I think the UK just demonstrated more institutional courage in one morning than the entire US Department of Justice has managed in five years.
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway, and I am a trad wife.
I made bread and butter this morning. Butter from scratch, and I made this delicious bread. Let me unwrap my...
You're really proud of it. You sent me a photo of it.
I know. Well, I am. I made it. I know it sounds really stupid, but I get... Here's the whole bread. You can see it. Everybody see it. It's a loaf of... it's a baguette. This today is a baguette. And I also made butter with a marble and a jar and some heavy cream last night at dinner. Fresh butter. I'm going to make cultured butter next. I get on Instagram and I'm obsessed with watching food videos and I save them and I'm starting to make all of...
What's the next thing you're going to make?
We're going to probably make another bread. Bread. We're going for bread and butter. We like bread and butter because I'm a trad wife. So, anyway, there you go.
Yeah. No, I think I like that white supremacist baking company. And he said that his family had a long history of being in bread.
Oh, I can't believe you have a bread joke. I have to say it takes me out of...
Takes you out of your head.
Out of my head. Like, it was advice, you know, from doing this series that's coming out. I spend too much time in my head. And so Zeke Emanuel suggested he makes honey. I was like, I'm going to do things that isn't in my head. And I have to say, baking is really... you know, you have to pay attention and I'm learning. And so it's totally... you cannot pick up... I mean, I have the phone there with the rest as they're talking to me, but it's a useful use of the phone, I guess. I don't know what else to say. Anyway, I really like it.
So, two muffins are in the oven when one turns to the other and says, 'Man, it's so hot in here today.' And the other muffin says, 'Holy [__], it's a [__] talking muffin.'
I can't believe you have bakery jokes, Kara.
My wife has been sleeping around with other men. Our church pastor is coming over tonight to offer advice, and my wife is baking cookies, but I'm embarrassed because the cookies are homemade. I could do this all night.
Why do you have them? Are you on the... Did you suddenly get on the internet and start saying baking jokes? Is that what happened there?
No, I have an incredible memory for 1970s Rams playoff losses and for dad jokes. That part of my brain is alive and well.
Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today, so let's dig in. This is an astonishing development. Former Prince Andrew has been... we call him former Prince Andrew right now, used to be known as Prince... has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office by British police. You know he should be arrested for something else, but this is what they could get him on. The full details of the arrest are not clear at the time of the taping, but former Prince has been under increasing pressure after the latest release of the Epstein files. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, which is his name, was previously stripped of his royal title due to his involvement with Epstein. I mean, finally, after many, many years of this. Meanwhile, Casey Wasserman has decided to put his talent agency and marketing firm up for sale amidst criticism of his past relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. There's a ton of people... I sent you the list of people that are, you know, obviously... Larry Summers stepped down. Dean Kamen is having trouble, he's the famous robotics guy. All manner of people, the former prime minister of Norway. Everyone but the guy who said 'they let you do it, grab them by the [__]' guy is not being investigated. But this is really interesting. So, you're not in England right now. But explain to people what this is like, what this is akin to arresting a royal.
I think the UK just demonstrated more institutional courage in one morning than the entire US Department of Justice has managed in five years.
And it's just ironic. You know, my attitude is, okay, now do Epstein's flight logs. I mean...
Yep. This is... I mean, some of it's probably pretty political. The crown is probably looking to try and renew their brand in an era where monarchies are fading. This really is the last monarchy.
And also the prime minister is feeling heat and potentially calls for his resignation. But I think that the UK, quite frankly, is actually showing some fidelity to the notion that no one is above the law.
Yep. Absolutely. I agree. One of the things that's really important is the investigation should have gone on. These investigations that should have happened... how badly prosecutors over the entire period of time, from down in Florida to now, have [__] this up. And in terms of... I think the moment with Pam Bondi, and she had never talked to those people, like all of them are liars. Like, I don't know, why don't you do an investigation? And so she's obviously not going to because she's bought and paid for. But the fact that they didn't do investigations here on, as you say, the people who are criminally liable and the other people who are getting... you know, Bill Gates had to pull out of something because of this. Look, that'll play itself out because that's about... I don't think it's about shaming. It's about bad judgment. People are going to have to pay for their actions eventually. But the criminal investigations that haven't gone on here, the ability... and I have to say we owe a debt of gratitude to Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie for pushing this through. And the redactions that this Bondi Justice Department is doing are, you know... Ted Lieu, who is a trained lawyer, got up and said there is credible evidence that Donald Trump... this is what he is saying, I have not seen these things... that he sexually attacked... what is the right way to say...
