Jack Dorsey's Bitcoin hopes, Biden picks a heavy hitter, and the Pegasus spyware scandal

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

Scott Galloway: And I'm Scott Galloway.

Kara Swisher: Hello, Scott. How you doing? There's so much going on.

Scott Galloway: There is so much going on.

Kara Swisher: Let's start with Jack Dorsey, who hopes that Bitcoin will, quote, "create world peace" or "help create world peace." I'm not sure why he had to make the differential, but just so you know, that's how we're going to get there.

Scott Galloway: Well, yeah, and I think he's the one to do it. Just not be at Twitter is your point. So Scott Harrison is saving the world from charity water, kind of like one well at a time. But he never says, "I think I can save the world." I think there's a special type of narcissism when you claim that your next venture is going to save the world or is for all humanity or "imagine the possibilities." When, okay, maybe you should just put in place technology to demand identity so people don't harass trans kids. Why don't we start there?

It just, there's a special kind of like uber master bullshit to be using a term. I think it's going to save the world when you're making every day through your inactions and your delay and obfuscation the world a tangibly worse place. So, look, reaching for the stars, that's wonderful. I don't think there's anything wrong with people grasping beyond the reach and making these bold statements. It just rings hollow when your company is leading or catalyzing my enemies' genocide. His other company. Anyway, what do you think?

Kara Swisher: You know, it's just, there's been a lot of billionaire pronouncements this week, like with Jeff and others. And it's exhausting. It's exhausting to be lectured to by these people. That's how I feel about it. I think what's interesting is that they can't help themselves in terms of when they've got the world stage, this is what they do. I just, I find it, I don't know. I'm just like, okay, just keep lecturing us on how the world should be and how you're going to take us to space, although you're the only one who's going to get on that spaceship and things like that.

So I find it, it's just, what's interesting is I went back, I'm writing my memoir of Silicon Valley, and I went back and I've written a story 20 years ago where they were doing the same thing. "We're doing this to save the world, Kara. We're doing this to make the world a better place. We're doing this to bring people together." It was always some giant pronouncement. And I don't know if it's a disease. And in some cases, it's admirable to talk about things like this. When I hear this from different people, I'm good with it. It's just that, I don't know. I just feel it's just-

Scott Galloway: Only I can fix this. Only I can fix this. It's just like that, which is the book about Trump that's on the bestseller list. It's the same level of sociopathy that affects all of these folks. I mean, going into – and by the way, they're the targets of this disdain, but the underlying disease is among us. And that is – do you realize – do you want to talk about a scary stat? Sunday morning or broadcast morning television shows spent more time covering the Blue Origin, Bezos, Dickins Space thing.

Kara Swisher: Well, it's irresistible for TV.

Scott Galloway: Well, hold on. It looks like a penis. One day. In one day, they spent more time, more hours covering the Bezos launch than they did covering climate change in all of 2020.

Kara Swisher: I know. I know. And at some point, the editors or whoever it is at these stations has to go, okay, are we a big part of the problem? And when they send all these reporters and journalists down there to act breathless, I mean, think about this launch. And by the way, I was on MSNBC yesterday and I felt intimidated not to be that cynical. And I just couldn't help it. They went 100 kilometers to the car. Say what you said. Because I thought it was quite interesting.

Scott Galloway: OK. It would have been cheaper if Jeff Bezos had crashed his canary yellow T-top Corvette into a hair plugs clinic. What is the achievement here? They went up 60 miles and floated back down. 50 years ago, we sent three brave people into orbit. We sent them 400 times as far. No, I'm sorry. 4,000 times as far. We sent them a quarter of a million miles, had them land on basically a big asteroid rotating at tens of thousands of miles an hour. We weren't even sure what was going to happen when we landed on the goddamn thing. And this was in an era.

Kara Swisher: Which is the anniversary. But go ahead.

Scott Galloway: This was in an era when the majority of homes in the United States didn't have air conditioning. A third of homes in certain regions didn't have indoor plumbing. And then we brought these men back safely to Earth. And now we're pretending this is some sort of achievement. I mean, I am going to be in Nantucket this summer. I'm going to take a boat just as far across the Atlantic, which would be the equivalent of six miles, and have Lester Holt cover it and claim it's for all mankind. And then I'm going to ask Bezos for $100 million. Okay. Anyways.

Kara Swisher: I didn't like that he thanked. Everyone criticizes Bezos, but it just was a little much. Let's just say it's a little much.

Scott Galloway: A little much? A little much. They're all a little much.

Kara Swisher: I like that they've come out of their pandemic shelter, and I want them to go back into their shelter. That's how I feel. I don't want to hear pronouncements, although Code is coming up, so we'll be hearing a lot of pronouncements from people. But hopefully we'll have some more illumination in them.

