--:-- 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.
--:-- [Podcast intro music]
--:-- 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 Tim Cook.
--:-- Kara Swisher: No, you're not. Tim Apple, you mean.
--:-- Scott Galloway: He's leaning into it. So let me get this. Okay. Tim Cook. Tim Cook was on. I'm trying to think. You have two podcasts. I'm going to guess which one Tim Cook was on. And Dwight, he'd be better banter with you and me, but you're trying to build this new podcast. He's not a banter.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Go ahead.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah. So I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the CEO of the most valuable company in the world in technology, which is supposedly the theme of this show.
--:-- Kara Swisher: No, that's not true. It's Microsoft, I think. But go ahead. Keep going.
--:-- Scott Galloway: He went on more of an obvious fit for Pivot.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah. But he went on, let me think. Let me think. Sway.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Oh my God, Sway.
--:-- Kara Swisher: He was on Sway. I'm not even going to go there because it's getting a little tired. So tell us about the interview you did with Tim Cook on Sway. You know what? Listen to me. Listen to me, Scott. It was a natural place for him to go. Apple versus Facebook. What are your thoughts there?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I think, look, we're going to talk about this in a minute, but Facebook is at an all-time high, right? The stock's at an all-time high. So it doesn't really matter what Tim Cook does or thinks about them because nobody seems to care, you know, until the government gets involved. Even though they're going to do this ATT thing, some transparency thing, nothing is going to happen to them. And so Cook is just going to push ahead with this thing where you get to click that you're being tracked essentially or not. And I don't know how much it's going to affect Facebook. And he said he's not thinking about them at all. He thinks it's a flimsy argument to argue that it's anything but a privacy matter. He doesn't understand why there's so much pushback from them and others. So, you know, I think they're just—and he also said they're not competitors. He doesn't consider them competitors. They are sort of like what he said on CNBC this morning, weird roommates that don't like each other. They have to sort of coexist because Facebook's one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, and so is Instagram and all the others. And at the same time, they need Apple to be popular, right? So it's a weird, bad relationship between them. But they're moving forward on this effort to make people say they want to be tracked, essentially opt into it.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So let me just press pause there. My sense is that he's in a room saying, "We're going to put that motherfucker out of business." And that's what they're doing. To de-cookie or whatever it is such that Facebook cannot track people across multiple platforms is basically saying, "Okay, we're going to go in and we're going to take out your liver." You can function as a human for a little while without a liver, but effectively, if they accomplish this, they take the most valuable consumer base in the world, which is iOS users, and they make them dramatically less valuable to Facebook.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yes, they do. They do. But there's still Google, there's still Android, there's still across the world, there's still all kinds of things that Facebook can do. And I think he sort of scoffed at Facebook's idea that they're there for small businesses. You remember those ads they were doing? "We're here for small businesses."
--:-- Kara Swagger: Thank God. Thank goodness. Thank God. The billionaires are protecting us from terrible, terrible Apple.
--:-- Scott Galloway: It's interesting. I think he doesn't give a fuck. That was my sense.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Well, one thing that was interesting is that he said he hoped to have Parler back on the platform if they behave, like if they do their moderation. I mean, "behave" wasn't the word you used. But that was interesting. It caused a lot of, like, "What?" And of course he was like, "Look, if they follow moderation policies, they should be able to say what they want." Even if it—and I was like, "It can be a pit." But he was sort of saying that they just wouldn't follow moderation policies. And he talked a lot about the fight with Epic, and of course he had his point of view about safety and the linkage and that you couldn't sideload apps, and said they're going to fight it. But I sensed in that part of the conversation that there's a lot of flexibility in what they're going to do with app developers, and I think they recognize that it's their problem. They have a big problem there.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, one is when he punches—so first off, I think this is all a recognition of death. I think he's finally figured out that despite captaining the most successful company in the last 10 years, he's going to die. And he's decided he's willing to take some risks that might have a social impact and leave the world a better place. Because his complexion on these issues—most CEOs just stay out of this shit. And I think he's decided, if they're going to build a statue for me, it's not going to be because I increased the value of Apple. It feels to me like he's more willing to put shareholder risk at risk to do what he believes is the right thing.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And also that right thing happens to be very advantageous usually to his shareholders. On Facebook, he realizes it's a great punching bag and that Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath, and anything you do to get in the way of Facebook is probably good for humanity. But Parler, I think that's a lot of nice rhetoric that we need voices on both sides. We'll see. I'd be shocked if Parler ever ends up back in the app store.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, I don't think they'll moderate correctly.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And then on Epic, he realizes he's the bad guy. He realizes that he has become the enemy. He is Cersei realizing that she's become the wheel instead of trying to break the wheel. When he goes after Epic, he's kind of all wet there. He's the bad guy.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah. One of the things I thought was interesting was the car thing. He acknowledged that he didn't speak to Elon and that if they made a car, they would make the whole car, which was interesting.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Really?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah. That they would go vertical. They would manufacture it. He said we would not just make the software.
--:-- Scott Galloway: If we were to be in cars. And I said, "So that's a yes." And he's silent. Essentially. And so I think they're there. And AR was a big thing he was talking about. When we were talking, wouldn't it be great if he could put up graphs to show me things? A lot of AR stuff I think is in the works. And healthcare is still a big area of interest for him. He didn't—I don't think I asked him about Peloton—but healthcare is a big area for him. And he said they're still interested in content. I think it's a rounding error for them, but he said he's interested in making great shows and it's an important part of their ecosystem. So it was good.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I'll tell you, the moment he gets on stage with even a cardboard cutout of an Apple car or an electric car with an Apple logo on it, within 10 business days of that, take $100 billion from Tesla and shift it over to Apple.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, we'll see. He's got to make it. Look, everyone knows Tesla's up again this week, today. It's hard to do what Elon's doing. He acknowledged—he was quite effusive in his praise for Elon.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Maybe that's right before he sticks the knife in his back. But he was quite—he went out of his way to compliment Elon Musk.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I don't—I mean, I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, just over the last 36 months. But to not acknowledge the extraordinary gray matter between Elon Musk's ears is to be in total denial.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And what's interesting is all of a sudden overnight, literally in a year, the automobile market has gone from a low margin shitty business to one of the most valuable industries in the world. Because Tesla has turned the automobile manufacturing business from a $100 billion market to a near trillion dollar market. And that is entirely full stop why Apple is all of a sudden rethinking getting into that.
--:-- Scott Galloway: What's interesting is they were supposedly going to partner with Volkswagen or Hyundai and outsource the kind of low margin shitty part, the manufacturing, and try to be the operating system. It kind of makes sense they would go vertical though because their strength—Apple's strength—is it's the greatest intersection of hardware and software to date. And so a car that is fully integrated. And also, people don't talk about this. Apple has so many strengths, but a strength they don't talk about—people always say it's their marketing, it's their branding. Tim Cook has built arguably the most robust supply chain in the world, maybe with the exception of Apple. And so if anyone can pull off the dance or the orchestra of parts coming into a factory from anywhere, that's his area of expertise. That's his thing.
--:-- Kara Swisher: It's his thing.
--:-- Scott Galloway: It's his thing.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think the AR stuff he's always been very excited about, which is interesting. One of the things he also did—and let's get into the other thing—he doubled down on this stuff in Arkansas and Georgia and other places, the voting stuff. And he was like, "You know what?" Essentially, what was really interesting about the conversation, he was dripping with disdain for Zuckerberg, liking Elon and stuff like that. And then with this social stuff, I asked him about the law, the gay and lesbian. We talked a little bit about his coming out a few years ago. But he's on his 10th anniversary as CEO, and that company has gone from $350 billion to $2 trillion. He's added more shareholder value than any individual in history.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Indeed.
