Elon Pushback, Trump's Distraction Trap, and Disney Earnings

Transcript

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Speaker 16 You're my junkyard, dog.

Speaker 17 I like that. Thanks for saying that.

Speaker 16 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 17 And I'm thinking of doing ketamine recreationally tonight.

Speaker 17 Why?

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 17 I used to have this incredible ability as a young man to disassociate. I was basically sleepwalking through life.
I didn't care much about anything.

Speaker 17 I'm having trouble disassociating from all this bullshit. No.

Speaker 17 And so I think I'm going to a fashion week party tonight. I don't have my kids.

Speaker 17 I push my meetings back till 10 a.m. tomorrow.
So that all spells ketamine for the dog tonight. Really?

Speaker 16 Do you want to try it? Yeah.

Speaker 17 I don't even know how you take it, though. Do you know how you take it?

Speaker 16 No, that's not a good thing.

Speaker 17 That was a medically supervised ketamine trip. There's a big difference.
Tonight, I'm going to do it to like me more.

Speaker 16 Watch a few moves. Why don't you just go down to Washington with the gang that's taking apart the government? I think they probably have some information on how to do that.

Speaker 17 That is not tomato tomato. Me at a fashion week party, hitting the moves, thinking I like me a little bit more than usual, doing ketamine with some strange person.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 17 By the way, I don't, as opposed to going to Washington, that is not tomato tomato. Okay, that is that is huge.
Yeah, I want to have a good time tonight. I want to forget everything.

Speaker 16 I want to disassociate.

Speaker 16 You got to be awake, sweetie. You got to be awake.
You got to be woke, as they say.

Speaker 17 Do you snort it? Do you inject it? Or what I'm hoping, do you shove it up your ass?

Speaker 16 Hello, ladies.

Speaker 17 Who's got a glove? Who's got a glove?

Speaker 16 All right. Listen to me.
You can't disassociate. There's no disassociation allowed.

Speaker 17 Oh, daddy. You can disassociate.

Speaker 16 You can't. You have to be in this.
You got to like, everybody's writing me like, I can't keep up. But I'm like, you know what? It's the long fucking run with these people.
You got to stick in there.

Speaker 16 They rely on your exhaustion. They rely on you being overwhelmed.
And you need to not. You need to just keep going.
What do you, why do you want to disassociate? You have to associate.

Speaker 16 That's how we win. We associate.
They're disassociative people, these people.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's right. Thank you.
Why don't you do a happy drug? Like, not one that's so ruminative. And

Speaker 16 what's a happy drug? I don't know. I never take any drugs, so I have no idea.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 I don't have any idea. So let me answer that.
That's called MDMA or X. And I took it a couple of times in college.

Speaker 17 And I remember thinking to myself, I don't have an addictive personality, but I remember thinking, this is so good. I cannot do this again.

Speaker 16 Well, then do that. Do that.
Do that. I don't know.
You'll hug me. You'll try to hug me.
You'll call me and say loving things, which would be disturbing to me. But that's okay.

Speaker 17 No, it makes me happy. It does make me fucking crazy.

Speaker 16 I know, but there's a lot of hugs happening from what I never took it. I never took it.
There's hugs, right? There's a lot of hugging.

Speaker 17 Do you know the initial, its initial use case? How it was psychiatrists in couples therapy wanted them to open up to each other.

Speaker 16 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 16 I don't know. Never tried it.
Never will. I'm high on life, Scott Galloway.

Speaker 17 I'm high. I hate it when people say that.
I know, I do.

Speaker 16 It's the least expressive way.

Speaker 17 I don't need drugs. Well, I do because of people like you.

Speaker 16 Although, let me say, I'm looking at the window right now. I just got back on a red-eye from Los Angeles.
I was in San Francisco in Los Angeles. Nice having you.

Speaker 17 Thank you.

Speaker 16 I'm wearing the same clothes. I was out to dinner at a very fancy, the Mother Wolf in Los Angeles.
Have you been there? It was really good.

Speaker 15 Mother Wolf.

Speaker 16 I have a secret project going on there, another secret project, which will soon be revealed, but it has to do with lesbians in Washington. That's all I'll say.

Speaker 17 I heard about this.

Speaker 17 I won't spoil it for you, but it's good for you. I'm convinced you're pulling a Scott when his kids were little, and that is you're coming up with a lot of reasons to leave the house right now.

Speaker 16 No, I'm not. I got to go to San Francisco.

Speaker 17 Oh, my God. It's terrible.
I'll miss you guys so much.

Speaker 16 Unlike you, I do very short trips, and I come back on red-eyes. So I'm here.
I took the kids, I took

Speaker 16 Clara to school this morning and

Speaker 16 made the kids lunch. I get back so I can do that.

Speaker 16 One of the things I went out, you know, I went out with two people, one of my brother and

Speaker 16 friends of mine to Zuni, which was amazing.

Speaker 17 Cafe Zuni? Yes.

Speaker 16 It was great. San Francisco was great.

Speaker 17 Well, I'm glad you're back and you need to stop taking red eyes.

Speaker 17 When you turn 70, such as yourself, as a gift to yourself, you need to stop doing red eyes. I don't do red eyes anymore.

Speaker 16 Oh, really? I don't mind. It was a lay down bed.
I slept. It was fine.
It was fine.

Speaker 17 Your sleep, your nutrition. All right.
Your sleep, your nutrition, and your exercise are the three pillars, and you need to prioritize sleep. You don't sleep well on playing.
I don't know.

Speaker 17 I have no more red eyes for you.

Speaker 16 You know, I'm wearing my aura ring, and it tells me that I'm quite ready for the day. It's weird.
I don't sleep well.

Speaker 17 You're rested and ready?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I don't know why. I think it's lying to me.
Anyway, we've got a lot to get to because I need to be rested and ready.

Speaker 17 By the way, I have an aura ring, and I just downloaded my data, and it says one thing: Trichetamine tonight.

Speaker 16 Uh-uh, don't do it. Don't do it by me.
I can't wait.

Speaker 17 I just think I'm going to like me.

Speaker 16 You're not going to like it. Don't.
Please don't.

Speaker 17 I'm going to feel better about everything. It's not an insurrection.
It's a dance party.

Speaker 16 Anyway.

Speaker 16 Oh, that's funny. That's a good joke.
That's a good one. Okay, we've got a lot to get today, including Democrats finally showing some backbone and Trump's plan to create a sovereign wealth fund.

Speaker 16 This lunacy is every single day. I forget what, yes.
Well, anyway, plus earnings from Disney, Alphabet, and Spotify.

Speaker 16 But first, I think we know, both know why Google searches for the word coup are up this week.

Speaker 16 Elon Musk, who's now a special government employee, whatever the fuck that is, has had a very busy couple days, essentially shut down USAID, offered buyouts to every member of the CIA, and his Doge team got access to the IT systems of Medicare and Medicaid,

Speaker 16 NOAA, which is weather agencies, and other agencies. We're going to talk about Trump and Gaza and the craziness in a bit, but I want to start by focusing on Elon.

Speaker 16 Overall thoughts, what we've been seeing, Trump still thinks he's in control, saying this week Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval.

Speaker 16 You'll be shocked to learn that Senator Susan Collins is very concerned about Elon and Doge's actions.

Speaker 16 People at the Trump White House, they're leaking all over the place that he's too big for his britches. I'm like, when did you start to notice his pants were tight, my friends?

Speaker 16 He's totally too big for his britches all the time.

Speaker 16 You've been saying, where are the Democrats? They're starting to show signs of life, protesting Elon's power grab at a rally outside the Treasury Department.

Speaker 16 Some House Democrats are trying to subpoena Elon to testify before the oversight committee. They're making a lot of trouble.
The motion didn't pass. It probably will pass at some point.

