Trump on Trial, Big Bank Earnings, and Guest Charles Duhigg

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hi everyone this is pivot from new york magazine and the vox media podcast network i'm kara swisher and i'm late today because of scott's friend jonathan height we were chit-chatting about his book the anxious generation so scott got anxious which is his state of play hello scott how was the interview?

I'm glad to see he's finally getting a little bit of press on his book.

Yeah.

It was great.

It was a great discussion.

I'm glad.

He's your colleague.

He likes you a lot.

I like him a lot.

So anyway, how are you doing?

Really well.

Weekend of football,

I went to this place called Maison Manor with.

What's that?

It's all the private clubs now have these kind of adjuncts in the Cotswolds that are very fancy and

nice, and you can take walks and all sorts of, well, you can take walks.

I don't know how to describe it.

It's like Soho Farmhouse.

You know what Soho Farmhouse is?

Yeah.

It's like those, except even fancier.

And

I've tapped into this list of A-list gay friends and they're just so fucking fabulous and in such great shape.

It's very intimidating.

Is it?

Why?

They're just impossibly good looking and successful.

They're beautiful.

They have, hold on, I'm getting something that I just got in the mail.

What an impossibly good looking gay man.

This is Algebra of Wealth, a simple formula for financial security.

Scott Gallagher.

It came with a pin that seems to have fallen off with a little money sign.

That was cute.

Daddy needs the Benjamins for the male pros.

Yeah.

Anyway, so you like the gays?

I had a nice, you know, I did my Jennifer Aniston

Reese Witherspoon interview.

Yeah.

Sent me pictures.

I didn't recognize who they were.

What?

I didn't recognize them.

I just saw that they've clearly, I didn't know that they have adopted an 11-year-old boy.

Oh, wait, that was you.

Never mind.

Never mind.

Yeah, they're quite beautiful and gammon, as they say.

And I am not gammon is the word, what you're looking for.

Most importantly, are they hot?

Do they look good in person?

They do indeed, and they're actually lovely.

I would say I was going to focus on that.

Who cares?

Talk about their hotness.

They're quite beautiful.

They're good looking hotness.

And also superstar.

Reese Witherspoon

could run a corporation.

Boy,

she knows a lot about AI and not fake knowing, you know, actual knowing.

And I did the whole cast of the morning show, which you like and I like on stage at the Paley Center.

Who's the biggest surprise there in terms of how interesting they are in terms of characters?

Tig Nataro, who plays the

Tig Nataro plays the chief of staff to John Hamm, you know, the one who's the lady who like tells him to like get.

focused and stop smiling.

And she's the chief of staff.

She's a famous stand-up comedian, and she's playing a dramatic role here.

And she's fantastic and very funny, very funny.

But she was, she's, the whole cast is great.

It's hard to do a panel of like nine people or 10 people.

And then right next to you is sitting Rhys Witherspoon and Jennifer Annison.

So it's, it's, it's a little bit disconcerting, but it worked out well.

Worked out well.

Just I'm glad that sounds like fun.

Yeah, it was.

It was really fun.

Um, and let me just say just today, let's have a shout out to Alex Swisher.

It's his birthday.

Happy birthday, Alex.

Well, I, you know, it's not like you to bring your kids into the podcast.

Oh, wait, it's been a week.

Oh, stop it.

They're the best.

They're so good.

Jesus Christ.

They're so great.

Anyway,

so we've got a lot to get to today, though, including Donald Trump's Hush Money Trial.

It's getting underway and the latest trial, latest earning news.

Plus, our friend of Pivot is New Yorker writer Charles Duhigg, which this is a cool book called another popular book, along with Jonathan Heidz's book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language to Connection.

But first, we have a lot of things to talk about.

Barry Diller is hoping to turn the Daily Beast around with new leadership.

The publication hasn't made a profit since it started in 2013, and Diller has considered selling it.

He's bringing in former president of Disney ABC television group, Ben Sherwood, and former chief content officer of hers, Joanna Coles, who called me just a second ago, but I haven't talked to her about it.

Sherwood and Coles will get equity stakes for half of the Daily Beast and receive salaries.

Coles will be chief creative and content officer, and Sherwood will become his chief executive and publisher.

Diller wrote me a while ago to ask if I knew of any editors, which I didn't.

And I know they lost their CEO and stuff like that.

Will this work?

I mean, these are very longtime professional media people.

They're friends of ours.

Ben is not necessarily a friend of ours, but Joanna certainly is.

Yeah, I'm doing a call later this week with Joanna and I assume it's to talk about this.

I'm a big fan of Joanna's.

I would just look at this as a startup that has a brand with some awareness.

It's like when I first heard about it, it felt like, okay, when I hear that Rush or UB40 are still touring, I get excited and think, do I really care?

Is there any value there?

The Daily Beast, the Daily Beast brings some awareness and nothing else.

But having said that, Joanna's talented.

I assume that Ben is talented.

Barry's obviously a talented person.

So I just think of it as a startup where they're adopting a brand that has some awareness, but trying to resuscitate or

find some sort of new strategy.

The Daily Beast is worth nothing but its brand value, and its brand value is only worth its awareness.

So it's a startup is the way I see it.

Talk about that idea of reviving brands versus just starting afresh because you've seen puck happen or the information etc or others over the many years that are new.

Well okay so

name name something you purchased previously but name the last thing you bought where you had never heard of the brand before.

A puck.

Puck.

Okay, you had heard of the brand.

I had, but it was new.

That was an upstart brand.

Yeah, it was an upstart brand, yeah.

But you'd heard about it.

It was everywhere.

My point is, awareness is just is literally the foundation in letter A of brand building.

And even, unfortunately, it's been taken to a place where now we have personalities online who decide, I'm going to wallpaper over my mediocre work with just awareness, no matter how I get it.

And that's true of politicians.

It's just name recognition.

When I sold my company in 2007, I've sold.

two or three companies.

Every time I sell them, I get a call from someone saying I should run for office because it's clear that the primary criteria for running for office are that you're going to put 10 or 20 million of your own money into it.

And the first test they do is name recognition.

So it's the same with brands.

It's much easier to launch Diet Coke than it is Tab or a new Coke brand.

And the Daily Beast, the question is, does the Daily Beast bring

more baggage than its awareness connotes?

And I think it's an okay brand.

I don't think it's a strong.

It's been through so much drama that my sense is

it does come with a little bit of baggage, but on the whole, people know it.

It does feel kind of elegant and aspirational and hip.

Like I think Joanna is the right person for this because she's all of those things.

