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

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Speaker 16 No one has ever described me as openly heterosexual. No one has ever said openly heterosexual podcaster.

Speaker 17 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 16 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 17 Where are you, Scott? You just, you're somewhere strange with the wallpaper situation going on.

Speaker 16 I am at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, where I just returned from getting

Speaker 16 from the Department of Motor Vehicles at Palm Beach Gardens, where my son is now a licensed driver.

Speaker 17 How exciting. That's great.
I thought you were at Mar-a-Lago or something like that.

Speaker 16 No,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 and he gave me the cold shoulder i think it's because i refuse to have him on my pod i don't know he was

Speaker 16 like cold to me who rfk rfk no memon and i are friends uh rfk yeah was suit was noticeably cold to me he's very handsome though i did notice that because he's a crank

Speaker 17 did you see the latest he's put i don't even want to go into it four months until autism is solved

Speaker 17 not just that all his stuff he's taking information off he's saying vaccines aren't necessarily a good thing

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 Okay, all right, okay, all right.

Speaker 16 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 and service establishments.

Speaker 16 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%.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And so I describe them as 64s, and that is six-star prices with four-star service.

Speaker 17 No, okay.

Speaker 16 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 Beverly's Hotel or, I don't know, at the Langham in London.

Speaker 16 I mean, there's just a ton of great hotels of great service. This is not one of them.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 16 No, RFK is not here. I don't want to dispute.
I don't want to disparate. It's a beautiful hotel in Palm Beach Valley.
It's 74 and sunny. God, so nice here.

Speaker 17 That's good for you. It's very nice here in Washington, too.
Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today.

Speaker 17 There's also a lot of tech stuff going on, including Meta's big antitrust trial and, of course, women in space.

Speaker 17 We'll get to that.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Trump posted on True Social on Sunday that products are just moving to a different tariff bucket.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Of course, Scott predicted Apple's reprieve on our Friday episode, Let's Listen.

Speaker 16 You want to enrage a cult?

Speaker 18 Take iPhones to $3,500,

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 You're going to take pushback people's retirements.

Speaker 5 Apple's going to have to withdraw all sorts of growth plans. And you want to piss off every

Speaker 12 millennial in Gen X in the world, take their iPhones to $3,500.

Speaker 7 Apple is not going to have any tariffs here.

Speaker 17 So in the interim for that, you were absolutely correct. Very good.

Speaker 16 But what was And then I was not correct.

Speaker 17 Yes, I know. So what is the deal?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 This flip-flopping is really bad.

Speaker 17 Carolyn Levitt, of course, it goes against what they were saying. We're going to make things in the U.S.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 what do you think about this flippity floppity flippity flop?

Speaker 16 The brand U.S. has become toxic uncertainty.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 One is the CEO of a huge catalog and retail company that does a lot of housewares.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 to get to the port of Long Beach when they arrive and write a check for $85 million

Speaker 16 that he wasn't expecting to write. And he has to call a CFO.
And this is a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. He's like,

Speaker 16 I can't just find 85 million bucks.

Speaker 17 The 85 is for what? To pay for the things now? Or what is the 85 for?

Speaker 16 That's the correct question because the way tariffs work is the importer, the catalog, the retailer company taking delivery of outdoor furniture from China.

Speaker 16 If these products, quote unquote, cost $60 million,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 So this individual has to come up with $85 million

Speaker 16 to get the shit off the boat. In In addition.

Speaker 17 Unless they're given a reprieve.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 he can't just let shit sit on a boat.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And when the stuff comes off the boat, re-tag 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.

Speaker 17 And wrapped, right? Whatever, if there happened to be clothing or something like that.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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,

Speaker 16 my earnings call is going to be a shit show

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 It's sort of a self-healing mechanism. In this instance, we have a reduction in consumer spending, the economy is slowing down, but the 10-year spiked 50 points.

Speaker 16 So, you have everything getting more expensive as the economy slows down. That's called stagflation, which is a bridge to a depression.
The tenure went up 50 bips in five days.

Speaker 16 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%,

Speaker 16 it's another $3.5 billion in interest payments we have to make on our national debt.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Our entire Veterans Affairs budget is $300 billion.

