Pivot - Tesla’s Chargers, The Writers’ Strike, and What Global Policies Will Save the World

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

Will Tesla’s Charging network provoke the FTC? Can writers take control of their intellectual property? Can our electrical infrastructure support EV expansion? And what global policies could help us prevent technological disaster? Kara and Scott open the listener mailbag…and find Scott a new nickname in the process. We’ve got some more listener mail episodes coming your way soon, so send us your questions! Call 855-51-PIVOT or go to nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. And today we're opening our listener mailbag. We always love hearing from listeners with your

comments, critiques, and thought-provoking questions. And today you've asked us about everything from electric vehicles to intellectual property to the future of streaming and podcasts. Scott, are you ready for the listener mailbag, which we love to do? Born ready, baby. Born ready. We got it in actual mail. No, no, people sent in and called it in. All right, let's listen to the first question. Hi, Scott and Kara.

Question regarding Tesla. Tesla has recently announced that it will join with Ford and GM to allow these companies to use their charging stations. Do you think this is going to grow into a monster that's going to require the FTC to get involved, to have Tesla spin off its charging station division? My name is Rich from New York, and I love the show. Thank you. Scott, I had no idea Rich was from New York at all, whatsoever. I love it. Rich, we love your accent. Fantastic. We've talked about this in previous shows. Scott and I come down a little different. We do think it's a really good thing. Rivian also, I think, just agreed. It looks like it's going to be the standard. And that puts Tesla in a good position because it's been very prescient about putting these things out there. I was at a stop this weekend, and there were Tesla chargers there and other companies. I think all those other companies are toast, and there's a lot of them. There's a whole bunch of them in the space

competing if this becomes the standard. That said, I do think eventually this becomes a commodity, like a gas station and this and that. So I don't know if they'll have the only standard. And they definitely have to be careful from a regulatory point of view of charging. They will get license fees from everybody. So it's good for them in that if other people do businesses. So it could be a very good little business for them. I think it'll be seen as a key moment. And initially, I thought the best analog was the App Store from Apple. But having upon further reflection, I think a more apt analogy is AWS. And that is, they took a cost center charging for their own vehicles, made a pretty substantial investment

in it. And now they've turned around and turned a cost center into a profit center. Yeah, very good. That's much better. I didn't like your app store because I think that's not quite the same thing. Well, I'm glad I've corrected myself. So I think they could make a lot of money here. And this might even be at some point spun off into a distinct business. Whether the FTC gets involved, that's more about if the FTC continues to kind of stir from its 30-year slumber. Could be very interesting.

They have to be careful. And one of the things, as they're facing a lot of price cuts and everything else in their actual business and competition, which is going to be a problem, just that China's a very juggernaut in the area. Their version of Tesla is suffering

because of price cuts and expenses. And this is going to be a problem for Tesla. This is an area where they are way far ahead as they are in many areas like battery. And so you can see them, you know, this was important for them to have because if people are using these Teslas, new companies to create this. It won't just be Tesla doing it. They'll license it, or people will do a version of it that works or something that could work with it. Some of these chargers are going to be instantaneous. Toyota's working on one that's going to be a 10-minute charge. And so every gas station you see will be a charging station for, in some fashion, that people will drive in 10 minutes.

And it will be a profit center, very tight profit center with margin, very low margins, I think. Tesla's been a leader here. So for this short amount of time, they certainly will benefit from the prescience of doing what they did, I think. It was a smart move. He's got like Starlink. He's got a lot of smart moves that aren't the main event that I think are smart on their part. But I do think Tesla's going to see enormous competition itself going forward. Anyway, here's another one.

It comes via email. I'll read it. My beloved favorite podcasters, Cara and Scott. Beloved. We're beloved, Scott. I love your show and converted many friends and family to listen to you. The interaction between the two of you is both entertaining and edifying, dick jokes included. Okay, if you insist.

I have a question about EV cars and the infrastructure needed to support the expansion of EV cars. I've been wondering lately if the U.S. electrical grid and related infrastructure is really ready for the expansion car manufacturers are planning planning the next decades. I recently came across several interviews online on the subject and heard very opposing views and cannot really understand if people raising the alarm are veritable or not. What do you think? It would be great to hear you interviewing some subject matter experts on this. I work in supply chain and I can attest

that supply chain is a really sexy job that could benefit with more women in it. Much aloha, Aliche. Well, I love Hawaii, Aliche. This is a good question. It's a similar thing in where this infrastructure is coming. And I just mentioned

that I think every gas station will eventually be converted to an EV charger. And we definitely have to upgrade electricity. And of course, electricity is not without its issues and related infrastructure. And I think it's something

definitely to be concerned about as we move forward. There's lots of ways to create electricity, including nuclear, which is, I think, when we'll have more nuclear energy across our country over the next few decades, as we try to get to zero, there's no other way to get to it without using nuclear energy. And so I do think we have to be thinking hard. I don't think, I think this is moving slowly enough that they'll be able to upgrade. It's not going to be a sudden shift of everyone to electric cars, although it's moving much more quickly and there's advances. But yes, it's really important.