But this is a startup.

Like I hope it doesn't come with any legacy assets, including, you know, whoever the team was there.

Maybe it does, but I would want to start brand new and go into, you know, whatever we call this world now.

Yeah, there's attempts like this, like air mail with Graydon Carter.

There's all these attempts to do that.

It's interesting.

It's hard.

It's hard to build a

media brand.

That's why we're so special.

Anyway, good luck, Joanna and Ben.

So Google says another thing, it says it's starting to remove links, speaking of people who actually have the power in news, to remove links from California news websites for search results for some users.

The move comes in response to California Journalism Preservation Act, which would make online ad companies pay publishers for content appearing in search results.

Google said the bill is a wrong approach to journalism.

It would create business uncertainty.

Supporters of the bill say it would help news publishers get a fair share of the ad profits.

The bill is pending in the California state legislature.

This is their move is to remove the links all over the world, not just here.

But they've done it before, and they're just not going to pay too much for this muffler, as they say.

Thoughts?

Well, when you only really have three toll booths bidding for all attention online, between 40 cents on every venture capital dollar are spent on Amazon, Meta, or Alphabet.

Literally, they're the toll booths online.

And when you think about the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of retailers, media companies, small businesses that all need to acquire customers online or reach people online, they have absolutely almost nil leverage over the two or three platforms that are the toll booths for the entire internet.

So what the government has done is it's kind of stepped in here and to a certain extent said, we're going to unionize for you.

And we're going to force them to give a portion of their proceeds to you.

Now, California tends to lead the the nation on this kind of stuff.

I find it's typically a blunt instrument and they're not very good at this stuff.

Porten, where we really pay the price for a lack of journalism and funding is when you're covering state corruption or local corruption at, you know, in the in the Pomona courthouse.

You know, kind of these, you call them, I think, gumshoe reporters.

When you don't have an ecosystem where you can pay for that, you just end up with small-time corruption everywhere and a lack of scrutiny.

So I like that the government's stepping in here and saying, look, you make so much money and there's a public service around supporting these news outlets that we're essentially going to transfer wealth.

I don't, I don't, I'd be curious if it holds up.

I hope other states adopt it.

What do you think, Carrie?

You're in this business.

They probably think it doesn't matter to have these links there.

They're trying, you know, as you know, we talked about last week, Facebook trying to escape news.

I mean, one of the things that we'll talk about in a second is the situation in the Middle East.

It was very hard on threads to get a lot of, you know, it was two day ago news.

And so the question is, is it help them or hurt them not to have have news, right?

That's, they know, they know whether it helps or hurts, or is it just enough to have fun videos to dancing, Beyoncé, et cetera, et cetera.

They know what works.

And I suspect they wouldn't cut these if they knew that these things aren't worth the money, right?

For them to pay for them.

See, I think it's a power play.

I think they're trying to do it.

I think they're trying to threaten these folks and say, not only are we not going to give you the money you deserve, you're not going to get any traffic.

Right.

That's right.

Take your two cents on the dollar and be happy with a bitch.

Yeah, that's what they're doing.

That's what they're doing.

I don't know how important the news is to their sites.

I just, I would like to know, and I would love there to be a lawsuit so that we can find out.

So, anyway, we'll see where it goes.

This is an ongoing thing.

It's happened all over the world, and it has to do also with

AI, too.

This is how much are these companies going to start really paying the freight that they are getting from these media companies and have gotten them?

Because they certainly damage them.

And these companies have gotten damage themselves by not being part of, you know, not being, by allowing these companies to run over them many years ago.

So we'll see.

I really would love to know how much it does contribute, though, because of course they won't tell us in any way.

They know.

But what this represents, though,

this is California stepping in because of the failure of the DOJ and the FTC to let these companies get too big, such that there are so few bidders on content.

that the content creators, it's just a shitty business.

And it doesn't support newsrooms.

And so what they want is content for free, or and they'll find little creators or conspiracy theory.

And unfortunately, they elevate content that is not fact-checked.

And it's ended up in a, you know, we're now in a kind of a post-truth world.

So, the fact that the government had to step in here, I think the government should have stepped in, but I think a better way to have done this would be to break these companies up such as there's more bidders on this content.

And people differentiate themselves because they do.

They run the table.

They run the casino, essentially.

Anyway, we need to very briefly get into the situation in the Mideast.

There are a lot of big news over the weekend.

Iran has launched more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel over the weekend in retaliation for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria.

Israel said it shot down 99% of the projectiles fired by Iran under its iron dome system with the help, a lot of help from the U.S., Western allies, and Arab partners.

President Biden has told Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu the U.S.

will not provide support for

yet another counterattack.

What are Biden's options here?

I mean, let's focus on that.

Because a conflict in the Middle East and this moving into a regional war is literally the last thing that should be happening here.

Because another, you know, a continued Mideast conflict without any kind of

any, whatever position you have here, this is not good for the global economy.

It's not good for people there.

There needs to be an end to it, I think most people feel, or that's where it's moving.

Any thoughts?

Well, I mean, my my views are not in the mainstream here.

Let's not talk about your emotional feelings about this.

I'm talking about the global economy.

I'd like to think my emotions are based on facts and how I see things.

Okay.

So, look, I think Iran is at the center of almost all chaos in the Middle East right now.

This was an extraordinary victory for not only the West, but Arab nations who see prosperity and see peace in the Middle East as a key criteria and want normal relationships with Israel and

see not Iran, but the

Islamic State, this fundamentalist group and the mullahs ruling over an increasingly younger population in Iran, and their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, they see them as agents of chaos.

And I believe

Biden got it, in my view, almost entirely right.

And that is he has coordinated and provided support for what is, in my opinion, one of the biggest victories in recent history in the West in terms of military.

They sent ballistic missiles and drones over, and the entire damage done was that one Bedouin seven-year-old girl was injured.

And this is the great Iranian, you know, the superpower in the Middle East supposedly, is totally impotent, totally flaccid against the superior technology, the democracy of the support of other democracies, and that is Israel.

This is an enormous win for the West.

I think where Biden screwed up, and I want to be clear, I think the White House has been steadfast here and deserves a lot of credit around the support of our ally.

I think it made absolutely no sense to say we won't support a counterattack.

Why would he take that off the table and diminish Israel's threat, deterrence, stability?

I suspect it's because it's Netanyahu and that he counterattacks is his business.

Well, he can say it privately.

Yeah.

Why would he say it publicly?

Why would he signal to Iran

that you are in a stronger position?

on this issue than Israel.