Speaker 16 So they have figured out a way to reduce the economy, to send the economy into what looks like a low-grade coma

Speaker 16 while interest rates are going up. This is the worst of all worlds.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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?

Speaker 17 That's what you stop doing.

Speaker 17 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,

Speaker 17 or it's rendered impossible for him to do anything. That's saying his lawlessness continues.
He's defying the Supreme Court on immigration.

Speaker 17 He's defying the, he's defying everybody on every 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.

Speaker 17 Let's talk China then, because President, this is an opportunity, as we've talked about with President Xi.

Speaker 17 He currently is visiting Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia, presenting China as a reliable ally and trading partner.

Speaker 17 China also spent exports on a wide range of critical minerals and magnets.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 What will Trump do next? Because I see him more in this press conference in the Oval Office. He's defying the Supreme Court.
He's defying the Fed. He's defying

Speaker 17 anyone he can defy. And when he makes a good decision, he defies his good decisions.
So

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 16 So I never miss a chance to boast.

Speaker 16 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 you speak to the management team of the board.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 He goes, What would you do if you were us, given what's going on in the U.S.?

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 no idea. No idea

Speaker 16 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. I said, oh, we're doing that.

Speaker 16 And going to that notion around, let's talk about China now.

Speaker 16 China since COVID or since 2019 has reduced its percentage of its total exports to the U.S. from 24 to 17%.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 The basic premise is that we can hurt them more than they can hurt us, so they will cry uncle. So

Speaker 16 let's assume we could hurt them more than they could hurt us.

Speaker 16 That is a pretty shaky thesis because while the administration wants you to believe that we're the only customer at the country club and they have to be nice to us,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 22 So yeah, we have a lot of power.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 But what they realize is that if they really hurt and kneecap their third biggest customer, it would be bad for them as well. They are not stupid.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 China has its own troubles. Here's the issue or the piece of calculus they are missing.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 I just did that today.

Speaker 16 When you talk about

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 China starves tens of millions of people when they think it's good long term for the country.

Speaker 16 Do you realize the pain threshold of America relative to China?

Speaker 16 And we think we're going to strongarm them

Speaker 16 into into doing a decision they don't want to do?

Speaker 17 Nuts. This is just absolutely nuts.
Bo and Yang did a very funny thing on SNL, this idea.

Speaker 17 They are made for pain.

Speaker 26 But wait, I'm just wondering, which side is more willing to endure hardship for the glory of their nation?

Speaker 26 The one that's been around for thousands of years or the one that's sending Katy Perry to Spain?

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 We left Vietnam after we had we had decided we can't take any more when we had lost 58,000 servicemen. At that point, the Viet Conga, North Vietnam, they had lost a million people.

Speaker 16 And we cried, uncle,

Speaker 16 to think that, I mean,

Speaker 16 the calculus here is just so

Speaker 16 incredibly ignorant.

Speaker 17 The performative defiance of on everything.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 You know, when you see a toddler, like, I'm not going to do anything. And that's what it feels like.

Speaker 16 I feel like I'm dealing with like a three-year-old or, or or something like that first off it's corruption all all over the place because okay you give me a million bucks you're the cult of ios uh just kidding the the tariff strap we'll wait back there not 98 of the companies in america who are dependent upon exports for their well-being are small and medium-sized business.

Speaker 16 Another CEO I spoke to this weekend, a friend of mine from my fraternity at college, he has a specialty products company.

Speaker 16 You know, when you go to a conference and all the cups, the fleeces, the banners, the signage?

Speaker 17 I have a lot.

Speaker 16 I'm wearing one right now. There you go.
Okay.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 He's built probably a $10 or $12 million business, 130 employees, has put three kids through college, lived a really nice life, right?

Speaker 16 Slowly but surely over the last 30 years, everything's gone to China. About 80% of his products are produced out of China.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And he doesn't have time to figure out new routing 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 We're putting a pause on interviews and hiring.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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...

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 I mean, one of the things that's very

Speaker 17 that's astonishing here is that we think we have choices. And that's the problem with this entire thing is we do not have the choices.
And this is not being an America like is a bunch of losers.

Speaker 17 This is self-inflicted damage that we're doing to ourselves.

Speaker 16 Definition of on goal.

Speaker 17 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?

