DOJ's Google Breakup Plan, Nvidia's Earnings, and Comcast's Cable Spin-off

Transcript

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Speaker 14 I need to get home and get my colonic and take my edible, watch Murder She Wrote, and go to sleep.

Speaker 16 I love that scene. That's a beautiful scene to think about.

Speaker 16 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 14 And I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 16 Where are you? Where are are you, Scott?

Speaker 14 I am at my favorite second home. I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 And I was showing, before you showed up, so a few minutes late, I might have.

Speaker 16 Thank you. I know.
I know.

Speaker 14 I was showing Taylor, our 14-year-old producer,

Speaker 14 something

Speaker 14 called, See This Thing?

Speaker 16 We used to print news on dead trees in the old news. You read it.

Speaker 14 I just want to read everything on the front page from what is arguably the champion or the reflection or the ultimate reflection of Western values. The lead story.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 Wildfire risk only growing for Northeast. The next one, debating role of trans rights and Harris's loss.
Then we go on to Republicans Eye Medicaid slashes and work rules.

Speaker 14 Oh, better yet, grieving Israeli parents weigh freezing dead soldier sperm. And finally, just to lighten things up, wicked fans beg seatmates.
Shush, please. So we're freezing dead sperm.

Speaker 14 We're cutting Medicaid and we can't even enjoy wicked. No wonder.

Speaker 14 You asked me why I eat Xanax like they're fucking Skittles. Look at this.

Speaker 14 How am I supposed to respond after reading this every morning? This is the world, literally?

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's called the news. What do you want? A good newspaper? What do you have? A plane landed in Chicago today and everybody got their suitcases.

Speaker 14 The fish tacos at the pool are awesome. F1 is this weekend somewhere in the world.
It's beautiful out.

Speaker 16 Yeah. I'm in the equinox right now here in New York, and I have to say, I don't dislike it.
The Equinox Hotel? Yeah, Hudson.

Speaker 14 That means

Speaker 14 you're top-shelf CNN guests. That's correct.
I found out that you get put up at like the fucking Weston or some Joey.

Speaker 16 No, no, the Sheraton.

Speaker 14 Yeah, but if you're top shelf, you get to stay at the Equinox. That's correct.
They gave you a lot of stuff. I'm sure the egos at CNN don't even register little things like this.

Speaker 16 Well, no, because I am doing something with CNN. I'm doing several things here.
One secret project and the other. I'm going to be on the news show with Roy Wood Jr.
and Amber Ruff and that.

Speaker 14 Don't know any of them. Don't know any of them.

Speaker 16 They're comics.

Speaker 14 I just know they're about to get an 80% pay cut. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 16 This show is doing okay.

Speaker 16 They put me here and I mentioned it to a CNN person and they're like, the Equinox?

Speaker 16 They like knew. They knew.
It was so funny. They're like, oh, you got to the Equinox.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Most people, I don't know what the one is like in Hudson Yards, but generally speaking, the most beautiful gay men in the world hang out at Equinox.

Speaker 16 It's beautiful. I'm very loving it.
And I slept the whole night.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting.
I like that you like going to F1 and everything else. You're going to have a good time.

Speaker 14 You'll have a great time. Well, I like that you like it because I'm going to continue to do it.

Speaker 16 I'm going to Miami on Saturday, my Jammy. I'm going to Mijami to do the

Speaker 16 Miami Book Fair. You're the one that got somehow got it.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 14 I was going to go, but I don't like that smart stuff.

Speaker 16 I know, I know, I know. But I'm selling some books.
I'm selling some books. I'm going to Mijami for a minute.

Speaker 16 Where are you staying?

Speaker 16 I'm leaving. I'm going down and coming back the same night because Amanda's going to divorce me if I travel anymore.

Speaker 14 that's cool yeah so i'm coming back i'm coming back number three how old will number three be and how new will the subaru be that's what i want to know

Speaker 16 i do not have a subaru anymore i had one i loved my subaru yeah yeah it's you have like a nissan which is like a mini sum no i have a kia try to keep it straight i have a kia hybrid and i have a chevy bolt There's so nothing hybrid about you.

Speaker 14 Hybrid is sort of in the middle, a little of this, a little of that. That just isn't you.
You really shouldn't own a hybrid.

Speaker 16 And yet I do.

Speaker 16 What cars are you going to see at F1?

Speaker 14 Really fast ones.

Speaker 16 You really love this F1 thing almost more than the soccer stuff.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's not about the race. I only go for an hour.
It's about being in Vegas with friends, and it's fabulous, and it's fun. We go to the race just, you know, just an excuse.

Speaker 14 But the thing that's unique about, I'm actually in my newsletter, No Mercy No Mouse, I'm writing about F1.

Speaker 14 They take over a city, and it's an interesting thing. It's typically a franchise model where they license F1 to a city.

Speaker 14 The city pays a lot of money to bring in tourism, and then the teams pay a licensing money. It's a great business model.
Right.

Speaker 14 And for the first time, they decided to go vertical and own a race, and they decided to pick Vegas. And you think Vegas F1, it would be just an enormous win.

Speaker 14 I can see why they decided to own it themselves.

Speaker 16 So it's like McDonald's. They like have franchises in the cities.
They have to be or Ted's or what?

Speaker 14 No, what it's like is the majority of the hotel companies are no longer hotel owners. They have a flag, a reservation system, standards, branding.

Speaker 14 That way, a a guy like Michael Dell, who wants to have

Speaker 14 a four seasons hotel in Hawaii, underwrites all the capital costs. And then they just take 8% to 12% and they have standards.

Speaker 14 So the hotel flags now got out of the business of taking capital risk because one bad hotel can sink everything. Sure.

Speaker 14 And they're just in the business of the flag and the reservations and the standards and the HR and the marketing. And F1 was effectively the same way.

Speaker 14 They made the money no matter what, whether the thing was successful in a city. And last year was the first F1 in Vegas.
And a couple of things happened. One, they vastly overestimated demand.

Speaker 14 The F1 customer in the U.S. is not the same kind of fabulous, wealthy F1 customer in Europe and all over the world.

Speaker 14 And they overestimated, they were able to sell about 40% of the tickets they initially planned. So you had entire grandstands empty because supposedly they just priced it too high.

Speaker 14 And they just underestimated how difficult it is to fill Las Vegas. Las Vegas has just so many hotel rooms.

Speaker 14 And if you don't aren't coming for F1, you're not going to come that weekend because one of the cool things about the race is

Speaker 14 the race is done at night and it's on the streets, yeah. It's on the strip.
And so there's great parties and it's fun to watch the race.

Speaker 14 But in terms of an actual economic model, it's been a bit of a disaster.

Speaker 16 So, therefore.

Speaker 14 I just thought I'd provide a little insight. I understand,

Speaker 16 but it's growing, correct? I can't tell. I don't know.
I wouldn't ever go to an F1 thing.

Speaker 14 F1 has hit, I don't want to say it's hit a wall, but it had a huge surge because of the, what's it called, Drive to Survive Netflix show.

Speaker 16 Yeah, the shows, yeah.

Speaker 14 But there's a lot of competition, and it's sort of, it's hit a bit of a speed bump this year.

Speaker 14 It's not growing the way it used to, and it's the one driver, it's kind of always like a race for a second now because the one driver wins every time.

Speaker 14 It's like when Pete Sampras was dominating tennis, and we tried to pretend it wasn't really fucking boring and that he wasn't boring. Yeah.

Speaker 14 So, but yeah,

Speaker 14 I'm excited. It's Vegas.
It'll be a ton of fun. I have friends coming together.
It's going to parties with cars.

Speaker 16 Oh, 100%. Okay.
100%.

Speaker 14 They start too late, though. That's the problem.
Yeah. Yeah.
They start too late.

Speaker 14 i need to get home and get my colonic and take my edible watch murder she wrote and go to sleep i love that scene that's a beautiful scene to think about um we're gonna move to something else that's a good segue outstanding segue that's hey i just i have to think about it that's why that's why they put you up at the equinox

Speaker 16 segues like that you saucy little news angler i'll go down to the soul cycle and take a spin you know the same owner owns all those things the guy uh yeah that developer who developed hudson yards hudson yards by the way is like lively it was lively last night.

Speaker 16 It was doing well. It seemed like everyone thought it was sort of a wasteland, but I got to say, I don't know.

Speaker 14 It's hard to get to. Very lively over here.

Speaker 16 Lots of restaurants and everything. I kind of like it.

