Trump and Elon Clash Again, Paramount Settles, and the Fate of the “Big Beautiful Bill”

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Speaker 18 I agree with Marsha Blackburn. Oh, yay, yay.
Whatever. I'm with you, Marsha, today.
Just today. That's it.

Speaker 18 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher. Scott is off today, sailing in some place, maybe a BISA, who knows.

Speaker 18 So in his place, I brought someone actually smart, a fantastic co-host, Kristen Soltis-Anderson, who is a pollster, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and co-founder of Echelon Insights.

Speaker 18 I was on the Chris Wallace show with her, and she is a Republican pollster. I am obviously.
Well, I don't know what I am. Anyway, welcome, Kristen.

Speaker 19 Thank you so much for having me. I miss our weekly get-togethers

Speaker 19 with Chris Wallace refereeing.

Speaker 18 Yes, I know. They're quite good, but you're never really like, you're always so reasonable.
And then you convince me of things I don't want to be convinced of. So that's why I'm having you here today.

Speaker 18 But there's a ton going on. What are you up to mostly right now? I mean, obviously you've been inundated with information as a pollster, right?

Speaker 19 There's a ton of stuff going on. So you've got the tariffs that next week.
We will see

Speaker 19 90 deals, 90 days. Does that work out? So lots of people interested in what's public opinion on tariffs in the economy, everything that's going on in the Middle East.
Do people feel safe?

Speaker 19 Do they feel unsafe? What's their reaction now that we've had a little bit of time to digest what happened?

Speaker 19 And then, of course, what's going on with One Big Beautiful Bill and the many different ways you can try to gauge, do Americans even know what this bill is?

Speaker 19 And from what they've seen, do they even like it?

Speaker 18 Right, which they don't, right? I mean, we'll get to that. We'll get to all those things.
You have some things to talk about today.

Speaker 18 Do you, right now, when you are doing polling, there's so much polling out there and there's so much internet polling and everything else.

Speaker 18 Talk just a tiny bit about the business because people like don't trust polls, but they're glued to them at the same time.

Speaker 18 So give me an idea of how you figure this out when you're in this pool of info. You're right.

Speaker 19 It's very much one of those like the portions are terrible and so small kind of situations where people will say that I hate polls. I don't trust polls.

Speaker 19 But they seem to know exactly what's going on in the polling averages. Look, distrust of polls or skepticism of polls is completely natural.

Speaker 19 I understand it.

Speaker 19 Oftentimes polls are used to do something they are not built to do.

Speaker 19 They are not actually great at predicting down to within a point or two how a fluid situation might turn out a week or two down the road. And so I get why people are skeptical.

Speaker 19 The other challenge we're facing is technology makes it easier for me as a pollster to find you and ask you questions.

Speaker 19 And it makes it easier for you as a respondent to evade me, ignore me, block me, and so on. And then you add to that the way that AI is going to change our industry.

Speaker 19 It's going to make it so that you have more hurdles to jump through as a pollster to try to make sure, are the people that I'm contacting and surveying really legitimate? Or are they bots?

Speaker 19 Are they bots that look an awful lot like people digitally? These are challenges that we as an industry are facing. And really right now, the big thing that I am watching is

Speaker 19 there was a great Atlantic article, I think, a week or two ago that was about how teenagers are asking for landlines again.

Speaker 19 And gosh, the return of the landline would be like the greatest thing ever for pollsters.

Speaker 18 Because people answer the phone.

Speaker 19 No one answers the phone anymore.

Speaker 18 No one answers the phone. Not at all.
But when you have so many of them out there too, when they're doing them online, Elon Musk just did one.

Speaker 18 We'll talk about that in a minute, like about whether you should start an America party. He did one around a lot of things this week.
He does it all the time, but he's not the only one.

Speaker 18 Everybody seems to have a hot take or I've pulled these people. How do you stand out as an actual pollster with actual standards?

Speaker 19 So there there are a couple of things you can do to stand out. One of them is you're not just looking for the cheapest, fastest data you can find.

Speaker 19 The reason why these panels exist of people that you can survey is not actually mostly for political purposes.

Speaker 19 It's because every brand under the sun has a marketing department that's trying to gauge, how's our new ad campaign going? What do people think about our new consumer product? It's so on and so forth.

Speaker 19 So most of these polling panels that a pollster in the political space is using don't first and foremost exist for political purposes.

Speaker 18 Right. It's like, how do you like this Clorox or whatever?

Speaker 19 Yeah, you have to be good at knowing how to take this

Speaker 19 panels that are made mostly to gauge what do people think about bleach or sneakers or anything and make it into something that looks really like what an electorate will look like.

Speaker 19 What we do at my firm, we use the voter file. It's the publicly available list of everybody who's a registered voter.
It's pretty frequently updated in most states.

Speaker 19 And that can at least give you some ground truth of who is and isn't registered to vote. How often do each of those people vote or not vote?

Speaker 19 And that can help you have some sense that the people you're talking to are real people, they're registered voters, and you have a good idea of how often they are a voter.

Speaker 18 And last question, you do this thing for the New York Times. You have the same people that you talk to.

Speaker 18 Is that helpful? Because you're trying to gauge their opinion over time, correct?

Speaker 19 So for the New York Times, what's really fun is that's qualitative.

Speaker 19 We are bringing in, you know, eight to 12 people, depending on the group, to just talk to them for 90 minutes about what they think about a key issue. And there, you know, you're getting real people.

Speaker 19 You know, you're not getting bots. You're looking at each other face to face.
You can see how they react to each other.

Speaker 19 And what's neat there is we have, as you mentioned, had times where we bring the same people back. You know, a year later, we did one like that around January 6th.

Speaker 19 We had some Republicans come one year after January 6th and tell us, okay, a year later, how are you feeling about this? horrible thing that happened in our country.

Speaker 19 And then we had those same people back a year after that to see, okay,

Speaker 19 how had the horror of the day converted into belief in a conspiracy theory or just a belief it's not that big a deal? And so on and so forth.

Speaker 18 Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, one more question.
Are there beefs between pollsters? There's beefs between journalists, that's for sure.

Speaker 19 For the most part, pollsters are all friends, and that includes pollsters across the political aisle.

Speaker 19 So Republican and Democratic pollsters, we generally all view each other as part of the reality-based community who are trying to live in a world that is driven by data.

Speaker 19 And so you find a lot of these fun partnerships between Republican and Democratic pollsters that do not exist anywhere else in the political consulting space.

Speaker 19 You don't find Republican and Democratic like ad makers working together that often, but you will find that in polling.

Speaker 19 The beef is less, you know, you're right versus left, and it's more quality versus people who are peddling garbage.

Speaker 19 And they, the folks that are peddling garbage make it harder for the good pollsters to do their job because they quote lower prices, they set different market expectations, and then they're the ones that are out there sort of pushing narratives that you either have to debunk or

Speaker 18 it doesn't really matter if they're right or not, right? They don't, they just move on to the next thing. Um, all right, so we've got a lot to get to today, and you're bringing us some stats too.

Speaker 18 Um, we're also going to talk about Paramount settling with Trump and Trump's latest target, New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mandani, who did spectacularly well now that the results are in.

