Government Shutdown Averted, A Surge in Hate Speech, and Guest Adrian Aoun

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Scott Galloway: Hey.

Kara Swisher: What did I do?

Scott Galloway: Late. I've got an interview with Martina Navratilova after this. Very tight. I'm going to have her come over to that hotel and smack you around a bunch.

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.

Kara Swisher: Why are you in Miami and late to this endeavor that we do every twice a week? What are you doing in Miami?

Scott Galloway: I'm here with the good folks from Live Nation who are inspiringly young for a management team of this company of the success, but it's also quite depressing. When did we get so old, Kara? I used to be the youngest person in every room. Now I'm the oldest. I just couldn't. All these people are so young and so talented.

Kara Swisher: Oh, Scott. This is the way of life. Did you not pay attention to it as the years clicked on?

Scott Galloway: Yeah. I accepted your invitation to your birthday party, by the way.

Kara Swisher: Oh, good. Yeah, I'm super excited.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. It's a year away. We were kind of hoping you'd... Oh, you said yes. I said yes. You said I wouldn't come. You were categorized under "invite them and they'll say no." I got to recalculate. I got to recalibrate. I'm coming at least. I'm not sure the whole gang is coming.

Kara Swisher: Do you have those people for events where you invite them thinking they'll say no?

Scott Galloway: Yes, totally.

Kara Swisher: Am I one of those people?

Scott Galloway: No. We're excited to have you there. If I wasn't there, you'd be deeply hurt.

Kara Swisher: Mostly Amanda. We're going to find a way for Amanda to come and leave the kids at home. Plus, you're going to satisfy my diversity, equity, and inclusion officer I've hired for the party.

Scott Galloway: Okay. You check a lot of boxes.

Kara Swisher: All right. Well, we'll see what we can do. So anyway, you know who I had on stage last night? Christopher Nolan.

Scott Galloway: Oh, from Dunkirk?

Kara Swisher: No, yeah, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, yeah.

Scott Galloway: Dunkirk is the closest thing, I think, to a perfect movie.

Kara Swisher: Oh, wow. Not Oppenheimer?

Scott Galloway: We have the same agent. He's a tad more successful than me. He's a touch, just a smidgen.

Kara Swisher: He is elegant, I would say. Just a little switch more talented than the dog.

Scott Galloway: I should call my agent right now. Why am I not producing or directing Dunkirk?

Kara Swisher: Yeah. He was getting an award from the Federation of American Scientists for the movie. First director to get one. Also, Chuck Schumer was there, a whole bunch of people were there. But before we went on, he said, "I'm Hollywood smart, not smart, smart, like these scientists." But it turned out he was quite smart. And he's pretty smart. He had a real back and forth with Senator Young from Indiana about regulation and everything else and around AI that I thought he was quite up to speed. Schumer asked him to do his next biopic, Schumer. That's what he asked him.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, something tells me there's not going to be lines around the block and people dressing up as Chuck.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it was a real Washington night. That's the kind of humor we get in Washington. Anyway, he was quite elegant and very smart. I'm hoping to get him on the podcast at some point. But he probably won all the Oscars this year. Anyway, it was quite a fascinating interview. Even it was a short one. Anyway, congratulations, Christopher Nolan, for your award, by the way. We have a lot to talk about. We have a lot to talk about. Mike Johnson avoided government shutdown, although some people think he's in trouble because he got a lot of help from the Democrats, which you talked about. We'll play that clip. Plus, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate speech rising to new levels on social media. And that's not just Elon Musk. And a friend of Pivot, Adrian Aoun, he's the CEO of a health tech startup, Forward, which you and I both know about. He joins us in a chat about his latest AI adventure. I'm going to reveal it to you because I think it's pretty interesting. But first, Nikki Haley has walked back her stance that everyone using social media should have to verify their identities. Haley previously called anonymous accounts a national security threat and said verifying identities would eliminate foreign bots. Now she's saying actually anonymous accounts would still be allowed for Americans, but Americans only, adding, "I don't mind anonymous American people having free speech. What I don't like is anonymous Russian, Chinese, and Iranians having free speech." You've been a sort of a, you pushed the idea of no anonymous accounts, correct, as I recall? What do you think of this?

Scott Galloway: I think she's out of her league on this issue, but I don't know. What do you think?

Kara Swisher: I think she was called by very powerful billionaires and PACs representing big tech and saying, "Look, your candidacy is getting serious, but no candidate has ever become president without pulling out the kneepads for big tech and you need to pull out yours." And part of that is getting away from this shit that would cost us billions of dollars to implement, regardless of how much sense it makes. And it's not that I'm against anonymous accounts. I'm against anonymity in this bullshit free speech argument that they're all hiding behind. You could figure out a way to create anonymous accounts for people who truly need anonymity or humor accounts, parody accounts. If you are talking about the violation of women's rights in this nation or Gulf nations, and there is a tangible reason why you need anonymity, we could absolutely figure out a way using the blockchain or something to provide people those accounts. But the 1% of people who truly need anonymity, or it adds value to the parity, is overwhelmed by the danger, the coarseness, the tearing at our fabric. The New York Times reporter accused me of playing into Putin's playbook. And I'm like, no, actually, I think you're playing into Putin's playbook by pushing for...

Kara Swisher: Well, when you allow millions of anonymous accounts, I mean, I just think the Chinese and the GRU are laughing at us.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, in some ways. Although the idea of all those companies having a lot of our identity, just like, well, although it's everywhere, license and things like that, is troubling given how they've behaved in general.

Kara Swisher: Not a problem for you. Repeat what you just said, Kara.

Scott Galloway: That they have our identity, that they would have a lot of information. But you think verification is critical.

Kara Swisher: Oh, that horse has been out of the barn.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, agreed, agreed. Altria knows who you are and if you smoke. And when you stop, when you're trying, they can figure out when you're trying to quit. And they used to send you points, coupons.

Kara Swisher: That's true, which you buy at the grocery store. You're right. Okay, I'm going to leave off that one. All right, they don't want to do this. The notion that somehow these companies, these guys are worried about our privacy. That's it. They're worried about our privacy.

Scott Galloway: Here's the thing. In a wealthy society, in a democratic society where there is free speech protection, anonymous accounts are nothing but this insidious weapon that our foreign adversaries exploit. And two, it is creating such a level of disharmony and disunity and tumult in this nation because here's what it comes right down to. When people come up to me... Twitter mostly. Look at my comments on my feeds, my newsletters. Right. And then look at how people behave when they come up to me in person. And I see their person and I know their identity. Here's the thing. I was having dinner last night. And at the absolute perfect moment, I got someone, the late waiter came over with a glass, with rocks and sacapa and started pouring coke in it and said the couple over there wanted to send you a drink. And it was this lovely couple from San Francisco. In person, people are wonderful. They err on their most gracious, wonderful selves. They're generous, they're nice, they're friendly. And occasionally people come up to me and say, "Love your stuff, can we talk about Israel?" Or "Can we talk about this?" Because I have some, I disagree with you. And we have really nice civil conversations. And I learned from it and sometimes they even influenced me. And guess what? We need a lot more of that. And we need a lot less of people throwing water balloons and then running behind their mother's skirt.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, okay. So you're a Haley. Haley is your dude, in other words. You like the Haley. She should have stuck with it.

