This is just sort of frat rock on too much human growth hormone.
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Fox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway. Kara, what is on the Washingtonian's 300 most powerful women in Washington list?
I am. I... You didn't see that? No. Are there 300 powerful women in Washington? Except that's not the news. What? It says Kara Swisher, co-host with Scott Galloway for the Pivot podcast. So I am now one of the most powerful women in Washington.
And I knew this was coming because I got comped or comped at the Hay-Adams. Ask around. It's true. They knew it was coming.
And I just want to give advice to all young men about how to become the most powerful woman in Washington. One, first and foremost, just get proximity to a terrifying lesbian with sunglasses.
Excellent. Excellent. Good choice.
And also, it's just pretty obvious. I sat on my back at the elevator at the Washington Park Hyatt. I took three Viagra, hit the elevator up, and I broke the glass ceiling. Kara, I broke the glass ceiling. Also, I'd just like to say...
How you turn my victories into your own dick.
About me. I just like dick jokes and that's what happened. I'd like to say, Justice Sotomayor. Okay. Does she host a podcast? I am more powerful than Justice Sotomayor.
You might be in this particular Supreme Court. Actually, I love how you're pretending you didn't know that list. I'll bet I didn't. I didn't.
I'll bet you're the only person on that list that called a hundred other women and told them they didn't deserve to be on the list.
No, I didn't. I didn't know I got on it. I'm on so many lists now because I'm old, Scott. That's why.
I don't know that one of the 300 most powerful women.
I hate those lists. I hate 300. I'm sorry. I just, I mean, yeah, it's me and Susie Wilds, right? She's got to be on it.
No, no, finally you're on a list with Natalie Harp. That's got to feel good.
Oh, that's nice. See, she is a powerful woman, unfortunately. Um, anyhow, we've got a lot to get to today. There's a lot of news, so I think we need to dig in.
First, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled a new plan for the military in his State of the Force address, including a reduced senior leadership — that's sus — and an end to diversity programs. He also announced Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich will lead a new effort to study the future of warfare. Uh, none of whom I think has been in the Army or Navy or military, but okay. Hegseth also attacked the media over coverage of the Iran war, calling the reporters anti-American losers and saying the reporting amounted to treason. Um, one, but Scott, I'd like to get your reaction to one particular part of the speech. Let's listen to this.
But it's worth saying again so that the fake news understands it. We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fannies, no fatties, no [__], no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals — just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.
Oh man, there's something deeply wrong with him. Anyway, how do you reconcile putting Elon, who has, you know, speaking of weirdos, Palmer Luckey, who is also a weirdo, and Newt Gingrich, who is probably a wimp. I don't think he's a [__]. He's a bit of a fatty. Like, anyway, um, let's speak of this, of what he's doing here from a messaging point of view, Scott, first, and then obviously it's terrifying on many levels because he's incompetent and is in power. He wants a kind of John Wayne cinematic version of macho believing that keeps our nation safe. You can take your roided-up macho, you know, WWE, you know, warrior...
...and give me a 90-pound man or woman in thick glasses with a drone and a Hellfire missile and a command module. Let's see who wins. We fight wars now not as much with brawn but with brains and with people who have a certain level of discipline, a certain level of respect for each other. They acquit themselves professionally. You know, hold your head high, stick to your values. This is just sort of frat rock on, you know, too much human growth hormone. It's just stupid. And all the part that really bothered me, you know, no fatties alone, but no [__]. It's just... who uses that word anymore? Like it's from the '50s or something.
Yeah. And beardos. You're a beardo, apparently. Just so you know. I think you just wanted to rhyme with weirdos. I guess beardos.
Let me see which ones are these are yours. You're not fat. You're not a [__].
I'm a wimp and I'm a, I'm a wimp, a radical and a beard and a beardos.
Or a fatty. All of these things.