Speaker 14 That place freaks me out. It is so modern.
It feels like one of those places where if a supercomputer gets something wrong and you end up in the wrong elevator, you get off and

Speaker 14 you wake up without your liver.

Speaker 16 Yes, exactly. And

Speaker 14 it gets sold to some wealthy Indian businessman. And they're like, but what's going on?

Speaker 16 It feels like a mall in Hong Kong or Dubai. That's what it feels like.
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 14 My favorite. The two anchor tenants over there when I opened were Neiman Marcus and Brooks Brothers, which both went chapter 11 within a year.

Speaker 16 But they seem to have.

Speaker 14 I forgot if it works over there.

Speaker 16 I can't either, but I have to say there's a lot more people

Speaker 16 because I think a lot more people are coming back to work, and there's a lot of law firms here.

Speaker 16 It felt very lively when I got here. Felt very lively when I went out last night.

Speaker 14 CNN's there. KKR is there.
Tapestry, the owners of Coach and Sudan.

Speaker 16 There's quite a lot of people going on here.

Speaker 14 Companies over there. And they have Milos, that kind of cool Greek, fabulous restaurant.
Yes, I like Milos.

Speaker 16 You know who I I went to that with many years ago? Ariana Huffington.

Speaker 16 Are you in love?

Speaker 16 Yes, when you go to Milos with Ariana, it's really fun because they Greek out on you.

Speaker 14 Joanna Coles had a party, invited me over, and they introduced me to Ariana.

Speaker 16 She's like, Scott, are you in love? And I'm like, what?

Speaker 14 What? She immediately went there.

Speaker 16 Are you in love?

Speaker 14 Oh, no. I'm like, come on.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 That would be an awkward question for Scott Calloway. Yeah.
That's very, it's a little too warm. It's a little too.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's a little too. I'm sorry.
Who are you, Greek lady?

Speaker 14 Greek lady with a website.

Speaker 16 Hey, I have a new person to join your posse. I have a new famous guy to join.

Speaker 14 I mean, I'm always looking for new friends.

Speaker 14 First off, do they drink?

Speaker 14 I think so. Never mind.
It's like when I'm looking,

Speaker 14 when I'm talking, when I'm hitting on a girl at a bar, one question. What's your relationship like with your father? Anything remotely positive? Move along.

Speaker 16 Well, I went to dinner with you. Do they drink?

Speaker 16 Yes, I think so. Yes, I believe so.

Speaker 14 Are they better looking than me?

Speaker 16 Much, much, both of of them.

Speaker 14 Are they famous? Yes, yes. Check, check, check.

Speaker 16 Check, check, check.

Speaker 14 Come back one. Wheels up 440 on Friday.

Speaker 16 He's going to kill me for mentioning it, but I went to dinner last night with Tim Daly and Te Leone, who I love from

Speaker 16 I know. And he want he, they're both Pivot fans and

Speaker 16 wonderful. They're so lovely as people.
And he was like, Can I meet Scott? When we were leaving the restaurant.

Speaker 14 I was going to say they're using you to get to me.

Speaker 16 I get to meet you. That's correct.
Well, I don't know. I doubt that.
But he's like, can I meet Scott sometime? And so I volunteered your apartment for a dinner party at some point.

Speaker 16 So just a hundred years.

Speaker 14 You mean what you do every week when I'm out there?

Speaker 16 Correct. That's correct.
But

Speaker 16 I think he wants to be part of your posse. I get the sense.
I get the sense.

Speaker 16 He's a great guy. Tim is

Speaker 16 awesome. We're rolling.
Okay. Tim, you're in.
And Tay is amazing. They're just lovely people.
And I feel like

Speaker 16 a good, yes.

Speaker 16 You're going to be very intimidated.

Speaker 14 Very good looking, very talented.

Speaker 16 Again, it's a low bar when it comes. Oh, did I just say that out loud? I want you to have a posse of friends that you

Speaker 16 roam with. I need that.
You roam the urban landscape with. I like that.

Speaker 16 We've got a lot to get to today, including Comcast's spin-off plans and Trump's reality show administration gets some new cast members.

Speaker 16 First, NVIDIA's domination continues with another blockbuster earnings report.

Speaker 16 The company reported on Wednesday that revenue jumped 94% from a year ago, a profit increased by 106% from the last quarter.

Speaker 16 NVIDIA also projected revenue in the current quarter would rise by 70% from a year ago with sales of its new Blackwell chip.

Speaker 16 Despite all the good news, NVIDIA NVIDIA shares slipped after hours trading, signaling their results were not quite as spectacular as investors had hoped.

Speaker 16 This is still going, but people have a little bit of

Speaker 16 and then there's the tariff issue with Trump, which is going to, I think, hang over everything because the stock market is off, is starting to really see worries about that.

Speaker 16 The continued focus of Trump on picking a tariff-loving Treasury Secretary or head of commerce like he just picked.

Speaker 16 Thoughts on NVIDIA?

Speaker 16 Well, I mean,

Speaker 14 similar to a media that says people are freezing dead soldier sperm and there's wildfires,

Speaker 14 this is not a glass half empty kind of story. It's actually the stock is basically flat today.
It was down a little bit. But here you have a company.
I mean,

Speaker 14 its profit doubled in the last quarter, quarter on quarter. Its stock is up.
I mean, it's just, it's insane how much the stock is up over the last several years.

Speaker 14 It now accounts for one-fifth of the SP 500 gains. That's more than the rest of the Magnificent 7 combined.

Speaker 14 I mean, think about that. 20% of the gains have been driven by one company, and the stock over the last 24 months is up over nine-fold.

Speaker 14 I mean, the expectations now are that you blow away expectations, but this company, you know, and it says it's sold out of Blackwell for the next several quarters.

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 14 this thing is nothing short of remarkable. And NVIDIA itself is worth more than the entire German,

Speaker 14 French, UK stock markets.

Speaker 16 And you assume it will keep up.

Speaker 14 So that's a request for stock advice. And what I would tell anyone is the following.
And one of the most frequent emails I get is asking me, is it too late to buy NVIDIA?

Speaker 14 And what I say is, I don't know. I can see it doubling.
I can see it getting cut by 50, 60, 70%.

Speaker 14 So what you do is you don't try and buy the needle in the haystack. You buy the whole haystack.
Go buy everything. Go buy an index fund.

Speaker 14 But this company's, I mean, the difference here versus people often equate it to Cisco in 1999 is that the company's earnings and revenues are exploding.

Speaker 14 And so while its PE has gone up, its valuation has gone up relative to its earnings, it hasn't gone up nearly as much as, say, Cisco did. Cisco's stock price tripled, but its earnings didn't triple.

Speaker 14 Whereas this company's like quintupled and its its earnings have only tripled, but its earnings have tripled. So

Speaker 14 this, I believe, and unfortunately, I think it warrants scrutiny because effectively what you have is

Speaker 14 just as we had the Wintel duopoly, you definitely have the formation of a new duopoly, OpNVIDIA. About 88%

Speaker 14 of all traffic to AI goes through OpenAI and is queried on a processor that has been sold into them by NVIDIA. So I don't even think Microsoft or Intel had this dominance.

Speaker 16 Yeah, for now. For now.
For now. I think that's what people are worried about.
And that's probably what they're.

Speaker 16 I think don't know is a really disturbing thing for a lot of people. I think you are sort of hitting the nail on the head on that.

Speaker 16 Speaking of things, people we do know about, the DOJ is asking a judge in the Google search monopoly case to force the company to sell its Chrome browser as part of the remedy.

Speaker 16 Chrome has about 67% of the global market and could go for as much as 20 billion, according to some estimates.

Speaker 16 The government also wants to stop Google from getting into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the default search engine on phones and browsers.

Speaker 16 The DOJ stopped short of requesting a full divestiture of Android. Google called the DOJ proposal extreme and is set to file its own suggestions by December 20th.

Speaker 16 Remedy hearings will be held in April and the judge is expected to rule over the summer. I know

Speaker 16 all these agencies are sort of waiting for what happens with Trump, although you just never know because he's had some anti-Google

Speaker 16 statements and everything else. And there'll be a new head of antitrust at the the Justice Department.
It's not clear who that's going to be.

Speaker 16 What do you think of this remedy? It seems like an unusual thing. Tech writer John Gruber noted Chrome and Android are not standalone businesses.
They're appendages to Google.

Speaker 16 It's like saying, I have to sell my left foot. It's very valuable to me, but of no value to anyone else.

Speaker 16 And if a buyer of Chrome is a company like OpenAI or Microsoft, could they be accused of creating, as you just, you know, another monopoly with this purchase?