Scott Galloway: I believe Governor Haley. I mean, we're all, it's like all of a sudden, Senator Romney and President Bush, to me seem like more reasonable than ever because I've seen how bad things can get. I did not like these people. And now I'm like, well, I could live with these people. And I look at Governor Haley and we're gonna talk about this, but all these fucking narcissists throwing their hats into the ring who are going to do nothing but spoilers. I'm like, Jesus Christ, you're all setting us up again for the orange Hitler's comeback.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, the technical name is Schittler, just so you know online. Speaking of Schittler, former President Trump's Truth Social, the risk of failure, it's down 73 million since its launch. The platform has under 900,000 monthly active users, quite small. That's barely 1% of the number of users on X. But Truth Social is an alternative to Twitter, but accountants say it's burning through cash so fast it may not survive unless it completes a long-delayed merger with Digital World, which has been backed up. A blank check firm, which I think that boat might be sailed. There's also some investigations into it. Do you think Trump wants it to fail? I mean, it was going to fail. We've said that over and over again, very briefly. I would just like to know how many shares he was given and how many he sold. And I haven't been able to discern that from the filing. But I think ideally, what we're going to find is this is another yet another pump and dump. Force feces to tourists to the unicorns and sell your shit and then get out. His stake is so low now in terms of monetary value that I think he would rather get the hall pass to start going on Twitter and raising awareness.

Kara Swisher: What do you think here? Well, I think it'll look like a failure. I don't think that's one of the things his perception of failure and he kept saying how great a platform it is. It's certainly not. I think that's where he might hold it up. It's like Trump Stakes, the digital version of Trump Stakes or whatever he puts his name on. So it's probably headed for the trash heap, like a lot of social sites. Let me just be fair. There's been tons of them that have gone down, but it's a particularly, we've been saying this for a long time. Anyway, interesting thinking of things that are successful. Google pays Apple 36% of its search advertising revenue from Safari under the terms of the search default agreement. That is huge. This detail, which was previously confidential and which the companies have tried to keep away from people, was revealed by a witness in Google's antitrust trial, reportedly by accident. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the number this week while testifying in a separate lawsuit. Now, it's long been known that Google has long paid to be the default search engine in certain browsers. Mozilla, they certainly did. A lot of these specific numbers have come out of the trial. I think $10 billion payment, a huge amount of money. But people even think it's possibly more. The trial is set up to wrap this month with a verdict likely coming next year. I'm not surprised at all by this number, Hugh.

Scott Galloway: Well, it's staggering. And what's telling about the fact that it's not, it plays into the hands of anti-competition laws or violates them. It's just how they have guarded this number more closely than nuclear launch codes. And the question is, well, why? Why are you so worried about people knowing this number? Understanding the payoff here, yeah. And it comes down to this. Apple is one of the few companies, one of the handful of companies that could potentially be a viable competitor to Alphabet in Search. There's only a handful now that could even have any shot at it. They control the interface of the wealthiest people in the world. So they could launch and they have the technology, the brand, the engineers, the capital. And there's been rumors of them doing it.

Kara Swisher: You know, they did mapping. It didn't work as well.

Scott Galloway: That's right. But then Alphabet shows up and says, "You know what? Let us give you tens of billions of dollars to keep you from competing against us." That's the bottom line. And that is, at the end of the day, when you end up then with one company that can take the extract, the amount of money that a large travel company, Expedia, needs to pay Google from $500 million to $10 billion. Nobody else can compete, I think is more the point. Nobody can pay it. Nobody can do it. And so this is simple. One company, the only company that has the capital to pay off a potential competitor, thereby resulting in fewer companies in the search business, thereby raising rents globally across every corporation that must engage in search. This is the definition of anti-competitive behavior.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they do. They get a leg up. And of course, Apple points out that you can change your default search, but you don't. It's buried very deep. If anyone, I can show people how to do it. But you don't do it. Your use, it just comes with a phone and it's not something you move along. And it does give them an incredible advantage and they're paying the price for it. Apple is, you know, sort of Fifth Avenue real estate, essentially, that only Google can pay. And then Google could turn around and charge more for that dominance. They've done it. They did it at Mozilla. They sort of got the whole thing wrapped up. It would be natural for them to try to do this. It's just, does it give them unfair advantage? Which I think is what the government is arguing. So we'll see where this goes, but it's a big number. I think everyone thought it was, and they were purposely vague about what it was because it is so staggering. There is not one company that can afford this, but Google. And that's 36%. That's 36% of the revenues. The telling moment was when the economics expert on stand under penalty of perjury had to reveal the number, the head lawyer for Google looked like he was going to faint. And the question is, well, why are you so worried about this? Well, because it's a lot. Because then it's everything we thought it was. That's why. It's exactly what we thought was going on here. And the question is, should they be allowed to do that, sell off their real estate that way? Or make it fair to lots of people. And again, they will point to the fact that you can change it on the phone, but it comes preloaded. It comes preloaded, and people just don't do it. It should, well, it might be when you first get the phone, but nobody, that's only one time in your life that you can change it or that you might change it. They might say, "Would you like these things?" But you're going to pick Google over all of them. And Google says it's because they're better. I would say they just have good placement and they're good. It's not, that's not, I'm not going to take any way from their search, but.

Scott Galloway: We don't know. We don't know what we're missing.

Kara Swisher: We don't know. We don't know what we're missing.

Scott Galloway: I would argue that if you go on Google today, it's remarkably similar as it was 10 years ago, except every link now takes you to another place they can further monetize. This would be similar, and I'm trying to think of an analogy, but say Elon Musk said, "All right, Tesla is worth more than the entire auto industry combined practically at this point. And Ford and GM are seen as shitty companies or mediocre companies that are eventually going away. So what if I went to Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis and said, 'You know what, halt all of your EV production, and I'm going to build your EVs and you can slap a logo on it. And in addition, I'll give you, I will double your profits every year because I have so much money that for me to give you a measly billion dollars to effectively stay out of the EV business and just license it all to me, I can pay that. And it's high margin revenue. And because you're struggling, you need that money or it's just easier for you to not make the capital investment and take this high margin revenue.' And then what do you have? You have an ecosystem where there's no competition in EVs.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Yep, that's a very good, that's good. That's a very good. You could do it in real estate. You could do it in a lot of ways. This was not good for Google. We'll see where this case goes. Lastly, I didn't want to miss it. Did you see the lovely photo of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez for Vogue?

Scott Galloway: Oh, God. The reaction has been less than ideal. Jesus Christ, Kara, make them stop.

Kara Swisher: That's what you wrote, make it stop. You know them, make them stop. I don't know. I don't know. I haven't talked to him in years. I got to be honest.

Scott Galloway: I think Harry and Megan are rolling with Lauren and Jeff and said, "You know what? We're getting so much shit about being the grossest couple in the world. We need your help. Can you become more gross than us and get everyone's attention off of us?" And I think Lauren, who's probably a very generous person, said, "I know exactly what to do here. I'm going to parade around in $10,000 gowns around the SpaceX, not the SpaceX, the Blue Origin facility."

Kara Swisher: Yeah, not SpaceX. That would have been good.

Scott Galloway: And I'll convince Jeff. Jeff is in the midst of the mother of all, the Amazon of midlife crises.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he looked pretty happy in that photo, I'll tell you. He looked pretty happy.