Speaker 18 But first, so President Trump is hitting back at Elon Musk after days of Elon railing against Trump's big beautiful bill, which just passed the Senate.

Speaker 18 Trump took aim at the government subsidies that Elon's companies received and said the country would save a fortune without them.

Speaker 18 He also threatened to sick Doge on Elon and said it would, quote, take a look at deporting Elon. When asked about that, he also said Doge would eat Elon for some reason.
I'm not sure why.

Speaker 18 After those comments, Elon said it was so tempting to escalate, but he would refrain for now.

Speaker 18 And I had predicted that he was going to slap back over this bill because he really, I know him pretty well previously, and and this would bother him he's been ramping up the rhetoric posting on x that republicans who vote for the bill will quote lose their primary next year if it's the last thing i do on this earth okay and after declaring that we live in a one-party country the porky pig party elon renewed his calls to form a third party the america party if the bill passes so we're going to talk about the bill in a moment let's start with the return of the feud now i am not surprised elon erupted like this i said he would when he did his first eruption and then apologized But Tesla's shares took a tumble on Tuesday, falling 5%.

Speaker 18 And this just came in. Tesla's global car sales fell sharply in the second quarter.
Now he's expressing regret over his chainsaw stunt, saying it lacked empathy, you think.

Speaker 18 So he's threatening this third party. Let's start with this.

Speaker 18 You have some brand new polling on third parties in the United States, which has been tried and tried again, although it has happened in the United States several times.

Speaker 19 Yeah, polling on this really shows that a lot of Americans don't think that the two existing political parties are meeting their needs, but there's really not a lot of consensus about what a third party would look like.

Speaker 19 And the bad news for Elon Musk is that this kind of libertarian type viewpoint is most likely not where you would find a real viable third party spring up.

Speaker 19 So I've been doing research at my firm for the last number of years where what we do is we ask people, do you think of yourself as liberal or conservative?

Speaker 19 But then we also ask them a bunch of issue questions to get their sense of, you know, are you picking the conservative position on 10 out of 10 economic issues or 10 out of 10 social issues?

Speaker 19 And then we kind of plot everybody out on a chart and we see where do people fall. And only 11% of voters are strong conservatives, right? They're picking the right-wing position on almost everything.

Speaker 19 And only 13% of Americans pick the strong liberal position on everything.

Speaker 19 There's a lot of people that choose a little from column A, a little from column B, but the problem for the libertarians is only about 5% of people tend to choose a bunch of liberal social positions and a bunch of conservative fiscal positions.

Speaker 18 Oh, wow.

Speaker 19 There are significantly more people who are the opposite, who take a more sort of socially, culturally conservative viewpoint, but then also believe that, yeah, we should have robust government safety net and those sorts of things.

Speaker 19 So the problem that Musk is going to run into is, yes, Americans don't love the two-party system.

Speaker 19 Yes, there's a hunger for a third party, but no, it doesn't necessarily look exactly like what I think Musk's politics look like.

Speaker 18 Right. So what would that look like? Like that they're socially conservative.

Speaker 18 That's interesting. Usually it was the socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
That used to be kind of a thing from a lot of people in the Senate. Right.

Speaker 19 And, you know, I do a lot of presentations to business leaders and I'll ask, you know, how many of you in this room would describe yourselves as fiscally conservative, but socially moderate to progressive?

Speaker 19 And tons of hands go up. And like the bad news for those folks is in the data, it's actually a very small portion of the electorate.

Speaker 19 We tried asking it a different way where we gave people five different hypothetical parties to choose from. One is kind of a far-right nationalist populist type party.

Speaker 19 One is a more center-right, maybe old-school Republican party. One is a center-left labor party.
One is a green party.

Speaker 19 And then one, we jokingly call it the Acela Party, but like that's not really what it's called. But it's this kind of Mike Bloomberg, like socially moderate centrism.
And that only gets 13% of voters.

Speaker 18 Oh, wow. Which one gets the most?

Speaker 19 The most is the Labor Party.

Speaker 18 Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 19 Well, so I don't know if I would say that's Bernie Sanders. I would think of it more almost as a like,

Speaker 19 maybe a John Fetterman.

Speaker 19 Setting aside, like I know he definitely has some views that are at odds with the Democratic majority on a couple cultural issues these days, but this idea of like middle-class economics, labor unions, tax the rich a little bit, support programs for those less well-off, but it's not like break up big corporations.

Speaker 19 Like that's what we said for the Green Party. And that only got 6% in our polling.
The more interesting thing, I think, to me, too, is that the right is really split.

Speaker 19 So while most Democrats coalesce into that kind of labor party type model, Republicans are very divided between this more old school, you know, three-legged stool of conservatism, right?

Speaker 19 Strong military, strong families, limited government versus a like, we're cracking down on illegal immigration, we're stopping political correctness, America first.

Speaker 19 Like that really does divide the right in our polling.

Speaker 18 No foreign intervention, that kind of thing. So

Speaker 18 are they headed for a crackup in that way? It seems like once Trump is removed from the situation, there's a real crackup about to happen.

Speaker 19 It feels like Donald Trump is holding a lot of pieces together, that in the absence of a strong dominating personality who has just captured this party entirely, those cracks would begin to show.

Speaker 19 A lot of this Musk feud reminds me of the Tea Party days. I think I described it on air once as like the reheated leftovers of the Republican Party's interfamily drama from like 2011.

Speaker 19 These fights feel familiar, but they feel old. They feel like they come from an era before Donald Trump came in and said, it's my way or the highway.
Right.

Speaker 18 So, but is there a chance for him to have a party in here? What would it be? If you were, if he said to you, Kristen, I want you to create a party for me. What would you advise him?

Speaker 18 And he's going to give you a pile of money and you'll do it, right?

Speaker 18 I don't know if you would, but you should, because you would be a good influence on him.

Speaker 18 What would you advise him, Elon? This is the party you need to start.

Speaker 19 So I think he's got some good instincts in the sense of

Speaker 19 being anti-establishment, right? I think the problem that too many attempts to start a third party have had is that they have been too captive by existing establishment or it's like elites driving it.

Speaker 19 And so your sort of average American is like, well, I want a third party, but maybe not that.

Speaker 19 He is, of course, an elite himself, but I think he is more comfortable breaking out of that sort of elite bubble. And so I think there's something about the anti-establishment vibe.

Speaker 19 You would need to pull this off. But I do think that this idea of just like slashing government and that being the main thing you're all about.

Speaker 19 That's tough to build a party around because, you know, Republicans, they love to cut spending.

Speaker 19 They love to talk about it at least. But the political reality of the popularity of cutting spending is very different.

Speaker 19 And so if you can talk a big game about it, but then when push comes to shove, what is it that you want to cut?

Speaker 19 You know, Doge has already cut most of the things now that were politically low-hanging fruit. And I think we're going to see some.
thermostatic backlash to some of this too.

Speaker 19 Like foreign aid is something I've seen in poll after poll was pretty popular to cut. Well, now that we've cut it, we're going to see the consequences of that.

Speaker 19 Wouldn't surprise me if all of a sudden funding for foreign aid becomes more popular than it was five years ago, precisely because we've now cut it. Interesting.

Speaker 18 So one of the things he said is he lacked empathy. Again, polling on him is terrible, right? Correct.

