Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Take Us Inside Trump’s ‘Imperial Presidency’

24:23Who funds it? They explain to him the concept of compute and how much energy it requires. And he went within the space of about 20 minutes from being like, what the fuck is this thing? And it seems really bad and terrifying to, how can I help you as president?

24:42Kara Swisher:How can I just open the floodgates, get rid of all. And then, of course, it becomes known to him, he's briefed, that Biden had been chaining these guys up and that he could be the one to liberate them. So he becomes a convert. He becomes a total convert. And the first 12 months of the administration was essentially open season for these guys. They're changing course now, which is actually very interesting. But that's what it was. Maggie, how do you look at that shift? because Trump, for a Luddite, he's astonishingly prescient about tech. You know, I always said he's the world's greatest internet troll.

25:21Kara Swisher:Like, he's good at it, actually. But he's not technical, obviously. But that hardly matters because he understands it, I think. Understands at its heart that it could be propaganda. He understands the attention economy. That's what he understands. But yeah. Right, right. We'll be back in a minute.

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29:36Kara Swisher:He also formed an alliance, obviously the most famous alliance is with Elon Musk, and gave him huge latitude to operate across the government Doge, which is now apparently closed down with nothing to show for it. In fact, probably a lot of costs. Except, you know, just a minor detail, USAID doesn't exist anymore. Correct. And that's what I'm saying. There's a lot of costs, including deaths of people across the globe. So you write that some in the administration, he appeared unhinged, which I told you this, Maggie. He would just wander to meetings drunk whenever he wanted and take fights with cabinet members.

30:08Kara Swisher:Talk about the tenure, that first tenure that created so much destabilization, which the White House still hasn't recovered from or has it? First, Maggie, explain that sort of what happened there. Yeah, it's a good question about the recovery piece. So it's almost, it's memory hold at this point with so much that has happened for the most part, what those first couple of months of the administration were like. But Trump basically let Elon Musk become not exactly a co-president, but basically a co-president. He was issuing directives. He was, you know, sending out these memos from the personnel management office, you know, the five things email.

30:52senior advisors in the West Wing would learn when the rest of us did what Musk was up to. It created this, you know, sort of presidency within a presidency. And he was demanding cuts at cabinet agencies in ways that, you know, there were some people who were quite fawning over him, like Lee Zeldin at EPA. And then there were others who were very, very troubled by the demands that he was making, Marco Rubio at State Department, Sean Duffy at Transportation, Doug Collins at the VA, although, you know, it's a sliding scale of how animated everybody was, but he was just sort of doing these slashes of, you know, get rid of this one.

31:35He would make accusations. We read about this remarkable cabinet meeting in March of last year, which was only like six weeks into the administration at that point, where, you know, Elon Musk is insisting that Sean Duffy has, I think it was like, you have DEI hires still in the air traffic control towers. And Duffy was like, who? Like, names, please. And that was one of the things that became the beginning of the end of Musk. On the one hand, Trump saw Musk as something of a heat shield at the time. He was the one absorbing a lot of bad press. But the reality is that Musk So essentially, as one person put it to us in the course of this reporting, hijacked this second administration for several months.

32:20And, you know, they've recovered in the sense that there were, you know, other things that they moved on to, like the 12-day war in Iran, which was early last June. Then there was the summer of Jeffrey Epstein files, and I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point. Yes, because it was Musk related. You know, there are people who, it's not like they are rowing in different directions in terms of what they want to see happen agenda-wise in this administration overall. They really aren't. This is not Steve Bannon versus Jared Kushner. But how you get there, they're not all on the same page, you know, whether it's Russ Vogue or Elon Musk or Stephen Miller as the top people I would put in that bucket.

33:05So you have this situation where Musk, yes, they closed a congressionally created agency in USAID, just got rid of it. It's just gone. And the rump that was left became Marco Rubio's problem. But beyond that, as you say, they did not do anything close to the savings they said they were going to do. We had the sitting president do what was essentially an ad for Tesla by buying a Tesla and bringing it up to the White House, which, you know, in a series of pretty astonishing moments, that was one. But that was the beginning of the end. Right.

