Google’s Potential Break Up, Hurricane Conspiracies, and Guests Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner

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Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

I just flew in from Toronto, and gee, are my arms tired?

You're back from Canada?

Yeah, again.

I did this fundraising thing for something called the Leecock Foundation, there, which helps

kids

in certain schools in the area.

They join with schools.

That's what the French exchange students said to the fraternity brother.

Oh, it's Lecoq.

You just knew it was coming.

I knew when I saw it if I said the name of the foundation, which is a fine foundation, it was good.

It was a debate.

It was one of those funny debates where I was on the side of the internet has ruined everything and other famous Canadians were on the other side of the internet saved everything, essentially.

It hasn't ruined everything.

So I won.

And who hosted the debate?

It was the Leacock Foundation.

It was to raise money.

It was to raise money for it.

It's a very good cause.

It's a very good cause.

I don't often do those, but I thought

the Canadians convinced.

They wore me down last time I was there.

And I went from New York there.

So it was good.

Give money to the Leecock Foundation.

I went to this group.

I went to this thing, a bunch of friends.

The only reason I went was because it was a bunch of people from my high school and I like to rub my success in their face.

And I just went around going, to all of you that signed my yearbook, Stay Cool, job done.

I thought that was the line.

I thought that was the line.

Anyways, Toronto was lovely, by the way.

I took their subway.

Have you ever taken their subway?

Everything is so clean there.

It's crazy clean.

Canadian.

I know, but it was like so pleasant.

It was the most pleasant trip there.

And there's also interesting diversity there.

Like I was on the street where this took place.

I took the subway to it.

And I'm like, how do they maintain?

Like, they seem to get along.

Oh, they have issues.

They do have issues.

I just find it a really interesting place.

Canada is sort of like entrepreneurship for us.

We kind of romanticize it.

They face many of the same issues as us.

You know what?

Honestly, Canada is one of the best managed brands in the world.

People are under the impression that Canada is just a much better version of America.

I would argue that Canada is just very similar to America, but it does face many of the same issues we face.

Crime, homeless.

It does, but it's a different tone.

They are more civil.

Let's say that.

They're more civil.

They are.

That said, I have to say, most annoying airport Toronto going through customs there.

They're like very fussy about how many things to put in a plastic bag, et cetera.

It's really, it's such a performance theater there.

And they're very like, is that bag too big to put in the top?

Like, there's a lot of that going on.

Of course, I felt like 100% American.

It's fine.

I paid for this seat.

What do you need to do this for?

I want to speak to the manager.

Leave me alone.

Leave me alone.

You nice people.

Stop helping me.

There is

a different personality type.

But anyway, the fundraiser was nice.

It's weird whenever I drink Canadian whiskey,

I get.

I get very angry, just like when some people drink gin, they get very mean, except when I drink Canadian whiskey.

I'm very mean, but I'm sorry, too.

I'm sorry.

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

I did have a Tim Hortons donut, so that made me happy.

Anyway, it was a good trip.

I'm glad you're back.

And let's be honest, fucking Canadians.

You give them an inch, Kara, and they'll take 2.54 centimeters.

Oh, my God.

Anyway, we're moving along.

I'm going to see you next week.

I'm very excited to see you.

I know.

We're doing an all-hands.

You know me, I don't like hanging with our employees.

We're going to do that, and you're going to be nice about it.

Bothers me that they expect to be paid.

Yeah.

Anyway,

we also are, we're also also going to do a thing with Joanna Coles at Zero Bond.

We're going to do a little togetherness.

My stomping grounds.

Apparently, I can't wait to see it.

I've been there.

I don't think so.

I don't think you've ever brought me there.

I'm sorry.

It's very exclusive, Kara.

I can't.

They have standards, Kara.

It's very, very exclusive.

I understand.

I understand.

Very, very exactly.

I understand.

By the way, did I tell you I'm going to be on the Daily Show next week, too?

Oh, that's awesome.

Who's your Desi?

Desi, who are those?

Oh, yeah.

She's a gangster rock star.

I have to say, I like all of them.

I think they're all incredibly talented.

I'm bringing Louis Swisher and his girlfriend, Ivy.

Louis was actually excited to go to something of mine, which was very fun, which I'm very excited.

I finally was a cool mom.

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

The DOJ may want to break up Google and misinformation running rampant during the historic hurricane season, which is really unfortunate.

It's your plain old kind of misinformation, basically from the lips of Donald Trump.

Plus, our friends of Pivot are New York Times reporters Suzanne Craig and Russ Buechner.

Very excited.

It's a new book called Lucky Loser, How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.

It's a pretty good illusion.

It's still going.

Firstly, quickly, let's talk about Kamala Harris's press splits this week.

Some highlights, 60 Minutes.

Harris urged voters to watch Trump's rallies in place of the interviews he's canceled.

On The View, she said she wouldn't have done anything differently than President Biden had done during the administration.

Some people thought this was a fault of her do that.

I'm not so sure.

On Howard Stern, the vice president said former President Trump has a desire to be a dictator.

And of course, she cracked open Miller High Life with Stephen Colbert and seemed to say, what the fuck?

Let's listen.

But elections, I think, are won on vibes because one of the old saws is, they just want somebody they can have a beer with.

So would you like to have a beer with me so I can tell people what that's like?

Okay,

this was...

Now we asked ahead of time because I can't just be giving a drink to the Vice President of the United States without asking.

You asked for Miller High highlight.

You rather Miller highlight.

Well, except for the unfortunate choice of the champagne of beers.

Scott, how'd she do?

Yeah, but she wasn't going to order a dosekies, right?

I mean.

Right.

No.

Had to be a Miller.

You know, just, it's funny, just listening to her just now, her laugh is a real asset.

I mean, branding is all about differentiation, and you want to highlight where you're different than the competitor.

I don't know if this is true, but I wouldn't be surprised if they said, look, I don't know how to say this.

I don't think she's as compelling sometimes in person in terms of how she equates herself and the arguments she makes around issues versus past presidential candidates.

And I think they said, okay,

let's just manage the campaign very tightly.

Let's keep things kind of under control.

And then I think somewhere around a month or two months ago, they said,

in contrast to Donald Trump, She's fucking Winston Churchill.

So let's get her out there.

And again, we've said this a couple of times, but for me, the kind of observation, everybody out here, I'm in LA still, everybody out here, no one's talking about Colbert.

No one's talking about 60 Minutes.

Everyone is talking about one media appearance.

You know what that media appearance was?

Call Her Daddy?

100%.

This is the pivot to

new mediums.

I mean, there's a lot of TikToks and everything.

I just can't get over.

I don't know.

Is it selection bias or proximity bias?

I don't think so because the people I'm surrounded by are, I don't know if they're like hardcore podcast listeners, but I just, I've overheard people saying, did you hear to the Call Or Daddy thing?

Did you hear her talk to Alex Cooper?

It's really a pivot.

I think we're going to find when they reverse engineer what had the most influence,

they're going to say, or one of the things they're going to say was, and he did this, to be fair, the Trump campaign did it first.

He started going on all these Manosphere podcasts.

