Election Predictions, Comcast Spinoff Plans, and Guest Dan Harris

Speaker 1 The world is buzzing with AI tools. But instead of making things easier, they've made things overwhelming.
There's a better way.

Speaker 1 Enter Superhuman, the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers so you can outsmart the work chaos. With Grammarly, Mail, and Coda working together, you get proactive help across your workflow.

Speaker 1 Experience AI that meets you right where you are. Unleash your superhuman potential today.
Learn more at superhuman.com slash podcast. That's superhuman.com slash podcast.

Speaker 5 Support for this show comes from Upwork. If you're overextended and understaffed, Upwork Business Plus helps you bring in top quality freelancers fast.

Speaker 5 You can get instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in marketing, design, AI, and more, ready to jump in and take work off your plate.

Speaker 5 Upwork Business Plus sources vets and short lists proven experts so you can stop doing it all and delegate with confidence.

Speaker 5 Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business Plus, you get $500 in credit. Go to upwork.com slash save now and claim the offer before December 31st, 2025.

Speaker 5 Again, that's upwork.com/slash S-A-V-E, scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit. Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 5 Support for this show comes from Upwork. If you're overextended and understaffed, Upwork Business Plus helps you bring in top quality freelancers fast.

Speaker 5 You can get instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in marketing, design, AI, and more, ready to jump in and take work off your plate.

Speaker 5 Upwork Business Plus sources vets and shortlists proven experts so you can stop doing it all and delegate with confidence.

Speaker 5 Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business Plus, you get $500 in credit. Go to upwork.com slash save now and claim the offer before december 31st 2025.
again that's upwork.com slash save

Speaker 5 scale smarter with top talent and 500 in credit terms and conditions apply

Speaker 6 My favorite poll is a short one that has an on switch and then I stick it up my ass.

Speaker 6 Maybe I should try that. I'm so stressed out.
Xanax and ass play. There you go.
That's the peanut butter and shot. You asked me what I was going going to do tomorrow night? There you go.

Speaker 2 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 2 How are you feeling today, Scott? You're posting a lot on the threads. The fast-growing threads.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think that's a sign of neuroses. When people say, how are you?

Speaker 2 I say,

Speaker 6 you know, I'm okay. And then the voice in my mind goes, you're pretty fucking far from okay.

Speaker 2 I'm actually really stressed. How are you? Are you? Yeah.
I'm a little stressed. But Clara was sick, so that sort of got me out of my stress.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm just, I've decided to be Zen. I'm going to try to be Zen.

Speaker 6 Can you decide to be Zen? Is that a decision we get to make?

Speaker 2 I can. I don't think you can, but I can.
Yes. I have a lot of control over my emotions from years of years of having to be controlled.

Speaker 2 You know, I watch Menendez documentaries. Oh,

Speaker 2 we started watching.

Speaker 6 I find that really disturbing, but it's really good.

Speaker 2 I love both of of them. I like the Ryan Murphy one,

Speaker 2 and I love the documentary. I thought it was great.

Speaker 6 I've been watching the original scripted series with Ryan Murphy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I'm two episodes in.

Speaker 2 Keep going. I grew up with that.

Speaker 6 I was a senior. I was a first year in grad school or a senior in college when that happened.

Speaker 2 That was a big deal. It's a lot.
It's a lot about stories and narrative and what we think about men being abused. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Like the second trial, which they went to jail on, the judge said they couldn't use the abused woman defense, essentially, because men don't get abused. It was really amazing.

Speaker 2 Things have changed so dramatically.

Speaker 2 And it looks like there's more proof that the father was indeed exactly what they said he was.

Speaker 2 So this imperfect self-defense thing,

Speaker 2 they may get out. The two of them may get out.
Anyway, that's what I'm watching to feel better.

Speaker 2 Let me just say, I went to Miami for a wedding this weekend. Oh, hello.
By the way, I love the breezes. It was nice.
It was lovely.

Speaker 2 She lives in Miami Beach. It was very pretty on a waterway.
I don't know which waterway it was.

Speaker 6 The Venetian Causeway?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I have no idea.
Anyway, I just took an Uber there.

Speaker 2 It was nice. I stayed at the edition, was there for five minutes.

Speaker 2 It was literally 24 hours in Miami. We got there with Tammy Hatton.

Speaker 2 Saw a lot of friends.

Speaker 6 Did you go to the Matador room? It's beautiful with all the paneling.

Speaker 2 Not really. No, I didn't.

Speaker 6 Did you see the bowling alley or the ice rink? Didn't. I spent a lot of time at the audition.
That smell, is that jasmine?

Speaker 2 Whatever.

Speaker 2 it's lovely it's lovely to go walk on the beach etc but um the poll con our ros is their specialty at the matador and yet i didn't do any of that um so i literally the plane was late i got there got dressed went to the wedding

Speaker 2 had drinks on the deck there at the at the hotel afterwards and then left the next morning by eight o'clock so i was gone but i have to say you know one thing i did like and i forgot how much i like not just miami but hawaii the caribbean is that those warm breezes

Speaker 2 no it's warm here it's we have warm weather here it's more the breezes the tropical breezes I love that feeling.

Speaker 6 You know, it goes, you know what I miss that they don't have in London or most places? Really fucking hot women wearing nothing. They are everywhere enjoying those.
Oh, it's a warm breeze.

Speaker 2 I think I'll wear a halter top. Oh, God.
Love Miami. Yeah, not in London.

Speaker 2 Love Miami.

Speaker 2 A lot of tweed.

Speaker 6 And they love the wealthy, older, ugly guys.

Speaker 2 Hello, ladies. Oh, that's you.
That's you. That's equal.

Speaker 6 Yeah. No, you're not supposed to agree with that.

Speaker 2 I just didn't say anything. I was, I, uh, so anyway, so I had a good time.
I saw my friend Jedi Beals, his own friend Carrie, Ferrell. Indo name drop.

Speaker 6 What was that? That was three and a half minutes in. And you sent me a picture.

Speaker 2 Never mind. I don't tell you.
Yeah, she's great.

Speaker 6 She's a very tall woman.

Speaker 2 She's very tall. She took all the pictures for me because I was way in the back.
Let me just tell you, I was stopped several times at the airport.

Speaker 6 I think about how much people love us.

Speaker 2 No. Yes, they do.
Yes, that they did. But

Speaker 2 white men,

Speaker 2 Republicans, when I was like, oh, no. And then they're like, I'm voting for Harris.

Speaker 6 How do you know they're Republicans because they're white and they're men? I'm triggered. They said it.

Speaker 2 No, they said it.

Speaker 6 I literally owned a Subaru Forrester.

Speaker 2 I'm just telling you, they said it. They said it.
I was waiting for the pushback. And then they're like, I'm voting for Harris.
And you all convinced me. That's one of the reasons.

Speaker 2 And they're like, I love John McCain. I love, you know, I'm always a Republican.
All men. And I literally was expecting some in-cell nonsense for most of them.
So just with some.

Speaker 6 It's so funny because I have, I'm not exaggerating. I have have women come up to me all the time and say, I'm now a lesbian because of you.

Speaker 2 That's good. Anyway, that's good.

Speaker 6 It's usually an ex-girlfriend. Well, I'm lesbian now.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Thanks to that. I started off lesbian.
Watch, I'll turn straight because you're so attractive. Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 6 No, no risk there, Amanda. Absolutely no risk there.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I just want to play a quick clip from Instagram of comedian Ami Kozak. He does this bit called If Scott Galloway Was a Weatherman.
Let's listen.

Speaker 7 What we're facing Wednesday for the forecast is a chance of rain and then an absolute disaster.

Speaker 7 It looks like over the weekend there'll be some rain and mixed with some sunshine and then an absolute disaster.

Speaker 7 So if we don't do something soon, I mean, this is catastrophic proportions in which the weather is just going to be an absolute disaster. We're facing absolute disaster.

Speaker 7 It is just a disaster for young men.

Speaker 6 And I love that kid. I didn't know you guys were going to do that.
You know me. I'm a narcissist.
So thank you for doing that. It makes me feel nice.

Speaker 6 Yeah, he's good.

Speaker 2 It's an absolute disaster. He's got you cold.
I always love when people make fun of you. It's very fun.
They usually got you dead on. Amy, thank you.
That was really great.

Speaker 2 We've got a lot to get to on this election day from the last-minute polls to the final campaign pushes.

Speaker 2 Plus, our friend of Pivot, this is who we brought in to make you all feel better today because this will be published on Election Day. Dan Harris, host of the 10% Happier Happier podcast.

Speaker 2 Dan is going to tell people how they can manage some of their election anxiety, including people if Trump loses. You guys are going to have to deal.

Speaker 2 So, not that we care very much how you feel, but you're going to have to deal if he loses. Anyway, we're not going to skip our business and tech stories today, though.

Speaker 2 Up first, NVIDIA is replacing, this is interesting, rivaled chip member Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average this week.

