Epic Games Wins Against Google, COP 28, and Guest Naomi Alderman

[Podcast begins]

Kara Swisher: As marketing channels have multiplied, the demand for content has skyrocketed. But everyone can make content that's on brand and stands out with Adobe Express. You don't have to be a designer to generate images, rewrite text, and create effects. That's the beauty of generative AI that's commercially safe. Teams all across your business will be psyched to collaborate and create amazing presentations, videos, social posts, flyers, and more. Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content. Learn more at adobe.com slash express slash business.

Kara Swisher: Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like Tea Time You. Mmm. Or this Tea Time You. Or even this Tea Time You. Said you hear about Dave. Or even Tea Time, Tea Time, Tea Time You. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great.

Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

Scott Galloway: And I'm Scott Galloway. How's it going, Scott?

Kara Swisher: How's it going, Scott?

Scott Galloway: It's going really well. I'm headed to, I'm going out to dinner with friends tonight. Then tomorrow I head to Florida. So I'm excited to be back in Delray Beach for the holidays.

Kara Swisher: You're going to be there because you got your house back, right?

Scott Galloway: Yeah. Yeah, and word is in Florida, they have this round yellow thing in the sky that emanates heat and light. And I'm excited to see that again.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I'm excited. I'm going to California on Saturday for two weeks.

Scott Galloway: Oh, you are?

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Hang out with the family?

Scott Galloway: With the kids. Yeah, all the kids are flying in. Louis from Buenos Aires. Alex is already there with Jeff. So we have a big family thing. Dragon mom, the ex-wife, I told you. Amanda, the kids, everything.

Kara Swisher: Wow, that's a lot. You want to come?

Scott Galloway: Hard no. That's a hard no.

Kara Swisher: What is your Christmas tradition?

Scott Galloway: Well, this year will be total dysfunction as I have committed to teaching my 16 year old how to drive. So the whole house is going to come crumbling down under that pressure.

Kara Swisher: It's easy. It's not hard.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, well, we'll see.

Kara Swisher: Okay, I'll call you if it's not easy.

Scott Galloway: Okay, it's not that hard. Yeah, I taught two kids. I didn't... you know what, I let my ex-wife do it. And I actually have videos of them me teaching... I like, no no no. So I didn't... I'm not a very good driver. But they get good. They get you feel confident.

Kara Swisher: The big issue I tell you... Well, you have to be able to see over the wheel to be a really confident driver, right? Very funny. I don't like to drive actually that much.

Scott Galloway: Just sit on a phone book.

Kara Swisher: Okay. Are we done?

Scott Galloway: You know, they have special cars or they raise the pedals now.

Kara Swisher: Get through them. Get through them. Get through them. Go ahead.

Scott Galloway: That's good. I'll tell you the one thing that's really hard. The Hervé Villachez model. That's probably a hate crime.

Kara Swisher: All right. We're done.

Scott Galloway: Getting on the highway is the real thing with someone, a new driver.

Kara Swisher: Oh, no, I'm not allowing them to drive on the highway to Florida.

Scott Galloway: I know, but that's the real moment. You're like, hmm.

Kara Swisher: I remember the Louis one. I was like, I am now going. This is how it ends for Kara Swisher. But that's the one that's really hard because on the local streets, you're kind of like, how much damage could they do? But a highway is something that's nerve wracking with a teen, I have to say, because they're nervous because they're appropriately nervous.

Scott Galloway: Well, that'll be fun. I want to know what your resolution is besides that. I didn't get you anything for the holidays. I didn't. I didn't. I'm getting you a bunch of dad jokes. You got me a sweater, but I really wanted a moaner or a screamer. Oh. Ring in the holidays. Ring in the holidays. Maybe I'll send you a book. I don't have a resolution. I don't do that. I don't buy any of that. I don't do any of that. I'm not.

Kara Swisher: You're not that.

Scott Galloway: No. No resolutions.

Kara Swisher: Neither do I. Isn't that interesting?

Scott Galloway: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: I think it's kind of dumb. You're supposed to make little ones, not big, bold ones.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. I don't have any. I don't do any. One year, I was at a party, and everyone goes around the table and everybody says, what is your resolution? And I said, I hope it rains. And people were unhappy with my resolution.

Kara Swisher: But I like rain. So I hope it rains. I got a city that's waiting for you. Come visit.

Scott Galloway: Oh, oh, it's London.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it's raining. But it's not the good rain. You know good rain? Like, good rain? No, it's a mist. It's like God spitting. It's like an old man peeing. It's just awful.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I like good rain. We had good rain here in D.C. the other day. Actually, I'm doing a renovation, and I decided to get a metal roof because I like the sound of rain on a roof.

Kara Swisher: Really?

Scott Galloway: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: I have a story about a metal roof.

Scott Galloway: Oh, what?

Kara Swisher: A tin roof.

Scott Galloway: Yeah?

Kara Swisher: My Uncle Alan and Aunt Mary basically were in council housing as they digressed into poverty through severe alcoholism in the outskirts of Glasgow. That's welfare housing, essentially. And we went over to visit them. Of course, my father and my uncle, thinking they can fix anything, decide, oh, Mary and Alan are raging alcoholics, so we'll go over there and fix it in a weekend. So I went with them. Of course my father used my miles that I was getting in Morgan Stanley because it was so ridiculously cheap. Anyways, we go there. They lived in basically what is low housing. And it was one of the grimiest settings I had ever been in, even after growing up in a kind of upper-lower middle class household. And when it rained, it sounded as if there was thunder. It sounded as someone was pounding on the roof because it was a tin roof. Anyways, fast forward a couple of years later, she pushed him down the stairs. He was knocked unconscious. And she went and grabbed a bottle of Vicodin and vodka, drank it, drank and digested them both, laid down next to them, and they were found five days later. Merry Christmas!

Kara Swisher: Merry Christmas! What? What? What? Is that the Galloway family? That is a terrible story.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, well, it was terrible. It was terrible.

Kara Swisher: Oh, my. Why did she... well, we don't know why she pushed him. Something smells from the Galloway household. Hello, kids. Oh, no. Well.

Scott Galloway: Let's go caroling. Let's go caroling.

Kara Swisher: My tin roof is on an outdoor porch, which a covered porch. That's not happening to Amanda Katz and Kara Swisher. That is not going to happen here.

Scott Galloway: Oh, I just don't know what to say about that.

Kara Swisher: Well, okay. I learned a lot, by the way, about you. If you push me down the stairs and look like I was checking out, would you lie down next to me and down a bottle of vodka?

Scott Galloway: No, I'm going to hit you with a bottle of vodka.

Kara Swisher: Oh, I saw Ricky Gervais last night.

Scott Galloway: Oh, how was that?

Kara Swisher: I think that guy is a genius. He is funny. Oh, my God. And he's fearless. He is. I love people who are dancing as if no one is watching them. I think he's deep down a good man and very thoughtful and quite actually has progressive values.

Scott Galloway: Oh, he likes to tweak the libs. He does. Oh, my God. He's like...

Kara Swisher: Yeah, you probably like that. I think you're moving into Vivek Ramaswamy territory, but keep going. Go ahead.

Scott Galloway: No, Vivek is a fraud who lacks empathy. Uh, no. You're moving into the Elon camp. I feel it. This is what 2024 is going to be.

Kara Swisher: Don't say that.

Scott Galloway: I'm just saying you're expressing some views that are problematic. But that's okay. You go ahead and do that.

Kara Swisher: Problematic as in common sense? As in...

Scott Galloway: No, not common sense. As in truly progressive? That is realizing that actions are more important than words. The words aren't violence. Violence is violence. Dumb stuff like that. Here we are. 2023. I know. Let's cancel all DEI leadership and ethics departments and use the money to expand freshman seats.

Kara Swisher: You know why he's being this way, everybody? Like, there's no white man who's had a pointless job. No.

Scott Galloway: Yeah and I sure they have a job where they overpaid and have no accountability. Instead, let's fire the person that wrote you and let in more black kids and let in more trans kids. No no no.

Kara Swisher: Can I just say there is no white man who ever gotten to step up before everybody else just because of their manly whiteness?

