SoftBank's Investment, ABC's Trump Settlement, and Guest Co-Host Paul Krugman

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Speaker 19 I don't think you seem like a hot rabbi type.

Speaker 19 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 19 Scott is off today, so to fill his shoes, his tiny shoes, I've brought in someone with big shoes.

Speaker 19 I brought in a Nobel Prize winner and a famed economist, Paul Krugman, who recently announced he was going off on his own from the New York Times after a long and illustrious career there. Hi, Paul.

Speaker 19 How you doing? I'm good. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing?

Speaker 20 Well, basically,

Speaker 20 at the moment, I'm trying to build an audience for a Substack. Okay.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 yeah, one of the things that I couldn't do at the times was, you know, have an independent newsletter. I used to have an independent blog, but they eliminated those a long time ago.

Speaker 20 And so now I'm off there able to weigh in on whatever seems appropriate and

Speaker 20 even

Speaker 20 have charts and

Speaker 20 funny pictures and whatever else. So that's what I'm doing for now.

Speaker 19 Whatever you feel like. Right.
So you were 25 years a columnist there, correct? Yeah. How did you assess those years? You know, you're still writing.
Your sub stack, by the way, is, I love the name.

Speaker 19 Krugman Wonks Out.

Speaker 19 You said it's going to be wonkier and snarkier. You've got music recommendations.

Speaker 19 Everybody wants through the world. You had tears for fears

Speaker 19 this week.

Speaker 19 So I'm going to ask you about those in a second,

Speaker 19 but about the specific pieces that you've written, because I'm really interested in them. But

Speaker 19 what are you going to do different? And talk about your 25 years at the Times just briefly. I mean, what a run you've had.

Speaker 20 Yeah, what a strange thing. I mean, I was hired at the beginning of 2000.

Speaker 20 and literally,

Speaker 20 Halloween, who recruited me at the time, said, you know, we have five guys writing about the Middle East and nobody writing about the economy.

Speaker 20 And the Middle East just isn't interesting anymore, which turned out to be a pretty bad call. But

Speaker 20 it was also the economy. And it was just a very different time.
And we were all having fun with dot-coms and

Speaker 20 it's, you know,

Speaker 20 stuff looked silly, but

Speaker 20 interesting. And

Speaker 20 then, you know, it turned into a much grimmer world. And, but, but, you know, there was a, there was a period.

Speaker 20 My best year, the best years of my life were the worst years for the world economy, which was the aftermath of the financial crisis when there was a perfect convergence between my job as a journalist and my own academic research.

Speaker 20 Not only was I an economist, but I had literally spent a lot of time on the Asian financial crisis in the 90s and had warned that something like that could happen here. And it did.

Speaker 19 So, when you decided to break it, why now? Was it you said 25 years? You know, I quit my conference 20 years. I was like, I did a great job for 20 years.
I want to do something else.

Speaker 20 Oh, yeah, there's a lot of stuff I think I probably shouldn't talk about.

Speaker 19 But the one thing was exactly to be able to do this.

Speaker 20 I mean, there was no

Speaker 20 the Times had actually canceled my newsletter, even at the Times. And

Speaker 20 look, I'm still a wonk.

Speaker 20 I want to do stuff where I can have lots of charts, maybe even an occasional equation.

Speaker 20 And also

Speaker 20 the flow. Rather weirdly, I felt like I wasn't,

Speaker 20 I wanted to write more than I was able to at the times because I was limited to two columns a week. And

Speaker 20 there's so much going on right now. I've got subjects and topics stacked up in a holding pattern waiting for a chance to write about them.

Speaker 19 Right. Isn't it cool? It is cool.
I can do whatever I want.

Speaker 19 I always used to say, someone asked me why I leave various places, not just the Times, because I also left the Times too, which was, I don't want mama telling me what to do.

Speaker 19 I don't know what else to say. It's not nothing's wrong with mama, but I was sort of like, I got, what if I want to do this today? I want to do that.
It makes you very, it's very creative.

Speaker 19 I think you'll find it, someone like you will find it really creative to be able to wake up every morning and just decide what you want to do, which is a very different thing.

Speaker 20 Yeah. It's,

Speaker 20 among other things, it gives me a chance to be silly, you know?

Speaker 19 Yeah. Silly does not pop to mind when I think of Paul Krook.

Speaker 20 Well, but that is, you know, I was able to start

Speaker 20 the most recent,

Speaker 20 just before we recorded this,

Speaker 20 with

Speaker 20 Mike Myers as Dr. Evil saying $1 million.

Speaker 20 I'm not sure that would have been beneath the dignity of the times, but not beneath mine.

Speaker 19 No beneath your dignity anymore. No dignity, Paul, no dignity Krugman.
But first, let's talk about your latest, one of your latest posts on Substack.

Speaker 19 Oh, by the way, you're not supposed to say you're on Substack, says the Substack. You're supposed to just say

Speaker 19 it's your. You're my own newsletter.
Yeah, you're wonky, Paul.

Speaker 19 But crypto is for criming. I love this piece.
Tell us, talk about this one. And you've talked about whether it matters.

Speaker 19 Then the next one was about whether Trump is ignorant on trade and whether it matters.

Speaker 19 So talk about those two, those two that you just wrote.

Speaker 20 So crypto has been, you know, I've been following. the crypto thing.

Speaker 20 I've actually made money in crypto by going to conferences as a paid speaker as the designated enemy. So I'm there for people to yell at and they pay me a fee in actual money.

Speaker 20 But

Speaker 20 it's a remarkable phenomenon. And a lot of people,

Speaker 20 what makes it remarkable aside from the fact that they have incredible price gains, but

Speaker 20 those of us who think we know something about monetary economics have asked, does this thing look like money? Does it fulfill at all the functions it's supposed to?

Speaker 20 And not just talking about academics, but also financial industry types.

Speaker 20 I'm part of various groups that have informal meetings. And in some of them, we've actually invited articulate crypto people.
And the question is always, what purpose does this serve?

Speaker 20 What can you do with crypto that you can't do more cheaply and more easily with conventional stuff? You know, it's,

Speaker 20 you know, Bitcoin and Venmo are roughly contemporaneous in terms of their creation. And Venmo is clearly useful.
Everybody uses it. Why would you want to go through all the somersaults and so on? And

Speaker 20 have never gotten an answer in terms of legitimate uses.

Speaker 19 Yet it's on the upswing, right? It's $107,000.

Speaker 20 It's crazy high,

Speaker 20 but still not in use for anything legal. That's the most amazing thing, even where they've tried.
I mean,

Speaker 20 El Salvador tried to make Bitcoin legal tender and actually subsidize people's

Speaker 20 crypto wallets on their phones, and they still don't use it.

Speaker 19 It's because it's awkward.

Speaker 20 It doesn't really, you know,

Speaker 20 dollar-linked digital payments are just a much easier tool.

