Tariff Twists and Turns, Meta Antitrust Trial, and Blue Origin Girls' Trip

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No one has ever described me as openly heterosexual.

No one has ever said openly heterosexual podcaster.

Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

Where are you, Scott?

You're somewhere strange with the wallpaper situation going on.

I am at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, where I just returned from getting from the Department of Motor Vehicles at Palm Beach Gardens, where my son is now a licensed driver.

How exciting.

That's great.

I thought you were at Mar-a-Lago or something like that.

No,

I ran into my friend Mehmet Oz yesterday and he came over and he introduced me to RFK Jr.

They're hanging out.

Oh, no.

And he gave me the cold shoulder.

I think it's because I refuse to have him on my pot.

I don't know.

He was

like cold to me.

Who?

RFK?

RFK, no, Memon and I are friends.

RFK, yeah, was

noticeably cold to me.

He's very handsome, though.

I did notice that.

Because he's a crank.

Did you see the latest?

He's put, I don't even want to go into it.

Four months until autism is solved.

Not just that, all his stuff.

He's taking information off.

He's saying vaccines aren't necessarily a good thing.

He's such a fucking disaster.

These people are setting themselves up for a lot of pain years from now.

It's just the murders he is committing right now, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, in addition to the additional death, disease, and disability across our populace, it's made traffic much worse for me.

That's what I'm really upset about.

Okay, all right, okay, all right.

The traffic is awful down here.

But anyways, I'm at the Colony Hotel, which I affectionately call, I think there's a whole cadre or cohort of what I call 64 hotels hotels and service establishments.

And that is because of the unprecedented prosperity that we've started to believe is a normal operating system in America and a series of fiscal and monetary policies that literally and tax policies cram all this prosperity in the top 1%.

And the fact there's a lag time.

You can't build a four or five star hotel in a year.

It takes 10 years.

These places are over capacity.

And so I describe them as 64s and that is six star prices with four star service.

Oh, okay.

and these places are so expensive and i don't mind paying a lot of money if you get great service and you do get great service at the beverley's hotel or i don't know at the langham in london i mean there's just a ton of great hotels with great service this is not one of them this is not one of them all right colony hotel with rfk there that's all i need to know i'm not going there no rfk is not here i don't want to disprove i don't want to spread it's a beautiful hotel in palm beach fellow it's 74 and sunny gosh

here that's good for you it's very nice here in washington too.

Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today.

There's also a lot of tech stuff going on, including Meta's big antitrust trial and, of course, women in space.

We'll get to that.

But first, let's get to tariffs because first, President Trump now says nobody is getting off the hook on tariffs, despite granting exemptions for smartphones, computers, and other electronics late Friday, which is a lie, apparently.

Trump posted on True Social on Sunday that products are just moving to a different tariff bucket.

He also says that semiconductor tariffs are coming, but tariff exemptions or whatever Trump wants to call them are good news for Apple, NVIDIA, and Dell, at least for the time being.

Of course, Scott predicted Apple's reprieve on our Friday episode, Let's Listen.

You want to enrage a cult, take iPhones to $3,500,

and then you're going to see the largest, the most valuable company in history, an American company, lose the value of the German GDP over the course of a year.

You're going to take pushback people's retirements.

Apple's going to have to withdraw all sorts of growth plans.

And you want to piss off every

millennial in Gen X in the world, take their iPhones to $3,500.

Apple is not going to have any tariffs here.

So in the interim for that, you were absolutely correct.

Very good.

But what was And then I was not correct.

Yes, I know.

So what is the deal?

Because Lutnik started, everyone thought Lutnik was off script, but then Trump underscored it and added more confusion to something that was already confusing and seems very oligarchic and sudden and shifting.

Apple was trying very hard to deal with this.

They're airlifting 600 tons of iPhones from India last week to reportedly beat the tariffs.

This flip-flopping is really bad.

Carolyn Levitt, of course, it goes against what they were saying.

We're going to make things in the U.S.

Carolyn Levitt, Tracy Flick, said over the weekend that Trump is still committed to seeing more products and components made in the U.S.

She noted Trump's direction.

Tech companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing United States as soon as possible.

This is, Carolyn, sit down, you 27-year-old ignoramus.

But

what do you think about this flippity-floppity flippity-flop?

The brand U.S.

has become toxic uncertainty.

There's several organizations that track an uncertainty index, and that index has reached its highest level since the 80s.

The level of uncertainty in the U.S.

right now is greater than COVID.

Right.

Think about that.

And by the way, I'm going to give you some anecdotes.

I'm not going to name the people because they didn't want to be named.

But what I would tell our listeners is that, unlike the Trump administration, my anecdotes are true.

I'm not lying.

Over the weekend, I talked to several CEOs.

One is the CEO of a huge catalog and retail company that does a lot of housewares.

This person has, he thinks, about $60 million in outdoor furniture waiting to hit the stores for summer that are on ships en route from China.

All of a sudden, he has to figure out a way to get to the port of Long Beach when they arrive and write a check for $85 million

that he wasn't expecting to write.

And he has to call a CFO.

And this is a publicly traded, multi-billion dollar company.

It's like,

I can't just find $85 million.

The 85 is for what?

To pay for the things now?

Or what is the 85 for?

That's the correct question because the way tariffs work is the importer, the the catalog, the retailer company taking delivery of outdoor furniture from China.

If these products, quote unquote, cost $60 million,

you have to, with 145% tariff, you have to, the person receiving the items, the retailer in the U.S., has to pay $85 million to the U.S.

government in the form of a tariff payment.

So this individual has to come up with $85 million

to get the shit off the boat.

In addition, unless they're given a reprieve but he can't he can't just let shit sit on a boat right and right now he has to plan for what the government is saying in addition he's got to find hundreds if not thousands of people to go down to the port and when the stuff comes off the boat retag and reprice everything because now the majority of retailers that order their stuff out of china have it tagged and priced and attached to the actual physical item in china and wrapped right Whatever, if there happened to be clothing or something like that.

Whatever it is.

And so, in addition, he's like, okay, so I have stopped all shipments from China.

I've told them, stop producing, which is going to take my inventory levels way down.

And the only way I'm going to get anywhere back to even is if I raise prices, which I'm going to have to do, in addition to more expensive prices, i.e., inflation,

my earnings call is going to be a shit show

when I have to explain that, oh, yeah, I wasn't expecting to pay an $85 million unexpected straight from the bottom line payment for tariffs that didn't exist seven days before.

Right.

And he has to go into his office and the CFO goes, all right, if we've got to go borrow $85 million against the line, we can do it.

But if every retailer is hitting their line, the interest costs are going to go up.

Correct.

And this is what played out last week and why this guy blinked yet again.

The president has access to more information than any individual in history.

