The New McCarthy Era, A.I. on the Rise, and Guest Mike Allen

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Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher.

Kara, it's not about me, and I think we need to bust right into the news.

I just don't, I don't want to dwell on me.

This isn't a big deal.

Yes.

Wait, what is that?

Okay, it's a little bit about me.

Kara, do you really know your co-host?

Is he the kind of guy that after seeing France lose to the incredible Argentinian team, goes to a Doha library and reads to underprivileged kids?

No, that's not him.

Is he the kind of guy that takes an Oedipal, gets on a camel, and then interrupts the shooting of Dune 2, getting warmer?

Is he the kind of guy who, when he's in Bangkok, is disturbed when he takes a prostitute home and finds, in fact, that she is a woman?

Because you know what they say, prostitutes today, you don't know which one has nuts.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls from the Vox Media Podcast Network, it is most definitely not Audi Cornish.

Who is it?

That's right, as Elton John reminds us on his seventh farewell tour.

The bitch is back.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's the dog.

Oh, yes, you're welcome.

God.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, good God.

That's good.

Make it.

That was good.

Stop.

Oh, man.

You are definitely not Audi Cornish.

I'll tell you that.

She's good.

That's the only one I listened to while I was going.

She's good.

I'd like to be her neighbor.

Would you?

Don't you think she'd be a great neighbor?

I suppose.

I guess.

I'd be like, hey, can you watch my kids?

And she'd be like, oh, gosh, Scott.

And she'd watch my kids.

She would watch your Scott.

Do a lot.

There'd be a lot of eye-rolling neighbors, what she would do.

By the way, Kara, that was Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.

Mark Knopfler, one of the great lead guitarists, and back when you didn't need to be attractive to be a rock star.

Scott, how are you?

We missed you so.

Did you?

Did you?

No.

I'm great.

I'm doing.

I'm doing really well.

Went to the World Cup.

Yeah, where the fuck have you been?

You've just disappeared off the face of the earth.

I went to Dubai, then Doha, then back to the Devon.

You were like there forever.

What were you doing?

Were you making investment deals like Sharon Kushner?

I was trying to do some of that.

I was watching a lot of football with my boys.

I absolutely loved the World Cup.

It was wonderful.

And then

I went to Bangkok with my boys, then to Chiang Rai, and then to Khuket.

And I went to Chiang Rai.

What's Chiang Rai?

There's two different places.

Oh, okay.

All right.

I'm a little bit triggered that you don't understand Thai geography.

If you just invested a little bit of time in Southeast Asian culture.

All right.

So you went to Thailand?

Yeah, we just had a wonderful time.

A ton of time with the family.

I don't know about you, but I find if I'm away from my boys for longer than a couple of days, it's literally like...

I've lost a limb.

And I found that after spending four weeks with them, you want to chew your arm off.

No, I don't agree with you as usual.

I have had it.

I have had it.

I am so long family right now.

I literally have to go.

I spent my whole time with my family.

I miss them all.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

We were all together.

No.

Once going through puberty.

All of us that were together, including one girlfriend.

Although, you know what?

I did have that all-important.

I have a 15-year-old boy and we did have that all-important sex talk.

And I wanted to talk to him about, and I think this is important about

safe sex.

So I brought in a banana and a condom, and I'm going to tell you how to put a condom on.

And he said, what's the banana for?

And I'm like, I can't get hard on an empty stomach.

That's right.

It's good to have me back.

By the way, that's the comedy of Dan Natterman, total comedic DG.

Oh, good God.

Anyways, enough of that.

You had heart surgery.

I had heart surgery.

I had a heart surgery.

Thanks for asking.

I really liked the flowers you sent and the calls you made to me.

Yes, I did.

I had the heart surgery, and I'm here to say that I am fine.

But thank you for asking.

You seem more loving.

No, not even slightly.

I have a cyborg heart now.

I have a device in my heart that closed the hole that was there.

And it was a day surgery.

It was amazing.

It was amazing.

So I didn't lose a step, I would have to say.

Yeah, I was a little like, I thought it was a little bit over the top about how everybody, all the Twitter love you were getting.

I'm like, Jesus Christ,

I'm more at risk when I go get Invisalign installed.

I did some research on your heart surgery and everyone's like, best of luck to you.

We're thinking about you.

Go, girl.

You're such an inspiration.

And I'm like,

It's more dangerous to get your teeth cleaned than what you're doing.

Oh, really?

No, I don't think so.

They went up through a vein into my heart.

If they had had missed one thing, I could have been dead.

You were in and out.

You didn't even spend the night in the hospital, correct?

I did not.

I went in at seven, hung around for a couple hours, and then had the surgery, woke up, and just hung out in the hospital until three o'clock when a friend of my brother's drove me home.

It was very nice.

And didn't some little boy from a poor nation have to give you his heart?

Isn't that how it works?

No, they put this thing in, this umbrella something or other, and it went in and it was fine.

Heart flap harvesting in some little village somewhere.

No, they didn't harvest anyone's heart.

It was a piece of plastic and now I am well.

I am well.

And then the rest of the vacation was the family all together in San Francisco.

Oh, you're in the Bay Area for the whole time?

Yes, we were there for a week.

I was there for two weeks and then we were in Palm Springs for a week, which I love.

I love Palm Springs.

You love Palm Springs?

I stayed at the Jerry Lewis estate.

That's where I rented for the family.

Yeah.

It wasn't a big house.

It was a small house.

It was a smallish house.

Had a pool, though.

Was it a Neutre?

There's a lot of Neutre architecture.

It was a lot.

We went on a, Amanda and I went on an architecture tour, a bike architecture tour, which was cool.

And all the gays kept inviting us in to look at their own beautiful homes.

And then we went out to a hot springs by ourselves.

We did a few little dates.

I love Palm Springs.

Yeah, I love Palm Springs.

It was great.

We should all go there.

So we should do an event there.

There's all this cool stuff going on there.

I loved it.

It was great.

And then I'm back here working away.

Working away.

Working away.

Thanks for covering me.

Oh, no problem.

I kept seeing in my feed new pivot podcasts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I listened to your podcasts on, I forget his name, the guy with the car company.

I thought that was just Odyssey.

Tony Fidel?

Who?

No, the guy, the guy with the hair transplant, who's like kind of a

man-child, supposedly worth a lot of money.

He's lost a billion dollars.

I forget his name.

Oh, Elon.

Yeah.

I listened to that one.

That one's pretty good, but I really enjoyed Audi Cornish.

I thought she was good.

Audi was very good.

I was trying people out as usual.

I'm always waiting for you not to come back for whatever sojourn that you go to.

You never know with you.

You probably did a deal with like Doha TV to do a TV show.

I tried.

I tried.

It was called Doha Plus, and it's already been canceled.

Me and Al Gore.

Well, there's been a lot going on since you've been away.

Things have not stopped just because you're away.

Kevin McCarthy is finally Speaker of the House after 15 votes, I guess.

We'll talk about what that means for the tech industry.

He's quite close to the tech industry, and the Republicans are not.

We'll chat about chat GPT, how tech companies are capitalizing on artificial intelligence, and we'll speak briefly with Axios's Mike Allen about politics, the news business, and the soul of wit.

I think that'll be very exciting.

Are you glad to be back?

Are you glad to be here?

Yeah, back in London.

I'm just kind of glad to be back in the swing of things.

I was on the road for five weeks, and I find, I don't feel the same way.

I find as I get older, travel is harder and harder for me.

I don't like travel that much.

