Signalgate, Auto Tariffs, and Trump's Crypto Empire

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Speaker 4 If you want to know what you looked like when you were 17 and you got caught masturbating, that is literally the facial expression of these people.

Speaker 6 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 4 And Kara, if you're texting and you see the emoji of a Makers and Ginger, a guy dancing in Olympic. I am in the chat.
That means I am in the chat.

Speaker 4 Oh my God. I am here.

Speaker 6 I can't believe this happened right after we taped the last show.

Speaker 6 Let's get right into a fallout from Signal Gate. Some people are calling it Whiskey Leaks.

Speaker 4 Hold on. You like Whiskey Leaks? Whiskey Leaks.
Just before we get into the serious stuff, I think people want to hear more about me. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 I'm a little slow today.

Speaker 4 All right. So

Speaker 4 I think, as you know, for the first time in my life, I had something resembling a non-outstanding physical where he said, you're borderline hypertensive. I didn't tell you that.

Speaker 6 Ooh, statin time.

Speaker 4 Yeah, 140 over 80. And I'm like, what? Take it again.
I made him take it like eight times. I'm like, sorry, we're not doing a night time.
And so immediately.

Speaker 4 Had my urine, my blood, drawn, my fecal matter, like everything uploaded to ChatGPT. And they all come back with the same fucking thing: drink less.
And when it started asking me questions.

Speaker 4 So, anyways, I have

Speaker 6 what are we going to do? Are we going to dryout clinic with you? What are we doing? What fun thing can we do?

Speaker 4 Dryout clinics as a sober person.

Speaker 4 By the way, just a quick side note: I think this anti-alcohol movement is the second worst thing behind remote work to happen to young people. Your 25-year-old liver,

Speaker 4 the damage or inability to process, or ability to process alcohol at 25 is dwarfed by the risk of social isolation and anxiety.

Speaker 6 I understand you're looking for alcohol.

Speaker 4 Anyways, yeah, well, no, it makes sense for me to drink less.

Speaker 6 Tell it to Pete Hagseth, Whiskey Leaks, the head of Whiskey Leaks.

Speaker 4 My 50-year-old, my 50-year-old liver can process the same way. Anyway, so I took my blood pressure over the weekend.
I hadn't taken it in a while. I was becoming obsessed with it.
It's 127 over 72.

Speaker 4 It's dropped dramatically. And I'm like, oh, it's a mistake.
And I kept taking it. No, it's not.
It's perfectly healthy.

Speaker 6 You're not going to ask my blood pressure. I just had it taken.

Speaker 4 Do you want to know? What's your blood pressure? Sure.

Speaker 6 106 over 68. I'm like a corpse.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I think that makes you a vampire. Anyways,

Speaker 6 I'm a corpse. I'm a corpse.

Speaker 4 So I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And I figured out that I'm drinking dramatically less because

Speaker 4 Chiltern Firehouse burned down. I was going there once or twice a week.
What?

Speaker 6 That hotel in London? And you're

Speaker 6 not.

Speaker 4 No, I went that way.

Speaker 7 Oh, my God.

Speaker 4 My Mecca, my cathedral. Oh, my God.
Okay, I'm sorry, folks. You're there.
That's geopolitical disasters are going to have to hold on for a minute. So I go there.
I'm never able to get in there.

Speaker 4 It's total face control. The coolest people in London, the coolest room, greatest bartenders, greatest vibe.
The door woman ends up, she has a podcast called, I forget what it's called.

Speaker 4 Oh, shit, I'll find out. A really talented young creative woman.
And she came up to me and said, hi, I love your podcast. Would you willing to have lunch someday? I said, sure, we had lunch.

Speaker 4 End of the lunch, she goes, here's my WhatsApp number. If you ever want to come by, here it is.
This is like Charlie getting the golden ticket in Willie Walk in the chocolate factory.

Speaker 4 And whenever I go out with my friends, everyone's like, Wouldn't it be great to go to Chiltern? And everyone's like, Do you know anybody? And I'm like, Yeah, no problem. I'll just text my friend.

Speaker 4 Anyways,

Speaker 4 this is, I'm there twice a week. And the world clearly decided that the universe was out of order with me having access to this level of hot, cool people just regularly.
The place fucking burned down.

Speaker 6 What? That's a beautiful old building.

Speaker 4 No one was hurt. No one was hurt, but it's gone.
It's out of commission for three years. Oh my God.

Speaker 6 Well, it's got a janky inside if you stay there. It's like a really old hotel.
It's made out of a firehouse, but it's all these twists and turns. It does feel...

Speaker 4 It's a total Andre Balas special. It's a shitty hotel with decent service and hot people and amazing, cool vibes.
So he can charge $1,100 a night for a $400 room. Anyways, more tower to you, Andre.

Speaker 4 By the way,

Speaker 4 met the mother of my children at a Raleigh hotel controlled by Andre Balaz.

Speaker 4 My son's middle name is now Raleigh.

Speaker 6 Anyway, so what are you doing with your health? Let's move away from children.

Speaker 4 What I'm doing with my health is the Children Firehouses burned down. And I figured out that I think somewhere between, I'm drinking somewhere between six and eight

Speaker 4 fewer drinks a week because children burned down. Anyway, so I need to find a new place.
So last night, there's a bunch of new contenders. Last night, and I'm checking them all out.

Speaker 4 Last night I went to this new place called Soho Muse, which is a Soho house, but Soho House has figured out they let in too many people. So now they have

Speaker 4 one that you can't get into.

Speaker 4 That you have to have. There's always another level.
That's how it works.

Speaker 7 There's always another level.

Speaker 6 That you're not in.

Speaker 4 So I found somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. Went there last night.
Pretty good. Not sure.
Daddy went deep in the paint. And tonight I'm going to Kensington Gardens.

Speaker 6 You just got a thing that said, stop drinking. What are you doing, high blood pressure man? Where's the statin and the sitting around watching, hugging, hugging and watching?

Speaker 4 As Winston Churchill said, I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me.

Speaker 4 I would not have kids, and I'd likely still be a virgin, and I'd have very few good friends if it wasn't for alcohol.

Speaker 6 Let's get back. Listen, Pete Hegg says

Speaker 4 national security breaches. Let's go back.

Speaker 6 You know,

Speaker 6 whiskey leaks. Let's go to whiskey leaks.
The Trump administration is denying and downplaying the wrongdoing, even though the next day,

Speaker 6 Jeff Free Goldberg from The Atlantic, the editor-in-chief, of course, released the text from the signaled group that he was mistakenly added to. This is so unreal, what happened here.

Speaker 6 The The newly released messages showed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sharing a timeline of the Yemen attack and a description of the aircraft involved, which is classified, Pete. Sorry, it is.

Speaker 6 They're pretending it's not, but it is. The latest White House strategies insisting these were not actual war plans, which they were.

Speaker 6 And as Pete Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday, he knew exactly what he was doing. Let's listen.

Speaker 4 There's no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information.

Speaker 10 You know who sees war plans?

Speaker 4 I see them every single day. I looked at them this morning.
I looked at attack plans this morning.

Speaker 4 What an idiot.

