Apple’s Secret China Deal, Buzzfeed’s Mild Disaster, and Newspapers Strike Back

Speaker 1 Support for the show comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Sacks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style.

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Speaker 3 So your AI agents, they make the team that uses them more productive, right?

Speaker 3 But if they aren't connected to other agents or your data or your existing workflows, how productive can they really make your teams?

Speaker 3 Any business can add AI agents. IBM connects your agents across your company to change how you do business.
Let's create small to business, IBM.

Speaker 5 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 6 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 5 How are you doing, Scott?

Speaker 7 I'm doing well. I'm happy to be in New York.

Speaker 9 Crazy busy week.

Speaker 12 I just came from Dreamforce, where

Speaker 11 Mark Benioff came over to me.

Speaker 15 Disclosure.

Speaker 16 And just gave me shit

Speaker 14 in front of this entire Force team.

Speaker 14 So, as usual, I'm representing.

Speaker 21 I'm bringing home the bacon while you go have get foot robes with AOC or whatever it is you do.

Speaker 5 What I do is I have many children. I was in New York.
I only have a short amount of time, so I couldn't come up for that.

Speaker 5 I would have been happy to, I will do the next advertising thing, a partnership thing, but there are new partners. We're going to do video, Scott.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 15 We're going to do video.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 9 No, I love podcasting, except for the people we have to work with, our advertisers, and our listeners.

Speaker 11 Otherwise, I'm totally down with what we do.

Speaker 15 I think it'll be nice.

Speaker 5 People like our little videos. They like them.
We'll have to dress up more.

Speaker 7 I'm not going to speak for you.

Speaker 20 I'm not exaggerating.

Speaker 27 People meet me and they're like, oh my God, you're Sky Cow.

Speaker 29 And they look at me and they're like, oh.

Speaker 20 Like, they just assumed I was going to be much better looking or much more charming or something.

Speaker 15 So if we work on video.

Speaker 5 You sound handsome, in other words, is what you're saying. Hello.

Speaker 15 Hello. Hello.

Speaker 5 Yeah, you actually do sound handsome. Well, no, you're pretty handsome.

Speaker 30 That is something you are not supposed to agree with.

Speaker 32 Let me just stop you right there.

Speaker 13 You're not supposed to agree with me.

Speaker 5 You know what? In your apartment, there were pictures of your dad. He was a handsome man.
Your dad, I think that's your dad, right?

Speaker 14 Tom Galloway is a handsome man.

Speaker 33 Handsome man. Handsome man.

Speaker 24 Got him to a lot of trouble. Yeah.

Speaker 9 Good looks and low character.

Speaker 15 Oh,

Speaker 34 means you don't have a pot to pissin with five alimony checks and child support.

Speaker 5 You sound very comely. That's what you sound.
Someone told me I sounded tall. They met me and they're like, what?

Speaker 32 You sound tall?

Speaker 5 Did you see that picture of me at that lunch in New York?

Speaker 5 There's a picture of me with, I look like a hobbit like i'm at least a foot under every like joanna coles in her silver fancy jacket like design sounds tall like someone who wandered in a little tiny thing that wandered in off the street it's crazy i'm telling you the reason they asked me to do this thing with benioff today is not you is when you stand next to benioff it looks like he's about to eat you it looks like he's going to get angry and go all tiger king gone wrong on you

Speaker 35 it's like a it's like a dancing bear and a four-year-old like yes like coming to see the dancing bear

Speaker 35 he's a big man And then Salesforce Today announces they are no longer in discussions with

Speaker 5 Vox. No, it's already done.
We can say anything we want. He has a sense of humor, unlike many CEOs.
That's why I enjoy him.

Speaker 33 That's a great God. I'm genuinely like Mark.

Speaker 15 He's a funny guy.

Speaker 5 Anyway, today, just so you know, we're going to get away from this fall derall about our different ad deals and partnerships.

Speaker 5 Today, we're going to unpack Apple's secret deal with China, an interesting lawsuit involving Google and Facebook. Plus, we'll take a listener question about the layoffs at Better.

Speaker 5 That was not done well.

Speaker 5 Anyway, first of all, BuzzFeed's NASDAQ launches off to a rocky start. I thought you might have some thoughts on this.

Speaker 5 After its debut on Monday, BuzzFeed shares briefly surged, then quickly fell from the opening price of $10.99. Investors withdrew about 94% of the money raised by BuzzFeed's SPAC, which is a lot.

Speaker 5 At the time, they said they wanted the money for doing things. At the time, the recording shares were trading below $8.

Speaker 5 What do you think of this?

Speaker 9 Well, so the good news is they did get public. That's a victory.

Speaker 40 They have a liquid currency to try and go roll up to space, which is Latin for we have no vision for organic growth.

Speaker 12 So we're going to go buy companies.

Speaker 9 But there is probably room for consolidation.

Speaker 14 There probably are a bunch of smaller sub-scale media companies.

Speaker 20 Someone told me it's actually the first pure play digital media company to actually go public.

Speaker 5 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 42 Which I thought was interesting.

Speaker 27 But to be blonde, Kara,

Speaker 9 this was sort of like a...

Speaker 9 a mild disaster because first off if you look at SPAC SPACs raise the money based on the notion that this team is is going to go find, be bankers and find a good company that should be public.

Speaker 8 And they'll find something they get a good valuation on, and they'll be a private to public pop.

Speaker 9 But as the SPAC market has cooled,

Speaker 44 it's gone from when they announce the deal or right before the deal, the investors in the original SPAC can redeem and get their money back.

Speaker 8 And that's a signal not only of the market, but what they feel about the prospects of the target and the new deal.

Speaker 22 And a lot of people are saying, the market sucks.

Speaker 20 You have a gun to your head and have to give us the money back or find a deal.

Speaker 44 So you're finding shitty deals.

Speaker 22 And the percentage or the average redemption or people who want their money out, don't want to go along for the ride with this new acquisition or this new co has gone from 25% to almost 60%,

Speaker 20 meaning that the majority of people who are in SPACs are deciding not to go through with these deals in terms of their own dollars.

Speaker 44 This one was 96, meaning that nobody who bought into the SPAC wants to stick around to see what happens.

Speaker 13 It's down at 100%.

Speaker 20 Wants to be a BuzzFeed shareholder.

Speaker 42 And then what they had to do, which is even more damning, but people aren't talking about it, is in order to complete the deal, they had to raise,

Speaker 20 they usually do a pipe in equity financing, public, private investment, and public equity.

Speaker 6 Terry Quadrow always calls me and corrects me on that.

Speaker 20 And then, but what they had to do is a convertible debt offering.

Speaker 27 And a convertible debt offering means that if the thing goes bankrupt, they own the assets.

Speaker 27 And that's a negative forward-looking indicator that the only money they could raise to get the deal done was in the form of debt.

Speaker 26 And the stock's already off 20 or 30 percent. So, here's what I'm doing.

Speaker 15 Just let me give you some figures.

Speaker 5 I'm just looking at the stock.

Speaker 5 It is market cap is $240.6 million.

