Hey, I'm Matthew Schell, comedian, writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Lot.
You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think that sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can. I'm going to get into it every Friday.
You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian or an actor or writer or honestly anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it.
That Sounds Like a Lot, coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher in New York.
And I'm Scott Galloway. And God, you have to say it. Say it, Kara. God.
You're in Cannes. Where are you? Cannes. You're in France, right?
You're in France. On the Côte d'Azur. What are you doing there? Why are you there?
I'm mostly sort of like an accoutrement that makes people feel like they have some sort of faux PBS at their events they invite. There's like two academics in all of Cannes. It's me and Adam Grant, who's my nemesis, who I will someday. He's such a nice.
He's a wonderful guy. Look at the head of hair he's got on him. That's a nice head of hair he's got. No, that hurts.
Imagine me, but better in every dimension. He is. This guy, he gets invited to everything. And I'm always in like parlor two.
But anyways, I'm the second academic they invite. And they all invite me to their events to, I don't know, feel like they're more PBS or something. And it's like subscribing to The Economist. I think they think it's a good idea.
And then the shit actually shows up every week. I show up and by the way, all these things are named. If you end up sitting next to me, it means they think you're really interesting and boring because they stick me next to you. And the hosts come up and say the same thing.
Like, you two will have so much to talk about. And I'm like, oh, you got sat next to me. You get a free advertising conference, right? Is that correct?
Because I've gone to it. I am not there on purpose. I was invited, but I declined. It's called the What Advertising Stucks Least conference is what they really talk about it.
And let's celebrate the technologically illiterate and the poor who are stuck still watching advertising because anyone with any options gets to opt out. But they don't realize when I come to these events, Kara, that I drink. And when I drink, I dance. And it's really awkward.
So imagine a 54-year-old white male heterosexual dancing is definitely a triumph over. It's a triumph of joy over any self-awareness. You can dance. And I can tell they're all looking at me and they're going, where's Kara?
Why didn't we why didn't we invite the other one that doesn't drink? I'm having a wonderful time. There's rosé. There's a lot of rosé going on there, right?
A lot of rosé. A lot, a lot of rosé. A lot of rosé. You know, years ago when I went, all the big tech, the reason I did is Facebook had a big thing on the sand right there.
Twitter did. Snapchat has Snapchat actually always has a really cool thing. They had an art installation by Alex Israel this year. They always have something really neat.
And it was much more internet heavy before. Was it this time? Oh, yeah. The beaches keep getting bigger.
I went to an event hosted by Joanna Coles, who's lovely, and Evan Spiegel. And he looks 14. I mean, the guy literally, he looks like my paper boy. That guy is really young looking.
He is. Not that that's good or bad. But so Snap and Twitter, I feel like, are both kind of the comeback kids right now. I got that wrong.
I thought they were history. But there seems to be a mood of, I don't want to call it cautious optimism, but everyone's sort of happy that the immunities are kicking in. I think deep down, even the other tech players, including Pinterest, are sort of happy that Facebook and Google are getting. I don't want to say their comeuppance, but there seems to be some immunities kicking in.
So I feel like there's some balance here for the first time in a while. And, you know, it all washes out in the end. Until the empire strikes back. Anyway, let's talk about speaking of the empire striking back.
Libra. Libra. Are you putting everything? Are you all in on Libra?
Explain Libra for the people who don't understand Libra. So Libra is Facebook's new currency or cryptocurrency. And from a branding standpoint, it's genius. So at an event like Cannes, you have a tendency to conflate great marketing and great strategy with good businesses and good people.
Right. We assume that great marketing connotes a great strategy because on the face of it, from a branding perspective, Libra is brilliant. I mean, even even the name Libra is a measurement of weight from the Romans. It's where the British pound derives the symbol of their currency.
It's just such a gorgeous. It's such gorgeous branding. And they literally sat down and said, OK, let's start with the assumption that nobody trusts us. How would we do this?
Just cryptocurrency. Explain what it is. A coin. It's a Facebook coin, essentially.
Transactional. But it's strange in the sense that it's not crypto because they're talking about creating identity and regulatory bodies and going through the traditional players such that the regulatory agencies are more comfortable with it. Because a lot of government agencies aren't comfortable with the fact of anonymity such that money laundering or funneling capital to from bad actors to other bad actors is something that's very dangerous. So, Facebook, in their eyes, tried to do everything right.
They're like, OK, nobody trusts us. Let's let's assemble a supervisory board that's a nonprofit. We've told people we're not going to use it for targeting people. It's it's run by other large, trusted agencies, this supervisory body that includes Visa, MasterCard, a bunch of other people.
