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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. And my heart is full of love and joy today.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I'll give you three guesses why my heart is full of love and joy today, Kara.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Edibles. Three guesses.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Edibles, edibles, edibles. Anderson Cooper was on my podcast.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I know, I saw that.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Anderson Cooper was on Prop G, not on Sway, not on Sway, not on Pivot. He is my revenge guest. Let me just say, you never bring guests to Pivot, so why didn't you bring him here? Will you be able to bring him here? I'm just saying, you give me such a hard time.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Because Kara, as successful as he is, he wanted to be in a safe place. And I think he and I share a special bond of friendship.
--:-- Scott Galloway: None of that is true. He was promoting his book.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Oh, okay.
--:-- Scott Galloway: He's promoting his book about, you know, he's like, he literally is the descendant of the Jeff Bezos of that era, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Yes, he was. Who was richer than Bezos at the time.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah. He's—I'm out of breath because I worked out. This guy, AC, do you know him? He's a very thoughtful, deep guy.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, he is. There's a lot going on there.
--:-- Kara Swisher: There's a lot going on. But anyways, he was on Prop G. I was going to mock you and Sway, but you look like shit and you're sick. This is not an Amazon warehouse. Go home and go to sleep.
--:-- Kara Swisher: No, I did. I'm in San Francisco. I flew to San Francisco last night from D.C. with my oldest son, Louie, who will be at Code. And I have to get there. So I'm here. I'm going to rest the next several days, and then I will be in fighting spirit for Code, which starts on Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And you're going to have to carry a lot if I don't feel well. But I'll feel fine by then.
--:-- Scott Galloway: It's really interesting. I was working on my presentation last night. I am never nervous about presentations. I am nervous about this presentation.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Honestly, because I don't want to let you down. I know this is important.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah. It's not that important.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Okay. All right. Fine.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay. Never mind. I'll just wing it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, just wing it. I'll just wing it. Just wing it. It'll be great. It'll be really good. We're going to have a great time in LA. And there's a lot of great speakers. And it's going to be the first in-person thing. We're doing a lot of testing. We're doing obviously masking because of California. And we're doing vaccination required. I'm expecting to get—it was really fascinating. I'm getting people that think it's not enough and people that think it's too much. And I want to say to all of them, we are trying our best. And it's fascinating to watch everyone being Dr. Google at me, people who are wholly unqualified to do so.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, once you get over a certain amount of wealth, it automatically bestows you an MD, is what I've found. It's crazy.
--:-- Kara Swisher: What do you think? We want to get people sick? We're doing our best to keep everybody safe. We're doing all the safe things. The only thing that we could do to keep people completely safe is not to do it, obviously. But we are doing all we can. And our staff has been amazing to get it all together. And we're hoping it'll be great. So I don't want a lot of lip from either side. I would happily entertain good suggestions, but I don't want to argue about whether masks are useful or not because that's the law in California. And so that's what we're going to follow.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, to be honest, you sound defensive and you don't need to be. You're asking for proof of vaccinations.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah.
--:-- Scott Galloway: You're doing testing on site.
--:-- Scott Galloway: You have distancing. You're complying with every California law. So at this point, people have basically one decision: do they want to come to this, given as much as you can do right now and as they're expected to do, or not come? That's kind of the decision. But heckling from the cheap seats at this point is just that, heckling from the cheap seats.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, we have some very amazing experts on this issue, who have been under siege, especially one of them was in particular siege at the beginning and was completely correct about what happened. So it should be interesting. I think everyone is tired of talking about this. You've got Elon Musk coming. You've got Sachin Adela. You got Mark Benioff. You got Harriet Manuel. A lot of people. Marguerite Vestager. You continue to bring it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: And then obviously...
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, but not Anderson Cooper, obviously.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, yeah, but let's be honest. You got the dog. You got the dog. That's the draw. We're very excited about your presentation. That's what you told Elon. You're like, okay, I don't want to drop names, but Prop G is going to be in the house. He's like, okay, I'll clear my calendar.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, exactly. I'll clear my calendar. Anyway, there's a lot going on. We should move on to other things. We're going to have a lot to talk about next week.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So Google is betting big on office space. It's spending $2 billion to purchase the St. John's Terminal in New York City, which is really interesting because they already have lease space that is huge downtown. I remember going when they were looking at the space with Tim Armstrong at the time. They'll have over 1 million square feet of office space in New York. The New York Times wants to fully reopen its office in the first quarter of 2022, which is very soon. What do you think this says?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I heard nothing you said after you said you were with Tim Armstrong, because all I imagined is Gulliver next to literally—I mean, you should never stand next to Tim Armstrong. I've stood next to him. He is so big and handsome. I'm like, Jesus, I should never stand next to this guy.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, he's a handsome man.
--:-- Scott Galloway: There's a lot here, a few things. One, the death of cities has been greatly exaggerated, and I don't care. Everyone talks about San Francisco. Okay, fine. That's situational. It's gotten expensive, but bad. But two-thirds of economic growth over the next 30 years is going to come from 20 super cities. In addition, the ultimate business strategy in a crisis is that if you're in a position to get off your heels and onto your toes and play offense, you do that. And that is exactly what big tech did. Big tech looked at this crisis and said, okay, we have cash on our balance sheet to buy Boeing and Airbus. How do we play offense? What did they do? They started increasing hiring. Google has hired 5,000 people in New York in the last two and a half years. And they increased their office space expenditures. They've been leasing up while everyone is paralyzed and canceling their leases.
