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Hey, everyone, this is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

And you've been so bad, you've been good.

And it's time for an extra episode because you've earned it.

You're welcome.

We met up in New York City in front of a live audience.

Scott managed not to get killed by someone to do an extra unfiltered episode, so it's very lively.

I don't know.

Did you see the audience?

I would call it sort of live.

Okay.

Let's get to it.

Live from New York.

It's Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.

Boom!

So, Scott, we're here live in New York.

We are.

It's great to see you, Kara.

It's very warm here.

It's very hot and stuff like that.

So you've been away.

I was away.

We were both on vacation, although we did a couple of pivots.

But there's so much news.

There is.

I'm not sure where to stop.

But how is your vacation going?

I left the shark zone of Cape Cod.

How are you still doing?

You mean Amityville?

Yes.

Look, I'm a wreck, and I've been

once swimming in the pool.

Right, I got that.

I got that.

But it's how you get in the pool unless it's like a James Bond.

By the way, James Bond is coming back for the 25th film.

It was announced today.

Move along.

Back to me.

All right, okay.

Sorry.

You and Shark, go ahead.

So fear, right?

It's not about the agent of fear.

It's about the delivery, right?

So we all know the stats about sharks.

No.

But

the idea...

Well, the bottom line is about 30 times as many people will die having a vending machine fall on them and crush them this year than be eaten by a shark.

But I would rather,

much rather, like have a vending machine crush me

than have So death by Twix bar is preference.

I learned to surf in the Bay Area and then a kid had a chunk of his leg taken off by a great white, and they said, don't worry in surfing lessons, because what happens is the shark, the great white, mistakes you for a seal, takes you into his mouth, and then realizing you're not a seal, spits you out.

I would rather die than have that experience.

Wouldn't you just rather have a seal come up to you with an AK-47?

At some point, seals are going to have access to AK-47s.

and just kill you before actually having a great white clamp down on you in that moment of decision.

Is this my food food chain or not?

Anyway, so Amityville fucking sucked.

I'm glad to be back.

All right.

Back to you.

All right, thank you.

So, you know, there are some stories.

I was looking at, there's a debate, should locals deploy buoys or drones to detect sharks?

There's all kinds of things if they should get rid of the seals.

What should happen?

Is there a tech solution to the shark situation?

Yeah, they kill the seals and the sharks.

Okay, all right.

Scott.

Oh, no.

In any case, Scott, there's lots of news for us to talk about.

I want to talk about just briefly something I tweeted today that got a lot of attention.

What was that, Carol?

It was a photograph of

a white dude not getting up for a pregnant lady on the subway.

And it set off a frigging firestorm on, and I said you might want to look up and see this.

pregnant person in front of you.

And so it was really interesting because all the women had a million stories of this, anyone who's been pregnant, including myself, of people not getting up and who got up for you and who didn't get up for you.

And so there was a lot of ire towards this man who wouldn't get up.

And at the same time, there was a whole pastel of men who were like, one, why didn't you just ask?

Why didn't you know, why don't you just say something?

Like to the person on the phone.

And the second one is, how do you like gender equality now?

And I'm not sure how that has anything to do with getting up for people in distress.

And the other one was, what was the third one?

I've never seen it.

Men always get up for women on buses.

So just as general advice to men here, you should just, as a rule, never assume, unless you see the head crowning, that a woman is pregnant.

So

it's just going to lead somewhere bad.

Oh,

it's clearly going to be a girl.

And they're like, what?

Secondly, it sounds like your friend has committed broken the rule.

Like, what happens on the subway, like Vegas, stays on the subway.

No, no, not that.

You're one of the few people that actually read that sign that says, if you see something, say something.

No, don't say a fucking thing.

We're on the subway.

All right?

And you think that's the worst thing that's happened to you on the subway?

This is no joke.

I'm on the R-train six months ago and a man begins masturbating.

And that is not the most disturbing part of this disturbing story.

He catches my eye and you know what he says?

Scott?

Absorb that for a moment.

Absorb what I'm thinking.

When I know the R-train masturbator.

And I'm like, oh shit, it's Steve from Hot Yoga.

So, yeah, okay.

Guy doesn't get up for a pregnant woman, blah, blah, blah.

I know Steve, the masturbator on the R-Train.

Thank you, Tri-Nets.

All right.

I'm not sure how to recover from that one, except to say, what do you think of shaming on Twitter?

Which people accuse me of shaming someone on Twitter.

This is about to take a turn for the much more serious.

I was in Rwanda, and I'm fascinated with death and genocide.

I'm like, you know, I just want at night, the way I relax is I watch Netflix documentaries about the crimes against humanity that we've levied against each other.

And they have this process in Rwanda post-genocide.

They're like, if there's any way to exact equivalent revenge, we're just never going to recover as a society.

So they have this process by which people come into a village where people have killed perpetrators or genociders, I think as they call them.

and they ask what can be done to forgive this person and reintegrate them.

And it's kind of this long process.

And I think the only way we're going to get past the shaming culture where all of us do everything that's on our permanent file and there's an industry that, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the media is attracted towards violence and conflict and the potential to shame each other is if we also develop some sort of process for reintegrating and forgiving people.

Because the thing I love about being an academic, and I think there's a lesson to be taken here, is that academics, our goal, or what we're supposed to do, is we're supposed to provoke and challenge people and say offensive things in the pursuit of truth.

But we can't do that.

My career would have been over if I didn't have the suffix or the prefix of professor.

Because I've said some not only provocative things, I've said some stupid things that are wrong.

And the wonderful thing about academia is you're given license to do that.

And at some point we have to provide that blanket and that process for reintegration back into society as opposed to just being gotcha all the God knows.

Well, here's the thing though.

Charlie Wurzel wrote about that today in the New York Times, actually.

I think it's called something justice.

Does someone know who that is?

Retribution justice, or something like that, where you bring, what they did is they took three people on a

Reddit area on Christianity, and they were three people who

were constant offenders.

And one was against gays and lesbians, one was an atheist, and the other, just an asshole, I think.

And it didn't work with

two of them.

They did not get nicer.

And what they did is they brought them into these groups and had them discuss the stuff.

And the gay and lesbian guy was just terrible as usual and didn't care.

The only one that worked was one, and he said, I didn't realize I was being an asshole.

It turns out I was the one causing the problems.

So it's really sort of an artisanal way of getting people to stop.

And when you have the internet, which is so amplified, which continues to iterate, iterate, iterate, it's really hard to be able to not do that.

And you see that sort of almost constantly, which I will turn to our first news story, which was this week, President Trump continued in his typically inaccurate quotes talking about Google shifting the election.

And he said, millions of votes were shifted by Google

based on a disputed report that was very disputed.

It was based on 21 people.

And the guy who created the report was like, that's not what I meant to say.

And it simply was about Google putting a vote now button on the homepage, which they were saying that Democrats would respond to it better than Republicans, apparently, by just suggesting voting.

And so it was a really interesting thing that he did this.

And then Hillary Clinton responded, which was interesting, saying, in context, this was a disputed report and it was just 21 people, which is about, I think, in context, about half as many people have been indicted in your administration, which I thought was genius.

She's sort of sitting over there going, yeah, today's the day.

And

so it was interesting.

So I called him a liar today on Morning Joe, that this is a lie.

This is a thing.

Of the many things Google manipulates, and of which there are many, this is not one of them.

But Trump is sort of on this Google is treason, Google is this, and stuff like that.

