Pivot - Kevin Mayer exits TikTok, Palantir’s scorching S-1, and a listener mail question about cable news with Baratunde Thurston

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Kara and guest host Baratunde Thurston talk about TikTok's CEO Kevin Mayer stepping down amid tensions with the Trump administration. They also discuss Palantir, the controversial data-mining company filing to go public and using their S-1 to throw shade at the rest of Silicon Valley. In listener mail, we get a question about a new cable news program. Baratunde predicts there will be more grief to deal with in our country in the months to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. Scott is still on his luxurious month-long vacation, so I'm joined by the talented Baratunde Thurston, who was on the show Monday, and I'm thrilled that he's back again today. Baratunde is a writer, activist, comedian, host of the new podcast, How to Citizen, with Baratunde launching this week. Welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me back, Cara. It's so nice to work with you. I had a lot of fun. Looking forward to doing it again. And, you know, Scott doesn't want to come back. You know, we can work something out. We can just work something out. I know, you know something?

I'm feeling like a real chemistry here that I don't have with Scott, which is, you know, you're not offensive. You're not offensive. Is that the bar you have for chemistry? Well, you know, I don't know what to say. He's actually a little bit nervous. I think he's a little bit more, most nervous of all the many great guest hosts I've had. I think he's like, he's pretty good. He's pretty good. Here's the thing about Scott, given his background, he will appreciate having more diversity in the marketplace, more competition to hone his skills

so he comes back better, faster, stronger. Yeah, he's a walking font of diversity. None of us is the big dog, so. No, nothing, I guess. Anyway, I'll be happy to have him back, but I see him every week in this Pivot Live. We did an interview with Google CEO, Alphabet CEO, Sunar Pichai,

and then Tim Wu, who's the Columbia University professor on antitrust. It was really interesting. But let's talk about the topics this week. There's so much going on. RNC recap. I mean, please. I mean, I turned it off last night. I was like, I can't deal with this. It was painful. I think, I hope that Kimberly Guilfoyle takes advantage of the other great feature of the state of California, which is legal access to marijuana. She just needs to bring it down several notches, go on a retreat, do some deep breathing, some meditation, and breathe into this anger that's going on. Yeah.

Well, you know, I met her when she was married to Gavin Newsom, who is the governor of California. I just learned that this week, by the way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. She was calmer, but she was intense then. She was really quite intense then. But it's really taken. That was the weirdest speech.

And I don't like to focus on. What's really interesting is I don't like to focus on gender, but the women in particular seem particularly like, I don't know. It's just, I don't know. It's just, I don't know. It's really quite unusual. But the whole group of them, there's sort of like, there's this sort of tone throughout it. It's very Hunger Games.

The music and everything else is very like, and now we will bring out this. And the aggressive shows of diversity, I don't know how else to put it. So here's how I see it. I thought about this in a fever dream. So bear with me. But I remember as a kid, we always had animals in the house.

We had dogs and cats. And those animals would sometimes get sick. And they would poop or vomit on the floor. And we'd use newspaper to cover it up. Right. on the floor and we'd use newspaper to cover it up. And the RNC this week felt like the newspaper that we used to cover up the excrement left by these animals. And there's some true information in those newspapers. You can learn something from it. It's not all lies, but the larger picture is your room is covered in excrement. And I think there's been a

distraction this week when people say things like law and order, where they feel free to just criticize entire swaths of the country that live in cities. And we don't do that, right? We're not allowed to do that in reverse. And instead, we're not going to acknowledge the kidnapping of children, the selling out of our troops overseas to Vladimir Putin. And so we're going to wrap ourselves in a flag, but it's covered in excrement. And I think we're just...

They allowed themselves to focus on the small bits of truth in a really disgusting scene that they allowed to all of us to live in. Let me ask you the harder question. Is it effective? the amount of lying was really quite astonishing just bold it was a choice it was an interesting choice an emmy for that yeah um i don't know if it's effective we'll find out in november if it's effective i suspect um that it works for people who are already there,

who are already with them. I want that to be true. And I know that self-identified Republicans as a group are shrinking relative to other independent and Democratic Party affiliation. So I hope we were looking into a small cult rather than a truly effective sales pitch. Well, it's interesting the uses. It's very autocratic in a way that is an American autocracy. You know what I mean? It was really, it was a really, you know, it was sort of stuck in the 80s. I thought the Melania Trump, whatever it was,

the speech was really particularly disturbing with the, with the militaristic outfit. I know she, she's very careful about it. I don't like to focus on women's clothes, but she's very particular about what she picks, what she wears. And she was messaging a lot through her clothes. And then the walk down the colonite.

