Internet’s Luigi Obsession, Biden Pardons, and Guest R.J. Cutler

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Speaker 1 Support for this show comes from OnePassword. If you're an IT or security pro, managing devices, identities, and applications can feel overwhelming and risky.

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Speaker 5 Hopefully one of us will go to the other's funeral. That will be the case, correct? Unless we die together.

Speaker 4 What do you mean?

Speaker 4 In case both of us are killed on our way to Vox in the same car. Yeah, chances are that's going to happen.

Speaker 5 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 4 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 5 Scott, thank you for so many birthday wishes yesterday, including some photos that I think people were disturbed by of me hitting you in the ass.

Speaker 4 There you go. And, you know, at this point, Kara, we just have to celebrate everything.
When you get to this stage, you know,

Speaker 4 everything could be the last thing. So we're really trying to

Speaker 4 lean in and, you know, and celebrate. Celebrate the little things.

Speaker 5 Show off the love. You know where I went for my birthday dinner?

Speaker 4 I don't. Where'd you go?

Speaker 5 Benihana.

Speaker 4 I love Benihana.

Speaker 5 I love Benihana.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they do a great job.

Speaker 5 It's so pleasing. And I don't, everyone was sort of surprised.
I love the Benihana. I like the whole situation happening there.

Speaker 4 They do a great job. What you got?

Speaker 4 Everyone gets the same thing, right?

Speaker 5 You know, steak, chicken, blah, blah, blah, and stuff like that. And then the whole, they do the whole exact same thing the whole time.
And that's why it's comforting.

Speaker 5 And so my first set of children loved it. And now my second set of children love it.

Speaker 4 So it's working out very well, I i think anyway it's delicious um where are you now you're in london still right yeah i'm in london um yeah i'm going to riyad on monday or tuesday and then i'm going to uh south africa i'm going to cape town for the holidays wow why did you pick cape town it's beautiful there i'm told i've never been there uh i've only been there once and it was in the middle of covid uh which was fine but it kind of put a strain on it especially when my son started not feeling well so i immediately started freaking out about some sort sort of crazy scenario trying to get my son into a hospital in South Africa.

Speaker 4 So it kind of put a little bit of a crime.

Speaker 5 I remember we went on a, it's a modern country. It's a modern country, but go ahead.

Speaker 4 I know, but you're, when you're a parent, you don't think that way. And yeah, so we went on a game drive, we had a safari, and he ended up, he had, I think it was Salmonella.

Speaker 4 Anyways, he was having stomach problems. So he would say, Dad, pull the Jeep over.
I need to go to the bathroom. And he'd be like, he'd be walking into the bush and he'd say, give me some privacy.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, privacy? There's lions around here.

Speaker 5 I wouldn't let him go bathroom in the savanna.

Speaker 4 Yeah, my boss.

Speaker 4 There's, there's a, I'm like, no, I'm not going anywhere. Anyway,

Speaker 4 these are what you call high-class problems. But Cape Town reminds me of what I've imagined California was like in the 60s.
I think it's one of the most beautiful cities I've ever been to.

Speaker 5 I've heard. And you're going there because, why?

Speaker 4 Well, because my sister is turning

Speaker 4 40, 50, and we're going to take her and her family. And the the cousins are at a great age, same age as my kids.
And so just super excited.

Speaker 4 And I was just so taken with the country when I was there the last time. I mean, Cape Town is one of those places, just the raw beauty, like the wildness of it all, the ocean and the hills.

Speaker 4 And it's an extraordinary beautiful place. And also the food is really good.
The people are really friendly.

Speaker 4 And this just drawing it to a conclusion that, you know, people not as crazy fortunate and privileged as me can appreciate is I do think there's some incredible, I love the idea of a lifestyle arbitrage.

Speaker 4 And that is sometimes in your life, you're blessed with the ability to work remotely or a lack of routes, which is both good and a bad thing.

Speaker 4 But I always ask people: are you in the midst of a period in your life where you could engage in a lifestyle arbitrage?

Speaker 4 And my three favorite lifestyle arbitrages, which is a fancy way of saying moving to a lower cost place, are Mexico City, which is still inexpensive and has an amazing art and and food scene.

Speaker 4 Madrid, which is like the best of Europe at 60% to 80% of the price of a Munich or a London.

Speaker 4 Also, if you're really blessed with the ability to conduct remote work, I think Cape Town offers an extraordinary quality of life, especially if you can figure out a way to make money in dollars because of the weakness of the RAND.

Speaker 4 Anyways.

Speaker 5 Oh, interesting. Thank you for the travel tips.
I'm just going to California to my house in California. That's what they call the kids.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no lifestyle arbitrage moving to California right now.

Speaker 5 I understand, but I have a beautiful house there. My kids love it, and all four kids are going there.
We're going to spend our holidays in the Californias. We love the California.

Speaker 5 I was just there this week, you know.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you love it there. You absolutely, I think you're, I think you're paving the way to either run for governor or mayor of San Francisco.

Speaker 5 No, I hope they just I'm going to actually go see the new mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, who they just elected.

Speaker 4 Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. He's, I know.

Speaker 4 And he's a pragmatist, right? He's kind of.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Is he one of the Haas heirs or the Levi's heirs? Is that right?

Speaker 5 Sort of. It's complicated, but yes, his mother was married to a Levi Air.
So,

Speaker 5 and he's a great guy. He's really interested.
You know, all of them were

Speaker 5 more centery than you could imagine recently, I would say. They're moving in that direction, more center-left, I would say, than anything else.
We'll see.

Speaker 5 But Daniel's just pregnant. He's a lovely guy.
He ran an organization that was working on homeless issues. And, you know, it's, but the city looked great.
I have to say, I had a great time there.

Speaker 5 Anyway, we got a lot to get to today, including Trump's FTC pick and the internet's fascination with the United Healthcare shooting suspect. Plus, our friend of Pivot is filmmaker R.J.

Speaker 5 Cutler, whose latest documentaries on Martha Stewart and Elton John have a lot of people talking, particularly Martha herself.

Speaker 5 The first, President Biden is commuting the sentences of 1,500 people and pardoning 39 people, largest clemency grant by an American president in a day.

Speaker 5 The commutations are geared toward individuals who've been placed on home confinement for at least a year under the COVID-19 Euro CARES Act. All recipients are nonviolent.

Speaker 5 The Biden administration reportedly still considering whether to use a blanket pardons or some of President-elect Trump's public enemies, which both of us think is not a particularly good idea.

Speaker 5 I'm not sure what he'll do there if he'll have some dramatic, I thought he should have waited the Hunter one till the last day.

Speaker 5 Even his one of his top aides, former top aides, Anita Dunn, is saying that the timing was really just awful.

Speaker 5 He seems to have disappeared into the hedges, I guess. He's sort of gone.

Speaker 4 Yeah, as should anyone in public life at that age. I don't,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 and by the the way, my sense of this, whether you agree with the pardons or not, this is what they're supposed to be for.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly. Not your friends or people who pay you.

Speaker 4 You're supposed to take the time to be really thoughtful and have, you know, a great staff.

Speaker 4 Look at where, whenever you systemize or routinize a process, there's going to be inefficiencies and injustice, whether it's veteran affairs or the prison system or, you know, how you evaluate affirmative act.

Speaker 4 Whenever you try and routinize and get something scale, things are going to fall through the cracks here. And when you have,

Speaker 4 unfortunately, I think this is somewhat, or unfortunately, somewhat related to what we're going to talk about with the CEO shooting.

Speaker 4 When you inject a for-profit motive into prisons, you have lobbying groups trying to get legislators to pass three strikes year out such that the population of people incarcerated goes up because they have a profit motive in getting more people in prison.

Speaker 5 We have the most incarcerated public society in the world. Hands down.

Speaker 4 Hands down on almost every dimension.

Speaker 4 And then it gets really frightening when you start looking at the demographics of the people locked up. But I don't, and

Speaker 4 I love this. At the low end, it bothers me that there are certain municipalities, mostly run by Democrats, who have decided to not enforce the law at all.
I think there's a problem there.