Speaker 2 The change is being made to, quote, ensure more representative exposure to the semiconductor industry.

Speaker 2 NVIDIA stock was up nearly 3% in after-hours was trading, after the change was announced, which makes sense. Last week, Intel was down nearly 2%.
One of those fallen angels, as Scott calls them.

Speaker 2 Intel also just posted a $16 billion loss for the third quarter, the biggest quarterly loss in the company's 56-year history. Probably a lot of charges in that one.

Speaker 2 But what do you think of this move to put NVIDIA in the DAO? And does it matter? Or DAO used to matter a lot more, I guess. I don't know.
What do you think?

Speaker 6 I think it does matter because

Speaker 6 it sends a signal about one company doing poorly and one doing really well and right also there i believe there are certain funds kind of quote-unquote passive funds that buy the index and they only buy companies in the index so it puts some selling pressure on companies that are kicked out and puts some selling buying pressure moving the stock up on it's just an indication of how well and how poorly each of these firms are doing yeah uh respectively and it's happened so viciously yeah i think there are few companies that have been more poorly managed than intel because typically when you talk about a company.

Speaker 2 Many leaders, many leaders.

Speaker 6 Well, okay, look at Time Warner, for example.

Speaker 6 That company has fallen really far. And that is it made a terrible acquisition or merger.

Speaker 6 It was convinced by Steve Case, who recognized he was sitting on a company that was going to go down 90% of value. And Steve did his shareholders a solid and said, it is time to get out of Dodge.

Speaker 6 And we're not going to merge with an internet company. We're going to merge with a company with real old world assets, which are less likely to implode.

Speaker 6 Like he correctly foresaw these internet assets, especially a dial-up asset was going to implode.

Speaker 6 And then since then, essentially Warner Brothers or Time Warner has, you know, Time Warner, since going public or doing this merger with Discovery, has lost 70% of its value.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I thought Jeff Buchas did very well to sell it. Oh, I thought that was kind of a good thievery on his part in that, in getting it over to AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 6 Jeff pulled off.

Speaker 6 Jeff, there's one kind of person likes Jeff, and that's shareholders. He sold the magazines right before the magazine industry imploded.
He sold the cable business when cable was peaking.

Speaker 6 And this is what's so unusual about this: CEOs have a habit of acquiring and not disposing of assets because traditionally their compensation is linked to how big the company is.

Speaker 6 And then he got the hell out of Dodge when ATT saw Verizon by Yahoo AOL and he sold it for $115 or $120 billion. And now it has an enterprise value of of barely half that.

Speaker 6 And the reason I bring it up is that Zaslov can legitimately say,

Speaker 6 the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, he can legitimately say, I have faced enormous headwinds.

Speaker 6 Now, granted, there's no excuse for why he's paid himself a third of a billion dollars while the stock's gone down 70%, but he can legitimately say, The market is bigger than any specific company and the market dynamics here around cable have been and broadcast and ad supported media have been terrible.

Speaker 6 What's unusual about Intel is it is a shadow of itself in what is arguably one of the best business sectors in history. So,

Speaker 6 where this was a company everyone wanted to work for when I was going out of business.

Speaker 2 Remember Intel Inside. Intel Inside.
Andy Grove was the CEO of this company. Andy Grove.
I covered Andy Grove.

Speaker 2 The CEO. And they had Mark.
They had a home, but they had a bunch of people. They did keep shifting after after he died.
It was, he was sort of, he ran it up the table for years and years and years.

Speaker 2 Like, he really was the, he was such a character, too. But one of the things that you have to, there's a lot there.

Speaker 2 I think there's a lot of brand there, but you can see how quickly this thing can, you know,

Speaker 2 topple. But it's, do you, would you buy the Intel? Would you, now that it's off now,

Speaker 6 I like to circumvent that. If Intel goes below 20 bucks a share, and this is why I'm, I've lost a lot of upside.
I always think stuff's not cheap enough. I think that at

Speaker 6 $100 billion market cap, if this company shows, they have incredible IP, a lot of patents, they do have a lot of fantastic managers there. They have incredible supplier relationships, capital.

Speaker 6 If this thing shows any sign of life, it doubles or triples. Whereas NVIDIA has to be a $10 trillion company to triple.

Speaker 6 I think Intel is absolutely,

Speaker 6 if someone said, I don't own, I do not own either Intel or Nvidia, but I'm actually looking at Intel because I think any pulse here,

Speaker 6 any pulse here,

Speaker 6 the thing doubles.

Speaker 2 You might get a new CEO. We'll see.
Anyway, interestingly, Chinese EV company BYD just scored a major victory in its battle for dominance, topping Tesla in revenue for the first time.

Speaker 2 BYD's Q3 revenue was $28 billion, up 24% from a year ago. Tesla recently reported a $25 billion for the same period.
Tesla still has a lead over BYD in terms of net profit.

Speaker 2 BYD is set to face some headwinds with the EU. Recently announced tariff increases on Chinese EVs taking duties as high as 45%.

Speaker 2 Same thing if they come to the U.S., by the way, especially if Trump takes every, he's going to put tariffs on everybody, including Mexico, apparently, today.

Speaker 2 He was talking about fluoride and tariffs for Mexico. Crazy stuff.
We'll talk about that in a minute.

Speaker 2 You know, BYD also has some very innovative stuff

Speaker 2 that Tesla does a lot of hand-waving, has not introduced the smaller cars, the cheaper cars.

Speaker 2 You know, talk about

Speaker 2 he's going to continue to increase tariffs on Chinese EVs if Trump wins. Trump did soften his anti-EV stance back in August, saying, I'm for electric cars.

Speaker 2 I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.

Speaker 2 But I don't know. It just, I don't, look at this.
Guy felt the last three days. We'll talk about it.
It seems addled as can be. So

Speaker 2 where do you imagine this going?

Speaker 6 There's just no getting around it. BYD, as far as I can tell, tell, is kicking Tesla's ass.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 In terms of the global EV market, in 2021, BYD had 7%, Tesla had 21%.

Speaker 6 By May of 2024, BYD is now at 16%

Speaker 6 and Tesla 17%, May, probably meaning, as we sit here now, given this momentum, that BYD likely has a greater share of the EV market than Tesla.

Speaker 6 And my sense is they have figured out a way to deliver what

Speaker 6 I mean, the biggest complaint about EVs is a lack of charging infrastructure. Then, and number three is range, but number two is cost.
And DYD has cracked the code on this.

Speaker 6 They make what is supposed to be an outstanding EV for, I think, it's adorable, too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for something like sub $15,000.

Speaker 2 Really cute. I would love to see this.
Every time I see a Tesla, I'm so bored with them now. I mean, even if I

Speaker 2 wasn't such a chod, I'm like, oh, look at that. And when I get picked up, I'm like, oh, I want to, I would like a different car, like a different-looking car.

Speaker 2 It feels like, like, you know, when, like, I don't know, like the 1980 wants you back, like kind of thing. I'm like, it's a great car.

Speaker 6 It just hasn't.

Speaker 6 Like, I like the word used, needs a freshening, a freshening.

Speaker 2 It needs a freshening. And I have to say, some of the other cars I've seen, I'd love to get in one of these Chinese EPs.
I'd love to see them.

Speaker 2 I haven't seen them because they're not in this country widely.

Speaker 2 I don't think they're here at all, actually. Anyway, we'll see.
I think, you know, they're going to dominate. This is the country wants it to to work.
They're going to flood the market eventually.

Speaker 2 But, you know,

Speaker 2 I think probably Harris will be pretty tough in that regard, too, would be my guess.

Speaker 2 Interesting story. I was curious what you thought of this.
Comcast is exploring the creation of a separate company for its cable networks, which include MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, and USA.

Speaker 2 Comcast president Mike Kavanaugh, who I think is very smart, I've spent some time with him, announced the spin-off possibility on the company's earnings call. last week.

Speaker 2 He said the new company would be owned by Comcast shareholders and be well capitalized. I don't think they're going to shove a bunch of debt over there.
Who knows? Do they have a bunch of debt?

Speaker 2 The NBC broadcast network and streaming service, Peacock, would remain with the core company. It's sort of more of a cable thing, I guess.

Speaker 2 Comcast shares gained more than 3% on Thursday after that earnings call. What do you think of this spin-off? You know, a lot of people were talking about this, and I thought it was, hmm.

Speaker 6 It's typically the sign of a company in decline that doesn't think they're getting the credit they deserve.

Speaker 6 And that is when you're doing really well and you have cheap stock, you go make acquisitions. And then at some point, oftentimes the synergy

Speaker 6 doesn't manifest. And all of a sudden, your stock is getting hurt.
And the company has good assets.

Speaker 6 But typically, when a company in the conglomerate model, as Comcast is, with a mix of businesses and different businesses, the way investors evaluate company and structural decline is they say, Let's look at the shitty ass, the shittiest part of the business and assign that multiple to the whole thing.

Speaker 6 So at the New York Times, we owned about.com, which on its own was worth probably a billion dollars.

