Kirk Suspect Motives, TikTok "Framework" Deal, and Tucker Carlson Plays Detective

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Hi, everyone.

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

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

Hey, Scott, how's it going?

What a week, huh?

Yeah.

How was your weekend?

It was good.

A lot of really interesting stuff.

And then took my mom out to lunch yesterday with my ex-wife.

That was nice.

That's nice.

Yeah.

How is Megan?

She's good.

She's really been lovely to my mother, I have to say.

That's nice.

Yeah.

And then just getting

ready today for all the week because there's a big week ahead and a lot of news and a lot of news.

What did you do?

You know what?

I had one of those really lovely, but somewhat bittersweet weekends.

It was my son's 18th and he had some friends over.

And,

you know, it's just, so I spent most of the weekend like looking through old photos of him and like trying to hold back the tears.

It's just wild how fast it goes.

18?

That's a big birthday.

It is a big birthday.

He doesn't have to listen to you anymore.

Well, that happened on his third birthday.

Yeah, but in England, they can drink.

And he invited over a bunch of his friends.

He goes to this grade school and he has great friends in his house.

And they just came over and, you know, they had two beers and acted like they'd had 12 beers.

I think it's more the Pavlovian effect than anything.

And they're just such smart, good kids.

A couple of them are trying to get into Cambridge and Oxford.

You know, they're at that age.

And another one is interesting.

One of them has decided he's going to go to the Gulf.

He's this

kid who just sees all this opportunity in the Gulf and he wants to move to either Riyadh or Dubai.

And, you know, they're just such lovely young men.

And my son seemed really happy.

So, oh, it's just very nice, very rewarding.

What was your word of advice?

You're 18th.

I remember, I mean, it's probably a little different with a dad and a son, I have to say.

But I remember when they both turned 18, it was big, it was a big deal.

21 is also a big deal.

Yeah.

My advice has been

to my oldest and also a little bit to my youngest is that, you know, I talk a lot about what makes a man.

And I said, manhood, there's a lot of males who get older and never become men.

Most of them.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Okay.

Fair enough.

But in the delineation when you become a man is

this idea of surplus value.

And that is you take a lot of love from your family as a kid.

At some point, you do what you're doing.

You know, you're taking Lucky out.

You're adding surplus value.

You're adding much more value to Lucky than she is to your life, quite frankly.

That's pretty much all.

But also, Carrie,

you're making a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes.

You're creating more tax revenue than government services you've absorbed.

That's surplus value.

Yeah, I'm a man.

I am a man.

But that's my point.

My point is at some point, you notice people's lives.

You absorb more complaints than you complain.

You,

You do more cleaning around the house than people cleaning up after you.

You provide more emotional support at some point

than you're a better father to your kids than your dad was to you.

So

I'm really into this idea of surplus value.

And

at what point do you get there?

At what point do people,

he lives in a little house at his boarding school with 40 other young men.

At what point are you seen as somebody that is,

you know, adding more to the house than you're taking?

And it's okay to occasionally lean on people, and that doesn't mean don't be vulnerable.

It doesn't mean don't be a stoic.

Cause I think being a good friend means occasionally opening up to people because that's what friends want.

Friends want people that occasionally need them, right?

Right.

100%.

Both, both ways.

100%.

Yeah.

One thing I noticed with Louie, he was always giving a little more to his friends than they were to him.

And we had a long talk about it.

I was like, you need to ask for things because he's one of those guys, right?

Let me fix it for you kind of thing, which is good, but it's also important to take at various points in your life.

I find there's hacks around that.

I mean, first off,

I've met people who say, I pride myself on never asking anyone for anything.

And I'm like, well, then you're not going to, you're never going to be that close to anybody because people don't want to be charities.

People don't want to be your patient.

People want to occasionally have the opportunity to help you.

And

I like the idea.

And one of my hacks is when you ask someone how they're doing,

let them respond and then stop and say, no, really?

No.

How are you doing?

And then another hack is to say,

I'll go first.

I'm struggling at work.

Oh.

Or I'm in a bad place with my wife right now.

Or I've got this thing acting up.

I was just diagnosed with, you know, high blood pressure.

It's got me totally fucking freaked out.

When you pause and say to someone, no, really, how are you doing?

And then say,

this is what's going on with me.

You literally, it's like pulling, it's like opening the doors to a lock of a million gallons of water.

The moment you're willing to kind of sort of open up, especially as men,

and say, you know, fuck, I'm worried about money.

Scott, Scott, how are you doing?

I'm actually, okay, so the honest answer is...

No, we have to ask the second part.

You have to say fine.

And then I say,

Oh, I'm fine, Kara.

How are you?

How are you really doing?

Ever since this Kirk thing, I have been extremely online, and I think it is taking a toll on me.

I think I am disassociating from reality and relationships.

I have been so going down rabbit holes around this shit, and it is taking a toll on me mentally.

Oh, wow.

And that's fine.

That's probably a natural part of the cycle.

But the last five days have, quite frankly, have been awful.

I have this.

You had, we talked yesterday.

I have this eerie feeling that this is very ominous, that this is different.

When January 6th happened, I was angry.

I was embarrassed, but this feels different.

This feels as if it's sort of a cauldron or a crow showing up or a black cat.

Oh, wow.

Black swan.

And it's a black swan, something black.

And I don't know.

I have trouble dissecting my own anger and depression as I get older or what is probably better than most people's spidey sense about cultural and societal norms.

But as it probably should have been, the last four or five days have just not been great.

How are you?

I have hemorrhoids.

I asked for something from you yesterday.

I said, I want to be on your plane, Scott.

That's what you're focused on.

I like that.

Which part of the trip should I join you for?

And I'm like, oh, okay.

No problem.

I asked.

He's told me to ask.

I'm not a charity.

You're not a charity.

I am good.

I'm actually, I feel less.

Look, this is.

You're able to disassociate pretty well.

Here's what I didn't disassociate.

I look at history.

That's what I do.

And we're going to talk about this more in the thing is I put on from Hairspray, You Can't Stop, you know, Can't Stop the Beat, that song.

And I played it.

Like, it's, you know, the Hairspray is about an integration of a TV show in Baltimore.

It's by John Waters, obviously, Hairspray.

And I put it on and I listened to it three times.

I was like, you know, it's a really good song.

And that's what I do.

I was like, hairspray?

That's your answer?

Hairspray?

I feel like they are, the forces of retrograde, which are always there, are.

particularly desperate and strong today, right?

Like it's like Mercury in retrograde or whatever you call it.

It's like right-wingers in retrograde.

And I think that they are desperate to turn back the clock on every single thing.

And they be, and as they become more desperate, they get more vicious and violent.

And that's a worry.

At the same time, you can't stop the beat.

I just don't want to say you can't.

You can't.

You can't.

They can't.

History has shown again and again, they try it and they never win.

And so we'll talk about this in a little bit more.

This is getting very intense.

But just to press pause on that, you said something really powerful.

And that is something that does give me comfort is I do start reading a lot about history.

And for all the people saying this feels like it's going to be a civil war, we have been much closer.

