Trump Mobile, WhatsApp Ads, and Bezos Wedding Protests

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They'll put ads anywhere.

They'll put ads on Mark Zuckerberg's ass if it would work for them.

Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

Well, welcome live from our podcast in France in Conn's French.

It's canned con.

Kara Schleischer, it's can.

All right.

I realize you took French for the eighth time in the 11th grade, but it's canned.

All right.

In any case, we're here taping and we're here in front of a live audience.

So welcome, everyone.

Thanks for coming.

So

we have...

We have a lot to get to today, but I want to first, how's it going for you?

How's your, your, I'm not going to even say the word, can con.

Look, I absolutely love it here.

I'm sincere.

I think it's wonderful.

I love the French.

I love France.

But I heard you're disliked.

You're like the anger pillow for the ad business.

Oh, so this is how I make money here.

They basically have me show up to some event and then they say to me, we've heard you believe that brand is dead.

And I do my thing.

So seriously, the economy, about one and a half percent of the economy every year, GDB goes to marketing.

And as we've seen over the last 20 or 30 years, more and more of that one and a half percent is going to, for lack of a better term, digital platforms, right?

Pretty soon, Meta's Beach is going to be San Trope

and Dentsu and WPP are going to be in some bad pub seven miles inland.

So we know what's happening, but brand still matters.

I'm just like it's being built differently.

If you're banking your career on trying to get a big brand to spend a bunch of money on media, which is advertising, which in my opinion is nothing but a tax inflicted on the poor and the technologically illiterate, your industry, you're in trouble.

And then they have someone very articulate.

This guy, Rory Sutherland, Sutherland, this like really handsome, charming British guy, weighs in about the power of brand.

And the whole audience goes crazy.

Right.

And it's like, thank God, maybe we'll get invited back next year.

And this is literally like an award ceremony for the Pepsi commercial nobody is watching.

Back to you, Carol.

Okay.

I can see that happening.

So you're like the bad villain.

I'm the anger pillow.

No, but you're like wrestling.

You're like the villain.

100%.

You're the villain.

And then they come in and try to get out of it.

And I tell jokes that offend people and they're like, oh my God, I hate him.

Book him for next year.

Yeah.

Book him for now.

Anyways, in any case.

Good to see you.

But it's been a good time.

You've had a good time.

You came here and you're zooming in.

I've been here 10 years in a row.

Yeah.

Take a moment.

First off, dude, it's dying.

Why do you keep showing up?

Because they keep paying me.

Okay.

You could be the yellow pages.

If I can cash your check, I'll talk about the yellow pages.

Anyways, I'm a whore.

I'm an expensive whore, but be clear, I'm a whore.

Daddy's a whore.

I absolutely, if you're in this room, it means you're likely in the top 5% of income earners globally.

It means you have rights.

It means you have access most likely to family planning.

It means you can marry anybody you want.

And you have the opportunity to hang out in one of the most beautiful places in the world and be carefree.

You probably have a great job, although it may not seem like a great job.

And you live in a democracy in an age where there's less measles and rubella for the time being, unless these shit up their...

head up their ass, people take over, continue to take over our HHS.

Don't know how I got there.

But I like to take a moment as I zoom in on a zodiac over the fucking Cote d'Azur and recognize just how fucking lucky we are.

Anyways, back to you.

All right.

So you get a sense of how this marriage goes.

I'm totally thinking of something else while he's talking.

Just, you know, I'm like, I really need ham at the house when I get back in my house.

I had two lattes.

Not a good idea.

Okay, I can see that.

We have a lot to talk about.

I mean, there's so much going on and we've got, but I do have to give two things, a shout out.

I can't can't believe I'm fucking saying this.

Tucker Carlson taking down Ted Cruz was delightful.

I would recommend you watch it.

It was about, I don't agree with Tucker Carlson on Iran, by the way, but the way he showed how incompetent and ignorant Ted Cruz is was.

spectacular, I have to say.

So I'm going to give him a call out.

And the second thing I want to just say is

today I was just having lunch with Emma, who runs the Wall Street Journal, and she's an amazing editor.

And

Linda Yaccarino of Twitter said that their story was untrue.

This is not true.

This is

not factual, what they're saying.

And I would like today to just say the Wall Street Journal did an amazing job on that story about X suing advertisers.

I've talked to dozens of advertisers.

It's absolutely happening.

And I want to say Team Wall Street Journal.

So great job by Emma, and she did a great job.

So,

and

it's truly a heinous thing

to do a provable lie.

I just don't understand it.

And it's ridiculous.

And so you either do well by making great products, but you don't sue people into marketing.

I just, I don't, I didn't understand that.

Anyway, just to say that.

But anyway, let's get back to France.

We have a lot to go through today.

We'll start with something light.

Activists in Venice have begun protesting the upcoming wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

The wedding cost is estimated to be as high as $21.5 million.

