LIVE from Toronto, Kara and Scott go international!

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It's dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. If you're tired of endless swirling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Beater.

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Download the Beater app at beaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Box Media Podcast Network.

I'm Cara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. All right, Scott. We're doing it.

We're taking Pivot on the road. That's right, Cara. We've got everything from drink tickets, bribes, extortion, firstborn children, heroin, pictures of baby goats, but we're finally settled on. Drum roll.

Scott, we have no drink tickets, bribes, extortion, firstborn children, pictures of goats, or heroin, but we are going to Toronto. I've been told you're supposed to say Toronto. Toronto? No, Toronto.

That's how it's spelled. Anyway. We flew out to Elevate in Toronto to do Pivot Live this week. They say it's south by southwest of Canada.

I hear Michelle Obama is there. Are you ready? Boom. Let's do it, Cara.

Here's Pivot Live from Elevate in Toronto. All right, Scott. Get yourself together. I'm good.

All right, good. I'm good. So first off, first off, Canada, Toronto. So my father is 89, and we turned 85, as any good son does.

I said, Dad, you're going to be dead soon. You're a bucket list. You need to create a bucket list, and every year I will take something off your bucket list. He said, okay, I'll think about this, and I'll put it together.

So every year I said, what do you want to do? And I think it's going to be why. I want to go home to Scotland, or I want to spend time with you and your sons. And every year for the last six years, it's been the same thing.

I want to go to opening night of the Leafs to the Air Canada Center. So four out of the last six years, and he thinks about it every year, and then he tells me the same thing. We go, see, usually the Leafs lose, and then he carats me and says, we need to do something very important after the game. And we grab a cab, and we go to the dark reaches of King Street or something, and he takes me by.

And by the way, I've never seen, my dad doesn't cry. The only time I've ever seen him cry is when the bagpipers come out pregame in the Leafs, and he just loses it. After the game, he takes me in the cab to the dark reaches of Toronto. We walk out, tells the cab to wait, and he looks up, and he says, do you see that apartment?

I'm like, yeah, I see it. And it's this pretty nondescript brick apartment. He's like, third floor, over to the apartment. See the broken air conditioner.

I'm like, yeah, I see it. He's done this four times in a row. And he holds my hand, and he goes, that's what you were conceived. Oh, my God.

And he says it angrily, like it's my fault. Anyway, so I'm very honest. When I say literally for me, everything began in Toronto. Oh, my God.

So wait a second. Aside for your egregious kissing up to Canadians here. That's right. I was not born in Canada.

Are you Canadian then? No, my parents met here, and then my mom said to my friend. Can you be called a landed citizen or whatever, so you can escape Trump when the time comes? Aren't all Americans kind of honorary Canadian citizens?

I mean, aren't we kind of like, for the most part, aren't we brothers in arms or sisters in arms at this point? No. I'm thinking, you know how technology... No, they don't want us, Scott.

Well, that's the point. You know how technology does aqua hires? I think we should have an invasion hire. I think we should invade you and have your leadership take over our country.

Well, we'll get to your leadership in a minute. We'll get to your leadership in a minute. We've got some issues with your leaders right now. We have worse issues.

Yes. You know, brown face, orange face, it's all a problem right now. Anyway, this is our first international trip, Scott. That's right.

That's right. This is our honeymoon. We were invited... It's not going to happen for you.

You never know. Yeah, you know. You absolutely know. There's nothing ever going to happen between us.

You can watch the dog. Not in the... You can watch the dog. It's so nice.

That's right. Your wife is another issue. Anyway, so... So, yeah, her.

So, anyway, so here we are in Toronto. We have big fans here. We were asked by lots of cities, and this is our first... Well, we've been to New York and done live events there.

But someone from Toronto wrote a 10-part thread on how pivots to scale its business, including its network effects. And I think it's good. I think this selection of Toronto is the best decision we've made so far. Yeah, I think it's going really well.

So, let's get started. We would like to know what is going on with Justin Trudeau. We thought he was just dreamy, and now apparently he's not so dreamy. So, can anyone give us an idea of what's happening?

Embarrassment. Embarrassment. So, the election is in October. Is that right?

Four weeks. Is he going to win? The tallest emittance. He's the tallest emittance.

Which is really fascinating to us from the United States. Look, listen, we've got something going on down south that's pretty major going on this and, you know, he's got the dreamy thing going on. And, you know, he had a honeymoon period, especially in the United States, like, come here and be president, this and that, after Trump was elected. And what was really fascinating to me, my son was 17, my other son's 14, we were like, how bad could it be?

Like, someone said he had been in brown face. And we were like, how bad could it be? Like, people possibly did this in college. It's really, it is racist, no matter how you slice it.

But how bad could it be? And then we saw the picture, and we thought, this guy took a lot of effort to do this. And that was what was most fascinating. He was like, that is flawless makeup, you horrible man.

And so, that was what was interesting to me. And then three times, all fantastically done, which was horrible. If you think through the practicality, this is when it gets really scary. If you think about the prep, the actual prep, and you put yourself in the room where he's going, yeah, this is a really good idea.

On a risk-adjusted basis, this makes a lot of sense. Like, imagine, and then you decide to do it a second and a third time, but that's not disqualifying. What is really disqualifying is using taxpayer funds to basically co-opt a foreign government into pursuing his political enemies. That is treason.

That's our guy. That's our guy. We'll get to him in a minute. But first of all, so, anyway, it's really, you know, we're watching it from afar, but of course, we have our issues in our country, so we should talk.