Between our security apparatus, the brightest people in the world, a ton of data that's digested, distilled for him.

He is the helm of the bobsled.

He technically has more insight into what is going on in the world than any individual.

And I'm sure two pieces of data were presented to him in fairly stark terms.

Consumer confidence is plummeting.

Uncertainty is skyrocketing, which all adds up to a decline in spending and hiring and insecurity, which has taken the economy down.

Now, traditionally, when an economy goes down, people don't want to borrow money.

People don't want to invest.

So interest rates come down.

And that makes people more confident.

It's sort of a self-healing mechanism.

In this instance, we have a reduction in consumer spending and the economy slowing down, but the 10-year spiked 50 points.

So you have everything getting more expensive as the economy slows slows down.

That's called stagflation, which is a bridge to a depression.

The tenure went up 50 bips in five days.

And let's bring that down to a number.

Okay.

All right.

We have a $34 trillion deficit, meaning every basis point increase in the cost of the tenure, if it goes from 4% to 4.1%,

it's another $3.5 billion in interest payments we have to make on our national debt.

I'm not even talking about the incremental cost to consumers of their student loans, their mortgages, and their credit cards.

I'm just talking about the interest on the debt we have to pay.

So, when it spikes 50 basis points, right, on $3.5 billion per basis point in incremental interest expense, all of a sudden, in a few days, America has to come up with another $175 billion in interest payments to foreign creditors.

Our entire veterans affairs, our entire veterans' affairs budget is $300 billion.

So they have figured out a way to reduce the economy, to send the economy into what looks like a low-grade coma

while interest rates are going up.

This is the worst of all worlds.

Right, right.

And they're not getting, and the $85 billion million dollars this guy has to pay is going to the government, but it's now going to be sucked up in interest rate payments.

It's just like, so we're going to lose so much money every which way you lose.

So, how companies proceed is impossible at this point.

What do you do?

What do you just stop payments?

That's what you stop doing.

And then you lay people off and then you hunker down until this lunatic is either he loses at the midterm and he gets investigated out the yin-yang, which he should be, honestly,

or it's rendered impossible for him to do anything.

That's saying his lawlessness continues.

He's defying the Supreme Court on immigration.

He's defying the

single thing.

And also, by the way, he doesn't weigh 224 pounds.

He weighs like at least 250 pounds.

Anyway, that was just his thing.

Let's talk about China then, because President, this is an opportunity, as we've talked about with President Xi.

He currently is visiting Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia, presenting China as a reliable ally and trading partner.

China also spent exports on a wide range of critical minerals and magnets.

China is holding steady here, and they are willing to endure pain, but they're also doing the correct thing, which is to visit partners and show themselves to be reliable partners.

What will Trump do next?

Because I see him more and more.

This press conference in the Oval Office, he's defying the Supreme Court.

He's defying the Fed.

He's defying

anyone he can defy.

And when he makes a good decision, he defies his good decisions.

So

what do companies do?

And how do you look at China's role here?

Because I think they're benefiting enormously from his idiocy.

I don't know what else to call it.

Stupidity.

So I never miss a chance to boast.

The CEO of one of the most iconic German automobile manufacturers reached out and said, we'd love to come.

We'd love to host you and come have to speak to the management team of the board.

And I said, and I was trying to arrange dates.

And then he called me and he said, can I ask you something?

I said, of course.

He goes, what would you do if you were us, given what's going on in the U.S.?

And Kara, as a guy who is always willing to run other people's lives and tell them what they should do, I'm like, I have no fucking idea.

I have

no idea.

I have no idea

what to do here other than, and I hate to say this because I love America, other than figure out a series of partners that are more reliable.

And I said, oh, we're doing that.

And going to that notion around, let's talk about China now.

China since COVID or since 2019 has reduced its percentage of its total exports to the U.S.

from 24% to 17%.

We have reduced ours by 4%.

So we're both diversifying away from each other.

They have diversified at nearly double the clip we have.

The basic premise is that we can hurt them more than they can hurt us, so they will cry uncle.

So

let's assume we could hurt them more than they could hurt us.

That is a pretty shaky thesis because, well, the administration wants you to believe that we're the only customer at the country club and they have to be nice to us.

Right.

The number one trading partner with China is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, at 1 trillion.

Who's number two?

The EU at 900 billion.

We're number three.

So yeah, we have a lot of power.

But if they wanted to, and you want to talk about restraint, if they wanted to go into the market and take the tenure from 450 to 550 and create inflation while the economy is going down, they could do that.

But what they realize is that if they really hurt and kneecap their third biggest customer, it would be bad for them them as well.

They are not stupid.

In addition, let's discount all of that and let's take the administration at its word that Howard Luttnig, that we're the biggest consumer and they would be fucked without us.

China has its own troubles.

Here's the issue or the piece of calculus they are missing.

When Americans find, when they're watching the Logan Paul Mike Tyson fight, And it starts, the bandwidth slows down, they go fucking ape shit and they call their cable company.

I just did that today.

When you talk about

women are born with a much higher tolerance for pain because they have to endure childbirth.

Men have much lower tolerance of pain.

We're the man in this relationship.

China starves tens of millions of people when they think it's good long term for the country.

Do you realize the pain threshold of America relative to China?

And we think we're going to strong arm them

into doing a decision decision they don't want to do.

This is nuts.

This is just absolutely nuts.

Bo and Yang did a very funny thing on SNL, this idea.

They are made for pain.

But wait, I'm just wondering, which side is more willing to endure hardship for the glory of their nation?

The one that's been around for thousands of years or the one that's sending Katy Perry to space?

Look at us in the 70s when we had a much higher tolerance for pain when we didn't have Netflix and shows on demand and couldn't get a pack of gum delivered to us within 15 minutes, we left Vietnam after we had decided we can't take any more when we had lost 58,000 servicemen.

At that point, the Viet Cong and North Vietnam, they had lost a million people.

And we cried, uncle, to think that, I mean,

the calculus here is just so

incredibly ignorant.

In addition, the performative defiance of on everything.

Like, there's not anywhere they're not losing and being performatively defiant and then dragging people who were not like this, like Marco Rubio, into this performative defiance.

That's what I would call it.

And it's just, it's like, it's like Saul, my son, this, you know, I'm not going to, you know, he, he does this thing where he does his arms.

You ever see, you know, when you see a toddler, like, I'm not going to do anything.

And that's what it feels like.

I feel like I'm dealing with like a three-year-old or, or something like that.

First off, it's corruption all over the place because, okay, you give me a million bucks, you're the cult of iOS.

Just kidding, the tariffs route.

We'll wait back there now.

98% of the companies in America who are dependent upon exports for their well-being are small and medium-sized business.

Another CEO I spoke to this weekend, a friend of mine from my fraternity at college, he has a specialty products company.

