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

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Hopefully one of us will go to the other's funeral. That will be the case, correct? Unless we die together.
What do you mean? In case both of us are killed on our way to Vox in the same car? Yeah, chances are that's going to happen. Hi, everyone.
This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway. Scott, thank you for so many birthday wishes yesterday, including some photos that I think people were disturbed by of me hitting you on the ass.

There you go.

And, you know, at this point, Kara, we just have to celebrate everything.

When you get to this stage, you know, everything could be the last thing.

So we're really trying to lean in and, you know, and celebrate the little things.

Show off the love.

You know where I went for my birthday dinner?

I don't. Where'd you go? Benihana.
I love Benihana. I love Benihana.
Yeah, they do a great job. It's so pleasing.
And I don't, everyone's sort of surprised. I love the Benihana.
I like the whole situation happening there. They do a great job.
What'd you get? Everyone gets the same thing, right? 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. And so my first set of children loved it.
And now my second set of children love it. So it's working out very well, I think.
Anyway, it's delicious. Where are you now? You're in London still, right? Yeah, I'm in London.
Yeah, I'm going to Riyadh on Monday or Tuesday, and then I'm going to 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.
I've only been there once, and it was in the middle of COVID, which was fine, but it kind of put a strain on it, especially when my son started not feeling well well so I immediately started freaking out about some sort of crazy scenario trying to get my son into a hospital in South Africa so it kind of put a little bit of a I remember we went on I know it's a modern country it's a modern country but go ahead I know but when you're a parent you don't think that way yeah I know so we went on a game drive at a safari and he ended ended up, he had, I think it was salmonella. 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. And I'm like, privacy? There's lions around here.
I wouldn't let him go bathroom in the savannah. Yeah, I'm like, boss, there's a, I'm boss.
No, I'm not going anywhere. Anyway, 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.
I've heard. And you're going there because why? Well, because my sister is turning 40, 50.
And we're going to take her and her family and the cousins are at a great age, same age as my kids. And so just super excited.
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.
And it's an extraordinary, beautiful place. And also the food is really good.
The people are really friendly. And it's 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.
And that is sometimes in your life, you're blessed with the ability to work remotely or a lack of roots, which is both good and a bad thing. But I always ask people, are you in the midst of a period in your life where you could engage in a lifestyle arbitrage? 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 food scene, Madrid, which is like the best of Europe at 60 to 80% of the price of Munich or London.
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. Anyways.
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.
Yeah, no lifestyle arbitrage moving to California right now. 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.
I was just there this week, you know. Yeah, you love it there.
I think you're paving the way to either run for governor or mayor of San Francisco. No, I'm going to actually go see the new mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, who they just elected.
Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. And he's a pragmatist, right? Seems to be, yeah.
Is he one of the Haas heirs or the Levi's heirs? Is that right sort of it's complicated but yes his his mother was married to a levi heir so um and uh he's a great guy he's really interesting you know all of them were centery 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 um but daniel's just pregnant he's a lovely guy. He ran an organization that was working on homeless issues.
And, you know, the city looked great, I have to say. I had a great time there.
Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today, including Trump's FTC pick and the internet's fascination with UnitedHealthcare's shooting suspect. Plus, our friend of Pivot is filmmaker R.J.
Cutler, whose latest documentaries on Martha Stewart and Elton John have a lot of people talking, particularly Martha herself. But first, President Biden is commuting the sentences of 1,500 people and pardoning 39 people the largest clemency grant by an American president in a day.
The commutations are geared toward individuals who have been placed on home confinement for at least a year under the COVID-19-Era CARES Act. All recipients are nonviolentviolent.
The Biden administration reportedly still considering whether to use a blanket pardons for some of President-elect Trump's public enemies, which both of us think is not a particularly good idea. 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.
Even his, one of his top aides, former top aides Anita Dunn is saying that the timing was really just awful. He seems to have disappeared into the hedges, I guess.
His stores have gone. Yeah, as should anyone in public life at that age.
And by the way, my sense of this, whether you agree with the pardons or not, this is what they're supposed to be for. Yeah, exactly.
Not your friends or people who pay you. You're supposed to take the time to be really thoughtful and have a great staff.
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 how you evaluate affirmative action. Whenever you try and routinize and get something scale, things are going to fall through the cracks here.
And when you have, unfortunately, I think this is somewhat related to what we're going to talk about with the CEO shooting. When you inject a for-profit motive into prisons, you have lobbying groups trying to get legislators to pass three strikes you're out, such that the population of people incarcerated