Speaker 17 When the transition was happening three or four months ago. Now we are just doing it to ourselves.

Speaker 17 And I think most people understand that, but we have to move on, but this is just what is a fucking disaster.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Like everyone else is fucked. We'll see what political implications that has, but

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 We'll get to that.

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Speaker 1 Support for the show comes from Odoo.

Speaker 3 Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

Speaker 29 One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

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Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 I find this to be a little bit of a weak trial,

Speaker 17 to be honest with you. I think there's others that are stronger, but the trial is expected to last about seven to eight weeks.

Speaker 17 Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandman will be called to the stand, among others.

Speaker 17 This is the case that Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to stop.

Speaker 17 It's interesting that Trump has not intervened. Zuckerberg has visited the White House three times since Trump took office.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It also just named former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick to Meta's board.

Speaker 17 She's also the wife of Senator David McCormick from Pennsylvania.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Excuse me, the head of the FCC.

Speaker 17 So he said he would follow what Trump says. And

Speaker 17 thoughts on this? If Meta loses, the remedy could be divesting Instagram and WhatsApp.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Talk about this case a little bit and what you think will happen here.

Speaker 17 It's going on, so it's not been stopped by any means.

Speaker 16 Well, Zuck is the most disliked person in America under the age of 30. He's got a two-thirds unfavorable rating.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it is kind of crazy.

Speaker 16 He's even less popular than Musk. And

Speaker 16 think about when you're the most disliked person.

Speaker 16 amongst a group of people who is literally ground zero for your product and two-thirds of those people use your product and yet you are the most disliked person in America.

Speaker 16 I'm hopeful. I had Jonathan Cantor on ProfG and Jonathan said.

Speaker 17 Explain who he is.

Speaker 16 He was the former head of antitrust at the, was he at the DOJ? He was at justice, right?

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 There's still some people there that are pretty committed and quite frankly, sort of, you know, antitrust badasses that are going to make a a very powerful argument. I've become so cynical, Kara.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 He's put this, basically, this Trumpite on the board.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 So I believe they have become masters at slowing these things down and letting them die a slow death.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 I think they're surprised the trial is going forward. Let me just read from the opening statements by the two lawyers.
This is Daniel Matheson, the FTC's lead litigator.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 They decided that competition was too hard and it'd be easier to buy out their rivals than compete with them. This is the buyer-bury argument.

Speaker 17 Now, Meta's lawyers, this is a guy named Mark Hansen from a big law firm, Kellogg Hanson.

Speaker 17 This case is a grab bag of FTC theories at war with fact and at war with law. The facts are going to prove the FTC's theories are all wrong.

Speaker 17 You know,

Speaker 17 it is a difficult trial. I've talked to a lot of lawyers.
The FTC would like it to divest these companies.

Speaker 17 Legal experts say it might be hard to win. I'll read directly from the New York Times.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It's also extremely rare to try to unwind mergers approved years before.

Speaker 17 So that's one of the difficult ones, even though this is somewhat of a bipartisan effort.

Speaker 17 It's the, just for people to know, there's three going around

Speaker 17 to go to trial. The DOJ won its case against Google.
A federal judge is hearing arguments about remedies and a potential breakup.

Speaker 17 And there's a separate trial with the DOJ for monopolizing ad technology by Google. That's still going on.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 But if they do spin it off, it would be unprecedented.

Speaker 16 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I mean, the baby bills are broken up. The aluminum, the sisters, the seven sisters, or whatever.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 So it's one of the few things that kind of always works are breakups.

Speaker 16 The problem is, to your point, we should have a much higher bar for approving mergers because, quite frankly, the job of the government is to prevent a tragedy of the commons.

Speaker 16 And the easiest way to do that is preventive.

Speaker 16 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 that say, we screwed up letting Meta acquire Instagram.

Speaker 16 They probably should have never let Google acquire what was a double-click and or YouTube.

Speaker 17 That was Google, yeah. Google, yeah.

Speaker 16 But so there probably needs what this says is it is very on it is very difficult to unwind a merger and force a spend. What is easier is to block an acquisition.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 18 What they don't realize is that

Speaker 16 The concentration of industry has led to massively higher prices, whether it's chicken, whether it's pharma, whether it's health care.