Scott Galloway: And the way to give non-whites and trans and LGBTQ community to step up is when you're sitting on a $55 billion endowment and only letting in 1,500 kids, fire anything with ethics or leadership and then let in more kids.

Kara Swisher: Well, that's a different thing. The ultimate bigotry is exclusion.

Scott Galloway: Yes, that is a great idea.

Kara Swisher: But let me just say, the original people who got to step up for not their talents were a certain group of dudes. It's true. It's true. It wasn't out of their talents. I'm not a fan of affirmative action. It should just be based on income.

Scott Galloway: You want to spot the most incompetent people at NYU or any university? Here's a quick tell. Find the people who are loudest about DEI because they're creating a weapon of mass distraction from their mediocre teaching and their mediocre research because then no one can go after them because, oh, they're leaders talking about microaggressions. That's so ridiculous.

Kara Swisher: Literally, the focus on people who get a step up compared to other people who have long gotten a step up is really, we're done with that. 2024, we're done with that. And here's the thing. We need more steps. They got a slight step up. They got a slight step up in the long history of everything.

Scott Galloway: All we have done is reshuffled the elites to the freakishly remarkable and the rich under the banner of DEI. We have reshuffled it. The most bigoted thing you can do is exclude people. And we take so much money with virtue signaling.

Kara Swisher: This is true, but—

Scott Galloway: Sustainability departments.

Kara Swisher: Well, how do you measure that? For decades and decades and decades. Listen to me. There are measurables that you're wrong about this. Actually, I've gotten dozens of letters how wrong you are about this. You know why he's acting like this? This is, I'm like, what is going on? I'll tell you what's going on, people. Scott and I had a session with Esther Perel, and Scott's feeling vulnerable because he showed his true side. Did you enjoy that?

Scott Galloway: I was very self-conscious.

Kara Swisher: Yes, you were. You were very self-conscious. I did enjoy it. But I'm just saying, I think you felt a little vulnerable there. That's what I think. A little vulnerable. That's what I think happened here. So you're showing your tough guy. It's a little more complex than Scott is putting out here. But nonetheless, we're going to move on. Are you done?

Scott Galloway: Are you done?

Kara Swisher: I'm done.

Scott Galloway: Okay. Anyone else you want to attack? Anybody else?

Kara Swisher: Attack? I'm not attacking anybody. I'm defending. I want more people in freshman classes.

Scott Galloway: I'm defending, I want more people in freshman classes. I want true progressive values, not virtue signaling, from people who don't want to actually do their fucking job.

Kara Swisher: All for that goal, you must drag others. Okay, that's an excellent goal, but you don't have to say all of DEI is pointless.

Scott Galloway: Well, all of a lot of things is pointless, by the way. You could do that. You could walk your way through things.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, happy 2023. Dun-da-da-dun-da-da-da. Anyway, today we'll talk about the major climate change deal coming out of the UN's COP28 summit, what Google's antitrust loss means for the company's future. And we'll talk to a friend of Pivot, author Naomi Alderman, about her new novel, The Future, which is, in fact, about issues like this, including tech billionaires. But first, Tesla is recalling 2 million vehicles to fix autopilot features. Elon doesn't like the word recall because he's just sending a software update. Auto safety regulators found the features to be too easy to misuse and abuse, causing a, quote, increased risk of collision. Tesla's begin rolling out the software update remedy, including additional controls and alerts that will simplify engagement and disengagement of auto steer. The update will also make it possible for drivers to get locked out using auto steer if they do not use it responsibly. The recall marks the fourth for Tesla in two years. It looks like they did cooperate with the regulators on this one. I guess maybe they had them dead to rights or something like that. But they don't want to call it a recall as this software update improved on safety.

Scott Galloway: It always cracks me up when people say they're cooperating.

Kara Swisher: Well, Elon didn't do his typical rant against regulators on this one. His mother did one. It matters what his mother thinks. Anyways, look, I actually do think this is a bit of a nothing burger because it's not even a, I mean, it's a recall. What it is, is it's a mandate to fix, which they can do over the air because quite frankly, and you got to give Tesla its due. The first time I had a tune-up on my Tesla over the airwaves. I'm like, Jesus Christ, that's remarkable. So I don't think it's a very, just to be blunt, I don't think it's a big deal.

Scott Galloway: The biggest impact—

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they should care about safety.

Scott Galloway: The biggest impact all this has had, I think, on society is that, because since Tesla and since the decriminalization of marijuana, when I pick up a wayward hitchhiker, I can only demand ass as payment. No. Get it? Grass and gas are no longer, you no longer need them.

Kara Swisher: I like that. You don't think that's good? A little holiday cheer?

Scott Galloway: No, I think it's bad. You on a real bender today, a little offensive bender. A little too much nog in his egg.

Kara Swisher: It's fine. It's fine. It's an update. They should have updated it. It looks like they cooperated. I don't think this is a big deal. The auto driving, and also there's data that shows, and you know how much I hate to defend Musk, but there's data that shows that people who drive Teslas are actually less prone to crash. The reason why there's more data on their crashing is because there's more of them in this regard. And they should be safe. And eventually, they're not going to be as many Teslas. There'll be other cars. And then it'll be an industry issue, just like seatbelts or anything else.

Scott Galloway: I think he's a little faster and looser with how quickly he rolls things out.

Kara Swisher: That is true. But he's not going to be able to because there'll be competitors who will sell on safety or whatever the heck else. So he'll have to be a little sharper on this kind of stuff. Same thing with hiring. There's a lot more people going to get jobs. The thing it illuminates, and we understand it, but we still don't do anything about it, is the dissonance between data and how you feel about safety in the sense that, in my view, the most obvious place for AI or automation is actually in air travel. Because if you look at, I'm obsessed with air disasters. And I go to this, unfortunately, I go to this website that has the tapes of every air disaster.

Scott Galloway: You're obsessed with air disasters? Why did I not know this? But okay.

Kara Swisher: All right. Anyways, my advice to anyone who has a fear of flying, which I did for like two years for some reason, is to not go to the site. Anyways, but if you look at the data, the majority of air disasters are first and foremost owner pilots on weekends with their families. The dentist who buys a Pilatus PC-12, arguably one of the best planes ever manufactured out of Switzerland, a wonderful plane. So I won't use that, a King Air or something else. And they don't have practice. And on landing and takeoff, it's hands down where like 95% of the air fatalities take place. And it's someone who's not trained and also not having a second pilot, a second set of, kind of wisdom of crowds. But it's almost always pilot error. The FAA was really visionary in that as these planes are so overengineered, imagine your car every two weeks had a mechanic come out, inspect everything, test everything, replace the tires when they had 80% of their tread left. That's literally the standards we have for aviation equipment. These things are never, it's never an equipment malfunction, it's pilot error.

Kara Swisher: Well—

Scott Galloway: Go ahead.

Kara Swisher: I was saying there was a very big story about air traffic control problems which is another issue.

Scott Galloway: Well that is human error. Yes exactly. But you know smoking, drinking, not enough of them, tired, et cetera.

Kara Swisher: It was really disturbing. That's an outdated system in human error. Near misses all over the place.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, they're overworked. I think that's more, I think that's holdover from Reagan, where people have a lack of respect for institutions and government.

Kara Swisher: Okay, let's land this one, so they say. But go ahead.

Scott Galloway: Really, the most amazing invisible infrastructures are airways. But anyways, back to air disasters. It would just make a lot of sense. You would see a dramatic reduction in—you would have almost zero air disasters if you let AI and automated flying take over. But here's the thing. No one in the back is going to put up with a computer up front. Not yet. They just need to see an older guy with a very deep-sounding old man voice make them feel comfortable.

Kara Swisher: We are—

Scott Galloway: There are women pilots.

Kara Swisher: Oh, and they're outstanding.

