0:00:02 – Okay, business leaders, are you here to play
0:00:04 or are you playing to win?
0:00:07 If you’re in it to win, meet your next MVP.
0:00:08 NetSuite by Oracle.
0:00:10 NetSuite is your full business management system
0:00:12 in one convenient suite.
0:00:13 With NetSuite, you’re running your accounting,
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0:00:18 and more all from your online dashboard.
0:00:20 Upgrade your playbook and make the switch to NetSuite,
0:00:23 the number one cloud ERP.
0:00:25 Get the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning
0:00:30 at netsuite.com/vox. NetSuite.com/vox.
0:00:31 ♪ Herama ♪
0:00:35 – Behold, my name is Maximus Entertainmentus
0:00:38 and I come to you with big stars in big dramas
0:00:41 like “Gladiator 2,” “Dexter,” “Original Sin,”
0:00:42 and “1923.”
0:00:45 – Stream Paramount Plus for $6.99 a month.
0:00:48 – Clear your schedule for U-time
0:00:52 with a handcrafted espresso beverage from Starbucks.
0:00:54 Savor the new small and mighty Cortado.
0:00:57 Cozy up with the familiar flavors of pistachio
0:00:59 or shake up your mood
0:01:02 with an iced brown sugar oat-shaken espresso.
0:01:03 Whatever you choose,
0:01:07 your espresso will be handcrafted with care at Starbucks.
0:01:13 – I’m Scott Galloway and this is “No Mercy, No Malice.”
0:01:17 This past weekend, Elon Musk called me cruel,
0:01:19 mean, and deceitful.
0:01:23 Two and a half years ago, I called him a welfare queen.
0:01:27 You decide, cruel, mean, and deceitful,
0:01:29 as read by George Hahn.
0:01:38 – This post was originally published August 19th, 2022.
0:01:44 What’s the most successful venture capital firm in history?
0:01:47 Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital
0:01:50 backed many internet era success stories.
0:01:52 And recent Horowitz?
0:01:57 No, one organization towers above.
0:02:01 This firm was there before the first transistor was printed
0:02:03 and it will be there after we receive brain implants.
0:02:08 One investor funded the computer, the internet,
0:02:11 speech recognition, last mile distribution,
0:02:13 mapping the human genome,
0:02:15 the core technologies of fracking
0:02:18 and the first horizontal shale drill.
0:02:21 And today, it’s driving down the cost of solar
0:02:24 and wind power below that of coal.
0:02:26 Even better news?
0:02:30 If you’re a U.S. taxpayer, you’re a limited partner.
0:02:35 Founded in 1776 by General Partners Washington,
0:02:39 Jefferson, and Madison, and headquartered today
0:02:42 in a Bo Arts corporate campus in the District of Columbia,
0:02:45 the U.S. government is the world’s premier funder
0:02:48 of technological and commercial innovation.
0:02:53 The Inflation Reduction Act, IRA,
0:02:57 is being hailed/hated as a climate bill.
0:03:00 But it’s really just the most recent investment
0:03:02 by Eagle Capital.
0:03:06 Opponents of the legislation claim it’s a poor investment.
0:03:09 Eagle Cap’s track record suggests otherwise.
0:03:12 And we can expect big returns.
0:03:15 The IRA, awful name,
0:03:19 will direct $369 billion to a variety
0:03:23 of clean energy initiatives largely through tax credits.
0:03:27 The largest investments are for solar, wind,
0:03:29 and nuclear power generation,
0:03:32 where Eagle builds on a track record of success.
0:03:35 The government has invested over $3 billion
0:03:39 in wind power R&D since 1976.
0:03:42 And it’s been offering tax credits for wind and solar
0:03:44 since the 1990s.
0:03:49 Just since 2010, the cost of solar has dropped 85%
0:03:55 and the price to harness wind energy has been halved.
0:03:58 Public funding through R&D and tax credits
0:04:02 has been instrumental to that progress.
0:04:06 90% of U.S. coal-fired power is now more expensive
0:04:10 to operate than replacement wind or solar sources.
0:04:13 And that’s not for lack of investment in coal.
0:04:15 Conservative accounting puts government subsidies
0:04:19 for coal at $20 billion per year.
0:04:21 And the IRA includes investments
0:04:23 in carbon capture technology
0:04:26 intended to support coal energy for several years.
0:04:31 Eagle Cap’s $528 million loss
0:04:34 on solar cell manufacturer Solindra,
0:04:39 which declared bankruptcy in 2011, was a notable miss.
0:04:43 But failure is inherent to venture investing.
0:04:46 One analysis found the best-performing VC firms
0:04:51 have more money-losing investments than the average funds.
0:04:54 The key difference is the magnitude of their successes
0:04:57 and aggregate portfolio returns.
0:04:59 Solindra was a miss,
0:05:02 but the $30 billion Department of Energy loan program
0:05:05 that funded it turned a profit.
0:05:08 There are many notable wins.
0:05:12 One business that took a $465 million loan
0:05:16 from the same program in its early days, Tesla.
0:05:19 You likely didn’t know that
0:05:22 as its CEO spends more time shitposting America
0:05:23 than crediting it.
0:05:27 Early-stage, future-leaning research is riskier
0:05:31 and requires large amounts of patient capital.
0:05:33 Private industry struggles to justify
0:05:38 long-term mammoth investments in deep science.
0:05:41 The most enduring societies have one thing in common.
0:05:45 Their governments play the long game.
0:05:47 In the 1960s in the US,
0:05:51 this meant computer and networking technology.
0:05:56 At its peak, federal R&D spending approached 2% of GDP.
0:05:59 The most cutting-edge work was done
0:06:04 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA,
0:06:07 which developed or funded the development
0:06:10 of almost every building block technology
0:06:12 of our tech infrastructure,
0:06:14 from the internet and the mouse
0:06:18 to graphical user interfaces and GPS.
0:06:23 More recently, DARPA has been a major funder of AI projects,
0:06:26 notably speech recognition.
0:06:29 Both Dragon and Siri spun out of DARPA.
0:06:31 Speech illuminates the difference
0:06:34 between government and private R&D.
0:06:36 In the 1950s, Private Bell Labs,
0:06:40 a.k.a. the phone company, did pioneering work
0:06:44 on speech recognition, but only on phone digits zero through nine.
0:06:48 The government also invests upstream
0:06:51 by supporting public education and universities.
0:06:55 Stanford established its leadership in engineering
0:06:57 thanks to a unique three-way partnership
0:07:02 between the university, industry, and government contracts,
0:07:05 centered around the Stanford Research Institute,
0:07:09 where many DARPA innovations have been created.
0:07:11 Mark Andreessen coded Mosaic,
0:07:14 the first consumer-friendly graphical web browser,
0:07:17 it was the precursor to Netscape Navigator,
0:07:21 while attending the publicly funded University of Illinois
0:07:23 and working at the federally funded
0:07:27 National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
0:07:29 Again, did you know that?
0:07:31 Why would you?
0:07:34 According to an MIT study,
0:07:37 technology developed at universities
0:07:41 and then licensed to industry between 1996 and 2010,
0:07:46 created $388 billion in GDP and 3 million jobs.
0:07:54 Double-click on any major tech product or company,
0:07:57 and you’ll find government-funded tech.
0:08:01 Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm were all beneficiaries
0:08:04 of a loan program similar to the one
0:08:07 that funded Solyndra and Tesla.
0:08:09 Google’s core algorithm was developed
0:08:13 with a National Science Foundation grant.
0:08:16 Economist Mariana Matsukato in her book,
0:08:18 “The Entrepreneurial Slate,” calculates
0:08:22 that US government agencies have provided roughly a quarter
0:08:26 of total funding for early-stage tech companies,
0:08:28 and that in the pharmaceutical industry,
0:08:31 a sector requiring immense experimentation
0:08:36 and a willingness to fail, 75% of new molecular entities
0:08:40 have been discovered by publicly funded labs
0:08:42 or government agencies.
0:08:46 50 years from now, the field most likely
0:08:51 to spawn more value than digital computing is genetics,
0:08:52 and similar to digital computing,
0:08:57 genetics is an EagleCat portfolio industry.
0:09:02 The Human Genome project cost US taxpayers $3.8 billion,
0:09:06 was completed under budget and two years ahead of schedule,
0:09:11 and has generated $966 billion in economic activity
0:09:17 and $59 billion in federal tax revenue.
0:09:23 It’s estimated the federal government’s $3.3 billion
0:09:26 in annual spending on genetics projects
0:09:31 generates $265 billion in economic activity annually.
0:09:36 This number doesn’t account for the improved health outcomes
0:09:39 and quality of life flowing from genetic breakthroughs,
0:09:41 which have an estimated value
0:09:45 of $1 trillion per year and growing.
0:09:49 One of EagleCat’s recent wins in this space,
0:09:51 the Moderna COVID vaccine,
0:09:55 the result of a $25 million DARPA grant
0:09:59 to the company for developing RNA vaccine technology.
0:10:03 The biggest critics of the government
0:10:07 are oddly some of its biggest beneficiaries.
0:10:11 Tech billionaires are often the first to shitpost America,
0:10:13 even as they continue to harvest wealth
0:10:15 from the investments taxpayers make
0:10:17 via the US government.
0:10:21 In fact, the biggest bitcher
0:10:24 may be the biggest financial beneficiary.
0:10:27 Elon Musk says we should get rid
0:10:30 of all government subsidies that, quote,
0:10:33 “The government is the biggest corporation
0:10:35 with a monopoly on violence,” unquote,
0:10:39 and last week mocked Washington
0:10:42 for hiring more employees at the IRS.
0:10:44 Let’s be clear.
0:10:47 Elon didn’t build an EV company in South Africa
0:10:51 or start a rocket company in Canada.
0:10:56 He built Tesla and SpaceX in the United States,
0:10:59 and both continue to be heavily dependent
0:11:01 on US government support.
0:11:06 There would be no SpaceX without NASA,
0:11:08 its largest customer.
0:11:11 Tesla built its Fremont factory
0:11:16 with a $465 million DOE loan in 2010,
0:11:20 and its first 200,000 cars benefited
0:11:24 from tax credit subsidies of up to $7,500.
0:11:28 For years, the company was able to report profits
0:11:31 thanks to the sale of emissions credits
0:11:33 to other car makers.
0:11:35 All told, the company has accepted
0:11:40 an estimated $2.5 billion in government support.
0:11:45 Mark Andreessen says he’s pro-gridlock,
0:11:48 because, quote, “When the government does things,
0:11:52 it usually doesn’t end well,” unquote.
0:11:55 Except for providing the state-sponsored platform
0:12:00 for his career, the University of Illinois and NCSA.
0:12:02 Now Mark is making news
0:12:06 because he’s concerned about our nation’s housing crisis.
0:12:09 “We aren’t building enough houses,” he wrote recently,
0:12:12 and that’s, quote, “a driving force
0:12:15 behind inequality and anxiety,” unquote.
0:12:20 Except when the housing is near his house.
0:12:24 Another outspoken billionaire, Peter Thiel,
0:12:27 says the US government is socialist
0:12:30 and believes we have, quote, “much worse outcomes
0:12:35 than the Soviet Union in the 1950s,” unquote.
0:12:37 His solution is to take up seasteading,
0:12:40 i.e., building floating autonomous ocean communities
0:12:44 that aren’t subject to regulations or taxes.
0:12:46 But Thiel’s current venture, Palantir,
0:12:49 is a government contractor that provides data analytics
0:12:54 to the CIA, DOD, and other government agencies,
0:12:58 and these contracts make up almost 60% of its revenue.
0:13:03 Note, Palantir has lost money every year of its existence.
0:13:06 That feels like a Soviet outcome.
0:13:11 In the 1980 presidential run,
0:13:15 Ronald Reagan advocated tearing up our social safety net
0:13:17 on the manufactured claim
0:13:20 that it offered nothing more than handouts for lazy people.
0:13:26 He popularized the notion of the welfare queen,
0:13:28 someone living large on the government’s dime,
0:13:32 having more children to generate more welfare income.
0:13:37 It was a classist, racist stunt, and it worked.
0:13:42 22 states passed laws banning increased welfare payments
0:13:45 to mothers who had additional children,
0:13:49 and we’ve been slashing and burning the government ever since.
0:13:53 Reagan’s welfare queen was a caricature,
0:13:56 a country club cocktail fantasy
0:14:00 of the ungrateful beneficiary of hard-earned tax money.
0:14:04 The new welfare queens are tech billionaires.
0:14:07 The only difference is, they’re real.
0:14:12 VCs claim they partner with entrepreneurs, many do,
0:14:16 bring unique insight, most don’t,
0:14:21 and care about the founder, read money.
0:14:24 What’s clear is that the economic model
0:14:28 of 20% carried interest, investors and VCs
0:14:33 get 80% and 20% of the gains on capital, respectively,
0:14:36 has been flipped on its head regarding public investment,
0:14:40 where investors, taxpayers, often get less than the VCs
0:14:43 and entrepreneurs, they back.
0:14:47 Ironically, a Democrat held up the legislation
0:14:51 until the most obscene tax break in our tax code was restored.
0:14:55 I hope someday somebody loves me
0:14:59 the way Senator Sinema loves VC and private equity.
0:15:02 We’re on vacation and my kids made $27
0:15:05 from their lemonade stand yesterday.
0:15:10 They then spent $29 on nerds and airheads candy
0:15:14 and were 100% confident they should have unfettered access
0:15:18 to their returns before, during, after dinner,
0:15:20 as they earned it.
0:15:26 The gap in the math was that dads spent $38 on supplies,
0:15:31 table, sign, market, pitcher, cups, lemonade mix, et cetera.
0:15:34 Take this times a trillion
0:15:36 and you’re starting to get warm
0:15:39 regarding the relationship between taxpayers,
0:15:42 Sandhill Road and the innovators they back.
0:15:46 A wonderful thing about our country
0:15:49 is that the people who are the most patriotic
0:15:53 are the ones who’ve made the greatest investment, veterans.
0:15:57 Less heartening are the individuals
0:15:59 who’ve registered the greatest benefit,
0:16:04 are the least grateful and are often the most critical.
0:16:07 VCs who relocate to Miami
0:16:11 and before buying Sunblock disparage constantly,
0:16:14 the state they built their wealth in.
0:16:19 Also, mega welfare queens who cash EV subsidy checks
0:16:23 and sell carbon credits as they mock the elected leaders
0:16:25 who passed those laws.
0:16:29 By the way, nobody believes you move to Florida
0:16:31 or Texas for better governance.
0:16:34 You wanted the chance to recognize a capital gain
0:16:37 at a lower tax rate than the middle-class taxpayers
0:16:42 who funded your infrastructure, fuck off.
0:16:47 The first trillionaire will likely be an entrepreneur
0:16:49 who builds a layer of innovation
0:16:52 on top of the bold investment American citizens
0:16:55 are making to address climate change.
0:16:59 Let’s hope they display more grace and citizenship
0:17:02 and our elected leaders demonstrate more backbone
0:17:07 representing investors, the lower 99.99%.
0:17:13 – Life is so rich.
0:17:16 (gentle music)
0:17:19 (gentle music)
0:17:22 (gentle music)
0:17:25 (gentle music)

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0:00:42 >> Okay, business leaders, are you here to play or are you playing to win?
0:00:46 If you’re in it to win, meet your next MVP, NetSuite by Oracle.
0:00:50 NetSuite is your full business management system in one convenient suite.
0:00:52 With NetSuite, you’re running your accounting, your finance, your HR,
0:00:56 your e-commerce, and more all from your online dashboard.
0:01:01 Upgrade your playbook and make this switch to NetSuite, the number one cloud ERP.
0:01:06 >> Get the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com/vox.
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0:01:43 >> Episode 336, 336 is the area covering North Carolina.
0:01:47 In 1936, the first superhero to wear a skin tight Cosman mask,
0:01:51 the Phantom, appeared in newspaper comic strips.
0:01:52 Choose to wear it.
0:01:57 My premature ejaculation problem started with my other half dressed up as a superhero.
0:02:00 Before I knew it, I came in a flash.
0:02:03 Oh, God, it’s all gonna end soon.
0:02:06 Go, go, go!
0:02:15 [MUSIC]
0:02:19 >> Welcome to the 336th episode of The Prodigy Pod, what’s happening?
0:02:23 Back in London, after a short stint, I went to, what did I go?
0:02:26 I went to Disney World for a speaking gig, and then I went to New York.
0:02:29 Had to get three or four nights there, saw a bunch of friends, went out.
0:02:31 Probably drank a little too much.
0:02:33 Well, daddy went deep in the paint one night, I’ve been trying to drink a lot less.
0:02:38 I’m trying to cut my alcohol consumption by 40 to 60%.
0:02:42 And I think I’m hovering somewhere between, I think I’ve reduced it somewhere between 20 and 30,
0:02:44 but I’m on a roll now.
0:02:47 And I have been feeling better, I have been, or less bad, I should say.
0:02:48 I feel less bad.
0:02:52 I was about to take a run in Regent’s Park before I did this pod.
0:02:56 I’m starting to run a little bit, and of course I ran out of time.
0:03:01 There’s one couple lessons I’ve taken away from previous podcasts.
0:03:05 I did a podcast with Mel Robbins when I interviewed her for my pod.
0:03:10 So she said something that struck me, and that is I do away with the stall or
0:03:14 the time or the gap between deciding or thinking you should do something and doing it.
0:03:16 I used to be really good at this.
0:03:19 I used to think, oh, I need to go work out.
0:03:22 And as soon as I thought that, I tried to force myself to get up and
0:03:23 put on my clothes and go work out.
0:03:27 Otherwise, I would start watching TV or eating and delaying.
0:03:29 And I find a lot now I delay.
0:03:33 And I need to get back to this notion of having, being a little less thoughtful.
0:03:39 So I think around things like action, have a tendency to just move to action.
0:03:43 Oh, I need, I want to write something that, we’ll just start writing, right?
0:03:45 And around things that you think are a good intention.
0:03:50 When you think, I think a lot about, I want to express to someone that they’re
0:03:51 an impressive person.
0:03:53 I know someone who has a podcast.
0:03:57 I don’t know them very well, but I saw a clip of them and I thought, that’s so smart.
0:04:00 So what I’m trying to do, I thought I should really tell them the next time I see
0:04:04 them that that was a really interesting segment and how impressed I am by them.
0:04:06 And instead, I thought, no, just text them now.
0:04:07 Move to now, move to now.
0:04:13 Think, mind the gap between your emotions, your positive sentiments, action, and
0:04:15 actually doing something.
0:04:19 We also have been, or I also have been thinking a lot about strategy.
0:04:24 And that is, I’ve had some discussions and I want to use what’s going on in the
0:04:25 government right now.
0:04:31 And what I would describe is a strange, if not illegal seizure or I think it’s
0:04:36 trespassing and a hacking of our government systems to kind of stop payments
0:04:38 and then negotiate where we should cut funding.
0:04:43 I think the notion around cutting funding is a really valuable conversation.
0:04:45 There’s obviously waste in government.
0:04:50 They don’t have to face, put their feet to the flames of the private sector.
0:04:52 They never effectively run out of money.
0:04:55 Companies can borrow money, but at some point they run out of money.
0:04:58 Whereas the government, especially the US government, is blessed and to a certain
0:05:02 extent cursed a little bit, mostly blessed with the ability to keep printing money.
0:05:06 So it likely doesn’t have the same discipline around managing its house
0:05:09 in a kind of prudent fiscal manner as evidenced by the fact that we’re spending
0:05:12 $7 trillion a year on $5 trillion in tax revenues.
0:05:13 So I’m down with that.
0:05:18 I think we should have an open and honest conversation around the department of education.
0:05:20 Like what value does it add?
0:05:21 Should it be reformed?
0:05:23 It sort of enhance it, don’t eliminate it.
0:05:28 I think it’s probably the right approach, but it’s a worthwhile conversation.
0:05:32 The question is, should we be having this conversation with a gun pointed to our heads,
0:05:36 with a bunch of very talented young men who, in my opinion, are trespassing in federal
0:05:39 buildings? So a lot of people would say you’re not trespassing if you’re made
0:05:44 a legitimate employee by the full faith of the White House, and then going in and without any
0:05:49 sort of congressional oversight or approval under the auspices of an individual who has
0:05:53 absolutely not been vetted by the US government to go in and make decisions around.
0:05:54 They’re not even decisions.
0:05:56 They’re like, we’re cutting off payments.
0:05:59 Now let’s start the negotiation, which literally is holding a gun to someone’s head and saying,
0:06:01 okay, let’s have a negotiation.
0:06:08 So the question is, how do you get leverage here and how do you punch back when Republicans
0:06:14 control all three houses of government? You’re now the opposition party, and what do you do?
0:06:17 Because something I’ve struggled with my entire career is the difference between
0:06:18 being right and being effective.
0:06:22 And whether or not you think this is a good idea or a bad idea, and I can understand it,
0:06:26 sort of tickles the sensors of people to think, government’s just gotten so out of control
0:06:29 that them going in and kind of breaking some eggs, if you will.
0:06:32 I think that appeals to a lot of people, and I can understand that.
0:06:36 The question is, one, is it the right way to go about it?
0:06:41 Are we setting a precedent where once the Democrats get in control of all three houses,
0:06:43 they’re going to start just randomly shutting shit off?
0:06:50 I mean, does this just enter into a downward spiral where the standard institutional processes
0:06:55 of democracy just kind of go down the drain from both sides, and both sides ignore each other?
0:06:58 There used to be a certain level of mutual respect, that’s gone.
0:07:02 Now, of the mind, it kind of needs to go to mutual destruction.
0:07:06 How I think you want to think about negotiations is, one, where you have leverage,
0:07:10 and two, where the pressure points on the other party should you ever enter into this type of
0:07:14 hostile negotiation. And the pressure points, I think, are the following.
0:07:21 One, I think this is all about money, and that is, if you want to get leverage against Trump,
0:07:24 you’re going to have to get leverage against Musk right now, because he’s kind of the heat
0:07:29 shield doing all the dirty work here. Musk is about money, and I think if you want leverage
0:07:32 against Musk, you have to go after the purse just the way they’re going after the purse
0:07:37 of these government programs. And it’s already sort of happening in Europe.
0:07:44 It is striking what’s happening to Tesla sales. Get this, the annual year-on-year change of Tesla
0:07:53 vehicles in France is off 63% in Germany, 60%, Sweden 44, Norway 38 in the UK 8.
0:07:58 I believe the EV mark is actually down 6%. But this is essentially a meltdown.
0:08:05 But if you wanted to send a message to Musk, or if they wanted to send a message to Democrats,
0:08:09 because I think Democrats are just as obsessed with money as evidenced by the fact that our
0:08:14 Speaker Emerita continues to engage in insider trading.
0:08:19 Another talk show, another talk show, I think we’d be going after money. And instead of screaming
0:08:24 into TikTok, we’re showing up at federal buildings and waving your cane at people and saying,
0:08:30 we’re members of Congress. What could you do? I would suggest that you go after the purse,
0:08:33 and that is trying to figure out a way to communicate to people that they shouldn’t
0:08:37 sign up for T-Mobile because they’re doing a deal with Starlink, or they shouldn’t be flying
0:08:41 United Airlines, or they shouldn’t be buying, obviously buying Teslas, or if they order an Uber
0:08:48 and a Model Y comes up from Tesla that they cancel and say, “I don’t ride in Teslas.”
0:08:52 I think that is probably at this point the only way to get their attention now. If you were to
0:08:58 really go gangster here, pull or do what the Republicans did, and that is threatening to
0:09:02 shut down the government. Essentially, when they were the opposition party, the Republicans said,
0:09:07 “All right, we’re going to burn the village to save it. We’re not going to raise the debt limit.
0:09:13 We’re going to let the US government default on its debts, which would create, essentially,
0:09:18 the ripple effect would be, the Treasury auction would fail, interest rates would dramatically
0:09:24 spike. You’d probably see a drawdown of anywhere between 10, 30, and 50% in the stock market.
0:09:30 You would have an economic, at least a pretty serious shock here. I think, unfortunately,
0:09:36 what we have is when you are engaged in a battle with an opposition party, and the opposition party
0:09:42 shows willingness to just go much further than you, and you will back down, you create asymmetric
0:09:47 advantage. The example I would use is, if you have an army that’s willing to put its own civilians
0:09:53 in harm’s way, and the opposing army is not willing to do that, what you’re doing, which I think is
0:09:58 the ethical thing to not, in fact, bomb a place with civilians, but what you create is incentive
0:10:04 for other armies to begin putting people in harm’s way and using them as human shields. I think,
0:10:08 right now, one party has essentially shown its willingness to shut down the government, and
0:10:12 the other has said, let’s not do that. I think the only way you’re going to restore any sense of
0:10:17 mutually assured destruction and get any leverage at this point would be to say, okay, we’re willing
0:10:23 to do this too. Where does this go? In the Trump administration, I think that you have effectively
0:10:30 won adults in the room, I would argue, around restoring institutional norms, if you will,
0:10:35 and that is the bond market and the stock market, and I think that Democrats at this point have
0:10:41 to say, all right, our only pressure point, our only leverage here is probably to force the president
0:10:47 on his watch to default on the government’s debt and to give up or basically see a failed
0:10:52 Treasury auction, and this is going to happen on his watch. The Republicans threatened to do that
0:10:57 in the last minute. They blinked, and it did not happen on Biden’s watch, but my sense is the
0:11:04 Republicans have been so aggressive and shown such a lack of respect for any kind of consolation,
0:11:09 consideration, process, institutions, whatever you want to call it. I think the Democrats need to
0:11:13 also show that they’re willing to shut down government. So when you’re negotiating, there’s
0:11:18 really only two things you need to remember. Generally speaking, in your negotiations,
0:11:22 you don’t want to make it emotional. You just want it to be, this is what we’re willing to do,
0:11:27 this is what we’re not willing to do, and two, you have to show a willingness to walk away. And in
0:11:32 this instance, it’s a willingness, quite frankly, to go kind of nuclear and leverage a nuclear option
0:11:38 and shut the government down and have us fail on our debt and have a failed Treasury auction.
0:11:43 And again, I want you to stop, and when you think about things, it might feel good. I oftentimes
0:11:47 point it out in meetings, okay, this is wrong and felt really good about myself, but I thought,
0:11:53 am I doing just antagonizing the other side? And don’t threaten to quit unless you’re actually
0:12:00 going to quit. Otherwise, your threats become a little bit hollow. Already, the President is
0:12:07 developing a reputation for not living up to his threats. I’m going to impose these 25% tariffs
0:12:12 on Mexico and Canada. They turn around and commit to doing what they’re already doing.
