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We know how to get people to fuck.

Scott and Kara know how to get people to fuck.

Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher, R.I.P.

Pope Francis, who died doing what he loved best, which was calling J.D.

Vance an asshole.

So last night, my kid, my 14-year-old comes into my room in the middle of the night, all upset.

And he said, dad, on my group chat, it says we're bombing the Hootis at 1,900 hours.

Should I be worried?

We're mixing.

We're mixing

scandals here.

We're mixing.

We're making scandals.

I'm serious.

I think everybody, this is my suggestion.

To everybody, should you decide that there's so much.

There's so much ridiculously insane, deprived weirdness and competence every day that we don't know where to start.

Every text message I send out now, I end with 1700 hours cash F-15s coming into Yemen.

Every message I'm putting in fake military information.

He's referring, Scott's referring to the second signal gate or probably the 10th, probably the 20th.

Pete Heg says was including his wife, his personal lawyer, friends in attacks on, I think it's Yemen, right?

Was it Yemen?

Yemen.

What a, Jesus, this guy's got to lay lay off the water.

That's who I want.

That's who I want,

commanding my

man in uniform.

Just to add, add to this, J.D., the Pope died.

J.D.

Vance visited him yesterday, and the Pope took his time to insult J.D.

Vance in his Easter, essentially what J.D.

Vance represented in his Easter homily, and then died soon after.

But one of the third thing that just came in is Christy Noam got her bag snatched in D.C.

and it carried $3,000 in cash she had in it, which she accused the guy that she sent to the El Salvador in prison of being in MS-13 for holding $1,500 in cash.

Like, what was she doing with cash?

Like, anyway, the stories, these people are just, I feel like we're in a simulation, Scott.

I'm just so here for Christy.

No, it's such a, it's such a Cinemax film waiting to happen.

She is Cinemax.

She is.

Anyway, she lost her money.

Sorry, Christy.

You shouldn't be carrying that much cash.

Should we bring this all back to me?

Ask me what I did this weekend.

Oh, I will.

Okay.

What do you do this weekend?

Oh, this shit is so upsetting and boring, Kara.

Let's talk about the dog.

It's not boring.

Let's talk about the dog.

So when I moved to Florida after I lost everything in 08 and my kid didn't get into school because it was speech delayed preschool, I'm like, that's it.

We're out of here.

We moved to Florida.

We

bid on a house, got it accepted.

And then Goldman, who at that time was managing my money because they were investing in small entrepreneurs, came back and said, last year you made negative one and a half million, so don't qualify for a mortgage.

So I had to go home and tell my partner that we couldn't get this house.

I couldn't close because I couldn't get a mortgage, which was really a nice conversation for me.

Anyways, we ended up buying a home in Del Rey.

We built this home, and we had to have a pool because we had young boys.

And every morning on the weekends, we would get up, make breakfast, and our kids would immediately start jumping in the pool with our dog Zoe.

And I would play

what is my favorite album in the world.

Is it my favorite album?

Other than the Damned Torpedoes by Tom Petty.

I played Morning Face by Beck.

Have you ever listened to this album?

No.

Oh, it is so beautiful.

It is so beautiful.

It won Best Album.

It was probably the biggest surprise of Best Album 12 or 14 years ago.

It's an instrumental orchestral album.

Okay.

Don't rush me through this.

This is, I'm revealing a little bit about my soul to you.

I'm trying to wait to see where this was going to be.

So last night, I went to the Royal Albert Hall and I saw Beck play with the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra, which is one of the most talented in the world.

And me and Beata just sat there and cried for an hour and a half, remembering like our kids jumping into the pool.

Such a night.

Last night was literally the moment, also the mushroom gummy self, but

that will be the moment.

That's like my crowning moment for London.

And it was such an outstanding performance and took us, took us back to this really nice moment.

Oh my God.

Music is so powerful.

It stirs up your mind.

It is.

But in any case, you want to ask me what I did this weekend?

Okay.

Oh,

all right.

What did you do this weekend?

We had Easter.

We did the Easter.

Oh, yeah.

Did he rise?

Is he risen?

He's risen.

Christ has died.

Christ was born.

Christ.

Wow, you're more Jewish than me right now.

I'm Catholic.

I'm actually Catholic.

If you can believe it.

You know what I'm excited for?

Honestly, Conclave.

Conclave.

Like that movie.

Did you see Conclave?

I don't even know what that is.

It's a movie.

It was up for Oscars.

It's with

Ray Fiennes.

They're going to have a conclave.

It's when the Cardinals get together and they all vote and stuff.

There's some interesting prospects for a new Pope, including a very young one.

I actually, I love, I would say I love Easter, but

Easter for me is something I got to do.

You know, I hide Easter eggs.

Where?

Don't tell me.

Because I don't want anyone to know that I'm fucking a chicken.

Oh, my God.

That's good.

Oh, my God.

I had such a good, like, I had such, I have so many beautiful, my grandmother used to make Easter foods in Tale.

He has resin.

He has resin.

She went to Mass every day.

She would be very interested in who the new pope is.

Anyway, we'll see who the new pope is.

He was a good pope.

He was a good pope.

You want to understand an organization that understands branding, that burning the ballots to create white smoke that signifies there's the new pope.

Yeah.

The garb, the candles, the outfits, the music, the artisanship.

It's almost like they're gay.

It's very, it's very gay.

I'm so glad you said that.

And what a shocker.

And you can't sleep with women.

And what do you know?

What do you know?

Can clave.

Can clave.

You have to watch that movie.

Do yourself a favor and watch it with your wife.

It's a great movie.

It has Isabella Rossellini in it.

She's a nun.

She's a nun.

She's fantastic.

She was up for an Oscar, I think.

Anyway, word of advice to the next pope.

Stay away from J.D.

Vance.

Anyway, we have a lot to get to today, including the Supreme Court handing Trump a late-night loss.

Netflix is staying strong and market chaos, yet another Tesla setback.

This company is really done for, I feel like.

SignalGate too has dropped, as we just referenced.

Defense Secretary Pete Heg says shared attack plans for strikes in Yemen.

Yet another group signal chat, including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.

Hegseth is blaming disgruntled former employees for leaking the information about the use of his chat.

They are.

In fact, Let me tell you, these employees aren't being quiet.

One of them wrote a piece for Politico saying how much Pete Hegset sucks.

In the the group, there were around a dozen people from HegSeth's personal and professional circles and was named Defense Team Huddle.

Hegseth created the signal group himself and conducted the chat from his private phone.

It just gets worse and worse.

The details shared were the same in the chat as Jeffrey Goldberg.

