Pivot - Billionaires Shouldn't Tweet, Netflix Layoffs, and Guest Rebecca Traister

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Primary results are in! Aggrieved billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can't stop tweeting at the government and Netflix laid off 150 full-time staffers. Also, ICE is watching you. Kara and Scott are joined by Friend of Pivot Rebecca Traister to discuss the impending end of Roe v. Wade. You can find Rebecca on Twitter at @rtraister. Send us your Listener Mail questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or via Yappa, at nymag.com/pivot. CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this episode, we stated that Netflix cancelled its animated Matilda series, which was incorrect. In fact, Matilda is going back into development, but has not been cancelled. The streamer will also release a film version of Matilda the Musical later this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher broadcasting to you from Hamburg, Germany.

Hello. Hello, Cara. Hello. How are you doing? Are you jet lagged? I'm a little tired, I'll be honest with you. I did a lot of your work today also, because you were supposed to be here. Well, that's called pivot.

No, I had to take over for you on an interview and other things here, your duties that you were dragging me here. But I like it. It's nice. I'm having a great time. I had schnitzel with our producer, Lara Naiman. I don't want to hear about your personal lives. Look, what you do on your own personal time is up to you. We've enjoyed ourselves, and tonight we're going out again.

So there you have it. Nice. And it's a huge event. It's 10,000, 15,000 people, right? No, 72,000 people. It was crazy. It was a packed hall because I was interviewing many people, including one of the top startups and 26 here in Germany. And also, I did a special event with you where you showed yourself off on a remote feed. And then I interviewed Ashton Kutcher.

And he says hello. He didn't really say hello. But anyway, I'm pretending he did. Who got a bigger response from the crowd? Ashton Kutcher. And he says hello. He didn't really say hello, but anyway, I'm pretending he did. Who got a bigger response from the crowd? Ashton Kutcher, the dog. Come on. Keep in mind I'm sensitive. Ashton Kutcher.

Ashton Kutcher. He's charming. They didn't realize he was an investor. He's actually a very active and savvy investor. And many of the Germans did not realize this. They just thought they were coming to see the guy from that TV show he was on, whatever it was called. What was it called? I can't remember. Two and a Half Men? No, no. He was on that too, yeah. He was on the other one with the people from the 70s.

Oh, the 70s show. That 70s show. Yes, yeah, yeah. But he actually has been in Uber. He's been in Airbnb. He and his wife, Mila Kunis, raised $36 million for Ukraine. He's involved in all kinds of stuff around stopping child traffickers and pornographers around the world. Just so you know, my question was the intro to talk about me, not Ashton Kutcher.

Oh, okay. I'm just saying. They loved him. You would have been a hit had you shown up. Well, you know, I saw a video. I was on that big, enormous screen. It looked like I was on trial in the future. These are your crimes.

Hello, Hamburg. My name is Ashton Kutcher. As I commented when it started, I've never seen you looking so enormous. And that was my Venus joke for the Germans. I don't know if they got it. I'm not sure they got it. Although they might have liked it. They're pretty hip in Europe here.

Anyway, it's called the OMR Conference, which Scott really literally roped me into and then abandoned me. But that's okay. I convinced you to go, and then I didn't go. I'm like, it'll be great. You're going to love it. Have fun. Thank you. Yeah, right, exactly.

Also on stage with us was OMR, who's sponsoring this amazingly large conference. I was sort of astonished. Philip Westermeyer, who did a great job in your place. You could have been on stage with Ashton Kutcher, but instead, Philip Westermeyer was. Yeah, there you are. There you have it. There you are. What's going on in the world of business and tech, Kara? Lots of things. Jeff Bezos gets in on the board. Rich guys tweeting game. Also, more layoffs at Netflix. And we'll speak with writer Rebecca Tracer about the Supreme Court and the end of Roe v. Wade.

But first, some results from this week's big primary elections in Pennsylvania. John Fetterman won the Democratic primary in the Senate. He, of course, had just suffered a stroke, but he won by resoundingly in any case. Doug Mastriano, Trump's pick for governor, won his primary. He attended the January 6th Stop the Steal rally, and he's a real proponent of the election lies thing. It's kind of ridiculous. He's kind of a, I hope he loses to the guy who's going against the Democrat. As we record this, the GOP Senate primary is too close to call. It looks like it's headed for a recount between David McCormick and Dr. Oz. So your friend did not win, but nobody has won yet. But David McCormick made a much stronger showing,

and Kathy Barnett, which everyone was touting, all the political writers didn't seem, she did pretty well, but she didn't cross the line. Actually, she's a spoiler. I think she's had a huge influence on Australia. She got a lot of votes. I don't know who she heard or helped, but she kind of came out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah. It was my sense. Yeah, no, well, she's run before in Pennsylvania. I think she was, she's sort of beyond Trump. She was sort of even- She's crazy. I mean, I say that affectionately and meaningfully. She is kind of-

Yeah, she's to the right. She said Trumps were beyond Trump, essentially. You know, I don't know. She was, she's definitely tapping into something. You know, she linked herself with Doug Mastriano is what she did, and she got those people. So, you know, both McCormick and Oz aren't thought of as Trumpy enough among the Trumpy people. So I don't know. I don't know. I would— Well, you know, Democrats lost it. It took a huge blow in this election.

Yeah. You know what that was, right? What? Well, Madison Cawthorn was not reelected. I know. He was literally the best thing that happened to the Democratic Party. I know. You know, the thing is the Republicans are who did him in, by the way.

Yeah. They said, sorry, boss. You know, that's who really did him in. Not the Democrats, but go right ahead on the others if you don't mind. They're trying to rid themselves of the clowns. We literally – I love a guy who's packing his bags to the airport and thinks, well, you know, is this moisturizer, this cologne more than three and a half ounces? Okay, I can't take it, but I'm going to put my handgun in my luggage. And the thing about it, I can understand. I can't understand,

but I can conceptually get how someone accidentally brings a gun to an airport once. He accidentally brought one twice. He is not the guy. He is not the guy you want to be seated next to on an airplane. You don't want to look left and say. Well, he was backed by Trump. He was backed by Trump, you know, and until he got too weird. I think Trump decided it was even too weird for Trump. So, who's to say? Yeah, I just thought that guy. I think Democrats should have poured a ton of money into that race to win it for him. I think that was the best thing that could have happened for us if he'd been reelected. Oh, that's true if he's still around being a ridiculous chode.

