Apple's Vision Pro, Chris Licht Outlook, and Friend of Pivot Ben Terris

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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 Scott Galloway.

I hear it's sunny in London.

It is beautiful here.

I mean, it is spectacular.

The flowers are blooming.

I have the most beautiful, I don't know if it's a cherry tree in my backyard.

And I went to the FA Cup final, Man City versus Man United.

Wembley is now my second favorite venue in the world after, I think it's called the Lusalle Stadium in Qatar.

I've just had the most fantastic weekend.

Oh, nice.

We went to the fourth biggest mall in the U.K., the O2 Mall.

My son is determined to go to the 10 biggest malls in the United Kingdom.

Yeah, well, also Mall of America he's got to go to in the United States.

Don't even say those words around my child.

I was there when it opened.

Mall of America.

He's decided like malls are the seven wonders of the world.

Well, they used to be.

They used to be.

It's nice to visit them.

That's a nice habit.

Sort of weird.

Yeah, nice.

I should reach out to David Simon and tell him my son has a fetish for malls.

Yeah, yeah.

Say fetish.

Say the word fetish.

Well, I had a beautiful week.

I was in San Francisco visiting autonomous car companies and rode around in an autonomous car quite a bit.

The Waymo visited the truck autonomous car.

And I got to tell you, the Waymo is doing, it was amazing.

It was an amazing experience.

That's the Google company?

Yeah.

Yeah, it really works incredibly well.

And I drove all around without a driver in San Francisco, uphills, downhills, going decent speeds.

And really well done, I have to say, so far.

There's some issues around it being too cautious, I think, or blocking intersections and things like that.

But actually, compared to what I rode 10 years ago, which I've been riding these for that long, amazing progress.

We said this on the last bot.

It just feels like the place that autonomous driving would start would be with trucking late at night when the highways aren't being utilized.

I also thought, and it probably won't happen for a long time, that the place it should go is in aviation because the vast majority of

air crashes are pilot air.

Yeah, that's true.

But people just can't handle the idea of a computer up in front of them.

I was in this thing.

It's like an Uber.

You call it, it unlocks with your app, and then you get in.

And this was a car.

This was not, I mean, I visited, I did two interviews.

One was a truck one, one was a car one.

Chris Urmson, who started Google, what is essentially now Waymo, is doing the truck one.

Then they're going to also then apply it to cars.

And Google is doing stuff on cars, which is going to then apply to

trucks eventually.

Anyway, I have to say,

I am just amazed.

You know, the reason why I wanted to do this is because Tesla sucks up all the oxygen and they're pretending they have robo-taxis, which they don't.

These are robo-taxis, and I just wanted to put a focus on where others are.

And there it is, four minutes before our first insult of Elon.

No, I know, you know what I mean.

I was like, I wanted to show there's all kinds of interesting things going on.

You're just giving equal opportunity to the other autonomous folks.

I think that's good of you.

Yeah, and I was impressed.

I have to say, I was super impressed.

And hung out with Louis Swisher, which was even better.

Are you back in D.C.?

Yes, I went out to St.

Michael's, Maryland, this weekend for a big lesbian fest with our friends who have a house.

Really?

Yeah, it was nice.

In a pool.

It was a pool full of children.

It's a pool full of children of lesbians.

Where do all the gay guys live?

P-Town?

Yeah, we go to P-Town.

Is there like a lot of good DJs and a lot of sacks?

No, it was a bunch of lesbians with small children.

We had a wagon full of children of lesbians wandering through St.

Michael's.

I'm not sure they knew what was happening to them, but it was.

It was fantastic.

Is that an annual Agora?

No, no, but we're going to have a big lesbian party.

I'm thinking of inviting you at the end of summer there.

I'm not exaggerating.

People come up to me and just assume they're going to bond with me.

They come up and like, I listen to you and Kara.

And they look at me like, I'm a lesbian.

They say that, like, because I'm friendly with you, it means I must have this natural affinity and play well with lesbians.

See?

A whole new class of friends.

Well, I may invite you, but then they may drown you as a ritual drowning in the Chesapeake Bay.

The lesbians love the dog.

I don't know.

Come on.

They raise their eyebrows is what I get a lot of.

I get a lot of like, okay, if you insist, Kara, that's fine.

Anyway, they do.

They do.

They just love you.

I can't even tell you how much they talked about you completely the whole time.

Anyway, I'm going to move on because we've got a lot to talk about.

Today, we'll talk about a punishing inside look at CNN and its boss, Chris Licht.

Also, social media networks are gearing up for 2024 with some troubling new policies.

And we'll speak with friend of Pivot, Ben Terrace, about his new book on behind-the-scenes Beltway Characters.

There's always someone.

But first, the Directors Guild has tentatively reached a deal with Hollywood producers.

The three-year agreement includes wage increases, new safety guidelines, and a ban on live ammunition on set.

The DGA has been in negotiations since May 10th, pretty quick, and voted on a pretty complex deal today.

I think they didn't get everything they wanted, but apparently they got quite a few things.

The Writers' Guild has been on strike for almost a month.

SAG after the Screen Actors Guild would begin negotiations for a new contract on Wednesday and could go out too.

So, you know, here we are.

Here we are.

Yeah, I find it sort of, I mean, my observation is that the media is obsessed with itself.

There are 80,000 Uber drivers and get this just in New York City.

And then I think there's 20 or 22,000 in the director's guild and 11,000 in the writers

guild.

They will claim victory.

I mean, their wage increases, if you look at inflation, isn't they aren't keeping up, right?

Yeah.

Aren't even keeping up with inflation.

The notion, the agreement, I'd like to get the language, but the agreement that AI is not a person, generative AI cannot replace the duties performed by members, I don't know what that means or how you enforce it.

And also, my favorite is that it bans live ammunition on set.

Well, no shit.

That's a win.

Isn't that just sort of like an IQ test?

Yeah, a lot of people.

I was reading Matt Bellany today and he was like, this was not such a big deal.

My guess is everyone was down with that.

That wasn't exactly a give on anyone's part.

No, we want live ammunition on the set.

It feels like the win for the writers' guild, or excuse me, the director's guild was they got what I understand is a substantial increase in residuals from foreign deals.

I don't know what that amounts to.

I don't know how big a component of residuals foreign residuals are, but that felt real.

Everything else felt like the union representing them trying to claim victory.

Yeah, one of the things that Matt Bellany wrote, so why the compromise?

The reality is that most powerful DGA members don't work at scale.

So this issue affects mostly fledgling TV directors and below-the-line members such as assistant directors.

So it'll be different because a lot of SAG after people do work at scale.

And the same thing with writers.

So these are fancier people.

I was at a party where there were SAG people, and writer people were like, oh, the directors will totally throw us under.

They didn't even expect them to do anything.

And yeah, it didn't keep up with inflation.

And the AI stuff was toothless as far as I could see.

Anyway, we'll see.

Again, what's your prediction on the writer's strike?

Even though it gets a lot of attention, but it does.

Yeah, look, I got, wow, there's a few things where it's sort of like, it reminds me of when I challenged or said that tenure was an outdated contract and that tenure was Latin for student debt.

And so many of, I don't want to call them my colleagues, but so many tenured professors from

universities around the world weighed in on the topic and kind of came after me.

