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Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.
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I'll do it again. I'm tearing up paper. I'm the speaker. Oh my god.
Nancy Pelosi, nice to meet you. And we're all basking in the warm glow of the majesty and honor of the Presidential Medal of Freedom being awarded to Rush Limbaugh. That's right. A man who calls women's slots because they advocate for government funding of birth control and refers to Obama as his favorite Negro.
Freedom! Let freedom ring! I can't even speak. I don't even...
Back to Madam Speaker. She has what is arguably the most uncanny, either intuitive sense or the best Advisors around recognizing opportunities for visual, iconic moments. Yeah. She is.
She does herself. I asked her last time when she was tweaking about something, one of her 27 tweaks. And I said, oh, who thought that up on your staff? And she goes, oh, I thought it up myself.
Like, she does think of them herself. She's incredible. You know what it would be. Many did not like it.
Yeah, I called it the 48% of America this pro-Trump. I mean, it's pretty... I got a ton of pushback on it when I said I've showed the film and said I wanted the meme of Speaker Pelosi tearing up the script, played it in my funeral. I got huge playback.
You know what would be gangster, though? Is it for the next day of the union? She tore it up. She sucked pen.
No, she tore it up and then slowly but surely, as the president was delivering his state of the union, which hopefully never happens again, she just starts, she tears it up and slowly but surely starts eating the paper. That would be gangster. That would be gangster. That would...
No one would focus on what the president was saying. Just pick by bit, just started eating the paper. Our nation has degenerated into like a 13 year old boy's bedroom. It's just...
By the way, that was... I stole that joke from a woman named Best Call. I don't know what Best I Was Bet she's a genius. Thank you, Best Call.
Yeah, I like that. Oh, God. What did you think? By the way, how old are we?
The state of the union, I now found interesting viewing. It was off 21%. I thought it was really interesting. What did you think?
Off. I tweeted this thing. I'm the only person that has watched all the apprentices. This is exactly what happened with the apprentice.
People got tired of the story, got tired of the error, the shitty error, every shitty error. And this is when it fell off. This is exactly what happens with him. You get entertained.
He's a hot mess. But then the hot mess is like, this is exhausting and I don't want to watch it anymore. Let me ask you this. Beyond, there were two I found incredibly offensive upsetting moments.
Well, the first one was when the president, a man in his 70s, a man in his speaker, a woman in her 70s, who both, regardless, put partisan politics aside, they're both important figures in the United States where all Americans, when he basically rebuffed her hand. I found that just rattling. Just sort of whoa. Yeah, he learned that from Melania.
He got that. The second was, I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but the whole reality, they show, it was a very moving moment and very upsetting. It's all very emotionally manipulative when they showed a mother and this beautiful young son who had lost her husband and father in his service in Iraq. And it was very moving.
The son was trying to comfort the mother who was obviously very upset. And then a few minutes later, they had this bullshit reality TV moment where they bring one of the soldiers home and the wife and the two kids weren't expecting it. And the only thing I could think about was the other two, who's like, dad wasn't going to come bursting through the door. And I'm like, did anybody in the administration planning out these nuclear moments decide that might be kind of difficult for the mother and the son to realize, well, where's our dad come home?
The military didn't like that. A lot of people in the military didn't like that. I thought it was very cheap. It was, you don't use them for that bullshit.
It's crass. It's crass. It's crass. I'm sorry.
The whole thing was crass. And Rush Limbaugh was icing on the very toxic cake. Anyway, Tesla stock took a major tumble this week by nearly 18%. Cars that were initially scheduled for delivery in early February, due to the outbreak of the new coronavirus.
You know, this has been a stock that's been on a tear. Although this fact you didn't, you had been saying it was going to crash and it did not. It went up further. But coronavirus seems to be impacting it along with other things.
Apple closed stores in China. Obviously, there's a lot of high-level manufacturing being done there by Silicon Valley, especially Apple. Any thoughts on this? Sure.
I mean, let's be fair. It's still up 100% in the last year. Tesla's a really, Tesla's an unusual phenomenon. Tesla is no longer an equity that represents a portion of ownership that trades based on fundamentals.