Speaker 5 Its revenues were almost double that. That's what's crazy.

Speaker 5 It was up as high as $14. Now it's at $6.56.
That low is $6.43.

Speaker 5 Its workers are slamming the company as it went public.

Speaker 5 It's a tough, it's a, you know, watching from the seats in Vox, it really does be like, oh, maybe not so much.

Speaker 46 Yeah, I'm not sure.

Speaker 21 I think that market cap may be, that valuation may be incorrect, but the bottom line is

Speaker 16 it doesn't bode well.

Speaker 14 The difference is, and I'm talking our own book.

Speaker 5 It originally valued it at more, but this is what the, what the, what, what?

Speaker 38 Yeah, I had that it was at 1.5 billion on the iPad.

Speaker 51 Yeah, it was.

Speaker 5 It was after SPAC merger that valued the firm, but it may be worth a lot less now. But go ahead.
Sorry. I'll look.
I'll go.

Speaker 14 I mean, the bottom line is they're Android.

Speaker 9 We're iOS of digital media.

Speaker 14 And we're totally conflicted because you and I are both shareholders.

Speaker 28 But we have less revenue, but more growth, and we make money.

Speaker 6 We're higher marketing.

Speaker 14 They're top 10 lists.

Speaker 20 Vox is Kara Swisher, getting ZipRecruiter to pay a lot of money because they think powerful people listen to you.

Speaker 25 It's one is, you know, one is literally Android, massive, and one, and the other is IOS.

Speaker 21 Where are the iOS?

Speaker 9 So if Vox does a SPAC or tries to go public, it'll be very interesting to see if we get grouped into the same

Speaker 4 corner of the buses.

Speaker 16 We'll totally get it. You think we will?

Speaker 5 Yeah. What's interesting is a lot of these companies, whatever they're worth, used to be worth like $5 billion, billion, whatever.
There were those numbers that they were going to bought by Disney.

Speaker 21 Oh, the bloom is off.

Speaker 31 The bloom is off the road.

Speaker 5 I do still, at the same time, I do admire what Jonah Peretti and Jim Bankoff have done.

Speaker 5 Like, you know, I mean, it is, you know, it's been a rough road, but some of the products they make are really terrific.

Speaker 15 But nonetheless, nonetheless.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 9 So it's the SPAC, but look what's happening.

Speaker 46 I mean, look what's happening at SPAC market.

Speaker 6 Remember,

Speaker 6 remember Virgin Galactic?

Speaker 45 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 26 when we said that that was going to be a poster trial for SPACs, that's been cut in half since we said that a few months ago.

Speaker 33 It's, it's, and you're dealing with a couple hundred

Speaker 9 special purpose acquisition courts that haven't de-SPAC, that have a gun to their head.

Speaker 22 They're going to start coming up on,

Speaker 20 you know, targets where they either have to give the money back or do an acquisition. So it's a very interesting dynamic.

Speaker 4 Yes, there's a lot of SPACs.

Speaker 5 I ran into so many women with SPACs at this lunch, and I was like, oh, this isn't good.

Speaker 4 This is not good.

Speaker 15 What's going on? Women with SPACs.

Speaker 5 SPACs. And, you know, speaking of SPACs, let's move on to Devin Nunes as leaving Congress to become CEO of Trump's media That just makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he'll stitch the House at the end of the month. He was going to be like the head of the House Ways and Means Committee, I think, if the Republicans take back the House.

Speaker 5 Cutting his term short by about a year, Nunez has a combative relationship with big tech. He's previously sued Twitter.
He sued a cow, I believe, or Twitter cow. He didn't win, I don't believe.

Speaker 5 Trump's SPAC deal has already drawn the attention of the SEC. They're investigating.

Speaker 5 What thinks you of this? This is weird. He doesn't have any tech experience whatsoever or media experience.
So that always works. works.

Speaker 6 I think it's kind of like borderline ridiculous.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 14 if you're looking at the stock right now in the options market and you want to buy calls, in other words, you think it's going to go up at about the strike price that are just like nine days out, you got to pay $5.50.

Speaker 18 Whereas

Speaker 7 if you want to buy puts,

Speaker 39 you got to pay a lot.

Speaker 16 a lot more, meaning that essentially everybody thinks this stock is going to go down.

Speaker 23 um and so it's and i it's just like i'm a fan of corporate governance i don't think we should have part-time ceos and i don't think we should have ceos whose fathers owned dairy farms and then his kind of professional experience is he's to his credit was one of the youngest members of i think the board of the college of the sequoias and then he won a congressional seat as a very young man he has no business running a business much less a tech company this is

Speaker 47 And this company, I think, has about a, I think it has about a billion and a half.

Speaker 6 Let me like de-whack.

Speaker 41 It has a market cap of $2.3 billion

Speaker 44 based on Trump as the anchor and now a CEO.

Speaker 5 We don't know who's in his pipe. It supposedly have a billion dollars.
This is a private investment in public equity. It was not publicly disclosed.
They don't have a product.

Speaker 5 This feels very trumpy to me. This seems to me.
And True Social missed its November deadline.

Speaker 15 It's December.

Speaker 5 Maybe they'll launch on January 6th. That would be a good day to launch for them.

Speaker 27 Ew, a little inside the Belway humor.

Speaker 35 A A little inside the Belway humor.

Speaker 15 It's outside the Belway.

Speaker 5 But it's under investigation for

Speaker 5 possible, it probably won't go anywhere.

Speaker 5 Who they told about what and what they discussed. I don't even understand it.

Speaker 18 That joke makes you sound taller. That joke makes you sound like 5'10.

Speaker 13 It does.

Speaker 5 I do. I'm tall.
I'm tall. By the way, Gary Gensler is targeting these pipe offerings.
So, you know, and rules are a coming.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 15 anyway,

Speaker 5 this is a disaster. There won't won't be a product.
I mean, I hate to say it, but parlor looks fantastic in comparison in terms of technology and the ability to get a product out the door.

Speaker 24 Look, there's a cycle to all of this innovation.

Speaker 20 SPACs are an innovation.

Speaker 40 And typically, whether it's junk bonds, whether it's the internet, or whether it's SPACs, there's excitement, there's mania, there's a huge fallout, but there will be some SPACs that endure.

Speaker 26 And I do think special purpose acquisition cores as a financing vehicle will survive.

Speaker 20 It's just, it's going to be a lot more discerning in the marketplace.

Speaker 22 I mean, when 96% of the people who gave you money based on the idea and then you find a target and it's like, no, we don't, we don't, we want off this train.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 14 It means the SPAC market is reaching way too far into the barrel, so to speak.

Speaker 5 You know what Nunion should do? He should just buy one of those shitty cable competitors and compete with Fox.

Speaker 5 That's where they should stick with, because that's not quite as hard to do as create a social network where you got to make, you know, make fetch happen, which I don't think this guy has the ability to make anything happen.

Speaker 18 Technology, which can break down, as I can personally attest to.

Speaker 5 Speaking of which, internet services have recovered from the massive AWS outage. That was problematic.

