Regulating AI, Culture Wars at the School Play, and Guest Anne Applebaum on Ukraine

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Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher, and Scott, it's fucking early.

We're all up for you today.

Yes, I appreciate that.

I'm headed to L.A.

today, and I have a flight out of London at about, I figured when it is, 3 p.m.

And given London traffic, it it means I need to leave, let me think, yesterday.

Yesterday, yeah.

And so everyone is up at 7 a.m.

Eastern Standard Time, and I'm super appreciative.

I know.

You want to hear about my trip?

I'm going to

LA to hang out in a pink robe at the Beverly Hills Hotel and get a cop salad.

And then I'm going to, maybe, maybe a little counter, maybe a little in-and out burger just to spice things up.

Then I go to San Diego to see my dad.

Then I go to

Seattle to meet with a software company and an online travel agency.

Two guesses allowed.

Then I'm going to Austin, where I haven't spent much time and I'm excited.

I'm speaking at some big conference there.

Then I go to New York to meet with a bunch of people and catch up.

Then I go to Miami and I'm speaking at something called Summit at Sea.

Oh, yeah.

So you're going on a cruise without me, in other words?

Well, you know, I think it's time to start a trial separation.

Okay.

And

I'm just going to see what it's like to be on a cruise for three days.

But

I think it's something Pivot should consider doing.

I'm doing recon.

I'm doing it.

Somebody seems very famous.

It's this thing where they have big speakers come in.

And me.

They pay you a brick to do it.

Oh, no.

No, they don't pay speakers.

This is like the first non-paid speaking gig I've had in a while.

Oh, so you just get the room and stuff.

Do they give you a nice room?

I don't think so.

There's a boiler in the room, if that's any indication.

Oh, no, right.

Yeah, you're down.

Like, that's not Hope is Titanic or anything like that.

So you're going to like Bahamas or something.

Yeah, it's kind of a fake cruise.

Basically, I think they steam offshore to, you know, 11, the Strip Club and Fort Lauderdale, dock, and then come back.

I don't think it's much of a real cruise, but it's basically Coachella meets Ted on a cruise ship.

So I am predicting I'm either going to hate it or love it.

There's going to be no in between.

You're going to love it.

You think?

You're going to love it.

You're a cruise kind of guy.

I see it.

I see it.

I don't see that.

Really?

Yeah, I hate cruises.

I've been on several.

Really?

I've never been on one.

Yeah, I think a cruise, one like this will be kind of fun.

I went on a Disney cruise once.

How was that?

The soft serve ice cream was excellent.

The constants, but otherwise, terrible.

I hate a cruise.

And let me tell you, they're the top cruises.

It was so well done.

I still didn't like it.

Anyway, I'm going to be at a podcast thing, an event, and it should be very fun.

In Toronto.

Toronto.

Toronto is nice.

Toronto is a wonderful city.

It's like, imagine New York, but cleaner and everyone's mouthed.

Exactly.

Toronto.

Toronto.

I was interviewed by many Canadian broadcasters upon to go there, and it was very fun.

I went out.

I was on like Canada Today, the today version of the Today show.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I heard that reaches like dozens and dozens of people.

Stop it.

Stop it.

Canada Today.

That sounds like a sitcom.

That should definitely be a South Park episode.

I'm going to Canada.

Scott's going to all these glamorous places.

And I'm going to Canada.

I like Canada.

It's very nice.

Here on Canada Today, we have Harry and Megan, those Instagram loving bitches.

Here they are.

No, they're not coming.

Harry's Harry's at the coronation for four seconds.

Just him though.

I hope they put him literally at the kids' table and like

darkest corners.

They're not.

They're not.

They're not.

His father's not going to do that in the end.

He will be nice.

They're talking.

I like his dad.

He's not going to do it.

I think the brothers aren't talking, but in any case, why do we care?

I don't think there should be a monarchy, but I should say that out loud because all my British friends will be.

There's a lot of them.

This one will survive.

Actually, this monarchy is accretive.

It generates a lot more money than it takes in, and it's a great symbol.

And it's unifying.

The majority of of monarchies, though, like, you know, the one in Thailand,

I'm telling you, Megan Markle is the COVID-19 and monarchy.

She's going to take out the weak ones.

And monarchies are obese.

They just make no sense.

And she's, you know, the British monarchy is thin and in good shape.

It's going to cough a little bit and then it'll be fine.

Some of these other monarchies are going to be on a ventilator.

She is literally, she doesn't realize this.

She is putting weaker monarchies out of business.

Okay.

All right.

I don't even understand what that means.

Anyway, by the way, I know our listeners are excited to see me hold Bill Mauer's feet to the fire in my upcoming appearance, but it's been canceled due to the writer's strike.

Canceled or delayed?

I don't know.

Delayed probably.

I don't know.

It depends on how long, you know, because they also, all these shows like SNL and...

Late night stuff and Bill's show have scripts.

He does monologues, et cetera.

It's supposed to be a lot of fun.

He's got amazing writers, by the way.

Yeah.

He's got amazing writers.

He does.

And I don't know if they're like, it depends on whether they go back without a script or whatever.

I don't, I'm not keen to

cross a picket line.

So I don't think I will wait.

I can see that.

Yeah.

I can see that.

Yeah.

I think I should.

That's going to be, I'm excited to see you.

I'm excited to see you.

Yeah, but it might be months from now.

Who knows?

Who knows how long?

It's an interesting thought that how these things impact the stock price.

And I wonder how many, I mean, in stock price and cash flow are two different things.

But I wonder if someone is calculating, okay, how long does this go and how much market capitalization do we lose?

Unless unless they lose it for a short time, and then everyone's like, oh, they're saving money.

Well, that's the thing.

You have to manage these union contracts.

And this is the problem

in a lot of cities and in New York.

It's easier just to give in.

And you end up with a city or a state that has incremental taxes and citizens don't feel the real benefit.

Because,

anyways, I don't want to go on an anti-union rant here, but it's just easier when you're an elected official to give in.

And that's one of the reasons I really respect what Macron is doing in France.

It would be much easier for him to say, whatever, mirror, you know,

retire at 44.

I don't care.

I'm out of here in three years.

Instead, he's trying to make structural change that will, quite frankly, benefit future leaders.

He's not going to recognize any benefit from it.

Yeah.

Well, we'll see about that.

I don't think he's going to win that particular fight.

Don't know how I got here.

Bill Maher.

Bill Maher.

I don't know.

Okay.

All right.

Now we're back.

Oh, wow.

I'm trying to carry the show because I know it's 7 a.m.

We have a lot to talk about.

We have some very serious things happening, actually, in the world.

Today, we'll talk about AI leaders heading to the White House for a meeting with the vice president, as well as the latest battleground in the Culture Wars student theater.

And as more violence breaks out between Russia and Ukraine, we'll talk to the Atlantic's Ann Applebaum.

She was on the ground in Ukraine for her latest article.

But first, interest rates are up a quarter of a point after the Fed's 10th hike in a little over a year.

That puts them in the 5 to 5.25%

range.

We haven't seen this level since 2007.

The Fed statement hinted that this hike could be the last for a while, though Powell said we were prepared to do more.

A decision on the pause was not made today, but most people thought that.

The Dow, of course, fell 250 points at the news.

Do you think it will be the last?