0:12:17 I mean, even look at the language in Canada, we will implement the things we have
0:12:25 committed to, and he backs away. So don’t make threats, make promises, and make them
0:12:30 very sparingly, especially in a relationship with someone you care about. I remember, I just think
0:12:34 you want to be very careful when you’re talking to people you care about, especially romantic
0:12:41 partners, and especially your spouse around threats. I just think it one, reduces your
0:12:47 negotiating leverage if their threats not promises, and two, it damages the relationship.
0:12:51 In negotiations, you also have to remember, and we seem to be well beyond that in this instance,
0:12:55 in negotiations, you want to remember that at some point, you’re probably going to have to
0:13:00 work with the other party. You’re going to have to do deals with them, get along with them,
0:13:07 share the same household with them, raise kids with them. And it’s worth, in my opinion, and this
0:13:11 does not apply to this because it feels like the train has left the station on any level of mutual
0:13:15 respect between our two parties. But when you’re negotiating with people, you want to remember,
0:13:20 I think it’s okay to leave a little bit on the table. Also recognize that in that specific
0:13:26 negotiation, you’re not only negotiating around the terms in that moment, but you’re also creating
0:13:32 a context for the relationship moving forward. So showing up and threatening nations with tariffs
0:13:36 when you are the much more powerful economic entity, that is probably going to work in the
0:13:40 short run. You may get something. In this instance, President Trump, as far as I can tell, got nothing,
0:13:45 extracted nothing from Mexico and Canada. But we are the bigger economy. We could literally
0:13:50 tank their economy. So if we want, we could extract our pound of flesh. The question is,
0:13:56 what happens after that with the relationship and the benefits we accrue from what is a very
0:14:02 strong relationship? When these countries show up to help fight our fires, they follow us into wars
0:14:09 in the Gulf, these relationships long-term are an enormous asset. So what are you getting short
0:14:14 term in exchange for something or in exchange for giving up something perhaps more valuable?
0:14:19 And that is a strong relationship. Success is the following. Success, I would argue,
0:14:28 is really just comes down to two things. First, a series of small examples of discipline every day
0:14:32 that add up to something huge. Take advantage of the fall on the species and try and say five or
0:14:40 10 or 20 bucks a day. That is 150, 300, 600 bucks a month when you’re young. Time will go a lot
0:14:44 faster than you think. And that will add up to a great deal of money. And by the time you’re 30
0:14:48 or 35, you’ll have the down payment on a house. And by the time you’re my age, you’re not going
0:14:51 to be worried about money. You’re going to feel some sense of security and be able to spend more
0:14:57 time with your kids and hopefully your grandkids. Don’t think about working out every day, try and
0:15:01 do something. And you’re going to wake up one day, three months, six months, nine months and think,
0:15:06 wow, I feel better. I feel more confident. I’m less depressed. I like the way I look naked.
0:15:11 I feel more confident. I feel less angry. I feel more masculine. I feel more feminine,
0:15:18 whatever it might be. A series of small efforts made every day that is an expression of discipline.
0:15:24 And then the second thing, the second key to success is putting yourself in a room of opportunities
0:15:29 when you’re not in the room, when you’re not physically in the room. And how do you do that?
0:15:34 You create allies along the way. You don’t look at relationships as a transaction. You help people
0:15:40 when they’re less powerful than you. Any opportunity to help someone, any opportunity to make them feel
0:15:46 good about themselves is an opportunity for you at some point in the future to be put in a room
0:15:52 of opportunity, even if you’re not physically in the room. Hey, we’re looking for a new head of
0:15:57 media planning. And the person thinks, I know this really wonderful woman or this really
0:16:04 wonderful man. We should interview him or her. You know what? Matt is a really good guy and really
0:16:08 good at what he does. I’m going to personally vouch for him. And I hope he is hired having an
0:16:14 evangelist internally. And how do you create evangelists? A series of small investments every
0:16:20 day in relationships. A small expression of discipline every day around money, around fitness,
0:16:25 around kindness, such that you put yourself in a room of opportunities, even when you’re not physically
0:16:32 there. Okay, anyways, in today’s episode, we speak with Dr. Alok Kanojia, better known as Dr. K, a
0:16:37 psychiatrist and co-founder of the mental health coaching company, Healthy Gamer. We discussed
0:16:42 with Dr. K how tech addiction affects mental health, the science of relationships, and the
0:16:47 challenges men face today. So with that, we’ll be right back for our conversation with Dr. K.
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0:19:28 Welcome back. Here’s our conversation with Dr. K, a psychiatrist and a co-founder of
0:19:34 the mental health coaching company Healthy Gamer. Dr. K, where does this podcast find you?
0:19:39 I’m in Houston, Texas. Dr. K, how do you describe what you do?
0:19:43 I support the mental health of the digital generation.
0:19:48 I love that. And tell us about your journey. You went from being a video game addict to
0:19:54 studying to be a monk to later becoming a doctor. Give us a little bit. Give us some color on your
0:20:01 origin story. So my parents are both doctors. They’re first generation immigrants from India.
0:20:10 I was born in Texas and grew up here. And then basically I was genetically pre-med. So I’m one
0:20:18 of these South Asian diaspora kids that was told when I was nine years old, my dad told me and my
0:20:21 brother. He was like, one of y’all is going to be a doctor and one of y’all is going to be a lawyer.
0:20:26 And so grew up genetically pre-med. Really had no interest in it.
0:20:32 And so was like pre-med as a freshman in college. And then just completely started like spiraling.
0:20:36 So like I had freedom for the first time in my life, like was playing video games a lot,
0:20:41 joined a fraternity, failed out of like college, basically was on academic probation, had a bunch
0:20:46 of Fs. And then my parents tried everything. So they tried to like, you know, they tried tough
0:20:50 love. They tried being supportive. They were like really good parents. They just didn’t know what
0:20:55 they were dealing with. So they didn’t understand what was going on. So after two years of second
0:20:59 year in college, I was barely able to like pass my classes. Where were you in school?
0:21:06 The University of Texas at Austin. And then after that, my dad was like, look, we got to do
0:21:09 something like this is not working. So he’s like, I think you need to go to India. And this is one
0:21:13 of the rare times that I chose to listen. So I was like, why do I need to go? And he’s like, I
0:21:20 don’t know. It’s just nothing else is working. So I boarded a flight about one week later and
0:21:26 went to an ashram, which I had never been to before. And then really like the first two weeks
0:21:32 were like some of the worst, probably the lowest point of my life. And then after that discovered
0:21:37 something amazing, which was like, when I was in college, I remember being frustrated with myself
0:21:43 like I knew I needed to like go to class. All I needed to do was show up because I had missed
0:21:49 so many days of class that each subsequent day of class I missed, I dropped a whole letter grade.
0:21:54 So it was like, if I miss one more day of class, the highest grade I can possibly get as a B.
0:21:58 And then one more day was a C in one word. So like over the course of five days, I went from
0:22:03 A to F. And I just couldn’t get myself to go like I couldn’t understand why I would
0:22:09 play games when I know I shouldn’t. I had no control over myself. So what I found in India
0:22:15 was a system that teaches you how human beings work. Where do desires come from?
0:22:21 What really is the nature of willpower? What’s the nature of attachment? And I absolutely fell
0:22:25 in love with it. So I felt like it was kind of like an owner’s manual for myself. So decided to
0:22:31 become a monk. Spent seven years sort of focused on that goal would spend my summers in India. And
0:22:36 then my teachers would give me a set of practices. But they also said, I tried to become a monk at
0:22:40 21. And they said, you need to go back, finish your school, go get a doctoral degree of any kind,
0:22:46 doesn’t matter how, what kind. And then when you’re 30 years old, if you still want to become a monk,
0:22:50 then you can take your vows. So I was like, okay, fine. So they’re like, go participate in the
0:22:56 world for a little while. And then if you want to, you can come back. So I would travel back and
0:23:01 forth, study more advanced meditation, and then ended up meeting my wife, which I’m pretty sure
0:23:07 my teachers understood that I wasn’t ready to give up my life yet. And then ultimately decided to
0:23:13 try to go to medical school. And that was because one of my teachers said, anything you try to do
0:23:17 in the spiritual world is going to be way harder than anything you can accomplish in the material
0:23:22 world. So try to do something very difficult in the material world, and that’ll be training
0:23:30 for a spiritual path. So I had set my target on becoming a doctor. Also because I wanted to
0:23:34 understand like humans from the other side, right? So I’d learned this like owner’s manual of the
0:23:41 self, but then like, what does medicine teach us? So went to medical school at Tufts, and then
0:23:46 realized I loved psychiatry, like towards the end, I loved like sitting with people.
0:23:50 The mind is my favorite organ. And then to the chagrin of my family,
0:23:56 decided to become a psychiatrist, ended up training at Mass General McLean and Harvard,
0:24:00 was faculty there for a couple of years. So I want to go back, there was a point,
0:24:06 to a certain point, you and I have a very similar origin story. I went to UCLA, I think UT Austin,
0:24:11 or they’re kind of similar, big land grand public schools. I also joined fraternity. I was 17 when
0:24:17 I showed up to UCLA. I had a lack of self-discipline. I, like you, was getting a lot of Fs. I was on
0:24:23 academic probation. I didn’t have video games like you did. I wonder if I really, and I didn’t have
0:24:29 porn. If I’d had video games in porn, I’m not sure I would have, I mean, I was, I went on academic
0:24:33 probation and all I needed to get was a C average to get another two semesters before they would
0:24:40 kick me out. So I kept doing that over and over. But I decided I, while it was a kind of, I don’t
0:24:45 know, a fairly superficial life void of meaning, as far as superficial lives void of meaning go,
0:24:52 it was pretty good. And I was enjoying myself. You decided to get on a plane for India. Like what,
0:24:58 what happened or what was your thought process? I’m at UT Austin in a fraternity.
0:25:03 You know, that’s, that to me sounds like a pretty good life, even if you’re not doing well academically.
0:25:08 What inspired you to get on a plane and go to India? Like did you hit, was there a moment where
0:25:12 you hit sort of rock bottom or did your parents force you? Like what happened there?
0:25:17 Yeah. So I remember I had a, I had a conversation with my dad in our living room at like two in
0:25:21 the morning. It was like, like, it was like one of these conversations where he was kind of like
0:25:26 done, like not in a bad way, but he’s like, look, I’ve tried everything. You know, I’ve tried being
0:25:31 supportive. I’ve tried tough love, like nothing is working. So he’s like, and he was like, look,
0:25:35 your life is not moving in a good direction. I knew that. Like, I mean, sure, in some ways,
0:25:41 it was a lot of fun. So I loved my first two years of college from a dopaminergic standpoint,
0:25:47 but from like a meaning, a purpose, I was just sort of existing. So that there’s a really interesting
0:25:53 conception from existential depression, which is that so existential depression is kind of like
0:26:01 when we struggle to like look into the future. And so we can’t move forward in life. So instead,
0:26:07 what we start doing is we start moving laterally. So there’s no point in moving towards something.
0:26:11 So I’m just going to spend all of my energy in the lateral direction. So this is like partying,
0:26:16 like partying never leads to anywhere, video games never lead to anywhere. So I was spending all of
0:26:24 my time engaging in actions that don’t lead to anything. So I knew that something was horribly
0:26:30 wrong. Like I was out of control. Like I didn’t, I mean, I enjoyed, let’s say a four hour brick
0:26:35 of my life, but I did not enjoy a four week period. Like I was, I wasn’t going anywhere.
0:26:41 I understood that he understood that. I now understand this is all karmic too. So, so there
0:26:46 was just like, there were just no other options. And I asked my dad, I was like, what am I going to
0:26:51 learn there? Why? And he’s like, I don’t know. And it was really interesting because I think
0:26:58 oftentimes when we give guidance to lost young men, we never say you should do this. And then
0:27:04 they ask why. And then we, you say, I don’t know, right? We always like give them the answer at the
0:27:10 very beginning. But I think in retrospect, something about that like really appealed to me that look,
0:27:14 you don’t know what’s going on with your life. We don’t know how to fix it, but you got to try
0:27:21 something. How do you discern? I drank a shit ton of alcohol. I smoked a lot of pot, but I never
0:27:27 felt like I was an addict. And at some point they were probably, they were definitely inhibiting my
0:27:33 academic progress. They’re probably, I would argue that it was worth it. It created a lot of
0:27:37 friendships, a lot of figuring out my limits. I’ve, you know, I’ve often said,
0:27:42 I got more out of alcohol than it’s gotten out of me. But it also had it gotten just a touch more
0:27:49 frequent. I could have easily gone down a very dark path. If you’re someone listening to this
0:27:55 right now, and you’re at college or not in college, and you think I’m playing a lot of video games,
0:28:00 I’m drinking a lot. I’m smoking a lot of pot. I’m watching a lot of porn. What are in your mind
0:28:08 the signals that discern between what I’ll call youthful, if a bit reckless behavior or irresponsible
0:28:15 behavior. And when you are an addict and you need to do something. So I’ve got kind of two answers.
0:28:20 So one is like a psychiatric answer, right? So we say that impairment of function is what caused,
0:28:26 where’s the dividing line for addiction? Well, if it impairs your function, you have an addiction.
0:28:29 So if it’s interfering with your academic performance, if it’s interfering with your job,
0:28:33 if it’s interfering with your physical health, your mental health, your relationships,
0:28:39 that’s the threshold of addiction. Now, in your question, I hear two things. I’m not,
0:28:44 I have a psychiatric answer, but then I also have like a life answer, which is that sometimes
0:28:50 addictions, and I do a lot of addiction psychiatry, sometimes addictions are part of our journey.
0:28:54 So there’s this concept of something called post traumatic growth, which is like,
0:28:59 you know, you kind of say that you got more out of alcohol than alcohol did of you.
0:29:03 So I was addicted to video games, but I started a company called Healthy Gamer because it’s a part
0:29:09 of my journey. Just because I had an addiction doesn’t mean that, and you know, people will
0:29:13 ask me if you could go back and change something about your life, what would you change? I say,
0:29:18 honestly, absolutely nothing. Because I’m pretty happy with where I am now. And then even addictions
0:29:25 were without my video game addiction, I would not have walked the journey of self discovery
0:29:31 that I did. See, we talk about addiction as an impairment of function. But I think that mental
0:29:39 illness is oftentimes a sign that who we are does not fit with our circumstances. So one of the
0:29:43 biggest challenges that I see as a psychiatrist is that when we kind of medicate problems away,
0:29:52 we can maintain an unhealthy way of like living life, right? So if I have like back pain,
0:29:58 and I start taking opiates, I may continue to engage in the behaviors that are creating back pain.
0:30:04 So you were kind of asking, how do you know when an addiction is part of your journey? And that’s
0:30:10 kind of the way that I see it is that, yeah, it’s causing a problem now, but it is also a signal
0:30:14 for you to fundamentally make a change in your life so that there’s something within you that
0:30:20 is not gelling with the society around you. And that’s kind of really like the way that I see
0:30:24 some of these issues like addiction. It’s like addiction is a sign that something in your life
0:30:32 is not going well. You require some sort of external crutch to cope with all of the negativity in
0:30:40 your life. And the real solution to addiction is not just sobriety. It’s fixing all of the sources
0:30:46 of those negativities that you need the substance to deal with. Yeah, I like that. And one of the
0:30:53 issues I have with the industrial medical complex is like, okay, you know, Drs. Atya and
0:30:57 Huverman, who I think are fantastic if I’m both on the podcast, have basically declared war on alcohol.
0:31:03 And where they see drunkenness for most people, most young people, I see togetherness. I think
0:31:12 there’s an upside to alcohol. And I find it’s very binary that people, my guess is my son plays,
0:31:19 and I’m going to speak specifically, I have a 14 year old boy, and he plays probably about 30 to
0:31:26 60 minutes of video games a day. That sounds about right. And I hear him upstairs. And he’ll let out
0:31:34 this battle cry of he’ll go, I’ll literally hear from the upstairs. And then I hear all his friends
0:31:41 laughing and him laughing, and them talking, and it’s group dynamics and teams, and learning how to
0:31:50 lose. And I actually think video games are additive to his life. And it’s as a parent, at the same time,
0:31:55 there’s been periods in his life where he’ll he’ll hide his phone and go into the bathroom and pretend
0:32:00 he’s not well. And then the bathroom won’t come out. And I know he’s on TikTok. And it is really
0:32:07 this is a long-winded way of saying with kids or with adults, I’m addicted. I’m addicted to
0:32:12 my phone. I just am. If I’m anywhere bored, sometimes I make excuses to go to the bathroom
0:32:16 at dinner so I can check my phone. And I’m not proud of that. But at least I’m old enough to
0:32:23 recognize and modulate it. I really worry about the young male brain, and screen time, and video
0:32:34 games, and social, and porn. What do you think as a young man or as a parent, what are some practices
0:32:41 or best practices for ensuring you are trying to use these things in a positive way? Is your view
0:32:47 put time limits on it with kids not under a certain age? With your kids, what will be your
0:32:53 approach to screen time? So I think one of the biggest challenges with raising kids with
0:32:58 technology nowadays is that I think most of the advice is geared towards mothers.
0:33:05 And I think we don’t talk enough from a dad’s perspective. So if we look at single-parent
0:33:10 households, more likely to be single-parent moms. And I think, first of all, if you’re a dad out
0:33:16 there, the most important thing, because some of these problems like pornography are problems
0:33:23 that are going to be foreign to moms and foreign to daughters. So age of first exposure to pornography
0:33:30 is usually, on average, nine. So kids are getting exposed to pornography at a very young age. And
0:33:34 a lot of times, we don’t really know what to do about it. So I’d say the first thing to do is talk
0:33:44 to your kids. Try to explain to them that they’re growing up in a world where all of these apps,
0:33:50 like TikTok and pornography and all this kind of stuff, all of these people have a goal to try to
0:33:55 addict you. That’s their goal. That’s their monetization model. So I think sort of sitting
0:34:00 down with your kids and really talking to them about what impact is this having on your brain?
0:34:07 What attracts you to it? Trying to really help your child exercise some meta-awareness about
0:34:12 if you’re sitting in your bathroom and you’re scrolling TikTok. What’s up with that? Why are
0:34:17 you doing that? What’s driving that? And over the course of, let’s say, one or two months,
0:34:22 really sitting down with your kid and asking them, okay, let’s take a look at your screen app usage.
0:34:29 So you’ve spent 32 hours over the last two months on TikTok. How do you feel about that? Is this
0:34:34 the kind of life that you want to live? Two months, last two weeks. Yeah, right? So average
0:34:39 telephone use is four to six hours a day. Average TikTok usage in 14-year-old males in the US is
0:34:44 17 hours a week. Yeah. So this is like, and really sitting down, I think the biggest mistake that
0:34:51 parents make is that we try to regulate the technology used for our kids. So we try to do
0:34:58 things like limit screen time. But instead, what I think is way, way, way more effective is having
0:35:03 your child understand why it’s important from their perspective. Do you want to spend 17 hours a
0:35:08 week on TikTok? Is this really the kind of life that you want to live? And once you start to get
0:35:13 to those kinds of questions and conversations, and I find that dads having these kinds of
0:35:18 conversations with their son, how much pornography do you watch? You shouldn’t ask, do you watch
0:35:23 pornography? I think you start with, how much do you watch? How do you feel about that? Is this the
0:35:27 kind of life that you want to live? And oftentimes, what we’ll find is when you have these kinds of
0:35:34 conversations with your kids, what you’ll discover is that your kids are being drawn to the technology
0:35:38 because something is missing in their life. The reason I watch porn is because I have a crush
0:35:44 on a girl, I’m 15 years old, and I don’t know how to talk to her. And so then what a beautiful thing
0:35:49 happens when you start talking to your kids about why they use technology, what’s going on there,
0:35:54 you’ll start to uncover things that you can actually start to address. And so then, you know,
0:35:58 hopefully if you’re, you know, you’re a good dad and you’ve got a kid, you can be like, okay,
0:36:03 let’s have a conversation about how to talk to girls. And so I think this is something that’s
0:36:09 really missing. We’re all about regulation and taking things away, instead of understanding
0:36:14 what is driving the teenage mind to technology and offering it a healthier alternative.
0:36:18 I think I’m going to follow your dad’s lead and put him on a plane for India.
0:36:27 I like that. I thought that was a gangster move. And not only that, I appreciate that you actually
0:36:32 agreed. I think that’s such an interesting pivotal moment in your life. What have you found, especially
0:36:37 with young men, is the most common demon they’re fighting that they need to address,
0:36:46 where the addiction itself is just their attempt to medicate it. What is the most common
0:36:50 shape and manifestation that that demon is when they get to the real problem?
0:36:57 So men are, young men are being blamed no matter what they do. So the basic problem is that we,
0:37:02 there’s no way for a young man to win in this world. That’s the most common thing. Manifest is
0:37:07 all kinds of things. I’ll give you a simple example. So nowadays, we’re all saying, oh,
0:37:11 like men should be in touch with their emotions, right? Emotional expression is healthy, correct?
0:37:17 And there’s no such thing as good emotion and bad emotion, right? These are all things we hear,
0:37:24 we say to young men. So if I’m a man and I get angry and I raise my tone of voice,
0:37:31 is this considered an acceptable emotional expression? No, it’s abusive. Absolutely.
0:37:37 I don’t feel safe around you. And now, this is the other thing that I see so much in society today,
0:37:43 which I think is very, very unhealthy. Your feelings of safety become my responsibility.
0:37:47 So I saw this all the time when I was doing, you know, working in the emergency room at Mass
0:37:52 General, we would get kids from Harvard and MIT and University Health Services and stuff all the
0:37:58 time. And one day I was talking to one of the chiefs of security at MIT and I was like, you know,
0:38:04 a lot of students feel unsafe. And he said something to me that stuck with me so well.
0:38:11 He said, my job is not to make students feel safe. My job is to keep students safe. And there’s a
0:38:19 very big difference. So now what started to happen is that if someone feels unsafe around a man,
0:38:24 that isn’t their own unprocessed trauma. That’s not their lack of emotional regulation. This now
0:38:33 becomes the man’s fault. So men are now put in basically unwinnable situations. So women, you
0:38:39 can look at global kind of survey data about dating preferences and things like that. More than 50%
0:38:46 of people who graduate from college are now women. But the average woman wants the male that she dates
0:38:52 to make more money than they do. That’s just becoming an untenable situation. So we teach
0:38:58 kids, men, boys, it’s okay to express your emotions, but we punish them anytime they express their
0:39:04 emotions. We don’t teach, we say, oh, men need, like, boys need to do this and they need to do this.
0:39:10 No one is accepting responsibility for teaching men how to express emotions. No one is accepting
0:39:15 responsibility for holding the space for that kind of thing. So we’re setting a lot of fundamentally
0:39:24 unachievable societal standards for men. And then we do one other thing. Young men and men
0:39:33 in general are the only class in society that does not deserve help. So there’s such a systemic
0:39:38 bias that if it’s a man, like, so we say, oh, like, it’s not our job to help you.
0:39:45 So I do think that young men are getting a lot of mixed messages. At the same time,
0:39:50 well, I’ll put forth some, I think about this a lot, and I’ll put forth some other TCs and you
0:39:57 respond to them. I think an even, perhaps an even bigger issue is male involvement or lack of male
0:40:06 involvement. You had your blessed, you had a male role model that tried really hard, showed you
0:40:10 that he loved you, was present in your life, noticed, gave witness to your life, and then
0:40:15 ultimately helped you kind of get back on track. And there’s a lot of young men who don’t have the
0:40:22 blessings you had. And without the presence of a male role model, whether it’s a coach,
0:40:28 whether it’s an uncle to get involved in your life, hopefully your dad, brothers that care about you,
0:40:34 for me, it was my fraternity brothers at UCLA. They took an interest in my life. They would,
0:40:39 I remember my, I don’t know if you had an interest in my big brother, like four weeks into my freshman
0:40:44 year is like, dude, you got to smoke less pot, man. You’re gonna fail out your first semester,
0:40:51 stop smoking, stop getting high every night. And because he noticed my life, and I didn’t have a
0:40:59 present father, but the absence of men being involved in young men’s lives, for a lot of
0:41:03 reasons, whether it’s family court, whether it’s male abandonment, whatever it might be,
0:41:09 a lot of single family homes. And we can go into, go into the reasons or that’s a longer
0:41:16 conversation. And also, a lack of economic opportunity for young men, because so many
0:41:21 jobs now require the skills that women are showing at a greater propensity, and they’ve earned it,
0:41:26 ends up when we leveled the playing field, they blew by us academically, and they’ve earned it,
0:41:30 don’t want to do anything to get in the way of that. But it used to be one third of jobs required
0:41:34 of college degree, now it’s two thirds, women that ends up are better suited for college than
0:41:41 most men. So there’s just a lack of economic opportunity. Do you see, I see those two as
0:41:49 maybe even being bigger causes for men trying to medicate than the mixed messages they might be
0:41:54 getting from society and women, your thoughts. So here’s why I think men medicate. So men are
0:41:58 taught to be something called external problem solvers. So this is the way we’re conditioned.
0:42:05 So if the world is unhappy with us, and we’re a man, we should step up and fix it, right? So if
0:42:09 I’m married to someone who is unhappy with the amount of money that I make, I should earn a
0:42:15 promotion. If I get a bad performance review, I need to do better next time. So what we’re taught
0:42:20 is men, I don’t know if this kind of makes sense, but anytime there’s a negative event in life,
0:42:24 this creates an emotion within me, there’s this external thing that creates an emotional
0:42:28 response within me. And the way that we’re taught to deal with that emotion is not internally,
0:42:34 but we have to correct the external circumstance, right? So if I can get my boss to give me a good
0:42:41 performance review, if I can prove to myself that this person is an idiot, then the negative emotion
0:42:46 goes away. Does that kind of make sense? If someone disapproves of me and I feel shame,
0:42:51 the way to resolve my shame is to earn their approval. And if I can earn their approval,
0:42:56 then the shame goes away. So this is a huge problem. This is why men I think turn to substances,
0:43:04 because we are not taught when you feel shame, we’re actually conditioned to live up to the
0:43:10 expectations of others. We use an external tool from the outside. It can be a promotion,
0:43:18 a drink of alcohol, marijuana, video games, pornography. We use things outside of us to
0:43:23 manage and control our internal emotional state. That’s why I think men are three to four times
0:43:29 more likely to become addicted to anything than women are. Yeah. It’s really back to your point
0:43:34 about a lack of empathy. I mean, to a certain extent, we don’t have an opiate, a homeless crisis.