Scott Galloway: But a lot of surveys show that people feel safer with a big, tall male pilot with a lot of hair. My point is exactly that, that we have these preconceived stereotypes that people are safer than machines, and they're not.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they're not. They're not. They're not. Anyway, Elon, we're going to give you a Christmas present. You're right. It's just an update. And good for you for cooperating, I guess, if you did. Next, Netflix is revealing viewership statistics on nearly all shows and movies. They've been moving toward this for a while. The streaming service released its first What We Watch report this week, ranking all shows and movies by amount of hours watched in the last six months. Season one of The Night Agent was the streamer's most viewed show. Have you seen that?

Scott Galloway: I watched the beginning. I didn't like it. I didn't like it.

Kara Swisher: And The Mother was the most watched show. That's J-Lo. 55% of viewing for the period came from original films and 45% from licensed titles. That was interesting. Netflix has a reputation of not releasing streaming numbers. It has, actually. Ted Sarandos talked about it at Code a couple of years ago. The issue brought up in the Hollywood Strikes this year. They put out some of the most popular ones, not just to me, but in general. I've been watching Squid Games. Have you seen that?

Scott Galloway: That was a long time ago.

Kara Swisher: I know, but I'm just getting around to it. I've been watching it with my 13-year-old, which is probably bad parenting.

Scott Galloway: No, I don't want to watch Squid Game.

Kara Swisher: It is rough.

Scott Galloway: Really good.

Kara Swisher: I don't want to watch rough. Anyway, they're going to release more numbers, but they've been very non-transparent with these numbers, honestly. That's one of the big complaints of Hollywood writers, et cetera.

Scott Galloway: You know they need to release more because of advertisers presumably but they've been playing hide the sausage for a long time. That's my favorite game.

Kara Swisher: Anyways.

Scott Galloway: Yeah I know. Speaking of which, I dated a girl from Netflix and it was awesome. After we have sex she recommend other chicks I should bang. I'll be here all week.

Kara Swisher: Okay. All right. What do you think about this?

Scott Galloway: It's good.

Kara Swisher: Okay. So being serious, because I realize I'm here mostly for my jokes, but also for the inside.

Scott Galloway: There's a lot here. First off, when it comes to compensation, the standard decorum that has been rained on from senior bosses that you can get fired if you share your compensation with other employees. That's because asymmetry of information seeds powerful advantage to the people who have total symmetry. So what organizations inevitably engage in is kind of what I'll call not unethical, but unjust compensation practice. Because the reality is if someone is doing a really good job but not complaining. Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes, they don't get the compensation they deserve. And part of the reason they don't complain is they have no idea that Joey Bag of Donuts next to her is making 40% more because he was hired in at a higher salary, even though he's a fucking idiot. The asymmetry of information benefits the employer and the person who holds the information. And Netflix has asymmetry of information. And that is, if a producer or a writer or a star or anyone along the food chain does not know how popular or unpopular their show is relative to other shows, that's one less bit of information with respect to their ability to negotiate more compensation. So you will always maintain an asymmetry of information around compensation, and they will hold those cards as close to their vest as possible. The other observation I would make is that I think in 2024, you're going to see TikTok come for Netflix. For the first time, you are actually seeing Netflix viewership plateau and level out across both youth and adults. And I think it's the TikTok effect. I think TikTok is going to start releasing full feature films and series. And for the first time in 2024, an analyst is going to say, you know what? I think TikTok is having an impact on not only Netflix, but Spotify. And then the third major thing this reveals, and this is the most interesting thing, is just five years ago, two-thirds of contracted media in the film space was English-speaking. Now it's one-third. Why? Because we hit peak artistic masturbation with Flowers of the Moon or whatever it's called. No one's seen it.

Kara Swisher: Oh, it's getting on all the lists, just so you know. But go ahead.

Scott Galloway: It'll win everything. It'll win everything. But very few people, it's going to lose a shit ton of money. Because what they're finding and what Netflix figured out is they can produce Parasite for 20 or 30 million bucks, and it can do $250 million, the ratio of box office revenues to costs of Spanish and South Korean productions is just showing a remarkably better ROI. So the analogy here, and I realize this is a stretch, and this is the question, is Los Angeles in the 2020s the Detroit of the 80s? And that is, is it about to be impacted by globalization as capital goes to other markets where they get a much greater ROI on creative expenditures.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's interesting because it looks like Quibi was right, but this idea of shorter films, they're definitely moving that direction, TikTok is. And what's interesting is many, I don't know if you remember years ago, they tried this in Hollywood. It was just an idea before its time. There was a show called Quarter Life that was all online. It was by the guy who did Dirty Something.

Scott Galloway: Oh, I love that show.

Kara Swisher: There were short, yeah, there were short version, well, it was Quarter Life, which is 25-year-olds. And so it was really interesting. It just was, before its time had come, it'll be interesting to see how TikTok does it and what kind of attention it attracts. Because I know Hollywood has always been interested in these shorter films. It just was, didn't work.

Scott Galloway: Well, Quibi had the right idea. Vine, remember Vine? Jesus Christ. I mean, they basically had TikTok.

Kara Swisher: Well, wasn't that Twitter?

Scott Galloway: Anyways, they had the right idea. They just didn't have enough capital. And if you look at this, I don't know about you. People constantly ask me, what are your news sources? And I try and come up with things that make me sound impressive. I say, oh, The Economist or the FT. The reality is, you know what my number one source of news right now is? TikTok. How pathetic is that? It has figured out I love economists, I love geopolitical analysts, and it is serving me up just amazing, insightful, thoughtful, smart people. It's just totally... Anyways, TikTok. TikTok. There you have it.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, we'll see. Tickety-tock. Anyway last one. Throw yours a cup away because I have a favorite new drink for you. Dorito has teamed with Empirical, a spirits company, to create a liquor. Limited time creation will be nacho cheese flavor.

Scott Galloway: Oh God. That is literally a heresy. That literally is bitch God.

Kara Swisher: Oh, my God. Speaking of that, of terrifying liquids, Panera Breads, and you know this company, Charged Lemonade is now responsible for a second death, according to a lawsuit. The Charged Lemonade has 390 milligrams of caffeine, an old size large, which is more than a Red Bull and a Monster Energy drink combined. It's like three cups of coffee. People, you can drink as much as you want if you belong to their sips club. Amanda put me onto this. She's like, death lemonade is what she's calling it. Which one would you drink? The Doritos nacho cheese flavored liquor or the charged lemonade?

Scott Galloway: I mean, this is tough for me because I was on the board of Panera.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I know.

Scott Galloway: And they're good people. And my guess is they're suitably freaked out by this. And I don't know enough about it. Is it... are these deaths a direct... are they a direct result of the massive amount of caffeine in these things? Is it actually pushing people into some sort of cardiac... I'm sure we'll find out more.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I think it's... you can't take that much caffeine. But I would bet every day... I mean, you're asking me which one. The reality is alcohol kills more people in the United States than almost any substance. I mean it is really... I joke a lot about alcohol, and I like to remind people, I did not have a drink until I was 19. And I think people need to do an audit every year of what substance they could do less of and improve their life. And oftentimes, the top of that list will be alcohol.

Kara Swisher: See, I give you a funny setup for Dorito-flavored liquor and death lemonade. Sorry.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I didn't take it. Softball. Softball. Softball. Softball. Which one would you drink, if you had to pick?

Kara Swisher: Oh, I would. The idea of nacho cheese flavored spirit just sounds disgusting to me. The charged lemonade, it is. Death lemonade for Scott.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I would do charged lemonade. I do limoncello after dinner.

Kara Swisher: Do you?

Scott Galloway: I'm finally, I'm confident enough in my masculinity where I order limoncellos. I used to be very self-conscious about it.

Kara Swisher: It is kind of ladylike. That's very ladylike of you.

Scott Galloway: And I order two scoops of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. Like, I'm literally a nine-year-old girl on her birthday. And a limoncello. A limoncello.