Speaker 18 The biggest brand, Scott talks about this, the biggest brand diminishment, and it's affecting his businesses.

Speaker 18 If you were hired by Tesla or Starlink or whatever, what would you say he do? He said he lacked empathy. That's sort of a little step towards, I was an asshole, right?

Speaker 18 I shouldn't have been such an asshole, essentially. How do you, what do you say to someone like that to get his brand back to where it was? Probably never.

Speaker 19 Yeah, this is part of why I'm surprised that he's picking the fight again, because I think he had an opportunity to say, I went in, I was trying to do things that I thought would be good for the country.

Speaker 19 I made some progress on some things. I didn't get some other things done.
I'm now turning back to my businesses.

Speaker 19 And I'm going to focus in on the core things that Americans thought were really cool about me before I got got too into politics, that they think I'm a really smart person.

Speaker 19 They think I'm really innovative. They think I'm building things that are cool and are going to change life on this planet.

Speaker 19 I would encourage him to go back to those brand attributes, like less chainsaw, more Mars.

Speaker 19 And that to me feels like it would be the smartest short to medium term play for him in order to kind of rebuild his brand.

Speaker 19 I mean, I don't know that he's ever going to be back to like strong favorables among Democrats, but I mean, we live in a world where anything's possible. People love reinvention.

Speaker 19 And I think if he goes back to the things that have traditionally made people think he is a voice worth listening to, those attributes can still exist.

Speaker 19 They've just been blocked out by so much of the noise and the insanity. The insanity.

Speaker 18 But at the same time, right now, Democrats are not reaccepting him.

Speaker 18 And now Republicans, who he thought were his new customers, are now not accepting him because he fought with Trump and he continues to fight with Trump.

Speaker 18 Even if he doesn't name him, that's exactly who he's fighting with. And he is going to, when he says, I can respond for now,

Speaker 18 he is going to escalate. There's no question in my mind.
He's going to escalate.

Speaker 19 What do you, I'm curious, what do you think escalation? will look like from Musk?

Speaker 19 Because when he talks about how he's going to go primary every Republican that votes for this bill, that's a lot of people to primary.

Speaker 19 Like the nuts and bolts of politics, of going in and finding a viable challenger, building their name ID, taking out an incumbent, that's hard to do in a handful of races, much less taking out almost the entire Republican conference.

Speaker 19 I think he's going to find that that's more challenging than he thinks if he really tries it. But what do you think escalation would look like from him?

Speaker 18 I think, I think he'll, like he said, he's going to back Thomas Massey. Where is he polling, right? He's the one that pushes back on Trump.
He's been the one who hasn't backed down in that regard.

Speaker 18 And Trump has threatened him. Now, the other two Trump threatened are leaving, essentially, whether it's Tillis or Don Bacon or whoever.

Speaker 19 Trump definitely has levers he can pull. Trump can make Elon Musk's life very difficult.
I am skeptical about how difficult Elon Musk can make Trump's life.

Speaker 18 Right, right. That he could, he could do something.
What would, if, if he wanted to, what would be the best thing he could do? He shouldn't insult Trump, right? Correct?

Speaker 18 I think he's not going to resist. I think he's going to go back to Epstein.
I think he's going to go.

Speaker 18 I don't know. I feel like scorched earth is his kind of policy in lots of ways.
He doesn't care.

Speaker 19 I think the smartest business leaders in this crazy political moment are the ones that try to stay as far away as possible from anything partisan and from anything involving directly addressing Donald Trump.

Speaker 19 If the word Donald Trump is coming out of your mouth, you have created problems for yourself.

Speaker 19 The way I describe the Trump effect on everything is that that science experiment you can do as a kid where you put a bunch of pepper into a dish and then you put like a drop of dish soap in the middle and all the pepper like flies out to the side of the dish.

Speaker 19 That's what happens anytime Trump gets involved in anything. Everything flies out to the side.

Speaker 19 And that's a terrible way to run your business when you need to be reaching customers across a political coalition. You need to be maintaining favorability from stakeholders.

Speaker 19 Donald Trump is the drop of dish soap that just makes everything fly to the sides. And so Musk has, he has gotten himself tangled up in Trump.

Speaker 19 He has benefit, he had benefited from that by being a very powerful individual for a while. But it's there is there is a trade-off there.
And that gamble does not always work out well for everybody.

Speaker 18 Yeah. So Trump can do him more damage.
Eventually, he'll be able to do more damage. I just, this guy didn't blow up rockets for no good.
I'm just saying he's a blow-up rocket kind of fella.

Speaker 18 That's my feeling is that he is, and he could do damage in the constant drumbeat of things. You know what I mean?

Speaker 18 Like if he was a normal person and he cared about blowing up his businesses, that's one thing. I don't think he cares.
That's, you know what I mean? Like he, he, math is very important to him.

Speaker 18 And this math doesn't work, Right. And so he couldn't hold it in.
You know, you'd think he wouldn't say anything about the bill, but he can help himself. He cannot.
He can't.

Speaker 18 You saw how little control he had over himself, right? Physically and mentally and everything else. But he really doesn't.
And it's not a game. It's not a, I don't know.
We'll see what he does.

Speaker 18 Eventually, he will cause damage to these people, you know, because he doesn't care about the repercussions for himself.

Speaker 18 So let's move on to where things stand with the Big Beautiful bill, which most Americans, according to several polls, I think some of your own, aren't exactly thrilled about.

Speaker 18 The bill narrowly passed through the Senate on Tuesday in a 51 to 50 vote, with three Republicans siding with Democrats and Vice President J. Devance having to break it with a tie.

Speaker 18 As of the recording, the bill is now back in the House where Speaker Mike Johnson has vowed to get the bill over the line. He's been very successful previously in doing this.

Speaker 18 By the time you're listening to this, this may or may not have happened. Now, I want to note a few things about this Senate bill.

Speaker 18 The latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office has adding more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.

Speaker 18 The bill cuts about $1 trillion from Medicaid and other health care programs. It also makes cuts to SNAP.
Nearly 12 million people will lose health care coverage if it becomes law.

Speaker 18 What jumped out at you over the last few days when we saw this debating and negotiating in the Senate? Obviously,

Speaker 18 Senator Lisa Murkowski, who I'm calling the Quizling, said it was an agonizing to vote for the bill, and yet she did.

Speaker 18 She kept trashing it as she was voting for it, which is, of course, typical of her. Talk a little bit about what jumped out at you and then this data you have.

Speaker 19 Yeah. So this bill is, uh,

Speaker 19 it was always going to be a massive challenge because it is the like Cheesecake Factory menu of conservative priorities that some people in the coalition love and some people in the coalition hate, but you're kind of asking them to eat everything on the Cheesecake Factory menu all at once.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 so you, the, the thing thing you may love, like I might love my 1600-calorie Santa Fe salad,

Speaker 19 but like in order to get that, I have to agree to try a little bit of everything on the menu. And that's that's the legislative situation they've all found themselves in.

Speaker 19 There's three things that are making this bill move, even though the polling isn't great. The first is the power of Donald Trump.
He says, This is my agenda, this is my bill.