Well, what's so interesting, everyone's talking about AI and my AI is I do these word searches.

And I used to, it was my trick when I was a consultant.

I would go through earnings reports and look at the number of words.

At times they said AI.

You know, you can see Netflix used to talk about subscriber, use the word subscriber 50 times.

And then when the market started punishing their stock and said, okay, you're losing too much money, all of a sudden, the number of times they said subscriber went down and the number of times they said profit went way up.

And

what I find, or you can do this, if you just do a word search on the transcript, his language is different.

And that is he's not using the term runaway or incessant inflation.

If you look at his language, and this is what these LLMs do, essentially the language looks as if this might be the last one for a while.

He's giving you the sense that they're sort of getting their arms around it.

And there's just no doubt about it.

The unintended consequence of these run on these banks has probably given him the sense that, okay, inflation is the monster under the bed, but there's another one in the kitchen.

And I have to be mindful of it.

But the language and the tone and the complexion of his talk is different.

Yeah, you didn't need an LLM to figure that out.

You know that.

You love that LLM these days.

I feel shamed.

I feel shamed.

I parsed those words and I went, hmm, this looks like there's a pause.

That's how I came out with it.

But how fast did the LLM do it?

You're an LLM.

You're a loving lady machine.

Explain to people what LLMs are, please.

Large language models,

basically generative AI.

Yeah, it's what feeds it.

Yes, indeed.

Yeah.

And you give it a data set.

And if you type in

some tweets in the voice of Kara Swisher insulting Elon Musk, it'll come back with 10 or 12 reasonably good tweets.

By the way, everyone's talking about how it's going to be lawyers or who's the other one, teachers that are going to be put out of business.

I think social media managers are in real trouble.

Oh, interesting.

Why?

How would you use it that way?

If you go to ChatGBT right now and just type in in the voice of Kara Swisher, give me 12 tweets on Chairman Powell's testimony yesterday.

It'll come back with 12 tweets and two or three of them you would find acceptable.

And you're going to see, I think, I would bet the volume of tweets from famous people that somewhere between 70 and 90% of them are not from them.

They have someone managing that.

They can't be bothered with it.

And at some point, you're just going to be able to in a very calibrate the voice.

It's interesting.

You can add in other types of voices.

This isn't funny enough.

So add some George Carlin voice, dial up, dial down, the variance, the volatility, the humor, whatever it is, and automatically upload them to Twitter, LinkedIn.

I think social media manager is a job that's going to be increasingly stressed.

That's an interesting thing.

Yeah, you can do almost anything.

Interestingly, I spent, I talked to Sam Altman for quite a bit of time yesterday, which was interesting, just a follow-up thing that I did.

And he's traveling the world to visit other countries to talk about ChatGPT and to meet users and regulators all around the world.

Interesting.

To pretend he's concerned and then get in the way of any regulatory.

No, he's not that guy.

This is the playbook.

I don't even know the guy and I know what he's going to do.

He's not going to do that.

I don't know.

No, not this guy.

Regulate us and then deploy an army of capital and regulators to get in the way of anything.

No, I think they actually welcome regulation.

Oh my God.

I can't believe you're falling for this shit.

I'm not falling for it.

I just think they know what has happened.

You of all people.

And Cheryl Samberg has been great for women.

Okay.

In any case, we'll see what happens.

I think they do want some signals from regulators of what to do here because it's not protected under Section 230.

So I think they're a little more, they're a little smarter about it.

How's that?

That's what I would say.

I don't think they welcome regulation, but I think they know that if they don't have some protection, they're going to get sued out of existence in some fashion.

That's my feeling.

The most heartening thing I've heard is that, but you always start off liking these people.

I always like a lot of them.

Yeah,

I'm generally, I think you're a really strong judge of character.

And I don't know the man.

And you said early and often, I think this is a good guy.

And I think that's exceptionally important given the horse he's got the reins on or whatever, or the ship he's steering, so to speak, or the nuclear bomb he's detonating.

There's other competitors, so many different people now in here running to do it, and so many startups.

It'll be interesting to see.

I do think they need to get ahead of regulation because it's this, in this case, as we talked to

Senator Bennett, they're all looking at this hard compared to the last time.

They didn't look at it at all the last time, and I don't think that's the case here.

You know how I spoke to you on my podcast, speaking of hitters for players.

I did a long interview, my second one on the Prophet Pod with Brian Chesky, our favorite,

our adopted son.

Our adopted son, Brian Chesky.

Speaking of Brian Chesky, Airbnb is gearing up for a massive vacation season by rolling out 50 new features on its platform, among them one called Airbnb Rooms, which makes it easier to find private rooms.

It's a lower-cost option.

Things cost under $100 typically.

It's also expanding price transparency.

This is something he and I have talked about a lot in interviews.

You'll be able to see the total listing price directly in the search results and see the checkout instructions for completing the booking, everything.

A lot of more stuff you see.

There's a lot of tension between guests and hosts and more just confusion on the part of people who rent, I think.

What do you think about this?

How do you think they're doing?

Tell me about your interview.

Brian Chesky, and I vote with my feet here in disclosure, Airbnb, I think it's my largest position personally.

I think Brian is exactly the CEO on as an investor.

First and foremost, unfortunately for him, he has no life outside of work.

He is just all in.

That's what he thinks about all the time.

We spent the majority of the podcast with me acting like his mother saying, well, when are you going to find a nice girl?

You know, I saw his mother the other day and she said the same thing, but go ahead.

Literally, you meet this guy and he's such a lovely young man.

And he, I said to him, I asked him, I think verbatim, what do you have other than work?

And it took him about 60 seconds to even respond.

Yeah, he knows.

And the other thing is on a more operational level, the thing I really like about what Brian's doing as a CEO is his challenge is not what to do, but what not to do.

Specifically, I find incremental improvements by the CEO, the more exciting and sexy they are.

Like there's nothing sexier than an acquisition.

We go out and we buy Hilton, right?

That makes everyone feel important and it's bold.

He didn't buy Hilton, right?

No, no, no.

Sorry.

My point is the greater the sex appeal, the lower the ROI.

What CEOs win their plans.

And what you want is a CEO that's focused on the really boring stuff.

And he's focused on things like

they basically storyboarded it, took the top 40 complaints from hosts and guests, and they're going through the hard, boring work of like, okay, how do we make pricing more transparent?

That's not that sexy, but it's super important to his customer base.

It's been a big issue for users.

You know, it's interesting.

He was on Twitter asking, what are your biggest problems?

And what are your, what, what irritates you about my service.

Anyway, you're right.

I agree.

I think he focuses on not the,

he could do a lot more hand-wavy stuff.

He's not a hand-wavy kind of fella.

No, he's an operator.

Yeah.

But, you know, his, his business is all about details and irritations and compared to a lot of others because it's so ensconced in the real, like in the, like you actually go to a room and what it doesn't look like.

So I think he should focus on that stuff because he's really a hotel business, really, in a lot of ways.

Correct or not.

Yeah, I would say,

I mean, he has some crazy stats.

One out of $1,200 spent globally is spent on Airbnb.

It's actually a fairly sizable company.

And I think he could, I think, you know, my idea, and of course, it's easier for me to be generous to other people's time and money.

I'm like, use an LLM or partner with your buddy Sam.

I guess him and Sam are close.