What do you think about that?

Well, you've written about this.

And we know people, all of us know people at Google and Facebook.

And if you know these people and you know their priorities and you know the approach they take and the consult they take at work, they don't lean left, they don't lean right, they lean down.

They're uber capitalists.

They've promoted and taken ads from people paying in rubles, and they just look down and ignore it because they're uber capitalists, which some people see as a good thing.

In addition, if you go one level deeper, the genius of Google and Facebook as platforms is that they're impossible to master.

Can anybody here name a company that's developed long-term sustainable advantage through the mastery of Google or Facebook?

Nike developed tens of billions of dollars in advantage mastering television as a medium.

William Sonoma created billions of dollars in shareholder value, sustainable competitive advantage, mastering the medium of catalogs.

There hasn't been a single company nor a political party that has mastered these platforms to their advantage.

Their genius is they democratize the tools and best practices such that they have not become tools.

They've become taxes everybody has to pay.

Everybody gets out a little bit ahead.

Oh, I have a gym.

I bought some Google keywords.

It worked for a little while.

Then the gym across the street bought them because I have a series of salespeople who share all best practices, all industry advantage to create what is the ultimate tax on our economy.

And that is, if you wanted the mother of all tax cuts, you would ban all advertising from Facebook and Google.

So you're saying they're like arms dealers, which is what I've called them, like arms dealers of the digital age.

They're perfectly egalitarian platforms.

It doesn't matter how good you are, right?

You can't, remember how Burberry was supposed to be the digital brand?

Instagram, yeah.

And guess what?

Everyone caught up.

So their genius isn't that they're tools that create advantage.

They're essentially a tax.

You don't use this to gain advantage.

You use this because they've become table stakes and you have to be on Google and Facebook, which for my mind means they're no longer tools.

They're just taxes.

So they're not treasonous.

They're not what?

Treasonous.

So first off.

Well, they're not treasonous.

I'm just repeating.

Yeah, I don't think.

Look, if at some point you'd like to think that people have enough concern for the Commonwealth that they would decide, all right, rather than letting our platform be weaponized by Russians and our platform gets perverted and we probably elect an illegitimate president, and this illegitimate president appoints people to the Supreme Court who are slowly but surely eroding a woman's rights to safe family planning.

And then, in order to put that lipstick on that cancer, we send out someone telling women to lean in.

You'd think at some point they would connect the dots.

Oh, trust me, it's going to get worse.

You think at some point someone would connect the dots and go, okay, maybe we do in fact decide that we have some regard for the Commonwealth and that this constant virtue signaling wrapped in a hypocrisy sandwich.

Somebody at some point will say enough.

Hasn't happened.

The FTC's chairman said maybe the merging of Instagram, WhatsApp may have been a tactic to keep from breaking it up, which is sort of no shit kind of thing.

Well, here's the issue, and this goes a little bit to a story from the business roundtable today.

We can wait for better angels to call on the leaders of these organizations.

We can wait for consumers to wake up and decide they don't want that little black dress for $9.99, which by virtue of a little black dress being $9.99 means there's unethical supply chain behavior.

Don't hold your breath.

The reason we elect officials and pay 23 cents on the dollar is we want them to prevent a tragedy of the commons and think long term.

And they're supposed to regulate these companies because a better business model is for automobile manufacturers to pour mercury into the rivers.

A better business model is to delay and obfuscate and continue to take ads from Russians and anyone who will pay for this business model that divides our society.

The Facebook fine of $5 billion, that was almost perfect.

It was missing a zero.

If the FTC had fined Facebook $50 billion, the next day every media platform in this nation would have been, okay, shit just got real, we got to figure this out.

And the brightest minds in the world, be clear, would have figured this out.

Instead, they were high-fiving each other because the amount of the fine was surpassed by their stock going up.

We have implicitly told every one of these companies that the shareholder-driven thing to do, the smart thing to do, is to break the law.

If there was a parking meter in front of this building that cost $100 every 15 minutes, but the parking ticket was 25 cents, everyone in this room would break the law.

Everyone in here is capitalists.

3% of you will build wells in Africa, will be good people.

The rest of us will focus on fixing our own mass first.

But we will pay 23 cents on the dollar and hope that politicians think for us long term, which they are not doing.

Which they are not doing.

But are the business leaders doing that?

So this week, the business roundtable, which is led by Jamie Diamond, pledged to uphold stakeholder values, including employees, the environment, consumers, and various and sundry people.

Is this a new dawn of capitalist philosophy?

This is something I interviewed Shoshano Zuboff from Harvard, who wrote a book called Surveillance Capitalism, which is all about the shift to shareholder focus in the past two decades, essentially.

Milton Friedman was a big part of that.

What did you think of this?

Why did they suddenly do this?

Because Jamie Dime isn't someone that strikes me as friendly to anybody but Jamie Dimon.

Well, it's self-preservation.

I'm kind of misreading the situation.

Look, it's self-preservation because when income inequality traditionally throughout history gets to these levels, people show up with pitchforks and they start killing rich people.

And so at some point, the wealthy people have to decide that it's in our best interests to not have this level of income inequality.

And the idea of stakeholder value isn't a new one.

No, it's an old one.

There are a lot of CEOs who have approached business this way.

But here's the problem.

Okay, so the guy, this is literally like arsonists talking about putting out fires.

Right?

Oh, it's Jamie Dimon who is going to collect $123 million in fees from WeWork to flee feces on the retail investors visiting the Unicorn Zoo when he takes WeWork public.

Oh,

oh, but we need to act more ethically.

Yeah, he makes $31 million a year.

Google now has more temps, $121,000, than full-time employees, $102,000 of which they don't provide any benefits.

And they can't even go to the best cafeteria there with the finest kombucha.

There's more free corporate freelance, contract workers, gig workers everywhere.

So, why did they do this?

This is just essentially bullshit.

I'm feeling that that's what your mood is.

Look, words matter, and the zeitgeist in our nation around this notion that shareholder value beyond anything, so it's worth repeating that we have stakeholders, not just shareholders.

So, I do think there's some positive value.

But at the end of the day, you have to have federally mandated $15 an hour minimum wage because no firm wants to disarm unilaterally.

When you have a capital gains tax that is half as regular income tax, we've decided that wealthy people should have more incentive to cheat than people just making money vis-a-vis salary.

When you get to this point of income inequality, what you're doing is we've created all these incentives that say as you get wealthier, the incentives to cheat become greater as opposed to lesser.

Also, there's very few disincentives.

Who went to jail from the financial crisis?

Who's going to go to jail from the weaponizations of the greatest experiment or the perversion of the greatest experiment in history?

And that is democracy.

Who's going to go to jail?

Would you put Facebook in jail?

Bombas.

I don't know.

I'm not,

that's not, that wouldn't be appropriate for me to comment on.

Why not?

I just, I don't.

I mean, it would be inappropriate.

You literally are close to making 17 possibly questionable remarks.

Yeah, I don't know if anybody's, anybody's, I'm choosing my words very carefully.

I don't know if anyone's broken the law.

I think the guilty party is not Mark Zuckerberg or Shell Stamberg.

I think the guilty party is us who have decided not to put in place the laws that have regulated companies in the past.

Is there any sign that that's going to happen right now?

Yeah, they're being broken up.

I think the breakup of big tech has started.

All right, who's the first one to go?

Well, what do you think?

I've been doing all the talking.

That's our relationship.