Speaker 6 We owned the tallest, seven tallest building in America that was worth close to, I think, I forget what it was worth. It was worth a lot.
At some point, it was worth more than the paper.

Speaker 6 So I'm like, are we in the, are we a REIT or are we a newspaper company? We owned 17% of the Boston Red Sox, which made no fucking sense.

Speaker 6 So when you pull these assets out, especially when a stock's price has been under pressure, the disposition of assets are accretive because essentially

Speaker 6 there was no multiple on

Speaker 6 there was no EBITDA from the Boston Red Sox. So we got no credit for it, for owning a baseball team.
Meanwhile, some midlife crisis guy was going to show up and pay 100 or 115 million, 150 million.

Speaker 6 Or you could spend, I wanted to spend about.com because I'm like, we could get a billion dollars for this thing right now.

Speaker 2 Remember that? And then,

Speaker 6 so

Speaker 6 this is a smart move. And so what they do is, and not only that, it creates a cleaner story.
Investors like a clean story because this is what CEOs do.

Speaker 6 They claim they're synergy, but there's not usually. Usually, what they're trying to do is they're trying to say, I hate being responsible for one type of business that is volatile.

Speaker 6 And I like to smooth out my earnings so I'll buy assets, which will increase the size of my business, which likely gives me bigger compensation because my compensation is based on the size of my business.

Speaker 6 And then it makes my life a lot nicer.

Speaker 6 But here's the thing: investors, in their way, in their own way, via a stock price, will say to the CEO, I don't need you to diversify for me unless there's real synergy.

Speaker 2 I can do it myself. Let me ask you: why isn't isn't NBC in this

Speaker 2 I don't quite is NBC in this no no the the spin-off would not include streaming service PCOP or broadcast network NBC I guess they see why because MSNBC picks up stuff from NBC and so does CNBC or I don't know it's the only thing

Speaker 6 the only thing I can figure out is one of the Roberts is very affectionate around NBC and doesn't want to I don't know that they see it as too core or too central to the whole brand positioning it doesn't make any sense to me.

Speaker 2 Pretend you're him. He's a lovely guy, by the way.

Speaker 2 Pretend you're him. Why would you care?

Speaker 6 I'm a billionaire that's going to be dead in 20 years, and I get to do things I enjoy, and I enjoy having NBC as part of this. I don't know.
It doesn't make any economic sense to me.

Speaker 2 You would put it in there, I would think. Yeah.
I can see why the streaming service stays because it's part of a cable offering, but then it never relationship with them.

Speaker 6 Basically, what they're doing here is kind of good bank, bad bank. And that is the bad bank is these companies in structural decline that have really good cash flows.
All right.

Speaker 6 People know how to value that. The good bank is a streaming service that has some, you know, has some momentum.
And these things trade at a much higher multiple.

Speaker 6 So, and those things lose money, but the market will afford some capital or at least more capital.

Speaker 2 I guess because if you're keeping Peacock, you have to keep NBC for the entertainment assets.

Speaker 6 This is what Warner Brothers Discovery is going to do after Comcast, which is considered a better managed company, does.

Speaker 6 Warner Brothers Discovery will do the same thing. They'll go good bank, bad bank.
The bad bank will be all of their cable assets, all the discovery stuff, CNN, Turner Network, all that stuff.

Speaker 6 And then they'll take HBO and they'll take Warner, the movie company, which has a lot of IP and can feed stuff directly into HBO.

Speaker 6 They'll say, this is the good bank, which will trade at a higher multiple because it's a growth company and has more definitive or defensible assets. This is the bad bank.

Speaker 6 And by the way, the bad bank is still a good, might be a good investment because these companies still create, generate a lot of cash flow. But

Speaker 6 yeah when you mix companies of different ages if you will or different investor complexions unless you can really

Speaker 6 really justify the synergies there the market goes yeah i don't like it i can't figure it out i'll go buy netflix which is a pure play

Speaker 6 pure play right or i'll go buy or i'll go buy gannette which is a shitty company still spending cash flow

Speaker 2 times right

Speaker 2 yeah all right okay well good explanation scott um okay let's go on a quick break we come back it's finally election day how How close are we to the end of the race? Hopefully soon.

Speaker 2 And for everyone who's anxious right now, our friend of Pivot, as I said, is Dan Harris on how not to drive yourself crazy today.

Speaker 4 In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.

Speaker 8 What if you could have all three at the same time?

Speaker 4 That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have. since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Speaker 8 OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds.

Speaker 3 How is it faster?

Speaker 4 OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Speaker 3 Cheaper?

Speaker 4 OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Speaker 2 Better?

Speaker 4 In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Speaker 4 Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Speaker 3 Head to oracle.com slash Vox.

Speaker 8 That's oracle.com slash Vox.

Speaker 5 Support for this show comes from Upwork. So you started a business, but you didn't expect to become the head of everything.
Now you're doing marketing, customer service, and IT with no support staff.

Speaker 5 At some point, doing it all becomes the reason nothing gets done. Stop doing everything.

Speaker 5 Instead of spending weeks sorting through random resumes, Upwork Business Plus sends a curated shortlist of expert talent to your inbox in hours.

Speaker 5 These are trusted, top-rated freelancers vetted for skills and reliability.

Speaker 5 And with Upwork Business Plus, you can get instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in marketing, design, AI, and more, all ready to jump in and take work off your plate.

Speaker 5 Upward Business Plus can take the hassle out of hiring and the pressure off your team.

Speaker 5 That way, you can stop doing everything and instead focus on scaling while the pros at Upwork can handle the rest. Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business Plus, you get $500 in credit.

Speaker 5 Go to upwork.com/slash/save now and claim the offer before December 31st, 2025. Again, that's upwork.com/slash S-A-V-E.

Speaker 5 Scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit. Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 9 Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

Speaker 9 Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one.

Speaker 9 You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

Speaker 2 Scott, we're back. It's a day we've been anxiously waiting.
Roughly half of the 2020 electorate has already taken advantage of early voting, including Republicans.

Speaker 2 They're voting early now because Donald Trump has decided it's not evil. But today is the last day to cast your vote.
Have you voted already? Do you have a vote? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah. I voted.
I had a weird experience. This is how old I'm getting.
I'm in Florida and I thought, oh, this would be nice.

Speaker 6 And I went to the place behind the tennis courts in Delray Beach and I I walked in to do my voting thing. And I walked up and they said,

Speaker 6 they said, it says you've already voted. And they looked at me like I was trying to vote twice.
And I said, I said, are you sure? And they're like, yeah, we received a mail-in ballot nine days ago.

Speaker 6 I'm like, oh, fuck, I've already voted.

Speaker 2 I totally forgot I'd already voted.

Speaker 6 So I tried to vote twice. The Republicans are right.

Speaker 2 It's a conspiracy.

Speaker 6 I'm literally the person there.

Speaker 6 But it's my age. It's my early onset Alzheimer's.

Speaker 2 There's no conspiracy there.

Speaker 6 And just so you know, they knew right away, they turned around and they're like, yeah, you had a mail-in ballot and we received it eight days ago at 11, you know, 11:31 a.m.

Speaker 6 And here's your signature. And I'm like, oh, never mind.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Thank you for your service.

Speaker 2 I hope you voted for the right person, Scott. I am going to go to the, I love going on election day.
And we're taking Clara. I used to take my boys every year to vote.

Speaker 2 I think it's really important to take kids to vote to make them understand the privilege that we have.

Speaker 2 So we, Amanda and I are going to take Clara. Both sons voted also, by the way, early.
Congratulations, Alex, on your first election. Congratulations, your first presidential election.

Speaker 2 Very pleased that you voted

Speaker 2 in this important state. But Vice President Harris will watch election returns at our alma mater, Howard University, here in the D.C.
area. Former President Trump has a watch party.

Speaker 2 Where do we guess it? West Palm Beach.

Speaker 2 What are you going to do the night with hours left in the race?

Speaker 6 I think I'm going to go out because I'm going to try and not watch. I say this and I I won't be able to do it, but the plan is I'm going to go out and I'm going to get up really early on.

Speaker 6 I mean, we're now, we were four hours ahead. Now we're five hours ahead because you guys, I guess you guys fell back yesterday, but

Speaker 6 I'll, I don't want to look at it until

Speaker 2 Wednesday.

Speaker 6 I just, I find the, I remember in 2016 when I was following it

Speaker 6 and essentially I can do math and they showed all these Florida counties and I go, oh, I'm immediately I could tell Florida's going to Trump. And then I did the broader math.
I'm like, Trump's one.

Speaker 6 And it was fairly early in the evening. And the thing I don't like about it is they try and create tension as if no matter

Speaker 2 what noise they make.

Speaker 6 Oh, and then they go to some reporter

Speaker 6 on a basketball court in a high school gym saying, we just found someone, someone who's not that smart to talk to us about what they think about the election.

Speaker 2 Exactly. I'm going to watch Menendez's documentary.