You know, when you go to a conference and all the cups, the fleeces, the banners, banners the signage i have a lot i'm wearing one right now there you go okay

that's a big business he has a family-run business that he's worked at for 30 years since we got out of college he's built probably a 10 or 12 million dollar business 130 employees has put three kids through college lived a really nice life right

slowly but surely over the last 30 years Everything's gone to China.

About 80% of his products are produced out of China.

He also has to go down to the port and sign a check for a couple million bucks, which he doesn't have to get the shit off the boat.

He's told China to stop shipping everything.

And he doesn't have time to figure out new rooting relationships.

He's basically said, Scott, this is COVID times 10.

I'm not going to get any relief.

I don't know when this is coming to an end.

And literally, my business has come to a halt.

At campuses, And I know this firsthand, some of the biggest organizations, companies, recruiters have said the following.

We're putting a pause on interviews and hiring.

And a pause sounds benign, but when you pause hiring for three months for new grads out of college, in three months when they resume, they don't double the pace.

They basically reduce hiring for 25 or 50% for that year.

It's not as if they decide, now we're going to go crazy with hiring when we start again.

So you have a reduction in the number of jobs for kids coming out of college.

You have stocks that are going to get the shitcacked out of them.

You have small and medium-sized businesses that don't know what to do.

You have earnings calls, which are going to be an absolute shit show.

And you have the threat of stagflation.

And all of this is the chickens coming to roost because countries don't go out of business because they're invaded.

They go out of business because they go broke.

And we have borrowed so much fucking money.

We are so debt laden that we no longer have that bullet to fire.

I mean, one of the things that's very, that's astonishing here is that we think we have choices.

And that's the problem with this entire thing: we do not have the choices we think.

And this is not being an America like is a bunch of losers.

This is self-inflicted damage that we're doing to ourselves.

Definition of on goal.

You know, exactly, right?

We should be running, like just three months ago, you're talking about how the U.S.

is dominating everything, right?

When the transition was happening three or four months ago.

Now we are just doing it to ourselves.

And I think most people understand that, but we have to move on.

But this is just what is a fucking disaster.

Now, Apple stock and NVIDIA stock is up today because they're hoping that these things stay in place, but they might not.

And so you might see an impact.

Lots of shares are down right now.

Apple and NVIDIA are up because they've gotten this break, but who knows what's coming?

Because this is this idea that he wants to continue to hold over people's head that he could grab these anytime.

Anyone who can't get in on this gravy train, you use the Vietnam thing.

I used it yesterday on one of our socials.

This is like if you're not on the helicopter out of Saigon, you are fucked.

Like everyone else is fucked.

We'll see what political implications that has, but

we'll see where it goes.

Anyway, Scott, let's go on a quick break when we come back.

The antitrust trial that Mark Zuckerberg tries so hard to shut down.

And he looked so nice at the inauguration.

We'll get to that.

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Scott, we're back.

Apparently, putting on a tie and kissing up to Trump didn't do the job.

The FTC is facing off against Meta in a blockbuster antitrust trial getting underway this week.

The case goes back to Trump's first term in 2020, if you can believe it, with the government alleging Meta violated competition laws by acquiring Instagram.

And WhatsApp, for its part, Meta, says regulators should be supporting innovation and it also faces fierce competition from TikTok, Snap, and other platforms.

I find this to be a little bit of a weak trial,

be honest with you.

I think there's others that are stronger, but the trial is expected to last about seven to eight weeks.

Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg will be called to the stand, among others.

This is the case that Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to stop.

It's interesting that Trump has not intervened.

Zuckerberg has visited the White House three times since Trump took office.

Meta also donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund and settled a lawsuit with Trump for $25 million back in January, of which they did nothing.

It also just named former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick to Meta's board.

She's also the wife of Senator David McCormick from Pennsylvania.

FTC head Andrew Ferguson has been vocal about reigning in tech, but also said he'd obey lawful orders if Trump asked him to drop the suit.

I think he would.

He's been wearing the Trump.

Have you seen the gold-headed Trump that people are wearing?

I think it was him.

Yeah, I think it was Ferguson that was wearing it.

Anyway, oh, Brendan Carr was wearing it.

Excuse me, the head of the FCC.

So he said he would follow what Trump says.

And

thoughts on this?

If Meta loses, the remedy could be divesting Instagram and WhatsApp.

The judge who will decide the case for the remedy is James Boseberg, who's been clashing with Trump over deportations and many other issues.

Talk about this case a little bit and what you think will happen here.

It's going on, so it's not been stopped by any means.

Well, Zuck is the most disliked person in America under the age of 30.

He's got a two-thirds unfavorable rating.

Yeah, it is kind of crazy.

He's even less popular than Musk.

And

think about when you're the most disliked person amongst a group of people who is literally ground zero for for your product and two-thirds of those people use your product and yet you are the most disliked person in America.

I'm I'm hopeful.

I had Jonathan Cantor on Prof G and Jonathan said explain who he is.

He was the former head of antitrust at the, was he at the DOJ?

He was at justice, right?

I said, I'm really sad that you and Lena are gone.

I just don't see anything happening.

And he said, he actually said, you know, you underestimate some of the people that

are still there.

There's still some people there that are pretty committed and quite frankly, sort of antitrust badasses that are going to make a very powerful argument.

I've become so cynical, Kara.

I know what I want to happen.

I think that they're going to play slowball.

I mean, look at how strategic Zuckerberg is.

He put Dana White on the board.

He's put this basically this Trumpite on the board.

He's figured out the existential threat to my business.

isn't distribution, isn't innovation, it's political.

And so I am absolutely muscling up with all sorts of contacts into the White House.

And the reality is this White House can be bought.

And not only can the White House be bought, so can the Democratic caucus with enough money.

So I believe they have become masters at slowing these things down and letting them die a slow death.

I hope, I hope I'm wrong.

These companies have figured out a way to avoid all regulation.

I don't see why this would be any different.

I think they're surprised the trial is going forward.

And let me just read from the opening statements by the two lawyers.

This is Daniel Matheson, the FTC's lead litigator.

For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed.

The reason we are here is Meta broke the deal.

They decided that competition was too hard.

It'd be easier to buy out their rivals than compete with them.

This is the buyer-bury argument.

Now, Meta's lawyers, this is a guy named Mark Hansen from a big law firm, Kellogg Hanson.

This case is a grab bag of FTC theories at war with fact fact and at war with law.

The facts are going to prove the FTC's theories are all wrong.

You know,

it is a difficult chart.

I've talked to a lot of lawyers.

The FTC would like it to divest these companies.

Legal experts say it might be hard to win.

I'll read directly from the New York Times.

That's because the government must prove something unknowable that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, wouldn't have achieved the same success without the acquisitions.

It's also extremely rare to try to unwind mergers approved years before.

