The Twitter Whistleblower, A Potential Saudi Vice Deal, and Guest Mark Bergen

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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.

Scott Galloway: And I'm Scott Galloway.

Kara Swisher: Well, welcome back again, Scott. Fresh off your appearance on Bill Maher, no less. Let's play a clip of your glorious return to that show.

[Clip plays]

Scott Galloway: [In clip] If you believe, as I do, that there is no separation between the CCP and a Chinese company who can disappear a CEO for four weeks. If you believe that the CCP has a vested interest.

Bill Maher: [In clip] You're talking about the Communist Party in China.

Scott Galloway: [In clip] OK. And if you believe the CCP has a vested interest in diminishing our standing globally. And then you also acknowledge that people under the age of 18 are spending more time on TikTok than they're spending on every streaming network combined. Are we comfortable? Are we down with an organization that wants to undermine America controlling the media our children see? It should be banned, full stop.

[Clip ends]

Kara Swisher: Whoa. Wow. You said this at Code. You talked about this in your presentation, which was great. And also several of the other people on stage agreed with you. Matthias Dopfner from Axel Springer, who we interviewed. A lot of the other ones seemed to have that idea. He said outright ban. He's resisting going on TikTok. But a lot of people said the same thing, and you were quite explicit about that. So talk a little bit about that.

Scott Galloway: Well, there was a bit of a Twitter kerfuffle that broke out online. People saying, "You're distracting from the larger point. How can you say this about TikTok? This is just jingoism or xenophobia."

Kara Swisher: Ah, jingoism. Yeah, I hadn't heard that in a while. That's a word in school.

Scott Galloway: A Washington Post reporter said "this MF," which I think means motherfucker, doesn't understand TikTok.

Kara Swisher: Which one? The one that's on TikTok? I don't know. Anyway, he shouldn't be doing that. A very aggressive person in the Washington Post thinks it's going to make them look younger.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. Anyway, I'm just uncomfortable with a platform that can put basically what I feel is like an electronic node or direct cable line into the brainstem of our kids under the age of 18 who are now spending more time on TikTok than every streaming network combined. Someone online correctly pointed out that there is no direct evidence that they are doing what you're accusing them of. I want to acknowledge that point. But here's the thing: I don't want them to have the potential to do it. It strikes me as just naive to think that the CCP, if they have this sort of inroad into an addictive substance... it's kind of what the British did to the Chinese with their opium, right?

Kara Swisher: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think more to the point is several people who are in the U.S. TikTok don't like this either. You have to separate the really good product from the ownership, right?

Scott Galloway: 100%. That's the correct issue.

Kara Swisher: It's just like the Saudis owning things. I've always been a critic of Saudi investment because they're murderous thugs of Jamal Khashoggi. If you're going to take that money, be aware of whose hands you're holding. And secondly, it's a great product. We think it's a great product. We see why it's a good product. It's better than Facebook, for sure. It's better than Twitter. It's like Snapchat. It's addictive. Fantastic. And it's well done. But I think the issue is this is the Chinese government. I'm sorry to report, but they are... I mean, we can talk about our authoritarianism in this country and it exists and everything else. That's their modus operandi. Our government's looking at it. There are oracles involved. There are all kinds of things. But let's be clear: the Chinese government is a surveillance economy. If we complain about it here, wait until you go over to China and live over there. I think that's not jingoistic to point that out. It's not at all.

Scott Galloway: The idea that Matias had, which is most, is we're resisting putting our stuff up there. He said he's not going to not do it, right?

Kara Swisher: Well, I'm on it because here's the thing. I also advertise my online education firm on Instagram because I'm not going to disarm unilaterally. You can't get across nuance, unfortunately, in a format like Bill Maher. But there is some nuance in between. That is a spin of the firm, ensuring that all the data runs through strictly U.S. servers.

Scott Galloway: In Singapore, yeah. They say that it is. I just... it has to be separated. The word "ban" is a very blunt tool. I get that. I do think that there are a lot of people at TikTok who deserve economic upside. Usually, the idea of the government coming in and banning something... that's a pretty blunt instrument. But anyone who has kids... people say, "Actually, I'm doing some research on this right now. YouTube actually commands more attention than TikTok among children. Why aren't you worried about YouTube?" There is something different about the effect. I find with my 12-year-old, he does search and destroy on YouTube. He goes, "I want to see the highlights from the Bayern Munich game. I want to see a YouTube video on how to install batteries on this type of handset." He sits on his side like he's just taken a hit of opium and he just watches it. The algorithm says, "How do we take them deeper and deeper and deeper?" I think literally in a 48-hour period, if they decided to weigh in and you wouldn't even know they're doing it, they could sway elections. Or they could decide, "We're going to have another protest or protests emerging or blowing up all over the nation, as some have over the last couple of years, and we're going to inflame it among young people." They could. And they have lots of other things.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, great appearance, Scott. Thank you. We have a lot to talk about, but I think you're right. I think it's something to discuss. And calling you an MF... I'm going to find out who that is and give them a talking to.

Scott Galloway: Mama's way in here.

Kara Swisher: I see you're wearing a Washington Post t-shirt there. Do you know "Democracy Dies in Darkness"?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I wear... isn't that ironic? I wear a Washington Post. I love the Washington Post.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, today we'll talk about the latest drama at Twitter, a kinder, softer Bob Chapek. Bob, too, has grown a beard. Why a potential Vice media deal is raising eyebrows. Plus, we'll speak with Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen, who used to work for Kara Swisher, about his new book on the rise of YouTube, speaking of YouTube. But first, let's cover these very quickly. Twitter whistleblower Peter "Mudge" Zatko testifies to the Senate today. Last week, we learned that Twitter paid Mudge a severance of more than $7 million just past June, which Elon Musk is trying to make a big deal out of and saying the severance violates the terms of their deal and citing another reason why Elon should be law. This is ridiculous. They pay severances like this. I was like, that's not very much, actually. I remember a Google guy who was a real problem there got $40 million.

Scott Galloway: The most outrageous golden parachute ever was when Marissa Mayer at Yahoo fired Enrique de Castro. I think I got that right.

Kara Swisher: Yes, you did.