Why would he publicly state that?

How does that do anything but cede advantage from our ally to Iran, the purveyor of chaos and violence in the region?

Well, I think he's going for peace here, right?

I think he wants everyone to calm the fuck down, is my impression of the situation.

Because I do think the impact of a conflict of this escalating out of control is rather severe, right?

It just only takes, you know, this is how.

I realize I'm going to sound like a war hawk here.

Yes, you do.

But

those were the same arguments made in 1939 and 1940 for us not to get involved in that war again in Europe.

And as long as Iran has these proxies that have on their flag, death to America, death to Israel, the Houthis, I wonder, quite frankly, I don't believe in half measures here.

I understand, but it's a counter-attack from an attack that started with Israel.

So I think that's the point he's making.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.

Are we talking about the counterattack against embassies, Israeli embassies in Argentina in the 60s and 70s?

We're not going to be here.

Hold on, hold on.

Scott, we're not doing this.

We're not doing this here because we're not experts on it and we're not going to, okay?

Well, you don't need to be an expert, but you can read the fucking newspaper.

I do read the newspaper, Scott.

We're talking about trying to contain a situation, and that's what I suspect he's doing.

I'm not defending that he shouldn't say, I think he probably should have said it privately, but I think what he's pulled off here is rather astonishing in terms of getting everybody together to push it back.

And so let's stick with that.

Let's stick with that because we need to have.

Not peace in the Middle East.

That is never going to happen, it feels like.

But we definitely have to have a de-escalation of constant attacks and counterattacks.

It's just the tension, the decision they have to make, and it's really difficult,

is that one, Biden's comment here, and it was powerful, and I see the argument, was take the win.

Right?

Yep.

A lot of people think Iran signaled this, and it was performative, and that they do not want to escalate.

Right.

And so if Iran doesn't want to escalate, And Israel has their own play pretty full right now, and we have our own issues and don't want a wider regional conflict, then take the win and stand down.

I think that is a really powerful argument.

On the other side, we have a weakened Iran that looks feckless or looks at least diminished, who continues to develop their nuclear capabilities and continues to sow chaos, including Americans and Israelis with their proxies at every move.

And what happens if they get a nuclear weapon?

So, and right now the war machine is sort of lubed.

I do not take the view.

I take the former that it's probably time to stand down.

But we consistently through history, when we are in a position of strategic advantage, when you have an enemy, you locate, you track, and you eliminate.

And there is an argument to be made here that it should be a coordinated - we have the cloud cover, quite frankly, to go in and take out some nuclear capabilities in Iran.

And I think it's something that I'm sure people much smarter than me in the Defense Department are talking about.

But we always have a tendency to say we should,

Israel and its allies should only fight back to a truce truce that we can never go on the offense well okay all right well i think an impact thank you thank you dr kissinger but um uh uh uh i i think the impact in the global economy right now and would be devastating all over the place we there's some bigger things at play and i think what had how they handled this was exactly with the coordination is exactly the kind of thing we should always be thinking about um as a as a um as a country and i think he doesn't get enough uh you know and I think the attacks by the right wing in this country is crazy right now.

Like that's, we used to be able to just like agree, good job.

And nobody, you know, the right wing is immediately accusing him of all kinds of nonsense.

And there is, there is, speaking of which uniting and things like that, having handled something so well, it's.

He'll get a bump for this.

Yeah.

This is, yeah.

We don't even realize it this morning.

We will realize it in seven days and in 30 days.

This is the biggest geopolitical victory for the

since us repelling back the Russians in Ukraine.

I kept saying I'm so glad he's in the situation room and not Trump.

That's all I've been thinking.

Anyway, let's move in to our first big story.

Goldman Sachs is out with his first quarter earnings, and it's good news for CEO David Solomon.

He needs it.

Profits rose 28% from one year ago to $4.13 billion.

Revenues increased 16% to $14.21 billion, beating analysts' expectations.

The bank reported its best earnings per share since the third quarter of 2021.

At the same time, JPMorgan Chase earnings, since you had some predictions last week, the company reported more than $13 billion in profit and $42 billion in revenue, beating estimates.

But guidance for net interest income came in lower than expected.

That said, and the shares fell on that news.

It's probably the stock's worst day in four years.

So talk a little bit.

about these two, about these numbers.

Goldman has moved away from consumer lending and also offloaded some of its shitty businesses that David Solomon got them into in recent months.

What else should it be doing?

And Jamie Dimon is warning about an unsettling global landscape, which we just discussed, that could threaten the economy.

And Wells Fargo and Citi also reported better than expected profits and revenues and lower net interest income.

So give us the big picture since you talked about the stocks being up, but now they're slightly down.

But talk about the overall banking situation.

It's a great time to be a bank.

Investment banking, they had enough

kind of what I'll call the dry period over the last two years of low investment banking fees, gave them cloud cover to, quote unquote, be more efficient, lay off some people.

The net interest margin or net interest income, all that they say it's actually going down because people are moving their deposits into high-yield accounts.

But investment banking is up again.

Their IPOs are starting to come back, all the ways they kind of traditionally make money, and also the money they make on deposits, which is more JP Morgan than Goldman.

And also, there's just no getting around it.

There's been a pretty serious consolidation.

And that is, you know, people now want,

if you're going public, but there aren't a lot of companies going public, everybody wants Goldman and J.P.

on the cover.

In addition, they have had huge inflows of assets under management, which is how JP Morgan makes money.

These companies are really well managed.

Jamie and David are both grown-ups with fantastic colleagues and a bench.

They continue to attract amazing human capital.

The kids that go to work for these companies out of NYU and other skills are just so talented and so hardworking.

And so the market's coming back off a lower cost base.

Their wealth management businesses are consistently low growers, but steady, predictable income.

And there's a consolidation in the industry.

It's just, it's a great time.

It's a great time to be a bank.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: What about the net income?

You know, his worries about

not just the unsettling global landscape, but this net interest income coming in lower?

Well, that's because typically people were putting money in CDs, which were paying like 1%.

And they were getting this split.

Right, yeah.

And then they loan it out at 3.5%.

This is two years ago for a mortgage.

So it's 2.5%.

Now, for a brief while, people still were putting money into CDs and low-interest-bearing accounts, and their net interest margin exploded.

Now people are wising up and say, if I have cash, I'm going to put it in something with a little bit longer duration and I'm going to get 5%, 5.5%,

which has kind of starched out that delta.

Consumers are smart.

There's a lag, but consumers are start.