You know, it'll be interesting to see what happens. I think John Fetterman is such a likable guy despite being sick right now. But he'll be fine. I could have run for office weeks after I had my stroke. Weeks, days. Weeks. I was fine. I was fine. I was fine. I could have run for office weeks after I had my stroke. Weeks, days. Weeks. I was fine. I was fine.

I was fine. I was fine right away. Anyway, he's got to really care about his health. But, you know, stress works for me, and I think it probably works for him. In any case, it's going to be an interesting race. We'll see who's going to win among those two. Anyway, also, ICE is watching, and not in a good way. The U.S. Immigration Agency has access to the personal details of nearly every American through a vast surveillance work revealed in a new report from Georgetown University. ICE used public and private databases, including information purchased from data brokers, to put together its dragnet.

It did it almost entirely without warrants, of course. We vomit up so much information about ourselves, but they're putting it together. I don't know quite what they need it. They're not supposed to be surveilling the U.S. public, but of course they do. Even if you want the state to have these power shit agencies allowed to do this and purchase it, probably not. But how could they not if others are doing it? I think it confirms what most people think about this topic. Do you mind being spied upon? We have a different view on this. I actually think surveillance, that technology is already out of the bottle.

And there's entire neighborhoods in New York and in London where you're always on camera. That is true. And I'm actually down with that as long as the people who make decisions in courts around what that data can and cannot be used for. Because I don't know if you can hold back technology, but what this reflects, in my view, is sort of a hangover from the Trump administration that we demonize immigrants. Immigration issue, I know it's a complicated one. It's like the homeless problem. It calls on so many dimensions. But they never want to go after—I've always thought as long as people want to have a low-cost labor that's a flexible workforce and we don't punish those people. I've always thought if you

start handing out $10,000 fines to every employer for every undocumented worker that's working for them, this problem or this quote-unquote problem would go away. But they don't want to do that because illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants have been such an incredible boon to our economy for the last 30 or 40 years. Yeah, but why should they need to spy on everyone else? I just don't even understand. I agree with you. Without people knowing, there should be... I don't get it. It's demonization. If it's a government thing, it should have transparency with citizens.

There should be citizen boards, all kinds of stuff. But of course, you know, ever since Edward Snowden, I assumed, whatever you think of Edward Snowden, he did show us precisely what they're up to. There's all this trove of information that people are vomiting up about themselves. And why shouldn't they be part of it? It's natural and it's not normal for government to do this, but this is what government has done since the beginning of time. And so I think the lack of transparency and why they're doing it, I'm not surprised. I used to watch all those movies where they, you know, they would say, you know, where the born identity, they can find anyone in seconds. Like, that's the thing.

They know exactly which way you go. And it's terrifying. I mean, just terrifying if you get a real authority, a really competent, luckily, most authoritarians are not as competent as they need to be to be really terrorizing their populations. But it gives them power that they shouldn't have. They're not elected to have. I'm sorry. I'm particular about this. I think that's a reasonable viewpoint. stuff on this. And especially with facial surveillance, it's been proven by Joy Bollamwini at MIT and others that it's so racially, oh, every problem that we have in regular life iterates itself and gets bigger on the web. But there you have it. They're spying on you. So you should be paranoid and think it's a conspiracy theory.

All right, let's get to our first big story. The world's richest men are in a shitposting contest. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have spent the week tweeting aggrieved defensive messages at various government officials. Bezos tweeted at President Biden saying inflation wasn't linked to the corporate tax rate. He doubled down with yet another tweet defending the rich, essentially. Meanwhile, Musk called on the SEC to investigate Twitter's bot numbers, which is ironic. Isn't it ironic? Called attention to a video from a right-wing provocateur's Project Veritas.

This was a Twitter employee, not a high-level one, getting caught saying stupid things. Certainly by no means the executive would ever do this. I mean, a high-level executive wouldn't. So where should we begin with this? They really now will not shut up. They literally won't shut up on any topic whatsoever. It's really quite astonishing, like on every topic. What I take away from this is that Jeff Bezos is coming back as CEO of Amazon.

If he's bored enough to wait. So we've all been, at least I have. I found myself bored and getting out over my skis and ultimately saying stupid things that contradict things I've said previously. For Jeff Bezos to say, to weigh in on what isn't causing inflation and how he's critical of the Biden administration's decisions, he wasn't critical of the $7 trillion stimulus that would end up taking Amazon to ridiculous valuations that was going to be the most inflationary thing we've done in decades. He didn't seem to have a problem with that. But now he's decided- Also, he never tweeted about Trump. Do you remember? Never. Not once after Trump was attacking him. Kept quiet, held his tongue. But now he's decided that his tax rates-

He was CEO at the time, but go ahead. But the most inflationary thing that has been done across Western economies in recent history was putting $7 trillion in pockets. A lot of that ended up at Amazon. He kept quiet on that. He kept quiet during the Trump administration. And what I see is a guy who's bored, who's been to the Cannes Film Festival, has taken his girlfriend to Saint-Tropez and St. Barts. He's definitely coming back. You watch. I've heard

some rumblings from some people at Amazon that Jassy doesn't have the same, not nearly the same of affection as Bezos. And the fact that Bezos is tweeting what I would call poor judgment tweets. He never used to do this. To me, it says he's bored and he's coming back.

Or is he just looking at Musk and seeing him get all the attention? The two of them have this weird rivalry. Well, maybe that's true. I think he was correct in what he tweeted in that the Biden administration is trying to say tax the rich to get, you know, to hand wave in a certain way. And I think his first tweet was fine, although others didn't agree. Let me just read it just so we're being fair to Jeff Bezos. The newly – oh, this was about the disinformation board. Should review this tweet. This was a tweet that Joe Biden's Twitter account, you want to bring down inflation, let's make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share. And then he wrote, the newly created disinformation board, which is a reference to this stupid board that it's not – he's just being a jerk.