--:-- Scott Galloway: And what is so powerful about this—the secret sauce of any high growth company—is a 24-year-old double E from Dartmouth or someone you find from a good state school who you can pay $80,000 to $120,000 and they think they've died and gone to heaven. They work their ass off. That is the secret sauce. That is the highest ROI investment of any company: attracting and retaining outstanding young people who haven't collected distractions like dogs and spouses. They work their ass off. They're surprisingly smart.
--:-- Scott Galloway: And Google—this broke my heart—at Section 4 we had this amazing young man. We've always been really good at attracting really talented young people. I thought he was loving it. I knew he was loving it. And he came into my office and said, "I'm going to work for Google." And I said, "What?" I was really floored. Usually you have an idea when people aren't happy. And I said, "Why are you going? Don't you love it?" He's like, "I love it here. I'm going for the Google cafeteria."
--:-- Kara Swisher: It's a nice cafeteria.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Quite frankly, he's at an age where he wants to find friends, mentors, and potential mates. One out of three people meet their spouse at work. And we're all working remote. If you go to the Google cafeteria, it's the modern day Studio 54 for the information age. It's social. It's fun. It's curated. Everybody there is really fucking smart and ambitious and has their shit together. So what are they doing? They're creating the corporate equivalent of Xanadu at these headquarters.
--:-- Scott Galloway: And the final lesson—I'll stop blathering—if you're young, all the shit about remote work, "oh no, boss, get into HQ." I think it's going to be hybrid for people who have children. It's a lot easier.
--:-- Kara Swisher: That's exactly right.
--:-- Scott Galloway: If the kids are in school or if you have some sort of childcare, I think for others, it's great. Or caring for a parent or living way out in the suburbs so you can have kids. I get it. But if you're young and you don't have those things, get into the office. I got to say, a lot of my friends who've moved to Park City, they hate it there. They're like, food bad, not interesting culturally. New York was so exciting last weekend when I was there. New York's on fire, Kara. Fallen New York is out of control. It is absolutely on fire.
--:-- Scott Galloway: And here's the thing about career trajectory—they've done studies on this. The gal running Europe for a big multinational won't get promoted, and she's doing a better job, and it's more profitable running Europe, won't get promoted as fast as the gal at HQ doing almost as good a job. Because typically, two or three people are always qualified for a promotion. So the decision maker makes that decision based on relationships, and relationships are a function of proximity. While you can, put on a pantsuit, blow dry your hair, and get into HQ as often as possible.
--:-- Kara Swisher: You know, I was trying on all my outfits for Code and I can't wear anything but sweats at this point. It's really weird. Honestly, I was like, silk, no. It's kind of interesting. I never went to the office, so it doesn't really matter.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Speaking of someone I work for in one of my many jobs, Donald Trump is suing the Gray Lady and also a real lady, his niece. That'll work. That'll work. Trump says the Times engaged in an insidious plot when they published parts of his finances. In 2018, Mary Trump was the source for the story.
--:-- Scott Galloway: So that'll work is your answer. That's it.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah. Come on. I mean, come on.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Fundraising.
--:-- Kara Swisher: That's exactly right. Sorry. Let's not even give it any oxygen. Good luck with that. Have at it.
--:-- Kara Swisher: SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, who is actually going to be coming to Code this next week, interviewed by Preet. Thousands—he says thousands of cryptocurrencies are on their way out. We're excited to talk to him about this. Let's run a clip.
--:-- Gary Gensler (clip): So I don't think there's a long-term viability for five or six thousand private forms of money. History tells us otherwise.
--:-- Kara Swisher: He compared cryptocurrencies to the wildcat banking era of American finance when banks issued their own currencies, which I did not know. Also, the Treasury Department sanctioned a Russia-based crypto exchange. The Treasury says the Suex exchange handles the funds of ransomware attackers. So here they come, and they've just appointed someone to a key finance position who is sort of a cryptocurrency critic. So it's interesting what's happening here. What do you think?
--:-- Scott Galloway: So last night on Thursday nights, the mother of my children goes out with her friends and they party like rock stars. And she leaves me a list. I was doing a podcast last night and she's like, "Okay, Nolan has algebra homework. Alec has a science test. They need to be fed, X, Y, Z. Leah needs to go out." She leaves me a list. And then I look up and it's late, and Alec is still working on his algebra. And I fucking panic. And I scream out reflexively, "Shit, mom's coming home. Mommy's coming home. Everybody get their act together."
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, let me tell you, Coinbase and Tether: Mommy's coming home. And this is—I think crypto is super exciting. I think some of these coins will endure. I think Bitcoin is a phenomenon. I think the dispersion of trust and scarcity credibility that central banks have lost to crypto, I think young people creating their own volatile asset classes, some will endure. A lot are about to have the hammer dropped on them.
--:-- Scott Galloway: And what they have done, which is really stupid, is what Facebook and Amazon and all the other innovators did: when they got insulted or lawmakers got aggressive with them, they would pretend to be thoughtful and concerned and want to work with them and say, "We look forward to working with you." And instead, crypto has put on this arrogant mean girls attitude as, "Oh, you don't get us. Oh, we're innovators. We shouldn't be subject to your little minds of regulation." And guess what? That shit's not going to hunt. I think Gensler is going to come down on them. And you're going to see two-thirds of these shit coins go from chicken salad to chicken shit overnight. It's going to be like leaving the egg salad out in the sun.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Is that your technical name for them, shit coins?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, that's what they are. They're going to go from chicken salad to chicken shit overnight.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I don't think they've handled it. I don't think as an industry—this is worth your sperm metaphors from last week.
--:-- Scott Galloway: My fainty sperm?
