Pivot - LIVE! From the Lesbians Who Tech Summit
Episode Date: September 13, 2019Kara and Scott talk at the annual Lesbians Who Tech Summit in New York City. Scott is dubbed a #LezBro. They discuss 48 state AG's putting forth an antitrust probe into Google. They love it. Kara come...s with her new augmented reality glasses -- she thinks they're the future, Scott disagrees. WeWork's biggest investor encouraged them not to go forward with their IPO -- it's either because Pivot has gone so hard after them or because their S-1 is utter nonsense. Kara's win is Chrissy Teigen taking on Trump on Twitter. Scott's win is California's new law protecting gig workers. And they answer audience questions about how tech can be a better place for the LGBTQ community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hi, this is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway.
This week, we did Pivot Live in New York City at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit.
We came on right after Roxane Gay, so I had to behave myself or risk an all-out war on Twitter.
Yeah, which you would lose, Scott.
Yeah, no kidding.
We're live in New York to talk at the Lesbians in Tech and Allies Summit.
Everybody say hello.
So, how do you like being here?
Do you like being here?
And we're going to talk about all the different tech issues of the day?
Yes and yes, Kara.
All right.
Okay.
All right.
So, one of the things that we did talk about is how you can be a better ally.
Yeah, say more.
Say more.
And so what I did is what naturally,
what I think is really important for you to wear
is I brought you a T-shirt.
It says Lesbro.
Who wants to see a 54-year-old man change his shirt?
Oh, my God. wants to see a 54-year-old man change his shirt. Scott, no one's interested in you here.
Well, most places, actually.
Fantastic.
Thank you, Scott.
Okay. All right, so we have a lot to talk about this week.
We're going to use Pivot. You know, we use Pivot as a different platform,
but it's really important that we use it to talk about the issues in tech
that affect all communities and try to push for more diversity.
So we're very excited to be here.
So speaking of sort of interesting things,
I interviewed Marianne Williamson this week,
and tomorrow I'm going to interview Bill de Blasio.
So I'm going on the people who didn't get into the debate tour, essentially.
So it was a really interesting interview with Marianne Williamson.
Yeah, and I'm actually hosting Michael Bennett, another guy I didn't make.
Right.
And it's interesting to think about kind of unexpected consequences.
And so the Democratic National Committee wanted to
ensure that it was more inclusive. They were accused of basically railroading Hillary through.
So they tried to be more inclusive and they came up with all these rules. And, you know, they're
sort of damned what they do, damned what they don't. But the notion that you have to get a
certain number of donors. Right. And what's ended up happening is that people are paying 70 bucks to Facebook and Google to get a $1
donation, right?
Right.
And it's also, I mean, I feel as if we have some people on stage, the big winners
through all of this are the off-card people, the Andrew Yangs, the folks you're talking
about who've gotten incredible awareness.
And they're going to have to flip it back because you're going to literally see 100
people run for president in the next cycle.
100 people next cycle.
Yeah.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Yes.
I think your point is that it shouldn't just be people who have been politicians their whole life.
But I think the DNC has an obligation to probably screen out earlier some people who shouldn't be on the stage.
I think it's taken a lot of oxygen away from people who have an important message. Who should? I mean, that was
an interesting discussion I had with Marianne Williamson. She feels she's more in tune with
Americans than she was saying she's in 2019 politics and most of the candidates are in 1985
politics, which was kind of interesting. And when actually you meet her in person, it is kind of
interesting that the media sort of has to portray her.
Like, it was really interesting.
David Brooks wrote a column where he called her a wackadoo, which and then agreed with everything she said, which was fascinating.
And, you know, it's really interesting how she's portrayed because she's quite, you know, there's some controversy around what she said about vaccinations, which she has.
She had a relatively good explanation for, but a lot of
people still don't believe her. She didn't say she was praying away the hurricane. She was talking
about prayer in general, which I think a man would be allowed to do very easily. So it was a really
interesting interview. And I was surprised, you know, one of the things she said, I think you'd
like her too. I think a lot of people would like her in person. She thinks that if we don't make a change, that young people are going to storm the Bastille.
And so she, that was the most interesting thing she was talking about. And she was talking about
how, you know, the populism in this country and the, and the, the hate that's growing is problematic
for politics. I think it's, well, one, there's a huge divisiveness, but typically throughout
history, when we get to this level of income inequality, it self-corrects, and it self-corrects the war, famine, revolution.
And I think we're going through a soft revolution where people have just had it.
Just had it, with wealthy people, most of whom are tech people.
Well, the top 1% have doubled their income, while the income of the bottom 50% have been halved.
13 people are worth the same wealth as the southern hemisphere plus India.
And it's pretty basic logic.
At some point when half, when three and a half billion people go, the easiest way to
double our wealth is to take away the wealth of these 13 people.
They figure out a way to do that.
I mean, it's kind of happened over and over in Central America and different economies
where if you don't have some level of empathy or redistribution and all the wealth and all the spoils and
all the good stuff aggregates to fewer and fewer people, at some point everybody else
says, all right, we've had it.
And when you see all these very wealthy people talking about we need higher taxes, it's not
that they're being progressive.
It's self-preservation.
They recognize at some point people are just going to show up with pitchforks and lanterns.
This week at Code Commerce that Amazon, you were specifically talking about Amazon,
didn't pay any taxes or paid very low taxes given how much money they make.
So since 2008 or approximately over the last 10 years,
Walmart has paid $64 billion in corporate income tax.
Amazon has paid $1.4 billion.
And a huge, a huge...
Our economy is just not used to a company being this successful
and never paying taxes because it's not profitable.
Typically, the markets demand a company becomes profitable at some point,
and our taxation system is based off of profits.
In addition, you have this genius, and Bezos is a genius who's figured out a way to perfectly game the system, where he never pays taxes. So remember, and we talked about this
at Code, in the 1980s, this was basically this racist whistle call where Reagan had this
caricature of what he called a welfare queen, right? The mother of all welfare queens in our society is Jeff Bezos.
Because he owns approximately 17 or 20% of Amazon.
Amazon extracts billions of dollars in tax subsidies by gamifying the process to put
their data center here.