Should review this tweet or maybe they need to form a new non-sequitur board instead. Raising corporate tax rates is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection. Now, then, and then he later tweeted, which I think was interesting. Let's just read what he said. Again, about the similar thing, he was tweeting another quote from the president. Look, a squirrel, this is the White House statement about my recent tweets. They understand we want to muddy the topic. They know inflation hurts the neediest the most, but unions aren't causing inflation, neither are wealthy people. Remember the administration tried. And then he was talking about because they attacked him on Amazon employees. And what was interesting is Larry Summers, who is usually

quite not, loves the mogul, never met a mogul he didn't like, wrote, I think Jeff Bezos is mostly wrong in his recent attack on the Biden administration. It's perfectly reasonable to believe, as I do, and POTUS asserts that we should raise taxes, reduce demand, and contain inflation, and that the increases should be as progressive as possible. I say this even though I have argued vigorously that excessively expansionary macro policy from the Federal Reserve and the government have contributed to inflation. I have rejected rhetoric about inflation caused by corporate gouging as preposterous. Anyway, it's kind of interesting.

I love that Larry Summers kind of weighed in here and said, not so fast, a very famous economist. So, Jeff Bezos in tweeting probably isn't a good idea. The guy has so much respect. Advises and tweeting probably isn't a good idea. The guy has so much respect. He's seen as the brightest blue flame thinker in the history of business. For him to come out and become anything sort of political is just on a risk-adjusted basis. He's clearly not listening to his advisors. He's clearly bored.

I think that means he's coming back. And then what is really like continued par for the course, true to form hypocrisy, Elon Musk is now asking the agency he called Bastards to investigate the bot issue. Yeah. I mean, that's the one where I was really like, okay, that's pretty thick. That's rich, Elon. You want the SEC's help. I'm sure they're just dying to weigh in and give you a helping hand here. Yeah.

I know. That was funny. That was, I didn't know what to say. I almost put the, isn't it an ironic song? But I mean, you know, he can't help himself. He's been just tweeting up a storm, you know, and retweeting things and this and that. And he's, of course, continuing to double down on the bot problem. And that's what that was about.

That's what that was. He also tweeted a picture of Louis XIV that says, borderline, too sexy, great shoes, incredible art. And then noted the Golden State is cooking. He does a lot of this stuff. And of course, he's now declaring he's a Republican, which, okay, sure.

He declared he was a Republican? I think so, something like that. He's, anyway, he's whatever. He's my, I just heard. He's doing a lot of sort of right-wing virtue signals we discussed. Why do men as rich and powerful as these two spend their days tweeting? That's whatever. He's my—I just started. He's doing a lot of sort of right-wing virtue signals we discuss. Why do men as rich and powerful as these two spend their days tweeting? That's one.

One of the suggestions that one of our producers made was, shouldn't they be hunting humans for sport on an island somewhere? Which is what they really need to be doing. That's a joke, people. We don't think they should do that. We think that's wrong. I love that movie with the hot woman. She's a great actress. What's her name?

Glitter. That movie didn't come out because of some shootings that happened later, but it was about rich people hunting humans for sport. It's a good movie. She's a very talented actress. But anyway, is there any plus for Elon? Someone was, when I said this is ridiculous, he needs to stop, I was like, no, this is the way to negotiate in public like this.

I'm like, I don't understand. Is it anything but especially the poop emoji and things like that, but making him look like an idiot. I just got off my other pod with the chair of the finance department, David Yermack, And he said, I said, my view was, okay, the worm has turned. So many people are so sick of this guy that the Delaware court is going to say, sorry, boss, this is an airtight contract. You need to show up with 45 billion or pay an enormous fee bigger than the breakup fee. There's a specific performance clause that says he will show up with this money. And David, Professor Yermack, who's always sober and kind of a very steady hand, sort of corrected me and said, Scott, there's actually a lot of precedents for private equity firms walking away from deals. They pay a fee. It's a negotiation in the financial crisis because the market materially changed. And he

said, this is the negotiation to try and figure out between all parties what they're going to settle for. The thing that bothers me here is that if the market absorbs that you can make an offer for a company, have it accepted, and then kind of worm out of it, what happens when Apple decides to buy Netflix and Facebook says, you know what, let's top their offer, force them to accept our offer, and we'll just keep them in a state of coma for a year, and then we'll walk. You know, there's a downside here that companies can start basically signing agreements knowing these agreements aren't really enforceable and paying. They have so much money that the breakup fee really doesn't matter.

And if an asset was about to go to Apple that Facebook didn't want to go to Google or whatever, they could just say, go ahead, outbid, outbid until it makes no sense. And by the way, in 10, 12 months when the markets change, we'll pay a couple billion dollars. We'll come up with some excuse, bots or something. So the lack of enforcement around the rule of law and enforcing certain protocols, I do think it's an existential threat to the market, if you will. Interesting. Interesting. Another interesting thing, new filings reveal that Twitter offered Elon Musk a board seat before he disclosed his 9% stake in the company, which I don't know. Yeah, that's the equivalent. That's the equivalent. Okay. That's the equivalent of, you can't get any more active as an investor to be having discussions around a board seat. So

he's violated the purchase agreement where he's trying to. He's violated the non-disparagement agreement. He's violated the standstill. He's violated the disclosure rules. Literally, signing an agreement with Elon Musk is worth nothing. It's worth nothing. Lawyers on both sides, every lawyer proofs with some sort of implicit indication that both parties are going to have to live up to this agreement, but one doesn't. An agreement for, and this is why I don't think the board is going to

renegotiate a lower price. An agreement with Elon Musk means abso-fucking-lutely nothing. You know, despite all this shit posting, one, sources, Bloomberg has a story saying sources, despite Elon's tweets, Twitter, Musk's team,

and banks are continuing to work to close the year, including preparing a 139-page SEC filing so that while in public he may be saying things, in private that is not necessarily the case. Secondly, Twitter's board has sort of finally got a slight backbone, says it intends to, quote, close the transaction at the agreed price and enforce the merger agreement. That's from CNN and others. So here we are. That's where we are in terms of where it is. What do you think about this, Scott? It gets thick fast because if he is going to make an argument in front of a Delaware court that he was genuine and it was a material adverse condition or effect, he can't have as evidence that, oh, yeah, I told my bankers to stop working. So whether or not he's – this doesn't tell you what his real intentions are. I think he's already made his intentions very clear.