Assaulted an underage girl. And for him to get up and say that, knowing that he's a lawyer, is really something. And of course Trump is saying he's exonerated. He's not exonerated. He hasn't been investigated properly, right? And so, you know, when he said... let me just read this again, maybe just maybe, as this penny drops. Maybe it wasn't locker room talk, right? Do you remember that? I mean, this is what he said. Let me read it. I don't even... wait. 'And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the [__]. You can do anything.' I don't know if he did anything, but I'd like to have investigators really. I don't know if they need an independent investigator or...
Special to me. I never like those things, but in this case, everybody's dirty, right? And certainly Pam Bondi has no business being in the job she's in. They should have a special counsel, release all the files, and especially the criminal stuff. Keep it as... maybe not release those because they really need to, and it might not lead to anything, but to show that we have what the UK is doing. And there may be a statute of limitations, by the way, Scott, on this stuff. I don't know.
That's what's kind of interesting about this specific case with Prince Andrew is that... or the person formerly known as Prince...
Yeah, the... I know it is kind of funny, but he's not funny. He's gross.
But when the feds come for you and say you've clearly engaged in criminal activity here, they usually don't get you for what you know they didn't. They got Al Capone for money laundering or for...
And Prince Andrew isn't being accused of sexual assault. He's being accused of passing state secrets to a convicted felon. But that's the point. The point is if you commit crimes, our reach is far and our memory is long. And now I have a different... to me this is how you handle the Epstein files, and that is I don't think the Epstein files should have been released. I think that the Department of Justice...
Gets sullied. I know what you're thinking, right?
I think the Department of Justice and a team of lawyers, including outside lawyers contracted for this very important case, should have gone through these things with a fine-tooth comb and said, 'Okay, we're going to communicate to the public what is in these files vis-à-vis grand jury indictments and prosecutions.' Because I think what has happened is... I think we have been so played here. Kara, if I was advising the Trump administration on how to dilute the depravity here and to get him out of this, I would be doing exactly what they're doing. And that is by dripping it out sclerotic-ly, incorrectly. Some stuff's redacted, some stuff isn't. And then we all chase. We're like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Wherever we see movement and violence and ring-light algorithm shaming, we start talking about [__] Deepak Chopra.
We should talk about him too, but go ahead.
I disagree. I think the Department of Justice is there for criminal indictments and to create incentives such that if you have a daughter and you're a single mother and your daughter gets invited to some [__] island, that there's incentives that people who feel entitled to rape your daughter won't. Yes. Whether or not someone is a creep or not is a distant, distant second. And all of this [__] has diluted the criminal activity.
I don't think it's [__]. I think it's part of the same thing. And this is like... let me just say, who's the person that said Epstein had legs? This whole thing had legs a long time ago when everyone thought it was going to go away. This is one at the heart of the MAGA infrastructure. As I noted, it is also at the heart of a lot of... it's true, right? Some of it's true, some of it's not, but it is part of a whole movement around corruption of the elites. And this is the worst version of it. And I think we do need to talk about people. Andrew did this because he...
I'm on board. And Andrew is being criminally prosecuted.
But I'm saying he did it because he thought he didn't, as you say, he's not bound by the law. Right. Right. Now, breaking: New Mexico investigators open a probe into whether Epstein ordered the burial of bodies on his Zorro Ranch property. We need to investigate this fully and wherever it takes us. For it to have to just get out and get everyone's attention, the normal people, not the QAnon people. I think this has so many drip, drip, drip legs that it's absolutely going to reach Trump.
This should have been dozens if not hundreds of indictments and prosecutions from an institution we trust.
That's right. We don't trust the appointment of a special counsel.
Saying a cabinet member didn't look to commit a crime, but when he went under oath in front of Congress and bragged that he had nothing to do with this person.
No, he did that on a podcast, but go ahead.
Well, he... Oh, really? He hasn't done it under oath?
No. No, under oath he told the truth. So I feel that all of the liar... I feel all of the shaming feels really good and it does say something about these individuals. I think it is diluting and weakening the case against the actual criminals here.
Well, I don't know. I think you can do both. I can just walk and chew gum at the same time. And well, I think, as I was saying, let me move to the next thing because it's part of this. Everyone's tired of these [__] rich people taking everything. Like, so right now Mark Zuckerberg took the stand this week in this landmark social media addiction trial defending Meta against claims Instagram was designed to hook young users and damage mental health. Zuckerberg said in his testimony that Instagram was not a harmful product. It's a valuable service. Of course he'd say that. He said that all along. He believes he's navigated the safety of young users in a reasonable way. He has not. He also defended the company's decision to allow beauty filters even after experts warned they could harm teen girls, including people internally. When pressed about old emails and growth targets, Zuckerberg repeatedly pushed back, saying the same answer more than a dozen times. 'You're mischaracterizing this.' This is an old Mark Zuckerberg trick. We don't understand him. Neither of us are lawyers and it's a really complex case. And what... two things: it's not just Facebook, it is also YouTube is involved in this one. Others settled, other social media sites seem to have settled here. So, and it's not clear if YouTube is going to settle before this, but this idea of whether they're entertainment or they're actually addictive. The lawyers for the tech company sides are going to try to portray this young woman who got on Instagram when she was nine as troubled, had nothing to do with social media. She's alleging that social media dragged her down a hole of shame and self-esteem. It's a jury trial. Putting Mark in front of a jury helps her. He's not great at that. And he also... the judge wasn't happy to see Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses worn by several members of Zuckerberg's team, which I thought was super [__] obnoxious to do, for Zuckerberg to use it as a marketing event. She warned anyone wearing smart glasses to be held in contempt, noting the concern about facial recognition of it. So, just thoughts on this case because I think it's really... there's thousands more behind it. By the way...
