Why Pete Hegseth's speech is 'terrifying' to Kara Swisher, and Pivot's Friday crowd
The Hegseth talk takes up only the first few minutes of the episode, which goes on to Anthropic, OpenAI, Paramount and Amy Klobuchar.
Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott GallowayStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 142,862 views a day, 23 times a normal first day on this channel (6,285).
Why Kara Swisher Finds Pete Hegseth's Unhinged Speech So "Terrifying"
Read the title and you might expect an hour on the Pentagon. "Why Kara Swisher Finds Pete Hegseth's Unhinged Speech So \"Terrifying\"" is in fact Friday's full Pivot episode, and Hegseth fills only its opening stretch. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway spend those minutes on what the description calls his macho vision for the military, then turn to Trump's new AI safety deal.
The title did its job. Fifteen hours after going up, the episode was past 110,000 views, roughly twenty times the start a new Pivot episode usually gets. It is the show's second outsized start in a few days, after Galloway's worries about the Democrats and the midterms, as we reported here. The same Hegseth segment also went up on its own as a short clip, "Pete Hegseth Says No 'Beardos' or 'Weirdos' in the Military," and that one has stayed at the channel's ordinary pace. Viewers came for the long version.
After the opening it is the Pivot mix its regulars know: Anthropic's IPO filing, OpenAI delaying its own IPO, Mattel's Ynon Kreiz joining David Ellison as co-CEO at Paramount, and Amy Klobuchar correcting the record on Capitol Hill, before the hosts' predictions close the show.
The comment section has a strong veterans' thread, with former soldiers measuring the speech against their own service, and a long discussion of a planned cut to senior military leadership. Several viewers also point out the irony of hearing ads for AI products in the middle of a conversation about how frightening AI could be. Others replay a Swisher aside, her claim that she could be in the army.
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- Channel views, pace per day
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- Video published
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The numbers
One full episode ran far ahead of everything else the channel posted this week, including a short clip cut from the same conversation.
💡 Test your knowledge
Mattel, the company Ynon Kreiz has led, co-produced which 2023 film directed by Greta Gerwig?
Greta Gerwig directed Barbie, which was made with Mattel and became the biggest box-office hit of 2023.