Speaker 5 Everybody felt that problems caused disruptions. Alexa, Ring, Disney Plus, Dropbox I had a problem with.
What happened with you, Scott? Give us your tale of woe.

Speaker 28 So distinctive the fact that the VCs and their flying monkeys claim that everything I predict the opposite happens.

Speaker 20 Yes, they do.

Speaker 40 Every year I do a public predictions webinar.

Speaker 33 Yeah. And

Speaker 8 17,000 people registered.

Speaker 21 8,000 people showed up.

Speaker 14 And then then come five o'clock, you know, I'm already, I'm stretching, I'm psyching myself up, you know, looking in the mirror and go, I like you.

Speaker 18 I deserve to, I deserve to have a good webinar or whatever we call this live stream.

Speaker 43 And then my tech guy, he wasn't handling the tech.

Speaker 25 It was someone else said, we're having a problem.

Speaker 26 They can't figure out how to go live.

Speaker 16 I'm like, what do you mean they're having a problem?

Speaker 5 And you started yelling right? You started throwing

Speaker 15 the worst in a crisis.

Speaker 31 I'm like, who can I yell at and just make everything harder?

Speaker 5 Why did I think that was so?

Speaker 33 Go ahead.

Speaker 46 And I'm like, that's it.

Speaker 9 And I fucking pop up. I shoot.

Speaker 45 I literally like down or bullet a Pacifico because I'm like, that's it.

Speaker 18 I don't even pretend not to have an alcohol problem. I'm stressed.
I'm angry. I'm going to start drinking.

Speaker 55 And then freaking 6.20, this is bad news.

Speaker 22 At 6.25, I called it.

Speaker 8 I just put out a tweet saying, I'm really sorry.

Speaker 25 I don't know what happened here.

Speaker 16 I take responsibility.

Speaker 9 We'll reschedule.

Speaker 42 And get this?

Speaker 56 Because of the dog.

Speaker 20 4,500 people at 5.30 were still on.

Speaker 26 And what was supposedly hilarious was all the mockery and memes that went back and forth in the chat function, which was still working, fortunately.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 43 So people could mock me and my technology.

Speaker 44 But yeah, anyways, AWS

Speaker 5 was not Scott's fault.

Speaker 7 Just a few minutes later, we were using some new platform called Hoppin' or something.

Speaker 5 Hoppin' it's just new.

Speaker 5 It's a very big service. Anyway, go ahead.

Speaker 42 Just because you're six feet doesn't give you the right to like push back on me.

Speaker 15 It's one of those promising meetings.

Speaker 43 I did get immediately, I don't know if it's a coincident or not, I immediately got a little

Speaker 49 handwritten note messenger saying to me, How do you like me now, bitch?

Speaker 20 And it was from Zoom.

Speaker 22 It was from Zoom.

Speaker 11 Get it? How do you like me now, bitch? I get that.

Speaker 15 I got it.

Speaker 4 I got it.

Speaker 32 I'm getting it. I'm shrinking.

Speaker 5 Anyway, I'm shrinking. Anyway, how did it? And then are you doing it again? Did you do it? I'm sorry.

Speaker 46 Yeah, no, we gotta re we got a reschedule.

Speaker 5 You didn't invite me to that.

Speaker 34 I wasted 17,000 people's time for an hour.

Speaker 54 I burnt an hour. I've literally like killed two people.

Speaker 34 That's like two lifetimes.

Speaker 5 All right. Well, there's Scott's tale of woe.
There's Scott's Tale of Woe.

Speaker 4 Some good predictions.

Speaker 5 AWS.

Speaker 9 By the way, I nailed it last year.

Speaker 17 Did you? I'm sorry. Go ahead.
All right.

Speaker 31 We'll nail my predictions last year.

Speaker 5 All right. Forget those flying monkeys.
Why do you get so upset by those flying monkeys? They do like to go after you. They start to, one started to go after me, but I shut them down

Speaker 5 because of you, and I shut them down real fast.

Speaker 13 Oh, wait.

Speaker 18 You're blaming it on me now. Now we're going to do it.

Speaker 13 It was about you.

Speaker 5 They're like, how can you affiliate yourself with that man? And I said, very nicely. Fuck you, essentially.

Speaker 5 He's got a handsome voice i'm just telling you i'm getting a lot of that late for some reason all the uh internet dudes some of the internet dudes are getting mad at me i got like whack i got palmer lucky mad at me over says i'm a bull no it's only because i can do math and i refer to their portfolios as septic tanks because while they foist their feces from their unicorns on tours to the bullshit zoo they get angry and see it as a crime against humanity when you get in the way of their their ability to maintain their consensual hallucination with the markets.

Speaker 20 That's just me, though.

Speaker 5 They are on the warpath. I also got the former editor of the Wall Street Journalist.

Speaker 42 That was Palmer Lucky.

Speaker 29 I think those are the cigarettes my mom smoked in the 70s.

Speaker 5 He created Oculus. He's a very good entrepreneur.
Palmer, you're an excellent entrepreneur. Otherwise, please let's stop.

Speaker 6 Palmer Lucky.

Speaker 42 Palmer Lucky.

Speaker 9 That's like a drink you ordered at the polo lounge in the 70s.

Speaker 5 In any case,

Speaker 5 I'm not even going to...

Speaker 15 beef with him at the end of the day. Hello, ladies.

Speaker 20 I drive a 240Z and my name is Palmer Lucky.

Speaker 5 I will only talk about the Oculus and how I don't think it's going to be worldwide because it's too big of a different thing.

Speaker 32 He invented the Oculus?

Speaker 5 He sold it to Facebook.

Speaker 4 Was that acquired acquired by Facebook?

Speaker 15 Yeah. Very,

Speaker 5 very, very good entrepreneur.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God.

Speaker 15 Otherwise, we don't get on.

Speaker 5 I don't know him very well. I've interviewed him once or twice.

Speaker 38 And he's giving you shit about me.

Speaker 14 I should not care.

Speaker 54 Why do I care?

Speaker 5 No, no, no, no. He was giving me shit about me.
Apparently, I retweeted Orion. I don't even understand, but apparently I'm a bully.
I'm a bully to wealthy and men of means.

Speaker 9 Well, you're,

Speaker 20 I don't know, you're lesbian privilege. You punch down.
I just is.

Speaker 5 I'm sorry I hurt you, Palmer. That's all I have to say.
Anyway, time for our first big story.

Speaker 5 Tim Cook apparently made a secret deal with the Chinese government to the tune of $275 billion, according to the information, in exchange for lighter regulation from the Chinese government.

Speaker 5 Apple agreed to invest heavily in China, which it has been over the many years. It's put money into data centers, wind farms, and directly invested in companies like Didi.

Speaker 5 Still, Apple has played by China's rules. At government request, Apple has pulled apps from its store and altered the way that disputed territories appear in the Apple maps.

Speaker 5 Anyone who operates in China, that's an American company, does this, let me be clear. It was interesting the way it was phrased, this deal.

Speaker 5 I think he probably went over there and negotiated as if he was his own country, right?