Speaker 20 So, and, but it just occurred to me possibly after

Speaker 20 a few stories in particular after

Speaker 20 seeing some of the latest whining from Elon Musk,

Speaker 20 that the real trick here is that we were asking the wrong question. We're asking what legitimate use case is there for this? And there still is none.
Nobody has actually come up with one.

Speaker 20 But illegitimate use cases are a pretty big deal. And if you actually know anything about currency, you know that actually crime is big business.
You know, the vast bulk of the dollars in circulation

Speaker 20 by value are $100 bills. And nobody uses $100 bills.
Most people never see one. You can't actually go into a store with a $100 bill.

Speaker 20 But there's trillions of dollars. There's actually about $6,000, $6,000 bills in circulation for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

Speaker 20 Most of them, we think, and this is all inferential, are outside the country.

Speaker 20 But we also are reasonably sure, although this is inherently impossible to prove, that they're mostly for illegal purposes.

Speaker 19 So how do you, when they say to you, well, it's up in 100 and some, Trump's going to to create a

Speaker 19 Bitcoin, you know, put currency for everybody, what is, what is, it's still going up like crazy. And that's what they'll, that's what they'll point to.
Krugman's an idiot, like Kara's an idiot.

Speaker 19 Well, I mean, we've been through that before.

Speaker 20 Now, this is a longer run than most, but I've been around long enough to remember the dot-com bubble

Speaker 20 when lots of people thought, you know, you're just stupid for thinking that this is a bubble.

Speaker 20 I remember the housing bubble where people

Speaker 20 got extremely furious. If you said, you know, the

Speaker 20 housing prices circa 2006 did not make sense. So, you know, it's the old line.

Speaker 20 The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Speaker 19 Plus,

Speaker 20 there's also, and this is something I did write about in my last newsletter, there's a strong element of kind of, it's not just speculation, there's gambling. We ask, you know, who,

Speaker 20 you know,

Speaker 20 a lot of crypto is clearly being used by

Speaker 20 Putin and by drug lords, but a lot of small players buying crypto are basically young men. And

Speaker 20 at this, you know, contemporaneous with this big rise in crypto prices has been an explosion of sports gambling.

Speaker 20 Also meme stocks like GameStop is also, so that's probably a general phenomenon of people,

Speaker 20 you know, they probably would say, oh, I'm being a forward-looking investor, but the psychology is really that of gambling.

Speaker 20 And so, you know, put all these things together. It's still kind of astonishing that it's gone this high.

Speaker 20 But then, you know, the national Bitcoin Reserve amounts to a huge government bailout, which is,

Speaker 20 you know, for a libertarian invention, it's

Speaker 19 a very fair point. That is actually the, it is.

Speaker 19 Well, they talk about free speech and then they try to censor everybody, but that's another issue.

Speaker 19 So, one of the other ones you wrote about today, I was reading, was about trade, as we tape two things.

Speaker 19 One is your piece about trade and whether Trump knows what he's doing around tariffs, which you basically conclude no.

Speaker 19 But then at the same time, as we take this, news just broke that Trump and soft bank CEO Masioshi-san will announce a $100 billion investment in the U.S.

Speaker 19 over the next four years, which they say will create 100,000 jobs based on AI and related infrastructure. It's very thin on information.

Speaker 19 As you know, Masioshi-san has had his share of failures and wins. Wins.
He's sort of one of these, you know, there's a book coming out about him, basically, you know, that he just goes up and down.

Speaker 19 Like it's just, he's really quite a risk taker.

Speaker 19 So talk a little bit about this idea of Trump pushing the trade issues and at the same time saying, I'm going to bring, I'm going to give free anyone who invests more than a billion dollars in this country is going to get like right through the regulatory ticket without a problem.

Speaker 20 Yeah. So first of all, you know, the fact that somebody's bringing money to the United States, you know, the regulations are there for a reason.

Speaker 20 Now, if you want to fix the regulations, fine, but to say, well, you know, bring a billion dollars to the U.S., it'll,

Speaker 20 and I'm not sure what.

Speaker 20 We won't care if you're polluting the air.

Speaker 20 We won't care if you're poisoning the water. But what's really funny for somebody, certainly with my background, is

Speaker 20 There's a

Speaker 20 I've been trying to figure out if there's a way to say this and that it doesn't totally put people off, but you know, it is a

Speaker 20 fact. It's an accounting identity that the trade balance plus

Speaker 20 net capital flows into the United States equals zero. The balance of payments always balances.
And so if we can persuade foreigners to invest more in the United States,

Speaker 20 then

Speaker 20 arithmetic says that we have to have a bigger trade deficit. So you have Trump on the one hand saying, you know, we're subsidizing Canada and Mexico because we run trade deficits with them.

Speaker 20 And the other hand saying, it's great I'm bringing in all this foreign money, which guarantees one way or another, an even bigger trade deficit. And

Speaker 20 I

Speaker 20 have no question in my mind that he has no idea that

Speaker 20 that's how it works.

Speaker 19 People say they're going to try to stop him in this or move him off him, but they don't seem to be able to.

Speaker 19 There's a lot of people saying he's going to do a, you know, a more lukewarm version of it that has a lot of jazz hands and not a lot of push behind it.

Speaker 19 And that you were noting that other countries have a lot of things at their disposal to make it hurt here.

Speaker 20 I mean, I have no way of reading Trump's mind, but lots of stuff he makes, you know, on crypto, he was, it's total nonsense.

Speaker 20 Oh, and also I'm going to throw hundreds of billions of taxpayer money at it. So he changes his minds on lots of things.
But tariffs have been an obsession of his.

Speaker 20 for a very, very long time, long before he really entered politics.

Speaker 20 Trade deficits are bad is a long obsession of his.

Speaker 20 So I would be surprised if he's willing to water it down too much. But if he doesn't, then

Speaker 20 he has a very kind of

Speaker 20 19th century, if you like, view, which kind of makes sense, you know, given he loves William McKinley, but the

Speaker 20 of trade as

Speaker 20 countries trade

Speaker 20 food and manufactured goods for each other. And that's kind of the end of the story.
That's not the world we live in now. We live in a world of these highly interdependent economies and supply chains.

Speaker 20 Trump thinks that because we run a trade deficit, because we buy more from other countries than they buy from us, that we have all the leverage.

Speaker 20 But the fact of the matter is that some of the most effective forms of retaliation that other countries can do are not levying tariffs on U.S. exports, but

Speaker 20 putting taxes or restrictions on things that we import.

Speaker 20 And I thought it was striking to see that the

Speaker 20 even the Canadians are talking about putting export taxes on oil to get the Canadians mad and seeking revenge. This takes special talent.
But

Speaker 20 so the fact of the matter is that we could be

Speaker 20 very much in a world of

Speaker 20 mutual punishment over trade. escalating trade war.
And the trade war will not look the way I think Trump imagines. He imagines the U.S.
puts on tariffs.

