use all of them.

Okay.

And I would just be, you know,

at work for some reason they call me swipe left.

That's my nickname.

Yeah, I would use all of them.

But you feel good about Facebook dating.

But they're using Instagram as the.

I think Instagram is the right brand for it.

I don't think Facebook is.

I don't think people trust Facebook.

But I think Instagram is a great brand for dating.

I think it could be huge for them.

But now it's called Instagram by Facebook.

So this is interesting too, right?

And this kind of signals the end of the brand era, and that is Facebook has decided to say, all right, Instagram by Facebook or WhatsApp buy Facebook.

And every marketing professor in the world had a grand mall seizure when they heard this.

But what this really indicates, and I thought about it, is the end of the brand era.

And that is, the way we've traditionally created shareholder value is to come up with a marginal product and wrap great associations around it.

An American car that's kind of a mediocre, shitty product, but make it feel tough and American and like a rock.

And then print money with your marginal product, but great associations and great margins.

And I think we've officially left the brand era for the monopoly era.

And what Mark Zuckerberg has decided, I mean, this is equivalent of Volkswagen going, I know, let's call it Porsche by Volkswagen.

Or Boeing going, okay, the 787, let's call it the 787 max.

This just makes no sense.

But what they've decided is they want to conjoin the triplets.

And if they can in any way reduce the likelihood that they're broken up, which is a half a trillion dollar franchise or monopoly, that that is worth the erosion of tens of billions of brand value and brand equity.

So they're trying to stick together in order to avoid being broken.

They're trying to put the three together such that he can say when the DOJ or the states come in, that he can say, look, if you try and separate the babies from one another, you're going to kill the whole being.

He's purposely trying to encrypt everything and come to the bottom.

That sounds sneaky on Mark Zuckerberg's part.

Yeah.

What do you think?

I hope it's not going to work.

If I were the DOJ of the FTC, I would move in

right now and I would say, look,

whatever you do right now, just be clear if we find

that Megan Del Rehn we'll break your ass up

the head of the Justice Department antitrust trust so do you so you predict a breakup you think that's what's going to happen eventually I think a combination of antitrust and regulation I think all of them at some point either themselves proactively break themselves up so prediction I love predictions by 2025 the most valuable company in the world will be AWS

Amazon Web Services

Amazon will spill into AWS and AWS will be the most valuable company in the world because right now there's no pure play way to play the cloud.

Right.

The cloud is the fastest, most growing, most profitable part of technology right now globally, the cloud.

How do you invest as a retail investor or an institution or endowment in the cloud?

If you invest, do you got to crawl over a search engine to get to Microsoft or Google?

You got to crawl over a software company at Microsoft, and you got to crawl over an e-commerce company and a bunch of other things, the marvelous Mrs.

Mizel, to get to the cloud of AWS.

If AWS, if the fastest-growing pure play company in the fastest-growing sector and the most profitable sector was a stock, we'd all own it, or all of our pension funds all the time.

Interestingly, I've actually spoken to the CEO of AWS and he said he's not going to go public several times.

But we've had this conversation.

No one can say, you know what, I'd like to be king, because they end up dead the next day.

No one can say that.

No one can say, yeah.

So, but be clear, Andy Jassy wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror and he goes, hello, CEO of the most valuable company in the world.

Right.

Well, we'll see if he does that.

It seems indicationless.

Interestingly,

as much as they protest going public, we work.

Yeah, go on.

Go on.

Go on.

So you have been riding the WeWork Since the S1 came out, the most crazy S1 of all time.

Its biggest outside investor software urged the tech company to shelve its IPO.

I feel like we're responsible for that.

I feel good about that.

That's definitely us.

That and the fact this company makes absolutely no fucking sense.

Okay, so,

but now the company is supposedly going forward with the IPO.

Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.

Okay, what's going to happen then?

Okay, so

for people who don't know, WeWork, you've probably all been in one.

How many people have been in a WeWork?

Lots of people, right?

It's very nice.

You have the beer and the kombucha and the wallpaper and the slightly above IKEA tables kind of thing.

And they have put out an S1, and we've always felt that I've always felt they're a real estate company, essentially.

And the guy who runs it has very luxurious hair and says a lot of things about feelings and happiness and whatever.

But he's a real estate company.

And they've been proliferating like kudzu all around the country.

And when this S1 came out, it was pretty shocking how much he owned a lot of the buildings in it, which is a lot of self-dealing.

He got a giant $700 million loan, essentially, or took $700 million out.

He owned the brand.

and then the business is just terrible.

