Adam Neumann's Return, Climate Change Tech, and More with Molly Wood

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Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. Scott Galloway is a distant memory during Scott Free August. So today I'm joined by longtime business and technology journalist, podcaster extraordinaire, and managing director of the Climate Syndicate at Launch, Molly Wood. Molly, thank you so much for coming on.

Molly Wood: Kara, I'm so excited to be here. What great August company.

Kara Swisher: I know. Isn't it great? And one of the things we're going to address right at the top: we don't care about Jason or Scott or their beef at all. Not our problem.

Molly Wood: Not our problem. I think you put a Cinderella meme up, which I liked a lot.

Kara Swisher: This is my theory that people always want me to be the Cinderella for this situation. And I'm like, you should interrogate why you think you need me to clean this up.

Molly Wood: What does the Cinderella mean? I wanted to understand it. Explain it to people. I feel like there are a lot of people out there who want women to clean up the messes of these men, whether we are or are not involved in those messes.

Kara Swisher: That's correct. I actually sent an email one time to somebody that was like, "You should really ask yourself why you're asking me to do that instead of just emailing Jason." His email is right there on the internet.

Molly Wood: Right. Yeah. I'm sure you get a lot of those.

Kara Swisher: We're not going to Cinderella for Scott and Jason. They've got their thing. No, we're not Cinderella. We're not going to do that. We just want Jason to be a little nicer to Scott. Scott, don't be so upset about it. That's how I feel about it.

Anyway, there's a lot to talk about. Explain what you've been up to. You've done a lot. You've been doing a lot of stuff. So explain your main focuses lately.

Molly Wood: I guess so. I had a big career switch in January. I still do podcasts with Jason every day on *This Week in Startups*, but I moved into—I became the tech journalist cliche and moved into venture capital. Primarily because I had started getting really passionate about the climate crisis and climate solutions. I started covering that from the startup angle and from the venture capital side of things. After four or five years of that, I think I was like, "I don't have time to change minds." I really just wanted to be more active.

Kara Swisher: Talk about that transition. A lot of technology—I never did that. I was offered many, many venture capital positions and I was like, "Oh, should I have to talk to you?" I think that was what it was. I'm sure I would have been extraordinarily wealthy. In fact, I know I would have. But that's not really the reason many people do it, even though it's a byproduct. What was the theory from your perspective? Was it you wanted to see change happen faster? That writing about it wasn't enough?

Molly Wood: Yeah. I think I just got—and I, like you, have been venture curious for a lot of years. This was a great opportunity to actually write checks, which I sort of couldn't resist. It was this sense of wanting to have some boots on the ground, be in the room where it happened, help enable a solution. What I have found that's borne out that theory is that it's a more hopeful job than journalism can be. You and I both know what it's like to be in a newsroom with a bunch of cynical reporters who are just down on everything. I'm not saying that's always the way journalism is, but it's easy to feel that way, especially in an environment where journalists are getting beat up on all the time by one entire political party, sometimes the other. And by venture capitalists, FYI.

Kara Swisher: And by venture capitalists.

Molly Wood: I think I chose the only profession that people hate more, actually, than journalists.

Kara Swisher: Well, it's interesting because when I thought about it, I thought I had more impact doing the journalism. Focusing on—I think some of my articles on Facebook really did get people to notice what was happening there. Especially when there were regulatory issues, there was more impact. But I do think you're right. There is something to funding, walking the talk. If you really do believe in something. Was there something about climate that really made you think about this?

Molly Wood: I think it was—I developed what I think is a slightly different approach to climate coverage. I came at it from a tech and business perspective because of a conversation at my hairdresser's with a climate scientist who was talking about—this was probably 2016—talking about all the ways in which we've already tipped. There are going to be impacts no matter what, and they're going to be pretty bad. She made this offhanded comment that it was an engineering problem now. Not exclusively, but in some ways we were going to have to adapt. So I started covering adaptation and resilience—the ways we were going to create technology to not die when the weather gets worse, or crops won't grow in 300 mile an hour winds or drought.

Kara Swisher: Exactly. What are we going to do about that? We will be solving a lot of these mob murders, but go ahead.

Molly Wood: Right. You don't want to enjoy the climate crisis already in progress. But those stories are amazing.

Kara Swisher: They are. They really are. And everything else. But it was always a desert. I always used to point that out to my kids. It was originally a desert and it probably will return to a desert. Geologic time.

Molly Wood: Yeah. But I didn't see a lot of that coverage. Anyway, it appealed to my sense of, "OK, let's just get to work on this. Let's just do solutions." Now I'm starting to see, to your point, since I have left journalism and am investing in climate, more and more people are coming to me asking about climate storytelling. It's very possible I made the jump a little too soon in the journalism way, but I'm happy to see there's a lot more interest in those stories.

Kara Swisher: Well, you can still do that. You don't have to write douchey blog posts like many venture capitalists. You can write really important—there are several venture capitalists who I've always enjoyed. Not very many, but a few who I think are beautiful writers. I've always thought Chris Dixon was a beautiful writer. Bijan Sabet was always very good. There were a couple who I thought did a great job of articulating. I think storytelling is part of your job still, even as you're investing.

Molly Wood: It is.

Kara Swisher: We're doing one of our Code conferences on climate change tech. The whole day. Last year was healthcare and psychedelics, which I'd been very interested in much earlier. This is climate change tech. I've done it a lot on my podcast. I think it's one of the most important areas. I just gave a speech the other day saying it's the only important thing to focus on. There's an old joke—I'm not going to tell it right—but it's like, the internet says "I'm great," the chip says "I'm great," this says "I'm great." And then electricity says, "Without me, you're nothing. So fuck you, bitches." Without climate change, it doesn't really matter what they make and what they do. Every company is a climate company now. Every story is the biggest business story in the world. That's not to be mercenary, but when you have a total addressable market of the entire planet...