He makes it irresistible for a municipal official who wants to be the one to detonate a prosperity bomb in their city not to fork over tons of
benefits and tax subsidies. So say two to three billion dollars gets transferred from the city
of Phoenix or Denver to Amazon to put their new data center there. That's technically a transfer
from all of us who are taxpayers to Jeff Bezos of approximately a half a billion dollars.
In addition, he himself never pays taxes because anyone who's worth that kind of money just
borrows against his holdings at a low interest rate of 2%.
But he's worth $164 billion.
He's the richest man in the world.
And he is a net debtor or taker.
So the National Park Service, the Central Intelligence
Agency, the Navy,
and Jeff Bezos
are taking money out of the Treasury, not
putting it in. So, hands down,
mother of all welfare queens for the ages,
the wealthiest man in the world.
Alexis is a good thing.
We're going to move into actual news this week,
because we do news, we do predictions and everything else,
and we have questions from you guys. I'm going to put on
AR glasses, which are from Focal.
They're at Lisa Zane's in the audience.
And what's augmented right now?
What's happening?
There is a screen right here that I'm looking at and getting some information about you,
Scott.
Yeah.
And it comes with this, it's really interesting.
I just think, it was interesting because I'm kind of fascinated where AR is going and where
these glasses,
because as you know, Google Glass, while it was not a hit, I think technically it was
the right thing.
It was the idea that we're going to have glasses on our face.
I think these are pretty attractive.
And what you do is you wear this ring.
It kind of looks...
No?
No, not yet?
That's not a wearable.
It's a prophylactic.
All right.
No, not quite yet. Oh, that's nice. But let a prophylactic. All right, no, not quite yet.
Oh, that's nice.
But listen to me.
I like these better.
I think eventually these are going to get amazing.
What happens is you use this as a joystick, and I can see time.
I see.
Yeah.
You're going to touch my joystick?
All right, okay.
And so what happens?
So what happens, I get all kinds of information right now.
I'm looking at Spotify, whether I want to turn it on and play it.
I've got messages.
I can see it in this little eye thing here.
And then you can just, oh, it's on.
I don't know if it's on.
But anyway, so it goes to time, messages, all kinds of stuff that your calendar,
just pretty much all I think.
And I can call an Uber on it, which is interesting.
And I'll actually send out texts in my calendar and things like that
So it's it's coming eventually eventually this will have a lot of information on there are technologies you want to over invest in there are technologies
We want to under invest in this is absolutely when you want to under invest. I think you're wrong
I think you're utterly wrong. You know who's in this Intel and Amazon?
Well, I'm Mark Zuckerberg said it was gonna unlock new worlds. No, it hasn't. It hasn't done anything.
Yes, but because it's early.
You're wrong.
You're 100% wrong.
Everyone's going to have something on their face that is going to...
Yeah, Ray-Bans.
Okay.
In any case, everyone's going to have these.
And as you move through them, I agree.
Google Glass was the first iteration of it.
But eventually, this is how we're going to get our information.
We're not going to be looking down at phones or doing...
And staring and wandering around the streets. I think you're going to have a heads-up display
and you're going to look at it. And this one is getting there. This is absolutely getting there.
It's really interesting that Amazon and Intel would put this amount of money. And I think a
lot of people do believe in it. Supposedly Apple's coming out with their own pair, right?
I'm sorry? Supposedly Apple's coming out with their own pair. Yes, Apple's coming out with
their own pair, which will probably be super attractive. So eventually this will get really interesting.
It'll not be as heavy on the site.
But this is a quantum leap from Google Glass.
Is it?
Yes, 100%.
And what's the name of the company?
This is Focal.
They're from Canada, so they're very nice.
So I'm really, you know, if they make Ray-Bans, I may wear them, which will be great.
But I think it's really interesting that this is kind of the new kind of investments that are being made in these kind of things, in food and agriculture and stuff like that.
But let's get to the news of the day.
Big story breakdown.
Speaking of large, state AGs go after Google and Facebook, 50 state AGs.
Yeah.
So basically all of them, including D.C. and Puerto Rico, are joining an antitrust probe of Google spearheaded by Texas state AG.
California and Alabama are out.
Go figure.
They'll probably do it on their own.
Last week, Letitia James announced
that she would lead a similar probe into Facebook.
Antitrust probes might be the thing
that brings Republicans, Democrats together
in this country, which is amazing
because they can't agree on lunch.
And it was sort of spearheaded by Elizabeth Warren.
She was talking about it earlier. What do you think about what's happened? What has occurred here this week?
So I'm really- Finally the thing has dropped or whatever. I'm really hopeful, right? That there's
finally a bipartisan issue that people, now they're going after tech for different reasons,
the red states and the blue states. I think it's really exciting. And that the fact that they're
coming together, it's well overdue. It'll take a while.
But it's similar to tobacco, where they said, look, we're sick of waiting on DC. We're going
to do it ourselves. So it looks like the states are coming for Google. And we said this earlier.
But do you think something will actually happen? What would you predict would happen,
would actually occur? How long will it take? And how long can they agree to it?
It'll be years, no doubt about it,
but at some point there'll be a grand bargain either for an enormous fine or prophylactically
Google will break itself up and come to some sort of deal. So what do you think they're going to do,
break off YouTube presumably? Well, you talked about this, you predicted this. You think it's
going to be a spin of YouTube. What's interesting is they're going after the ad part, the kind of
double click part, but something, the breakup has started.
And what the markets get wrong is that the stock is going to skyrocket
once people start doing their math.
Then why is that?
Well, we make the mistake of believing that antitrust is bad for companies
when they get broken up, that it's some sort of punishment.
And what we have to, I believe we have to do,
is not look at it through the rubric of they're bad,
so we're punishing them.
But a natural part of our economic cycle is that when a company becomes an invasive species
and kills small companies and prematurely euthanizes big companies, that it's healthy
for the economy to go in and break them up.
And when we broke up AT&T within 10 years, each one of those nine companies was worth
more than the original company that was broken up into nine pieces.
When eBay smudged PayPal, PayPal's now worth five or 10 times what eBay is. So you're going to see a massive unlock in shareholder
value. So it's not punishment. So breaking up Google, pulling off YouTube or the ads off of
Google or taking Instagram off of Facebook, which it seems to be integrating even further
with Facebook dating, which... Are you using Facebook dating?
Just curious.
Not yet.
