Pivoting in politics, tech, antitrust and economic growth | Gary Shapiro interview

Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the CTA, has seen tech change over decades. I talked to him about his latest views of politics, tech and economic growth. He was blunt in his responses, and that reminded me of the title of his new book on innovation, dubbed Pivot or Die: How Leaders Thrive When Everything Changes.

I spoke with Shapiro a day before the U.S. presidential election. I asked him about politics and tech in one of my early questions. But he first went on to tell me about CES 2025, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas that will happen in early January.

After all, that’s job one for Shapiro, who, as CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), has to make sure the massive trade show for technologists goes off without a hitch.

We eventually circled back and talked about some political issues. He was particularly concerned about the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s “excessive” antitrust enforcement against the tech giants under the leadership of Democratic appointee Lina Khan.

We also talked about the turbulent tech economy and how its been affected by the shadow of two major wars in the world. And we addressed the impact of AI on the tech industry. That led us to a discussion of the role of government in the tech industry, when it comes to both support and oversight. And I asked him about the chance we have for balanced growth — where revenues grow, AI gets accepted, and jobs grow too.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: It’s good to see you getting another book out.

Gary Shapiro: It’s still relevant. We just had a meeting today, the day before the election and 60 days before CES. We talked about the pivots we had made previously in the last few years as an organization. Given the uncertainty of what’s going to happen tomorrow, given the economy and everything else, the only thing that’s certain–well, something will happen.

VentureBeat: This is going to run after the election, but what are some of your thoughts that link what you have in the book to your views of politics and tech?

Shapiro: The CES is an amazing, powerful tech event. I was looking back at what you had written last year about it, before and after. A lot of people go with a very full agenda, but we always say you have to have time for serendipity and discovery. We have a new look, a new feel. We focused the campaign on “Dive in.” We’re inviting attendees to do three things: connect, solve, and discover.

“Connect,” in the technology world–we want people to get together, through B2B and B2C. The statistic we’ve used before is that the average attendee has about 29 meetings during the show. It’s an important business event. You get that face to face. About 75% of attendees say their business is primarily B2B, or both B2B and B2C. We struggle with the name. Some people call it the Consumer Electronics Show, but it’s just CES. There’s so much there that’s B2B. That’s one of the changes that occurs for people when they discover.

Another theme of the show is not only to connect, but to solve. We talked about human security for all, our work with the United Nations focusing on the sustainable development goals, focusing on fundamental human security in areas like health care, finances, personal safety. We see that in all sorts of ways. Of course accessibility is another big thing. Even for me, attending the show in 2024, that was one of the biggest surprises and themes. I don’t think I even talked about that before the show – how many people were there looking out on behalf of the disability community, and how many companies were responding to that with all sorts of technology. We have a meeting of the disability community before the show. We had to cut off attendance because there wasn’t enough room.

Discovery or serendipity is the third theme, the trends we see. Some of it is a continuation, but some of it is new. Obviously AI is still a big thing. It pervades almost every category. Digital health is also very big. Mobility is huge with electric vehicles and connected cars, autonomy, sustainability. We’ve done our own pivots as well. The concept of electricity being available is not something we’ve talked about at CES before. Now we have a whole conference track on it. With electric cars, generative AI, and quantum, they all use tremendous amounts of electricity that we’re not prepared for. Not surprising to me, a number of companies in the last month have announced deals with nuclear power plants and things like that, which is totally new, but it’s a way of dealing with it.

We’ll have that. We’ll have exhibitors focusing on energy savings on the supply side, heat reduction, local production. We’ll also have panels talking about how we can look at the electric grid. Similarly to that vein, we’ll have a shift that we haven’t had before to quantum computing. We have a half day of programming on that. While AI and generative AI is currently the thing, now generative AI doesn’t get you to the finish line with a lot of things, for example in health care. It’s a whole shift upwards in computing that we haven’t had in a long time.

The other great thing about CES, we have the most powerful group of keynotes we’ve ever had. You heard about Delta earlier this week. We’ll continue to announce more. This is our first keynote in the Sphere, Ed Bastian. Delta is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Their shift to becoming a technology company is centered around CES. In mobility we also have the Volvo Group. We have a first-time exhibitor, OshKosh. You may only know them from kids’ clothing, but they also have a huge business where they dominate in fire trucks, ambulances, and emergency vehicles. They want to show what they can do against some of the other mobility companies.

And how could I not mention Nvidia? This is Jensen Huang’s third time keynoting. It’s a big shift from the last time. I’ve known Jensen for a very long time. I’m sure you’ve known him longer. It’s the hottest company there is right now.

VentureBeat: At one point it was one of 80 graphics chip companies.

