Reddit Goes Public, Microsoft’s Big AI Move, and the DOJ Sues Apple

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Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher.

I'm Scott Galloway.

Guess where I am today, Scott?

You're on the West Coast, no?

No.

I'm in the city of Big Shoulders.

I'm in Chicago.

Really?

Okay.

What are you doing in Chi-Town?

Well, from Ann Arbor, after seeing giant Alex speaking of Big Shoulders and doing an event there with the CEO of GM, I went to Minneapolis where I had the loveliest time.

They are truly nicer people in Minneapolis than anywhere else.

Yeah, it's a great city, a great music city.

Anyways, what were we doing in Minneapolis?

It was another event, another sold-out event there for the book.

We had a lot of discussions about George Floyd, which was interesting.

Sort of the repercussions and everything.

That was kind of interesting.

Now I'm in Chicago for two events today.

Two events.

One with Brene Brown, our friend from Vox Media, and one with Mark Liebovich,

who is an old friend of mine, who works for the Atlantic now.

That sounds good.

Sounds very white, but it sounds good.

It does.

It's very white.

I had a hot dog, a Chicago dog.

You're practically one of them now.

I love Chicago.

Do you like Chicago?

I think Chicago is the old navy of cities.

It's 80% of New York for 50% of the price, which I say that positively.

It's a great trade.

I love this city.

It's freezing, but I love this city, I have to say.

I would live here.

My best friend Adam lives there.

It's yeah.

And it's close to everything.

I think its geography is really powerful.

I went on a bit of a bender and started to watch Chicago movies like About Last Night and

the one with Kevin, you know, where he plays the FBI agent, catching Al Capone.

Oh, The Untouchables with Kevin Costner.

Yes, The Untouchables.

I watched Blues Brothers, a little bit of the Tom Cruise movie, Risky Business.

Anyway, a lot of movies set here.

It has a lot of visuals.

Sarah Smuell's Day Off.

And all the John Hughes movies.

Anyway, I'm headed to LA tomorrow to be on Bill Maher, which you were also going to be on, They Tell Me.

So that was nice.

Do you know who your co-panelist is?

I'm not a panelist.

I'm the interview.

Oh, you got the big chair.

You're right up front.

That's very exciting.

I think I do know who yours are, but you're not supposed to talk about it.

You're going to have some fun.

Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today, including Reddit's IPO finally happening and Microsoft making a big AI hire.

But first, Elon Musk Neuralink has released released a video showing the first human patient playing chess using nothing but his thoughts.

The patient, a quadriped, moves a cursor on a laptop to play a game and turn off music.

Neuralink is the third company to release video evidence of brain implants after Neurotech and Synchron.

What's different here is he can do other things, but he can multitask and

also

it's closer, so it has a

some of them are on the outside, I guess, and this one is implanted.

But this whole area is really, really interesting.

Are you ready to let Elon have access to your thoughts, Scott?

Oh, God, I'm trying to come up with something snarky.

It's cool.

There's no getting around it.

It's really hopeful and exciting.

I have someone very close to my

close to me in my life who suffers from multiple sclerosis.

There's all sorts of,

I mean, this could be very exciting on a number of dimensions.

So I'm

distinctive how I feel about his personal behavior off mic.

I'm rooting for him and the company.

Yeah, and and there's other companies too.

It's a really interesting area.

I think we know so little about our brains.

We really do, about how they work and everything else.

And so all these,

you know, these neural issues and what you can do with them are interesting.

And we'll see where this guy goes.

I think he was in a diving accident, this guy.

I'd like to, you know, it just got me interested in more of the whole area, all these companies

and how we're going to do this.

And I just, I remember seeing Dean Kayman, if you remember, he did the segue, but he also did this chair, this special wheelchair that you got up in.

We had it once at a code.

Someday they're going to print in your liver, Scott, so you'll be okay.

Oh, you're not going to want to see that movie.

That's basically the Hollywood stars of bars in downtown is my liver.

Oh, I see.

Well, it's going to be able to be printed and made from synthetics.

I think it's just, I think all this stuff is really cool.

And these are the Elon we like.

And not just, again, not just Elon, but lots of companies like this.

I love this part of Ted.

Wait, do you remember the segue?

Yeah, I do.

I remember Jeff Bezos on a Segway at Ted.

I didn't put that in the book, but yeah, I remember it.

They were always around.

They rode him around a lot.

It goes to the idolatry of innovators, and this kind of marks the time.

But coming into my professional years, the Jesus Christ of my world was a guy named John Dorr of Kleiner Perkins.

Yeah, I know him well.

You know John.

Okay, anyways.

Yes.

And he announced.

He announced that one, the Segway was going to change the world.

So we were all waiting for the Segway.

It literally was the headset of before headsets.

And, but everyone, you know, these folks spent a ton of money on it and it was supposedly going to change mobility and do away with cars.

And also, I remember my biggest moment, I was just so excited as an entrepreneur.

We were doing work for Kleiner Perkins, my firm profit.

We were doing branch energy.

And so they let us invest in this online wedding registry.

I forgot the name.

So I convinced my partner.

I'm like, John Dorg is letting us into a deal.

And we literally gathered every cent we had.

And it was a quarter of a million bucks.

Oh, no.

And we put it into this thing and we're waiting.

I was literally thought, okay, that's it.

I'm done.

I'm going to be a billionaire.

I got to co-invest with Kleiner Perkins and like in six months, the business was out of business.

He was, he's been a lot of good things, you know, Google, Amazon, you know.

Well, yeah, he had a very, very strong career.

But and actually a lovely fellow, I have to say.

Really nice man.

Smart.

But I mean, obviously the stuff around Alan Powell was problematic at Kleiner, but that was a larger story.

It's good we got that in.

It's good we got that in.

I was just going to say that everyone has a mixed record, just like you just insulted him for the segue.

But all the digital people rode around on them.

And I just remember Jeff Bezos riding around like a lunatic on it every into restaurants and things like that.

But it's being used all over cities across America for tourists.

You've seen them, little Segway tours, haven't you?

Yeah, they haven't in Paris, but I mean, it's literally, it's like, how can I look?

How can I look like the worst cliche of a tourist?

Yeah.

Mall cop, mall cop.

If I could take a segue into a marine park and start harassing and petting dolphins while, you know, while eating fried Snickers, it's just, it's, it is the cliché of cliché.

