Kara is joined by guest co-host Katie Drummond of WIRED! They talk all things DOGE: Is Elon Musk not in charge? How much have cuts actually saved so far? Is Steve Bannon a fan? Plus, X is in talks to raise money at a valuation of $44 billion, which is the same amount Elon Musk bought it for. Read more from WIRED here. Follow us on Instagram and Threads at @pivotpodcastofficial. Follow us on Bluesky at @pivotpod.bsky.social. Follow us on TikTok at @pivotpodcast. Send us your questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is co-hosting with Kara Swisher in this episode?
Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher. Scott is off today. Who knows where he is? But in his place, we have someone so much better, Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired. Wired has always been a powerhouse, but particularly in the era of Trump, Elon and Doge, which I'm calling doggy now.
and its coverage has become required reading. Katie, welcome. You've had a busy couple weeks with all these scoops on Doggie, which led to a record-breaking increase in subscriptions. We'll get to that in a second, but welcome. Thank you for coming.
Thank you so much for having me. I am also in a mysterious location, but I'm not going to tell you where I am either.
Okay, all right. Well, you're here, at least, as opposed to whatever the hell Scott's doing, taking edibles and not skiing, wherever he is. So I want to talk a little bit, because you guys have really come on strong here. Now, tell me about your approach to covering this administration. Now, you became Global Editorial Director relatively recently, right? Is that correct? Yeah.
Chapter 2: What is Wired's strategy for covering the current administration?
Yes. Time is a funny thing these days, but it was about a year and a half ago. It was September 2023. I got the job. I started. And actually, my second day on the job, I emailed my boss. My boss is Anna Wintour. That must be fun. It's actually delightful. She's amazing. And I said, I need to hire a politics team. And here's why. And here's what I want to do. So it was...
I'm happy to talk more about it, but it was sort of from inception, I think, looking ahead at 2024, which was obviously a critical election year for the United States and for so many other countries around the world. At the time, in my head, it was much more about
generative AI, mis- and disinformation, hacking, and those sort of tech adjacencies to politics, I wasn't thinking, well, obviously Elon Musk is going to jump in and end up sleeping at the White House. That wasn't on my radar at the time. But certainly our coverage has evolved a great deal since then.
And why did you have that instinct? Because of AI around the world, regulatory issues, that was the focus, was that everybody's going to be focused in on what AI means and the governments included.
AI was a major catalyst at the time. And I think my feeling was, you know, Wired covers a lot. I think Wired being described as like a tech outlet is... is incorrect and sort of misses the forest for the trees, but you can't separate technology from politics anymore.
And so it just felt like we had the tech industry coverage, we had the consumer tech coverage, we had the science coverage, we had all this other coverage, but we were missing this really important piece over here that
Made made everything kind of click together like you can't cover artificial intelligence without looking at well how is it being used in elections how is it being regulated how are politicians talking about this technology and so it just felt like we needed that political expertise so.
When did you sort of get the idea that you should really look at Doge? Because I think it's really, I mean, I'm feeling like, how did they get into this USAID? Where did you get this? You know, all this stuff that you were getting and the identities and information about all these people that were working for it. Because that's years of beat reporting, essentially.
I mean, I was trying to figure it out. I'm like, wow, they were up to speed rather quickly and rather accurately on what's happening. What was the strategy there? Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How is Elon Musk allegedly influencing the U.S. government?
Right.
And they were like, well, that's, you know, rude. I'm like, what? Like, I'm sorry. He's a terrible CEO. He's doing terrible things and he's not staying down. So when he stays down, that's probably when we'll stop or even beyond. It was interesting. It's hard for people to understand. Do you feel pressure yourself? Because this is big stakes. I mean, that was just Uber, like who cares kind of thing.
I don't mean to say who cares, but you know what I mean. This is the bigs. This is really the bigs. Do you personally feel pressure? Or do you feel that you have to pull back anyway? I've noticed a pullback among certain people, for sure.
No, no, no. And it's not even some grandiose... notion that I have. I mean, I remember when we published that, one of our first stories naming several of these young engineers, and it was an explosive story. We got a lot of criticism. And it's not that I was surprised by any of it, but I just hadn't, like the idea of... softening that story had not even entered my mind.
And I don't say that to brag. I say it because we're just like, this is the job. I get paid to do this. This is my job. I take my job very seriously. I love what I do. But I have not thought for a second that we should soften anything that we're doing. I think what we owe our audience is
very clear, very transparent, like very direct coverage and explanations of exactly what is happening as we are able to learn it and confirm it. Like, that's all we're doing. That's it.
Yeah, exactly. One of the things that was the attacks were so disingenuous. You know, you're saying who they are. You are not saying... little pricks or anything else. You know, you were, I was saying that. But you were very clearly just saying, this is who's working on this stuff. This is the federal government. It deserves transparency. And those attacks were disingenuous.
I mean, he attacked, Ilan attacked Scott and I for being mean to them or something like that. It's part of a narrative they have, trying to get on how these poor kids, how dare you attack these poor kids. Right.
