TikTok Lawsuit, Reddit's Debut Earnings, and the 4-Day Work Week

24:28And the bigger the business, the higher compensation. but investors don't like it because I don't need Bob Iger to put me in the parks business. I can go buy stock in a park business or I can go buy stock in a pure play streaming company called Netflix. So investors don't like it. And typically the way investors punish CEOs for being in a bunch of businesses that may or may not be unrelated. And some people would argue Disney has a flywheel, but typically in a conglomerate, investors will find the worst business with the lowest multiple and they will assign that business. They will assign that multiple to the entire business.

25:03So oftentimes - Dragging them down. So I would imagine if the stock goes down to say 70 or 80, Nelson will switch his complexion to this company needs to be broken up. Right, and they'll have to sell a product. He's got to sell that. It's going to be hard to sell a broadcast network right now because there's so many in the money's declining sopers. But you could make a lot of money, as you've noted, on the decline. Linear networks, you can soak them till the very end. and keep them in business. A business like Yahoo, I recently interviewed at CEO, is doing rather well now, if you can believe it.

25:33They're great businesses. They're just in decline. They're in decline. They still hemorrhage cash. They're just in decline. Yep, yep. Or you can do something, bring the costs in line and then it's not even in decline. It just is maintaining in a lot of ways. That's what's happening at Yahoo. We'll see what's happened. Pick me one CEO for that company. Anybody you could pick. Disney? Disney. Not the ones that are necessarily in contention within. It's Dan and Walden. who's had some problems at ABC, Jimmy Patero, who's had some problems at ESPN, the Parks guy who now has some problems. Pick anyone outside the company.

26:08Evan Spiegel or the guy who runs Fubo, Fubo TV. He seemed pretty bright to me. Okay. Someone like that. Well, Evan is incredibly talented, incredibly creative. I think he's pretty good with shareholders. Snap is actually doing pretty well. I think they need, quote unquote, some youth at the senior management level. All right, I'm going to give you one that you're going to love. Sheryl Sandberg. Sheryl Sandberg to run Disney? She was on the board. Well, look, I think... Things have calmed down enough around her, except for with you. I think anyone who does that kind of damage to the mental health of young teen girls should have that type of opportunity.

26:42Okay. All right. I'm just telling you. She's a good operator. She knows all those businesses. Okay. Yeah. You let all the men return. She's going to return just like the rest of them. Anyway, let's get on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about AI and election fears and a four-day work week experiment we've heard about here in Germany.

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28:30We're back with more from the Finance Forward Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

28:38Thank you.

28:45For the audience back home, I made them yell and they complied. They're much better behaved than American audiences. Anyway, it's a big year for elections around the globe. Oh, by the way, Kim Kardashian didn't ask about you at all. Just a reminder. It's a big year for elections. Why? I'm just saying. I expose myself to you when you jab. I jab because she doesn't even... I mean, if literally she walked past, she wouldn't know who you are. Yes, she would. She would know me, right? She knows you. She would know me, right? No. She knows me. Right? Yeah. Okay. All right. it's a big year for elections around the globe.

29:17Roughly 2 billion people are heading to the polls in over 60 countries, including in the United States. You might have heard of our election. It's deja vu of a 20, whatever, 2020. The land of the dead. The land of the old and the dead. And the court bound. And of course, one of the biggest concerns is how artificial intelligence and deep fakes will be used to influence people. So this week, Microsoft and OpenAI say they're putting aside 2 million. I couldn't believe this number. I thought it was B, but it's M. $2 million to fight the threat of AI being used to, quote, deceive the voters and undermine democracy.

29:55Google and Meta said they're already restricting election-related content on their chatbots. When I saw that number, it was laughable. $2 million to fight one of our biggest problems in the United States. And by the way, it's not just deepfakes. It's actual presidential candidates who lie on a daily basis, including in court and he's about to go to jail for that in court which I thought I predicted and looks like he is soon enough. So what are your thoughts on this the money they've spent and any thoughts on the election and deep fakes? So there's there's a general practice in business that it's not what you do it's how you do it and yes deciding to make a concerted effort have a distinct group that would try and fight misinformation or deep fakes around the election is absolutely the right thing to do.