Speaker 16 Democratic Senator Chris Murphy was on Morning Joe talking about the game plan for his party. Let's listen.

Speaker 18 People understand that we are the minority party. We don't run the White House.
We are the minority in the House and in the Senate.

Speaker 18 But we need to act like a real opposition party in the middle of a constitutional and democracy crisis. That means we should not be moving forward nominees or legislation in the United States Senate.

Speaker 18 Democrats should not be giving votes to nominees or to legislation in the United States Senate until Republicans get serious about this crisis.

Speaker 16 I think he's been pretty good. Jamie Raskin has.
Obviously, AOC is terrific.

Speaker 16 So talk a little bit about the Elon situation and making, you know, they're making him the villain so that it sort of offloads it from Trump in a weird way.

Speaker 16 He's sort of the, I'm calling him a heat-seeking shield for what they're doing. But there's protests that have popped up around the country.

Speaker 16 It doesn't mean anything's going to happen criticizing particularly Musk. So talk a little bit about this and what the Democrats should do.

Speaker 17 You said something that really resonated with me, and that is

Speaker 17 I've fallen prey to what is a really smart strategy on their part, and that is the invasion of Greenland or

Speaker 17 somehow some fucked up weird strategy for clearing out or the ultimate, I don't know, apartheid or whatever they're planning to do in Gaza or invading the Panama Canal or accusing a helicopter or saying that the people responsible are a helicopter crash or

Speaker 17 somehow a function of DEI. You're exactly right.
And it struck me what an idiot I was being.

Speaker 17 That's nothing but weapons of mass distraction from what effectively a second insurrection by the same president. And insurrection is probably the wrong term.
It's probably more of a coup.

Speaker 17 But you change the entire negotiation between someone, two people, when one person holds a gun to the other person's head. And what they have done,

Speaker 17 they're very smart and elegant here.

Speaker 17 Instead of a bunch of duck dynasty mobs with trucker hats and goatees getting out of their RAV4s, it's the wealthiest man in the world who, in my opinion, is trespassing in federal property and has enlisted a bunch of acolytes and has stopped making payments for things like Head Start

Speaker 17 or the funding of AIDS programs or malaria treatment. There are people, you know, being carried out in stretchers that are in hospitals because they don't have funding.

Speaker 17 And it's not, these are, these programs and this funding, whether you agree with them or not, or think they should be subject to review, are a function of laws that were passed by three branches of government.

Speaker 17 And you have, they figured out a way to say, look over here at this helicopter crash, or it's DEI, or, or we have a plan to clear out Gaza to distract you from the fact that we now have insurrectionists or a coup being led by the world's wealthiest man.

Speaker 17 I think the Republicans are thinking, I can't believe they're letting us do this.

Speaker 17 And as long as we're kind of in favor of this, and now they're in a position, when you hold a gun to someone's head,

Speaker 17 it changes the complexion of the negotiation. It's no longer, oh, you need laws to do this.
It's like, well, we might turn the payments back on for Head Start, but let's talk about it.

Speaker 17 Well, no, we're not going to discuss it.

Speaker 17 I don't think they're going gangster enough. They probably just unmasked

Speaker 17 because of their recklessness, the names and identities of CIA officers, which is an incredible act of treason and stupidity.

Speaker 16 I think they did that on purpose, from what I understand. They wanted it.
They were sending, what Scott's referring to is they sending emails

Speaker 16 not in a way that's safe to the White House. They wanted things like that.

Speaker 17 So I want to know who are these young, highly intelligent, highly motivated zealots following them into these buildings and shutting off payments to schools and Head Starts.

Speaker 17 I want to know their names.

Speaker 16 Well, you know,

Speaker 16 the local officials are trying to make that official. The newly installed Trump are threatening people for naming their names, just so you you know.

Speaker 17 But go ahead. Oh, yeah, but they can unmask CIA officers who've put their lives in harm's way to

Speaker 17 try and keep our Americans safe.

Speaker 17 I want to know who their names are, and I want to see Democratic governors saying, I'm going to do everything I can in my power to use the full faith and to the letter of the law to put you folks in prison.

Speaker 17 I think what you're doing is trespassing. I think this is a coup.
And be clear, just because the new insurrectionist who was elected, you know, I don't believe this is legal.

Speaker 17 And I'm going to hold the people accountable who are trespassing and part of a coup accountable.

Speaker 17 To just sit back and say

Speaker 17 this is horrible, and this is unlawful, we need to go gangster here and say,

Speaker 17 look, we are not negotiating around this stuff. This is illegal.
This is a coup. This is the unlawful seizure of power.
We are not going to engage in these bullshit, ridiculous arguments over

Speaker 11 Gaza and Greenland.

Speaker 17 We are going to hold the people accountable.

Speaker 17 Here are their names, here are their faces, and we have contacted the local authorities in where these kids live, these young adults, and we are going to hold them accountable.

Speaker 17 We need to start hitting back in a way that disrupts what is the unlawful seizure of resources that have been leaked. You might disagree with them.
Fine.

Speaker 17 That is not anyone's right. Our elected representatives pass these laws.

Speaker 16 No, we get that. I think repeating, it doesn't matter because they are blowing through stop sign after stop sign.
It doesn't, see, this is a very typical,

Speaker 16 I've talked to, I would say, a half a dozen governors, senators, congresspeople this week. And I would, they were like, well, we're going to say something.

Speaker 16 And I was like, he's going to break the rules. Like, I said, you don't understand.
He's not going to stop because you tell him he's bad. There's no way he's stopping.

Speaker 16 And like, look at everything he does. He blows past the SEC.
He keeps going. He does lawsuits against the press.
He does lawsuits against competitors. He blows up rockets until he gets it right.

Speaker 16 I was like, this is a person with a high risk tolerance who has noticed that when you break things or break rules or

Speaker 16 open your company when the government of California says not to, they don't stop you or it's very hard to stop you.

Speaker 16 And in the very act of doing it, even if he gets stopped later by a judge or whatever, because

Speaker 16 legal is slow moving, as you know, even if he gets stopped later, he's already broken it, right?

Speaker 16 instead of reforming things um which is what they should be doing if they don't agree with this stuff they're destroying them and and if you read any peter thiel any of their stuff this is what they talk about the destruction of a liberal democracy and then starting from scratch with a unified ceo theory which is essentially a dictatorship this is

Speaker 16 and and the question is a lot of them are like what do we do They're literally asking me, what do we do to stop him?

Speaker 16 I was like, I just don't, I was like, you don't. You actually don't have the means to do so because these poor people are in these agencies.

Speaker 16 And when these idiots come in, these children, these arrogant little pricks come in and say, we're going to call the federal marshals or the president has ordered you to step aside.

Speaker 16 They kind of have to. You know, you have to be resistant and be walked out by security.
And then security doesn't know. which one to listen to, right? Essentially.

Speaker 17 I've had, we've been critical of Democrats. And I've heard from about six Democrats, one senator, five representatives.
And he says, well, what would you do when we talk a little bit about messaging?

Speaker 17 He's like, I'm like, but that's not enough. And he said, well, what do you want me to do? Walk down there and stop them? I'm like, yeah, I'd like to see all whatever it is, 48 or 49 U.S.

Speaker 17 senators and any Republicans that want to join. I'd like to see a couple hundred members of Congress go to the fucking building where this is and demand to go in.

Speaker 17 and physically stop this and let them arrest you. I'm like, fine, let America see that there are still people who believe in government in the U.S.
and democracy. Let them arrest you.

Speaker 17 I'm like, go down there. This guy I'm talking to is a former, this representative, a newly elected guy, a former service member.
I'm like,

Speaker 16 dude,

Speaker 17 if someone attacked our shores,

Speaker 17 you put yourself in harm's way.