Over 200 guests are expected, reportedly including Katie Perry, Gail King, and Oprah Winfrey.

Notably not on the list, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.

Scott,

if you had to give a toast there,

what would the toast be?

There you are.

I've given four toasted weddings, which is a humble brag of saying I'm at a lot of wedding parties.

I'm being serious.

I give three pieces of advice to the groom.

I say, one, biggest unlock in relationships is don't keep score.

Decide the kind of father, husband, friend you want to be and hold yourself to that standard because you'll always inflate your own contributions and minimize theirs.

And if you keep score as I did as a younger man, you end up with fewer friends and fewer healthy relationships than you should.

You weren't expecting a serious one.

I know I wasn't.

I was waiting for the good job on the HGH, but go ahead.

Two, always express affection and physical desire.

I think women want to be wanted.

I think that sex and affection say, I choose you.

I think it's really, really important to maintain that just out-of-control fire in a relationship.

Yeah, he's got that one.

That's happening.

It's the difference between friends.

Awkwardly.

It's bonding, regardless of what the Atlantic or the New York Times will tell you.

We are sexual beings and we want to be wanted.

And three, never, ever let your wife be cold or hungry.

Oprah's about to kill you at this point in their toes, but go ahead.

I would love to go to that wedding.

Would you?

I'm here for his midlife crisis.

I think it'd be cheaper

if he just got a canary yellow Corvette tee top and crashed it into a hair plugs clinic.

That would be a lot.

I think it's going to be an amazing wedding.

I wanted to go to that wedding.

Yes.

I think it's going to be

summer in Venice.

It's just disastrous.

It's going to be disastrous.

People would so go in.

We would so go in a heartbeat.

We would so

we would so go.

And we'd take pictures.

We would steal things.

The cool party before prompt.

You didn't get invited to.

Well, I didn't want to go.

I didn't want to go.

When you tagged me on Instagram.

I'm sorry about it.

Yeah.

We should have been invited anyway.

That's a nice show, Scott.

I thought you'd say something much different, but here we go.

All right, speaking of your boyfriend, Macron, he says he will ban social media for children under 15 if progress is not made at the EU level.

France is already making efforts to force social media sites like X and Reddit to have age verification systems by classifying them as pornographic sites.

Macron's escalation comes after the country had a fatal school stabbing in the suburbs of Paris and says age verification will be imposed on sites selling knives online.

Greece, France, and Spain are

pushing the EU to limit the amount of time teenagers can spend online.

Scott, shall we move to France?

We're for this.

We are absolutely for this idea of age verification, even though it's not popular among the tech set.

Yeah, we've said a bunch of times, I meet a lot of people with kids.

If your kids are below the age of 10, that's great.

If your kids are over the age of 22 and got through this mess, great.

It's the people.

Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who has kids who are 14 and 17 that had to grow up in an unregulated environment where we had very charming people holding book parties on the beach as they were figuring figuring out business models to encourage young girls to cut more, self-cut.

Teen suicide is up 62%

in the last decade, 62%.

And some of that is bulldozer parenting.

We, as parents, do clear out all the obstacles for our kids such that they show up to NYU and they've never gotten their heart broken, they've never had no, they've never gotten a C, and they literally freak out.

Some of it is R.

Shot a D, but go ahead.

As parents, some of it is

bulldozer concierge parenting, but there's no doubt about it.

When kids express frustration or bullying online,

the algorithms pick up on it and will literally start sending the message that is like suicidal ideation.

And until someone goes to jail, this is going to continue.

I think the most consequential academic in the world right now is my colleague Jonathan Haidt.

I think he's played a huge role in this movement.

But Greece, Spain, New Zealand are all putting in wonderful age limits.

Can you imagine the U.S.

would do it?

I think it's coming already, 11 states.

I think it's happening.

Europe's leading the way on this.

But think about it.

We age gate alcohol, the military, pornography, driving, but we're letting a 14-year-old go on social media and get bullied.

And the algorithms pick up on it and love it because it creates more Nissan ads.

And it's especially rough.

on young girls because again, I'm a sexist.

I believe typically 95% of people born as male or female are more prone to certain behaviors than the other gender that doesn't mean there should be any less rights or any less opportunity but till we lean into these wonderful attributes that most of us have an easier time leaning into and some negative attributes i don't think we're going to make real progress and here's one of those attributes boys bully physically and verbally girls bully relationally and we've put fucking nuclear weapons in their hands of 14 year old girls have you checked out your go on

There's some really good apps where you can go on.

I believe in a police state.

You can't get your kid off of social media because unfortunately, unless it's a collective action, they become isolated and more depressed.

But I go on and I look at my 14-year-old social media.

And the really crazy shit is amongst the girls because it's tactical and it's smart and it's cutting.

The guys are just like, fuck you, jerk or dude, you know, whatever.

And then it's over.

But the girls are really,

we are going to look back on this age and we're going to think, okay, income inequality was out of control.