It's a terrible business.

So we started, especially Scott started banging on this IPO, which was comical.

Like it was weird that they even put out this S1.

Well, first off, you got to be dangerous of cults.

Cults of personalities are usually terrible stocks.

So

typically a COVID-19.

No, Apple, hello.

No, that's not true.

Come on, I'm on a roll.

Okay, all right, sorry.

So on average, unicorn CO prospectus.

Netflix,

they mentioned the name DARA in the

Uber S1 23 times.

In Lyft, it was like 18 times.

The term Adam is used 169 times.

This is Adam Newman, this is Adam Newman, the CEO.

You have a company that is scaling its losses, so it'll do 3 billion in revenues this year, and it'll lose almost that much.

I take Uber, which is SoftBank, all the time because for a $15 ride you pay $10 for.

So it is economically irresponsible not to take Uber everywhere because it's being subsidized by SoftBank.

And right now, WeWork is losing almost $1 on the dollar.

So you have a company, and it has no gross margins, meaning that as the company scales, it just loses more money.

And the thing that's going to actually probably is probably going to ruin the WeWork IPO

is Uber.

Because Uber has shown that you can't scale a company with negative gross margins.

You just scale your losses.

And

they're starting what I believe is an initial case.

Well, they this week they've had a lot of

Uber Eats

had

code, and even Uber Eats looked like it wasn't making much money.

And that's considered their growth engine, which was interesting.

But Uber is talking about there's rumors of layoffs, there's marketing issues, there's obviously the costs coming in, and that's also a soft bank investment.

That stuff I put an enormous amount of money in at the end.

So Uber is showing what, that you can't run these bits.

You can't have businesses that lose money into eternity, correct?

Well, it's okay.

So if you

SmileDirect is going public, I think, tomorrow.

I Invisalign.

I don't know if anyone else here envisalion.

It's nice to be doing Orthodontia at 54.

But it's a great company, a great technology, and a company came in at a lower price point, about half the price point, and cut out the Orthodontus and has stores and spent their money on marketing.

and is growing, it's going to grow to a billion dollars this year.

It's growing about 150% a year.

It's incredible technology.

And it's got gross margins of 69%.

So it's losing money, but when you're making 69 cents on every dollar of product you sell, at some point if you get big enough, you're going to start making money.

But the thing about Uber and WeWork is that for every dollar in incremental business, they lose $1.05 or $1.50 or $2.

So this company shows no signs that scale or size would ever result in profitability.

They would fundamentally have to change their business model.

And Uber is showing that doesn't work.

There's There's just a very basic analysis showing that the companies that have lost the most money the year before they go public are generally terrible performing stocks.

And all of a sudden, the market, which is prone to fits of sanity, has kind of sobered up and said, look what happened on Lyft, times that by two, and that's what we're looking at with WeWork.

So WeWork, by the way, great product.

I actually think it's a great, you know, an interesting company.

It's probably worth five or seven billion dollars, but the problem is they've invested $12 billion to build a company worth $5 to $10 billion.

And the market is realizing that.

There's going to be this ripple effect with SoftBank because they have raised money based on debt that was securitized by the value of their stake in WeWork, which they valued at $47 billion.

And the markets are about to remark that debt or that collateral at a much lower price.

So, what happened?

SoftBank has wandered into handing out $200 million checks to everyone in Silicon Valley.

By the way, half that money comes from the Saudis.

We'll get into that in a minute.

Thugs is what I like to call them, from Jamal Khashoggi.

And so this money has sort of changed venture capital in Silicon Valley.

This has been like a crazy time because what happens is someone does a deal that's already crazy and SoftBank walks in with their giant checks and makes it 10 times crazier.

Venture capitals hate, who are never really controlled in Silicon Valley at all.

There's not enough rat holes to shove all the money down there.

But they hate what

SoftBank has been doing.

to the SoftBank's basically come in and blown all the traditional masters of the universe out of the water.

So typically what's been happening is you're the leading something in cloud, and you want to raise 50 million.

And you get a term sheet from a tier one VC and Andrews and Horowitz.

And then SoftBank shows up and says, you are raising money at a valuation of $100 million.

You wanted to raise $50 million, so we get a third of the company.

Tell you what, we'll raise your valuation to $200 million.

We're going to invest $100 million.

And if you don't do this, we're going to the number two space and we're giving them $100 million.

And they're literally blowing every other VC and every other term sheet out of the water.

So they're hugely disruptive.

But what it looks like now is that they've been drunk, that they've been throwing too much money at too high valuations.

And I think we're going to start to see an unwind.

