Pivot - Netflix Golden Globe noms, bipartisan agreement on encryption, and Amazon's plan for fashion

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

Kara and Scott talk about Congress' hearing on regulating end-to-end encryption on messaging apps. They discussJack Dorsey's tweet storm about building a small internal open source team. We get updates on leadership at Away. In Friend of Pivot, we hear from legendary fashion and media icon Joanna Coles on what Amazon wants out of the fashion industry. Scott's win is the Silicon Valley finale. Kara's fail are people like AG Bill Barr who continue to protect Trump. In predictions, Scott thinks we'll be talking about the effect internet porn has on developing minds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Pivot comes from Virgin Atlantic. Too many of us are so focused on getting to our destination that we forgot to embrace the journey. Well, when you fly Virgin Atlantic, that memorable trip begins right from the moment you check in. On board, you'll find everything you need to relax, recharge, or carry on working. Buy flat, private suites, fast Wi-Fi, hours of entertainment, delicious dining, and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. delicious dining and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. Check out virginatlantic.com for your next trip to London and beyond, and see for yourself how traveling for business can always be a pleasure. to get your customers to notice you, Constant Contact has what you need to grab their attention. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform offers all the automation, integration,

and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly, all backed by their expert live customer support. It's time to get going and growing with Constant Contact today. Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. And, Cara, happy birthday. I just want to say you look amazing for 73.

Happy birthday. I'm an attractive 57. I don't mind saying my age. I had a very good week, Scott. You're 57? Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. That's so old. Oh, Jesus Christ. That's so old. Oh, my God.

That's ridiculously old. That is old, but I look good. I'm doing great. I'm winning awards. I'm having babies. I'm getting married. I'm just on top of my game here at 57, so I'm good. You are.

Good for you. So I watched the series finale of Silicon Valley last night. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Highlight of my week. I forgot about that. Yeah. And I thought it was – I didn't think – I actually didn't think it was great. I thought it was just okay. But it stirs a lot of emotions when you have that type of investment in a program. And I was thinking, how do you develop an actual relationship with a media property? I guess it's anything you make an investment in over six years. It's easy to get sentimental. Yeah, sure.

And, of course, you were in it, which sort of fucked up the whole thing. I'm everywhere this week. This is a good week for Kara Swisher. Literally. There is like no escaping you this week. But I enjoyed it. Did you see the series finale? What did you think of it?

I liked it a lot. I thought it. Did you see the series finale? What did you think of it? I liked it a lot. I thought it was very quiet. I love Alec Berg and Mike Judge, who did the show, and I was a advisor to it for many years. I think I was paid like $16 or something like that, and I got a nice jacket from them, pretty much. I would argue you deserve $17.

I thought your contribution was really right in the $17 range. I made more money from appearing on it. You get like $700 or whatever scale is, and you get to join the Screen Actors Guild. But I thought it was good. It was very kind of sad and beautiful, I thought. I thought that was very sentimental, and I like a sentimental ending. I also watched, of course, the ending of Madam Secretary, which I also loved. But I agree.

You have relationships with shows. I mean, I remember where I was when I watched the last episode of MASH. You remember that, or the last episode of West Wing. The biggest TV event in history in terms of viewership, which shows you how much TV has changed. So let me ask you this. What is your favorite series finale episode, or what series finale do you think was most moving or did you enjoy the most? I found Six Feet Under. I thought Six Feet Under

had that amazing. Word to your mother. That was my number one. That literally blew me away. Well, it's death related for me and I was like I love the idea of knowing how people die. That was the whole trick of the show at the beginning. You learned how they got their

bodies essentially in their funeral home. That just made me just weep. And they had that song by, whatchamacallit, Sia? Is that pronounced Sia? That was a beautiful song and everything. The whole thing was just, it just got me right there. Incredible. I watched it many times.

I thought that show was amazing. You know what's a close second is, did you see, although I think it moves men more because it taps into sort of our paternal instincts. Did you see the season, or did you watch the series Breaking Bad? No, I did not, but I heard it moves men more because it taps into sort of our paternal instincts. Did you see the season or did you watch the series Breaking Bad? No, I did not. But I heard it was great. Yeah, the series finale there was really powerful. Really powerful. Yep.

Yeah, and of course there's the famous Mary Tyler Moore ending. Oh. Where they all, where the studio gets sold. There's a lot of shows do a great, and of course The Sopranos is the famous, famous one. That was awful. Which I liked. I liked that. I don't know if a lot of people had an issue.and, of course, The Sopranos is the famous, famous one. That was awful. Which I liked. I liked that. I know a lot of people had an issue.

I thought there was something wrong with my cable box. I didn't understand it at all. Oh, they were fucking with you. They were messing with you. Well, since we're talking about television and how much we love it, we talked last week that Netflix absolutely swept the Golden Globes nominations this year. I mean, they really did. They were just announced this week. You know, the Marriage Story did, which I haven't seen yet because I just got engaged,

so I'm not going to talk about Divorce yet. But it was amazing that this might be the year a streaming platform takes home Best Picture. Morning Show was nominated for Best TV Series, Best Performance by Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. So the Irishman and The Marriage Story were nominated. A lot of other shows like your beloved Game of Thrones were kind of zeroed out. So what is happening here? Yeah, but they kind of lost all, I don't want to say they lost all credibility with me, but The Irishman?

Really? I thought this was, you know, I mean, it was literally, okay, let's do the same movie and see how long— Yeah, I agree. See how old we can cast young people as. It's just— Yeah. I thought it was ridiculous. It was—I mean, they're just such incredible actors.