Kara Swisher: Oh, my God. I got to say, that's very ladylike. Do they make that suit for a man?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kara Swisher: Okay let's get to our first big story. Nearly 200 countries have approved the global pact that calls for transitioning away from fossil fuels. This pact was reached at COP28, the UN global climate summit, after much debate. It's the first deal to explicitly curb fossil fuels in 30 years of these agreements. Scientists say major cutbacks are needed to keep global temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. We've missed everything. There was a big argument over the wording, instead of phasing out, they had to do transitioning from. They did use the word fossil fuel. It was in Dubai, and it was run by somebody who runs the oil company. There was a lot of oil company people there doing their cosplaying, their virtue signaling. It includes tripling the amount of renewable energy like wind and solar installed around the world, as well as pledges to restrict methane emissions and halt carbon emissions entirely by mid-century. Again, this person leading the summit, Sultan Al-Jabbar, runs the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. They're also working on renewable energy, obviously. There's nothing legally binding about it or incentives to have these oil producers do anything. A lot of critics, including former Vice President Al Gore, said the deal had cavernous loopholes that allow some countries to get new oil exploration with room for transitional fuels like natural gas. We are hurtling towards a real problem here if we don't get together on this. Of course smaller, less developed countries are saying the people who actually cause all this, which is developed countries, have gotten the pass and now they can't, they have an energy poverty and can't keep up, and so they're stuck in their same thing. So I don't know. Any thoughts? Probably the biggest criticism we get, other than my dick jokes, is that we don't talk enough about the climate crisis. And I don't know about you, I don't speak to it because I feel like I have no domain expertise in it.

Scott Galloway: Oh, I just interviewed Rajiv Shah, who runs the...

Kara Swisher: Well, then you're an expert. What's the answer?

Scott Galloway: Well, he's an expert because they're doing a lot of focus on it. They're doing all kinds of initiatives with IKEA, the foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund and everything else. You know, I think he's really worried about the implications of these countries being asked to do things they can't afford, right?

[Podcast continues in Part 2]

Scott Galloway: That they can't do it. That's right. And he calls it energy poverty. And I think one of the things that's difficult is that there's no binding here. The inability, I think he feels, that individual billionaires deciding on these things is a problem. That we've got to get a global initiative. I think the mistrust in organizations is a problem, according to him. But this is, you know, there'll be a mix of tech solutions here, but that's not going to be exclusively that. There needs to be a much stronger ability of government to agree on these things.

Scott Galloway: He did think it was more bipartisan than I think it is. Obviously, he was talking a lot about nuclear energy, because renewables, most people agree, is not the way to get there completely. And finding ways to do like what we did in Europe after World War II with these developing countries to get them energy, not poor, right? That they can't develop anything. And he said a lot of things are moving faster and things are cheaper.

Scott Galloway: Another thing he said, I'm just going through a wind of things, all the battery stuff is being used to buy rich people cars, you know, electric vehicles, which could, you know, the battery is a good solution for a lot of these developing nations. And of course, there's China, always China. What are they going to do? Because they're obviously a great producer of this. EVs are growing slower, but inevitably we're going to head to EVs at some point.

Kara Swisher: But, you know, these climate disasters are not fewer and far between now, as you know. Let me ask you, if we're not the experts on it, because 2023 is now officially the hottest year on record. We are hurtling.

Scott Galloway: Until next year.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, until next year. Exactly. Everyone feels they can't do anything. I want you to talk about it from a marketing point of view. How do you get, you have to have these initiatives that everybody agrees on and not spend a lot of time on, which of course took forever, these words, like transitioning away versus just getting rid of fossil fuels, which did finally get said, but it's a lot of posturing versus, and it takes 20 years to do so, to make that statement. I know it sounds crazy, but how do you get people to be motivated by this? Young people certainly are.

Scott Galloway: I mean, there's two ways to go. You could try to appeal to people's fear and say that weather is going to be used as a weapon against us, that these coal-producing nations are trying to create mass migration. You could try and appeal to their nationalistic instincts. I don't think that's the way to go. You could do what insurance companies do and try to appeal to people's paternal and maternal instincts. And that is, if you care about your kids, you get life insurance and you start thinking about climate change.

Scott Galloway: The thing that I don't think is useful is that we have fallen into this cold comfort that's a direct adjunct of the idolatry of innovators where we believe that climate change will be fixed by two yet-to-be-named students at MIT in a dorm who are going to come up with some algae-eating technology. And we're not only going to solve climate change, but we're going to get rich.

Scott Galloway: And here's the bottom line. Young people and developing nations are angry because through the 20th century, my generation and the generations before us engaged in what was the most prosperous or most lucrative arbitrage in history. And that is fossil fuels being turned into hospitals and transportation and everything. And Vaseline requires petroleum. I mean, it's just—and fossil fuels have been the gift that has kept on giving. And we didn't take enough. We didn't tax basically everything enough, such that we had the funds to help developing nations who haven't had a chance to recognize or engage in that ultimate arbitrage or to make the requisite investments in whatever it is, nuclear or wind or solar.

Scott Galloway: But I think we're just going to have to—and by the way, let me come back to this thing. Davos is coming up, and people are very critical of Davos. I think it's really important that people get together and words matter and make statements like this. And for the Gulf nations who have a vested interest in the continued use of fossil fuels, but also a transition away from that, I think it's important that they get together, they talk about this. And even these kind of statements, regardless of how substantive or not substantive they are, I think they're important.

Scott Galloway: The problem is, is that until you tax something based on its sustainability, whatever it is, its fair trade, its supply chain, and the carbon it produces at the source of production, companies will continue to engage in gymnastics where they offshore pollution, right? And I just don't think there's any getting around it. I think it requires leadership where you say, if you care about the future, it's going to be expensive. We have to start taxing carbon emissions. We have to start taxing these things.

Kara Swisher: Which is more unlikely. You know, let's just say you're right about the words because it's the first time they agreed to move away from fossil fuels. It's the first time they used the word fossil fuels. It is something. And it's very sweeping. And I think the problem is a lot of people feel like, well, they make these sweeping statements and nothing happens. That's not always the case. They decided to fix AIDS or, you know, to try to solve AIDS problems across the world. And for the large part, they really did as they moved together, right? But it took a minute or two to get it going.

Kara Swisher: I think what scientists are worried about is obviously the delays. Now, a lot of countries wanted it to be a complete phase out of fossil fuels. And that was obviously a big pushback. But it's also not just from, say, the Saudi Arabias, but also vast green countries like India. So it's an accelerate the global shift away, and this is the word they use, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner. They did agree to quit adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere entirely by mid-century. Again, tripling renewable energy, methane emissions, which is a short-term solution, I think.

Kara Swisher: You know, I agree with you. I think there's some, they had shied away from using even the word fossil fuels, and the fact that they're doing that is, that it took 30 years. You know, there was a good quote from this guy, and his name is Wopke Hoekstra, the European Commissioner for Climate Action, said, "Humanity has finally done what is long, long, long overdue. 30 years, 30 years we spent to arrive at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels."

Scott Galloway: I'm not an environmentalist. I've always said that after the last human draws their last breath, the Earth is going to belch for 50 years and it's going to be as if we were never here. I don't think the Earth is going to be just fine. It's us that are going to have to deal with mass migration and super fires. And the problem is, the problem is we're not electing people who do their job, and their job is to think long term because at the end of the day, people.

Kara Swisher: Yes.

Scott Galloway: These are political issues.

Kara Swisher: One hundred percent.

Scott Galloway: These will turn into political issues and societal. You know, people are going to, the voters act in their self-interest 364 days a year in the short term, but one day a year, they typically think long term when they vote. And unless our elected representatives make these huge, sweeping, massive scale investments that we, the shade of which they will never or we will never sit under, no one's going to do it. Not a tech innovator, not an individual. It's got to be government making coordinated cross-border massive investments in taxation and huge infrastructure investments to go after this. Otherwise, it just, it's going to get worse.

Kara Swisher: It also is a business opportunity. It certainly is a business opportunity for the next thing. This is a really interesting line from the Times piece on it: "Yet many politicians, environmentalists, and business leaders gathered in Dubai hoped it would send a message to investors and policymakers that the shift away from fossil fuels was unstoppable." This is how a lot of other global initiatives have happened. The problem is time is not on our side, right? It's just not on our side as we're seeing more and more climate. And a lot of people feel, a lot of scientists, if you're just reading on the stuff around the Arctic, which is just disturbing what's happening up in the Arctic, and that's just one area of the world, right? It's not coming back. So that means rising sea levels, coastal cities. I think that's the issue is that we can finally decide that fossil fuels aren't good, but it's already decided for us. Those islands that are disappearing.