It's now become a currency. And that is two groups of people get together and decide it has a certain value and it's a currency. And it's not really based on any underlying fundamentals. You had a two-day period this week where 60% of the flow turned over and 60% of owners don't decide the company is worth more or less in a 48-hour period.
You know, it's not worth, yesterday it wasn't worth 20% less than it was a day before. The company's not worth 86% more than it was, I think, three or four months ago. It has officially detached from how traditional equities are valued. It's now become basically a speculative currency and it's strange, but it's also, there's really two stocks that have been able to detach from any previous valuations that somehow anchored or tethered to sector.
And that is Amazon and the Netflix and now Tesla is the third. And it's really interesting. All around compelling founders. All around complex.
Also very talented founders. Each of those people are not like what are below hard. They're all really talented. It's the idolatry of innovators.
And what's interesting is it could be a self-fuling prophecy. Now, Tesla is now worth more than the entire US auto industry. And because they have access to such extraordinary cheap capital, they can now probably make the types of investments that other auto companies can't make. And it may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy where they're able to pull away from everybody else.
They ultimately have to get a business that works such as Amazon did with AWS. Ultimately, you can't keep doing it, but you can do it for a long time. You certainly can. And you're right.
A little cheap capital gives him lots of opportunity. And he's a very clever man. And so he will take advantage of this. Absolutely.
But the coronavirus very quickly is I want to get to the shadow app. What's going to do to investments? People are really starting to focus on that now. So, and what could be argued will be the mother of all poorly aging comments.
I think coronavirus is wildly over-inflated in terms of its impact on Americans. We'll have 15 million people who have flew in the last 12 months, 8,000 died from it. And I believe there's been nine identified cases of coronavirus in the United States. And when you have the administration making these bold announcements and saying the jobs are going to come back.
It's almost hard to overreact to something like this because key is public education and maintaining it. And everyone get away from the beach, evacuate when hurricanes come. I get it. But this to me seems, I think data does not foot to the media's hysteria over this.
And if you look at coronavirus, it's quite infectious on its spectrum, but it has a low fatality rate. And the bottom line is the people who die are old. The median age of people who die from coronavirus so far is 70. So if you're under the age of 60, it's not really a threat to you.
Not to say that that doesn't make it a threat. But I think it's more hype than horror. All right. This is Scott's calling of the herd argument.
All right. There you go. There you go. Sorry, now that's time.
I've had my cold for four weeks now. This is like now today. It's not good. We'll be back in action right now.
No, it's just every day. It's very like, I want to get on my palaton and I cannot speak. We'll get to palaton later in a second. But first, let's go to Shadow App, the Iowa caucus debacle.
I wrote a big column on it. Obviously, we're tech meets politics in 2020 race. The Iowa Democratic Party for those who don't know it used an app called Shadow to count votes. It was so glitchy that results of the caucus when I calculated it until well into the next day.
Actually, I think they're still counting them. Obviously, Republicans used a moment to talk conspiracy theories about reg results. And it turned out it was owned, although they tried to sort of distance themselves from it by another group called acronym, which was a group of, we're going to beat Brad Parcel, Democrats, a lot of them from Obama and Clinton administrations. And we're going to get back and do our digital thing.
And obviously, they do not do their digital thing. A lot of it had to do with connectivity. It's not clear, but the app just didn't work and now it's been removed from the VODA racism. So this is really fascinating.
And so I want you to talk a little bit about the mix between tech and politics, because I do think we should be voting on phones. We should probably be more digitized with lots of backup systems, but this puts a black eye on that, for sure, especially when the prospect of hacking hangs over everything. I don't know much about acronym. Can you explain, first off, do you think this is good or bad?
Do you think this is shadowy or it's about time the Democrats actually started hitting back with their own gangs or digital underhanded? Well, they are. There's a progressive nonprofit. There was lots of stories about it.
There's a lot of previous Hillary Clinton staffers. There's a lot of people. It's this idea that first of all, these names are just like villains in a Marvel movie. You put money into this nonprofit and it was supposed to be doing all kinds of things to hit the back of the Trump machine.