go... You have lobbying groups trying to get legislators to pass three strikes you're out, such that the population of people incarcerated goes up because they have a profit motive in getting more people in prison.
We have the most incarcerated public society in the world, hands down. Hands down, on almost every dimension.
And then it gets really frightening when you start looking at the demographics of the people locked up. But I don't, and 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.
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. So I like this.
I think this is what pardons were initially intended for. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think there's a question whether we should redo the presidential pardoning system. There should be a board that approves them.
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 these people come in and try to get pardons by carrying favor and stuff like that.
And so 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, 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. Rupert reportedly plans to appeal.
It can go to the next group, and I'm not sure where it goes from there. But, you know, this is just, it round the edge attempt to to control things beyond his death um you know it'll be interesting to see what happens to these he's in his 90s mid 90s I think um 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.
I think that's where they probably are right now. But one of the interesting things was they were talking about succession, the family itself, because they had watched the show where 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. 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. There's a lot of assets there in News Corp.
Well, my understanding is this is never about economics. None of them were ever going to lose any sort of economic control or economic domain or ownership.
This wasn't about reducing their wealth. This was about governance.
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 in 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. And I always go to the same thing.
I mean, media is obsessed with itself, and it wants to talk about this, and life imitates art, so it's a great story. But I come to the same place, and that is, what I don't understand, and there's probably things I missed, but I had lunch with one of the Murdoch kids, struck me as an infinitely reasonable, nice man.
And what I hate about this— The troublesome beneficiary? That's what he was called. Anyway, sorry.
Well, what I hate about this is one of the things I worry about most, or I hope for most, 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? 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.

And I don't know if it's trauma when they were kids or competitiveness, or oftentimes in wealthy families, one of them gets sick and one shows up and the other doesn't. They resent each other or there's fights over money.
But I think that when 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. But I think, why on earth would you raise this ridiculously flimsy legal argument that never held water, in my opinion? Because the only argument you can make is you're doing it, you're doing it for economic reasons to save, to save the other fiduciaries from themselves.
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.

The play may have worked,

but in the evidence you're hearing,

like the showdown in the game of poker

is where gamesmanship collides with facts,

and its conclusion, all the bluffs are called

and the cards lie face up.

Whoa.

Jesus, right?

I know.

It's true. Everyone thought this is what he face up.
Whoa. Jesus, right? So.
I know. Like, it's true.

That's what everyone thought this is what he was doing.

What's interesting, before you finish, the three other siblings, Prudence, Elizabeth, and James, were not particularly aligned before this, before he tried this move.

They all have had difficulties with each other and among and between them because it's an obviously famous family.

But what he's created here is a fiasco,

as Vanity Fair calls it.

It's just a fiasco at the end of his life.

And for what?

And for what precisely?

Because he's going to be dead, sorry.

Same thing with Prince Harry, by the way,

in your country, Prince Harry and Prince William.

Yeah, but 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. This is, in my view, a father or a son manipulating his father to create unneeded division, polarization, and agita between siblings.
and 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. 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.
So I look at this through the lens of a dad. It's like, this is the last thing you want to do.
I know. I thought he would avoid this because they got along sort of, you know, there's always interplay between them.
But anyway, I just, this is sad. We find this sad.
Rupert, it's a sad end to your toxic life. Anyway, let's move on.
GM is scrapping its cruise robo-taxi program, citing time and cost needed to scale and rise in competition. The company spent almost a decade and $10 billion developing.
It lost $3.48 billion in 2023. GM owns 90% of cruise and intents to buy out remaining investors.
Waymo is just running 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 in this market.
I don't mind that they tried this, but what do you think? Well, okay. So first off, it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback.
Companies need to innovate. The fact that they're unplugging it, I think, is a good decision because it's embarrassing.
But when you're competing against Alphabet and Tesla, you're competing against the deepest pockets in the world. Yeah, Tesla doesn't have cars out there.
Let's just be clear. It's not.
I know, but they're spending a lot of money trying to figure it out. But this entire category is overinvested, and 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, this would be like, in my opinion, if General Motors decided they were going to go into the streaming market.
I never understood what is their synergy. Well, it's related.
It's related to cars, I guess. Sort of.
Autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles. This is about AI and what's that, LiDAR technology.
I don't think this played to GM's strengths at all. 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 Jaguars.
And, you know, it's actually a totally seamless experience. And I use it a lot when I'm in San Francisco.
They spent $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.
This would be, I'm not exaggerating, this would be like 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.
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.
And it was so long ago we looked at they've been at this for a while and very intent on it. And so, you know, it's just you can't really compete with them.
The two success, the ones that are ahead, and we'll see how successful, there's three of them actually right now.