On the Manosphere.

That's what creates all the buzz is their appearances on podcasts.

what are your thoughts here yeah i think it's absolutely true i i kind of chastised i was on abby phillips show some of them about laughing about call your daddy and i was like oh you know they did that all over cable and all over mainstream news i was like are you kidding me genius like this is mat this is what matters you know and i i was like she should do more of those she should do them all over the place i think she do local news as i said and things like that but i think i thought it was a great idea.

I don't care if there was clapback on Twitter.

Who cares?

It doesn't matter.

It's it's just the right place to reach a certain group of people and a lot of them in one place and motivate them in some fashion and so you got it like i think one of the problems the mainstream media has is that it's like it's not as relevant as it used to be just like in all things like this is not where kids get their news this shouldn't be a new fresh take among anybody but i thought that was well i think it still is no matter how many she does trump floods the zone with lies and stunts and stupid things and people look right so even if even if she tries to get people talking about her, everybody talks about him because even bad things,

any publicity is good publicity for him.

And I don't, if she does hundreds of these, it doesn't matter.

I think they should be more aggressive, as you and I have said last week, going on Joe Rogan, going local news and everything else.

But I'm not so sure it would matter because Donald Trump is a one-man, you know, you know, P.T.

Barnum, toxic piece of PT Barnum.

So we'll see if that matters anymore.

But that's a real problem for her, I think, no matter how you slice it.

Anyway, we'll see.

I thought it was great.

Do you want me to name dropped?

Do you want to know who I had dinner with last night in L.A.?

Who?

Kiera, I don't like to talk about this stuff.

Okay.

All right.

I just can't.

I just can't.

You know, I respect the confidentiality.

I don't even know who brought this up.

My personal life is my personal life, Kiera.

I don't.

No, no, no.

Let's get on to the next subject.

Let's talk about whatever conglomerate is being broken up.

Oh, now you have to tell me.

Come on.

Who?

Okay.

Will Arnett.

Oh, how is he doing?

That's great.

How did that happen?

He likes our podcast.

He's totally into, he's got, I don't think I'm speaking out of school.

He's got a gaggle of kids, including young men.

And he's very interested in what we talk about, the issues around affecting young men.

And all I could think about, I saw him speaking, you know, he's very handsome.

He's shockingly handsome in person.

He is handsome.

They're all handsome.

It's so true in Hollywood.

Can I just give you one piece of advice?

Don't fuck it up like with Dax Shepard, okay?

Don't fuck it up.

Oh, he brought that up.

He's friends with Dax.

He literally sat down and he goes, did you text Dax yet?

And I'm like, no.

He's like, what's when he literally,

he's totally like, you just said that.

He's like, what's wrong with you?

He's like, he's a great guy.

Just reach out to him.

I hope you've gone on Smartlist.

You should.

It's a great show.

I did a great, I had a great text.

Well, they have to ask you first.

Oh, right.

That's the thing about that show.

They have to ask you.

As you said, I'm lower shelf.

Speaking of texting, I will text Jason and Sean and make sure you get on.

How about that?

No, I don't.

I don't.

I don't want to force my way.

Because Will and I are now good, good friends.

Yeah.

I don't like to call on my close, close friends.

I would totally use that.

One thing that was interesting is when we did Smartless, he hates Elon Musk.

Oh, I wasn't going to bring that up.

He got triggered when we started talking about Musk.

Well, he did it on the show, so he did it publicly.

Anyway, we'll get to Musk in a second, actually.

Oh, shit, really?

Before that, for one second, we have to.

That's a shocker.

Actually, let me just go there.

He's set to unveil his vision of Tesla's future at an event dubbed We Robot at the Warner Brothers lot in California.

We're recording ahead of the event, which is tonight.

But are you going?

It's right there in Los Angeles.

I'm going.

But Elon is expected, you should like totally bungee in.

But Elon is expected to reveal his long-waited robo-taxi or cyber cab.

I'm sure it's going to be slick-looking.

Supposedly a fully autonomous car, reportedly futuristic in design, two-seaters with butterfly wing doors, of course.

The car, as penisy as possible, he'll make it.

The car will be used, and not in a good way, penis.

The car will be used for a new ride-handing platform that describes a combination of Airbnb and Uber.

Elon has hinted that his team will show off a few other things at the event, rumored to be additional mystery vehicles.

I'm sure there's a scooter or something like that.

I actually talked to Elon about Tesla's plans for full self-driving cars, including robo-taxis, in a 2018 interview.

Let's listen to what he said then.

I don't want to sound overconfident, but I would be very surprised if any of the car companies exceeded Tesla in self-driving, in getting to full self-driving.

You know, I think we'll get to full self-driving next year as a generalized solution, I think.

That's

like we're on track to do that next year.

Uh, he was not on track to do it next year.

It turned out to be a lie.

Uh, that was 2018, and he's done that many times.

The interview was later referenced, oddly enough, during a lawsuit brought by a family of men who died in a Tesla.

And Elon's lawyers claim Musk, like many public figures, is the subject of many deep fake videos.

They tried to claim this interview is a deep fake video.

This is all such nonsense.

And he also said in an investor call back in July, anyone who doesn't believe that Tesla would solve vehicle autonomy should sell their Tesla stock.

By the way, Waymo, which we also introduced, the original ones at our code conference,

has been driving millions of miles in San Francisco and all over the country.

And so they didn't solve it first.

They were not,

they didn't get Tesla, was exceeded in self-driving so far.

But it's a really big deal for him.

If he does, a lot of people just left Tesla this week.

Another group of top executives went either to Waymo or other places.

There's a lot of quitting going on.

So what do you think?

He's sort of betting on this, isn't he?

I think it's a lot of showmanship, but we'll see.

His friend, I was at the bar last night, and there were some folks in.

One guy was in from the Bay Area and he was there with his date and he was there for the event.

He's an engineer at Tesla and they're there for the big unveil.

Look,

I think the guy's a great showman.

I think he's really smart.

And like you said, all good press or all press is good press.

Very much like Trump, Trump, yeah.

Yeah, so I don't, I, I'll, I won't watch it, but I'll, I'll be interested to read the reviews on how it's better than what's out there right now.

Um, I, speaking of which, I took my first, I met my friend at the Maybourne Hotel, and we were having

a dinner at Medeo's, I think.

Um, and I, I uh ordered my first Waymo.

I had never been in a self-driving car before.

Oh, yeah, aren't they great?

Then it was a Jaguar, and I got in.

And first off, it struck me like the way it drives, it drives like a nervous 17-year-old.

It drives like

how you would want your kid to drive after he or she got her driver's license.

And that is like, it'll stop at anything, friendly honk in the whore, and just, it's very cautious.

But I was, it really is, there was, there was construction.

There was construction with cones and an accident and a cop using his red light, his baton to wave people despite what the light was saying.

And it was a little confused and would break cautiously.

And I remember even a cop looking at it singing, oh, shit, a self-driving car.

But it's just amazing.

It figured it out.

And I thought the millions of data points it must be observing to actually not just shut off and go, I can't handle this shit.