Scott Galloway: She brought him over to do biz dev. He lasted 15 months, and then she had to pay out a severance worth $58 million. By the way, the board's wet on this one. They likely approved that severance package.

Kara Swisher: Yes, indeed. I wrote a lot about Enrique. I helped move him that direction. He was really not up for that job, and that was not a very good hire from her. The lawyers in Musk know, "Okay, we're wrong. We're all wet. We're going to lose this case. Let's try and find any technicality possible." They're literally going to be like, "They served a lunch that was too much." Hey, Elon, this is not a lot of money. And you know it. It's not a lot of severance. I know it seems like... and I'm going to get all "Oh, Kara says $7 million is not money." No, it's not. Not in Silicon Valley for severance payments. Not in this world. Many people have gotten severance. I was surprised about how low it was compared to all the others we've written about over the many years. That was even 10 years ago. They were $40, $50 million on average for high level people like this. It just didn't work out with him. There's all kinds of noise about his bad managerial skills. Maybe it wasn't a fit. And now he's complaining about it at this unusual time. Again, very well regarded. Timing seems weird. Elon, this is not going to get you out of a deal. Stop making excuses. By the way, that judge has not allowed it to go any longer. Mid-October is when it happens. He can put the Mudge things in. But she did reiterate: you signed a deal without any kind of ability to complain about things and without any due diligence. So here you are.

[Transition]

Kara Swisher: While we were chatting with former Disney CEO Bob Iger at Code this past week, his successor, Bob Chapek, was getting ready for Disney's massive annual fan event, the D23 Expo near Disneyland. I had been invited by Bob Chapek to come to that the weekend after Code, but I did not because I needed to sleep. Over the weekend, more than 100,000 fans turned up to find out about upcoming Disney movies, new theme park rides, see Disney stars. They're all there. By the way, the New York Times covered the event. Very good piece, actually, by Brooks Barnes. It was a chance for Bob Chapek to, quote, "rebrand himself after a difficult start." The headline of the article by Brooks Barnes read "Disney CEO Pitches Warmer, Fuzzier Side." Speaking of fuzzy, he has a beard. He seems to be wearing regular shirts and suits. He's a more awkward person. As you saw, Bob Iger looks fantastic and as smooth as silk. Why do you think he has to do that?

Scott Galloway: In a 24/7 environment where CEOs are constantly... Code is absolutely like you couldn't do that any better. But the reason why I think these conferences are struggling a little bit is that you have so much access. These people are so present all the time. Everything they say is on video. Their conference calls are recorded. They're not only very accessible, but they're under constant media lights. The embodiment of the brand... if you look at the most successful companies over the last 20 years who've managed to get cheaper capital and then use that capital to pull the future forward, they all have one thing in common. They have an incredibly charismatic leader who's sort of this 3D embodiment of the brand. Unfortunately, that charisma has become too important.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: People want someone to enthrall them and excite them and be an incredible spokesperson.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they want a character. That's 100%. Bob Chapek is more kind of the old school CEO. I get the feeling he's an operator. But somebody has said to him, his board, his CMO has said, "You know what, boss?" It's Christina Shockey. They brought her in. She's helped Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Instagram she was at. She's quite talented. She replaced the guy from BP who sort of screwed up the "Don't Say Gay" thing. I think she's like, "Start to be a person. Start to be a writer."

Scott Galloway: Well, you hate to say it, but here's the bottom line. Disney probably trades... I don't know. It's such an incredible asset. He'll get another turn on EBITDA if they can make Bob more likable.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: So it's like, okay, if we're talking about another $3 to $8 billion in market cap, if we can just make you more likable, Bob, you need to dress better. You need to have some talking points. You need to smile more. By the way, that was the feedback they gave me. My segment producer gave me on Bill Maher. They're like, "Can you smile more?"

Kara Swisher: Yeah, you need to smile. I think you should smile more. And actually, sit up, Scott. You need to sit up more.

Scott Galloway: And there we go.

Kara Swisher: Oh, there you are. I have terrible posture.

Scott Galloway: You really do. I was going to point that out. It's bad for you to be an old, creaky man if you do that.

Kara Swisher: I am. See how nicely I'm sitting here. I'm all of those things.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. And no, but the gun show's in town. See, that's what I thought. Hello, ladies. Did it just get a little hot in here? Back to Chapek. Do you believe in lust at first sight or should I walk by again? Hello, hello, ladies. And he's back. You should not be the CEO of Disney. That is my observation from that last thing.

Kara Swisher: All right. In any case, it was good that he's doing this. I'm hoping he talks to me. By the way, we're going to play my entire interview with Bob Iger, Smooth Jazz at Code this coming Saturday. All right. First big story. We're going to get on to our first big story. Vice Media is struggling with a new do or don't. Vice is weighing a deal with Saudi media giant MBC, which is partly owned by, guess what, the Saudi government. Everything's owned by the Saudi government. That means you're dealing, no matter what you do, with MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, who I always call Mohammed Bonesaw.

Scott Galloway: Mohammed Bonesaw. Right, yeah.

Kara Swisher: Vice staffers aren't happy with the potential deal, taking the issue of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, among other things. But Vice's owners, including Rupert Murdoch, may decide the deal makes them more desirable as they seek buyers for the company. They've really been struggling. Now, I know you work there a little bit, but what is the Saudis doing? They have all this money now, obviously, even more, given the energy crisis. Would a deal help Vice's chances of selling or hurt it?

Scott Galloway: I don't... they have deals with MGM. This is, as I understand it, an opportunity for them to start creating content in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which would be incremental cash flows that would probably be very profitable, which would make the company worth more.

Kara Swisher: Sure.

Scott Galloway: So I think this would be good. The question is...

Kara Swisher: What Scott's referring to is a multimillion dollar music festival. They had organized one. Vice had done one. This is more stuff like that. They've always been pay to play, that company, in terms of advertisers and stuff like that. But go ahead.

Scott Galloway: So I would argue that if I was on Vice's board, I would be a proponent of this deal. And it's easy to be.