This is – he doesn't want to give the Twitter legal counsel that's going to say, you owe us $45 billion more evidence that he wasn't genuine about trying to get this closed. And unfortunately, this material adverse, this MAC clause got triggered. The other thing is there's some really unusual incentives here because Morgan Stanley, who's arranging the debt, I think stood to make something like a half a billion, five or 700 million in fees. So they want it to close. Yes, that's true. They're not going to be happy about that.

So they're not thrilled about, I mean, can you imagine? Morgan Stanley has probably had – I wouldn't be surprised if there's more than 100 people directly and indirectly running around the world speaking to anybody with a bank account saying, do you want to participate in this debt deal and trying to structure it? And they only get paid. My understanding is they only get paid if the thing actually, the debt gets issued. So they want to see this thing close. Yep, 100%. And so, you know, I thought, again, someone I love, we should get him on the show, Matt Levine from Bloomberg, had a really great piece about this. And he said, he was talking about bots and everything else. And he essentially just said, let's just say Elon is lying about this entire thing because he knows about this, he talked about this, and he's been very clear on the bot problem for a long time. And so a lot of people are dismissing these tweets as noise, and we'll see where it goes. I mean, it looks like Twitter will sue, bankers will sue, shareholders will sue.

He may not care about the suing, but it sounds like he's also working at it. And perhaps he's trying to create a narrative as, oh, I saved it at the end or something. I'm not really clear what he's doing. I think he's out. I think he's out and everything he's doing now is trying to create cloud cover to position themselves as a victim slash hero that wanted to get the deal done, but couldn't when he found out that shocker, there was bots were there. You said something really interesting

earlier in the podcast that the ones, the people really out there really making aggressive statements saying bold slash obnoxious, borderline hostile, borderline reckless things despite their prestige,

despite their power. And I know I'm playing identity politics here. It's always fucking dudes. And it just struck me. I'm like, what woman is on Twitter with more than 10 million followers wreaking havoc or weighing in on shit she has no domain expertise in? No, Lauren Boebert is kind of at the top and Marjorie Taylor Greene are right up there doing it.

But yeah. But their followings are pretty small, relatively speaking. Indeed. No, there's not a woman. A woman executive could never, never, ever. Start doing this shit. I agree. You get called, you know, every name under the sun, you know, that kind of thing.

Boebert just tweeted something because, of course, she's the Maz and Cawthorne thing has got to scare her a little bit. And she said, I'm a woman, not a W-O-M-X. And someone wrote something back with it, starting with C-X. And then you know the other two letters. It was very funny. It was very funny. There you go. Anyway, yes, yes, you're right.

It's only those two. And there's some others. There's some others. It's all political. They're all political. Twitter is going to – should force him to stick to this deal or get a payment or something like that. And then, you know, if it's stock languages, he could come back at them. What he's doing is trashing the place on the way out, which is really, I don't know, he's just leave quietly.

What did we say at the very beginning? He brings volatility, not value to this. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm not sure what the plan is here. I really don't. Unless it's some dastardly plan to trash Twitter and ruin the company.

But it was already troubled, as it was. But nonetheless, speaking of Twitter, Trump is poised to return to Twitter if the ban is lifted. In SEC filings, Trump's, which he said he wasn't returning, his SPAC partners say that he can post on any platform at any time about, quote, political messaging. That leaves the door wide open, but only if Twitter unlocks it first, of course. Most people think Twitter was essential for him. It may not be when he gets around to running, if he's running. On True Social, he can post anything. It's pretty boring. Nobody's like going crazy there. There's an account that reposts his stuff on Twitter, but nobody cares. But, you know, then we have DWAC, the SPAC, which SPAC is having a terrible time in the market. The Journal had a great story on this, on a lot of SPACs have to return their money

and not because they can't find things. So it's a really volatile situation for Trump himself in all these areas of whether he has a place to really be Trump going forward. Yeah, I do think it's, I mean, he's, for better or for worse, he's very good at tweeting. And he was constantly in the collective consciousness, so it is an issue. But I want to go back to an idea I had last week that everyone was just horrified by. I absolutely think Twitter should kick Musk off the platform. Someone else said that to me.

I was like, what are you, channeling Scott? Tell again why you want to do this. People immediately check back like, oh, my God, that's too much. Hold on. If you show up to a bar and you're drinking and you're the best customer and then you put an offer on the bar and then you say, you know what, and you disrupt it, they can't get other offers, you start shitposting management or a restaurant or whatever, and then you say, you know what, I'm worried about trans fats, or the market's changed, and you start coming up with lies. And they say, you know what, boss, we don't want you here anymore. Just stay the hell out. We're revoking your membership. We're canceling your account. And people act as if he has some sort of First Amendment or civic right. It's not oxygen. It's not First Amendment. This is not a national treasure. Right. It's not oxygen. It's not First Amendment. This is not a national treasure. This company should say, you have caused so much damage, distraction, and you've been bad for shareholder value.

You've been bad for morale. You've been bad for the vibe around here. We would rather you not patronize our company, and we're shutting your account down. And people act as if that's unthinkable. Being a jerk? They don't have a being a jerk rule. I got kicked out of an Uber once because the guy thought I was an asshole. Yeah, that's different. Uber has those rules. Uber, right, they're in that rule.

Okay, Twitter. Let's pull a musk. Let's have, by the way, I'm usually very nice to Uber drivers. Twitter can make its own rules. We have a new policy. If you try, if you say you're going to buy the company for $45 billion, sign an agreement, start shitposting our CEO, start creating havoc, and then what? Literally. We kick you.

We close your account. New rule. Yeah. New rule. Yeah. Then he'll sue them. They could absolutely do that. They will spend their whole lives in a – you know what?

When you wrestle a pig, the pig likes it, and you only get dirty, as they say. Scott, he'll sue them. If you wrestle a pig, listen to you. I'm here in Germany. A little German pork reference. That's right. I'm just saying, the pig loves it. The pig loves it.

Yeah. The pig in question is Elon Musk in this particular metaphor. This is a closed platform. FYI, the board met last night, and we've decided that we no longer want to. No. By the way, they don't have the courage to do something cool like that. Elon Musk has the courage to do something cool like that. Super easy.

Closes account. They won't do it. They won't do it. We should run Twitter because we would do stuff like that all the time. I like when you always decide we should do this. We should buy Twitter. We should run Twitter. You know what? You know, you're always trying to get away from me, and then you always come back.

