Market Madness, The Latest on Roe, and Guest Kirsten Grind

Kara Swisher: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it. And give fresh perspective on everything. From wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more. Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.

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Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher, broadcasting from Scott Galloway's living room in New York and Soho. I'm very excited. Hi, Scott. You're in the other room. Guest in the man cave.

Scott Galloway: Hello. Hello.

Kara Swisher: People do not realize that we really do spend time together now. It's really kind of fascinating. We're going to go out for drinks later tonight, just a late night, you and me at Balthazar. How's that? What do you say?

Scott Galloway: We're so old. I made reservations for us at like 6 at Balthazar, this touristy place at like 6 p.m.

Kara Swisher: 6 p.m. I'm free at 10.

Scott Galloway: And we'll come home and we'll watch Murder, She Wrote, have some prune juice.

Kara Swisher: That sounds good. Maybe do an ear candling if we really get crazy.

Scott Galloway: That's disgusting. You probably do air handling.

Kara Swisher: In any case, I'm here at Scott's apartment because I have some meetings. And Scott is here, and it's unusual because we're together, and we will be plotting later in the night.

Anyway, so today we'll talk about the recent market madness, the latest on Roe versus Wade, and we'll speak to Kirsten Grind about her book, *Happy at Any Cost*, about former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. I knew him very well, so I'm really looking forward to this. He was a really interesting character.

But first, the latest on Elon Musk's plans for Twitter. I know we don't want to talk too much about Elon, but he thinks he can double its revenue with subscriptions alone and quintuple it in the next six years. *The New York Times* got a look at the pitch deck he presented to investors, which details exactly how he plans to do that. His strategy includes cutting reliance on advertising to 45% of total revenue. I think it's almost all of it right now. He wants to add a payments business to the platform, and he plans to drive up Twitter Blue subscriptions while also adding a second subscription product he called X, which was the name of his first company, oddly enough. *The Times* guesses it might possibly be an ad-free product. Scott, this sounds like Scott Galloway's plan for Twitter, I have to tell you. What do you think?

Scott Galloway: Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that he listens to Pivot. And I also want to acknowledge that it's possible that different people come to the same conclusion around the same time. But essentially, what's driving this is he has decided with the market starting to draw down and probably a recognition that if Twitter went up a thousand percent, it could go down 90 percent. And he's trying to find new equity investors. The pitch around "fund my misadventures" and "free speech" — the moment you ask one or two questions, what I'm saying makes absolutely no sense — wasn't resonating with additional equity investors.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he got a kind of a grab bag, as we said last week, for people who weren't tuning in. But go ahead.

Scott Galloway: And so he's moved to a more thoughtful and compelling narrative, and that is specifically a move to subscription. He's talked about getting rid of the bots. He has talked about incorporating payments. He's got an investor now. He wants to do a billion in payments by 2028. But this is — granted, this is an individual who said there'd be a million autonomous taxis on the road by 2021. So a lot of this is hand-waving, but it's elegant and compelling hand-waving. Going from one or two percent data and analytics and subscription to 45 is really compelling. Creating a payments platform that he believes — and there should be at some point some meat on these bones — over a billion dollars in payments. I think that's the real unlock here. I'm usually the subscription guy, but something he started talking about made me realize: if they can get to payments, they could technically position themselves as the most credible super app.

Kara Swisher: So explain what payments is for people who don't understand. I mean, the subscription is you pay for the product. You don't have to deal with ads. You get a whole bunch of features. Twitter Blue is very thin on the features. Not very helpful, really. It's got to give you things you want to use. But payments — explain what that would mean to regular people.

Scott Galloway: Well, try transferring more than $10,000 overseas. It's like trying to get a mortgage. You set up a wire, which is time-consuming and expensive, and regulatory agencies come in and hold it. I always thought, why is it like you press go and it was there? It's not. Twitter could potentially be a global payments platform for remittance, for transfer of payments. It might be that great kind of Web3 payment system that says, "All right, I'm renting a house. I don't want to pay 3% Visa fees. I don't want to pay currency exchange fees. I don't want to go through my credit card. I don't even want the US government to know that maybe I'm transferring money." There are currency controls all over the world in terms of outflows. The idea that you could just go on Twitter and say, "Okay, I'm transferring — I want to take advantage of the pound being weak, and I want to pay in pounds, or I'm transferring money back to El Salvador to friends or family" — and boom, it's as easy as sending a tweet. That's very powerful.

Kara Swisher: So how would that compete? It would compete with Venmo and PayPal, et cetera. That's how I pay for most of my things now, both of those services.

Scott Galloway: Right. But what Twitter has is trust, a relationship, a user interface. What he's trying to do is get them to have those credit cards on file. The most surprising thing about what he said — the most stunning thing — is that if you have relationships including a credit card for 100 to 200 million people, and it's trusted and it's instantaneous and everyone is on a similar protocol or platform, you have something really powerful. I don't think any of these payment platforms other than Visa and MasterCard have that many people on them.

Kara Swisher: The thing that struck me was that he wants to quintuple revenues by 2028, which — let's just say what this is. It's going public then. That's what he wants to do.

Scott Galloway: Well, yeah, but to go from $5 million to $25 billion in what will be about five years is definitely the Venti, Big Gulp, Ayahuasca business plan.

Kara Swisher: Maybe he's selling ayahuasca.

Scott Galloway: Well, seriously.

Kara Swisher: Can I just say one thing? He has been in this business. He started X.com. That's where I started covering him.

Scott Galloway: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: And it merged with PayPal. So he does know this area quite well.

Scott Galloway: 100%. That was the beginnings of his fortune. By the way, I told you I spoke at the PayPal conference last week. As I was busting into my especially angry "Elon Musk is not a great role model for men" speech, it dawned on me as I was getting heated that I was speaking to a company whose co-founder was Elon.

Kara Swisher: Well, he didn't found PayPal. They merged. X.com was his.

Scott Galloway: It was interesting.

Kara Swisher: Well, I may also say he didn't found Tesla. But anyway, okay, the guy who gets the most credit for it.

Scott Galloway: No, he founded X.com, and it merged into PayPal. It was exactly the same company. They were right near each other in San Francisco. They warred, and then they merged. And then they were the PayPal Mafia.

Kara Swisher: Is that fascinating behind-the-scenes color coming out in your new book? Is that coming out?

Scott Galloway: No, I don't care.

Kara Swisher: I didn't much like them back then, that whole gang. They love to call themselves the PayPal Mafia. They always have to do their mafia thing. They're so undangerous, these people. Do you see that picture where they hired Annie Leibovitz to come in? They look like the worst motorcycle gang in the world. They're literally like the Marin County Dentist Motorcycle Club. I mean, they just look so lame.