How young we can cast old people as because they de-aged him. They de-aged Robert De Niro in that. That was a bad use of technology, I thought. Yeah, it just didn't work. The whole thing just didn't, in my view, didn't work. But they're winning these awards. These are a big deal among the people of Hollywood. They're winning these awards. Yeah, but what I take away from all of this, Cara, is that over the long term, there's no core competence like capital. And that is, culture of creativity can hold the wolves at the door for a while and hopefully use that to go and

access capital. But if you think about, I mean, I'm just such an enormous fan of HBO, but because, and HBO's creativity either didn't, because it was stuck in a much bigger company, did it translate to the kind of cheap capital? No, that they could increase their spending and go toe-to-toe with these guys. And now I think they're totally screwing up, and I've talked about it too much. But over the long term, it's just really difficult to compete with someone who has six times the capital of you. And Netflix is spending $12 or $13 billion a year versus two. I feel like there should be a second award ceremony that's ROI, and that is how much you spend per Emmy. So HBO spends something like one-eighth the amount per Emmy

that a Netflix or an Amazon Prime has to spend to figure out creativity. But here's the thing, they're closing the gap. They're figuring it out. Capital, very hard to compete with cheap capital over the long term. It is, 100%,

especially in this area because people in Hollywood are so rapaciously interested in money in that way. And they'll move wherever they want. You mean they're human? You mean they live in a capitalist society? You think they're more into money than any other? Versus those

ethical people that want to save the whales on Wall Street? No, that's not what I mean. Or those tech people who don't care about their options? I mean, people in Hollywood are always jealous. Hush your... Go ahead. Shut your piehole there. Listen. People in Hollywood always got cash. And I used to argue with them that they never got a piece of the action, which is the actual ownership of the IP. That's interesting.

So they always, like, went for the cheap cash. I was like their well-paid employees. That's what I called them all the time. Like engineers? Engineers. No, because they get a piece of the action. Yeah, but I've always thought – I've always found in tech companies or the companies I've worked in that basically your tech team and your sales team are pretty much coin-operated. And will get a new job over lunch and not come in if someone offers them, you know, another 50 bucks a year.

Whereas the other categorization of employees are more focused on their equity in the culture and career advancement that salespeople and tech or the kind of the engineers are pretty much coin operated. Another fascinating insight from the CEO of nine companies, seven of which have failed. Yes. Okay. I want to talk about Jack Dorsey had a tweet storm about decentralizing the platform, which is against everything they've been doing for the past bazillion years. Now, I covered when they centralized and they got rid of all the

third-party people making things on it or they just, or they sidelined them because everybody was making all this cool stuff and being very innovative around Twitter.

Yeah. And then Twitter sort of shut all that down by controlling the entire experience, which they had good reason to do at the time under... Costello, right?

Dick Costello. Costello, excuse me. But he announced, Dorothy announced this Blue Sky team, a five-person team of open-source architects, engineers, and designers to develop open and decentralized standard for social media. I don't understand it. Can you, do you have any thoughts on this? Oh, no.

I was going to ask you to give us a history. Well, here's the deal. That they're doing, that it's not creative if they're not solving their problems fast enough. And this is a way to, like, create more creativity on the platform, presumably. Well, when it's an open API, you basically unleash, or if you will, you surf off of the talent of other people who see an opportunity to take those tools and build cool little apps on top of a platform, right? And it creates the developer community.

The most obvious example is iTunes and the apps that populate that community, and it creates a halo for. So Apple's always been able to inspire a more robust app community, and Android hasn't been able to garner the same sort of momentum, at least initially, which creates a less robust platform and ecosystem. that they wanted to centralize one look and feel because Costolo came from Google and wanted it to be an ad platform and so wanted to aggregate not only eyeballs, but eyeballs through sort of a similar rubric. And people would argue, well, they've kind of shut out. Unlike some of the other platforms, some of the creativity and investment, they weren't able to free ride off of other people's human capital, scrappiness, crazy ideas to build stuff on top of their platform. But I would, you know, I read this thing. I would argue this is kind of,

talk about pissing in the ocean. So, five developers, and in this press release, he says that whose impact may not be felt for years. It felt like, okay, the PR department wanted to respond, wanted to say, no, we're creative, we're open, we're innovating. But they have more people making sushi at their cafeteria trying to create a Xanadu environment for millennials than they've devoted to this project. So it's sort of- Yes. They have very good food, though. Let's be fair. They have delicious food at the Fair enough, good food. But they put almost no wood behind this arrow.

So I'm sort of like, well, is this more of a press release? It reminds me of Burberry and Digital, that they would hire one person to do something on Snap and to talk about these huge Snap initiatives because they thought, okay, let's make. This felt like more hype than reality. Here's my issue, is that they need to innovate on Twitter. They've got to innovate on the product. If they ran the company better, like, that they would have the edit button and everything else that we've been asking for. They just, the product hasn't changed a lot, even though you and I both love it. It's really the same old, same old for a long time.

And I think that's what it is. And speaking of changing, is encryption, that Facebook is following Apple's lead to develop end-to-end encryption, as Mark Zuckerberg previously talked about. Lots of people on both sides of the aisle, Lindsey Graham and Dianne Feinstein, are agreeing on this. Democrats and Republicans have already hosted a hearing to demand Facebook and Apple give the government a way to sidestep end-to-end encryption

for law enforcement purposes. This is going to be a big fight again, I think. And they are, you know, Apple's been pretty firm. And they are, you know, Apple's been pretty firm. And Will Cathcart, the vice president of Facebook, sent a letter to A.G. Bill Barr, also known as Trump's, I'm not going to say. In short, he said whatever the government gets access to, so will bat. No, Bill Barr is literally, as I said last week, he really should. Read Eric Holder's piece about how he's unqualified for the job.