Let me just say, having written it, it's a cool news.

Secondly, if it brought us Paul Blart Mall Cop, I think it's worth every cent.

Worth it.

That's the best movie ever.

Have you ever seen it?

It's just because

nobody has any goddamn idea.

I mean, who would have thought, oh, but...

you know, a handheld phone, I guess we would have thought that, or this little blank page with a query box was going to be,

I mean, it's just so interesting what works and what doesn't.

Yeah.

Bubbler.

He lives down the street from me in Delray Beach.

No, he's made a lot of money doing what I would call fairly unimportant work, but good for him.

Actually,

King of Queens is pretty cute, isn't it?

Good for him.

I like him.

I don't care.

He's great.

That movie is, go watch that movie if you want to be happy.

I like any movie where a mediocre overweight guy with a minimum wage job gets to like date hot women.

Gates the girl and rides a Segway.

That's right.

Yeah, it's very realistic.

Anybody, watch it if you want to be happy.

Anyway, former President Trump won't be able to secure the $464 million bond to appeal his fraud case.

New York, according to his lawyers, right now, we'll see.

Trump's legal team has called the amount impossible.

He's making a big deal of that and said they had contacted around 30 companies that provide appeal bonds with no success.

The bond is due to be posted next week, but Trump's lawyers have asked the court to either pause the judgment or accept only $100 million.

Try to do a deal, deal or no deal.

I'd love you to talk about this because that lunatic from Shark Tank, Kevin Kevin O'Leary, who I think is such a pompous ass, was screaming at the very lovely Laura Coates the other day on shows.

But everyone feels like, look, this guy did the crime.

If you don't, don't do the crime if you don't want to pay the bill or do the time, essentially.

He shouldn't get now because he's rich, et cetera, et cetera.

Thoughts?

Well, the whole bond thing is pretty interesting, right?

Because there's probably some people that just shouldn't be allowed bond.

And then on the other hand, if people are granted bond and not seen as an immediate threat to society, you know, kind of nonviolent crime,

I think bond prices should come down because this is yet another example of how the justice system right away

is just entirely not blind based on how much money you have.

The issue here is whether or not, and I don't know the answer to this, so I'd love to ask Preet, if this is kind of what I'd call an extraordinary demand, that

to ask for a half a billion dollar bond, My understanding is this is a fairly unprecedented size and that this is.

It's not.

I've searched it, but go ahead.

Well, half a billion dollars.

Are there a lot of half a billion dollar bonds?

It is.

It's a lot of money.

Yes, it is.

But it's not unprecedented.

There have been other ones.

Is that right?

Okay.

Yes.

From what I understand, this is the way they're handling this is the way they

handle everyone's bonds.

This was the judgment.

It doesn't really, it doesn't, you can't make changes.

Maybe you should.

Maybe it should be.

you know, if as the price goes up, the bond goes down.

I don't know.

But it seems like that favors rich people, right?

So I don't know.

It'll be interesting.

So she could seize.

It'll take forever from what I've been reading a lot about this.

It'll take forever for her to seize something.

And a lot of his properties

have other obligations on them, loans or whatever.

So the worry is that he has to go to like Saudi Arabia or some single rich guy or

a donor.

And all the Republican, all the MAGA people, not the Republicans, are screen.

Another person, who was it, was screaming about why doesn't a rich person, maybe that was Kevin O'Leary again, about giving, why doesn't a rich person pony up?

Why doesn't Sean Hannity pony up and everybody else?

No one wants to give this guy money, but he may get some money with True Social, which may go public and give him several billion dollars because he owns

a whole bunch of it.

So that could happen.

It's now maybe if they decide to, the shareholders decide it'll go public, he'll get the money, but he can't sell it for six months.

Maybe that he could borrow against it.

I wouldn't take that bet.

But there's that.

He doesn't have a half a billion dollars in cash, so he needs to get a bond, and he's having trouble finding someone to secure the assets.

In my opinion, it's fairly likely to speculate that his reason with Elon Musk was, hey, Elon, would you like a cabinet position?

Can you give me half a billion dollars?

And the scary thing here, as everything becomes financialized and we've normalized how what just a whorehouse Washington is, I would imagine we're about to find the second VP pick is based on how much money this person has and how much they're willing to give to the campaign.

I would imagine that Donald Trump's running around saying, hey, hey, how'd you like to potentially be president?

No, I'm old and I'm obese.

Do you want to be VP?

You know, how committed are you to the campaign?

Wink, wink, are you $500 million committed to the campaign?

Because this just happened.

And I think the media.

He can shove money over there.

He shoves his legal money.

He uses the campaign.

That's why he's so far down.

He's really not.

Now, everyone says he'll get money once it gets going, but

there's a lot of worry about how much money Biden has versus Trump in this campaign because these campaigns are made of money and that's how things work.

But where I was going with this, Kara, is that I do think the media is remiss or at least takes a beat before they

I'm trying to be polite around saying.

RFK Jr.'s supposed VP pick.

Nicole Shanahan.

Yeah, who who seems like a nice young woman.

If she was a he,

the media's hair would be on fire because the only reason she's, in my opinion, has been vetted and potentially is supposedly now his VP pick to be announced in Oakland is because he needs 15 million bucks to get on different state ballots, and she has it.

And if it was a young tech bro with absolutely no experience in elected office who had gotten a settlement from someone he was married to for two years, the media would have their their hair on fire.

But

the Veep Stakes have entered a new level of just

how inane they are.

And that is this individual, who, by the way,

I don't doubt she's a lovely person and even an impressive person.

They should do some reporting on her.

Like you and I.

Like I said, mixed bag.

Mixed bag.

Well, there is, no, no, it's not a mixed bag.

There is no bag.

She has no business near the White House.

That's correct.

That's correct.

Neither does he.

But my point is, the Veeep stakes are now about who's willing to give me money to either bail me out of jail or get me on ballots in different states.

I mean, we really have, is this a fucking simulation?

It is.

Elon's right.

Elon and all these people are right.

It's a simulation.

What's going to happen next?

You're going to be asked to be, would you take the job?

Do you have $444 million?

Yeah.

No, we're going to need a lot more downloads.

We're going to need Elon.

Who would you pick then?

Elon can't do it.

By the way, FY, Elon said he didn't, was not asked for money when asked in that interview with Don Lemon, but who knows if that's true.

