A Podcast-Sized History of Tech (with Scott Galloway)

little Baritune Day. Yes, there was a point when I was small, but we weren't just reminiscing for old times sake. We were sharing the lessons our mom taught us, lessons that laid the foundation for how I see tech and citizen. My mom taught me to stand up for myself, to advocate for my own education, to question authority, and to wash my own damn clothes. But beyond that, she showed me that tech could help me citizen. And now that I'm grown, or at least mostly grown, I'm gonna take

it one step further. Tech has the potential to help us all citizen. Imagine a social media platform where people supported each other instead of tearing each other down, or a web browsing experience that doesn't assault you with advertising at every single page load. Or imagine just having control over your personal data instead of constantly hearing about some company losing it again. Unfortunately, we're nowhere near any of this.

Our tech landscape is dominated by a handful of wildly wealthy companies that in so many ways make it harder for us to citizen. How did we even get here, what happened along the way, and how do we fix it? I wanted to find find out. So today I'm going to retrace the defining moments of the tech industry, at least according to my definitions. I'm gonna see where we went wrong and try to figure out a path forward. I don't want to just address the problems. I want

to imagine a better future. And this task, Yo, it's a big one. So I brought someone along to help me out very ten day. First off, you are coming for my job, your guest hosting. I'm pivot. I know what you're up to. This is this is diplomacy right now. I'm like, if I have him on my pod that he won't feel the threat, so sharply, he won't feel the knife going in. Yeah, you and your good looks and your deep boys, brother that that you know. Sorry, sorry,

this job is taken. I'm Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at n y U Stern and co host of the Pivot podcast for Now. I've actually never met Scott in person. I mostly know him from his podcast with Kara Swisher, but I feel like I've got to know him. He's really fiery at this intersection of tech and business. Was there a moment that got you really

into this world? As an academic, you you hit a ceiling if you don't do research, And so I decided to do research on how technology disrupts traditional industries and then wrote a book and kind of made I don't say a living, but my I would say my star kind of rose. I mean if I called my star whatever it is. A dark moon on Pluto started getting some heat because I was talking a lot about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which became kind of bigger and bigger parts

of the economy. Yeah. I love this stuff. I'm interested in technology. I'm interested in society and to try and understand big tech has to understand everything from grocery to teen depression. It gives you a lot alattitude to talk about a lot of different things. Clearly, Scott gets it. I knew he'd be able to help me better understand the problem and also offer up some guidance and words

of wisdom. Big tech wasn't always a thing. Um, there was lots of little tech being connected, especially by the Internet. What do you recall as the early aspirations of this thing that is now dominating our lives in terms of connected in network technologies and the Internet. Well there was Intel and Microsoft, so there was sort of the Windtel world, and then now they seem kind of quaint compared to

the impact. You know, no one weaponized our elections using Microsoft word right that we know of, that we know of. Oh yes, I remember the Windtel world vividly. And you are this, Jennifer Andson and Matthew Perry. We're here to see Mr Bill Gates about a possible starring role in the video guide to Microsoft Window. It was n and the long awaited Windows had just hit the scene. And Scott is right, it was quaint compared to what we have now, But for me it represented possibility. Honestly, I

was obsessed. And when my big sister Belinda, who was a journalist at USA Today got the opportunity to have someone review Windows. Well, she gave me the best gift I could have dreamt of. The headline read teen says, program gives PC a Macintosh personality. Life was good. Your boy was in the paper. But it wasn't just Windows

that made notable. That same year brought us Craigslist, Match, dot com, eBay, and even a little bookseller that went by the name of Amazon dot com, Earth's biggest bookstore. You can't drop by, not in person anyway, for the customer, Amazon only exists on the computer screen. These soon to be Internet goliath were just little David's back then, and they've benefited from the dramatic increase of home computers, the rising curiosity in the world Wide Web that hit the

scene ever so slightly ahead of the curve. And while many of us were setting up our dating profiles and fighting with our roommates over who got to use the dial up, these tech David's we're seeing as just a bunch of quirky dudes innovating out of their garage. We ate that underdog story up, allowing these future giants to