Speaker 4 But at the same time, there are just so many people, in my view, who are in prison who, through work programs or monitoring or whatever, that unfortunately have very powerful lobbies trying to keep them locked up such that their for-profit prison system can garner another 30 to 50 grand a year.

Speaker 4 So I like this. I think this is what pardons were initially intended for.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 I think there's a question whether we should redo the presidential pardoning system. There should be a board that approves them.

Speaker 5 So it's not this like grab for power or lobbying on behalf of some like nonsensical person who's related to someone. And, you know, like

Speaker 5 these people come in and try to get pardons by carrying favor and stuff like that and so they think the presidential pardon system feels a little king-like to me and I don't mind the commuting part but I think there should maybe be a group that overlooks them rather than the president just getting to do it anyway we'll see this is a story that's really interesting a Nevada commissioner has ruled against Rupert Murdoch's attempt to alter his family trust what a sneaky old crocodile he is but it didn't work to give his son Lachlan Murdoch sole control of his media empire the decision means all of Murdoch's children who are not politically aligned with him,

Speaker 5 although I don't think they're that far off, will have equal control. The commissioner argued Rupert and Lachlan were acting in bad faith with the Crest.
Of course, they were.

Speaker 5 Rupert reportedly plans to appeal. It can go to the next group, and I'm not sure where it goes from there, but

Speaker 5 you know, this is just, it was just a round-the-edge attempt to control things beyond his death.

Speaker 5 You know, it'll be interesting to see what happens to these. He's in his 90s, mid-90s, I think.

Speaker 5 What happens to this company? But he was trying to sell, they'll probably do a deal. So Lachlan, they'll take some money or something, I guess.
That would be my guess. So Lachlan can keep running it.

Speaker 5 I think that's where they probably are right now. But one of the interesting things was

Speaker 5 they were talking about succession, the family itself, because they had watched the show where the

Speaker 5 Logan Roy dies. And they said, we have to have a succession plan in place, which was, and they called it that, the succession memo.

Speaker 5 So, which just makes me laugh hard. They all pretended it wasn't about them.
And then, of course, now it was. So, any thoughts? I think this will be interesting to see.

Speaker 5 There's a lot of assets there in New Score.

Speaker 4 Well, my understanding is this is never about economics. None of them were ever going to lose any sort of economic control or economic

Speaker 4 domain or ownership. This wasn't about reducing their wealth.
This was about governance.

Speaker 4 And specifically, what it felt like was that either Rupert or Laughlin, we don't know, had decided that the kind of conservative son should get to dictate how these companies are operating or specifically maintain their very conservative complexion.

Speaker 4 And that the other three siblings aren't necessarily on board with that. This wasn't about money.
This was about governance and the political positioning of the properties as I understand it.

Speaker 4 And I always go to the same thing. I don't, I mean, media is obsessed with itself and it wants to talk about this.
And it life imitates art. So it's a great story.

Speaker 4 But I come to the same place, and that is, I just don't, what I don't understand, and there's probably things I missed, but I had

Speaker 4 lunch with one of the Murdoch kids, struck me as just an infinitely reasonable, nice man.

Speaker 4 And what I hate about this.

Speaker 5 The troublesome beneficiary? That's what he was called. Anyway, sorry.

Speaker 4 Well, what I hate about this is one of the things I worry about most, or I hope for most,

Speaker 4 is that my two sons either aren't as close as I would like, and I hope that they're really close, specifically such that they take care of their mother and they just have family, right?

Speaker 4 It has always shocked me how many really good siblings I know independent of each other that not only don't get along, they don't like each other.

Speaker 4 And I don't know if it's trauma when they were kids or competitiveness, or oftentimes in wealthy families,

Speaker 4 one of them gets sick and one shows up and the other doesn't. They resent each other, or there's fights over money.

Speaker 4 But I think that your final, one of your final acts as a human on this earth, and that pretty much defines every act of Rupert Murdoch right now. And maybe he's being manipulated, who knows?

Speaker 4 But I think, why on earth would you raise this ridiculously flimsy legal argument that never held water, in my opinion?

Speaker 4 Because the only argument you can make is you're doing it, you're doing it for economic reasons to

Speaker 4 save the other fiduciaries from themselves.

Speaker 5 That was his argument. Actually, let me read from this.
The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan Murdoch's favor after Rupert Murdoch's passing, so the succession would be immutable.

Speaker 5 The play may have worked, but in the evidence you're hearing, like the showdown of the game of poker, is where gamesmanship collides with facts and its conclusion.

Speaker 5 All the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up. Whoa.

Speaker 4 Jesus, right?

Speaker 5 So I know, like, it's true. That's what everyone thought.
This is what he was doing. What's interesting, before you finish,

Speaker 5 the three other siblings, Prudence, Elizabeth, and James, were not particularly aligned before this, before he tried this move.

Speaker 5 They all have had difficulties with each other and among and between them because it's a, you know, it's an obviously famous family. But what he's created here is a fiasco, as Vanity Fair calls it.

Speaker 5 It's just a fiasco at the end of his life, and for what and for what process? Because he's going to be dead.

Speaker 5 Sorry, same thing with Prince Harry, by the way, in your country, Prince Harry and Prince William. Yeah, but

Speaker 4 I think that's, I can understand that. That's Prince Harry making stupid decisions because of a hot woman.
And all of us who have done that sometime in their life raise their hands.

Speaker 4 This is, in my view, a father or a son manipulating his father to create unneeded division,

Speaker 4 polarization, and agita between siblings.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I can see as one of my last acts in virtue signaling saying, all right, I need you to be good to your little brother, right? I need you to look after him, or I need you to look after your big brother.

Speaker 4 I need the two of you to make every attempt to get along, not figure out some weird fucked up law that's going to pit one of them against the other or legal case.

Speaker 4 So I look at this through the lens of a dad. It's like, this is the last thing you want to do.

Speaker 5 I know. I thought he would avoid this because they got along, sort of.
You know, there's always interplay between them. But anyway,

Speaker 5 I just, this is sad. We find this sad.
Rupert, it's a sad end to your toxic life.

Speaker 5 Anyway, let's move on. GM is scrapping its cruise robo-taxi program, citing time and cost needed to scale the rising competition.
The company spent almost a decade and $10 billion developing.

Speaker 5 It lost $3.48 billion

Speaker 5 in 2023. GM owns 90% of crews and intents to buy out remaining investors.

Speaker 5 Waymo is just

Speaker 5 run away with it. I rode several Waymos in San Francisco, and they're all over the city.
And they're now in Miami and Los Angeles. They're so far ahead of everybody else

Speaker 5 in this market.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 I just, you know, I don't mind that they tried this, but what do you think? Well, okay.

Speaker 4 So first off, it's easy to play money money quarterback. Companies need to innovate.
The fact that they're unplugging it, I think, is a good decision because it's embarrassing.

Speaker 4 But when you're competing against Alphabet and Tesla, you're competing against the deepest pockets in the world.

Speaker 5 Tesla doesn't have cars out there. Let's just be clear.

Speaker 4 It's not. I know, but

Speaker 4 they're spending a lot of money trying to figure it out. But this entire category is overinvested.

Speaker 4 And it's being the competitors here have access to such infinitely cheap capital that to go toe-to-toe in an area where you don't already have pre-existing platforms, workforce, brands, to enter, this would be like, in my opinion, if General Motors decided they were going to go into the streaming market.

Speaker 4 I never understood what is their synergy.

Speaker 5 It's related. It's related to cars, I guess.
Sort of. Autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles.

Speaker 4 This is about AI and what's that? LiDAR technology. I don't think this played to GM's strengths at all.

Speaker 5 I thought they should have partnered. That's, you know, in this case, you know, Jaguar partnered with Waymo.
That's what you ride around in these really lovely lovely Jaguars.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it's actually a totally seamless experience. And I use it a lot when I'm in San Francisco.

Speaker 4 They've got $10 billion, and it's all a write-off to go into this category, like you said, without a capital partner, competing against the cheapest capital in the world.

Speaker 4 This would be, I'm not exaggerating, this would be like.

Speaker 4 Vox deciding that they were starting a video streaming network to compete against Netflix. They just don't, General Motors just doesn't have access to the capital to try and figure this shit out.