So that's one of the difficult ones, even though this is somewhat of a bipartisan effort.

It's the, just for people to know, there's three going around

to go to trial.

The DOJ won its case against Google.

A federal judge is hearing arguments about remedies and a potential breakup.

And there's a separate trial with the DOJ for monopolizing ad technology by Google.

That's still going on.

Justice Department has also sued Apple and the FTC has sued Amazon accusing companies of antitrust violations.

Those trials are coming up later just for people to get a background.

But if they do spin it off, it would be unprecedented.

Well, I mean, the baby bills are broken up.

The aluminum, the sisters, the seven sisters, or whatever,

it does happen.

And generally speaking, when we look back in economic history, there's never been a breakup that hasn't turned out well for everybody.

So it's one of the few things that kind of always works are breakups.

The problem is, to your point, we should have a much higher bar for approving mergers because, quite quite frankly, the job of the government is to prevent a tragedy of the commons.

And the easiest way to do that is preventive.

And that is not let these companies be acquired to begin with.

I mean, even there's been a lot of officials in the government say, we screwed up letting Meta acquire Instagram.

They probably should have never let Google acquire what was a double-click and or YouTube.

That was Google, yeah.

Google, yeah.

But so there probably needs what this says is it is very unit is very difficult to unwind a merger and force a spend.

What is easier is to block an acquisition.

And I think the bar should be pretty low to block an acquisition for a company once it gets above a certain dominance in its own category.

I think that's what the argument they make so effectively, that resonates with the public, is that capitalism means making more money and they should let just be capitalist and the market do its thing.

What they don't realize is that

the concentration of industry has led to massively higher prices, whether it's chicken, whether it's pharma, whether it's healthcare.

Right.

This is harder.

And think about the way I'd look at it: the hard part is some of these costs are non-economic, but for God's sakes, look at the rents and the increase in emotional prices that Meta has levied on every parent globally.

Yeah, and add bad businesses that have been destroyed because they dominated and stuff like that.

There's those, these are just harder to do.

Just for people, just a little more.

We're going to talk about it.

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for a billion dollars.

I covered this.

And then in 2014, it paid $19 billion for WhatsApp.

Both were crazy prices at the time, although Instagram certainly has yielded a lot.

There is a paper trail of emails between executives talking about the startups because they were threats.

I wrote about that at the time.

The lawyers mentioned the documents.

Zuckerberg was so paranoid.

And he talked about in emails neutralizing a potential competitor.

And then Zuckerberg wrote to Sandberg, Messenger isn't beating WhatsApp.

Instagram was growing so much faster than us.

We had to buy them for a billion.

So because they're such bad product people at Facebook, and I cannot underscore this enough, they had to buy or bury.

It's a very famous phrase in tech, buy or bury.

And so

that's what the government is alleging here.

And also keeping it out of.

other competitors hands is another one to build a moat around the monopoly.

And so WhatsApp was that for them.

So it should be really, really interesting, I think.

We'll see what happens in this trial.

But so far, the Trump administration is not doing pay or play here.

They're just letting it go, which is, to me, interesting.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Well, yeah, he doesn't like these guys.

And it's,

one, it looks as if Instagram.

would be worth about $100 to $200 billion right now.

Now, granted, it might not have had the same level of success had it not been able to cooperate and share data.

But what's interesting is within about 40 days of one another was the best and likely the worst acquisition in tech history.

And they looked remarkably similar at the time.

And the best

you would argue, maybe

other than the acquisition of YouTube.

Brilliant.

But Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars.

It's worth $100 to $200, if not more now.

And within a month or 45 days, the worst acquisition in tech, do you remember what it is?

I'm thinking it's Yahoo.

Exactly.

Tumblr.

I broke that story, Mr.

scott galloway i know you did uh so so uh facebook acquires instagram for a billion it's worth a hundred to two hundred billion yahoo slash marissa mayer acquires tumblr for 1.2 billion and i believe about seven years later they sold it for three million dollars yeah it's worth nothing now i just ran into some tumblr people what a great site that was though you know what i mean it really was i like tumblr a lot it was a very innovative site but you're right it's just this is just come on This is what Mark Zuckerberg played from the Bill Gates Buyer Berry

playbook.

Sorry, this is what this is.

We'll see if they can decide if

Facebook will make the argument, Meta will make the argument that there's plenty of competition and that there's lots and lots.

There's, you know, whatever, blue sky, whatever.

But the fact of the matter is,

two things, both for Google and for Facebook.

When have you seen a new fresh social network get built, if not buried, like, you know, next Snapchat is doing its level best, but Mark keeps stealing his things because he can't buy it.

He couldn't buy it.

And so he decided to bury it.

That's what they did with Snapchat.

And when have you last seen a new search engine that really had any kind of traction?

And you were close with the guy who did the one who left Google and tried to do it.

It's impossible.

Nobody's going to be, nobody can switch.

The switch costs are too high.

And then when Apple does a deal with these companies and makes them the de facto map or

or whatever map or search engine, it sort of puts the nail in the coffin for every other competitor.

And the similar thing we just talked about with the tariffs.

If you can get an out like Apple did, you're great.

If you can't, like your furniture guy, you're fucked.

Like that's really it.

And this is.

It's corruption.

It's corruption everywhere.

Yeah.

It's be it's an autocrat.

It's not systemic.

And also, just to put a fine point on the concentration of industry, this is happening up and down industries.

Yeah.

U.S.

higher education is a cartel.

There's two great universities in every city, and the people who give you accreditation such that you have access to student loans are run by the incumbents.

My old company, L2, got acquired by a large research company that everybody hates and everybody uses.

And I couldn't figure out after they acquired us the series of decisions they made.

I felt like it was George Costanza, where everything I thought they should do, they did the exact opposite.

I just didn't understand the decisions they were making.

And it finally dawned on me about 18 months later, and I'm just speculating.

I'm like, I think they thought, okay, we'll pay 3% of our market cap for this company because they're nipping at our heels around CMOs.

And if they will squeeze them for cash flow, and then we'll put them out of business.

It was, I think, I'm like, I think I've just been aqua killed.

Yep, yep, aqua killed.

That's what it is.

Yeah, that buyer baron.

And it's like, okay, a competitor goes away.

They get some cash flow back.

And quite frankly, for two or or 3% dilution, just not having someone running around nipping at your heels, establishing a wedge in your business.

And I remember thinking, why on earth are they doing nothing with us?

Why are they not driving the business?

Why do not they understand me?

I'm a genius.

I've been there.

They've domesticated me.

And then you left.

And then you left.

Poor me with my big fucking bag of money.

You did get a bag of money.

But this is what happens.

That's what they have.

They have bags and bags of money, everybody.

They show up to an entrepreneur and they say, tell you what, we're going to make you rich.