--:-- Kara Swisher: My fainty sperm? Yeah. No, but I think the industry would benefit from regulation because I think there's some really smart people and smart investments here who would like to see some guardrails and also put some of the crap out of business. Doja coin is not good for Bitcoin because if one of these or more of these things crashes and there's no there there, I think Tether could bring the whole fucking thing down.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Tether's beginning to smell like froth. Early internet, early internet. This is exactly what happened.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And I say more—you were there for that because you're much, much older than me.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yes, I am. And obviously smarter.
--:-- Kara Swisher: There were a lot of shitty companies, a lot of bullshit, a lot of hype and overdoing it. Some of them were just good ideas too early. Other stuff was just a fast buck kind of thing. It was a crazy time. And I think it's really important to understand that a couple of companies emerged through that that are the most important companies in the world right now. And I think this is the redo of finance, just like the redo of health or transportation, are big, big, big money areas right now. But you're right. The government has to come in and put some guardrails around it and create it so that it feels safe for everybody else to enter the pool. So I think that's correct. I think you are correct, Scott Galloway.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Anyway, we'll see. We'll ask Gary Gensler that when he is at Code next week.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Crete and Gary Gensler. That is a powerful cocktail.
--:-- Scott Galloway: It is. I might even have to show up for that interview.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think you need to. You're going to show up for all of them. I have a special seat for you. It's socially distanced, not just for COVID, for all other reasons for you. And you are going to sit there and learn some stuff.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right, Scott, time for our first big story. Apple wants to diagnose depression and cognitive decline in iPhone users. The Journal reports on proposed research projects that would gather sensor data from the iPhone, including physical activity, sleep patterns, and typing behavior. Another project would use the iPhone's camera to diagnose autism in children. The programs might run on the iPhone without uploading data to Apple's servers. That's a move to address privacy concerns. Twitter is full of jokes about this with one user tweeting, "Losing out on mortgages because I haven't performed the required 72 daily smile units, which is a linear regression model, assures the lender means I'm a high-risk loan." And the other one, which I love: "The ultimate plan to make a device that causes depression, then detect depression." So, Scott, what do you think of this?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I think this is a point on a line of a much bigger trend. The biggest opportunity for disruption and shareholder value creation over the next decade is going to be the disruption and reconfiguration of healthcare. Arguably the largest consumer industry in the world is U.S. healthcare, 17 percent of a $22 trillion economy, so a $3 to $4 trillion business. The ability to disperse the value of healthcare away from a doctor's office or a hospital and out to our devices and into our homes could potentially take healthcare from being a defensive, disease-driven industry to an offensive, health-driven industry.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I think this is wonderful. I have a close friend, and I know you also have a close friend, who they found a spot on their lungs, and they found it early, and they went in and removed it, and by all standards or expectations, they're going to be fine. The key to all of this is early discovery and intervention. Right now, that's not what happens in healthcare. Too many people end up in the emergency room way after they should be there, trying to figure out a rash before it becomes a full-blown infection or a mole before it becomes a melanoma. The same is true of mental illness.
--:-- Scott Galloway: This has an added benefit. Mental illness is kind of where cancer was 20 or 30 years ago. We're all just starting to acknowledge that every family probably at some point is touched by this. Let's be open and let's talk about it and let's destigmatize it. I think this is another step in the right direction. I think it's wonderful and it's a larger trend of something very exciting.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Security issues. Come on. Go ahead.
--:-- Scott Galloway: What are the—
--:-- Kara Swisher: These devices do cause depression. It gets us addicted and everything else, and now they're going to tell us. That's a different issue. Yeah, I agree. They're looking for some things around sleep, but it feels very open to problems. I just feel like they have all this. I ask that sincerely. What are the problems?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, like anything, like the pictures of you drunk on Facebook years later. It's the kind of thing where companies are trying to save money by getting people more physically active, eating better. Surveillance is the obvious problem here.
--:-- Kara Swisher: But why does this need to go to surveillance? Couldn't it be just something you opt in for and your data is protected and you decide if you want to turn on something saying, "Do I need to modulate my behavior?" Fit people do that, right? Everyone you know that uses all these devices are people that already aren't in trouble. "Oh, my goodness, I'm obese. I had no idea." That kind of thing. I just feel like to work, it's got to be used all over the place. And to be used all over the place, you have people using it without knowing what they're using. I think it's fascinating that it could show lots of things. It's very clear that you're with your phone all the time or your watch or whatever device you happen to wear, and it will know everything about you, including where you go, what you do, who you talk to.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Isn't that true already, Kara? Isn't that genie already out of the bottle?
--:-- Kara Swisher: It is.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I just feel like insurance companies are getting their hands on this stuff.
--:-- Kara Swisher: But that's not a foregone conclusion.
--:-- Scott Galloway: No. Why do insurance companies have to get this data? They don't. It's sort of like these devices are controlling us in a lot of ways. You know how much I love them. I had my device with me when I had my baby in the hospital. When you were down here in Florida, you had me staple into your arm. I would refuse to do it because I thought I was going to throw up and pass out.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yes, that was a continuous glucose monitor. But let me—it's just—I think this stuff has to be—we may trust a company like Apple, and I do more than others. But it feels—look, people—there was an interesting interview the other day on Hannity, of all things, where this military guy was like, "I'm not taking—"
--:-- Scott Galloway: Are you watching Hannity?
--:-- Kara Swisher: Sorry, go ahead.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I do. It wasn't taking the vaccine because I want to understand it because of freedom. And then Hannity, by accident, got him to say that he takes 26 other things in the Army. But this one is a bridge too far. "This one I shall not, this far and not farther." It's crazy. But it does—at some point we're going to have so much molecular scanning of us that we have to—I don't think the government is there. They should get in front of this before the companies do. And the companies, once again, are making all the decisions. Okay, that's the end of my rant. Thank you.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, I think you're exactly right. I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle. I think what we need are really talented, thoughtful judges that enforce very strong privacy laws and don't let insurance companies screw in.