Another thing is the Olympics are supposed to kick off today, barring any last-minute cancellation. There's been a lot of glitches. Fewer than one-third of Japan's citizens are vaccinated. They do not want it there. COVID cases hit their highest level since January this week. Toyota is one of the top sponsors of the game, and they've pulled all Olympic-themed ads off of Japanese TV, although they're doing it elsewhere. It's very hard to resist doing the Olympics for advertisers. I get it. So it's just, there's all kinds of things popping up besides the early stuff. There's different people that can't come and they are getting this and that. I think people will probably forget it the minute the Olympics start and you see Simone Biles doing something fantastic. But the fact that they pushed on through with this is really interesting to me.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I don't know. I'm more what a shocker. I'm more glass half empty. I think that malls, office space, movie theaters, business travel, and the Olympics are never going to be the same. And this is the perfect storm of bad things for the Olympics. And I think this is a real tragedy specifically for the athletes. I lived – when I was at UCLA, if we were a country, we would have been the seventh most successful country in terms of medals. And I knew a lot of Olympians in water polo and in track. And I mean, they basically have a 24-month window where they peak physically from a training standpoint. And if they don't strike during that window, 99% of them aren't going to make a living doing this. So this is really their shot. I think this is a tragedy for the Olympics.

But look at the semantics here. You have obviously the novel coronavirus. And I feel sorry for the IOC. I feel sorry for Japan. I mean, they are in a no-win situation here. And then the athletes are testing positive. And this is their one moment. And all the news attention has been around COVID. It's not been building up any athletes. It's not been talking about Michael Phelps or Simone Biles' road to the Olympics. Like, other than Simone, who was amazing and was the last Olympics, have you heard of any new stars except the one that got kicked out for THC?

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: So this is a real tragedy for the athletes. But what it also represents, you're going to see a decline in viewership of 50 to 70 percent.

Kara Swisher: All right. OK, that's going to be your prediction. We're going to get to predictions. But yeah, I mean.

Scott Galloway: But it will take Peacock from 3 million to 3.01 million signups.

Kara Swisher: I don't know. I'm not sure because the winter Olympics are going to follow very quickly. Usually there's that break time. So I think they were going to go through no matter what after the delay. They were going for it after last summer, I think. It just wasn't even a question.

Scott Galloway: Well, I think they're going to do it. I just think it's just going to bomb. We'll see.

Kara Swisher: They have all kinds of new things. They've got some skateboarding. They've got some interesting things. We'll see how many people want to look at it.

Scott Galloway: I like the optimistic, sunshiny Kara.

Kara Swisher: I'm not sunshiny. I just think people like the Olympics. They like the Olympics. And one of the things that's interesting will be, people are out in their hot summer of love. Although now with the Delta variant, people are suddenly talking about everything, about whether they should get vaccinated again, about whether they should go to restaurants. People are back to that thing with the Delta variant. But I think people will enjoy the Olympics. I do think that they shoved it on through, and I think the Japanese government is going to probably be in a little bit of trouble with their people there when they're doing it. It's not with any joy. This is not with any joy. This is the joyless Olympics, but we'll see.

Speaking of joyless, Marjorie Taylor Greene is back on Twitter, that ghoul, after getting suspended earlier, speaking of someone who says things that are ghoulish constantly. She was suspended early this week for spreading COVID misinformation, which is anything that comes every time she opens her mouth, essentially. She's calling it a communist style Twitter ban. I don't even think she knows what communism is. Saying she was sharing information that anyone can find, that her First Amendment rights were violated. They are not, of course. Under Twitter's policy, 12-hour suspensions are imposed for second and third violations. A fourth violation gets a week suspension and a fifth strike would lead to a ban. And she's headed down the Donald Trump highway on this one, I think, in terms of what's going to happen to her.

She raises a ton of money. She and Matt Gaetz are the ones that raise a ton of money. She says crazy stuff and she gets a lot of attention. And I think she's completely calculated. She's not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. So she's using it to bang on her First Amendment drum, which is not accurate. But here she is. What thinks you, speaking of Jack Dorsey, is going to save the world through Bitcoin?

Scott Galloway: Well, I love this because I can talk about my favorite subject: me. But so as you know, and I've mentioned several times, I hauled my ass down to Wall Street every Wednesday morning for about four years to speak on CNBC. And I loved it. I love Carl Quintanilla. I love John Ford. I love Sarah Eisen. I love Mike Santelli. I just think they have fantastic business journalists. And then one day they said, oh, we have a scheduling conflict. And then they never invited me back. And then someone who works there says that on their guest registry, it says, "Do not book ever." So I was banned from CNBC. I'm still not entirely sure why. And then I've been talking about- I keep thinking I'll find out, but I don't really care. I'm about to get banned from my second network. And then yesterday on MSNBC, I'm not exaggerating. At one point, Stephanie Ruhl had her head in her hands on live TV. Head in her hands. Okay. So I may now be banned from three networks.

Kara Swisher: No, that's the same network.

