TACO Trade, Elon's DOGE Farewell, and AI Video Gone Wild

Transcript

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Speaker 20 No, no, no, they're kissing. Don't do it.
Don't do it. Oh, no, stop.

Speaker 20 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swischer.

Speaker 6 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 20 Hello, Scott. How's it going?

Speaker 6 it's good i'm i'm trying to i've been setting up my home gym i'm i actually you know what i didn't i'm trying to i took a week off of alcohol and edibles because i and i found this research that is i find accurate and it said that if you cut out

Speaker 6 alcohol and edibles from your life for just for 21 days or more you lose 60% of your will to live. Oh, ha ha.
I knew that's where that was going.

Speaker 6 Also, Alsa, it's been a while. Hold on.
Hold on. I'm not stopping there.
My in-laws are staying with me. Oh, God.

Speaker 20 Oh, how's that going? You like that?

Speaker 6 Oh, they're wonderful. It's perfect because they don't speak very good English, so we don't communicate.
Nice.

Speaker 6 I'm convinced that your relationship with your in-laws starts to come off the tracks when you begin communicating. Oh, but something kind of awkward happened over the weekend.

Speaker 6 Uh-oh, I left my computer out.

Speaker 20 Oh, no. Is there a nudity involved?

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 my mother-in-law opened it, and what did she see on my computer? No, no, what?

Speaker 6 Well, you can imagine. One guess.

Speaker 20 Porn, porn.

Speaker 6 Porn, yeah. So, but I had the perfect excuse.

Speaker 20 What?

Speaker 6 I said, I get my weather from cockgobblers.com.

Speaker 20 Okay.

Speaker 20 Before this didn't happen. Okay.

Speaker 6 Cock gobblers. I mean, that is good branding.
That is real.

Speaker 20 It's not.

Speaker 6 That signals awareness. It signals intent.
It tells you what the product offering is.

Speaker 6 I love that. Yeah.
I love that. I get my weather there.
All right. Okay.

Speaker 20 Well, I'm going on a big trip.

Speaker 6 He's back.

Speaker 20 Okay. We're going to try to move on from that.
Okay. So I think you should start taking edibles again immediately as soon as possible.

Speaker 6 Well, okay. Well, okay.
All right. You talked me into it.
Okay, good. You talked me into it.

Speaker 20 Good. I'm thinking of starting to take edibles.
I'm so tired. There's so much work.

Speaker 6 Really?

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I'm tired today. Yeah, but you're doing this to yourself.
I keep warning you.

Speaker 20 That's true. You're right.
You're right. More of the house stuff.
I was doing a lot of gardening. I have my gardeners here, and we're gardening up a storm to create.

Speaker 6 Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Two words, undocumented immigrants.

Speaker 20 They're not. They're two amazing gay guys from San Francisco and they're very like macho and also gay.
So I have the most beautiful garden vault.

Speaker 6 Really?

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 6 They're great.

Speaker 6 I don't, unless

Speaker 20 Gary and Michael.

Speaker 6 So why is that taking time if other people are doing it? I'm a huge believer in comparative advantage. I can do a small number of things very well and everything else I outsource.

Speaker 20 I like it. I like to scrub the pollen off of patio furniture.
I don't know what to tell you. I love it.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah. You're kind of a, you you like to clean.

Speaker 20 I like to clean and it's very satisfying. I organized my, I built myself a tool shed and I have organized it and I couldn't be more happy about that situation.

Speaker 6 Built myself a tool shed. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 20 Yeah. I had, well, I didn't build it.

Speaker 6 God, we could, we are literally a different species.

Speaker 20 I know. I have a tool shed.

Speaker 6 Built yourself a tool shed?

Speaker 20 I'm going to show it to you when you come visit me if you ever do. Are you handy? Yes, I'm very handy.
Yeah. Saul always hands me things and says, fix it.

Speaker 6 Yeah. I'm the handy one.

Speaker 20 I'm the handy lesbian.

Speaker 6 Yeah, see, my kids cut out the hand it to me. They just look at me and say, fix it.
And I'm not even sure what they're referring to. Or buy it.
They're just fix it. I'm upset.
Fix it.

Speaker 20 Fix it. No, I'm very handy.
I bought myself an electric lawnmower, an electric blower, and an electric weed whacker,

Speaker 20 and of course, my power washer. So I'm very happy now, but it takes a lot of time to get everything in place.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you need to travel less. I actually am worried about you.
You do need to travel much less. Oh, I haven't traveled in a while.
I haven't traveled.

Speaker 20 This is the the first big trip I'm taking in a while. And I'll see you in France.

Speaker 6 That's good. I also think you need to spend some of your money and enjoy yourself and relax a little.

Speaker 20 I'm not a vacationer, Scott.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you should start. It's a lot of fun.
I'll show you how. I'm really good at it.

Speaker 20 I don't like it. I never like vacations.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of wonderful stuff out there.

Speaker 20 I like doing gardening. I like doing organizing my things.
Anyway.

Speaker 6 Can I give you a hint? Yeah. Two hints.
One, don't take your kids. And two, travel to hotels, not to cities.

Speaker 20 Oh, well, I'm going to be in San Francisco, so I'll be at my beautiful home there, which I love, too.

Speaker 6 That's not travel. I understand.
That's not travel.

Speaker 20 But I'm happy and I'm a homebody because I'll tell you, I'll tell you, my mom moved us around a lot. And so

Speaker 20 all my brothers and I have beautiful homes that we love, like very comfortable. And I don't mean stunning, enormous.

Speaker 6 Because you inherited a lot of money, why?

Speaker 20 No, because we work hard.

Speaker 6 I work really hard. I actually do work hard.
I just said that. You work too hard.

Speaker 20 My brothers and I are very into our making lovely homes where we live. And my younger brother just built a beautiful house that's off the grid, if you can believe it.

Speaker 6 Off the grid?

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's like one of those houses that can survive an apocalypse. Like he has energy, water.

Speaker 6 I got to meet this guy.

Speaker 20 You do. It's beautiful, too.
You would like it. It looks like a Four Seasons.
It's gorgeous. It's up in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 6 I'm not going anywhere.

Speaker 6 I'll take him to Shamargot in New York, but I want to meet him. I've heard so much about him.

Speaker 20 He's really interesting. This house is gorgeous, but it also has like electrical, like its own electrical thing.
It's all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 20 And he's anyway, he's got himself one of those carts that you drive around, those, those carts that you drive around across the land and stuff.

Speaker 6 Anyway, yeah, I immediately liked Dr. Swisher.

Speaker 20 He liked Lawyer Swisher. He'd like Lawyer Swisher very much.

Speaker 6 He's a lawyer. He took over the family coal business, right?

Speaker 20 Yes, he did. Yeah.
Good for him.

Speaker 20 Yeah, yeah. He's just, he's a, he's, we're all stay-at-home people, which is interesting.
Anyway, because we were dragged all. It's because you're all old.

Speaker 6 That's what happens when you get old.

Speaker 20 No, we were always like this. No, I'm telling you, we were dragged.
We were dragged from place to place. You get afraid.

Speaker 6 I saw some teenagers with a skateboard. They're criminals.

Speaker 20 Anyway, you didn't really show your mother-in-law porn, did you?

Speaker 6 I hope not. No, that's a lie.
Okay.

Speaker 20 She is a lovely lady, as I recall.

Speaker 6 I clear my browsing history. And I'm okay.
Now I'm all paranoid because I found out people actually listen to this thing and they get angry when I say stupid things about them.

Speaker 6 That aren't true, by the way.

Speaker 6 Oh, okay. My in-laws are

Speaker 6 to be blessed blessed with young, competent in-laws is just.

Speaker 6 We moved to Florida because to be near them, and it was one of the best moves we ever made. They're really lovely people.
Also, having grandparents, that is a, I did not witness that.

Speaker 6 I did not participate in that because all my grandparents passed away.

Speaker 6 The grandparent-child-grandkid relationship is just so

Speaker 6 incredible to watch. Absolutely.

Speaker 20 My grandmother was critical to my life, I have to say. She really was.
She raised me in a lot of ways.

Speaker 20 Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today, including Elon's farewell to Doge, his long fucking goodbye, the Trump taco trade, and what happens when we tried Google's new AI video generator, VO.

Speaker 20 But first, Donald Trump's tariff strategy has been dealt a major blow. The U.S.

Speaker 20 Court of International Trade ruled Wednesday that Trump overstepped his authority by using emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs, in fact, not bypassing Congress.

Speaker 20 The three-judge panel found that federal law did not grant Trump unbounded authority to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.

Speaker 20 The White House plans to appeal, and the case is likely going to the Supreme Court. They're working hard over there.