And I'm going to Istanbul for the finals of the Euro Cup with my 12-year-old who is football mad.

And I'm trying to do more stuff.

It's time for me to virtue signal some more.

I'm trying to do more stuff individually with my boys.

And I don't understand why Airbnb wouldn't say, give us your data set or give us permission to feed your data set into an LLM and you can type in EuroCup final

in Istanbul.

It'll know the dates and then you ask it what additional information you need from me.

It'll know my weight class economically.

It'll have my credit card.

It might say how many days are you going to be there?

How old is your son?

Do you need adjoining rooms?

It asks you a series of questions.

And then it comes back with an itinerary from everything from the car that's picking you up to the hotel to the restaurants and then it'll say across each of them do you want me to confirm this do you want me to book this reservation do you have tickets here are the seven ticket brokers i found here this here's the seating chart should i confirm which one do you want to confirm because i spend and i actually enjoy it but i spend i will spend a dozen plus hours uh planning coordinating and planning a strip me too i feel the same way i was just doing that for a trip to Europe later this year.

It is interesting.

He actually, Sam did talk about this exact thing for LLMs a little bit about that's other use cases and stuff.

And I think you're 100% right.

It'll be, it'll be interesting to see.

You know, I did tell you about the one that Jeff does, right?

For his, for anesthesia.

So he, I was surprised.

He just said it to me.

I didn't know he was using it so much.

And he uses it to, so say there's a liver transplant.

He gets ideas.

He's like, what would you give this patient?

Here's the, here's the stats on them.

And what would you recommend?

And they come back with very good answers.

He said, you you know, ideas he hadn't thought of,

ways to do the procedure, the anesthesiology procedure.

So that was interesting.

And it helps him think of ideas.

He could consult 10 of his other anesthesiologists, but this is just a lot easier.

You know, just you saying that?

I like to think I have a decent gut for new businesses.

That's what your brother should do.

He should launch a thin layer of innovation on top of an AI, regenerative AI, around anesthesiology and doctor's advice.

We call it second opinion for doctors, for anesthesiologists.

Give him a call.

But he could build an interesting business on that.

And not only that, your brother has the gravitas, the credibility.

He's measured.

People trust him.

And

I know he's thinking as all of us are, or most of us are, kind of about his next thing.

And not only that, his sister's in tech.

That just feels right as rain.

He should be all over that stuff.

All right.

You call him.

I'll tell him.

Well, he'll listen to this.

Well, Jeff, Scott's got an idea for you.

Anyway,

those are both.

I do like Sam Alton more than other people.

Again, but it's a low bar.

And speaking of low bars, let's move on to the text message that made Fox News say enough is enough about Tucker Carlson.

In a message obtained by the New York Times, Carlson describes watching a video of several Trump supporters attacking a single Antifa kid.

He goes on to say, jumping on the guy like that is dishonorable.

Obviously, it's not how white men fight.

And then he went on to like agonize that he sort of wanted to see him beaten and he shouldn't.

It's bad for him.

The Fox board reportedly saw the message the day before Fox was set to defend itself in the Dominion trial.

We don't know whether it would have ever shown up in the trial, by the way, or been revealed because it's not really pertinent.

The next day, the board reportedly decided to bring in an outside law firm to investigate Tucker Carlson's conduct and the rest of his history.

I don't know.

He says this stuff on the air.

Like when I read it, I was like, he didn't say it, it's not how white men fight, which is a very unusual phrase, I would say.

It is how white men fight, actually.

And he says all kinds of racist things on the air all the time, you know, dirty immigrants or replacement theory or, you know, insulting Elon Omar, everybody.

So what do you think about this?

Because I don't know if it would have ever gotten into the public view.

Yeah, I think when I think Tucker Carlson publicly says, you know, warns people about replacement theory, there needs to be, A, it reveals something about his character that he's essentially a bigot because it's essentially demonization of people, of immigrants, specifically non-white immigrants.

The public stuff is enough reason to think this is a low-character person in the institution that is platforming these awful ideas

is not the kind of institution you want to, or platform you want to advertise on.

Having said that, I think text messages, and I don't know how you do this, but I think text messages should largely be just as people's personal lives are still sort of out of bounds.

We don't mock people's private relationships usually.

I think

if somebody is in the context of what they feel is a private conversation, I think

work texts.

It's just not.

Yeah, but

I just sort of feel like it's none of our business.

I don't think it's fair to cherry-pick all the texts that people send to each other.

I've sent you some texts that, if taken out of context, would make me look really bad.

And

it's just, you think you're in a private conversation.

You think you're in a safe place to be a fucking idiot.

So I don't, I just feel uncomfortable reading people's texts.

Well, my only thing is, look, he said worse on the air.

So I'm like, this is what, this is what got him.

It was weird.

I don't like it.

Of course, I wasn't surprised in any way.

And it was demented.

It was like, you know, I'm struggling with wanting to beat the shit out of this kid.

And it's not good for me to think this way.

And it was this whole series of things.

It was like, what a weird person.

And by the way, you're weird on the air.

The stuff he does on the air is worse.

And this is just Fox trying to like turf him, which I'm good.

Good for them.

They will turf each other is my guess.

And I'm happy to see it kind of thing.

But at the same time, it's like,

didn't they watch his show?

And that wasn't enough?

Didn't he see advertisers flee the show when he kept, you know,

essentially backing white, not essentially backing white supremacists or having, you know, all kinds of viewpoints on the air that were just as bad as this, just not as very, you know, clearly saying something like, it's not how white men fight, you know, which was weird.

Well, I'd like to know what's going on.

Something else is going on here.

I mean, I'm sure they have these other information about the

culture around his show.

They have that Abby Grossberg suing.

She's got hours and hours of tape.

I think they're preparing everybody.

I mean, they're just giving us a little like appetizer of his behaviors.

And honestly, when I read it, I'm like, oh, didn't he say that on the air?

Didn't he say that on the air?

Like, they don't listen to him.

I mean,

whatever.

Good luck, Tucker.

You two are going to be in a death match or something before you settle.

And they, and by the way, if they wanted to settle it and make it, bring him back, they would hide everything.

They don't have any, Fox doesn't have any ethics around this stuff.

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

The leaders of top AI companies are headed to the White House as we record this.

See what I'm saying?

There's much more activity.

That's such a Nadella, Asundar Pichai, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodi, CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI are set to meet with Vice President Kamal Harris and other senior officials.

The meeting comes a day after the New York Times op-ed from FTC Chair Lena Khan, who I saw this weekend, where she argued that AI must be regulated.

Akhan's biggest concerns are companies who misuse AI to perpetuate discrimination, fraud, and scams.

She wrote, although these tools are novel, they are not exempt from existing rules.

She's arguing the FTC has authority under current laws to crack down on companies who misuse AI in these ways.

The White House meeting is supposed to build on a blueprint for the AI Bill of Rights.

I think it was created by a previous person who just left, Alondra Nelson, and other conversations they've had.

What do you think about this?

I hope we move to the action part of all of this and that it's not just former people who've made millions and then get a conscience and decide, stop me before I kill again, and I'm worried about all of this.

I don't find that productive.

And I would like to see the government as soon as possible announce some some sort of new regulatory body similar to the FTC, you know, the AITC, whatever it is, the Artificial Intelligence Ruling Commission that has teeth and is immediately charged with a set of guidelines and very early sends flares across the bows.