Speaker 19 You're with me or you're against me. And he's a very powerful force in the party.
Nobody wants to cross him. He could,

Speaker 19 more so than Elon Musk cause people problems in a primary. The second thing that's driving them is Republicans love cutting taxes.
They like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from 2017.

Speaker 19 Their regret is only that they didn't do it earlier in that year, in 2017, that instead of doing it at the end of the year, they should have done it earlier.

Speaker 19 So it could have, in their thinking, helped them in the 2018 midterm. So they're like, we love this.
We want to get it done.

Speaker 19 Even if it is loaded up with all this other stuff that we might have questions about, the core thing is the tax cuts, and we've got to get it done.

Speaker 19 And that's the carrot that's dragging everybody to this bill, even if they have other reservations.

Speaker 19 But the final thing is that I think Republicans, not incorrectly, believe that they will be able to turn these numbers around.

Speaker 19 So, because this bill contains so many multitudes, in a poll, How do you even begin to ask about it? It is a Medicaid reform bill. It is a spending cuts bill.
It is a tax cuts bill.

Speaker 19 It for one point in time was an AI regulation or non-regulation bill.

Speaker 19 It's an EV tax credits bill. I mean, it is a child tax credit increase.
It is the number of different ways you can describe this bill is almost infinite.

Speaker 19 And so the question is going to be, Republicans have started to coalesce around we're going to describe this as it's a tax cut and or preventing a tax hike.

Speaker 19 And it is focusing on making sure we're putting America first. And they describe that as we're funding stuff for border security.

Speaker 19 We are putting in these work work requirements on Medicaid, which in and of themselves test well.

Speaker 18 Lazy Medicaid people, right?

Speaker 19 That's the Republican message. The Democratic message, on the other hand, is you're calling these people lazy Medicaid people.

Speaker 19 In reality, it's going to be hardworking people who can't figure out how to file the paperwork.

Speaker 19 And they're going to get dropped from their health care because they can't navigate your new requirements.

Speaker 19 And that's going to be, as you mentioned, it's going to be 12 million people, many of whom you would say are deserving or are your neighbor or did vote for Donald Trump.

Speaker 19 And so the reality is like Republicans do have a message that can work, but if the reality of it is that the economy is not actually doing better by next November or that these policies in states that begin to try to implement work requirements earlier, if that creates snags and causes people who voted for Trump to lose health care, there could be really big backlash to that to create, that would create problems in a midterm.

Speaker 18 Why right now is it polling so badly?

Speaker 19 I think it's polling badly because if you don't like Donald Trump, you know you don't like it.

Speaker 19 And so you're already starting off with almost half of America right there that's like, oh, it's Trump's bill. I'm out.

Speaker 19 And then of those voters who do like Donald Trump, there's not unanimity that it is a good thing.

Speaker 19 Because for some of them, they're like, well, I like Trump, but this has some things that I'm not crazy about. So it's easy for the opponents to all be unified against it.
We don't like Trump.

Speaker 19 This is Trump's agenda. Trump bad.
Bill bad, done.

Speaker 19 But for the supporters of it, you've got the criticisms from the middle, the murkowskis the mike lawlers of the in the house but you've also got attacks from the right from the chip roys the thomas masseys and so it's like a two-front war this bill is fighting right what marjorie taylor green says it's a shit show why is she doing that what why are they all doing this on from the right um every i i believe a lot of them

Speaker 19 Again, to the extent that this is echoes of the old Tea Party moment, they want to be the one that says, I stood up for true fiscal discipline, but they don't want to be the one that sinks the bill.

Speaker 19 Like if the bill is already going down, they will happily be like, yes, I was part of helping to tank it because it's bad and we need to demand that we get a better deal.

Speaker 19 But like none of them wants to be the one that causes this to go down. Nope.
None of them want that headache.

Speaker 19 Because if so, they're not just going to be held responsible for you tanked the things that are unpopular. They're like, they're worried you'll be held responsible for

Speaker 19 making taxes go up. And that's not anything any Republican wants to do.

Speaker 18 So the taxes is at the center of it, correct?

Speaker 18 The idea of giving these, even if the Democrats are putting it out as a, as a gimme for wealthy people, is that a good message from a polling point of view?

Speaker 19 It's one of those things where when you test it, should we cut taxes for wealthy people? Even a lot of Republicans say no.

Speaker 19 The reality is that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from the first time around, the economy was doing pretty well under Trump during that first term.

Speaker 19 And so if Republicans say, we just want to keep that going, we don't want to undo that, that's a way you message it that people say, oh, well, that actually makes sense.

Speaker 19 So just using the same messages against it that were used last time, I'm not sure actually moves the needle for Democrats.

Speaker 19 And it'll all also come down to what does the economy look like in November of next year? If the economy is in the tank,

Speaker 19 then everybody's going to vote for Democrats and Republicans are going to be in big trouble. If the economy looks good, then it'll make Trump look like he was right.

Speaker 18 And what do you, what would you advise Democrats to do at this point? To just keep pounding in on the people are going to not have their health care, the sort of scare tactics?

Speaker 19 I mean, I think they need to coalesce around a message, because as you noted, I mean, one of the downsides of the bill having a million different pieces, it is a target-rich environment for Democrats.

Speaker 19 But if they don't pick one or two main targets,

Speaker 19 that's going to be a problem.

Speaker 19 And right now, even though Republicans are having struggles, it is not as though the brand of the Democratic Party is great.

Speaker 19 It is not as though voters are saying they think Democrats have strong leadership and a clear vision.

Speaker 19 And so, like, they need to sort some of that out as well if they want to have a chance at having a really good midterm next year. Right.

Speaker 18 So, the best message for them, right, at this moment? It depends on the economy, right? It's the economy stupid kind of thing.

Speaker 19 It depends on the economy.

Speaker 19 I do think that the Medicaid message is potentially potent, in part because of the new coalition Republicans have put together that includes a lot of people who are on Medicaid who may think of themselves as hardworking people, who nevertheless find that the new work requirements and such

Speaker 19 actually do catch them up in a paperwork problem and suddenly they're without health care. And that is a huge, huge, huge potential problem if that's how this comes to pass.

Speaker 18 That's sort of the leopard ate my face argument.

Speaker 18 So one of the big points of the condition of the bills you just talked about was something we've been talking about here a lot on Pivot 2, the 10-year moratorium on state laws regulating ai the senate voted 99 to 1 to strike the provision from the bill they also got rid of the one about selling off public lands but the loan holdout was senator tom tillis who's not running for re-election as a few days ago opening and a few other big names in silicon valley have been lobbying for this amendment I find it to be a silver lining in this whole mess, but

Speaker 18 how does that poll? Like, states should be able to do Green was on board for that. Lots of people, Democrats and Republicans.

Speaker 19 Yeah. So this is an issue that I did some polling on for Common Sense Media, which they're focused on kids' safety online.

Speaker 19 And they came to me because I can help understand Republican voters and they wanted to know, okay, how does this actually test with the GOP?

Speaker 19 And this was a provision that was really unpopular. It was unpopular on the left.
It was unpopular on the right.

Speaker 19 And I wanted to know in this poll, okay, even if you're just asking people, do you think states shouldn't be allowed to regulate AI? That tests terribly.

Speaker 19 But I wanted to really pressure test it because at a like a policy level, I understand the instinct to say, it's really bad if you have a patchwork of 50 different state laws all telling tech companies what they can and can't do.

