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That's O-D-O-O.com. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway. So, Scott, I spent the morning in the hospital to find out that I am very healthy. That was what I came away with. Are you sure you shouldn't be watching CNBC if you have health issues?
No. Kara, tell me about... I had a stomach ache, but it's not gone away. It might have been a bad tuna sandwich, but it still continues to exist.
And so I was worried because I've had it before. And so I went in. And I never go to the hospital. I haven't been there since I had a stroke many years ago.
And I did blood tests. They did ultrasounds. They did everything. And they literally were like, Nothing's wrong with you.
And now I guess I'll go right to ulcer next. But those are more a gallbladder. And you don't think it's stress? No.
It's stress from talking to you, perhaps. But no, no. You need to spend more time with me. No.
You know, I need the algebra of happiness is what I need. That's what I need. Go on. Number three on Amazon as of today.
One behind Melinda Gates. Curing malaria, blah, blah, blah. Let me talk about happiness. Wait, you're number three on the full list?
No, no, I'm sorry. Number 30. I'm number 30 on Amazon. 30 of the best selling books on Amazon.
What do you think is going to do on the New York Times bestseller list? You know, it's funny. I just said a thing to my publisher. How long do we need to be on the Amazon list to get on the New York Times publisher list?
And it's interesting that that list has actually changed a lot. And they're very disciplined about the inputs for who they put on the list. And now it's a total black box, which it should be because guys like Ray Dalio went out and bought a million books. So they could be a number one.
Dalio. I did a podcast with him. That's what he did. That's what he did.
Yeah, anyways, I'm number 30. But anyway, I was turning this back to me. So you don't know what it is. I just told you, you're fine.
Yes, they don't know what it is. They don't know what it is. Nothing. They have no information.
But I find medical care now just, like, ridiculous. Like, they never know what it is. But you do a lot of tests. They have the thing in my arm.
I was on a gurney. They moved me around on a gurney, which is always so incredibly respectful way to feel like an adult, which you don't. Like, you feel like a complete, like, 100 year old man. But otherwise, it was fine.
Everyone was lovely. The people were very lovely at the hospital. I had a similar thing happen. Enough of that back to me.
I had a similar thing happen. Five years ago, I closed my, at L2, we only did one round of financing. And I closed my round with General Catalyst. Nice people.
I was really thrilled with $17 million. By the way, we ended up spending none of it. But anyways. And right after it closed, like, we closed on Thursday or Friday.
On Sunday, I'm like, wow, I haven't gone to the bathroom in a while. And then by Wednesday, I realized I was turning into one of those allude Eskimos that never has a bowel movement. Oh, my gosh. Really, Scott.
I know this is too much detail, but I find my lower intestine is a chamselise. It's just very interesting to everybody. Anyway, so I go in and I give me a colonoscopy. And I come out and everything's fine.
And I was sort of worried, like, why did I just stop functioning? Do you know what the awesome thing is? I had that drug they gave Michael Jackson. And I'm like, okay.
Yeah. All of a sudden, I'm like, well, when are we starting on? It's over. You're fine.
I drove to the Hamptons. It was as if nothing ever happened. Like, I got some stuff. My brother's an anesthesiologist.
He uses a lot of propofol. That's just incredible. Yeah. Michael Jackson should not have been using it like that.
That's what my brother lectured me. You mean every night to go to sleep? Yes. At length.
My brother gave me the ins and outs of that. So, anyhow. Are we going to get on to actual things? Come on.
Exciting topic. But let's move on. Because I didn't. They offered me morphine.
You know, they immediately give you the opiates. And I said, no. And I right now feel like I should have said yes. Anyway, Chris used his op-ed.
Fallout continues. I obviously did a podcast with him on Friday, too. And he wrote the op-ed in the New York Times. And he's talked to a bunch of people.
Fallout from Chris Hughes? What do you think? So, I want to be upfront here. I'm a bit jealous or resentful that Chris Hughes, who seems to be more lucky than talented, my sense is that he shared a dorm room with this genius named Mark Zuckerberg.