Just stop bothering and competing against us.

Stop bothering us and stop competing.

In this case, Trump ain't playing.

So we'll see where it goes from here.

One of the things that Meta is doing, I got texted by a Meta person today.

They're like, can you bully this?

And I'm like, yes.

Yes, we can.

Sure, we can.

And by the way, you know what?

If they take off Instagram,

good for capitalism if they do.

If they take off WhatsApp, good for capitalism.

If they spin off YouTube, good for capitalism.

We're capitalists, Scott and Tara, because we think that's good for this country.

It's good for competition.

And maybe you'll do a little better in your other things if you have to not just put.

It's good for the stock price.

Yeah.

If you can't just

buy your wife or husband or whatever, it's good for everybody.

All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, Blue Origin sends an all-female crew into space.

We must be very careful here, but nonetheless.

We'll find out what God has to say.

Oh, I can't wait to see what you have to say.

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Scott, we're back.

El Salvador's president says he won't order the return of a Maryland man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported.

They've admitted he is mistakenly deported.

President Bukele, who I'm just going to call sleazy club owner, appeared with President Trump at the White House.

By the way, he wasn't wearing a tie.

I think it was very

stately of him to appear looking like he's about to, you know, do an ecstasy dance or something.

The two appeared as Trump administration was digging into its heels, refusing to bring Garcia back to the U.S.

At one point,

Salvadoran president Bukele called him a terrorist.

There's no proof of the

how can I smuggle a terrorist back into the country.

Stop it, you unctuous piece of shit.

A Supreme Court ruling is directing the government to, quote, facilitate the return.

That's a weird word.

Now Trump administration is arguing that what facilitate means means saying they just need to remove any obstacles to return and not actually bring him back.

Also, the agenda for today's White House meeting, political reports, a team of defense contractors is pitching the White House on a plan to expand deportations to El Salvador.

I'm not sure what's more frightening, the legal implications, the administration cozing up to another unsavory leader, what this guy is.

This one calls himself the world's coolest dictator.

He's certainly the world's most oily dictator I've seen of late.

He just seems just completely just in it for the money.

He's very popular, let me say, in El Salvador.

I know a lot of people from Salvador and they like him because he cleaned up a lot of the gang violence there by just arresting everybody.

Very similar to

the Philippines with Duterte.

But of course, he's gone overboard, as they all do, with unlimited power.

And so they're just pretending this guy's a terrorist.

And just, you know, when reporters were justifiably asking about this, Trump mocked them.

Then Rubio jumped in about that the Supreme Court has no purchase over

the way the government decides to do foreign policy, only the president does.

What a waste of breath that guy has become.

So anyway, thoughts, legal implications, world's coolest dictator?

Look, El Salvador.

was

the murder capital of the world.

And so this guy's very popular, but basically,

basically, he just started rounding up people who had, had you know a tattoo that said they had a gang affiliation so there's tremendous collateral damage there and you have to decide do you opt for rights and with some crime and inconvenience and cost or do you go full autocrat and we said this on the last show

when you round up people it takes a different complexion this is a form of rounding up people this is there are there are just some innocent people being rounded up and what is just insane is these people supposedly you know, are Christians, right?

They're all very fond of holding the Bible.

If you know that you have taken an innocent person and sent them to a hellscape, and Bill Maher summarized it perfectly.

We can bring a man back from space, but we can't get someone back from El Salvador.

Of course, we could get them back.

Of course, we could get them back.

And then the weirdest moment.

was this weirdo Christy Noam posing it with guns after having a Sephora explode all over her face.

It felt like a fucking Cinemax film where she was going to start having sex with all the prisoners.

It's like, yeah, I agree.

It's like, this is just a snuff film.

This is weird people.

And also, you can't, you don't hold Bibles when you start taking people and sending them

incorrectly, unjustifiably.

It's like, for God's sakes, have you no sense of decency?

It's just...

And why wouldn't Bukele take our money and create a Guantanamo there?

That's what he's doing.

Why wouldn't he take our money?

It's good for him.

And he doesn't care who is innocent.

By the way, it's not his business to care who's innocent or not.

But if we send someone who's innocent there, and it looks like many of them were or had no criminal background that were sent to these prisons, Venezuelans in particular, because Venezuela won't take these

their people back, you can't send them to prison.

You just can't.

Put them in another country and let them go, I guess, if you have to do with this heinous stuff you're doing.

But to put them in a prison and they had, they're guilty, I mean, was, was it 60 Minutes Showed Up?

They had 75% of them had no criminal background whatsoever.

They just had a tattoo to their mother with a crown on it.

Just really.

It's just, look, I mean, I'm sorry, if that was the case, Pete Hegseth would be in a Salvadoran prison.

He's got a lot of tattoos.

So I just, just, it's really,

the worst thing is them trying to parse what the

after Trump promised he would follow what the Supreme Court said, he's not following what the Supreme Court said.

The same thing they're doing.

They were supposed to let back in AP into the press cycle.

They're not letting, they're barring AP, even though it was, they were ruled against.

They just don't do it.

They're lawless

as a government.

I think you summarize it perfectly.

I don't understand.

The whole idea of roundups.

Luis Noslasho, just be careful.

When you tolerate this, just wait for the knock on your door.

And the other theme this goes to is the following: the only thing I know about these people is who's not being deported, and that is rich people.

Yeah, I can think of a lot of criminals, rich criminals.

Well, you're again in America, the whole idea of a constitution and laws is to protect the most vulnerable.

The rich are protected by the law, they're not bound by it.

I love that line.

And the poor are bound by the law, but not protected by it.

And

I can't name a person.

Nobody in the top quintile of income earning Americans or who is here illegal who has money has been taken.

This is what is so mendacious, so unchristian, so un-American, such a violation of our Constitution, is that the basis of your quality as a government is how the poorest and most vulnerable are treated, whether it's a 14-year-old who's a victim of incest or an undocumented worker.

And by the way, folks, I mean, let's just go to undocumented workers as we demonize people for a bump in our Q rating.

A third of fast food workers are undocumented.

You could take the top 10 fast food companies, do a statistically significant sample of raids, and say 22%,

25% of McDonald's or jack-in-the-box workers are undocumented.

We're fining you $100,000 a day per percentage.

And guess what?

You'd end it.

Here's the dirty secret.

Immigration is the secret sauce of America, but the most profitable part of immigration is illegal immigration because they pay Social Security taxes, but

they don't collect Social Security.

They pay taxes for our cops' environment, but they don't call cops because they're worried about being deported.

So we have turned a blind eye.

If we wanted to stop this problem, we would find the employers, but we're not interested in doing that.

We want to pretend that this is a runaway problem.

And to be clear, it did get run away, it got out of hand, 250,000 people crossing the border in December of 23.