Opening up these backdoor lines would affect innocent platform users. This is what Apple is stuck to. And now Facebook is sort of putting, speaking of wood behind an arrow, that's a big deal. And so what do you think is going to happen, this situation? This is a big deal. And boring stuff is the important stuff. And that is, I think you and I differ a little bit on this. And I got the most pushback I've ever, probably the most pushback I've ever received. But I think if the FBI finds a terrorist phone who's just committed a mass shooting and wants into the phone to see if there's other shootings being planned or underway, I think that a tech company has an obligation to comply with that court order. At the same time, I also believe that tech companies have an obligation to work with our government, and I've never really understood these employees protesting.

You and Jeff Bezos. Oh, I'm totally with Jeff on this one. I think that you may not—I don't think you get to cherry-pick our government's actions. I think if you're a U.S. citizen and you've benefited from the extraordinary opportunities, occasionally we get a bad king, occasionally we have the wrong decision from the FBI or the CIA. But I think it's ridiculous that these companies are trying to pick and choose which government departments or initiatives they want to be involved in. I think our government— No, I disagree with you completely. I completely disagree with you. Let's go back to the encryption issue.

It only takes one king president to ruin an entire century. Well, yeah, but 49% of the population always decides they don't like their president. And so let's go back to encryption. But look, if they can't – if our government can't find other ways to catch terrorists besides getting into a phone and then exposing so many other people, millions and millions of people to get exactly what they want, which is access to everybody's phone, as we know from Edward Stone, whatever you think of Edward Stone, they want in on all our stuff. Well, then you're saying, okay, but hold on. You're saying you trust Tim Cook more than you trust federal judges. You trust tax CEOs more than you trust our judges. I think these, look at some of the stuff this week around the FISA courts.

I am. I do. I do. I do. I do. I have to say. Okay, so we just have a fundamental agreement there. I believe that rule of law in courts, I trust more than taxis.

And case in point, encryption, what they're trying to do is put all of their data out of the reach of our government and our law enforcement agencies. So, one, I mean, they'll claim it's privacy, but two, it's because I think they want to abdicate responsibility for the damage that's happening on their platforms. responsibility for the damage that's happening on their platforms. They can just throw up their arms and say, oh, these people planned an attack or this person was a pedophile. We didn't know, not our fault. And so the notion that they're trying to put this out of the reach of- They are constantly complying. They are constantly complying with justifiable federal demands. They are constantly complying. In this case, it's just the phones themselves. And so they're constantly giving information. You should see all those requests for information from the government, tons, and they comply all the time. As they should, but this will make it

impossible to comply. Well, on certain things, these communications on the phones. Let me ask you this. Has the complexion and the format and the gestalt that tech has brought to civic and defense issues make you confident that we should head in the way where more of their content on these platforms becomes out of the reach of regulators or government officials? Is that the direction we want to head? All right. In this case, and I thought Apple was on the right side. I don't love Facebook jumping in here. You're right. It's right. It's depending on the company. I don't trust Marks. I do trust Apple to do the right thing around privacy comparatively.

So I think that's the problem. And as others jump in, as Google and the others, yes, you're right. And by the way, lots of people are – Australia passed a law that mandates the company's break encryption if requested. And so, you know, they don't want to have a key. They don't want to have a key that could open up everybody's door. That's, you know, the skeleton key of all time. But it's an interesting, it's going to go, this is going to, this never was going to stop back with James Comey fighting. It was James Comey actually was fighting with Apple back then. And then President Obama was on James Comey's side on that one. But it's an interesting time. This is a big deal. This is a

very, this is a big, big deal, this encryption debate. And as we get into quantum computing, it's going to get even bigger because there's going to speaking of the last episode of Silicon Valley, that's what it was all about, was something that could break AI, that could break codes. But some of these new wrinkles that Google has gotten into

around quantum computing, this quantum supremacy, they're calling it, is certainly going to be problematic for encryption and everything else. So it'll be an interesting time. But last one, and then we'll take a break, is the Away CEO was, after we talked about this situation, you were like, who cares if she's tough, and I agree with you. She has been replaced, essentially fired,

and they brought in the former Lululemon executive, Stuart Hazelden, I think his name is. It's all very complex because it doesn't – you know, there's lots of critiques about the work culture there. It looks like they were sort of getting this guy to come in as COO to sort of move this Steph Corey CEO, one of the founders, out. And there's all kinds of, like, debate online about what happened. Jason Del Rey wrote a story about how they moved this fast forward to it. And some people are positing that they used it as an excuse to get rid of her, which is, anyway, it's fascinating. You still are on the too bad, suck it up. I think she's the Tony Montagna of CEOs.

Say hello to my little friend, accountability. Did you read those slacks? Yeah, yeah. I mean. I got to say, I don't disagree. She was a man. Jeff Bezos does that with his stupid. 100%.

Read the Everything Store. Jeff Bezos behaved this way over and over, and it was called leadership then. Yep, yep. You know what the most, I think the most interesting thing about this is mediums. It's a great story. Jeff Bezos behaved this way over and over, and it was called leadership then. Yep. You know what the most, I think the most interesting thing about this is mediums. And that is the way people react, the way you establish relationships, the tone of something. You know, and I don't know if it was Kurzweil. I don't know who said it, and I'm sure Twitter will tell me a million times who said this in very crisp fashion. But the medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan. Thank you. Thank you for that. who said this in very crisp fashion, but the medium is the message. And there's-

Marshall McLuhan. Oh, thank you. Thank you for that. And so you should be on Silicon Valley. I was. There, Slack has become, I don't use Slack. I have trouble with it.