fly under the radar. I think this gross fetishization. This idolatry of innovators has resulted in a lack of scrutiny or counterbalance because they're doing their job, So the government is meant to be a counterbalance and the government because individuals fetishize innovators and tech, so they all say, oh, it's innovators and our economy and our most productive citizens

and YadA, YadA, YadA. So there there they have gotten free rein If I said to my ten year old, you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want, you know, it would pretty much be occasionally to have a peanut butter sandwich, but for the most part it would just be you know, ice creams amwiches in Coca Cola. So there's just no guardrails. But at the time, I wasn't paying attention to all that. I was too busy starting

college at Harvard University. Yeah, there's no way to not say it and not sound like that dude who's dropping the Harvard thing. But if I don't say it, you could be like, why are you being mysterious about the college you went to? So, yeah, I went to Harvard University. Now, if you ask someone who met me in those first few months, They're likely gonna remember two things about me. First, my afro. It was huge and it was beautiful. Second

my four eight six d X two computer. Yeah, I was always on the computer, which, depending on the angle you were at, you might not see because of the afro. Now, one of my first campus jobs was as a computer user assistant a k a. Tech support, and we had a mission to bring the Internet to every dorm room. Basically, I set the stage from Mark Zuckerberg to launch Facebook nine years later. You're welcome Mark now where my share

is at. And long before Facebook even existed, I helped create and maintain an online community built around real life friendships. It was a small, simple email list of many of the black students in Harvest class, and it worked because we actually knew each other, We had something in common,

we lived among one another. We were actually friends, not Facebook friends, real friends, and that made this space safe for us to joke, to organize our politics, to organize our parties, even two more in the loss of some of our members, and none of us was in it for followers or likes or brand deals. It was real community powered by the Internet. In I graduated Harvard and I had the privilege of living through a brief moment

of technological hysteria. Why two K the year two thousand computer bug as a worldwide crisis special hardware stores, But the biggest sellers our ammunition, gun safes, kerosene lefts, and water jugs. But if you're looking for a generator, forget it. There are It's gonna be for a long time. It's gonna be a change. I think we're gonna be setting ourselves back to about side. It could quite literally trigger at the end of the world, depending on what nuclear

missiles think when that computer screens suddenly go blank. It's not Why two K is the first time that I can remember a collective pause about our faith in technology. It was this idea that the way we coded, literally the code that was in almost all of our systems, would implode because of a law error and lack of imagination and destroy us. Because the year changed over beyond

someone's expectations. And though the world didn't implode, the U. S Government did spend nearly a hundred billion dollars trying to fix the glitch, and this left many people with a permanently uneasy feeling about the future of tech. Yet at the same time, there was an emerging underground revolution of bloggers. Around the turn of the twenty one century, the term blog entered the mainstream, along with the formation of blogging sites Zanga, live Journal, and of course blogger.

Blogs were a threat to traditional media gatekeepers. Folks who had been subjected to the narratives others wrote for them, they could finally write their own and reach an audience without asking for permission. I even threw my hat in when Cheryl Contie and I launched Jack and Joel Polock six, a black bourgeoisie perspective on US politics. That's what we called our blog. We held institutions accountable for their treatment of black people, whether it was the Congressional Black Caucus

or CNN. When I think about Jack and Joe politics, it gave me so much a chance to grow as a writer, community organizer, and citizen. And this period wasn't just good for me. We all as a society experienced this big push for at home broadband. Two thousand three to two thousand six, we saw the launch of Skype, MySpace, Facebook popping up at my alma mater, Twitter, which called itself a micro blogging site. It was on right. The

latest cyber drug of choice. It is called Twitter, an addictive concoction of blogs, Google maps, personal websites, and text messaging all the century version of the old paper bound yearbook. Now millions of students used the Facebook dot com to list not only their pictures and hobbies, but as a virtual community. And this was exciting. I mean, we were

connecting and creating together on the Internet. But while hundreds of thousands of people were logging into these sites, these future tech golias were growing like crazy, some of them offering services below costs just to gobble up market share. And they were blowing our minds with what we were told was innovation. And remember, they could do some of

this because the government didn't want to regulate innovation. No innovation knows no bounds because you can't get in the way of at least a man, probably white, trying to make a doubt. These tech giants weren't just capturing our attention though, they were also capturing our personal information. And while we thought we were just sharing our cute selfies with our friends, behind the scenes, we will share something