Scott Galloway: Oh, hey, I'm sort of here for his midlife crisis because I think it's kind of funny, but this represents so many things. It represents one, kind of what we knew was what was happening, but quite frankly, the beginning of the end of Vogue. This kind of idolatry of rich people.

Kara Swisher: Well, hello. Photoshopping the shit out of them. Have you read the article?

Scott Galloway: I have not.

Kara Swisher: It's like a parody. The article is "Lauren Sanchez looks to the future."

Scott Galloway: Yeah. What, by marrying a billionaire?

Kara Swisher: Yeah. What do you mean by that? She looks to the future. Yeah. And then all of these highly over-stylized...

Scott Galloway: They were.

Kara Swisher: Photoshopped pictures. And it's sort of, the headline should have read, in my opinion, "We have everything but still want fucking more." We want.

Scott Galloway: Okay. All right. I'm going to give an alternate thing. Here the thing. You keep cutting me off. Am I getting you in trouble with your friends?

Kara Swisher: No, no, they're not my friends.

Scott Galloway: Is this going to make it uncomfortable for you at a cocktail party tonight?

Kara Swisher: Are you kidding? No. I did a caption contest where I said "Let me start Body Hack Mountain."

Scott Galloway: That's good. That's good. That was good. Thank you very much.

Kara Swisher: So I did not feel worried about it because it looked like there was a lot of body fixing activity going on in this photo. Here's my thought on this. It was by Annie Leibovitz, which it looked like an Annie Leibovitz photo. Not a career building photo for Annie. When she used to take those pictures like of Demi Moore with Pregnant or Whoopi Goldberg in the bath of milk, they were funny. Or on the horse, was it Arnold Schwarzenegger on the horse?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, it was Arnold. He looked amazing. He looked amazing. He looked amazing.

Kara Swisher: They were funny. Like you could see the people having fun with them. And I just, I felt like this is not a joke to them. That's what I felt was a problem is that all those pictures were performative in a very obvious way, like from an artistic point of view. And like, how ridiculous can we be? And they were in on the joke. In this picture, they thought, "Don't we look good?" And I was like, you don't, but you think you do. And that was my problem with the picture because all those pictures that she does are always just, they're funny in a weird way. And this was like, do you understand how you look? And then I felt bad for them because I don't think they do. I think he thinks he looks good in that hat, just the way Elon thinks he looks good in a cowboy hat. I don't understand the need of these people to wear cowboy hats. Nonetheless, I think he thought with his arms, the guns, the sexy shots kind of thing. I just was like, oh, my God, you're not kidding, are you? This is not a joke. This is not a – I like a joke photo of famous people, but this was not a joke.

Scott Galloway: Look, we have – Can we take a picture like that?

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: This is so funny, Kara. I literally thought last night, I'm like, we have to find between your contacts.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. And I don't know, my humor. I know Annie Leibovitz, actually. We should absolutely.

Scott Galloway: No, she's not going to mimic herself. We need to do this photo. This needs to be our Christmas gift to the world.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, our Christmas card.

Scott Galloway: We need to do our holiday gift. We need to do this. I'm obviously the Jeff Bezos person with that.

Kara Swisher: Oh, 100%. 100%. 100%. You've got to go like this. I just want to go meta. Can you do that lip thing? Let me see. Let me see you do it. I just want to go meta on a couple of things here. The first is a woman has been told for hundreds of thousands of years that her job is to find the smartest, strongest, and fastest seed that can protect her offspring. Men have been taught. Only 40% of men have reproduced throughout history. 80% of women. There's been a dearth of mating opportunities. So, sex, this is all about sex. And that is women in our society are overvalued based on their sexual attractiveness and when they start to lose it, they will go to crazy lengths to try and hold onto it for as long as possible. And that's perfectly understandable. Men want to be as attractive as possible such that they can spread their seed to the four corners of the earth.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, got it, see, see, got it.

Scott Galloway: This is this on fucking steroids because he never had any sort of game sexually because, I mean, look at the guy and he was focused on his work. This happens to all the tech guys. They're like, "Oh, my God."

Kara Swisher: Well, they were comparing the old pictures with the new one. They kept doing, you know, the khaki ones. They wake up all of a sudden like, "Oh, my God. I'm the sexiest man in the world for the first time. I'm really going to enjoy this."

Scott Galloway: Yeah. This is just.

Kara Swisher: Well, she thinks he's sexy. I think he looks good. Actually, I think they both look good. I just think they should keep it to themselves.

Scott Galloway: And that leads to my second meta thing here. They look shiny. I think they look shiny. I don't care if it's the gag reflex and the dragging they're getting deservedly on the internet right now. I don't care if it's Black Lives Matter. I don't care if it's content that I think is distinctly, incorrectly pro-Hamas and anti-Israel right now. I think that all reverse engineers do the same thing in America. And that is for the first time in our history, a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents at 30. The income inequality has gotten so fucking crazy.

Kara Swisher: Wait, how did we get here?

Scott Galloway: Okay, all right, go ahead.

Kara Swisher: That's why I'm here.

Scott Galloway: Okay, let's go. That's why I'm here. Make the link. That's why you pay me the little bucks. Right. Is that people are really upset that they used to celebrate rich people. They used to celebrate famous people. Now they look at them. They used to celebrate outposts of democracy. Now they look at people who are wealthy and quite frankly white and say, "You know what? These people have just had it way too fucking good and I don't need to celebrate them any longer. I resent them. I'm not doing as well because of things out of my control or things they decided. They decided to vote themselves more money in entitlements, but they also wanted to pay lower taxes. So I'm going to have to pay back this crazy amount of fucking debt. And meanwhile, my salary in the last 40 years has gone up 6x, but housing, education, and health care has gone up 20x."

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they're not aspirational. This is not an aspirational. You don't want to be this. And it's interesting. I'm all for people having fun, but it really is uncomfortable. It is an uncomfortable picture. And one is because they aren't in on the joke or they don't think it's, they're serious. They're dead serious that this looks good. "We look good." You can hear them thinking that. And, you know, if you look at her Instagram, and I highly recommend it to everybody because it's something else. The performative nature is, I'm like, why? What does she need? And I don't want to just blame her because I think he's right along for the ride with the whole thing. But it's a really, wow, has this guy come a long way since I first met him. That's all I have to say. Anyway, we should move along.

Scott Galloway: Let's do the Christmas card.

Kara Swisher: I'll tell you, Megan and Harry are so happy today. No one loves that photo more than Megan and Harry. They're like, "This is the kind of thing we would do."

Scott Galloway: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, let's get to our first big story. Government shutdown averted with Speaker Mike Johnson getting his temporary spending bill passed in the House and Senate. Schumer left this event. I was at last night to do this vote, which they did. So the government stays funded for now. The bill made it through the House with a 336 to 95 vote with significantly more Democrats backing the bill than Republicans. All those 95 were, I think, pretty much all Republicans. This played out somewhat closely to a scenario that Scott predicted in our last episode. Let's listen.

[Audio clip plays]:

Scott Galloway (in clip): The exciting outcome here might be that they come to a deal that gets enough Republicans and Democrats where they say, "Here's an idea. I need some Democrats. You need some of us. I can wrangle or whatever the term is, 150 Republicans. All you need to do is give me 80 Democrats." And the Democrats extract their pound of flesh for what they want. And for the first time in a long time, someone might be able to stick up the middle finger to the far left or the far right and go, "You know what? When you're this unreasonable, we do find reason to do what we're supposed to do."