But he may have been asked by someone else,

which is you have to ask a question very carefully around Elon Musk.

But I think he probably in some fashion was asked for the money.

There's,

who could do that then?

Who could he pick as VP, Trump, to get $500 million?

Oh, there are a lot of billionaires that will take.

I think Vivek doesn't have that money.

There are a lot of billionaires that would figure out a way.

And I don't think he'd care.

I think he'd violate campaign finance rules.

I'm like, once I'm president, it doesn't matter what laws I've broken.

That's why I'm running, quite frankly.

But if you think about it, the vice president is the least important job in the world until it's the most important, potentially.

And they all say the right thing.

They all say, well, obviously the qualification or the only consideration is who would be a good president.

But that is just such bullshit.

The only reason Veeps are picked is who will increase the likelihood that I will be president.

In other words, they bring a state, they bring money, they check some boxes, whatever it might be.

That's why they're picked.

And unfortunately, what I think happens is people forget these two really should have a good relationship.

And supposedly, Biden and Harris don't like each other.

And I, quite frankly, I think Vice President Harris is a very impressive woman.

I think he wanted to pick a woman of color, and she was the most qualified.

She checks a lot of boxes.

She's a very impressive woman.

She would have had a greater chance of being president had she never been vice president.

For whatever reason, she has lost her voice.

And a lot of it, people say, is that the West Wing does not like her.

I have interviewed people in the West Wing and including on the record, lots of people saying this is just not true.

It's not, I don't think vice presidents have a very good job.

She's been especially bad at that not good job.

I mean, she just hasn't.

Well, I don't know about that.

Dan Quayle, come on.

We could list lots of vice, but come on.

I'm going to know.

Okay.

Okay.

She's right up there with Dan Quayle.

No, she is not.

Are you kidding me?

Oh, she's awful, Kara.

No, you're wrong.

She's awful.

Again, speaking without knowing, I actually do know a thing or two about this, and it's not true.

I think she has problems politically, and I think it has a little to do with being a woman, a little, not an insignificant amount being a woman of color.

I think she has, she can feel like a prosecutor.

There's all kinds of things like that.

And I think she suffers from being a vice president.

I don't know.

I don't think you're correct.

I think that she had a ton of opportunities around Roe, around Black Lives Matter to be a powerful voice.

She is doing that right now.

Well, she hasn't been effective.

I don't know.

It's a long road.

We'll see where she comes out.

We'll see where she comes out in the end.

In any case,

she's certainly qualified.

How about that?

Oh, out of central casting.

And by the way, was an outstanding senator.

Yeah, very much so.

Very good at Attorney General of California.

So we'll see where she zeroes out in the end.

But you're incorrect about some of those things.

Good to know.

You are.

You are.

You know, you're just saying off the top of your head.

Yeah, it's called a podcast.

I understand.

Vivek Ramaswamy is worth apparently $950 million, although he says he's a billionaire.

Well, he's right in there.

He's right at the edge of that.

Maybe he could give.

What people don't realize is when you're worth 900 million, you can't find 450 million in cash.

Right.

That's what I mean.

Yeah.

Supposedly he's a billionaire, but I'm seeing numbers of 900 million.

But he says he is, but others do not.

In general, the more dudes talk about their wealth, i.e.

like Trump, that the less they have relative to what they're saying.

I found the wealthiest people in the world do not talk about their money.

He's right at the edge of a billion, supposedly.

Go ahead.

Is that right?

But Trump used to call Forbes and complain that they weren't saying he was wealthy enough.

I think we're going to find out that actually Donald Trump's net worth is a lot less than we thought or he claimed.

Yeah, that's what this is going to show.

We'll see where it comes up with the money,

regardless.

He has to pay like everybody else.

Bonds are hard for poor people, too.

In any case, the Justice Department is suing Apple, accusing the company of violating antitrust laws by blocking rivals from accessing hardware and software features on its phone.

The suit escalates the Biden administration's antitrust fights against the biggest U.S.

tech companies, including Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon.

This is happening as Apple is coming under increasing scrutiny in Europe over alleged anti-competitive behavior.

As you know, Margareta Vestiger, her group in Europe and the EU, fined them over $2 billion.

So, Scott, what do you think of this?

Finally, the penny is dropping for Apple.

We've been waiting for this one.

Look, I think that it is shocking how much

likability plays into this because, and I'm guilty of this, and I think a little bit you sometimes, Tim Cook and Apple are just so likable that we don't apply the same unbiased scrutiny of their role in addiction to devices, their role in privacy, even though they claim privacy is,

you know, they use kind of the virtue signaling of privacy, quite frankly, around certain to let themselves to not, in my opinion, not live up to the standards of what would be best for America or the consumer.

And Marguerite Bestier, there seems to be a group of regulators who are not impressed or not really concerned with how likable Apple is.

And so I'm here for it.

I think it's a good thing.

Yeah, we'll see where it goes.

They definitely are facing a lot of things,

again, in the EU under, and so are tech companies, especially in the EU.

But this is the U.S.

finally stepping up.

The thing is, outmatched by all these companies, every one of them.

And this Apple case was a long time coming, and as are the others, the Google one's coming, Alphabet one's coming.

That's further advanced.

So we'll see what happens with all of these.

But there's a wide-ranging group of cases.

And by the way, there were also cases that began in the Trump administration.

So

this is a little bit of a bipartisan thing.

I don't know if it's anti-tech, but it's anti-power.

And it's something I've been talking about all the time, that there is no governor.

And I happen to like Apple, but I I don't care.

They shouldn't be controlling the App Store the way they are.

And it's just, this is about bigness and whether you like the company or not, it doesn't matter.

Bigness begets anti-competition.

That's it.

I'm one of those.

Power corrupts.

No, I don't know about that.

I don't necessarily.

Oh, we all know about that.

Power corrupts, Kara.

Look, the bigger they are, the less innovation there is, Scott.

That's it.

I'm sorry.

You think about, you know, Standard Oil or ATT, et cetera, et cetera.

I just think,

and by the way, there's going to be lawsuits in the AI area too, and there should be.

I think lawsuits are the only way to handle this stuff, given that we have no federal legislation protecting us from tech companies

with any kind of teeth, no privacy bill, no anti-new new updated antitrust bills, no algorithmic transparency.