Molly Wood: Yep, exactly. That's why you see banks paying attention regularly. A lot of money is moving behind the scenes that has nothing to do with policy. They get it.

Kara Swisher: The economic impact and the social impact is going to be vast and incalculable. Though people make fun of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going to Mars, we have to think about other planets. We've got to think about lots of different issues. And they're all technological, each of them in some fashion. Not everyone—there's usage and stuff like that.

Anyway, we have a lot to talk about, including the return of Adam Neumann. We'll see how social networks are preparing for the midterms. First, let's go to the metaverse. Meta launched a new VR game, Horizon Worlds, in France and Spain this week. Mark Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of the game to celebrate. Have you seen it, Molly?

Molly Wood: Oh, bless. I have indeed.

Kara Swisher: Your thoughts?

Molly Wood: I don't know why we expected anything different. There have been screenshots up to this point that suggested he had not achieved the *Ready Player One* thing we're all kind of waiting for. There's the promise and the reality. And the reality really is still... yeah.

Kara Swisher: But good God. Does nobody go, "How is this going to look?" That's my whole thing. It's a much more complex story than just "Facebook sucks." Although there are elements of that. And they still didn't tell that story right. This one I thought was an easy layup for them not to have published.

Molly Wood: One of my favorite jokes is from comedian Andrew Nadeau, I think it is, who tweeted: "So far as I can tell, the metaverse is just Animal Crossing, but you're being hunted by Mark Zuckerberg."

Kara Swisher: He does. We are seeing such egomania in action. The fact that he is the central character of his metaverse is the part that makes it so easy to dunk on. It would be one thing if it just came out and was embarrassingly cartoony. It reminds me of the Sonic redesign—they have to do a Sonic the Hedgehog redesign here. But it's the part where he is in every scene that's just like, "Listen man, I'm the CEO, bitch."

Molly Wood: It never changes. "I'm the god of my metaverse."

Kara Swisher: I have that card. I have that card. I was sort of like, when I got it, I was used to weird names from CEOs—"Chief Thoughtful Officer" or "Chief Astronaut Officer." Back in the day when I got that, I was like, "Whoa, dude, that is something else." And then it was a "Mark Zuckerberg Production" at the bottom of Facebook for years. I'm not even slightly surprised. But we shouldn't lose sight of that, because what you're pointing out is that this has always been the trajectory. Now he is in front of our very eyes spending a ton of shareholder money—their own profit, to be fair. They print profit. But spending, what is it, $10 billion to build what is effectively a universe for himself to be the god of.

Molly Wood: Yes, of course.

Kara Swisher: But talk about it from a serious perspective. Where does this go? Do you think we'll all be like, "Oh, we were wrong about Mark Zuckerberg in this metaverse"? Or do you feel that it's early—I keep saying so early, I can't even tell you—and it's not coming from Facebook essentially?

Molly Wood: There's no doubt that we're going to do more in virtual reality. I just don't think—and frankly, from a climate perspective, there's a lot more we're going to do in virtual reality as opposed to flying places all the time. If anything, I worry that Zuckerberg and Facebook are going to turn this into such a joke and suck up so much of the resources and make it a technology non grata that it'll set it back.

Kara Swisher: That's true. Did you like what Microsoft put forward? Although very bad cartoons too, and without legs, but that's fine. There's no need for legs in virtual reality. But did you like the direction they're going in?

Molly Wood: Absolutely. But like you say, we're really early. We don't know what Apple's going to do. They're most likely going to lean into augmented. I don't think virtual reality is dead as a concept. We may have underestimated Facebook. It's impossible to discount their scale.

Kara Swisher: I do. Here's why: creativity. They've had a lot of flops. A lot more than I think, if you add them up, they're quite floppy.

Molly Wood: They're very floppy, but even a flop at Facebook can still get 300 million users.

Kara Swisher: That's true. And the "suck up the resources" thing that I think is more important. They don't want to move slowly. They want to move in a really dominant, scary way. I think that's a mistake on their part. They should have just been helping all kinds of companies, especially in climate change. Things like that would have been good for their brand, good for them, and good for the universe. But this is all about Mark.

Molly Wood: But we do get a lovely picture of him prancing around looking like Sonic the Hedgehog. He really gave himself the princessy green eyes. He really went Disney with the big doughy emeralds with the lashes.

Kara Swisher: I'm so against talking about people's looks, but you can't help it.

Molly Wood: You can't help it. That's not him. It's an avatar.

Kara Swisher: I was on Bill Maher once and he started dunking on Mark Zuckerberg's looks. I was like, "You're not so pretty yourself, but we don't talk about their looks." But here I'm like, "Why are you making us talk about your looks?" That's the whole thing. He looks ridiculous.

In any case, let's be ridiculous. Elon Musk is getting comfy with the GOP. Musk spoke at a Republican retreat hosted by Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday. McCarthy and Musk supposedly had a fireside chat with supporters, which was closed to the press. Musk solidified his stance in the gray area in a tweet on Tuesday saying, "To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party." I believe this is true. He just keeps trying to irritate Democrats, I guess. He's pretty mad about not being acknowledged for his work at Tesla. I know that. I think that's at the heart of a lot of it, oddly enough, because he's tweaked that Biden didn't mention him around electric cars. Talk a little bit about where you think he is right now when he's doing stuff like this.

Molly Wood: I think you're absolutely right that it's a combination of personal ego, attention-getting, and owning the libs. I was thinking about this in preparation for the show, and I think it actually is very much in keeping with his kind of disaster capitalism brand. Wherever there's a disaster, Elon Musk shows up and tries to sell something. Whether it's a literal disaster like the Thai cave, or some big natural disaster where he wants to roll in, or COVID with ventilators that didn't turn out to be ventilators. There's something I haven't put my finger on exactly what it is. Maybe it's that he's willing to let America fall into flames and then try to ride in and sell us stuff to fix it. I wouldn't put that past him. I feel like that's the Peter Thiel strategy. I don't think that's out of the range of possibility. That also ascribes this kind of 4D chess thing to it, which might or might not even be true. It really might just be purely opportunistic, purely attention-getting, and possibly his version of an intellectual exercise in talking to both sides.

