These two people are two of the kindest people I know. And I think it's super important as you head into this tonight. People can be smart and sassy and sarcastic and funny, but truly the guiding principle of these two people is kindness. That they do everything they do is because they want their children, they want the next generation to have a better, smarter, more just world than the one we live in today.
So yes, neither are afraid to take a tech titan, a politician or an athlete to task or anyone for that matter. But I know that both of them do it from a true place of goodness and kindness. And that's why they got me here rolling out tonight when the last place I want to be is on a stage and I'd rather be in a bed. So let me bring out my two dear friends, Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway. It's their show.
Hi everyone, live from the Beacon Theater in New York City's Upper West Side. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher
and I'm Scott Galloway.
Well done. Nice. That was good. We're in Toronto tomorrow. I want to hear it a little bit louder because the Canadians rock. Let's go.
Okay.
Before we start, I want to send a big thank you to our title sponsor, Beehive. The platform for building an audience and a business around your point of view, from newsletters and websites to podcasts and communities. Beehive brings content all together in one place. Thanks also to our official sponsors Tanium and ODU. Thank you so much for sponsoring this.
We are taping this show for audio and YouTube distribution because kids love YouTube. So, you'll be able to hear it or watch it on Tuesday, November 3rd, election day, which is tomorrow, everybody,
which is probably why we're going to be in Canada in case it goes bad. Okay, as we tour the country this week, we'll be sending out three special editions of our new newsletter filled with photos and behind-the-scenes content. Go to pivotshow.com to sign up. We're going to start on a high note by someone I've been cheating on Scott with in a podcast point of view to talk about the election that's coming up. We're trying to find out who would be really great to do this. And so our special guest tonight is co-host of High Stakes, my other podcast. She's also a Grammy-winning former Secretary of State and a Scorpio. Please welcome Hillary Clinton.
Heat.
Heat.
All right. Are you ready to hear some real wisdom here? Hey, looking good with those glasses.
Yeah, I picked them up from somebody.
Yeah. Well, before you were born, I used to wear glasses like this and it brings back a lot of memories.
Good. Well, it works for you, I got to say. Don't you think, Scott? Yeah.
Scott's looking at us like, 'Oh, this is too bad.' We're also going to be announcing our 2028 presidential bid again because, you know, so let's get to it. We're going to start asking questions about stuff. We've been doing a lot of this on High Stakes, which is our new podcast. And one of the things that was great, I was at dinner where Hillary was at, and she was laying down so many truth bombs, and they were so smart. I was like, I wonder if this woman was like valedictorian of something. And I wanted to create a podcast that was the world's greatest civics lesson and she has been everywhere and so we're going to ask her some questions obviously about the election. So let's start. Ted Cruz, El-Sayed, AOC, Newsom, Klobuchar, you've met all of them. Who in that group is the real deal for the next 10 years and who's peaking too early?
Oh my gosh, we have an election tomorrow which is called the midterms. Remember that? I think I thought I taught you about that. And um
we'll put that at the end.
Yeah. And so we're leaping ahead beyond even that election. We have no idea. We have no idea. I think, you know, having run for president, you don't know until people actually get on the field and they start competing who's going to rise, who's going to fall, who's going to come back. I mean, it's an actually exciting prospect for me to believe that we're going to have a dozen really good Democrats running to compete starting, you know, probably after the first of the year,
which is a good thing for the Democratic party to happen.
It's a good thing. It's a very good thing. And, you know, we're going to have a bunch of governors. We're going to have people with a lot of experience. They're going to be out there, as we say, testing the waters. I think it's going to be not just good for the Democratic party. I think it's going to be good for the country because we haven't really had politics. We've had a cult in charge of our country over the last years. And I think we need to get back to having like real debates where people are exchanging views and audiences like this here at the theater get to make up their own minds. So, I'm looking forward to it.
Yeah. So, what are we going to wake up to on November 4th?
Yeah. I think we're going to wake up to a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate.
And why? Give your case, do your, do a Hillary Clinton case.
