Maybe I’m dating myself, but there was a time that whenever I would hear the “Big Four,” I would always think of the big four accounting firms...Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC.

Well, it’s now 2017, and the new, much bigger, Big Four are Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. Given their outsized share of the marketplace, not to mention our lives, are these companies monopolizing our lives in a negative way? Our guest this week, Scott Galloway, certainly thinks so.

Scott is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand strategy and digital marketing to second-year MBA students. A serial entre­preneur, he has founded nine firms, including L2. In 2012, he was named one of the “World’s 50 Best Busi­ness School Professors” by Poets & Quants.

In his first book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Scott explores how these massive companies infiltrate our lives so completely that they’re almost impossible to avoid.  Why does the stock market forgive them for sins that would destroy other firms? As they race to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company, can anyone chal­lenge them? These are just a couple of the fundamental questions Scott asks throughout the book.  

Let’s face it, there’s no avoiding them, so we all better figure out how to either compete with them, work with them, or just live in a world dominated by them.

For more laughs and dry humor from Scott, I highly recommend his weekly YouTube series, “Winners and Losers.” It’s laugh out loud funny and has generated tens of millions of views.

“Better Off” is sponsored by Betterment.

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"Better Off" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com.

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