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Go to Vanta.com/com Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway.
So, okay, before we get into my favorite topic, me. So, a beautiful little girl. Congratulations, Kara. Thank you.
Thank you. You and Amanda. That's wonderful. I have some advice for you.
All right. Oh, my God. But first, I have children, so I have some experience with children. I've had children more recently.
You know there's actually, this is a biological fact, a hormone releases, it's like starting a business or writing a book and having a birth. At the same time, a chemical hormone is released that gives me amnesia around how awful having babies are. Dead. Dead.
It's fine. I am good. I love the children. I love it.
This is the best baby, too. It is not that hard. I know people want it, like, everyone's like, oh, is it going bad? I'm like, no, it's going great.
People don't want to hear that. Everything's great. Good for you guys. It's really good.
The baby sleeps. Great delivery. That's amazing. My last two pieces of advice.
First is night. Second is nurse. Over-resource that shit out. I get that.
She's not so hot on the night nursing. But we'll see where it goes. It's fine. The baby's great.
Listen, I have no complaints. Beautiful baby, healthy baby, a little bit early, but I'm very happy with the situation. And now I have a girl, so she's making me feel. I'm absolutely convinced that my goals on this planet are to make it equitable for women and men to behave correctly in the world.
I now have even more. I have two sons who are wonderful. And I now have a daughter. So it means a lot to me that the world's a better place.
But speaking of babies, that you're pissing off, a lot of VCs on Twitter that I know in Silicon Valley. I don't know these guys. Tell me. Give me their biographies.
Well, you have Jason Calacanis and Keith Raboy, both of whom are pretty loud-mouthed venture capitalists. Jason, of course, is well known for Silicon Valley Insider. He does The Launch. He's done all kinds of, like, he's kind of a media person.
He had a whole bunch of companies. Well-known Tesla owner. Keith is a longtime entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He's been around PayPal, a whole bunch of stuff.
And both of them have been on my podcast. Yes, they have indeed. And for some reason, did they go after you? Explain what happened.
Should we do an original reading of what happened? Yeah, but let me provide some context. First off, I did not know these guys, so I pulled up Jason's book. And it's the something about Angel investing.
But the subtitle is How One Man Turned $100,000 Into $100 Million. So if you're friends, I think we scrape together $100,000 and give it to Jason because he can turn it into $100 million. And I could use the $100. I'll give you $51 if I can have $49.
And then Keith Raboy, how do you say his last name? Raboy. Yeah, he is the most successful venture investor in history. And you know how I know that?
He tells you. He tells people on Twitter that he's the most successful venture investor. Anyway, so I wrote a piece. They're the louder venture capitalists.
Yeah. So I wrote a piece last Friday on Mercenary Malice talking about SoftBank and Masayoshi Son, basically accused of Masayoshi Son of being a money launderer. I talked about how our democracy was frying. Yeah.
But the thing that invoked... I don't know why this would bother them, but go ahead. The thing that invoked the most, like, crime against humanity reaction when it was, I actually suggested that some of the portfolio companies of these guys might be overvalued. And so this is a crime.
This is literally a crime against humanity. And they weighed in and got very aggressive, you know, discrediting me, you know, intimidating others with their money, constantly talking about their success. And it got, it just struck me. They called you irrelevant, correct?
No, no, not just me. There was actually some interesting discourse. Someone pointed out Tesla's market share, which I thought was interesting. Someone else was talking about...
Jason's a big friend of Elon's and Tesla investor. Also an Uber investor. He's also an Uber investor. Yeah.
And then, of course, I said, if you don't stop threatening Professor Galloway, I'm like, you know what I'm doing. I appreciate you weighing in. And then, like, Big Sister. Yeah, I know.
Big Sister came in and started yelling at me. But I actually will damage their Tesla. Well, no, I want to make sure I can get this right. Keith Raboy's exact tweet was, I said I didn't have inside access.
I co-founded Night Crimson. He responded, any of them successful? Question mark. Definition, 10 billion or more, or changed the world.
I don't change the world. So there you go. We got to change the world here. Right.
We got to change the world. Yeah, they're arrogant. They're arrogant. And it's just, it's this idea that they hung the moon, and there's nothing they could do that's wrong.