Kara Swisher: I do think more and more as I watch it, it feels sad to me. I say this about a lot of people. When I look at them, I think, "Well, you didn't get hugged enough as a child, did you?" There's a lot going on with his dad. I'm not a psychologist, but I've been talking to a lot of people close to him. There's something going on here. He's so talented. When he's doing these things like this Twitter stuff and half-baked comments, it's such a bad side to him when he has such a better side. It's almost like he's trying to create disaster for himself. There has never been—as Scott says, and I think he's right—such a brand decline as this guy in a very short amount of time. Even though he still has crazy fans, very much like Trump, who love him no matter what he does. They sort of red-pilled in that way. But regular people—my sons loved Elon Musk. And now they're pretty much like, "What a douche he's being."

Molly Wood: "What a douche he's being."

Kara Swisher: Exactly. And it starts to be inseparable because you don't know him. You ascribe personality to his actions and you start to come away with...

Molly Wood: I am one of the people who had a Tesla for a few months. Right at the moment that he—I had a Tesla for a few months that tried to kill me multiple times. Then he tweeted a Hitler meme. I was like, "Well, I'm not taking my Jewish kid to school in this car." It really was...

Kara Swisher: Back up. It tried to kill you several times?

Molly Wood: Oh, I had all of the issues. I had the superglue part of it. It's a $70,000 Model Y. I drive it home from the dealer and have to superglue part of it. The air conditioning crapped out in the salt and sea. But what really happened was the phantom braking. I didn't even have the autopilot on, just the automatic cruise control. I had two phantom braking incidents on the 5. I'm going 80 miles an hour and the car just hits the brakes for no reason I can discern. My son is in the car. If anyone had been behind us, it would have been a terrible accident. It would always try to think it saw things on the road and then take over the steering. But the Hitler memes would send you over the top?

Kara Swisher: That was even before the Hitler meme, I was having problems. Then that happened, and I was like, "You know what? I don't have to do this. I'm not going to apologize for this car to my friends."

Molly Wood: May I recommend the Kia Sorento hybrid to you?

Kara Swisher: I got the Polestar. I'm about the all-electric life. It is amazing. Let me say, you don't want to make a typo when you try to Google Polestar. You do not.

So moving on, let's get to our first big story. Social networks say they're preparing for the U.S. midterm elections. On Tuesday, Facebook announced it will restrict political advertising in the week before Election Day. I'm sure that'll help. Meanwhile, TikTok is telling influencers they can't accept sponsored posts from political groups. TikTok and Twitter already banned political ads in 2019. So where are we again? We're back to the same thing. Should Facebook ban all political ads the same way TikTok and Twitter have done? Of course, influencers are still free to do posts to promote whoever they want. There's really no way for TikTok to know the difference. They all say they're working on this. Where do you think we are at this point?

Molly Wood: I feel like I would almost prefer for these companies to say, "There's really not much we can do." Because if they're not willing to actually do the thing it would take—devote tens of thousands of human beings to combing through this content and taking it down when it's inappropriate, including advertising—nothing is going to work. The idea of banning political ads a week before the election is frankly laughable. Don't even put out that statement. Just don't even say that. That's a slap in the face.

Kara Swisher: Let's put out, Mark. Yes, I agree. It's really quite something to have done that. They had some effect in the last election, though, from what people say. They toned down the heat. They did it early. They did it in a massive force. Facebook says it has hundreds of employees working on the election issue. But in June, the *New York Times* reported only about 60 people working on elections full time. This has become an enormous headache for them because they can't get it right, presumably.

Molly Wood: From the experts I have spoken to over the years, it really does seem to just be a human power issue. That's what they all say. You have to have moderation in-house full time. It can't be contractors. It can't be an algorithm, because then you end up accidentally taking things down that are trying to rebut conspiracy theories. TikTok seems to be being very aggressive, but it seems to suffer from the same issue. They just don't want to devote—look, I understand it's a large budgetary item if you are going to try to bring in an army of moderators and train them. I'm not sure that banning all political ads is the panacea we think it is, even though I want it to be. Because what that does is advantage incumbents who have enough money to buy ads on TV and newspapers. For small independent candidates, being able to buy social media ads and boost their traffic that way is actually incredibly important for getting other voices into the races.

Kara Swisher: One of the ways to do it is just say no political advertising. That's what Twitter did, I think largely because they didn't want to deal with it. The cost of dealing with it was more than the advantage of having it. I think they didn't mind taking crap for it at that point. But it was very much to do with cost and how difficult it is to do properly. You can only do it badly if you do it, unless you truly devote time to it. It's a money hole for them all in some way. Then they always have someone yelling at them from some political party. It'll be interesting to see if these ads have as much influence. They seem to have already become a permanent part of people's mentality of misinformation. I think the election lie stuff is the stuff they let go right after the election that was the most damaging, obviously. It continues to be. It seems like they still really are...

Molly Wood: Yeah. My question is not necessarily, "Are you going to take ads or not?" It's, "Where are you going to place those ads? Who are you going to target? What's the algorithm behind targeting those ads or recommending groups to people?" Those are the questions that still don't get answered. If the ad is there and it doesn't get pushed to people based on 75 different psychographic metrics that Facebook won't show us, then maybe it doesn't have such a big impact. Maybe those are some of the dials they've turned and just haven't been as forthcoming about.

