Pivot - Twitter Blues, Israel Protests, and TikTok espionage with Emily Baker-White

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Short sellers come to Jack Dorsey's Block, Apple's employees don't like what they're seeing in the company's AR device, and there's peace in the Silicon Valley Bank tonight. Also, NPR cancels four podcasts, the SEC gets serious about crypto, and Twitter Blue's latest feature is... pretending you don't pay for Twitter Blue? Journalist Emily Baker-White joins Kara and Scott to discuss her work on TikTok, and the stories that led ByteDance employees to spy on her. Find Emily Baker-White on Twitter at @ebakerwhite. Send us your questions! Call 855-51-PIVOT or go to nymag.com/pivot. 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. My hair is magnificent today. Look at that. Look at that, Scott.

Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. I was doing it in the voice of Succession. You know, this is Kara Swisher. Doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. I think we should play that music after I speak all the time now.

Did you watch the, well, obviously you've seen the opening. Or the initial show, yeah. Yeah, yeah. My podcast went up. I'm very excited. It was really good. I heard it was the second highest rated cable show. Yeah, yeah. My podcast went up. I'm very excited. It was really good. I heard it was the second highest rated cable show just behind Bill Maher.

I wonder what happened there. I wonder what happened there. I will ask you about that. I have not watched it yet, and I will. You know, again. Have you listened to my podcast? Have you listened? No, you haven't.

None of my families watch Bill Maher either. I came home thinking they'd be like, oh, you're amazing. And they're like, what were you doing in LA again? They didn't even know. They don't care. Oh, no. I did tweet that you were on it.

I gave you support. How did you think? How did it go? And then I'll tell you how successful. You know, so just to be like, I get very nervous. I'm on TV a lot. I do a lot of public speaking. And there's nothing that matches my nerves before that show.

Oh, really? I was trying to understand why as a means of not having a panic attack. Right. And I think it's because if you're a tennis player, you dream of coming out center court at Arthur Ashe. If you're a football player playing in the World Cup, that is literally me walking out on a Wimbledon for me. It's trying to catalyze a conversation around important things. He tries, whether you agree with him or not, I think he does try to be fearless. I don't think he's afraid at all of being canceled or being accused of being too liberal or too conservative. I don't think he cares. are all things I aspire to. So for me, it's like every time I go on that show, it's really important to me to do well. Also, my father only watches two things. He watches the Toronto Maple Leafs and Bill Maher. That's it. But I get really, really nervous before going on that show. So

when I do okay, it's a nice moment. Okay. How did you do? Okay? Did you better than okay? It's another example of instead of working on the things that actually affect us, people want to figure out what offends us so they can raise money. It's a bullshit topic.

Yeah, it's, you know, from CNN, watch your mouth. Oh, sorry. Keep your swear words out of your mouth. Sorry about that.

I thought, it's, you know, I'm too close to it, Cara. I'm just too close to it. I saw good reviews on the Twitter. Yeah, Twitter and social loves it. But the people there are super nice.

They're super supportive. It's like a lovely group of people. They gave you liquor. That was smart. They gave me Maker's Mark. I feel seen. And what's interesting is Bill talks this big game about not having kids.

Everyone you meet there has been there like 25 and 30 years. He has kids. They're just all wearing Time Warner badges. He is very loyal. He has, I mean, everyone there has been like, oh yeah, I've been with Bill 27 years. Anyways, thank you for asking. It was very nice of me. Good. How was Annie and David Sedaris? I saw your picture with all of them. Well, David is, I mean, I remember reading Me Talk Pretty one day and just, it's not only hilarious, but I think it makes young people feel better about themselves. Yeah. Louis loves David Sedaris. So does Alex. He's a wonderful writer. I made them listen to it when they were littler. He's a wonderful writer. take because I'm just too close to it. I shall watch it. I shall watch it with Alice tonight. I'm just too close to it. So, yes, we will watch it. I'm excited. And I think Succession went well. People seem to like the podcast. And did you do the post-show pod?

Yeah. What it does is it runs after every show. So, there's a show and then my podcast, and the podcast is about the show. But it's not like, oh, let's recount. It does that a little bit in order for people to understand. And who was your guest? Do you have guests? I did the, I had the creator, Jesse Armstrong and Frank Rich, who used to work for the New York Times. He's an executive producer. And then I had,

because in the plot of the first episode, the kids start, are trying to start a website to compete with their father called The 100. The 100 is Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker. I feel like we said iconic and you guys are leaning ironic. They're just terrible.

They're just, it's a terrible idea for this sort of digital thing. You mean it's Vox? No, it's Semaphore. So I had Ben Smith come on and talk about it, about starting something like that. And it was very funny. And so they immediately abandoned it on the show. And it's just so idiotic. And only rich kids would come across

with something like this. And so he talked about starting Starp and the difficulties and then how it looked on the show. Because just some of the dialogue was really hysterical. I think one of the keys to that show is one of the reasons that Woody Allen films

were always so successful and billions. I forget what you call it, the setting scouts or the location scouts do such an incredible job because basically what it is, it's wealth porn. Yeah, it is too. I mean, the homes and the clothes. Yeah, there's a couple of good homes. They had one in LA that was like worth and one in Napa. Oh, that home in LA? Oh, my goodness.

Right? Yeah. But it's sort of an insight into what would it be like if you were a billionaire and also had much better taste? Because here's the bad news. I know a lot of very wealthy people. A lot of them don't have very good taste. They don't know how to spend their money. So when you have a show that shows very wealthy people who know how to spend their money or at least hire people with better taste than them, it's just wealth porn. It's just fun. It's just visually so beautiful.

Yeah, well, wait, get ready. Get ready. You'll see a lot of it. It's really, they've done a nice job with the scouting. Anyway, everyone was really good and the actors. And it's nice to see the three siblings interact so much. I love the guy running for president, trying to sit above 1%.

He gets a lot more time. He's good. He's really good. Ferris Bueller's day off. He was, but he's really good. And the wife is, the woman, his fiance is, I think, quietly good. He's really good. Ferris Bueller's day off. He was. But he's really good. And the wife is, the woman, his fiance is, I think, quietly good. There's a lot of very quietly good side actors in this. Anyway, very good.

You'll see. You'll like it. It's something I enjoy doing. Again, HBO. How does HBO, with a lower budget, continue to always be the conversation? Just quality training. Yeah. Yeah. The legacy of Richard Plepler. Plepler. Plepler. The Plep, who lives in a beautiful home in Connecticut. Also, speaking of wealth porn, I call it the manor, Wayne Manor. Anyway, today we'll talk

about Twitter blues. We have so much to talk about, including some leaked source code. Oh my God. Also, another crypto mogul is in handcuffs. We'll talk about what's happening there. And we'll speak with journalist Emily Baker White about the moment she learned that TikTok was spying on her. This was referenced at the hearings last week. But first, Silicon Valley Bank has a buyer. First Citizens Bank has agreed to buy up all of SVB's deposits and loan that's worth about $110 billion. The FDIC is still holding on to $90 billion in securities and other assets that we'll have to unload in order to help deal with the problems there. So what do you think? It's nice that it went to a regional bank, although a lot of money is shifting, as you

said, to the JP Morgans of the world. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's a good thing. I think that the government has done exactly what it's supposed to do and the market is doing what it's supposed to. It's taken two kind of... So First Citizens was, I think, the 30th largest bank. So it's taking two regional banks and making them sort of super regionals. And what's interesting or the takeaway, I think, from this is that I've invested in every part of the food chain, from angel to venture to growth to IPO to growth public to mature to distressed. I have found on a risk-adjusted basis that the best place to invest across the entire stack is distressed. Because distressed assets are like old people. No one wants to be around them.

