Disney's Hulu Deal, UAW Strike Impact, and Guest Chris Krebs

24:01And the biggest ad for why unions work without unanimity here is that everyone else, per your comments about Toyota, is having to respond to these higher wages. And the big white rhino here, no doubt about it, is Tesla. And it all points, it's all, you know, the wonderful thing about this - You wanted to say white rhino, didn't you? I did. Okay, go ahead. The wonderful thing about this can be summarized with one piece of data, and that is as a percentage of GDP, corporate profits have never been greater and wages have never been lower. Now, I've argued that unions aren't the best way to close that gap, but you just have to give it to this guy.

24:40The leverage, the way they deployed this, the media savvy, the results, and the second order effects of other automobile companies being forced to raise their wages. Look, it's good for America. Capital has been beating the shit out of labor for 40 years. And so I hope that we return to a point where younger people and middle class people can have more money, can form families. because I think a lot of what's going on, whether it's, you know, just anger, dissatisfaction with government, being willing to, you know, cut someone off in traffic or shitpost them online or demonize people. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that society has lied to them.

25:24They've worked hard. They're good citizens and they're not, they don't have the same quality of life their parents did. Meanwhile, social media is serving them up these images that Everyone but fucking me is on jets and has ripped abs. So we need to put more money in middle-class households. So, look, I think this guy deserves a lot of praise, and I think this is a good thing. And I hope it ripples out to the rest of the automobile industry. And mostly, mostly I hope it's Tesla. Yeah, Tesla's in. I mean, Toyota responded. Tesla is making the argument that it's better for its workers without being unionized.

26:01But I think they're in for a world to hurt from this guy. I think he's effective and smart, and he looks substantive compared to Elon in this thing. It's going to be his challenge. Elon should be focusing on this over almost anything else rather than his Twitter, whatever he's doing over Twitter. Elon is smart. My guess is what he's going to do. He's going to preempt it, and he's going to raise their wages or give them stock options or something and just try to say, I think he's just going to try and block it. And the only way he can block it, he can have to be hostile, which is not going to work, and he might do that.

26:32But I think what he'll do is I think he'll raise their wages or give them options or give them a free ride on SpaceX or something. But anyways, we'll see. Yeah, he's got to act. Everyone's dancing to this guy's tune, though, in any case. Good job, Sean Fain. But by the way, it was mentioned when it was at the White House. It was announced when we were there. Gene Sperling had worked on it, who works for Biden, and he got to announce it there. It was a very wide-ranging group of people. We had a good time. Anyway, and it was nice to see Biden announce that there. That was a nice thing to do. Anyway.

27:03All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll chat about Disney taking full control of Hulu in front of Pivot Chris Krebs. We'll join us to break down the new executive order on AI.

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28:13Scott, we're back with our second big story. Disney has announced that it will take full control of Hulu, paying at least$8.61 billion to buy out Comcast's 33 % stake. That is the floor price. They've got to value it. Well, I'll talk about it in a second. The two companies had a 2019 agreement giving both sides the option to trigger this deal, which Comcast chose to do. Most people thought that was going to happen. The ultimate price for Comcast's stake will be determined by the appraisal process. There's a couple banks. If they don't agree within 10%, then another one gets involved. Hulu had a$27.5 billion guaranteed floor value no matter what when Comcast and Disney entered the agreement.

28:48And, you know, So Ryan Roberts, who runs Comcast, called Hulu a scarce kingmaker aspect at a conference in September. I think he's right and also said it's more valuable than what a deal was made. Of course, he has to say that. He wants more money. Some people think$30 billion. So what do you think about this? We will solidify Disney as the biggest player, presumably. And then I assume Comcast will want to buy Warner. But what do you think? Well, we knew this was coming. And the market is just, I mean, really, the market really is an amazing thing. And when you were looking at streaming a year or two years ago, it was just pretty obvious.

29:19At some point, a few things are going to have to happen. They're going to have to cut costs. They can't sustain this level of spend. There's going to need to be consolidation, and they're going to need to raise prices. And all three of those things have happened. And this is part of the consolidation part of the program. And it goes to kind of capital structure. And that is initially they thought as a response to Netflix, we need to create a Switzerland where all the other media players can contribute their assets and we can have a platform that everyone feels comfortable putting their content on.