I think Jon Ossoff, who's running for Senate, has come up with a brilliant term, and that is a lot of how Democrats lose is this stereotyping and keyboard virtue signaling that if you like... all white people are racist, all billionaires are evil, and all young men are sexist, fine, they're going to leave the party and you're going to have Vance as president. What Ossoff has done is really smart. He has started describing this group of people as... he doesn't say the billionaire class, he says the Epstein class. Because the majority of Americans like the idea of being rich someday and believe that if they get richer, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to become depraved weirdos. So I think that is a really powerful distinction, that there is a class of people... most rich people I do not believe are like this, but there is a class of people who believe they are, again, as we talk about...
Protected by the law but not bound by it. There's smoking guns everywhere, but the real smoking gun I would focus on if I were advising the prosecution is their own internal research.
So let's go through a body...
It's not a prosecution. It's a civil lawsuit. It's civil, but the people... the plaintiff's attorney or whatever you would call them... their own internal research regarding body image harm. 'We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.' This is according to a 2019 internal Meta presentation. 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. That was a March 2020 internal presentation. Meta's leaked internal research showed that 32% of teen girls, one-third, said Instagram made them feel worse about their bodies and the company knew it. Addiction by design. Meta employee internal message: 'I worry that driving session incentivizes us to make our products more addictive without providing much more value. How to keep someone returning over and over the same behavior each day. Intermittent rewards are most effective. Think slot machines.' In focus groups, teens told us they didn't like the amount of time they spent on the app and they felt like they had to be present. They often felt addicted and know that what they're seeing is bad for their mental health, but they feel unable to stop themselves. On depression and anxiety, teens blamed Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression, said another slide in a 2019 presentation. 'This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.' This is their own research.
They also... their own research showed they have 4 million kids between 10 and 12 on the platform when it's not supposed to. 13 is when they're not... they didn't have age verification, which isn't very good anyway, on the platform until 2019. This is what kills me with these people. It's like, how did... how did 4 million... It's like, oh, 4 million kids got into liquor stores somehow. Are you [__] kidding me? 4 million kids. How did that happen without them knowing it? When they know everything that is happening on that platform whenever they go into this... I don't... you know, kids can get into things. You know, my kid just got into the refrigerator and took a... you know, took a cookie the other day. That's what they act like. And in their own... Let me tell you, I can't tell you how many times I have harangued Mark Zuckerberg on safety and people inside the company harangued him on safety. He just didn't agree. And because he cannot be fired. If the board decides to fire him, he can fire the board and appoint a new board that likes him. He can make decisions on his own. And we are all subject to decisions of one person who has no accountability on him because he's been making bad decisions, whether it's about antisemitism, whether it's about anything. And he always... and he did this again. And I sighed... I sighed for free speech or not, you know, the filter thing, like, 'Well, I decided not to act paternalistic.' Okay, Mark, don't act paternalistic toward adult users. We get it. But you absolutely have to act paternalistic towards young people. Like the safety issues about young... the fact that they still stick to their idiotic guns when it comes to young people. Let me mention another big tech suit that just broke. Apple just got sued by West Virginia for alleged failure to curb child sexual abuse materials on iOS devices and cloud services. They should sue Grok. They should sue all of them for these things. And this is the way these companies are going to go down like the cigarette companies. And they still... to me, and I'll stop ranting, his testimony showed me once again he is absolutely intractable in his decision that everything he decides is correct. And it is simply not. It is simply not. And let me be fair, YouTube is bigger, but it's all the same to me. They're all enormous and deleterious to the impact on our kids. Period.
