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I'm Cara Swisher. And this is Scott Galloway. Scott, we are in New England right now, together, but not together. Sharkbait!
Sharkbait! We'll get to sharks in a minute. You are on Nantucket where all the fancy people are. And I am up in Provincetown where all the interesting artists and people, different people are.
And that's essentially our relationship with you. Let's rephrase that. You're lame. I'm cool.
My name is Cara Swisher. Is that what you just said? Yes, I believe that's what I just said. I'm with a drag queen.
I saw a great drag queen. But the sharks we're referring to is all over the Cape and Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. There's been sharks everywhere, sighted everywhere, all kinds of stuff on the Internet. Great white sharks are everywhere.
And you're scared to go in the water, I understand. Well, I'm not going to say this has had any impact on me, but I refuse to go in the pool. I'm literally, I am so freaked out. Because here's the thing about sharks.
You're not part of their natural food supply. I know way too much about them. There's unfortunately this great website. You can go to track all these great whites, which is like going to airdisaster.com and that is after you do it, you wish you had not done it.
Yeah, yeah. But effectively these guys don't want to eat us. And most of the time you survive a shark attack. Some data Florida has more shark attacks every year than the rest of will combine, but they just take a small bite, realize you're not their food supply.
And they leave. But the idea of a refrigerator with teeth coming up and taking a bite out of me, I'd rather just die instantly than survive that to experience the survival. Did you see Jaws? We saw Jaws.
Jaws was a formative movie for us, correct? One of the great films about time Roy Shider and Robert Shaw's cinematic peak, probably Richard Drive is a cinematic page. And Spielberg, it makes Spielberg a star, too, as a director. 100% of second movie after duel with Dennis Weaver.
Anyways, enough about sharks. I'm scared shitless. Can we segue into we work as we work? Speaking of sharks.
Speaking of sharks. Speaking of sharks. You're obsessed with we works, too. First of all, let's just make it clear.
You have been talking about the we work business model as being less than sound for a long time. Why don't you go into that first? And of course, their IPO is coming. So go for it's gone.
Well, first let's talk about their mission. And their mission is to elevate the world's consciousness, which they say that like it's a good thing. I've got an appointment here tomorrow at this thing called the Green Lady Dispensary. And my entire, all my disposable income lately is going to try to dampen my consciousness, but they're talking about elevating it, whether it's a kappa or trips to the dispensary.
My wife was complaining this morning that I'm not present enough. I'm going to go trust me on this. You do not want me present. I need to be less conscious.
Anyways, elevating our consciousness. It's a fucking, it's real estate. And this is literally, we kind of continues this culture of let's find the words and the positioning of the highest multiple companies in the world. And then let's try and masquerade as one of those companies.
So they're calling themselves spaces service SaaS. They talk about themselves being a tech company. They mentioned the word technology, 123 times in their perspective. They talk about you're not a renter care.
So you're a member. So when I stay at the holiday and next week, I'm not a guest. I'm a member. And they also talk about, they're trying to position Adam Newman as the next step.
As they mentioned, his name, 169 times. And if you read the related party transaction section, it's like literally reading a lesson in poor corporate governance. And it's an terrible indictment on the board that they let their shit go down. So for example, what have they done?
Well, for example, Adam Newman owned the term we, he called his family office and investment holdings, the we group, and they decided, or we, they decided that would be a better name for the company. So in his generosity, he sold the term we, which I didn't know to be trademarked back company for a cool $5.9 million that was supposedly validated by an outside third party. So 700 million in loans, a constant two step in the, in the, the prospectus. And what we have here is a company, it's an interesting company.
It should be worth like two or $3 billion similar to its competitors, but they're trying to position it as something that's worth 45. And what this really is, Cara, this is a test of how whether or not the markets finally say enough. I mean, Uber and Lyft got out. They probably shouldn't have, but the markets are starting to sober up and take both those terms to the woodshed.
It'll be interesting if the consensual hallucination continues and we can even get out. So what, what do you think this business is worth? And what do you think the business is? Away from all there's, you know, renting as a service or whatever it is.
What do you think it is? Well, it did 1.8 billion revenue per 2018 and granted its explosive growth of 105% year on year, but it also reported losses of about 1.9 billion. And if you look at other companies, they're in the business of renting offices, they get anywhere between 0.5 and three times. So let's look at this and say, it trades at the upper range of this.
This is a company. And let's assume that at some point they get some scaling and, you know, somewhere along the lines look at profitability. This is a company that if you're really excited about it, you could justify maybe a five to 10 billion dollar valuation because it is a great brand. They do a great job.
But let me start a company where I can lose 100, you know, I can, I can lose 50 cents on the dollar and I'll build a great coworking space. I don't think that's, you know, I think it's an interesting concept. By the way, like Uber, every consumer in the world should use WeWork and take Uber too. We work because your investors are investors are financing.
What is a non-economical value proposition. But I think this company ultimately is worth five to 10 billion dollars. And I think the public markets after some time should even get public will register that value. And the problem is, or one of the issues is these these companies are supposedly worth and they use it as a proxy and a benchmark.
