Pivot - Biden's Bad Polls, Lessons Learned from SBF Trial, and Guest Kashmir Hill

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Kara and Scott discuss why Jeff Bezos is really moving to Florida, major changes coming to the real estate business and Elon's new AI bot, Grok. Plus, what's next for crypto and investors after Sam Bankman-Fried's guilty verdict. Then, with less than a year to go until the 2024 presidential election, should everyone calm down about the latest polls? Finally, our Friend of Pivot is New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill, who has written about facial recognition and privacy in her new book, "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It." You can follow Kashmir at @kashhill Follow us on Instagram and Threads at @pivotpodcastofficial. Follow us on TikTok at @pivotpodcast. Send us your questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher.

And, Scott, happy belated birthday. Thanks very much, Cara. You got me a sweater, but I would have preferred a moaner or a screamer. Oh, my God. Versus a sweater. Get it? That is another bad joke. You need to, like, up the joke game in your advanced age and stuff.

People generally find my profanity fine as long as I'm funny. What you're saying is I'm just being profane. No, no, I think you just need to be funny. I just think as you're advancing in the years, I think you should up the game on your jokes. That's all. You know what I did for my birthday? Yeah. So they said, what do you want to do on your birthday? So I said, I want to have a big breakfast. Yeah. I want to work out with my boys. And then me and my boys went to the Brentford-Everton game. We're going to these little, kind of smaller stadiums. We had just a really wonderful day.

I just had a nice birthday. That was really sweet. That's a very good birthday. We're going to be with you next year. You've already invited me to your party. Oh, that's right. You're coming. Your big one.

I'm not going to say the year, but it's a big one. Big 50. Big 50. 50. Do you know, but it's a big one. Big 50. Big 50. 50? Do you know, just go with it. Sure. Adam Alter, my colleague at NYU, has done all this research. Supposedly the year you make really big decisions, whether it's to change your job, get divorced, commit suicide, disproportionately happen in the nines.

Something about 29, 39, 49, which i am now you're not um it's my birthday it's my birthday go with 29 you're 29 yeah i don't naked i don't look 29 like if it's dark i can pull off 49 anyways he said that all of your big decisions and like life-changing yeah so i'm here comes the big decisions get ready carol what are we doing wow that's exciting did i make a lot Wow. Yeah, I don't know. That's exciting. Did I make a lot of decisions last year? I don't think I did.

I guess children. Oh, I had more children. Oh, wait, that. There was that. You decided to be 105 when your kid goes to college. Yes, that's exactly right. Well, I had a lovely time with my children this weekend, too. We took a hike.

Where'd you go? We took a three-mile hike to ice cream. So the kids actually walked three miles. It was great through the woods. It's very beautiful woods around Washington, DC. And so we did a nice hike and then we took the bus back. They had not taken a bus. So I took a bus with them. Anyway, it was a lovely weekend. We both had lovely family weekends and I'm excited to spend next year's birthday with you. Your 49th birthday with you next year. I'll bring you. In Scotland. Scotland. I'm excited to spend next year's birthday with you. Your 49th birthday with you next year. I'll bring you- In Scotland. Scotland. I'm going to be there. I told Amanda, she gave me an aha, you know when the eyebrow

cocks upwards? Yeah. She's like, oh. That's all she said is, oh, like that. Like that. She's excited. I'm excited. It doesn't sound that excited. No, she was excited. We're very excited. We love Scotland. We think it's beautiful and we'll be there. We will be there. We shall be there for your birthday. Good, good.

So there's a lot to talk about also. There's so much going on. There's so much going on. We're going to talk about the new election poll that has Democrats worried, what Sam Bankman-Fried's guilty verdict means for crypto. And we'll talk to The New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill about her new book on facial recognition. She's a badass of this area and a lot of crypto stuff. So it's actually a good time to talk to her. But first, The Washington Post has a new CEO, William Lewis.

He's British. He's a former reporter turned executive. He previously was CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos said in a statement that he was drawn to Lewis's, quote, love of journalism and passion for driving financial success. I spent a lot of time finding out about him from people who know him. I missed him. He was brought in to sort of clean things up after the big hacking debacle. They brought a bunch of different people. He's reporter. He's a longtime reporter. He's turned executive, essentially. He's got a pretty good rep. I would say he's right of center, maybe, but people seem to like him. Lots of different people I called around to about who gives a flying fuck who's the new CEO of Washington Post? What? Anyways, the thing that's interesting is that the new heads of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, what do they all have in common? What?

They're all Brits. So CNN, right? British. CNN. Not Meredith. Meredith is not. Meredith Levy is not British. I'm sorry.

CNN, the new head of the Wall Street Journal, and the new head of the Washington Post, all Brits. Yes, yes, yes. Well, they were, he's British. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, she's the new editor. Yes, that's different. This guy's the CEO. I love how you work through stuff real time. This is fun. Is this how we watch your brain working? No, I'm just thinking, because they're not exactly on the same level as CEO is different, is an American. But yes, there's a lot of Brits. They like a Brit. They like to bring in a Brit.

If you have a British accent, you want to go to work for a consulting firm because everyone's under the impression you're 10 IQ points smarter than you actually are. Yes, that is true. It's just you sound very smart. Or Northern European, something you can't identify. I think people are in, see people who run U.S. media, they identify them and they stereotype them as being to one pole or the other, one string or the other. So I think people coming in to interview to be the head of media organizations that pride themselves on trying to be balanced or just about the facts, I think they hear someone is British and immediately think, oh, this person is a little bit more reasonable.

I'm sure that's what happened with Jeff. This guy's got a rep for being good at talking to rich guys. That's another thing he does. I would not say it's a negative. Good at talking to rich guys? You know, he's good at— Does that mean he's a prostitute at the bar of the Four Seasons? What does that mean?

No, those people are also. But it's actually— Asking for a friend. Asking for a friend. Isn't it the King Cole bar? Isn't it the King Cole bar from what I understand? I have been there once, and two mobsters got in a fight when I was there. I've been to the – oh, but you know who I did see?

I saw Jared and Ivanka there and they came over and said hi. Jared was my student. Oh, the King Cole bar. That to me – I have heard that's the prostitute bar in New York, but I don't know. Allegedly. Allegedly. Have I told you I'm hooker blind? I'm totally hooker blind.

I don't think I've ever. And then someone said to me, gave me like a quick, kind of a quick spotting mechanism. They said, Scott, for you, any woman who returns your eye contact is probably a prostitute. Oh, that's true. That's true. Yeah. But I've never, ever actually seen a prostitute. I'm not good at picking them out.

I'm hooker blind. Interesting. Okay. All right. Well, I don't know how we devolved that from the British guy. All right. In any case, he's got a good reputation. I've heard from some of the people who were involved in the talks, and they were all very worried about the finances and what to do, and whether Jeff had the stomach to spend money where he's got to spend if he really wants to go anywhere with this thing, or else it's just going to bump along. And that's their worry is that's going to bump along as you know, as you were noting by saying, who cares? Speaking of which he announced he's, he might have extra money announced he's leaving Seattle and moving to Miami to be closer to his

parents. Plus Blue Origin operations are shifting to Cape Canaveral. He's also from there, by the way, he graduated high school. This one I'm not so irritated about. He's there for taxes, I assume, but he is actually from there. So let us give him a break on this one. Okay. Hold on. Okay. Give me an actual fucking break. He's moving to Florida to be closer to his father. He's close to them. Okay. So first off, at some point, these people are going to realize we're not idiots. I moved to Florida in 2011. And one of the reasons I moved down there, the primary reason I moved down there is because we couldn't get our kids into school. I wasn't making any money at the time.