It's too dangerous.

You figure it out.

Somebody needs to get in the seat and do this.

And then the other thought I had was.

you know, these billions of data points and AI, and it forgot to put the fucking driver's seat forward.

I mean, I'm not, I'm six foot two.

It's like, why?

It's like there's no driver there.

Why is the seat not more forward?

But I thought it was super.

I got to be honest.

It's so, it's so much better.

I was in the original ones that tested at Google.

And I got to tell you, it's, I ride them all over San Francisco.

I've had very few problems.

They have had problems, but humans have more, as I always point out.

But they're so far ahead.

They're driving on highways now.

They're starting to do drives and highways in, I think, Arizona.

They're very far ahead in this game

in this Waymo division.

Whether they make money or not, we'll see.

But I mean, Tesla's idea is that you use Teslas to like someone, when someone's Tesla is sitting empty, it comes dressed.

I would never in my frigging life get in a Tesla.

Let me just say, in my neighborhood in San Francisco, someone was driving a Tesla, had it on autopilot.

It drove into the bodega in my neighborhood at the corner store and crashed into the, in the wind.

The guy's like, I didn't do anything.

It just, I would never, because they don't have as many points of

safety as the Waymo does.

I think you're spreading misinformation.

I'm not spreading.

I'll send you the photos.

It was crazy.

Tesla are great cars.

We just don't like the guy who runs it.

They're great cars.

No, that is not true.

I don't think they're driving.

This thing is as good as other companies at this point.

Well, look, it's obviously.

It's a great car for an EV and some

driving with a person there, but I do not trust it in the same way I trust the Google version of it at all.

But

the next evolution of self-driving cars that we've been waiting for, and it's clearly,

you know, it really isn't on the horizon, is that soon country singers' trucks are going to start leaving them in addition to their wives.

Yeah.

Takes a minute, but it's funny.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

There's all kinds of problems.

I just don't trust it anymore.

I don't trust this company anymore in a way that I do trust others.

Do you trust Waymo more than whatever?

Absolutely.

They've just done it quietly.

They've done it with more points of there's more.

I'm not a technical person, but they use laser and cameras and this and that.

Is that the technical term?

Laser and camera?

Whatever.

No, but like he does.

He does, they do LiDAR, and he doesn't believe in that.

And I don't know.

I don't think he cares for safety as much as others.

And I think that's borne out in a lot of his history.

You're really going full, full.

I am.

Anyway.

I mean, you've really, you've really like, that's it.

You're just.

I wouldn't get in a Tesla for this.

I'm sorry.

I wouldn't, but I would with someone that's done millions of miles.

And this is, we'll see how they do.

I, I am all, the thing is, I'm all for self-driving cars.

I, I think autonomous vehicles are cool and I get in them earlier than other people.

I just wouldn't get in this one yet until I understand the safety.

And especially with all these executives leaving, it's, you know, it's head of vehicle programs.

It's the CIO.

It's the, like, it goes on and on and on.

And so

I just, he takes too many risks.

And I'm not, he's not going to take a risk with my life on this.

And I hope, I hope he gets there at the time he did this interview.

It was very hopeful, but it was bullshit.

It was just another lie.

So that's all I'm saying.

That's all I'm saying.

Well, Apple's self-automated car is coming up, but supposedly they're having a tough time installing windows.

Oh, my God.

I could do this all night.

I could do this all night.

Well, good luck with your thing tonight, Elon.

I'm sure it'll go well.

TikTok is being sued by a bipartisan group of 14 attorneys general across the country for violations against consumer protection laws.

The lawsuit led by California AG Rob Bonita and New York AG Letitia James alleges TikTok uses addictive features on young people to make ad money.

The TikTok features highlighted in the lawsuit include beauty filters, push notifications, and endless scroll.

Last year, over 30 other states filed similar lawsuits against Meta.

More people were filing against Meta, which is interesting.

They didn't quite get as many with this one.

You know, it's part of a long onslaught.

I was fascinated by it.

It was half as many as filed against Meta.

I guess Meta's bigger, or I'm not sure.

A little of this feels performative.

I don't know.

How do you feel?

Look,

if there was one,

there are two substances the Galloway household is addicted to.

And the first is the affirmation of strangers.

I care too much about what strangers think of me, which is really fucking pathetic.

You do.

The second is TikTok.

I don't think my kids are addicted to Instagram or Reels or video games.

I actually like it when my son plays video games.

He does it with his friends and he screams out these warrior cries that wake up the whole neighborhood that I just,

you know how, you know how as a parent, even if you don't see your kids, but just knowing they're in the other room is very comforting.

And I'll be, I'll be working on something in the other room, like other part of the house, and I'll hear my son go, y'all like scream out.

And I know he's just accomplished something on a video game.

And it makes me very happy.

Anyway, I don't know how I got here, but

the thing that has been the substance that has caused the greatest level of dysfunction and would qualify as an addiction in my household is TikTok.

And I wonder if it's Instagram for girls.

I don't think there's been a ton of studies around, you know, supposedly 24%.

We talked about this last episode, 24% of Instagram users,

adolescent Instagram users would be qualified as addicts.

I think among young boys, I think it's TikTok.

We're talking about addiction.

And then one of the most valuable platforms in the world, Ascendant Platforms out of China, is an addictive substance.

And then the most valuable company out of Europe is treating addiction.

The business of addiction is such an example of how regulatory forces have failed to move in and price things or recognize their externalities.

It kind of goes back to what you were talking about with, or, you know, the gentleman you referenced before and how impressed we are with him.

And we make excuses for him.

We talk about these platforms.

We talk about semi-glutide because we're all just so, the bottom line is

we've all acquiesced to money.

And we absolutely, we defer, we acquiesce,

we let money wash over anything, us, no matter how bad it is for us.

And unless we can reverse engineer it to something that's getting in the way of the sale of legal drugs or it's coming, we can weaponize it against foreigners or immigrants.

I mean, 80% of people arrested for the trafficking of fentanyl are American citizens.

But wait, let's demonize immigrants.

Unless there's some sort of demonization or politicization in it, addiction is the ultimate business.

Well, we have to hit everybody.

It can't just be in this haphazard way.

This is just, I just sit here and I'm like, this is a waste of time in a lot of press releases.

So can we just have national rules on this stuff

and figure out what the best way is, by the way?

It may not be age gating.

It may not be, but like a considered national plan.

It's got to be simple.

And the simplest thing is the following.

No smartphones under the age of 16.

Look at the, sure there'd be some downside.

Sure, there'd be maybe some,

I'm not entirely sure how it violates anyone's privacy.

What would be the upside of kids not having their brain being wired as we put every addictive substance in a dopa bag in their pocket?

Especially kids who are raised by single mothers, don't have a lot of people overseeing them, or going to public schools where the teachers can't keep up with kids watching whatever in class.

This is, again, being

outsourced to the most, to lower-income households.

I wonder what the addiction rate is to these products among lower-income households where there's not enough parental time to

among the parents, among everybody.

You said something really coaching, and you said that the bottom line is we let them do it because we're addicted to our screens and we want time on our own screens.