The thing, and I am not advising Jamie Dimon, but if I was advising him, I think Jamie,

my sense is Jamie kind of fancies himself the next Treasury Secretary, and he makes a lot of kind of prognostications about the economy.

And my sense is after following the economy, making a ton of predictions, watching economists, I am absolutely certain that almost nobody has any fucking idea.

Yep, I would agree.

And it is on a balanced scorecard, the job as the CEO of, in my opinion, of JPMorgan, their job isn't to predict the future.

It's to set the company up for success despite a variety of futures.

And that is to say,

here's our bread and butter.

This would survive a recession.

Here we're well set up.

Here's some bets in case the economy continues to scream.

I want to explain as the CEO of a company like JP Morgan scenario planning.

And that is here are three or four different possible outcomes for the economy in the next 12 months.

And this is why JP Morgan is well positioned to take advantage in any scenario.

But trying to predict where the economy is going to be in 12 months, good luck with that.

Yeah, he's been doing that.

He was wrong in the last one.

He also had some mistakes.

You know, he's talking a lot.

He looks like he's trying out for Treasury Secretary all the time.

100.

It's really

like, stop it.

I think he'd be great.

Great.

I think he'd be great.

Great.

He doesn't need to talk so much.

You know, for a banker, he talks too much.

That's my feeling.

Well, the guy's a leader.

My guess is like a lot of these guys, he's got a pretty healthy ego.

But there's a difference between, I'll give you an example.

The right financial leader, the wrong financial leader.

Mark Rowan felt very passionate about anti-Semitism on campus.

He took real action.

He effected change.

And quite frankly, he has withdrawn to being the CEO of Apollo.

Bill Ackman gets involved, gets drunk on the fame, gets drunk on the power, and now has decided that he needs to weigh in on all things higher ed, all things DEI.

He has handled it poorly.

I think David Solomon, I don't want to say sticks to his knitting, but is pretty focused on Goldman and his prospects.

Jamie is a huge national leader.

He has huge respect.

He gets a lot of business that way.

But if I'm whispering in his ear, I'm like, just, just, I would probably pull it back a little bit.

Yeah, I've noticed he's surrounded by a lot of yes people lately.

That's my opinion.

It's hard not to when you're a guy like that.

Yeah, I get it.

But he used to be a little more able to take criticism, I would say.

I will say this, though.

I've spoken at a bunch of J.P.

Morgan events where you have the wealthiest people literally in the room, and he'll stand up and he'll say, yeah, we should all, everyone in this room should pay more taxes.

He's not afraid to say that shit.

So I think he's also advocating to his credit.

He's advocating for a negative income tax, which is basically UBI.

Like, when's the last time the head of the largest bank in the nation advocated for something like that?

I'm super excited for him to do that when he's Treasury Secretary.

That's all.

There you go.

I'm saying.

Anyway, he's going to get the job.

Jamie, you're going to get the job.

Don't worry.

You don't need to.

It's almost like selling past the sale.

Do you know that expression?

He's selling past the sale.

He's buying it back.

Don't buy it back.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Like, I'm like, okay, got it.

You want to be proud of your secretary?

Okay.

All right.

Let's go on a quick break.

We come back.

Donald Trump's first criminal trial begins.

Oh, for the Lord's sake.

And as his stock continues to fall at True Social.

And we'll be back with a friend of Pivot, Charles Duhigg, about how to be a super communicator.

We could all use that.

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Scott, we're back.

Former President Donald Trump's criminal trial over hush money payments is getting underway in the Manhattan

courtroom this week, just today, the first time in American history that a former president will stand trial in a criminal case.

Trump faces, for those who want to keep track of this, he faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

He says he plans to testify, though it's unclear if it will actually happen.

He says a lot of things.

This is the porn star one, everybody.

So, just so you know, this is not the documents one or the

insurrection one.

This is the

porn star one and whether he was, oh, anyway.

This is the first of Trump's four criminal trials.

The latest New York Times Sienna poll shows candidates in virtual tie with Trump at 46 and Biden at 45.

Biden's come up quite a bit.

The five major broadcasts and cable networks also put out joint open letter over the weekend urging Trump and Biden to participate in televised debates ahead of the election.

That's going to be a lot of posturing back and forth.

And finally, the stock price of True Social's parent company, Trump Media, continues to slide, plunging more than 15% on Monday after the company filed to issue millions of additional shares.

Trump Media has lost about $3.5 billion in value since its public debut last month.

There's another three to go.

Ultimately, what happens with this stock, obviously?

The Washington Post profiled several Trump supporters and investors say they're in it for the long haul.

I felt sorry for them because they seemed idiotic, but willfully so.

I don't know if Trump can liquidate his holdings.

It's what we said it was.

So thoughts on our latest Donald Trumpness?

Let's keep this one short.

I think he's probably found guilty.

I don't think he serves any time, and it increases the likelihood he's re-elected president.

I don't like this case.

And the only thing I'm fairly certain, well, not fairly,

I think Trump social, whatever we're calling it now, will be below 10, will be single digits.

The people have gone in here for whatever reason.

Nobody went in here for business fundamentals.

They went for in for because they thought maybe it was a meme stock or they wanted to support Donald Trump.

And I just got to,

I mean,

when you wake up, I think, well, I don't know what the people were thinking here, but I know what they're thinking now.

And that is I've lost two-thirds of my money if I bought at the peak.

Right, but they're having

some of them are like, I'm going to buy more, but go ahead.

You should read that to us.

I guess that's

the, the, this company could be, I don't know what it's at today, 20 bucks.

This company could be at a dollar a share in 30 days.

It just, there's no floor here.

It's a company doing 4 million in revenue.

So,

and by the way, I don't, I think you should, people should be able to buy stock and whatever they want.

And the directors and the, and him, if and when the lockup comes off, they should be able to sell their shares.

But for the people investing here, be clear, you're investing in

some sort of, you're not investing in a company.

It's a scam.

Well, it's not even a scam.

You're just investing in a meme stock or you're investing in support of him, but you're not.

You might, it's like the way I think of it, think of it as a campaign contribution.

You're not getting that money back.

And whenever I give money to politicians, I got to be honest, I feel good about it when I do it.

And then a year later, I think it was like it never happened.

Did Did anything really come of that?

I don't.

Yeah, a lot of people are putting their life savings into it.

And they think it's like that George Soros is doing this.

Story is just like, I know that he's being taken advantage of.

I'm like, it's like, it's a shitty business.

That's why it's doing this.

Like, let's just be clear.

It's the business is terrible.

It's a terrible business.