Kara Swisher: My issue is that they're looking at this election thing as if it's an event. It's an ongoing thing, like right now with Trump. He's doing the same thing he did with election lies with this attack. He has 10 or 12 different excuses, each of which they try out on social media. Then you see the ones that work. "How dare they take my passport. They planted evidence. They did this." He tries out everything, and it's all being tried out on social media. I'm just going to say—that doesn't sound like I'm sitting here attacking my former profession—but we, the media, then dutifully print it every time he says it. So everybody on Facebook has something to link to. It's probably the *New York Times* not helping. I was thinking last night as I was watching one of them, they were talking about how he may release data or video. One person was going to use data, they had documents. Now Kash Patel, who feels very sketchy to me. Then they were going to release video so they could show the FBI getting the boxes. Then everyone reported it. I'm like, "Are you kidding me? Print it?"

Molly Wood: I know. I can't resist.

Kara Swisher: See, now that you're a VC, you don't even have to deal with this stuff. It's really delightful, I have to say.

Molly Wood: If you move to an aggrieved VC, I'll have a problem with you, Molly.

Kara Swisher: No, gross. No. I'm being victimized in some fashion by the media. I resisted VC for a lot of years for the same reason you're talking about. I was like, "What are the parties going to be like?"

Molly Wood: They'll be fine. I'm sure people will...

Kara Swisher: One of the things TikTok is facing is their links to China. I think we're going to have Vanessa Pappas at Code this year talk about this. Oracle is reviewing the social network's algorithms to make sure they're free from manipulation by the Chinese government. Oracle now has access to TikTok's American user traffic. TikTok is still in the process of moving all its American user data to Oracle's cloud. Oracle, of course, had wanted to buy TikTok during the Trump administration. It'll be interesting to see how this relationship moves forward. I think Oracle still has interest in buying the company. All those people at Oracle said, "We didn't really want to get dragged in here, but Trump, Larry..." that kind of thing. How do you look at this problem for TikTok, their China problem?

Molly Wood: I think this is such a weird and complicated problem. I find myself dragged into whataboutism with it a lot myself. I'm like, "You guys, the rank hypocrisy and jingoistic China-hating around TikTok when Facebook does everything that Facebook does and has done to democracy... you've got to be kidding me, right?" You're going to say that this is so much worse when you have yet to prove it. Then I find myself thinking, "Well, if you're saying that the House shouldn't download it, members of Congress shouldn't download it, I can understand why this data might be valuable." But I also don't know that I feel better about that data living on Oracle servers either, because I don't know what the goal is. There isn't a regulation that says this data—it's not like the United States has massively awesome data privacy laws. We're sort of just baby-stepping toward the GDPR. I'm going to set aside all questions of patriotism and say, "I don't know that this thing is better than this thing. I'm not sure I believe it is."

Kara Swisher: Well, they're an American company. I'm sorry, what does that mean?

Molly Wood: Right. American companies have never perpetrated any ills on society whatsoever.

Kara Swisher: It's still valuable to Oracle to be in this position. Absolutely. And to get that data on all of those people. Don't forget that Oracle is going to get all of the same data on American citizens that you claim China has. And you're fine with that? That's okay too?

Molly Wood: Yep. You know who Larry Ellison is mentor to? Mark Zuckerberg? Elon Musk.

Kara Swisher: Oh, right. Elon Musk. Yeah. Don't you feel better, everybody?

Molly Wood: I don't.

Kara Swisher: They've got the data on all the Husky videos that I watch on TikTok.

Molly Wood: That's true. Though people say, "Oh, I don't have any secrets. What do I care what I watch?" I do think there is more value to knowing what people do. I'm a little bit...

Kara Swisher: We did a guy. We interviewed him. He said, "I don't have any secrets." So we followed him everywhere and told him everything he did. He was totally creeped out. He was like, "Well, how did you know that?"

Kara Swisher: And I was like, we know where you were. I know where you were. I do a trick on an iPhone where I show you all your location data and the minutes you spent there. So, though I trust Apple more than I trust, say, TikTok or Oracle or whatever, you have your levels of trust. I think it's a really interesting question because it does get sucked up into the China issue, which is a government that is a surveillance economy, clearly. And so you do worry about that. I think Oracle will use it to manipulate you for money. China might use it to manipulate you for something else. And it's all manipulation, of course. It's all manipulation. And if we really wanted to solve it, we would put into place a comprehensive right to privacy. Or what is the Ron Wyden thing? The digital bill of rights. If we really want to solve this issue, we're not going to solve it network by network, which would, by the way, be to Facebook's advantage. There's no question that they have been lobbying and mounting all these PR campaigns and talking about how evil TikTok is because TikTok is eating their lunch. Every time I see one of those stories, I think to myself, which digital media consultant or PR person on behalf of Facebook placed it? I've been watching a lot of ads against Amy Klobuchar right now. They're showing in Washington that tech companies are doing. "Do you want to stop innovation like Amy Klobuchar does?" She pointed them out to me. And I was like, yeah, you're an evil person. You're a monster. You hate innovation, Amy. It's over her bill. It shows how—there was just some data coming out that tech is a bigger contributor to lobbying than big pharma, which is something else.

Molly Wood: Anyway, what I want to know is why you watch husky videos, but I won't get into it.

Kara Swisher: I love them. I'm obsessed with huskies. I never want to have one. They're insane. You don't have a husky, but you watch husky videos. I would never have one. Those dogs are bananas, but they're great content.

Molly Wood: My TikTok is a perfectly curated oasis of cute animals, mostly dogs, primarily huskies. But a lot of pit bull content sneaking in now. They're adorable, too.

Kara Swisher: Oh, wow. Mine is all air fryers, as people know, when I use it on my burner phone, which I wrote a whole column about. I need a burner TikTok account because I don't want to mess up my algorithm.

Molly Wood: That's what I have. I have a burner TikTok account. Smart. Genius.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about Adam Neumann's second act and take a listener mail question about climate change.

