Pivot - Crypto Chaos, Meta Layoffs, Musk Mania, and Guest Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Kara and Scott dissect what the FTX meltdown means for cryptocurrency, Meta's layoffs, and how the midterms might impact big tech. Friend of Pivot Jonathan Haidt stops by to talk about the impacts of social media on teens and society. And hours after our regular taping, we dragged Scott out of a fancy London bar to record an updated reaction to the latest Twitter news: Elon Musk was warning of a possible Twitter bankruptcy, while top executives were jumping ship. You can check out more of Jonathan Haidt's work here. Send us your questions! Call 855-51-PIVOT or go to 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 Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway. Hey, Scott, do you know why Kevin McCarthy hates surfing? I can't wait for this one. Why does Kevin McCarthy hate surfing, Cara? Because there's no red wave. Oh, my gosh. So many wave jokes. Anyway, it was not good, not good for the Republicans, but still, it was a really interesting race.

You know what the voters said? Stop it. Just stop it. Stop all the noise. That's of said, you know what the voters said? Stop it. Just stop it. Stop all the noise. That's what I think. What do you think? Very brief. Well, brief is not a friend I walk with, Cara.

All right. Well, let's wait then. Let's wait. What's the point of podcasting if you have to be brief? All right. We're going to get to that in a minute. Then let me just go through it. Today, we'll talk about the meltdown in the crypto world.

Big deal. It's a big, big deal with FTX. Also, big tech layoffs finally hit meta. Not as bad as people thought. And I thought Mark Zuckerberg handled it well. We'll speak with NYU's Jonathan Haidt about social media and mental health. But first, OK, the midterm election results are still coming in. And tech could be the loser.

Big tech opponents on both sides of the aisle notched wins this week. On the Republican side, J.D. Vance won his Ohio Senate race. He's called for an end to tax loopholes for tech companies, although he was a former techie and a tech investor. In North Carolina, Representative Ted Budd will become senator. Very tight race there, shockingly. He's tried to weaken Section 230. He's replacing Senator Richard Burr, a Republican who is a bit more sympathetic. And some Democratic victories mean that antitrust legislation is still on the table.

Senator Michael Bennett and Maggie Hassan both won re-election. They're considered key swing votes to the antitrust bill. So not so good for tech, but I think good for the country. Let me have your overall and then talk about the little tech element of it. This wasn't a red wave. It was a goodbye wave from Trump. All of a sudden, all the bookies are saying that DeSantis is now the odds-on favorite to get the Republican nomination. Alito took a hit here.

Going into the polls, abortion rights were number five. Coming out, they were a close number two to the economy. Very close. Almost equal. And also, I think the most exciting thing is that our institutions appear to be holding up. Now, what do I mean by that? is that our institutions appear to be holding up. Now, what do I mean by that?

I was very inspired by what happened with Lula in Brazil and what looks like it's going to be a peaceful transfer of power. And election denial appears to be a losing campaign tactic. And what's also, I really hope- We're not a winning one. We're not a winning one. I really hope, I think the most important election right now in America is Carrie Lake. I think she has done a tremendous disservice attacking a pillar of democracy, the peaceful transfer of power, when there's absolutely no evidence that Arizona did not do an outstanding

job in the 2020 election. And she is literally running against the election representative or the commissioner of elections. So that is a very important race. Something that's very hopeful is we expect a certain amount of fair play, a certain amount of civility, a certain lack of hate, a certain lack of, oh, hi, Dr. Fauci, whether you agree with him or not. He's been a public servant for 60 years. And when people start chanting, put him in jail on the floor of the Congress, that person shouldn't be reelected. And that's Lorraine. Babert? No. Some people call her Boebert on Twitter because it's so mature, but it's Boebert. Boebert. Lorraine Boebert. Thank you for that. She might lose her seat. That is very exciting. So,

there's just no getting around it. This was very good news for Democrats. It was. It was interesting. Let me give you some statistics. 18 toss-ups won by Democrats versus seven for Republicans. That was interesting to me. They were supposed to grab everything. Now, they are going to get control of the House, likely, but not a very good one and puts Kevin McCarthy in a real problematic position because he's got the screaming memes like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who did win, on the other side making trouble for him. So he's going to have to yank right, but that's not good for elections. So it's a real problem.

He's got a real problem because he doesn't have – and you could peel away a lot of Republicans. The Democrats certainly could. Even Lindsey Graham was talking about bipartisan legislation immediately. Let me just say, it was, as I tweeted, it was a good night for lesbians across the country. Say more. Maura Healey, who's now the Massachusetts governor. I did not know that. Yeah, she's amazing.

I did a great interview with her. I know her a little bit. And also Tina Kotick in Oregon. She fended off a very interesting challenge from a Republican and an independent. So two big lesbian, no, three. Well, there's the mayor of Chicago. We're all over the place, let me just say. The other thing is the coordinated attacks on Trump by Fox are really interesting.

They call him Trump-ty-dump-ty. The Wall Street Journal had quite the, Trump is the Republican Party's biggest loser. It's quite an eviscerating piece. And then the Wall Street, a perfect record of electoral defeat. He has led Republicans into one political fiasco after another. So very interesting shifts going on. The other one I would comment about is Peter Thiel. Did he win?

J.D. Vance won in Ohio. It was a close race. Tim Ryan, kudos to him in terms of that race. And his concession speech was incredibly, that guy's going places, I think. We don't know about Blake Masters in Arizona, but he's quite behind. Both are former Thiel employees, but he's quite behind. Both are former Teal employees, and he gave a lot of millions and millions of dollars. I don't think he's as interested in politics as people think.

I don't think he wants to be Sheldon Adelson. But he likes to put money here and there. So I don't know if he won or not. Just a quick call out, though, to Tim Ryan. I thought the speech he gave, which has been seen around the world, had more impact on a democracy than he likely could have had had he won the election. I have the privilege to concede this race to J.D. Vance, because the way this country operates is that when you lose an election, you concede. And you respect. I thought that was very powerful. I do too. And he sets a great role model for other elected representatives. He set, I think,

a great role model for young people. He could have gone to the Senate and served well for six years and not had the kind of impact he had with that six-minute concession speech. I thought that was very powerful. Yeah. What about tech? No, it feels like it's one of the few bipartisan topics. They come at it for different reasons, but even your guy, or not your guy, the guy you mentioned, J.D. Vance, Teal's guy, is claiming that he wants to do it with tax loopholes. It just feels as if everyone's coalescing around some sort of legislation here. But you know what? I've been saying that for five years. Yeah, I know. I know.

We'll see. Well, they have trouble abroad. Regulators in the EU have announced a probe into Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Last month, Microsoft accused a different regulator in the UK of relying on biased input from its rival, Sony. It's going to be really interesting. Europe is, of course, leading the way, but there's going to be a lot of stuff scrutinized. And, you know, companies like Facebook can't really expand if they need to buy things. We'll get to Facebook in a minute. But I think there's going to be legislation. I think Amy Klobuchar's antitrust bill might, if they get the Senate, it looks like Mark Kelly will get it. That means the

race in Georgia between Senator Warnock and the football guy. That's from a column. Herschel Walker is not my father. Yeah. So I think that's going to be interesting, but they may not need it. It might just, you know, just sort of sideline Joe Manchin a tiny bit more than he's been, pull the power from him, which I don't know. I think it's probably a good idea not to have one guy deciding everything. And then lastly, I think that power from him, which I don't know. I think it's probably a good idea not to have one guy deciding everything. And then lastly, I think that if Chuck Schumer may lighten up on all the tech legislation, he's been a champion of tech. So, I mean, he's been a, I don't know if a champion is the right word because I don't think he knows anything about it.