Scott Galloway: Okay. Here's their thing. That's their fucking right. They're private companies. The First Amendment, just quick and dirty civics lesson here. The First Amendment states that government shall pass no law that prohibits free speech. And by the way, there are carve-outs to that. This is not the government. Facebook is not the government. And they've been hiding behind it. This is not Facebook. It's Twitter. This is Twitter. Okay, Twitter. They've been hiding behind this First Amendment bullshit. They have no allegiance, responsibility, or fidelity to the First Amendment. They do not. Nor does she have any rights to impose on these private companies as it relates to the First Amendment. If Vox decides to censor me.

Kara Swisher: Unless they get declared utilities, et cetera. You're right. You're a hundred percent. But right now it's a private company.

Scott Galloway: It is indeed. The First Amendment thing doesn't, that dog doesn't hunt when it comes to private companies.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. We've said that a million times. She's a nincompoop. What's really bad is she's not reading the room. If you notice the Republicans backtracked on vaccines and suddenly they're hugging vaccines, and here she is spreading vaccine misinformation. I'm sure they're not happy. I suspect they've seen polls that show people don't like dying, especially the unvaccinated. And there's been some very, you and I both tweeted the same story about the Alabama doctor who's like, these people all want vaccines right as they're dying.

Scott Galloway: Harper, can you say more about that? I thought that was really powerful.

Kara Swisher: It was a great piece. It was this piece about people, this doctor in Alabama who is putting young people on ventilators and they're like, "Can I get the vaccine?" And she goes, "It's too late. It's too late." And then she tells her family, "Go get vaccinated. That's the only thing you do to honor this person who's about to die." You know what I mean? And it's a really gripping, really gripping story. And it's just, I think probably a lot of people are reconsidering what they're doing here because people with vaccines can get COVID. It's just like the flu. You can get the flu if you have a flu vaccine. It's not as serious in most cases, almost everyone. And as Biden's, and I think he's using the term, I thought it was a really good political term. I'm sure it would have been tested politically. It's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And so Marjorie Taylor Greene is a ghoul and she needs to move along. And she's going to get kicked off of Twitter. And then we don't have to hear from her, which would be great. But she'll find ways to get on all her kind of things. But she's a very powerful voice. And unfortunately, she's using it for bad.

In any case, let's get to the big stories. Speaking of reigning in tech, Wu, Khan, and Kanter, the hottest new law firm of all in D.C. President Biden will nominate big tech critic Jonathan Kanter to lead the Justice Department's antitrust division. It's a big appointment. John is, I know him, is a big tech critic especially with Google. And so it'll be interesting if confirmed. He'll join Lina Khan who is at the Federal Trade Commission and Tim Wu who's on the National Economic Council to form essentially an antitrust trio that's sure to terrify big tech, which it already is. By the way, there is already a coffee mug with their names on it, like a law firm. So it's pretty much a done deal. The website is called leftygoods.com. It's very funny. But the fact of the matter is, this is a trio that Biden is sort of walking the talk in terms of big tech. And so Kanter gets confirmed. He takes over the DOJ's lawsuit against Google monopolies in search and ads. So what do you think of this? This rounds out. He picked the most – not the medium character. He picked the one who's going to really – who has been very clear about issues around big tech.

Scott Galloway: Look, this is another step in the right direction. And the only part of the narrative that I don't think is accurate is everyone's like "big tech is scared." Now, Mark Zuckerberg, who values power and money over everything and has such a lack of self-awareness around the fact that he probably shouldn't be controlling the content of the population of the Southern Hemisphere plus India. The reality is employees at Google, the shareholders are going to do well when the breakup becomes a reality because everybody's going to go, "You know what? YouTube's an amazing business." Yeah. And when it's no longer coordinating with Google, it can start its own text-based search. And instead of having all these constraints around their actions and trying to figure out what impact it's going to have on their other divisions, they will – these are – in every one of these companies are three or five amazing public companies that in aggregate will be worth more than the original company literally not even on the day of the breakup but on the day where the breakup becomes imminent.

Kara Swisher: You're making the economic argument. I think they're going to try to do all kinds of manner of things. John has represented Google competitors. And so they may try to get him to recuse himself like Amazon and Facebook have tried or trying with Lina Khan, who will probably be refiling that lawsuit, the FTC lawsuit where the judge pushed back on it. A lot of progressives are very excited about this. And this is something that Biden can do for progressives. He's not going to do everything for progressives. But he also has support from Republicans like Makan Delrahim, who had the job before. So it'll be interesting to see how they proceed. They don't have a lot of time. Just assuming that as often happens, say Biden loses the House, the Democrats lose the House, they've got to move quickly in these areas and get things in place so that they can do this. But it's a really interesting appointment because it does say to tech, "Let's make a deal," because these people are the toughest trio you're going to put up in front of us. And so what would be interesting to see is what kind of deal they make. They've been rather aggressive, which is very typical of what you do in these situations. But we'll see what happens. I don't know. I just feel like it's a tough trio. They didn't Merrick Garland it here.

