Scott Galloway has a lot to say, and isn’t reticent to say it. The professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, was the featured speaker at the Jay and Patty Baker School of Business and Technology’s Dean’s Forum on Monday, April 16, where he spoke to a full house in the Katie Murphy Amphitheater.
Here are 10 things he wants you to know:
- If you don’t think Google is a god, imagine your name and your face above everything you’ve typed to that query god. Google knows when you’re about to get engaged, Google knows when you’re about to break up with your boyfriend. Google knows what ailments you have. Google knows what ailments you’re worried about having exposed yourself to. Google knows your fetishes. Google knows who you can’t stop thinking about. Google is probably a better reflection of you than anybody you know who knows you better.
- The number one signal of whether you’ll make it to 100 years of age is…how many people do you love? If you want to commit suicide, go home, do nothing, and don’t be involved in other people’s lives—and you’ll get your wish.
- The basis of the book [The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google] is how to tap into evolutionary anthropology to develop a business strategy, how these companies have done it, and how to suss out the seven pillars of success of these companies. This book is a love letter to these companies.
- I think there’s something sort of perverted in our society where we no longer worship at the altar of kindness and character, we worship at the altar of money and innovators.
- The brain is rational, but appealing to love and the heart is irrational and it’s a great strategy. The industry that’s actually paid the most shareholder value isn’t tech, it’s luxury…there are more people on the Forbes 400 list [from luxury] than any other sector, and Apple has some of that. [The] companies that tap into our instincts have created more shareholder value than the GDP of any country in the world with the exception of four, and that’s Japan, Germany, the U.S., and China.
- More households have Amazon Prime than voted in the U.S. election.
- The most powerful person in the world is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg has power over the algorithms for what 2.1 billion people see every day. I think this is the equivalent of an Information Age autocrat.
- Google has a 92% share of an industry that by dollar volume is bigger than the entire ad market of any country except the U.S. and will soon blow by the U.S.
- Google and Facebook own two-thirds of all visual marketing.
- We really do have a new religion. As the country’s become more wealthy and more educated our reliance on church goes down. We’ve become less religious…I think big tech is filling that void and that is Steve Jobs is our Jesus Christ, Apple is our religion and [the iPhone] is the new cross.