Oh, my. That's true. Okay. No one wants to be around them. Oh, my. That's true. Whenever I, you know, whenever anyone brings their 80-year-old parents to a party, I've noticed everyone is polite to them but doesn't really want to hang out with them. And I'm going to get shit for that, but it's true. And here's the thing. There's all the monies in old people, or specifically all the money is in distressed assets. Because what happens is everybody wants to hang out with Gisele and Tom Brady with the growth cool companies. And as a result, these things are overpriced.

And distressed assets, one of the best investments I've ever made was in a Yellow Pages company. It was trading at two times profits. And I said, we all knew it was going out of business, but it wasn't going out of business in 24 months. And this is the same, kind of a similar situation in that as First Citizens has made a great business out of going in and acquiring with FDIC backing or government help failed banks. It's done this 12 times. And distress investing is, there's opportunity, and this is one of the many amazing things about the market. is there's opportunity. And this is one of the many amazing things about the market. When stuff is so broken,

oftentimes that's when the biggest opportunities for upside is. Yeah, yeah. One of the information had a pretty good story about this. A lot of people did, but it said among the firms moving quickly are SVB rival Western Alliance-owned Bridge Bank and JP Morgan Chains,

as well as new institutions like Mercury and Brex. They are all moving in to fill the void. And it's a good void to fill. You're right, opportunities, knocking for these things. And it's nice that it was a regional bank. I think the Fed was determined that it was a regional bank. I don't think they really entertained the bigger ones getting this thing. Well, the bigger ones, from what I understand, the bigger ones just feel their eyebrows got burned in the banks they were forced to acquire in 2008. Oh, I bet they wanted this.

They feel as if they just had a bunch of lawsuits that the government wasn't supportive. Supposedly, Jamie Dimon never wants to get near one of these things again. And Goldman was probably a little bit conflicted because they were advising SVB when everything kind of blew up. The big takeaway from, I think, from all of this is going to be the importance of communications. And that is the communications at SVB just panicked everybody. The way he communicated their capital raise was just disastrous. The reason that Credit Suisse, with the same liquidity ratios as UBS, had to sell the UBS is because the Bank of Saudi Arabia, I think it was, not only said, they could easily said, oh, we don't need to put money in. Instead, they said, no way, like they were angry,

like they had just found out something bad. So this is, we're going to come away from this. When you're loaning more money out than you have, it becomes about confidence and communications. And this was a failure in communications. Yep, 100%. So anyway, we'll see what happens with bank stocks. It still makes you nervous when something like this happens, but it feels like, yeah, they're going to be up. We're still, we had to be very careful and not be stupid in terms of panicking. Anyway, NPR, speaking of things that upset a lot of people, NPR is cutting 10% of its staff and canceling four podcasts, including Invisibilia. and they recently launched Everyone and Their Mom. It marks the company's biggest layoff since 2008 in a move the chief executive called existential. It's interesting

what's happening here. I talked to someone who had worked there and they said this is not a group of people used to being laid off at all. It doesn't take it well because it feels like a government entity, even though it's not actually. A very small amount of the money comes from, people think much more comes from the government. I think it's 2% or it's some very small amount. But it's still a very, it's a very different staff. A lot of these kinds of things, whether it's PBS or whatever, feels different, even though it's a business. Again, I just love to know what the hiring has been over the last three years. And NPR, I think as it relates to a balanced scorecard of trying to call balls and strikes, of pitching right down the middle, of production quality, of the ability to attract and retain

really talented people, I would argue NPR is one of maybe the three or four best media companies in the world. And what's really interesting about NPR is a government-funded media is usually seen as being very liberal. NPR really does a good job of trying to say just the facts, man. You know, they really do try to cut through and they try to be real journalists, not make it about the journalists, see both sides of the issue. And as it relates to, I think you've played a seminal role in podcasts. I think Joe Rogan has. You mentioned it relates to, I think you've played a similar role in podcasts. I think Joe Rogan has. You mentioned Mark Maron, Bill Simmons. But also, just as an organization,

I don't think anyone's done a better job in audio than NPR. A lot of its money comes from corporate sponsors and annual grants from this publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But a lot of it are these corporate grants where you hear their names. And most of the member stations are owned by nonprofit organizations. But I agree, I think they do a great job. I think there's a lot of controversy over these things, like political, they try to attack them, but they're actually quite, I think they do a great job. I really do. Whether it's, I'm trying to think the other show, the TV show that's amazing. NewsHour? NewsHour, right? So, you know, just, I think they're think, the other show, the TV show that's amazing. News Hour? News Hour, right?

Yeah, they do a great job. I think they're doing a great job, and they do try very hard to stay within the lanes. The private ones, whether it's Fox News or CNN, are much more political, much more, much more, much more political by far than any of these. I agree. I think they do a great job, and I'm sorry for the people who laid off, but this is also a business on one level. Apple employees, speaking of a business, are skeptical about the company's

upcoming interactive headset, according to a report by the New York Times. Employees have doubts about the device's utility, high price point, and whether there's a market for the product, all of which things we've said. It's, I think, 3,000 bucks. The device is set to release in June,

but team members speculate they may delay it. External research predicts the company would sell less than half a million headsets in the first year. I don't know. I don't know. I feel like we'll see when we see it, right? And people who want it, it's going to be the best version of this. I don't particularly want one, but I didn't think I wanted AirPods. And if it comes down in price, I might like something like this, watching movies, et cetera. I just don't know until it's out. I never discount anything Apple makes.

What about you? This is over before it started. The market for a $3,000 unproven headset in a category that is imploding. I mean, this whole thing was developed and conceived when everybody was worried that Mark Zuckerberg was in fact a genius and that the whole market was moving into these headsets and VR world. Since then, we have learned that is not working. People do not want to put something on their head

that doesn't have tremendous utility or make them more attractive to potential mates. The market for a $3,000 headset is pretty limited. It is for now. I don't think it'll stay at that price. And so I think about like surgeries, all mechanical stuff. They're much more aimed at, listen, the only thing, as I told you, Tim Cook is obsessed with the idea of AR more than VR. He finds the complementary things that will help you move through the world that aren't sitting in your hand is where I think this thing is going. And I do think it's a little more than that. And so putting it out there and selling it to a higher level of people,

they did this with a lot of their early stuff. Their design stuff was very expensive and now it's not. I don't know. I think they can't not play in this space on some level because eventually there will be a heads-up display. And so everyone in the business is just not working quite right. So take the greatest designers of consumer products, which remains Apple and a couple of other companies, but overall Apple, and you start to put this stuff out there and get it in the wild, I think you just don't know where it's going. But I get that people, it may not be for this. It may be for where it's going.

I think headsets, whatever you call this category, is going to go down as the next iteration of wearables, only a bigger failure. Wearables aren't a failure. Look at watch. Watch. Okay. I would argue that the watch... First off, the watch by the most... They stepped into the market and got it, but go ahead. Go ahead.