much more valuable. We were giving away our data and as a result, the CEOs and shareholders of these companies would profit big time. Little did we know this data capture would eventually power the most profitable and destructive business model yet, online advertising, which has since grown to dominate

almost all Internet businesses. This is the Onion News Network, a twenty four hour, NonStop loses and in two thousand seven, when I started my job at the satirical news organization, the Onion online advertising was really starting to take off. As the first ever director of Digital, my job was basically to bring the Onion online and I loved it. But one of my biggest frustrations was also just keeping

up with the tech. And I say this as the tech guy, but we'd have to change our entire creative process to accommodate some software or some app that I just knew wasn't gonna be around in two years. And this was really my first personal exposure to the intersection of business and technology. Sometimes it worked great, other times there was some conflict. I actually remember being in the room at an online ads award show and folks were giving out awards for like the best pop up ad.

They were giving out awards for obscuring the content, and I was like, oh, they think they're content too. It was a huge aha, like a major turning point for me because the Internet, in the future of tech was no longer this shiny object that excited me and gave me a place for community and fun. It was becoming something co opted by opitalism. The perfect example is Facebook. The company went public in two and raised a record sixteen billion dollars during its initial public offering I p

O for sure. To this day, Facebook is the largest tech I p O ever and as CEO is like Mark Zuckerberg, started selling more and more of their company shares to the public. They also started figuring out clever ways to hoard their power. One, I want you to quickly explain dual class shareholders in terms of the path we've taken to get here and why it's become a problem. What is a dual class shareholder company? So governance, what are the systems and constructs for who's in charge and

who gets to make decisions and remove leadership? Right? So, corporate governance is loosely based on societal or national governance, and that is we show up at shareholder meetings and we get one share, one vote, and we vote for who the board is and the board gets to make decisions around whether or not the CEO gets fired if they sell the company. So essentially, the notion is that the wisdom of crowds and ownership is linked to accountability

and responsibility. And until Google, very few companies had dual class shareholder structures. Now dual class shareholder structure means that Mark Zuckerberg, even though he controls less than half of the company, he has control. So that is a total departure or a fissure from what you call democratic governance. The bottom line is it's a group of individuals that like control and don't want to make the economic sacrifices

or don't have the economics to get shareholder control. You know, the board isn't a board at Facebook, It's an advisory board because at the end of the day, Mark can get rid of all of them do whatever the funk he wants. The Apple is not a dual class shareholder company, and I would argue that there's a link to behavior. I think Apple behaves better because Tim Cook can be fired Mark Zuckerberg, and I've said this before, is the

most dangerous person in the world. Putin will be out of office because of biology In ten or fifteen years or less. We can vote by them out office. Mark Zuckerberg could be with us for sixty years. For the record, I'm not trying to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. He wasn't the first tech founder to adopt a dual class structure, but when he did it in he opened the doors for so many others to do the same. According to Fast Company, in of tech companies that went public were

dual class models. And while Facebook was going public, I was having my own internal conflicts about tech. I didn't just like tech. I loved it. I thought it was gonna free us all, but I was starting to see hints that it could do the opposite, and I wanted to make sure it didn't go down that path. After

the break, I leave The Onion for Silicon Valley. That same year, I left my job at The Onion to start my own company, Cultivated with with a vague but important mission to merge humor and technology by bringing together comedians, designers, and developers. We opened an office in San Francisco, where I spent increasing amounts of time, and just as I had committed myself further to technology, I got a platform

to reflect on and challenge it. When I took over the back page column for Fast Company magazine, I wrote pieces with headlines like social media may be efficient, but don't forget good old face to face conversation. Okay, Grandpa tun day another headline, living in the cloud apps can only get you so far, or one of my favorites, a radical proposal for putting people in charge of their data.

The era of technology that I loved was turning into an environment that aggressively and effectively mind our attention and seemed to demand more work from us rather than liberating us from work as promised, and all that was by design. I would say that when you know I'm one of

my colleagues. Jonathan hy sort of raised my awareness when you start talking about He wrote this book called The Coddling of the American Mind and said that the emerging mental health crisis among teens was in large part due to the rise of social media and then dual class shareholder companies such as these companies didn't have to really listen to shareholders regulatory overrun. I just all these things added up, and I just noticed personally my addiction to Twitter.