Let's begin with WeWork. Yep. You all following our work on WeWork? Do they have WeWork in Toronto?

Yeah. Okay. So this week, the CEO, Adam Neumann, is out, and the question is, have we hit peak founder? Now, we're talking about WeWork, even though both Scott and I think that WeWork is not a tech company.

Scott, how do you feel about this? I think people feel like you're somewhat responsible for this situation. Yeah, so the autopsy on WeWork will be death by S1, which is our prospectus or the SEC. It's actually a victory for the markets, because if you look at what's happened to WeWork, in the last 30 days, it's a company that Goldman said was going to go public.

It was taking them public at a range of $60 to $90 billion, twice the value of Ford Motor. And now it's worth zero. It literally is worth probably less than zero. It's got $42 billion in long-term leases and $3 billion in revenues, and it loses a billion and a half dollars.

So for every dollar it spends, in top line with no margins, it loses 50 cents. And it's not a company that's scaling, that has great gross margins like a Google or even a Peloton, which is supposed to go public today, where it has positive gross margins. Once it gets to a certain top line, it would be profitable. This is a company that's similar to Uber.

As it grows, it just grows its losses. So it's literally worth zero. So we've had probably the greatest destruction in shareholder value over a 30-day period that we've seen in a long, long time. But here's the good news.

There is a silver lining here. The mandatory disclosure by our government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, put out something that kind of was a whistle call for this incredible competence that is still sort of alive and well in American business and Canadian business called math. And people showed up and saw this thing and said, okay, including myself and Sarah said, something is very wrong here. So all of a sudden, the value went from $50 billion to $20 billion to $10 billion to now it's zero.

But who's incurred those losses? This is the good news. Yes, we're getting to our next victim here. Just slowly.

So admin employees lost a lot of money, which isn't good news. Obviously, a lot of hurt in a lot of employees. The move a lot of fund out of the UAE lost a lot of money. And who lost the most money?

The company that has washed the dirty money of the Saudi public investment fund and then has moved dollars into the U.S. and is leaving with dimes. I think this is the ghost of Khashoggi, who, by the way, was dismembered by a bone soft funded by the Saudi government. And basically, as far as I'm concerned, Saudi Arabia, you should definitely invest in Vision Fund, too.

So here's the thing. Today, interestingly enough, MBS was saying it happened on my watch. He was watching self-responsibility of Khashoggi and then kept saying it happened on, he said it to Martin Snet, which is in a documentary that's coming out, that it happened on my watch, but didn't take responsibility, which was astonishing. Yeah, again, we definitely pivoted away from WeWork there.

Okay, but we always like to get into dismemberment of journalists. One of the things that people talk about is the focus was on Adam Neumann and his pot smoking, and he bought a surf company, and he bought this and that, and he was a bad manager, essentially. But the fact of the matter is, people enabled this behavior and allowed it, which happens with tech companies, and he's not a tech company, but he's startups, in a way, the sort of founder allowing them to behave in juvenile manners. And so I think the real problem here is the board of directors of this company, which has allowed it to go on and continue.

And what was amazing was that SoftBank, which I think was essentially, like, provided the sugar to, like, a toddler, essentially, like, a whole giant bowl of sugar to this management, and then said, I can't believe this management is doing what it's doing. And so it seems to me that the board, board reform is a big deal, whether it's the board of Facebook, whether it's the board, which has no power, or the board of this company. And I think we have to really look at these investors, because what happened after the Wall Street Journal story about him lighting up on a plane, like, honestly, I don't care if he does that. What airline's that?

What airline's that? It's air, private plane, which she and I are never going to get on. So what was fascinating about that is they immediately then went after him, as if they didn't know the difference. They were shocked.

They were shocked. They were horrified. I know. And so that's what's really, to me, really, the most annoying part of this.

It's not so much about Adam Neumann. And look, he's an interesting entrepreneur, great idea, great brand, but, you know, is running a non-economic company, essentially. But that this board gets off, and SoftBank gets off, and Masayoshi Son gets off. And they shouldn't.

They're completely responsible for it, as far as I'm concerned. But again, you have to discern between a public company that is supposed to be representing stakeholders, including the community, and all the retail investors who piled into this. If WeWork had gone public, a union worker in Detroit, a teacher, and Ottawa, who would have been a shareholder most likely, and WeWork, and they would have incurred those losses. So the tragedy here, the tragedy of the commons was prevented.

And if you look at SoftBank Vision One, it's a $100 billion fund, it's basically impaired now. It's probably not going to work, because two of their biggest investments, Uber and WeWork, which they invested $20 billion and $100 billion into, if one of them catches a sneezes, Vision One catches a cold. And right now, Vision One fund from SoftBank has full-blown pneumonia. So the notion that this thing is going to work, it's just not going to happen.

And then there's some, it has 40% of the, 40% of the fund has what's called a preferred return, meaning it gets 7% per year in cash. And so they're taking the few good investments they have, the proceeds of a few good investments they made, and they put it back into the 40 preferred, which means the 60, the remaining 60 billion of the fund, which you can think of as common, is severely impaired. So SoftBank's adventures playing in traffic are about to come to an end. It'll die with a whimper, not a bang.

But this does represent something more fundamental. And now, just as there's a tension between capital and labor, there's a tension between capital and founders. And when I was starting companies in the 90s, the general viewpoint was a founder was there to start a company, but they were crazy and irresponsible. And as soon as the company became real, you brought in some old guy with gray hair like Jim Barksdale to take over.