And Tesla's not one of them at this moment.

They could be, certainly, is Aurora, which was the guy who started the google program um his name's chris ermson we've had him on um and that's a that's more trucks but he'll move into other buses and things like that uh because trucks are easier to make money at um there's waymo and then there's uh and the guy who runs waymo is really a woman it's a woman and a man running it. Really smart people.
And then Zoox, 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 creator.
They don't want to make cars. We'll see.
But sorry, GM. Sorry that messed up for you.
Anyway, let's get to our first big story. One of the biggest stories this week, obviously, Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare 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 the best story I read was about him being kind of a typical tech pro.
If he hadn't shot this guy, he would have seemed relatively normal in his interests. 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.
He was quite an active online person, like a lot of people his age in his sector, in the tech sector. I think he worked for True Car.
I think he was a video game aficionado. He did have health issue over the last years on Ready.
He talked about

this back problem he had and struggled with brain fog. 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. Very difficult to characterize.

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

Well, okay. So, first reaction is, in my opinion, and let me be arrogant here, I think the correct reaction is to feel sympathy for the family of this man who was murdered.
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, this is justified because this is an uprising or this is, you know, the most shocking thing about this isn't about the murderer.
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, 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. 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? It doesn't really matter, in my opinion, as much. What matters, or the most interesting thing here, is how society has responded.
And I can tell you how someone feels about this with 70 or 80% accuracy based on one thing. Can you afford, pretty easily, health insurance? Because here's some data.
60% of bankruptcies are related to medical debt. 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. We spend $13,000 a year on healthcare, despite the fact that everyone else pays 6,500 and we have lower health expectancies.
People oftentimes compare healthcare to how I would describe San Francisco, expensive but bad in the U.S. or healthcare in the U.S.
And you have essentially, 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. And by the way, two-thirds of lobbyists are former government officials.
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 horrors, 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.
This is, 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.
And the thought that they're all of a sudden going to re-examine their ethics, what? Don't hold your breath, folks. 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.
Yeah. But what was interesting, too, is I think this reaction, and I think it's borne out from what you're saying, it snowballed since the police captured him, too, this reaction to this young man, this troubled, very troubled young man.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro spoke about this. Let's listen.
I have no tolerance, nor should anyone, for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most. In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice.
In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this.
He is no hero. So it's interesting because I don't think it's in the dark corners.
I think it's everywhere. People have been writing fan fiction.
Etsy is full of merchandise. They call him Robin Hoodie.
There's been Spotify playlists and crypto coins. His lawyer told CNN he's gotten offers from members of the public to pay his legal fees.
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 that and then laughing or making fun or being less than empathetic is to the murder victim is really terrible.

But at the same time, that man isn't a person anymore. He's the insurance industry, right? That's what he represents.
And perhaps he is in some ways. So just so you know, major insurance stocks, including UnitedHealthcare, have fallen more than 6% since their closing prices the day before the shooting.
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.
They loaned them money in a usury way and then took control of them. There's a bipartisan effort.
They should not be owning pharmacies. They should not be owning hospitals.
They put people out of business. That's an astonishing thing I didn't know about.
So talk about the justice and 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, a sort of an unfortunate folk hero, and what's going to happen to the insurance industry. Well, okay.
So in my opinion, the solve reverse engineers are the same place. 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.
You have a self-correction and that's the good news. 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. I believe the Me Too movements and the Black Lives Matter movements, which both had righteous components of them.
But all of these things have in common is the following. They're going after the 1%.
And effectively what happens is people decide if 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. This is what has happened in Central America and nations all over the world throughout modern history.
And this is a form of revolution. 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. Everyone in America wants gun control except for a small, loud- It's minority rule.
The tyranny of minority rule, right? It's capture of our government by rich people. Yeah, yeah.
And this is what happens in democracies without stronger institutions, is 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. And at some point, people wake up and go, you know what? I've had it.
And they grab their torches. And this is a form of that.
This is a form of revolution. 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? It really is.
I just had, I just, Scott knows this. When I'm part of being in San Francisco, my doctors are all there, and I had my annual everything.
And there were a few things that needed special tests. And the struggle I had with the insurance company was insane.
And the doctors just shrugged. They're like, this is how you get around.
Literally, it was like, I felt like I was in Russia. Like, remember in the old days, this is how you get around and get the meat for your table, right? I was like, what in the world? This makes no sense.
These are, you know, and I'm sure 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? Like basic.
It was so frustrating. Let me just 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. She spends five months of her year handling that child's health care.
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? 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. And Anderson pointed out, he said, I know you canceled your health insurance seven years ago.
And I did. Why? 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. And their job is to make sure it's 54, then 53, and 52.
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.