A slow burn to fascism from the greatest experiment in history of America was out of control, but I'm confident we're going to repel that.

We're going to really regret, I think, the coarsening of our discourse.

But the thing we'll really regret, the thing we'll look back on this age and think, how did we let this happen?

Because I think we're going to look back and think, how did we let this happen?

One of the things that is hard to do is regulate yourself when you yourself are addicted.

I think the problem is adults are addicted and can't look down and doom scroll or

whatever.

They don't regulate themselves and manage to get themselves into whatever hole they're in.

And so it's not unusual that kids would, although I would say, I think one thing that you're not saying is a lot of kids are rejecting it, like are not taking things off.

I've told you the story.

My son said he took a whole bunch of them off because he felt bad.

Mine does that and then he goes back.

Does your goes?

No, not at all.

No.

He was

6% of teens are clinically addicted to alcohol or drugs.

24% are addicted to social media.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's an issue.

Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

I think the first step is the school stuff, is getting them out of schools, getting these.

And that's happening everywhere.

Now, an interesting wrinkle, which I was a little bit more nervous about, was they're putting cameras in schools and using AI to watch behaviors and bullying and things like that.

And then also monitoring the phone, some of the phone chats, like you were talking about.

I find that to be a little bit disturbing.

The idea of monitoring behavior in that way and using AI to help it.

I find that like a step too far.

I think parents should be doing this, teachers should be doing this.

And we shouldn't leave it to teachers to do it, by the way.

It should be the parents themselves, but it's often impossible because parents themselves, again, are addicted.

But these kind of rules, I don't see it passing in the U.S.

because I think the tech companies, I mean, I was surprised it happened.

They're too powerful and they like to pretend that they're all really good for us.

And that's what they say.

You know, they try to like this idea that it's all going to be better.

States are taking action.

They are.

But look, what was in the thing?

I mean, again, I'm fucking agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The fact that states can't, I mean, today.

Marsha Blackburn's been a leader on this.

God, I'm on Tulsi Gabbard's side today, too.

Like, what in the fuck?

But commonality, trying to bring people together.

Civility.

Civility.

I hate that word, by the way.

I'm sorry.

Only straight white men can think civility is our biggest problem.

But

I'll move along.

Okay.

Anyway, we hope it gets past.

We love Macron and we think he's very sexy, both of us, Scott, more than I.

Okay.

That guy's a tall drinking lemonade, right?

Hello, daddy.

At this point, a few beers don't show them.

Did you see the guy online who's putting Trump's words into a gay guy?

He's a gay guy.

Oh, it's the best with the chain.

It's the best with the chain, and he sounds like, well, of course,

as I've said, Elon and

Trump breaking up is the first breakup of pride.

Anyway, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, Meta makes some big moves and not everyone is happy.

What a surprise.

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Open on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast, brought to you in part by Amazon Prime.

Scott, we're back live from Con.

Meta just announced that it's putting ads on WhatsApp for the first time.

This is something they talked about, and one of the founders of WhatsApp said over my dead body.

So I guess he's not living anymore.

The ads will appear in the updates tab of the app, which is visited by 1.5 billion people a day.

Meta says there are no plans to put ads in chats or personal messages, I'm sure, yet is in there and silently.

And all conversations still say encrypted.

Meta shares rose 2.5% on the announcement.

I think the question is, are they confident about the outcome of the antitrust?

trial.

Meta just did $14 billion deal to acquire also a 49% stake in Scale AI, a startup that supplies training data for AI models.

Google is Scale AI's largest customer customer and not happy about the meta deal.

It's poorly cutting ties with scale.

Microsoft and XAI are also pulling back.

I have heard from federal regulators who feel like this deal isn't going to go through at all, even though Microsoft did a similar thing when it bought Inflection.

The deal with Scale AI?

Yes, it's like that.

It's one of those deals where it's sort of an Aquihire kind of situation.

They're getting the 49%,

not control of it.

It's an acquisition period.

And I think the government's, even this government is not going to allow this to happen.

So talk a little bit about these ads in the app.

Of course, they'll put ads anywhere.

They'll put on, they'll put ads on Mark Zuckerberg's ass if it would work for them.

But go ahead.

What do you think?

It wouldn't work for them.

I'm surprised it took so long.

Yeah, me too.

It won't be the revenue general.

It'll be incremental growth.

It'll add one or two percentage points to their growth each year, which will which is great.

But if you look at it

If you look at ads, Meta's ability to monetize a consumer in the U.S., they get about 75 bucks a year in ads if you're on Meta platforms in the U.S.

Their average, I think, across their whole network is more like 12 or 14 because the market's actually the strongest in with WhatsApp are the lowest.

It is very hard to monetize attention in India right now because a couple hundred million people in India are not consumers, meaning they don't have any excess income for stuff.

So it won't be the revenue boost I think that analysts think it'll be.