I think it's like Snap. I have trouble figuring it out. But everyone in my company uses Snap. And the thing about email is it piles up in people's email boxes. And it feels to me that basically Slack is like text messaging or group emails that have more immediacy. But the fact that it's always on. It's very impulse driven. It's very impulse driven. And a lack of filters. And this came back to haunt the CEO. But I read through her emails. And

I mean, there's a couple of things going on here. Most of these young CEOs of tech companies don't have mentors. They don't have coaches. They also, I mean, they grew up and they're kind of their training was they read, you know, Ben Thompson's book or they read Peter Thiel's book. That's the kind of the sum of their CEO training. And I think that, you know, there's some basic general rules as a CEO, and that is, you want to kind of praise publicly and provide feedback or criticize individually in a thoughtful, measured way, because people, especially, I think younger people, need watering. And also, the level of directness should be correlated to the seniority. I think it's okay to hold,

to pull people in who are getting paid a lot of money and are senior and say, you know, basically, what the fuck, right? But junior people, I don't think, I think you call them into a room and not to sound too Hallmark Channel and say, okay, we're having a challenge here and this can't continue

and I need all of your help figuring this out. But it did feel a little bit, I don't know, it felt a little bit bullying and grandstanding. But I don't think this is anything that male CEOs have been doing or just CEOs in general, which is redundant with male. So I'll put it back to you. If she had been, if she was a he, do you think she would have been asked to step down? If she was a he, do you think she would have been asked to step down? No. No? No. Travis Kalanick was there for years, and they grudgingly got rid of him when he crossed every single line possible. No, I don't.

I think it's really interesting. There might be some other things going on there called, you know, her personality. I would imagine she's an inexperienced CEO. Right. But so they're all inexperienced CEOs. That's called tech. But women who are inexperienced CEOs in Right. But so they're all inexperienced CEOs. That's called tech. But women who are inexperienced CEOs in the startup game

get killed. Like, look, whatever you think, Theranos fraud, everything else, there's lots of behaviors like Elizabeth Holmes is out there

and they just don't, they don't, there's 9,000 movies about Elizabeth Holmes, right? Like, why? Like, you, and believe me,

I'm no fan of what she did. So it's, but it's interesting that she gets, like, nine movies and 12 books and an excellent book, by the way, by John Carreyrou. But still, it's really fascinating. I agree. I think some of her stuff was very much like I would have written an email. I'm sure if you could find my emails on certain things, it was tough. Yeah, I've done worse. And then— Yeah. sure if you could find my emails on certain things. I was tough. Yeah, I've done worse. But what this also indicates, I think, is we've reached peak founder. And that is there's always a tension between capital and the investors and the

founders. And because mostly of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, these founders who have just returned extraordinary return to their shareholders, there's what I would call founder fetish. And that founders are given way more license and way much more runway to fuck up than they should be given. They used to be not given enough, now they're given way too much. Yeah. Well, they brought in an executive who's got a great reputation, this Lululemon. He's a turnaround guy. So, I think what they... Go ahead, I'm sorry. They've got a great business, but under a lot of pressure because there's a lot of copycats, et cetera. And so this is the moment they could really throw it all away. And I suppose they're not going to – you know, they don't want to lose the goose that laid the golden egg here.

Has Amazon done to Away what they've done to Allbirds? Have they basically come out with a knockoff that's 90 percent of the quality for 30 percent of the price? Go search for Away on Amazon and see what you get. Yeah. It's a knockoff. It's a knockoff. It's a knockoff. They're all knockoffs. They knock off everything.

All right. When we get back, we will talk more. We are going to listen to a friend of Pivot, and we have wins and fails of the week. And also, you're going to have a prediction, so you better think of one, Mr. Scott Galloway. All right. We'll be back after this. 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. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people.

These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim. And we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to

work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash Zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic. You already know that AI is transforming the world around us, but lost in all the enthusiasm and excitement is a really important question. How can AI actually work for you? And where should you even start?

Claude from Anthropic may be the answer. Claude is a next-generation AI assistant, built to help you work more efficiently without sacrificing safety or reliability. Anthropic's latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, can help you organize thoughts, solve tricky problems, analyze data, and more. Whether you're brainstorming alone or working on a team with thousands of people. All at a price that works for just about any use case. If you're trying to crack a problem involving advanced reasoning, need to distill the essence of complex images or graphs, or generate heaps of secure code,

Clawed is a great way to save time and money. Plus, you can rest assured knowing that Anthropic built Clawed with an emphasis on safety. Welcome back to Pivot. All right, we're going to hear from a friend. Last week, Amazon elevated two more women to its S-team. That makes the S-team three women out of 22 people. That is not a very good number. One of the women promoted is its fashion vice president, Christine Beauchamp. So demographic questions aside, it seems like an interesting promotion.

Bezos is taking further interest in the fashion sector. So, Scott, what did you do? I spoke to Joanna. I did an in-the-field reporting. Explain who she is. Explain who she is. What Joanna calls is she's a total gangster. She was the chief content officer for Hearst, a position that was invented for her before that.

She was editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan. She worked in television for a long time. And she's British, so everything she says sounds, you know, reasonably smart. So I'm a big fan of Joanna. I love Joanna Coles. She's one of my—she's also on the board of Snap. All right, let's go. Let's hear from Joanna Coles.