30:44Somebody did not check the how. The fact that these people who are so smart would be so stupid as to say we're allocating basically the security budget for society. I bet they spend more on security for their CEO. I bet they spend more on kombucha at the headquarters. Two million is literally, a VP doesn't even see that number. So this is, speaking of Sheryl Sandberg, an attempt to convince people that they care when they don't, right? This is what I call a Sandbergian move. I'm going to pretend that I care about you. I'm going to pretend that I hear you. We're proud of our progress and we need to do better.

31:25And it's clear when they create a distinct unit, put out a press release and allocate the same budget that they spend on Diet Dr. Pepper across the organization, that what they were saying is try and do a head fake. Try and convince people that we care when we don't. Because we're not going to put anything behind this, but put out a press release. And somebody didn't ask the question of, don't you think they're going to see through this? we're Microsoft, we have a$3 trillion market cap, and we're announcing that we're spending$2 million. You don't think people are gonna see through the fact that we are being totally disingenuous and creating a weapon of mass distraction and trying to pretend that we care about this?

32:08You are going to see the biggest short-term threat of AI is not what I would even call deep fakes, it's shallow fakes. It'll be little videos that are AI altered just incrementally, just imperceptibly that don't make Biden look 81. It makes him look 83 or 84. That makes Vice President Harris seem just a touch more awkward. Like you wouldn't even pick up on it because most deep fakes, you kind of figure it out that it's AI, but it's going to be these little tiny things and they are going to flood the zone. And then I love you. I'll give you, you deserve credit for this or three or four days before the election, find the swing states and the swing districts.

32:53This crazy thing about the American election is it's literally going to be tens of thousands of voters. 80 ,000 voters, 81 ,000 voters. In several counties in America that are going to decide this election. What if they decide one of those swing counties or four of those swing counties are in fact leaning the way we don't want to go. So they put out a bunch of deep fake videos the day before showing shootings at those polling places. And by the time people, word gets out that this didn't actually happen, you're safe at this polling booth, people just sit and go, you know, I don't really love voting anyway.

33:26It's cold out and it suppresses turnout. You're going to see a bunch of shallow fakes leading up to it. Then you could see a bunch of very severe deep fakes. and it's just insane that these companies wouldn't get together and say, all right, for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days before the election, we are going to come to a multilateral, industry-wide, self-imposed ban. We're going to try and just get rid of anything that's AI altered. And if your cat videos aren't as cute, we're sorry. If it gets in the way of some of your content, if it diminishes the experience, we're sorry. If it hurts our revenues, we'll deal with it.

34:01We make hundreds of billions, but they won't do that. In Europe, they stop doing stuff before an election. They do all kinds of things. They shut it down. They shut it down. It's interesting, the front page of the Washington Post today, states are taking control in at least the United States of this, especially states that are now controlled by Democrats that didn't used to be because they're worried about the Republicans who are quite good at deepfakes using them, especially Steve Bannon, who talks about it incessantly. But this is a story. In Arizona, election workers trained with deepfakes to prepare for 2024.

34:36And let me read from this. For years, election officials across the country have faced extraordinary pressure from rampant conspiracy theories and violent threats. But 2024 presents something more widely available and highly convincing AI-generated deepfakes. The FBI director told the National Security Conference there have been malign foreign influence campaigns in the past. This year's election cycle adversaries will move faster, enabled by new technologies such as generative AI. And local officials on the front lines of this, one of the things that's also been happening in our country is there's an agency called CISA, I think it's CISA maybe, that helps state and local governments deal with these kind of things.