It looks like he cut and pasted.

And who among us has not cut and pasted war plan details in all our group chats?

I mean, will he go?

Because now his people are after him.

His, his little, you know, his little stormtroopers are after him now.

So do you think he'll, he's finished or, or not?

Or will Trump not care?

I had a question for you, because what I saw, I love News Not Noise with Jessica Yellen.

Yep.

And she said, what's going on here is a phenomenon in journalism.

I'm curious to get your take on this called taking out the trash.

And that is when your own team turns on you and starts leaking everything,

you're done.

There's no way.

There's no way to plug the boat.

Do you think that's what's going on here?

Yeah.

I mean, they're explicit.

One of them, who is a spokesperson, John, I think it's Uliat or something like that, he wrote a whole piece saying, you know, still saying he loves Donald Trump, blah, blah, blah.

But Pete Heggs has to go.

Essentially, that's what this piece said, which was explicit.

You don't often see an explicit one.

Now, this four people in this group chat.

dropped a dime on him.

And you could, I could tell two of them, the ones, two or three who were just fired by him for things he lied about.

These people didn't do what he said they did.

So he turned around and fucked them.

And then they're like, you're not fucking us.

We're fucking you.

And yeah, I I think there's.

And then the guy in his piece said more to come, which is like probably around his drinking or whatever.

But it sounds like a fucking disaster there.

I don't know how Trump can save this.

He's got to dump him.

I think there's no question he has to dump him.

But it's Trump.

So you never, I mean, any other president, absolutely.

He'd be gone by yesterday.

But, you know, he's maybe he's thinking the Pope will give him cover or the Pope's death will give him cover.

I don't know.

I just think he's, he's done.

He's done.

I thought that the last one.

I thought that was, I thought that Waltz was going to get fired.

Yeah.

Trump just has a different behavior system.

But I wonder if at some point the Joint Chiefs go, you realize at some point people are going to question orders for fear that service-to-air missiles are waiting for them because Shift-Brains over here is playing is

next thing he's going to put it out on his Nintendo Wii, what the attack plans are.

I mean,

at some point this week.

At some point, this begins to compromise the safety and security of our

men and women in uniform, if it hasn't already.

Private, is a private phone who knows where he was.

Like, come on.

Can you just appoint his brother to some sensitive?

His brother is in the Defense Department.

His per another friend of his, a personal lawyer, was on this thing.

Like, I wouldn't put my, oh, God, this whole thing is just the sense of it.

Just, it seems like there's a deeper story here because they were signaling it, this one person.

And to use your name in public to do it, this guy is either kamikaze or knows something.

like this is going to get worse so they're going to find an elegant way to get him out because trump apparently likes the way he looks he is a handsome man very handsome you know in a kind of a cheesy unctuous way but i think he's very handsome he's a handsome man he's very handsome i think trump likes his look and feel but they're going to put someone else who's more competent in there he says he can do five sets of 47 push-ups i can do five of 35.

he should go back to fox news that'd be great that'd be he should go there that's where he belongs so speaking of which the google google and the justice department speaking of people in trouble are headed to court as we tape money to argue on how to remedy the company's online search monopoly.

The outcome could result in Google being forced to sell off Chrome and share more data with competitors.

Witnesses from Microsoft, Mozilla, Perplexity, and Open Air are set to take the stand.

Closing arguments will be on May 30th, the decision coming by August.

And for once, I would agree with Bill Barr, the former attorney general, who's

just a sack of shit, really.

In an op-ed he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, all the solicitude we express for free markets is hollow talk without a willingness to confront bad actors that use illegal practices to squelch rivals and establish monopoly power.

Well done, Bill Barr.

No one says you're stupid.

But anyway, what do you think is going to happen here?

Because they also lost the advertising case, too, just last week.

So this is the first case.

So they're in the remedy section of it.

I think they feel the wolves are circling, and it does feel real this time.

It feels, you know, while you were sleeping, you know, we're so focused on everything else that it does feel like the momentum here is pretty staggering.

Um, I wonder if they're just so smart and they have so many connections.

I wonder if they're going to do a blood offering and offer to spend something or offer a pretty big fine,

like some sort of big bargain.

No, I can't, I think it has to be a remedy.

I think it has to be a spin-off.

But

yeah, my guess is they offer to do something prophylactically because I think they see

a spin of spin of their ad group, a spin of what was used to be double click.

I'd like to see a spin of YouTube because I think it'd be so incredibly valuable.

I think it'd be good for shareholders and be pretty clean.

They don't seem to want to spin any of them, not Mark Zuckerberg, not Amazon, not any of them.

Well, they get to share data and it's also

it all comes back to money care.

This is the point it all reverse engineers do, and it's the following.

Except for Zuckerberg, who I think just at this point lacks control, although maybe that's not true.

The way a CEO gets compensated is the following: there is a subcommittee of the board called the Compensation Committee, and basically they're there to approve, to make sure that we have enough options in a private company for new hires and also to deal with the hardest part, and that is CEOs' compensation.

And we hire Towers Perrin and we pay them $200,000 or $300,000 because we don't like to do any actual work ourselves.

And they come in and they say, okay, New York Times Company, you're a $5 billion revenue company in a media space.

50% is the

exact median of CEOs of media companies making $5 billion.

And this is what happens.

You say, well, Janet Robinson's doing her level best.

We'll pay her at 60% because we don't, it feels weird psychologically to pay someone average.

But keep in mind, this is the average of CEOs in $5 billion media companies.

So you pay them, generally speaking, 60%.

But what that means is when you're paying everyone 20% more than the medium, it means every three and a half years, the compensation is doubling.

And what that means is in 40 years, we've gone from CEOs making 30 times average worker salaries to 300 or 400.

Now,

essentially, what happens is

that metric,

that scale you get, is based on the size of the company.

So when the Bank of America CEO says, I want to make more money, Even if he's making shitty acquisitions that may not pay off in the long term, his compensation goes up based on the size of the company.

So there's this disincentive or you're deincentivized a little bit from shareholder value, although you have options, but everybody wants to sit on the iron throne of all seven realms versus Westros.

And this is why I have always highlighted Jeff Buchas.

He sold the magazine group about two years ago before magazines went into decline.

He sold.

He sold the cable companies

before the plummet in cable companies.

He sold Time Warner about five years before it went into structural decline because he said, My job is to get shareholders as much money as possible, even if it means putting myself out of a job.

So, so do you imagine they would offer this?

I don't think they will.

I don't think it's just because of money.

I think they just don't.