I mean, there was the actual civil war, but since then, we have been much closer to civil war than we are now.

People forget 20,000 former World War I

veterans marched on Washington to protest the economic conditions of the Great Depression, and a young general gave the order to fire on those veterans.

That young general, by the way, was Douglas MacArthur, who would go on to be a World War II

hero.

The civil rights movement, there was much more anger on both sides.

So the notion that I think people who don't have a sense for history who believe that, or even just logistically, how would civil war happen here?

Because you think, oh, it'd be the red states declaring war on the blue states.

The red states can't afford to declare war on the blue states.

They're takers.

They get so much fucking money from the federal government as a means of channeling additional surplus revenue from blue states.

It's like there might be an increase in political violence, and we'll talk more about this.

But the Civil War, one, historically, we're nowhere near the same temperature as we've been several times before, as bad as it might seem.

And two, logistically, it just doesn't make sense how it would unfold.

Yeah, they still are so enthusiastic about their retrograde behaviors.

But anyway, we've got a lot to get to today, by the way.

And this is, why don't we just get started on this?

First, we have some competition as we tape.

J.D.

Vance is hosting the Charlie Kirk show over on Rumble.

He announced on X it would be an honor to, quote, pay tribute to my friend.

Charlie Kirk's suspected killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is expected to be formally charged this week.

He's currently not cooperating with authorities.

I think he's in that fuck that mode since he did what he did.

That's what he seems, as Scott and I have talked about, to be terminally online.

Robinson's motive is still unknown.

There's a lot of speculation and misinformation.

floating around.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox shared some details of everything saying Robin was indoctrinated with leftist ideology and spent much of his time on the deep, dark internet.

I don't, he just Cox is saying that Robinson had a roommate and romantic partner who was transitioning.

Again, they're not providing any details.

So I'm not going to believe anything, including what Cox said.

I think he is trying his best and he's getting enormous pressure from Trump.

But when asked it was relevant to motive, Cox said, that's what we're trying to figure out.

Though FBI Director Cashfeld shared a link to a Fox News story about it on X.

I mean, literally, make your own announcement, Cash Patel, if you don't mind, rather than doing stuff like that.

What a, what an idiot he is.

So we don't know his motives at all.

Again, as Scott and I have been saying, let's find out.

Obviously, when you move to murder, there's something very deep and tragic going on and also possibly mental illness too.

Talk about, you just talked a little bit about your overall thoughts in terms of what we know and don't know.

And since you've been down a rabbit hole, I just don't, I'm not going to believe anything until a trial.

That's my feeling.

I just don't, I don't trust Cash Patel in any way.

I think people are grabbing bits and pieces for their own.

You know, the bullet was trans, no, it wasn't.

The shooter was trans, no, he wasn't.

Oh, his roommate is trans.

Well, I don't know.

And so I'm going to go with the, and I don't even know it has anything to do with it.

Like, that's the other thing is that's the really key part.

So your thoughts?

It's clear what's happened here.

Governor Cox made the mistake of acting like a leader

and trying to take down the volume and not engage in the violence entrepreneurship that the president and some people on the left, but mostly people on the right, have engaged in to find an opportunity

around violence to create advantage at the expense of potentially fomenting more violence.

So let me go to the notion, let's assume his roommate was transitioning.

Okay.

So the fuck what?

If he had been in a relationship with a white girl in a sorority at ASU, does that mean this is the Republican's fault?

I mean, who the fuck cares?

What does that have to do with anything?

With anything.

I agree.

His grandmother was like, where MAGA?

I'm like, I don't care.

That has nothing to do with it.

Thank you, grandma.

And

this all goes.

What's so frustrating for me about this is look at the data and to try and figure out who the real culprit is such that we can stop this or reduce it, the likelihood of it happening again.

98% of mass shooters are men, mostly young men.

Almost every act of political violence, of course, here's my rabbit hole.

Let's just talk about the right, mostly the right, but also the left is doing everything they can from interpreting the font on these bullets to who their roommates are to find evidence, to cherry-pick evidence to try and show that it's the other side of the political spectrum's fault.

And this is the bottom line.

This kid, he was 22, was raised in a Republican household, registered unaffiliated.

And I'm not sure, but I don't think he's voted yet.

No, he didn't vote.

Okay, Thomas Matthew Crooks, the person who shot Trump and Butler, registered Republican.

And when he was 17, he gave 15 bucks to a voter registration drive that used Act Blue.

Luigi Mangioni.

He was more mission and policy oriented in so much as he'd taken on corporate greed and healthcare as his cause, but he didn't come across as partisan or of any left or right aligned political movement.

Vance Luther Bolter, age 57, the alleged killer of the Minnesota political figures, he was more politically oriented, but ultimately no more politically engaged than the stereotypical angry uncle at a Thanksgiving who rants.

Cody Allen Ballmer, age 38, arrested after the attempted

arson and to kill

attempted murder of Governor Josh Shapiro.

No political associations beyond some angry social media posts.

David DuPage, age 42, attacked Pelosi's husband with a hammer, broke into Pelosi's house, very online and immersed in conspiracy content, but again, not a member of any group.

And so each side is trying to blame the other, and then media tries to play referee to get their ratings up.

But this is the bottom line.

What do we have in common across all these acts of violence?

They are almost always young men, and they are almost always not political political extremists but extremely online so if you just want to reduce how about we just reduce violence including political violence including mass shootings let's figure out how we get more young men to engage with guardrails in the form of relationships more male mentorship more males in high school more economic opportunity yes sorry more safeguards and how about we hold The rage machine that is driving 40% of the S ⁇ P's value.

How about if we hold them to the same standards we hold every other media and say, if you elevate content that has been directly correlated to rage, which results in violence, mostly violence against themselves, social media creates a lot of violence against themselves among young girls, a lot of violence

of young men against themselves, but also with young men sometimes, and I don't mean to pathologize young men who are extremely online.

Most of them will not pick up a gun, but some of them do.

That's right.

So if anyone is interested in actually reducing the violence, they're going to talk about removing Section 230 protection for algorithmically elevated content and providing more opportunity and more empathy and quite frankly, more love and relationships for young men.

Yeah, I'm going to interject.

I would say they don't want to do that.

Groups do not want.

They want to engage in this sort of sharks versus jets kind of situation that's going on.

And it's like, I have to say, one thing I picked up my mother's phone she had so she's somehow gotten on some trump group things her texts were full of the most heinous efforts to get money charlie's a martyr charlie's this you must fight the left who's trying to kill us it was so upsetting to read her texts i deleted every single one of them i tried to block them all um it was such And her email was worse.

It was all these like efforts.

And, you know, it's fine.

JD Vance can go on his show, but they're all doing it in order to raise money for themselves and to push their cause.

This is just grotesque.

Same thing with Donald Trump Jr.

Like they're all trying to push.

They literally are walking over this guy and using him as like a way to raise money, a way to get people mad, a way to get political advantage.

I mean, it's grotesque at this point.

Like, have they forgotten their friend died?

or something like that?