And I do think the fact that Mark Zuckerberg continues to do tremendous damage to the world is a genius. And he made a ton of money. My sense is Chris wasn't even involved that long. But he wrote this op-ed and basically summarized everything we've all been saying for a while about Facebook.
And it's gotten a ton of traction, which is great. But it's really created a lot. It got a lot more attention than I would have guessed. Why do you think it did?
Because it summarized everything. And he said founder next to it. You know what? It's the correct question.
I have no idea. I've listened to him. I listen to him on the daily. I think he's a thoughtful guy.
I wonder if we're just at that point where the American public or people are just ready to kind of say, Okay, enough already. We need to do something about it. And the article, his opinion piece, was very well written. It was a little bit long, in my view.
I don't think most people have an attention span that long. But he kind of summarized everything that people have been saying. But I don't know why all of a sudden this, because a lot of people from Tim Wu, I mean, Roger McNamee has been saying a lot. A lot of people have been piling on.
And yet this seemed to be, for some reason, Chris Hughes says it and everyone is all over it. Where do you think it's going to go? There were rumors that the FTC was going to impose a 20-year monitoring process on Facebook. Could you imagine if Biden jumped in and said, Oh, these big tech companies suddenly.
What's interesting is, I don't know if you saw this week, but also the big news was that basically the courts said or the Supreme Court said the case can move forward against Apple in terms of their app store. Which I found interesting that that's happening before Facebook. But bottom line is Facebook should absolutely, FTC or DOJ action going after them to break them up. And even if it doesn't happen here, it's going to happen in another country.
They're going to make it so uncomfortable for them. And they can't, obviously a foreign sovereign nation can't break up a U.S.-based organization. But it definitely feels as if the worm has turned. And I don't know.
I don't know. I don't understand Washington well enough. Republican lobbyists reached out to me yesterday and said we should talk. And I'm like, Oh, the dark side is coming for me.
So I don't know what's going on. But I do think when every Democratic candidate is talking about it, when you hear from, and I've heard from everyone from Senator Warren's office to Senator Cruz's office, which means this might actually be the first bipartisan action in a while. But I think after a long time, I think winter is coming for Facebook and it just couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. That is Aria coming.
Oh, my gosh. No, no. By the way, Kara. No, we promised our Twitter followers.
You brought it up. No, you brought it up. You may not. You may not.
You may not go there. I'll say this. HBO needs to be more thoughtful about playing with my emotions like this. That's Divided made experience so far superior, is really happening on Apple.
So when Apple comes out with this, the natural defense will be, we're a minority. We have a small market share. How can you come after us? But if you look at market share by revenue, they're incredibly dominant.
Mm-hmm. Yes, that's true. It's true. But anyway, these are very problematic things to go after.
And again, in that case, Apple's going to really defend that one. That's right at the heart of what they do in terms of controlling things. All right, very quickly, away raising $100 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. They're obviously a luggage company.
They were one of our sponsors at one point. And I have one of their luggage. They're very nice luggage. They've opened some stores, obviously, around the place.
But now they're going to go into all kinds of travel needs. What do you think? So you have, well, first off, you own a piece of Away. Do you like it?
My son loves it. Why does he love it? He loves, loves, loves it. He doesn't like all the gugaws with the plugging in of the phone.
He doesn't do it. He doesn't care about that. It's actually irritating because he has to take it off every time he gets on a plane because the plane's there. But he loves the luggage itself.
He really does. I'm not sure why he's so attached to it given there's plenty of others that are like that. But that was their the foam thing was their special feature. But he loves it and he likes the brand.
I'm fine with it. It's, you know, it's a good suitcase. What do you think? I think they've done an incredible job.
And the key to building, in my viewpoint, almost as important as the company you're building and that is management, great execution, is you got to look at the category you're going into hoping that it's ripe for disruption or that there's a bunch of fat and happy incumbents. So and we talk about this. I think Tesla comes undone because I just think the auto industry is actually fairly well run and efficient. Facebook and Google, their success is they went after the fattest and happiest $60 billion carcass of broadcast media.
And if you think about luggage, luggage, in my view, is one of the least competitive categories in the consumer world. How many great names? We've known a bunch. You know, in the tech industry, we have all the trendy ones like Tumi and the others.