But I think the legislation here that solves 80% of this or 80%, at least my kids, no smartphones under the age of 16.

And by the way, Apple and Alphabet could absolutely figure this out.

It wouldn't be hard.

They could do it.

They could figure it out in 30 days.

Yeah, that's

never going to pass.

That's the thing.

Exactly.

Regulation, laws.

It's a question of what they want to.

They have to be made to, sorry.

Well, speaking of that, let's get to our first big story.

The DOJ is considering breaking up Google after declaring Google's search business as an unlawful monopoly.

The DOJ has released a proposal for limiting the company's dominance, including breaking the company up.

Included in the proposal, the government is considering limiting the contracts Google can have to make search a default.

Apple is what they're talking about.

Requiring Google to let sites opt in to search engine inclusion while opting out of inclusion in Google's AI tools, forcing Google to make certain information like data and ranking signals available to rivals.

I thought that was interesting.

And licensing or syndicating Google's ad feed separately from search results and requiring Google to provide certain performance information to advertisers.

These all seem rather reasonable.

I'm not sure about

the second one.

But talk about, does this list address monopoly problems adequately?

And will any of it happen?

Obviously, Google right now holds 90% of the market share of search.

Incredible.

There used to be three.

It was Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.

And Yahoo was ahead for many years.

The judge on the case aims to rule on the proposed remedies by next August.

And after a likely appeal from Google, the changes could take years, obviously.

And Google is calling the recommendations radical.

So I'd love to know what you think if this addresses it.

I think these are pretty strong things.

And what advice would you give Google what to do besides slow rolling it as they have done for many years?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, but you're exactly right.

It's slow roll.

And what's interesting is if you really think about the impact that antitrust has had,

it's the scrutiny that you're under during antitrust that actually creates, has the most tangible impact.

Because as you know, Microsoft was found guilty of monopoly abuse and the remedy was to, they were ordered to be broken up, and then it was overturned over several years.

This is years long.

This will play out or not play out over several years but even even if it ends up being reversed which i don't think it will be even if they manage to slowball it it's good because google will or alphabet will think twice before they think oh here's an emerging ai player let's force people not to install it on their you know android phones or let's outspend them and put them out of business so these things it may take years i was kind of hoping i thought I thought that there was a chance Alphabet might prophylactically spin YouTube because everybody talks about, oh my God, if you ask people who's the biggest streamer, they say Netflix and that commands about 7.5% share.

YouTube is at 10%.

YouTube is the number one streamer in the world and it's really well run.

And anyways, I would think that that would be the logical spin that maybe they'd go to the DOJ and say, hey, what if we spun YouTube?

Would that satisfy?

And it doesn't look as if it would be.

No, no, no.

Cause then there's an ad, there's a, this is the search one.

There's also an ad case in Virginia.

It just is, they've got to separate them.

They just do.

They have all the information and they have, they're ahead.

And they, whether, even if they're lagging in AI, they have so much power.

And so they really,

I think forcing them to make information and data ranking signals to rivals is a great idea.

I think licensing it separately is a great idea.

I think limiting the default thing, they can buy their way into dominance.

Like that's, they're not doing it because they're better.

That's a more thoughtful answer.

You're right.

You know, I just, I don't know.

These seem reasonable to me.

And they're going to have to do at least, you know, three of four, two of four.

Um, and then it'll, then they'll drag it out for as long as they can.

But eventually, they're going to have to do something.

You're right, they should do it prophylactically.

But this is a pattern for companies like Google.

There's only a few of them: Amazon, Apple.

You know, they all have to change their practices, especially it depends on, again, who wins.

But I think a lot of politicians are much more hostile than they were before.

And sometimes too much so in a weird way, as someone who's been calling for this.

Well, this is a question looking for an answer,

not just to make a point,

but I can't think of another industry of this size, $300 billion, that has one player with a 90-plus percent share.

Like, there's just, there isn't a market that this is big that has this sort of dominance.

Their argument is that search, Amazon does search, you know, OpenAI, they have competitors.

Yeah, we have competitors everywhere, one click away, yet they've managed to maintain 90% of a $300 billion market.

Yeah, it's because they're so good.

They haven't innovated at all.

And there's been no innovation in search that's lasted.

So it kind of is classic in lots of ways.

I agree.

Anyway, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, the dangerous hurricane misinformation is also surging online.

And we'll speak with friends of Pivot, Suzanne Craig, and Russ Buetner.

Their book is a chronicle of Donald Trump's lucky breaks and shady business practices.

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Scott, we're back with our second big story.

Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida on Wednesday night as category three storm, a little less than they thought.

It was coming in at five, bringing wind, storm surge, and tornadoes, still very devastating.

Ahead of the storm hitting, President Biden called out Donald Trump for his onslaught of lies about recent hurricanes.

Conspiracy theories and lies about the hurricane Helene have been spreading for the last week, courtesy of Trump and the far right, and also social media sites like X.

Some of the claims, FEMA funding was given to migrants, the government purposely neglecting areas with GOP voters.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene actually said weather can be controlled, presumably by Jewish space lasers again.

Oh, you stole my joke.

We're starting to become the same person.

Sorry, I know we are.

Huge information.

It's really bad on X.

And Linda Yaccarino, one of the more heinous executives

I've run across recently, is saying, stay safe, stay on X.

Do not stay on X if you want to stay safe.

Just so you know.

Pete Buttigieg ended up calling Elon Musk to sort him out on some of this stuff.

You know, he was being polite about it,

but spreading misinformation on this.

platform is really bad.

Biden and other government officials are doing what they can to debunk the nonsense.

The White House started posting posting on Reddit,

keep people informed about the hurricanes and combat misinformation.

Meteorologists are also doing what they can to warn people about what's actually happening out there.

Let's listen to a clip of NBC6 meteorologist John Morales getting emotional as he delivered an update on Hurricane Milton.

This got this went hugely viral.

It's just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane.

It has dropped

50 millibars

in 10 hours.

I apologize.

This is just

horrific.

Wow, he's the Scott Galloway meteorologist there.

I was going to say that guy, that guy.

I know.

Sounds like you.

That guy cries at a lighter shoe being dropped than me.

I don't usually see people get emotional over weather, but.

Yeah.

Well, I think he, you know, he understands the devastation that.

could could have happened and did happen, but not in the number that they were very worried about.

So talk about the misinformation to me is,

again, another moment where Trump doesn't pay for what is really inhumane on the massive level.

Even Republican governors are like, shut the fuck up, dude.

Like you're making it worse.

Like this is just lying and lying and lying.

You can win by lying, really, pretty much.

Well, this, I mean, what did he say that they ran out of, FEMA ran out of money because they were giving money to migrants?

And,

you know, this is obvious, it's just a real, you always have a tendency, I think, as you get older to think things are getting worse but i do think there's some legitimate legitimacy to the notion that in instances where there used to be bipartisan cooperation

we now have people making it harder for femina to do their work because when they spread this type of misinformation people believe them and don't call don't go to the wrong place for resources think they shouldn't leave i mean this costs time, energy, and maybe even costs lives, this type of misinformation.