I like home.

You're right.

I've always been like that.

A lot of photos of you in bars with in bars in Doha.

A lot of eating by yourself.

I was by myself a lot.

So how was the World Cup?

How was the World Cup itself?

Was it exciting?

In a word, amazing.

Was it?

Did you love it?

It was a pretty good match, right?

The final between Argentina and France was arguably the best football match in the history of the World Cup.

But the ones before it were good, too, right?

Yeah, Morocco was an inspiration.

Saudi Arabia beat in the initial rounds the ultimate winner of the World Cup.

Croatia did an incredible job.

The fans from Morocco were incredible.

The stadiums.

I mean, I understand there's a lot of justified concerns about Qatar and the golf in general.

But in terms of a host nation, you know, nothing like a quarter of a trillion dollars helps you put on an amazing World Cup, and there's just no getting getting around it.

It was flawless.

How is the no-liquor situation?

Well, it's funny because ABM Dev actually hosted me.

I've presented to the board a few times, and they're really nice people, and they'll say, What can we do for you?

And I'm like, two words, world and cup.

And they hosted me and my family, super generous.

And we had a bunch of Bud Zeros, and my boys just love rolling around the hotel lobby with a Budweiser.

My 12-year-old thought that was the coolest thing in the world, you know, just hanging out, yelling at strange people, holding a beer.

Okay, a non-beer, right?

Yeah, but it was, it was amazing.

Yeah.

Did you hang out with Elon Musk there?

He was there.

I saw on Instagram, someone said, I was literally, I think, about 40 feet from him, but no, we didn't.

I mean, we made out in the men's room, but other than that.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, are you getting ready for our Euro?

Are you excited to see me in Europe?

Yeah, I am excited to see you.

We're going to Munich, and then you're coming to London to see my

home.

And it'll be really nice.

I'm excited.

We're going to do some quality snuggling, okay?

That'll be nice.

That's where we met.

We're going to where we met.

That's right.

So we're going to DLD, where I thought, who is this asshole?

But I like him.

Anyway, it's going to be fun.

We're going to do a live pivot in both places and we're going to hang out and talk about 2023 and where we're going next, Scott, you and I, on our long journey.

We're going to renew our vows.

Renew our vows again.

Oh, God.

I was in Thailand at a resort.

We met this really nice couple.

I thought I could be friends with them.

And then they told us they were renewing their vows.

I'm like, that's it.

We can't be friends with these people.

I'm like, that's it.

It's all.

That's a beautiful place.

I love Thailand.

I love Bangkok.

I love all of Thailand.

So we have a lot to talk about.

There's been a lot going on politically, actually.

Echoes of January 6th with the insurrection in Brazil.

Thousands of pro-Bolsonaro rioters stormed government buildings over the weekend.

They smashed windows, climbed on roofs, ransacked government offices.

300 people have been arrested.

Brazilian President Da Silva blamed Bolsonaro for encouraging the attack, called the attackers fascists.

Bolsonaro denied any responsibility.

He's reportedly been in Florida with hanging out with Steve Bannon, I guess, since December.

Sounds familiar.

I don't know about you, but it sounds familiar.

Any thoughts on this?

I think it's really upsetting.

You've talked a lot about Brazil as an innovative place, Argentina and Brazil.

Well, America is that shining beacon on a hill, whether it's reality TV or capitalism or equity markets.

The rest of the world has a tendency to look at what we do and take it very seriously and model it.

And there's a dark side to that, and that is you have sort of, you know,

B-level fascists or domestic terrorists who are not held to account for organizing an insurrection and resulting in the death and

injury to government employees.

And the whole world has to see our representatives who represent us, regardless of what you think of them, cowering in fear and a president who tells this mob to take a noose and hunt down his vice president and a speaker of the house and isn't held accountable.

And I'm kind of, I'm over this both sides.

President Trump is a, is a stain on the American fabric.

And until he is held accountable and all his, all the people are complicit in this type of domestic terrorism, and that's what it is, other nations are going to, democracies all over the world are going to register this and think it's okay.

So I think this is terrible.

Well, they've tried hundreds and hundreds.

They're getting off with light sentences, although getting a lot of yelling at them by the judges, essentially.

Yeah,

I read that too.

But you do feel for them.

You read these things and they did go down rabbit holes.

Social media should be held responsible.

In Brazil, it certainly was off the charts there.

A lot of the misinformation in the organization happened on social media.

But at the end of the day, until everyone talks about coming together and moving forward, I think the key step to that is accountability.

And I think until the leader of this insurrection, is subpoenaed and tried for this type of domestic terrorism.

I don't think we can move forward.

And I think it's only going to spread.

We talked about the domino theory in Southeast Asia and Vietnam.

That didn't happen.

This is a real domino theory playing out, though.

Oh, I lose an election.

I'll coordinate on social media.

And

what price do I have to pay?

What price did Trump pay?

He hasn't paid any price.

Well, we'll get into that when we talk about Kev McCarthy.

He's definitely becoming relegated to the sidelines in the Republican Party.

But yes, you're right.

He hasn't gone to jail and he hasn't certainly been on.

There's been the January 6th committee.

There's been a look at it.

It's just a question of whether he's going to pay anything for his misbehavior and an insurrection.

Someone who is paying is Jack Ma.

He's giving up control of Ant Group, the fintech giant behind China's Alipay app.

Ma founded Ant Group eight years ago and has controlled it through a web of holding companies.

Ma has rarely been seen in public since clashing with Chinese regulators in 2020 over Ant's planned and canceled IPO.

He'll remain one of its major shareholders, but CNN estimates his stake will drop from more than 50% to just 6%.

What's happened to Jack Ma is really so much, remains shocking to me.

And even though, you know, there's all these debates of whether tech platforms should be controlled by one person, China's not putting up with it at all.

And it's really quite quite breathtaking given how popular he was, he is, has been with Chinese entrepreneurs.

Yeah, it's just, it's fascinating and chilling at the same time.

And that is the CCP has definitely taken very meticulous notes on what's playing out in America and said that these individuals who become almost like nation nation states in terms of their power and through leveraging technology and the idolatry of innovators and the power of money.

And they've said,

that dog's just not going to hunt here.

And for all of these tech billionaires here who shitpost the government and don't want to pay their taxes or move to low-tax domains and say government should just get out of the way.

I mean,

to not at least nod your head to the fact that the equivalent here would be if

Jeff Bezos started saying, I don't know, for whatever reason, insulting Biden.

And all of a sudden, and this happened, he disappeared for four weeks.

And then he showed up five weeks later in Tokyo and said, I'm no longer in e-commerce.

I'm going to paint.

Oh, and by the way, my stake in Amazon's gone from 16% to 1.6%.

That is what is happening in China.

Yeah.

I agreed.

Agreed.

It'll be interesting to see where it goes and why.

I'd love, there's got to be.

a bigger story here, which we'll never get to see, like how it happened and what he's doing.

He was such an Ebolean entrepreneur and so aggressive.

I've known him for a very long time.

I would love to talk to him.

I don't think he's able to talk, I suspect, or he's been very cooperative.

I don't think he has a choice.

He's sort of been stripped of his fame, essentially.

I think they basically

do what every autocratic government does through intimidation.

They're like, okay,

here are your cousins, your sisters, and your family.

And they're going to start dying or being imprisoned unless you fall in love.

That's happening across the globe in Iran, everywhere else.

Interestingly, here, one of the more interesting things that companies use to control people, non-compete agreements, have nowhere to go.