Speaker 20 Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and a few other sectors are still in place, but they're imposed under a different law.

Speaker 20 This is going on. And let me just bring in taco trade.

Speaker 20 You've heard about taco trade. Taco, short for Trump always chickens out, is a new acronym coined by a Financial Times columnist.

Speaker 20 It describes a pattern where Trump rattles the markets with his tariff threats only to backpedal a few days later, sending stocks surging.

Speaker 20 The latest example: Trump vowed 50% tariffs on EU goods last week, hit pause on Sunday after a good call with European Commission president.

Speaker 20 And when the markets reopened Tuesday, the Dow jumped over 700 points, and the SP 500 saw its biggest gain in weeks.

Speaker 20 Trump doesn't like the taco terminology, mostly because he probably doesn't,

Speaker 20 tacos. Remember that whole thing with tacos he had going? His pissiness was on full display when asked about it on Wednesday.
Let's listen.

Speaker 21 And I said you have to open up your whole country. And because

Speaker 21 I gave the European Union a 50% tax tariff.

Speaker 21 And they called up and they said, please let's meet right now. Please, let's meet right now.
And I said, okay, I'll give you till June 9. I actually asked them, I said, what's the date?

Speaker 21 Because they weren't willing to meet. And after I did what I did, they said, we'll meet anytime you want.

Speaker 21 And we have an end date of July 9th. You call that chickening up?

Speaker 20 Oh, man, is he sensitive about that taco trade? So talk about the two things, the court ruling and then this taco trade, the idea that his unpredictability has become predictable or that...

Speaker 6 Well, I just have an adjacent thought. And the first is that there's a lot of

Speaker 6 sort of quote-unquote

Speaker 6 conspiracy theory from the right that there was this gigantic cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. First off, if it was a cover-up, it was the worst cover-up in history.

Speaker 6 They let him go debate and put his cognitive decline on full display. Correct.
But it was no more a cover-up than the cover-up of Trump's cognitive decline right now.

Speaker 6 Did you see his speech at West Point?

Speaker 20 I agree. I was really struck by it.

Speaker 6 So is this a cover-up? The guy is rambling about nonsense.

Speaker 20 Trophy wives. Sounded like one you might give, but go ahead.

Speaker 6 Are we in the midst of a cover-up? Anyways,

Speaker 6 in terms of the taco trade, Trump, since the inauguration, Trump administration officials have announced new or revised tariff policies more than 50 times. Wow.

Speaker 6 And I'm having trouble finding one deal.

Speaker 6 I mean, he talks about deals, announced a deal with the UK, but nothing was signed.

Speaker 6 It was an agreement to have further discussions.

Speaker 20 He's saying it's helping them come to the table by his crazy moves, his wave or something, whatever he calls it.

Speaker 6 This is how terrible a business person

Speaker 6 and negotiator Trump is.

Speaker 6 Trump puts a policy, a tariff of 145%, and then he admits himself, well, that was kind of high. And then he lowers it to 30 because the markets.

Speaker 6 the markets throw up.

Speaker 6 So he's essentially, if he's a poker player, he shows up to the table with all this bravado and swagger.

Speaker 22 He goes all in.

Speaker 6 And then before he even sees what the other players say or do, he goes, I fold. I fold.

Speaker 6 He negotiates against himself. Yeah, that's what it feels like.
And nobody takes him seriously. But here's the real story in my view.

Speaker 6 This is nothing but a weapon of insider trading. And that is he can create volatility.

Speaker 6 He can take markets up for some of their biggest gains in history when he takes these ridiculous trades off the table.

Speaker 6 He can take markets down, and the people around him are trading stocks like fucking crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Including, you're going to find that some of his hedge fund buddies that he speaks to or tucks him into bed at night,

Speaker 6 some of whom we talk a lot about, are going to vastly outperform the index.

Speaker 20 Yeah, and even

Speaker 20 representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene, there was a whole bunch of them that were trading. Okay, let's talk about this.

Speaker 6 The fish rots from the head. The nation's top cop is the Attorney General.

Speaker 20 Yeah, Pam Bondi.

Speaker 6 Pam Bondi on April the 2nd sold somewhere between $1 and $5 million in Trump media stock. Why April 2nd? That was the same day the Liberation Day tariffs were announced.

Speaker 6 So we have the person supposedly ensuring the markets have rule of fair play is trading stocks the day her boss announces tariffs that will take the markets down.

Speaker 6 She sells a ton of stocks and it is everywhere.

Speaker 6 State Department officials,

Speaker 6 Michael Platt, staff director, and Congress

Speaker 6 sold around escalating.

Speaker 6 They are trading in and out of the market based on who knows what, when. Huge spike in options volume right before he makes these announcements, which means that people know something.

Speaker 6 And people hear this. I just want to try and connect the dots here.
People hear this and go, okay, there's always been Grift, Speaker Pelosi,

Speaker 6 Speaker Amateur Pelosi, there's always been Grift. So if some people are getting richer, fine.

Speaker 6 What people fail to make the connection is the following: is that when you buy same-day options because you know he's about to reduce the tariffs and the markets are about to scream up, somebody is on the other side of the trade that doesn't have that insider information

Speaker 6 that is selling that person that option and it's going to get taken to the laundry, is going to lose a shit ton of money.

Speaker 6 And the reason why, off a $27 trillion economy, we have a $50 trillion market cap stock market, which gives companies the ability to raise money.

Speaker 6 It gives people the chance to save money for their retirements. It gives people incredible compensation upside if they get options.

Speaker 6 The reason why we have such incredibly deep pools of capital that create prosperity and risk aggressiveness, we have $5 million in risk capital for every startup. Europe has 1 million.
Right.

Speaker 6 It's because people believe there's a rule of fair play and fair trade. Now, let's look at

Speaker 6 Russia. Russia is 1/14th the size of our economy.
2 trillion, we're about 28 trillion. The total value of the Russian stock market is $80 billion

Speaker 6 because people don't trust it. People are like, unless you know Putin, you don't know what's going to happen.
And there's so much insider trading and kleptocracy that the markets don't have any trust.

Speaker 6 So, what do you have? You have essentially, even on a size-adjusted basis,

Speaker 6 our stock market is 70 times the value of the Russian stock market, even ramping it up to adjust it for the difference in the size of the economy.

Speaker 6 So when a bunch of people think I lost money and I'm not on the inside, I'm not going to participate in the markets.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I agree. This is, that's a really fantastic take, actually.
I really, what's going on here. He's also doing it because he doesn't have a plan at the same time.

Speaker 20 And people are, either he is in on the grift, right?

Speaker 20 Or he's so dumb and a bad business person, they're playing him and understanding.

Speaker 6 It's rewarding his allies.

Speaker 20 He's rewarding his allies and also doing what he does, which is run businesses right into the ground, which is his, that seems to be the consistent part of his business career is to run businesses into the ground in some fashion with these sort of capricious things.

Speaker 20 And the fact that he gets so angry about it was really revelatory. It's like he knows exactly what he's doing.
He's trying to put it off.

Speaker 20 And it's really depressing when someone like Scott Besson says, oh, acting crazy is a strategy. I'm like, no, it's not.

Speaker 20 It's not as, I mean, maybe once, but you can't do it over and over and over again. And that's what he's doing.
And so Europeans, he's like, oh, they came to the table because they made that threat.

Speaker 20 I'm like, they probably waited until you did this. And then they're like, okay, now time to come to the table.
But they are long, they are long

Speaker 20 gaming him so badly. It's really an astonishing thing.
And he deserves every single insult he gets about how he's conducting these. The court thing, how do you feel?

Speaker 20 Like they just are just all the courts, 96% of courts are against Donald Trump on all these rulings, not just the tariff ones, but all of them. 96%.

Speaker 6 Okay, I'll talk about the courts and I want to give you just some more data here around the insider trading that has gone fucking out of control and it's going to is going to scare the shit out of capital to leave the U.S.

Speaker 20 People using markets. Okay.

Speaker 6 I feel for the most part, 80 to 90% of executive actions, tariffs, EU tariffs, Apple tariffs,

Speaker 6 going after international students at Harvard, all of this they know will likely be swept away and these organizations will get injunctive relief and these things will not stand.

Speaker 6 I think it is, they're like, okay, what could get us kicked out of office, how we lose Congress, is if Americans wake up.

Speaker 6 And instead of focusing on international students that might be kicked out of Harvard, which will be turned over and the media clutches its

Speaker 6 progressive pearls for good reason. I realize it has larger implications, but folks, this is going to have no impact on anybody because it's going to go away.