If all of a sudden it ends up that there is a generative AI that is producing a lot of content that is wreaking havoc,

what is, you know, bring in communications and First Amendment lawyers and say, all right, when does it become, you know, yelling fire in a crowded theater and start outlining,

some laws and regulation here.

But the first thing they need to do, in my view, I don't think the existing agencies.

Let me back up.

On an international basis, I'd like to see a new division of NATO around AI because I think this has real defense implications.

NATO has newfound life.

It is out of its brain coma because Europe is finally a union.

NATO has new purpose because of this murderous autocrat trying to invade in a land war, an invasion of Europe.

So I think this is a great time for NATO to establish similar to,

you know, they have all sorts of different divisions or task forces that keep them, you know, keep an eye on.

Bioweapons, I think they should start something around AI.

Domestically, we need an entirely new regulatory body.

Which is what Senator Bennett said.

Yeah, instead of starting from a position of, oh, we're going to take so-and-so from the FCC because they're on Twitter, which means they understand technology, they're going to have to build it from the ground up and bring the gentleman who we had on the podcast a few weeks ago, Dmitry.

Alperovich.

I just also saw him this weekend, but go ahead.

But ground up from with filled with people like that.

So instead of having 4% of the people have a background in engineering or technology, 4% of the people don't.

But I think it needs to be a new body.

And Washington hates that because they think of it as bureaucracy and cost.

But AI will generate a ton of additional tax revenue if it's handled well.

So I'd like to move to the kind of action part of this.

I think they are acting.

I know you said they don't do anything.

I think in this case, it has to be global.

And this is something Altman did talk about, that the reason why he was going to all these countries is because he doesn't think you can do it in any way, but a global authority on this stuff.

The way he was, he was comparing it more to the sort of the nuclear groups that are all around the world.

And I think he's right.

It's got to be a global.

kind of thing.

He's not going to China and Russia, though.

I asked him specifically.

But all the ones, the countries that don't want to use this for nefarious means

to sort of get together and make a decision on things like killer robots, like we talked about, or whatever it happens to be.

Not everybody's worried about AI.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg he expects to replace 30% of the company's back office roles with AI over the next five years.

30%.

You know who else isn't worried?

More than two-thirds of Americans, only 28% believe the use of AI will have a major impact on them personally.

According to Pew Research, they're incorrect.

It'll be all of them will be impacted.

Why do you think some scientists who work on AI are very concerned, as we saw Jeffrey Hinton last week who had left Google.

Why do you think there's this disconnect?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I don't think people look at their job and can immediately reverse engineer it.

I don't think most people really understand AI.

And also, I think there's some truth to the notion that we continually catastrophize and talk about the worst possible, go to the worst possible place with any new technology.

And again, the cycle repeats itself, some short-term job destruction, and then it ends up creating more jobs.

But there's some interesting things there.

So for example, a company called Chegg, which I believe is online ed, they announced, they said, they acknowledged in their earnings call, they said that ChatGPT was hurting their business and the stock dropped 40%.

And the investor relations department could have done a pretty interesting jiu-jitsu move and said, this is how we're using AI to increase our business.

And I don't think the stock would have gone down 40%.

Comms has to be more around, all right, how are we,

just as everyone in the late 90s was saying, oh, we're not William Sonoma, we're WilliamSonoma.com.

Yeah, right.

And Howard Lester and Denny.

Remember, we have a website.

We have a website.

That's right.

Add the term.com to everything and your stock goes up 10 or 20%.

So much of this is about storytelling and communications.

Or what I am advising CEOs is like, okay, to what extent can we say we need to talk about how we are leveraging AI, not being

a victim of it.

Otherwise, because this is what's going to happen, stock market analysts are going to go industry by industry, decide who's vulnerable, look for any evidence that it's hurting that business and take the stock down 30 or 50 percent.

And these companies need to say, no, we're leveraging AI, use the appreciation of their stock price to go get cheaper capital and actually make that future, pull that future forward.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of them, though, are going to be affected.

So it's going to be hard to do like a fan dance about it, correct?

I think there's a lot of opportunity.

I mean, we talked about how Airbnb could use AI.

I think that a lot of these generative AI companies are probably open to partnerships, I would think, that create different niche applications.

I mean, what we just talked about with your brother, your brother could start a small consulting firm saying, are you going into a surgery or would you like a report every time for every major surgery that says, have you thought about the following 11 things?

And here are some ideas.

Right.

They have to be very careful legally.

Like, look, if you take these, just make sure you know what you're doing.

They have to be super, everyone's got to be super careful about when they start to give advice like this.

I agree with you, but so far the tests show that the advice coming back from

generative AI is more empathetic and sometimes more correct than second opinions from actual doctors.

Of course, but I'm just saying, you know, it's, you know, it's like when an autonomous car crashes, everyone goes crazy.

Meanwhile, there's 53 crashes on your block the other day, right?

You know, people.

But and I'm already like developing the business plan in my head for Jeffrey.

It would have to be, this is a piece of information and input You're the arbiter here and you have to take responsibility for the decision, ultimately, what you do here.

But I think the argument you made, and I think it's a genuine and honest argument, is going to be made much louder and in a much more hysterical fashion to try and block generative AI by lobbying bodies from insurance companies and medical professions who will claim that they know best and they don't want anyone to fuck with what is probably the most obscene, profitable business in the world, and that is a medical industrial complex where everyone has their hands hands in this pod called U.S.

healthcare, where one out of five people are actually happy with their healthcare.

Yeah, because no one is, right?

Yeah, well, 20%.

20% of Americans are happy with their healthcare.

Yeah.

So this is going to be an interesting time, 100%, about where we're going to go.

And I think people will go back and forth.

You know, I think they've got to.

submit to some regulation.

I think government has to be involved.

And, you know, it doesn't have to turn out the same way that the internet did, right?

And on the whole, as we talk about

from a net point of view, it's been positive, but it really, the damage has been massive.

And so it has to, they have to be doing this in a smart way.

It's really, there's an opportunity here for government.

There's an opportunity for companies.

There's an opportunity for regular people.

There's also problems that we can absolutely even anticipate in ways that we should have anticipated before.

But let's see.

Let's go on a quick break.

We come back.

The culture wars are coming for your kids' school play.

And we'll speak with friend of Pivot, Ann Applebaum.

It's a very good, or I would say bad day to talk to her about what's happening in Russian Ukraine.

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Scott, we're back.

I wanted to make sure we talk about how culture wars are playing out in schools because first they came for the books, but now they're coming for the theater department.

I saw an article in the Washington Post on Tuesday about the trend of schools canceling student shows with LGBTQ characters.

Let me give you some examples.

This January, a school district in Ohio canceled a high school performance of the 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee over objections to profanity, a song about erections, the portrayal of Jesus, and the fact that one character has two gay fathers.

That's almost the exact description of an episode of Pivot, except with gay mothers instead.

The district later agreed to allow a lightly edited version of the musical.

The musical director of the show actually got help on those edits from a volunteer, from volunteer Rachel Sheinkin, the woman who won a Tony for writing the play.

I can't believe an update school board got a Tony-winning artist to defend her work.

Another example, a school district in Texas canceled elementary school field trips to see the musical James and the Giant Peach.