I just find it really strange.

Like the stuff on my mom's phone was so disturbing, Scott.

I couldn't, I was sort of like, and then you have someone like Elon Musk, who is making it worse.

Like Democrats of the Party of Murder?

Party murder.

He just was like, he's putting out lists of people who said, who said negative things about Kirk.

He's done like a number of things.

We have to stop these people.

We have to, and now the words de-indoctrinate.

We have to, it sounds like fucking Russia.

Like it's really disturbing.

Let's move to that because people across the country are getting fired.

Suspended or investigated over posts criticizing Charlie Kirk after his assassination.

Washington Post columnist Karen Attia just shared a little while ago that she's been fired over her blue sky posts, which are at best.

Nothing, like seriously, nothing that she's done here has engendered that they're waiting to fire her.

That's another story.

But far-right activists have been doxing people, they say, are celebrating Kirk's death.

Then they're just deciding what a celebration is and what's not, just regular criticism.

Defense Secretary Pete Heggs has ordered his staff to identify military personnel who mocked uh kirk's killing so they can be punished these are the free speech warriors these are the people that went on and on about so cancel culture they used to their advantage and now they are doing cancel culture in full they are the most cynical non-free speech people i have ever encountered and it's really astonishing how quickly they move to to this thoughts well again it's this term i like it's violence entrepreneurship, trying to reap capital and advantage from an opportunity where you see violence.

And two, another thing we're just not talking about is the CCP and the GRU are having a field day.

And

do your own research here.

Go on TikTok or go on threads or Instagram or on Facebook or on Twitter.

And when you see something really inflammatory from either side, Look at the comments.

The algorithms elevate content that gets a lot of comments because every comment results in the person, the people who respond to the comment coming back, and that's another impression, another ad,

more shareholder value.

Look at the really heinous comments that would likely incent and do motivate more comments, more Nissan ads, more shareholder volume.

Click on the profile.

It's someone with 38 followers.

Yes, exactly.

Guess what?

If I were in the GRU, in the CCP, and I couldn't beat us economically or kinetically, might I decide to do what is happening now and divide us internally, make the call come from inside of the house?

Putin has talked about this very specifically.

And by the way, the Nazis talked about it.

I mean, they have done a great job of convincing us, no, the threat isn't

massive energy, a willingness to kill millions of their own people, technology, the largest consumer economy in the world, India.

China, and Russia binding together to push back on our interests.

We've decided no, it's some young white liberal saying really heinous things, and they are heinous things.

So let's elevate that content.

Or let's listen to senior advisor Stephen Milner claiming that it's civil war against the Democrats.

Let's elevate that content by filling up anything with those feeds with bots, with comments that take that content beyond its organic reach on its own.

And what Governor Cox initially said, go out and touch grass, go out and touch people, because generally what you find is.

Well, with their consent, but go ahead.

Just go touch people.

Go out.

Go out.

I don't think so.

I think we need to be more affectionate.

But anyways.

I understand, but you should really ask.

And I also think we need a lot more sex and a lot more alcohol.

Trust me, kids, the risk to your 25-year-old liver of alcohol is dwarfed by the risk of social isolation.

I go to conservative places.

I meet a lot of people.

In person, it is shocking how lovely people are.

I get it.

I agree with you.

But I'm just saying, it's being for you've got, speaking of you going down a rabbit hole, you have to get offline.

Like you must literally just,

someone said, I am now 100% confident that some guy named Aesthetica, that Charlie's assassination was carried out by Charlie's, because he's a friend of his, right?

It was carried out by radical left-wing transgender terror cell.

Let's get into the evidence.

And then Elon Musk tweeted, seems likely.

Now, Elon, I'm sorry your kid's trans and you have this reaction.

I'm not sorry your kid's trans.

I'm sorry that you're such a jackass about it and such a strange, twisted person.

But to do things like this, just to create this, I think they believe there's a transgender terror cell, which there isn't, but fine.

There's no evidence.

The only evidence we have on mass shooters is the following.

The overwhelming evidence is that they're young men who are

disenfranchised.

This isn't about division.

It's about the disenfranchised.

This isn't even about, I would argue, it's not even about political extremism.

It's about being extremely online.

Yeah.

And you and I agree on that.

You could get around the most hostile table of political,

you know, you could take Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson, these shooters, these, these folks committing this political violence, they are less politically affiliated than those two.

These are people who have not connected to others and have easy access to weapons, to guns, and have no judgment.

And go extremely online and don't have

a good friend, don't have a romantic partner, don't have in-person work, don't have a male role model to say, something's going on with you.

What's going on?

What are you thinking?

Where are you spending your time?

No, that's not right.

Come to my church group.

You're going to see how good people are from both political spectrums.

Hey, have we been thinking about getting in better shape?

I noticed you're acting strange lately.

What's going on?

You know how much we care about you, right?

Are you all right?

It's a case of lack of mammalia.

If you put an orca in a tank alone, it goes fucking crazy.

Most animals.

The worst thing you can do to a dog is leave it alone.

And then when you put it in a tank where they start pumping in sound waves to make the orca go crazy, because whoever pumps in the sound waves can make billions or trillions of dollars in shareholder value, which is effectively what's going on.

40% of the SP right now is represented by companies that have an economic incentive to divide us.

And instead, we want to find,

dissect the font on a fucking bullet so we can blame the other side.

It works so well.

That's the thing.

Let me go back to Spencer Cox because people are like, you shouldn't like him.

I'm like, I'm going to a little bit, okay?

He has kept up his criticism of social media since you're doing it right now, calling it a cancer.

In an appearance on Meet the Press, he appeared to be taking notes from you, Scott Gallery.

Let's listen.

I think anyone

can change the trajectory of this.

It truly is about every single one of us.

And I can't emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us.

Those dopamine hits, these companies, trillion-dollar market caps, the most powerful companies in the history of the world, have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage, which is the same type of dopamine, the same chemical that you get from taking fentanyl, get us addicted to outrage and get us to hate each other.

I'm seeing it in real time since the tragic death of Charlie Kirk.

I'm seeing it in every corner of our society.

The conflict entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us and we are losing our agency and we have to take that back.

We have to turn it off.

We have to get back to community, caring about our neighbors, the things that make American great, serving each other, bettering ourselves, exercising, sleeping, all of those things that this takes away from us.

Conflict entrepreneurs.

I love that.

You should feel that.

Conflict entrepreneurs.

That's exactly what they are.

100.

And the same conflict entrepreneurs, may I point out, people like Elon and Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, are shutting down actual free speech, which people should be able to do.

Thoughts?

At what point do we get serious about this problem?

The media has a vested interest in pretending the referee and in getting more clicks and more views.

And notice how quiet big tech has been on this.

They know what's going on.

They know.

I mean, it's really.

They'll try to shut down Cox.

You know that.

Anytime you arbitrage one substance into another, you have externalities.

The greatest arbitrage in history has been fossil fuels to energy.

You can't build a hospital without massive fossil fuels.

The externalities there, carbon, are obvious.