I prompt you.

I actually kind of like it.

It feels like Gene Martin and Jerry Lewis, essentially.

You know how that's going to end.

You don't like to admit this, but our relationship is much deeper than that.

Really?

Much deeper than that.

No, it's not.

Anyways.

I have other boyfriends, so to speak.

This is getting so awkward.

I know, it's true.

All right.

I think they're going to pull Instagram off of Facebook.

I think that's probably what I'd be.

Yeah, but as or YouTube off of Google.

As we've talked, so so what is Mark Zuckerberg trying to do?

And this is literally, there was a disturbance in the force a couple weeks ago, and every marketing professor in Europe and North America had a grand mall seizure when Mark Zuckerberg said that he was doing away with essentially WhatsApp and Instagram as independent brands.

And it was going to be WhatsApp by Facebook and Instagram by Facebook, which was literally like Boeing announcing, I know, let's call the triple seven the triple seven MAX because the 737 Max is going so well.

Or if all of a sudden they said, I know, let's do Porsche by Volkswagen because we own it.

I mean, this was literally heresy.

And what this comes down to is it's another reflection of the fact that the era of brand, the sun has passed midday, where these incredible assets called brand that create tens of billions in shareholder value have ceded way to the monopoly era, which are worth hundreds of billions.

So you'd rather sacrifice these unbelievable brands called WhatsApp and Instagram in order to decrease the likelihood, even 1%, that we get our monopoly broken up.

So I think this was actually a brilliant move, but it's another reflection that Don Draper has not only been dead, he's been drawn and quartered.

We have left the brand era, and we are now in the monopoly era.

And what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do is conjoin triplets such that when the FDC and DOJ move in, he can say, wait, you're ruining American business and capitalism because if we're going to separate these triplets, you're going to kill all of us.

So he's trying to conjoin them as quickly as possible.

I'm disappointed that the DOJ and the FTC didn't go on background and say, look, boss, whatever you decide to do, be clear, we can break your ass up.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I think it will be probably Google and YouTube.

If I had a pick right now, Google and YouTube.

Spin of YouTube.

Yeah, spin of YouTube.

It makes a lot of sense.

It's, you know, we'll see.

There have been some troubles at Google lately and running it and some lot of sort of negative articles about their management.

So I think moving YouTube off is a smart thing.

Yeah, you've always thought.

And the logic is there are 93% here.

think about process that the there's some incredible research coming up about the notion of process and how we make decisions right Kahneman and a bunch of other interesting behavioral economists what's the most important process in the world is it when a solar flare comes off that 90 million you know mile diameter ball of radiation that creates all life is it the moment of conception that creates so much controversy which is obviously a wonderful thing Or is it the moment when intention becomes action?

When you go from from someone who's upset about your government and you type in overthrow government into Google, is the first search return you get a voter registration form or is it instructions on how to build a dirty bomb?

One firm controls 93% of those decisions.

And one of the keys to a healthy society is checks and balances.

That we have diversity of opinions.

that someone's saying, no, that's not the first search decision they should see.

It's someone else.

So we have outsourced 93%.

If you don't think Google is your God, as society has become more educated and wealthy, their reliance on a super being, or as I like to call it, an invisible friend goes down.

But our void of questions goes up.

And so who do we return?

Who's our new God?

Google's our God.

Well, I don't know if God.

I would say it's the database of human intentions, if you want to think about it, because what you type into it matters.

You know, years ago, and Google doesn't do this anymore, but if you went to Google's headquarters, you would see a constant, now they put them on steps for visiting potentates.

But what they would do is they put the searches that were happening in real time.

They removed the porn ones, which were quite a bit, apparently.

I've never searched those.

And they would put what people were searching in real time.

And you'd sort of sit there.

I used to have to wait for Larry and Sergei to finish their Pilates for the day.

And it would be like

horses,

wrenches,

caftans.

And you're like, what does that person want?

Like, I would sit there and say, what do they want?

Like, what is their intention?

What are they looking for?

Some of them were very typical, which was the news of the day.

But it was really fascinating.

I used to think literally it's a database of all human intentions and what they want to do.

And what the really interesting part of it was, they also had this globe.

I've told this story before, but it was really fascinating.

They had a globe, it was a 3D globe at the time.

A 3D was not something that was around super early.

And what would happen is light would go off the globe, and the amount of questions that people were asking Google would be the amount of light coming off of a certain area.

And it would depend on the date, time, and day, and stuff like that.

But the whole world was super glowing.

And you know, the United States and the cities were lots of questions, the Midwest almost took.

It was fascinating to see.

It was really interesting.

No, it was.

It was like, whoa, there's not asking questions.

So it's all about people who weren't asking questions and who were asking questions.

And which I found fascinating.

When you spun the globe around, though, because they didn't have have linkages to the internet, Africa was actually dark.

Like you did, no light except in tiny little areas, Kenya, a little bit in Kenya, a little bit down in South Africa.

But they had very little light coming off.

And it was really interesting because I remember sitting there, and one of the two of them came over.

I'm like, this is really fascinating.

And one of them, and I cannot tell them apart, was like,

Do you think they're not asking questions

in these countries or is this because they can't?

And it was the one time I thought, oh my God, they're actually thoughtful.

And it was a really interesting question, but I do, I agree with you.

It's not God, but it's a database of intelligence.

It's 100% our God.

All right.

Be clear.

Anyone who has kids, anyone who has kids has prayed.

You have your world of work.

You have your world of stuff.

Something comes off the tracks with one of your kids.

You get religion.

You start praying.

Will my kid be all right?

And what is a prayer?

A prayer is a query into the universe, hoping for some sort of divine intervention that sees everything, that gives you back an answer you can trust.

And it used to be, will my kid be all right?

Now it's symptoms and treatment of croup into the Google dialog box.

If you don't think Google is your God,

if you don't think Google is your God, Google knows when you're about to get engaged.

It knows when you're about to get divorced.

It knows your sexual fetishes.

It knows...

the diseases you're worried about.

It knows the diseases you're worried about having exposed yourself to.

You trust Google more than any priest, rabbi, scholar, mentor, or boss.

Google is our God, full stop.

And it's time to have more than one God.

Okay, who's your devil then?

Deep thoughts.

Deep thoughts.

I don't know.

Opioids.

I don't know.

Okay, all right, okay.

All right, two more things.

Has anyone been into a goop?

That's Satan.

That's directly from Satan.

All right.

Seriously, that shit's from Satan.

Two more things this week.

Facebook, opioids, and goop.

You have a choice.

Listen to me.

Listen, I need commentary on one of two things.

You get a choice.

One, Facebook and Twitter say China is spreading disinformation in Hong Kong.

By the way, go Hong Kong.

The companies took down a social media campaign from the Chinese government that undermined protesters.

Twitter says it won't accept advertisements from state-controlled media outlets.

That might actually be a Twitter win for once.

The other choice you have we can talk about is the mooch going on the offensive against the president on Twitter.

Your choice.

You know the mooch.

Let's talk about the mooch.

Give us your sense of all things mooch right now.

Mooch.

Here's the deal.

I find it fascinating that a lot of these people, including the guy who owns SoulCycle, a lot of these different publics, I know, right?

I have to stop doing Soul Cycle now, unfortunately.

And then, of course, he also invested in the United States.

I went to Equinox today, get over it.

Okay.

No, you said you weren't going to go.

You have to separate people from their ideology.

Are we going to commit economic warfare against 49% of Americans?