--:-- Kara Swisher: It's really interesting. So I think he's in that place, like, forget it. And so he doesn't care about the pressure about saying anything about voting rights, which is interesting because a lot of companies are facing threats of pressure and boycotts. I don't think these companies care. The Republicans have decided to call them woke companies and publicly oppose election legislation in Georgia and other states. Tim could not care less what these Republicans think. That was my impression of talking to him. He's like, not just that, but there's lots of corporations. So CEOs from more than 100 companies, including Target, Snapchat, Uber, issued a public statement opposing any measures that deny eligible voters the right to cast ballots. Major League Baseball says it will no longer hold its All-Star Game in Atlanta because of the controversy. Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, both companies headquartered in Georgia, are facing backlash from Republicans for speaking out against the new restrictive laws. What do you imagine? And then the Republicans go in full hog. McConnell just whined about it saying, "How dare they cancel us?" We're going to be talking about cancel later. But what do you—I think it's crazy what the Republicans are doing here. Maybe I'm misreading it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Boycotts are ineffective. They typically speaking just don't work. But what is effective is that when the All-Star Game withdraws or leaves Atlanta, it inspires a new cycle of more scrutiny on just how strange and unfortunate and quite frankly, just how un-American this voter restriction legislation is, which is premised on a lie. They're trying to position it as "we're expanding voter access." It's like, well, no, there was no voter fraud. It's just the whole thing. Anything that brings more scrutiny to it weakens it. And while the boycotts themselves aren't going to have any impact or near no impact, what does have impact is that when the All-Star Game and Delta Airlines keep it in the news cycle—like the Derek Chauvin trial, the reason why the trial is so important is not only because this might have been a murder and a crime and there needs to be punishment, but you see what happened here. It reminds us that it just puts it back in our face again, that this is just so awful. And this is where America is. Again, it's not the boycotts, but it's the additional scrutiny of what is—I can't imagine a more un-American legislation than this. It's the scrutiny, not the boycotts, that have an impact.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So what do you imagine? What do you think of the Republicans doing this? Then we need to get to the big story. Doing this, saying that these are woke. They're using terms like woke companies. Mitch McConnell said something inane. "How dare they do this?"
--:-- Scott Galloway: It's effective. I think that there is a backlash amongst—or I think there's a real feeling that the Democratic Party, rather than focusing on everyday problems that face real Americans, has decided that their mission and their resources should be focused on being a self-appointed police force for cultural issues. And that moderates and conservatives find this really unappealing. So I think to go to this—
--:-- Kara Swisher: But these are corporations doing it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, but basically what conservatives are saying is that you have these big corporations that have been weaponized or intimidated by wokesters.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Oh, stop it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I'm talking the Republican talk track. I'm not saying that I believe this. I'm saying this is their playbook, and I think it's an effective one.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I do not. I think people like the corporations. And so I think people like corporations more than they like Republicans, and they trust the things they use. I think this will—and especially they decided not to take any money from them. That's crazy. Like, this creates a real—they could try for the populist thing, but most of them are not populist. So it'll be interesting to see what happens.
--:-- Scott Galloway: All right. So you adopted a dog, right?
--:-- Kara Swisher: That's right.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Oh my gosh. Tell us very briefly, then we got to get to Janet Yellen. Did you call the dog Janet Yellen?
--:-- Kara Swisher: We're either going to call her Leia, as in Princess Leia, or Daenerys. We've got a bunch—we're still tossing them. Anyway, when I was eight years old and my parents split up, I used to come home and there was the most frightening animal next door named Thor. It was a male Great Dane. And this thing ended up being—as the breed is—just the sweetest and most loving breed in the world. And literally, Kara, I'm not exaggerating, for four decades, I have wanted a Great Dane. And they don't make sense. They're too big. They don't live long.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Don't apologize for a Great Dane.
--:-- Scott Galloway: They have bad hips. I've always gotten rescue dogs, never a pure breed. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to be dead soon. What do I want more than anything?
--:-- Kara Swisher: Are you dying soon?
--:-- Scott Galloway: We're all dying fast. I understand that. Time goes faster than we all think. I'm probably dying faster than you.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay, good, good.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Anyways, I thought, what do I want most in the world in terms of something I can buy, if you will? I want a steel blue Great Dane, and I went to Kentucky.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Steel blue.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Which, by the way, dog breeders in Kentucky—they and I have a lot in common. We really hung out, and we really got to know each other.
--:-- Scott Galloway: But I went and got something I've wanted for 40 years. I went and bought a steel blue Great Dane.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Steel blue? Great.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah. I can't wait to—I'm going down to see Scott in Florida.
--:-- Kara Swisher: You're coming to the dog town.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I'm coming to the dog town. That's right.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Come to Florida. You better have a nice place. I don't like—the pictures on Airbnb look very nice.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I got to fix the smoke alarms.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay. All right. Okay. I can do that. Lesbians are coming. We can handle that for you.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That might not be very nice.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I want to meet the dog. I'm very excited.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Oh, you will.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I want to meet—how many dogs do you have?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Just two.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay. We're bringing Clara to meet your kids. Swimming in your pool.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, wait.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Doing et cetera, et cetera. She may pee in your pool. It's going to be nice. You like that idea? So do I. Bring her in.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Okay. All right. We're going to get on to big stories. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will call for a global minimum corporate rate tax to prevent companies from going overseas. Yellen says she and the Biden administration will work with G20 nations to agree to implement this tax rate in order to create a more level playing field. Her plan comes as President Joe Biden is looking to raise the corporate tax rate as a way to pay for the $2 trillion infrastructure improvement plan. Under the administration proposal, the corporate tax rate would climb to 28% from 21%. The increase would come just four years after former President Donald Trump slashed the rate from 35%, which at the time was the highest in the world. What thinks you on this, Kara? Very bold move by Janet Yellen.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Well, they had to have it because basically the Republicans say, "Our most productive citizens will leave the country" or "Our job creators will leave the country." And so there needs to be some sort of bilateral agreement on taxes. Otherwise it just becomes a race to the bottom where Apple ends up incorporating in the Isle of Man, which they have done. So we need to enforce taxes unless we have some sort of bilateral or multilateral G20 agreement. But this is really interesting. The legislation is really fascinating. I think the Biden administration is so smart because they could have gone after—and I'm parroting the Meet the Press episode this weekend—but who, by the way, is parroting us like maniacs. All of a sudden they're taking an interest in virgins.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Who talked about that?
--:-- Kara Swisher: And young men who haven't had sex. Oh my God, who talked about that this week? We are literally dictating the media coverage of the most awful people in the world. Anyway, anyway, enough of us. But you have—he could have gone after guns. He could have gone after immigration. And he said, "No, our signature legislation has to be something that can get done." And a lot of parts of this are popular with Republicans. But okay, if we're going to do a big thing, we have to pay for it. Well, how do we pay for it? Let's go after the least popular entity, and that is corporations. Who haven't paid their taxes. There were some numbers out this week. Nike, FedEx, and Amazon don't pay any taxes. So this feels to me like really smart legislation. It's not—it's kind of—it's basically redefined or dramatically expanded the term infrastructure. Infrastructure now, I guess, includes caring for our seniors.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, everything.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So it's kind of—
--:-- Scott Galloway: Kind of does.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So you could have called this UBI to a certain extent, but it'll be really interesting to see what happens here. I'm excited about it. I love infrastructure, even though I would say only about half of this is what most people think traditionally of infrastructure. And then going after—taking the tax rate to a happy medium, not back to the 38 or 37, but going back to 28. Do you think other countries are going to sign on to this? I mean, who wouldn't?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, we have a pretty big hammer just as we have a default currency. If we could say to them, "Look, if you don't do this, we're going to be lower than you and you're going to have inversions." Everybody runs the same risk, and we show up with the biggest stick. So I think it just makes sense. Who this hurts is places like Ireland or all these tax havens. And no one's really fond of those guys. No one's saying, "Oh, we need to—" or Amsterdam or wherever people start to headquarter. So I think this is a great move and it kind of backstops an argument here. What do you think?