And what I've generally said, and I think it's true of the writers who have come out and provided some very, you know, colorful descriptions of my work,

that

your fondness for tenure tenure or the writers union is inversely correlated to your currency in the marketplace oh dear and

the people who are really fond of tenure oh don't text me anybody but go ahead sorry the people who are really fond of tenure are typically professors who haven't pulled their weight in over a decade okay and so what do you know they love tenure and writers let's go let's go for a writer one now okay so we know slapped the professors now writers please bottom line directors have more currency in the marketplace there's fewer of them and they're more central to the production.

So they were just more apt to sign an agreement because the vast majority of them don't need the minimum standard.

What about the screen actors guild?

Now, that's a different thing.

There's so many actors.

I don't know.

I don't understand the dynamics there.

I don't, I don't.

And I realize I'm hopping around here, but I did have a clip go semi-viral on CNN's Mercanist this weekend where I said, don't follow your passion.

That's just the stupidest fucking advice.

And people who tell you to follow your passion are already rich.

And they played all these clips of actors.

The unemployment rate rate for actors over 90

the number one identified aspirational career for young people is influencer do you know what percentage of people who say they're full-time vloggers on youtube make more than thirteen thousand dollars a year you know what percent three percent three percent oh that's pretty good okay but a working wage over fifty thousand

less than half a percent.

Right.

So just be careful, kids.

Passion is Latin for there's no money here.

And

what I would say is have a passion for taking care of your children, have a passion for living well, have a passion for giving money away, have a passion for taking care of your parents.

And that if you find something you're good at and something that people will pay you for, and then you become great at it, and people will pay you a lot for it, guess what?

You find that tenure and union aren't as important to you.

Yeah, you've been saying a lot of controversial things that work at home.

I'm not going to let you go on about that because I'm moving on.

Okay, go ahead.

But I'm just saying, you've been saying.

Yeah, okay, sure.

Prime members may soon have a new offering, Prime Wireless.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon is in talks with carriers about offering low-cost mobile plans with Prime.

Shares of Verizon and T-Mobile fell on the news, while shares of Dish are up 11% based on speculation of a potential deal with Amazon.

I don't know.

Would you take, I would probably buy wireless from Amazon, would you?

So Amazon, I think Amazon, other than Airbnb, is my largest holding.

Amazon needs to get back in form and start getting back to its disruptive gangster.

Oh, I see.

You like it.

I love what Jeff Bezos said.

Your margin is my opportunity.

For some reason, somehow, like we read these,

we do these commercials like Mint Mobile, 10 bucks a month.

Do you know what my AT ⁇ T phone bill is every month for my

for from AT ⁇ T?

A zillion.

It's between $800 and $1,200 a month.

It's high.

Yeah.

And I go through it.

I don't understand it.

And occasionally I think I really got to do something about it, but I'm lazy and my company or, you know, my, my business pays for it.

So I never really do the work.

But it just strikes me, there's a lot of potential for disruption in that.

Agreed.

And Amazon has, it has your credit card.

It has a reputation for amazing technology.

It has a reputation for incredible consumer value.

Yeah, and response.

But, you know, it's got a lot of customer service.

There's antitrust issues here, or regulators, maybe.

I don't know.

Probably not.

There's so many competitors.

Oh, I'd love for them to come into this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the thing is, they've, have you moved over to their pharmacy?

I haven't, interestingly enough.

I still use my Cigna one.

I go to fancy doctors.

I'm just saying, I wonder how that business is doing.

That's an interesting one.

But look, your phone, Bill, having Amazon needs to do something.

Amazon has,

it feels like surprisingly flat-footed and boring.

And then if you look at, and then they have the power, what's really interesting here is the biggest players, T-Mobile, AT ⁇ T and Verizon, begrudgingly have to play here and bid on it.

T-Mobile is down 10%

over the last two years, Verizon 40%.

Dish is down 82%.

That's because they keep buying stupid things.

But they're basically selling an undifferentiated service, but charging a ton of money.

Just as healthcare in the United States keeps increasing prices with no underlying innovation, which makes your chin bigger and bigger, waiting for a fist of stone, telco, my telephone bill, feels like a huge chin waiting for a fist of stone.

Yes, agreed.

Agreed.

I would buy it from them.

We'll see.

We'll see.

It's interesting.

They should get in this.

It's something people might trust them with.

And then you buy a phone and then you buy this from them.

And they can link it to your speaking, your speakers and your house, and on Alexa.

I like this a lot.

Yeah, they could do it.

That's an area they could get into.

Speaking of areas that you aren't negative about, Apple unveiled its mixed reality headset at its WWDC event on Monday.

Tim Cook devoted about 40 minutes to the new device in a surprise twist.

It's called Vision Pro, not the Reality Pro that we expected.

The headset will launch early next year at a price of $3,500.

Tim Cook also brought out Disney CEO Bob Iger to talk about his company's plans for the device.

He said that Disney Plus would be available on day one.

Apple stock hit an all-time high Monday, but fell after Vision Pro's unveiling.

And for those who aren't visually in tune with Scott Galloway, he's wearing ski goggles right now, and he looks fantastic.

Scott, I see that you're dubious.

We've had a back and forth.

I believe that this will be the company to make VR and AR more acceptable.

acceptable to the broad masses of people.

I've only been right all the time about their various and sundry things, But go ahead.

Tell me what you're doing now that you're sitting there looking like you're in Ready Player One.

Well, I got an advanced copy of a new app called the Prof ED goggles.

It takes you to a place, a home in London, where a 58-year-old man with ED and midlife crisis just pays $35 million to get a product that makes no fucking sense, Kara.

Okay.

All right.

Why?

Explain to me why.

Because you sound like the people who were against AirPods, the watch, the phone was expensive at the time.

I mean, give me your why this one, since they've been so good on products.

They really have.

They've had very few losers.

What problem does this solve?

Well, I think if you watch entertainment, I think if you do things, you know, I think VR and AR are coming, some sort of heads-up display, us staring and looking at our phones seems ridiculous.

And they're calling the next phase of computing, essentially.

Spatial computing.

Spatial computing.

That's the word they used.

Yeah.

Yeah, look, I'm kind of with you.

You never want to count Apple out.

And Apple has the,

I mean, any company that had launched the watch, it would have been a failure.

There were, I thought the Nike Fuel ban right out of the gates was probably better than the Apple Watch, but they don't have the deep pockets, the brand, and the staying power of an Apple to sort of, they can put so much wood behind an arrow for so long that they can iterate and morph.

But this to me feels a little bit like the Hermes watch.

It'll be cool, a lot of press, but I'm having trouble figuring out, I can't get past a few things.

One,

I have a bias.

I'm worried that a technology is sequestering us more and more from each other.

And that's a larger issue here, but it's something that's very concerning to me.

But also, just anthropologically,

the things we could kill and eat and the things that could kill and eat us came from our peripheral vision.

So as a result, we really don't like our vision impaired unless we're in a very safe environment.

Well, this doesn't totally impair.

It's a little different than VR.

You can see the room with it.

But go ahead.

I haven't, I'm trying it out next week.

Yeah, I don't know.

But I stick stick to the only thing you'll put on your face, whether it's, you know, Mac cosmetics or a pair of Warby Parkers, are things that correct your vision, which is a threat to your safety and to your security, and you can't read, or increase the likelihood that you'll find a mate, make you feel more attractive.