In one case, one parent complained to school board members because actors were playing roles that are both male and female, which is very common.

Again, this feels like an episode of Pivot.

She felt it was the same as a drag performance.

One mom ruined the entire school trip.

An example I find personally egregious, well, I find them all egregious.

Administrators in Wisconsin Elementary School tried to cancel Dolly Parton in March.

Some first graders were going to sing the Miley Cyrus Dolly duet, duet, Rainbow Land, in concert.

We are rainbows being you.

Every color, every hue, don't shine up.

It was deemed controversial because it allegedly promotes LGBTQ acceptance and references rainbows.

The song was removed from the lineup and the teacher was placed on administrative leave.

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

Yeah, look,

book burnings or banning offensive material is just right out.

It's the first page of the playbook of fascists and extremist religious leaders when they take over a modern society.

It's kind of the go-to for an autocrat and a fascist.

So it's very disappointing.

The whole point, let's talk about schools.

The whole point of learning, you can't learn when everyone barks up the same tree.

And by the way, let's make the argument on the other side.

Jonathan Haidt made a very compelling argument that when all or when a disproportionate number of academics started signing up to this narrative that seemed especially progressive, that when everybody signs up to one narrative, you become stupid.

The whole point of education is to let ideas collide with each other such that we can form better ideas.

And if you, when you, at an early age, you start saying, okay, books about coming of age, books about alternative viewpoints, books about people who are not in the mainstream or what we hope is the mainstream.

You immediately stop learning.

You start turning your kids stupid, regardless of the morality of it or who it offends.

The whole point of education is to bring in different viewpoints.

And when you talk about comforting kids, I remember books in high school that talked about, that's at the time seemed shocking.

I mean, what's next?

Are we going to ban psychology books?

Probably.

They would like to.

Listen, Scott, in 10 states, there's proposed legislation that would force administrators to list every book, book reading and activity that teachers use in their lessons so parents can review them, which parents may not have.

And it's all being pushed by moms for liberty.

They're known for their opposition to critical race theory, which is not taught in these schools, by the way.

They put out a list of 150 books they're challenging in libraries nationwide, including Gone Girls, Slaughterhouse 5, The Kite Runner.

They're national.

There's about 260 chapters.

They've said they've helped install 275 of their favorite candidates on school boards in 2022 alone.

They've got PACs in Florida and South Carolina.

DeSantis went to their national summit and denounced woke gender ideology.

You know, it's very much like Phyllis Schlafly, if you remember her.

You know, it's a very,

these people pop up almost constantly in American history, but they're very powerful.

Well, let me piss off everybody.

I think schools, and I think most schools do this, and this problem or

so on the right.

They said, okay, you're spending too much time on social justice issues.

I just want my kid to read and write.

There was a kernel of truth in that.

For the school that one of my kids is at here in London, the headmistress was, I think, ultimately let go because she passed out something called a privilege chart that helped you identify how privileged you were to very young kids and said, all right, if you're this background, this background, you're really privileged.

And that, I think, correctly upset a lot of parents.

So I think we...

In some ways on the left around schools, stuck our chin out.

But that was an attempt to move kids to more social justice issues.

The intent was well-meaning.

And then on the far right, they've taken advantage of this.

They have exaggerated what has taken place in schools.

And they have gone the other way with a series of really mean-spirited, borderline, not even borderline, but just hateful recommendations and guidelines that feel fascist.

And it's like, okay, everyone on the far left.

you know, needs to needs to recognize a lot of people aren't comfortable with a certain viewpoint and political narrative below a certain age.

But at the same time, have we lost our minds regarding banning books?

I mean, if you want to understand where this goes,

you know, understand that.

It does not go to good places.

No one ever looks back and says, it was such a good idea to burn, then ban those books.

Nobody goes back to, nobody looks back and says, that was a good idea at the moment.

Well, I think it also creates a situation where part of the country is educated in a certain way and the other part is ignorant of all kinds of things.

I mean, but honestly, what they're going after, James and the Giant Peach, because of people dressing, it's not a drag show.

There's a long history of men dressing as women in plays and vice versa.

You know, lots of Shakespeare, hello, you know, as you, I think it's as you like it is cross-dressing, right?

Is that going to be a problem?

It just, it's, it's so non-controversial until they make it seem sordid, right?

It's, it's really just a play, a kind of thing.

And it doesn't doesn't promote drag being a drag person.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with that.

But

it certainly creates a situation from a, you know, the media that kids get is so critically important of how they do it.

And the ability to

be part of that, I just don't know where it ends.

It doesn't end at Shakespeare.

I could name 20 things that could be seen as what these people would put on a list.

And you know, they would do it because they're demented.

This Moms for Liberty is a very, I find to be a very dangerous group.

If you want to talk about a threat to your kid, if you want to talk about on the ground, what is actually influencing them, you would ban TikTok, not Judy Bloom.

Yeah.

We are just so focused on the wrong thing.

And again, in our nation, we suffer from so many examples of minority rule.

In Florida, 70% of people support the right to choose.

They support choice.

But that's, you know, they pass under the cover of dark, one of the most restrictive abortion bans.

I also believe that the majority of people who are really passionate about what is happening in schools don't have kids

in schools.

And they're nowhere near a school.

I generally believe a lot of people think we let them show up at school and day one go, okay, oppressors over here, oppressed over here.

It's just not true.

There's some of that.

Did some of it go too far in certain liberal school districts or liberal or very progressive?

It may be, but it's not what you think.

The majority of the time in these schools, they're just trying to figure out how to get a kid food because he can't learn when he shows up hungry.

How do we deal with a kid who's been out of school for a lot of two years and has fallen behind in math?

Yeah, do you see the history?

They're behind in history now, which they never were, that kind of thing.

They're behind in math and reading, and now they're behind in history in eighth graders.

I'm going to start a group.

What should I call it?

Moms for what?

Moms for what?

Loving Lady Machine.

Well, just, I can't stop thinking MILF, but that's not going to work.

Moms, Moms, MAF, Moms Against Fascism.

Oh, that's interesting.

What about

Moms for Liberty from Moms from Liberty?

Moms from Liberty from Moms.

What?

I don't get it.

Moms for Liberty from Moms for Liberty.

We'll have to workshop it.

Moving on from banned books to the war in Ukraine, let's bring in our friend of Pivot, Ann Applebaum.

Ann Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic.

She is the co-author along with editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic's June cover story about Ukraine.

The situation seems to be escalating today, with Russian forces launching drones and missiles into Ukraine overnight.

This seems to be a retaliation for an ostensible drone attack over the Kremlin, which Russia blamed on Ukraine and later the U.S.

Ann, does this escalation take us straight right into the spring counteroffensive?

Or how do you assess what's happening today?

I'm not sure I would describe it necessarily as an escalation.

It looks like the Russians have used this weird drone

attack over the Kremlin, which could have been anything and certainly couldn't have ever been planned to kill Vladimir Putin because he doesn't live at the Kremlin and it happened in the middle of the night.

So it looks like they're using this as an excuse to do propaganda and to

launch a new series of missiles.

But really, they've been doing this almost every day.

Just a couple of days ago,

they hit civilian targets in Kherson, which is where Jeff Goldberg and I were a month ago.

This is actually an ongoing, ongoing constant onslaught on civilian infrastructure.

And

it's just a continuation.