You needed adult management. And then Steve Jobs changed everything, because they brought in all these gray-haired old white guys who almost ran out of the ground. And then the crazy founder came back and took the company from $2 billion to $300 billion. And Bill Gates was the first founder to take a company from $0 to half a trillion all on his own.

And all of a sudden, all the power swing back to the founders. I think that if you tell a 30-something-year-old male, he's Christ, he's inclined to believe you. And that is what happened here. You called him WeChrist?

Is that right? WeChrist. That's right. I think the best advice on Twitter was Weegis.

Weegis. For Jesus. Weegis. Yeah.

But also, we've hit kind of peak what I'll call yoga babble. And that is, okay, yoga babble, right? We claimed that they were elevating our consciousness. No, no, no.

They're in fucking desks, right? And now, Peloton today is supposedly going public. This delivers happiness. No, they sell exercise equipment like Chuck Norris and Chrissy Grinkley did with the Bowflex.

I mean, it's pretty soon someone's going to come out, you know, some company's going to come out that sells, I don't know, rents plants as a service and say, we're curing cancer because of carbon remission recapture or something. But we've had enough. And there is, I'm doing this, trying to do this analysis right now, looking at kind of frauds planning or BS in the S1 and then look at the returns. And I think at some point we need to return to a company saying, okay, this is what we do.

We buy, we rent real estate, and then we rent it out short term. That's not sexy. And one of the things you mentioned, how many times they mentioned Adam Neumann in the S1. Again, it's also such a victory for math.

It's a victory for text, like words. They had the word Adam, and they couldn't do this company without him. You remember, he had a hundred and some times the importance of Adam, and the importance of Adam, and Adam is really important. What happens now, from your perspective?

Here they have this sort of steaming pile of desks. Yes. What do they do? They hired this guy who I met many years ago, named Artie Minson, and others.

They're going to be co-CEOs. But really, what do they do now? Well, the interesting contrast right now is between we and Uber. And they're similar companies in the sense that they were both terrible businesses losing money where they replaced vision and growth instead of profits, or they replaced profits with vision and growth, and they weren't scaling to a point of profitability.

So it's interesting that we is blessed in the sense that it's now valued at zero. So getting back to $5 or $10 billion in value is an attractive, doable action item. So what they will do is lay off a third to half of their employees. They will sell away pool companies.

They're going to sell off all the companies. They're selling three of the companies, including Meetup and some other stuff they bought. They will focus on margin expansion instead of top-line growth, because it is a differentiated product. I actually think the Wee product and several ones I've been into is a differentiated product.

They did evolve the marketplace. And they will build, if they are swift and crisp at this, and have a little conversation with their investors about something like this, you fucked up, you trusted us, you want to invest, or you want to get washed out. Because this is going to zero. So I think it doesn't put any more money in.

It will rationalize the business, and they could turn it into a $3 or $5 billion business. So they could actually pull this off. Whereas Uber is still in consensual hallucination with the marketplace that it's worth $30 or $40 billion. It's not.

So they have no choice but to try and continue the heroin, to continue the ayahuasca trip, right? And continue to grow like crazy. So Dara Costa Shahi can't pretend, can't move, bust, and move to profitability, because that would involve substantially slowing growth. Raising prices.

Raising prices. Pulling out of certain cities where Uber just doesn't work. Paying their drivers more. Paying drivers minimum wage.

So to a certain extent, we as blessed with a bit of a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And we could, in fact, emerge from this and be a nice little company. $3 to $5 billion valuation, which is not bad. Whereas Uber has painted itself into a corner.

And until the stock declines 60%, 80%, which will happen over the next 24 months, it won't have the burning platform to make the requisite changes it needs to make and become a profitable, rational company. Right. So one of the things that I might dispute with WeWork, I think these things have a trend cycle. I used to cover retail.

I remember the trendy retailers used to, oh, they always say we can fix it. But ultimately, it loses its attraction by its constituents, which would be millennial, small businesses, and startups. And it's easy to compete. There's no moats for WeWork.

It has sort of weird, shitty wallpaper and beer. It's a really good beer, though. Okay, fine. But why would you go there over something, except if they have convenient places where you want to set up offices at prices that are decent and things?

It's like an exercise club. That's what it reminds me of. It's like an equinox, essentially. And so why would you not shift?

I think there's going to be empty WeWorks all over the world. I think it's over. So if there are empty WeWorks all over the world, what they've done is the company's been structured similar to what hotels do. So at the Four Seasons, a Toronto company, a fantastic company, the Four Seasons doesn't actually only own a couple of their hotels because owning hotels is a terrible business.

So they find wealthy people who are excited about owning a Four Seasons the same way you're excited about owning a Ferrari dealership, and they put all the capital risk on them, and they take, I don't know, 6% to 8% of the top line. It's a fantastic business. What they also do is they ring fence the businesses by creating what's called an SPE, a special purpose entity, meaning that if the WeWork in Toronto on King Street goes out of business, they can declare bankruptcy of that SPE and walk away from that landlord. And this is interesting, and that is the next story zone we will be the blast zone.