But anybody who moves there, especially if it's California or New York to Florida, recognizes that a 13% swing in taxes, if you reinvest it, is enormous. Yeah. 13% swing in taxes if you reinvest it is enormous. And there is something about, I do believe, I used to think that we needed to normalize the tax structure in the United States because it was straight tax avoidance. Now, having said that, there is something to competition that if a state like Texas or Florida can manage to run the state on higher property taxes and lower income taxes, that it creates healthy and needed competition such that when state legislatures, in order to curry votes with whoever it is, special interest groups or unions, actually says, okay, if we just tax everyone out of existence, at some point people are going to

leave the state and the tax base is going to erode. There is a healthy competition. Having said that, the very disturbing part about this is that this is yet another transfer of income from the poor and the middle class to the rich. Because the bottom line is of the tens of thousands of people who work for Amazon and Seattle who have registered capital income gains of $10,000, $100,000, maybe even a million dollars, very few of them have the luxury and the option to move to Florida. Who are the most mobile people in the world who can engage? Rich people. 100%. And that's the problem. When France passes an uber-wealthy tax, what do you know? The wealthiest man in the world moves to Belgium. So what you have to recognize, what I think they should probably do

is what they do with options. And that is, if you move to Texas, you get to, and then you sell as Elon Musk says, you sell all the stock you have. The next day, the next year, you no longer are subject to the taxes, despite the fact that you leverage California infrastructure, or that Jeff has been leveraging the unbelievable engineering department at the University of Washington. Also, Microsoft is there. I mean, he's just registered all of this investment, public investment, for middle-class taxpayers, and he's monetizing it and avoiding those taxes by moving to a low-income state. He gets to do that on his shares.

But in terms of options, when you exercise options, it is based on where you were when those options vested. Oh, interesting. So if all of his capital gains were from options, and some of the capital gains that Musk realized were from options he was awarded, if they were vesting over four years and he moved to Texas three into that four-year vesting period, 75% of the gains from his options would be taxed based on California taxes. And I'm wondering, Kara- Well, no, not for him, Seattle, because they just put a new wealth tax in Seattle and they're contemplating more. They're in Washington State. Yeah, but isn't it held up in the quarters? Anyways, my point is- In any case.

What I think they should move to is some sort of thing that says, okay, Jeff, you're going to start to sell down your $90 billion in Amazon stock. Our view is that the vast majority of that wealth was accreted in Washington. And any money accreted from this point forward, if you're really living in Florida, fine. But this sort of tax avoidance where you don't match the taxes to the investments made by your fellow citizens while you were there. There's something uncomfortable about that. I would agree. I would agree. I find it disturbing. In this case, let me just say, his parents are there. He did grow up there. This is not like he's not going like somewhere weird.

It is where he's from. His Blue Origin operations are going to be in Florida. So moving there seems a little more believable in that regard. And I'm sure Lauren is not like love in Seattle. She's, she's, she's a Miami gal. You know, I'm sorry. She just did look at her Instagram. She's a Miami gal. I think there are personal things here, but I agree with you that he got most of his wealth

from moving his, he and his former wife to Seattle. That's who made him. And so he does owe something to that state and that city. Absolutely. No question. Anyway, another thing that you talked about a lot and actually you wanted to talk about, and I agree with you, is major changes in the real estate industry are likely coming following a court ruling.

Last week, a federal jury found the National Association of Realtors and several other brokerages conspired to artificially inflate commissions paid to real estate agents. The association and brokerages were ordered to pay damages of nearly $1.8 billion. The chief executive of the National Association of Realtors resigned two days later. It's worth noting he'd also been facing sexual harassment allegations. So how will this impact buying or selling a house? You were very interested in this. I think this is the biggest business story that was the most underreported of last week. And that is, it's not very romantic. It's not very interesting. But in terms of impact on the

real economy, it's enormous. People's largest asset, or 80 or 90% of Americans are largest asset, especially older Americans, is their house. And the National Realtors Association has figured out a way to basically hide costs, transaction fees. If you want to be on the MLS, the major listing, you have to agree to what's called an offer of compensation. The compensation comes out of the seller's pocket. And they have to offer compensation to the buyer's broker so the buyer doesn't negotiate the fee directly with the broker because what difference does it make? So it's all led to an ecosystem where it's less competitive than most. And as a result, versus the UK where real

estate commissions are kind of three to 4%, they're five to six in the US. And when you're talking about people where average home $420,000, people move on average every five years, you're talking about $2,000 a year in commissions for most homeowners. That's real money. And you can trade stocks for like 0.1% commission. The biggest asset in your house, and it's a fairly liquid market, you pay 5% to 6% commission on it. There's also a ton of brokers out there. So you'd think, well, why on earth, like every other ecosystem, haven't we seen people pop up and say, I'm a new broker. I'll do it for, you know, 50% off because I need to get established. Why hasn't competition starched down the costs here?

I think this is a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really, it's interesting how we buy and sell homes is so, it's one of these big costs that we pretend isn't a big cost. That's what I always think when I talk to people. That's exactly right. And we spend more time on like stock, everything else, but it is usually someone's biggest asset when they have an asset like this. Not everybody does have a house, by the way. And the way it's done is so, you know, I did like, I know you make fun of some of the different real estate attempts

to try to clean up the real estate selling process, whether it was Compass or whatever, or Nextdoor or something. But I did appreciate, like, why is this process so onerous? Arguably the greatest regulatory capture, other than probably the hospital and the insurance lobby for the medical industrial complex where Americans pay $13,000 a year versus $6,500 in Australia, Canada, or Britain for worse health care. The most regulatory capture that results in kind of an unusual or anomalies in the economy is the real estate industry. And that is, and who owns real estate? Rich people. So if I sell a home, I can 1031 it, and it gets tax deferred. I can roll it

into another real estate without paying taxable gains. Where if I sell shares in a stock, once I sell it, I have to pay the gains on it. I can, if I own an office building, while it's appreciating in value, I can depreciate it 3% a year. I can lever it up five to one. I can write off the interest on it. The real estate lobby has made the real estate industry

the most tax advantage. In addition, they're in bed with the insurance industry. Do you know, if you're in Florida or somewhere else, you can't get a mortgage unless you prove insurance. You know what I've done? I own some property in Florida. I'm in a privileged position where I didn't have to take out a mortgage. I have been self-insured on health insurance and on property, wind, fire. Because when you do the math... Wait, you didn't... Self-insurance means you don't have insurance, correct? Don't have insurance. That's right. And again, 45 cents on the dollar of all insurance goes to profits and administration, meaning you get 55 cents back. So when I did the math on a

rental property I own in Delray Beach, unless it burns to the ground every like 14 years, I'm better off self-insuring. But you can't self-insure if you're not rich and need to get a mortgage because the mortgage guys are in bed with the insurance guys. Insurance is yet. We've talked about this. My health insurance cost me 55,000 a year for me and my family because I'm a narcissist and I want the gold-plated insurance. I went naked, no health insurance. Oh, you're a bad person. You're a bad father. No, you're not. I have enough money to survive any illness. Five years, 275 grand, that'll buy a lot of health care. So again, the insurance industry is nothing but a transfer of wealth from poor and middle-class people who can't absorb these risks to rich people

who can't. Right. That's true. Do you think Bezos has a mortgage? Oh, God. No, he pays cash for everything. You know, Ivanka was at some party with her, with Lauren. We did a lot of pictures of Kim Kardashian, Lauren, and Ivanka Trump with Marc Andreessen's wife hanging out in the background. That was quite a photo. Anyway, should be fun times down in Florida. Let's go down. Let's go stay at your house. It'll be fun. I love Florida.