They're most recent private round valuation, which for WeWork was around 47 billion dollars. And what they fail to realize is that in the private markets, the most recent investors usually get a prep, meaning that if they put in a billion dollars into the last ones to put it in, even at the sky valuation, the first billion out of the company, they get back. So that number is sort of a fake number, but it serves a very useful purpose for the people trying to pump and dump it in that they can say to the public markets, hey, Joe lunchbox, you should pay this value for this company because it's cool. They're smart people behind it.
It's an interesting cool concept that your son uses or your daughter uses. And smart people have paid this number for it, not realizing that the public market investor, the retail investor doesn't have that same downside protection. So this is another example and we'll go into the ultimate. I agree.
I think this guy taking this much money out was unprecedented. It's such a lack of board oversight in terms of this guy taking how much you take out $700 million. That's an every single thing to me. I'm sorry, Adam Newman.
You take out $700 million. You just signaled exactly what you think of this company. You know what I mean? It's just take it's happened before several times and it's the same bullshit, essentially.
In addition, one of the keys when you're ideally when you're looking at it, when you're staring down the barrel of a recession, you want to company, you want a company where you can variableize the cost, meaning that, okay, if our revenues go down, we can variableize our cost structure down and survive. And if you think of we work, it's almost like an investment vehicle that buys real estate and then tries to arbit out short-term at a higher number, which is no different than Hertz or really real estate landlord does by a company long-term and then they sell a short-term. That's not a different business model. But where these companies go out of business is what this guy Jim Colberg used to work with gave me this great term.
The reason they go out of business is mismatch durations. And that is they bar my short and they invest long. In other words, their customers need to give them 24 hours notice sometimes. Sometimes they have leases as long as eight months.
But their revenues can leave fast. Whereas their expenses, they're signing 10-year leases. So you head into a recession and you have a 20 or 30% laying down in members, but you're still stuck with the long-term leases. This is a company that is especially vulnerable to the down-term.
Which this inverted, wider, yield curve is freaking people out. It sounds like a recession. You can't just, to me, you can't just slap nice wallpaper and kombucha, you know, fresh kombucha on it and think that that's going to survive the recession. It's just not true.
It's just, that's where it gets me. It's the recession that is clearly headed this way that most people, most smart people think caused by a lot of things won't get to that in a second. But I agree. I think, what would you do?
Short this company? Or would you, I don't buy and sell stocks like this. So I don't typically either. And also, I don't ever short companies.
One, because I think it's bad karma. The natural trajectory of the markets are up. You have to be a professional to short companies. You got to spend all day watching the stock.
I think shorting really is for the pros. But if you look at this company, I mean, it looks like at some comparables, Hertz, which is effectively the same business model for cars except there's not a tap of IPA in the passenger seat. Which, by the way, I think is a really good idea. Anyways, they trade, they trade at .2x times revenues.
Amazon, who clearly we work, if you believe their practice is trying to be the next Amazon saying that they're a tech company for some reason, Amazon trades at four times revenues. And based on the most recent valuation of we work, this basically this real estate company trades at 26 times revenues. It's a big flashing accident sign, I think. That sounds right.
Have you, have you talked to anybody, investors or people at the company? They kept offering me him for interviews. And I just was like, I just think this is just bullshit. Like, you know what I mean?
Like, I didn't feel like beating him up. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you know what I mean? Like, you know, I just didn't, and this whole like, Hey, I'm wearing a t-shirt and my hair is in.
Hey, it's all cool. I just didn't like, you rent office space, right? Like, it's not a tech company. It's sort of like, there knows in that way.
It's like, you're not a tech company. I'm pretty, and that was more a tech company. And it's fake, whatever that Edison machine was. It's not a tech company.
It's not a tech. It's just not. And so I don't know why I would speak to him. That's how I feel.
Oh, you use the T word there. Well, that was low. I just watched that documentary, which was fascinating. What a good idea was at least.
What a good idea that was. This one is just renting office space. Like that's, that's where it comes down to. And it's a very lovely office, but you know, whatever.
And anyway, speaking of which real companies are getting hurt by economics is this trade wars with China affecting tech companies. Obviously Trump, who was doubling down on these tariffs, now pulled them back a little bit for Christmas, I think largely for political reasons so that the economy doesn't get, you know, bashed a lot. But a lot of these electronic firms are seeing a sharp slowdown in revenue growth for the quarter because of this, including the ones in China too, everybody, everybody on both sides of the ocean are seeing the troubles. Any impact you think?
Well, I unfortunately, I think we've lost this one. And that is, I believe that the, actually the president got right that the, the agreement or the approach of the Chinese kind of this mercantile trading is still this bad for, you know, asymmetrically advantages them, but we should have gone into this discussion with the full heft of our allies and had a more thoughtful conversation. And here's the problem. You know, World War II, the Americans lost a quarter of a million people, Germans lost 550,000 and the Russians lost 20 million people and they would have lost another 20 million because the poor competence of Russians is the ability to, you know, to basically suffer.