And I realized they took down those trees so she could do a cat walk down it. Like, you know what I mean? Like the visual, it was for the visual. And I was like, huh. And in some ways I was like, wow, that's a commitment. You know what I mean?

At the same time, it was horrifying. Well, all they have is the personality. You know, if you think about past conventions, there are platforms for up and coming candidates to make their pitch. There was one, I think, Republican senator contested on stage this week, Joni Ernst. Everybody else, they decided it was to their advantage to not be there. And so all you're left with is the Trump kids and people who owe this man favors. Like, yes,

Donald Trump did a great thing for Kayleigh McEnany and looked after her pre-existing condition, but that pales in comparison to trying to strip the health insurance from millions of people who might have pre-existing conditions by canceling Obamacare. He called me. I'm like, that's what people do. Your boss does when you have residents. So I was like, he actually called me and I was like, low bar, low bar on the cancer thing. He pays you to lie for him. It was fascinating. That was, he was like, or he was surprisingly nice.

You know what I mean? Unlike, it reminds me of when we interviewed Rupert Murdoch at one of our all things D's. And I said this to myself and then I had to catch myself. I was like, he was quite, someone was like,

he was kind of avuncular, you know? And I was like, don't be fooled. Like I'm, he was, he was quite, someone was like, he was kind of avuncular, you know? And I was like, don't be fooled. Like I'm, he was, he was, he's really charming and pleasant in person. And I was like, it doesn't, what he does is what's more important. And the avuncular niceness was sort of like, it was distracting from what the real thing. And let me just ask you, you know, one of the things, my mom, who's a big Fox News watcher, as everybody knows, she was immediately drawn to Tim Scott, which I was sort of, he's like, he's okay. He's very reasonable. He's this. And I was like, wow, that worked. You know what I mean? It was really interesting. Like the mixing in of reasonable seeming Republicans with the others was a really fascinating trick.

And my fiance pointed out, you know, they seemed very specifically savvy about painting the picture of people from Wisconsin and some of these swing areas. The only places that will matter given the way we sort of do democracy in America. So the flood of information that we talked about in the previous episode works because we're overwhelmed. And so it's just the most recent data is the relevant one. And I think the upside to that, for clarity at least, not for the health of our democracy, is we will forget this entire week in a week. Yeah, I agree. And that whatever front this dude has put on, he will undermine on Twitter in five, four, three, two. And speaking of front this dude has put on, he will undermine on Twitter.

In the next week. That's what I was thinking. In five, four, three, two. And speaking of which, there's other news. There's the hurricane, which looks like it's not as serious as they thought it would be. And then the NBA team's halting their season

in protest of police brutality. And the Jacob Blake shooting, I think that's going to be what people will, I hate to say it, really care about. Like this kind of thing, is they're not getting their basketball. They're not getting, you know, this is where, and then his reaction to it, which I think will probably be bad. There's also such, there's a mean-spirited and othering that happened at the RNC that I want to take a second to reflect on, which is, it's very popular to just dump on cities and blame it on the Democrats and say it's needles

and crime and drugs and riots. And that's objectively not true. But I think, you know, if we did this in reverse and said, well, let's do a sorting function on Republican leadership and COVID and count the deaths. If we did this in reverse and talked about opioid addiction or unemployment or the net drain on the federal coffers from some of the poorer states and counties in our country, they're led by a certain party with a certain political ideology. The Democrats did not do that during their convention. They featured rural people and talked a lot about Jesus and tried to open the door. And the Republicans expressed disrespect and contempt

for more than half the country, you know, from many different perspectives. And so it was a small convention made for a small group of extremists. Yeah, that was interesting. This idea of rioting. You know, someone today, I was engaged with someone, I think it was probably a Russian bot. But they were like, oh, you know, nobody's writing about the crimes going up in New York.

And I literally just Googled news murder in New York. And there was like hundreds of articles. And I go, it's called Google. Of course it was covered, you imbecile. Like, it was just, it was, they were like, crickets. And I go, it's called Google. It's, of course it was covered, you imbecile. Like it was just, it was, they was like crickets. I'm like crickets? Does it bring you some level of joy to engage with questionably human avatars?

No, it's a disease I have. Do you need to do this? I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, speaking of things that actually are working in a weird way and not a good way is we're going to get on to big stories. TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer has unexpectedly stepped down from the role at the company that he took four months ago.