What I think it is, and no one's talking about it, is I think it's sort of an ATT and Verizon killer because it'll give them, you know, my sense is WhatsApp is slowly becoming just the best telco and it's free.

For the first time, I've thought, wow, I have AT ⁇ T and somehow they have figured out a way through taxes and me ignoring the bill and not calling and complaining.

I pay $400 to $600 a month for ATT.

And a couple of times recently, I thought, I'll call back on WhatsApp because it's better.

And if they can figure out a way to make more investments in technology and outpace the technology investments of AT ⁇ T or Verizon and offer free service to everyone globally, and it becomes a self-expressive benefit where it feels cooler to be on WhatsApp now.

Yeah, yeah.

I just think

I get a lot of what's happened.

You know, it's interesting.

They could go back to that terrible phone they did.

Do you remember many years ago?

They had a phone.

It was like home or whatever it was called.

Who had a phone?

Facebook had the phone, and then they got out of it.

It was, you know, who was run by?

Jamath Palihapattiya ran that division.

Oh, really?

And it was a huge failure.

I know.

Ha, exactly.

Speaking of HGH.

What

explain?

I mean, could they do that?

Could they go back?

Because they had a phone.

It failed.

Microsoft had a phone.

Amazon had a phone.

They all had phones.

And that was their move, was to sort of go into that business.

But AT ⁇ T Verizon sort of sewed it up along with Google and Apple.

I saw this as I thought it was good news for Meta.

Probably the two.

So they don't need a phone is what you're saying.

They just need the WhatsApp phone service.

I think there are just so many amazing hardware manufacturers now.

They're better off just being the operating system that that garners money and advertises i don't think they're in that business anymore but i think i saw i read this as worse news for at t and verizon than it was an increase in revenues for uh so ads not a big deal and ads not just a thing well

i mean four out of five people are on a meta platform i think every 48 hours outside of china so my sense is that I think the ads will be fairly unobtrusive.

I think they'll get more and more targeted.

They'll have more and more data to put into their flywheel.

You know, but it's where WhatsApp is strongest, is where they have the lowest monetization.

So I think it'll be a longer road to the revenue.

You're very bullish on Meta right now.

And also, the scale AI deal is his, you know, they've been sucking wind in the AI area.

He thinks so, and I think he's right.

And so he's making a big move, which is very typical of Zuckerberg.

Like when he bought Instagram, when he did all kinds of things, he always makes the big, aggressive pivot for himself.

I don't think, I think this one was a rare misstep.

He's arguably the best acquirer in history.

Instagram bought for a billion.

Later, Marissa Mayer made the worst acquisition in tech history.

She bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion.

And I think seven years later, it was sold for $3 million.

And meanwhile, Instagram is probably objectively worth $200 to $300 billion if it was an independent company.

And then everyone thought he was crazy for spending $19 billion on WhatsApp that had no revenue.

And that's ended up.

Now he arguably bought the largest telco globally for $19 billion.

That looks like a genius acquisition.

This one's a little bit bit different because they were trying to be cute when you buy 49 of a company you're not triggering what's called a change of control meaning that the sec looks at it differently and technically the ftc and the doj have a different set of rules to apply to a minority investment yes it was 49 for a reason they technically they're not in control but this is what happens when you take 49 of a company you're on top you're in charge you're in charge they also made its founder the head of their ai now essentially he's head of the ai lab or whatever that they're making But they're effectively in charge now,

Meta.

And they thought that, and Scale AI is going now back to all of their other.

So Scale AI is essentially an attempt to optimize content for generative AI.

Remember the SEO world?

Remember how there used to be companies and people here 10 years ago who had businesses that optimize you for search?

These guys are now in the business of optimizing for generative AI, right?

It's a great company, super smart people.

By the way, it's going to go the same way of SEO.

I think in 10 years, that whole industry is gone.

But Meta saw a reason to bring these very smart people in to help optimize content for generative AI discovery.

They thought they'd be cute and only buy 49% of it.

And Microsoft got away with it, essentially.

Well, but what, right?

But what their clients now, Scale AI, have said, that's fine.

Yeah.

But a dog we don't like has peed on you, and we're just not getting near you.

We're done.

So Google's out.

I think he overpaid for this acquisition.

Yeah.

I think this was

a rare misstep.

But

we'll see what happens with him.

It'll be interesting.

But I do like, I have to say, the one thing Zuckerberg compared to a lot of people is his management style.

He's a very strong manager.

He's a brilliant businessman.

He's also a sociopath and has done more damage to young people while making more money than anyone else in history.

Well done, Mark.

That's it.

Well done.

But we like your management style.

Anyway, brilliant.

Next up, a chatbot revolution is killing news publishers.

As AI replaces Google searches, news sites aren't getting much need of referral traffic.

We've talked about this.

Organic search traffic to HuffPost and Washington Post is reportedly down 50% over the last three years.