Okay.
Not yet.
Ever?
Would you ever use... If you weren't married, would you use Facebook dating?
I'd use all of them.
Okay.
And I would just be, you know...
At work, for some reason, they call me Swipe Left.
That's my nickname.
What?
Yeah, I would use all of them.
But you feel good about Facebook.
But they're using Instagram as the... I think Instagram's the right brand for it. Yeah. I would use all of them. But you feel good about Facebook, but they're using
Instagram as the... I think Instagram's the right brand for it. I don't think Facebook is. I don't
think people trust Facebook, but I think Instagram's a great brand for dating. I think it could be huge
for them. But now it's called Instagram by Facebook. So this is interesting too, right? And
this kind of signals the end of the brand era, and that is Facebook has decided to say, all right,
Instagram by Facebook or WhatsApp by Facebook. and every marketing professor in the world had a grand
mall seizure when they heard this because but what this really indicates and I thought about
it is the end of the brand era and that is the way we've traditionally created shareholder value
is to come up with a marginal product and wrap great associations around it an American car
that's kind of a mediocre, shitty product,
but make it feel tough and American and like a rock.
And then print money with your marginal product,
but great associations and great margins.
And I think we've officially left the brand era
for the monopoly era.
And what Mark Zuckerberg has decided,
I mean, this is equivalent of Volkswagen going,
I know, let's call it Porsche by Volkswagen. Or a Boeing going, okay, the 787, let's call it the 787 Max. This just makes no
sense. But what they've decided is they want to conjoin the triplets. And if they can in any way
reduce the likelihood that they're broken up, which is a half a trillion dollar franchise or
monopoly, that that is worth the erosion of tens of billions of brand value
and brand equity.
So they're trying to stick together
in order to avoid being broken up.
They're trying to put the three together
such that he can say,
when the DOJ or the states come in,
that he can say,
look, if you try and separate the babies
from one another,
you're going to kill the whole being.
He's purposely trying to encrypt everything
and conjure up.
That sounds sneaky on Mark Zuckerberg's part. What do you think?
I hope it's not going to work.
If I were the DOJ or the FTC,
I would move in
right now and I would say, look,
whatever you do right now,
just be clear. They have said that.
Macon Delrahim has said that. We'll break your ass up.
The head of the Justice Department,
the Anti-Trust. So you predict
a breakup. You think that's what's going to happen
eventually? I think a combination of antitrust
and regulation. I think all of them at some
point either themselves
proactively break themselves up. So prediction. I love
predictions. By 2025, the most
valuable company in the world will be
AWS. Amazon Web
Services. Amazon will
build an AWS and AWS will be
the most valuable company in the world because right
now there's no pure play way to
play the cloud. The cloud is the
fastest, most growing, most profitable
part of technology right now globally.
The cloud. How do you
invest as a retail investor, an institution
or endowment in the cloud? If you invest
you got to crawl over a search engine to get
to Google. Or Microsoft or Google. You got to crawl
over a software company at Microsoft and you got to crawl over an e-commerce company and Google. Or Microsoft or Google. You've got to crawl over a software company at Microsoft,
and you've got to crawl over an e-commerce company
and a bunch of other things,
and the marvelous Mrs. Mizell to get to the cloud of AWS.
If AWS, if the fastest-growing pure-play company
and the fastest-growing sector
and the most profitable sector was a stock,
we'd all own it, or all of our pension funds,
all of our unions.
Interestingly, I've actually spoken to the CEO of AWS,
and he said he's not going to go public several times.
But we've had this conversation.
No one can say, you know what, I'd like to be king,
because they end up dead the next day.
No one can say that.
All right.
No one can say, yeah.
But be clear, Andy Jassy wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror,
and he goes, hello, CEO of the most valuable company in the world.
Right.
Well, we'll see if he does that.
It seems indicationless.
Interestingly, as much as they protest going public, WeWork.
Yeah, go on.
Go on.
Go on.
So you have been riding the WeWork since the S1 came out,
the most crazy S1 of all time.
Its biggest outside investor, SoftWang, urged the tech company to shelve its IPO.
I feel like we're responsible for that.
I feel good about that. Yeah, it's definitely us.
That and the fact this company makes absolutely no fucking sense.
Okay.
But now the company is supposedly going forward with the IPO.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.
Okay, what's going to happen then?
I don't think the company's going to get public.
For people who don't know, WeWork, you've probably all been in one.
How many people have been in a WeWork?
Lots of people, right?
It's very nice.
You have the beer and the kombucha and the wallpaper and the slightly above IKEA tables kind of thing.
And they have put out an S1. And we've always felt that, I've always felt they're a real tables kind of thing. And they have put out an S1,
and we've always felt that,
I've always felt they're a real estate company, essentially.
And the guy who runs it has very luxurious hair
and says a lot of things about feelings and happiness and whatever.
Yeah.
But he's a real estate company.
And they've been proliferating like kudzu all around the country.
And when this S1 came out, it was pretty shocking how much he owned a lot of the buildings in it, which is a lot of self-dealing.
He got a giant $700 million loan, essentially, or took $700 million out.
He owned the brand.
And then the business is just terrible.
It's a terrible business.
So we started, especially Scott, started banging on this IPO, which was comical. Like it
was weird that they even put out this S1. Well, first off, you got to be dangerous of cults.
Cults of personalities are usually terrible stocks. So typically a CEO... Well, Apple, hello. No,
that's not true. Come on, I'm on a roll. Okay, all right, sorry. So on average, Unicorn CEO prospectuses...
Netflix.
They mention the name Dara in the Uber S1 23 times.
In Lyft, it was like 18 times.
The term Adam is used 169 times.
This is Adam Neumann, the CEO.
Adam Neumann, the CEO.
You have a company that is scaling its losses.
So it'll do $3 billion in revenues this year,
and it'll lose almost that much.
So I take Uber, which is SoftBank, all the time
because for a $15 ride, you pay $10 for.
So it is economically irresponsible not to take Uber everywhere
because it's being subsidized by SoftBank.
And right now, WeWork is losing, you know,
almost a dollar on the dollar.
So you have a company, and it has no gross margins,
meaning that as the company scales,
it just loses more money.