29:48That did not work. It turned into a Frankenstein. And when you only own, if you own 20 % of ESPN as Hearst does, you get billions of dollars of free cash flow and it makes the value of the company go up. When you only own, when you're a minority owner in a company that's requiring investment and you may not have that stake long enough to recognize that value down the road, you don't get the value for it. So for Disney to get the credit that they should for being big and dominant in the future, which is streaming, and to be able to make the requisite investments that that category requires, they need to own it.

30:27And one of them had to own all of it, or all they were going to get was the requirements, the capital requirements of a platform that requires more investment, but they weren't going to get any credit for it. So this is absolutely the right thing to do as Disney moves to parks, movies, and streaming. And movies and streaming are synergistic. And the IP flows down to the parks. This was a smart thing to do for both companies. Yeah. Down to the question of price, Disney announced earlier this year that Hulu would be available on Disney plus the subscribers of both services with one app experience by the end of the year.

31:00These one app experiences, so it's not confusing. We don't know what users would pay. With this emotion, they're going to have to divest. They think ESPN, possibly, obviously ABC. And so maybe they could spin off ESPN to Comcast. That makes a lot more sense. There's going to be a lot of media stuff in play here, no question. Meanwhile, Nelson Peltz is still making a play for the Disney board. And he now is an ally in former Marvel executive Ike Perlmutter, who was his ally before, by the way. He was kind of a jerk, as I understand it, from those who have told me this. who revealed this week he entrusted his Disney stake in Peltz's fund.

31:37Perlmutter was fired from Disney earlier this year as a result of what he calls fundamental differences with leadership. You know, he's a troublemaker is what he is. But, I mean, a legendary executive, but not a nice person from what I understand. But nonetheless, Peltz is still over there pressuring Bob Iger. Any thoughts? This will get solved. I mean, we made this prediction. We said that Nelson Peltz or representatives of Tran were going to get seats on the board. And Bob Iger, he's not only kind of a classic, he doesn't want to go to the board meeting and gin up a fight. He's got bigger fish to fry.

32:14So my guess is both sides are talking to each other and negotiating a board seat for Nelson or a representative. And Bob Iger's style is just not to start shitposting and show up to the annual meeting in a fight. He just doesn't want to do that, even though it's not their stake. They still don't own a large stake because it's a big company. But he doesn't want to get in a war trying to commit to shareholders in counter communication because all the communications from Trion, if they go to an annual meeting, it's going to be just how bad Bob is and what shitty decisions they've made. Bob doesn't need that distraction.

32:50He's a smart person who is able, which a lot of CEOs aren't able to do this, and that is elevate shareholder interests above his ego. And so he's just going to say, look, this is bad for me. It's bad for you. It's bad for the stock price. Let's come to some sort of agreement. Who do you want on the board? And then let's get back to the good work of adding stakeholder value. I think that's, I'm shocked it hasn't happened already. This does not go to the annual meeting. This gets solved. They're both adults. Nelson Peltz and Bob Iger are both adults. Yeah. And this move is important. This Hulu move is important.

33:21They've got to, Disney's got to make a profit at this. And by the way, Hulu was profitable. Was it one of the early and profitable streaming ones? So there is money here if the consolidation happens. That's really, and then you've got Paramount Plus, MGM Plus, stuff like that. But those are small, like nothing burgers that people will suck up. Anyway, interesting times, interesting times. Lots of content today. Even more so, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

33:52Chris Krebs is the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and is now a partner at the Krebs Stamos Group with Alex Stamos, who we adore also. He's going to help us break down President Biden's new executive order on artificial intelligence. Welcome, Chris. So let's start at the top. How effective do you think the order would be? It is long. It is wide ranging. It hits pretty much every, you know, every stop, every stop on the bus route. Talk a little bit about it. It's over 100 pages. It's going to address cybersecurity, global competition, discrimination. It directs federal agencies to establish rules and guidelines, includes reporting and testing requirements for AI companies tied to national security.