Speaker 6 Just one. Meanwhile, national security officials were on Capitol Hill getting questioned about the signal leak and hearings becoming contentious.

Speaker 6 Democratic Congressman Jim Himes noted the worst case scenario of the whole incident at one of these hearings. Let's listen.

Speaker 4 Everyone here knows that the Russians or the Chinese could have gotten all of that information.

Speaker 4 And they could have passed it on to the Houthis, who easily could have repositioned weapons and altered their plans to knock down planes or sink ships.

Speaker 4 I think that it's by the awesome grace of God that we are not mourning dead pilots right now.

Speaker 6 Among other things, where were they? Who was listening?

Speaker 6 what item, what devices they are on.

Speaker 6 So talk about what your initial thoughts and hearing the story and what you think about the White House strategy here, arguing about semantics of what war plans and classified is and making Jeffrey Goldberg the enemy.

Speaker 6 And he keeps just dropping the receipts every five minutes, and they're caught out lying.

Speaker 6 Are they making things worse for themselves by not owning up to it and taking responsibility?

Speaker 6 Press Secretary Karen Levitt, who I like to call Tracy Flick, did say in her briefing that Elon has offered to put his technical experts on the case to go figure out how Goldberg got out of the chat.

Speaker 6 Oh my God, stop with the Elon solution. He doesn't know anything about this.

Speaker 6 Talk a little bit about this

Speaker 6 and then we'll get to the repercussions, if there are any.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 these are some of our most senior and most impactful and most important people in government. And I think you have to take them at their word.
So let's just look at a few of their past quotes.

Speaker 4 Any security professional, military, government, or otherwise, would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information.

Speaker 4 That's Secretary Hagseth referring to Hillary Clinton's emails being on a server. More from Secretary Hagseth.

Speaker 4 How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?

Speaker 4 Again, that was Secretary Hagseth when they found emails on a server that he decided were classified.

Speaker 4 Let's keep going.

Speaker 4 The fact that she wouldn't be held accountable for this, I think, blows the mind of anyone who's held our nation's secrets dear, Hegseth added back in 2016, and who's had top-secret clearance like I have, and others who know that even one hiccup causes a problem.

Speaker 4 What about Secretary Rubio? Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton, Rubio said at Fox, even though she thinks she is. Well, let's talk about CI Director John Ratcliffe.

Speaker 4 Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the Espionage Act. That's a criminal charge so serious that it can bring the death penalty.

Speaker 2 Close quote.

Speaker 4 When you have the Clinton emails, on top of the fact that the sitting president of the United States admitted he had documents in his garage, Director Waltz or National Security Advisor Waltz told CNN, but they didn't prosecute.

Speaker 4 They didn't go after these folks, exasperated.

Speaker 4 Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such, said

Speaker 4 Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. And my favorite quote on the

Speaker 6 name for her is Cruella de Text.

Speaker 4 And my favorite quote is actually from the text message chain. We are currently clean on OPSEC from Secretary Hagseth, meaning we are clear.
You can trust that the security protocols are in place.

Speaker 4 And this reflects a couple of things. One,

Speaker 4 this administration, as led by Donald Trump, President Trump, believe that the government of the United States, which is the most impressive organization in history, ask yourself for all the shitposting all of us do about the U.S.

Speaker 4 government, who's provided more rights and more prosperity at a lower cost at taxes this low? Best product for lowest price brought to you by the U.S.

Speaker 4 government, most impressive organization in the world. And these folks have decided that any protocols, no matter how established or how important, they're bigger than.

Speaker 4 That they just, they don't need to pay attention to this stupid shit that people before them were doing.

Speaker 4 It's the ultimate Dunning-Kruger effect. And then the last thing I'll say before I get your comments is

Speaker 4 when someone is pulled over and convicted for a DUI, on average, on average, they have driven drunk 80 times previous to that.

Speaker 4 So the question isn't what happened here, because fortunately, Jeff Goldberg understands security protocols.

Speaker 4 He didn't release the information until after the attacks had happened when he realized he was privy errantly to classified information. He voluntarily exited the chat.

Speaker 4 He understands security protocols. I mean, make him fucking defense secretary.
Right.

Speaker 6 He knows more about national security than all of these people put together.

Speaker 4 But the scariest question is, we found out they got a DUI here. What are the other 79 times that secure information has been leaked to bad actors who aren't going going to follow security protocols.

Speaker 4 Maybe work for the CCP or the GRU. When you put pee wee little leaguer incompetent ass clowns in positions of this importance, there are going to be unforced errors.

Speaker 4 But the problem is we don't see 79 of the 80 unforced errors.

Speaker 6 100%. And you know what's incredible is, of course, Trump uses his,

Speaker 6 a couple of things. One, they're morons.
Let's just be clear. They're also liars.
They're liars about what they're morons and liars.

Speaker 6 And then they're hypocrites because of what those things you just read. They literally were making a big case on a much less egregious violation, right? So that's one.

Speaker 6 Two, who knows what phones they were on? Were they on person? They were not using, you know, my ex-wife worked in the government. I saw the phone she had.

Speaker 6 She didn't like it, but she used it because it was secure, right? She couldn't use her iPhone. You can't sideload signal on these things.
By the way, the Signal CEO is like, are she wrote me?

Speaker 6 She's like, I cannot fucking believe this shit. Like, this is crazy that they were using our, our, our stuff.
Now, journalists use it to talk to sources. Lots of people use it to

Speaker 6 be, to have encrypted communications. But these are not impenetrable systems, by the way.
It's a commercial app. It is not, it shouldn't be loaded.
They were definitely doing them on personal phones.

Speaker 6 And they also were definitely doing them from places. You don't know what network they were on.
They were definitely not in skiffs doing this, which is these protected little tents that they make.

Speaker 6 They weren't on protected communications, and they were talking about war plans, like whatever word you want to use, it's information that should not be on a commercial app.

Speaker 6 The second thing is the way they put Jeffrey Goldberg, I think what happened is there was someone with his initials that they brought in, because that's happened to me with several tech companies.

Speaker 6 I've been brought into emails at Facebook by Sheryl Sandberg one time, I think.

Speaker 6 I've been brought into seeing the earnings of a tech company before they were released to the public once, because someone with my name was similar to to someone at the company and i just got emailed i got into the email chain it happens people do that um but the fact that they're doing this not on a secure line and doing this with such cavalierness um was just so moronic and then to lie about it afterwards and then get caught again the second time when he releases what was there i just i i don't think anyone will get fired because the people in charge of the justice department will not do their jobs because they're very busy protecting Elon Musk and no one's going to get.

Speaker 6 So it may be Mike Walls will get because he also, apparently his Venmo is open too.

Speaker 6 Like it's just, they're being sued by the government watchdog group for using Signal to discuss military plans, by the way. And you can't make this up.

Speaker 6 Trump's not-so-favorite judge, the one overseeing the Venezuelan. deportation cake, got assigned to the Signal case.

Speaker 6 But is there any, it looks like Trump is just going to defend his people and maybe throw one over.

Speaker 6 But is there any recourse here? Do you see anything at all? What do you make of their response? Like just from a marketing point of view, trying to get this, you know, this move on.