If a CFO were really to apply hard metrics to the watch, it would be hard to argue that it's a success. If it was a company that didn't have the massive deep pockets of Apple, it probably would have been shut down. And also, I would argue the Apple Watch is not a wearable. It's a second screen for the iPhone. I don't think a single wearable has worked. I just, maybe, you could argue, okay, give it to the Apple Watch. But in terms of this whole notion that we're going to go to different places or AR with smart, I mean, Google Glass, obviously the Oculus. Badly executed. I don't think there's no way we can really give a verdict until one of us tries it and has our own view. In general, this space is shaping up to have the hype of the Segway but sell fewer units. AirPods are $300, and the utility is staggering. I don't know. Let me read you from a Mac world. Apple Watch is the most successful flop in history. That's a great way to put it.

Yeah, except it's a success. They completely dominate watch buying, which is incredible. I feel like it's one of these things that's necessary for the whole ecosystem. It's an example of them owning an ecosystem, and it's part of the same ecosystem. And everybody thought this thing was going to disappear. It was slow to come out. It was too expensive. It didn't have the kind of numbers that iPhone have. But it's, I have the 8, I guess, version 8.

I don't have the big one. I see them on everybody's wrist and they, especially including those new ones that are like very manly, the manly one, the one where the ultra, whatever it's called. I just feel like The manly one's called a Panerai. It's big. It's a big thing, but people are using them. I, I didn't, I had all eight of them gave away seven. Now this one I find absolutely necessary. And something happened in the development. And it's very useful.

I pick it up as a phone thing. You're right. It's an adjunct to it. But I'm starting to leave the phone and use just the watch when I go places, which is interesting. This is interesting. In 2019 alone, the Apple Watch sold 31 million units. The entire Swiss industry sold 21. It's way beyond that. It's kind of, it's really punched it. Yeah. More Apple Watches in the entire,

than all of Switzerland produced. That's a staggering fact. Everyone has one. Everywhere I go, people have them. I don't know. I have a feeling that if it gets down, if it got to a thousand000, you sure as heck will buy one. I think when you get to that price point, it has to be an item that lasts longer than 12 or 18 months. I think the shelf life on these things is just going to be so short. We're going to disagree on this one. This will be good. We should make a bet. Speaking of disagreements, you forgot to mention our fight made the media. Yeah, I know. That was funny. So explain what happened. Right. So we had this very good discussion about woke culture, which Scott and Bill Maher are

obsessed with. And I said, there's bigger problems. And Scott accused me of being elite when in fact, he's 15 times at least richer than I am and more elite. And then we like got into it. And it was good. It was a great discussion. And lots of people thought we hated each other after it. It was weird. So there was a story in Mediaite or wherever saying, look at the big showdown and fuck you and whatever. I couldn't believe that. I couldn't believe it. Yeah, you called me and laughed about it. We laughed and laughed and laughed. People can disagree about things. The Apple Watch wasn't quite as angry as that, but come on. It wasn't even angry. It was just disagree.

And you can then disagree and you might not even agree. Sometimes we often come to an agreement in some way or we change each other's mind a little bit. In that case, we didn't. And so people thought we were really, I said bullshit to you. People seemed upset by that. I was like, it's like every day with Scott. What's going on? I got lots of texts like, are you okay? I was like, what are you talking about? I didn't think it was a thing. Although I just want to assure everybody, the best thing about us fighting like that is we get to not have makeup sex.

Yes. Ew. I can't believe. I was just shocked. It was a media story. It was so ridiculous. Anyway, we'll do a big Jerry Lewis Dean Martin breakups, and that's an old reference, but we'll have one of those someday,

but not today. I don't think either of us thought about it that much once it was over. What would have to happen? What would have to happen for us to get in a real fight? One of us was dating the other's spouse. I'm telling you, we should do a Joe and Mika. I don't think you'd mind that either. I'm trying to think. I know, we're deeply in love, everybody. You'll see. Anyway, let's get to our first big story. Scott, how do you make a small fortune in tech? You start with a large one. That's what Elon Musk

seems to have done at Twitter as he issues stock grants to employees. Musk says the company is now worth $20 billion. FYI, it's worth a lot less than that. Less than half of what he paid for it, though. It was $44 billion is what he paid for it, or him and a bunch of people. Part of that could be due to disappointing Twitter blue rollout. Since relaunching three months ago, the subscription service has made just $11 million on mobile. Blue's value is so low, Twitter might soon let subscribers hide their blue checkmark, according to reports. That could help them blend in with the legacy verified accounts who are going to lose their checkmarks on April 1st. I'm so sad. I don't know what I'm going to do without it. And adding insult to injury, part of Twitter's source code

was leaked online. That's a big deal, actually. It was posted to GitHub. It may have been up there for months, according to New York Times. No one's paying attention. No one's paying attention. So one, how did he strip so much value out of the check mark? It seemed to be something you could sell. And I think Facebook's about to roll out its version of it, which I think they're doing correctly. Is there any way to bring it back? I guess ours will go unless, I don't know, you're probably paying. I'm not. I'm not. I've been so upset by the way he's handled the whole thing that I just don't feel comfortable giving money to them.

I don't want to give him my credit card. Oh, that too. I'm less worried about privacy. I should probably be more worried about it. But this was a fundamental, I mean, the reason you take marketing is to understand consumer value proposition and to understand where the real value is and then to try and foot where you charge where the value is. And this is just like a classic marketing mistake. The value of the blue check isn't from the person themselves. It's to the rest of the network so that people know this is actually Kara Swisher. And so to try and charge Kara Swisher such that the rest of the network can benefit from her identity, the only way you inject value is if you enforce identity. And they didn't enforce identity. So immediately, people started buying blue checks for Dr. Phil. And they said, blue check, I'm Dr. Phil.

And the whole idea of trust and verification got blown up. So they not only didn't figure out a way to create incremental value, they figured out a way to destroy the value of the blue check. I mean, this was just so poorly executed. Now, to the larger point about valuation here, he's valuing it for the purposes of issuing equity at $20 billion. The average multiple on revenues of Meta and Google and Snap is four. Optimistically, this company's got held on to $3 billion or is that an annual run rate of $3 billion, meaning it's worth $12 billion. Less, less, less. He said less. But interestingly, I'm in San Francisco still and I ran into a former executive and he was like, they'll be lucky if it's two, someone who would know, who was very involved in it. But let me finish. Let's give him a benefit of the doubt. Let's say it's four times revenues. That means the company has an enterprise value of 12 billion. It's got 13 billion in debt, meaning the equity is worth nothing. He put a valuation of 20 billion on this thing. 22, yeah. This is again, he's trying to convince people there's an Elon effect here.

And then he puts out a big number of a quarter of a trillion dollars. Yeah, he says that. Yeah, that's right. Just for people that don't know, he said the company will be worth $250 billion. And that employees are allowed to cash in their stock grants at specific periods. How would Twitter employees feel who are still there? Like, would you, I'd go right over to an AI company. There's so many starting and so much funding going on. What would you do? Is there any upside to

staying? Like, well, it couldn't get worse? Well, look, I've always said to kids when there's a lot of tumult, that's when you stay and see what happens. Because whenever there's a lot of activity, who knows? Having said that, I would think at some point, if he keeps treating these employees with such a lack of respect or much less empathy, that it's going to be, it's going to exist. There's really going to be two types of Twitter employees. One, people who are just enormous fans of his and want to stick around and see what happens. And also to be fair, he has turned, he has turned two distinct companies into incredible companies. So they're probably like, I'm going to bet on Elon and just see what happens. Or people who have other reasons to stay. There's a lot of people there that probably lose their visa if they leave. Would you stay or would you think I got opportunities elsewhere in this market, especially in AI? You know, Cara, I've been working for myself for so long, I can't even relate.