I mean, the rhetoric has moved several notches up.

And yes, that may be a kind of preface to the counteroffensive or a propaganda preface in any case to the counteroffensive, which from the Ukrainian side may also be now beginning as the Ukrainians are beginning to probe up and down the line to see where the Russians are weak.

And so President Zelensky addressed The Hague on Thursday in a renewed push to establish special tribunal to prosecute war crimes.

Talk a little bit about the strategy behind that at this point in the war.

It's usually typically toward the end.

I think that it's part of the Ukrainians'

raison dread.

I mean, this is why they're fighting.

They're not just fighting for territory.

It's not about exactly where the borders of Ukraine are and that they need this acre of land as opposed to that one.

Their argument is that

we have been attacked by a power that is seeking to wipe us off the map.

There has been genocide.

There have been the kidnap and deportation of Ukrainian children and then the attempt to Russify them in Russia.

On occupied territory, Ukrainians are forced to speak Russian.

Their identity is destroyed.

They're trying to establish, I think, in advance of the end of the war or in advance of negotiations, whichever happens first.

why they were fighting and what it was for.

And so this is really part of their,

in a way, their national argument.

Why you should help us,

why we deserve to win, and why, you know, and why the Russians deserve to lose.

So I don't think it's incidental to the war.

I think it's a central piece of what they're trying to say and project.

When I first read about this, I thought about the Doolittle raid, where American forces

bombed Tokyo just to try and raise morale in the U.S.

and also make sure that the Japanese understood that they weren't out of reach.

Do you think that this has any sort of psychological impact on both Russians and Ukrainians as the war moves forward?

Well, I mean, the complicated piece of this is we don't know who launched that little tiny drone, actually, over the Kremlin.

And it may well have been a Russian self-provocation.

It might have been a Russian group.

There are a lot of people in Moscow who don't like the war and who wouldn't mind Putin being embarrassed in some way.

And so, you know, whether it's the, you know,

it's hard to make a narrative out of the fact that the Ukrainians are trying to raise morale

by attacking the Kremlin.

But I suppose you could look at it the other way around.

I mean, yes, the Russians may also be trying to raise morale at home, as they know support for the war is falling.

I mean, it's very hard to measure in the general population, and we can only measure it anecdotally in the Russian elite.

But there have been a few things in the past few weeks to indicate that not everyone's happy.

There was a leaked conversation between two very senior Russian figures, a businessman and a kind of cultural figure, in which they were cursing the president and saying what a waste the war was.

We've had some open criticism from

the leader of the mercenary group, the Wagner mercenary group, which is also fighting in the war.

And so there's clearly some cracks in Russia.

And yeah, you're right.

Maybe this is a kind of attempt on the Russian part to raise morale and say a lot of what Putin says is also about scaring people at home.

You know, we're really serious.

You know, we're going to crack down on traitors.

So yeah, that may be a part of the story.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So the White House announced a spike in Russian combat deaths, 100,000 since December.

That's part of that, right?

To keep pushing at the soft tissue of Russia, of their nervousness of what's happening here, the Russian people.

Yeah, I mean,

you know, the Russians, of course, don't know how many people have died.

That's not public information in Russia.

It's not widely circulated.

So yes, I think the U.S.

discussion of casualty figures is also important for that.

I mean, remember this,

there's a military war going on, but there's also a political war.

This is what Jeff and I wrote about in our piece, that

the point of fighting is, as I said, it's to take back territory and so on, but it's also to create a kind of political change in Russia, by which I do not mean regime change, and I don't even mean that Putin has to fall out of a window.

I just mean that there has to be a moment when the Russians say the war was a mistake and we need to end it.

The way in 1962, the French said the war in Algeria is a mistake and we need to end it.

And so some of what you're seeing is an attempt to

push the Russian ruling class, if you will, in that direction.

Is that a hard push that they have to do it?

Is this a difficult thing from your perspective at this moment?

I mean, I don't know that it's difficult to convince, as I said, most people who live in Moscow and are paying attention, which is a pretty small group.

But it is, yes, it is difficult to convince Putin because this is his war.

You know, he started it.

He didn't tell anybody he was going to start it.

He didn't warn some of his closest allies in Moscow.

He didn't tell his close friends in Beijing.

You know, he really took this war on his own.

You know,

it was absolutely his personal decision based on his understanding of the nature of modern Ukraine, which was completely wrong.

Completely wrong.

Is there now this massive intel leak on Discord?

What is the ⁇ it's been a few ⁇ it's been a month since this happened.

Can you give some assessment of its impact still?

And I know President Selene told the Washington Post that the White House had said nothing to him about the Discord leak.

So I can't really speak to the entire range of stuff that was leaked, and some of it's very embarrassing for the U.S.

and its allies around the world.

I didn't find the material that was leaked about Ukraine to be especially revelatory or interesting.

I mean,

the estimate, for example, that was cited a lot about the Defense Department not being sure whether the Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring would be successful.

I mean, that was said to me in the Pentagon in December.

And so it wasn't really a secret that the Americans feel some doubt about how much land the Ukrainians can take back, how the counteroffensive

can work.

So

it was more the casual way in which this kind of stuff is thrown around and in which this kind of stuff is made available that it's not just Ukraine that's irritated, almost everybody is.

I didn't think that in the context of the war, it was fantastically significant.

I see that you already knew that.

They already knew the U.S.

thought that and that it just was on, it was just printed.

It was just that it was on a piece of paper and it was printed and it was embarrassing.

But I'm sure the Ukrainians know that the Americans think that.

And I'm sure that lots of people in Washington already knew that the Pentagon thinks that.

And so I didn't think it was,

it didn't strike me as a major revel.

Actually, by the way, I'm sure the Russians know the Pentagon thinks that.

I mean, some of it has been very, it's very close to what senior officials have said out loud.

So.

And how would you, or it would be interesting just to get, what do you think the state of the play is?

Everyone's talking about them bulking up for a counteroffensive, debating Ukraine.

What is it about the narrative, maybe in the U.S., that we have gotten wrong or the wrong impression from the media about the state of the war right now?

So, first of all, I think people don't really understand the nature of the Ukrainian army, which is very, very hard to

kind of rate and to understand exactly how it operates.

It really operates almost like a partisan army with a kind of Silicon Valley branch.

You know,

it's very embedded in the society.

I think when the war began, as the defense minister said to us, people thought this was going to be a big Soviet army fighting a little Soviet army.

But actually, this is, they fight like a partisan army.

You know, their bases and headquarters are in suburban towns and farmyards.

You know, some of their equipment is Soviet junk from the 1980s.

And then they are also using the most modern military software anybody has ever invented.

And they have this drone operation, which is

also like nothing anybody has done before.

I mean, they're sort of manufacturing drones in underground workshops all over the country.

This was a technology proficient country, very much so.

It turned out to have been.

I mean, we didn't think of it that way, but it was.

Well, they use a lot.

A lot of Silicon Valley uses Ukraine quite a bit before this all started.

Well, exactly.

But that wasn't widely understood in the general public.

But then what happened when the war started is a lot of those people went home

to help.

Plus, some of the U.S.

tech stars are there as well.

Often working pro bono, which is interesting.

But

so they have software that can connect all these drones and connect all these ancient guns and new guns with one another.