34:37Give me your overall. It's a lot. I mean, you could chunk this thing up, and probably get six, seven, or eight individual executive orders out of it. So as you mentioned, it's over 100 pages, 111, 118, something on that order. And it got pulled together actually pretty quickly. So if you think about the landscape of AI and generative AI in particular, it was only really, what, 11 months ago that ChatGPT was made available for public release, November 30th, 2022. So they pulled together this honking large executive order over the course of, I mean, it's just, it's, yes, that is a very, it's, it's like flops and floating point operations and things like that honking.

35:24It's very technical. Yeah. And, and it was spearheaded by Ben Buchanan, who is a bit of a name in the tech communities operating out of the office of technology, science and policy, and under the kind of guidance and direction of the chief of staff's office. And it pulls together all these different elements within the executive office of the president, a dozen or so agencies. There's a significant amount of input from industry and academia, a bunch of different listening sessions, and then they roll it out earlier this week. So it's, you know, it's impressive in and of itself. And I'm also a little bit reminded of, you know, when I was reviewing yesterday's AI Summit, Safety Summit.

36:06In England at the same time. Yeah, and he who shall not be named on the podcast said something on the order of, right now AI is 80 % beneficial, 20 % potentially damaging. And I view the executive order the same way. There's a lot of goodness here. There's a lot of benefit. There's educational tools. There's workforce enablement. But it does give a pretty quick priority rundown of the things that can be bad in the immediate future related to artificial intelligence. So is it a win? Because there are a lot of congressional people. Obviously, everybody thinks Congress should be doing this job, not President Biden or by executive order.

36:46And you've been involved in those. I mean, it's not the way we want to legislate, presumably. Yeah, I think it is a win, particularly when you consider the transatlantic element where you have the European Union that has the AI Act, and then you have the UK that's looking at regulation. I think it sets the right tone and is consistent with the typical American approach to regulation, which is, you know, let's let this play out a little bit and then regulate to prevent the biggest societal harms as opposed to the European approach, which is regulate first, ask questions later. So I think it will enable the innovation community in the ecosystem.

37:24I know there's a lot of chatter about regulatory capture in the bigs that are positioning so that they have solidified the high ground in the AI wars in the coming years. This is open source versus closed systems. Well, it's a little bit of that, but also, I mean, there's plenty of the proprietary systems and the burgeoning VC community that wants to get into the proprietary and close side too. But I think it does give plenty of opportunities and plenty of pathways for everyone to get into this ecosystem. And it's not just about locking out kind of like it looks like in hyperscale cloud battles that it's not limited and everyone still has an opportunity to get in.

38:06Just for people who don't know, Bletchley Park is about 50 miles from London and was the place where British codebreakers worked during World War II. It's a meeting that's going on in London. Vice President Harris went. Elon Musk is the person you're talking about, was there, too. A lot of people. And it's, of course, where they solved the enigma, the Nazi enigma with Alan Turing. So it's a very famous place for this, one of the first, sort of the birthplace of this modern computing, essentially. Nice to meet you, Chris. Because if you were to try and guess who are the winners, typically with any sort of regulation, there's winners and losers.

38:38And let's start with companies. Do you think that the big AI guys are winners? If you were to discern, again, who are the winners and losers in the private sectors, and also from a consumer standpoint, what do you think will be the first effect that the consumer feels of this executive order? Well, on your first point, it's always interesting to see who comments and comes out first when there are big executive orders or regulatory movements. And there are elements of regulation within the executive order. And there's, you know, you heard Lena Kahn at the FTC jump out there and say, hey, you know, there's no AI carve out in the FTC's authority.

39:16Right. I'll read the entire tweet. There is no AI exemption from existing laws and the FTC will continue to promote fair competition, privacy and honest business practices. Go ahead. Yeah, that's a flex. There's no question about it. But Brad Smith from Microsoft's out there. You had one of the co-founders of Anthropic out there. You had Aaron Levy from Box out there. So the industry, I think, is saying, hey, this was a smart way to do it. You're not boxing us in. And so, you know, from a winners and losers perspective, I think that the bigs, particularly when it comes to the large language models, certainly have preserved their lanes to success.