--:-- Kara Swisher: We don't have any privacy laws.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Oh, there's HIPAA.
--:-- Kara Swisher: There's HIPAA. The government knows a lot about your health right now, but there's HIPAA compliance and privacy. There is—you can't—there's search and seizure laws. Bill Cosby was released from prison because the law decided that information was extracted from him illegally. So, sure, there are laws. We need thoughtful judges. And I think we need privacy standards. I agree with you. But the genie is out of the bottle. And I think this type of data, if managed thoughtfully and carefully and there are laws to enforce it. And also, if Apple gets hacked and this data comes out and they say, "This guy that lives in Delray Beach is angry and depressed," I can sue Apple. So they have financial incentive to protect my angry, depressed data points. But the flip side of that is if Apple can tell me, "All right, it appears maybe you're having a rough day, you haven't been exercising," just an alert that you are prone to feeling bad, I think that might be a very healthy thing.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Well, perhaps. I think one thing that's interesting to me is the autism thing. From many years ago, I visited a lot of companies. A lot of them are in Berkeley, interesting, where they use different computer things, not just to diagnose autism, but also to deal with it. There's a lot of things the computer does that helps kids that are on the spectrum, which was really interesting at the time. This was super nascent at some of these labs at University of California.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Wait, hold on. University of California, is that the institution that was ranked number one by Forbes? It'll graduate more kids from low-income households this year than the entire Ivy League. 27% of the students are on Cal Grants. Including Scott Galloway.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Did you go there?
--:-- Scott Galloway: That's right. Go Bears. Go Bears. One of the finest institutions in the world. A gift.
--:-- Kara Swisher: My brother went there. A gift to the citizens of California. Indeed. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Anyway, there's a lot of really interesting things, because these things are with us all the time. I just feel like, in this case, I would like the government to be leading this stuff versus—and it's interesting, because I did a really interesting interview, as I told you last week, with Anne Wojcicki from 23andMe. And the Chinese are way ahead on this genome stuff. All this tracking, developing pharmaceuticals, et cetera. It's a huge and lucrative area. And that's why it makes me nervous.
--:-- Scott Galloway: It's a huge and lucrative area.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, but let me ask you, though. Should the government be leading or regulating? I'm not sure. Is this scientific exploration or do we let—I don't know. Do they piggyback off the capital of private companies with a profit motive, but they regulate it? I just feel like in this case, the stakes are higher. I don't know. You're right. You're right, I guess. But I don't agree with you. Does that make sense?
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about Facebook's crazy defense play and talk to a friend of Pivot about the issues around Facebook Marketplace.
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--:-- Kara Swisher: Scott, we're back with our second big story. Facebook thinks the best defense is a good offense. The company planned to push pro-Facebook content in the news feed as part of a program called Project Amplify. By the way, it's only gone out a tiny bit, just so you know. It's not all over the place. The Times reports that Facebook executives decided on the change earlier this year after concluding the public apologies weren't working.
--:-- Scott Galloway: They never did.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Facebook also cut down how much data it shares in April. It disintegrated the team behind CrowdTangle, a data tool popular with researchers. Zuckerberg personally signed off on the changes according to the Times. Also this week, Facebook announced that its longtime CTO, Mike Schroepfer—people call him Schrep—who oversaw the artificial intelligence unit and a lot of other things. He's been around a long time, very close to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, is stepping down. He'll be replaced, interestingly, by Andrew Bosworth, who leads Facebook's efforts in augmented and virtual reality, and the person who was tweeting about the Journal stories in a really ham-handed way. So he's such a different person than Mike. I like Mike quite a bit. I think he's a very decent and thoughtful person. That said, this was, again, the same thing. They've decided now they're not going to study themselves.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I'm sorry, a decent and thoughtful person that's a senior manager at Facebook?
--:-- Kara Swisher: I know, but I have to pick one or two.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Who's decided to prostitute himself so his grandkids can say, "We're rich, but granddad basically sold his soul."
--:-- Kara Swisher: But he's a thoughtful guy. He was a thoughtful guy. All right, that's enough. Not everyone else is evil. In any case, Amplify has only been tested. The cigarette management team's right on the table.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Now, I knew you were going to do this. Do they think that this has been tested in three cities? What do you think about this?
--:-- Kara Swisher: You know, I want to flip this back to you because you read an article on it in the New York Times. What are your thoughts on it?
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think they pretend this is a PR issue. It's not a PR issue. It's a product issue. There's a very famous story about one of the guys, Burson Marsteller, or one of the guys, either Burstyn or Bronchella, where he had—someone repeated it on Twitter this week—but it's a very famous story. The head of PR for this king, when the vandals were sacking the city, went and did PR to get people to replenish the treasury. Everybody was happy to do it. It happened again. They were less happy to do it. The third time, they were not so happy to do it and he couldn't get anything done. And the head of PR said, "Maybe we should work on a moat." The whole thing is PR is such a big thing with these companies. And they think it's the answer, that it's the PR. It's a product issue. And I don't know if the product is able to be fixed. I think that's what the Journal series showed, which has been built on the shoulders of so much reporting about this. And now they're not going to report on themselves or give anybody access. I just don't understand this. I don't understand it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, I always think about—because I work with students—talented people are at moments where they think, "What lane do I pick? Where do I really double down on a skill set?"