Kara Swisher: Thank you, Trump golf tournament. Well, here's the thing. I think if the government wants to weigh in and impose sanctions on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for having a leader that kills American journalists, I'm down with that and I think they should do that. Until then, I think for-profit companies need to be thoughtful about how they compete. If we're expecting the better angels to show up, I would respect and admire if they decided not to do that.

Scott Galloway: Where's the line though? What if Putin wanted to give him money?

Kara Swisher: That's the hard part. I agree.

Scott Galloway: What if Putin? I agree. But here in the media, what will we do when we're not shareholders and we're not employees and we're not trying to figure out a way for Vice to survive? The journalists there and the people there actually have jobs. It's very easy for us to be purists. I also think there's something to the notion that Western media has been the greatest 24/7 running commercial to espouse American values and also to make America a place that everybody feels empathetic for, everyone admires, everyone aspires to, everyone wants to immigrate to. So I do think there is a strategic interest in having American media and influence in these regions.

Kara Swisher: I don't think it affects them in any way. But I want to give you air time here. You don't think you think Biden should not do it? Yes, because I'm going to... meanwhile, another American company may need to address similar questions. The Saudi government and Union of Gulf states have called for Netflix to remove content that offends Islamic values, speaking of values, or face legal consequences. This is the problem. I don't think Netflix should comply, but they probably are going to have to.

Scott Galloway: Well, they have a choice. They can comply or not do business there.

Kara Swisher: That's right. Look at every movie theater. Look at Top Gun. They can't even put a flag on the enemy's planes that Tom Cruise is fighting against because they don't want to offend the Chinese, because they can make half a billion dollars in China. If you're looking for moral clarity, you're not going to find it in Hollywood.

Scott Galloway: No.

Kara Swisher: So I think Netflix will comply. I think they have to.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, or they have to leave. That's the bottom line. Google had to comply and they decided to leave. So you have a decision. But trying to say "no, it's censorship"...

Kara Swisher: All right, fair point. But let me just say, Vice does a lot of lectury stuff. Like, "Oh, how dare you do that?" I really don't want to listen to it from now.

Scott Galloway: I think you're underestimating the editors and the journalists at Vice that they would do that.

Kara Swisher: No, I don't think they'll be affected by it. I would be uncomfortable working there with that money. I did a column a couple of years ago saying, "Look, you can take their money, but let's be clear what you're doing." I was at a dinner party where they were stack ranking different investors of who's worst. They were like, "Singapore money is the best. Saudi money is the worst. Russian money is the very worst. Chinese money is below that." They were literally stack ranking who to take money from. It was interesting. But just be aware of what you're doing. I would not probably work for... I mean, I do leave when there's things we don't agree with. And I live with the consequences. But it's problematic for people working there, I suspect.

Scott Galloway: Well, Uber. Uber's taking money from this region. Unless we're just going to take Canada's...

Kara Swisher: Oh, Uber loves that money.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, unless we're going to take Canada's money. I think there's an argument for taking their money. Vice has journalists there who have a decision to make around whether they want to work... do you remember Al Gore's company? Al Gore, Mr. Inconvenient Truth, he sold his company to the Qataris.

Kara Swisher: Yes.

Scott Galloway: The question is, do you totally isolate them, which in many ways makes them more dangerous? NYU has a campus in Abu Dhabi.

Kara Swisher: Yes, yeah.

Scott Galloway: I'm going to guess it cost us zero. I'm actually going to guess we made money before the thing even broke around there.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I'm sure. Because they want... given what they offered us, I'm sure.

Scott Galloway: They want great Western institutions. One, I think they want academia. They want great media. But they also want, as a benefit, they want to whitewash some of the bad behavior there.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: But I also think there's some benefit to integration. And also, just being a capitalist, the cheaper capital we can access as American companies, the more successful our companies, the more taxes, the stronger our military. So I don't think this is an easy issue. Let's take that dirty money.

Kara Swisher: No, I think one of the things is that Trump points this out. It's like, "You think we're so good?" I'm like, "No, I don't think we're so good." But I think they're particularly bad this week. You know what I mean? They have to have something that costs for what they did. If I'm looking for total fairness, you're right. The U.S. has done all kinds of unpleasant things. But it's still at its heart... In Saudi Arabia, they arrested and jailed and detained a woman who was advocating, was one of the key proponents of getting Uber there and around women driving. She got out just relative last year. Then they arrested another Saudi woman. She was sentenced 34 years in prison for retweeting activists through her Twitter account. So it's really in another era. It's another age.

Scott Galloway: But let me ask you this. It's weird to be a defender of the kingdom here.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: Are you getting an investment from them soon?

Kara Swisher: I have not.

Scott Galloway: Do you think... although I'm going, and I'll get shit for this, I'm going to World Cup in Doha, just as I went to World Cup in Moscow, because I have young boys who are football crazy, and it's amazing. And now you're British, so yeah.

Kara Swisher: There you go. By the way, Scotland didn't make another World Cup, which is hugely disappointing. I don't care.

Scott Galloway: I don't care. The question is, is the treatment of gay people, in your view, more likely or less likely to improve if we become closer to them or if we attempt to punish them by not being involved?

Kara Swisher: I don't think those change one bit.

Scott Galloway: Where do you think we have a better outcome?

Kara Swisher: I don't think we change them one bit by being there. I don't think we make them more liberal for sure. I think that's such an argument, like the same thing. These anti-gay people came roaring back and everyone was like, "Oh, everything's changed." I'm like, "No, it hasn't. They just are not talking." Many types of people, especially of religions that are including some in this country, do not change. You listen to what they say. So no, I don't think we help them.

Scott Galloway: Okay, but there's a lot of... you can get so many layers here. There's a lot of journalists who are probably gay or people of color at Vice who want to have economic... they have a decision to make. But also, I have a tough time sometimes with us being so morally indignant when we're passing bullshit like "Don't Say Gay."

Kara Swisher: Yeah, but that's one bill in Florida and the law of the land isn't that. We at least don't think it's a good thing. I think very few people do. We're not throwing gay people off cliffs. I think you just have to aspire to better. They are definitely... if they wanted good faith, don't beat up on the gays. They're never going to.

Scott Galloway: They're never going to. Okay. The best way to punish the Saudis is to have a kid born in Israel figure out a way for a Korean national living in Japan to raise $100 billion from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and then spend it all on American office space.