No, boo.

Yes, we are.

In fact, we are.

In any case,

grow up.

You know what?

Sorry, go ahead.

You still have back fat.

I do.

I do.

Look, I'm 54, but naked.

I look 53 and 70.

I welcome his situation.

I welcome him talking about it, but I don't think you can have a la carte decision-making on someone like Trump.

I think you can't say, I don't like his

racism.

Like, how hard is that to say?

Like, come on.

And then, I do like this.

I don't like this.

When you get the full benefits, I find that offensive.

So I've told him that for a long time.

I'm going to have him back on the podcast.

We're going to talk about it.

I just texted him.

Yeah, but look, no one escapes that orbit of Trump not soiled and kind of ruined.

But it's interesting, he's hitting hard on Twitter, and he's hitting hard in the media.

He plays that way, too.

So it'll be interesting to see them go at it.

Yeah, but I think these people have decided, like Trump, they'd rather be accused of something terrible than be out of the media cycle for more than 24 hours.

Yeah, but that's the easy.

Yes, I agree.

But here's the deal.

The way you FUD someone is to say, even if they're saying the truth, that

their intentions are wrong.

I don't care if, you know, if today George Comey called Trump vile scum, or in a very witty little tweet, he did.

But it sounds terrible, but it was actually a very funny tweet using vile scum.

And what was interesting about it is that

he's the only one that's really actually saying things that are quite firm and regular.

And so you don't always get the truth teller you want necessarily, but it's interesting when these people who are familiar with the situation do talk about it.

I think it's interesting.

I think it'll be interesting to see if it matters to anybody at all, or else it's just preaching to the choir.

Well,

back to Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral economist who's my new Yoda, he says that we don't make decisions.

We make decisions about the reasons of the story around decisions.

Right?

So remember Gary Cohen?

We're down in Wall Street.

I'm thinking about Goldman Sachs.

Was he Treasury Secretary or Chief Economic?

I can't remember.

He was chiefly economic.

But he decided when Trump said there were good people on both sides, that he got a lot of grief from his congregation.

He's Jewish, and he got past that crazy bigotry and racism that other than everything he says and does, I don't think Trump's a racist, but you have, and then, but he decided he could survive that, but then when Trump proposed tariffs, he's like, that's it, one man can only take so much.

And so it's like, you know, the free trader in me likes Gary Cohen, the Jew, not so much.

But anyways.

That was ugly.

He's all of a sudden decided

he doesn't like Trump.

No, he doesn't.

The only thing he has no tolerance for is being out of the media cycle.

And so let's talk.

Can we skip to a story versus the reality?

Can we talk about

this is the six-month anniversary of Amazon deciding they were pulling out of New York.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

We are in New York right now.

We are.

Here's the story.

Amazon thinks we need a second headquarters.

Let's think about this thoughtfully.

Let's think about what city wants us the most, where there's the most universities, where what city would, among other things, maybe help us provide some subsidies.

And let's have this contest and let's put together a team and let's see, let's let the best city emerge.

And then they pick New York, and then New York comes in, and a bunch of crazy liberals chase them out of New York, and they pick up their tent, and they leave.

Okay, that's the story.

And I think the media has largely bought into that narrative.

This is how it played out.

A 54-year-old man worth $150 billion thinks, I want to roll in New York and D.C.

He always knew that.

He always knew that.

It was always coming here.

And by the way, I predicted this in January.

I'm not preaching.

I just understand how a 54-year-old man thinks.

Okay?

And here's the thing.

With $150 billion.

Here's the thing.

This is what happens when you get more money.

You start getting some money, and you start seeing the end.

And both of those things have happened to me.

You become the master of no.

You get to say no more often than anyone else.

So does the master of no, who can say no more to anything and anybody in the world, decide, I know, I'm going to spend 14 weeks a year rolling in Columbus, Ohio?

It's a very nice situation.

So he was always coming to New York.

He was always coming to D.C.

They announced New York, the worst poker players in the world, total incompetence.

Mayor de Blasio,

who should run for president, said no one ever.

By the way, I'm thinking, I'm really hoping for an all-New York ticket between Kirsten Gillibrand and Mera de Blasio.

Let's call it the brighten-up a room by leaving a ticket.

Okay, de Blasio and Cuomo, the worst poker players in the world, give $3 billion to a guy in the mother of all midlife crises, which, by the way, I think he's going to grow out of in about 40 or 50 years.

Let's give him $3 billion.

And then this is a rare victory of the grassroots against big tech.

They showed up in the town that has got the greatest proportion of union members in this nation, Queens, said, Are you going to let the factories unionize this or will you actively fight it?

They said, we'll actively fight it.

And they said, not here, girlfriend.

And they kicked them out.

And by the way, here's the data.

Yeah, supposedly Amazon's left.

Taylor, who's here in the back, who works with me at Section 4, ran the data on LinkedIn.

Amazon in New York has 850 open job requisitions right now versus a quarter of that at Google and Apple.

In the last six months, since they announced they were leaving, Amazon has hired an additional thousand people and another 500 people in AWS.

In exchange for $3 billion, they were going to sing they were going to bring 10,000 jobs over four years.

They are ahead of that hiring pace right now, and we didn't have to give them a fucking red cent because we said no.

All right.

So.

So you were right.

Your prediction was right.

We're moving to predictions.

I like when you, I let him rant.

I never let anybody talk, but this guy I enjoy.

So we've been very judgy over the last few months, six months.

Then we're going to get to the people in a second.

We're going to go slightly over.

Some winners for you.

Patagonia refusing to sell vests to tech bros.

That was a great prediction.

Bezos Medium Post calling out his dick pic bullies at the National Enquirer.

Well done, Scott.

Megan Rapino in general.

Awesome.

Awesome.

I had some winners and losers.

The FTC's $5 billion parking ticket, which is what I dubbed it in the New York Times.

The Time Representative Steve King didn't know that Google doesn't make the iPhone, but he's done so much fantastic work since.

You know what?

Occasionally you're going to get it wrong.

Occasionally.

So of all these winners and losers, before we get to the questions, what do you think the most, the biggest winner and the biggest loser was?

I think about companies.

So I love Walmart and Disney because I think they're punching back.

I love to see older comedy companies.

I know that's boring.

Punching back against Amazon.

They're about to launch a streaming service.

I like Walmart a lot.

I think they're doing interesting things.

God, that just felt so flat.

I should have something better than that.

No other bigger winner?

That's all right, Disney.

You love Bob Iger.

That's your latest man crusher.

Yeah, him and his cashmere ways.

Yeah.

He is the cashmere ways.

I think we should roll.

I think I take him to Lasquina, maybe Cafe Select, because I think that's how me and Bobby would roll in the city.

He's not going to hang out with you.

I don't want to say I know.

Who are your winners?

My winners?

Nobody.

Nobody's winning right now.

No, I think, you know, some things that have happened in terms of,

I think the media pressing back, starting to really wake up to the Facebook, Google stuff.

I'm glad they have gotten on board.

You have to see the DOJ?

Yes.

Whoa.

Okay.

All right.

And my loser is Congress not doing their jobs.

Not doing their job.

I think that's it.

I think that's right.

That's pretty much.

They have the power to do this stuff.

These agencies have the power to do this.

They can blame Trump, which they should, because he's hardly doing anything.

And especially right now, I was on a show this morning with the

FEC chairman of the Federal Election Commission,

Ellen Weintraub, and she's the only one actually pushing back on some of this stuff.