39:52And, you know, I still see the blockers as fairly minimal in terms of large language models going forward. And you look at some of the thresholds where the reporting to government kicks in, and those don't even exist, at least in large deployment right now. And that's my understanding is that the thresholds are above what's currently deployed. It's for the next chat, GPD. These are this is the flops that we're not going to go into it, but it has to get they have to do these reporting if they get to a certain size and inform the government and testing of safety. And at least at my reading, even the reporting requirements are not particularly onerous.

40:31You just have to tell the government you're about to train this model. And then as you go about it, you have to provide the results of any red team testing. Now, I just I don't see red team testing, safety testing as particularly high of a bar to clear for anyone that gets into that once again in the game. I think it's kind of table stakes. So, yeah, for now, for now. Sure. But then but then you have the government procurement side, which is pretty standard. It's like, you know, if you want to play ball, you must be or if you know, if you want to get on the ride, you must be this tall. And so they continue to kind of adhere to power the purse requirements.

41:10Do you think the federal agencies have resources actually of what's being asked of them? Because he also asked the federal agencies to do a number of things. You know, when you start at the National Security Community, Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Intel community, I think they're - Commerce Department. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, I like carving these things up. I look at the IC and DOD, and the things I'm seeing over there are, again, it's smart. It's saying, hey, if we're going to bake AI into any of our workflows, let's make sure we know how it was built up, how it's getting implemented, and then we have the proper controls in place so it can't go haywire.

41:42The commerce side is a little bit different, right? It's setting up guidelines for, you know, watermarking and deception of AI-generated content, right? It's got NIST figuring out how to deploy the AI risk management framework. It's got CISA in the Department of Energy looking at cybersecurity implications of AI, but also for critical infrastructure, but also sponsoring these grand challenges or cyber challenges that say, hey, how can we use AI to our benefit in software coding to detect vulnerable code and potential bad spots for threat actors to get in? I was shocked. Typically, when you see this type of executive order or any regulation coming out of the president's, off the president's desk, immediately there's talking points from the other side saying why this is going to ruin America.

42:30And I haven't seen that this morning. I'm just I'm curious what your thoughts are. There's a little bit right. The effective accelerationists are right there saying you got to let us go. Say more. Comment on that. What's so far the talking points on the other side of this? They are minimal, but you're seeing a little bit out of Sand Hill Road about, you know, you guys are bending us in, you can't stop innovation. And generally, I agree with the philosophy that we're not going to be able to dial back or rein in technology development. But I think it is smart that you have to keep looking for where the societal impacts may be and blunt them to the greatest extent possible.

43:13But understanding that, you know, we're at least in the U.S., we're not we're not going to lose this race and we're not going to do, for instance, what the Europeans have done with cloud and some of the other software development innovations that have happened here as opposed to over there. Right. Although there is the sort of the damage that was done by having no regulation at the beginning of the social media phase or any of the Internet phases, having zero privacy regulation. And that was the argument then. Let's not do anything. Let's let them let's let them figure it out. And there's been damages, as you know, as you've you've been part of.

43:46Yeah, of course. And, you know, we see that every day across the Internet. So what about the future of openness in AI? I want to mention a sub stack that I think people I like a lot called AI Snake Oil written by two Princeton academics. They published a piece cataloging the openness of the various policies in the order. The piece says it's mostly good news for those who favor openness critically since there are no licensing requirements, though it doesn't do much to require transparency in AI development minus the national security. So people can keep their secrets except for when it affects the government.

44:18I was a little surprised that there were not any requirements on explainability and transparency in the training sets. The AI Act has explainability and transparency requirements. Some of the legislation that's been proposed in the U.S. Congress similarly has those requirements. That's not to say that they're off the table. I just think this is kind of the early shots and some of the subsequent regulatory movements may come. But to kind of the earlier question, I do not feel entirely comfortable that we've just left this entirely in the executive branch to determine the path forward on what the guardrails are.