They're hoping to play the long game here and just delay and delay and obfuscate and delay.

When in fact, they should have done it.

So, should Mark.

They should spin off YouTube.

It would be a very successful company.

They need to spin this thing off.

They need to just take their lumps and do it because they clearly use data and other advantages here to dominate the market.

And again, if Bill Barr and Karis Wisher are in agreement, it is a real moment in time, I think.

And real Republicans don't like this stuff, right?

The question is, is Trump going to throw them some sort of lifeline here?

Although I'm not quite sure what he can do, because in the advertising case in Virginia, there are state's attorneys general.

But the White House looks like it's continuing with uh with pambondi and i'm saying the white house and pambondi because there is no independence between the justice department and the white house anymore so we'll see we'll see we'll see we'll see any give me one quick prediction i think it's a prophylactic i think they're so focused on shareholder value i think a prophylactic spin

of

whatsapp instagram or youtube whatsapp is over at facebook but i know well right or so is instagram but this is google right but isn't instagram isn't meta also that case has got more momentum.

That is going to, yes, that is also.

That is also, but that's in the midst of the case.

That hasn't, but go ahead.

Yeah.

Anyways, you asked for a prediction.

I think we're going to, we're going to see a spin in the next 12 to 24 months.

All right.

I've been, and by the way, I've been saying that for a long time and I've been wrong.

Yeah, well, we'll see.

They are definitely, it looks like Tom Francis going to save my lifeline, but we'll see.

He may do that if he gets enough money.

Just for people who don't know, the production of Tesla's Model Y has been delayed.

This company has one mess after the next recently.

The Model Y, more affordable version of Tesla's electric SUV, was promised in the first half of this year, a pentaway to boost sales.

Production plans we push back a few more months, though Tesla reportedly still plans to produce them, maybe.

They think it's because he wants to double down on RoboTaxis and the Optimus Prime.

He thinks that's where the future is, not in these cars.

Obviously, people are running circles around them, including Japan and China and others.

And legally,

it's settled a racial discrimination lawsuit after a black employee alleged harassment, gender-based insults, insults, and racial slurs on bathroom walls, which were pretty heinous.

Tesla's also facing a proposed class action suit, claiming this one is amazing, too, claiming it speeds up odometers so vehicles fall out of warranty faster.

What a, oh, oh my God.

It's just all over the place.

So his car company's given a lot of yips.

We're taping this on Monday.

Tesla reports earnings on Tuesday afternoon.

Any predictions?

Like, it looks like he's not interested in making cars anymore or he's making other things.

He wants to shift Tesla.

And I think you're going to merge XAI

X and this together in a big

alliance.

Yeah.

And make it an AI company.

Make it an AI company.

Huh.

That would be really interesting.

And use the

use the AI kind of halo as a means of propping up the company.

Wow, that's actually, I think that's really interesting.

Look, this company should be a $14 stock.

And I'm not suggesting you invest here because it's a meme stock and there's forces outside of your control.

And now that the SEC has been neutered, who knows what kind of manipulation

has taken place here.

But it used to be the CEO from the street, the best thing you could do was kind of under promise and over deliver.

And there's still a market for that in traditional mature companies.

Unfortunately,

the ground has shifted a bit that in the kind of fake it till you make it economy, it's over promise

and deliver just enough.

You can under deliver, but just enough.

So for example, some of the promises Elon has made.

2,200 days ago, he said there would be 1 million Tesla Robotaxis within the year.

So seven years ago, he said we'd have

RoboTaxis in one year.

Nine years ago, he said all superchargers were being converted to solar.

That hasn't happened.

Another nine years ago, he said since Tesla started charging customers for self-driving software that he said would be able to drive from LA to New York City autonomously by the end of 2017.

He said that that would happen by the end end of 2017.

I think he sent it to me on stage.

Nearly eight years since the second generation Tesla Roadster was announced, you can still pre-order one on Tesla's website for $45K.

That's interesting.

Some of the promises that did come to fruition, but the details were still a little fuzzy.

The Cybertruck was scheduled for production in 2021 and was supposed to cost $40,000.

It

came to market in late 2023 and the base model was over 60K.

And it's a heinous looking vehicle.

They're getting, yeah, it makes no fucking sense.

It's, they're getting

sold that many.

They haven't sold that many.

They're currently getting hit with a lawsuit concerning the alleged speeding up of odometer readings.

Tesla does not have incentives to fib the odometer numbers.

Warranties expire faster, meaning less Tesla-covered repairs and extending the alleged range of the Tesla, which is,

I remember when I was buying used cars, I thought, why don't people just fuck with the speedometer?

They did.

That was a big thing, is fucking with the Sometimes.

Yeah, but that's literally kind of like fraud on a different sort of masculine level.

It was like, do not ever accuse anyone of with the spin you know the odometer whatever it is so like i don't i don't i think he's lost interest in it i think your

your

speculation that they might combine it all into one company is really interesting i hadn't thought i hadn't considered that because he hid to he's hiding x's shitty business within the xi by the way they don't have that many customers what is their revenues open ai is making five billion six billion at least you know and actually growing um they have to have custom you know it'll just have this halo.

So he's moving it to a new meme stock, just a better meme stock from, because the Tesla meme stock isn't going so well.

That, that meme is over.

And then he'll take, and then he's getting all kinds of contracts.

He might be in charge of Golden Dome, all this other stuff.

And so he's got other, he's got better fish to fry, better, better women to impregnate, I think, here.

But anyway,

let's go on a quick break.

We come back, the Supreme Court's late-night rebuke to Trump.

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Scott, we're back.

The Trump administration has a busy few days.

Let's dig in for a few.

The Supreme Court handed down a rare overnight order on Saturday blocking Trump from deporting a group of Venezuelan immigrants in Texas.

The court's order bars the government for now from using the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law from 1798.

This was a 7-2 ruling with Thomas and Alito in the minority.

Alito wrote in his dissent that the court's decision was to intervene was not necessary or appropriate.

The Trump administration quickly asked the Supreme Court to to roll back the decision, saying the order was premature as lower courts had not properly weighed in.

Really, it's none of his business what they're going to do.

Actually, they're working.

This guy is putting them to work in terms of making decisions.

They might try to keep Trump in check, or at least they're at least moving to do so, even before things like that.

Also, the Trump administration appears to be preparing for a drastic overhaul of the State Department, a plan described by one U.S.

diplomat as bonkers crazy pants, and that's a technical term, a draft, that's an ambassadorial term, bonkers crazy pants.

That's all the name of Scotts in my band.