35:19And it's been under deep attack by all kinds of public officials, Republican, all GOP officials, who want to take the power away from anything to be able to – they want to call the election fake by making it problematic so that you can't fix the problem. They would like it to be confusing. And it's a real – it's so anti-democratic. It's really kind of astonishing. But the guy, the most famous person, I just recently interviewed him, Chris Krebs, was fired by President Trump for saying the U.S. election was not stolen. He's a terrific guy, and he's been trying to help. But even I just ran into the director of CISA the other day, and they're trying to block her helping election officials all across the country.

36:03It's really, it's borderline. It is fascist. That's what it is. It's fascism, what they're trying to do, control the elections in that way. But it doesn't matter. A lot of these states are pushing back. So it'll be on the front lines with local officials who are already under attack for violent threats against them that's been ginned up by right-wing media. I can't underscore how dangerous it is to be an election official in the United States. It feels like we're in some country that we used to go help have better elections. In some cases, they're terrified. In any case, we'll see what happens.

36:40It's a very important thing. So we're going to move on to our last topic, then we're going to get to predictions. Moving on to a major controversial topic, the four-day workweek. Young people in the U.S. love the idea. The new CNBC survey found that 81 % of workers 18 to 34 think it would make them more productive. And 45 companies here in Germany are in the middle of a six-month period where they're trying it out. This experiment started in response to a labor shortage here. Other countries who've done the four-day workweek trials include Spain, Portugal, and South Africa. Also, the UK, where about 90 % of the companies who tried it made it permanent.

37:17Scott, yes or no on the four-day workweek? Let's talk about it a little bit. My companies, I'm trying to bring back the six-day workweek. Yeah, I have a seven-day workweek. The bottom line is, companies should be free to do what they want, and there's different ways to attract human capital. And right now, there's a labor shortage, I believe, in the US and in Germany. There is. So giving people flexibility and maybe saying, look, we do a four-day work week, more power to you. I like the idea of a different classification of worker called the care worker, who is taking care of kids, taking care of parents.

37:54And that person gets additional compensation or flexibility such that they can work remotely, have more flexible hours, whatever it might be. but it should be up to the companies. What this really impacts is government organizations, right? Because I believe private businesses should be able to do whatever they want. Some companies say we're a good company. You come here to, you don't live to work, you work to live. That's great. We'll give you a four-day work week. Other companies basically say you're super ambitious. You want to work all the time and we're going to pay a lot of money because you're super ambitious and super hungry.

38:29Companies across that spectrum should be allowed to do whatever they want. I like the idea from a government level of instituting a four-day workweek because I would like to see government figure out new ways to increase their compensation such that we attract more talented young human capital into our government agencies, which have consistently shed great talent to private organizations. So I call colleges sort of government adjacent, but I like the idea of creating additional compensation through flexibility through government agencies. But private organizations should just assess the market and figure out what works for them.

39:08Well, though you have to sort of begin to think about the lack of workers, certain workers. I just did an interview, which I think is appearing today, with the guy who founded Chipotle, your favorite eating place. And he had a problem getting worker. I mean, he's not there anymore. He founded it. And his new business is called Kernel. It's a vegan robotic, using robotic arms to cook. He's incorporating technology throughout it. It's a hub and spoke method where all the workers are in a central kitchen where prep happens. He couldn't find enough people in stores to prep the foods for Chipotle when he was running it.

39:41People didn't want to do that. So he keeps them in the hub doing that and doing really high quality work, prep work there. And then he uses bicycles to send them out to the stores, which have no back kitchen, really a small one. And the front is a wall and your stuff comes out behind a glass wall. Essentially, there's no workers out front. You order it on an app. And there's three workers as opposed to 20 that were there before. And then they can focus if they want to being in the front on customer service, making sure. And they prep the things once the robot cooks them. And the The robot is very exact.

40:20It's just an arm. It's not a very complex robotic device. So it puts the vegetables that were already prepped into the stove, pulls them out exactly the right time. No person gets burnt, anything else. And then they dump them, and then the people put together whatever it is, but it comes in via an app. And so it's instantly made, so it's fresh. He's very well known for that, for fast food that's fresh and healthy. And it's doing rather well in New York. It's just started. And so it'll be interesting to see if we can create all kinds of technological solutions to the lack of employees in the U.S., at least in here, too.