The externalities of turning attention into shareholder value.

The externality there is rage.

These guys know it.

They know what's going on.

They know that they profit off of this divisiveness and this rage.

They're not bad people by commission.

They didn't set out to do this.

They are bad, irresponsible Americans by efforts of omission they are ignoring and obfuscating what is going on here they know what's going on and also the illusion of complexity has been weaponized here there are common sense people are bereft and throw up their arms and say it's only going to get worse bullshit there are absolutely common sense solutions here no social media under the age of 16 no smartphones in schools they have banned uh phones in i think about 19 states and and that's with a lot of teachers telling me that kids can't wait to get to their phones even when they ban them, right?

That's even a problem.

That's okay, but at least they're not.

I don't think my kids are capable of any longer sitting through a two-hour movie because of the way their brains have been have been rewired.

And again, it's political.

I don't care.

In the next six hours, there's going to be more gun deaths in America than there will be in the UK over the next 12 months.

This is, if we want to get serious, there are a variety of programs, more after-school programs, national service, more men in primary education, more money for young people such that they're more economically secure and

they start mating, 8 million houses in 10 years, such that people have something to look forward to and a way to save money and don't feel is hopeless.

Also, let me just take a page out of the right.

We have orientation at universities for a week.

We have increasingly spent more time at orientation talking about mental health and saying, Look, if you're feeling bad because you get your first D, if you're feeling bad because you haven't had a lot of experience with relationships and someone breaks up with you, that is a normal part of life.

And what has happened over the last 20 or 30 years is because kids are so sheltered with concierge parenting and with social media, you might feel hopeless.

It's not hopeless.

Trust me, we've all been there.

You need to reach out to someone.

There is something to the notion that these kids have turned to this oppressed or oppressor ideology and are going on the hunt for people that say certain things.

I do think that's changing so I hope so.

And now it's the right that's doing it.

Just let's be clear.

I actually don't agree, Kiera.

One out of three people on campus now believe that political speech and certain words are violence and can warrant actual violence.

And it is mostly from kids who are strongly on the left.

I think that's changing.

Hold on, let me finish.

College should be a safe place physically.

It should be a dangerous place intellectually.

Yes, agreed.

And we have to tell these kids, and I've seen this first hand, I've seen them turn on each other.

There's like two or three kids who are brave enough to support Trump in my class, and everyone turns on them.

We are supposed to say provocative, offensive things.

Can I make a point there?

Yes.

If they want to do that, then they should be strong enough to defend it.

Like, that's actually a good thing to be turned on.

Agreed.

Right.

Critical thinking.

Let's debate it.

Let's debate it.

Let them have it.

But I have to say, one of the things you accuse the left of, not you, one accused, is like, oh, they're shutting things down.

Is the people that are actually banning, getting people fired

and are the free speech warriors.

And it wouldn't be so irritating that they were such free speech warriors lecturing us.

You know, someone like Chris Rufo, the rest of them are now using cancel culture oppositely.

And it's just, it's typical.

We have to move on, but conflict entrepreneurs, Governor Cox has that right.

That's what they're trying to do.

And unfortunately, because this is a dope mean hit, we are drug addicts.

We are addicts.

But you've already seen his narrative change.

And quite frankly, Governor Cox, stick to being a leader.

You can see, you know what happened over the weekend.

He tried to go back again.

Over the weekend, Trump called him and said, sign up, motherfucker.

And all of a sudden, he's saying that there was certain leftist ideology.

No, there isn't.

Certain leftist tendencies.

He may have had a roommate that was going through transition.

Who cares?

Why would you even bring that up?

It doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter unless they're there.

No, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter at all.

This is a young man.

He was dating someone that went to a gun range.

This clearly is the right's fault.

Said no Democratic governor ever in the midst of this type of violence.

Ever.

Nothing about his grandmother.

Great.

His grandmother's MAGA.

We're not blaming her.

Care.

Right?

Exactly.

He likes Sidney Sweeney and her family is MAGA.

It must be a conspiracy from the right.

Yes, exactly.

It's exhausting people.

Just pull yourselves out of it.

Okay, let's go on a quick break.

When we come back, Prompt teases a TikTok deal.

We'll see.

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Scott, we're back.

President Trump says the big U.S.-China trade deal in Europe is going, quote, quite very well.

Who knows?

He posted on Truth Social that the two countries have reached a deal on TikTok that will make the young people very happy.

I don't think he named TikTok, but whatever.

That's what he was talking about.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, meanwhile, is calling the quote, framework of a deal, which always makes me like wonder what the hell's going on.

Parent company Byte Dance is supposed to sell U.S.

assets or face a nationwide ban by Wednesday, the 17th, which is just a few days.

Trump is saying he'll talk to Jinping on Friday.

All of this comes as China accuses NVIDIA of violating antitrust law.

I don't know.

Everyone who's near this deal tells me it's such a fake deal.

It's such a like they're really not separating them.

It's really not going to be anything but a lot of

fakery on top of what it is.

And then they'll give some pretty stuff to Larry Ellison, who seems to be winning all day long.

Your thoughts?

I just think it's bullshit.

I think this is a fake story.

Let me use the

trend.

Fake news.

I just don't.

I don't.

You don't do it with conviction.

I don't buy it.

I don't know.

It's fake news.

It's from.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Sure.

and so they're just trying to stave off that that deadline yeah and it's an excuse to to not ban tick tock because trump has decided that tick tock the ccp when they're about to be banned said dial up the algorithm to be positive trump and then somebody on his team came back and said oh no tick tock's good for us and all of a sudden he now likes it and one of his biggest donors who gave him nine figures is one of the biggest shareholders in TikTok.

This is pay-for-play, and he thinks it's good for him.

So he didn't like it until he liked it.

And also, this represents a breakdown in government because this was a law passed by both houses, signed into law, and we've decided just not to do it.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

By the way, Scott Descent is starting to really irritate me on so many levels.

He's like, such a suck up and such a like, he's punching people.

I don't like that much either.

I don't care if it's Elon he's punching.

I don't like him punching anybody.

Well, I thought violence was never the answer, Kara.

That's correct.

I know.

I just find it so like, ugh, ugh.

Anyway, yes, Scott and I will believe it when we see it, and we think it's probably a lot of nonsense and that you aren't going to be protected from the CCP with this gang, that's for sure.

OpenAI is also making some big moves on the way to becoming a for-profit company.

This is something they've been trying to do.

Musk has been trying to stop,

they're finalizing terms for a new agreement with Microsoft.

Microsoft is expected to take roughly a 30% take in the reorganized company.

OpenAI's nonprofit parent will also hold an equity stake valued over $100 billion.

But attorneys general in California and Delaware say they still have serious concerns about user safety, good for them, and want to see improvements before signing off on restructuring.

What do you think about this?

I assume there'll be an IPO, correct?

That's the way it looks like it's heading once they get this through, this idea of essentially a for-profit company with a vague non-profit hanging over it.

And again, Musk still has legal challenges to a lot of this, and he has a lot of allies still.