Scott Galloway: Right.

Kara Swisher: I don't know. Merrick was like the, seems to be a disappointment to a lot of progressives. And they went for the ones that really hurt and you've seen action. You're going to see action from Lina, I think. And you've seen action from Tim Wu on the executive order and you'll see action from this guy. And so he's, they wanted to get in these positions for a very, I don't know anything about him. He's a longtime representative of anti-tech forces. I don't know. He's just been well-known for this.

Scott Galloway: I like the cut of his jib. I like his jib. I just think the three of them and they all know each other. If I went into space or near space, I would take him.

Kara Swisher: Would you?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, him and Lina Khan and Tim Wu. We don't want them off the earth. We want them on the earth doing these things.

Kara Swisher: So I think what will be interesting to see is how the confirmation goes and what kind of resistance he faces. And then what they do afterwards. It would seem to me that Google has not been as aggressive as Facebook and Amazon have in terms of they're a little more like, "We'll wait and see. We're going to fight these things." But they haven't been sort of that in your face kind of stuff. I suspect they realize what's happened here and they need to do something. And I don't know what's going to, not break up something necessarily, but be more cooperative. I suspect Google's going to be more cooperative here. Interestingly, I interviewed Neeva CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, yesterday.

Scott Galloway: Would you have an investment in Neeva?

Kara Swisher: And he thought this was inevitable that they would have. He used to work at Google. He used to be head of advertising there. And now he's doing this paid search engine. And I think a lot of people.

Scott Galloway: He's a nice guy. He's got a nice cheer about him.

Kara Swisher: It was good. He said a lot. But what's interesting is that I think everybody sees the writing on the wall here. And so time to make a deal? Yes, I suspect. We'll see. Google has been like Ted Kennedy at the Anita Hill hearings. They're just like, "Let's just not say anything. Let's just fade into the woodwork. Anything we say is not going to be a good idea. This is a no-win situation for us. Let's just keep it to ourselves."

Scott Galloway: Well, Wall Street doesn't seem to have affected these stocks. They're doing really well.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, but they get it. The breakup's good.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I suspect. I've said this a bunch of times. I think the most valuable company in the world in 2025 is AWS, which will have been prophylactically spun by Rocketman. We'll see. I don't know about Amazon. They seem – Andy Jassy, when I asked him, said absolutely not. And now he's in charge. He said, you know, whatever. Let's see if he does that. At the time when he wasn't in charge, he said no. I don't know. I feel like they'll do what they damn well please. That's how they act. And Wall Street will like whatever happens, I think. These companies are valuable and powerful, and they're valuable, not powerful. But this group of people are going to be very surgical, I suspect. They don't just rail at big tech. And if you've noticed, they've been all very quiet. Tim, who's been around and talked a lot. Lina, same thing. And John, too. I think they're going to be very quiet and try to make a deal here. Anyway, we'll see where it goes. I think a deal would be the best thing rather than sort of banging on pots. That's my feeling.

All right, Scott, let's go for a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the Pegasus spyware scandal and take the listener mail question. We've got some good ones this week.

[Ad break]

Kara Swisher: Welcome back. Let's get into the big report by The Washington Post and over a dozen other media organizations about the Israeli spyware that was used to infiltrate personal cell phones. What a surprise. The International Investigation scanned a list of tens of thousands of phone numbers. I don't know if we're on it, Scott. Belonging to activists, lawyers, politicians. The Post said that 10 prime ministers, three presidents and a king were among those potentially targeted by the spyware known as Pegasus. Pegasus was developed by a cybersecurity company named the NSO Group. The organization insists that Pegasus is only intended to be used against criminals and terrorists. But what a surprise it's being used against others. The founder of the NSO group issued a statement saying NSO will thoroughly investigate any credible proof of misuse of its technologies. Of course, we're going to build these things.

Now, it's interesting. It also comes at the same time that a high-ranking Catholic priest resigned last week after his phone data showed up, him supposedly using anonymous gay hookup app Grindr. The Catholic news outlet called Pillar somehow obtained the app data and outed Monsignor Jeffrey Burrell, a top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Federal law does not prohibit this type of data from being sold. I mean, yeah, I don't, I mean this isn't surprising. I think whenever you have a connected device you should assume that some security apparatus or somebody might have access to it.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, it's just not about, I mean everyone has a right, let me be clear, everyone has a right to privacy. But I don't think a bad way to live your life is to assume that at some point everything comes to light. And to a certain extent, if it just all got out there, it would in some ways be better because then everyone would realize the majority of people have some sort of, I don't know, dysfunction or weird or human, whatever you want to call them.