Speaker 17 Right. This is harder.

Speaker 16 And think about the way I look at it is 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.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and add ad 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.

Speaker 17 We're going to talk about it. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for a billion dollars.
I covered this.

Speaker 17 And then in 2014, it paid $19 billion for WhatsApp. Both were crazy prices at the time, although Instagram certainly has yielded a lot.

Speaker 17 There is a paper trail of emails between executives talking about the startups because they were threats.

Speaker 17 I wrote about that at the time. The lawyers mentioned the documents.

Speaker 17 Zuckerberg was so paranoid. And he talked about in emails neutralizing a potential competitor.

Speaker 17 And then Zuckerberg wrote to Samberg, Messenger isn't beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us.
We had to buy them for a billion.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And so

Speaker 17 that's what the government is alleging here.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Now, granted, it might not have had the same level of success had it not been able to cooperate and share data.

Speaker 16 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,

Speaker 16 you would argue, maybe, 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.

Speaker 16 And within a month or 45 days, the worst acquisition in tech, do you remember what it is?

Speaker 17 I'm thinking it's Yahoo.

Speaker 16 Exactly. Tumblr.

Speaker 17 I broke that story, Mr.

Speaker 16 Scott Galloway. I know you did.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 Facebook acquires Instagram for a billion. It's worth $100 to $200 billion.
Yahoo slash Marissa Mayer acquires Tumblr for $1.2 billion.

Speaker 16 And I believe about seven years later, they sold it for $3 million.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 But you're right. It's just, this is just, come on.
This is what Mark Zuckerberg played from the Bill Gates Buyer Berry

Speaker 17 playbook. Sorry, this is what this is.
We'll see if they can decide if

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 But the fact of the matter is,

Speaker 17 two things, both for Google and for Facebook. When have you seen a new fresh social network get built?

Speaker 17 If not buried, like, you know, 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.

Speaker 17 That's what they did with Snapchat. And when have you last seen a new search engine that really had any kind of traction?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And then when Apple does a deal with these companies and makes them the de facto map or

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 If you can get an out like Apple did, you're great. If you can't like your

Speaker 17 furniture guy, you're fucked. Like that's really it.
And this is corruption.

Speaker 16 It's corruption everywhere. Yeah.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 My old company, L2, got acquired by a large research company that everybody hates and everybody uses.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 Yep, yep, aqua-killed. That's what it is.
Yeah, that buyer bear.

Speaker 11 And it's like, okay, a competitor goes away.

Speaker 16 They

Speaker 16 get some cash flow back.

Speaker 16 And quite frankly, for 2% or 3% dilution, just not having someone running around nipping at your heels establishing a wedge in your business yeah 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 right

Speaker 17 i've been there

Speaker 16 they've domesticated me

Speaker 16 not and then you left and then you left poor me with my big bag of money but you did get a bag of 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.

Speaker 16 Just stop bothering and competing against us. Stop bothering us and stop competing.

Speaker 17 In this case, Trump ain't playing. So we'll see where it goes from here.

Speaker 17 One of the things that Meta is doing, I got texted by a Meta person today. They're like, can you embalate this? And I'm like, yes.

Speaker 16 Yeah, sure we can.

Speaker 17 Sure we can. Sure, we can.
And by the way, you know what? If they take off

Speaker 17 Instagram,

Speaker 17 good for capitalism if they do. If they take off

Speaker 17 good for capitalism. If they spin off YouTube, good for capitalism.
We're capitalists, Scott and Kara, because we think that's good for this country. It's good for competition.

Speaker 17 And maybe you'll do a little better in your other things if you have to not just play.

Speaker 16 It's good for the stock price.

Speaker 17 Yeah. If you can't just

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 We must be very careful here, but nonetheless,

Speaker 16 we'll find out what God has to say.

Speaker 17 Oh, I can't wait to see what you have to say.

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Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 President Bu Kele, 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

Speaker 17 it wasn't very stately of him to appear looking like he's about to

Speaker 17 do an ecstasy dance or something.

Speaker 17 The two appeared as Trump administration was digging into its heels, refusing to bring Garcia back to the U.S.