0:43:38 We have a male opiate, a male homeless crisis. Like as you said, three out of four out of five
0:43:43 suicides. When someone comes in with an addiction issue, what I’d like you to do if you can is
0:43:48 stack rank the addictions. The addictions, when they walk in the door, you think, okay, we can handle
0:43:53 this, or an addiction walks through the door and you think, oh no. Stack rank house, from what you
0:43:58 think are most serious, generally speaking, to least serious or most addressable, I should
0:44:04 say addictions. My first answer is that I think all addictions are addressable because their root
0:44:10 is the same. This cycle of addiction, which is I’m going to use this external thing to manage
0:44:16 my internal emotional state, that’s common for all addictions. Nora Volkow, I don’t know how to
0:44:22 pronounce her last name, who’s the head of NIMH, or maybe the head of addictions in the US.
0:44:28 She talks about, illustrates this beautifully. There are just a lot of common pathways to
0:44:33 addiction. And for anything to be addictive, it needs two requirements. One is to give pleasure,
0:44:39 and the second is to take away pain. So in that sense, there’s a very common root and common
0:44:45 solution to addiction. As long as we can help people manage their pain in other healthier ways,
0:44:51 then we can conquer any addiction. That’s my belief. That being said, I think probably the
0:44:58 hardest addiction to treat is probably body dysmorphia. So when people get addicted to a
0:45:05 version of themselves, this is the hardest addiction to treat. So anytime, I’ll give you
0:45:08 examples of this. So like, what does that mean addiction to a version of yourself?
0:45:13 When someone comes in and says, I love marijuana, not because it makes me high,
0:45:19 but it allows me to be normal. I like the normal me. The hardest addictions I’ve had to treat
0:45:26 are when marijuana allows someone to participate in a normal life the way that all of the other
0:45:32 humans do. I’ve worked with people who have addictions to things like stimulant medication,
0:45:38 like people with ADHD. So they exist in the world. They can’t focus. They have difficulty
0:45:42 regulating their emotions, because that’s a feature of ADHD. They struggle with issues of
0:45:49 confidence. And if they take Adderall, they feel normal. They feel like confident, I love this
0:45:57 version of myself. And I also see that in body dysmorphia, where it’s like, I don’t want to be
0:46:03 grotesque. I don’t want to be ugly. I don’t want to be pathetic. I want to achieve. I want to be
0:46:07 good. I want to be proud of myself. I want to be happy when I see, when I look in the mirror
0:46:13 and I see myself, this is what they strive for. And what we know about genetics is like, when you
0:46:18 have an addictive, let’s say, personality, you may just have a drug of choice. So your opioid
0:46:22 receptors, your mu receptors may just be genetically a little bit different. In some people, GABA
0:46:26 receptors, which are for alcohol, may be a little bit different. So you may have just a genetic
0:46:31 vulnerability to a particular drug of choice. And that’s why human beings have drugs of choice.
0:46:38 But the underlying mechanism of addiction is like pretty shared. And the hardest ones to treat
0:46:45 are when the substance allows you to be a version of yourself that you like. And you don’t like the
0:46:48 sober you. We’ll be right back.
0:46:59 Clear your schedule for you time with a handcrafted espresso beverage from Starbucks.
0:47:05 Savor the new small and mighty Cortado, cozy up with the familiar flavors of pistachio,
0:47:11 or shake up your mood with an iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso. Whatever you choose,
0:47:14 your espresso will be handcrafted with care at Starbucks.
0:47:23 The Republicans have been saying lots of things. Just yesterday, their leader said he wants to own
0:47:30 Gaza. The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it.
0:47:36 On Monday, the Secretary of State said an entire federal agency was insubordinate. USAID in
0:47:39 particular, they refuse to tell us anything. We won’t tell you what the money’s going to,
0:47:45 where the money’s for, who has it. Over the weekend, Vice President Elon Musk, the richest man on
0:47:51 earth, tweeted about the same agency that, you know, gives money to the poorest people on earth.
0:47:57 “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties.
0:48:01 Did that instead.” But what have the Democrats been saying?
0:48:05 “People are aroused. I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time.”
0:48:10 Huh. That’s a weird way to put it, Senator. We’re going to ask what exactly is the
0:48:15 Democrats’ strategy to push back on Republicans on Today Explained?
0:48:20 Over the last few weeks, America’s health and science agencies have been shaken.
0:48:26 There’s been funding freezes, communications gag orders, censorship of research.
0:48:28 “It’s really a chaotic picture.”
0:48:30 “I am really scared.”
0:48:33 “The United States was the best place in the world to do science,
0:48:37 and that has never felt more threatened in my career than it does right now.”
0:48:44 This week on Unexplainable, what does all this mean for the future of science in America?
0:48:48 Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Wednesday.
0:48:56 I want to go somewhere a little bit more positive here.
0:49:00 One of the things you talk about that is super interesting
0:49:05 is what science can tell us about the formation of relationships and falling in love.
0:49:11 What does the latest research reveal about how we form de-connections
0:49:16 and how is technology reshaping this process or put more basely?
0:49:21 How can someone today, in this digital age, find love?
0:49:28 First thing to understand is that we have birth rate crises in parts of East Asia.
0:49:31 I don’t know if you’re familiar with the 4B movement in South Korea.
0:49:37 People are engaging in fewer long-term relationships.
0:49:40 We’re seeing a lot of situationships and friends with benefits.
0:49:43 People are, there’s a loneliness crisis.
0:49:45 There’s a mental health crisis.
0:49:46 There’s a dating crisis.
0:49:53 All three of these things are correlated with an increase in technology use across society.
0:49:55 How do these two things actually interface?
0:50:00 This is what a lot of people don’t understand.
0:50:04 Falling in love, if you really think about it, is an addiction.
0:50:09 What we know is that falling in love is governed by our dopaminergic circuitry.
0:50:10 And let’s just think about this.
0:50:14 So if you’re lucky enough to have fallen in love, you are obsessed with this person.
0:50:17 So if we look at dopamine in the mesocortical circuit,
0:50:20 this is the nucleus accumbensis, this is our addictive part of the brain.
0:50:21 Dopamine does three things.
0:50:25 It gives us pleasure, it gives us craving, and reinforces behavior.
0:50:29 So when you’re in love with someone, you crave them.
0:50:30 You think about them all the time.
0:50:34 Literally, what happens in your brain, these can best be described as cravings.
0:50:35 They’re preoccupations with this person.
0:50:42 And then when you’re in this person’s presence, the presence alone creates dopamine in your brain.
0:50:47 So just like sitting there and being with them feels like the most amazing thing in the world.
0:50:51 So, and there’s also other things that we know about addiction.
0:50:57 So addictions also suppress the risk assessment parts of your brain.
0:51:02 So once you fall in love, or your best friend falls in love,
0:51:03 they start to change who they are.
0:51:05 They start making stupid decisions.
0:51:09 And all of your friends get worried about you when you fall in love,
0:51:13 because you don’t realize you’re missing all of these red flags.
0:51:16 That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
0:51:20 So thousands of years ago, millions of years ago when our brains were evolving,
0:51:22 they realized there were two humans.
0:51:25 One human who was able to accurately assess risk,
0:51:29 and one human whose dopamine-ergic circuitry was suppressing risk,
0:51:32 which one of them ended up mating?
0:51:34 The person who suppresses risk.
0:51:39 So dopamine creates impulsivity, creates craving,
0:51:42 creates pleasure, suppresses our ability to gauge risk.
0:51:45 And this is what falling in love is, falling in love is stupid.
0:51:46 It’s beautiful, it’s idiotic.
0:51:50 I mean, I jokingly say that young people should go out and drink more
0:51:52 and make a series of bad decisions.
0:51:54 Doesn’t that mean we should be a little bit more reckless with our emotions?
0:51:56 Yes and no.
0:52:01 So I think the way that we should correct this is by fixing what causes the root problem.
0:52:05 So the root problem is that when we use social media, when we use technology,
0:52:08 it alters our dopamine-ergic circuitry.
0:52:12 And those alterations, once your brain changes from social media use
0:52:15 or video game use or pornography use,
0:52:20 that same brain becomes more incapable of falling in love.
0:52:24 And so what I’ll tell people who are struggling to fall in love is
0:52:29 before you go on a date, walk for one hour and do not touch a device.
0:52:34 What I find is that people who do that, the quality of their dates improves.
0:52:38 There’s another really fascinating mechanism.
0:52:43 So remember that all social media and the technology and all this kind of stuff
0:52:47 suppresses our negative emotional circuitry and evokes emotional circuitry.
0:52:52 And one of the key factors for falling in love is shared emotional experience.
0:52:57 So there’s a beautiful study that illustrated this.
0:53:02 So they had two groups of couples go on dates where they met on a bridge.
0:53:03 But there are two bridges.
0:53:05 One is a stone bridge that’s stable.
0:53:07 One is a wood bridge that’s rickety.
0:53:11 And what they found is that when you meet in the middle of a wood bridge that’s rickety,
0:53:13 we’re both a little bit scared.
0:53:16 And so since there is a shared emotional experience between these,
0:53:18 I think we’re heteronormative dates,
0:53:22 when you have two human beings that are both shared the same emotion
0:53:26 and we’re both scared on the bridge, we actually bind together a little bit.
0:53:28 The empathic connection becomes strong.
0:53:33 And when we meet in a stable place where there is not a shared emotional state,
0:53:35 then those people feel less connected.
0:53:39 I want to bring it down to kind of a ground level.
0:53:46 And that is, I think they’d probably, I mean, in addition to a good job
0:53:48 in support of parents in a male role model,
0:53:55 if I could wish anything more of on young men right now, it’d be relationships.
0:53:57 Not only friendships for romantic relationships.
0:54:01 Only one in three men under the age of 30 is in a relationship.
0:54:03 Two in three women under the age of 30.
0:54:04 And you think, well, that’s mathematically impossible.
0:54:08 It’s not because women want more economically and emotionally viable men,
0:54:09 so they’re dating older.
0:54:13 And I find without the joy and probably more importantly,
0:54:18 the guardrails of a relationship, men just come off the tracks.
0:54:22 That women reinvest that energy in work and friends
0:54:25 and men reinvested in video games and conspiracy theory.
0:54:31 Your thoughts on limiting the amount of porn, such as a young man,
0:54:36 quite frankly, builds up more desire and is willing to take more risks
0:54:39 in terms of meeting women or putting himself in a context
0:54:43 or another man where he can take that leap of faith
0:54:46 and endure the rejection, take the risks, thoughts.
0:54:48 This is the biggest problem that I see right now.
0:54:53 We are coping with our negative emotions instead of harnessing them.
0:54:55 So this is something that I want you to really think about.
0:54:58 Why do human beings have negative emotions?
0:55:00 Right?
0:55:02 So negative emotions are, first of all,
0:55:07 much more powerful motivators of behavior than positive emotions.
0:55:10 Curiosity will get you interested in something for a little while.
0:55:13 Joy will get you interested in something in a little while.
0:55:17 Shame, sadness, and anger are incredibly powerful motivators.
0:55:21 Now, why are they such powerful motivators?
0:55:24 Because these are the signals that our brain sends us
0:55:27 to tell us we need to make a change.
0:55:32 If I’m ashamed of my body, the solution to that in the way that our brain evolved,
0:55:33 because we couldn’t avoid people.
0:55:35 We were in like tribes of 300.
0:55:37 So I had to see these people every single day.
0:55:42 That shame is a powerful motivator to change the way that I look,
0:55:48 change the way that I act, and even this hunger for companionship,
0:55:53 this sexual drive, which is one of the strongest drives in the human being overall,
0:55:59 is what causes us to reach out and overcome our shame.
0:56:03 And now what’s happening with things like pornography and technology,
0:56:07 social media, video games is we are taking all of these negative emotions,
0:56:13 which normally are the most powerful fuel to allow us to fix our lives.
0:56:18 And we’re wiping them away with things like porn or video games.
0:56:22 And now what we’re doing is we’re disabling our primary motivational fuel,
0:56:23 which is negative emotion.
0:56:24 And you’ll see this all the time.
0:56:29 Like even if you look at movies, right, when the hero becomes a hero,
0:56:31 it’s not curiosity that makes him a hero.
0:56:36 It’s a powerful negative emotion, a sense of betrayal, a sense of anger,
0:56:37 a sense of shame.
0:56:40 I’m never going to be this way again, never again.
0:56:42 I’m never going to be weak again.
0:56:44 And that’s what drives them to change.
0:56:49 And so what we’re actually doing is short-circuiting our most potent motivational drives
0:56:51 through things like pornography.
0:56:58 If you could give, and this is a difficult question to answer, but advice to younger men
0:57:04 in terms of, you know, they’re starting out, maybe their first job or college,
0:57:08 as it relates to addiction, as it relates to establishing a healthy relationship,
0:57:14 any practices you recommend that are more likely to set them on a strong path?
0:57:22 What advice do you have to young men as it relates to recognizing addiction,
0:57:26 screen time activities, behavior modification at a digital age,
0:57:30 where obviously addiction is kind of sort of one click away everywhere?
0:57:36 So I’d probably say that, see, the reason we rely so much on these technological
0:57:42 devices and addictions is because we cannot tolerate life without them.
0:57:43 Right?
0:57:48 So if we think about, if I told you to take your your phone away from a day for a day,
0:57:50 it would be really hard for people to exist.
0:57:53 So one thing that we do in our community is a beautiful meditation practice
0:57:59 that we tell people to do, which is stare at a wall for an hour and just look at what comes up.
0:58:02 So at the beginning, you’ll be bored.
0:58:10 And then like the basic problem is that dudes today are trying to always move away from themselves
0:58:11 and towards something.
0:58:12 I need to be sexier.
0:58:13 I need to be healthier.
0:58:14 I need to be more fit.
0:58:16 I need to have more friends.
0:58:17 I need to join a fraternity.
0:58:18 I need to be like these guys.
0:58:23 One of the weirdest things I’ve always heard is the men that I work with long for rock bottom.
0:58:26 They want nothing more than rock bottom.
0:58:32 I want to hit rock bottom because that’s when I know I’m going to die or I will be reborn.
0:58:34 They long for that more than anything else.
0:58:37 They just want anything except for this numb existence.
0:58:39 They would rather break it or make it.
0:58:40 One of the two.
0:58:42 But just no more this limbo.
0:58:42 They hate limbo.
0:58:48 The way to get out of that limbo is to first of all stop paying attention
0:58:53 and stop caring about the world thinks because you’re getting all of this contrary advice.
0:58:54 Right.
0:58:59 So, you know, be a more masculine man so that you can attract women
0:59:02 or be more emotionally available so that you can attract women.
0:59:03 Make more money.
0:59:06 Assert yourself or be more passive.
0:59:11 There’s just no way that you can make anyone else happy like you’ve tried and it doesn’t work.
0:59:14 So, instead, what you need to do is sit your ass in front of a wall
0:59:16 and look at what comes up for one hour.
0:59:23 And what you really need to do for your compass in life is listen to what comes up
0:59:26 because you’ve tried to make the rest of the world happy.
0:59:27 It ain’t working.
0:59:30 So, stop trying and start trying to make yourself happy.
0:59:34 Listen to the signals on the inside and try to make those signals happy.
0:59:37 Irrespective of how painful it feels.
0:59:41 Because you will get better at managing the pain.
0:59:43 Whatever you do, you will get better at.
0:59:49 The problem is that we end up trying to make everybody else happy, avoiding all of our emotions.
0:59:52 And so then we become puppets to the world around us.
0:59:57 Dr. Alok Kanogia, known as Dr. K, is a psychiatrist and co-founder
1:00:00 of the mental health coaching company Healthy Gamer,
1:00:02 which aims to help with modern stressors,
1:00:05 including social media, video games, and online dating.
1:00:08 He joins us from his home in Houston.
1:00:12 And also we should note that Dr. K is also a popular Twitch streamer
1:00:14 who engages with audiences by discussing mental health,
1:00:18 addressing issues including addiction, motivation, and depression.
1:00:20 The Good Doctor has a book out
1:00:24 How to Raise a Healthy Gamer and Power Struggles Break Bad Screen Habits
1:00:26 and Transfer your Relationships with Your Kids.
1:00:28 It was published last year.
1:00:30 I really enjoyed this conversation, Dr.
1:00:33 If any, I find your story inspiring.
1:00:39 I mean, what I just would want to, I wish what has happened to you for more people.
1:00:42 I think it’s such a neat story and such a nice,
1:00:46 just so nice to hear about a young man who kind of comes off the rails and then ends up,
1:00:49 you know, on the fucking Concorde somehow.
1:00:51 I just think it’s such a nice story.
1:00:54 Congratulations on all your blessings and your success.
1:01:04 [Music]
1:01:06 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.
1:01:08 Our intern is Dan Shalon.
1:01:10 Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
1:01:13 Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:01:18 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercer No Mouse, as read by George Hahn.
1:01:23 And please follow our PropG Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes
1:01:27 every Monday and Thursday.
1:01:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:03 Support for Prop 3 comes from Viori.
0:00:05 Oh my God, true story.
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0:01:46 Welcome to Office Hours with PropG.
0:01:48 This is the part of the show where we answer your questions
0:01:51 about business, big tech, entrepreneurship and whatever else is on your mind.
0:01:55 If you’d like to submit a question, please email a voice recording
0:01:57 to officehours@propgmedia.com.
0:01:59 Again, that’s officehours@propgmedia.com.
0:02:01 So with that, first question.
0:02:07 Scott, hey, long time listener, my name is Doug.
0:02:10 I’m an environmental consultant and I work on biodiversity
0:02:12 and climate change issues across the U.S.,
0:02:15 often involving public-private partnerships.
0:02:17 I really appreciate your recent comments with regard to the interaction
0:02:24 between businesses and politics and how unequal society has become.
0:02:27 I’m wondering, is there a way for a business leader such as yourself
0:02:31 to get together and work to reverse Citizens United
0:02:35 to provide some rational guardrails on campaign finance?
0:02:38 Maybe you can call yourselves the SuperFriends.
0:02:39 Thanks so much.
0:02:41 Ah, the SuperFriends, I like that.
0:02:45 If I were a superhero, I think my power would be, what is my power?
0:02:49 I don’t know, the ability to pee three or four times in any given evening.
0:02:52 It’s like I wake up and I don’t even think, oh, why am I waking up?
0:02:53 I know I’m waking up.
0:02:57 It’s my bladder going, hey, your prostate’s the size of a fucking grapefruit.
0:03:00 And it says it’s time to pee, even if it’s not time to pee.
0:03:01 Anyway, isn’t that exciting?
0:03:03 Isn’t that why you come here?
0:03:07 So Citizens United, you could argue if you were to reverse engineer
0:03:11 a lot of the problems we have, it’s, well, OK, it’s that we send crazies.
0:03:14 The majority of people in America now identify as independent
0:03:18 or somewhere in the middle on most issues and kind of think, OK, we can,
0:03:21 we can accommodate both sides and sort of come to some sort of agreement.
0:03:24 Instead, we send far left crazies and far right crazies.
0:03:27 In addition, because the incumbents can raise a lot more money
0:03:31 and because there’s no caps on how much money they can raise,
0:03:32 it creates more and more incumbency.
0:03:35 And not only that, corporations are now considered people
0:03:41 or money is considered voice and free speech, such that if you’re the pharmaceutical lobby
0:03:44 and you want to give a bunch of money to a candidate or a better yet,
0:03:48 the private equity lobby and you give $800,000 to Senator Kristen Sinema
0:03:51 such that she is a holdout and says, I won’t pass.
0:03:53 I’ll be the swing vote against the infrastructure bill
0:03:56 unless you pull out this loophole such that some of the wealthiest people in the world,
0:04:00 private equity billionaires, maintain carried interest loophole
0:04:03 where they get long term capital gains or they get a lower tax rate
0:04:04 on what is essentially a commission.
0:04:08 Whereas if you sell a car and get a commission, you pay a much higher tax rate.
0:04:11 This is nothing but pure grift for the rich that has been weaponized.
0:04:14 So unless we put some sort of campaign finance limits on this
0:04:18 and de-jarring manner these districts, it’s just not going to get better.
0:04:22 There’s other things you could do, rank choice voting, final five,
0:04:26 where it’s not just the crazies, it’s people who across the spectrum.
0:04:29 Lisa Murkowski is a fantastic moderate center from Alaska.
0:04:32 Why? Because they have final five voting in Alaska
0:04:35 where everybody votes for the first, second, third and fourth candidate.
0:04:39 And they get the lower ones get kicked out and the other ones get votes.
0:04:42 So you end up with the moderates have a shot, if you will.
0:04:45 And it was back to Citizens United following the 2010 Citizens United ruling,
0:04:50 which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited money on political campaigns.
0:04:52 Independent political spending surged.
0:04:55 Over the past decade, election related spending by non-party independent groups
0:04:59 skyrocketed to get this four and a half billion dollars
0:05:02 compared to just 750 million 20 years prior.
0:05:03 So it’s up about six fold.
0:05:06 Additionally, political campaigns are now spending more than ever.
0:05:08 Between the presidential and congressional races,
0:05:12 American political candidates spent a total of 16 billion dollars
0:05:14 this past election cycle.
0:05:18 The overwhelming impact of Citizens United could be addressed in a few ways.
0:05:20 The Supreme Court could revisit the decision.
0:05:22 Good luck with that.
0:05:25 Pongas could propose a new amendment to limit corporate political spending,
0:05:27 but the majority of them are such whores.
0:05:30 Why would they want to shut off the spicket, right?
0:05:32 Congress could pass laws to increase funding transparency
0:05:35 and cut off communication between campaigns and super PACs.
0:05:37 We need to work around here.
0:05:40 If the Supreme Court isn’t going to overturn Citizens United,
0:05:46 we’re going to have to come up with a bunch of hacks such that money gets out of DC.
0:05:49 Because if you look at the fact that we pay twice as much
0:05:54 as any other G7 nation for healthcare, despite the fact we have lower life expectancy,
0:05:57 higher infant mortality, higher rates of obesity,
0:06:02 you can directly go to the weaponization of our elected representatives by money
0:06:07 from pharmaceutical, the health industrial complex, hospital systems, et cetera.
0:06:10 So money in politics has been a real cancer.
0:06:13 And I think your question is the correct one.
0:06:19 Last night, I watched Senator Michael Bennett give what I thought was just an outstanding grilling
0:06:22 of RFK Jr., who’s up for health and human services.
0:06:22 Oh, that’s a good idea.
0:06:27 Let’s have an anti-vax conspiracy theorist decide the healthcare of our children.
0:06:28 That makes sense.
0:06:29 That makes sense.
0:06:32 Anyways, the way I express affection or support for somebody is I send them money.
0:06:35 So today I’m going to send money to Senator Michael Bennett.
0:06:39 And that is, I realize I’m part of the problem, but at a minimum,
0:06:44 if they’re going to fire bazookas at us, I’m going to get a javelin missile or whatever they call it.
0:06:46 Anyways, thanks for the question.
0:06:48 Question number two.
0:06:50 Hi, Professor Galloway.
0:06:52 My name is Pete from DC.
0:06:57 My question is about how to ask for a raise and if it’s always appropriate to do so.
0:07:01 I’m an account executive for a medium-sized tech company and had a decent 2024,
0:07:04 exceeding my quota by about 30%.
0:07:07 I’d like to ask for a raise because who doesn’t like or need more money.
0:07:11 But I’d be interested in hearing about times when people ask you for raises,
0:07:14 both when they’ve done it effectively and when they’ve done it ineffectively.
0:07:16 Thank you.
0:07:17 I think this is a tough one.
0:07:25 So one, I think that in a pre-interview, typically a good firm will ask you to review yourself
0:07:28 and you will have access to management throughout the year.
0:07:32 I think it’s okay to constantly check in and say, or not constantly,
0:07:34 we’re regularly checking and say, how am I doing?
0:07:36 These are my goals for the year.
0:07:38 I feel as if I’m hitting them.
0:07:43 And then when you typically come in for compensation once at the end of the year,
0:07:44 they’ll give you the number.
0:07:49 And I think it’s okay to ask questions about the number and also to express disappointment
0:07:53 and say, I don’t feel as if I’m getting the type of compensation I’d hope for
0:07:56 or nowhere’s warranted by my performance.
0:07:59 Now, typically expressing that sort of disappointment won’t result.
0:08:03 I never change bonuses or decisions around raises.
0:08:07 And I tell my employees, these decisions only happen once a year.
0:08:10 Otherwise, there’s a line in my office of people every two months thinking,
0:08:11 oh, I just did a good job.
0:08:13 I’m going to go in and ask for a raise or a promotion.
0:08:16 So these discussions need to happen once a year.
0:08:20 I think what’s helpful is if you have senior level sponsorship in the organization,
0:08:23 it’s just to be very transparent saying, I’m looking to make more money here.
0:08:26 What do you think I can do?
0:08:26 How am I doing?
0:08:30 And also just to be honest with your direct report, your boss saying,
0:08:31 you know, I’m ambitious.
0:08:32 I want to make more money.
0:08:33 I want to be promoted.
0:08:35 What do you think I need to do to get there?
0:08:39 Instead of saying, I want more money, saying, what do you think I need to do
0:08:46 to increase the likelihood that I’ll be promoted or register an increase in compensation?
0:08:51 And if you don’t get the compensation you want, I think it’s okay to say, I’m disappointed.
0:08:52 I was expecting more.
0:08:53 I was hoping for more.
0:08:57 Also at the end of the day, and there’s evidence that shows this,
0:09:01 the people who typically make more money on average are people who switch jobs every three
0:09:03 to five years because this is the issue with employers.
0:09:08 You have a tendency to see employees through the lens through which they were hired.
0:09:11 And that is we romanticize strangers.
0:09:16 We had an editor in chief who I have been working with since he was 22, 25 years ago.
0:09:25 And I see him as Jason, the recent Yale grad who I was paying $60,000 a year to in 1995 or ’98.
0:09:30 And I realize now, no, he’s a 40-something-year-old man who is very talented and should be making,
0:09:33 you know, two, $300,000 a year.
0:09:35 But I still see him as Jason.
0:09:39 And the folks who leave typically take advantage of this,
0:09:42 how attracted we are to strangers, if you will.
0:09:47 So if you really don’t feel like you’re getting good compensation or being fairly treated,
0:09:52 I would talk to your mentor or your boss there saying, “Yeah, I was unhappy with my compensation.”
0:09:56 But at the end of the day, if you really are unhappy with your compensation
0:10:00 and don’t feel as if they’re likely to change it,
0:10:03 quite frankly, the easiest way to increase your compensation if you are in fact being underpaid
0:10:07 is to let the market decide and go out and try and find another job.