Speaker 6 Over the long term, it's bad, and I'll come back to why it's bad for our best, one of our biggest exports, and that is education. But it is a distraction from what really impacts people.

Speaker 6 And this is my problem with the left is we get outraged and we're more interested with proving and grasping at social virtue as opposed to actually focusing on what impacts the material and psychological well-being of millions of Americans.

Speaker 6 And this is what is going to impact tens of millions of Americans.

Speaker 6 This big, beautiful tax bill is about to cut taxes for 5% of the wealthiest Americans and take away Medicaid for 8 million people and increase the deficit by almost 4 trillion, which will be a tax on tens of millions of young people.

Speaker 6 And by the way, it's going to disproportionately impact red states.

Speaker 6 So if we focus on that and say, what is really impacting millions of people, we might actually take back control of Congress.

Speaker 6 But instead, we go for, oh, no, let's get outraged about Harvard. Okay, I get it.
But they are purposely trying to misdirect us.

Speaker 6 Now, in terms of these court cases, if he wants, he can make life really difficult and essentially impose tariffs in different ways, but it's not going to happen.

Speaker 6 I have made the same prediction over and over. In a year from now, two years from now, the tariff and global trade situation will look remarkably similar to the way it looked when he started.

Speaker 20 And his people will have grifted their way into insider trading.

Speaker 6 Can I give you some more data just real quick?

Speaker 20 Sure, but we have to move on. But go ahead.
Okay.

Speaker 6 Go ahead. Okay.
Just because this insider trading thing, I don't think people realize what this does to the unbelievable,

Speaker 6 incredibly cheap capital and pools of capital that the U.S.

Speaker 20 is. And the trust that people have in the markets, despite all the problems they've had.
Now, they've had insider trading issues.

Speaker 6 For 99% of our existence on this planet, people would never give money, sell something to strangers in a marketplace.

Speaker 20 If they thought it was all insider.

Speaker 6 Right. Trust in markets is literally the jet fuel of our, or one of the jet fuels of our prosperity.
Okay, so this has been going on for a while.

Speaker 6 In this first term, Carl Icon sold 31 million in steel-related stocks the day before Trump announced steel tariffs in 2018.

Speaker 6 On March 30th, three days before Trump's initial tariff announcement, at least three hedge fund managers attended a private dinner in Mar-a-Lago, and all three dramatically increased their short positions in the 48 hours following that dinner.

Speaker 6 One of those funds, Bluestone Capital, is run by a guy named Brian Shevlin, who was instrumental in the early days of Trump's media SPAC merger. Bluestone Capital increased its short position in Tesla

Speaker 6 by 300% or fourfold on April 1.

Speaker 6 One day, one day, Kara, before the tariff announcement that sent Tesla shares down 17%.

Speaker 6 And And then the fund then closed most of its short positions on April 8th, right before Tesla rebounded 18%

Speaker 6 up on news of the tariff pause.

Speaker 6 So this guy either has a fucking crystal ball or a gut like we've never seen or investing, or he is getting information from people at the very top about non-public information.

Speaker 6 So why would an average investor ever buy or sell Tesla stock when chances are someone on the other end knows more than than I do.

Speaker 20 And we have an SEC who's not enforcing any of this. You know, as I told you, there's a lot of people outside of government following all of this and collecting all this information.

Speaker 20 If our government's not going to, there are technical people.

Speaker 6 Even some podcasters. Yes.
I'm keeping notes on all this shit.

Speaker 20 Yes, exactly. But they're keeping the actual transactions in case they try to do that.

Speaker 6 People with actual power. Power.

Speaker 20 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 Not yelling into tickets. They are going.

Speaker 20 This is someday. They will probably run off with this money, but it is absolutely a grift.

Speaker 20 And someone who understands the griftiness of it, Elon Musk has talked about it, is officially, he's using the term grift, but he's talking about the problem with deficits and tariffs.

Speaker 20 Elon Musk is officially an ex-special government employee posting on his social platform that the Doge mission will only strengthen over time, which means it will not. It's over.

Speaker 20 Musk thanked Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending, but only after throwing some shade at his former boss. Here's what he told CBS News.

Speaker 20 By the way, the guy who hates old media is fucking all over old media these days. Let's go.

Speaker 24 I was like

Speaker 24 disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,

Speaker 24 which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing. I actually thought that when this big, beautiful bill came along.

Speaker 24 I mean, like, everything he's done on Doge gets wiped out in the first year.

Speaker 24 I think a bill

Speaker 24 can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it could be both.
My personal opinion.

Speaker 20 Yeah, yucking it up with Elon. He's not the only one out there.
Doe spokesman Katie Miller is following him.

Speaker 20 For those who don't know, she's married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Speaker 20 By the way, there is a lot of very funny memes about this on the internet, but I'll let you go there and find out what they're insinuating.

Speaker 20 Elon, meanwhile, has ordered himself back into the offices of X, SpaceX, and Neuralink with mixed results. The SpaceX Starship system exploded in a Tuesday test.

Speaker 20 It went further, but it's still, this is the third failed launch in a row.

Speaker 20 It did go further.

Speaker 20 This is what he does a lot of time. X crashed twice in one week, which Musk attributed to failover redundancy, whatever that is, issues that need to be addressed.

Speaker 20 On the bright side, Musk says Tesla's been testing Robotechs in the streets of Austin with no incidents and promises delivery to customers next month.

Speaker 20 Meanwhile, Waymo does millions of these all the time. And Neuralink just raised $600 million at a $9 billion valuation, which is good for him.
So a couple things.

Speaker 20 One is they have wiped out, they're sending up a, I think it's a rescission package of just $9 billion

Speaker 20 from

Speaker 20 Doge cuts that they may try to fix, but that's $9 billion in our multi-trillion dollar promise that Musk made to us.

Speaker 20 I think he's been used as a jump by Trump in a lot of ways, sort of a hand-wavy thing. And then Trump turns around and ruins the whole thing through a deficit.

Speaker 20 And I think Musk does understand that the deficit and the tariffs are a real problem. Whether he can bring back his businesses, that's an open question.
He's certainly talented. Your thoughts, Scott?

Speaker 6 Well, I'm glad you brought it up.

Speaker 6 It was a good week in the sense that Neuralink, which creates diversification for him, raised money to nine, I thought it was seven, but you're saying it's nine billion. That's incredible.

Speaker 6 And also a testament to his genius and vision to do things like that. We'll see how it pans out.

Speaker 6 But yeah, I don't, you know,

Speaker 6 if you, the two seminal impacts of Doge are the following.

Speaker 6 It has almost no impact on the budget, because if you look at it, essentially what's happened here is he's also cut a ton of staff at the IRS.

Speaker 6 And the estimates are that that will reduce their ability to collect what would have been another $400 billion in revenue. So give him his word that it's $150 billion in savings.

Speaker 6 That means that Doge is essentially taking the deficit up another quarter of a trillion dollars a year by virtue of these cuts.

Speaker 20 Nobody believes that 150 number, by the way. Most people think it's about 10 billion.

Speaker 6 anyways, I like what Mitch McConnell believes, that the chocolate and peanut butter of our power around the world is a combination of hard and soft power.

Speaker 6 And he's essentially gutted our soft power by taking, I mean, that $75 million in U.S. aid was just

Speaker 6 when there's genocide in a nation, a bunch of people show up and try to hold people accountable such that it doesn't happen again. And a lot of those people are Americans.

Speaker 6 When there is a war-torn, ravaged village town in Ukraine, a soup kitchen gets popped up, and a lot of those people are Americans. And that just makes people think, oh, they're good guys.

Speaker 20 It's mostly Jose Andres, but no, it's not the government. Well, but

Speaker 6 we do have all sorts of hospitals around the world that help kids with vaccines. And I mean, there's just a ton of software.

Speaker 20 It's the old Hershey Barr American GI story, right? This idea.

Speaker 6 100%.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 that will have a long-term impact on our brand.

Speaker 6 Doge is it's going to end up costing us more than it saves.

Speaker 6 And again, I go back to the same thing, Kara. It did its job.
It was a distraction from this administration's decision to blow up the deficit to give a tax cut to you and me. I mean,

Speaker 6 the grip. That's what Democrats should be focusing on right now.
Yeah.

Speaker 20 I mean, it's been a failure for him. Also, at first, it sort of raised his wealth substantively, and it certainly got the regulators off his back, which was one of his goals.
Absolutely.

Speaker 20 It got him some Mars stuff that he wants allegedly there you know the mars money so he got his mars money he got some regulators off he lost a lot of money in the in his in terms of tesla and also his personal brand is decimated i think and he certainly could get it back i suppose but he's certainly done not draped himself in glory in this effort at all he looks you know one of the things about these tech people is they look a little godlike and now he looks like he has feet of clay, right?