Tumi's been around forever and they have another product. There's like lots of things that you wear on your back, like bicycle messenger things in San Francisco. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of those people. Topo, Topo?
Topo's another one. There's a bunch of trendy ones. That's the weakest flex in the world, Topo. Well, you know, but I'm saying there's a lot of trendy backpack ones, but suitcases, no.
Whatever. Brooklyn, whatever they call it. Whatever. Look, the bottom line is it's a big category and there are very few categories, consumer categories like this that have such a lack of great brands and great retail.
So this category was incredibly ripe to be disrupted. And by the way, yeah, right. Samsonite is basically saying, don't have sex with me. I travel and don't have sex with me.
That's what it says when you get on a Samsonite bag. I use this. Why does he love it? He loves it.
Why does he love it? Don't judge me. Anyways, I'm trying to buy less stuff and spend more money on experiences specifically. That's me alone at a bar drinking until I'm shitty drunk.
Those are experiences, too. That is a happy moment for you, but go ahead. Anyways, how do you know I'm into you? I don't look at my shoes.
I look at yours. I'm an introvert at a bar. Anyways, so one of my favorite, literally my favorite things in the world is I bought a piece of Rimowa luggage. Oh, yeah, that's a good luggage.
Oh my God, I'm so German. I'm so cool. Me and Gwyneth Paltrow. That's how the big dog rolls when he's getting on Mosaic class pre-boarding on JetBlue with my Rimowa.
It's a beautiful piece of luggage. All right. It's gorgeous. Anyway, I'm sorry, Away.
Quickly, because we have to get to an ad break to pay for this. I love this company. I love this company. Female founders backed by Forerunner Ventures.
And I was curious about Forerunner Ventures because I met them at this conference. And I went to their website. Oh my God, it's going to start raining frogs. It's all females who are partners in the land.
We had her at our events many times. You weren't paying attention. We've known about her for a while. Well, at least she was smart enough to introduce you to Kara Swisher.
Introduce yourself to Kara Swisher. No, she's just smart. She's just been in a lot of stuff. Very nice.
I usually follow who's a toad, but this time I didn't. But anyways, this venture group in a way, it's like they are breaking through the sea of white guys in pleated khakis and forerunners. I went to their website who backed Away. And it's all women except for one guy.
And I pray he hopes HR, he runs HR. I think that would be perfect. The one dude runs HR, I hope. Anyways, Away, a really cool store, a fantastic and really interesting product.
And DTX are the direct-to-consumer market. And my Yoda on this is Tim Armstrong. I texted him this morning and I said, Can you give me something smart to say about direct-to-consumer companies? And what he said, what you're seeing happen is that big investors don't want to buy IPOs because they're so ridiculously overpriced, as evidenced by Lyft and Uber.
That they're moving further down the food chain as companies stay private longer and they're going into private companies. And there's just a wash of capital or just a huge wash of capital in a way at $1.2. Was it $1.2 billion? $1.4.
Oh my gosh. I mean, that's amazing. It's hard to imagine how they grow into that valuation. It feels like not a good idea to me, but okay.
For the investors. Yeah. Yeah. But their stores are great.
Well, that's a fair point. So according to Tim, the DTX space has probably declined in value across all valuations 20% to 30% just in the last three to six months as people realize that a really cool toothbrush probably isn't worth a billion dollars. There's Quip. The company that just raised at a two plus billion dollar valuation is Warby Parker, which again, the key component there in addition to great execution, fat and happy incumbent, right?
Also, I love their glasses. I get them all the time. They do a great job. They do a great job.
But remember, we used to buy glasses $700 from blah, blah, blah. Who owns that? I don't know how they do it. I don't care.
I'm taking their investment. They do a fantastic job. All right. All right.
When we get back, we're going to hear your wins and fails and also your predictions. Thanks very much. Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?
Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.
And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com.
That's O-D-O-O.com. Support for the show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end.
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Learn more at harvey.ai. Scott. Sarah. Wins and fails.
What's going on? You go first. Fail is my stomachache that I've had for 24 hours now. No, fail.