And I will stand on this.

I've been screaming this on this book tour.

This has to happen because there are no other options.

And as great as these companies are and as much money as they make and how valuable valuable they are, that's all great.

And it says a lot about America.

You can't have all these big companies if you want to be what we are in 10 years from now.

That's my feeling.

Anyway, let's get to our first big story.

Microsoft just made a big move in the AI race, hiring former Google exec and deep mind founder Mustafa Suleiman to oversee its consumer AI unit.

Suleiman had, until recently, been running his own AI startup, Inflection, which he co-founded with Reid Hoffman, among others.

Inflection has raised over $1.5 billion from a number of investors, including Microsoft.

And Reid Hoffman's on the board of Microsoft.

There's a lot.

I really want to see the big story about this.

I chatted with Suleiman last year, actually, and he asked him about his startup and its place in the AI world.

You know, Inflection, Anthropic, DeepMind, Open AI.

We're a group of...

you know, friends and colleagues that have been working together for the best part of 10, 15 years.

And I think we have slightly different,

you know, a different flavor.

I mean, we're still fundamentally working in big tech.

I'm not, you know, gonna sort of, you know, that's, that's important to say.

But, you know, I think there's a different flavor to the kind of approach that we're trying to take now.

And it represents the next step forward in the evolution of companies and how we run big tech.

So this is interesting because there's so many interactions here.

In addition to Suleiman, Microsoft hired a number of Inflection employees, including its chief scientist, who is another co-founder.

Inflection is staying operational, but will stop running its chatbot pie and will instead sell its software to businesses.

I don't know what happened here.

I just, I haven't read anything.

Got any thoughts on things like this happening, given all the various interconnections, including Hoffman being on the board of Microsoft?

He said he recused himself, by the way, of this thing, but he doesn't seem angry about it.

I pinged him.

We're missing something here because essentially,

from what's been reported, Microsoft has taken the heart and lungs of this company.

It's taken Mustafa, and my understanding is every important person at this company, that all the company is left with is its IP.

And if you're an individual like Mustafa, and I also had him on a podcast,

you can't raise a billion and a half dollars and look at people and ask them for money and then take your entire team over to another company.

So they've clearly someone at a high level between two companies has come to some sort of accommodation, otherwise, lawsuits would have been announced yesterday.

Yeah, this is very strange.

The whole basically, the whole firm is getting you know, is getting their mouse pad or whatever, and they're walking across, you know, they're going to Microsoft.

It's just very strange what's going on here.

Yeah, a little like when they tried to hire Sam Altman, you know, when that whole thing was happening, if you remember, um,

when Sam was going to go over there and run the AI division after Microsoft had a had a big stake in open AI, it's really interesting.

He's going to lead Copilot, which is their consumer.

He's running the consumer unit.

I have searched for a very good, I probably should do the reporting myself, but I haven't.

I don't,

who's going to pay back the people?

And one of its co-founders, I think it's Karan Simonyan.

He was also a leading researcher at DeepMind.

I don't get it.

Do you have any idea?

It has to be Microsoft has said to the shareholders of Inflection, we're going to make you whole or we're going to, there's just no way Inflection and Inflection's investors would just get an email saying, oh, hi,

it's Mustafa and me and 60 of the 75 employees or whatever it is are going to Microsoft.

Well, it's moving out of the consumer space with this pie, which was kind of cool.

I liked it.

It will work with commercial customers to create, test, and tune AI systems.

This is from the New York Times.

Microsoft is also licensing Inflection AI's latest underlying technology to make it available to business customers of its cloud computing products.

And this guy's working on the consumer stuff.

But the reason why, Mustafa, in addition to obviously being very, very talented, I believe that he was hired and that they are probably paying inflection or figuring out something to make inflection whole and spending this much money is Satya said, we are not going through that bullshit again that we went through three months ago.

And what's strange about AI, true or not, they've decided that there are three or four kind of key athletes.

There's Messi, there's Ronaldo in this world.

And I would bet that Satcha said, I don't like how vulnerable we are to something along the lines of what happened a few months ago with Sam.

I need Steve Young to his Joe Montana.

And that's what this is.

It's basically saying that the most, you know,

Satcha probably believes and aspires to be the most important AI company in the world, and he doesn't want it too dependent from a reality or a perception standpoint on one person.

No matter how lovely or how smart Sam Altman is, he needs, I mean, the 49ers, this is the limit of my sports knowledge, and whenever it was, Bill Walsh, the coach, slept really well at night because he had the best quarterback in the world and the second best quarterback on the bench in case one guy got injured.

There just appeared to be too much shareholder value riding on one person, and this is diversification from that.

Yeah,

I see why he's doing it.

But interestingly, Suleiman, and you probably know this from interviewing him, he was the one that has been much more out front with this technology is very dangerous, could be very dangerous, it could be great.

But I mean, he's sort of more in the middle, but he's

in his book, especially, and I think that you talked to him about too,

he talked about the transformative nature, but he also talked about the destruction of humanity part.

The other part, they didn't do open sourcing, although he's said, Suleiman has said that these technologies shouldn't be controlled by one company.

There's all kinds of really shifting sands here in a really

interesting way because they're not open the way Meta and XAI are open sourcing to make it safe.

But he's sort of a proponent for that a little bit, too.

It's really lots is going on here.

And nobody's actually making money from a business yet.

That's the other thing we need to underscore.

Well, this Game of Thrones here is the ultimate Game of Thrones.

I don't know know if you saw, I mean, just speaking of which, we're waiting to see what the first trade is on Reddit, but a company yesterday, Astera Labs, went public and it had a 72% pop

on its first trade.

I mean, we may be off to the races again because this company, Astera Labs, they sell hardware and software products that improve the efficiency and reliability of enterprise AI systems.

So it's legitimately an AI company.

Right, but do they make money yet?

Oh, none of these things make money yet.

None of these.

Let's just underscore that for people.

They have revenue.

They went from 85 million to I think 120.

So they had about 40% revenue growth.

The company, as of yesterday, posted the pop, has a $9 billion

market cap.

It's trading at 70 times revenues.

I know it's crazy.

Revenues.

Revenues, not earnings, revenues.

Revenues.

If Reddit comes out and gets a pop,

the markets, baby, are back and we are off to the races.