Let me see. What am I here? I'm not really fat. I'm a, I don't have a beard. I don't think I'm that weird. Um, I'm not a wimp. I wouldn't say I'm radical. I could be in the army. Anyway, I just, the whole thing is just ridiculous. He's just trying to get rid of women in the military. He's trying to get rid of anyone who doesn't go along. And the issue he has is that he's in a position of power. I'm kind of perplexed since Republican senators are pushing back really hard on him that Trump keeps him in place. I assume he's doing it so he can make some action at the election. That's the only reason presumably. I'm not sure what to say.
Weight standards, grooming standards, and physical toughness map onto a fitness standard. A [__] is a slur targeting a group's identity, not their capability or appearance, essentially, or appearance standard being enforced. Conflating it with fatties is laundering a slur as if it's just another performance metric.
He thought it was funny. You know, they sat around and workshopped it out for 10 minutes. I think it reads as a calculated message, not a gaffe. Repeating nearly the same list a year after the first time — I think it was at Quantico, he addressed the address — suggests this is a deliberate signature, not something that slipped out.
No, no, I don't think so. No, I don't think that. What do you think of this, this group of what, the future of wars? Do you have another commission? They're going to do a, like, I think it's just like a report essentially, and I think it was just a lot of handwaving. Um, you know, Palmer Luckey has, you know, done some really interesting things in the defense area. Newt Gingrich, before he lost his mind, was very digitally oriented. I had spent a lot of time with him. Actually went on the road to introduce the internet to college students many, many moons ago. Um, but he's sort of since become sort of curdled into this like demented little demon. Elon, certainly, you know, rockets, I guess rockets. Elon, I don't know what that has to do with defense, but okay, sure, why not. I think it should be a larger commission. If you want to talk about where war is going, it's perfectly fine to do that. But this is just a bunch of handwaving from my perspective. I don't, I, it seems like not useful.
I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. The problem is it's probably the wrong person overseeing it because the, the biggest, I think arguably the biggest or one of the biggest silver linings around Russia and Ukraine and what we've learned there is I think a Democratic candidate for president should say under the auspices of fiscal responsibility, which is an existential threat. I think there's an opportunity to take our military spending from 1.5 trillion to 600 billion while making it a more lethal fighting force.
Yeah, it is. It's an opportunity, but this is not that.
Agreed. It's the wrong person. He's probably going to ask for more money. But we have a series of platforms that are too big, too expensive. It's basically the military-industrial complex full employment act. And not only that, unfortunately, they have to be manned, which means we have a glass jaw and are afraid to use any of it. You know, the, the bar around the quote-unquote bravery or the missions. It is really easy to demonstrate incredible bravery and bold actions with your strikes when these things aren't manned. Right? The moment you put an individual in a billion-dollar craft, your risk tolerance goes way down. When Ukraine launches a thousand drones against Moscow, they know a thousand of them aren't coming back. They know that. They know that 97% aren't getting through and are getting shot down before they get to their target. You can't take those risks with manned aircraft.
Yeah, you can't. I just, it's like it's an opportunity, right, to change things. And speaking of which, executives from top AI companies have signed what President Trump called a morally binding — he knows all about morals, according — agreement. The agreement encourages companies to, quote, implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities of AI models. It's voluntary, at least for now. Uh, the document states over time it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulation, but not to worry. Trump said, quote, there's going to be tremendous self-policing aspect. He went on later to say the word policing, self-policing, over and over again. He also signed an executive order rebranding the artificial intelligence as super intelligence. Fine, he's SI instead of AI, but we're not, we're going to be using AI, I feel. He's directing federal agencies to use super intelligence or SI in government documents or communications. He unveiled an America.gov chatbot powered by Gemini and Grok that's being called a concierge to the federal government. I use that, it's relatively useless, though. At first, the bot correctly said Biden won in 2020. There was no evidence of widespread fraud. Now, it says it can't answer those questions. Uh, you know, again, it's a propaganda thing. Um, you know, this agreement was all these CEOs wandering around the White House. They never leave the White House. It's only tech CEOs get to be at the White House, apparently. You know, I'm dying for like a heavy manufacturer CEO to be there or someone else. But, um, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly was the driving force behind this sort of toothless agreement. Um, they all look like ridiculous. The whole thing was, it's ridiculous, nonsensical. It's a little bit of what I had, you and I had been to when Biden did the same thing. It was just, it was just a statement of principles essentially, and it wasn't that different from when you and I were at the White House what Biden was saying. So this is just such like theater, and both, both, both Hegseth and, uh, this is just sort of war and AI theater.