Speaker 5 And obviously, the heat on China is growing and growing. So Apple's going to be put into the spotlight rather significantly on this issue.
I'm not surprised by this.

Speaker 5 I guess I was like, well, of course they do things to bend to the Chinese government. But

Speaker 5 what do you think? Maybe you have a different take.

Speaker 20 No, I mean, I have a bias towards Tim Cook and Apple, but

Speaker 8 I think

Speaker 42 the greatest

Speaker 21 force or the greatest

Speaker 39 buffer against what could have been a really terrible conflict is NATO.

Speaker 11 I think having

Speaker 24 an umbrella of security across Europe where the major conflicts all seem to break out, having a multilateral force with a shit ton of tanks keeping the peace has been a fantastic deterrent.

Speaker 42 I think, and this is going to sound geopolitically a little strange, but I think the greatest deterrent to a very serious shooting war is Apple.

Speaker 6 Now, what do I mean by that?

Speaker 5 No, all right. I was wondering where you're going.

Speaker 15 Natal and all, right? But go ahead. Go ahead.

Speaker 36 Palmer lucky.

Speaker 15 Palmer lucky.

Speaker 5 I'll leave him alone. Don't bully him.

Speaker 15 I like that name.

Speaker 33 I like that name.

Speaker 42 Anyways, countries that trade together are much less likely to go to war.

Speaker 20 And I feel like China and the U.S.

Speaker 14 are kind of the two superpowers now.

Speaker 53 And the thing that helps us is when you understand each other and you make money from each other and you have a mutually vested interest and mutually vested destruction, you're more likely to try and figure out a way to work out problems around Taiwan.

Speaker 20 And the most valuable company in the world, if all of a sudden every Chinese youth that has iOS, if their phone got turned off, they would be angry and think the CCP is bad and maybe we need a second party, which is Latin for revolution in China.

Speaker 27 So I think the immense amount of trade we do with one another is probably the safest thing in the world.

Speaker 15 All right. All right.

Speaker 5 Well, that's one, that's the argument. That's the main long argument that if we're in there, we're going to change them.
I do not believe that's the case.

Speaker 14 I'm not saying we're going to change them, Kara.

Speaker 9 I'm saying they're going to think twice before they really get aggressive, as are we.

Speaker 18 I mean, the bottom line, we could have 500 million people flow into our borders and we could make all the shit we need.

Speaker 47 So we need China.

Speaker 26 Apple is one of the probably, I imagine, the biggest employers.

Speaker 5 I would guess. They have definitely gone over.
Obviously, Google pulled out over lots of reasons. Other companies did.
Some people

Speaker 5 talked about forced labor. That said, a lot of these people just couldn't operate in China.
It's a very complex place to operate. Facebook's not there.
This is just in tech.

Speaker 5 But News Corp's been in there. There's all kinds of, you know, Disney, they pulled some criticism.

Speaker 5 There was a whole controversy over one of its stars saying something against China and then having to pull it. I think it was, I forget who it was.
Anyway, it happens a lot.

Speaker 14 John Sana said that Taiwan wasn't a country.

Speaker 14 No, he apologized for saying Taiwan was a country.

Speaker 18 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 5 But that's, it's one of dozens of times this has happened. So lots of media companies have already been through the ringer here.
And so, you know, it's not a surprise that Apple is.

Speaker 5 I think what the issue is, is that more and more pressure is going to be put on all U.S. companies around China.

Speaker 5 There's a coal, there's coalescing around aggression towards China, whether it's Marco Rubio or Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whoever.

Speaker 5 This is a trend of painting them as our big rival. And

Speaker 5 I think it's going to be a dicey time for Apple in terms of how to negotiate and operate because it's so important to its business to be operating in China and making things in China.

Speaker 50 Yeah, I just don't know.

Speaker 18 The bottom line is they are so pregnant with China.

Speaker 10 I mean, the most robust supply chain in the world is run by the most valuable company in the world,

Speaker 28 which has more employees in China than it does in

Speaker 14 its home sovereign. So

Speaker 14 I think they're very dependent upon us.

Speaker 18 I think we're very dependent upon them.

Speaker 8 And I think that's a good thing.

Speaker 34 I think that just creates cooler heads.

Speaker 23 I think everyone has motivation to try and figure this shit out.

Speaker 47 It also gives us teeth to do stuff if and when they continue to perform what I'll call you know, genocide light or

Speaker 8 putting ethnic groups in re-education camps or what you want to call them.

Speaker 9 Because I was even thinking about Biden's call where he talked to Russia and said we're going to clamp down.

Speaker 23 You're like, Jesus Christ, we still have sanctions that haven't been issued against them.

Speaker 21 So building up economic involvement gives you the ability to untangle them and hurt that other nation.

Speaker 22 They could hurt us just as badly at this point, which we're not used to.

Speaker 27 I mean, I'll just give you an example.

Speaker 37 I think Chinese, as Americans, I think it's good that we're putting pressure on them for human rights.

Speaker 8 I think we should continue to do that.

Speaker 40 The disappearance of a tennis player is really disturbing.

Speaker 34 At the same time, you can put yourself in their shoes and go, what moral authority do you have?

Speaker 58 You just, you had a president who just overran the fucking Capitol.

Speaker 31 Who are you to lecture us?

Speaker 5 Well, yeah, that's the other part of that foreign equation. But here's the deal.
This is going to be a very difficult time for

Speaker 5 them. I mean, lots of Microsoft's there.
Boeing is there. There's all kinds of things around this.
It's just, it's going to get worse. And Apple is now the target.

Speaker 5 The reaction has not been good to this deal. It should be no surprise that there was this deal, but it's going to attract all kinds of issues.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the New York Times actually had a big story about,

Speaker 5 it was called Inside Apple's Compromises in China, Times Investigation.

Speaker 5 So it's just, it's now going to, it's now going to attract all kinds of attention. It just is.
So that's just the way it's going to be.

Speaker 28 But I mean, we, Boeing and Apple,

Speaker 9 they raise the issue so they get all of the attention.

Speaker 26 But if all of a sudden

Speaker 47 Chinese manufacturing, we couldn't have this podcast right now.

Speaker 14 40% of the furniture in your room would disappear.

Speaker 48 Half of our clothing would go.

Speaker 27 I mean, people really don't have a sense.

Speaker 22 And something like 92% of toys are manufactured in China. And I think that's a good thing.

Speaker 27 I think comparative advantage is a good thing.

Speaker 15 All right, we'll see how it goes.

Speaker 5 I don't think it's a good thing for Apple right now. I think there's going to be increased pressure

Speaker 5 going forward.

Speaker 20 I apologize because I don't know the story and you know the company better than I do.

Speaker 47 What exactly are they accusing them of?

Speaker 5 Not accusing them, that they just, they just, you know, they were doing, they were, they would, they would put money into this to help the country grow and that they would,

Speaker 5 do things like pulling apps.

Speaker 5 Lots of people do these things.

Speaker 5 Lots of companies do this when they're in these countries. And so

Speaker 5 altered the way disputed territories appear in Apple Maps there, stuff like that. The stuff you'd expect,

Speaker 5 the stuff you'd expect. And one of the reasons Google left was because of this stuff.
And Apple is not leaving.