A draft of an executive order reveals plans to shut down embassies across Africa and eliminate State Department offices focusing on climate change, refugee, and human rights.

So the entire continent of Africa and anything nice for people.

The draft also calls for ending a foreign service exam, laying out new hiring criteria in line with the President's foreign policy vision, which means you have to agree with him.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to the New York Times report on the overhaul on X, writing, this is fake news.

Oh,

little Marco.

If these plans do come to fruition, we'll see how it affects our standing abroad.

And lastly, and then you can comment on all these things, Scott, the White House is reporting looking into new policies that will incentivize more Americans to get married and have kids, according to the New York Times.

Some proposals for those policies include a $5,000 cash bonus given to every American mother after delivery.

I wish I got that.

Government-funded programs educating women on their menstrual cycles to better understand when they conceive.

I wouldn't be against it, except it feels very

controlling.

Giving the National Medal of Motherhood to moms with six or more kids.

I'm almost there.

As we discussed, this is a cause that's near and dear to the hearts of Elon Musk, J.D.

Vance, Conservative Heritage Foundation, for his part.

Trump recently coined himself the fertilization president.

He's also pitching for the idea of baby bonuses for a while.

Let's listen to what he said at CPAC in 2023.

We will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom.

How does that sound?

That sounds pretty.

I want a baby boom.

Oh, you men are so lucky out there.

You're so lucky.

You are so lucky, men.

He's so gross.

He's so incredibly gross.

Anyway, I'd like your thoughts.

Let's start with the first, which is this Supreme Court situation briefly.

Go ahead.

Well, one of the two pillars of the way we approach justice or how we prosecute or acquit or deliver justice and some general themes.

And Alito gave a very eloquent speech on this.

I apologize.

It was Justice Scalia saying that every nation has a really powerful Bill of Rights.

And we keep focusing on when these decisions come down.

But that's not the bigger issue.

Russia has a Bill of Rights that says you are entitled to free speech and anyone who gets in the way of your free free speech should be immediately imprisoned.

Where a nation's medal and justice system is proven or dissolves is your willingness to enforce those Bill of Rights.

And that's where we are now is that for the first time in our nation, it used to be when the Supreme Court or lower court made a decision, it was just a grievan it was going to be enforced and that the president wouldn't think of turning back planes against a court order.

And we're giving the president credit right now.

It's almost as if we're saying, see, he's actually listening to the Supreme Court because we no longer have that certainty.

To me, that's really scary.

The other thing is, generally speaking, we have decided with our justice system that it is worth the trade-off, and there's always a trade-off, to have some people who are guilty be free, OJ,

versus imprisoning innocent people.

Joe Rogan just said this yesterday, but go ahead.

Who did?

Joe Rogan.

Really?

He likes due process.

Yes, he did.

He said it's better to have

100 people that are guilty get off if one innocent person gets convicted.

I think that was his.

And right now, I can hear a lot of Americans saying, okay, now do black people, because I think there's a lot of black Americans who've been incarcerated unfairly.

But those are kind of two pretty significant tenets.

And those have been, so the notion that...

this Republican talking point of, well, yeah, it's worth it.

If there's a couple people in El Salvador that shouldn't be, it's worth the general progress we've made.

Meanwhile, there are 60 minutes that 75% of these folks haven't committed a crime.

So I think the bigger issue is we just have to, at this point, make sure that these decisions are upheld because we have a strong man who's kind of picking and choosing, it feels like, what decisions he's going to decide to comply with.

In terms of the natalist movement, I do believe

I mean, I think of a unifying theory of everything around what the democratic message should be.

And I think it should be the following, that anyone under the age of 40 who works

should be able to form a household, buy a home, or at least afford rent, meet somebody, and afford to have children.

So minimum wage of $25 an hour, national service, 7 million homes in 10 years, do away with capital gains tax and a tax structure that transfers money from young to old, universal child tax credit.

There's a ton of actual programs I'd like to see the Democrats actually put forward instead of fucking whining all the time.

But here's the bottom line.

It's about economic prosperity such such that if the 60% of 30-year-olds that had a kid, now it's 27%, want to take it back to 40, that's fine.

But at the same time, if they decide they want to not have kids and spend that money on brunch and St.

Bart's, that's their right.

So I want a program that takes the

people under the age of 40 that are 24% less wealthy than they were 40 years ago and not the 72% wealthier of people over the age of 70 and levels up young people and gives them a chance to meet each other and gives them economic viability, but only rewarding them for some sort of kind of weird propagation.

The reality of.

I'm not having babies, right?

It's a good thing to have babies.

I mean, I've had four kids.

I love children.

It's that it should be one is your choice if you want or don't want them.

But this idea that you didn't put anything else in place, like, why isn't he talking about daycare?

If you really want people to have kids.

Give natural daycare to everybody.

100%.

Good daycare.

Like, if you really want to have kids, this is very similar to the abortion thing.

If If you really want people not to have as many abortions, make it so it's easy to have children, perhaps.

And maybe people would make different decisions.

It's the same.

They never want to solve.

And they also don't like the kids after they're born, right?

They don't help any of those kids that get born

in problematic homes and everything else.

So they don't, all they want is, and you can see it.

His giveaway was, man, you're going to get to fuck.

I think that's really what he was saying.

He was saying that.

I don't think it.

So this idea of baby bonuses is fine.

That seems fine.

The idea of IVF being inexpensive, great.

It's all like individual gate, but it's not followed by anything that really matters to people who have kids, which is daycare or child care, which is important at every income level, by the way.

Even if you can afford it, it's difficult.

Same thing with elder care, by the way, on the other side, also hard.

But they don't want to do any of this thing.

They just want like men to like have 14 babies, Elon.

But what do you care if you're a shitty father, right?

None of that matters.

So I don't, you know, it just for people to realize

these expanded child tax credit would be better or a baby bonus would require an act of Congress, by the way.

But like expand child tax credit.

That's a great idea, too.

That's right.

But just the other things matter much, much more.

And Scott is 100% right.

If you don't have kids, you should not be like,

you kind of, remember when people were giving money to people giving people their college

for giving the loans why does people who have babies get it and people that don't don't get it there's that moment right like why do they get money because we want them to have babies that's kind of sick you need young people who are economically viable and if you want to talk about a baby boom you got to reverse engineer it to why the baby boom happened

And effectively was the following.

I don't like to talk about this because some of it sounds politically off-putting, but 7 million men came home from war and they had demonstrated heroism and uniform and they were fit.

And we put a bunch of money in middle-class homes through the GI bill, through FHA loans.

And we said, okay, young people, here's a bunch of attractive men.