First of all, I think that the issues that people are responding to are real to them. They are living them. They are seeing the results. So when we started talking about the affordability issue, that was something that most Americans could say, 'Hey, you know what? I can relate to that. My health care costs are going up. Why is that happening?' Well, maybe because this administration and this Congress have cut back on health care subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Oh my gosh, my gas prices, if I use diesel, my diesel prices, they're all going up. Why is that? Well, most dramatically and recently because of the war in Iran or maybe also because of tariffs which get passed on. They are not some kind of deus ex machina that can be put out there with no consequences for consumers. So you go down the list and all of the efforts to distract attention, to make up other reasons why things were hard, to try to claim, as we keep hearing from the president, that, you know, we're living in a great time and people are saying it's not so great for me. It's not so great for my kids.
Well, it is good for the Trump family.
It's very, very good for the Trump family. And one of the smartest moves that was made in this campaign was to link affordability and corruption. And I want to thank not just Democrats, but you go back and look at the election in Hungary. And this is a bit of an aside, but think about what happened in Hungary. Orban had been in power for what, 10 years. And the opposition had tried to defeat him before. They were unsuccessful. He'd been corrupt for years. There were problems in the country, but finally Peter Magyar and his party made the linkage. Part of the reasons why you're having trouble is because they're getting rich. They're taking advantage of being in government to make themselves and their families rich and it's costing you money. And now I think you're finding in polls and research and focus groups when voters are asked, 'What do you think about corruption?' They say, 'It's costing me money. Somebody else is making a lot of money and I can hardly make my rent. I can hardly pay to fill up my gas tank.' It's the linkage.
So assuming, let's count our chickens and assume we take the House and the Senate and it's November the 4th. I would argue it's at least not a mortgage, dating, not a relationship. I think that it'll be a function of not them loving Democrats but hating us less. What do you think the Democratic Party needs to do or Democratic leadership? What are two or three things you think they need to do immediately such that we can turn this into something enduring going into '28 instead of just them flipping back
You're absolutely right, Scott. If the Democrats don't go in with an agenda and have the discipline to enact that agenda, then they're going to lose the kind of support that they're going to gain in this election. Number one, they ought to look at the affordability agenda, what's going to be in that. I think there are several things, one of which is health care costs, but there also can be even more fast-tracking of, you know, housing starts, taking a hard look at how we can, you know, shift the burden on fossil fuel costs from consumers to the oil and gas companies which have recorded record profits. So I think that there's a lot of good work being done right now to put together an affordability package.
Secondly, an anti-corruption package. You know, people have to feel that this issue of corruption is going to be front and center because it has been costing money. People have been benefiting at the expense of, you know, everyday Americans, consumers, people who get up every day and, you know, try to, you know, make a living. And so, what's that going to look like? Well, I think that has to be linked with closing loopholes. I thought the emoluments clause in the Constitution meant something. I thought it meant that you could not be the president of the United States and report a $1.2 billion, you know, income from making deals through crypto and other things while you were in the Oval Office. I'm amazed that we can't enforce the Constitution. And so we need legislation to close these loopholes to make it very clear. And finally, they're going to have to do some investigations to get to the bottom. And you know, when Kara and I were on a couple of programs earlier today, The View and CNN with Anderson Cooper, you know, she was making the point, we still don't even know the damage that Elon Musk did through Doge. We don't know what data was illegally taken. Your social security data, your Medicare data, whatever data, tax data, where is it? What's it being used for? We need to get to the bottom of this. Not for the sake of investigating, just to kind of hold hearings and look like we were, you know, pointing fingers and scoring points, but let's find out what damage has been done so we can begin to repair it.
So, let's get to the simple test. There's a lot of races that are... You had been worried in a couple of our things. Yes, you're always like Texas, we'll see. Even though Ted Cruz is clearly popular, right, and Ken Paxton is pretty low as a candidate. But there's a couple of races. One, obviously, the Michigan Senate race, which is taking up a lot of time. And Scott has a point of view on this, too. Democrat Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, flipped and endorsed Republican Mike Rogers over the weekend. I know, I know, I know, I know. So, yeah, that's, I was going to say, is she a traitor? Or is she just saying out loud what some moderates really think about where the party's going. Do you think it helps or hurts? I'll say Scott does have a point of view on this. So, first, oh, why don't you go first?