Speaker 17 At one point,

Speaker 17 Salvador President Bukele called him a terrorist. There's no proof of the how could I bring, how can I smuggle a terrorist back into the country? Stop it, you unctuous piece of shit.

Speaker 17 A Supreme Court ruling is directing the government to quote facilitate the return. That's a weird word.

Speaker 17 Now, the Trump administration is arguing that what facilitate means saying they just need to remove any obstacles to return them, not actually bring him back.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 I'm not sure what's more frightening, the legal implications, the administration cozing up to another unsavory leader with this guy is.

Speaker 17 This one calls himself the world's coolest dictator. He's certainly the world's most oily dictator I've seen of late.

Speaker 17 He just seems just completely in it for the money. He's very popular, let me say, in El Salvador.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 the Philippines with Duterte.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And just, you know, when reporters were justifiably asking about this, Trump mocked them.

Speaker 17 Then Rubio jumped in about that the Supreme Court has no purchase over

Speaker 17 the way the government decides to do foreign policy, only the president does. What a waste of breath that guy has become.

Speaker 17 So anyway, thoughts, legal implications? World's coolest dictator?

Speaker 16 Look, El Salvador

Speaker 16 was the murder capital of the world. And so this guy's very popular, but basically,

Speaker 16 basically, he just started rounding up people who had, you know, a tattoo that said they had a gang affiliation. So there's tremendous collateral damage there.

Speaker 16 And you have to decide, do you opt for rights?

Speaker 16 And with some crime and inconvenience and cost, or do you go full autocrat? And we said this on the last show.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And what is just insane is these people supposedly, you know, are Christians, right? They, they all, they're all very fond of holding the Bible.

Speaker 16 If you know that you have taken an innocent person and sent them to a hellscape, And Bill Mars summarized it perfectly.

Speaker 16 We can bring a man back from space, but you don't, we can't get someone back from El Salvador. Of course, we could get them back.
Of course, we could get them back.

Speaker 16 And then the weirdest moment was this weirdo Christy Noam posing it with guns after having a Sephora explode all over her face.

Speaker 16 It felt like a fucking Cinemax film where she was going to start having sex with all the prisoners.

Speaker 17 It's like, yeah, I agree.

Speaker 16 It's like, this is just a snuff film. This is weird people.

Speaker 16 And also, you can't, you don't hold Bibles when you start taking people and sending them

Speaker 16 incorrectly, unjustifiably. It's like, for God's sakes, have you no sense of decency? It's just.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And he doesn't care who is innocent. By the way, it's not his business to care who's innocent or not.

Speaker 17 But if we send someone who's innocent there, and it looks like many of them were or had no criminal background that that were sent to these prisons.

Speaker 17 Venezuelans in particular, because Venezuela won't take these

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 But to put them in a prison and they're guilty, I mean, was it 60 Minutes Showed Up? They had 75% of them had no criminal background whatsoever.

Speaker 17 They just had a tattoo to their mother with a crown on it.

Speaker 17 Just really,

Speaker 17 it's 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.

Speaker 17 So I just, just, it's really the worst thing is them trying to parse what the, the, the, after Trump promised he would follow what the Supreme Court said, he's not following what the Supreme Court said.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 They're lawless

Speaker 17 as a government.

Speaker 16 I think you summarize it perfectly. I don't understand

Speaker 16 the whole idea of roundups.

Speaker 16 Luis Flasho, 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.

Speaker 16 The only thing I know about these people is who's not being deported, and that is rich people.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I can think of a lot of criminals, rich criminals.

Speaker 16 Well, you're again, in America, the whole idea of a constitution and laws is to protect the most vulnerable.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 I can't name a person.

Speaker 16 Nobody in the top quintile of income-earning Americans or who is here illegal who has money has been taken.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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%,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Immigration is the secret sauce of America, but the most profitable part of immigration is illegal immigration because they pay Social Security taxes,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 That's right. Except, you know what, Scott? They're profitable in terms of creating prisons and putting them in it.

Speaker 17 That's, 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.

Speaker 17 And we were 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.

Speaker 17 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 nothing wrong.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 In a giant publicity summit for Jeff Bezos, six women are launched into space aboard a giant penis.

Speaker 17 Lauren Sanchez, Katie Perry, Gail King, and three others made a 10-minute trip on Blue Origin's new Shepherd rocket and returned safely to Earth, thank goodness.