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Kara Swisher: Molly, we're back with our second big story. Adam Neumann is back at it. His new housing venture, Flow, has raised $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz. That's the biggest check A16Z has ever cut. The idea behind Flow is similar to Neumann's proposed WeWork spinoff, We Live, which failed at the time. I remember a lot of people wrote about it. Flow will own and manage existing apartments and allow renters to build some undefined amount of equity with them. There was a weird blog post about Mark Andreessen lecturing us about being happy about home ownership and how renters suck. I really thought it was great to be lectured by a billionaire who owns many homes, or at least one enormous one in Silicon Valley. Talk a little bit about this. Several people I've talked to, including at Airbnb and different places—you'd think they could get into something like this—say this is an impossible company because the amount of money needed is so vast that it's impossible to create. Adam Neumann, they did know what he was doing, but getting a second chance? Female founders would not get this. You're not going to see Elizabeth Holmes getting this money. She's going to jail. He, of course, did not commit fraud as was found, but he definitely had some wrangling with investors and lost an enormous amount of money, vaporizing billions of dollars in investment money. So what do you think about this? There are also so many other bizarre questions about what this company even does. They had already raised money for Flow Carbon, which was maybe going to be emissions tracking on the blockchain, then this appears to possibly be just the WeLive concept, recycled, right? The idea of communal living, maybe.

Molly Wood: Dorms for adults.

Kara Swisher: Dorms for adults. Yes, exactly. And then there was some bizarre reporting from Forbes late yesterday saying that the company intends to launch a digital wallet to store crypto.

Molly Wood: I had breakfast with Adam relatively recently, and he was talking about crypto. I happened to be in Miami and he was there talking about crypto quite a lot before he announced Flow Carbon.

Kara Swisher: Huh. But then now maybe we think Flow, the real estate company, is not related to crypto except that now it is, evidently, according to Forbes.

Molly Wood: Yes, but they say Flow Carbon apparently isn't related yet to Flow. Maybe.

Kara Swisher: That's correct. That's correct. Maybe.

Molly Wood: I'm pretty new in venture capital, but mostly what I've been taught so far is you have to get a coherent pitch with a plan and a product, even at this early stage, or at least an MVP. I'm sort of joking here, but this is the sort of thing that only Adam Neumann is ever going to be able to pull off. There's been sort of a Rorschach backlash, right? Everybody was really angry about it. And then it came back all the way around to all the reasons why it might be okay. And pretty soon the snake was eating its own tail. Is it fair? 100% not. No woman founder, no founder of color, no founder over the age of 50, no one underrepresented in any way would ever get the kind of second chance or first chance that Adam Neumann just got. That said, I watched that DealBook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin after I had watched the entire *WeCrashed* show and listened to the podcast and done all the years of reporting on it. And I was like, I would write that guy a check.

Kara Swisher: Really?

Molly Wood: I hope he never calls me because I would probably write him a check.

Kara Swisher: He's going to call you now. "Hello, Molly. How are you?"

Molly Wood: He is totally charming, I have to say. He's terrifying. He's mesmerizing.

Kara Swisher: He is. He is. I don't even understand it. He's really interesting. So talk about the two ideas. Flow Carbon—do you even understand it? Carbon credits on the blockchain, which because of blockchain declines, couldn't happen.

Molly Wood: Carbon credits on the blockchain makes some sense to me. I have heard pitches that are somewhat similar because right now the tracking and selling of credits—we all have this vague sense that there's going to be a huge market. Explain for people who don't know what carbon credits are. You fly to Europe and you buy a credit or whatever. The way the credits exist: let's say you build a solar farm on some private property in upstate New York, or you engage in regenerative agriculture processes that make your soil able to sequester and store a lot more carbon. Then you can effectively have a couple of private agencies certify that you are carbon positive and create these credits. The credits can be bought and sold. The people who create those regenerative soil or the solar farm get paid for the credit.

Kara Swisher: So it's a way to keep them clean, essentially, on the blockchain. Correct? Rather than it being all over the place and there being a lot of fraud, from what I understand.

Molly Wood: There's a lot of fraud. There are a lot of old solar farms that might not even be in use anymore, but the credits are still being sold. The theory is that if you put it on the blockchain, we have this idea that the blockchain is the perfect record, the perfect immutable record that is available for everybody to see. There is some basic logic that if you could get credits on the blockchain, totally track their life cycle, input the fact that this solar farm has been taken offline so don't keep selling those credits. If you had a fancier database for carbon credits, it could enable what people think is going to be a huge economy in terms of creating and selling carbon credits.

Kara Swisher: Now, a lot of people feel they're bullshit. So explain to people why it's not bullshit. You said it's going to be a big economy.

Molly Wood: I think it's probably going to be a big economy. And if it becomes a big economy, then there is a real financial incentive for organizations to be more renewable, to employ more renewable energy so they can get credits. And for there to be a place that people trust. Right now, we don't have any of that. A lot of the offset carbon market is bullshit. No question. It is not a pitch that I am particularly interested in.

Kara Swisher: So good idea from Adam Neumann, who always has big ideas. It was a big idea. I think in some ways it was a better, although smaller idea, than "I'm going to transform residential housing," which is, to borrow a phrase from my boss Jason, operationally insane.

Molly Wood: Yes, that's what several people tell me. Housing has never been more expensive in the United States except for maybe the last two weeks. One of the things Linette Lopez from Insider called the deal: "one of the most efficient ways I've ever seen Silicon Valley light money on fire."

Kara Swisher: So you like the carbon credits better, correct?

Molly Wood: I don't love it, to be clear. I'm just saying it was a more understandable pitch. At least that was an issue that feels solvable in some way, whereas it's still so unclear what the intention even is around this residential play. I think communal living, when people are interested in that—if you could create a Starbucks-ified living experience where any city I went to, if I encountered a Flow unit and the amenities were always the same, the rents were effectively normalized, I just dealt with an app on my phone to rent it, I could rent it for a year, sublet it, whatever—I could actually imagine that being really cool and transformative and awesome.

Kara Swisher: That was WeLive. That was WeLive, exactly. I remember the spate of pieces done on it. And it went nowhere. I'd love to know why it didn't before I would invest in it. Timing wasn't it. I think people don't want to live in dorms when they're 40 years old. Maybe some people do, but not everybody.