Speaker 5 This is what you do if you live, if you operate in China. And they were willing to do that.
So

Speaker 5 I would say it's no surprise. And yet I think it's going to bring enormous pressure on this company, no matter what.
Anyway, let's go on a quick break.

Speaker 5 When we come back, we'll talk about a big lawsuit in the world of digital advertising, Scott's area of expertise, and take a listener mail question.

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Speaker 5 Scott, we're back with our second big story. Newspapers around the country have been quietly filing antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook, arguing big tech is monopolizing digital ad revenue.

Speaker 5 This is, again, not a new thing. It's been going on for a while.
You and I both know people at these organizations that have talked about this for a while. It's happened in Europe.

Speaker 5 Lawsuits for more than 200 newspapers were consolidated in the Southern District of New York over the summer.

Speaker 5 A lawyer for the publisher said the goal is to, quote, recover past damages to newspapers and to, quote, establish a new system going forward in which newspapers aren't just competitive again, but can thrive.

Speaker 5 You know, again, happened in Australia, happened all over the place. These deals with these companies in Australia, Google and Facebook are paying new news publishers by law.
That might happen here.

Speaker 5 It's being worked on in Canada. So what do you think of all this? What do you think about this?

Speaker 6 Look, and

Speaker 50 I'm not,

Speaker 28 you know, like most of the things I say, I'm reflecting myself in a very good light, a taller light.

Speaker 14 But in my first meeting on the board of the New York Times, I'm like, we should turn off Google.

Speaker 11 Our infatuation with being part of the cool club and hanging out with the popular kids has resulted in us debasing our gorgeous content.

Speaker 43 They slice it up.

Speaker 29 They sell it for 10 cents and give us a quarter of a cent.

Speaker 47 And we act that we're excited because we're embracing the future.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 25 they basically came in and

Speaker 43 turned a lot of content into a sewer and debased our amazing content. And

Speaker 51 I found it very frustrating.

Speaker 14 I think Facebook and Google did nothing much more complex than pull up a dump truck to the vault of every newspaper company and take money out.

Speaker 14 Now, that's not to say they weren't being unbundled on their own.

Speaker 25 It's not to say

Speaker 28 they didn't need to innovate.

Speaker 32 Which they did. I get it.

Speaker 20 The New York Times did.

Speaker 22 The New York Times is, I mean, you work for them.

Speaker 21 I think they've actually been very innovative.

Speaker 5 Yes, but it's still not enough. They're tiny.
They're like a little dinghy with ocean liners.

Speaker 53 We went and acquired about.com because we wanted to accessorize our analog outfit with digital earrings, and we paid $400 million for it.

Speaker 27 It was growing.

Speaker 20 It was worth a billion.

Speaker 22 And then overnight, we got a message from the CTS saying

Speaker 22 about.com's revenue is down 60% today.

Speaker 20 Traffic is down 60% because Google did an update.

Speaker 46 Google just said, you know what?

Speaker 34 Rather than letting you monetize that, we're just going to take all that revenue.

Speaker 48 And if you want to talk about rents and duopoly and monopoly, and this is overdue, this lawsuit.

Speaker 46 Look what has happened with Amazon.

Speaker 25 In 2014, if you were a retailer in the third-party marketplace, between placement fees, between paying for fulfillment, between them twisting your arm and forcing you to spend money on Amazon media groups, which you could come up in higher rankings than what is the second largest search engine, which is Amazon.

Speaker 22 You had to pay Amazon an average in 2014 of 19% of your sales.

Speaker 24 So if you sold $100 worth of goods as a retailer on the third-party platform, you gave up approximately 19 cents.

Speaker 34 Now, it's 34 cents.

Speaker 9 The rents these companies are able to extract from corporate America has gone up every year.

Speaker 14 And when 60 cents on the dollar go to just two players in the medium that everybody has to play in, it doesn't mean

Speaker 22 it's a capitalist point of differentiation.

Speaker 47 It's a tax.

Speaker 25 And no one company has been able to develop strategic advantage using this medium, similar to what Nike's done with TV or William Sonoma's done with catalogs.

Speaker 49 We all have to use it. And when everyone has to use something and can't establish advantage from it, it's a tax.

Speaker 12 It's not a service.

Speaker 20 So the monopoly and duopoly power here has just run unfettered.

Speaker 34 And I'm happy to see them do it. I'm happy to see them file these suits.

Speaker 5 May I ask, all right, but what can be done? How can you sort of roll back the, you know, it's like unmixing cream and tea. It's just done.
Like, that's the thing.

Speaker 5 Probably there'll be some payments.

Speaker 5 First, we gave it away, then we took some payments. And then, you know, we've always sort of been lining up to whatever, you know, gruel they hand us.
But what can be actually done? Like to

Speaker 5 this is this is now a secular change that is finished, really.

Speaker 20 Well, there's remedies and damages if they say they used unfair pricing or cartel power.

Speaker 9 And there's a cartel pricing case in Texas that says that the two that Google, senior executives from Google and Facebook coordinated to keep prices high for advertisers, which actually the interesting thing about that case is there's criminal remedies.

Speaker 20 But if you were to force Facebook to spin Instagram and WhatsApp, and maybe force Amazon to spin Amazon, Media Group, whatever it might be, all of a sudden you have more competitors and you have

Speaker 12 a distinct

Speaker 17 supply, which would lower the rents on the demand side.

Speaker 9 So, I mean, the bottom line is when there's one or two providers across millions of

Speaker 24 buyers, the one or two providers do really well.

Speaker 40 So, we just need more, we need more providers, if you will, or more options.

Speaker 5 I mean, I think that you run the danger of there being

Speaker 5 legislation. There's been legislation everywhere, obviously in Australia.
It happened. There's some here in this country.
It's just digital competition with newspapers, I think, is over.

Speaker 5 I think they've won this one. And the question is, what can happen? Since 2006, here's a figure.
Newspaper ad revenue has dropped 50%.

Speaker 5 Not a surprise. And it was already dropping because of Walmart and everybody else not advertising.
And then there's classifieds, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm not so sure

Speaker 5 what saving them will mean, except for a few large ones like The Times or The Post, et cetera.

Speaker 40 Yeah, I don't, look, I think newspapers, if my suggestion was that every media company, and I suggested this in 2008, and that I wanted to get the Salzbergers, the Murdochs, the Hearst family, the Pearsons, basically every large print media company together and say, we need to be like the Record Labels Association.

Speaker 43 We need to bind together and license all of our content or none of it to one or more of these search engines.

Speaker 41 And this is back when Microsoft still thought they had a shot.

Speaker 5 What did they say?

Speaker 34 You know what they said to me? They said they didn't.

Speaker 38 Well,

Speaker 55 they thought of like, I mean, the New York Times thought of the Wall Street Journal as their competitor.

Speaker 46 I'm like, no, there's their enemy.

Speaker 27 I'm like, no, they're our adversary.