Quite frankly, we aren't producing enough attractive men for the women who have ascended.

And we should do nothing, including some sort of weird tax credit that somehow pulls women out of the workforce and has we should do nothing to get in the way of women's incredible ascent.

What we need to do is lift up men who, quite frankly, aren't keeping pace.

And the way you lift up men is by lifting up all people under the age of 40 and giving them a chance to meet, giving them a chance to fall in love, giving them economic viability.

We have to get them together.

Do you know realize?

And I know this sounds 40% of nightclubs in London have gone away since COVID.

If people aren't going into work, they're not going into bars, they're not going to church, where does a man or where does a woman who has a much finer filter for sex?

Because quite frankly, the downside of sex is so much greater, ever have the opportunity to let a man demonstrate excellence.

Like where, if you talk to people who've been married longer than 30 years, 75% of them say that one was much more interested in the other than the beginning.

It was always the man that was more interested.

Women are just more choosy for very strong instinctual and biological reasons.

So where does the man have an opportunity to demonstrate excellence?

And now you have men who, quite frankly, aren't demonstrating excellence.

As women have ascended

the earnings ladder and can contribute more to a relationship, men have not filled that gap.

You know know what it would have would give have more babies jd vance in case you're interested and by the way i have more children than you again let me stress that is 25

hello let them who's like that would have be a baby boom that would housing 100 housing would cause a baby if you really want to do it we are we should run the government scott gall seven million seven million new homes manufacturing homes that cost 30 to 50 percent less than homes built on site 25 an hour minimum wage national service do away with long-term capital gains

More night quality.

Quite frankly, subsidies to places, businesses, whether it's putt shack,

whether it's bars that get young people together, whether it's nonprofits, sports leagues, anything that gets people together so they can go, you know what?

I didn't like him at first, but he's funny.

He's nice to his parents.

We know how to get people to fuck.

Scott and Kara know how to get people to fuck.

I'm going to go out with a group of people.

I'm going to have a few drinks and make me make a few bad decisions that might pay payoff.

The most rewarding thing in life is the opportunity to partner with someone, fall in love, and raise children with a competent person and have a government that has wind in your sails to be economically viable so you're not fucking stressed all the time.

My point is we need to level up young people.

I don't like programs that target specifically one gender because I think it gets politicized.

We need to level up all young people.

Yes, I agree.

Can I ask you a question?

So were you the one that was, you know, you said after 30 years, they say which one liked one more?

Your wife liked you less than you liked her, correct?

At the beginning?

I'm just guessing.

Is that right?

I'll give you exactly what happened.

You've told me the story, but go ahead.

I saw someone wearing nothing but a thong who was wearing at a pool party at the Raleigh Hotel.

And I promised myself, I'm going to speak to that person before I leave, to that woman.

And she was with another woman and another guy.

Without the benefit of alcohol in the light of the midday sun, I thought, I'm going to go up and I'm going to introduce myself.

And I'm like, you can make all sorts of reasons not to take your shot.

It's like, how do you do it?

What do you say?

So I went out to the valet.

I got so angry at myself.

I went back in and I walked right up to him and I said, hi, I'm Scott.

And I introduced myself.

Where are you guys from?

18 months later, our son's middle name is Raleigh.

But I'm saying she liked you less than you liked her.

I'm going.

My stories obviously take too long.

And I said to them, I hung out with them that day and I said, come to my friend, come to my place and I'll make you dinner.

I have no idea how to make dinner.

So I called George and Holly Mattson, who I was sharing a place in the continuum in Miami with.

And I said to Holly, who was out on a boat with George, I said, you need to get home and make dinner for me and these three people because I'm really into this one ridiculously cool hot woman.

And we had a few drinks.

We were having a great dinner.

We sat down on the couch and I sat down across from her and I said, look,

I'm like, I pride myself on my transparency.

This is exactly what happened.

This no adjectives or embellishments.

I said, look.

I pride myself on my transparency.

I feel a really nice vibe with you and I'm super interested in you.

And I just feel a really nice connection with you.

Do you feel the same?

And she paused and thought about it and she said, no.

And the worst part was to pause so she could think about it.

But she looked around and paused and went like, she really wanted to give me an honest answer.

She was moved by my transparency and she's like, let me think.

No.

No.

No.

And then the next weekend,

I lied to her and said I was going to a party.

It was actually the rehearsal party for my friends George and Holly Madsen, a rehearsal party.

And she showed up in jeans and a Led Led Zeppelin t-shirt, and she was about to kill me because

I lied to her.

It was a rehearsal dinner.

And we spent every weekend together for the next, you know,

three years.

Well, there you go.

You can, you worked on it.

Well, that's good.

You know, with Amanda and I, it was equal.

I have to say, it was equal.

Although I did say to her, I can't believe she's actually agreed to marry me.

When I said, I'm beachfront proper.

I was single for a very short amount of time.

I haven't been single since I've been married.

You remember you were dating someone and then you weren't?

Then you were dating.

I don't want to talk about that.

A man was a relationship.

Amanda, we went out right away, like immediately after we were fixed up by friends of ours on a blind date.

We were fixed up on a blind date, but I literally said to her something very soon after, like we started seeing each other.

It was very equal, I have to say, was that I was beachfront property and she better grab it.

Do you like that?

Beachfront property.

I know, is that the most obnoxious thing ever?

Yeah, that's pretty bad.

I'm beachfront property.

You better grab it now.

It was not, it's going fast, going fast.

I'm like a bad condo that's been repossessed in an auction.

You're lucky to have me.

Can I have a very brief thing on this bonkers crazy pants, getting rid of our African embassies across Africa?

I was a subway.

I'm just having all the things that make us Americans, which are refugee help, human rights, climate change, et cetera.

Any thoughts?

Look, I don't,

my view is that with brand, what is a brand?

This is a brand.

Right.

That's what I'm asking.

A brand is unearned margin because of soft power, the promise of what you will get if you buy this brand.

And you got to deliver it against the performance.

And the promise is what I would refer to in terms of aid overseas as soft power.

And people feel good about us.

When you see an American embassy, you know it's going to be well staffed.

You know, they're polite.

You know that if you're an American abroad and you get mistreated, you go straight to the embassy.

And the fact that we're reducing our soft power all over the world, all that means is a reduction in the promise, a reduction in our brand, which will reduce our unearned margin across our business relationships, our safety.

Do you think how many people, and the problem is you're not even going to realize how much damage it does.

Do you realize how many people call our intelligence services when they suspect a terrorist cell somewhere?

They call American embassies because they're like, you know what?