And I don't think this does either.

It seems to me the smart thing they did was, and it was different than I anticipated, it is more enterprise, B2B.

So I can see when I go into my dentist's office, they give me these weird goggles to watch Money Heist.

And this will probably get pickup at very high-end services place where they put on goggles.

I wondered if it was maybe a Zoom killer that makes it, you feel more in the room with people.

Yeah, you can see people and they take a version of you and they follow you around and you can actually see the room.

So I would think meetings would come alive.

I mean, the staring at the computer screen needs to be fixed, the idea of staring at a computer screen.

And there should be more visual ways to do that.

And if putting on a pair of very, you know, compared to all the others, it's the most attractive version of this, but these are hard to design correctly.

I think meetings, I could see it.

I could see watching certain, you know, you could put this, you're right, an isolate a kid, put them watching Frozen and it being surround sound, which was one of the original uses when I first started trying these out at Sony and at Samsung many years ago.

Aaron Powell,

But if you think about the way you watch Frozen, for example,

unless it's a sole-purpose viewing experience, which it is sometimes,

you want to have your peripheral vision.

You want to be able to look at other people.

And the thing I didn't buy from the nine-minute video I watched is the notion that the transparency, such you can see other people's eyes, makes it seamless and comfortable around other people.

I don't think you're going to talk to or interact with people with this thing on unless you're in that environment.

I just don't buy that.

The other thing I just can't get past here is the price point.

And And that is when you get to 3,500 bucks and you talk about sales tax and everything, you're talking about a $4,000 ticket.

And $4,000,

it's like, and for something that feels to me, the technology is so sophisticated here that every six or 12 months, it could be upgraded.

That's for sure.

I think this is just, you know, Casey Neistat, I think, says, I mean, look, a lot of the earlier dapsols will use it and then they'll work on it, work on it, work on it.

And it'll be, it'll get down to a price.

But some of the funny Twitter ones, for $3,500, I better be able to shoot laser beams like Cyclops or some shit.

For $3,500, I better be able to fight the people I'm talking to on Twitter.

For anyone looking to reenact Notting Hill, you can now with a brand new Apple Vision Pro.

I mean, it's been good for jokes, but I do think, I would say, I think KZI said it has this is for an elite group of people, and then we'll see, right?

And then I just feel like this, someone's got to get this right the way the watch was,

the way the AirPods were, the iPhone itself, I think people were worried about the price.

So I just feel like ultimately it will go mass market, but at the beginning, it'll be the enthusiasts.

And I think they'll probably sell enough to make it worth their while initially, although the cost has been enormous putting money into this.

So they put this, they green lit this before they knew that the Oculus with $15 or $20 billion in R and D behind it and a price point of $500 was going to be such a big flop.

And so you're coming in with a competitive product that's seven times the price of a product that isn't working?

Well, I wouldn't compare it to the Oculus.

I think this is aimed at a very different group of people.

But I just want to tell you, you look incredibly attractive to me with that outfit on.

Hello, ladies.

That's right.

Come on.

Literally, Scott is wearing headphones and a pair of very attractive ski goggles.

That's the good news about getting older.

You just, when you're younger, when you're in your 30s and your 40s, you're kind of holding on to some semblance that you might still be attractive.

And then you just start embracing the ugly.

Yeah.

Well, you're doing a good job embracing the ugly.

You're in fact.

Keep working.

I do think these will be smaller and more attractive.

But I like the step in the direction.

I do.

I'm going to be.

I will let you know since Apple invited me to come see it next week in New York.

I will let you know how it is.

I was just thinking an Apple car, an Apple microwave, almost any device with an Apple logo on it, I would trial.

I'll try this just out of curiosity, but I don't, even I was thinking your entertainment experience.

I don't want to say my entertainment experience is maxed out, but between my whatever you call wallpaper TV that's thinner than a pencil, I don't want it any bigger.

I've got a great Bose sound bar.

I'm just sort of like, do I really want to put on a headset?

Maybe

in bed if you don't want to bother your partner, or maybe B2B?

I don't.

I was on the train.

I was wearing the big Apple headset today, watching on my phone, which I would have liked to have been right in front of my face.

I mean, if I could see the passengers at the same time, sure, I would have done it.

I think there's something weird about,

I think our body feels uncomfortable when our peripheral vision.

I think we're more prone to motion sickness.

I don't know.

I just don't, I don't, and at this price point.

Well, I appreciated.

We got to go, but we got to go to the next thing, but I appreciated your vasectomy jokes, and I hope they'll be.

And

so did Apple by the way.

Oh, did they?

Yeah.

Did they retweet it or something?

Or am I on some list where I'm about to give it?

I think we have different thoughts on this.

I think it's the right direction.

You think it's never going to be sold, but we'll see.

I think this is coming in some format.

But think about where Apple's been most successful.

Apple takes an existing idea.

They take the pioneer who got, you know, mud on their face and arrows in the back, and they iterate.

They're never the first.

This isn't, is this iterating?

This feels like.

Yes, it's on the Oculus.

It's on a lot of stuff.

I think it is.

I think it's an obsession of Tim Cooks, too.

I think his obsession is doing anything that Zuckerberg does.

I think Apple and Microsoft put a chip on the table for optionality such that if the Oculus took off, they wouldn't be too far behind and they could crush, either participate in meta success or crush them, respectively, for Microsoft and Apple's interest.

And the Oculus and the Metaverse has not panned out.

I don't think they would greenlight this today.

I don't know.

We'll see.

I'll let you know when I try it on.

But we'll talk more about it at the end of the week to see how Apple is faring and the reviews are in as real reviewers.

Stock hit an all-time high today.

And then it dropped after this.

The money's already spent.

We'll see how it goes, and I'm excited to try it.

And it kind of doesn't matter.

I mean, I'll get a lot of press, but this is a drop in the bucket.

I mean, you could argue it's a diversion of focus, but it's not.

They haven't spent a lot of money.

It's not like Meta where the CEO went into the street and burned $20 billion.

That's true.

All right, we'll see.

Anyway, enjoy yourself with your outfit on tonight and we'll move on from there.

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

New details on the turmoil inside CNN, a 15,000-word Atlantic profile.

It was a beautifully written piece by Tim Alberta.

It was very fair of CNN's CEO, Chris Lick, portrays him as isolated, stressed, at odds with his employees,

prone to quoting, saying things stupid in quotes.

It's the latest Black Eye for Licht following a year of low ratings, talent issues, and fervor around the Trump Town Hall.

The propile depicts Licht as a little paranoid.

He may have reason to worry.

And this week, CNN announced David Levy, who had joined the company as chief operating officer.

He's the number, he's a close confidant of David Zaslov.

I know, David, it's not a good sign for Chris for this to happen.

They were calling him bringing in the pain sponge, making the reference to succession, and

Tom Womgans.

This is something.

This was some piece.

And then today he got up in front of the, he got up in front of people and apologized and was properly humble, I think, saying he became the center of the action and he should not have been doing so many chit-chats.

He did one with me as focused on results and their world, which he's been doing.

Apparently spends a lot of time.

I think the most...

There were so many devastating quotes in this thing.

One was with his trainer where he was, I think he was trying to make a joke.

He's a super awkward guy, saying, lifting something and said, I bet Jeff Zucker couldn't couldn't do this, which was his predecessor.