Speaker 19 We're in a race against China. We need to be able to survive and be competitive and be cutting edge.
And we can't do that if states red and blue are passing. all kinds of nonsense legislation.

Speaker 19 Like I get the argument. So I wanted to test it and we pitted the strongest possible case for for this legislation up against an argument that basically says it should be states' rights.

Speaker 19 States should be able to do this. We need to be able to protect kids and families.

Speaker 19 And even when you pit those things together, you still find a huge number of Republicans saying, yeah, I get the arguments that we need to be competitive on AI, but that doesn't mean you just handcuff states for 10 years.

Speaker 19 And so this was one where that's how you get to 99 to 1, the Senate going, yeah, let's take this one out of here.

Speaker 18 This one out of here. So they just states' rights always prevails, in other words.

Speaker 19 Well, it wasn't just states' rights. I think in and of itself, a states' rights argument doesn't get you all the way there because it's kind of wonky.
It's process.

Speaker 19 I think the thing that added to this and made it so powerful was the like the safety of kids online.

Speaker 19 You know, it is possible for the federal government to pass legislation or for there to be regulation that people really like around AI, things like the take it down, you know, around things like Revenge Porn or AI Gen.

Speaker 19 That kind of stuff gets really popular.

Speaker 19 But when we ask, you know, even when you're presenting, here's the reason why you don't want to have too much regulation on AI, and you spell it out for people, even then we still had by a 12.

Speaker 19 to 70 margin people saying no a blanket preemption on states goes too far because it could roll back these red and blue state protections for kids from tech related dangers there was an attempt at a compromise where they had Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee.

Speaker 19 She's really big on this because she represents country music, as well as, you know, she's, you know, socially conservative.

Speaker 19 They have a lot of interest in this like legislation around protecting kids.

Speaker 19 They tried to come up with language that would be a carve-out that would try to exempt like kid safety focused stuff from this blanket preemption.

Speaker 19 But ultimately she decided that the compromise wasn't worth it. And so.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah, she's got to stick to it. I agree with Marsha Blackburn.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah. Well, we can come.

Speaker 19 You bring a Republican on the show. All of a sudden, you're agreeing with Marcia Blackburn.

Speaker 18 You know what? Everything else about her is just a hot fucking mess. But this one, she's, she's, when someone's directionally correct, Kristen, I'm going to go with them, right?

Speaker 18 She's directionally correct. All her reasoning.

Speaker 19 I appreciate that about you, Kara.

Speaker 18 Yeah, all her reasoning is like anti-gay. It's always something terrible.

Speaker 18 You know, she'll, I'll agree with her. And she goes, it's because we have to protect ourselves from the gays.
And I'm like, no, no, that's not why. But

Speaker 18 I'll bring you along, Marsha. Anyway, whatever.
I'm with you, Marcia, today. Just today.
That's it.

Speaker 18 Okay. I was kind of pissed she was actually making a trying to make a five-year.
They were going to do a five-year or whatever. I thought, no, either stick to your guns or you don't.

Speaker 18 And I'm sure she has plenty of guns. Anyway, Kristen, let's go on a quick break.
We come back. Paramount settles with Trump.

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Speaker 18 Kristen, we're back with more news. And actually, this is what you were dovetailing.
It's better to keep your head down.

Speaker 18 Paramount has agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with President Trump that alleged a 60-minute interview with Kamala Harris was deceptively edited.

Speaker 18 The settlement does not include a statement of apology or regret. And in fact, Paramount had said this is just a ridiculous case, as did most lawyers think that.

Speaker 18 Aside from legal fees, the payment will go towards Trump's future presidential library.

Speaker 18 The settlement comes as Paramount seeks to complete a merger with Skydance Media, which requires approval from the Trump administration.

Speaker 18 Reminder that ABC News has agreed to pay Trump a $16 million to settle a defamation case late last year, which is a much stronger case. In this case, it's not.
It's just not.

Speaker 18 So talk about this, the repercussions. I mean, obviously, they want to get this deal through.
It has the feel of a shakedown and a bribery that has been brought up against Sherry Redstone.

Speaker 18 It feels very urban, autocratic, very strange and,

Speaker 18 you know, lawfare, which is what's something that conservatives complain about. And it's also heinous on many levels.
Your thoughts?

Speaker 19 So I can't help but think about this in the context of a couple of other lawsuits that have proceeded further down the road against media organizations, not necessarily from Trump himself, but I think a lot about the Fox News defamation case and how much they had to pay out regarding

Speaker 19 the Dominion, SmartMatic, all of that.

Speaker 19 And then CNN, where I'm a contributor, where we met doing Chris Wallace Show, I mean, they had to settle a case around some stories earlier this year about someone who was trying to evacuate refugees from Afghanistan.

Speaker 19 At any rate, a lot of these media organizations, I think, feel like they are nervous about what happens when, even if you feel like you've got a really good case, and even if you feel like I'm just doing good journalism, it's not fair, I shouldn't be in this position.

Speaker 19 This just feels like a moment where the climate is not on your side.

Speaker 19 And so, do you just do the settlement, save yourself the embarrassment of discovery and going through a trial and all of that pain and suffering?

Speaker 19 Even though it's going to cost you a pretty penny and even though you're going to have to swallow your pride, like which is the least painful path forward?

Speaker 19 But I also think that things like this are part of why, if you look over a long enough. trend line, do you trust the news media? I mean, those numbers have been declining for a long time.

Speaker 19 But most recently, the decline is not actually coming from Republicans. It's coming from Democrats.

Speaker 19 And it's coming from Democrats, whether they think that the media has become too soft on Trump or they've normalized Trump or that they are too sensationalist or what have you.

Speaker 19 Like the decline in trust in the media from Republicans happened a while ago and that has kind of bottomed out.

Speaker 19 The declines that we're continuing to see overall are actually being driven by Democrats who say, I don't know that I trust that these organizations are doing the right thing either.

Speaker 18 Right. So in this case, I get the idea, oh, let's just let it go away, right? That kind of thing.
And I do, I understand. In the case of Fox, they had a good case, right? There were so many emails.

Speaker 18 There were like, it was like, it was frightening how bad they behaved in that situation.

Speaker 18 They knew just, they had all the elements of proving it and they'll probably lose their next several cases in that area.

Speaker 18 So that was actually really egregious behavior on the point of on the part of that news organization. And they deserve to lose, really, in many ways.

Speaker 18 In the case of ABC, probably I suspect there was some emails that weren't so great or texts or something like that. You know, there was, and there was an obvious mistake.

Speaker 18 It was when he had the information

Speaker 18 of how to say it. And we have had to correct it.
You know, we have changed stuff when we edit stuff if if it's said wrong.

Speaker 18 So you have to really be careful whether they could have proved there was malice. That's a different situation.
In this case, it's just not the case. And they have a brand, 60 Minutes.

Speaker 18 Two people have left the company.

Speaker 18 The staff is obviously, I don't know what they'll do today or whatever day, but it's a real problem of sort of collapsing what is a trusted institution, which is 60 Minutes, over something that

Speaker 18 isn't a problem, right? Is that dangerous in the longer term or does it not matter at all?