Shapiro: I wish I’d bought their stock, but hey. And we have many other new exhibitors. Foxconn, Komatsu, Scout Motors. I think the number I heard at our staff meeting today is at least 400 new companies.

VentureBeat: How do you feel about how the tech companies feel right now as far as the strength of the tech economy? It feels to me like some elements are very out of sync with each other. The AI boom is happening for a lot of the tech industry, but the game industry is coming off 30 months of layoffs. It’s fairly weak. Hollywood feels like it’s also been on the ropes in many ways. These things that used to be so tied together feel like they’re on different economic cycles.

Shapiro: Certainly there’s economic uncertainty. If you think about it, COVID was devastating to the economy, but good for the tech industry. It forced people to stay home and play games and watch movies and build home offices and invest in all these things. People invested in their homes. Then we had the government fueling a tremendous amount of cash into the economy. Every time I’m trying to drive around the Detroit area, there’s construction projects on top of construction projects. Obviously they don’t talk to each other, so it takes a long time to drive anywhere.

What’s obviously also changed in the last couple of years, we’ve had a couple of major wars going on. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now. The economic uncertainty sometimes builds on itself until we talk ourselves into a recession. The tech industry is positive and promising a better future, better solutions. Certainly there’s a dislocation going on with the skills that are needed. Because of generative AI, a lot of companies are trying to hire people who know how to deal with generative AI and try to make them more efficient. Some of the people who were really hot a few years ago, software people, are less so. In the free market economy there’s some dislocation going on. In the long run it’ll work out for the better of everyone, but in the short there are some personally painful situations. Anyone who’s running an organization, the last thing you want to do is lay off people. But it’s the reality.

The other thing that’s going on, and we’ll know in a week or two whether it will continue–the federal government, the Federal Trade Commission, has been pretty tough on tech. The chairman of the FTC literally wrote her thesis that made her famous about why Amazon is so terrible. She believes big companies should not acquire small companies. That isn’t something that’s been pervasive. The positive thing is, a lot of tech people supporting the Democrats and Harris, those same tech people are saying that she’s gotta go. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

On the Republican side, obviously–I could get into the details a lot on this issue. JD Vance has said he kind of likes her. Who knows what Donald Trump thinks? It’s unlikely he would keep a Democratic chairman of the FTC, especially because she rules like such an authoritarian. Changed the antitrust standards. Literally, there’s a report that just came out Wednesday or Thursday last week from the House oversight committee laying out in very clear detail what happened with Amazon and iRobot and others, how they’ve gone to Europe and tried to stop American companies and gotten fines put on them. Also, internal emails showing that they intentionally tried to keep large companies from buying small companies. Not just through the lawsuits, which is the tangible side. They’ve lost almost every one of them at the FTC. But just the threats. Acquisition activity has gone down, and therefore startup activity has gone down, because startup investors don’t see the exits they used to see. That adds to an uncertain economy. There’s a different level of investment.

VentureBeat: I see part of this playing out in a different way on my level. Epic Games has been at war with Apple over antitrust issues for quite a while now. The platform companies extract their fees. They hold the most power in the industry. They’re the biggest companies. The developer companies are underneath paying these 30% fees. Is that holding back growth from happening? Those big companies are getting bigger. Apple is getting bigger. But the developers of those technologies can’t necessarily move on to the next generation if they’re paying 30% of the top line to platform companies. But it’s not a black and white issue.

Shapiro: There are two issues there. One is, what is the federal government’s role? I would maintain that it’s been overly aggressive, anti-American, anti-big tech, expressly so. It’s not only the U.S. It’s a global situation. For the most part our companies dominate the world. There’s a legitimate question about the role of the federal government. Plus they’ve changed the standard, which President Carter put into place almost 50 years ago, which is what’s best for consumers, not what’s best to protect existing competitors. Those are big changes. I believe they’ve been very unhealthy for tech and the U.S. economy in general.

On the other hand, there are private lawsuits, which is what you’re talking about. We’ve stayed out of that. I would agree with you that there are arguments on both sides. On the one hand, you can take each of the platforms and say they’ve enabled X hundreds of thousands, or even millions of new businesses to do business on their platforms. Before this technology revolution they wouldn’t even exist. It’s not just one platform. There are several. They keep coming alive. Everyone thinks that once they have this exclusive hold–the history of technology has shown that it’s hard to come up with a platform that survives for more than 20 or 30 years. They seem to be eclipsed. If you look at the different search engines and the different selling platforms that come along–to me that’s something for the courts to work out on the basis of those private lawsuits, whether you’ve taken advantage of something in a way that’s wrong or unfair.