Scott Galloway: I was thinking me and three lesbians could take their part in very thick order. I mean, talk about — thanks, I don't want to have a boner. Anyway.

Kara Swisher: Anyhow. Anyhow, I'm just saying he has experience here and he's very tough around these people. Back to the plan. The thing is he wants to quintuple revenues, which is aggressive. And he wants to go to subscription. But what I found interesting is he wants to go from a quarter of a billion users to a billion. I don't know how many of those are actually not people. So he's not talking about an increase that great — only a 20% increase from $25 to $30 per user. What he's talking about, and it will be more interesting to understand why, is how he's going to go from a quarter of a billion to a billion users.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, that was a little one. And changing your business model — usually when you go to subscription, you create a more valuable company with fewer users. So there are some inherent contradictions here that he's going to have to answer. But he's moved away from this unfundable, irrational, quite frankly, just challenge. We're just having fun.

Kara Swisher: Well, it should be less moderation. It's like, "Okay, help me understand how that's going to help the business." He's still doing that, though. He was on Twitter sort of slapping, saying that Twitter was leftist. And then he said he died mysteriously, something. He was doing that kind of weird tweet. His mother didn't even like it. She didn't think it was funny. He's still doing his thing on Twitter, which is his thing. Whatever. He's not going to die mysteriously. But he's gotten serious about raising money because he absolutely wants to diversify. He needs some cash from other people.

Scott Galloway: 100%. He needs some believers.

Kara Swisher: He needs some believers. He'll get them. I think he'll get them.

So Meta's latest plan to get more people into the Metaverse is a new brick and mortar store. They'll sell the Oculus Quest 2 headset, accessories, Portal video chat devices — which you can't give away. It's located on the company's campus. So it's not even in a mall. It didn't even do the Microsoft route, which was always so sad to me. Apparently, one quarter of teenagers say they own a VR headset, which is pretty high, but only 5% of them use them regularly. That's the issue. As you said with your teens, they start to use it, then they don't. Losing money on this hardware division, Reality Labs. I mean, a store. Shall we go? Let's go to that store. What do you say?

Scott Galloway: I actually think this is a good idea.

Kara Swisher: Okay. And that is — why? I don't think it's a good idea. Do you want to go first? Why do you not think it's a good idea?

Scott Galloway: No, no. Just go ahead. Tell me why.

Kara Swisher: I don't think it's a good idea. I've seen a million of them from Dell. K-Way. There's so many. Zoom. There was another one I forgot the other day. Walt Mossberg reminded me of it. It was in Palo Alto. They're always in Palo Alto on this one corner, and they're not the Apple store. But go ahead.

Scott Galloway: Well, for the last 12 of the last 15 years — actually probably 13 or 14 — I've been telling companies you need to take money out of retailers and luxury brands. You need to take money out of your retail budget, your brick-and-mortar budget, and put it into customer acquisition online. Every year, the rents that these companies charge online, whether it's Google or Facebook or Amazon, have gone up. What you've seen in the last two years since COVID-19 is the rents that retail can charge have dramatically drawn down. For the first time, you can get percentage of revenue deals in tier A malls, which you never would have been able to get just three years ago. So it's changed the dynamics. I think, A, opening stores is much more economically feasible than it was. But more so than anything, I think Facebook, with the types of products they have, need a controlled environment where they can explain them and display them.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, but it's on their campus.

Scott Galloway: Oh, yeah, but that's where they're starting.

Kara Swisher: Have you gone there?

Scott Galloway: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: Oh, yeah. I get invited to the Facebook campus a lot, Kara.

Scott Galloway: I don't either, but you don't get to go to the good parts where all the cool restaurants are and all the food areas. But Apple has a store actually outside of its main — that incredible space thing they built. And it's a beautiful store. And there was a lot of foot traffic there, even though it's kind of more remote. It's not as remote as the Facebook one. The Facebook headquarters is remote.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, but isn't — I read this as this is a proxy and a beta test for ultimately what might be eight or 12 stores in cities around the nation.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, it could be. Yep.

Kara Swisher: It's in Burlingame. They have a campus in Burlingame. I forget what they bought there, which is not their big campus, but it's still — they're all — if you've gone down to any of these campuses, they're hard to get to.

Scott Galloway: Sure.

Kara Swisher: Okay. I just watched Microsoft do it, and then there was another phone company that did it.

Scott Galloway: Well, Verizon and AT&T both have stores. I mean, they have huge networks of stores.

Kara Swisher: No, I get it, but there was — this is not going to — you buy this thing once, this Oculus headset, and nobody buys the Portal.

Scott Galloway: Well, there might be pop-ups. Pop-ups would be good. That would be good. I think it is very difficult to sell over the long term a branded high margin product that requires explaining without being vertical. If you're going to rely on someone else to sell the Oculus, as challenged as it is, and the Portal and all that, good luck to you. The only place I've seen a Portal is in the Amazon store. And I wonder how much Amazon is excited about merchandising the Portal.

Kara Swisher: I love those stores. Yeah, the Amazon 4-star store. I love those stores. We have one in Washington. I like it a lot. It's a very attractive store. Very well merchandised. Full of stuff. I spent an hour in there. It was kind of cool. Cool stuff. Whoever's doing the merchandising is really smart. But nonetheless, not much traffic. You know where they should sell the Oculus Quest 2? In the Apple store. It might do well there.

Scott Galloway: You think?

Kara Swisher: I don't think that's going to happen.

Scott Galloway: I know, but I'm just saying that's where they could explain it best for you.

Kara Swisher: I don't know. I'm getting you one for Christmas, as you know. You're getting one for Christmas.

Scott Galloway: I don't know. The man who has everything. Just put me on a roller coaster and I'll throw up.

Kara Swisher: Same, same. Okay, no. All right, last thing. Google is trying to stem the bleeding from the Great Resignation. The company is raising pay and streamlining the employee review process. That's after the most recent annual survey showed employees were increasingly unhappy with their pay compared to what they could make at similar work. Google is also simplifying its promotion process, which requires lengthy forms and relied heavily on peer reviews. It will not issue a blanket pay raise to keep pace with inflation, but they pay people rather well there. It's interesting because the top machine learning person left Apple because he wanted to work from home and they wouldn't let him. There are all kinds of problems with all these companies and retaining talent. What do you think of this?