And the thing that's going to actually probably,
is probably going to ruin the WeWork IPO is Uber,
because Uber has shown that you can't scale a company
with negative gross margins.
You just scale your losses.
And they're starting what I believe
is an inexorable downward spiral.
Well, this week, they've had a lot of...
We had Uber Eats...
It's out of trouble.
...had code, and even Uber Eats
looked like it wasn't making much money.
And that's considered their growth engine,
which was interesting.
But Uber's talking about...
There's rumors of layoffs.
There's marketing issues.
There's obviously the costs coming in,
and that's also a soft bank investment.
That's how I put an enormous amount of money in at the end.
So Uber is showing what?
That you can't run these,
you can't have businesses that lose money into eternity, correct?
Well, it's okay.
So if you, Smile Direct is going public, I think, tomorrow.
I Invisalign. I don't think, tomorrow. I Invisalign.
I don't know if anyone else here Invisalign.
It's nice to be doing orthodontia at 54.
But it's a great company, great technology,
and a company came in at a lower price point,
about half the price point,
and cut out the orthodontist and has stores
and spends their money on marketing
and is growing.
It's going to grow to a billion dollars this year.
It's growing about 150% a year. It's incredible technology and it's got gross margins of 69%.
So it's losing money, but when you're making 69 cents on every dollar product you sell,
at some point, if you get big enough, you're going to start making money.
But the thing about Uber and WeWork is that for every dollar in incremental business,
they lose a dollar five or a dollar fifty or two
bucks so this company shows no signs that scale or size would ever result in
profitability they would fundamentally have to change their business model and
uber showing that doesn't work there's just a very basic analysis showing that
the companies that have lost the most money the year before they go public are
generally terrible performing stocks and all of a sudden the market which is prone fits of sanity, has kind of sobered up and said, look what
happened on Lyft, times that by two, and that's what we're looking at with WeWork. So WeWork, by the
way, great product. I actually think it's a great, you know, an interesting company. It's probably
worth five or seven billion dollars, but the problem is they've invested 12 to build a company
worth five to ten billion, and the market is realizing that there's going to be
This ripple effect with Softbank because they have raised money based on debt
That was securitized by the value of their stake and we work which they valued at
47 billion and the markets are about to remark that debt or that collateral at a much lower price
What happens Softbank has wandered into the handing out $200 million checks to everyone in Silicon Valley.
By the way, half that money comes from the Saudis.
We'll get into that in a minute.
Thugs is what I like to call them, from Jamal Khashoggi.
And so this money has sort of changed venture capital
in Silicon Valley.
This has been like a crazy time,
because what happens is someone does a deal
that's already crazy, and SoftBank walks in with their giant checks and makes it 10 times crazier.
Venture capitals hate, who are never really controlled in Silicon Valley at all.
There's not enough rat holes to shove all the money down there.
But they hate what SoftBank has been doing to the market.
Yeah, SoftBank's basically come in and blown all the traditional masters of the universe out of the water.
So typically what's been happening is you're the leading
something in cloud and you want to raise $50 million.
And you get a term sheet from a tier one VC in Andrews
and Horowitz.
And then SoftBank shows up and says,
you were raising money at a valuation of $100 million.
You wanted to raise $50.
So we get a third of the company.
Tell you what, we'll raise your valuation to $200 million. We're going to invest $100 million. You wanted to raise 50. So we get a third of the company. Tell you what, we'll raise your valuation to 200 million. We're going to invest a hundred million. And if you don't do this,
we're going to the number two space and we're giving them a hundred million. And they're
literally blowing every other VC and every other term sheet out of the water. So they're hugely
disruptive. But what it looks like now is that they've been drunk, that they've been throwing
too much money at too high valuations. And I think we're going
to start to see an unwind. And whenever you have a recession, largest post-war expansion in the
history of our economy, 11 years, recessions always happen. That's the bad news. The good
news is to go away, but we're due. And it always comes from an area we're not expecting. And this
could be an area when we see the information economy start to to unwind and implode, that could be it.
I personally think it's going to be the deficit.
We're not worried about the deficit.
It's ridiculous that we've managed to have the lowest unemployment and the greatest deficit
in the history of the country.
That's hard to do, and we're doing it.
But it could also be, SoftBank could be ground zero for the recession if all of a sudden
all the stuff starts unwinding and all these unicorns start crashing and all these private companies can't get out, there's layoffs in
the part of the economy that we thought was going to drive all the innovation, this could
be SoftBank and this story could end up being much bigger than we think.
Yeah, but people think WeWork might be the moment.
I've gotten so many texts-
It's the firewall.
Yeah, like everyone's going to go just a second, even though it's kind of a relatively silly company
in comparison to a lot of them.
But it'll be interesting to see if they go public or not.
You don't think they're going public.
I don't think they get out.
I think the consensual hallucination
between companies and the markets is ending.
All right.
And this company,
it just, this company makes absolutely no sense.
The governance is terrible.
Does it ruin the IPO market?
There's a lot of people with startups here. They're trying to get funded. What would you do
if you're in this market as it starts to unwind? Is it curtains for everybody?
I hope not. I don't think so. I think there's a lot of fantastic companies out there,
but companies that lose money. Here's what's happened. This really weird dynamic. Amazon
invests so hugely invested.
We've never seen a company make those sorts of investments
and keep losing money.
But Amazon has positive gross margins.
Amazon was able to create this flywheel effect
and spawn these amazing businesses.
But everybody has adopted, not everybody,
but a lot of companies have adopted this philosophy
that if we just grow, regardless of the losses
to fund that growth, we're going
to be Amazon and we're going to be fine.
Yeah, they keep calling themselves Amazon.
We're Amazon of.
No, I thought the most outrageous one is they've decided, let's take the names or the words
of the most profitable sectors.
So the fastest growing, most profitable sector is the cloud or arguably in software, SaaS.
So they've decided to call themselves space as a service, SaaS.
They use the word
technology in their prospectus 123 times. There's no technology at WeWork. They're a real estate
company. They have an app for meetings. They've got an app for meetings. That's right.
They invest long. They pointed that out to me in an email. They invest long. They do 10-year leases.
They do 10-year leases. They have $43 billion in long-term obligations.
Very analog.
$43 billion in long-term obligations.
They'll do $3 billion this year in short-term leases.
What could go wrong?