I think it would be so interesting to see what OpenAI's legal bills are

and what's happened to the cadence of those legal bills because there is so much money on the line and this thing is so just as there's technical debt, you know, you come into an organization and they've invested so much in old mainframe technology that I was on the board of a Yellow Pages company and they said when we actually fired the CIO was when he came in and basically said,

you know, it's going to take us 18 months to reconfigure the technology.

It's like, it's a fucking Yellow Pages company.

This isn't a cloud company.

And he kept going on about technical debt.

So the term technical debt means pre-existing investments make it just really difficult to sort of untangle everything and expensive.

I would love to know what the legal debt is at OpenAI.

And that is this company has such an unusual corporate structure that they are trying to unwind

and how much they've invested in legal work.

I would love to know how much they're using AI.

They must be spending $10 or $20 million a month on lawyers right now.

I would love to know as a case study,

if and how they're deploying their own AI to reduce their own legal costs.

That's so funny.

But what about an IPO?

I assume if this gets through and the restructuring gets through, which probably it will given the money at stake here, because they're spending money all over the damn place.

They got to get cooking on the making of the money.

It's a really interesting question because there are 3,700 publicly traded companies right now.

That is down by 50% since 1997.

It's down 17%

just since COVID, because every time there's an acquisition or a bankruptcy or a take private,

it's like in China now, there are more people dying than there are being people born.

So the same thing, there are more companies coming off of the NASDAQ and the S ⁇ P than are going on.

And we'll talk more about this.

Some of it say it's regulation, but more than anything, a company like OpenAI, I think OpenAI just did a secondary where they gave every employee like a $1.6 million bonus.

They can raise capital, they can acquire companies, and they don't have the regulatory burden of being public.

So unfortunately, unlike in 2003 when Google goes public at effectively, what was $2 a share and gives retail investors the chance to 100x their money, there's so much money in the private markets that effectively, as long as the company is still jamming its current investors and private market investors and institutions, which tend to be wealthier Americans, say, no, no, no, no, we want to hold on to all that juice ourselves.

So, increasingly, you would have never had a company like OpenAI worth a half a trillion dollars having not gone public.

So what does that mean?

It means the retail investor no longer has access to these great growth companies, and these guys have less incentive to go public.

And typically when they do go public, it's the following.

All right.

The smart guys who really know our company have decided there's not much upside left here.

We got to find a group of people who will turn this into a meme stock.

Oh, I know, public market investors.

Right.

Just like what's happening with Tesla.

So all of the juice, you know, the juice has been squeezed by the time these guys go public.

Now, does that mean there's still not opportunity in the public markets?

No, there probably still is, but you would have never, it used to be, it took a company seven years to go public.

Now it's 14.

The really good companies are staying private because they can get everything they need in the private markets now.

So we'll see.

This is the seventh most valuable company in the world, I think, right now.

I know.

It's not public.

It's crazy.

The only one that I was was thinking of that was really valid, but never went public was Mars.

Remember, the Mars people never went public.

The Mars family.

Also, it used to be a company called Bechtel.

And then before that, my biggest client in the 90s was Levi Strauss and Company.

Yeah.

And these were not like big companies because

the only way you could attract employees, make acquisitions, all of that good stuff was to be a public company.

All of those things are now available in the private markets.

So, I mean, we'll see what happens, but they definitely probably will go public, presumably, correct?

That's my, I'm assuming they will at some point

when that moment passes.

I want to mention a bizarre moment from Tucker Carlson's interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week.

Carlson brought up a conspiracy theory about the death of an OpenAI whistleblower, which is being pushed by Elon Musk, by the way, suggesting it was murder, not suicide, as authorities had ruled.

Let's listen.

I don't think we should say, well, he killed himself when there's no evidence that the guy was depressed at all.

I think, and if he was your friend, I would think he would want to speak to his mom.

I did offer.

She didn't want to.

So

do you feel that

when people look at that and they're like, you know, it's possible that happened, do you feel that that reflects the worries they have about what's happening here?

Like, people are afraid that this is like...

I haven't done too many interviews where I've been accused of like...

Oh, I'm not accusing you at all.

I'm just saying his mother says that.

I don't think a fair read of the evidence suggests suicide at all.

Well, now, thank you, Inspector fucking Cluso.

What are you talking about?

This is like, this was the craziest thing.

Like, don't you think we should entertain conspiracy theories that there's a cult in, you know, there's a murderous cult inside of open AI?

I mean, I don't know why he sat down.

I, I was, I couldn't understand why he would talk to this guy given, I get why he would, but ew, ew, the whole thing was really strange.

tucker carlson's gotten really strange like everything else first off uh tucker carlson now appears to be a fully credentialed psychiatrist around self-harm yeah also a detective because he's decided that this guy does not qualify as one of the 25 000 people who every year decide i'm really down i'm really depressed and oh by the way there's a gun upstairs i i know what to do

Okay, first off, this is just all about money.

And that is Tucker Carlson, who I think is a bright guy, decided, oh, I know how to get this to be a Ted Cruz like viral moment and be number one instead of number four in podcasting and make more money.

I'll create a rumor in front of one of the most powerful people in the world that he's a murderer.

That's what he's saying right here.

Yes, he is.

That's what Sam was like.

I've never been accused of murder.

He's saying, I think you murdered

this guy in some sort of thriller.

And let's go back.

Aside from the fact that while I think Sam Altman might be a sociopath and that is ignoring the harm of AI because there is so much pressure on him to live up to the incredible expectations, and that's, that is not a nice thing to say, but I have a lot of fact patterns around all these guys who in their hushed tones pretend to give a flying fuck and then go on to build character AIs with no guardrails that result in real harm.

I think, I believe that there is no, that economically, it would be really stupid for Sam Altman to put out a hit on one of his employees.

I would agree.

For a lot less money, he can give money to Charles Schumer

and to Senator Cotton and make sure that there's no legislation that gets in the way or slows down AI or show up to a dinner and say, gee, President Trump, your big orange cock is like nothing I've ever seen.

And it's so huge.

Apparently, it's little and mushroom shape, but go ahead.

And you're such a great kisser.

It is so much easier and low risk for Sam Altman to pursue legal means of economic success than to order a hit on one of his employees.

Sam Altman is already a billionaire.

He would never risk spending the rest of his life in prison.

He would never risk the economic implosion of putting a hit out on his own employees.

And Tucker Carlson, in my opinion, no one should go on that show if they're going to be falsely accused of being a murderer for clicks.

Agreed.

I agree.

I think it's crazy that he sat there i i actually texted him i'm like oh so you're a murderer good to know it's just ridiculous like that this guy did this anyway uh we don't believe he's murderer just officially all right scott let's go on a quick break when we come back paramount skydance tries to shake up hollywood with a new deal

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Scott, we're back in the small ball area.

As I predicted last week, Paramount Skydance has preparing for a mostly cash bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, backed by the Ellison family, who's richer than ever.

For those trying to keep score at home, Paramount itself was just acquired by Skydance last month, and Warner Brothers Discovery has plans to split into two separate companies, one with the big studio and streaming properties, the other gets the live cable networks.