Molly Wood: I don't think they want to when they're 40, but I think they want to when they're 20 to 35, and then maybe again when they're 65 or 70.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. That's a more interesting area. Older living, to me, is where I would be investing. I'm dealing with a parent in that regard, and it's way too artisanal, way too distributed, way too involved. There's nothing like a brand I can trust. Anyway, we'll see where that happens. Molly, let's pivot to a listener question. You've got mail. This comes from Craig Evergarden on Twitter. This one's specifically for you. "Is COVID denial a predictor of the failure of climate change prevention? Will risky geoengineering be necessary?" I'm thinking of an interview I did with Neil Stephenson about his new book where a billionaire shoots sulfur out into the air on his own. Let me answer that question first because we have a second one too.

Molly Wood: Yes and no to the first part of that question, whether COVID denial is a predictor of the failure. There are all these entrenched feelings about both COVID and climate change, and it has started to become the exact same people now. People who say, "I'm never wearing a mask, getting a vaccine, and I don't believe that climate change is real." It is super unfortunate that climate change itself has gotten caught up in the culture wars. There was a good piece that said the big problem is it's caught up in the culture wars. It's gotten worse. They pointed out that Mitt Romney used to be a very reliable vote in favor of climate-oriented regulations, and now, for philosophical Republican reasons, never can be or never will be. However, I think for many people, COVID created this feeling that the worst case can occur. All of a sudden, you had a lot more people move into climate investing or start climate startups. There was this parallel conversation where a lot of people went, "Wait, so shit could get really bad. And we keep saying that shit could get really bad around climate. Maybe we should do something about that."

Kara Swisher: I wrote a column many years ago where I made it up. I said the world's first trillionaire would be a climate change technology investor. I totally made that up. I just want people to get into it out of greed.

Molly Wood: So how do you shift that feeling? How does it get fixed? Because some might be risky geoengineering, right? Some of these ideas have to do with sulfur guns and cooling down the climate and have unintended consequences.

Kara Swisher: Even though he was writing about it in a fictional way, that has been raised, right?

Molly Wood: Without a doubt. I think whether we think risky geoengineering should or should not be a part of the solution, someone is going to do it, full stop. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about it in *Ministry for the Future*—after a horrible heat wave in India that kills 20 million people, India goes ahead and starts doing cloud seeding and geoengineering. I think they're already doing some versions of that in Abu Dhabi. There's no doubt that humans are going to try it, and we probably need some version of every solution. Some of them are going to create unintended consequences, without a doubt, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But we are certainly to the point where things are going to get worse and worse, a lot of people are going to start dying, and people are going to get more desperate for solutions.

Kara Swisher: Water, particularly around water on the West Coast, for example. Water and heat. The wet bulb events that are occurring—we have heat that is not survivable occurring on a regular basis now around the globe.

Molly Wood: We're going to try everything because existential dread is a powerful motivator for people.

Kara Swisher: Absolutely. Or it makes people crazy. When I was in London, I was there after the heat wave. The parks—it's so weird to see them looking like Northern California. I was like, "Oh, look, it's Northern California," which has that dry, desiccated look, quite beautiful in a weird way, but also, what's it doing here in London? What's happening?

Molly Wood: It looked like that in London? Wow.

Kara Swisher: It did. It was crazy. It looked like Northern California in the middle of summer up north. That golden color—it didn't look right in England. It looked weird. I was sort of shocked by it. There's been no rain in the Northeast, same thing in California and all those states, Lake Mead. And then all these weird different climate events in the Midwest.

Molly Wood: You're absolutely correct. But I think the deniers are going to be very powerful going forward.

Kara Swisher: I do. They remain powerful with COVID. They remain powerful. They brought polio back to New York.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Like, don't underestimate them.

Kara Swisher: No, that's right. They brought polio back. Thank you. Great job, guys. Great job. Second question from Patrick Hunt, also on Twitter. "Do you see an issue with climate tech startups fitting the VC model due to capital intensity?" That's been something. Vinod Khosla tried a lot early on with natural gas. John Doerr had a ring at it. Now he's just decided to fund a school for $1.1 billion of his dollars at Stanford, which I thought was fascinating. He's going to come to Code with the head of the EPA to talk about this. So what do you imagine? The amount of money needed is crazy.

Molly Wood: First of all, I just want to reiterate how awesome I think it is that you're doing a day on climate at Code. I think you're the only major tech conference I know of. I did one panel at a conference recently in a side room, and I was like, "This is a main stage thing."

Kara Swisher: We will have you in as you start making investments at Pivot. We're going to make it a big focus. Great job. I love it.

Molly Wood: Thank you. So, is there a capital solution? The capital requirements are huge, and the benefits are not immediate. It's a little like drug development. This is the sort of first series of stories I started doing on climate and investment back at Marketplace, about venture capital and what had happened in that first cleantech boom and bust cycle with John Doerr and Vinod Khosla. These efforts to invest in renewable energy projects were extremely capital intensive and took a long time. Venture has a 10-year lifespan that's dictated by the structures of the fund. The legal documents say, "You will invest in this period of time. You will reap during this period of time. After 10 years, our deal is over." That's why VCs talk in these 10-year horizons. That was a super interesting, specific thing for me to learn, because I was like, "Are you guys just very impatient? What's your problem?" For a long time, the excuse that some VCs used to not invest in climate was, "It's going to take too long to come to fruition." Now, as more firms and individuals get interested in this, we're starting to see us all try to figure out what our lane is. There are definitely some funds that have set up new structures with a longer life, 12 years. I think Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates Fund, is maybe even 20 years. They're saying, "We're going to raise a lot of money and the goal is to be long-term capital." That's great. Some funds are saying, "We're going to do hard tech. We know it's super risky and we know it has a long shelf life, but our investors know that too. That's our goal." This would be carbon moderation, direct air capture, or using fungus and mushrooms and mycelium networks to break down types of waste and turn them into food or building materials. That science takes a while but is very promising. Some firms are dedicated to that kind of progress, R&D, and commercialization. You're seeing funds start to work with universities. Universities incubate for the R&D, and then the VCs fund the commercialization part.