And I think the thing that she pressed was the legislation that Moscow Mitch is not passing around foreign influence in elections is critical.

And the fact that they can't do this and it's become partisan is really depressing.

And it's really problematic of all the legislation.

The breakups they'll get to and everything else, but this legislation to protect us from foreign influence with an upcoming election is disturbing, especially online.

And so therefore, I think what they should do is just ban all political advertising from online sites.

Agreed.

All right.

So, soon,

you have any other winners or losers?

Now, my big loser is, again, is back to Amazon.

I think gamifying the Commonwealth, which is nothing, I mean, when you think about this process, it was nothing but an elegant transfer of wealth from municipal fire, school, and police districts to Amazon shareholders.

And I think it just reflects a lack of character and code on the part of Jeff Bezos and his board.

Right.

He looks good, though.

He's jacked.

Yeah.

He does.

He looks good.

He looks good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you see those pictures on the boat?

I didn't see those.

Oh, no, I did with David Geffen and all the other

stuff.

Yeah.

No back fat there.

Good stuff.

He doesn't go to Equinox.

All right, Scott, we're so hilarious live.

We need to do a quick breather.

We'll be back to the live show after this quick break.

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Kara, is it time?

Yes, Scott.

Let's go back to Pivot Live from New York City.

All right, so we're going to do some live questions in the audience.

Instead of making predictions, we're going to get some from you and questions.

By the way, just while we're waiting, you should never have a big event without inviting Canadians.

Where are my Canadians?

They're in the back from Halifax.

Word, I met them at a bar last night.

Oh, my God.

By the way, just if you want to meet people who are emotionally secure, super friendly, and if they get sick, will not be bankrupted and go to a good university, the American Dream is alive.

It's just alive in Canada.

Welcome.

Welcome, Canadians.

Hello, Canadians.

All right, question first.

By the way, Andrew Wasorkin is a spy for the Canadian government.

Just so you know.

Just so you you know it's true.

Oh, I love Andy Ross.

I do too.

It's funny.

Spy.

Don't say anything.

He had a good column today chastising the power people.

He enjoys talking to all the time.

If you were moderating political debates, what questions would you ask that haven't come up, Scott?

Oh, my God, where to start?

Okay.

So you want open borders.

There's a billion people who want to come to the U.S.

Does that mean we no longer have a process for legal immigration?

Does that mean you're a sucker if you actually go through the process of trying to get here legally?

That'd be my first question.

I know it's not cool not to endorse open borders.

I think it's ridiculous that the Democratic candidates would basically, we shouldn't demonize undocumented workers, but at the same time, we shouldn't turn everyone coming here and saying they're here for asylum into saints.

The murder rates in Central America have plummeted, yet applications for asylum have gone up.

There's some nuance here.

Oh, we want to give free college to everybody.

You know what that is?

That's a a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich because 80% of kids in the wealthiest households go to college.

Only a third of kids from poor households go to college.

So you want to transfer more wealth to the rich?

Then, yeah, make college free for everybody.

What the fuck are they thinking?

At some point, Democratic candidates have to double down on capitalism.

We have mistaken cronyism for capitalism.

That's what we have on the right.

We have to embrace capitalism.

We believe in a certain level of winners and losers, but without any empathy, we can't level the playing field.

So, yeah, my question for Democratic Connect is the following.

Step up to the plate and start endorsing the greatest sources of good in the history of mankind, and that is the American middle class and capitalism.

Thank you.

Back to you.

All right.

What would you ask?

Thank you.

Thank you, Buddha.

What would you ask?

Thank you very much.

Would I ask?

What would you ask?

I would probably ask about tech because I'm like that.

Like, what are they going to do?

I would ask about tech.

I'm never going to get much.

They haven't brought it up much.

They really haven't brought it up much.

They haven't brought it up at all.

It's not a big thing.

It's not a big topic, I think.

If you were still, Kara, if you were still a daily reporter, what would you be interested in covering?

I was just talking to Scott about that backstage.

I would like to see if I can get someone else fired, like the Uber guy.

I don't know.

There's a couple companies.

Who would you like to see fired right now?

I would like Mark to move to chairman of Facebook.

I'd like them to put a professional CEO.

What about Cheryl?

Should she be fired?

I think she's hardly the point, as I've written.

I think he's the CEO.

No, no, I'm not going down this road with you because he has full control of the company, just like the WeWork guys has.

The WeWork guy has full control.

All these

substandard juvenile men who have complete control of companies is a problem.

I think they should be.

They've fallen into the same trap that's the perversion of high-tech.

Women have to navigate this hunger games to get to the C-suite in technology, and once they're there, they become a protected class.

We need more female CEOs such that we don't have an existential crisis every time we try and fire one.

All right, yes, because let me just say, because women really are the problem in tech.

That's how I look at it.

Please.

Give me a break.

It's him.

He controls everything.

I look at the person with the power.

Kicked up to chairman.

He's got the big guns.

He's the same one.

Fantasy, Silicon Valley.

Who do you replace Zuckerberg for Facebook CEO, Brad Smith, the CEO of Microsoft?

Good one.

Great guy.

I'm about to do a big podcast with him.

He's written a new book that's driven.

He's thoughtful, smart.

Agreed.

All right.

Scott, with the coming recession in mind, where should I put my money?

Yes, Scott, with the coming recession.

The definition of a recession is something that happens every seven to ten years.

The terrible thing about recessions is they always happen.

The terrible thing, the great thing about them is they always go away.

And it feels to me that in

In an effort to stave off what every capitalist nightmare seems to be a recession, we're pulling prosperity forward.

And that is we're issuing more debt, we're keeping interest rates artificially low.

So, yeah, take our medicine, it's okay, but don't give our kids this huge debt to pay back, which is only going to increase the depth of recessions they have to incur.

You know, we've been through recessions before, we'll get this.

But you asked me where to put your money.

This is a boring answer.

Traditionally, if you look at markets since World War II, the U.S.

outperforms Europe and South America for 10 to 15 years, and then it flips.

So, if you think that America has been on an 11-year bull market, and I don't like to make stock recommendations because I believe the only stocks you need to own are unregulated monopolies.

I own Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

And by the way, everyone says, well, that's hypocritical.

No, it's not.

I don't want to be some professor in tie-dye barking at the moon.

Daddy's flying back to Nantucket tomorrow.

Anyways,

unregulated monopolies are the best stocks to own, but on a macro basis, rotating, I think the U.S.

is probably going to underperform.

There's always the most powerful, one of the most powerful forces in the universe is regression of the mean.

I think Latin America and Europe will probably outperform the U.S.

over the next 10 to 15 years.

That's a very, very boring answer.

All right, any one company?

You're not going to buy we work, though, right?

Oh, my God.

Did someone mention we?

What the fuck?

We work.

I know.

Let's take a boring industry that trades it five to seven times EBITDA, and if we mention the word tech 123 times in the prospectus, we're a tech company.

Wait, SaaS trades at a multiple of revenues, so let's call ourselves Space as a Service.

Wait, companies that have a Jesus Christ-like figure seem to trade at a higher multiple.

So let's use the word Adam 153 times in our prospectus.

Well, guess what?

I'm going to call you Giselle.

I'm starting for the fucking Pats this Sunday.

I think you're just joking.

You'll get there.

That makes sense.

I call her Giselle over and over again.

Giselle.

Giselle.