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yellen's a smart one. That's what I think. I think they're doing everything—
--:-- Scott Galloway: Hello, Professor Berkeley.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, I think they're doing everything in a very coordinated way. This is sort of like, then this, then this, then this, then this. Smart, 100%. And so I think it's really—and I think it's stuff that's very hard for Republicans to fight back on. Makes it harder. It's hard to get a piece of him. You know what I mean? Like, they were desperately trying this weekend with Jill Biden's outfit. She was wearing fishnet stockings. She got off a plane wearing really cool fishnet stockings and looking real hot. And they were like, "How dare she?" And I was like, "Hello, Melania." Like, what are you talking about? Jesus, this is what Melania wore? You know, no, this was Jill Biden. You got to see this picture. She looks fantastic. Good for her.
--:-- Scott Galloway: In any case, it was like sort of—and then they went crazy on her. It's nutty.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I did not see that. It's nutty. I was like, "Really, you need to move along." And by the way, the only thing that offended me about Trump was when she wore that jacket that was so obnoxious. She didn't know what she was wearing. A lot of stuff offended me. Her clothing. I don't know.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Let me go out on a limb here. Worst first lady in history. It's just like—similar to George Conway. You stick her next to their partner and she seems more likable or less unlikable. Worst first lady in history.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I agree. But I think her clothes—I didn't care what she wore. I don't care if she looks like whatever she wants to look like. She can wear whatever she wants. The jacket bugged me. Most of her tenure bugged me. But I don't—this Republican outreach, this bill really, these bills really are hard for Republicans to slap back at. We'll see if they can make hay with this "woke companies" and "Jill Biden looks like a tramp" kind of thing. But I don't think it holds. And trans, I think they got to go for some better stuff than that. I don't think it sticks. I don't think people want to get back to work. Seems like a lame argument.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah. People want to get back to work.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. We'll be back to talk about Facebook data leaks and a friend of Pivot on cancel culture, your favorite topic. Here we go.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique: fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Support for Pivot comes from LinkedIn. From talking about sports to discussing the latest movies, everyone is looking for a real connection to the people around them. But it's not just person to person—it's the same connection that's needed in business. And it can be the hardest part about B2B marketing: finding the right people, making the right connections. But instead of spending hours scavenging social media feeds, you can just tap LinkedIn ads to reach the right professionals. According to LinkedIn, they have grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, making it stand apart from other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, and company revenue, giving you all the professionals you need to reach in one place. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right professionals only on LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so you can try it for yourself. Just go to linkedin.com slash pivotpod. That's linkedin.com slash pivotpod. Terms and conditions apply. Only on LinkedIn ads.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay, we're back with our second big story. Half a billion Facebook user information has been posted on a hacking website. This is from a previous hack that happened several years ago, according to cybersecurity experts, but it's now resurfacing. There are records including names, phone numbers, birthdays, location—more than 32 million accounts in the United States, 11 million in the United Kingdom, and 6 million in India. Facebook spoke—people said it's old information they had fixed in August 2019, but did not say if they had notified users at the time. Meanwhile, the company stock is at an all-time high. The stock has risen 120% since the end of 2019. So through these very difficult times, the investors keep going for it. And this breach is not a breach. It happened, just to make it clear to people. But it's just resurfacing in these dark parts of the web for sale and things like that. Again, it's just another reminder that you give a lot of information to Facebook and they grab a lot. Scott, what do you think?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I don't know. Does anyone care anymore? You can't trust Facebook. I mean, okay, they take your data. They don't protect it. If there's a hack, they will minimize it. I mean, it's like add this to the list of, "Oh, advertiser, you're getting a billion video impressions and it's worth what you're paying. Oh, just kidding, you're not getting a fraction of that, but we're not going to refund you." Facebook is very smart. And like, if we just keep abusing data sets and hiring more lobbyists such that we don't actually get in trouble other than fines, which we can afford to pay, and we flood the zone with misinformation and information, and we keep violating people's trust, then we can get away with it. We're now in a shareholder-driven economy where the shareholder class has overrun government. And as long as the stock keeps going up—
--:-- Kara Swisher: So tell me why it's unscathed. Explain for the people why the stock remains unscathed. Because this is something you talked about, that the stock was going to be higher. I said the stock market was going to boom, and it's doing that right now overall. Why do you think the stock remains unscathed?
--:-- Kara Swisher: Explain for the people. Specifically, we made a prediction when the stock was at 160, 18 months ago, that it would hit 250. And then I got a ton of shit for owning it and people said, you're a hypocrite. And there was some legitimacy to that. So I sold my stock and now the stock's over 300. It's an amazing business.
--:-- Scott Galloway: The bottom line is the best business model in the world has been unregulated monopoly. They have fantastic engineers. They essentially are now two thirds of all social media on one platform. They massively abuse their monopoly power. Anyone that's a threat to them, they put out of business. It's a complicated business, so they're able to show up and confuse lawmakers. They now spend more on lobbying than big tech does in any industry in history. And they've deployed fantastic lipstick on cancer with very charming executives to run around and talk about gender balance and personal loss to totally delay and obfuscate the damage they continue. It's an amazing business. Unregulated monopolies are the best businesses in the world. This is a company that has 90 or 95% gross margins and can tell you, if you're an advertiser like Geico, they can say, we can identify households in New Jersey where someone just turned 16 and then using other assets, we can track them around the digital world and just keep running Geico ads and then do lookalikes on that. It's an amazing business and amazing product.
--:-- What's interesting is that Mark Zuckerberg feels like MBS right now or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where they're desperately trying to diversify away from one platform, oil versus data, and get into other businesses. Their weak point, and people don't see this yet, but it's really playing out with Apple, is that Facebook recognizes they're not an operating system as they'd like to think, they're an app. And as long as that app has to go on someone else's rails, be it Android or iOS, they are vulnerable.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And so what is Facebook doing under the radar that almost no one is talking about? Tell me.
--:-- Scott Galloway: They have 10,000 people developing a hardware device.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, they've tried it. Bad, bad, bad, bad.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I know, but 10,000 people? So they realize, and this is one of the key attributes of any company that wants to be a trillion dollars, you have to be vertical. At the end of the day, and this is Netflix's challenge right now, this is Disney's challenge. At the end of the day, if there's someone in front of you who is the guardian or the gatekeeper or the distribution, you are vulnerable. And Mark Zuckerberg wakes up every morning and says, "God damn it, that Tim Cook," and there's nothing he can do about it because Tim Cook owns the rails. So essentially, Facebook is trying to build the biggest railroad, and it's the biggest railroad project in history. They have 10,000 people trying to figure out whether it's an AR or a VR headset. They could be working on a phone, who knows?
--:-- Kara Swisher: So let's assess the things they've done. They bought Oculus and have been quiet off to the side. And I think that's not coming soon for people. It's just even the glasses. And Apple's going to move heavily into AR, too. This is where they do clash. They had Portal. Cook was saying we're not competitors, but they will be when AR. They all say they're not competitors.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, I know, but right now they're not in the social media business.