And the Chinese will close towns down. They will say, Oh, sorry, you need to be relocated because we're no longer making this widget because of the trade war with our enemy US. And we have a soybean farmer in Wisconsin that is all of a sudden struggling and MSNBC is out there talking about bailouts. So we just don't have the same tolerance to endure this sort of suffering despite the fact that on a kind of peripassu level, we're in better shape or can hurt them more than hurt us, but we're going to hang nail and we're going to freak out.
The US is just so incredibly, you know, our soldiers needed chocolate, playboy magazines and cigarettes, the Chinese and World War II needed a handful of rice ago a week. Yeah, I saw this movie, The Farewell here, which was not about that. It's with Aquafina. But they actually talked about those issues, the difference.
And it was, and I was thinking, this sounds like the trade war is like they can, they can wait us out. They can wait us out. They can wait us out. They think in 10 year, they think in 10 and 20 year increments.
We think in 10 year increments. Yeah, but the companies that will affect in tech are obviously Apple, probably Apple the most significantly, and we'll see how that goes. Speaking of tech companies, I wrote this week in the New York Times about Tumblr and how it was sold to the company behind WordPress, Matt Mullen-Wake. It's called automatic.
For a fraction of what it was sold for, Marissa Mayer bought it for $1.1 billion in 2013, a story that I actually broke. And now I think it's maybe $3 million to $10 million. They don't really quite know the price, but it's hardly anything, even though it's relatively still a big site compared to a lot of other social media platforms. You know, Tumblr was the, I wrote about how it was the thing, and it was when it was, when things were sort of, they were the most creative of all these companies, these social media companies, and sort of, they fell on hard times because of a range of things, both external and internal, and including, you know, pornography, the pornography on the site, all kinds of different issues.
So what do you think about that sale, the number? You have a different take on this. I mean, first off, 99.7% decline, destruction of value. That's just unprecedented.
Yeah. I think Tumblr was a porn site. And I think that because venture capitalists and nice people from Silicon Valley saw an opportunity to make money, they tried to recast it or something else, somewhere between 23 and 28% of the content from, even from the early days, was adult content. And then when they decided to turn off the porn after all these people had sold their shares, they lost a third of their, their traffic overnight.
So when you're a platform whose primary domain is adult content, you're a porn site. And my, my question would be the following, you know, Union Square Ventures and the general limited partners there who invested $400,000 and got $240 million back. Have there ever been any individuals in the history of business that have made more money from pornography than these individuals? Hi Fred Wilson.
Oh, you mean, oh, you mean King of porn? King of porn Fred Wilson? Okay. And I'll get an email on that one.
All right. You know, it's an interesting thing. I don't agree that it was all fully porn when it was started. I think it was really.
You're right. It was gay porn. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
You know, there's a difference between safe havens to express sexuality and porn. I mean, I think it started off as gay people to express sexuality. Some of it isn't porn. It was, it isn't for Scott Galloway's enjoyment.
It was a way for people to express themselves. You know what I mean? Like it was, and then it got to that. You had absolutely did.
And then obviously when they got corporate owners, that couldn't happen. It couldn't happen. It could happen as long as they own shares. Yes.
But I'm saying when the companies that finally sold Yahoo for that incredible amount of money, I thought it was incredible at the time because they weren't making that much money in their advertising. They had a problem with it. I remember them talking. We don't like advertising.
I was like, what are you going to do? Well, porn, I guess, sell porn. They started to crack down. They first started by trying to ban things or move things or put a safe default on it, safe watching default.
But then when Verizon got it, it was like, no. And then their mobile app, you know, trial porn got into, you know, Apple wouldn't tolerate that. And so I think it's, you know, it's series of owners because it went from Yahoo, and Yahoo got bought by AOL. AOL became, oh, AOL got bought by Barack.
You know, it just went one after, you know, it just was one corporate owner after the next. That really just, it was the wrong place. Where it is now is a really interesting place. Matt Mullenweig is one of the sort of the original type of people who should have owned a site like this, who did understand all these problems.
I think it'll be interesting what he does. And it was sort of a solid for Verizon to sell to him versus Pornhub was interested in it, as you talk about buying it. It was kind of a solid that they didn't go for the most money here, because it was like a de minimis amount of money. But the one thing I would love your commentary on is like, Merissa Mayer, $1.1 billion is what she paid for it.
Could be possibly the worst deal in history. I'm patting myself on the back and we'll hopefully have finite tape and roll tape here. Another loser, Tumblr. We believe that Instagram is the best acquisition of the last five years and Tumblr is the worst.
Both cost about $1 billion. Both have the same user base. Instagram will be due between $250 million and $450 million this year. Tumblr was noticeably absent from Yahoo's earnings call, which means likely the revenue is somewhat negligible.