Speaker 6 It reminds me of the IPO of Meta. This was like, I don't know, six or eight years ago, I was on with Stephanie Ruhl when she was still at Bloomberg and Alex O'Hanion, the co-founder of Reddit.

Speaker 6 And we were supposed to go, it was supposed to go public at the open, and there was a technical glitch, and it didn't go public till noon.

Speaker 6 So we sat on air for two and a half hours trying to talk about Meta. And the producer kept coming out in the brain going, I'm sorry, maybe talk about WhatsApp.

Speaker 2 And me and Alex were sitting there like, we're out.

Speaker 6 We thought we were going to be here for six minutes and we're supposed to talk about this shit. Anyways, there's Stockholm syndrome.

Speaker 6 I'm convinced that's why Stephanie Ruhl and I like each other so much. We have literally been.

Speaker 2 Because he was stuck.

Speaker 2 We have been through. Let's get back to the election.
Let's get back to the election.

Speaker 2 With hours left in the race, they're neck and neck, apparently, in swing states, according to the final New York Times Sienna poll.

Speaker 2 More specifically, it shows Harris marginally ahead in Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin. The poll has Trump slightly ahead in Arizona.

Speaker 2 Michigan, Georgia, Michigan is more... Harris, actually, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Pennsylvania are extremely close.

Speaker 2 One surprise, a separate outlier Iowa poll showing Harris three points points ahead of Trump in a state he's won twice.

Speaker 2 This is not a state that was even considered being played, but the pollster is one of the most respected. The one who is not an irritating chode, J.

Speaker 2 Ann Seltzer, she is considered the best pollster in politics. And then there, of course, is Scott's favorite poll, which I do not agree with.

Speaker 2 Trump media stock price up 54 a week ago down in the low 30s and headed down as we head into election day.

Speaker 2 You may use that. I'm not going to use that or the predictions market.
So thoughts, right?

Speaker 2 Top line thoughts.

Speaker 6 Well, first off, that's misinformation. My favorite poll is a short one that has an on switch and then I stick it up my ass.

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 6 All right. Anyways, maybe I should try that.
I'm so stressed out.

Speaker 2 Anyways, I know.

Speaker 6 Static's an ass play. There you go.
That's a peanut butter and shot. You asked me what I was going to do tomorrow night.

Speaker 2 There you go. Oh, I didn't wish I had to do that.

Speaker 6 That's my Tuesday night, and it's not just election week either.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't even remember the question. I got so excited.
I'm going to eat your jokes, Elon Musk. Let's go.
Okay.

Speaker 2 What are your overall thoughts? Because I'm going to move on. Oh, my overall thoughts.

Speaker 6 I'm going to move to Carl. I got to be honest.

Speaker 6 Jess Tarlov had the exact right term to describe my mood. I'm nauseously optimistic.

Speaker 2 Okay, nauseously optimistic.

Speaker 6 Kara, I was bereft about seven, eight days ago. The momentum is squarely in Harris on Harris right now or for Harris.

Speaker 6 And this, this poll, this seltzer individual is probably the best pollster in the nation, hands down, in terms of her ability to predict stuff over the last eight or ten elections.

Speaker 6 And she has Harris up three to four points in Iowa.

Speaker 6 And in addition,

Speaker 2 it's all over the place. That's it's whether it's happening in other states nearby.
That's the thing.

Speaker 6 But that's, that's, I, I thought that's, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty interesting. And two,

Speaker 6 um, I think his media coverage lately has just been horrible.

Speaker 2 I think he looks old. Horrible.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 2 saying crazy shit. The, the crowds, There's a lot of videos of the crowd this morning in North Carolina.
It's half full.

Speaker 2 All his venues are half full. And that's not just Kamala Harris trolling him, which she is, but they're actually half full in several places.

Speaker 6 Name one good thing that's happened for him in the last five days.

Speaker 2 Nothing. Fluoride with Robert Kennedy Jr.? What the fuck is that guy keep showing up saying don't drink Gatorade mayonnaise or fluoride? Like, what the fuck? Like, have you seen that?

Speaker 6 All of these self-inflicted wounds. Tony Hinchcliffe.

Speaker 2 Hinchcliffe. And then the My Pillow guy, Al Capone and the Mike Pillow guy with Trump.
I was like, what are you doing, Grampy? Go back and get it.

Speaker 6 But these are unforced heirs. You could have said about RFK, we're going to have him on the environment.
It would have softened him.

Speaker 6 Instead, they said, we're going to put this guy in charge of vaccines and also women's bottles.

Speaker 6 I mean, all of these self-inflicted injuries that they don't.

Speaker 6 And also, I've heard, I have friends canvassing in Pennsylvania, and they run into other canvassers

Speaker 6 from both sides. They said the number of

Speaker 6 canvassers in Pennsylvania right now is running people getting kind of souls to the polls, feet on the street, is 10 to 1 Harris canvassers.

Speaker 2 They pay people. They pay them unlike the Elon Musk crowd.
He's outsourced everything to Elon Musk, which is he's running, he's running their,

Speaker 2 this way, it looks like he's running it, like he's running Twitter and not Tesla or SpaceX.

Speaker 2 It's the Twitter Elon running this, not the SpaceX,

Speaker 2 SpaceX Elon, who is very competent.

Speaker 2 It does not mean the madness is going to slow down, though.

Speaker 2 The elections, everything from the FCC to Cardi B, who gave Elon a real slap in the head, which she's so, you know, turns out she was like in AP history.

Speaker 2 She never talks about her academic career, but all her teachers were like, she's the smartest kid we had.

Speaker 2 Grew up from a very humble background, and she whacked Elon Musk hard in the head over on Twitter.

Speaker 2 But NBC gave Donald Trump free airtime during Sunday's NASCAR race in order to stay compliant with the FCC's equal time rule. The move came after Trump appointed FCC Commissioner Brandon Carr,

Speaker 2 who is such, I'm sorry, he's just such a, he's so thirsty, claimed that Kamala Harris's Saturday Night Live appearance this past weekend violated the rule. Fine, Brandon, you were so thirsty.

Speaker 2 I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with that.
He was all over the airwaves. He could just upset it and not like, he's thirsty.

Speaker 2 Anyway, we can talk about the relevance of equal time in the broadcast in just a second, but it's an interesting comparison to see how each candidate used their time. First up, Kamala Harris on SNL.

Speaker 2 Maya Rudolph was doing her regular Kamala Harris impression, which is fantastic. And

Speaker 2 the vice president popped up to play her mirror image. Together, they poked fun at Donald Trump's recent stop in Wisconsin.
Let's listen.

Speaker 3 Nice to see you, Kamala.

Speaker 5 It is nice to see you, Kamala. And I'm just here to remind you, you got this because you can do something your opponent cannot do.
You can open doors.

Speaker 5 I see what you did. They're like to a garbage truck, right?

Speaker 2 Next up, Trump campaign commercial that aired after NASCAR race.

Speaker 10 We've never seen anything like it, at least for the last 40 years. We have to straighten out our country.
We have to close our borders. We have to lower our taxes.
We have to get rid of inflation.

Speaker 10 And we're going to do it. Just remember, Kamala and her friends broke it.
I'll fix it. Most important election in the history of our country.
Go and vote.

Speaker 2 Wow. Okay.
Equal time for both and that we give them here at Pivot. I thought that was terrible, but fine, whatever.
He seems to be a little bit more.

Speaker 2 They're both strong. I don't know.

Speaker 6 Trump hit the notes at this base once in this people want to hear. That was strong.

Speaker 2 I guess. In any case, she was funnier.
The equal time rule requires broadcast stations and candidates comparable opportunities to appear on the air this close to the election.

Speaker 2 I think that's one of the things, seven days. It doesn't mean they have to be on the same show or that they have to give advance notice.

Speaker 2 But in any case, they did that. And I did think Gamla was charming.
I don't know about you.

Speaker 6 You got to think. Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the majority of the SNL writing staff leans progressive.

Speaker 6 A bunch bunch of Harvard educated people who live in New York writing for SNL. I'm just going to go out on a limb and assume that they're probably progressives.
They got the assignment.

Speaker 6 They sat down and said, we need to make her look likable, funny, intelligent, deposition him. And the writers there, wow, they showed up.
That is not an easy thing to do.

Speaker 6 That was really what I was doing.

Speaker 2 Can I say, I thought she did because when Hillary's been on, it's been a little stiff. When other people have been on, it's been a little stiff.
I thought she handled it beautifully.

Speaker 2 I was surprised by how adept she was. She usually can be a little awkward, but she was quite good.
I think she likes Maya Rudolph. I think there was a real rapport between them.

Speaker 2 I thought that worked really well.

Speaker 2 It was interesting. And I also think that,

Speaker 2 and she also looked good. I hate to say that, but she looks younger than he does.

Speaker 2 She looks significantly more attractive. Yes.
And I know that's dumb, but it's the thing. It's the thing.
Dumb.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know. I'll work for handsome.