44:59I think the Congress is going to have to move. I think this is one of the areas where there is some, it's kind of like China, where there's uniformity across the two parties. There's a bipartisan need. But I just I don't think we have the technical policy chops in the U.S. Congress right now to get where we need to go. That said, these AI Insight forums are happening on a regular basis to inform the conversation, at least in the Senate. So I think I think that's a smart, smart approach. Yeah. Do we feel Mike Johnson has technical skills? I do not. I'm worried a little bit. But let's not get into him.

45:37You mentioned it was a big week because there was also the UK summit where 28 governments, including the U.S. and China, signed a declaration agreeing to work together on AI risks, which is a big deal. Again, Vice President Harris was there. Elon Musk, Sam Altman were among them. Harris delivered an address on Wednesday outlining AI guardrails while also putting the U.S. forward as the global leader in innovation and policies for this technology. It was important they put this out before this event, for one. This is one of the reasons I think they got it out so quickly. But can the U.S. continue to lead the way here?

46:10Because as you noted, Europe has passed the AI Act, and they, of course, led the way on GDPR previously. Look, I mean, to your point, getting this out, A, before the AI Safety Summit, as well as before the AI Act goes into implementation next year was important because it's kind of one of – what we've seen is the EU has tried to regulate U.S. companies to date. And it's not been particularly effective. GDPR in general has not been an overwhelming success. You look at some of the other tech-related regulations that they're struggling to implement a little bit. So, again, I think it was effective.

46:54It was important for the White House to get out in front and in part signal to industry that, hey, there's a middle path here that will, again, leave the U.S. tech industry an opportunity to have some dominance in the AI industry. Chris, how broad and aggressive do you think either cyber or disinformation using AI and deep fakes? What would be your guess in terms of what we can expect going into an election year? And how prepared or not prepared do you think the U.S. government is to deal with it? And let me just I'm going to remind people you were fired from your role as director of CISA by President Trump after you defended the integrity of the 2020 election.

47:36You're the most famously fired person for being right in recent memory. But go ahead. Well, I think this is kind of the key question right now. And it's two parts. Right. It's what are the risks and how prepared are we? I am concerned that we may not be prepared for what's coming because we haven't necessarily seen it yet. We don't have kind of the reps on keyboard to defend against some of these threats that are out there. So in terms of specific threats, we're already seeing AI, at least from a cybersecurity perspective, we're already seeing AI show up in threat actors using them for things like phishing emails, really kind of overcoming some of the historical challenges that foreign cyber criminals have had with like poor grasp of the English language, poor syntax.

48:24So we're seeing them really clean up their act on their tradecraft. Similarly, with generative AI for video, for voice, from my conversations with the intelligence community and folks in the national security space, they are seeing threat actors, nation state actors, China, Russia, and others that are experimenting with these tools to improve their capabilities to change and influence the public discourse. We haven't seen it so much, but we know it's out there. And really, you only have to look at what happened in the immediate aftermath of October 7th and the Hamas attack on Israel to give you a sense of just how toxic the online discourse is, particularly in social media, and everyone's rushed to jump on the next big thing without any degree of discernment whatsoever.

49:18So I think there's a significant amount of risk. I don't know how prepared the government is because I feel like a lot of the tools that we have historically had in the toolkit have been pulled back with a bit of a chilling effect from some of the action out of Congress, the House specifically. Right, and also the lawsuits. And the lawsuits, of course. And Alex and others can talk about that at great, great length with the chilling effect on academic research. So all that said, I'm still not clear what the specific scenarios and use cases are where you would have the most harmful effect of AI plus disinfo around an election.

50:00And I tend to think it would be time constrained and a very discreet event. And, you know, the thing I can keep coming around to is election day, the morning of election day. There's some video that has a candidate getting assassinated or something else that could could spin out churn and impact turnout for the election. I think everything else you could probably hit at and debunk fairly quickly. But when you when you're talking a matter of hours, I don't know if we have that. So speed is important here because it moves so fast. Let me ask you, because you were director of this and now Jen Easterly is running it.