In other words, we's at ground zero and it's going to get fried, go from $50 billion to zero. But who just kind of gets burned and who gets leukemia in 20 years in terms of the rings out from the blast zone that is the disaster that is we. And one of those blast zones, two or three degrees, will be the commercial real estate market in New York where they're the largest tenant, in Chicago where they're the second largest tenant, because we could technically start cherry picking and just walking away. And the deal they have with folks is they say, okay, we'll agree to a 10-year lease deal, but you need to put $3 million in TIs into this floor in terms of reclaimed wood and beautiful paneling and built-in beer taps, whatever it does.

So you can see some real estate owners take a real bath here, because it's not the individual properties that are cross-collateralized by the parent company. So they won't be empty, they'll be shut down. Yeah, I think shut down. And I think what will be interesting to see is if they get the money back from Adam Neumann, the $700 million.

I don't know how you get it back. I don't know how you decide the problem. There'll be lawsuits. I don't see anything good here.

I think everyone's going to do it. So Adam Neumann sold $700 million in stock. But you should buy some on the IPO. Yeah, exactly.

Before it comes to the secondaires. I don't know, there's enough of a disaster here. But we'll see what happens here. I think more interestingly, I was just going to ask what our next company is, our next company to needlessly attack.

Next thing? No, you know what? We do a public friggin' service. You're welcome on WeWork, by the way.

Uber seems to be, you've been trying really hard to get a Tesla. It's not working. He may be Jesus. So what, an odd Jesus, but there you have it.

What company is it? Uber? It seems like Uber. You're sort of getting a little head of steam about Uber going on.

Yeah, but we've been talking about this a long time. Flash lift. Ride hailing makes no sense. Uber's a great company, probably also worth $5 to $10 billion, just now $30 to $40.

Global Brand is probably the first and the last brand of the global affluence see when they come and leave the city. It has great technology. I don't know how many of you, as much as I criticize Uber. Uber changed my life.

I really do love, I love the service. So there is something there just at the valuation, the valuation that you see it as. But it can never be an economically sound business. Yeah, the raised prices, the pull out of two-thirds of the cities, they're going to be forced to pay people a living wage and stop being in the business of exploitation and being in the business of actual transportation.

I mean, that's the problem with tech right now, is its core competence is the exploitation of workers as opposed to trying to liberate us and put us on the moon. And that's become their new core competence, whereas you have 24,000 mostly white, mostly college-educated people at HQ dividing the value of Airbus, but our 4 million driver partners are making less than minimum wage. And when we say driver partner, that's Latin or American for no health insurance, no minimum wage protection, no dignity. And things have finally, again, there's always a tension between capital and labor.

Things have gone so far back to capital in the United States that we're starting to see. I think communities kick in and people say, all right, enough already. Just stop it. And hopefully Uber's ground zero in California.

You want to talk about some of those things? California has AB5. Are you all aware of AB5? They passed a law against Ubers and Lyfts, contractor workers, where they treat them like employees.

And this is a big topic for our dreamy politician, Gavin Newsom, who looks a little like Justin Trudeau. He does. He's a governor of California, and right now he's in a war with the Trump administration over a number of things. California's really leading the way on privacy legislation, on emissions, on – they made a separate deal with the auto manufacturers to fight the Trump rollbacks.

And also AB5, which is the first really significant piece of legislation, talking about gig workers, especially in tech businesses, which they're used indiscriminately all over the place, as employees deserving of benefits, deserving of rights, instead of treating them like the chattel that they've been treated like. And so it was a real shot across the bow of those companies. It's not just Uber and Lyft. It's lots of them.

And so Postmates. It just goes to all their businesses. And it'll be interesting, because this is something – I call them Governor Newsom. Gavin and I have talked about a lot for years and years.

The idea that we have to have a new designation for workers. It's been something he's talked about for a much longer time than I think people realize. And so what is a worker today, I think, is a really important question. Yeah, the gig economy.

I just immediately – I kind of lost – the idea of Gavin Newsom and Trudeau in the same room. I think they should – we should abscond with their children and invade Australia. I think that would be the perfect army of handsome, smart people. All right, all right.

Let's talk about Canadian companies. Can we talk about Shopify? Shopify, all right. Oh, my God.

All right, let's do something positive. Oh, my God. How do you say Canadian? Gangster.

Yeah, all right. Gangster, right? What an incredible company. By the way – What do you do?

Own stock? What's going on here? All right. I own stock.

Tell me why you love this Shopify. I own stock on Amazon, which is bad for the planet, bad for the world, and an incredible – And good for South LA. Okay, all right. I have no desire to be a professor in tie-dye barking at the moon.

I'm on – All right, so it's Shopify. So Shopify. I love it so. So this is so interesting.

The threats to companies, the dragon slayers will never come from where you think they're going to come from. And the idea – so they have filled – Shopify is this incredible company, as I can see. They have filled this white space where basically Amazon tells every brand and third-party seller where you're partner. And the reality is Amazon partners with brands and third-party sellers the way of virus partners with a host.

And that is it always ends up, you know, well for one of them. And Amazon has now got this terrible reputation as a terrible partner. So there's this white space of, okay, who could be an e-commerce platform and actually be our partner? And that is ship stuff in our own boxes.

Give us our data. Provide features and services, but we kind of own the customer and the data set. And that's Shopify. And the growth has been unbelievable.

And then Shopify is now off their heels and onto their toes. One of the first few companies that's actually landing counterpunches on Amazon and spend a billion bucks to build out their own fulfillment network so they could do 48-hour delivery. So this is – it's really interesting. We thought that the thing that was going to come after Amazon was going to be out of D.C.