We should have subject matter experts on this. I will look for one. Scott? Well, I don't know if you heard this, but Lorena Bobbitt was in an auto accident last week and died. Do you know why? Why? Some dick cut her off. Oh, no. Okay, hold on, hold on,

hold on. My first wife left me because of my small dick. She said, Cara, that she just wasn't feeling it. She just wasn't feeling it. All right, two dick jokes. Thank you. I heard nothing after he said he liked my dick jokes. So, infrastructure, yeah, Inflation Act or Infrastructure Act, supply chain, yeah, we definitely need Act or Infrastructure Act, supply chain, yeah, we definitely need more women in the supply chain. Congratulations, you get a Gardens of Gachapin from Bokistan. Okay, go ahead. Anyways, look, I love infrastructure. I think any investment in infrastructure is an investment in the middle class, which is the greatest innovation in history. And it's been shown that if you can

give people more time with their families, if you can invest in whether it's internet, whether it's GPS, whether it's roads, that there's all sorts of spillover into the main street economy. So there isn't an infrastructure investment I don't like. And when you don't make investments in infrastructure, you send the worst signal in the world to... You send the worst signal possible to the world when your airports look like third world countries, when your apartment buildings that are literally in a stone's throw from an apartment building going for $5,000 a square foot collapses in the middle of the night when bridges are collapsing.

It just says to the whole world that we are being blown by China, who spends 10 times the amount per GDP or per capita on infrastructures in the US. So I don't care if it's expanding the electric grid. These create great middle class jobs. We need vocational training to suck up some people who've been sort of left out of the incredible prosperity but no progress movement we've had over the last 30 or 40 years. Whether or not the electrical grid is actually the place when it collapses on itself, I don't know. I heard you talk about

nuclear. I'm a huge fan of nuclear. I'm hoping that has a renaissance. But yeah, infrastructure, we are overdue. I think that is one place that would probably be worth once interest rates coming down again. That is one of the few places I think you could justify increasing the national debt because that will result in growth. And these charging businesses are clearly going to be a business. I mean, that's what everyone worries about. A lot of the grumbling came from Tesla users because people will be on the Tesla chargers. Although I was at this rest stop and everyone was at the gas station and not at the Tesla or the other chargers.

I think it takes a long time. You can't just sit there. And that's the issue is fast charging, which Toyota is working on very fast. They're all working on very fast charging, but Toyota supposedly has a 10-minute one coming out in a couple of years. This is going to be an area of right for innovation and how to share it. I happen to have a charger at my house. There are companies where you can say you have a charger and charge people for using

it overnight and things like that. A lot of this just sits there. But definitely, to me, if you're going to do something innovative that has both analog and digital parts, all the information you have from people, really interesting businesses are going to come out of this stuff. And again, the gas stations are going to go by the wayside. And it makes sense to repurpose them as electrical things. If you're a gas company, you've got to be interested in investing in this, I would imagine, don't you think? Yeah, but here's the thing. I mean, okay. So there's the hopeful side, and then there's the

realist glass, half empty side to side. And that is 97% of transportation is still fueled by fossil fuels. And what I have found from Exxon, BP, and Shell and all the rest is there's a lot of jazz hands around investments in renewables. And if you actually look at the balance sheet and see where they're actually investing money, they are dwarfing these investments in renewables, in new fields and new exploration. Because at the end of the day, the best business in the world over the last hundred years hasn't been microprocessors. It hasn't been the internet. It's been fossil fuels. And you could argue that if you want to follow the flow of power globally for the last century, you just follow the flow of energy. And we wouldn't have hospitals,

we wouldn't have any of this without fossil fuels. So in these companies, you want to talk about stocks that have performed the last two or three years, and it hasn't been because of excitement over their move to renewables. It's been an unfortunate recognition that we're going to be dependent upon fossil fuels for the long time. The emergent player globally that people don't talk about that much, but the emergent player that grew its GDP faster than any large economy last year is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Fossil fuels are still going to dominate for a long, long time. Yeah, you know, people had a lot of horses and wagons

and things get replaced. I hope so. I think it's the case. It always happens. There used to be like carts, you know. Anyway, we'll see. We'll see. We have different thoughts on this.