[End clip]:

Kara Swisher: Anyway, Johnson is facing some pushback from far right members. He's gotten a pass for doing exactly what Kevin McCarthy did from his party for working with Democrats. We'll get into that. So what do you think? I know you're happy about this, but people think it's not going to last. He's going to pay the price for this, for doing so, because they're pissed off. The far right GOP members, Chip Roy, expressed frustration with his fellow Republicans on the House floor. Let's listen.

[Audio clip plays]:

Chip Roy (in clip): One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one, that I can go campaign on and say we did. One. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, well, I guess it's not as bad as the Democrats.

[End clip]:

Kara Swisher: Well, here's the one thing. We kept the government open. That was immediately cut as a Democratic ad, just so you know. What an idiot this guy is. So what do you think about this? I know you're sort of positive toward it, but it's still showing the dysfunction here is that they're not able to agree on anything.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, the problem is my answer is more thoughtful and it's going to get in the way of your pedicure with Martina Navratilova. So I'm going to ask you to just like cool your jets.

Kara Swisher: No, stop it. No, you're not going to go long. Oh my God. You're talking a lot today, just so you know. We'll time it later, but go ahead. Go ahead.

Scott Galloway: Look, it's all about game theory. And we have a set of narcissists that love doing fucking nothing, but putting themselves in a position of leverage, whether it's good or bad for the government. So you have Kristen Sinema. Senator Sinema says, "Well, they can't pass the Infrastructure Act without me. I'm probably not going to be reelected as a Democrat. So I'd really like a million bucks and I will get a million bucks from the lobby representing private equity. And in exchange, using my leverage as the swing vote in this act, I will demand that they pull out the elimination of what is the grossest loophole in the history of the tax code. And that is the wealthiest industry and individuals probably in history now pay lower taxes than their assistants, the secretaries or the guys who clean the office." And she manages to get that. And then Joe Manchin absolutely loves the attention he gets from wringing his hands. And you could argue that there is some principle there because he is serving his constituents, which are mostly red. And finally, and the market's doing its job here, they said, "You know what? We're not going to let a guy who was last in the news because of accusations of sex trafficking, of which he was cleared, be the hero here all the time and just be intransigent. We're not going to allow eight fucking crazies to run the government." And this was a gift to America because what they forced the speaker to do was his job. And that is find something that actually both parties could come to some sort of agreement on. This was actually, I think, a pretty good moment for America when they said, "You know what?"

Scott Galloway: Just being intransigent. And by the way, the next person to find out that his or her political terrorism is not good in the long run is Tommy Tuberville, who has decided that because he's figured out leverage, he can squelch promotions in our military, which weakens our defense capabilities. He's just said, "I'm just going to leverage this to the hilt because the incentives are to be seen as principled." Don't think about governing. Don't think about laws. Don't think about the Commonwealth. Take a principled stand, go on TikTok, and we'll send you more money, because money is all about getting reelected. And the problem is there's no governing. Everyone wants to be a political terrorist.

Kara Swisher: I think people do talk about it. This is an interesting quote from Representative Dusty Johnson, a Republican from South Dakota. "Republicans have a choice. We can work together to get conservative victory. We can bicker, squabble, or take hostages and lose. Some of my colleagues, I don't get the sense that they've been part of very many successful teams." He was followed up by Representative David Joyce from Ohio, a Republican. He put it more bluntly: "Folks believe they are independent agents rather than anything else." And I do think Johnson is trying to bring people together. I just think it's almost impossible. They're cutting him slack right now because he's only a few weeks in the role. They don't have a stomach for more fighting like over Kevin McCarthy. As you said before, Kevin McCarthy was not well liked. Congressman Ken Buck said, "I am more likely to give grace to Mike than I am to Kevin." Johnson did throw them a bone, putting out a statement on Wednesday giving support to the Biden impeachment inquiry, which should appease some in the party. Red meat, I guess.

Scott Galloway: I just think these performative people are quite successful, except when they have to pivot, like Kari Lake in Arizona suddenly being friends with the McCain people or trying to pretend she wasn't a crazy—and I'm sorry to use this word about a woman—but a shrew about election denial and everything else. So I do think these performative people, it does work for them versus cooperation. That's the problem. It does work. But this might be a healthy immune response to say, okay, all of a sudden, Matt Gaetz is irrelevant. He's like, "Wait, you're actually going to govern? You're actually going to cross the aisle?" Because none of these guys have any solutions. If you ask them, "Well, what program should we cut?" Look, it makes sense. Our deficit, our debt spending are out of control. It is a real existential threat to future generations. But then when you say to them, "Okay, what should we cut?" They're like, "Oh, I'm not going to go there." They don't actually want to govern. They don't want to get in a room with Democrats and say, "Okay, should we cut spending or raise taxes?" And the honest answer is yes, we need to do both. They're not interested in that hard work. They're interested in just being seen as principled by the crazies who will mail in $10 after they see them on TikTok shock-inflaming the other side. This was overdue. It's a good moment for America. It's only till January 19th, by the way. But I think even Democrats might go, "You know what? Maybe this is a good idea. Maybe occasionally we should not have things purely on party lines. Maybe we can work with this guy." It's also a good look politically to fix the government.

Kara Swisher: What's interesting is that it's spilling over—all this online performance of anger. I'm looking at you, Chip Roy. It spilled over into real life. One congressman called another a smurf, another alleged that he got assaulted in the kidneys, which was Kevin McCarthy apparently kidney-punching someone. Then this moment with Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin—what a name—and Teamsters President Sean O'Brien in a hearing. They've tangled before online and in hearings. Mullin referenced something O'Brien had posted about him on X and then took it further. Let's listen.

[Clip plays] Markwayne Mullin (in clip): Sir, this is a time, this is a place. If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here. Sean O'Brien (in clip): Okay, that's fine. Perfect. You want to do it now? I'd love to do it right now. Markwayne Mullin (in clip): Well, stand your butt up then. Sean O'Brien (in clip): You stand your butt up. [Commotion] Bernie Sanders (in clip): Oh, hold on. Oh, stop it. Is that your solution? No, no, sit down. Sit down. You're a United States senator. Act like it. Okay. Sit down, please. [End clip]

Scott Galloway: Oh, good God. What a bunch of idiots. I blame the senator here because he started it, but he took his ring off. He acted like he was going to have a punching match and then he's proud of it. He's going to cut his own ad. It's interesting because I was reading up on the assault on Charles Sumner before the Civil War by Preston Brooks. Same thing. It was all planned, performative. They used to duel then, but this is just ridiculous. And here's Bernie Sanders, like a dad, like, "You can't do that." That was weird. This broke my heart. This is literally the worst clip for the American brand in a long, long time. The Senate is supposed to be the finest deliberative body in the history of democracy. And they reference each other on Face the Nation as "my good friend." I even think it goes back to dress code, Kara. There is a decorum here that says we are the most impressive nation in history. Part of that is a certain congeniality, a certain decor, a certain civility. I think that senator should be censured. It is so incredibly disappointing that this is going to show up in the TikTok feed of my boys. And it all goes back to a previous story: Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. I'll bet you there are millions of anonymous bots egging this on. You don't think that the GRU and the CCP have gotten ahold of that clip and said, "Oh my God, dial this shit up"?

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I do.