Right. Instead, it could potentially be out of Canada. So it's really – and Shopify is probably, I would argue right now, other than regulation and maybe ethics, the greatest existential threat to Amazon is Shopify. And it's just – it's exceptionally exciting.

I've been this excited about Shopify since I was sending text messages on my Blackberry about a Canadian company. I really miss those delicious keys. Who misses those keys? We all do.

Oh, that was lovely. Yeah. But Shopify is a really exciting company. Super exciting company.

Yeah, it is. It's interesting. The idea of where you go in the size of these sort of big open spaces – I just did a podcast yesterday with the CEO of Super Awesome, which is not a gaming company, but makes software to help companies create kid-friendly websites and things like that with identification, with moderation, with community, so that it hues to laws all around the world, like COPPA in the United States or GDPR Kids in Europe. I don't know what the law in Canada is, but I'm sure every country seems to have a law around kids and online.

And so just recently, the FTC fined Google – it was couch change, but it was about $150 million, I think it was maybe something like that – and also TikTok and the way they market to kids and also protections of kids. And there's this big open space of a company that can ride through the idea of creating a video streaming service, and besides offering software to lots of media companies and tech companies that are in this space in order to comply, they're now going to create a video streaming service by taking all the influencers on YouTube, who YouTube has ignored, essentially, that are in kids' areas and not protected, and pull them over to this new platform. So I think there's all these open spaces with these companies. Essentially, YouTube is created for adults and has kids' stuff on there and hasn't done enough.

And so everything in Silicon Valley – this CEO I thought was really smart – was talking about every single thing in Silicon Valley is created for adults and not for kids or other constituencies, and other constituencies are growing like crazy. And so there's an interesting idea, like Shopify or Super Awesome, is that there's a space where these companies have failed miserably, and to take advantage of that space, I think, is a great business opportunity. And there's tons of them out there, whether it's against Google or Facebook or anything else. So the question is, can someone compete in a smaller area against YouTube and create a really significant business – same thing with social networks, the same things with ad platforms, online ad platforms.

And so, you know, especially given that right now people really – tech companies are not the favorite – even though they're saying it's only the media saying this, but I think most people feel very uneasy about tech companies, such as how you all feel about Google making a smart city. Silence. I'll give you an outsider's view. I actually think it would be a really interesting experiment, and I think it would be a great thing.

I think everyone would learn a lot. They have the capital. They're very good at what they do. But here's the problem.

It's from Google. It's like – do you know the Facebook portal, the camera they were trying to put in? It's actually – it's a wonderful product. It has real innovation.

The problem is it's brought to you from a guy who puts a piece of tape over his camera. But he wants you to put a camera in your home. And these companies have lost so much trust and so much faith. The guy running Google Sidewalks, like Dan Dockter, is a really high-integrity, thoughtful person.

That's the kind of person you would want overseeing massive capital investments in your city. He's the deputy mayor of New York and he did a great job. But the problem is it's from Google. And people have just – they start using terms like surveillance capitalism.

So I wonder if it's going to be DOA. I don't know where it is here. But it creates such hostility. And going back to your notion around kids and white spaces, I would like to think that there are white spaces and opportunities that great companies like Shopify move in and take advantage of.

But the problem is, is that for the most part, what you see is for every Shopify, there's a thousand acorns or startups trying to fill those white spaces. They get crushed. They can't get funding because they're competing against a monopoly. If you look at seed funding across our economy, the categories that get no seed funding are the ones that compete with the four because no one wants to fund an e-commerce, a tech hardware, a search engine, or a social company right now because no one wants to be the VC partner who says, yeah, I tried to compete against Amazon.

So you have a lack of funding. Then you have companies that are incredibly repatriate as competitors. And we'll put out – as soon as they see anyone, it's any threat. They either try and spend them to death, legislate them out of business, or they acquire them.

And then they put in onerous non-competes and non-solicitations so the innovators and employees can't go do anything. So the branch either grows for their own company or it gets cauterized. So there's really – I see only a few things we can do. The first is Andy trusts.

We talk about this a lot. And this is what I think Canada – and it's weird to say this is an American who owns all of their stocks – that the other thing that could happen here that could really foam in a conversation around better behavior and better checks is if a country banned one or more of these platforms. They said, you know, we have an important election coming up, and there's evidence that Facebook, you have in place the requisite safeguards to ensure our elections aren't weaponized by a foreign government that has an agenda here. Hey, YouTube, we're sort of fond of this thing called kids.

And we've decided that the more time they spend on YouTube and the more time they spend on social media, the more prone they are to be admitted to an emergency room for self-cutting and self-harm. So you're smarter than us. We can't figure this out. We're just going to ban you.

We're just going to see what it's like to be in Canada without Facebook for a year. And then shit gets real. And then they sit down and say, okay, the jig is up. Let's figure this shit out.

Because right now, they've fomented this false narrative that these problems are really difficult and we're proud of the progress we've made. Oh, trust me, you kick their asses out, they'll figure it out. So any country, in my view, that has the backbone, I think this is important. It could be a smaller nation.

It could be Uruguay or someone. But until someone says, you know what, we just don't have the artillery to go toe-to-toe with you and figure this out, these problems are complex. So we're moving to an outlet. It's also the money, too.

I, again, introduced this to the commissioner for the FTC, the commissioner for the Federal Election Commission. In the United States, we don't have a quorum for our Federal Election Commission, so they can't act on any campaign finance, for example, which is another story. But the FTC has $300 million in budget and 1,000 people against the whole U.S. business environment.