And it kind of all makes sense. And the notion that they would be able to have some sort of coin that attacks the 500 billion, that's half a trillion dollar remittance industry where basically people are sending money to their families. It charges on average a 7% fee for you to send your money home to your relatives. I mean, this is an industry waiting to be disrupted.
It makes all kinds of sense being able to tap on that cool item or that cool scooter on Instagram and immediately have it sent to you to be able to transfer money easily. I mean, if you try to send a wire to Europe, it's easier to get a mortgage. It's just so difficult. A lot of the world does not have as easy as they do.
We have lots of financial options here, including the company that Facebook owns, PayPal and Venmo. And we have credit cards and we have cash and we have a bank and we have checks and everything else. Most of the world doesn't operate, especially when you're working on a global basis to be able to buy things easily on Facebook. They've tried for years to make it easy.
It hasn't been easy. Sending money back and forth. The unbanked, if you will, is a huge opportunity and a huge need globally. This thing makes all the sense in the world.
The only there's only one problem. What's the one problem? Let me guess. It's the same problem as the portal.
It's from Facebook and nobody trusts Facebook. And if it doesn't take very much imagination to go to the scariest parts of history where the three pillars of tyranny or takeover of a society are first, you get control of the media, then you get control of the money or the economy. And then that leads to control of the military. Those are the three pillars of the takeover of the society.
And Margaret Atwood really in a genius way kind of said that the fastest way this dystopian society wanted to kind of go after the power of women was to just shut off their credit cards. Right. So when we look at, OK, how they handled the first leg of the stool media, people like, OK, not so great. Do we really want to give them access to the second leg of the stool and potentially make this coin the default currency?
If 50 percent of Facebook users all of a sudden started using this coin, then you potentially have a new reserve currency globally. And it's not even that people think that folks at Facebook are evil, which they may or may not be. But they haven't shown an ability to think through unintended consequences, nor protect bad actors from weaponizing the platform. And if you were to weaponize a global currency and start monkeying with it, you could have what what capitalists fear more than war.
And that is recession or some sort of global economic meltdown while the ATMs stop working and there's run on banks, etc. So you are today and yesterday you saw a lot of people in Washington say not so fast. Not so fast. And France, the finance minister, a lot of people were saying Facebook is saying they've talked to all these people.
So this is just, you know, they're just being public about it, even though behind the scenes they knew everything. You know, they did. They had the Switzerland thing, the independent body, the idea that there's more partners. They're trying to sort of put all the The iPhone pulls 70 to 100 data points a day.
Android or free phones pull between a thousand and fifteen hundred. So they're bad, but they're about five to six percent. They're 94 percent less bad if you want to talk about shared data. Unless I trust them with it.
I trust I do trust them with it. I don't feel like I'm going to get unnecessary screwed by Apple. Well, I don't think about that. I get to rank who you think you're going to get screwed by.
Like in a coin. I'd buy an Apple coin. Amazon coin. Facebook coin.
You had that guy, by the way, you kicked off this campaign when you interviewed him on MSNBC and when he said, I wouldn't be in that position. And the other thing is the guy in the worst position in the world is the guy who was head of portal. Someone interviewed him at code. The guy who charged with the Facebook portal product.
Oh, Andrew Bosworth. Yeah. OK, so Mr. Bosworth, never in the history of business has been someone been set up to fail as badly as you, Mr.
Bosworth, because you could have released. He literally could have released a vaccine to polio and it's going to fail because there's no way. Here's Mark Zuckerberg. I'm going to put tape over every camera on my computers.
But no, let me take my camera into your house. I mean, it's just the hypocrisy here is so thick, it's frightening. Again, Apple's the only one I let in. There you go.
I have an Eero. And now that Amazon bought it, I'm a little weary. I have a ring. I'm a little weary.
It does make you nervous. And my son, as you know, is unplugged every Google device we have in our home. Because he doesn't trust Google? Everything.
No. But he trusts Apple. Even though the house. Yeah, even though his mother worked for Google.
Yeah, he doesn't trust Google at all. And what about Amazon? Amazon. Absolutely not.
Really? He owns everything. He owns everything. Maybe he could be one of those like off the grid people, but he doesn't like any of it.
And speaking of which, the FTC is investigating YouTube over children's videos and how they've been abused. Obviously, this was the shoe that was going to drop, I think. It was pretty clear when they started discussing how they're handling videos involving children on the site. And they've been taken advantage of by pedophiles.
So, parent to parent, you have boys, two boys that are a little bit older than mine. I have an 8 and 11. I know yours are several years older. Have you had any experience in terms of your boys and objectionable content on YouTube?