Speaker 55 Our enemy is in fucking Cupertino.

Speaker 19 Wake up, guys.

Speaker 8 We're bickering with each other.

Speaker 20 And meanwhile, the Panzer tanks are lining up at the border.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And what did they say? What did they look at you like?

Speaker 30 And then the official word back was, we would be committing antitrust.

Speaker 9 This is how fucked up the laws were, that if the newspaper companies were...

Speaker 14 If the newspaper, well, then the laws need to be changed.

Speaker 22 Because if the San Francisco Chronicle and the Miami Herald and the New York Times bind together to try and get some better terms from Google Google is antitrust.

Speaker 18 You had 93% of the search market controlled by one company. It's not antitrust.

Speaker 45 We need different laws.

Speaker 21 So, look,

Speaker 38 these companies,

Speaker 9 all media companies, in my mind, outside of Google and Facebook, need to do a better job of pushing back with one voice because the key to winning a war is to atomize your competition.

Speaker 34 I even remember us prostrating ourselves to Steve Jobs.

Speaker 22 Like, oh, we wanted to be in the app store and give them huge revenue and give them a job.

Speaker 4 So did the journal.

Speaker 5 I was in meetings like that. He loved it.

Speaker 37 He knew.

Speaker 34 Because the CEO of the company loved having drinks with Steve Jobs.

Speaker 42 I mean, it's just,

Speaker 20 we're so like fascinated hanging out with the cool kids that we entered into ridiculously bad stuff.

Speaker 5 You know what Jobs did in one meeting with the journal? He literally insulted them all, said, like, you suck at tech. You're never going to beat us.

Speaker 5 It was so funny to watch. Like, you know, and they sort of sat there and took it.
And I was just like, okay, guys, this is who he is. You know, it was, it was, you know, and they tried everything.

Speaker 5 You know, Murdoch tried a whole bunch of things. You know, they did the day, the daily, it was called, that daily app.

Speaker 5 Then before that, they had something else. I can't even remember all.
I should be remembering all their names, but everybody tried a lot of things for sure.

Speaker 5 The question is, did any of it really matter? It seems like most of it really didn't, like on some level. They couldn't keep up.
And Jobs was right.

Speaker 5 Technically, from a technological perspective, they were toast is essentially what he told all the media companies that I saw him speak to.

Speaker 5 Anyhow, let's pivot to a listener question.

Speaker 5 Let's go.

Speaker 10 You got, you got, I can't believe I'm going to be a mailman. You, you got mail.

Speaker 41 Hey, Karen Scott.

Speaker 60 It's Corey from New York. I had a question about the better mortgage layoff.
Scott, you always mentioned that you can't control the layoffs, but you can protect the people that are being laid off.

Speaker 60 Given that this layoff was three weeks prior to Christmas and one of the hardest seasons to be hired in, and that they are only getting four weeks of severance, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the situation.

Speaker 60 Thanks, guys. Love the show.
Bye.

Speaker 5 Okay. This is a really, I haven't really followed this until just recently.
The chief executive in Vetter.com, Vishal Garg, laid off 900 employees over Zoom.

Speaker 5 On a networking site blind, he accused the terminated employees of stealing from the company by underworking, saying, you guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of two hours a day while clocking in eight hours plus a day in the payroll system.

Speaker 5 They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills, that pay our bills, get educated.

Speaker 5 He later apologized for failing to show the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation. So,

Speaker 5 any lessons here? Not good. Not good.
This didn't make him look good.

Speaker 5 Even if he might have been right, possibly, I'd have no idea. I have no information on this.
But what do you think?

Speaker 16 Well, so

Speaker 35 I wasn't expecting this question and just disclosure.

Speaker 6 You know, I'm an investor and better. Yeah.

Speaker 21 So

Speaker 31 take that for what it's worth.

Speaker 5 You're a CEO's behavior.

Speaker 45 Oh, this is an easy one.

Speaker 52 He fucked up.

Speaker 18 Compare and contrast this with how Chesky laid off employees.

Speaker 11 And by the way, companies that are growing lay off people all the time.

Speaker 18 And that's oftentimes it's the right thing to do.

Speaker 9 Google, in the midst of its power alley, laid off like a thousand people because they wanted, they felt they were getting fat.

Speaker 14 And back to his original notion, what he was referring to is I believe that, you know, we talk a lot about this in management and board meetings.

Speaker 26 You know, it's always a difficult decision to lay off people.

Speaker 28 And I feel like you need to be fairly shareholder driven or Darwinian about the decision.

Speaker 18 But once the decision is made,

Speaker 22 you become very generous.

Speaker 42 And that is big severance packages. You try and do it in a way that is dignified because people should be disappointed, but they shouldn't be scared.

Speaker 26 They shouldn't be like, oh, fuck, how am I going to pay my mortgage?

Speaker 20 Especially if you're a company that is doing well and has cash.

Speaker 30 I don't know the specifics.

Speaker 12 I think the severance is going to be more than that.

Speaker 9 If it's just four weeks before the holidays, that too is a fuck-up on top of a fuck-up.

Speaker 27 The strange thing is as soon as I heard the story, I went on

Speaker 14 Google and I love tracking the number of news hits.

Speaker 9 And this is what's really sad about this.

Speaker 11 And this isn't a comment about Better, but a comment about our society.

Speaker 22 You know what's going to happen to their business in the next 30 days?

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 31 It's going to go up.

Speaker 17 Because

Speaker 34 we live in a society now where awareness is kind of the key attribute because people are like, oh, they've heard of a company called Better.

Speaker 46 Oh, I'm thinking about an online mortgage.

Speaker 14 Can I get a lower interest rate?

Speaker 20 And now they've heard of this company.

Speaker 25 I think it's,

Speaker 20 I'm not excusing it in any way, but I think part of the innovator's dilemma here, what's dangerous about our society, is it's more important to be in the news than it is what you're in the news for when you're a tech company.

Speaker 9 You're just part of.

Speaker 18 the narrative. But there's just

Speaker 27 no getting around it.

Speaker 20 I know Vishal. I like him.

Speaker 22 Brilliant product guy. It's an amazing company.

Speaker 10 It's de-spacking with SoftBank.

Speaker 20 It's just an incredible company. He's done an amazing job.

Speaker 52 God, did he fuck up?

Speaker 55 I mean,

Speaker 34 you just, that was so tone deaf.

Speaker 9 And around the holidays, the company has the money.

Speaker 43 I don't think it's going to be four-week severance.

Speaker 22 I'm almost entirely positive it's going to be much more than that.

Speaker 34 But compare, contrast it with what Brian Chesky did around his layoffs.

Speaker 17 He did.

Speaker 5 And they were, people were unhappy anyway. You know, I got a lot of pushback when I complimented it.
They were like, sta-da-da-da. He didn't do this.
I was like, boy,

Speaker 4 no one's going to be happy with everything.

Speaker 50 Yeah, I don't. I mean,

Speaker 18 what are your thoughts on this? I don't, I think it's a speed bump.

Speaker 43 I don't really think it's going to affect the company long term.