Defender. Defender, whatever. Apologist. Something like that. Without the Senate leader, majority leader, this is how they kill stuff. They play slow ball. Yeah. And he has tremendous power.

I feel like our Democratic leadership always has a good excuse for why they're outplayed. Yeah. And including Senator Schumer, who, in my view, has gummed up and gotten in the way and basically slow balled any legislation or meaningful legislation around tech. All right. Okay. I'm going to compliment someone I was very angry at, Glenn Youngkin, who made that stupid joke at Nancy Pelosi's offense when her husband got beaten. And obviously, all the information that's come out since shows exactly what happened, which is he got attacked by someone who had been radicalized into QAnon type of stuff. And he sent a handwritten apology note, which, you know what, I'll take it. I think he was stupid. And he's been doing that quite a bit,

going to see Kerry Lake, etc. He should pull away from these people. They're not good for him. I suspect he's, I don't agree with much of his policies. But I have to say, I was heartened by that, that he apologized. And we have to let people apologize. People were mad when I said, okay. They're like, don't forgive this. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to. I'm going to because I'm going to. I'll take any civility move towards civility by either side.

And so I thought that was nice. One of the great attributes and singular attributes of our species is that we have the ability to apologize and also to forgive. No other species does that. And I think it's something especially men have a difficult time acknowledging when they're wrong and apologizing. I apologized to my 12-year-old the other day. You do. You do apologize.

I have a tough time apologizing to my kids. And I got very angry at my kid and yelled at him the other night. And he was physically scared. And it took me back to a point when I was a kid and my kid and yelled at him the other night and he was physically scared and it took me back to a point when I was a kid and my dad used to yell at me and it would really scare me. And I, of course I'm going back to me totally off topic here,

but I sat him down the next day and I said, look, I'm sorry, parents get in bad moods too. I shouldn't have yelled at you like that. And anytime that you ever feel any kind of scared, just say, dad, you're scaring me, and I'll stop. But anyways, it was hard for me. I find myself wanting to be a role model for them, which immediately leads me to some weird notion that I can't apologize.

Anyways, I think apology is a wonderful thing. I'm trying to get better at it. Very nice. And we're not going to go into it because we disagree, but I was very pleased that John Fetterman won. Senator-elect Fetterman. Did not work. That cruel, cruel effort to make, that he did a great speech on election night,

seemed to be able to speak. I thought that was really, that was very heartening. He just kept getting back up. That guy kept getting back. I think it's an American story. And I think it's really nice. And I think he'll be a surprisingly good senator.

I love the way he dresses too. I love that he's going to show up in Carhartt. I mean this sincerely. I hope you're right. Yes, thank you. I think he's going to be a good senator. Yeah, that was a no-lose race for me. I had a good friend who I think is very competent and a good person and a family man. And I think we need moderates. I would task everyone with doing, I got attacked a lot for that. I would task everyone with just doing some, being self-aware. And a lot of people say they're center-left or center-right or they're moderate or they think they're bipartisan. If there were 465 people on

the ballot, if you can't find a single person in the other party that you would support, you are not a moderate. You are not bipartisan. And also, attacking people for who they support, just so you know, doesn't work. You want to attack the issue, you want to attack the candidate, you want to have a discussion, that works. But shaming people, shaming people for supporting Trump, it backfired on us. Because they're like, you know what, I'll show you when the curtain's closed. So, I have tasked myself with every election trying to find someone a Republican. Because I think we've gotten very lazy and I think we've gotten very partisan.

All right. So, but let's stick to policy then. I think if the Republicans took over the Senate, they would outlaw abortion. So, I was perfectly fine being that that's a policy thing. And a woman's right to choose was on the line in that state in many ways. I agree. Things have become so dangerous around issues that I understand the importance and the power of maintaining a majority in the Senate, especially around judges, I would argue. But at the same time, unless we

start electing moderates and unless occasionally voters reach across the aisle and our elected representatives are motivated and encouraged to reach across the aisle, this polarization is never going to end. Agreed. But your friend couldn't say that. He couldn't be a moderate because the pressure not to be. Anyway, we can never know. We'll never know, Kara. friend couldn't say that. He couldn't be a moderate because of the pressure not to be. Anyway, we can— We'll never know. We'll never know, Carol. You don't know that. I know, but you don't have to say it.

You can be silent. Anyway, okay, let's get to our—that's the last argument we're going to have about your friend, Dr. Oz. And I hope he has a lovely television career going forward. Okay, let's get to our first big story. Crypto transactions can take a long time to settle but at least one shake-up happened at light speed this week this was something scott on tuesday crypto exchange fds agreed to sell to its rival binance as fdx faced a liquidity crunch run on the bank essentially but on wednesday binance walked away from the deal citing problematic things on the balance sheet it

looked like a double whammy set the crypto market spiraling. Bitcoin dropped below $16,000 for the first time in two years. Another exchange, Crypto.com, paused withdrawals from some stablecoins. FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has told investors that his exchange needs $8 billion to cover a shortfall. Oh my God. Is this the kind of meltdown that Bitcoin cryptocurrencies were supposed to solve? It's supposed to make third parties obsolete, but traders put their crypto into third-party exchange anyway, and that exchange is in very deep trouble. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who goes by CZ, says that his exchange will pose, quote, proof of reserve soon. It better be soon. Let me hear what you have to say.

So this is a tough one. People are saying this is the Lehman moment when it all starts to unwind. And I would argue it's more like when Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch. The problem is eventually Bank of America- But it didn't happen here. Yeah, but go ahead. Eventually Bank of America had to be bailed out by the government and government isn't bailing out these institutions. There's no FDIC insurance. This is now a, it used to be a $3 trillion market. I think it's sub a trillion, which means it's not really a threat to the economy. But I think I understand crypto better than 99% of the public, and I don't understand crypto. And the carnival barkers and bullies online took advantage of the fact that we didn't understand it and created this halo of innovation.