Speaker 17 I'm like, march down to wherever this fucking building is where all these acolytes and the high sparrow are and walk in there and demand they stop and let them arrest you.

Speaker 17 For Democrats, this isn't the time to come together. This is the time to come to the rescue.

Speaker 17 Get together, all of you, wherever the building is, whatever they're actually shutting off payments to veterans.

Speaker 16 Well, they move very quickly. This is the problem.
They don't quite know where they're going.

Speaker 16 Like they, they go from, they have the advantage here in that regard, is they can show up at various places and you don't know where they're showing up.

Speaker 17 Well, we have we have very talented smart people too with smartphones.

Speaker 17 I would create a group of people, elected representatives, that go to these places where they are and say, you are doing, you are, I believe you are breaking the law. You are not an elected official.

Speaker 17 You need to leave this federal government building.

Speaker 17 And if the Capitol Police respect the law, if the Capitol Police show up at the order of the president and say, you need to vacate, I would not vacate. And if you get arrested, fine.

Speaker 17 I think I'm not a fan of breaking the law. I think the law is on our side here.
I think these guys are breaking the law.

Speaker 17 And just because you have permission from the president, let's fight it out in court and find out, well, can can the president break the law? Because as we have seen, the president has been stopped.

Speaker 17 Anytime this shit gets in front of a judge, it usually gets stopped. So do you have the right as a citizen, an elected representative, or do you have the obligation to get in the way, legislative,

Speaker 17 verbally, legally, and quite frankly, at this point, physically? I'm not suggesting violence. I'm not suggesting these elected representatives have license to walk into any federal building.

Speaker 17 Millions of people have elected them. Find out where this shit is going on and go down there and say to these people, what you are doing is illegal.

Speaker 16 The issue is,

Speaker 16 even when the judges stop them, though, they say, oh, we have security clearance, but no proof of it. Like this, they're persistent.

Speaker 16 Elon Musk has said, move fast and break this.

Speaker 16 That's correct. This is what they're doing.
And, you know, like Elon Musk has said to me, we have self-driving in a year. We have self-driving in a year.
We have security clearance.

Speaker 16 Anything, like like one of them was like, how do you know they don't have it? I go, because their mouths are moving. They're lying.
They lie as a practice in order to get to the next thing.

Speaker 16 They're high risk takers. They're willing to,

Speaker 16 they know you're not going to stop them. You know, ultimately, because it takes effort.
They don't want to govern. They want to break.

Speaker 16 And even though they're in charge of the government, they want to. They don't want to reform it.
They want to break it. They want to destroy it.

Speaker 16 They want to take it down to its studs so that they can then rebuild in the way they see fit. And

Speaker 16 the arrogance of these people, I cannot tell you. You could like fuel a rocket to Mars with the arrogance of these people.

Speaker 16 And what's interesting is there's a bunch of lawsuits filed, as you said, as part of the counteroffensive unions, federal employees, and others are challenging the legality of Elon and Doge to get access to federal systems, destroy agencies, or push people out of jobs.

Speaker 16 I'm telling you, Elon also loves a legal fight, right? He doesn't care. He doesn't care.

Speaker 16 He waits people out.

Speaker 16 This is perfectly designed for someone like him, like to behave. And every one of his actions is very much the way he's behaved.
That's one thing.

Speaker 16 You know, when I said he's not going to listen to that, he's going to go to the next one. And someone was like, how did you know? And then he did it.

Speaker 16 And I'm like, because this is his little act, right? This is the same thing every time. He's not particularly creative in new methods of this kind of stuff.

Speaker 16 But one of the things that's important to keep in mind is that he does have a pattern that

Speaker 16 he does all the time. And so do all these people, by the way.

Speaker 16 They all have the same pattern of making a mistake, whether it's for your teen girls and making them feel bad and going, we so sorry, we're so sorry, we're so sorry, you know?

Speaker 16 And I think that's the one thing is not fully appreciated that they don't, they're not sorry,

Speaker 16 nor will they pay attention to the law.

Speaker 16 Even if a court orders, you know, right now, court orders Musk out of the treasury computer payment system so it can sort out whether the doge is a legal government entity.

Speaker 16 You know,

Speaker 16 are they out? They were in there before.

Speaker 16 You know, that's the whole thing is I don't know if they're actually, nobody knows that they're out. And then let me say the last thing, what they're going to do is find little cherry-pick costs that.

Speaker 16 that look bad, right? And make things up because they just lie. They just lie.
Money laundering. Money laundering or they're criminals.

Speaker 16 This This thing about subscriptions and Politico, it was $24,000 at USAAD. They were using their Politico Pro, just like you'd buy a subscription.

Speaker 16 And may I point out that Elon, the government pays Elon $15 billion, so everybody for his wares. And then they, so it's, it's petty and unbelievable nonsense.

Speaker 16 And they'll cherry-pick stupid little things, a lot of them inaccurate, like the condoms to Gaza, for example. A lot of them deeply inaccurate or based on stories that are specious.

Speaker 16 So they'll keep doing that constantly so that we're like cats chasing a laser pointer.

Speaker 17 But this is,

Speaker 17 but just moving to what we can do,

Speaker 17 the Democrats at this point, I mean,

Speaker 17 I remember talking to Ray Dalio about our elected officials, and he's like, and by the way, this is, he was like,

Speaker 17 this is war. Take the gloves off.
I mean, this is like, this isn't try to understand or empathize with the people who elected this guy. In my opinion, this is war.

Speaker 17 And they essentially,

Speaker 17 they're challenging the Constitution and democracy.

Speaker 17 I don't think it's time for us to try and figure out, like understand them.

Speaker 17 What I would say is, and I've heard from a lot of Canadians who appreciate our thoughts around the tariffs. And one person called me who

Speaker 17 Canada's actually strangely like There's like 12 families who kind of, I don't want to say run anything, everything, but kind of own the majority of stuff.

Speaker 17 And I was like, I mean, I'd like to think that America came to the aid of a lot of nations in real times of crisis over the last hundred years, and we want to keep doing that. I mean, at this point,

Speaker 17 I believe that nations need to come to the aid of America at this point.

Speaker 17 And to the extent that people feel frustrated or worried about America no longer being the shining beacon, leading democracies all over the world, we're setting the tone.

Speaker 17 What Canada did was it, I'd go, I think you need to be very Machiavellian strategic. Province in Canada has canceled a $100 million contract for Starlink.

Speaker 17 They've said, we're just not going to continue to fund the lead of a coup.

Speaker 17 I'd hit them where

Speaker 17 they're in their soft issue, and that is if you think America plays and should continue to play a vital role in our democracy and be that shiny beacon on a hill, and you are using Starlink or your government is in negotiations around subsidies, whatever it might be for EVs or Tesla, I would make it clear that you are not going to support an individual who's leading a coup in a nation that has, for the most part, been a really staunch ally.

Speaker 17 I'm now at the point where I can't call him Republicans.

Speaker 17 I think they are both kind of surprised and giddy that they're getting away with this and also scared of crossing Elon for fear they'll be primaried by Twitter and his hundreds of millions of dollars, which he can do now, given the fact that we let one man amass $400 billion in power.

Speaker 17 And two, you know, they're surprised. And also, quite frankly, Kara, I think Senator Murphy's fantastic.
We come across as neutered and feckless at this point. We are like, well, look over here.

Speaker 17 Oh, I can't believe you would say it was DEI around a helicopter. You are exactly right.
That is a sideshow.

Speaker 16 And may I say the media is doing the same things. These headlines in some of these papers, it's like innovative way to.
to deal with government. I'm like, I said, it's a coup.
Stop saying this.

Speaker 16 And one thing I did have as a theme in my book was the juvenilization of men and the coddling of them and persistent sidelining of women in Silicon Valley, like and people of color or anybody that was different.