And whenever you have a recession, largest post-war expansion in the history of our economy, 11 years.

Recessions always happen.

That's the bad news.

The good news is they go away.

But we're due.

And it always comes from an area we're not expecting.

And this could be an area.

When we see the information economy start to unwind and implode, that could be be it.

I personally think it's going to be the deficit.

We're not worried about the deficit.

It's ridiculous that we've managed to have the lowest unemployment and the greatest deficit in the history of the country.

That's like hard to do, and we're doing it.

But it could also be SoftBank could be ground zero for the recession.

If all of a sudden all the stuff starts unwinding and all these unicorns start crashing and all these private companies can't get out, there's layoffs in the part of the economy that we thought was going to drive all the innovation.

This could be SoftBank in this story could end up being much bigger than we think.

But people think WeWork might be the moment.

I've gotten so many technologies.

It's the firewall.

Yeah.

Like everyone's going to go just a second, even though it's kind of a relatively silly company in comparison to a lot of them.

But it'll be interesting to see if they go public or not.

You don't think they're going public.

I don't think they get out.

I think the concentral hallucination between companies and the markets is ending.

And this company, it just, this company makes

absolutely no sense.

The governance is terrible.

Does it ruin the IPO market?

There's a lot of people with startups here.

They're trying to get funded.

What would you do if you're in this market as it starts to unwind?

Is it curtains for everybody?

I hope not.

I don't think so.

I think there's a lot of fantastic companies out there, but companies that lose money, here's what's happened, this really weird dynamic.

Amazon invests so hugely invested.

We've never seen a company make those sorts of investments and keep losing money.

But Amazon has positive gross margins.

Amazon was able to create this flywheel effect and spawn these amazing businesses.

But everybody has adopted, not everybody, but a lot of companies have adopted this philosophy that if we just grow, regardless of the losses to fund that growth, we're going to be Amazon and we're going to be funding.

Yeah, they keep calling themselves Amazon.

We're Amazon of.

No, I thought the most outrageous one is they've decided, let's take the names or the words of the most profitable sectors.

So the fastest growing, most profitable sector is the cloud or arguably in software, SaaS.

So they've decided to call themselves Space as a Service, SaaS.

They use the word technology in their prospectus 123 times.

There's no technology at WeWork.

They're a real estate company.

They have an app for meetings.

They've got an app for meeting.

That's right.

They invest long.

We pointed that out to you in an email.

They invest long.

They do 10-year leases.

They do 10-year leases.

They have $43 billion in long-term ability.

Very analog.

$43 billion in long-term obligations.

They'll do $3 billion this year in short-term leases.

What could go wrong?

And there are companies that build nice businesses investing long and then ARBing out short-term rental.

Hertz does that.

They buy a car long-term and they ARB it out short-term to people who just want a car for a day and they make money.

That company trades at 0.2 times revenues.

WeWork is claiming that it's worth 17 times revenues.

Amazon is worth four times revenues.

IWG, its biggest competitor, or the closest analog, Regis.

Remember Regis, it's just bad plants and bad coffee, but it's basically WeWork.

They trade at two times revenues, and they're profitable.

So

do you feel better about the scooter companies?

You know, my beloved scooter companies, didn't they just open?

Didn't they just drop in Brooklyn?

Aren't there scooters in Brooklyn?

Yes, they're coming to Brooklyn.

So, what's I have to be in Brooklyn now a lot, which is interesting, but they're going to bring scooters, which will be a good thing.

So, you scooter.

Break down the scooter world and who wins and who loses.

I think it's an interesting bit because they do, like, they don't have the drivers, they don't have a thing.

They have, if they start to figure out the execution and the usage of these things,

they can do that.

They can be like, I don't know if they'll be worth billions of dollars, but I think the two independent ones I think are really interesting, Lime and Bird.

Lime is run by a really smart guy.

I just did a podcast with him, Joe Krause, and some others there.

And I think it's a real,

the way he explained it, he seemed to convince me, and maybe I'm being stupid, but I really enjoy it.

I use them a lot.

And you can start to see as it's much more sustainable than an Uber or a Lyft, I think, in terms of making money.

I don't think it's worth the crazy amounts they're worth, but.

See, just as a citizen, I think they're a menace and the equivalent equivalent of littering.

I hate cities with scooters.

I think they're everywhere.

Well, get ready, my friend.

Well, I don't agree.

I think it's a great last-mile solution.

You love it.

I've seen you on them, which is kind of a disturbing image.

I'm in Austin, and I see Karricum rolling with her Ray-Bans on the thing.