In a memo to employees, Mayer said the changes on the app and pressures from the Trump administration prompted him to leave. Mayer had said a big draw of the company was its global nature. He was a trusted executive at Disney prior to joining TikTok, was in line to one of the CEO possible choices. He did not get that job, but he was right at the top of Disney. Earlier this week, TikTok sued the federal government for Trump's executive order and banning the app in the U.S. So, you know, this is interesting. So, you know, we interviewed Vanessa Pappas, who is a former Google executive who's running the U.S., who's now taken over for him. Is this working? Is this idea of sort of ruining TikTok, which I think Mark Zuckerberg, it's his favorite thing to have happen. Is it working? This is something where Zuckerberg and the president are aligned.

And I just want to give kudos to Sarah Cooper. Clearly, she's gotten through. And this is all an attempt to shut down her very effective mockery of our president on that platform. Wow. You want to talk about going for censorship? I think I'm on the outside of this. I don't know a ton of TikTok insiders. I'm not a big TikToker myself, but it looks to me like this man stepping down makes sense. He didn't sign up for this. And it's a flash of both realistic threats to his business and his power, and also a bit of fear that this pseudo authoritarian way of going about it, he's kind of read the coverage. It's like, this isn't going to end well. So I think as much as there is legitimacy to challenging and questioning how Chinese companies and the Chinese government enter various markets and don't allow the reverse, I think this just looks like intimidation and very political in how it was pulled off.

And there's a counter lawsuit. But I think for this person who probably has other executive and high compensating options out there, it's a big headache. So that's my guess. He was going to be a billionaire. They were going to take this company public. And this was his big shot to run a very big company. And so it's obviously going to be sold. The rush sale is ridiculous. That's why the lawsuit is here. So it delays everything that Trump has been trying to do, which is rush a deal which is kind of ridiculous on so many levels. Cause it's a very, Oh, that's funny. That was a turn of phrase. I thought you said Russia. Russia's in there always. But this deal is a very, you know, I've talked to a lot of security

people in doing this. It's very difficult to, to shift the platform. Even a company like Microsoft, who is one of the lead possible purchasers for this, didn't really want to buy it at first. They wanted to make an investment in it. And then presuming it was going to go public, et cetera, et cetera. Sort of similar to the way Facebook did, because Microsoft took a big investment very soon after it went public, which is, I think, what Kevin Mayer was hoping for. You know, slowing this whole thing down till after the election, I think, is the goal. And then presumably Trump will back off on the Chinese stuff.

You know, a lot of it, this whole idea of China, which was another thing at the convention, was that this was a China virus. They're trying to get us the threats of China. was that this was a China virus. They're trying to get us the threats of China. That's Peter Navarro, who is, I think, one of the most particularly. A trade representative. Yeah. Yeah, whatever.

He's a chucklehead, really. And inaccurate almost completely on lots of stuff. But he seems to have the ear of the president. And it just keeps continuing this. And so it's basically wrecked a business that had so much promise. And we'll see how it affects the company itself, but it can't help but do that. And that's, I think, the goal here. And I think delaying it and slowing it down is the smart move. Is there something, when you talk to more CEOs than I do,

and does the fear and concern about an unstable business environment extend beyond a Chinese-owned tech company? Does it make them all nervous that a weaponized U.S. regulatory environment by a mercurial president could be coming for them next? Well, no, because he started off by doing all those tweets. He just didn't want a good year. At first, they were very nervous. And now they're like, you know what I mean? It didn't really have an effect. In this case, he's got a, if you're owned by China, yes.

You have a president has enormous power around national security. If he declares national security, most of these things are not that. So he can't, he doesn't have most of his things, like his executive order on 230 and some other things. They're just toothless. They're, you know, a lot of like, I'm going to build the wall. And then he just does it. The other thing I want to know is, does anybody have a heads up on the tweet so that they

can make money off of him? Because he does, in short term, move the market. And that's... Sort of. It's not moving. It did at the beginning of his administration. Everyone's on to him, essentially. These are tricks that they use.

He does the same thing over and over again. And so I think one person who I talked to was worried about if he wins, the autocratic nature will he start to go after, sort of reward people that he is close with and hurt people that are sort of anti-Trump. And a good example here is Oracle suddenly entering the picture, the least likely company to be here. I don't care what they say, they're incompetent to the task to do this. And they're a stalking horse, obviously, and they've been brought in by some of the other owners,

which are U.S. venture firms, two of which are close to the Trump administration, or people who work there are particularly close. And so they've been brought in as a pal of Trump's to make the price go up and possibly force Microsoft into giving a VIG to the U.S. government, which is just unprecedented. And I think that's what it is.

