Pivot - TikTok's China Problem, Kellogg's Snack Attack, and MSNBC'S Katy Tur

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Twitter's board gives Elon's bid the go-ahead, the Obamas ditch Spotify for Amazon, and TikTok denies that it's sending data to China, even as reporting says otherwise. Kara and Scott speak with MSNBC's Katy Tur about cable news, Trump, and her new memoir, Rough Draft. Katy Tur is on Twitter at @KatyTurNBC. Send us your Listener Mail questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or via Yappa at nymag.com/pivot. *An earlier version of the episode referred to Vanessa Pappas as the CEO of TikTok. She is the COO. We regret the error. 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 in France.

Wow. I'm Scott Galloway in Laguna Niguel. Yeah. I'm in the south. I'm in the Riviera, Scott. You're in the Cote d'Azur. Whatever. I don't know.

Whatever. Here I am with the French people. I am at Con Lion, which is the big advertising thing, which I wish you were here. I have to tell you. I wish you were here because we are very popular among the global advertising set. Is this the part of the show where you talk about how much people love us? They do. It's really interesting. No, it's not all French people. It's not Americans. It's like they like it. They really like the dating show, which was earlier this week. A lot of people told me they listened to it with their spouse and it makes them happy. And they all wish you were here. That is what they all wish you were.

They wish you were here. Yeah. This is actually, it's interesting that you're here. It's the first year I think I have not gone in about six years. I absolutely love basically kind of an extended last meal for the advertising industry. Think I'll be invited back next year? What do you think? I don't know. They want you here. In any case, one of the interesting things is it's really packed. It's crazy packed. I was at this lunch today. It was on this island and people are lost their frigging minds. They were, of course, dancing to some of the songs from Mamma Mia while drinking rosé and like throwing their napkins up. Apparently, that's a thing here. And it just was, it's astonishing how vibrant it is. Not just Google. Google has a beach. Meta has

Meta Beach. There's Twitter Beach, by the way. Spotify Beach had Dua Lipa last night. And they have Post Malone tonight. And they had Kendrick Lamar last night. I went to something with Sam Smith. Let me just rewind a bit. So, Cannes Lions used to be a very significant event because it was where all executives went to collect trophies and then find another better job. It was the ultimate networking event. And recognizing, you know, who does the best job of selling light beer or a Korean car. But it's in a beautiful part of the world. Everyone's very usually optimistic. It's a wonderful get-together.

I've always had a nice time there. Yeah, a lot of yacht. People rent yachts. Axios had a yacht. We need a yacht. That's what I was thinking. Wait, hold on. Axios has a yacht? They have a yacht. Not a big yacht, but they have a yacht. All these different people have yachts. That's ridiculous. One of the things that's interesting, we were driving past all these yachts, and I kept going small dick energy, small dick energy, small dick energy.

There you go. And a lot of really interesting things. i've done some panels and things like that a lot of people feel that at this point now maybe google and facebook will lose their grip on the ad business there's all these people yeah wouldn't that be nice i'm just telling you oh i love it there another bottle of rosé and also some meth, please. Yes. Hey, hey, rosé. What other hallucinations do you have on the menu? I am having a lovely time. Very smart people.

And they love a lot of selfies on La Croisette. Anyway, great time. They're very excited. And they're drinking a lot of rosé. In any case, I wish you were here. Thank you. Thanks for saying that. So we have a lot of things to talk about. And you know who else is here? TikTok has a big activation here. They say it's not sending user data to China, denying it even as New Report says

otherwise. Also, Twitter's board gives Elon Musk the go-ahead. Of course they do. They want that price. They want that $54 price even as the stock price stays low as ever. And also we'll speak to MSNBC's Katie Tour about her new memoir, which is a surprise. I read it on the plane here and it was so wonderful. And it's not what you think it's about. It's really interesting. We'll talk to her about that.

And it has a tech angle too, which is interesting. But first, Medicare could have saved $3.6 billion if it bought its drugs from Mark Cuban's pharmacy. Cost plus drugs, according to a study by Harvard Medical School researchers. You know, you've talked to Mark about this. I've talked to Mark about this. Huber's pharmacy buys meds directly from manufacturers, unlike Medicare. Researchers found jarring price differences, such as a 90-day supply of acid reflux treatment costing $160 for Medicare versus $17 through cost plus drugs. Mark is really trying to push this through,

and it's an interesting thing. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think it's really exciting. You wonder just how the system became so inefficient. You know, it's a supply chain. You wonder if there's corruption or, I don't know, monopoly power involved here. But it seems as if, I mean, this felt like it was written, and it wasn't, by Mark Stern, because it's basically just this giant. It's just sort of unusual for a medical journal to do a comparison and say, if you'd use this private company, you would have saved this many billions of dollars.

But yeah, look, anything disruption, if someone had read me this and said, what company is disrupting? I would have bet anything. It wasn't a startup from Mark Cuban. I would have bet that it was Amazon. And so I think it's impressive and obviously testament to Mark's vision and entrepreneurial skills that he's been able to get so much traction and so much visibility so quickly. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. You've talked to Andrew about it in my book. It's an

interesting pivot for him because he thought about politics. He's been involved in all kinds of other things. It's the only thing he wants to talk about now. What's really interesting is you come to Europe, speaking of Europe, and everything is much lower. You go to Asia, everything is much lower. As you know, I got really sick when I was in Asia once. And the bill was for a very significant illness was $8,000 total. Like, it was crazy low for all the things they did. And they apologized for that bill. And I was hospitalized for two weeks.

It was interesting. So when I was researching my book, The Algebra of Happiness, trying to understand happiness as it relates to societies, the happiest societies, seven of the 10 happiest countries are in Northern Europe. And happiness is not only a function of what you have and your relationships.