It's like the weirdest, strangest invasion of an alien force in history.

Here she comes.

I look good.

I look good.

And I like them.

And I wish I could.

I carry my helmet around.

Now, you should wear your helmet, by the way.

Lyme others are trying to innovate in helmets.

That is a big problem, is safety.

Their biggest problem is safety.

I think safety and figuring out the logistics of it.

And

that's, I think, their issue is people hurting themselves.

My brother is always like: if you want to enjoy no elbows, Kara, go right ahead.

He's a doctor.

Anyway, so

speaking of not scooters, I wrote a column this week about Joey Ito of the Media Lab.

An appalling, sexist, horrible story and pedophiles, dirty money.

money.

They had taken money from Jeffrey Epstein, quite a bit of it, and

the head of it, Joey Ito, who I know very well, had to resign from the MIT Media Lab because it had turned out through a story by Ronan Farrow that he tried to cover up

the giving of the money.

And they had given a name to Jeffrey Epstein

within MIT Media Lab, which was Voldemort, he who must not be named, which was just, it just was one appalling detail upon the next for this thing.

And a lot, it turned out a lot of their scientists were hanging out at Jeffrey Epstein's island.

He was involved in a lot of these dinners.

I've been to one or two of them, not with Jeffrey Epstein, thank God.

But

he had just been, he was pervasive within these science and tech communities.

And there's going to be more coming out, I think.

And one of the things that was interesting is that the emails that Ronan surfaced

about

that.

And so one of the things, when I wrote a column in the New York Times, it was pretty tough, Joey, who I've known a long time.

And I get what I wrote was, not every fortune is clean, and is it impossible for every donor or investor or advisor or leader in tech to be perfectly pure?

But if you can't manage to say a hard no to those responsible for the dismemberment of a journalist or to a predator of young girls, I am not sure what to say.

So I was trying to...

It was incredible, though.

I'll tell you, I got a ton of pushback from lots of people in the comments and on I did a live Twitter and they're like, what's wrong with taking money from Jeffrey Epstein if it's for the good?

And I was literally like, he's a pedophile, and you shouldn't take his money.

I feel like that should be the way it is.

And it was really interesting that there was a big debate going on whether to take money from bad people.

But what happened here at the Media Lab was they were covering it up because they knew that taking money from someone who was a convicted sex offender offender was probably a PR problem.

But so, and I'm

arguing here to learn, not to be right.

Yeah, right, sure.

Go back to when he took the money.

They took the money.

Yeah.

He was a guy who was a sex offender.

No, they took it after he was convicted.

Yeah.

But he, quote-unquote, served his time.

Were they cognizant of the additional crimes?

Yes.

No, no, they weren't cognizant.

No, no, but they were cognizant of the crimes.

And it was, I think,

you know, there had been rumors about this guy for a long time.

But he had been, even even that sort of shitty conviction that happened that got overturned

that he was, you know, that's why he was brought to New York to be tried here and he killed himself.

Rest in non-peace, Jeffrey Epstein.

But

he

they were aware of the problem.

And so what was interesting to watch in the emails was how much, how, what links this media lab, which is an important tech,

a lot of big people, my ex-wife is on the is on the advisory.

There's like a dozen, a hundred people in this advisory board.

It's all luminaries and stuff.

Um, she went there.

Um, and what was fascinating was the lengths they went to hide the money this guy was giving.

Yeah.

Um, and I just, I could, I was sort of like, if I, every day I think tech cannot get worse.

And I thought this is just an astonishing display of lack of any kind of judgment.

The same thing, lack of consequences, lack of ethics, lack of care about anything.

And it was sort of like, I was like, I've had it with these people.

Like, this is insane that you have to argue whether it's good or if we're at the, it's sort of like it's reached Trumpian levels.

Like, we have to argue about the weather, or we have to argue about

that kind of stuff.

We've reached a really weird place, I think.

And now he had to resign, obviously, and we'll see who they put in his place.

But I think this thing goes a lot further because a lot of these dinners that Jeffrey Epstein was at, organized by another group called theEdge.org, which he had given a ton of money to,

You know, you had Gates there, you had Sergey Brin, you had Larry Page, you had Marissa Mayer.

They all sort of were, not to like, they didn't hang out with Epstein all the time, but it's just like a really interesting, sort of weird,

very male-centered

environment where things just get passed over.

And it was, you know, there was clear, there was clearly

very few women, very few people of color, very few, very few diversity.

It was sort of this weird little club.

And he managed to take his reputation and rewash it.