Let's see what the professor thinks.
Okay.
I have a lot of disagreements with El-Sayed, but at the end of the day, we get to have a discussion with El-Sayed. Whereas Rogers, you don't get to have a discussion because he's an election denier. So, we don't even have a democracy. I would vote for another Democrat, but given the situation, I'm a supporter of El-Sayed because at least we get to have these important discussions.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you think it's a distraction? You
Look, I'm with Scott on this. I mean, the most important objective has to be to rein in Trump and to defeat as many Republicans as possible in this election tomorrow. And El-Sayed won the primary. I don't know what's going through the congresswoman's, you know, head about her feelings or her opinions, whatever it might be, but it is a sideshow because it has nothing to do with what's really at stake in the election. I'm sorry that, you know, people's feelings get hurt. I've won elections and I've lost elections and I have also lost elections where I got more votes than the person that allegedly won. So, you know, I think I know a lot about this. And my attitude is we need to win these elections and I am pulling for all of our Democratic nominees.
So, is there any election you're most worried about? I suppose Texas is the one that you've seen. You're always like, you never know with Texas.
Look, I think Ted Cruz is a fabulous candidate and I love... I also think Gina Hinojosa is a fabulous candidate, the woman running for governor of Texas. They are polling really well. They have a lot of energy. They are great both in so-called real life and online. They communicate effectively. Texas is just huge and there is so much infrastructure that the Republicans have built over so many years that they are, I'm telling you as we are meeting here tonight, working overtime to turn out every Republican voter and their sister and their brother and their cousins, and, you know, they're going to do everything they can to flood the zone tomorrow as well as what they have, you know, done up till now, right.
I just have a really hopeful, good feeling that, you know, Ted Cruz is going to pull it off because I think that there are enough Republicans and independents in Texas who will not be able to vote for Paxton, who is the poster child of corruption in Texas. And so I think that we've got a very good chance to win in Texas.
Win in Texas. So remember when all the CEOs lined up to kiss Trump's ring? That was yesterday. Mostly tech CEOs. The donations, the investment pledges, the ballroom donations from Apple and Nvidia. If Democrats win the House, how far should they go with investigations and subpoenas of these people? And by the way, Trump said he'd preemptively pardon Elon and also close aides. Now, is that something you think is going to happen? And how do you look at tech CEOs right now?
Well, I'm disappointed in a lot of them. You know more, both of you do, about them than I do, but they made their bets on Trump. And they have all different rationalizations, but most of them wanted contracts. Most of them wanted some kind of monetary reward for supporting him. So, you know, they've contributed and they've, you know, kept their mouths shut and haven't criticized him. I think that will begin to change if we win the Congress, because all of a sudden, you know, we get back closer to, you know, politics where guess what, you got to find common ground. You have to, you know, understand the other's point of view. When it comes to what Trump said today, which was he was thinking about pardoning Musk and pardoning other people, he may well do that, but that doesn't mean they can't be called and forced to testify because just because they're pardoned for something unclear does not remove the obligation to respond to a subpoena in the Congress. And in fact, some legal experts argue that if you're pardoned, then you have no protection.
You cannot take the Fifth Amendment because you have no jeopardy. So, let him pardon Elon and then let's call him in and figure out what he has to say.
A few more things. I'll get, we'll do the next question. A New York Times analysis of a decade of Trump's speeches finds he's getting cruder, more extreme, and harder to follow. I think they're talking about dementia, but they weren't quite going to say it. Let me bring up something you said in 2016 because you're like Cassandra, you were right about quite a few things. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with the nuclear codes. Democrats got destroyed over Biden's age. And why isn't Trump paying the same price? Because we had talked about that you were dying.
Oh, I was, I died many times. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you are looking at a reincarnation.
I don't know all the reasons why he has been consistently held to an easier standard than anybody else in politics.
Yeah. I mean his word salads are legendary and if you try to follow it's really complicated and difficult to make sense. But it hasn't until recently been covered particularly as indicative of his inability to really think clearly about very important issues. So I can't explain that but I think we're catching up to it.