Those are nice people.

They're the good guys.

And we're losing that.

This is the

reduction in soft power across America.

Also across Africa, we just decided to give Africa over to China anyway.

Which, by the way, has been a hotbed for, quite frankly,

it's not only

not playing offense.

Africa likely will have the greatest GDP growth over the next 40 or 50 years.

It's just kind of time, right?

And it has huge, unbelievable human potential.

unbelievable natural resources.

At some point, Africa is going to have its moment, and we want to be in there and establishing strong business and military relationships.

In addition, there are some hotbeds of terrorist activity in Africa, and we want African nations and governments cooperating with us.

It all comes down to the same thing.

To believe that you can build a bubble around your shores is just naive.

I've always believed you not only take the fight to foreign nations, you take the empathy and the goodwill.

It has to be a carrot and a stick.

Yeah, I agree.

This is, it's an astonishing thing.

We're just giving up.

Literally, I know it sounds dumb.

Do you remember like sort of the image I have of you?

This, you know,

Hershey bars by GIs and stuff like that.

Like all this stuff we did.

It sounds like it's such a trope, but it's so like we are the good.

We've not always been the good guys, but we're the good guys.

And now the Chinese are going to be the good guys.

And they are not the good guys, by the way.

It's just grotesque.

Anyway, let's go on a quick break.

We come back, China's latest salvo in the trade war and Netflix.

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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 dumped the entire market for this stuff, right?

And like, this is something that's painful for OpenAI, 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.

China is warning countries not to make any trade deals with the U.S.

at China's expense and is threatening retaliation against countries that do.

They're doing the carrot and stick situation.

China said it was responding to foreign media reports that the Trump administration was trying to pressure other countries as a negotiating tactic.

Harming the interests of others for one's own selfish and short-sighted gains is like negotiating with a tiger for its skin.

Oh, that's an interesting metaphor.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement.

They went on to say, in the end, it will only lead to a lose-lose situation.

Why do the Chinese seem so reasonable at this moment?

What does it make of the strategy?

I mean, obviously, they're going to have to threaten too, because we're threatening, presumably.

Our threats mean less and less.

I do think that one of Obama's biggest mistakes was not responding when Syria crossed that red line.

You should make very, very

few threats, but what they should be is not threats.

They should be promises.

And

unfortunately now we're just, we're threatening everybody.

So no one takes this seriously.

They're like, I just don't think we have, there's no veracity with our threats.

It because it's like, well, he didn't threaten Canada, but he came after them for no apparent reason.

And then when he threatens to ban TikTok, he does.

Harvard, it was a mistake.

We are not a serious people.

It just doesn't,

we have absolutely no authority or reliability.

We come home every day to a drunk, manic depressive, bipolar mate.

We don't know who we're waking up against or we don't know who we're waking up with every morning.

And the fact that any nation is going to respond and back down other than saying, oh, okay, sorry.

And wow, have you lost weight, Mr.

President?

And then just back channels to China and say, hey, we really should have those talks we were talking about about lowering trade barriers.

And China, oh my God, they must be licking their chops, as is Vietnam, as is Turkey, as is the EU.

The EU is, I mean, obviously this has hurts them, but they're making all sorts of, they're doing all, they're working overtime.

They're doing all sorts of trade deals right now.

Yeah, and they still don't want to turn their back on us and they don't have to.

Anyway, amid all the economic turmoil and confusion, one company that is weathering the storm is fine.

And people are worried about this.

Netflix, the company reported in its Q1 earnings last week, beating revenue and earnings targets.

And a letter to shareholders Netflix said the revenue and profit growth outlook remains solid.

It's not making any changes to its forecast for the year.

Look, this is the one company that stays going, even despite the volatility, because it requires, I would imagine, maybe making, they make a lot of films elsewhere, but a lot of their stuff is sort of tariff protected in a weird way, correct?

Yeah, I don't see how it's subject.

I mean, eventually, eventually it'll impact them, but I mean, this is this is arguably, I mean, we always say this about a lot of companies, but one of the best managed companies in the world, but arguably the best pivot in the world.

They were sending out DVDs.

A real insight was, they said,

the real insight was the best broadband in the world is the U.S.

postal system.

That rather than trying to send a movie over pipes, send it in the mail.

And then when the pipes caught up to the mail, they said, we're pivoting.

And that was the ultimate.

pivot and it worked.

They then

adopted a page out of Bezos' playbook playbook and said, if we can paint a really compelling vision for this company and deliver against it on an incremental basis, we can attract more cheap capital, which gives us more and more money.

And we're just going to literally outspend, we're going to overwhelm the competition with capital.

And they spent $18 billion a year.

And then, when they kind of pulled ahead and it was clear no one was going to be able to caption in terms of capital, they then globalized the industry and did to LA what Tokyo did to Detroit.

And that is, they moved huge production facilities overseas.

And now they can on $18 million, on $18 billion in content, which is what,

five to eight times what HBO, Apple, all of them spend, Apple, I think spends $5 billion.

They can spend, if they're spending three times what another company spends in gross dollar volume, they can produce four times the content because it's just a better managed company.

About, I think now almost 40 or 50% or maybe even more of their capital is spent overseas in production than spent domestically.

Yeah, they really were smart about that.

They also brought shows from there, either remade them or used them from there.

They were very good about the globalization.

Let me say, let me give kudos to Reed Hastings, who has stepped down as executive.

He was executive chairman.

He was very quite involved to chairman of the board.

I met Reed when he was selling those DVDs.

I mean, he was moving those DVDs very early in Netflix's history.

And there had been a series of companies like this, if you recall, that were trying to do this, what he was doing.

I did a very famous interview with him.

I think it was 2007, maybe with him, the head of Hulu at the time, Jason Kylar, and Chad Hurley, who's the head of YouTube.

And

we were put down in a basement.

And I always thought that these three, especially Reed Hastings, really had a vision for the future.

But they, they, he,

he really, even though he's dropping his status, he's, he's the pivotal person who made a lot of these issues.

And he is smartly followed with executives that he has cycled out some that haven't worked, even though if they did well for a while, I have to say he really is has to go down as one of the greatest agree but i mean and kudos to reed he brought in ted sarrandos and ted whose job as a young man he ran six or eight video rental stores i mean the guy just has a feel for content

and they now are leveraging their platform they're going into uh video games they're going into uh sports they're going into this is a scary one they're going into podcasting uh the really interesting thing would be the Clash of the Titans, the celebrity deathmatch would be if Alphabet spun YouTube.

I mean, the war between Netflix and HBO and Disney, and

it's not, that's not the war.