--:-- Kara Swisher: And so he didn't say he wasn't competitors with Amazon and content or Spotify. They don't have as many points of conflict except that they have to live together, essentially. So what would they do? How do you beat an Apple or a Google in the phone business? They haven't been able to. I still have a Facebook Home in a drawer somewhere. And Microsoft couldn't do it. So what way do they get in from a device point of view? Headsets are just not happening yet.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That's an outstanding question. I don't know. I'm thinking, whose handset division could they buy? They couldn't buy Samsung's handset division. That's too expensive. Samsung wouldn't sell it. I don't think people want to wear VR and AR. That takes the virginity rate up to 50% when all young men start wearing headsets. No wearable has ever worked except the Apple Watch, and that's because they put billions behind it. Wearables is one of the biggest technology head fakes of the last 10 years. So I don't know if they are going to be in the phone business or the smart speaker business. They tried Portal. They're way behind in smart speaker.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Way behind, but they have 10,000 people working on it. Someone gave me a Portal, and I actually threw it out. I was like, no way am I putting this near my house.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah, don't plug it in.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I'm not taking it out of the box. It's supposedly a good product, too.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Well, I hardly want the Amazon one in there, and Apple's sort of gotten out of the business. So where do they go? It's very difficult. A phone from Facebook is probably the least appealing thing to many people.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I don't know because there's only so many entry points unless there's something we haven't thought of. There's wearables, which feels like that's where they have the most progress or traction. And that's what they've publicly said they're going after. But that, to your point and my point, has been a big thud. There's the gaming industry as a portal, but that's crowded.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Amazon has more open job listings in their voice group now than Google has across their entire company. Amazon's making an unparalleled investment in voice, which I think is kind of the technology of the next decade. And then is it interfaced with cars? I don't see Facebook there. I've got too many competitors. Is it a phone? If Google can't figure out a phone, can Facebook? And by the way, the Pixel is supposed to be a great product. It is a great product. They still couldn't get it right. The honest answer is, I don't know.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Here's my thing: they're not good in any industry they have to compete in or have to be innovative in. They just don't. They can buy and they can copy, like they just did the other day again with another thing. They borrow from Clubhouse or whatever. They just can't do anything innovative. I just don't know how they can get to consumers in a similar way. And then face the barrage of criticism if they have a device. Why would you trust a Facebook device at this point, especially getting back to the data? There is nothing I would put on a Facebook account. People I don't like, I would put on it, I guess. When I see these data breaches, even though this is an old one, just the amount of information they have and the ability, and then when you add on the disinformation and misinformation stuff on top of it, it's just like, no, thank you. It's going to be hard. I agree, it's at an all-time high. If you want to get to people this way and if this system stays in place of social media, by all means buy Facebook. But I have a feeling the next five years is going to be a lot harder for Facebook than the last five years.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I think you're right. I think Facebook is the most vulnerable of all of them because they don't control the end consumer experience and they have the most people gunning for them. And they have to go into competitive, really competitive markets unless they can come up with something. You look at someone like Microsoft, which wasn't considered innovative, and they've done a great job. If they stay in social media and do something innovative, they certainly can shift around their fortunes the way Microsoft did. But I don't know. Look, if you're an investor, you should buy it because it's going up. And if you're an advertiser, you have no choice but to go to Facebook. You have limited choice and it's all problematic everywhere you go. And I suppose it's the least problematic. It's the best choice for you. Every single person who advertises on Facebook says we have no choice. We hate them. We have no choice.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Or Google. They just don't feel like they have any choice. Anyway, this is a fascinating area. Nonetheless, the stock is up. Do you feel bad about selling it?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah. I mean, I'd rather have held on to stocks that have gone up, but no. It's like when people say, "Scott, you can't criticize Amazon or Apple." I'm like, I think they're net goods for the world. I'm comfortable. I'm a capitalist. I'm comfortable owning them. Facebook really bothered me. I think Facebook is a net negative for society. So I kind of gave in to my better angels and sold that stock. And I really don't regret it.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right. Well, we're going to move on. Did you notice how Amazon kind of apologized for its pee tweets?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Oh, did it? What did they say?
--:-- Kara Swisher: "We're so sorry. There is peeing going on. We apologize to the congressman who raised the issue. People are urinating in their trucks." When they did it, I was like, oh my God, cue the 50 reporters who are going to have pictures of bags of pee and excrement. And I was sort of like, don't bring it. Don't we all end up peeing in a bag? Isn't that where we're all headed?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Oh my God. What is going on? You just bought a dog. You believe in life enough to have a dog. The dogs live 17 years, Scott. So you're going to be around at least that long, for goodness sake. People who buy dogs do not believe in the end of life. I'm sorry.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I'm saying. Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot. We're joined by John McWhorter. He is a professor of linguistics at Columbia and the host of the podcast Lexicon Valley and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. John, thank you for coming on.
--:-- John McWhorter: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So we have a lot to talk about. We've seen a lot of recent cancel culture. It never seems to go away. Some people are calling it "consequence culture," the opposite side. How do you view what's happening right now? There's the Matt Gaetz controversy versus Condé Nast and the firing of the Teen Vogue editor. There's these Republicans saying that corporations who are against voter restriction laws are part of "woke culture" or "woke corporations." So give us a lay of the land right now in the cancel culture debate.
--:-- John McWhorter: Well, I think that there is a tendency, especially from the left, to say that objections to cancel culture are really just well-fed, obnoxious people who are pushing back against being held responsible for undeniably questionable or nasty behavior. I think more is going on than that. We've reached a point where we're calling something cancel culture because a critical mass of, I think, reasonable people are beginning to think that an awful lot of figures are being punished for things that it's not clear they deserve to be punished for.
--:-- So, for example, Matt Gaetz is one thing. It would seem that there's certainly some things that we might need to be concerned about in terms of his conduct. But when you see professors being dismissed or suspended for what wouldn't have been considered offensive in any way just a year before, when you're seeing people being fired from their jobs for things that they tweeted 10 years ago, often at a different stage of their lives, something different is going on. We've gone from criticizing people, basically policing the culture in the way that any healthy culture does, to spraying for heresy. The idea being that if you have a certain stink on you, you are to be dismissed from polite society. And where do you draw the line? That's the issue. But I think that we've gone way over it. And that's what has gotten this labeled something called cancel culture among people who feel like something unnecessary and harmful is going on.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right, what about the corporations? This is the Georgia Senator, Governor Brian Kemp said that the corporations talking about voter restriction laws in Georgia were part of woke culture. "We won't be cancel cultured in our legislation." It used to just debate things and then people were on one side or the other. And if corporations didn't agree with you, that was fine. Why are they using this term? Because it feels like they're using the word like "fake news," which got out of hand in that regard. Everything was fake news when it wasn't.
--:-- John McWhorter: Yeah, it's inevitable that terms like this are going to overgeneralize and start being used as weapons by people who don't understand that there really might be an issue at stake, such as the issue with voting laws. Another example of that is playing the race card. There is such a thing as bringing race into something where it really has no business. And you could say that, yes, racism exists, but why did you have to make this racial? Very quickly, though, just playing the race card became bringing race up at all, even when it was relevant and often when it was really the only thing relevant. That's going to happen. And so that's also happening with cancel culture, where it's often people on the right or even from the middle who call it cancel culture whenever anybody on the left has anything to say about what they're doing at all. We can't avoid that, unfortunately, and we're going to have to come up with maybe a new term after a while. But the phenomenon itself, I think, is genuine. There is such a thing as undue, overzealous cancellation, even if people are going to start using the term to refer to things that don't deserve that description.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Normal things, like corporations can be for or against these voting laws. They used to do it all the time. That was considered quite normal. Now one way to push back if you don't like the way it goes is to give it that label. Scott?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Nice to meet you, Professor.