Kara Swisher: Okay.

Scott Galloway: That was, in my view, an example of how capitalism benefits us and draws 10 years of oil wealth out of the kingdom.

Kara Swisher: I would agree. When they were losing all that money, Adam Neumann, I was like, "Yay, good. Couldn't have happened to nicer people." That's how I felt. By the way, a ride-sharing company or a media company somewhere in Europe or somewhere else will take that money. So I don't... anyways.

Scott Galloway: All right. Easy to heckle from the cheap seats.

Kara Swisher: Not heckling from the cheap seats. I won't do business with them, but that's okay. You can.

Scott Galloway: All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. When we get back, some more tech regulation, and we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Mark Bergen.

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Kara Swisher: Scott, we're back. Some tech news out of Washington this week. The Senate journalism bill may be dead on arrival that Amy Klobuchar talked about. She thought it was going to work. She withdrew a bill that would have allowed small newspapers to collectively bargain with tech platforms to get paid for their work. Last week, Republicans led by Ted Cruz added an amendment, said they would address potential censorship. It's the same thing that she was worried about, says the amendment undercuts news publishers. This is the Republican thing that they have to have is this whole censorship thing where they want to be punitive, the real stick on this thing. So she talked about it like it was going to pass and then it just, she pulled it. So there you have it.

Scott Galloway: Well, I'm really disappointed. I thought Senator Klobuchar is fighting the good fight. And as always, Republicans bastardize or pervert this notion of free speech. They decided they didn't want newspapers to have the ability to moderate their own content, which is its own form of suppression of free speech. And here's the problem. The best way to defeat an enemy is to atomize them. And that is what Google and big tech is doing to newspapers in the last 20 years. The number of journalists has been cut in half. The number of PR executives or comms executives at companies has gone up sixfold. So the ratio of bullshit to journalism has gone the wrong way by 12x.

Scott Galloway: We just lost a journalist in Las Vegas who was murdered in a very strange and upsetting situation where he wrote about corruption at a local agency. And so this guy showed up and allegedly stabbed this journalist to death.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, that was some story.

Scott Galloway: Here's the shavings of shit on a shit salad there on that tragedy for him and his family. He won't be replaced. The amount of money that's been sucked out of newspapers and the harm it's having on just local corruption. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, I think there's still people covering the big stuff when there's classified documents on nuclear codes in the golf cart room. They cover that. But when you're talking about corruption at a local level, the absolute shit kicking that journalism has taken is enormous.

Scott Galloway: And I have some history here. In 2008, when I went on the board of The New York Times, I thought, I'm such a genius. I know what I'm going to do. I know people at Hearst, at Condé Nast, at the FT. I'm going to get all of them to bind together at The Wall Street Journal. And we're going to present one unified face to Microsoft, which had a viable search engine called Bing at the time and Google. And we're going to say one of you gets to license all of our content. And we're going to pull all of our gorgeous content off of the other one that doesn't license it. And you're going to have a sewer of bullshit content. And I thought we were going to get billions, if not tens of billions. And the first thing that happened was the lawyers in the New York Times came back to me and said, we can't do this. We can't even be in the same room because of antitrust.

Kara Swisher: Well, the New York Times would have been out of this bill. It was aimed at the smaller ones. She made changes. She extracted the big ones.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, she's trying to be.

Kara Swisher: I mean, it's just a lot of people had a problem with this bill. Mike Masnick had a very good argument against it. About what was the argument? That linking has been free. You don't get paid for linking. Linking is good for a newspaper. There's all kinds of arguments against it. But Ted Cruz sneaking this thing in and then winning it is just a problem. They love to blow up everything. That's what they do. They're just bomb throwers and they are not legislators. And so, I mean, she was willing to do all kinds of compromises, but they liked it. They're obsessed on this idea of censorship, which is just nonsense. These amendments also help the tech companies. And he's just a piece of work.

Kara Swisher: And they're doing the same thing over on the marriage bill, the same-sex marriage legislation that Tammy Baldwin and others and Senator Collins, I think it's Senator Collins, are working on. They just want to let it go back to the States. Like I said, they haven't changed. That's where they wanted it, because then half the country can be discriminatory against gay people. Same thing. They love to put these things in here.

Kara Swisher: I did push back on her on this bill on the linking stuff. I think the issue is whether her big bill is going through, which is the antitrust bill. Josh Hawley, for example, is not supporting the bill, even though he's big on antitrust. He thinks it's too pro-trust. And it's just, let's see if she can get one of these two bills. And I think the one she wants through is the antitrust bill, which she talked about a lot on stage. But it's really a shame that she's trying her hardest to do good legislation. As she said, she's working with everyone and she makes changes and she's not blowing and breaking the Internet. And they always manage to shiv people like her at the last minute with this stuff. And it's always Ted Cruz holding the knife.

Scott Galloway: So anyway, he's an anti-legislator. He's useless. And he wants to be president.

Kara Swisher: Republican.

Scott Galloway: He wants to be.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. No, not all of them. Certainly not. But he, in particular, is one of the worst public servants that's ever been around, I think. He's just a bomb-throwing narcissist who will never be President Ted because nobody likes you. Nobody. And I will re-quote another senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, who said...

Scott Galloway: Do you want me to help you?

Kara Swisher: Yeah, go ahead.

Scott Galloway: He said, "I like Ted Cruz more than most senators, and I hate Ted Cruz."

Kara Swisher: That's exactly right. So did his roommate. I can see why that's happened.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, we're going to move on and bring in our friend of Pivot, Mark Bergen. He is a reporter at Bloomberg News and the author of *Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination*. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Bergen: Thanks, Kara.

Kara Swisher: So there's lots of criticism on Facebook, which has gotten a lion's share in elections or Instagram's effects on mental health. I mentioned this to Sundar Pichai in an interview. YouTube often gets left out of these discussions. Talk a little bit about that. By the way, it's run by Susan Wojcicki, a longtime Google executive, been there at the very beginning. Why do you think that is?