Speaker 20 Everybody says, oh my God, we need access to to the U.S. market.
What can we do? And they surrender, although it's not even clear what they surrender, because I'm not sure he has coherent demands.

Speaker 20 But what would actually happen is a mixture of retaliatory tariffs, but also retaliatory export restrictions and just a big global economic mess.

Speaker 19 Is there any way that what he's saying is that he's going to, he sort of sees it as

Speaker 19 a boxing match or something? It seems like that. That's right.

Speaker 20 He thinks of it as a zero-sum.

Speaker 20 That basically, if we sell more to foreigners than they buy from us, then we buy from them, that we win. And if we buy more, then we sell, that we lose.
And that's never made any sense as a story.

Speaker 20 And it's pretty clear. I mean, when he,

Speaker 20 I have to admit, even I was shocked when he said, I'm going to have 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. I mean, if you know anything about modern manufacturing, you know, there is no U.S.

Speaker 20 manufacturing sector. There's a North American manufacturing complex in which things like like auto parts may cross the border six or eight times in the course of putting a car together.

Speaker 20 And so that's completely crazy, but he doesn't know that. And who's going to tell him?

Speaker 19 No, he lives back in the McKinley times. You're absolutely right where we used to have all these big factories.

Speaker 19 Speaking of retaliatory, OpenAI has fired back in its ongoing lawsuit with co-founder Elon Musk,

Speaker 19 who had left the company. In a blog post, OpenAI has said, you can't sue your way to AGI and said Musk wanted to transform the company into a for-profit six years ago.

Speaker 19 The post also claims Musk demanded majority equity, which I think he has said he had. And he said he needed $80 billion to, he needed that because he needed $80 billion to build a city on Mars.

Speaker 19 Now, Meta, of course, no surprise, is siding with Musk. The company is urging California's AG to block OpenAI's planned conversion to a for-profit company.

Speaker 19 They're trying to slow this company down, which doesn't seem to be slowing.

Speaker 19 Talk to me about this because one of the things that's really astonishing, and you were talking about this, is people that talk about competition really just want to stop each other using all kinds of regulatory or legal means.

Speaker 20 Oh, yeah. I mean, this is, we have a remarkably, the tech sector is remarkably oligarchic.
There are, you know, a handful of players that have strong market positions.

Speaker 19 It's called a brolegark.

Speaker 20 Well, I like the brolegark too, and that's good.

Speaker 20 But it's a,

Speaker 20 and they do their best

Speaker 20 to prevent competition. They do the nature to some extent of tech is that once you've sort of committed to a platform,

Speaker 20 it's very hard to get out of it, which gives them a lot.

Speaker 20 And this is, you know, if there are things I, again, something I'm sure I would never be able to write for the Times, but I'm a big fan of Corey Doctorow's

Speaker 20 insidification.

Speaker 19 In certification,

Speaker 20 you build a

Speaker 19 platform that could get a lot of people locked in through network externalities and then degrade the experience step by step to extract the maximum amount of money from it um so these guys and they're of course they're using the courts as well to try and and prevent competition so um but really is anybody surprised what does that look like is it do you think that it'll work or what when people do this what what stage are we at with tech when they're doing this because this is obviously the next great race is to dominate ai and open ai is way ahead by a lot compared to even despite the money being spent 30 billion dollars at meta 80 billion dollars at i think microsoft and and 50 at google these are and of course whatever elon's spending at grok uh which

Speaker 20 in trying to keep up by both you know these kind of things or any other means he can to get ahead yeah i mean i don't know where we are on this first of all i the ultimate value of ai is very much up in the air we still don't know what it's worth i mean i actually had a uh someone who works with uh with us on the text they have a textbook um

Speaker 20 but it also teaches students, and they're all totally into AI. And he fed one of my Substack posts into ChatGPT for a summary.
And my God, it bore no resemblance at all to what I said.

Speaker 19 And it's fantasized.

Speaker 20 It somehow had me talking about Brexit, which wasn't in there at all. So,

Speaker 20 I mean, that's just an example.

Speaker 20 They say there are some things that it's really useful for, but we don't know. There's a real question whether the amount of money that's being thrown at it will ever make sense.
Right.

Speaker 19 It's a little like the beginning of the internet, may I point out? Remember, it was like we didn't know, and then, of course, it would have been good to have been there with the right players, right?

Speaker 20 With the right players, although it's a little bit

Speaker 20 what we used to call the Sierra Madre effect, where somebody said the reason gold costs so much because of all the people who went out looking for it and didn't find it.

Speaker 20 And that's all tech is a lot like that.

Speaker 20 It's the

Speaker 20 but yeah, and

Speaker 20 the question is, are we,

Speaker 20 it turns out that a lot of established tech has turned into kind of, you know, what in the old days we would have called natural monopolies. It settles into a handful of big players.
And

Speaker 20 that happens really fast, actually, with internet-based stuff.

Speaker 20 I suspect it may happen with AI. Now, whether it's,

Speaker 20 I mean, open AI does look like it's got a big leap, and maybe

Speaker 20 that's,

Speaker 20 maybe there's still room for somebody to jostle it aside but i i very much doubt that we're going to have uh

Speaker 20 10 years from now multiple competing llms it's commodification of them yeah that seems unlikely what's more likely is that we'll have a kind of network effect where everybody is using something i mean the general llms the big ones that they can't all

Speaker 19 come competing at once what's really interesting is you know

Speaker 19 open ai could have become like netscape if you remember netscape had the far and away or maybe it's google right that's the issue is which one it which one That's right.

Speaker 20 And we have no idea, really.

Speaker 19 I mean,

Speaker 19 or what it's going to be.

Speaker 20 And I think further, we can say that nobody has any idea. We just don't know how that plays out.

Speaker 19 What do you say to students who are like, I got to get into AI? How do you advise them?

Speaker 20 You know, just generally, you know, how about learning a lot of basics, you know, particularly grad students, they actually all students, they want to learn a lot of tools for. analysis.
And

Speaker 20 if you start using AI for every question, first of all, you're not going to get get those other skills. And secondly,

Speaker 20 apparently, again, there are some things it does, but on anything I happen to work on,

Speaker 20 the Monkau is an effect.

Speaker 20 It fabulates. It just makes up stuff.

Speaker 19 I think it's improved. Having used it since the beginning, it's certainly improved and you can see how it's doing that, but you're right.

Speaker 19 It's hard to figure out what the best use cases are. And eventually someone will.
Who would have thought of Uber back when the iPhone was created, right? Or even before that, right?

Speaker 20 It's actually, it was funny. I was ahead of the curve because I, because they already had digital ride-hailing for taxis in the UK years before it came to the US.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 20 So I was spending time over there and I got accustomed to it. But it's true.