But five years ago, five years ago, I said in a very public conference that Instagram and Tumblr were the best and worst acquisitions in the last decade in tech. And I said that at P&G signals conference before Merissa Mayer took the stage. So I had to sit behind stage after saying that this was the worst acquisition in technology. And if you want to talk about pump and dump, the backstory on Tumblr is really interesting because you had Dan Loeb, who I know your friends would come in.
He's not my friend, oh my God. I know him. I know him. You know him.
He basically took a large stake in Yahoo, agitated against seats on the board, and then fired a guy named Scott Thompson for saying that he had a minor in computer science from his university on his resume. Whereas, it's a pretty good idea in what the company's doing to be a partner. It's a great show, and he's actually at the same time after he has a great campaign. And now he brings her in.
Clearly, in the first two board meetings realises she has no idea what the fuck she's doing and sells all the shares once the stock is up. And then Merissa Mayer goes on to do some of the low lights of her tenure, hire someone to head sales from her old company, Google, who she fires within 14 months and gives $120 million in the tech management. She had the reference checks. Almost queers the tax structure of the asset that would comprise 96% of the value of the company.
That was her stake in Alibaba took revenues down 20% evited down 50%, more money, the market is our converter, Sheryl Sandberg, but there's very few people who have made more money while destroying more shareholder value than Marissa Mayer. That was, what did she have to do? You know, my coverage was like, you know how I wrote about that particular tenure. No, you were, and you were out in front of this when everyone had decided that, you know, no one wanted to say anything bad about Marissa Mayer, but she had to feel this void of hype and inflationary expectations.
And the way she filled it was with the pumpers and dumpers of the modern era, Union Square Ventures. By the way, if you want to see what bullshit private companies are being hyped right now, just go to amazing.com and see what blockchain or crypto bullshit is totally overvalued to be foisted on some unwitting corporate executive. Anyway, so they foisted tumbler into the void of inflated expectations, $1.1 billion. And it was, I wasn't, are you blaming them?
Are you blaming them? They got, they got, they're smart. They're smart. But let's be clear.
This is this company, the core competence of these individuals is they are master's pumpers and dumpers. And when I said this was the worst acquisition in the last 10 years, five years ago, I wasn't, it was very awkward and uncomfortable because you seem like a nice woman. Anyways, I wasn't prescient. I just could do math.
They had absolutely no advertising. A third of their content was torn. And they paid $1.1 billion for it. I mean, it was just, anyways, this was, this was really just massive inflated expectations, pump and dump everywhere.
And you say, okay, it's interesting what's happened here. The fucking bike rental shop down the road in Antucket is worth more than tumbler right now. And it's, it's a joke was that Silicon Valley house, middling Silicon Valley house was worth more than tumblers. There, it's still now, aside from all your thing, it's still has, it's quite large.
It's still quite large. There's not that many big sites and some of it is good. And so they'll be interesting to see what Matt Mullenway does with this. There's no downside to him for this.
WordPress used to be a competitor in a lot of ways in tumbler. And so it's interesting to see what he'll do with NCV can salvage the really very creepy, there was enormous creativity on tumbler in the beginning. I understand the porn part. I do, it did degenerate into that.
It was 21% actually of it. Never degenerated though. That's what I'm saying. It was always a porn site until a bunch of nights VCs and Silicon Valley people while they were holding shares, tried to recast it as something else.
It was always a porn site. I saw it early. You were not using it early. I'm telling you.
Oh, I was using it almost every daycare. Trust me, I want to know, I was using it to post pictures of graffiti. You were doing something else. And I'm just saying that two things can be not mutually exclusive.
Don't criticize my hobbies. Don't criticize my hobbies. Where it is now is the right place for it. And I'm hoping that Matt, who was a very, has been a very quiet, successful entrepreneur, will do something with it.
He's not, he doesn't do his own horn. He's made a very successful, you know, blogging platform, very quietly, could have sold it a million times. I think it'll be interesting to see if he can get to the heart of what was good about it and remove the parts that you like and perhaps sell it to you. So you can run such a site.
Anyway, we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. Lastly, before we get to our break, you know, there was a story in the New York Times this week, supposedly that, which James Stewart wrote from a meeting. He apparently, Jeffrey Epstein was going around to tech reporters, but not this one and meeting them talking or people that are interested in tech about how he was advised to a lot of tech people, specifically in this column, it alleged Epstein alleged that he was helping Elon Musk compile a list for new chairman candidates to oversee the Tesla board.
At the same time, Epstein alleged that, you know, most tech, a lot of tech moguls are very hedonistic and wild and he knew all the stories. But of course, never saying anything. I thought it was a tiny bit irresponsible to let this dead guy. It was an off the record meeting, but he's dead.
So I'm fine with them running. It's just that there was no backup on like whether any of this was true and letting this line dead guy pedophile have his last words seem to be problematic as far as I was concerned. So we'll see if there really were links between tech people and Epstein when these federal investigations get going and if they were problematic or if they were just gross. But it was an interesting question.