Speaker 16 And that is, that is a, that's this is a 30 years going of this idea that these people have the right idea. And I found some stories that I wrote.

Speaker 16 One was called The Men and No Women of Facebook and The Men and No Women of boards. And one of the things that was interesting is I was able to put those headlines because I controlled my own media.

Speaker 16 That you can't believe what a bunch of idiots have such disdain for people.

Speaker 16 And the press is treating it like it's like an equalized thing and it's just not i'm finding it so frustrating um i even you know i you know i'm on cnn and on friday i was like this is a hostile takeover you need to treat it stop talking about dei and the plane crash you can talk right stop you need this is what this it's it's a hostile takeover government probably illegal And you can't look at it like, well, look at that kind of things.

Speaker 16 I just, I'm perplexed as to why it isn't a five-alarm fire everywhere, all day long, every minute in the media.

Speaker 17 No, your house is on fire, and you shouldn't be arguing over the pattern of the couch. It's just, and all these things are important, but this really is,

Speaker 17 again, I think our elected representatives who have contacts overseas should be calling them and saying,

Speaker 17 you need to put pressure on Elon. You need, and Trump is doing the same thing that Zuckerberg did to Sandberg.

Speaker 17 He's using him as this very powerful and effective heat shield such that if he does go too far, and in fact, they do find this is illegal, and they they start, Trump can back away and say, oh, I didn't know they had done that.

Speaker 17 Yeah, they went a little too far. Let's do that.
He's done that.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 17 So he's basically, I mean, to a weird extent, Elon Musk is a $400 billion media platform weaponized sandbird. He's a heat shield.

Speaker 17 And he's like, you understand this technology and how to go in there and shut off payments. And what they're hoping is it resets or recalibrates the playing field for negotiation.

Speaker 17 Let's start from you're getting zero, despite the fact that our elected representatives passed this law that says head start is a good thing.

Speaker 17 And this is, they went right to the mechanism for the payment. I mean,

Speaker 17 it, and it's, I don't understand. This is illegal.
I would just, very simple. This is illegal.
And I believe the people involved in this will be prosecuted.

Speaker 17 That is what I'm planning to do.

Speaker 16 I'm prosecuted by this Justice Department because all they're doing is getting rid of

Speaker 16 threatening companies that have DEI. That's the first thing Pam Bondi did.

Speaker 17 Again, another weapon of mass distraction. That's not going to go anywhere.

Speaker 17 What could go somewhere, in my view, legally, is to say, these are the laws that I believe you and these 25-year-olds have broken, and I plan to do everything within my power to enforce these laws.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Okay, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back, Trump continues to flood the zone with crap.

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Speaker 16 Scott, we're back, and President Trump is making all sorts of headlines this week. Trump surprised pretty much everyone with a plan for the U.S.

Speaker 16 to take over Gaza and turned it into a Middle East Riviera, Mara Gazo. That's the joke, which is not funny, actually.
Though some administration officials are walking that back a bit.

Speaker 16 His cabinet nominees, R.F.K. Jr.
and Tulsi Gabbard, appear to be on their way to confirmation. He's reportedly getting closer to an executive order abolishing the Department of Education.

Speaker 16 He's doing everything by executive order because he doesn't want to bother with legislators. Questionable executive orders, I'd say.

Speaker 16 We talked a few weeks ago about the strategy of flooding the zone with shit.

Speaker 16 Let's talk a little bit about this and how people can avoid falling the trap of distraction, Trump throwing up these crazy ideas and orders while Elon is making this power grab.

Speaker 16 It's quite coordinated from what I can tell, although I don't think Trump knows what he's doing. Courts have done a few things to keep them in check.
They're stopping him from...

Speaker 16 He's already was in the treasury. Now they're saying get out of the treasury.
Who knows if he will? Because, again, liars, all of them.

Speaker 16 A federal judge did block the birthright citizenship order this week.

Speaker 16 But then Trump was busy signing executive orders outlining plans for a government-run sovereign wealth fund, which potentially used to buy TikTok. That's called state-run media.

Speaker 16 The fund would also support other national endeavors like infrastructure projects.

Speaker 16 I don't know what to say.

Speaker 16 Talk a little bit about the strategy as a marketing thing. I hate to say that, but this is he's, and then we have a story in the New York Times.

Speaker 16 It's like, well, it's good that he's shaking up the difficult problem in the Mideast. Maybe it will create fresh ideas.
Now, I was sort of like, what?

Speaker 16 Like moving people against their 2 million people against their will to where they've lived their whole lives is a fresh new idea.

Speaker 16 I mean, and as if no one, especially because Gaza is absolutely destroyed. Like, again, they destroyed it.
And now

Speaker 16 they've destroyed it. They can't go back.
That kind of thing.

Speaker 17 Well, okay. But before we even get to the notion that Egypt,

Speaker 17 I mean, look at the borders.

Speaker 17 Look at the Gaza border

Speaker 17 with

Speaker 17 its neighboring nations.

Speaker 17 No one wants to take these refugees, whatever you want to call it. That is such a, I understand the argument.
It is an interesting argument.

Speaker 17 The notion that we're setting up a situation where nothing's really going to be different and eventually we're going to face the same problems in two, five, 10 years again, that's a powerful argument.

Speaker 17 So the notion that we need to be creative and thoughtful, fine.

Speaker 17 This is not the time. If you go into the emergency room, okay, the term stop the bleeding originates from a very logical place.

Speaker 17 And that is if you go into the emergency room with a gunshot or you've fallen and hit your head and you're hemorrhaging blood, they don't take your PSA.

Speaker 17 They don't talk about, they don't say check his or her cholesterol. They stop the bleeding.
Everything else at this point is a worthy conversation that should be had by our elected representatives.

Speaker 17 But if we let a coup be successful and change the complexion of the negotiation, whereas opposed to arguing over who is prosecuted here and under what laws and how do we immediately arrest this coup,

Speaker 17 such that we're not negotiating, well, will you give us 50% of the funding back for Head Start, dear person who wasn't elected to make these decisions?

Speaker 17 Focus on stop the bleeding and the bleeding here.

Speaker 17 America is bleeding out in a small building somewhere that has access that is being remotely accessed by different locations by a group of people under the cover of dark to stop payments based on programs that were passed by laws by our elected representatives.

Speaker 17 This is a coup. And it's not a slow-moving coup.
It's a fast-moving coup.

Speaker 17 And everything else is an ER doctor saying, okay, they lost their leg and they're going to be dead in three minutes if they continue to bleed out.

Speaker 17 Let's find out what their good and bad, let's figure out what their blood pressure. I mean, no, none of that's important at this point.
Stop the bleeding. This is our focus.

Speaker 16 Well, here's the problem. Ketamine.
You know, ketamine, exactly.

Speaker 16 But this, this plan, literally, Israeli defense minister said is instructed the military to draft a plan to allow voluntary departure of Gaza from residents.

Speaker 16 The only way they're leaving is if you, if you ethnically cleanse them. And I know,

Speaker 16 you know, it's funny, like one of one of the right,

Speaker 16 most of the conservative uh think tanks are sort of like, oh dear, like right now, if you look at someone, they were like, No, this government thing isn't good, this Gaza thing isn't good.

Speaker 16 And they're like, don't be hysterical and use the term ethnic cleansing, but I'm like,

Speaker 16 only the comedy shows are getting it right. Like the daily show, they keep saying they have different euphemisms for what it is, like,

Speaker 16 you know, voluntary departure or

Speaker 16 refugee moving them as refugees. And

Speaker 16 the word was password of the day is ethnic cleansing. And they keep doing different words and they go, bah, when they have the wrong word.