Speaker 19 And something, look,

Speaker 20 something that actually is useful to me is, and it's fundamentally the same kind of big data thing is translation. I remember when translation or

Speaker 20 speech recognition

Speaker 20 were both total jokes and uh and are now you know not

Speaker 19 that they're completely usable now have you looked at their sora i haven't looked at it yeah a lot of what i'm getting a lot recently is a bunch of ceos going i'm going from 6 000 engineers to 2 000 that's my goal like that's they're all they're looking for is efficiencies and i think that's

Speaker 19 That's where I see a lot of the opportunity, efficiency.

Speaker 20 By the way, in terms of giving students advice, it's not very long ago, like maybe two years ago, that you would have been telling your students, learn to code.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 20 And that turns out that's exactly one of the jobs that...

Speaker 19 Learn to do plumbing. Plumbing is a big thing.

Speaker 19 Plumbing is going to be a long time before we had robot plumbers. No, yeah, there's not going to be digital plumbing anytime soon.
All right. Paul, let's go on a quick break.
We come back.

Speaker 19 ABC settles with Trump and Apple's votable vision for the future.

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Speaker 19 Paul, we're back with more news to discuss. Let's start with TikTok is facing it.
And I want to get into China because it's looking like

Speaker 19 you've written extensively about China over the years, but let me go through a couple of things.

Speaker 19 They're facing this legal setback after DC Court of Appeals rejected a temporary freeze on the upcoming law requiring the parent company ByteDance to divest or face a ban.

Speaker 19 TikTok is expected to ask the Supreme Court to take the case, though it's unclear if anything will happen before the law goes into effect next month, which means they've got to act.

Speaker 19 The leaders of the House China Committee sent letters to Google and Apple on Friday telling them to be ready to remove TikTok from their app stores on January 19th, a day before Donald Trump goes into office.

Speaker 19 Donald Trump was against TikTok before he was for it, especially because one of his big

Speaker 19 funders, Jeff Yass, was a bike dance, for people who don't know, is owned by a lot of big U.S. billionaires, just so you know.

Speaker 19 It's running out of time and options. And let me just say, you've written extensively about China.
What do you see as their move? Because China's economy continues to struggle.

Speaker 19 It's in a period of deflation with prices falling in six consecutive quarters. And of course, these Trump tariffs we just discussed.
So what do you see as their move at repercussions here?

Speaker 19 I'd love your thought. If you want to go backwards, any way you want to go through it.

Speaker 20 Yeah, on TikTok, you know, that is one social media platform that I have never visited in my life and don't really expect to. And so, but we know that, you know, in many ways, the

Speaker 20 social media are media.

Speaker 20 And we wouldn't want a largely current controlled entity

Speaker 20 to own the New York Times.

Speaker 20 We wouldn't want it to own one of our major cable news networks.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 the same logic really does apply to social media. So I'm fine with the idea that we really need to force divestiture.

Speaker 20 Now, I mean, you could say the general principle is you shouldn't have people who are fundamentally hostile to American values owning social media platforms.

Speaker 20 So, of course, Elon Musk to divest Twitter. But anyway,

Speaker 20 the China story, let me talk about stuff I actually know something about. China.
It's a really interesting case because China has moved very quickly from

Speaker 20 incredible, roaring economic success story towards something that looks a lot like Japan circa 1990.

Speaker 20 It's, and of course, Japan was a huge, I'm old enough to remember when airport stores were full of books with samurai warriors on their covers promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese management.

Speaker 20 And Japan, but what's happened with China is we go to the fundamentals. Their working age population has been declining now for almost a decade.

Speaker 20 So they're in a kind of a real Japanese-style demographic slowdown.

Speaker 20 It's interesting.

Speaker 20 They are still doing really impressive stuff on some advanced technologies. But as best we can measure it, the overall technological level of the economy,

Speaker 20 what economics Jargon calls total factor productivity. But anyway, the overall efficiency of the Chinese economy is not growing very fast.

Speaker 20 The big convergence on Western economies that they were experiencing

Speaker 20 in the 80s, 90s, even the first decade of the 21st century appears to have largely stalled, which means that China has gone from an economy that's capable of doing

Speaker 20 8% growth not that long ago to something where 3% or 4% would be really

Speaker 20 a lot.

Speaker 20 But their whole economy is set up to be an 8% growth economy. They have very, very low consumption relative to income.

Speaker 20 The government kind of suppresses distribution of income that comes from production to the public. And it's a complicated story, but basically lots of their growth does not filter down to consumers.

Speaker 20 And they maintain investment of 40% of GDP, which is like triple

Speaker 20 what we do.

Speaker 20 And there's no place for that money to go. So they were able to mask it for about a decade with a gigantic housing bubble

Speaker 20 with all those ghost cities and all of that.

Speaker 20 But they run out of room.

Speaker 20 They can't do that really anymore.

Speaker 20 But they seem to be weirdly incapable of accepting that they need to kind of grow up and accept that they are going to be a middle-income, moderate growth economy from here on in.

Speaker 19 Right. So what do they do with these bans coming, with this TikTok thing,

Speaker 19 with the tariffs?

Speaker 20 That just adds to the pressure, because one way that you can temporarily try to

Speaker 20 deal with that kind of stagnation is to run,

Speaker 20 you have this productive capacity and not enough domestic demand, so you want to export stuff.

Speaker 20 And I'm not sure exactly how TikTok plays into that, but the reality is the world is not going to accept all those exports. The world is not going to see BYD destroy their auto industry.

Speaker 19 BYD, for people who don't know, is their car, which is quite a good car, but they're not going to let it in this country.

Speaker 20 There's no way. Yeah, it's just not.
It's just, I mean, even if you can make an intellectual argument that we should accept it, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 20 I used to spend a lot of time in and studying Japan. So I was one of the relative handful of Western economists who looked at Japan's problems in the 90s.

Speaker 20 And instead of saying, oh, those stupid Japanese said, gee, you know, this is a big, advanced country with policymakers who are not ideal, but are not idiots.

Speaker 20 If this can happen to them, it could happen to us.

Speaker 20 And sure enough, it did.

Speaker 20 But, you know, we were, a lot of us were very, very critical of the Japanese for not being more forceful.

Speaker 20 And I've often argued that those of us who were critical, which a group that included, among other people, Ben Bernanke, that we should all go to Tokyo and apologize to the emperor because they actually did a better job.

Speaker 20 First of all, they did a better job of dealing with their financial crisis than we did, but also that they, in the end, handled it pretty gracefully.

Speaker 20 You know, Japan is no longer going to rule the world, but it's, but they never had mass unemployment. They haven't had mass social unrest.

Speaker 20 There's every indication that the Chinese are not managing that kind of graceful downshifting in their growth rate and so that could be really ugly how can they with the population when they've got them the expectations oh but they no but they just need to let more income get through to consumers they need to shift from 40 of gdp invested to 25 and then 20 which means increasing the consumption share by the same amount and now it's true they took the japanese about 15 years to make that kind of shift.

Speaker 20 And the Chinese have delayed this so long that it's a much more violent thing. but still they don't have a choice.
Basically live it up.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 What will the tariffs do if these tariffs go into place? At one point, it's 100%, I guess, on those cars. Yeah.