Speaker 14 So I like this. The potential remedies were a fine.
You can't come up with fines big enough.

Speaker 14 Some sort of administrator from the government bureaucrat that had to, they got to go into any meeting and tell them why they shouldn't do something, which they basically can ignore.

Speaker 14 Stick the fat, ugly, weird kid in the corner. And then two, and then finally, a breakup.
So I was happy to see this. Now, whether it holds or not, but I'm not sure I agree with the writer because

Speaker 14 Chrome, you know, has about two-thirds global share, I think, of the browser market. That's so much attention.

Speaker 14 That's so much attention that a lot of different people could monetize that. So it would have no shortage of bidders.

Speaker 14 It would

Speaker 14 immediately stop this default,

Speaker 14 you know, steering everyone towards their search engine. It'd be more of a competition.
So I like this.

Speaker 14 I think I generally find that the FTC and the DOJ, and this is because they bring in a lot of my colleagues from business schools, are pretty smart about trying to come up with solutions that grow the total market.

Speaker 14 So I like this.

Speaker 16 I hope it goes through. I don't know if it'll hold.

Speaker 16 You know,

Speaker 16 there's so much uncertainty because, as I said, Cantor will be leaving, John Cantor, and Lina Kahn's tenure may be over or maybe not. It's very unclear.

Speaker 16 You might get someone like Brandon Carr who's making a grab for power at the FCC, which it didn't have, but may be trying to do so.

Speaker 16 There's all kinds of uncertainty on who's going to be able to run this and then who is going to be the antitrust head. And it is all in the hands of a single judge,

Speaker 16 which then can be appealed, et cetera. And the government can stop trying, right? The government can go a different direction depending.

Speaker 16 You know, it'll be interesting because Sundar Pichai, the head of Google, met

Speaker 16 Alphabet, was on the phone with Trump. And of course, guess who was on the phone with him? There's the whole Elon element.
Elon was on a phone call with the CEO of Alphabet, with Trump.

Speaker 16 I mean, there's all these different competing power centers happening here. So

Speaker 16 I agree with you. I think something should be cleaved off of these companies.
That's to me the only

Speaker 14 key question is, where was Omar Rosa?

Speaker 16 Her back.

Speaker 14 She actually seems quite credible now.

Speaker 16 No, she does. I can't believe it, but she is.
You're right.

Speaker 16 I mean, it'll be interesting to see what the remedy is, but I think the only remedy is the start to breaking up of parts of their businesses and then creating whole new vibrant businesses from them, right?

Speaker 16 100%. It just seems healthier in so many ways.
The fine's not going to work. Threatening prison's not going to work.

Speaker 16 You know, it's just, they should just cut them up and create new businesses and see what could be made. I mean, having 67% of the global market, and it does, it does help their other businesses.

Speaker 16 I can't tell you how many times I open Chrome and it says, don't you want to make this your default browser? Right.

Speaker 16 I unsign out from Google because it's constantly trying to get me sucked into their system for no good reason. So it seems that I would rather it be owned by more people.

Speaker 14 That's my feeling. But search is arguably

Speaker 14 I bet on a gross dollar volume basis, it's search may be the biggest business in the world. I think it's $150.

Speaker 14 I think it's like a quarter of a trillion-dollar business, but I bet it's got gross margins of 80 or 90 points. And that makes even the iPhone look like a distant, not a great business.

Speaker 14 And essentially, all of this accretes to one player.

Speaker 14 And if you didn't have this incredible data advantage of looking at what everyone is doing on the Internet two-thirds of the time, and then be able to steer them towards your search engine and then extract all sorts of payments to be the default,

Speaker 14 you would just have a lot more, all of a sudden the biggest market in the world wouldn't be a monopoly, which would ultimately lower rents on everyone that has to pay the toll rent and search would be better as a product

Speaker 14 100 and they'd be forced to innovate they might who knows someone might pop up and say

Speaker 14 this is search that is uh not gonna not gonna give this information more reach this is we're not gonna let computers create content i had eric schmidt on and he said something i thought was really insightful this was the former just for people who don't know the former google head former CEO alphabet yeah yeah who I think he never was Alphabet, but Google, but go ahead.

Speaker 16 Oh, you're right.

Speaker 14 Excuse me.

Speaker 14 But he said something really interesting. He said, humans should have absolutely very strong First Amendment free speech rights.
But he said, computers should not.

Speaker 14 And that really struck me as insightful because I think a lot of the misinformation, a lot of the incendiary content that polarizes us is not generated by a human.

Speaker 14 And I thought that was really an interesting place to start around all of this.

Speaker 14 But back to breakups and antitrust, ask any economist or ask any lawyer trying to fight against this, what breakup in U.S. history did not end up being a good idea?

Speaker 14 Every time we have broken up companies, you end up with more powerful, more valuable companies. You end up with more choice.
You end up with lower rents. You end up with more innovation.

Speaker 14 The only person that loses is the person who has the controlling shareholders or the super voting majority shares who wants to sit on the iron throne of not just Westeros, but all seven realms.

Speaker 14 But everybody else, every other stakeholder, the community, the tax base,

Speaker 14 employees, they then have more companies vying to rent their labor.

Speaker 16 It's always better. It's always better.
Look at what's happening even over in social media. Blue sky, that's that choice.
That's, you know, whether you like threads or not, that's that choice.

Speaker 16 It feels like

Speaker 16 texting me blue.

Speaker 14 People kept texting me blue sky stuff.

Speaker 16 Yeah, everyone's moving over there, but it's different. They have a different, like, this is how our place is going to be.
It's not going to be mean.

Speaker 16 And it's not like, that's the whole point of different things

Speaker 16 is you get to choose what you want. And that's the true free speech.

Speaker 16 That's my feeling is you get to, you know, everyone's like, you have to be, you know, Elon and his gang are pushing like, you have to be on Twitter. Like, no, we don't.

Speaker 16 I can do whatever I fucking want. And if I want to be in a bubble, great.
If I don't, great. Like the ability to make and choose your own adventure to me is the, the, oh, is freedom.

Speaker 16 That's my feeling. Anyway, um, speaking of shifts going on, Comcast is spinning off its cable networks.
We've discussed this before, including MSNBC and CNBC into a separate company.

Speaker 16 Comcast said the new company, dubbed Spin Co., how original, for now will be better positioned to achieve long-term growth and create value for stakeholders.

Speaker 16 The transaction will be structured as a tax-free spin to shareholders and will take a year to complete.

Speaker 16 Mark Lazarus, I know him a little bit, he's very smart, the current chairman of NBC Universal's media group, will be Spin's Co.'s CEO.

Speaker 16 The NBC broadcast network, NBC News, Sports, Bravo Peacock, and the Universal Theme Parks remain part of Comcast.

Speaker 16 That That means the entertainment stuff,

Speaker 16 all the entertainment, and the main news. The NBC News staying there is interesting because I don't understand that one.

Speaker 14 That's a lot of fun.

Speaker 16 I don't, because they share MSNBC and NBC, they share a lot of people. I get all the others and Peacock and everything else.

Speaker 16 And then you may have to rename MSNBC. By the way, for people that don't know, it's Microsoft NBC when they did people don't, no one remembers that.
And

Speaker 16 so, so, anyway,

Speaker 16 thoughts, you would call this good bank bad bank, but what do you imagine is going to happen here? And

Speaker 16 what's the plus for the bad bank, which is the cable assets?

Speaker 14 So we've been predicting this for a long time. And that is when you have businesses that have a different business model or different life stages of maturity.

Speaker 14 So you could argue that still that Peacock, for example, and the theme parks,

Speaker 14 are still growing businesses and they get a certain valuation because they're seen as more strategic and they're growing and they're about the future. USA Network,

Speaker 14 CNBC, MSNBC are not the future, they're the past. And that is they're flat to declining and mostly declining.

Speaker 14 And so these companies get an entirely different multiple, a much lower multiple. They're still very profitable.
They're good businesses, but they're shrinking.

Speaker 14 So they might get a multiple on EBITDA of five to seven, whereas

Speaker 14 the Bravo or the Peacock or the

Speaker 14 the theme parks get a much higher multiple because there's a lot more potential for growth there.

Speaker 14 The problem is when you shove companies and businesses of different points in the life cycle together, investors go, generally speaking, the market goes, I'm confused. I don't like this.

Speaker 14 So I'm going to find the shittiest business in your portfolio, CMV,

Speaker 14 CMBC, and I'm going to assign the same multiple to the entire business.