Google search volume on Apple's Safari browser just fell for the first time in 20 years.

TV News is feeling the pinch, with social media reportedly now surpassing TV as American's top news source.

And over at Amazon, Danny Jassy told employees that AI would come for their jobs.

What a nice memo to get from your CEO.

You suck.

I'm going to fire you.

Amazon is the second largest private employer in the U.S.

They're a huge company, a million people, whatever.

The number is enormous.

This thing, everyone should have seen coming here in advertising.

Every publisher that didn't see what they were going to do coming.

At first, they stole your content

and got in the catbird seat and pushed stuff to you so you were beholden to them.

And now they're just taking your shit and putting it up.

And I have to say, it's very effective because

that's the first thing.

I don't go any further than the first AI thing because it's gotten increasingly better.

I mean, what's the point of going, except then I then go organically to people's sites like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or whatever, but it's a real killer for the clickbait websites.

It's a death sentence for them, much like what happened to Demand Media many years ago when Google did the, when they did that redo of whatever, panda or whatever the fuck they called it.

Yeah, so I mention this probably once a month on the podcast because I'm desperate for affirmation.

But

I was on the board of the New York Times from 08 to 2010.

they didn't like you i heard um not true they kicked me off after 24 months okay um salzbergers really really talented thoughtful people seriously

choosing my words very carefully uh we had something called about.com and it was essentially a content farm and we'd have somebody who did a whole thing on southern cooking and then we would optimize it for google and then google would send traffic and we'd split revenue from them and the site was doing really well.

And we could have sold it for a billion dollars.

And I remember saying, why on earth would we not sell this thing?

This is not our business.

Billion dollars is a lot of money.

And they said, no, because the management team wanted to accessorize an analog outfit with digital earrings, thinking it made them look younger, right?

It was their bell bottoms or whatever it was.

They thought it made them seem hipper.

And then one night, literally overnight,

Google changed their algorithm.

And 40% of our traffic went away like that, like 40%.

And I had this conversation, and I have this conversation with any entrepreneur.

I had this conversation with Jessica Yellen, who's not noise, which I absolutely love.

She's dependent upon Meta.

I'm like, the only thing a partner of Meta and Alphabet have in common over the medium and long term is you're going to get fucked.

Yeah.

They will run their fingers through your hair, send you traffic, call you partners, invite you to the cool party tonight.

And then slowly but surely, the moment you have anything resembling real margin that they can come from, they will tweak their algorithm and suck it out.

Google Google used to be the best place to go.

Now, the first two or three pages are where they can go to further monetize.

And the thing that really bothers me about these generative AI descriptions now is if you type in, give me the major themes from Carr Switcher's book, Burn Book, it'll list links to Amazon where they can buy the book, but it summarizes it.

Yeah, it does.

Which means they've crawled your content.

That's right, which means they haven't,

are they paying Penguin Portfolio Random House for Simon and Schuster?

So this is a moment in time.

Going back to the New York Times, I suggested that we form a consortium and stop letting Google crawl our data.

I'm like, they've convinced us that this is good for us.

And they're sending us traffic to run shitty banner ads that nobody watches, that we get 50 cent CPMs on.

And they run stuff across the right rail that is much more targeted and they get a dollar for.

So they're giving us two pennies.

They're taking a buck from our gorgeous content, right?

And we're supposed to be happy about it.

And they said, no, we're in the business of eyeballs, da-da-da.

This is before they went subscription.

That was a moment in time where we could have pushed back on search, where if we'd all banded together as content creators and said, we're going to license it to Bing, which was still a player at a time, or to Google, we could have extracted a lot of money.

We are at that moment in time right now with AI.

And that is we need very, a very aggressive, very intelligent group of people and a lot of money for lawyers to go to every one of these guys and say, we have evidence everywhere that you are crawling our amazing content that includes people who are willing to go to war zones and risk their lives.

It includes people that spent a lot of money on graduate education such that they can fact check and write reasonably well and compelling narrative.

And you are crawling their data and running these synopses and not paying them.

Right, exactly.

And the Times and others spent, you made that point about the fact-checking on the article about me that you got called.

He's here in the room, Ben is here, but

the puff piece?

Yes, the puff piece.

The puff piece.

No, it was not.

It was very hard hitting.

So anyway,

literally, I got a call.

Can you talk about her leadership skills?

Oh, God.

Make it stop.

Puff piece.

Did you see the puff piece in the FT?

Yes, they did.

Daddy got a little love.

Yeah, yeah.

That's right.

It's too bad everybody reads the F Tech Teams.

New York Times.

Yeah.

FT.

How many people read the FT piece?

I love it.

How many people read the New York Times piece?

Everybody, right?

Thank you.

Okay.

Anyway, literally.

Okay, just so you know, you're all cynical.

This is what advertising has become.

Advertising media used to shape culture, now falls me to the fucking urologist on Instagram.