And also they're losing subscribers, et cetera, et cetera, everything about it.

It's not a business.

It's not an actual business.

And they just continue to insist.

If they want to love Donald Trump, just send him your check directly.

Just send send him your money directly.

I feel bad.

I felt bad for these people when I was reading this story.

And then I thought, you're a bunch of idiots.

So I don't feel bad in any way whatsoever about you.

So we'll see.

And so you think the trials don't matter?

I don't agree with you.

I think these trials are a chippity chip chip for women, especially.

Women are already like with the abortion thing.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, he was a rapist with the Eugene Carroll.

And oh, he likes porn stars.

I don't know.

I just don't.

The reminders.

So, first,

listening to you, you evoked the right analogy.

And the analogy is the people who give money to these televangelists who are flying private.

You know, people who spend their welfare checks giving money to these television.

Anyways, to me, it's the exact same thing.

I don't, I think this case

probably helps him because I think it rallies his base who feel he's being unfairly persecuted.

I don't think this is a good case.

They always, I think it's actually better than, I've run a lot of analysis.

There's a lot more here than meets the eye.

I think he's, look it's pretty it's if they could make a pretty clear thing he'll never testify by the way people he'll never get on 100 he won't you're out

if he does he's finished he's finished if he testifies um i think he and by the side i don't know if you've been seeing some of his speeches he's got some cognitive difficulties that are really quite profound the whole thing about robert e lee i don't he's he's slurring words all he cannot get on the stand like it will show quite a lot of cognitive problems, I suspect.

Well, and he'd perjure himself.

It's a purger himself.

He can't do it.

No.

He can't take the stand the same reason that Elon Musk was never going to take the stand, because he would either have to basically say, I've lied over and over, or he would have to lie.

And when you start lying on the stand, there's potentially real prison time.

There's perjury.

But this case,

I think the nuclear secrets one, I think the election interference.

I would stay focused on those, but we'll, we'll, we'll see.

Just reminds women that he's a pig.

Like, I don't know.

I just more of.

Haven't they figured that out already?

No, no, just a reminder.

Like, you haven't been reminded in a while.

You're like, oh, yeah, the rapist.

Oh, yeah, the pig.

Oh, yeah, the porn stars.

Like, it's like, do we want this again?

And I think that's how, look, the numbers of Biden, as I said, are starting to grow again because people are like, oh,

this fucking guy.

Yes, all the, all the bulls, like, as I predicted, I'm good on the political stuff.

I'm not as good on the business stuff as you are, but I'm better on the political stuff.

I just think we'll see where it goes.

With Trump media, oh, you pretty much.

Well, I get too emotional.

I get too emotional.

Some of your facts are not factual.

But anyway, feelings feelings are not facts.

Um, uh, yeah, that's not fair.

Yeah, it is a little bit fair.

It's a little bit fair.

Yeah, it's not fair.

It's fair.

It's fair.

Anyway, in the case of Trump made it, Scott is 100% factually correct.

In any case, don't buy that stock, people.

And if you have to, just send him the money.

Just walk over to Mar-a-Lago and drop off a bag of money.

Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot so you and I can learn to communicate in a more super way.

Charles Duhig is a writer at the New Yorker and author of the new book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.

Welcome, Charles.

And I just was saying previously, I admire your beard.

You're going into Malcolm Gladwell School of Weird Hair Situations,

follicular.

You know, Scott could do the beard too if he wants.

He's got it started there.

He's got it started.

Then he'll look like he's from like the 1864, say, Arizona.

I look like Lennon if he was less sexy.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

You don't have the eyebrows for it.

Anyway.

By the way, Charles, you look, I got,

when we, we saw you at South by Southwest, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That just so you know, the beard ages you.

Maybe you're looking for that, but the beard absolutely adds.

I'm actually hoping that I look about a, you know, 85, 90.

So it's great.

That's great.

Sounds like it's working.

No, I remember, I remember you, you're like a young spry guy.

You met this young spry guy at South by Southwest, and Kara goes, that guy's such a hitter.

His book is great.

She just, she very rarely compliments people as much as she complimented you.

In any case,

first of all, explain to us what exactly is a super communicator you write in this book actually came about when you realized you weren't communicating well in your marriage.

So yeah, that's exactly right.

Or at the New York Times, right?

I was in the middle of the day.

No, that's impossible.

That's impossible.

I won't go into it, but that is not you.

So I had this problem where I'd come home from work and I would complain to my wife about my day and she would give me this really good advice, like, you know, take your boss out to lunch, get to know him better.

And instead of being able to to hear her, I would, you know, get upset and say, why aren't you supporting me?

You're supposed to be on my side.

And then she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.

And I wanted to understand what was going on.

And so I went out to researchers and I asked them, you know, why am I miscommunicating?

I'm a professional communicator.

And what they said is, well, look, we're living through a golden age of understanding communication.

And one of the things that we know now is that we think of a discussion as being about one thing, but it's actually many different kinds of conversations.

And in general, they tend to fall into one of three buckets.

There's practical conversations where we're solving problems, we're making plans together.

But then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling.

And I don't want you to solve my feelings.

I want you to empathize.

And then finally, there's social conversations about how we relate to each other.

And if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, that's when you miscommunicate.

I was having an emotional conversation.

My wife was having a practical conversation.

And so we couldn't really hear each other.

I know that.

I'm always like, what's the solution?

I don't really care about the feeling as much as the solution, which is interesting.

So what do you see as the main reason?

I mean, of course, it's hard to like say one reason that people struggle to communicate effectively, but talk about a few of them.

It's usually because for a couple of reasons.

First of all, that we don't, we're not having the same kind of conversation.

Remember that wave of like tech CEOs doing layoffs over Zoom?

So obviously, when you're laying someone off, that's an emotional conversation.

And yet they were treating it as a practical conversation.

This is why we're laying you off.

Here's the benefits you're going to get.

This is what's best for the company.

Somebody hearing that they're being, that they're losing their job, they don't want to hear about the practicalities.

They want to hear someone who empathizes with them.

And so having the same kind of conversation at the same moment is critical.

Another thing that's really important is asking more questions.

Super communicators ask.

10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person.

And as reporters, we know this, right?

The power of questions and particularly asking deep questions, questions that ask me about my values or my beliefs or my experiences.

Like if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of saying, where do you practice medicine, saying, oh, what made you decide to go to to medical school?

That's an invitation for them to say something real.

And then finally, the thing that super communicators do is they prove that they're listening.

They ask follow-up questions that show they're paying attention.