So, anyway, I wonder if the bigger story, I don't know if this is as much a negative indicator on tech as it is on higher education.

Yeah.

And that is, in the U.S., there's a direct correlation between your ranking as a university and the size of your endowment.

So, I know this firsthand.

You're at NYU, Scott is at NYU.

There's tremendous pressure to be raising money all the time.

And you can see how these people,

institutions would rationalize, you know, weaken to ethics to raise more and more money.

And I think it all kind of reverse engineers down to this really terrible gestalt in the world of academia, where we no longer see ourselves as public servants, we see ourselves as luxury brands.

And we want to raise billions and billions of dollars, but we don't want to expand our freshman seats.

So Stanford has tripled the applicants for its freshman class, but they refuse to expand the number of seats each year such that people like me can stand up in faculty meetings and listen to our dean say we rejected 90% of our applicants and say it with pride, which in my view is tantamount to a homeless shelter bragging that they turned away 90%

of the people who showed up last night.

Money has totally, money and prestige has totally invaded

academia.

And we no longer, we think of ourselves as luxury brands.

We've totally lost the script as opposed to public servants.

And it's a race to become the Vuitton or whatever the premier luxury brand is.

And

we need to totally shift, in my view.

I think we should start taxing endowments unless you grow your seats faster than population.

And we need to dramatically expand the number of seats.

It will be interesting to see what happens at these companies, but it really does sort of, it's not just MIT, it's Harvard.

All of them.

Stanford, USC keeps getting dragged into one horrible story after the next.

And so what's interesting is a lot of these places are centers of tech or certain like that, where it's sort of,

you know, you sort of wonder, to me, the biggest question is what kind of influence did Epstein have?

And he had some weird ideas about genetics,

you know, because he wanted to actually use his sperm to create more Epsteins, which is horrible.

But

how much did it influence the actual science itself by who's funding it?

And so it's the same idea of why are we taking our cues from very wealthy tech people?

And I think Anand Giergaardos talks about this:

why do we go to someone like Mark Zuckerberg and let him determine how education should be reformed?

Why don't we just tax him and then we decide?

100%.

That's fascinating.

Anyway, that's an interesting question.

Why is space exploration and the cure of infectious disease now the domain or the sole domain of rich people?

Yeah.

I want NASA putting us in space, not fucking Elon Musk.

Yeah.

Why?

So it's very simple.

And

I'm a capitalist.

You know, I don't, I've started companies.

I think it's important that we have billionaires.

It's literally onto the point.

Should we have people worth the GDP of Norway?

Does that make any sense?

Yeah.

And so all of these unbelievable, inspiring things that we used to pull together around government, it has so many negative consequences because we can't pull together as a people, right?

Curing disease is something we can all get and we can respect our government.

We can all feel a collective investment in that.

Putting a man on the moon is something we can all get behind.

Now we've all got to worship at the, I call it the Pablo Escobar effect.

He built parks.

He cared about Colombia.

Is that where we are?

That only people who get money, you know, through what I think is fairly rapacious behavior and a lot of genius, they're the ones that build the parks because the rest of us can't afford it.

We are becoming that nation.

Yep, I would agree with you.

I don't think they should determine anything.

All right, we need to take a quick break.

We'll be back with more live pivot in just a moment.

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Okay, Scott, let's get back to Pivot at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit in New York City.

So let's get to winners and losers.

I'm going to do the first win.

Yeah.

Obviously, Chrissy Teigen's Twitter feud with President Trump.

Whatever you do, don't make hashtag president pussy ash bitch a trend.

In the middle of the night, Trump tweeted about how John Legend and his, quote, filthy mouth wife had not given enough credit for his work in just criminal justice reform, but he messed with the wrong woman, obviously.

Chrissy Teigen is an expert tweeter, and she called him a pussy ass bitch.

And that's where we are in our presidential day.

Nice.

And he was busy with the Alabama stuff going on for a long time, and then she got his attention.

Yeah,

that's where we are.

Yeah, so she's a winner.

She's a winner.

I love Chrissy Teagan.

I think she's a great tweeter.

I think she's funny, and she manages to, she doesn't keep it clean, that's not true, but I think she does a great job.

And I kind of am fascinated by his continued attacks, trying to best her, which is going to end in tears for Donald Trump.

So that's my win.

What's your win?

Let's hope so.

My win is California,

is it the state legislature, the state senate at AB5, saying that independent contractors or Uber driver partners, which is Latin for no health insurance, no minimum wage protection, they've decided that if you, they've reclassified what it means to be an independent contractor.