Mark Bergen: I think in part because it's situated inside Google, which is a very savvy company. It's a little bit more mature and just politically smarter than Facebook, for one. YouTube is tucked inside Google, which is inside Alphabet. So every time Sundar is dragged before Congress, it's usually about antitrust and privacy. And YouTube is farther down the list. They share just less data. We only have like the ad sales. We don't have any other financial figures. And so there's less for journalists to come over. I think we should blame myself and the industry, which has largely been covered partly out of Hollywood and then partly by Google reporters that tend to cover a lot more parts of Google.

Mark Bergen: And I think there's just a structural issue where YouTube, unlike Facebook, is for most people, it's a utility. Most people have a good, sort of fuzzy relationship with YouTube, especially during the pandemic. Like I did yoga from home or baked bread or something.

Kara Swisher: Very similar to TikTok in that regard.

Mark Bergen: Yeah. It's not the same where you don't see your kooky uncle posting QAnon memes on YouTube necessarily. But there's plenty of that on that service. It does exist for sure. And there are all the trappings of social media. Certainly if you're younger than 25, YouTube is your primary television screen. It also does degenerate really quickly. Watching my kids use it, it gets to very yucky stuff pretty quickly.

Kara Swisher: And that was one argument I had with Susan over the many years. One thing that I thought was just recalling, because I'm working on my own book, a memoir, and one of the things I'll never forget is when the founders of YouTube came to one of our All Things D conferences. They were on the same program that George Lucas was on, huge Star Wars fans. They came over to meet him. He arrived very late for the session the next morning. And I introduced him. He's already a gruff person in general. I said, "These are the founders of YouTube. And they're huge fans of Star Wars. Huge, like crazy fans." And he looked at them and he said, "You're ruining all of video and all of movies and all of television." He just was like, "You're terrible people. And what you do is like throwing puppies on a highway." That's what I'll never forget. Puppies on a highway. And he had it cold that it was degenerative and not good for art or anything else. And of course, they were like, "We love Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker," whatever. It was a really fascinating moment. He had a sense of something else. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Mark Bergen: Yeah, I think Viacom sued YouTube basically out of the gate after they were bought by Google. I talked to people at Viacom, too, who were kind of ignoring YouTube a little bit beforehand. They were more worried about Grokster, the video Napster that studios were obsessed with. And then after the seal of approval of a $1.6 billion purchase, which was a huge eye-popping number at the time, that was a critical lawsuit. It occupied so much of YouTube's time and attention. And I think a lot of their DNA is still built on this idea that they are an underdog, that the media industry is trying to attack them.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Mark Bergen: And at the time, Viacom was like, "See what it is." They certainly had a lot of sloppiness. They had weird, creepy videos on YouTube Kids. Sloppiness was the same thing that was happening at Facebook.

Scott Galloway: First off, Mark, you look like Elvis. Has anyone ever told you that?

Mark Bergen: Oh, my God. Maybe Kara did at one point.

Scott Galloway: Congratulations on the book. Everyone's talking about TikTok right now, but YouTube still commands more attention of people under the age of 18. It's still number one. How would you describe the Google or Alphabet's approach and Susan Wojcicki's approach to trying to protect stakeholder value and young people? There's a lot of concern around Meta and their approach to young people. TikTok is, I think, finally getting overdue, warranted scrutiny. How would you describe YouTube's approach to youth and their concern for the well-being?

Mark Bergen: Yeah, I think one of the themes in the book that I try to get across is sometimes YouTube will move in a direction that Susan often is trying to push it in the opposite direction, and many places that she can't control. And this is one. Sometimes without YouTube's own doing, they were able to capture the youth zeitgeist. If you go look at the most popular YouTube channels right now by traffic, by volume, they are ones built for your children, like nursery rhymes.

Kara Swisher: I'm not putting my kids on YouTube. Move along.

Mark Bergen: They are a multimillion-dollar industry. The biggest YouTuber in the world is Ryan Kaji, who's nine, the toy and boxing star. So I think certainly YouTube has built tools that make it very appealing to younger audiences, even separate from the YouTube Kids app. I think TikTok is a viable threat in a way that they were scared of Vine. They were scared of Vessel, which was this premium video service. They were certainly scared of Facebook for a long time.

Kara Swisher: They were.

Mark Bergen: And saw themselves as an underdog, really.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Mark Bergen: TikTok has at least started to pay creators in a somewhat meaningful way. I think you can argue it's not necessarily at the scale that YouTube is. You talk to a lot of creators, they're like, "Oh yeah, TikTok is fun. I can break out and have an audience. But you really make money on YouTube." And I don't see that changing. But if you use a YouTube app, YouTube Shorts, which is their version of TikTok, is being shoved at you. A lot of creators are being told, "Go hang out on Shorts." So that's their response. They're very nervous about losing eyeballs, but they're also very nervous that their creator class and base will move to TikTok. In part because YouTube is just very crowded. It's hard to break through unless you have a million subscribers or a built-in audience.

Scott Galloway: Let me be more specific. YouTube has been accused of being a platform for the radicalization of young men. Do you think that YouTube takes that threat seriously or spends more time trying to delay and obfuscate from those accusations?

Mark Bergen: No, I mean, they're quite good at delaying and obfuscation. And I think that's a major reason why they're not part of the conversation. Facebook chooses to fight and YouTube just stays out of it, which is very smart in some ways. I have this in the book, which I thought was a fascinating detail: they knew internally that their audience skewed pretty heavily towards men. And they had tried various ways to get a stronger female audience, to position Susan as one of the most prominent female CEOs in the Valley and the only one running a social media company.

Kara Swisher: I don't think they've necessarily succeeded in that. What's really interesting, now that we're talking, I'm recalling she had me out there to talk to her staff at one point. This was before it started to really radicalize. But it was clear that they were worried about some of the political content, some of the misinformation. It must have been 2014, 15, right when she took over. And I remember them being agonized, the people who work there. They're like, "It used to be cat videos and fun. And now I feel like every day we are facing some very serious societal issues." They articulated it then. They were aware of the thing. And then they didn't do anything about it because they were so worried about competition from Facebook and everything else.

Mark Bergen: Yes, and they tend to move slowly. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Facebook and Twitter can make these changes and it impacts viewers and their advertising base. YouTube has now 2 million plus creators, even more people whose livelihoods are tied to the platform. And they saw this right in 2018. There was a very troubled woman who was a YouTuber. She went on a shooting spree.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, who came to the campus with a gun.