You just have all these little moments I remember my kid at the age of nine doing a handstand and asking me to record it and then saying could you put it on YouTube? And I said sure, because I think technology is wonderful. I want my kids understand it. And then on the way home, uh, he said, oh my gosh, I got a like, And then every fifteen minutes for the next day he wanted to go back

onto YouTube to see if he got more pikes. And it was one of those moments like, there's some externalities here, and while we focus on all the wonderful things about technology, the shareholder return the innovation it does unlock a tremendous amount of value. It seems like the gross idolatry of technology has resulted and we ignore the externalities, and it's been, I think, really detrimental to mental health, really detrimental to

our economy, really detrimental to our democracy. And I feel as if there needs to be a counterbalance, and usually that counterbalance our regulatory bodies. They have been in a deep slumber for twenty or thirty years. As it relates to technology. In my personal life, I felt like I was on a hamster wheel producing content for my feed, taking pictures of my food, instead of eating it, posting about books online instead of reading them. I was doing

all that more than living my actual life. This lack of accountability that you've been bringing up, whether it's inside the company's governance structure, whether it's our collective will through our government and an unwillingness and ability to regulate them. I think of it in another way about the funding of some of these businesses. When when I see a lot of VC backed firms that have never made a dollar after five, ten, maybe many more years, that doesn't

to me deserve to be called a business. It's like a special project that's subsidized by people who should have been taxed more at some point in their lives. What role do you think, um the funding mechanism for these companies has contributed to some of the downsides we're experiencing now in terms of that lack of accountability, like they're not failing. The thing that has kind of changed everything.

And this is your point, and it's an important one, is that before Amazon, a company was kind of given three four years a runway and then it was expected to start making money. And two thirds of companies that went public just ten twenty years ago were profitable right now as we sit here today, s the companies that

go public are not profitable. So the markets have taught because of Amazon the Netflix, which were extremely unprofitable but still became gargantrian companies that dominate their sectors and have had enormous returns to shareholders. It's taught investors to replace profits with vision and growth. And it's really changed the ecosystem because the big shift you're talking about where there's a new class of companies that are afforded cheaper capital

and more runway. It's just an enormous advantage. If I told a T and T they no longer needed to be profitable, they no longer needed to have a divin end, they could go negative for ten or twenty years and their shareholders would continue to bid their stock price up. They could be remarkably innovative. So this is a real shift in our economy in the markets, and that is the keyest disruption, and the key is being perceived as

a leader, not necessarily profitability. It used to be that the numbers kind of spoke for themselves, and now it's the numbers that everyone's looking at. Is growth and also just a certain level of innovation, so you end up with Facebook with seven people in pr and comms. Let me set one thing straight, it's not necessarily a bad thing to bet on companies with a vision. I love

risk taking, I support it. And there are so many innovative people out there with brilliant ideas that deserve to be funded, even overfunded, even if it may not immediately be profitable. But who's getting this no strings attached funding. It's just gendered men. It's mostly white men a k a. The visionaries that we've been taught get to have that title. They have this endless supply of chances. They can be unprofitable for years, and often their share prices still go up.

But are we doing the same kind of investing, the same kind of risk taking for women for l g B, t q I A plus business owners for BIPOC folks. Hell no. And let's not forget the big five companies who control the industry get to cherry pick who succeeds. They decide who to acquire, who to buy out. Anti monopoly experts Stacy Mitchell said it best on this podcast last season. If you control the roadway that the vast majority of traffic is traveling down. Then you control what

that traffic sees. For example, all the movies on Netflix are basically stored on Amazon servers. Facebook bought Instagram and What'sapp. And think about it, Google's algorithms determine what posts you see first in your search results. If someone new steps onto the scene, maybe someone who's trying to help us citizen better, these five companies can basically determine if they succeed.