0:10:15 And what I did every three to five years at NYU is I would get an offer from a competitor institution
0:10:19 and then I would go back and say, “Full transparency, I don’t want to leave NYU,
0:10:24 but according to whoever, Cornell or Columbia or Wharton, I’m worth this.
0:10:27 I need you to match it. That appears to be my market rate.”
0:10:31 And quite frankly, had I not gone in and said, “You have to develop your own currency.
0:10:32 My currency was putting butts in seats.
0:10:37 My course quickly became one of the most popular courses in the marketing department and in the school.
0:10:40 And I would go in and say, I need more money or I would do a market check.
0:10:41 So what are we going to do?
0:10:45 We’re going to check in with our boss and see how you’re doing.
0:10:51 You’re going to lay out your expectations and say or your desires that you want to get promoted
0:10:53 and you want an increase in salary and ask for advice.
0:10:55 How can I make sure I’m tracking for that?
0:11:00 And if you don’t get the compensation of the promotion in a very thoughtful, civilized way,
0:11:02 so I got to be honest, I’m disappointed.
0:11:05 And at the end of the day, you have to show a willingness to leave
0:11:09 and that is start doing a market check if you feel you’re being unfairly compensated.
0:11:11 Appreciate the question.
0:11:14 We have one quick break before our final question.
0:11:15 Stay with us.
0:11:23 This episode is brought to you by Cresed Family Office.
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0:12:19 All investing involves risk, including loss of principal.
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0:13:34 [Music]
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0:13:39 Thinning hair is a very common,
0:13:41 very frustrating problem that many men deal with,
0:13:44 but there’s so much more going on than what you see in the mirror.
0:13:47 There are so many internal factors that might affect your hairline
0:13:49 like stress, nutrition, even lifestyle.
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0:14:48 Welcome back, question number three.
0:14:51 Hello, Scott. I’m David from Mexico.
0:14:54 I’m a longtime listener and have learned a lot through the path
0:14:55 and your books.
0:14:56 Thank you for that.
0:14:59 I am 30 years old, currently living in Monterrey,
0:15:01 expanding the family construction business.
0:15:04 My wife and I did marriage in 2023,
0:15:07 and I’m currently enjoying our time as a couple.
0:15:11 We honestly have a great relationship and have been together for 10 years.
0:15:16 Lately, we have started to discuss the best timing of when to have kids.
0:15:20 We are both working in good and stable jobs,
0:15:23 living a good life and have been saving and investing,
0:15:25 but I know means have our future secured.
0:15:28 She prefers sooner rather than later,
0:15:30 while I prefer to wait a little bit longer
0:15:33 and prioritize our economic security and time as a couple.
0:15:37 What are your thoughts about when to have children?
0:15:39 What are some factors we should consider in our decision?
0:15:42 And is there any advice you could give us?
0:15:44 I would really appreciate your opinion.
0:15:45 Thank you.
0:15:49 David from Mexico, this is such a personal decision,
0:15:52 so you should take everything I say with a grain of salt,
0:15:53 because I’m going to tell you kind of my way,
0:15:55 but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right way.
0:15:59 I think these, at the end of the day, are decisions that you, your wife,
0:16:02 and quite frankly, your sperm and her eggs,
0:16:04 because sometimes it’s just not easy to get pregnant,
0:16:05 and sometimes it’s super easy.
0:16:08 By the way, probably under the auspices of TMI,
0:16:12 my girlfriend and I decided I didn’t want to have kids,
0:16:16 and she said, “Well, I have to have kids,
0:16:17 otherwise we can’t be together.”
0:16:18 And I said, “Well, I don’t want to get married.”
0:16:20 And she called my bluff and said, “I don’t need to get married to have kids.”
0:16:23 So we pulled the goalie and started having unprotected sex.
0:16:29 Oh my god, and literally, I’ve had two kind of, I don’t know what you’ll call it,
0:16:32 surreal, mystical things happen to me.
0:16:34 One, four months after my mom passed away, she came to me,
0:16:36 and it was so real.
0:16:37 It just felt real, and she said,
0:16:40 “I just want you to know I’m doing fine, and I love you.”
0:16:43 But it was so real, it felt, I don’t even have to explain it,
0:16:45 that’s the first one of two.
0:16:52 And the other one was, after my girlfriend and I had fornicated in Vegas,
0:16:57 at CES of all places, I went into the bathroom and I came out,
0:16:59 and I knew we had just conceived a son.
0:17:02 And I said to her, “We just conceived a son.”
0:17:07 And what do you know, you know, pregnancy tests, bright blue,
0:17:14 and now the purpose of my life and my biggest joy is my son who’s now 17,
0:17:18 and tied for that position as the son we had three years later.
0:17:22 It’s so funny, you spend your whole life trying not to get pregnant,
0:17:24 and then sometimes it’s not easy to get pregnant.
0:17:27 Anyways, not what you asked.
0:17:30 Look, I’m not sure there’s ever a perfect time to have kids.
0:17:36 I would argue that it’s very kind of base pillars you need in place.
0:17:40 One is, you have to have a partner that you think is competent,
0:17:45 and that you can see being with for the next 18 years at least.
0:17:49 Because once you have kids, you’re in each other’s lives for 18 years.
0:17:50 Even if you get divorced, you’re in each other’s lives.
0:17:53 Some semblance of economic security.
0:17:56 You don’t have to be rich, but not strained.
0:18:01 If you’re strained now, and you throw a kid into the mix, wow, that’s a lot of stress.
0:18:06 So having a little bit of economic security and some professional trajectory.
0:18:10 If you have those things, I would err on the side of doing it,
0:18:15 because there is never a perfect time to bring this little thing into your life
0:18:21 that’s going to demand constant attention, additional cost, and a lot of unknowns.
0:18:23 So there’s never a time when it’s like, okay, this is definitely the time.
0:18:28 And there really is an advantage, I think, to being a young parent.
0:18:30 Having said that, I had kids later.
0:18:31 It was nice to have some economic security.
0:18:33 I was a little bit more thoughtful.
0:18:35 Again, really personal decisions.
0:18:36 Do you have a support group around you?
0:18:40 Do you have family or young parents that could be involved in the kids’ lives?
0:18:45 One of my biggest blessings is that our in-laws are fairly young,
0:18:49 and they’ve played a hugely positive and supportive role in raising our children.
0:18:51 So that’s been a real factor.
0:18:53 So I think there are a variety of things.
0:18:56 But if you get to what I call 70% or 80%,
0:18:57 don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
0:19:01 And what I mean by that is if you’re mostly kind of there,
0:19:04 then I would just go there and start procreating.
0:19:06 I just don’t think there’s ever a perfect time.
0:19:09 And I have found I was sort of wandering.
0:19:11 I don’t think you have to have kids to be happy.
0:19:14 I don’t think kids are the right decision for everybody.
0:19:21 But I know that for me, having kids has been the first time I’ve ever felt a sense of purpose.
0:19:23 So anyways, what am I saying?
0:19:24 Get on it.
0:19:26 Get on it.
0:19:27 Make sweet sweet love.
0:19:29 Procreate.
0:19:30 Have progeny.
0:19:30 That’s right.
0:19:31 Progeny.
0:19:32 That’s right.
0:19:34 Anyways, congratulations to you a nice time in your life.
0:19:38 That’s all for this episode.
0:19:39 If you’d like to submit a question,
0:19:42 please email a voice recording to officehours@propertymedia.com.
0:19:46 Again, that’s officehours@propertymedia.com.
0:19:57 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.
0:19:59 Our intern is Dan Chalon.
0:20:01 Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
0:20:05 Thank you for listening to the Proprety Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:20:09 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercino Mouse, as read by George Hahn.
0:20:13 And please follow our Prodigy Markets Pod wherever you get your pods
0:20:17 for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
0:20:27 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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0:00:59 Are we shaping AI or is AI shaping us? There’s a number of existential risks that confront
0:01:06 human beings. I think AI just being developed reduces the overall existential risk characteristics.
0:01:14 I’m Preet Bharara, and this week, Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Super Agency,
0:01:20 What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future, joins me on my podcast Stay Tuned With Preet.
0:01:26 The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned With Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:35 Welcome to Raging Moderates. I’m Scott Galloway. And I’m Jessica Tarlev.
0:01:38 Jess, did you watch the Super Bowl? I did. It was so boring.
0:01:42 Yeah, it wasn’t a good one. We would do for a bad one. Did you stay up?
0:01:47 You know, I wasn’t planning to. I’m not into sports, and it started at 11.30 p.m. and I made
0:01:54 this big to-do about, I was basically this axis of evil between shitty fatty food and the diabetes
0:01:59 industrial complex and that the game is boring and CET. And then, of course, my 14-year-old said,
0:02:05 “Dad, you want to watch Super Bowl?” I’m like, “Yep, let’s do it.” And so I stayed awake until
0:02:09 the halftime show, which I thought was awful, by the way. And I get I’m not Kendrick Lamar’s
0:02:14 audience, but I thought the whole thing was just a giant snooze. What did you think?
0:02:20 The game itself, I wasn’t much interested. I’m not the biggest NFL enthusiast. I was like the
0:02:25 side stories. So, you know, I want as much Taylor and Travis as possible. I thought that, you know,
0:02:30 Trump was the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, which kind of surprised me.
0:02:34 I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened before. So, you know, there were side stories going on
0:02:41 that were kind of interesting, but the game not so good. The halftime show, I wasn’t wild about.
0:02:48 You know, it wasn’t Bruno Mars for me was such a good halftime show, which I’m sure is a very
0:02:52 lame pick in all of this, or Janna Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Actually, a friend who was
0:03:00 over was at that show and got to see the nipple. So, we talked about that for a while. But overall,
0:03:04 not great. We had a lot of little kids in the house. We cooked a lot. My husband made a great
0:03:11 pasta carbonara, rigatoni carbonara, or no, lumaki carbonara. I’m trying to get my noodles
0:03:18 straight. All in all, whatever, I guess, but raw, raw America. There was one fantastic moment when,
0:03:23 of course, Taylor Swift got booed. That made me happy. Why is that? Is that wrong? Yeah.
0:03:27 Is that wrong? I thought that was hilarious. Why? I thought that, I don’t know. It’s like,
0:03:31 it’s like the Roman Coliseum, except lions. We have Taylor Swift. So, occasionally,
0:03:37 I think he’d boo against the lions. I don’t know. I found the whole thing. It’s like America,
0:03:42 where we sell boner pills and opioid-induced contemplation medication while giving young
0:03:49 men CET, you know, America. I just find the whole thing. I don’t know. I’m too cynical.
0:03:54 So, when are you moving home? I’m not sure. 17 months, three weeks, and four days is what is
0:03:58 on my calendar. Not that I’m thinking about it, but I’m looking forward to getting back
0:04:00 to the States, because, you know, things are going so well.
0:04:06 Totally. Yeah. I would be desperate to come back at this particular moment. Though,
0:04:11 I think about moving back to London, and then I think I’ll definitely want to, if we do it,
0:04:15 that I’ll want to come back to America as well. So, it’s like…
0:04:18 I don’t think anything makes you feel more… The abuse of relationship, you can’t quit, right?
0:04:23 Well, I mean, the reality is, if you didn’t know what was going on, I think the reality for most
0:04:28 Americans, unless you’re a veteran or a beneficiary of SNAP or Head Start, which is a lot of Americans,
0:04:34 but quite frankly, if you’re in our economic weight class, you can shield yourself from this
0:04:40 nonsense. And I would argue you’re probably in a beneficiary of it, and not in a good way.
0:04:45 But what I recognize moving to London, which is in my opinion, the second best city in the world,
0:04:51 is it is really hard to beat America. And that is, if you like opportunity, if you like a crush
0:04:59 and a collision of culture, grit, creativity, there’s just nothing like America. And my reductive
0:05:04 analysis after I say this and it triggers some people molesting the earth for the last 30 years
0:05:10 is that America is still the best place to make money, and Europe’s the best place to spend it.
0:05:16 So, when you’re going into your spending years, absolutely spend time in Europe and go to Madrid
0:05:22 and get a great bottle of wine for 10 bucks, not 80. Check out Munich, which is an amazing city,
0:05:29 Milan, go to, you know, PSG game in Paris. It’s just, but if you’re looking to advance your career,
0:05:34 your influence, your impact on the world professionally, everything here, I would
0:05:40 argue is a kind of medium or second gear. It just can’t get out of second gear. But
0:05:44 I gotta be honest, I can’t wait to get back. I can’t wait to get back to America.
0:05:50 Yeah, well, we’ll be thrilled to have you. No, I’m done with that part. But I did notice that
0:05:58 when I was in grad school, that all of the top performers in my PhD class, all desperate for
0:06:04 American positions, like couldn’t wait to be able to do it, even with all of the problems with academia.
0:06:09 But yeah, well, that’s, that’s the joke about Scotland, that some of the finest minds in the
0:06:13 world, and they all have the same thing in common they left. Anyways, all right, enough of that.
0:06:17 Today, we’re discussing Elon Musk’s increasing government influence. I don’t know if you’ve
0:06:22 heard, he’s this very wealthy individual who puts rockets into space but doesn’t live with any of his
0:06:30 children. He’s this former South African slash Canadian slash naturalized American. Anyways,
0:06:34 interesting cat, we’re going to talk about him. Reminds me of this very popular guy in the middle
0:06:38 of the last century, who some people really loved. We’re coming in hot, I guess, right?
0:06:44 But most people, you know, most people over time found that, found that, well,
0:06:47 they, it’s interesting, they have the same hand gesture. It appears that they say they have the
0:06:52 same body language. Anyways, we’re going to talk about Elon Musk’s increasing government influence,
0:06:57 Trump’s buyout offer to federal workers, and the latest Democrats’ effort to fight back. All right,
0:07:03 let’s get into it, Joss. I think we’re already in, so go. Go, yeah. I’ve already, I’ve already
0:07:08 dived in the shallow. You gave away the game already. We’ve already talked about 1930s, so yep.
0:07:14 Elon Musk’s grip on the executive branch keeps tightening. His Doja crew has been popping up
0:07:19 at federal agencies, snooping around sensitive systems. And until last week, when a federal
0:07:23 judge blocked his team from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system, my understanding
0:07:28 is every time they run up against a judge, they get blocked. Trump defended Musk’s efforts calling
0:07:34 it part of his plan to cut wasteful spending and praise Musk for his work. But the AFL-CIO and
0:07:40 the Department of Justice are hitting back with multiple lawsuits. And Elon got also a new provocative
0:07:46 time magazine cover that puts him behind Trump’s desk. Interestingly, Republican support from
0:07:52 us all in the Trump administration is cooling off. An economist you got pulled shows only 26%
0:07:58 now want him to have a significant influence. That’s down from earlier numbers, Joss. Musk also
0:08:05 tweeted at me and Kara, funny. Barely noticed my pivot co-host over the weekend accusing us of
0:08:12 threatening his engineers just for calling out the harm they’re causing. So, look, before I’m
0:08:17 not going to, I don’t want to get into a back and forth here. What I would say is that the comments
0:08:22 made were made by me, not by Kara. And I find it sort of telling that he puts Kara’s name first and
0:08:29 goes after Kara instead of just going after the person who he has or should have a grievance
0:08:37 with. And that’s me. And anyways, I’ll let you go first. Any thoughts on what’s going on with
0:08:44 Elon, Joss? Well, I have a lot of thoughts on what’s going on with Elon. I assumed that Kara
0:08:48 came first in that because she has long covered him. And last week she had a big interview with
0:08:55 Ezra Klein, which I thought was very impressive talking about her years of covering him and
0:08:59 being close to him. So that was my assumption as to why that happened. But yes, I have a lot of
0:09:04 thoughts. I don’t want to steal. If you have things to say about the tweet stuff or maybe you’re
0:09:08 saving for pivot when you too can talk about it more in depth, but I don’t want to cut you off
0:09:12 if you’ve got more on that because mine is not about the tweets necessarily. You know, I don’t
0:09:18 have a lot. At first, I started, this is what happens whenever Elon tweets at me or gets angry
0:09:23 at me. And that is my phone starts blowing up with, “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” And I’m
0:09:27 not on Twitter. So I’m shielded from most of the toxicity. And someone sent me a screenshot
0:09:33 of the tweet and that it had 11,000 comments. And I’m like, “Well, I bet those comments aren’t
0:09:39 fun to read.” But, I mean, essentially, I start to get worried and I start to get panicked and I
0:09:44 start to, you know, I start to get anxious. And then I realize, okay, whatever you say about Kara
0:09:49 and me is we live with our children. We don’t sleep with a loaded gun next to us. We’re not
0:09:56 severely addicted to a disassociative substance. We’re not making Nazi gestures. And he’s acting
0:10:02 like these engineers are in Quantanimal Bay when the reality is that probably the most serious thing
0:10:06 they’re doing other than denying children and veterans their payments, trying to figure out if
0:10:14 the meme further for Doge should be wearing sunglasses. And just this notion of these billionaire
0:10:20 tears where he can’t decide if it’s his struggling engineers or just proper grammar, like pick a
0:10:25 struggle boss. It’s like, well, you don’t have auto correct. I just, I start to read this thing.
0:10:30 I start to get upset. I start to think about responding. And then I think I don’t want to
0:10:36 create a sideshow. I want to focus on what I think is important. And that is highlighting
0:10:42 that we have somebody who was not cleared or approved by government or Congress,
0:10:49 who is basically hacking into our federal systems. If China did this, it would be an
0:10:57 act of war without the permission of Congress and shutting off funds to veterans and children
0:11:04 and the neediest. And I think that’s where we have to remain our focus. So Musk saying mean
0:11:09 things about me, that’s a sideshow and it really doesn’t matter. It’s not important.
0:11:14 And I’m not going to, other than I want to stay focused on, you know, when you go into an emergency
0:11:20 room, there’s a staying called stop the bleeding. And that is if someone comes in with a gunshot
0:11:24 and they are hemorrhaging blood, they don’t take their PSA or their cholesterol level.
0:11:31 So my ego and me being butthurt or responding or getting into it with him on Twitter,
0:11:36 that’s a distraction. We need to stay focused on the fact that we are now in a position where
0:11:41 we’ve created a series of incentives where when we convict the president of being a felon and he
0:11:47 gets reelected, he has learned that the American public, as long as they control all three branches
0:11:53 of government, will not hold him accountable for trespassing or hacking into our most sensitive
0:11:58 federal systems. Now, if it gets to a judge, it gets pushed back, but they’re kind of in this
0:12:03 Blitzkrieg moment of let’s ask for forgiveness as opposed to permission. That’s what I want to
0:12:07 stay focused on. So I’m trying as hard as I can. And this isn’t easy for me, as you know, Jess.
0:12:15 Yeah. To put my ego aside and focus what limited audience and bandwidth I have on stopping the
0:12:20 bleeding, if you will, your thoughts. I applaud your maturity. It wasn’t what I expected.
0:12:26 I had a daunting walk down here this morning. I was like, how do I avoid
0:12:30 what I was going to happen in the conversation about the tweet? I don’t want to get involved.
0:12:36 That’s your bag, but I like this attitude. And I think it’s honestly where the American
0:12:40 public is going to be best served, A, because podcasts are the most important thing in the
0:12:47 entire world and we can save them all, but B, because the American electorate has basically
0:12:54 told us that they’re not interested in a lot of the side shows. They voted kind of singularly
0:13:00 focused either on the economy or on an immigration. And that’s what they deserve to have in their
0:13:04 conversations. That’s what they deserve to have delivered for them in terms of policy.
0:13:10 None of those things have happened thus far in the first, I can’t, it’s only three weeks.
0:13:17 So that’s what’s so crazy that this has only been three weeks since Trump was inaugurated.
0:13:23 But I think that’s a very mature outlook on this. And I look forward to listening to pivot,
0:13:28 where I’m sure you two devolve into the immaturity. I’m just going to unshane Kara.
0:13:33 Just let her loose. Well, she’s better. She’s better at counter punching than me.
0:13:41 She does have good insults. Yeah. She’s fearless. And I did, I mean,
0:13:45 it’s interesting, I’m thinking a lot about men emasculated. It is interesting that the Doge
0:13:52 team is all young men. Yeah. And I do think that at the end of the day, the people responsible for
0:13:57 this are the president and Elon Musk. And I think these, I’m going to call them kids,
0:14:02 but these young men, young men are more risk aggressive. Biologically, the prefrontal cortex
0:14:07 doesn’t catch up until they’re the age of 25 to a woman. It is interesting that there are no women
0:14:13 as part of this group. But isn’t this what you predicted to some degree in talking about how
0:14:21 disenfranchised and out of kind of mainstream society, young men were being pushed. So they’re
0:14:28 looking for community. They’re looking for fun and adventure and that high, wherever they can
0:14:33 find it. And they’ve spent a lot of time on their computers and they’re really fucking good, right?
0:14:38 They’re the ones who are going to be able to hack into our system. So it does seem,
0:14:43 I think calling them hackers is probably wrong. Hackers in a past life and some of them have even
0:14:52 been fired from past internships or jobs for hacking or working at places where convicted
0:14:57 hackers have been employed. I mean, this is a motley crew in terms of resumes. And there are a
0:15:02 lot of FBI agents, former FBI agents who have been speaking out saying, these are not people that
0:15:07 could pass a conventional clearance, which seems like a problem to me when you’re talking about
0:15:13 the treasury payment system. But I do think that what we’re seeing in the Doge team is very much
0:15:18 linked to the world that you have been talking about for the last few years and will be the
0:15:24 subject of your forthcoming book if you would like to plug that. Thanks for that. So I think
0:15:29 they should be held accountable if a law has been broken here and that anyone who goes after
0:15:35 the president or must for laws broken, which I believe they’re trespassing. I believe that they
0:15:40 have purposely circumvented Congress. We’re in uncharted territory because you don’t know if
0:15:46 that’s an actual, if that is a civil or criminal offense when the president approves of it. I think
0:15:53 that’s for courts to decide. But I do think it’s a side show to a certain extent to focus on these
0:15:57 young men, to be clear, the people accountable for this, the people who are orchestrating this are
0:16:03 the president and Elon Musk. And to a certain extent, the Democrats, I don’t want to say who
0:16:06 are enabling it, but have been caught flat-footed and have to figure out a way to strike back.
0:16:12 And we’re going to talk about that later in the show. But it is interesting. And just to be
0:16:18 real here about these young men, I was thinking about it. I’ve said a lot. If I was born in 1920
0:16:23 Germany, I’d probably be wearing a Nazi uniform and probably would have died on a Russian field
0:16:29 somewhere thinking that I was serving the fatherland. You are a function of where you grow up and in
0:16:34 what time. And you can see with a lot of young men, these are really talented young men with a lot
0:16:39 of opportunities. So I don’t feel comfortable grouping them into the bigger swath of young men
0:16:45 in America who have a lack of on-ramps to a good living, a lack of financial security, a lack of
0:16:51 prospects, a lack of an ability to meet a potential mate and start a family. These guys are all
0:16:57 incredibly talented and have a lot of opportunities. And the only lesson someone called me, a
0:17:00 readership called me, I didn’t go on and I said, “What would your advice be to these young men?”
0:17:04 And I’m like, “Again, it’s a side show.” But what I would tell any young man is that we’re in a
0:17:10 high pressure situation. Do what I didn’t do. And that is assemble a kitchen cabinet of people to
0:17:15 advise you say, “This is what’s going on. Do you have any thoughts for me, whether it’s your parents,
0:17:21 whether it’s your parents’ friends, whether it’s just friends?” Because I saw being a young man,
0:17:26 trying to express my manhood is quickly assessing the situation and then making a snap decision and
0:17:33 trying to talk everybody into me being right, whatever that decision was. It is very hard to
0:17:38 read the label, especially as a young man when you’re more risk aggressive and quite friendly,
0:17:42 don’t have incredibly good judgment or reason. You’re not that thoughtful. You’re not that measured
0:17:48 yet. It is really hard, if not impossible to read the label from inside of the bottle. So the larger
0:17:54 learning I would want to communicate to all young men is do what I didn’t do. I would have saved
0:18:00 myself a lot of heartache, a lot of professional missteps, a lot of broken relationships. Had I
0:18:05 just reached out to people and said, “This is the situation. Do you have any thoughts or advice for
0:18:11 me?” And you might decide not to change your mind about what you’re doing. But this is, you know,
0:18:16 when you find yourself in kind of uncharted territory, it’s just a really good idea to check
0:18:21 in with people from different backgrounds and say, “This is what’s going on. It’s pretty intense. Do
0:18:27 you have any thoughts?” And I didn’t learn that until I was much older. And I think men have a much
0:18:34 more difficult time because we conflate strength and masculinity with being decisive as opposed
0:18:39 to being thoughtful and listening. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think Democrats really suffered
0:18:45 from a very effective smear campaign of us being the feminine party because we were talking about
0:18:52 issues that, God forbid, affected women. And men by extension, when someone is pregnant and there’s
0:18:58 someone who got her pregnant and is sticking around, then it affects you too. So I totally
0:19:04 agree with that. And I didn’t mean to paint with such a broad brush, but I do think that there’s
0:19:10 the widest group of young men that you were talking about who are lacking in opportunity and
0:19:15 lacking in mobility and the chance to make meaningful relationships and to live a full and
0:19:23 loving and beautiful life that we all want. But then there is also a large contingent of
0:19:29 these bro types who feel, even though they have been afforded, tons of opportunities
0:19:33 have had the best education and probably aren’t facing any student debt at the end of this,
0:19:39 getting internships at places like Palantir at 19 years old who still feel aggrieved.
0:19:44 And a lot of that is rooted in the fact that they don’t see a ramp to the level of success that
0:19:50 their boomer parents or late Gen X boomer parents had by their age. I mean, thinking back to how
0:19:58 enormous it felt if a parent could earn a million dollars in a year and then how stifled people
0:20:03 who see themselves as upwardly mobile and are living in these big cities and maybe are at a
0:20:09 big law firm or in banking, when you say, oh, earn a million dollars a year, I’m not going to have
0:20:13 anywhere close to the life my parents have. My kids are not going to go to private school,
0:20:21 which is now 55 to $65,000 a year versus the 25,000 when I was growing up as an elder millennial.
0:20:27 So I wanted to add that. But something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and this is shifting gears
0:20:33 a little bit, but still about what’s going on with Musk and Co is how much this moment feels to me
0:20:41 like it did when Trump and the array of lawyers that were fanned out across the country after
0:20:47 the 2020 election were getting to work to essentially poison pill as big of a swath of the
0:20:53 population as they possibly could to not believe that Joe Biden had won a free and fair election.