What's the budget for the FTC? $300 million. Okay, so versus Adam Neumann sold $700 million in stock. That's America.

Yeah, welcome to America. And it used to have 1,800 people, and now it's 1,100. So it's a really, you know, you talk about government growing, it is not growing. It's actually contracting.

And so what's really interesting, what you're saying, and what you're saying about Google maybe has ideas, here's my problem. Why are, why, for example, why does Mark Zuckerberg know about education just because he can give someone a billion dollars? I don't know why we take, I'm with Anand Geergaard on this. Why do we have, let's just tax them and have our elected officials decide on policy rather than billionaires.

I just, I just don't think they, and they don't know how, you think they know how to run things. What is their, do they take courses in city management? Do they take courses in, they just don't have any expertise. What they have is money and an enormous amount of arrogance that they can build a better city.

Now, they can work in conjunction with cities to help them, but there's no evidence that they're good at anything except what they do. And frankly, they're not, they need to mind their piece and do their own business, fix their own problems. And what they tend to do, and this is very typical if you know them, is they're over here making search, and then suddenly they're like, now space. And you're like, fix search.

And you're like, but space. And you're like, what? Like, they have, they have, they're not interested in the thing they do. It's like me suddenly deciding, you know, hey, I think it'd be really good to sing and dance in a Hollywood musical.

Like, no, this would be bad. I'm not even good on TikTok. Like, this is just, it's just, it's a mentality that they could, you never see, let me just say, you never see Steve Jobs doing this. And I, I, you just, he wouldn't all of a sudden say, I think I'll fix it.

He's making, he's just selling a freaking iPhone. That's what he does. And he, you know, he was actually not very, even though he's a marketing romantic, you know, they just sold iPhones, or they sold AirPods, or whatever they were doing. And, and that's, it's just like, I just, this mentality that they have to do something else, and they have better solutions, I think is false.

Like, how different are they than any other, they're looking for tax gimmies, they're trying to take development money from the city. This is taxpayer money, and they don't deserve it. They shouldn't have it. And if they're so, they did it in San Francisco, trying to wire the whole city.

They tried to do that, make the whole thing wireless. That didn't work, because they got bored of it. The same thing, at one point, Larry and Sergey wanted to put chairlifts in San Francisco to make it easier to go up the hills. And literally, Mayor Newsom, at the time, had a meeting with him.

And I remember, like, why are you meeting with him over this insane fucking idea? And it was because they were the Google founders. Like, why did they get to be, there'd be a lot of crazy people in San Francisco. They don't get to have lunch with Gavin Newsom to decide to put chairlifts in San Francisco.

Now, thank goodness we don't have them. It's a bit of a, we talk about this about the Pablo Escobar effect. And that is, Pablo Escobar, recap it in this country, was bad for the world, but then decided to build parks, right? I'm more important to Colombia than the government or the rule of law, and I'm going to build parks.

And I remember, at the end of the dialogue, I remember being in the 11th grade and seeing the space shuttle brought to you by, in my opinion, the greatest source of good in history, the American middle class and technology. And you saw the space shuttle, and it had this funky arm with a big Canadian leaf on it. Remember that? My guess is, pretty soon in America, we'll have Elon Musk's picture on the space shuttle, but something tells me Canadians would never put whoever the CEO of Shopify on their space zone.

Yeah. You know, in Canada, and in general, across what I'll call, I don't know, you guys, let's be honest, it doesn't come as a run, you cut the tops off with trees, and that is your taxes are higher, and no one likes taxes. But in the U.S., we have the mother of all welfare queens, and it does try into Toronto. I just thought it was so cute how you thought you had a shot at HQ2.

Yeah. That was just so adorable, Toronto. We definitely knew you did not. That was so adorable.

No. The proposal you put in, and sending them maple syrup, and come to Toronto, and have great universities. Was there maple syrup? Do you ever think, do you ever think a man in the midst of a nuclear midlife crisis who spends 300 days a year in rainy Seattle is going to decide he needs to spend more time in the winter in Toronto?

Do you think a guy whose biggest threat to his wealth is anti-trust regulation is going to spend money in a place where there are no American elected representatives? Literally, and this is kind of indicative, and you were a victim of this, he was always coming to New York. Because guess what? And I relate to this.

A 54-year-old man with a little bit of money in his pocket wants to roll in New York, especially when he's about to be single. Because when Jeff Bezos goes into any city in America, of $150 billion, he's the wealthiest man in the city. When he rolls into New York with $150 billion, he's the wealthiest man in the city and the sexiest man alive. Yeah.

He looks good, though. He's jacked. He's good. He looks good.

All right. He's jacked. Anyway, don't tell Toronto the truth about that. Okay, sorry.

We're not interested in you. It's not you, it's them. Anyway, we're going to get to winners and losers in a second. But you know what?

I have this whole page on Trump, but let's just ignore that asshole today. And let's throw in Netanyahu and Boris Johnson. Like, honestly, Boris Johnson. He's like Trump, but not Teflon.

What is the opposite of Teflon? Like, everything Trump should get, this guy gets, and he keeps losing, and he still is an asshole. Like, did you see that speech in front of Parliament? Astonishing.

Ugh, you're all, the Supreme Court's wrong. You're all wrong. I was like, you know what, sir? In any case, I'm not going to do anything except that Nancy Pelosi, I think, did a fascinating job of control.