A proposed rule from the FTC would ban non-compete clauses.

I'm sure you're very familiar with these.

Chairman Lena Khan said the agreements deprive workers of higher wages and businesses of talent pools that they need to build and expand.

The agency estimates the rule would increase worker wages by $300 billion per year.

An estimated 16 to 18 percent of U.S.

workers have non-compete provisions in their contracts.

The U.S.

Chamber of Commerce opposes the rule, calling it blatantly unlawful.

What do you think of these?

They're not very enforceable is what everyone always tells me.

Outside of California, and if you're an officer of a company, they're very enforceable.

Yeah.

All right.

Talk about this idea.

So let me be clear.

I take back any negative thing I've ever seen around Lena Khan.

I think this is a hugely important move.

I had a company acquired.

I'm a big boy.

I signed the non-compete.

And basically, all I had to do was stick around at the company for three years.

And I was going to make, you know, $10 plus million dollars.

After about three months, I realized that it wasn't worth the money for me.

And when I told them I was leaving, they began sending me letters from their legal firm saying they were going to sue me if I did anything.

And effectively what you have is the following.

You have a chilling on the economy because some of the best and brightest can no longer look at all these incredible companies that Facebook acquired and all these incredible entrepreneurs.

They've gone on to do absolutely nothing.

Yeah, that are sitting on the sidelines, rest investing.

Yeah.

And they can't because they'll get sued.

And granted, we're big boys.

We took the money and we signed these things.

But what it does is the following.

It lowers wages across.

I mean, you shouldn't have sympathy for officers or people who make millions of dollars.

But so someone who's making 150 or 200 grand and might get a good offer to a competitor, another platform, can't get it.

And they use, and companies now use acquisitions to kill companies, kill innovation.

And then the employees, so what it does is it suppresses wages.

It suppresses innovation.

And who it does benefit is the entrepreneurs that sign these things and get huge payouts do well.

And also the company that's able to establish monopoly power, because Kevin Seidstrom or an entrepreneur who started a business intelligence firm that might compete with its acquirer can't go off and start anything similar.

It helps monopolies entrench their monopoly power.

It does.

I've always found them super irritating.

One of the things I do to them is I edit them and I say, but this is left out.

And I leave myself a giant hole.

And I definitely get, that's the one place whenever I do contracts, I get pushback from employers.

Well, what does this mean?

You know, I got in a beef with the New York Times over my succession podcast thing I did.

It was, it was finally settled, but it was, it was irritating.

You know, it was, I try to write as much as possible because they try to be as broad as possible when they're doing it.

So you can't do anything.

And I thought, why do you care if I don't want to work for, I don't mean the times, but in general, I have done this.

I've done it at Vox.

I've changed the non-competes.

I don't even know why they're there at all.

And then since I should be illegal in California, it was like, it doesn't really matter.

Suppressed wages and innovations and startups yeah i think what people want to do is they want to buy you to stay right and then they can do that decide that you should be able to decide if you want to stay for the money they can buy you to say they can say all right here's golden handcuffs we're going to pay you millions of dollars every year you stay and if you leave you leave it i left several million dollars when i left the firm i and i think that's fine what isn't fine is they use intimidation in law firms to start sending you letters i'm not exaggerating every week for a year what did you do i basically at one point said, okay, sue me.

I'm starting another company.

And

look, I'm not the victim here because I was paid a lot of money and I had lawyers review the contract and I knew what I was signing.

But what they do is, and this is their playbook, is they try and intimidate you and threaten to sue you and threaten to shut down your new firm and your firm won't be able to raise money.

And

you end up with, you decide, okay, I'm not going anywhere near this field.

Even something that could be interpreted

very broad.

And then what happens is

not for senior level employees, but mid-level employees that are now signing these things can't go anywhere in their sector, which suppresses their wages.

And so the shareholders of the monopoly get more money.

The senior level employees who sign these things who get huge payouts, it creates income inequality.

It suppresses innovation and it suppresses wages at a mid-tier.

These things are terrible.

I understand how the U.S.

government said it's blatantly unlawful.

I think this is a very popular thing.

You're right.

Lena's done a great thing here.

They'll probably try, some people will try to sue her back, but I would agree talent pools need to build and expand.

All right.

Speaking of no talent, let's get to our first big story.

The House of Representatives finally has a speaker, but does it have a leader?

That's a harder question to answer.

Kevin McCarthy signed away much of his position's autonomy in his deal with the chaos caucus.

Among those concessions, any one member of Congress can call for a motion to to vacate, essentially a vote of no competence.

Democrats worry that McCarthy's concessions could lead to total gridlock on key bills like raising the debt ceiling.

Were you paying attention?

I really was watching.

This was good TV because C-SPAN was there.

Best season of C-SPAN so far, right?

Yeah, I know.

It is.

It was so exciting.

It was very exciting.

What are your thoughts on this, Carl?

I was so riveted to the ridiculous drama.

I hated myself for watching it.

I was watching Stephanie Ruhl, actually.

And I kept texting her because she interviewed Lauren Boebert.

She did the whole thing.

It was sort of like a weird drama.

And it was interesting from a watching democracy in action kind of thing, which means they're all a bunch of idiots, essentially.

But it was also interesting to watch the deal making in real time.

I think he's given, I think he desperately has desperate ambition and wanted this job and will have no ability to do anything.

I don't think he cares about doing anything.

That's what it seems like because he's certainly already the election was difficult enough for him to do a good job here because of the how small it is and how easy it is for you know centrist Republicans to wander over to the Democratic side on a lot of bills.

So that's a problem.

I think that he puts himself at risk and has for this chaos, this right-wing chaos group that just doesn't really want to govern.

They just want to make a mess.

I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, you know, but the Republicans are in charge.

I think they're going to pay for it at the ballot box and you're going to have two houses of Congress controlled by the Democrats in the next election.

And it's just, is it embarrassing?

I don't know.

It's just the way things work.

But I don't think they've made themselves disagreeable to big business.

And what's interesting, he's also going to have a problem with the chaos caucus, which I'm just going to keep calling it.

He opposed antitrust legislation.

He didn't want to empower Lena Khan and the FDC.

One of his closest confidants is a lobbyist whose clients include Apple, SpaceX, his name's Jeff Miller, and Amazon.

He adopted the Republican Party line regarding big tech, taking issue with the industry's censorship and et cetera, and relationship with China and collusion with Democrats.

But honestly, I've talked to lots of tech people and he's out there looking for money and friends almost constantly and agreeing to do all kinds of deals with these people.

So I don't think he's an un-friend of tech.

I think he's quite close to tech.

Obviously, he's from California, but that doesn't mean he has to be.

I don't know.

What do you think?

How did it look?

When did you get back?

Were you watching it?

I think the Republican, and granted, there's some bias here, but if you think about how the Republican Party was a news, by the way, I just longed for the days when George Santos was Speaker of the House.

I found that

much easier.

Oh, I forgot about that story.

Look at the Republican Party.

You got George Santos, a guy who essentially just made up everything.

And I think the most interesting thing about that story is that we really pay a price when we don't have local journalism.

Yeah, right, we do.

Although local journalists did alert people, it's just that nobody else

care.

Nobody listened.

Yeah.

And then you have Matt Gates all of a sudden becomes a power player.

I know, right?

Sitting there with his punchable face.

I think that's what's happening.

But look, they're winning.

These people have been elected by people who just say, cause chaos.

We don't want government.

We literally want it to just stop.

We would like to go to zero.

And they're winning.