But folks, we have purposefully ignored this problem because illegal immigrants are super fucking profitable.

That's right.

Except, you know what, Scott?

They're profitable in terms of creating prisons and putting them in it.

It's profitable for a very different group of people is that we round them up and we put them in these camps, which is what we did with the Japanese.

And we have a shameful part of our history.

You know, a lot of these people are also like, let's figure out who, like, the woman who got grabbed off the street.

Remember that video with all the people in the masks coming up to her?

She has not done, they've found out she's done done nothing wrong.

She's done nothing wrong except write an op-ed that was vaguely and politely against what was happening.

Like she just, and now foreign students here in this country are so scared.

And I've heard from many, are scared of saying anything or doing anything.

And if you have even a minor like weed violation, you're getting taken.

Like whatever excuse they can have, something you wrote or something else, you can get taken.

And you should have to appear.

It's called habeas corpus, everyone.

Requires a person in custody to appear before a judge.

It's one of the core fundamental rights that protects against arbitrary state action.

And he is trying to suspend habeas corpus for ridiculous reasons, for ridiculous and nonsensical reasons.

We're all in danger and we're not.

So anyway, world's coolest dictator, you're not cool.

You're uncool.

If you have to call yourself the world's coolest dictator, you're not cool.

And speaking of not cool, let's move on to some lighter news, other wastes of time and money.

In a giant publicity summary for Jeff Bezos, six women are launched into space aboard a giant penis.

Lauren Sanchez, Katie Perry, Gail King, and three others made a 10-minute trip on Blue Origin's new Shepard rocket and returned safely to Earth, thank goodness.

Noted science aficionados Oprah Winfrey, Chris Jenner, and Chloe Kardashian watch from the launch site in West Texas.

It's the first time an all-female crew has been in space since 1963.

And yes, Scott, they did fly above the Carmen line, just so you know.

So, reaction, Scott?

Their outfits?

I don't know if you heard, but they called Houston and they said,

Houston, we have a problem.

And Houston said, What is it?

And he said, Well, you should know what it is.

That's your joke.

Actually, actually, Kara, I was hoping that we'd get to see them masturbate because I'd like to see them

defile gravity.

I could keep going.

I could keep going.

Hey, look,

at the the end of the day, it's such a

fine.

Good for them.

Good for them.

I'm fine.

They can fly up there with their outfits, their slinky outfits, whatever they want to do.

Here's what I don't like.

Pretending it's a feminist movement.

It's just not.

It's just a bunch of ladies.

And their interviews show that because they're talking about their eyeshadow and their eyeliner and et cetera.

They're going up there.

It's a total PR stunt.

You are not here to save women.

I'm sorry.

If you wanted to save women, you'd be saving the woman who was grabbed off the street.

You'd be saving all kinds of things,

or you'd be, you'd be pushing up against Facebook and saying we really shouldn't be doing things to young girls that make them feel bad.

Like, this is not, of all the things you could do to help women, this is not one of them.

And that's how I feel about it.

But have fun.

You don't know who a real female astronaut is?

Sally Ride.

Yeah.

A PhD in physics.

PhD in physics.

Learned how to operate that crazy robotic arm.

And as Megan Kelly would say, openly lesbian and spent a ton ton of time in space.

She's openly.

Didn't make a lot of money.

I mean, Sally Ride

is our astronaut.

These folks.

I agree.

There were some science people on board.

There were some science on

board.

Whatever there were, but still, it's just a stunt.

It's a stunt.

It's not feminist.

It's just a stunt.

And

how much fun Oprah and all the rest of you have, but there's some serious shit happening.

So maybe stop pretending you're doing something you're not.

Have at it.

I don't resent them for it.

Have at it.

Have fun.

Go ahead.

Have at it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just don't like the feminist thing.

Okay.

Okay.

Last thing.

Sally wasn't openly lesbian, just so you know.

Oh, she wasn't?

Well, I meant I was a play on.

Notice how no one has ever described me as openly heterosexual.

No one has ever said openly heterosexual podcaster.

That was my favorite part about her attack on you,

as if you're not allowed to be openly lesbian.

I am openly lesbian.

She's openly lesbian.

At least you'd have the

real old tale.

At least, good madam, you'd have the dignity to be a closeted lesbian.

Closeted lesbian.

I've been in a closet.

I was never really in a closet.

I wasn't a closet.

That's not true.

I was not openly lesbian at the beginning of my journey of lesbianity, which started at age four.

But we're not going into it with Megan Kelly.

What a she-devil she is.

Anyway, last thing, Bill Maher says he wasn't high at his White House dinner with President Trump, even though he also claims that Trump was, quote, gracious and measured.

The comedian described his March 31st visit with the president during a monologue at the top of his Friday show.

People felt it was controversial.

The cader was organized by illustrious statesman Kid Rock.

Bill said that he and musician, quote, share a belief that there's got to be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away, although Bill's pretty fucking good at that.

Here's what he had to say about his interaction with Trump.

He's much more self-aware than he lets on in public.

Look, I get it.

It doesn't matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian.

It matters who he is on the world stage.

I'm just taking as a positive that this person exists because everything I've ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy.

Okay.

I'm going to be on Bill Maher's show in a couple of weeks.

I think you are too.

Are you?

Be on Steve Bay Beach.

No, I was supposed to be on Friday, and

I had a tough time trying to figure out a way to be on with Steve Bannon and I'm something about the idea

in a little way normalizing Nazi salutes.

I just, I don't know.

Go for you.

I I didn't know how to thread the needle there.

But anyway, that's great.

We talked about it.

I'm glad you did that.

I called you and I asked your advice.

I called your advice.

I said, Douglas.

I called you and asked your advice.

Yeah, you're a great panelist there.

Go ahead.

You start.

You start.

I have some thoughts too.

Look, I think Bill Maher did and Joan Mika did the right thing.

I think when the president calls you and says, come to the Oval Office, I think you go.

And I think that him trying to show him not immediately going to the

to the kind of polarized this guy's a fucking idiot and

acknowledging that he's a charming guy or that maybe trying to provide some comfort that he's not is not as crazy as we think and he's self-aware and he listens.

I think that's important.

The only thing, and this might be my bias, is that someone who

is so angry and aggressive, and I'm talking about the president now against people, I've heard this about President Trump, that when he meets you, he's nice and he's charming.

And then a few minutes later, he'll basically say vile things about you to his 200 million followers.

I think someone who's nice to you to your face and then shitposts you behind your back in a way that really hurts your reputation.

I think there's a word for that: asshole.

I much prefer someone, and I think you're like this.

I think you're more likely.

Who do you want?

If someone's, if it's like, if you're going to be critical of someone, try and do it in a constructive way to them personally and then speak well of them or at least gently behind their back.