I mean, the notion that there is something illegal about And naming individuals working within federal agencies at the behest of Elon Musk is nonsense. Like, I just, I don't even, I don't even understand what that means.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Doge's federal access?
So it essentially is designed to safeguard very sensitive information about the American people from agents within the US government. And so essentially we have lawsuits saying, you know, everything that's happening here, sort of the access that Doge appears to have within these agencies is a violation of this Privacy Act that was instituted, you know, several decades ago.
You know, whether that actually succeeds in any or all of these lawsuits is an open question. And I think one thing that's interesting to me and I think troubling to me is that You know, that argument could succeed in one instance, let's say a lawsuit with regards to access in the Treasury Department, and it could fail in another instance. So let's say access to IRS data, right?
So you have this sort of like Band-Aid slapdash approach to trying to just like... stop Doge from accessing as much data as possible, but how do you stop them from accessing data wholesale on sort of like a holistic level? I don't think we have an answer to that.
Do you have a legal reporter? How do you, because I think the lawsuits will reveal a lot, but it's the slowest way of dealing with a very difficult situation.
It's the slowest way, and certainly it opens up questions about whether or not the administration decides to abide by the rulings of the courts, right? I mean, I think that's an existential question for the country. You know, we don't have a legal reporter.
We just have really, really smart security and politics reporters and, you know, a team of managers on top of them who are the smartest journalists I've ever worked with. And we make a lot of phone calls. So we talk to a lot of experts who know this stuff inside and out.
and can essentially help us translate all of that information for the audience to make it as easy as possible for people to understand, you know, what is happening and what potential safeguards exist to prevent it from happening.
So you use the word chaos a lot. It's important. This is one of Elon's signature moves, chaos. to create chaos or create trouble and then make accusations. He's got six or seven moves, including attacking you for revealing the names, for example. But chaos is the point here, I think, in many ways, so that everyone has to run around and do these Band-Aid approaches.
Yeah, it's interesting, too, because chaos is also a signature move of President Trump. And so we're sort of seeing... chaos in a big-picture way across the entire federal government, the entire federal apparatus. Doge being one pocket of chaos that, like, sits within the larger chaos umbrella. So it's just, like, chaos everywhere you look. And I actually think, my sort of theory is that
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Chapter 5: How has Wired been reporting on Doge and Elon Musk?
It does vaunt Grok ahead, which is not ahead. Grok is not ahead. But it puts him in a pole position. Because, as you know, many... AI researchers think we're running out of data, right? That's been the big discussion recently. Well, there you go. And you're right, he does. But for what purpose does he want to run it? That's the part that's going to be very difficult to report.
when you're thinking about it in that big a term.
And you have a better sense of his psychology than I do. But there certainly seems to be something very, very deeply buried inside of him that just wants to run everything. I mean, it just feels like pure ego.
Or he wants to go to Mars and he needs the government to do so. There's all kinds of theories on that. So let's talk about the relationship you mentioned between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They sat down for a joint interview with Sean Hannity, the House reporter there at the White House. And I mean that in a negative way. Hannity said he felt like he was interviewing two brothers.
Hannity, it was the biggest wet kiss. He licked them up and down the entire time. Elon shared how much money he's trying to cut from the deficit. Let's listen.
Well, the overall goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit. And if the deficit is not brought under control, America will go bankrupt. This is a very important thing for people to understand. A country is no different from an individual in that if an individual overspends, an individual can go bankrupt. And so can a country.
God, that's the idiot's guide to how countries are run. But that's not correct. That's not correct. But, well, Doge says it saved $55 billion in federal spending. So far, the actual data shows it's much less. One major error found on the Doge website, it mislabeled the contract as $8 billion when it was actually $8 million.
You all have been doing a lot of reporting around this, this idea of what the cuts that are being made. And NPR just did one showing the same thing, that this is not $55 billion. And of course, now they're also talking about sending people dividend checks, which is trying to make people happy with them and allowing them to keep doing what they're doing. It's come rather early.
The payoff has come rather early. But talk a little bit about this and what these young people are trying to do. And are there more of them moving into the space now that it's gotten momentum?
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Chapter 6: What is the relationship between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon?
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Hey there, I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, the podcast about tech and media and the way they're colliding. And this week I'm talking about the state of the movies and the state of TV and how they all get melded together in the Oscars, a huge event that looks like it's going to get smaller every year.
Here to explain what happened this year and what's going to happen in the future is Matt Bellany, the veteran Hollywood journalist from Puck. Matt is smart. He's going to make you feel smart for listening in. You can hear our chat on channels from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
It's official. The United States is breaking up with Ukraine. On Monday, the president suspended military aid to the country. That's about $1 billion in arms Ukraine isn't getting until it commits to negotiating peace with Russia. That move, of course, comes after a perfect meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office on Friday. They talked about playing cards.
You don't have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.
But right now, you're playing cards. You're playing cards.
You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War III.
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