Congratulations.

Well done.

In any way, in any case, they will do it again, and they will do it again and again, and they have no interest.

I will give you one very quick when I was at Google when they started, and Larry Page was taking me around, showing me the office, and there was a room, and I've told this story, full of television sets, and they were all on.

And it was everything at Google was weird at the time.

You'd turn a corner and there'd there'd be a tent or there's something.

It was all, it was a very strange, quirky culture.

And I was like, oh, a room of television is like Circuit City, essentially.

And I said, what are you doing?

At this point, Larry was carrying a pollution meter around his neck because he was worried about pollution.

And I was like, no matter what you do, Carmen, you're going to die.

I did the moonstruck line to him.

And he was like, what is that?

What do you mean I'm going to die?

I'm like, you're going to die.

Like, this was the kind of conversation that.

But we get to this room.

It's full of TVs.

I'm like, what are you doing in there?

And he goes, we're taping TV.

tv and i this is exactly where he talks and i go taping tv he goes yes all of tv and i said you're taping tv for what they were crawling it through closed captioning so they could search it and and i said did you get any of the copyright to do that and they were doing the same with books yeah very soon after and he goes why would i need to do that And I was like, because other people own that content, not you.

And you're a fucking shoplifter.

And he was like, I think it's going to be good for the world.

I said, I think it's going to be good for you because no one's going to do it after.

So we had this big debate right there.

But this is in the DNA of these companies.

Let me tell you, shoplifting and thievery is in the thing.

And Walt Mossberg got it right when he called them information thieves many years ago.

And I think that's absolutely true.

And then they serve you the.

the solution for it.

Like they give you info cancer and then say, we have the medicine to cure you of info cancer, which they don't, which is a line from Mountain Head this week.

Anyway, speaking of things that might cause cancer, when we come back, we'll talk about Trump launching a mobile plan.

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And we're back live from Con,

We got some time for questions.

The Trump organization has announced a mobile phone plan for a 499 smartphone, they said, will be made in the U.S.

This is not true.

You cannot make a phone in the U.S., but they don't care if they lie about things like that.

Trump Mobile will offer plans under $50.

It's like the Bible.

Will offer plans under $50 a month.

The T1 smartphone appears to have a gold covering with an American flag, obviously.

Gold is best.

For those who haven't seen that, it's a great skit on Apple.

Gold is best.

Get the gold.

This device will run on Google's Android operating system, and a Trump organization says it will be made in the U.S.

Again, it's not possible.

But meanwhile, in the podcasting world, the Boys at Smartless have also launched their own mobile phone company.

I don't think we're not going to be doing that, just so you know.

But

this is ridiculous.

Shira OV did a great thing.

She tried to sign up.

They charged her immediately.

She can't get her service.

It's very confusing.

It's obviously just,

he probably did it.

They did a deal with someone.

Trump isn't running it.

It's like stakes, except now people buy it, essentially.

Any thoughts on this?

Creating a mobile service?

Well,

why would we create a mobile service?

The grift in the criminality and the monetization of the White House has become so outrageous, it just doesn't feel strange.

If Obama or Reagan or Carter had tried to launch a phone service, Fox News would have had their just their hair on fire for seven days straight.

But because we now have a president who opens a Swiss Swiss banking account, the Qatar or anyone else can say, I'm putting $100 million in tonight at 12.03 a.m.

and nobody knows.

And by the way, could you stop sending shipments of arms to these people?

Or, you know, basically the White House is now for sale.

The criminality is just so outrageous that we now see the monetization of something that this should not happen.

This is crazy, but it almost feels like, oh, that's not a big deal, right?

Sending your kids to Qatar, who is the political mouthpiece and funder of Hamas, and then taking a 400 million dollar bribe from them well if you can do that okay let them launch a phone so this what's so sad about this by the way you can get the exact same plans someone did a did in another yeah because some of these plans are great because you are being overcharged by Verizon and ATT.

So some of these other plans are terrific.

Because they basically ride on Verizon and AT ⁇ T.

They pay them.

And some of them are wonderful.

And the prices should not be these prices.

Well, not to get too deep into the weeds here, but there's a duopoly.

A small number of companies own the networks.

And the FTC and the DOJ said came in and said you have to lease them out to people to start what's called an MVNO.

And a lot of great companies, including Mint Mobile, came in with very fantastic advertising and acquired a bunch of customers.

And then they basically sell to one of the big guys.

They end up being kind of niche customer

acquisition vehicles for the duopoly that is rising in ATT.

But you can get the same plan for

less money.

But I don't, I like these little niche uh offerings if people are that crazy about trump and they want to do it but they it's just insane that somebody who has the power of the purse power of laws gets to decide the most important decisions globally that sets the tone for the rest of the world is selling a fucking phone i mean come on it just we become so numb to how terrible and uh uh inappropriate all of this is and just the incredible erosion i have found i'm on a bunch of panels, and I have found I'm the anger pillow for Can.