0:20:59 They did it with vaccine skepticism. Their power is strongest when their supporters are separated
0:21:05 from the rest of society. And I feel like we’re seeing that moment again. And J.D. Vance tweeted
0:21:10 over the weekend after the judge ruled about the treasury payments. Not that Scott Besin
0:21:14 couldn’t access the treasury payment system, but that you couldn’t have individuals that weren’t
0:21:19 fully vetted having access. And we’ll see what happens. I think today there’ll be an addendum
0:21:23 to that. But he’s tweeting saying that they’re trying to control the executive’s quote unquote
0:21:28 legitimate power. And a lot of that as a reference back to the Supreme Court case where they basically
0:21:34 gave Trump immunity from anything or future presidents, but it was really about Trump.
0:21:37 And then you had, I don’t know if you saw Christine Noem, the Homeland Security
0:21:43 Secretary was on with Dana Bash this weekend. People don’t trust the government.
0:21:47 Right. And then Dana says to her, sorry, I shouldn’t have said Dana, it’s Dana,
0:21:55 says to her, well, you are the government. And then she’s driveled for 58 seconds after
0:21:58 that and shows she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. But she actually did say the
0:22:04 important part out loud, which is they are creating an environment and have fostered for years now,
0:22:08 an environment in which people don’t feel that they can trust the government.
0:22:13 And one of the first things Trump said when he started running for president was I alone
0:22:20 can fix it. And now it’s I alone plus Elon and JD and whoever is on board for all of this.
0:22:28 And I’m scared to see society perhaps even further breaking apart along these new lines of
0:22:33 who thinks that the government does anything good for me and who thinks that there is absolutely
0:22:42 nothing that of positive note that the government delivers. And that’s hugely dangerous. And I
0:22:48 don’t know, that’s been the most disturbing part for me that I feel like I’m back in November and
0:22:52 December of 2020. And I worry we’re not going to get these people back.
0:22:56 Well, this is a serious issue. And I want to apologize for my Nazi references because they’re
0:23:02 not funny. Although it is clear that Musk and Trump have made a hard right turn. And also the,
0:23:07 I don’t know if you’ve driven the new model SS from Tesla. And I saw on Twitter.
0:23:09 Are you coming up with these on the fly? Or do you have a list of
0:23:14 Musk Nazi jokes that you like to make? Well, you know, he’s changed his pronouns
0:23:19 to he and Himmler. But anyways, there’s a lot in there. And I think that
0:23:26 potentially you have, unfortunately, everything reverse engineers to one key statistic in my view.
0:23:32 And if we don’t fix it, we’re going to have some form of revolution, famine or war.
0:23:37 And that happens in every society. And it’s the following. The ultimate social compact is that
0:23:42 my kids will do better than me. If I work hard, I play by the rules, my kids will do better than
0:23:48 me. The definition, I used to think the definition of love was caring more about someone than you
0:23:53 care about yourself. And I’ve broadened that to, you know, you give witness and notice to people’s
0:23:59 lives. But the people who irrationally love are your children. They’re, you know, I always say
0:24:02 to my sons, you’re the only people in the world that I want to be more successful than me. And
0:24:08 I’m embarrassed to say that, but it’s true. And when your kids aren’t doing as well as you are,
0:24:13 we’re at 30 for the first time in the nation’s history, it’s just a breakdown in the social compact.
0:24:19 And people want chaos. There’s also because we’ve had what I would argue is the best functioning
0:24:24 organization. And let me go, I think the most impressive organization in history is a wing
0:24:28 of the US government. And that’s our military. And I think in the top five is the US government.
0:24:35 And Mel Robbins, who I think is going to probably displace Joe Rogan, if Stephen Barton doesn’t,
0:24:42 has this new book out called Let Them. And I’m sort of at the point right now where the people who
0:24:46 are under the illusion that Trump represents them, the genius of the Republican party is they represent
0:24:53 the top 1% in corporations. And they’ve convinced the bottom 99 that you should endorse us because
0:24:57 once you get into the top 1%, you’re going to love it here. And you have more of a chance
0:25:04 with us. And when Democrats keep spewing out this elitist dribble, and we continue to move
0:25:09 towards a 30 year old not doing as well as his or her parents, then the parents and the people
0:25:14 under the age of 30 just want chaos. And what I say around some of this stuff, I’m at the point now
0:25:21 where it’s like, let them, the states that went for Trump are the states that are the biggest
0:25:28 takers of federal assistance. So just see what happens when veterans and fairers benefits when
0:25:34 we disrupt and shut down those people you can’t trust. Okay, let’s see what happens to you and
0:25:42 dad and your neighbors. And what happens in these rural dark red communities when there is no head
0:25:49 start. See what happens when you shut down DEI and there is no job opportunity for veterans. Like,
0:25:54 I’m at the point where it’s like, you got, you know what, you broke it, you own it, you’re going
0:26:02 to get to find out just how quote unquote incompetent government is, you’re going to find out that
0:26:06 government is a lot more competent than you had originally thought. And you’re going to get a
0:26:12 very ugly awakening in my view. And I’m sort of at the point of, all right, it’s time. You really
0:26:17 want to see what life is like in these red states, the people who are most rapidly for
0:26:24 Trump who tend to be, who tend to be in rural areas tend to be quite frankly have a larger
0:26:30 body mass index are more dependent upon Medicare or more dependent on government services. The
0:26:35 biggest takers from a state perspective are the ones that went hardest towards Trump, which means
0:26:40 when these payments in these programs get shut down, they’re beginning, this isn’t going to hurt
0:26:45 us. Yes, I mean, we’re upset about this because I’d like to think we have some fidelity to America
0:26:50 and the Constitution and want to pay back based on the prosperity we’ve recognized because of this
0:26:55 incredible system and rule of law and democracy, but quite frankly, this isn’t going to really hurt
0:27:00 you or me. We’re not, our kids aren’t in snap. We’re not getting veterans a fair payments. We’re
0:27:06 not getting social security payments, right? We’re not, we’re not dying a malaria in Malawi or
0:27:11 wherever, right? This won’t affect us. It’s just fascinating though that the people who I think
0:27:17 are about to get the biggest dose of like, wow, be careful what you ask for are the ones that are
0:27:22 most rapidly pro-Trump. So my sense is at this point, you know, as Mel Robbins would say, let
0:27:30 them have at it. You ask for it, you’ve got it, Toyota. That’s definitely the big debate, I think,
0:27:38 amongst people who voted the way that we did, that balance between wanting to live in a society
0:27:43 that uplifts everybody, which I feel like is so core to the Democratic Party, and then thinking
0:27:49 we are never going to have a reversal of these kinds of electoral outcomes unless there is real
0:27:55 suffering. And that feels like a terrible place to be. I don’t want to be someone
0:28:02 that wishes a bad economic outcome on anyone. I would love a world in which everyone can succeed
0:28:08 to the utmost level. But it does seem like there has already been a bit of this. I don’t want to
0:28:12 go as far as saying buyer’s remorse, but you’re seeing these videos coming up on TikTok. I don’t
0:28:19 know. There’s a farmer who relies on this cost sharing program that gets funded through the
0:28:24 Inflation Reduction Act that has been frozen and gone away, and he’s talking about potentially
0:28:30 losing his farm. He was someone who voted for Trump. Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama,
0:28:36 is out there talking about how we can’t have the NIH go away, the new policy of getting
0:28:41 indirect costs down to 15%, which will basically mean that we have to shutter labs that are
0:28:47 saving us from every disease under the sun and our huge economic boon for the country. I was
0:28:54 astounded to see that for every dollar that we put into society from the NIH that we get
0:29:02 $2.46 back, and it generates nearly $93 billion in economic activity in the U.S.,
0:29:08 and also is what keeps us, the leader of the PAC, our competitiveness. It’s so funny to hear
0:29:12 Republicans bemoaning how far we’re falling behind all the time, and then they’re like,
0:29:17 “You know what we’ll do? We’ll get rid of, we’ll slash NIH funding.” That’ll be the way that we’ll
0:29:24 really show the rest of the world. But in a more personal level, I talked about two or three months
0:29:30 ago to a college student from the Midwest. He reached out, he watches the Five, is thinking
0:29:34 about a career in politics, and really interested in political communication. We got on the phone,
0:29:40 and he emailed me last week, and he said, and he said that I could share this. I’ve really
0:29:46 appreciated hearing what you have had to say the past week on the Five and your podcast with Scott.
0:29:50 So, yeah, Scott, you’ve really opened my mind on certain things that are currently going on as
0:29:54 someone who voted for Trump, and you have been communicating a lot of frustrations I’ve been
0:29:59 feeling alongside some family and friends who didn’t expect all the chaos. And then he puts in
0:30:04 parentheses not to mention the tariffs, as our family owns a small business where all our products
0:30:11 are made in China. So, this is a 20-year-old bro, right, from the middle of the country,
0:30:17 comes from a conservative family. They love Trump, and it only took, I got this a week ago,
0:30:23 so it only took two weeks of this level of chaos for him to feel strongly enough that
0:30:28 he would write that down, right? That’s not a casual comment, and he told me that I could talk
0:30:32 about it, that I could put that out on air. So, it’s obviously something that’s very emblematic
0:30:38 of not only what’s going on in his life, but what’s going on in his orbit. Elon Musk’s popularity
0:30:45 has gone from in 2016, it was plus 29 when he was the SpaceX guy, down to negative 11. So,
0:30:51 something is happening. There is pushback out there and the realization that, yeah,
0:30:57 maybe there are cuts we should be making, but this wholesale approach to just move fast and
0:31:02 break things is not something that works for the public sector. Well, you’re already starting to
0:31:07 see it, and it kind of goes to, and we’ll talk about this in a bit, potential solutions, but
0:31:14 basically sales of Tesla cars are diving in the EU. Electric vehicle market declined by 6%
0:31:23 overall in January. So, there is a structural decline, but sales of Tesla are down 63% in
0:31:31 France, 44% in Sweden, 38% in Norway, 42% in the Netherlands, and 12% in the UK. And as someone
0:31:37 who has worked with automobile companies, they measure share in sales and basis points. And
0:31:43 that is, if year-on-year, you’re down a half a percent, the person running that country is
0:31:52 sweating. I mean, these are, I mean, these literally are kind of implosions of sales. So,
0:31:57 it does appear that finally, what, you know, everyone’s been outraged, the lack of outrage on
0:32:02 the left. It does appear that people, that the bloom is off the road here. People no longer seem
0:32:08 as a, you know, kind of this provocateur and innovator, but as someone who is a threat and
0:32:14 that they just don’t need to own his car. I’m curious, with all of these lawsuits and a DOJ
0:32:20 investigation piling up, how serious do you think the legal threat is to Musk and Doge and what could
0:32:26 the long-term fallout be other than, obviously, his popularity is going down. But I’ll put forward
0:32:32 a thesis. When you tell someone you can be a convicted felon and then reelect them,
0:32:37 he’s essentially decided the incentives and disincentives no longer apply to me that I can
0:32:43 break the law with impunity. Do you think there is a bridge too far here around these court cases?
0:32:49 Well, so far, like you mentioned earlier on, the courts have gone against them in all of these
0:32:55 instances. But the problem is, is that the courts move slower than 20-year-old kids that are in the
0:33:00 Treasury payment system to some degree, right? It’s already disrupted people’s lives. Funding
0:33:04 has been cut off, even if it is then getting reinstated. There are all these lawsuits with
0:33:10 harrowing testimony from people who work for USAID and are stationed abroad and are saying,
0:33:14 you’re sending me back to America. I haven’t lived there in 15 years. We have no infrastructure.
0:33:20 We have no family. We have kids with special needs. And if there is a disruption in their care,
0:33:24 I have notes from their doctors about the long-term suffering that they will endure.
0:33:30 Nobody in the government seems to care at all about that. So the courts are great. And we’re
0:33:34 going to have Mark Elias on the podcast in a few weeks. And I’m really interested to talk to him
0:33:41 about the legal approach to all of this. But they’re moving to some degree too quickly. And I think
0:33:47 on the fundamental level, what’s most disturbing about all of this is that they are going for
0:33:52 a two-branch approach to government. I think they don’t care at all about Congress because
0:33:57 appropriated money means nothing to them. And we should note as well that the government is only
0:34:03 funded through March 14th. So they’re offering buyouts to people. They have no cash to pay them
0:34:08 for the next eight months. So Democrats actually have a lot of power in that respect. And some
0:34:13 of them are already talking about shutting down the government to be able to shut down Elon Musk.
0:34:18 So I think that they are looking at a world of essentially one and a half branches of government.
0:34:23 So they want the most powerful presidency or executive that you’ve ever seen in your life.
0:34:28 And then they want about half of the judiciary. They want the good judges. Which is always how
0:34:32 Trump talks about things. He says, “Well, of course we want immigration. We just want the good
0:34:36 immigrants. And of course we want this, but we just want the good ones.” So he wants the judges
0:34:41 probably that he picks. So he wants Eileen Cannon and the Supreme Court. And the rest of it can
0:34:49 kind of go to hell. And that’s really new territory for us. Looking at a world in which the executive
0:34:56 has no interest in having checks and balances with the Congress and who may openly flout
0:35:04 these judicial decisions. We’ll have to wait and see in terms of how they approach it. Even this
0:35:10 week will be an interesting incubator for that. But I think that they are so far emboldened even
0:35:14 from where they were in 2020 when they were getting bad rulings that we could see something
0:35:15 completely unprecedented.
0:35:21 Bill O’Reilly recently said that he doesn’t believe Musk has as much power as we think.
0:35:26 And then Time Magazine in the same week puts him on the cover behind the president’s desk.
0:35:29 Do you think we’re overestimating Musk’s influence or underestimating it?
0:35:34 I’m not sure. Listen, Time Magazine wants a good cover. It was a good cover. It definitely pissed
0:35:39 Trump off even though he said like, “Oh, are they still in business? Who reads that anymore?”
0:35:43 But he definitely, when he got Time Person of the Year just a month ago was super psyched about
0:35:49 Time Magazine. I’m sure the answer is somewhere in the middle. I think you don’t want to be the
0:35:54 person that went out there and took a big swing like Elon Musk actually doesn’t have that much
0:35:59 power. You can even see from the level of disruption that we’ve had that he has that power and also
0:36:05 that he swayed the election like this, you know, $290 million, whatever algorithmic changes
0:36:11 to social media that will probably never understand the true impact of that or the gravity of that
0:36:17 impact when, I mean, you’re not on Twitter anymore. I still am. I need to be there for work.
0:36:26 It’s A, assess pool. But B, I can barely find content that I need to be able to do my job.
0:36:32 Reporters that I follow are not showing up even in the, you know, the for you column.
0:36:37 It pales in comparison to what it used to be, which was I thought the best news gathering
0:36:42 site you could always find what you needed right away when you logged on to Twitter. And it’s not
0:36:46 like that anymore at all. So I’m in the middle on it. What do you think? Are you a Bill O’Reilly
0:36:51 or Time Magazine? You know, I don’t know. I know that the staff in the White House is more worried
0:36:57 about trying to calm Trump down when he’s angry because he doesn’t drink or do drugs whereas with
0:37:04 Musk, you just give him a ketamine infused juice box. There goes the bigger man. That bigger
0:37:09 man part of the show is over. He’s back. That’s right. Anyways, with that, let’s take a quick
0:37:19 break. Stay with us. The Republicans have been saying lots of things. Just yesterday,
0:37:25 their leader said he wants to own Gaza. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a
0:37:32 job with it too. We’ll own it. On Monday, the Secretary of State said an entire federal agency
0:37:36 was insubordinate. USAID in particular, they refuse to tell us anything. We won’t tell you what
0:37:42 the money’s going to, where the money’s for, who has it. Over the weekend, Vice President Elon Musk,
0:37:47 the richest man on earth, tweeted about the same agency that, you know, gives money to the poorest
0:37:53 people on earth. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some
0:38:00 great parties, did that instead. But what have the Democrats been saying? People are aroused. I
0:38:05 haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time. Huh. That’s a weird way to put it,
0:38:12 Senator. We’re going to ask what exactly is the Democrat’s strategy to push back on Republicans
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0:39:26 Grammarly.com/podcast. That’s Grammarly.com/podcast. Hey, this is Peter Kafka. I’m the host of
0:39:32 Channels, a podcast about technology and media. And maybe you’ve noticed that a lot of people are
0:39:38 investing a lot of money trying to encourage you to bet on sports right now, right from your phone.
0:39:44 That is a huge change. And it’s happened so fast that most of us haven’t spent much time thinking
0:39:49 about what it means and if it’s a good thing. But Michael Lewis, that’s the guy who wrote
0:39:54 Moneyball on the Big Shore and Liars Poker, has been thinking a lot about it. And he tells me
0:40:00 that he’s pretty worried. I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient
0:40:05 as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It’s like the world has created less and less
0:40:09 friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more. You can hear my chat with Michael
0:40:18 Lewis right now on Channels wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Over the weekend,
0:40:22 Trump made history as the first sitting U.S. president to attend the Super Bowl. He also said
0:40:28 he planned on announcing a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports into the United States.
0:40:32 Meanwhile, Trump raised eyebrows last week by suggesting he could turn Gaza into the
0:40:38 Riviera of the Middle East during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
0:40:43 He floated the idea of U.S. owning Gaza and hit it at relocating 2 million Palestinians
0:40:49 before walking back comments about deploying U.S. troops. And back home, a federal judge
0:40:53 temporarily blocked Trump’s federal workers’ bio plan delaying a decision for the 2 million
0:41:01 eligible employees 65,000 have opted in so far. Trump’s recent comments about the U.S.
0:41:06 taking over Gaza have sparked a media backlash. I would argue, Jess, that this is another
0:41:12 just weapon of mass distraction and that it’s just so ridiculous. I don’t know. It’s just sucking
0:41:19 oxygen out of the room of the real issue, which is this digital coup, if you will. But how might
0:41:24 this negatively affect the ongoing, in your view, ceasefire between Hamas and Israel or doesn’t have
0:41:31 any impact on the conflict or the tension in the Middle East? Well, the thing that it does in the
0:41:36 immediate term, even if he says it’s not something that he was completely serious about and you saw
0:41:41 that Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, had to walk back his openness to boots on the ground
0:41:47 the next day in the briefing because that was something that freaked even the biggest warmongers
0:41:53 out there. They were like, “No, actually, we are not putting boots on the ground in the Middle East,
0:41:58 but this helps B.B. in the immediate term ensuring up his right flank, which he definitely
0:42:04 needs if he’s going to be able to stay in power.” And Trump always just has that side door available
0:42:11 to him where he says, “Well, it was a negotiating tactic. We just needed to see what Egypt and
0:42:16 Jordan were really made of.” The former deputy prime minister of Jordan said that this was a
0:42:21 declaration of war on the Arab people. That doesn’t sound good, even if that is the place that you
0:42:28 were starting at, that you can even think of a world in which you’re going to move two million
0:42:34 people out of the place that they live. And this is not about defending Hamas, staying in charge,
0:42:38 or anything of that sort. But just Egypt and Jordan have been very clear about this. Saudi
0:42:42 got involved and said, “We’re not doing this either.” The Arab world has not been open to
0:42:48 taking Palestinians for a very long time, which is one of the endemic problems with this conflict.
0:42:52 And I don’t know what the solution is. We all wish that there was going to be able to be
0:42:56 a two-state solution with a neat bow and we can’t get there. There are people who have
0:43:01 dedicated their lives to it, like Tony Blair, for instance, and we have not been able to get there.
0:43:08 But I think that it’s a little too easy to just say that it’s a distraction or it’s a sideshow
0:43:13 because it is forcing people to have to deal with it, first of all, which makes a big difference.
0:43:18 Like Marco Rubio is going to have to say something about it, right? And people like Tom Cotton are
0:43:22 going to have to say something about it. The administration is going to have Pete Hegseth
0:43:29 over at Defense. People are going to have to prepare themselves for the fact that his mercurial
0:43:35 or herky-jerky approach to foreign policy might not go your way all the time. And we did talk about
0:43:40 it as maybe it’s one of the advantages that our enemies have no idea what he’s actually going to
0:43:47 do. But there are real implications for this and his words matter as much as we’d like to
0:43:50 pretend that they don’t. And he says a lot of shit and he throws stuff against the wall and sees
0:43:58 whether it sticks or not. You cannot, with a serious face, say at this point that Trump is
0:44:06 not interested in being a modern-day imperialist, at least to some degree. The amount of times
0:44:10 that he’s talked about, Greenland, he’s talking about the Panama Canal. Now he’s talking about
0:44:14 whatever he wants to do in the Middle East, which is Jared Kushner’s vision. Jared Kushner said
0:44:18 there’s a lot of waterfront property that’d be available. And it was interesting, my colleague
0:44:22 on the five, Jesse Waters, said something about, well, Albania has said that they’ll take people.
0:44:28 And a couple weeks ago, there was a story in the New York Times about how Albania gave the go-ahead
0:44:38 for a $1.4 billion luxury hotel investment for Jared Kushner. So it always comes back to money.
0:44:44 It always comes back to business prospects in all of this. And I don’t think this is something
0:44:48 that’s going to happen. But I don’t think it behooves us to just kind of push it under
0:44:52 the carpet or the rug and just say, oh, it’s a complete impossibility.
0:44:58 So to your point, the premise, it starts from what I think is a legitimate premise. And that is
0:45:06 the path we’re on now, like, okay, the way I would see right now, the Middle East or the problem
0:45:12 in Gaza is there’s no moral clarity. And that is when World War II ended,
0:45:19 we had the Nuremberg trials. And we basically said, this was genocide. And we’re shaming you and
0:45:24 punishing you. And the world came to some sort of moral clarity. We don’t have that coming out of
0:45:30 this conflict. And it feels as if all we’re doing is just setting up the exact same thing to happen
0:45:36 again in two, five or 10 years. That Hamas will rearm, there’ll be people sympathetic, they will
0:45:45 use aid and their popularity with their domestic population who are feel, you know, understandably
0:45:52 agreed. And the same thing is going to happen. So the notion that we need to be creative around
0:45:57 doing something different, that the status quo, the wash, rinse and repeat, we are going to see
0:46:05 the mother of all shampoo effect here. It’s just going to happen again. The current construct just
0:46:10 does not work. Now, but this notion of a two-state solution where the two states are either Egypt
0:46:16 or Jordan, neither, I mean, here’s the problem of relocating these two million residents,
0:46:20 whether you want to call it ethnic cleansing or some sort of a part, whatever you want to
0:46:27 term you or relocation or, or condo development or a creative solution. The problem is
0:46:33 these two million people don’t want to leave. And even more, nobody wants to take them. Albania,
0:46:39 what’s the population of Albania? I don’t look at the border. You want to see a fortified border?
0:46:46 Look at the border between Egypt and Gaza. Albania is 2.7 million. And we’re talking about
0:46:52 two million people who need to go somewhere. What Egypt and Jordan have decided is that
0:46:57 the elements of this population that they cannot risk incorporating is chaos and violence.
0:47:06 So this just doesn’t seem like what I’d call a viable solution for anybody. So until we have,
0:47:14 do we need to be creative? Yes. But I find this, most of those just sort of kind of ridiculous
0:47:20 that, okay, you’re going to relocate two million people and then put up a bunch of
0:47:27 residence inns and, and Trump towers and, you know, Western hotels and then invite the rich
0:47:34 ones back? I don’t, it’s like, okay, walk me through how this logistically actually makes
0:47:41 any sense. So I don’t see any viable path here. What do you think is the significance of the
0:47:44 Judge blocking Trump’s federal work or buyout plan and how could this play out in the coming
0:47:50 weeks? What I think it’s significant, and I already mentioned this, that I know this is Elon’s
0:47:56 playbook and he does it all the time. He did it with Twitter in 2022 as well, but the cash isn’t
0:48:00 there to do it. So it is pretty significant. I think there’s a pretty strong case for saying,
0:48:04 you know, you’re not even talking about money that’s been appropriated. Are you paying out of
0:48:09 pocket? He’s a very rich guy versus man on the planet. Maybe that’s what he intends to do,
0:48:13 but going out to people and saying, you can go on that trip you’ve always wanted to take.
0:48:18 I don’t know. Actually, you have no salary to be able to do that. It’s pretty duplicitous.
0:48:25 The big question is what orders are they going to abide by and what orders, frankly,
0:48:32 are they going to be using the younger dogeys to get around? You know, what will be authorized?
0:48:40 What will the actions from the top level that look pretty normal, right? Post rulings be and
0:48:49 then what are 20-year-old kids that can hack into anything able to actually do? And I know that it’s
0:48:55 not necessarily to turn us into a technocratic state. Maybe that is for some people’s vision who
0:49:02 are involved in this, but I think that because Trump is a lame duck, we have four years essentially
0:49:08 to break as much as possible that they will be looking to push boundaries in ways we haven’t
0:49:12 seen before. So while they might have abided by some of these rulings before, they’re going to
0:49:18 push the envelope even further is my feeling. I mean, I guess the question is their attitude is
0:49:23 it doesn’t matter if it’s legal or illegal. If we make an offer and people accept it,
0:49:28 then it’s done. So before you can get caught robbing the bank, just spend the money and enjoy
0:49:33 yourself. And then if you get caught, okay, we’ll give the money back. There is definitely a kind
0:49:39 of like a move fast and break things kind of element here and have no regard for institutions
0:49:44 or process. Just see if you can get away with it. Whenever I see Republicans, I feel like they’re
0:49:48 sort of like, I can’t believe we’re getting away with this shit. Totally. And it’s like tickling
0:49:52 their sensors. Isn’t this amazing? And I even, I don’t know if I’m imagining this, but I’m wondering
0:49:56 if they’re even getting a little bit nervous like, Jesus Christ, I didn’t realize it would be this
0:50:01 easy. But they are getting upset about things that matter to them. Like I already mentioned,
0:50:09 Senator Katie Britt, Jerry Moran, Senator Wicker, who are big proponents of USAID programs had to
0:50:16 go to Rubio and plead with him. Rubio was a fan. Rubio was a fan last year. He was pushing Biden
0:50:19 to allocate more money. And that links to the problem. And I know we’re going to talk about
0:50:24 the Democrats next. Well, let’s do that. But first, we have to take one more quick break. Stay with us.
0:50:32 All right. So here’s the deal. Take a former world number one. That’s me, Andy Roddick,
0:50:36 adding the journalist who knows everything about tennis and a producer who’s still figuring out
0:50:40 how to spell tennis. You get served with Andy Roddick, a weekly podcast where we break down
0:50:45 the game we all love. We cover the biggest stories, talk to the sports biggest stars,
0:50:48 and highlight the people changing tennis in ways you might not even realize.