Scott Galloway: So this all goes back to the same thing. The amount of damage that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have levied on this nation by tearing at the fabric is now seeping everywhere, resulting in incivility. If you can't beat them kinetically with military power, you can't beat them economically, you can't beat them on moral values, get them fighting each other. This is another example of that. The only person who came out looking good here was Senator Sanders, who was literally like, "Okay, there's one man in the room." But that senator and that union representative—there are few things online that will get more virality because of these anonymous bots from bad actors that make our nation look worse than what happened here. It was devastating.

Kara Swisher: I would agree. I would agree. And I think Republicans know that. Representative Kelly Armstrong, a Republican from North Dakota—you'd think would love a fight—compared Republicans infighting to grade school bullying. She said, "It's the same clown car with a different driver. We essentially don't have the majority because of the way they're behaving." This is just ridiculous. They're children.

Scott Galloway: But look what's happening. Kevin McCarthy in the vote for the speaker rushes over and supposedly he elbowed a colleague. Any of that shit? He was also like cute about it. Like it was a tight haul. Fuck you, Kevin. Fuck you. Don't do that. You don't have to put your hands on people. You're supposed to be the role model for young men around the world. For God's sakes.

Kara Swisher: He's just a terrible person, honestly. The fact that he used the excuse, "Oh, it was a tight haul." He obviously elbowed a guy in his back. It's just ridiculous. A lot of reporters there thought that's what he did. That's an assault. You shouldn't be allowed back in the car.

Scott Galloway: And here's the next step. If you normalize two men being violent against each other, when do we start normalizing men being violent against their female colleagues in the Senate? You have to cauterize this. There has to be a place. This is why I was so pissed about that cage match. Same exact thing. The most blessed people in the world have decided that our country is so fucked up that it has to digress to violence, even among its most blessed citizens.

Kara Swisher: Yep, I would agree. Anyway, you're all an appalling group of people. It is a clown car. It's not a clown car. It's like a vicious clown car. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the unprecedented surge in hate speech on social media tied to the Israel-Hamas war. And we'll speak to a friend of Pivot, Adrian Aoun, who's using AI to try to revolutionize healthcare in the U.S. Thank you.

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Kara Swisher: We're back with our second big story. We're learning more about how antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate speech has surged on the internet and social media since the Israel-Hamas war began. Academics and researchers who study social media are saying hate speech is at far higher levels than before, according to the New York Times, including millions of explicitly violent posts on X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Content is both driven by emotion over the violence and stoked by extremists looking to forward agendas. According to social media researchers, a number of posts have been shared hundreds of thousands of times, even though they seem to violate platform rules. Even when explicit content is removed, veiled content remains—words and phrases that get past filters. Early on, it seemed like tech leaders might face consequences, but that hasn't happened. TikTok has faced a lot of criticism, accused of pushing pro-Palestinian content, as some have noted a disparity between the number of pro-Palestinian versus pro-Israeli hashtags. But Facebook and Instagram data show a similar gap, with pro-Palestinian hashtags being used on significantly more posts, according to a piece in the Washington Post. Of course, Elon Musk replied to an antisemitic replacement theory—a vile person about this. I don't even want to repeat it. He did more antisemitic behavior. We've been talking a lot about the role of TikTok in this war. We've heard from listeners as well. What's your take on it right now? And does the fact that pro-Palestinian content appears dominant undercut any of the China arguments? I'd love your thoughts on it.

Scott Galloway: Why would you say it undercuts the Chinese arguments? I don't understand.

Kara Swisher: It undercuts the Chinese arguments that China is directing this on TikTok because it's on all platforms. It is on all platforms. And some people don't think you should use hashtags as the metric. But it's clearly being used to further propaganda. So it's kind of a mess out there. And these companies are not monitoring it in any way. But it is not just TikTok. It's all the platforms.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I think evidence is going to show that TikTok—well, first off, see above: anonymous accounts and the downside of anonymous accounts. If you find really vile shit on Islamophobia or antisemitic content, you're going to click on it and it's going to be an anonymous account. Very few individuals want to put their names behind this. I just don't think this represents how most people actually feel. It seems obvious to me we're going to find out that the CCP was putting their thumb on the scale. And by the way, if the whole nation was rallying around Hamas—and this would be heartbreaking to me—I think on TikTok, you'd start seeing more pro-Israel content. I think they provide us with a weapon. They provide us with a spark and a fire. They just pour gas on it. Seventy percent of people my age are pro-Israel because I grew up with an Israel that was Munich, the '67 war, and Israel were the good guys. But because of far-right extremists and inhumane policies on behalf of Netanyahu and the religious extremists in Israel, younger people—who also conflate wealthy white people, and there's no one wealthier and whiter than the state of Israel right now—they conflate them with oppressors and incorrectly, in my view, see the struggles of the civil rights movement as being analogous to the struggles the Palestinians are facing, without really doing their homework. This is essentially Hamas is the Nazis minus the industrial might. Actually, that's not fair to Nazis. Nazis weren't embedding command centers in hospitals and schools, versus Hamas militants who call their parents to brag about how many Jews they've killed at a music festival. They have not done their homework. The problem is that these platforms have algorithms that get a lot of engagement and more Nissan ads by elevating this incendiary content. I believe the CCP would be stupid not to use this wedge issue to get us focused on hating each other versus passing bills.

Kara Swisher: But it's across platforms. You would acknowledge it's not just TikTok. All these studies show that.

Scott Galloway: I think all of these platforms have been weaponized by bad actors. This is a sample size of one, this is pulse marketing. My feed on Reels is distinctly different than my feed on TikTok. It might be an indication that younger people are less pro-Israel than on Reels. But all of these platforms, in my opinion, have been weaponized by bad actors under the auspices of free speech and shareholder value being built at these companies. They let this content run amok. It's not really representative of how most Americans feel, but they keep seeing it. And we keep getting angry at each other. We go on the hunt for fake Islamophobes and fake antisemites. I believe both are out there. But this content would lead you to believe that America is just rife with both of those things, and it gets us angry and upset at each other.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I think they're using all the platforms. On Facebook, hashtag Free Palestine had more than 11 million posts, 39 times more than Stand with Israel. On Instagram, the pro-Palestinian hashtag was found on 6 million posts, 26 times more than pro-Israel. It's a question whether hashtags should be the metric. I think it's being done across these platforms. I recognize the worries about China and TikTok, but I think all these platforms have been used in the same way. If I were China or Iran or Russia, I'd be doing that. But one of the things the Post story points out is that the right hashtag offers a deeply limited and simplistic way to analyze the shape of social media conversation, because users often add them to videos that are unrelated to the issue or seek to criticize the point they mentioned. Comparing the views of pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian hashtags around the world, as TikTok's critics have done, does not take into account that many of the videos come from predominantly Muslim countries with high levels of Palestinian supporters. TikTok argued that Stand with Israel hashtag is newer than Free Palestine and therefore had less time to be added to posts. It doesn't factor in the generational gap, which is very real.

Scott Galloway: You're absolutely right. And I think later we'll find out exactly what the usage was, if we're allowed to. But it's complex. What it goes to is the point you're making: these pathways are being used to weaponize the population overall. And they're not doing their job in taking the temperature down. Look, do you remember in the third or fourth grade when there was a new kid and some words were said, not even really harsh words, and a bunch of people might surround them and shove them into a circle and start screaming, "Fight, fight, fight"? And all of a sudden you found yourself like, "Okay, I don't really want to fight."