It bothers me a lot that he goes in and out of what I consider to be coherence. I don't know whether he's distracted. I don't know if it's medical. I'm not going to speculate on that. But, you know, when you're making, like he's about, I believe, to make another decision as to whether or not to renew active attacks on Iran.
The consequences of that are so serious and they need to be thought through carefully and I don't think we have a commander-in-chief who is either interested in or willing to have that level of careful deliberation before making a decision. And so this is not just that he stands up there and he goes on and on and makes, you know, lots of non sequitur comments about all kinds of things. This is what happens inside the Situation Room. And I am worried that post this election, if we do get back both the House and the Senate, it's going to even further short-circuit his thinking. It's all going to be, here's what I believe, here's my, you know, impulsive take on this situation. You're going to do what I tell you to do. And I worry about that. But I hope that maybe with Congress in Democratic hands and the threat of investigations, you know, the people around him will be able to rein him in.
Oh, yeah. Stephen Miller is a real reiner in our
Well, he is obviously one of the main provocateurs. But there are other people who I hope will exercise some respect.
Yeah, that Pete Hegseth, that's going to go. I'm just aware.
At this point I'm rooting for Kristi Noem. I mean really.
Well, you'll notice he only gets rid of women.
Yeah, I did. So that's another thing,
But they're also incompetent. So I don't know how I feel about that.
But even, you know, I think, you know, outgoing Congressman Massie's already introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth and it couldn't happen soon enough because he is really a danger to our country.
Yeah. Scott, last question. We talk a lot about young men and young people and a big belief of mine is that your success is a function of your willingness to mourn and move on. What can you tell or say to young people or anybody else who faces disappointment around how you get back on your feet? What gives you strength? How do you repair? How do you mourn and move on? What did you do? I don't know you, but I sort of know you and my sense is you're doing just fine. What?
And honestly, I know a lot of people that hit a fraction of that disappointment and just get stuck for the rest of their lives. What advice do you have for people that face that type of disappointment?
Well, there's so many different kinds of disappointment in life. Everybody's faced disappointment and
You know, I feel very much grateful to my parents because my mother had a really miserable life and was literally on her own by the age of 13. But she found it in herself to keep going. And part of what she really taught me by example and by advising was that everybody gets knocked down in life. You know, it's not always on a big stage where everybody can see you get knocked down. It's often in the most private, personal, difficult moments of your life when it happens to you, whether it's death, relationships, you know, work disappointment, whatever it might be. And you know what she said to me over and over again. And I took it really seriously because I saw and understood how she'd been treated, how she'd been, you know, basically given up by her mother and father, abandoned, how she'd been mistreated by her grandmother, kicked out of the house when she was 13. How she'd gone to work in somebody else's house taking care of their kids. How she had hoped that her mother would love her at some point and her mother asked her to come back to Chicago because she'd been sent to California when she was like 8 years old and she came back thinking she could maybe have a relationship and her mother was, you know, basically just wanted her to work for... I mean, just disappointment and abandonment and despair, but she found it in herself to get back up every day and to keep going and that's really what she conveyed. To me, it was, look, everybody gets knocked down. Everybody gets disappointed in life, in love, in work, whatever it might be. And you got to make a decision every single day. Are you going to lie down there and give up on yourself and let people walk all over you, or are you going to get up and, you know, start a new day and make a new path for yourself?
It's a great piece of advice.
That's how I was raised and that's how I've tried to live.
Yes. You're a game gal, as my grandmother would say. We really appreciate it. I went out and got that present you asked me to get for Donald Trump. He's been talking about men's asses a lot.
It's very strange, but I think I found the perfect present for January when he leaves office because it's super cold. Okay.
So, if you could give this to him.
It says, 'So gay for you.'
Well, you know, you and I had a conversation about this earlier.
You think one thing, I think something else.
But I will certainly try to deliver it.
Okay.
2028, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.
Oh god. What might have been, everybody? What might have been? It's a different timeline. It's like we're in Black Mirror right now. Anyway, thanks again to Secretary Clinton and please listen to High Stakes. It's really good. She does, she just, she's amazing. She's like Zelig. She's been everywhere and has great advice like that. I thought that was really lovely. Okay, we need to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll get to some news.