Kara Swisher: The thing that struck me, and I want you to comment on this, is that-

Scott Galloway: Because I could not agree with you less, but go ahead. Keep going. I think people should have secrets, but go ahead.

Kara Swisher: No, I agree with you. I don't, let me be clear. I just don't think it's, you should just assume that anything you type into anything that is going to be stored on a server might someday come public. And I agree, people have a right to privacy. I don't. But the thing that made me, I guess, sad about this is that as I get older, I'm more interested in Jesus Christ as a historical figure. And if you read the Bible, or you try and understand anything about Jesus Christ, or even our Constitution, the fundamental is people should have, we should be generous with people in terms of who they are. And the thing that really made me sad here is here we are in 2021, and we have a senior level executive of a very important organization who has to live a lie and can't love who he wants to love.

Scott Galloway: That has to do with the Catholic church, the awful Catholic church, Scott. That doesn't have to do with his phone.

Kara Swisher: I agree. There's nothing wrong, in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with this man. There's nothing wrong with Grindr. Who's fucked up here is an organization that in a strange way is very, in my view, anti-Jesus, if you want, based on what I understand of Jesus.

Scott Galloway: So it's sad. I went to college with a bunch of wonderful men who couldn't be who they were for a long time. And it's still a tragedy that one of the most powerful organizations in the world has this view where you can't love or be who you want to be. It just made me feel very sad for him and sad that we still haven't made a lot of progress. And also the Catholic Church continues to be one of the most damaging organizations in modern history. It's just fucked up so many lives.

Kara Swisher: Well, that is a larger topic. But in this case, it's about technology. In the Pegasus case, we know that at least 23 Apple devices were successfully hacked. And of course, Apple devices are supposed to be unhackable or nearly unhackable. And of course, they're not. And that was sort of brought into sharp relief when Apple refused to hack its own stuff and then someone did, in terms of the attack in California many years ago in the big fight with Jim Comey over encryption. But it's really, it's just nothing is not available to be hacked. And it's one thing to be worried about the government spying on you, which they do, which we know from Edward Snowden revelations and everything else, but this is from a private company that's licensed out. And we had Nicole Perlroth talking about this, that the United States, in a lot of ways, facilitated this by all kinds of things they did in creating these markets where you can buy information, buy tools to get information. And it's very hard to regulate this. It's very hard to figure out. And then you want the government who's spying on you. It's illegal. Oh, no, it's not illegal, is it?

Kara Swisher: But some of it is. Some of it isn't. It's not clear. And so one of the things that's difficult is that, at some point, you have leaders that really, if everything is porous, it's very hard to do a lot of things if you can't keep some secrets. The fact of the matter is most people should realize, even if you take all kinds of precautions—I do, I think a lot of people do—you're going to get hacked at some point. This could be very devastating, especially for criminals. Look at what happened with China paying criminal hackers. That's the allegation from the Biden administration. I think it's just a hot mess in terms of where we're going, because we are all jacked into this system in such a way.

Kara Swisher: But when it gets to activists, lawyers, politicians, prime ministers, they're not safe. This is not just Donald. Who knows if Donald Trump got hacked? I assume he did because he was using like a... he didn't care. He didn't care. That's right. That's exactly right. He just let anything. But at some point, you do have to have things that are secret or protected. I know internet security people go crazy about that. Even today, when you talk to Democrats or Republicans in the security industry, they just hate Snowden. But it still points out that this is a very thorny issue, but very disturbing. I felt this was the most disturbing of all the many security stories.

Kara Swisher: I believe you can't put this genie back in the bottle. It's more important to have laws that protect people's rights, because the notion that we're going to hamstring these technologies—it's out there. If you have a phone, assume that at some point somebody could hack it. The question is what laws do we put in place so that if someone does hack your phone illegally, they go to jail and we have the ability to track those people down.

Scott Galloway: The entity that registers the most damage here is the U.S. security apparatus. What is going on here has been going on for 15, 20 years. It used to be the U.S. government was the best at it. When Obama went to the Lat-Am summit 15 years ago, he pretty much knew what every leader was going to say and ask for because we had their phones. We were going into Starbucks and figuring out ways to plant listening devices, to hack phones of world leaders so that when we showed up to negotiate a trade treaty with the president of Chile, we already knew what their terms were. We don't like to admit this, but we used to be the best at it.

Scott Galloway: Unfortunately, this type of spyware has now been democratized, for lack of a better term. It's much less expensive now, and a lot of different actors can do it. I think the big loser here is the U.S. security apparatus, or the delta between our capabilities and the capabilities of anybody with some money has narrowed dramatically.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I think—again, I recommend listening to the interview we did with Nicole Perlroth. Her book is called *This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyber Weapons Arms Race*. That's what it is. You're going to see—there was a story like this a couple of years ago that the U.S. was spying on people. From WikiLeaks to this, to everything else, this is all part of the same thing. We are jacked into the system. We have all kinds of information. Everything lives there.