And to me, that sounds really undemocratic. You know, I'm still lingering on something you said earlier about disrupting major industries. I'm for becused, and I think we're focused in this upcoming season on the disruption to our democracy itself and into the fabric of our society, not just their competitors, which in some ways should happen. How are you seeing the structure of the industry, the design of the technology, the lack of oversights, what elements are making the impact

on us less bearable? I would say ground zero for what I'd call the unraveling of the fabric of America. Kind of one threat at a time is algorithms. These algorithms have been trained to figure out a way to capture as much of your attention for as long as possible. And so we are a tribal species. We are very suspicious of each other. We're very prone to making stereotypes and believing bad things about people who don't look, smell, and feel like us. That's one of the flaws of

our species. Of modern societies learned to cooperate and they learn from more progressive ideals. And if you think about capitalism, which is kind of the least bad system of its kind, it's based on this collision of cooperation and self interest, which is this gangster cocktail. And what these algorithms have done is staid, let's tap into our primal instincts and let's amplify content that is really divisive and create violence

online because people can't look away from violence. So and by the way, it's not just social media, it's the situation room at CNN. It's Fox gas lighting America constantly. But there's less money in news and content that says, you know, everything is kind of incrementally getting a little bit better. Isn't that great? That's just not an exciting story.

It's like remember the kid. Remember when you're in fifth grade and two people start having words and someone would screen fight, fight fighting, and they just didn't really have an intention of fighting. Facebook a billion times an hour is saying to any two entities fight, fight, fight, It just it promoting this coarseness. So one of the things I checked around myself is I started identifying people as

blue a red. And what I realized is if you don't separate the person from the ideology, you lose fifty of all potential relationships. And what you find is that the majority of conservatives don't dislike democrats, and the majority of democrats don't like conservatives because of their viewpoint, but because of our ecosystem has taught us to hate each other and take taken the worst aspects of our dialogue and turned it into insults and made it very personal.

And I think these companies lie at the center of that. With infinite computing capacity and bottomless venture funding on their side, these companies had the power to keep us in their world by luring us to click and scroll and swipe, such that I had written a Fast Company cover story talking about taking a social media detox. I can't express to you how dramatic and public this rejection was of the tech I had long celebrated and been celebrated for

that cover piece. You know it kind of unleashed me. For the next few years, I spoke up louder about the gap I was seeing between the promise of tech and the reality unfolding. My critiques were bolstered by others seeing the same things, who taught me even more than I thought I already knew. The most fun group of fellow critics were the people I met through cultivated with comedy hackathons. These events brought together comedians, designers, and coders

to build apps in a single weekend. The apps themselves were designed to be jokes, satirizing the industry we were all a part of, and trust me, there was a lot to satirize. Who's been here. You got one bill, multiple people, a wage gap plaguing women in minorities, plus Molly drank most of the wine. That's why I created an appuit Table, the only bill splitting app that uses real labor statistics to adjust for income inequality between races

and genders. Now, during this period, I was bouncing back and forth between San Francisco, where I had this office with my colleagues, and New York, where I actually lived, and when I was in New York. I worked out of the offices of a group called Data in Society. It's a research institute that studies the social implications of

data centric technologies as well as automation. These researchers were pointing out with data how the systems we were building discriminated against folks who are already overlooked in our society, poor people, l G, B, t q I, A plus and BIPOC folks. Today, it's become fashionable to talk about things like the surveillance economy and criticize how we make money with tech by observing and mining data around people's behavior. But I first heard that phrase years ago when I

was at Data in Society. I remember being there and seeing Rebecca Wexler, a lawyer in residence who was part of the group, give a talk about how the New York government it was using evidence derived from computers in prosecuting black and brown people, but that digital evidence from cell phones and social media was often deemed proprietary or some companies trade secret, so folks had no ability to

challenge it or even understand it. As smartphones and apps became more than norm, attention mining and addiction became the new currency. You know that little thing called the terms of service that no one ever reads. Well, it gives these companies the authority to use and sell our data

to their hearts content. Eventually, this data mining became a full on surveillance apparatus, monitoring and monetizing our whereabouts, social interactions, tastes, and more international intrigue, and an American fugitive on the run, Edward Snowden, the man who told the world about the federal government sweeping top secret domestic spying program, is on

the move as we speak. Incredible extent to which the US government is monitoring and keeping records of not just our phone calls, but also apparently our emails, internet searches, downloads, photos, Facebook pages, and on and on. All this led to a massive shift for the little boy who was so excited for that apple to eat. Instead of feeling like a technology user, I was feeling used. The tool that

had empowered me was now sapping my power. And it's no wonder these big tech companies were set up with essentially zero oversight and in a position to do pretty much whatever they wanted. And the extra frustrating part is that despite all these warning signs, it still felt like this was all happening under our noses. Big business had essentially pick pocketed the people's internet and made it their internet.