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.

The last seven years,

I've saved $350,000 in health insurance premiums,

which will buy a lot of healthcare.

But again, this is the problem. And I want to be very clear.
Give me a second here because I don't want anyone to interpret this incorrectly. I'm not suggesting that lower and middle income people ever give up their health insurance.
But the reason I can do it is because I'm wealthy enough that I can absorb any health emergency. 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 usurious, ridiculously expensive regulatory capture infrastructure called the health insurance system. We need to take Medicare.
It's at 65 now. Lower the age limit every year.
And essentially, we need universal health care. Medicare for all.
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. The profit motive injected here with Citizens United, 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.
And that's where we are in America, is the tail that wags every dog is shareholder value. It is.
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. That's, this is exactly, this is the place it comes to.
And I will say at the time I thought he wanted to, he wanted to armor plate his Tesla. He liked that idea, like that, that he would protect himself and his family from the poor people that were coming for him.
Well, he's a weirdo. 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.
You don't want to live like that. I know it's a shitty way to live.
I agree. We This is something that maybe will, something the Democrats, I talked to Ro Khanna this week, can really focus in on is healthcare.
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. 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 it's a good area to do something to help people. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back, we'll talk about Trump's pick for the FTC and talk to filmmaker R.J. Cutler about Martha Stewart's critique of his documentary about her.
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Well, 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.
Lena Kahn, it ends Lena Kahn era. Ferguson called for rolling back of some of Kahn's agenda, including efforts to regulate AI and abandoning tougher standards for mergers.
He's sort of open season on mergers. Mergers are going to happen like crazy.
People can disagree or not agree. I think he's 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.
He's quite thirsty, but interesting person. With Trump appearing, he's declaring war on his FTC, FTC and antitrust choices.
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.
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.
He met with Trump as well as Marco Rubio 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. Bezos is doing the same.
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 get involved.

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?

Well, again, we've just gone full kleptocrat.

It's like, OK, you clearly don't support this person, but you're going to give a million dollars to their inauguration because.

Never done it.

He's never.

I think they haven't done it. Yeah, because you've figured out this is just...
I mean, this is just nakedly pay to play. And I don't fault Mark Zuckerberg.
I fault us for electing somebody who's decided to take us to a kleptocracy or kakistocracy. What's it called? What's that? Kakistocracy.
Kakistocracy. I just, you know, fine.
This is pretty obvious. I have trouble believing that Jeff Bezos is really optimistic about Donald Trump.
The interesting— He's just going to sail off on his yacht that's armor-plated. Yeah.
You know, look, you're going to see a boom in M&A. I actually think you're going to see a boom in IPOs 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.
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. 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. 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.
And this is back, this is a continue. It kind of got cauterized for about four years with Biden.
But now again, we're full shareholder mode. 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.
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. What do you think about it falling apart? Interesting.
She did. She does.
She's really badassing her way out the door, which I kind of love. Yeah.
You know what? I'm personally happy for Chairman Khan or Chairperson Khan or just Chair Khan, which sounds like a Star Trek figure. It does.
I think it is. Anyway, thoughts on Lena? I think Chair Khan served well.
I'm happy for her personally. 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.
I think it's bad for the economy. I don't.
Again, this is whatever's good in the short term for a sugar high for the shareholder class. You need competition.
and the notion, 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 AT&T. 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 an – Raise prices.
Raise prices, lower them. They're there to raise prices on consumers, is what you're saying.
I think Chairman Khan is there and the FTC and the DOJ are there to ensure there's competition, which results in lower prices. 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, you need somebody saying no.
And Albertson and Kroger's, I initially was sort of, okay, was this just populist bullshit where they're just trying to create a more unified, bulky response to Amazon? 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. So be careful.
A lack of concentration of power is not the problem in our economy right now. Yep.
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.
I love Wegmans. Wegmans fucking rocks.
And you know why? Because it's a great product, right? They're not here bellyaching. They're just making a great store, right? And so, 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 those stores do not get better for consumers

they don't the cheap it's not even a better experience they they just don't get better

Or Trader Joe's or Lidl, L-I-D-L.

