Pivot · Jun 27, 2025

Mamdani's Victory, Iran Nuclear Damage Dispute, and Fed Chair Succession

Automatic transcript of the end of the episode, from 49:16. Speakers are labeled by software and may contain errors. Highlighted passages are Scott’s predictions.

Scott Galloway · 49:16 Is an industry that we talk about as if it's important, and it's not. It employs a decent number of people. The ad industry played a really important role in the advancement of women. It was one of the initial industries to have female CEOs, Shelley Lazarus. The character that Peggy plays in Mad Men was actually a really important woman. It was one of the industries that figured out and elevated women to their natural ability as opposed to... Let me put it this way. There was... The glass ceiling was still there, but it was higher in the communications industry. It's been an important industry for The United States, but these companies need to consolidate just to survive. The idea of... I can't imagine a worse job than being a salesperson for x right now. Kara Swisher · 50:03 Yeah. Well, speaking of which, what do you think about this idea that the FTC is... This guy who runs the FTC is such a clown. It's just ridiculous. He's like a he's like a a errand boy for Trump from daddy Trump. Scott Galloway · 50:14 Not for Trump. For Musk. Musk's hands is so far up his ass. If he opens his mouth, you can see Elon's palm right now. The notion that you are Ew. The notion that you are... What about that that black hole on fire? Kara Swisher · 50:27 Black hole. Scott Galloway · 50:28 Come visit us in our web. If if if I was on a honeymoon with Jeff Bezos, you would absolutely show up. I have no doubt. Okay. Anyways, the the... It's insane. Yeah. You're saying free speech is your ability to say things, but it's not free speech when you decide you don't wanna advertise on a platform? Kara Swisher · 50:46 Yeah. They're allowed to care if they have lunch and all decide to do it together. Who cares? You know, here... Linda Linda Yaccarino, make a better platform. Don't have a shitty platform. Elon, sell better cars. Sell better cars. Perhaps you will do well. Otherwise, you know, step off letting advertisers do what they want. And by the way, they're already, as you say, suffering. They should do whatever it takes to do well. Correct? Right? Scott Galloway · 51:11 Well, okay. So the actual law is a boycott would only be illegal if the companies involved colluded with each other to obtain lower prices. I mean, that's not what they're doing. No. They're just basically saying shitty Kara Swisher · 51:21 platform. Platform. Scott Galloway · 51:21 They're basically saying as a service to their to their advertisers, this is not a safe place. You need to be careful here. And until they make it more brand safe, you shouldn't advertise here. That is entirely that is entirely legal. Kara Swisher · 51:33 Yeah. Anyway, one interesting case, though, I have to say. I was really struck by both Meta and Anthropic struck legal wins against the book authors this week. The two companies faced similar suits. In both cases, federal judge ruled that the training of AI models on copyrighted books was fair use and transformative. However, both judges noted the case were limited in scope. The judge in Meta's case said the plaintiffs, which included Sarah Silverman, quote, made the wrong arguments and failed to prove that copying harmed the market for authors. And then Sam Altman, on, my friend Casey Newton and Kevin Roose's podcast, Hard Fork, pushed back really hard on the New York Times and saying, like the New York Times, but they're wrong about this. So there's some real aggression here on these legal wins. I I I love to know what you thought about this too. It's... They were... It's super... Copyright is super complex. And I guess one judge said if you buy the book, you... You've done enough. If you actually buy the book instead of steal it, I guess. Scott Galloway · 52:26 I was I was disappointed and surprised. And I thought, okay. We've said for a while, this is a moment in time where creators need to really circle the wagons around their IP and at least participate in some of the extraordinary shareholder gains that this industry is garnering by not actually creating content, but crawling content and then using machine to to offer it up in interesting ways. And so this, to me, was disappointing and and surprising. And I don't understand the mechanics of the legal ruling, but I would have hoped that they would have pushed back and said... You know, I was hoping that there'd just be more respect for IP because at some point, this just reminds me very much of back to the old days when Google figured out a way to crawl data and give the content providers 2¢ by sending them traffic they couldn't monetize, and they get 98¢ on the dollar for curating information in a really interesting way that other people had had created. If you look at all of the models here, it's just all moving towards an asset light model where you don't create content. You you crawl it, slice it, dice it, serve it. And at some point, that's gonna be bad for the overall economy when there's just no money in the business of fact checking and content creation. And, anyways, I was disappointed to see this ruling. What do you think? Kara Swisher · 53:49 Yeah. I I need to learn more about it. Like, Yeah. Scott Galloway · 53:51 Don't understand it. Kara Swisher · 53:52 I don't understand it because if they are able to do this, it's a real it's a real problem for authors. There's a great piece if people wanna read in the Atlantic this week about AI, upending publishing, which I thought was really smart. So I want... I need to... We need to learn more about this because it's an area we should know more about. But, yeah, I was surprised by both these rulings, but, they're doing little jigs over at Meta, I guess. But it's not over. I'll tell you that. It's not over for OpenAI. It's not over for any of them in terms of legal struggles they'll have a little bit. Alright. One more quick break. We'll be back for predictions. [Ad break] — Predictions segment begins — Kara Swisher · 56:23 Okay, Scott. Let's hear your prediction. What is your prediction? Scott Galloway · 56:26 I went back and looked through, the headlines kind of the few days following nine eleven or our entry into Iraq