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Scott, we're back.
Binance says it's restored roughly 95% of the assets stolen in last week's $6.3 billion hack, the biggest crypto heist in history. The FBI has confirmed that North Korea was behind the attack. The hack fueled a crypto sell-off that combined with the tech stock plunge had some social media calling it Bloody Friday. Binance customers pulled $64 billion from exchanges over the weekend when withdrawals were unfrozen. Crypto has gone mainstream. Trump has really unleashed that in recent years, especially with his backing. How much of a setback? Where are we with that? And I think tech stocks.
So what's actually interesting about it? So first off, just on a macro level, theft is hands down the best way to grow an economy. We did it in the 19th century. We went up and down. We stole, we actually kidnapped artisans, we copied manufacturing technology and we put factories all along the eastern seaboard. We basically engaged in massive IP theft of European manufacturing. We scaled a better industrial revolution. The core competence in China is IP theft. They basically will steal. People think spy versus spy or espionage is some handsome guy like killing a bad person in a Bond lair in some hill in New Zealand. It's not. Probably about 89% of espionage is a, you know, very nondescript assistant uploading thumb drives from Monsanto and finding the dyes and the colors to usually China in which they sell back the products for 40 to 60 cents on the dollar. The scale of this theft, it's the scale that's interesting because as it relates to Binance, they've only lost about 2% of their assets under management. So, it doesn't look like it's actually been that big a deal for Binance. Now, having said that, $6 billion on a $30 billion economy means they grew their economy this week by 20%.
Imagine that. The equivalent theft, if we were able to pull off that type of IP theft in the United States, that means we would be able in 48 hours to capture about $6 trillion. They essentially, relative to their government, paid for all government expenses for a year with this hack. So the scale of it is so extraordinary because North Korea is quite frankly just such a, you know, a rogue failed nation state that this type, every kid is going to be taught hacking and AI. That is now their core competence. The people who figured this out in North Korea grew their economy 20% this year. And the scale on the other end about just how successful our economy is is that a company can lose $6 billion and the next day it only loses 2% of its
What about the tech sell-off because it's really starting it? I know we talk about this idea that before the big crash in 2000 everyone thought it was going to crash for a couple of years and then there was up, up and then not up.
How do you look right now because you see these cracks whether it's data distribution, Elon just quote said that Grok's too expensive you think, and at the same time he said we're all going to have abundance whatever, but how do you look at where tech stocks are because as we've talked about it's everything in this economy right now, it's nothing else matters but tech stocks.
Well, I mean, I'm about to engage in a word salad but let me skip to the end. I don't know.
Just don't have an utterance like I'll make the bull case.
AI is transformative. The railroads are transformative. Electricity was transformative, right? The internet was transformative. All of those involved bankruptcies along the way. What I'm fairly certain of, I don't know what's going to happen to these stocks. I know at some point they'll correct. I don't know how severe the V will be. What might be happening right now is there's a bit of a soft landing. These stocks are down, right? And that might be a good thing as opposed to a crash that scares people. What's most interesting is among the big tech firms, the firm that has outperformed every other of the Mag 7 this year is the one that has purposely stayed out of the AI arms race. Apple has vastly outperformed all of the other Mag 7 because it has refused to engage in this multi-trillion dollar arms race. They've just said, 'You guys go play in traffic and we'll see how it settles out,' the same way they avoided the search wars. So, what could go right this?
Can I just note Apple just announced earnings right before our taping, the first since CEO John Ternus took over from Tim Cook. Revenue rose 12% from a year earlier, slightly ahead of expectations. Gains were driven by those price hikes a few months ago, plus demand for the new iPhone 18 Pro lineup. iPad sales were down as well as sales in China coming in below estimates. The iPhone Fold, Apple's new foldable phone, wasn't on sale during the quarter, so we'll have to wait to see its impact. So, go keep going with Apple.