Speaker 6 he's handsome.

Speaker 2 What do you mean, dumb? It matters. It's hugely important.

Speaker 2 He looks really old.

Speaker 2 Really old. It looks really saddled and old.

Speaker 2 But interestingly, speaking of his top surrogate, Elon Musk, as I noted, Cardi being here fighting, Musk called the rapper a puppet following her endorsement of Harris in Wisconsin last week.

Speaker 2 Her response, I'm not a puppet, Elon. I'm a daughter of two immigrants' parents who had to work their ass off to provide for me.
P.S. Fix My Algorithm, and she didn't say please.

Speaker 2 On the latest episode of On With Cara Swisher, I assembled a panel of experts to look at Elon's role in the election. I thought that was the perfect thing for my show because he's been so active.

Speaker 2 And I got the reporters who have broken a lot of these stories, whether it's on Putin or all manner of things,

Speaker 2 the million-dollar giveaway, whatever. Reporter Zoe Schiffer talked about how Elon's ex-management provides some hints about his potential future in government if Trump wins.
Let's listen.

Speaker 2 From Elon's perspective, he's like, look, I got rid of all these people. I save all these costs.
And the platform is still relatively functional.

Speaker 2 But it's one thing to have a relatively functional Twitter or X. It's another to have a semi-functional government.
And I think him deploying these same techniques in the U.S.

Speaker 2 government is a much scarier prospect.

Speaker 2 Anyway, you talked about a range of things.

Speaker 2 You know, Elon's really, as I said, I think it's the Elon election. You've talked about it being the podcast election.
Probably it's both.

Speaker 2 His on-the-ground canvas

Speaker 2 efforts, as you noted, seemed completely disorganized. Lots Lots of stories of

Speaker 2 putting people in trucks without windows, without seats and stuff like that, and not paying them and stranding them in Michigan.

Speaker 2 Do you think

Speaker 2 if he loses, I suspect they're going to point a lot of fingers at him and Trump, of course, but him in particular. I don't know.
What do you think? Is this. Yeah, it must, do you think?

Speaker 2 Or what do you think? We all concluded that he'll be fine in either administration.

Speaker 2 He'll be more irritating in the Trump administration and dangerous, but in the Harris administration, he's done rather well in the Biden administration, by the way.

Speaker 2 So what are your thoughts of where he goes in each scenario?

Speaker 6 Well, we talked about it in this last episode.

Speaker 6 That's the problem with autocratic tendencies is that it pays to support the autocrat because there's, you're right, there'll be no downside for him as far as I can tell if Harris wins.

Speaker 6 And also, I think if Harris loses,

Speaker 6 people are going to correctly, in my view, blame Biden's narcissism and the Democratic Party's consensual hallucination that this guy had any business running for re-election.

Speaker 6 And two, a huge tactical error,

Speaker 6 not rising to the level of why she might, you know, why she didn't do better than she did in retrospect. It was a huge tactical error for Biden

Speaker 6 not to kiss Elon's ass.

Speaker 2 And I know that sounds, I know we want to say, I agree.

Speaker 6 I know we want to say, good for them. They don't, they don't kowtow to Elon.
To have an EV summit and not invite him, keep in mind, Musk did vote for Obama.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 as much, you know, neither of us are fans of Elon Musk. He's an outstanding surrogate for Trump because there are few people in this nation or globally who more young men look up to.
And

Speaker 6 he's robust. He's in it.
He's unafraid. He's out there for them.

Speaker 6 It's just too bad. And another talking about unforced errors.

Speaker 6 It's an unforced error that Biden didn't kiss his ass and do what everyone does for Trump, and that is kiss his ass to get him on his side.

Speaker 6 But if he loses, I don't, I don't, my sense right now, Musk is, okay, Twitter, he's cut the value by 75%,

Speaker 6 but SpaceX is on a roll.

Speaker 2 SpaceX is on a roll. That

Speaker 6 one of the most seminal images, I mean, quite frankly, I think two of the most...

Speaker 6 The images of the year, I think it's a toss-up between Trump pumping his fists in the air after the failed assassination attempt or that rocket being captured by those metal chopsticks.

Speaker 6 And that's Trump and Musk.

Speaker 2 Yeah, although I give you a third, the picture of Kamala Harris's niece looking up at her. I thought that was a beautiful photo.
Do you know the one with her hair?

Speaker 2 I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 Beautiful. That was a beautiful picture.

Speaker 6 It kind of depends who wins, right? What will be seen as the end of the year?

Speaker 2 Oh, I think the Trump one was quite a picture. I mean, I'm talking just pictures.

Speaker 2 I think think those two, to me, Harris with the niece and Trump, I thought those were the most

Speaker 2 important political pictures of the year. Yeah, I think that's sweet.

Speaker 6 I think one's more sweet than historic. I think, anyways, but there's no getting around it.

Speaker 6 Musk is an outstanding surrogate for Trump, and it was a self-inflicted wound that we shouldn't have made to alienate him the way the Democratic Party did.

Speaker 2 And I'll put some insight in here. When that happened,

Speaker 2 two things. I heard from Musk a lot about it.
And he was like, why are they doing this? Why are this is shitty? He was, he could not stop talking about it in a very manic way, I would call it.

Speaker 2 We were speaking then.

Speaker 2 And I was sort of perplexed. I was perplexed too.
I was like, huh, you kind of do, even though you're an egomaniac, you kind of deserve that one. And I was like, well, it's the union thing, I assume.

Speaker 2 But he wasn't taking any of that. He's like, I was like, it's the union thing.
Don't get, don't get your nose out of joint. And which made sense to me.

Speaker 2 But then, and when I, I call, I actually called people in the Biden administration. I'm like, this was a big fucking error.
This guy is pissed. They're like, oh, come on.
He's not that pissed.

Speaker 2 He gets it. I'm like, no, no.
He's pissed. Like, in a way, I said, this is not a normal person.
And he has normal emotions. He thinks he's the father of all electric cars at this moment.
And so

Speaker 2 in many ways.

Speaker 2 Well, no, but technically, no, but yes. Yes.
He was the one that pushed me to the bottom. I'm sorry.

Speaker 6 We're going to have a TV summit, invite the person in charge of the Pontiac Leaf, but not Tesla.

Speaker 2 I know that. I get that.
I get it.

Speaker 2 This is what I said to the Biden people. And I thought it was an error the whole time, although

Speaker 2 I thought they traded a very short-term thing, which is the unions being anger at him and one being Musk being. And I always felt Musk was more dangerous than the unions to them.
But you're right.

Speaker 2 That really was a moment for him. And he overdid it at the same time.
He could have gotten over it, but he wasn't going to if they understood him as a character.

Speaker 2 And he really does have a Jesus complex. So, in any case,

Speaker 2 we will see what happens. Let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Speaker 2 Dan Harris is the host of the 10% Happier podcast. Welcome, Dan.

Speaker 11 Thanks for having me. It's so weird.
I'm sure you hear this all the time. So weird to be on a show that I've listened to for so many years.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, welcome. We're so thrilled you're here.
And I am 15% happier right now for you to be here.

Speaker 2 Anyway, because we're here on Election Day, this is publishing on Election Day, we want to share some numbers. 69% of American adults say that 2024 election is a source of stress.

Speaker 2 That's mostly Scott Galloway in that survey, but it's a survey of the American Psychology Association. 72% are worried that the election results could lead to violence.
I am too, actually, shockingly.

Speaker 2 I usually am not that way. So let's start off sort of high level.

Speaker 2 What's your advice for people, specifically Scott Galloway, in terms of managing stress and anxiety on Election Day and the days that follow? On both sides, please.

Speaker 11 I mean, Scott,

Speaker 11 whose career I follow quite closely, is actually doing the thing that I would recommend as a first step. There's a great expression.
I did not come up with this,

Speaker 11 but the expression is action absorbs anxiety. So I follow Scott on social media.
He's out there talking about what he believes in. He's taking action.

Speaker 11 And we all have the capacity to exert our agency, even though, of course, none of us can single-handedly affect the outcome or control the outcome for sure.

Speaker 11 But you can take action by joining a campaign or doing what Scott does, is speaking out publicly publicly to the extent that you have that capacity.

Speaker 11 It doesn't even have to be related to politics, however. You can just volunteer at a soup kitchen or an animal shelter.
You can just be more useful to the people in your environment.

Speaker 11 There's a little, you know,

Speaker 11 little inner inquiry I ask people to do, which is what does it feel like when you hold the door open for somebody? It feels good if you're paying attention, and that feeling is infinitely scalable.

Speaker 2 Go, I like that idea. You know, it's interesting.
A lot of my friends are, who are driving me crazy, actually, because they're very stressful people.

Speaker 2 They've all gone out canvassing and they are so much happier.

Speaker 2 You know, even if they see people who don't agree with them, every one of them is now not irritating in the way they were, which was interesting. So you recommend making wearing a team sport.

Speaker 2 Can you explain that?

Speaker 11 I mean, we're doing that right now.