Speaker 5 And they've been at it a while. You know, I ran into in San Francisco, the woman who was chief engineer of the early Google programs on this.

Speaker 5 And it was so long ago we looked at they've been at this for a while and very intent on it. And so I, you know, it's just, you can't really compete with them.

Speaker 5 The two success, the ones that are ahead, and we'll see how successful, there's three of them actually right now.

Speaker 5 And Tesla's not one of them at this moment. It could be, certainly, is Aurora, which was the guy who started the Google program.
His name's Chris Ermson. We've had him on.
And

Speaker 5 that's more trucks, but he'll move into other buses and things like that because trucks are easier to make money at. There's Waymo.
And then there's, and the guy who runs Waymo is really,

Speaker 5 it's a woman and a man running it.

Speaker 5 Really smart people.

Speaker 5 And then Zeukes, which is also smart people, and that's owned by Amazon. So I feel like they're going to dominate this area and then use GM as a, you know, creator.
They don't want to make cars.

Speaker 5 we'll see but sorry sorry GM sorry that messed up for you anyway let's get to our first big story

Speaker 5 one of the biggest stories this week obviously Luigi Mangion the 26 year old man charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson there's a lot of information out there about his online presence everyone's digging for clues there's been stories about whether that means anything or not I think one of the best story I read was about him being kind of a typical tech bro if if he hadn't shot this guy he would have seemed seemed relatively normal in his interests.

Speaker 5 What was your first reaction when you started hearing about this guy? He stopped communicating with friends and family about six months ago and really went offline.

Speaker 5 He was quite an active online person, like a lot of people his age in his sector, in the tech sector. I think he was, he worked for TrueCar.
I think he was a video game aficionado.

Speaker 5 He did have a health issue over the last years on Reddit. He talked about this back problem he had and struggled with brain fog.

Speaker 5 John Herman wrote in New York Magazine, what's most striking about Mangione's extensive online dossier is that had it been studied before the shooting took place, it wouldn't have raised much alarm.

Speaker 5 Very difficult to characterize.

Speaker 5 Talk about that first, then we'll talk about the reaction from people.

Speaker 4 Well, okay, so first reaction is,

Speaker 4 in my opinion, and you know, let me be arrogant here, I think the correct reaction is to feel

Speaker 4 sympathy for the family of this man who was murdered.

Speaker 4 And then what I immediately registered was everybody decided that they would use this event to speculate on what happened to confirm their current beliefs. So people immediately went to,

Speaker 4 this is justified because this is an uprising or this is, you know, the most shocking thing about this isn't about the murderer.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's a tragedy because when you're a young high school valedictorian with an engineering and computer science degree and master's degree respectively from an Ivy League university and you're handsome and in great shape,

Speaker 4 and your life is over. That's a tragedy as well.
But the reality is, any speculation around what was going through his head, you're just getting lost in the soup. We have no fucking idea.

Speaker 4 We don't know if he had a schizophrenic break. We don't know if he was a Ted Kaczynski-like character who was a genius but came off the rail.
We don't know. And you know what?

Speaker 4 It doesn't really matter, in my opinion, as much. What matters, or the most interesting thing here, is how society has responded.

Speaker 4 And I can tell you how someone feels about this based on with 70 or 80% accuracy, based on one thing. Can you afford pretty easily health insurance? Because

Speaker 4 here's some data.

Speaker 4 60% of bankruptcies are related to medical debt.

Speaker 4 And the largest source of bankruptcy is medical debt. We pay $1,500 per person for pharmaceuticals versus $500 elsewhere, despite the fact that we manufacture and distribute them.

Speaker 4 We spend $13,000 a year on healthcare, despite the fact that everyone else pays $6,500 and we have lower health expectancies.

Speaker 4 People oftentimes compare healthcare to how I would describe San Francisco, expensive but bad in the U.S., or healthcare in the U.S.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 you have essentially,

Speaker 4 again, going back to the prison system, when we have injected a for-profit motive where the largest lobbying groups in Washington aren't big tech, they aren't the defense industry, they are the healthcare industry, which spends three quarters of a billion dollars.

Speaker 4 And by the way, two-thirds of lobbyists are former government officials.

Speaker 4 What you end up with is despite the fact that 70% of America supports price caps and universal health care, it doesn't happen because of the whores, better known as our elected representatives, keep letting the pharmaceutical and the healthcare industrial complex maintain this mendacious, fuckery duopoly of sugary, shitty food from the food industrial complex that gets you obese and then hands you over to the diabetes industrial complex, which has created regulatory capture and charges too much money to people to die slowly.

Speaker 4 This is

Speaker 4 everyone is obsessed with this guy. That's wrong.
Everyone is angry at CEOs. These CEOs of these companies are doing what they're supposed to do.

Speaker 4 And the thought that they're all of a sudden going to re-examine their ethics, what, don't hold your breath, folks.

Speaker 4 The people who are at fault here are voters who have failed to find elected representatives who have a backbone and start thinking about the tragedy of the commons that is healthcare in this country.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but what's interesting, too, is I think this reaction, and I think it's borne out from what you're saying, it's snowballed since the police captured him, too.

Speaker 5 This reaction to this young man, this troubled, very troubled young man. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro spoke about this.
Let's listen.

Speaker 4 I have no tolerance, nor should anyone,

Speaker 2 for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most.

Speaker 2 In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice.

Speaker 4 In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this.

Speaker 2 He is no hero.

Speaker 5 So it's interesting because I don't think it's in the dark corners. I think it's everywhere.

Speaker 5 People have been writing fan fiction. Etsy is full of merchandise.
They call him Robin Hoodie. There's been Spotify playlists and crypto coins.

Speaker 5 His lawyer told CNN he's gotten offers from members of the public to to pay his legal fees.

Speaker 5 You know, this is just such a snapshot of where people are. They just have sort of had it.
I don't know what else to say. And then laughing or making fun or being

Speaker 5 less than empathetic to the murder victim is really

Speaker 5 terrible. But at the same time, that man

Speaker 5 isn't a person anymore. He's the insurance industry, right? That's what he represents.
And perhaps he is in some ways. So

Speaker 5 just so you know, major insurance stocks, including United Healthcare, have fallen more than 6% since they're closing prices the day before the shooting.

Speaker 5 There may be some Wall Street anticipation of moves. There's some moves to United Healthcare, I don't know how, got a hold of pharmacies.

Speaker 5 They loaned them money and then, you know, usury way and then took control of them. There's a bipartisan effort to not, they should not be owning pharmacies.
They should not be owning hospitals.

Speaker 5 They put people out of business.

Speaker 5 That's an astonishing thing I didn't know about.

Speaker 5 So talk about the adjustments justice of like giving this guy a lot of attention and, you know, making him kind of, as you said, this folk hero who's not a folk hero, sort of an unfortunate folk hero, and what's going to happen to the insurance industry.

Speaker 4 Well, okay. So in my opinion, it's all reverse engineers to the same place.

Speaker 4 And that is when a nation gets to this point of income inequality, where six people control as much wealth and the wealthiest nation in the world is the bottom half,

Speaker 4 you have a self-correction. And that's the good news.

Speaker 4 Income inequality always self-corrects. The bad news is that the means or the vehicles of self-correction are war, famine, or revolution.
And I would argue this is a form of revolution.

Speaker 4 I believe the Me Too movements and the Black Lives Matter movements, which both had righteous components of them. But the thing all of these things have in common is the following.

Speaker 4 They're going after the 1%.

Speaker 4 And effectively, what happens is people decide if

Speaker 4 the 1% is making more money than the bottom 99, at some point the bottom 99 figures out the best way to double their wealth is to either show up and kill these people, tell them to move out of the country or to shame them.

Speaker 4 This is what has happened in Central America and nations all over the world throughout modern history. And this is a form of revolution.