Speaker 20 And you've seen parts of him that are a nuisance and irritating and weird.

Speaker 20 So it hasn't been, you know, this is stuff a lot of us who spent time with him have seen, you know, his

Speaker 20 like telling jokes like that and laughing at his own jokes and stuff like that. He seems odd and strange.
And so

Speaker 20 I just feel like this has not been a plus for Elon Musk. He may bring it back.
He may do other things. The question is whether he's going to return to politics or if he's had it with them.

Speaker 20 It's felt like a little bit kind of, he had it. He kind of has enough of this.
And he realized

Speaker 20 he got taken by the world's most adept con man, which is Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 99.9% of the time, if you're on a board or you have a temptation to take a political stand as a corporation, the answer is no, you don't do it. Yeah.
And not only that, he not only bet

Speaker 6 one way, he went into politics, which is sort of a no-no, he bet the wrong way because three quarters, the people that he's endeared himself to by taking a red pill stand, three quarters of them say they would never buy an EV.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 6 So it's just very unusual that he would decide to go into politics in a way that alienates his core market.

Speaker 20 Maybe it's some psychological problem he has. Please hate me, hate me, please hate me.
I don't know. It's very strange.
We'll see if he can recover. He's certainly a talented business person.

Speaker 20 He may have gotten data and information that he didn't have before.

Speaker 6 Who knows?

Speaker 20 I think that needs to be investigated.

Speaker 20 Not just me, but Sadiq Banan does. What exactly did they download? Where is the data? What happened to it? I think there needs to be, at some point, a real look at what they did, what Doge has done.

Speaker 20 And we'll see if they continue. But without the engine of, and the threat of Elon Musk, I don't think it's going anywhere.
They will just, they will just, they will just smother it.

Speaker 6 I always feel a need to try and bring some semblance of balance around Musk.

Speaker 6 I've thought for a long time, Waymo is just so far ahead, they'll never be able to catch him.

Speaker 6 And I did speak to an analyst around Tesla and said Tesla does have some very real advantages around autonomous, and that is they have more data

Speaker 6 because they have a huge, you know, they have hundreds of thousands of cars that have been in the market for a while, and all of that is great data.

Speaker 6 And also, the average cost of a Waymo car is almost a quarter of a million dollars.

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's Jaguar and outfitting it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's outfitting it. It's just really expensive.
And they say that the Tesla autonomous driving vehicle is going to be substantially less expensive.

Speaker 20 Except that they may be sacrificing safety for that. There's all these debates over whether they have enough points of failure.
And look, he doesn't, he takes them off.

Speaker 20 This guy likes to go commando on a lot of stuff.

Speaker 6 Well, you bring up an interesting point because a lot of people say, regardless of what has happened in the markets or the perception of his brand, the Tesla brand's gone from the eighth most revered brand to the 93rd.

Speaker 6 I don't think I've ever seen a destruction like that. I don't even think that happened to Exxon

Speaker 6 with the Valdez. But you bring up an interesting point.
And that is a lot of people say, well, he's playing the long game because all of the inspectors and all of the lawsuits

Speaker 6 that were getting in the way of his regulation around autonomous or going after him for lawsuits for whatever have all just disappeared. So safety.
So it still might have been.

Speaker 6 He might in fact be playing chess. You know, who knows?

Speaker 20 Yeah. In his case, opposed to Donald Trump, who is eating the pieces, Musk does.
That said, I would not get in a Tesla right now. I think they don't have as many points of failure.

Speaker 20 You know what I mean? He doesn't care about safety as much as others. And I just don't, I have talked to a lot of experts about how they're putting them out there.

Speaker 20 And they're just, I would rather have been extraordinarily safe. Eventually, it'll be looser, but not today.
And I don't, I just don't trust them.

Speaker 20 I trust those, I trust those Jaguars more than I would trust the Tesla.

Speaker 6 I don't get into Teslas because I don't, I don't like the men. I don't want to paint the fence with someone who I think is such a terrible role model for young men.

Speaker 6 But on the safety point, I would get in and Tesla because I think I'm talking about an autonomous Tesla. Yeah, an autonomous Tesla.

Speaker 6 Yeah, because I think from a perception standpoint, I think if they have two or three crashes in their first month, they're pretty much out of business.

Speaker 6 I think just from a pure economic standpoint, they got to make sure this thing is pretty safe.

Speaker 20 He has a theory about what they need on those cars. It's very different from every other person I know.
And they all are like, this is a risk you should not be taking.

Speaker 20 And it's not because they want me to ride in their cars. I'm going to send some people to you because it's really, he argues with the entire industry about how much, how much

Speaker 6 we need test pilots and it's a dangerous job.

Speaker 20 You can get in them. I'm not getting in them forever, but

Speaker 20 I do not feel unsafe in a Waymo. I suspect you feel it.

Speaker 6 Do you know what I did about a year and a half ago? I went to the DMV

Speaker 6 and my son, who was barely driven a golf cart, took a test saying that he understood the difference between a single yellow line and a double yellow line.

Speaker 6 And then they gave him a driver's permit and he was allowed to drive home. Yeah.
I mean, it was just like, God be with you. Here you go.

Speaker 20 Okay. I will get in a Tesla rather than drive near with your son.

Speaker 6 I was at the DMV going, wait, he can drive right now?

Speaker 6 And I said to her, I looked at her, like, are you sure that's a good idea? He can drive right now.

Speaker 20 Oh, and your son probably was like, dad.

Speaker 6 And on the way home on a red light, making a left, he pulled out into the intersection. I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, I stopped first.
I'm like, you can't make a left.

Speaker 20 I don't.

Speaker 6 I think there's a lot of dangerous drivers. I think humans are much more dangerous than a driver.
I agree.

Speaker 20 You know what? I'd rather take a like.

Speaker 6 Quick lucky story. She comes over to our place with her aunt, with her sister.
They drove there, which is. crazy.
You've told this story.

Speaker 6 And after her kind of, you know, mildly offensive comments to me over and over,

Speaker 6 she leaves and you're giving her instructions to get to palm beach which is north of where i live

Speaker 6 and first off i'm horrified i walk out and i see lucky behind the wheel i thought you were giving instructions to your aunt or whoever your niece whoever that is who's who is much younger than lucky she's like 90.

Speaker 6 aunt my aunt i see lucky behind the wheel yeah and so i walk over and think okay lucky all you have to do you come out of the driveway you bang a right got it. Stop talking to me.

Speaker 6 Stop talking to me, right?

Speaker 6 Heads out, gates open, bangs a left.

Speaker 20 Without looking, without looking.

Speaker 6 And I'm like, she's going to end up in Havana.

Speaker 20 It's true. Can I just say,

Speaker 20 I didn't let my children drive with Lucky at any point.

Speaker 6 Oh, no. Never.

Speaker 20 She's like, why can't I drive them? I'm like, because they want them to live into the next century.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no, she should not be driving.

Speaker 20 No, no, no. I have not gotten a car with Lucky for decades.

Speaker 6 It's a cover-up. You're engaging in a cover-up.

Speaker 20 This is one of the things she'd do. She'd throw us in the car, and we never knew where we'd end up.
This is why we stay home. Anyway, let's go on a quick break.

Speaker 20 Someday I'll tell you the story of her leaving me behind in a store, but that's another wonderful memory from childhood. So let's go on a quick break and we come back.

Speaker 20 Trump's many feuds with Harvard Putin and Tim Cook.

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Speaker 20 Scott, we're back. I know you don't think it's important, but I do actually.

Speaker 20 The feud between, and I think it's a real feud, the feud between Donald Trump and Harvard doesn't appear to be wrapping up anytime soon.

Speaker 20 Trump now says the school should cap international student enrollment at 15%. What is he telling people what to do?

Speaker 20 This follows last week's legal fight where a judge temporarily blocked the White House from revoking Harvard's ability to enroll international students.

Speaker 20 Tripp is also moving to cancel remaining federal contracts with Harvard. It's not just Harvard.
The administration is now considering social media vetting for all foreign students.

Speaker 20 So free speech, hello, and is halting student visa interviews in the meantime. Secretary Marco Rubio, what a show he's become, also says the U.S.

Speaker 20 will aggressively work to revoke the visas of Chinese students.

Speaker 6 Ah,

Speaker 20 crazy. He's also accusing Russian Russian President Putin of playing with fire after Russia recently ramped up attacks on Ukraine, launching its largest drone and missile attack of the war so far.

Speaker 20 In the post-Untrue Social, Trump also exclaimed that Putin has gone completely crazy.

