Meredith Whittaker on Who Controls Your Data in the Age of AI

Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation and a leading voice on AI and privacy, joins Scott Galloway to examine the growing tension between artificial intelligence and personal freedom. They discuss how Signal actually works, why most messaging apps aren’t as private as they claim, and whether AI agents embedded in operating systems pose new security risks. Algebra of Happiness: a hack for dads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:19Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:50Scott Galloway?

  Episode 386. 386 is the area code serving north-central parts of Florida. 1986, Top Gun hit theaters. True story, Tom Cruise is starring in a romantic comedy about body positivity. He and his actress both gained 300 pounds for the roles. The name of the film? Missionary Impossible.

• 2:12Scott Galloway?

  Just give it a second.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Go, go, go!

• 2:25Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 386th episode of the ProbGPod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with Meredith Whitaker, the president of the Signal Foundation and a leading voice on AI policy. I first came across Meredith at South by Southwest. She was on a panel. I never, I was bored and I walked in. I almost never listen to panels. And I thought, who is this? Who is this strange, dark haired woman speaking all sorts of truth and logic about AI? And it ends up she runs the app and I had lunch with her and she struck me as really intelligent. And I have been much more concerned about, for the first time, I don't know if I'm getting older, I'm much more concerned about my own privacy, worried that at some point, all of my AI queries will be made public. Right? Is that my prostate?

• 3:08Scott Galloway?

  Question mark, expecting, expecting AI to answer. I'm pretty sure every ailment I have is because I'm in large prostate. I'm convinced everything starts with the prostate. Anyways, don't know how I got here. Anyway, she's an incredibly insightful, intelligent person, and I would argue probably the most well-liked person or CEO in tech right now, which isn't saying a lot, but very impressive, very intelligent, and sort of signals trying to, or is, I think carving itself out as sort of the clean, well-lit part of the internet. And I'm fascinated with the trade-off between privacy and utility, and we'll speak more about that.

• 3:46Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, here's our conversation with Meredith Whittaker. Meredith, where does this podcast find you?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  I'm in New York City.

• 3:58Scott Galloway?

  In New York? I thought you were, I thought you lived in Europe.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  I'm in Europe a lot. I go between Paris and New York. We're a small org. We spread a lot of jurisdictions.

• 4:08Scott Galloway?

  There you go. So, let's bust right into it. I want to start with the basics. Signal has been in the news a lot this year, and we'll get to that in a moment. We know it's widely used by journalists, public officials, and people who are especially concerned about privacy. But on a practical level, how does Signal actually work? And what makes it different from other messaging apps?

• 4:28Speaker 04

  On a practical level, Signal is the most widely used, actually, private communications platform. We go out of our way to collect as close to no data as possible, and that's really what sets us apart, because we exist in an ecosystem where, for better or for worse, in one way or another, most of the time you make money in tech by collecting and monetizing data. So you collect data about the users of your platform, and then you sell access to different types of users based on that data to advertisers, or you collect data and you train your AI model with it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  That's kind of the economic engine of tech since the 90s and, you know, maybe before. Signal is obsessed with maintaining the human right to communicate privately, and we have built, you know, an alternative communications platform that does just that. We end up rewriting core pieces of the proverbial stack to enable us to do what is normal, to provide a, you know, basic and easily usable messaging platform in a way that does not collect your data and thus does not put us in a position of being forced to turn it over if we get a subpoena, of having a breach expose your most intimate information, of,

• 5:53Speaker 04

  you know, violating the compacts that we make with the people who rely on us. So that's, in a nutshell, we're also open source, and open source matters here because that means you don't have to trust me, you don't have to like me, you can actually verify that, yeah, the thing that she or anyone says it does is what it does because we can scrutinize the code, we can prove it.

• 6:15Scott Galloway?

  Well, I think you're the most likable CEO in tech, which isn't saying a lot, but...

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, the bar, the bar is where it is, but I'll take it.

• 6:24Scott Galloway?