How did we as a society let this happen? What do you think happened along the way in terms of the development of the Internet, in the role of technology in our lives to give us the Internet we have now that has so much more harm than we remember in the early days. Well, a lot of good things. There's more utility, you know. I can order a car and see where it is before it gets here. I can have almost everything delivered to me off my phone. I can find out almost answered almost any basic question

from our new god Google. So the utility and the innovation has been extraordinary. Um that's one of the many positives. One of the many negatives is that as a society becomes wealthier and more educated, it's reliance on a super being in church attendance goes down. But we still need that spiritual guidance or what I call is super being that can answer very complicated questions. And into that void

has slipped tech. Because technology is kind of the closest thing we have to magic or some sort of godlike action. I just have no idea how my phone does what it does, but it's amazing, so it feels somewhat mystical, somewhat spiritual, so what God like? And as a result, I think our new Jesus Christ are Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs and that we don't longer have go to church,

we go to Apple. And there's a certain that's dangerous now whole type because after the break we'll find out why despite all this doom and gloom, my optimism has returned, and we'll learn about Scott's take on investing in citizenship as a way to get us out from under big tick. So at this point in my personal journey, we're now in the year I know it's almost as hard of a year to say as why do we get trauma's

eyes every four years in America? That same year, I was at south By Southwest ringing the alarm bell even before the election. Upon receiving the Hall of Fame award, Yes I am in a Hall of Fame and it's exciting. My acceptance speech sounded a very different tone from my more optimistic past self. Could we in the virtual reality racism? Could we have should learned sexism? Could power the police by drones and Internet of crop. This is all very possible.

We don't needede cautiously in the world that we're all doing. Hate to say I told you so. After that historic election went down, so many of us saw that the human manipulation and tricks learned through attention economics weren't just stressing us as individuals, but also as a collective as a democracy. This is where I mentioned Robert Mueller. I'm so sorry to bring you back to that era of

our history. It explains that under longstanding Department policy, he probably president, cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office, even if the charge is kept under sealed and hidden from public view. That too is prohibited. But I remember reading through his indictments against the Russian hackers and learning how they poured gasoline on our existing,

highly flammable divisions. Their techniques were not novel spycraft. They were simply effective digital marketing strategies, the kind I'd seen myself, the kind I'd used myself and had become increasingly critical of, but the kind that even I hadn't imagined could help weaken a whole nation. I was screaming even louder than before. I wasn't sugarcoating anything, and comedy alone wasn't gonna cut it for me. This led to my longest tech piece yet,

my technology manifesto, Humble Guy Here. Technology Manifesto Demands from a citizen to Big Tech. This manifesto included five overall demands. Number one transparency around data collection and usage. Number two data sovereignty, as in, we are in charge of our own data and consent to use it is in our hands. Number three inclusive design and participation by diverse stakeholders in the development of all these tools. You can't design for the world if you don't look like the world. Number

four we need new regulations and new accountability. And number five decentralization of tech power back to the people the way we design this thing in the first place. Between pursuing profit regardless of the social harms and the lack of transparency and oversight, we've reached a point where tech is actually making it harder for us to citizen. But when we're overwhelmed by the serotonin inducing algorithmic hits from our tech products, we can't show up for our communities.