Scott Galloway: One of the things that I talked about with Rajiv Shah was fisheries. The fish that people depend on to eat is dying off really quickly, and that creates all kinds of social problems. You said something that really stuck with me, and that is the biggest danger here, or one of the things that's gotten in the way of progress or a call to action, is the incrementalism. And that is, you said something that did register with me. You said humans are very adaptable. So if everything had been as it was in 2022, and then in 2023, and in the last 50 years, we had three superfires in California. And then in one year, we had 18 superfires and a third of the Arctic shelf broke off. Everyone would be like, "What the fuck? All hands on deck. We need to, this is war. Go on a war footing. Double the taxes on gasoline, triple the investments in nuclear, put out a carbon metric footprint on every individual and publish it on every company." But because every year it's just gotten a little bit worse, we're the frog that wakes up in boiling water and we're adapting and it's not a good adaptation.

Kara Swisher: No, it's not. And then we also, I think the idea, you're talking about technologies, is carbon capture and storage. It's just not, well, you might want to accelerate that. It just means we want to burn more fuel so that we can capture it. And so we have to move to alternatives, not just regular renewables that we know about, solar, wind, et cetera, but nuclear. And that's where tech can really step up.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, but a lot of it, I mean, again, so much of it just comes down to coal in a few markets. The two big puffs of carbon into the atmosphere were, one, the suburbanization of America, which was basically a lifestyle choice around the car to increase the quality of our life, and two, the industrialization of China, mostly fueled by coal. So even if you look at the fastest growing populations in the world, they have a lower per capita carbon emission footprint. It's basically been the lifestyle and economic choices of the U.S. and China and also the impending choices of developing markets that went all in on the same game.

Kara Swisher: Two final things they did. Speaking of coal, they had an earlier draft the agreement urged nations to stop issuing permits for new coal fire plants. According to the New York Times, China and India pushed back as they were too overly strict and the language was removed. The other part, the last part, is a lot of African nations said that it shouldn't be at the same pace. And then without financial help, they cannot. They want theirs.

Scott Galloway: They want theirs.

Kara Swisher: They needed to exploit their own gas and oil reserves in order to grow rich enough to fund clean energy transition. They've got to fund it. Or we have to pay for it for them. Since we are the world's biggest, we're the wealthiest and we're the biggest emitters of these things. Anyway. I'm sorry.

Scott Galloway: If we can pay Iran not to get heavy water or uranium, we should be able to figure out what to pay these nations not to build coal-fired plants or at least offer them subsidies to go to—it's a big issue.

Kara Swisher: And I think—well, okay, we talked about New Year's resolutions. We should probably make a more concerted effort to have more guests on Pivot, similar to the guests you just had on—

Scott Galloway: Yes, I have.

Kara Swisher: I have a lot of climate change people on that one. Actually, it's a big issue. Many years ago, because tech had talked about it for so much many years ago, I did a column where I said the world's first trillionaire is going to be a climate change technologist. I made it up, but I wanted to get people in that direction. We will do more in 2024 on climate change, and we'll focus on the technology of it because that's an area we can talk about somewhat intelligently.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll discuss the repercussions of Google's antitrust laws and talk to Naomi Alderman about her new book, The Future. It's a terrific book.

[Ad Break]

Kara Swisher: Scott, we're back with our second big story. Google was dealt a major blow this week in the Epic Games case with a jury ruling the company violated antitrust laws with its Android app store and in-app billing system. The unanimous verdict from a jury, as I said, was reached after three hours of deliberation following a four-week trial in San Francisco federal court. The judge in the case will decide the remedy next year, but Google says it will appeal the verdict.

Kara Swisher: Obviously, it's opposite from what happened to Apple, which won a similar case. It's unusual to have a jury trial. So it was in the hands of actual consumers. Google might be forced to allow other companies to have competing app stores on Android phones and tablets. Developers could also potentially charge users without giving a cut to Google. That could be a remedy.

Kara Swisher: You know, the big app stores, I think the time has passed. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said after the verdict, "The dominoes are going to start falling here. The end of 30 is in sight." But again, Apple did prevail over Epic in a similar trial. It was appealed and upheld this past year, which I think is confusing to some people. So Google's also facing other antitrust issues with the Justice Department. In May is when they have the closing arguments about that. And then there's also another antitrust trial. So what do you think about all this?

Scott Galloway: So just a disclosure, I'm an investor in Epic. But my editor-in-chief at Prop2Media, Jason Stavros, is a lawyer. And he said this was just pure malpractice from a legal standpoint.

Kara Swisher: By whom?

Scott Galloway: By Google. To choose a jury trial, he said, was just idiotic. And also that the reason that Google lost and Apple won is because Apple is much more professionally run. And that is when you conduct discovery against Apple, you don't find them shitposting or speaking casually about them getting away with shit or saying, "Fuck regulators." Like that kind of language and that kind of behavior, those kind of emails at Apple are severely frowned upon. And at Google, it's just sort of the Wild West, like, oh, the, you know, romper room children just having at it on their Slack channels. Supposedly the zeitgeist or the culture at Google is just a plaintiff's attorney's dream.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it had been. I remember years ago thinking, why are they putting all this stuff in emails? There was an issue around the destruction of emails, too, of not keeping them. But anyway. And Apple is just much more buttoned up and much more professional. I would imagine that they get, I mean, think about it. Apple doesn't have leaks. But I'm pretty sure that Apple has this basically orientation, which I would affectionately call a re-education camp that says, imagine everything you write, do or say here is going to be in court. And just think about it, because the level of discovery on Apple versus Google was just night and day. And also Apple was decided by a judge on its legal merits and the Google trial was decided by a jury.

Scott Galloway: I actually think this is the most significant business story of the week that wasn't really discussed because this will embolden and give a lot of confidence to judges to start ruling against these companies around antitrust issues as it relates to—

Kara Swisher: Yeah, because juries.

Scott Galloway: Juries, yeah. I was surprised it was a jury trial. I'd be interested to know what would happen if Apple had a jury trial. And it will have real impact. I just, I had to bug out for a minute just a couple of minutes ago because my 13-year-old is home. And I can tell you with 110% certainty he is right now within about seven seconds of walking through the door on Epic's Fortnite, I think it's called Chapter 5, and they buy stuff. And the fact that now 30, 50, 80% of the commission that used to go to Apple or the Google Play Store will now be held by the, I mean—

Kara Swisher: Well, not yet. There's going to be appeal after a while.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, but you know the remedy. The remedy, where the remedy ends up is that that fee is going to go down.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: Whatever the remedy is, whatever that tax was, whether it was 15% or 30%, you know it's coming down.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Apple should act proactively right now. They are kind of. It's not fully 30% for everybody or everything, but it's that you don't have a choice, right? Let me be accurate. It's sometimes 30, sometimes it's 15. Sometimes it's not at all. It's very haphazard. I think that's been pointed out by lots of app developers.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, but this is the definition of anti-competitive. If Tesla, I'm making up this analogy so it might not be the right one, but if Tesla, if you said, "All right, my seats are old and I'm replacing my seats, but I'm going to replace them with non-Tesla part seats." And this is, automobile companies make all of their money on repairs and parts. They charge onerous fees on maintenance and parts. They make no money selling the car. And so if Tesla said, "OK, we know if you use non-Tesla high margin products for repairs, and if we find out, if you do this and we find out 100% of the time, we shut off the car." And that's basically what they've done here. They said, "OK, this person may have paid for the product, but if you want to give them an alternative platform to buy additional products within the product, we're turning off the game because we have total control over it."

Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah. And I think the bigger point you're making that, you know, there are 11 antitrust claims in this case that Epic Games had. And again, they make Fortnite, as Scott just pointed out. But Google's found fault on all of them by this jury. So it is, people could say it could preview what's going to happen in the other significant cases and will have a huge impact on Google's business. That is the worry I think in terms of profit making and everything else. So it definitely is a real shot across the bow for this company.