He seemed to have his, you know, anywhere powerful people were. This guy shows up like Zelig, which is kind of disturbing. But there's a, there's a sub economy in a boutique industry now into shaming people and it's gotten to the point where, oh, you, you were at the same party, which Jeffrey Epstein, that means you're guilty of something. It's like, okay, enough already.
If Jeffrey did. It's one a little further. This was a little further, you know, there was a string of dealing mail that Bill Gates took a plane ride with them. So what?
I understand that. I understand that. I'm just saying that what I'd like to see is if the federal investors actually find out anything that is actually legal. And that's my, I agree with you.
I think we're on the same page on this. It's like, could be, but him just investing is that how would that, you know, it's gross. It grosses. If you knew about his, if you had done this after he was convicted, it's just gross to, to have done that at the same time.
You're right. Just adjacency does not. It's a problematic adjacency unless you have proof of, of something more, more sinister. It reminds me of when Bill Clinton was accused of being a Manchurian type figure because in college he'd done an internship in Russia and James Carville, you know, adroitly responded for god's sex.
We were playing with basketball. I mean, it's just at what point does, like you said, adjacent, adjacent associations just become that adjacent associations and nothing more. That's it. I think people are very upset by this sort of very clear power structure that sits on the top of society at some of who's members are super abusive like Epstein, right?
So I think there is this, you're going to hear more about this. I think this idea of this power structure that, you know, sort of back, back rubbing kind of back slapping group. It's the same thing as the, you know, the cigar still spoke from everyone knows that these, there's these elite centers of power that other people don't get into. And I think you're going to, you know, like all of a sudden there's a word for that society that happens.
I know, but I'm just saying, I think you're going to see a lot of it. I think people of this rapsing thing shows a very ugly aside of that. And I think it'll be interesting to see if federal investigators really do come up with some significant things. We'll see.
100%. We'll see. But, you know, the shaming culture continues. Don't complain about the shaming culture sitting on time.
I'm scared of the sharks. It's manifesting and me giving you a hard time. I'm scared of the operators within. We're coming for you, Scott.
We're going to bite you and just leave you alive. I need to dampen my consciousness, elevate my consciousness, fucking we work as if that's what I need. Anyway, where's a break when we get back. Is it new yet?
Wins and fails? No, I'm ready to drink. You can drink soon. We'll talk soon about wins and fails in our predictions for the next week.
We'll be back after this. I'm a Seth Herndon. And this is America, actually. We're all talking to each other to see what we do wrong.
What do we not see? I'm in Washington, DC this week to interview Ruben Gaiago. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona. And he's been thinking openly about running for higher office.
But he's recently running to some hot water because of his connection to Congress, Monera, Swallow. I have to learn from this. And I will learn from this. But, you know, for me, it's out of 2028 question.
It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gaiago about predatory behavior in Washington. His plans for immigration reform and more. We're back with Scott Galloway.
He was on Nantucket where all the elite people are gathering secretly to make deals that the rest of us are not party to. I'm here in the more Democratic Protestant town. Scott wins and fails. You've got a big win this week this week.
Come on. You can say it. You can yell it. Yeah.
You know who I'm just blown away by. Do you know this guy, Raj Chaddie? He's an economist at Harvard. And he was one of the youngest.
He's basically a student for the Nobel Prize at one point. And he gets government data and he looks at income inequality and income mobility. And as, occasionally, you just see an academic and his whole tagline is big data as a force of moral good. And I just love this guy.
And he's looking at basically income mobility and income inequality. And I've learned so much as reading his data. So, for example, I've always thought that affirmative action should be economically based and not race based. And what he's found is that, for example, a person of color born into wealth is twice as likely to end up in poverty than a white person born into wealth, which I just thought was fascinating.
He's also done this incredible research around where you live has a huge component of income mobility. So, for example, a poor person born in the bottom quintile in Salt Lake has an 11% chance of getting the upper quintile where someone born in Charlotte has half that. And his whole attitude is if we can find data and connect them to an issue, we can manage the data, we can adapt it and we can manipulate it. And I think this guy is just taking an incredible brain, incredible discipline, an incredible immigrant story, and it's changing the world for the better.
And it just brings out the best in what we're supposed to do in academia. And that is pursue the truth for the betterment of the commons. So, anyways, my win is Professor Raj Chate, future Nobel Prize winner, who is taking very boring data and turning it into very important seminal work. Fantastic.
That's so brainy. I thought you were going to scream Rundals our back, baby. Oh, Nike, we can talk about that. Yes, come on.
Take the win. Oh, my God. Only one word to describe that. Gangster.
Nike, the swoosh. Come on in. Explain what Rundals are for the people who do not follow us closely. Okay.
So, this is a little bit, I'm trying to think, I don't know if I'm conflicted to all disclosure because it makes me look good. But I've done some work with Nike and I've been talking to them a lot about recurring revenue bundles or Rundals. But basically Nike has decided to go after effectively a subscription product with kids who have this terrible habit of growing. Kids age two to five.
They grow one and a half millimeters a month. They need six pairs of shoes. Then they need about four pairs from five to seven. And then it goes down to like two pairs.