--:-- Scott Galloway: And I would argue for the last 20 years, it would be hard if you had any affinity or showed any skill around technology to understand technology or engineering. That was just a great wrap, right? Whenever you pitched a VC, they would say, "Who's the technologist here?" And they'd want to know that technology person's chops. Sometimes people just backrate technologists.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Now I'm wondering, is it design? I think of Evan Spiegel. I think of Brian Chesky. They're not great technologists. I think they're great designers who understand the interface between technology and human behavior. But also, I think the competence you want to develop because it's multidimensional is storytelling. That is the ability to take disparate data points and string them into a narrative. We as a species have a much easier time absorbing and believing information if it's told as a story, as opposed to a bunch of instances or data points.
--:-- Scott Galloway: What big tech has done a great job of is investing in massive story creation and telling that creates a narrative beneficial to them. The way they take data and turn it into what I'll call fiction is really extraordinary. These stories are fiction. They're not even stories.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And their ability—what's so insidious about Facebook—is that if the *New York Times* started publishing articles saying, "We're awesome, and this is why we're so good for the world," you'd immediately recognize it. We do it in ads. They're obviously ads.
--:-- Scott Galloway: But it's de-marketing. That's what's so insidious about Facebook. It shows up in your feed as something your mother forwarded you, and you don't realize it's sponsored by Facebook.
--:-- Kara Swisher: They're doing that too. I'm having an issue with them buying Sway and buying—I think they bought Pivot. They're all over the place buying podcasts. The more they do it, the more I say terrible things and write terrible things about them. I don't mind the advertising. They can do the advertising. I get a lot of complaints from users, but that's at least advertising. It's obvious.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That's what they're trying to do. Amazon and Netflix promote their content on their site. So what? It's so obvious what they're doing. This is just so strange. I'd love to be in that meeting and have nobody say, "What the fuck, Mark?" Right?
--:-- Kara Swisher: It's not different than anything else they're doing. Right now they promote content that gets people upset and also content that makes people joyous because that results in more comments and more forwarding. The fact that they would go to promote content or have the algorithms promote content that's benign or positive towards Facebook, it's not surprising. It's just more of the same.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, I agree. By the way, I was on the water today working out, and this guy came by on an electrofoil, a hydrofoil. It's literally ruined that for me. Every time I see one of those guys, all I can think about is, I fucking hate Facebook. It's ruined hydrofoils for me. They're everywhere down here.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Their problem is their product. Your problem is your product. And it may not be fixable. That's one of the issues. But it certainly isn't PR. And it certainly isn't reporters out to get you. That meme is so deep within Facebook, trust me, it is. And they're so petty about it. I agree, some reporters can be too, like, not doing the work. These reporters have done the work. And it shows a real problem with the product. If they think it's a PR problem, we have a real problem with Facebook.
--:-- Scott Galloway: By the way, my greatest worry is it's going to work. It'll work.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Well, it does work. They create confusion. There's a reason they have a 900-person communications department. There's a reason. Some of the smartest people I know—I know this guy named John Panette, who I would describe the way you described Mike. I think he's a thoughtful, lovely man. And he decided to go to work for Facebook. I don't begrudge anybody for wanting to make a living in a challenging, interesting organization. But it just kind of frightens the shit out of me.
--:-- Scott Galloway: You know how everyone got freaked out that the most talented people were going to work for hedge funds? Like, "Oh no, they're not going into science or STEM. They're going to work for hedge funds. All our astrophysicists and geophysicists are going to work for Bridgewater." I feel that times ten. Some of those talented people I know are basically going to work for these, in my opinion, mendacious companies that are bad for the commonwealth, and their entire job is to spin the story, which is really powerful. They can overwhelm media.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Senators Klobuchar, Senator Bennett, Attorney Generals. It's time. It's time. We're not going to win this.
--:-- Scott Galloway: No, but they're doing less research. I think that's one of the things. Casey Newton wrote this week, which I thought was smart: when Facebook moved to make it harder for people to volunteer their own news feed data to an external research program, it signaled that's the way it was heading—to just stop giving information. But what if it did the reverse? What if it invested dramatically more in research and publicly pressured its peers to join it? What if Facebook routinely published its findings and allowed its data to be audited? What if the company made it dramatically easier for qualified researchers to study the platform independently? It would be unprecedented in the history of American business, but Facebook is an unprecedented thing in the world. The company can't rebuild trust with the larger world through blog posts and tweet storms, but it could start by helping us understand its effects on human behavior and politics in society.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think that's the way to go—radical transparency. But they won't do it. They won't do it. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook shareholders claim the company paid billions of dollars to the FTC to get Zuckerberg out of a deposition for Cambridge Analytica.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, that's the issue here. You said this: there's only two changes that really need to happen. The first is Mark Zuckerberg. The second is Sheryl Sandberg. If the two of them decided to step down—and they're only going to step down under the threat of the wolf circling around criminal prosecution—I think the company has the potential. I know a lot of good people that work there. You know a lot of good people that work there. Supposedly, there's starting to be a real uprising internally where people are going, "Jesus Christ, I am not comfortable." This is everyone throwing the documents over the edge. People are dropping a dime on them.
--:-- Kara Swisher: That's your turn. You want to see change? There's really only a couple things that can happen. One, Mark and Sheryl need to go. He declares victory and leaves. Or two, someone needs to do a perp walk.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I disagree. I think that might happen. Stock's never been higher. They can sit it out. They can wait it out. I know these people. There's too many AGs that see a path to the governor's mansion by filing criminal charges against this organization.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think you're smoking something again.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I think you're smoking something, as usual.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah. Anyway, speaking of which, let's bring in our friend of Pivot, Craig Silverman. Craig is a reporter at ProPublica and has spent years covering social media and fake news. His most recent article looks at Facebook Marketplace's fraud problem, which is a problem that other marketplaces have had. Welcome, Craig Silverman. How are you doing?