Probably shouldn't have mentioned Jeff Zucker's name ever.

What do you think?

Profits are down.

That's the most important issue.

$750 million, down from a billion during the Zucker days.

Ratings down considerably.

The Nikki Haley one didn't make much news, although I thought Jake Tapper did a pretty good job at it.

Trump Town Hall didn't move the needles, only brought in 3 million viewers.

I don't know.

What do you think?

Well, so market dynamics will always trump individual performance.

And if you look at cable news right now, whether it's Fox, whether it's CNN, there's no profiles on how great people are because everything sucks.

I mean,

across the board, yeah.

Okay.

CNN's viewership dropped 60% in March alone.

So that's down, I think, 25% year on year.

Prime time, they're only getting 473,000 viewers.

And so there's just no getting about it.

They're They're the slowest tortoise.

You know, they're, everyone's doing terribly here.

You know, just it's the context and the atmospherics here are such that it makes for really easy hit pieces.

And I don't think this was a hit piece.

This was not a hit piece.

I don't think this was a hit piece, but it definitely really tore them apart.

And

I've spent a little bit of time with Jeff Zucker.

I think he's incredibly impressive.

I think that

I would argue Jeff Zucker right now is probably the most reliable media executive who can create hundreds of millions in EBITDA in a difficult environment that isn't working for a media company.

I know it is kind of amazing.

And, uh, but having said that, I've, I've spoken with Chris,

and he's the guy, he didn't fire me directly, but technically, I don't even know it was his decision, but, you know, when my programmer, CNN Plus, got unplugged.

But I found Chris to be a thoughtful, you know, decent guy.

He explained to me a strategy, and a strategy made sense to me.

But what I worry about is that I just hope, and I've always thought there's, I've always said there's opportunity in the middle.

And whatever that opportunity is, CNN is not, is not seeing it.

Either they're not executing against it or it's just not working.

Well,

it's a bad business, and he's got a bad morale, and he's been at the center of it.

He said off-the-cuff things.

I agree.

I think he can be very thoughtful.

Although, several times, relatively recently, he's done things that I'm like, can you stop talking?

He needs to stop talking.

You know, when he did the Don Lemon firing, and I think he, I think media reporters have decided, you know, to feast on this guy.

And by the way, he kind of deserves it.

So it's not even like it's, I feel particularly bad for him.

This is, you know, he's a big boy.

To embed a reporter of such quality

in that organization for a year, I don't even know why he thought that was a good idea.

I just don't know.

There was no upside to that.

And he talks too much about himself and his ideas versus the company.

So when the New York Times called and said, Scott, we want to do a profile on you and I gave them full access, you would have counseled me not to do it?

Not for a year.

Not for, this was a year.

This guy was like following me for two or three months.

Oh, really?

Well, that's, I think that's different.

I think that's different.

I think CNN has such attention brought to it that it's almost impossible.

not to fail, especially he seems to have lack of self-awareness.

That's really what it was, right?

He doesn't know that people, I get more calls from CNN people unhappy, and I never, I don't, I don't, I don't even get it why I do.

And I think that he's leaving from someone who is beloved, beloved.

I'll tell you why they're unhappy.

I remember, I remember flying or going to the airport, and I got a cab.

This is back in LA when in like the 90s, when you took a cab to the airport, it felt like Apollo 13 re-entering the atmosphere when it went over 40 miles an hour, and it was like $110 to get to the airport.

This is before Uber.

And the driver immediately just started griping and complaining about dirty dirty politics.

He used to be a pilot and he flew like constellations, which were a prop plane.

And like the future just outsourced him.

Cable television is you're literally, these guys, they don't recognize it.

When you talk to these anchors, they're pilots for a 747.

So they have a lot of prestige, but it's for Pan Am Airlines in the 80s and their days are numbered.

I don't even watch live TV anymore.

I don't, you know what's interesting, Carol?

I don't know if you same way.

And I realize this is pulse marketing, but I find the same is true of the young people in my company.

I don't even turn on my TV.

The only time my TV goes on my household is for my kids playing FIFA.

We don't even turn on the TV.

Yeah, I definitely watch most things streaming.

I watch most things streaming.

I do watch Stephanie's show.

I do, because I like the news at the end of the day, and I think she does a very fair job of it.

So I tend to watch that one.

But that's watch clips of her on my computer.

Yeah.

They're high-prestige and they're angry.

They're angry that they're no longer like the stars and getting laid easily because they had a pilot's uniform that said Pan Am on it.

The bottom line is that this industry is in massive structural decline.

Yeah.

You know, and still it's still relevant.

I think these are still relevant politically.

I think, so again, getting back to this piece, he just shouldn't have had one of the things that happened.

He argued that CNN should be home for the absolute truth.

But in the Trump Town Hall, one of Lick's Truth White Man.

Yeah, it was Truth White Man.

During the Trump Town Hall, one of Lick's lieutenants phoned the control room to remove a Chiron about the phrase sexual assault.

He denied there were any deal to put pro-Trump pundits on after the panel, after that terrible disaster.

And then when asked if his lieutenants made a deal without his knowledge, he says anything's possible.

It was just like, oh, stop talking.

I just kept thinking, oh, stop talking.

Please stop talking.

You know what I mean?

And I got an interview with him and I thought, good for me, not good for Chris Lick at the time.

Memo to anyone who gets a call from Tara.

Yeah, no, some people, yes, it's good.

Like, yeah, I think, but in this case, I was like, you need to do something before you talk about doing something, especially without a knowledge of

with the knowledge that this Jeff Zucker is so well liked.

I mean, it just, he just doesn't seem to read the room, is what I kept thinking about this guy.

And in this case, it's really bad.

We'll see.

We'll see if he stays.

I don't, you're right.

I don't know if it matters that much.

Interestingly, Chuck Todd is leaving Meet the Press also at the end.

Chuck Todd at the end of the summer after nearly 10 years on the job.

Kristen Welker, who we both think have great regard for, NBC's chief Washington correspondent, will take the role.

You know, we'll see.

Again, another Sunday news shows.

Wow.

Meet the Press is the longest-running one, but that might be like being the, you know, the oldest wagon train.

So, I don't know.

My first response is, I love Margaret Brennan.

I think she's

so good.

CBS.

Facebook.

I think she does a great job of just, the story is never about her.

She just asks very pointed, smart.

She's the definition of forceful yet dignified, which is, I think, what you want in a Sunday morning house.

I think Chuck Todd does a great job.

I think the guy before him, David Gregory, I think Meet the Press has always had really, I love Tim Russert.

I think they do a really good job of producing really good.

And I think he's had a great 10-year run.

I hope he feels good about himself.

I think he did a great job.

And I hope he goes on to, you know, great things.

I love Meet the Press.

I think it's a fantastic,

a fantastic show.

So you do watch that show.

You don't or you don't?

Yeah, but I watch it online.

Online.

I watch it on my computer late at night.

Late at night, right later.

Yeah.

It's interesting to figure out.

Yeah, I don't think they used to be so relevant, so so relevant immediately and I don't think they run the cycle anymore.

I think it's hard all these TV stuff is super are you kind of it's kind of good that you're not on CNN Plu right now, I would say it would be a suck up of your time and I'd probably have a hard time getting your attention Well, you realize Chris Licht having a conversation with me probably means he's gonna be fired in the next 90 days.