Well, so Apple's flat. A beat on the top and bottom line, 12%. But anytime we've had more than 2% of GDP allocated towards a technology in this short a period, there's a fairly severe crash along the way, which we have not registered yet. At the same time, to make the bull case, I was like, I struggle with anger and depression. I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. And so I constantly have to ask myself because one of my biggest flaws as an investor is I'm constantly thinking everything's going to get cheaper and it's going to crash. Every day if you look at the markets, the optimists have kicked the crap out of the pessimists. If you were to be honest about the markets, the way you would calibrate it or describe it is that every day it gets a little bit better and you'd be stupid not to keep your money in the market and be diversified. The bull case is the following. If you look at the price to earnings ratio of an Alphabet right now or an Nvidia, they're trading at a lower PE ratio than the average S&P company. And would you rather have YouTube and search and cloud and the most sophisticated chips in history growing 40% a year, growing its profit 60%, or would you rather own P&G or Caterpillar? So now the E is the hard part because we're worried that these things are so out over their skis that we have a circular financing. For example, Nvidia is financing. It's a mine, right? It's financing the picks. It's financing the shovels. It owns the banks that is loaning money to the mines. That the demand signal might not be organic. But when you look at these companies' cash flow generation and you look at their valuations, Cisco was trading at a PE of 299. Nvidia is trading at 16 or 17. So the bull case is they don't look expensive, right?
But you just brought up that idea of picks and shovels. Nvidia just invested in Meta in their... So Meta is looking for money too. Everyone's looking for money essentially because they have to pay for these data centers.
Well, that's the fear is the infrastructure buildout feels like the railroads and it's just too much and the R will never catch up to the ROI, right? But when you have a company like Anthropic, I'll go to the bull case again, growing 14x. If it just grows 3 to 5x a year for two years, it'll look cheap. It'll look reasonably priced.
Can there be a lot of them?
A lot of like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc., etc.
Well, the fear is, I mean, it gets very complicated very fast because Nvidia, excuse me, Anthropic and OpenAI are, I mean, this is so weird. You have Nvidia loaning money to Meta and Meta is using some of that money to buy Nvidia chips. So that's a circular financing. Yeah.
And when that unwinds, it unwinds really fast. And also you have Nvidia and OpenAI borrowing money from their competitors. In other words, the people offering compute, whether it's Broadcom, Nscale, Google, Amazon, to the front-end LLMs are also their competitors. So, they're probably going to have to even spend more money and go vertical such that they're not dependent upon their, for financing and for compute from their competitors. This all feels just very incestuous and very strange and very dangerous and it smells like, you know, it smells like teen spirit. It smells like '99 again. But then when you actually look at the cash flow generation of these companies to call it a Cisco or to call it a pets.com is just not accurate.
Would you, will you buy into the... Anthropic is going to be going out in November. You would buy into this
Anytime. What difference? Pre-IPO, IPO.
Oh yeah. And I would trade out on the first trade.
Yeah. I would trade out on the first... People will get so excited about it. Goldman and JP Morgan. The IPO market is rigged, folks, in that they'll use AI and they'll do all sorts of demand scenarios to make sure it gets a 20 or 30% pop on its first trade. And they give the insiders, it's institutional clients that create fees for them and investment banking fees. They give them access and they say to the company, it's worth taking additional dilution for the 20 to 30% pop because you'll be on the front page of every newspaper saying that you got a 20 to 30% pop, which is a once-in-a-lifetime branding event. It's totally rigged. And the people in this audience get to buy it after that pop when it hits its natural pricing level. So, if you're fortunate enough to get in pre-IPO or from Goldman or JP Morgan, you buy it and then I would just sell it on the first trade.
The first trade. Wow. Well, that's a real, you know, wow, that's, you really love that company. Okay. A couple more things. OpenAI wants to rebrand AI data centers as compute campuses.
I hate these people. I mean, they're not even good at English. It's just like, oh, come on. In an effort to improve public perception, maybe if they weren't such... it might... Anyway, a spokesman says the name better describes the scale and role of infrastructure the company is... I can't believe I'm reading this... is building. The move comes as the company prepares for potentially tougher regulatory environment after the election. You think Sam Altman? Oh well. Too many lunches at Trump at White House. I guess Mr. Branding does the name change. I think they should just call it, I don't know, Train Daddy or something. I don't know. Something that's appealing. Compute campuses. Thoughts, Mr. Branding?