  So...

• 6:26Scott Galloway?

  The term, I meant that, the term encrypted is, is, is a loaded term. Can you talk about the biggest misconception about encryption and messaging apps?

• 6:36Speaker 04

  I mean, I think it's, it's a little bit like, you know, the way skincare ingredients are like, I don't know, gold or something gets invoked, right? We can say it's, you know, both of these have encryption in them, but one has 10% encryption or encryption is only applied to 10% of the data, whereas another is fully encrypted. And so if you look at, say WhatsApp and Signal, WhatsApp uses Signal's encryption protocol. And this is the gold standard for encryption messaging was released in 2013, has stood the test of time, really advanced the field of privacy preserving technology when it was introduced.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  That's licensed by WhatsApp, but WhatsApp only applies it to one layer of the WhatsApp layer cake, so to speak. They use it to encrypt the content of your messages. So if I'm texting you like, you know, hey Scott, where are we going to meet at South by Southwest? WhatsApp would not be able to see that. But WhatsApp does not encrypt intimate metadata. And metadata is a fussy little term, but it's, you know, it's actually pretty revealing data. It's who you text, it's who's in your contact list, it's your profile photo, it's when you started texting someone, your therapist, your oncologist, your FBI cutout, whoever it is. That's very revealing data.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  And then of course, we're not owned by Meta, which means that, you know, there isn't a bunch of Facebook and Instagram data you could then join that intimate metadata with to make profiles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Signal is, you know, encrypted up and down the stack. We encrypt the contents of your messages, but we also encrypt your profile photo, your contact list, who is texting whom, who is messaging with whom, who's in your groups. So, you know, you can look at our website, signal.org/bigbrother.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  And we work to unseal any subpoena that we are forced to comply with. And what you see there is a long list of requests for data. That's normal. That's what governments assume an average messenger is able to give up. And then you see what we're actually able to give up, which is very close to nothing. We can confirm that a phone number has an account. We can confirm a handful of other things, but we have gone out of our way to be, you know, unalloyed, you know, 100% encrypted, to use that slightly metaphorically. But to, you know, you get the gist. We really take that extremely seriously. We're not just sprinkling encryption dust on top of a, you know, kind of ultimately non-private infrastructure.

• 9:20Scott Galloway?

  So I wanted to talk about something that gets no news. I don't know if you've heard of AI, but it's in the news recently and

• 9:26Speaker 04

  AI.

• 9:27Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, right.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Infrastructures.

• 9:29Scott Galloway?

  There you go. What is that? It's a movie by Steven Spielberg. So the AI agent specifically, you've been pretty vocal about the dangers of the agentic AI, that the danger it poses to our privacy and security. Can you elaborate on the risks here and what are most people not aware of?

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, the risks are the flip side of the promises, really. And we actually started talking about this about a year ago when we were seeing things like Microsoft Recall creep into, you know, the product updates, in this case for Windows. And really recognizing that if Signal, Signal exists at the application layer, right? Which means that we have to trust the operating system. We build on top of iOS or Android or Windows. And we have to trust that the operating system will be a reliable set of tools that we as developers can leverage to ensure that Signal works for the people who rely on us and that, you know, the users of the device can rely on.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  And our primary concern is that as agents get integrated into the operating systems by these AI companies, the people who maintain the operating system, and as they get leveraged beyond that in ways that are giving them very pervasive access to your life, it undermines our ability as Signal to guarantee the type of privacy that we guarantee at the application layer. And I'll give, you know, that that may sound a little bit arcane to people who don't, you know, live in these waters with me. But just a quick example, you know, if you have an agent running on your operating system or sort of given deep access to your file system and other

• 11:13Speaker 04

  other sort of data on your device in order to do something like, you know, plan a work dinner. Well, the agent will need access to your calendar, it will need access to your browser, perhaps to look for a restaurant, maybe your credit card or your EA's credit card in order to book that work dinner. And in a scenario where you are, as you should be, all using Signal, it will also need access to your Signal and your Signal contacts to text them and coordinate dates and times. All of that becomes a pretty frightening set of data access points and ultimately a security vulnerability. Because instead of, you know, having to break our gold standard encryption