Speaker 14 So what you do, and this makes sense, is you go good bank, bad bank. Simon Properties did this.
Simon Properties has a ton of malls.

Speaker 14 The best malls probably in America are probably Simon, but they also have a lot of B-class malls that are dying.

Speaker 14 So they took all the shit that was still profitable and stuck it into a different company, a Spinco.

Speaker 14 And that way you get to decide if you want the growth high-end stuff or if you want Spinco

Speaker 14 is will trade at a much lower valuation, but it'll still attract investors. And in addition, the cultural shift is dramatic because what you have with the Spinco is the following.

Speaker 14 They're going to go to ABC or Disney and say, hey, ABC or hey, ESPN or hey, even maybe CNN.

Speaker 14 You're like us, you're these shitty assets, but there's a good business model in distressed assets, and that is the following.

Speaker 14 We take on ABC, we take on CNN, and your business is declining 10 to 12% a year. But through consolidation, we're going to cut costs 14% a year because we only need one CFO.

Speaker 14 And we're going to clear out all the salespeople except for the top 10%. We're going to clear out all the back office and we're going to consolidate and cut costs.

Speaker 14 And as long as we recognize that this is no longer a teenager, but an aging senior, and we can cut costs faster than the revenues decline, you make more money. And these are good businesses.

Speaker 14 They're just in different points of the life cycle. And the market likes that.
The market wants companies.

Speaker 16 You also have to come up with good things too. You could, separate in a way, you could figure new things out for your business, presumably.
They don't just have to be AOL.

Speaker 16 You're describing AOL dial-up here, right? It's still a good business.

Speaker 14 I've said this before.

Speaker 14 The second best best investment I ever made was in a yellow pages company.

Speaker 14 And the guy, a guy named Joe Walsh, really outstanding operator. And it was Paulson in there.
And my buddy Jason Mudrick from Mudrick Capital put me on the board.

Speaker 14 And basically, the strategy was very simple. Businesses, we all know yellow pages are going out of business, except these businesses typically go out of business more slowly than you think.

Speaker 14 And so we projected the company was going to decline.

Speaker 14 There are still a ton of rural households that want that big, big, fat fucking book on their porch every year to call a lawyer or someone to put up their fence or something like that.

Speaker 14 There's still a lot of people. You referenced a decent analogy AOL dial-up.
And there are a lot of different yellow pages companies.

Speaker 14 So what you do, quite frankly, is you go buy them at two to three times profits because everybody knows it's a declining business. And then you consolidate the back end

Speaker 14 and you print money.

Speaker 14 And every year our EBITDA went up because we went to the biggest yellow pages company in the Southeast and said, hey, we know it sucks, but we can make this easier for everybody and consolidate the back end and save a lot of money and increase profits.

Speaker 14 Bad bank.

Speaker 14 Of all the different asset classes, whether it's angel, which is the worst part of the asset class, venture, which is very difficult, small number of VCs and a small number of partners, partners at those small number of VCs get all the deal flow.

Speaker 14 IPOs, growth companies, mature companies, distressed.

Speaker 14 In my view, the best asset class is distressed because it's like the best small business in the world with a 90-plus percent success rate is senior.

Speaker 16 I'm going to give you another challenge, though. How could they grow?

Speaker 16 You just assume they're old and going to die someday and we're going to keep Grampy, who has the wallet, good

Speaker 16 or make him more efficient or feed him less or whatever. Could they grow? Could this bad bank become not a bad bank kind of thing?

Speaker 14 Well, okay, a couple of things. One, the way they grow, they will.

Speaker 14 The way they grow the top line is by going and finding the other cable orphans that are also fucking up the valuation for the larger enterprise.

Speaker 14 Disney Plus would trade at an enormous valuation, multiple on revenues. ABC does not.

Speaker 14 So at some point, Bob's going to give up and just throw his assets into this company who can pay stock for these other declining cable assets.

Speaker 14 Warner Discovery or Warner Brothers Discovery, excuse me, they'll do the same thing. They'll put their shitty cable assets into this new code.

Speaker 14 So they'll grow the top line, but they will dramatically cut costs.

Speaker 14 And what's dangerous in the gestalt in these companies, it kind of fucks them up, is they always bring in someone with fresh legs who has visions of growth and rejuvenation.

Speaker 14 And the reality is what they should do is do a good job operating, present a good product.

Speaker 14 But quite frankly, their job is to cut costs and manage the company efficiently through acquisition and consolidation and cutting costs on the back end.

Speaker 14 And what they usually do, private equity will usually bring in a player that knows how to do that. And that's okay.
They make money.

Speaker 14 But to believe that they can pump this thing up with Botox and they start looking freakish again, believing that, oh, no, CNN is going to grow again.

Speaker 14 Now, CNN might, they might be able to staunch or cauterize the bleeding. They might be able to come up with some sort of interesting.

Speaker 14 But be clear, these companies are not going to be growth companies again, or I find it unlikely. And that's not the right strategy for shareholder growth.

Speaker 14 There's a ton of little assets that need a home and need one back end.

Speaker 16 Right. Right.
Right. Interesting.
And so they could all be one. They could all be one bunch of cable assets together.

Speaker 16 Would there be any pushback from the government if, say, you combined, because there's all the talk of what Paramount's going to throw in here, what Warner's going to throw in here, that it could be a problem if you decide to merge.

Speaker 16 There's all these talks, you're going to merge this with Warner Brothers, or David Zazov's going to do this, or Paramount's going to do this. Can they all be in one?

Speaker 16 Can all the networks be in one company, for example?

Speaker 14 So I would be shocked if it didn't fall under DOJ review. But here's the data the lawyers trying to get through the acquisitions would argue.

Speaker 14 And that is in 2017, 73% of three in four households had cable television. Okay, just to scan seven years later, it's down to 42%.

Speaker 14 They could rightfully get in front and say, this isn't about dominance. This is about survival.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 14 And everyone's watching, none of these assets get nearly the viewership of Netflix or YouTube or

Speaker 14 name your digital growth property or Instagram. And you want to block us? Folks, we're just trying to survive.
Now,

Speaker 14 you could argue some sort of a security risk because it's so important what people see or news, but I don't even think they'll be able to.

Speaker 16 I don't think the government would be able to make that risk.

Speaker 14 And also with the Trump administration, the general view is that they're going to let these guys start acquiring and cutting costs. And you want to talk about a department of government efficiency?

Speaker 14 You know, let the guys who are getting the shit kicked out of them by TikTok and Meta and Alphabet consolidate and bulk up.

Speaker 14 These guys, CNN, Yellow Pages, all of these companies are great businesses. They just need to be smaller

Speaker 14 with lower costs.

Speaker 16 New York Times should buy the Washington Post, for example.

Speaker 14 I don't think they want to buy another newspaper.

Speaker 14 Based on what you've told me, that culture is, what's the term, a cluster fuck? Yeah. I don't think the New York Times should get near it.

Speaker 16 I'm just trying to think of different things you could put together that you could roll up.

Speaker 14 Well, Gannett, for example, Gannett rolled up every local newspaper.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 but there's a lot of instances where you can make really good money doing this.

Speaker 16 And sometimes it doesn't work, and then it's just bad bank all the way down, essentially. But yeah, you're right.
It's efficiencies. Roll-ups are very interesting things.

Speaker 16 So I find I'm studying them lately. Anyway, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back, we'll talk about the latest TV personality added to the Trump administration and more.

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Speaker 16 Scott, we're back with more news. Well, Trump has named some more people, including someone you know well, Dr.
Oz, to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Speaker 16 Oz is a former heart surgeon, but has no experience running a government bureaucracy and has repeatedly drawn criticism from some medical professionals.

Speaker 16 That said, he looks good compared to some of the choices. As a reminder, Oz lost to John Fetterman in the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race.

Speaker 16 In a statement, Trump said Oz would cut waste and fraud within our country's most expensive government agency. There is a lot of waste and fraud in those areas for sure.

Speaker 16 If confirmed by the Senate, R.F.K. Jr., both were confirmed, would be Oz's boss, which seems should be flipped, honestly, if I had to pick.

Speaker 16 And other Trump picks, former professional wrestling executive Linda McMahon has been chosen to serve as the Secretary of Education.

Speaker 16 McMahon is a longtime Trump ally and ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term. In fact, I think I interviewed her when she was that.

Speaker 16 That seemed more appropriate for her as a job. Trump has said he wants to dismantle the Department of Education, which would require congressional approval.

Speaker 16 So I'm really not clear what's going on there. And last but not least, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Luttnick is Trump's pick for commerce secretary.