That's right. That's the case. In any case, we'll see what happens with Trump and his SPAC, which seems like it's going to be in trouble in an SEC filing. Trump's business partners also listed Trump's previous bankruptcies, including Trump University, vodka, mortgage, shuttles, and stakes. And they kept saying, like, if he does offensive things, that's okay. It was the opposite to most agreements. You know, if, you know, scandal, you bring scandal upon us, they're like, he's going to bring scandal and that's fine. It was really, it was a couple of lawyers, George Conway and others were commenting on

that it's the opposite of these usual kind of agreements. So there you have it. What was our prediction last week, Kara? What? The Patagonia vest recession. Yep. People love that. I'm setting up big story, too. We're setting up big story, too. We're going to have a quick break. You'll get Scott's fleece vest reference in a second. When we come back, Netflix is hit with another round of layoffs, and we'll speak to a friend of Pivot, Rebecca Tracer, about what's next for the Supreme Court. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle.

When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting, crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists.

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They're obviously pulling their horns. It's probably good news for Netflix's shareholders in terms of saving money, but there might be more on the way. Shutting down social media is one thing,

but it acquired the entire Roald Dahl catalog for nearly $700 million. That's the Willy Wonka author. They canceled this animated series from Meghan Markle. In the latest rounds of cuts, they shut down Ava DuVernay's show, which has been in development. Okay, so Netflix laid off 150 full-time staffers, 70 jobs in animation. Yeah, a lot.

And the social media team, 70 roles, and they laid off 35 staffers. animation, and the social media team, 70 roles, and they laid off 35 staffers. What people don't notice is if you look at these layoffs, they add up to about the same number of people that lost their jobs when CNN pulled the plug on CNN Plus. So in sum, another CNN Plus, if you look at it from a human capital standpoint, has been closed down. And it all comes back to the same thing. The mother of all investments in streaming is just as the stimulus, we're paying the price for the hangover from the massive stimulus in the form of inflation, you're going to see the creative community pay an enormous price for the massive overhiring at the hands of $140 to $240 billion in original content that households can't justify. But this is the tip

of the iceberg. We're going to start seeing this kind of stuff everywhere across what we're calling the Patagonia Vest crowd. And that is people who had the skills to be in these high growth categories, whether it's Netflix, whether it's Unity software, Snowflake, that whole genre is going to experience a real shit-kicking in terms of human capital and layoffs. And it's basically Netflix closed CNN Plus in the last week, the equivalent, the same size of the business. Indeed. It's interesting because they've also got to be careful of getting flack for firing women of color at its fan site to dumb just five months after hiring them. You know, they have such a scrutiny on them.

Every move they make is going to, you know, Ava DuVernay or Meghan Markle and this and that. New data shows that longtime also Netflix subscribers more than three years are leaving the service at a higher rate than previous quarters. 13% of all Netflix cancellations that first quarter of 2022 versus five in the same quarter of 2020. You know, all of streaming has got to be looking at this, although I did ask Ashton, my friend Ashton, and he feels it's just – he has great regard for Netflix. And he thinks that it's just a dip, you know, that they will dip out at some point after sort of equalizing this stuff. But he still thinks they really did – everybody's still moving in that direction. It's a secular change. I would agree with him on that. Yeah, our buddy Bill Cohen said that it's overdone. Our buddy Bill Cohen said that it's overdone. I need to dig into the fundamentals here, but it's hard to imagine Netflix at 70% off isn't something worth looking at.

Yeah. Well, oddly enough, Ashton on stage, he said, I said, I think they should merge. I have talked about them merging with Roku or Spotify. And he went, hmm, I haven't been on investor calls talking like that. And he wouldn't be specific because he didn't want to be a Martha Stewart, he said. But he was, you know, I think a lot of people in Hollywood are thinking, what could Netflix merge with? What could make it stronger in this weak time, essentially? So I think people see it as an opportunity. I think you're 100% right.

Yeah. It's like Netflix is the gorilla in this space. And it'll be interesting to see if they, you know, they're going to cut costs. I think the first thing they'll do is cut costs. You're about to see, you know, a lot of projects by, you know, Meghan Markle and others get shelved. Yeah. And they're going to get less aggressive around spending. They're going to have layoffs.

And by the way, that's a good thing. You asked me an interesting question on stage today, and unfortunately I didn't get a good answer. Where's the innovation moving forward? And in a boom time, capital is a tremendous source of innovation. If we poured as much human capital and financial capital into grilled cheese as we did into crypto right now, we would find out grilled cheese could do amazing things. So just the sheer amount of capital and risk-taking creates innovation. In eras like this, or I think we're about to go through, I think they also create a ton of innovation. Because what happens is it forces a sober conversation around, all right, what have we built here? And what are the opportunities

that we're not seeing? Because quite frankly, what we're doing right now is not working. It's not sustainable. And what you know, what is it? Necessity is the mother of all innovation. And the majority of these companies, the majority of huge companies didn't end up where they started. You know, they started indexing websites for academics or whatever. It's just where they were hot or not for college campuses. And so I bet there's a – this will be, I think, good over

the medium term. It's going to be really painful in the short term. I actually think it's going to be what we're about to go through in the tech sector. It's going to be good in the medium term for tech. We've gotten too fat. We've gotten too, there's too many, too much consensual hallucination that cheap capital

has provided that these concepts make sense and are working. I think it's going to be – I think it's overdue and it will be painful but welcome. Oddly enough, Ashton said the same thing. We did. Yes, he did. Was it like looking at me when you talked to him? Because we look very similar.

No, it was extraordinarily looking person saying what you said. We look like brothers. Extraordinarily. We look like brothers. You look like brothers, yes. That guy, look at him, look at me. Can you believe we're the same species? Do you remember the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with Danny DeVito when they were called twins?

Twins. That's what it was like. That's what it was like. You're the Danny DeVito character in case you're interested. Anyway, we have to get to our friend of Pivot. Rebecca Tracer is a writer at large at New York Magazine, where she's been diving deep into the Supreme Court and the impending end of Roe v. Wade. She's also the author of Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Welcome, Rebecca Tracer.