But I just wonder, I don't know how long he lasts.

To me, he's always come across as a very weak leader.

And that is, I'll say whatever's, it's like purely the pursuit of power and nothing else.

And

I don't think that sort of inspires a lot of loyalty.

He's given away so much.

It just seems to me that this is just the beginning of his

on his resume.

I know it was so interesting because he sort of had a shit-eating grin the whole time.

Like, and I was like, why do you want to do this?

I don't have a sense of why he wants to do it.

I did have a sense with Nancy Pelosi and previous Republican speakers.

It just feels like he just wants the job, no matter what.

And you're right, seeing the visuals of Matt Gates and Lauren Boebert, who barely won her election, and she's going to lose the next one, I think, because that guy is very popular.

The guy who was 600 votes or something in a very red, a ruby red district.

I think she's sitting there.

Like, she's really functionally, she really doesn't know what she's saying.

The interview with Stephanie was, I couldn't believe Stephanie had her on, but nonetheless, she just didn't know what she's saying.

Yeah, but the interview that really hurt her was the interview on Fox.

Fox, yes.

So Sean Hannity was with, was on the side of Kevin.

I mean, when Fox turns on you, it's like, okay, you really got a problem.

Yeah.

And that was weird.

And then it's like, why am I looking at these people and not actual?

I'm sure the real legislators are like, what the fucking hell is going on here?

Like, you know, that guy with the bad rug on his head was trying to attack Matt Gates.

Yeah,

we almost became that, whatever, I don't know if it's South Korea, that assembly that regularly breaks out into fizz fights.

And then what struck me was Kevin McCarthy said, I want to secure the southern border.

I want to take wokeism out of our schools.

And I don't agree with his version of either of those things, but I can see it why they're at least talking points.

And then the third thing, which just struck me, is he wants to defund the IRS again.

He wants to do away with this.

And it's like, okay, let me get this.

I mean, it's just, they're so the party of the 1%

that they want to defund the IRS such that wealthy people with complicated tax returns can continue to not pay taxes.

That's correct.

Because what the IRS and Kevin McCarthy are saying is that on a risk-adjusted basis, Don't pay your taxes when you're wealthy because there's a lesser and lesser chance you're going to get audited.

Also, I think they were, it was interesting because the visuals of Biden with McConnell in doing infrastructure stuff and meeting, it just was like, that's functional.

Biden at the board are functional.

And they're just doing this ridiculous like pizza box delivery stuff.

I think the press didn't do itself any favors by the coverage.

It was so like breathless.

And now this one, now this one.

I get why the political press does that, but I find it really like, is anyone talking about what it actually means?

Or is it just sort of fun to see who wins class president?

Because this is a meaningless class president.

So I was a little bit disappointed with that because it was so breathless.

And so I had no idea why it mattered.

And I don't think it'll have any impact.

I think you'll have zero impact on anything.

I don't think, you know, they'll continue not to do anything about tech.

They'll continue, it'll just bump along and nothing will happen.

And there was a lot of legislation that was passed, good legislation.

Newt Gingrich made the speaker a partisan position.

It used to be mostly an administrative position.

It was just the party put up, the controlling party put up a person who kind of ran the meeting.

It was like, okay, who's going to run this?

Who's going to count the votes?

And who's going to gavel?

And I mean, it wasn't meant to be a person who was sort of partisan and it was meant to be someone who made sure that everyone got time to speak.

And so I was hopeful for a moment, and I didn't, you know, and it didn't happen, that they were going to pick someone outside of Congress to come back and say, have Kasich do it.

He seemed like a nice guy and organized.

I thought that was an interesting idea for a while, but

it just further,

it's like, okay, you're winning on the far right.

You want chaos and total intransigence and you don't want government to do anything?

Okay.

You're winning.

Yep.

I agree.

I think it's not going to go anywhere.

One of the things that's interesting is that there's, you know, it'll be interesting to see how the voters, I don't think the voters are paying a lot of attention to it, although it was embarrassing.

But I do think it's sort of, they're going to do all kinds of dumb, loud things and not actual governing.

And that's really where they're going to lose.

Because I think voters have said in the last election, we're tired of this noise.

We're tired of election denialism in the case of Republicans, and we'd like you to do something.

And I think that's going to be the real problem.

And I don't know, it just seems, it's pretty sad when you think about what they, what they're capable of doing.

And the other thing that's a little frightening is he's second in line for the presidency, right?

This guy who's such an oaf.

The Senate is very calm.

It looks like the Senate's very calm, but they can't do anything without the House.

So I suspect behind the scenes they'll do a little more cooperation because they should be thinking about helping the American people and not sitting around trying to target individual government officials and do this woke mind rivers bullshit.

But they will.

That's what they'll do because that's what they've given into that wing of the party.

I do think a couple of the things that the side asked for was actually kind of, I agreed with, like term limits.

I was like, yes, push the term.

I

yay.

I was sort of, there were a few things.

I was like, yeah, let the legislators not have to vote on giant packages.

They don't read,

force things through, do individual pieces of legislation.

I felt that was actually correct.

But of course, the power mongers don't want that.

It means they're not going to do anything, which is probably a good thing.

Let's go on a quick break.

We come back.

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Scott, we're back.

While you were gone, AI just suddenly got real big.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about it.

It's put some tech giants defensive.

Late last year, Research Lab Open AI released its bot, Chat GPT, for public testing.

The bot impressed many with its lifelike answers.

Now, Microsoft, which is backing this,

is reportedly incorporated the bot into its Bing search engine.

So Bing is coming back, according to the information.

But other companies aren't opening the pod bay doors for new tech.

The New York Times reports that Google management has declared a code red over the chat bot.

They're also been working on their own.

Meanwhile, Google and Apple have been using AI voices to read audio books.

Let's listen to a clip.

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies with Uncle Henry and Aunt M.

Their house was small.

For the lumber to build, it had to be carried by wagon many miles.

There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one one room.

And this room contained a rusty-looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds.

Huh, that sounds good.

I don't know.

It works fine.

What do you think about this?

I mean, were you paying attention to this?

Google has its own Lambda chatbot.

Remember when that engineer said it was sentient, which it's not?

So they wanted to, you know, they've been slower to do it, but Microsoft is back here.

Maybe Bing's going to make a recovery.

Maybe this is the future of search.

It certainly gives a lot of wrong answers, but what do we think of this, or is it just another like silliness that will go away?

Well, it is powerful.

I spent a bunch of time with my youngest, my 12-year-old, asking

Chat GBT or whatever it's called questions and seeing what it came back with.

And first, we started with visuals, you know, give me a great Dane drinking Zacapa in the, you know, the format or the design of the old masters with your child.

Okay, go ahead.

He's really into this stuff.

He's got to have role models.

Anyways,

and then I'm going to do a London intervention on your children.

Did I tell you it was hanging out in the lobby and yelling at people holding a Bud Zero?

Yeah, you told me that.

Yeah.

I'm filing this all away for the report I'm going to need to do to London officials when I take your children.

But we said, okay,

write a poem, write a story, summarize the third, you know, summarize Harry Potter in two pages or less.

And I mean, it really is very, very powerful.

And right now, I think it's great marketing for Bing because it kind of gives, I mean, has anyone heard of Bing in a while?

So there you go.

You know, he introduced it at one of our codes and he yelled Bing, Bing, over and over again, Steve Bomber.

There you go.

It's now, I think, one of the 10 most valuable startups in the world.

They're doing.

29 billion.