0:50:53 Whether it’s grand slam predictions, coaching changes, off-court drama,
0:50:58 or the moves shaping the future of the sport, we’ve got it all. This podcast is about having fun,
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0:51:08 Catch serve with Andy Roddick on Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you listen. Or watch us on
0:51:20 YouTube. Like, subscribe, follow, all that good stuff. Let’s get started. Welcome back. Before
0:51:25 we wrap, Democrats are stepping up their strategy. Rallies are gaining momentum. Schumer is calling
0:51:30 for opposition to every Trump nominee, and Jefferies is making his stance clear in negotiation
0:51:34 letters. Jess, do you think this is the right approach? Do you think it’ll be effective?
0:51:40 No. Have you seen these rallies? It’s horrible. So you have, John Stuart did a great
0:51:47 impression of Schumer of them, where, you know, you have a guy in his 70s who’s not the most
0:51:54 charismatic. I’m being generous here. Screaming we will win after we just lost everything.
0:52:01 And then you have Congressman Al Green shaking his cane in the front of the frame. So it’s just
0:52:07 Schumer’s face with a cane going back and forth. Or Maxine Waters, you know, trying to barge into
0:52:16 the Department of Education. And I’ve noticed that all of the key speakers at these rallies are
0:52:23 safe seat Democrats. And that’s really the wrong approach to all of this. I almost want to see
0:52:29 exclusively people who have run tight competitive races out there talking about what they think
0:52:34 is the right thing for us to do. Because it’s, you know, it’s all well and good and people are
0:52:39 great communicators and you be on your social feeds and everyone should be amplifying as much
0:52:45 of the bad shit that Republicans are doing as possible. But I feel like it just sends the
0:52:52 message that we haven’t learned that much from the election and that frankly, we’re proliferating
0:52:58 more hysteria than the average voter is interested in hearing at this point. So it has to be so much
0:53:04 more targeted. I know how came Jefferies put out a 10 point communications plan. But everyone has
0:53:10 to, you know, see what their constituents are interested in and what their temperature is
0:53:15 in terms of Trump versus Elon. There seems to be a big dichotomy there. Jared Golden,
0:53:22 who is a Democratic Congressman who won in a competitive district, a Trump very rural
0:53:27 district in Maine, said that all the calls that he’s getting to his office are about Musk.
0:53:32 People aren’t upset about Trump. They’re upset about Musk. And that’s what he’s leaning into.
0:53:37 And people have to find kind of their North Star for all of this. But the thing that was driving
0:53:43 me crazy in terms of the messaging is, I don’t know if you watched after the election, Tony
0:53:48 Fabrizio, who was Trump’s pollster and Chrysla Savita, who was one of his campaign managers,
0:53:54 participated in a panel with the Democratic campaign managers as well. And they were talking about,
0:54:00 you know, what worked, what didn’t work. And they said that Project 2025 was destroying them
0:54:06 up until a couple months before the election. So it had a 57% negative approval rating.
0:54:12 And that we were doing a great job hammering it. That all of those, even if we kind of had
0:54:15 rolled our eyes at it, it had been hugely effective that every time we said, well,
0:54:20 this is the Trump 2025 playbook. This is what they want. This is what they’re going to do.
0:54:27 And that has disappeared even as people who wrote Project 2025 are in charge of OMB,
0:54:34 Brendan Carr at the FCC. And I want that messaging back on mass. I want everyone talking about this
0:54:41 to say Time Magazine did an analysis. Two thirds of the executive orders that Trump has already
0:54:47 implemented are out of Project 2025 already. I mean, I was happy to see those Democratic
0:54:52 Congress people walk over. I think at least, I think they need to be seen doing anything,
0:54:58 but the optics here, I agree with you. It felt like a senior’s home when they found out water
0:55:04 aerobics were canceled or jello night had been switched to Thursday. I mean, it just felt, oh,
0:55:08 God, that’s, that’s how we’re going to win this fight. That’s the army we’re sending in.
0:55:14 You know, as we try and process this, there’s, I want to move to like, okay, what do we do?
0:55:18 And there’s, I would argue, and I want to put forward some potential ideas and have you respond to
0:55:22 them. There’s short-term and there’s long-term. And the first thing you got to do in any sort of
0:55:27 strategies, you got to determine where’s the soft tissue, what’s the leverage, what are our assets,
0:55:32 what can be exploited. And he King Jefferies, I thought was actually quite eloquent and honest
0:55:36 when he said, they control all three branches of government. There’s just not a lot we can do
0:55:42 from kind of a legislative level. And when the stuff gets to judges, it gets pushed back, but
0:55:48 they’re, you know, they’re moving at this Blitzkrieg speed. And my view is, okay, I think you go after
0:55:55 the money, like what they’re doing by hacking and turning off these payment systems or intervening,
0:56:00 I don’t know what the right term would be. And I think you go after, I think you go after musks,
0:56:05 financial interests. So it’s already happening in Europe, as I previously mentioned, Tesla sales
0:56:11 are going down. I think that our congressional representatives and people who think what’s
0:56:17 going on here is a total subversion of our democracy to make it known that you probably
0:56:22 shouldn’t sign up for T-Mobile right now, because T-Mobile has just struck a deal with Starlink.
0:56:28 You probably shouldn’t be thinking about any advertiser on Twitter. That’s an obvious one.
0:56:34 You should be thinking about, okay, United Airlines has just announced a big deal with Starlink.
0:56:39 How do you go after the pocketbook? I think that’s really what Musk cares about. It’s already
0:56:44 happening with Tesla. I don’t see any reason. Should the department, should veterans groups
0:56:51 be doing anything around Tesla, Starlink, any of his economic interests? I think you go after the
0:56:57 purse, because that’s what I think these people care about. Over the medium and the long term,
0:57:03 I think you draft resolutions and say, okay, if this unelected group of people can go in and start
0:57:11 turning off payments, we’re going to propose turning off payments or anything related to Starlink.
0:57:18 To a certain extent is a huge beneficiary, and I even wrote a post titled, “Welfare Queen.”
0:57:22 The notion that he’s trying to cut off payments and claim the government is too big and that
0:57:26 its large S is wasted. Meanwhile, he’s one of the biggest beneficiaries from this large S.
0:57:30 Should we be thinking about, one, how do we go after the economic interests
0:57:36 of Elon Musk to say, we’re not down with this and you circumventing democratic channels
0:57:42 to implement what you think is right, and we’re going to punish you and your companies? There’s
0:57:47 nothing illegal. You don’t have to sign up for T-Mobile that’s introducing Starlink. You don’t
0:57:54 have to fly United Airlines, which is signed a contract with Starlink. Then over the medium
0:58:00 and long term, I think you just have to tell Republicans, okay, you realize that if you can
0:58:07 do this, then we can shut off Starlink. We have our own programmers and we’ll find out if a judge
0:58:13 thinks that’s legal or not. I do think, though, the nuclear option is now on the table, and that is,
0:58:21 I believe that the Democrats should credibly threaten to get in the way of blocking the extension
0:58:28 on our debt ceiling such that the next Treasury auction fails, because at the end of the day,
0:58:33 the reason why the tariffs were rolled back is the leverage in the people that Trump listens to
0:58:40 are corporations and shareholders, and they called him around these ridiculous Canadian and Mexican
0:58:45 tariffs and said, do not do this. This will have an immediate impact on the stock market. The adult
0:58:55 in the room is the stock market and the 10-year bond, and he basically got these illusory symbolic
0:59:02 concessions and then walked them back. I think if the Democrats say, okay, you want to play
0:59:10 Russian roulette, we’re going to load the chamber around the upcoming Treasury auction.
0:59:14 If you want to call all your buddies and tell them that interest rates are about to spike,
0:59:19 which will take the stock market down, and I’m still trying to figure out if that hurts the
0:59:26 1%, 1% of America’s population owns 90% of the stocks. I think that the real leverage here is
0:59:31 around money and is around, you want to shut down the economy, you don’t believe in a democratic
0:59:36 process, fine, we’re going to shut down the economy, and you’re not going to be able to make the
0:59:40 interest, the upcoming interest payments, and you’re going to be the president who, for the first time,
0:59:46 was so offensive, was so non-democratic that we felt we had no choice, but to get in the
0:59:51 way that you’re about to be the first president where a Treasury auction where America did not
0:59:57 pay its debts, and let’s see what happens, boss. But I’m trying to think of where we have leverage,
1:00:01 and those are the only places I can think of because per what Hakeem Jeffery said, us just
1:00:08 screaming outrage and waving our cane in front of a federal building. That’s not working, right?
1:00:13 We need to go after the money, and we need to say you’re going to be the president that takes
1:00:19 the stock market down 8% or 10% on the opening bell next Wednesday after a failed Treasury auction.
1:00:25 Your thoughts? I love that idea, and I’m sure they’re considering that alongside the negotiations
1:00:31 that are going to come up in March because the Republicans had these high hopes for one massive
1:00:36 bill, which seems like a really stupid way to be funding the government anyway. But if you
1:00:41 put those two things together, that’d be very difficult for Trump to weather, and he will be
1:00:48 the person in charge if we fail at auction, or if the government shuts down in general,
1:00:54 though it seems like he does want to furlough employees anyway. But I have an idea that maybe
1:01:01 could be used as a compliment to this, and I’m hoping that Democrats, I’m loosely calling this
1:01:05 the Democratic Disruption Plan, because everyone loves this term disruption. It’s become very chic,
1:01:08 right? And that’s what the Republicans have run on, that we’re just trying to disrupt things. You
1:01:13 got to shake it up because there’s all of this waste in there that we can cut. And I think that
1:01:20 we need to counter program with our own doge. And you can go back to the ’90s, and the Clinton
1:01:24 administration did this. They called it the National Performance Review. I didn’t realize it was as
1:01:32 successful as it was. It made a 426,000 cuts to the federal workforce going agency by agency,
1:01:36 and they did it with a lot of precision. They said, “Are there offices that would
1:01:40 can be closed? Regulations that we can cut? Are there programs that actually don’t need to be
1:01:47 funded within USAID of the $44 billion that goes out there?” I’m sure there are cuts that we can
1:01:52 make, but we should be the ones to propose them. So just take all the crap that they’ve been spewing
1:01:58 and throw it back in their faces. And I think that that would be really effective and show to the
1:02:02 American public that we are serious about governing, that we do know that there is a huge
1:02:09 waste, fraud, and abuse problem, but that 66% of US spending is untouchable. And that’s the most
1:02:14 important part, that we have to be the party out there saying they’re lying to you about cuts that
1:02:20 they can make. The stuff that they’re talking about are tiny. They’re trimming like a dollar
1:02:25 off of the budget, but we will never let them touch your social security, your Medicare,
1:02:31 your Medicaid. And I think that that is a place where we can run and win. And I want to say as
1:02:36 well, on the Department of Education front, I don’t know if you saw this, the national report
1:02:46 card test results came out. And it breaks your heart to see stuff like this. And I just…
1:02:51 So just reference all time low for eighth grade reading levels, is that right?
1:02:58 Well, since testing began, so 1992. And when the Republicans come out and they say, “I want to
1:03:03 abolish the Department of Education,” which by the way is in Project 2025, and you look at those
1:03:12 test results, you understand how average American parents who don’t have optionality to go to a fancy
1:03:17 private school alternative are being denied vouchers to maybe take a few thousand dollars and put
1:03:22 their kids in religious schools, which in general have been performing better than the average public
1:03:27 school, that they say, “You know what? Yeah, burn it all down.” Trump had a great line where he said
1:03:32 about Linda McMahon, “You know, I don’t want you to have a job for that long,
1:03:37 because I want you to destroy the Department of Education.” And what they want in the end is for
1:03:42 private equity to own our education system. That’s what’s already happening. They have been making
1:03:48 tons of money off of these schools, specifically in the charter school space. But if we are going
1:03:54 to have public schools under attack at this level and believe strongly in making them better than
1:03:59 they are certainly, and hopefully taking them into some sort of golden age, we have to play ball
1:04:03 on the education front. And we have to say, “Abolishing the Department of Education isn’t
1:04:08 the answer necessarily, but these are our real reform policies.” And that includes going after
1:04:15 the teachers unions and saying to Randy Weingarten, “No, this all is imperfect. You know, we haven’t
1:04:20 certainly recovered from the lows of the COVID era and all the damage that was done to those kids,
1:04:25 not only as academic learners, but as social emotional beings.” But that Democrats aren’t
1:04:30 going to be afraid to touch that third rail anymore. Someone like Josh Shapiro has done that. He said
1:04:35 before that he’s for school vouchers, “Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where we have better
1:04:40 public schools and some kids have the optionality to go to religious schools or private schools
1:04:44 with the help of the government so that we can save the public school education system?”
1:04:51 So a lot there. I felt that I got into it a little bit. Is it Ronit Weinberg, the head
1:04:57 of the National Teachers Union? Randy Weingarten. I got that one close. Yeah. Randy Weingarten.
1:05:05 You were in the Jewish realm. Something. I was circling the white fish. Anyways,
1:05:10 I said that I thought that the union she represented was using the kids’ drug meals.
1:05:16 During COVID. I’m sure she loved that. Well, during COVID, she decided that we have to protect the
1:05:21 teachers. And she was basically saying, “You’ve got to pay us more and give us a ton of time off.”
1:05:27 And the reality was that the population of teachers in America is the least vulnerable. It was the
1:05:32 least vulnerable to COVID. They were young, primarily female, primarily thin. These were
1:05:38 the least at-risk people in America. And she was using basically kids and their mental health,
1:05:44 which we found were severely impacted by being out of school, such that she could try and find
1:05:49 a moment of leverage to get more money for her dues-paying members. I think teachers’ unions,
1:05:53 and I’m casting a broad brush across all of them, but we have a tendency to
1:05:58 sanctify all of them, not recognize them. Some of these unions are just bottom line corrupt
1:06:03 and really don’t seem to care that much about kids, despite their hush, grandmotherly tones.
1:06:07 Where I would depart a little bit with you, and it sounds like also Governor Shapiro,
1:06:15 is I am very wary of vouchers, because I think effectively what vouchers do is like everything
1:06:21 else in our society, the kind of the narrative of let’s shut down the Department of Education and
1:06:26 let’s take money and just give people choice and give them vouchers. I think theoretically,
1:06:29 it makes a lot of sense. There are instances where someone would say, “I’d rather take the money,
1:06:34 put them in a religious school, or I want more choice.” I get it, but effectively on the ground,
1:06:39 I think what happens is what always happens in our government the last 40 or 50 years,
1:06:45 it is nothing but a naked transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, because the reality is the
1:06:52 majority of rural areas or poor areas don’t have a private school option where they can use the
1:06:58 voucher. The only reason they have a school is because of federal mandated legislation that they
1:07:02 have to have transportation, and they have to have a school, and the school has to be funded.
1:07:08 And all you are doing when you give, say, people a $10,000 voucher, and I was on the
1:07:13 board of my kid’s school, there would be probably some people who are middle-class who would rather
1:07:18 have the choice. We charge $22,000, they come up with the $12,000, it would provide access to a
1:07:24 private school, it’d be good for them. But really what it would be is a $2 million giveaway to the
1:07:30 other 200 families that can’t afford it, and it would just take income and desperately needed
1:07:36 resources out of the public schools in that area. So I get it theoretically, but I think on the ground
1:07:42 all vouchers end up doing is again transfer money from the poorest people in the districts that need
1:07:49 mandated head start in schools and transportation and food programs to wealthy people who would just
1:07:54 get, that would be, you know what, that would be just, you have two kids, that would be a $40,000
1:07:59 gift to you and me. My guess is, I don’t know if you said, do you send your kids to private or public?
1:08:05 One isn’t in school and one is in a private pre-K. There isn’t public school for her yet.
1:08:12 So this is what a voucher program would be. It’d be a $30,000 gift from government to you and me.
1:08:16 I totally understand what you’re saying and I, maybe I got a little ahead of my,
1:08:22 ahead of my skis or I didn’t mean to say that I want to turn into the party of vouchers. What I
1:08:28 wanted to say is that if we continue to look so detached from reality that we can, we are telling
1:08:34 people that these scores are okay with us and we’re going to do nothing about it, which is
1:08:38 essentially what we’re doing without having our own reform policies, that we’re going to lose people
1:08:43 forever because there’s nothing that is more valued in society than our children. We have
1:08:48 Governor Glenn Yonkin in Virginia because Terry McCall have got up there and said,
1:08:54 you know, the kids, the kids aren’t yours, right? They belong to the teachers when they go. So I,
1:08:58 I just want to have the conversation about it. I think it can be perhaps done in some sort of
1:09:06 targeted way, but we look so silly if we just keep saying we’re going to, we’re going to do it the
1:09:10 same way. We’re just going to keep going down this path. That’s what I meant. But I, I would
1:09:15 like to see, you want to talk about a way to save government tens, if not hundreds of billions of
1:09:21 dollars over the next 30 or 50 years, do what Japan does. America has a 40% of its population is
1:09:26 obese. That is an enormous strain on the well-being, the mental health and our financial system. And
1:09:32 one of the reasons healthcare costs $13,000 a year here per person at 6,500 in Japan. You know what
1:09:37 the, we have 40%, 70% of America’s obese are overweight, 40% obese. Do you know what the
1:09:45 percentage of obese pop, of the population in Japan is obese? 12, four. And here’s where it
1:09:50 starts. If you wanted, if you wanted to increase the well-being of children in America, you would
1:09:55 do what Japan does. And that is you’d find the extra money to have a chef at every school. And
1:10:01 the chef has one mandate. Everything has to be fresh. There are absolutely no processed foods
1:10:06 allowed in school because this is what we do. We give these kids shitty, sugary, cheap food.
1:10:10 They get obese because the deal is, okay, we can get them addicted to the food industrial complex
1:10:15 who basically ran every fucking app last night on the Super Bowl and then hand them over to the
1:10:20 diabetes pharmaceutical complex. And that’s the axis of evil. North Korea and Iran are nothing
1:10:24 compared to the food industrial and the diabetes industrial complex in this nation.
1:10:28 And in Japan, they say, we’re going to spend the monies. Have you seen those interviews with the
1:10:35 kids coming out of school? What’s your favorite food? Broccoli. Yeah. Right? And they say, your job,
1:10:40 at three in the morning, these chefs get up at every school, not hugely paid, but a lot of them do it.
1:10:45 Former chefs, they go to the fresh fish market, they go to fresh, and they have to find fresh food
1:10:50 every goddamn day. And these kids grow up with a different sense of nutrition. I love the
1:10:55 idea of thinking out of the box and thinking longterm, but corporate interests get involved.
1:11:01 And again, this is our school system and our children. What I have found is that America is
1:11:07 nothing but a platform to transfer money to companies and shareholders who trade and traffic
1:11:13 in addiction, addiction to food, addiction to opiates, addiction to sex, addiction to Dopa.
1:11:20 And we use the kids as basically body bags or Dopa bags. I have gotten so far off track,
1:11:26 Jess. No. Bring me back. Reel me back, Jess. I would just reel you back by saying, as we
1:11:32 are on the precipice of probably an RFK junior health and human services secretary, that the case
1:11:37 that you just made is why they should have carved out a role for him at like USDA and had somebody
1:11:42 who believes in vaccines. He’s great on this. Yeah. He’s great on this. Yeah. I agree. There,
1:11:46 did I bring you back? I don’t know. Read us out. We got to go. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let’s
1:11:50 leave it there. That’s it for the episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates, our producers,
1:11:56 our David Toledo and Cheninye Onike, our technical directors, true boroughs. You can find Raging
1:12:02 Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That’s right. Raging Moderates on its own feed. If you
1:12:08 want us to keep making this pasta of a podcast, please hit subscribe right now on YouTube or on
1:12:14 our distinct Raging Moderates feed. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts without fear or
1:12:21 favor. That’s right. That’s right. The hit of the show, the one on Fox. That’s what’s coming next,
1:12:27 and who is the one? That’s right. It’s just Harloff. We are immune. We are super power fucking
1:12:31 fearless from tweets from the wealthiest man in the world. I’m not going to read any of those
1:12:37 11,000 comments. You’ve definitely read them all. I have not. I’m not on Twitter. I’m not on X. I’m
1:12:42 still calling it Twitter. Anyways, and by the way, who sold his Tesla two years ago and before
1:12:48 he sold it, took a big fat fucking dump in the passenger seat. That’s right. That’s your man.
1:12:57 Hit subscribe now. Just have a great rest of the week. You too.
1:13:07 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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0:01:55 – Today’s number, $8 million.
0:01:57 So that’s how much a 30 second ad spot
0:01:58 on the Super Bowl costs this year,
0:02:00 an all time record.
0:02:03 Ed, nothing says American exceptionalism,
0:02:05 like four hours of beer,
0:02:07 boner pill ads, and men giving each other CTE
0:02:08 for our entertainment.
0:02:11 It’s essentially Rome, but instead of Lyons,
0:02:13 we have Taylor Swift, Ed.
0:02:14 We have Taylor Swift.
0:02:17 (upbeat music)
0:02:21 (singing in foreign language)
0:02:27 – Welcome to Prop G Markets.
0:02:31 That was sort of a thoughtful Super Bowl themed intro.
0:02:33 Banter, Super Bowl, do you care?
0:02:35 – No, I don’t care at all, actually.
0:02:37 And this is the first year I’ve decided
0:02:38 I’m just not watching.
0:02:40 I feel like I’m always watching
0:02:41 because I feel like I have to,
0:02:43 but I’ve just decided, you know what?
0:02:44 I’m not interested in the NFL,
0:02:45 I’m not gonna watch this year.
0:02:46 Are you watching?
0:02:48 I don’t even know who’s in the,
0:02:49 Claire, do you know who’s in the Super Bowl?
0:02:51 By the way, Claire, I have a,
0:02:53 oh my God, I just realized you’re in my house, Claire.
0:02:56 I literally thought she has the same climbing wall I have.
0:02:58 – Yeah, this is your house.
0:02:59 – Claire, how are you?
0:03:01 – I’m really good, it’s good to see you.
0:03:04 – Welcome, welcome, don’t touch anything.
0:03:06 – Thanks so much for having me.
0:03:07 – Anyways.
0:03:09 – Yeah, you have a climbing wall in your house.
0:03:10 – You’re in the kids’ room.
0:03:12 I do have a climbing wall, and my kids have climbed,
0:03:14 my kids climbed for a good 30 minutes,
0:03:15 and now it’s just a decorative piece.
0:03:16 (laughing)
0:03:19 Cost me about 40 zip recruiter ads.
0:03:20 – By the way, I think it’s Chiefs and Eagles.
0:03:21 – That’s right, Chiefs and Eagles.
0:03:23 – Chiefs and Eagles.
0:03:25 – I thought you used to be a big NFL fan, Scott, no?
0:03:28 – I’ve never actually been a sports fan until my kids.
0:03:31 I decided to give up golf and watching all sports
0:03:32 and poured into fitness,
0:03:35 in trying to spend more time with clients,
0:03:37 such that we could develop a father-son
0:03:38 parasocial relationship,
0:03:40 and they’d pay me millions of dollars to consult,
0:03:45 and then I could at some point buy one quart of a golf stream.
0:03:46 – You know what I’m doing tonight?
0:03:47 I think I’m gonna do ketamine tonight.
0:03:48 – Really?
0:03:50 – I went out with some friends last night,
0:03:51 and they were having such a good time,
0:03:52 and I’m like, “What are you drinking?”
0:03:54 They’re like, “Oh no, we don’t drink raw ketamine.”
0:03:55 I’m like, “Really?”
0:03:58 And I’m having trouble, Ed.
0:04:00 I’m having trouble disassociating.
0:04:02 I think we’re in the middle of a second insurrection,
0:04:03 and no one’s talking about it,
0:04:05 and it’s freaked me out and got me really upset.
0:04:07 So I think I need to disassociate,
0:04:10 and I’m hearing good things about ketamine.
0:04:12 Do your friends do ketamine, Ed?
0:04:14 – Yeah, good amount of my friends do ketamine.
0:04:15 I can’t tell if you’re serious,
0:04:17 so you know it’s illegal to just do it.
0:04:19 – There’s a few things I do that are illegal,
0:04:21 and I continue to engage in them, Ed.
0:04:24 – Okay, just making sure you’re clear.
0:04:25 I know you did it the legal way.
0:04:28 – Hot’s legal now, so yeah, edibles are legal,
0:04:29 so that’s not a problem.
0:04:30 – Right, yeah, exactly.
0:04:32 – Actually, I don’t do that much that’s illegal.
0:04:35 – And the way people do it is they snort it.
0:04:36 You’re really gonna go up and–
0:04:38 – Oh, really?
0:04:39 I was hoping to stick something up with my hand.
0:04:41 I was hoping to find an attractive one
0:04:42 with some gloves handy.
0:04:45 (laughing)
0:04:48 I have to pay for that, I have to pay.
0:04:52 Now, now cough, Nurse Ratchet, anyways.
0:04:55 – Well, I’m excited to see you in a couple of hours.
0:04:58 I’m gonna come over and hang out at your house.
0:04:59 – Oh, that’s right, I have a team meeting,
0:05:01 you’re all presenting your business plan.
0:05:02 – You excited to see me?
0:05:03 (crickets chirping)
0:05:05 – Get to the headlines, Ed.
0:05:08 – Let’s start with our weekly review of market vitals.
0:05:10 (upbeat music)
0:05:13 (upbeat music)
0:05:17 The S&P 500 inched up throughout the week.
0:05:19 The dollar declined, Bitcoin was volatile,
0:05:22 and the yield on tenure treasuries dropped.
0:05:23 Shifting to the headlines.
0:05:25 Disney earnings beat expectations
0:05:26 on the top and bottom lines.
0:05:30 However, Disney Plus lost 700,000 subscribers
0:05:34 with another modest drop expected in the current quarter.
0:05:37 The stock fell 4% following that earnings report.
0:05:40 Novo Nordisk saw strong fourth quarter demand
0:05:42 for its weight loss drugs with Wigowi sales
0:05:44 more than doubling, and Osempic sales
0:05:45 rising 12% year over year.
0:05:48 Profits also exceeded analyst expectations
0:05:51 up 29% from a year earlier.
0:05:53 The stock rose on that news.
0:05:55 And finally, Uber’s fourth quarter revenue
0:05:59 beat expectations, rising 20% year over year.
0:06:02 However, operating income was lower than expected,
0:06:05 and the company issued weak booking guidance
0:06:09 for the current quarter, and Uber’s stock fell 7%.