Hi. It's good to be here. Good to see you. So, first, we should mention we're recording this interview on Wednesday. The court could issue its final ruling on the case at any time. It's because I'm traveling, and so we're doing that a day early. So let's just start, Rebecca. You and I, we've done a very terrific podcast when your book came out, which is about topics of anger around women. So just as Roberts confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft opinion, is the end of Roe inevitable now? I think that's sort of the basic question you have to ask at the start. Oh, absolutely. But I mean, I have to say that it's been clear that the end

of Roe has been inevitable, I think, since the oral arguments in December when the court absolutely signaled its intention and that it was leaning toward full overturn. But I honestly also want to clarify that even, I think the way that the leak has been reported on, including Robert's view that maybe we could just support upholding the Mississippi case in question in Dobbs, that's being cast by the media as a moderate position. It's not moderate. That would also be the end of Roe, just to be clear.

We can talk about why and how, but that would just be- Well, explain why. This is, for people who aren't following this closely, Justice Roberts supposedly has a middle ground idea, which is upholding the Mississippi law versus completely overturning Roe. Right. And in many ways, that's actually a more pernicious way to end Roe and is actually more closely, I think that's what a lot of people assumed would happen. And it's frankly what's been happening ever since Roe was decided. Roe was decided in 1973. Starting just a few years later, you started to see access undermined for millions of people via the Hyde Amendment, which is a legislative rider that has said since the late 70s

that people using state insurance programs can't use those insurance programs to pay for abortion, which basically makes abortion unaffordable and therefore inaccessible to the country's poorest populations. And that's been true, again, since the late 70s. trap laws that dictated that a clinic had to have wide hallways in order to perform abortions, to 24-hour waiting periods, parental consent, all kinds of things designed to make it harder for people to get abortions. Those have all happened as Roe stood, and it became less and less protective for more and more people. So I think that this end of Roe, it could have happened in any number of ways, and it still can. We don't know what the final outcome is going to be. It could be the full overturn, which is what you saw Alito drafting. Or it could be this version, I think it's unlikely that it's going to be this version, the Roberts approach, which is being cast as reasonable, but it would just say, oh, no, we're not overturning Roe.

But we are saying that this Mississippi ban at 15 weeks can stand and it would be cast by a lot of people as like, oh, it's still 15 weeks. It's a long time. But what that does, just to be clear, is do away with the notion of viability, which has existed since Roe, right? Which is, you know, around 23 weeks. And once you say that viability isn't a barrier, there's no reason legally, if you say, it's sort of an untenable position. If you say a 15-week ban can exist, then there's no legal impediment, even if you're still saying Roe stands. There's no legal reason why it can't be a 12-week ban or a two-week ban. Well, it can reverse engineer to birth control, can't it, based on that logic? We can keep going back. A Mississippi governor for the first time was comfortable saying that the outright banning of birth control is no longer off the table.

Right. Well, there have been signals about this. So that gets to this question of where privacy is in the 14th Amendment and the due process clause. And there are a lot of protections that are rooted in that. And yes, birth control is one of them. There are a couple different angles that it's worth talking about. So in part, in states that are trying to say that life begins at conception, right? Then there are certain forms of birth control, including IUDs and Plan B, that could then be understood, and this is all still theoretical, that could be argued are abortifacients. And so that is one possible path toward the inaccessibility of certain kinds of birth control. Then there's, there's other question about other Supreme Court cases. I think people, you know, there's not enough understanding that on a, on a sort of

federal level, the Supreme Court only made birth control legal for married people in the mid-60s. And in fact, in a totally separate case, that's Griswold v. Connecticut. In a totally separate case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, in 1972, just the year before Roe, is the Supreme Court ruling that made contraception legal for unmarried people, right? So this is pretty recent history that contraception was legal on a federal level. And so that's the second question. If you can shake the notion that there is a right to privacy, then you do get into Griswold. You get into decisions like Loving. It's notable that major Republican lawmakers have dropped this spring, even before the leaked Roe draft. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee talked about Griswold, that contraceptive case, as being, you know, a bad

decision. And Mike Braun, Senator Mike Braun, also talked about Loving v. Virginia, which is the interracial marriage case. They just talked about it, And he kind of walked it back and said, oh, no, no, no, I don't expect we would ever do that. But yes, there are huge numbers of cases that are on the table. Yeah, it's the gay rights, every gay marriage, gay sex, and things like that. So right now, this moves it to a state-by-state decision, and that states will basically decide what to do. Companies are also important in this. And some companies have offered to pay for employees out-of-state travel

if they live in a state that restricts abortion. Amazon, Citigroup, Tesla, Levi Strauss. What will happen with companies? Because if the states pick and choose, I forget how many, there's 13 or more states that'll put in really strict or ban abortion or criminalize it. What do you imagine the role of companies will be? It's interesting. I mean, you're seeing some corporate pushback to these incredibly harsh, extreme right-wing policies in the fight happening in Florida around Disney, right? So you're seeing an example of what that could look like.

Um, so you're seeing an example of what that could look like. Um, and, and I don't know how willing companies are going to be to, to stake those kinds of fights around abortion, right? You've seen some of the big, um, losses around abortion or, or around, uh, actually access to birth control happening with, for example, the Hobby Lobby case in the past, where it was a company that actually didn't want to be able to pay for abortion for its employees, right? So you've seen companies take stands in all kinds of directions. There's certainly no guarantee that corporate America would come out on the side of abortion access. But I also want to stress that when we talk about the company's roles, and of course, on some level, yes, I want to see all kinds of structural supports put in place for people to be able to get access to the abortion care that they need. But I also want to stress

that what happens if we move into a future in which it's corporations that are going to put in place protections for their employees and be willing to pay for the health care that they need. You're just seeing a widening of the gap in terms of who has access to basic health care and human rights and basic protections and freedoms. And that's going to be a class of people who are employed often by high paying corporations versus and it's of course exactly the same kind of inequities that we see across so many policy realms that has been the story of abortion access, as I said, for these, these past decades. Realistically, what, is there anything, if you, if this opinion

is, is credible, which it looks like it is, and it looks like we're barreling towards this, is there anything that can be done? No. I mean, I shouldn't say that. I'm sure an activist would say something else. Well, I agree with you. So let me just follow up then. Should we be thinking about workarounds? Yeah. So I mean, the question of, is there anything that can alter the Supreme Court? No. But I would also challenge the notion that the Supreme Court is currently isolated from a political idea, like that it's sort of buffered from a political role. That is clearly not the case here. I think it's more immersed in these political currents right now, given the leak and the nature of the leak and the leaks that have happened since, than we've seen it.