• 11:58Speaker 04

  algorithm, which has been, you know, tested and mathematically proven to be secure, you just have to leverage the type of access that these pervasive agents are being given into your applications, into your intimate data in ways that, you know, are, you know, just from a security architecture perspective, very, very insecure. And I'll note that right now, almost every agent that we're seeing kind of in the mainstream is relying on large LLM models, models that are too big to run on your device, which means that, you know, ultimately, most of this data would need to be sent off your device to a cloud server to be processed for inference, you know, creating another security issue and potentially, you

• 12:43Speaker 04

  know, placing data in the hands of whatever company is running that agent. So that's, you know, our concern is really coming from a Privacy integrity standpoint and from a concern for the people who rely on Signal by the introduction of these tools, which can be useful for some things, but you know, also pose this pretty significant risk that isn't getting the kind of attention I believe it should.

• 13:11Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 13:19Scott Galloway?

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• 14:03Scott Galloway?

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• 14:36Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Regent Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 15:21Scott Galloway?

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• 15:43Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Regent Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 16:28Scott Galloway?

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• 16:53Scott Galloway?

  What do you think the risks are? If you're using Claude or ChatGPT, what do you think realistically the risks are over the next five or 10 years? That your data is compromised and some bad actor or the LLMs themselves will have access to your private information and be able to link identity with, I mean, the John Oliver segment on finding people's data in the dark web, including their search history. Should people be really, should people be cognizant of what they, of what they query these LLMs?

• 17:31Speaker 04

  I mean, I think they absolutely should be cognizant. Any query to an LLM that isn't sort of a specialized private inference setup, you know, kind of what Moxie, who founded Signal, is doing with Confer or other similar setups. But any, you know, a general query ChatGPT is sending that data to servers that are controlled by OpenAI, Microsoft servers. They retain that data, they could leak that data. We know that when presented with a valid subpoena, they will turn that data over. In a world in which norms and laws and definitions of criminality shifts from,

• 18:16Speaker 04

  you know, one year to the next, perhaps, it's good to be cognizant of where that data could go and what it could do in terms of, you know, marking you as one or another type of person. Not to mention, I think, you know, with the introduction of advertising and, you know, increased targeting, at least the plan to introduce advertising in ChatGPT, I think there are also issues about what that can reveal about you, you know, in more mundane context as a consumer or as a job seeker and, you know, the kind of advantages or disadvantages that might accrue, given that the power to define you based on data that is, you know, in the context of ChatGPT, often extremely intimate.

• 19:02Scott Galloway?

  You've actually referenced that AI as a marketing term. What did you mean by that?

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I'm being flatly literal, although I think that's sometimes taken to mean that I'm saying AI doesn't exist, or it's not serious, which is, you know, marketing is in fact very serious. You know, what I'm talking about there is just sort of denaturalizing AI as a technical term of art. If you look back at the term AI, you know, it was, it was created in, you know, 1956, 1957 by John McCarthy, who hosted the Dartmouth Conference. Those of us in, you know, in this world will be familiar with that, a kind of an iconic conference where a number of the quote unquote fathers of AI gathered to try to create intelligent life,

• 19:48Speaker 04

  you know, in the form of a machine over the course of a summer. And John McCarthy created the term in his own words in subsequent interviews, because he wanted to exclude Norbert Wiener from the convening. They didn't get along. Norbert Wiener had, you know, created the term cybernetics and the field of cybernetics. And McCarthy classically did not want to be a disciple. He wanted to be the father of his own thing, a very common academic urge. And he also wanted grant money. And he thought artificial intelligence was a kind of flashy term with a, you know, a cool valence that would get some of that, you know, Cold War era ARPA money flowing to his lab, which it did. It funded the conference. But over the history of the term, it's like over 80