Speaker 26 That doesn't excuse it.

Speaker 9 But there's a lot of lessons here around laying.

Speaker 51 I remember when my first company,

Speaker 18 we've gone 10 seconds without talking about Scott.

Speaker 9 So let's fix that.

Speaker 22 But my first company, Profit, we, a brand strategy firm, brought in a CEO, raised some money, and immediately went from 60 to 120 120 people, hired, you know, huge, massive hiring.

Speaker 22 Business softens.

Speaker 34 I think it was the 2000 and

Speaker 23 like the, I forget which recession it was.

Speaker 20 And I had to call 40 people into a room and say everybody in this room is being laid off.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 38 And it's just, and these are, these are kids who just got out of business school, who had a lot of opportunity, a lot of options, bought into our vision, moved to

Speaker 53 San Francisco.

Speaker 14 And 12 weeks later, some guy who lives in Noe Valley is telling, sorry, because I'm an idiot and I approve this plan.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I've got to let you go and

Speaker 20 And here's I think all you can do is there's no it's like there's no easy way to kill someone We've taken cameras out of war zones because we realize when we get a number back that we've killed half a million Iraqis we like to think that they just floated away into Iraqi heaven and we don't it's it's war is fucking gruesome and the reason one of the reasons and it was a worthwhile reason and I think we should have cameras and ICUs and on every battlefield is that there's just no elegant way to kill someone.

Speaker 20 And quite frankly, there's no really elegant, humane way to fire someone.

Speaker 38 You know, one of the reasons I'm not CEO of my ed tech company right now?

Speaker 55 Because you don't have to do that. I'm done firing people.
Yep.

Speaker 5 I've done only a few, and I didn't like any of them.

Speaker 5 One of the best explanations of firing, I would point everyone to one of my favorite movies, Broadcast News, where they're firing people in the...

Speaker 5 in the in the the station.

Speaker 44 Well, you could die when he says, is there anything I could do for you?

Speaker 15 He says, well, you could die.

Speaker 5 Well, you could die.

Speaker 5 And it was a great line. Grave.

Speaker 37 Great. Albert Brooks.

Speaker 5 Come on. Yeah.
What a great movie.

Speaker 4 Come on. Holly Hunter.

Speaker 5 I love Albert Brunson.

Speaker 31 William Heard. Tall Drinking Lemonade.

Speaker 5 It's my favorite movie. I actually own the movie.
I physically see it.

Speaker 26 I can totally see you loving it.

Speaker 15 Yeah, Holly Hunter.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah.
In any case, there's a line where he goes,

Speaker 5 Jack Nicholson is the anchor for the whole broadcast. And he comes in only for a minute.
He only has a few short scenes. And he goes, all this because they couldn't program Tuesday night.

Speaker 9 And it was just like, you know, he fucked up.

Speaker 50 Best line of the movie. Best line of the movie.

Speaker 9 William Heard says to Albert Brooks, he says, what happens when your reality exceeds your dreams?

Speaker 33 And you know what, Albert Brooks?

Speaker 15 Keep it to yourself. Keep it to yourself.

Speaker 5 That movie is full of great lines,

Speaker 15 James L. Brooks.

Speaker 5 Fantastic.

Speaker 27 He loves the newsroom.

Speaker 41 James L.

Speaker 31 Brooks loves the newsroom. And loves it.

Speaker 5 It's such a good movie. So it's really, I'll tell you, influenced me a great deal.
Anyway, he fucked up. But let's just say he fucked up.
And here's an investor telling you that he fucked up.

Speaker 5 I also think he fucked up. All right, Scott, one more quick break.
We'll be back for predictions. Maybe you can give me one of your fancy predictions that you couldn't get out to the people.

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Speaker 5 Okay, Scott, give us this week's predictions. You must have, you have like a boatload since you didn't get them out to the people in your in your AWS ruined situation that you were working on?

Speaker 50 So I have a bevy of them, but I'm going to

Speaker 28 be a big one. I'm going to be a coy little minx here.

Speaker 5 Okay, give me one of your bevy. Just peel off a grape, please.

Speaker 41 What I'm going to do, what I'm going to do, and this is almost as much fun, is I'm going to review verbatim my predictions from

Speaker 25 December 2020.

Speaker 5 This is where we pat ourselves on the back part of the show.

Speaker 29 Okay. Well, I got some wrong, too.
All right, okay.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 6 we'll go through them.

Speaker 18 I predicted when Bitcoin was at $22,000 that it would hit $50,000.

Speaker 16 And so I got that right.

Speaker 14 I put that we might work.

Speaker 43 I was especially fond of

Speaker 17 the

Speaker 16 language there, that they would get public. I think I got that right.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 18 I put, and this is when Airbnb was a private company, I put Airbnb was going to hit $200 a share.

Speaker 9 They priced at $68,000.

Speaker 8 I said it's going to hit $200 a share.

Speaker 52 I got that right.

Speaker 30 I said CNN was going to go behind a paywall.

Speaker 6 I got that right.

Speaker 9 Sort of.

Speaker 18 I said restoration hardware would hit $1,000 and Sonos would reach $40 because I thought there'd be such a massive dispersion of value and assets that would decentralize from offices to homes.

Speaker 26 I got that half right.

Speaker 40 So Sonos hit $40.

Speaker 20 Resto never hit $1,000, although it's up about 40% for the year.

Speaker 33 Okay.

Speaker 24 I said, and you've heard this over and over, I predicted that Apple would acquire Peloton.

Speaker 37 I got that wrong.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 5 But someday, this is going to be like your Jack Dorsey thing. We'll see.

Speaker 16 We'll see. Broken clock, right?

Speaker 33 Broken clock.

Speaker 20 I predicted Roblox stock would double from its offer price within six months i was wrong it's gone up about five-fold um and this one you've i think you've heard this before twitter hit sixty dollars and dorsey is ass ousted hello champagne

Speaker 20 though there was somebody wasn't ousted whatever hello he's gone yep and uh oh and i my my i always get political and angry i my prediction was robin hood is the new is the new menace And you can decide if that's right or wrong.

Speaker 22 Anyways, last year was one of my better years for predictions.

Speaker 31 We'll see.

Speaker 5 We'll see. Very good.
Okay, give me one, give me a, peel off a little grape here. By the way, Airbnb stock is now in 182.26, but it did hit 206 in November.

Speaker 27 Come on, I made the prediction.

Speaker 9 Was it 68? Give a little love to the dog.

Speaker 13 Rub his belly.

Speaker 4 Rub his belly. Rub your belly.

Speaker 15 Okay. Rub his belly.

Speaker 21 By the way, we just, we just spay Leia, and she has this big incision along her torso.

Speaker 9 So we have to wrap her in towels. She loves to go to the beach, obviously, as does every dog.

Speaker 42 And she literally sits, she cries when we don't get her out.

Speaker 18 And so we wrapped her in dish towels and diapers to create like a makeshift Spanks bodysuit.

Speaker 35 It's a great conversation starter.

Speaker 15 It's a great conversation starter.

Speaker 5 Is that your prediction? Get us a prediction.