--:-- John McWhorter: You too.
--:-- Scott Galloway: So I really appreciate, and it struck a chord when you were saying, there is a difference between being accused of trafficking a 17-year-old and a 17-year-old putting out racist tweets. There's just a big difference. And we seem to have, I don't know if because we're busy, just grouped it all into one. It's almost dangerous that we have one term to describe all of this because there are not even shades of gray. There are shades of just entirely different situations. I've always thought, and I want to hear your view, that there are two underlying things driving this. The first is a total lack of trust in our institutions. We used to say, all right, there are civil and criminal procedures for when people do something terrible, and that we trust those institutions to either fire that person or put that person in prison or find them. And we've just lost trust in those institutions, so we've moved to new institutions, whether it's Twitter or media, to try and police ourselves. And the second is that income inequality has become so severe that this is a method of going after what I'll call the white patriarchy or the establishment. Your thoughts on those two things being kind of the underlying fuel for cancel culture, for lack of a better term?
--:-- John McWhorter: You know, I think that those things are relevant to this, but in a way, I'm a little less sophisticated about it than you are. I think that there's some more basal impulses going on here. I think that a lot of this is a religion in every single way. An anthropologist would notice this as a religion growing. And it's not that wokeness is a religion. It's this particular development since about June of last year. It's a religion where what a person gets out of it is that you feel good about yourself by showing that you know that there are inequalities, and especially ones that are based on race. I think an awful lot of people really get off on showing that they understand what systemic racism is. And that's a good thing in some ways, but I think that it's gone overboard where people are competing to show how good they are. The term for this is, of course, virtue signaling. It could even be just somebody showing off that they have a bigger car than someone else. This is a natural human impulse.
--:-- I think quite mundanely that part of the reason we're talking about it now is because of the pandemic and the fact that starting about a year ago, all of us were bored and lonely and indoors. I think that all of this gives people a sense of togetherness. I don't think this would have happened if there hadn't been a pandemic. But I think that's what it is. It's people feeling good about themselves. And then this is even harder for me to say, because when I say that, I'm talking mostly about white people. But when I talk about black people, I have to say that a lot of it is because one way to feel like you matter is to play the role of a victim beyond what reality actually specifies. And that's not to say that there aren't hideous things that happen to people. I need not mention George Floyd. But I think all of us deep down understand there's a certain amount of exaggeration that happens, and that has really magnified over the past year. Any human being has times when they're insecure and they seek to feel significant. There are all sorts of ways that we can assuage that. One way that a Black person can is by playing this victim role. And we're encouraged to do it. And it plays into white people who are waiting to be the people who acknowledge your pain. And so there ends up being a kind of a dance. And I think that's what we're in when it comes to the racial aspect of this.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Does it end up undermining our efforts though to have a more just world?
--:-- John McWhorter: Yeah.
--:-- Kara Swisher: When we end up taking agency away from women or Black people and assume that anytime someone accuses someone else or is offended, it means they're right and it means they're a survivor, as opposed to having some sort of construct or organization to vet these things, it just feels as if we've decided that one group are always the perpetrators and one group are always the victim. And that's who accuses the other first, isn't it? Aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot here to a certain extent?
--:-- John McWhorter: Yes. I think that all of this is so brutally condescending to, for example, Black people. I am dismayed at what children we are treated as, as the result of this etiquette that we develop. And unfortunately, a lot of Black people aren't in a position to see it. There's a sense that somehow the rules are supposed to be different for us because of our history, but that can be taken too far. I think that the whole thesis of a book like White Fragility is infantilizing of people. Not to mention that it makes white people into devils in a way that's vastly oversimplified, despite the nastiness of history. So yeah, it creates a really hostile, not to mention just mendacious situation between all of us. All of us are doing this weird minuet where none of us really believe anything that we're saying, and we're told that this is somehow progress. It's scary, really.
--:-- Kara Swisher: So, let me push back on both of you, actually, because there is a line. I want to draw the line between what is cancel culture and what is actual accountability, because most of the damage does come from certain groups. As a gay person, I don't want to be a victim, but I can tell you, I just had to adopt my own child again in a really ridiculous way. So at some point, groups, whatever group you have me part of, it's like, enough. Why do I have to deal with this? There is a feeling of being not victimized, but like that you can't... When I heard Brian Kemp do that, I was like, you're kidding me. Corporations should be... You're taking this term, which you're right. The woman at Condé Nast, it feels a little much. It seems like overkill. But in some cases, it's not overkill. It's accountability for behaviors. So where is the line that you think through these things of what should be used? Again, it reminds me a lot of fake news in that it's overused all the time. I'm so tired of people going "oh fake news." Please stop. Because it's not fake news. It's actually good news.
--:-- John McWhorter: Exactly. Yeah. The line is not a line. We're talking about something that shades from one thing into another. But I think there are cases where you don't even have to wonder. So, for example, let's say there's a white male law professor, and he has on one of his exams a question about employment discrimination. In the question, he writes "N" and then five asterisks. He doesn't actually write the word that was in the document, but he writes that so you know what it is. And a group of Black students decide that that hurts them, even to see it written there like that. And one of them claims to have had heart palpitations to see that on the piece of paper. And they make it so that this man can no longer work on campus, and is taken away from all of his administrative duties. And that softened a little bit because this hit social media, but still, they're still trying to make his life a living hell. That's one where I would say that it's not Black people saying we've had enough. That is Black people being encouraged to put on a certain kind of act. And the sad thing is that that story, if that were 10 years ago, it would be an outlier. But since last summer, that sort of thing has been happening all the time. I have unwittingly become, with my aspiring partner on Blogging Heads, Glenn Lauer, kind of a clearinghouse for these things. I'm not completely sure why it's now thought that anything like this that happens, you're supposed to send John McWhorter an email. But that is what happens. And the volume of it is crushing, and it shows that there's something that's gone off the rails despite, Kara, what you're saying, which is that there are times when something real has happened. And it can even create a certain oversensitivity. I'm not saying that you are, but that's where we were, say, last year. Something weird has happened since last summer.
--:-- Kara Swisher: All right. So what's the solution to moving it back to normalcy where there are certain things that do get canceled unfairly and the other is you deserve exactly what you're getting? What's the reason for it getting worse? Is it Twitter? Is it the ability of people, everybody to speak in a blog or on Clubhouse or wherever? Is there any way to turn that back so that people do feel like their voices are being heard? Because some of it is about not being heard. I think it's not victimization. It's not being heard.
--:-- John McWhorter: Yeah. I think it's about honesty really. Because what creates this is not only the pandemic, but social media as it's existed for about the past 10 years. And what scares a lot of people is being called dirty names on Twitter. That can be genuinely chilling. And it's at the point where this may be a quick side of cope, but I think a lot of people are going to need to start standing up to that and enduring being called names by people when they know that they don't deserve to be called that name. And just to let it blow over and let a certain kind of person see, and I'm not talking about only Black people, I'm talking about all the people who participate in this kind of witch hunting, see that they don't have the power that they started to have roughly last summer. That you can't get anything you want by calling somebody a racist or something else-ist loudly and cleverly on social media. If people don't start standing up to it, then there's no reason why this sort of hyper-woke person is going to change their behavior. We just need more honesty, I think.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Oh my God, I love this guy. I love this guy. I gotta be honest. I'm so sad for having all my speakers on this way. Kara had Tim Cook on her other podcast. You're still number two, but you're close. You're literally just behind Tim Cook.
--:-- John McWhorter: I'll take that.