Speaker 17 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 uh above the carman line just so you know so reaction scott their outfits i don't know if you heard but they called houston and they said um houston we have a problem and houston said what is it and he said well you should know what it is

Speaker 17 that's your joke actually

Speaker 16 actually kara i was hoping that we'd get to see them uh masturbate because I'd like to see them.

Speaker 16 I'd like to see them defile gravity.

Speaker 16 I could keep going. I could keep going.

Speaker 16 Hey, look,

Speaker 16 at the end of the day, it's such a

Speaker 16 fine.

Speaker 24 Good for them.

Speaker 16 Good for them.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It's just a bunch of ladies,

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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,

Speaker 17 or you'd be pushing up against Facebook and saying we really shouldn't be doing things to young girls that make them feel bad.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 16 But have fun. You don't know who a real female astronaut is? Sally Ride.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 a phd in physics phd in physics learned how to operate that crazy robotic arm uh and as megan kelly would say openly lesbian and spent a ton of time in space openly didn't didn't make a lot of money i mean sally ride is our is our astronaut these folks yeah

Speaker 17 there were there were some science people on board there were some science

Speaker 17 whatever there were but still it's just a stunt it's a stunt it's not feminist it's just a stunt And

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 16 I don't resent them for it. Have at it.
Have fun. Go ahead.
Have at it. Yeah.

Speaker 17 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?

Speaker 16 Well, I meant I was a play on. Notice how

Speaker 16 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,

Speaker 16 as if you're not allowed to be openly lesbian.

Speaker 17 I am openly open.

Speaker 16 She's openly lesbian. At least you'd have the dignity.

Speaker 17 That's a real old thing.

Speaker 16 At least, good madam, you'd have the dignity to be a closeted lesbian. Closeted lesbian.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 But we're not going into it with Megan Kelly. What a she-devil she is.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 The dinner was organized by illustrious statesman Kid Rock.

Speaker 17 Bill said that he and musician, quote, Share believe that there's got to be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away, although Bill's pretty fucking good at that.

Speaker 17 Here's what he had to say about his interaction with Trump.

Speaker 35 He's much more self-aware than he lets on in public. Look, I get it.

Speaker 36 It doesn't matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian.

Speaker 35 It matters who he is on the world stage.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 17 I'm going to be on Bill Maher's show in a couple of weeks. I think you are too.
Are you going to be on Steve Banner?

Speaker 16 No, I was supposed to be on Friday, and

Speaker 16 I had a tough time trying to figure out a way to be on with Steve Bannon, and I'm something about the idea

Speaker 16 in a little way normalizing Nazi salutes. I just, I don't know.
Go for you. I didn't know how to thread the needle there, but anyway.
That's right.

Speaker 17 We talked about it. I'm glad you did that.

Speaker 16 I called you and I asked your advice. I called your advice.
I said double. I asked you and asked your advice.

Speaker 17 Yeah, you're a great panelist there. Go ahead.
You start. You start.
I have some thoughts, too.

Speaker 16 Look, I think Bill Maher did and Joe and Mika did the right thing. I think when the president calls you and says, come to the Oval Office, I think you go.

Speaker 16 And I think that him trying to show, him not immediately going to

Speaker 16 the kind of polarized, this guy's a fucking idiot, and

Speaker 16 acknowledging that he's a charming guy or that maybe trying to provide some comfort that he's

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And then a few minutes later, he'll basically say vile things about you to his 200 million followers.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 I much prefer someone, and I think you're like this, I think you're more likely.

Speaker 16 Who do you want?

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 I think that is the worst role model for our young people. Yeah, I agree.
I agree. But

Speaker 16 I'm glad he did it. I think he was smart to do it.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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 doing some the sharpest attacks on Trump among comics, which there are many, by the way.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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?

Speaker 17 Like, sure, yeah, lots of people, by the way.

Speaker 16 Lusssolini was great to party.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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 um, was he was he lying to you at dinner or to the world? Which one?

Speaker 17 Because he is a terrible person publicly, terrible. The stuff he did today, terrible.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 So, I just honestly, that's what I kept thinking of. Like, I'm sure like any nasty piece of shit is charming in person.