Kara Swisher: Yeah, that never happened to me, but I've seen it in movies.

Scott Galloway: Okay, it happened to me a lot. Not a lot, a couple times. Take that times a trillion. That is what social media has done to the world. You have algorithms with rewards and gamification following you around everywhere. Someone says something a bit off-color or uses the wrong phraseology, and in your ear, someone is constantly going, "Fight, fight, fight, get back in their face." Oh, maybe don't take the gesture with the intent that it was given. Use it as an opportunity to score virtue points and get back in their face. Get more and more coarse. Even if it's an anonymous account, go crazy and invite other people so we can sell more fucking Nissan ads. It all leads back to the same place. We have real problems, real fissures in this country, but we've let other people—bad actors who are not our friends, who are our adversaries, and sometimes our enemies—show up freely with a cannon of gasoline.

Kara Swisher: Yep.

Scott Galloway: And it jumps into real life, as it's done in Congress. This is all performative. A hundred percent. This happened online. All these guys were talking about shit that had been said to each other on X. If our senators and our leaders don't set an example and take the temperature down, if we don't get over this ridiculous bullshit about anonymity that's been fomented by the packs of these organizations, it all comes together. We are tearing each other from the inside out.

Kara Swisher: We could also all agree on the Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez picture. Okay, Scott, let's bring in our friend of Pivot. This is a surprise for you. This is going to be really interesting, I think, to you, but maybe not. We'll see.

Scott Galloway: At my age, if you surprise me, I could slip and break a hip, Kara.

Kara Swisher: Okay, you might break a hip here. All right. Adrian Aoun is the CEO and founder of the health tech startup Forward. This week, the company announced its latest venture, CarePod, which has been billed as the world's first AI doctor's office. Welcome, Adrian. Thanks for coming. I have purposely not told Scott about what this is, sort of in vague terms, because I want you to make a pitch to him of what it is exactly, CarePod. Now, obviously, you run Forward, which was a new kind of doctor's office for people, a physical place people go. It's a little like concierge medicine, but a little different. But talk about what CarePod is doing.

Adrian Aoun: The premise we started with was: look, there are billions of people on the planet who don't even have access to healthcare. So you start asking yourself, what would it take in the year 2023 to deliver healthcare to literally the entire planet? We kind of know how to do that. We've got these things called smartphones that are now in the middle of India, in the middle of Rwanda. The key insight is that if we can convert things to hardware and software, we can scale them up. So what we did is, as you mentioned, we've got these clinics. We watched what's happening inside of them. Every time a doctor did something, every time a nurse did something, we said, "Can we shift that to hardware and software?" If you do that for quite some time, at some point you wake up and realize you've moved almost everything over. Maybe not everything, but almost everything. What you're left with is just the hardware, just the software. We call this a CarePod. Just think of it as this cool little box. For those of us who watched too much Star Trek as a kid, just think of it as the med bay from Star Trek. You walk up to it, you unlock it with your phone, and immediately it's like, "Hello, Scott, welcome to Forward. Please step inside." As you do, it shows a bunch of different apps on the screen. If you choose something like the body scan app, it says, "Please stand still," and then it rotates you in a circle, takes a whole bunch of readings, shows you the results on the screen, explains them to you, and then gives you whatever treatment you need, whether it's a prescription or something else. Let's say you choose heart health. This one's pretty awesome. It opens a tray, hands you a sensor, shows you how to hold that sensor against your heart, and then again, takes the results, explains them to you, gives you your treatment. The best way to think about it is almost the same way you think about an ATM. An ATM doesn't do everything a bank does. It does maybe 90 to 95 percent. You lose your credit card, you can still call the teller. For us, it's the same thing. We still have doctors behind the scenes, but now those doctors are just there for the final five or ten percent. You video with them just because you've got an exception case or you just want to chat. Most of your experience is really just dealing with this hardware device. The cool thing about that is we can launch them everywhere. They're not limited like the number of doctors on this planet. We've built billions of iPhones on this planet. So imagine having healthcare on every street corner. Imagine having apps developed by entire companies focusing on just one thing at a time. That's the world we're trying to create.

Kara Swisher: All right. So, Scott, I want you to take this apart. Adrian has made the analogy to Tesla: Forward was his Tesla Model S, the CarePod is the Model 3. Scott, I want you to have that. Adrian, please.

Scott Galloway: This really is a surprise. And Adrian, I think kudos to you. I think the intersection between AI and healthcare represents an enormous opportunity, perhaps even the biggest opportunity in our economy. The first question I would have is: at $99 a month, first off, I haven't heard how AI is anything but a moniker to try and raise cheap capital. I don't understand how AI actually integrates. And then my second question would be: at $100 a month, this is yet another healthcare startup focused on the upper middle class or the wealthy, as opposed to the people who actually need it. So what are your plans to push this into the corners of America that really need preventive healthcare?

Adrian Aoun: Well, let's go even further than that. Not only do I agree with you, I'm going to beat myself up even harder. Let's not talk about the corners of America. Let's talk about the corners of Rwanda. Let's talk about the corners of India, where $9 a month is probably too much. But you've seen this story play out before. The first iPhone was $800. Now in the middle of India, we've got smartphones for $20. How do we get there? It's the classic Moore's Law. What we're doing is shifting healthcare from a low capex, high opex business—a normal doctor's office that costs nothing to make and just costs a lot to pay the doctors—to a high capex, low opex business. You build a CarePod, but then it costs almost nothing to run it. You've already built it. We've seen how both of those models play out. Kaiser is the low capex, high opex business. Kaiser has not been able to go global. In fact, no healthcare system has ever been able to get to even 100 million users, much less a billion users. But we've also seen what happens when we convert something into a tech company—high capex, low opex. Google has data centers all throughout Africa. Even though that data center costs Google a billion dollars, it amortizes incredibly well because it's scaled. The trick for us is the more we can get healthcare to be an infrastructure problem, the more we can get healthcare to scale, the more we can plummet that cost. I don't think this is an overnight thing. If you want to push back and say, "Sure, Adrian, but you're at $99," you're right. And I hate being at $99. We started Forward at $149. A few years later, we've cut a third of our price. We're down to $99. But we've got a long way to go. Next, I want to get to $79, then $59, then $49. We're just going to keep going until we can deliver these to the ends of the earth.

Scott Galloway: Talk about how AI is integrated into the product. I'm totally with you that basically everybody does one logistic regression and then calls it AI.

Adrian Aoun: Okay, so here's what we're doing. This is a lot of newer technology, candidly. We've written an AI that can go out and read modern research—published research from the New England Journal of Medicine, Stanford, UCSF, any of these academic institutions. You give it an article on a condition. It can actually read the article and then extract what we call a clinical protocol. Basically, think of it as a big flowchart of "if this, then that." To treat your hypertension, the first thing we need to know is: is your blood pressure this? The next thing we need to know is X. The next thing is Y. Once it maps that out—and that could be hundreds and hundreds of nodes—we map that onto the CarePod. For example, if it says, "What's your blood pressure?" the CarePod is smart enough to say, "We should give you a blood pressure cuff." If it says, "What's your A1C?" the CarePod is smart enough to give you a blood test. That allows us to go from a paper to an app that a user can experience. We're even exploring, very early for us, with some generative AI to say, "Can we create the experience inside the CarePod just based off that clinical protocol?" The reason this is fascinating is that there's all this amazing research out there, and yet all that latest research has a lot of trouble getting to consumers, much less the middle of India and Rwanda. It doesn't get to people in San Francisco. Could you imagine every doctor having to sit there and read every single paper and remember? It's an absurd concept. So that's a little of how we're using it. One thing you have to be really cognizant of is that AI today just isn't at the level of accuracy you'd hope for in modern medicine. So what we do is we take anything the AI has learned and we show it to a doctor to review. We give them tools where they can test through a bunch of situations, look at where the errors are, and manually go and tweak it. By manual, I mean it's pretty cool—they can just talk to the AI. "Oops, you made a mistake here. You made a mistake here." They can get it to a point where it's solidified and stamped. Does that give you a good sense of it, Scott?