Well, I know Christine. She was at Ralph Lauren. She was at Ann Taylor. She's absolutely terrific. She's a great executive and it's excellent news for her. And clearly, Amazon wants to eat shops, right? It wants to finish off fashion. I do think, though, that fashion's resistance will be that fashion is frequently an emotional purchase and it's hard to imagine a less emotional shopping environment than Amazon, right? I'm very interested in Verishop that was set up by Imran Khan, who used to be the chief strategy officer at Snap, with his wife, Kate, who actually used to work for Amazon. And they've set up what they want to be an alternative to Amazon with the guarantee that what you buy is the real brand.

So it's not an open platform where anybody can sell you anything. But Christine Beauchamp is a very talented fashion executive. So I think the fashion world is very excited to see what she does. And it may be that they have to create a spinoff of Amazon that just becomes its own fashion brand. That's what I would do if I were them. Where can we start, Scott? Please talk about this. And you had an interview on your other show, Professor Galloway's Office Hours, on your Section 4 YouTube channel. So what does this mean? Give me some more insight to this, Scott Galloway. Well, so Luxury has watched what's happened to other categories

on Amazon, and they've said similar to what television said. So you can imagine YouTube went to every station and TV broadcaster and said, hey, Modern Family, wouldn't it be great if we could bring you more eyeballs and raise your awareness. And put on YouTube the next day, the funniest moments from Phil last night. And to their credit, the content or the television industry basically said, no, girlfriend, we've seen what you've done to every other media. We saw what you did to print

and we'd rather just not go there. And so you can't watch the greatest hits of Modern Family on YouTube. And it was absolutely the right move for them to say, no, we're not going to diminish, cheapen, bastardize, and let you slice up our content in exchange, give you dollars and you give us back nickels. And the luxury industry has essentially said, you know, we just don't need to distribute or we don't want to distribute. It's kind of a one-way highway in terms of the relationship or economic power being transferred.

And they largely, largely speaking, the luxury industry has not embraced Amazon as a point of distribution. Now, the question is what happens in a downturn when they're all really hungry. Basically, guilt was launched as a distribution channel by a recession. And that is the recession came, Gucci woke up, had $150 million in inventory, needed cash fast.

And then Gilt showed up and said, I know, we'll sell this stuff at 60% off, but it'll be a membership-only thing behind a wall so you won't feel as bad about discounting it. And a bunch of luxury brands went on this new distribution platform called Gilt, and it launched Gilt. Yep. Then all of a sudden, when the economy got better, they started pulling off that distribution because they're like, we don't want non-aspirational distribution or anyone that discounts our product. The real test of luxury will be what happens when we hit a recession and Christian Louboutin or a variety of wonderful smaller luxury brands say, we need the cash, and these guys can flip on a switch and solve our cash problems overnight. Yep. So resist. What you're saying is resist, even if you need that. Don't do it, right? Don't give in to Amazon. You know, there's, I think a lot of people, they use the term partner, but I've always said Amazon partners with a brand the way a virus partners with a host.

And it's just not, I don't think you're going to find a lot of companies that would say as as are, you know, as an industry, we're better off with Amazon. I think most are like, OK, we've entered into a deal with the devil. Now there's just no getting out. We're addicted. They have so much power. We have no choice. There are P&G made this enormous early investment in Amazon. They let Amazon into their warehouses, which you can imagine must have really pissed off Target and Walmart, and people have been working with P&G for a long time. And there are moments on the platform where P&G products are not available because the algorithms find products from Unilever or

Clorox for a penny less, or the algorithm of user reviews, stockouts, puts one above the other. Or Whole Foods or Amazon products. Because they've been accused of all birds, stealing IP, doing these Amazon Basics brand replicas, all this stuff they're doing. And so, you know, they'll do it in fashion. They've already tried to, you know, they're doing the away luggage. They're doing things that, it'll be interesting how quickly, because Joanna was talking about this emotional relationship you have with the brands you like.

Like my kids will only they've switched now from Nike to Adidas, but they only want that. Like it's you know, they have an emotional relationship with their clothes and their shoes and things like that. And the thing that one of the reasons that so Amazon fashion and luxury are one of the few categories where Amazon has really tried hard and just hasn't figured it out. And one of the reasons is that the power of Amazon is it's algorithmically driven and that it looks at the best sellers, looks at reviews, looks at stock out, looks at a variety of things, makes millions of decisions. And then it will promote into that golden buy box or like in Google, whoever comes up first in the search, Amazon now second largest search engine in the world, number one product searches. It's key that you have the algorithm that puts your product up first. But the thing about an algorithmically driven shopping experience is that a booty from six years ago that sold more pairs than any other shoe comes up first because it's a top seller. But the thing about fashion

and luxury is the primary value proposition is someone with better taste than you is looking into the future and saying, this is the hot shoe. And you may not have known that, but you can trust me because I'm Joanna Coles or I'm the chief merchant at Stuart Weitzman. And you can trust me on this. And the algorithmically driven decision model at Amazon, as opposed to the merchandising are creatively driven. No algorithm is going to tell you to buy a Gucci bag. I mean, have you seen Gucci bags? They are just out there. But the creative director there is a genius and sets the tone.

So it's almost like they're set up to say, okay. So what would you do if you were – two questions. What would you do if you were Christine Beauchamp, with a great name like that? Yeah. And then who is their biggest competitor? Very quickly, then we'll get to wins and fails. What would you do if you were her? Just keep copying or what?