Well, it depends. If it's a merger and you have an opportunity, Morgan Stanley acquired, or Dean Witter kind of acquired Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley is a better brand. Then you absorb Morgan Stanley as the brand. Wells Fargo, Norwest, a boring mortgage company out of Minneapolis acquired Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo is a great brand. So they absorb the Wells Fargo brand. But generally when you make a name change, it doesn't work. Whether it's ValuJet to Transair or like, oh, I'll definitely go to work for Altria, not Philip Morris. I mean, it doesn't really work. You know, it's like, okay, there's such good people at Meta, it's not Facebook. So generally speaking, it's a negative forward-looking indicator when you think the general perception of us is so negative that we're not going to change it. I had a brand strategy firm and we actually did work for Axon, I know, hate me, but they were thinking about a name change and we said the global recognition, the association with the tiger, investors still love this company, fossil fuels are huge, you're a global brand. No, you're not going to escape a psychological disaster by changing your name.
Yeah, remember GP was beyond petroleum. And just so you know, they're calling them super campuses now. Yeah. So, I have some knowledge here. I teach at a campus and your electricity rates aren't going to go up in my campus. Yeah. Yeah. So, not a good idea. It almost never works.
Yeah. And then with the regulatory environment, what do they need to do? As I make a joke, do people like Mark Zuckerberg have to call themselves they/them going forward? What has to happen?
Well, but it will happen. I just got invited to a Meta party, so you know things are turning. But go ahead.
We'd love to have you, Kara. I'm like, what? Anyway, go ahead.
But just because I like to wait and dangerous routers. This is obviously a very progressive audience. I personally think the kerfuffle over data centers is misplaced and I think it's a bad move for Democrats. The moratoriums that Governor Hochul, who I'm a fan of, I think it's populist [__].
This is an argument as old as time. Nobody wants the chicken processing plant or the nuclear power plant or the Ford factory down the block from them. It's up to elected officials to figure out a way such that it's a win for the local community and to assuage their concerns, whether it's them producing their own electricity. But the reality is this is what, in my view, is going to happen and bums me out as a Democrat is that the Republican states are going to get all of those data centers that pay property taxes and they will raise the rates in the money that they have to provide to the local community, which will benefit the red states that say, come on in. Good local officials should be able to figure out a way to say you cannot raise the electricity rates. It has to be in an area. It has to be closed loop water. But all this populist [__] is going to do what we always do. We'd rather be indignant than pay for our [__] food stamps.
Well, at the same time, let me be clear. I'm going to push back on that because I've talked to lots of mayors. It's the citizens. It's not the politics are just reacting, but it's the citizens because they feel populist movement.
It's not just that. I feel like, as Hillary was talking about, accountability, corruption there, it...
You know what state has the most data centers?
And they're good citizens. They don't call the fire department. They don't call the cops. There's no ICE raids. They pay property tax.
You have to do it right. But it does reflect voter sentiment. And you should pay attention to that if you're a polit. You should not...
Oh, I agree. It's a populist movement, but in my view, it is not leadership. It is posture.
Well, when it feels like there's some reigning of these people in, people might feel better about that kind of stuff.
Data centers are the latest vessel for income inequality. People are angry. All they hear about is people becoming trillionaires and being ungrateful, not quitting themselves. Well, and so their anger, they find a vessel for their anger. And I feel like the vessel right now, unfortunately, and I think it's a mistake, the vessel for their anger is rallying against data centers. I don't... I think it's a bad move. And ultimately we need like we need growth. We need money to pay for wonderful social services and to have tax credits for housing and better schools.
And you have to have an eye on growth and we are pushing all the growth into red states.
As long as they feel like the money is going to them. I think that's part of that. They feel like it's corruption. They feel like it's not. It's quiet. It's NDAs. It's like all the NDAs in the world are really irritating to average citizens and they're articulating it through that. In any case, speaking of tech people, my good friend Larry Ellison, who is the owner now of CNN... wait, I'm sorry. Wait, I'm getting... Sorry, Scott. I apologize.
I literally have no idea what's going on right now.
Miss Swisher, Miss Swisher, I need you to sign this. I need you to sign this. How are you?
Hi, Miss Swisher. How you doing?