When tech platforms just view us as dollar signs and click potential. They make it harder for us to feel connected to each other. When economic and computing power is concentrated in a handful of companies, that makes it harder for all of us to be fluent in our power and use it for collective benefit. One of the things my mother encouraged me to do often was question authority. She wanted me to think for myself and understand my own power. We've ceded too much authority to too few

controlling how we use technology. It's past time to question that and come up with some better answers. That brings us to season three of How to citizens the technology addition, because despite all that we've gone through, I see a light and that's what this season is gonna focus on. There was a moment when I was listening to Scott and Karros Swisher's Pivot podcast walking down the Street in my Hood, and Scott said something that stopped me in

my tracks. But I've been plenty of money and private companies in my theme, My entire theme for the next five years of my life around investment strategy is citizenship. Other than lobbying to get on this podcast, why did you choose to use the word citizenship in connection with your own investment strategy. What do you see coming? What do you hope is coming? That's an alternative to what

we've been talking about. Sure, So first off, just the asterisk around all my virtue signaling is I'm doing this for selfish reason. I think there's money to be made and what I'll call the citizenship or immunity strategy. And I like the strategy. I like the idea of trying to do stuff that I think are investment companies that

I think are good for the commonwealth. When Amazon becomes abusive to their partners, Shopify emerges, and when I think the toxicity of Twitter and Facebook becomes so noxious, I think Snap and Pinterest, which are less toxic, are outperforming Facebook and Twitter right now on a shareholder level. I think the people that Robin Hood I'm gonna use an academic term here, are mendacious Fox. I think that they

are addicting young men. I think they are absolutely using dark psychological techniques to create a dopamine addiction among young men. I do not think they are building wealth. There's just so many gotchas, but make them richer and their shareholders poort a much less their customers. I've invested in open web, which manages comments section. The comments section is actually more important than the actual content. It's where you get a lot of back and forth and they're trying to make

people fights right. And this this company, open Web, manages it for big media companies ranging from news Core to ganet and helps them create a comment section that elevates productive, thoughtful comments. I invested in better dot com, which is online mortgages. We have found it and when whenever we get humans involved in improving mortgages, we end up with terrible things such as this emmic racism, and mortgages are just too expensive and intimidating. You know, take a take

a young immigrant family. They don't want to walk into a bank of American apply for a mortgage. They don't have a confidence that they've heard really bad things about mortgages and redlining and all that bullshit. So I think there's just some really outstanding opportunities from companies that are zigging when other companies are zagging in terms of not

addressing the externalities they create. What obligations do you think a tech company in particular, company in general has to the public to us, you know, other than generating as many profits as possible for their shareholders, we've basically prioritized companies and shareholders over workers. We have done that for

the last thirty years. And the results of since two thousand and eight, the nastacas quintupld CEO compensation as a multiple of the average workers compensations got from sixty to thirty and minimum wayagees exploded from seven dollars and cents to wait for it, seven dollars and cents. And we say that, oh, this is a function of a processor network economy, and isn't this terrible? And let's pretend that

we give a flying fuck. We have managed this. We have orchestrated a transfer of wealth from poor people to rich people, from young to old, with almost every major economic policy and constructing our approach to this. So I'd like to think that companies have an obligation will calling their better angels. That is not a good strategy. The

government needs to regulate them. The government needs to say, if you have grown your wealth a hundred billion dollars in the last five years and paid less than one percent of that and taxes, we need to rethink our tax system. When you have a profit incentive around making young girls feel bad about themselves, the government needs to step in because here's the bottom line. And I'm guilty of this too. When it's raining money, it blurs your vision.

The people at Philip Morris weren't bad people, but they talked themselves into believing cigarettes were no worse than ice cream because they were all making a ship ton of money. So we need to elect leaders who will hold these firms to the same standards we've held other firms. We call this show how to Citizen, and he interprets citizen as a verb actions When you think about citizen ng as a verb, how do you define it? What does

it mean to Scott Galloway to citizens? First and foremost, I'm trying to raise secure, loving kids that have empathy in a sense of how fortunate that they are to be to be American, but more than anything, and this is hard for me because I'm naturally an angry to press person. I'm trying to be less coarse in my dialogue. I am really good at dunking on people, and I've

tried to stop that. I've tried to say, Okay, your opportunity to get a couple of thousand likes because you call out someone, make a character of their comments, and take it to an ugly place. It's just not adding any value to our commonwealth. It might feel good, so I think it's sort of what I call comedy a manner being good to your neighbor and imagine that everybody you meet online is your neighbor. You would never say this ship to your neighbor. You would never say hey about.