33:40Kara Swisher:So, John, how do you look at this period of time? Is it just that he gave Trump a lot of money and possibly was a critical element in it in the election of Trump winning? I believe that to be so. Or something else was happening here. And interesting enough, when the break happened, which I predicted would happen, Elon's tweet about Epstein set off the Epstein stuff. Absolutely, to me. When I saw that, I was like, oh, no, this is where it's good. Because I had spent a lot of time focused on Epstein stuff in MAGA world, essentially. It had been a bearing wall for MAGA world. And when I saw Elon's tweet, I was like, oh, dear, he's really angry if he's putting this up.

34:21Kara Swisher:Talk a little bit about the course of that relation. Because there was also the criticizing the big spending bill. John, talk a little bit about both those things. And Maggie, if you have any thoughts. But John, you go first. Well, so the Elon relationship is interesting for lots of reasons. But Trump had no relationship with Elon Musk before 2024, really. I mean, they'd met each other a couple of times. Elon had been quite critical of Trump. They'd sort of attacked each other publicly. there were a series of meetings throughout 2024, you know, breakfasts and things like that. And then Elon became a huge booster after the assassination attempt in Butler and they just went all in, spent around$300 million to elect him.

35:13Kara Swisher:That we know of. That we know of, exactly. Correct. Which is just maybe the most ever spent on a presidential campaign by any donor. So I think it's that, but it's also Trump was fascinated by Musk. You know, Maggie made the point earlier, he equates wealth with intelligence. Well, by that score, Musk must have been the smartest man who ever lived. And Trump would talk about him almost like he was socializing him into the world. You know, he would say like, Elon's a recluse, but he's not a recluse anymore. I mean, Elon Musk moved in. He literally was living at Mar-a-Lago. in a cottage on the property called Banyan that Trump usually rents out for$2 ,000 a night.

35:58We don't know what Elon was paying for it. He was getting meals from the Mar-a-Lago kitchen at odd hours. He became essentially a housemate and was suddenly involved in everything. Trump, I think, was intrigued by him, flattered that the world's richest man was essentially working for him. Trump would constantly, usually in previous iterations of Trump, you might think he'd be insecure having someone who was so much richer than him around. But Trump at that point was such, he had been so inflated by his victory. He was now indisputably this figure of history. He would say to people, he can't be president.

36:40He's South African. He can't be president. He would throw that in. So Elon was not a threat from that respect. And he sort of, I think, felt that he was larger than Elon, even though Elon was richer than him.

36:50Kara Swisher:It was paternalistic or older brotherish. At one point when he was living, I knew that he had a cottage there. One of the Trump people were like, oh, it's great. He's there. He's there all the time. I go, that'll get tired in 14 seconds. And you'll call me in two weeks, three weeks and tell me, he crazy. And the person called me and said, he crazy. And it was like, they didn't know what to do. It was like Bob. I kept calling him Bob, the guy who wouldn't leave in the Richard Dreyfuss movie. What do you make of the break, both of you, very briefly, of the break between them and then the reconciliation, which seems to be afoot?

37:24Well, it was inevitable for the reason that you said. There was always going to be a moment when Elon Musk did, or several moments where Elon Musk did too much or went too far. And by the time that he did that Epstein tweet, or expo, whatever the hell we call it now, expo. I will tell you, though, that I don't share the view that Elon is why that all suddenly came to bear. I think that that was a slow-moving disaster in MAGA world. And with accelerating speed, he made it impossible for people to look away at that point. But that was a different issue. Trump is never going to be happy with somebody else getting spotlight, attention, credit.

38:04Elon did become a liability in Trump's mind. He was privately telling people he was worried about conflicts of interest, which was a little late after the whole Tesla display, but whatever. And the ultimate reality is, I mean, to Jonathan's point earlier about how Trump uses power and wields it over these tech officials, you know, Elon Musk is not so relevant politically without Donald Trump. And I think that he has seen that. And so Trump cut him off. Yes, Trump did have this remarkable line about how this is why he can't have friends. You know, they always leave him, which a lot of people have noted to us, whoever had the book, and were struck by.

38:46But Musk is back because Musk likes influence and power and because this government still has, you know, sway over some of his companies. And a lot of people around Trump still believe that Elon Musk can be of use to the party financially. I don't think it's more complicated, but Jonathan may have a— Does Trump think that?