Scott Galloway: I think it's really the market. The beautiful thing about the market is typically when you hit a lot of big numbers — people just couldn't leave for a decade at a lot of these companies. You look at the shares, the options on the shares you were awarded, or the RSUs. For every year you stick around, you're going to get another $700,000, a million, $2 million. Amazon's off 30%. Apple's not off nearly as much. Facebook is off 50%. Google, I think, is off 20% or 25%. All of a sudden, people look down and go, "Okay, my — and the options, if you have options, not RSUs, the tail of the whip is even greater." So it's like, "Okay, instead of getting an additional $300,000 a year, I'm getting an additional $110,000. And I have this cool payment startup that's been coming after me. Or me and the other two VPs who maybe started a little bit later than me and don't have quite as much to lose, we've all thought about starting some kind of cool company together."

The bigger, mature companies all go through this transition where they change their compensation from equity to current comp. Their current comp skyrockets because they can no longer say to people, "Oh, well, you have —" They no longer know when they're doing negotiations. "This person has $7 million in unvested shares." That's no longer the case. So this is a natural part of the ecosystem. I think it's healthy. Google pays — these companies — Google actually, my understanding is, pays really good cash comp. Facebook is right there. Amazon is lagged. But they're smart. They realize —

Kara Swisher: Well, one of the things is — my ex-wife worked there. I remember when she was explaining the promotion problem with Director 1, Director 2, VP 1, 2. It was totally incomprehensible. And then the peer reviews were involved. But it never seemed to really matter. It seemed so random. And I know it wasn't, but it was one of the more confusing promotion processes.

The problem is, as many VCs — there's a real shutdown of VC funding. People are really pulling their horns back in. So it'll be interesting to see if they have options, right? Although, as we know, great companies have started in a downturn. But most VCs are expecting quite a severe downturn. From just watching even their Twitter discussions, there's been a lot of pullback. I don't know where they go. You think they would run to somewhere like Google or Facebook in that time, but I don't know.

Scott Galloway: Interesting. There will be some — in a recession, you go to the safe places for that safety, right?

Kara Swisher: Yeah. That's actually the place you should — that's the time, the best time to start a company actually.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. But you can make an argument either way. The people you see at any of these big companies are all vaguely unhappy, even though they're living in full comfort. They've got a warm fuzzy around them all the time and all the good food and everything else. But there's a point of making kids too comfortable. It's like *Downton Abbey*. Would you want to live in *Downton Abbey*?

Kara Swisher: I always think I would like it for a week, and then I would just be like, "What do they do? What's their source of pride? What's their source of meaning?"

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think they feel like they're part of a thing. Everyone I talk to at these companies is always like going like this. And I'm like, "Wow, that's a lot." There's this person making Chipotle over there that doesn't get to do this. I don't know. It's going to be very hard to keep people engaged as the companies grow older. All of them, every one of them. People now want to do what they want to do, like this machine learning guy at Apple who's apparently quite high up in the organization.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, they've got to figure this thing out because where people are going to work, especially these tech companies where they can move many times, is a big deal.

Okay, let's get to our first big story. After an insane last week on Wall Street, literally what is going on with the markets? Quick recap. The Fed raised rates on Wednesday and the market took off. The Dow had its best day since 2020. But then on Thursday, it erased all those gains and more amid concerns that the Fed might raise rates again soon. The tech stocks took a particularly big hit. The Nasdaq hit its lowest point since November 2020. Netflix hit a four-year low. Snap, Meta, Apple, and Alphabet were all down. As you pointed out in your newsletter this week, Scott, roughly half the stocks in the NASDAQ are down 50% from their 52-week highs, a quarter are down 75%, and more than 5% are down 90%. So, Scott, this is — again, we talked about this a little last week. Is it less exuberance? Are people worried? There feels like there's something in the air, coming out of the pandemic but not quite out of the pandemic. So do you think it's going to get as bad as 2001 and 2008?

Scott Galloway: That's a tough one, but you could argue for the growth sector, it kind of already is as bad. You're talking about great companies. Moderna is a great company. Roku is a great company. Pinterest is a great company, and they're off 70%, 80%. These payment platforms that felt like they were going to take over the world are down 60% and 70%. So in that sector, it's already kind of happened. But it just comes down to what I think is a fairly basic thing. We overdid the stimulus. The only way to get your arms around inflation is to raise interest rates. We have never been able to raise interest rates like this without going into recession.

Kara Swisher: Let's talk about cryptocurrencies. They're down. Bitcoin and Ethereum peaked in November, now down roughly 50% to like $32,000 for Bitcoin. And also VC funding is down, as I said. VCs are down on startups because valuations are down. IPOs and exits are slowing. Venture money into startups totaled $47 billion in April 2022, which is the lowest invested in the past 12 months. Tiger Global, the hedge fund with the most investments in private billion-dollar startups, is down 44% this far. That's a crazy number, and 15% in April alone. I tweeted a fascinating thread from tech strategist Nathan Bosche, who summed up this situation in the tech sector pretty simply. He said, "Shit is hitting the fan."

Scott Galloway: Oh, look, there's just no doubt about it. If you talk to a VC, almost every fund that was deployed last year is massively underwater. And then you have this kind of perfect storm of interest rates going up. It's very difficult not to go into a recession. You know who's really screwed is Europe, because at least in the US, we are food and energy independent, whereas in Europe, they are neither of those things. So you could see Europe going into a severe recession. What everyone's hoping for here is a soft landing. It'll probably be a hard landing, but our economy's diversified. We have sectors that are still doing really well. But the scariest stat that's come out is we had record consumer debt in March.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, people wanted to spend after the pandemic.

Scott Galloway: Well, and not only that, but young people, generally speaking — current income. The reason current income is so dangerous is you have the illusion that current income will always stay the same or go higher. So you increase your spend to that. Among young people who have not only increased their spending but increased it dramatically, and then you have this moral hazard of, "Oh, I haven't had to make my student loan payments for two years, and there's a chance that it will all be wiped away." And you layer in this "buy now, pay later," which is nothing but consumer debt with no guardrails masking as innovation.

Kara Swisher: You had noted that to me. This "buy now, pay later" — there's been a lot of articles lately on this.

Scott Galloway: Oh, Kara, it's a train wreck. It's a train wreck with lipstick on it. The innovation — "Isn't this cool? This is finding a new way to give easy credit to people who, quite frankly, should have had the guardrails of not being able to get that credit." They can walk into a Free People store and buy $400 in outfits for Coachella when they can't afford it. You're going to see this is a big deal.

Kara Swisher: A credit squeeze, yeah.