Oh, God. You've been to my house. I have. Of course, I stayed there. I stay at all your homes. Anyway. But wait, hold on. More importantly, how many dead hookers does it take to change a light bulb?

Oh, no. Stop with, hold on. More importantly, how many dead hookers does it take to change a light bulb? Oh, no. Stop with the hookers. Apparently, Kara, not three, because my basement is still dark. Oh, my God. Better? No. Anyway, last week, over the weekend, Elon Musk launched an AI bot called Grok. One of my favorite words is Grok, so I'm kind of pissed off he's using it as part of his new venture, XAI.

Grok apparently has a, quote, rebellious streak, just obnoxious is what I think it is, and it answers spicy questions. Grok will be available to X premium plus users at $16 a month. I haven't tried Grok, not going to buy Grok. What do you think of Grok? I actually think it's a really good idea. The thing that I think is sort of strange about these LLMs is in an attempt to recognize that if you feed media, if you feed in historical data, it's going to have a bias because the history of the world and the history of America is that we have biases, we have stereotypes, we have racism built into our books, into our literature. And

so you can tell these things have been tweaked to try and compensate for that. And when you ask it a question, it'll condition things and it'll say, it does come across, the LLMs do come across as a bit woke. And so him offering an LLM that I bet is going to be a little bit offensive and red pill will have an audience right out of the gates. I, they're anodyne is what it is, is what you're saying. I don't know if woke is really the word. It's just they don't want to say racist things to someone, which I think is probably a good thing to tweak. I'm not saying they're right or wrong doing this. I think their intentions are noble that we want to, you know, we want to recognize that all the data we put in here might end up with things that are not only not true, but are hurtful or discriminatory, whatever it might be, right? So they want to be thoughtful about that.

They're also covering their ass because immediately everybody, when they get an LLM, I have- Goes and tries to get it to do a bad thing. I have PropG.ai. I built an LLM, input all the transcripts from this podcast, all of my newsletter because- Did you ask me? No, you didn't, but go ahead. That's good. You're being anodyne.

Anyway, so- No, I'm not. I get a lot of emails from people asking questions and I say, I'm sorry, I don't have time. Askprofitea.ai. And it's interesting, you can tweak it to say, be more irreverent, be more profane, be more politically correct, whatever it might be.

And it'll come back with a different tone. And I would bet if it's a good LLM, I would bet that people do. The opportunity in LLMs will be like a healthcare LLM or one that's focused on certain types of stocks, niches and things like that. This is a toy. I mean, I immediately, I was dying to get on there because I wanted to ask it questions like, should a billionaire be denying people of their severance payments? Which he's doing. Is it a good form to accuse a coworker of a sex crime when it's not founded? Did a gay lover actually beat up the speakers?

I wanted to ask it those questions and see what it came back with. That's funny. I don't love the use of woke stuff. Anodyne is the word you're looking for, bland, inoffensive, innocuous, and that's what you don't like. That's a better word. That's what they're trying to do. And he's using woke as just like a marketing tool.

Whatever. Good luck, Elon. I will not pay for it, but good luck. I don't really, I have other things that entertain me more, such as TikTok and other things. So anyway, let's get to our first big story. Sam Bankman Freed's trial took about five weeks, but it took a jury less than five hours to find him guilty on seven charges, including wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Bankman-Fried's charges together carry a maximum sentence of 110 years.

Sentencing is set to happen in March. His lawyer alluded to an appeal in a statement saying, quote, Mr. Bankman-Fried maintains his innocence and will continue to vigorously fight the charges against him. Were you surprised by how it shook out? No. I mean, quite frankly, he's not only has committed fraud, he has terrible judgment. There's no way his lawyer said you should take the stand. I remember being at the Andrew Ross Sorkin's deal book conference where he did an interview. And I remember thinking,

this kid is clearly not listening to anybody because he just added 10 or 20 years to a sentence in this interview. Wow. You don't- This was post, right? This was post his- Oh yeah, this was after he'd been subpoenaed.

Like Trump does, yeah. And I'm like, been subpoenaed. Like Trump does, yeah. And I'm like, this is just the dumbest thing he could have done. And I feel bad for his parents. But look, there is a lesson here. And that is, if you're blessed with success, you have to implement. with success, you have to implement, everyone around you is going to tell you you're amazing to the point where you're going to start believing that small incremental violations of the law are not violations of the law. And then they become big violations of the law. And that somehow you could just throw up your shoulders and say, I mean, he built his career based on trying to

create this myth or the story that he was a genius. And then his defense became a story on how he was an idiot. Well, I didn't know. And it's like, well, okay, which is it, boss? And he's going to jail for a very, very long time. But where I was headed with this is if you're successful, the people who stay successful and stay grounded and maintain their marriages, maintain their friendships, maintain their success, maintain their economic livelihood, maintain their freedom are people who always implement guardrails. I'm going to make sure there are people around me who can tell me like it is. I check with lawyers. I check with my board. I check with people who push back. I think kids are really important. You know why? Kids remind you you're not that fucking cool. Kids are just not

impressed by it. My sons are so unimpressed by me. And to a certain extent, they kind of keep it real. And a good spouse and a good partner will tell you, like, you're full of shit. That's not true. You're reading your own press. A good board will say, no, you can't do that. That is not cool. It's illegal. Yeah, this guy had nothing around him. Or he pushed people around. I think he was quite aggressive in terms of pretending he was feckless. And then everybody did what he said. Interesting.

The Atlantic had a headline, Silicon Valley May Never Learn Its Lesson. Do you think people keep falling for these characters? Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement, this case, she sent a clear message to anyone who tries to hide their crimes around a shiny new thing. They claim no one else is smart enough to understand. The Justice Department will hold you accountable. Interestingly, the VC firm Sequoia is getting dragged after in the aftermath. One of the partners, I think it was Alfred Lin, tweeted about how the company evaluated its due diligence process after FDX collapsed and determined it had been deliberately misled and lied to.

These people didn't do due diligence. Firms included New Enterprise Associates, SoftBank, Sequoia, BlackRock, collectively putting $2 billion into FTX. So talk to me about that, the due diligence part of it. You get involved in all kinds of companies, and it's sort of a lot of people go along to get along kind of thing. There's just a different approach. to get along kind of thing. There's just a different approach. When General Catalyst invested in my last or two companies ago, L2, I think conservatively, they called 50 people I had worked with and interviewed them about me. I mean, people that I hadn't talked to in 10 years. And the amount of diligence they did on the numbers, and they brought in an accounting firm to pour over everything.