Speaker 20 But despite floating sanctions of Russia over the weekend, Trump now says he's holding off because he thinks, Taco, he's close to a deal and doesn't want to screw it up.

Speaker 20 Taco, Trump said he was going to resolve this conflict on day one. It's not day one anymore, and he bragged about his relation with Putin.
So that's something. And lastly, it's not the only one.

Speaker 20 He's still got Tim Cook in his crosshairs of Apple, threatening a 25% tariffs on iPhones made outside the U.S.

Speaker 20 The move comes in the wake of Cook reportedly buffing the White House's invitation to join Trump on his recent Middle East trip that all the others went along on, all the other tech moguls.

Speaker 20 There is also Financial Times report that Apple contractor Foxconn is preparing to spend $1.5 billion on a new plant in India. And problems...
for Apple are piling up in addition to these tariffs.

Speaker 20 Cook is also juggling legal battles, global regulators, and a rising AI competition.

Speaker 20 There's a book out about by Patrick, I think it's Matt Meyer talking about how much money

Speaker 20 spending in

Speaker 20 has created the Chinese tech sector, essentially. They train them up.
So let's start with all these things.

Speaker 20 I know you think they're distractions, but I think he's quite committed to this Harvard thing.

Speaker 20 Either he didn't get in or something is going on here, but he seems obsessed with controlling the amount of foreign students that enter the United States, too.

Speaker 20 And Harvard is his proxy for doing that at this moment.

Speaker 6 Look,

Speaker 6 if you look at, there's few people that have added more economic value than graduates, foreign graduates of our elite institutions.

Speaker 6 70% of graduate students in AI research

Speaker 6 in the U.S. are international students.

Speaker 6 And over half of America's startup companies valued at at least 1 billion. So over half of our unicorns, have at least one immigrant founder.
So let's even go beyond that. Let's just go short term.

Speaker 6 I have said the term we should use for international students is they're our cash cows. They pay full freight.

Speaker 6 They're not eligible for a lot of financial aid, unless they're PhD students who are the brightest people in the world who we bring in and we actually pay.

Speaker 20 And who we want here.

Speaker 6 At the first day of class at NYU at business school, I say, get to know the international students because they're rich kids. They're the richest kids in El Salvador and Brazil.
Get to know them.

Speaker 6 They like to party. They're fun and they're really rich.
And when you go and hang out in Brazil, you want to know them. Scott.
By the way, America does a small number of things really well.

Speaker 6 Hands down, we're the best in tech and software. I don't even know what the export volume is of that.
I tried to figure it out this morning. I couldn't figure it out.

Speaker 6 We make the best weapons in the world. We sell about $300 billion, $350 billion, about a third of a trillion dollars.
We export weapons around the world, right?

Speaker 6 Violence and death are fantastic businesses for us or the ability to deliver them. And we have the best military industrial complex in the world.

Speaker 6 We make the best best media in the world and we ship

Speaker 6 the total export volume or business of our movies and TV. So all the money we make from Fantastic Four

Speaker 6 and you know Frozen and Big Bang Theory and the White Lotus, that is we get $40 billion

Speaker 6 in revenue from exporting our TV shows and our movie. We get $43 billion

Speaker 6 from the tuition and the economic value of international students who come here to buy our education. So U.S.
education is really a bigger U.S. export than movies or TV shows.

Speaker 6 And if you want to raise tuition on domestic students, just take away the full freight high-margin cash flow of international students. I'm not even talking about the brain drain.

Speaker 20 Right, the money we get from them.

Speaker 6 We make so much coin from international students because why? It's the ultimate luxury item. What's the ultimate signal of your success if you live in China or South Korea

Speaker 6 or Singapore? Your kid gets in and attends an elite American university. Going to Harvard.
Of the 100 best brands, we own like 70 or 80 of them.

Speaker 20 So it's great for his. Why is he doing the Harvard thing and then Russia next?

Speaker 6 I think Russia just tickles

Speaker 6 his censors. I think a lot of his far-right supporters love this.

Speaker 20 But why attack Putin and then come back on it? Because he's being played by Putin.

Speaker 6 I don't know what he is thinking on the

Speaker 6 I mean, you want to talk about someone who makes absolutely no sense. You know, Putin's bombing cities.
I don't like what he's doing. He's sending missiles in a city.

Speaker 6 Okay, you realize he's been doing that for two and a half years, right? Nothing, nothing. I don't know if he got personally incensed or I don't know what's going on there.

Speaker 6 It's a sclerotic, impossible.

Speaker 6 And Marco Rubio has to be the clown behind this elephant cleaning up his shit, trying to make some sort of sense of our nonsensical foreign policy.

Speaker 20 He's being played. I think it occurs to him, and he's mentioned it.
Maybe he's been playing me. Yes, he has, sir.

Speaker 20 Been playing him. I think, look,

Speaker 20 for Russia right now, the war is its economy. It's now, it's not going to pull very quickly away from it because they don't got nothing else.
And they got this war. And

Speaker 20 Putin has created Russia as... as a military economy now with this war and he hasn't won.
And so they're in a world of hurt to get out of this and create a dynamic society.

Speaker 20 And so war is their best choice right now in a lot of ways. So not going to be easy for them to pull themselves out of this situation.

Speaker 6 Putin's life depends on it. Depends on it.
I mean, we think that he has total control. There's a lot of other people.
Yeah. If Putin.

Speaker 6 If Putin loses face in Ukraine, we're going to find out he's going to fall out of a window.

Speaker 20 He cannot not win. And the economy is now based on it.
And Trump is being played like a fiddle. It's just like, and this going back and forth publicly is so embarrassing.
Same thing.

Speaker 20 It's the same thing as the tariff. It's the same stupidity that got us Trump stakes or the casinos.

Speaker 20 He's just not very good at business.

Speaker 20 The Cook one is really particularly strange. And it all is about feelings.
It's all about feels, it feels like.

Speaker 20 He has a point that Tim, that Apple has created a very robust technology economy in China over the many, many years, 50 billion, something like that, and not in the United States.

Speaker 20 But there were reasons for them doing that, obviously to save money to do it at a cheaper amount.

Speaker 20 Where do you think Apple is at this moment on the outs for sure?

Speaker 6 It's so fascinating. You referenced that book by, I think it's Patrick McGee, and he really opened my eyes.
So Apple has upskilled and trained 25 million Chinese. That's amazing.
Think about that.

Speaker 6 They've upskilled the population of California.

Speaker 6 And Patrick's thesis, and I thought it was a fascinating one, is that essentially Apple's investment in upskilling of their tech sector has given rise to Xiaome and Huawei, basically that the Chinese who are very smart and play the long game have an IP flow that is one way.

Speaker 6 At the same time, now that Cook is trying to move manufacturing from China to India, China is getting in the way of that flow and not issuing visas to Chinese who Apple, Chinese employees who Apple wants to send to India to set up manufacturing capacity there.

Speaker 6 Also, the notion that I said, I use that stat that that analyst used, I think it was Dan Ives, that a phone produced in the U.S. would be $3,500.
And he said, it might as well be a million.

Speaker 6 We're not capable of it. There are a thousand parts in every iPhone.
They make a million phones a day. So that's a billion distinct parts.

Speaker 6 It was easier for Oppenheimer and the Army and these universities to get to splitting the atom than it would be for us to get to producing all of the iPhones. We just couldn't do it.

Speaker 20 Yeah. So what is happening with it? How will this affect?

Speaker 20 You know, have their they have their legal issues of course with the government right now in terms of cases and all kinds of stuff but this falling out i mean he this appeasement that tim did i i never thought would work there's no appeasing trump there's no appeasing this guy he's he's endlessly thirsty and and i think i did talk to maggie haberman over in my podcast this week and he was genuinely angry that tim didn't go like genuinely angry strange well he takes these slides personally but the market he He does.

Speaker 6 The market is starting to respond to the taco trade, and that is the juices coming out of it.

Speaker 6 Because if you look at Apple, I mean, if he did what he said he's going to do, it would seriously diminish the most profitable product in history. And Apple stock would take a pretty big hit.

Speaker 6 Apple's off,

Speaker 6 I mean, it's down 15% in the last six months, but that's off an enormous high. Right.
And it's still, it's still up. It's still up in the last 12 months.
So I think.

Speaker 20 What would you do if you were Tim?

Speaker 6 Be nice, stay out of his way and put out fake press releases

Speaker 6 that

Speaker 6 says, oh, we're investing in because of the great work of President Trump. It depends.
Does Tim want to be totally focused on shareholder value or on the rights afforded him as an American?