They might do this thing called looping for understanding, where they repeat back what they heard you say.

And when we feel listened to, that's when we become more likely to listen in return.

Oh, that's an interesting technique.

So that's, so what you've just said to me is, no, no,

you're very good at it.

Yeah, no, I'm not.

Do you want me to explain it to you?

Yeah, yeah, that's what he does.

Sure.

Scott, go for it, Mr.

Communications.

You've sort of outlined

my dad said this to me when I was much younger and I didn't register how important it was or how many subtleties to it.

And it sounds like it's a lot of what your theme.

So you always used to say, communication is with the listener.

Can you talk about something I didn't figure out till I was much older is the power of silence, just looking someone in the eye and make make sure that you know that you are not waiting to speak, that you're listening to them.

Can you talk about the power of silence and sort of acknowledging the point, if you will?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Creating those spaces for silence is critical.

And what's interesting is that speaking is such a cognitively intense activity that oftentimes we don't really pay attention to how people are acting when we're speaking.

Right.

And so the way that we create that silence or we create that proof of listening is when they stop talking what we do.

For instance, think about how powerful it is.

If you just said something profound and someone says, wow, that gives me a lot to think about.

Let me take a second just to think about what you just said.

In that moment, what you're really doing is you're saying, I am listening to you.

I promise I'm listening to you.

And then if you ask a follow-up question, or if you say, here's what I hear you saying, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong.

What we're doing is we're proving that we're listening.

Cause you're exactly right.

Many people, particularly in a hard conversation, a conflict conversation, we suspect in the back of our head, this person isn't listening.

They're waiting their turn to speak.

And we have to prove that that's not what's happening.

And when we do, it transforms a conversation.

So, so one of the things you just talked about, referenced Zoom communication, a lot of communication happens on text or video or social media, which is a very different level of community, which is not about listening in any way.

Some of the time it is, but usually it isn't.

How does technology play into what we're writing about?

Because often when Scott and I get into beefs, it's over us text.

You know what I mean?

Like I'm thinking,

which he takes the wrong way.

No, one of us gets into a beef.

The other just sits there and thinks, what the fuck is she texting me for at 3 a.m.?

No.

I don't respond.

When we talk.

I listen.

When we talk.

I'm the winner.

I'm the super communicator.

I just listen.

In any case,

we always solve it when we talk together.

Always.

Even over the phone.

Even over a phone.

It makes a huge difference, right?

In the book, there's this story about a CIA officer who's a terrible CIA officer.

He's sent over to Europe to try and recruit spies and he's terrible at his job.

And he learns this lesson, which is different types of communication have different rules and different strengths and weaknesses.

And what's interesting is if you look at 100 years ago when phones became popular, there were all these articles that said, no one will ever have a real conversation on a telephone because you can't see each other face to face.

And at the time, they were right.

If you look at early transcripts, it's people using phones like telegraphs or sending stock orders and grocery lists to each other.

But of course, by the time we're in middle school and our kids are, we can have phone conversations that are some of the deepest conversations of our life.

And it's because we learned how to use phones.

And when you're talking on the phone, you tend to, without realizing it, overemphasize your words a little bit more.

You put more emotion into your voice because you know the person can't see your expressions.

And when it comes to digital communications, the same thing is true.

There are certain rules.

If I say something sarcastic to you, you can hear the sarcasm in my voice.

If I type something sarcastic, you're going to take it seriously and you're going to be pissed off.

And so we just have to remind ourselves of what those rules are, that there's some conversations that have to be telephone, have to be face-to-face.

And if we do them online, then we have to overemphasize politeness.

We have to overemphasize emotion.

We have to underemphasize sarcasm.

So first off, I think storytelling, someone asked me, what is the core confidence you would want to give to your kids?

I've been thinking a lot about high school curriculums.

And hands down, and I am going to buy your book and give it to my two sons.

I think the competence that will stand the test of time is storytelling.

You're on a podcast with two people who've made their livings storytelling.

If you buy into that and you have sons or daughters and you want them to become great storytellers,

what exercises or what hacks would you recommend for acquiring that skill?

Yeah, it's a great question.

And the first thing to understand is what happens when we communicate.

So when we're in a conversation, the reason it's powerful, and communication is Homo sapiens superpower, right?

It is the thing that has set us apart from every other species.

When we're talking to each other, our bodies start to match each other, right?

During this conversation, without us realizing it, our breath patterns are matching each other.

Our heart rates are starting to align.

And most importantly, the neural activity, the brain activity that both of us have, all of us have, are starting to mirror each other.

And within neurology, that's known as neural entrainment.

And when you think about it, it makes sense because if I describe an emotion to you,

if I describe an idea, you actually experience that idea or that emotion a little bit.

That's what makes it powerful.

And that's our brains aligning.

So when it comes to storytelling, the thing to keep in mind is my goal is not necessarily to tell you the most polished story on earth.

My goal is to take you on a journey with me, right?

Many people who, when they tell stories, they focus on the beginning and the end, but it's the middle, the journey through the middle that makes it a story.

If you think about the movie Cinderella, the beginning is the parents, her father dies, that's two minutes.

The ending is she lives happily ever after, that's like 45 seconds.

The rest of the movie is the middle.

And when we bring people on that journey, we invite them to align with us,

to entrain neurologically.

And that's incredibly powerful.

But when people have less of attention, obviously people have less attention now, and especially when they're distracted by a phone or whatever it happens to be.

But distraction is certainly, you know, we're in a persistent partial attention is where we all live now.

Does that affect that?

Because it's very hard to have.

I've had many fewer longer conversations than I used to.

I'm starting to talk like I'm starting to tech.

You know what I mean?

Like you have, they're usually more logistical and

that kind of thing.

What happens in

that space?

And can people get, like you said, if you can adapt to phones, you can adapt to social media too.

How do you communicate well?

Absolutely.

Well, and time is less important than

authenticity.

So if I tell you that like, you know, I had this incident with my wife and we couldn't hear each other.

And I went to these researchers and I talked to them.

That takes me 40 seconds to explain, but it's a little bit of a story.

You get to come with me.

You get to envision me and my wife not getting along because that's probably something that happens with you guys and your wives, right?

And so

never, never.

And so what I think what happens is that particularly when we're on social media, if we use social media as a way to simply broadcast, to scream, rather than to interact, we'll fall into that pattern throughout our life because it becomes a habit.

And so the thing to do is to remind ourselves that the goal of a conversation is not to convince the other person that you are right and they are wrong.

It's not to impress them.

It's not for them to like you.