Speaker 20 Well, and it's, I mean,

Speaker 20 during the campaign, Trump was saying 60%

Speaker 20 on China, and that may now escalate. And

Speaker 20 yeah, this is rough. I mean, particularly, you could say, well, all right, they can just export to someplace else, but where?

Speaker 20 A fair bit of stuff was probably in effect, you know, rerouted through Vietnam, but that won't be, that will be cracked down on so is is trump putting the squeeze on them a good thing for the united states no because we you know we do not want the world's uh biggest country um by some measure the world's biggest economy we do not want to see them descend into chaos and among other things uh you know uh autocracies that are failing at economic management have this habit of trying to distract people by launching uh uh launching wars.

Speaker 20 You know,

Speaker 20 I'm, I, I find myself thinking about the Argentine junta and the Falkland Islands. Yeah.
They've been around for a long time here.

Speaker 19 So it's going to, Taiwan's going to be a little different than the Falkland Islands, I suspect.

Speaker 20 Yeah, a lot tougher, although that didn't work out too well.

Speaker 19 But still, still.

Speaker 20 But and then that would criticize, that would be disastrous for all of us.

Speaker 19 Right, right, because of our chips and everything else. Speaking of that, I'm just curious

Speaker 19 with Apple, Apple is looking to kickstart sales growth with a series of major design changes. They have a big market in China, by the way.

Speaker 19 They would love to see China put more money in the hands of consumers because that's one of their same thing with Elon Musk, by the way, with Tesla.

Speaker 19 The company plans to produce an iPhone next year that will be thinner and cheaper than current models. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is working on two foldable devices.

Speaker 19 Foldable devices are very hot now. They're going to do a smaller one and a giant iPad-like one.

Speaker 19 They're pushing for quick release. Now, you've been skeptical and somewhat contrarian about tech product type in the past.

Speaker 19 Talk a little bit about that because iPhone sales, which account for about half of Apple's overall revenue, are in the slump with fiscal 2024 revenue growing less than 1%.

Speaker 19 They were on a bit of a tear in the last few years, but they don't, people don't, don't upgrade anymore. They don't, and you talked about this.
So, talk a little bit about it.

Speaker 19 And China is a critical part of their business, right? Where they make stuff and they also sell stuff.

Speaker 20 Yeah, so a trade war would be bad for just about everybody, but it would be especially bad for Apple. And Tesla and Tessa.

Speaker 20 But

Speaker 20 one of the things that is extremely, makes me very unpopular when I do talk to tech types is saying that, you know, for practical purposes, in terms of the lived experience, technology has really slowed down a lot.

Speaker 20 I remember when people were enormously excited at the latest iPhone. Or, you know, I remember when smartphones first became available.
And now it's okay, it's going to be thinner and foldable.

Speaker 20 Well, that's fine. I had nothing against that.
In fact,

Speaker 20 I'm pretty much in the Apple ecosystem in terms of of my own phone and computing and all of that.

Speaker 20 But it's not

Speaker 20 world-changing by a long shot. And

Speaker 20 so, yeah,

Speaker 20 they're going to,

Speaker 20 in a way, Apple is kind of in the position that China is in, you know, a very high growth past and a kind of,

Speaker 20 if they do it right, an okay but not spectacular future.

Speaker 19 Could they fix that by some spectacular? You know, Jobs did that many times.

Speaker 20 He was in one business and then suddenly the iphone then suddenly the blank yeah maybe there's something out there that will do it although at this point everybody's uh into ai uh as the and that's where all this tension comes from but um hard to know i mean um new technologies are by their nature really hard to predict what what might be coming down the pike what might be transformational but as they are stand now it's hard to like china apples like china that's a really interesting insight that they they've got to sort of manage their decline that's that's on my not even decline.

Speaker 20 It's just downshifting. It's sort of, you've been driving along the highway at 70 miles an hour and now you're

Speaker 20 now you're on local streets where you really shouldn't be going above 30. And how do you, how do you,

Speaker 20 can you make the adjustment to driving safely under these conditions?

Speaker 19 No, Paul, foldable phones. Foldable.

Speaker 20 Foldable phones.

Speaker 19 Will you get one?

Speaker 20 I wait until the last, you know, the,

Speaker 20 I only have my current phone because my last phone was viciously attacked by a tile floor. So,

Speaker 19 okay.

Speaker 19 I'm getting one right away. You know that.
I'm getting a photable. Yeah, well,

Speaker 19 I have wanted a photable for a long time. I've been bugging them about it.
My whole, my whole, when I saw Cook recently, I was like, you know, the app economy is over. You get that, right?

Speaker 19 Because it's all going to be. And by the way, they're getting, to be fair, they're getting very good reviews for their integration of ChatGPT into the iPhone right now.

Speaker 19 So some of the things will be services, which have been growing like crazy at Apple comparatively.

Speaker 20 I've actually invested in one of those poor pay search engines that doesn't do AI.

Speaker 19 Oh, okay.

Speaker 20 Because anything I actually really need to research.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 20 I have a much better idea than ChatGPT of what is actually a relevant result

Speaker 20 just gets in the way.

Speaker 19 For now, eventually.

Speaker 20 Lots of things can be replaced. And then me as well.

Speaker 19 Would you put all your stuff up

Speaker 19 and become, you know, I was talking to Martha Stewart. She was going to do Marth AI.
Like, she has so much content she's created and has been affiliated with.

Speaker 19 She was going to load it all up and find out what happens.

Speaker 20 Let's just say, watch this space.

Speaker 19 Oh, oh, Paul Krugman is AI, robotic.

Speaker 20 Robot me.

Speaker 19 Yeah. Robot you.
So, um, wow, you, I love when you keep saying watch this space. I love it.

Speaker 20 Well, you know, this, it does, first of all, there, you know, I'm talking with various people, there are various things, and I also have some constraints because,

Speaker 20 you know, I'm, I'm, and it's just in general, i'm still on the on the payroll at the times through the end of this month and also uh uh i don't want to be one of those people who you know trashes the place on the way out yeah yeah that's for later um but um no i'm kidding but you're gonna do merch obviously paul krugman merch there's gonna be well let's try i don't know i haven't figured that one out with kim kardashian for skims or something like that look i'm i'm 72 and fighting it but i don't think fashion is going to be my thing.

Speaker 19 Paul, don't, the world is your oyster now. So speaking of lack of oysters, ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump.

Speaker 19 The suit centered around comments that ABC's George Stefanobos made against in a civil suit against Trump brought by Eugene Carroll.

Speaker 19 He said he was found liable for rape when he actually had been found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll.

Speaker 19 The judge had mentioned that it was in most terms that would be considered that, and that's, I think, why he said it.