Speaker 4 When people decide, when they see that insurance companies have a profit motive in denying claims, when they see insurance companies and their shareholders consistently getting richer and they also know somebody whose wife got lung cancer which meant they were going to be bankrupt two years later they start to get enraged this is a form of revolution and the support for this person can i make a comparison though i'd love you because like look this happens with the shootings all the gun we everyone in america wants gun control except for a small loud it's minority rule

Speaker 4 the tyranny of minority rule right it's it's capture of our government by rich people yeah yeah and this is what happens in democracies without stronger institutions: rich people who don't see themselves as bad people and they usually aren't say, let's vote for people that will put in place regulations and put in place subsidies that we get richer and richer and richer.

Speaker 4 And at some point, people wake up and go, you know what? I've had it.

Speaker 4 And they grab their torches. And this is a form of that.
This is a form of revolution.

Speaker 4 And as long as we have elected representatives that continue to soak the bottom 90 or the bottom 99, I mean, do you realize how insane our healthcare system is right now?

Speaker 5 It really is. I just had, I just got noses.

Speaker 5 Part of being in San Francisco, I said, my doctors are all there and I had my annual everything. And there are a few things that needed special tests.

Speaker 5 And the struggle I had with the insurance company was insane. And the doctors just shrugged.
They're like, well, this is how you get around. Literally, it was like, I felt like I was in Russia.

Speaker 5 Like, remember in the old days, this is how you get around and get the the meat for your table, right? I was like, what in the world? This makes no sense.

Speaker 5 These are, you know, you know, and I'm sure there's, there's abuse, of course, and they're trying to protect against abuse and people trying to trick them, but most people are just there to get tests, right?

Speaker 5 Like, basic,

Speaker 5 it was so frustrating.

Speaker 4 Let me just give you some, let me give you some examples here. A mother who's taking care of a child with childhood diabetes, and let's be honest, it's always a mom.

Speaker 4 She spends five months of her year handling that child's health care.

Speaker 4 And a lot of it is on the phone arguing with insurance companies who have a vested interest in making friction and difficulty in you getting your claims. How does she feel about this shooting?

Speaker 4 I'm not saying she's an evil person. And I was on Anderson Cooper last night.
I've essentially become everyone's booty call. When someone cancels, they call me and say, bring him on.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And Anderson pointed out, he said, I know you canceled your health insurance seven years ago. And I did.
Why?

Speaker 4 Because health insurance, 45 cents on the dollar goes to profits and administration, meaning for every dollar you give to health insurance, you're going to get 55 cents in claims back.

Speaker 4 And their job is to make sure it's 54, then 53, and 52.

Speaker 4 And might they not make it more difficult for you or more reasons to cut your anesthesia early or decide you're outside of their coverage zone, whatever it might be?

Speaker 4 And so what I decided was at $50,000 a year, which was my insurance because I'm a narcissist and I want the gold-plated one. So I went naked.

Speaker 4 The last seven years, I have saved $350,000 in health insurance premiums, which will buy a lot of health care. But again, this is the problem.
And I want to be very clear.

Speaker 4 Give me a second here because I don't want anyone to interpret this incorrectly. I am not suggesting that lower and middle-income people ever give up their health insurance.

Speaker 4 But the reason I can do it is because I'm wealthy enough that I can absorb any health emergency.

Speaker 4 So this is yet another transfer of wealth from lower and middle-income people who cannot take the risks I can take, and I can opt out of this userous, ridiculously expensive regulatory capture infrastructure called the health insurance system.

Speaker 4 We need to take Medicare. It's at 65 now, lower the age limit every year.
And essentially, we need universal health care.

Speaker 5 Medicare for all.

Speaker 4 Medicare for all. And do it slowly.
Do it slowly. Do it over 44 years until you get to 21 and then maybe go all the way down to zero.
But something is wrong in Mudville.

Speaker 4 The profit motive injected here with Citizens United,

Speaker 4 where democracy is no longer about people voting, but about dollars voting, has led to a healthcare system where we are trading despair and anguish for shareholder value.

Speaker 4 And that's where we are in America is the tail that wags every dog is shareholder value.

Speaker 5 It is, you know, as you know, when I was talking about income inequality to one of the billionaires many years in my book, where I said, you're either going to have to deal with income inequality or armor plate your Tesla because that's where we're going.

Speaker 5 This is exactly, this is the place it comes to. And I will say at the time, I thought he wanted to arm.
He wanted to armor plate his Tesla.

Speaker 5 He liked that idea, like that he would protect himself and his family from the poor people that were coming for him.

Speaker 4 Well, he's a weirdo.

Speaker 4 I was just in Brazil. I had lunch.
Or I had dinner and drinks with one of the wealthier or one of the more famous business people there. He drives around in an armored car with a security guard.

Speaker 2 You don't want to live like that.

Speaker 5 I know it's a shitty way to live. I agree.

Speaker 5 This is something that maybe will, something the Democrats, I talked to RoConna this week, can really focus in on is healthcare.

Speaker 5 They've sort of banged their head up against the wall with gun control, which still they should continue to bang their head up against the wall.

Speaker 5 But this is something that I think really does appeal to people if you get real changes here. Something Mark Cuban's been working on and others.
So

Speaker 5 it's a good area to do something to help people. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
We come back, we'll talk about Trump's pick for the FTC and talk to filmmaker R.J.

Speaker 5 Cutler about Martha Stewart's critique of his documentary about her.

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Speaker 5 Scott, we're back with our second big story. President-elect Donald Trump Trump has named Andrew Ferguson to lead the FTC, elevating a current Republican member of the agency.

Speaker 5 Ferguson posted on X after Trump's announcement saying we will end big tech's vendetta against competition and free speech. He's sort of on the Elon side.
Well,

Speaker 5 those people, I'm not sure free speech is what they're talking about. He's on the tech is censoring everybody and we must stop them.

Speaker 5 Lena Khan, it ends the Lena Khan era. Ferguson called for rolling back of some of Khan's agenda, including efforts to regulate AI and abandoning tougher standards for mergers.

Speaker 5 He's sort of open season on merger. Like he's going to, mergers are going to happen like crazy.
People can disagree or not agree.

Speaker 5 I think his ridiculous, this idea that big tech is this free speech quasher is just sort of, it illuminates the right. And he did a one-page memo for his job.

Speaker 5 He's quite thirsty, but interesting person

Speaker 5 with Trump appearing.

Speaker 5 He's declaring war on his FTC, FTC, and antitrust choices.

Speaker 5 With these choices, he's declaring war on big tech. He's trying to stay in, at the same time, they're trying to stay in his good graces because they're suck-ups eternally.

Speaker 5 Meta announced a $1 million donation to Trump's inaugural fund, according to the Wall Street Journal. This follows Mark Zuckerberg's recent trip to Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 5 He met with Trump as well as Marco Rubia and Stephen Miller. He's done a lot of ring kissing.
Trump had threatened him with prison over whether he tried to affect the election.

Speaker 5 Bezos is doing the same.

Speaker 5 This is something they have to do, although Mark did say he wasn't going to get involved, just the way Elon said he wasn't going to involve.

Speaker 5 They're all going to get involved because it's in their business interests. Any thoughts on where we're headed now with big tech and the Trump administration?

Speaker 4 Well, again, we've just gone full ecleptocrat. It's like, okay, you clearly don't support this person, but you're going to give a million dollars to their inauguration because never done it.

Speaker 5 He's never, I think they haven't done it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, because you've figured out this is just, I mean, this is just nakedly pay to play.

Speaker 4 And I don't fault

Speaker 4 Mark Zuckerberg. I fault us for electing somebody somebody who's decided to take us to

Speaker 4 a kleptocracy or cacistocracy. What's it called? What's that?

Speaker 5 Kacistocracy.

Speaker 4 Kakistocracy. I just, you know, fine.
This is pretty obvious. I don't, I, I have trouble believing that Jeff Bezos is really optimistic about Donald Trump.
The interesting.

Speaker 5 He's just going to sail off on his yacht that's armor-plated. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I, you know, look, you're going to see a boom in MNA. I actually think you're going to see a boom in IPOs

Speaker 4 over in 25. People are excited about it.
But again, again, the reason we block these mergers, folks, is such that there's more competition and lower prices on consumers.

Speaker 4 And when you don't block these mergers, usually what ends up happening is there's a transfer of wealth from consumers, especially low-end consumers, and there's a transfer of wealth to shareholders.