39:05Kara Swisher:Does Trump think that? Trump's always happy to have somebody invest. Yeah. Is how I would put it. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the ways Trump has also used the presidency to enrich himself and his family. It's a lot wrapped up in technology. Trump has made at least$2 billion after returning to the White House. Again, I think that's undercounting it. About half of that comes from the family's cryptocurrency business. One of the ways is getting fees. Even as people lose money, they get a VIG every time. Other ways is like the UAE buying into their companies and getting something else somewhere else.

39:36Kara Swisher:They purchase 49 % of World Liberty Financial, and it's a crypto firm they share with the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy. Talk about this, and what do you make of what's happened here? It's not a surprise, but compared to Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden wasn't imaginative enough, apparently, in terms of taking advantage of this. To compare them is almost absurd at this point. I mean, Hunter Biden, was it$80 ,000 a month that he was getting from Burisma? And some paintings, basically. Obviously, Hunter Biden was influence peddling when Biden was vice president. I mean, he's not on the board of Burisma because he's an energy expert, obviously.

40:18But this is something of a scale that we've never seen before in the American presidency. And it's actually not even close. The Trump family has made clear to everyone in the second term that you actually don't need to go through intermediaries anymore. You can put money directly into their pockets. You can put the children on boards of companies that are competing for government contracts and in some cases getting major government contracts, if you're a foreign government or a fund attached to a foreign government, you can go into business directly with the Trump family and the Whitcoff family.

40:54And you said, you know, that we don't know the half. I don't know. We might not know 5 % of what the family's making. I mean, like any time you go down a rabbit hole, like we went down in the book a rabbit hole on the library, the presidential library, which I think is a really underreported exercise. Of course, it's not a library. It's a skyscraper. And the plot of land was given to the Trumps free, very valuable plot of land in Miami was given to them for free. Eric Trump is out soliciting Gulf Arab sovereign funds. This is at the same time as his father is conducting foreign policy with those countries and those countries are seeking favours.

41:37but it's also if you want to stay in with Trump you can give money to him so Howard Lutnick his commerce secretary Trump was some of our reporting in the book was Trump was very irritated at reading stories about Lutnick's sons being involved in business that had overlaps with his government Lutnick gave 25 million dollars to the Trump presidential library and Trump would remark in front of people the only reason I this is in front of Lutnick as well but others in the oval The only reason I put up with Howard's bullshit is because he gave me$25 million. You know, other times he'd say, you know, how great is Howard?

42:13I asked for 25. He just gave it to me straight away. So it's all out there. They've made it very clear that they're open for business. And, you know, understandably, many businesses, many rich people, many people who are seeking pardons understand that this is the Trump economy in Washington. and you got to get into it.

42:37Kara Swisher:I've called it a coin-operated presidency. You put money in and you get more out, typically. Musk is a good example. He puts 200, 300 million in and he's gotten billions out in contracts. And he may have deserved those contracts, but some of them he might not have, right? But talk about how that's allowed. Is it because of the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling or the fact that Trump is going to pardon or going to try to pardon everything? Because it's not just that. There's luxury resorts in Albania linked to Jared Kushner. Everywhere, it seems everywhere that Trump's sons are doing licensing deals around the real estate businesses that are somehow linked to.

43:12Kara Swisher:So it's essentially the monetization of the White House. Maggie, how is this going to be, how is this going to turn out, this blurring of foreign policy with private interests? Well, there's no question. And sorry, Jonathan, I didn't mean to cut you off. I was, I wanted to make sure that you made the letnick point because that's an example that I don't think I could have imagined before, honestly, as a cabinet official. making sure to stay in a good place that way. In terms of how is it going to turn out, I mean, it's inevitably raising questions about the overlap between foreign policy and, you know, personal finances.

43:48There is a bit in the book where, you know, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff went to go try to hammer out this ceasefire deal with Gaza, get the hostages back. It was a huge deal. It was a big deal. It was a legitimate accomplishment. And their view was, you know, what you guys would call, I'm paraphrasing, but what you would all, the collective you, would call a conflict of interest, you know, these are negotiating assets for us. However, there is so much overlap that it is really, really hard to determine what ends where and what begins where. In terms of how is it, I think you said, how is it allowed?