But they're essentially offering a subscription service where you can pick any of these shoes and not have to worry about cost. And they have some even some predictive technology to try and figure out. Are they the good shoes, though? Are they the good shoes?
Well, they do offer the good shoes. And here's the thing, it only makes economic sense because on average, they're charging about 50 or 60 bucks a shoe and you can get them for about the same price on zapples. It only makes sense if you go for the higher price shoes and you get the shoes more often than your kids feet are growing. But what that doesn't take into account is A, it's fun to be a part of a community and be it's more convenient than trying to figure out the constant price straight off and figure out when my kids mind shoes to just have an order.
But you can see this as a trend where great brands like Nike begin to attack individual cohorts with a subscription offering that takes a friction out of the process and just says, all right, you don't have to constantly measure off price versus quality. Just get your damn shoes because you're entitled to them. But this is, I think this is a fantastic move and basically an indicator of where our consumer economy is heading. So thanks for bringing it up.
What's the next Rundals that you're not involved with planning? What's the next Rundals or maybe the one you're involved with planning? Well, I'm so loosely speaking and I won't mention the brand, but I think that travel. So unfortunately, the top 1% are garnering all the incremental income, but I think travel involves a lot of decisions and a lot of uncertainty.
And one of the biggest mistakes that brands and the economy or consumer brands and the consumer executives make is that as Professor Shina Engar says at Columbia University is a total gangster, the consumers don't want more choice. They just want to be more confident in the few choices they're presented with. And I think something around travel where a fantastic iconic brand comes in and says, we're going to handle everything. Pay us one fee and we're literally going to take your hospitality, your travel, your airplanes, your hotels off the table.
We're going to tell you where to go. You're going to pay one fee. So for example, four seasons just to give you an app and anytime you land it, it says, you either pay four or $600 a night depending upon the city and then we send you a QR code and you're just done and you pay $10,000 a year or something like that. I think there's a huge opportunity.
What do they give you? Because people are plagued by choices. At the same time, you're also like, was this one better? Did I miss this?
Right. But I think there's a lot of people that would just love to land somewhere and have the confidence of knowing, okay, this is my brand, they're putting me at the right hotel. I don't have to do the trade off of cost versus everything. They just know what I want.
I pay an annual fee. Maybe they give it to me at cost or they give me the best hotel room in the hotel and I pay an annual fee and I'm just... Well, how many people have done this? There were all those...
I mean, rich person, I know, belong to some vacation properties. I can't remember what it is. They were all in it and they got to see the nicest. Yeah, whatever that.
Yeah. So is this just for everybody else? No, I don't think so. I think this is going to be a bigger grand bargain where somebody is going to be the lead dog here and roll up or coordinate a bunch of other brands and just say, okay, I mean, to a certain extent, Amazon has done this in e-commerce.
You just trust Amazon, you just default is there. Now, if Amazon were to go into predictive modeling and just start sending you stuff proactively or speculatively, that's what I think we're talking about. But I think there's going to be a series of brands across our major consumer categories, travel, health, apparel, and it's just going to be one brand that says, we know you better than you know you and we're just going to start proactively sending you stuff so you don't have to make choice. We're going to tell you, you tell us you want to go to Africa, we'll tell you where to stay, how to get there and we'll charge you wholesale and every year we'll just charge you one big fee and we'll get to know each other.
It's the difference between what I would call serial dating and monogamy. The most marketplace wants monogamy. It's a better way to run a business. So I think you're going to see a series of monogamous recurring revenue bundle relationships emerge.
You're so deep this week. You're not as challenged. And I haven't even been to the dispensary yet. Talk to me in a few hours.
What's your fail? What's your fail then? My fail is just this pump and dump culture that I just wonder when it's going to end. I wonder if we were never said the person who's the most human race until the human race is blown off this earth.
But go ahead. But as we work the next tumbler at some point does the manufacturing of hype and the nomenclature or the fraudulent nomenclature and just using the word tack 127 times in prospectus and then claiming that someone paid evaluation of 47 billion and then foisting it on the unwitting retail investor at some point does the pump and dump culture to somebody call bullshit on it. And so my fail is the pump and we'll see but tumblers is such a cautionary tale and we work could potentially be I think the next tumbler if it manages to get out. I think you're going to see an extraordinary destruction of value if the bankers are actually able to force this thing on the public market.
Do you think they're going to foist it? What are the chances right now? You don't care. I don't know because I thought I didn't think I thought Uber and Lyft there was a chance they might not get out and granted they're they're slowly but surely the errors being led out of that balloon.
Those companies are off I think 20 or 30 percent. But look at you know the bankers got their money the founders got their money and the investors got their money and it's the guy the gal holding shares in an ETF. Especially at the interest session. Yes.
It's a real we are cautioning you people just the way there are shark cautionings on the beach where we are. There are sharks out there you're going to be a bit and you're going to lie on the shore in pain and not dead. Well that's a nice image. Jesus Christ.