Bunchin.

Listen to me.

Literally, that prospectus, literally, I mean, there's one thing to wallpaper over bullshit.

This is the wood paneling of Mike Brady's den from the Brady bunch.

This shit,

and when the paneling comes off, this company and we see what's behind this bullshit, we're going to find literally a family of raccoons and

a bunch of mummified drug mules.

The halcyon of inflated stocks is cheap capital.

This is a test for the markets.

If WeWork gets public, Granite Uber and Lyft got public, stupid companies.

They're being taken to the woodshed.

If this shit gets public, it could literally torch the markets.

You're looking at a destruction of value if this thing gets out, the likes of which we probably haven't seen, maybe the exception of Cisco, that got cut by 60 or 70 billion in 2000 to get another boring comment.

But WeWork is literally the most amazing exercise in creative writing.

Read that prospectus.

It is fascinating.

All right.

So

this next one will be good.

So that's a sell.

Yes, that's a sell.

Okay, got it.

So this question is excellent.

Have you made many enemies on Pivot?

Like, here's the thing.

And here's the thing.

And

I think you need a code.

I think everyone has to have a code.

I make personal attacks.

And I have a code around personal attacks.

Only with people who are more powerful than you.

Otherwise, it's bullying.

And also, if you have people who love you and you're economically secure and you get a great job where people give you license to say whatever you want, my heroes are Ruth Bader-Ginzard, Kurt Cobain, and Muhammad Ali.

Do you think they were living their life in fucking fear?

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

I can do any job a man can do, and it smells like teen spirit, bitches.

Personally, I think you're jealous of Adam Newman's hair, but that's another thing.

He's dreaming.

Has anyone seen him?

Oh my God, I'm coming back as him in my next life.

My rap, his hair, junior senator from Pennsylvania.

Hello.

He looks, I thought he was an Argentinian.

He's Israeli, but he has that Argentinian polo player dreaminess about him.

Yeah.

That's another two turns of IBITA right there.

Yeah.

Seriously, right there.

Do you know what I think?

That guy's dreamy.

And by the way, I love his wife going on CNBC saying that a woman's role is to help manifest their husband's dreams

like Adam.

Hey,

whatever works for you guys, fine.

But by the way, Adam should feel pretty manifested with $700 million in secondary stock sales before the company goes public.

But by the way, you should buy shares.

Yeah, please do.

You should buy shares.

Well, he said it shows that he's optimistic.

But anyway, well, according to sources close to the company.

in the Wall Street.

That would be Adam, by the way.

Sources close to the company.

Give me a little lesson in reporting.

When it says sources close to the company, it's usually a top executive.

It sources close to the situation exactly the person.

Just

something like that, right?

You know that?

I didn't know that.

Did you know that?

Welcome to journalism.

Welcome to journalism for you.

All right, what's the best bit of unconventional career advice you've gotten, both of us?

Walt Mossberg, when I got the job at the Wall Street Journal, said to me, go in, parachute into the internet's the tech space with cleats and smash everybody's faces.

I think that worked out well for me.

That was a good piece of advice.

best piece of advice I've ever seen.

Hamid Mogadam, the chairman now of ProLogis Reed, said to me after the dot-com bubble burst, and I mean, I just got run over by that, and I was feeling very sorry for myself.

He said, nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems.

And I have found that has really helped me because when I think I'm killing it, it's easy to blame the markets for your failures and credit your character and your grip for your own success.

When things are going really well, it's important to realize it's not entirely your fault.

And at the same time, when things get really bad it's also important and it's helped me realize it's not entirely your fault and this too shall pass nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems is that the algebra of happiness go on

go on scott's book which i number 13 on apple books by angry depressed professors and erectile dysfunction

I was planning to read it on vacation.

Yeah, thanks for saying that.

You need to start investing in this relationship.

No, I don't think so.

I'm going to read it at some point in my life.

All right.

Kara, you were spot on with your prediction that no one would have a landline, and I agree that personal cars are on the way out.

What is the next thing to go?

I'm going to write a follow on that story.

I said that cars, owning a car is going to be like owning a horse someday, like a hobby kind of thing.

I have sold my car.

I am working without personal car ownership, and so I'll be writing an update of it, which is really interesting.

I've been walking a lot.

Don't shake your head at me.

You don't have a pickup.

It's fine if you want to pick up in the middle.

The big dog loves his car.

You do.

You have like a lot.

How many cars have you?

I have a throaty V8, like three miles to the gallon?

Literally.

I roll up and it's like

bit to baby.

Hello, German ambassador.

Throaty feel of an internal combustion engine.

By the way, Tesla, we love stories.

The fastest way to address climate change right now, there's three trillion trees in the world.

You want carbon recapture, figure out a way to plant another trillion trees.

But there's no money in that, and there's no one to idolize in that.

There's no IPO in that.

You build a Tesla, it's bad for the environment.

The energy it takes to manufacture a car and bend steel and then fire up that coal plant to give you electricity.

What bullshit.

But there's no money in planting trees, right?

All right, but you sell big cars.

You know, I don't need a car to make me feel more like a man.

Anyway.

Oh.

Scott and or Kara, what are you optimistic about?

Sharks.

Sharks in Nantucket next week.

You go first.

What am I optimistic about next week?

What are you optimistic about it?

I'm an optimistic pessimist.

I think people are either optimistic optimists, and they're idiots,

pessimistic optimists,

who are okay, whatever.

They assume the best, but things turn badly.

Pessimistic pessimists, which you're kind of that.

And I'm an optimistic pessimist.

I assume the worst, and then things turn out.

I'm like, oh, that's turned out well.

You know, I hate my life less and less every day.

So, yeah, I don't know.

I see the world as half empty right now.

Really?

Kara?

Yeah, you feel bad.

Yeah, time with my kids makes me feel optimistic.

All right, me too.

You're having a kid?

That makes me feel optimistic.

Yes, I am indeed.

Yes, indeed.

You have to believe in the future if you're having children.

That's a good idea.

Okay, then.

All right, then.

All right.

In Mark Zuckerberg's old age.

Okay, he's dying.

Okay.

Will he be more Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch?

Bill Gates.

That's his mentor.

People don't realize it.

If Mark, I asked him, I interviewed him, I was expecting a different mentor, but Bill Gates has indeed been his biggest mentor, and they spent a lot of time.

Will he be more Bill Gates or?

Rupert Murdoch.

Oh, he'll definitely be more Mussolini.

Okay.

Here's the thing, all right?

Most dangerous man on the planet, Mark Zuckerberg.

And by the way, all right, Trump, you may be scared of Trump.

Trump's either out in whatever, 17 months or 65 months.

Biology will take care of Putin in six to nine years.

This is an individual who oversees the algorithms, nudging people one way or another of a population the size of the southern hemisphere plus India, and he's going to be around for another seven years and can't be removed or elected out of office.

By the way, all the greatest tyrants in history didn't wake up and say, oh, I'm going to be a bad person today.

They all thought they were being good people, or at least most of them.

But we didn't have checks and balances and power corrupts.

And so he may be the most wonderful person in the world, but the fact that we figured out a way to give someone a platform that nudges people one way or the other in the pursuit of shareholder value of the third of the planet, what could go wrong?

Yeah, I agree with you on that one.

I do.

I do.

But he's a nice guy.

Anyway, Amazon acquires, this is from Terry Kawaja.

Hi, Terry.

I see you right there.

Another Canadian.