Whether or not, I mean, it'll be interesting to see what

I predicted in my prediction stack that AI would be the technology at 2023.

And I don't, and I want to be clear, I don't know if it will actually have tangible impact that makes it the technology of the year, but it's going to be the next thing that everyone's going to get huge FOMO around.

And you're going to see $100 billion in market capitalization leaked to the company.

The subscription search engine Neva that I'm an investor in is pivoted to AI-driven search.

And all of a sudden, we have new life, and people are calling us and

want to partner with us.

So AI is about to become the new Web3, the new metaverse, the new whatever you want to call it.

It does have uses.

I think one of the things about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you never really had a use, right?

It was just speculative assets.

And so, you're like, what am I using this for?

In this case, people are experimenting with it.

You actually get to use it, right?

And it's interesting.

I just wonder if it's going to be interesting and then not interesting, like a lot of things like

Clubhouse was, right?

It was useful and then not, right?

That kind of thing.

And so, I do think that, you know, there's all this like worry, as usually there's one stupid worry, which is AI-generated

cheating in schools and writing term papers.

I mean, kids already do a bad job of that enough already.

So,

and they're trying to figure out a way to digitally watermark the text and stuff like that.

But this is, people always find ways to cheat.

To me, that story has been written way too many times.

But it makes sense that a lot of just like you know, accounting is done by computers really now, right?

Anything that can be, I keep saying this, anything that can be digitized will be digitized.

And some of this stuff shouldn't be done by people.

You know, some of this text shouldn't be done by people.

And could just as easily be read by AI.

Like people were going freaky about that.

And I'm like, I know there's an industry of reading books, but if it's done by, it costs less with them.

Why not do that?

That's that, you know, they don't, you don't still use horses, you use cars.

And so it makes sense.

There's usefulness here.

I do see there's usefulness here when you finally begin to see it.

Some of it is just a parlor trick, though, to me.

A lot of it is right now.

It strikes me that the analogy is what robotics did to manufacturing, this will do to the information age or information workers.

So if you're an editor,

you know, voiceover.

There's edit stuff, yeah.

This is just going to, just as a robot doesn't want holidays or doesn't get, have payroll taxes or demand health insurance, you know, for drafting, say drafting today's big stories, you know, there's a producer that drafts all these stories for the local for radio station for the guy who comes on and reads the weather, reads.

Which all they're doing is pulling other people's weather.

That's right.

But at some point, the

chat, the bot will be, you'll be able to instruct it and say, okay, go find me the most interesting news stories out of Asia, put it in bullet form.

And the woman who used to put that together for Tom Keene at Bloomberg is going to be out of a job.

But I think at the end of the day, this is progress.

I don't think it's going to have the kind of societal, I think a lot of people are more fearful of it than they should be.

I find that when I was asking a lot of questions.

It's like automating a lot of stuff, but go ahead.

It's elegant, but it's also wrong a lot.

And I think there's going to be huge opportunity for more referenceable AI that says, this is our summary.

This is this is the references we drew upon, because it gets a lot of stuff wrong.

And but it's fascinating.

You know, we used it.

We used it a little bit.

We had a Casey and I did a session in San Francisco that we put it on.

It was good.

Yeah.

And one of the things I think Casey was really 100% correct is that it's fine, that you can see the usefulness in it as opposed to other new technologies.

And I agree with that.

I think it's really, you can start to see that this makes sense just the way you wouldn't do.

spreadsheets anymore by hand.

You wouldn't, why would you?

Why would you not have, I think your robotics thing in manufacturing is exactly the right metaphor.

I think one of the things that's hard for people is that

it does sound, it does still sound a little stiff, right?

Some of it does.

When it was answering, it sounds like someone who doesn't quite know English, for example, when it's in English, some of the times.

They did ask who's the most powerful tech journalist.

It was me, which was accurate.

You started asking questions about yourself.

No, no, no, Naima did.

I had to go very narrow.

I'm like, who's the most popular professor at NYU who's still active, who has a podcast?

And finally, it found my name.

They found your name.

Yeah.

I do think it's interesting.

We'll see.

I think what's exciting is people will make what they want to make of it, right?

Some of the picture generating stuff is kind of silly and porny to me.

Like, I think it's just a game.

Again, it's like, okay, great.

Show me a, you know, a dog dancing on a table.

It's fun, but you stop doing it.

You're not going to do it every single day of your life.

So

what's going to be the thing you're going to do every single day of your life with it?

And that's what will be interesting, I think.

And it'll make things easier that people, that is very rote for people.

What's more interesting is this Apple soon will announce its augmented reality headset.

It's coming.

The device will run on a new operating system, XROS, and will likely be called Reality Pro.

They're using their own chips, everything else.

sort of taking a little thing from Tesla, doing everything on their own, not

getting captive by a supply chain situation.

What do you think?

It's been late.

It's been years and years late for sure.

It was supposed to debut in 2019, 2020, 21.

Now it's going to be pushed out to June.

January was when it was coming out.

Now it's coming out.

Where do you see it?

Is it next iPhone, next Google Glass?

Or are you just uninterested?

Something that isn't very useful.

We'll see when we see it, right?

So far, I don't find a use for these things on a daily basis.

But what do you think?

Well, I couldn't have envisioned, I'm not exaggerating.

I spend

between $600 and $1,000 a month on AirPods.

I have them everywhere.

AirPod Max, you have Macs, right?

I have Macs, and I give them as gifts.

I always keep a spare pair around.

They're like keys and sunglasses for me.

I just lose.

I'm always five minutes away from losing my AirPods.

If I was in the Doha Airport, it's almost instinct for me if I see an Apple logo to just go pick up a pair of AirPods, knowing that I'll either need them or I can give them away.

and that people love them as a gift.

And I find them, they're now saying that if you put using certain modes with AirPod Max, if you put the phone in between you, and I'm trying this with my 92-year-old father, who's basically can't hear at all, but if you put the iPhone in between you and the person you're speaking to and you go into a certain mode, it's as good or better than a $10,000 pair of hearing aids.

Oh, with the AirPod Max, it's so interesting.

And so I think these things are revolutionary.

I think it's incredible.

And I never would have guessed that.

So I'll reserve what I'll call final judgment until I actually put a pair on and get to wear them and try them.

But

my general gut is that I believe anthropologically we don't want anything that limits our peripheral vision or that doesn't make us look more attractive to other mates.

And I think sunglasses and fashion, the tech community other than

if I had to bet, Kara, I think this is going to be the Hermes Apple Watch.

I think it's going to get a ton of press.

It'll be cool.

And it fades away.

I think they'll make the best version of it.

It's just a question whether you find it necessary and need to use it all the the time.

But

I just don't see wanting to put this on and

isolating myself.

Maybe if I'm trying to meditate or I want to see Thailand and not with you,

something like that.

You want to see Thailand with me.

I know, but you know what I'm saying.

Not Scott's Thailand.

Scott's Thailand is different than Kara's Thailand, let's just say.

I could see using it once a week.

Like, even if I think apples will be the best one, right?

Of something I don't really want.

It's like the best bread maker.

It'll be the best bread maker.

I think it still ends up in the drawer with the Fitbit and the Nike fuel band.

I think it's going to be more Segway than AirPods.

I wish they would work on the car, but maybe they'll just be making the software for a car.

You even asked me about my Chevy Bolt, which I love.

Oh, you're into the bolt?

Oh, yeah.

The bolt is fantastic.

I sold all my vehicles.

I now have no carbon producing.