The goal of a conversation is simply to understand how they see the world and speak in a way that they understand how you see the world.

And when you hold yourself to that standard, I'm not going to continue or discontinue this conversation until I can show, try and understand what you're saying and help you understand me.

It makes everything healthier.

Can I do a follow-up?

We're obviously in election year.

It seems like candidates are not that doing that.

It's a dunk, dunk, dunk.

No one ever listens, you know, even more so than anybody else

of all public facing people, they're the worst, I think.

Is there anyone who's a super communicator that you see on the campaign trail?

Well, what's really interesting is if you go to rallies, and this is true of both Trump and Biden, and you pay attention to when they get off script, what they're doing is they're proving that they're listening, right?

Trump, you know, setting aside what he's saying and the craziness coming out of his mouth, when that audience applauds, he leans into the applause.

He leans into whatever he's saying.

That's why he starts saying all these crazy things.

He's proving to them that he's listening to them.

And Biden's doing the same thing in his rallies, and he's trying to do it right now with his public statements.

You're exactly right.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because we have forgotten how to communicate, right?

This used to be taught in schools.

Your parents took a course called Homec or Interpersonal Relations.

And as schools got more technical, it fell out of the curriculums.

But this is important.

And our brain is designed to be amazing at communication.

If we teach it the right skills, it makes it into a habit very quickly.

And so super communicators is about that handful of skills that we know helps you connect with other people.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I do think you learn to communicate without talking.

Something I've learned of having smaller children is we talk a lot, but not speaking, right?

You know what I mean?

There's a lot of non-communication communication happening.

Scott, final question for you.

Yeah, just, Charles, I know very little about you.

Do you have kids?

I do.

I have a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old.

Oh,

you're in the midst of it.

You're in your second tour of Iraq and Vietnam right now.

Anyway, so.

That's exactly right.

How has your study of being a super communicator and the best and worst practices changed the way you interact with your children?

It's actually transformed it.

And in two ways, the first thing is that I mentioned that deep questions.

And what that really is, is it's about asking not about the facts of someone's life, but how they feel about their life.

And I used to ask my kids, like, how was your day?

Fine.

Did you learn anything at school?

No.

Did you have fun?

No.

Right.

You guys had this.

Like, it's like pulling teeth to have a conversation with them.

And then I started asking, instead about the facts of their day, I started asking, saying things like, hey, I know that you hung out with Jasper after school.

Like, what do you admire about Jasper?

Why do you like him?

And suddenly it's like opening this book.

You know, my kid is like, oh, he's very courageous.

What does courage mean?

Well, he rode his bike off the roof.

Like, is that courage?

Or what else has he done?

Oh, it turns out Jasper can talk to girls.

And I prove that I'm listening to them.

I ask them these deep questions about how they feel about their life because they're experts in that.

And then I repeat back to them.

I say, oh, that's interesting.

What do you mean by courage?

I prove to them that I'm paying attention, that I want to learn from them.

And they're not annoyed by that?

They're not annoyed.

No, No, they love it.

They love it.

Right.

I mean, you have older kids, Carrie.

You know, like when they're teenagers,

they're just bursting at the seams to be experts on things and to share their expertise with you.

And the thing they're an expert on is their own life.

Yeah.

That is fair.

True.

That's true.

So give us a little review here.

Are Scott and I super communicators?

You guys are super communicators, Parks, Jordan are.

I mean, the thing is, I've been listening to some of the podcasts that you've been doing, Kara, about for your book.

And the thing I love about it is that you go in and you have something to say, right?

You're coming in, not just waiting for a question.

You're coming in with something you want to share.

But at the same time, you're also listening to that host.

You're interacting with them.

And you guys might not walk away completely agreeing with each other, but you walk away understanding and connecting with each other.

So

you guys are definitely super communicators.

Give everybody one quick tip before we go.

What's the one thing you have to do?

The one thing you have to do is today,

ask a question that you wouldn't have asked otherwise and make it a question that feels to you like it's personal.

Like Scott does that well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why did you decide to become a journalist?

Like, what was it like growing up wherever you grew up?

What do you love about your neighborhood?

Those questions are an invitation to someone else to tell you who they really are.

Yeah, I think I told Scott this something Louie does.

My son does.

Everyone he asks, and I've borrowed it because I think it works really well.

He looks at someone he doesn't know and he says, how's your day going?

And I have to tell you, you, it changes dynamics constantly where we're at rather than just rush past them.

It works.

It works.

It's powerful.

It is very much so.

Anyway, Charles Duhigg, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection is out now.

Thanks, Charles.

Thanks for having me.

All right, Scott, that was interesting.

He's an interesting book.

That's a good book.

I like his books a lot, a lot of the stuff he worked and his stories at the times.

And now at the New Yorker.

Anyway, we'll be back for Wins and Fails.

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Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails.

You go first this week.

Well, so first, I just want to...

I close the loop on Charles.

So I do think that storytelling is the core competence that's going to stand the test of time.

I think the two of us have made extraordinary livings and have interesting lives and influence because of our storytelling capability.

Storytelling is not only incredibly important, but storytellers are super attractive to the other sex because they're important to the survival of the species.

As is the reason that Mick Jagger gets to

bang a woman 50 years

his junior.

Anyways, kind of lost the thread there, but

here's.

Well, he's a great storyteller.

That's the bottom line.

That's true.

But also, just a pro tip to the young men and young women out there in dating.

A mistake I always made on a date was I always felt like I had to fill every silence with words.

And I was constantly talking and asking,

and here's what, here's what I think is a hack in dating and mating early on.

Be really comfortable with silence.

And I would be at dinners and there'd be a pause in the conversation and I would just stare, I would just stop and just stare politely and smile nicely at my date until it almost became uncomfortable.

And she would say,

what's going on?

Or

why are you smiling?

I think, I just enjoy listening.

It says, I'm confident.

It says, I don't need to fill every word.

And then to just be very emotive and say, you know, I just like looking at you or I just like listening to you.

God, I just like looking at you.

It's because of the spray tan.

By the way, if anyone's ever depressed out there, my first piece of advice when people call me and say, I'm peeling room down, I'm like, have you thought about a spray tan?

Because things can change.

Did you actually

know?

But I do use man makeup.

I use that Clinique bronzer.

Oh, it looks good.

I use it with the Chanel moisturizer, and I look fucking radiant.

Look at me.

Look at me.

I look 48 today, not 49.

Anyways, silence, young men and young women, embrace it.

It reflects confidence.

Okay, good.

Now you're wins and fails.