44:29So there's a couple of factors. One, people keep saying to me, you know, wait until the House flips, if the House flips. I don't think Trump's going to have a big problem. I mean, you know, there might be subpoenas that he doesn't want to deal with, among other things, because most processes move much slower than Trump does, number one. Number two, Trump is operating with an immunity decision, which he will often say, you know, I'm immune, I'm immune. Trump runs the Justice Department, and they've made very clear there is no, and we lay this out in our book very clearly, there is no separation between the DOJ and the West Wing as there was as a post-Watergate norm for a very long time.

45:07And Trump has told people that he'll pardon everyone who's come within a certain radius, the number changes, of the Oval Office. And we spoke to a number of people in the course of our reporting who were counting on those pardons. They were explicit about it. He's going to give out pardons. I'm counting on my pardon. I hope he does, et cetera. So, that sets up its own incentive structure. And then when you have a group of House Republicans who behave as if they are an extension of the executive branch, that's another way. So, I don't know what this all ends up looking like, but what it's not going to look like, in my humble opinion.

45:44And again, I could be wrong. There is no use, to some extent, in prognosticating, she says before she does it, a version of it. But this isn't going to look like 2019. You know, this is going to be a very, very difficult world for Democrats in the House to get subpoenas complied with. We'll be back in a minute.

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48:48Kara Swisher:Let's finish by looking forward at the upcoming midterms in the presidential elections. You write in the book that not only does Trump seem uninterested in the midterms, but he seems to take satisfaction with the idea of Republicans losing when he's not on the ballot, which seems on brand. He also expects to be impeached again if Republicans lose control of Congress. Can you explain that indifference, Jonathan? in? Well, firstly, it's not completely black and white. It's not that he doesn't care at all about the midterms. It's just that he cares about them far less, A, than he did in the first term, B, than his advisors would hope.

49:22They would hope that he would be more exercised about domestic political concerns, and he's just not. Things could change, but I think in Donald Trump's mind, the way he's behaving right now, he's not ever going to run for office again. He's constantly talking about, you know, should it be JD? Should it be Marco? You know, what have you. And he's in what he would talk about as described, I think, as legacy mode, but a very specific type of legacy, you know, putting his stamp on Washington. He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about architecture and building monuments to himself, renaming institutions, essentially branding himself indelibly on Washington and also on reshaping parts of the world.

50:10I think one of the great appeals of the Iran situation was that he could be the first president in 47 years to finally deal with this problem. It's what can get me in the history books. So I think that's part of it as well.

50:24Kara Swisher:Maggie, you've also said you're not sure Trump wants a successor. And just a few weeks ago, he again floated the idea of running for a third term. Is he serious about that, or is he just trying to drive everyone, including Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, crazy? Because there's a scene in the book where Trump asks Rupert Murdoch about both of them, and they're in the room. Talk about that moment. Sure. Let me work backwards. So, from that, we have this scene in the book, and it was a pretty remarkable moment. Yes, Trump likes trolling people. We have no reason to believe in our reporting that Marco Rubio is running for president.

50:59You know, maybe that will change. You can scale up fairly fast. But J.D. Vance, in all of our reporting, is the front runner at the moment. But Trump's not going to make it easy for him. And to that point, you know, Trump has Murdoch to the White House for dinner in October of last year while Trump is suing Murdoch over some of the Epstein coverage and then Wall Street Journal at the time. Very big group in the Blue Room at the White House. And J.D. Vance and Usha Vance are there. Marco Rubio is there, along with a bunch of other people. And Trump starts engaging Murdoch. You know, what do you think of J.D.?

51:36And Murdoch says, well, J.D. has the potential to be great. And, or good. I don't remember the exact word. Jonathan, is it good or great? Great, I think. Yeah. Whatever. I think it was good. Anyway, so, and then J.D. Vance, who knows that Murdoch did everything he could to stop Trump, you know, and we didn't succeed from making Vance the VP in 2024 as nominee. Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot, Rupert. And then Trump says, you know, well, what about Marco? And Murdoch just icily says, coolly, you know, Marco is brilliant. And it was uncomfortable. And it was a pretty incredible scene just to do this in front of them, in front of this group of people.