Speaker 11 This is

Speaker 11 based in an enormous amount of evidence. So just for some context, there was this study that you guys may have heard of, the Harvard Study for Adult Development.

Speaker 11 It's been going on for nearly 90 years, and they've been following several generations of families in the Boston area to try to figure out

Speaker 11 what contributes to a long, happy, and healthy life. And

Speaker 11 the number one variable is not sleep or exercise or whether you're achieving ketosis. All of those things, I guess, are helpful.
But the number one variable is the quality of your relationships.

Speaker 11 That is what matters most. Why? Because stress is generally what kills us.

Speaker 11 And the most effective way to regulate stress for a social species, such as Homo sapiens, the most effective way is through quality relationships.

Speaker 11 Hence the expression, also not mine, never worry alone. Make your anxiety a team sport.

Speaker 11 Call your mom, call your friends, talk about it with people who you respect. That is, I think, probably the best way to get through this.

Speaker 2 Interesting. So, Dan, essentially, you are a less neurotic, friendlier, better-haired person than Scott, but you're the same person.
So

Speaker 2 here you are. Scott, ask your question.
You're his doppelganger in a weird way.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so let me just say, bicep friend, I love Dan and his content. And

Speaker 6 I'd steal your sayings. I'd say I'm 10% more Jewish now.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I heard you say that, actually.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 your content for me is a little too optimistic.

Speaker 6 I don't like that part of it. But what has really moved me with your content is you come across is just so so shit together and like the guy you would want in a crisis.

Speaker 6 Like you remind me, like if you're ever in a movie, you're going to be that medic on D-Day just running from injured person to injured person. You come across as so,

Speaker 6 quite frankly, just shit together and can handle everything. And you've been very transparent about your struggles and anxiety.

Speaker 6 Even so much, I've seen videos of you de-planing because you couldn't handle it, because you were having a panic attack.

Speaker 6 And I think it's really important that

Speaker 6 people see who they perceive to be very strong men having that sort of vulnerability. So

Speaker 6 for those of us who do struggle with anxiety,

Speaker 6 talk a little bit about your struggles with it, where it's happened recently, and what kind of cognitive therapy or behavioral therapy you've incorporated that has helped you.

Speaker 11 Well, thank you for that.

Speaker 11 One of the little jokes I make is that some people teach from the mountaintop and I teach from the fetal position. And

Speaker 11 I'm not

Speaker 11 some sort of perfected being.

Speaker 11 And occasionally people will say to me, you know, you're pretty anxious for a meditation guy or a happiness quasi-expert. And my answer is you have the causality wrong.

Speaker 11 I am into meditation and well-being because I'm so anxious. And,

Speaker 11 you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think this is, first of all, we're at a time where we have unprecedented anxiety in our culture.

Speaker 11 But the good news is there are ways to treat it. I'll talk about two that have been very helpful for me.

Speaker 11 Not only am I anxious, I also have panic disorder. So that can show up in public speaking or in claustrophobia.
So on a plane or in an elevator. Two things that are helpful for me.

Speaker 11 are one is called exposure therapy. And this is just everyday bravery.

Speaker 11 Being afraid of something and doing it anyway saddling up anyway and approaching the things that scare you as counterintuitive as this is if you can carefully and slowly and systematically approach the things that scare you that is the way through anxiety for many people myself included and especially with panic so um elevators are have been tough for me historically and so i'll ride an elevator at the westchester mall with my shrink for an hour and it's uncomfortable but that's how you get over over it.

Speaker 11 The second thing for me is

Speaker 11 learning how, and to me, this is just so radically powerful and such good news that you can rewire the way you talk to yourself.

Speaker 11 And so for me, just learning to

Speaker 11 talk back against my inner critic or my inner anxiety dragon in

Speaker 11 to channel my capacity to mentor other people and direct it toward myself has been really helpful.

Speaker 2 So, social media, of course, can be a source of stress and people will likely be doom scrolling as they do all the time now. Is it helpful to take a break or not?

Speaker 2 Because I think people can't, or news, more than just social media, but news consumption, like every little moment.

Speaker 11 Yes, this is a short answer. The slightly longer answer is

Speaker 2 we

Speaker 2 all

Speaker 11 have to make the call individually.

Speaker 11 But it's about, for me, it's about drawing the line between being an engaged citizen, an informed citizen, which is important, and being a crazy person.

Speaker 11 And we have to figure out how much is enough, how much can our nervous system handle. To me,

Speaker 11 one of the most powerful tools in terms of gauging this, in terms of walking this line, is mindfulness, which is, of course, the fruit of mindfulness meditation, which helps you have more self-awareness so that you might notice, oh, yeah, I'm on hour eight on X slash Twitter and I'm typing in all caps.

Speaker 11 Maybe it's time to put this thing down and take a nap.

Speaker 11 Or, you know, my stomach is rumbling. I haven't eaten.

Speaker 11 Or whatever it is, to have the self-awareness of what's happening in your body and mind so that you're not owned by it. Mindfulness is very helpful in that way, especially

Speaker 11 as it comes to the titration of your news consumption.

Speaker 2 Scott?

Speaker 6 So, Dan, you

Speaker 6 your career was, I mean, you essentially rose to be, I think, either the anchor or the co-anchor of Nightline. Is that right?

Speaker 11 Yeah, one of the co-anchors of Nightline.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 that's a pretty big seat.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 the majority of the anchors I know from broadcast television, whenever I speak to them, they're complaining about just how shitty their career and compensation and prospects have become because that business is melting.

Speaker 6 And you managed to transition to, I think you actually have a bigger footprint footprint right now than you used to, maybe.

Speaker 6 You're one of the few that kind of, you know, got out and

Speaker 2 made it out.

Speaker 6 What advice you, well, let me, let me go back. What were the pivotal moments?

Speaker 6 And how did you manage to do that successfully when so, quite frankly, just a lot of people have had a really difficult time transitioning out of old media into new media?

Speaker 11 I mean, it's brutal in old media. I'm not telling either of you anything you don't know.

Speaker 11 And I started to really think about this many years ago. I remember as early as 2008, 2009, thinking,

Speaker 11 I better build a personal brand. And I didn't know what that was going to be.
At first,

Speaker 11 I had

Speaker 11 a little show on YouTube about Indie Rock. I'm a big Indie Rock fan.
That show did horribly, and most of the comments were really, really negative.

Speaker 11 So I ended up euthanizing that.

Speaker 11 And then around the same time, I was starting to get interested in meditation and mindfulness.

Speaker 11 And I had this entrepreneurial sense that, yeah, there's a lot of science that shows that this stuff is really good for you. And most of the books I'm reading about this are really annoying.

Speaker 11 And so I thought, well, let me write a book that tells really embarrassing stories and uses the word fuck a lot and see if I can, you know, get people who otherwise would reject this material interested in it.

Speaker 11 And yeah, so that became a book called 10% Happier. And that ended up sort of swallowing my life.
And

Speaker 11 I spent a lot of time trying to do two things at once, maintaining my career at ABC while

Speaker 11 becoming this traveling evangelist for meditation. And most of that was kind of based in fear.
But eventually, a couple of years ago, I was able to make the leap and

Speaker 11 retire and just do this full time.

Speaker 6 When did you start the pod?

Speaker 2 Yeah, how did you start? What advice would you give to people still there? I bet they call you, correct?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, I hear about this all the time.

Speaker 11 I think

Speaker 11 I did it incorrectly in that I waited too long to leap. But I think you can start developing your personal brand while you are within the belly of the beast.

Speaker 11 And there's a way in which being associated with a major organization, for me, it was incredibly helpful. I was employed by Disney, which owns ABC News.
And that allowed me

Speaker 11 an enormous, that gave me just a huge platform from which to build. So I think it's possible to do this straddle.

Speaker 11 But I mean, the good, the good news, and I mean, I'd be curious to hear from the two of you, but my reading of the media landscape is that while

Speaker 11 it's largely a blightscape, the one bright area is what the three of us are doing, which is building a brand around a distinctive voice and figuring out

Speaker 11 what you can add and then building around that. Now, there's never been a time better than right now for that.

Speaker 2 Would you agree? Yeah, absolutely. We love it.

Speaker 2 We never done better, I think, right, Scott? Don't you think? In a lot of ways? Or happier? Well,

Speaker 2 we're at least 10%.

Speaker 6 We're going to need a bigger boat. The bottom line is

Speaker 6 you can have a third of the audience that you used to have.

Speaker 6 But it requires a tenth, if not a 20th, of the resources, making it a much more profitable economic venture.

Speaker 6 And I mean, I can't imagine the infrastructure you had to have around you to produce Nightline. Yeah.
And

Speaker 6 you can garner maybe 50% of the audience or a quarter of the audience. You have a top 200 podcast on a fraction of the resources, making it a better economic model.

Speaker 6 Having said that, the unfortunate thing about podcasting, which is taking over everything that's been digitized, is there's tremendous inequality.

