Scott Galloway Professor of marketing at NYU Stern and author of bestselling books including The Four and The Algebra of Wealth.

“Anytime we've had more than 2% of GDP allocated towards a technology in this short a period, there's a fairly severe crash along the way, which we have not registered yet.”

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

Context

Responding to Kara on Apple's earnings and the wider tech sell-off, Scott warned about the historical pattern for big technology build-outs. He then went on to argue the bull case, so this is the cautious half of his view.

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Transcript

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) Around 27:59 into the episode

Scott Galloway

…race. Apple has vastly outperformed all of the other Mag 7 because it has refused to engage in this multi-trillion dollar arms race. They've just said, you guys go play in traffic and we'll see how it settles out. The same way they avoided the search wars. So what could go right? Can I just note

Kara Swisher

…a few months ago, plus demand for the new iPhone 18 Pro lineup. iPad sales were down as well as sales in China coming in below estimates. The iPhone Duo, the Apple's new foldable phone, wasn't on sale during the quarter, so we'll have to wait to see its impact. So go keep going with Apple. Well,

Scott Galloway

so Apple's flat, a beat on the top and bottom line, 12%. But anytime we've had more than 2% of GDP allocated towards a technology in this short a period, there's a fairly severe crash along the way, which we have not registered yet. At the same time, to make the bull case, I was like, I struggle with anger and depression. I'm a glass half-empty kind of guy. And so I constantly have to ask myself, because one of my biggest flaws as an investor is I'm constantly thinking everything's going to get cheaper and it's going to crash. And if you look every day, if you look at the markets, the optimists have kicked the crap out of…

Kara Swisher

just brought up that idea of PixanXs. NVIDIA just invested in Meta in their five. So Meta's looking for money too. Everyone's looking for money, essentially, because they have to pay for these data centers. Well,

Scott Galloway

that's the fear: the infrastructure build out feels like the railroads, and it's just too much, and the R will never catch up to the ROI, right? But when you have a company like Anthropic, I'll go to the bull case again, growing 14X, if it just goes three to 5x a year for two years, it'll look…

Kara Swisher

there be a lot of them? When you say

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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