The number one thing is deep and meaningful relationships, but also an absence of fear of something being taken from you. Or an absence of fear of something terrible happening creates happiness. And what the Northern Europeans have, or an absence of, that unfortunately we have, is that if you find out your wife in America, if you find out your wife has lung cancer, there's probably a one in three chance you've also found out you're going bankrupt. And just to, it basically, it's the number one cause, medical cause of bankruptcy filings. And not only that,

I'm, for the first time in a while, I'm having some interface with our medical industrial complex. It is just so, let me use an academic term, it is just so ridiculously fucked up and overpriced and expensive and inefficient. And I don't know if it's regulation. I don't know who's making money here, who isn't. But it just feels as if, and I don't have any proposed solutions.

Are you getting your annual tummy tuck or are you okay? Sorry. I could use a little tuck. I could use it. I'm getting my third penile enlargement. The third one's going to do the trick. From now on, I want you to call me tripod. Oh no, my God.

Our last show, people were laughing with man gravy and the threesome sandwich. Anyway, well, this is interesting for Mark. Let's try to have him on and talk about it in a little bit. And, you know, obviously, pay too much. This is a big topic for so many people. And politicians should really respond to this in a much different way. I know they've tried, but whatever. Anyway, the Obama's production company, by the way, Higher Ground,

has signed an exclusive multi-year deal with Amazon's Audible. They left Spotify, which has, right now, there's a concert going on by Spotify here. This comes after the end of their deal with Amazon's Audible. They left Spotify, which has right now, there's a concert going up by Spotify here. This comes after the end of their deal with Spotify. They'd been in place since 2019 amid much jubilation, et cetera, et cetera. During the deal, higher ground staff pitched dozens of show ideas, but Spotify produced only a handful. Spotify declined to renew the deal. I heard from Obama's side that they weren't happy with it. A lot of like, kind of stuff. So now Amazon's picking them up, which is okay. Yeah. So this is pure speculation. But when I saw this in kind of the go-go days of hedge funds in

2006, 2007, I was advising hedge funds on their tech and media investments. And the head of one of the hedge funds that I was close to said, could you put together an advisory board for our fund? And I'm like, well, what are you looking for? Are you looking for domain expertise? Are you looking for connections? He's like, well, we're just looking for visibility and credibility. And I said, okay, there's one name that's at the top of this list. And he had just left office. And I thought this is the right time to ask him to be an advisor for a fund like this. So I ended up meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair several times and negotiating a deal for him to become the advisor. And I think the initial ask on behalf of his representatives, I assume a confidentiality agreement expires after a decade,

was around 10 million bucks. And we ended up somewhere, I think, at around 3 million. And he was great. He's incredibly charming. He's incredibly smart. But he didn't want to ever introduce us to capital. He thought that would be a conflict of interest. Everything was kind of screened in terms of what he would participate in. And then after about 12 months, which goes really fast, and you decide, do we want to pony up another quarter of a million dollars a month? We decided, you know what? He's wonderful. He's a super interesting man.

We've enjoyed the partnership, but we're not renewing. And Kara? Pricey show pony. Go ahead. That's right. Kara, I think that's what happened here. And I don't know this. I think that everybody thought,

wouldn't it be great to have Michelle Obama do a podcast about women empowerment and to have Obama kind of roaming around the hallways and maybe even introduce our lineup at our spring? And the reality is these people are notably and understandably very prude about what they'll be involved in and what they won't be. Although, come on, everyone's getting – all those polls are going to pay out. I think it's, I think it's untoward. All of these deals from way back are bothersome to me. I find it's like, you know, I don't mind people making money. Yeah, but I think the Obama, well, okay, let me put it this way. This is show pony land.

There's no way they didn't get tens of millions of dollars. Yes, yes. And the next question is, do you think it's been worth it for Spotify? That's what it comes down to. No, they want, they need an Obama podcast or, you know, they needed something real big that makes a lot of money. Yeah, and my guess is he doesn't want to do that. My guess is he sees himself above doing what we do twice a week. And so at the end of the year... Yeah, so it's just a vehicle for other things, yeah. Look, I might be entirely wrong. Amazon might have called and there might have

been a bidding war. What I think happened was they just said, you're great. You're so expensive that we're willing to let you move on. I bet when the story comes out, and eventually it will, someone will leak or go on background. I think they're going to find out they were getting paid tens of millions of dollars. And it was a lot of fun to have them around. It was super impressive. And they weren't producing that much revenue. Yeah, that's probably it. You know, Jeff Bezos donated $100 million to the Obama Foundation last year. There's also these presidential foundations. You know, I'm hoping they create something interesting.

They certainly can attract talent to them. It doesn't mean they will. That's the thing, like little scrappers like ourselves. You wouldn't find Obama, you know, dancing with a napkin to Mamma Mia amid the advertisers, for example, like myself, which I didn't do either. But nonetheless, yeah, it's interesting.

We'll see where these big high-profile celebrity deals go with these things. I think they're just a lot of money for a lot of nothing, unfortunately. Well, I was just going to say, it's an interesting topic, what presidents do post-presidency. And Obama and the First Lady are so impressive and so young and so attractive on a lot of levels that their problem was not what to do it was what not to do and i think they've suffered from a little bit of paralysis the last uh five five and a half years i don't think they've done a hell of a lot and now more power they all do books which is kind of their books were hits i think obama's i think

her book was a big hit right um those are sort of the go-to kind of thing it's is interesting because even, I don't keep compared to here, but there's a lot of celebrities here. There's a lot of different things. You know, Ryan Reynolds was here. Snapchat did an incredibly creative thing on the La Croix set with Vogue and all these fashion designers, which I thought was pretty wonderful. I met a couple of them. But it is. There's got to have an ROI, as they say, somehow, in some way, rather than just, I hung out with President Obama, had a beer. Well, okay. You want to know who's next, right? Who? Who? Netflix is going to announce

that after a wonderful partnership, they are parting ways with Meghan and Harry. Yeah, maybe. What the fuck have they done? Yeah. A whole lot of nothing. These high-profile, big-burst celebrity things. They've cut them back. They've cut them back, as you know, the animated series,

if you remember we talked about it. You're just going to see a lot of people decide to give up these kind of high-profile celebrity feel-good partnerships because all of a sudden, shit's gotten real in the market.