So it's, I just don't know what you you do other than punish people hard.

And people will say, well, it's censorship.

I'm like, no, if you're purposely spreading misinformation to try and sow division and you knew you were purposely spreading misinformation and people get hurt, I think you should be under, you know, legal scrutiny for that.

This is serious stuff.

You don't, you don't spread misinformation that says, oh,

the fire in the lobby is actually, we're not sure it's a fire, it's a conspiracy.

And you know, there's an actual fire in the lobby, and you confuse people as to what resources to access or what the correct escape route is, I think you're liable.

And unfortunately, because of this Wild West mentality and this crazy bullshit notion that even crime is speech,

as long as it's on a digital platform,

anything qualifies as speech and all speech should be protected.

It's very,

I know, it's just incredibly disappointing.

What I can't figure out is, do, and I haven't seen any data data on this, do people go, okay, climate, let's be honest, folks, climate change is real.

FEMA's, government is important.

I do think the majority of people in these states, despite the devastation, appreciate that the federal government and their local officials are putting aside, are trying to put aside all the bullshit and are trying to get help to the people who need it.

I do think that

my impression of the response so far, and it's impossible to get it right in this type of chaos 100% of the time, But my sense is they're doing their level best, and that we pay a lot of money in taxes, and that FEMA gets billions and billions of dollars, and that

government works.

It does make sense that they are minimizing some of the devastation or the effects of the devastation.

So, I can't figure out if people are going to say, okay,

we do need government.

Climate change is a real thing.

President Biden and thereby Ergo Vice President Harris are doing a decent job and they get a benefit.

Or if this misinformation is getting traction, in addition to that, the chaos, you know, whenever there's chaos, you just blame whoever's in power.

You just hold them responsible.

I can't figure out, do you have any gut or seen any data on if it hurts or helps one of the other candidates?

Well, I think people are wondering about whether it has an impact on the election in terms of turnout and how people vote.

North Carolina just passed emergency measures to ensure voters on impacted counties, often rural ones, can still vote on Election Day.

You know, I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't think people tend to, they may blame the government, but they don't blame the government, right?

They know this is a storm.

They understand that.

I think the question is, why make people in a terrible situation feel worse or feel more under fear or that the government can't help them or that someone's out to fuck them?

It's this,

like, I am, I guess, heartened to see a Republican governor saying this is.

bullshit, stop it.

But they don't stop him, right?

They don't stop him.

And next year, when there's storms, they'll be with him on it because it worked if he wins right and so that's the repulsiveness of this is that it works on some level and and you know it it's sort of like that at long last have you no sense of decency right that's it's sort of that's the moment to me i don't i don't know i think i i i literally the person i was really irritated was linda yakarina saying you know be on x stay safe i'm like you

how dare you how dare you like say use this platform when it's being used for all kinds of nonsense?

It's just and not caring about that.

It's, I don't know how they sleep at night, these people.

I honestly don't.

And in this case, people need good information brought to them.

Let me give a compliment.

The Starlink things are really important for people getting good information.

But what they're, if they're getting, if you put the Starlink up, they get the information and then it's crap.

I don't even understand that the two things in the same place.

Anyway,

it's just, it's disheartening.

But he has, just to be fair, he has weighed in and tried to offer Starlink or make it available to people, right, in affected areas.

Yes.

Yes.

I said that's great.

But if you're, if you're beaming down crap, like, what is why?

Why?

If you're doing this good thing, why would you let this other thing happen?

Like, I don't even understand that.

And Trump is altogether just

another story, just really incredibly irresponsible.

And it's so disheartening if it works.

Anyway, speaking of which, speaking of Trump, let's bring in our friends of Pivot.

Suzanne Craig and Russ Buetner are investigative reporters for the New York Times.

That is underselling it.

They're amazing investigative reporters for the New York Times.

They've written a new book based on a lot of their reporting they have published this year called Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.

Suzanne and Russ, welcome.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

This is exciting.

So I went to your book event here in D.C., it was really interesting, but you've been reporting, for people who don't know, on Donald Trump's finances for years, but you go really in-depth in the book.

Talk to us about

what, obviously, Donald Trump's all about talking about money, but what does his financial history tell us about him as a businessman?

Let's focus on that part.

Yeah, I think that was our big interest in

doing this book was to get to the bottom of that.

We had done three longer stories in the Times that explored different windows, how much money he got from his father and how his businesses performed in the 80s and 90s, and then again after the 2000s.

But stringing all that together is where you really kind of see the pattern.

And I think what you notice is that he's very good at drawing attention to himself, at selling things when there's things that need to be sold.

Often he's drawing attention to things he never does.

That's one of the themes that runs through the book, he sort of builds up his reputation by saying he's going to do things that never happen.

But operationally, he has difficulties.

He never seems to be very careful about the finances of projects.

So he regularly spends far more than what the projects bring in.

He often says that.

And then he needs money from other sources outside of his business operations to support those businesses.

A bit of a Ponzi scheme is what it looks like.

A little bit.

You see his inheritance filling in the holes.

And then later, the fortune from the apprentice really filling in a lot of holes as well and sort of sustaining this image that he's a powerful businessman when he's really having problems that he's hiding from public view.

And Suzanne, talk a little bit of how you went about this reporting because you've been doing this for a long time.

Right.

And like Russ said, we had a number of stories at the Times.

There's kind of three big ones.

We've been covering him since 2000.

It's hard to believe we're coming up on nine years of this, but says every journalist, I think, covering this guy.

And then we decided after the 2020 story, it was a big story we had where we got decades of his corporate and personal tax returns.

You know, we found out in that, that he wasn't paying much income tax ever.

We also got an incredible window into how much he'd made from The Apprentice.

So we laid that out, and then Russ and I had a conversation.

And we realized we had a, I think, you know, we call it a skeleton for a book, but we really saw this as an epic American tale.

And we wanted to tell it and we wanted to delve further into his father.

We were really intrigued about his dad from the reporting we did, you know, while we were at the paper.

And then we wanted to just learn more about Fred and see that impact that it had had on his life and then re-explore Donald's life because I think there's just a lot of misconceptions that were out there.

Some of them were laid down by him early on and just repeated over and over and over.

And so, you know, when we decided, Russ and I had a chat and Russ took a very heavy lifting on the writing.

He's a beautiful writer.

And we worked together and I did a lot of the reporting.

So we just spent a couple years just full at it every day trying to get this together.

Talk about the role of Donald Trump's father.

This is Fred.

Talk about his role and influence because he was a pretty good business person.

In this case, he was as you know, as not a small-time developer, a pretty big-time developer in New York, which is a tough market.

Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing arc to his career.

He really was the self-created person, businessman that Donald Trump's always said that he was.

And he started out just building like garages in the up-and-coming neighborhood in Queens where he grew up.

And then over the course of the next like 40 years, he really benefited from some of the big programs, the government programs to solve the biggest crises of the 20th century.

First, the Great Depression, then building housing for soldiers during World War II, building more housing for veterans when they got out, and then a couple of programs to sort of build up housing for middle-income people later than that.