Speaker 16 He wanted to be Treasury Secretary and he instead got commerce.

Speaker 16 Trump said Luttnick, who is the co-chair of his transition team, will lead on tariffs and trade. That seems more appropriate, I guess, for him.
But

Speaker 16 he engendered a lot of dislike in that, you know, in that climb up the greasy pole of Trump world.

Speaker 16 People thought he was a little too thirsty for that job.

Speaker 16 What do you think about that?

Speaker 14 So I think Linda, Dr. Oz, and Howard Luttnick are fucking Henry Kissinger compared to Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 16 I'm Matt.

Speaker 14 I think all three of these people,

Speaker 14 like the winner gets to pick their friends or gets to pick who they want.

Speaker 14 Sometimes people surprise you.

Speaker 14 I think all three of these folks, you could argue

Speaker 14 are incredible, reasonable picks.

Speaker 14 And then you have an apologist. for Assad who went over there and didn't disclose it.
And by the way, is everyone's favorite pick for this job in Russia?

Speaker 14 Can you imagine how demoralized you would be if you're an asset who has spent your life risking your life

Speaker 14 to protect us against enemies? And then you have someone show up who seems to have more empathy for the enemy than for the risks and the commitment you've made to your own country.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 So,

Speaker 14 you know, even I like I have a really, a lot of us have a real issue around RFK in terms of, in terms of vaccines, but he's also very good on some issues what issues is gabbard good on like literally what issue do you think they get right that uh being apologist for a guy who killed 400 000 of his own citizens yeah being an apologist for putin

Speaker 16 anyway i i i'm i am totally down with these three picks well done they got my vote i thought the most interesting thing was nikki haley who's now decided again to get back to her what I think is her real personality, honestly.

Speaker 16 She went after Gabbard

Speaker 16 saying she opposed ending the Iran nuclear deers. She opposed sanctions on Iran.
She opposed designating the Iran military as terrorists who say death to America every single day.

Speaker 16 She said that Donald Trump turned the U.S.

Speaker 16 into a Saudi Arabia prostitute. This is going to be a future head of national intelligence.
She added that it was disgusting that Gabbard went for a photo op with Bashar al-Assad.

Speaker 16 Now, here is what she said about Kennedy, which I would agree with. She says he's not a health guy, despite having years of stuff.
You should face hard question.

Speaker 16 He's a liberal Democrat, environmental attorney lawyer who's now overseeing 25% of our federal budget and has no background in healthcare.

Speaker 16 Now, some of you, and this is you, Scott, may think RFK is cool with some of the some of the things you may like that he questions what's in our food and what's in our vaccines, but we don't know when he's given reins to the agency what decisions he's going to make behind the scenes.

Speaker 16 I think she's right. If you like a couple of, like we can all agree we need healthier food, that doesn't mean his crazy conspiracy theories

Speaker 16 should qualify. You should get someone who says that and doesn't have crazy crazy conspiracy theories on earth.
I've heard a bunch of other things. I don't have a problem with that.

Speaker 16 Like, who doesn't, who can like, I'm for oxygen, like, okay, like that kind of thing. So it's interesting.
There's a lot of inter-fighting going on in the right in many ways.

Speaker 16 Carl Wove wrote quite a piece about saying this is a fucking clown show. He had all this opportunity.

Speaker 16 The first week was all these very qualified and reasonable enough people, depending on whether you liked Republicans or not, right?

Speaker 16 And he said, and then it degenerated into a clown show and that Trump is fittering away all his political advantage by doing it and that he's actually a lame duck president, as you have noted,

Speaker 16 and that he will,

Speaker 16 that he's, when you're in your second term,

Speaker 16 you don't have as much political power. So he doesn't know why he's using up this political capital that he has built up.

Speaker 16 And then he also noted, again, that the that the win wasn't so big that it gives him the right to behave like this. So anyway, it's interesting.
Yeah. Infighting.
Infighting.

Speaker 16 I like when they fight with each other over there. It leaves us not to fight with them.
Anyway, we'll see what happens.

Speaker 14 Maybe they should freeze their semen or go to the wicked show. Jesus Christ, no wonder everyone's so depressed.

Speaker 16 You seem to be upset by reading a paper newspaper. A paper newspaper has triggered you.
By the way, go to the wicked show. It's great.
I took Clara this week. She loved it.
Oh, you did? Yeah.

Speaker 16 She loved it. I saw it the second time.
It's wonderful. It's very long.
Everybody, let me be clear. It's a super long movie, but it's as wonderful the second time as the first time.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I won't see it. Won't see it.

Speaker 16 I know you won't, but you should. You should.
It's better than Barbie. How about that?

Speaker 14 Better than Barbie. A lot I don't do that I should care about.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's a long time. You know what? I think you would tear up at the end.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 16 When she wants to defy gravity, you're like, I want to defy gravity. Scott Galloway wants to defy gravity.

Speaker 16 Anyway, one quick thing, podcast alert, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who never met a microphone they didn't want to chatter into, are starting a podcast or Dogecast to document their work with the Department of Government Efficient.

Speaker 16 It'd probably be full of like, it's like Beavis and Butthead, as far as I can tell.

Speaker 16 The pair detailed their plans to cut spending in the Wall Street Journal op-ed, which will be focused on three types of reform: regulatory cuts, administration reductions, and cost savings.

Speaker 16 They also plan to recommend a return to office and early retirement policies, and will take aim at funding of things like public media and Planned Parenthood.

Speaker 16 Should we have them to promote the new show?

Speaker 14 Have them on?

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Yeah.
That's what we need to do. Yeah.

Speaker 14 I got to be honest with you, Karen. There's a part of me that likes this.
What?

Speaker 16 The return to work or what? No, no, just

Speaker 14 the whole try and shake things up. I don't think they're going to get anywhere.

Speaker 14 I mean, it's just hilarious to have a Department of Government Efficiency that has absolutely no power. Most of the cuts they want to make would require congressional approval.

Speaker 14 And the thing that kind of says it all is that there are two heads of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 14 But I do like the idea of a little bit of shock therapy every once in a while.

Speaker 14 I mean, the problem with the government is that they're not subject to market dynamics the same way the private sector is. So you can imagine there's a lot of fatty deposits to build up.
Sure.

Speaker 16 I get it. So, so are the companies they run had those things.
Fine. I get it.
Here's the thing: a lot more scrutiny on the business. I would agree.
I would agree.

Speaker 16 But the way they're doing it is cruel. And it's not in good faith.
It's not in good faith. And that's what it is.
They don't care. They want to just, they want to have a podcast.

Speaker 16 They want to make their stupid jokes. They want to say, look at me.
This is not, this is,

Speaker 16 they're offended, like, especially Ramaswamy. He's like, this whole thing has to go.
I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? Like, really?

Speaker 16 Like, do you, it's just, it's all head start and school lunches.

Speaker 16 It's all like, it's all hat and no fucking cattle. And it's on another, it's on a serious topic.
And the same thing with RFK. Yes, we need healthier foods, but what the fuck are you doing over here?

Speaker 16 Like, it's just, this is all, this is a look at me administration staffed by people who didn't get hugged enough as children.

Speaker 16 And that's my my issue with them. And they're not in good faith doing things that matter to people.
And they're not like, they just let's cut. And that's Elon's way.

Speaker 16 Let's fire everyone and sort out the rest. And I just don't think, I get the shock to the system, but this is not, you know, this is not a frat.
This is not a, I don't know. It has this feel.

Speaker 16 Oh, I think it is, Kara. It is.
You're right. It is a frat.
I think it is. It's a very

Speaker 14 dropping, dropping dead bears in the park, wrestling.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's a very rapey. It's a very rapey group of people.
You're right. It's like, you know, grabby, you know, brush the boob,

Speaker 16 make obnoxious things. Yes, it's the boob.
Brush the boob. There's levels of rapey.
Just so you know, my trainer was mad at you about your comments about Pete. I got several of that from

Speaker 16 Pete Hegsteth. That you were saying he was on a different scale than Matt Gates.

Speaker 16 You know, I'm just saying. I got a lot of pushback.

Speaker 14 Let me ask. So you're, well,

Speaker 16 this is a man. This is a manly man who's saying that.

Speaker 14 Next thing I know, you're going to be telling telling me I shouldn't refer to my assistant as Jiggles.

Speaker 16 Oh. Come on.
Come on. He was right.
Shall I read you the text I got? No, I wasn't. Yeah, that's what we need.

Speaker 14 You usually don't read them to me. You send them to me at night and say, Cheryl says you're being unfair.