0:06:11 Scott, your reactions,
0:06:14 starting with Disney’s earnings a beat,
0:06:16 but the stock did fall.
0:06:18 – It’s clear who the number one is in streaming,
0:06:20 but they’re all fighting to be number two.
0:06:23 They’re like, okay, the number two will survive,
0:06:25 and it’s not entirely clear who’s number two.
0:06:29 And the race for number two is between, in my opinion,
0:06:32 the artisanal sort of HBO that’s created
0:06:35 an incredible culture that produces kind of the water cooler
0:06:37 zeitgeist moment of content.
0:06:40 And then Disney, which has just such singular
0:06:42 clear positioning around family,
0:06:44 and then bundling Hulu and ESPN.
0:06:46 I think it’s ESPN plus.
0:06:47 It’s a pretty good offering.
0:06:51 Now, they were able to raise prices of 4%,
0:06:52 which isn’t a huge price increase,
0:06:53 but it is a price increase.
0:06:56 And basically they lost 700,000,
0:06:58 but they would argue that’s flat.
0:07:00 That does kind of communicate
0:07:01 that they have some pricing power.
0:07:03 I would argue that’s a good thing.
0:07:06 Netflix’s churn is 2% while Disney’s is five.
0:07:09 That may not sound like a lot, but it’s huge.
0:07:11 It means that every three years,
0:07:14 Disney has to reinvent their entire customer base
0:07:16 that Netflix does not.
0:07:22 In addition, you have this incredible transfer
0:07:23 or means of production.
0:07:24 What do I mean?
0:07:28 What Japan did Detroit, Netflix is doing to Hollywood.
0:07:31 And that is Netflix announced that the majority
0:07:34 of their content, more than 50% of their $15 to $18 billion
0:07:38 investment on content is being spent and/or,
0:07:40 if you will, produced overseas.
0:07:43 They’re not doing that because they like Spanish people
0:07:46 or they want more multiculturalism in their content.
0:07:48 They’re doing it because they figured out
0:07:52 they can get a gaffer, a writer, an actor,
0:07:57 a producer, sound engineer, studio construction folks
0:08:03 for 40 to 60% of the cost of what it is in the US.
0:08:07 Whereas Disney, the percentage of content spend overseas
0:08:08 is 4%.
0:08:12 But what Netflix has said is that if I have every week,
0:08:16 not a 10, but I have just a shit ton of sevens and eights,
0:08:17 people don’t cancel.
0:08:20 – Yeah, I think these earnings, I mean,
0:08:22 Wall Street did not react well to these earnings.
0:08:25 And I think rightly so because I think this was just
0:08:26 unimpressive on so many levels.
0:08:30 I mean, Disney plus subscribers declining,
0:08:34 not by much, it was around 1%, but still a decline.
0:08:38 And Disney plus’ response or Disney’s response was,
0:08:41 well, we rose prices, so this is expected.
0:08:43 And by the way, that’s kind of what you said too,
0:08:45 but you look at Netflix,
0:08:48 Netflix also raised prices last year
0:08:51 and they still added 19 million subscribers.
0:08:55 So I don’t fully buy the, we’re raising prices
0:08:58 and therefore subscriptions are gonna fall off.
0:09:01 We’ve seen it with Spotify too, Spotify raised prices
0:09:04 and their subscriptions are still continuing to climb.
0:09:07 You also mentioned the churn rates.
0:09:12 I just see this as such a big issue in all of streaming
0:09:15 that it makes me believe that streaming
0:09:19 is in a lot of ways uninvestable over the long term.
0:09:22 Apple TV’s churn rate is 8%.
0:09:26 Peacock’s churn rate is 9%.
0:09:28 Disney’s churn rate is on the low end,
0:09:31 but still it’s really high, it’s 5%.
0:09:34 So if you just wanna stay flat in any given quarter,
0:09:36 you basically have to grow your subscribers
0:09:41 by 5% every single quarter, which is just insane.
0:09:42 I mean, I just don’t see
0:09:44 how that is a sustainable business model.
0:09:46 And then the second thing that makes me concerned
0:09:50 about Disney was their box office results,
0:09:52 which were exceptional,
0:09:57 but it was all because of this one movie, Moana 2.
0:10:01 And that was kind of what saved these earnings.
0:10:02 Without that movie, this earnings report
0:10:04 would have been pretty terrible,
0:10:05 which again begs this question,
0:10:08 like how sustainable is this business?
0:10:12 Where you’re basically riding on your growth vehicle,
0:10:15 which is Disney Plus, is pretty stagnant.
0:10:19 And then you’re also relying on these sequels
0:10:20 every single year.
0:10:25 I mean Moana 2, Inside Out 2, Deadpool and Wolverine.
0:10:27 At what point are people just gonna get bored
0:10:28 of these sequels?
0:10:32 Like who’s gonna watch Moana 3 and Moana 4 and Moana 5?
0:10:34 Like how much longer can this go on for?
0:10:35 – You do start to see fatigue.
0:10:39 I would even argue like Deadpool and Wolverine,
0:10:41 I love both those actors.
0:10:43 I think they’re fantastic.
0:10:45 And I’m like, I’m not sure I’m gonna see the next one.
0:10:47 I’m like, okay, I think I’m sort of done with those franchise.
0:10:50 Anyways, what’s really interesting here though
0:10:53 is that the parks did well.
0:10:55 And that is, and if you think about it,
0:10:57 AI can’t replace the parks,
0:10:58 or at least I don’t think it can.
0:11:01 There’s still something especially wonderful
0:11:04 or especially horrible if you’re the parent
0:11:06 about Walt Disney World, right?
0:11:09 That still is a, that isn’t a norm.
0:11:11 Netflix is gonna have a tough time
0:11:13 into Universal’s credit.
0:11:15 They spent the money and the decades
0:11:17 to build those franchise businesses.
0:11:19 But Adams are, this is your notion
0:11:21 that Adams are more important than bits.
0:11:23 But the Disney business right now,
0:11:25 the strongest part of the business as far as I can tell,
0:11:27 is the parks, the cruises and the resorts.
0:11:31 Because it’s hard for Netflix to spin up a cruise ship
0:11:33 business, these things take a long time
0:11:35 and they’re good at the in-person stuff.
0:11:38 – Absolutely, but if you wanna keep that business going,
0:11:40 you’ve gotta also be creating original
0:11:43 and persuasive and compelling intellectual property,
0:11:45 which they’re not doing.
0:11:47 No one’s gonna ride the Moana three ride.
0:11:50 – Yeah, but they can license content, they can.
0:11:51 I mean, I don’t, was Harry,
0:11:55 I mean, for example, Harry Potter, Lego.
0:11:57 I don’t, I think Lego licensed its IP
0:11:59 to someone who knows how to run those parks.
0:12:00 I don’t know if it’s a division of Lego,
0:12:01 maybe it is Legoland.
0:12:02 By the way, you’ll see when you have sons.
0:12:05 Legoland, in my opinion, is the least awful
0:12:06 of all of them.
0:12:07 – Legoland’s amazing, that was my favorite growing up.
0:12:08 – Oh really?
0:12:09 Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot how young you are.
0:12:12 But I used to, I took my sons to the Lego hotel
0:12:13 and it was pretty cool.
0:12:14 – It’s epic.
0:12:16 – I love the image of Little Ed at Legoland.
0:12:20 Right, building scary, like you’re like,
0:12:22 I can build something bigger than that.
0:12:23 Anyways.
0:12:24 – By the way, just before we move on here,
0:12:26 when is your Netflix show coming out?
0:12:27 – Oh, not for a while.
0:12:28 – If you had to guess.
0:12:33 – I would guess fall of 26.
0:12:35 Yeah, it’s gonna take a while.
0:12:38 – We need to get you on camera here.
0:12:39 Is that part of the plan?
0:12:40 I hope so.
0:12:42 – No, I am, you will see soon.
0:12:46 I do have a cameo in what is the hottest show on HBO
0:12:48 in several seasons.
0:12:50 I do have a voice cameo.
0:12:52 So I’m excited about that.
0:12:54 We’ll have a party, you’ll all come over,
0:12:56 we’ll all celebrate and we’ll watch it together.
0:12:58 None of that is true.
0:12:59 (laughing)
0:13:01 None of that is true.
0:13:02 But it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?
0:13:05 If I was kind of a more loving and engaged boss,
0:13:07 get out of my climbing room, Claire.
0:13:09 Don’t touch anything.
0:13:11 Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
0:13:13 – Let’s talk about Novo Nordisk.
0:13:17 This was pretty important earnings report for this company
0:13:20 ’cause they simply put have not had a good year.
0:13:24 The stock’s down 30% in the past 12 months.
0:13:26 They tried making this new GLP-1,
0:13:31 this drug called Kagrosema and the trials failed.
0:13:34 They’ve been outclassed by Eli Lilly
0:13:36 who have been sharing from their studies
0:13:38 that their drugs are just more effective.
0:13:42 So Novo Nordisk is not in a great place.
0:13:44 They needed a really strong showing,
0:13:47 not from the insulin business or the glucagon business
0:13:49 or any of their other medicines,
0:13:50 but from the GLP-1 business
0:13:53 because that, as we know, is the only thing
0:13:56 Wall Street cares about with this company.
0:13:59 And rightly so, that’s where all the growth is coming from.
0:14:01 The results were pretty good.
0:14:04 Wagovi sales more than doubled.
0:14:06 If you look at that in combination with OZMPIC,
0:14:10 the obesity drug business is up more than 50%.
0:14:13 So the GLP-1 business is doing quite well.
0:14:16 I think the question here is a larger question,
0:14:20 which is, will this whole GLP-1 thing live up
0:14:25 to the hype that we had about 16 months ago?
0:14:28 And that’s sort of up for debate.
0:14:31 I mean, I’ve seen market size predictions saying
0:14:33 this is a $100 billion market.
0:14:35 Some say it’s a $500 billion market.
0:14:37 No one really knows.
0:14:38 So I kind of look at this company,
0:14:39 I look at these earnings
0:14:41 and I don’t really have an answer.
0:14:42 The only thing I can conclude with Nova Nordisk
0:14:45 is, you know, wait and see.
0:14:48 – I would argue that the space is just getting started.
0:14:52 The GLP-1 drugs, the category, everything I’ve read,
0:14:56 I just think this technology is incredible.
0:14:57 The next sort of question though
0:15:00 is how many competitors are in the space?
0:15:03 And also asked about the motor and who we had on last week,
0:15:04 made an interesting point
0:15:06 and that is for him, Nova Nordisk,
0:15:11 history was they kind of slipped and fell on Bogovino’s Epic.
0:15:12 – Let’s face it, they got valuable
0:15:14 because they were in the right.
0:15:15 They got lucky.
0:15:16 I mean, it’s not like amazing R&D
0:15:18 where they said we’re gonna come up with a weight loss drug.
0:15:21 The diabetes drug happened to have a side benefit.
0:15:25 And I think that until they come up with another product
0:15:30 that is a market changer, blockbuster drug,
0:15:32 I think the hypothesis has to be
0:15:34 that they got lucky with these two drugs
0:15:35 and they’re going to go back
0:15:38 to being a sleepy Danish diabetes drug company.
0:15:39 – I mean, that has showed an ability
0:15:41 to create another or acquire another product
0:15:44 in Instagram, right?
0:15:47 Google launched YouTube, you know, these companies,
0:15:50 Microsoft has an incredible cloud bed.
0:15:52 These companies have shown an ability
0:15:56 to innovate more than, you know, repeatedly.
0:15:58 And his view was Nova Nordisk
0:16:00 hasn’t really demonstrated that.
0:16:03 – To his point, the only company
0:16:06 that actually innovated this drug
0:16:09 that didn’t stumble its way into it was Eli Lilly,
0:16:10 who created their own versions.
0:16:12 Of course, after Nova Nordisk
0:16:14 figured this whole thing out accidentally.
0:16:17 So I think if you’re thinking about, okay,
0:16:19 how do I get exposure to GLP-1s?
0:16:22 Yes, Nova Nordisk is the market leader.
0:16:26 It has the greatest market share in the US and in the world.
0:16:28 But I think in terms of culture and innovation,
0:16:30 all that stuff that Aswa talks about,
0:16:33 I do think Eli Lilly is probably a better bet
0:16:35 from that perspective.
0:16:37 Let’s move on to Uber.
0:16:40 Uber reported earnings revenue grew 20%.
0:16:42 They had this kind of soft guidance,
0:16:44 $42 billion in gross bookings
0:16:47 expected in the course coming up.
0:16:49 And the stock did not react very well.
0:16:52 I thought the most interesting part with these earnings
0:16:56 was that Uber is officially launching a wait list
0:16:59 for its Waymo partnership.
0:17:03 So this is gonna happen in Austin first
0:17:05 and later in Atlanta.
0:17:08 Uber and Waymo are teaming up
0:17:12 and self-driving taxis are coming in 2025.
0:17:15 And I think the most important thing here is
0:17:17 the autonomous taxi fleet.
0:17:19 It’s not coming from Tesla.
0:17:21 It’s coming from Uber.
0:17:23 And I think that’s notable
0:17:25 because it just highlights this market bias
0:17:28 that we keep on seeing towards Tesla
0:17:30 where Tesla will go out and talk very vaguely
0:17:33 about full self-driving and autonomous taxis
0:17:35 and the stock rips.
0:17:39 Meanwhile, Uber does it and the stock declines.
0:17:41 People just don’t take it seriously for some reason.
0:17:43 And I can’t really wrap my head around it.
0:17:44 I mean, some people say,
0:17:46 you know, Waymo’s are more expensive to build,
0:17:48 they’re more expensive to operate,
0:17:51 which is probably a fair point.
0:17:54 But I think the larger point still stands,
0:17:56 Waymo is the only one that has figured it out.
0:17:58 And now they’re going to market
0:18:00 with the biggest ride sharing company in the world, Uber.
0:18:03 Meanwhile, Tesla has shipped nothing.
0:18:05 So I think this is a pretty big deal.
0:18:07 I think full scale commercialization
0:18:09 is still a long way away.
0:18:11 But to me, this signals Uber’s actually kind of
0:18:13 leading the pack in autonomous.
0:18:16 And I get the sense it’s probably very undervalued
0:18:17 at this point.
0:18:19 – Waymo’s been here for a while.
0:18:22 And the notion that we’re all waiting for Tesla autonomous,
0:18:25 I took a Waymo taxi six months ago in LA.
0:18:30 By the way, extraordinary, my first ride in this thing.
0:18:32 And we get to this intersection
0:18:34 where there’s been an accident.
0:18:35 I’m like, oh, great.
0:18:38 I’m going to be the first like autonomous guy taken out.
0:18:40 I’m like, this is so fitting for what I do.
0:18:43 PropG takes his first autonomous Uber
0:18:47 and gets, you know, T-boned by a bus.
0:18:52 Because the fucking Waymo couldn’t process a billion points.
0:18:57 There’s a cop with cones waving with illuminated batons
0:19:00 saying, okay, you need to go around the crash car
0:19:03 into the wrong side of the road
0:19:05 and to get around this accident.
0:19:07 And I thought, there’s no way
0:19:10 this thing’s going to be able to process this.
0:19:11 And it was very hesitant.
0:19:14 It drove like what I would imagine
0:19:19 a scared 16 year old girl would approach the situation.
0:19:20 That sexist.
0:19:23 – Or a boy or a scared 16 year old boy.
0:19:25 – No, my boys decided you can make,
0:19:29 you can make a left on a red light if you just stop first.
0:19:30 That’s what he’s decided.
0:19:32 It’s like, wait, you just need to stop.
0:19:34 And then you can go, no, no, no, no, anyway.
0:19:38 So this thing went out very hesitant and it figured it out.
0:19:41 So the notion that we’re waiting, it’s just so ridiculous.
0:19:43 Tesla, in my view, has already lost.
0:19:45 Waymo’s doing a great job.
0:19:50 Uber has massive, I mean, the number of Teslas is dwarfed.
0:19:54 By the number of Uber rides out there every day.
0:19:57 And you gotta give, I think Dara Kastur Shahi
0:20:01 has done a fantastic job because in their DNA,
0:20:02 if you think about a lot of the companies
0:20:04 that have outperformed the market,
0:20:05 they’re asset-like, right?
0:20:06 They don’t have big catbacks.
0:20:08 Airbnb, Uber said, no, we don’t wanna be
0:20:10 in the business of owning real estate.
0:20:12 We don’t wanna be in the business of owning cars.
0:20:15 We’re gonna leverage other people’s catbacks investment.
0:20:18 So Dara said, rather than go into AI
0:20:19 and announce big partnerships
0:20:22 and that we’re putting 10 billion into AI and autonomous,
0:20:25 he just said, no, I’ll draft off of other people’s catbacks,
0:20:27 in this case, Google and Waymo,
0:20:30 which has spent kind of 15 years and tens of billions
0:20:33 of dollars and I’ll give them, I’ll co-brand,
0:20:35 I’ll have an offering.
0:20:37 This is kind of how you do it.
0:20:40 – And by the way, Uber had their own autonomous vehicle unit
0:20:42 which they scrapped in favor of this.
0:20:43 And I think the market said,
0:20:45 oh, they don’t know what they’re doing.
0:20:48 Actually, it’s a small move for exactly the reason you said.
0:20:51 No one’s complaining that Apple didn’t go deep
0:20:52 into AI spending.
0:20:57 They said, okay, similar to how Uber evaluated autonomous
0:21:00 and said, there are other people spending more money
0:21:01 than we need to, we’d be playing catch up.
0:21:03 Why don’t we just become a remora fish
0:21:06 off of that giant spending?
0:21:09 And despite the deep seek meltdown,
0:21:11 Apple has not registered a loss in their stock
0:21:14 because they never decided to get into this arms race.
0:21:16 So I really, I’m shocked.
0:21:18 I think Uber arguably,
0:21:19 I don’t wanna say it’s been the biggest turnaround,
0:21:23 but I think that you needed someone sort of crazy
0:21:25 in a reverent and provocative and build fast
0:21:27 and break things in Travis Kalanick.
0:21:28 I don’t think he gets enough credit
0:21:31 for what he envisioned and what he built.
0:21:32 I think it’s extraordinary.
0:21:36 But Dara came in and has just made a series of very,
0:21:39 what I’d call smart, thoughtful moves.
0:21:44 Oh, it’s about to sneeze.
0:21:49 Sorry, that’s my pre-ketamine face.
0:21:51 By the way, if you run into me tonight and I like me,
0:21:52 it means I’ve tried the ketamine.
0:21:53 I’m excited.
0:21:54 I’m gonna truck you down.
0:21:56 I’m gonna make sure I see Scott on ketamine.
0:21:58 Instead of my screensaver,
0:22:00 I have a picture of Preep Barara in his phone number
0:22:04 because he’s my one call if I get into trouble.
0:22:06 So I used to be my boys on my screensaver.
0:22:07 Now it’s gonna be Preep
0:22:09 ’cause if I get really fucked up, I’m calling him.
0:22:11 He just seems like very responsible
0:22:15 and he can get me out of any bad situation.
0:22:16 – We’ll be right back after the break
0:22:18 for a look at Spotify’s earnings.
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0:26:06 We’re back with ProfG Markets.
0:26:09 Spotify posted its first full year of profitability ever
0:26:12 with gross profits rising 40% year over year.
0:26:15 The streaming platform also added a fourth quarter record
0:26:18 of 35 million monthly active users.
0:26:20 That’s a 5% increase from the previous quarter.
0:26:23 Spotify Wrapped was one of the top drivers
0:26:26 of user engagement, fueling double digit growth,
0:26:31 shares surged 13% after that earnings report.
0:26:33 I’m just gonna point out,
0:26:37 I made one prediction on our 2025 predictions episode.
0:26:40 And that was that Spotify would be the media platform
0:26:41 of the year in addition to YouTube,
0:26:44 which I’m also really bullish on.
0:26:47 But I am just consistently impressed
0:26:50 with this company, the innovation,
0:26:52 their integration of video,
0:26:54 the integration of comments and polls,
0:26:57 their transition to profitability now.
0:26:59 I think if there’s one platform
0:27:02 that can rival YouTube in this new digital age,
0:27:04 I think it’s Spotify.
0:27:06 And we’re starting to see it in the numbers here.
0:27:08 Scott, your reactions to Spotify’s earnings.
0:27:10 – I love Spotify.
0:27:12 I think I picked it as one of my stock picks five years ago.
0:27:15 I went flat for three years, so I got it wrong.
0:27:17 But there are very few companies
0:27:19 that are able to take an entire medium
0:27:22 and distill it down to an app, a searchable app.
0:27:24 I can find anything on Spotify.
0:27:25 And people say, well,
0:27:27 Apple and Amazon have done the same thing,
0:27:29 but to your point, they’ve really innovated.
0:27:31 The rap thing, I thought,
0:27:34 I’m not entirely sure how you connect rap to more revenues.
0:27:36 I thought it was cool.
0:27:38 And I like Spotify saying, by the way,
0:27:41 you listened to Tom Petty and some DJs and that’s about it.
0:27:43 But how does that, I’m curious.
0:27:44 I don’t understand the mechanics
0:27:46 of how that translates to more revenue.
0:27:49 Tell me young person, what is happening on Spotify?
0:27:52 – Well, they didn’t connect it to revenues,
0:27:54 but they connected it to user engagement,
0:27:56 which that’s what it’s all about.
0:27:58 It just creates heat and excitement.
0:28:02 And I think possibly, I mean, full disclosure,
0:28:05 I don’t use Spotify because I’ve always used Apple Music
0:28:09 and I’ve never wanted to go through the cumbersome process
0:28:11 of transporting everything over.
0:28:13 But when Spotify rap came out,
0:28:15 it was the first time I was like,
0:28:19 maybe I should switch because this just sounds fun
0:28:22 to have this little presentation about me
0:28:23 and all of my music habits.
0:28:27 So I think that would be the answer.
0:28:28 – Let me just give you a little insight
0:28:33 into the role that streaming music plays in mating.
0:28:36 If you’re ever at home with your girlfriend
0:28:38 and you’re thinking, I don’t want to have kids
0:28:39 and I don’t want to have sex.
0:28:41 – I know it’s coming, I know it’s wrong.
0:28:46 – Just play ad supported Pandora.
0:28:51 – Nothing says do not mate with me.
0:28:56 This is, you are taking the evolutionary pull down
0:29:00 a couple notches if you have sex with someone
0:29:02 who has ad supported Pandora.
0:29:06 I play, I love, I still have ad supported streaming radio
0:29:07 and I think it’s hilarious.
0:29:08 I play it and I’m like, oh my God,
0:29:11 the commercials are so bad, listen to this commercial.
0:29:14 Anyways, but back to, I’m shocked.
0:29:16 I thought you would have had Spotify.
0:29:17 I absolutely love Spotify.
0:29:19 And also they have the best party.
0:29:21 Just so you know, they have the best party at Cannad.
0:29:22 – Oh really?
0:29:23 – I’ll take you, you can be my date.
0:29:24 – I would love that invite.
0:29:26 Well, let’s just go over some of the numbers here
0:29:28 because I think they’re pretty incredible.
0:29:33 So Spotify’s monthly active users hit 675 million,
0:29:34 beat estimates by 10 million,
0:29:39 which means that one in 12 people on earth is on Spotify.
0:29:44 Premium subscribers grew 11% year over year.
0:29:46 That was despite the price hikes,
0:29:50 average revenue per user up 5%.
0:29:52 First profitable year in the company’s history,
0:29:53 which I think is a very big deal
0:29:58 and stock is now at an all-time high, $620 per share.
0:29:59 We should probably think about
0:30:01 what could go wrong for Spotify.
0:30:06 I think one potential issue is this growing public resentment
0:30:11 towards Spotify and specifically towards Spotify
0:30:13 and how they pay their artists.
0:30:17 So a lot of people say that Spotify squeezes their artists.
0:30:18 They don’t pay them enough.
0:30:22 They reward the top 1% and the other 99% get screwed.
0:30:24 And that’s timely because Chapel Roan,
0:30:28 who just won the best new artist award at the Grammys,
0:30:30 she actually called this out.
0:30:32 She didn’t call out Spotify specifically,
0:30:34 but she called out the whole music industry
0:30:36 of which of course Spotify plays a huge role.
0:30:38 So let’s just listen to what she said.
0:30:41 – I told myself, if I ever won a Grammy
0:30:43 and I got to stand up here
0:30:46 in front of the most powerful people in music,
0:30:49 I would demand that labels and the industry
0:30:52 profiting millions of dollars off of artists
0:30:55 would offer a livable wage in healthcare,
0:30:57 especially to developing artists.
0:31:00 (crowd cheering)
0:31:04 – Well, isn’t that fucking precious?
0:31:06 (laughing)
0:31:08 Well, here, if you, you know,
0:31:10 and if you get in front of a group of kids
0:31:13 in high school, tell them not to be music artists
0:31:15 because it’s a shitty industry with too many people
0:31:17 fighting over too few revenues
0:31:20 and a series of platforms that are developed in a monopoly.
0:31:25 So okay, the notion that’s great virtue signaling,
0:31:28 you know, good for you and it’s gonna,
0:31:30 it’s not gonna mean dick.
0:31:33 It’s not, these guys are doing their job.
0:31:37 If you wanted, all right, are you sincere?
0:31:39 Pull your shit off of Spotify.
0:31:43 Are you really sincere about helping an event
0:31:46 and call your friends, you know,
0:31:48 do you hang out with Beyonce, do you know Taylor Swift
0:31:52 and pull your shit off of Spotify?
0:31:55 Because as long as you have oligopolies,
0:31:57 they’re gonna extract more and more
0:32:00 and they find that the best way to get retention
0:32:03 is to just consistently recommend Taylor Swift
0:32:04 over and over.
0:32:09 And the notion that she’s gonna bully the record labels
0:32:11 Spotify is now worth more than all the record labels.
0:32:13 So if she really wanted to have an impact,
0:32:15 let me do some virtue signaling.
0:32:19 When Spotify decided to not fact check Joe Rogan
0:32:21 who would have one legitimate doctor on one day
0:32:24 and then an illegitimate doctor the next day
0:32:26 and create all sorts of vaccine hesitancy
0:32:28 and false equivalences,
0:32:31 I called them and said, we’re pulling Prove G off of Spotify.
0:32:34 I pulled my shit down and it cost us
0:32:35 somewhere between a quarter of a half a million.
0:32:39 So yeah, put your money where your fucking mouth is,
0:32:41 pull off of Spotify.
0:32:42 But there’s notion that you’re gonna shame people
0:32:45 in the audience to paying artists
0:32:47 who aren’t making them any money, more money.