And they've said, okay, to be an independent contractor, you have control of your own time.

You have to kind of have your own business.

And Uber drivers or partners could qualify as that, but you also can't be offering the service that is core to the business.

And it's going to be very difficult for Uber to argue that the drivers aren't core to the business.

And this is an enormous victory.

If you see union memberships been cut in half,

and it's it's pretty straight math.

Everybody complains about the fact, or we're like,

how did we get to this point where the bottom 50% of America has about the same wealth as seven families in America?

And it's a direct correlation to the kind of the absolute shit kicking that unions have had and the fact that we haven't really had a minimum wage raise in about 30 years.

So this is, I'd like to think that this is a firewall, that this is us saying that.

Gavin Newsom, who just signed it into law, Uber says it doesn't apply to them or is making the argument that it doesn't apply to their contractors.

Oh, they've already funded,

significantly funded, they've allocated $20 or $30 million along with some other companies, DoorDash, et cetera, to fight this and take it to the Supreme Court.

But it's time.

I mean, it's absolutely time for

workers to rise up and for us to get to the bottom of the city.

Well, it's also ruining their business plans even further.

And one of the best interviews I've ever done in terms of getting getting someone to say something just awful,

which is my goal in every interview,

was when Travis Kalanik, who was the previous CEO and one of the founders of Uber, I asked him what, I said, you know, your business has some financial difficulties in getting profitable.

And he goes, well, you know, when

we, the problem I have is that guy in the front seat, I'd like to get rid of him.

Yeah, he's the cost.

He's a cost.

And once I get rid of him, I have a great business.

And I was like, what?

And the whole audience went, what?

And I'm like, like you say, go on.

And he just, it was fascinating for him to admit,

because he was evil, and that's what a villain does in a Bond movie.

So I'm going to kill you now, Mr.

Bond, by cutting you with a laser in six parts.

So it was really interesting, but I think that they are not going to be able to outrun this.

Do you?

I don't think they will.

No, I don't know.

Unless they get rid of the guy in the front seat, really.

Yeah, and

let's go to our losers.

The losers.

Losers.

So

this is a Los Anna win.

I think Amazon and Twitter, with continued lack of regard for the Commonwealth, the Business Roundtable put out this wordy statement saying it's no longer just about shareholders, it's about stakeholders.

And 50, 70, 80 years ago, companies were evaluated.

It was prestigious to have a lot of employees.

That was prestigious.

It was prestigious to be seen as a really good citizen.

It's paying your people well.

Those were signs.

Those were markers, not just your share price.

People probably had a stronger view of the company based on those things and didn't know what the share price is.

And we've seen Twitter basically file suit in San Francisco refusing to pay that tax

going after that.

I think that's a big lose.

And I think also Amazon, you want to talk about heroes, and I brought this up a lot.

Amazon supposedly got very angry at questions around unionization and the pushback they got from local officials here in New York.

And so they they quote unquote took their ball and went home and they pulled out of New York.

Remember that?

That was six months ago.

Yeah.

LinkedIn is amazing.

You can go on LinkedIn and you can scrape data and you get a ton of insight.

Apple has about 15 or 20 open job positions.

Google, 100 open job positions in New York.

Amazon has 800 open job positions in New York right now.

In the last six months, since Amazon pulled out, they've increased their hiring.

They've hired 1,000 people at Amazon in the last six months.

They've hired 500 people at AWS.

That means they are on pace to bring those 25,000 jobs, right?

Why?

Because Jeff Bezos was always coming here.

A 54-year-old man with $160 billion wants to roll in New York, not Indianapolis or Denver or Columbus, Ohio.

That was ridiculous to begin with.

And guess what?

They are bringing those jobs here to the greatest city in the world.

And you know what?

That guy had to put his fucking hand back in his pocket.

AOC state senator Giannara saved us all $3 billion by saying, you know what, boss?

You're coming here.

This is the greatest place in the world we do not need to pay you for your midlife crisis this is a huge victory for us

I love when you go all AOC on me it's really nice

not so much when you go other ways but I like AOC but it's true absolutely true they didn't we don't need to pay them like the idea that we that we subsidize I don't know about all of you I'm paying a lot to be here yeah aren't you paying a lot you pay to be in New York you're right exactly all right my fail is Trump tweeting, all this tweeting about Alabama, the tweeting about running in the election for 2024.

And don't you just love when presidents talk about subverting the Constitution,

which is just Wednesday for us in the United States anymore.

And that, you know, the whole Alabama thing, it was insanity.