Speaker 16 Only the comedy shows are actually

Speaker 16 calling out this stuff for exactly what it is. Only the comedy shows are calling it a Nazi salute that Elon did, are saying this is illegal, are just explicitly doing it.

Speaker 16 And I guess it's under the cover of comedy because some of it's very funny, but it's actually quite strong, I guess.

Speaker 16 I don't know what else to say because that's where I'm seeing the best coverage of this stuff or the best commentary, I guess.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I just, look, again,

Speaker 17 I'm just remiss to engage in the conversation about how ridiculous it is because

Speaker 17 I don't think it's going to happen.

Speaker 17 I think this is, again, an attempt to say, look over here.

Speaker 17 Let me talk about gender in the workplace as I figure out a way to create algorithms for profit to make it more likely that your 15-year-old girl is going to engage in self-harm. Look over here.

Speaker 17 I have a book signing.

Speaker 16 Yeah, the wealth fund thing. I, you know, someone wanted me to go and talk about the wealth fund.
I said, that's fucking ridiculous. State-run media, it's not allowed.

Speaker 16 And they're like, well, what do you think it would be? I'm like, I don't. I don't.
What do I think of the Loch Ness monster? You're like asking me. It's not, it doesn't exist.
Or maybe that does.

Speaker 16 But the wealth fund, I'm sort of like, state-run media. Does everyone have a problem with state-run media in a country with the First Amendment? Like, yeah, I do.

Speaker 16 Like, other countries do have sovereign wealth funds that invest surplus income. The U.S., by the way, runs a budget deficit, so we don't even have money to put into this sovereign wealth fund.

Speaker 16 I mean, I don't,

Speaker 16 you understand sovereign wealth funds better than I do, but this is nutty. Like, it's not to buy TikTok.
What?

Speaker 17 Look, a sovereign wealth. Yeah, in the case, they play different roles.
In the case of. the kingdom, it's like we need to figure out a way to transition away from fossil fuels.
We have a ton of money.

Speaker 17 We want to be strategic.

Speaker 17 We want to turn it into more greater return.

Speaker 17 We want to be thoughtful about it such that we can then make the investments we need to pivot away from an economy that's dependent upon a sea of oil, which is going to dry up in 30, 50, 7 years, such that we entered the quote-unquote modern world.

Speaker 17 In Norway, it's a means of saying, okay, Norway owns 1.5% of the world's stocks, and they create an incredible standard of living

Speaker 17 for their folks because they have thoughtful people trying to figure out how to invest their excess excess capital to greater ROI than their competition. America doesn't need a sovereign wealth fund.

Speaker 17 We have so much capital being invested privately. That's a financial argument.

Speaker 17 But the other thing is when you buy one firm, this is a sovereign wealth fund invests and tries to find alpha dislocation for the benefit of its citizens. We don't need that here.

Speaker 17 In addition, this is the sovereign wealth fund, again, is a distraction from what he's really suggesting. And that is the government owning a business which is socialism.

Speaker 16 And a media business, a media business. It's not like it's potatoes or something.

Speaker 17 But the UK made a very compelling argument at the time. I see why they probably thought that we need manufacturing to come back.

Speaker 17 And we have this really compelling guy who built the Pontiac GTO and we're going to bring manufacturing.

Speaker 17 We have an opportunity here to be one of the largest shareholders in this amazing new technology and manufacturing brand called DeLorean.

Speaker 17 And so they made him bet.

Speaker 17 I believe that the critics of Republicans were right to criticize Obama for some of his subsidies around solar firms.

Speaker 17 The whole Republican argument is that the public sector shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers. I kind of get that.

Speaker 17 Now, if you're going to do it systemically and say we want to support companies who are building our chips for defense reasons, fine. But this is the state controlling the means of production.

Speaker 17 And even saying this, I'm taking the debate. This is never going to happen.

Speaker 17 But again, I go back to where we're bleeding. So this, again, is another distraction.
It's a stupid idea. It will never happen.
They know it, in my opinion.

Speaker 17 Maybe he just thought about it and thought, I'm a deal guy. I can make money here for the government.
Now, we don't want to own TikTok. We want to regulate it or ban it.

Speaker 17 We want to promote the rule of fair play in even playing fields, such that startups have a shot and everyone is playing under the same rules.

Speaker 17 And meanwhile, if you, in fact, have an algorithm that can be reverse engineered to polarization, radicalization, or self-harm among teens, maybe you should be subject to the the same liability as traditional media.

Speaker 17 Okay,

Speaker 17 that's the government's role. The government's role isn't to start cosplaying business.
Trump has been cosplaying business his whole life. This is the reality of Trump.

Speaker 17 If he had invested his father's massive fortune, which he inherited, in any index fund, he'd have more money than he has now. But he's been cosplaying business.
He was hugely insecure.

Speaker 17 I ran across Trump businesses all the time doing business.

Speaker 17 And the general reputation of Trump and his family was they were a bunch of rich kids who didn't know what they were doing, that they just weren't very good at what they did.

Speaker 17 He's been cosplaying business his entire life. And this is, again, him thinking, I've got an idea.
We'll own TikTok and we'll make money. That is not a government role.
It's not. And again, here I am.

Speaker 16 taking the bait.

Speaker 17 Look over.

Speaker 17 It's just not happening.

Speaker 16 It's just such non. It's fucking nonsense, like nonsense.
Every time they ask me to comment on things, I'm like, it's nonsense. What else can I say? This is bullshit.

Speaker 16 This is such, there's no, there's no interest. Like, sometimes I think it is good.
Like, let's think of some fresh ideas, right? Let's, huh, what should we do here with this?

Speaker 16 How do we protect our national security and yet protect the First Amendment? Like, how do we do that? Like, there's always room. And that's the good part of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 16 Like, let's think of new ways to do things.

Speaker 16 And by the way, they don't have, let me just say,

Speaker 16 this attack. I'm going to just have one slight rant here.
I got contacted by Bijan Sabat. Do you know him? He's a great investor.
He was in Twitter early and stuff like that.

Speaker 16 And he's written a piece called, There Are People in Silicon Valley that are not like this, just so you know. And he wrote a great piece called Public Service, the Backbone of American Democracy.

Speaker 16 And he really didn't like this one line in these Doge.

Speaker 16 press releases where he says, the way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector reveals a staggering ignorance of the essential work performed by those in government.

Speaker 16 It is not only offensive, but also demonstrably false. I was so happy to read that.
You know, that the private sector,

Speaker 16 simply put, the narrative that the private sector is inherently superior to the public sector does disservice to the millions of Americans who serve their country every day.

Speaker 16 It risks demoralizing a workforce already under strain and undermines the very institutions that protect and advance our shared values.

Speaker 16 These people who have had so many friggin' failures of their startups, they fuck up so much. And Donald Trump is the top fuck up, the top fuck up of business.

Speaker 16 They're allowed to say they're innovative and they then insult government officials who have done a pretty fucking good job keeping us safe every day.

Speaker 16 And it's so, it's so offensive and so easy to insult the government and its workers.

Speaker 16 And it's, they have fucked up so many times that we should start making lists of all the different stupidities they have perpetrated.

Speaker 16 I find it the whole thing just, it's nonsense.

Speaker 17 There's also, there's parsing kind of mendacious to just stupid and dangerous.

Speaker 17 The CIA, I've had the pleasure of working with several officers. These are incredibly bright people, incredibly skilled.

Speaker 17 And instead of going to work for Google or Procter ⁇ Gamble, they decide to serve their country and they take enormous risks.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 the fact that they have so little regard for our national security apparatus that they might be unmasking these folks either recklessly, negligently,

Speaker 17 that is 100% the right word. It's traitorous and it's stupid because what is the likelihood? The Central Intelligence Agency recruits out of every top business school, every top college.