They tried to distance themselves saying that they were merely an investor, although other things on their website that were saved show that they had a lot more linkage to this group. In any case, it's a Democrats being, and I wrote a column saying, look, it's a myth the Democrats are better at tech than Republicans. Republicans are great at tech. They were talking 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I interviewed Ralph Reed because he was using email and other things more effectively than the conservatives and the evangelicals because they were outside the mainstream media.
They learned how to use these tools. Whatever you think of Brad Parscale, who runs the Trump campaign, they're good at this, even through nefarious means, anything you can do, but they're very good at targeting, micro-targeting, lying, putting in lots of messaging. They're very effective. The Democrats just sort of sit there looking as if they are internet-y, but they're not.
They're not as much. The mother of all terrible brand movies, I would say the worst brand of the year, and there's one that tops is the Democratic National Committee for Iowa, or Iowa Democrats. The debacle in Iowa, think about this, some of the most important people in the world, shaping legislation around vets, seniors, sitting in a confidential intelligence briefings, have probably spent more time in Iowa over the last 12 months. Marco Rubio is already starting to go to Iowa in hopes of 2024, someone will decide he should finally get content for president.
These people have spent so much time eating fried Snickers bars. And all they're trying to do, and they've probably spent $100 million to a quarter of a million dollars, they have spent more time in Iowa than probably anywhere in the world outside of their home states or DC, such that they can get momentum in an early indicator that they should be the next president. When I'm doing math with my nine-year-old, and things get tough, occasionally he pulls out his fingers and he looks at the sky and he starts using his fingers, I'm suggesting my nine-year-old should run the Iowa caucuses in four years, because it couldn't be much more than what has happened. The way it's set up is so just not, this is why Bloomberg is interesting, whether he can sweep in and knock it all out on super Tuesday.
A lot of people think he can, a lot of people think he can't, but he's certainly ripe for disruption the way this is done. They always do it, this is the way it's done, we have to go to these pancake breakfast. I think retail politics is important and going to give speeches, and I think actually more interesting is what Trump's done in these rallies, not everyone can do these. That's an interesting thing, an old-timey kind of thing to do and works.
Have you been to Iowa? I have driven through it. I'm sorry, that summarizes Iowa's rolling United States. I've driven through it.
No, I've been to Iowa. You want to know again, everything we do in our society. The point is very lovely, but go ahead, sorry. Everything we do in this society is rigged such as a transfer of stakeholder value and power from the young and people of color to old white people.
I have to talk about the caucuses. Iowa, Iowa, population of Chicago, 90% white, skews older, and you can't help it if you're a presidential candidate, but when you spend all this time in town halls with older white people, you start talking about the fact that Social Security is sacrosanct. No, it isn't. Social Security is the largest transfer of stakeholder of money to the wealthiest generation in history in that senior U.S.
citizens. We should absolutely be means testing and raising the age. You're like very much, I just put them on the iceberg kind of thing, and I'm very much about calming crazy, but young people are the future, we need to stop robbing from them. Okay, so that's where everyone is focused.
That's where every presidential candidate is listening to being influenced. And then where do they go next to the second oldest state in the union, New Hampshire, which also happens to be 92% white. And then what do you know are policies, are legislation, the shaping of the narrative around U.S. politics is what do you know all about old white people?
Iowa, you are so fucking done. You are so overdue to not have the influence. You have in our national politics. Mississippi has the same population.
So technically it's just important. And 58% of Mississippi is white. 62% of America is white. Mississippi would be a much better place to start shaping the narrative around what American needs in terms of its policy than fucking Iowa.
That's my other rant. Something tells me I'm not a bit of a Hawkeye games. I see that Iowa. You have a war on old people, Scott Galloway.
Well, there's been a war on normal and young people, so much got a punch back. Fair, yeah, because both of us are the youngest of people. Listen to me, we had an argument, speaking of arguments. I don't agree with you on all of this.
I think some of it needs to change. We're going to talk about it. Facebook's 16th birthday this week. We had an argument about Sheryl Sandberg's engagement announcement.
Yeah, so go ahead. What do you think? She made an engagement announcement in People Magazine. She's getting married to this guy that she's met.
She's lovely, by the way. She seems lovely. Scott, you tweeted. Sheryl Sandberg isn't getting his lovely, I've met him once or twice.