And there isn't any way to get around it. Everyone is looking at their numbers in a much harder way for the first time. Got to sign workhorses like ourselves. We're workhorses. You know that. We pitch that. We shovel those ads. We do. In any case, it's an interesting time. Lastly, interesting story. I don't think you had any thoughts on this, but I thought you might. Kellogg's splitting into three independent public companies separated by its cereal, snacking, and plant-based brands. Shares rose by 8% in pre-market trading. They closed just a little bit up, but 80% of its net sales came from the snack division. CEO Steve K.

Hollain said he's exploring a potential sale of the plant-based businesses. Nonetheless, why are they doing this? It's too big. They don't make any sense together. These conglomerates, there's a lot of them here too. Again, Unilever, those kind of people. I love this. And of course, the CEO said

that this would give each business a chance to focus on realizing their full potential. This is exactly what happened here. A forward-looking investment banker or the CFO said, okay, all our peers are up 20 to 30% over the last 36 months. We're up eight. The NASDAQ, the S&P, even with these drawdowns, are up 20 to 30%. We are an underperformer. We are inviting.

We are an enormous Battle Creek, Michigan dinner bell. And if we don't do something, somebody, Nelson Peltz, an Ackman is going to come in here and do what we need to do ourselves. So what they're doing is they're breaking themselves up because what companies do when they're out of ideas is they start acquiring firms or doing stupid things. And actually, maybe that's not even fair here, but what you have here is you have a low-growth slash declining business, Cereals, that probably still produces a ton of cash flow. Kellogg Frosted Flakes probably costs about, the most expensive thing about Frosted Flakes is the box, and they still get three bucks for it to families who are stuck in the 50s. But the business is declining, but it spins off a ton of cash.

Then you have the snacks business, which is not only growing, but it's big. It's growing high single digits. That's an amazing business. I'm going to look up some Kellogg's. And then you have kind of their cool, growthy Tesla, you know, the one that got the crazy valuation, Impossible Foods. So they're smart to split all three of them up. They're going to try and take- Can I give you some of their brands? I just looked it up. Obviously, Special K. Ago. Pringles.

Right. Cheez-It. Cheez-Its are quite good. Cars, Table Water, Mini Wheats, Frosted Rice, Crispies, Garden Burger. They bought. That's one of their things. Fruit Loops, Corn Flakes, Cocoa Pops, Corn Pops, all those. Anything if you're looking to consistently and crisply take 10 years off your life.

Cocoa Pops are not good for you? What? The plant-based thing is called Morningstar Farms. Not impossible, by the way. But they do have garden burger. That's what they have, which are pretty good. But they also have some healthy stuff. And also, snacking is an enormous trend in America. There's a huge, younger people are replacing at least one meal a day with snacks. It's a well-run company. They've always been great brand managers. So what happens in a conglomerate when you end up with a bunch of different divisions is the market looks at the shittiest business and assigns that multiple to the entire business.

So if you're a newspaper business in New York Times and you own the seventh tallest building in America, it doesn't get valued as real estate. It gets valued as a newspaper company, which was trading at four to five times EBITDA. So what the market was doing here is it looks at, it says, okay, Kellogg's is cereal. Cereal is a shitty declining business. So it gets X multiple. So the disposition or the spin of assets is accretive for shareholders. This is a really smart move. So Pop-Tarts get screwed. I love strawberry Pop-Tarts, but I don't eat them anymore. Nonetheless, they have Eggos, too. I'm saying the Swisher children eat quite a few of these every now and then.

Let's think. They definitely eat Froot Loops. Hello. They love Froot Loops. Froot Loops? Frooting like a mic. It's disgusting. Disgusting.

Anyhow, we'll see what happens to Kellogg's. I think they'll probably get sold off those pieces, but just me. It's too small. They'll take the plant one public and hope for a crazy valuation. Yeah, something like that. We'll see. Okay, let's get to our first big stories about TikTok and China. In leaked audio from internal TikTok meetings, employees indicate that engineers in China have access to the data of American users. That's according to a report in BuzzFeed News. TikTok previously said that U.S. user data stays in the U.S. and last year a TikTok executive told Congress the company doesn't share data with the Chinese government. Shortly before the article came out, the company announced that

U.S. user data would be handled by Oracle, which is interesting, which was one of the people that were vying to own TikTok in that weird VIG deal that Trump was proposing. And the author of this thing also used to work for Facebook, which is interesting. In 2019, Amnesty International said that Facebook and Google's user data posed a, quote, systematic risk to human rights. There's a big move. Actually, this is one of the topics I talked to the CEO of Trade Desk, to this open internet where you can really track this stuff much more and getting rid of these black box algorithms, especially for publishers and advertisers.

In any case, why is that important, do you think? If TikTok keeps American data on American soil, you still have an issue where they could influence what content algorithm surfaces. I'm not sure how powerful that is. So what is the power here from your perspective? Name and date, location, viewing history? They can buy all that stuff on the open market.