This firm was calling me and saying, we see this $4,000 charge here. I mean, they did a full body cavity search. What I also found out from another investor is he was about to put a billion dollars into FTX. Then when they asked for financials, he said, we don't have financials. I can send you a text message that summarizes our financials. Wow. And when you see the gains that the people who invested last year made,

your standards come down. You're like, okay, this is a new world. Let's get super aggressive. Everyone's making money but us. We have access to something special. This is a tale as old as time, and it's not gonna stop. Yeah, to stop. That's what I said. Whether it's Adam Neumann,

there'll be Elizabeth Holmes, there'll be a new character that comes across as very honest, comes across as an innovator, and the opportunity, the sense, you know, the illusion of scarcity to get in erodes your ability to start.

And look at those guys are in it, those guys are in it, those guys are in it. You know, that's what happens. Oh, Sequoia's in it. You know, oh, Andreessen's in it. Oh, that carries along a lot of these firms. There's so many dozens of firms that this has happened, even sort of minor ones like Juicero. When they came, we're like, we don't get this, right? We were just sitting there going, nice people, but this seems stupid. nice people, but this seems stupid. And they just pile the money in. I don't know why.

I never understood the mentality. I've been asked to be a venture capitalist many times, and I've turned it down because I never understood. Well, you can empathize with the fact that if you invest in some of these firms in 19, some of them got seven 10x returns in 12 months, at least in paper. So it's like, okay, all of my buddies at the firm down the road, Soundhill Road, have literally clocked $100 million in limited partner carried interest by moving. And what happened was the following. There was this tidal wave of capital into these companies that they needed to deploy. Now, in order to deploy it, it became a war around how to get into a finite number of hot firms that seem to be just going to the moon, and FTX is one of them.

And so they could only compete on a few things. They could compete on relationships. That's how you got introduced to Sam Bankman-Fried. You could compete on valuation. It was like, well, okay, these valuations are crazy. So Masayoshi San competed. Everyone was willing to pay these crazy valuations. So a new form of competition, a new form of differentiation and winning the deal was the following.

And it happened across CO2, Tiger, SoftBank, and it was the following. They said, Sam, we can move fast. We can do this round in 48 hours. Right. And so all of a sudden, now, what does that mean? Granted, it won these guys a lot of deals. We can move fast. It also meant that you can't put 10 pounds of diligence in a one-pound box and conduct

anything resembling diligence. And you can be sure that Sequoia said to Sam Bankman Freed. Oh, they did. They wrote an essay about it, how adorable it was. We can move fast. Oh, you need $500 wrote an essay about it, how adorable it was. We can move fast. Oh, you need $500 million at an $8 billion value? No problem. And guess what?

We have so much capital under management. We have such incredible relationships with our investors. We can sign the term sheet in 48 hours. We can fund in seven days. And they were all doing it, Kara. Or not all of them. But if you wanted to deploy capital and have fun at Studio 54 of this incredible wealth generation, you had to kind of go along and pay not only these outrageous valuations, but be ready to fund in no time flat. Right, right.

No, I agree. I mean, there was an essay that Sequoia did about it that was just embarrassing. I don't know what else to say. You mean the blowjob on a piece of paper? Yeah, it was crazy. Oh, my God. This is the now. People have it there.

They archived it because it was so bad. This is the now removed Sequoia profile of SBF and FTX that they put up, and it was called Sandbank Manfrede Has a Savior Complex, and Maybe You Should Too. And it just is so it's so embarrassing. They were saying that as if it's a good thing? Yeah, it's just an embarrassing profile. It's really- No, if you want really embarrassing, again, I have a bit of a bias against Sequoia, but

go to Sequoia's website and look at the quotes from the partners. There's one young partner who shall remain nameless. This is like literally an exact quote. It's like, when I meet with the founder CEO, I don't want to know just about the company. I want to know about how he's doing. And I thought to myself, I'm going to reach out to this guy and say, no joke, I'm a 3X times Sequoia-backed CEO. I have prostateitis, erectile dysfunction. Can we get together? Because I'd really like to hear from a 29-year-old who learned on the mean streets of Groton and Dartmouth how I'm doing. I mean, the quotes from these partners are just so like, they're comical.

This piece, you should read it. It's in the Wayback Machine. Let me just read this one thing. With the SPF doing the hard work of interviewing himself, I'm free to think. And finally, just as the clock is running out on my allotted hour, by the way, hour, I ask what might be the first non-stupid question of the entire interview. So I summarize, you are young and vital and peaking at precisely the moment when the world is at, and as you see it, peak crisis. SPF nods in agreement, deep in another round of storybook brawl. He's playing a video game during this.

Does that strike you as a lucky coincidence? Does it strike you as perhaps a signal that you're thinking is flawed and you have a savior complex? That's an interesting question, he says, is stalling. I double down. Ooh, journalism. You happen to be alive at the most important time in the history of the future race. Is it the existential point, really? SBF hedges. It certainly would not be one's prior, at least, not naively. It just goes on, literally. And I literally am like, this guy is a horse's ass, and this is nonsense. And it just is beyond belief. Anyway, good luck. Good luck, Sam Bankman-Fried. This is the end of crypto. Bitcoin is up. I mean, Bitcoin has doubled this year. Look, I think that they will, the crypto universe will, and maybe correctly, try and say this is, we've bottomed out here.

We've starched out the bad players. There's real value here. And it's time for, you know, the kind of adults in the room, whether it's a Mike Novogratz or, you know, the people that might be seen as, but are seen as honest, ethical players making a market in the space. There is some technology here, but it's going where it should be. It's a small niche market where there's probably some real innovation.

If you're in an emerging market that has an unstable currency, there is value to getting your Argentinian pesos converted to something more stable. But I mean, you want to talk about, by the way, I'm listening to the best Spotify music channel, Bangles Radio, which is all this kind of 80s music. And one of the greatest songs from the Bangles, of which there aren't a ton, but there are a few, The Hero Takes a Fall. I'm doing my predictions deck. So many heroes have

taken it. Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Sheryl Sandberg, Sam Bankman Freed. I mean, what do you think has happened to Elon Musk's brand in the last 12 months? Right, yeah. I would bet 90% of the world had positive views on Elon Musk just 12 months ago. My son did. Remember I told you my son was like, I liked him. Now he's such a douche. Like that really pretty much.

I shouldn't use that word, but that's what the word he used. But it'll happen again. There'll be someone next year. someone not us though anyway let's go on a quick break good luck sam godspeed when we come back what to make of a new poll about the 2024 election and we'll speak with friend of pivot cashmere hill about her new book on facial Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer

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voters have with Biden, as you've noted, with 71% saying he's too old to be an effective president, opinion shared across all demographic and geographic groups polled. Now, Obama was way down at this point before he won re-election, but I'll posit that. But if the results of the poll were the same next November, Trump would easily win the election, more than 300 electoral college votes. David Axelrod, who was an advisor to Obama, pointed out on Twitter, Biden needs to decide whether running for president is in his best interest or the country's. What do you think? I think it's a little too early. That's my feeling. And a lot of people I respect think that, like Mike Madrid and others. When you say too early, what do you mean? I think we don't know. I think people are not like, this is just off the top of their head. I think, first of all, we don't know if Trump gets convicted.