But companies do have a right to do business and try to grow. We have a right to know what the law is. In some cases Congress hasn’t done their job. They sometimes come up with a compromise that’s intentionally ambiguous. What has changed, and radically so, is that the Supreme Court came out with a case several months ago saying the agencies can’t do anything other than what Congress says they can do. They can’t fill the gaps. That’s already created a huge number of lawsuits challenging regulations and government action. In the private antitrust area–these antitrust lawsuits are expensive on both sides. I have mixed feelings. I started out as an antitrust lawyer. I have a lot of experience in this area and I follow it closely. In the U.S. there are litigation costs that no one else has. Both sides pay a lot for antitrust lawsuits. There are treble damages. It’s very unusual. I just wish there was a better way of creating legal certainty.

At CES, we have the best thing for competition in the world. Trade shows are great because you get to see all the competitors lined up. We’re seeing it play out in so many areas. We see it in electric vehicles. I was reading a Wall Street Journal story about the Latin American market for electric vehicles, because the U.S. and Europe are shutting them out. Competition is an amazing thing. It drives down prices for consumers.

VentureBeat: A good question is, what’s going to be the way to something like an open metaverse? How can you ensure that it will be open and accessible so that we get the best of all economies that come from it?

Shapiro: Things have a way of working themselves out. If you make something too closed it doesn’t work. That goes all the way back to VHS and Beta. Sony had the better technology by almost every definition, but Matsushita was smart enough to license out theirs to everyone.

VentureBeat: Or America Online.

Shapiro: Right, and all the systems before and after that. I hear you. If you don’t allow returns on investment for the companies that are there first, you don’t get investment. The bottom line is, we have to create a system if we want to be a winning country. You have to be willing to change your response to circumstances. Many of these companies are going through a rough patch, but they have to pivot. COVID allowed every company to pivot in a way they’d never done before. That was to the benefit of tech as well.

What I talk about a lot in the book a lot is, who can pivot quicker? A big company or a small one? The truth is, a small company can pivot quicker by far. They can adjust. That’s why big companies like to acquire them. A big company has the capital and the infrastructure, but they’re always protecting their existing moneymakers.

VentureBeat: You mentioned that a lot of companies pivoted during the pandemic. Do you feel like this is a time for pivoting again, for any particular reason, in the post-COVID era? Do companies have to change one more time?

Shapiro: What’s changed since COVID is that–certainly we focus on our health. That will always be important. Tech provides a lot of solutions there. That’s why generative AI and health tech and telemedicine and all these things are so important. We have–again, talking very specifically about this moment in time, where we have what feels like an equally divided election, where all three bodies of government are equally up for grabs, where we have an economy that’s so uncertain.

The Fed lowered interest rates by half a point and there was no response. The long-term yield hasn’t changed, which is unprecedented. They’re meeting the day after the election as we’re talking about another quarter point. At the same time inflation seems to feel high, although the numbers don’t indicate it. Consumers are whiplashed. The university system, the educational system is under dramatic change. There’s a lot of pressure to cause a lot of change very quickly. We have two pretty significant wars that are going on that are very new.

VentureBeat: We still don’t know what the true effect of AI is going to be.

Shapiro: We’ve seen already that generative AI is having positive effects, a lot of efficiency and improved competence. We’re seeing promise in health care very quickly. I’m an optimist. I think it’s going to be great. I think we’re going to solve fundamental problems. That’s what CES is about, solving these problems. Generative will be there. But that also comes with new problems. When we focus on efficiency we get a lot of things. We get the products the Department of Energy certifies as Energy Star compliant from us, from our companies. But that was the products themselves. I don’t think we focused on the energy business the way we do now.

If you look at the numbers, the numbers don’t lie. If generative AI truly does take off, that’s a lot of energy. The same with electric cars. Energy has to come from somewhere. The same with quantum. This is definitely a transformational period in our technological history. There are new challenges. With all these new challenges, you have to pivot. What I talk about in the book, there are certain things that force pivots. We had COVID. We have to change quickly in response to external forces. Or what Microsoft just did with the nuclear power plant. There are startup pivots, where you get new opportunities, new equipment. That’s where startups are at. Then there are failure pivots, where you know your business is going down, and if you don’t succeed, you try again.

VentureBeat: The media business is front and center for that one.

Shapiro: It is. I just saw the headline today. Marc Benioff is looking at selling Time. I was wondering what value it had. A lot of tech moguls bought media properties. Jeff Bezos was in the news this week because of the Washington Post [he had killed an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris]. There’s a lot of stuff going on. It seems like you’ve figured it out. You write more words than anyone I know.