Speaker 19 Yeah, I never love

Speaker 19 the use of lawsuits to try to achieve an end, especially if it's potentially going to have the effect of chilling free speech.

Speaker 19 I mean, this is one of the things that these days frustrates me a lot about the right is I think over the last decade, there have been a lot of very legitimate questions raised about the existence of free speech in this country and the protection of free speech in this country, especially from, you know, when conservatives say we're being silenced, like I'm sympathetic to those charges that you, you need free speech and that has to include even speech that you think is offensive or is out of bounds.

Speaker 19 But then once you get the reins of power, deciding that you actually do want to just like stop speech that you don't like or, you know, chill speech, that does make me very concerned.

Speaker 19 Another case that I sort of think of as part and parcel of this, it's very personal to my industry, is the lawsuits against Ann Selzer, the pollster in Iowa, and the lawsuits against the Des Moines Register.

Speaker 19 The case, I believe the federal case was dropped, but I believe it was refiled as a state case.

Speaker 19 And it was done a day in advance of the anti-slap laws coming into effect in Iowa that are supposed to protect against the use of like lawfare to go after people who engage in speech you don't like.

Speaker 19 So that's a case that I'm watching very closely because the idea that someone can come after you and sue you because they think that your poll was wrong

Speaker 19 and that it was reported on, you know,

Speaker 18 in a way you didn't like in a paper, that's very, very very concerning where does it go from here this is this embolden trump to do because they're doing it all over the place like anything he doesn't like he threatened cnn the other day he threatened for for reporting on an app like that there exists the existence of an app they didn't say please buy this or use it it's about ice this ice app um does this what what happens here does is there a point where people say no more or or they overreach or not at all if it works i mean if this works and these people especially if you're a company that wants something and you always want something from

Speaker 18 the government, right? Or it's just just, once it stops working, it's going to be hell to pay, I suspect for Republicans.

Speaker 19 I don't know where this ends. And this is where not being a lawyer, you know, I'm unsure of what the

Speaker 19 what the strategy is in terms of like continuously trying to push people in courts and like how much pain do you incur if you do try to fight back.

Speaker 19 I'm less familiar with that, but I know that if you look at sort of Trump's target list, he is picking targets that are not beloved by the sort of general public, whether it's the media, Ivy League institutions, you know, big powerful law firms.

Speaker 19 Like he's picking targets that your sort of median American goes, yeah, I don't really like them that much anyways.

Speaker 19 And that has been, I think,

Speaker 19 at least savvy political strategy on his part, setting aside that I don't feel qualified to comment on it as a legal strategy.

Speaker 18 Right. And is there any chance the media's image will bounce forward in any way?

Speaker 18 What would happen to do that?

Speaker 19 Well, I do think that you're right, that at least in the short term,

Speaker 19 it much the same way that we were talking about with Musk earlier, that like he lost his credibility with Democrats and now he's picking fights with Republicans, but he's unlikely to, at least in the short term, see like a resurgence of

Speaker 19 love and admiration among the Democrats that he has alienated over the last couple of years.

Speaker 19 I sort of feel like this may be the same way, at least in the short term, that like by doing this, it's not as though you're going to suddenly have a bunch of Republicans who are like, fantastic.

Speaker 19 These news organizations have all made big donations to the Trump Library. We love them.

Speaker 19 Like, at least in the short term, it just means that kind of everybody's mad at you, even if for very different reasons.

Speaker 18 Yeah, absolutely. You don't win at all.
I don't know. I think fighting is probably better, but they want this deal.
They want this deal to happen.

Speaker 18 There have been threats later to go back at them as a bribe someday. I doubt they'll get to that.
But so they're making that calculation that Democrats won't wreak revenge once they get back in power.

Speaker 18 But we'll see. Maybe they will.
They have long memories.

Speaker 18 And President Trump says he also has a buyer for TikTok, another thing that he's doing in the media. Let's listen to a climp of the announcement on Fox News in an interview with Maria Bartaroma.

Speaker 31 We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way.

Speaker 32 I think I'll need probably China approval, and I think President Xi will probably do it. Which is fine.

Speaker 31 I'll tell you in about two weeks.

Speaker 33 The big technology company there.

Speaker 31 Very, very wealthy people.

Speaker 34 It's a group of very wealthy people.

Speaker 18 The potential buyers reported the same investor consortium before the first bid stalled amidst trade talks, Oracle Corp, Blackstone Inc., and Andreessen Horowitz.

Speaker 18 The president recently signed an executive order extending the deadline for the third time. The law requires ByteDance to divest from the platform, so we'll see.

Speaker 18 Polling a few months ago showed support for TikTok bans standing at 34%. Not great.

Speaker 18 Where are we on polling this? Are people forgotten given all the other news happening?

Speaker 19 Polling on the TikTok ban has been fascinating because a couple of years ago, when you did polling around something like TikTok, there were real concerns about it, right? Is this Chinese propaganda?

Speaker 19 Is this warping kids' minds? Is it taking too much of their attention?

Speaker 19 And, you know, when this was initially proposed and passed by Congress, it was reasonably popular. Really, the only people who were particularly mad about it were...
the kids who used TikTok.

Speaker 19 But TikTok very, very smartly was able to marshal their users and to make the case, how can you take this from us?

Speaker 19 And I think because Donald Trump perceives that he won his election in part by doing well among some of these disaffected Gen Zers who may be using a lot of TikTok, he is not inclined to tick off that constituency.

Speaker 19 And so he loves to be viewed as a dealmaker.

Speaker 19 His position on China is fascinating because he likes to talk about being tough on China, but he also likes to talk about, you know, coming to deals with Xi.

Speaker 19 So this is sort of ready-made to be the kind of thing where even though being tough on China is almost never a losing position within the Republican coalition, on this one, the very particular constituency of who really loves TikTok is a group that Trump is trying to win over.

Speaker 18 And so it's good if he comes to a deal, even if he hands it over to people or not. If he doesn't, what happens? If China says, fuck you, like no way we're doing this.

Speaker 19 Well, I'm curious about how legally this can all proceed because my understanding is that Congress was pretty clear that this has to happen.

Speaker 19 And so I expect if Trump does, you know, how much longer can he keep saying like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Congress, you passed this law, but I'm kind of not going to follow it because I don't really feel like it.

Speaker 19 Like at a certain point, doesn't the court have to intervene?

Speaker 18 No, you'd think Congress would do its job, but they seem to be abrogating a lot of bad.

Speaker 19 Well, Congress is saying that they already did their job. And so that's like, this is now, you know, they've already passed a bill saying Trump has to do this.

Speaker 18 Yes, they hold him to account over so many things.

Speaker 18 Just like, come on. It's like down the list.
Like, I don't know.

Speaker 18 He doesn't listen to them otherwise, but it'll be interesting to see if he gets a real bump if something really comes off, even if he's handing it over to his friends, whether it's Larry Ellison or Mark Andreessen, correct?

Speaker 18 I mean, nobody cares about that, that these rich people are getting another break, essentially.

Speaker 19 He will just love that he can say, I made another deal. And it will

Speaker 19 just add one more piece to the puzzle of his kind of brand image on that front.

Speaker 18 Right. So that works more than the particulars.
All right, Kristen, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, I'm very excited to talk to you about this.