Currently, Warner Discovery has double the market cap of Skynet.

It's a lot of money.

It's $30 some billion dollars.

This would be for all of it.

So, not to split it up.

Obviously, they want the Warner Brothers studio and streaming properties.

I'm not sure why they're not waiting for the split.

The bid hasn't been submitted.

We'll see what the FCC thinks, although that guy's a toady to the Trump administration.

And if Ellison wants it, there is some will get it.

And,

you know, we'll see.

There'll be other bidders, presumably Comcast and some others, if there are bidders.

In fact, thoughts?

This is huge.

And the last, I mean, because there's so much news, this would have been huge news.

It's been drowned out.

Warner Brothers Discovery, who has the highest paid investment banker in history, their CEO convinced a bunch of investors to buy Warner Brothers from AT ⁇ T.

And in exchange for destroying a massive amount of shareholder value, has taken out about a third of a billion dollars.

He's the most, maybe with the exception of Chamath Palihapatiya, he's the most well-compensated investment banker in history.

Now, what you have here is in the last five days, the stock is up 55%.

It's had its best week in history.

Why?

Because

Larry Ellison figured out there should be a number two to NVIDIA, stopped doing stock buybacks, made a massive bet.

on being the number two infrastructure provider in AI

and announced an agreement where OpenAI was going to commit to $60 billion a year in compute from Oracle, despite the fact it's only running at $10 billion a year.

And in one day, Larry Ellison increased his net worth $130 billion.

So he can afford this easily.

Larry Ellison could buy three Warner Brothers with the gain in wealth he registered in one day.

And this is where it all heads.

And I think it's fucking fascinating.

And I wish I had the time to do more about this, but instead, I'm spending a ton of time trying to talk about young men and its relationship to online speech and everything.

Anyways, I went to go see The Fantastic Four.

I hope there is never a sequel or a superhero movie ever again.

I just, I hate these superhero films.

Yeah, this one didn't get good reviews.

Superman did, but go ahead.

Anyways, I love Vanessa Kirby.

I think Pedro Pascal is a movie star, and my son loves superhero movies.

So we went.

And like all 15-year-olds, or not all, my son makes me stay through to the very end because these goddamn

movie makers always have an Easter egg at the very end.

Do you realize how long the credits went on for?

A long time.

I've done it.

I've done it, my friend, with my sons.

Okay.

So I typed into AI approximately how many people worked on Fantastic Four.

Somewhere between 12 and 1,500 people worked on that film.

And I got screenshots online.

It had things like costume design, Sweden, and it had 20 people.

This is what's going to happen.

They're going to roll up these companies.

And then at some point, Larry's going to go say to his son, All right, I gave you a bunch of money to plan traffic.

Now it's time to get serious.

Are they going to do that through innovation or new types of movies?

No, this is what they're going to do.

That movie probably cost $200 million to make before even marketing.

He's going to go, We're very good at AI.

We have the best AI infrastructure, cloud relationships with LLMs.

I need you, David Ellison, to come here and we're going to figure out how to take a $200 million film and produce it for $20 million by going through

each line item.

Let's say costume design,

50 or 60 people.

We're going to use AI, the Agentic layer that speaks to AI-enabled fabricators in China.

And we're going to need three highly skilled costume designers to basically put in long prompts that use 3D imaging and all sorts of shit to basically get the costumes made with three people, not 20.

And they're going to go through each of these things that have 30, 40 people, and then we're going to reduce it to three or four.

And it's going to happen at Ellison's company with the help and the urging of dad at Oracle.

And then with TikTok involved with it too, the whole thing.

I know that's interesting.

You thought this was like a nothing burger, small ball.

You always are like, parent, who cares?

But you think this is a big deal?

Or you just said it's...

In the world of media, it is.

But when I say small ball, if Larry Ellison had 15 kids, he could give each of them a paramount.

Yeah.

With the economic gain he had in one day.

Yeah.

So there's the economy and then there's the economy, which is AI.

I mean, everything is being driven.

Who would have thought you're about to see costume designers, 70% of them get their real estate licenses in Hollywood

because Oracle announced its best earnings in history.

This is impacting everything.

Well, see, others will try to get this.

Comcast will try to go for this.

Maybe Amazon.

I don't think they can afford it.

That's the thing.

He's so fucking rich.

This is the thing, Kara.

These are shitty businesses and they're declining.

And

I put together, I was approached by a group.

Here's two examples of companies that are going to get the shit kicked out of them with AI.

Gartner has this amazing business where if you're a small regional bank trying to figure out, should we use Azure or AWS, you call a stay-at-home mom who's learned everything about cloud companies, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

She makes 200 grand a year.

She works from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon answering questions from clients.

And Gartner charges First National of Oklahoma $120,000.

Now that person, the CTO, and they do a good job.

It's an amazing business.

Stock has tripled since 2017.

They do an amazing job.

Now the CTO at First National of Oklahoma has figured out if they type in a thoughtful prompt, they can get pretty much the exact same answer back for their $20 a month, you know, GPT-5 Pro subscription.

And since the beginning of the year, Gartner's stock has been cut in half.

And I think it's,

I, AI is going to come after that business.

OnlyFan.

I was approached by a group of people that said, we're putting together an investor group to buy OnlyFans.

Why are they selling?

Because to do 60 minutes of video cam with a live creator costs anywhere from $300 to $1,200, depending on the popularity of that creator.

AI is going to start to create AI girlfriends that get closer and closer to the thrill of watching a live person talk dirty to you or or whatever.

Not illegal either.

And the guys, the folks that own OnlyFans are like, we're out.

We have seen the future.

I mean, you're going to see so many.

So much of this stuff.

So many interesting places.

And here's the issue, moving to solutions.

This is going to create so much economic value.

Here's an idea.

Any company that does over a billion in profits, we have a progressive tax structure of, say, 40%.

And we figure out really thoughtful retraining and apprentice programs that people can sign up for and say, I see the writing on the wall.

You know, I've always wanted to be,

you know, I've always wanted to be, who knows?

I've always wanted to be

Christ, a therapist.

I've always wanted to be in nursing.

I've always wanted to be, do something

with my hand, whatever it is, retraining, right?

But instead, we're like, let the thoroughbreds run and let the shit shake out where it is.

That's right.

That is correct.

Guess where we are?

Ellery Ellison is now trained daddy from gilded age that is what's happened here uh we'll see how that goes it's not going so well for trained daddy right that was almost as good as your your what was that you were making a reference to that 50s musical the sharks and the what was it the sharks and the jets west side story i'm very culturally could you be any older oh stop jesus trained daddy gilded age is very popular i'm sorry to tell you that but it's owned by uh warner brothers by the way speaking of which he will now own trained daddy oh is that the one with uh cynthia yeah cynthia nixon yeah

nixon yeah yeah well anyway we'll see if they get it.

I can tell you one thing, Kara's wisher will not be working for the Ellisons.

Let me just make that statement right now.

Anyway,

one more corporate shake-up.