I think that is the worst role model for our young people.

Yeah, I agree.

I agree.

But I'm glad he did it.

I think he was smart to do it.

I think it's a dignified thing to do.

I thought it's an impossible needle to thread because people who hate Trump are angry at him for going.

They're angry at him for acknowledging the president has some positive qualities.

I think it's kind of an impossible position or needle to thread for Bill.

Well, here's what I think happened.

He was getting very sharp on Trump, very sharp, very tough.

And they decided to neuter him a little bit by being charming.

I think he has been doing some really, you know, he has been, he tries to do the down the middle contrarian thing a lot of the time, but he has been done some of the sharpest attacks on Trump among comics, and which there are many, by the way.

So I think they were trying, I thought they were trying to neuter him and it worked in that regard.

Now, you know, look, I think it's right to go to the dinner.

That would be really interesting.

But to say, oh, look, he's charming in person.

Like, I'm sure Goebbels was thrilling at a cocktail party, my friend.

Like, are you fucking kidding me?

Like, sure.

Yeah.

Lots of people, by the way.

Lussolini was great to party.

Lussolini was so much fucking fun.

He'd put a hat.

He'd put a lampshade on his head and we'd dance all night.

And, you know, and, you know, the Tarantella.

I like, I don't know what to say.

Like, I don't, I just am like, so, so, Bill, I won't bring this up with Bill if he lets me on now, but

was he, was he lying to you?

At dinner or to the world?

Which one?

Because he is a terrible person publicly.

Terrible.

The stuff he did today, terrible.

um and it's not there's nothing charming about keeping a person who is unjustly jailed in jail and then laughing about it and then haranguing reporters about it there's nothing you know charming about most of the things he's there's nothing charming about ruining your friend's business there's nothing charming about it so i i just honestly that's what i kept thinking of like i'm sure like any nasty piece of is charming person and there are a lot of them that i have dealt with but you should have gone but you don't give me this.

He's charming because he's not.

He's just not charming.

And he's, he'll probably, the minute you go after him again, which I hope and pray you will, and I know you will, actually, because

he doesn't pull punches a lot.

Sometimes he does, but he doesn't really as a comic.

So the minute you go after him again, he's like, I was so nice to him.

I made him dinner.

I was going to, I showed him off the White House.

I showed him my bedroom, whatever.

He's going to come after you.

So that's, I don't know, whatever.

Anyway, but I probably, would you go to dinner if he asked us?

Do you think you'd ever ask us?

Do you just give a fuck about us?

Well, I agree.

We're not on his radar stream.

I said this about Joe Mika.

I believe it's about Bill Morrow.

I think if the president calls you and asks you to come to the White House, you go.

I just.

No, I'll go.

I just wouldn't be as polite in person.

I wouldn't be like, oh, hey, can I have a role?

That's the kind of thing.

Anyway, we'll see.

We'll see what happens.

I'll tell this to Bill's face when I see him.

Anyway, Scott, one more quick, because I do that, Bill.

I say things to your face that I say in front of your back, behind your back, anywhere near your back.

He's my hero.

I know.

That guy's my hero.

I know.

I'm glad you didn't go, Scott Galloway.

Now I like you even more.

Ugh, get along.

Is that possible?

Is that possible?

Good for you, Scott Galloway.

Good for you.

I know you like being on that show.

I do.

I love it.

I know.

We'll have him back, Bill.

Don't be a douche nos.

I'll have him back.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for Wins and Fails.

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Okay, scott let's hear some wins and fails may i start yeah you go ahead let me just say

two things

television is so happy place for me these days watching different things and this weekend there's two shows g20 with viola davis where she plays a kick ass woman president who like kicks ass she actually they go to the joe summit there's a south african guy who takes over all the g20 it's called g20 excuse me and

she kicks ass and wins out.

It's like Harrison Ford's Air Force One.

And let me just say, I love Viola Davis.

I love her kicking ass and killing South African terrorists.

And or maybe they're from Australia.

I don't know.

They had that accent.

So good.

It was so bad and so good at the same time.

It was Air Force One, but Viola Davis.

So there was some good acting in there too.

Fan fucking tastic.

Second one, Hacks, the season premiere.

Again, two women,

Hannah Einbender and

Gene Smart.

Oh my God, it has risen a level of like it was already one of my favorite shows.

I've heard it's great.

This season, the two of them go at some point.

I'm like, just kiss you two, because they're going, they're insults of each other and the going back and forth.

And then there's a poignant moment in the first two episodes about heartbreak.

And I just love this show so much.

So win, win, win, win, win with these badass women.

I have to say, and they're just, they're, they're just wonderful.

The fail is obviously Doge falling short of its goal.

It was supposed to save $2 trillion and it went to $1 trillion.

Now he said, and Elon said in a meeting that it's $150 billion.

Dave Fahrenhold, as always, he's now at the New York Times, showed the math to be wrong.

Again, that it's probably even less money that

he's saving, but we don't even know how much he's costing for the savings.

that's not in in this so he's not saving any money and he's causing incredible harm and cutting things without thinking about it and doing it surgically so we're not benefited as a people on stuff we should reform government as everybody thinks so what an incredible waste of our time and energy to have this ridiculous person prance all over the place saying he's saving money.

And then, of course, he's not delivering.

It's the same thing that this is a theme of his life right now is over promising and under delivering, delivering, whether it's the cyber truck, whether it's autonomous cars.

This is just such a, such a ridiculous thing, this Doge thing, given how much energy and time and pain it has caused people unnecessarily.

That is my fail.

I like it.

And

I was going to do a prediction, but I'll try and reshape it as a win and a fail.

The fail is what you, I'll just piggyback off what you said.

Essentially, if this audit proved anything, it's that there's a lot less inefficiency in waste and fraud than we thought.

I mean, this is about as clean a bill of health as anyway, because they were dying to find fraud and

they just didn't find very much.

And most of their claims of fraud and savings ended up to be fraudulent themselves and that they were lies.

And we predicted he would exit.

He's gone.

I think he's already gone.

I think he's already figured out this.

He was with Trump the other night at that stupid WTO.

Yeah, but that's proximity to power.

I think Doge is basically the curtain is closing on Doge.

It just didn't work.

It was a distraction, fine, but

it's not working.

The reality is Americans, again, see above, not willing to endure pain.

They have to face a hard decision here.

It's the hard thing about the hard things.

And that is if we're serious about

being a country that doesn't spend $7 trillion and taking $5 trillion in tax receipts, there's only two things you can do, folks.

You either have to cut entitlements or raise taxes.

And the answer is yes.

And at some point, we're going to have to figure out a way to do that.

And, or, or just wait till we get, you know, shoved in a corner and the people who own our debt can basically start calling the shots, which they're doing now.

In a company that gets so highly levered, basically the bank owes you.