They don't post a lot on YouTube. So that's not an issue. And I don't do a lot of videos. So that's another issue.
But here's the deal. I definitely see people contacting them on some of these services. And they always show me the phone. I'm like, who's this?
Who just left me this text message? Or who left me this message on this thing? And I'm like, do not respond. You know what I mean?
There's a little bit of that. And I don't know why that happens. And I don't know if it's pedophile. I don't know anything.
I don't know quite what they're doing to get them to that point. But it's happened at least a dozen times. And so, you know, I think these kids are using these platforms and they're accessible. That's all.
And I think that they have to, you know, all these companies that they're taking so long to get to this issue. It seems like, talk about low-hanging fruit in terms of safety. This should be the most safe area. But, you know, they're not that interested in the safety of gays and lesbians.
They're not interested in the safety of women. And so even though they do say they are, and I think at their heart of hearts they are, the actions they take sort of say they aren't. Or it's one of the many issues they've got to deal with that they have a hard time handling. Yeah, I've always really, I've always loved YouTube.
I personally really enjoy it. It's been good for my career. And last summer, we found what I'll loosely refer to as objectionable content on my 8-year-old's iPad on YouTube. Actually, it's his brother's iPad.
And I know for all of you out there thinking, well, it's your fault as a parent letting your 8-year-old on an iPad. Yeah, that's the whataboutism there. Just so you know, that means you don't have kids because your 11-year-old has to have an iPad because all of his classmates have it. And once your 11-year-old has an iPad, the 8-year-old has to have access to it.
And I looked at how this objectionable content came up. And he had typed in Harry Potter nude, N-U-D-E. And this really crazy upsetting content came up. And I thought, if YouTube and all their genius hasn't figured out a way, or Google, such that they can stop really objectionable content coming up around any modification of Harry Potter, then I would argue that really isn't the priority.
And it was, I thought it was very upsetting. So the idea that they're trying to separate to a new YouTube Kids, I think is a good idea. The other thing is, I don't think we should accept that we age-gate all kinds of things. I couldn't get into R-rated movies when I was 16.
I had to wait until I was 17. So if movies can figure out a way to keep 16-year-olds out of objectionable content, You know, YouTube and Google, with tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow, can figure it out. There is age-gating across all elements of our society and media. These guys should be able to figure it out.
For some reason, they've decided. They make all sorts of excuses, and all of the excuses are Latin for, we want unfettered content and unfettered business model. They should absolutely be able to age-gate. It's the same thing.
They want unfettered. That's a really good way to put it. They just don't want to be responsible for monitoring anything. You know, and again, like I always think about it, and I think I've talked about this, that it's like they allow people to think that's the way it is.
You can do anything you want, you know, anywhere at any time. It's like, give me your children. Sugar, sugar, sugar. And then saying, oh, you know what?
You can't eat donuts. And they go crazy. Like, that's why they're getting all this crazy, which I think is the problem. But what do you think is going to happen in the FTC?
Well, maybe we'll talk about that in predictions. I don't know. All right. I'm not sure.
You don't know? We'll see if our FTC has any juice. You think they will. I don't think they do.
After the break, wins and fails. I'm Asad Herndon, and this is America Actually. We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong. What did we not see.
I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona. And he's been thinking openly about running for higher office.
But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But, you know, for me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents.
This week on America Actually, we ask Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington, his plans for immigration reform, and more. This week on Net Worth & Chill, I'm breaking down the institution everyone's talking about right now but nobody actually understands, the Federal Reserve. With all the drama happening between Trump and Fed chair Jerome Powell, you're probably seeing headlines and wondering what any of this has to do with your money. Spoiler alert, it's everything.
I'll explain what the Fed actually is, why it exists, and how this one institution controls the interest rates on your mortgage, credit cards, student loans, and more. We're diving into why raising or cutting rates isn't just boring policy talk. It's the difference between affording a house or watching prices spiral out of control. Plus, I'm breaking down the current controversy over firing Fed board members and why both Republicans and Democrats are freaking out about it because this fight isn't just political theater.
It could mean real chaos for your wallet. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. All right, Scott, wins and fails. Wins and fails.
Do you have any? I've been doing all the talking here. Do you have any wins and fails? I think the win, no, that's okay.
You do that all the time. That's okay. You're used to it. That's all right.
I think, I know, I know. So I think the Slack IPO, that'll be interesting. I think it's a great product. I wonder, you know, looking at the finances, I'm a little worried about them losing so much money.
And I do still think they should get bought. That's always been my thought. But I think that that was a great win for Stuart Butterfield. It started off as a company I visited in Vancouver.