And he built up this colossal empire of 10 to 20,000, sometimes apartments that were rentals.

He never had one, except for a couple outside of New York City that didn't make money.

And so by the time Donald joins the company, Fred owns what would be during his lifetime, a billion-dollar empire of rental apartments.

It's kicking off tremendous amounts of cash.

It has very little debt.

And so Donald has this like windfall behind him to do what he wants.

And Fred, it's a really interesting relationship to us, and it's seminal to Donald's life.

Fred really puts his full faith in Donald from that point.

There were other siblings, two brothers, for for various reasons.

Fred, the older one, falls off the scale, doesn't get his father's trust, becomes an alcoholic and dies very young, unfortunately.

And the younger one never really seems to be taken seriously because Donald has already claimed the helm by then.

And Fred never challenges.

Donald at all in anything he wants to do.

And they're entirely different.

As I said, Donald starts saying he's going to build things that he doesn't do.

Donald's not paying attention to the bottom line.

Donald's taking great risk, but it's not really with his money.

But Fred throughout his life supports him, even as Donald starts to say, I'm way bigger than my father was when he's only built like one building with other big partners.

But it really seems to be a seminal relationship in his life.

Right, right.

I have to say, Carol, though, you do see it in

Russ talked about.

Fred and that era where he went into these larger projects.

They came out of government programs.

And Fred was seen at the time as taking advantage of them and exploiting loopholes.

And, you know, there's even, there was an article in one of the Brooklyn papers that ultimately called him a pariah feeding off government largesse and gouging his tenants.

So you see shades of sort of what the practices that Donald is accused of.

Oh, not a good guy.

Yeah,

in some respects, but a great builder.

So there's contradictions in there.

Right, right.

No, always a malevolent force.

Scott, go ahead.

Nice to meet you.

So the data that I've seen is that from the 70s through the 90s, when his dad ultimately passed away,

he inherited approximately $413 million is the number that sticks in my mind.

And if that were invested in just an S ⁇ P index fund, it would be somewhere, depending on the returns worth today, somewhere between $10 and $20 billion.

And it's very hard to nail down

his actual net worth, but we know it's less than that.

We know if he just stuck it in an index fund, he'd be worth more money.

Which businesses have been the most successful and which have been the least successful that he's been engaged in since inheriting that money?

I got to imagine the casinos and the golf courses have not paid off, but the apprentice was a big deal.

What else has made and lost him money?

It's a great question.

I'm so happy that you remember that number because that was on a spreadsheet on my screen for about a year and a half.

We were all coming up with the numbers to get to that 413.

And you're right.

That's the way we've kind of looked at his wealth and his general success is that, you know, if he had just invested it and gone sailing, he'd probably be infinitely more wealthy than he is now.

I mean, on The Apprentice, look, all he did was show up there.

Mark Burnett had, the producer had made this deal with NBC that he would get half or he would get all of the product integration money.

And it wasn't really product integration.

Each show was a commercial for whoever sponsored it.

And they didn't know, NBC didn't know at the time what that was going to be worth.

It took about a year to get it going, but pretty soon companies were paying one, two, three, four million dollars to be on each episode.

And Burnett, in order to persuade Donald to join that effort, who he thought was really busy, busy, promised to give him half of whatever that

would raise.

And so that became just a huge windfall in his life, about $200 million.

And then there was a string of licensing deals that as soon as he became famous, flowed from that.

Early on, the year before, he had tried to get licensing deals and he had literally been laughed out of offices.

As soon as the apprentice starts, they just start pouring in the door.

Eventually, that goes bad.

You see Trump University and all these developments that don't happen because he's not really doing due diligence.

But still, over the course of the years of the the apprentice, that generated another $200 million.

But when you look at the businesses that he created in that window, we see a lot of like alligators.

The Chicago Tower, he secretly declared worthless on his tax returns while he's telling the world it's hugely successful.

The retail part of that tower was built below grade, so there's no street traffic.

It's been empty now for, I think, 15 years.

His UK golf courses have continued to suck money and require influx of cash.

The old post office, the same problem that, right?

He built that thing and he spent too much on it.

All his competitors knew he was spending too much on it.

And we saw in his tax returns, he was having to put seven to ten million dollars a year into it, which we presume came from the easy money he was getting from the apprentice and from licensing deals.

So, golf has been a mixed bag, real estate's been a mixed bag a little bit.

Uh, 40 Wall Street, for example, has been up and down at different times.

Um, but overall, like the line that's stuck in my head on this is that the less involvement he has in designing and operating a business, the greater its chances of financial success.

So talk a little bit, Suzanne, this idea of wealth and success, how he put this out as sort of using creative accounting, using various task codes and rules to his advantage.

Not something other people don't do.

And he actually brags about it.

Why shouldn't I take advantage of it?

So can you talk a little bit about how he does that and creates these faux

faux ideas that he's rich?

He just says it, right?

Well, I think that what a great, yeah, because there's, of course, the use of the tax code.

But I think when I think about that question, when you first said it, I think about just this crazy image that he projects that's not backed up by reality.

You look at one of the things I always remember about the book was when we got, or just the project, it was that we got it before we started the book.

We got 10 years of tax records from 1985 to 94.

And in that was, of course, the year he wrote Art of the Deal.

And we were thinking, well, there's maybe going to be some good news in there.

That year, he's writing a book saying he's this master deal maker and he lost $45 million in change that year.

So behind the curtain, that's what's going on.

And in that decade, we actually were able to find out because we got some anonymized taxpayer data through the National Archives in Washington.

We were able to go in and compare his taxes for that decade.

to a huge number of other taxpayers.

And in that year, it looked like he lost more money than any other single American taxpayer but what he did this is like the interesting part of how it started is he was able to identify i think really in in the 80s i mean in the 70s he was spinning the story that he was richer than he was but then he fell in with not just the larry kings of the world who where he was able to get on cnn and repeat it but wealth porn sort of took off in the 80s and you saw him on shows like lifestyles of the rich and famous with robin leach and and he had he had the accoutrements of success So he's flying around in his helicopter.

He was on his yacht.

He was losing a lot of money.

We know that now from his taxes, but they loved him.

And not a lot of really rich people wanted actually to be on that show because it's sort of tacky.

But he was all in and it perpetuated this idea that he was rich.

And then he was getting on the rich lists and all that.

I mean, it really did feed on itself.

But he started.

in the early 70s by lying about his wealth famously to the New York Times saying he was worth a couple hundred million dollars.

Actually, his dad was.

And then it just rolled up and kept, the number kept getting bigger and bigger.

How did you get these records?

We started out

in 2016,

three pages of his 95 tax returns were famously mailed to me.

And we Russ and I and other reporters worked really hard in a small amount of time to confirm those sort of big loss.

But then we got a really significant amount of information from Mary Trump.

And she's now come forward in her own book and said she was our source.

But she really opened

a window to us just on Fred Trump.

She had documents from Fred's world because the litigation that she was involved with the family and stemmed about Fred.