Just one more piece of data. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of 8th grade through 12th graders exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms increased by 33%. In the same period, the suicide rate for girls in that age group increased by 65%. By 2015, 92% of teens owned a smartphone. And today, here and now, let's talk a little bit about young men. Young men between the ages of 20 and 30 are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates. The data here... there are hundreds if not thousands of families whose kids have killed themselves. There are millions of families struggling with anxiety and depression. And there's a lot of different factors here, but this definitively has made things worse. The good news is that I do think finally, and I've said this before and I've been wrong, but I'm going to say it again. I think the worm has turned. And that is typically it takes 20 to 30 years before the public moves in on a well-funded addictive substance that is creating harm across our society. It took us 30 years with tobacco. It took us 20 years with opiates. It looks like it's going to take us about 20 years here. But what you're seeing is it's getting tied up in politics in sort of a good way. And that is, I think the tariffs... I think the ultimate reciprocal tariff from different nations is going to be they're going to start banning US tech companies and they're going to use this as a valid excuse. They're going to say, 'You're out. We're age-gating. We're banning this,' or they're going to ban an entire platform. But it does feel like we are at a turning point.
Well, the only... this is a jury trial. This is what's really interesting because what I think is going to be the problem for them is... and by the way, sometimes like when some of the FTC stuff, I see why Facebook or whatever company won in certain ones of them, right? But jury members either they have kids and get it, know it in their bones, or they themselves are addicted and call it problematic usage when it's everybody who... you... I'm addicted to food videos on Threads, Mark. I can't stop watching them. And I am not an addictive... I don't drink. I don't take drugs. I am absolutely addicted. There is no question in my mind. And same with you, right?
Some of it's good. And I use... most of the time I use... I was looking at the time spent. I use it for texting, like bothering you, for example. But a lot of it is addiction. And this jury is going to hand you your head if you keep insisting it's problematic usage. We don't think you're totally at fault. I'm sure this poor girl had problems in her family life, but this is a contributing factor. Just like people can have bad families and smoke cigarettes, it is part of a thing that is making us worse as a country. And the same thing with Apple. They should get sued. They should all get sued and then we can have it out in court. Same thing with the Epstein victims and the people and the perpetrators. Let's have it all out in court. Let's do it. Like, if we lose, we lose, but if we win, we win. And that to me is the fairest thing.
I think we'll... I think it'll start with the kids. What I'm curious is if it starts to...
Melt upwards, and that is...
Well, the kids are the biggest problem, right? And that's the one we're most sensitive to.
That's where cigarettes started. But go ahead.
I also think there's a real issue around the coarsening of our discourse. I think it's making us all more anxious and making us all hate each other more. I think if you type into OpenAI 'how to ruin youth' or 'how to undermine the power of the United States,' both times it'll come back with something that resembles social media. There's just... people... there's a reason, and a lot of it's economic, that young people feel worse and worse about America. But social media is basically... it's like when you're in the third grade and two kids start having words and everyone surrounds them and shoves them and says 'fight,' encourages them to fight. That's happening a trillion times a day on these platforms. It's turning even amongst... I'm spending a lot... I'm thinking a lot about how ways the left might [__] it up and lose in '26 and '28. And one of those ways is the algorithms do a really good job of convincing people who agree on 90% of things to find the 10% they don't agree on and figure out a way to get them fighting and hating each other. You know, it's just... it really is ripping at the fabric of society. I think our adversaries are sitting back and watching this and just loving it.
Yeah. I'm going to read from a very famous author. Let me just read this. 'All these companies began with a rosy credo to change the world. But they have done that in ways they did not imagine by weaponizing pretty much everything that could be weaponized. They have mutated human connection so that connecting people has often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord into an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized social media. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civil discourse and they have weaponized most of all politics.' I wrote that in 2018. I got screamed at by Facebook and the tech people for saying that they were digital arms dealers. That's what they are.
I'm just telling you, it's just like... enough. Enough. And it begins... the cigarette companies began with Joe Camel, them using cartoons. They were that cynical that they used cartoons to attract kids to smoke. It's the same thing and they need to stop. And same thing, and by the way, let me not just pick on Mark Zuckerberg. Apple, you need to do something about CSAM. Grok, you should be taken to court. Google, YouTube needs to be fixed in ways that kids don't become incredibly addicted to what you're doing. And to pretend otherwise just because you have money, you can run over all these senators and congressmen, you're not going to run over all of us. That's my feel. Anyway, that's enough. I'm going to stop. All right, we're going to go on a quick break. When we get back, Cole Bayer takes on Paramount and the FCC.
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Scott, we're back. Late-night host Stephen Colbert is calling out CBS and its parent company Paramount for not standing up to the bullies. Colbert revealed this week that CBS lawyers told him he could not air an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. There were concerns about running afoul of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, the [__] as I like to call him, and the FCC's equal time rule. Colbert ended up posting the interview on YouTube, where as of this recording it has nearly 7.5 million views. The broadcast typically gets around 2.5 million viewers. This is just one single interview. Colbert summed up the irony on his Tuesday episode. Let's listen.
So, we obeyed our network and put the interview on YouTube where it's gotten millions of views. And I can see why. Talarico is an interesting guy. I don't know if he should be the senator, but it was a good discussion. I wish we could have put it on the show where no one would have watched it.