Speaker 17 They try and find the best and brightest from a very early age.

Speaker 17 Do you think you're more or less inclined to go to work for the Central Intelligence Agency right now, knowing that your own government might ouch you? What if you're overseas on assignment right now?

Speaker 17 Oh, sleep well tonight.

Speaker 17 They might know who I am and what I'm doing here. And by the way, it's not like these guys lose their pension if they're found out.
It's not like they get fired.

Speaker 17 They are tortured and then murdered trying to protect our shores. And you have people who have so little regard for their sacrifice and their patriotism.

Speaker 16 Let me just take one thing. We've got to move on is someone who is very interesting.
Some of his comments is Bill Gates. He's on a book tour for a book called Source Code.

Speaker 16 He has met with Trump because he's trying to stop him from defunding AIDS things. And he has to do that.

Speaker 16 He's the president. He's got to go in there and make his argument.
Why not? And he has been defending USAID. He's someone who was very arrogant about government.
When I met him, he was super arrogant.

Speaker 16 He now is like, I was arrogant. And let me tell you, there's some amazing people working for the government.
I've had government, there's

Speaker 16 dedicated, important people doing important work. If you partner with the government,

Speaker 16 he's very quietly doing the right messaging around why this is wrong. And every now and then he's like, what Elon's doing is nonsense and irresponsible.
And here's why.

Speaker 16 I don't think I'd like him to yell more, but I have to say, I was pretty surprised how explicit he is being. There's very few other leaders that are doing that.
None of them, like none of them.

Speaker 16 He was the only one that you see because he knows he doesn't have a price to pay because he's Bill Gates, right? So he can do that.

Speaker 16 So all you other rich fuckers who don't think this is right, not saying anything is heinous on your behalf. Anyway.
All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.

Speaker 16 When we come back, we'll talk about this week's earnings.

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Speaker 16 Scott, we're back. There's lots of earnings news.
We still have to talk about earnings. Disney beat expectations, reporting a 4.8% increase in revenue.

Speaker 16 The company's experience business, which includes parks, cruises, and resorts, rose 3%. Its entertainment division saw a 9% jump in revenue.

Speaker 16 Disney Plus saw a 1% decline in subscribers following an increase in prices last year. They had been, they're doing pretty well.

Speaker 16 Their streaming business is quite stabilized and it's moving forward.

Speaker 16 At some point, you run out of subscribers, essentially,

Speaker 16 and there's a lot of churn, et cetera.

Speaker 16 um alphabet i'm going to go through them and then you can comment on shares of company are down almost six percent in the last five days at the time of the taping alphabet's overall revenue grew 12% compared with 13% in the same quarter last year.

Speaker 16 Advertising revenue grew 10.6% compared to 11% last year. The company announced plans to invest

Speaker 16 above expectations, $75 billion in capital expenditures as it continues to build AI offerings.

Speaker 16 One of the things they did note is they're going to stop all their efforts in DEI because they're going to, unlike Costco and Apple, they've decided to cave.

Speaker 16 And there are threats from Pambondi and state attorney generals, and they've just decided to cave in all their different programs.

Speaker 16 Non-Spotify shares are up 12% in the last five days at the time of the taping after the company reported its first profitable year.

Speaker 16 The company reported 40% gross profit growth year over year and operating income of 477 million euros. Monthly active users grew by 35 million, up 12% for the year.

Speaker 16 Lastly, Uber reported a lower than expected operating income of 770 million. 3.1 billion trips were completed on the platform, up 18% year over year.

Speaker 16 Uber also announced it's ramping up for a public launch of robo-taxis in Austin through its partnership with Waymo. Waymo is killing it in San Francisco.
I can tell you that.

Speaker 16 Well, then the company is optimistic about the autonomous vehicle market. Admitted, there are many, many years to scale.
They're absolutely right. So which one of these would you like to take?

Speaker 17 Well, I'll touch on each of them and then try and extract what I think is an interesting theme. So Disney, essentially the streaming wars, everyone's fighting to be lift.
What do I mean by that?

Speaker 17 Netflix is running away with it. Definitely.

Speaker 17 Everyone's fighting for number two.

Speaker 17 And I don't want to say they've given up, but Netflix, I mean, just to give you a sense, in 2015, Disney price to sales was four.

Speaker 17 Netflix was five. So they saw them in kind of spitting distance of each other from a shareholder standpoint.

Speaker 17 As we sit here today, Disney trades at two times revenue and Netflix trades at 11 times revenue. Disney, they lost 700,000 subscribers, but that was in the face of a price increase.

Speaker 17 Now, it wasn't a huge price increase, but it does show kind of the strength of Disney's positioning around family. Whereas Netflix added 19 million subscribers,

Speaker 17 Disney's added, Disney Plus has added 13 million.

Speaker 17 The big thing comes down to churn, and that is there's this really uncomfortable dynamic where everyone but Netflix has to reinvent their entire customer base every 10 years or two years because they go on and they download the entire season of Ted Lasso and then they cancel Apple TV Plus.

Speaker 17 And Netflix has so much, so much gross tonnage that their churn is only 2%.

Speaker 17 Disney is number two, but it's at 4.8%. And then the other guys have even higher churn rates.

Speaker 16 Can I just make a note here? Real competitor, and this is me talking to holiday people yesterday, is YouTube.

Speaker 17 YouTube.

Speaker 16 Is the competitor of Netflix?

Speaker 17 The real competitor. No one talks about it.

Speaker 16 They are killing it.

Speaker 17 But to your point,

Speaker 17 total share of video viewership is like 8% or 9% for Netflix. YouTube is 11%.

Speaker 17 YouTube, you could argue YouTube is the number one streamer, but it's still categorized as a different sector.

Speaker 16 I think they're going to do a lot more originals, FYI, but go ahead.

Speaker 17 Disney's Parks, Cruises, and Resorts continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Revenue up 3%, but the operating income was up 6% to 8%.

Speaker 17 Disney's done a good job incorporating ESPN into a pretty compelling bundle with Hulu, Moving on to Google, their full-year revenue grew 14%,

Speaker 17 but people are freaked out about slower-than-expected cloud growth because they see that as a proxy for their AI offering.

Speaker 17 So they took the stock down a little bit. They're also worried about the amount of capex.

Speaker 17 Their capital expenditure is supposed to increase to $75 billion. The thing about Google, though, is that they have five separate businesses that do more than $30 billion in annual revenue.

Speaker 17 If their stock were to go down, I mean, look at it this way. That's like saying they have the revenue power of five different Starbucks or five different Visas with different businesses.

Speaker 17 They are just a cash, a series of cash volcanoes, seven products and platforms with over 2 billion users, Search Maps, Gmail, Android. They're just doing incredibly.

Speaker 17 Spotify is probably the most impressive

Speaker 17 performer from where it was, say, 12 or 24 months ago. And that is

Speaker 17 they essentially set quarterly record highs for revenue, gross margin, operating income. The stock has tripled in the last year.
Their platform growth is accelerating.

Speaker 17 Their total monthly active users hit 675 million. Their premium subscribers are up 11%.
Their average revenue per user or ARPU is up 5%.

Speaker 17 And now, kind of what I'll say, and I'll come back to him in a second, but the big theme here, or something hopefully resembling Insight, is the following. If you look at the acceleration

Speaker 17 in Spotify stock and in Netflix, I believe that that's more than just growth in the category. It's effectively, so Netflix now has more than 50% of its production overseas.

Speaker 17 And if you look at

Speaker 17 Spotify, less than 1% of its artists garner more than 92%

Speaker 17 of its streaming revenues.

Speaker 17 Effectively, with the scale that these companies have and by not sharing analytics or information, what Netflix has done is it has transferred a massive amount of capital, earnings power, money from the means of production, specifically artists, to Netflix shareholders.