I can't even understand. I just couldn't, I couldn't stand. I mean, this is a guy that takes, that has people introduce them to advertisers and works them really hard. And then they find out on the way back from the meeting, they've been fired and they can't even get a hold of HR to get their COBRA payments. Right, no, yeah. Has this treated people so poorly? Poorly, shabbily. They have.

I think that's why. We'll get to the GitHub thing in a minute. But the checkmark thing, he wants businesses to pay $1,000 a month to keep their checkmarks. Businesses might pay that, but grudgingly, like not getting it. Because with Blue's features, you get longer tweets, edit button, longer video uploads, higher rank of replies, NFT pictures, whatever. Nothing works. So why would you want to, that's one thing. And he said that they still see the same amount of ads as everyone else. And he said they'd see half the number. I literally see an ad every two tweets now, if not every tweet.

And they're really shitty ads. And they're the same ad over and over again. I've never experienced such a decline in quality of a service. It's hard when I'm just looking, because I was putting up some succession tweets. I use it purely for promotion. And I just was like, there's so many terrible ads that it's like watching cable late night. One more ad for some Viagra kind of thing. He said he'd share Twitter ad revenue with blue subscribers that he hasn't. And so it just creates a bad experience. And then the source code gets leaked. And so usually it's people who have, it seems to be someone who left or this is what he was scared of. It's a problem. I've talked to a lot. I didn't know if it was that big a problem. A lot of techies were like, oh, this is not a good thing because hackers can figure out more how to hack the company or

shut it down or steal. How are you going to get people to give you a credit card when the source code gets leaked so that hackers can, you're a better attack landscape, I guess. Well, if you can feed code into a large language model, AI, and ask where it's the problem in the code, couldn't you ask different LLMs or different large language models, what's the vulnerability in the code here? I mean, this could go a lot of bad places. I'm surprised it took this long. He said he was going to release code. Remember that? But he hadn't. Like he said, he was going to release it by the end of this month, I think. But when you treat, it's not that you lay off 80% of your staff. It's that you treat 80% of your staff poorly. And these are intelligent. And not only that, you're talking about a group of young, mostly young, mostly men, people who are part of a culture that quite frankly is a little bit wily and a little bit mischievous, right?

And when they're nice, when they're not nice. But then they're treated poorly. How easy would it be for one of these engineers to say, oh, I accidentally put in this line of code, and this line of code does the following in 90 days. I mean, I would bet. It's like when a nation, when a departing army leaves a city, they booby trap the place.

I would be shocked if there weren't booby traps all over Twitter. There's a lot of pissed off people who have been unceremoniously escorted out by security there. And not enough people to catch it. And not the best people. You know what I mean? It feels like not even his loyalists. Remember that Esther Crawford got dumped? And, you know, they just? Even the ones who were super

loyal to him get dumped. It's crazy. He has implied that good people who tried to stand by him, he has implied that they're guilty of sex crimes. That was Yoel Roth, yeah. And what about, I imagine there's a lot of people who are loyal to Yoel and think, you know what? Fuck this guy. I'm supposed to, I can't even get my health insurance, but I'm supposed to on the way out the door ensure maybe I'm in charge of safety or making sure things don't get hacked and, you know, from IPs in Argentina. I mean, this is a complicated, porous network with a lot of vulnerabilities. I think I'm shocked it took this long. Yeah, this is buying him a lot of vulnerabilities, I think, I'm shocked it took this long. Yeah, this is buying him a lot of trouble. I mean, his only thing is if he can get it public in all his stands, you know, just like

Trump had this rally in Waco with thousands of people, he'd get his stands to buy it and become a meme stock. I don't know how else he can get this money back. That's, it could have happened that way or could not. I mean, people do, you know, I've turned everything around, sure, but doesn't mean you're gonna turn this around. If he was focusing in on AI, where he was very early to open AI and things like that, one of the primary funders, early funders of that, he would literally make so much money if he just focused on AI, not this. It's really, it's like a weird disease with this guy. It's like, you know, they can't fight it. Anyway, Elon, good luck in getting to $250 billion and

good luck making people think it's worth $22 billion. We'll see. We'll see. Good luck. You know, it couldn't happen to a nicer person. Anyway, Scott, let's go on a quick break. And when we come back, a tough week for the crypto crowd, including Jack Dorsey. And we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Emily Baker-White, about TikTok. 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

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In, knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Scott, we're back. Jack Dorsey's payments company, Block, is the subject of a damning report by the influential short seller Hindenburg Research. Hindenburg accuses Block of facilitating fraud

through its cash app. The group found multiple impersonators on the app using names like Elon Musk and even Jack Dorsey. And Hindenburg says it was able to obtain a debit card in the name of Donald J. Trump. Block's stock price fell almost 15% following the report. Block, of course, is pushing back at all this. Any thoughts? I think what you have here is there's been such a lack of regulation that you have other entities filling this void. The first kind of person to fill the void was Tim Cook came in and said, all right, Facebook and Meta are such bad actors and have so overrun Washington and regulators. I'm going to step into this void and basically stop them from molesting the privacy of iOS users or at least give give them the ability, make it opt-in as opposed to opt-out. And then Hindenburg has come in and said, we're going to pretend that we're the SEC or that we're a regulatory body in India and just highlight what looks like blatant inter-party dealings. But you can easily find, yeah. And now they're going for these guys. The only thing that I thought was really legitimate and

cause for concern was that it's pretty easy. They're claiming that a lot of Cash App accounts are fakes. So when they announce that, oh, our number of Cash App users is up, it's again more of this wash trading or false signals to the market. I think it's fascinating. I think Hindenburg is a fascinating company. I love it when people figure out a way to... It's like there there used to be, you know, instead of investigative journalism, it's investigative investing. And it's really interesting. Now, at what point does their, you know what they get accused of. And Block might take legal action against them. No, they're not. Well, okay. They're going to want this out of the news as quickly as possible. I don't think. If I were on the board there, it's like, you really want this in the news? You want a judge saying that, no, you want a judge really looking at all these things they're accusing us of? And it's their First Amendment rights. Right. Drug sales, sex trafficking, facilitating drugs, illegal activity, not monitoring enough.

I think that was more of their thing. And this particular group, I mean, it's a 17,600 word report. And obviously it's a short seller, let's put it at that. But it doesn't mean short sellers are always wrong. And, you know, I think they're making their case, which is what short sellers do. A lot of short sellers, you know, they said they're going to explore legal action, you know, and it's interesting. But they, listen, Hindenburg just took billions of dollars off of the Adani group, that Indian billionaire guy, Gautam Adani. They had allegations of fraud at Nikola, the electric truck maker, and the CEO and criminal prosecution of its CEO happened. And so these are not people to trifle with in terms of just doing things. And of course,

short sellers always get dinged for this, but sometimes they're quite accurate and they do want to make the case. They want to make the anti-case for these companies. And so, you're right, there's not enough regulation here. They might not have been running the show as right, and so they can find fraudulent things all over the place, right, even as these things have surged in value. So, anyway, it's really, it's an interesting attack. But 20 years ago, some incredibly talented person at the New York Times or the FT would have had the license and the resources to have an editor assign this to them. And they would go in and do all of this themselves. And then they would write something on it.