The abortion laws across the South, at least in Alabama lawmakers in particular, to vote to effectively ban abortion in the state. One of the statistics I saw was that they left out cases. They're so bad, they left out cases. They shouldn't have done this at all, but of rape and incest.
And the doctors who will, if the doctors do it, they get like 99 years in prison, which is more than the people who committed rape and incest get. It's just insane. It's insanity what's going on down there. And they're trying to get, obviously, the case in front of the Supreme Court.
But what a horrible, what a horrible way to do such a thing. It's as if a lot of stuff we just sort of took for granted as conventional wisdom. It's as if what we thought were known knowns. Don't call the FBI scum.
Don't insult the judge based on his ethnicity. And now a woman's right to family planning. We incorrectly, or at least I did, thought that five, 10 years ago that that was kind of we checked that box. I got on Fox on two weeks.
I'm talking about it. If you can't hold your own on Fox, you can't hold your own. That's not true. Neil Cavuto, who have already both been interviewers.
Okay, if you can't hold your own on Fox, you can't hold your own on America. That's different. Sean Hannity, would you go on Sean Hannity? All right, then get out of the kitchen.
Hannity's not, is Hannity moderating those town halls? He's not gonna moderate. They're gonna bring on someone sane like Shepard. I only know about this all because my mother watches it.
I don't know. Elizabeth, you want into this, or Senator Warren, you want into the kitchen, get used to it. Go on Fox. Okay, you're hard on Elizabeth.
At least she's causing some stuff. She's saying something. She's saying some stuff. That's actually saying something.
She's got proposals. She's got policies. I got a plan. She's got plans.
And then she actually got them. Anyway. Oh, by the way, I don't know if this is another loose, but did you see Beto O'Rourke on The View? Oh, Beto, your boyfriend.
As I was predicting, he's been a whole lot of nothing. He's been a whole lot. Well, we don't know that yet. We don't know that yet.
Yes, we do. Hold on. Keep holding. Oh, it's early.
It's early. Dream until your dreams come true, Scott. It's not coming true. It's early.
Your Beto dream ain't coming true. What about, okay, so when away is a big win. Oh, you know what? Let's revisit our predictions.
Okay. Okay, so one of our predictions, we got one right and one wrong. And that is, I said last week that Uber, the IPO would be meh and then hold. I was wrong.
It was meh slash disaster. It was. So I would argue that it probably hit an all time low today, which will be an all time high looking back. This company.
You're going to take it down. Well, it's not that it's not a great company, if you will, or that it has incredible potential. It's just that the valuation is well beyond anything this company can execute against. It's just not.
I don't see how this company grows into that valuation. And if you're watching CNBC, it's literally just been a stream of excuses. They're like, oh, it's China. It's the bad.
It's a bad. They went public into a bad tape. No, they didn't. This company is overvalued.
And so if this company executes perfectly, it might be worth 20, maybe $25 billion, which, by the way, is about 60% less than it's trading today. And Lyft. I mean, there is no hope for Lyft. Lyft doesn't have the flywheel effect.
It doesn't have anything. But the Uber IPO was one of our predictions. I got that one. One of our predictions is turning out to be right.
And that is, we said, if you look at 19 across the entire unicorn class going public, I said that they post their opening trade will lose money, that these companies will be worth less than the opening trade of their IPOs where CNBC, retail investors, and these companies have all entered into consensual hallucination about what these companies are worth. And I think that's panning out. I think Uber's losses on its own have wiped out all of the market cap gains of some of the other guys, including Zoom or even Beyond Meat, which went crazy. So, so far, I think the unicorn class is failing in the public markets.
So Slack might be coming. Airbnb maybe, not for a while. Yeah, both those companies. You think they went too late?
No, because the private markets where the gift that kept on giving. The public markets are actually more rational, which is unusual. It's usually the private markets that are a little bit more rational. And what you see in the private markets is, again, to Tim's comments, all this capital is trying to move downstream and you can get liquidity through secondary offerings.