And then the person you focus in on, obviously, is Jeff Bezos, who is, so he's lost it. He's in court about it, the Defense Department award that was very large and that's a really important business for amazon to go into you know they've got it they have to get bigger because they're so big they're to government contracting the way elon musk has a way a lot of these companies have microsoft and so it's really um it's a real fine line because he can hurt them and things like that and that's you know jeff's lucky because he can hurt them and things like that.

And that's, you know, Jeff's lucky because he's got a business everybody loves. So I'm at him easily, but the postal service is one way to do it. There's all kinds of ways. It just doesn't work very well. You know, it's real hard to take down. And if I was a betting person, I'd bet on Jeff Bezos and not Donald Trump. Jeff Bezos follows through with things. He's a vicious. So long as it remains one man,

as opposed to an entire infrastructure of media and politics. If you look at, you can tear down the reputation and reduce trust in institutions broadly. And I think that's part of what the attempt with the president and the postal services, let's reduce confidence in this thing

that everybody loves. And so if he can point that at particular businesses over time consistently, and he stays in power, then I think there might be a greater risk of, oh, I guess I'm not supposed to trust this thing because the president told me not to, and Fox News told me not to, and the senator who seems like a really nice,

you know, ball-headed, articulate Black guy told me not to too, because he co-signed on it. He seems nice. I think he's got, I think he, articulate black guy. Told me not to too because he co-signed on it. He seems nice. I think he's got, I think he, picking a fight with Jeff Bezos is not one I would do. I mean,

it's interesting because when they were, you know, when his sex came out, you see how he hit back hard. He just said, yeah, here they are.

You know what I mean? And so he's a very different, he's, he's tough. I wouldn't cross him. And I think, and he's highly competent as opposed to the president.

And so it'll be interesting to see if he, he would be, Amazon would be the company. They're also looking, investigating Google and not Facebook. FTC is investing in Facebook, but that's been a slow rolled, the Facebook investigations. And they are at the most exposure in terms of emails and other proof that they've been trying to shut down competition. other proof that they've been trying to shut down competition. But we'll see. We'll see. And I think in a Biden administration, mostly there'll be hands off for tech. So that would be their Biden administration, even though Facebook is advantaged in this is probably better for everybody because they'll not do anything. I don't think a Biden administration would do nothing. I think there's too much pressure on the left and the right to deregulate to, I'm sorry, to regulate and break up these companies to some degree. And he probably had a handshake deal with Elizabeth Warren, which is like, I'm going to copy and paste some of your plans and get this done.

But he won't be wildly, whimsically, interpersonally savage about it. And there'll be a thing called a process. He's talked about removing 230. I don't think he knows, Biden knows what he's talking about. But certainly Elizabeth Warren is head of the FTC, which is what my prediction was. All right, Baratunde, let's go on a quick break and come back to talk about Palantir and its IPO and a listener mail question. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle.

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and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. And we are back. Controversial data mining company Palantir filed to go public this week. A lot of companies did. A lot of tech companies did. Palantir works with governments and law enforcement to analyze and process their data and has had several contracts with the U.S. government, including with ICE. A reminder, Peter Thiel, one of the company's founders, is a Donald Trump campaign donor and supporter. In a letter to investors, CEO Alex Karp threw some serious shade at other Silicon Valley companies without naming names, he wrote. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more about building software, but they

do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires. Our company was founded in Silicon Valley, but we share fewer and fewer of technologies, values, and commitments. Is that a dog whistle? The company had a valuation of $20 billion, expected to be the biggest IPO since Uber, until Airbnb goes public, that is. So here we are, speaking of that topic. Hands up for the S-1 filings and just the potential to stir the pot with that. That is some very expensive grade A trolling going on there. And whether I agree with the statements or not, I just got to give credit.

That was sharp. I like that. I like that use of a regulatory filing to throw shade at one's former colleagues. In the filing, there's a letter that adds the company won't be working with China. You know, it's just, it's really, it's really, the politicization of this stuff is really, you know, an S1. It's just, I just don't even get it. I just don't, I don't know what the point is. I don't know what the goal is. It's, again, it's a dog whistle to the Trump people. Yeah, I think that they're seeking favor. They're currying favor with the would-be autocrat. And

like you said, signaling, we're on your team. We stand with you. We co-sign on the things you do. And we're going to start calling people enemies without quite saying that word. But they're other, they're not one of us. What's interesting is sort of the idea of how much these companies need to work with the government. And they do because, you know, you look at the numbers for Google or Amazon or Microsoft or any of them or Apple even. Now, Apple does not work with the government,

in fact, has been at cross-purposes with the government many times. But they need to move into government work. They really do because that's where the big money is. You know, Elon Musk just broke the defense contractor's stranglehold by getting a huge contract, which I think he probably had a lot of pushback from defense contractors, I'm guessing, although he's been somewhat favorable

to the Trump administration. It's not clear sometimes what he's doing. But, you know, this idea, you know... That is the understatement of the decade. It's not clear sometimes what Elon's doing. It's not clear. You never know what he could come out with at any time. But he's a complex person, I would say.