They set me up, you say brand is dead, and then they have a very articulate British person say, why brand matters more than ever.

And I have felt, I don't want to say anti-American resentment, but I just think globally, our brand, you want to talk about brands?

There has never been a brand erosion of a brand as big, fallen as far as fast as the U.S.

in the last 151 days.

Well, Tesla, but go ahead.

Fair enough.

That's fair.

And that's still going.

But if you think about it, we used to be the good guys.

People said, okay, they get it wrong.

But generally speaking, the White House has an occupant in there that may be dumb, maybe, not sound fair, not dumb, maybe not the brightest person in the world, may be arrogant, may be imperialist, bad wars.

But generally speaking, our heart's in the right place.

I've always found that.

And what I'm sensing when we go abroad is a certain level of fear.

Like, I think people, quite frankly, took America a little bit for granted.

They sort of said, Oh, you're smart.

You're nice.

You have more weapons than anybody.

That's kind of nice.

And then when they realized, okay, our rich Uncle Sam's gone fucking crazy.

They're like, Wow, we kind of miss our uncle.

We kind of miss the old uncle.

That felt pretty good.

And also, there's a real decent level.

I find that

it's not, I don't want to say there's an anti-American thing in France.

We're still wonderful allies.

We push back fascism together.

But what I notice

visibly when I'm on panels, someone makes an anti-American joke, and the people just love it.

The people just love it now.

So, that erosion of brand equity

has an enormous impact on it.

It means that one of the largest exports in our nation, U.S.

Education, where we make $42 billion a year, we make $40 billion selling TV shows and movies overseas.

We make $42 billion getting the richest kid from El Salvador to come to NYU Stern and pay $288,000 in tuition over four years.

All those numbers are accurate.

We get the best and brightest, the flows of human capital in the U.S.

People, people have have one aspiration, the best and brightest, typically, and that is to come to the U.S.

If you're noticing a terrorist cell forming and people wanting to get on planes to DC or to San Francisco, there are a lot of people who say, you know what, Americans are good people and they notify our embassy.

They highlight security threats.

I have always run global companies, small companies, but global companies.

And I always found when I walked into Samsung or to LVMH or Toyota in, you know, Tokyo,

Seoul, or Paris.

And I took for granted, you know what?

People generally like Americans.

They generally speaking think you're not actually funny, but they like us.

They think, oh, you're.

Not now, though.

We're going to have to say that.

Well, that's my point.

That's my point: is that that brand erosion, I mean, you're in the business of brand.

Brand erosion means less margins.

It means less consideration.

It means less profits.

The erosion in goodwill will translate to an economic hardship and

making our soft targets much bigger targets because we're no longer the good guys.

Which is making out like bandits, and I mean bandits.

I'm stressing bandits.

What could they sell next?

Then I want to get to questions because we only got a few minutes.

I have no idea.

I think erectile dysfunction.

Well, if you think about advertising, advertising used to shape culture.

Now it sells creatine to self-hating people like me.

Anyway, excellent.

All right.

One more quick break, and then we'll take some questions from the audience.

Hey, this is Peter Kafka.

I'm the host of Channels, a show about the biggest ideas in tech and media and how those things collide.

And today we're talking about AI, which is promising and maybe terrifying.

And if you happen to be in a very select group of engineers that Mark Zuckerberg wants to hire, it's incredibly lucrative.

Which is why I had the New York Times Mike Isaac explain what's going on with the great AI pay race.

I'm talking to executives across the industry who are pissed off at Mark Zuckerberg because he has up the entire market for this stuff, right?

And like this is something that's painful for Open AI, I think, because they can't shell out a quarter of a billion dollars for one dude.

That's this week on channels, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Scott, we're back.

Let's take some questions right here.

Do you think Trump and Musk are going to make kiss and make up?

No, I do not.

No, I think Trump has he's used his Musk has outlived his usefulness, and

he's a live wire,

and he takes away too much attention, and Trump doesn't need him at this point.

He's got his billions of dollars.

He's got his presidency.

He'll probably get off scot-free.

Not everyone in that administration will get off scot-free, but Trump certainly will.

And so I think he doesn't need him.

And the only thing is Musk is not, like I said, it's not like Omarosa leaving.

Although he has the qualities of Omarosa, although I like her a lot better,

I think that she will,

I think that he will, he could cause trouble.

You just never know what he's going to do.

So I think that's one of the, he has some power, especially on, if he changes the algorithm on Twitter, you could fuck with him there, he could fuck with him a lot of places.

That said, there's plenty of people rushing in to take his place.

And Trump's got most of tech by the ball.

So

for some reason, I don't know why, because they could certainly do damage to him, too.

I don't know.

Very quick.

Quick.

Or else.

No.

No, I'm not going quick.

You don't love the Holman.

You don't love.

Bowen Yang is waiting.