And if you ever say anything critical about it, you don't get it. And I still don't entirely understand what happened. So I had one of my analysts, Mia Silverio, attempt to write up what happened. And I'll just read it because I think most people pretend they sort of understand what happened here, including me, but they don't really understand. So FTX was valued at approximately $33 billion earlier this year. Its investors included Sequoia, SoftBank, and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. And what happened was that leaked documents by Coindesk last week showed that FTX may not have been backing user funds one-to-one behind the scenes. So you put money in, and then they take the money and invest it in illiquid assets that you may not be able to get out if there's a run on the bank, if everyone wants to redeem at the same time. The documents showed that Alameda Research, a trading and investment firm founded by SBF, Sam Bankman Friedman, who I guess now has acronym status, had its finances intertwined with those of FTX, which in any traditional financial services industry would be a no-no. Alameda held a significant amount of FTT, which is the trading token of FTX. Most of FTX was owned

by FTX and Alameda, making it illiquid. And then the documents, the same documents also showed that Alameda had been borrowing millions of dollars against FTT, this coin, and rumors spread across Twitter that FTX was loaning out user funds to Alameda and using its own illiquid FTT token as collateral. CZ tweeted that Binance would be unwinding its own position in that FTT token over the span of a few months, and everyone started selling. And the price of FTT crashed, and you had what is a classic run on the bank. And if you just really read this, it sounds like a pyramid scheme because it is. These things have no underlying utility. They're not backed by the government. This really is, as far as I can tell, this whole market is you exchange fiat currency to go into

a casino and get tickets that are worth nothing. And you're supposed to have one-to-one ratio, but go ahead. And hope that at the end of the day, you get a stuffed animal or something for your tickets and you get the hell out of the Chuck E. Cheese that has become the crypto market. It really is. I mean, I don't know what's happening today, but we saw Bitcoin come down to a two-year low. The good news is it's more noise than news because it's not a huge market. And there's contagion here a little bit, but it really has become such a small market. It gets more news. Like Twitter, it gets a lot more news than it actually has impact.

Yep. That's a fair point. And nonetheless, it's still, this is an industry. What's important here is Sam Bankman-Fried was seen as the stable one. He's been spending a lot of money in Congress trying to get rules in place around crypto. He's considered the calm one. He's considered the non-Ponzi scheme guy, all these things. And so I think that's where we're in trouble in that regard. Do you know what's happened? His net worth has gone from $16 billion to $1 billion. Binance said it would, the largest crypto exchange stepped in and said they would purchase FTX. And then it reversed course on Wednesday saying the issues at FTX were quote unquote, beyond our control or ability to help. SBF told investors he needs emergency funding to cover a shortfall of $8

billion. And then again, it's always the second order, the knock-on effects that are the most interesting. Bitcoin dropped below 16,000 for the first time in two years. Solana got cut in half. Again, SBF $16 billion to $1 billion. A more loss of trust in crypto. And a Binance purchase of FTX would have been similar, again, to B of A's bailout of Merrill Lynch, except that B of A was later bailed out by Uncle Sam. And this just shows the risk of putting your money in a trustless ecosystem. You can't trust that it's safe. Yep, yep, yep. And I think that's the problem. And now, you know, regulators are moving in to look,

this is from Bloomberg, I think it's from Bloomberg, U.S. regulators are circling FTX, investigating whether the firm properly handled customer funds, as well as its relationship with other parts of Bankman-Fried's crypto empire. As you said, you know more than 99% of the people, and I don't even understand this at all, except that it's a – is it a solvency crisis or a liquidity crisis, really? I don't know what's going to happen here, but I can't underscore how many Silicon Valley investors are going to get hosed. They're all going to lose all their money, apparently, and big names. But the question – I have a question for you, and this is my conspiracy theory. You're a big VC fund. Yeah. And you invest in a company that has a project, a quote-unquote,

that's issuing a token, and supposedly this coin has some sort of underlying technical utility. Yep. You buy, say, for 200 million or 300 million, 30% of this company. Are you not only taking equity in the parent company, but are you being issued 30% of the coins? Because if a tier one VC attaches its name to something in the midst of a kind of a tulip mania, and then they mint the coin, and they have millions of these coins that for a moment

pop to several hundred or several thousand dollars, what's to prohibit them from then dumping those coins in a measured, I guess dumping a measured oxymorons, but what's to prohibit them from selling those coins because they don't have to disclose their sales. And then while we in the press say, oh, what idiots, what they've just done is sold a bag of shit to retail investors who got caught up in the euphoria,

but they don't have to report their sales. I mean, that's what, and I have no evidence this has happened, but that's what I would do. So I wonder if we're going to find out that all these guys we sang are idiots and lost billions actually made billions selling this shit into the market. Could be. I mean, the CFTC and the SEC have been fighting over who should regulate this or looking in this situation. Everyone's getting looked at now. And the thing is, Sam Bankman-Fried, they always call him SBF, he has given $40 million mostly to Democrats in the election cycle. And I don't think it necessarily got him anything. But nonetheless, I think it'll be interesting to see that what I was really riveted to was the exchanges with venture capitalists who just are like, when he went on about you could buy a banana, you could buy this, you could have value, you could do this. The banana

stuck in my head, as did many people's. But you can't buy a banana with this. You can't. Like, you can't. You really can't. I mean, maybe you can somewhere. Everyone goes crazy because they're taking a cryptocurrency at one subway in London. Again, the narrative is the following in the crypto community. And by the way, the company I'm on the board of, Ledger, which is cold storage, has seen a huge uptick because the bottom line is if you put your coins or any assets into these exchanges, they're not necessarily yours any longer. So anyways, the notion that you've had this asset class emerge, and I would argue that that $40 million that SBF invested in lobbying,

essentially, or politicians, he got a huge return on it. Because what's happened is, you have a series of senior citizens who have been paid by, they see a new revenue source to get the key mother's milk to getting reelected, and that is money. And again, all they have to do is nothing. This space should have been much more aggressively regulated much earlier. And because you have- It's been more than the internet, but go ahead. All right, go ahead. You think it's been more regulated than the internet? Yes. Biden put out some stuff. I've talked to CFTC and SEC people. They've been much earlier

than they were to any internet stuff, but go ahead. The narrative coming out of the crypto community is the following. This is the internet. Remember the internet? Huge mania, 99. Internet capital group worth more than General Electric. In 2000, a crash, and then these giants emerged. But here's the thing.

In 1999, I was using Yahoo Mail. I was buying books off of Amazon. I was selling millions of dollars of gifts off of Red Envelope, a company I started in 1997. There was real transactions. And I always ask the same thing when I go to these lunches to try and learn where some very thoughtful billionaire from some Litecoin or Meta or Luna. I say, how did the blockchain change my life today? What exactly did it do for me? Give me anything,

anything I can point to around utility. And they'll come up with these weird Byzantine examples. Yeah, it's very hard. It's sort of like using the metaverse. It's hard. And I think some, oh, they had all those conferences insulting Warren Buffett. Yeah, they showed him. Warren Buffett for the win. All those really aggressive guys, all these crypto, you know, the crypto Taliban. Yeah. They have gone oddly quiet. They're so mean.

Anyway, one FTX investor who could be crying foul, Tom Brady, the quarterback, had a partnership with FTX since 2020. God, these people can't stop themselves. Like, why? And reportedly took a large stake in the exchange in 2021. It's unclear how large the stake was, but he's had a bad 2022 Tom Brady-attracted retirement, one of the worst seasons in the NFL, a divorce, and now this. Tom, he's still handsome. Okay, but just let me be clear.