Very quickly, Trump is now suggesting that U.S.

public companies should no longer report earnings quarterly, but every six months.

I think you might like this idea.

I didn't hate it,

but maybe not.

No, shareholders should know what's happening at companies, although then people focus on the short term.

Your thoughts very quickly.

I do like it.

It's a response.

And the reality is that there's a fine line here.

One, there's too much administrative and very costly burden on public companies.

It costs $2 or $3 million at least a year just to be public.

More than that, CEOs, CFOs, IR professionals spend two weeks of their life every 12 weeks managing the earnings call and trying to figure out the right words and legal liability and the fallout from the markets.

So it makes sense that the administrative burden should lessen.

Having said that, one of the reasons our market trades at 26 or 27 times PE and every other market trades from 22 to 12 is because of the regulatory burden.

Orphans and widows are less likely to find out they own stock in Enron when they buy a company in the SP versus a company.

I was pitched by a hedge fund 10 years ago that said, all we do is find fraudulent companies in China and they're everywhere because the regulatory standards, and they have gone up the last 10 years, weren't as high.

So the whole idea of these regulatory standards is when you buy a company in the SP 500, it may go down, it may not have a good future, but there's much less likelihood of outright fraud because of these regulatory constraints.

Now, good private companies, every company I've run or been an investor in that's a good company, we do effectively what is an earnings call every three months.

However, it's not the same level of regulatory burden.

What I think is going to fill the void of the delta, quite frankly, And this is an opportunity, is some sort of AI good seal of approval.

And that is, okay, company X, if you send us your financials and let us tap into your

APIs, we're every three months going to put out a rating on the financial health.

Basically, these companies every three months are to signal growth and also to make sure there's not fraud.

I can see an AI good housekeeping seal of approval, better business viewer, rotten tomatoes, which has become an arbiter of whether you want to waste your time that says, it doesn't look as if this company, similar to a Fitch or a Moody's or an S ⁇ P, it doesn't look as if there is fraud here.

It's got a 2% rating of fraud, not 99%.

Well, that calls for more scrutiny then, not less.

You like six months or do you not like six months?

Oh, I like it because the reality is the administrative burden, it goes back to what we said previously.

There's too few companies that are public, and there's too few companies for retail investors to pick from.

Part of the reason companies are not going public is because of what has probably become burdensome regulatory oversight.

Now,

it's a fine needle to thread.

You do want some disclosure requirements.

I believe that AI will create a level of disclosure and fraud protection, should you decide to engage in with it, that could give you a

good housekeeping seal of approval that it's unlikely fraud is taking place here.

And there will be hopefully more public companies.

Because the reality is, if you can bet on whether there's civil war, which you can right now in polymarket, should we really be infantilizing investors and not letting certain companies go public for risk or a belief that we need to protect them.

Jesus Christ, people can bet on the Super Bowl on their phone right now.

So if, you know, it's gone overboard.

We need more public companies.

We need retail investors to have access to more companies.

Okay.

I do like it.

I thought you would like it.

I thought you would.

I actually do too, because the short-term thinking of all our companies is really problematic, I think, in a lot of ways.

That's a bigger problem in the United States and America, but still.

All right, one more quick break.

We'll be back for wins and fails.

How does everyone know what everyone knows?

It's a state sometimes called pluralistic ignorance or a spiral of silence where everyone mistakenly thinks that everyone else believes something and no one actually believes it.

I'm Preet Barara and this week cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker joins me on my podcast Stay Tuned with Preet to discuss his latest book.

It's called When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.

We discuss what common knowledge can teach us about collective behavior.

The episode is out now.

Search and follow stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.

There is a lot to talk about when we talk about Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel.

One big question I've got is why in 2025 are late night TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show still on TV?

Even in our diminished times, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, they're just some of the biggest faces of their networks.

If you start taking the biggest faces off your networks, you might save some nickels and dimes.

But what are you even anymore?

What even is your brand anymore?

I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, and that was James Ponowosek, the TV critic for the New York Times.

And this week, we're talking about Trump and Kimmel, free speech, and a TV format that's remained surprisingly durable for now.

That's this week on Channels,

you get your favorite podcasts.

It's been more than five years since President Donald Trump said that we were either going to ban or sell TikTok.

And now, more than five years later, it seems there might actually be a TikTok deal.

Sort of.

Potentially.

Maybe.

This week on the Vergecast, we go into all of the things happening with TikTok and how TikTok is almost inevitably going to become something very different in its next next phase.

That, plus what YouTube and Instagram are trying to do to copy TikTok and lots more on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

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

Would you like me to go first?

Please.

Guess what's coming back?

Hunting Wives.

And they did the funniest.

No, you were going to say the L-word or something.

No, that is maybe coming back.

The Hunting Wives is coming back for season two, and they did, I have to say, Malin Malin Ackerman.

What is that?

What is the Hunting Wives?

You need to watch it.

Just watch it and then call me.

I don't watch TV anymore.

Wait, is that the one with Charlie Turan and someone else make out?

No, that's another one.

There's plenty of lesbian things, material going on these days.

But no, it's this, it's MAGA Christian gun-toting lesbians.

So there you go.

MAGA Christian gun-toting lesbians.

In Texas.

Just what you said there.

I'll see it twice.

Exactly.

So it's coming back to season.

And they did the best.

Malin Ackerman and Brittany Stowe did the funniest announcement using

like a cell phone conversation that was very hysterical.

And congratulations, ladies.

And I'm hoping to interview the creator of it because it's just such, so funny.

It's exactly what we need at this moment.

I have to tell you, it brings together MAGA and lesbians in a way that's really satisfying.

I don't know how they did it, but they did it.

That is my win.

My fail is Donald Trump and his incessant lies, and especially Pulte, Bill Pulte, who is just a Nepo baby imbecile.

They accused this woman, Lisa Cook, of mortgage fraud.

It turns out it's bullshit.

Oh, it's bullshit.

Fuck you, Bill Pulte.

Oh, my God.

Stop it.

She registered it as a vacation home.

You liars.

They just, they raise a, this is what they do.

They raise a lie and then they, and then they, and then it's not true, but they've caused damage along the way.

They do not care about the truth.

And that is Bill Pulte in any other place.

So would Cash Patel.

So would Pete say, so would Christine Om be fired for their incompetent, their like rank incompetence.

But as long as they salute at the, at the, at the leader, dear leader, they're going to stay in their jobs.

But that guy is really a heinous piece of shit.

And let me tell you, Bill Billy, call me up.

Come and visit Kara Swisher because what you did to this woman is reprehensible in terms.

And I know why you're doing it, but it's grotesque.

And at some point,

this has to stop.

Maybe it doesn't, but it should stop.

Anyway, that's my fail.

So funny.

I don't know.

One of my favorite movies is a movie called Hannah and Her Sisters.

Yes, yes.

And there's a scene, Max Monsido is having an affair with a much younger woman,

who I thought was one of the most beautiful women in this, I'm dating myself, but Barbara Hershey.

And I always remember that movie, oh, God, what was it with Bette Midler?