Scott Galloway: It's just all the moons are lining up, and then you're just going to see forced selling. You're going to see a lot of people get margin calls and start to sell. Now, having said that, the time a guy like me says it's going to get really bad, the market rips up again. Markets don't go straight up or straight down. There'll be some big days in the market.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, like the other day.

Scott Galloway: Whenever anyone says to me, "Okay, well, what do you do then, Scott?" I'm like, "I personally am always in the market." It's just as I've gotten older and my Kevlar is diversification. I try to be in a bunch of different things that are somewhat uncorrelated. You can never find anything that's totally uncorrelated because diversification has meant everyone's invested in everything. But I just don't think there's any getting around it.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. The market —

Scott Galloway: You should diversify. That's always something.

Kara Swisher: I mean, Scott here has a closet full of ketamine right now as we speak.

Scott Galloway: Where did that come from? He's been emptied.

Kara Swisher: Where did it come from? A closet full of ketamine?

Scott Galloway: My brother has a closet full of things for the apocalypse.

Kara Swisher: Does he? He has a go bag?

Scott Galloway: He has a — not a bag, like a closet. Like a closet, yeah.

Kara Swisher: I don't know. I don't know.

Scott Galloway: Two-headed glass dildo, some ketamine, a Pamperer video.

Kara Swisher: No, oh my God. I'm ready to go.

Scott Galloway: Oh my God, why do you go there? And my testosterone. That's it.

Kara Swisher: Oh my God. But anyway, tech companies are laying off employees. This is a big deal. Robinhood cut 9% of its workforce — we talked about them last week. Meta is slowing or freezing hiring for mid-level and senior roles. And Uber — Dara Khosrowshahi, who you talked about last week — announced plans to cut costs and treat hiring as a "privilege," which means no hiring. That's what that means. So what do you do with your company? Do companies go on buying sprees because there's too much antitrust settlement also at the same time? What do you think is going to happen here? How long does this last?

Scott Galloway: I don't know. I think that depends on a variety of factors, including Europe's superpower, which is to start world wars, if that actually keeps happening. So I don't think anybody knows. But there's just no getting around it. Every company I'm on the board of, we are looking at costs for the first time in a long time. I'm on the board of another company that's laying off people. You're going to see — there's just no doubt. We've just been feeding at the trough for a while, and companies are going to have to tighten their belt. There's just no getting around it. We're going to see layoffs and it's going to ripple through. It started in the public markets. It's rippling through to the private markets. One of the basics of strategy is if you're in a position, you never make up more ground than when you play offense when everyone else is playing defense.

Kara Swisher: That's the point, yeah.

Scott Galloway: And you're going to have companies that are still doing really well, and even though their stocks are down, if they feel confident they can get around antitrust, they are going to go start acquiring companies. Peloton is a great deal right now.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they're looking for investors, by the way.

Scott Galloway: Peloton will do a debt deal, but it's a great acquisition for somebody. Roku is probably a great acquisition for a big media company right now.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, Pinterest. Pinterest.

Scott Galloway: There's a lot of companies that all of a sudden are in the 70 to 80% off bin.

Kara Swisher: Yep, quality goods. That beautiful pair of shoes that you kept for your whole life.

Scott Galloway: There you go. It's a quality discount bin.

Kara Swisher: All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. And when we come back, the abortion fight isn't coming down anytime soon. And we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Kirsten Grind, enterprise reporter at the *Wall Street Journal*.

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Kara Swisher: Scott, we're back with the latest in the fight over abortion rights, which gets more explosive with each passing day. I can't even believe some of these headlines. *The Washington Post* is reporting a new leak that further confirms the Supreme Court's intention to overturn Roe v. Wade. The latest report confirms that the five-majority to strike Roe remains intact, according to three conservatives close to the court.

Kara Swisher: Senate Democrats are planning to vote Wednesday on a bill that would make abortion legal nationally, which doesn't have the 60 votes to overcome the filibuster in the 50-50 Senate. Senator Chuck Schumer is still promising to bring the bill to the floor with a strategy of making every senator go on the record about their position. I mean, it's okay, sure.

Kara Swisher: And there's all kinds of things about making abortion murder in some states, not allowing—my brother, Dr. Jeffrey Swisher, went nuts around ectopic pregnancies. Meanwhile, telemedicine providers and groups are seeing a massive spike in the number of people requesting information about actual abortion pills, according to Politico. And Mitch McConnell said a national ban on abortion would be, quote, "possible."

Kara Swisher: So anyway, what do you think of the situation? People who have been telling me on Twitter to calm down, that this is just the Supreme Court deciding they shouldn't be in the business of this and that it should be left up to the states, and that your hair's on fire for no reason. What do we see? The governor of Mississippi stated for the first time, had the confidence to say on network television that a ban on contraception is not off the table.

Kara Swisher: So to not believe that this doesn't continue to cascade or waterfall back to, again, absconding the rights of people who are disproportionately people of color, disproportionately women, disproportionately people who don't have a lot of economic flexibility. This couldn't be—as the world is realizing that to be a progressive nation, to invest in prosperity involves giving people rights, not taking them away. We are going the other way. It's like you're literally waking up right now and going, "Is this my America?" Yep.

Scott Galloway: I know you were saying that earlier today with me. Canada has said they will let people come there to have abortions. It literally is that. Margaret Atwood wrote a really amazing piece in *The Guardian* from a talk she gave. She, of course, wrote *The Handmaid's Tale*. And I just think she's a good predictor, not a—she's writing about dystopia. A lot of the stuff in that book, Canada and Mexico were the good places and the U.S. was not.

Scott Galloway: One of the things that drives me crazy is that we're called alarmists. We're not alarmists. We can read and hear what these people are saying. It'll be interesting to see if they've gone too far, if they're over their skis on this stuff. They're really overreaching in a way that is really significant. But they're hoping to lock in their voting wins and then lock in a minority rule, essentially. This is a minority position—whether it's on gay rights, on contraception, on abortion. This is a minority point of view. And so they're hoping to lock themselves in so they can impose it on everybody else.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I mean, I'm hopeful that it inspires people to realize, no, we've been saying it could happen and it is happening. And with it, it begins to catalyze a broader conversation around the need for moderates. It hopefully catalyzes a conversation around young men to say this impacts us in terms of our ability to have economic viability ourselves, what it means for our daughters, our mothers, what it means for our ability to start businesses and have a workforce.

Scott Galloway: I hope that men start thinking about—young men start thinking about—okay, let's be honest, guys, we love to get laid. And it's always the guy's idea to have unprotected sex. If you look at why women have abortions, the majority are done in the first 12 weeks. And the most prominent reason given is they have an unreliable partner. And it's always the guy that wants to have unprotected sex.

