I want to take you all back to the last time I felt this much joy in this city. And it was UCLA about four miles that way. 1986, banging out C's and D's.
I had a ponytail. Serious.
Hi everyone, live from the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway. [cheering] [applause]
All right. Before we start, I'm going to thank our sponsors. Our title sponsor is Beehiiv, the platform for building an audience and a business around your point of view. We just started the Pivot post there. We love Beehiiv. From newsletters and websites to podcasts and communities, Beehiiv brings all your content all together in one place. It's the only one of these platforms I would have been on and proud to be on. Thanks also to our official sponsors, Tanium and Odo.
All right, we're going to start off with our guests, which we did in Minnesota with Senator Klobuchar, who's now Governor Klobuchar. But today she was amazing. You should listen to it. We wanted to do something a little more Hollywood. So our next guest made his name chasing celebrities out of restaurants. Recently he's been showing us that politicians are just celebrities with worse publicists.
So we want to talk about this because Harvey Levin is someone who really has evolved over the years and done all manner of interesting things. And a lot of his stuff, I have to say, his coverage in Washington is quite good and asking a lot of important questions, which I'm really fascinated about where it's going. So we'll find out. So please welcome the executive producer and founder of TMZ, Harvey Levin. [cheering]
So, Harvey and I met each other a long time ago when I was at the Wall Street Journal. I did a profile of a very new little site called TMZ that I was noticing was growing very quickly and was doing some interesting things online. I was so frightened by her because she is small but fierce, and it's sort of like crackerjacks, and I wasn't sure when we first interacted.
I thought she was going to tear me apart.
Yes. And I didn't, because I was really interested. No, you were really great in the business because it was sort of I was looking at all kinds of new things and this was in the early internet. But let's start now. Right now, Trump is the first president who was a TMZ story long before he was a political one.
Did covering him as a celebrity for decades shape how the media covers the president? And how did you think of it? Because you wanted a DC bureau for a long time and it finally happened. And your big story was Lindsey Graham at Disneyland, I think.
RIP. Disney World. RIP. But he looked great with that wand. And TMZ viewers flooding you with photos of members of Congress on vacation during the shutdown. Talk a little bit about Trump as a celebrity moving into the presidency and why you guys decided finally to go to DC.
As for Trump, I knew him for 20 years and I knew him in a totally different way. I mean, he was the star of The Apprentice. He was, you know, a businessman, and I never thought of him as a politician. And he was a very different person from what you see.
Because he was the most less-affair guy that you could imagine. I'm gay. He couldn't give a [__]. He would talk about other people and just let them live their lives the way they want to live their lives. I saw him treat people in his building really well.
And people who worked there loved him. And to a person, the people I know who knew him and then saw this radical change when he ran for office, everybody was just dumbfounded.
And you know what Bill Maher said was just so smart, because he acts the role of president. I think that there is an act here, and I'm not saying that I don't ascribe bad motives to what he's doing, because I do, but the person that I knew before is just not this guy. And something either changed or he's putting on an amazing kind of Barnum and Bailey act.
Well, I'm not so sure that's the case because a lot of it is quite toxic and angry and has repercussions all over the world. But when you think of covering that, politics has become a celebrity thing right now. So talk about going to Washington. Why did you decide finally to cover it? And your reporters do actually ask questions. A lot of Washington, and the reason I didn't cover Washington and covered tech was because it was so incestuous, the way the press and politics were together and they were at the same parties.
And your reporters really do ask pretty good questions of these people as they're moving. Some of them are funny, some of them are tough, because some of it is interesting. Talk a little bit why you decided to go there.
Well, I have a passion for politics and I wanted to do this when TMZ was part of Warner Brothers. And twice I was on the eve of launching it and Warner Brothers killed it because they were nervous and they thought that we'd piss off a congressman who had a regulation that Warner Brothers needed and the congressman would vote against it. So they blinked at the very end and both times they shut it down. This time I was able to do it.
And the reason I wanted to do it is, you know, you say incestuous, and I think it is, it's also cookie cutter. That when you look at reporters in DC, they are cut from the same cloth. They kind of look the same, they ask the same questions, the cadence of interviews are the same. So what I wanted to do for a long time was zag.
And I have these two guys who have worked for me for a long time and they are, [laughter] you know, I mean, if you looked at them, you'd call them ragtag reporters. They dress differently. They're young. They speak to politicians the way they talk to each other.