Speaker 17 And that is when you put something on Netflix, they don't tell you how successful it is.

Speaker 17 They might produce it in Spain or in Seoul, but they've basically extracted a shit ton of capital from California-based employees, from actors, from producers, and said, we're kind of the big dog here and you have to operate under this new religion or this new operating model.

Speaker 17 Because by the way, if you don't want to be in our Netflix drama, there's 179,000 other sag after people that are looking for work.

Speaker 16 And can I just make a point? They also put out so much content that's pretty good, right?

Speaker 16 None of it's really one of the way someone was telling me a story who was with last night who used to work at Google was Susan Wojski, the late Susan Wojewski.

Speaker 16 And they were thinking about getting into originals. And they walked her through

Speaker 16 the economics of Hollywood because she wasn't familiar. You know, she had been very successful at Google and she had just taken over YouTube.
And they

Speaker 16 walked her through it. And she got up and she goes, this isn't a business.
Like what? Only one hit carries all the losses? Like she was like, she immediately clocked the problem, right?

Speaker 16 Like she goes, this isn't a really sustainable business if you don't have this one hit. And she goes, why are they operating like this?

Speaker 16 And she was, I think she had insight into the idea that if you had a lot of little hits or spread it out with stuff that people like, you would do a lot better.

Speaker 16 And that's what Netflix has kind of done here. They have nothing, every now and then they have a big one, but all the others are fine.
And they help sustain the fact that. that it's a good product.

Speaker 16 You find efficacy in the product. You find pleasure in the product.
Same thing with Spotify. It's a good,

Speaker 16 at its heart, it's a good product. I don't know what else to say.
It's like enjoyable to use. You find what you want.

Speaker 16 Maybe it's not like soaring like an HBO can be sometime, but every now and then it is. And it's so that's, you know, it's a good, I don't know what else to say.
It's a good product.

Speaker 16 Like, that's how I feel about both those companies.

Speaker 17 There's two ingredients to the secret sauce here. And it's an asymmetry.
They both have to do with an asymmetry of information. If Deadpool does $1.3 billion,

Speaker 17 the agent for Ryan Reynolds and for Hugh Jackman know that.

Speaker 17 And the next time they want to do Deadpool, Meets Fast and Furious 18 or whatever, the agent from WME goes to the studio and says, I know how important Hugh Jackman is.

Speaker 17 And they extract a shit ton of pound of flesh. In streaming, the only evidence that Ben Stiller has that Severance got more than one viewer is they order seasons three and four.

Speaker 17 So the asymmetry of information always benefits the person that has symmetrical information. When Jennifer Anison's agent knew that the Thursday night lineup counted, depended,

Speaker 17 was resting on the pillar of friends, the people producing and acting in friends could extract a lot of revenue. No one in streaming has any fucking idea.

Speaker 17 And then the second big number out of the Disney earnings that fascinated me and

Speaker 17 explains why Netflix trades at 11 times revenue and Disney at two times is that now more than half of Netflix's content budget is spent overseas.

Speaker 17 And some of it's done to be more multinational, but the majority of the reason they do it and the reason why they're building big studios in New Jersey is because New Jersey just supersized their tax subsidy.

Speaker 17 They realized if we can produce two eights in Spain or Seoul, instead of producing one possible eight or nine in LA, go with the eights overseas.

Speaker 17 Over 50% of their content budget is now spent overseas. Do you know what percentage of Disney's content budget is spent overseas?

Speaker 16 I bet none.

Speaker 17 4%.

Speaker 16 Right, none.

Speaker 17 Like none. So, so what essentially what Japan did to Detroit, Netflix is doing to Los Angeles.
And I don't care. You want to talk about nuclear code secrets?

Speaker 17 When we launch our series on Netflix and I say, if I call them and say, I am not working with you again unless you tell me how many people downloaded this relative to your other dramas, they're going to say, well, it was nice working with you, Scott.

Speaker 17 Yeah. See?

Speaker 17 Because they don't want anyone to have that leverage. So asymmetry of information and the globalization of content production.
And a decent product.

Speaker 16 A decent, pleasurable product.

Speaker 17 Oh, it's a fantastic product.

Speaker 17 But all of those benefits, all of, I mean, this is a straight line. There's a lot of innovation, a fantastic product, but you want to talk about a massive.

Speaker 17 flow to the bottom line and who it's coming from beyond the natural growth, organic growth of the sector.

Speaker 17 It's coming from the, it's coming from the gaffer, the lighting guy, guy, and the woman who wrote season four of SpongeBob SquarePants and used to make 200 grand a year.

Speaker 17 And Netflix has said, you know what, I figured out a way to pay you 40 grand.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 all of that capital coming out of high production states and people has moved to Netflix shareholders. And it represents a much broader trend in our society.

Speaker 17 And that is the notion that we give a shit about stakeholders, not shareholders, is just not true. Everything is run for shareholders.
And by the way, there's some upside to that.

Speaker 17 I'm not arguing that it's the wrong way, but be clear, folks. Everything is now optimized to transfer as much capital as possible from states, from workers.
The workers here are not being prioritized.

Speaker 17 Production in Los Angeles was off 40% year on year, not because they're not talented, but because they're too goddamn expensive.

Speaker 17 And Netflix has found a way to keep them in the dark and then hire 80% as talented a person overseas for 30% to 40% of the price. It's a transfer of wealth from artists at Spotify

Speaker 17 and from the creatives in Hollywood to Netflix and Spotify shareholders. And Spotify has made the jump.
So they have so much leverage. They are now extracting revenue from the bottom 99.9% of artists.

Speaker 17 They're going to make less and less money.

Speaker 16 All right, very quickly on Uber.

Speaker 17 Incredibly well managed. I just think you got to give it to Dara.

Speaker 17 He and Apple were the ones that said, no, I'm not going to jump into the shallow end headfirst here and make huge capital allocations to autonomous. He pulled back.
He pulled back. I'm going to wait.

Speaker 17 I'm going to rent other people. Just as, I mean, they're good at this.

Speaker 17 Uber's innovation is Airbnb's innovation, and that is I'll build a thick layer of software on top of other people's capital expenditure, on top of their apartments, their houses, and their cars, right?

Speaker 17 So it's in their DNA to say, well, why don't we just ride? Why don't we just be the Remora fish off of Google's multi-decade, multi-tens of billions of dollars investments and autonomous?

Speaker 17 That's where we should be riding. That's where we should be playing the game.

Speaker 17 He is doing a great job of managing that company.

Speaker 16 You're right. It's on top of it.
I got to say, Waymo is so integrated into San Francisco now, and you're going to see it all over the country. It's so convenient.

Speaker 16 And they live together with Uber, by the way. That's in a very comfortable way.
I took both in San Francisco this week, and both were great. Prices are still too high for all of them.

Speaker 16 And I know they need to make money and stuff, but it's a really interesting time. You're right.
Dara's done a nice job here and there are no competitors really.

Speaker 16 And I mean, Lyft is sort of a competitor, I guess. Anyway, one more quick break and we'll be back for predictions.

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Speaker 16 Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction.

Speaker 17 Well, if you think about the three layers in AI,

Speaker 17 there's the infrastructure layer, the NVIDIAs of the world, there's the LLM layer, the Anthropics, the ChatGPTs, and then there's the application layer.

Speaker 17 And the entire infrastructure and LLM world was thrown into

Speaker 17 disarray when Shock or China came up with something cheaper, right?

Speaker 17 But I think what you're about to see is

Speaker 17 kind of a golden age or dozens of new unicorns in what I'd call the application layer.