Speaker 18 Trump targets New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani.

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Speaker 18 Kristen, we're back. Official results are in for New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, and Zoran Mamdani took it away with a massive 12% lead.

Speaker 18 Mamdani still faces a general election, which will include incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and potentially Andrew Cuomo again.

Speaker 18 Meanwhile, President Trump was asked about Mamdani at a press briefing on Tuesday and made some pretty bold claims.

Speaker 18 Let's listen to a clip of Trump's response to being asked what he would do if Mamdani blocked ICE raids in the city.

Speaker 34 Well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we don't need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.

Speaker 18 Trump then took things a little further, saying this.

Speaker 34 A lot of people are saying he's here illegally. He's, you know, we're going to look at everything.

Speaker 18 Mamdani was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018.
He responded on social media saying we will not accept this intimidation. Any big takeaways from Mamdani's official win, Kristen?

Speaker 18 And also these threats, which are troubling, I would say, to say the least.

Speaker 19 Yeah, in terms of the win, first, I cannot imagine why the sort of Democratic establishment thought that selling Andrew Cuomo with all of his baggage was going to work.

Speaker 19 It is in some ways kind of appalling and in an indictment of New York's Democratic establishment that they couldn't come up with a better alternative.

Speaker 19 But I also don't want to take anything away from Mamdani here. I think making the number one issue, the number one issue, which is cost of living, stuff costs too much and it should cost less, is

Speaker 19 that's the right strategy.

Speaker 19 And he paired it with, and this is something that I also think AOC is so good at, despite the fact that I don't agree with her on a ton of policy, but I rate her very highly as a political communicator.

Speaker 19 She's very good at showing up where voters are and speaking to them the way voters want to be spoken to. It's not condescending.
It's not

Speaker 19 overly fancy or overly technical, but it's not dumb. It's not dumbed down, so to speak.
It's just speaking normally.

Speaker 19 And like most politicians are just allergic to doing that for reasons I cannot comprehend. And he's very good at it.
The video of him talking about like make halal $8 again.

Speaker 19 Like is it was a really great video. Like stuff like that's so good.

Speaker 18 You liked him a little bit, didn't you? You liked him. Sort of like Trump in a lot of ways.

Speaker 19 Look,

Speaker 19 I think that populism plus T, not even TV savvy, but like media savvy is a very potent combination. And I think he has it.

Speaker 19 And, but I would also say, I think there's a lot of like overreading into this about what it means ideologically.

Speaker 19 There was a quote from a Democratic strategist like the morning after the win that was something like, oh, our base, they're always voting for these insane ideas and these far left lunatics.

Speaker 19 And it was this like real contempt for the Democratic base coming from this like centrist democratic strategist.

Speaker 19 But I don't actually think that that the Democratic base on the whole is super ideologically to the left.

Speaker 19 On economic issues, like they are very open to a robust role for government, but I don't think that actually the majority of the Democratic electorate is like truly DSA. aligned.

Speaker 19 And so what works in a Democratic primary in Manhattan is not necessarily transferable anywhere.

Speaker 19 The other thing that I think is very valuable though to learn from Mamdani's win, if you looked at the age breakouts of people who voted in this primary, younger voters were like the biggest group of voters.

Speaker 19 That almost never happens. And especially in a primary, which is always like a really low turnout sort of thing.
It's exactly the kind of contest young voters typically sit out. He turned them out.

Speaker 19 So I take nothing away from him on those grounds, even though I disagree with him on a lot of policy. I think this feud between him and Trump is,

Speaker 19 it's probably going to benefit both parties involved as much as I think like the whole idea idea of trying to denaturalize someone because you don't like what they're saying, I think is terrible.

Speaker 19 Everything I said earlier about free speech, right? We should not be in the business of trying to punish people's speech and saying, we don't like what you said.

Speaker 18 That does not pull well. I can't imagine.

Speaker 19 People do not want people generally just like deported because you are, you know, left-leaning or you said even in the cases where you've said something that's really offensive.

Speaker 19 Like if you are a naturalized U.S. citizen, being deported, I cannot imagine is something that would be popular.

Speaker 19 At the same time, Donald Trump is going to love the elevation of Momdani as like the face of the Democratic Party. He will think that is a very advantageous dynamic for the White House.

Speaker 19 At the same time, that it's probably good for Momdani politically to be coming under fire from Trump, because to the extent that there were any like wavering establishment Democrats or centrist Democrats who were like, oh, maybe we just vote for Eric Adams because we can't with this crazy guy.

Speaker 19 If all of a sudden he is like the poster child for I am taking the fight to Trump, that probably does pretty well to unify the Democratic base behind you as you move into a general election in November.

Speaker 19 So it's not to say that there was like a Republican candidate who I think was going to win and become mayor of New York, but to the extent that there are independent challenges, it's probably good for Mamdani to have, to be in the line of fire from the ratings are good, as Trump would say.

Speaker 18 But talk about where he did well. He did well with young people.
What kills me is that they're like, young people don't vote. And then they vote.
They're like, we don't like how young people vote.

Speaker 18 And it was sort of like they're voting and it's there. It's up to them to decide what they want.

Speaker 18 Do you see, you know, the Democratic reaction has been really interesting and sort of they're upset. They're largely upset around globalize the Intifadi won't push back on that.

Speaker 18 That seems to be the focus. But they also were sort of shocked by this in a way that I wasn't shocked or other people weren't.
It's really interesting because when you look at voters,

Speaker 18 they complain about young people not voting and then they did and they didn't like it. And the same thing was with Sanders, whether it was with AOC.
They're hugely popular. Why?

Speaker 18 Why the response of the Democratic establishment?

Speaker 19 Well, this reminds me a lot of the

Speaker 19 sort of freak out that a lot of Republican strategists had when the Tea Party movement was getting going in the sense that it was very, like it felt like, oh, these people are kind of off-putting to me and they're going to drag our party in a direction that's going to make it impossible for us to win elections.

Speaker 19 And that wasn't 100%

Speaker 19 true.

Speaker 19 And I think the same thing is the case here, that I think there are certain positions that the sort of further left wing of the Democratic Party takes that have been a big political problem for Democrats.

Speaker 19 I think it is true that they pulled Democrats too far to the left on a number of things that gave Trump this big opening.

Speaker 19 But with that said, like I think in the case of New York City, the idea that suddenly like somebody like Mom Dani is going to win a primary for like the South Carolina Senate seat.

Speaker 19 Yeah, if that happened, then Democrats aren't winning the South Carolina Senate seat. Like that's true.
But you also have to adapt to like what's, what's the right candidate for my area?

Speaker 19 And like who are, who are the voters there? What do they care about?

Speaker 19 And so something that is okay in New York may not be okay for trying to pick up a swing congressional seat in Iowa. But smart parties are able to

Speaker 19 understand that different electorates exist in different places.

Speaker 18 Right. And so Mom Dani's approach can be used by a centrist, right? It just depends if you're genuine.

Speaker 18 The qualities here are genuineness. And one of the things I was struck by is Bill Stepian, who's a very well-known Republican campaign person, said, Don't make fun of this guy.

Speaker 18 He's like, in the similar way, people are like, I used to say, don't make fun of Trump. Like, Trump is interesting, right?