Speaker 6 And that is, you're talking to three people who are in the top 200 podcasts of a world that produces 600,000 a week. So if unless you're in the 0.001%, this is a brutal industry as well.

Speaker 6 But if you get there, it's where media is headed. It's just a better economic model.

Speaker 11 Yeah, but podcasts are also happy. Podcasts and happier, I totally agree with you, Kara.

Speaker 11 Podcasts are really brutal. However, I do think social is a place that's become more democratic in that as we've moved from the social graph to the interest graph.

Speaker 11 I can create a video with very few followers that reaches millions of people because the algorithms have changed recently.

Speaker 11 So I think there are places where you can build an audience that are, that would be easier and more hospitable than the podcast space.

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. All right.
A couple more questions about the election. I have just two more.
For parents out there, how can we avoid passing our anxiety on to our kids? We have a lot of kids.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you have kids, but I assume you do.

Speaker 2 And what will you be doing on election night to stay calm as you're, and maybe you're not watching results? Scott is not watching, he's going out. I am not going out at all, and I'm going to read.

Speaker 2 You're avoiding it, Scott?

Speaker 6 Well, I live in London, and generally speaking,

Speaker 6 this really does, I don't, I, I don't know if I'm

Speaker 6 older, and so I, I have a better perspective on how important this election is, or I'm just older and more stressed. But because I wouldn't know, I'm not going to know anything on Wednesday morning.

Speaker 6 Tomorrow night, I'm just going to, I'm going out with some buddies and I'm just going to enjoy myself. And I'm going to wake up Wednesday morning and freak out then.
But yeah, I'm not going to engage.

Speaker 6 Oh, I'm going on Brian Williams on Amazon for a few minutes. But other than that, I'm not going to engage.

Speaker 11 Karen, you're going to read?

Speaker 2 I'm going to read, too. I'm interviewing some historians right after the election, so I'm reading history books.
That's what I'm doing.

Speaker 6 I think you're totally posing. I don't believe you.

Speaker 2 I will watch

Speaker 6 TV. I'll watch TVs on.

Speaker 2 No, just one. Just one, and I'll flip among them.
I think I'll watch Radioview. I'll watch poetry.
No, I'm not going to go to the class. But I'm not going to a party.
That's for sure.

Speaker 2 I'm not going out because I just can't. I just can't do it.
There's lots of parties, but I'm not going to any of them.

Speaker 6 What are you doing, Dan?

Speaker 11 So just to respond to all of that, first of all,

Speaker 11 I think it's great to do whatever is in your best interest to keep yourself sane. And as a parent myself, I have a nine-year-old.
That is what osmotically is likely to land for your children.

Speaker 11 Better than any lecture you could give them is taking care of yourself in a way that they observe and will, I think, absorb.

Speaker 11 And in terms of history, there's some evidence that reading history actually is a bomb in the face of our current tumult because you can start to see that we've been through horrible stuff before.

Speaker 11 Would you rather be where we are right now?

Speaker 2 Or on the lip of World War II or the Civil War?

Speaker 11 Personally, I'll take today.

Speaker 11 So I think I hear a lot of wisdom in both of your election evening plans. And also, Scott, I'll be on with Brian Williams as well.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 6 I'm on at like 4 a.m. They know they have you up first.

Speaker 2 It's as tight as a tick in a da da da. He'll have a million of those, right?

Speaker 6 He'll be like, that's like watching a moose drive a convertible. And everyone, I don't know what that means, but it sounds good.

Speaker 2 You know, you guys are going to the nicest place.

Speaker 2 Mr. Williams is very calming.
I think that's a good choice.

Speaker 6 They have to have you on if you have a prime membership. So 87% of Americans are back at this on.

Speaker 2 I am just, I'm going going to just watch Rachel Maddow. That's all I'm going to do because she makes me shocked.

Speaker 6 Jesus, and that's going to help your stress.

Speaker 2 It is. She is.
The lesbians make me calm.

Speaker 6 That's like two Subarus colliding into each other at 100%.

Speaker 2 Not just the militia etherage.

Speaker 6 Oh my God. So inappropriate.
A Subaru Forrester and a Subaru Impressa had a head-on collision on election night.

Speaker 2 If Trump wins,

Speaker 2 we have to initiate the militia etheridge. And so we've got to move on.
So anyway,

Speaker 2 I think I'm going to stay home and just be calm about it. Anyway, Amanda, of course, is like lost, is already losing her mind already.
So we'll see where it goes. She already warned me.

Speaker 2 She goes, I will not be good if he wins. I was like, okay, great.
Sounds fantastic. Anyway, Dan,

Speaker 2 are you writing 15% happier next? What is your next thing?

Speaker 11 I am working on

Speaker 11 a book that I've been writing for six years that I have not been able to get right, which really moves from mindfulness, which was the subject of my first book, to, and I don't know know the right word for this, but I'm going to use the word love or warmth or friendliness or this capacity we all have for compassion that we can direct not only toward other people, but also ourselves.

Speaker 11 That seems like the missing skill in an anxiety epidemic and in the middle of a really divisive time. So that's what I'm thinking about.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 you mentioned, you have a nine-year-old that just won or?

Speaker 11 Just one.

Speaker 6 So I really relate to some of the stuff you talk about around anxiety and panic attacks. I also get them rarely but consistently when I'm speaking.

Speaker 6 And one of the things I found really helps when I'm feeling stressed is time with my boys.

Speaker 6 In general, my boys just raise my stress level, but when I'm really stressed, I find they bring it down because they can be so awful. It demands that I go out of my own head.

Speaker 6 Any thoughts around time with kids?

Speaker 11 I mean, to me, this goes back to action absorbs anxiety. If you can be useful to anybody else, it will pull you out of your stuff.

Speaker 11 And so parenting, for all of its vexations, can do that. And you can up the effectiveness of that by just tuning in to what does it feel like if I'm taking care of another being? It feels pretty good.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 let's turn the volume up on that and turn the volume down on our own self-centered rumination.

Speaker 11 I mean, another of my little dumb quips is that the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass.

Speaker 2 And I think that's where we will end it. That's really exciting.
The view is so much better.

Speaker 2 It is, you will be 26% happier if you pull your head out of your ass. That's my feeling on that one.
Dan, you're fantastic. We love your podcast.
We love all your work. Thank you.

Speaker 2 And thank you so much. I already feel better.
And you can listen to Dan on 10% happier. Thanks, Dan.
Bye. Wasn't that lovely? Isn't Dan lovely?

Speaker 6 So you didn't come through. You purposely tried to get in between me and Emily Rodokowski, but I want to be friends with Dan Harris.
So I need you to set us up for a mandate. Now,

Speaker 6 I want Emily, but I need Dan.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 I realized you're a little jelly of me and Emily's budding relationship, but you can make up for it by setting me up with... I want to mandate with Dan.
I need that guy in my life.

Speaker 6 That guy just makes me feel calm.

Speaker 2 I will.

Speaker 6 He's a total baller. His hair is spectacular.
He's very handsome. He's very successful.
That's what I want to roll with. And I'll have lunch.

Speaker 2 Does he live in D.C.?

Speaker 6 Seems like the kind of guy would live in D.C.

Speaker 2 I don't care.

Speaker 6 I don't care where he lives, but I go to dinner with him and people are like, oh, there's Scott with Dan Harris. I always knew Scott was more interesting than he seems.

Speaker 2 And people,

Speaker 2 I will make.

Speaker 2 I will make

Speaker 6 a play date.

Speaker 2 So next time you're in. Set up a play date.
That's your job. I will set up a play date.

Speaker 6 That's your job.

Speaker 2 Scott Galloway. I will do that.
That will be your birthday present. By the way, everybody, wish Scott happy.

Speaker 6 The birthday that will never end.

Speaker 2 The last weekend. It will never end.
No, I forgot. But it was his birthday just recently.
So

Speaker 2 congratulations. Thank you very much, Carol.
All right. We'll be back for, we're going to change wins and fails to predictions, and then we'll do wins and fails on Thursday.

Speaker 2 So we're obviously going to predict about the election, and we will do that in a minute.

Speaker 6 Support for the show comes from Mint Mobile. If you're still overpaying for your wireless, it's time to start becoming more comfortable with saying no.

Speaker 6 Because at Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no.

Speaker 6 They mean no owner's contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS. So when they say no, they really mean it.

Speaker 6 Mint Mobile is letting you ditch overpriced wireless with plans starting at just $15 a month.

Speaker 6 All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Without the job dropping, monthly bills are unexpected overages.

Speaker 6 Plus, you can use your own phone with any Min Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Ready to say yes to saying no?

Speaker 6 Make the switch at mintmobile.com slash pivot. That's mintmobile.com slash pivot.
Upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 per month.

Speaker 6 Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan.
Taxes and fees extra. See Mintmobile for details.

Speaker 6 Support for the show comes from Hype Drive. I've spent plenty of hours speaking to entrepreneurs, and the one issue that always seems to pop up, they struggle with their sales process.