And that's typical. And speaking of which, talking about, you know, the expression is they born on third base and they think they hit a home run almost all the time. It's not for the first time in history, billionaires paid lower tax rate than the working class. Two, hmm.
You don't agree there? Yeah. I've been listening to podcasts to try out my game. And the only thing I've taken away is that the most famous podcast daily, all that guy really does is occasionally goes, hmm.
Anyways. Two economists from the University of California, Berkeley, released a study of the average tax rate paid by the 400 richest families in the country, which I assume includes you, was lower than the rate paid by the bottom half American households. Just so you get some numbers, so I know you like data, Scott. The wealthiest foreign families had a 23% tax rate, which was down from 47% in 1980.
And in 1960, 56%. The working class tax rate remains the same around 24%, 22%. Wow. Yeah.
And if you start doing the kind of the math, I've been helping my 12-year-old with his math and it's like solve for. And if you look at solve for, bottom 50% have had the same tax rate. And the top, the 400 wealthiest households in America have gone from 60 to 40 to 20. And yet our government spending has stayed static.
And that means who's paying for it? And the answer is debt. So what we've decided is that our new gross ideology of the dollar has translated into cutting taxes for the wealthy. The taxes haven't gone up or down for the rest of us for the most part, but they've gone dramatically down for the wealthiest Americans in America.
And we haven't increased our GDP spending. Our government spending hasn't gone down either. So this all translates to additional debt. And when you think about debt at its most simple form is that we're pulling prosperity forward for all of us.
And so what this really means is this translates is that we've decided to not pay it forward, but borrow it forward and pull the prosperity of our children and our grandchildren forward to lower the taxes for the wealthy. It's also really stupid for people in the top 0.1% because there is a very basic dynamic. And that is when nine families are worth more than the Southern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere figures out a way to take away their money. And it's happened across nations everywhere repeatedly, especially in Central America, where a small group of wealthy people make incremental rationalizations to not share their wealth, co-op the government, and then ultimately someone shows up at the door and says you need to leave within 24 hours or we're killing you and your family.
And then a new government comes in that's totally fucked up and socialist and fascist, and it all starts over again. Right. And what's interesting is that it's very similar to what you're talking about Jason Keith. We know better.
We deserve the money we get. There's no fix in the system. We didn't get this because of a fix. We're not trying to pawn off shitty companies onto people and then acting like we're smart.
And when things go wrong, we don't take responsibility for them. It's really a rationale of wealthy people, which is, some people absolutely deserve the money they get and they made it. You know, Jeff Bezos from nothing. Jeff Bezos created that company.
But now he's getting advantages. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't take away from his accomplishments to say Kind of walked it back, right? It's like it's a tremendously difficult position for everyone involved.
And I find that the NBA commissioner is a pretty thoughtful guy. What does Apple do? What does Apple do? Like, it's got a huge...
What do you do? What would you do if you were running one of those companies? You know, to be blunt, I just don't know. I think this is why they get paid a lot of money.
I think it's a very difficult position. And, you know, it's... I think they'd all like to go back to the days where there's no politics involved. What are they going to do?
This week, President Erdogan... He's not a professor. Erdogan of... He's not a professor.
That hurts. I know. Turkey announced via Twitter he would be invading Kurdish-held sections of northern Syria after Trump sort of let him do it. Where they want to house serious refugees.
So, again, where is Jack Dorsey here? Like, this is, like, stuff is happening on his platform that is killing, that people are dying of. Yeah, they don't look... Whether it's the Biden kind of conspiracy theory that Facebook's running ads on, again, there's a fairness, there's an honest advertising act that was proposed in 2017 that Mitch McConnell has refused to come up for a vote.
That would be a start. Jack Dorsey has got... The good folks at Twitter have more running on Trump's presidency than anyone else in terms of their own economic well-being. It's just strange that people who are world leaders are now announcing invasions via Twitter.