Speaker 4 And there's some benefits to that. A lot of people own shares, but corporate profits are at an all-time high and wages have been stagnant in the minimum wage.

Speaker 4 I mean, at some point, there's always a healthy tension between capital and labor, but capital has been kicking the shit, specifically shareholders, out of labor for 40 years now.

Speaker 4 And this is back, this is a continuum. It kind of got cauterized for about four years with Biden, but now, again, we're full shareholder mode.

Speaker 5 Well, Lena Kahn did get a good hit on her way out. She scored a victory.
Both the federal and state judge blocked Kroger's acquisition of grocery rival Albertsons.

Speaker 5 Albertsons has since backed out of the deal and sued Kroger for breach of contract. It would have been the largest grocery merger in U.S.
history.

Speaker 5 What do you think about it falling apart? Interesting. She did.
She does.

Speaker 5 She's really badassing her way out the door, which I kind of love.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you know what? I'm personally

Speaker 4 happy for Chairman Khan or

Speaker 4 Chairperson Khan or just Chair Khan, which sounds like a Star Trek figure.

Speaker 5 It does. I think it is.
Anyway, thoughts on Lena?

Speaker 4 I think Chair Khan served well. I'm happy for her personally.

Speaker 4 She's going to go on at a very young age to make a shit ton of money and have less stress and not have people hate her because for whatever reason.

Speaker 4 I think it's bad for the economy. I don't, again, this is whatever is good in the short term for a sugar high for the shareholder class.
You need competition. And

Speaker 4 the notion,

Speaker 4 whenever we look back, I challenge people to say, oh, my God, we really screwed up blocking that merger. We absolutely should have done it.
Or, oh, my gosh, what a mistake breaking up ATT.

Speaker 4 Said no one ever. These people are there to lower prices on consumers.
And if you think, okay, these acquisitions should take, people can make

Speaker 5 raise prices, not lower them. They're there to raise prices on consumers.
That's what you're saying.

Speaker 4 I think Chairman Kahn is there, and the FTC and the DOJ are there to ensure there's competition, which results in lower prices.

Speaker 4 And when you look at how consolidated our market has become, whether it's home improvement, whether it's obviously big tech, pharma, chicken, when you look at just the concentration of power,

Speaker 4 you need somebody saying no. And Albertson and Kroger's, I initially was sort of, okay, was this just populist bullshit where

Speaker 4 they're just trying to create a more unified, bulky response to Amazon?

Speaker 4 I think that's a decent argument, but I trust the economists at the FTC did the analysis and said food prices are going to go up.

Speaker 4 So be careful.

Speaker 4 A lack of concentration of power is not the problem in our economy right now. Yep.

Speaker 5 You and I feel the same way. No, one of the things, let me tell you how you compete, Albertson and Kroger's and giant food here in Washington.
You're good at what you do. Wegmans, let me just say

Speaker 5 Wegmans fucking rocks. And you know why? Because it's a great product, right? They're not here belly aching.
They're just making a great store, right? And so this,

Speaker 5 to me, some consolidation like this is always an excuse because you sucked. You just sucked and you just want to get bigger and win that way.
I just feel it's so

Speaker 5 those stores do not get better for consumers. They don't, the cheap, it's not even a better experience.
They just don't get better.

Speaker 4 Or Trader Drew's or Lidl,

Speaker 4 L-I-D-L.

Speaker 5 Letal, they're called. Letal, Lidel.

Speaker 5 We had this debate in our family because there's just one that opened up. Great store, inexpensive, 45% croissants that are delicious.
Like, how do they do that? You know, and they're wonderful.

Speaker 5 Like, anyway, I just,

Speaker 5 this is going to be, you know, open season for

Speaker 5 merger lawyers. They'll be able to just.
kill it. That's not, mergering is not, it's not, it's not innovating.
It just isn't. It just isn't.
It's just, it means you can't innovate.

Speaker 4 You know my Wegmans story, right? No, tell me.

Speaker 5 I love Wegmans. I live above a Wegmans right now.
Do you?

Speaker 4 I almost married into the Wegmans family. What? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Kind of love in my life at that point. A wonderful woman.
And she was one of the heiresses to the Wegman fortune.

Speaker 4 And the first thing, like our second date, our first date, I forget where I took her, like to, you know, one of my lame things, like, I don't know, Las Kina or something.

Speaker 4 And then on our second date, she took me to a Wegmans.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 4 And she was like, they're like, the family is so into it. And as you can imagine, and anyways.
That's why it rocks. And I remember thinking, hmm, oh, this could be mine.

Speaker 5 And then you, you blew it. Is this like a Patty Stone cypher story that you really didn't? I'm going to get a call from Wegman Air and say no.

Speaker 4 No, we don't know this guy. Yeah.
He was just sending her strange emails.

Speaker 5 I feel like I'm going to get a Wegman call. Like he's going to care, we love you, but Scott Galloway, no.

Speaker 4 No, this was, this was the real deal. This was, I was very much in love with her.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 All right. Okay.
Could have been you. You could have been, you could have been running Wegmans right now.

Speaker 5 Anyway,

Speaker 5 it's an interesting time. We'll see.
I think they're going to be able to merge everything. You know, people who can't compete are thrilled.
That's what I feel like.

Speaker 5 Anyway, let's bring in our friend, a pivot.

Speaker 5 R.J. Cutler is an ME winning and Oscar-nominated filmmaker who's had a very busy year.
He directed and produced the documentary Martha about Martha Stewart, which is currently on Netflix.

Speaker 5 His latest film, Elton John, Never Too Late, is out on Disney Plus today. Welcome, RJ.

Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. So happy to be here.

Speaker 5 So I loved this documentary. Well, let's start with that, the Martha Stewart one.
I have not seen your Elton John, but I'm going to watch it today.

Speaker 5 But it's been very popular on Netflix, though Martha herself had some strong, not so positive reactions. I remember her telling me about doing this when I was at her home in Connecticut.

Speaker 5 Let's talk a little bit about the film and why you did it. And

Speaker 5 I guess her issues, she took issue of how she was filmed, what you chose to focus on, and communication with her during the production.

Speaker 5 But talk a little bit bit about the documentary itself and what you were trying. I thought it was

Speaker 5 exactly what Martha Stewart is like, I thought, knowing her for so long.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you. I agree with you.

Speaker 2 And I feel Martha's come round.

Speaker 2 I will say,

Speaker 5 bless her. She's popular.

Speaker 2 And of course, I'm empathetic towards her for

Speaker 2 how

Speaker 2 challenging it must have been to see the film and relive all of those different aspects of her life. But

Speaker 2 I met Martha a few years ago at a dinner that she came to, and we were seated next to each other. And

Speaker 2 as you know, since you know her, her background is so fascinating. Her life is so,

Speaker 2 she's really lived the kind of quintessential

Speaker 2 American womanhood life of the 20th century, latter part of the 20th century, early part of the 21st, and what an extraordinary story there was to tell about her.

Speaker 2 It's almost a movie when you just hear the outlines of it. You can imagine

Speaker 2 the film, this incredible rise from such humble beginnings, a woman who has to go to work as a model in order to put food on

Speaker 2 the table for her family, an alcoholic and abusive father

Speaker 2 whose love she yearned for and

Speaker 2 has, in many ways, spent whole her whole life uh over you know trying to achieve and um

Speaker 5 and a visionary a a a pioneer visionary and and in many ways brought down by the patriarchy and overcomes that you know there's so much to tell one thing that i thought was that i liked about it and away from all the stuff about her husband and all the different and various things was her entrepreneurship i think that's what people two three people that i don't think get celebrated enough women would be Taylor Swift, Dolly Barton, and Martha Stewart, right?

Speaker 5 And Oprah, I suppose, on some level. Same thing.
Very heavy-duty entrepreneurs where people tend to focus on everything but their business acumen.

Speaker 5 And she's had some stumbles, but overwhelmingly, she's like reinvented, reinvented, recreated, remade. You know, she's the first person who started talking about AI.

Speaker 5 She came to my conference for 20 years, like at my tech conference.