This idea that you have to be this political and then you have to move in, especially when employees such as Google, for example, have pushed the company away from this kind of stuff. Amazon's very deep into some of this stuff with recognition and some other things. And with ICE, Salesforce got dragged into that. is very deep into some of this stuff with recognition and some other things. And all of them are very, and with ICE, Salesforce got dragged into that. When you're a company now, when you have these issues around ICE or drones or whatever it is, what do you do? How does it look?

Do you have to signal on the other side? Were the people that won't spy on protesters? I think it's worth a pause to understand what Palantir is. I didn't know until this week where the word came from. It's this Lord of the Rings reference to the evil eye of Sauron's glow. So that's troubling that you're going to take Sauron's tool and use it for what? These tech tools are supposed to be neutral, but you signaled from the beginning that you're on the side of evil, not too exciting. I think it is going to be increasingly important for leaders in

these businesses to question the use of their tools. We're not in the Pollyanna and naive world of, oh, I'm just trying to make the world a better place. I'm just going to, like, technology will fix it. It'll make education better because we gave a kid a laptop. Like, that's not how this works. So it's not entirely surprising that there's a politicization of the S1 because tech has been politicized because it's being abused. And in policing, which is where Palantir works in law enforcement, the idea of this body, which is already so unaccountable and we see so dramatically this week with Jacob Blake and what's happening in Kenosha, that they have the tools to type in a protester's name into their magic box and suck in all this data that they've been collecting. That deserves being questioned. We need FOIA requests and things like that.

So if you're a tech CEO and you recognize you sit on top of this immense power, you've got to wrestle with it. There's no easy answers. It's not like I do it, I don't do it. But you've got to wrestle and listen to the customers and listen to the people and listen to our constitution and listen to your employees as we figure out how we regulate and have some reasonable use of some of this stuff. But why go out on a limb on one side? Like, sitting in the middle, like, look, Jeff Bezos is, again, deep into recognition,

very controversial. You know, it's a part of AWS. Because I think our current environment has forced us to. It would not have been as controversial for a tech company to work with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement if that agency had not kidnapped hundreds of children and intentionally lost the records around them and created these criminal prison camps on the border in violation of human rights. So working for the government, quote unquote, is one thing. Co-signing on massive public human rights violations against children in plain sight, that's not a neutral act anymore.

That is an act of inhumanity. And you got to speak against that. We all have an oath to stand up for human rights, regardless of who's in the government and the fact that it's our own government. Yeah, and you of course saw the heat ray thing, this idea. This is another tech thing. They were doing some extreme immigration policies in the first four years as a pitch,

which is putting heat rays designed by the military to make, let me read this from the New York Times, designed by the military to make people's... Please do. This afternoon, a separate meeting with top leaders uh suggested deploying a microwave weapon a heat ray designed by the military to make people's skin feel as if it was burning when they got within range of its invisible beams it's like a dog fence or you know i can't even begin to understand what it's called the active denial system and and let me just say it was had been largely developed by the military as a crowd dispersal

tool. Two decades ago, the active denial system has been largely abandoned and made doubts over its effectiveness and morality. I mean... Yeah. I did a show a long time ago for Science Channel called The Future Of, and I got hit with one of these non-lethal weapons, as they are called. It was a noise machine, and my head hurt for half the day after that. And I doubled, there's footage somewhere of me looking like I got punched because I just doubled over from this pain. The other challenge with this stuff, Cara, is who do these tools get used against? When we say law and order, when we say law enforcement, it's being used against the least of us, the least wealthy, the least politically powerful. If we were going

to take the magic of Palantir and its ability to suck records in from all these different data sources, I would be more okay with it if we used it for dirty cops, right? Why don't we use those records? Why don't we use it to find the pedophile priests? You know, like there's another way to do this, but it turns out we're just handing the tools over to those who abuse power in the first place. And that's imbalanced. A lot of these tools have been,