So what do you think the power of this is and why it's important? Oh, it's not identity. It's not names. It's not social security. It's not hacking. It's very simple, and it's a huge threat. And that is, I think people under the age of 15 or 18 in the U.S. are now spending upwards of 60 to 90 minutes a day on TikTok. As you noted with your kid, yeah. And it's very simple. It's a few small, discrete tweaks to the algorithm that says content by thoughtful people, even Americans, talking about the issues and the externalities of capitalism and how maybe we're a little bit hypocritical or we've lost some moral authority

or how capitalism isn't working for the working class, how our government is bought and paid for. Let's just put a thumb on the scale of that content in terms of small tweaks to the algorithm. And you have what is potentially one of the most dangerous, damaging weapons in the history of mankind. But for propaganda. A hundred percent. Interesting. If you think about, you know, the vast majority of Americans don't have a passport. And the same is true of other people around the world.

So, when our impression, why we go to war is a function of perception and brand. You know, we declare wars on nations all the time, but we've never been there, never met these people. So, if- By the way, Ukraine has done until, you know, now people are forgetting it. There's a great job of that in terms of propaganda. Or they can just say, you know what, play a bunch of videos by thoughtful people who claim that January 6th was just a dust-up. Just favor those people saying, well, it really wasn't that big a deal. And I realize I'm being really boomerish here, but first off, as it relates to this specific complaint a Google engineer saw data from Google China. But as has happened,

China has kicked all these companies out because they realize the danger. And the danger to China is the same danger to America. And that is propaganda has become the nuclear threat. So it's a question of how you solve for that. I just don't, you know, how you solve for it is going to be a very interesting thing. And this idea of Oracle keeping the sign, there's very few companies who can do this, Microsoft and Oracle were the two companies at the time, were the only two capable of doing things like that. But it's very difficult. And the – and I know this is what TikTok is. They should spin the American division of TikTok, and they should basically invite, be very transparent, and say there's absolutely – we are red, white, and blue up and down.

Well, I think I talk to a lot of people who are experts. This stuff has been built, and the software has been made. It's almost impossible to re – they'd have to build it from the ground up. That's what everyone from Microsoft and Oracle told me, that it can't, that the people who created it and who created the software, there's just too much there to understand why certain things are there or what they're doing with them. You know, one big thing is no matter how you slice it, everybody has all this information on you across the world, like your movements and everything else are being tracked by all these massive stores.

And then they bid on them and things like that. The U.S. government collects enormous amounts of data on you. And I think I would say Google less than Facebook is being really disingenuous, saying, you know, Mark Zuckerberg raised this with me, you know, eight years ago. You know, and he was scared about the competition, not national security. And, and they aren't, you know, exactly stewards of privacy. In 2018, Facebook announced that malicious actors retain data of 2 billion users. So it's, the data isn't as important. You're right. It is, it is something else. It's the, it's the tonality of the thing. You know, they're all, and the US government, of course, collects so much data on people. If they're, as you said, are they undercounting their influence? I suspect they are.

You have talked about that. I think TikTok is the most ascendant tech company in the world. And I think it's the only tech company in the world that sandbags their numbers. Everyone else lies, uses accounting tricks, invented metrics to try and, you know, turn chicken shit into chicken salad. I think they've been downplaying their numbers. And, you know, again, going back to this notion of a threat, there was some research done on TikTok, and it's the same confirmation bias that exists across all social media. But when young women went on, they had fake accounts with young women talking about how depressed they were. Within 45 minutes, they were being served just a ton of content around depression that was not helpful. Other people talking about how depressed they were being served just a ton of content around depression that was not helpful.

Other people talking about how depressed they were, why they should be depressed, why it's understandable that they're depressed. Nothing around remedies, nothing around how to get out of it. Although many people say TikTok is quicker to take action. I think that's true. But as long as this problem exists, here's the thing. All social media, or almost all social media, has shown no regard for the Commonwealth or for our children's mental well-being. The majority of them, or really all of them, have done it under the auspices of a private motive. They're not malicious actors.

I don't think the people at Facebook wake up in the morning and say, I want more young girls to be admitted to the hospital for self-cutting today. No, no. I don't think they – It's a consequence. They're not like that. What they do is they kind of ignore the research and the signs because they're making so much bank, similar to what the cigarette companies did. However, there might be one that unfortunately has another – That was disingenuous.

They lied. But go ahead. They knew. It's sort of like Trump in this hearing. They know it was illegal and they did it anyway. But, you know, the cigarette companies knew it was a problem and did it anyway. And I suspect a lot of these companies either aren't looking closely enough, but they have some awareness of the problems, whatever they happen to be. And they're very different depending on what they're doing. And so ignoring the data is what they do. and what they're doing. And so ignoring the data is what they do. Yeah. So, but back to TikTok.

Yeah. TikTok might have an additional menacing incentive here. And that is you might have the CCB saying the quickest, most efficient way to undermine American society is to make young people just feel really bad about capitalism and democracy. And we can do that really easily because guess what?

They're listening to us in their ears 90 minutes a day. Yeah, we're their entertainment. Although, you know, we watch any movie. There's so much propaganda coming at people on all sides now. It's really hard to understand. Yeah, but there's a diversity of it. It's fairly transparent. TikTok, I think you're going to have, I think TikTok, well, look at it this way. I believe TikTok, other than school and maybe a kid's friends, is going to be the most influential thing in a young man or woman's or a boy or girl's life. At this moment, it certainly is one of them. Are we comfortable with the notion that the CCP might have some influence over your kids' views of the world? And we're not talking about a cartoon or a show or media, because we're talking about 90 minutes a day. So, I think it's a real issue. All right. Well, we'll be talking about it more.

In any case, it's going to be interesting to see what happens to that company if they continue to stay as creative as they are, by the way. They're very creative also. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. And when we come back, Twitter's board gives Elon Musk a green light and we'll speak with friend of Pivot, Katie Turr, about cable news, Trump and her new memoir. 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.