Speaker 16 And there are a lot of them that I have dealt with, but

Speaker 17 you should have gone, but you don't give me this. He's charming because he's not.
He's just not charming.

Speaker 17 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, because

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Anyway, but I probably, would you go to dinner if he asked us? Do you think he'd ever ask this? Did he just give a fuck about us?

Speaker 16 Well, I agree. We're not on his radio stream.

Speaker 16 I said this about Joe Mika. I believe it's about Bill Maher.
I think if the president calls you and asks you to come to the White House, you go. I just

Speaker 17 wouldn't be as polite in person. I wouldn't be like, oh, hey, can I have a role? That's the the kind of thing.
Anyway, we'll see. We'll see what happens.
I'll tell this to Jill's face when I see him.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 16 He's my hero. I know.
That guy's my hero. I know.

Speaker 17 I'm glad you didn't go, Scott Galloway. Now I like you even more.

Speaker 16 Ugh. Get along.
Is that possible?

Speaker 17 Is that possible? Good for you, Scott Galloway. Good for you.
I know you like being on that show.

Speaker 16 I do. I love it.

Speaker 17 I know. Well, have him back, Bill.

Speaker 17 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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Speaker 17 Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. May I start?

Speaker 16 Yeah, you just go ahead.

Speaker 17 Let me just say two things.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 woman president who like kicks ass.

Speaker 17 They go to the GSU summit. There's a South African guy who takes over all the G20.
It's called G20, excuse me. And

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Or maybe they're from Australia. I don't know.
They have that accent. So good.
It was so bad and so good at the same time. It was Air Force One, but Viola Davis.

Speaker 17 So there was some good acting in there too. Fan fucking tastic.
Second one, Hacks, the season premiere.

Speaker 17 Again, two women, Hannah Einbender and

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 At some point, I'm like, just kiss you two, because they're going, they're insults of each other and going back and forth.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Now he said, and Elon said in a meeting that it's $150 billion.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 he's he's saving, but we don't even know how much he's costing for the savings. That's not in this.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 And then, of course, he's not delivering.

Speaker 17 It's the same thing that this is a theme of his life right now is overpromising and under delivering, whether it's the cyber truck, whether it's autonomous cars.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 16 I like it. And

Speaker 16 I was going to do a prediction, but I'll try and reshape it as a win and a fail.

Speaker 16 The fail is what you, I'll just piggyback off what you said. Essentially,

Speaker 16 if this audit proved anything, it's that there's a lot less inefficiency in waste and fraud than we thought.

Speaker 16 I mean, this is about as clean a bill of health as anyway, because they were dying to find fraud, and

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 And we predicted he would exit. He's gone.
I think he's already gone.

Speaker 20 I think he's already figured out.

Speaker 17 He was with Trump the other night at that stupid WCA.

Speaker 16 Yeah, but that's proximity to power.

Speaker 16 I think Doge is basically the curtain is closing on Doge. It just didn't work.
It was a distraction, fine, but

Speaker 16 it's not working. The reality is Americans, again, see above, not willing to endure pain.
They have to face a hard decision here.

Speaker 16 It's the hard thing about the hard things, and that is if we're serious about

Speaker 16 being a country that doesn't spend $7 trillion and take in $5 trillion in tax receipts, there's only two things you can do, folks. You either have to cut entitlements or raise taxes.

Speaker 16 And the answer is yes. And at some point, we're going to have to figure out a way to do that.

Speaker 16 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 shops, which they're doing now.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 4 Doge

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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,

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 He has unwittingly inspired unbelievable, an unbelievable torrent tsunami of deals, cross-border trade deals, but it won't be with us.

Speaker 16 The EU is talking to Latin America. Japan, South Korea, and China are talking.

Speaker 16 This has set off an incredible incentive 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 The unwitting, unintended consequence of this is that the U.S.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Now, you're going to see trade deals between Mexico and Canada. You're going to see trade deals between the EU and China.

Speaker 16 This is going to, the intended,

Speaker 16 what they claimed they were going to accomplish for America, they've accomplished for everyone else but America.

Speaker 17 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?

Speaker 17 It's finished. Avocado toast and pancakes are done for us as Americans.