Kara Swisher: So that's what Doerr is doing on a big level at Stanford, right? Exactly.

Molly Wood: And then you're starting to see the software-ification of climate investing, which is a great lane for VCs. Two of my early big investments are around measurement—very precise measuring of emissions in specific areas. That's super investable because it's software with software margins. And it's super necessary because you can't manage what you don't measure. Those technologies don't exist yet, and they will drive change. We're all in this process of figuring out what the best approach is, because it's not going to get solved in any one sector—private, government, or risky capital. Everybody has to get in the pool. I'm fine if VCs say, "Only these four segments are investable for us because we need them, and the rest is appropriate for government and research." It doesn't have to be one or nothing, perfect or nothing. There will be things that VCs can't invest in because the returns just aren't there.

Kara Swisher: Much of it has to be government and VC together. This has to be a massive, worldwide government cooperative effort, which is very difficult given all the tensions. It literally feels like some of these movies. When you watch *The Day After Tomorrow* or *Don't Look Up*—I'm a big watcher of all those movies. I've watched every single one of them. I love them. Even the one with Schwarzenegger on Mars—*Total Recall*—where they have a machine to make air on Mars. I was like, "They must. They have to." One of the things I like to think about is that this is all possible with the commitment of lots and lots of money. Sometimes when people were running around with Bitcoin, I was like, "Just take that energy and put it into climate change." Literal, that literal energy. You silly, silly boys. And it was mostly boys. Germany made a surprise announcement this week to keep its last three nuclear power plants running as it deals with an energy crunch amid Russian cuts to the gas supply. Is there a role for nuclear energy in this? Do you think about that as an investment?

Molly Wood: There has to be. I've heard lots of very good arguments for nuclear power plants.

Kara Swisher: But then you have the Russians with the Ukrainians, and you're terrified what's going to happen to that particular power plant. So is that something you think about or worry about?

Molly Wood: I'm an absolutist on this. I think there is no universe in which nuclear energy cannot be part of our solution. If we had actually embraced nuclear energy in the 70s, we would not be in the situation that we're in instead. If we had done that instead of oil and gas, we would have cut gigatons of emissions over that period. We're in a process of redefining the Overton window on energy. You're seeing Europe say natural gas is now in the green bucket because it is greener than coal. If we have to choose between oil and coal and natural gas for the period of this energy transition, we should choose natural gas.

Kara Swisher: What about solar? You haven't mentioned solar. Do you do solar investments?

Molly Wood: Absolutely. Yes, definitely. I'm super into new panel technologies. I talked to a company that's trying to do this new panel technology. The technology is not new, but it's more moldable. You could put high-functioning solar panels on the top of cars or on devices.

Kara Swisher: Just wrap it around a watch and charge? And they're smaller?

Molly Wood: Yeah. There's awesome technology. I want it all. I want nuclear. I want better solar.

Kara Swisher: I have solar panels on my house for 20 years. I had some of the early ones. I've been worried about this crisis. Anyway, this is really interesting. Last question in this area. Who are the leaders among tech people? Is it Doerr and Gates and anybody else? Musk, you certainly have to put in that bucket because of electric cars. Is there anyone we don't know besides Molly Wood?

Molly Wood: I wouldn't sleep on Chris Sacca. I think he was one of the earliest to make this move into climate tech investing. He started Lowercarbon. I think that's a big deal. There's a woman named Emily Kirsch who has an organization called Powerhouse Ventures who has also been quietly, awesomely investing for years. I'm trying to find all of these investors, the new ones and the old ones. There's a really interesting firm in New York, J. Co. at Lightspeed, and they're doing specifically adaptation and resilience investing—the kind of "how we survive" type investing. They're all over.

Kara Swisher: Guns, more guns to steal water from each other. That was the plot of that Kevin Costner disaster movie. Do you remember that one? *Waterworld*.

Molly Wood: Oh, my God. *Waterworld*.

Kara Swisher: Yes, *Waterworld*. That was about a tanker and Kevin Costner and land. You need to get on it. That was about a climate disaster. You can also watch them on *Yellowstone* if you want to calm down. I love *Yellowstone*.

Molly Wood: Me too.

Kara Swisher: But just FYI, Gates lobbied Manchin to vote yes on the climate bill. These people are really getting involved. But thank you for this. Sacca.

Molly Wood: Gates has this idea for effectively nuclear power backpacks that could be a complete game changer—small modular reactors that you could pop up in places. If you could situate one of those on the coastline in Northern California, you have all the energy you need for desalination and water is fixed. That's why I'm so bullish on not throwing any solution out right now. We do not have time for that.

Kara Swisher: Right, 100%. I love those other names. Sacca, of course. I've had an up and down relationship over the many years, but I've grown to really enjoy Sacca. Anyway, if you've got a question you'd like answered, send it our way. Go to nymag.com/pivot to submit the question for the show, or call 855-51-PIVOT. All right, Molly, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.

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Kara Swisher: Okay, Molly, your win and fail, please. I have an obvious one, but you go first.

Molly Wood: My win, well, actually, I think my win is a little bit humanity this week. In amidst all of the other news is that this is the week that the – I'm just calling it the climate bill, but the Inflation Reduction Act was signed. And it was easy to lose sight of what a huge deal that is. The fact that the United States, which I thought would be a laggard for decades, actually really kickstarted the economic development of real climate solutions in such a meaningful way. You can quibble all you want, nothing's ever going to be perfect. I'm sorry, humans, that's how we work. That's huge. That's a big, big deal for humans on the planet.