I think it's a great business area and it's something, you know, that will be slower in coming than people think. But certainly at this point, Tesla's ahead on that issue. Okay, let's listen to another one. Professor the Dog, you've made it clear on multiple occasions that you don't think the WGA or labor unions in general are effective. You said that screenwriters have no currency in the market compared to directors and compared writers to tenured professors who don't pull their weight. Thing is, you've also said that IP is one of the most valuable assets that a media company can own and who originates IP? Writers do. And

it's not like these media companies aren't making record profits. They pay their executives enough to meet the WGA's demands many times over. So respectfully, Prof G, what do we do to capture the wealth that we're generating for all these other people. Square this circle, oh patron saint of erectile dysfunction. Save us, Prof G. And thank you both so much for your insights and your commentary every week and to your team for making sure that we can appreciate them. Oh, I love this guy. Patron saint of erectile dysfunction.

No shit, he's a writer. I know. Let me just say, the candle is being made dysfunction. No shit. He's a writer. I know. Let me just say, the candle is being made for that right now. I just ordered it on candles.com. He's in the right business. Oh, my God. I love this guy. Do you want to take this first or do you want me to do this?

No, I don't. I feel like he was talking to you, penis problem. I don't know what to say. I think you're mean to writers. Let me just tell you, this guy sounded like every writer who calls me and complains about you. Oh, no, he was much kinder. He's like one of the few writers I haven't heard from. I get a call a day about you. So by very well-spoken people. But go ahead. Go for it, Scott. Yeah. So my assertion that unions are ineffective, it's not my assertion,

it's fact. Union membership over the last 40 years in America has been cut in half, not because their mission isn't noble. We all believe in a stronger middle class. We all believe in higher wages. There should be one union, and it should be the U.S. government, and it should enforce minimum wage. I would like to see minimum wage raised to $25 an hour. Yes, I said it. A lot of businesses would go out of business. A lot of small businesses would go out of business, and it would be worth it. Above that, labor in the United States is based on supply and demand. And what I found from a lot of these writers, similar to what I hear from a lot of tenured professors, is they think they are very, very precious. Nobody owes you a living writing for Succession or for SpongeBob SquarePants. And the reality is, if there is not enough good jobs to make enough money for you, go elsewhere. There are three legs of the stool of this type of journalism. There are newspaper writers, there are writers for television, and there are authors. I would speculate that the best compensated over the last 30 years by far have been writers in Hollywood.

30 years by far have been writers in Hollywood. Now, having said that, their leverage here, their leverage here is they have totally miscalculated, as is usually the case on behalf of unions. And that is they have thrown these writers at a German pillbox and they are going to get shot up and torn apart. Why? Because everybody, due to this massive overinvestment in content for the last decade, has a Netflix, a Hulu, an Amazon Prime queue that is about 300 hours. Raise your hand if anybody, anybody at home feels any impact from the

rider strike right now. No hands are going up. So your union has massively, massively miscalculated. And if you want to make a moral argument, I was just at Summit at Sea with the founders of Google who are each worth $60 billion. If you want to talk about compensation and taxation and what is fair, let's talk about teachers, let's talk about nurses, but that is a much bigger boat we're going to need. Your riders union has poorly served you. You have absolutely no leverage and nobody owes you a living in riding. What we do owe people is dignity and work, 25 bucks an hour minimum wage. But the writers who for some reason have decided that they are owed a living in Hollywood, guess what?

Most of us can't make a living in Hollywood, so we do something else. All right, square the circle. They do create the IP. How can they get that power then? Because they don't. They work for these companies and they give up their IP by doing so, by taking their salaries or whatever. How do they get to a position of power? I want you to square the circle, because they are creating the shows, they are creating the IP, they are creating the ideas. them. We went through this orgy of overinvestment, and they have absolutely played into the hands of the studios who dreamt of a multilateral forced pause in spending to recalibrate down

costs. So, how do they, quote unquote, get some of the rights to the IP, amazing IP that they create? I want to be clear. I get tremendous joy from original script to television. I can go through a list of moments that have really been meaningful for me personally. But here's the bottom line. Just as there are too many people in fashion design, there are too many people opening restaurants, there are too many people who dream of being an athlete. There are too many writers in Hollywood who were supported by the sugar high of an orgy of spending that is no longer sustainable. And their union has decided to strike when they are at an absolute trough

of leverage. Now, again, I love the basic notion, the basic intention of unions. The construct has been ineffective. I've been on boards where we deal with unions. I have, the New York Times used to bring in union representatives, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, saw the union as the enemy and would roll their eyes and then they'd leave the room and we would slowly but surely pick them apart. Unions have been disorganized. They don't attract good talent. They have a reputation for corruption. One union, 25 bucks an hour.