--:-- Craig Silverman: Hey, I'm good. Thank you.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So what's the problem with Facebook Marketplace? If you could just give us a pithy answer. I know this is a very long and important investigation, but give people an idea of why you focused on this.
--:-- Craig Silverman: Well, Marketplace has a billion active users a month. As with anything with Facebook, once they hit scale, the question is what's happening. We found that they've got these automated systems which are really bad at spotting obvious scam listings and posts. They've got a few hundred low-paid contractors—very typical Facebook approach. They say they're not really stopping people from getting scammed. In fact, Facebook allowed them for a while to access people's entire Messenger inbox to read all their messages. There really weren't a lot of guidelines on preventing them from doing things like snooping on romantic partners.
--:-- Craig Silverman: We also found that during the pandemic, when Marketplace has been booming, there's also been a surge in violent crime on there. Facebook has not taken some steps that other platforms, even Craigslist—which has a huge scam problem—have done to rein this stuff in.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Right. And not just eBay and Craigslist. Craigslist had that for years, obviously, when it started. Very small outfit. But this is a big company doing this. Explain what—give me an idea of violence. Explain to people why violence would break out.
--:-- Craig Silverman: At the core, most of what happens on Marketplace is a person-to-person transaction. Somebody posts something, somebody else wants to buy it, they connect locally. On Craigslist and other places, there are times where people post things saying they're selling something. Somebody shows up with cash and they rob them. Sometimes that goes really awry and leads to murder.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I'm sorry, can you pause there? I had no fucking idea. So people are advertising products on Marketplace, and then people who express an interest—criminals are tracking that and then showing up and robbing and murdering them? Come again?
--:-- Craig Silverman: It's the criminals who are often using a fake account. They're luring people to an area. Person shows up with cash, criminal robs them at gunpoint, robs them at knifepoint. In some cases, they're killing them. There was one example of a guy who showed up with more than $5,000 in cash to buy a four-wheeler. This was how he was making his living—buying and selling stuff on Marketplace. He was murdered, allegedly by a group of people who'd been robbing people using Marketplace going back weeks, according to the local sheriff who told us. They often get organized and the crimes can escalate over time because they're not getting caught.
--:-- Kara Swisher: OK, and my follow-up question is—
--:-- Scott Galloway: Can I just say—has this happened unclassified?
--:-- Kara Swisher: Well, that's my question. Is this over-indexing on this marketplace versus other areas of transaction where there's crime?
--:-- Craig Silverman: The bottom line is just how big Marketplace is. What we heard from law enforcement is that Marketplace has become the place. It's got lots of people on it, so that's where the scammers are going. That's where the thieves and the criminals are going. The issue with Facebook is scale. It's in more than 150 countries. There's a billion people using it every month. As Craigslist is declining—we talked to an analyst who said Craigslist revenue is probably half of what it was even three or four years ago—Marketplace is the spot. We asked them, "What have you guys done to deal with increasing violent crime? What have you done as it's scaled up and become huge over the pandemic?" They didn't really have any specific stuff to point to. They're using their standard playbook, and we're seeing the consequences.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So talk about what user protections could be in place. Anyone who's used Craigslist has had this happen. I tried to sell something and had all sorts of—not violent, but crazy people. People making sexual remarks. This is not a new thing. But what user protections could go in place, especially because they're so big? As usual, Facebook is sloppy. Sloppy is like Facebook's management style, I think, in many ways.
--:-- Craig Silverman: They launch stuff. They get tons of users. They can scale things quickly. Then it's sort of like, "Oh right, we've got to address the specific problems we've created." Even going back to newspaper classifieds, there's been problems with this stuff. It's endemic. In Facebook's case, they are doing a good thing: scanning every listing before it goes live. That's a good thing. The problem is we see obvious patterns of scam listings all over it. So what is this scanning doing? We talked to workers who say it misses obvious red flags. They need to actually put in the effort and dedicate the resources to make this scanning effective. I found literally thousands, probably tens of thousands of posts created by fake accounts that were violating multiple Facebook rules. Still to this day, I'm getting these same things in my Marketplace recommendations.
--:-- Craig Silverman: One is invest in the systems. Two, they have a few hundred low-paid contractors looking at this stuff. They're not empowered to actually scan and look for listings and help remove them. They're just coming in after the fact, after people have been ripped off. Where is the proactive detection? You probably need more people than a few hundred when you've got a billion users.
--:-- Craig Silverman: Also, Craigslist—one of the things that did used vehicle scams are massive—started requiring people to pay to post a used vehicle ad. What we've been told is that led a huge amount of these cyber criminals, many based in Eastern Europe or parts of Africa, to actually move to Marketplace because Marketplace loves cars, wants you to post used vehicles. They haven't put up barriers that Craigslist has. Also eBay, if you're buying a used car over eBay, eBay has purchase protection there as well. There are a few things they could and should be doing: scaling up the security and safety as the product has grown. They just haven't done them at the same rate.
--:-- Kara Swisher: One of the things I found interesting is Craigslist is declining. Craigslist was a really important company when it started. It changed everything. I'm actually working on a book about my time on the internet, and I remember when Craigslist came in and started to hurt newspapers.
--:-- Scott Galloway: In the 60s? Sorry, I couldn't resist. Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm sorry. Go ahead.
--:-- Kara Swisher: What has happened to Craigslist? You said Facebook has just decided this is a lucrative market and is trying to upset that particular apple cart, whether it's eBay or Craigslist.