You would never say this ship to another American who maybe served and was a good person and got up in the morning. You would never say this to someone who'd been raised by a single mother and was struggling with you know, economic shame. You would just never say this ship, So why would you do it online? And I fall into that trap. I get angry at people, and I respond the easiest way to live your life? I think, are there are good? I give a lot of advice to your dad's try and be the man

your kids think you are, especially your young kids. My thirteen year old kind of figuring out who I am, unfortunately, but my ten year old still a lot of evidence out there. Yeah, my ten year old still thinks I'm the bomb. Unfortunately, they have Google and they're finding ship on me and the like, oh God, Dad did this? You have been really gracious with your time. I want to thank you for being here with me. Scott Galloway, good luck with everything, all the journeys. You're wrong and

I really appreciate you. Yeah. Likewise, brother, congrats on your success. Here's the thing that optimistic Baritune Day who went dorm to dorm connecting his classmates to the Internet. He's still with me. I believe there's more to the story than vaccine disinformation, mental health crises, and hyper concentrated wealth. This season, I'm gonna be speaking with ten different people who are redefining tech. They've built systems that reward consensus, create safe online spaces for l g B, t q I A

plus communities, and use games to combat misinformation. It's easy to get bogged down by all the negativity surrounding tech, but it's exciting to think about the possibilities. As I wrote in my tech Manifesto, the promise of the Internet isn't that a few centralized powers will do everything for us. That's the old world and we shouldn't try to recreate it.

Imagine if we used our collective data to help us be better than neighbors, partners, artists, citizens, and humans, rather than just better products to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Imagine two. If we could hold technology companies accountable by demanding that they share power more equitably with the people who use and enable their products and services. Imagine it. Now, let's go building. I still believe in

that vision because I've seen evidence that it's real. I've used tools that empower us collectively, and I've met some of the people building those tools. So now that we know how we got here, let's find the people with the solutions to take us where we want to go, the people making technology that helps us live together better, that helps us citizen. Next week we talked to co founder of New Public, Eli Pariser. I think this is the playbook for how we've moved through times of social

stress and social fracture in the past. Is like we've invented new kinds of organizations, new kinds of institutions, public libraries, or a thing that we're invented. Hear it, How do citizen, We're committed to giving you things to do beyond listening to me, talk to somebody We're building an entire universe of citizen action over at our new website, how to citizen dot com. For this episode, I'm gonna give you three types of things you can do. First, feeds and feelings.

I want you to take a moment and reflect on your various social media feeds. If your Facebook or Instagram or TikTok had a personality, what would it be and how would you describe it? Is it sassy with a little bit of inspiration? Is it gossipy and entertaining? Does it just make you sad? How do those feeds make you feel? Once you thought about that, consider training the algorithm. Selecting accounts and content that makes you feel good, that

pushes you forward rather than drags you down. This small act could have a mighty impact on your mental and emotional well being. The second category of action, check out my digital manifesto. Yes, I wrote this thing for you, and I'd love you to check it out. It's available via link in the show notes, and there's even an open source Google doc version that you can contribute to. I am open to expansion, modification, uh and criticism, So share your thoughts on this and I'll share some of

your feedback on my own social channels. Lastly, let's ensure the regulation of big tech. We talked about it a lot in this episode, and there are several grassroots efforts already underway that you can lend your voice, your skills, maybe some of your money to. Check out Freedom from Facebook and Google dot Com, Athena for All dot org, which is working to free us from Amazon, which we probably all need, and the Economic Liberties Project dot US. You don't have to memorize all this stuff. We have

a whole website with this and more. Visit how to Citizen dot com and follow us on Instagram, Join with us and others on the journey becaus the Internet doesn't have to be terrible. Hashtag how to Citizen See you later. How To Citizen with barrettun Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and dust Light Productions. Our executive producers are Me Barretton Bay Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Yusa. Our senior producer is Tamika Adams. Our producer is Ali Kilts,

and our assistant producer Sam Paulson. Stephanie Cohne is our editor. Valentino Rivera is our senior engineer and Matthew Laie as our Apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eapen, with additional original music for season three from Andrew Clauson. This episode was produced and sound designed by Ali Kilts. Special thanks to Joel Smith from My Heart Radio and Rachel Garcia at Dustlight Production