Speaker 14 No,

Speaker 16 these were straight men that came to me. I'm just telling you, I would,

Speaker 16 yeah, yeah, I'm just saying. That's what I wrote.

Speaker 14 I'm dying to know, Kara,

Speaker 14 I like to dictate my thoughts around what your trainer and your DJ think.

Speaker 16 I'm just telling you, I'm He's a very smart guy. I'm just like why do you have to pull him down? He's just as smart as you can.
Pull him down.

Speaker 16 That's a thing.

Speaker 16 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He goes, I feel like Scott would compliment Dahmer on his fashion choices.
He treats everyone like they're completely genuine in their statements. I was, I was.

Speaker 16 Dahmer on his fashion choices. I just think it's funny.

Speaker 16 He says, the glorious middle we need to reach, kind or rapey.

Speaker 16 He's funny, kind of rapid. He is funny.
He is funny. You're going to learn to take feedback, Scott.
This was not from a lesbian.

Speaker 14 Oh, I'm sorry. Hold on.

Speaker 16 Hold on.

Speaker 14 I need to learn to take feedback.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 14 We should call this show Estrogen and Scott and Scott and feedback.

Speaker 16 It's true.

Speaker 14 Learn. Come on.
Take that back. I need to learn to take feedback.

Speaker 14 We could call this podcast Feedback for Scott.

Speaker 16 Feedback for Scott. But that's why it's brilliant.
That's why it's brilliant. It's Scott's journey.
It's Scott's journey.

Speaker 16 It should be called Scott's journey. Maybe we'll change it to that.
It's pivot. It's called Pivot.
You're pivoting, Scott. We're getting you to Pivot.
And then you're going to be a little bit more.

Speaker 16 Courtesy of your trainer. And then he's really smart.
I'm going to meet him. I know.

Speaker 16 He gave you some recommendations in London for your show so you can do pull-ups also. I'll send you that.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 16 He was working on it. Pull-up bar.
Crazy. You said you wanted to do pull-ups.
He gave me a recommendation in London of really good. And she's a very

Speaker 16 comely

Speaker 16 woman trainer there. I think you would like it to do pull-ups.

Speaker 14 You have me a comely.

Speaker 16 There are pluses and minuses of

Speaker 16 insults from trainers. Anyway, let's, Jay, you're wonderful, by the way, Jay.
I appreciate your texting me. Anyway, let's pivot, speaking of which, to a listener male.

Speaker 16 This one comes from BJ. Ooh, I love that name.
Let's listen.

Speaker 25 Hi, Scott and Kara. Whenever the topic of huge CEO salaries comes up, we're told that CEOs deserve their pay because of the huge time commitment and tremendous responsibility of the position.

Speaker 25 Elon is the CEO of two companies and CEO in all but title of a third. Yet he has time to shitpost on Twitter, appear at political rallies, father, but admittedly not parent, kids.

Speaker 25 show up at raves, do drugs, and so on.

Speaker 25 Doesn't this give lie to the concept that CEOs earn their pay? And do other CEOs ever think or tell you that they wished Elon would cut this shit out because he makes them all look bad?

Speaker 25 Thanks for all the content. BJ Wick.

Speaker 16 Hmm, BJ. Well, Elon has created value in the companies.
I think he's a sort of a different unicorn situation. I think he has created value at SpaceX and Tesla and et cetera.

Speaker 16 Some of it's meme-y, and it's certainly not in line with the economics of some of the companies, like Tesla, for example.

Speaker 16 But he has created, he's a different kind of CEO, he's a founder CEO in that regard. So he may be worth the money he's paid.

Speaker 16 I think it's a mixback on that.

Speaker 16 I think CEOs actually are split that I talk to. They wish they could behave like that.
Actually, they prefer, they would like to be assholes. They just can't pull it off.

Speaker 16 It's sort of like a lot of politicians sort of want to behave like Trump and they can't. They fall on hard times when they behave like Trump and only Trump can behave like Trump.

Speaker 16 And they're very comparable in that regard. Other CEOs really don't like it.

Speaker 16 They are like, this is making us all look bad. And eventually

Speaker 16 the karma will fall into place here with this particular person.

Speaker 16 I do think CEOs get paid too much. I just think other people should be paid more and value should be more evenly distributed across companies.

Speaker 16 But we have the CEO, love the CEO culture. And as Scott says,

Speaker 16 the obsession with innovators. So I don't think that's going to change.
Scott?

Speaker 14 So I'll talk a little bit about CEO compensation and not specific to Musk.

Speaker 14 We live in, we've decided in terms of wages, it's supply and demand. And at some point, we realized supply and demand isn't healthy.
So we have federal minimum wage.

Speaker 14 And if it had only kept up with productivity and inflation, it would be $23 an hour, not $725. So that's a problem.

Speaker 14 At the other end, you're talking about CEO compensation, where it's gone from about 40 years, 40 times the average compensation of the worker at that company, to three or four hundred times.

Speaker 14 And this is how it's happened. The person or the group that decides CEO compensation is the compensation committee of the board.
It's three or four people.

Speaker 14 Generally speaking, the CEO will figure out a way to get his golfing buddies on that committee because they get to decide how much he or she makes.

Speaker 14 And this is what happens. We don't like to do actual work on boards.

Speaker 14 We only get paid a quarter to a half million dollars a year to show up for free lunch or free dinner every three months and think big thoughts and then go back to our formerly important person life.

Speaker 14 And what we decide on the compensation committee is that we hire hire Towers Perrin, we pay them 100 to 300 grand to come back with a CEO compensation survey. And it's the following.

Speaker 14 It looks at the size of the company and the performance of the company and it says the lowest paid at zero made this and the highest paid at 100 made this.

Speaker 14 And generally speaking, what you do is you say, well, Bob and Lisa, who are always the former sorority or fraternity rush chairman and are exceptionally likable, they're doing their level best.

Speaker 14 They're good people. Maybe the company's not doing great, but it's doing okay, all things considered.
So we're not going to pay them at a five, the average.

Speaker 14 We're going to pay them just above at a six. So slightly above average for a company in that sector of that size and that performance.
And you might think, well, that's innocuous.

Speaker 14 The problem is when you are raising someone's compensation, the CEO, at 10% a year, which sounds reasonable, that's not bad. Give Bob 10% more this year.

Speaker 14 That means every 21 years, the compensation of the CEO goes up eightfold relative to other employees. And so what we have is CEO compensation that has gotten just totally fucking out of control.

Speaker 14 And the CEO says, okay, whether it's out of control or not, if you don't pay me market, which is out of control, I'm going to go next store and get more out of control compensation.

Speaker 14 So we agree to do it. Now, the next question is, what can you do about it? And I don't think there's anything you can do about it on the compensation side.

Speaker 14 What you need to do is have an alternative minimum tax such that if a CEO is making 60 million bucks a year, they don't pay a lower tax rate than their assistant because there are all sorts of goodies and loopholes, how folks that exercise options get long-term capital gains, how they can defer their compensation, all sorts of shit.

Speaker 14 They can go beg for a bailout after paying themselves $120 million over five years, the CEOs of biggest airlines. There's all sorts of ways that the top guy or gal can avoid paying their fair share.

Speaker 14 So my feeling is there is nothing you can do or should do. I don't like the idea of a socialist contract around limiting compensation.

Speaker 14 What you can do is say, all right, if you make over a million bucks a year, we have an alternative minimum tax. And that is take advantage of every loophole.

Speaker 14 But if you go below 20%, we're rounding up to 20%.

Speaker 16 All right. And get to the other part of his question.

Speaker 14 What was the other part?

Speaker 16 It's that, you know, do people want to be like this from your perspective?

Speaker 16 Be like Elon? Yeah.

Speaker 16 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 16 Some of them do. Not all of them, I would say.

Speaker 13 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 14 I think the majority of people in business who are on this hamster wheel and see the kind of love and generosity America affords you if you have a lot of money, If they finally get to that point of CEO compensation, they all want to be the overpaid guy or gal.

Speaker 14 No one at your funeral says, you know.

Speaker 16 No, no, not that, that they want to behave. I'm talking about like doing whatever you feel like.
Right. Oh, Elon.

Speaker 14 Elon has channeled and actualized his inner eight-year-old. And there's a healthy market that seems to appreciate it because CEOs have been told the decorum is to act like an adult and

Speaker 14 a grown man or a grown woman. And then he comes in and just scratches everybody's it.
And, you know,

Speaker 14 no one can look away and in an attention economy as long as you're famous you know that's a that's a success story in itself i not only do most ceos not want to be this guy they couldn't be this guy they just their decorum the way they were raised they could never they could never do it they just they they would refuse to they can't yeah some of them do so i what i get is either well it's kind of cool he gets to say what he wants this is what i get and then the others give a face you can see a face before they say anything they're like oh like But at the same time, they can't believe it's happening.