• 20:31Speaker 04

  years now, we've seen it applied to very disparate technical modalities. So McCarthy was invested in symbolic systems, which would look much more like decision trees, and was actually deeply skeptical of the neural approach, which predated, you know, the term by about 10 years and was, you know, McCullough and Pitts and neural networks sort of stemmed from that. So what we see is a term that was invented primarily to describe an approach that's out of favor today, has now been applied, you know, because of the Specific resources available and the recognition that, you know, neural networks can do interesting things with data and compute and the type of business models we have.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  The term AI is now applied to an approach that was not actually kind of under its umbrella when McCarthy invented it. And why is any of this important beyond it just being very interesting if you're a nerd? I think it's important because it allows us to step back and actually recognize that this is not a term of art and what we are describing are very particular approaches that have their own historical and political economic formulations and that we can actually sort of have a bit more agency to define what we mean by intelligence, to choose the technologies that we are leveraging to produce intelligent seeming outputs and to be

• 21:56Speaker 04

  a bit more critical and actually regain a bit more of our own agency in relationship to mythologies that kind of naturalize these systems as just a sort of linear arc of technological and human progress.

• 22:08Scott Galloway?

  There's been a lot of, I don't know if it's warnings or catastrophizing from AI executives who said, I'm scared of what I've built and I need to retreat to the, you know, the Cottswolds and write poetry. I'm curious what you think the threat level is of AI? And if it's been overstated, understated, and where you see the biggest threats and how we as a populace respond to it?

• 22:35Speaker 04

  I think there are threats, particularly if we integrate these probabilistic generative and decision-making systems into high-stakes domains, you know, nuclear, defense, energy, and put them to tasks that they are ultimately not secured or suited for. So, you know, you can have, you know, reward hacking, you can have emergent behavior, all of those things are real. Those aren't things that are simply going to sort of spring out of nowhere or, you know, Athena from Zeus's head and suddenly we have ephemeral technologies running around without our control or

• 23:18Speaker 04

  delegation in some sense, right? Those would need to be choices that are made by people and decision-makers. And I do think, you know, in some sense, some of the fear Has a bit of escape velocity from material reality and almost sounds a bit like a religious fervor. Rather than kind of a, you know, technically grounded concern about the rush to integrate technologies that are not fit for purpose and could have collateral consequences, which is where I land on it. My primary fear, however, is the combination of the mythology of artificial intelligence, which is really framing these technologies as

• 23:58Speaker 04

  you know, superior to human judgment, superior to human capabilities, which on some axis measured in some ways, you know, sure, they they do math much quicker. So does a calculator. They can, you know, produce things more efficiently, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. But ultimately, these are very centralized technologies that rely on huge amounts of data, data that is captured by an industry invested in what I'd call the surveillance business model, which is effectively, you know, collect all the data you can via your platforms and then, you know, train an AI model, sell it to advertisers, et cetera. And, you know, so it's it's requires huge amounts of data. It requires huge amounts of infrastructure and I don't have to go into the

• 24:42Speaker 04

  the wild capex spending, the kind of, you know, Nvidia's picks and shovels, the the, you know, monopoly on on chips and the the, you know, build out of data centers. And it requires huge distribution networks, which often get left out of that calculus. But basically, if you're gonna make money or gonna integrate this, you need, you know, either a large social media or marketplace platform, or you need a cloud business model, or you need to latch on to one somehow. So all of that redounds to an industry that is highly concentrated in the hands of effectively the winners of the, you know, the last tech boom, the platforms who were able to establish, you know, data pipelines and massive amounts of data,

• 25:28Speaker 04

  large platforms, cloud infrastructures, global reach that were sort of cemented via network effects and economies of scale, all of, you know, classic communications network monopolies. And so my concern with all of that is that what we're looking at is a significant concentration of power over infrastructure and decision making that is then rebranded as a kind of god's head intelligence in ways that are making us less critical than we need to be about how that power is being leveraged.