That's over.

The war, if there is one, is between Netflix and YouTube.

Yeah, that's why they should spin it off.

By the way, YouTube happens to be bigger, by the way.

13% versus Netflix at 11%.

Yeah.

Anyway, you're right.

And who would be the CEO of that?

I mean, they would try to get Sarandos, obviously, right?

They try to grab him, but...

of YouTube, yeah.

Oh, I think Neil Mohan's done an incredible job.

Yeah, I'm just wondering if they would go, but that would be great.

He has, and before that, another person who I had great regard for Susan Wojski, who died, also did a great job

there while she was running it.

And she was one of the very earliest, in fact, one of the earliest Google executives.

They started Google in her garage.

So, yeah, you're right.

YouTube versus Netflix is the story.

There's really the story.

Anyway, all right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for Wins and Fails.

Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails.

Why don't you go first?

You have an easier time disassociating than me.

I've been so stressed and upset about everything that's been going on that to just be at the Royal Albert Hall listening to beautiful music that reminded me, I think it was Diane, was it either, I think it was.

Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper's mother, who said that the happiest time in her life or the happiest time she believes in anyone's life is when you're, when you have young kids at home.

And I do think I'll look back on that and look at that as the happiest time in my life.

But feeling that music in that venue, it was just so extraordinary and just absolutely gave me an hour of peace and emotion to share with someone I care a great deal about in the content.

I mean, we just knew exactly how we were both feeling.

I felt very connected to London.

I felt very connected to music.

And it was just a nice hour of respite.

Does anything else remind you of that?

Like Saul was wearing a shirt that Louis used to wear this weekend and that gave me the chills in a good way.

You know what is incredible is

a woman who used to work with me at L2.

I don't think I'm speaking out of squalid.

I won't say her name, but she just took on a strategy role at Apple's and she's overseeing memories.

You know that, do you have those things that pop up?

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

That, you know, as you know, I'm fascinated with death.

I'm just going to play that shit over and over and live my life again.

Those that does, music does, seeing certain people does.

I mean, that's, and the piece of advice I would give to anyone, especially men who have a tough time with this, you know, from the, I've said this, from the age of 29 to 45, I didn't cry.

I didn't cry when I got divorced.

I didn't cry when my mom died.

I just kind of forgot how.

And it is a real gift to,

in a practice, an effort, to really lean into your emotions.

If you hear something funny, force yourself.

This is one of the things I really like about you.

You laugh out loud.

You have a wonderful laugh and it's infectious.

And it gives everyone else permission to laugh and it just makes everything a little lighter.

If something upsets you or it moves you sentimentally, let yourself weep.

Let yourself cry because it informs what's important to you.

When you see a piece of art or a piece of creative that inspires you, sometimes I even rewind it 15 or 30 seconds and say, wow, this is such a wonderful scene.

I want to watch it or I listen to music.

Really lean into your emotions because our advantage is a speech.

You're a crier.

You're a crier.

I cry at the door.

You really are.

You're a hat.

You do.

I cry at the door.

You really do.

I'm scared to watch certain movies.

It's one of the things I like.

I like the messy part of myself.

My kids see me cry all the time.

You win?

Your fail.

Excuse me.

You're fail.

Don't rush me through my personal parables

as I open myself to you and you jab.

You jab.

But my lesson here is...

I let you cry.

I like your cry.

Our advantage as a species is our cooperation.

And the way we cooperate is we communicate.

A close second is we're able to feel things.

That part of our brain is bigger, with the exception of elephants and killer whales, which, by the way, should not be locked up in tanks when you realize how emotional they are.

If you don't lean into your emotions, you're not taking advantage of what it means to be human.

And it's very rewarding.

It really informs your life.

Otherwise, you're like me, 29 to 45, and just kind of sleepwalking through life and thinking, okay, how do I make more money and have more sex?

Which was an empty, meaningless experience because a pretty good empty, meaningless experience, but this is better.

Anyways, my win is the Royal Albert Hall and back and listening to Morning Phase and thinking about my boys.

My fail is

at the end of the day, management is just one thing.

It's your ability to allocate capital to a greater return than your peer group.

And the cruel truth of capitalism is every organization has a finite or scarce amount of resources.

So Tim Cook's job is just to allocate capital more efficiently than the CEO of Meta or Samsung.

And the president has more capital to allocate than anyone in history.

And the best allocation of capital, and we talked about this, is the investment in our universities.

And probably the greatest innovation in history was our race to split the atom.

If we hadn't gotten there first, and Hitler had, we'd be doing this podcast in German.

And that effort, and one of the things I don't think they did a great job of in the movie Oppenheimer was nodding to all of the universities that were involved.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

And I'm going to get some wrong here, but Caltech, Berkeley, WashU, Purdue.

University of Minnesota, Chicago.

You've heard Chicago played a huge role.

Rochester, Princeton, all of these universities were working on different things from the effects of radiation to the risk of us lighting the atmosphere on fire.

And these individuals were so, who had this incredible, esoteric, generic,

ridiculously mile deep.

and a centimeter wide expertise in something were all coordinated by the army and the government to try and figure out a way to get there first to literally save the world.

That has happened every day since then and has given us unbelievable return on investment.

And it's not only capital through investments in our great universities, but it's the ability to attract the best human capital that know how to deploy this capital because they're so brilliant.

And

when you start sending out errant emails, which by the way, end up are not legal, telling people, graduate students, to self-deport.

Let me give you a basic rundown on who our students are in our universities.

The undergrads at our elite universities are a mix of rich kids and freakishly remarkable Americans, and then a combination of the two from foreign countries.

At business school, I won't speak for other graduate schools, the MBAs are the following: the Americans at business schools are what I affectionately call the elite and the aimless.

They're good, smart kids who hated their first job, don't know what the fuck to do with their lives, so they go back to business school to try and figure it out.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I was one of those people.

And then the foreign students are the richest kids from Paraguay, whose dad dad owns the licensing agreement from L'Oreal and the Ultimate Luxury brand is to send their kid to NYU or to Stanford.

And by the way, those are the kids you want to party with because they're rich kids and they love to party and also they're going to be running their country at some point.

And then there's the PhD students.

The PhD students, we don't cash their check for $72,000.

We pay them.

And they come here and take on a very narrow topic.

And they're so good at what they do that they teach students and then they go on to do nothing but focus on a tiny part of the world and decide, I'm going to know more about this tiny part of the world than anyone in the world.

Arguably the most impressive cohort in America is our PhD students.