You can raise a ton of capital and you can maintain sort of the, I'll call this halcyon effect because you don't have to mark your book and you don't have to provide the type of transparency that the public markets demand. So once people actually go, okay, this is a company that lost $3 billion. How does this ever get to a point where it's spending the kind of free cash flow it needs to justify the current valuation? The public markets have said nine, and they can only voice so many shares when they raise $8 billion on retail investors.
So I think you're going to see, I mean, the ride hailing business is probably going to be one of the greatest value destructions from retail shareholders that we've seen in a long time. You're talking about a loss probably, in my view, over the next 6 to 12 months between Lyft and Uber, a loss of 20, a destruction of $20 to $30 billion in shareholder value. And I mean, that is real pain for people out there. And so you're not going to see that come back.
You don't see any promising ones in that group. I think Uber could execute perfectly and be worth half what it is right now. Yeah. All right.
That's not good. Yeah. That's not good. That's not good.
That's a lot of money lost. All that investor money, including all that Saudi money. Well, you realize that it didn't happen to a nicer group of people. Here's an interesting stat.
Since 2000, as of today, no investor who's invested in the last four years in Uber has not lost money. So basically, the private markets, this whole, so far, this whole IPO rush of IPOs has said, stay private longer. Stay private longer. Really?
Or forever? Or go public sooner. You know, no. Well, that's an interesting point.
But then if you're public sooner, you can't spend the kind of money you need. I don't know. I think this all, this all goes one direction. And that is, you know, who's going out of business is the NASDAQ and the NYSE.
We have 50% fewer stocks than we had 20, 30 years ago. And Marc Andreessen's put together a new long-term stock exchange. Direct listings in the private markets, you can get almost everything you need from the public markets now. So you don't have these predictions, Scott.
That the NASDAQ and the NYSE are going out of business? Now, my prediction is, you're going to like this prediction more. Okay. I have another prediction.
All right, quickly. And this is unfortunate, but in the next 90 days, I think people are starting nibbling around the edges. And I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to talk about politics, but I can't help it. I think people are starting, unfortunately, geopolitically, to test this administration.
We have rockets going off in North Korea. That is a pure test. I think the Chinese, you think in 20 and 30 year increments, have seen a guy who's trying to wage a unilateral tariff war instead of partnering with our allies, who's he's alienated. And by the way, I think he's right on trade with China.
I think essentially, at universities, we spend a lot of time creating incredible human capital that takes advantage of an incredible financial market to create innovation that the Chinese then steal and sell back to us for 30 cents on the dollar. So I think that conversation was overdue. But as one would suspect, the conversation has been handled really in a very clumsy way without the benefit of our allies who could speak with a much bigger stick. Bottom line is, I think we're unfortunately in the next 90 days going to see what I'll call more a significant test who senses weakness amongst an individual who is consistently every day with his bluster, his insecurity, and his lack of empathy demonstrates weakness every day.
Maybe we should send him your book. That hurts. Come on. Let's do it.
Let's go to the White House and deliver it ourselves. You think? Yeah, come back to D.C. I like that.
Together. We'll say we think the occupant. Number 30, 30th best selling book on Amazon. I'm very excited.
Everybody go out and buy the algebra of happiness by Scott Galloway. All right, we got to go. That's it for this week. What do you have on tap this week?
I'm coming to New York. You're not going to be there to do an event at a WeWork, actually. And then I have to take my son to some colleges up there, including the Culinary Institute of America. It's his birthday today.
He's 17. I'm very excited. Wow. And he likes cooking.
He's a chef. He's a great cook. Yes, indeed. That's nice.
A very good restaurant tonight. That's what he wanted. And then we'll go to a different restaurant. We're going to go to somewhere.
We're going to New York. I forget. He decides all the food places we go when we travel. But it's always a weird place.
He always finds a weird little joint and sandwich shop that is famous. And he read it right about it. So by the way, your opening line at WeWork should be, and this is true, now that Uber is public, it's great to be in the valves of the most overvalued private company in the world. OK, I'll do that.
That's what I'll do. Do that. Take it off. Boom.
I'm Kara Swisher. I have a lot going on, but I'll be here in D.C. next week. And I hope that you'll come down soon.
And of course, I'll see you at the Code conference. Anyway, LeShot Kirwa is the show's executive