• 25:59Scott Galloway?

  Well, let's let's drill down to specifics. What do you think? And nobody knows. But what is your best guess with respect to AI and employment? And let's call it the West and Europe and the US over the short and the medium term. I've seen TikToks of economists and AI executives saying, or AI thought leaders saying, employment, you know, we're going to see a massive destruction in the labor force. But the flip side is so far it hasn't really manifested. There's some, there's, you could potentially interpret that the job market is softening, but youth unemployment is about where it has been historically at average.

• 26:42Scott Galloway?

  AI and the labor force, what is your best guess?

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this, I got to be careful here. This isn't really my lane and I'm seeing a lot of kind of competing headlines. It does seem clear to me from some, some conversations that at least in part, AI has been a handy pretext for job cuts. You know, boards and media and shareholders will accept that, you know, hey, we cut X number of people because this is part of our AI strategy. That doesn't look like weakening demand. That looks like innovation. And so I do think there's some AI wrapping of downsizing that is happening. And I've heard that firsthand from some folks.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  I do think, you know, we are seeing at least a sort of degradation of work. And degradation, meaning, you know, there are people who maybe used to have a job as a copywriter or a translator. And, you know, we've seen this with translation, who are now just kind of editing AI output, right? And it's a less secure, maybe less fun, less rewarding job. But you, it's, it's not removing the human. It's sort of removing the. Agency and power that a human would have in that job under different circumstances.

• 28:03Speaker 04

  I am really impressed with what I've seen, or you know, it's, it's the, the new round of coding agents are very, very capable. Um, and you know, they're definitely, I'm seeing a lot of excitement across my industry there. It's, you know, you can't deny that these are very useful and produce output that is, um, you know, pretty commensurate with like a junior programmer. But again, you still need a senior programmer, you still need somebody who understands how it works to review the code and maintain it. And so even though you're seeing advances in capabilities,

• 28:41Speaker 04

  one thing that isn't being talked about enough is, you know, there are few things that many engineers I've worked with hate more than having to maintain someone else's shitty code. So you still need somebody who has an understanding of the systems level, who's bumped their head up against problems and understand them, you know, and can fix them, who understand how one, you know, pull request or kind of tranche of code might interact with another. And that's the place where I'm not only concerned that the kind of rapid outsourcing of some of the, the development work to agents.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Yep, I, I, I think some of that could backfire in, you know, a kind of technical debt that is very difficult to pay down. If what we're looking at is systems that are sort of, you know, built by agents or, you know, kind of coding AI and not fully understood by the people who, you know, the, the kind of skeleton crew who are left to maintain them. So those are, you know, those, those are some reflections. I don't think I have a clear answer because I think this is not just a question of AI. It's also, you know, where is their market will? You know, how is AI going to be used as a pretext? And then what happens when we do have the first significant issue with the reliance on these AI systems?

• 30:01Speaker 04

  And I, you know, I say that as I recognize that, you know, Amazon went down apparently because of an error made by an AI agent that they integrated. So, you know, we have already seen a kind of, you know, first wave of, of critical issues that are caused by a kind of dependence without, um, human oversight.

• 30:24Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 31:01Speaker 05

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• 31:32Scott Galloway?

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• 32:41Scott Galloway?

  We're back with more from Meredith Whitaker. So there's a tension between privacy and encryption, and I think the potential weaponization of encryption and privacy by bad actors. And I would imagine my virtue of your position, I think I understand where you would land on this, or at least a bias or a view on it. In London and New York, they say you can't go more than 12 or 15 feet outside without being on camera somewhere. And to a certain extent, I like that. More, I think I like it more in Britain because I'm less worried about it being weaponized by the administration here. But if you look at the decline in crime rates, I think some of it is because of technology.

• 33:26Scott Galloway?

  And then court ordered mandated, if you will, violations of privacy. If there's enough evidence that this person is a bad actor, and then we need to violate people's privacy to understand, you know, if something bad is about to happen. You must be given this question all the time, that tension, where do you land on that tension? And is there, is there ever a reason for why people's privacy should be violated in the context of larger safety concerns?