It's also just incredible... The governing via Twitter. It's just crazy, right? And then what's also really disappointing is that America, who gets it wrong all the time, but we're pretty good at when, you know, the American ambassador who has made a lot of the wrong decisions in Saigon waited around until all of the allies or tried to, and I'm sure people are going to correct me on this, but we waited around and we tried to get our allies out of Saigon, recognized they were going to be murdered if they stayed.
We have taken our alliances and our allies very seriously. And when someone via Twitter and some sort of half-baked notion comes out and says, we're going to turn our back on our allies, it's not only the wrong thing to do, it absolutely diminishes our power and influence moving forward. Well, that's what's happening. They're all out.
I mean, I'm not talking about Matt Lauer. I'm talking about... Somebody complains that, oh, this person got, you know, handsy in a photo or something. Joey made a bad decision back when.
That one didn't need it. This is the MIT guy. He made a bad decision. Got to go.
Bad decision. Right. Sorry. You know what I mean?
Like, that's the people who lose their jobs around this decision. I see that. Does their career ruin? Should they be toxic?
Should they not be someone you hire? Someone else can hire them. I'm just saying, in this case, I suspect there's going to be a lot of departures higher up and stuff. The reality is, as a 6'2 white guy, I have never felt physically intimidated by work.
I've never felt physically... And I can't imagine how just devastating that must feel. And to not be able to report it and to think that you're going to be... Just even, like, let me tell you about the baby.
We were in the hospital. We got the form. What does it say on it? Parent, father, mother.
Right. This was 17 years ago when San Francisco, for example, changed it eventually. But when I saw that, again, 17 frigging years, I got furious. And I let loose on the thing.
I'm like, what are you doing? Why don't you change the frigging forms? What if you're a single mother and you don't have a father? You don't even write about that.
I read the whole thing. I was furious. And I was brought back to 20 years ago when there was like... And here I am, a very privileged person.
I have lots of money, lots of power. And there it was. Like, I did not have any rights right then. And it was sort of like...
And then I was told, I have to be married to be on this. And it just went on and on. It was sort of like... And I called a lot of people.
I know the right people to call. But it's just the way it is. And it just... I remember it again.
It was 20 years later and it's still the same form. And I sort of was like, and I get that straight people don't understand it. But if you just had a baby and you get a form like that saying you are not a legitimate parent, it's not only depressing, it's rage-inducing. And I have to tell you, it just was...
It was just... I get it. I get why people... But I would say...
I actually think straight people do understand that. We just need help. We just need help. I do think there's an education process.
And just hearing you say that makes me more empathetic. And I get it. If I had been in the hospital and filled out that form, I would have noticed it. I'm so sorry to the woman I yelled at, but she deserved to be yelled at.
Someone had to yell at her. Anyway. Anyway, we're going to go to the break now. When we get back, we're going to talk about more serious stuff.
More serious stuff. Jesus. Less serious stuff when we get back. We're here with Pivot in a very special episode.
Scott Galloway. I'm a Seth Herdan. 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 NetWorth & 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 youarerichbff. Welcome back to Pivot, Scott. That was a bit of a downer right there.
Let's go wild and get a listener mail. Who's nice? It's a development of a relationship. Oh, wait, this is Twitter.
I found something fun on Twitter this morning. Let's lighten the mood. Do you know that the second lady, Karen Pence, her first husband was one of the inventors of Cialis? I found that on Twitter today.
Wow. Isn't that amazing? I think I got to like vice president Pence now. Oh my God.
First off, I didn't know she was married before. Yeah, that's true. Anyways, Twitter does that value. Yes.
Thank you so much for that. Your favorite thing. Yeah, let's get to the mood. All right.
So we have to get to listener mail. This comes from Toronto. Canada. Canada.
We love Canada. Anyway, it's about Google sidewalk Labs, a division of Alphabet that is designing a district in Toronto's waterfront to quote tackle the challenges of urban growth. The American dream is a live character. It's a live in Canada.
So we reached out to Anne Cavoukian. She is a privacy expert and former privacy commissioner of Ontario. She was working with sidewalk Labs in Toronto, but she resigned from that position a year ago, I think it was because she had concerns about how the data they collected would be used. I don't know why you worry about Google collecting data.