Above that, my brothers and sisters, nobody owes you a living. All right. So you're going to stick to it. You're sticking to it. Well, where do I have this wrong? What I'd like you to answer, though, is, is there a way, is there a different economic relation between right or just fewer of them is your argument right now? Just not as many.

Is there a way that they can own the IP, for example? But that all comes down to negotiating, which all reverse engineers are the same place, and that is leverage. The reason why a plumber coming out with any sort of apprenticeship or any certification in plumbing can make $100,000, $120,000, $140,000 their second year as a plumber is there aren't enough of them. And the reason why the WGA has massively miscalculated is relative to the amount of money that is going to go into original scripted drama relative to where it's been the last decade, there are just too many riders. So how do you get rights to future IP? Simple. You get leverage by taking out capital. And that

is a lot of what I'll call tier two and tier three riders are going to need to go find a living somewhere else. The same way cab drivers had to find a living somewhere else when Uber came in and disrupted them. Or get paid what the studio tells them to pay. How do you get to this idea that the executive pay is so high? That's a different talk show, Cara. I mean, think about this. Okay, we're going to talk about income inequality. I'm just happy you answered his question, Scott. Sure. But this is an emotional argument. David Zaslav, a fairly mediocre executive,

at least over the last couple of years, has made a quarter of a billion dollars. So why shouldn't writers get some living wage? I can't argue with that. Look at what tech billionaires make. wage. I can't argue with that. Look at what tech billionaires make. Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg make $2 billion and $60 billion by depressing teens. So if we're going to talk about executive compensation, the reality is it is very hard to rein in CEO compensation because boards decide the compensation, then you get to know Lisa or Bob, who are nice people, and a CEO is very important. What we need to do is increase taxation on people making this amount of money. Because we live in a capitalist society where if you're smart enough to figure out a way to get to the top of the pyramid, you're going to

be exceptionally overcompensated. And if we don't think that's the right thing to do, shareholders should rise up, and some do, and go after CEO compensation and try and replace the board. What is a no-brainer is we need to restore a progressive tax structure such that we can take some of those taxes and retrain people who are displaced by autonomous driving. Truck drivers, number one job in America for people who are not college educated. Those folks are really going to get kicked in the nuts by technology. But there is this certain feel, quite frankly, and this will solicit a lot again, my Twitter feed will follow up, between my colleagues in academia and the writers where somehow they see themselves and their jobs as a birthright to be well compensated in this industry. No, it's not.

You have no more birthright to be compensated well in this industry as teachers or nurses who are vastly underpaid. There is no social good or very little social good. So the question is, do you make enough money? If you don't, you have the same choice every other American has to make every day. Maybe I go to another industry. Yep. All right. I'm going to let it stop there. I tend to agree with you largely on some of this. I just have that argument, as I told you, with a bunch of people about headline writers and AI. I was like, you don't have a right to write headlines anymore if it's cheaper by AI.

And it is. And you can bemoan it all you want, but that's not a job people should be doing. They should be doing a better something that AI can't do. So I understand this. I do think there is a moment to think about IP that is very different, like what you'll be willing to do for selling your IP,

which means making a lot less, right? If you want to own your IP, you make a lot less. Those relationships might change over time of who owns the IP and who has the rights. And that would be interesting. I do think they are in a deleveraged position as you do. I think they absolutely are on lots of levels. Well, Ray Charles negotiated to own the master copies

of his albums because he was singular. And when there's very few writers, and 10 years ago when there was an upsurge in spending, writers had a lot of leverage. There just weren't enough writers relative to the spend. It has flipped. And the folks at your union have grossly miscalculated their leverage. All right. Let's leave it at that. RJ, I'm sorry

you didn't get the answer you wanted, but I love your question. Very well, well written, I'll say, well written. I want to apologize for coming across as so defensive and combative and angry. I have gotten so much shit from people. And so I apologize. I am defensive around this issue. And I'm actually going on a podcast with an old fraternity brother of mine, a guy named Billy Ray. He used to be on the negotiations committee for the WGA because he's been very generous with me. And I want to be thoughtful about the issue. But anyways, I apologize for being so defensive. I'm just sick of, quite frankly, just getting attacked by people with very eloquently written attacks.