I think that'll change a lot of people's minds. I don't think they suddenly like him more after he gets convicted. And I think convictions is different than just being accused of a crime. So there's those. You know, there's all these the wars, what's happening in Ukraine, in Israel. There's all kinds of that. We have the economy still TBD. Things could change. So I think there's just a lot to come. That's all. There's all kinds of that. We have the economy still TBD. Things could change. So I think there's just a lot to come. That's all. That's all. I think it's early.

To your point, a poll at this point is kind of meaningless. I mean, you just don't know. And although there's just no getting around it, the fact that the president, after what are, by any reasonable metric, kind of historic accomplishments, lowest inflation among the G7, fastest growing economy, more jobs created in two and three quarter years than any president has done in four years. I mean, he's- He's not getting credit. He's got, if there is a piece to be kept, the reason why so far the conflict in the Middle East hasn't become a regional conflict is because he immediately sent two carrier strike forces over there. And people believe that he will use them if the Iranians get too involved here. I think the guy has literally put on a master class in presidency.

And at the same time, two-thirds of his party doesn't want him to run. And here's the thing, people recognize that the mortality rate across our species is still 100%. And not only that, it's not death they're worried about, it's the two or three years leading up to death they're worried about. I mean, he's been running for president since I was in elementary school. And I like the president, but like any person who ever agrees to put up with the bullshit to become president, he's a bit of a narcissist. And this narcissism that has infected everyone from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Senator Feinstein,

I mean, if he announced today, I wanted to step in, I saw an opportunity to, I think this country really needed me. And now I think it's time for a new generation. I think he'd go down as one of the greatest presidents in history. Yeah, he's been a great president. He has. He has been a great president. But I would love to see, I third-term congressman. He's not very long. He's an heir to a Caesar Rich guy, a distilling empire and co-owner of a gelato company. I feel like perhaps not the most qualified to be president. Nonetheless, he's running. One House Democrat called Phillips' campaign an exercise in futility. The New York Times polling does have an unnamed generic Democrat doing better than Biden. Obviously, RFK Jr. is doing rather well against both Trump and Biden. He's trying to make this case. Phillips was on Bill Maher on Friday. Let's listen to what he said about more candidates joining the field. The more the merrier. It's still not too late to jump into this race. I wish we had more competition instead of a coronation. This is not that difficult. And I don't understand why people are so hesitant to do what the country needs so desperately.

So tell me what your thoughts are. Well, I've been saying this for a while. I think that so much pressure is building up. And I don't know if he's kind of the finger out of the dike, if you will, or that he breaks the seal. But I just, when you see Governor Newsom headed to Israel and debating Ron DeSantis, and when you see Governor Whitmer, there's just a lot of people kind of waiting and saying, put me in coach. There's a lot. I think the Democratic bench is really strong. I think it's like when Steve Young, this is as deep as my sports metaphor goes, the greatest quarterback in history was, or one of them was Joe Montana. The second greatest was Steve Young on the bench. We have a really strong bench. And right now, as I've said, we're playing not to lose. And Congressman Phillips, while I don't think he will win, I think he might have a very profound impact, and that is, I think he's going to poll in the high single or double digits with no name recognition, and I think the pressure is going to build, and somebody who's more credible is going to say, I'm in. I'm in.

Go up the middle. Interesting. RFK Jr., speaking of which, there's a new poll showing he has a good amount of support and is in a position to be a serious threat to both parties. I think to both parties. And Trump people are worried, too. That is just a radical narcissism that shows you don't give a flying fuck about America. Whether it's Ralph Nader or Ross Perot, all you're doing is handing the presidency to someone else. Right. And an exercise of narcissism.

And this guy. But Phillips is not in doing that or no, it's just within the Democratic Party. He's not a spoiler. He's running to get the nomination of the Democratic Party. He's not. It's the independents that bastardize and create unintended consequences or outcomes. What does Biden do to pull himself out of this poll that there's a problematic, you know, the Israel-Hamas war for Biden's re-election? I think it's early for that, too.

There's increased infighting within the Democratic Party, obviously, over Biden's support of Israel, although Blinken has been visiting all over the place. I think it's early on that one. But how does he pull himself out of the hole? By not running, that's what you're saying. I just think biology is the most unforgiving friend in the world, arbiter in the world. There's just nothing. Think about how hard all of us are fighting biology. And there's literally almost nothing. He's done everything he can. The guy is remarkable. He's remarkable. I mean, we took my father's driver's license away when he was five years younger than President Biden. But there's no time waits for no man.

The biology here, and this is also true of Trump, although I got to give it to Trump, he just comes across as more robust. Well, he's crazier, that's why. Yeah, but you're right. He's got this great That's why. Yeah. But you're right. He's got this great tan, whatever he is. But this is, at some point, you're, I mean, I go to one scene, Cara, and I've asked you to answer me honestly here. It's the first presidential debate. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Republican nominee, President Donald Trump. And ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Democratic nominee for president. And now scan your emotions when you say Joe Biden or when you say Governor Newsom or Governor Whitmer.

I'd rather have them. I'm looking forward to seeing the contrast here. And if it's Joe Biden, they're like, oh, God, I hope he doesn't like fuck off. Oh, I think we're we I think we are. I think you and I are a nervous supporter of him earlier than anybody last year, a couple of years ago, as you remember, and you made fun of me. But I thought he was the right answer for the time and the others were sort of flash in the pans. But in this case, I'm sort of mixed. I think he can handle it. But I also do think that, yeah, I think it's early. I think Trump is going to be convinced. Think about, okay, hold on. I'm sorry to repeat. Think about Lucky. Think about your mom six years ago versus today. Yeah, I'd agree. Six years ago versus today. Let me guess, she was driving, living on her own.

Yeah, I remember she drove, but we didn't want her to remember your house. Oh my God, that was one of the scariest things I've ever seen. Exactly. Looking at her like, couldn't find the door out. And then I see her in a car behind the driving wheel. And I'm like, you headed that way right. And immediately she makes a left. I'm like, that's it. She's going to end up in Cuba. Oh, my God. Do you remember that? I do remember that. And your aunt.

I'm like, she's not only going to kill herself. She's going to kill her aunt or your aunt. But here's the thing. And this is the opportunity for the guy. Yeah, it is. Think about what a service for the country would say. It's time to let a new generation. I'd love to see. I don't know if it's going to be Trump a service to the country would say. It's time to let a new generation. I'd love to see.

I don't know if it's going to be Trump either. I think he's good. I think Christie and Hayes Hutcherson are right. This guy's getting convicted. The candidate, in my view, who's going to gain momentum there is by far 100%. Haley. Because if you look at the top. Come up the middle.

If you look at the top things, it's inflation, conflicts around the world, and who can unite America. That's Haley, Haley, and Haley. I mean, she has a real shot. And my biggest fear is that Trump picks her as his veep. But if Biden said, I'm opening this up to this incredible – I'd love to see Mayor Pete run. Or Secretary Pete. I'd love to see Secretary Lincoln on the debate stage. That's a man.