Speaker 6 Everyone was right after, let's move on. Let's move on.
Let's move on. That was the sort of the message from all Republicans.

Speaker 6 Now there seems to be some cracks in it because it's so serious what they did here.

Speaker 4 This is a crisis. And there's only three things you have to remember in crisis management.
I don't care if it's Martha Stewart, Exxon, or what's happened here.

Speaker 4 One, you have to acknowledge the problem. This was a fuck-up.

Speaker 4 There's just no getting around it. This is unacceptable.
That should have been their three words. This is unacceptable.
Two, the top gargail needs to take responsibility.

Speaker 4 The person, either the defense secretary, someone needs to say, I take responsibility. And then the third thing is, and this is the hard part, you need to overcorrect.

Speaker 4 When Tylenol, when it was found out that some crazy person had put cyanide in Tylenol

Speaker 4 capsules,

Speaker 4 Johnson and Johnson cleared all of the shelves of all Tylenol nationally at huge cost to them to restore trust.

Speaker 4 They're doing none of these things because President Trump comes from the Roy Cohn zeitgeist of never, never acknowledge that you're wrong and just continue to lie.

Speaker 4 And if you lie long enough, you in fact will, you know, people will start to believe you. But the real damage here is that if you think about

Speaker 4 within the greatest organization in history, the U.S. government is arguably the most successful organization in history or the most impressive, and that is the U.S.

Speaker 4 military that has turned back fascism, that has turned back, turned, repelled armies out of Gulf nations in days because of our ability to deliver violence anywhere in the world really effectively, efficiently, and because people are willing to put their lives on the line.

Speaker 4 And when you can't trust the people at the highest levels that they are taking,

Speaker 4 when you're flying an aircraft, you're trusting some guy from Omaha or some gal from Nebraska that she is obsessing over every fucking part on that plane before you have to skirt along the atmosphere at two times the speed of sound, avoiding surface-to-air missiles, and then trust that the agents on the ground risking their lives would never have anyone not follow protocols that might unmask them.

Speaker 4 So, what does this do to the effectiveness, the morale, the willingness to join these security forces? And also,

Speaker 4 this stuff around the phone and the app, it's a misdirect.

Speaker 4 I've had some interaction with our security apparatus. When you go into a a building of the NSA or the CIA, you can't even bring a phone in.

Speaker 4 I'm not talking about high-level classified information.

Speaker 6 No, they make you put them in a box. They make you put it in one of those lead boxes.

Speaker 4 And then this conversation was why skiffs were invented. Right.
Because the idea is you have a secure room that no one...

Speaker 4 How are our allies going to share their sensitive information with this clown car? So the damage here, we don't know. The damage here is like an iceberg.
The majority of it is is below the surface.

Speaker 4 We will never know about it until there are military operations that fail. They will blame it on somebody else.
But this is, this is an enormous.

Speaker 6 The astonishing reaction of, well, nothing happened.

Speaker 6 The operation was a success.

Speaker 4 I'm like, I don't care.

Speaker 6 We don't know. Who knows?

Speaker 6 I don't trust any of you people to tell the truth on anything. And then misdirecting it towards Goldberg.
Goldberg, two things. Let me make two points.
One, you're a bunch of morons.

Speaker 6 Again, lying morons. Two, Goldberg was doing the right thing here, and he's a fucking badass for doing all.
He did everything right. Ethically, he did.

Speaker 6 And then when they challenged him about whether it was true, he released, he didn't release the text initially, but then he's like, fuck you. I'm going to release the text.

Speaker 6 The third thing is, let me just tell you. Do you know who's who's also a quiet hero here? Lorraine Powell Jobs, owner of The Atlantic, is letting this keep going, right?

Speaker 6 Because there's a lot of corporate people who are pulling in their horns for Trump, whether it's Disney paying that settlement with George Stephanopoulos or Paramount considering it around Paul Weiss, Lawrence Paul Weiss, spending

Speaker 6 Paul Weiss. Like all these people are doing this.
And Lorraine Powell Jobs is running the Atlantic. If you don't think they're going to come at her or

Speaker 6 they've already come at Jeff Goldberg over that Nazi piece he wrote about Trump, you remember

Speaker 6 Jeffrey did that story that infuriated the Trump people.

Speaker 6 Let me just tell you, if you're looking, I was just thinking, who's the Catherine Graham of this era? People like her, like that, that are not backing the fuck down. And there's a billionaire.

Speaker 6 Not all billionaires are bad. She's a billionaire.
She's, she has got a lot of bravery to put up with this stuff and to be able to take the pressure.

Speaker 6 When I think of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the, and, and the rest of them, and Musk sitting and sort of prostrating himself to Trump and what she just did, just a, again, just a real differential.

Speaker 6 And this, this is, puts people in danger. And I think it's, again, a good topic for Democrats to attack on.
You're You're incompetent and you're liars over and over again.

Speaker 6 And then the other excuse they're using on Fox News, which are also complicit in trying to defend this after attacking Hillary Clinton relentlessly for years

Speaker 6 over something that was much less serious by a factor of 10. Do you remember when you accidentally added a random person to our pivot text chain?

Speaker 4 Do you remember that?

Speaker 4 I don't.

Speaker 6 You did. You added some guy and he's like, hey, I'm here.

Speaker 6 Okay, if Scott does that, that was fucking annoying enough. But the media on the right is saying, well, everyone knows about that.
Everyone's done that. I literally like,

Speaker 6 Jesse Waters, you're a moron. You're a fucking moron.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 you don't need to be a national security advisor to know what happened here.

Speaker 4 And that is, when I establish an ongoing relationship with a male prostitute, I change the name and the number or I change the name.

Speaker 6 To Kara Swisher.

Speaker 4 It throws the people in my life off the scent. So it's clear.

Speaker 4 It's so obvious what is happening here. Walls is fucking Jeffrey Goldberg.

Speaker 4 It's obvious what's going on here. And he had the wrong name purposely on the wrong number to throw the folks in his life off.
Oh, interesting. A little geopolitical humor to lighten up.

Speaker 6 I think it was someone with the JG on the staff that he thought he was adding. I think he thought he was adding someone else.

Speaker 4 And Tulsi Gabber refusing to acknowledge it was her.

Speaker 4 And Senator Warren's like,

Speaker 4 so TG

Speaker 4 isn't you? And she's like,

Speaker 4 well, no, well, it's under review. And he's like, what does that have to do with anything?

Speaker 4 And then she says, there was no classified information linked. And he's like, well, then share it if it wasn't classified.
She looks like I. Yeah, he was good.

Speaker 2 Warner was good.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God. She looks like a

Speaker 4 bad. So was Asaf.
Oh, Senator Bennett, my man.

Speaker 7 They all were. All were.
They were my man.

Speaker 4 My man, who I supported for president in 2020. You know what?

Speaker 6 They all had the same attitude. What in the actual fuck? That That was the tone.
What in the actual fuck?

Speaker 6 The only person who's conducted himself kind of like better than all of them is Trump because he's like, yeah, I think it looks like they fucked up.

Speaker 6 But then he, of course, defends them by attacking the reporter, which is the same thing.

Speaker 4 I love watching these hearings.