Speaker 19 But in fact, the jury had found him liable for sexual assault and defamation. Under the terms of the settlement, ABC News will donate the money, $15 million,

Speaker 19 to a future presidential foundation and museum. And Stephanopoulos and ABC also issued a statement of regret for the mistake.

Speaker 19 Many experts thought, I've talked to a dozen lawyers, they thought ABC would have won. And Trump typically does this a lot.

Speaker 19 And so does, speaking of Elon Musk, we just talked about him. They use legal threats as a means of

Speaker 19 having people acquiesce. So talk a little bit about this.

Speaker 19 I mean, from a business point of view, again, it's using censorship, it's using legal means, it's using anything but actual competition or just like things work out.

Speaker 20 It's more than that. What we're seeing is that, I mean, some of us had warned that a

Speaker 20 second Trump administration would be one in which the coercive power of the government against business. would become huge.

Speaker 20 It's really a mixed economy. The government plays a big role.

Speaker 20 The private sector plays a big role.

Speaker 20 Lots of things in the private sector depend upon government decisions that are reasonably favorable.

Speaker 20 As long as you have rules, nor rule of law,

Speaker 20 then that kind of works okay.

Speaker 20 But if you start to have arbitrary exercise, and one of the things we're worried about on tariffs, it happens to be the case that the way that our trade laws are written, the president has enormous discretion in tariff setting.

Speaker 20 And in some ways, one of the worst things about Trump tariffs will be not the tariffs he applies, but the ones he doesn't, because he can play favorites with who gets to get exempted from a tariff.

Speaker 20 There is some evidence he did even on the relatively small tariffs he imposed in the first term. So if you're ABC and you're looking at

Speaker 20 all the ways that Trump can hurt you if he wants to,

Speaker 20 then you

Speaker 20 pay protection money. That's what just happened.
And this is a much bigger thing than just competition. This is basically big business already acknowledging that we've become a

Speaker 20 protection racket.

Speaker 19 Pay for play.

Speaker 20 Pay for play.

Speaker 20 And that's scarier than anything. I mean,

Speaker 20 that's

Speaker 20 one of those reasons to wonder whether

Speaker 20 2024 was maybe the last real election.

Speaker 19 So talk a little bit of it, because from a business, from an economy point of view, you can have a very robust economy even with this cooperation or does it ultimately end this oligarchy and in

Speaker 19 lack of innovation which has been the hallmark of the u.s really um dominance and innovation and new fresh ideas we it's really been a remarkable rotten for the united states over the last 40 years.

Speaker 20 Yeah, so the last 25 years, you know,

Speaker 20 in 2000, roughly all the advanced countries seem to be about on the same level technologically. The U.S.
has now pulled well ahead.

Speaker 20 And there are one of the pieces I've written recently says a lot of that is actually just geography. There's probably room for only one Silicon Valley anywhere in the world.

Speaker 20 But a lot of it is also, yeah, openness,

Speaker 20 rule of law,

Speaker 20 success depends upon actually producing stuff that people want and can use,

Speaker 20 on being able to attract the best and brightest from around the world to work. And all of that is at risk.
You're in a situation where

Speaker 20 we know that there are people with influence on Trump who who think of tech jobs as being goodies to be handed out and don't not don't let foreigners have those um we know that uh we're may well be heading for a situation in which

Speaker 20 in which success in business depends upon poll with the administration depends on right on whether you're in or out of favor um and we even have i mean uh for what it's worth uh regimes like that according to an imf study um it subtracts about one percent from growth growth.

Speaker 19 How do you look at with all these billionaires around him? And they certainly are just one, it's mostly tech that's going there, but Disney just did this, right?

Speaker 19 This is Bob Iger doing this, making he had had to approve of this settlement. And he is not, you haven't seen him at Mar-a-Lago, but this is his version of that, right?

Speaker 19 What is that?

Speaker 19 Were you surprised that it's been the tech people who had mostly stayed out of government, right?

Speaker 19 And until they realized there was, there was an interview that Mark Andreessen did who I've known for a long time.

Speaker 19 I find him largely a despicable character but um one of the things he said he was terrified by what biden was going to do and he was scared and that's what drove him into trump's arm which i think is unlikely on some level i mean i i am actually not surprised because i'm i'm a cynic and the thing about tech by the way is you know these are no longer upstart innovators that we're calling

Speaker 20 now we're talking about people who you know who were who made their their billions very very young but they're now middle-aged and um and they're sitting on in many many ways on on these monopoly positions created by by their past efforts

Speaker 20 and of course they're going to try and curry favor with the government that the libertarian idea ideology was never more than skin deep

Speaker 20 but I also think that some of the backing Trump you know this is the classic era oligarchs it's funny in in a in a democratic rule of law nation great wealth brings a lot of power with it.

Speaker 20 And it's natural to think, well, if I help elect an autocrat who will,

Speaker 20 you know, is sympathetic to my interests, that I'll have even more power. But you very quickly find out that actually all of the power is on the other side.

Speaker 20 And, you know,

Speaker 20 I don't think analogies with Putin, I mean, I'm hoping that we're not going to go full Putin, but the analogies are really clearly there.

Speaker 20 And the oligarchs who helped put Putin in power thought that they had bought themselves a government and they found out that they were working for him, not the other way around. And if they didn't

Speaker 20 work for him, they were,

Speaker 20 you know, their fortunes can disappear quite quickly. Yes, windows started.
Well, they're falling out of windows. I hope we don't get to the falling out of windows stage, but it could.

Speaker 20 And so, no, this is a, and that's going to happen very, very fast. I mean, I'm.
I think there's a reasonably strong case

Speaker 20 that Elon Musk and Trump will have a falling out and Musk will not be the winner. And I don't know that for sure, but I'm actually kind of looking forward to it, to be honest.

Speaker 20 I'm not a saint.

Speaker 19 Okay.

Speaker 19 What's the counter to that?

Speaker 19 Where does that break? Because people have always been quietly running the country, right? The whole idea of

Speaker 19 degrees and degrees. Yes, but

Speaker 19 is this unprecedented? I don't think so, right?

Speaker 20 It's totally precedent.

Speaker 19 Right. So talk about the precedent.

Speaker 20 This is the story of Putin's Russia.

Speaker 19 This This is the story. Right.
What about in our country?

Speaker 19 That there have been wealthy people behind the scenes. They just aren't as performative.
They don't jump down at a rally and show off their belly and stuff like that.

Speaker 19 How is this different?

Speaker 20 I actually have been wondering about that. I'm planning to do a little,

Speaker 20 you know, I'm not a historian, but I think it really is an interesting question.

Speaker 20 You know, we had a Gilded Age in which there were enormous fortunes and a lot of raw corruption, and yet democratic institutions were not corrupted too much.

Speaker 20 I mean, a lot of purchased votes and all of that. But in the end, when people voted for something different, those votes were honored.

Speaker 20 We didn't lose, in some ways, the essence of what America is about, despite all of that. And it's an interesting question to ask why.