Speaker 16 I think he's a very Trump-like figure. He's unusual.
There won't be another one like him for a long time.

Speaker 16 I guess the equivalent before was Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs looks like the best-behaved boy in there.

Speaker 14 You see above Henry Kissinger.

Speaker 16 Right. Yeah, exactly.
And he actually, he would have hated this.

Speaker 16 This is not, he did everything to sell phones. This was not about.
personal, like putting his personal life in front of everybody. It was to sell more eyes.

Speaker 14 There are 500 CEOs in the S ⁇ P 500. 499 of them.

Speaker 14 If they put out a tweet saying that I'm taking the company private at a massive premium, the funding is secured, they would have been fired within a week.

Speaker 14 The board would have said, I either need to see direct evidence of this right now,

Speaker 14 or we're doing an emergency board call and we're firing you.

Speaker 14 I mean, CEOs of the S ⁇ P 500.

Speaker 16 You read that story every week, right?

Speaker 14 Are fired every day for much less, or at least, at least demoted them or something.

Speaker 14 The fault here is not Elon Musk. The fault is the board of these companies.
And I can see how they've decided this because they've said, okay, or at least they rationalize it. This guy's singular.

Speaker 14 He's putting, I mean, he's just accomplishing shit no other individual seems to be accomplishing. And we're all making a shit ton of money.

Speaker 14 That's true. You know how much money the people on the board are.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Well, I read on the wall.
There's a great Wall Street Journal story about this. It makes perfect.
Everything's everybody. Let me just explain to you.
Everything comes down to the money.

Speaker 16 If you make a lot of money, you can act like a douche nozzle. That's pretty much the

Speaker 16 situation. What do you think we could do to get fired? What would we do? What could we, how far could we push it? I wonder.

Speaker 14 Oh, I don't, geez, I don't, I think, I feel like I'm well on the way. That's, I mean, that's.

Speaker 16 Honestly, no, I don't think so. I think you have a great latitude.

Speaker 14 Thanks for saying that. I'm just saying.

Speaker 14 You're a protected class.

Speaker 16 And I think people

Speaker 14 don't think you're a protected class? Because why? Because you're a lesbian journalist, Kara.

Speaker 16 No, that's not at all.

Speaker 16 I've never trotted that thing out ever. I've never used it.

Speaker 14 You need to trot it out. Everyone knows you.
You're powerful. You're a leader and advocate in your community.
No one, no, I don't think it's because of that.

Speaker 14 People think I think, people think, I've got to think twice about canceling you. You're also very good at what you do, which helps.
I think that's really it.

Speaker 16 Thank you for saying that. But I think the gay card is a lot less strong than you think.

Speaker 16 I think it's not that.

Speaker 16 I think both of us have an attitude of we'll go somewhere else. We don't care, right? I think that's more power, and we're good at what we do.
And that's what

Speaker 16 is, it's very hard to attack us because we don't care as as much.

Speaker 16 I had dinner with my

Speaker 14 one of my role models last night, Sam Harris, and he said something profound to me about 10 years ago.

Speaker 14 He said, if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, you have a moral obligation to speak your mind.

Speaker 14 Because in a society where everyone has a narrative and pressure to go up, to sign up for the narrative, which a lot of people need to do because they want to put food on the table, when we all start barking up the same tree, as my colleague Jonathan Haidt said, we get stupid.

Speaker 14 And so that's something I try to remember. And And also,

Speaker 14 we say, or I say, I should say, a lot of borderline inappropriate things that some people, a lot of people might find offensive.

Speaker 14 And there's, I just want you to know, and I've said this before, there's a strategy here. And that is, I want to see progressives take back power of our government.

Speaker 14 I refuse to normalize the notion that sexual abuse, inciting an insurrection, or a convicted felon should be president. I don't care if he got 49 or 99% of the vote.

Speaker 14 And one of the ways progressives take back power is we prove to the world that we are not fucking humorless.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And if you look back in history, the people, the comedians who really made social change, they were progressives and they were incredibly profane.
Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce.

Speaker 14 So when I go out there and we go out there and I make off-color jokes about your sexuality or I say inappropriate things or things that might trigger people,

Speaker 14 you know,

Speaker 14 A, it's me. I think it's funny.
I think a lot of people think this way.

Speaker 14 But also, I think part of progress will be when we get to a post-agree, post-I don't know, bigoted era where we appreciate and rib and a little bit of mockery of each other's differences, but it's okay.

Speaker 14 We recognize we're different. That's okay.

Speaker 14 That's what makes this beautiful. And we can have a sense of humor about these things.

Speaker 16 I would utterly agree with you. Actually, Jon Stewart had a good riff on this this week on the Daily Show and his Monday appearance.
It was, it was, it was along these lines.

Speaker 16 The only place I'm going to draw the is

Speaker 16 the attacks on trans people right now are getting really ugly and it's not funny. And there's no, like the Nancy Mace, and let me tell you, Nancy Mace, you're a heinous, heinous person.

Speaker 16 That's really vile. It's vile.
I get you can have a debate about bathrooms.

Speaker 14 I mean, the legislation that's targeted at one person.

Speaker 16 One person. And this woman, can I just tell you, Sarah McBride is handling herself with such class and grace.
She goes, I'm here to work for the constituents of

Speaker 16 my district in Delaware

Speaker 16 about prices and the economy and helping them have a better life. Where I go to the bathroom doesn't matter.
She doesn't

Speaker 16 she had so much class, and Nancy Mace,

Speaker 16 honestly, what is wrong with you? You are, you are an attention. And by the way, her staff talks about this.

Speaker 16 She wanted apparently to get punched in the face during the insurrection so she could get attention. You are an attention-seeking, heinous, cruel person.
And it's working.

Speaker 16 Look at what we're talking about. I get it.
I know we're talking about her, but not in a good way. And Sarah McBride, good for you for rising above it.

Speaker 16 But that's the one place where it's gotten, it's turned in a very ugly direction. And it's not funny.
But I agree with you. I would recommend watching Jon Stewart to have the same exact idea of like,

Speaker 16 let's start playing the loophole game like they do and the rule breaking. And you shouldn't behave like, you know, the class monitor so much.
And maybe we can make some gains.

Speaker 14 I was at a urinal yesterday, and this guy came up to the urinal next to me and said, he said, looked over and he said, circumcised. I'm like, nope, that's just the wear and tear.

Speaker 16 I don't even understand that.

Speaker 16 I don't understand why it's funny. I don't understand it.

Speaker 14 So just so you know, anytime if someone asks you if you know a guy, do the following. Go, wait, 5'10, dark hair, circumcised?

Speaker 14 That's a great conversation.

Speaker 16 I feel like I'm not going to do that.

Speaker 14 And two,

Speaker 14 my favorite is that Republican senator who was soliciting blowjobs in the men's room at Minneapolis airports

Speaker 14 and he was a total homophobe in the Senate.

Speaker 16 Of course, wide stance.

Speaker 14 I'm starting a boys' band called Wyatt. And he just said, I just have a wide stance.

Speaker 16 Wide stance. Wide stance.
I'm starting a boy band called Wise. He said, anyone who is so anti-gay, you know what's happening.
Let me just give you that piece of information.

Speaker 14 I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Speaker 16 Oh, my God. It's a lot of truth to that.
It's like, calm the fuck down. What do you care? I was at it, this is my last story.
I was at a dinner party with all these VCs a couple of years ago.

Speaker 16 And this guy, and he's a well-known gentleman capitalist, starts going, he goes,

Speaker 16 he goes, first he made the typical lesbian jokes. There was a law about gay marriage.
And he said,

Speaker 16 I don't like gay sex. I like a lesbian sex.
Ha, ha, ha. Did that one, which is like, oh, good God.
And I knew it was coming next. And he goes, but I don't like this gay sex thing.

Speaker 16 And so Nero didn't know what to do. And I said, you know what?

Speaker 16 If you don't like gay sex, you have to stop having it. And he goes, what? And I said, well, if you don't like gay sex, you just said you don't like it.
Don't have it.

Speaker 16 I don't like this zucchini and I've put it over to the side of the plate here because I don't like it and I'm not going to eat it. And he's like, I'm not having gay sex.