Despite the divorce, despite the losing season so far, despite losing $650 million, I would still trade places with Tom Brady. I would ride that Tom Brady thing out. I think he's going to be just fine. I think Tom Brady's going to recover. Let's pour one out for Tom Brady. I think he's going to be okay. Moving on, on Wednesday, Facebook announced layoffs of 11,000 people or 13% of his staff, a little better than people thought. He still has more employees than they started the year

off a year ago. Zuckerberg addressed his employees on the same day. Here's the clip. I want to say, you know, upfront that I take full responsibility for this decision. You know, I'm the founder and CEO. I'm responsible for the health of our company, for our direction, and for deciding how we execute that, including things like this. I thought he handled this really well. Again, I like to call him as I see him, and I thought he was empathetic. He signed everything. He's given them very generous. I think it's 16 weeks of severance and two additional weeks for every year they've worked at the company. Very generous. He did it himself. He was classy about it.

And Meta will cover the health care costs of laid-off employees and their families. They're also helping people with visa issues. You know, we knew they were coming. He has to do it. It is his responsibility. He does control the company. But I think he did a good job here. What do you think?

Well, the most interesting thing about Meta, there's a lot here. The most interesting about Meta is that I believe they've been very bad for the Commonwealth, but they are very good. I mean, this was a contrast in management competence relative to the shit show that is Twitter right now. Did you notice when they put out, first off, they leaked to take some pressure

off the announcement on late last week, or I think over the weekend. And then when did they do this, Kara? They did it the day of the midterms. They buried it. And if you want to talk about news- They didn't sign it. He didn't sign it. He didn't have a speech. He didn't talk to employees. Humble. This was a masterclass. And there's a few things here. I meant Elon didn't talk to employees, but go ahead. That's right. This was a masterclass from Facebook on how to do this. And here's the thing. Talk about news versus noise. Look at all the noise around the Twitter layoffs. Meta just laid off three times the number of the entire workforce at Twitter.

Yep. And not only that, there's different stages of a company. I'm on the board of a couple of these companies. There's the initial stage. Oh, it's a V. It's just a quick, we're going to correct back and the party's going to continue. That's the first stage of denial. is a layoff, and then the next stage is a second layoff, and then typically you can kind of get back to work. And I'm the Debbie down on the board saying, let's just skip to the second layoff, go deeper, and get the company in fighting shape. Well, in 2015, it was less than 60,000. Now they have 76,000. They hired like crazy. Yeah. You could see another 20,000 or 30,000 layoffs here, Kara. You could. Maybe he's doing it in tranches. That's not a great idea. Loosely speaking, loosely speaking, what we're seeing in the growth economy is that the business and the stocks are kind of moving back loosely to where they were pre-pandemic. So if you were to take meta back to where it was pre-pandemic on an employment level,

you're going to lose 15 times the workforce of Twitter. So the noise is Elon Musk and these layoffs and all these things on people saying goodbye and asking for people to come back. They just laid off 11,000 people. Here, let me just say the contrast. There are so many angry Twitter employees both inside. I get so many leaks. It's crazy. I don't even try. I got several notes from Facebook people saying, I don't always like Mark. I haven't liked working part days, but I have to say he was a classy dude in something that's bad. They got laid off. And I haven't gotten one angry. He did a nice, mature job of this. I agree. There's probably going to have to be more layoffs. They've got a lot of challenges, headwinds, not just overspending and

betting the farm on metaverse, but also TikTok and Apple and recession and et cetera, et cetera, and regulatory scrutiny. He's got a lot on his plate. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, Elon Musk turns Twitter into a masquerade ball and we'll speak to a friend of Pivot, Jonathan Haidt. 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 with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.

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today. All right, Scott, it's been a crazy day at Twitter in that I've dragged you back into the studio to tape a fresh update. When we taped earlier, Elon was having some mild problems with check marks, but now he's talking bankruptcy and there's a lot of other trouble there. And here's where we are. Okay. I am in a relationship with a manic depressive person called Elon Musk. Yeah, you are. And I'm Nurse Ratched, a manic depressive person called Elon Musk. Yeah, you are. And I'm Nurse Ratched, like trying to give this person advice, and so are you. And they're not even in the room to talk therapy. And it's the worst relationship in the world because I'm getting really bad head, as in I'm not getting any head from this guy.

Okay. So I am just done with this, Cara. I am just done. I know you're not done with this. Granted, I am two or three makers and ginger into this podcast right now. Okay. All right. Okay. Tell me what stupid fucking thing he's done today, Kara. Your turn. Here are some highlights. Musk just told Twitter employees he's not sure how much

run rate the company has and, quote, bankruptcy isn't out of the question. Zoe Schiffer of Platformer is reporting that Yoel Roth is out. The senior director of trust and safety is out. Casey Newton is reporting that Robin Wheeler, vice president of client solutions, is also out. Both Yoel and Robin were on the call with advertisers in Elon yesterday, the ones speaking. And also in an all-hand staff meeting, Musk told staff,

if you can physically make it to the office and you don't show up, resignation accepted. So he's gotten nicer, I guess. On Thursday, senior member of Twitter's legal team posted a message in a Slack channel saying, everyone should know that our CISO, which is chief information security officer, chief private officer, and chief compliance officer all resigned last night. This news will be buried in the return to office drama. I believe it is intentional. On Thursday, the FTC announced it's monitoring the situation at Twitter as executives depart. Jeez, Louisa, it's not even Friday.

Look, Yoel was the one they were pushing out. They were tweeting all his things over and over again. Yoel sounded reasonable. He's fantastic. And he also has been the target of right-wing people because he's been reasonable. That's a big deal. Robin Wheeler, again, was on the call sort of giving, throwing Elon easy softballs in front of advertising,

trying to make him presentable for them after he has kicked them in the teeth several times before. I think this very aggressiveness towards staff, I think he wants to get into bankruptcy. I don't really know. And then pull it out. No, he doesn't. No, he doesn't. Yes. And then President Biden said, yeah, people should look into the foreign ownership of that company and laughed. So tell me what he wants to do. Let me just take a moment. And the people want to know what we think because we've been so right about how this particular chapter of Elon's life is gone. So people think L. Ron Hubbard and Tony Robbins and Khomeini can do no wrong.

Today, you said some things about Musk and a bunch of people attacked you that, oh, no, he's smarter than you. Everything he's done is brilliant. Like smart people, talented people are saying this. It's like, no, he's acting like a child. He's acting like a narcissist. He's acting like someone who's never had any guardrails. So first off, him saying bankruptcy is not out of the question. It's meant to be a threat. Like, you should be scared. You might lose your job. No, it's not. If they go into a bankruptcy,

reasonably responsible people, their debt holders will now own the company, and they will bring in an adult to run this company. That's not a threat to them. His equity would be wiped out, and he'd have to call his buddies and go, I not only lost all your money, I lost it in about 60 or 90 days. In addition, when you plant landmines behind you and around you and you get lost, you're going to lose a leg. And this guy has pissed off so many people that what do you know? The people at the FTC, the people at CFIUS aren't in any hurry to do this guy any favors. And you know what's going to happen next, Cara? Tell me. See, now we've gotten to it. The bourbon is kicking in. Go ahead.