Amazon acquires Viacom CBS for TV content.

Also, Union Square Ventures will not lead Section 4's Series A round.

That's what you were attacking.

That's insider baseball.

You're baiting me to say something that's going to get me in trouble.

So what was the question about?

The investors of WeWork.

Yeah, so look, I don't,

this is how I think, and I'm guilty of this.

This is how I think we lose the election.

I've been thinking about we're accused a lot in New York and on the left of being elite, elites.

And what does that mean?

It means constant virtue signaling wrapped in hypocrisy.

It means complaining about Trump when you finance the platform that's given him access to 65 million people and haven't kicked him off the platform despite the fact he, in fact, violates terms of service every day.

It means financing a company and talking about its creativity when, in my view, it was primarily a porn site, which I think is fine.

But has anybody other than the firm that Terry was talking about made more money off of porn than Union Square Ventures who invested $400,000 and got $250 million back?

More power to them.

But my sense is elites are primarily what we have to be careful of is spending our evenings barking at the moon about inequality in Trump and then spending the day pissing in the well.

Let's kill all the lawyers.

All right, all right.

Which Fortune 500 company would you love to run?

What would you do with it?

You go first.

What would you like to run?

Disney and I'd close all the parks down.

Yeah?

I hate those parks.

Bob Iger always makes me go to a Disney park where I do an interview with him, like always.

And then one time he had a TV crew following me around just to document my horror.

Because at one point when I was interviewing him, he's like, how do you like Disney Parks?

I said, Oh, the unhappiest place on earth.

So I would do that.

No, Disney, I think that would be a fun company to run right now.

100%.

Ton of fun.

Kids, media, get to the Academy Awards.

It'd be a ton of fun.

I think that would be great.

Yeah, I'm in.

Co-CEO.

Yeah.

I think Airbnb would be interesting too.

Great company.

That'll be, it's easy to be nagging.

That'll be, I mean, we'll see on the valuation, but that'll be the best performing probably unicorn.

That's going to be incredible.

Very thoughtful.

Moats,

real barriers of entry.

If you think about Uber, there's local supply and local demand, is all that's needed.

So if Kara and I had 30 or 50 million bucks, we could start a ride-hailing company in New York and create local supply, drivers, and local demand.

But what Airbnb has that is so special is they have to have local supply, that is, people willing to rent their homes, but they have to have global demand, meaning that the people coming into New York are from all over the world.

So that's a huge moat.

In order to replicate or create a competitor to Airbnb, I think you would literally need billions of dollars.

So

I think that's the most undervalued private company in the world right now.

And I think we work as the most overvalued private company in the world right now.

Yeah.

And Brian Chesky, who runs it, is terrific.

He's terrific.

He's flat out terrific and learning on the job and has a great staff.

It's interesting.

And not everything's perfect.

They have all these issues around.

But they've been sorting them out in a really interesting way.

Not perfect, but certainly more interesting.

All right, let's ask a few questions from the audience, and then we'll finish up with one last question right here.

Ivan Shaw from Condi Nest.

Hi, Ivan.

Ivan.

Hi.

Thanks for your talk.

It was terrific, as always.

Thank you.

Do you miss Bob?

I do.

I do, but I think Roger is terrific.

So I'm very excited.

That's an excellent corporate answer.

So I still have my job, is what you're saying.

You started the conversation about talking about fear, and I wonder if you could elaborate on that.

There seems to be fear of the president, fear of disruption, fear of the Russians, fear of social media.

Is it more than normal?

Are we just more aware of it?

Or is there something really going on?

I was having dinner with somebody the other night, and they're saying this sense of anguish and fear.

It just seems like it's very prevalent.

I'm just curious, your thoughts.

I'm not scared of it at all.

So, you know, I think it's just typical, it's cyclical.

Like he said, I think people get like I'm older, and I remember during the Reagan administration, during at the depth of the AIDS crisis, how depressed I was about what was happening.

And, you know, and James Watt was saying trees cause pollution.

If you remember him, he was the head of the Department of Interior.

They had like people who now seem fantastic, by the way.

You're like, ah, you know,

Donald Rumsfeld, great guy.

Like, not at all, right?

Cheney used to be nice, right?

Like, you're like, if you're slightly liking Cheney, you want to poke your eye out, essentially.

And so I think I remember feeling that way.

And then things started to change.

For me, it was through art, like Angels in America and Rent and some other things where people said, enough.

That's enough.

And it's the same thing with Joe McCarthy.

We've gone through these periods.

And then

at the hearings, it was, you know, have have you no shame I think there are moments like that that end things and for me that happened during the Region when ACT UP started to do stuff and it changed it suddenly you're like we don't have to take this shit and we can turn it around and so I don't feel I feel like this will pass like he says that this will pass there will be huge damage of course as it was in other things but so I feel when people are scared that's sort of the time to double down on that's enough and no this no further kind of stuff.

I think people are starting to, young people for sure are starting to feel that way, which I've just met a bunch of hopeful people that are working for like Elizabeth Warren's campaign and other campaigns and I really enjoyed seeing them.

I was pretty positive about that.

That's nice.

So FDR was right, you know, fear, nothing to fear but fear itself.

The reason we are demonizing the

people who are less fortunate than us all stems from fear.

I remember I lived in San Francisco in the early 90s walking around the Castro and there were these young men with their whole lives ahead of them, littered in stores who were like three months away from dying.

And I don't want to say we solved it, but we got through it.

My mother in 1944 was a four-year-old Jew who got led by her father to the bottom of a tube station to spend the night, and they used to pass out gas masks in the shape of Mickey figures in case a gas alarm went off.

And we got through that.

So if we can't get through any of the bullshit we're dealing with now, it's kind of an insult to everyone who's shown so much more mettle than us up until now.

There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed with what's right with America.

You also see people like, I've done several podcasts with Stacey Abrams, who I'm so impressed with every time I talk to her.

What a brilliant person.

What an orthogonal thinker.

She thinks in ways, she gives me answers.

I'm like, oh, I hadn't thought of that.

So when you see like certain politicians work, and she could have anything she wants in the political thing, she's working on voter suppression, which is critically important.

All she wants to be is governor of Georgia and wants to do a good job.

So you see see people like that, and I get a lot of inspiration from people like her.

Her, in particular, for some reason, she really strikes me as a politician, the kind of politician we can have in this country who works with everybody, is not angry, but doesn't put up with any shit.

You know, that kind of person.

So, another question?

And we lost men's vogue.

Okay, right.

This woman right here?

We lost men's vogue.

That was a blow, but I think we'll come back in a minute.

Kara, I'm pretty sure I know how you feel on this or generally.

Scott, I'm now a little bit murky on you, you, but she's murky on you.

That would mean someone who knows.

You know what, Liz?

I'm murky on him too, so don't worry.

Murky, thanks.

So it seems like big tech has done more harm than good.

Is there a way that these companies like Google, who offer so much, can rewind and do good for society?

That's actually good, or is it too late?

I will say yes, because I was just, oddly enough, I was tucked my son up to look at University of Washington on a college trip, and I went to visit Microsoft.

I went to see Satchinadella and Brad and stuff and the people and some of the stuff they're doing.

Microsoft used to be just flat out evil.

Like you remember, like damage, damage, damage, all the place.

And I really was sort of heartened by, like now they're like kind of good.

They're like, you know, they're kind of smart.

There's lots of ways that the leadership of Google and maybe not Facebook, unless they change.

leadership.