Speaker 4 If you want to know what you looked like, you look at these people. If you want to know what you look like when you were 17 and you got caught masturbating,

Speaker 4 that is literally the facial expression of these people. Never happened to me.
Yeah. Literally the facial expression.
No one's going to pay.

Speaker 6 Do you think someone's going to to pay? No, Walls, maybe. Let's take a bet.
Which one?

Speaker 4 Oh, there's, I actually do. One of them's going to go down.
Tag Seth or Walls?

Speaker 6 Not Heg Seth. He seems to like Head Seth, despite the fact it looked like he was drunk texting.
That's what it seemed like to me.

Speaker 4 I think it's the, oh my gosh.

Speaker 4 I think, look, I don't think Trump cares about national security.

Speaker 4 I don't think he cares that he's.

Speaker 6 I think he had documents in his bathroom.

Speaker 4 That he's putting Trump, that he's putting warriors in harm's way.

Speaker 4 I really don't think he cares. What I do think he cares about is I think this is very embarrassing for him.
It makes him look incompetent. There's going to be a blood offering.
It's a toss-up between,

Speaker 4 I think it's got to be walls.

Speaker 4 Well, I don't know. It could be walls.
He could also decide, Hexeth, this DUI hire just makes us look bad. Hex Seth getting off that plane and being so indignant.
No, no attack plans were shared.

Speaker 4 I see attack plans every day. And then you see these text messages, and they have the equipment, the cadence, the sequencing, the targets, the time.
I'm like, what do you want? Color-coded tabs?

Speaker 4 I mean, yeah, all right.

Speaker 6 I know.

Speaker 4 He came across, he's handled himself so poorly. I think, so I, Gabbard, I don't know.
Someone's got to go. I think someone's going to go.

Speaker 6 He likes their schemes of how he got.

Speaker 4 It was a hoax. It was a hoax.

Speaker 6 He was, he's a spy.

Speaker 6 He's a spy. And then I'm like, I've never met him.
And then, of course, inevitably,

Speaker 6 when he goes,

Speaker 6 I've never met Jeffrey Goldberg. Literally, picture of them standing talking together.
They have met.

Speaker 6 He's a national security person. Jeff Goldberg is known for national security reporting.
They know each other. Like, literally.

Speaker 6 It's sort of when Trump always goes, I've never met Maggie Haberman, or I've never, you know, I don't know that person who worked with me for five, 10 years.

Speaker 4 A really easy prediction. This isn't my prediction.
A really easy prediction. At a very big DC event in the next 30 to 90 days,

Speaker 4 Jeffrey Goldberg and his wife are going to walk in somewhere. There's going to be a pause and he is going to get a standing ovation.
Yeah. He really.

Speaker 4 If there's a winner here, it's journalism and it's Jeffrey Goldberg.

Speaker 6 We are so annoying. Journalists are so fantastically annoying these days.
I love it.

Speaker 4 But this guy just did the right thing. He just, he, he resisted the temptation to just continue listening in because he understands

Speaker 4 defense and security protocols. He didn't release it till after the attack.
He's been, he has handled this perfectly.

Speaker 6 Perfectly. Perfectly.
We'll see if it matters. Actually, the snap polls are people are like, what in the act?

Speaker 6 Because one thing that it does, I do think it's more, this is a real crisis, is because everyone understands this. It's very easily understandable what they did because everyone has been.

Speaker 6 The one thing they're telling the truth is everyone has been in these things. And they're like, you did what? You did.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 6 Like this, this is something understandable to the average citizen of incompetence. Like

Speaker 6 even my mother at first, and of course, my mother immediately went when she didn't know about it because Fox wasn't covering it properly. And then I explained it.
She's like, well, that's not good.

Speaker 6 And I was like, no, it's not. And she goes, but Hillary did it.
And I'm like,

Speaker 2 that's where you go.

Speaker 6 I was like, not really. And then she's, Biden did it, but that's where they're going.

Speaker 6 Here's one of my, let me just finish this by one proposal. I was thinking about what do you do about this? Like, this shit has been going back and forth.
between Republicans and Democrats,

Speaker 6 this leakage of information, right? In this highly informational age. I think we just decide from this day forward, everyone else before this, you get off the hook for it.

Speaker 6 You were, the government is sloppy around, everyone in the government, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, have been arguably sloppy around communications and especially classified communications.

Speaker 6 Everyone gets a pass. From now on, if you do it again, if you have, you've sideloaded shit or you're using your personal phone, you're going down.
From now on, we're going.

Speaker 6 Everybody, nobody gets a pass from, it's not going to happen in the Trump administration, but let's just clear the playing field. And from now on, these are the rules.

Speaker 6 And if you break them, you're going to jail.

Speaker 6 That's what I would do.

Speaker 4 What do you think? Yeah, I like it, but I think it runs deeper than that. I think these guys, look,

Speaker 4 we'd like to think that you can put people,

Speaker 4 I mean, for God's sakes, we got a Fox host as defense secretary. And we're surprised that there's amateur errors.
I mean,

Speaker 4 so it's not, okay, you can have protocols and fine, put them in jail. That's not the problem.
The problem is an environment where you have an autocrat who values loyalty and failed over competence.

Speaker 6 The other thing I think they were doing, and I think people haven't talked about it enough, is they're on signal because they're trying to avoid accountability and they don't want people to see these things.

Speaker 6 And so what they're doing is they're all this stuff, just for people who don't know, the government is supposed to preserve all their communications on things like this, and they're trying not to preserve them.

Speaker 6 And the only last thing I would say Walls did that was astonishing to me, on Signal, you can have disappearing information.

Speaker 6 this stuff can disappear and usually people set it to an hour or a day he had four week disappearance i was like are you an idiot like if you're going to disappear disappear it right away but i think what they were trying to do is avoid accountability disorganized crime that's like they're not even they're not even competent criminals but that's what at the heart of it they were trying to abrogate their responsibility to preserve accountability and i think that's why they were on that chain and so they were hiding and they were hiding and then they got caught essentially the u.s military our ability, our near monopoly power on the ability to

Speaker 4 deliver violence all over the world in a lethally devastating, expert, competent way,

Speaker 4 I don't think, especially people on the left, I don't think they realize how much prosperity that delivers to us, that fear. 100%.

Speaker 4 The attacks of October 7th happen and Hamas is hoping to inspire a multi-front war on Israel. Biden sends these amazing things called U.S.

Speaker 4 carrier strike forces that literally take a city to run and massive, massive capital expenditure and skills and 5,000 sailors who are just so highly trained, so committed, so willing to put themselves.

Speaker 4 And he parks them off the coast of the Mediterranean and says to Iran, sit the fuck down.

Speaker 4 And we don't have a multi-front war and we don't have a nuclear power backed into a corner, Israel. America doesn't realize, it doesn't miss what it doesn't have, and that is a level of,

Speaker 4 it has so much prosperity, so many freedoms that they don't recognize are a function of a military that trusts each other, that trusts that the people back in Langley, Virginia will not accidentally share who I am and I will be tortured and then murdered, that if I am flying with a package of armaments and a cache to deliver, that I have the right coordinates and the air defense systems haven't gotten that.