Mark Bergen: So for all the normal reasons why they move slowly and are risk averse and reluctant, and they only act when there's press coverage or their advertisers actually force them to do something, they are aware that they have ramifications that no other platform really does.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. And that's happened repeatedly. We always talked about a different YouTube that was cleaner. One of the things they had a hard time with, she was always very interested in Hollywood stuff, but they never really veered that way in the way that Amazon did.

Mark Bergen: They tried. They had YouTube Red. They had the studios. They had an originals program.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. They just shut down and Robert Kyncl just left. So they basically threw in the towel on that. And why is that? Why has Amazon done a pretty good job? You can not like everything. Some of it's very good. And Apple's done a stellar job. Facebook has not wandered in there, has tried slightly, but never really has gone that way. Why has... I'm recalling a dinner that Richard Plepler had and had Susan next to him. And the conversation between them was fascinating. She just wasn't a content person the way he was. So why have they not done the same thing? What's the problem?

Mark Bergen: I think it's Google. That's the point of the book: you can't understand YouTube unless you understand Google. Before Susan, there was Salar Kamangar, who was super early at Google and extraordinarily Google-y. So there is just this cultural philosophy. YouTube doesn't believe in gatekeepers. They don't understand media programming. And I think in part because of their concern about liability, they're concerned about getting into more legal trouble or regulatory trouble. Their originals program, which was "we're going to make our YouTube stars in scripted TV to compete with Netflix and Amazon," there's an argument that if they invested more, that could have been successful. *Cobra Kai* was one that's now a minor hit on Netflix.

Mark Bergen: But PewDiePie, for instance, was the biggest star on YouTube for a long time. They had this scare with a reality TV show. I watched some of it. People who are PewDiePie fans don't really want to see that. They want to see him play video games. So I think a part of it is this gap: the company has a hard time understanding the creator base. I think it's changed a little bit, but for a long time, their eyes were so set on traditional media and Hollywood.

Kara Swisher: At the very beginning, they used to have these showcases that Chad ran. There was one down in San Francisco and there was this young star who was big on it named Katy Perry. And she sang. They were showing off some of their people who were doing well on it. So they were there, but they just couldn't keep going. And I think it had to do with they spent a lot of their time stealing other people's copyrighted material and then not getting in nearly enough trouble for it. And then moving their way through. I think for a long time they didn't think that the stars of YouTube were marketable really. Like Fred. You remember Fred? Even PewDiePie early on. It's like, "Can we make money from this guy?" And then he said some terrible things.

Mark Bergen: Yeah. And then there's stars like PewDiePie and Logan Paul. The inevitable happens when you let young 20-something dudes broadcast themselves with no rules.

Scott Galloway: I've always thought that YouTube doesn't get the scrutiny it deserves because it has these two incredible heat shields. Specifically, Meta has been the gift that keeps on giving to Alphabet. And two, as you referenced, Susan Wojcicki is incredibly likable and is the most senior female executive. So I think she probably doesn't get the pushback that other executives get sometimes. And in certain instances, she gets more than she deserves probably. But my question is, as a father of 12 and 15-year-old boys, and I don't know if you have kids, getting to know YouTube as well as you do, I always feel like someone like you knows YouTube as well as anybody that doesn't work at YouTube in this moment. Do you think for parents with teenage boys, YouTube is a net positive or a net negative? How would you approach your son's use of YouTube?

Mark Bergen: Have you watched Mr. Beast videos in their entirety, Scott?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I have.

Mark Bergen: Yeah. Is Mr. Beast that different from reality TV? I don't know. There's a lot of wish fulfillment in Mr. Beast. He seems so far to have avoided any of the pratfalls of it.

Scott Galloway: I think it's cute.

Mark Bergen: The metaphor that someone at the company used was that before 2018, it was like cars without seatbelts. They didn't have any safeguards. And they put in the seatbelt laws and have made a big difference. And the FTC fined them around children's privacy. So for your kid who's under 13, that programming is very different because the regulators actually had some teeth and did something.

Mark Bergen: I think the book is just a call to pay attention to YouTube more. There should be academics and journalists writing about Mr. Beast like *Game of Thrones*. His audience is that big. We should be scrutinizing what material is in there. YouTube is so under-covered because academics have a hard time getting data from the company. Video is harder to analyze than text. So yeah, that's my long-winded answer.

Kara Swisher: Which is one of the big issues with misinformation, I know, for that. Let me ask you something from the history. People don't realize this, but Yahoo almost bought YouTube. I think Gideon Yu was there, was the dealmaker, as I recall. And Terry Semel wasn't going to pay enough, I guess. And one of the things I'll never forget, Sergey Brin telling me, because he was much more involved in the company then, was "We couldn't lose YouTube." He said it to me. He's like, "Of all the things, there were two: the ad company they bought and then YouTube." And they had Google Video that was not going anywhere. I remember the woman who ran it. I don't remember her name, but Jen, I think something like that. And he said, "We had to have it. It was existential for this company." How important is YouTube for Google now or Alphabet now?

Mark Bergen: So, Sergey, unsurprisingly, didn't speak to me for the book. I don't think he speaks to anyone anymore.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Mark Bergen: The company, actually, I sent him a bunch of fact-check questions about Sergey and Larry. I think that was a mistake.

Kara Swisher: You sound very even-handed on this. I would even say, my sense is you actually strike an optimistic tone around YouTube, which is not where a lot of journalists go.

Mark Bergen: My sense is that Larry and Sergey cared about YouTube because it was a search engine. It was a powerful search engine even early on. And that's Google's existential fear: that someone will beat them in search. And YouTube remains the world's second biggest search engine. So in that sense, it is incredibly valuable to Google. It's debatable whether or not it's social media. If you call TikTok social media, you certainly call YouTube social media. It is very important for Google to have an arm in that, to have a foothold in that market, especially now that it's moving towards e-commerce, whatever metaverse-y thing. YouTube is incredibly important for Google there.