52:19You know, and there have been other moments like that where Trump has made a side, or we write in the book about how Trump was talking about his gilding of the Oval Office, and someone asked him what happens when the next person who succeeds him takes it all down, and Trump says, Cubans love gold. J.D. Vance is not Cuban. So... That was a funny line. So Trump, you know, this was misinterpreted when I said it somewhere that, you know, he doesn't... What he wants is to be the last big sort of leader among Republicans and among the MAGA movement. It doesn't mean that he doesn't actually want another president to take over the country.

52:56But with the 2028 stuff, you know, he just doesn't like other, he doesn't like seating the stage. And so the second that he anoints someone, that person is going to start the hourglass on Trump, number one, depending on how he does it and what it looks like. fine, number one. Number two, these things often start out as trolls with Trump, and then they take on a life of their own, like the 2028 thing. Now, it is really hard to see a world where he could run again. But that said, there's no world where he is leaving the stage, even if he leaves the White House. And so I think that becomes its own complication in various ways going forward.

53:40I mean, this was like, I keep thinking about the people who keep talking about this. I keep wondering if they lived through the same 2021 that I did, where Joe Biden kept saying the former guy, as if that was going to make Trump never appear again. He is the most consequential president, certainly of my lifetime, certainly of Jonathan's lifetime. You know, depends on how long we live. Maybe it'll remain that way, but he's not just going away.

54:05Kara Swisher:No, that is very true. So he doesn't really want. And it's interesting, John, it's Vance who's been, including in your book, voicing skepticism about Trump's impulses. He's the one that seems most not on the same page. How do you look at what he'll do? J.D. Vance is actually, when it comes to most of Trump's agenda, completely on board, if not more aggressive on some issues like immigration. I mean, we have a scene in the book where only a few days after the killing of Alex Pretty in Minnesota, J.D. Vance walks into the chief of staff's office in a meeting and is agitating for them to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress the left-wing protests in Minnesota.

54:47So it's not like Vance is, you know, against a bunch of Trump's agenda. Where he was really vocal were two issues, Epstein and Iran. And the interesting thing about Iran was, which I think was quite revealing, was no one in Trump's inner circle thought this was a good idea. The closest may be Pete Hegset, but basically everyone else was very skeptical about going into Iran. But no one made a case to Trump against it, vocally, except for Vance. And it cost him. It cost him with Trump. It irritated Trump. He didn't want to hear it. and it strained their relationship. So I thought that was kind of interesting because if you're J.D., I always looked at Vance through the prism of his one job politically is to stay in Trump's good graces and to get, you know, if Trump says, you're my guy, that's it.

55:46It's over in terms of the primary. So it was just interesting that he was willing to risk that at that moment. And it showed me that ideologically, it does run deeper for him on certain issues than it does for Trump.

56:01Kara Swisher:Yeah, absolutely. I think he can't stand it. It's just his history. I think eventually he won't be able to stand it. Trump is also 80 years old and showing signs of aging as Biden did. But Maggie, you've said that Trump's health is, quote, one of the black box secrets of the administration. Why? I mean, obviously, they can't figure out what's going on with Mitch McConnell. He's in a hospital. One would assume you could find out. But why is this, this ability to suppress the information about any president's health? So to your point, it's not just this. All presidents, you know, have some version of being secretive about their health, not to the same degree by any stretch of the imagination, all of them.

56:38But he's not alone in that. Trump has always just been very, very, very secretive about his health going back decades to when he was running the Trump organization. Why? I don't know. It doesn't, you know, doesn't mean that there is some dark secret. It just it's an area that really he doesn't want people going to, in part because he sees illness as as weak. He is constantly worried about getting sick. You know, there was an amazing moment in term one where George Stephanopoulos was doing some hours long project with Trump of just a news recording project. And Mick Mulvaney was in the background and the White House chief of staff and Mulvaney starts coughing.

57:19and Trump was like, get out of here. If you're sick, get out of here. And it was all on camera. That's a pretty pervasive attitude. But yes, he is 80. He obviously looks older than he used to. He sounds older than he used to. His voice is slower. His language is less crisp. I can watch the same videos everybody else does from 10 years ago. But we don't know what we don't know. And he has gone to Walter Reed more often with less information being released. I think presidents in general have, you know, a desire not to be seen as weak in terms of illness.