But you are the patron saint of erectile dysfunction. You know it. If that's wrong, I don't want to be right. You are. See what he did to you? He threw you a bone there, so to speak. A boner. He threw you a boner.

He threw you a boner. All hail to the flaccid king. Anyway, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, a listener wants to know how we can prevent the end of the world. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.

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Scott, we're back with more listener mail. This one came in via email. Let me read it to you. Scott and Carol, longtime fan and steadfast listener. I'm a communications consultant who is increasingly asked by clients to worry less about earned media and traditional kinds of PR and more about owned media, blogs, email, newsletters, and wait-for-it podcasts. My question is, where does this all go? In a year or five years? Or what will we be using to tell stories? Are we looking to a future of more in-person, real-life conferences and meetups? Or are we just going to be swiftly shunted to social reality as the preferred method of storytelling and B2C messaging? TLDR, if streaming and podcasts are both over, what's next? Thanks. Kenny from Chattanooga. Well, Kenny, thanks for writing. I don't think it's over.

It's just changing. I think it's great to communicate via podcast as a company. Some of them are quite good. I mean, look, my Succession podcast was won by HBO. It just was really well done. Blogs are a good way to do it, email newsletters. Own Media is actually very effective compared to Earn Media, I guess that's what you call it, and traditional kinds of PR, because I don't think people are listening. I think that it will change to see you should be on TikTok, you should be doing storytelling anywhere storytelling is happening. I don't know if that's a problem. I don't think streaming is over. I don't think podcasts are over. I thought there was overspending with celebrities and things like that, which I thought was economically ridiculous. All of us knew that at the time they were economically ridiculous. But any way you can

tell stories is fine. I don't think traditional PR is going to work anymore, that's for sure. And that will be replaced by AI if used at all. It's mostly useless, it seems like me. Wonderful advertising is still a great way to tell a story. Then there's lots of new creative ways to do that. If there was one skill I could give my kids, it would be storytelling. It's not Mandarin, it's not computer science. I think storytelling is enduring, whether it's the ability to raise capital at a lower cost of capital, whether it's the ability to entice a crowd, whether it's the ability to attract mates. Storytellers, whether it's Mick Jagger or Beyonce, have a broader selection set of mates because what they are is they're amazing storytellers. This is, now the next part of this

are what are the mediums? And that's a tougher one to tell. I don't think anyone saw the rise of TikTok. Obviously it's social media. I'm a huge fan, a huge fan of getting together in person. I'm not even talking about can. So that was great. It really was.

I learned a lot, but go ahead. I agree, but something did strike me when I was there. It is very stratified, and it's really kind of sequestered to the top 1%. And what I would like to see as part of an infrastructure act is a fairly significant investment in what we refer to as third places, parks, opportunities for nonprofits, leagues. Used to be churches, other community groups. Religious institutions, subsidized extension classes. We need to touch, smell, we need more unsupervised opportunities for random encounters in the service of other people. And that's one of the reasons I'm a fan, actually,

of national service, because I used to go to Westwood Park and play basketball. And I remember it was 28 bucks a year, and I got to play in every league there. I made a bunch of great friends. I found mentors. My dad's been married four times, so I've been to every temple, Presbyterian Church, and Unitarian Church in Los Angeles, and I made a lot of wonderful friends there. But there is an absence of third places, and we need something more than just conferences that kind of the tech elite go to. We need a reason to get it.

Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, all of that. We need more of it. It's school, kids in school and everything else. That sure was a very clear signal from the pandemic that kids need to be in schools. They just need to physically. Online schools just don't work. And after school, you know, drill team and drumline. And I mean, just all that stuff is so

important. You know, one of the things that Clara loved at Con, there was a daycare that they had that was free, which was great. So we could go off and do work and stuff. And Amanda could get a break. And they loved it with other kids and met kids from all over the world. And it was really interesting. And I was like, do you want to come with us to see this thing in Valence or whatever? And she's like, I'd like to go back to school. You know what I mean? She just wanted to hang with people, which was interesting. I do agree with you. I think it's interesting because on the storytelling, it's critically important. And you're just going to have to just cope with whatever's come. And you don't have to make

owned media, blogs, email newsletters, and podcasts sucky. You don't have to if you're a PR person. They can be really interesting. You can be interesting and tell a story well, even if it's PR, right? Even if it's about your company. It's just become boring, and it's done by people who are not interested in what they're doing in a medium that's dull. And so storytelling, you can be good no matter where you are, what you're doing, and you should find new and creative ways to, I guess I said TikToks and everything. And as Scott said, to real life thing, I think you're 100% right. I think we have to invest more in all variety of in-person things, it's so well worth it for people to do it.