I am literally typhoid merry when it comes to anyone in television.

That is true.

Don't get near me.

Don't get near me.

Don't get near me.

Don't get near you.

Anyway, we'll see.

Chris, sorry, sorry, but really stop talking.

Really?

I can't believe I'm saying this to someone, but stop talking.

Let's see.

Let's see if you make it.

I don't know what you're, you know, you might be presiding over Pan Am, as Scott says.

And by the way, for those young people, that was a very sexy airline back in the day, but no longer.

Anyway, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, tech companies are gearing up for 2024, but they've learned their lessons.

No, probably not.

Also, we'll speak to a friend of Pivot, Ben Terrace, about the strange personalities of Washington's elite.

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Scott, we're back as Chris Christie and Mike Pence prepare to jump into the race.

Tech companies are hurrying to get their election policies straight this week.

Instagram reinstated the account of Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., who's launched a long shot campaign to primary President Biden.

Kennedy's Instagram account has been suspended since 2021 for spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines, and so is his organization.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk says he'll host Kennedy in a live audio chat, like the one with Ron DeSantis.

Twitter's former CEO, Jack Dorsey, thoughts that's a good idea.

There's all kinds of things happening.

You know, they're all sort of loosening up their rules.

And then today, our friend Alex Stamos just posted that child online abuse is really problematic on Twitter.

And of course, they've been cut off like other academics to study it.

So Facebook had made rule changes after his

Trump's tweets broke the rules.

And then, so they're going back to where they were.

They're going back to where they were, essentially.

They're just letting them back on and hoping for the best.

Well, no,

they'll pretend they'll backfill reasons for why they're going to put candidates on such that they can collect money from their,

I mean,

RFK Jr.

will raise somewhere between $50 million and a billion dollars, and 110% of it will go to media.

So what do you know?

They're going to find excuses to let them back on their platforms.

I don't, you know,

to me, vaccine denial is,

I just find it, I understand the dissenters' voices

is really important.

To me, there's just so much data around this.

I have trouble.

For me, it's disqualifying.

I think that misinformation that he spread.

The only thing that RFK's candidacy shows me is there's such a vacuum and a void in a need for an alternative on the left to battle test the Democratic, you know, who should be the Democratic nominee, because I think he is woefully underqualified.

But

because everyone's falling in line behind Biden, and I understand that, there's just this huge void of anyone credible to present an alternative.

But him going back on, they'll say anything, come up with any rationale for why someone with a big checkbook should be allowed back.

Remember, all of a sudden, Jack Dorsey grew a pair 11 days before Biden's inauguration to kick Trump off the platform.

Oh, Trump's no longer spending money on media.

We have found a backbone.

Anyway, your thoughts?

You know, I just think

they just don't want to bother anymore.

They just don't care.

They don't care.

I mean,

this APA cutoff for academic groups on Twitter, which is not a surprise, it happened May 31st.

You know,

it'll be hard for groups that are studying abuse on, say, Twitter or anywhere else to, especially Twitter,

in the election cycle.

Twitter, two people just left, two major people, Ella Irwin and another executive left Twitter, who was in charge of this.

This means all these countries will be able to run rampant on these platforms.

And I think Facebook has cut its team, but it's still there.

And then something that people don't realize is Republicans in Congress, I just was sent a note by someone, are trying to intimidate any academic or NGO groups from studying election disinformation.

Subpoenas all over the place from a lot of things, including going after students.

I think it's they're gonna the Republicans are trying to shut down any serious election misinformation studying by academics.

And these platforms are letting these platforms become rife with this kind of abuse.

So I don't know if they matter anymore, like cable news.

Like maybe it doesn't matter.

What do you think?

I've said it.

I think the biggest threat of AI over the last 12 months, or I guess it's 18 months, will be AI, generative AI tested, manicured, bulletproofed,

leveraged misinformation that these platforms will wring their hands and pretend to be concerned and not do anything about because they're going to make so much money.

Can you imagine how much money is going to be spent online by various parties and entities leading up to the election?

Yes,

it's going to be a disaster.

It's going to be an absolute,

like I said, I don't think we need an AI pause.

I think we need a social media pause on election information 90 days before the election.

I think that would really, really help.

And also, just to be very transparent, you and I are going to Cannes.

Every year I go, I speak to this group of like hundreds of CMOs from the biggest organizations in the world.

And they always, the only question I know I will get is, what would your advice be to CMOs around how to build their brands, right?

And my only piece of advice right now that I'm certain of is the worst place you could advertise would be Twitter.

You're advertising on a platform that is sub-scale, shows no ROI, but you risk being shamed and insulted by the CEO or the old CEO if you stop advertising.

And you might be next to really objectionable, awful,

you said something, you got into it with someone and a person with a huge following, huge following,

called you the C-word.

Yep.

That's good.

And I'm like, okay, you know,

do you really want to be next to that shit?

And by the way, the person you were in the argument with didn't say, didn't weigh in and say, hey, tone it down.

That's the platform you want to advertise on.

Yeah, I think this sexual abuse stuff is really, I mean, apparently Linda's starring in a couple of days, Linda Yaccarino, although I assume she got out of their contract issues.

Best of luck.

Like this child sexual abuse stuff

material is very serious, and they have nobody working there anymore.

I don't know what I think she's look, again,

very well liked.

People will give her the benefit of the doubt.

But first of all, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, right?

As a platform.

And being next to anything,

they've taken every single possible way to protect.

advertisers.

Let's take this away from a societal way.

This is a bad place for advertisers for right right now.

And if you have all this stuff going on of trying to stop these people from studying very significant issues like child sexual abuse, wow, that's not really, I don't know what I would do.

They have asked her, they've given her a very prestigious position.

They've said, we want you to captain a huge, prestigious vessel here.

The problem is it's the Titanic after it hit an iceberg called Elon Musk.

And this is nothing.

The best you can hope for is to be seen as someone is who couldn't overcome these odds because

their year-on-year advertising revenues are down 59%, something people don't talk about because he creates so many sideshows.

I challenge anybody to name a company that does over a billion dollars in revenue that has ever seen a 60% year-on-year decline in revenues.

Yeah.

He's saying they weren't, but now these documents show they are.

And these people are trying to keep them away from white supremacists.

And now all the people have left.

The people who left this week was over this trans

video, What is a Woman that Elon then promoted?

Of course, of course.

Name any company.

I can't name any billion-dollar plus company that has seen a destruction in their business revenues at the hands of new leadership like Elon Musk.

And then they cheer him on.

That's my whole

good job.

You're just not privy to his unfolding genius.

Okay, still waiting.

Linda, we wish you luck.

If you're starting this week, come and visit us in Con.

We'd be happy to put you on stage and we can talk about this.

As we've said, we've invited her many times.

I think you're right.

Let's just focus on the business story.

59% ad sales down.

All these companies have gotten, have gutted these election observers or the people that work on this.

Twitter's gotten rid of them completely.

Facebook has significantly less people.

They've just given up.

They've given up and AI is here.

Yay for democracy.

Yay for democracy.

This is crazy.

It's just they just decided to give up.

They've just decided to give up.

There's a certain purity if they just came out and said, you know, we don't care.

We don't care.

I'm not going to publish a book on gender balance.

I'm not going to hire former British politicians to say we're proud of the progress.