57:55Kara Swisher:I am astonished that we don't have this information for any president, including this one who's clearly aged. Yeah, I mean, I think this is true for all public officials. I personally am of the opinion, either party, presidency, Congress members, anybody, you know, if you have a condition that is impairing your ability to serve, that is not in the public's interest. That doesn't mean I think he does, by the way, Trump's. I'm just saying that this is not something that any president really is particularly forthcoming with. Last question. One of the big arguments you make in the book is that it was Democrats' successes in driving Trump from office in 2020 and their support of efforts to hold him accountable that made him, quote, the most consequential and feared president of our lifetimes.

58:40Kara Swisher:In other words, it egged him on to get, one of the things you say is stay out of prison. The other is to make money. The third is to have a do-over here. For Democrats, what are the risks that come with aggressively going after Trump again? Should they retake power? Well, I don't think it's really a disputable premise. The point was that if Trump had have served a consecutive second term, it just would be nothing like this term. He was hobbling along at the end of 2020. And if he eked out a narrow victory in that election, he would have had to deal with all the same stuff Biden did. COVID, inflation, the notion that he would have avoided the global inflation.

59:17I mean, okay, fine. You can claim that, but it's not really plausible. He would have had to withdraw from Afghanistan, which he was trying to do on a precipitous timeline. So that was the argument. Instead, he leaves power, the public sours on Biden, and Trump gets built up as this almost mythological figure through four indictments, the assassination attempt, holding up the fist, the blood coming down the face. He became a larger figure. He was enlarged by all of this and had time during the interregnum for his team to really prepare for what they want to do, people like Stephen Miller. So I don't think that's disputable.

1:00:00That's just like anyone with any common sense can see that. As for the future, look, I never want to make confident declarations, but I don't think Donald Trump is running for a third term. I don't see any evidence that he is. Um, so I think then the, the, the political risk is simply just, uh, energizing the Republican base, right. And impeachment effort obviously energizes the Republican base. We've seen that with Bill Clinton and the democratic party. We've seen that in the first term with Donald Trump. Um, so, you know, it's pretty obvious. And I've spoken to people who are, you know, advisors to Trump and people who are supporters of J.D.

1:00:48Vance who've said to me, the best possible thing for us in 2028 is if Democrats impeach. It would just be something that we could rally behind. I mean, remember, the Republican Party is very divided right now. There's all kinds of fractures and an impeachment effort would just be, it would be a glue. So, I mean, that's the political analysis.

1:01:08Kara Swisher:I would agree. Maggie, why don't you finish up? I'm sort of of the opinion, A, like I agree with everything Jonathan said just about sort of the unifying factor that it would be. I don't really see how Democrats can have been running on Trump as one of the most dangerous threats in the world and talking about accountability and then not pursue accountability, despite the fact that what Democrats have run into every single time, among other problems in their party and with their own messaging and their own actions, is it's an asymmetrical fight because Trump will, we write this in the book, his shamelessness is his superpower.

1:01:52And so, you know, Graham Plattner, for instance, did eventually drop out of the race. You really, you're never going to see Trump take a similar, I mean, you're not going to, he's obviously not going to be in that position again, but you're not going to see a commensurate action. But what I will also say, just my personal guess, and again, this is useless and all the caveats. If it is an impeachment, there's going to be something else that Republicans unite behind as to why they're galvanized against Democrats. And it will be the same for Democrats against the Republicans, because this is the world of political polarization that exists.

1:02:30So it's just, it's all tribal and neither side wants to see the other get ahead.

1:02:36Kara Swisher:So no more books, right? No, you're never doing a book. Don't say the word book to us. Terrible question. Yeah, but so much good stuff. That's why. Just enjoy this one. Okay. Well, no, but there's more. I can't speak for Maggie. You ain't getting another one from me. I know how that feels. Enjoy this one. This was a unicorn. All right. Well, it's an excellent book, and congratulations on the success, and good luck covering the rest of the administration. Yeah. You're going to stay until the end, right, Maggie? Bitter end? Sure. So is Jonathan. You too. All right. Well, we'll look forward to more of your reporting in The Times.

1:03:10Kara Swisher:Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Bye. Thanks for having us.

1:03:17Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemary Ho, Dave Shaw, Lissa Soap, and Julia Sharp-Levine. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you are writing another best-selling book. If not, you're falling asleep on camera. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

1:03:54Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Thursday with more.