• 33:54Speaker 04

  I want to back this up to sort of the fundamentals of encryption. And when we're talking about, you know, Signal, what we are talking about when we talk about encryption and the way that it works is a technology that either works for everyone or it works for no one. If you undermine the math of encryption, if you put a backdoor in there, you have a, you know, not actually random, random number generator, that means you could sort of, it basically perturbed the encryption, decrypt it.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  That's not just a backdoor, that's just not, not just a, an error that only the good guys can avail themselves of. That is, that is effectively breaking encryption for everyone. So it really is a scenario where the people you hate the most have to be able to use it to exercise that right, so to speak. If the people you love the most are going to have access to it as well. It's a all eggs in one basket and that's that's at the level of math. I'm not answering the question, is it ever good or appropriate to undermine? You know, that is, that's not actually what I'm talking about.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  What I'm talking about is a world in which, over the last 30 years, we are surveilled within an inch of our lives. You said every 12 feet, we're recorded great. And then you made the comment, you know, I'm more comfortable with that under one regime than I am under another regime. Well, that becomes the issue. You're not really in control of, you know, how the sands of that regime shift. I mean, maybe you vote or, you know, whatever it is, but that data is indelible. Those systems are pervasive. Meta is adding facial recognition to their Ray-Ban glasses, right? Where is that data going? Which governments will access that? And so it is interesting to me that in a, you know, a golden age of surveillance,

• 35:56Speaker 04

  when unprecedented in human history, our actions, our preferences, our communities, you know, who we date, who we talk to, what we do for a living, how we spend our money, are surveilled and logged at a level of detail unimaginable to the Stasi, that we are still pinpointing a tiny refuge where the fundamental right to private communication that is recognized as such, that is necessary for a full and joyful and intellectually rigorous life that has intimacy and the ability to exercise our opinions and dissent and blow the whistle and do journalism and all of that, that that one right is presented as a problematic

• 36:40Speaker 04

  and as the barrier between stopping crime and allowing it to run rampant in a world where, you know, the issue is more often than not. Finding the needle in the haystack of noise and the haystack of data, not getting access to an encrypted channel. So my stance on that is very, very clear, but I also think the framing of the problem needs to be shifted a little bit.

• 37:07Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, my pivot co-host said something that really struck me. She said that people have the right to have secrets and it really struck me. And this, the kind of the smartest people I know that also understand tech all use Signal. And I realize how promiscuous and careless I've been with my own data. And I thought, what I do is just not that interesting. And most recently, when I hear the Trump administration talking about assembling lists of people who are vocal, you know, pretty outspoken against the Trump administration. I'm like, wow, I spoke too soon. If you were to, and you have advised the government, I know you were part of, you worked with Lena Kahn. What regulation, if you were to advise the administration

• 37:51Scott Galloway?

  or the FTC, maybe it's under a different administration, on what would be the most thoughtful regulation as it relates to privacy, encryption or AI? You know, kind of magic wand time. What do you think is most needed from our governments right now?

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a bit of a tricky question for me because I've been not in the policy bubble for a while. I do think, you know, something as simple as of meaningful consent. And by which I do not mean just a bunch of click rap and cookie banners around whether or not a given company or institution gets to create data about us at all. Not what they do with our data, but whether they have the right to tell my story, to know about me, would go a long way. Of course, that would wreck an entire logic of the tech business model.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  But I do think the fundamental thing that needs to be done, however, the regulatory paintbrush would paint this is to question and then take back the authority to define who we are from a handful of companies that have naturalized their right to sort us and order us and tell us our place in the world.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  That's a bit of a philosophical answer, but I do think that's the core issue is the the authority we've given tech companies who create data for advertisers to sort and order our world and tell our stories for us.

• 39:27Scott Galloway?