Speaker 45 A great day in Spanks.

Speaker 20 No, my prediction is the following, and it could get us canceled off a pivot, but

Speaker 16 okay.

Speaker 27 This is, and this is just human nature.

Speaker 6 I don't know anything.

Speaker 23 I don't think it's any accident that Brett Taylor was made co-CEO of Salesforce and chairman of Twitter at the same time.

Speaker 45 Okay.

Speaker 20 I'm pretty sure, first off, this notion that, oh, it was Jack's idea.

Speaker 20 Elliot came in, I'm pretty sure, and said, okay, this is fucking ridiculous.

Speaker 39 You're out of here.

Speaker 18 We'll make it dignified, but you're leaving.

Speaker 44 And I'm pretty sure, I think this guy, Brett, is a really talented manager.

Speaker 9 I'm pretty sure Twitter, this is just pure conjecture.

Speaker 23 I have absolutely no idea what happened here, but that's my conjecture because I think I understand humans and the way these things play out.

Speaker 9 I would bet the Twitter board said, Brett, would you

Speaker 8 consider being CEO?

Speaker 18 And then Brett went back to Mark and said, hey, Mark, by the way, Twitter wants me to be CEO.

Speaker 26 And he's like, hello, Mr.

Speaker 9 Co-CEO of Salesforce.

Speaker 6 And you can be chairman.

Speaker 21 But the prediction is simple.

Speaker 26 The prediction is simple.

Speaker 46 Salesforce is going to acquire Twitter.

Speaker 14 We know Mark Benioff wants it.

Speaker 15 We know that

Speaker 41 he has wanted it.

Speaker 27 And here's the thing: this is why things are different this time, Tara.

Speaker 20 When they wanted it in 2016, and supposedly his board threw up on it, Salesforce had about a $70 or $80 billion market cap, and Twitter was at 25, meaning there would be like a 25 or 30% dilution, kind of a bent the ranch.

Speaker 41 Now, Salesforce, because of outstanding execution, has a $275 billion market cap, and Twitter has a $38 billion market cap, meaning this is no longer a bet the ranch acquisition.

Speaker 14 Meaning that Twitter, by virtue of a percentage of dilution, is now 50 to 70% less expensive.

Speaker 5 I thought you were predicting that Jack Dorsey was going to buy it from Square because he's at a similar rate. That might happen.

Speaker 7 It'll be, my prediction is Salesforce or a FinTech company is going to acquire Twitter by the end of 2022.

Speaker 15 But I'm now.

Speaker 5 I think you said this at a dinner with Mark, didn't you? And caused the room to be.

Speaker 14 Yeah, with Mark. And everyone everyone just went quiet.

Speaker 15 Lovely dinner.

Speaker 18 Yo-Yo Ma then played.

Speaker 28 I thought it was like prom in 1998.

Speaker 15 Okay. All right.

Speaker 5 So glad that you're doing this.

Speaker 5 I should have gone to that dinner. We'll see where it goes.
I think it's interesting to lay it out.

Speaker 5 This is not, this is Scott's predictions, people. So don't like bend my ear of whether he's right or wrong.
This is his analysis. It's called.

Speaker 30 Yeah, lucky palmer lucky. Go get lucky on your palm or somewhere else.

Speaker 5 He did not insult you. Let me be fair.
He did not insult you. He insulted him.

Speaker 4 You should be nicer to others.

Speaker 5 Okay, I'm going to try. I'm going to try to be nicer to him.
I don't even know him.

Speaker 5 I'm just going to remove each other from our consideration.

Speaker 38 Anyway, you're so not used to getting attacked. You are so used to it.

Speaker 4 It's just, no, no, you've gone from

Speaker 30 too much shit.

Speaker 18 You are now a protected class.

Speaker 5 No, I am used to being attacked.

Speaker 6 It's a whole open season on the 50-something white.

Speaker 5 I have my mother. I'm used to being attacked.
I'm very good at being attacked. Lucky.

Speaker 15 Lucky. Lucky.

Speaker 5 Lucky.

Speaker 5 I was made. I am made for being attacked.
Anyway, yes, she's coming down for Christmas. That should be, that'll be an interesting time.

Speaker 33 Coming down for the holidays. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 36 It's beginning to look a lot like lucky.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it is indeed. Anyway,

Speaker 5 we will see your prediction. I think it's really interesting.
I think I like these creative analysis of these things, and I look forward to when your prediction show is, and then we will do it.

Speaker 5 And thank you for going over your predictions. Those were very interesting.
Anyway, let us read us out and we will be back on Tuesday for more, for Tuesday for more. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 46 Oh, that's right. We're coming back, right?

Speaker 9 What is our holiday schedule?

Speaker 28 Do we need to give the viewers?

Speaker 5 Let me look.

Speaker 5 We are next Tuesday. I think there's some episodes coming up of year-end things that we've already taped.
And then we'll be back live again on the 6th.

Speaker 5 We'll tape on the 6th of January for the 7th.

Speaker 5 So we'll have a little time off. But we have taped some very lively and saucy shows for you for year-end.

Speaker 4 Saucy.

Speaker 6 You know what I'm doing on Wednesday?

Speaker 16 You know what I'm doing on Wednesday?

Speaker 18 What? I'm taking taking my boys to the chelsea everton match in uh london to see belgian striker romalu lukaku oh my god where are you going

Speaker 5 to london you're going to london i'm going to london yeah when over the weekend and then i'm going to thailand oh they didn't tell you oh wait should i give our producers a heads up okay bring in katie kouric so you're not flying in for my birthday it's your birthday well then i'm not going yeah you're not bringing in the jet scrambling the jets for carrotswisher that's right i'm going to see westside story by myself that is my gift to myself by the way.

Speaker 4 It got great reviews.

Speaker 9 Westside Story.

Speaker 5 Steven Spielberg did it.

Speaker 5 It's been written, Kushner, who did Angels of America.

Speaker 5 And I am so looking forward to it. I'm going by myself.
My son is going to cook me dinner. Amanda's going to make dessert, my favorite dinner, which is he makes fresh clam sauce and fresh pasta.

Speaker 5 And then I'm going to the movies by myself to see my favorite musical of all time. And it got stellar reviews.
Stellar reviews.

Speaker 32 That's really great.

Speaker 5 You're going to London. I'm going to a Westside Story.
In any case, I will be doing the dinners from now on, Mark Benny off. I apologize.
I'm so sorry, but

Speaker 5 it is what it is, as they say. It is what it is.

Speaker 32 Who produced today's show, you may ask?

Speaker 30 Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin.

Speaker 24 Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Neil Silverio.

Speaker 58 Ernie Entertod engineered this episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.
Or if you're an Android user, check us out on Spotify or frankly, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 58 Thanks for listening to Pivot from Box Media.

Speaker 24 We'll be back next Tuesday for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Speaker 26 Romalu Lukaku.

Speaker 62 This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness. We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Speaker 62 collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers. But what does it actually mean to be well? Why do we want that so badly?

Speaker 62 And is all this money really making us healthier and happier? That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.