What are you doing to me? You know what the worst thing is? My kids are running around the house in their wetsuits. Basically they might as well be flapping flapping their fins and asking for a you know asking for a fish.
I got seals this week. I went fishing with my kids we caught quite a few fish and then my son cooked them all and we gave the carcasses to the seals as we were relaying them on the dock. Stay away from seals, food chain, food chain. They don't get seals that fishermen hate the seals here because they take all the fish.
I like the seals. What are your wins and fails? I have one that's a win on a fail and it's Anthony Scaramucci's fight with the president. Oh my gosh.
Go on. Go on. I haven't talked to him yet. Stay more.
I didn't have enough energy to text him this week. But I think it's interesting that he's now suddenly you know and it's the concept and he and I argued about this is this allocart liking and disliking of the president. It's the same thing with Stephen Hudson yards do Ross right. Like he's an allocart method of liking someone.
Like I don't agree with his racism but I like his text. I'm like it's not an allocart. They can't pick and choose between this guy. Like it all goes together.
You have to take the send their backs. You got to take the racist tweets. You got to take what's obviously you know a declining mental situation which I think Scaramucci quite specifically referred to in which George Conway also people you know close to those groups are referring to like a continuing decline in mental facility. I mean it's they're not even being you know sort of oh he's a little bit off.
It's like he crazy you know so I think in that way I kind of welcome the message and it's and in a fail thing. It's like you were never our friends before. Like now you're worried and now you know so you sort of say brave of you and what took you so long. So that's I think I'm sort of the double minds and so I do want to have a discussion about it because like what they tend to try to do is get you to dis the people who oppose them when these people sort of break out and start actually telling the truth is that they try to undercut them by saying things like oh well you know he wants a contract he wants he wants to be on standing he wants to be like by the libdards whatever I don't care if he's telling the truth who cares if he wants to benefit from it and what is the real benefit is there a real benefit and so I'm fascinated by if there's gonna be he was saying that the cabinet members think this that he's crazy and so I'm wondering will there be a moment when everyone goes okay like I cannot do it but I don't think there is a bottom for the Republican party with this situation they seem to do another comfortable defending the indefensible and so it was fascinating I thought it was a win and a lose.
I don't know quite how I feel about it so that's my win and lose. That's a great one and you brought up to kind of the irony or the I don't know the inconsistency of when cloud flare all of a sudden decided they had enough with H.N. and you're like well look we've been having this conversation for a while and all of a sudden you found a legend which was a fair point but the mooch there's a term to describe the mooch and that is totally full of shit and that is when a white supremacist ran over a woman you know he was okay with that he was talking about tax cuts but all of a sudden he's fed up with president trump you know what the mooch has no tolerance for being out of the media cycle that is the only thing he gives a shit about and all of a sudden he's popped up and decided he's had enough of the president well show me anything the president has done recently that is any different than what he was doing while you were carrying his water and the notion that all of a sudden he's found religion oh he hasn't he just wasn't on msnbc enough and well we'll see but people can also tell the truth at the same time they may be in it for themselves that's what that's my problem with all this it's like that's the issue i think captain ramp out from the washing post had a very good thing is that i think it all came from an appearance on bill mar where he was on bill mar he was defending the president actually quite handily and saying i have some disagreement and he voiced his concerns about the racist tweets but they were concerned you know about these racist tweets i don't like them and what happened was trump then reacted saying he was traitor like as he always does and then and then that's where he then then by sunday he was like fuck you like you know you know you know what i mean it was like an episode of goodfellas but which i feel like it is like we're living in goodfellas almost continually and he's i guess the joe cashew character but it's a really i find it fascinating but then at the same time i'm like well i kind of want these people to say this because they know like like so so on some level at least he's saying it and the others aren't so what does you know he was there 11 days i know you know they're all part of the same gangs they're all they're in the same game it's just so i you know i i welcome the truth and at the same time i'm like what took you so exactly and i think i've had this discussion with him a million times on this issue and so it's a fascinating i think i'll bring him back on the podcast just and maybe i'll have you join maybe i'll have you join them now well but the thing is what if someone is actually telling the truth that do you just discount see that that's how the trump group works that's how they flood these people so you know i don't know i don't know i don't know i'm confused and i don't know what to do about thinking this is what should be said at the same time do we like the people saying it sometimes we aren't we don't get the people we want to tell the truth so i think what we all need to do is to elevate our consciousness and pay seven hundred dollars a day for a desk an IPA tap here that's what we need to do we work for fourteen point two seconds recode was fine they do a great job by the way we worked as a designer it was an inexpensive it was like slightly better than a key a desk and i was irritated i think they're great i like what they do actually a number of things there i didn't i did not spend much time there it's a great concept where it's two or three billion dollars what about prediction you got to get to the beach i got to get to the beach predictions okay so i'm going to choose my words carefully here because this is such a hot topic but oh oh i think that by the way if i'm not risking my career every 48 hours i'm not doing my job okay look i think the story of the year and maybe even the story of the next several years is going to be a parent