Kara Swisher: I think about it a lot these days. I have a couple of iPads that I haven't used, and I'm using them. I keep thinking, after I was interviewing Sridhar, why am I using Google? What do they have? How do I get out of it? And then you can't. You just can't get out of it. You can't remove yourself from it. Vox's email is on Google. The New York Times' email is on Google. You can't escape it in some fashion. It renders people completely vulnerable.

Scott Galloway: Completely. The cocktail that I think is the sodium pentothal is not only the hacking. Your email gets hacked—that's bad. But what is worse is that bad actors who might be trying to undermine your credibility because, say, on a regular basis on podcasts you are critical of the Putin administration, they get your emails and there's 6,000 of them and they publish them. Then what do they do? They plant six misinformation emails. Will the media and the Twitter mob say, "Well, maybe"? If 99.9% are credible and ring true, the 0.1% that are false and take your reputation to an entirely different level could be extraordinarily damaging. Our news cycle isn't going to take the time to stop and try to figure it out. They're just going to go, "Oh my God, this person was not only on Grindr, but they were downloading really awful stuff." That might not be true, but if it's planted, it's the best type of misinformation—it mixes the truth in with the false.

Kara Swisher: That's the whole point of it. And hence, Marjorie Taylor Greene. No, he's just a naked poop. Anyway, Scott, let's listen to a listener question. Roll tape. You've got mail.

[Listener question plays]

Listener (Nicholas): Hi, Scott. Hi, Kara. My name is Nicholas and I am a Zoomer from the state of Minnesota. With the ever-looming threat of the climate crisis, why should someone from my generation save for retirement? I understand it's a nihilistic view, but I feel this whole retirement brand keeps us from rebelling against the rich. Hope you guys can help. Thank you.

Kara Swisher: Hmm. Gosh, Nicholas, give it all up. Nick. Nick. Nick. Well, it's an interesting question. Someone posted something like this to me just recently. They were saying the Democrats—I don't know if you saw some dumb Republicans said Democrats don't believe in the future, they're not having children. I'm over here having children. What are you talking about? It made me start thinking a lot of kids—a lot of Swishers running around. But here's the thing: as we're having children, what is life going to be like for the golden child? I hadn't thought about it until just recently—what is their life on this planet going to be like in 70, 90 years when I'm long gone? It makes me think, why do anything? Why not just sit there and stare at the wall? You see what's coming and what could possibly happen.

Kara Swisher: I don't know how you save the brand. You have to just believe that the future will be better, despite some proof that there's going to be some ugliness. Oddly enough, last night I watched *Noah* with Russell Crowe. It was a dark take on the whole thing. Did you ever see that movie, *Noah*?

Scott Galloway: I didn't.

Kara Swisher: It was Russell Crowe and Hermione Granger—the woman who played Hermione Granger in Harry Potter. It was dark. It was a dark look at civilization. God just wipes the world clean, essentially. But even the Noah family was not clean. I started reading into it, and there's some crazy stuff around Noah's family that's weird. Look at Ham's relationship with Noah, which was his son. In any case, it made me think about that. I don't know what to say. How do you save the retirement brand? I just keep hoping. What do you, Scott? Give the kid some hope here, please.

Scott Galloway: Well, first off, Nick, this is what the world's going to be like for your children. It's going to be wonderful. Historically, what we've seen is that the arc of progress has dips and it's jagged, but it bends towards increased prosperity and freedoms. We have an 80% reduction in abject poverty globally in the last 30 years. As cynical as I am, as hateful and as angry as I am, if you look at the data—and this is one of the things that bothers me about some of the progressive social movements—they never want to acknowledge the type of progress we've made.

Scott Galloway: First off, boss, it's important that you have cynicism. It's important that we hold people to task. It's important that we model out that we have too many nuclear weapons. It's important that we model out that if the seas continue to increase in temperature, we're going to lose cities and have forced migration, and we need to address that. But generally speaking, I think you can rest assured with a lot of confidence that the world is going to be a wonderful place as long as there are thoughtful young men such as yourself.

Scott Galloway: As it relates to retirement, Nick, oh my God, boss. What it means to be a man is to take economic responsibility for your household. Sometimes that means getting out of the way of your partner and saying that she is better at the whole money thing, or your husband is better, and being supportive of them. Economic security in America is key to your children's happiness. You absolutely want to begin saving and investing. This whole nihilistic notion of "why even save?"—boss, your lack of economic security will be worse than any climate change. If you don't start saving, you don't live a little bit of a stoic lifestyle, you don't get good at something, you don't save more than you spend. Early investing with a focus on retirement—time will go faster than you think. Start saving, start investing right away. Then develop the resources and economic security so that you can make a real change around the things you're passionate about, including climate change.