Speaker 20 Why didn't

Speaker 20 the J.D. Rockefellers and the J.P.
Morgan's

Speaker 20 go to the limit? Why were they willing to allow Teddy Roosevelt to be elected?

Speaker 19 Right. Often a wealthy person.
FDR, wealthy person. JFK, wealthy, right?

Speaker 20 Well, the FDR brought us closer to a coup than we like to think. But yeah.
But the, you know, how did the progressive movement manage to flourish in a time when the wealthy also had that?

Speaker 20 And I don't quite know the answer, although it's possible.

Speaker 20 Hard to believe, but it's possible that people actually had at least some values and ideals, enough to say that, okay, I will go this far, but not beyond that point.

Speaker 19 I'm not so sure with this crew. I'm not so sure either.

Speaker 19 I know them, I'm certain they will go as far as they take because they are perpetually aggrieved. They're aggrieved, Paul, because

Speaker 19 they're the victims, just so you know.

Speaker 20 Oh, yeah, that's one thing I mean, you would know better than me, but

Speaker 20 my really strong sense is that particularly the tech bros,

Speaker 20 I mean, everybody loved and admired them 10, 15 years ago. And now they're not loved and admired universally.
And I think that really, you know, I do spend enough time in meetings with

Speaker 20 people of various, people at the top of multiple status hierarchies. And everybody wants to be what they aren't.
And

Speaker 20 these, these are people who can buy anything except except love and adulation.

Speaker 19 That's correct. It was funny.
It's funny you say that because one of them was in touch with me and that like, see, we won. And I said, you're still an asshole.
I still think you're an asshole.

Speaker 19 I'm sorry. Can I say this?

Speaker 20 Apparently somebody used Grok to search for the most, the word most used to characterize Elon Musk. And it was asshole.

Speaker 19 Yeah. Yeah.
Well, that wasn't the one who called me, but nonetheless, same difference. I would have said the same thing.
I often say to many of them, you're so poor, all you have is money.

Speaker 19 Anyway, we're going to go on a quick break when we will be back for wins and fails.

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Speaker 19 Okay, Paul, let's hear some wins and fails. Would you like me to go first, or would you like to go first? Well, if you go first, okay.

Speaker 19 I think a fail is HBO is no longer airing episodes of Sesame Street on Max. They've been, they've opted not to renew the output deal, which brought new episodes.

Speaker 19 The library, the existing Sesame Street Library, which my kids watch a lot. I have two younger kids,

Speaker 19 remain on the platform till at least 2027.

Speaker 19 And they will, the new season will be there, but they're moving on.

Speaker 19 And so I just, I don't know. They're wonderful.
It's not like some things get old and you shouldn't keep airing them, but Sesame Street remains fantastic. It had been in a five-year deal.
And

Speaker 19 it's sad. I mean, they're trying to save costs.
It probably doesn't do very well for them. But to me,

Speaker 19 Sesame Street's been around since 1969, if you can believe it. They're often at the whim of politicians and defunding and everything else.
But

Speaker 19 so I just, you can see them to 2027, but the control over something like this is really sad to me by people who are just looking for, you know, obviously David Sasloff just did a whole mechanation about spinning things into pieces at the company.

Speaker 19 And I, by the way, I have a contract with Cena. Nonetheless, I think it's horrible, David.
Bad job. And

Speaker 19 my plus is I just did a whole on with Kara Swisher about books.

Speaker 19 And I had two amazing book critics come on, Dwight Garner from the New York Times, who's amazing, and Becca Rothfeld, who writes for the Washington Post.

Speaker 19 And we had a great time talking about books that will be appearing, I think, next week.

Speaker 19 But she did a review of Jordan Peterson's new book, We

Speaker 19 Who Wrestle with God. And I recommend that you read this review.
I think Jordan Peterson is a...

Speaker 19 just

Speaker 19 a dimwit,

Speaker 19 which she writes about. And she says, let me just read this.

Speaker 19 It takes a special kind of spiritual dimwit to cast a text as fierce and mysterious as the Old Testament as a banal and scolding exhortation to make your bed.

Speaker 19 But Peterson, as it happens, is just this kind.

Speaker 19 I just loved her writing. I think she's a wonderful writer.
And I just,

Speaker 19 I laughed and cackled throughout the review.

Speaker 19 And it's a wonderful review of a terrible book. And that's always a pleasure for me.
You know, I think it's just,

Speaker 19 I just love, I love really,

Speaker 19 as you said, there's no Paul Grugman. There's no, you can't replace any of this with

Speaker 19 anybody else but the person writing it. So I just love Becca.
What a great review you did. And I'm excited for people to listen to her thoughts on books along with Dwight's.
All you, Paul.

Speaker 20 Okay.

Speaker 20 Well, so fails, you know, I live in New York, although it's not where I am at the moment.

Speaker 20 But, and I have to say, this whole business with congestion pricing, which was on and then off and is now down on.

Speaker 20 And, you know, this is completely insane.

Speaker 20 driving into lower manhattan you the cost you impose on everybody else by making that you know this is insane is it if there was ever and not only that was it not only was it something that we should be doing just plain to discourage people from doing this but it was also a revenue source for really badly need so that that has been a i thought i thought we finally got them to the point of doing the right thing there and it's just and it's it's uh you know i mostly take the subway but this does get at the quality of my life.

Speaker 19 So you think there should be congestion pricing

Speaker 19 to limit people.

Speaker 20 If you try to estimate, you know, what the true cost that you impose on other people by driving into lower Manhattan during the workday, it's on the order of $100

Speaker 20 just by slowing up other people. So the congestion pricing should be really strong.
And this is so, that's a big fail.

Speaker 20 And New York is still my, you know,

Speaker 20 I sometimes, even when I'm elsewhere, I say something, well, I'll be in the city tomorrow. The city means New York.
There's only one city. There's only one city.

Speaker 20 But this is really, anyway,

Speaker 20 wins.

Speaker 20 So

Speaker 20 I have lots of questions about Apple and Tim Cook. But Apple TV, I'm a science fiction fan.
And

Speaker 20 the, first of all, just in general,

Speaker 20 as film science fiction,

Speaker 20 we are in a golden age for that. The two Dune movies, I grew up with that book and that, my God,

Speaker 20 Villeneuve was incredible. And now I just saw just about an hour before we got online with each other that Tim Cook has extended silo for two seasons.

Speaker 20 And I'm a total addict, both a total silo freak and a total Rebecca Ferguson fan. So two more seasons of silo.
That's a significant improvement in the quality of life.

Speaker 19 Oh, good. You know, Severance is coming.
Did you like that one?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I found, it's funny. I have good friends on Wall Street who are absolutely into severance.
And I

Speaker 20 not quite, maybe because I've never actually worked in a cubicle. I know it doesn't quite work the same way for me, but I sort of see it.

Speaker 19 Have you tried Dark Matter? What about Dark Matter?

Speaker 20 Dark Matter, I've been working through it. It's stressful for some reason.