And the stock might go up or down based on that. Instead, because there isn't enough money in covering this from a journalistic standpoint, the new business model is investigate companies. And when you find there's trouble in Mudville, ride it up. But before you do that, go short a shit ton of stock. I think it's fascinating. I'm really interested in it. This is not a group to be trifled with.

I think they're quite careful. Well, they do the work. I mean, have you seen this presentation? It's pretty powerful. I have not. Well, look, you did that around WeWork. You've seen this presentation? It's pretty powerful. I have not.

Well, look, you did that around WeWork. You can be right and also have economic interest in it. Just by way, I did not have an economic interest in WeWork. You did, but lots of people. There were a lot of short sellers wandering around that and stuff like that. Anyway, another thing that's happening this week, authorities in Montenegro arrested Do Kwon, the founder behind Terra and Luna cryptocurrencies. Terra and Luna collapsed last May, wiping out nearly $40 billion in value.

It's the year's second biggest crypto disaster, none of which was covered by the federal government. Kwon is wanted in the US and South Korea in charges of fraud. SEC is stepping up enforcement against crypto companies. It's been a bad week for Cathie Wood. Anyway, last week, the agency issued a Wells notice to Coinbase warning of possible violations of securities laws. SEC also issued a warning to

investors saying crypto companies may not be complying with the law. You know, they charged a handful of celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, of illegally promoting crypto securities. Lohan and Paul settled without admitting any guilt. Talk a little bit about this. This is where the SEC can take action. This is an area that remains the Wild West. Everything they're doing here makes sense. The problem is, you know, is it a day late and a dollar short? And that is, so many retail investors have gone on a roller coaster ride and had very smart people going on CNBC or on Twitter, making very compelling cases for crypto, and then lost a lot of money. And I just wonder, the point of the government is to do things that

citizens can't do, fund and run the Navy. The government's better at that than any private agency. And they're also supposed to think long-term and prevent a tragedy of the commons, even when it's not popular. And the thing I don't like about this is my sense is they're moving in now because they feel as if they have public support and cloud cover. And the whole point of leadership is that you're supposed to move in and do things even when they're unpopular, which these things would have been 24 months ago. But they would have taken some heat out of this Ponzi scheme balloon that ended up costing a lot of people, mostly retail investors. You can bet the people on the inside here, the carnival barkers, were selling over the last 24 months. And so, great.

It's good to see you. It would have been great had you shown up when the house was on fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what it does is, you know, there's a lot of, someone pointed out to me, there's a lot of good stuff in here, too, that should be helped, right? All the better players. And so what it does is it takes the whole industry and throws it in the trash in a lot of ways because of these very bad players. Listen, they got out of control, a lot of these people. It'll be interesting to see what happens to something like Coinbase was considered one of the more viable companies, right? And its CEO was Brian Armstrong, was quite out there, you know, being a thought leader, doing thought leader things. And what happens, who comes in and

becomes the face of this? Obviously, because of these bank failures, Bitcoin was up, it's not going away, you know, so it's a really interesting time. But you're right, the government should have come in before. But it didn't come in like we talked about with TikTok. It didn't come in many years ago. I mean, it doesn't come in with all the internet stuff. It just waits and waits and waits until damage is done, whatever the damage happens to be. Yeah, it strikes me that what we've seen over the last few years is there's been a lack of regulation across almost every industry. And it's ended up hurting those industries. There are some very thoughtful people in the Web3 and crypto space,

and most of them, ranging from Michael Saylor to Novogratz, have actually called, you know, they did, to be fair. They did say regulation would be a good thing. And it wasn't a fake Zuckerberg, oh, we want to be regulated, wink, wink. Or Bankman Freed. So that, remember, he was Mr. Let's regulate us kind of person. Yeah, and then sending out text messages saying, fuck the regulators, they're idiots. Yeah.

I do think that the people who see value in an alternative form of some sort of store of value or currency in crypto would like to see some form of regulation because they realize that the Wild West is becoming lawless and people are going to stop settling. They're going to go, no, I don't want to live in that town because there's no sheriff. Well, except the price of Bitcoin. Right now it's $26,000, almost $27,000. It was at a low of $16,000 back in January or something like that. It's obviously the high has been in $61,000, $62,000. So it's still around. It's still a thing, right? Of course, the same carnival barkers are still there, essentially. and Barker's are still there, essentially. But it'll be interesting to see with real, not just enforcement action, but real rules around rules of the road here and what it does, because I don't think you ban its entire sector. I don't know. I don't think you think that. No, I just, the thing that's most troublesome about Bitcoin, and again, I've also thought Bitcoin's genius is they figured out a technological way to create scarcity value.

And that's the key to a fiat currency that endures. And no fiat currency has ever endured because of the political pressure to avoid, you know, to ruin the scarcity illusion and just keep printing. And some people would argue we're already starting that downfall based on the amount of debt we've taken on in printing. One in three dollars in circulation has been printed since COVID. The most distressing thing from a national standpoint is that when you see the banking system, when you see what is arguably one of the most existential

threats, maybe with the exception of COVID over the last 10 years to the US, to the country, you see Bitcoin skyrocket. The problem is it separates interests from some of the most powerful people in the world and those of Americans. And that is you start betting on the U.S. banking system unraveling and America becoming a more insecure place. In other words, typically businesses do have some alignment with the interests of America. It's a survivability, yeah. And when all of a sudden it's like, oh, wait, if I shit talk the banking system and U.S. economy and say we're going to go into hyperinflation and the banking system is going to collapse. And that means my $10 billion in crypto investments go up.

It's just a dangerous place when we can't figure out a way to create regulation that aligns the incentives of the most powerful people with the interests of Americans. That's the frightening thing about Bitcoin's rise over the last week or two weeks. Yeah, I would agree. It's very dystopian. But let's get back into the real world and bring in our friend of Pivot. Emily Baker-White is a journalist and senior writer at Forbes, where she's broken some of the most impactful TikTok stories that we talk about every week. So, Emily, welcome. I just want to say you work for someone who used to work for me, John Pachkowski, who we call Patches. You're welcome to do that. And if he gives you any trouble, please let me know and I'll make sure he doesn't. Okay? Noted. Okay, good. So let's talk about how you first started reporting on

TikTok. Last year, you reported that American TikTok user data had been accessed in China. The same day your story broke, TikTok announced it was moving American data to Oracle. Talk a little bit about that first, and we'll get to what happened to you. Yeah, so I first started reporting on TikTok a little over a year ago, and my first story broke the existence of Project Texas, which is TikTok's sort of big bet to try to sequester U.S. user data to be managed by a team based in the United States and to host data only in the United States and sort of limit access to that data abroad. And after I reported that first story, I received an email that said, Project Texas, want more? And as a journalist, you definitely want more. So I began speaking with the person who sent me that email. And eventually that person was able to share with me audio recordings of over 80 internal TikTok meetings about Project Texas.