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I guess. Twitter is not the only subject where Musk was wishy-washy. He was talking about, he was talking at an event for Bloomberg. I'm sorry. He also said this week that he's undecided on supporting, whether he's going to support Trump in 2024, although he's indicated interest in DeSantis. DeSantis, by the way, is gaining on Trump rather significantly in polling. So among Republicans, how does, he was very coy about Trump. Republicans already support the deal. The Texas Attorney General is going after Twitter boss, supposedly, allegedly. I'm sure he's not. So what is going on here? Just

Twitter board has to do this because they want to try to get that money, right? Correct? That's their move. This could be summarized very, very easily. And that is, boss, you broke it, you bought it. He has been shitposting, he has been distracting them, he has been shit posting he has been distracting them he has been violating all their agreements fine you want to fuck with us like you own us guess what you got to pay for it i mean this is this is okay i met a prostitute i fucked you every which way but loose now the wants their money. Pay me. Pay me. Your thoughts. What can I say? They want the money.

It's a great deal. It's a big spread there. And so he's going to have to pay it. That's really it. Of course, they're going to do everything to say you're buying this puppy right here. I'm not going to use the prostitute thing. I think you broke it. I would bet that the last couple of board meetings at Twitter have been the most enjoyable they've had in a long time.

Yeah, a lot of rosé, a lot of throwing the napkin around. They have lawyers in there doing nothing but saying, how can we back this bitch into a corner and make life really, really uncomfortable? They know exactly what's going on here. Yeah. Yeah, they're doing a good job here. Also, the Qatari minister was supportive of it, whatever. Anyway, go ahead. They believe in Elon. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, they're just saying, okay, we want to see. They're all going to be in six months or less in a Delaware court, and they want to see this guy squirm. And the way they do that, and this is what they're all doing right now.

They're not posing for investors. They're not posing for the company. Team Musk and Team Twitter now are all, they're entirely performative around making their case to a Delaware court judge. He owes us $45 billion. No, I should be able to exit this deal with no breakup fee. This is all, this is basically a courtroom drama playing out right now. The people of Twitter that I've talked to recently are very jolly. It's very jolly. I don't know why they're so jolly. They were agonized, but now they're jolly. It's interesting. Also, I can't say much. You know, one of the things he posted was he was very calm and almost like dull in this interview. And he had posted a thing where he showed the Hulk, Elon on Twitter, and Elon in real life, which was Bruce Banner and the Hulk, you know, pictures of himself because, you know, what would a narcissist do like that? So narcissistic. But he was showing that. a narcissist do like that. So narcissistic, but he was showing that. One of the sad stories that came out this week, and we'll see where this goes. One of his children, he has many children, he has two 18-year-old twins, filed to legally change her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson. Vivian

says she wants no association with her father or his name. And one of the things, it sort of puts it to interesting new light. Some of his tweets a couple of years ago, I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an aesthetic nightmare. I don't. Can you say more? I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, he was tweeting some really like stupid. You know, I've known him as a supporter of gay and trans. I actually he talked about it with me extensively, actually, at one point on the phone when he then started tweeting stupid things like I don't like to say they them, them, like stupid, dumb, like the 12-year-old got a hold of, Hulk got a hold of the keyboard.

And so, that was, and I was like, why did you just tweet that? He did a few that were like, listen, you know, okay, like it was weird. And so, I don't know if it's anything related. It's just, it's a sad situation when your child says they don't want your name, I guess. And there's obviously some trauma there in some ways. So, I don't know. I try not to talk about people's personal lives, but I didn't love his tweets. So, somewhat ironic here. You're right on both counts. It seems, I don't know if it's a syndrome that's been labeled or identified, but I generally believe that President Trump and Elon Musk and a variety of other people would rather say outrageous things,

maybe they believe, maybe they don't, knowing they'll offend people just so they have attention. It's just like a— Yeah. I was very— My 11-year-old, my 11-year-old, I'll occasionally, you know, a few weeks ago, I had this wonderful moment with him. We were talking about when my mom and my dad met, and he smiled. And, you know, I was about to turn the lights out

and I said, one moment, please. And he ran into his brother's bedroom, hit him in the mouth and screamed, no one likes you. And then ran out for no real reason. And I'm like, okay, what just happened? And it's clear like my 11 year old really on a regular basis decides i must have the entire household's attention regardless of how i get it and i feel this is what these individuals or elon musk goes through every 30 seconds it's it's just yeah it's it's really it's i don't know if it's psychopathic or what what the term is but yeah this stuff makes no sense he's a smart guy he knows this stuff is not right in any case it, let's not talk about it. I don't want to talk about that.

It got a lot of attention. I agree with you. I think that's off limits. He should stop tweeting stupid things about trans people. It would be really nice if he would cut the shit. He can make as many stupid meme jokes as he wants, but these are kind of really hurtful. Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot. Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Katie Turr is an anchor at MSNBC's Katie Turr Reports and the author of Rough Draft, a memoir in which she traces her career from its beginnings watching car chases from her parents' news helicopter. That's what the twist is here to reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign, which has its own kind of action-packed adrenaline rush with a shocker ending. Anyway, there's probably a chapter or two about fish shows. It's one of Katie's favorite bands. But hi, Katie. How you doing? Welcome to Pivot. Thank you for coming on. Let me just say, I read this on the plane here, and I did not expect it. I hadn't opened it. I didn't read about it. And you were the first member, unbelievable in 2017, which really focused on Trump, the situation with you and President Trump when he was certainly rude to you. I don't know how else to put it. But this is about your dad, who is, speaking of trans issues, is a woman now, correct? now, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's partially about my dad. It's about my childhood, the way I was raised, news family, and how it just informs everything I do now and how it informs the business in general, because they did some pretty revolutionary things. Yeah, talk about what they did, because they're very well known, your parents, I mean,

and sort of ushered in this era of live video in the moment kind of thing. My parents were helicopter news journalists. They pioneered the form. They weren't the first helicopter up in the skies, but they were the one that made it useful to a TV news audience. They covered, if not the first, the very second live police chase in real time. The station broke into daytime programming. It broke into Matlock, and the chase beat real time. The station broke into daytime programming. It broke into Matlock

and the chase beat Matlock. And the station said, oh, wait, this is good for us. People will watch. Let's put this on whenever we can. So they started putting on police chases all the time in LA. You can thank my parents for that or blame them. They also covered OJ. They found him first on the slow speed pursuit. They covered the LA riots and most notably the original Denny beating, the guy that got pulled out of the red truck and beaten within an inch of his life. Malibu fires, Madonna giving the camera the finger on her wedding day. That was your mom's camera, right? It was not. That was my dad's camera at the time. That was not my mom in the helicopter.