No, I don't think so. I think they have to take a page out of, Alibaba has tried to be the kind of luxury, Tmall has tried to be the luxury-friendly platform. And they respect, they really go after counterfeits. They respect distribution. They respect pricing. They try not to discount it. They provide more data and analytics back.

Shopify is probably one of the few brands that you're going to hear more about Shopify in 2020. Agreed. Because they are transparent in terms of analytics and they realize that they have set up a partnership model. So unless there's fundamental change and she's not going to get to make those decisions, she's either got to overwhelm the industry with capital or wait till a recession and people are desperate to go on

and then they get the lips around the crack pipe of revenues from Amazon and won't be able to put the pipe down. But she's in a very different – Oh, God. How did you get this to crack? How did you get this to crack? Jesus Christ.

Crack is whack. I don't know. I just love drug metaphors. I am more into drugs than anyone who does as few drugs as me as anyone in the world. But anyways – All right. Teenage boy. All right, teenage boy. Teenage boy. All right, I got it.

That's virtue signaling. All right, you're right. I think you're absolutely right. I think that they, it's, she's right about the emotion, this is an emotional thing, and Amazon does everything by the numbers, and they don't have creativity. Although some of their shows do, it's still, you know, it's very hard for them to be hyper-creative. They are good at fast following.

They're very much like Walmart in that regard. You know, they were just essentially, the planes are covered with the bodies of pioneers, and they'll come right on after by either copying or making a fast follow. That's what they're good at. What do you think they should do? I think fashion will be tough for them, except in the stuff that's easy to copy. Like, I'm going to buy Allbirds, or I'm not going to buy those shoes. Like, right?

You know, I just—and I don't want Allbirds, so that's fine. But, you know, I just—my kids are going to want the Adidas or they're not going to want it. Like, you just can't create something like that. You just can't. You have a relationship with fashion stuff in a way that you don't. Now, I don't dress at all, so I will take whatever stupid T-shirt, but— Oh, so speaking of fashion, well, two things. Yeah, I don't have any fashion. a t-shirt. Oh, so speaking of fashion, well, two things. One, what she could do, but unfortunately,

Christina Vestiaire would get in the way of this. What Amazon could and should do, or should do if they could do it, would be to buy aspirational distribution and to buy Zalando. Because Zalando has played nice with luxury brands, and they would immediately overnight gain distribution. I initially thought that Amazon might buy Nordstrom such that they could gain distribution to high-end beauty and fashion brands, but that didn't happen. That's true. That's like do the whole food trick. Yeah, that's interesting. But the problem is any kind of high-profile, any high-profile acquisition is going to get a ton of scrutiny. So they just make these little acquisitions of unknown companies in fulfillment. But I have had a fashion, I don't want to call it a nightmare, but something that

embarrassed my son. I took my son, I had to go pick up my son at school. And I'm like, well, I'm just picking him up in front of the school so I don't need to change. So I had on my pajama bottoms and I sleep in any shirt I just grab. And I grabbed the shirt I got at the Lesbians Who Tech conference. And do you know what it says across the front? Lesbro. It says Lesbro. And I threw on my flip-flops. I'm wearing flip-flops, pajama bottoms, a T-shirt that says Lesbro.

And I'm on a conference call, so I have my big Bose headphones. And, of course, my son's not out front, so I got to go back to the field where he's playing soccer. I walk out onto the soccer field in kind of lily-white, conservative Gulfstream, Florida. The place just stops, and I yell, Alec. He looks at me, and then he looks away like a dog that's done something wrong and just pretends like he doesn't see me. And so, anyways, my fashion is embarrassing. I like that entire outfit. I like the entire outfit. I'm glad you showed off for them and didn't dress up.

Oh, my God. By the way, it's like two degrees here on the East Coast. You're lucky to be in Florida wearing flip flops and a lesbian Zootac t-shirt. All right. Wins and fails, Scott Galloway. We'll see what happens in the Amazon. They definitely have an uphill battle in that way. Wins and fails.

Wins and fails. I've been doing all the talking. You go first. What are your wins and fails? You know, I have a lot of wins and fails. This week, I think our democratic process going through, despite all the ridiculous lying by the Trump people and Bill Barr is once again doing something awful again this week by looking like he's got his nose so far up Trump's butt that he's coming out his mouth. That's the fail.

It continues to be the fail that these people who just will do anything to stay close to Trump. And then I think the biggest fail this week for me is Trump attacking Greta Thunberg and making a remark about her Asperger's, like that she should chill and she, you know, she should smile more. It just was like literally his wife is going be better, like, or be nicer, or whatever the hell her stupid thing is, because it's like meaningless, is just appalling. He's just an appalling person to attack a kid. He did it before with her. He's obviously jealous that she's on the cover of Time. So that was irritating to me. But it wasn't shocking that Bill Barr and

Donald Trump act terribly. And the win was actually, and I tweeted it, was this video that Michelle Obama did where she gave, she went to a local school in Washington, D.C., and it was for some Allen giveaway. But ended up, you know, giving stuff to this school. But it was so meaningful, this video. And it just made you go, oh, those people who are good to people. Like these kids got a new computer lab and a basketball court and they got iPads and stuff like that. But this group of kids who just are in a terrible part of Washington and this vice principal who's just amazing, just makes you, restores your faith in humanity. And I know it was, you know, it was a movie trying to talk to my emotions, but it was

like, oh my God, good people again. Like, seeing Michelle Obama and how thrilled the kids were to see her and hear her name. These kids knew just who she was, were so happy. She's such a hero to them. And it was like such a contrast to me that those two things is, you know, it just is like, they're just disgusting people. And there are, but there is great hope out in the world. These kids deserve the same. We could do that for every school district instead of just handing money to rich people. It was really quite a contrast. Thank you. That's my wins and fails. Merry Christmas or happy holidays or whatever you're supposed to say. Okay. So my win was the show Silicon Valley.