Yeah. Is it AI that's the existential threat or the fact that we have a trillion-dollar industry growing this fast that's not regulated? We're in uncharted territories and the notion that this is morally binding — they might as well say, they might as well have all of them hold up three fingers and give scouts honor. I mean, it's just so, the contradiction here is stifling. Anthropic's own securities filing says models can resist shutdown and manipulate information. OpenAI just shelved a model after internal tests found deception evasion issues. Uh, so this is where they go to is they say, but, and this is kind of the message coming from the broligarchs trying to stay off regulation that they can get sued and that this is in America, this is tremendous guardrails. But here's the problem. That's not, that's not enough after the fact.
That's right. That's after the kids have already died.
These companies don't police themselves. Right. Airlines, manufacturers, you know, restaurants themselves don't, you know, don't inspect themselves, right? They don't...
They don't, restaurants don't expect themselves, inspect themselves. No.
Banks, banks don't set their own capital requirements. Boeing doesn't certify its own plane. We're, we're asking the guys building Jurassic Park to serve as the park rangers. We're asking the Tyrannosaurus Rex to be the park ranger here. You know, you use the expression all the time. We're allowing the arsonist to tell us about fire safety, essentially. And one of the things that's really interesting here is how much I'm just riveted. Like when it came out, I think I'm sure you went on, I was like, this is just ridiculous. This is just, and of course they spelled the United States wrong, which is just like, who in the world is over there that can just like actually copy edit. But this Hegseth thing, this thing with the president at the White House, it's all such theater. It's just ridiculous theater without anything. Meanwhile, these guys get to do whatever they want and sort of pretend that they're getting along. This is a, this is a Silicon Valley beef happening on the asphalt in front of the White House. That's all it is. It's like how they, and they had poor Dario there. He looked like a hostage. I don't know if you noticed. They kept moving him around.
You know, he kept trying to run away. And it was just the whole, I know he's trying now to cooperate because he's going public, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Um, but I just, this is like so dangerous. It's both things are so dangerous in terms of what's happening and leaves us so vulnerable in so many ways. Um, and especially the fact that he's doubling down, Scott, when every single poll says differently. I, what do you imagine is going on there? He just doesn't care or he's getting money or what, what is your explanation from a marketing point of view even of pushing this stuff when everybody is against it? I...
I think it goes to a broader point and that is the incentives here overwhelm morality. And the problem isn't that these people are evil. Exactly. The problem is that they're capitalists and we shouldn't build a regulatory architecture that requires CEOs to choose humanity over market share every Tuesday morning. This isn't their job. Their job is to be rapacious capitalists and the government's job is to ensure, prevent a tragedy of the commons and then tax them such, reinvest in the middle class to actually buy their products and have a navy and food stamps. And we're not doing either. So this is, this is just really, in my opinion, really poor governance. And I think these guys, I can't imagine all of these guys aren't on Lexapro and Xanax to get to sleep at night. Okay, we don't know what's going to happen when the next administration comes in and says, oh, we've decided you're liable for everything, the bad thing that happened here, and there's a populist uprising against these guys. You could definitely see one or more of these guys on trial if something bad happens.
Yeah. Yeah. So, and Bill Gates gave, I thought, an excellent interview in the New York Times and has me rethinking everything. I've always said, you know, there's always a wizard behind the curtain and that there's going to be more jobs created than destroyed. And he believes that once these, you know, in all of these professions, once they get to a quote-unquote acceptable level, you're just going to see entire industries, employment goes away. And to be fair, Bill's been wrong before, but he's mostly right about technology. I found it very, I found it very scary.