50:34how there have been attacks now on CISA continual, including defunding. Obviously, some Republican states pulled out of some of the good things they help people do to defend election integrity. Where's the state of play right now from your perspective? Well, particularly from a cybersecurity perspective, CISA is still fully committed, as I understand it, to working with state and local election officials on protecting election systems, right? The Russians, Iranians, Chinese coming at our election systems and the ability to vote and count and certify. As for the broader information ecosystem, information disorder, you know, since it continues to, again, from what I understand in my conversation with election officials, election officials on both sides of the aisle continue to express concerns about disinformation in related to elections.

51:27And in fact, you're seeing Republican and Democratic election officials resigning or withdrawing from office because it's just gotten so toxic. And some of these were historically those that would push the big lie and stop the steal. And yet they are kind of victims of their own bad behavior and reaping a little bit of what they sow. So, you know, 24, we're going to see the playbook from 20 run again, except I think we're going to see it sooner. We're not going to see it after the election in volume. We're going to see it before the election continuing through. And with President Trump back in the election, probably going to be the candidate, this is someone who fired you for telling the truth.

52:09You don't have to attack him in any way, but what would you expect if he prevails in terms of systems like election integrity? He's got an authoritarian bent. I think that's being kind. What happens to these systems that are in place to defend the integrity because he's put enough, he's thrown enough slime on it to create because he can, and he continues to do so. How big of an effect is that? I think from a, from an election process kind of infrastructure perspective, this is where the founders got it right. This is where individual states are responsible for administering elections within their, within their borders.

52:47And, you know, so the, the, the chief executive cannot put their finger on the scale, at least when all the checks and balances are working. It worked in 20, and I expect it to work in 2024. I do think that there are some probably concerns at the individual state levels. I know that the independent state legislature case went before the Supreme Court earlier this year, and that was shot down, where state legislatures could effectively pick who wins the electoral college from that state. That didn't fly in terms of this Supreme Court. So at least we blunted some of those approaches. But this is, again, it's one of those things where democracy takes a little bit of work, if not a lot, a bit of work.

53:29And there are a bunch of folks that are working to ensure we make it through this election and the next. Chris, I just want to put forward a thesis and you nullify or validate it or tell us what your gut is on it. If you can't beat us militarily or economically, you try and divide us or atomize us internally. and you take porous social media networks with amoral management or a social media network that is the dominant frame through which an entire generation gets its information, and you start dialing up content that enrages young people and divides them against their parents. 50 % gap in pro-Israel sentiment, my generation and younger generation, and a younger generation is dominated by their frame as a platform controlled by the CCP, or at least influence.

54:19What is the likelihood, in your view, we're going to find out that these platforms have been weaponized by bad actors to try and divide us internally? I realize that was a mouthful. I apologize. It's TikTok turning them into children of the corn, I think. Let's try to keep that tight. Thanks for that. I think it's unquestionable that our enemies are using our social media platforms as their own, you know, bullhorns to both get their propaganda points out there as well as kind of subvert stability globally. There's no question about it. And this goes to kind of Kara's earlier point about, you know, just kind of, you know, Jesus take the wheel on section 230 and everything else back in the 90s.

55:09So we tend to be much more technical and, to your point, hard power focused on how the West dominates. But everyone else kind of looks at it from an asymmetric perspective at the information ecosystem and the psychological impacts of warfare. And they're much, much better. We do not have the societal resilience in place right now. And I think we're in for a rough go of it in the coming years. All right. On that note, you like this AI, you like this, this hundred page. Look, I think it's a massive, you know, we're talking a trillion plus in revenue generation in the coming years. And so you got to, you know, it's a big play and it's a big response from the administration.

55:57I'm pretty excited about just in general where things go with AI. I'm not a doom and gloomer, at least, you know, Skynet's not here yet. But so, you know, as long as we've got the rules of the road put down, then I think everybody has the opportunity to succeed. All right. Chris Krebs, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. All right. Good to see you. Chris is really smart, don't you think, Scott? He's a very smart man. Yeah, very impressive. And he got he was awarded the Moral Compass Merit Badge and then he was fired by the Trump administration. Yeah, I know. I know. Well, he stood his ground.