--:-- Scott Galloway: The question I have is you're at Columbia. I'm at NYU. Don't we play a big role in this? Somewhere between 1% and 4% of our faculty identify as conservative. And it seems to me that we have decided our job is to graduate wokesters when we should be graduating warriors. And what I mean by warriors is the people that can respect and hold two contradictory thoughts in their brain, discuss them, and then figure out, all right, gay rights are important. The laws that Kara has to endure are total bullshit, and we become more effective at doing away or putting in place the right laws. Aren't we part of the problem?
--:-- I have seen a serious uptick. I've used the term... of course, I'm very good at turning all this back to me. I've used the term on a Zoom class. I said that Facebook's testicles haven't descended or something. And I had someone reach out to me. He says three times a week on this show, but okay. But I had a student reach out to me saying, "This is an elective over Zoom. I don't feel safe around you." And I don't know how to respond to that. I'm like, okay, well, tell me, help me understand why you don't feel safe over Zoom when I use a term like that. And I appreciate it. I probably shouldn't use terms that indicate genitalia because I can be effective without doing that. But it feels like we have decided that our collective job as universities is to produce wokesters. And aren't we doing a disservice to the dialogue?
--:-- John McWhorter: Yes. That is definitely true. I don't think it was true 30 years ago when there was all that hand-wringing about tenured radicals. I thought then that a fringe of people who were actually putting forth some interesting ideas were getting a bad rap. But something really has happened once again. And I do feel that there are a great many professors who very innocently think that they're teaching students truth when they're actually teaching students how to be leftists. I think a lot of them really don't understand that the leftist catechism is not the truth, because they only spend time with each other. They don't have any reason to think out of the box.
--:-- But I myself try very hard. Most people don't know that I don't teach this stuff at Columbia. I'm a linguistics professor. I teach about verbs. But where societal issues do come in, I try very hard to go down the middle. And I've actually frustrated some students who know about my kind of other life where I'm the contrarian about race, where they're waiting for me to play that role. And I tell them, no, no, my job is to teach you guys to think and to teach you guys to figure out where you come down on something. I'm not going to preach what I wrote in The Atlantic last week in this class. You can read it, you can bring it up, but that's not what I'm going to do here. In general, yeah, I think that it would be nice to see universities change on that score. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, though. I think that the epicenter of this way of thinking, unfortunately, has been the university, and I think it's going to be the last place to change.
--:-- Kara Swisher: But Scott, don't you get the feeling that the faculty are further to the left than students? My sense is that there are some students who are the hyper-wokesters, but most of the students understand that there is a larger truth than what's in Mother Jones and The Nation. I'm less worried about the students than about the faculty.
--:-- Again, I'm going to push back on you two in violent agreement with each other. You have someone like Josh Hawley. "I'm so canceled." He had plenty of time to talk to people. One of the things I always say is the people who talk about how they've been canceled never shut the fuck up, really, honestly. And they have lots of opportunities to talk. And again, they're abusing this term on the other side. And there's a whole industry of anti-cancel culture people that exhaust me, often privileged people, often people with lots of platforms, often white. And it feels like they think if you say something offensive and people are offended, too bad. That's my feeling on a lot of this stuff. So how do you push back on that? Like Josh Hawley, give me an example of how you look at something like that. Do we, for a second, think he has been canceled, even though he claims it and then just whines and gnashes his teeth about it? I find that just as offensive in terms of, "How dare you question my idiotic statements?"
--:-- Kara Swisher: We're so intermediate on that right now. I mean, the linguist in me says that words' meanings change, and words like that change quickly. When he shakes his fist and says, "I'm being canceled," loudly where everybody can see it, and books, et cetera, what he means is—
--:-- Scott Galloway: Not just books, but books, cable, online, everywhere.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Right. Yeah, he's not being canceled at all. What he means is, "I'm being criticized unfairly, that people are wishing I wouldn't say things that I should not be being criticized for." I don't know whether he actually thinks he's being muzzled in any particular way. He knows that that word hits a certain button. But yeah, obviously he can say anything he wants and be heard by everybody on earth. He's not being canceled in any sense, but he means "there those people go again." Kind of the way people use "playing the race card" to mean mentioning racism at all. It's sloppy usage and maybe manipulative in that if he says "cancel," he knows it whips up his base.
--:-- That's the intermediate place. Again, how do we get to a point? Because sometimes you just say, maybe you're just—someone was saying that to me the other day. They were like, "They're being canceled." I said, "No, I'm just calling them an asshole." That's it. That's like the end of it. I don't know what else to say. So how do you get back to a civil conversation where everybody's not either offended or they can't deal with the fact that they're offensive and they're getting feedback, which is what it used to be called back in the day. So how do you get to a center point of that? What do you think, you're a linguistics professor, how does it sort itself out?
--:-- John McWhorter: This is how this needs to be sorted out. There's a certain kind of person these days, generally under 40, in my experience, who is part of a genuine desire to cancel certain people, where the new idea is that you don't just get called an asshole, which is fine. You used to be called an asshole in very creative ways. I have suffered that regularly for 25 years. But now the idea is that it's not only that you call somebody an asshole, but you try to strip them of their epaulets in some way. They have to be sanctioned.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Or their livelihood.
--:-- John McWhorter: Or their livelihood. The idea is that if you say something that offensive, not only are we going to make fun of you, but we are going to destroy your life to some extent. That assumption is unjust. And we need a few good humans to stand up and start questioning it and start having a kind of an "I am Spartacus" ending to the movie. In which case, some people will deserve to be canceled, of course. But I think we should go back to just being abusive, as opposed to the idea that if you don't like what somebody said, they should be eliminated.
--:-- Kara Swisher: We can do that. Yeah. Now, in some cases, though, in cases of sexual harassment, like with Matt Gaetz and many others, there's a lot of like the Charlie Roses, the Harvey Weinsteins. There's actual like, look at that. And then, of course, some of them were claiming cancel culture. And I was like, "You shouldn't have grabbed the intern, I guess."
--:-- Scott Galloway: Those are actual crimes, though, no?
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, right. But some of them aren't crimes. Some of them are just like certain things people say that are problematic. What do we do if people on television, like there's been a million of those sort of edge cases, and then it unveils like a lot of behaviors, like I'm sure is going to happen with Matt Gaetz. Like there's going to be a lot, you know, as they pull back his filthy covers.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Societal mores change.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah. And sometimes it's messy. Not every case is going to be perfect. But, you know, we are in a society where the sorts of things that Charlie Rose thought of as perfectly normal are now considered utterly beyond the pale. And he lost his job for it. And you can put yourself in his head and imagine that he feels like too much happened to him for something that he thought of as so minor. But unfortunately, no, we have to classify that as a dinosaur.
--:-- John McWhorter: I think that the analogy between Me Too starting circa 2016 and cancel culture starting in June 2020 is a little off because, for example, I think Al Franken was a bit much and I think I'm not alone in that.
--:-- Kara Swisher: No, you're not.
--:-- John McWhorter: But for the most part, with the Me Too cases, I always thought, yeah, this is how it needs to be. It's time to change that. It's just that we're modeling upon that what really doesn't seem to many reasonable people to be a constructive approach to running a society, which is that you fire somebody. You fire a white man for saying that it would be reverse racism for him as the head curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to no longer consider white artists for the collection. He says, "I'm going to spread out and look at a more diverse range of artists, but I'm not going to completely disregard white artists because that would be reverse racism." He was made to resign just for saying the word "reverse racism." There's a difference between Charlie Rose and that man.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Fair.
--:-- John McWhorter: That's the kind of thing that worries me.