We get the Tom Brady's of every nation who decides, I'm super into liquid particle propulsion dynamics and I'm going to go to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and devote my life to it.

We find these people that have done nothing but go so fucking deep around this specific topic that they know more about it than anyone in the world.

And yet we've decided we don't, we want to scare these people from coming here.

We haven't.

One person has decided.

Well, we not, we elected this guy, but

it's as if we're a team and we get the number one draft choices from everywhere.

And then Tom Brady shows up and we says, you know, Tom, I hate to say this, but there's a chance you might show up one day.

And ice might be there and ruin you and your family's life for no goddamn good reason.

We are scaring away

one of our core competences, our core advantages globally is not only the fact that we allocate capital to this university, but we attract the finest human capital to allocate this capital, resulting in unbelievable innovation that has driven prosperity, that has driven unearned margin.

My fail is an unnecessary turning away of the strongest human capital in the world.

And that is our amazement.

You meet a, just trust me on this, you meet a PhD student from India.

I don't care what fucking field there are.

You're talking to someone who was the best at their elementary school, then the best in their region, then the best in their state, and then the best at IIT, and then figured out a way to come.

to the University of Pennsylvania and study options theory and helps banks figure this shit out.

It is incredible what they're doing here, the destruction around not just there, but at NIH.

Okay, mine are.

I have so many wins today.

One, I recommend you reading Larry Davids, My Dinner with Adolph, which is a sort of attack on it's a very funny thing of him having dinner with Adolf Hitler and making fun of Bill Maher.

It's very, very, very funny.

Bill Maher needs to step down on defending it.

Nobody thinks you shouldn't have had dinner with him, Bill.

They just, you're moving into Gail King territory here in defensiveness.

But it's really funny, Larry Davids' little essay in the New York Times.

And I love Larry Davids so much.

My other win is more seriously, is Alaska Senator Lisa Markowski, one of the few Republicans criticizing Trump.

She admitted last week she was afraid and fears retaliation, but she's doubling down and being sort of a leader in that way.

And

she has won.

She won despite an attack by Trump in the last election.

So she's safer than most people at this moment in time, but good for her for doing that.

And I think it's infectious, just like what Scott was just talking about at universities.

When Harvard did it, then MIT did it, then others did it.

Now Columbia looks like it might be finding its spine at some point.

So I really admire her for doing that.

Also, I just for a little thing, this is a picture, speaking of medical students.

This is a picture my mom found of my dad.

from it fell out of a drawer of hers this week.

And this is me as a kid.

My mom's pregnant with my brother, but there's our little family being very feckin' Donald Trump.

But we did it because my dad was a poor guy, like you said, and he got a break.

He went to the Navy, paid for medical school, built his family, was able to lift himself up from not poverty in West Virginia, but not means in order to go to West Virginia and to go to school there and stuff.

That's nice.

And then my fail is this continued, it's sort of coming together.

Wired has a piece of something I have talked about on this podcast.

The scale at which Doge is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, is unprecedented, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to the disastrous privacy violations for citizens and immigrants alike.

I've always said their game was uniting the data.

I heard this weekend, I'm not going to say who it was, by someone who's considering leaving the United States.

European countries are offering our greatest technologists.

Speaking of what you're talking about, Scott, it dovetails perfectly.

Countries are trying to get our technologists to go there by giving them visas so they're safe.

And a lot of people who I never thought would consider it are considering it because they fear retaliation.

You know,

the thing, the executive order against Chris Krabs has been chilling to a lot of people I know who've been working on really important things.

And the whole point of Doge is to unite this data, as I've said, to create an Uber data situation, which has never been united, to create an ability to cross-reference things that have never been cross-referenced and for good reason.

It's not for efficiency.

They don't do it.

It's because we're scared of creating a surveillance state the way they have in China.

And so the fact that it's a reverse brain drain going on really dovetails in what Scott was talking about is we are rejecting the finest from elsewhere, but our own people will be leaving our country to develop in other countries.

And that is the biggest tragedy of this.

At the same time, the government is creating an Uber database.

I have said this over and over again.

I know you said Elon's leaving, but the legacy of what he's doing here is incredibly dangerous for our freedom, as far as I'm concerned.

So I think we should pay a lot of attention to these databases being joined in a way that you'll be searchable and findable.

And there will be so many mistakes in the data that it's terrifying.

A lot of people considered dead, that aren't dead, have to prove they're not dead now.

People that are getting arrested that are American citizens now.

We shouldn't be arresting.

these immigrants without due process.

But now it's moving because of mistakes and everything else.

And also,

it will not be mistakes at some point.

So we should be very wary about what Doge is doing in that regard and pay attention, even if Elon's been out of the news a little bit recently because of so many other ridiculous situations.

So I just please pay attention to that.

Wired has a great story on that this week.

And so that is my fail.

If we don't pay attention, they will have all our information and then do terrible things to us.

I'm still kind of

sort of blown away by your

speculation or thesis that

all of these, both the government and Musk are bringing all this information together to develop sort of one like,

I don't know, skynet of surveillance,

of surveillance, control, and capital.

It'll be used against immigrants first, but it's always, you know, it's always for more.

And by the way, I don't want Democrats having this power either.

FYI, I don't want any of them having this power.

You can have your opinion about whatever you thought about

the various things of leaking information, but the government should never have this much power and information about people in one place.

It will always be abused,

as has been shown throughout history.

Anyway, we want to hear from you.

Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

Go to nymag.com/slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 85551-PIVOT elsewhere in the Kara and Scott universe.

I talked with Melinda French Gates and on with Kara Swisher.

Let's listen.

I never,

never would have guessed that USAID would essentially be folded.

You know, it was endorsed by Republican and Democratic administrations because they saw that people could live where they were if they had good health and they had peace and some chance for prosperity.

And so to see that, you know, 16 million women won't have access to maternal health services because of that pullback, how does that make us look better?

How does that help us with peace?

It's just what you were saying, Scott.

Same thing.

You and Melinda Gates are on the same wavelength.

Also, I'll be interviewing Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, speaking of badass women, live on stage at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., this coming Monday, April 28th, a week from now.

If you want to hear a smart conversation about semiconductor chips, industrial policy, and the future of AI, Google Kara Swisher and Lisa Su, SU, to RSVP, tickets are free.

Okay, that's the show.

Thanks for listening to Pivot.

Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

We'll be back on Friday.

Scott, read us out.

Today's show is produced by Larry Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie Intertod engineered this episode.

Jim Mackle edited the video.

Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Ms.

Severo, and Dan Shallon.

Nashot Kirwaz Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

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We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business Beck's morning phase.

Trust me.