Well, Reddit is just an ad business and it loses money just like the rest of media in the old-fashioned way.

Just for a couple of things, there's so you're talking about things going on right now.

Google and Apple's potential partnership is a big blockbuster.

Microsoft also invested $16 million in Mistral AI.

It's a French rival to OpenAI.

It's all over the place.

It'll be interesting to see what it does to its relationship with OpenAI because He tried, he thought he was going to bring Sam in if Sam didn't, Damn Altman, if he didn't get that job back at OpenAI.

Nadella apparently told, according to Bloomberg,

Altman about the new role on Monday, just a day before everyone else.

I'm sure he was like, swallowed his tongue a little bit.

But he also said they're very committed to its partnership with OpenAI.

I mean, Satya looks like

the head of Westeros right now.

And of course, they're also facing copyright lawsuits

all over the globe.

Google was just fined $270 million by French regulators for training its model on news articles without notifying publishers.

The New York Times is obviously in a lawsuit with OpenAI.

There's all kinds of things happening here.

All kinds of things.

It's really interesting.

From an economic standpoint, this is arguably the most important or intense chess game ever played.

The amount of money on the line here for

whoever outwits the other, finds the human capital, the positioning, the marketing, staves off government regulation, pretends to give a a flying fuck about the Commonwealth such that they have AI operating committees, but never do anything.

That firm will probably meant their first trillionaire.

I mean, you talked about Reddit.

Reddit's pricing at eight times revenues.

I mean, there's just,

there's all the companies in the world, and then there is the companies in the center of AI, and they are treated by an entirely different standard in terms of the market.

I am excited to see the story on what happened here, because especially around Reed, and

they're all in everybody's grill.

So it's really interesting.

Actually, you know what?

I'm going to start making calls this afternoon.

I'll find out for us.

This is a really weird story.

There is definitely some reporting that needs to be done here because we're missing something.

You can't cash someone's check for a billion and a half dollars, which Mustafa did, then walk across the street.

Yeah, there's no shareholder lawsuits.

Something.

Yeah, exactly.

Somebody has come to an agreement here that is the controlling shareholders at Inflection and with Microsoft.

Yeah.

And again, just to be clear, Reid Hoffman is on the board of Microsoft.

There's OpenAI.

He used to be on the board of OpenAI.

I mean, they're all the connections are so interesting.

Reed used to be on the board of OpenAI.

Sam is close with Satcha.

I mean, and Suleiman was at Google.

I mean, it is.

It's a game of friggin' thrones, game of AI thrones.

And we'll see where it goes.

Anyway, let's take a quick break.

When we come back, we'll talk about Reddit's big IPO now and take a listener to mail question about pop culture tear jerkers.

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

Reddit has officially gone public.

The social media company made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with a share price of $34, the high end of the targeted range.

Its share price puts Reddit's value at around $6.4 billion, which seems tee tiny these days, which is what they were aiming for, but below the $10 billion valuation from a private fundraising round in 2021.

I chatted with Reddit CEO Steve Hoffman yesterday prior to the IPO and asked him about how he was feeling about all of this.

When somebody asked me what keeps me up at night, my answer has been the same for a long time, which is one, just practically, I actually sleep very well at night.

And then two,

you know, I think for Reddit, you know, we've been around 20 years.

So we've seen the rise of social media.

We've seen the internet totally evolve.

And by and large, these things haven't affected Reddit.

What affects Reddit is

how we work, right?

Are we executing effectively?

Are we shipping the right stuff?

And so it's always kind of felt like we're in control of our destiny,

for better or for worse.

Well, I mean, for better.

Though I think sometimes we've been better or worse at being in control of our destiny, if that makes sense.

He also told me he thought that a two years of not IPOing was one of the best things that ever happened to the company.

It gave it discipline.

We're recording this.

This trading is getting underway.

How do you think it'll go?

Well, I voted with my wallet.

I'm trying to get shares here.

So if JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs

and Morgan Stanley could do this, this is what they would do.

They themselves would find $100 million each and

buy into the first trades and try and send this stock soaring.

Because the IPO market has been in a deep thaw for two years.

It's been some of the slowest two-year period, 24-month period in several decades.

Yesterday, the landing lights got lit by this company, this company, Astera.

Is that what it's called?

Astera, if I got the name right.

Yeah, Astera Labs.

If a popular, or not a popular, but a well-known consumer internet brand, Reddit, gets a big pop,

we're back in business, baby.

And the amount of money that flows from the IPO market in terms of downstream secondary, green shoe follow-on, wealth management, all the shit, they create so much fees.

Let me push back here.

This is an advertising company.

This is not an AI company, first of all, which is a little different.

Just for people to be aware, Reddit sold, I mean, it's almost fully an advertising company, completely, $800 million in advertising.

It's very small.

It's like a Snapchat kind of situation.

I think Snapchat's a lot bigger, actually.

I think double, I'm pretty sure.

Reddit sold just for people to be just above 15 million shares in the offering, and existing shareholders sold another close to 7 million shares,

taking some money off the table, I think, right away.

And you were talking about Estera, A-S-T-E-R-A, for people who don't know.

But it's a dry spell.

Just so people are aware, Reddit's revenue was $804 million last year.

It rose from $667 million, but it lost $90 million in almost $91 million,

and the year before lost $159 million.

It's trying to get into other businesses like data licensing.

It got just around $66 million from Google in a data licensing deal

to train these AI models.

It got a query from the Federal Trade Commission for this.

It's also, Steve told me he was, you know, they're looking at commerce and other businesses besides advertising.

And they think they have a good advertising story because it's safer because of contextual advertising and also because you can reach individuals.

This is decentralized content moderation, decentralized groups.

I don't know.

I think it's an advertising business.

So I think, and also, the last thing is they're famous for Wall Street Bets, which, and in Wall Street bets, they were betting, they were going to short the stock.

So there's a meme possibility here too, that they will, that there's, that the people that are on the site will try to work against it.

And then the last thing, in moderators, some of the mods are getting shares

and not all of them liked it necessarily because this is a very noisy company among the people who run it.

It's run by people who are volunteers and stuff.

Anyway, it's a lot happening here.