And there are companies that build nice businesses investing long and then arbing out short-term rental.
Hertz does that.
They buy a car long-term and they arb it out short-term to people who just want a car for a day.
And they make money.
That company trades at.2 times revenues.
WeWork is claiming that it's worth 17 times revenues.
Amazon is worth four times revenues.
IWG, its biggest competitor, or the closest analog, Regus.
Remember Regus?
It's just bad plants and bad coffee, but it's basically WeWork.
They trade at two times revenues.
And they're profitable. So the company gets out. Do you feel better about the scooter companies? some bad coffee, but it's basically WeWork. They trade at two times revenues.
And they're profitable.
So the company gets out. Do you feel better about the scooter companies?
You know, my beloved scooter company.
Didn't they just open?
Didn't they just drop in Brooklyn?
Aren't there scooters in Brooklyn now?
Yes, they're coming to Brooklyn.
I have to be in Brooklyn now a lot, which is interesting.
But they're giving scooters, which I'm very sick.
So you scooter.
I do.
Break down the scooter world and who wins and who loses in that.
I think it's an interesting bit because they do, like, they don't have the drivers. They don't have a thing.
If they start to figure out the execution and the usage of these things, they can do that.
I don't know if they'll be worth billions of dollars.
But I think the two independent ones, I think, are really interesting, Lime and Bird.
Lime is run by a really smart guy. I just did a podcast with him, Joe Kraus, and some others there. And I think it's a real, it's, the way he explained it,
he seemed to convince me, and maybe I'm being stupid, but I really enjoy it. I use them a lot.
And you can start to see as it, it's much more sustainable than an Uber or Lyft, I think,
in terms of making money. I don't think it's worth the crazy amounts they're worth, but.
See, just as a citizen, I think they're a menace and the equivalent of littering. I hate cities
with scooters. I think they're everywhere. Well, get ready, my friend. Well, I don't agree. I
think it's a great last mile solution. You love it. I've seen you on them. It's kind of a disturbing
image. I'm in Austin and I see Kareem rolling with her Ray-Bans on the thing. It's like the
weirdest, strangest invasion of an alien force in history.
Like, here she comes.
I look good.
I look good.
And I like them.
And I carry my helmet around.
Now, you should wear your helmet, by the way.
Lime and others are trying to innovate in helmets.
That is a big problem, is safety.
Their biggest problem is safety.
I think safety and figuring out the logistics of it.
And that's, I think, their issue is people hurting themselves.
My brother is always like, if you want to enjoy no elbows, Kara, go right ahead.
He's a doctor.
Anyway, so speaking of not scooters, I wrote a column this week about Joey Ito of the Media Lab.
Yeah.
An appalling, sexist, horrible story and pedophiles, dirty money.
They had taken money from Jeffrey Epstein,
quite a bit of it, and the head of it, Joey Ito,
who I know very well, had to resign from the MIT Media Lab
because it had turned out through a story by Ronan Farrow
that he tried to cover up the giving of the money.
And they had given a name to Jeffrey Epstein within MIT Media Lab, which was Voldemort,
he who must not be named, which was just, it just was one appalling detail upon the next for this
thing. And it turned out a lot of their scientists were hanging out at Jeffrey Epstein's island.
He was involved in a lot of these dinners.
I've been to one or two of them, not with Jeffrey Epstein, thank God.
But he was pervasive within these science and tech communities.
And there's going to be more coming out, I think.
And one of the things that was interesting is that the emails that emails that ronan uh surfaced um about uh about that and so
one of the things when i wrote a column the new york times was pretty tough joey who i've known
a long time um and i i get what i wrote was not every fortune is clean it is impossible for every
donor investor advisor or leader in tech to be perfectly pure but if you can't manage to say a
hard no to those responsible for the dismemberment of a journalist or to a predator of young girls, I am not sure what to say.
So I was trying to, it was incredible though.
I'll tell you, I got a ton of pushback from lots of people in the comments and on, I did a live Twitter.
And they're like, what's wrong with taking money from Jeffrey Epstein if it's for the good?
And I was literally like, he's a pedophile and you shouldn't take his money.
I feel like that should be the way it is.
And it was really interesting.
There was a big debate going on whether to take money from bad people.
But what happened here at the Media Lab was they were covering it up
because they knew that taking money from someone who was a convicted sex offender was probably a pr problem so but so and i'm i'm
arguing here to learn not to be right yeah right sure go back to when he took the money they took
the money yeah he was a guy who was a sex offender they took it after he was convicted yeah but he
quote-unquote served his time what were they say? Were they cognizant of the additional crimes?
Yes.
No, no, they weren't cognizant.
No, no, but they were cognizant of the crimes.
And it was, I think, you know,
there had been rumors about this guy for a long time.
But he had been,
even that sort of shitty conviction that happened
that got overturned,
that he was, you know,
that's why he was brought to New York
to be tried here and he killed himself.
Rest in non-peace, Jeffrey Epstein.
But he, they were aware of the problem.
And so what was interesting to watch in the emails
was how much, what links this Media Lab,
which is an important tech, a lot of big people,
my ex-wife is on the um is on the advisory there's
there's like a dozen a hundred people in this advisory where it's all luminaries and stuff
um she went there um and what was fascinating was the lengths they went to hide the money this guy
was giving yeah um and i just i could i was sort of like if i every day i think tech cannot get
worse and i thought this is just an astonishing display
of lack of any kind of judgment.
The same thing, lack of consequences,
lack of ethics, lack of care about anything.
And it was sort of like,
I was like, I've had it with these people.
Like this is insane that you have to argue
whether it's good or,
it's sort of like it's reached Trumpian levels.
Like we have to argue about the weather
or we have to argue about that kind of stuff.
We've reached a really weird place, I think.
And now he had to resign, obviously,
and we'll see who they put in his place.
But I think this thing goes a lot further
because a lot of these dinners that Jeffrey Epstein was at,
organized by another group called TheEdge.org,
which he had given a ton of money to.
You know, you had Gates there,
you had Sergey Brin, you had Larry Page,
you had Marissa Mayer.
They all sort of were, not to like,
they didn't hang out with Epstein all the time,
but it's just like a really interesting
sort of weird, very male-centered environment
where things just get passed over.