Here's what she had to say about that. The problem arose when they created a model for an urban data trust where they said, we understand that people want not just sidewalk labs to be controlling this data, but others should be involved. Like the municipal government, the provincial government, Waterfront Toronto, of course, and various levels involved in terms of the actual companies themselves, IT companies, etc. delivering these technologies will all form this, what they called an urban data trust.
And then they said the following, which is what led to my resignation. They said, of course, we'll encourage companies to de-identify data at source, but we can't make them do that. We have no control over what these companies do. And that's the minute I knew that everything was going to fall apart.
Because you see, personally identifiable data, it's a treasure trove. Everybody wants to collect personal information and then use it for our advertising, marketing, etc. And the minute they said that, I knew there was no way we could preserve this as a smart city of privacy. I'd be And the reason that these cities have to turn to these deep pockets is because they don't have the money to build smart cities themselves anymore.
Right. They're giving away public transportation, giving away prisons. I'll take you into space because NASA is not doing it because their budget has been cut. So it's a reallocation of resources.
And when it comes to civic issues, we need cities to do it. Even like talk about data hacks. Right. Think about how many corporations have had data hacks and everyone makes fun of the government.
The most sensitive information in the world is probably on the CDC who gets information on can't get Trump's taxes. Why are the IRS hasn't been hacked? The IRS is the most secure, most secure organization in the world. Everybody mocks government employees.
You know what? They're they have to provide. Yeah, but in terms of security, you know, in terms of the names of assets and agents and CDC and health information, the government is proving itself to be a hell of a lot more competent in the private sector. So I kind of come around to your thinking.
I really like the guy running sidewalk labs. I've met Dan Doctor off. He's really thoughtful. I just think the whole premise, first of all, there's third party companies involved here.
There's Google, which is the biggest information sucking sound in the universe. I just it just sounds bad on every level. It's just what could go wrong. Right.
I just like pay more taxes and let's build some more stuff or be part of the solution where you're highly monitored by people who are elected. Like they're not elected. I just 100 percent. I just feel like, look, maybe we make bad choices on our elections, but they're elected and nobody picked Google and nobody picked Facebook and nobody picked any of these people.
And so how do you have consent to what just the ways this is like facial recognition, the ways this can go. I can think of 20 bad outcomes and maybe four good ones. I'm actually a fan of facial recognition as long as it's controlled by people who are elected at the end of the day. I don't believe in facial recognition.
It's problematic. And so I just I just how the data gets used, how it gets de-identified, who will have access to it, how it will be used. There's so many questions. And the fact that this woman and so many others are like quitting and being thoughtful about it.
I think her issue was the third party. And then it says this may be out of sidewalks hands, but out of their hands. Why not have partners who agree to very strict rules of this? You know, there's lots of ways.
It's again, pretending they don't have power over this. Oh, speaking of private corporations overstepping their boundaries and threatening our health as a nation. What did we predict in June and the June 20th? It was the June 21st.
I'm looking at our producer about Libra when it was announced. What did we predict? That it was DOA. We said it was going nowhere.
And in this past week, it looked like mass card views are pulling out. I mean, this was such an easy one. It just amazes me. Success creates a level of arrogance.
It's very dangerous that anyone at Facebook thought, oh, this is a good idea. This will fly. This makes sense. Well, it feels innovative and new.
It was, by the way, currency should be a great idea. A stable coin is genius. If you look at the construct, this is genius. A Walmart, I don't know, JP Morgan.
I don't know who's going to do Amazon because I think they're more trusted. Somebody is going to do what Facebook has done elegantly to WhatsApp, Snap and every other innovative firm. They're going to pick their pocket. You're going to see another stable coin from someone in six months.
It's just not going to be from the good people at Facebook. No, I think they are. But anyway, this is smart. What is smart city should look like?
Cities need to get smarter. One hundred percent. I just don't want IBM ads. Smart City.
I haven't even talked about something. No one takes IBM seriously. Right. I'm not threatened by IBM.
I don't want to stack rank who would be more appalling in terms of running this. But definitely Bill Gates, nothing. I think he's wonderful. You don't like Bill Gates?