The only thing I was sort of like didn't know how to feel about was the whole John Bolton tweets because I hate John Bolton.

So I was like, who do I vote for here?

Like, who do I root for?

Like, you know what what I mean?

Like, I'm like, he's out.

I really think Trump's an asshole, but that guy is a real, he's been a persistent asshole for 20 years.

So it's a real, it was an interesting thing, that was my thing.

But this, the tweeting about this is not, it's really weird.

I think looking at his mental illness is something we need, well, we know this already, but I think it needs to be taken seriously by journalists to start to.

Can I have a second win?

I think there's a lot of good things going on right now.

I'm really hopeful.

And I'm not mad.

All right.

And then we're going to go to questions for you.

I hate my life less and less every day.

But the repudiation of Boris Johnson

bypassing Parliament.

Yeah.

So

he lied to the Queen.

One of the things I don't like about being a Democrat, or I don't like about us, is I think we're wimps.

So Fox Talks has a wee called socialism versus capitalism.

They're constantly calling us socialists.

And I think it's time we started saying, you know what, now?

We're not socialists.

As a matter of fact, the worst type of socialism is cronyism, which is happening on the other side.

I think we need to say no, and I'm hoping that we're having sort of a reverse D-Day when the British Parliament, when the Conservative Party there, 23 members defect and go to the other side, which we haven't seen among Republicans here, with this what I'll call soft fascism.

And let's be clear, this is a soft form of fascism.

Fascism is nationalism, demonizing immigrants, a refusal to condemn violence.

And that, to me, perfectly describes some of the actions that are happening across the extremist right wing in Europe and the U.S.

So yeah, you call me a socialist.

No, no, boss, you're the fascist.

And Britain just said no.

And I hope that begins to infect us.

Will we start to push back on a president who's taking money out of our defense budget

without a discussion or legislation or any sort of discourse with our legislative body?

And Boris Johnson tried to do the same thing in the UK, and they said, not here, boss.

And we need to do the same thing here.

We need less fascism.

I like you in a lesbian.

You've gone full lesbian, which is really nice.

I wish that lesbian Lindsey Graham would do that.

That's good.

What?

Come on.

That's good.

That's good.

Literally, I'm like, I think everyone has the photos or something that's going on there.

Anyway,

come on.

Let's go.

We're going to have questions from the audience.

All right, Mary Ann in the audience, I don't know where you are.

What can large tech platforms, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera, do to protect vulnerable communities while not accidentally preventing members of the community from reclaiming what used to be hateful slurs?

What can they do?

Do you want to go first?

No, you go.

I think as long as there's a dollar bill at the end of it, they're not going to.

I don't think we can expect we can call on their better angels.

I think they've shown a masterful delay in obfuscation with like a faux concern.

And we continue to see that

here's the problem, the underlying business model and the algorithms.

As a species, we like to think we're a generous, empathetic people, and there's a large vein of that, but we're more tribal than we are generous or empathetic.

And we're very drawn to violence and conflict.

And it's the ultimate business model to create a model where advertising gets to target conflict.

So when we talk about engagement on these platforms, what we really mean is enragement.

So there's an economic interest in letting anti-vaxx go on and talk about this stuff without stepping in and saying, you know what, this is not only not true, it could potentially be very harmful.

It could result in an outbreak of meningitis or what have you.

And so

they will always default to, well, okay, rage and hate.

We're worried about it.

We're concerned about it.

But don't get in the way of it.

So the bottom line is we need legislation.

We pay 23 cents on the dollar to DC and to our state governments such that they can prevent a tragedy of the commons.

And these companies will never make that connection.

So what we need to do are elect officials that hold them to the same standards and scrutiny we've held other industries and companies.

But folks, they're not going to get there on their own.

When it's raining money,

your vision gets blurred.

Absolutely.

I agree with you on that one.

All right.

What will happen to Lyft and Uber drivers?

Because you do predictions mostly.

So what will happen to Lyft and Uber drivers?

Well, I think all of us probably need to take fewer Ubers.

You know, I don't know.

I don't know if it makes sense for a professor to be taking a suburban or whatever I'm going to be taking for 80 bucks.

I should probably be angry that it takes so long to get to the airports and vote for people and be willing to pay taxes such that there's public transportation to these places, you know, like they've done in Europe for the last 50 years.

Right.

So I'd like to think the workers get a little bit more dignity, the wages go up, that we go to minimum wage.

By the way, remember

all the fear-mongering about what happens if you raise minimum wage to 15 bucks?

Yeah.

That hasn't panned out anywhere.

No.

Hasn't panned out anywhere.