Speaker 6 And the Russians don't know it, and the Chinese don't know it, and the Iranians don't know it. This is this is so it's it's just moronic, right?

Speaker 6 It's moronic, and they're liars, and they're trying to hide at the same time. Anyway, okay, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back, Trump unveils his latest tariffs.

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Speaker 6 Scott, we're back. President Trump announced a 25% tariff on imported cars and car parts.
Let's listen.

Speaker 17 This is the beginning of Liberation Day in America. We're going to take back just some of the money that has been

Speaker 17 taken from us by people sitting behind this desk or another desk that's not quite as nice, but they have their choice of seven, as you know.

Speaker 17 And we're going to

Speaker 17 charge

Speaker 17 countries for doing business in our country and taking our jobs, taking our wealth, taking a lot of things that they've been taking over the years. They've taken so much out of our country.

Speaker 6 He's so obsessed with, first of all, his digressions are so strange about the desk, but his obsession with we're getting cheated is really, it's becoming like, what's your fucking problem, dude?

Speaker 6 Everyone's not trying to cheat you all the time. And again, every accusation is a confession.
He's a cheater. And so he focuses in on cheaters and takers and things like that.

Speaker 6 And that's exactly what he is. The tariffs will go into effect on April 2nd and will apply to finished vehicles shipped into the U.S., including from American brands that assemble outside the country.

Speaker 6 Almost half of all vehicles sold in the U.S. are imported.
But lo and behold, Tesla will be spared. And while the Musk company does import parts, it makes vehicles in the U.S.

Speaker 6 However, Elon posted on X x saying important to know that tesla is not unscathed here the tariff impact on tesla is still significant no it is not again a lie um do you think trump uh will pull these back and what does he keep doing here because it it really spooked the markets were recovering a tiny bit and then they didn't so um any thoughts on this well i had a few thoughts listening to the speech that's the first time that I have, in my view, or that I've really noticed cognitive decline.

Speaker 4 It's the first time I thought, oh, wow, he's getting old.

Speaker 4 And you've been saying it for a while. That's the first time I really saw evidence of it.
He just sounds not flight of foot, so to speak.

Speaker 4 Look, and also his speech writer clearly is mimicking what Nigel Farage said about Brexit, claimed that it was, this is our independence day.

Speaker 4 And it's like, well, folks, you realize that people declare independence from Britain, not. Britain doesn't declare independence, like declaring independence from who.

Speaker 4 But we've just said this all along.

Speaker 4 If you were looking for the most elegant, clear, blue-line path to increasing prices and reducing the competitiveness of our products overseas as reciprocal tariffs are implemented, there's no more elegant a way to reduce prosperity in economic history, probably, than tariffs.

Speaker 4 And it comes down to, so I teach strategy. And if you try to distill strategy down to a few basic tenets, two of them would be the following.
In strategy, you're trying to answer one question.

Speaker 4 What can we do that's really hard? Either with spending $18 billion a year on content is really hard, but we have access to cheap capital. Okay, we're Netflix.

Speaker 4 Building the most robust supply chain in the world because of access to cheap capital is really hard. High, we're Amazon.
What can we do that is really hard?

Speaker 4 And then the second thing is the biggest mistake people make in strategy organizations is believing that they're boxing against a speed bag or that they're in that twilight zone where when they move, they stop time and no one else responds.

Speaker 4 And this is the strategic here is so basic, and that is he's under the impression that the U.S.

Speaker 4 is so powerful and superior that we can just levy tariffs errantly without any rationale and that they won't respond and levy reciprocal tariffs.

Speaker 4 As a matter of fact, you want to talk about people who are doing it strategically.

Speaker 4 Canada and Europe have said, not only are we going to implement reciprocal tariffs, we're going to be especially hard on the tariffs affecting red states.

Speaker 4 We're going after your heart and lungs, President Trump. I mean, they're being quite strategic about it.
And it's this basic error. Companies make, I see companies make this all the time.

Speaker 4 We're going to do this, we're going to do this, and we're like, okay, you realize that Adidas and On will do the same thing. I mean, they will respond.

Speaker 4 And that is the biggest strategic error is assuming that you are operating in a vacuum of strength and that your competitors aren't going going to respond.

Speaker 4 And every nation has levied reciprocal tariffs.

Speaker 4 No one has said, President Trump, you're so big and bad, and America is so amazing.

Speaker 4 I think there's an argument that you could say we have unfairly subsidized a military umbrella for the second and third largest economies in the world, specifically Japan and Germany and maybe most of Europe.

Speaker 4 I think that's a real, I think that's a valid argument. But the notion that we don't get the better end or as good a deal on any trade agreement, on any business relationship, is just not true.

Speaker 4 I have done business in every large Western nation, and there is a brand halo by rule of law, innovation, the fact that we are willing to enforce laws, the fact that we don't take shit from anyone, that we attract to the best and the brightest.

Speaker 4 When you walk into a room, even as a small firm, I ran small strategy firms, you benefit from the halo of the American brand.

Speaker 4 And to think somehow that people were taking advantage of us is just, it's this weird victim complex. It's this weird notion of, of, again,

Speaker 4 I make decisions in isolation. No one will respond.
And somehow I'm the victim. It's incredibly immature and

Speaker 4 it lacks all what I call forward-leaning thinking or real kind of blue flame thinking around strategy and game theory.

Speaker 6 Well, it's just, I think it's just moronic. I don't know what else to say.
It's just, and it's because

Speaker 6 Trump's crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, has announced plans to launch a stablecoin. This is, this guy is just literally like, he's like an octopus.
He goes everywhere.

Speaker 6 He's like a handsy guy who's everywhere at once. Stable coins are tied to assets to maintain more stable prices.

Speaker 6 USD1, as it will be called, will be pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar.
That's what stablecoins often are pegged to. GOP lawmakers, that means they have to hold a dollar for every coin.

Speaker 6 Anyway, GOP lawmakers are currently working on legislation to regulate stablecoins. World

Speaker 6 Liberty Financial said it has brought in over $500 million from previous coin sales. Trump Media also announced a partnership with crypto.com this week to launch a series of ETFs.

Speaker 6 I know there's a fire hose of news every day, but what in the actual fucks, speaking of what in the actual, there's so many what in the actual fucks, but he should not be doing crypto.

Speaker 6 He should not be doing crypto and his family shouldn't be doing crypto and they're doing crypto, which is such a

Speaker 6 like an opaque area. Thoughts, very brief thoughts?

Speaker 4 It's grift.

Speaker 4 And there's so many when you're trying to chase down or respond to national security breaches of incompetence and recklessness, it kind of unfortunately wallpapers over the fact that he's engaging in a level of grift for his kids that if Obama did it, there might have been a move to impeach him and some Democrats would have voted to impeach him.

Speaker 4 I mean, the standards have just been lowered so dramatically. I was thinking about

Speaker 4 when I remember going to China a few times with a group of American businessmen, and we would, or they would bring up the notion of human rights.

Speaker 4 Can you imagine us even having the gall or the gumption to bring up human rights violations now when we go abroad? We can't.

Speaker 4 I mean, or to accuse them of grifting corruption. It's just, we have lost all moral authority.