Oddly enough, I went to church when I was a kid, and I don't at all anymore, like most people. Actually, the numbers are really striking. I've been walking past churches and wanting to go in, and not just because it was in France and pretty. I've had this feeling like, I kind of want to go in for a service. And I don't want to go to the Catholic Church because I have all kinds of issues. But I was like, the community part is what I loved about it. The sitting in a room full of people. Pete Please greet your neighbor. Remember that? Turn to the left, give them a blessing, say hello, shake their hand. It's wonderful. Jennifer I just, for some reason lately, I've been having a feeling, it's not religious. It's not. It's something else. It's something beyond religion. And so, yes, it's a weird feeling. It's so strange that every time I go past a church, I want to go in for a service, which is interesting. Quaker meeting.

or whatever you call it, the rabbi was basically almost educating us. We talked about politics, and it was just some incredibly well-educated, a lot of domain expertise, reading and life lessons. When I went to the Presbyterian church, what I found is it was just a bunch of good people who wanted to be together in the agency of something bigger than them. And it was just a... I remember the minister coming up to me, I think it's called a minister, I was an 11-year-old, first service, coming up to me and go, I heard you're out staying with your dad, my mom and dad, you know, he was on his third wife, and he said, come over tomorrow, I have a bike for you. Every 11-year-old boy needs a bike. You know, these are like good people trying to help strangers. And I miss that a lot. The problem

is I just can't get over the legacy stories. But I agree with you And I miss that a lot. The problem is I just can't get over the legacy stories. But I agree with you. I miss that community and that connection. And it's helpful. And even if it was elite, it was just fun. I have to say, being around a lot of people, just walking down, all kinds of people. I was watching people outside. They were leaving the Palais because we had an apartment across from it after they'd done their awards and they were having a great time, right? You know, you didn't see this, but it was on a screen on the front of the Palais. You could watch the ceremony as people were winning their things. It was lovely to watch. Claire and I sat and watched it and then everyone poured out and then went off to things. And it was a really nice, even if it was elite, this was sort of the regular grunts who were getting awards and stuff. I found it very lovely to watch people just spill out of a gathering. And it just was, I don't know, it was really nice. Anyway, here's the next one. I'll read it.

That's our name just together, just so you know, Swish Away. It sounds like a toilet product or something. Swish Away, yeah. Swish Away. What kind of global policies, in your views, would prevent existential technological disaster for the next generation? Oh, just a light one. Examples of already always happening existential threats, rapid climate change and species extinction from fossil fuel, global political destabilization, social media, Skynet, AI, and nuclear war, atomic tech. I'll take my answer off the air via my genetically enhanced and AI-enabled PalmPilot.

Thank you, Eric from Brooklyn. Oh, man, global policies. Well, I guess I'll start again. We need to have AI policies in place right before this starts to really roll out around the uses of it. And we could imagine all the bad uses easily. So I think that's number one, a global regulatory body dealing with this issue immediately. As to climate change, again, a global body that agrees to do things. We have a lot of people who don't believe in climate change. And in the absence of that, a much faster move, as much as I love all the renewables and as much as I what fossil fuel is doing to this world. We have to make a choice here. And so that's one thing, I think, nuclear energy. And I think many, many people who protest against it are misguided and don't understand the overall feelings about it. I just did an interesting interview with Oliver Stone.

He has a new documentary called Nuclear Now. It's quite good. He has some kooky ideas in general about other things, but he's correct in this particular point. Via social media, another, we have to have global standards for social media, but unfortunately it's now owned by people some of whom have lost their

marbles in many ways, and so allegedly lost their marbles. And so there's nothing we can do since most of them are privately owned. More regulation, any regulation about that. Scott? American superpower is our optimism. Our species superpower is cooperation. And this isn't a new idea. And there are examples of a lot of wonderful organizations that reach across borders for the common good across not only the Commonwealth, but the well-being of humanity. We have the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is obviously comprised of Western nations, but we have the Geneva Conventions. We had rules around war that we all agreed to.