there've been some amazing things that Google and others have done around children and pedophiles and things like that. Like a lot of these things, they can be, you know, I use the expression tools and weapons. And what's happened here is that a company like Palantir has weaponized things. And the Trump administration is willing to look into things like heat rays and things like that, that have been discarded, you know, has been discarded as immoral and are right up there saying, why not? Yeah, I just, I think it's a good test

of someone's intent, who they want to give this power to and who they want it to be used against. And if you're telling me that you're going to use a palantir like, you know, Lord of the Rings Sauron orb to find tax dodging, to find corruption in the halls of great power, to find the cops who've

been fired from three different departments but managed to get hired again so they can kill again, then we can have a conversation. But if you're just going to use it on people who already have so little or protesters, which that Pete Ray thing is probably going to be used on, then we got ourselves a problem. Well, you know, the problem is they all work both ways. And that's the question of who's deploying it. Like, you know, I always use the example of a knife. Like, look, a knife cuts all kinds of good food and things like that.

But Palantir is not a knife. It is like an automated high-speed switchblade in the hands of a demon. You know, like that's not a fair fight. Okay. Please buy our stock. We're going public at a valuation of $20 billion. Yeah, just in terms of the imbalance.

Not that everyone uses a demon. I get it. They are the ones who grounded it in Sauron. Like, I didn't do that. That was Peter Thiel. They were built it. They were 100% built it. You leaned into the demon.

So anyway, that company deserves a lot of scrutiny. I hope investigative reporters who have written a lot about it will continue to do so. Okay, Baratunde, let's take a listener question. Let's go to the tape. You've got, you've got. I can't believe I'm going to be a mailman. You've got mail. Hey, Kara and Baratunde.

I loved your episode earlier in the week. My question relates to the media world. Nextdoor Media Group and WGN America are launching a primetime cable newscast next week. It starts on Tuesday. They're promising unbiased news in that time slot, which you don't find on the other cable channels. It's all opinion shows. The company's invested a lot of money. I'm very curious what

your prediction is. Is there a lane for them, especially with CNN moving into opinion in recent years and such a divided time in American politics? This is an excellent question, Baratunde. Let me give you my quick thought. I think the problem, and I agree, CNN has lost its narrative the same way. I think MSNBC does a little better. But one of the things I keep thinking about, why not just have reporters there instead of all these pundits? That's what they've really moved into. Like it would be, if there was a show where you actually had people who've done reporting, talking about it, that would be so helpful to people. Like, you know, rather than these quick reductive takes. And it's one of the reasons I seldom go on cable. I seldom do because it plays into

a desire to say something quick and dirty, essentially. How do you look? I think there is room for this, but maybe I'm wrong at this point. Maybe we're all wrong. It's always possible. I just want to give this caller kudos for perfectly pronouncing baratunde. Well done. all our kudos for perfectly pronouncing baratunde. Well done. I'm a big fan of you. Thank you so much for that. I agree that what we could use more of is actual journalism and less opinions about the journalism that the host has read if we're going to try to create a new lane. I sadly don't think that this is going to be very successful. It's a mild prediction, but I think we are so pushed into corners and there's so much money encouraging us to have this quick reaction that this probably won't cater to a huge and growing market. What I would love to see, and this is coming out of Chicago, which is interesting, is more local news. And what we

need, I think, as a democracy is to fund local news. So if someone were going to be throwing money into the news business right now, I'd say support local newsrooms, local news gathering, and create a network of those that can feed up into something like this and maybe into a CNN and a Fox News and an MSNBC, but we're missing

that ground layer. And so that gives all the punditry even less to hold on to. Yeah, it's really interesting because the idea of unbiased news and the executive behind it said, we're so sick and tired of polarization of news, news should not be polarizing. But you know, every bit of news, like here's the city, there are peaceful protests and there is some looting, and now it's either mobs or there's no, you know, it's not that bad when like, it just, it goes like, you can't even just say this is what happened here in this small area. This happened, you know, with the Sharpie and everything else, you can't, the idea of getting unbiased, if it was ever unbiased, by the way, let me just be clear. It was the ideas of, you know, a bunch of East side of New York for a long, long time. Let's, you know what I mean? Like, and I'm not sure why they had it right necessarily.