Mark Bergen: It is now the world's biggest music service and probably the biggest podcasting service that no one talks about. YouTube is desperate now. They're saying, "Oh, you're already uploading your podcast. Why not just flip a switch and put it on YouTube?" That's a lot more hours of content. So I think it's a growing percentage. Cloud is much more important to Google in some sense. But YouTube is the future growth beyond search advertising, which the company has been looking for for two decades now. My sense is YouTube would be worth $100 billion plus on its own.

Scott Galloway: The growth and the revenue and the profitability, do you think there's ever a chance that Alphabet, if their stock were to languish, would consider spinning it?

Mark Bergen: It's hard to decouple YouTube from Google's ad tech machinery. The sales team that sells YouTube ads doesn't report to Susan. They report up to Google's head of chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, who runs the ads for YouTube. All the back end, part of the reason YouTube is so successful is because advertisers just give Google a check, and then Google says, "We're going to run a search ad for you, a display ad, and a video ad, and we're going to algorithmically sort out the best place to put it." So YouTube kind of loses that. It loses a lot of its machine learning power.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, that was always their argument. Which maybe would have had better societal consequences.

Mark Bergen: But also, I think that's unlikely. I think it's more likely that Google will either be forced to... I think they're going to be forced to do something. I don't think they're going to do something on their own will to spin out their ad tech business that's under a lot more scrutiny. It doesn't seem like the Department of Justice is going to force them to spin out YouTube.

Kara Swisher: No, there's too much competition in that area. Let me ask you a final question for me. Trump, I think Sundar was very noncommittal. I think it means they're not going to do a thing. They're just going to keep him off. They put him in permanent purgatory, which doesn't seem fair because they should make a decision one way or the other, but they sort of purgatory him forever.

Mark Bergen: Yeah, I think they are. I don't see them acting before Facebook. They just haven't in the past. I think YouTube is more difficult because Trump is a big presence on YouTube, but he's not nearly as big as he was on Facebook and Twitter. The bigger problem for YouTube is that so much of their first 15 years, it's like you and I can go on and be on equal footing with a news organization, with CNN, with ABC. And now they've been trying to scramble to raise authoritative channels. So you have a conservative pundit on YouTube hosting, was it Kari Lake, the Arizona candidate, talking about how the election in 2020 was rigged. YouTube is going to have a lot more of that coming up to the midterms.

Mark Bergen: The company will say, "We've outlawed sort of election conspiracies. But at the same time, if it's a context of news, we don't want to take down you and I having this conversation about the big lie versus me actually promoting that." So they've set themselves up for this intractable problem. I assume that if Facebook lets Trump back on, then YouTube would follow. That's my hunch. But I don't see them as a first mover.

Scott Galloway: In writing the book, Mark, what was the most surprising thing you discovered about YouTube or Alphabet?

Mark Bergen: Hmm. That's a good question. Maybe I shouldn't be, it's a little bit naive, but I was shocked about how they saw the kids. They saw kids content sort of exploding and didn't know how to handle it. Part of this was legal issues. But at one point, ten years ago, the biggest channel in the world was this really strange, anonymous unboxing channel who ended up being a former adult film actress. I was surprised by how people inside the company felt paralyzed and just had no idea what to do under that circumstance. That was kind of shocking to me.

Kara Swisher: Interesting.

Scott Galloway: Interesting. Also, you had a really good thing that people didn't know about, that Susan almost worked for Elon. She was looking to leave.

Kara Swisher: Oh, yeah. That was also surprising. And then there's a lot of internal disputes about how much the YouTube problem should be on Susan versus the prior leadership.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. Anyway, it's a great book. You should read it. *Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination.* Thank you, Mark Bergen.

Mark Bergen: Thanks for having me.

Kara Swisher: Congratulations on the book, Mark.

Scott Galloway: Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it.

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

[Ad break for Mint Mobile]

Kara Swisher: Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails.

Scott Galloway: I have a couple wins. I think probably the biggest win for all of us globally is that Ukrainian troops have taken back a lot of lost territory. Since earlier this month, Ukrainian troops have taken back an area about the size of Rhode Island. They claim the momentum was driven in part by Western military aid, and they need more. But this is arguably a turning point. This is when Ukraine has gotten off its heels onto its toes. It's a victory for Europe. It's a victory for democracy. It's also, I think, what we will find out when this conflict hopefully comes to an end. I think we're going to find out that Western security apparatus and covert operations from our men and women in our intelligence group, in terms of training Ukrainian forces with more sophisticated weaponry, will have played a huge role. This is not only a victory for Ukraine. It's a victory for Europe. It's a victory for the West. And it's a victory for freedom-loving people all over the world. This is a big deal.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I agree. There's been a lot of coverage of the trouble Putin is in because of that. I don't ever think he's in real trouble, but because they have to actually do something about him. But it's not good. This is bad for him. This is very bad for him.

Scott Galloway: Yep. And you're even seeing some very brave people in local governments in Russia, which I was just shocked, who have come out against the war. They do that at huge risk to their personal safety and the safety of their families. So I think that's very exciting.

My other win is I've been thinking a lot about Serena Williams. I would argue the greatest athlete of all time, and I'm not into sports, but was Muhammad Ali. Not as much because of his athletic excellence. His win-loss ratio is not the best. But what he meant to the sport and the world, he meant something much more than his excellence in the boxing ring. I think the Williams sisters are in that same weight class, if you will. I was just shocked how overt the racism was the first few times one of the Williams sisters won a big tennis tournament. They didn't like the way they behaved. They were more aggressive. But it was just so blatantly racist. They wanted the world of tennis in America to want Chris Evert in a nice dress. It started with Martina Navratilova being aggressive and athletic. And then, I mean, she's a straight line to Serena Williams.

Kara Swisher: But she dominated the sport. Again, I think the reason she'll probably be remembered for a long, long time, and both of the sisters really, is that it's not only what they did on the court, but the larger impact they had. So I think it's a huge moment of recognition for her and what she meant to the sport and what she meant more broadly to America. I think it's a real nice moment for her and her family.

Scott Galloway: It is. It deserves all the credit.

Kara Swisher: Any fails? Sad fails is how she was treated?

Scott Galloway: Well, I don't know if that's a win or a fail. Those are my two. We'll call them what we want.