So

I hope just across the board, the gig workers and everybody else just that this California legislation goes national.

Yeah.

Do you think it's going to have

to be?

I do.

I think, you know, it's interesting.

I did have a discussion with Gavin Newsom when he was lieutenant governor and he didn't have anything to do all day, so he'd have lunch with me.

We talked about this a lot, this idea of reclassifying workers and creating a new kind of worker.

So I do think this, I think California, I'll be writing about this next week in the New York Times, is really the de facto national legislator for everything,

whether it's a privacy bill, whether it's the AB5, with the CAR deal, the deals they're making with CAR.

So, I think, in a weird way, Gavin Newsom and the Senate there is determining a lot of our regulations for tech.

And Marguerite Vestiger, who just got a giant job, she got quantumly more scary for, which she's fancy, she's a badass, speaking of badass women.

Who here is in a union?

Anyone here in a union?

When I was, I went to UCLA.

I was.

was, I was, at the journal, the journal in the Washington Post.

I'm not now.

So junior year at UCLA, every summer at UCLA, I had basically 12 weeks to make $2,300 so I could afford to go back to school.

And I worked as a box boy at San Vicente Foods.

And this guy took an interest in me, and he said, do this, do this, or this.

And he had me fill out a bunch of paperwork.

And he said, it's going to cost you $80 up front.

I'm like, I don't have $80.

He's like, we're putting you in the union.

And I went from $4 an hour to $11 an hour.

Like someone taking an interest in me and the power of unions.

And by the way, everybody seemed to be fine shopping in Bel Air at San Vicente Foods.

And it literally paid for my junior year of college, was somebody saying

there's dignity and work, and anyone who shows up here and packs other people's groceries should get paid $8 or $9 an hour in 1986 as opposed to $4 an hour.

And so I got through my junior year of college, and I think that needs to happen across millions of households.

We need to raise, I mean, I'm really on my soapbox now, but I think it's, I would really love to see a reinvigoration of unions.

Well it's interesting that it's happening actually at internet media companies.

What's that?

There's been unionization efforts more anywhere else than, well, lots, but internet media companies.

Vox went unionized.

They're obviously working on it BuzzFeed and Vice News and stuff like that.

So it's a really interesting time because it's the media companies that are doing that, the internet media companies.

And I know it was a struggle at Vox, but they ultimately came to a deal with the unions.

And it was interesting.

But I also did,

I'm not in the designation now for the VOGS union,

but it's an interesting trend.

We'll see.

Unions have been so kneecapped, it's kind of hard to imagine that.

All right, last two, 2020 tech IPO predictions.

Scott Galloway.

The biggest IPO or the most successful IPO of 2020 is going to be Airbnb.

Airbnb.

Yeah.

And we're going to see.

Are you bullish on this one?

Are you going to be able to get this?

Airbnb is a gangster.

Airbnb is an incredible concept because with Uber, Uber has no moats.

The core business has low margins.

Airbnb is the exact opposite.

You have to have global supply.

That means you have to have people who know about Airbnb coming in from Copenhagen and Tokyo, so it has an incredible moat.

It's well run.

You like the CEO and the Airbus.

I do very much.

They have issues around what they do to cities and removing rental properties at big cities, but in general,

he's very aware of these things.

And he's not just saying,

what I don't get from him is I get a really strong and interesting discussion, and you can really shame him, which is always helpful.

But I find I don't get a you know, we'll do better.

Yeah, we've made some mistakes, but we'll do better.

What kind of internet do we want?

What kind of internet do we want?

First Amendment

without knowing what the First Amendment is.

And then it's easier to pick the losers: Uber, Uber, Lyft, Tesla, Beyond Meat, all down 20 to 80 percent in 2020.

How about you?

What do you think?

I think Airbnb.

Airbnb.

Maybe Pinterest.

Yeah.

We'll see.

You think they'll do well, Pinterest?

I have no idea.

Yeah, Pinterest.

Yeah, you have to do it.

I haven't paid attention to them in years.

They've done well.

Pinterest is actually.

Pinterest.

All right.

Thank you so much.

This is Pivot.

Scott Galloway, our Lesbro.

Thank you very much.

Scott, always lovely to see you in person.

And thanks to Lesbians Who Tech for inviting us.

Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis and Eric Johnson.

Eric Anderson is Pivot's executive producer.

Thanks also to Rebecca Castro, Drew Burroughs, and Nishat Kirwa.

Thanks again to Lesbians Who Tech for having us.

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We'll be back next week with another breakdown of all things tech and business.