Speaker 6 I mean, it depends who you're calling on. If it's calling on his fiduciary obligation to shareholders, he should just kiss his ass, put out a bunch of fake faux press releases, stay out of his way.

Speaker 6 And what do you know, Trump will move on to the next red dot that angers him. And

Speaker 6 the cult of iOS will be fine. It's like a cat.

Speaker 6 If Tim Cook recognizes that the reason I'm a billionaire, the reason why, if I want to marry a woman or a man, I can do that, because America has had the foresight and the rule of law to afford, to give people rights, or if I want to continue to access the deepest pools of capital in the world, if I want to have a society where I am fairly safe, if I want to have a society where someone can't wake up and come take all my shit just because they don't like who I am,

Speaker 6 then he should, in my view, take a stand

Speaker 6 and say, this is an American company and what is going on here is un-American. Nobody has done that.
I don't want to put that pressure on Tim Cook because nobody has done that.

Speaker 6 He is going to be a billionaire the rest of his life. That's correct.
The question is, at the end of his life, does he want to be known as an American hero?

Speaker 6 And most of these CEOs, and I understand it, have decided my job is just to stay out of the angry child's way until he gets mad at somebody else and go about my business.

Speaker 20 You know who could do that? An owner of a company, a Zuckerberg. Someone who has full control is the only one who can do that.
He's the only one who

Speaker 20 has the ability. Tim is not the owner of Apple.
The shareholders are, right? And so it's got to be that guy, whoever that guy is. There's a Zuckerberg who controls his company.

Speaker 20 Very few companies are controlled. I guess Snapchat, nobody cares.

Speaker 6 It'd be very hard for Apple to all of a sudden get high and mighty about American patriotism when they've essentially outsourced their entire supply chain to China and upskilled China.

Speaker 20 So shareholders will win.

Speaker 6 The company that has the ripest opportunity here to wrap themselves in the flag through the lens of sport and immigrants is Nike.

Speaker 6 And their stock has been kicked in the nuts so badly, they don't have a whole lot to lose.

Speaker 6 That is the ripe, the ripest opportunity in branding right now would be for Nike, not even to mention Trump's name, but to talk about American immigrants who have excelled, built the world of sport and competition and rule of fair play.

Speaker 6 When you're on a field, you have to have rule of fair play. And they also have the creative resources.
They are known as risk takers.

Speaker 20 Go, Nike. Just do it.
Just do it.

Speaker 6 The majority of their business comes from young people who are more progressive and don't want to be part of a fucking fascist state. Anyways, Nike, get on it.

Speaker 20 All right, last quick, quick, quick, quick. Harvard, what should they do? Well, they've already...

Speaker 20 Many people, there was a New York Times piece saying they've got to, they're going to get hit hard by this, even if Trump is wrong.

Speaker 6 Get rid of it because of the.

Speaker 20 All the things he's doing is very damaging to Harvard. They were like, they may not win this fight with him until he goes away, which is inevitable.

Speaker 6 I don't, I don't see, I think Harvard has so many,

Speaker 6 in a weird way, I'd go long Harvard. I think Harvard comes out of the stronger.
Maybe so. I think Harvard was developing such an awful reputation for the definition of elitism

Speaker 6 and how progressive, progressivism, when it goes out of control, can actually accidentally turn into racism.

Speaker 6 And I think them standing up, if you think about it, what I'm urging Nike to do, Harvard's been the first important organization to actually stand up and say, fuck you.

Speaker 6 And they're winning in the courts. They have a lot of powerful alumni.
They have the capital.

Speaker 20 Yeah, you're right. It cleans them out.

Speaker 20 It starches them white. That's correct.

Speaker 6 It starched their hat white.

Speaker 6 I never thought I'd be wearing a Harvard t-shirt.

Speaker 6 I wore one at the 92nd Y

Speaker 6 a month ago when I was on with Jeff.

Speaker 20 You like to slap those Harvard people a lot. You like to run around Harvard Yard and slap them.

Speaker 6 When you have a $54 billion endowment and you decide to let in the number of students that a good Starbucks serves, you're not a public servant. You're a fucking Chanel.

Speaker 20 Oh, there he's back. He's back.

Speaker 20 All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, Trump dives deeper into crypto, if possible.

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Speaker 20 Scott, we're back. President Trump's romance with cryptocurrency is getting more serious.
Earlier this week, the administration killed Biden-era guidance against using crypto in 401k plans.

Speaker 20 Oh my fucking God. Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of True Social, announced raising $2.5 billion to invest in Bitcoin, a Michael Seller move.
And listen to what J.D.

Speaker 20 Vance told a crowd in a keynote address at Bitcoin 2025 conference.

Speaker 56 I'm here today to say loud and clear, with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House.

Speaker 56 In our administration, we understand the full potential of the digital assets industry, not just as an investment, not just as a flashy technology, but as a symbol and driver of personal liberty for all our citizens.

Speaker 20 Also, Grift. He left out Grift.
The president's crypto holdings now reportedly represent around 40% of his net worth or approximately $2.9 billion.

Speaker 20 Scott, you had a rant where you called the crypto dealings in Trump's first hundred days the greatest grift in our history of our economy, and now it is a divisive issue for Democrats.

Speaker 20 Some want to support the Genius Act, which regulates stablecoin. Others say it supports Trump's grift.
What do they do here? Public companies are leaning into crypto as well, not just true social.

Speaker 20 There are reportedly 114 publicly listed companies that own Bitcoin up from 89 at the beginning of April.

Speaker 20 What do you think about also the reports that big U.S. banks are having internal discussions about expanding into cryptocurrencies?

Speaker 6 Look,

Speaker 6 they're smart. One of the genius moves of the Trump campaign was recognizing that this was not going to be a referendum on women's rights.
It was a referendum on struggling young men.

Speaker 6 I'd still hold to that. And I think the evidence is everywhere.
That's who showed up

Speaker 6 was young men and the people worried about them that swung this this election in terms of the people who pivoted hardest from blue to red.

Speaker 6 And the easiest way to signal that was to go Joe Rogan, embrace Musk, and also really embrace crypto, which has this almost like,

Speaker 6 you know, testosterone smell to it. It's so male.
Ew. And

Speaker 20 what is testosterone smell? And is that perfect?

Speaker 6 I'll try it later when I inject it in my ass.

Speaker 6 Yeah, okay. Actually, I don't think it has a smell.
I don't think it has a smell. I don't want to think about that.
Smells like victory in the morning. Okay.

Speaker 6 Anyways,

Speaker 6 that's right. I think they're smart to embrace the crypto.

Speaker 20 We should have scratch and sniff on this podcast. Go ahead.

Speaker 6 Sorry. I think they're smart to embrace the crypto community.
I think financial services innovation is a good idea.

Speaker 6 You know, fine. I'm a no-coiner.
I was on the board of a company that was the leading hardware wallet.

Speaker 6 It feels to me that the Democrats screwed up by not at least being more

Speaker 6 clear about what the regulation is so people could actually do something with it. Do you you make a business of it? And I think Trump has leveraged beautifully the crypto community.

Speaker 6 And also, it's the perfect vehicle for a grift because there's no records.

Speaker 6 I mean, people say you can track it, but I don't, I'm, you know, my sense is when a guy launches a meme coin the Friday before his inauguration and it runs to 70 billion.

Speaker 6 And then, and now it's, like I said, he's made a billion dollars a month since he's had this thing. I think they're smart to embrace it.

Speaker 6 I also think a lot of small and medium-sized investors are probably going to lose a lot of money.

Speaker 6 And what I tell people is if you want to take 2%, 3%, 5% of your net worth and

Speaker 6 put it in Bitcoin, I wouldn't do any of these other coins.

Speaker 6 There is a genius to Bitcoin because it has established a credible sense of scarcity because people do believe the technology will result in that they will stop mining at 21 million coins.

Speaker 6 I do think that's actually a very elegant. way of creating a currency that has more veracity than a fiat currency, which everyone has failed throughout history.

Speaker 6 The other coins I see as just like, that's just Vegas. But I think it's smart to embrace the community.
I think it's working for them.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I think it has to become something more than just like a speculative instrument, like that it's that it's useful in some fashion. And there's all kinds of companies working at that.
For Trump,

Speaker 20 it's a casino. This is a casino kind of mentality that he's got around it.

Speaker 20 And a fee, getting fees. Most of the money he's made has been in fees of the transactions.
The current income.

Speaker 6 They made over 300 million fees so far. Right.

Speaker 20 Yeah. And so, and then the value of it is the, and it's not traceable in some ways.
And so it's a perfect sort of bribery grift/slash scam kind of thing, which he's very familiar with.