So you're like I was.

Yeah.

And I sold everything.

The Kia is still around, of course.

Now, Kia has a very successful.

You should buy the Kia EV.

It's hard to get.

It's got really great reviews.

And there's a Nero nevo i would buy a kia but i still have hopes of having sex again so okay all right nonetheless

so i have no i have no cars no planes anymore i'm going carbon negative for a year just to feel better about myself oh my gosh and wow and uh so there's this amazing service in london called wheelie which is basically uber but better

and i just got picked up in a mercedes gs450 which is the new ev for mercedes oh my god it's incredible yeah it is yeah a friend of mine incredible.

The whole, it doesn't have that stupid, like the Tesla has that computer screen right in front of you.

This has the whole dashboard.

It's beautiful.

But it's super modern and it's got those Mercedes finishes.

It's comfy.

It's plush.

I was in the Lucid.

I went to visit Lucid in California when I was there and I was so impressed by their stuff.

There it's a lot of ex-Tesla people.

The guy was great.

The CEO was like, listen, they're way ahead of us in lots of things, but we're going to catch up eventually.

But they are.

He was good because they really did admit they were way ahead in terms of manufacturing and stuff like that.

But boy, is that one impressive, beautiful.

I got driven around by one of the engineers, one of the top engineers who's this German guy almost was killed because he was driving like a German person on the Audubon.

But boy, the pickup, the comfort, the luxury.

Mercedes.

Yeah.

There's a ton of fantastic EVs.

I predict you're going to get one of those at some point.

I'm waiting for the Range Rover to come out with their EV next year.

Okay.

You don't want the Chevy Bolt like me?

Pick it up.

It could be Twinsies.

I wouldn't fit in a Chevy Bowl.

How big is that?

Alex got in it.

It's fine.

Yeah, he's taller than you.

Apple, we're very excited to see it, but we doubt we're going to use it very much.

It's our bread maker of tech right now.

Air fryer.

No, I used to.

By the way, I bought an air fryer.

Your recommendation.

I'm unimpressed.

Really?

Why?

Louis is mad I got one because he says the convestion oven.

He goes, use your stove.

It works just fine.

I was like, I love my air fryer.

Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Mike Allen is the co-founder of Axios, the author of the site's daily AM and P.M.

newsletters and the co-author of Smart Brevity, The Power of Saying More with Less.

All right.

Welcome, Mike.

Mike and I have known each other a long time.

Remember that time we had when I told you to become entrepreneurs?

That worked out well for you.

I would say it was good advice, and you always get good advice from Kariswisher.

Yeah, you were at Politico at the time and you didn't have a piece of it.

And I said, you should start your own thing.

I remember it was at a place in Washington, a restaurant with you and Jim.

Nonetheless, how's it going?

You got bought by Cox.

Can you explain that rather briefly, what's going on?

You guys started Axios, which we'll talk about brevity in a minute, but

that was sort of the premise of it is very quick, important news you need to know.

Tell me why you sold.

What was the deal?

What was the deal around that?

Yeah, the premise behind Axios was the fire hose, just too much.

And people want to know what's new, why it matters in smart brevity.

And

every morning telling people what they need to know the most important stories, like turned out to be super

popular with people.

We now have Axios, Axios Local in 26 cities across the country, Axios Pro, subscriptions, Axios Events.

And Cox Enterprises, which bought Axios.

They loved the fact that we were doing journalism in a way that also was a good business.

So Cox has journalism in their bones.

They started a century ago with the Dayton, now the Dayton Daily News.

They, of course, have the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and they've gotten rid of most of their legacy media properties, now in cable, now in the life cycle of the auto.

But they loved Axios.

They said, we like what you're doing.

We want you to do more of it.

We want you to do it faster.

So Cox Enterprises turned out to be a fantastic partner.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And you had almost sold to Axel Springer, correct?

There were

reports of conversations with Axel Springer.

We did.

And we sold to Cox Enterprises.

Great.

But they bought Politico, which you guys started too.

I remember when I visited you out in that newsroom in things.

So why now?

Because a lot of digital news media is seeing struggles.

Protocol, the recount, future.com.

I don't consider that a journalistic institution.

But nonetheless, what was the theory of selling now?

Is that you needed more heft?

Or why did you do it?

Yeah, and Kara, by the way, Politico, which was started by me, Jim Vandehey, the CEO of Axios, John Harris, who's the founding editor of Politico.

We're there with Roy Schwartz, who's a founder of Axios.

So Jim Roy and I left Politico to start Axios, and Politico sold for a billion dollars.

So it turned out to be a pretty good idea.

Yeah, it was very good.

I wish you had owned more of it.

But why now?

Why sell now?

What's the impetus for doing it?

We loved Cox.

We were not planning to sell.

We were very picky about who we might tie up with.

And what we liked about Cox Enterprises, and we found our values were very aligned, was their generational thinking.

Like Jim Vandehey, Axios CEO, has always talked about this as a forever company.

Like, how do we build something that will way outlive us?

And that's how Cox thinks.

Cox Enterprises thinks for the long run.

They want us to build for the long run, and they wanted to invest in us to grow Axios National, all of our national and global coverage, including 24 newsletters, Axios Local, which will be in 30 cities very soon.

We're hiring for a couple more.

Right now, you can get Axios Local, 26 cities every morning.

Something that sets Axios Local apart that will interest the two of you is that every single one of our Axios

journalists is from there.

So we don't hire people in Brooklyn and send them to Des Moines or to Austin.

They're all from there.

And they write for their neighbors.

They write for people in Denver or in Tampa or

just been sidewalked from Microsoft and over the years.

First off, my congratulations.

So

they paid $525 million

for Axios.

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that that's probably on an accretive acquisition, that they saw they paid a premium or what I call a strategic premium.

And is that premium a function of how they think they can grow you or they're hoping to

axios

other properties within the Cox enterprise?

What's the strategy that resulted in the kind of multiple they paid for your company?

Yeah, Scott, this is very much about growing Axios.

So we are a standalone company.

We're still Axios employees.

Alex Taylor, the CEO of Cox Enterprises, is the chairman of our board.

And like they're fantastic and supportive partners.

But one of the big ideas behind this, what attracted them and what attracted us, was Axios with its culture, its theory of the case, its leadership,

its colleagues that we would build from here.

And so I mentioned Axios National, Axios Local, Axios Pro, which are subscriptions in both the deals

space, an extension of Dan Primax Pro Rata franchise, now in media deals, healthcare deals,

and Axios Policy in healthcare and others, that all three parts of Axios would grow in the years ahead.

And so Cox Enterprises said, we like both what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're doing it.

We want to be part of that forever company.

So when you think about what you're doing, one of the things, I listen, we tried to do something like Zerica.

We never were as ambitious as you were, but it was the same idea.

And there's lots of people, whether it's Punch Bowl or various people, a puck, there's many others starting up by journalists, entrepreneurs, or reportrepreneurs.

Jessica Lesson at the Information does a subscription service.

When is peak too much of this?

Or does it take from national media?

Because you are hooking up with

a legacy media company.

What happens to all those?

And how do you look at the market, especially with the fallout in advertising, subscriptions, et cetera?

Carol, what we've found is there's more demand than ever from people to be smarter, faster about the topics that matter most.

And people talked about peak newsletters and like what...

Jim has said is that it's peak shitty newsletters that if you have peak shitty podcasts, but go ahead.

If you have

quality journalists, quality coverage, if you're not wasting people's time, if you're not insulting their intelligence, like that is a very sweet spot.