I like Bill Gates, but I don't want making a decision on smart city. I'm sorry. Like I love the stuff he's doing abroad and they need it desperately. And in some cases, it's great when these when these billionaires put money into places where government doesn't have enough throughput to make it happen.
But in this country, we need our government. We do have a functional government in a lot of ways. Sort of. But we do.
We do. Let me just tell you, I don't pay bribes every five minutes to do something. I don't have like, you know, I think I would like their expertise. And at the same time, I don't want them to control it.
That's literally they don't want to just join in a model of stone soup. They want to, like, control every aspect. And I get why they want to. I get it.
They think of governments as incompetent. Well, I think they're being good, but it all comes back to one thing in terms of Google. And the reason why Toronto has to go hat in hand to Google for a smart city is that in the United Kingdom, Google reported seven billion pounds sterling in revenue and for the purposes of taxes, reported a profit of fifty thousand pounds. So I think they've been paid taxes.
That's the kind of thing. Taxes. Anyways, we're in agreement. We're in agreement here.
We're in violent agreement about smart cities. I think I should design a smart city. Anyway, wins and files. There's so many.
There is so many. You go, go for it. What's your fail and win? My win is the economist in Berkeley pointing out this notion of income inequality.
I think data as a force of moral good is really powerful. And it's just it's it's powerful, right? It's the thing that disappointed me about the Twitter exchange. There was just an absence of data around.
OK, I disagree. Here's my data. I disagree. I'm rich, which means I'm right.
My fail is obvious. My fail is this. And I'm a product of it. And I've experienced it.
This culture in Silicon Valley where people have mistaken their their blessings for talent. And I think this smells like 1999 and everyone says it's different this time. So this leads right into my prediction. I thought the biggest news story of the year was going to be.
We work, by the way, coming here. I got off on floors 16 and 17. You know what those floors are here? We work.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven or hell. Does this mean I'm in heaven or hell? Anyways, they like kidnapped you. They're here.
Yeah. And then they pulled me out. They pulled me out, put me under a drug. And now I no longer have a kidney.
I don't know what that means. But anyways, and it's being rented out. It's being rented out. Anyways, I thought it was gonna be work.
No, now I think it's gonna be SoftBank. I'm pretty sure, like last night. When I have four. Let me see.
When I go to dinner, I'll usually have one or two drinks. And afterwards I'll have let me see. No, it's another seven. And the next day, most of my decisions are bad decisions.
And I think that SoftBank's incredible. Poor judgment around we perhaps means that they've demonstrated poor judgment around other investments. So I'm looking at their other real estate investments, specifically Oyo, Compass and Opendoor. Failed to come.
Well, what I think we're gonna have is the new prediction is that I think this level of arrogance. Peter was a big investor in Opendoor. Is he really? Oh, delicious.
It's gonna be on my podcast. Anyways, the abundance of capital, the abundance of cheap capital, a level of arrogance, all this bullshit rhetoric around genius and magic and this Jesus complex. I have been here before. The big story next year, the beginning of the year, we said the unicorn class was going to lose money, which was heresy because the previous year IPOs were up about 18 percent.
The year before that, they were up 79 percent this year. Year to date, they're only up five, which means they go down a little bit more. And this year, IPOs and unicorns have been a net loser. Next year prediction.
Take every private company worth over. That's my prediction. Every unicorn worth over a billion dollars. Now, that's a private company.
And I think we can add them up. And I'll do this and I'll publish on my blog is going to be cut in half next year. The amount of the amount of consensual hallucination. The amount of consensual hallucination between the markets, the unicorn industrial complex trying to shame people for having a thoughtful conversation on valuation.
I have been to this movie before. We are going to see the valuation of private company unicorns cut in half in 2020. You literally just slapped Jason Calacanis in the face. And you were saying we harken at dawn, Jason.
I will be your second. Is he the guy that turned $100,000 into $100 million? That's right. He's coming.
We're going to go for drinks. He's a good drinker. Yeah, you'll enjoy it. You'll become best of friends.
OK, just my win is Greta Thunberg is poised to win the Nobel Peace Prize. You really think she's gonna win? I don't know. I think it would be great because it will drive Trump crazy.
That's really pretty much what I want to win. Although she's really quite