40:58And so I don't know. I think it's fine if you can get your work done in a four-day work week if you're more efficient. I think COVID has already accelerated that significantly. I think companies are already doing the four-day work week in a weird way, if you think about it. There's all sorts of flexibility. I dated someone who was in their internship for surgery, and she used to go in for 36 hours straight. If you serve on an oil platform in the North Sea, you go on, I think, for two weeks and basically work around the clock. And then you get three weeks off. Firemen, there's all sorts of nuclear power.

41:29There's all sorts of jobs where you have weird, unusual. Flexibility is, I think it's a fantastic thing. I am not a fan of automation at Chipotle. Escobar is my man at the Chipotle at Soho, and he's one of the few people in my life that makes eye contact with me and is very nice to me every day. Okay, all right. He's like, hey, Prof G. He knows me. He likes me. Yeah. No robots. Yeah, really? I think it's all going to be robots and food service. Why wouldn't they? They can't find the employees and keep them there. They really can't. They really can't. I think it's going to take longer than we think.

42:04I think humans are... He's paying his employees that he has, and there's plenty at the hub. There's real people cutting. It's not robots cutting. But he can now pay his workers because he has fewer workers and fewer real estate costs. Everyone makes, even the bicyclists, make$27 an hour with healthcare benefits and all kinds of other benefits, educational benefits and everything else. But this isn't about flexible work. You're making an argument for automation. Yes, well, some automation and the stuff you can't get workers for. And with flexible work, I think if people can work that many days, And, you know, there is an argument, and it's different here in Europe, is, you know, we work too much in the United States.

42:42We really do. People, and we are starting to become, I think the young people are becoming more, less hard charging and less and more European in their orientation than you and I, for example. I think that's reductive. I think both you and I have extraordinary lives because we work our asses off. Okay. And I think young people— If you don't get to enjoy then, but go ahead. By the way, I've been molesting the earth for the last 30 years. my reductive analysis is make your money in the U.S. and spend it in Europe. But more specifically, more specifically, young people need to have a sober conversation with themselves.

43:16Regardless of whether you find a company that has a four-day work week, you can have it all. You just can't have it all at once. And my sense is if you desire to be economically very successful or you want real influence the marketplace will just figure out a way that the people who attain that are both talented and work extremely hard for a large portion of their working years I just I think we keep looking for this notion that somehow we're going to get to this new point where we can have it all where we don't need to work that hard but we make a lot just a shit ton of money I don't know any of those people.

43:57Beyonce works 60 hours a week. If you want to move to a low-cost neighborhood and you're one of those people that wants to work to live, God bless you. There's nothing wrong with that. But be clear, you just need to have an honest conversation when you're young. Where do you expect to be economically and from a relevant standpoint? And if you expect to be in the top 10 % and when you really talk to young people and you ask them hard numbers around where they expect to be by the time they're 40, oftentimes it's in the top 1%. The top 1 % in the U.S. per year, I think$750 ,000 a year. Many of whom are inherited, but go ahead.

44:35Inheritance at the top 1%, but go ahead. There's a lot of - No, I mean top 1 % income earners. Income earners. I think it's about$760 ,000 a year. A lot of people expect at some point in their life to be at that level. I don't know anyone that didn't start with rich parents who got to that level without devoting a great, I don't care what the government says or what there's a four day work week or whatever it is. The people I know, you work all the time. Yes, I do. You work all the time. Well, I'm not for a four day work week. And I don't, I do not work very, I only work 30 to 40 hours a week now because I work, no joke, 60 to 80 for 20 to 30 years.

45:13And the marketplace figures out a way to reward people who are both talented and work hard. And I have found, I have found that hard work and grit trumps talent. And everyone likes to think they're more talented than their average bear, so they're going to have a better quality of life than everyone else. I think it's a pretty simple trade-off. When do you want balance in your life? Do you want balance now? Fine, you're trading off balance when you're a little bit older. I have a shit ton of balance now because I had almost none when I was young. So it's just pick your poison. You did note I do work a lot, but I happen to like working, and I don't like to vacation very much.