I mean, you still think because it's an ad business, I mean, and you know the ad business, that it'll, it'll be, it'll, it'll mean as as much so there's reddit the specific company its performance and how how it performs in the market and then there's a larger question about what it's what it means the ipo this morning of reddit to the larger market so let's talk about reddit you're right it's an ad business they basically have a series of boards and redditors that manage those boards they have unbelievable traffic but they haven't really figured out they don't have the ad stack and the business model to really monetize it the way other companies have run it it's an 800 million dollar business not a big business it grew 20 last year.

It's still losing money.

It's going out or it's priced at about eight times revenues, which draws sharp relief between, as you pointed out, an ad-based business and an AI business.

The question surrounding Reddit is the following.

They have the worst monetization of any...

of any platform that gets this kind of traffic.

I think Meta gets something like 30 to 50 times the monetization per person on the platform as Reddit.

Now, it's like my dad told me.

I remember my dad telling me this when he was trying to test whether I'd be a good salesman.

He's like, a salesman goes over to Africa, and this marks the time, this was the 70s, and he comes back and one salesman goes, he's a shoe salesman.

One salesman comes back and says, terrible market force, nobody wears shoes here.

Another salesman goes over and comes back and says, this is amazing.

Nobody has shoes.

So the question is, is Reddit, is the fact that they have the worst monetization, given the traffic, an incredible opportunity if they figure that out?

Or is it a company that's never been able to figure it out and is going to go nowhere?

That's the question.

But at $6.5 billion,

a lot of people are about to take, I believe, that bet.

Now, the bigger issue here is what it means for the market.

Would you buy Reddit?

I don't buy into these things.

So would you buy it?

I'm trying to.

So, because you think that it's undervalued in that regard.

Yeah.

Because I don't think people think that the data stuff is going to be the big money maker at all, the data stuff.

And the commerce stuff is absolutely nascent.

And, like, I sell more t-shirts than they do, that kind of thing.

I'm buying for two reasons.

The first is, this could be, I think this, I think there is a ton of pent-up demand.

In 2021,

there were 397 IPOs.

And of those 397 IPOs, because a ton of them were SPACs and shit and caught up in the mania, eight out of 10 of them, 82% of them, are trading below their IPO price.

And the market feels burned and jilted.

So as a result, in in 2023, there were only 108 IPOs.

The reason I'm investing in this is two reasons.

One, I think that essentially it's a global brand.

And two, it's the most traffic site in America that isn't owned by Alphabet.

And it's trading all of this set against a valuation of $6.5 billion.

There are real issues, as you pointed out, with this company.

They have not yet figured out a way to monetize anything resembling the fire hose of traffic they have.

It's not that big.

500 million users, 76.

He was focused in on the daily users, 76 million, and it's not ugly.

They've really cleaned it up quite a bit compared to a Twitter where everyone's in the same pile of crap.

You know, everybody's in the same feed or whatever.

There's a lot to not like about this company.

They haven't figured out monetization.

When I go on the site, it feels like, you know, Lycos or Alta Vista called and wants their UI back.

I don't think it's very elegantly done.

But for $6.5 billion, a company that is, if you type in most traffic sites in the U.S., it goes, it goes Google, it goes YouTube, and then it's Reddit.

And so, and I, and also, I think there's so much money on the sidelines hoping to get back into the IPO market.

But if Reddit comes out at a healthy pop, we're off to the races again, Kara.

You're going to see a ton of companies file in the Greed Glancer and the Animal Spirits are going to get going again.

So, Reddit is actually, Reddit is more important to investment banks and the IPO ecosystem and the broader market, I would argue, than almost any company in a while.

This IPO has much bigger meaning and ramifications than just what shareholders of Reddit are going to garner.

In the midst of this, of all these things that are happening, two things interesting.

One of the big winners could be Condé Nas' parent company, Advance, whose stake in Reddit will be worth around $1.4 billion.

I don't think they can sell, though.

Maybe they're selling a little bit of shares in the IPO.

They might be among those sellers.

They made a $10 million investment for Condé Nass to buy Reddit in

2006, and then they spun it out again.

So, you know, this company got bought in and then spun out.

It's been through a lot in the many years.

Second thing,

Reddit had to reveal the FTC is conducting an inquiry tied to the company's deals to license data, as we said.

And then also, Reddit, along with YouTube and Meta, also has been ordered by New York State judge to face a lawsuit tied to that 2022 racially motivated shooting in Buffalo.

The lawsuit claims the platforms helped radicalize the shooter and prepare him for an attack.

Of course, the Supreme Court found differently when it was a Google case, so I'm not sure this will go anywhere.

So there's all those things hanging around.

Will this set it off, or will something else set off the IPO market?

Because Instacart didn't do very well.

Others didn't do very well.

Like I said, the table's been set with Astera Labs up 72%.

If a big consumer internet brand, Reddit, comes out at a healthy pop,

the IPO market is back in business.

All right.

Okay.

We'll see, Scott.

We'll see what it is.

Scott Galloway here, coming in with an update.

Since we've taped, Reddit has begun trading.

The stock opened at $47, and at its peak, the company had a market cap of, get this $11 billion, and also ended up closing up, I think, around 45 or 50%.

I would argue that essentially this is enormous for the markets, that this has turned the IPO market from sort of like blinking yellow to illuminant green.

The IPO market, the animal spirits, I think are back.

In some, Astero Labs kind of illuminated the runway yesterday and this big consumer internet brand, Reddit, landed the plane with a huge pop today.

This is big for the markets.

It's actually the bigger part of the news here isn't a consumer media company up, whatever it was, 45 or 50%.

The bigger story here is the IPO market, I believe, is back.

The animal spirits are back.

John Travolta is on the dance floor.

Okay, now back to the show.

Let's pivot to a listener question.

The question comes from Justin.

Let's listen.

Hey, Scott and Kara.

Justin here calling in from New York's ugly older cousin, Philadelphia.

I took your advice and watched the show one day.

My wife and I just finished the finale last night, and I got to say, I haven't cried that hard since I re-watched Titanic stoned in my parents' basement back in high school.

Great recommendation, Scott.

My question for both of you.

What show or movie has made you cry the hardest in your life?

Thanks.

Actually, we got a lot of messages about Scott's TV recommendation, including one from Lou in Brooklyn.

Please tell Prof G to fuck off about his win, that one-day show on Netflix.

I cried like a little bitch, but that's neither here nor there.

Fuck that guy.

I met this

really impressive woman, Miriam Vogel, who is doing this great startup or a nonprofit around AI and trying to manage responsible AI.