The site's going to go down. Something's going to go wrong with the site. You can't behave this way. You can't make so many enemies. You can't treat people so poorly without someone pissing in the fucking punch bowl. I mean, he's literally making enemies everywhere. Your thoughts? I would agree with you. I think I literally, I've never, every bad quality he has over the years, and you know I've supported him on lots of things, because I do think he's making things that are better than other people. Again, you're an owner of a Tesla. The rocket stuff is cool. You have to admire that. But in this case, since the beginning, since it started to crater, and since he sort of has been red-pilled all over the place, he's become really bad at his job. And that's the only thing I can say is this is not how you treat people.

This is not how you treat people. Anyway, you don't tell them they're all idiots and you're a genius when you're not making genius moves. And we've said that. The way he tried to get out of this deal was sketchy at best and really creepy and just a series of lies. And it's been problematic. I can't remember a company that was this crazy. I don't have a memory of one. I've been in my own companies when we've lost all of our business or a lot of our business or our biggest client left and I had to bring 30 people into a room and fire them at the same time. That was probably my lowest moment professionally.

I remember walking into the room and a bunch of people we had just hired out of business school were holding hands and crying. And I remember thinking, Jesus Christ. So that was upsetting, but it wasn't chaos. I was on the board of the New York Times when we almost lost the New York Times. People don't realize in 2008 how close the New York Times came to basically handing over the company to its creditors. And the Sulzbergers were about to be, or Arthur was about to be the cousin that lost the company to its creditors. And the Sulzbergers were about to be, or Arthur was about to be the cousin that lost the company. That was very stressful. I have never seen anything like this. The level of erratic, manic, juvenile, reckless behavior where you

can't even predict what he's going to do next. I've never seen anything like this because this is what happens. Corporate governance and checks and balances, whether it's government, whether it's boards, are meant to have guardrails where someone shows up and says, you know what, Travis, you're acting, you're the bro-iest bro in Broville, and it's no longer working. You're out. People can show up and say, you know what, you're just, you need to, you need a time out. We're going to bench you for a little bit. There's no one here to say that to this guy. No, no. He doesn't listen to anybody.

He's brought in the team is, as we've said, suck ups and not the best people in Silicon Valley. They just aren't. There's so many good people he could have brought in here. He could have brought in Adam Bain, who understood the company. He could back. He could have brought.

Yeah, he hasn't called him. Just so you know, I checked in. What about a guy like Dick Costolo? He always struck me as a fairly level-headed guy. Not been called. Not been called. Not been called. Any of them. You know, you don't have to even call them. There's so many great media people. I was willing to talk to him about it. He asked me and then, you know, went sour because I was slightly critical. It was ridiculous. He had, like, what should you do? I was like, oh, well, you know what? I'm using this. I've known it for years. Let me tell you what I've seen over the years. He doesn't have to, but, you know, I want this service to work. And so the way he's treating people, this story after story, it's like the Trump administration. It really feels like that.

Story after story after fuck up after fuck up. And people tolerate that, but I don't think he has a constituency that Trump has in terms of all the Silicon Valley, people are not going along. They find this ridiculous traffic accident. It makes Silicon Valley look bad. There's blood in the water here, I think, at this point. I never thought I'd say this. Trump looks like an adult compared to Elon right now. But Trump left ambassadors in place. He left the majority of generals. He left the majority of his defense team in place because he realized this is serious shit. And even though he was reckless. Then he shed himself of those. But go ahead. When the GOP tweeted Kanye, Musk, Trump, little did we know how prescient they were. That was literally a tweet that summarizes

three people who all suffer from the same thing. I don't know if it's megalomania. I don't know if it's mental illness. It doesn't matter. But here's the thing. This is what we're witnessing. And all his fans will weigh in and say, oh, no, there's a genius behind this and he's doing what's required. There isn't. We are not. There's a genius behind it, but it's not here. No, no, no. None of this is genius, Carol. No, none of this is genius. I'm saying he could have done it and he hasn't.

What's the opposite of better angels? Whatever the opposite of better angels is. Dark shoots? I don't know. All the dark parts of his personality have now won out. Honestly, all the dark parts in here. Whatever happens at Twitter, whatever he transforms into,

it's like watching, you know, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This is just a disaster. Just a disaster. But here's the thing. We're not watching a company implode. Twitter is not... Asfat Damodaran, my colleague at NYU,

summarized it perfectly. He's like, Twitter's not a national treasure. If Twitter goes away tomorrow, we're all going to be fine. Yeah. We'll all find different ways to communicate. We'll all find ways for woke people to yell at each other and for conservative people to create fake accounts and start spreading conspiracy theory. We'll all figure it out and move on. We're not watching a company implode. We're watching a

person implode. You know what's next? Tesla's going to shit the bed. It's down to 190 today. It's crazy down. That's nothing. I know, but I'm saying. Anyways, I am sort of, and this is media, as evidenced by the fact we're here talking about this now, but we love to watch people unravel. And this isn't about Twitter unraveling. This is about a man, a 50-year-old man or whatever he is, unraveling. And we love to watch it. We love to watch it. We love to watch it. And then all these people come on Twitter and say, oh, there's a genius here.

No, there's not. You don't behave this way. These are people's livelihoods. He told people to give him their money and that he would invest it responsibly. It is an important service. And all of these people who he pissed off and said, oh, I thought you were dead or how come your personal profile looks like you just came? Guess what?

They have the head of the FTC and the CFIUS panel. They have them on speed dial. And they're like, you know what? Don't cut this guy any slack. Yeah. And all of this bullshit, he is constantly all this lack of respect, all this bad karma. You don't think at some point, I'm curious to hear that, I think the site's going to go down. I do.

I'm worried about the security of it, obviously, with all those people leaving. And I think he is painting, he has had the worst, as you said, brand decline I've ever seen. He's lost so much brand equity as a person, and he's trying to do the same to Twitter. And unfortunately, he's got his hands on the wheel, and everyone around him is a sycophant. And so not good things are going to happen here. Well, okay. You should never diagnose someone. But look, I'm not a cop, and I can tell when a car is going 100 miles an hour. This guy needs connective tissue.

In my view, this guy needs to take some time off and call people that he trusts and have his best interests at heart and just get counsel. And call some people in media or just some people he trusts. Not far right podcasters or sycophants, you know, and just get some counsel and take a breather here because he could, this whole thing could just be over like barely after it started. It feels as if crypto and Twitter are in a race to the bottom right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I wonder who could, I'm trying to think of someone I could think of who would stop this. None of them will, none of them. They just, they can't do it. No one, no one. I'm trying to think. Ellison, no. Andreessen, no. Sequoia, no. Ellison's probably a guy, aren't they friends? Ellison seems like a reasonable guy. He's

obviously a brilliant guy. Can be, but he never crosses founders. He won't cross them. He won't cross them. He won't, he. He won't tell the truth. They love to buck each other up, even in bad behavior. All of them do. I've never seen – Chris Saka was the closest I've seen to someone, class traitor, like you've talked about, like Mark Benioff, etc. You know, he's not going to listen to Benioff. Cuban tried to engage him, and he responded today. I think Cuban has a lot more choice things to say to him, but was being very polite. Mark would be a great. Mark. Mark would be a. Call Mark Cuban, Elon. Look, at the end of the day, again, as Aswath said, Twitter is meaningful. It's not profound.