Kara Swisher: Because this is where, like, whether it's ads where they have a foot up or it's the app store where they have a foot up. And that's not even its biggest, but the ad business antitrust trial is coming. The search one is with the Justice Department. The ad business is in federal court in Virginia. These are significant, significant legal cases.

Scott Galloway: I like that, those numbers. It's 97 points of margin. I mean, and let me use a worse analogy. You use Delta. Delta is the only airline to get to Europe. The only airline. And if you go on Delta, if you want to go to Europe, it's the only airline. You have to use the Delta credit card. And then you have to use the credit card while you're there. And they take a 30% surcharge on everything you buy while you're in Europe. I mean, they literally control, they have total domain over you while you are in on another game or another platform because they are providing the underlying. And they say they will claim it's safety and, you know, with cybersecurity and all this stuff.

Kara Swisher: Sure.

Scott Galloway: And Barry Diller had the right analogy. It's like a credit card, and credit cards take between one and a half and three percent.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens. The search trial with the Justice Department and also dozens of states are involved in that. It's by a judge in the U.S. District Court, as I said. He has not said, he said he didn't know how he was going to decide. But if he sides with the government, he could do a lot of things. Spin-offs, there's going to be significant changes. I do not think they're going to win any of these cases, as I've said. The ad tech case, same thing, same kind of area. The Justice Department's saying it has to divest itself, another big case. And of course, there's the European cases. Google's in for a world of hurt. Apple's a little more protected, but Apple will have its time at the docket at the same time.

Scott Galloway: Apple just hit an all-time high, by the way, the stock.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I know.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, it did.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Anyway, they're much more protected.

Kara Swisher: Okay, Scott, let's go to our friend of Pivot. Naomi Alderman is a bestselling author as well as a video game designer and a creative writing professor. So she hits all the notes with all we talked about today. Her newest book is titled The Future. It tells the story of a trio of tech billionaires preparing for the impending apocalypse. It's a climate apocalypse. The Guardian called it "a complex novel of ideas, slightly hidden inside a satirical dystopian tech thriller." Welcome, Naomi.

Kara Swisher: So I've already done a book talk with you, which I really enjoyed. I think we had a great time because we're on the same page about tech CEOs, etc. But I want you to, Scott, it's not as familiar. And the things we've been talking about on this show of climate change and apocalypse, essentially, the power of tech billionaires, including the case against Google and Epic Games, so something you know about, and the overpower of tech and how they're going to be reined in. So you've created a world that's similar to ours in this book, but taken it to extremes. Talk about why you wanted to write about these people.

Naomi Alderman: Well, it occurs to me, actually, one of the reasons that I wanted to write about them was because I sold my previous book to Amazon for a TV show. And, you know, that's a great experience. But at the same time, you have to consider what you're becoming implicated in when you do that sort of thing. And the more that I considered it, the more I thought, "Oh."

Naomi Alderman: So I've worked in technology for many years now. I create a video game called Zombies, Run! I've been in a bunch of tech startups. I have seen how tech people think and operate, mostly great people. And at the start of 2017, I read that piece in The New Yorker that I think maybe we all read about the tech billionaires and their survival bunkers, where they were going to blast out the apocalypse. And I think if you've worked in tech, you read that and went, "Oh, yeah, I 100% believe it. There's not even a question. That is exactly the thought process." And having read that and having gone, I think they're a bit evil. I think this is something that is so profoundly wrong that things have to make me pretty angry, Kara, for me to end up writing a novel about it.

Kara Swisher: So the premise is they know about this apocalypse coming and they're preparing for it, even as the rest of the world isn't, and people are trying to stop them. Talk about what the general premise is.

Naomi Alderman: Right. So yeah. So the novel opens with three tech billionaires getting a little notification from their predictive software saying the apocalypse is coming, trying to get into the PJ, private jet, and to fly off to your bunkers to escape. Meanwhile, we flashback to find out that some people close to them, a soon-to-be ex-wife, one of their children, one of their assistants, has been watching them doing what they're doing and have been trying to work out how to stop them. So the novel is a sort of race between can this group of misfits stop them before the world collapses?

Kara Swisher: So there's the line in the book about the impact where you wrote, "The mental health of humanity continued to be strip-mined." And it's interesting because it has climate implications of coal and everything else. Is there a specific person in big tech that exists that you base this on you find particularly fascinating or horrifying?

Naomi Alderman: I mean, you know, the tech journalist Rebecca Eisenberg just did a very lovely review of this book on Goodreads, where she goes through and she says, "I think this one could be Larry Page or Sergey Brin. I think this now..." Obviously, I don't want to get sued by the richest people in the world. They're definitely not based on specific people. However, I mean, we're all looking at Elon, I think, and going, "Oh, we thought 15 years ago that you were actually incredible and you had a brilliant mind and you were working on some of the big problems. And now you seem to have gone crazy from power toxicity somehow."

Naomi Alderman: So I am interested by how somebody ends up calling some cave rescue people in Thailand pedophiles. I am very interested in how that happens, which is a real thing. I'm sure listeners to this know that. But I'm also interested in how power affects people and how the more power you get and the more people you have around you telling you that everything that you say is brilliant, the more insane you're actually likely to become.

Kara Swisher: Sort of tease it up for Scott.

Scott Galloway: It's nice to meet you, Naomi. So if you agree that this cohort of tech billionaires over-indexes in terms of neuroses or a lack of concern for the Commonwealth or mental illness or whatever you want to call it. I guess the question is, why? Is it their youth? Is it they're surrounded by so much idolatry of innovators? The power corrupts them? Is it that the kind of person who's drawn to technology is more vulnerable? Is it their use of ketamine? I mean, why? Because there are very powerful people in Washington, D.C. There are very powerful people in other industries, but there's definitely seems to be a specific type of neuroses or, you know, I don't know what the term would be for it.

Kara Swisher: Crazy.

Scott Galloway: It's a brand of crazy. There's a certain kind of crazy. What do you think underpins it? And having worked in tech, because you've seen it, right? As have I and as has Scott.

Naomi Alderman: Oh, I love this question. Having been around these people and also having, you know, conducted some like in private interviews in order to research the book. I think these are great questions and I don't think we have to pick any one of those answers. I mean, are you guys familiar with the book The Power Broker by Robert Caro?

Scott Galloway: Yes, of course.

Naomi Alderman: Which is about the great builder of New York City. Right, right. I think Americans are familiar with this. Americans who are interested in politics are familiar with it and maybe British people are not necessarily. So obviously that is a book that charts a guy going from being the kind of idealistic architect who wants to put baby changing stations in Central Park to becoming the kind of corrupt power monger who directs a road so that it goes round his friend's house. So how does this happen?

Naomi Alderman: Well, one thing is, if you're in a position where you've done something great to start off with, and everybody has gone, "Oh, my God, you're amazing." So in the case of Robert Moses, he built Jones Beach. And everyone in New York City went, "Oh, my God, this guy, he's a visionary, he's bright, he's energetic, he's young, he's capable. Why does he have to have term limits? Why does he have to have budget constraints?"

Naomi Alderman: Just let this public-spirited civil servant free. And at the point that you do away with all of those term limits, checks and balances, at the point that you say to even founders of companies, "Well, there's no way you can be got rid of," then they start to go a bit crazy. A part of that is that a lot of people are then attracted to them who want them to use that totally inviolable power that they now have for their benefit. They start getting offered quid pro quos. They come a long way from the certainties that they used to have morally.

Naomi Alderman: Something that I get into in the book as well, and I think we've seen this with Sam Bankman-Fried and the effect of altruism, is that even if you think about the robber barons of the 18th, 19th century, they had a sort of basic feeling about what it meant to leave a legacy, which is based in a religious worldview. Now, I'm not saying we should go back to the religious worldview that they had, but we haven't replaced that with any values other than the effective altruism thing where you long-termism make up some imaginary people in the future, make up what they want and then go and achieve that for them. It just seems like pretending you're in a science fiction story.

Kara Swisher: One of the things that was interesting about this book is you started writing it in 2017. It was pre-COVID, pre-ChatGPT, pre-Elon reading levels of crazy, and you anticipated a lot of where it was going.