Okay. One of the things that's interesting is you talked about the tragedy of technology and what happened here. This is a tragedy in technology together. And it really is, your dad did a stream of consciousness kind of reporting as he looked, right? He wasn't just saying, you know, oh, look, there's a crash on the 405, which is a lot of helicopter journalism, is traffic journalism. No, so my dad was better than everybody else for two reasons. He was a good storyteller and he could tell the story of what was unfolding. And I'm using he in the past because my memories of my childhood or my dad of, my dad a certain way, my dad after 2013, when she came out to me as a transgender woman, I used she. So I hope you understand how I'm using the pronouns. Yes, please go back and forth. Yeah.

So he, back in the time, was just better at storytelling and live breaking coverage than anybody. And it was because he was a good storyteller, but it was also because he knew the US penal code by heart. He knew every code on the fire or police scanner by heart. He understood what they were saying. So he'd listen to the police scanners and he could tell you what was happening in real time. And because they had a helicopter, they were really good at developing sources within official capacities because, hey, you want a helicopter ride? Oh, now we're friends. I'm going to call you for source information. So he just had an inside scoop on a lot of stuff. And my mom, the two of them together knew the city better than

anybody. I mean, they could draw you a map with their eyes closed of the city from overhead. It was remarkable. So you became a journalist, not a helicopter pilot. What was it about your parents' job? It obviously inspired you or played a role in what you decided to do? So I didn't want to do what they did. My parents' worlds fell apart in 1998. They lost the helicopter and my dad lost his health. My grandmother died. She was a part of the business and very much the glue of the family and it felt like news really tore my existence apart and I wanted no part of it I mean they they would give up everything for a story and I just wanted to be normal and I felt we weren't normal so I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer but I quickly realized that

I couldn't be a doctor because I failed out of calculus and I couldn't I didn't wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, but I quickly realized that I couldn't be a doctor because I failed out of calculus. Um, and I couldn't, I didn't want to be a lawyer because I didn't want to keep going to school. And then one day I just found myself drawn to, I was in college driving back to college from Los Angeles, Santa Barbara. And I found myself drawn to a fire in Malibu. I just needed to be in the smoke. I needed to be surrounded by the flames.

I'm sure there's a before there. That was your dad's thing, running into flames, correct? It was my dad's thing, exactly. And I just, I wanted to be a part of it. And I found that there was nothing in my life that was more adventurous and more exciting and more thrilling than what my parents did. Right. I mean, I wanted to see the entire world, and this would let me do it.

And you ran up to the Boston bombing. That's when you got one of your first breaks, big breaks. Would you call yourself an adrenaline junkie? And what effect has it had on news, this idea of, now local news has always been, if it bleeds, it leads. It could happen to you, the fear part of it, this and that. Do you think it got further in that adrenaline fear kind of thing that went on? Well, there's two questions there. So I'll start the first one. Am I an adrenaline junkie?

I think to a degree. When I thought about being a lawyer, I mean, a doctor, I wanted to be an emergency room doctor. I wanted to be in the middle of the chaos. And it's because I grew up in chaos and I feel most comfortable in chaos. I feel most calm. Even now when there's a breaking story in front of me, say there's a subway shooting the other day in New York, or there's the insurrection, I find myself very calm, but also thrilled internally by reporting it in real time. And that was partially the Trump campaign as well, reporting in real time the country changing in a really dramatic and sometimes very scary way. Now, what my parents did and that adrenaline that they chased,

while at times they covered important news that was revelatory and necessary and they uncovered stuff that would not have been uncovered had they not been there i mean they covered uh the chp just beating the crap out of a bunch of immigrants on the side of the road nobody would have ever known about that had my parents not trained a camera on it same thing with the riots um there were other instances which made them you know an enemy of some local officials in los Los Angeles because they felt that they were being intrusive, spying on them. But in covering these live police chases, they essentially made TV news at the time into reality TV news. You know, there's no context. It's all happening now, now, now, now, now. You don't know how this is going to end. Oh, my God, is he going to crash into something? And oftentimes it would end in tragedy. It would end with the driver, you know, crashing into a bus, running through a light and crashing into a bus or the cops shooting the driver to death on TV, on live television. Right, right. It becomes like network. Yeah. And people were just fascinated by it and they tuned in in droves. And so, you know, the TV news business is a business. In order to do any

sort of news gathering, you have to have people watching. You need to sell advertising. You need the money. And so it becomes sort of a vicious cycle. And Cara, you know, we talk about, we've had this conversation. We talk about the way politics is covered today, kind of like a horse race or just put it on the air. We'll figure it out later. I think you could draw a straight line from what my parents did with these police chases to the way we covered Trump in 2015 and 2016, the way we cover things now. There you go. You said something that just piqued my interest and I guess I'm thinking about it. So I'll just ask the question.