--:-- Craig Silverman: They've really harmed Craigslist, particularly in places like the U.S. and Canada where Craigslist has been really big. Europe is a little different because there are a lot of regional classified sites that are actually quite successful. But in the U.S., a lot of people are moving to Facebook because one of the things that should be good about Facebook is you can see the profile of someone posting the listing. On Craigslist, it's an anonymized kind of posting. So that should be good. Except Facebook has a big problem with hacked and fake accounts. Something that should be a signal of trust gets turned on its head and is actually luring people in.
--:-- Craig Silverman: With Craigslist, the pandemic really hurt them as opposed to Marketplace, which was helped. Craigslist got a lot of its revenue from help wanted and job ads and job posts. Those started to decline during the pandemic, so that hit them pretty hard. They did not have a mobile app until about 2019. Marketplace launched in the existing Facebook app in 2016, super easy, super user friendly. They've been eating Craigslist's lunch. The analysts I talked to who've tracked Craigslist for a long time believe that about four years ago, Craigslist revenue had gone from a billion down to about half of that. They think it's recovered a little bit. But Craigslist has a really big battle on its hands against Marketplace, which in a lot of ways is a better product.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, it is a better product. My question is—any marketplace will have externalities. I remember hearing about in the Hamptons that some very innovative criminals were posting a summer rental with pictures and giving you very credible reasons to believe this person had a summer rental. "Why are the money here? Sign this contract." Then people would show up to their summer house in Watermill and knock on the door and they'd be like, "Who are you?" They'd realize it was a total fraud. Is there some sort of redress? What legal liability does the platform have? Is Facebook less liable because of Section 230? What are the means of redress here? Are they any less or greater at Facebook in terms of the law or Facebook's demeanor and approach?
--:-- Craig Silverman: As far as I understand it, they're pretty similar to Craigslist in that sense. They're telling people, "Listen, unless you are buying through an e-commerce shop on Marketplace—something they've integrated—unless you are buying there, you are on your own. Buyer beware."
--:-- Kara Swisher: And the other part: seller beware.
--:-- Craig Silverman: Yeah, both. One of the things that's interesting about Marketplace is Facebook has represented on its website and other places that you can know who you're dealing with. I think that's a representation that is really misleading for people because they are not doing a good job of educating people about fake accounts, about hacked accounts. In your example, real estate agents are getting hacked like crazy on Facebook because then people post apartments for rent or houses for rent and they scam people exactly as you just described. It's a post from a real real estate agent. Facebook does not have good guidance for people on how to avoid scams. We wrote our own guide because of that.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Two things. How did Facebook react to you? And then what can users do to protect themselves?
--:-- Craig Silverman: Their response was kind of the standard Facebook response: "Listen, we take safety and security seriously. We invest in it. Nobody's perfect. These kinds of platforms always have scams and fraud." It's pretty much a cookie-cutter comment to the stuff I've gotten over the years. The one thing they were very sensitive about was that they really try hard to engage with law enforcement. When law enforcement asks for records, they try to service them. They were also very sensitive about the fact that they had given this wide-ranging access to these low-paid analysts to go look in people's Messenger inboxes. They said they reined that in. I was told by a source that was about six to eight months ago. That's sort of their response. Maybe in the coming months, they'll roll out some new features as a result.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right. What can people do to protect themselves? Because Facebook's not interested in doing that necessarily.
--:-- Craig Silverman: One of the big things is if somebody—if you are buying or selling and the person is not willing to meet you in person, that is a huge red flag. You should not be sending your money to them unless you have seen the item and inspected it yourself. It seems very obvious, but this is where a lot of people get roped in. Second, when you are meeting someone, it is recommended to meet in person at a police station parking lot where there is surveillance.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Oh, God. Yeah. Come on. That's what police stations need—a flea market every day in their parking lot.
--:-- Craig Silverman: Some police stations have created what they call safe exchange zones. They've actually painted parking spots in their parking lot saying, "Come." For law enforcement, this is a nightmare. They are getting so many complaints from people and they can't investigate all of them. We saw so many notices from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the U.S.—
--:-- Kara Swisher: That's a great idea.
--:-- Craig Silverman: —of law enforcement really having to throw up their hands and warn people. So many warnings put out. The other thing is when you look at a profile, you should look at someone's seller profile. A really big red flag is if they're posting the same item in multiple states that are nowhere near each other, because that's just a scammer trying to get as many victims as possible. Facebook's systems should stop this, but they don't. It's also considered a warning sign if they're trying to take you off platform. Some people may want to text rather than use Messenger. But a lot of times scammers want you to direct you to an email. They'll say, "Oh, I'm selling this on behalf of my aunt." There's a suspiciously low price on it and they're trying to get you to send the money really quickly. Those are all really big red flags.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Won't this ultimately—or shouldn't this—I would think Facebook has a vested interest in not having the core associations of their marketplace be fraud and violence. Similar to eBay or Amazon, won't there be certain certifications? Power seller at some point? Whenever I was on eBay or Amazon, I looked for that company-wide certification that these guys deliver, not even for fraud, but for better customer service. Is there some sort of evolving badging mechanism here?
--:-- Craig Silverman: They have reviews. You can see a seller's profile. But beware, because if it's a hacked profile, the hackers will often target people with a good reputation. The second part is that at one point, Marketplace actually had verified sellers, and then they kind of got rid of that. Facebook wouldn't really tell me why they got rid of it except to say, "Well, we test different things." The short answer is no. There's really no certified kind of piece happening here. People really need to treat this as the Wild West. They need to guard themselves, whether they're selling or buying, and follow the best practices that are out there.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right. So what's going to happen? They're just going to get bigger? Is there any other marketplace that is problematic—eBay or others? What will happen? They'll just eat up the business of Craigslist and eBay, and then we're at their mercy.