  I'm just curious what you thought of the Ring Super Bowl ad.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  My God, my God. I mean, I didn't expect it to become so flagrant so quickly, I guess. And and seeing that it was, you know, I was like, do who are they selling this to? Is it people who would install this? Or is it the government contracts who recognize exactly what this is selling and want to sign up for data access? Like, I, I, I certainly wasn't the core demographic it was aimed at, but it also felt like there was a, you know, a tertiary market that was actually being addressed that wasn't, you know, eager doorbell owners.

• 40:10Scott Galloway?

  When you look at the landscape, well, I, I'm going to ask a market question and I'm, I'm, my guess is you're going to tell me it's not your lane, but I just want to remind you that's never stopped us from opining on it and all talk, all manner of topics. We have no domain expertise. And in the markets, there's been a meltdown around SaaS companies from a valuation standpoint. You work, you essentially work for or run a software company is the way I would think of it. I don't know if you call it that, but at the end of the day, it's, I would imagine it's code.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  I worked for a software company, yeah.

• 40:40Scott Galloway?

  There you go. So there's been an enormous destruction of value among SaaS companies believing that AI is going to come in and, and kick the, kick the crap out of these guys or make them, you know, obsolete. When you see that happening, do you have any initial thoughts on the viability of these, some of these software companies who are, you know, some of them lost 40, 60, 70% of their value?

• 41:02Speaker 04

  I think ultimately, when you're providing. Enterprise software, particularly to highly regulated industries, it needs to be interoperable with legacy equipment. Even if you don't like that legacy equipment, that's, you know, there's, there's a superstructure there, there's a foundation. It needs to work with the data that you have, even if that data isn't great. That data needs to be clean and fungible. You need to be able to account for the different determinations that are made, depending on, you know, what kind of model you hook in there. That might not be a possible, particularly in, you know, financial services and, and other industries with high compliance burdens.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  You need to have, you know, often human oversight that is personally liable or accountable for different decisions. So I, you know, I do anticipate that AI in some form or fashion will be integrated, will have impacts here. But fundamentally, this is not a magic wand, right? And there's a lot of legacy infrastructure, regulatory burdens, and if labor processes and, and modes of work that need to be accounted for. And I don't, I don't see SaaS software going away anytime soon. And I don't see AI doing anything to really erase those other considerations. Right? Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  I think predictions of the demise are a bit self-interested and, um, you know, far premature.

• 42:33Scott Galloway?

  And last question, Meredith. It, it strikes me that young people are absolutely, at least when I see their actual behavior, there's some consumer dissonance in that as people talk a big game about privacy. And then I see people basically telling the world where they are, what they're doing and who they're doing it with. And it strikes me that even if you put a thin layer, if Uber would ever get hacked, a thin layer of AI on top could, could basically connote who's having affairs, terminating pregnancies, HIV status. It just wouldn't be that difficult to just know everything about someone with just their Uber data. Do you see the same dissonance I see in that as consumers have just decided to trade off massive privacy for utility? And do you have a message for them?