Oh, I'll go quick.

The gays are waiting to come on.

They want to see the gays.

This happens every day.

I'm a gay.

This is a much bigger, bolder, cattier, stupider version of the following, and it happens millions of times in corporate America.

My company was acquired.

I didn't like working there.

They didn't like me.

I didn't like them.

That's a little hard.

Shocking.

Different culture.

And they said, Okay,

I said, I want out.

And they said, Fine, we want you out.

And I, they gave me a shit ton of money and I signed non-disparagement and non-compete agreements.

That is effectively what's going on here.

They have fired him.

He wanted input on CIA, NASA,

and IRS picks.

They said, No, you've overstepped your boundaries.

We need you out.

He started shitposting them, calling the president a pedophile.

It didn't seem to bother him when he wanted subsidies.

Can you think of anything worse you could call somebody?

And meanwhile, all the right-wing media that was saying, release the Epstein files.

There's all these Democrats.

They're all of a sudden like, oh, that's not true.

That's just Trump.

He just hung out with Epstein for fun.

I just love how all of a sudden they're like, oh, conspiracy.

Anyways, they basically said to him, Boss, we're not going to give you extra money, but we're not going to put Tesla and SpaceX out of business.

But you have to sign a non-disparagement.

This is a firing.

And he's basically been told, okay, if you want us to take SpaceX from $300 billion to $30 billion by losing all contracts and you want us to take Tesla from $950 to $50 billion, you better shut the fuck up.

Sign here.

This happens every day in corporations.

He's much more leveraged than you really.

If Starlink falls apart, he's got a lot of problems.

And Tesla's on a downward spiral, which has something to do with his Trump support, but a lot to do with his lack of good cars.

That's really, I mean, at the very heart of it.

Hi, I'm Kendra Barnett, Senior Eric Tech Supporter.

I'm Nigel.

I'm a huge fan of OC.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you.

I just wanted to ask if you guys could share any predictions about the remedies that we're going to see in both of the DOJ and Google cases.

I think probably they'll have to break it up.

I think they'll have to be spinning something off.

I think that the judge is really smart, actually know a lot about him.

But I think Google's on the ropes on that one.

The Facebook one, I'm not sure, because some people felt it wasn't a particularly strong case, and Facebook's being ultra-aggressive.

And they've got some support for the idea that they do have,

I think it's a better case that they brought back that Lena Khan then resubmitted.

but i think a lot of people feel that that possibly uh facebook will possibly i think the judge will rule against them but it will go to appeals it'll go on and on and on but i think the google one is a signific probably a significant issue and it'll keep it'll keep going but the google one is more and it's very clear what happened what's happened there and they should not be on every side of every market including you know youtube is now television you know they they control so much stuff and it's so obvious that they should be broken up in some fashion but rolling back the Instagram purchase, I don't see it happening.

Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts here, but I think if Alphabet stock continues to underperform and for some reason it goes down, I think that they will decide to prophylactically spend YouTube because I think once an asset...

Alphabet trades at a P of, I think, 16.

The S ⁇ P trades at 24.

The average S ⁇ P company is not nearly as impressive as Alphabet.

At some point, the shareholders of Alphabet will go, all right, the hole is worth less than the sum of its parts.

So maybe we can kill two birds with one stone, go to the DOJ or the FTC and say, what if we spin

YouTube, which would probably be worth more than Netflix.

It captures 11% of viewership.

Netflix

captures 7.7%.

So I think if they see the tea leaves, it would be good for shareholders and potentially

maintain the wolves, the FTC and DOJ wolves at the door.

I think you'll see a spin.

Having said that, every prediction I have made around DOJ and FTC over the last decade has been entirely wrong.

But the Trump administration hasn't pulled back on this, which is interesting.

I don't, you know, I think they probably thought they might get a little bit of it, but it doesn't matter.

This isn't in front of a judge, and we'll see what happens.

But they don't seem particularly interested in helping these companies.

But I do think Google's probably going to have to spend something off at some point.

Anyway,

okay, this is the end.

Okay, thanks.

But Boen Yang is waiting and he's sick of you.

Okay, that's the show.

Thanks for listening to Pivot.

Make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

We'll be back next week.

Scott, let me give it to you.

Read us out.

You think I know?

I'm not going to to wait for you.

Go ahead.

Go.

All the people we value.

Getting with the hook situation.

Can you please?

Today's show was produced by Larry Namon, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Kevin Oliver.

Ernie Interest on Indian this episode.

Thanks also to Jibros, Mia Severo, and Dan Shalon, Nasha Kerwa, Box Media Executive Producer podcast.

Thank you to Lauren Stark, Ray Chow, and Jackie Sanguia.

Do I get that right, Jackie?

I've known you for so long.

All right,

she's in charge of events.

She does a great job.

At Vox, anyone in charge of events, it's what I call an invisible until you fuck up job.

Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform.

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Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

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