I don't know if there's a, that there could, but I always think that if they just put on CNN, just the reporters, it would be, it's always better when you have just the reporters on it. Always is whenever I'm watching any of this stuff. I tend to agree with that. And I think there's a formula that's proven financially successful and small d democratically destructive, which is just the quick reaction force of opinion that the news has become on cable. I met someone who took a job

with a major cable news operation within the past two years and came from a local news background. I said, what are you going to do on camera? What's your show about? It's like, I'm just going to, it depends on what the president tweets. That was, that was this person's legitimate responses. I'm just going to react to the president's tweets. It's cheap to do that financially. And it cheapens all of us to build a whole information ecosystem around that lack of depth. So I wish them well,

if what they're trying to do is provide a bit more depth. I think just saying unbiased, that's also loaded terms. And we'll just have to see what the product is they put out there. You're a comedian. And obviously, some of the smarter stuff of this sort of punditry does come from comedians, which actually ground a lot of their comedy in fact, right? Yeah. Hassan Minaj, John Oliver. Yeah. How do you look at that? Because that's where my kids, for example, they watch all those comedians. You know what I mean? And it's really interesting. And I find them rather better informed than most people, certainly than my mother. I think the key difference with, if we just take two shows

as an example, there are so many people who've done this. John, my good friend, John, John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj, they respect the audience. They assume that you're capable of handling big ideas, of listening for more than 30 seconds at a time, of processing complexity. And what I have found in my own journey in this business is there are a lot of executives who do not have that same faith in their audiences as some of these comedians do. And so they're able to pack more investigative journalism into a comedic monologue because they try,

as opposed to pre-writing off a listener or a viewer or a reader saying, they'll never click on that. I know my readers. And maybe you don't. Maybe you're underestimating them. And also being funny helps a lot. But I think before the funny is a faith in people to be able to handle it. So when you're doing, let me ask you about your own thing, How to Citizen, you're not going to try to be like, satisfy the liberals or satisfy, you know, or

anger the conservatives. How do you approach it? I'm not going out of my way to anger anyone or satisfy anyone. I'm approaching this from the perspective of my own fatigue with news rage, with my own absence of an outlet to do something. I feel like there's so many of us who want to be involved and contribute to some kind of helping, but we're not being given much more than voting. And I think the act of citizening and being in a democracy

comes down to so much more than that. So it's almost like a course, like a practice where I'm trying to remember, what else can I do to be a better citizen? And we're doing it topically. So our first episode's all about love, actually. Not expected. And then power in the second episode, Valerie Cowher, Eric Liu set us off. And then we're getting into COVID and we talk about criminal justice and policing, but it's all about finding people who are doing something rather than academics who've just written something great or people who have opinions. Yeah, I think it's dangerous everywhere. And not just, you know, I think cable news, as much as I rail against social media, because that's sort of the inmates run the asylum, essentially.

run the asylum essentially i do think cable at fox is the top but all of them are responsible for sort of the cheapening and and and uh downgrading of our mentality it just is it's just so i can't watch it anymore in a lot of ways there's only a few people i like oddly enough i watch as as tarnished as he had become brian williams is actually an old style journalist kind of stuff. And so I tend to like watch him because it's like, at least you're getting perspectives. I don't feel like it's, I'm not waiting for the hit, depending. Anyway, it's a really interesting time to launch a linear television service. We'll see how that goes. And if the other consequence, and it's not just cable news, but if we think quickly about

local news and the perception of crime in this country, independent of the data, Americans are terrified of crime, even though we've hit recently 30-year lows. That's not just because Americans are a fearful people. Well, they are. It's because we've been sold a fearful narrative repeatedly, which has been profitable for certain media outlets to sell repeatedly, that the criminals are coming right for you. And they're not, and they haven't been. And so that's a function of a broken news ecosystem, which breaks our democracy. So we got to get better at it. I'm going to try to contribute with our show a little bit, and then I'll mess up, but it's the effort. That's the thing it it's so true and it actually did start off with local news i had a friend who wrote those teasers for local

news for his job and he's i was like well how do you do those and he goes all you have to do is like think of something scary like killer bees could you be next and could you be next is they always do you know like guns in toddlers and you you know, weapons. Could you be next? You're like, is my baby going to shoot me? Yeah. Yeah. Could you be next is, was like, and that's how they did it. And then didn't that sort of voice like, could I be next? Is a killer bee going to kill me? No, a killer bee is not going to kill you. But it was that, that was my, could, I was going to write a book called could you be next anyway?

You could still do it. No, I'm not going to. All right. One more quick break. We'll be back with predictions. You have to have a prediction. OK. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere and you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered

customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers.

Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees? And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos videos and posting on social a breeze. So now it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers.