Scott Galloway: Oh my gosh, boss, investing is a wonderful thing. The reason why I can get kicked off of CNBC is I don't give a fuck because I'm economically secure. You know what I did? I didn't back into my couch and go, "The world's going to be a worse place," and not save. I saved, I invested, and now I can get kicked off CNBC. Get kicked off CNBC, Nick.

Kara Swisher: All right. Okay. Nick, I think the world is going to be *The Day After Tomorrow*, which was the movie with Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal, which I watch over and over again. I watch all these disasters. I watched *2012*—remember that was John Cusack. I watch *Greenland* with my favorite—what's his name? That guy who was... oh, he's so good. Gerard Butler. I watch all these apocalypse movies. If you remember many years ago, the one where the nuclear weapon went off—that was a great movie. I have a more apocalyptic feeling about this planet. At the same time, I keep having children. So there you have it, Nick. Save for tomorrow. That's all I got to say. Assume the worst. Things are going to continue to get better and better. Assume the worst and prepare for the best.

Scott Galloway: How about that? Assume the worst and prepare for the best, rather than assume the best and prepare for the worst.

Kara Swisher: That's how I conduct my life. So I'm actually incredibly hypocritical.

Scott Galloway: One of those ways you prepare is you start saving and investing early.

Kara Swisher: Yes, you do. That is a good thing. Just assume maybe things will break for you. And even if it doesn't, it's okay. By the way, Jeff Bezos won't be on this planet anyway. It's so funny. The world's richest person wants to leave the planet. Let's get back to everything about it. Everyone had a real bad feeling. I don't think many people were going "yay" for him.

Scott Galloway: I have never seen—I think if Elon did it, they would.

Kara Swisher: That's right. In the history of media, I have never seen so many people tune into something they had so much disdain for.

Scott Galloway: Really? It was amazing.

Kara Swisher: It was amazing. It was interesting because I didn't see an Elon comment. He didn't drag him, which I thought he might, but he didn't. It was interesting.

Scott Galloway: I think he's actually the winner here because the scrutiny shows that space hauling is a great business and the rest are shitty business. It's not space exploration, it's space execution. Anyone you send to Mars, you're executing. Virgin Galactic is a Mach 3 train wreck. You have space scientific exploration, which should be done by the government because we don't know where the payoff is going to be. But space hauling—SpaceX has already secured three billion in contracts from the Pentagon and NASA. Blue Origin has a lot of catching up.

Kara Swisher: It was awkward. The whole thing with the hats. The old lady I liked—that's the only part.

Scott Galloway: Oh, she was inspiring.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. She was inspiring. At the same time, I was like, there was the moon landing. I'm inspired by those people, and they're long dead, 50 years ago. It was just... I don't know. Anyway.

Scott Galloway: Come on, Sally Ride. Youngest person in space.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I agree. I like being inspired. I love exploration.

Scott Galloway: Now the youngest person in space is the son of a Dutch private equity billionaire. What's wrong with our world?

Kara Swisher: Nothing. What's wrong with our world?

Scott Galloway: By the way, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that that is the mother of all bad parenting.

Kara Swisher: You think? "We're going to take away your iPad, or we're going to spend $28 million to send you into space." I just... I know.

Scott Galloway: I feel like we should be nicer about it.

Kara Swisher: Nicer? I do. Oh my God. It's one of those things. I couldn't look away. And they're like, "For all mankind, a rocket up 60 miles and then it floats down." What the fuck? What the actual fuck?

Scott Galloway: All right. I need a prediction from you.

Kara Swisher: We need to. Thank you, Nicholas. We feel like you should be hopeless and hopeful at the same time. Please do both things. That's going to be difficult, but please do both things. All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

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Kara Swisher: Scott, we need a prediction from you.

Scott Galloway: So once a year, my mom and I used to take a vacation. We would take two weeks. One year we went to Niagara Falls, which was lovely. That's the kind of vacation you took in the 70s with a single mother. We flew through JFK. This was like 1974 or 75. My mom said, "I have a treat for you." This was a time when they didn't have security and you could just walk around the airport and go to any terminal. We went to the international terminal and she showed me the Concorde because she knew it was there. That was the kind of thoughtful person my mom is. I was really into science, and I saw this thing and I thought it was just so incredible.

Scott Galloway: The link to the prediction here is that I hope—and I expect—that the real economic opportunity and the real problem that needs to be solved as it relates to space is not around "far." It's around "fast." I think companies including Overture and some of these supersonic transportation companies deserve and will start to get more attention. The addressable market to go up in a plane and then go for eight minutes into near space for $250,000, much less $40,000—I mean, this is how fucking ridiculous that thing is. They're claiming they want to do 400 missions a year if they execute perfectly. That capsule holds four people. That is a total of 1,600 people if they execute perfectly. They're claiming they want to bring the price down from $250,000 to $40,000. That's a total revenue of $6.64 million. The company is trading at $7.5 billion. It's trading at 120 times revenue if they execute perfectly. It makes no sense.