Speaker 18 Do you see that at all? It was interesting that he said that when they were sort of touting, oh, no, now we've got them. I'm like, do you? Because he's really attractive, like in so many ways.

Speaker 19 I think I 100% agree with Steppian on this one. I think communication savvy, genuineness, as you described it, that matters so much.

Speaker 19 There is so much noise and there is so much stuff that politicians say and do that just sounds the same. And it just washes over people.

Speaker 19 People can pick up a talking point from a thousand yards away.

Speaker 19 And if you are able to communicate in a way that does not sound like you're just regurgitating talking points, that doesn't sound like it's something you've, you know, you're just saying because like you've been fed it by a consultant.

Speaker 19 The benefit that the thing that makes Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders similar is that you actually believe they believe the things they are saying at some level. And that goes a long way.

Speaker 19 Like I believe Mom Dani believes the things that he says. So even if I don't agree with him, like at least that's, you get, you get some points for that.

Speaker 18 What about freshness? Is that something that's important? Do you think they're calling it an earthquake for the Democratic Party? Do you think that's the case?

Speaker 19 I would caution everybody from reading too much into a primary election in New York, but I think it ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that you can just defend the status quo.

Speaker 19 That this is a wake-up call that in order to win elections in 2025, you have to be the candidate of change. You have to be.

Speaker 19 You had to be the candidate of change in 2024, which was a big reason why Joe Biden was in trouble and then the handoff to Kamala Harris was ultimately unsuccessful.

Speaker 19 You have to be the candidate of change. You have to be the candidate of what's new.
And Mamdani was able to channel that very, very, very effectively.

Speaker 18 Now, last question. What would you advise him to do now if he, you know, he's going to do what he wants to do, but what's the most important thing he do?

Speaker 19 I would advise Mamdani to focus in on the cost of living question relentlessly. Do not get pulled in these other directions.

Speaker 19 He has said and done a lot of things in his past that his opponents did not dredge up in the primary that are going to get dredged up now.

Speaker 19 But I think if he keeps his message focused on cost of living and does not become over-consultantified and keeps his message

Speaker 19 pretty focused on we need New York to be a livable city again, I think he will succeed.

Speaker 19 Now, if he ultimately becomes mayor and he tries to implement these policies and things like city-run grocery stores or rent freezes have all of these second and third order negative effects that folks on the right think are inevitably going to happen, then the backlash will come.

Speaker 19 But for the moment, I do think that Republicans should be wary of thinking, oh, let's just elevate this guy and like it'll be great that he's the face of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 19 I think media-savvy populism really sells, and be careful of thinking that you can make that really, really, really unpopular.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I always see them put up lists on Fox News, and I'm like, that sounds good.

Speaker 18 It was just, I'm like, are you trying to get him elected? It's kind of funny. All right.
One more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

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Speaker 18 Okay, Kristen, let's hear a prediction.

Speaker 19 I predict that the F1 movie starring Brad Pitt, which came out a week ago and did very well at the box office, both domestically and globally, I think it's going to have legs.

Speaker 19 I know this weekend it is going up against a new Jurassic Park movie, but I think this F1 movie is fantastic. I'm a big F1 fan.
I saw it last week.

Speaker 19 I I almost never see movies in theaters anymore, but it was so worth it. My prediction, this movie is going to have legs.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 I'm excited to see this. And Apple finally has a hit.
Like they've done a lot of great movies, but they haven't had a big hit like this.

Speaker 18 And people will worry that F1 had jumped the shark a little bit, you know, in terms of expanding too quickly. But it's really good.
I'm excited to see it. I'm excited.

Speaker 18 I may have to go with you because my wife doesn't want to see it. Kristen, I may have to go.

Speaker 18 I'll go back and see it again. All right.

Speaker 19 I would love to go back and see it again.

Speaker 18 I'm excited to see it.

Speaker 18 My prediction has to do with Mark Zuckerberg's creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs this week. This is a group that will be focusing on Meta's AI efforts.

Speaker 18 He's been on a hiring spree grabbing top talent. Zoe Schiffer from Wire had a great scoop.
Zuckerberg offered pay packages up to $300 million over four years.

Speaker 18 One open AI staffer told Wired that's about how much it would take for me to go work at Meta.

Speaker 18 Though Meta is saying the size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place. That's not, he is trying very hard to do this.

Speaker 18 I do not think he's going to be successful. I mean, I don't think they did a lot of due diligence on scale AI as much as they should have.
I think it's a lot more internally kind of a chaos.

Speaker 18 I think there's going to be a lot of chaos here. And just grabbing all these people and creating like an Avengers team, that's what they're calling it.
I don't think it always works.

Speaker 18 I don't think doing that is particularly smart. He has had a lot of misses, although the stock is at an all-time high.
Let's be clear. They're doing great in the areas they've always done great in.

Speaker 18 But, you know,

Speaker 18 we renamed the company Meta in order to go into the metaverse. And that was a $10, $20 billion disaster, and they can afford it.

Speaker 18 I just don't think he has the same sense of innovation that someone like Elon Musk or even Open AI or other companies has.

Speaker 18 So I think this might be, I think he can afford to do this, but I think it's really the wrong way to go about doing innovation. So I'm not so sure it will pay off in the way he thinks it will.

Speaker 18 We'll see. How does he pull? Not well, I guess, correct? Do people like him?

Speaker 19 I think most of the tech billionaire type folks have not polled particularly well. I think like 10 years ago, there was a sense of like cool and excitement around them that now has sort of faded.

Speaker 18 Has waned. Yeah.
Yeah. I know.
He's leading the way. And the Bezos wedding, I'm guessing that didn't pull well.

Speaker 19 I have not, you know what? I haven't pulled on it, but we're actually putting a survey in the field next week.

Speaker 19 So if you think of any question you would want me to ask the American public about this wedding, you limit.

Speaker 18 Was this a heinous display of wealth in the most grotesque and tasteless way? There's my question.

Speaker 19 If you had gotten invited, would you have gone? That might be an interesting question.

Speaker 18 You know, of course. Of course.
You want to see this ridiculous traffic accident up close. I mean, and for the bag alone, the swag bag alone, I suppose, I guess.
I don't know.

Speaker 18 I'd want to see it, but I would be terrible and take pictures and put them out the whole time. I'd be terrible.
I'd be the worst.

Speaker 19 You would break the rules right away.

Speaker 18 You remember wedding crashers? That's Kara Swisher.

Speaker 18 anyway um we want to hear from you send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-pivot okay that's the show kristen thank you so much i find you to be so smart i like i could almost become a republican oh thank you for having me it's an honor to be on the big show yeah the big show you're on the big show you did you delivered with all kinds of information scott should hang his head you have so much good data and that's what's important to our listeners to get the real deal um and and to really say what's happening which is really important anyway thanks for listening to pivot and be sure to like and subscribe to our youtube channel which is fast growing actually we'll be back next week i will read us out today's show is produced by lara naiman zoe marcus taylor griffin and kevin oliver ernie enderdot engineered this episode thanks also to kate gallagher nishat kirwa is vox media's executive producer of podcasts make sure to follow pivot on your favorite podcast platform thanks for listening to pivot from new york magazine and vox media You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod.

Speaker 18 We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

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