And they don't interview. And that is to me the secret sauce. They don't do interviews with people. They have conversations with people and there's a huge difference. They don't have five questions in mind when they talk to somebody. They just go with the flow and the flow can go in all sorts of places and a lot of people can't do it. These guys, I just, I love them and they are brilliant.
And in two days, they won Congress over and people wanted to talk to them. And what they found was that when we posted this, it got millions and millions of views because the politicians showed a human side. And it doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican, but my guys are just really good at bringing things out because they're really, they're just authentic.
Is it a good thing that politics has now become entertainment? It does feel a little like the Hunger Games at this point in a lot of ways because it has real life implications for people. And I get the idea. I think cable news is boring. I think it is cookie cutter. I don't think they're particularly tough. Corporate media just hasn't been.
But is it a problem that, you know, now we have all these politicians who are very comfortable, especially these new Democratic ones, very comfortable online. Is that a good thing or should there be some gravity because there are again real things happening across the country with politics?
And entertainment has intersected for a long time. [laughter] George Murphy was a senator from California. Ronald Reagan, Gopher from The Love Boat. Fred Thompson, and you know, and I can go on and on. And you know, celebrities, John Glenn was a celebrity and became a senator. So entertainers have been part of DC, right?
Absolutely. Sonny Bono, who ended up being kind of a formidable congressman.
Yeah. And so it's not, they're not strange to politics. Entertainment and politics have always kind of intersected, but I don't see it as that. I see it as pop culture.
That politics to me is part of pop culture. And pop culture is, you know, has a big tent and it's sports and it's celebrity and it's business. It can be technology. It can be anything. And so I just think it fits in pop culture because so much of what they do really involves, well, it should involve everybody's lives.
And I just don't see it as strange and I don't think it's necessarily new.
I do think that stuff you did about the congressman on vacation had an impact, was really interesting.
But that came out of anger.
Well, it did. I was interviewing a TSA agent during the government shutdown and Congress was about to go on a two-week Easter break, and this woman was telling us that she was losing her home. Her mental health was going down the drain. She didn't know what she could do with her kids.
And I just got so angry. I just said, 'If you guys see pictures, if you guys see your congressman on vacation, take a picture and we'll put it up on our platforms.' And two days later, Lindsey Graham's at Disney World with a bubble wand. And all of a sudden, everybody started sending these pictures and it had an impact.
And honestly, I launched TMZ DC in a week because I realized this is the moment that I'd been waiting for. And literally in a week, I got Jacob and Charlie to move to DC.
So, I think of TMZ as being singular. Like, I have trouble even identifying who your peer group is. So, traditional media and allies paid a price for it. Traditional media, I mean, we keep getting nostalgic for a dead cat bounce and, oh, theaters are back, and the reality is media, traditional media is really hurting.
And if you were starting, if you thought, okay, I'm a talented person. You graduated Chicago Law School, you taught, I know you taught for a while, and then you decided to go into media. If you were starting a media company in LA, and you thought, you know, I want to carve out a distinct new property. I want to do something different, right? Go back to you're just in LA and you want to do something singular and different. What would you start right now in the media space? What would the content be? The category? How would you approach it?
Build a business. Take yourself back 30 years ago and you have a mandate to start a new media company. What would it look like?
We're doing it. Look, I speak at journalism schools and the idea that they're still teaching television is insane to me. I mean, television, you know, you look at news on TV and the median age is somewhere between 67 and 70, and people under 30 don't have cable.
And so there are no new people coming in and you know how the story ends, right?
And so television is legacy and even websites now are legacy. So my focus is on social and especially on YouTube. Beginning next week we're launching a documentary a month on YouTube and we're not only putting it on YouTube but it's a YouTube style. It looks different and the people...
What does that mean? What is a YouTube style from your perspective?
It's raw. It's rawer. And there's more of a connection. The people we have just have a way of connecting. There's feedback that you get.
And we can do things that you can't do in traditional media. We can take chances and go out there and we have an amazing documentary coming up next week and we're going to do one a month. So my focus is YouTube. My focus is social. We have content creators that we're developing. I'm merging all of it as one. So the legacy stuff and the social stuff is all...
kind legacy. Do you stay on legacy?
Yeah. It's sort of like riding a wave into shore. You know, if you can ride it in as far as you can, you do it, right? I'm not going to give up our TV shows, right?
But TV is going to go away.
It's going to go away. And I think websites, you know, I mean, it's crazy to say, but websites are legacy right now.