And then if you do so favor and listen to her speech, I think she's really good at what she does. We'll see where it ends up. There's some testimony today. But I do think, it depends on how this goes.

Obviously, he may be impeached by the House, but the Senate will not, Moscow Mitch is not going to take him out. When in Ukraine it pours, right? Yeah, exactly. Did you just say, when in Ukraine it pours?

Boom! How much we love that. Come on. Poor guy.

There was a great story. Everyone in the back, come on up, get the ducks in love. Yeah, come on in. All right, Scott, let's take a quick break for some good old-fashioned American ads.

That's great. We're ruining the world. We'll be back in just a minute with more Pivot Live from Toronto. I'm Maria Sharapova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.

Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. So we are 250 years into this American experiment, and I say it's going okay.

I give us like a C+. There is no perfect past, but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are going to human. That's what we do. I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand those principles to include more people.

What's going to determine the next 250 years of America? And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve? Okay, so I'm just going to be a jerk here because I'm a historian, so we have to have a prologue explaining, you know, we the people. You know, I just don't remember from Schoolhouse Rock.

We the people, I don't know the former war for the union, I establish justice. What is it? Ensure domestic tranquility? So you're talking about a foundational document, so I'm building a document that will protect American democracy.

That's this week on America Actually. Here, I'm in the mood for some health care. I'm in the mood for the American dream. I know, let's get right back Yeah, the creator and star of what I think is the best series of the last few years and I'm playing Monday Morning Quarterback.

I've loved this for a while. Top winner of the Emmys, four words, best comedy. And it also indicates kind of an interesting shift and that is Amazon Prime is finally starting to make inroads against Netflix. So they find it's time to deal with her.

20 million bucks a year to create more stuff. And Jeff Bezos said, bring me my Game of Thrones and instead of Dragon you got a dame, but it's working for him. And Amazon is now in, I think about 100 million homes versus 150 for Netflix. People with Amazon Prime watch five hours a week versus 10 for Netflix.

But it just shows how incredibly powerful infinitely cheap capital is when you can go into an adjacent industry and start monetizing it as you said across paper towels. But I think it's probably a pretty negative forward-looking indicator for Netflix because just a quick micro class here. If you think about all the companies that have gotten past three or four hundred billion dollars in market cap, they have several things in common, but one of them is they're vertical. They build and manufacture their own products, they distribute it and they control the end distribution.

Google controls your Android phone. Apple has their own stores now in addition to their own phone. They're totally vertical. Amazon obviously totally vertical.

Controls up until you can even put stuff in your home now with Ring. And Netflix is not vertical. They don't control the TV. They don't control the screen.

So I think an interesting acquisition would be for Netflix to acquire Sony because not only would they get a lot of original content reverse integrating them back into content creation, they would get owned and operated platforms in the form of Sony televisions and Sony Playstations and they could control the distribution, if you will. That's never going to happen. Not going to happen. Why not?

Reed Hastings, but move along. Reed Hastings won't do it. Well, you're talking about a Broadway show. Give me Netflix acquiring Sony.

I mean, it's unrealistic and it's unrealistic. So you think the win is Phoebe with this idea. The winner is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. My winner this week is whistleblowers.

I love a whistleblower, as you might imagine, but I like whistleblowers who do this legally and are protected by our governments. I think it's critical to the function of democracy that whistleblowers have protections. And in two cases, MIT, the Media Lab, I actually just did an interview with Whistleblower Aid, which is the group that helped Ron and Farrow find this whistleblower at MIT, this woman who was in the development department and was able to, legally, bring forward emails that, of course, implicated a lot of people at MIT in taking money from Jeffrey Epstein and hiding it. I thought that was a great system to work in the right way.

And then secondly, in this case, this whistleblower is also involved in this, in the Ukrainian whistleblower, the intelligence officer, who is trying very hard to remain anonymous. I have 14 seconds where Trump tweets his name. I'm worried about that. Or his or her name.

I don't know if it's a woman. I think that whistleblowing is critically important in this age, especially when there's so much digital footprints for these people. The Trump mission happens to be completely incompetent in how it just writes everything down. Now we are going to lean on the Ukraine or the Ukrainian president.

There was a good joke. It's a nice country you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. It was sort of this monster mentality that they just like, and releasing that phone call, just even the small amounts they released, it's literally like, yeah, I did the murder.

Here, let me show you the body. It's really interesting, but it starts with a whistleblower. So I think whistleblowers are the best people ever when they do it in the correct way. I like that.

Yeah, and my loser was going to be founders where I talked about I'll pick a new one and I'll couch it in something positive. I do think, I'd like to think that the immunities are kicking in across a number of dimensions. In a weird way, the immunities kicked in around disclosure, around we and said, we're sick of private companies foisting these unicorn feces on tourists at the startup zoo in the retail markets and we're not going to allow you to inflict that sort of economic loss on retail investors. I'd also like to think that their immunities are kicking in around what I call soft fascism and that is leaders in Europe and in the U.S.

who have decided to bypass Congress, demonize immigrants and effectively not condemn violence against their political enemies and the repudiation of Boris Johnson where 23 of his own party defected to the other side I think is a very hopeful sign and I'd like to think in America the immunities are kicking in as well. So my loser is the soft fascism that passes for what is leadership in some what traditionally have been a great democracy so my loser is soft fascism and I know it makes no sense. Help me, bring me back Toronto. Shopify.

