Kara and Scott discuss President Trump lashing out at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, The White House asking the IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status, and Elon Musk trying to build an army of super-babies. Then, Nvidia says it will start producing AI supercomputers in the U.S., Mark Zuckerberg takes the witness stand, and a federal judge rules that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology. 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: What are the implications of Trump's attacks on Fed Chair Jerome Powell?
My more substantive observation that I'd like your thoughts on is that when we get to these levels of income inequality throughout history, they self-correct through war, famine, and oftentimes revolution, right? And when the guillotine shows up, it's, okay, they come up with a crime and maybe this person committed the crime, maybe they didn't.
But they're essentially, at the end of the day, the crime is that the 1% have been just fucking the bottom 99% for way too long.
Way too long. I'm just going to say, I think it's really interesting how much it's stuck. And especially what's really fun is people are having fun with it, one, which I think is funny. And I like that. But it's like very high profile people. Like they're, you know, just a lot of celebrities are like, what in the actual fuck is going on? Which is surprising.
They usually keep quiet about each other. You know what I mean? They really do. But a lot of people who don't are saying things. Some are doing really funny things. Like the woman who's in Hacks, who plays, she's amazing. She plays a manager. I'm blanking on her name. She did this whole fake space flight. Everyone's really being creative.
But it strikes at a chord of something that is, and especially, I think it is when they're saying it's sexist to say it's a ride. I think this is what Gayle King said. It's sexist to say it's a ride. When Alan Shepard did it, when she did the Alan Shepard.
Alan Shepard.
That's who she was comparing it to.
You mean someone who trained as an astronaut his whole life?
Like, this was the 60s, Gail. This was hard. This was dangerous back then. And more dangerous, obviously. It's always dangerous to go up in space. But the fact that they're pretending it's feminist when it's not feminist is anti-feminist, right? That's the thing, is...
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Chapter 2: Why is the Trump administration targeting Harvard's tax-exempt status?
Trump's initial response to Harvard's pushback was freezing more than $2 billion in federal funds for multi-year grants and contracts apparently wasn't enough.
The Harvard president, Alan Garber, condemned the Trump administration in an open letter earlier this week, writing, "'No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.'" What do you think, Harvard fighting back here is really interesting.
Let me give some statistics. Harvard is gearing up for this fight financially. They issued $750 million of taxable bonds last week to shore up liquidity. It does have a $53 billion endowment, but there are restrictions on how the money gets spent. I see you're wearing a Harvard t-shirt. I can't believe, one of the jokes on threads was, I can't believe we like Harvard again.
Like we're backing Harvard here, which is sort of the pinnacle of, snooty elitism, I think, for most people in general. But at the same time, this is a real shot across, along with MIT, Princeton, Columbia, of course, caved. So it's a really interesting situation happening here with these schools saying, no, fuck, we've done enough, and showing their work.
Now, today, for people who don't know, the Trump administration is trying to do this with no proof whatsoever, very similar to what they did with the migrants who they sent out of the country. with no proof on any, they don't give any proof to their allegations on almost anything they're doing, no matter what, across the spectrum.
And in this case, they filed something without any proof that Harvard did anything wrong. So there's several, and of course, they're hurting funding of really important research that's going on. Scott?
Yeah, it took Donald Trump to get me to like Harvard.
Yeah. That t-shirt is handsome. Where'd you get that?
My assistant got it for me because I just wanted a Harvard t-shirt to wear around. I was strolling around in a Canada t-shirt last week. If you look at the darkest moment of the last hundred years, there was some... key attributes of a move to fascism. One, they start demonizing people and rounding them up. And it takes on a different complexion.
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Chapter 3: What are the ethical and social concerns around Elon Musk's family planning?
Chapter 4: How does income inequality relate to current political and social upheaval?
Well, a little too much, I would say. Policies, although you could argue he doesn't control this. The reason we're in such a crazy corner right now is because we as Americans, and this is true through Democratic and Republican administrations, are under the delusion that we can spend $7 trillion a year while taking in $5 trillion in tax receipts and that everything will be all right.
Then we get back into a corner where the whole world owns our debt, and they not only are reciprocating with the trade war, they're reciprocating with the capital war. That is they just go into the market and sell a disproportionate number of our treasury bills and the 10-year spikes, and all of a sudden we have an additional $175 billion in interest rate payments,
which we weren't planning on making. I mean, we have put ourselves in such a vulnerable position because if you think of the US as a household, we make 50,000 a year in tax receipts, we're spending 70, and we have credit card debt of 370,000. And the scary thing is the kids, despite not spending any of this money or really benefiting from it, are going to inherit those credit card bills.
And everyone has power over us now. We no longer really own our home. So this is if you anyways back to Chairman Powell, he probably can't wait for his termination because guess what? He's going to go be chairman of like Bridgewater.
No, I don't. I think he is. I think he's taking his, listening to him, I think he's taking his job rather seriously. Oh, I agree. I think he thinks he's the bulwark against this lunatic.