What are your observations or what surprised you about your father's relationships after your father began identifying as a woman? You know, I don't feel like I'm in a really good position to answer that. And the reason is my dad and i are estranged and we had been on track for estrangement um before she told me she was a woman we had a very strained relationship uh because of some of the things that happened while we were growing up some of the emotional turmoil abuse it was some physical abuse that i that i had been i had resented and i had been carrying with me and i just was i was running away from all of it and so when my dad called me and told me that she was a woman um part of the conversation scott was that she said this is where

all the rage comes from and the rage is going to disappear bob Bob Tur is dead. I'm now, at the time it was Hannah, now it's Zoe. And I use that as my opening to say, hey, okay, great. Let's do that. Let's move forward. I'd love to have a better relationship. I'd love for the rage to be gone. The rage haunted me. No, no, no, no. And that's what's hard. The conversation didn't go well. It ended okay, but it didn't go well. And then the next one we had really didn't go well. And it's just, you know, we've tried, we started and stopped a bunch of times over the years and it just ends the same way

with her getting really angry at me. Yeah, yeah. I don't really know how things have changed. Yeah, let me shift, speaking of anger, that Trump, when you covered him, you were right in the middle of that and you were subject to a lot of it. And then just this week, the really brave election workers were subject to anger brought on by Trump and stuff. And so you were in the middle of a rage machine with covering the Trump administration and the Trump campaign. And with covering the Trump administration and the Trump campaign, can you talk a little bit about that and what you see? You know, there's sort of such a bright line between that campaign and what's happening right now in the hearings. Can you talk a little about that, what's happening, this sort of free-ranging rage all over the country, including about trans issues, by the way? And we could talk about that. But let's talk about the rage that I saw back then. You know, it was really it was very strange for me because I came back. I

was a foreign correspondent. I came back just for a few days to say hi to folks. And in the time that I was back, Donald Trump announced he was running for president. Everybody thought it was a joke. But also the Supreme Court said that same-sex marriage was legal and constitutional. And I remember in the moment of that feeling so filled with pride and joy for our country and being so optimistic about, just genuinely optimistic about the future, surprised me how happy I was in looking at what would lay ahead of us. And then it just felt like that was ripped away from me when I started covering Trump because all of that joy and that happiness and acceptance

was nowhere to be found while I was covering these rallies. Instead, it was rage. It was anger, rage. You're taking something from me. You're doing this to me. I like this guy because he's pushing back against you. You're not on my team. He's on my team. And they would take it out in the media. They'd come up and they'd spit at us and they'd give us the finger and yell and call

us names. Not everybody, but a good portion. And it was shocking to me. And it didn't get better after Donald Trump was president. It just, people seemed to get angrier and angrier. And then you had, you know, it wasn't just, you know, Republicans and Trumps who were angry. It's everybody got angry. And that led to where we are today. And I think looking back on these, on these January 6th hearings, all the lies that fueled, that fueled the violence of that day and the violence that I think is still hanging over us. It's a hard thing to reckon with. Yeah. CNN's new boss, Chris Lick, says he wants to rein in opinions. The cable gets blamed for this, says he wants room for nuance. So is there room for nuance, not just in media,

but in politics and everything else? Do you feel that that's the case? I think there should be. Listen, I think some things are black and white, some. But I think most stuff has some nuance to it. And I do think there's more room for being able to have a conversation. I think there's a desire for that within the country. I mean, we talk about cable news.

There's a very small portion of the population that watches cable news. There's a very big portion of the population that is out there to be gotten, to be consumed. And so we have to find a way to convince them. And we've done research on this. We know what there's a lot of people out there looking for news and analysis that isn't hitting you over the head biased. And I'm certainly drawn to that. I don't need to be screaming from the rooftops about this side being evil or that side being

evil. I think there's room for it. Is it going to fix our problems? I mean, it remains to be seen if we can figure out a way to talk to those people. Do you think this is, if you go back to 2014 and we're 20-odd months out from an election where Trump is elected, it feels eerily similar. Yeah. Is it happening again?

I mean, I don't know. I have a hard time. I don't know anything. to hand over the power of the Republican Party at Mantle to Ron DeSantis, which is what would happen if he did not run. So, I think he's going to run again, and I think it'll be different because he, well, he might be, but he as of now won't be on Twitter or Facebook. And so, it'll just be functionally different. And I think we've learned some lessons in the press, but I don't have hopes that it won't be violent. Wow. Well, I think we'll end on that.

Oh, good. Your book is very, I was surprised and moved by it. At the same time, just it felt hopeless. You know what I mean? Like it was, I was so surprised, not that you're not sunny and bright whenever you're on cable, but it was, it was the difficulties, the way you reflected in the relationship with your dad was also the relationship we all have with everything, right? It's sort of like, we've gone down some hole of some sort. it is just accepting, you know, and I write about this, it's everything and it's nothing. Yeah. All at the same time. And, and I'm hopeful that it's stuff that I've been running away from. So I'm hopeful that getting it out there is going to bring me some peace and make me a better mom. And I also just, it's a good story. It's a good story. I'm proud of a lot of it. And I'd like, you know, I'd like to be able to share it. Well, it's a great book. It's a good story. I'm proud of a lot of it. And I'd like, you know, I'd like to be able to share it.

Well, it's a great book. It's called rough draft, a memoir. I think you will really enjoy. It's beautifully written. It's out now. Thank you,

Katie. Thanks, Katie. Thank you, Kara. Thank you, Scott. All right,

Scott, I recommend you read. It's a really, really good book. It was so surprising. And the stories about the helicopter stuff was astonishing and the abuse. And it was real. It was a real eye opener. Anyway, 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. Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. Just so I can alienate the left and the right. My win is I thought that the International Federation for, I think it's for swimming, it's called FINA, I don't know.