--:-- Craig Silverman: We had a guy in a story whose account was hacked and used to sell cell phones and vehicles that never arrived. One of the things he said to me was, "Everybody's on Marketplace now. The only things that will be left in this world are Marketplace and Amazon." He may be right. eBay is still very strong, but I think Craigslist is in huge trouble. As for Marketplace, they're in more than 150 countries and territories, and they continue to roll out. Last month, they announced they were launching Marketplace in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. An interesting note on that is one of those countries was Benin. But we found from internal documents that Benin, for months and potentially years, had already been labeled a high-risk country because scammers there were using hacked and fake accounts to scam people. They rolled out officially in a country where they already knew there's a huge problem, and they haven't put any new guardrails on that.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Jesus, they can't. There's nothing they don't want to eat, is there?
--:-- Scott Galloway: There isn't. There just isn't. It's amazing.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right, Craig, this has been great. Everybody, we recommend you read his piece. It's a really important thing. There's been so much Facebook news. How do you feel about that, Craig? There's been so much over here, over there. But this is a really important area because it really does affect people physically in a way that I think people don't realize, which I think is critically important, and their money and stuff like that. Thank you so much for coming on.
--:-- Craig Silverman: Thank you for having me.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right, Scott, as usual. That was interesting, wasn't it?
--:-- Scott Galloway: He is. It's a great piece. It's a great piece. It's a really interesting area because it's an area that Facebook's not as—people tend to focus on Amazon or e-commerce or other companies.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Anyway, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay, Scott, give us this week's prediction besides the fact that Code is going to be lit.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Code is going to be lit. I'm so excited about it.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I know. Can you interact with people? Because I can't.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I thought you were asking, like, "Are you so fucked up in the head that you cannot interact with people?" No, but I did this. I'm an introvert, so I don't like people. I don't know. I'll do my best. I'll represent.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I will represent. I wanted you to do that because I did a live event with Sam B. on Little Island in New York this week, which was great. Both she and I were like, "This is the first live event I've done in a long time." This was outdoors at that beautiful thing that Barry Diller worked on. It was really amazing. Both of us were like, "What are you people doing here?" It was weird to be interacting in person. It's very hard, I find.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That's called getting old and agoraphobic. The mental illness is finally here.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Oh, hi.
--:-- Scott Galloway: It's setting in, Kara.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Oh, like—anyway, it's going to be interesting. I'm excited. It's been two years, and I'm very excited—or more than two years since the last one.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I track my presentations pretty meticulously. Since the outbreak of COVID, I've given 170 presentations to approximately 84,732 people, 11 universities, 27 of the Fortune 100. I've only done two in person. This will be the second one.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Well, we're excited for it. Scott's going to do a whole presentation of where things are going. I'm sure he'll piss off a sponsor, which he does every time, and they come yelling at me.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I'm going to piss off more than that. My sister.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Well, great, because then I have to deal with them. One sponsor—I'm not going to say who it was—came running up to me and said, "I can't believe you did that, and we're sponsoring your show." Amazon. Hello, Amazon. I was like, "You know what? I don't know what to tell you. You shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have sponsored us." They thought I was going to say, "Oh, I'm so sorry." I didn't at all. I was like, "That's the way it goes. I don't know what to say."
--:-- Scott Galloway: You can take the dog out of the pound, but you can't take the pound out of the dog. You know what?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I just made that up. Boom! That's great.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Anyways, my prediction, and I was reticent to make this prediction because something that really bothered me was when Bill Ackman said about Herbalife, "The arrests are coming." I thought that was a reckless thing to say. But my prediction is around Facebook.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I think that there are building, mounting political motivations to criminalize or start criminal investigations. I think either the antitrust case in Texas, which has criminal remedies, is going to be federalized. I think some of the stuff around QAnon... I think it's becoming too tempting for an AG, even if they feel like they're standing on fairly tenuous legal ground. I think it's going to be too tempting for somebody not to say, "Enough is enough. I'm the sheriff in town. The buck stops with me. I'm going to file criminal charges against this company."
--:-- Scott Galloway: I think in the next 90 to 180 days, we're going to see criminal charges filed against someone or the corporation of Facebook. It's becoming too tempting. I think a lot of this stuff is political. And I think there are too many people with teenage girls, too many people who see what's happened to our voting, too many people who think, "Okay, this is an organization that has been subject to a fraction of the scrutiny of other firms that have done a fraction of the damage." And I think someone's going to decide, "I'm willing to take this on because, quite frankly, I see personal interest in doing this."
--:-- Scott Galloway: So I don't want to say arrest. I have no idea if there'll ever be an arrest. But I think somebody—an AG in a state, or the feds—are going to decide it's time.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right. Oh, that's a big one. Okay. All right. What do you think? You don't think that's going to happen?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I do not.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think they're just going to keep on keeping on. That's what they do. Anyway, we'll see. At some point, at some point they'll get it, but not today.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Anyway, thank you. That's the show. We'll be back on Tuesday for more from Los Angeles. We didn't get to a listener question this week. We've received some really great questions on our site. We even noticed some listeners talking to each other on YAPA, which we love to see. Keep it coming. Go to nymag.com slash pivot and join the conversation.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Scott, read us out.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Thanks also to Drew Burrows. Ernie Andretot engineered this episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Thank you for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. The City of Angels, In-N-Out Burger, the Hollywood Bowl, body surfing at Zuma Beach. The Jungle Cat and the Dog will be doing none of those things, none of those things. But City of Angels, watch out. We're coming in. We're coming in.
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--:-- Scott Galloway: Thank you.