Which took a long time to go through, but taught me a lot about Project Texas and about how TikTok is thinking about data management. And I wrote a story based on that leak last summer, which showed that in the course of trying to redo its sort of data pipelines. Which was the right thing, right? Which is important for them to do. Sure, yeah. In service of a good thing, employees at TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, who live in China and work in China, had to access U.S. user data regularly because that's the way the app was built. And so TikTok and ByteDance had often answered questions about whether our U.S. user data was accessible in China by saying, oh, it's okay, the data is stored in the United States.

But that's an answer to the different question. And so what we were reporting on was data access. That they could get it, that they could get it. That they could access it. I don't know where my Gmail messages are held. I don't know where the server is, but I know that I can get them no matter where I am around the world.

And it's sort of the same thing. So it's the access idea. So they noticed your work. And when did you first learn that they were accessing your location data? I learned that in October of last year. So how did that happen? So a source from inside the company let me know that there was a leak investigation into who had leaked me audio

from those meetings. And as part of that leak investigation, sure, normal thing. But as part of that leak investigation, a team at ByteDance was going to pull my TikTok user data, including my IP address, which gives an approximation of my location. And the idea was that they would also, they would then match that data or attempt to match that data against the IP address-based location

of all of TikTok and ByteDance's employees, which also meant, by the way, they were watching where all of them were going. But the theory is that if my phone, if my TikTok account showed that I was in a cafe at a certain time and a TikTok or ByteDance employee was in that cafe at the same time or a library or whatever public space, that might be a clue as to who was leaking information to me. Apparently, they didn't actually get any leads on their leak investigation from pulling this data. But the fact that they pulled it meant that it was possible sometime between October and December when they concluded their investigation for individuals in China who work for ByteDance to pull the IP address-based location of individual U.S. citizens.

Such as you, that they're able to do it. Again, they had to be able to be accessed. It's interesting because years ago, there was someone had Yahoo called me and said they were surveilling me, meaning actually physically following me. Try was, who knows? You know, who knows, right? That's the thing.

This is what these people do. But in this case, pulling your actual data and this group employees who've all been fired, their bosses didn't know. Do you believe them? I know that some bosses knew. Some of the people who were fired were the bosses of other people who were fired. So clearly there was some senior knowledge. I don't know exactly which executives knew what thing. access to that team. So that team can't pull that kind of data anymore. But how many teams like that team exist? And this team, it was sort of part of their job to figure out who was leaking. So they

sort of thought they were doing their job, but it turns out that they were using data in a way that really makes us concerned. And so are there other teams that sort of think they're doing their job that could be pulling data that could be putting people at risk? teams that sort of think they're doing their job, that could be pulling data, that could be putting people at risk. Nice to meet you, Emily. So there's kind of what I'll call the espionage threat. It sounds like when they spy on journalists, as they were with you, that's the espionage threat. And most social media companies, in one way or another, have been accused of or been proven sort of guilty of engaging in this. They have all this data. It's hard to resist the temptation to, you know, you can see how these bad decisions get made.

Oh my gosh, there's an existential threat to the company. Someone's leaking confidential information. Let's find the leaker. That's our right. And you can see how one bad decision leads to more bad decisions. But the other threat, and I would argue it's the bigger one, is the propaganda threat. And that's not access to user data as much as it's access to the algorithm, such that you could just elegantly put your thumb on the scale of anti-American content. What are your thoughts on this as the threat of propaganda versus espionage. I agree that it's the bigger and more complicated threat for a couple reasons. First of all, there's a strong argument that the Chinese government could get my IP address another way if they really wanted to.

Data brokers can sell it to them, right? But there aren't that many people or entities that have access to sort of subtle control over what millions of people are seeing each day. So I agree with you that I think that's bigger. It's also we might not know if it were happening. Obviously, there's content that's critical of the Chinese government on TikTok today. But we don't know whether it's being subtly downranked or other content is being subtly upranked. So we don't have evidence that TikTok is manipulating its algorithm to serve the Chinese government. The closest we have is I reported a story last year when I was still at BuzzFeed about another ByteDance app called Top Buzz.

It was a news aggregator app. People who previously worked for ByteDance told me that the TopBuzz app would sometimes pin or promote or sort of send to the top of the feed content that shared sort of pro-China messages. And this was soft stuff, like this is a cute panda or this is a great place to go on vacation. ByteDance denied that that happened, but multiple former employees told me that it happened and how it happened. And so that's sort of the closest we've seen to a direct allegation that ByteDance has ever used its international apps anyway. We wouldn't know, though. Right. Right. But we wouldn't know. That's the whole point of this stuff, is it's very subtle. In this case, I want to just get back to the access things, because the idea of tech companies monitoring journalists, again, as Scott said, is not new. And they all do it at Harvard.

Mark Zuckerberg allegedly used Facebook data to read the emails of Harvard Crimson journalists who are writing about his drama with the Winklevoss twins. Facebook was accused of people there looking at ex-girlfriends and stuff like that. I remember in the early days, Uber had the God view that everybody was watching and they were watching journalists. I think they said, I was, Travis Callen, one of the executives said, oh, I know where you went, like that kind of stuff. Is it, and I know I've been tracked in some way. I don't use these things as much as you were doing in this case. Do you think it's a, what do you think the impact is? How did you feel when this was happening? Because it does create, I mean, Scott said they feel like they have a right to do it because someone's asked

with me. It was because I had all their internal memos. They wanted to figure out who was giving them to me. What was the impact on you? It certainly didn't make me want to report on them less. I think when a company is trying that hard to keep you from getting information, as a journalist, you're more determined to go with the information. I also just think it was a terrible, bad decision. I mean, Scott called it a bad decision, and I think that's exactly what it is here. Because these are two companies. This is an entity that's trying so hard to get the government and the public to believe that it is not spying on people.

And this was such an unforced error. I don't think it ever, like when companies spy on journalists, and to your point, many of them have, it comes out and it looks really bad for the company. So like companies, come on, like, you know, this is going to end badly if you do it. You know, it's probably not going to get you that much information. Why on earth did they think this was a good idea? Well, they do think they can stop whistleblowers. In one case, I think Carol Bartz was the CEO. They were implicating someone who didn't leak to me.

And I called them and I said, I've never done this, but this is not a person who leaked to me. And if you fire them, I'm going to make sure you pay the price for being wrong, right? I'll actually come out and say this wasn't a source of mine. How do you stay safe online now when you're, because you want to use this app because you're covering it, right? I'll actually come out and say this wasn't a source of mine. How do you stay safe online now when you're, because you want to use this app because you're covering it, right? I do not have the app on my phone. Oh, you don't? Well, neither do I. So that's one thing you do. What else do you think you have to do? Do you worry about where you go or that they're continuing to monitor you? Are you in a great shape? Because they won't. They'll

say stay away from her even if she breaks stories. I assume there are lots of people who want access to my communications. And so I try to take all the reasonable steps we can. Use Signal, folks. I use encrypted email sometimes. And a lot of it's also about meeting sources where they're at because sources have different strategies for staying safe. And at the end of the day, they probably know what they're afraid of more than you do. And so I have had sources communicate with me in ways that I wouldn't have thought of. What, like a dead drop? I'm not going to tell you. Okay. I hope it's a dead drop. I love it. But I think we do have to meet sources where they are and help them do whatever they need to do to stay safe without sort of, obviously, we can't tell sources what to do. That wouldn't be smart and it wouldn't be right. They were spying on me. It was so ridiculous.