But in fact, it's always been a myth that the Supreme Court is somehow insulated from politics, right? That's an institutionalist myth. But secondly, like the idea that what has been, I believe, destined to happen, I mean, there have been moments of revelation for me where I understood that this was on the horizon. One of them was November 8th, 2016. Another was the day that Anthony Kennedy resigned. You know, another was the day that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. You know, there are all these, there had been these moments, um, sort of culminating with the oral arguments and, and what was very clear during the oral arguments that this is, this is how the court was going to rule. Um question of workarounds, yes, but I want to

also emphasize that there have been people helping people get abortions for decades. Abortion funds have been doing this work on the ground. I think that the overturn of Roe or the gutting of Roe, whichever form it does wind up taking, is going to be a wake-up call for a lot of upper and middle class Americans who have been insulated from these kinds of privations and restrictions and inequities in terms of access to abortion care for these decades. And I think there's going to be an impulse like, well, and you can already hear it, like we've got to do something. But the reality is there are all kinds of networks that are in place and that in fact have been doing things and helping people who need abortion care, get abortion care over decades. And so as the restrictions have increased, as the restrictions have increased, yes. You know, the abortion funds help people pay for procedures, help them, you know, undertake the travel and get safe lodging that they need. I also think that one of the really important things to talk about moving forward is that we're in a different era.

If, in fact, the full if Roe is struck down, I think there's going to be a lot of knee-jerk assumptions that this is going to be right back in the pre-Roe days. But in fact, the medical possibilities have changed and medication abortions, pills that you can get through the mail that are safe and effective and indistinguishable from miscarriage are now available and that safe abortions are more available to people than I think is widely known. And that's going to be an important thing moving forward to make sure that people know about that. But they are attacking those, correct? They are attacking those. change so profoundly means that the tactical landscape for anti-abortion advocates and politicians is going to change too. And there will certainly be a move toward criminalization. You know, nobody on the right wing wants to say that they're going to criminalize the pregnant people, though there is also appetite for that. You know, that's also a little bit of a ruse, but there certainly is a bigger move toward the networks, toward criminalizing providers and networks of people who help.

They're going to try to find a case in that regard, you know, in terms of that, including the medical, the pills. I think that's, they know. Right. They'll make all kinds of attempts to stop people from getting those pills. from getting those pills. The other thing that's really important to mention is that the very structure of the Texas law that has gone into that, you know, that is the ban in Texas, a six-week ban, is also a ban that's rooted in a kind of vigilante system that you can see also around many of the transgender, the Florida laws encouraging and- Yeah, tell on your fellow citizens. Florida laws encouraging and tax laws. Tell on your fellow citizens. Right.

Tell on your fellow citizens. Turning in people who are. Or suing. Suing. And that's sort of pioneering a new and very old, reaching back to fugitive slave laws, set of tactics for how to discourage and punish this behavior. Okay. So my last question, and Scott may have a last one, is protecting people's data.

Now we're being tracked every day by our phones. And so that's one of the ways these states could do things like that. They could track mail. They can track phones, orders, this and that. You know, Vice, the story that got a lot of attention, was able to purchase user data of a period tracking app. And there's concerns about location data around abortion reporters, but it could do anything. Everything you order from Amazon could be known, for example, or subpoenaed or whatever.

Could tech companies do anything better? They're not very good at protecting user data in general. Yeah. I mean, I think that they certainly could. If you think about something as simple as the weather apps that are on your phone, you know, they are apps that track where you are. And I think that this is something that regulators need to look into because, I mean, urgently in an emergency way. And, you know, as you say, I don't know that I have a lot of faith in tech companies themselves doing this kind of regulation. doing this kind of regulation. But I do think it's something that probably needs to be addressed via legislation and protective legislation

and regulatory approaches to, because this is absolutely, you know, there are apps that we have on our phones right now, truly, including weather apps that can tell you, you know, that you've driven to another state, that you're parked in a Planned Parenthood parking lot.

This stuff is going to prove to be potentially very dangerous. This is a right that Supreme Court usually confers rights. And what is sort of unprecedented is for the first time in a long time, after 50 years, they're taking away a right. When you step back, what do you think it is about societal trends that has resulted in this? Is this income inequality that creates angry young men? Is it by absolute hardening of the left and the right?

When you look back at what's happened here, and this is extraordinary, and try to explain it, do you have any thoughts on what has led us here? Yeah, I absolutely do. try to under try to explain it do you have any thoughts on what has led us here yeah i absolutely do so one of the things i mean this is my this is my way to tell the story um you know and i think there are you know millions of other ways to tell it but in my view um what has happened is you saw social and political upheaval um with hard-won centuries-long fights for greater inclusion and protection um and laws that would keep more people um supported, and protected, right? People who had been shut out of the original American vision of, of citizenship. Um, you know, you're looking at, at everything's, you know, abolition, suffrage, civil rights movements, women's movements, gay rights movements. And, and so many of those movements, um, produced these massive victories that changed in the mid 20th century, right? Um, culminating

many of them in the sixties and seventies, um, new rights and protections that would better enable populations that had historically been shut out of power to participate more fully and more equally and to gain power themselves politically, professionally, economically, socially, sexually, right? It was a huge upheaval in american life and in terms of how the politics of it worked uh the left wound up with the base of those people who had historically been shut out and now had these new protections and new rights and the right was fundamentally representing the interests of the people who had been forced to share their power. And the right began, starting in the mid to late 20th century, a decades-long strategic effort,

starting on every level, right? It was going through electing people on school boards and state legislatures, right? In elections that nobody else was paying attention to. Beginning to build a pipeline of judges via the Federalist Society, really thinking about how to overtake media narratives, right? Building a news network dedicated to putting out right-wing storylines. And that right-wing strategizing was really effective. And it has been now, what, five decades of right-wing, patient, and exceedingly well-funded strategizing on how to ultimately gain control of the institutions, the court, the White House, right? They don't have control of the White House right now. But remember that in recent decades, they've gained control two times while the Republican has lost a popular vote. And that those minority elected Republican presidents have now appointed the majority of the Supreme Court justices who are deciding on these things. And the goal has been the rollback of those victories. This has been a part of a long, long, long con that's been going on for a long, long time.