VentureBeat: The interesting thing to me is that some people feel like tech and government, tech and politics, have always been different topics, not tied together so much. But I remember this one program way back. George Gilder was talking about how tech companies bring themselves up by their bootstraps and get things done, and they’re so much more efficient than anything related to the government. And then Andy Grove was in the same session, and he said, you know, does it give you no pause that all of us, all the chip companies were born because of the space program? It was an interesting moment to hear that government and technology have gone hand in hand over many years.

Shapiro: They have. If you look back to developments in telecommunications, a lot of it is government procurement. They’re the biggest customer. On the other hand the government can also slow it down. Look what they did with AT&T. Look what they did with Microsoft. They spent years killing it off just on the basis of the search engine, which makes no sense. A lot of the government actions against the big tech companies prove to be irrelevant, but they do distract the companies and their senior leadership in a big way.

Generative AI is one area where China has definite advantages over the free market system, given the lack of focus on privacy and their strategic focus on it. There’s more of an international competition going on in a non-war environment than any other time. When the government has gotten its act together in the U.S., it’s been World War II and other things. That’s when technology worked well with the government. Right now, is technology working well with the government? I’m not sure. I don’t know if I have a good answer. In some ways, yes. AI is one area. Generative AI is one area where the government, the federal government at least, has taken a very reasonable approach. It started with Trump and continued with Biden.

The only challenge is, just as with self-driving cars, Congress has been rather slow to react. Congress, especially the Senate side, they’ve really engaged in some listening, and they recognize that premature action is probably going to be less helpful than anything. But I don’t think the private sector is looking to the government on generative AI for anything other than guardrails. We say, because we believe in this as an organization–the mistake that Europe has made on AI is they made it so difficult and expensive for any startup to get involved. That’s not healthy. We don’t want to be like Europe. Going forward, we’ll know by January which direction we’ll be going in terms of government.

VentureBeat: One thing I hope, and I wonder whether you agree–eventually we’ll get to balanced growth, which to me would mean revenues for the industries all keep growing. Jobs also stabilize and keep growing. People hire a lot of people. And we embrace new technology like AI. We don’t get these things out of sync – AI advances and all of a sudden jobs disappear. That’s not what we want. Or revenue grows but no hiring happens. If they could all synchronize and be together – people accept new technology, people get jobs, and revenues grow for companies.

Shapiro: What I’ve learned in my career is that you never get to perfect, but you just try to do better than you did last year. The definition of perfect changes. I don’t think, in a free market economy, that perfect is where everyone gets to keep their jobs. You have to learn new skills.

There is another theory out there, though, which is that it will add more free time, and that will generate its own economic growth. My wife goes to a lot of medical conferences, and there’s a generational difference between doctors in that the incoming doctors don’t want to work as hard. They want regular hours. They don’t want the lengthy hours. Today that’s a front page story in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been talking about this for two years now. It’s true, and I know this because I’ve talked to enough doctors in different fields about it. People want time now. It probably predated COVID. People value experience and time. That’s what it is.

There are two theories. One is the one you mentioned. I don’t want to call it old school, but it’s based on traditional economics. Economic growth can solve big problems with debt. Economic growth can lift up everyone. Economic growth should not cost jobs. And the way you do that is you get people trained differently and quickly. That’s one thing Trump did a lot of. He doesn’t get credit for it, but the whole white collar apprentice concept of hiring people and training. That’s one thing he was personally focused on with his daughter Ivanka. I worked with them a lot on that. They had major strides. The Biden people kept it up.

But guaranteeing employment, making it more difficult to fire people, putting European restrictions on letting people go and how much you have to pay them–we’ve already seen some of that. You can’t have non-disclosure agreements. You have to disclose salaries. You can’t ask people what they’ve been paid. You can’t do all these things. That’s a shift toward a more European way. But there is that third way, where people start talking about guaranteed income, basic income and things like that. Studies have shown that it doesn’t really work very well, because then people don’t work. If nothing happens then they’re not necessarily happy.

My belief in life is that people are happy if they’re productive, if they have some type of job or volunteering where they do something good. A lot of these discussions will occur. I don’t think it’s next year’s issue. Several years ahead, I think you’re right. People will talk about it. I’ve been in the room with President Trump where he’s in with companies committing to how many people they will train and hire. They make commitments. First there was no follow-through. We didn’t make that commitment, because we’re an association. A lot of our members made commitments, but you can’t make commitments like that because the economy is so volatile. It’s very difficult. It was an interesting time.

Trump tried to establish himself as a president for the working class. If he’s elected again, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to go back there. He’ll talk about AI in that way. But I also think Harris will talk about AI in that way if she’s elected. We’ll see. The federal government is imposing rules. The question is whether they’ll put up the type of strictures that have made Europe very non-competitive, non-innovative, and non-productive. The number one export from Europe is now regulation.