And it's just like out of central casting for the person who you would want to lead this organization.

And as I was walking in, like immediately someone yelled at me and they're like, one day.

And they gave me a thumbs up sign.

I mean, people are literally, because we tell people that we like hearing from people, which we do, people just feel totally emboldened to like yell across a restaurant at me a reference from the pot or something.

I told you, ketamine trip was the big topic on my book tour right now.

Scott's ketamine trip.

Oh, wait.

I got to, before we come back to what made you, and I want you to answer what made you cry, but before we come back to that, just a couple of things.

I've heard from a lot of psychiatrists and a lot of people very involved in ketamine saying that I didn't spend enough time talking about the very important benefits here.

And there's a lot of studies, and I just want to highlight a lot of studies.

showing that it has real,

that it is really effective and a wonderful drug for people, veterans and others who have suffered trauma or really struggle with depression.

So I want to put that out there.

The other thing, just as a follow-up that I think is kind of interesting, I'm now two weeks in, and for the first time in 35 years over a two-week period, I haven't had a drink.

And that is very unusual for me.

And it's not because I had some sort of,

you know, revelation that I was drinking too much.

Something has happened where the taste, I've lost the taste of alcohol.

You know how they say when.

Interesting.

And you're not taking Ozempic because that does it too.

That's exactly the right question because my feeling is whatever, supposedly Ozempic just sort of turns, tells your brain to be kind of a little turned off and nauseated by food.

I feel like the same thing.

I walked in.

I went last night.

I had dinner downtown and then I went to Zero Bond and just the smell of alcohol.

I had grapefruit spritzers the whole night and I didn't drink, which was so unusual for me.

By the way, I'm not nearly as charming or nice to be around.

You're literally becoming Kara Swisher.

Let me Let me say I had dinner the other night with the third Emmanuel brother.

I know Ram and Ari very well, but I didn't know Zeke Emmanuel.

He's a doctor.

He's a very well-known doctor

and scientist.

And he was telling me about the effects he's studying of

mushrooms on cancer patients and all these psychedelics.

And he was very much like, this is important.

This is important stuff.

So yes, the good thing for saying that.

One thing that I'd like to know is, what's your movie?

What's your movie that made you?

Well, you said one day, but is there another one?

And then I'll tell you mine.

But I'm an easy cry.

Remains of the day with Anthony Hopkins, The Black Stallion.

Oh, wow.

Um, with Terry Garr and Mickey Rooney.

You cry at everything, though, like, right?

Literally, yeah, any pretty much any episode of Modern Family.

Yeah, how about you?

What have you cried in?

I don't cry at movies.

It's a very big joke between Amanda and I.

She cries at literally everything.

It's, it's, it's fascinating.

Like, I look over and she's tearing up over something like True Detective or something.

Like, it wasn't true detective, but it was something like that.

And I was like, are you kidding me?

So she, she cries at everything.

I cry at nothing.

Um, I'm trying to think what movie got me.

Um, I cried in Barbie.

Like, what the fuck am I doing here?

How did I end up here?

No, stop it, stop attacking Barbie, you're not allowed.

You're you've you've used up all your anti-Barbie remarks for your life.

I do love what you said that Margot Robbie, had she not been in pink, would have been nominated.

I thought that was a super interesting frame.

She's an astonishing actress.

I'm sorry, her whole face is so expressive.

Um, what did I cry in?

Let me think.

Oh my god,

I

Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze.

Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze because it was so beautiful.

That's what it is.

Another one, The Champ with Ricky Schroeder and John Boyd.

Oh my God.

Cry in that.

No.

I don't cry in movies.

I really don't.

Really?

Roadhouse, Gladiator, when he died.

I didn't cry, but I was sad.

The English patient, my favorite movie, The English Patient, you didn't cry in that.

That didn't grab you and like really move you?

No.

Old Yeller?

Nope.

Nope.

Oh, my God.

I'm dead inside.

Roadhouse.

Patrick Swayze.

His beauty.

Oh.

Yeah.

My favorite line in Roadhouse is this guy when he's fighting me and he says, Not the new one.

No, no, no.

The old Roadhouse.

My favorite scene is when they're fighting, and the guy goes, I used to fuck guys like you in prison.

And I'm like, well then.

Oh, yeah.

Well done.

Okay.

Every Patrick Swayze movie is spectacular.

Maybe I turned up a tiny bit in Dirty Dancing when she goes, nobody puts baby in the corner, but that wasn't really sad.

That was the happy part.

I'm like, yes, yes, Patrick Swayze, pull baby out of the corner.

But that was, I still didn't cry.

Didn't cry.

I'm sorry.

Dead Poets Society, that did move you?

Dead Poet Society?

No.

Oh, God.

Oh, my God.

No.

Oh, God.

It was so saccharine.

Maybe Ghost, the end of Ghost a little bit.

Broke Back Mountain.

That didn't make you cry.

No.

You're not going to get one.

No.

Beaches.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Terms of Endearment?

Really?

Sophie's choice?

I like that.

Philadelphia?

No.

Schindler's List?

Oh, don't do that to me.

Keep going.

I know I'm going to find one here.

Hold on.

I would cry more at a Bugs Bunny.

I mean, there's some very moving Scooby-Doos that really get to my heart.

Because, you know, if it wasn't for those kids, I would have gotten away with it.

Oh, my God.

So many movies I've cried in.

Hold on.

The Elephant Man?

No.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

No.

I mean, I like them.

You're naming movies I like very much.

Little Miss Sunshine on Golden Pond when Henry and Jane Embrace.

I'm literally getting welled up right now just thinking about these movies.

You cry at every you and Amanda are like waterworks as far as I'm concerned.

The Shawshank Redemption, when he's talking about his wife,

oh my God,

you are dead inside.

These are incredible movies.

Notting Hill was when she made that little speech about, like, I'm just a girl,

you know, looking for a guy, that speech made everybody cry.

No.

I do like Julia Roberts, though.

I'm a big admirer of hers.

I'm going to try and reverse engineer this to a lesson here for young men.

I didn't cry

from the age of 29 to 44.

For 15 years, I didn't cry.

I lost the capability or the, I just didn't know how to cry any longer.

I didn't cry when my mom died.

I didn't cry when I got divorced.