And it was, you know, there was clearly very few women,
very few people of color, very few diversity.
It was sort of this weird little club.
And he managed to, like, take his reputation and rewash it.
So, anyway.
But I wonder if the bigger story,
I don't know if this is as much a negative indicator on tech
as it is on higher education.
And that is, in the U.S., there's a direct correlation between your ranking as a university and the size of your endowment.
So I know this firsthand.
You're at NYU. Scott is at NYU.
There's tremendous pressure to be raising money all the time.
And you can see how these people, the institutions would rationalize,
weaken to ethics to raise more and more money.
And I think it all kind of reverse engineers down to
this really terrible gestalt in the world of academia,
where we no longer see ourselves as public servants,
we see ourselves as luxury brands.
And we want to raise billions and billions of dollars,
but we don't want to expand our freshman seats.
So Stanford has tripled the applicants
for its freshman class, but they refuse
to expand the number of seats each year such
that people like me can stand up in faculty meetings
and listen to our dean say we rejected 90% of our applicants
and say it with pride, which in my view
is tantamount to a homeless shelter bragging that they turned away 90% of the people who showed up last night.
Money has totally, money and prestige has totally invaded our academia and we no longer,
we think of ourselves as luxury brands.
We've totally lost the script as opposed to public servants and it's a race to become
the Vitan or whatever the premier luxury brand is.
And we need to totally shift, in my view,
I think we should start taxing endowments
unless you grow your seats faster than population.
And we need to dramatically expand the number of seats.
It will be interesting to see what happens at these companies,
but it really does sort of, it's not just MIT, it's Harvard.
It's all of us.
Stanford, USC keeps getting dragged into one horrible story after the next.
And so what's interesting is a lot of these places are centers of tech or something like that where it's sort of, you know, you sort of wonder.
To me, the biggest question is what kind of influence did Epstein have?
And he had some weird ideas about genetics,
you know, because he wanted to actually use his sperm
to create more Epsteins, which is horrible.
But how much did it influence the actual science itself
by who's funding it?
And so it's the same idea of why we're taking our cues
from very wealthy tech people. And I think's the same idea of why we're taking our cues from very
wealthy tech people. And I think Anand Girgardos talks about this, is why do we go to someone like
Mark Zuckerberg and let him determine how education should be reformed? Why don't we just tax him
and then we decide? Which is fascinating. Anyway, it's an interesting question.
Why is space exploration and the cure of infectious disease
now the domain or the sole domain of rich people?
Yeah.
I want NASA putting us in space, not fucking Elon Musk.
Yeah.
Why?
So it's very simple.
Tax.
I'm a capitalist.
You know, I don't, I've started companies.
I think it's important that we have billionaires.
It's literally out of the point.
Should we have people worth the GDP of Norway?
Does that make any sense?
Yeah.
And so all of these unbelievable, inspiring things
that we used to pull together around government,
it has so many negative consequences
because we can't pull together as a people, right?
Curing disease is something we can all get behind and we can't pull together as a people, right? Curing
disease is something we can all get behind and we can respect our government. We can all feel a
collective investment in that. Putting a man on the moon is something we can all get behind.
Now we've all got to worship at the, I call it the Pablo Escobar effect. He built parks. He cared
about Columbia. Is that where we are? That only people who get money, you know, through what I
think is fairly rapacious behavior
and a lot of genius,
they're the ones that build the parks
because the rest of us can't afford it.
We are becoming that nation.
Yep, I would agree with you.
I don't think they should determine anything.
All right, we need to take a quick break.
We'll be back with more Live Pivot in just a moment. Fox Creative.
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Okay, Scott, let's get back to Pivot at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit in New York City.
So let's get to winners and losers.
I'm going to do the first win.
Yeah.
Obviously, Chrissy Teigen's Twitter feud
with President Trump.
Whatever you don't make,
hashtag President Pussyass Bitch a trend.
In the middle of the night, Trump tweeted about how John Legend and his, quote, filthy mouth wife had not given enough credit for his work in criminal justice reform.
But he messed with the wrong woman, obviously.
Chrissy Teigen is an expert tweeter.
And she called him a pussyass bitch.
And that's where we are in our presidential day.
Nice.
Yeah.
He was busy with the Alabama stuff going on for a long time.
And then she got his attention.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's where we are.
Yeah.
So she's a winner.
She's a winner.
I love Chrissy Teigen.
I think she's a great tweeter.
I think she's funny.
And she manages to... She doesn't keep it clean. That's not true. But I think she's a great tweeter. I think she's funny, and she manages to...
She doesn't keep it clean.
That's not true.
But I think she does a great job,
and I kind of am fascinated by his continued attacks,
trying to best her,
which is going to end in tears for Donald Trump.
So that's my win.
What's your win?
Let's hope so.
My win is California...
Is it the state legislature or the state senate at AB5 saying that independent contractors or Uber driver partners, which is Latin for no health insurance, no minimum wage protection.
They've decided that if you, they've reclassified what it means to be an independent contractor.
And they've said, okay, to be an independent contractor, you have control of your own time.
You have to kind of have your own business. and Uber drivers or partners could qualify as that,
but you also can't be offering the service that is core to the business.
And it's going to be very difficult for Uber to argue that the drivers aren't core to the
business.
And this is an enormous victory.
If you see union memberships been cut in half. And it's pretty straight math.
Everybody complains about the fact,
or we're like, how did we get to this point
where the bottom 50% of America
has about the same wealth as seven families in America?
And it's a direct correlation
to the kind of the absolute shit-kicking
that unions have had
and the fact that we haven't
really had a minimum wage raise in about 30 years. So this is, I'd like to think that this is a
firewall, that this is us saying enough. We'll see. Gavin Newsom, who just signed it into law,
Uber says it doesn't apply to them, or is making the argument that it doesn't apply to their
contractors. Oh, they've already funded, significantly funded,
they've allocated $20 or $30 million
along with some other companies,
DoorDash, et cetera,
to fight this and take it to the Supreme Court.
Yeah.
But it's time.
I mean, it's absolutely time
for workers to rise up
and for us to, you know,
I'm a member of a union.
Well, it's also will ruin their business plans
even further.
And one of the best interviews I've ever done
in terms of getting someone to say something just awful,
which is my goal in every interview,
was when Travis Kalanick, who was the previous CEO
and one of the founders of Uber,
I asked him what, I said,
your business has some financial difficulties
in getting profitable.