Go ahead.

Anyways, my win is this multilateral

defense of Israel.

This guy, Ambassador James Jeffrey, I think it's from the Wilson Center, kind of summed it up for me.

He said, The Iranians, by their massive but failed military response to Israel's Damascus strike, have brought the entire October 7th, Gaza discussion back to the key underlying factor:

Iran on its proxy's decades-long effort to dominate the region and tank stability at the expense of Arab states and of Turkey, Israel, and the United States and Europe.

300 projectiles.

Not one made it through.

Shrapnel of one injured a seven-year-old girl.

American aircraft carriers took out drones.

American F-15s took out drones.

The Israeli iron dome and the Arrows defense systems.

Jordanians took down drones over, over.

Most of these things never even got into Israeli airspace.

When the West and its allies coordinate, we are an insurmountable force.

But go ahead.

I mean, Israel has the technical superiority, the most vibrant economy, and the most potent political system in terms of its allies.

And the fact that everyone got together, regardless of what they think of the current administration, and said

there's a bad administration, and then there's someone sowing chaos throughout the region.

And for them to coordinate in such a sophisticated manner with this type of success, it is a real moment of victory for the West.

So that's my win.

My fail is I'm becoming incredibly,

what's the term,

Bernie Sanders around, I've been thinking a lot about Daniel Kahneman

and our tax policy.

It's gone from, I mean, every year taxes get lower on corporations and the wealthy for the most part.

And Daniel Kahneman's research showed that

essentially there is a correlation between money and happiness.

Absolutely.

Middle income people are happier than lower

income, wealthy are happier than middle income.

But at a certain point, the returns diminish.

And it just got me thinking, if you, and this is part of my presentation, if above call it $5 or $10 million,

you don't get any incremental happiness,

but the difference between $30 and $50,000 for a low-income family is extraordinary in terms of their well-being and happiness.

Then why on earth would we not have marginal tax rates of 90% above a certain level?

I mean, it might be 10 million, but if you're not giving up anything at that level, but you're redistributing a massive amount of goodwill, health, and happiness, I've all of a sudden kind of gone back to where Eisenhower was, and that at a certain income level, we should have

pretty aggressive tax rates.

And the thing that we don't get in the U.S.

is we figured out the hard part,

whether it's child poverty, universal pre-K,

homelessness, veterans affairs.

There are nations all over the world that have figured out these issues.

The hard part is the resources.

And the fact that we can grow the economy by a quarter of a trillion dollars in a five-minute earnings call means we've actually got the hard part figured out.

So I think that what I'll call my fail is the weaponization or the lie that we can't figure these problems out and that progressive or non-progressive tax rates somehow result in greater well-being for the nation.

They don't.

The The incremental, from going from $10 to $20 million,

you get absolutely no utility.

You get absolutely no happiness.

So my fail is this myth that's been fomented in this part of the zeitgeist that we need, that lower taxes on the wealthiest and on corporations is part and parcel of a growing economy and important for people's well-being and happiness.

It's not.

It doesn't add any incremental happiness to anybody.

And if you look on the corporate side, the higher the tax rate, the more reinvestment there is in the company.

Because if you have 50% corporate tax rates, companies go, well, why wouldn't we take a chance and open another plant or hire more people?

Because we get kind of 50% off.

So my fail is this tired, outdated, and false

mythology that really low tax rates on the most profitable companies and our mega earners somehow add value back to the Commonwealth.

They don't.

They reduce our happiness.

Oddly enough, Mark Cuban, of course, just tweeted about his taxes.

I pay what I owe tomorrow, will transfer to the IRS $288 million.

Country, I've done so much for me.

I'm proud to pay my taxes every single year.

Tag a former president you know who doesn't.

He actually corrected his $276 million rather than $288 million.

But I thought that was funny.

My win is obviously your new book, The Algebra of Wealth.

I want everybody to read it.

I haven't had time to look at it yet because I just got it in the mail.

I'm very excited to read it.

I'm very excited.

It's for your boys.

I'm excited.

You're done.

You don't need to read it.

You're done.

It's for your boys.

They'll read it.

I was just thinking I'm going to give it to Alex in a second once I look through it.

But I'm excited to look at it.

I'm excited for your book.

And I'm excited to talk about your book.

I know you have a lot of events, and I will probably be attending one of your events as opposed to someone else who didn't communicate

super with me.

Anyway, I probably will.

And then my fail, you know, right now, I don't know if you know this, but right now,

Tesla, it's laying off 10% of its workforce right now.

It's today, and

a number of executives

are leaving.

Senior vice president, 18-year company, veterans leaving.

Another one, Rohan Patel, is leaving.

He ran business development.

This was a really company that was really on the cutting edge, and he's lost the way.

And that's all we were saying.

And this is going to lead with competition, with people obviously not keeping up in terms of new products, not taking your eye off the ball.

It's a shame.

It's a damn shame that it was inevitable they're going to lose some market share because that's the way it goes because he's pioneered an industry incredibly.

But this is a fail because it didn't quite have to happen this way, even though everyone's cutting back in this area.

It just shows you that if you take your eye off a ball of a really exciting product, you can really get into trouble.

And I don't think that's with any rancor towards this person.

It's a shame because

this is an industry-leading company away from the stock price, away from his toxic this and that.

So it's a real fail on his behalf for taking his eye off the ball, I think, personally.

So that is, I wish it wasn't a fail in a lot of ways, oddly enough.

Well, but to be fair, those people who've been there 15 or 18 years, they have recognized enormous, even with the drawdown in the stock,

they have recognized enormous economic security, which is what a for-profit company is for.

So those people have done really well.

Yep, absolutely.

Anyway, I just, just, they have done really well, but they needed to make changes, and that's what they did.

And

10% of the workforce is going to suffer for it anyway, but that's fine that's what happens unfortunately um in any case uh 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 don't forget to vote for us in the webby awards at the link in the description we need to be number one because it will fill the giant empty space in our souls um okay scott we would like to win we would like to win um okay scott that's the show we'll be back on friday with more meanwhile this week on prof g you can check out scott's interview with Georgetown professor Cal Newport to hear his ideas on slow productivity.

And for on with Kara Swisher, as I said, we'll bring you my conversation with Jonathan Haidt.

Anyway, please read us out, Scott.

Today's show was produced by Lara Names, Rily Marcus, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie Durtod engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Brose and Mil Severio.

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

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

Thank you for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine Vox Media.

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

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

Thank you to His Majesty King Abdullah II and the good people of Jordan for your support of America and its allies.