Speaker 16 Much less lumber or gypsum drywall. You want to talk about the cost of building right now, gypsum drywall from Mexico or lumber?

Speaker 17 I just renovated my house. I'm so pleased that I did it last year.
My contractor said it would have been double.

Speaker 16 I'm interviewing Mark Carney this afternoon. What would you ask him?

Speaker 17 Oh, what?

Speaker 17 What? Yeah. Today Galloway.
He reached out. For what? Which show? Which show?

Speaker 16 I wanted to do it for Pivot of Raging Moderates. He said he wanted to do it for Profit Conversations.
I think he wants to talk about young men.

Speaker 17 Yeah, good. Well, that's, I heard you have.
By the way, you have another podcast you didn't tell me about.

Speaker 16 Which one's this?

Speaker 17 The what, the man, the men thing with Scaramucci and Smircon?

Speaker 16 Oh, that's a limited series. He called me and said, let's do four pods.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it looks good for your book coming out. Good.
I'm very excited.

Speaker 17 You cat around on me quite a bit. That's okay.
I don't mind you. I just want to know about it.
I just need to.

Speaker 16 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, okay.

Speaker 17 I know you did. I'm ignoring it completely.
I would like to make your book like best sound.

Speaker 16 Defile gravity. Defile gravity, Katie Perry.

Speaker 17 I want to make your book a ton.

Speaker 16 Let me hear you roar. I can't believe that.
You 90s pop star wonton bitch. Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.

Speaker 17 He defied gravity. Anyway, let me just say from one thing, Scott said, there's a lot of reporting from Rolling Stone and Puck that he's annoying people at the White House.
They question if he's high.

Speaker 17 And Republicans on Capitol Hill are no longer terrified of him either.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 problematic for our country in those positions. So 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.

Speaker 17 It's so good. It's so good.

Speaker 16 I think that's just an attempt to address your PTSD and pretend that Vice President Harris won the election.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 It's so much fun. Like, because she's won the, she's won an Oscar, isn't she? She won an Oscar, whatever.
She deserves an Oscar. She won an Emmy, an Oscar, whatever.

Speaker 17 This woman is like a top actor, just chewing up the scenery. It's so enjoyable.

Speaker 17 She did won 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,

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

Speaker 17 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 uh i don't know if on is but in any case uh vote for us go to vote.webbyawards.com to cast your ballot.

Speaker 17 We won last year and we're hoping for a twofer.

Speaker 17 Elsewhere in the Scott and Carroll universe, I just did a whole panel on tariffs with trade law expert Raj Bala, Pucks, Bill Cohen, and Catherine Rampel from the Washington Post.

Speaker 17 Let's listen to a quick clip.

Speaker 40 The only way I can explain it is that we're dealing with the madness of King George type moment.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 40 But

Speaker 40 all of his explanations for what he is trying to do are completely incoherent and self-contradictory

Speaker 40 and come back to, well, he's just like tariffs for a really long time.

Speaker 17 Anyway, it was a great interview. All of them had different things to add.

Speaker 16 Just FYI, I think Catherine Rampell is a total cummer. 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.

Speaker 16 She had an outstanding moment on that show. I think it's a fucking food fight, whatever.

Speaker 17 On Abby Ford Show.

Speaker 16 And whoever the Republican is was trying to defend Scott Jennings. Whoever the Republican is is was trying to defend.

Speaker 17 I call him bad Scott. He's bad Scott.

Speaker 16 He's trying to defend Bannon. He was like, it was a wave.
And Catherine Rampell goes, give us that wave. Give us that wave.

Speaker 16 And he just sat there like someone who'd just been caught masturbating or defiling gravity.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Scott, read us out.

Speaker 6 Today's show was produced by Larry Manzoy, Marcus, Taylor Taylor Griffin, Erin Ruff, and Kate Gallagher.

Speaker 16 Ernie Intertod engineered this episode.

Speaker 14 Jem Mackle edited the video.

Speaker 6 Thanks also to Jude Burroughs, Ms.

Speaker 16 Severio, and Dan Shallon.

Speaker 6 Nishak Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Speaker 20 Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 6 Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 5 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/slash pod.

Speaker 12 We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business care.

Speaker 6 Have a great rest of the week.

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