Scott Galloway: So guys, let me put it really base. You want to get laid? This is going to severely threaten that because women have a much finer filter for who they have sex with and how often they have sex because the downsides and the commitments are much greater for them than for us. All this is doing is vastly widening that gulf. If you want to go back to old Spain, where men had to come to the house and court a woman for 15 months before getting engaged and then having sex, okay, that's where we're headed. This is going to have all kinds of ramifications that people haven't even thought about.

Kara Swisher: You spoke very eloquently about it last week. A lot of people were very moved by it. I was certainly, about your mom and everything. But there's no such thing as too much alarmism here. We have seen it. The gays know when they're up to trouble.

Kara Swisher: Speaking of which, there was a very good *New York Times* piece about Ed Koch being in the closet this week, which you should read.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, it was really gripping. Really sad. It made me feel sad for him.

Kara Swisher: He was sad. It was a sad piece. And also, by the way, how he handled AIDS was terrible.

Scott Galloway: My favorite quote was from an older piece by Michael Specter where Larry Kramer, the wonderful playwright who wrote *The Normal Heart*, who was an activist, said he lived in the same building as Ed Koch. And he used to say to his dogs as they were passing each other, "There's the guy who killed all of daddy's friends." Which was just so vicious but fantastic on some level.

Kara Swisher: It's true. As sad as it was, it was also what a terrible thing he did and allowed to have happened and didn't really respond to the AIDS crisis. At the same time, by the way, *The New York Times*, which was not in this piece, was quite anti-gay for a very long time too in terms of covering this stuff back then. I wish there was a little more of that in that piece, but it was really a very moving and sad piece about the policy impact of a closeted homosexual. They exist today and we know who they are.

Scott Galloway: It brings up a lot—it's something that the straight community doesn't really empathize with. I didn't think I knew any gay people when I was in college. Then what I found out is the majority of my close friends are gay and were gay. As soon as they got out of UCLA where you couldn't be gay in the 80s, I found out. A couple of my close friends didn't come out until their late 20s and early 30s, and I just didn't get it. I'm like, we live in San Francisco or New York. None of your friends were going to judge you. Why wouldn't you just get on with living your life?

Scott Galloway: And they kind of sat me down and said, "Scott, do you have any idea how upset my parents were going to be, upset my employer was going to be, how upset I was going to be at myself? I had been taught my whole life there was something wrong with me." In reading that story about the mayor, it really took me back to just how hard it is. We don't get it when you're straight and you feel like you're a progressive and you're like, "Well, I would have accepted you." It's like, maybe you would have, but the world wasn't going to.

Kara Swisher: I'm having flashbacks right now. You're causing me to have flashbacks. Honestly, it sucked. It sucked. And it took a lot of guts to come out, of which Ed Koch did not have, and which many people don't have.

Kara Swisher: By the way, same thing with abortion. A lot of these people pushing this stuff either have had abortions or have directed their mistresses to have abortions. It's good for me quietly and then do this virtue signaling. There are so many stories of those people.

Scott Galloway: It really is.

Kara Swisher: I would urge you to read Margaret Atwood's piece. *The Handmaid's Tale* is a primer on some of the future. Not every bit of it, of course, but it really is an attitude towards women's bodies. She said enforced childbirth is slavery, really, of women. I don't think she said that lightly. It's a very good piece. You should read it.

Kara Swisher: For more on the Supreme Court leak and its implications, you can check out some of our other shows across the Vox Media Podcast Network that are covering the story, including *Stay Tuned with Preet*, *The Weeds*, and *Today Explained*, wherever you listen to Pivot.

Kara Swisher: Wow, this is a fucking bummer, Scott, in your apartment. Jesus, Louiseus. And now we're going to bring on a friend of Pivot, Kirsten Grind. Kirsten is an enterprise reporter at *The Wall Street Journal* and co-author of *Happy at Any Cost* about former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who died tragically several years ago. Welcome, Kirsten.

Kara Swisher: I knew Tony very well and spent a lot of time with him in this book and all the stories about his death, his untimely death. Although for people who watched him for a while, it was also not a surprise in some ways. Can you tell us what Tony's story tells us about Silicon Valley? He was a lovely person and also troubled at the same time, almost very poignant and sad. I recall even when he was living, even though he was devoted to happy workplaces. Can you talk a little bit about him in general?

Kirsten Grind: Definitely. Thanks to you guys for having me. So Tony, what a heartbreaking story. He was truly this legitimate entrepreneur. I feel like we cover a lot of entrepreneurs here who aren't so earnest and good as Tony was. He tried very hard to revolutionize the workplace. But all along, he had these sort of hidden mental health issues that popped up along the way, but were very easy to sort of ignore, gloss over if you were a friend of his or a coworker. It's really easy to just see someone drinking regularly and copiously, but functionally, and just kind of ignore that. And that's what was going on with Tony.

Kirsten Grind: It's kind of the reverse story in a way. If you think of Adam Neumann at WeWork or something, these are people that truly did something wrong at their startup. But it's the same trend we're seeing across Silicon Valley all the time, which is this notion of turning these people into gods. That's exactly what happened to Tony too. He became this sort of business figure, happiness messiah, and became sort of not even a real person.

Kara Swisher: For people who don't know it, in his company, he had this—I did a funny video years ago walking through this place. And it was relentlessly happy. And it had all kinds of things. People putting on whatever they wanted on their desks. They did all kinds of weeding people out who weren't happy. It was an odd and interesting way to run a company. It was in Vegas at the time where he was, and then he did other things in Vegas also. He did Holacracy. He was always trying to perfect the workplace because his workplace was his family in a way that was unusual, although many entrepreneurs are like that.

Kara Swisher: Can you talk a little bit about this? Because he had a bus that he went around on with his book about happiness. He'd always try to hug me, which was irritating to every level. I'd be like, "I'll break your arms if you hug me one more time." But talk a bit about this idea of creating families and happy workplaces and then not being happy. And he did drink quite a bit, as I recall.

Kirsten Grind: Yeah, it's funny because now that doesn't seem that unusual, but back then when Tony was pioneering it in, say, 2008 to 2010, this notion of your employees being happy was really odd. And I like the word "relentless" because it did seem relentless to some people. Stuff everywhere, paintball fights, interrupting your work, parties all the time. But for some reason, it really worked for Zappos for quite a lot of years. I've never talked to company employees who loved a company as much as they loved Zappos pre-2018. They just were obsessed with that place. So he had clearly figured something out.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they were perfectly pleased. There's a lot of cupcakes and sugar, as I recall. But Scott?