If you realize Microsoft is today, you could see that changing.

And then, you know, you look at, it doesn't last for autocrats, don't last that long.

Autocrats are monopolies.

I mean, every autocrat always ends up in a drainage ditch dead, as far as I can see in history, most of them.

And so all these big monopolies always tend to cycle themselves out.

But certainly, there's people within the employee base and stuff like that that certainly

think so.

What do you think?

I don't know, I haven't heard a word.

Since you said the word murky, because I'm such a narcissist.

Murky.

By the way, that's the thing.

Murky is where the sharks are.

That hurts my feelings.

So let me be clear.

I think, if you look at all of big tech, I think we're net gainers from big tech.

I think if we had door one or door two and we could have big tech or not have it, we would choose to have it.

I also think we would choose to have pesticides.

I think pesticides are a net good, but we have an FDA.

I think we would choose to have fossil fuels, but we have emission standards.

What I don't understand is why we don't take this organization or this sector and do the same thing we've done with every other sector, and that is take something incredible, but also realize there are exogenous negative attributes, and unless we regulate them, this could turn out really ugly.

So a net gainer, they're the number one recruiter out of my class.

I've made a lot of money.

I like them.

They used to pay me a lot of money to come advise them.

They're a net gainer.

The problem is the word net, and that doesn't mean we let them off the hook for everything.

That's right.

Also, electricity is really working out well for all of us, I think, right?

Okay, two more quick questions right here in the front.

Okay, cool.

Could you talk a bit about venture capital and their role in having those big valuations in unicorns?

And I'm always wondering, should they have like a moral obligation in not letting things go too far and in investing in other companies and other products more than just another app or another right-hand app?

Yes, they should.

No, they won't.

So it's it's the most homogeneous group of people you are ever going to want to meet, you know, as a group of people.

It's becoming slightly more diverse, but slightly, slightly.

And so it's a group of homogeneous people that live in a very small part of Northern California and not the best parts either, the dullest parts of Northern California.

You know, Palo Alto on a Saturday night, that's a rock and time.

So

it just literally they don't have any, and they're not like they're really particularly good capitalists either.

They're just sort of like, it's such a

masturbatory culture.

I don't even know.

I just, it needs to change.

Financing needs to change drastically

in order to find.

Oh, come on.

That was good.

That was good.

That was a VC, by the way.

So I think I'd be surprised if it changes.

I think financing has to change because they're not reaching out to, you know, I did a really good, of all things, at a Scaramucci conference that he had in Vegas.

I was in Vegas with Scaramucci and Ted,

Steve Case and Mark Cube and I had to interview them there and they were talking about this like two white guys I'm interviewing but they were right.

That was like world-class name dropping even.

Yes, I know.

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

I just was there.

That's why I was interviewing.

I'm sorry you weren't invited.

In any case, they were talking about talentism and talent being everywhere.

And Steve's wife, Jean Case, has written a book about the, and her one quote from it that really struck for me is, there's not a lack of talent, there's a lack of opportunity.

And so you have to find out where those people are, because there's talent everywhere across the world.

Because if not, it means that only,

if you went by Silicon Valley terms, only

middle-aged white guys would be the only smart people on this planet.

And while a lot of them are,

they don't have, you know.

So it has to change.

I don't see it changing, but it has to change.

Last week I went to go to the Amazon bookstore and I bought the Everything Store.

Right.

Brad Stone.

Brad Stone.

Yeah, great book.

So when Brad Stone's book came out, it was infamous and Mackenzie Bezos released a review, released a review on it saying that the book was inaccurate, I went to look at the comments.

Amazon buried that review completely.

Of hers.

Of hers.

It's not there anymore.

It had a thousand recommendations and they completely buried it.

And what does that mean that Amazon could just bury a review just because it didn't portray someone favorably?

Also, kind of like Bezos, like yeah, it's a little awkward with the two.

It's a little awkward with that.

And

they they can do that, but they can't really clean out any of the bot reviews.

Well, you know, it's interesting.

It's an interesting question about Amazon.

Do you have any thoughts on their reviews?

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and argue that that is not the worst thing that big tech has done.

No, he has a bigger point.

It's the control that they have over these platforms.

And they have enormous control.

And so that's why these questions around free speech and everything else is a big question.

But let me be clear with you.

Like, when I argue with people about them, right, they are in charge of regulating this stuff.

They are in charge until Congress steps in or does something.

These are private companies who control enormous platforms.

And that you have to understand whenever people, when I say you've got to get some of this drek off of Reddit or Facebook or whatever,

I get all the free speech dudes come up and be like, free speech, you know, I have freedom of speech.

And I said, did you read the First Amendment?

Because I'm pretty certain you didn't.

And it's Congress shall make no law.

It does not say Twitter shall make no law.

It does not say Facebook.

They are not public squares, and we pretend they are and expect things of them that we would expect from public squares.

And they are not that.

And they're incapable of doing it.

They're not inclined to do it.

And so they will manipulate it in any way they feel like.

And often it is random.

And in that case, I bet it's some random person did that.

I don't think Jeff Bezos is up there pushing buttons like he's a bond bill, and although he certainly looks like one these days.

I don't think that's the case.

I think they're the, I use the quote from the great Gatsby, which is, you know, Nick and Daisy, they were careless people.

They broke things in people and they moved on.

And I think that's what they remind me of.

And I think that if you think about that,

they're not plot makers.

They're more,

they don't care.

I think that's the problem.

And I think we have to make them care.

And as consumers and as politicians and everything else, and they'll do it just like everyone else has fallen in line.

Anyway, Scott, any final thought?

Final thoughts?

I'm grateful to be here.

This is to think about where we are distinct of all the

noise and everything.

I think our kids and our grandkids are going to look back on this age.

And if we're fortunate enough to live in the greatest city and the greatest country in the world in an economic boom time with so much promise, our grandkids are going to look back and think, wow, grandma, grandpa, you got to be in New York in 2019.

So here's the us being in such a wonderful country, a wonderful city, and a wonderful time.

It's great to be here.

Thank you so much.

Look behind us.

I was on such a roll.

I know.

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

You just, we're going to get the thanks.

But,

you know, look what's behind us, Zuccott Park.

Remember what this was like not too long ago.

So I think you started to think about revival.

Wasn't that too long ago?

The 9-11.

It's got it.

Jesus Christ.

Talk about shaming.

Did you see the look she just gave me?

In any case,

this week we're going to do another, another amazing amazing podcast.

You're going back up.

We're going to talk about a range of things.

We're going to do more live stuff.

We're going to do more live events.

We really like them.

We're going to take them across the country.

We really appreciate your suggestions and questions.

So please write us to Scott or I.

We really do respond.

And we respond ourselves to the things we're getting from people.

So we do.

So thank you so much.

Keep listening.

And again, thank you for being here to our live event.

Thank you.

That's a wrap, Kara.

Thanks to our audience for joining Pivot Live.

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

Erica Anderson is Pivot's executive producer.

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

Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

If you like this week's episode, leave us a review.

If you have any suggestions for what you want to hear us talk about on a future show, send us an email, pivot at foxmedia.com.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from Voxmedia.

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

You cannot get enough of Scott and Kara.

Isn't that right, Scott?

Yes, that's right.

We're like Reese's peanut butter cups.

Oh my God.

Anyway, come back.

I don't know where I got that.

I don't know where I got that.

In any case, we'll see you all later this week.