I think he's fantastic. Our bench is so deep here of candidates who, in contrast to President Trump, would be like, oh, I'm definitely going with that guy or gal. I don't know. So far, that's not what I picked up. We'll see. We'll see. Anyway, we've got to move on. We'll see what happens. But that was a very good discussion about this. You were very good. You weren't just making old jokes. Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot. privacy reporter at the New York Times and author of Your Face Belongs to Us, The Secret of Startups' Quest to End Privacy as We Know It. Welcome, Kashmir. How are you doing? I'm good. Thanks for having me on. Good. As you know, I think you're a fantastic reporter. And this came out of an investigation into facial recognition startup Clearview AI. I'd love you to sort of give us a background

on what made you start digging. Obviously, facial recognition has been a topic I've talked about for a long time. But what made you start digging into this company? And I want to specifically write that what Clearview has done was not a scientific breakthrough. It was ethical arbitrage. Why don't you start from there? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're actually in the book here asking about facial recognition a decade ago. I initially started digging into Clearview AI because I heard about them through a tipster who had come across the company in a public records request. And they claimed to have done something pretty extraordinary, that they had scraped billions of photos from the public web, including social media sites, to build this facial recognition app where you take a picture of somebody, upload it to their app, and it shows you everywhere else. They appear on the internet, and they claim that it worked with 98.6% accuracy. And I hadn't heard of a facial recognition technology, you know, product that worked that well, that searched at

that scale. And so it was very striking to me knowing kind of what I did at that point. And at that point, I thought facial recognition technology honestly didn't work that well. I'd heard it was very clunky, that police didn't consider it a very powerful tool, really. And I hadn't seen another company do something like that. It seemed like something I would hear about Facebook or Google doing, not a little startup that was very secretive, nothing was known about them. And so that's why I initially started digging into them. And it was pretty extraordinary what they built. But what was extraordinary about it was, as you said, they were willing to do what others hadn't. The building blocks were there. Yeah, the reference you were making, the other companies have been working on similar technology in the book. You mentioned an interview that Walt Mossberg and I did with

Google's then chairman, Eric Schmidt. He told us Google had built facial recognition technology. We were very intent on finding out about it, but that had withheld it, largely for, I think, ethical reasons, right? In terms of not understanding the power of it. Every time I was at Google, you could tell they could do it, right? They had, you know, You could tell they could do it, right? They could, they had, you know, whether it was looking, not just faces, but things like in Paris, the Eiffel Tower, this and that. They were way down that road, much further than people realized. Yeah, and the technology got better, like with much like ChatGPT and these other, you

know, products, the neural net technology and large scale learning models really made the technology more powerful. But yeah, both Google and Facebook got to this point where they said, yeah, you can take a stranger's picture and figure out who they are, organize photos you have of them by face. But they both said, they both looked at facial recognition technology. And I thought this was striking because these aren't companies known for being particularly conservative in terms of new data usage. But they said, yeah, the downsides are too large here. I think specifically, Eric Schmidt said, you know, imagine what an evil dictator could do with this. And there's positive uses, but we're too worried about the harmful

uses. And so, yeah, they sat on the technology. But they could do it. Same thing with a generative AI. They could do it. They could do it. I actually watched this video of Facebook engineers a few years back. They're sitting in a conference room in Menlo Park with a smartphone strapped to the brim of a hat. It's still a very janky version of the future kind of augmented reality glasses where they looked around the room. And when the camera saw a face, it would call out the person's name. So they both had it, they sat on it, and it took this kind of startup with nothing to lose to go ahead and put this out there and see what they could gain through it. Which is always the danger, whether it's CRISPR or anything else. The cloning was done by someone in China, as opposed to the more famous scientists who were able to do it. Scott?

Nice to meet you, Kashmir. My sense of these technologies is that if the utility is strong, it'll run away from the privacy concerns. People talk a big game about privacy, and then they want it adopted. In the last week, I've had facial recognition expedite my journey at airports and through TSA. Is your sense that the utility is going to get so far out ahead of privacy concerns that a lot of externalities will emerge? What, if anything, are you most worried about with this technology? Yeah, I mean, I hear a lot from activists who say facial recognition technology is too dangerous. You know, it's like nuclear weapons.

It's the downsides are so large that we need to ban it. I, you know, I don't see that happening. I think there's a lot of beneficial uses, but it's this spectrum, right? And the version of it that I wouldn't want to see, hey, it's great. Yes, we're getting into a country. It's great for opening your smartphone,

even solving crimes. I've talked to officers who've been able to solve very horrible crimes using this technology. But the idea of it becoming ubiquitous, if you have facial recognition algorithms running on all the surveillance cameras all the time, where the government can track anybody, if every company, business has this running

so that they identify you as you walk through the front door, I think that's really alarming. And we've already seen that happen with Madison Square Garden, right? This is my favorite example. They installed facial recognition algorithms a few years ago for security reasons, and then in the last year decided, well, we've got this infrastructure in place. Why don't we use this to keep out the people we don't like, such as lawyers who suit us, right? And so you get that surveillance creep, that function creep. And so I really think that there should be guardrails so that we don't see the kind of like worst applications of this start to be embraced. Which we first saw with police. We'll talk about that in a second. I

was in the Whole Foods the other day and they wanted to do palm recognition and, you know, through Amazon One. Have you seen this in the stores now? You put your palm up and then it recognizes your palm and then you can pay by your palm, which I said, no, I was like, it's a palm too far, Jeff Bezos. It's not happening. I saw this at a Whole Foods in San Francisco, of course. And I asked the attendant there, I'm like, how many people actually, you know, sign up and give their palm? And he, you know, not very scientific, but his estimate was, you know, two or 3% of customers. And it was funny to me, because a company like this, it was called Pay by Touch in the early 2000s. They were collecting people's fingerprints to have them pay for

groceries. And they're actually the reason why this law, the one law that's super relevant to facial recognition technology in the United States, the Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, it's why it exists. Because an ACLU lawyer was there. The clerk was trying to collect his fingerprint. And he's like, what is this company?

And when he looked into them, he was very disturbed by who was running it and that they were asking for people's biometrics instead of a credit card just to pay for groceries. It seemed ridiculous to him. And his research led to this super strong law that's been one of the main kind of hurdles for companies that want to do facial recognition technology. But what is the future? Because, you know, there was the pushback with police with cams on them, or in Britain using so much excessive facial recognition in the streets and the mistakes that are made. Obviously, racial bias is a major issue. I remember interviewing Andy Jassy about the issues around their facial recognition technology, which was called Recognition with

a K. Talk a little bit about where is the future? Because they definitely get slammed up against these issues pretty quickly. It does seem like the dream for technology companies is to create a world in which we don't need to carry any bags around with us, that they keep trying to sell us on this, right? Amazon's like, pay with your palm, and then that means you're free to wander the world carrying nothing. You know, amusement parks and gyms and, you know, other places like that really like the idea of biometrics to prevent kind of ticket fraud or membership abuse so they can

make sure the person that buys that ticket and walks in is the same person that tries to get in later. So there's certainly a push for it from a lot of different companies. And I do think the use of facial recognition technology in situations that benefit us, you know, that society will probably embrace that. I mean, even for the book, I went to London to do research into how the UK police are using facial recognition technology. Quite heavily. I landed at Heathrow, instead of waiting, you know, hours and hours to be processed to cross the border, you know, I and hours to be processed to cross the border,

you know, I walked up to a little kiosk, put my passport down, look into a facial recognition camera, and it makes sure that my face matches the biometric chip in my passport. And I walked in, and I was in the country, you know, 20 minutes after the plane landed. It's incredibly convenient, and I think we'll see more of that. But this idea of, there's two different versions, right? That's like making sure that you're you. And this other version, what Clearview AI is selling is the kind of finding you in a huge database of persons and tracking you and kind of using facial recognition in a way that doesn't benefit you, that may harm you. And I think that's what we're going to see the pushback against.