And therefore,

it's hard to measure really what it is that the Ukrainians will be able to achieve.

As I said, I think that the counteroffensive might not look like what we think it would look like.

I mean, it may not be kind of brigades of tanks, you know, streaming across the countryside.

It may come in fits and starts.

So there may be, as I said, I think the Ukrainians are going to be probing up and down the line.

They're going to be looking for political opportunities as well as military opportunities.

Part of their goal is to kind of destabilize the Kremlin, as we've already discussed,

and create a sense in Russia that

just that the war is a waste of time and a waste of energy

and it should be stopped.

Remember, they don't need to occupy Moscow or conquer Moscow or take Russian territory.

They have no ambitions like that.

All they have to do is convince the Russians

to go home.

And really,

the moment when the Russians withdraw their troops, the war is over.

So there's no complicated territorial negotiation.

There's nothing complex that needs to be done.

They just need to leave and then it's over.

But they're not going to leave, right?

They're not willing.

They're going to leave.

I mean, they have left.

They left Kherson.

They left Kharkiv.

And they left the northern part of Ukraine that they conquered at the beginning of the war.

So there is some precedent for thinking they could leave.

But on that, do you think that's going to happen, Anne?

Sitting here right now, based on the fact that you know as much as anyone about the cadence of this war and what is actually happening on the ground, sitting here in a year, recognizing nobody knows,

how would you handicap this conflict right now or this war?

I would say it's possible.

I'd say that the Ukrainians have been consistently underrated.

One friend of mine said to me when I was there last month, he said, you know, the Americans never think we can do anything until we've done it.

And so I wouldn't underrate them.

I wouldn't declare it as impossible.

There are heavy odds.

Russia is a much bigger country.

They have many more people.

They have, you know, just a lot more stuff.

They have airplanes.

But this isn't just, it just, as, you know, for the the third time now, I think I'm saying it's not just a military conflict.

For the Russians, this is a war of choice, and the Ukrainians are trying to convince them to make a different choice.

And I think that's not impossible.

Why hasn't the Russian technology been better?

Obviously, Russia was also a big...

place where Silicon Valley went and had lots of, there's lots of coders, lots of famous Russians who are deep into technology.

It's really amazing how much the Ukrainians have used that and deployed it since they're smaller versus Russia.

And obviously, you know, the Russian army is famously incompetent, but they do have strong, not necessarily the army, but the country has strong technological skills.

Yeah, and actually, I don't want to underrate that.

I mean, you know, the Ukrainians said to me, you know, this is kind of like an arms race.

You know, once we get an advantage in whatever it is, drone warfare, you know, then we find the Russians figure out how to shoot down our drones.

And so there is a, it's not as if the Russians have no technological competence at all.

That's the wrong way to look at it.

I think the the problem is more to do with kind of incentive structures.

You know, the very, very best Russian tech people working in Silicon Valley are not rushing home to fight in the war, whereas the Ukrainians are.

And the way the army itself works in Russia, it's thought to be really quite profoundly corrupt.

So every time money is spent on whatever it is, new guns or new software or new whatever, a certain amount of it disappears, you know, to buy houses in the south of France.

And that happens all the way up the line.

You know, at every level, money is stolen and material is stolen.

And so

that was one of the things that became clear at the very first part of the war is how

unprepared soldiers were, how, you know, the stuff that was supposed to be there that was on a list saying, you know, this brigade has this much equipment, a lot of it just wasn't there

because somebody never bought it.

And so it's really, this is really more a reflection of Russian society rather than the skills of Russian Russian hackers, which are still probably pretty good,

or Russian software designers, which are also pretty good.

You know, it's just that, you know, remember also that several hundred thousand Russians have left the country since the war started.

And many of those people were tech people.

So many of them are now in Georgia or Turkey or whatever.

You describe Ukrainian society as, quote, both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized.

Yeah, I mean, they turned out to be.

You know, Ukraine has always been a country.

It's hard, that is, it's a kind of grassroots upcountry.

You know, it's very good at networked civil society struggles, for example.

And maybe that's because it was a colony for so long.

You know, so they've always been good at organizing themselves to create a nationwide protest movement.

They've always been rather less good at creating state institutions, which are notoriously weak and still, and in some cases, still are.

But it's that kind of networked,

you know,

the volunteer groups who call their cousins in America and say, you know, could you help us with this project?

And

their ability to motivate people inside and outside the country to help them that has given them this completely unquantifiable advantage that the Russians don't have.

It's not like the Russians can call on, you know, Sergei Brin and say, come home and work for us because he's not going.

And that turns out to, as I said, to have been a big advantage.

I mean, it certainly explains, even if it doesn't explain, even it doesn't help them win or take back all their territory in the next six months, it certainly explains why the country still exists today.

How would you assess the West's support for Ukraine?

And

what are your views on it?

Do you have a message for the West?

So it's really impressive what we've done so far, and it's a lot more than anybody had ever expected.

And that's also a reflection of the fact that the Ukrainians just impressed people.

You know, Zelensky was good at communicating, but it wasn't just him.

It was the, you know, the, you know, the Ukrainians fought back, you know, at Mariupol, for example, at the very

early part of the war and in Kiev.

And because of that, you've had this galvanizing effect on Europe, on America, you know, and our willingness to give them weapons and help them is extraordinary.

I would say one thing, which is that we always seem to be kind of three three or four beats behind the situation.

You know, eventually we will give them, you know, we said we wouldn't give them high Mars, these long-range missiles and long-range artillery, you know, and then we did.

You know, we said we wouldn't give them airplanes and now actually they're beginning to get some airplanes from European countries and we may eventually do that too.

And it would help if we would give them more immediately because then we could maybe end the war more quickly.

I mean, the danger of this war, obviously, is that it drags on, which is not good for them, not good for us, not good for anybody.

And having a decisive plan to end it, you know, soon isn't something I'm feeling from Washington.

I mean, Washington remains,

Washington, meaning the White House, the Pentagon, lots of different people, remains nervous about the idea that the Ukrainians could win, in other words, could push the Russians out of at least their territory since February 22, taken since February 2022, but in more than that February,

territory taken since 2014.

And there seems to be, there's, there's still a lot of nervousness.

And I think that

that's been a kind of drag on the war.

And there's a danger that that nervousness could extend the war.

So they don't want them to win too much.

They just want them to take.

They seem to not, nobody says it quite like that.

And nobody will ever say that on the record.

You know, even off the record, they don't really say that.

But

yeah, it's pretty clear that

they're nervous about what that would mean.

And I think that's wrong because, again, now I think said this another time,

it's a political struggle as well as a military one.

And the Russians have to be convinced that they can't win and that there's no opportunity for them to win.

To your point, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'll make a statement and you tell me if you validate or nullify it.

The best way to end a war is to win it.

And we keep getting, we keep saying no tanks, then tanks.

I mean, shouldn't we just skip to the part where we do what's required

to end slash win this war?

Well,

that's what I'm arguing.

Yes.

I mean, I think that's exactly right.

If those are the words you want to put in my mouth, those are fine.

Thanks, Anne.

So, Ian, last question.

When does that happen?

What is the time from your being there and assessing this counteroffensive in your article?

When does the counteroffensive start?

No, when does this end for Russia?

Do you see,

is there a path?

You know, the U.S.

has given the Ukrainians training and preparation for the counteroffensive.