It's not like the New York Times going out of business. It's not even like, I would say, Meta or YouTube. A very small number of people, relatively speaking, are really passionate about it. I saw this chart the other day, Cara, and it showed all of the platforms' usage of people under the age of 25. Twitter is literally irrelevant to tomorrow's generation. I mean, it's just totally irrelevant. generation. I mean, it's just totally irrelevant. And so we are obsessed with it because he is such a fascinating character and the story is fascinating. It also can be a good product. It also can be a good product. Well, it's addictive. It's an amazing product.

It sounds to me like slowly but surely he's taking the keys out after he blows stop signs and totals the car and he's going to take the keys out and just hand it to somebody else. I don't understand the strategy here. I don't understand what he's doing. Get back to the cars and rockets. You're not good at media. Media is hard. Come to think of it, do you remember Jeff Bezos' first couple of weeks as owner of The Post?

He was fantastic. Exactly. Exactly, Kara. All right, Scott, let's bring on our friend of Pivot. Exactly, Cara. All right, Scott, let's bring on our friend of Pivot. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist, author, and a Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at NYU Stern School of Business. I don't think you have a title like that, Scott Galloway.

Oh, no, I have titles. There's nothing we can repeat here. I get titles. There's nothing we can repeat here. I get that. He's the author of, of course, The Coddling of the American Mind, a huge hit, and recently appeared on 60 Minutes episode about how social media has polarized America. He's done a lot of research into it. Jonathan, welcome. Well, thank you, Cara. Thank you, Scott. Thanks for that, Cara. Jonathan, good to see you. So your research you've done, you said when we've spent time together that we had trouble with real rigorous research that nullified or validated these hypotheses around the impact that Facebook and social was having on mental health.

And since then, you've done a lot of peer-reviewed research that has illuminated certain correlations and also said there isn't evidence. Can you break that down for us? Sure. So, I'm a social psychologist, and I'm your colleague here at NYU Stern. And the way the psychological research community works is there's generally a norm of skepticism. So, if someone says TV is rotting kids' brains, research psychologists don't say, yeah, let's go show that. They say, hold on a second. Hold on. They're skeptical.

And that's appropriate. And so there are many previous moral panics around television, video games, where the evidence of harm didn't really pan out very much. between how much time you spend watching on social media and mental illness. They range between correlation of 0.05 to 0.1. But here's the thing. Whenever you zoom in, not on screen time, most of the studies are looking at screen time. If you focus in on social media and girls, those correlations rise from around like 0.05 up to 0.15. And even the researchers that I'm arguing with, they agree, they admit that the correlation

is around 0.15, which is larger than the correlation of lead exposure and adult IQ, calcium intake and osteoporosis. So social media and teen mental health for girls is actually a bigger effect than many other public health effects. And this is for kids. So one of the things is, you know, Francis Haugen had brought those things out in the Facebook files showing that they knew about its effect on girls and women. Talk about your research, how you did it, why you decided to focus in on this.

I'm not a developmental psychologist. I study morality and politics. And I ended up writing this book with Greg Lukianoff called The Coddling of the American Mind. And I began to see more and more that Gen Z, that is, people born after 1996, are really different from, say, people born in 1993. It's an incredibly sharp divide. And as I've been tracking down, why? Why did this happen?

Why is it so sudden? Everything points to going through puberty on social media. That's the divide. So the millennials, if you're born in 1993, let's say you hit puberty in 2009 or 2006, and you have a flip phone and it's not very harmful. You're talking with your friends on your flip phone. But if you're born in, say, 2000, you hit puberty in around 2013. Everyone got on Instagram around 2012.

All the girls got on Instagram around 2012. All the girls got on Instagram around 2012. And a normal, healthy childhood means you have a lot of time with friends, face time with them. You get in arguments, but it has to be face-to-face and synchronous. And all of a sudden, childhood gets rewired. Between 2010 and 2015, American childhood gets rewired so that now we don't have normal human interaction. Kids now just curl up with their phone and everything goes through the phone, including their romantic lives now. So anyway, I just began studying this and I haven't done original research. I'm not out there actually collecting data, but I've aggregated all of the published studies, hundreds and hundreds

of them. And listeners can find everything at jonathanheight.com slash social media. I put everything up there. All right. So what would you recommend to parents when it comes to assessing how much access children, especially girls, should have to social media? So here's the damnable thing, is that it's a social dilemma. That is, you know, if it was just like exposure to candy or some poison,

we'd all say, no, you're not getting this till you're 16 or 18 or ever. But this is all a network thing. And the platforms know this. The only reason any of us ever let our daughters on Instagram is because they say, as my kids did when they hit sixth grade, everyone's on Instagram. That's where everything's happening. I have to be on. So it's a social dilemma. And what's most horrible about this, I think, is that the official age is 13, which is way too young, and it's not enforced.

So girls, it's now normal at 10 or 11. And there's evidence that if they go through puberty on this, it warps their minds, it warps their thinking about others, it makes them feel they're not as good, they're not as beautiful, they're not as popular. And I think it has permanent effects. So FOMA on steroids. FOMA on steroids. You can see the parties. I'll never forget, one of my kids saw a party happening. It was all over Instagram. We just took Instagram off his phone. I'm like, if you don't see it, it didn't happen. And I remember the look.

I'll never forget it. I was like, oh, dear, this is not good. I wish I could just say to parents, just don't let your kid have it until they're 16. And that might be the best advice, but I'm not sure because that means they're isolated from other kids. So what you really need is you need to get together with other parents. And as long as your kid has a couple of good friends and they get together in person, then it's not so painful and they'll come out mentally healthy. The other thing is parents need to really put pressure on the schools to give a consistent message. No phone access at school.

Keep the phone. In my daughter's schools here in New York City, they finally adopted yonder pouches. The kids can't have access during the day. So there are some things that are hopeful. Yeah, that's what my kid has. Jonathan, do you have any thoughts on the contrast between the research you have done that shows that social media has been especially harmful to teen girls and also the evidence coming out? The young adult men seem to be struggling. What is the Venn overlap around technology or any other issues? Because you hear about girls

being really vulnerable to social media, and at the same time, our young men are struggling. No, that's right. And you just had my friend Richard Reeves on the other day. He's fantastic. And I agree with everything that he says on this. So here's what I can figure out. Having dug so deeply into the data on social media, what I can say with confidence is that the links are very strong for girls and they're weak for boys. So if all we think about is social media, then we'd have to say, well, maybe it's not a big deal for boys, but let's keep the girls off. But here's the thing. All kids are addicted to technology. And when everyone got an iPhone around 2011, 2012, the girls all went for these visual platforms. They dove into Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. The boys went for video games and YouTube, which are not as harmful. So what we have to do is we have to look at boys' childhood very differently. It's not about time on Instagram. It's about what do boys need to be healthy? And what they need is a gang. They need a group. They need to have adventures. Those adventures have to be face-to-face or rather

shoulder-to-shoulder. So, you know, the online video games can substitute a little bit, like it is kind of an adventure, but all the rules are set. They don't make the rules. So it's a kind of a synthetic, not satisfying kind of groupish paramilitary, pseudo-military adventure. Boys are starving for normal childhood experiences, too. It's just not focused on a single platform. And then this spreads out to the dating apps as well. it's just not focused on a single platform. And then this spreads out to the dating apps as well. Right. I was going to ask about that because my son's taken all of them off his thing. He said, they make me feel bad, Mom. I just, you know, he's a lovely kid.