Scott, you tweeted. Sheryl Sandberg is engaged. Seems like a nice guy. Everyone deserves a moment of joint privacy.
Okay, moment over. Guess they won't be hunting money in Canada where she has a standing summons. Scott, could you just... Okay, so make your point.
My point is... Okay. My point is, let us focus on what she's done as a business person and not lead into her personal life. You know how I am with this one.
Bill Maher went after Mark Zuckerberg's sweatshirt and his haircut that it makes him look like whatever. They think he looks like a Roman emperor or whatever. I just think it's not. Let's focus on him when we start to take these little digs at their personal lives.
It diminishes our argument which needs to be made about their shitty behavior as business people. And so I think that's why I just don't. There's so much more to attack them on and fairly that you don't need to also drag in this guy and everything else. Now, you make your argument.
Well, I think that's a fair point. I apologize. I'm learning from it. Just kidding.
What? Well, let me ask you this. When you coordinate when 30 or 90 of your 900 person PR comms team, coordinate with people magazine a photo essay using your engagement as a means of fabric softener for the harm you and your boss continue to levy against the US. You don't think that's fair game?
I don't think it's linked. I don't think she used 30 people. I think she has her own PR. This is a personal thing.
I don't think it was a face. There wasn't that much mentioned in Facebook about Facebook. It was about her husband dying. Let me just be clear.
He was a very good friend of mine. So I think that it wasn't by Facebook. I don't think it had a lot to do with Facebook. But I understand you're saying she's trying to soften up her image because of the other stuff.
And that's a good question. Maybe people knew about it. You wanted to get ahead of it. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I'm getting married. I'm going to put it out.
I'm going to do it for PR. You're getting married soon. If you invited Vogue in to do a photo essay on your wedding the same day you also tried to hide a Facebook update posting saying that the privacy was never your intention. The same day that the epoch times got circulation on Facebook saying to a voter fraud in Iowa to create again more insecurity and more corruption around our elections.
And people mocked the Vogue, what you talked about and Vogue after you coordinated with them at your wedding. It wouldn't be about your divorce. In my view this has nothing to do with her personal tragedy of several years ago. This is about her coordinating a PR orgy to try and soften the damage she's loving every day and her boss.
You're right. But I don't. This is public consumption. To be honest I think your argument would be more piercing if you would say to me Scott when you mock Jeff Bezos around his personal things around his girlfriend's brother suing him for defamation.
That's a lawsuit that's impacting his business. This is like this is a vocal. Yes. Yes.
I'm sorry. People. I imagine they were sitting in the room saying okay everyone hates Facebook. What do we do?
Let's put Sheryl's back. Exactly what they do every day. No they do. That's exactly what they do.
I don't know maybe I'm just I just don't think that. Who would agree to have their personal so if she. I don't know. Hold on.
If she had. If she had. Something else is a foot maybe something else. Well this is a theory and I want you to go on.
But first if she had said if she had said or her PR people had called me Alex and said look Cheryl's been through a lot and we want to keep her personal life and her engagement and kind of out of the press. I think everyone would respect it. That's just not Rihanna. She's not that interesting.
But instead they say let's do a photo essay. I'm the person who actually took Merissa Mary down so I got endless shit for it because she's one of the few I was hard. That's not true. That is not true.
In this case I think Cheryl needs absolute criticism for she and Mark together about what has happened at Facebook. I don't care about her engagement. I don't think it should be a subject of discussion. We're going to.
Well tell her that. Keep it to yourself Cheryl. We're happy for you keep it to yourself. Well you know what that's her decision.
I don't again that's not my biggest. And the question is are you as hard on Zuckerberg is you are personally on Samberg. You did not you did not talk about his haircut. You did not talk about his.
I think that's off limits. I don't think you make fun of people's physical attributes. I've never made a purpose about you. When he was doing the PR around his baby and speaking Chinese I didn't hear you.
It was pipe up. Oh, but you did hear me when you invited me to code. I got on a stage. Yes you did.
You're a fan. What did I do? I took people through an argument based on his statements accusing him of being a sociopath. I am not a wise person.
Yes you did. So I called him. I called him. I laid out an argument in public on video which got I don't know 200,000 views.