What do these big legacy media companies do? I mean, obviously the biggest one was the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers recently, and you used to work for them. Two biggest studios.
after Halloween. I did not. Happy Halloween. Boo. Boo. David Ellison. [laughter] He's fine. I'm leaving.
No, no, no. It's... I've left. Thank you. [cheering]
You know what? I said what I... No, I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's certain 100%. Thank you. I have children. It's from Horton Hears a Who. Thank you.
So, but there's two big newsrooms. There's HBO. They've got enormous amounts of debt and by the way Oracle stock has declined rather precipitously which is problematic because Daddy Bank is going down, right? But talk a little bit about what, use this as an example because here's, they're making a big bet and you've got Disney obviously, you've got Universal, and then all the small ones. What does a company like that do? You used to work for them as I said.
Well, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if you guys watch Dancing with the Stars.
But they did something really fascinating. That show was tanking and they decided to kind of embrace social media and bring on these social media people and required them, it was part of the contract that they go on TikTok every day, and it's become incredibly successful again. The show is a huge hit and what they've done is recast it using relevant platforms.
And you could still use a legacy platform and if you can tie the legacy platform to something more relevant, it lifts the legacy, right?
And I think that happened with... I think Dancing with the Stars is a good example of it, but I think that's a model of what...
Yeah, I've always had this feeling, and my office, everybody thinks I'm... they hate the term, but when we started TMZ Live about 15 years ago, what I wanted to do was blend digital with linear, the television with the internet.
And I always thought, you know, you have a screen in your living room and now you can integrate it and you can go online and look at websites and then you can also watch television. And I'm just thinking, why do you have one remote for one and one remote for another and why are they separate? Because you could take the best assets from websites, from digital, and then you can apply them to a linear experience and it becomes so much richer with photo galleries and comments and all that.
So I kept telling my office, we're going to call this Intervision. It's going to be a combination of the internet and television.
Intervision. It never took.
But the concept of it is still, I think, the goal that you can take all of these assets and produce better products because all of a sudden, I mean, wouldn't it be more interesting to be able to, you know, have this split screen where photo galleries appear and comments appear almost in real time? And that, you know, why not blend them? I mean, why do you have to have these two separate things? I'll let Scott in, but...
It's because of the huge costs. They have these massive studios, these massive costs. And you know, in my experience of doing stuff for CNN, I kept adding up the dollars they were spending and I did my little podcast in my studio that cost $25,000 and was making more. You know, I didn't understand how they could possibly bring the costs down.
No. And look, as media gets more fragmented and audiences get more fragmented, you know, it's going to be really hard for these studios to survive. It just is.
I mean, I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm so [__] proud of this that my staff produced this thing that we're doing on YouTube next week for $1,000. These should be $300,000 productions and we did it for $1,000 and we thought about how we were going to do it. I'm really excited about this because it's different.
And so that's kind of where we're going.
Where you're tapping into is podcasts and now YouTube. We get more views on YouTube than we get downloads of audio. Basically, podcasts are the new television shows with the lower cost means of production. It's just arbitraging the means of production.
I'm sorry. What? [laughter] Face for podcasting?
What is your view of Instagram features? Are you going to go hard at that? Do you think it's going to be disruptive or...
Well, long-form content will be available on Instagram now. They're clearly going after YouTube.
Yeah. I see it as additive.
It's going to grow the pie. You don't think it's going to cannibalize Netflix or YouTube?
You know, it's funny. Our experience has been that, you know, we can put... like today, I mean, we talked to Pete Buttigieg.
We put it everywhere. We put it on YouTube. We put it on our TV shows. We put it in the website. We put it on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook. And it's additive that ultimately, you know, for example, if you want to go to a sponsor and get an advertisement, you don't say to them, this is... I mean, you could say, well, this will, you know, buy a pre-roll just on X, but what if you go to them and say, yeah, you can get 1 million views, 1 million sets of eyeballs on X, but if you work with us on all of our other platforms, you could get 7 million sets of eyeballs.
Well, that's good for them. It's more money for us and it's cumulative. It's not a zero-sum game with these platforms.
Yeah. You're talking about being media promiscuous, really, is what you're talking. I always say that to staffers. I'm like, be as promiscuous as possible. And you can do it in your personal life too. I don't really care.
But I have thought about this a lot. It doesn't really matter. And years ago when I was at the Wall Street Journal, I'll never forget they were talking about doing another print version, which I was the young person at the time, and they brought me into a meeting because they're like, 'How can we get young people to read the newspaper? Kara, what do you think?'