Lidl they're called.

Lidl, Lidl.

We had this debate in our family because they're just one that opened.

It's a great store, inexpensive, 45% croissants that are delicious.

Like, how do they do that?

You know, because they're just one that opened. It's a great store, inexpensive, 45% croissants that are delicious.
How do they do that? And they're wonderful. Anyway, this is going to be open season for merger lawyers.
They'll be able to just kill it. Mergering is not innovating.
It just isn't. It means you can't innovate.
You know my Wegmans story, right? No, tell me. I love Wegmans.
I live above a Wegmans right now. Do you? I almost married into the Wegmans family.
Yeah. Kind of loving my life to that point.
A wonderful woman. And then she was one of the heiresses to the Wegmans fortune.
And the first thing, like our second date, our first date, I forget where I took her, to one of my lame things, of my lame things, like, I don't know, Laskeena or something. And then on our second date, she took me to a Wegmans.
Oh. 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, all this could be mine.
And then you blew it. Is this like a Patty Stone cyber story that you really didn't? I'm going to get a call from Wegman Air and say no.
No, we don't know this guy. Yeah.
He was just sending her strange emails. I feel like I'm going to get a Wegman call.
I'm like, no, Kara, we love you, but Scott Galloway, no. No, this was the real deal.
I was very much in love with her. Yeah.
All right, okay. Could have been you.
You could have been running Wegmans right now. Anyway, 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.
Anyway, let's bring in our friend, A Pivot. R.J.
Cutler is an Emmy-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.
His latest film, Elton John, Never Too Late, is out on Disney Plus today. Welcome, R.J.
Thank you for having me. So happy to be here.
So I loved this documentary. Well, let's start with that, the Martha Stewart one.
I have not seen your own drama when I'm going to watch it today. But it's been very popular on Netflix.
So 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.
Let's talk a little bit about the film and why you did it. And I guess her issues, she took issue of how she was filmed, what you chose to focus on in communication with her during the production.

But talk a little bit about the documentary itself and what you were trying. I thought it was exactly what Martha Stewart is like, I thought, knowing her for so long.
Well, thank you. I agree with you.
And I feel Martha's come round, I will say. Bless her.
Because it's popular. And of course, I'm empathetic towards her for how challenging it must have been to see the film and relive all of those different aspects of her life.
But I met Martha a few years ago at a dinner that she came to, and we were seated next to each other. And as you know, since you know her, her background is so fascinating.
Her life is so—she's really lived the kind of quintessential 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.
It's almost a movie when you just hear the outlines of it. You can imagine 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 the table for her family, an alcoholic and abusive father whose love she yearned for and has in many ways spent her whole life trying to achieve.
and a visionary, a pioneer, a visionary,