All of social or all dating apps, Kara? All of the apps. He doesn't want, he wants to disappear from the internet. But dating apps was particularly disheartening to him in a lot of ways. Yeah, 100%. It's really interesting. You said during the 60, you're on a 60 Minutes episode this week, you said it's not good versus evil story. It's a question of changed ecosystems.

I think that's what I was thinking that the way they do it makes you feel bad or lesser than. And I don't know, where is it that you could feel good? Except, well, even in person, you can have some bad experiences. A bar is not the most,

you know, heartening place to be. Bite your tongue. It's wonderful. I know. Well, yeah. Go to bars. Age, gait, social, have some bad experiences. A bar is not the most, you know, heartening place to be. Bite your tongue. It's wonderful. I know. Well, yeah. Go to bars. Age-gauge social and go to bars. They aren't perfect for the ladies. Raise the age limit on Instagram. Lower the drinking age. There you go. Oh, Scott. Go ahead. What did you mean by changed ecosystem? I always take both a cultural psychology perspective and an evolutionary psychology perspective. And so we evolved to have certain kinds of skills and abilities. We evolved for courtship. Like other mammals that pair bond, we have courtship rituals. And you need to sort of slow things down and show mutual, you know, you display your virtues and you display commitment, and then you fall in love. And then you have sex and the sex adds to the love. So

that's the way, that's what we have in our heads. And it's a little different, obviously, in boys and girls, men and women, but it's somewhat complementary. So that's what we evolved for. Now, when everything moves on to the dating apps, now everything changes. Now it's much more of a straight market value calculation. And you have these incredibly precise signals from others about what the market value of this person is. So it puts everyone into this terrible market in which, you know, in general, young women have an advantage, but women over 35 for the rest of their lives are the market losers. But then even with young people, a few men, women are so selective. I saw a study recently, they had men rate photos on an app of women, and they gave a normal distribution. Most were in the

middle. Some women are beautiful, some not. When they asked the women to rate, the women gave nobody a 10. And they said almost everyone is unattractive, and only a few are attractive. Well, guess what? Those few who check the boxes for the women, all the women swipe right on them, and the other 90% of boys get nothing. And so this fuels the sense that they're useless, they have no purpose in life, they're not. And so this is horrible for the boys, it's horrible for the girls, it's horrible for courtship and dating, it's going to be horrible for marriage. I think we're going to see very little marriage and very little childbearing among Gen Z. Yeah, my kids talk about that. It's really amazing because it feels like hopeless in some way. Yeah, yeah. I just remember a few years ago sitting in department meetings, and they would talk about how microaggressions would not be tolerated. And you were the first person that had the courage to say, well, what the fuck do you mean by that? And you wrote what is the most read article in the history of the Atlantic.

And I constantly pair you that, you know, we started all barking up the same tree in about the middle of the last decade. And as a result, America has become stupid. Can you give us the cliff notes on that article? Sure. So, that was the coddling of the American Mind. It began as an Atlantic article in 2015, and it was one of the top five most read at that time. And what I've come to see after that, it was describing a change in culture that happened first on campus. We couldn't understand it. Now, in retrospect, we understand, you know, the college students were sort of the first into this new bizarre world. They were the first into Tumblr in particular, nurtured a lot of these ideas about microaggressions and safe spaces.

So around 2013, 2014, they begin to bring those ideas into college and people think it's just college. They'll have to grow up. They can't be doing this stuff when they go work at Goldman Sachs or Google. Well, guess what? Gen Z began to graduate from college in 2018. And now when I talk to people in business, they say the same thing. It's very difficult to work with their Gen Z. Look, some of them are great. This is not about everyone. But people are noticing a big change between the millennials and Gen Z. And Gen Z is much more fragile, much higher rates of anxiety, depression. depression, much, when we say fragile, it's because they'll take almost anything as an offense, and an offense is actually danger or harm. And so we have this huge misunderstanding between generations.

COVID made it so much worse because what Gen Z most needed, Scott, you've pointed this out a lot, how young people today, they haven't really worked in an office. They haven't gotten socialized into work culture. So they take the college culture and the coddling culture that we gave them, they bring it into the workplace. So yeah, we're in trouble. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about that, I will push back a tiny bit on both of you, is that if you grew up someone who was gay

or something like that, it wasn't microaggressions, it was aggression, aggression. And I think some of it is a reaction to that. Like, I'm not going to take this shit anymore. And so I think that was a little bit of it. I think I really, after Elon did that

thing on Paul Pelosi, I was furious. It brought me back, right back to then. And I don't think I overreacted. I was like, no, you will not be doing this anymore. Let me finish. Okay. I love microaggressions because this whole show is microaggressions. And one of the things I always press with employees is at one point, my producer for On with Kara Swisher, but previous to that, she was with me at the New York Times. We're always arguing. And it seems like we're mad at each other, but we're not. And so one of the Gen Z people are like, oh, this is very upsetting. I'm like, it's called editorial tension. We like each other. What are you talking about? And it was really hard. Well, this upsets me. I was like, what?

Like, huh? Like, it was really interesting. So there's sometimes people have had it, I think, just so sick of like homophobic. I can't tolerate another homophobic. I just can't. I won't. I like just won't. And I'm not being nice about it anymore. And so that's where I think that's where the break comes.

Go ahead, Scott. Interrupt me. No, I want to return to Jonathan because we're hijacking his time. But you're talking about a place, everything you're upset about and you have your anger is justified. But when you're talking about a university campus, you're talking about a place where people are so angry at the injustices that you outline, they go on the hunt for what I call fake racists and fake bigots. And they feel so angry at what's happened in other parts of the world. You know, we're talking about the most diverse and inclusive places on the planet. They should be. And it's wonderful. But at the same time, we've decided, okay,

let's go after each other and let's create a divisive environment on campus. I'm going to pause there. How do we fix it, John? Why don't you talk about how you fix that? Because I think you do have to understand why people get like that. But how do you fix that? First, very briefly, you know, I was born in 1963. And whether you look at civil rights, gay rights, whatever, this is I was born just after Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech.