And I said, 'Uh, you could tape a joint to every page.' [laughter] And they threw me out of the meeting. They threw me out of the meeting. And my point was like, it doesn't matter if it's on salami or wherever it is. It's where people want to get it. They couldn't get out of the distribution system. So just be everywhere and see what works and then abandon what doesn't.
Can I just say one other thing?
One of the things I found so fascinating in the last couple of years is the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial that was dominated by TikTok.
That, forget about websites, forget about television, any other platform, forget about it. That was a TikTok trial and people got invested in it and it was just people would spew opinions and it brought this thing to life in such an unbelievable way.
Was it that different than the OJ trial though, which was on television?
Yeah, because OJ was just TV and OJ was gripping but it was television, period. Television. This, you know, the news covered it. You could watch this on NBC Nightly News. You could watch it on CNN, rest in peace. You could watch it anywhere. You could go to websites.
TikTok dominated it. And it's because of this user experience and this kind of... I don't know, it was almost like a town square for people. And when I looked at that, I thought traditional media is gone, when I saw that trial.
This is a great message for LA. All right. So, well, one last question I had. Amazon, the other tech player in this, just announced a Melania series which is streaming soon.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. No.
Yes. Yeah. Yes. It's not a bribe at all. That's even after they spent the money on the movie that shot the bed at the box office.
When you think about sort of, you're basically saying death of traditional media, which has been long predicted and it's been a downward slide. That's absolutely true. But two of the most powerful media owners in the country seem to have been doing the president favors. With the Democrats about to have subpoena power that actually sticks, [cheering] who should be more worried, Amazon or the Ellisons?
Or Rupert, you can add him too. Although that old crocodile, no one's getting.
Well, I don't know. Do you think this... I don't... that doesn't seem to be on their bingo card right now. Any... is it?
I would guess Ellison more than anybody just because of the alliance with Trump and the merger and they're going to want to see what happened.
But you know, as important as that is, they got a lot of other things to look at, right? I mean, they have got a lot to look at, right?
Although, you're going to boo me for this. I am really pissed off at Congressman Robert Garcia.
No, no, but let me tell you why. When the first thing after the election is lawyer up, it's... No, [cheering] I get it.
Let him have his face. I get it and they should, but the messaging is so important. Donald Trump lost the plot. He didn't get that people cared about. They wanted their lives better. And that should have been the first message out of the gate. This other stuff can happen, but it's like, don't [__] it up. You won. Don't [__] this up. And I feel like that was the wrong message.
Yeah. Well, as a lawyer, you're sort of giving away the game, right? We're going to get you. And I don't think that was what you say Wednesday.
Yeah, probably Monday. Next Monday was maybe just issue the subpoenas and say get your ass to Washington.
I'm really sorry, by the way.
No, I'm sorry because you told me I should be funny and I'm not.
Oh, well, you are. Okay, last question from Scott.
So, you're a self-identified political junkie. You know a lot of these people. You're kind of at the helm of the bobsled in terms of seeing what's going on. I don't know your politics. Well, actually, I think I do.
They change all the time.
But did you see this coming on Tuesday? And what surprised you, or did anything surprise you?
I didn't know it would be this big, but I knew it would be big. But Donald Trump, when he came out Wednesday and he decided to go to the ballroom and talk about the ballroom, and all he did was just rhapsodize about how beautiful this thing is. I swear to God, what I was thinking was this is like when your grandfather has a bad day and you take him out to the garden so he can kind of enjoy his hobby and forget about what happened. And it felt like that to me. It really felt that way to me when I watched that. He doesn't get it.
And with Stephen Miller, he's just going to see... My problem is I'm afraid that he's going to double down now and just defy everything. He can't be prosecuted. Supreme Court said that. So he doesn't go down without a fight. And now Stephen Miller is pulling the strings. So I think we're in for trouble.
I think we're in for trouble.
All right. To leave it on a happy note, are you going to miss Lauren Boebert? [laughter] [cheering]
Well, you know, there's always another movie at a theater, right?
Yes, that's true. All right, on that note, Harvey Levin.
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Scott, we're back live from LA. But before we get to local news, Trump is taking a break from ruining the White House decor to shake up his inner circle. Susie Wiles is out as chief of staff, moving over to his political operation. Allegedly, she's out. Replacing her is someone someone said evil life-sized thumb, Stephen Miller.