Speaker 6 All the high horses are gone. We're down off the high horse.
This is just ridiculous. He should not be doing this.
And people.

Speaker 6 We should look into this. Like there's no power to look into it, but this is just grift, pure and simple.
And especially in an area that is about to be

Speaker 6 GOP lawmakers are working on legislation. This is so like he cannot, he shouldn't even sign the friggin' thing.
Like, he should, like, uh,

Speaker 6 he won't do it. It's this is, and then it's open for so much uh fraud for regular consumers.
Just buyer beware in many ways. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.

Speaker 6 When we come back, we'll talk about whether Disney's Trump donation is paying off in the newest podcast network.

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Speaker 6 Scott, we're back. The FCC plans to investigate Disney's DEI practices.
They just are moving from company to company doing this. Disney shareholders rejected an anti-DEI proposal earlier this year.

Speaker 6 By the way, Apple and I think it was Costco also did.

Speaker 6 Last fall, Disney settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump and after the election agreed to pay a $15 million donation to Trump's presidential library.

Speaker 6 I mean, the sucking up to Trump isn't even paying off, right? It just isn't working.

Speaker 6 I don't know what to say.

Speaker 6 They're going to go to every DEI thing and just keep litigating one after the other, whether it's law firms who are against Trump or whatever they happen to do, whether it's DEI or just pure revenge.

Speaker 6 They're going to keep doing this shakedown. It feels like I'm in the middle of the early scenes from the Godfather movie with Robert De Niro wandering from Italian-owned store to Italian-owned store.

Speaker 6 I don't know what to say.

Speaker 4 Well, there's two things here. There's the policy around whether DEI practices should be legal or illegal.
That's in their current form.

Speaker 4 That's a valid argument.

Speaker 4 But the problem here, and you introduced this word to me, is systemic change versus non-systemic change. And that is when the president goes after Colombia,

Speaker 4 you know, it tickles my sensors. I like that.
I think that the Ivy League has tolerated a level of anti-Semitism they would not tolerate across any other special interest group.

Speaker 4 But the way you address it is you pass laws that affect everybody. You don't decide who you dislike the most and start going, or who you like the most and host,

Speaker 4 hi, I'm Cal Worthington, 10% off your Tesla right now.

Speaker 4 You're supposed to pass laws that show a lack of favoritism because there's no way to implement targets or enemies or favoritism for your allies without it just becoming an autocrat, you know, an autocracy

Speaker 4 and corrupt. So before we even start here, when he starts targeting individual firms or the head of the Department of Justice calls out or

Speaker 4 the attorney general calls out Disney by name, if he were to say

Speaker 4 the media is going to not have certain protections around certain slander and it's true for everyone.

Speaker 4 Okay, you might disagree. You might think that puts a chill.
But when they start going after specific universities and specific companies,

Speaker 4 then all you're trying to do is say, okay, we're Paul Weiss or we're Perkins or we're, or we're, or, or we're Scad Narbs or whoever, or Latham Watkins. So, this is what we're going to do.

Speaker 4 We're going to work for their kids for free on this new Trump stable coin thing because then we'll stay out of his crosshairs.

Speaker 4 And you end up in a downward spiral of corruption, where, and for corruption folks, that's the biggest tax because people get unfair advantage and it's taxed on everyone else that doesn't have proximity to the president or isn't willing to pay him.

Speaker 4 And we talked about this on CNN. There is a domino of cowardice.
Bob Iger, your cowardice inspired Paul Weiss's partner to say, okay, we'll pay or we'll settle rather than fight.

Speaker 4 Your cowardice inspires Jeff Bezos to go, the quickest way for me to get to 110 to 150 billion is to get rid of the opinion section at the Washington Post.

Speaker 4 Until one of these guys, and let's be honest, they're all guys, says, fuck you.

Speaker 4 And the public and shareholders in business rally around this person, this is just going to continue.

Speaker 4 He's just going to have these one-offs and everyone's going to go, I don't want to be in this crosshair.

Speaker 4 So just give him a couple million bucks for his inauguration or come out and say, You'll work for the stablecoin or you'll buy wink wink.

Speaker 4 The thing about these crypto coins is effectively what the family has done. They have,

Speaker 4 under our watch, opened a Swiss bank account and anyone could put money in. And Trump gets to know who's putting money in, but no one else knows.

Speaker 4 It is such incredible

Speaker 4 grift. And I don't think it's an accident they announce it and decide to move forward when it's like, oh, wait, we've had a national security.
How do we turn, how do we turn lemons into lemonade?

Speaker 4 Everyone's going to be focused on Hag Seth. So let's announce the stable coin.
Can you imagine Sasha, Malia Obama, and Chelsea Clinton launching a crypto coin? I mean,

Speaker 4 everyone would be going fucking crazy, right?

Speaker 4 This is, and here's the thing. It's not their fault.
It's our fault. And the way we got to get back to this is to be brave for companies to stand up to them.

Speaker 4 And we need to begin immediately pushing back, being fearless. And also, 2026 is not that far away.

Speaker 6 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 Let me give you an excellent example of what The Atlantic is doing. And by the way, they are fucking badassers.

Speaker 6 Carolyn Levitt, Tracy Flick, lying again on the stand at the White House goes, the mainstream media continues to be focused on a sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine that is falling apart by the hour, which is not true.

Speaker 6 Literally, everything comes out of her mouth is a lie.

Speaker 6 Fact check, Nick Thompson, who's the CEO of Atlantic, which is doing really well. We have more subscribers than ever before.
Ads are up. We're profitable.
We're expanding print issues and podcasts.

Speaker 6 We publish everything that is new to reading. We're hiring more and more great journalists to cover you fairly.

Speaker 6 And then he put fist, flag, and the fire symbol, which is what I think it was Mike Walls who used those emojis, you know, in terms of the attack.

Speaker 6 It's just, pushing back is the best way to go here with these people. You have to both be factual and you have to also punch back at this nonsense.

Speaker 6 And what is really interesting is they can't get this story out of this news cycle. And it's day five and he hasn't been able to change the subject by all manner of diversions.
So don't let him.

Speaker 6 Don't let him change the subject kind of thing. And so we'll see where it goes.
But Disney should stand up.

Speaker 6 All these companies should stand up and stop and find their, you know, find whatever you want to say, their backbone or their, or their set.

Speaker 6 So very quickly, Megan Kelly's launching a podcast network. Lots of people are doing this.
MK Media launching next month. We'll have shows from Mark Halperin, Maureen Callahan, and Link Lauren.

Speaker 6 I think the company she's worked with was sold to Fox, the red, whatever you call it. Let's listen to what Megan has to say about this.

Speaker 16 I'm so excited about these three.

Speaker 16 Aren't these a great three to launch with? They cover the gamut, right?

Speaker 16 It's like Link has got such a following amongst young, sort of right-leaning people or independent-minded people who have just had it with the weird left.

Speaker 6 Anyway, her podcast, which launched in 2020, I was one of the first people to talk to her about doing a podcast, as I've said before, is consistently one of the most popular news podcasts in the country.

Speaker 6 I don't know if it's news exactly. You're kinder to her than her.
I think she's just a rage machine and she has a little act that she takes on the road and screams at women, a lot of women.

Speaker 6 But the idea of what's happening here is a bigger thing: there's a lot of really interesting independent companies being created, whether they're on conservative or liberal.

Speaker 6 And it really is this idea of doing these podcast networks is going to be really interesting in how you do them and keep them entrepreneurial.

Speaker 6 I know Scott and I have talked about it, especially the voices on the weird left, like ourselves.

Speaker 6 What is wrong with her? Anyway, it's really, it's an interesting time for this idea of industrialization of podcasting and some of these other things as they move into video. Any quick thoughts?

Speaker 4 First off, I just, White House spokesperson Levitt married a 59-year-old when she's 27, so I'm kind of a fan, but it gives me, I think it means I have a shot with AOC. I'm just saying.

Speaker 4 I'm just saying.

Speaker 6 You so don't have a shot with AOC.

Speaker 4 It's crazy. Well, you know my criteria for every

Speaker 4 spouse I've had. It's very simple.
I don't want to hear this. Okay.
No? Okay, never mind.

Speaker 6 Okay, go ahead. What is it? Go ahead.

Speaker 4 It's simple. Two things.
A badass or the great ass.

Speaker 4 Okay. Oh, we're going to hear it on that one.
Okay, I kind of like that. We're going to hear it in the comments.

Speaker 6 Okay, I like that. I hate that.
I hate myself. All right.
Just talk about the podcast network. I'd rather not talk about Megan Kelly because I think she's a rage machine and hateful, but go ahead.

Speaker 4 Megan is very talented. And you got to separate the person and their talent from their political views.
She's a very no, it's not political views.

Speaker 6 It's performative rage. But go ahead.
Go ahead. Fine.

Speaker 4 She's whatever. She's very talented.
And okay, so one of my biggest, one of my big predictions in October of 24 was 25.

Speaker 4 I have tech of the year, media of the year, stock of the year, that the media of the year, hands down, podcasts.

Speaker 4 And it happened on election day. And that is

Speaker 4 so much money pours into local news stations because old people supposedly determine elections and old people still want to get the weather on their local news stations.

Speaker 4 So local news stations are hemorrhage money for 22 months.

Speaker 4 And then for two months every two years, they jack up their rates by sevenfold and they sell out because the local guy running for Congress just plows money into it.

Speaker 4 That typically is a 60-year-old. The average person is a 60-year-old white woman watching cable news or listening to local television.
Local television is probably even older.

Speaker 4 Trump realized he zagged when everyone zigged, went on the Manosphere, went into podcasts, went on every fucking testosterone-layton podcast, and it was brilliant.

Speaker 4 And the average listener to a podcast is a 34-year-old male. And a 34-year-old male is Latin for swing voter because they care about economics.
And who is seen as better on the economy is dynamic.

Speaker 4 Sometimes it's Democrats when they realize, oh, they've created 50 million jobs in the last four decades, and Republicans have

Speaker 4 created 1 million. And sometimes it's people go, oh, Republicans are acknowledging inflation.
They're speaking more. They're business people.
Trump's a businessman. So it goes back and forth.

Speaker 4 So they're the swing voter. In addition,

Speaker 4 you're seeing a flood of advertising into this young male demographic because by the way, those people are the great white rhino of advertisers because they're stupid.

Speaker 4 They spend money on things like shoes and watches and coffee. coffee and they're decision makers and their companies around technology.

Speaker 4 They buy high margin products and you you can't reach them because they're watching Netflix and Spotify. So where do you reach a 34-year-old male? You reach him on podcasts.

Speaker 4 Reaching a young male, wealthy audience is an advertiser's dream and you can't reach them anywhere else. In addition, 50% of people have to say they listen to at least one podcast a month.

Speaker 4 The medium is growing faster than Alphabet or Meta right now in terms of ad revenue. In addition, there's a built-in moat, and that moat is the following.

Speaker 4 Because we started seven years ago, we have a huge subscriber base on Apple, on Spotify, on YouTube, and anything we drop gets downloaded when you subscribe.

Speaker 4 advertisers base their advertising and CPMs based on your built-in installed base.

Speaker 4 So if you have been in the podcasting game for a while, you almost have a natural mode around you because advertisers will only advertise on pods who have a certain amount of scale.

Speaker 4 So the little guys, the 699,000 podcasts that aren't in the top 1,000, it is difficult for them to make it out of the crib.

Speaker 4 So you have a plethora, you have a tectonic shift in the flows of rivers of advertising capital into this new medium.

Speaker 4 And you actually, strangely enough, despite the fact there's low barriers of entry and 700,000 podcasts put out something every week, there's really only 500 or 600 of them that have the scale that advertisers want, meaning like almost every other medium where digitization comes in, it's become a winner-take-most, if not all, environment.

Speaker 4 What's interesting about podcasting is the two newer platforms are YouTube. More people listen to

Speaker 4 podcasts on YouTube now than on Spotify or Apple. 20% of my listens at ProfG, because the ProfG markets are very visual, is on TVs.
It's on YouTube that people airplay to their TV.

Speaker 4 You're seeing our revenues here at Pivot are comping up for the last seven years, probably 28 or 30% a year. So this is attracting a ton of talent, a ton of capital, big growth off a small base.

Speaker 4 And Megan,

Speaker 4 and oh, and by the way, I forgot. You know who's just decided they're getting into the podcasting game? Netflix.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So if they put Steve Bartlett or Pivot or on with Kara Swisher on their front page for a hot minute in front of 300 million people, that podcast is going to go into the top 10.

Speaker 4 They're getting into the game. So you're going to see advertisers switch to the small number of companies that have scale.
You're going to see a dramatic increase in advertising spend.

Speaker 4 You're going to see some multi, some nine-figure plus deals in podcasting. You're going to see some really, really big deals.
This is the medium of 2026.

Speaker 6 Let me ask you a question because I was just thinking about this. Like things were on par with advertising to do really well this year.

Speaker 6 And now this tariff thing that Trump's doing doing is fucking with everybody's business. And ads, they're showing a little bit of, now they're like, oh, maybe not so much.

Speaker 6 Because things were really sort of,

Speaker 6 the juice was going for a minute there. But they're noticing that when people pull, they're going to pull from this.
Is that a worry?

Speaker 4 Okay. In the short term, yes.
It hurts everybody because people go on to a standstill. And we've seen this.
And they say, just...

Speaker 4 you know, cool your jets, stand down until we figure out what's going on.

Speaker 4 However, if you look at the shifts in mediums, everyone knew people were shifting money and ad spend from traditional media into search-based media or social-based media. We all knew that.

Speaker 4 But what happens is, whenever there's an economic shock and media planners and big agencies are forced to rethink their budgets, they typically

Speaker 4 take everyone down, but then they come back in the new mediums. Exogenous shocks give a company pause to rethink their entire media strategy.
And that almost benefits the new guys.

Speaker 4 So, actually, in recessions and in economic shocks, in the short term, it hurts everybody.

Speaker 4 But in the medium term, it massively expedites the transition that was sort of already happening at a low speed. It expedites it.

Speaker 4 And Google and Meta, when they take their advertising budgets back, it gives them a chance to think: should we be spending this much on newspapers or broadcast television? Maybe not. Let's go.

Speaker 4 We know we're going back into TikTok and Meta and Alphabet. So while we will absolutely, with these tariffs, see a reduction in our growth.

Speaker 6 It's not going to be there first.

Speaker 4 When the economy comes back, it's going to expedite the disruption. The shift.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Maybe people are thinking, you're right.
Okay. I wanted to understand that.
All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

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Speaker 6 Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction.

Speaker 4 Oh, look,

Speaker 4 the Chinese see this void. We had spent decades and $70 to $80 billion a year on USAID helping fund a hospital in Cambodia.
Tremendous goodwill in Cambodia. Set up this infrastructure.

Speaker 4 It was working well. Money was being put to good use.
We just cut it off. You know who showed up literally the next week? And this is a true story, the Chinese.

Speaker 4 And they are taking advantage advantage of all the good work that's been done to usurp soft power.

Speaker 4 And I believe this goes back to the notion that we have a monopoly on our ability to deliver violence. We have, I think, 700 bases in 70 or 80 nations.
I think China has two or three.

Speaker 4 You're going to see a dramatic increase in the number of Chinese military bases on foreign soil because

Speaker 4 they are filling our shoes and getting massive benefit from the organizations, the relationships, and the NGO sector that we were funding.

Speaker 4 And they'll just slip into those shoes and say, No, no, no, you don't need to close the hospital. The good guys are here.
And that is going to, and nothing's for free.

Speaker 4 The next time they show up in a year, two years, three years and say, Look, we'd like to have a naval base here. We'd like to be able to refuel our planes here, and we'll pay for the revenue.

Speaker 4 And by the way, how's the hospital coming? Is it still working great?

Speaker 4 So, we're going to see for the first time a dramatic increase in Chinese military bases overseas, which to date the U.S. really has had a monopoly on.
This soft power translates to hard power.

Speaker 4 And people don't realize, again, these people don't think long-term behaviors.

Speaker 4 Well, the whole basis of

Speaker 4 an elected official, at the end of the day, it goes back to strategy.

Speaker 4 What are you supposed to do that's really hard? What are you supposed to do that's really hard? You're supposed to prevent a tragedy of the commons over the medium and the long term.

Speaker 6 Can I make an interjection here? Because there's just a news story from the New York Times today that Trump administration abruptly cuts billions from state health services.

Speaker 6 This is across our country. States have been told they can no longer use grants that were funding infectious disease management and addiction services.

Speaker 6 They've cut $12 billion in federal grants to states that are being used to track infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment, and other urgent health issues.

Speaker 6 That means these state health departments were already underfunded. are in real trouble.
They received notices Monday that the funds which were allocated are being terminated.

Speaker 6 And let me just say, in Lubbock, Texas, public health officials, this is not to, these are red states, just so you know, red state people, they're leopards about to eat your face.

Speaker 6 Public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by these three grants that help fund the response to the whiting measles outbreak there, according to Catherine Wells.

Speaker 6 On Tuesday, some health departments were preparing to lay off dozens of epidemiologists and data scientists.

Speaker 6 This is the same thing. This is goodwill and the things that the government does that are effective for people.
And it's going to be the same issue in this country.

Speaker 6 The question is, who's going to come into the breach, right? And which is what you're talking about with the Chinese doing that. I don't know if you'd like to link those.

Speaker 4 I like that. No, I think that makes sense.

Speaker 6 It's the same attitude across this country, and it will have repercussions.

Speaker 4 But the people of the entities that will fill the void abroad are foreign nations, some of which do not have our best interests at heart. I don't think of China as an enemy.

Speaker 4 I think of them as a competitor, maybe even an adversary.

Speaker 4 The organizations that will fill the void in the U.S. are for-profit organizations that over the medium and the long term will probably demand margin.

Speaker 4 So what happens when the government vacates from these services is private, and this is what they want. They want private enterprise running all prisons.

Speaker 4 They want to privatize Social Security because then corporations will insert themselves in the middle. In some ways, they're more innovative.
In some ways, they're more productive.

Speaker 6 In some ways, they're just interested in making money. That's what they do.
Yeah, I know. And that's not good for the public comment.

Speaker 4 They'll get monopoly power on the jails and whatever, this part of the county or this part of the state. They will slowly raise the rates and we will end up paying more for less.

Speaker 4 There are certain things that should be delivered at scale. The electricity in a city needs a monopoly.

Speaker 4 And in order to have monopolies, you have to have regulators such that they don't enact monopoly pricing power. So this is abroad.

Speaker 4 Our adversaries will fill the void domestically with these businesses that they're cutting. You'll see private enterprise move in, and over the medium and the long term, the consumer will lose.

Speaker 6 Lesser services.

Speaker 6 Exactly. All right.
Elsewhere in the Scott and Kerry universe this week on profit markets, Scott spoke with Karsten Brzewski, a chief Eurozone economist for ING.

Speaker 6 Scott's been talking a lot about Europe, what's going on in Europe. Let's listen to a clip.

Speaker 4 Debt means the same as guilt. Oh, wow.

Speaker 4 And I think that is

Speaker 4 not the only language, but that is an important one.

Speaker 4 So somehow debt, like government debt, always had a negative connotation. So Germany was clearly the fiscally frugal country, which could tell the southern European economies to also do austerity.

Speaker 6 So interesting discussion about what's happening there. I thought it was.
I listened to it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm convinced if my.

Speaker 4 co-host on property markets was German, we just wouldn't be successful. Yeah, let's look.
Let's talk about AI and the markets.

Speaker 4 It just doesn't have the same ring as when a British guy was talking about it.

Speaker 6 Oh, it's a good German joke.

Speaker 4 But the thing he was talking about, I don't think it got fully across, the German word for debt translates to guilt in English. Isn't that interesting?

Speaker 4 And they're about to kind of unchain their fiscal strength for infrastructure spending and military spending, which I think is going to be a big deal. But anyway,

Speaker 6 you know, and you've been talking about the European. Now, suddenly I'm seeing stories in the Wall Street Journal how the place you

Speaker 6 should invest in is Germany.

Speaker 4 What was my stock pick? What was my stock pick for 2025?

Speaker 4 You were great. New York.

Speaker 2 European value.

Speaker 6 Just for people who don't speak German, which I do, Schuld,

Speaker 6 Des Schuld is debt, the debt, S-C-H-U-L-D. It also means blame, guilt, fault, liability, trespasses.
So Schuld, you know, when you say, excuse me, and Schuldigen or something like that.

Speaker 4 My favorite German is Farferneugen.

Speaker 6 Farfen. You love that word.
Oh, it's the best. All right.
That's our show. Thanks for listening to Pivot and be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
We'll be back on Friday.

Speaker 6 Scott, read us out.

Speaker 4 Today's show was produced by Lara Naim, Soey Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Innertod engineered this episode.
Ronnie Palidaro edited this video. Thanks also to Juberos, Miasaviro, and Dan Shallan.

Speaker 4 Yes, Shakt Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine, Vox Media.

Speaker 4 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things things tech and business.
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