That's more people continue to pay $12,000 to come to the ultimate concave of white people called code which I'm happy to go to. And I called him a sociopath. But that didn't bother you. That didn't bother you.
No. You're talking about his business. You're talking about his wife and baby. You have never.
And nor should you. And if you do I'm going to have to speak to you very strongly. Right. He has a good judgment not to invite people magazine to do photos.
No, no, no, no, no. There was one. Wrong. They did.
They did a whole thing. There was a baby. I mocked the Halloween outfits that he had that he published with him and his daughter. It's just so weird to be trying to convince you that I've been cruel to other people.
Look, we're going to disagree on this. But let me get to what Zuckerberg said this week when he was announcing that he's still wrapping himself in free expression and stuff like that. And this is a quote. This needs to be attacked.
This is a new approach. There's a couple of other people off. But frankly, the old approach is pissing a lot of people off too. Let's try something different.
We're going to be honest. I just, my head blew off. Same work. Same work.
I just, I'm like, what do you talk about? First of all, stop wrapping yourself in this free expression thing and conflating all kinds. The second thing is going to be honest. We're going to be on, like, they aren't, they're fundamentally dishonest as a company.
And then piss a lot of people off, but frankly, that's the attitude that you have. Like no, no. You don't have to be in constant frustration if I'm sorry, but just like it's such an obnoxious, such an obnoxious, silly, I'm surprised because I've never seen that. such a victimization attitude where we actually do it.
We just keep him on it of sociopathy. I'm the victim. Yeah, well, OK. I'm the victim.
Only, and I can save us, and you don't understand me. And I mean, it's just literally an associate. It was so trippy, and I was deeply disappointed. He's decided to do the brazen and out approach, which I think works for some people.
And I don't think it's going to work for him. It works for Trump. He's a big hot mess. He makes a mess.
But there's very few people this works for. And I just couldn't see an adult like Tim Cook do this, or read Hastings or Jeff Bezos. You know what I mean? I'd like to, when Jeff punched back at the National Enquirer, but that was appropriate.
So in other words, just back off of Cheryl's fiancee, just back off of him. Just kind of angry and broken. We just disagree. We just disagree.
I think you have an incredible ability to have insight to things. And I think it takes away from your insights. I think people you open yourself up to attacks when you do this. And you need it because you have so much fodder, so much stuff you can throw.
You don't need to throw that. That's just like that. Don't try to obfuscate the argument with compliments. OK.
You're so insightful indeed. I think there's something else coming on here. Maybe she's thinking of leaving the company. I don't know.
It's just. Yeah, yeah. You have a theory. You have a theory that is part of the work.
I don't know why. I think she's going to leave. I think she's going to carve out an image. I don't know.
Maybe not. She said she's told me directly. She's going to stay until it's fixed. So I don't know.
I know. She thinks it's fixed. I don't know. I agree with you.
I think she's going to declare victory on leave. I think she's very focused on her manicuring her own brand. I think she has political ambitions. And she's not.
I think the brand's been hurt rather. It'll never happen. But that doesn't mean she doesn't have ambitions. Like I said, send it a river.
I don't think she did. I've been the one that said she doesn't. She wasn't going to offer politics. But that was me.
I was the only one that was saying that. But we'll see. We'll see. Anyway, we're going to first go.
We can talk about Huawei, but that's not too much time here. We've talked enough about it. We've sucked it up with Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg's personalized. All right, Scott, we've got to take a quick break.
We'll be back with listener mail and wins and fails and predictions. Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.
Introducing Odo. 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? Odo 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 Odo for free at Odo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com. Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough.
So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. Introducing Odo. 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? Odo 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 Odo for free at Odo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com. All right, we're back.
I'm here with Scott Callaway on pivot. Let's get into some listener mail, Scott. You've got to keep the leaf. I'm going to be a mailman.
You've got mail. Hello, Karen Scott. My name is Brian Collin from Toronto. My question is about One-Michael, the alphabet, back patient care instructor.
Where your thoughts about the company and the IPO debut? Do you believe the business model is sustainable and scalable? And what's your assessment of the concierge medicine industry? Thank you very much.