Beaches.

Beaches, thank you.

Barbara.

And I just thought it was hilarious.

I always joke that, of course, one of them gets cancer and dies, and everyone's crying at the end.

And I thought, if Bette Midler was dying, there wouldn't be a two-year-old.

Not so.

I love that Bette Midler.

Oh, no, no.

When it's the hot, sublime, beautiful one that dies of cancer, everyone's crying.

No, Bette Midler is a national fucking treasure.

I'm not making a statement on Bette Middler.

Not that.

I'm making a statement on how Luxus we are.

Anyways, but in the movie Hannah and Her Sisters,

Barbara Hershey wises up and decides

that she's going to leave Max Vonsaito.

And he's like, he's panicked and he's upset.

And he's like, you're my link to the outside world.

I feel like you have become my cultural link to the outside world.

I watch Premier League football.

Other than that, I don't turn the TV on anymore.

Trust me on the Hunting Wives.

Go ahead.

No, I take your recommendations.

I just wrote down the Hunting Wives.

Anyways, okay, some of my fail is along the lines of government and competence.

One of the most storied best brands in government institutions, one of the best institutional brands in the world is the FBI.

I've known some people who worked at the FBI, and universally, they're these low-key

people who literally reek of competence and humility.

That's correct.

They are the last people to go on social media and start saying, I have a suspect

in custody, and then have to go back and say, oops.

The FBI typically doesn't speak.

They speak with arrests, indictments, and prosecutions.

That is how they communicate.

And with a workforce of incredibly talented people who could make a lot more money elsewhere, but decide they want to serve their country.

And what is the elite of the elite of our law enforcement until fucking Cash Patel,

who is, there are so many reports inside of the FBI around what a bumbling idiot this guy is, announcing they have a suspect before it's confirmed and having to walk that back.

Firing competent people because they're a woman or a person of color.

Go ahead.

And then the ultimate contradiction of the speak softly but carry a big fucking stick that is the FBI is he goes on national TV and says in a press release and says and says and my friend Charlie

you know, rest now, my friend, he said, rest now.

We have the watch.

I will see you in Valhalla.

Dude,

if this, first off, if this is your friend, you should recuse yourself from the investigation as every FBI director would have done.

Yep.

And this is not, I don't,

people have the right to own their grief and miss their friend.

I get that, brother.

You're so performative.

Good for you.

And I think it's important that men, that men say how much they're going to miss their friends.

That's not what the head of the FBI does.

That is the last thing that

is so opposite.

That's a children's book author.

That is so opposite of the FBI brand.

Have you no sense of the history of the FBI?

No.

This guy makes J.

Edgar Hoover look like great.

They are just quietly very good at what they do, tracking down bad guys.

They don't go on social media.

No, they don't.

Anyway, the continued incompetence and erosion of some of the best institutional brands in history run by people who are more for like there for personal satisfaction than operational excellence, as evidenced by RFK Jr.

and now Cash Patel, who has no business running one of the finest institutions, one of the best brands in the world.

My fail.

That's my fail.

My win is New Mexico announced that they're going to basically have universal child care?

And distinct of the morality of it, I'm not going to go to like, you know, mothering is the hardest job in the world.

I've never bought that.

Fine, okay.

It's a difficult job.

Most people are pretty decent at it.

I've never bought this notion it's the toughest job in the world.

Let's just look at the economics of it.

When you give people universal child care, it stimulates labor force participation, particularly among mothers who, by the way, are increasingly more educated and in higher demand for information economy-like jobs.

It reduces poverty and income inequality, right?

Because child care costs can push working families into poverty or force them to no longer work.

It boosts disposable income and consumer spending because typically the person going to work, when you have the scale of universal child care such that it costs less for good care, then they have this positive arbitrage where they have more money.

Because when you send a highly qualified woman into the workplace, she makes more money than the cost of good child care at scale when you get universal child care.

It strengthens the childcare sector as employers pay better, facilities improve, it creates jobs.

It improves future economic outcomes via better early childhood development, which means less remedial education, higher earnings, et cetera.

The return on investment studies show distinctive morality and all the stuff about the toughest job in the world.

It is the toughest job.

No, I'm going to keep my mouth shut.

It's one of them.

Go ahead.

Well, okay, but the majority of literally both my kids were sick separate weeps, and Amanda and I are about to like fall over dead, but go ahead.

I get it, but 90% of parents manage, in my opinion, to do a pretty good job.

This is a different conversation for a different day.

Yes.

But if you look, just there was a study at the Wharton School at Penn, and it found that child care expansion and universal child care increases GDP by 0.1%

relative to even if you were to deficit finance it.

Even if you were to borrow money to pay for universal child care, you get a positive return on that investment.

We are the only G7 nation that doesn't offer.

So I'm not going to make, I don't want to make a far-left argument around how difficult it is and mothering and mothers need help.

All I'm saying is, okay, let's go for the money.

More money.

I like your argument.

Let's create economic growth, more shareholder value, more household income, income, more Netflix, more trips to Disneyland, more money to take care of our parents.

What is a way to get there?

How do we get a positive return on investment from the government?

Universal child care.

I like it.

High standards, high standards, ensure that you're getting your money's worth.

Every other Democratic nation does it too, by the way.

And it pays off.

So my, anyways, my fail.

is Cash Patel undermining one of the great brands in institutional history, the FBI.

And my win is this new universal child care program being implemented in New Mexico, which creates economic benefits and economic growth.

Let me say, a woman governor there.

Men can do this too, by the way.

It doesn't matter.

Do you hear the stress in my voice?

I sound like I'm ranting.

I know.

You are ranting.

That's okay.

You know what?

It's been a hard week.

It's been a hard week.

We want to hear from you.

Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

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

Elsewhere in the Cara and Scott universe, I recently spoke with Cristoval Valenzuela, the co-founder and CEO of Runway AI.

We talked about how Hollywood is using AI and why it's not necessarily a job killer.

I didn't agree with this, but let's listen to him.

Technology will change jobs all the time.

Look at the history of film is the history of technology.

It has changed many times before through many of the decades we've seen.

And it wasn't really about the jobs as much as the people doing the jobs.

And so

if you're hiring people, if you're a guild member, if you're in a union, like, well, help your people understand how to use these tools, like train them,

get them on board with the latest, understand how they can upskill what they already know.

I think it changed a little bit the perspective.

And I think that's, that's been my, my position so far.

And I think it's, it's allows us to work alongside them in much more productive ways.

He's making a good case, but we'll see.

Did he bring his crack pipe with him?

Okay, okay.

That's the show.

Well, he's selling anyway.

Okay, that's the show.

Thanks for listening to Pivot and be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

We'll be back on Friday.

Scott, read us out.

Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Corinne Ruff.

Ernie Intertod engineered this episode.

Jim Mackle edited the video.

Thanks also to Jew Burroughs, Miss Averial, Dan Shallon, and Kate Gallagher.

Nasha Carroll has Vox Media's executive producer podcast.

Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform.

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

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

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

How do we grow our economy?

Simple.

Universal childcare.