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, three people that I don't think get celebrated enough women would be Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, and Martha Stewart, right? And Oprah, I suppose, on some level.
Same thing. Very heavy-duty entrepreneurs where people tend to focus on everything but their business acumen.
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.
She came to my conference for 20 years, like my tech conference. She reinvented retail, right, with her Kmart deal.
She knew the content was king when everybody was saying to her that synergy was a bad thing and that one medium would cannibalize the other. She recognized that brand was the most powerful thing.
She saw influencing before there was such a verb. And you're right.
The focus is on her handbags. The focus is on her...
Swimsuits. Although that was entrepreneurially, I thought.
I thought that was marketing. That's right.
Everything she does now. Look at it.
I mean, I get text messages from Martha Stewart, Inc. all day long.
And I've got to say, is this from Martha the person or am I being asked to buy another product? She's incredibly entrepreneurial. And as you point out, a survivor, someone who gets knocked down and gets right back up on her feet again.
Well, that's an entrepreneur. That's an entrepreneur.
Oh, that's a good point. And someone 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. She said a lot.
Let me get to Scott's question. Scott, go ahead.
Nice to meet you, RJ. Likewise.
I'll just put forward, there's a thesis and I'm going to respond to it. I think Martha Stewart is, there's no doubt about it, she's a genius and innovator.
Even deciding to partner with Snoop Dogg, 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, hugely successful. I also think she, to a certain extent, represents what happens when that kind of success gives you, attacks your self-awareness.
Because the reality is, as much of a hero as she is, she lied to federal investigators and went to prison for insider trading. No, she didn't.
Scott, let me be clear. She didn't go for insider trading.
She went for lying. Stock parking, what was it? No, she didn't.
She went for lying. Obstruction of justice? No.
No. No.
Well, for lying to a federal investigator. That's not what I said, lying to federal investigators? Yeah, but you said for insider trading, she was not.
Well, she was being investigated for insider trading. That's correct.
But Comey was very explicit about the fact that he was not indicting her for insider trading. 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.
And this, to me, what your documentary sort of showed me was that men and women at this level, you know, what happens, 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 are generally male, it seems to attack their self-awareness.
I'm curious, and I would imagine some of those moments that you depicted, I thought pretty thoughtfully, she was not fond of. Your thoughts on this notion that once you get to a certain level of power, it is just so difficult to maintain any sense of perspective around, you know, rationalizing, quite frankly, wrongdoing.
Well, I want to say it's such an interesting question. And I want to say that one of the, you know, privileges and opportunities and joys of making films is that They're literary.
And we're in a realm of, you know, of kind of, for Martha, there's the character of the unreliable narrator. And there's that complexity that we get into.
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? And we see, listen, we have an incoming president who, not unlike Martha, cut their teeth in the public eye in their relationship with the New York media. And so these very things that you're talking about are essential in the culture.
You know, at the same time, Martha has this, 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. She goes to the New York Times and complains about her documentary.
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 complexities in here. And that's why she's such a great subject for a film like this.
Yeah, I thought those were amazing moments when she did that. And I thought, oh, here she goes, because she's done it with me.
Like she does it 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, at the same time, she's willing to admit without reservation that she cheated on her husband during her honeymoon. But the way she described it was the most fascinating thing.
I fell in love with a handsome man, but it wasn't really cheating. Just the way she framed her infidelity versus his, his was a crime against humanity and hers was understandable.
I just thought it was fascinating. It was just a kiss, Scott.
Well, maybe this is, yeah, maybe this is the point you guys are making, which is that entrepreneurial, to be an entrepreneur is to create a version of reality that we then all buy into. Let me ask you a follow-up with that, because one of the things that's interesting in this day and age, especially in something Scott and I talk a lot about, is performativeness, right? 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 they just did martha was one of the few that was a larger than life kind of personality for good and bad like she'd say the good and bad things um how do you deal with that when now because you have this new film with uh with elton john um you i'll note you co-directed the film with David Furnish, his husband.
How do you, that's a problematic situation you have there if you find things that aren't so pretty, right? 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.
Yeah, for me, I'm in the privileged position of being a final cut director. That is the relationship that I have with all my subjects.
It's been that way my whole career, but it's been kind of formal since I made the September issue about Anna Wintour. And generally, and we speak about this as close to the beginning of the process as possible, because I'm not going to make the film otherwise.
With Elton and David, the great opportunity, first of all, to know Elton John is to know that there are no secrets. I mean, he's been a very open book about his drug addictions, his sex addictions, the struggles he's had to overcome, his sobriety.
And I knew with David, I was going to have the opportunity to kind of delve into an area of 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, you know, 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.
I'm not sure I could have gotten to that 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. And Martha, it's no secret.
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. 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. And trust me, when they're color corrected, you'll look even more beautiful.
And 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. Yeah.
Also, it's popular. Popular is something.
And which is the most important thing. And by the way, one of the things we talked about, she would say, no one's going to like this.
And I would say, I think, you know, I get it. I understand the anxiety.
But, you know, we've gotten this far together. Please trust me.
Yeah. Scott? Well, I mean, I'm just thinking about it.
I understand the anxiety. But we've gotten this far together.
Please trust me.

Yeah. 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 bring what was typically thought of as these male 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.