or Afghanistan. And other than the Bin Laden raid where the headlines ended up to be... The first twenty four, forty eight, and seventy two years ended up to actually being quite accurate. In every other instance, what comes out six or twelve months later is that we... What came out twenty four hours later was just not that accurate. And so my prediction isn't that interesting. It's just that everything we think we know about these attacks in Iran, we don't know. And, also, I have never felt a lack of of certainty or confidence in the information coming out of our intelligence community and out of the White House, because it feels as if their priorities aren't giving the American public the truth, but just signaling macho. And I don't know if we're gonna find out that, okay, all of the nuclear material was actually transported out. Or Kara Swisher · 57:28 That's the worrisome thing. That's the one they are... That they... One of the things they're not doing is say... They're... They are sort of trying to punt on that because I think that's what happened. Like, if you look at a lot of the headlines, they won't say anything about whether the stuff was moved. Scott Galloway · 57:42 Yeah. I I interviewed this really interesting guy from the Carnegie Endowment, Kareem Sajipur, I believe his name is. Military intervention in The Middle East, the only thing you know about it is it has just so many unintended consequences. And this whole thing feels so, to date, just so performative on behalf... You know? We attack. It feels very performative. Iran responds in what feels like a very performative way. So it's it's kind of a nonprediction prediction, and that is whatever you think happened, the only thing I'm fairly certain on, that's not what happened. It's just Kara Swisher · 58:20 Do you feel like you're in a Mission Impossible movie where the where the uranium is on the move and Ethan Hunt has to get I Scott Galloway · 58:27 feel like I'm in the Truman Show. Kara Swisher · 58:28 Oh, see, I feel like Ethan Hunt's on the hunt for the uranium that's somewhere in a tiny ball that he just puts in his pocket. Scott Galloway · 58:34 But think about think about this situation. It's an 86 year old theocrat who knows he could be killed at any moment in a bunker. They've had to shut down the Internet because they can't communicate with each other. Mhmm. And at the same time, we have Netanyahu who is running to stay out of prison, and he's decided the way he does that is to be on a constant war footing, pulverizing, and creating what is arguably, at this point, unnecessary death and destruction in Gaza that gets... Likely played a role in the mayoral election in New York. Kara Swisher · 59:05 I know. Scott Galloway · 59:06 I mean, the... The fact that we probably wouldn't have gone into Iran to bomb these nuclear sites had the Ukrainian army been... Not been so successful against defanging Russia who would have still been in Syria and creating Kara Swisher · 59:18 twenty more four hours, Scott. Scott Galloway · 59:20 I mean Kara Swisher · 59:20 Twenty four hours. Scott Galloway · 59:21 The game theory here in the scenarios are just so crazy. And what I wonder... I know the military does this. Is there anyone with, like, a big whiteboard Mhmm. In the defense department or a secretary that is actually gaming all of this out? Do they actually think through this stuff? Kara Swisher · 59:38 Gaming. He couldn't play, like, war. Scott Galloway · 59:41 It was a nonfiction. Actually, that wasn't good. I'll I'll do another quick one. My... I'll do the... I'll repeat the prediction. Reed Hastings going on the board of Anthropic. We are going to have an anthropic Netflix joint venture that will compete with TikTok. Kara Swisher · 59:55 I like it. I like it. Yeah. I saw some other, analysts note that that TikTok's gotta reach down into the YouTube... In the in the TikTok and YouTube tick... Categories. They've gotta start really... You know, the growth isn't gonna come from their regular business, but they have to really do both YouTube and small stuff. And I thought that was... I was like, oh, Scott said that already. I already knew that. Anyway, good one. Alright. We wanna hear from you. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com/pivot to submit a question for the show or call 85551 Elsewhere in the Karen Scott universe this week, this week on prof g conversation, Scott spoke with Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of the Eurasia Group about Iran, the role president Trump plays, and what could come next on the global stage. Let's listen to a clip. — Predictions segment ends — Guest · 1:00:41 The backdrop on Trump is he's not gotten his deals done. He's really itching to make something happen. He wants to show that he can win on the international stage. And Iran suddenly was where he was putting a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of attention. So that's that's the background for him. The backdrop of Iran is that they have lost more influence both regionally and globally than pretty much anybody over the last year. Kara Swisher · 1:01:11 Interesting, except for Elon Musk. Okay. That's the show. Thanks for listening to Pivot. Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channels. We have a lot of YouTube channels, and we cross promote each other on all of them, whether it's the professor g one, on with Kara Swisher, or Pivot, which is a fantastic channel. We got lots of stuff in there for you. We'll be back next week. Scott, read us out. Scott Galloway · 1:01:32 Today's show is produced by Lara Naaman, Joey Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Kevin Oliver. Ernie and Troutt engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Neil Savaria, Dan Shalon, and Kate Gallagher. Yashak Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcast. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine nymag.com/pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. The wedding is going to span three days, Kara, because when you're worth 215,000,000,000, reception when you can have a small economic summit? That's no good. Venice is hosting Bezos where locals protest over tourism. It's like complaining about traffic while driving a monster truck to the complaint meeting. Kara Swisher · 1:02:17 Alright. On that, bye, everybody. See you next week. [Ad break]