Scott Galloway: You know what does make sense? If I can get from New York to London in two and a half hours, there is an enormous market of people who will pay $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 for that.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: So if you want to talk about the economic opportunity—supersonics is coming back. Overture, United Airlines just put down a commitment. I think that's a huge market, underreported. That's where the money is. The opportunity and increased excitement around a really exciting collision of science and actual utility for people here on Earth. Money is nothing but the transfer of time and work. If I can save a lot of time and I can connect with people more easily, I'd like to go to Australia six times a year. The reason I don't is not that it's so far—it's that it's so long to get there.

Kara Swisher: It is. So much time.

Scott Galloway: If I could get there in five hours, I'd be there every eight weeks. I would pay a lot of money, and there's a big market. If you look at the reality, 1% of the global population—that's 75 million people—have the money to pay for supersonic. It's a huge market, as opposed to 600 people who signed up to go to the near Carmen line.

Kara Swisher: So rich people flying all over above us and noisily is a good business. That hurts my feelings.

Scott Galloway: Okay. All right. Fine.

Kara Swisher: So I'm going to end on two tweets. Speaking of this topic, since we've been on this—one is from my lovely wife, who I thought did the most perfect tweet about the Jeff Bezos thing. She goes, "Everyone watches on TV as the world's richest guy takes what would have been government funds if he paid taxes and uses it to go to space for a few minutes in a ship shaped like a giant penis. America." I feel that was.

Scott Galloway: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: And then Brooke Hammerlein said she wanted to do a badger rocket. It was their turn. So just some stats. Let me read one more. Dan Rather—I'm sorry, go ahead.

Scott Galloway: These are so many good tweets.

Kara Swisher: "I would prefer watching the launches of independent bookstores. They're a lot more entertaining and they actually occupy space." Who knew Dan Rather was so funny?

Scott Galloway: Oh, he's such a funny guy.

Kara Swisher: Right. Yes. Anyway. Here are some stats. Okay. So Bezos—the entire budget for NASA is $21 billion. In the last five years, Bezos has added $100 billion to his net worth. He has paid 1% taxes. If he had paid the same tax rate as, say, you, we would have garnered just enough tax revenue from Jeff Bezos to double the budget of NASA.

Scott Galloway: You got to hate the game, not the player. I don't resent Jeff Bezos. I resent us for not electing leaders who've decided to have a more progressive tax structure so that we can properly fund NASA, who puts the daughters of ministers who are PhDs in chemical engineering into space. That's who we want to be our explorers. What we have now is we as a society have decided we no longer want astronauts—we want egonauts.

Kara Swisher: Egonauts. Oh, is that a new Scott? TM.

Scott Galloway: That's a new term. TM. We used to have astronauts, now we have egonauts.

Kara Swisher: Boom. Boom. All right. I'm going to end on that, Scott. So we'll see what happens. Go to my OnlyFans account and spill some bills for me. All right. So listen, you're only going to be here another week, right? And then you're going away for August?

Scott Galloway: Oh, that's right. August. I'm so European. I take August off.

Kara Swisher: He does. I will be here with lots of guests. Jackie, marry me. I make you very happy. Wait till you hear the guests. I'm not even going to tell you the guests. You're going to be so jealous of all the guests that I'm having.

Scott Galloway: Well, hold on. Hold on. People. I'll tell you about them next week. And of course it's not Chuck Todd, who, by the way, is clearly trying to get my attention by again not inviting me on Meet the Press this weekend.

Kara Swisher: Well, you know what? I have so many people. They're so good. I want to just surprise you with them.

Scott Galloway: I'm going to list them. Are you bringing back the Canadians?

Kara Swisher: Next Thursday, I will list them. Andrew Ross Sorkin? There's a lot happening. There's going to be a lot, but there's some new faces that you're going to enjoy. You're going to enjoy the whole thing.

Scott Galloway: Yes. It's going to be fun. I want them good, just not very good.

Kara Swisher: We're going to try to keep—you know what happens when Scott goes away? Our ratings go down, and vice versa with me. I'm going to see if I can keep the ratings up. Then you'll feel smaller, probably. I don't know. Anyway. Reach out to Bezos around trying to keep it up and failing. Okay. All right. Enough Jeff Bezos bashing. That's enough.

Kara Swisher: All right. Don't forget, if there's a story in the news and you're curious about and want to hear our opinion, go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show. Read us out, Scott.

Scott Galloway: Today's show was produced by Lara Neiman, Camila Salazar, and Evan Engel. Ernie Entretot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows. And for a limited time, you have a chance to fill out our survey. What a thrill!

Kara Swisher: That's right. We want you to tell us how we're doing. Go to newyorkmag.com slash pivot survey and sound off. That's newyorkmag.com slash pivot survey.

Scott Galloway: Make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts. Or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. If on the survey you say you are not enjoying the show, we will issue a full refund.

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