Speaker 2 She reinvented retail, right? With her Kmart deal. She knew that content was king when everybody was saying to her that synergy was a bad thing and that one one medium would would would

Speaker 2 cannibalize the other she recognized that brand was the was the most powerful thing she saw influencing before before there was such a

Speaker 2 verb

Speaker 2 and and you're right the focus is on her handbags the focus is on her uh

Speaker 5 swimsuits although that was entrepreneurial i thought i thought that was marketing that's right everything she does does now, look at it.

Speaker 2 Look at how, I mean, I get text messages from Martha Stewart Inc. all day long.

Speaker 2 And I've got to say, is this for Martha the person? Or

Speaker 2 am I being asked to buy another product? She's incredibly entrepreneurial and,

Speaker 2 as you point out, a survivor. Someone who gets knocked down and gets right back up on her feet again.

Speaker 5 Well, that's an entrepreneur. That's an entrepreneur.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's a good point. And someone

Speaker 2 who sees the future and is focused on the future, which, by the way, is why I think for her it was challenging to make a film, but God bless her for the courage to do so. You know, she does.

Speaker 5 She said a lot.

Speaker 5 Let me get to Scott's question. Scott, go ahead.

Speaker 4 Nice to meet you, RJ. I'd like one.
I'll just put forward this a thesis and I'm going to respond to it. I think Martha Stewart is,

Speaker 4 there's no doubt about it. She's a genius and innovator.
Even deciding to partner with Snoop Dogg,

Speaker 4 most corporations would say that's too big a risk. And she did it.
And the contrast was just so fascinating and so kind of joyous. I mean, she just has an innate sense for brand.

Speaker 4 Hugely successful. I also think she, to a certain extent, represents what happens when that kind of success

Speaker 4 gives you, attacks your self-awareness.

Speaker 4 Because the reality is, as much of a hero as she is, she lied to federal investigators, went to prison for insider trading.

Speaker 5 Nope, she didn't. Scott, let me be clear.
She didn't go for insider trading. She went for lying.
Stock parking.

Speaker 4 No, what was it?

Speaker 5 She didn't. She went for lying.

Speaker 4 Obstruction of justice?

Speaker 5 No. No, no.
No.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 for lying to a federal investigator.

Speaker 4 Isn't that what I said? Lying to federal investigators.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but you said for insider trading, she was not.

Speaker 4 Well, she was being investigated for insider trading.

Speaker 2 That's correct. But

Speaker 2 Comey was very, Comey was very explicit about the fact that he was not indicting her for insider trading.

Speaker 4 And the clips I've seen, the clips I've seen have, quite frankly, when she talks about her personal life, I would argue that she has demonstrated to me a striking lack of self-awareness.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 this to me, what your documentary sort of showed me was that men and women at this level, you know, what happens,

Speaker 4 she's inspiring, she's fantastic. But what I find is when you recognize this kind of success, many people, including her, and I would argue the vast majority of tech executives who

Speaker 4 are generally male, it seems to attack their self-awareness.

Speaker 4 I'm curious, and I would imagine those some of those moments that you depicted, I thought pretty thoughtfully, she was not fond of

Speaker 4 your thoughts on this notion that once you get to a certain level of power, it is so difficult to maintain any sense of perspective around

Speaker 4 rationalizing, quite frankly, wrongdoing.

Speaker 2 Well, I want to say it's such an interesting question. And I want to say that one of the

Speaker 2 privileges and opportunities and joys of making films is that they're literary and

Speaker 2 we're in a realm of, you know, of

Speaker 2 kind of

Speaker 2 for Martha,

Speaker 2 there's the character of the unreliable narrator and there's that complexity that we get into.

Speaker 2 So when you ask that question, Scott, I'm gratified because that is one of the issues that the film raises and is how does Martha kind of craft her own narrative?

Speaker 2 And we see, listen, we have an incoming president who, not unlike unlike Martha, cut their teeth in the public eye

Speaker 2 in their relationship with the New York media. And so these very things that you're talking about are

Speaker 2 essential in the culture.

Speaker 2 At the same time, Martha has this,

Speaker 2 in a way, this gift that you're pointing out. She understands that authenticity, we're talking on one hand about manipulation of narrative.
At the same time, Martha's brand is authenticity.

Speaker 2 She goes to the New York Times and complains about her documentary.

Speaker 2 She also understands that authenticity in a fractured culture is going to be essential. She sees it decades before the culture fractures in the way it's fractured now.
So there's all sorts of

Speaker 2 complexities in here. And that's why she's such a great subject for a film like this.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I thought those were amazing moments when she did that. And I thought, oh, here she goes.
Cause she's done it with me. Like she does it.

Speaker 5 And you're sort of watching it happen and you're trying to figure out what calculation is going on in her head, if at all. I think it's instinctual.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 At the same time, she's willing to admit without reservation that she cheated on her husband during her honeymoon.

Speaker 4 But did you, the way she described it was the most fascinating thing. I fell in love with a handsome man, but it wasn't really cheating.

Speaker 4 Just

Speaker 4 the way she framed her infidelity versus his, his was a crime against humanity and hers was understandable.

Speaker 4 I just thought it was fascinating.

Speaker 5 It was just a kiss, Scott.

Speaker 2 Well, maybe this is, yeah, maybe this is the point, the point you guys are making, which is that entrepreneurial,

Speaker 2 to be an entrepreneur is to create a version of reality that we then all buy into.

Speaker 5 Let me ask you, a follow up, because one of the things that's interesting in this day and age, especially something Scott and I talk a lot about, is performativeness, right?

Speaker 5 Whether it's Elon Musk or Bill Ackman or whoever, every big personality now has to have total control. And then they have to be so performative and ridiculous publicly where they didn't used to be.

Speaker 5 They just did. Martha was one of the few that was

Speaker 5 a larger than life kind of personality for good and bad. Like she'd say the good and bad things.

Speaker 5 How do you deal with that when now, because you have this new film with

Speaker 5 Elton John?

Speaker 5 I'll note you co-directed the film with David Furnish, his husband. How do you that's a that's a problematic situation you have there if you find things that aren't so pretty, right?

Speaker 5 How do you deal with these people who want total control? And maybe talk a little bit about that film too. And the Martha film.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for me,

Speaker 2 I'm in the privileged position of being a Final Cut director. That is the relationship that I have with all my subjects.

Speaker 2 It's been that way my whole career, but it's been kind of formal since I made the September issue about anna wintor and and the generally and we we speak about this as as close to the beginning of the process as possible because i'm not going to make the film otherwise um with with elton and david the great opportunity first of all you to know elton john is to know that he you know there are there are no secrets i mean he's been he's been a very open book about his his drug addictions, his sex addictions, the struggles he's had to overcome, his sobriety.

Speaker 2 And I knew with David, I was going to have the opportunity to kind of delve into an area of

Speaker 2 emotional accessibility that I otherwise would not have had. So that was an opportunity that I embraced.
Certainly, I had to go in with open eyes and

Speaker 2 a healthy skepticism, but I found that the relationship ended up being exactly what I had hoped it would be. And the film, when you see it, you'll see it's an extremely emotional film.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure I could have gotten to that

Speaker 2 without that partnership, without the level of trust that Elton had. But generally speaking, when you're in control, you're in control.
You just have to be able to say no, you know, and

Speaker 2 Martha, you know,

Speaker 2 it's no secret.

Speaker 2 There were issues that she wanted me to change things. And I had to be comfortable saying, look, I respect that.
I understand why you're asking for it.

Speaker 2 I'm happy to talk through why I think it's important that you're in the garden at the end of the film, which is the central metaphor of the movie. And I think you look beautiful in those shots.

Speaker 2 And trust me, when they're color corrected, you'll look even more beautiful, you know. And

Speaker 2 as I say, I think Martha has come around to see the film's virtues and that, you know, dare I say it, we were right.

Speaker 5 Yeah, also, she's, it's popular. She popular is something that she's like, which is the most important thing.

Speaker 2 And by the way, one of the things we talked about, she she would say, no one's going to like this. And I would say, I think you, you know, I get it.
I understand the anxiety, but,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 we've gotten this far together. Please trust me.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Scott? Well, I mean, I'm just thinking about it. I love what she's likely meant for women and the fact that you could be kind of bringing what was typically thought of as these male.