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.
Anyway, it's a 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? I mean, this is such a, 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. How has this world changed for a world-class documentary maker? Well, it's changed dramatically.
I mean, when I started out, my mentors were D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hedges.
D.A. Pennebaker is one of the founders of the American documentary movement in the early 1960s, the Verite movement.
And for those folks, the idea of documentary as popular art was a vision. They saw it, but it wasn't realized fully.
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 not seen by the public. 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. Great documentary.
And people would line up around the block. And around the block, I remember it ran for six months in Georgetown.
You know, George Stephanopoulos was a matinee idol. And James was larger than life and a bit of a movie star.
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. So there were very few career filmmakers.
That was very difficult. And 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, you know, when Netflix 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.
That was one of the films they wanted to see. And he would always point out that documentaries were incredibly successful.
So when they started doing original productions, documentary was a big part of the vision that he had for Netflix. And that changed everything.
And now you had evidence and they have, as we know, they know to the eyeball who's watching what and they know the value of these films. Now the vision of the American documentary movement that was formed in the early 60s is coming, it comes to fruition and you have an industry 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 the more popular films are going to get men.
Menendez, Menendez crime. Right.
It's going to be crime. It's going to be celebrity.
And then you get into the question of, well, where's the quality with those films? And of course, you know, I argue it's a popular art form and you can have great films that are about famous people as you do with narrative. You know, you can have Maestro and you can have Oppenheimer and you can have Complete Unknown or you can have films that aren't as good.
It's not, it's not whether the subject is famous or not. It's whether it's, it's where the quality of the filmmaking is.
And, but because documentary also tends to be, you know, it's, 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.
And so it's always going to be complicated. But the business as from a whole, you know, I'm a, you know, the folks who know me know I'm an optimist.
Look, we have to be industrious. 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.
You got to travel light and always be able to make a run, ready to make a run for it. And what he meant is we have to be industrious.
We have to find, we are not the mainstream of the entertainment industry. We're coming in from the angles and we're coming in with different objectives and different approaches.
But let me just add, I actually think the key to being a successful doc filmmaker is that you have an exceptionally fucking rich spouse. Back to you, Kara.
Stop it. You know what? That's what it used to be.
That's what it used to be. When I started, you'd make a film.
It would take you three years. You'd go broke.
And unless you had access to more money, you wouldn't do it again. You spent $3 million to get half a million back and go collect awards at film festivals.
That's right. They've changed.
This is a huge hit on Netflix. That has changed.
We have an industry and a community and career filmmakers. And for the optimist's perspective, sees this as an incredible time.
People like Alex Gibney are making beautiful films and are pushing the form. I mean, if you look at the films that are going to be nominated, when the shortlist 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,

a great art. Who would be your dream subject next? Who are you working on next and who would be your dream subject? That's a great question.
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. I've had a lot of passion for that subject and getting into the guts of it is really exciting and interesting to me.
I think Steve Cohn would be a great subject and it's very interesting as a sports owner. The trader? That's who he's talking about.
Yeah, he owns the New York Mets. He just signed Juan Soto to the largest contract of any athlete in history.
But he sees his ownership as public service. And that is a very interesting thing because every fan...
Also, and then he's got the history of being sort of a rapacious capitalist too. Yeah, so 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 you know.
So Steve Cohen is your dream subject. Well, next one on my mind.
I'm a Mets fan, you know. I've been there my whole life.
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.
Yeah, I would say take a look at Frida, which is such a beautiful film about Frida Kahlo that Carla Gutierrez made. and I would encourage people to see a film called Sugarcane, which is a beautiful and heartbreaking film about the abuses of Native American children at Catholic church-run boarding schools, made by Julian Brave, Noyce Cat, and Emily Cassie.
In Canada? Is that the one? Yes, it's in Canada, but, you know, I mean, Joe Biden has issued an apology from the American government for their involvement as well. And anyway, that is a beautiful and beautifully made film.
As I say, people looking for documentaries next week, the shortlist will come out.

Use that as a guide because there are going to be a lot of terrific films on that list.

But I'm a big fan of those two movies.

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.

Which is why I like that Martha did well. Yeah, me too.
Not that come to mind. Although I will say on Amazon for MGM Plus last year, we did a series called Murph the Surf that was about America's original true crime superstar.
He was a figure in the early 1960s who made, he stole, he and his gang of surfer kind of criminals, stole the biggest diamond from the Museum of Natural History in the world. Oh, it's like that Patrick Swayze movie.
I was just thinking of the Keanu Reeves film. What was that? Point Brank.
There's a connection there, but it was incredible. Bob Dylan sang about this guy, Murph the Surf.
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+. Thank you, RJ.
Thank you, guys. What an honor to chat with you.
Really enjoyed it. Thanks, RJ.
Scott, what do you think? 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 Wintour won.
This guy never misses. I remember that.
I love the Anna Wintour one if it's one I remember. It was great at highlighting the power of her number two.
Yeah, yeah. That was what I took away from that.
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. I love that.
Unless you got her wish, I guess. Yeah.
I don't know if it was glorious, but yeah. No, I think about that.
I think about that a lot. Have you planned out your last, like the ninth inning for yourself? Yes, totally.
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. I put money in for a big party in my will.
I'll show up in a hula. I want to put the fun.
I'll do a little dance. Okay, I put the fun in funeral.
I'm going to put the fun in funeral. We don't have to worry about that.
You're going to go about 40 years after me. That's true, but I want to have a fun funeral.
One of the things I do have is for my, I'd probably get cremated, but I do want to kind of a head, if I wasn't, I have a 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 head stuff. Fun, fun, fun, death.
People will laugh in the cemetery when they see it. Like they'll go, that lady, what a funny lady though.
I like that. It's nice.
I'm so glad you're thinking of your funeral. 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. What do you mean? In case both of us are killed on our way to Vox in the same car?