56:29It's ridiculous. All this election denials. And they're all going to jail. like Sidney Powell, the rest of them, they're all pleading and taking deals and everything else. Looks like Chris came out on top. Anyway, if you've got a question of your own you'd like answered, send it our way. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. All right, Scott, one more quick break and we'll be back for predictions.

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58:26But it's not just up to the airlines. What's needed is an industry-wide push to increase the supply to meet growing demand. You can learn more about how Airbus is contributing to accelerating this journey at fly.airbus.com slash the flight path.

58:49Okay, Scott, let's hear a delicious prediction. You've been doing rather well of late. I don't know what the impact on the stock will be, but I think we're going to see a narrative and some evidence that these GLP-1 drugs that reduce your cravings, the people on these drugs are actually consuming less social media. I don't know if it's the 20-80 rule, but there is a cohort of people that are on social media 24 by 7. And whether it's porn, whether it's Instagram, whether it's TikTok or Twitter, it is an addiction. And that is it gets in the way of the rest of your life. And I think we're going to find that people on these drugs reduce their social media consumption, among other addictions.

59:34And I wonder how the market is going to react to that. So I think that's coming. I think we're going to start to see news that amongst, you know, in addition to reducing your nail-biting, your alcohol consumption, your consumption of Pringles, you're also less likely to be on Instagram 14 hours a day. And then the other one's just a very boring one, but you're about to see, I believe, price increases across the streaming networks. When Netflix raises their prices— We are seeing them, by the way. They've been raising them. That's right. Right. When Netflix raises its prices 15%, it gives everyone cloud cover, especially as they consolidate and have beefier offerings.

1:00:10Disney Plus, if it includes Hulu, HBO, or whatever it's called, Max. I mean, these guys are really bulking up, and the big player has given them cloud cover to increase their prices. Like I said, they're doing what they had to do. They had to cut their costs and increase their prices. So price increases across Max and the new Disney Plus are likely coming. And now that Kara Swisher is there, it is worth it. It is worth it. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's why I'm getting Max. Chris Wallace is my new boyfriend, just so you know. Chris Wallace and his delightful red tie. That depresses me. But you know what I remember when I'm depressed?

1:00:52He has good hair, can I just say? He is fantastic. The guy looks 60 when he was 30, and now he looks 60 when he's 90. That guy has not aged. He's fantastic looking. He is a handsome urbane man. And I'm deeply, deeply in like with him. Let me just say he wears a tie. His hair is I'm just saying his hair. So just I just want to cheer you up. Do you realize I just found this out at the Salzburg Airport in Austria? there is a desk that is manned or staffed, excuse me, full time for people who thought they were going to Australia and errantly ended up in Austria. Not true. It's 100 % true. There are people every day who land at the Salzburg airport who thought they were going to see the Sydney Opera House.

1:01:43Got debunked. This will not happen on my CNN show with Chris Wallace because he like. Where's shrimp on the Barbie? No, no, not true. They fact-checked, AP fact-checked. It is not true. It is AP. I have a story here. Thank you, Lara. I'm going with it. No Australian airport. I'm going with it. All right, you stick with it. It just makes me happy. Debunked. If that's false, I don't want to live a life of truth. You're just mad I have other boyfriends. That's all. I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you about any of these things. Work boyfriends. Anyway, Scott, that's the show.

1:02:16We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot. I'm excited. I've had such a nice time with you. I really did. Likewise. Thanks for being such a man. And we went to Napa, and then we went to – where's our next trip? Where's our next trip? I don't know. So my other family is asking that I spend some time with them. I don't know. Maybe over the holidays or something. Oh, probably Europe, right? South by Southwest. Oh, yeah, we've got a lot coming up. Yeah. We've got a lot coming up. We're so excited. Anyway, Scott, read us out. Today's show was produced by Lauren Amon, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie and your talk.

1:02:46Enjoying this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Mia Silverio, and Gaddy McBain. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Wait, this isn't Australia? Love that. Love that. Debunked!

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