I thought they captured in a like a real, I think humor is so powerful. I think they captured kind of the eccentricities and just for anyone who's out there playing drinking games, they captured the gestalt of Silicon Valley. I thought they did a fantastic job. They did. I learned from the show. You could tell that the consultants on the show really did their job. And when they built into the storyline things like encryption or quantum computing, it felt, and I don't have enough domain expertise to know if it was real or accurate, but it felt accurate.

And I think a lot of people learned kind of some of the nuance and some of the problems and upside of technology in a thoughtful, humorous way. A lot of us, they brought a lot of people like me and many others. Dick Koslow was working on the show. Speaking of Twitter, he was involved in the case. Back to you. What a shocker. It's been three minutes. I'm just saying. They did. Koslow was working on the show. Speaking of Twitter, he was involved in the campaign. Back to you. What a shocker. It's been three minutes.

I'm just saying. They did. You're so jealous this week. You should be jealous. I am jealous. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong. You should be jealous this week. That's fair.

You're not going to break me on this. I love myself. There you go. I've always really loved myself. There you go. Forever. You demonstrate that. You're self-actualized.

But I think that they, you're right. The conjoined triangles of success, the lawyer, the guy who played the lawyer, myself. I'll be with myself forever. You demonstrate that. You're self-actualized that way. You're right. The conjoined triangles of success, the lawyer, the guy who played the lawyer, just down to everybody was like Russ Hanneman. Gavin Belson was amazing. That guy, I don't know if you remember him, he was in that show Big Love, which was, he played a Yes. Gavin Belson.

He played a Mormon pastor. Anyways, but my win is Silicon Valley. My loss, and this is going to sound, I was self-conscious about coming up with this one because it sounds very partisan being working at NYU. But I think my loss is, or my fail is Cornell Tech. And that is, I was really excited about a third world-class university coming to Manhattan. I think it was a coup for Bloomberg. I thought he showed a lot of leadership and vision bringing a third world-class university coming to Manhattan. I think it was a coup for Bloomberg. I thought he showed a lot of leadership and vision bringing a third university here. They were going to

Roosevelt Island. Is that right? But see, you said they're going to Roosevelt Island. That's really telling, and that's my point. They've been there for three years. And here's the thing. I taught there for a semester. I was super excited about it. The tech community in New York is either the second or third most robust, depending on the metric you use. It's been like a tree falling in the forest. You wouldn't know they're even here if you didn't know they're here. And I think it's because they've taken a traditional academic, slow, totally non-relevant research, uninspiring events. How can Cornell Tech not have the premier technology gatherings east of the Mississippi every year?

Let's go over there. Let's take whatever you take to Roosevelt. What do you have to get there? Well, actually, you know what? Maybe that's a better way to approach that, and that is that we should offer, we would be interested in doing something at Cornell Tech, although NYU will say, what the fuck are you doing? But I was so excited about the potential. Think about the potential for a tech campus in New York. It just has so much potential. We could do a stunt. We could, like, say, like, put you in a cannon and show it.

Like, you know that thing you tweeted about the physics professor doing all the things to make their – No, no, no. The only stunt we're going to do over and over – We could, like, shoot you out of a cannon to Roosevelt Island into the seat. You and your magnificent hair, me in a poochie dress and high heels. Hello, Adam and Rebecca Newman. That's how we roll. That is just how we roll.

That's been cast by Cousin Greg is playing Adam Newman, not you. He's going to be great in that. Sorry, my friend. He's going to be great in that. He's a really talented kid. Anyways, my loss, and I feel like it's a little bit, I don't know. I don't know if it's inappropriate, but I want to. That's all right.

I don't think Cornell Tech is living up to their potential. And I think it could be an enormous good. I love you saying, I don't know if it's inappropriate. That's my favorite thing so far of this show. Yeah. Yeah, as if that ever stopped me before. Should we go? Anyways, Cornell Tech, an offer out there. We would love to. Maybe we do a live pivot at Cornell Tech, but it could be an

incredible asset for Manhattan. We will do it. Let's do it. We will do it. We will go there. We'll row across the whatever river that is, the East River. We'll row across the East River, you and I together, little rowboat. It'll be so safe and fantastic. Anyway, that's a great idea. All right, Scott, predictions, and then we've got to get out of here. I just have one prediction, and Joanna Cole's got me thinking about this. And I have some experience with this, and that is with my kids, with my boys. And that is I think the greatest—I think in 2020 we're going to start hearing a lot more about the effects of pornography on young men. And when I think about where people spend their time online, you think, okay, Amazon, and it's massively disrupted retail,

Facebook and Google, which has massively disrupted the media industry. And it's kind of naive to think that the next largest category of time spent online porn isn't going to have tremendous disruptive impact. And I wonder what it's doing. I wonder what it's doing to relationships. I'm wondering what it's doing to men's young men's ability to establish relationships to their perception of the role sex plays in a relationship. Because when I was growing up, my access to pornography was once a week or two weeks, I would sneak out my dad's Playboy and look at it for 20 minutes in the garage. That was literally the entire exposure. And then when cable TV came along, I would watch

R-rated movies after my parents were asleep. But I wasn't...but literally nowadays, they're finding that there's a large portion of teenage men, or boys, I should say, who are spending somewhere between two and five hours a day watching hardcore pornography. And then also all that other porn that's like the local, the people doing it themselves. And also then it turns into revenge porn and stuff like that, which is really, yeah, you're right. We're in the midst of the largest experiment on humanity ever conducted, and we have no idea what the outcomes are going to be. And I think it's going to impact marriages, household formation. And the thing is, no male academic can really get into this because they're immediately seen as weird. Female academics don't seem to be that interested in it.