I just say, you know what, we don't care.

We're a for-profit.

It's your job to regulate us.

Until then, we're going to pour mercury into the river and we're going to sell talcum powder that gives people cancer or painkillers that addicts people.

That's our job.

We're a for-profit company.

I don't care.

People, they don't care.

They don't care about your safety.

Honey Badger just don't give a shit.

I think that would be more honest.

That is correct.

We wish they would say that.

It's not our job.

Oh, well, we'll just let all things fly.

And guess what?

You're going to continue to spend money despite the fact that we're literally ripping at the fabric of

democracy because you guys in Washington can't get your feet together.

Speaking of which, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Benjamin Terrace is a staff writer for the Washington Post, one of my favorite writers there.

I have many favorite writers there.

And the author of The Big Break, The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington while America Loses Its Mind.

Welcome, Ben.

We were just talking about some of the stuff going on on Twitter, the ad sales down, them cutting off some people looking into election misinformation.

A lot of the others have cut back on it.

So America is losing its mind at the behest of some of these tech companies.

But I'd love you to focus in on the Washington part of it because it doesn't seem like Washington does much about it.

So let's talk a little bit about what you think has happened because you have the, it's called The Big Break.

Explain that for people.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on.

Nope.

I have a book coming out called The Big Break.

And the idea is that Washington has gone through a big break, right?

The country has gone through a big break.

That's sort of the Donald Trump years.

And also there's a whole bunch of people who are trying to take advantage of this

new frontier of Washington that's gone through this, you know, this moment.

And they're searching for their own big breaks, right?

And I think that the thing that i've found in reporting on this for two years is that people are just trying to figure it out and and the place is broken the people are broken the politics is broken confidence is broken uh relationships are breaking it's a place that's just not really you know set up for this moment

and and this moment meaning that Trump has broken everything, although maybe it was just destined to break.

Maybe it was that brittle that someone came along and this is who he is.

What he is may be who we are in a lot of ways, people think.

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, Washington was not in good shape before Donald Trump.

That's what allowed him to become president, right?

There's a lot of things that he revealed to be true about Washington, not just that he changed the place.

He definitely did change it, but there's a lot of things that were true even before he came, you know,

ideological malleability, a bubble atmosphere,

you know, showmanship, and all these things kind of allowed Trump to succeed.

But he, you know, made it worse, right?

It's the same thing, but more in a lot of ways.

And I just think that, you know,

he is back, you know, possibly returning to Washington, and the place is just really not prepared.

It's not like they have set up a bunch of safeguards that's going to make it so it's a lot different this time around.

Right.

And also it's bathed in a sauce of social media, too, because you can't leave that part of it out, like the idea of constant, persistent news that much of which is untrue.

Of course.

I mean, that's Donald Donald Trump takes advantage of that, right?

In 2016, when he was running, there was a lot of talk about how he sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

And part of that was because the press really did want to hold him accountable.

They wanted to show all the things that he was doing that were norm-breaking and racist.

And,

you know,

there was a real need to cover him, but he also took advantage of that, right?

If he was the only person being talked about, then he could continue being talked about forever and he could kind of glide into the White House.

And I think a lot of people in Washington have learned that lesson, right?

You look around at the people who are in power now and rising to power, and you can kind of see a little trumpiness, right, about the way that they use social media to always be in the conversation.

Folks who normally wouldn't be considered, you know, serious legislators or serious players in Washington suddenly are.

And it's because they're following a playbook that at least worked for Donald Trump to a degree.

And I think a lot of people think it's going to work for them as well.

Yeah, nice to meet you, Ben.

The thing that really caught me in the intro was the parting in DC.

Can you talk about

how, in your view, partying has changed in D.C.?

Like

where, what, and who?

How has it changed?

And he'd like to go to some.

I'm not sure he would.

I mean, yeah, and how to, if it's any good.

Actually, it sounds pretty lame.

I would guess it's the lamest partying in the world, but I don't know.

So illuminate us.

Yeah, I mean, it's it for me, it's not fun, right?

I mean, going to to Washington parties feels like work in a way.

But so the book that I have does start with parties because parties are an important part of Washington.

There's a lot of soft power is what people like to talk about.

It's where you make connections.

It's where you talk yourself up.

It's where you talk up policy proposals or you try to eventually fundraise from the people that you're around.

And so to start this book, which is about the post-Trump Washington, possibly the pre-Trump Washington, trying to figure out what's changed about it and what remains the same, I go to two parties to kind of begin this journey.

One is a Christmas party for a progressive named Leah Hunt Hendricks, who is the granddaughter of H.L.

Hunt, who was the richest man in the world when he died in oil tycoon.

But she's this progressive fundraiser trying to kind of unwind a lot of the populist and right-wing policies that her grandfather cared about.

And the other party I went to, to get the complete opposite view of Washington, was at Matt Matt and Mercedes Schlapp's house.

They live in the largest.

The Schlapps, yeah.

They live in the largest house on Manchin Drive in Virginia, a house they were able to purchase because they were Trump loyalists who leaned way, way in to supporting Trump.

And

Matt's lobbying shop skyrocketed because he was a Trump insider.

And the important part of that for me was to kind of get a sense of how people were acting in Washington in this moment.

Trump was gone, but he was maybe on the rise.

Biden was trying to make things normal again, but clearly nothing is ever going to be normal again, right?

The new normal in Washington is not normal.

And so

yeah, it's weird.

It's really weird.

And I wanted to get a sense of, you know, how these players were taking advantage of this new moment, taking advantage of it for themselves, whether that's financial, you know, how are we going to make a living now that Donald Trump is gone?

Or ideologically, right?

If you care about the direction of the country, and a lot of people, especially at the, you know, the Progressive Party, really had policy proposals that they wanted to, you know, to get out there before Donald Trump came back or Republicans came back to power.

How do you talk about these things at parties?

And, you know, the moods were very different.

Progressives were in power, but they just felt down, like something bad was about to happen.

Republicans were out of power, but there was a real cynical thing going on there where they felt like, look, the stock is low on us.

It's time to buy because we're about to go on the rise.

The The schlaps are a very strange couple that pops up in Washington from time to time.

There's always a schlap.

What party is more fun and has better alcohol and hotter looking people?

Republicans.

Yeah, the Republican Party was a party, right?

That had the liquor was flowing.

People were smiling.

People were slapping each other on the backs.

Look, I did not have a fun time there.

I felt very uncomfortable, but the people who were there were having a blast for sure.

And, you know, Matt and Mercy, they were an important couple.

And Mercy is his wife, Mercedes, were an important couple for me to look at because I was trying to figure out how Washington became what it is today, right?

And

they were Bush White House establishment Republican types.

I mean, Matt even looks like the

ideal version of a Washington lobbyist, you know, kind of a bigger guy, white hair, pearly white teeth.

People used to call him like the nice Republican in Washington.

And now he's this Trump die-hard loyalist who all he wants to do is fight, fight, fight.

And to be able to figure out how he got from one kind of establishment figure to what this new establishment looks like, I felt like, okay, well, if I can explain him, I can kind of explain the party.

Yeah, we would also be remiss is that

he's under legal peril because he allegedly grabbed a guy's junk.

Exactly.

And that's partly what makes him representative of the Republican Party, right?