Yeah, chances are that's going to happen.

That could be.

Who do you think would be in top in the story?

Me or you?

Who would be?

Oh, definitely you.

You're much more iconic and you're considered an advocate for your community.

I'm just like, you know.

Kara Swisher and this guy.

No, I'm kidding.

I think he'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. He moved to London.
No, you wouldn't. It'd 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.
Last week, we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled The Joe Rogan of the Left. The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations.
It was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the Left. But enough about Joe.
We made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude. So Hassan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on Twitch, at least the only one who talks about politics all day.
What's going on, everybody? I hope everyone's having a fantastic evening, afternoon, pre-new, no matter where you are. They want his co-sign.
They want his endorsement because he's young, and he reaches millions of young people streaming on YouTube, TikTok, and especially Twitch. But last week, he was streaming us.
Yeah, I was listening on stream and you guys were like,

hey, you should come on the show if you're listening. I was like, oops, caught.

You're a listener. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, I am. Yeah.
Thank you for listening. Head over to the Today Explained feed to hear Hassan Piker explain himself.
Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction. Look, despite the fact that their earnings report was not that long ago, I think Meta's next earnings report are going to actually, again, exceed expectations because what I have come to believe is that Meta has figured out this ultimate algorithm.
We used to think that sex sells, that was the ultimate hook for advertising and building shareholder value, inject sex into advertising, sequester people around these three channels they watch, inject a mediocre product with these great brand codes. 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.
And effectively, meta creates a lot of ointment for your rage and your disappointment, cute dog videos, wonderful, inspiring moments. But it's also, at the end of the day, it monetizes, it incents, 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. 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.
But the more rage there is in a society, the more coarse our discourse becomes, the more grief. Meta's probably had record days the last few days because of what's happened with the murder of this HCA individual and how many, how polarizing it's been for people.
So essentially, one in three Americans reported spending increased time on social media during the election. 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. And digital media garnered 28% of that, which is nearly triple what it got four years ago.
So politics plus rage, it just adds up to peanut butter and chocolate for Meta. Meta is going to have their best earnings.
And unfortunately, it's a directly a function of the more fucked up in the head, the more angry we are, the better this company does. Something they all do well at, you know, 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. People are- They're exhausted.
Exhausted. We'll see.
I agree with you. 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. Time just announced its person of the year is, surprise, surprise, Donald Trump.
I think it's probably the right choice. Who do you think, Scott, should have been person of the year? Just curious.
And we want to ask our listeners, too. Do you have a thought? I thought Donald Trump was the right choice.
My person of the year would be Rav Aluf Herzi-Halevi, who is the general staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. In other words, he runs the IDF.
Okay. All right.
That's interesting. 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 absolutely kneecapping Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and now Assad in Syria, you have, in my view, a reshaping of the Middle East at the hands of the incredible execution of the IDF. All right.
I say it's Taylor Swift. Okay.
Wasn't she the person of the year last year? I don't know. Didn't she win it? Yes, she was.
I think she's getting it. Yeah, she won it.
I think it's Donald Trump. I'm sorry.
I was going to say that. There's only one person who's won it three times.
He's won it twice now. Do you know he won it three times? Who? FDR is the only person.
A bunch of people won it twice. He's the only.
FDR is the only person won it three times. 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.
Oh, First Lady Alania. First Lady Alania.
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.
Send us your questions about business tech, whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT.
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.
Let's hear Tim's take. Handsome.
Handsome man. Let's hear Tim's take on how Democrats need to regroup in 2028 let's listen look if there's any democrat listening almost around 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 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.
Anyway, great show, Scott. I listened to it after you told me about it yesterday.
It's terrific. Okay, that's the show.
We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot. Can you read us out? Today's show was produced by Lara Neiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin.
Ernie Intertatt engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Ms.
Severio, and Dan Shulon.

Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's

executive producer of audio.

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