45:50But you work all the time. But I like it. Great. It's not for money. It's not for anything. I enjoy it. But the notion that you can get to some level of success such that we can enjoy the fruits of the world. You get to enjoy, we get to enjoy such amazing things. That's true. And the thing we both have in common is that we worked our asses off for extended periods of time. And I challenge you to find anybody that has achieved a certain level of influence and success. Let me ask you before we finish this. But there is a feeling, and I feel it. I have four kids, but the two of them are older. One is going to be a hard job.

46:31Works all the time. He's very work-focused. He understands what it takes. The other does. It's not laziness because he works really hard when he works. but he is much more committed to not, like to being a parent, to doing, you know, softer things, I would say. And some of his friends are like that. And I don't detect laziness in them. I detect why are you working? Different priorities. That's right. Yeah. More power to him. And I'm not saying that person can't be happy, but I'm saying that person will probably need to live in a low cost neighborhood and will have a smaller selection set of potentially very hot mates.

47:09If you want to kill it, if you want to kill it, buck up, folks. The only thing I can promise you is a ton of hard work. The only thing I can promise you in your life is a series of victories and tragedy. That's the only thing I know that's waiting for you. But if you expect to be up here, I'm being redundant. I think it's an individual choice, but have a sober conversation about the trade-offs. I can't get over how many people in my class will say, they'll tell me what the revenue and income expectations are. And okay. And then I'll say, what's most important about your job? They don't say management or doing something interesting.

47:46They say balance. Like, let me get this. You expect to be making this amount of money and you think you're going to have balance? Yeah. So you mock your students. Great. So, but when you think about that, it's, but I do believe that younger people in the United States have very different attitude. I think we are going to become less productive in that regard in the United States. Why is that? I just, it's just, I think we're moving to a more European mentality in a lot of ways in that regard. And it's not lazy. It's just a different way of living. Longer vacations, more, I mean. Agreed. That's what, it's just a different way of thinking about it.

48:27But there is, there's a cohort. I increasingly, so Europe, I would say, adopted what I'll call work to live. This is very reductive to take this many countries, but generally speaking, there is stores closed in Spain from two to four. That just doesn't happen in the US, right? The notion that an entire continent would take most of an entire month off, that does not happen in the US. But I do see, I think the US and Europe are melding a bit. I see a cohort of entrepreneurs in Europe that are bringing the same intensity, the same laser-like all-in focus that is more typical of American startups.

49:06I see more of that here. And I see more younger people in the U.S. saying, I'm going to cash out a little early. I'm going to lower my burn. I'm going to focus on my emotional and mental well-being and my relationships and my health. I feel like the two are sort of converging a little bit. Yeah. Louis wants to marry a highly successful woman who works all the time and he wants to take care of the kids. Louis is Kara's oldest son. He's like, I got a whole plan, mom. And I was like, oh, great. And the gold digger plan. By the way, that's just a really, have him call me. That's a bad rap. Okay, I'll tell him to call you.

49:38He's going to do it though. It's going to be great. In any case, we'll see what happens. It'll be interesting. I do think one of the things that is happening in the U.S. right now is a lot of the AI companies getting funded. There's a lot of startup activity. And so we may, one of the things U.S. people are in love with is a gold rush. And so it feels like another gold rush again. So you're going to see, I think, a lot more activity. Everyone who had moved to Austin or Miami are all coming back to San Francisco. There's an intensity happening again around the startup. But you're such a fan of San Francisco.

50:11No, they are. It's the numbers are the numbers. The luxury housing is going up. Numbers coming back. People leaving Austin and Miami coming back. Are people really leaving Austin? Yes, numbers are the numbers. And coming back to San Francisco? Austin, definitely. They may go to Miami, but a lot of people are leaving Austin. But most of the AI activity is in San Francisco. There's study under study, and luxury housing is back up again. Tax revenues are back up again. It's just that's where open AI is. That's where all the companies are again. I would argue that California has got a little bit of an AI boom right now.