Scott Galloway: Kirsten, nice to meet you. I find this story—what's interesting about the story is more what it says about us than the actual story. I don't have the same affection for Tony as Kara or probably even you having gotten to know somebody. I just feel like he was a drug addict, like one of the 55,000 other drug addicts, mostly from opiates, that died. But because he was an innovator, we're fascinated with him. I find it's more of a weird reflection on us that *Dopesick* gets an amazing series to represent the 55,000 unmarked graves of basically middle America and lower income America. But Tony Hsieh is a tragedy.

Scott Galloway: It's just strange that we find it so heart-wrenching because he built an amazing shoe company and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. But at the end of the day, he was a drug addict. I'm curious what you think this says about our society, our fascination with Tony Hsieh. And I realize I'm putting words in your mouth here.

Kirsten Grind: No, that's a great question. And you're certainly not the only person to feel that way. So I'll start with a little story. For the book, Tony died in that shed in New London, Connecticut. He was found in a pool shed at a residential house of one of his friends. In the shed, there was a fire, there were whippets in there, nitrous oxide, there was flammables like candles. He was pulled out of the shed and then died nine days later from smoke inhalation. The death has been ruled an accident. They couldn't really tell if it was self-harm or if it was just something in the shed like a propane heater that caught fire.

Kirsten Grind: Because of this, I had to spend some time in New London with the fire investigators. New London's an interesting community. There's a very poor section. Tony was in a house in a very rich section. I remember the fire investigator who had been there for decades said to me, "I wish that the media would care more about the dozens of people that are dying in this poor section than this one billionaire that kind of showed up in our town and happened to die in this tragic way."

Kirsten Grind: Scott, I think that's what you were getting at. His death has been magnified in a way that it hasn't for normal people. We did really try hard to make this a story about all of us because that's actually what it is. It's not just a story about Tony Hsieh. I personally had never even heard of Tony Hsieh before I started investigating this. I don't think he's a Steve Jobs type name. But what this shows is what happens when all of us are going along our lives and we're just ignoring all these things that are happening to us and we're focusing on the wrong stuff. Maybe we're trying so hard to be happy because that's shoved down our throats in this culture. It's showing in a dramatic fashion what can happen if you do that.

Kara Swisher: That's a great answer, Kirsten. Can you talk about the mental illness too? Because really what happened was it got glossed over by his series of enablers. There were some enablers that were better than others. He was troubled. The pandemic particularly isolated him with more and more people who were just being paid for by him.

Kara Swisher: I remember going to Vegas and visiting him when he was doing the whole Holacracy thing. And then he had that park in Vegas, which is really quite beautiful, the thing he made there. But there was all kinds of tragedy in that too, where he was trying to build out this perfect ecosystem of entrepreneurs. Ignoring a mental illness in entrepreneurs is really profound, I find, as they're going around the bend. Was there any intervention by anybody? Could there have been any, given how much money he had and how everybody was on his payroll? I remember saying to him, "Everyone here is on your payroll. So of course they're going to say you're great."

Kirsten Grind: It's a seriously huge problem, mental health issues among entrepreneurs, because the same traits that are making you a great entrepreneur can lead to some of these issues. With Tony, his issues were easy to ignore for a long time. What happened in 2019 was Amazon, which owned Zappos, started putting a lot more pressure on him. Jeff Wilke, who was a Bezos lieutenant, sort of said, "These workplace experiments are nice. Where's the money?"

Kirsten Grind: At the same time, Tony's getting older. He doesn't really believe in traditional family. His friend group is getting younger. The party atmosphere at Zappos is kind of taking a dark turn. He decides to move to Park City, Utah, gets stuck there during the pandemic. His drug use begins to spiral out of control. That's when we start to see finally some intervention by his close friends and family. They really tried. But at that point, he was surrounded by this group of enablers that were really blocking access to people reaching him in Park City, Utah.

Kara Swisher: And then he moved. Then they got a hold of him in this place where he died, correct? Wasn't that by that time?

Kirsten Grind: They did. He had really gone downhill in Park City. I think he knew there was this kind of secret intervention attempt being headed up by his very good friend, Jewel, the singer. And he started traveling a lot, I suspect, to avoid this intervention. He had been in Puerto Rico. Then he was in New London. They were literally days away from getting to him when he had that accident in the shed.

Scott Galloway: I'm curious if it's the same arc here because I don't know the story as well. But there's a common story you find in the Valley. Success with males. They grow up with not a lot of social opportunity. They're the kid who's good at math. They're the kid who has a business in high school and doesn't go to the prom. They're the kid who works his ass off and by his senior year is already starting companies. The kid that has no relationships, no life, doesn't get to St. Bart's, doesn't get to Saint-Tropez because they're coding till four in the morning. They're not in good shape. They're not socially attractive. They're not sexually attractive.

Scott Galloway: And all of a sudden, they become the sexiest man in the world because they're seen as an innovator and they have hundreds of millions of dollars, which is attractive to friends and romantic partners. They literally have 40 years or 20 years of sensory deprivation of pent-up demand. And all of a sudden—and I'm not going to say I can relate to this—but partying in amazing places and hanging out with young people and having sex with young people is a lot of fun. When you haven't had a lot of that up until that point, you don't know how to modulate. It's like sticking my 11-year-old in a store called Just Sugar and giving him a credit card. He's going to have a difficult time modulating.

Scott Galloway: I see this across the Valley. These guys just go apeshit. And the other thing—I realize this is a speech here—I think we call them enablers. These guys made their own choices. They avoided people. They purposely chose this life. It's no one's fault in my view, but their own. We like to think that they were taken off course by a series of enablers. There's no shortage of people who will hang out with you and tell you what you want to hear if you're paying for the bottles. But isn't this a common story through the Valley?

Kara Swisher: That's true. Well, I'm going to push back on that, Scott. He was quite mentally ill too. You can take advantage of someone. He once told me—I mean, seriously, Elon Musk has said this as a joke—that we were living in a simulation, so none of it mattered. He always kept telling me that. It was strange. He had very severe mental problems. So I don't know. The enablers, you could see it rather easily. So I do blame some of those people. But isn't this a common story? Let's let Kirsten talk.

Kirsten Grind: It definitely is. No, it's for sure a common story. One thing for Tony specifically, going back to these mental health issues, this took a while to uncover, which you wouldn't think it would be that hard to uncover. But he had this severe social anxiety. Imagine this person who's partying, who's in this candy store, drinking, seeing people all the time, living in an Airstream trailer park, with this debilitating social anxiety. So he's realizing all these things for the first time and also having to cope with that.