So we have a dearth of real high quality evidence-based peer review research around it. But I think it's bubbling up. I think a lot of the things we're seeing about young men failing, about relationships, about people getting married later, about some of the misogyny that's manifesting itself online, I think we're going to start finding a reverse engineering into one of the biggest, quite frankly, the biggest sources, the biggest usage categories online, and that's porn. So anyways, my prediction is that in 2020, we're going to start to see a lot more news about porn.

I'm surprised by this one. I like it. You know, it's interesting because Representative Katie Hill wrote a piece for the New York Times this week talking about revenge porn and say the title of it, which was really interesting, was It's Not Over After All. I've overcame desperation, I felt, after stepping down interesting, was It's Not Over After All. I overcame desperation. I felt after stepping down from Congress, I'm still in the fight. She was the one, you know, they did her ex put out kind of naughty pictures of her with another woman and whatever.

And she talked about her suicidal thoughts and stuff like that and everything else. And it was really quite something about what she ended up doing. And it was – you should read it if you haven't read it. And she said – you know, she decided to, like, keep going. I don't think she should have stepped down from Congress in my feeling. I agree. I don't think she should have either. I think her and Al Franken – I think neither. I think she's the Al Franken of this generation or this class. I think she absolutely should not have stepped down. I thought that, I think that the manner in which they went after her trying to slut shame her or whatever it is, it would not have aged well. And if she, I think she absolutely, we needed her voice. And we needed that issue to be more present about just how ridiculous and how oppressive.

This isn't fucking old Spain. I mean, that was ridiculous. Anyway, I agree with you. But she talked about a suicide, a contemple suicide attempt that impacted this. And it was really something. I was surprised, and it was very—I was surprised to read it. But I also feel these things have these—they just degrade humanity. And it's also hard to resist at the same time, I think, in many ways.

So you have boys— It appeals to the base instincts. We took away my—we didn't take away my son's— Yeah. My nine-year-old. But he was typing in things like Harry Potter nude, which is pretty innocent. But the stuff that comes up is not innocent. I know.

I talk to him about it all the time. I talk to him about it all the time. What does that do to the nine-year-old boy's brain? Like, I wasn't exposed to anything like that. I talk to them about it almost continually. I think it's going to be an issue. We talk about the discussion. I talk about online porn. I talk about that's not how women are.

So far, so good. But, yes, it's definitely something you have to battle, and especially how people consider women, how they look at women. Well, just for people out there, there's a seminal TED Talk by Cindy Gallop, who's been a really, I think, a thought leader around this issue, called Make Love, Not Porn. And she did a TED Talk about 10 years ago that was really, I think, kind of— Yep, Cindy's been at front of it. And actually, again, the Times had a good piece this week and part of a series about these kind of impacts about gaming and children and pedophiles. But they've had a series of articles. There's a reporter who's written all of them with other reporters, but this week's was

about video gaming and it's like a hunting ground for pedophiles. But previously, you can't take things back on YouTube, porn, things like that. It's really, it's quite, especially devastating to children. And so it's worth a read also. But you're right, Ahonda. Cindy Gallop's a great, that's a great TED Talk to go to. Big issue. Scott, you surprised me. That's a really good prediction.

That's a really good prediction. I love, you know, it's weird. I bring out very maternal instincts in you. You say, shush, you're proud of me, you protect me. It's really, I feel like, I literally feel like at any moment you're going to take away my iPad and then give me a ride to Little League practice. No, I hate Little League. I did, my son did it, like takes 900 hours to sit there and watch them make one hit. It's awful. You know what's really wonderful though? My boys are really marginal athletes, so it's all going to be over pretty soon. It's not. The worst thing in the world is

when your kids are good athletes because then you end up literally roaming the earth and sitting on a sideline. Oh, my God. Lacrosse season starts soon. I'm so not looking forward to it. And then now

I have another kid who probably will be really athletic. I'm hoping piano or ballet. Even worse. I hate all that stuff. But I go to it. I go to it and I clap.

Speaking of games, I'm about to interview Megan Rapinoe. What should I ask her? Besides her fantastic outfits. Well, I mean, my question would be one word, next question mark. What is she planning to do? You know, what do all athletes do when their athletic career is over? I hope she doesn't end up on ESPN. She strikes me as very substantive and interesting and has strong leadership skills. What's next for her? All right. I will ask her that. Anyway, it's time for us to go. We'll be

back on Tuesday for more Tech and Business. How are you liking these twice-a-week things, Scott? I think they're good. Yeah, so far it's okay, although it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, I know. It's hard for you to yammer away for an hour. One plus one equals one and a half, I think. I think, anyways, this economy is a scale.

We're going to, I think they're working out rather well. I hope our listeners do. Please let us know if you're around this weekend and want to tell us what you think of the show. Let us know by tweeting to us at hashtag pivot podcast with your thoughts on our second show and how you like it. If you like more is better or more is not better. Or email us questions at pivot at voxmedia.com.

Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis. Eric Anderson is Pivot's executive producer. Thanks also to Rebecca Castro and Drew Burrows. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. Or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify. And frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts, tune in to Pivot. If you liked our show, please recommend it to a friend or an enemy. We don't care either way. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be

back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs,

creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere?

And you're making content that no one sees? And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers.