Meta Tell-All, Elon's Daughter Speaks Out, Cybertruck Recall

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If you want to talk about electoral justice, come over and we'll smoke cigarettes and have ice cream and talk about all our bad boyfriends. Hi, everyone.
This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher, and I'm in Puerto Rico.
So, Cara, one night I took home some girl who turned out to be a lady boy, which I'd done before. At this time, Cara, instead of fucking the lady boy, the lady boy fucked me.
And it was kind of magical. And I got in my head, what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me.
And to feel that. Oh, that's my dramatic reading of The White lotus oh Oh, my God.
Did you see that scene? Oh, my God. I didn't.
I've heard of it, though. I've read of it.
Oh, my God. That guy is good.
Yeah. Sam Rockwell.
Yeah. Okay.
I was a little worried there, but I'm allowing it. I'm allowing it.
He was the deputy in Three Billboards and something. He's a very good actor.
He's actually an outstanding actor. Anyways, I don't want to spoil it.
Yeah, you just did. But it is out.
It literally. It's gotten a lot of attention.
I mean, let's be honest. Season three is okay.
I carry the season. I've heard that.
It's true. I've heard that.
Yeah, that's true. I have to acknowledge that.
But this monologue from Sam Rockwell is a close second. Anyway, Puerto Rico.
I'm in Puerto Rico. It's lovely here.
Are you enjoying it? Yeah, I'm going back today. I'd rather not go back at all, but it's lovely.
It's a lovely place. Food amazing.
Got a great Airbnb. It was great.
Just a really nice—I had three of the four kids, and it's been lovely. Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today, including Elon's visit to the Pentagon.
Tesla's facing more trouble with a massive Cybertruck recall. I saw one Cybertruck here, by the way, Scott, in Puerto Rico.
That's it. That's all I've seen is one.
But there's not that many that were sold, apparently, as the massive Cybertruck recall has shown. Where are you right now? I'm in the UK.
I'm in London. Oh, good.
How's that going. It was great.
I had a nice weekend. Our friends, Alenca and Nacho, our Argentinian friends are visiting.
It's nice because our boys all are close friends and they just love to drink. As long as there's wine, they won't leave.
And their accents get thicker and thicker. And I don't know what they're saying, but he laughs so wonderfully.
It makes me laugh. That's nice.
Ah, that's nice. And I took him for a roast at Lore of the Land, which is this pub.
This is like a Sunday roast. Yeah, Sunday roast.
Yeah. Owned by Guy Ritchie.
It's a total British pub. So yeah, I had a nice weekend.
And then on Friday night, I took my youngest to see Team England play Albania. And literally half of Albania came to see this game.
I mean, these fans are so out of control. It's a nation of two million people.
And I'm not exaggerating. It felt like half of them were at this game.
Oh, that's great. It's a ton of fun.
Nice weekend. Good.
We went to the rainforest. We went to the beach, the rainforest.
Puerto Rico is a beautiful place. It really is.
I've never been. It's lovely.
It's sort of, you know, it's like most tropical areas, but it's really lovely. And the people are wonderful.
And the food is strikingly good. There's a lot of beans and rice and stuff like that, but it's been delicious.
I don't think of Puerto Rico as having great food, but that's just a brand perception. I know.
neither did I. And I actually have been very pleasantly surprised.
I don't go to the Caribbean unless it's St. Bart's.
Okay, I understand that. By the way, if you fly through Puerto Rico because it's a U.S.
territory, you don't have to clear customs. Also, the only story I have about Puerto Rico is I know two hedge fund managers that move there because you can qualify for 2% taxation.
It's a total tax avoidance move. Yes, the Bitcoin people did it.
Except you have to stay there. You have to be there 183 days a year.
And in both instances, they both move back because they decided they like Puerto Rico, but they don't like it that much. Oh, yeah.
I think it's hard to do those tax moves. Like Monaco was another one, right? There's a couple of people.
Florida, obviously.

It is the talk of the town here in London because of this thing called Nondam, where basically Kier Starmer and his government have decided no more tax advantage or avoidance for people who've been here for longer than five years. I have two friends.
One has moved to Milan, and he's left his family here, and he can only be here 90 nights. and then I have another who's moving he thinks he's going to move to Madrid

yet there's has moved to Milan and he's left his family here and he can only be here 90 nights. And then I have another who's moving.
He thinks he's going to move to Madrid. Yet this, Cara, in the last year, over 10,000 millionaires have left the UK.
Wow. Isn't that crazy? So they're doing it just to avoid taxes, to avoid, you know, on some level, it's sort of like they should probably lower taxes.
At the same time, the tax avoidance schemes are so insane. I remember we had some stories

in Puerto Rico

when a lot of the Bitcoin guys came in.

They were sort of wrecking the place

and at the same time

were buying up these expensive houses

and they were conducting themselves badly.

And the whole thing was so icky.

Like the ways,

the gyrations people make

to do this kind of stuff.

It seems ridiculous on some level. I get the Monaco thing, and I know people, like different tennis stars have lived in Monaco to avoid taxes and this and that.
And that's sort of a, it's designed for rich people, I guess, that town, or that country. It's so small.
But it seems so icky. I think it defines the term, the difference between being right and being effective.
And that is in the 90s or 2000s, I should say, Tony Blair passed a series of private property laws and said, I don't care how you made your money. If you bring it to London and invest in businesses or buy a home here, no one can come for it and take it from you.
And so London kind of became the most popular place in Europe, in the Gulf, to bring money. And quite frankly, it was really good for the UK economy because these are people who invest, they spend a lot of money, they create a lot of usage and VAT tax revenue, they endorse or they patronize the local businesses.
And it theoretically just makes sense in principle to say, okay, you should pay the same tax rates as people here because you're using our infrastructure. But the problem is it's not effective because rich people are very mobile.
So it's a tough one because while I understand the logic behind it, the reality is they're going to have less tax revenue for the NHS and for social programs social programs i get it i get it i just the bitcoin ones were so unseemly here in in puerto rico i remember the stories i was always felt dirty right you know right because they're just terrible people that were you know avoiding taxes and and then a lot of it was bullshit but some anyway anyway it's a lovely place i recommend people going there it is it is not a garbage island it's beautiful and the people are lovely um and they're americans by the way but people always go oh you're going to a foreign car i'm like no puerto rico is american and they should have they should be the 51st state and they should get uh get representation uh as should the district of Columbia, before we move into China and

Greenland.

Yeah, that's easily our biggest issue right now.

Yeah.

No, I'm just saying it's an issue.

I'd like to have my vote count, Scott.

You get to have your vote count, but I don't.

Your vote does count.

You're not Puerto Rican.

What are you talking about?

No, I'm a D.C. resident.

We don't have, we have taxation without representation.

We have a person in Congress, so does Puerto Rico, but we don't have, the votes don't

count.

Oh, yeah, I don't understand that.

That's right. Yeah, I don't either.
I don't either. I would like, we're one of the biggest, we have many, many, many, many, much more of a population.
Well, okay, if we're going to go down the street, should California that has the population of 30 million have two senators? Yeah, exactly. And Wyoming has one, too? I mean, there's a, come over.
Wyoming and Montana do well here. If you want to talk about electoral injustice, come over and we'll smoke cigarettes and have ice cream and talk about all our bad boyfriends.
I understand. But still, I would like to have my vote count.
Anyway, first, speaking of politics, bipartisan senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin plan to re-enterose the bill to sunset Section 230, I guess.

Okay.

The bill would give Section 230 an expiration date of January 1, 2027,

with the goal of pressuring big tech to engage in negotiations for new regulations.

President Trump has long been an advocate for repealing Section 230,

although he hadn't been before.

He's changed like a lot of these politicians.

He's not alone in that.

Graham has introduced repeal bills multiple times.

This one, you know, we'll see if it happens.

It's really a way to, it's just not the way to go here,

but there seem to be no other ways to go.

We'll see if there will be new regulation. There's also a danger that Trump administration

takes control of our online speech.

Dirt's take, which I think is the smartest. Democratic senators team up with MAGA to hand Trump a censorship machine.
It's really a problematic, it's like taking out your liver, I guess, or whatever you need, organ, would you need your heart to fix a real problem of these companies not being subject to any kind of litigation or regulation. So it's a really difficult situation.
It would really affect their businesses in ways that are really quite profound. I don't know.
What do you feel? I would read Mike Masnick on the entire thing. That's how I would recommend.
I think Senator Gretem is a really ineffective senator, in addition to having absolutely no moral compass or ability for his constituents to discern who he has less consistency or ability to figure out where he is or what he stands for than Secretary Rubio. And this is just this is just stupid, because the reality is Section 230, if you removed it totally, would gut some of our best companies.
These are great companies. All right.
I don't like them. You have issues with them, but without some form of protection around their content, they go out of business the next day.
And in addition, this isn't serious because they're saying until January, 2027. So they're basically thinking this would prod them into negotiations.
And what I really don't like about this is that we seem to value and understand the importance. And there is some value to kind of shock and awe and shoving stuff through.
So they shock and awe around canceling all USAID. They shock and awe around rounding up innocents and deporting them to these hellscape prisons in El Salvador, but around going after those nice white people and shareholders.
Let's be thoughtful and measured and give them till January, 2027 to deploy their lobbyists and weaponize and buy off government. They gave $62 million in lobbying next year.
First off, somebody should have done shock and awe. Somebody like Senator Murphy or Senators Klobuchar should have gotten the support, and they probably could have because this is a bipartisan issue and said, algorithmically elevated content is no longer protected by 230, because that's a decision they make to elevate content.
And they still would have had protection around stuff. They still would have had the whole free speech argument.
And the biggest argument here is around against it is around, well, you should have free speech. Fine.
If you want to say mRNA vaccines alter DNA, fine. But you shouldn't elevate it beyond its organic reach because it enrages people.
So when you do that, and also bots don't have, in my opinion, don't have rights to free speech.

So they could have come up with a thoughtful bill and gone shock and awe and just passed it. Instead, they come up with something stupid and give a warning, the same warning, the same due process that poor people aren't getting in our nation right now.
The poor people abroad are absolutely not getting right now. But they've said, OK, let's put out something stupid that will never happen and give them the due process that they're not affording to people who aren't white, who aren't shareholders, who aren't corporations.
This is total fucking bullshit and a waste of time and attention. Yep, I would agree.
And again, I would recommend, there's a really good podcast that Mike Masnick has done. He's written a lot about this.
years ago when they were doing this before when they tried to do this again

they

I had him on and a bunch, and Jeff Kossoff and others who know a lot about it to explain why this is the, it's like, there's an expression throwing a hammer at a piano to make music. Like, it just doesn't make any sense.
And this is what he writes. How did the once obscure internet law become the target of bipartisan crusade? The answer reveals much about our current moral panic over social media and dangerous appeal of quick fix solutions.
It makes them default to fix this. What people don't realize is that Section 230 isn't really the root of their concerns or removing or even reforming.
It won't fix the people on the internet. In fact, it will certainly make things worse.
So I think it's really important to get yourself educated on this. This is not the solution.
Again, you're right. They could have passed all of the different bills Senator Klobuchar and others had around privacy, around all kinds of things, around some liability that they never, they refused to do.
They refused to do decent law. and they have to use this as a cudgel.
Like, it's ridiculous. They should be able, if they can be bipartisan, they should be bipartisan enough to pass a series of laws that give these, that have teeth in them that have against these companies, privacy, algorithm, transparency, antitrust laws.
Why not an executive order here? Yeah, exactly.

Come on.

Shock and awe.

Shock and awe across.

Rounding up people.

Shock and awe.

Cutting off aid for malaria victims.

But when it comes to corporations

in Silicon Valley,

we're proposing something stupid

that'll take effect in two years.

Why not have a regulation around privacy,

around a bipartisan?

Right now.

Right now.

They could do it right now. And this is what they're going for.
They're so stupid. Age gate, executive order.
No one under the age of 16 is allowed on social media. Boom, done, tomorrow.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. This is really not the smart way to do it.
Anyway, I urge you to learn about it because as it perhaps might have not been correct in the first place, it almost was impossible to create these companies without it at the same time. So anyway, difficult, difficult times.
Speaking of someone that Meta has made a bestseller, Sarah Wynne-Williams released Careless People, documenting her six years at the company earlier this month. She was there quite a bit ago.
I think 2018 is when she left. Meta has recently successfully stopped Wynne-Williams from doing interviews based on a non-disparagement agreement signed at her termination.
Wynne-Williams has filed an emergency motion to overturn the ruling, citing lack of proper notice and whistleblower protection. She apparently wasn't present when they made the ruling.
At the time of the taping of the book, it's number three on Amazon's bestseller. I think this was the strategy of this publisher.
They didn't inform the company before. There was a lot of quietness around the release.
They didn't seem to fact-check. The ones I checked, they did not.
The ones people I checked with, they did not call. And they have, you know, the company is very upset about the book and has been trying to stop it and in the process has made it very popular.
She did a bunch of short interviews. There was one or two interviews before, but then has not been able to do that.
But it hasn't stopped it. I think, I don't know.
I think it's a problematic book. I have read it.
We can discuss it, Scott, if you want, because you haven't read it. But there's a lot of important stuff in this book.
And at the same time, a lot of stuff that is not what I say fact-checked, is what I would say, and is questionable about her taking credit for certain things. I think some of the stuff, the personal stuff, should have been fact-checked.
There's some stuff about Joel Kaplan, about sexual harassment. There's some stuff about Charles Sandberg wanting her to sleep in a bed in a plane, which I think, I'm sorry, I don't believe.
I believe it happened. I just don't believe it the way Williams is telling it, although only people there would know, I guess.
And I think Facebook is reacting rather emotionally to this because of the personal stuff in it. But the stuff around China is really interesting.
It's really interesting that their preparations to go into China, but then they didn't. And I don't think she was there when they decided not to.
So she doesn't know why they didn't, but they didn't do it. But some of the stuff is really interesting.
It gives you an insight to this company who are indeed careless people. But I'm not so sure this is the best narrator to tell it, although a lot of it is really important.
And lots of people I trust have mixed feelings on this book as I do. Well, I'll put forward, I haven't read, I've read a lot about it.
I'll put forward a thesis and you validate it or nullify it because you're just going to forget more about this topic than I'm going to know. And you know, these people, I don't.
And that is when I saw this, it reminded me sort of one of the issues or I think dangers of Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. I think my thesis is she's mixing truth with bullshit here.
And that is, I don't know Sheryl Sandberg. I know a lot about her just following her career, but her making advances on female employees or Joel Kaplan, who I do not know, but I followed his career closely, him engaging in a pattern of sexual harassment, a lot of this just didn't ring true.
And it felt like, quite frankly, I just read a lot of this. I love readings about whistleblowers and meta.
Frances Haugen, everything she said just felt true. And she was measured and she was happy to say, that's not true.
That's hyperbole. This, quite frankly, your bullshit sensors just go on high alert when you read about this stuff.
It just, for me, didn't ring true. What are your thoughts? Some of it.
Some of it. Some of the memos she has are really important to read.
Like, these are actual memos and things like that of how they did things. I just think it's her take on – she's always the hero in the story.
And I know a lot of people who work there who try really hard to do the right thing. And I think in some places where they had successes, she takes a lot of the credit.
I think that's one of the things certain people like Katie Harbath, who I like very much, who have been big Facebook critics, find issues with this. Like in the telling of the stories.
Now, it's a memoir. So this is her telling of the story.
And I just wrote my own memoir, so I understand how people might not agree with my take on situations either. But this has been met by a lot of people whom I trust, saying this is not the way it happened.
That said, I think her vibe is absolutely correct. This sort of carelessness, I think, is think, you know, how they go about doing things is true.

The China stuff is really interesting to understand.

It gives you great insight into the company,

and that stuff is, I think, very much, the vibe is correct.

Sort of like, I also don't know why she waited so long,

if this was so critical.

Of course, that's a Facebook argument,

and I don't think it's a wrong one. But I do think Facebook has reacted emotionally on this stuff and has made it into a bestseller.
So more people are reading it because of, because one of the things, and I told this to someone from Meta, I'm like, they're like, it's not trustworthy. I said, neither are you.
So it's not like we trust Meta when they're actually telling the truth. And that's the problem is that nobody has any trust for this company.
And so you assume the worst of them. And in my case, I do think it does hurt for people who are critics of them when things aren't buttoned up.
Unfortunately, you have to be super buttoned up with these people. And I was opposed to interviewing, but there was way too many holes.
I didn't feel like slagging her and I didn't feel like defending Facebook. And I just think she's got the vibe right.
She's got the vibe right. That's for sure.
But didn't it feel very sensationalist to you? It did. It did.
I hate to say that, but I really did. And the Sandberg stuff as, you know, I'm a little kinder to her than you are, but I can see how that happened and the way she told it isn't correct.
I can see Cheryl's very, I would say, sisterly or motherly with her employees and all tech companies, and Facebook included, are far too familial with their employees. And especially in the early days, it was like a frat sometimes.
Sometimes it was like a family, a dysfunctional family for sure. Facebook wasn't as much of a frat as say Google was in many ways.
And I think there was a familiarity in those companies that has long gone now, but initially was present. And I think all these companies were sort of behaved in ways that HR would just blush at.
And at one point, there was a meta, it was Facebook at the time, person in HR. And they had just gotten there.
And I said, what's your job? And she said, I'm the vice president of keeping people from fucking each other. And it was, I laughed out loud.
And Facebook wasn't the worst of them, which is interesting, as I recall. But there was just a familiarity.
So I could see her saying, oh, sleep in the bed, you're pregnant. Sleep in the bed, no, do it.
Like, I can see her doing that in a very sisterly, motherly way. I can't see her.
She depicts it as a sexual overture. I don't think she's, she kind of does.
But it's not quite there. Also, if you read it, it's sort of like, it's more invasive, I guess, than anything else, and it leaves the reader to decide what the intent was.
But let me just say, I can see Sosom being overly sisterly, motherly. I couldn't, this is just kind of ridiculous on some level.
And so even leaving it open really irritated me, I think, in a lot of ways. Although, again, I would read it because I think some of the memos and the vibe is correct.
I think she does nail these people, is the kind of vibe they have, which is whatever it takes. And I think that is, but that is not a new, fresh piece of information for any of us.
So. Your point, which I thought was a powerful one, is that when you're making accusations of someone being a sexual harasser or a bigot or being responsible for the coursing of our discourse and enraging the population, I really don't think people have any sense of just how much damage Meta has done to the U.S.
and the world, pitting people against one another. I absolutely 100% believe that Sheryl Sandberg likely saw research saying, oh, one in 18 girls in the United Kingdom cite Instagram as a reason for the depression and then her trying to wallpaper over it.
I absolutely believe that Sheryl Sandberg saw research saying and approved saying, we have this great new system of selling cosmetics and beauty products by identifying girls when they're feeling especially depressed and have especially low self-esteem at that moment and then targeting them with beauty ads. All of that really rings true for me, that Sheryl Sandberg, while weaponizing the important discussion around gender balance in the workplace, decided to continue to deploy a business model that absolutely attacked the self-esteem of girls resulting in a dramatic increase in self-harm.
All of that rings 100% true to me. Some of this stuff, some of this stuff, I just can't imagine Sheryl Sandberg ever taking the risks.
Or some of this stuff, it just didn't ring true. It felt very gossipy, very sensationalist,

meant to like feel more sinister

and just sell more books, quite frankly.

And I actually think this book does harm

because there's a lot of really credible people

who have reported on what is going on inside of Facebook.

And I think this helps Meta

because you can go, we have critics

that are just full of shit.

So I think what it does is it diminishes the credible calls and accusations and findings that this company continues to levy tremendous damage on our society. That's why I recommend reading it because the stuff around the memos is really interesting.
And I found it. I found insight in it.
That's absolutely sure. Anyway, we should move on.
Speaking of which, another person, another piece of shit in this case, not Facebook, but RFK Jr.'s latest target is surprisingly one we can almost agree on, cell phones in schools, sort of. Talking about the risk of cell phone use for kids on Fox and Friends, Kenny did mention depression and poor performance.
But then what did he do? Let's listen. Cell phones also produce electromagnetic radiation, which has been shown to damage, to do neurological damage to kids when it's around them all day.
And to cause cellular damage and even cancers. And there he goes, down the highway.
Research so far has not found an association between cell phone use and cancer, nor DNA damage. Last year, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on schools to ban phones in classrooms for the good reasons, which are depression and poor performance, that he had to do this.

Oh, God, I want to just, I can't slap someone.

I mean, I would like to virtually slap him for doing this because it's an important issue. And as usual, he enters all kinds of conspiracy theories into it without, you know, I don't

know what to say.

Just once again, this is the exact same thing.

It's like he's making a good point and then down he goes down conspiracy highway with his nonsensical bullshit your thoughts uh when i was in junior high school i saw my first r-rated movie me and my best friend adam markman we would get bored after school and we would go into westwood where they had all these amazing movie theaters and still do and we'd sneak into a movie theater we'd find a way we'd try and sneak in to the back door, the front door, and we'd get kicked out. Yeah, side door, whatever it was, wait till the movie was letting out, the back door into the alley, sneak in.
And we snuck in accidentally into The Exorcist. And for about the next six years, I had to sit in the corner to put my socks on.
I mean, I was so fucking freaked out. That movie traumatized me for years.
That's a traumatic. Mine was Halloween.
Halloween was mine. I was 14 and for about two weeks, my mom would wake up in the middle of the night and look over and I'd be sleeping next to her bed.
I just could not sleep alone. And there's a scene in it where the, I think it's the priest says, the devil will mix in truth with lies to really confuse you.

And here's the tough part about RFK Jr. is that I think he's actually really good on some issues

and really articulate. He's very forceful about the industrial food complex and how it's optimized

for profits and not for health, and it's gone too far and kids' health. I think he's really

good on some issues. And then he goes on to say, as the person who's supposed to be measured

I'm sorry. and not for health and it's gone too far and kids' health.
I think he's really good on some issues.

And then he goes on to say,

as the person who's supposed to be measured in citing research,

that this shit causes cancer.

Like you said, there's absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever.

He ruins it.

And loses a ton of credibility.

I agree.

That's a lovely story about The Exorcist.

But again, mine was Halloween.

Mine was Halloween.

I hate that movie. Fucking movie.
I love Jamie Lee Curtis, but I hate that movie. The guy with the hockey mask, he won't stop coming back.
No, no, that was a different one. Oh, that's Halloween.
Yeah, the chainsaw. Okay.
Oh, no, wait. No, that's Friday the 13th.
I'm sorry. Yes, that's right.
Yes. No, it's not that.
Jamie Lee Curtis. Ugh.
She's hot. She's a great person.
She's a great person. Yes, I've interviewed her and have talked to her in the interim, and she's a wonderful, lovely, jolly, fantastic person.
Just a real winner. In any case, RFK, we really think kids should not have phones in schools.
You're now fucking wrecking it for us. Like, stop wrecking things for us.
This is going to set it back, unfortunately. Same thing with, I think, careless people.

But again, read it nonetheless.

Okay, Scott, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, Elon Musk's visit to the Pentagon.

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Scott, we're back. President Trump is denying a report that Elon Musk was set to be briefed on top secret war plans for China during a visit to the Pentagon last week.
According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Elon's visit was just an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies and smarter production. Trump was later asked about Elon's possible involvement in Chinese foreign policy during a presser.
Let's listen to what he said. We don't want to have a potential war with China, but I can tell you if we did, we're very well equipped to handle it.
But I don't want to show that to anybody. But certainly you wouldn't show it to a businessman who is helping us so much.
He's a great patriot. He's paying a big price for helping us cut costs.
And he's doing a great job. He's finding tremendous waste, fraud and abuse.
But I certainly wouldn't want, you know, Elon has businesses in China and he would be susceptible perhaps to that. Well, at least Trump's telling the truth there, but I don't think he's telling the truth.
I think Elon has enormous access to intel. I think both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I think, reported this as well as the New York Times.
New York Times, I think, broke it. I just think this is exactly what they were going to do.
And I don't believe Pete Hegfiff. I don't believe Donald Trump.
I don't believe Elon Musk. And so in this case, I believe the reporters, and they probably pulled it back, the briefing he was going to get.
I think he's got his fingers in all kinds of stuff that has potential conflicts of interest. I don't even think they're potential.
I think everything he's doing right now has a massive conflict of interest. Any thoughts on this one? Because there's also one, of course, SpaceX is positioning itself to get billions of dollars in new federal contracts or other support, according to a report, again, in the New York Times.
NASA, the Pentagon, the FAA, and the Commerce Department are among the agencies with ongoing and new deals with SpaceX. SpaceX will also get a boost from Trump's new space-based missile defense project called the Golden Dome.
This is just ridiculous. Like, he's just so, he's got so many business interests and so many conflicts.
Scott? Well, I mean, if you think about the very founding of our nation, one of the pillars that our constitution rests on is that people were trying to escape religious persecution and they were visionary and said, all right, we're going to try and set up a separation between church and state. And that has now been breached.
And you could argue that a lot of like the political orthodoxy of the right is just white Christian nationalism. It's no longer even conservative ideals of small government, strong defense.
It's white Christian nationalism. So that kind of wall has been breached.
The other thing that people don't talk about enough is the separation between business and state. And that is they create an operating system for competition, for full body contact violence and competition.
They don't pick winners and losers such that we produce the best companies in the world that are more prosperous, that hopefully pay taxes to pay for schools, roads, and health benefits for veterans, amongst other things. We've now breached that.
I mean, that thing has just

been overrun. And essentially, the White House has decided, okay, the guy who gave us the most

money and probably put me in this chair, we're going to become the marketing department for

Tesla. We're going to do a used car lot bad infomercial, late night TV commercial on Tesla.
In addition, Musk comes out and says that the FAA is on the brink of near collapse. That causes panic.
You don't need to make people who don't like to fly even more nervous, claiming that the Verizon system is outdated. Then he has to come back and correct himself and go, oh, the current system is not from Verizon, but Verizon was picked to implement the new system.
I mean, this is just, you're not supposed to have, be the outsourced marketing department. Now, on a couple other levels here, there's a lot of stuff here.
I think Doge's critical mistake or one of their strategic errors, if they had started instead of with USAID, instead of starting with SNAP or veterans, if they'd started with the Pentagon, I think that actually for them would have been tactically very smart. Because I do think that, I do think there should be tighter integration between kind of that Silicon Valley ethos of innovation and our military industrial complex.
I do think that some of the innovators in Silicon Valley and the ability to build better weapons, I like that. I think that's a good idea.
And I think there's probably a lot of waste you could find. I won't call it fraud, but a lot of waste you could find.
There are ships being built that the Navy does not want. But because they bring billions of dollars to certain congressional districts, they refuse to pull the plug.
And the commanders in the Navy, the admirals are saying, we can't use these things. They're a liability.
So if they'd started with the Defense Department, it would have been better. And then this, just to go tactically, again, he's either stupid or using it as a weapon of mass distraction with the fact that we're surrendering to Putin and massively running up our deficits.
And that is the following, this notion of a golden dome. Okay.
And they cite Israel. Israel has the Iron Dome.
But just a few facts. The Iron Dome is very expensive, and it only covers purposefully and logistically certain key population centers.
The Iron Dome can't cover all of Israel. And by the way, Israel is the size of New Jersey.
They have ground defense systems, missile systems in place. To do for america is feasibly right now impossible reagan one what was the reagan one the reagan one that was genius the reagan one the reagan one the defense shield or the missile or the space shield whatever it was or the something like but do you remember they showed they released a video of an invisible laser taking out a rocket on the launch pad? Do you remember this? It showed them disintegrating a rocket on the launch pad.
It ended up that that freaked out the Russians and they immediately went to work on this and started investing a ton of money. And a lot of people say that incremental investment in military and defense spending was too much for the Russian economy to handle and actually led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Reagan not only spent them into oblivion, he gave them the perception we were further. It ended up that that video was bullshit.
We had nothing of the sort, but it freaked them out and got them spending so much money that it supposedly bankrupted them. I think that's genius.
I think that's the kind of shit you want our security apparatus doing, fooling the enemy into doing stupid things that hurt them. Yeah, he did a lot of that.
He did a lot of noise making and that caused the Russians to overreact. Go here, go here, look over here, no spend here.
Yeah, he did that a lot. He was quite good at that.
Anyone who understands defense systems or can just do any sort of scientific investigation goes, the idea of building a shield. I mean, maybe you put some of our universities and think tanks and scientists to work conceptually on this.
But the mother of all false equivalents is it's like it's like it's not even comparing. When you compare the Iron Dorm in Israel to this concept they're talking about, the Golden Dome, it's not even apples to oranges, it's apples to aircraft carriers.
You're talking about two entirely different things. So.
Yeah. And I think let's get back to the grift of Elon Musk.
I mean, I think one of, it's just literally, he is, he cannot be in meetings like this. He should not be in meetings like this.
He has already attacked people that are regulating him and cut their budgets so that they don't regulate him. He's already been involved in all kinds of things that have to do with his businesses, several of which are cratering.
All the videos this week about Tesla being pulled apart by glue, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Literally, get back to your business, sir, because really a lot of your businesses should not be advantaged in this way.
Maybe SpaceX is the best person for some of these things, but all of them, I doubt it. And I think one of the things that's happening here is he puts himself in a place, and one where he's explicitly trying to advantage himself.

He's taking a page out of his 2024 playbook to influence Wisconsin state's Supreme Court election. What's he doing in there? Paying voters.
His super PAC announced it's offering $100 to registered voters in Wisconsin who signed a petition opposing activist judges and register themselves or identify themselves. Elon-affiliated groups have now spent more than $13 million to get a GOP candidate, Brad Schimmel, elected in the Wisconsin race for a judge's race.
And the reason is they want to flip it from liberal to conservative. It's a 4-3 kind of situation.
He's very interested in Wisconsin. Why is that? Why do you think that is? Because he's trying to save abortion? I mean, trying to help anti-abortion forces? No.
He's interested because Tesla's involved in a lawsuit, which will go to the Supreme Court, challenging a state law that prohibits car manufacturers from owning dealerships. He has a beef with Wisconsin around his own personal businesses, and he's put enormous amount of money to get this one guy who is a Trump acolyte into power.
And that is that, that is what's happening there. And so he's gonna go around the country and do this, not just abroad, not just in China, not just everywhere else, where his self-interest take effect.
He's going to pump money into these things like these judgeships and these smaller things that will get him enormous payback. And it's just, it cannot be allowed to go on.
It absolutely cannot. And I think the Democrats are fighting.
There's enormous amounts of money going into this, like $56 million. It's a crazy amount of money for a judgeship.
It's just, this guy has got his fingers in every pie, and it always goes right back to his self-interest.

Well, he's allowed to do it. And there's a lot of pharmaceutical companies and, you know, big tech spent 60 or 70 million dollars in lobbying.
It all reverses back to the same place. One, in terms of 13 million dollars, Democrats should be able to match that, even though we're not the wealthiest people in the world.
And they are. This all goes back to Citizens United.
Unless we get money out of politics like the majority of democratic nations do and say, all right, they ring fence the time of the election, the amount of political spending. We're just not going.
He's allowed to do this. I know it.
And we position him as sinister. And the shock and awe of a third of a billion dollars and weaponizing his communication platform really quickly, quite frankly, was brilliant.
It was strategic. And he got to put, because our electoral system is all fucked up per your previous comments, and because money can run unfettered, he was able to probably decide who was president.
But he gets to do that just the way a couple of our very wealthy donors could probably do the same. What we're upset about is they're better at it right now.
And until we've reverse engineered to, unless you do something to modify or overturn Citizens United, this is only going to get worse. And both sides will complain about it.
But the reality is he's allowed to do this.

We're allowed to do it back.

We're upset.

Quite frankly, they're just more brazen about it.

Well, I think the second step is now I want all the contracts.

And I get that some donors get contracts after they give giving, but not in this is like an unprecedented level of of that.

I would have thought the Republicans had more self-esteem than to just let this guy kind of roll in and start making decisions on their behalf. I mean, that's a different level, but the idea that he can win contracts by giving money to certain people, you know, welcome to America.
That's how American politics work. But it's everywhere.
And I think at some point, this may spur a lot of reform, which will be interesting because someone just went a little too far, I think, on these kind of things. Anyway.
Hope so. We'll see where this goes.
It's going to be on April 1st. He, of course, had Brad on X.
You saw that thing of X, the amount of how it's changed in terms of that there's mostly, it's a MAGA echo chamber now. I don't read anything on X.
I'm not on it. No, it's not on X.
It was a chart which showed that 95% of the largest voices on there, besides Elon's the number one because he facilitates it, so he is. He pushes people towards his content.
And Kanye. Whatever.
It's 95% MAGA. It's crazy, like right-wing stuff now.
It was pretty mixed, actually, for a long time, screaming people. But now it's 95% that.
Anyway, let's go to a quick break. We come back.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of Elon this week. More trouble for Tesla.
And Elon's daughter, what a heroine, speaks out. Fox Creative.
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Go to klaviyo.com slash pivot to get started. Scott, we're back with more Tesla turmoil.
Teslas were calling 46,000 Cybertrucks. They really haven't sold that many.
They were supposed to sell 250,000. That was an interesting number.
Basically all of them because of an exterior panel that could fall off while driving. Meanwhile, Tesla owners are trading their cars at record levels amid Elon backlash, according to data from car shopping site Edmunds.
Trump is also now threatening to send people convicted of vandalizing Teslas to prisons in El Salvador, which is bullshit, but whatever. It's really obnoxious that he did so.
This is really interesting. Elon addressed Tesla employees at an all-hands meeting last week, saying they were still in hands and hang on to your stock even though the board is selling its stock.
So maybe not hang on to your stock, Tesla employees. There's videos all over the internet.
My son's cited them. They're all watching them of Tesla's fucking up and people pulling off things because of the glue on the front panel or something and stuff like that.
It's getting all over the place. Well, let's talk about that.
How do you look about this? Because now the videos are going crazy. I mean, again, my son's just said, have you seen these? And they have seen all of them, which is really interesting.
Well, again, as a general rule, just in terms of corporate governance, when boards address employees, including the CEO, you're not supposed to make stock recommendations. No, you're not.
You're just not. I mean, in the 90s, and this is one of, I've been wealthy three times, which means I lost it all twice.
And one of the reasons I lost it all and ended up being worth negative $2 million at a stage in my life where I was just starting to have kids was when I was on the border red envelope and I had a bunch of stock, the gestalt and the pressure from your investors was, oh, you don't get to sell stock. I mean, when they sell stock, it's for diversification and business reasons.
But as the founder or the chairman or the CEO, you're setting the wrong signal. I thought you were in this to win it.
It's changed a lot now. Now entrepreneurs are allowed to do secondaries and get liquidity, and VCs will let you do that because there's more competition, there's more capital than there are entrepreneurs.
Back then, whether it was Sequoia or the people backing my companies, you were not supposed to sell. They got to sell stock, but not you.
And just in general, also when you're on public boards, I remember when the New York Times went to three bucks a share saying on the board there, maybe we should, as a board, start to buy some shares. And Bob Denham, who was, I think, the lawyer for Warren Buffett said, we shouldn't pressure anyone, including each other to buy stock.
And you know what? I was wrong. He was right.
This is people's personal, you know, when the world's wealthiest man is telling you what to do with your own financial security, it's really not your fucking business boss. If they have shares that they've vested because they've worked there, I mean, Elon Musk does not care about you.

And if you, you know, that's not appropriate for a board member to be telling employees to hold on to stock or buy stock for their own benefit. That's for his own benefit.
He wants his wealth to go back up. And also just on a valuation basis, this company, even with its drawdown, it's still trading at, I think, at 120 or 130 times earnings.
And its revenues, Tesla is about to be the auto company that is declining faster than any automobile company in the world in terms of sales. And yet most of these companies trade at five to 20 times earnings and it still trades at 130.
So, I mean, I would not get near the stock for the 10-foot pole, much less tell employees who are probably have a net worth of maybe 400,000, maybe including their house when you're worth 400 billion or300 now, you should not be telling them to hold on or buy stock. That's totally inappropriate.
Agreed. And I think, you know, this shares, we'll see where these shares go.
They have stuck in the 240s, pretty much. They've gone up actually in the last week.
Everything's recovered in the last week. They're still down 24, 25% in the last month.
Still up for the year, though. Still up 12 months.
Yep, still up year-to-date. Well, no, year-to-date, they're down 34% in one year.
Last 12 months. 12 months, they're up 44%.
Yeah, they are. So, we'll see.
There was a big run-up right after that they were sort of dealing with, and it's probably going to stick down in the 200s, although some are predicting lower. And he'll do some nonsense, give some grok stock to it, you know, or something like that, like they did over on Twitter where he larded it with grok stock and just made the valuation of Twitter go up.
One of the things that got a lot, besides these videos, which are getting a lot of attention of people taking apart the Teslas, especially the Cybertruck, and also doing, there was a Ford 150 versus a Cybertruck face-off that was very sad for Cybertruck, and very happy for the Ford 150. There's this interview that his estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson, did for Teen Vogue and was on the cover.
I love Teen Vogue, by the way. I think it's a really great publication.
Wilson, who is a trans woman, called her father cringe and a pathetic man-child. She said she had not had a relationship with him since 2020.
This apparently, not a very good one before that. This apparently did not sit well with Elon, who deadnamed his daughter on X again, calling out the woke mind virus yet again, saying he was going to kill it once again.
He's also been amplifying a conspiracy theory

about trans people vandalizing Teslas.

He went on a rampage.

I thought this interview was fantastic.

It was very funny.

It was like a 20-year-old young person,

just pretty cool, a pretty cool young person

who also had a lot of wisdom,

at the same time really did understand herself

in terms of not knowing everything. It was very self-aware, and really, I thought, a very smart way.
It reminded me a lot of my own two older kids. They know what they don't know, but they also love to brag a little bit.
And I thought it was a wonderful interview, and I thought the pictures were wonderful. And that she gets under his skin so much is really quite delightful on so many

levels. And it's a big risk for someone like this.
She lives in Japan, but she doesn't have

financial links with him, but he's still a very powerful person. And obviously it set him off

quite a bit, especially because she is everything. She is a delight online and he is not.
She is

funny online. He is not.
And so she's everything he's wanted to be online, which is cool, I guess. Your thoughts? Look, I generally think you cut a pretty wide berth in that people's kids and the relationship with their kids is sort of off limits.
But when you deadname your kid on a podcast and say that she is dead to you, you're opening yourself up for scrutiny. And in my view, you know, when you talk about masculinity, when you talk about what it is to be a man, it can distill down to three basic points.
Your protector, your provider, and your procreator. Okay, ground zero for being a provider as a man is you stand by your kids, full stop.
I mean, you see all these parents in the courtroom when their kids have done horrible things, and you understand and empathize that they are going to side with their children. They're going to protect their children.
So I had, when I was at South by Southwest, I had lunch with a friend and he was talking about how his daughter said that they wanted to now identify as a man. And it was very traumatic for the parents, not because they, you know, they're struggling with, all right, a person should be comfortable in their own skin.
They're trying to put aside, they're trying to say, okay, one of the wonderful things about being a human and being in America is having the right to present you as you are most comfortable. At the same time, they're also worried that teenagers make bad decisions.
And, you know, you could just understand they're really like worried and upset about it. but the idea that this guy would ever be critical of this kid,

and they were just he could just tell how much. Just how much pain he was feeling, because not because he didn't want to have a trans son, but because he wanted his kid to make the right decision and was concerned about his kid.
And that's the right, that's what I think it means to be a mother or a father. You default to protection.
And this guy does not default to protection. He is making his daughter's life harder.
And that is exactly what it means to not be a man. I mean, this guy is such a terrible role model.
He is saying to other men, because of his incredible achievements, they look up to him and they are going to model him that if your child makes certain decisions you don't agree with, you're going to publicly shame them and make their lives harder. So this is, I mean, this is just so wrong on so many dimensions.
And he's just, again, I go back to the same thing. This guy's the worst fucking thing to happen to young men since porn, since old men deciding to protect their own land, decided to send young men off to war.
I mean, there are very few worse influences right now on young men than Elon Musk. That's my TED talk.
I would agree. I don't think it's working though.
I have to tell you, my sons make constant. And they used to really like him.
I have to say they did. But now they trade back and forth all these videos on Teslas and stuff.
And they were horrified by his response to the daughter. They thought the daughter was cool.
Like, the daughter's fucking cool. Like, she really is.
And again, what I really liked about it is she understood what she didn't

know. And she says like, maybe that'll change.
Maybe I'm wrong. Like she had more self-awareness

at 20 years old in a very difficult position than he has had his whole life. So let's just

give kudos to her mom who was quoted in the piece. And I thought it was a wonderful piece,

essentially calling her daughter magical. And really, it was a wonderful quote from the mother

Thank you. who was quoted in the piece, and I thought was a wonderful piece, essentially calling her daughter magical.
And really, it was a wonderful quote from the mother. And sounds like, and I know Justine a little bit, and it's just really terrific.
And thank goodness for that. I met her at TED.
She seemed lovely, smart. She's lovely.
She's really interesting, smart, and just obviously a great parent just, well, obviously a great parent here in this situation, in this really incredibly difficult situation.

I'm head must first wife at TED.

I think that's the whitest thing I've ever said.

It is, actually, I have to say.

I'm transolution.

I've become invisible.

We're going to move on.

We're going to move on.

Okay.

Anyway, Vivian, great job.

Great job, Vivian.

We think you're amazing, and we think your father's an asshole just like you do.

Anyway, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.
Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. Would you like me to go first? No, you go first, Cara.
I think you got to give the – well, there's one small win, which is this New York Times piece on Hooters becoming a refuge for young gay men.

And it's this wonderful piece where a lot of dads apparently brought gay sons to Hooters to try to get them.

And the Hooters waitresses thankfully saved these gay people who were like, don't worry about it.

Like there was this wonderful thing.

And it was just, just go find it.

Hooters gay men.

And you will, it's a delightful read. And thank God god and hooters is on the recipes of bankruptcy apparently but thank god for hooters waitress this is all i have to say in that regard um but i think you have to give it to the severance uh season finale i watched it here in puerto rico on friday oh you did how is it yeah amazing um i'm not going to give away too much, but boy, is Ben Stiller one hell of a director.
Did he direct this one? He hasn't directed all of them. He did, I believe.
Yes. And he directed a lot of them this season, more than he was supposed to, he told me.
But it is just, wow, was that a mindfuck in a way that was really good and it leaves open for a whole new season. That is really great.
It was not going the way you thought it was going to go, but it sort of did, so it had a very satisfying, and you didn't feel at a loss. And at the same time, it was a lot about innies and outies and the relationship you have with yourself, and it was real, the struggles you have with yourself.
And it was, there's so much to unpack. And Patricia, every single person in it, Milchak, the guy who plays Milchak, did this incredible, there's a marching band, there was a big fire.
And it just was, the whole thing was every single, there was a goat lady. There's so much to it.
Every single character had their moment, and every single character took advantage of their moment in a really profound and wonderful way. And I couldn't recommend it more.
Like, it was really funny, too. It was really funny and also heartbreaking and et cetera.
And every character was wonderful. So, I just have to say that was such a win.
And Hooters, also Hooters.

Wait, can I comment on your wins?

Sure. Yes, please.
Go ahead.

So I'm an enormous fan of Ben Stiller, and he gives awkward Jewish guys hope that they can marry

a hot, interesting woman. I got to know his wife a little bit.
She's very interesting.

Also very good looking. Not that that's important.

Okay, she's an actor too, but she's also wonderful. But go ahead.
Go ahead.

What, like interesting and hot wasn't enough? Anyway, so... Okay.
Smart would be good. Go ahead.
important okay she's an actor too but she's also wonderful but go ahead go ahead what like

interesting and hot wasn't enough anyway so okay the art would be good um just on the hooters story i read that i thought it was really sweet i'm i actually know someone who was a waiter at hooters and was in a car accident and lost her leg and now she works at ihop come on you just waited for that you don't want to talk about profound things. I couldn't think about anything else when you were reading that one.
Also, I wanted, just as a joke, I went down and applied for a job at Hooters and they gave me a bra and they said, okay, fill this out. Oh my God.
All right. Let me just tell you, Hooters waitresses rock.
I got more stories here. One is true.
And also the reason they're writing about it is because Hooters is declared bankruptcy. But I have an idea how to save the franchise.
They should do home delivery of meals. They could call it Boober Eats.
All right. Now the true part.
Now the true part of the story. Yeah.
Okay. This is true.
Somebody very close to me was a Hooters girl. You want to take any guesses? No.
Worked at Hooters through college. Who? Mother of my children.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Oh, she did? Wow. And occasionally she still has the outfit and occasionally puts it on.
Well, I'm sure she was lovely like all these people in this piece. No, she wasn't lovely.
She was fucking hot. No, I mean lovely in terms of the way that she handled these.
I'm not sure she was sitting down gay kids and telling them it's okay. Well, they weren't.
They would just sidle up to him saying, don't worry, kid. You're fine the way you are.
It is a sweet story. I'll give you that.
It is a sweet story. It's a sweet story.
All right, thank you for that. All right, so fail is that they really aren't finding as much of this doge thing.
I think it's an absolute fail. They are not finding as much fraud, waste, and abuse.
Oh, you think? And especially with Social Security. They're just not finding it.
There's a great story in the New York Times, at the Wall Street Journal, and all of them, they're talking about how they're just not finding it, especially in claims of massive problems. The lying about...
reforming government is a critical thing in our age.

We should always be reforming government and making it better for people to get their stuff.

Stuff you pay for.

I'm very cognizant.

Like right now, the fact that we're paying for innocent people to be sent to El Salvador,

to this lunatic who runs that country, and I know he's like there, but nonetheless seems like a lunatic, is heinous. It's just heinous.
So I just feel like it's always important to understand how government can work better. But this is making an argument that government does work well.
And I think that's great. But at the same time, just like, stop it.
Again, just like a lot of things, we really care about government reform. You're fucking ruining it for government reform.
That's my feeling. And I think we're going to have a problem with it because this will tarnish efforts like that for years to come.
Scott, all yours. No Hooters jokes.
If this is an audit of the federal government, then the federal government comes out with a clean bill of health. They have struggled despite all of their lies, hyperbola, and the fact that this is the largest business in the world and the fact that there is a lot of largesse.
There's a lot less waste and fraud than even Democrats, I thought, might be there. This is like going into the doctor's office and they do a full body cavity search of everything and they give you a colonoscopy and they take your blood, your urine, and it's like, okay, you're actually pretty good.
So I think if anything, Doge has found that, no, there's not nearly as much fraud and waste as people had feared. Anyways, my fail is the Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been tracking the missing children.

Russia has allegedly been kidnapping children from Ukraine and then bringing them back to Russia.

And the Humanitarian Research Lab from Yale University had been tracking this.

And the Humanitarian Research Lab, which, by the way, you can still make donations, says that more than 19,000 children had been deported to Russia and only about 1,236 had been returned. And according to the lab's research, the children have often experienced abuse, inadequate food, and have been cut off from their families as they are indoctrinated by Russia and often given military training.
And a bipartisan group of lawmakers said it has reason to believe that the data from the depository has been permanently deleted. And what do you know, the Trump administration has cut off all funding here.
And this could have devastating consequences. These kids have literally been disappeared.
And it's the same sort of thing that's going on right now where you have due process for tech companies, but a kid and more than due process. And Tim Miller did a great job on this.
By the way, Tim Miller for the Bulwark podcast, I decided he's my future ex-husband. I'm in love with that guy.
Smart too. Passionate.
But he's brought attention to this kid, this kid, I think his name's Andre, who's basically fled communist Venezuela and was rounded up and has been sent to this hellscape prison in El Salvador. And Tim went on his Instagram.
I mean, the kid is clearly gay and clearly not a member of a deadly Venezuelan gang. I mean, and it goes to the same thing.
I mean, for God's sakes. And this guy's not a member of a killer Venezuelan gang.
All right. And it's the same thing.
When I've been saying for a long time that we're one economic shock away from rounding up people. And this is a form of that.
And that is, all right, you're a Japanese dentist. You've been a great American citizen, but we're under threat and we're going to start putting you in internment camps.
This is a form of that. Without due process, they are finding people.
And of course, it's people who are poor and don't have Tim fighting for them, which he can for every person. They're just going to maybe disappear and never be heard from again.
But that along the lines of cutting funding from this fantastic organization of people at Yale trying to track down kids who've basically been kidnapped, Americans don't realize the price we're going to pay from going from the good guys to the bad guys. When you're big and strong and a good person, people want to be your friend.
People want to be your ally. People respect you.
People want to help you. When you're weak and small and when you're weak and kind, people might be nice to you and feel sorry for you, but it doesn't have the same implication.
When you're big and strong and mean, people start plotting against you behind your back because you're seen as a threat.

People start thinking, you know, I'm going to ignore those funds being funneled to terror cell groups in the U.S. I am going to I am not going to be as kind.
I'm not going to help or protect American tourists when I see them under threat. I'm not inclined to do business with American companies.
When you go from big and strong and trying to do the right thing to big and strong and just mean, people start plotting again. People are going to decide, you know what? I'm going to ignore that uranium-enriched uranium shipment to Iran.
I'm just going to ignore it. I used to like those guys.
I'd probably contact the U.S. Embassy and say, hey, FYI, confidentially, there's something going on here.
People have no concept, I believe, of just how much damage over the medium and long term are done when you go from the good guys to the bad guys. And this is happening everywhere.
And my loss is the East National Security Advisor Waltz was on Face the Nation and refused to answer questions because the reality is he has no answers about why we're cutting funding to a database. And they're not only cutting funding, they're trying to delete the data.
So these Ukrainian parents can't even find their kids. So in just a matter, it feels like, of shock and awe speed, we're going from being the good guys to the bad guys.
And regardless of your morals, your ethics, that's just stupid. We've gotten so spoiled to people giving us the benefit of the doubt, to people being nice to us abroad, to people wanting to work with American companies, to people informing our security apparatus when very bad people are trying to do bad things to us.
So my fail is just an unnecessary transition from being the good guys to the bad guys in record time. My win is I do love these town halls that a lot of Republicans where people are showing up in what I feel is a civil manner exercising their First Amendment rights.
There's a lot of jeers and shouts, but there aren't expletives. There have been no reports of violence.
I think they're powerful. I think the representatives hear them.
And also, it's got to give it to Senator Senators and Representative Ocasio-Cortez for their Fighting Oligarchy Tour, which is drawing record crowds. It feels really good to have what I feel is like a coordinated, effective response.
I agree. It's powerful and it's very satisfying and they're doing a great job.
And they're kind of touching on what I would argue are some of the key points here. Today, we are here to say very loudly and clearly, no, we will not accept an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires run the government.
I think they're doing a great job and the rallies are fun. They have sort of that, quite frankly, that early Trump feel with a group of really impassioned people.
So anyways, my win is these people showing up to express their viewpoint in a civil but robust but engaged manner at these town halls. And Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez and their fighting oligarchy tour.
Agreed. Agreed.
Of course, Trump is saying it's all fixed. He would know.
Anyway, it's not. It's really real, I have to say.
It's really fun to watch. I love to watch democracy like that.
I like screamy town halls. I love screamy city hall meetings, too.
Anyway, that's a great one. And they look fantastic and they sound fun.
You're right. They sound fun, actually.
We want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.
Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. And elsewhere in the Kara and Scott universe, this week on On with Kara Swisher, I talked to Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, the two Democratic commissioners Trump fired at the FTC last week for without cause.
They didn't even mention it. It's an illegal act, what he did.
But let's listen to a clip. I fear that the next merger that comes before the commission, it's not going to matter if it raises prices on consumers.
It's not going to matter if it screws over workers. It's not going to matter if it screws over small businesses.
The only thing that's going to matter is which billionaires have their presidency on it and which way they can tug it. It was a great interview.
It's really interesting. I'm sure they'll get their jobs back, but at the same time, the fact that he tried it is typical of Trump at this point.
Okay, that's the show. Thanks for listening to Pivot.
Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back on Friday.
Scott, read us out. Today's show was produced by Lara Neiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin.
Ernie and her Todd Andrew knew this episode. Julian Villard edited this video.
Thanks also to Drew Rose, Miss Vario, and Dan Shulon. Mishak Hur Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.
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Thank you.