Naomi Alderman: Yes, that is correct. And I will try and use my powers for good in the future.

Kara Swisher: Right. But when you think about the answer, and I think you're right, they don't have... what you're talking about is principles, right? They don't have basic... and whatever you think of these robber barons, they had religious principles or they had values, I guess is a better word. And what are the values in this book and also today for these people? They don't have any. It's just random.

Naomi Alderman: It's random and effective altruism, which I think a lot of people are calling ineffective altruism. It seems kind of nonsense.

Scott Galloway: It's nonsense.

Naomi Alderman: It's nonsense. It's not even ineffective altruism. It's ineffective solipsism because it ends up being a way of saying, "Earn to give." It's like, no, it's very good for you to try and earn as much money as possible. So what are they left with? They're left with, "Well, I have to deliver shareholder value and individual choice and liberty is great." And those are kind of not terrible as two of your 40 key guiding principles. But if they're the only two that you have, that is going to lead you into some deep trouble.

Naomi Alderman: So one of the things that I talk about in the book, the novel has sections which are a sort of forum where people discuss what they think is going to be coming in terms of the apocalypse. And I have a character there who comes from a cult background. Now, I should say, the reason I did this is because when I talk to people who know the executive assistants for tech billionaires, one of the things I found out is a lot of those women, and they are all women, grew up in cults. That's a separate conversation anyway.

Kara Swisher: Interesting. Right at the moment that you know that they grew up in cults, you go, "Oh yeah, I see the links between that and a tech startup."

Naomi Alderman: So I have her talking on this forum about the golden rule. It's not going to take you all the way, but it's a great place to start, which is to say, if you don't like it when someone does something to you, don't do it to anybody else. This feels like a rule that is sadly missing from the modern internet. It's sadly missing from both discourse and the wider way in which these companies are set up. You read about people who run social media sites who won't let their children use them. And then you go, "Oh, what you've done there is violated the golden rule." It's a very simple, nice little mental heuristic. Just go, "Is what I'm doing totally wrong?" If it fails to pass this test, then it's totally wrong. But I think we've thrown that out somehow.

Kara Swisher: Scott? So how would you respond to the thesis that it's our fault? That if you tell a 30-something-year-old guy, and I would argue now a woman, that they're Jesus Christ, they're inclined to believe you. And that because we as voters and citizens don't put up the same guardrails for these individuals, if we had the same lack of guardrails or the same idolatry of any industry, they too would abuse that. And then it's really kind of our fault that we're absentee parents.

Naomi Alderman: I have a lot of sympathy with that, which is why obviously I'm writing about it, because if it's our fault, then we can change our minds. And then we can say, "Actually, we think that these industries and these platforms are so important now to humanity that you should not ever be able to be in the position where you can just buy one, just like you can't buy all the roads in the United States." Maybe that needs to have at least public oversight. This is something that Kara and I talked about when we did that event in Washington, D.C. We need some laws now. I feel maybe one of the things that's happened is we've been sidetracked into thinking that we can do activism by putting a little badge on our Twitter profile or doing a rant on Threads.

Kara Swisher: Can I interject then? Google just lost its jury case in San Francisco. You're in the video game industry and you understand the app stores, et cetera. Do you think that's the movement towards it? This jury immediately, 11 counts that they're predatory, essentially.

Naomi Alderman: That's exciting, isn't it? Am I allowed to be a bit excited about that without having read the judgment? I haven't read that yet. I feel like I'm hopeful that there is a slow but steady movement towards saying, "Oh no, we the people need to be regulating these things much more fiercely." Because for me, the fact of the amount of misinformation about the current terrible war in the Middle East on Twitter, the fact that it's easier to find lies about it than truth, feels like at this point, this industry has shown that it is incapable of self-regulating. They don't have journalistic...

Kara Swisher: Right. But as an entrepreneur, the business model with a 30% cut, for example, creates a bad situation for creators like you.

Naomi Alderman: It does. It's extremely difficult, actually.

Kara Swisher: Yes. And you wouldn't... That is more of a cut than you pay to anybody else. Even if you're writing a novel, there's no single organization out there that is taking 30%. Particularly not if you're handing it to them ready to go. They haven't done anything.

Naomi Alderman: So, yeah, I like it. I think that will make it easier.

Kara Swisher: Is there, if there was one remedy to help us rein in or modulate this, what would you like to see happen?

Naomi Alderman: All right. I'm afraid I'm going to give you an answer that is a bit more complicated than a magic wand, but I think it's important. We are living through what I have called the information crisis. This is not the first information crisis the human race has ever lived through. We had one after the Gutenberg printing revolution as well. We've been through it before. You must know the book *Technopoly* by Neil Postman. He talks about how after the Gutenberg revolution, one of the things that was needed was the invention of universal schooling. It's that serious.

Naomi Alderman: I think the magic wand, if there is such a thing, is to take what we're currently living through extremely seriously. Yes, there are laws that are needed. Yes, we need as a community to take action. We need to change social norms. But actually, if I were a young person today thinking, "What can I work in that is going to make a difference?" There are two things. One is working on not destroying our planet and helping to save it. And the second one is, how can we get through this information crisis as quickly and cleanly as possible without burning people at the stake, which is what happened in Europe for about 350 years after Gutenberg? We needed schools, we needed indexes, we needed textbooks, we needed the invention of curriculums, ways for people to navigate through this sea of information without becoming mentally and emotionally destroyed. So short-term legislation, yes. Long-term...

Kara Swisher: Last very quick question. If you had to be stuck in a bunker with a tech billionaire right now, which one would you pick?

Naomi Alderman: Bill Gates.

Kara Swisher: Why?

Naomi Alderman: I'm telling you why. Because he said that he liked my novel. So that feels like we would get off to a fairly okay start.

Kara Swisher: All right. That's not my choice. Who would you pick, Kara? Mark Cuban. He'd be a lot of fun.

Scott Galloway: How about you, Scott? Who would you be in a bunker with?

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: I think Larry and Sergey would have the best drugs, but probably Bill Gates. I think Bill Gates is the most interesting. And I think he's very smart and reasonable and nice. I think you could talk his ear off.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, last thing I want to ask is that someday I would like to have power in my hands so I can zap Scott. I thought of it all the time since I read your book and watched the show. So someday hopefully women will have zapping power and it would be great.

Naomi Alderman: I can do that for you.

Kara Swisher: Okay, good. Naomi, this book is fantastic. Everybody should read it. It's a very thoughtful book and not just because the lesbian is one of the heroes. I really appreciate it. Again, the book is *The Future* and the author is Naomi Alderman. Thanks, Naomi.

Naomi Alderman: Thank you so much. It's been great.

Kara Swisher: All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for Predictions.

[Ad Break]

Kara Swisher: Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction.

Scott Galloway: I was trying to decide between two. I did my predictions event, which you did not ask about.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I did ask about, didn't I? Oh, I asked about it on the Estair thing, didn't I? How was your predictions event, Scott?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, 20,000 people.

Kara Swisher: Yeah? How many people?

Scott Galloway: Well, 20,000 people registered. I think about 8,000 people showed up.

Kara Swisher: Wow, okay. All right, good. Do they pay you for that?

Scott Galloway: No, no, I do it because I think it's interesting. No, it's not paid.

Kara Swisher: Oh, interesting. 8,000 is a big audience, Scott Galloway. Can I ask you one more question? How many predictions did you make?

Scott Galloway: How many predictions? I think I ended up with like 15 or 16, something like that. So my two relevant to this show or tech that I made. One, I always make a tech stock pick. And I got it right last year. I picked Meta. I just thought Meta was so ridiculously undervalued when I made the prediction. It was at $80, cash volcano, anyways. And had been overpunished because of the metaverse. And this year, my big tech stock pick is Alphabet. I've been looking at Gemini, and my thesis is that the actual LLMs will be somewhat commoditized, and that the generative AI that wins will be the one with the greatest fodder or coal to shove into the furnace, specifically writes to crawl information.