He was a guy who came to Trump's defense before almost anyone during the Axis Hollywood tape.

And, you know, he and then he allegedly gropes somebody himself.

And one of the first people to come to his defense is Donald Trump.

It's like the party respects loyalty, even when the worst, grossest, you know, allegedly worst things are happening.

One of the other things you wrote about, I think you were talking about gamblers, was this character on the Democratic side, Sean McElway, and his gambling habit.

And he was sort of the...

the strategist du jour for a minute there, for a hot minute.

And he was, he bet on races, including against his own clients.

Is that correct?

Yeah, he was sort of a Pete Rose of politics, if you will.

You know, hot shot Democratic pollster, getting really big clients.

He worked for the Fetterman campaign, which, you know, there's no bigger, there was no bigger race in 2022 than Fetterman.

His polls were getting tweeted out by the White House.

He was becoming a real player in Washington.

And one of the things he did kind of openly was bet on politics, on congressional races, on whether policies would pass.

He had bets with friends about, you know, whether a senator who had a stroke would be back in time for a certain vote, that kind of thing.

He would bet on everything.

And for me, I was surprised that he did it.

I was also surprised that he did it openly.

He talked about this with people.

It was not a secret.

It was sort of like Trump.

You know, if you do your scandal out in the open, people aren't sure if it's a scandal the same way as if it gets uncovered.

But, you know, Sean, between the betting and his connections to Sam Bankman-Freed and the way that he rubbed people the wrong way, his story was a very dramatic story in this book of a guy on the rise and what happens when you end up on the wrong side of too many stories.

Yeah, a lot of stories.

The other one, and then I'll let Scott ask the last question, is Frank Luntz, who I've interviewed.

He's a Republican pollster.

Very

contract with America was Frank Luntz.

A lot of what's happened now, and he even talks about it, is due to a lot of stuff Frank Luntz did way back in the day with Newt Gingrich.

He's sort of since become an anti-Trumper.

Talk about him because he's sort of trying to, he often is trying to be the reasonable person in the room these days, which I cannot, you know, Frank Luntz would not be the person I would have thought of as the reasonable person in the room

in most cases back then, at least.

Yeah.

So I met up with Frank Luntz as he was moving out of a house in Virginia that he lived in for a long time.

You know, he was kind of the center of Republican politics in the 90s, like you mentioned.

And this house was this kind of crazy

situation.

It was decorated almost as if he was like an overgrown child.

He had cabinets in his kitchen that were full of baseball cards, and he had a Terminator statue that was in the yard.

And he had the original Bob's big boy burger mascot, you know, kind of guarding his pool.

But he was moving out.

And the reason was, he said, is because he was kind of done with this part of his life.

He told me that Donald Trump nearly killed him, that

he hated Donald Trump so much that it gave him a stroke and he ended up in the hospital and he has to take

all sorts of medicine, which weirdly is administered sometimes by his best friend, Kevin McCarthy, which is an odd detail that he let me know.

Yep, they lived together for a while.

And they may still, Frank wouldn't say one way or the other.

But what was interesting to me about him is he was a guy who is partially responsible for this moment we're in.

I mean, he worked for Rudy Giuliani.

He worked with Gindigrich, as you mentioned.

He was a kind of a word guru type who could help Republicans get elected by saying the right words, calling, you know, the estate tax the death tax so people would think.

He was a death tax guy.

Yeah.

And I really kind of wanted to press him on, okay, I know you feel bad about this current state of American politics, but do you feel any responsibility for it yourself?

And he wouldn't take the blame, right?

I mean, it's hard to do, I suppose, but he wouldn't take the blame.

But he was saying that he's now trying to do everything he can to you know make things better.

He worked for the Biden White House trying to get Republicans to get COVID vaccines, but you know,

ultimately,

the work that he's done has gotten us to this moment.

And yeah, he's trying to say everything's normal.

Like, he reminds me of the guy in Animal House, where he's like,

remain calm.

Everything's normal sometimes.

He and I argue about this because I was like, you're dealing with bad people and you're thinking it's going to be okay.

And by the way, you created the bad people.

And I'm sorry they grew up so badly.

But

one of the reasons I decided to write this book in the first place was because when Biden became president, there was this idea that we could return to normal.

I mean, people thought that.

People were like, oh, things could go back to normal.

And so Frank Luntz is not alone in this kind of quest

to make things seem normal or move towards normal.

But when I looked around, and I've covered Washington for 10 years, 12 years, I looked around and I was like, I just don't see it.

I don't see how this can go back to normal.

Just curious, you spent a lot of time with these folks.

To the extent you're comfortable

revealing this, what individuals really surprised you to the upside in terms of their character and made you feel better about America?

Well, you know, the job I have is an interesting one because, you know, everyone in the country can look around and know that things are broken, but not everybody has the ability like I do to kind of go and and figure out why, to get into these back rooms, to get to know people who wouldn't otherwise talk to me.

But I'm a journalist trying to get to understand them.

And so I think a lot of people that I spoke to in this book are complicated.

And if you take the good stuff that they're trying to do, you can see, okay, maybe there is, you know, a path to fixing things if you just look at the good parts.

But to me,

I think the part of Washington that gave me some hope, even though

it's dark times, was talking to some of the workers

on Capitol Hill.

A lot of young people.

You mean the staff?

The staff.

A lot of young people come to Washington because they actually want to do things.

They actually want to make change.

You think that Washington is only filled with cynical people who want influence and power.

Sure, there's a lot of people like that.

But there's also people who go into work every day, work long hours, and are desperately trying to change things.

And a lot of the people I talk to in this book, which

the people that I think make this book special in a way, are those folks.

I mean, there's a lot of Washington books that come out, but not a lot that focus on what at least one person called the subaltern of Washington, the kind of people who are not right next to all the power, don't have all the power themselves, but help make the place run.

Yeah, I would say that too.

So do you have hope?

Do you have hope?

Because this is a crackpot group of people, I have to tell you, in your book, it's like, all your stories are like that.

I'm like, oh, God, these crazy fucking people.

Like, and they're in positions of power.

It's not like, you know, it's not like, oh, look at Marjorie Taylor Greene doing her whack job, whatever she does every day, but real, a real influence.

Do they or not?

Because you just saw this

deal getting struck, the debt ceiling deal, which seemed rather rational, like rather like cooperative and compromisey and this and that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, look, that deal, I wouldn't use that deal to say, look, things are back to normal.

I mean, yeah, it's great that we didn't have, you know, economic collapse in the country, but that is a pretty low bar.

Just barely being able to avert disaster is like, it's good.

It's better than hitting disaster, but I wouldn't say Washington is fixed because of it.

But I do have some hope.

Sure.

I mean, look, the country's been through lots of terrible times.

I don't know if we're going to be in a hopeful time in the next.

few months or few years, but there are a lot of smart people that come to Washington and continue coming to Washington and have decided to stick around Washington despite this.

And yeah, I have hope that those are the people who end up ultimately finding their way to influence.

All right.

It's a very good, it's a really good read, this book, Ben Terris' book, The Big Break, The Gamblers Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win Washington while America loses its mind.

How about they lose and we win?

That would be great.

It's out today.

Thank you, Ben.

Thanks, Ben.

Thanks so much for having me.

I like him very much.

Let's adopt that guy.

I know.

Isn't he nice?