And they were so stupid and clottish in the thing. There's also, someone brought up your status as a former Facebook employee. Facebook's obviously thrilled that this is all happening. How do you think about that? Explain that so people understand it. I think it's ridiculous. I've reported a bit on Facebook and Meta too. And you can see from my reporting that I don't pull punches against Facebook and Meta.

I think they have a lot of problems and should do a lot of things better. But I think a lot of the issues that TikTok faces, not all of them, but a lot of them are faced by other companies as well. I mean, I think a lot of the data security things that TikTok could do better, Meta could also do better. And of course, all of the sort of content moderation, privacy versus security, like all of these tradeoffs are tradeoffs that all of the companies are dealing with. And so I think it's, you know, hopefully, the fact that I have worked at these companies in policy can give me like a more granular understanding of what's going on. 100%. Zoe Schiffer at Platformer. I think she knows more because she's a techie who works at Casey Newton's platformer. I think it gives her a thing up. Emily, what do you think happens here? If you had to predict or speculate, there's been so much discussion around a ban or a spin. What do you think is going to happen? How do you think this plays out? I think a spin or a sale. The Chinese government could try to prevent that through tweaking its export laws or saying ByteDance doesn't have sufficient licensing in order to sell a recommendations algorithm, which is something that they sort of tinkered with before. And there also aren't that many companies with enough cash to buy TikTok.

And there also aren't that many companies with enough cash to buy TikTok. And the ones who do have enough cash to buy TikTok, like Google, might have an antitrust problem if they tried. So it's going to be complicated, but I don't think anyone wants a ban here. Is it going to happen? What was the mood on the Hill? You were there at the hearing. They were citing you, too. I thought they thought they were ridiculous. I thought they were ridiculous, too, but maybe it's just me. They often would ask a question and then not allow the question to be

answered. And at that point, you're not asking a question, at least not one that you actually want to hear the answer to. And I thought that was frustrating, but it was a big tech hearing. There was a lot of theater. Yeah. It was a startling lack of evidence. That to me, I mean, to make TikTok look like a victim is really hard here in a lot of ways. And I think that the lack of evidence is my problem. And they hung a lot on you, too, which I think you wouldn't do. I think you'd be much more even handed on what happened there, which you have been. Is that effective of Congress doing that sort of, you know, banging all these drums?

It depends what they're trying to do. Yeah. So what do you think they're trying to do? I mean, Congress has long had big tech hearings, pulled people in, made a lot of noise, and nothing actually came of it. I think the mood here is a little different. I think there are a lot of people who do want to do something. And there's also a sort of question of which organ of the government is actually the one making choices here. There's sort of a weird thing that happened where TikTok told the press last week, maybe it was more than last week now, maybe it was two weeks

ago, that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, with which they've been negotiating for years, had basically rejected Project Texas as a solution and was saying, by chance, you're going to have to divest or separate from TikTok or else face a potential ban. And then TikTok's CEO went on the Hill, which is, if anything, probably a more hostile audience, and made the case for Project Texas, which the Biden administration, per TikTok, is rejecting. And so it wasn't totally clear to me who Sochu was talking to or who he was trying to persuade. But I think the Biden administration and Siphius have been looking at this for a long time.

And Siphius is the real deal. They're the actual techies. Yeah, but go ahead. And they appear to think that an arrangement where ByteDance continues to own TikTok is insufficient. They don't seem to be willing to go there. And if they're not willing to go there, I'm curious why Sho Chu is arguing to Congress that they should go there, because I think Congress is less likely to do that. So I think it will be interesting to see what the Biden administration and CFIUS do

in the coming weeks, whether we hear from President Biden himself on this and whether Congress tries to actually pass legislation in the meantime. Do you think, I mean, you've gotten to know this company pretty well. How would you describe the culture in contrast with some of the other social platforms

that we've kind of done a 180. We sort of thought they were our heroes, and then they kind of turned to the villains. Do you feel as if you know the other companies well enough to sort of compare and contrast their cultures as it relates to this lack of a better term, rationalizing bad actions? Well, I'll say this about TikTok, and it's true of the other companies, but it's even truer of TikTok. It has grown incredibly fast. And when you grow that fast and you hire that many people, you are standing up so many teams. There was a team stood up last week that does the thing that your team is doing now. And it just causes a huge amount of chaos.

And I think that's true at all of chaos. And I think that that's true at all of the companies. I think that's true at Facebook. I think it's true at Google. But Facebook and Google have more time to sort of figure out how to make the left hand talk to the right hand, talk to the, you know, 14 other hands. And I think just because TikTok has grown this fast, it's a very chaotic place to work, and there's not always necessarily a really clear chain of command for every decision that needs to be made. And I think that can lead to what we call in the tech industry thrash. Oh, thrash. That's a great word. Fantastic. They talk about things being thrashy all the time. I use it with people.

It's chaos. Yeah. The tech and the skateboarding community is that word. That's like chaos, right? That's essential. I didn't know that this was a tech word until I started saying it to non-pay people. They're like, what are you talking about thrash? And when things are thrashy, like everyone's going back and forth and there's no clear decision and we don't know what's going on.

Yeah, it's chaos. Chaos. That's what we call it in our world. Okay, well, this is fascinating, Emily. It's really great that you're in digital media. John is lucky to have you, just so you know. Congrats on your work. Yeah, congrats.

And let's see, we're excited to see more. Thank you. And congrats on being spied on. Hasn't this made your career? No, it just hasn't. I didn't ask to be spied on. I would argue it's been good for your brand because it shows that very powerful people are worried about you for a reason.

Yeah. But at the same time, I got to say, I think you're being very fair to them, too. You're not like, you know, it's not, you don't seem like, I cannot believe this. It's a big company. And I think there are a lot of, there are a lot of people with a lot, like, trying to do good. There are a lot of people trying to make money. It's chaotic, and sometimes bad decisions are made. You and Harry and Meghan just want your privacy.

You just want your privacy. Yes, yeah. But listen, Emily, can I give you only one word of advice? It's usually, I said this about what was happening at Twitter this week, but it's always the case, is intelligence has its limitations and stupidity is infinite. These companies are much more thrashy than you realize once you start to cover them. That was one word. That was one word of advice. Thrashy. Anyway, Emily Baker White's work is in Forbes. You can follow her on Twitter at

eBakerWhite. Emily's a gangster. Well done. Thank you, Emily. Thanks, both. All right, Scott, doesn't it make you feel good, all these amazing journalists, young journalists? Can we adopt her? No, but also Zoe Schiffer. There's so many great journalists. I feel good for the journalism profession when I talk to reporters like this.

It's very heartening. And by the way, Yahoo is spying on you? Oh, yeah. I forgot. That's about as threatening as like American Samoa declaring war on you. It's like... It was at the time. It was at the time. It was at the time.

To be clear, I just want to say, when you say, well, Yahoo was spying on me, that's literally the weakest flex in the world. At the time, it was a big company. Yahoo was spying on me. Let me just say, I took down three CEOs, I believe. Anyway, we'll see. It was just ridiculous.