And in the 100 years, because it was 100 years since the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, in the 100 years before that, not much progress was made. And in the 50 years after that, the most extraordinary progress was made, decade by decade on every front. When I turned 50 in 2013, gay marriage had just been legalized in many states, and it was about to be made the law of the land. And so whether you want to look at gay rights, women's rights, animal rights, human rights, environment, I mean, that 50 years was the most extraordinary period of progress. So in 2014,

progressives should have been saying, yay, America, we won, whatever, whatever we're doing, let's keep doing it. But instead, what happened was everyone got online into on platforms that make you argue and, and fill you with anger and hate and offense. And so I think the progressive left, which should have taken credit, instead went on the warpath, the way Scott said, against microaggressions, which is very analogous to an autoimmune disorder. There's nothing left to attack. Let's attack each other. Now, how do we fix it? So first, I don't think there's any fixing this until we change social media dramatically. When the public square of the world's most important democracy takes place entirely in the Roman Colosseum, with the stands filled with people who are cheering for blood,

there is no democracy, there is no agreement, there is no compromise. So I think we're headed down. We're headed for disaster unless we can radically reform social media. I would like a fix, John, before you go. Okay. First thing is that one thing we do need government for is to raise the age to 16. This is a commons dilemma, and companies can't do it themselves or they'll lose all their market share to TikTok. So the government has to raise the age for internet adulthood to 16 and enforce it. And there's all kinds of ways to do that. That's the first. The second is we've got to create spaces of trust, And there are all kinds of ways to do that with authentication.

Elon Musk has actually floated a few possibly good ideas. He probably won't deliver on them, but he is at least thinking about it. And I just had drinks last night with Scott's new buddy, Noam Barden, who's come up with an alternative to Twitter, which is designed from the ground up to be a platform for creators and readers, not for advertisers focused on engagement. So I think we do need some government regulation to create a level playing field on which better platforms could compete. And then beyond that, I'm hopeful that we'll get platforms that will take everyone away from Twitter, Instagram and put them in healthier environments. So you like some of Elon's ideas, but how do you think he's performed thus far? It sounds like he's doing the same Roman emperor. I feel like I'm in the gladiator.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I was just watching a little bit of Idiocracy and, you know, the president there is crazy. Everyone should watch Idiocracy. Elon's obviously very smart, but he's behaving a bit like that. So I'm just saying, you know, long ago he said, you know, authenticate all humans. Like, yes, we need to do a lot more authentication. And then he recently tweeted something like, you should be able to, you know, choose your experience.

And if you don't want to be surrounded by assholes who are anonymous and incentivized to be jerks, you should be able to not, you know. So he has some good ideas. I am hopeful that he could do something. Well, they're old ideas and most of them are Scots. They are. So I think, look, if there's either some market pressure or some friends take him aside and do an intervention on him, I think he is capable of producing a much better Twitter. I don't know that he will. Jonathan, we have kids that are the same age.

I have two boys. You have a boy and a girl. What have you gotten right and what have you gotten wrong around parenting looking back on it? Well, my wife and I got right is keeping a lid on the total amount of screen time, trying to push them out to do things with friends, encouraging them to go out New York City at the age of nine or 10, which was way before others, but way after we went out when we were kids, when it was much more dangerous. So we listened to Lenore Skenazy, who wrote Free Range Kids. I think that we really got right. Let's see.

What did we get wrong? I wish we had found a summer camp for them long ago that they could go to every year and be there without devices, out in nature with other kids. That is so important, and we didn't do it. Every year in Maine. Kids love it. Really important. That's a really great thing. Also, you're very nice to them.

I'm sure both of you are. Anyway, you're good dads. Anyway, Jonathan, thank you so much. People should really pay attention to what Jonathan's doing. It's reasonable. We have to really start thinking about how we talk to each other in a lot of ways. You were on 60 Minutes last Sunday. What's the website? If you go to jonathanheit.com slash social media, all of my work is there. Okay. And of course, read The Coddling of America Mind, wonderful books. Well, thank you, Cara. Thank you, Scott. Please continue with your microaggressions. Thanks for your good work, Jonathan.

I love your title. Scott doesn't have a fancy title at NYU like you do, but okay. Well, he's not an ethical leader, what can I say? There you go. Exactly. Thanks, Jonathan. Gosh, I like that guy. I think he's so smart. All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions. Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction.

We're going to find out in the next 12 months that the fraud that has taken place behind the scenes with a lack of visibility and a lack of regulation around crypto is going to be second only to, I think it's going to be greater. It'll be greater in terms of criminal prosecutions. The thing about the subprime crisis is it took down the economy, but no one went to jail. This will be different. I think people will go to jail, but it won't take down the economy. but no one went to jail. This will be different. I think people will go to jail, but it won't take down the economy. I think we're going to find out so much shit went down here, Cara. So many big VCs, so many people, there was so much over-levering of assets without disclosure, run on the bank. It just feels to me that everything I read about this, the more you peel the onion back, the more incentives were around levering other,

putting massive risk where you would take the upside and the downside was borne by your depositors on these exchanges. I think you're going to see the majority of these exchanges, including Coinbase, also including Binance, I think you're going to see them go away or be severely impaired. This trustless system with middlemen that offer higher fees but no trust and no backing, it's the perfect storm of expensive but bad on every level. I like that. Criminal but not affect the economy. I think you're right. I think you're 100% right.

One more prediction. I predict great things for Ami Koak he's a comedian and this week he posted a video to instagram called how scott galloway orders at starbucks let's play it oh god here we go hello welcome to starbucks what can i get you well i can tell you this the amount of young men that come into a starbucks between the ages of 18 and 30 haven't had sex within the last year they're trying to order all sorts of things, and they're presented with a barrage of choices between espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, a double espresso, soy lattes, and that choice and that paradox is causing immense anxiety and a lack of understanding and gratitude and perspective. The kind of coffee I'd

like to order is something I'd like to order in person. I don't do it over a remote phone. I don't do it using an app. I do it coming in in person to establish human connection, and I talk to a stranger like yourself to order that coffee, and I'm going to do that right an app. I do it coming in in person to establish human connection. And I talk to a stranger like yourself to order that coffee. And I'm going to do that right now. And I think that's a prime example of how young men, particularly between the ages of 18 and 30, can establish better connections, better results, and a better future going forward because we are in a crisis right now. So a latte? Sure. That made my day.

My life. Welcome to my life. That made my day. He's a handsome to my life. That made my day. He's a handsome. So he used an app to make him bald. He's actually a handsome kid. Oh, wow. He's actually got this amazing mane of hair.

It's Ami. It's on Instagram at Ami Kozak underscore official. Yeah. Made my day. That was wonderful. Thank you for bringing that up. We love you. We love you.

We loved it. It was great. I predict great things for you. Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us you. We loved it. It was great. I predict great things for you. 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. Okay, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Friday for more. I'm sure a lot more things are happening. What do you got planned for the rest of the week, Kara?

And then it's Sol's first birthday. Oh, that's nice. Solly, jolly Solly. So we're having a party for him. So I'm very excited. All my kids are jolly these days. I just love them. They're so great. There you go. All right. All right. Happy birthday, Saul. And I'm excited for the present that Scott's going to send, you know, an expensive overall present. No, he's not. He's been very generous to us when we go to New York, et cetera. And we appreciate it. Anyway, happy birthday, Saul. Read us out. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Inderdot

engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Neil Silverio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Box Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. This was a peaceful transfer of power. America's wonderful democracy. I think this was a nice day. Congratulations to America. Well, we'll see. We haven't wiped the barnacle that is Lauren Boebert off of Colorado, but it's looking good. Wipe the barnacle. You're good. You're good. Barnacle. No problem. Barnacle.