And this is what's happening to us.

Our creditors are beginning to owe us.

This is Doge.

Doge was jazz hands.

It didn't, it cleaned bill of health.

When we decide to elect a grown-up, we're going to have to make some very hard decisions here.

My win, and it's sort of win, but this really was my prediction: you're going to see a flurry of deals.

You know, the art of the deal, the basic premise was, okay,

he's a negotiator.

He's bringing these people to the table.

First off, we just need to dispel the notion this guy's a good business person.

He's a rich kid that would have made more money if he'd given, taken all of his massive inheritance and put it into ETFs.

His business career is basically a series of bankrupted companies and unpaid subcontractors.

So let's just stop this nonsense that he has any fucking clue what he's doing in terms of business.

He has unwittingly inspired unbelievable, an unbelievable torrent tsunami of deals, cross-border trade deals, but it won't be with us.

The EU is talking to Latin America.

Japan, South Korea, and China are talking.

This has set off incredible incentive for for a ton of nations around the world to start thinking about free trade zones, to become more dependent upon each other, to take the cost of reconfiguring their supply chain and excising America from the supply chain.

They're thinking, how can we make up for some of that lost economic growth that this is going to cost us?

I know, let's lower each other's trade barriers.

The unwitting, unintended consequence of this.

is that the U.S.

is about to trade off a lot of its own prosperity and it's going to leak to other Western nations who are talking to each other and cooperating and coordinating now.

You're going to see trade deals between Mexico and Canada.

You're going to see trade deals between the EU and China.

This is going to, the intended,

what they claim they were going to accomplish for America, they've accomplished for everyone else but America.

That's true.

They're going to get all the avocados in Canada and Mexicans are going to get all the good maple syrup.

Do you hear that, people?

It's finished.

Avocado toast and pancakes are done for us as Americans.

Much less lumber or gypsum drywall.

You want to talk about the cost of building right now, gypsum drywall from Mexico or lumber?

I just renovated my house.

I'm so pleased that I did it last year.

My contractor said it would have been double.

I'm interviewing Mark Carney this afternoon.

What would you ask him?

Oh, what?

What?

Yeah.

Hi Galloway.

You reached out.

For what?

Which show?

Which show?

I wanted to do it for Pivot of Raging Moderates.

He said he wanted to do it for Profitty Conversations.

I think he wants to talk about young men.

Yeah, good.

Well, I heard you have, by the way, you have another podcast you didn't tell me about?

Which one's this?

The what, the man, the men thing with Scaramucci and Smercotti?

Oh, that's a limited series.

He called me and said, let's do four pods.

Yeah, it looks good for your book coming out.

Good.

I'm very excited.

You cat around on me quite a bit.

That's okay.

I don't mind.

I do.

I just want to know about it.

I just want to do it.

It's alcohol.

I hope it has nothing to do with our relationship.

I just like to wake up with a strange man's lipstick all over my day.

I want to, okay.

okay i want

i know you did i'm ignoring it completely i would like to make your book like best selling defile gravity defile gravity katie

i want to make your book a time let me hear you roar i can't believe i you 90s pop star wonton bitch

oh i'm sorry go ahead he defied gravity anyway let me just say for one thing scott said there's a lot of reporting from rolling stone and puck that he's annoying people at the white house that question if he's high and republicans on capitol hill are no longer terrified of him either.

That said, Scott, only thing is he's leaving, the Washington Post reported today incorrectly, that he's leaving Doge staffers in high power jobs at multiple federal agencies.

So he's not out of there.

He's like mold.

He's putting all kinds of stuff in the security implications and other people you don't know about that don't look like Elon Musk will still remain problematic for our country in those positions.

Just remember that.

All right.

Okay.

There you have it.

Those are good.

But please, for the love of God, watch Viola Davis kick some ass.

It's so good.

It's so cool.

I think that's just an attempt to address your PTSD and pretend that Vice President Harris won the election.

No, no, no.

She couldn't.

Vice President Harris couldn't have done this.

This was just, trust me, watch it and then call me back.

Just, I'm just telling you.

I'm just telling you.

You'll love it.

It's so much fun.

Like, because she's won, she's won an Oscar.

Isn't she?

She won an Oscar.

Whatever.

She deserves an Oscar.

She won an Emmy, an Oscar, whatever.

This woman is like a top actor, just chewing up the scenery.

It's so enjoyable.

She did one a TV show years ago called How to Get Away with Murder, which you should watch again, where she also chewed up the scenery with her Oscar-winning acting abilities.

Anyway,

she's so talented, but I love that she's doing this and just punching people in the face with the machine.

The whole thing, it's fantastic.

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.

Also, Pivot is up for a Webby Award for Best Business podcast, and we are asking for your vote.

And some of other, yours, your other podcasts are also up.

So vote for Prof G.

I don't know if An is, but in any case, vote for us.

Go to vote.webbyawards.com to cast your ballot.

We won last year and we're hoping for a twofer.

Elsewhere in the Scott and Kerr universe, I just did a whole panel on tariffs with trade law expert Raj Bala, Pucks, Bill Cohen, and Catherine Rampell from the Washington Post.

Let's listen to a quick clip.

The only way I can explain it is that we're dealing with the madness of King George type moment.

Maybe Trump is trading on the volatility, and certainly there's a lot of money to be made if you know what he's going to do from one minute to the next, which only he seems to know.

But

all of his explanations for what he is trying to do are completely incoherent and self-contradictory and come back to, well, he's just like tariffs for a really long time.

Anyway, it was a great interview.

All of them had different things to add.

Just FYI, I think Catherine Rampel is a total commer.

I think she's going to be.

Really?

I think you're going to hear her name a lot.

I think she is exceptionally talented.

She's great.

She had an outstanding moment on that show.

I think it was a fucking food fight, whatever.

CNN on Abby Florida show.

And whoever the Republican is was trying to defend Scott Jennings.

Whoever the Republicans was trying to defend.

I call him bad Scott.

He's bad Scott.

He's trying to defend Bannon.

It's like, it was a wave.

And Catherine Rampella goes, give us that wave.

Give us that wave.

And he just sat there like somebody who just been caught masturbating or defiling gravity.

Yeah, defiling gravity.

Yeah.

Anyway, we love her.

All right, Scott, that's another show.

Thanks for listening to Pivot.

Be sure to like and subscribe our YouTube channel.

We'll be back on Friday.

Scott, read us out.

Today's show was produced by Larry Neyman Zoy, Marcus, Taylor Griffin, Grin Ruff, and Kate Gallagher.

Attorney Intertott engineered this episode.

Jim Mackle edited the video.

Thanks also to Jude Burrows, Ms.

Severio, and Dan Shalon.

Nishak Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

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

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

We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business care.

Have a great rest of the week.