50:47We'll see how long it lasts. There's just been so much capital. Tourism is at an all-time high again. I'm just saying it's a fantastic state. We've all said the wealthiest people in the world choose to live in California, New York, and it's the place that people complain about the most. So the people with the most options of anyone in the world pick two places, and that's the places that everyone complains about, California, New York. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. Anyway, we're going to finish up Scott. One more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

51:20Scott, we're hitting the road, bringing Pivot Live to the people. Seven cities, Toronto, Boston, New York, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A., of course. You went to Oasis. You went to Beyoncé. You saw the remake of Wizard of Oz and The Spear. All those suck compared to the Pivot Tour. This is the biggest tour. Same people that are organizing our tour that organized Taylor Swift's tour. They are much more excited about our tour. All right. That's enough, Grandpa. It's going to be so good. And we're bringing our brand of whatever we do to the people. And we're excited to meet our fans. We love our fans.

51:59For tickets, head to pivottour.com. See you there. There is a lot to talk about when we talk about Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel. One big question I've got is why in 2025, our late night TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show still on TV? Even in our diminished times, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, they're just some of the biggest faces of their networks. If you start taking the biggest faces off your networks, you might save some nickels and dimes. But what are you even anymore? What even is your brand anymore? I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels. And that was James Ponowozik, the TV critic for The New York Times.

52:44This week, we're talking about Trump and Kimmel, free speech, and a TV format that's remained surprisingly durable for now. That's This Week on Channels, wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

53:03And we're back at the Finance Forward Conference here in Hamburg with our lovely live audience. Hello, everybody.

53:18All right, we're going to do some predictions. I'm going to go first. I'm going to do a prediction today. I've been talking to a lot of Europeans, and they're all telling me fatalistically, well, Trump's going to win, and I'm going to go the other direction. Today, yesterday, in Indiana, Nikki Haley, who is not running for president, in case you're interested, got 21 % of the votes in the Republican primary. Mary. She broke 20%. She hasn't run for months. There is an anti-Trump backlash within the Republican Party. Paul Ryan just got up and said he wasn't going to vote for Trump explicitly. They usually say something quizzling like, well, I'll vote for the Republican candidate.

54:01That's what they usually say, which is Trump. There is a weakness in the Trump campaign that I think is going to be really clear. Increasingly, the polls are starting to move in the other direction. Nobody's happy with Biden's age, but Trump has not acquitted himself in this court. He falls asleep and he has other issues around apparently flatulence, allegedly. But I have reporters there. They say it is actually accurate. He now cannot use the Sleepy Joe thing anymore. Cognitively, he's been losing a lot of voices. He's old. Let's just be clear. And his family has a history of cognitive decline, by the way.

54:38I think we treat Donald Trump like he's a winner when he has lost every election since 2016. He lost the 2018 elections. He lost the 2020 elections. He lost the 2022 elections. And a series of elections in the United States around abortion and other issues, including in vitro fertilization, IVF. There's been a dozen elections in the United States that he has lost badly in deep ruby red states, Ohio, in Alabama, and now Indiana. Let me just tell you, I drive around Indiana. I don't want to go to Indiana as a gay person from the East Coast. I just don't. This is not a state that is very welcoming to anyone.

55:28Nikki Haley got 21 % of the Republican vote. So to me, we treat Donald Trump like a winner when he is a stone cold loser every single time. I think women in the United States have had it. I don't think immigration is the biggest issue. New polls are showing that abortion rights continues to be a big issue. I have a lot of Trump relatives who I barely tolerate in the United States. All the men go on and the women sidle up to me afterward and said, I'm not voting for that person. and there's a quiet majority of people who may say they're Republicans, but will either sit it out or not go. I don't think young people are the big change agents in our country at all.