And people need,

want, demand, consume that coverage more than ever.

If it's brief.

Now, Axios said, pioneered and mastered Smart Brevity, which is the name of this book that you have written,

which is called Smart Brevity, The Power of Saying More with Less.

Talk about that idea because a lot of people think students are struggling with news literacy and critical thinking seems to be in short supply.

Should news reporting be getting snackable or how do you look at that?

I think your stuff is very intelligent and short, but a lot of it is, I was watching, we're going to talk about the Kevin McCarthy thing in a minute, but a lot of it was just breathless like silly, you know, kind of who cares?

It didn't have any meaning.

Yes.

No, that's the mistake of quantity.

for quality.

And that's what we do in the book Smart Brevity, which I wrote with Jim Vandehey and Roy Schwartz, the other two co-founders of Axios.

The big idea behind Smart Brevity, the book, is that anyone, whether you're a student, whether you are a boss, whether you want to be the boss, that you can communicate more powerfully by being sharper and

thinking through what you want to say and thinking about the audience.

Like Kara, you and I used to work at the Washington Post, and that's where those bad habits came in.

It even goes back to school where you're never assigned to come up with one great idea or to make one important thought.

No, like instead, we're told to write a thousand words or eight pages that we triple space.

And then at the post, quality was

a proxy for quantity.

That the longer you were, the more likely you were to be on the section front, even longer.

Do you remember opening up the...

I remember one time I opened up, you know, you always opened up, you went from the pun page, and then the entire two pages were full of text.

And I had the notebook dumped.

Yeah, like, and I opened it up once.

I went, oh, for fuck's sake.

And I, someone like Ben Bradley was there, what's wrong with that?

I said, everything,

everything is wrong with this.

Like, I don't know what to say.

I'm not going to do it.

And the secret for your listeners is like gravity, just something that is true, whether we care to accept it or not.

Gravity is that most people are not reading most of what we write.

And so what Smart Brevity, the book, does is show you how to think on the front end.

What is the one thing that I want people to remember?

Like what's a memorable, punchy, muscular way to say my big idea and then just say it.

Tell people why it matters, give them some evidence, give them the power to go deeper.

That's a formula for being heard in a way that you never will be with those masses of text.

I was talking about Smart Brevity, the book with one of the leading communications firms in the world.

And they were saying that they would,

when they were done with a report, they would go to write a headline or get a poll quote, like one exciting part to put in bold type, and they would realize there was no poll quote, there was no big idea.

And that's what Smart Brevity does is say, think about what that is on the front end.

Stress test that.

Think before you type.

And it also works for you in other forms of communication, including we have smart brevity for presentations and smart brevity for Zooms.

And the magic of it is it gives you time for a podcast like Pivot that's worth your time.

It gives you time to read books, articles that are worth your time.

But most of our communication is catch-up, transactional, and the way that it's presented now, we waste time hunting for the key point, hunting for what we're supposed to remember.

And like all three of us were taught when we were coming up, basically to hide it, right?

If you have three or four good things, like scatter them out through your text and make the reader find them.

Smart Brevity says, no, you do that work, put it up front, and you'll be a much more powerful communicator.

Aaron Powell, isn't brevity synonymous with economy?

And you can have brevity in a long form article.

You just have to pack more punch.

Isn't it a function of the intensity of the information, not necessarily the length?

Yeah, no, that's a great way to put it.

And what Smart Bevity says is that nine times out of 10, the best way to communicate is efficiently, right?

I have one awesome stat.

I have one great insight.

I have one big idea.

I want to sell you something.

Like I watch people try to make a sale and they're maybe a good salesperson and they maybe have a good product.

And I watch the body language of the person they're talking to and they've got the order.

They're ready to do it.

But what happens?

happens we instinctively keep talking and so very often like they'll raise so many issues that finally the person says oh think about it when if they would have just stopped they would have walked away uh with a signed order same thing when you're asking for a raise right like our tendency is to say well i know these are tough times i know you have a lot on your plate i know we're kind of no like if you want a raise like tell them what you've done for them tell them what you're going to do for them and then just stop yeah that's true Give me the fucking money.

Let me say, let me, one of the things that with these brevity things, though, we just were talking about ChatGPT and the role of AI playing in writing news stories.

We asked ChatGPT to write a fictional Axio story about Trump coming back to Twitter.

Here's an excerpt of what it wrote as read by another AI.

Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, returned to Twitter on Friday after being banned from the platform following the attack on the U.S.

Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump's return to Twitter was met with mixed reactions, with some users expressing support for his return while others criticized the decision to allow him back on the platform.

In his first tweet since returning, Trump addressed his supporters and vowed to continue fighting for what he believes in.

I may be gone from Twitter, but I will never be gone from your hearts and minds, he wrote.

Well, that was riveting.

And also very lame.

So look at how flabby that was.

Like, we definitely need ChatGPT to ingest smart brevity, the book, because it has a lot.

There are a lot of bad habits of writers.

If I were telling you that, I would be able to do it in like very snapply, muscular.

I'd tell you that

Trump came back and that people revolted online.

But then we sit at a keyboard and we start using long words.

We start using like boring phrases like the chat bot did there when Smart Brevity says, think about how I would say it to you if we were having chips and salsa.

Think about how we would say it to a human being.

Write like a human, not like a robot.

Beyond brevity, one of your things that Axios has been news breaking, right?

That's what, to me, is at the heart of like what you're doing.

Tell me something I don't know.

Always the gold standard.

Here's the problem that you may also face is a lot of your reporters, two have just left to go to big publications, John Swan being the most famous one, right?

Who broke a ton of stories and was very cheeky about it, was a very cheeky writer too.

How does that, if you're not going to rely on AI, how do you keep that going?

That was a big issue with me at Recode.

Every one of our reporters went to the New York Times or the Washington Post or Bloomberg.

Well, you've moved around a little bit yourself, and people do.

But the

smart bravity.

But the great thing about Axios is that we have tons of great reporters.

We're bringing in new talent now.

And there's no question that that is vital.

And it's something that the chatbot can't do.

Like human relationships who have an instinct for a story, the connections for a story, who can see the story

when it's in front of their face, which, as the two of you well know, is not necessarily a common trait for a reporter, and then can tell it in a way that makes me realize why I should care about it, why it matters.

Tell me something new.

Tell me something that matters in a kind of interesting way in the sea of content out there words that are always coming at us that

uh sharp smart new important

what's new why it matters make me smarter about the things that matter there's more demand for that than than ever and axios has a fantastic newsroom of people to bring you that

just just i just wanted to follow up on kara's question because it touches on our first story As the principal and founder of a company and someone whose company was acquired, what's your view on non-competes?

We We just talked about that FTC decision.

So I am not the chief of our people team, and so I'm going to leave that to people who are experts in it.

Oh, okay.

Come on, man.

Do you?

We'd like some briefings.

You're the principal of an organization that sold your company.

Do you think that organizations that acquire firms like Axios should have non-competes?

And what's your view on them?

We have people who are experts on that, and that person is not me.

That's no comment.

Oh, Mike, come on.

We don't like them.

Scott and I hate him.

And I, and I've signed them.

Mike, you didn't, you missed our conversation.

This is a big topic right now because Alina Kahn.

And I would imagine

you're very thoughtful and knowledgeable on the topic.

And anyways, you're

all right.

We're going to ask.

I have one last question.

I'm going to let you out of it, Mike, because, but you should answer.

You shouldn't like them, just FYI, because you're an entrepreneur and you want to create when you want to create.