I agree. And he came out, he's one of the few people, he's really the first kind of what I'll call leader to just in a thoughtful, methodical way, just stand up and say, okay, just in case you didn't believe every point of light from every economist or anyone who doesn't have their head up their ass and is trying to contort themselves into figuring out some way to justify this.
The interpretive dance taking place across podcasters and officials trying to support these tariffs is almost, it's literally hilarious. It's like modern art that doesn't make any fucking sense, right?
I don't, for what? And for what? Because, you know, I was thinking as I was walking the other day, like, especially listening to that idiot Pam Bondi was, it's like, You know, if the Democrats win in two years, you're all super fucked, like super fucked. You have to win in two years. And of course, they think they will through strong arming.
But what a risk they're taking because they're going to be investigated out the yingety yang and deservedly so. Anyway, let's move on. Go, Jerome Powell. We're on your side. We think you're behaving correctly. Trump's feud with Harvard is escalating. The White House is asking the IRS to begin the process of revoking Harvard's tax-exempt status.
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Chapter 5: What role does government-funded university research play in innovation?
So this is, you know, I'm not a fan of these institutions. I've even suggested their tax-free status be revoked if they have an endowment over a billion dollars and not growing their freshman class faster.
But you're about making bigger, becoming bigger, not to tell them what to do or how to run their program.
No, I don't care. They have the right to pick their curriculum. They have the right to pick their faculty. They have the right to talk about what they want to talk about on campus. I think if you're going to have a law—and be clear, folks— This has about as much to do with anti-Semitism as evangelicals liking Israel. They just see the notion of putting this under the banner of anti-Semitism.
They're just using it as a vessel to go after an ideology and centers that typically aren't traditionally and right now are not supportive of these types of policies. And there is, is it true that there's not enough intellectual diversity at these campuses? Sure.
But when you start targeting individual universities and going after, quote unquote, the cultural elite under the auspices of anti-Semitism, it's just, it's not, A, it's not true. And B, it's morally corrupt, but more, I'll just go to the economic argument. The funding of research at universities has been the greatest investment in history.
And that is, and I've said this before, that the most successful venture capitalists in history are middle-class taxpayers who give money to the government, and then the government funds research that private enterprise can't afford to make these types of staggering investments.
Right. Tuberculosis, for example.
Or a catalog listing all things on the internet for academic research that ultimately ends up becoming a $2 trillion company called Google. Or vaccines looking at how mRNA might be more effective than traditional vaccines. Or diabetes medication. Most studies show, and then the vessel for this unbelievable investment are universities.
Government funding of university research has proven to be one of the highest ROI public investments, with economic impact studies suggesting returns of, get this, Cara, somewhere between 20% at the low end and 60% annually.
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Chapter 6: How do current birth rate trends and extremism among young men impact society?
So, another tidbit from the journal's reporting, and by the way, I've spoken about this with so many reporters. I'm so glad that they're finally writing about this and not pretending it's just a silly, you know, an ex who's mad at him. This is really significantly weird stuff.
and especially since he's in such a position of power, Musk believes population decline is a massive threat and wants to make enough babies to, quote, reach legion level before the apocalypse. And Musk urged former girlfriend Ashley St. Clair, or I don't know what she is, I guess girlfriend, to give birth via C-section because he believes that vaginal births limit brain size.
You remember I was arguing with him about this, given I had a C-section. Scott, where shall we go with this? Where shall we start? I mean, I'm thrilled that reporters are actually doing these things around the drugs, around these weirdnesses around children. It is really demented in a way that's really around the bend. It's fine if someone wants to have a lot of kids, but this is a whole theory.
I think the one person in this story that didn't get enough shit is Jared Burchall, who works for him and is his facilitator. They wrote about him being a Mormon and talking about him having such a stable family. Jared, if you're facilitating this, you don't get to hide behind your perfect family and that you don't behave like this. You're just facilitating a rich person behaving badly and
and manipulating women who are having kids. I mean, everything sounds so pathetic. And at the very, and I'll let you go on, Scott, but the children are really, what really concerns me here is that these kids are getting manipulated by Musk in terms of what they're going to pay the mothers and this and that. You don't need $15 million to raise a kid or anything else. But the ethical implications of
All of this, for all of you who are facilitating this for Musk, are rather deep and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Go ahead.
Look, there's a kernel of truth here, just calling balls and strikes. There was this fear or this moral panic around a population explosion that we were going to absorb, that our population was growing faster than the Earth's resources, and it was going to collapse under population growth. What's actually happened is that bomb has detonated, but it's imploded.
And that is Western nations, as they become wealthier and more educated, women decide having a lot of kids is a bad deal for them. and also men, and basically birth rates go down. And evidence has shown that as population has gone up, poverty has gone down. It ends up that if you put 10 new brains into society, one is a problem, eight do just Fine.
And one might solve more problems in those 10 brains create. So population growth is actually really it's a huge problem in Japan and South Korea, supposedly like only three or four people will have grandkids right now with these birth rates. Now you can solve it.
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