We decided to not have, to use gas, to use chemical, to have chemical attacks in World War I. I'm sorry, in World War II, after we saw what they could do in World War I. We now have an agreement. There is technology, battlefield technology, with these hyper lasers that when they're fired will blind everybody on the field permanently. That technology exists and every nation, including nations that are at war with each other, have decided to sign up for that and they do not deploy that technology on the battlefield. We have multilateral agreements around bioweapons. So we have been able to do this and what's required is leadership and a comity of man

and realize that we have, we went from 50,000 nuclear warheads in the US and Russia, respectively, down to 10,000, because we cooperated. So these agencies have real meaning, and they work. And we need more of them specifically around, I think, probably AI or technology more generally. We need an AI regulatory body. I think it should be run first out. We need an AI regulatory body. I think it should be run first out of NATO for security reasons, but then we all need to cooperate. We cooperate. The World Health Organization attempts to get everyone on the same page.

We've got to work with China on AI. 100%. But we have taken our worst enemies and decided across the most sensitive topics to work together in the past. And there's no reason why we can't continue to do that and have better organizations that are even stronger and serve humanity. We do cooperate. And so this isn't anything new. We just need, what we need is we need leaders who recognize it's worth the effort, it's worth the work, and we want to plant trees the shade of which we will never sit under

because these are long-term investments. 100%. Any thoughts on any other parts? I think regulation of social media would be nice for once. I don't know if you can do that. That'll be interesting. I don't know if you can do that globally. I think that's-

Individually. Yeah, it becomes much more regional, right? Based on, I don't know, that's a, I would just settle for any regulation around social technology. Technology is the largest industry in history that has avoided any regulation for this long. And they have learned from the sins of the father, specifically Microsoft, who didn't want to play the regulation or the lobbying game, and then immediately was found guilty of monopoly abuse. and then immediately was found guilty of monopoly abuse.

And so the new tech titans are much smarter and they weaponize a pay-for-play government. And they have been incredibly deft and effective. Space, they're owning space now. I don't know if you saw, but Sam Altman, I don't know if you saw this, but Sam Altman, the Mr. Regulate Me Please guy, it ends up that he's actually participating or funding regulators who have all of a sudden decided that the regulation they're proposing is not the right regulation. So we need leadership

here. We need more Marguerite Vestiaires, Lena Kahn, Professor Tim Wu, who just left the administration. But these organizations matter, they're important, and they can work. Yeah, they can. Absolutely. We've got to trust our regulators a little more rather than demonize them. As a FIS member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month at FIS, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at FIS.ca. Okay, last one. I'll read it. policies apply. Details at phys.ca. Okay, last one. I'll read it. Kara and Scott, you guys are so in the know on everything. I'm amazed by your intellect.

How do you stay on top of the wall? What do you read specifically? Do you carve out time in your day? How do you make it a priority with the kids? Susie from Pittsburgh. Yes, Susie, we're geniuses. I don't know what to tell you, but our intellects are so massive. That's how we do it. That's it. That's our problem. Go ahead, Scott. You go first on this one. I get asked this a lot, and I don't have a good answer. I think greatness is in the agency of others.

Whenever we do this show, one of the analysts at PropG, Mia Silverio, puts together notes for me. I did an editorial call this morning, and we'll literally just spend an hour on the phone with the 10 people who work at PropG, just talking about ideas. And if something's really interesting, we start pulling data on it. I learn a lot from you, Cara. I try and find interesting media sources. I do find, less so now, but Twitter used to bubble up really interesting things, sort of crowdsource interesting ideas. And I'm very fortunate. I have a lot of people who will text me something, including you, saying, this is really an interesting article that cuts to kind of the cuts to the core, if you will. But I don't have my go to when I was a consultant, I had the secret weapon or two. I used to go to The Economist and I used to go to something. My

real secret weapon was something called American Demographics, which was this magazine. That's a good magazine. I've read that. But now it's just kind of a hodgepodge. Now it's sort of crowdsourcing from my team and colleagues. Yeah. I would say I'm a little more disciplined than Scott is in that regard. I read all the major newspapers every morning or at the evening and look for stories.