suicide and if you have ever ever been in a situation where it feels like there's a not a shoe but a ten ton truck about to drop and it's not even i'm not even curious around this i'm kind of scared because the notion that an individual who was about to spend the rest of his life in prison and the only way he wasn't going to spend the rest of his life in prison was to drop a dime on some of the world's most powerful people somehow ends up hanging himself in an eight by 12 cell after he's on suicide watch yeah i mean it's like an episode of homeland or something yeah yeah and so i i want to think it was an episode of homeland but go ahead i want to engage the same investigators the president trump engaged to investigate ted cruises father's role in the assassination JFK or the fact that he alleged that president obama was born in kenny i want to get those same crack investigators on this because if you were to basically look at all the conspiracy theories the white house is laid out over the last four years and then talk about the fact that you had this guy who now that he's dead the most powerful people in the world are all sleeping better and how how if i tried to hang myself on fifth avenue with the cameras somebody would stop me yet they couldn't figure out a way to not let this guy hang himself in an eight by 12 cell and there's all this stuff what the guard wasn't around and there was there's either just such incredibly gross negligence or malfeasance here that it makes me sad because some of the most talented people i know in some of my closest friends come to the united states and not only for a freedom it's not only for economic opportunities but because of the rule of law and their government agencies are not only seen as competent but there seems to be the right thing and kara this shit just stinks it does it makes me feel like a conspiracy theories i'm like this is insane like this can't be incompetence this is like so planned like the problem is which one of them killed them because there's so many there's so many sides it's like maybe if someone was like it's like um you know the agatha christian mover murder on the orange carat all did it yeah it's like that's what it's like all of them like it over here the clinton's over here the trumps the clinton's the elan musk is wandering somewhere around you know it's like literally it feels like there's so many and you know who knows what the russians it does feel like we live in russia right now it feels like oh they just fell they just got cold and died like what like you know like they took an umbrella and poked him or something like i don't know you're right i feel like there's so much here and the president's criminal defense attorney immediately comes out and says he's outraged like that protest it too much and then the president tries to create a diversionary tactic they're accusing the clinton's of this it's just the whole thing it's just talking about this group of people on the top who are running everything i'm just telling you yeah so i look i'm not i'm not even sort of curious here i'm just really disappointed that we're now that nation that can't seem you probably were always that nation in case you're interested there was always listen i'm near the top and i'm scared of the people at the top that's not just saying they just think they have a thing going on up there where they do bad things well that's the thing you got it down great to the little dog park with the big dog we don't have to worry about that ship we just taste our balls and smell their dogs again you are on it again i am up on problems here i'm feeling you're down great to the little dog park i have nothing to worry about i'm not going to be here i think you're lucky you would be gone right where you are one big giant wave and it would be over for most of elite that is an elite island there i've been there i have children who love me colors on your houses there because it doesn't fit anyway whatever kids who love me i have netflix a dispensary i'm just going to join myself i can't do that until the ask answer shows up there go the good news is we're going to be seeing a whole lot of each other next week we have a live we have a client for the people oh my gosh we're uh hosting a live pivot show in new york and we're going to do live predictions or we're going to assess people's predictions and it's just i'm just so a i'm just totally shocked that people want to show up and see us live but more than live podcasting is a thing i just still can't figure out that that is a thing it seems like it's sort of an oxymoron but you know we're a thing i have been stopped on the street a dozen times here in promise town but yeah i know yeah that's it whereas whereas you know Sean Hayes from uh Will and Grace he's a friend of mine like that guy three have his yeah we were hanging out jack yeah jack is a friend of mine so oh my god that is so awesome does jack ask about me does he ask about me he doesn't but he brought over like half a dozen other gay guys who loved pivot like i'm just like oh hi he's like this person's a huge fan they like recotico too but they're like they love the whole shtick anyway jack loves jack jack jack jack jack jack thank you you know another empty promise there's another rabbit coat on getting you a rabbit coat sweetheart yeah we're gonna send you a we're gonna send you a video okay jack jack jack okay anyway we'll be in new york next week it will also give it it'll be two pivots bonus episode galore next week we're gonna have a regular pivot and this pivot it's gonna be great and i can't wait to see scott what are you wearing you know what i was saying we should do i think we should go at least what i'm gonna do i want to go as megan or pino i'm serious we should trust i don't know don't you think you need hair for that but okay well i'll wear wear a wig okay you do whatever you want you i was thinking jump suits matching jumpsuits but anyway we'll figure it out on the phone separately thank you for dialing it back to the water take a dip yeah no way no way jump into the pop uh home scrabble that's my that's how the dog rolls you don't have to outrun the bear you just have to be faster than the other people running away from the bear that's why i know anyway today's show was produced by rebecca sananas nary johnson erica anderson is pivots executive producer thanks also to rebecca castro drew burrows in the shot kurwa make sure you subscribe to the show on apple podcast if you like this week's episode leave us a review if you have any suggestions for what you want to hear us talk about on a future show send us an email pivot at voxmedia.com thanks for listening to pivot from voxmedia we'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business