He had a gaming company and I can actually blank on the name every time. And it was a gaming company that failed and they had made Slack as a communication system for the gaming company. And they turned that into a business. And it was good that their VCs and actually it was You thought she was not as, she got not good reviews for it, I'll tell you that.
Well, I mean, it's been hard on her. It's been hard on her, really? It's been hard on you? Well, guess what?
It's been hard. How about all of the women who are slowly but surely losing their reproductive rights at the hands of an illegitimate president that you helped elect because of your gross negligence? It's been pretty hard on them, Cheryl. All right, okay.
I'm angry. Where's the rosé? Where's the rosé? Come on.
I have no excuse to be angry right now. It is beautiful here. I like that people are coming up to you wondering where I am. We're like, we're like conjoined twins that have been recently separated.
They see me and they smile and they go, where's Kara? Like we hang out together all the time. They literally think you and I just roll around all the time and find a mic and start complaining about big tech. That's how we live our lives, according to everybody.
That's right. That's exactly right. Well, I hope you enjoy yourself. So Scott, before I leave you to have rosé with Sheryl Sandberg, I would like a prediction from you.
What's your prediction? That'll never happen. That's my prediction. Yeah.
So I think that the two best performing IPOs of our new issuance since 2019. And again, I think there's three critical criteria here. Explosive growth, recurring revenue and network effects. I think Zoom and the company that did their direct listing this week, Slack, have all of those three things.
And I have trouble finding all of those three things in any of the other. All the other IPOs or direct listings have two of the three, maybe with the exception of Spotify. But I got that wrong. So I'm very bullish.
People always say I'm so negative. I'm very bullish on both Slack and Zoom. So look to them to perform well over the next 12 months. Even though Slack has those revenue issues.
I mean, there was slowing revenue growth, even though it's quite spectacular, it's slowing. And also they're losing money. You're not worried about that. You don't think investors will be concerned?
I can't tell you the kind of informal net promoter score that I've registered across small companies I work with around Slack is that it's almost like this virus that takes over the organization and people love it and can't live without it. So it to me seems like a great product. Great product. All right.
And then where are you with Uber still? Where are you with Uber? Uber and Lyft are still waiting for their massive implosion. We're going to lose the value of Ford Motor between the value destruction we're going to see Uber and Lyft over the next 12 months.
All right. That's right. That's exactly right. Well, I hope you enjoy yourself.
So next week, we'll have a guest host stepping in for you. Casey Newton of The Verge has written an amazing piece about Facebook on the moderators and their terrible lives of moderating all the dragon toxicity that flows over the Facebook platform. He's going to talk about that and more. And where are you going to be?
Where's your destination? You know, I don't like it and it makes me feel insecure when you bring in people more credible and more talented than me. You got to stop this. That article was great.
That was a hell of an article. Good stuff. Where are you going to be, sir? Are you traveling more?
I'm going to be in Greece. I head to Greece on Saturday morning. How interesting. I'm coming to France tomorrow.
What are you doing in France, Kara? I'll just miss you. I'm taking my lovely girlfriend on a vacation. Come on, say more.
Say more. And then I'm going to Brussels to talk to the Brussels regulators. I'm going to London to do podcasts with all kinds of powerful people there, possibly Silicon Valley. I'm going to be doing a lot of work, too, besides Messenger and Paris.
Oh, my God. Bring it and impressing your new girlfriend with France and then heading to Brussels to do some high-end. You're a saucy little minx. You're trying to show off.
You're throwing your feathers out there. You're like, I'm a peacock. Check out mommy. Check out mommy.
Oh, this is good. This is good. Maybe I'll just go have some oysters. You know, everyone speaks French with me, so that's going to be fun.
Of course you go. And I will ask her how to say it properly. Neither of us should be in Paris in any way, but she can go. It'll be nice.
I'll just be quiet next to her and eat crepes quietly in the corner. Anyway, thank you, Scott. I miss you for the week you're gone, but I'll be back next week again. That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.
Do you mean that? Do you really mean that? Yes, I do. I hope so.
That makes me feel nice. I feel warm all over. No, I'm just trying to lull you. No, no.
Just go get some rosé and hang out with Sheryl Sandberg. You both had a hard year. You and Cheryl. Sheryl Rosé with Sheryl Sandberg.
You know, Kara. You know, it's been hard. It's been hard. It's been hard on me.
You can pay for it with Libra. There you go. It's all going to be good. It's all good.
Anyway, Scott, have a good time. Thank you so much. Camilla Salazar produced our show today. Nashad Karwa is Pivot's executive producer.
Also to Eric Johnson. Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.
And if you like this week's episode, leave us a review.