What I would say to anyone, especially men, if you discover the ability to cry, it's a a gift because it helps inform what's meaningful to you.

And it makes you, I think, a much more, I think it makes a much more meaningful life.

Because the problem is when you shove down your emotions, and that's including learning how to laugh really hard when something inspires you, take time to try and understand why it inspires you, but lean into the crying because it really helps.

It helps inform like what's important to you, what really moves you.

And that's a wonderful thing as opposed to just kind of, kind of sleepwalking a little bit through life.

so i'd say lean into it i agree louis and alex cry all my kids cry amanda is like i guess i said like you water works i just i don't i can't explain it i laugh a lot but i can't explain it i will say in steel magnolia is i was kind of glad when julia roberts died is that wrong is that wrong the way we were

the way we were

look at you you're not going to find a movie let's move on thank you justin justin we're having a big moment in our relationship here um we just you know, I don't know what to say.

Anyway,

if you've got a question of your own you'd like answered, send it our way.

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

All right, Scott, one more quick break.

We'll be back for predictions.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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Hello, Daisy speaking.

Hello, Daisy.

This is Phoebe Judge from the IRS.

Oh, bless, that does sound serious.

I wouldn't want to end up in any sort of trouble.

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Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction.

My prediction is I think someone who's going to go down in history as just an incredibly powerful role model for young people and a really fantastic American is the co-founder of Amazon, Mackenzie Scott.

I agree.

Explain what you just did.

She just announced she's giving another $650 million away.

She's doubling the amount of money she's allocating to charities.

And I have some personal experience with Mackenzie Scott.

I'm a huge fan and a big supporter of something called the Jedd Foundation that leverages the infrastructure of high schools to help give them the tools to identify or discern between kind of normal but strange teen behavior and actual teen behavior you need to be cautious of and intervene around depression and suicidal ideation.

And it is an amazing organization run by a man who ran a pharmaceutical company whose son, Jed, killed himself.

And it has this

amazing staff, this guy, John McPhee.

They do an amazing job, amazing job.

And out of the blue, somebody called them and said, we need your wiring information.

We want to make a donation.

They get that all the time, $1,000, $5,000, $50.

And they got a wire for $15 million.

And it was Mackenzie Scott saying, I've been following you.

You're wonderful.

I don't want anything.

I don't need anything.

It's yours.

I've been following you.

Don't, you know, don't call me.

Don't put my name in the papers.

And it was so, A, it was so moving, but B, it really is a great lesson around giving because I give a lot of money away but here's the thing for me it's a transaction and it feeds my ego and i want i want recognition for it and it really taught me that like that's not giving that's consumption you know what she's doing is giving and and she's just giving i love it they're all like what's the what's the roi on the investment of the charity she's just like here's the money go for it she's not starting a rocket company or going to cann or or naming things after herself or or having three kids by two different people in one week she's just like i'm blessed and by the way i hate anyone framing her as solely as solely like a rich wife she was very involved in amazon in the beginning she was i was there whereas quite frankly the v candidate that i brought up before you could accuse her of being a wealthy housewife if that's an accusation or a wealthy spouse this is an individual who deserves the billions she has and she's not trying to figure out a way to have a midlife crisis explode She's trying to figure out a way to be helpful and lean into her blessings.

And she does not want or even desire recognition.

We're going to, I think we're, I mean, there are some problems.

Anon Girdadas correctly points out that rich people shouldn't be dictating our social priorities, but distinct.

She is all over the map.

That's why she's not dictating.

She's wide-ranging.

It's just social justice.

You know,

Elon Musk attacked her, of course, as usual, an ungenerous person, by the way.

And if you read the New York Times piece about him giving money to things that help him, that's exactly what he's like.

And she, you know, she doubled the donations.

Such an impressive person.

It was going to be $250 million and she upped it to $640 million.

And Musk called her a super rich ex-wife who's destroying Western civilization.

Let me just say, in this regard, fuck you, Elon.

You're an ungenerous person of charity.

This woman's giving away, I think, $16 billion at this point.

So fuck you.

Get back off of Mackenzie Scott.

He's not going to.

But in total, I think she's she's given $16 billion.

I don't know if it's $16, but she's given an enormous one.

But

she announced $2.15 billion in donations over the last year.

I mean, geez, Louisa, like, think about that.

Like, think about, and all

over the place.

I told my kids about her.

I think she's just, I think she's incredibly impressive.

And unlike these individuals who are like, how do I fly a dildo into space?

Yeah.

My, my burrito bar needs money that's the kind of giving elon must in my town that i'm building because i'm an egomaniac you know i i just i i can't even with these people the contrast i kept thinking of was like oprah sort of marks the age in the sense that you know you get a car you get shit you get more shit you get

you get a toaster oven and she's just her attitude is you need money and i'm giving you money you need money and i'm giving you money you're doing good work and you need money i'm giving you money and uh anyways i just love they have a woman bent, they have a social justice bent.

It doesn't matter.

It's her business, you fuckers.

I'm sorry.

Just like

go read the New York Times story.

But let's frame this in the pause.

No, I'm not going to because read the David Fahrenhold story.

That is about greed in giving.

She is about generosity in giving.

And

there couldn't be a starker contrast between two people.

Couldn't be.

Anyway, go ahead.

Sorry.

But she's a great American.

And the key word here is American because

for all the shitposting of America and the fact that we're raising a generation of young people that don't like America, Americans at their core, at their core, and this is different than Europe or other nations when it comes to philanthropy.

We are the most generous people in the world.

And she embodies that.

She's a great American.

She embodies our values.

And it's something,

she is an example of a reason to love America.

Americans are very generous.

I agree.

McKenzie?

Fantastic work.

Anyway, we love McKenzie, Scott.

Scott, that's the show.

We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot.

Read us out.

Today's show was produced by Larry Neiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie Intertod Engineer this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burrows and El Severio.

Nishat Kirwa 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 nlinemag.com/slash pod.

We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business at the iHeart Podcast Awards, where we won won best news podcasts.

I forgot to mention two people.

One was a huge oversight and that is Zoe Marcus who is a fantastic producer.

I apologize, Zoe.

Also, I forgot to mention Carol Swisher, not as big a deal.

I just wanted to say thank you to both of those people.

I was just off of ketamine.

I was not at my best.

So I apologize for forgetting both of you.

Thank you, Scott.