Okay, Baratunde, you are in the hot seat. This is usually Scott's segment, but I have faith in you. What do you predict we will see in tech, business, media, politics over the next few months or years or whatever you want? I think we're going to see at least three things. First, we are going to see more people who have served in this administration doing a patriotic thing and serving the republic instead, telling their stories and standing for the flag truly, not just saying it, and testifying against this administration, against this president and its unconstitutional ways. And that will bring a little flutter to my heart that there is still some patriotism left in the deep sense, not just in the rhetorical

sense. I think we're going to see the internet and the rhetoric around this election get very, very ugly. And I hate to predict that, but I know it's true. It's going to get bad. ugly. And I hate to predict that, but I know it's true. It's going to get bad. And so I encourage all of us to brace ourselves, to find whatever deep breathing we need to power through this, and to remember where the margin of this election is going to be decided and not distract ourselves energetically fighting bots online, even though I know, Karen, that's one of your favorite things to do. And I predict that we are going to grieve a lot more in the coming months due to continued assaults against our citizenry by those sworn to protect and serve us, due to those who would take weapons to a protest and use them to gun people down, take weapons to a protest and use them to gun people down as Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha this week.

And so I also encourage us to create some emotional space to grieve all that our country's going through. We've lost nearly 200,000 to COVID. We're losing people constantly in our streets by those who are supposed to protect us. We have lost money and self-esteem and relationships. But this moment is painful. And I think what's been missing so much from our political environment is people speaking to that pain, certainly from those in power right now. So I want to do that for a second and predict more pain is coming. Let's make space to grieve and love and try to heal through all of this trauma that we're being forced into. That is a very important thing.

It is a critical, people don't try to not do that and paper it over with all kinds of ways, whether it's drugs or drinking or just denial. It's really interesting. I'm glad you said that because one of the things I didn't bring up today was the the comments that Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham made about this kid who shot people in Kenosha um celebrating him you know it was really kind of astonishing but you know I thought I was gonna say something that I'm like you know what they're just trash I'm not gonna do it and you know let's just take out the trash that's what that's how I felt let's clean up America. That's something we can get behind. That's a good slogan. Take it out the trash.

Wish your thirst in 2020. Let's clean up America. Take it out the trash. We got a broom. That was, you know, years ago, that was in DC, Sharon Pratt Kelly, who was a very unsuccessful politician. I remember her. Yeah, I lived there at the time.

She wandered around with a broom all the time. And it sounded great, but then there was not a lot of good execution. But it was a good idea to broom people out. So let's broom them out. All right. I really appreciate you doing the show this week. You've been an excellent co-pilot and I hope you'll come back. I hope you'll come back. The whole team's been great. The audience has been great. Your caller who said my name right has been great. And I think, you know, if I could do a quick plug for this show, what I've liked about it as I've listened to Pivot for years is that you recognize long ago that tech isn't just about tech, that business isn't just about business. This is all about our culture, who we are as people, and it's about why that stuff matters. So to your producers, to your researchers, to you and Scott, well done. Because it's one of my must listens. So it's been an honor to be a part of it. Thank you so much. And well, you class up the joint

rather significantly. Anyway, thank you so much. And please listen, when does your podcast debut? As we record, Cara, it is dropped into the feed. So if you're listening now, you can subscribe, download, give me a good rating because some guy gave me a one star before even hearing it and acknowledged it like a trolly troll. It's called How to Citizen with Baratunde. You can find it online with howtocitizen.com. And we're encouraging actions. That's the other great thing about this show that I'm excited about. So all that stuff's available in the cloud, as I like to say.

Cool. Fantastic. It's from iHeartRadio. It's called How to Citizen. And it will be, it's dropping now. So go on there and give him, battle the one star guy. Yes, How to Citizen with Baratunde. Five stars. Woohoo. Out of those one stars. They don't like women who speak up. Anyway, I don't look, I don't look at them. It's funny that you look at them. I don't look at them at all. Literally, it's the only review. So everyone being introduced to the show sees one star. I'll get off of Twitter and I'll go attack one star, okay? I promise. Yeah, get him, Kara.

Okay, well. Thank you. Thank you. You've been a great co-host. Thanks for welcoming me. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Today's show was produced by Rebecca Sinanis.

Fernande Finite engineered this episode. Eric Anderson is Pivot's executive producer. Thanks again to Baratunde Thurston for co-hosting with me this week. And please listen to his new podcast, which is dropped, How to Citizen with Baratunde. Make sure you subscribe to that show

and this one on Apple Podcasts or if you're an Android user, check them out on Spotify or frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts. If you liked our show, please recommend it to a friend. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back next week with the epic return of Professor Scott Galloway, co-hosting our breakdown of all

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