Kirsten Grind: Another thing—not to also give a speech—but one thing that drives me crazy about this area is biohacking and how we all sort of celebrate these entrepreneurs for all their ice baths and all the stuff that they're doing. That really harmed Tony at the end because he thought he could solve his own health problems. Through so much of the reporting, I was just sort of like, "Oh, can he just like take some Zoloft or see a therapist? Why does he have to take like five ice baths a day or regulate his breathing?"

Kara Swisher: Some of that is fine to an extent.

Scott Galloway: Most of us don't celebrate it. We think it's ridiculous.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Well, Steve Jobs tried to cure himself, right? He did. He killed himself in that regard. Some of that is fine. I don't mean to say it's all terrible. Meditation is great. But to take it to the extreme that Tony did, where he was ignoring very traditional remedies that could have really helped him, that's the issue.

Scott Galloway: I just have a follow-up question. What is the one myth or the part of the narrative that the press and the general public gets wrong around what went down here? What surprised you when you sort of peeled back the onion?

Kirsten Grind: One thing—this is maybe a little bit in the weeds—but Tony's family, it's an interesting family story. They were Taiwanese immigrants. His brother kind of had this complex where he wanted to be like him. His brother was down in Park City with him towards the end, had been kind of sent in by the family to help. The rumors we were hearing about what this brother was doing, just wild stuff that never came to fruition.

Kirsten Grind: Back to the point of whose fault this was, this whole thing was like shades of gray. People were down there. There were some people that were outright just taking his money while he was sick. And then there were people like his brother who were taking some money, but also were clearly trying to help and were conflicted. They were dealing with an addict. One of the things that we really tried to get to the bottom of is the role of his family there, which I think had been sort of embellished along the way.

Kara Swisher: Meaning embellished that they tried to help him or embellished that his brother was out to get him?

Kirsten Grind: That his brother was like out to get him. I don't think his brother was out to get him. I think his brother was like a lot of people around him dealing with a mentally ill addict with enormous money.

Scott Galloway: And enormously.

Kara Swisher: I agree with you on your question, Scott. It made me think about it. Compared to a lot of these people, he was quite earnest. It wasn't all bullshit with this guy. He really was a seeker. That's why it was tragic, because so many of the others are so malevolent, and he just wasn't. He was a sweet man.

Kirsten Grind: He was a sweet man. It's funny because a lot of my work, I'm dealing with people who I don't find that nice and sweet. It took me a while. I really spent a lot of time asking people, "Was this for real? Was this workplace culture for real? Was this happiness mantra for real?" And I actually think it really was for a lot of years, which is quite an accomplishment.

Kara Swisher: He did. It was also weird at the time. It was weird at the time. I spent a lot of time at Zappos, and it was weird. It was odd.

Kirsten Grind: I bet.

Kara Swisher: And I was the malevolent person there, I remember. You're so unhappy, Kara. I'm like, "No, I don't have to say I'm happy. I'm just realistic."

Kirsten Grind: Well, you had this really interesting interview with him. Someone in the audience asked him, "I'm really shy. I don't know what to do if I'm speaking publicly. What should I do, Tony? What's your advice?" And Tony doesn't answer for a long time. And then he says, "Drink alcohol." I was like, "Now there is maybe a warning sign that you could have overlooked." What advice is that? Like, drink?

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it was fine for a while. And then it escalated. I saw him play poker a whole bunch of times. And he had a special liquor he drank and a lot of it.

Kirsten Grind: Yes, that's right. He had someone pour it for him. It was very odd.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, separately talking about other stories, you're the lead reporter at *The Wall Street Journal*'s Activision Blizzard investigation into sexual harassment and the role of Bobby Kotick. And you reported on Sheryl Sandberg pressuring the *Daily Mail* to drop reporting on Kotick's misconduct. Will anything come of the investigation Meta is supposedly doing in that situation? Eventually, by the way, Microsoft will take over this company and presumably all of the issues will be—Microsoft has its own history of sexual harassment problems, but they do know how to deal with it. So where is it right now, especially around Meta?

Kirsten Grind: In terms of Meta, that's a good question. We sort of have our eye on what's going on there. They were kind of narrowly looking at how Sheryl handled this whole situation with the *Daily Mail*. And this is the issue of her using Facebook resources to do so.

Kara Swisher: She has her own PR people, from what I recall. I haven't talked to her in years, but yeah.

Kirsten Grind: Exactly. It's whether she used Facebook resources specifically in her outreach to the *Daily Mail*, kind of on behalf of Bobby Kotick and his restraining order allegations. It's unclear what's going to happen next there. I think that just came out recently. So we're still looking into it.

Kara Swisher: That's so odd. She has her own people because I thought that would be a real mistake on her part. Go ahead, Scott.

Scott Galloway: Is it that this is anything—I'm cynical. My assumption is that friends are always trying to help powerful people, other powerful friends, and that this is not unusual. It just comes across especially cynical for someone who's tried to position themselves as a champion for women. But did anything really unusual happen here?

Kirsten Grind: That's right. That's exactly right. We all kind of just viewed it as an interesting view, albeit a detailed one, into people potentially abusing their positions of power. I completely agree with you. I don't have the evidence, but I'm quite sure this happens all the time.

Kara Swisher: Everyone's gotten a call from Sheryl, let's just say.

Scott Galloway: Right.

Kara Swisher: I've gotten, "Hey, girl." No. No, no. Congratulations. I'm going to give you the other side of this story here. I mean, you can just see how—what happens to the acquisition, though?

Kirsten Grind: What it's going. I've talked to Microsoft people recently about this and they feel like they're just sort of moving through it, just like trying to get everything done. It's interesting. It's sort of like I get asked that almost every day by an editor what's happening with the acquisition.

Kara Swisher: It's just, you know, the problems continue to strangely keep piling up on the Activision side. So they have this SEC investigation that is very much still underway. Explain that. This is David Giffen and Barry Diller, correct?

Kirsten Grind: No, that's actually a separate one. So this first one is actually about how CEO Bobby Kotick and the board handled these sexual harassment claims over the years. Then the Barry Diller one is separate. That's a DOJ investigation into potential insider trading. And we recently reported that Activision and Bobby Kotick has been pulled into that one as well. And that's, of course, separate from the Sheryl Sandberg thing. There's a whole separate issue going on with the state investigation into Activision. So, you know, these problems, they're still ongoing, but Microsoft is buying them. So I would be shocked if anything derailed that acquisition, to be honest. Still undergoing federal government looking at.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it's undergoing the FTC review. It should close next year. Really, this is just, to be honest, it doesn't look good reputationally for Bobby Kotick or those Activision board members, but will it derail the actual deal? I think it would have to be pretty big. It's a good outcome for them. It's important for Microsoft, which is interesting. In any case, everybody should read this book. Kirsten Grind works at the Wall Street Journal. She's a co-author. And your co-author's name is?