There's a bunch of reporters at the Washington Post that I think Ruby Kramer is a whole bunch doing really thoughtful things across the country on real people, and I just think he's one of them.

One more quick break.

We'll be back for wins and fails.

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

You go first.

Go first.

Well, I watched the first half.

I went to sleep because it was late here, but I watched the first half of the town hall with...

Do you call her Ambassador Haley or Governor Haley?

Where did she go for now?

And so my win is, I thought the town hall was actually pretty good.

And I thought Jake Tapper, he got some shit for not for not interjecting or pushing back.

But I think actually probably the way to handle a town hall is just to let them run and be more of a facilitator and let people ask questions and then let people judge themselves what they thought.

And I thought it was actually a really good town hall.

I actually, I don't agree with a lot of her policies, but I thought she was forceful and eloquent.

She was very rehearsed.

She's not catching fire, though.

It's interesting.

So, and my win is also, I thought she was very eloquent.

And what the smartest thing, and granted, I have a bias here because it supports something I feel very, very strongly about, but she's differentiating herself from the other Republican candidates in terms of her stance on Ukraine.

And she just eloquently pointed out that this isn't just about Ukraine.

This is about the West.

And this is about sending a signal to China to not invade Taiwan.

This is about sending a signal to

North Korea that if they fuck with anyone around them, we're going to push back.

This really is a statement on whether or not the West, when it's unified and puts the full faith and credit and resources and creativity and belief in democracy and our weapons and our fighting forces, when we all finally come together, what happens?

This is going to send, this is going to be, this is kind of the defining moment, I think, for the West in a long time.

It's not interest rates.

It's not inflation.

It's not who the president is.

I think this will set the signal and tone for whether we decide that murderous autocrats can run roughshod over borders and free nations.

And she said that forcefully, and I thought she was very good.

I think that was a win.

So my win was what she said about Ukraine in the town hall.

My loss was

she claimed, she went on this rant that allowing this anti-trans rant, basically saying that it's no wonder that one in three girls are depressed when they have risk having a trans person in their in their locker room.

And then she said, it's no wonder that teen girls are depressed.

There is absolutely no evidence, no data to support the notion that the existence of trans kids or your involvement with a trans kid on any level creates depression among girls.

What there is evidence of, half of trans and non-binary kids have considered suicide in the past year.

One in four LGBTQ teens attempted suicide in the first half of 2021.

Think about that.

If you know, if there's 100 LGBTQ kids at a high school, 24

attempted suicide in the first half of 2021, according to the CDC,

because they feel

persecuted and unwelcome when their leaders say these,

when people demonize marginalized groups like this, it is the mother of all pivots, which shows that she's mocking a serious issue, she has no understanding of the issue, and cements this basic go-to from the GOP where they decide to demonize and go after marginalized groups.

Teen depression is a function of a lot of things, mostly social going on mobile.

Parents, as parents, we have to take some responsibility.

The concierge or bulldozer parenting we engage in does not prepare them for the harshness and the disappointment that at some point they will face.

But nowhere on that list.

is a trans kid showing up at your swim meet or in the locker room.

No one has been able to remotely correlate that with teen depression.

And I thought that was a very disappointing moment.

I would agree.

I don't know why she's going for that.

I just, I was shocked.

I was sort of like.

Because the Republicans love it.

The far right, the crazies love it.

I, I, it's like ridiculous.

It was like, oh my God, teen girls is such an important issue.

Are you kidding me?

Like, literally, there's like a half a dozen issues of this.

So all teen girls are depressed about this.

You know, teen girls are depressed about sexualized content in media around men who assault them, like mostly cis men, all, almost all, and, and

social media and everything else.

I just, that, I agree with you.

I would would 100%.

I think this report about Twitter missing all these images of child sexual abuse and researchers not being allowed on these platforms.

I mean, first of all,

with AI and other countries attacking us in

election misinformation, that's bad enough.

This is just not having stringent detection systems for child sexual abuse on these platforms.

I just, I don't even know what to say.

I don't, it's, it's, um,

I just, I don't know what to say.

I'd say it's such a fail.

It's such, not just, and across the board, these social media companies, as AI is going to flood campaigns with fake videos, you know, flood at flood 2024.

Just that they're giving up is such a, like, not a surprise in any way, but I'm still like, are you kidding me?

You're kidding me.

You're going to get worse.

And so that would be, that would be a fail for me.

There's just news today that this is a positive thing.

I do think it's not positive.

Spotify's cutting jobs across podcasting.

They made too big a bet.

I think it's sad for all the people who they've laid off 600 employees this year.

Spotify podcasting division is getting gutted, really, essentially.

But I thought they over

hired, and it was bad for the business because it's a great business, right?

Like they overpay.

Like it reminds me of many years ago when that happened in content.

So I do think, you know, as things start to equalize in terms of economics, it's a good thing, although I feel terrible for all the people who lost their jobs in his podcasting division because they put out some very good podcasts at the same time.

But

there's a need for everything to equalize from an economic point of view.

But I, it's on that point, and this podcast shall remain nameless, but a top 50 podcast, I've gotten to know the co-host pretty well.

And they called and asked

about their deal and renegotiating their deal.

And they told me their deal and when they struck it.

And I'm like, and then they they said, what's your advice?

I'm like, my advice is to save money.

You have a non-economic, people will, people never feel overcompensated.

They never feel, they never feel over, they feel like fairly compensated.

When you feel fairly compensated, it usually means you're probably being overcompensated relative to the market.

And when I heard their deal, I'm like, let me guess, you struck this

with Spotify two years ago with an executive who was given a checkbook and quite frankly was drunk.

And I said, just be clear, I don't think you'll ever replicate anything.

I've seen your numbers.

You've told me your revenues.

You will not replicate this deal in a million years.

I'm like, just do the math.

They paid a multiple of revenues for you.

How do they get that back?

And the market is doing what it's supposed to do.

And unfortunately,

unfortunately,

podcasting, you want to talk about, we talk a lot about income inequality, the inequality across these passion fields, less than 1% 1% of podcasters make more than 99% of the revenue.

The 0.0001%

make enough money to even pay to make it profitable, to make it a living.

It's really

podcasting more than I think probably, I would argue, almost any other field, maybe with the exception of professional sports, where

your odds are just like almost impossible.

In podcasting, it is really inequality gone crazy.

And I don't know if there's a solution here, but if you're making, if you're one of those people at Spotify that struck a deal for millions of dollars, enjoy it, my brothers and sisters.

It may not be there at the end of your contract.

But I think it's actually healthy for the system, ultimately.

It does remind me of the old days

when they started coming at my reporters at Rico for such crazy salaries.

And I think I've told the story before, but they offered one of my reporters like an insane salary.

And they came to me and said, do you want to meet this?

And I said, I don't even want to pay you your current salary.

I think you're overpaying.

It was crazy.

It was, and I think it was bad for business.

It was bad for every, it made us all like, do non-economic.

I never did, but I thought it was bad for the people who lost their jobs, but good for like everyone gets sensible about their economics of their business and stuff like that.

So we'll see.

Anyway, 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.

Okay, Scott, that's the show.

We'll be back on Friday for more.

Read us out.

Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie Endertot engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miles Severio.

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

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

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

Kara, I will see you on, when do we record?

I'll see you on Thursday.

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This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It to Me, presented by Pureleaf.