And Democrats have not been as good at, I mean, that's an understatement, at long-term strategizing. Well, they, the right would say they have been with gay rights and everything else. They've been slowly, you know, now they're trying to push it back. I mean, but they are. They're very, Republicans certainly know how to organize. That's for sure. And that's what they do. Anyway, thank you, Rebecca Tracer. We really appreciate it. Again, you and Rebecca in New York Magazine and also her book, which is a terrific book that called her last book, Good and Mad, The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. I suspect

you have a second book in you right now in terms of the topics that are happening right now around Roe and everything else. Because I think women are going to be very angry as this starts to really become clear to people what's happening. Anyway, Rebecca, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money.

Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. All right, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. Let's make it snappy. Let's make it snappy. Schnappy, as they say in Germany. So I don't know if this is a win. I was really moved by the New York Times coverage of us surpassing this terrible milestone of one million COVID deaths.

The data visualization on the site has been incredible. And then The Daily did a very moving podcast drop, just basically talking about talking to people who lost somebody. I mean, we've lost a million people. I think per capita, we're just behind Brazil in terms of developed nations for how many people we've lost. I mean, my win is New York Times reminding us that what has happened here has just created incredible despair and real sadness, real warranted sadness across America. My win is the founder of Hey Jane, Kiki Friedman. And I know both of us are thoughtfully trying to move to a solution around some of the threats to a woman's rights here. And I like what she said. She did a piece in Slade where she said the word choice isn't the best way to describe

the aim, that it's abortion care, that choice sounds frivolous, whereas in fact, these women are in tough situations and in need of care and compassion. Abortion care is the best way to talk about it. Also more effective to talk about an individual woman versus women, plural. People get converted to reproductive rights after they have a relative need in abortion. Most people think that that will never be me or anyone in my family. But one in four women in the United States by the age of 45 have had an abortion. By the age of 30, it's one in

five women. And the need for abortion care is far more prevalent than most people realize. And one is- Yeah. I know dozens of women who've had them. What I'm trying to do, I had Kiki on my Prop G podcast, Raise Awareness, and our guest brought this up. But a medical abortion, 98% effective, privacy of your own home. The majority of abortions are within the first 12 weeks anyways. You can get around. There are absolutely workarounds in terms of states, but medical abortions are a really viable, productive alternative that people need to be made aware of. And then the other thing, and this is a little bit more sensitive, but I do think that abortion needs to come out of the shadows the same way we brought cancer and

then mental illness out of the shadows. And that is, while one in four women will have had an abortion, it's something we don't talk about because for some reason we see it as a stain or a scarlet letter on families. Well, women actually do. But okay, I've had lots of, women don't talk about it as much as they should publicly. And there have been lots of plays and things like that about it. I mean, Vagina Monologue

has had a whole section about it. But I agree. I mean, it has to be feel like that it's not a shameful thing or in any way, but it's still sad. We need to de-stigmatize it. And I don't know if it's talking about

a family saying, yeah, we are a family that has been fortunate enough to have the rights and access to family planning. But until it feels to me like this feels like mental illness 10 years ago and cancer 30 or 40 years ago where this is for whatever reason we've decided that it's shameful. And as a result, people don't realize how much this right has benefited them and their loved ones. They just may not know about it, or they may pretend it didn't happen. But it feels to me we need to normalize this. Hey, Jane, a fantastic organization giving women access to medical abortion, which is a fantastic innovation in the medical community and somewhere where technology is really adding a lot of positives to society. I would say my win is that I will be watching Top Gun 2 tomorrow night. I heard, the premiere. It's horrible compared to what you just were talking about, but nonetheless, I'm excited. I am very excited. I'm very excited about it.

I hate to say how excited I am. In London. Which is also my fail. In London. I'm going to go see it. And you're staying at a swanky, cool hotel. You're actually quite fabulous. I'm swanky.

That's what I am. But here's the deal. My fail is that I know everybody's doing this sort of the schadenfreude over Madison Cawthorn. And I think one of the things that we fail in doing is, and I know everyone wants to take a little lap with this guy, but it's the Republicans who brought him down because he's a problem for them and not for Democrats necessarily. He's a terrible public servant, obviously. But there's lots of terrible public servants. And to think he's the real problem and take a rest, just what Rebecca was just talking about, that he's not our problem. He's just a ridiculous clown. And we need

to, I mean, people, if you are opposed to a lot of these things, whether it's abortion rights, for abortion rights, or if you're opposed to these efforts, you need to get out there and vote. You need to get out there and organize. You need to get out there and organize. You need to get out there and do all kinds of things. Because feeling good on Twitter about Madison Cawthorn is just, that's what they're trying to get. It's bread and circuses as far as I'm concerned. So that's a fail on the part of people.

Anyway, Scott, I'm going to speak to you in German now. Oh, go on. Du bist mein Sonnenschein. Do you know what that means? It means you bought me a Volkswagen Rabbit. No, you are my sunshine. Go on. If you only meant it, my fräulein.

You have like little German from Hogan's Heroes era. That's what you got. That's my only exposure to German. Dad and I love BMWs. I'm like the total cocaine-aggressive BMW guy when I was a kid. When I was at Morgan Stanley, I had a BMW, and I used to hang my swim goggles from the rearview mirror. In other words, I was in German, duschbag. It's the same in any language.

Anyway, we're looking forward to all good questions from our listeners. By the way, go to nymag.com slash pivot and submit your questions for us or call 855-51-PIVOT. We have a lot of fans here in Germany. I was quite surprised. People love it. I was like, I wish you had been there because a lot of people came up to me and they just love, they know everything about us. They asked me a lot of questions about you. We have international fans, so it's very exciting. We're global. We're global. We're going to go. We got to do some global things. The link is also in our show notes, by the way. Scott, that's the show today.

I shall be back in the United States of America on Monday, but on Tuesday, the show will be on Tuesday, but I'll be Monday to film it. I hope you feel better from your COVID situation. Do you feel better? Yeah, I feel fine. I told you. Got this antiviral drug and no symptoms for a week.

Try not to catch anything else. Try not to catch anything else. And please read us out. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Enjotot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Mia Silberio. Make sure you subscribe to the show

wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Box Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Kara, enjoy Top Gun and safe travels.