So that was really important to that 2018 story that looked at Fred's wealth and the tax fraud that went into it.

And then we had another source come forward who had

a transcript and another one that was from the 80s and then another source who provided us with decades of tax information and he happened to have obviously a connection to the IRS.

So lots of ways.

Yeah, lots of different things.

And then all the interviews that we, you know, and research that we did for the book, we spent another two years just kind of going at that.

So there is a pattern, or my understanding is there is a pattern to generational wealth.

And that is

granddad, and it's usually a guy, is a baller, makes a ton of money, super impressive.

And then the next generation loses a lot of it because they're under the impression that it's easy, they're reckless, they've grown up without guardrails, they haven't grown up with the requisite grit to watch every nickel, and they usually lose a lot of it.

And then, what's even, I think, more interesting or more surprising is the grandkids.

The next generation oftentimes make a lot of it back because they look at how dad screwed up and how granddad was a baller, and they take lessons and they make some of it back.

Do you see any evidence that his, the next generation, his children are especially good or bad at business?

If you had to guess in 20 or 30 years,

are we going to be here talking about how they lost money or are they building it back?

Because they're all in the family business.

And I understand you're not supposed to talk about kids, but they're public figures.

Have they shown any business acumen?

Scott, I feel like you know the answer to that question already.

A little bit.

I mean,

scopes.

Look, I mean, what we've seen is I wouldn't follow that pattern at all, I would say.

Certainly, what you described between Fred and Donald, the original father and then the son, Fred was the famous anecdote about him is he used to walk around construction sites and pick up unused nails and give them to his carpenters so they could save a few pennies.

Donald never displayed that kind of care for the bottom line and often sort of bragged about that.

But with Don Jr.

and Eric and Ivanka, Ivanka is out of the business now.

And what you see with them during their era, they joined the company right as all these licensing deals are coming up.

And their big role seems to be going to ribbon cuttings, putting their name on businesses that other people are running or owning.

And they see, they call those things their jobs.

But for the most part, they weren't really jobs.

They were just appearance-based.

It was just drawing attention with the name.

And then the Chicago Tower is sort of their big effort.

It was, looks like, from everything we can see, a colossal business failure.

And they've, Eric has focused on some golf courses, which is a tough business and not a highly profitable business, and it hasn't been for the Trumps.

And Don Jr.

really seems to have never found a sort of place in the sort of real estate center of it or the golf center of it and now is off to a totally different thing.

I think his entire life now is

an extension of his father's campaigns.

Yes.

I'm betting on Baron.

And let's not forget crypto.

We're trying to forget it, but we can't.

You know, the people they're affiliated with are really questionable.

So let's finish talking about that.

He nor J.D.

Vance have released their information, which is astonishing that J.D.

Vance hasn't, but which is, I think, a pattern.

He's just not going to release it ever.

And he uses the excuse of an audit.

But after, if he wins the election, and there's been so many instances of other countries investing in him, and he's doing deals all across the world, including in Russia.

You found that his tax returns suggest that he got financial boost from his presidency the last time.

He's been during this campaign, he's been selling selling sneakers and Bibles, Made in China for $3 and selling it for $60.

He's currently facing major threats to his finance, including this alleged audit and a multi-million dollar judgments for some of these court cases.

He does have a stake in Trump media.

We talk about it a lot.

Those shares recently surged this week, but it's still below every peak.

It shouldn't be worth anything at all, but it is because it's Donald Trump.

So what happens if he wins the presidency and if he doesn't doesn't win the presidency each of you would love to answer that okay yeah i mean i think if if he wins i think a lot of things sort of are potentially at bay i think it's going to be hard to you know i don't know if they're going to be able to collect on that for example the new york attorney general fine um and and i think that that's going to really throw a wrench into things i wanted people to know when we talk about him doing deals now they're licensing deals so you could see i don't i don't think if if he doesn't win i think those licensing deals become pretty tricky.

Who's going to want to do business with him, right?

So the one thing that he, even this world financial or this world liberty financial, this crypto thing he's got going on, we don't know a lot about it, but it doesn't look like he has a stake in it.

Neither do the kids.

They're just in business with these kind of crazy, crazy guys.

They start a shifty, not crazy, but shifty folks.

So I think that those licensing deals we're going to see are going to dry up.

And if he doesn't get elected, that bill is going to come due on that fine by the New York Attorney General.

It's going to go on appeal.

But

if it's upheld, he's going to have to write a check for that.

The same with the judgment regarding Eugene Carroll.

And I just, I think it's going to be very difficult for them if he doesn't win.

I think he's going to maybe just buy some time if he does win.

But I think he's already been seeing a downsizing of...

of the Trump organization, and that may continue either way.

You know, they sold the old post office.

They've sold a golf course here up in New York.

They've been selling some other assets.

And I think that that has sort of been quietly going on in the background.

Not a lot of people are talking about it, but I think he could also see that as he needs to raise money.

For doing things for us.

Yeah, I mean, I think Sue covered it pretty well there.

I think the big, look, I think if he doesn't get re-elected, the first question will be.

Will he still have some marketing value?

Will there still be a mega?

Right now, he's basing his, all these licensing deals on two things.

Saudi Arabia seeming to want to be in business with him, to get money to him.

Will that still continue if he's not in the White House?

I think that's an open question.

No, no, no is the answer to that, right?

I think you're right.

And you have to wonder the same about the Kushner deal, right, as well.

Will he still seem like the best choice for a billion dollars?

No, again.

Right.

So, and then I think the secondary question is, so far, he's basically monetizing the MAGA movement.

He's monetizing this idea that they're persecuted, that he's their only chance for success.

Will he remain the leader of that movement?

Will there be something there to monetize?

That's the secondary question.

That has not generated anywhere close to the licensing money that he was receiving like 10 years ago, which some years was $25 and $30 million a year.

This is kind of small ball by comparison, but it's money.

I think if he's not re-elected.

Again,

the judgment is going to be harder to escape than if he is.

And I think either way, you're going to see problems at some of the properties continue.

40 Wall Street is not doing great.

It's always been up and down for him.

The golf courses in the UK have been money eaters.

He's trying to develop the Doral golf course in Miami.

Whether that will happen, whether he can put together the financing to make that happen, I think is very important to him being able to hang on to this assembly of golf courses.

But the best thing he's got going right now is the thing, again, he doesn't run.

He got pushed into this investment that's run by its two buildings,

one in San Francisco, one in New York, that's run by Fernado Real Estate Investment Trust.

They're run very well.

They kick off a lot of money.

And that is still the source of most of his wealth in terms of real estate businesses.

And that will like continue either way, although he can't tap into that.

He's just at the behest of the majority partner.

And what will you two focus on if he becomes president?

Where do you find the story?

I don't know what the next thing is.

I mean, we're going to, I think if he becomes, we keep reporting.

I'm not quite sure where, though.

I mean, we're still looking at some stuff right now.

I guess to be continued on that one.

Yeah.

I mean, I think we'd watch for the kind of things we're talking about, right?

Saudi Arabia, it seems to all of us, is interested because he's going to be president.

So if he is, will there be more of those kinds of things?