--:-- Kara Swisher: In some ways, I feel like a lot of, in that case, he's probably paying for years of ignoring, right?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I can see that, yeah.
--:-- Kara Swisher: You know what I mean? Like a lot of these years and years of making the exact choices that he—you know, you're paying something else for anything. All right, I have a last question. Is there another word? Can we stop using this word? It's like "fake news." I hate it. Cancel culture? Yeah. Do you have another word, Mr. Professor of Linguistics? And just make one up.
--:-- John McWhorter: Hmm. That's hard on the fly, but instead of it being "cancel culture," we could say that if you feel that you shouldn't be criticized like this, then you could say that you are being persecuted by what you could call a member of the elect. That's what I thought I was going to title my next book, but I don't think it's going to be called that. But it's these Calvinists, it's these people who have elected themselves to chase certain people out of society without most people even agreeing with what they're doing. So, the idea is, you know, I've run into some elect people, you know, I'm being elected or something like that. That's literally the way I think of it, because "cancel culture," you're right, doesn't make sense the way it's being used, and it's being used manipulatively. I think people should have a right to say, "I don't feel that I deserve this criticism," even if they're wrong. But yeah, it's awkward for them to say it's "cancel culture."
--:-- Kara Swisher: I don't deserve this outcome, probably. It's not the criticism necessarily.
--:-- John McWhorter: Right. The outcome. Yeah.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Scott, last question. I want to go more meta. So you strike me as a very thoughtful person. You also teach philosophy.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I do.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Do you have any thoughts about where we are as a society and what are really kind of the big existential threats in our society right now as Americans?
--:-- Scott Galloway: Yeah. Our problem right now is that a small group of people, based on a very interesting idea called critical race theory, are under the genuine impression that they have found the truth. So, you teach a philosophy class and you're going to start with Plato, and you're going to drag the students through Kant, and you're going to get up to John Rawls, etc. And nobody knows what the truth is, nobody can tell you what justice is. The end of a good philosophy class is that you teach the students that it was all for nothing. It's an unending series of questions. The CRT people, the people who are getting people fired, et cetera, these days, think that they have found what justice is. All these other people didn't quite get it. Kant didn't quite get it, but some law professors figured it out a few decades ago. I find that arrogant on my bad days, but on most days, I just find it very naive. And I think it's time for us to start telling people like that, "Your take on what truth and justice is is interesting, it's challenging, it's worth being at the table, but you haven't figured it all out. And we can't rule our society based on the tenets of your beliefs." I don't think most people, if it were put that way to them, would have a real answer. And then we could move on to the more constructive mess that real life is supposed to be.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Can you just talk a little bit about the manifestation of CRT thinking and why you think it's a negative? Because I don't think most people are familiar with it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Critical race theory is an idea. Well, there are various ideas in it, but one of the main ones that's informing what's going on today is that we are a society in which there are whites who are on top, who are the source of a structural racism that's embedded in all structures of society, and that this makes non-white people quintessentially victims. We are subalterns. The definition of being a Black person is living within the constructs of all of this white supremacy by which we are oppressed by whites. Our identity must be against that of this white oppression and contempt and disregard. And so, if that's the way society is, and you know, you can make an argument that that is the way it works, that's not crazy, but the imperative based on that is that we must battle power differentials as the central focus of our being. Intellectual activity has to be about battling power differentials. Your art has to be about that. The way you talk has to be about that. Legal theory has to be centered upon that. Today, the whole idea that your local bakery puts out a statement about George Floyd. And you're thinking, well, what does one thing have to do with another? It's because of this idea that we must be committed to overturning power differentials. Now, I think anybody would say that power differentials are a major problem. But the hyper-laser focus on it that we are being taught is necessary, that you must do the work, that if you're white you will always have this white privilege that stains you like original sin. All of that is based on originally this critical race theory idea. And it's an interesting idea, but you don't run a society upon the basis of such a narrow conception of what it is to act as a person. Battling power differentials alone is not what most of us would think of as the focus of any worthwhile existence. There are some people who will live that way, but a lot of the rest of us have other things to do as well. That's the problem that we're faced with these days. It's a very narrow and punitive ideology that we're being told we're supposed to live under. And at the same time, when someone like Donald Trump is saying nonsense, it adds the layer of white supremacy onto it. It's being pushed as completely ridiculous by people who are problematic at the very least in their attitudes towards people of color.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah, because they're using critical race theory as a stand-in for basically anything they don't want to hear, which is not what the theory was supposed to be.
--:-- John McWhorter: Once again, the term—well, there, it's not the term evolving. It's ignorant people misusing it or using it to evil ends.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yes, that was very disappointing to see. Because I mean it, the critical race theory is not ridiculous in itself. It's just what's being done with it these days.
--:-- John McWhorter: And I'm questioning a certain aspect of it. And then you have people on the right who are saying, "Stop talking about race, stop talking about identity, get rid of this critical race theory." That's not what I mean.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah. Okay. All right. This is fascinating. I'm sure we'll get lots of canceling for it. It's all right. It's mine. We'll take it. We can take it. We can take it. Anyway, Professor McWhorter.
--:-- John McWhorter: I am Spartacus.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Are you Spartacus? Are you Spartacus? Kara?
--:-- Scott Galloway: No.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Kara? No. I'm still like—
--:-- Scott Galloway: Those assholes in Georgia calling corporations can go fuck themselves. Don't pass bad laws if you don't want—
--:-- Kara Swisher: There's the linguist in you coming out.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Bad laws. If you want to pass bad laws that makes the MLB pull out of Georgia, too friggin' bad for you. It's called, I don't know, consequence.
--:-- Kara Swisher: You know, there's the other word is "consequence culture," which you've heard of course.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I'm gonna keep that.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Keep that. No, but I think it's Roxane Gay. She said "consequence culture." So but it's as if there's only two choices and there's more than two.
--:-- John McWhorter: That's really your point.
--:-- Kara Swisher: That's what I think. It's complex. It's "complex culture" is what it is we got going on here. Darn it. Anyway, we really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming. And Scott is all smiling right now. Thank you, Professor. Thank you, folks. Made my day.
--:-- Scott Galloway: All right. Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Are you happy right now? You got your cancel culture friend now?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I thought that guy was fantastic.
--:-- Kara Swisher: He is. He's great. I'd like to bring in lots of points of view on the show.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I'm telling you, that guy, I can tell you right now, gets an endless stream of shit from his colleagues at Columbia. It's lucky he's tenured.
--:-- Kara Swisher: He'll be fine. Okay, Scott, we'll be back.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay, Scott, wins and fails. So what do you got?
--:-- Scott Galloway: What do you got? There's so many. It's funny. I was thinking about this morning and I had trouble coming up with them. So a fail, I think AOC coming out and saying that the stimulus or the infrastructure bill isn't big enough and then using the number 10 trillion. I think that undermines our efforts on the left to get something done. I think that's a ridiculous number. I think it's unrealistic and kind of paints us as progressives, as people that just want to—that we've kind of lost touch with the economic reality of what it means to create that sort of inflationary pressure. We couldn't put $10 trillion to work responsibly. I love AOC. I think she's courageous.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I think she's a gangster. I love AOC.