And fuck those people, even if they gave me millions of dollars.

That's how we look at things.

But you may not agree.

You're more political.

Very Kara.

That's very Kara.

It's very Scott.

It's much more Scott than Kara.

Anyway,

can we, I'd love you to, your very, your brief thoughts on what happened this week on the Hill.

We got to go.

This is my last question.

What was that?

It's, I hate to tell you, it's a preview of coming attractions, that it was a very visceral distillation manifestation of the dysfunction that we have in our politics.

And the fact that Republicans won barely, but they won the House, and then they couldn't even seal the deal, couldn't take advantage of it.

Now, now that Kevin McCarthy is in a speaker, Axios has reporting today about the fast start that they plan.

He's going to go with red meat, try and reward the hardliners that he brought in.

So right away, they're going to go after big tech.

One of the first things they're going to do is going to the White House, trying to get any communications they've had with the five biggest tech firms, whether it's emails, memos, and then it's off to the races with Hunter Biden and Anthony Fauci and you name it.

They're going to go after it fast, both to make up for the lost time of the last week, but also it shows who has power in the Republican Party at this moment.

Wow.

Scott, last question.

What other media startups do you admire?

Who do you think is doing a really good job?

Punch Bowl is killing it.

So Punch Bowl is started by Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman, which covers the the hill.

They're awesome at what they do.

They have the formula of like know what your one thing is.

Be awesome at it.

Do better.

Do it better than anyone else.

Like they're fantastic journalists.

They have great business minds.

The two of you are rare in that that's not a super common convergence.

And they have it.

And Punch Bowl is great at what they do and is a very smart, successful media company.

That's something, yeah, you probably wish you had had done a little more of that.

They definitely focused and they're punchy, punchy, punchy.

And they were from Politico, too.

It's really interesting how these things evolve over time.

There's going to be a lot more of them, I suspect.

Anyway, the book is called Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less.

Mike, thank you so much.

You're such a gentleman.

Thanks for the conversation and congrats on what the two of you have built.

Thank you.

Congratulations to you, Mike.

All right, Scott, one more quick break, and we'll be back for Wins and Fails.

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

Mine is obviously not doing to recode what all these other people are doing.

I was too early to the game.

I was, we sold to Fox for a good sum of money, but you know, we were very early in the idea of entrepreneurial journalists before everybody else piled in.

Yeah, 525 is a big number.

I would bet that's like 12 or 13 times revenues.

Good for him.

My fail is I just found it so disheartening what took place in Brazilia.

It's just so obvious.

The world looks to America for what's best and what's worse about.

And do and until we have some sort of accountability and send a strong signal that democracies are worth protecting and that there should be ramifications and people at every level should be held accountable, we're going to start to see this across all of the West and all of these traditional pillars of democracy that we took for granted.

Those walls, I don't think they're going to fall down, but they're going to start getting chipped pretty hard.

What happens?

You don't think this, for God's sake, is it going going to happen?

What happens when it starts happening in Germany and people starts, you know, people start.

They won't do it in Germany.

Well, shit, I hope not.

They get mad when you cross the street, funny.

So, okay.

Anyways, my point is, I just think that's enormously disappointing.

And I think that we as voters

in America have a bear a lot of the responsibility.

And I don't think people, I think we know, but we don't really understand just how much impact we have on the rest of the world.

And anyway, so that's my fail.

My win is, and we've talked about this, I think Lena Khan, I think these anti-competes are non-competes are suppress innovation, end up hurting middle-class and upper-middle-income information age workers' ability to take their human capital elsewhere.

You end up in shitty situations where you don't want to work somewhere, but your options are limited because the company that's hired you, do you realize there are non-competes now for hairdressers and hair salons?

So

you can't leave and

competition

is just

one of the pillars of why our economy continues to grow and continues to best other economies and offer prosperity and freedoms.

And without competition, and they'll, you know,

it begins to atrophy.

So these non-competes are a menace and they should be done away with full stop.

You want to give someone, it's pretty simple.

You want someone to stick at your firm.

You provided them economic and non-economic benefits.

And if they choose to leave, they choose to leave.

And if someone can offer them a better life, good for them.

Good for them.

I would agree with you.

I think it's really, for the Brazil thing, there's a good piece I'd point you to in the Washington Post by Elizabeth Twaskin, how Telegram, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter were used to boost election fraud claims in Brazil before riots hit Congress and government buildings.

These companies just still continue to,

it's just, they're just vehicles of fomenting problems.

And it's not their fault.

Look, it's the political leaders who are the fault, but it's still being used in that regard.

I would agree with you.

It's still, I don't know if there's anything to be done about it, by the way.

So that's one of the problems.

I think my win has been

is that we're focusing on kind of really interesting things like AI and this emerging AI arena.

It's really interesting to me.

Like you said,

these are really interesting, and there's lots of fascinating companies.

Again, I'd point to another story that's great.

Ben Thompson of Strategic wrote exploring the impact of emerging AI epoch on DAO, led by Dali, Mid-Journey, Stable Diffusion, and Chat GPT on Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Google.

I think it's a really interesting time.

I really do.

It's really the same thing with EVs.

There's all this stuff that I find more interesting than some of the nonsense that's been going on before.

So I'm sort of super,

I'm just super interested in it.

And for thoughtfulness, I'm going to give a win I think you need to watch.

It's called A Trip to Infinity on Netflix.

It's a documentary made, Alex made me watch it in Louis.

And it's this wonderful, we watched it all together.

I'm not that smart after watching it, but it really, it's a little bit of popular science, but it's a lot of mathematicians, philosophers talking about infinity and what it means and what it is.

And it was so, just take some time and.

do something in this world of reductiveness in smart brevity, whatever brevity.

Take time not to be brief and really think hard about big questions.

This is all about stuff, science and infinity and numbers and space.

And I just think you should try a little harder to be a little less brief and think really harder in the new year.

Because a lot of this stuff, the chat BGEVs, healthcare, climate change tech, these are big fucking ideas.

Start to think big instead of this small little

bullshit that went on in Congress.

There's small people fighting for small things, and we should be fighting for big things.

That's what I would say, 2023.

I like that.

Thank you.

And watch that show.

You'll like it a lot.

It'll make your head hurt a little bit.

Anyway, Scott, I'm so glad you're back.

Thanks, Carol.

It's great to be back.

Nobody, no chat GPT can replace you.

Maybe.

Not now.

Not right this second.

They can't replace us.

They just can't.

We're not digitizable.

We're going to Munich.

We're going to Munich.

We will have a putnick kite and then in London, you will drink for both of us.

We're going to have a great time.

I have my new heart to be able to outrun you if I need to at any point.

We're going to have a great time.

We're very excited to see our European fans.

There's nobody like us.

And in advance, we're sorry.

And mostly for Scott.

Okay.

That's what I'm just going to tell Europe okay that's all they need to know that and also 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 85551 pivot anyway that's the show we're so glad you're back here with your your dirty mouth your potty mouth and isn't that what they called us or called you or called me lascivious

you're lascivious i am a long-suffering spouse anyway we'll be back on friday for more and that'll be from germany We're very excited.

Scott, I'm so glad to ask you to read us out.

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

Ernie Dutod engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miel Silverio.

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

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

We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business 2023.

It is going

fast.

Live your life.

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Decide what it is you want to do, who you want to be.

It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.

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You don't have time for this bullshit.

Live your life.

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

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

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter junk.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called it truce for their holiday and used used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.