Speaker 6 It's all too common to jump between back-and-forth emails, scattered notes, and forgotten follow-ups, and spending more time chasing paperwork than actually closing. That's where PipeDrive comes in.

Speaker 6 PipeDrive is a top-rated CRM tool for small to medium businesses. With PipeDrive, sales teams are quick to close deals at a much faster rate.

Speaker 6 The visual sales pipeline shows you where every deal is, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next, all in one dashboard.

Speaker 6 Plus, PipeDrive lets you automate your follow-ups so no leads slip through the cracks, and its AI features can analyze your sales process to take your business to the next level.

Speaker 6 It's a powerful yet simple CRM built by salespeople for salespeople. Join the over 100,000 companies already using PipeDrive.
Right now, when you use my link, you'll get a 30-day free trial.

Speaker 6 No credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/slash pivot to get started.
That's pipe drive.com/slash pivot, and you can be up and running in minutes.

Speaker 2 Okay, Scott Galloway,

Speaker 2 prediction from you, obviously, about the election, unless you want to talk about something else.

Speaker 6 Well, I'll do too, because we're supposed to be tech and business. So I'll try and do something about tech and business.
And then obviously people

Speaker 6 either come here for a prediction or either will love or hate this prediction. But I think there's a really decent chance.

Speaker 6 I think Intel is probably the ripest large, it's not large cap now, it's mid-cap. It's the ripest candidate I've seen in a while for a take private.

Speaker 6 That is, it's got outstanding assets, decent cash flow.

Speaker 6 I think actually a pretty talented CEO, depressed stock price, and it needs to be out of the public view or public markets for a good 12 to 36 months, similar to what Dell did.

Speaker 6 The investments they need to make, the layoffs they need to make, quite frankly, the efficiencies they need would best be done as a private company, not a public.

Speaker 6 And it's got so many outstanding assets in terms of its management, its suppliers, its supply chain, its vendor relationship, its customer relationships,

Speaker 6 its brand, its global brand. It's arguably one of the probably the 10 most recognized tech brands in the world.
It to me, Kara, just screams.

Speaker 2 Are you up to something?

Speaker 6 I am not personally no. Are you up to something? It just screams.
Take private to me.

Speaker 2 This would be,

Speaker 6 I got to think that this would be one of the better.

Speaker 6 It's just so fucking ripe.

Speaker 6 It's about to fall off the tree for a big private equity firm to come in and put together a a great investor group and take it private in my view my other prediction is simple i think this poll uh out of iowa shows there's real uh surprising momentum it just feels everything is coming our way and then that just the feet on the street operation organized by the harris campaign because of the money and the organization here i don't even think this is i'm predicting kara that it's not just a win for harris it's a decisive win Sorry, Scott, I had to change to my iPhone because we had a power surge.

Speaker 2 I'm blaming Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 6 I said that Kamlo was going to win and was going to be decisive.

Speaker 2 Well, Scott, I think I couldn't agree with you more. I think it's something I've been saying for a long time.

Speaker 2 I think women are the quiet majority of people who are going to be active in this election.

Speaker 2 It doesn't mean that Trump hasn't done very well, given all his, all the hair on this guy, and there's a lot of it.

Speaker 2 But, you know,

Speaker 2 he was a president, and so there is that popularity element of it.

Speaker 2 I just think the people he's aimed at are people who are low-propensity voters, and they don't leave the basement because they're stoned. Like that's the people he's trying to get to vote.

Speaker 2 I think the last week, all the mistakes have been massive and really significant, much more so than people realize. I think reporters have spent far too much time on Twitter.
And so they think that

Speaker 2 the world is more dire than it is because Elon's managed to create a terrible environment there. And so media reporters just cannot possibly imagine being pro-Harris at this point.

Speaker 2 So that's why they're doing that. And they spend too much time focused on polls and easily gamed predictions markets.

Speaker 2 My biggest thing, two things have been, and then you can react is one, the amount of money she's raised from small donors says a lot to me. It is about motivated people.

Speaker 2 I do think women do vote and they don't, and they're tired of incels. They're tired of rapists.
They're tired of being told what to do with their bodies.

Speaker 2 And they are much more motivated than the men who are just like, I like a tough guy, like that kind of thing. I don't think they like him that much.

Speaker 2 Lastly, today in the in the last week and a half at least, his rallies have been sparsely attended.

Speaker 2 And if right now there's pictures of him in North Carolina on the final day of the election, half empty halls in North Carolina, it says a lot to me. These people are tired of the show.

Speaker 2 And as a longtime watcher of The Apprentice,

Speaker 2 let me just say, I got tired of the show in the last season and got stopped watching it. And that's what it feels like.

Speaker 2 And you can decry me for watching The Apprentice, but it was a good show.

Speaker 2 So that's where I feel. I think she's going to perform better.

Speaker 2 But I have to tell you, I think he's going to do everything possible to stay out of jail, including declaring victory very early in the evening. So it could be a very long few days.

Speaker 2 And I'm worried a little bit more than probably you about violence.

Speaker 6 So I agree with Anat, Nat. I do get a little bit defensive.

Speaker 6 I think there's some misandry in there, Kara, when you refer to young men as saying women are tired of rapists and incels and are getting stoned in their basements.

Speaker 6 I don't think the Democratic Party has done itself any favors by ignoring the struggles that young men face. And I think the Democratic Party has lost a lot of potential voters.

Speaker 6 Young men are actually as in favor of gender equality as young women.

Speaker 6 They just don't feel that the Democratic Party, they feel the Democratic Party by purposely advocating

Speaker 6 or stating that they try and advantage 76% of the population, is not advantaging that 74%, but it's discriminating against the 26% that are young men. And I think sometimes we have have a tendency to

Speaker 6 stereotype them and not recognize the nuance and just the very real struggles that young men face. I don't think the Democratic Party's draped itself in glory there.

Speaker 2 I 100% agree. And I think it's one thing Harris should spend a lot of time doing, bringing in people like you and Richard Reeves and stuff like that.
Cause I think it is a crisis.

Speaker 2 I'm just talking political strategy. I don't think this is a dependable group of voters.

Speaker 2 I think you're right.

Speaker 2 I think you're right. That's what I mean.
And I think we have to. I have three sons.
It matters a great deal to me how young men feel about their lives.

Speaker 2 And we want to bring them in and make them feel better. And not, I don't love that a lot of, say, men of color right now are like, oh, Trump doesn't like us.

Speaker 2 That's why I'm not voting for him because he's saying we're garbage. I don't like that either.
It's like they should feel good about this country and they should feel good about their role in it.

Speaker 2 And, but I do think women have had it, really had it with, and I, I, I joke, I'm not saying incels.

Speaker 2 You made this argument yourself, which was ins, you know like women are tired of being like told what to do with our body really and truly and um i think that's the quiet thing that men are now saying out loud about uh being unhappy i think women are very unhappy underneath in a way that will motivate them to vote and we should we should begin to bring ourselves together as a group of people and i i i would recommend you watching the will i am video of the song because we used to get along not as well as we could have but better than we do now and this all this garbage has to stop the gar everything with garbage has to stop we're not garbage we're the american people it has to stop and hopefully that will mean kicking trump to the curb finally because he is a part of our personality that exists but shouldn't anymore word word my sister word

Speaker 2 sister brother well we'll see we'll see on thursday we could be totally depressed um but we're here for it we're here for it and we'll do whatever we can but we're still going to build a great country uh regardless of what happens.

Speaker 2 But we want Kamala to win because she's super cool.

Speaker 6 But I think that's

Speaker 6 an important point. Something that's unproductive is the catastrophizing on both sides to claim America is over if he or she wins.
America has endured worse than he or she.

Speaker 6 And while I do think certain groups,

Speaker 6 in my view, young people who would incur deficits or what are effectively tax increases that will be unprecedented, obviously women in terms of a continued loss of domain over their own bodily autonomy.

Speaker 6 But to believe that America is not going to be around in four years if he or she wins just doesn't recognize history or how enduring and outstanding America is.

Speaker 2 I agree with you, Scott, and I think it is. And I do like her message, which is much more about unity on the way out.

Speaker 2 His is about the fluoride, whether you should have fluoride in the water and al Capone. We're done with that.
And I'm glad that she's doing a unity message at the end.

Speaker 2 Hopefully she can stick with that. And I hope she does if she becomes president.
And it would be a great moment in our history to have the first woman president of the United States. Just exciting.

Speaker 2 And I'd be just as excited if it was a Republican, honestly, as long as it was a good one.

Speaker 2 But I'm very excited about that.

Speaker 2 Anyway, Scott, read us out.

Speaker 6 Today's show was produced by Lara Neyman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Christine Driscoll. Ernie Rutod engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Bros. Mia Severio and Dan Shulon.

Speaker 6 Nishak 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 Box Media.

Speaker 6 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/slash pod. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.
Kara, I will see you on the other side.

Speaker 2 And go vote, everybody.