Love the podcast. Cheers. So Scott, what do you think about this One-Michael thing? I just went to one of those places, One-Michael, and I think they're great.
I actually find them very helpful. But what do you think about this business? Because it's really interesting. You can see, you know, this is alphabet.
This is Google here. Amazon's options are getting in the healthcare business. It definitely needs to be streamlined, especially on things like flu or very easy things to solve. So what do you think?
What do you think about this disruption? Well, I think it's a gangster idea. And what I've come to believe around business is that even more important than the execution of the company itself is the industry that's disrupting. And the two most disruptive industries in the world right now are number two is education.
My industry where we have become drunk on luxury brands, have a small series of monopolies, and are basically preying on the hopes and dreams of parents, such that we charge them 95% gross margin to hopefully certify their children, to have the same opportunities we all have for action on money. But anyways, the most disruptive industry in the world hands down is US healthcare. And what's interesting though is the question around healthcare is, well, the same thing happened to healthcare that has happened to the media industry and is now happening to shipping and fulfillment. And that is, it becomes feature-ized.
And what I mean by that is that a big player, a series of big players, including Google, Apple, Amazon, come in and start offering healthcare services at a kind of break even or even a loss, such that they can increase the MPS, increase the loyalty, and increase another business that drives more shareholder value. So Apple can go into original scripted television, it's been $4.5 million, so they can sell more iPhones. Amazon spends $9 billion on original scripted television, such as more people. So more people, so we got some 72% of homes to 77%.
In addition, renewal rates at Amazon Prime, since they launched Prime Video, have gone from 78% to 92%, which has probably added $100 billion in market cap. So could the healthcare industry become the new feature of another business. So healthcare as marketing ham, interesting. Healthcare as marketing ham.
That's right. Healthcare as service. What do you think? That's true.
I think it's true. I remember talking to Jill Soloway once and she was talking about her experience at Amazon. We were just chatting about her stuff, why she went there and things like that. And one of the things I said is you should get more money because you're helping them sell more toilet paper.
Like, do you understand? Like, you should get a big of the toilet paper and she was laughing. I'm like, no, really, this is not about your programming, it's about selling toilet paper. It's like, it's having a relationship with a customer and you are just an added plus kind of stuff, which I thought was, and she had never thought of it that way, but it was, I was like, you hardly matter.
Like, they're happy to have it and it's good for people who like your wonderful entertainment, but it's really about that. And so, yeah, these, these, these, they've been sort of bumping along all these things. You know, I see case was involved in one of these minute clinics that were in Walgreens and you know, you'd think the pharmacy industry would own this area and they do. They have these minute clinics, but they're not very good.
But these standalone one medicals and City Med, I think there's a city med, empty or something like that. I had such a good experience and I, I, I, all I wanted to do was find out if I had strep throat, so I could take the right drugs. And it was simple, it was fast, it was easy, it was not, you know, it really was, and I was like, there's lots of these things happening. It's just that none of them has been backed by, like, it hasn't been big yet.
Do you know what I mean? This is how people get it. I think the whole trend is a good one for consumers, because you do get, like, most illnesses are small, like a strap or a flu and easily fixed. And the whole system, what happens, you get so sick, you go to the hospital and that's like a horrible, you know, situation.
But I do think, I do think it's an interesting, once, once, like an Amazon gets in here or a Google. Crazy. It's kind of crazy. And then of course the data, the data, the data, the data.
Well, here's the thing. There's good and there's bad. The good news is, you know, never have a group of people stuck their chin out further than the US healthcare industry. The insurance industry, the drug industry.
So it's sort of like, we welcome the disruption. Yeah, the bad news though, is that the majority of the shareholder value that's going to, you're going to hear this enormous sucking sound out of the healthcare industry, which is one of the most valuable industries in the world. And that's a good thing. They need to be disrupted.
Consumers will probably recognize some of that disruptive value transition. But all of that value, that shareholder value is going to go to the same people. It's always going to go to the big tech guys. Just the same way if you'd said, who's going to create the most value through the Witcher and show called Amanda Lauren.
You wouldn't say Disney and Apple. You wouldn't say that the coolest new comedy, Fleabag, who would that create a value to 10 years ago? You wouldn't say, Amazon, you would say, wait, is Amazon going to buy Macy's or something? So you have entire industries being disrupted, which you could argue is a good thing.