Scott Galloway: Sure. So are you selling into the consumer? Are you selling into the enterprise, the healthcare systems? What is the business model and the distribution strategy?

Adrian Aoun: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So we're entirely direct consumer. What we've been doing is we've been launching these care pods in malls and office buildings. Just think forwards historically live mostly in malls. So think of like the Westfield, the Simon, the Mayswich Malls, all the kind of major malls that you know. And we're starting for the first time to explore kind of office buildings.

Adrian Aoun: So, for example, we're going into Sears Tower. I think now it's called Willis Tower, but when I grew up, it was Sears Tower, so I'm going to keep it that way, which is one of the biggest buildings in the United States. We'll be live there in just a couple of weeks, and we're going to see how that works. But in both cases, we're going direct to consumer.

Kara Swisher: Now, you said $99 a month feels high. In some ways, it is, for sure. But in some ways, it's not that bad. And I'll tell you why. Most people in the United States, if you have insurance, literally $99 a month is cheaper than using your own deductible. So I think it's insane that we've created a health care system that's that expensive to use, but we have. And so it's a pretty good deal when you consider it includes your blood tests, DNA sequencing, as many doctor's appointments as you want, that sort of stuff. When you do this, the insurance is not acceptable.

Scott Galloway: By the way, Scott does not have health insurance because he's sort of figured out he doesn't need it because he can afford any big thing. How does it compare to, say, the minute clinics, which have had an up and down situation? They haven't worked out very well. And also One Medical, which Amazon is trying to do, which is doctor heavy, but much more efficient.

Adrian Aoun: I would say I've had a great experience there getting tests when I have the flu or COVID tests.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, totally.

Adrian Aoun: So what we're doing is we're looking at the existing system. When you look at the One Medicals or people in that space, what they did is they took the existing system and they said, let's put a pretty couch and a mobile app in front of it. That's not what healthcare should be in the year 2023. I want a world where we go insanely deep and use all the technology possible. But that's not the world that we have today.

Adrian Aoun: I'd encourage you to go walk into any healthcare system on this planet and be like, "Hey, let's go ahead and sequence my DNA and understand what's going to happen to me in 20 or 30 years." And they're just going to look at you like you're crazy, much less say, "Hey, I've got these wearables that are collecting some data. Do you want to do anything with it?" They're just going to be like, "No, leave me alone." This is the world we live in where literally pretty couches is what we've accepted.

Kara Swisher: One of the problems of whether it's the minute... You don't like the couches at One Medical then.

Adrian Aoun: I don't even want to wait. Are you kidding me? Why have a couch? I'm not trying to hang out at the doctor's office. I'm trying to get shit done. Pardon my language.

Scott Galloway: Okay.

Adrian Aoun: So the world that everybody else is going after and the reason they're struggling so much is they're saying, "Look, we want minute clinics to be everywhere." Okay, that's awesome. I want that too. We want, whether it's One Medical or CVS or all of these to be everywhere. But the fundamental problem of healthcare is that there's not enough doctors. They're really expensive. And not that many are graduating. So what are you going to do? Are you going to magically print me a million doctors that somehow cost almost nothing? You're not going to do that. There is no solution.

Adrian Aoun: So what we're trying to do is say, what would it look like if you truly scale that doctor? Let me give you an analogy. Before this, I was at Google and I ran a big segment of the search engine. One of the things that I had the ability to do was write some code that could literally go out to billions of people later that day. That's insane. On the other hand, what's the impact that a doctor can have today? They can affect one person at a time right in front of them. How do we end up in this world? Doctors are more educated than most engineers. Doctors are more altruistic than most engineers. Why do we end up here? It's because the tool sets that doctors use are from the stone ages.

Adrian Aoun: So we asked ourselves, could we build tools that allow a doctor to not solve the flu 10 times a day, but to solve the flu once, write the damn protocol and let the computer execute it for them. The more you do that, the more you can truly scale healthcare to the masses.

Scott Galloway: So give us what you think is the most compelling and realistic use case. I sign up, I'm spending 99 bucks a month. Give me an example, a specific example, and walk us through why that is better than the way I interface with the traditional healthcare system right now.

Adrian Aoun: Totally. So the healthcare system that you interface with today is roughly urgent care. You wait for something to go wrong. "Oh, I got a rash. I got a flu." But let's just take a step back, Scott. How many people do you know who have died of the flu? How many people do you know who have died of a rash? It's not exactly the thing that's killing us. It's the heart disease. It's the cancer.

Adrian Aoun: So when you come into Forward, the first thing you do is what's called the baseline. Basically collect a bunch of information about you from your DNA to your blood to asking you questions to your family history. As much information as we could possibly get. And we're always adding to that. Once we have that, we sit there and we say, "It seems like these are the biggest risks for you in the long term."

Adrian Aoun: Just think of the healthcare system we've created because it's paid for by your employer in most cases. Most people aren't with their employer very long. They're with their employer for what, two, three years. So that healthcare system wants to focus on the flu because that's going to keep you out of work. And they don't want to focus on the cancer because you're going to get that in 20 years. Why prevent something that's going to be the next guy's problem? Why incur that cost? So we've got a healthcare system today that's focused on keeping you at work, not keeping you alive. And we're trying to invert that model.

Scott Galloway: So you would go in if you had the flu and it would know, you wouldn't have to waste your time. It would give you a flu test. But there are doctors that then if there's an issue or you want it followed up for a very serious thing.

Adrian Aoun: Correct. We have doctors because sometimes you just want to talk to a doctor and that's cool, too. But we also have doctors because sometimes things are just too complex. The apps don't support that. And that's fine. We constantly are looking at those and saying, "Can we build that complexity into a piece of technology?" If we can, great. If we can't, that's what doctors are there for. But doctors are super scalable when they're doing 1% or 2% of the amount of work. And that's the world that you want.

Kara Swisher: Just so people know, you go in and then different blood pressure cuffs or testing things or a COVID test pops out. Or blood tests or diagnostics or swabs. They pop out of doors and they tell you how to do it.

Adrian Aoun: I like your version. We pop out of doors, but I'm going to go with my version. We've got a glorified vending machine. We've got a Coke machine. There's a tray and it can just give you different things. It can give you everything from a blood test to a blood pressure cuff. And we're just constantly adding. You can almost think of it like the iPhone where they launch and then they add 3G, 5G, LiDAR, GPS. We're just constantly looking at what we can add ourselves.

Scott Galloway: What's your biggest worry here? That people abuse these pods or that because they're not monitored?

Adrian Aoun: No, not really.