It was so comical and stupid. But it was, at the time, worth a lot, and a lot of people lost a lot of money. MySpace, Lyft has been tracking me. Uber was tracking. It was a problem at the time. I agree. You always try to denigrate my achievements, and it's fine.

I'm here to keep it real. Yeah, right. It was a big deal at the time. Obviously, it's not now. I don't even mention it. Well, you're a big deal at this time. Oh, okay, whatever. I don't take people down anymore.

I just comment on people taking people down. Let's not have another argument, okay? Because people will talk. We get to not have makeup sex again. Okay, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails. A win that I don't have to have makeup sex. Okay, let's hear some wins and fails.

I'm going to go first. What's happening in Israel? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister this week. This is a fail. It's a fail for him after an official publicly opposed a plan to weaken the nation's judiciary system. Led to outrage.

Departing flights were grounded at the airport there on Monday as protesters and labor unions rallied against the plan. They are the win. The thousands, 100,000 protesters blocked Tel Aviv's main highway. The Israeli orchestra was performing in the street. A lot of these ministers of Netanyahu, there are reports that he's suspending the plan, which could get him in trouble with the far-right members of his coalition. Its tech companies are protesting that are in Israel. It's causing real and serious problems. What a fail on behalf. It's inexplicable that he's continuing to be this stubborn.

And the Israeli people handling this, you know, there's instances of fires and things like that. But in general, what a way to handle a situation like this. You know, there's instances of fires and things like that, but in general, what a way to handle a situation like this. It's sort of a little taste of what might come if Trump ever got back in office in a lot of ways, I was thinking. So anyway, Benjamin Netanyahu, it's time to go, and good for you Israeli people for doing this. Very prominent people on all sides of this are coming out against what this was coming, and it's just the way a democracy needs to work and at some risk, I would assume. So anyway, that's my win. Yeah. So my fail is the same as yours, was this kind of democracy to autocracy shuffle

inspired by Donald Trump. Bolsonaro tried it, and now Netanyahu is trying it. I always thought Netanyahu was conservative, but I thought he believed in democracy. I think that he has literally just shit in the pond that is his legacy. This is nothing but an attempt to replace the Supreme Court. It is really damaging to the region and to democracies globally, because Israel, in addition to having an incredible culture and creating what is arguably one of the most productive societies out of dirt, and was always seen as a real beacon of democracy. And to just say, well, the Supreme Court and our laws

don't match my political opportunism, so I'm going to try and dismantle the Supreme Court. And you're right, Israel, this attack on our institutions, I mean, institutions, there's, I forget who said it, institutions are just the long shadows of people. And the people, the Israeli people are stepping in here. On my way home from dinner last night in London, I saw a bunch of Israeli flags outside of, I don't know if it was an embassy or someone's home. things, which usually you don't. Probably they'd say a lot more if it wasn't Israel in a lot of ways. And they have all the flags. It's kind of beautiful in a way. It is, but it's still, Israel is a vulnerable country, and this kind of instability is dangerous too, right? It's very

dangerous just to get out of a corruption, you know, or say that, speaking of which, essentially is saying that the justices have too much power and that they're too captive of the left, which is such a, it's the same thing that Trump was doing at the rally. The left was doing it, let's celebrate the insurrectionists, let's take down government. It's the same little song that they're doing it. I don't think people realize how powerful a role model, both positively and negatively, America serves. I don't think Netanyahu would have had the audacity to try and dismantle the democracy that is Israel if he hadn't looked at America and said,

well, if they can almost get away with it, maybe I can. It just, this democracy to autocracy shift is rolling across the world. And Israel, which is arguably one of the strongest democracies in the world, is also not, you know, totally immune from this. So, anyways, I loved your win and fail, and I just want to echo it. I won't add to it. I think that's exactly right. There's also the far right there. The far right minister says he will resign if the overhaul legislation is stopped.

A lot of these people are under investigation themselves, including Netanyahu. But he said he's going to freeze the legislation. It doesn't mean he's giving it up. But they're going to, you know, the far right minister just right now is looking at Haaretz, says Netanyahu has agreed to postpone judicial overhaul. And so- That probably kills it. He probably postpones it and never brings it up again. They miscalculated here.

Yeah. This was, the Israeli people have said, sorry, democracy kind of works for all of us. Yeah, yeah. We'll see. There has been an enormously inspiring pushback on this. My win is, as somebody who's been talking a lot about the struggles that young men are facing, I think the narrative has really shifted

in a very positive direction over the course of the last 24 or 36 months. It was kind of the narrative or highlighting the struggles of young men. I think you have to give, I'm trying to separate the person from the politics here and recognize that the conversation was initially somewhat catalyzed by Jordan Peterson. And I do think he deserves some credit for catalyzing the conversation. I think that a

lot of it, hold on. I think a lot of it was couched in thinly veiled conservatism and red pilling. And, but he does deserve credit for catalyzing a conversation. Unfortunately, the conversation from that point went to very dark places and a lot of TikTok celebrities picked up the torch and basically wrapped pro-male narrative in misogyny, or they used it as a front for what was thinly veiled misogyny. And then I do think it's taken a much more positive turn. And I would argue that the turning point, I think recently, was Richard Reeve's book. And Richard just has this wonderful- Good. Thank you for citing someone terrific. Go ahead. Well, I'm glad you approve. But Richard has this wonderful statement, and I parroted him on Bill Maher this Friday,

and I should have credited him, so I want to credit him right now. But he says something that is really powerful, and that is compassion is not a zero-sum game. And that just because he said, and it makes sense, right? If civil rights was not a zero-sum game, it didn't take away from white people. Gay marriage has not taken away from heteronormative marriage. They've both been accretive to all those things. And having compassion for young men does not mean you can't continue to have compassion for the important strides and the continued need to work on the problems facing girls

and women in our nation. But I just love, he has turned this narrative to something much more positive and productive. And you are seeing elected officials talk about the need for vocational training. We don't talk about this, but the Infrastructure Act is going to create, 70% of the jobs that will be created will be created for men who don't have college degrees. And that's something to be celebrated because a lot of these men have seen a lot of their jobs or a lot of job opportunities go away. But anyways, my win is this discussion

around the importance of talking about struggling men and young men in the US has taken a more positive arc. And people don't immediately have an understandable gag reflex of advocating for men as somehow being anti-women. It isn't. So, anyways, my win is I think the narrative, largely shaped by some really wonderful work by Richard Reeves and others, has moved the narrative away from this tick-tock, thinly-veiled misogyny to a real open and honest discussion

around how we have more compassion for any group that is really struggling or falling. I will take that. That sounds good. I like it. I like it. It's bigger. It's bigger rather than someone's a grieved victim. I would agree. We don't agree on Jordan Peterson, but nonetheless. But I really like that, Scott. And I agree, Richard Rees, it's worth reading that book. It's really quite something. Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVID. Okay, Scott, that's the show. And you are a creative to me. Let me just say that. I like the word creative. That's right. Thank you. Let's argue and get

more media, by the way. We got more downloads. That's incredible. I hate you. I hate you. We'll be back. I hate you so much. God, I'm going to find you and hit you. Anyway. That's the menopause speaking. Hey, that was a long time ago. We'll be back on Friday for more TMI. Scott, read us out. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Andretat engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Neil Saverio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Compassion is not a zero-sum game.