And he goes, well, you know, when we,
the problem I have is that guy in the front seat,
I'd like to get rid of him.
Yeah, he's the cost.
He's a cost.
And once I get rid of him, I have a great business.
Yeah.
And I was like, what?
And the whole audience went, what?
And I'm like, like you say, go on.
And he just, it was fascinating for him to like admit
because he was evil and that's what a villain does
in a Bond movie.
So I'm going to kill you now Mr. Bond
by cutting you with a laser in six parts.
So it was really
interesting but I think that they are not going to be
able to outrun this. Do you?
I don't think they will. Unless they get rid of the guy
in the front seat really. Yeah and let's go
to our losers.
Losers.
So this is a loss and a win.
Okay.
I think Amazon and Twitter,
with continued lack of regard for the Commonwealth,
the Business Roundtable put out this wordy statement saying,
it's no longer just about shareholders,
it's about stakeholders.
And 50, 70, 80 years ago, companies were evaluated.
It was prestigious to have a lot of employees.
That was prestigious.
It was prestigious to be seen as a really good citizen.
It's paying your people well.
Those were signs.
Those were markers, not just your share price.
People probably had a stronger view of the company based on those things
and didn't know what the share price is.
And we've seen Twitter basically file suit in San Francisco
refusing to pay that tax going after that.
I think that's a big lose.
And I think also Amazon.
You want to talk about heroes, and I brought this up a lot.
Amazon supposedly got very angry at questions around unionization
and the pushback they got from local officials here in New York.
And so they, quote unquote, took their ball and went home and they pulled out of New York. Remember
that? That was six months ago. Yeah. LinkedIn is amazing. You can go on LinkedIn and you can
scrape data and you get a ton of insight. Apple has about 15 or 20 open job positions. Google,
100 open job positions in New York. Amazon has 800 open job positions in New York right now.
In the last six months since Amazon pulled out, they've increased their hiring. They've hired
1,000 people at Amazon in the last six months. They've hired 500 people at AWS. That means they
are on pace to bring those 25,000 jobs, right? Why? Because Jeff Bezos was always coming here,
a 54-year-old man with $160 billion,
wants to roll in New York, not Indianapolis or Denver or Columbus, Ohio. That was ridiculous to
begin with. And guess what? They are bringing those jobs here to the greatest city in the world.
And you know what? That guy had to put his fucking hand back in his pocket. AOC State Senator Giannara
saved us all $3 billion by saying, you know what, boss? You're coming here.
This is the greatest place in the world. We do not need to pay you for your midlife crisis. This
is a huge victory for us. I love when you go all AOC on me. It's really nice.
Not so much when you go other ways, but I like AOC.
But it's true.
Absolutely true.
We don't need to pay them.
Like the idea that we subsidize.
I don't know about all of you.
I'm paying a lot to be here.
Yeah.
Aren't you paying a lot?
You pay to be in New York.
You're right.
Exactly.
All right.
My fail is Trump tweeting.
All this tweeting about Alabama.
The tweeting about running in the election for 2024.
And don't you just love when presidents talk about subverting the Constitution
which is just Wednesday for us in the United States anymore
and that, you know, the whole Alabama thing, it was insanity.
The only thing I was sort of like didn't know how to feel about
was the whole John Bolton tweets because I hate John Bolton
so I was like, who do I vote for here?
Like, who do I root for?
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, I'm like, oh, I really think Trump's an asshole,
but that guy is a real,
he's been a persistent asshole for 20 years.
So it's a real, it was an interesting, that was my thing.
But this, the tweeting about this is not,
it's really weird.
It's, I think looking at his mental illness
is something we need, well, we know this already,
but I think it needs to be taken seriously by journalists to start to...
Can I have a second win?
I think there's a lot of good things going on right now.
I'm really hopeful, and I'm not...
All right.
Then we're going to go to questions.
Or I hate my life less and less every day.
But the repudiation of Boris Johnson,
bypassing parliament...
Yeah.
He lied to the queen.
One of the things I don't like about
being a Democrat or I don't like about us is
I think we're wimps. So Fox
Talks has a week called Socialism
versus Capitalism. They're constantly calling us socialists.
And I think it's time we started saying,
you know what, no, we're not socialists.
As a matter of fact, the worst type of socialism
is cronyism, which is happening on the other side.
I think we need to say no
and I'm hoping that we're having sort of a reverse D-Day
when the British Parliament,
when the Conservative Party,
there are 23 members defect and go to the other side,
which we haven't seen among Republicans here,
with this what I'll call soft fascism.
And let's be clear, this is a soft form of fascism.
Fascism is nationalism,
demonizing immigrants,
a refusal to condemn
violence. And that to me perfectly describes some of the actions that are happening across
extremist right wing in Europe and the US. So yeah, you call me a socialist. No, no, boss,
you're the fascist. And Britain just said no. And I hope that begins to infect us where we start to
push back on a president who's taking money
out of our defense budget
without a discussion or legislation
or any sort of discourse
with our legislative body.
And Boris Johnson tried to do the same thing in the UK
and they said, not here, boss.
We need to do the same thing here.
We need less fascism.
I like you in a lesbian...
You've gone full lesbian, which is really nice.
I wish that lesbian Lindsey Graham would do that.
What?
Come on.
That's good.
That's good.
Literally, I'm like, I think everyone has the photos
or something that's going on there.
Anyway, come on. Let's go. We're going'm like, I think everyone has the photos or something that's going on there. Anyway, come on.
Let's go.
We're going to have questions from the audience.
All right.
Marianne in the audience, I don't know where you are.
What can large tech platforms, Twitter, YouTube, etc., do to protect vulnerable communities
while not accidentally preventing members of the community from reclaiming what used to be hateful slurs? What can they do?