But I think they'll come for more biometrics, right? It's going to be your palm print. It's going to be your voice print. I'm sure there's going to be a company that comes along that does what Clearview AI did, but for voice, where you upload, you know, somebody talking and then it finds everywhere else on the internet where they're in a video, where they're talking. That is, unless we put some kind of guardrails around it that say you can't just use people's information this way, you know, without their

consent. So how does that happen, right? Because, you know, especially with, you know, advances in AI and everything else, this makes it very easy to do this. So what are companies working to address that? And then legislation on a national level, you mentioned one piece of legislation, but it is something where cities tend to act, states tend to go into line, especially around racial bias, which is evident in a lot of these police cams, for example, which some, some which is good, because we found out what they're actually doing versus what they say they're doing, right? As you said, there's pluses and minuses, but what are the companies doing to address it? Or will we always be plagued by a Clearview AI kind of company that doesn't care, right? We're just lucky because we're relying on the kindness of Google not to track us everywhere.

Right. I mean, I think that is something that I wanted the book to get at, is that with these new technological tools and the fact that they're open source and that these models are increasingly kind of accessible to anyone with technical savvy is that it is going to be, you know, the most radical actor, small actors like Clearview AI. I mean, it's just this ragtag crew of founders that they're able to basically kind of cross the lines

that have existed. And I think we're going to see this in other spheres beyond just facial recognition technology, other kinds of AI. In terms of what companies can do, I mean, we saw Google and Facebook decide to sit on this and hold it back. I see companies like Signal, the private messaging app, creating face blurring tools so that when you are taking a photo of a crowd, for example, you can blur out their faces before you put it online. Basically, like limiting the supply of faces, right? Because that's what's been so surprising to me. Every time Clearview, I've

had a Clearview search done on me. It's not just finding kind of the photos I've put out there. It's me at a concert, you know, in the background of someone else's photo. It's kind of tracking where I've been as other people have taken photos of it. So I guess that's one way they're addressing it, right? The supply of faces. I do think that the most effective route is going to be regulations, a policy framework. And Europe is, as they often are on privacy laws, they are ahead of us. They said that what Clearview AI did was illegal, that you can't collect this sensitive information about people, put them in a database like this without their consent. They essentially kicked Clearview out of their country. In the U.S., we have that law I was talking about earlier, BIPA in Illinois. It says that you can't use people's face prints or voice prints or fingerprints without their consent or

face a very hefty fine. And because of that law, Madison Square Garden, which is keeping lawyers out of their New York venues like MSG and Beacon Theater and Radio City Music Hall, they have a theater in Chicago, and they're not using facial recognition technology to keep lawyers out there because it would violate this law. So these laws can work. We've regulated technology in the past that we found kind of frightening or taboo. And I think we can do it again. Scott?

So there's obvious applications here in travel, hospitality, retail. What other industries do you think are going to be able to substantially lower their costs or add, you know, reduce consumer friction here? What do you think is the next industry to adopt facial recognition? Well, we're seeing it adopted a lot in kind of amusement settings. So, I'm seeing a lot of sports stadiums that are starting to use facial recognition technology, sometimes for kind of picking up your food, like you can order it on an app, and then you just show up and it scans your face and you get it. So I think that that is something that we'll see a lot. I think real estate buildings are interested in this as like, you know, an access tool. My kind of fear with this is that we see the kind of tracking we already have online, right? Like every time you go to a website, they're trying to figure out who you are,

you know, what you've bought in the past, how much you have to spend. There's kind of all of this background tracking that's happening all the time as we move through the internet. And what facial recognition technology could mean is taking all that and moving it into the real world. That you walk into a store and they have these cookies that are attached to your face, you know, knowing what your leanings are, what your purchase history is, how much you have to spend. And I think that kind of idea of everything knowable about us on the internet kind of trailing us in the real world, I think it would be pretty chilling. And if it's just, I mean, I know you guys are thinking about the company uses of it, but I always think about how people will use this, the kind of little brother aspect of

this. And if everyone has a Clearview AI type app on their phone, what that means for day-to-day privacy and the kind of trolling that happens online, just seeing that all of a sudden leap into the real world where they see you buy something sensitive at the pharmacy and take your picture and they're like, look who just bought hemorrhoid cream and they're tweeting it out.

Or you're having a sensitive conversation over dinner, assuming that you're anonymous, that the people around you don't know who you are, won't understand the context of your conversation. And then they take a photo of you and now they know. Just all these ways in which we kind of assume that we're anonymous as we move through the world, that kind of everyday comfort we have could just disappear. Remember that it was the sun microsystems. There is no privacy.

Get used to it. Remember that was Scott McNeely, right? Something like that. Yeah. What advice do you have for people trying to protect their own privacy? What can they do? Yeah, I mean, with facial recognition technology specifically, the vendors have made sure that this works even with masks on. I mean, you can wear a ski mask. That would be a very effective way of making sure you weren't tracked this way. Great. Then you get arrested, but go ahead. I think, you know, thinking more deliberatively about your image on the public internet, there are more and more benefits, I think, to posting privately and restricting,

yeah, just your image being available. So thinking about that, I've asked a couple of law firms, you know, knowing what you know now, what MSG did, this kind of retaliation against lawyers. Are you thinking about taking your photos off your websites so that they can't make this kind of list? Because that's how MSG made it. They scraped the law firm websites, bio pages. So, yeah, so just thinking about what you're putting out there. So just thinking about what you're putting out there. If you are so lucky to live in a state that has privacy laws that allow you to access what a company has on you and delete it, you can actually go to, if you live in California or Colorado or Connecticut or Virginia, they have laws right now that say that you can get yourself deleted from companies' databases. So if you don't like this, you can go to Clearview AI or to some of the other public face search engines that are out there and say, delete me from your database.

But hard to do. You have to be proactive, in other words. You have to be proactive. And California actually requires companies to say how many of these requests they get. And I looked at Clearview AI's website, and over the last two years, they've had something like 800 requests for deletions in California. California's population is, what, 34 million people? Million, something like that, yeah. So not many people just to get – it's convenient.

So what you have to do is not have a face is really what I think the answer is. Scott, last question. What would you tell parents to do regarding pictures of their kids posted on social? Don't do it? I mean, I think unless there is some real benefit to posting publicly, you should be doing it privately. You should have a private account, you know, limited to family and friends.