And I read widely The Atlantic. I read, or I scroll it and then I pick the ones I want. I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. I look at Politico. I look at the San Francisco Chronicle. I just am interested in San Francisco. I look everywhere for the information. I get, I love the Puck newsletters. I tend to stick with news sources I trust and I, which I've covered. So I used to spend a lot more time on Twitter. It's a waste of my time unless I'm interested in dunking. Like funny dunks is what I find there now. I used to find a lot of interesting ideas, but I now specifically search

people. I have a list of people on any one subject that I look for, whether it's politics or banking or something like that. Everyone else I absolutely ignore, and I didn't used to do that. I used to be very open on Twitter. I do those emails, like CNN's Five Things. I love the email that Semaphore puts out, the Puck newsletter, the Axios. Yeah, I'll look at all the newsletters. Casey's platformer, I looked at. The Dealbook from Andrew Osborne, he does a great job. On Instagram, I love Jessica Yellen's News Not Noise. I find it's like a quick hit to get up to speed on stuff. I like Oliver Darcy's CNN thing. That's a lot of media, but I have cut back

for sure. When I want to know about something, I go in a deep dive on the regular media things. I watch some TV. I watch Stephanie Ruhl's 11th Hour because I like Stephanie. So it has a nice synopsis. Everything else is noise to me. I find it noisy. I look at it sometimes. But a lot of it is repetitive and sort of a dog race kind of stuff. And I find it, I don't like a dog race.

Like, who's up? Yeah, and Saturday and Sunday, God, I consume a lot of media. Saturday and Sunday morning for me are Fareed Zakaria, Michael Smirconish. And on Sunday morning, I go to Margaret Brennan at Face the Nation. Yeah, see? There, you do do a lot more. And then I tend to get recommendations from friends. People send me stuff a lot of the time.

And I talk to people more than most people. And so I'd rather do the reporting myself. That's just because of me. But I do carve out time in the morning and in the late evening. And priority for the kids, I stop. We have dinner usually. I try not to look at the phone or try to respond. Most of the time on the phone, I'm responding to my other kids, like someone's trying to reach us or family or Scott or something like that. And then we on Pivot and also on, we send stories back and forth all day long on things. And we do that.

Like, I looked at this. What about this? It's really helpful. So, it's a lot of people you trust. But in general, we're very interested and curious people, I would say. Don't you think, Scott? We love it. We're information vacuums, aren't we? I find this stuff, I don't even think of it as work. I just find this stuff so interesting. And people know I find it interesting. And I develop nice relationships this way. I just find this stuff so interesting. And people know I find it interesting. And I develop nice relationships this way. I just heard from someone, this Molly Jung Fast woman, and I thought, oh, I was flattered that she took the time to message me. I have another good friend, Whitney Tilson. And whenever Whitney finds something that he thinks I would enjoy,

he sends it to me. And your friends are a great source. What I would say is, where do you start when you find stuff that you think is relevant to other people, start emailing stuff to them, and they'll start emailing back. Or texting. I tend to text more than anything else. And then lastly, I do other things that are just weird. I just started listening. I listen to history podcasts quite a bit. I'm listening to one called The History of Rome, which is 12, 13-minute segments on the history of Rome, and I'm going to go all the way through it. I had studied. I do a lot of historical reading on a lot of stuff, but I used to read, now I listen. And I find it, they're 12 minutes. It doesn't take that long. And if I get tired, I turn it off, but never goes anywhere. And so I do that. I do that. And so with the kids,

I try to do just stuff with them. We just take time. Just take time, don't you? You took your kid to the soccer game. We did marshmallows last night. We traveled. We brought them on our trips. We both brought them on our trips. once a week do a full episode of The Daily from The New York Times if it's a subject matter that I want to know more about. I think they do a fantastic job. I just listened to a finance podcast with my friend Scott Goodwin, who's a credit investor, and this is an incredible podcast on credit cycles. He's with Diameter Capital, so occasionally I find a finance podcast that I'll go deep into. But oh my God, it's so... There's so much content, as Scott just said. There's so much great stuff out there. I watch a lot of docs on Netflix and mostly on Netflix, actually, and HBO.

I watch documentaries all the time, which I love. On things that aren't news things, like on physics. This in no way is instructive or helpful. We've basically just told them to do math and watch media all day, watch and listen to media all day. Right, all the time. Anyway, those are great questions.

Send us more. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Okay, Scott, that is the show. We'll be back on Friday for more. And again, listeners, thank you for your great questions. I love the way you guys ask questions, whether it's RJ handing it to Scott. I like that. Push back, argue with us. We love it. We will argue back at you. We love the questions we get in person. We love meeting you,

as we've said. We really do enjoy it. And if you don't agree with us, tell us. We love to hear from you. We are not the world's experts on everything. And if we're wrong, let us know. And if we're right, let us know. All right, Scott, read us out. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Travis Larchuk, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Andretat engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Miel Silverio, and Gaddy McBain. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.