I just read this morning there's a new

shipments of ammunition are going over right now from Europe, you know, as well as the U.S.

And we're, I think, collecting old Soviet Taiwan-style ammunition from around the world.

So

that's happening.

The question is whether it's enough, and we really won't know that until the counteroffensive or whatever fighting there's going to be over the summer plays itself out.

I think by the end of the summer, by next autumn, the situation will be a lot more clear.

I'm hoping it will be clear in the sense that, you know, the war will be over.

But

obviously, I can't promise that.

Right.

Well, in any case, uh, it's a terrific article.

Um, it does, I, I, you, you leave me more hopeful because these drones over the Kremlin make everybody nervous and the blame on the U.S.

And, you know, you just the escalation of tensions is not something we need right now, I suspect.

Um, thank you, Ann Applebaum.

Again, the title of the article is The Counteroffensive.

It's the cover story of the June issue of The Atlantic.

You can read it online now, or you can actually buy it.

Thanks, Ann.

All right, Ann, thank you so much.

It was a great article.

Thank you.

One more quick break.

We'll be back for predictions.

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Okay, Scott, let's hear some predictions.

My prediction,

what about Moms for Kids Liberty?

Get it?

Do you like my name?

Oh, by the way,

while we were talking, I went on ChatGPT and I said, give me six names for a group of moms who are against books being banned.

And this is what it came back with.

Mama Bears Against Book Bans, Mothers for Free Speech.

Parental Book Defenders, Mommy Bookworm Brigade, Protect Our Children's Literature, and Book Loving Mom Squad.

And

this is entirely representative of ChatGPT in the sense that they're all adequate, but you probably wouldn't pick anyone.

Not bad.

I don't mind book-loving mom squad.

Send those to me.

But what is interesting is that

there is probably no greater force in America that moves stuff than moms.

I do.

It was moms.

around

drunk driving.

It's basically when something happens to our kids, that's when we get incense.

Let's hope the same thing happens with guns.

But

it's when moms move in and because a lot of moms are kind of tend to be swing voters or are key to elections.

So anyways, I'm all for it.

All right.

So a prediction, please.

I got a couple of predictions.

The first is I think we're going to see

the banking crisis continues.

And I think we're going to see a couple of things.

One, I think FDIC insurance is either going to be raised to like a million bucks or there's going going to be a cap taken off of it, or the Fed is basically, and the Treasury is basically deciding that regional banks should go away.

Because there's just very little reason to keep your money in a bank above $250,000 that's not insured when there are now a series of banks that effectively have the full faith and credit backing of the U.S.

government.

So I think we're going to see a massive increase or even a removal of the cap of FDIC insurance.

Because what it comes right down to is these bank runs aren't about.

I mean, the increasing interest rates is what catalyzed it.

But the real problem here, the real issue in terms of outflows from one bank to another is that that cap.

It's that $250,000 cap.

And unless they raise that cap, you can kiss regional banks goodbye.

So for example, Charles Schwab, which has, I think, $300 billion in assets, is totally fine because their average deposit is $20,000.

So probably 90 plus to 98 plus percent of their deposits are fully covered by FDIC insurance.

But there are a lot of regional banks where 60, 80, 90% of their deposits by dollar volume are over, or deposits over a quarter of a million dollars.

And that's just all going to go away because there's no downside to shifting it to a too big to failed bank.

The only thing they can do to address this, you know, they're kind of hoping this is all going to go away.

It doesn't appear to be.

I thought it was going to, but there's now two or three new names.

So here comes FDIC cap raise or increase or take the cap off.

The other thing that I think people aren't focused enough on is that this isn't about interest rates as much as it, they think they aren't talking about it, social media.

And that is what happens when you can weaponize media and media has no fact checking.

And there's also incentives around catastrophizing and weaponizing media.

And if I were a short seller, I would take large short positions in regional banks and then I would deploy my army of 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 bots on Twitter and LinkedIn to go out and start creating insecurity that this is the next bank.

This is the next domino to fall.

And I think we're going to find out in three months, 36 months, is there were a lot of short sellers who created, who could weaponize media, given new media platforms and the speed and the circulation of catastrophizing media, that weaponize these platforms for financial incentive to take these.

Because the moment a name comes up, it's done.

It's kind of done.

The moment there's enough trend, it's trending on Twitter,

it ends up in a story on Business Insider.

And anyone with over $250,000 goes, what's the downside to transferring out?

Which effectively spells doom for the bank.

So that's, we're going to see one,

a lot of conversation around the weaponization of media and its social media age as it relates to financial institutions, a raise of the cap.

And then my final prediction is I think Senator Feinstein is going to resign in the next couple of weeks.

Really?

Why?

The Daily did this fantastic rundown of the issue.

And what it reminded people of that people aren't focused on and forget is that Senator Feinstein has been a lion in the Senate.

She passed hallmark assault ban, assault weapon ban.

No one else was able to do that.

She did it.

She was a senator who took a real leadership position around releasing a report that shed America in a very bad light about how we were torturing enemy combatants.

And it was absolutely the right thing to do.

And she demonstrated real leadership in the face of opposition from our military, the White House.

But she said it's important people understand

what is actually going on here.

And they also forget, and I know you were there, and I was living in California, this is someone who was thrust into politics by a murder.

And she was the one that actually came out and informed people that Supervisor Milk and Mayor Moscone had been shot.

I mean, this is...

She's amazing.

Oh, no.

She was.

She has had such a storied career.

And I think the reason she is going to resign is I think Senator Feinstein has always kind of long-term gotten it right.

Like, if I could build a senator from parts of lesser senators, it would look something like Senator Feinstein, a Democrat who faces adult realities and is pragmatic, and I would describe as a moderate, of which is becoming a species that is increasingly extinct in D.C.

But now, unfortunately, her legacy isn't going to be around.

If this continues much longer, it's been a little while she's been making some mistakes.

You know, remember, she's yelling at those kids that one time.

Well, okay, but that's my point.

Her legacy is evolving or devolving into something pretty negative.

And that is, this is now having a real impact on what is probably the sole place of

affirmative agenda from the Democrats.

And that is to finally restore the courts to a more balanced position after Trump literally stuffed courts top to bottom with very conservative judges.

And we have an opportunity to get some of that back, and it's not happening.

And I think someone's just going to say to her, what do you want your legacy to be?

Because it's changing fast day by day.

Yeah, I know, but who's telling her that?

That's my issue.

Is who's actually telling her?

That's the correct question.

But I think I'm aware of the people around her, and I don't think they have.

I think she's not at a place.

She's listening.

You don't think she's listening?

That's the issue.

But Senator Feinstein, I feel like she's just always over the medium term gotten it right.

I don't think she's necessarily capable of it.

That's what I'm saying.

She can make those sorts of decisions.

Yeah.

And therefore, and there's nobody around her.

She's not quite incapable enough for someone else to make the decision.

I think it's a real difficult situation.

But let's hope.

Let's hope.

Yeah, we'll see.

Anyway, we want to hear from you.

Those are good predictions, Scott.

We want to hear from you about them and anything else you think about us.

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.

It's action-packed show this week.

We'll be back next week for more.

Today's show is produced by Lara Neiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin.

Ernie Endertott engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Meal Silberrio.

Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

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

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

The best way to end a war is to win it.

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