Speaker 4 associations of drive and being a little bit cutthroat and making a shit ton of money while engaging in a business that was largely seen as a domain of more femininity.

Speaker 4 You could be fantastic at figuring out tabletop, but at the same time, understand shareholder value. I got to think she's meant a lot to a lot of female entrepreneurs over the last several decades.

Speaker 4 Anyways, statement there. I'm curious, as a documentary maker over the last, you've been doing this a while, you're going to be doing it for a while.
How has the business changed for you?

Speaker 4 I mean, this is such a...

Speaker 4 This ecosystem is going through so much disruption in terms of how you get funding, in terms of how you get distribution, in terms of how you make money.

Speaker 4 How has this world changed for a world-class documentary maker?

Speaker 2 Well, it's changed dramatically. I mean,

Speaker 2 when I started out,

Speaker 2 my mentors were D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hedgedis.
D.A. Pennebaker is one of the founders of the American documentary movement in the early 1960s, the Verite movement.
And

Speaker 2 for those folks,

Speaker 2 the idea of documentary as popular art was a vision.

Speaker 2 They saw it, but it wasn't realized fully.

Speaker 2 Certainly, there were a couple of films like Don't Look Back or Give Me Shelter that drew audiences, but most films, most documentaries were, you know, were not seen by the public.

Speaker 2 They didn't have a platform. They didn't have an outlet.
And I remember we made The War Room. That was a very, very popular film when that came out.

Speaker 5 It was a great documentary.

Speaker 2 And people would line up around the blocks and around the block. I remember it ran for six months in Georgetown.
You know,

Speaker 2 George Stephanopoulos was a matinee idol and James was like, you know, was the, was larger than life and a bit of a movie star.

Speaker 2 And you saw that vision starting to come to fruition, but there was nowhere except HBO under the leadership of Sheila Nevins that was actually airing these films.

Speaker 2 So there were no, there were very few career filmmakers. That was very difficult.

Speaker 2 And then then the form started to take off. And I remember going to film festivals and running into Ted Sarandos.
And he would tell me that The War Room, this was back in the days of,

Speaker 2 you know, when Netflix was a red envelope,

Speaker 2 was sending out DVDs and envelopes. And he would tell me that The War Room was one of the most popular films that his membership would request.

Speaker 2 That was one of the films they wanted to see. And he would always point out that documentaries were incredibly successful.

Speaker 2 So when they started doing original productions, documentary was a big part of the vision that he had for Netflix. And that started, that changed everything.

Speaker 2 And now you had evidence and they have, as we know,

Speaker 2 they know to the eyeball who's watching what and they know the value of these films.

Speaker 2 Now the vision of the American documentary movement that was formed in the early 60s is coming to, it comes to fruition. And you have an industry.

Speaker 2 And and sure the industry is going to have ups and downs and there are going to be difficulties and there's going to be frustration because uh the more popular films are going to get

Speaker 2 crime right right exactly it's going to be crime it's going to be celebrity and then you get into the question of well uh

Speaker 2 where's the quality with those films and of course you know i argue it's it's a it's a popular art form and you can have great films that are about famous people in this as as you do with narrative You know, you can have

Speaker 2 Maestro and you can have Oppenheimer and you can have

Speaker 2 Complete Unknown or you can have films that aren't as good.

Speaker 2 It's not whether the subject is famous or not. It's whether it's where the quality of the filmmaking is.
And but because documentary also tends to be, you know,

Speaker 2 there's a rich history of activism in documentary. There's going to be complexities and frustrations when you're dealing with, you know, with streamers who are looking for eyeballs.

Speaker 2 And so it's always going to be complicated, but the business from a whole, you know, I'm, I'm a, you know, my, the folks who know me know I'm an optimist. Look, we have to be industrious.

Speaker 2 We have to, one of the very first things Pennebaker ever said to me was, if you're going to make documentaries, you have to have a bank robber's mentality.

Speaker 2 You got to, you know, travel light and always be able to make a run for ready to make a run for it. And what, you know, what he meant is we have to be industrious.

Speaker 2 We have to find, we are not the mainstream of the entertainment industry. We're, we're coming in from the angles and we're coming in with different objectives and different approaches.

Speaker 4 But let me just add, I actually think the key to the key to being a successful doc filmmaker is that you have an exceptionally fucking rich spouse.

Speaker 5 Stop it.

Speaker 2 You know what? That's what it used to be. That's what it used to be.
When I started, you were making, you'd make a film. It would take you three years.
You'd go broke.

Speaker 2 And unless you had access to more money, you wouldn't do anything.

Speaker 4 You spent $3 million to get half a million back and go collect awards at film festivals. And that's right.

Speaker 5 They've changed. This is a huge hit on NIT.
That has changed.

Speaker 2 We have an industry and a community and career filmmakers. And for the optimistic's perspective, sees this as an incredible time.

Speaker 2 People like Alex Gimney are making beautiful films and are pushing the form.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you look at the films that are going to be nominated, when the short list comes out next week for documentary, if you look at any one of the films that's going to be on that 15 film list, you're going to see beautiful movies,

Speaker 5 great art. Who would be your dream subject next?

Speaker 5 Who are you working on next and who would be your dream subject?

Speaker 4 Great question.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm in the middle of working on a film about this Last World series that's going to be on Apple. I'm very excited about that.
As a big baseball fan,

Speaker 2 I've had

Speaker 2 a lot of

Speaker 2 passion for that subject and getting into the guts of it is really exciting and interesting to me. I think Steve Cohn would be

Speaker 2 a great subject and it's very interesting as a sports owner

Speaker 2 to see.

Speaker 4 The trader?

Speaker 4 SAC Capital.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that guy. Yeah.
I see what he's talking about.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he owns the New York Mets.

Speaker 2 He just signed Juan Soto to the largest

Speaker 2 contract of any athlete in history. But he sees his ownership as public service.
And that is a very interesting thing because every fan.

Speaker 5 Also, and then he's got the history of being sort of a rapacious capitalist, too. Like, what is it?

Speaker 2 It's, yeah. So, he's a really, he's a really interesting subject.
And I'd love to make a film about him. That would be a great film.
Yeah. Different, listen, different opportunities come along.
And,

Speaker 2 and, you know, we were.

Speaker 5 So Steve Cohen is your dream self-confident. Well, he's

Speaker 2 next. Next one on my mind.
I'm a Mets fan, you know,

Speaker 2 I've been there my whole life.

Speaker 4 That's your baseball fetish coming out. Just real quick, two docs, two or three docs you would recommend we go find that maybe people haven't heard of.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I would say take a look at Frida, which is such a beautiful film about Frida Kahlo that Carla Gutierrez

Speaker 2 made.

Speaker 2 And I would encourage people to see a film called Sugar Cane, which is a beautiful and heartbreaking film about the abuses of Native American children at Catholic church-run boarding schools

Speaker 2 made by Julian Brave, Noise Cat, and Emily Cassie.

Speaker 4 In Canada? Is that the one?

Speaker 2 Yes, it's in Canada, but you know,

Speaker 2 I mean, Joe Biden has issued

Speaker 2 an apology from the American government for their involvement as well. And

Speaker 2 anyway,

Speaker 2 that is a beautiful and beautifully made film.

Speaker 2 As I say,

Speaker 2 people looking for documentaries next week, the shortlist will come out, use that as a guide because

Speaker 2 there are going to be a lot of terrific films on that list. But

Speaker 2 I'm a big, big fan of those two movies.

Speaker 5 Can I ask you super briefly, any crime ones? Because they're everywhere. It seems like crime ones are like the bread and butter of the world of Netflix now.

Speaker 5 Which is why I like that Martha did well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 Not that come to mind.

Speaker 2 Although I will say

Speaker 2 on Amazon, for MGM Plus last year, we did a a a a series called murph the surf that was about america's original true crime superstar um he was a figure in the early 1960s who made he he stole the he and his gang of surfer uh uh kind of criminals stole the the biggest diamond from the museum of natural history in the world oh it's like that Patrick Swayze movie, right?