56:14I think they don't vote in the first place, although I just made my son register in Michigan where he goes to school and he better vote or he's not going to school next year. And I think we're gonna be surprised by the cognitive electoral and freedom decline of Donald Trump. At this point, it's impossible to tell. The two things that I don't think people are talking enough about is I believe the two things that will probably decide the election or one of the two things are, one, biology. We have one person who's 77 and obese. We have one person who's 81 and doesn't appear to be that robust. we have seven months until or six months until the election there's probably a one in three chance that one of them I'm not talking about dies but has a health incident 77 and 81 year olds slip and fall and the first health incident that happens to one of these people it takes them out of the race because they're going to look really old and they'll start lying and people around them will cover up and the news will come out whatever it might be so there's a non-zero probability that one of them has a health incident.

57:23The other thing that we're not talking about, and it's unfortunate, is whoever RFK Jr. pulls the most votes from is probably going to lose. Did you see the latest story today? About the worm in his brain? He's got a worm in his brain. He had a parasite. It ate half his brains, apparently. But okay, sure. Anyways. He's polling at 10%. Okay, so my prediction, and this is a bitter rant, so bear with me, Okay, you've got two minutes and 40 seconds, but go ahead. My prediction is Bukaya Saka. Does anyone know Bukaya Saka? And I'll get there in a roundabout way. All right. I have had the best time here.

58:03It was so beautiful here today that I thought I'd walk around Hamburg. I'm super interested in World War II history. Hamburg played a big role in World War II. It was actually the largest port for U-boats. The Allies firebombed Hamburg. 44 ,000 people died, 43 ,000 civilians. On the other side of Europe, my mom was five living in London, and her nine-year-old sister was killed in the Blitz. And for me to be here 80 years later is just such, I think, of us to be here, is such a symbol of our progress. Democracies find each other. Think about it. I would say the U.S. and Europe is arguably the strongest alliance literally in history.

58:50And I think about my mom passed 20 years ago, but if she knew that over the last 20 years, I had come to Germany 30 times. I've been to Oktoberfest three times. I've been to DLD five times. I've been to OMR four times. I was snowboarding in Stad earlier than year. I will be in Zult this summer. and most importantly, most importantly, the love of my life and the mother of my children is German and was raised in Munich. And even more importantly than that, ask me what I'm doing this summer, Kara. What am I doing? What are you doing this summer, Scott? I'm going to Cannes. I'm going to have a great time for the Lions Festival.

59:32That's not what I'm looking most forward to. Is it your birthday? I'm going to Greece. I'm going to do a boat thing, but that's not what I'm most looking forward to. The thing I am most looking forward to by a long shot... I cannot wait to see what this answer is. ...is in July, I'm coming to the first semifinal of the European Nationals in Munich. And then I'm going to the second European finals with my two sons in Dortmund, which I'm most excited about because those people are fucking crazy. I can't wait to go to Dortmund. And then, and then, and then I am going to the finals in Berlin with my two sons.

1:00:12Put another way, I love Germany. I love it here.

1:00:25You are such a sucker. Kiss up? Yeah. All true. All true. Let me see if I can do this. Scott ist unsucker. Einssuckab. I lived in Germany. He didn't. I lived in Berlin for six months, many years ago when the wall fell. But we really appreciate it. We do love the democratic alliances that we form. He's correct. And Scott will be here. So you'll see more of him here in Germany. And we really thank you. It's been a really fun time here. And we really appreciate the audience. We love our live events. And thank you for being part of our live pivot taping. Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot.

1:01:07Read us out. Just before I read us out, I need to close the circle. Bukaya Saka, I believe, will be man of the match in the finals between Germany and England. I'm sorry, I believe England's going to win. As long as it's not Let's all come together. He's lost it. Now he's screwed. What can we agree on? As long as it's not France. Okay. As long as it's not France. Anyways, today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. and Ernie Nertat engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miel Saverio. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

1:01:42Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Say something cool in German. Ausgesicht. Thank you very much, Germany. Thank you. Thank you.