I did kind of get, I went to PimEyes, which is one of these public face search engines. And I asked about this, the kind of search of kids' faces. And they've actually decided to block of search of kids' faces, and they've actually decided to block results for minors' faces. So that was a company kind of making a proactive move. But yeah, generally, I say don't do it. And when you get those waivers, you know, from the school or the daycare that says, is it okay if we post your kid online? Say no. Feel free to say no. I really don't see the benefits in that kind of public

posting in the world that we're in today. Yep. And they can get them anyway, as you say, from other places that they're walking down the street. Unfortunately, they can see them everywhere you go. Yeah, we are in a, this is going to change. And especially as the technology becomes better and better, and it has gotten better and better. It is not just face, although your book is called that. It's face, voice, palm, everything. Your signature, how you walk, right? There's all kinds of things being, you know, your gait can be different than someone else's, which is interesting. Yeah, this is what's so hard about privacy is that we kind of put this information out there or share information about ourselves in one context,

and it gets used in a way we don't expect. And with the technology getting better all the time, it's hard to predict how the information you make available could come back to haunt you. And I just don't think that most of us who are putting our face online, you know, over the last two decades on the internet anticipated that something like this would come along that would reorganize the internet and make it searchable by face. It's just hard to. I don't know. I think they knew, Cash.

You think, well, you knew, Kara. You're not the normal. No, I have a section in my book where they get mad at me, the Google founders, because I said they couldn't control all of search. And I said, well, I'm worried about a dangerous person running it, right? I call them thugs.

I said, ultimately, they're thugs. And I said, I'm not're thugs. And I said, I'm not worried about you. I'm worried about someone else. But they weren't even thinking of it. You're right. They were never thinking of it. It's a real blind spot, so to speak, on this particular book. Anyway, it's a really important book. Cash is an amazing reporter, does some of the top stuff around these issues. And again, the book is called Your Face Belongs to Us, A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy. As we know it, they will probably be successful. In any case, thank you so much,

Cash. Thank you, Cara. Thank you, Scott. Thank you. One more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Okay, Scott, wins and fails. May I go first?

May I go first? Something I wish was going to be a win, but I suspect it's not going to be. The Marvels is opening up. A lot of the MCU movies are showing signs of fatigue. And this one, of course, is women. And so they'll probably have even more fatigue. It's with Brie Larson, who I adore. As you know, I loved her in Lessons in Chemistry.

I think she's great. But it's pacing. It's not pacing well in terms of sales. Another theory, far more likely, is no one really asked for Captain Marvel sequel. While the film grossed over a billion dollars when it released in 2019, it has almost no cultural footprint and passionate goodwill in 2023. It served its purpose of connecting one Avengers movie to another and set up Larson's superheroes and effective, if dull, a hero who takes out the best villain Marvel has yet produced, Thanos, but none of the many trailers have convinced audiences. I'm sorry, I'm going to go see it, but it's a win for me because I love Brie Larson and the whole gang that's doing it, but probably a fail at the box office. These superhero movies look like maybe they've got the stuffing knocked out of them a little bit. All right. Any fails? That is a fail. I wish it wasn't. I wish it wasn't because I out of them a little bit. All right. Any fails? That is a fail.

I wish it wasn't. I wish it wasn't because I bet it's a great movie. I'm excited to see it. You know, fail is continuing. The creepiness of Mike Johnson. It continues. He had an app to monitor his porn use with his son. The anti-gay stuff is getting more and more clear, what he was doing. The bank

account, just a strange man, just a strange fella. Anyway. Got it. Okay, so my win is Caleb Williams. He's the quarterback for the USC Trojans, who I hate as a Bruin, but he's probably going to be number one draft pick. And most recently this weekend, it made news everywhere. He kind of lost the game and he ran over. It was sort of inconsolable and jumped into the fans where he embraced his mother and began to sob like while he was still in uniform. And I thought that was such a seminal moment in what needs to happen among young men who unfortunately let masculinity get in the way of expressing their emotions. 77% of suicides now are men. It used to be three to one. It's now edging towards four to one. And a big problem is that men have this

vision of masculinity, meaning that when you are struggling, you keep it to yourself. And so, for example, of all the addictions, the one that has the greatest incidence of suicide is actually gambling. Because if you have an addiction to alcohol or opiates or meth or whatever it might be, people notice it and they move in. And with gambling, you can get in really deep and no one even knows, and people feel as if there's no way out. And the reason I bring that up is the key to getting better is a practice of expressing your emotions.

And this kid, this kid is really like, he said to the entire world, I'm going to be the Heisman Trophy winner. I'm an amazing fucking athlete. I define masculinity. And when I am really sad, I go and embrace my mother and I don't give a flying fuck who is watching. I think that one moment, that unscripted moment, literally advanced masculinity and mental health among young men like light years. Because it's a huge problem among men that they don't want to express their hurt and their emotions for fear that they'll be seen as being less manly. I just thought this was such a powerful moment in addition to it being a very raw moving moment. I think it'll have a real positive impact. I like that. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so my win is Caleb Williams. My fail is I think think at some point, the university leadership across

America's universities is going to realize that there's a difference between free speech and hate speech and start kicking out students. I almost got kicked out of UCLA several times, mostly because I would get below a 2.0 GPA, more than two quarters in a row. There was a window called- That I'm not surprised, but go ahead. There was a window called the emergency loan window. And with your student ID, you could get 50 bucks, no questions asked, but you had to pay it back within seven days. I went past seven days once and I got a notice saying you've been kicked out of UCLA. So we kick people out of UCLA all the time. We kick people out of universities all the time. But

when people show up to a university and say things, there's free speech. If you want to march with a flag, if you want to say down with Israel, if you want to be a professor that says that she was affirmed by certain actions of the Palestinians. I actually think that's, I don't say that's fine. I disagree with it. it's fine, I disagree with it. But if I went to the campus at NYU and said, burn the gays or gas or lynch the blacks, I would be out the next day and I should be out the next day. And everybody goes through this bullshit First Amendment and we have a Second Amendment, but if you show up with an AR-15 to campus, you are kicked out of school. And there's one thing to have free speech, There's another thing to be saying things like, gas the Jews, burn the Jews. And then I get an email from my department

head saying, microaggressions will not be tolerated. And my attitude is, where between micro and aggression is students actually engaging in this type of hateful speech? And there is a difference between free speech and a difference between hate speech. And it is time for our university leadership to step up and say, if you say burn anybody, if you say do anything that invokes violence against any group, we are kicking your ass out of school. It is time. Yeah. You know, Bill Ackman also had a very – I usually think he sometimes goes off, but he had a very good letter to Harvard about this. I usually think he sometimes goes off, but he had a very good letter to Harvard about this.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting because a lot of the people who are sort of like, let everybody say what they want crowd is now on the other side of that, which is interesting because it's complex, as you know. I do tend to agree with you here. It really has gone too far. Some of it is just casual cruelty, such as pulling down the hostage pictures. I find that I don't even understand what child does that. If a child of mine did that with a disrespect for other people's opinions or putting up their stuff, I would be furious. And this stuff, it's gone past the point of tolerance. I would agree with you. I would agree. I would agree. Anyway, it's a sad time. Hopefully, people will get back to a more

central place where they treat each other with respect that everybody deserves. But who knows, probably not right now the way we're headed in this country sometimes. That's how a lot of people feel. Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. And please feel free to disagree with us. I suspect a lot of people will disagree with us on this issue for sure. Anyway, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Friday for more. Can you read us out? Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Travis Larchuk. Ernie Andertot

engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Mille Saverio, and Gaddy McMahon. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you 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. Young men, displaying your emotions

is a feature, not a bug. That is part of what it means to be a man.