And I think they've sort of acknowledged they're taking down the walls this time around.

They're not going to be concerned about appearances and he'll be a lame duck president from the first day.

So I think it's safe to say they would probably be going after things that might look dicey to us.

Right.

There's going to be a lot going on behind the curtains, I think.

In front of the curtains.

They don't even care anymore.

Yeah.

Scott, last quick question.

One of the things I really appreciate about your work is that you both really did the work.

Reading through some of your work, I just can't imagine how much time you were in a conference room with bad coffee trying to string together tax filings and really connect the dots.

Really do appreciate that you did the work and also that the New York Times would support you or support, provide you with the resources to do that kind of in-depth work.

My question is around Donald Trump Media, 80 million shares, 23 bucks a share, you know, whatever is that, 1.84 billion worth of value in those shares.

My understanding is he hasn't sold any, and that would come up amount of filing if he had sold them.

But if I were him,

I would be writing calls.

I'd be doing prepaid variable forwards.

I would be borrowing on margin like crazy to diversify.

Do you have any sense of or any evidence around what he is doing to diversify, monetize those shares?

But you left out run by that well-known tech executive, Devin Nunes.

But go ahead.

Sorry.

Let me just tell you, this podcast makes more money by far than

Trump media, but go ahead.

Yeah, I think in Astoria I...

This is Russ's favorite talk.

Run, Russ, run.

This is his favorite thing.

Well, I think in Astoria, I compare their revenue does not compare favorably to a single Chick-fil-A restaurant, right?

They're, they're, they really, or a McDonald's, they're, it's just not a real company.

He said a few store ones, too.

It's not a real company, and they don't really have a business plan that makes sense.

They're going to stream videos that are available for free elsewhere on their platform because they're at risk of being shut down.

But to answer your question, Scott, I don't have any intelligence on other ways he might be trying to monetize those shares at this point.

I think it's an excellent question.

I don't know that there's any way to, certainly no public way to see that right now.

But, you know, we'll be trying to watch out that for that.

And if you see any hint of it, please let us know.

We may be sifting through court filings one day looking for what he's done.

You will be.

You absolutely will be.

Also on the crypto, the sneakers, whatever you have.

That's one of the great things here.

So many court filings.

Anyway, once again, the book is Lucky Loser, How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune, Created the Illusion of Success.

I took it home.

I read it.

It's so good.

I love accounting.

I hate to tell you, but I love accounting.

But this is a really great reporting accomplishment that you two have done.

And

I'm excited to see more, even though I'm not excited to see a grifter continue to grift.

But you've done a great job.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Nice to meet you.

Thanks for your good work.

Isn't that fascinating?

I love reporters like that.

They're such good reporters.

Well, they really, if you read that initial article when we talk about taxes, it's like, okay, this,

you know, this, for me, that article kind of spoke to the importance of of,

quite frankly, journalism that has some funding because it must have just some editor, they came in and said, we can get through this, but to do an accurate job of this, it's going to take us months in a conference room with forensic accountants.

Right.

And there just aren't many newspapers that have the resources to greenlight that.

Yep.

Yep.

Great reporters.

Great topic.

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for predictions.

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Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction.

Well, just

in light of, I have a real one, but in light of what our guests just talked about,

I would bet we're going to find out.

I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that the entire or a big part of the campaign or a big part of his wealth is while Trump didn't sell any stock, I wouldn't be surprised if he is

doing covered calls against his 80 million shares.

So just to give you a sense for that, that's when you essentially write a call against a share you own.

And it's effective,

it's not risk-free because if you want to maintain your ownership in the stock, you essentially say, okay, the stock today is at 24 bucks.

I can sell calls expiring next week at, say,

25 for 66 cents.

And if I own 80 million shares, I can get 60 million dollars in premium.

Now, if it skyrockets to 30, I either have to sell shares or buy them back at a loss.

But just the kind of cash generation short term he can create from an ownership stake of 80 million shares in a volatile stock is just extraordinary.

So be clear, just because he's not selling shares doesn't mean he's not taking risks and making a lot of money.

And I'm very curious to see if and when it comes out what he was doing with those shares to try and monetize that stake or borrowing against it or what have you.

Anyways, that's my prediction.

My prediction is,

We are at a category three hurricane of misinformation.

It's about to go in the next three weeks to categories five and six.

Increased social media activity, AI-generated content that is super easy to spin up all sorts of misinformation, a polarized media environment.

We're just going to see what's going on with FEMA right now is an Easter parade compared to the, or a dumpster fire compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud of deep fake videos.

I think we're going to see videos of violence at polling stations that are deep fakes trying to suppress the turnout.

It's just this, the, the platforms have done what I'll call a glancing kind of jazz hands attempt to do away with this.

You know, Musk is all in on misinformation.

He wants to let it rain free.

It's going to go crazy the next three or four weeks.

Probably, I don't know if it's fair to say from both sides, but you're just going to see so many bad actors, so many bots.

I mean, if you're trying to discredit somebody or create misinformation that suppresses turnout in certain swing states, certain districts that you think are leaning away that's against your interests.

The ability to spin up accounts and misinformation using AI and then test it and see what is in fact going viral, what's creating the most confusion, the most polarization, it's just so, I don't call it easy, but the potential is so immense now that I just think you're going to see just

a,

you know, 10 millibars of rain of misinformation.

The first real,

anyway, the prediction, the word salad here is we're about to see the first real serious externality of AI.

And that is a level of misinformation and fake accounts creating polarization and confusion like we have never seen.

And here's the thing, the day after the election, the platforms are going to feel really bad about what happened.

after

the election.

But get ready, folks.

You know, there is a storm of misinformation coming over the next 20 days.

Yeah, I would agree.

I would agree.

It's terrible what's happened.

And I don't think these companies have learned a thing from last year, last

elections, the presidential election cycle.

In fact, I think what they've learned is to go and hide and not help our society have a better election.

I think they have no response.

They have decided no responsibility is the best thing to do.

And again, as usual,

they meet my already low expectations of what they should do.

Yeah, and as the Trump media stock, it is going up.

It's up 50% now, again, because they think he's going to win.

Again, it goes down when they don't think he's going to win.

It was down at 13.

It's up at 24,

which is a lot in the last month, I guess.

It's gone up 30% in the last five days, close to 50%.

It's gone from 46 to 12, back to 24.

I mean, it's just 50%.

Talk about volatile.

I know.

What a volatile stock.

We'll see.

We'll see what happens.

In any case, it's not a business, just so you're aware, whatever.

It's an indicator of how people feel about him and his chances of being president.

Anyway, it's still a bad business, even if he gets to be president.

And you will get, you will lose your money, MAGA.

Sorry.

And he will take it from you.

That is a really great prediction, Scott.

And I unfortunately think it's already happening.

Anyway, we want to hear from you.

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

Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIT.

Okay, Scott, that's the show.

We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot.

Can you read us out?

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

Ernie Intertyne, engineering this episode, thanks also to Drew Burroughs and Ms.

Severio.

Yeshak Kurua is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

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

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

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

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