Speaker 16 I said, why did you say you don't like it? Because you just said you don't like it. Are you lying about having gay sex? That's weird.
It was the most wonderful moment of my life.

Speaker 16 I have to say, this guy doesn't like me anymore.

Speaker 14 Well, you know how many LGBTQ supporters it takes to change a light bulb. Oh, no.

Speaker 14 The light bulb is fine, Kara, the way it is. It's society that needs to change the way it looks at the light bulb.

Speaker 16 You know what? We're not all woke, by the way. We contain multitudes.
We have plenty of conservatives and plenty of.

Speaker 14 I don't get that, though. I don't understand.

Speaker 16 I'm just saying, there's plenty of different gays of all kinds now.

Speaker 16 Same thing with everybody. Anyway, I agree.
Independent politics can get a little tiresome, but we're not all the same in any group.

Speaker 16 Anyway, if you've got a question of your own that you'd like answered, send it our way. Go to nymag.com/slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT.

Speaker 16 By the way, Pivot is now on Blue Sky because everybody else is, and we seek, seek, we're a thirsty group of people. So send us a message there.
We're going to be on all the platforms.

Speaker 16 We're not really engaged on Twitter that much because it's, again, a Nazi porn bar and it doesn't really help us. That's really the point.
All right, Scott, one more quick break.

Speaker 16 We'll be back for predictions.

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Speaker 16 Okay, Scott, we're going to do a prediction. I'm going to give one very quickly.

Speaker 16 I predict the Christmas rom-com Hot Frosty, which is already number one movie on Netflix, will continue to dominate this weekend.

Speaker 16 The movie stars Lacey Chaber as a widow who falls in love with a snowman she brought to life who's really hot. He's hot frosty.
It's so sick.

Speaker 16 It is so sick for those who've seen Frosty, the snowman, the thing, to think about a fuckable Frosty. But that's what it's about.
It's about a fuckable Frosty. And she falls in love with him.

Speaker 16 And he has a really nice set of abs. I think you'll appreciate them, Scott.
So that's my prediction.

Speaker 14 What does your trainer think?

Speaker 16 He's going to beat you up. That's what's going to happen.
Anyway, let's hear your prediction now.

Speaker 14 I think that

Speaker 14 So with the antitrust scrutiny probably being dialed down and

Speaker 14 the election over, I think private equity is getting its jets kind of fired up again. And we're going to see in 2025 a lot of M ⁇ A and take private activity.

Speaker 14 There's like a quarter of a trillion dollars in dry powder on the line or the private equity is a mass or raise and needs to deploy. And I think a decent target, if you will, right now is now Target.

Speaker 14 Walmart reported great earnings, Target terrible earnings. Walmart's now trading at, I think, 33 or 34 times earnings, and Target is trading at like 12.

Speaker 14 It's not doing really well.

Speaker 16 You know, it had a bad quarter.

Speaker 14 60% of Walmart's U.S. sales

Speaker 14 were in grocery, and it was less than 25% for Target. And that kind of essential business is more, if you will, more consistent.

Speaker 14 Target's business model relies on consumers who are willing to spend on non-essentials, such as clothing and beauty, and it's lost a little bit of that differentiation in Panache.

Speaker 14 Even if Target could match or beat Walmart's prices, experts believe that Target would still be perceived as more expensive.

Speaker 14 And generally, what happens in these kinds of business, everyone is compensated or focused on share. And I think Target is an example of a business that needs to shrink to become much more profitable.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 that's just so counter to the DNA of every manager there. But I think Target is now at a price level and would benefit from making difficult, hard, cost-cutting changes.
outside of the public eye.

Speaker 14 This strikes me that there's probably quite a few PE folks sharpening their pencils and looking at Target because it still has a great brand. It still has, I think, really outstanding real estate.

Speaker 14 I love the Super Target in Boca Rattan. I think it's a wonderful experience.

Speaker 16 Brian Cornell is the CEO. I know him pretty well.

Speaker 16 Really? Yeah,

Speaker 16 he's had a tough, this is the

Speaker 16 stock fell, what, 21%?

Speaker 14 I mean,

Speaker 14 yeah. Well, they own, Target operates 1,900 stores and generates sales of $107 billion.

Speaker 14 And their current debt is $19 billion on a market cap of 56. So it's got about a $75 billion.

Speaker 14 I i think you're going to see some of the biggest lbos in history and i think target is probably getting eyed right now because this is a company that probably at 1500 stores versus 1900 get rid of the 400 least profitable bring in a new you know freshen up the merchandise if you will i think this is i think this is the kind of deal yeah that pe loves and these guys have so much capital they've got it put to work this would be a club deal but it's a great brand it's ubiquitous yeah You hope it doesn't go the way of, I'm trying to think of another, because it was not trendy.

Speaker 16 It was 60 pennies. Yeah, it was not trendy, and then it got really trendy.
Target got really kind of fun to shop at, and now it's really struggling.

Speaker 16 The issue is inflation-wary shoppers, and the CEO said that

Speaker 16 shoppers are waiting, are stretched and waiting to the last minute to buy items. So I think it's gotten a little not fresh, I would say.

Speaker 14 Well, exactly. But this would be, so what I'm predicting, and these deals are hard to pull off, but I believe this would be the biggest LBO in history.

Speaker 14 TXU, now Energy Future Holdings was $45 billion in 2007. HCA Healthcare was $33 billion in $06.
RJR Nabisco was $31 billion all the way back in 1989.

Speaker 14 So maybe a better prediction, because it's more likely to happen, is we're going to have the biggest LBO in history in 2025. And I think a decent idea.
Interesting.

Speaker 14 Two decent ideas we've mentioned over the last three weeks. One is Intel, and one now I'm adding to the list target.

Speaker 16 Are you involved? May I ask?

Speaker 14 I'm not.

Speaker 14 I'm choosing my words carefully here.

Speaker 14 I talk to a lot of PE guys all the time. I'll say that.

Speaker 16 Yeah, interesting. Yeah, that's actually a great idea.
It's a great idea, an excellent one. But I feel my frost, hot, frosty prediction was better.
Hosties.

Speaker 16 Hosty.

Speaker 16 Hasty.

Speaker 16 What are they going to do next? They're going to take a cartoon and make them fuckable. I don't like this.
I just don't like this trend. But I did watch it and I liked it.
Anyway,

Speaker 16 by the way, watch The Diplomat also, second season. Amazing.

Speaker 14 People love it.

Speaker 16 Love it. Fantastic.
So smart.

Speaker 16 It's like West Wingy kind of, but it's really smart. And the two main stars are fantastic.

Speaker 16 Elsewhere in the Kara and Scott universe, as you mentioned, you spoke with Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, on the ProfG podcast. By the way, running up the charts, Mr.
Podcast.

Speaker 16 Maybe the Doge Cache will catch you, but probably not. And discuss the threats and opportunities of artificial intelligence.

Speaker 16 Let's listen to what Eric Schmidt is most worried about if we don't get a grip on this technology.

Speaker 16 Remember that it was the horror of nuclear war that got people to the table, and it still took 15 years.

Speaker 14 I don't want us to go through an analogous bad incident involving an evil actor, North Korea. Again, I'm just using them as bad examples,

Speaker 14 or even Russia today, who we obviously don't trust. I don't want to run that experiment and have all that harm and then say, hey, we should have foreseen this.

Speaker 16 Oh, Eric is being very careful. That's interesting.

Speaker 16 He's an interesting guy very smart i i covered when he got that job i i think i broke that story when he got that job at google many moons ago he was way out in utah uh working he was running oracle no no no no he was running oh god blanking

Speaker 16 novelle yeah

Speaker 16 yeah he was at novella so eric was at uh before that he was at sun he was at the where he got famous and he went to novelle and then of course got that google job where he did pretty well um but he's a very thoughtful person i'm glad you talked to him phd from berkeley no yeah i don't know he's just really smart.

Speaker 16 Very smart. God.

Speaker 16 Great, great moment of talk about getting the best job in history. That was when he went to Google and he kind of cleaned it up.

Speaker 16 But please listen to Prof G and listen to Scott's discussion with Eric Schmidt. It's quite good.
All right, Scott, that's the show. We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot.
Why don't you read us out?

Speaker 18 Today's show was produced by Larry Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Christine Driscoll. Ernie Intertode engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burroughs, Mia Severio, and Dan Shulon.

Speaker 14 Mishak Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 14 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod.

Speaker 14 We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Have a great rest of the week and weekend care.

Speaker 6 ODU is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything.

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DOJ's Google Breakup Plan, Nvidia's Earnings, and Comcast's Cable Spin-off

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