Kirsten Grind: Catherine Sayre. And she covers gambling in Las Vegas for us here at the Journal.

Kara Swisher: It's called *Happy at Any Cost*. And I know, Scott, I get your point, but it's a really... this guy was unusual. And it was really tragic. So everybody should read it. It's a really interesting book. You captured him rather well, I thought, of someone who spent a lot of time with him. Thank you so much. Anyway, thank you so much, Kirsten. Nice to meet you.

Kirsten Grind: Thank you. Very nice to meet you guys.

Kara Swisher: All right, Scott, that was a great question. I hadn't really thought of it that way because I knew him so well. But one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

[Ad Break]

Kara Swisher: Okay, Scott, let's hear some predictions from you. You've made several in the show already. And let's think, let me have a happy prediction because life feels a little down right now.

Scott Galloway: You're talking to the wrong guy.

Kara Swisher: I thought so.

Scott Galloway: You're talking to a guy who woke up on Sunday and thought, you know, is it a bad sign we're not going to have a great Mother's Day when I'm in a gas station thinking, do they have Mother's Day cards? You know you're just in for a rough day when you're—

Kara Swisher: I didn't get mine from you yet, but I'm waiting.

Scott Galloway: Okay, you got me the green juice, so you're good. You get 78. You're literally—I mean, you got enough. That's like—anyways, you're going to be—if you move to Japan, you're going to be the wealthiest woman in the world.

Kara Swisher: Aren't they all supposed to support you when you get older? Anyway, I think that was both. Let me just say, all I did was kid stuff all day. So it was Mother Works Day.

Scott Galloway: My prediction is not good. You can see how you fall into this trap of playing up or down stories because of personal relationships. I just find it fascinating that all of these libertarians who are investing in or taking over Twitter are so critical of Twitter. But Jack's okay. Jack's one of us. It's like, no.

Kara Swisher: Agreed. Come on.

Scott Galloway: Agreed. If you're looking for a culprit here, this thing was a fucking disaster under Jack. Under Jack. And you can blame the board, but fine. He was the CEO or the co-co-co-CEO. But I know this kid in the buy now, pay later sector, and he's just the most likable, decent, earnest kid. And I find that when I write about Buy Now, Pay Later, I find myself being reserved. And here's the prediction of what I actually think. This thing is a fucking shit show. Buy Now, Pay Later is the equivalent of the subprime crisis brewing for millennials and Gen Z. And in California, nine out of ten dollars of all consumer loans issued in 2020 were Buy Now, Pay Later loans. Gen Z consumers have spent 925% more through point-of-sale services than in January 2020 because they walk up, enter free people going to Coachella, and they say, "Are you sure you only want to buy a $40 outfit? You can buy a $400 outfit," and there's no credit check right now. And like all of these things, there's mendacious societal impact. 28% of Black and Hispanic Americans signed up for at least one point-of-sale loan in January 2022 compared with 14% of white Americans. And a lot of people on both sides will say, "It's not fair of you to infantilize certain segments." But the reality is young men and women of color are getting into more and more debt because of BNPL. And I find this is going to be very scary. And then you have 43% of Gen Z users have missed at least one BNPL payment. And then we have consumer debt levels for March of 2022 climbed by $53 billion in annual increase of 14% seasonally adjusted, which I think is the largest increase on record.

Kara Swisher: Yes. Not a surprise post-pandemic though, but go ahead.

Scott Galloway: And revolving credit, which includes credit cards, surged by 22%. And then you have the younger cohort, which is really getting whacked by inflation because their wages have gone up and the media goes crazy, but the cost of their core goods services has gone up. So their purchasing power has gone down. So you have this perfect storm of bad things. And then you have some moral hazard. And that is we gave away too much money and people will always think that that's going to last forever. And two, people get angry at me for this. I think this indecision around student loan forgiveness is really bad because young people haven't had to pay their student loans for the last couple of years and they're under the false notion, and maybe it's not false to them, that it's all going to be wiped out, which I think is a really bad thing. So you have this perfect storm of a debt crisis looming for young people. And then I won't have to deal with that.

Kara Swisher: By the way, you're going to have to deal with that, kids. It's called debt. It's called debt for a reason. It may be wrong way to do it. Maybe we should reform our educational system, but you're going to have to pay that.

Scott Galloway: Well, here's the thing. Here's the solution. I'm trying to be more thoughtful about offering a solution. There was an interesting tweet and it said, "Should we be teaching calculus to 11th graders when they don't have basic financial literacy?" And I think that if there was one piece of the curriculum I would want to see changed in high schools and even in junior high schools, we have to give young men and women some basic training in financial literacy. What is debt? What are interest rates? What are the stock and bond market movements? What does it mean for you? Living below your means, diversifying.

Kara Swisher: I would agree. Oddly enough, I just spent a lot of time with one of my sons talking about this, like going through everything, explaining... he lost his bank card, and I used this as an opportunity to discuss everything. And it was really helpful. And I was like, "Don't they teach you this in school?" And of course they didn't teach me in school. You just learn it. But you're right, 100%. That's a great idea. So I think my prediction is you're going to hear a lot more about buy now, pay later credit in this credit bubble that is a function of a lot of things, including moral hazard of this, holding out this notion that if you take out—if you're a student and you're about to sign up to take $100,000 out so you can go to get some Joey Bag of Donuts degree, are you more or less inclined to take out that debt if all debt gets wiped away right now? Why not? It might get wiped away again. So, we have a debt crisis brewing that's enormous in size. That's my prediction.

Scott Galloway: Big one.

Kara Swisher: All right. The Pied Piper is coming for you. Okay, Scott, that's the depressing frigging show. I'm making a prediction. Go ahead. I'm going to see *Top Gun* early because I'm interviewing one of the producers.

Scott Galloway: You are. *Top Gun 2*.

Kara Swisher: Nice. It's going to be happy. Everything is going to be good. There's a lot of playing basketball on a beach with oiled men. It's going to be fantastic. That's all I have to say. That is my happy place. Anyway, we'll be back on Friday for more. Please read us out. Today's show was produced by Lara Neiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Indretot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miel Silverio. 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 later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Are you looking to feel more upbeat? Two words. First, oiled. Second, men. Also, thank you, Drew.