Do you want to go first? No, you go. I think as long as there's a dollar bill at the end of it,
they're not going to. I don't think we can expect, we can call on their better angels. I think they've
shown a masterful delay in obfuscation with like a faux concern and we continue to see that here's the here's the
problem the underlying business model and the algorithms as a species we'd like to think we're
a generous empathetic people and there's a large vein of that but we're more tribal than we are
generous or empathetic and we're very drawn to violence and conflict and it's the ultimate
business model to create a model where advertising
gets to target conflict. So when we talk about engagement on these platforms, what we really
mean is enragement. So there's an economic interest in letting anti-vaxxers go on and talk
about this stuff without stepping in and saying, you know what, this is not only not true,
it could potentially be very harmful, right? It could result in an outbreak of meningitis or
what have you. And so they will always default to, well, okay, rage and hate. We're worried about it.
We're concerned about it. But don't get in the way of it. So the bottom line is we need legislation.
We pay 23 cents on the dollar to DC and to our state governments such that they can prevent a tragedy of the commons.
And these companies will never make that connection.
So what we need to do are elect officials
that hold them to the same standards and scrutiny.
We've held other industries and companies.
But folks, they're not going to get there on their own.
When it's raining money, your vision gets blurred.
Absolutely. I agree with you on that one.
All right. What will happen to Lyft and Uber drivers?
Because you do predictions mostly.
So what will happen to Lyft and Uber drivers?
Well, I think all of us probably need to take fewer Ubers.
I don't know if it makes sense for a professor to be taking a Suburban or whatever I'm going to be taking for 80 bucks. I should probably be angry that it takes so long to get
to the airports and vote for people and be willing to pay taxes such that there's public
transportation to these places, you know, like they've done in Europe for the last 50 years.
So I'd like to think the workers get a little bit more dignity, the wages go up, that we go to
minimum wage. By the way, remember all the fear mongering about what happens if you raise minimum
wage to 15 bucks? That hasn't panned out anywhere no hasn't panned out anywhere so i hope i hope it just across the board the gig
workers and everybody else just that this california legislation goes national yeah do you
think it's going to happen i do i do i think you know it's interesting i did have a discussion with
gavin newsom when he was lieutenant governor and he didn't have anything to do all day so he'd have
lunch with me um we talked about this a lot, this idea of reclassifying workers
and creating a new kind of worker. So I do think this, I think California, I'll be writing about
this next week in the New York Times, is really the de facto national legislator for everything,
whether it's a privacy bill, whether it's this AB5 with the car deal, the deals they're making
with car. So I think in weird way, Gavin Newsom and the Senate there is determining a lot of our regulations for tech.
And Marguerite Vestager, who just got a giant job.
She got quantumly more scary.
She's a badass, speaking of badass women.
Who here is in a union?
Anybody here in a union?
I went to UCLA. I was. You were in a union? The Journal and a union? When I was, I went to UCLA. I was, I was. The journal
in the Washington Post. I'm not now, but. So junior year at UCLA, every summer at UCLA, I had basically
12 weeks to make 2,300 bucks so I could afford to go back to school. And I worked as a box boy at
San Vicente Foods. And this, this guy took an interest in me and he said, do this, do this,
do this. And he had me fill out a bunch of paperwork.
And he said, it's going to cost you $80 up front.
I'm like, I don't have $80.
He's like, we're putting you in the union.
And I went from $4 an hour to $11 an hour.
Like someone taking an interest in me and the power of unions.
And by the way, everybody seemed to be fine shopping in Bel Air at San Vicente Foods.
And it literally paid for my junior year of college, was somebody saying,
there's dignity and work, and anyone who shows up here and packs other people's groceries should
get paid eight or nine bucks an hour in 1986, as opposed to four bucks an hour. And so I got
through my junior year of college, and I think that needs to happen across millions of households.
We need to raise, I mean, I'm really on my soapbox now, but I think it's,
I would really love to see
a reinvigoration of unions.
Well, it's interesting
that it's happening actually
at internet media companies.
What's that?
There's been unionization efforts
more anywhere else than,
well, a lot,
but internet media companies,
Vox went unionized.
They're obviously working on it,
BuzzFeed and Vice News
and stuff like that.
So it's a really interesting time because it's the media companies that are doing that, the internet
media companies. And I know it was a struggle at Vox, but they ultimately came to a deal with
the unions. And it was interesting. But I also did, I'm not in the designation now for the Vox
union, but it's an interesting trend. We'll see. Unions have been so kneecapped,
it's kind of hard to imagine. All right, last two. 2020 tech IPO predictions, Scott Galloway.
The biggest IPO or the most successful IPO of 2020 is going to be Airbnb.
Airbnb. Yeah. Are you bullish on this one? Or are you going to slap them around?
Airbnb is gangster.
Airbnb is an incredible concept because with Uber, Uber has no moats.
The core business has low margins.
Airbnb is the exact opposite.
You have to have global supply.
That means you have to have people
who know about Airbnb coming in from Copenhagen and Tokyo.
So it has an incredible moat.
It's well run.
You like the CEO and the management team there.
They have issues around what they do to cities
and removing rental properties at big cities.
But in general, he's very aware of these things.
And he's not just saying...
What I don't get from him is I get a really strong and interesting discussion.
And you can really shame him, which is always helpful.
But I find I don't get a...
You know, we'll do better. We've a, you know, we'll do better.
We've made some mistakes, but we'll do better.
What kind of internet do we want?
What kind of internet do we want?
First Amendment.
I'm proud of our progress.
Without knowing what the First Amendment is.
Yeah, and then it's easier to pick the losers.
Uber, Lyft, Tesla, Beyond Meat, all down 20% to 80% in 2020.
How about you?
What do you think?
I think Airbnb.
Airbnb.
Maybe Pinterest.
Yeah.
We'll see.
You think they'll do well, Pinterest?
I have no idea.
Yeah.
Pinterest.
Yeah, you like Pinterest?
I haven't paid attention to them in years.
They've done well.
Pinterest has actually done well.
All right.
Thank you so much.
This is Pivot, Scott Galloway, our Lesbro.
Thank you very much.
Scott, always lovely to see you in person.
And thanks to Lesbians Who Tech for inviting us.
Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis and Eric Johnson.
Eric Anderson is Pivot's executive producer.
Thanks also to Rebecca Castro,
Drew Burrows, and Nishat Kerwa.
Thanks again to Lesbians Who Tech
for having us.
Make sure you subscribe
to the show on Apple Podcast.
If you like this week's episode,
leave us a review.
Thanks for listening to Pivot
from Vox Media.
We'll be back next week
with another breakdown
of all things tech and business.
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