Speaker 20 Make it a little too stressful for these times. You would think the silo with everybody buried underground would be worth it.

Speaker 19 It's a great show.

Speaker 20 I have a cluster of civilized Wall Street

Speaker 20 friends.

Speaker 20 They're we're constantly going back. I was the one that turned them on.
This is already old stuff, but Orphan Black once upon a time. So amazing.

Speaker 20 So this is anyway. So, you know, I think my, I'm reading a little bit less news now because it is painful.
And

Speaker 20 so better streaming entertainment.

Speaker 19 Good. That's a great silo is wonderful.
I think you should watch Nobody Wants This on Netflix. Oh, it's very delightful.
It's not your, it's not sci-fi at all. It's about a hot rabbi, Paul.

Speaker 19 That's oh, gosh.

Speaker 19 All right. Well, I don't think you seem like the hot rabbi type.
Anyway, Sila was wonderful. You're right.

Speaker 19 Rebecca Ferguson, who was also in Mission Possible, a whole bunch of things, is just, and she was also in Dune.

Speaker 19 Astonishing, astonishing person. Is there any movie you like right now? Is there any movie that is your favorite? Meaning,

Speaker 20 still.

Speaker 20 absorbing Dune 2.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 not a real, nothing has really, really grabbed me since then.

Speaker 19 You don't seem like a wicked kind of guy.

Speaker 19 You and Superstar.

Speaker 20 I should go to it. Although I did actually see Oppenheimer

Speaker 20 a little bit back, but it was... Wonk.

Speaker 19 Wonk. Wonk.
Wonk. Wonk.
Well, that's the name of your, that's the name of your friend. Wonk Seth.

Speaker 20 If I might say, I thought I caught it in a historical error there, and it's too, too much to explain, but then I checked that it wasn't.

Speaker 20 I.I. Rabbi was actually

Speaker 20 at the Trinity test. I thought it couldn't have been because he was working at the MIT's radiation lab, but he was there for that.

Speaker 19 So amazing. Wow, that's amazing.
That is a great film. That's a good film to go back and watch.
He's working, Chris, the director, NOLA, is working on a couple of new things that I think you'll like.

Speaker 20 Oh, and actually, by the way,

Speaker 20 I'm always a little bit shocked in general in pop culture at what I like. I've been totally the musical stuff that's showing up now and again at the end of my newsletter, but

Speaker 20 I'm absolutely shocked to find out I really enjoyed Fola. Who knew?

Speaker 19 The new Paul Krugman. He's a new one.
Oh, really? And he's the same Paul Krugman. Now unleashed.
Unleashed. Unbound.
Unbound. Paul Kregman Unbound, which I love.
I'm really enjoying this episode.

Speaker 19 We want to hear from you, by the way, listeners.

Speaker 19 Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com/slash pivot.
Do some questions for the show or call 85551-Pivot.

Speaker 19 I also want to mention that I recently sat down with Democratic Congressman RoConna for On with Kara Swisher.

Speaker 19 Speaking, Paul, he talked about how billionaires funding the left are just as problematic as as Elon and his minions on the right. Let's listen.

Speaker 33 Our side will say, well, Elon's the problem. Yeah, sure.
It's a problem that he's pouring in hundreds of millions. But how about the billionaires on our side?

Speaker 33 I mean, how about the fact that Kamala Harris had more billionaire money than

Speaker 33 Trump did and

Speaker 33 more wealthy money? That Larry Lessing and I had an op-ed on that.

Speaker 33 That I think that was part of the reason we weren't talking about transformative change on Medicare for all or standing up for unions. How often did Kamala Harris talk about inequality?

Speaker 33 And so, yes, let's get the super PAC funding out. Let's be a party that says no super PAC funding in primaries.
But, you know, voters respect it more. It's not that I'm not going to call out Elon.

Speaker 33 I'm just dead. Don't, you know, that it's terrible to have that kind of spending.
But voters respect you more if you're also willing to call out your own side so it doesn't just come off as hypocrisy.

Speaker 19 What do you think about that, Paul? I thought it was a little two sides of his mouth gun.

Speaker 20 I think it's a little bit, you know, it's certainly a little distressing that billionaires are so important to the finances of both parties. But, you know, the,

Speaker 19 I,

Speaker 20 I mean, I watched the campaign along and I didn't see any real evidence that Harris was

Speaker 20 being more centrist than would have been warranted by the politics.

Speaker 20 And in general, I think that there are times when it's clearly billionaires are buying their interests, but there, I didn't see a lot of that in this campaign. And, you know, Medicaid,

Speaker 20 that's probably, I'm going to have a a newsletter on that very quite soon about

Speaker 20 about

Speaker 20 you know the given given the assassination in new york about health care um but the reason we can't have medicare for all just now is not because billionaires are in the way uh it's it's it's actually much more just that most people are reasonably happy with their private insurance and even if you tell them look this government provided insurance will be better and people who have Medicare actually are happier than you are, That's just not people who won't believe it.

Speaker 20 And that, you know, so it's not the billionaires that are stopping this.

Speaker 19 Yeah, they're in a rage, and the polls also show they like it. It's a really weird situation.
I think it's all these cases of denials.

Speaker 20 What the polls actually show is that people really like their private insurance unless they get sick.

Speaker 19 That was exactly unless they get sick. One of the things that I will note is that Elon invested $250 million in the Trump campaign, and he is now $200 billion

Speaker 19 richer. What an investment.
Best investment of all time, I think, correct?

Speaker 20 Oh, yeah. Buying political influence is still an incredible bargain.

Speaker 19 And look how much richer he is.

Speaker 19 Despite the fact that Tesla's share of the market is down considerably. Just amazing.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 as a New Yorker watching

Speaker 20 the current mayor and Eric Adams.

Speaker 20 Yeah, and

Speaker 20 the scandal of the bribes that he was receiving from the clerks.

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's tiny. It's like two days in a luxury hotel in Istanbul.
My God, that you can buy the mayor of New York for that little money.

Speaker 19 I know. Who should we buy, Paul? No, I'm kidding.
Let's not do that. Anyway, anyway, Paul, you're wonderful.
I'm so excited that you're out and about. I love these columns.

Speaker 19 And everybody should go to his sub stack, Krugman WonksOut, for all of your analysis and musings. It's very varied, and you have the musical thing at the end.

Speaker 19 I like Slightly Unleashed, and I look forward to all the different things you're going to write about in the economy and more and more.

Speaker 19 Thank you so much. We'll be back on Friday for more.
And I'll read this out, but Paul, again, really, I'm a huge fan and I'm thrilled that you're doing this. You'll have so much fun.

Speaker 19 You will not regret it.

Speaker 20 I'm definitely going to have a good time.

Speaker 19 Good. You deserve it.
Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Enderdutt engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burroughs, Mia Silverio, and Dan Shulon.

Speaker 19 Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 19 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.
Scott, I hope you're having a great time in Africa.

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