Speaker 20 That said, you're right. The Biden administration didn't really lean in.
They had the SEC head who was openly hostile.

Speaker 20 I think these people got activated politically, and they should have been because they needed to defend themselves. And they took out Sherrod Brown in Ohio for sure.

Speaker 20 Like they targeted a lot of things.

Speaker 20 And so they really got organized in ways that uh that trump helped facilitate and were able to do that and i think they will remain political um but at some point though there has to be safety around it if you put a lot of bitcoin in these 401ks and they get destroyed uh through scammery um it's going to be a real problem but bitcoin is or crypto just going about is a bit of a

Speaker 6 whenever you have these levels of income inequality you have war famine or revolution i think it's a form of revolution because i think young people have decided if you're going to continue to bail out the market so it's the incumbent stay wealthy

Speaker 6 and I never get disruption, I can never buy a house or stocks on sale like you guys have gotten to do time after time every seven years with a recession, I'm going to create my own asset class.

Speaker 6 Yep, absolutely. And I get it.
I, you know, I can, I can empathize and understand it.

Speaker 6 It's like, great, Scott, you had your time in the sun to buy Netflix at 11 bucks a share, but now that you and your other seniors voting yourself more money and using my credit card to bail your ass out every time the economy gets rough and I have an opportunity to buy in inexpensively, fuck that.

Speaker 6 I'm not going to play your game. I'm going to invent my own asset class.
Yeah.

Speaker 20 And they have become very politicized. And so it's up to the Democrats to not be, they don't cut your nose to spite your face kind of thing, I think, is a play here.

Speaker 20 Trump is grifting this thing, but you can't not lean into it just because he's doing that. You come after him later if you have to, but you can't.

Speaker 20 A lot of them are, we can't do it because Trump will grift more. He's going to grift no matter what.
No matter what,

Speaker 20 he will find a way to grift. And we can't make policy based on

Speaker 20 you, you need to lean into this Democrats in a way that's safe and good for consumers and good for young people and not worry about the Trump part until later. That's my feeling.

Speaker 20 Anyway, one more quick break. We come back is Google's new AI video tool, a studio killer.

Speaker 6 Sometimes the difference between success and failure.

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Speaker 20 Okay, Scott, a story we didn't get to chat about last week is Google's launch of VO3, which is a video generator that creates full video with audio.

Speaker 20 Its main competition is OpenAI Sora, but the key distinction is VO3 is supposed to be able to incorporate audio and that includes dialogue between characters as well as animal sounds.

Speaker 20 The main buzz about it on the internet as well. Will this replace movie studios? Some of this stuff is pretty impressive to look at.
And will this flood the news media with misinformation?

Speaker 20 Oddly enough, I interviewed Jesse Armstrong, who is the creator of succession for his new movie that's coming out this week called Mountain Head. And this is one of the plot points in it.

Speaker 20 It's a social media company with a sort of a Musk Zuckerberg character who runs a company called Tram that floods, puts out tools like this and causes worldwide destruction. In any case,

Speaker 20 you talked a lot about this during the writer's strike, and we're going to talk a little bit about it by stuff that we made too. But quick thoughts?

Speaker 6 I think it goes after commercials first and quick hits where if you're selling stuff on facebook or shopify and you need just a 30-second kind of competent elegant looking

Speaker 6 i i think it'll start there it'll start moving its way up i just see it similar to what cgi did in terms of reducing the cost of special effects it'll start to move its way up it'll just lower the cost of the means of production it'll be especially hard on certain people but i still think

Speaker 6 as someone who has a you know a limited but increasing amount of exposure to the industry,

Speaker 6 the way I see it is where we outsource their shitty manufacturing jobs overseas, but the real value add in the higher paying jobs are in design, distribution, product marketing, all that good stuff back here.

Speaker 6 I think this is kind of the same thing. And that is, I don't want to say the low-value work, but things like

Speaker 6 lighting and sound and extras.

Speaker 6 The people that Tom Cruise is going to be very aggressive and smart about protecting his own IP and his own, his own likeness.

Speaker 6 What I have seen with, and we talked about this before, whenever I write,

Speaker 6 I use AI to brainstorm and to, when I say, I don't like this paragraph, what additional data could be out there. But when I try and write stuff with just AI, it's very anodyne.

Speaker 6 It lacks all sex appeal. It's all chip, no salsa.
I still think that.

Speaker 20 For the boring stuff, it works. For press releases, things like that, like commercials are showing up.
I think you're absolutely right.

Speaker 6 Or simple legal agreements. By the way, the document you signed with Vox, I generated on AI.

Speaker 20 Oh, good to know. So,

Speaker 6 what did we give away? I was sick of dealing with my lawyers who were like going back and forth with Vox lawyers to run up our bills. And I'm like, fuck it.
I just produced it.

Speaker 6 And by the way, I didn't even run it by our lawyers. I just said,

Speaker 6 I sent it to Vox. I'm like, sign this, and we're going to sign it.
And

Speaker 6 no, thanks for watching.

Speaker 20 I'm flexing. Okay, flex.

Speaker 6 But I think it's going to go after some of the, it's going to lower the means of production.

Speaker 20 Did you give away our liver or kidneys at all in the agreement? Did AI suddenly do that?

Speaker 6 Just one. We have two.
Okay. Just one.
And plus, you don't want to give away my liver. You really don't want to give away my liver.
So it's my liver that's going to be in excellent shape.

Speaker 20 All right. So you're absolutely right.
I think this is something I discussed with Armstrong, who's just a brilliant person. He was like, I'm not really sure what to think.

Speaker 20 I've seen some of this and it's very impressive. I'm like, but it's not you, Jesse Armstrong.
Like you can't make you,

Speaker 20 for the untalented, it will be a problem. For or the stuff that's anodyne, as you said, it will be a problem.
And there's a lot of people like that, right?

Speaker 20 There's a lot of people who make sort of the boring scut work that are going out. Okay, now for our personal

Speaker 20 experience on doing this, we had our video producer, Kevin, mess around with it, and he said he's not too worried about his job just yet. We just hired him.
I hope not. Here are his initial findings.

Speaker 20 VO3 automatically puts makeup on Kara, but not Scott. It crashed and failed to generate video an aggravating number of times, and people are complaining online about its audio failures as well.

Speaker 20 And what VO3 can do frighteningly well is generate videos of fake people. For example, this AI newscast we asked it to create.

Speaker 61 Scott Galloway has broken the record for most dick jokes told in a podcast. The competition was extremely stiff.

Speaker 6 That was good.

Speaker 6 That's it.

Speaker 20 I was wondering. That wasn't a real person.
That person, I was showing the video to someone and like, who is that person? I'm like, that person doesn't exist.

Speaker 20 And they're like, a very, they were attracted to the person.

Speaker 20 It was a fake newscaster reading a very realistic but unconfirmed story that the competition was stiff. I don't think the competition is stiff at all.

Speaker 20 When prompted to use images of real people like me and Scott, it failed to generate audio and came up with some less than ideal results.

Speaker 20 Here's what we got with the prompt: Kara and Scott podcasting on Mars.

Speaker 20 What we're seeing here is Kara and Scott. Kara look with a lot of makeup on.
And Scott, why don't you describe it? Oh, you look like, what's that scoop neck shirt you've got on?

Speaker 6 I'm more handsome than that guy, aren't I? Karen, I think so.

Speaker 6 And I have a third hand. I have a third hand.
At least I got the panora right. Yeah.

Speaker 20 You don't look like you.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no, that's not me. That guy looks like he knocks on your door and says the law mandates that I notify you I've moved in next door.

Speaker 20 All right.

Speaker 20 Here's what we've got with the prompt, Kara and Scott, as bodybuilders. Scott, describe the situation as we're watching it, please.

Speaker 6 Oh, hello.

Speaker 6 Oh my God. That does look like you.
That does look like you.

Speaker 20 Describe.

Speaker 6 It's us as bodybuilders, and the faces are actually quite accurate. Jeez, this is so disturbing.

Speaker 6 This looks like the beginning of the most disturbing cinema.

Speaker 6 It's like from that

Speaker 6 movie, Stanley Kubrick,

Speaker 6 with Malcolm Medowell, Malcolm McDowell, the really disturbing one about.

Speaker 20 Clockwork Orange.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Clockwork Orange. You know, when they basically want to turn him off violence and sex and they force his eyes open and they show him.

Speaker 6 This would literally turn... Watching this, do not watch this, folks.
This will turn you off any physical encounter with anyone for a long time. This is so rattling.
Get him back.

Speaker 20 Kara and Scott is body dumb.

Speaker 6 It's so rattling.