Scott Galloway: Or that you'll have a wrong diagnosis and get sued?

Adrian Aoun: Not really. Everything goes through doctors on the back end. So it doesn't seem very likely that we're going to screw something up. But no, my biggest worry for us is execution. The reason I use the Tesla analogy is in some ways, when you look at Tesla, every part of what Tesla is doing can be done. People have built batteries before. People have built gas stations. People have built mines. People have built factories. People have built all these things. But when you look at one company doing all those things, you want to pull your hair out. It's really, really complex.

Adrian Aoun: So for us, the number one challenge is just execution. If we die, we're going to die via suicide, not homicide. It's a very, very tough company to build. We do hardware. We do construction. We operate blood labs. We're highly regulated. We have doctors. This is not an easy business to be in. And that's the thing we spend all of our time trying to de-risk.

Scott Galloway: Last thought? What do you think? Does this resonate with you?

Scott Galloway: I think one of the wonderful things about America is that people like yourself take these risks and try and leverage technology and build a thick layer of innovation on top of technology. So I'm genuinely pulling for you. I think this is exciting. I just hope that this doesn't digress into what every other VC-backed healthcare startup does, which is essentially serving one constituency: rich families in Palo Alto. So I'm pulling for you, brother.

Adrian Aoun: Well, that won't happen on my watch. I promise that.

Kara Swisher: All right, Adrian, thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this, Scott. I like to have a little pitch session. I'm going to do new things called Pitch Scott. I think it's interesting. Adrian's a very interesting entrepreneur.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, a couple of things. One, I generally appreciate you trying to surprise me in thoughtful ways. And two, can the next surprise involve handcuffs and a woman pursuing cosmetology who's turned to sex work? Can that be my next surprise?

Kara Swisher: No, no. This is about... I wanted to get your... I just heard about this. There's good surprises and there's great surprises, Kara. That was a good surprise. This is a good surprise. This is interesting. That was a good surprise.

Scott Galloway: Anyway, it's an interesting idea. Adrian's a really interesting entrepreneur. And I always find him very thoughtful. You're the only woman I would trust to pick out a sex worker for me. What does that say? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Kara Swisher: Okay. All right. We're moving along. Once again, I brought you something substantive and interesting. We're going to have more of these pitch sessions to see how Scott reacts. It's a hard problem he's trying to solve here, but interesting. I like that he's trying it.

[Break]

Kara Swisher: Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction. And quick, because I got to get to Martina.

Scott Galloway: Look, I'm trying to be more hopeful. My prediction is that the ultimate Iron Dome for Israel is formed in 12 to 24 months. And that will be the normalization of relations between the kingdom and Israel. I think Hamas was trying to invoke an overwhelming response from Israel, which they succeeded in, which created a lot of sympathy for Palestinians. They have succeeded. But I think the second objective was to rally and inspire other Arab nations to declare war on Israel.

Scott Galloway: And because of the leadership of President Biden and 7,500 brave sailors and Marines who make up each of the Eisenhower and Ford carrier strike forces, where we can deliver more firepower than almost any nation in the world and have it sit off their shore and not ask anyone's permission, the Iranians have been quiet, quite quiet. There's been some skirmishes at the border, but they know that these carrier strike forces are off the coast. We better cool our jets because we have the entire British military sitting off our shore. And it's not there to say hi. It's there to keep the peace, meaning they will deliver violence if we decide to deliver violence against Israel.

Scott Galloway: In addition, the kingdom has been suspiciously quiet around this. Let me go very crass. It goes to Mykonos. I was in Mykonos a few months ago, and every table there was inhabited by young men and some women, mostly young men, from the Gulf. I think the most pivotal transition in the world right now is the pivot from Islamism and terrorism to capitalism in the kingdom. I think MBS, and it's easy to hate, is the most important reformer of the last several decades. I think they will normalize relations.

Scott Galloway: And by the way, I don't think they can do that with either Hamas or Netanyahu in power. I think both those entities need to go. I'm not creating an equivalency here, but Netanyahu has been a disaster for Israel and Jews worldwide, and Hamas is a terrorist organization. I think the Gulf, specifically the kingdom, has said the better way of life is capitalism. And I think that they see opportunity by partnering with the largest economy in the Middle East.

Scott Galloway: I'm actually quite hopeful. I think the president has shown real leadership here. I think the absence of a multi-front war here is a good indication, and the fact that many Arab nations, especially the powerful ones, meaning the rich ones, have stayed a lot quieter than Hamas was hoping. So I am hopeful we're going to go through this and we're going to have a normalization of relations between the kingdom and Israel, which will create an unbreakable alliance.

Kara Swisher: Oh, interesting. I think that's a very substantive prediction. That's a really interesting one. I hadn't thought about that. I'm going to make a short prediction. With this revelation of the 36% that Google's paying to Apple as a vig, I don't think they're going to win this case.

Scott Galloway: You think Google's going to lose? You think Mehta's going to get her win here?

Kara Swisher: It's the DOJ. Got it. That's really interesting. What do you think the remedy will be?

Kara Swisher: I don't know. These things can go on and on and on. But boy, was that... I had heard it was $10 billion, and I thought, God, that's a lot of money. But now it's there. You know what I mean? Now we know what they're doing. On the face of it, you can't argue they're so much better if they're paying. That's their argument, that they're more innovative. It's a lot of vig. It's a lot of vig they're getting. I think the repercussions for Apple will also be significant. There are other cases involving Apple. There's a lot of gatekeepers here, and they've had it good for a while. But it really does prevent competition. I don't know how else you can look at it. They're not that much better. They just have a lot more money.

Kara Swisher: So that's my prediction. I looked at that coming out and I was like, "Oh, well, there you go. Boom, the shoe just dropped." Anyway, we'll see. That's my little prediction, but I like yours better.

Kara Swisher: Will you send a message to Martina for me?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, what?

Kara Swisher: The jarhead straight guys like me that grew up on "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Three's Company" who were, I don't want to say accidentally homophobic, but were raised to be American, which meant being homophobic, that she had a real impact. I remember personally her saying that people should stay out of her bedroom and thinking for the first time, "I get it. It's kind of none of our fucking business." I think she played a really important role outside of tennis.

Scott Galloway: We're going to have an interesting discussion. Yeah, she's an impressive woman. She's made a real difference.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, we're going to have an interesting discussion. She also has some trans issues. She's been pretty adamant on that issue. That people born with penises shouldn't be allowed to garner all the rewards and endorsement income and accoutrements and scholarships.

Scott Galloway: You mean she has common sense, Kara?

Kara Swisher: Okay. We're going to have a long discussion about it.

Scott Galloway: Oh, so she has common sense. Oh, okay. All right. Where's the sex worker with the handcuffs?

Kara Swisher: I'll be talking to her.

Scott Galloway: Bring on the handcuffs.

Kara Swisher: There you go. There's our letters for this week. We had such a nice show. You really need to stop talking right now.

Kara Swisher: We want to hear from you. 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: Okay, Scott, that's the show.

Scott Galloway: Or if you're Jeff Bezos, that's the gun show.

Kara Swisher: We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot. Please read us out.

[Credits roll]

Kara Swisher: Today's show was produced by Lara Neiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Entretot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Miel Saberio, and Gaddy McBain. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Scott Galloway: I have fucking everything, but it's not enough. Annie, I'm ready for my close-up.