Kara Swisher: Okay, that's all right. This discussion of TikTok really has to happen. *Wall Street Journal* just had a story about internal documents that show that users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, which is their version of that. And TikTok is 197.8. This is the biggest company in the world, Facebook, and they're getting their clocks cleaned from TikTok just by a factor of 10. It's crazy.

Scott Galloway: It's crazy. But it's not because it's a better product. It does show you products do out. They're not doing anything but making a great product. It's the ownership issue we have.

Kara Swisher: And then the other one that I think is interesting that just came out that we'll love to talk about maybe on Thursday is Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg had a great piece about Amazon spending $15 billion on programming, including sports, this year. That's ahead of Netflix at $13.6 billion, Disney's $9.5 billion, and Apple's $6 billion. So the money has still been pouring into the streaming space. And these tech companies, as I've told Hollywood people, they ain't going to give up.

Scott Galloway: Yep, yep, I get it. And then on a final note, Kara, I wanted to read an email that came in to me. Or that I got that I forwarded to Lara and I asked if we could read it on the show. The email said the following:

"Dear Scott, we write as parents to our beautiful nine-year-old daughter," and they name her name, but I'm not going to say it because I don't know if they're comfortable with us revealing our identity, "who has a common form of dwarfism. We were disappointed in a moment in last week's episode where you referred to Kara as the tallest M in the room. We are sure you are aware that the M word is extremely derogatory. For some reason, stature seems to be one of the few physical differences where negative comments are still deemed acceptable. You are obviously a very intelligent and eloquent person, and there are many other ways you could have made your point without using that expression. As parents, when we hear that word, it's like a punch to the gut, especially when used by someone we respect. We will always advocate for our daughter, and we hope you will not use that word moving forward. We appreciate your time and consideration." And then their names, and they're from the UK.

Other than this being a story about a white guy finding his truth and overcoming his internal deficiencies, I wanted to say, first off, they're absolutely right. Just as I remember in college, we used to use the R word all the time as part of our common language to describe anything. And then I remember Timothy Shriver at the World Economic Forum giving a very powerful speech. You just don't say this. There's no reason to say this word.

The lesson here for me, or what I want to highlight, is, first off, absolutely, I will stop using the word and I appreciate the feedback. But the lesson to young people is that there's a difference between being right and being effective. And this email is both. They're right, but it was effective. It was respectful. It was civil. And it didn't immediately put me on my heels. I think what you find is a lot of times in our discourse, people aren't really trying to be effective. They're trying to be right and pose for the cameras. This is how you actually affect change.

The other lesson here is that I don't like something, especially among young men raised in this Trump era of social media, that they feel every time someone comes at them and points out something, they're supposed to double down and be more politically incorrect and get back in the face of people. "I can say what I want. Woke, woke, woke." The key isn't to be right. The key isn't to double down. It's to evolve. So, one, I really appreciate this email. It was civil. It was in its own way kind of caring, caring about their daughter and also being very nice to me. And it's effective.

Kara Swisher: They didn't assume the worst of you.

Scott Galloway: 100%.

Kara Swisher: You know what I mean? That's why it was. They didn't say, "You jackass."

Scott Galloway: Interestingly, when people push on the idea that someone's being woke not to use these words, you're being kind not to use them. Why do you want to make people feel bad?

Kara Swisher: 100%. Why? If they tell you it makes them feel bad. Same thing with they/them. They have to go crazy on this stuff.

Scott Galloway: Agreed.

Kara Swisher: It drives me crazy. It drives me crazy. And this is a good example of it. I met with a big media executive the other day. He's like, "Why can't I say what I want?" I said, "Maybe you just shouldn't anymore. Just because."

Scott Galloway: You're bringing up a key point. On this issue, it's super easy for me to understand. This is a layup. They're right. I'm wrong. I see the point. Sometimes people come after me for stuff where I think, "I'm not sure I entirely agree." But here's the thing. If it's an easy give and they're genuine that it upsets them, make the give. Stop using the word. Stop using the pronoun. It's just being kind. If someone is legitimately upset and they share and they represent a number of people who are legitimately upset and it's not core to who you are... Most of the time, these are not big gives. They're not big gives. There are people in my life that get offended over weird stuff that I find it ridiculous they get offended over. But the point is, if it upsets them and it's not difficult for you, it's not a big give.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Then just be on the right side of the issue.

Scott Galloway: Correct.

Kara Swisher: Scott, I love how you evolve. You're evolving. There we go. You're an evolving thing. I don't know what you're evolving into. But the organization Little People of America has a helpful post about the M word for anyone who'd like to learn. It's linked in our show notes. Scott, I really appreciate that. Thank you for the letter. Again, we're not using their names, but thank you. It was a great letter and we completely agree with you. We welcome all feedback from the show, even people who don't agree with us. And questions too. Go to nymag.com/pivot to submit a question or note for the show, or call 855-51-PIVOT.

Okay, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Friday for more. There's the Emmys to talk about, there's Mudge, there's all kinds of stuff happening. It's newsy. We're back to school. We are ready with our pencils sharpened.

Scott Galloway: Nobody uses pencils.

Kara Swisher: And we are excited. I'm excited you're back, as I said in the last show. I think everybody loved having you back.

Scott Galloway: Happy to be back. Can I just note this? I was stopped four times this weekend by people in the supermarket, at the plant store, and they were listening to Pivot right then. They gave me great feedback, and they were thrilled you were back.

Kara Swisher: I was thrilled to say... Yeah, I got stopped in the gym this morning. I think Christina, I think Joel, and they were all great fans. And you like it, right? I always say to people...

Scott Galloway: I love it. I might come up and say hi. We're friendly.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. I like it. It's nice. They came up and they're just great and they really appreciate the content and we appreciate them. So I just like to call them out for that. It's not for self-aggrandizement. It's really always a surprise and always a delight when that happens.

Anyway, Scott, read us out.

Scott Galloway: Today's show was produced by Lara Neiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Intertot 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.

What does it mean to be a grown-up? What does it mean to be a man? It doesn't mean being right. It means being evolving. It means evolving and also taking easy wins to make other people feel better.