We need job destruction for innovators. We need to reinvent industries. But all that value is going to the same small number of companies. By the way, don't pay their taxes.
By the way, overrun Washington. You know, by the way, let their platforms be weaponized. So there's good and bad here. And we need, we need smart people to step in and figure out where the externalities are.
They're coming in. They're coming in. This is exactly what I would do if I was each of those three guys. It would be Apple, Amazon, and Google really.
Facebook doesn't seem to be wandering around this area, but it certainly could. Alright, it wins and fails. It wins and fails. I'm going to do mine first.
Spotify, buying Bill Simmons. They're going to here at Largely because it's good for Cara and Scott. Do you know what the purchase price was? I've heard $100 million, but I heard it.
Yeah, Spotify is fourth, major podcast. I was just not doing it. Do they offer health insurance? They do.
They have Spotify, Cara and Scott are for sale. So that was great for Bill. We talked about this. I think he had some issues around that company.
There was a union thing going on. I suspect he didn't like running things. I know that feeling. And so this puts me, it'll be interesting to see how they manage.
My issue is, look, it could be a hot mess inside Spotify with all these different podcasts. If they don't organize them correctly, but it makes sense on Spotify's part to try to buy up different things to differentiate themselves. But I hope they organize it properly because I can just see, like, Gimlet, I think Simmons thing is going to be separate from Gimlet. It just feels a little bit like, oh, this could be a problematic mess inside the company.
But otherwise, I think it's great for Bill. Some things products are great. And so it's interesting that he started this just a few years ago and he's selling it to 50, 50, 50, 50 podcasts he has, but he has a lot. And they're all in sports, a lot of sports oriented stuff.
And my fail is, it's not my fail. It's not my fail. It's Peloton did really well, which is a plus, but that it seemed to have affected SoulCycles profits. And you know, as you know, I have this now, I love SoulCycles.
The idiot who owned it gave all this money to Trump and I stopped using it. But it's because you're over your sales decline on record, especially in December because of the people buying Peloton's and stuff. And I see, you could see that coming. So that's my to fail for Peloton's sales.
I was like, I'm not to have a Zelda bike, for example, and done this. And you both, you both. Have you found your own? No, I don't go to SoulCycles at all.
I refuse to give that money. I'm sorry. Yeah, but even to stink of that, do you think that you personally see that trend moving to in-home Peloton versus? Yeah, I do.
I think they're really good. I think these things are interesting for people who can afford them, obviously. I also join the Y this week because I think the Y is great and I want my kids to go there. And I just think it's a good community base, things like that.
So, you know, it's a certain thing. I like to go out and do things with people. So I think it's definitely a trend then, for sure. Especially that they do a beautiful job.
I've got to Scott's and beat him with a hammer. I'm back in on my Peloton. He's got it on my Peloton. Let me put it up to 50.
So anyway, so yes, I do think it's a trend. But that's what we can talk about in the day. What are your wins and fails? My win was, I watched, did you see this in a New Hampshire town hall?
Yes, I did last night. Yes. I thought there were two powerful moments. First off, I appreciate that Andrew Yang is calling out Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg per year comments.
I've been disappointed that thus far, there really hasn't been a lot of focus on Big Tech. And I think they're so busy that it's difficult to learn and be nuanced. And they're also scared to poke the bear. It's going to be very powerful and a lot of money.
So I appreciate Andrew Yang calling out. Someone else did. Someone else did. Someone else did.
I just saw the hang on. The other one was, the other one for me was Senator Warren. I thought I had a very powerful moment. They didn't get that much attention.
And she talked about the AIDS crisis in the context of the opioid crisis and created, and said that there was a lot we could learn from the AIDS crisis. And that is similar to opioids. That part of the reason the government hadn't intervened and provided the funding and the education and kind of the heft and the mojo to push back on these tragedies. And you need government intervention here.
You need the full heft and might and dignity of the greatest fighting force in history and that's the US government. And the reason it had taken too long with opioids was similar to AIDS. And that is there's a stigma around both of these things. And she brought up how a young man named Ryan White changed everything.