Speaker 17 And I met with this incredibly impressive young man yesterday who founded a company called Rogo, which is essentially they take all of these financial data streams, whether it's CapIQ or Bloomberg, and then they put a layer of intelligence, AI weaponized intelligence on top of it.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 they turn an investment banking analyst into someone fighting on horseback, to someone in a panzer tank.

Speaker 17 So you can type into this AI that's customized for financial services or institutions, institutions, IPO, put together an IPO Rocho deck for a fast fashion company that does this revenues and these are the concerns, and it'll put together a 60-slide deck of which 48 are pretty good.

Speaker 17 So you can basically do the job of three analysts. And they'll say that it's making people more productive, but it's going to result in massive layoffs.

Speaker 17 Anyways, I think you're about to see dozens of unicorns in the application layer.

Speaker 17 I do think that the infrastructure in the LLM layer is about to shed tens of billions of dollars as people realize the moats aren't as big as they thought.

Speaker 17 That if Sam Altman can copy everything out there, someone's going to be able to figure out a way to copy Sam Altman shit. But the additional customization or artisanal

Speaker 17 AI application layer in healthcare and in financial services and fitness and all sorts of things is going to create a bunch of branded consumer AI applications. I mean, that's what Airbnb is, right?

Speaker 17 That's what Uber are. They took existing infrastructure and breakthroughs and they branded it and they created interesting vertical niche applications.

Speaker 17 I think that you're about to see a bunch of companies. I mean, this guy, I had breakfast with this kid, 25.
Jesus Christ. I'm like, can I come back as you?

Speaker 17 By the way, I'm going to be him tonight under the influence of Cambridge.

Speaker 16 You're just going to get a call from the police and I'll have to come get you or something. Something about that.

Speaker 17 No, by the way,

Speaker 17 you're not my call. Preet Barrara is my call.

Speaker 16 It's true. I call him.

Speaker 17 I literally, I have him.

Speaker 17 I'm about to make him and his phone number tonight my screensaver.

Speaker 16 Oh, that's a good idea. That's my voice.
I'm going to call Preet.

Speaker 17 Tonight, it's like, this is the guy. Here's his number.
I've told Preet this.

Speaker 16 I know. He's going to be a good person.
I just need you to do one thing.

Speaker 17 You can ask me for anything, but if you see my name come up, I need you to answer.

Speaker 17 And I'm not calling to say hi. I'm not calling to say hi.

Speaker 16 Wow. Okay.

Speaker 17 Anyways, I've told him I'll send millions of dollars of money to this

Speaker 17 law firm. He's now like the rainmaker for.
Anyways, but no, I'm not calling you. I'm calling Preet.

Speaker 16 I'll go as a scold for you. I would leave you.
I would scold you. I would.
I'm going to make a very brief prediction. You know, there's a lot of new polls out.
The Economists have polled that

Speaker 16 back in November, 47% of those surveyed Republicans say they wanted Elon Musk to have a lot of influence in the Trump administration, while 29% wanted a little, and 12% want him to have none at all.

Speaker 16 Today, the number of Republicans who say Musk have, they want him to have a lot of influence has fallen substantially to 26%, according to this story in The Hill.

Speaker 16 Meanwhile, 43% of Republican respondents said they wanted Musk to have a little influence, and 17% they wanted him to have none at all. I see that.

Speaker 16 But I have to tell you, I had thought they would have a falling out. I think he is, as I have said,

Speaker 16 he is little pussy

Speaker 16 for Trump, the mop boss, essentially. He is the heat shield.
He is the junkyard dog. And I think Trump understands this intuitively.

Speaker 16 There's one thing about Donald Trump, he has an intuitive sense of things.

Speaker 16 Musk is good for him because he gets the shit done, even if it's illegal and he's willing to, and nobody else is.

Speaker 16 And as much as these insiders are going to complain about him being bigger than his britches or overstepping,

Speaker 16 I think maybe he might be around a little longer. I think I was wrong about that falling out.
I wish I wasn't, but I do think

Speaker 16 even if people are indignant, this guy has a stand.

Speaker 16 Everything has shown when everyone thinks Musk is going to lose on the pedophile case or with the SEC,

Speaker 16 he's got an ability to not just to take risks, but also take ridiculous, heinous risks, but to also stick it out. So I don't know.
I think Trump recognizes that it's good to have a junkyard dog.

Speaker 16 You're my junkyard dog.

Speaker 17 I like that. Thanks for saying that.

Speaker 17 Get away from her.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Anyways,

Speaker 17 I mean, this is insanity or crazy, but I would describe it more apt as like late stage syphilis crazy.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's what they were saying online.

Speaker 17 Syphilis crazy. But the thing is, that can go on for years.

Speaker 16 You can have syphilis for a lot.

Speaker 16 Please don't get it.

Speaker 17 No, no, no. Unfortunately, the good news is I'm so unattractive and unappealing now that you have to have someone else to engage in giving you syphilis, and that's just not going to happen.

Speaker 16 What a word we use enough, syphilitic.

Speaker 17 It's a great word, isn't it?

Speaker 16 Let's use it like several times.

Speaker 17 I used to like the word encephalitic, but that's not syphilis.

Speaker 16 That's a brain disease, cloudiness.

Speaker 17 But but syphilis.

Speaker 17 I do like syphilis. Can I tell you?

Speaker 16 Amanda's always like, Scott used that word wrong. She's like such a word person.

Speaker 16 Several times you've used words that it's.

Speaker 17 She means I used it incorrectly.

Speaker 16 Incorrectly, that's correct. Yeah.
Anyway, she's often doing that to me. I'm like, did he? I don't know.
Like, she's like, you need to tell him. I'm like, I'm not telling him.
I forget.

Speaker 16 I completely forget the minute she tells me.

Speaker 17 I wouldn't mind her. Your texts are mean.
If she calls me and says, you meant this, I'm open to that.

Speaker 16 All right, I'll tell her. I'll tell her she can be your spelling lady.
Anyway, elsewhere in the Karen Scott universe, which is growing by the second. It's expanding.

Speaker 16 This week on Prof G Conversation, Scott spoke with Mo Gaddat, the former chief business officer of Google X, best-selling author and founder of 1 Billion Happy. Let's listen.

Speaker 28 The truth is, the world is not ready for what is about to hit us.

Speaker 28 Whether you take the simple things like the economics of the world and how they will change as a result of AI, all the way to the change of the dynamics of power and

Speaker 28 the resulting deprivation of freedom,

Speaker 28 all the way to how the economics of the world are going to change and how

Speaker 28 the jobs are going to change and how the human connection is going to change and how our understanding of reality is going to change. And these are decisions that are not made by us anymore.

Speaker 28 Think about it this way.

Speaker 28 Spider-Man's with great power comes great responsibility. We've disconnected power from responsibility.

Speaker 28 There is massive, massive power concentration concentrated in hands that do not answer to anyone.

Speaker 16 Well, Ketame, I say.

Speaker 17 He's a very thoughtful guy. Mogada, I really, I really enjoyed the conversation with him.
And basically,

Speaker 17 you should listen to the conversation, but he basically summarized like, you know, Sam Altman is

Speaker 17 reshaping the way we think about things, the way we approach problems, potentially what types of weapons are developed. And he was kind of like, who the fuck is Sam Altman to get to do this?

Speaker 16 Right, that's correct. Who the fuck is Elon Musk? Who the fuck are any of these these people? But that's where we're going.
Okay, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot.

Speaker 16 Read us out.

Speaker 17 Today's show is produced by Larry Names, Joy Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Dertertod introduced this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Ms. Severo, and Dan Shulon.

Speaker 17 Nishak Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thank you for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 17 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.
Who is that guy in the corner at that fashion week party?

Speaker 17 I get the sense he likes him a lot.

Speaker 16 That's the dog.

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Elon Pushback, Trump's Distraction Trap, and Disney Earnings

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