Speaker 20 All right, here's what we got with the prompt. Kara and Scott getting married.
Okay, what we're going to watch here is... Let's see it.

Speaker 6 Seventh Circle of Hell. Oh, that's nice.
Oh, that's nice. That's nice.
Holding hands or walking down the aisle. Oh, no.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 6 No, no, no. They're kissing.

Speaker 20 Don't do it. Don't do it.
Don't do it. Oh, no.
Stanley.

Speaker 6 It looks like Stanley Tucci and Marlowe Thomas.

Speaker 6 And by the way, I'm a good foot taller than you. That is just unrealistic.

Speaker 20 Look at me thrilled to be married to you. A very heavy version of me.

Speaker 6 Oh, my God.

Speaker 20 They make me a lot fatter.

Speaker 20 Anyway, okay. Okay.
We'll post these on our social media accounts later today, but we are unimpressed. George Clooney doesn't anything to worry about right now is what we have to say.

Speaker 6 Well, no, he'll he'll be able. I do think that the,

Speaker 6 but again, it'll be more of a transfer of wealth from the entrants to the incumbents because the incumbents that already have established their IP will be able to scale it.

Speaker 6 A guy like Jesse Armstrong is going to make a lot more money because he's going to get to produce three things a year, not one.

Speaker 6 And because he has already established brand equity, he'll be, it's like a really good lawyer, I think, is going to make more money because they'll be able to scale themselves faster by outsourcing the 80% of the document.

Speaker 20 And then have the creative part, yeah.

Speaker 6 But I think that the entrants are just going to have a really tough time because there's going to be less training, fewer jobs at the lower mid-levels that really teach you about creative and filmmaking and give you an opportunity to shine and rise up.

Speaker 6 It's just going to be, I think the incumbents are just going to get wealthier and wealthier.

Speaker 20 I would agree. One of the things I was talking to Jesse about is like, what if you put all of your work in succession? They could make more seasons of succession eventually.

Speaker 20 They will be without your input. And he's like, well, we have those rights and the contracts.
I said, but do you? Like, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Speaker 20 Like, for example, I would love more episodes of the West Wing, and they're not going to make them, but they could, right?

Speaker 20 If they jammed all the West Wings in there, they could possibly make a pretty decent thing. I have the feeling they will be able to.

Speaker 6 Well, that's a really interesting thought because it ends up that HBO owns the ip to the white lotus yeah and that was i think a hundred or two hundred million dollar i don't want to mistake for the original producers now they still make a lot of money because they want that incredible talent back to make seasons four five and six but if at some point it's no longer worth the 150 million dollars in production for that season they might say well we'll spend three million and we'll use new characters And we'll do seasons five, six, seven, and eight and squeeze.

Speaker 6 And then it makes it even harder for new entrants to break in. I can't figure out, does it help, does it make it less expensive?

Speaker 20 It could help the studios. Whoever owns the IP, whoever owns the IP of the original IP, there's got to be a lot of it.
So you could make more, all kinds of shows like Happy Days.

Speaker 20 There's lots of shows that went on for 10 seasons and that you could possibly.

Speaker 20 It could write them. It could write them.
It could. Anyway, so we want to hear from you.

Speaker 20 Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind or go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 85551 pivot elsewhere in the Cara and Scott universe this week.

Speaker 20 On the latest episode of Prof G Markets, Scott spoke with Aswath DeMotorin, professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business.

Speaker 20 Aswath shared his take on the recent tariff turmoil and what he's watching with the next round of earnings. Let's listen.

Speaker 62 This is going to be a contest between market resilience and economic resilience as to whether in fact the markets are overestimated the resilience of the economy.

Speaker 62 And that's what the actual numbers are going to deliver is maybe the economy and markets are a lot more resilient than we gave them credit for.

Speaker 62 In which case, we'll come out of this year just like we came out of 2020 and 2022

Speaker 62 with much less damage than we thought would be created by what we saw happening on the ground.

Speaker 20 That's interesting. He's so smart.

Speaker 6 And by the way, an Indian immigrant who got his PhD at UCLA. That's correct.
And

Speaker 6 is arguably one of the 10 best instructors in America.

Speaker 6 Right, I know. That is a kid training young Americans.
So much value.

Speaker 6 And, oh, okay, but yeah, let's go after those folks.

Speaker 20 Yeah, well, the good thing Barron's at NYU. Scott, before we go, you have a quick fail.

Speaker 6 Trump is claiming, you know, one of the things Trump's calling for or claiming that America would benefit if Harvard reduced the number of international students is it would open up more seats for domestic students.

Speaker 6 I do think there is some truth to that, that we we need to expand freshman seats for Americans.

Speaker 6 There's great university systems like University of California do take their commitment to Native Californians really seriously.

Speaker 6 83% of the University of North Carolina seats are reserved for graduates from North Carolina high schools. I do think the University of Wisconsin is living up to its mission.

Speaker 6 But what if he was really serious, though? It's all such bullshit because also in this big, beautiful bill, he's talking about gutting Pell Grants.

Speaker 6 And that is he wants to cut Pell Grants by about $67 billion through 2034, reducing grants to low-income students by more than one-fifth from 2027 through 2034.

Speaker 6 And really, it's more like one half when you take inflation. into account.
And more than half of Pell students would have their aid reduced in some way. I'm not exaggerating, Kara.
I'm here.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of things that led me to being here and having the wonderful life I lead. One of them is Pell Grants.
I didn't know that. I got Pell Grants because my mother was a secretary.

Speaker 6 We were considered in the lowest quartile of income-earning households. Every summer, I had to save $2,300 at least, work and save $2,300 because I knew I would get a Pell Grant for $1,300 to $1,800.

Speaker 6 And I could go back for my next year at UCLA.

Speaker 20 Wow, I didn't realize you were a Pell Grantee.

Speaker 6 The reason I got through UCLA was because of Pell Grants. Wow.
And by the way, the Cal State system in California is the largest granter of Pell Grants.

Speaker 6 Pell Grants, in my opinion, and I'm biased here, is where all affirmative action needs to go.

Speaker 6 And that is affirmative action should be based on color, should be based on green, specifically the economic situation you face.

Speaker 6 And without Pell Grants, without affirmative action, I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action. It's called Pell Grants.

Speaker 6 And these things are a lifesaver for those of us who just wouldn't have had access to college.

Speaker 20 It gives you that extra amount of money that you don't, that will give you the chance to excel.

Speaker 6 Wouldn't have graduated from UCLA. I just wouldn't, I couldn't have done it.

Speaker 20 It also gives you the relief that you don't have to work, you know, slinging burgers.

Speaker 6 Well, and it's a grant. It's not a loan.
I don't have to worry about, okay, with my philosophy degree and 150 grand in student debt, am I going to be, is this worth it? These are like, okay,

Speaker 6 the fastest way for us to level up America, full stop, is to put more money in the pockets of people who don't have money. That's correct.

Speaker 6 It's not complex, folks. Yep.
All right. And Pell Grants figured that out.

Speaker 20 We need to save Pell Grants, a really important program. I'm going to give a quick positive one.
It was Go See Mountain Head by Jesse Armstrong. I'm curious what you think about it.

Speaker 20 It's really crazy, but it's

Speaker 6 Mountainhead.

Speaker 20 It's an HBO show that's going up, a Mac show that's going up on.

Speaker 6 I get that in Aspen every year at the summer solstice.

Speaker 20 Oh, stop it. I knew you'd say that.

Speaker 6 Anyway.

Speaker 6 Mountainhead.

Speaker 20 Steve Corell is starring it. It's really good.

Speaker 20 Anyway, and it's by Jesse Armstrong, who's fantastic. There's so many good lines in it that it's crazy.

Speaker 20 One line, I'll do one line. They were in, they were looking, they were in nature.
They're up in Utah, essentially.

Speaker 20 And they look around and the guy who plays Mark Zuckerberg slash Elon's characters goes, oh my God, it's so beautiful. You could fuck it.
And I just thought it was the best line ever.

Speaker 20 That's exactly how they look at nature and think. Anyway, that's the show.
Thanks for listening to Pivot. Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
We'll be back next week.

Speaker 20 Scott, read us out.

Speaker 6 Today's show is produced by Larry Naman, Zoe Marcus, Marcus, Taylor Griffin, Kevin Oliver, and Corinne Ruff.

Speaker 39 Ernie Intertod interviewed this episode.

Speaker 63 Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Ms. Severo, and Dan Shalan.

Speaker 48 Nishak Caro is Vox Media's executive producer podcast.

Speaker 17 Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform.

Speaker 63 Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 54 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/slash pod.

Speaker 63 We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

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