And it immediately took me back to when I first heard about and learned about Ryan White and just how it really like he punched you in the gut and it kind of changed everything. And I thought, I mean, they should have given it long. There was just no, there was just regardless of your religion regardless of whatever bigoted fucked up in the head reasons you had to not feel sorry for certain certain cohorts that were getting ravaged by this plague. You just couldn't ignore Ryan White.
You just couldn't ignore it. You couldn't turn away from it. And that's when things change in the Ryan White Act. And we have pushed back in a big way.
The warm hand of science has lifted a lot of people up from HIV. And it's been a huge victory. I'll be too late. And Senator Warren said we tend to be $1 short in a day late on these things.
And last year, more people died from opioids and died during the peak of the AIDS crisis in the mid 90s. And she's data, compassion. She has a plan. She's fantastic.
She's proved so drastically. She's so qualified to present it. She's an incredible blue flame thinking. She's a leader.
She's a jet Bartlett. I'm like, she's a lady jet Bartlett. She's a impressive woman. She is.
And it's depressing that people just have to focus on what they don't like about her. She's really quite brilliant. I think she's jammed too far over to the left. She shouldn't have, because she's really not actually.
Open borders and Medicare for all have killed it. She's not. She's not. She's really quite a kind of a character.
She's the smartest person in the room. She reminds me a little bit. Obviously, a different character in moral fabric. But she reminds me of Bill Clinton.
I think when Elizabeth Warren shows up, it goes into any room. There's a good chance she knows more about the topic than anyone else in the room. Speaking of the way, speaking of which, I'm going to be very quick, fail, which was the Barnes and Noble Diverse editions for young people. I do want to mention this was depressing to see.
They used A.I. in Scannan set of books where there was this reference for pranks being white. And they didn't change that, but they literally put people of color on the front. And it was just ridiculous.
It was a ridiculous for Black History Month. It was just insane not to just get more people of color as writers, publish more, put them on stores, feature them. It was like, this was just, they should be elevating narratives that reflect these stories. And they just put, it was depressing.
I was sort of like, who in the room, what did that happen in? And he thought this was a good idea. It was just, I was shocked by the news day and age, someone would do something as dumb and papp as that. So thank you.
I'm going to just release it. Yeah, that seemed like how did that get through? I wouldn't be in that room where I would have been like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. My fail, my fail is, I love the term, you have the straight term, you called Pete Buttigieg, a non-carbonated gay, which I always use the term non-carbonated or the diatro version of.
Casper is pricing today. I think Casper is sort of a non-carbonated, I don't want to call it, we work. It's more like the non-carbonated Blue Apron, Blue Apron, Blue Apron, and I love it. So it's a cute brand, kind of a nice business, aspirational, business made no sense.
So Casper is going public, they initially said they were in price of $17 to $19 a share. They're saying the pricing of $12 a share, which gives it a market cap of $500 million. It's last round was a $1.1 billion. And it's becoming a bit of a poster child for how the froth around taking a bad business, putting a bright young management team on top of it, putting VCs behind it, calling it disruptive, using the term technology 130 times.
So that makes a great company or a company worth over $1 billion and it doesn't. And I think this company, if it gets out, and I guess it is going to get out, it's going to be down 40% in the next six months. This business makes absolutely no sense. You did predict it wasn't going to go public, but it's going for it, guys, saying screw you.
We'll see. I said, if it did, to be fair, I said, if it gets public, it's off 50% of the first 12 months. I think it's not going to go on. I know that by our next show.
But until then, what is it? Well, not in the first week. Hold on. Hold on.
Hold on. My timing around this stuff. I don't think. Should we move to predictions anyway?
Casper is a loss. No, I want to do it. So Casper is not a prediction. So you think it's going to go out in a much less than drop precipitously?
It might hold because Goldman will do a good job of mine. I'm not running around institutions and saying, I'll get you a Casper, but you can't sell. They're going to try and find people who won't sell for a while. They're going to constrict the float to try and create artificial demand and keep it artificially up.
But once the lockup on this thing comes out, everyone of Casper, all the employees are going, yeah, yeah. And then kind of going, what is my lockup done here? There's a lot of companies like Casper. There's so many.