Kara Swisher: The economic development part of it is critical. I think that's what they were doing, giving all these subsidies and various things. That's why I put solar on my roof when I did. That's why we got a literally electric car. Google actually subsidized them at the time, which was interesting. It's a really, really, really, really big deal. What's the biggest part of it, do you think, the most important part?

Molly Wood: I think the subsidies are a huge deal. I think that all the moves that the Biden administration has taken toward things like electric heat pumps and decarbonization of homes – I'm one of the last people who still thinks consumers have a huge role to play here. I sort of feel like at this point in America, if you make $200,000 or more and you're not putting in an electric heat pump and an induction stove and solar, you're kind of a climate criminal. Get after it. So the idea that that stuff will become more affordable to people and that it could then start to become the cool thing to do, I think is really powerful. And then all of the infrastructure for electric charging and for more and more. I mean, solar in so many ways is the simplest silver bullet we have.

Kara Swisher: Right, 100%. Put it everywhere. Put it everywhere. What I love about it is energy efficiency is so impactful and you don't even have to care about climate to want to do it because it saves you money. It's those kinds of solutions that are really normal for people.

Molly Wood: Yeah, it did. I had a very low heating bill and it gets cold in California.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, OK, what's your fail?

Molly Wood: My fail, actually, even though it may take some time to develop, is the GOP. I think that this embracing – Liz Cheney getting absolutely trounced, so many election-denying attorney general candidates advancing – that party getting more and more and more extreme. I think ultimately is the end of that party. And it may take longer than we want, but I think that we saw some pretty big steps toward the eventual dissolution of the GOP as we know it today.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I would agree. I think it's really – someone was arguing about Liz Cheney, "This is the height of her power," and this and that. And I go, you know what happens to Wyoming? It becomes a really shitty little state nobody pays attention to because now they have a congressperson without any power. She's going to be a nobody and it's back of the line for you, Wyoming. Now you're just a little state with no power. So wow, did you win? Good job. Nice job. You had an incredibly powerful person who was super conservative and had all your values. So conservative, I hardly want to speak to her, I hardly want to talk to her, though I do. And it's really – I was like, you've now become a loser. You become a loser because you won on one thing, on one thing that is so meaningless and ridiculous. But it's not to them. So they want to die on that hill. They can die on that hill. That's what they're going to do. So we'll see.

Molly Wood: Exactly.

Kara Swisher: All right. My win – it's a win-fail. Obviously it has to be the Dr. Oz stuff. Fetterman is winning by a lot. Some people say social media is kind of what the elite think is happening. He is using it beautifully and using it in a retail politics kind of way that I think is being really effective. One of the things that I think he's doing well, and someone pointed out, is he's not going, "Oz is the end of civilization." He's not making it upsetting and angry, making you upset about the Republicans. All he's saying is, "This guy's an asshole. Why are you voting for an asshole?" He's mocking him in a way that's effective and very clear and consistent. "He's from New Jersey. He's an elitist. He doesn't live in Pennsylvania. By the way, crudité, what the fuck?" I know that's small, but it's not. It's actually very revelatory toward this guy. So he's defining him, not unfairly, but very explicitly. I did a podcast with him many years ago. I was so struck by how he responded to the COVID crisis in such a smart way compared to a lot of Democrats. I think he's a really interesting character. I hope he stays healthy. I myself had a stroke, too. You certainly can stay healthy. But I think the way he's handling this is fun and funny and very Pennsylvania oriented. So he's local and also national at the same time. I think he's a winner of a candidate. And I always did when I talked to him years ago. He's sort of the real deal in a lot of ways. And Dr. Oz, I think he doesn't want to be senator. I don't know what else to say. I just think – what? Like, who? How? I finally decided he's like, you know what? I want to stay a celebrity and not be a senator. Don't you think they're just at this point? I don't know. It's just for money? Like he's going to start selling supplements any minute now. He thought he was Trump. He's not Trump.

Molly Wood: I think a fail is the continued media coverage of whatever comes out of Trump's fucking mouth. I would really tamp that down. It's a race for stupid scoops. The one last night was like, "Oh, he's threatening." It's like, guess what? The toddler said he's going to vomit on the floor if we don't do something. It's very akin to covering mobsters, which everyone used to cover John Gotti like he was funny. And I get it. But he was a killer. He killed people for a living and ruined people's lives with drugs. He wears a nice shiny suit. I find it at this point, I'm like, that's enough of this. I get that he runs the Republican Party. That should be absolutely covered. But his weird little threats and lies? Imagine if the media covered Trump the way that Fetterman deals with Oz. Imagine if the media said, "This guy is at this point pretty much a proven criminal who had one of the most corrupt governments in United States history who is barely able to string a sentence together." What if instead there was just this kind of honest assessment of the absurdity of this situation? Instead of saying, "He threatened to do this," say, "Look at how absolutely absurd. Who cares?" So either don't cover it or be honest about it and say this guy is an asshole. The fact that we still have learned nothing about the way this guy manipulates media is embarrassing.

Kara Swisher: He's very good at it. Anyway, I think that's the fail. I really started to be like, this is going to be a problem if they keep doing this. And then lionizing Cheney at the same time – it's not complex in any way. There's a reason she wasn't voted for. Write about that in a much more honest way. Anyway, I had Roxane Gay on Monday. I loved all of the things that she said. She said that's how low the bar is for inspirational. We'll take it. We'll take it. Is she anti-Trump? Perfect. I like fine. That's we got so little.

Molly Wood: Yeah, it's a little much.

Kara Swisher: Molly, thank you so much. I'm excited to hear more about your climate change stuff. And I wish you will come back on when you start to make – how many have you made investments?

Molly Wood: I have four companies in our pipeline now. Two in our accelerator and two through the Climate Syndicate that will be officially announced soon, the bigger investments.

Kara Swisher: Okay. All right. We want to hear about that. All right, Molly, thank you so much. That's the show. We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot. Today's show was produced by Lara Neyman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ben Woods engineered this episode. Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Jason, see how well we can get along. Scott, let's all hug.