Speaker 4 I was just singing the piano Reeves film. What was that?

Speaker 5 Point Brank. There's

Speaker 2 a connection there but it was incredible bob dylan sang about this guy worth the surf he was a he was people were check it out that's a true crime that goes back to the roots of true crime okay great anyway rj cutler this is a wonderful documentary martha's on netflix and elton john's on disney plus thank you rj thank you guys what an honor to chat with you really enjoyed it thanks rj Scott, what do you think?

Speaker 5 He's great. I love, I think he's, War Room was a groundbreaking documentary.
He's done so many that are so good. Anna Winter one.
This guy never misses.

Speaker 4 I remember that. I love the Anna Winter one.
If it's one I remember, it was great at highlighting the power of her number two. Yeah.
That was what I took away from that.

Speaker 4 But Frida Kahlo has one of my favorite quotes. She says, I want my death to be glorious and I don't want to come back.
I love that.

Speaker 5 I love that. She got her wish, I guess.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I don't know if it was glorious, but yeah. No, I think about that.

Speaker 2 I think about that a lot.

Speaker 4 Have you planned out? Have you planned out your last, your last, like the ninth inning for yourself? Yes, totally.

Speaker 5 It's all in my will. Yeah, so have I.
I have to add you now. I have to add you in some way.
I appreciate that.

Speaker 5 I put money in for a big party in my will. A huge party.

Speaker 5 I want to put the fun.

Speaker 5 I put the fun in funeral. I'm going to put the fun and funeral.
And I have. We don't have to worry about that.

Speaker 4 You're going to go about 40 years after.

Speaker 5 That's true, but I want to have a fun funeral. One of the things I do have is for my,

Speaker 5 I'd probably get cremated, but I do want to kind of a head.

Speaker 5 If I wasn't, I have a

Speaker 5 headstone in mind, which is, and it's punctuation is important here. Fun exclamation point, fun exclamation point, fun exclamation point, death, period.
That's what I want on my headstone.

Speaker 5 Fun, fun, fun death.

Speaker 5 People will laugh in the cemetery when they see it. Like, they'll go, that lady, what a funny lady that.

Speaker 4 I like that.

Speaker 5 It's nice. I'm so glad you're thinking of your funeral.

Speaker 5 We'll go to, hopefully one of us will go to the other's funeral. That will be the case, correct? Unless we die together.

Speaker 4 What do you mean?

Speaker 4 In case both of us go are killed on our way to Vox in the same car.

Speaker 4 Chances are that's going to happen. That could be.

Speaker 5 Who do you think would be in top

Speaker 5 in the story? Me or you? Who would be?

Speaker 4 Oh, definitely. You.
You're much more iconic and you're considered an advocate for your community. I'm just like.

Speaker 5 Kara Swisher and this guy.

Speaker 4 No, kidding. I think you'd be equal.
I'm just that guy with the dick jokes. What happened to him? Oh, he was hit by a bus.
He was hit by a bus looking the wrong way. Moved to London.

Speaker 5 No, you wouldn't. It would be the same.
All right, Scott, we got to go. One more quick break.
We'll be back for predictions. Make it a good one.

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Speaker 5 Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction. Look,

Speaker 4 despite the fact that their earnings report was not that long ago, I think Meta's next earnings report are going to actually, again,

Speaker 4 exceed expectations because

Speaker 4 what I have come to believe is that Meta has figured out this ultimate algorithm. Or we used to think that sex sales, that was the ultimate hook for advertising and building shareholder value,

Speaker 4 inject sex into advertising, sequester people around these three channels they watch, inject a mediocre product with these great brand codes.

Speaker 4 And what we figured out since the introduction of Alphabet, quite frankly, is there's something that sells better than sex, and that is rage.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 effectively, Meta creates a lot of ointment for your rage and your disappointment, cue dog videos, wonderful, inspiring moments. But it's also, at at the end of the day, it monetizes, it incents,

Speaker 4 it shepherds, it cultivates, it matures, it gestates, and it monetizes rage. And the amount of rage, and you don't really feel it until you step back and think about it in the U.S.

Speaker 4 and Europe over the last three or four months because of the lead up to the election, I think is probably the greatest it's been since maybe Vietnam. I don't know.

Speaker 4 But the more rage there is in a society, the more coarse our discourse becomes, the more grief.

Speaker 4 Meta's probably had record

Speaker 4 days the last few days because of what's happened with the murder of this HCA individual and

Speaker 4 how polarizing it's been for people. So essentially, one in three Americans reported spending increased time on social media during the election.

Speaker 4 Three in four members of Gen Z report spending more time on Instagram during election season. Political ad spending was expected to top $12 billion a cycle, which is 30% greater than it was in 2020.

Speaker 4 And digital media garnered 28% of that, which is nearly triple what it got four years ago. So politics plus rage,

Speaker 4 it just adds up to peanut butter and chocolate for Meta. Meta is going to have their best earnings.

Speaker 4 And unfortunately, it's directly a function of the more fucked up in the head, the more angry we are, the better this company does.

Speaker 5 Something they all do well at.

Speaker 5 And that's a great prediction. That's a really great prediction.
I agree with you. I do think there's going to be a falling off.

Speaker 4 People are exhausted. Exhaustion.

Speaker 5 We'll say, but not, but they will benefit first compared to TV or everybody else. Anyway, for the rest of you listeners, it's time for this week's poll.

Speaker 5 Time just announced its person of the year is, surprise, surprise, Donald Trump. I think it's probably the right choice.

Speaker 5 Who do you think, Scott, should have been person of the year? Just curious. And we want to ask our listeners, too.

Speaker 5 Do you have a thought? I thought Donald Trump was the right choice.

Speaker 4 My person of the year would be Rav Alouf Herzi Halevi, who is the general staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. In other words, he runs the IDF.
Okay, all right.

Speaker 5 That's interesting.

Speaker 4 I think Israel is basically reshaping the Middle East and doing all of the West dirty work for us. Between the precision attack against Hezbollah, between taking out Iran's air defenses, between

Speaker 4 absolutely kneecapping Hamas, Hezbollah,

Speaker 4 the Houthis, and now Assad and Syria, you have, in my view, a reshaping of the Middle East at the hands of the incredible execution of the IDF.

Speaker 5 All right. I say it's Taylor Swift.
Okay.

Speaker 4 Wasn't she the person of the year last year?

Speaker 5 I don't know. She didn't.

Speaker 4 She was. I think she's getting it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, she won it. I think it's Donald Trump.
I'm sorry. It was.
I was going to say.

Speaker 4 There's only one person who's won it three times. He's won it twice now.
Do you know who won it three times? Who? Who? FDR. He's the only person.
A bunch of people won it twice. He's the only person.

Speaker 5 FDR is the only person who won it three times.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I would have given it to Elon and say the real president to drive Donald Trump crazy if I was running that place, just to make him First Lady Alania. First Lady Alania.

Speaker 5 Anyway, you have your choice and let us know. Visit us on threads at Pivot Podcast Official to answer.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. And we do want to hear from you.

Speaker 5 Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 85551-Pivot.

Speaker 5 Elsewhere in the Kara and Scott universe over on Raging Moderates, Scott spoke with Tim Miller. We both think he's great from the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 5 Let's hear Tim's take,

Speaker 5 handsome man. Let's hear Tim's take on how Democrats need to regroup in 2028.
Let's listen.

Speaker 7 Look, if there's any Democrat listening that wants to run in 2027, the thing that they should practice the most is how to sound like a normal person and how to sound like a not a politician and how to talk to regular people.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there's a lot of those. They've got a lot.
You've got Whitmer, Fetterman, AOC. There's a whole bunch of them that actually are pretty good at that.
Sort of, I think so. We'll see.

Speaker 5 Anyway, great, great show, Scott. It was listened to it after you told me about it yesterday.
It was terrific.

Speaker 5 Okay, that's the show. We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot.
Can you read us out?

Speaker 4 Today's show was produced by Larry Larry Neiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Erniner Tott engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Ms. Severio, and Dan Shulon.

Speaker 4 Nishak Kurwa 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, New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 4 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.
Kara, have a great rest of the weekend.