Soft fascism. Soft fascism. I shouldn't have drank this early. Okay, listen.

Soft fascism sounds like a meal of some sort. Well, we're such wimps in the U.S. I go on Fox television. We're such wimps as progressive.

I go on Fox News because I consider myself part of the resistance and I go behind any lines and because I call for the breakup of Dick Tech they introduce me no joke as a socialist. And when you say that it's a bad thing. Seven of the ten happiest countries in the world have one thing in common. They're socialists.

And by the way, we're the top schools to do the math. We used to be about upper mobility and middle class kids like us instead of upper mobility about crazy upper mobility about rich people. So the notion that you not only have happiness from what you can get but happiness from fear from what can be taken away from you. Right now in America and you don't suffer from this oh, your wife has lung cancer which also means you're going bankrupt.

Right? So the notion that we have some sort of we have modern societies that have capitalism where you can be rich you can have the spoils of being great at what you do but at the same time you take away these immense disastrous fear and anxiety from people that's something that we should all aspire to. So we are I think learning and this notion that they can call us socialists well, you know what boss I'm fine, call me a socialist I'm going to start calling the far right what it is that have taken over some of these governments and that is the fascists. Fascism is a refusal to condemn violence.

It's a demonization of immigrants and it's extreme nationalism. What better describes the administration overseeing where I live right now or some of the very dangerous things that's going on in Europe? So fine, I'm a socialist you're a fascist let's get to it. Alright, okay, wow you're running for office?

That's Scott Calloway. I'm just a democrat we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping I hope for the best I hope for the best with your thoughts so Zuckerberg in our brains I thought Facebook dating was bad enough so I'm finding this to be problematic that Facebook keeps marching into areas that I think again they should work on their business and they have been they've been trying to fix their problems for sure but I know they have to keep growing but it seems a little desperate to move from Libra which is going to see enormous problems all over the globe and of course it's only their own wallet even though they say it's an independent it's just not it's a link to Facebook but they're going into Libra or they're going into dating and now they're going into mind control or mind controlling whatever I don't think there's a difference I find it fascinating on one thing that they still continue to be this ambition and a little bit desperate because they just can't you know their business is doing rather well like really make their business as good as it could be I wish they would do that instead of you know it feels like this will make a great press release this will be and then it'll go nowhere it reminds me of when Google started doing like 53 moonshots all at once when I wish they would just fix their search on YouTube and things like that so I think Zuckerberg in our brains is my fail of the week yes absolutely you have to quickly make a prediction okay so I love stocks in the markets Peloton's my public today it may already be public but in fact typically what happens is when a company goes public and has it does really poorly fewer companies get out and it casts a pall across the entire market so the markets are typically not only rear view looking but they can only see 5 or 10 feet behind them so when a company has a tremendously poor IPO it literally cuts the number of companies that can get out in half and when a company has a great IPO a flurry of companies comes to the market and I would describe this right now we're in a bit of a chill not only from what's happened with Uber but the we company going from 50 billion to zero has put it chill so Peloton is going out today and it's a really interesting company it has 45 points of gross margin on its bikes these are Apple hardware like margins it has a recurring revenue stream it does in fact they managed to unbundle this app this paid for app from the bike which is impressive it's growing like crazy it's also losing money it's going out I think it's going to decline in value but it'll hold so I think it's going to be off 10 to 30% in the next 6 months and hold we also have a Hollywood agency a famous Hollywood agency going public in the next couple weeks Endeavor which is this incredible collection of assets but it's not entirely clear the synergy there and the valuation they're trying to go at so I think what we're about to see is companies these great companies get out but they're going to recognize a 10 to 20% decline in value but then they will hold we're not going to see the 50 billion to zero so my prediction and I realize this isn't that enthralling is that the stocks that come out over the course of the next 3 to 6 months people are going to be yeah people are going to be a little bit more measured it's going to be a little bit more PG-13 and we'll see a small check back but they won't collapse the way we saw we collapse and this year will be a lot of IPOs supposedly Palantir, Airbnb Pinterest perhaps Pinterest is already out and doing quite well actually Pinterest is probably best performing of the tech guys but the big one will be Airbnb Airbnb will be the big one can we end? yes we can can we end?

alright so here's the thing capitalism with a conscience freedom from fear being taken away from you a series of good universities they're affordable for the middle class the American dream is alive the problem is it's alive in Canada you are you are such a suck up to the Canadians oh my god Big Dog is smelling your butt he likes what he's finding alright you are our brothers in arms you are an inspiration for us and if my dad reminds me every Sunday night you have the fastest front line in hockey thank you Canada thank you come to America we are with you alright thank you very much this is Pivot live from Toronto I'm Tara Swisher who are you? you have to say I'm Scott Galloway and I'm Scott Galloway alright thank you very much everyone that's our show what do you think Scott? should we be up and moved to Canada and get gay married? what do you think?

I'm in I'm in you know every marriage is a triumph of hope over experience and I'm trying to be more hopeful so let's get on it between the two of us we're coming up on 9 or 10 aren't we? exactly anyway thanks Canada we love you we do today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis and Eric Johnson Eric Anderson is Pivot's executive producer thanks also to Rebecca Castro Drew Burrows and Nishat Kerwa thanks to the people of Toronto and Elevate for having us Scott do you want to thank the people of Toronto? yes thank you so much go Leafs make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast if you liked this week's episode leave us a review thanks for listening to Pivot from Box Media we'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business you you