• 43:17Speaker 04

  I do see some of that. I would shift it a little bit. I think ultimately, humans want to be loved and they want to be included.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  They don't, you know, even when we talk about Signal and privacy, we're not talking about a vacuum. It's not Meredith by myself with none of my thoughts escaping the anechoic chamber of my, you know, meaning making. I am using Signal to share what I think with other people because I am a human and communication maps to human relationships and the desire to be connected and to be included, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we're in a world where, you know, ultimately, we will opt as human beings. I use these services too because I want to go to the party. I want to see what people are doing. You know, I got to get somewhere.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  I want to participate in life while I'm living, as do, I think, most people, right? So the ways to do that are things we're going to do. And I don't think they represent actual choices about where we feel comfortable or uncomfortable with our data, whatever our data might be, right? We don't really have access to it. We know we don't want someone to share our mean DMs with our friend. We know we don't want, you know, our health data leaked to our insurance in ways that would harm us. But that's also a place we don't have that much control. And in the meantime, we got to get to work. We want to see what our friend posted. We want to be part of the popular people.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  And the ways of doing that have been slowly, you know, we can say colonized or sort of, you know, instrumented by these tech services that advertise convenience, advertise connection, advertise ease. And then below the surface have sort of hollowed out our, our privacy and our ability to, you know, define ourselves in the place in the world. So I would say what we're seeing is a natural human inclination. You know, we use what we can to be together, to connect with each other, to participate in life. Those services have themselves kind of, I, I think in some sense betrayed us structurally. And that doesn't mean we don't care about privacy.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  We mean, that means a meaningful choice around what, what it would take to care about privacy has not really been given to us. You know, we do see the number of people using Signal going up and up and up. We do see people's understanding of why privacy is so important. I think becoming more acute and more. You felt for people at a personal level when they see people's social media posts being used at the border, when they see these collateral consequences that are coming home. I think the issue then is, okay, what do we do about it? And you can't say, well, the choice is never to communicate with your friends because that's simply unrealistic and anti-human. But you should use Signal.

• 46:16Scott Galloway?

  I'm not exaggerating, and this is my final plug. The smartest people I know, and then the people who understand technology the most have domain expertise around technology, that vent overlap, they all use Signal. It's almost like a badge of like, I get it. You know, anyways, but my favorite quote from this is people are, people want to be loved and included. Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation and a leading voice on AI policy. She co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU, advised FTC Chair Lina Khan, and was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI. She joins us from New York. Meredith, very much appreciate your time and your good work. And I meant what I said.

• 46:57Scott Galloway?

  You're the, you're the bright, well-lit, clean part of the AI technology bookstore. Let's put Meredith Whittaker in charge. Let's just, let's consolidate all of it. I'll go raise $11 trillion, buy all of these companies and put you in charge. Deal?

• 47:15Speaker 04

  It's a deal, Scott. It's a deal. Yeah, looking forward to working with you and thank you for having me on.

• 47:43Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of Happiness, a Hack for Young Dads. It is striking to me how selfish kids can be. I mean, it's just, I feel like I'm essentially, essentially a credit card that occasionally gets to watch a football match with them sometimes. And let me just give you a hack. If you're a dad like me who thinks that you're going to have all these hallmark moments with your child, you'll have some of those. But for the most part, it's going to be mostly a one-way relationship. And I'm not saying it's not amazing, but the hack...

• 48:21Scott Galloway?

  I have implemented and it's helped me a lot is that my favorite title, I've been a founder, you know, all these cool titles, see or whatever, my favorite title in the world is dad. And that is every time my kids call me or say, oh, hi dad, or they call out dad, or, you know, I love you dad. Every time I hear the word dad, I'm like one of those dogs that hears the word walk. And I've trained myself to just love that term. It's the most important term in my life. And it just, it's more dope for me than anything is when these two things that kind of look, smell and feel like me called me dad. And what I've decided, and I started believing and training myself to believe five years

• 49:05Scott Galloway?

  ago, is that when my kids are awful, you know, they give me a hard time, or they come home and expectorate their emotions, or they're unreasonable, or they slam their door. My kids, and what you'll find is generally speaking, your kids don't behave that way outside of the house. If you're like 90% of us, you're going to find that outside of the house, your kids are pretty reasonable, pretty good citizens, pretty polite. And at home, they're fucking terrorists, assessing the household for vulnerabilities so they can strike when you're at your weakest. Now, why do they do that? Because they're processing, they're emoting, and they know what they can do with you because they know you are

• 49:46Scott Galloway?

  there unconditionally. They know you love them unconditionally. Why? Because you're their dad. And so what I have done, and it's been a real unlock for me, is that when my kids say something inconsiderate, or even mean to me, or aren't respectful, or aren't kind, I'm not saying I let them roll right over me, but I assume they're saying one thing to me. They're saying dad. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janer. Kami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director.

• 50:29Scott Galloway?

  Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.

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