--:-- Scott Galloway: And I heard her say that and I just cringed and I thought, "Oh, you're just doing us all a disservice. You're making it less likely we're gonna get anything done when you say it's not big enough, it needs to be 10 trillion." That's my loss.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Do you have a loss? I think she's reacting against how much money we spent on the military over the many years. I think that's where it comes from. She talks about that quite a bit. And my win is, I have a weird win. I've been trying to wrap my head around crypto. China came up with their own cryptocurrency today or announced some sort of coin, or I'm not entirely sure what it is, which seems to be totally oxymoronic to the point of crypto, that there's no central bank or no source of information, that there's a lack of transparency, if you will. So the idea that the Chinese security apparatus would understand money flows seems just totally contrarian to the notion of crypto. And then you have, like any digitization of any sector, you have power to a few currencies and it feels like we're going to, I think, go to the Yuan, go to the Euro, go to the dollar, maybe the yen, but things like the real, I think other kind of tier two currencies are just going to get hammered. And then Bitcoin or Ethereum or—I mean, there's a couple others that are showing some promise that I'm trying to wrap my head around. But a long-winded way of saying, I think the winner here might be India. And the reason why is just as Joe Manchin is a swing vote, if there's this war lining up between American and Chinese currencies or cryptocurrencies, the swing vote will be India. And if India decides to embrace Bitcoin, you could see Bitcoin skyrocket. If you see India decide, "No, this is the default currency." But it strikes me that India is shaping up to be the swing vote in what will be the default currency, the default crypto. But I'm still trying to wrap my head around this shit.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Do you understand this stuff? I can't get my head around it.
--:-- Scott Galloway: A little bit. I need to study it more.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I can't say I'm an expert.
--:-- Scott Galloway: We all feel that way. I've dabbled around in it.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Anyways, that was a weird win.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That's all right.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I'm going to—I was saying the stock market is going to continue to—that's not a prediction, but it's this, they're all at all-time highs. Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft. They're just going up and up and up. All the whole stock market's gonna go up, up, up, up.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Go ahead.
--:-- Kara Swisher: But the weird thing about that though, is I agree with you, but the weird thing is that, don't underestimate the market's ability to disarticulate itself from the real economy. I'm very confident the real economy, unless there's some sort of variant that shows up that can sneak around the vaccine, which is why we all need to get vaccinated sooner rather than later. But other than that, the real economy is going to boom, but the stock market doesn't always reflect the real economy. You can see the stock market starting to go, "Uh-oh, there's inflationary pressures," and then start to creep around the corner. Well, what happens when we run out of stimulus? What does the world look like? You could see a market where the GDP goes up 8%, consumer spending is at an all-time high, and the market corrects 20%. Those could happen.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Yeah. Yeah. And then the fail is—I mean, it's kind of a win-fail. It was a fail for Amazon. The National Labor Relations Board just said that Amazon illegally retaliated against two of its most prominent internal critics when it fired them last year. These two employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, had pushed the company publicly to reduce its impact on climate change and address concerns of its warehouse workers. And so I'm reading from the New York Times story here. And the agency said it would accuse the company of unfair labor practices. I think that's a really interesting case. We'll see. Have you heard anything? What's going on?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I thought we were going to have the results by now.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Not yet. No, it's going to take a longer time. I had spaces with Jason Del Rey and he filled us in. It could take a while. And then Amazon can either decide to go into negotiations with the union if they win, or they can question every vote. Each side can question every vote. So even if it's a couple thousand votes, it can take forever. And so they expect Amazon to push back on every single vote. And so it can take a very long time apparently if that's the case.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Could they just leave Bessemer?
--:-- Kara Swisher: They could. That was another thing we talked about. They could leave Bessemer.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That would be a pretty tough thing to do because they just opened a new plant there and it's a new fulfillment center. So that would be hard because they've invested quite a lot of money there, but you never know. They've pulled out before.
--:-- Kara Swisher: They're like that. So on my way to this breeder yesterday, I was asking the driver, I said, "What's going on in this area of Kentucky?" And he said, "It's booming because there's a new Amazon plant." And we went by the Kentucky, the Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky airport. That's where we flew in and out of. And there were this row of Amazon Prime planes with a smile on it. I'm like, wow, the economy is just really reconfiguring before our eyes. They cannot pull out of everywhere, is my feeling. I think they're going to be losing these things at the National Labor Relations Board in lots of places. As I said many times, employment is going to be their biggest opportunity and vulnerability, and they have to focus on it. And they can't just be obstreperous across the nation.
--:-- Scott Galloway: No, as my oldest son will attest, pulling out doesn't always work.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Oh, come on.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That's good.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I'm canceling you for that. Cancel. Consequence called shark. I don't feel safe around you. I feel unsafe.
--:-- Scott Galloway: I don't feel safe around you. Nobody feels safe around you.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I don't feel—nobody feels unsafe around you. Just for a piece of news.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Don't stand too close to my flame. You might get burnt.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Oh, God. I can't believe I'm coming to Florida. I'm going to have to bring my weaponry.
--:-- Scott Galloway: We're going to have such a nice time.
--:-- Kara Swisher: I'm going to bring my weaponry. We're going to have such a nice time. I wonder if I can get on the plane.
--:-- Scott Galloway: No guns in the Galloway house.
--:-- Kara Swisher: This is the first time I've flown, and it's for Scott Galloway. Let me just say.
--:-- Scott Galloway: That's right. What do you think about that? We're excited to see you. We've been talking about it. My wife, who seems really like in the emails, Scott the text, Scott is insane and doesn't know anything. And his wife gets in and she breaks it down right. Like that. There's a word for that in German. Anyway, she's good. I'm not allowed to talk to her. That's part of her role. I'm not supposed to talk to her on the show.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Let me just say she operates this place like a Panzer tank division. Let me just say she's great. Thank you so much. Just so you know, quick news. Supreme Court, we'll talk about it. Maybe Thursday ruled 6-2 in Google's favor in a copyright dispute with Oracle, which has been going on forever over Java APIs. Anyway, they overturned Oracle's win. And I've written so many stories about this or edited so many stories. So we'll talk about it maybe on Thursday. But that's just news just in. Anyway, Scott, this has been a great show. I'm so glad you liked our guest. Professor. I knew you would. I knew you would. And I think it's time to get to a more cogent discussion, although not forgetting problems of the past. Thank you very much. I apologize. That was going to be a good wind-up. I think we need stronger institutions. I think we need better infrastructure, corporations, and more responsible governments such that in real time we can deal with these things before they turn into—I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if clueless men in their 50s or 60s were told, "You know what, this behavior just doesn't wash. Stop it." And arrested for everyone's good, arrested them kind of before these things turned into terrible—I don't know. There's got to—our institutions are weak.
--:-- Scott Galloway: It is. It's absolutely true. Although there's not, you know, watching the George Floyd thing, there's not anyone that's going to say, "Stand down, everybody. Don't worry about racism anymore." That is not going to fly.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Horrific. Just horrific.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Not going to fly. He was exactly where he was because of who he was. And that is just so clear in that case, at least.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Anyway. Okay, Scott, that's the show. Come to Florida. I will be in Florida. Come to the land of crazy. We could broadcast from Florida.
--:-- Scott Galloway: We will broadcast from Florida. Broadcast live.
--:-- Kara Swisher: No, we're not going to broadcast. We'll do a little video. From the Fontainebleau.
--:-- Scott Galloway: We'll do a TikTok dance in front of Scott's incredibly expensive pool.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Okay. We'll be back on Friday for more. Go to nymag.com/pivot to submit your questions. This is a Pivot podcast. And also the link is in our show notes. Read us out, Scott.
--:-- Scott Galloway: Today's show is produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Ernie Andretat engineered this episode. Thanks also to Hannah Rosen and Drew Burrows. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or an Android user. Check us out on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Who discovered Florida?
--:-- Scott Galloway: I don't know, but the jungle cat is rediscovering the craziest fucking state in the union. Come on down, Swisher. We're going to Miami.
--:-- Kara Swisher: Team Swisher. We're going to Miami. Hey, Francisco Suarez, we're coming for you. Thank you.