Scott Galloway: It just sort of got me thinking about the proprietary access that Gemini will have. You can turn on access to your Gmail and it'll be able to go into your email and go, "Scott, we see that you have 11 speaking gigs lined up. We see where they are. Here is exactly when you should book the airfare. And we know that you always eat at Casa Dona in Miami when you're there. Do you want us to make reservations because we see you're there?" It could look at your YouTube viewing patterns. It could look at all of the text of your emails. It strikes me it's going to have such an extraordinary amount of information that it'll be able to proactively... I'm going to Florida. I get my teeth cleaned when I'm in Florida. It has taken me an hour or an hour and a half to figure it out. At some point, Dr. Craig Spodak in Delray Beach will be Gemini compatible and the AIs will just speak to each other. The AI will go, "Scott, whenever he's in Florida, gets his teeth cleaned. When is your next available appointment?" And it'll look at my calendar and give Dr. Spodak's AI the windows and they'll do it in a microsecond. And I'll get an alert saying, "Before we confirm, we want to confirm your teeth cleaning." And I'll go, "Yeah."

Scott Galloway: Now I think they're in a world where if they lose these ad cases, they're going to have to replace some big businesses. Ads and search. They'll be able to push off the remedies. The big tech thousands of lawyers delay and obfuscation. It'll be years before the remedy actually takes effect. YouTube, and I learned this from you, YouTube's actually the fastest growing cable company in the world.

Kara Swisher: Indeed, I've said this a number of times.

Scott Galloway: And so when I look at their what still is the largest toll booth in the history of mankind, specifically search, which is still growing low double digits. When I look at YouTube being one of the fastest growing media companies in the world, and I look at the amount of data capital they have to feed into Gemini that other people won't have access to, I think this is the year of Google.

Kara Swisher: Just so you know, Meta Platforms went up. It started December 13th, 14th of last year. 2022 is $121 and now it is $332. That's a good choice.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, it's basically tripled since then. I made three stock picks: Airbnb, Meta and Chinese internet stocks. And I got Airbnb and Meta both outperformed the NASDAQ substantially. Chinese internet stocks substantially underperformed the NASDAQ.

Kara Swisher: Alphabet's not up much in a year.

Scott Galloway: Well, also, part of my prediction, and I didn't mention this, is on a relative valuation basis, while Alphabet has had a good year, it looks not cheap, but reasonably valued relative to the rest of big tech right now because they look flat-footed. It's up 35% over the past year.

Scott Galloway: The second prediction is I think by, and I get the timing wrong, by the end of 2024, the end of 2025, Musk is going to lose control of Twitter. He's either going to sell it or be forced to sell it. I think there are so many existential risks he's created for himself. One, and I actually said this on my predictions deck, but I think there's a non-zero probability now that he's violated the terms of service of the App Store of Apple. And that would, in my view, probably be, if not the final nail, a pretty big spike in the coffin of Twitter.

Kara Swisher: That's a big call from Tim Cook.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, but this would be so quintessentially Tim Cook. He waits. He's thoughtful. And I really do think that putting Alex Jones back on the platform has really upset a lot of people. I think they sort of like, "Is this guy really...?" And just into that void, guess who floated the idea of working with him? Kevin McCarthy floated the idea of working with Elon Musk. He wants to work on AI. He's looking for money. He's looking for a job. I get it. But of course, Kevin McCarthy would go for Musk. Of all the many people he has choices of in California, that's who he would go for.

Scott Galloway: There's also an existential risk of, keep in mind what he's done here around the new X.AI. The structure he's trying to basically... it's thievery. He's essentially said, "Okay, everyone, we're going to give 25% to Twitter shareholders." No, what he's doing is taking 75% of the assets they own for himself. And by the way, some of those investors are like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. I think he's going to have shareholder lawsuits from investors at Twitter. I think they're going to say, "What the fuck are you doing? You wipe out our equity because you can't control yourself, and now you want to take 75% of the assets here for your own AI purposes." I think he has lawsuits. I think he has deplatforming risk. I think the feds are fed up with this guy.

Scott Galloway: Monkeys are dying over at Neuralink. He's starting a university. Quite frankly, I'm a fan of that. I think we need more innovation and more pressure on universities. But anyways, I don't think it'll ever happen. I do think by the end of the year, he might even just throw up his arms. And when the virus jumps the lab of Twitter and starts infecting SpaceX, which is becoming the new golden goose, or Tesla, I think he and his... I guess he doesn't have a board of directors. So you know what, it's not your adventures in media should come to a quick end. I think he'll declare victory and leave.

Kara Swisher: He lost his Scandinavian Tesla suit, union suit, just so you know. Of course, there's the jokes around the incel car, the Cybertruck. See how good it is. He's got a lot of federal people on his ass. I just think this is going to be a rough Q1 and Q2.

Scott Galloway: He's got a lot. He's got a lot.

Kara Swisher: But then again, can I just push back on one thing? SpaceX just got valued at $180 billion. He's as rich as ever, if not richer.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, and I used to say, people say, "Well, he won't be able to make interest payments." No, it won't be a function of interest payments. Someone told me he's not very liquid. Well, he already pledged 60% of his Tesla shares. I just think at some point even a guy like that goes, "This just isn't worth it." I think that Twitter is about to become a constant source of death by a thousand shivs. I think the next couple of quarters are going to be what happens when everyone starts leaving because they realize their equity value and their options are worth nothing. And maybe, who knows, maybe some people at Twitter who actually have kids of their own go, "You know what, I'm just not down for this Alex Jones stuff."

Scott Galloway: I do think it's going to get worse. I know everyone was focused on his mother thing. If his mother's not speaking to him honestly, instead of being this kind of feral cheerleader who's on the payroll, like everyone who works for him, I just don't think he has anyone. If my son behaved like this, there would be hell to pay. And then pretending he wants to save humanity. He needs some guardrails and he doesn't got none. He don't got none. That's the biggest problem.

Scott Galloway: Anyway, so I think Alphabet is the best big tech performer in 2024. Revenge of the Empire Strikes Back at the hands of Gemini, YouTube. And I think that by the end of '24, maybe '25, Musk is going to decide that the juice is just not worth the squeeze here.

Kara Swisher: That's two years. You're not getting '25, end of '25. You don't get to say "someday he's not going to be in it." Just, all right, next year.

Scott Galloway: Someday, yeah. I guess technically that's not... yeah. At some point he won't own it. That's not much of a prediction, yeah. I think it's going to spiral even worse. There's no guardrails. But we'll see. He's got a lot of money.

Kara Swisher: So anyway, Scott, I have to say, it's been another fantastic year. We've grown. We've grown individually and together.

Scott Galloway: I've shrunk. I used to be 6'3", now I'm 6'2". True story.

Kara Swisher: We've grown in size of the podcast. We've grown personally, except for your penis jokes, which continue to be terrible. I'd like you to improve on those next year. Make them funnier? I'm going to hire you a comedy writer, I think.

Scott Galloway: Did you know your ears, your nose, and your penis are the only things that keep growing? No joke in there. That's actually a fact.

Kara Swisher: Okay. On that note, we want to hear from you, especially about how you need Scott to have better penis jokes. Send us your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT.

Kara Swisher: I also want to shout out to our fans. I get stopped. Oh, I got stopped a lot this week for some reason. We love when you come up to us. It's the nicest feeling for someone saying, "Hey, it's you. I love your show." It means a lot to us and not just because we're narcissistic fucks. But that too. But we like it and we love your feedback. You don't have to agree with us, but we're trying our best to be as genuine as we are. And we will correct ourselves when we're wrong, at least I will.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, that's the show. Happy 2023. Welcome to 2024. Scott, have a beautiful, beautiful holiday season. Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. Happy Kwanzaa. Whatever you happen to celebrate. Read us out.

Scott Galloway: Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Andertott engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Neil Saverio, and Gaddy McBain. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Scott Galloway: Kara, my New Year's wish is that reincarnation is a thing because that means statistically there's a really good probability I'm coming back with a much bigger penis.

Kara Swisher: That's good. That's good. 2025.

Scott Galloway: Same old dog.

Kara Swisher: Wait, 2024. Where are we? What year is it?

Scott Galloway: Fuck.

Kara Swisher: Happy New Year, everybody.