I thought that they handled the situation around transgender athletes well. I think that's a really difficult, I think we're having an overdue and wonderful conversation around gender fluidity and the rights that people should be afforded and the grace they should be afforded. But it quickly presented what was a very unusual situation with women who had gone through puberty as men and were competing against female athletes. And I think that deciding that you have to transition before puberty, otherwise you have to compete as the gender you were born, I think that was the right call. And I think it was a difficult call. I think they could have sat on their hands. But I think that took a difficult issue. I think it was the right call, and I think they handled themselves well.

And the majority of these athletic bodies, so many of them are corrupt. They operate in this nether nether land where they can just make a shit ton of money and not be subject to any sort of audits. And I was just impressed with the way they worded this. I liked the release. I thought they showed leadership. Anyways, my win is FINA

and how they handled what is a difficult issue. Do you have any thoughts on that, Kara? It's interesting. So many people have mentioned this. I don't know why it's become such a huge topic. You know what I mean? It seems to envelop people's brains. I thought they handled it well.

I'm of many minds on this stuff because it's not because – I think transgender people have suffered so much pain and so much abuse by our society, and it's inexplicable. It isn't, but it is, you know, I see why people, you know, it's the same thing with racism. It's just, I get, I see it, but I'm also like, how can this be at the same time? Not naive. But I think it's very, it's, there's a, in this case, I thought they handled it correctly. It's still hard. You know what I mean? Like, if you feel like you're a woman, and there's all these arguments about words, I'm just like, stop, just try kindness. Like, let's try to all figure this out. Like, kindness has not been tried

against this group of people that deserves much more dignity and has been much abused. It deserves much more dignity and has been much abused. Society's a real punching bag. And so I think most people, if they are allowed to be decent, can be decent. Maybe that's not right. But it's a difficult one. That's a good one. I think a lot of local school districts, too, will decide that they want to let their kids, whatever they identify with, play that specific sport.

And I think that's up to, you know, a complicated issue. My fail is just in case if you were worried that Florida was fresh out of crazy, once again, we've cemented our role as just batshit crazy. And we've decided that we're going to be the only state in the nation not to pre-order or distribute

the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines. Yeah. This is just, okay, so how do we make- Oh, and he was obnoxious about it. He was a douche about it. Ron DeSantis, his speech was so obnoxious. about the GOP ideology is there's a power to people get to decide, that we shouldn't infantilize people, that you always want to err on the side of letting people have liberty and have domain over their own decisions. And what he's decided is he's going to make it harder for state-sponsored

health clinics and doctors to let parents who decide to vaccinate their kids, find a vaccine. That couldn't be more anti-GOP. No, he's so government-sanctioned. He's such a communist. But go ahead, sorry. Yeah, it's so, I'm a former Navy lawyer, and I know better than the CDC, the National Association of Pediatrics, every health commissioner on the planet except for the whack job we have in Florida, because I know better. And what's going on here is the same thing that always goes on here and is the reason why I believe we are in such a bad place in our nation. And that is everything is doing right now is an attempt to say, to get press, and the press says, hey, far right voter in Iowa, I am crazier than the next guy. And that's become how you win elections. You go, it's been conflated. The more batshit extreme you can be, that's been conflated with leadership.

see as fearless and macho. And the way you demonstrate your fearlessness and your macho is you make these batshit fucking crazy decisions that impact and hurt people on the ground. I think he's just playing for the cameras. But honestly, the whole pack of people around are a bunch of loons and they love government overreach. I don't know how else to put it. Government overreach into people's lives. That's what they become. On the other side, there are public officials who really do the right thing. I would point to two, three, actually. Arizona House Speaker Russell Rusty Bowers couldn't be more different than me. He did his duty under enormous, enormous difficulty.

He walked in and did the right thing and told he was – they tried to make him say the election was rigged. He refused to do it. He also said, he said that the Bowers, Trump put out a statement asserting that Bowers told me the election was rigged and that I won Arizona. Bowers chuckled at the absurdity. Again, other officials, Brad Raffensperger, these are all Republican officials,

and Gabe Sterling faced similar pressure. And these two election workers, I urge you to watch their testimony, former Georgia election worker, I think it's Wandrea R. Shea Moss is her name, really resisted. were just astonishing. These kind of attacks that he and she and all of them, all of them got in Georgia were really disturbing. And, you know, of course, the clown prince lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who I hope gets all his licenses revoked, said, we've got lots of theories, we just don't have evidence. What a terrible person that man has become. In any case, i find that really like

it shows how how thin the defense is um you know for our people that stand up and say this is bullshit and i really appreciate their their work so i think that's a powerful testimony i thought that was really powerful so did she um and her daughter i think these are election workers like what the hell is wrong with you? Like, honestly. Anyway, very, very moved. And a lot of the, you know, I know people don't want to say, don't, you know, support Republicans who finally came around and told the truth about Trump. These people at the time when it mattered most absolutely did their jobs.

And that's a really, I know it's a low bar, but it's the right bar. Anyway, those were my wins and my fails were like the people that attacked them. You know, and we're speaking on Wednesday night. You know, tomorrow probably Roe versus Wade will probably somehow be destroyed by the Supreme Court. That's obviously a fail. This idea of governments not letting people do the things they want to do with their own bodies. It's really sad. And taking away people's rights that they've had,

I think they're going to rue the day they did it, and we'll see what happens. But it's not a particularly good sign for our democracy for this to happen. So that's on that note. That's probably going to be my fail this week. Okay, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Friday for more. Can you read us out? And I'd like you to do it in French, please. I feel as if we need to be my fail this week. Okay, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Friday for more. Can you read us out?

And I'd like you to do it in French, please. I feel as if we need to end on a brighter note. Did you know right outside of Cannes, a huge cheese factory exploded? I don't know. All that was left, Cara, was a bunch of debris. That's good. That's good cheese humor. That is good French humor.

There you go. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie and Jatot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Mille Silverio. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for listening to Pivot

from New York Magazine and Box Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Cara, have a great time in the south of France. Thank you.