0:32:48 Yeah, good luck with that, have at it.
0:32:50 – No, I completely agree with you.
0:32:53 And I think this just, it reminds me
0:32:56 of all the dynamics that we’ve seen in Hollywood.
0:33:00 And the reality is altists have been getting screwed
0:33:02 since the dawn of time.
0:33:06 And historically it’s been the record labels
0:33:09 that have screwed their artists.
0:33:11 And I think back to the 1950s,
0:33:12 this is probably the most famous examples
0:33:15 where you had all of these incredible black musicians
0:33:17 who are suddenly dominating the charts
0:33:19 and then none of them got rich
0:33:21 because they signed these shitty deals
0:33:24 that ultimately rewarded the owners of the record labels.
0:33:29 So this dynamic of artists getting screwed to an extent
0:33:34 is nothing new, but I don’t think,
0:33:37 I mean, a lot of people are blaming Spotify for this
0:33:39 saying that they just don’t pay them enough
0:33:40 and blaming the business model.
0:33:44 I really don’t think you can blame Spotify for this
0:33:48 because all you have to do is look at the financials.
0:33:49 You have to remember,
0:33:52 this is Spotify’s first ever year of profitability.
0:33:57 So for the 16 years before this, Spotify was losing money.
0:33:59 They were losing money to pay employees
0:34:01 and to pay for technology.
0:34:03 And yeah, to pay their artists.
0:34:07 And so I’m not trying to like make a sob story for Spotify,
0:34:10 but I think all I would say is this is a business
0:34:12 and the business has to make money.
0:34:16 And this year was the first time they ever did that.
0:34:18 The other side to this, you know,
0:34:21 one other way that they could have paid their artists more
0:34:24 or they could pay their artists more
0:34:28 would be to massively raise prices for the consumer.
0:34:30 But actually they haven’t done that.
0:34:32 And in the past 16 years,
0:34:37 the price has gone from 9.99 to 11.99.
0:34:40 So actually on an inflation adjusted basis,
0:34:42 Spotify actually got cheaper.
0:34:45 And then you compare that to things like Netflix.
0:34:47 Netflix has more than doubled its prices
0:34:48 in that same amount of time.
0:34:52 So, you know, I’m sure someone’s being greedy here.
0:34:55 I’m sure, you know, for the record label
0:34:59 has screwed some artists here or there.
0:35:03 But the fact that Spotify is getting wrapped into this
0:35:05 like as the big bad company
0:35:07 that’s just sort of ruining the music industry,
0:35:10 I just don’t think that is true.
0:35:12 And I think ultimately what this is
0:35:16 is that as you say, being a struggling artist
0:35:18 is a bad business.
0:35:20 It just doesn’t really work.
0:35:22 And in almost all industries,
0:35:27 it only starts to make you real money when you hit the 1%.
0:35:29 And finally, Chapel Roan has done that.
0:35:33 And I don’t think she’s gonna be giving her money away
0:35:34 to the other 99%.
0:35:36 I think she’s gonna be, you know,
0:35:39 claiming her check from whichever record label
0:35:40 she’s signed to.
0:35:45 So, I have a very boomery outlook on this.
0:35:46 Sounds like you do too.
0:35:48 And it sounds like we’re just in fervent agreement.
0:35:50 – We need a different term than boomery.
0:35:53 Look, the digitization of markets
0:35:56 results in a consolidation and a winner take most environment.
0:35:58 You digitize retail, you end up with one company
0:35:59 with 50% of all your commerce.
0:36:02 You digitize connections and socialization online.
0:36:04 You end up with one company meta that owns two thirds
0:36:06 of all social interactions online.
0:36:08 You digitize information.
0:36:11 One company ends up with 93% share of search.
0:36:14 You digitize mating and online dating.
0:36:19 And 80 to 90% of all swipe rights happens amongst
0:36:22 the 10% of most attractive males, right?
0:36:24 Men are less choosy, women are more choosy.
0:36:26 They all want the same guy.
0:36:28 And the same thing’s happening on these channels.
0:36:30 When you digitize a platform,
0:36:34 the Taylor Swift gets more listen,
0:36:37 more listen time than all of classical music now.
0:36:42 Taylor Swift is bigger than classical music or jazz,
0:36:44 the entire genre.
0:36:47 And it’s because the algorithms, they consolidate
0:36:50 and they say, okay, when everyone has access to everything,
0:36:54 the very best, and Taylor Swift is the very best,
0:36:57 according to hopped up 14 year olds on sugar,
0:36:59 they consolidate the market.
0:37:01 Now, I don’t know if there’s anything you can do.
0:37:03 The only things you can really do about this
0:37:04 on a systemic level is to make sure you have
0:37:07 a really robust FDC and DOJ
0:37:09 that makes sure there’s a lot of competition
0:37:12 such that you transfer money back from the monopolies
0:37:13 to the artists, to the means of production,
0:37:15 to the labor force.
0:37:16 The other thing you can do
0:37:18 is have minimum wage of 25 bucks an hour,
0:37:21 such that if these people have side hustles,
0:37:23 they’re at least making a good living.
0:37:26 But let me just, let me just clue young people in.
0:37:29 The world does not owe you your passion.
0:37:34 And you don’t have the right, the birthright to make music.
0:37:36 You have the birthright, in my opinion,
0:37:38 to make, to have healthcare.
0:37:41 I mean, let’s start there, healthcare, universal childcare.
0:37:44 You don’t have a birthright to be an independent music
0:37:46 producer or independent musician and make money.
0:37:48 These are, the vanity industries
0:37:50 will always have an overinvestment in human capital
0:37:52 and they’ll be a small number
0:37:54 and increasingly, unfortunately, a small number of people.
0:37:57 What I think you have to do is say, okay,
0:38:01 if you’re the backup drummer on a Kellogg’s ad,
0:38:03 they have to pay you at least 25 bucks an hour.
0:38:06 Anyways, I think this is a social issue
0:38:07 and we need to break up monopolies,
0:38:10 of which I’m not sure you could say Spotify’s a monopoly.
0:38:12 Everything’s going hunger games.
0:38:15 The winners leave it a remarkable life
0:38:17 and everyone else dies a slow death.
0:38:20 And if you want to change that,
0:38:21 you have to make systemic change
0:38:25 at education levels, antitrust levels,
0:38:28 but believing that somehow shaming the record labels
0:38:30 or Spotify and to paying people.
0:38:33 You know why they pay these people nothing?
0:38:34 Because they can.
0:38:36 And they’ll keep making music.
0:38:38 And by the way, the only way it gets better
0:38:40 is if it becomes such a shitty business
0:38:41 that just people don’t go into music
0:38:44 and over time they have to pay them more.
0:38:45 – Right?
0:38:46 – Anyway, I think the market,
0:38:48 I don’t want to say the market’s doing its job here,
0:38:50 but the solutions are societal.
0:38:51 They come out at DC.
0:38:54 They don’t come out of like virtue signaling
0:38:55 at the Grammys.
0:38:58 – We’ll be right back with a look at Google’s earnings.
0:38:59 If you’re enjoying the show so far,
0:39:03 hit follow and leave us a review on Prof.G Markets.
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0:41:40 We’re back with ProfG Markets.
0:41:43 Google’s fourth quarter earnings largely disappointed.
0:41:47 Revenue grew 12%, which was the slowest pace since 2023.
0:41:49 Growth in the cloud division
0:41:51 also slowed from the previous quarter.
0:41:54 Still, CEO Sunder Pichai highlighted
0:41:57 the company’s accelerated investments in AI data centers
0:41:59 with plans to increase capital expenditures
0:42:03 to $75 billion this year.
0:42:05 That’s up from $52.5 billion last year.
0:42:10 The stock fell 7% following that earnings report.
0:42:14 Just wanna quickly touch on why the stock fell so much.
0:42:17 By the way, that was Google’s fifth worst trading day
0:42:18 in 10 years.
0:42:21 It erased $200 billion in value.
0:42:24 So you would think based on that
0:42:28 that Google had a dreadful quarter.
0:42:31 Actually, on the whole, it was fine-ish.
0:42:36 Revenue up 12%, roughly in line with expectations.
0:42:40 Net income up 28%, it beat expectations.
0:42:43 The problem, as we keep on seeing with big tech,
0:42:47 was this one number, which was the cloud revenue,
0:42:50 or you might call it the AI revenue.
0:42:53 And that was $12 billion up 30%,
0:42:57 but most importantly, lower than what Wall Street predicted.
0:43:01 And I think in 2025, if you are a big tech company
0:43:04 and you’re not smashing expectations in AI specifically,
0:43:06 your stock is immediately gonna drop.
0:43:08 It’s just a non-starter.
0:43:10 This is, by the way, exactly what happened
0:43:11 to Microsoft the week before.
0:43:14 They had decent earnings, AI revenue missed,
0:43:18 $200 billion in market cap erased overnight.
0:43:21 Let’s get your reactions to Google’s earnings, I guess,
0:43:25 particularly this obsession with the cloud revenue
0:43:27 and missing on those estimates.
0:43:30 – Yeah, look, it’s impossible to ever count them out.
0:43:31 They have five separate businesses
0:43:33 that do more than $30 billion in annual.
0:43:34 This is a really robust business,
0:43:38 meaning that while they’re kind of core business of search,
0:43:41 they have five companies that could be
0:43:44 $100 billion plus market cap companies.
0:43:45 They’re very diversified,
0:43:47 and they coordinate, cooperate with each other,
0:43:49 which is probably not a good thing.
0:43:52 But between Google Search, the DisplayOut Network,
0:43:54 YouTube, and subscriptions,
0:43:57 that’s YouTube Premium, Google Play, and then cloud.
0:43:59 They just have some amazing businesses.
0:44:01 The analysts here made the analogy.
0:44:03 It’s like having the revenue power of five Starbucks
0:44:05 or five visas.
0:44:08 The thing that I think was the scariest thing in here
0:44:11 was one, analysts pointed to the fact that
0:44:13 their cloud business was not growing as fast,
0:44:14 which they saw as an indicator
0:44:17 they haven’t figured out a way to monetize AI
0:44:20 from the company that had most of the IP around AI.
0:44:21 I think the scarier number here
0:44:23 is that for the first time, their market share,
0:44:25 the scariest number for Google shareholders,
0:44:28 I should say, or for Alphabet shareholders,
0:44:30 is that for the first time, their market share of search
0:44:32 dropped below 90%.
0:44:37 And so what I’m hearing from some young people
0:44:39 is they have totally abandoned Google Search
0:44:43 and are now just using AI, that they just get more.
0:44:47 And I’ve found myself getting impatient with Google Search
0:44:49 and just going to chat to BTR Anthropic
0:44:51 and typing in a question.
0:44:54 And I find it just, it doesn’t give me 500 links
0:44:55 to make me sort through them.
0:44:57 It just says, it tries to give me,
0:45:00 it tries to answer the question, right?
0:45:02 Because with Google right now, it’s a query,
0:45:05 but it’s also an invitation to throw a bunch of shit at me
0:45:08 that’s not accurate that you think you can further monetize
0:45:10 and take me to another place.
0:45:11 Whereas chat GPT, although it hallucinates
0:45:13 and as does Anthropic,
0:45:16 it attempts to actually answer the question in one shot.
0:45:18 And so you could see the stock,
0:45:22 if Google Search share drops below 85%
0:45:23 in the next 12 months,
0:45:25 I think you get the stock really get hammered
0:45:27 because what that means is that their ultimate toll booth,
0:45:29 it’s losing its power.
0:45:30 And at the same time,
0:45:34 they announced an increase in CapEx from 58 billion to 75,
0:45:36 which the market didn’t like.
0:45:39 But I still think this stock and this company
0:45:44 have so many amazing, at the same time YouTube is growing.
0:45:48 We’ve said this before that Netflix isn’t a premier streamer.
0:45:51 It really is YouTube if you’re talking about video.
0:45:52 But I think fears around AI,
0:45:55 they haven’t figured out an AI strategy to monetize
0:45:59 and to search dipping below 90%,
0:46:02 I think analysts are gonna keep watching
0:46:05 what’s happening to a search share
0:46:06 because I could see an environment
0:46:08 where if there’s enough applications
0:46:11 and these AI guys continue to raise this kind of capital,
0:46:12 I think you could see in a year,
0:46:16 their search volume go from 90 to 70%.
0:46:19 – I think I disagree on these points.
0:46:21 And I think the market share,
0:46:23 the search market share is an important point
0:46:26 that has to be tracked and we’ll see what happens.
0:46:29 But I can just say from my experience,
0:46:30 I do use chat GPT,
0:46:35 but I would say it’s 95% Google and 5% chat GPT
0:46:39 and maybe 1% other tools.
0:46:44 So search is still an incredibly valuable product to me.
0:46:47 And I think it’s still an incredibly valuable product
0:46:48 to many others.
0:46:51 And I think that’s why you’re seeing their search revenue
0:46:55 is continuing to grow quite steadily
0:46:58 on the cloud revenue point.
0:47:00 I think it’s important to note,
0:47:03 the reason Google missed on cloud this quarter
0:47:06 was not because there wasn’t enough demand,
0:47:09 it was because they couldn’t keep up with supply.
0:47:12 They literally don’t have enough compute,
0:47:15 which you might say, okay, well, that’s another problem.
0:47:16 But then you realize,
0:47:19 well, actually they’re about to invest $75 billion
0:47:21 into data centers this year,
0:47:24 which solves exactly that problem.
0:47:27 So, you know, I see the stock dipping
0:47:30 because everyone’s getting all wigged out
0:47:32 about this cloud revenue thing.
0:47:34 But to me, I see it as kind of a good problem.
0:47:36 There’s too much demand
0:47:38 and now they’re investing in meeting that demand.
0:47:41 So I see this, I think they’re being over-punished
0:47:42 for those cloud numbers.
0:47:45 I also think they’re being over-punished for deep seek,
0:47:48 which we can get into.
0:47:51 But, you know, 25 times earnings,
0:47:53 lowest P multiple in all of tech.
0:47:56 Meanwhile, you’ve got Apple at 37 with what?
0:47:58 2% revenue growth.
0:48:02 You got Google over here growing at 12, 13, 14%.
0:48:06 I think that it’s perhaps being over-punished here.
0:48:07 – I like your take better than mine.
0:48:08 I would draw the comment.
0:48:10 I think your take is better than mine.
0:48:13 The thing you said there that stick out was 25.
0:48:15 Cheapest company in tech,
0:48:17 the diversification of the revenue streams.
0:48:20 I like how you couch it against valuation
0:48:23 and that it’s arguably the cheapest of the big tech players.
0:48:27 And the reason I love Alphabet is because, you know,
0:48:29 it’s impossible not to find a business
0:48:32 that’s not, you know, only meeting expectations
0:48:34 when you have five different businesses.
0:48:36 But the reality is they have five different businesses.
0:48:38 They’re hugely diversified.
0:48:42 And their ability to coordinate and cooperate
0:48:44 and share data to the users
0:48:48 and the advertisers detriment is extraordinary there.
0:48:49 They’re kind of the only other company
0:48:51 that can gather this much, who grew up this much data
0:48:54 and then use it to increase prices
0:48:56 or rents on people is meta.
0:48:57 And these guys have it.
0:49:00 They also have the second largest operating system
0:49:01 or actually the largest operating system,
0:49:05 but the second most profitable in mobile with Android.
0:49:08 So you just, this is one of those stocks, I think,
0:49:10 especially at this price, you just own it.
0:49:11 You know, you just–
0:49:13 – You better own it. – You just own it.
0:49:15 – By the way, just on YouTube,
0:49:19 10 and a half billion dollars in ad revenue, up 14%.
0:49:21 It is still the fastest growing unit
0:49:22 in the Google ad business.
0:49:25 It’s still bigger than Netflix.
0:49:28 And I pointed out it’s the most popular
0:49:30 TV streaming platform in the US.
0:49:35 It is now also the most popular podcasting platform too.
0:49:37 More popular than Spotify,
0:49:40 twice as popular as Apple podcasts.
0:49:43 So this thing is just growing so rapidly
0:49:45 and it’s already a behemoth.
0:49:48 It’s already way bigger than Netflix.
0:49:52 I’m so, I mean, we’ve been bullish on YouTube for a while.
0:49:55 I just, I remain extremely bullish on YouTube.
0:49:58 – YouTube is now the largest podcast distribution platform.
0:50:00 The more people are listening to podcasts now
0:50:03 in terms of listenership on YouTube,
0:50:05 then they are on Apple or Spotify.
0:50:07 – Yeah, and then just one final point here,
0:50:09 we should touch on is this CAPEX.
0:50:12 I think there were a lot of questions following deep seek
0:50:15 as to whether big tech would be pulling back
0:50:17 from all of this AI CAPEX spending.
0:50:19 The answer we’ve gotten from this round of earnings
0:50:21 is a resounding no.
0:50:22 It’s kind of crazy.
0:50:25 You’ve got Google spending $75 billion,
0:50:27 way up from last year.
0:50:29 You got Meta spending $65 billion,
0:50:33 Microsoft $85 billion, Amazon more than $90 billion.
0:50:36 This is more than $300 billion in CAPEX,
0:50:38 all coming down the pipeline for 2025.
0:50:40 It’s all going to go to AI,
0:50:42 which presumably means it’s all going to go
0:50:44 to Nvidia pretty much.
0:50:48 So I’m just looking at what’s happened with deep seek here.
0:50:52 I’m struck by the extent to which deep seek
0:50:54 did not affect the AI CAPEX story,
0:50:57 at least in this round of earnings.
0:50:59 Maybe that’s going to change next quarter
0:51:01 and they’re going to switch things up.
0:51:03 But so far at least the plan
0:51:06 is basically completely unchanged.
0:51:10 Let’s take a look at the week ahead.
0:51:12 We’ll see the consumer and producer price indices
0:51:13 for January.
0:51:17 We’ll also see earnings from McDonald’s, Shopify, Reddit,
0:51:18 and Airbnb.
0:51:21 Scott, do you have any predictions?
0:51:23 You’re a big shareholder in two of those companies.
0:51:25 – Yeah, they’re both going good, especially Reddit.
0:51:26 Jesus.
0:51:28 God, why didn’t I buy more?
0:51:29 That was so obvious.
0:51:30 – Come on, you did well.
0:51:31 – You have been out well.
0:51:32 Dude, I’m glass half empty.
0:51:34 Haven’t you figured that out?
0:51:36 Anyway, so my prediction is the following
0:51:38 and I didn’t have one, but you inspired one.
0:51:41 I think Joe Rogan is about to be displaced.
0:51:44 I think that the new number one podcasters
0:51:48 will either be Mel Robbins ’cause she’s so talented
0:51:50 at like connecting emotion with psychology.
0:51:51 I think she’s outstanding.
0:51:56 But my outside shot here is I think that the new Joe Rogan
0:51:58 is Steve Bartlett, diary of a CEO.
0:52:00 And it’s for the reason you stated.
0:52:03 And that is the first thing I did literally
0:52:06 when I landed in London, a friend of mine said,
0:52:09 “There’s this Brazilian party at Five Hurtford.”
0:52:11 And I went and it was like an amazing party
0:52:12 with hot people everywhere.
0:52:14 And I’m like, “I love London.”
0:52:16 It’s been downhill since then.
0:52:19 And then the next day, the first thing I did,
0:52:21 this is all true is I went on this podcast
0:52:24 of this young handsome guy who was supposed to be,
0:52:27 he was like the number 10 podcaster in the UK.
0:52:30 But I thought, “Oh, I wanna get to know people in the UK.”
0:52:31 And it was Diary of a CEO.
0:52:33 And I think I’ve been on his show four times now.
0:52:36 And the thing that just blew me away,
0:52:38 and this is two and a half years ago,
0:52:41 was he had probably six people in the room
0:52:46 and five of them were focused on camera work.
0:52:48 He had lighting, obviously amazing sound,
0:52:52 but swivel cameras and cameras on sleds,
0:52:54 getting different shots.
0:52:56 And he forces everyone to come into the studio
0:52:58 as does Rich Roll actually.
0:53:01 And the result is just these podcasts
0:53:03 that are just kind of visually arresting
0:53:04 and do really well.
0:53:09 And he also was testing, A/B testing like crazy buttons.
0:53:11 And I don’t know if you’ve seen his promos, but–
0:53:12 – They’re incredible.
0:53:13 – He’ll do something where I’ll say,
0:53:15 the secret to happiness is,
0:53:17 and then I’ll like goon, cut away and say,
0:53:21 tune in now, he just spends a ton of time
0:53:24 optimizing for YouTube before it was cool.
0:53:26 And the result is he’s now the number one podcaster
0:53:30 in Europe and I think he’s number nine in America.
0:53:32 I think he’s gonna be number one
0:53:36 because he understands the medium of YouTube.
0:53:39 He’s weaponizing and leveraging
0:53:42 what is now the biggest distribution platform
0:53:43 in podcasting, that’s YouTube.
0:53:45 So my prediction is the new Joe Rogan
0:53:47 or the person who’s gonna displace Joe Rogan
0:53:49 as the biggest podcaster in the world
0:53:52 is Steven Bartlett from Diary of CEO.
0:53:54 – But you’re missing someone.
0:53:54 – Ed Elson?
0:53:57 – Two of us, we’re investing in video.
0:54:00 We don’t have swivel cameras yet, but we’re working on it.
0:54:01 – Yeah, I think–
0:54:02 – We can– – I don’t wanna be that big.
0:54:05 I wanna have enough money just to have a second jet
0:54:07 in unlimited supply academy,
0:54:09 but I don’t see us as the number one podcast.
0:54:11 I think that, I think we wanna be,
0:54:12 well, we could be number one in business.
0:54:14 We’re talking about, by the way in a meeting today folks,
0:54:17 we’re talking about Ed going daily.
0:54:20 We’re talking about doing a daily property markets
0:54:23 to talk about the markets ’cause the news keeps coming.
0:54:24 But I think we could be number one in business.
0:54:26 We’re in the top 10 in business
0:54:27 and occasionally we’d pop into the top five,
0:54:30 but that guy, David Ramsey,
0:54:32 who keeps selling expensive mutual funds
0:54:34 and saying that you can pick a mutual fund.
0:54:37 – We could beat the Ramsey network, surely.
0:54:38 – Yeah.
0:54:39 – We gotta do that.
0:54:40 – I love shitposting our competition.
0:54:42 That’s so classy, isn’t it?
0:54:43 It’s so big of me.
0:54:45 But anyways, let’s go back to my prediction
0:54:47 where I can actually lift up young people.
0:54:51 Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett, he’s the new Joe Rogan.
0:54:53 – This episode was produced by Claire Miller
0:54:55 and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.
0:54:56 Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.
0:54:58 Mia Silverio is our research lead.
0:55:01 Isabella Kinsel is our research associate.
0:55:02 Drew Burris is our technical director.
0:55:05 And Catherine Dillon is our executive producer.
0:55:06 Thank you for listening to Prof.G Markets
0:55:08 from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:55:12 Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Alice Hahn
0:55:13 only on Prof.G Markets.
0:55:20 ♪ Lifetimes ♪
0:55:26 ♪ You help me ♪
0:55:32 ♪ In kind reunion ♪
0:55:39 ♪ As the world turns ♪
0:55:44 ♪ And the dark lights ♪
0:55:49 ♪ In love ♪
0:55:52 (gentle music)
0:55:58 – The key to good leadership is to motivate people
0:56:00 and give them a vested interest in the success
0:56:01 of the company I’m announcing today
0:56:03 that we’re doing really well.
0:56:07 And if the company and individuals such as yourself
0:56:09 continue to perform like this,
0:56:11 because I want to create motivation
0:56:13 that there’s a really good chance
0:56:15 if you guys continue to show the same type of talent
0:56:18 and commitment that I’ll be able to get a second plane.
0:56:20 (laughing)
0:56:23 That’s…
0:56:26 But I want you guys to just–
0:56:27 – I always know what it’s come to.
0:56:27 – I don’t want to promise anything.
0:56:28 – I don’t want to promise anything.
0:56:29 – It’s like sullen.
0:56:33 You start looking down at the floor and I just know it’s coming.
0:56:34 – It’s not sullen, it’s my age.
0:56:35 You’re getting a map.
0:56:38 If you continue to perform like this,
0:56:39 daddy might be able to get a Gulf Stream.
0:56:41 I want to motivate you.
0:56:43 I want to keep you in the game.
0:56:44 Super exciting.
0:56:46 I promise to send you photos.
0:56:47 – Okay.
0:56:49 – Seriously, Ed, something to look forward to.
0:56:51 (laughing)
0:56:53 Now get out there, little soldier.

0:00:03 This is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups sound experiment.
0:00:07 We’re looking to find the perfect way to hear Reese’s, so you’ll buy more of them.
0:00:08 Here we go.
0:00:11 Reese’s, Reese’s.
0:00:14 Reese’s, Reese’s.
0:00:17 Reese’s, get out of here, you little stinker!
0:00:22 Reese’s, Reese’s.
0:00:24 Reese’s.
0:00:26 Peanut Butter Cups.
0:00:31 That breathy one sounded very creepy, am I right?
0:00:33 What’s up y’all, this is Kenny Beachham.
0:00:36 On this week’s episode of Small Ball, we get into maybe the wildest, craziest, most
0:00:38 shocking week in NBA history.
0:00:41 The trade deadline came, and it did not disappoint.
0:00:46 Some trades I love, some I hate it, and some made absolutely no sense at all.
0:00:49 The league has been shaken up, and I’m here to break it all down with you.
0:00:51 Man, what a time to be an NBA fan.
0:00:55 You can watch Small Ball on YouTube, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:00 Episodes drop every Friday.
0:01:03 This isn’t your grandpa’s finance podcast.
0:01:07 It’s Vivian2, your HBFF, and host of the Net Worth & Chill podcast.
0:01:12 This is money talk that’s actually fun, actually relatable, and will actually make you money.
0:01:15 I’m breaking down investments, side hustles, and wealth strategies.
0:01:19 No boring spreadsheets, just real talk that’ll have you leveling up your financial game.
0:01:21 With amazing guests like Glenda Baker.
0:01:24 There’s never been any house staff sold in the last 32 years.
0:01:27 It’s not worth more today than it was the day that I sold it.
0:01:30 This is a money podcast that you’ll actually want to listen to.
0:01:32 Follow Net Worth & Chill wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:01:37 Your bank account will thank you later.
0:01:41 I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
0:01:48 Which AI company will build and sustain trillions of dollars in shareholder value?
0:01:51 The answer is no.
0:02:02 The New World of AI, as read by George Hahn.
0:02:10 A hat tip here to Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong, who gave some insight on
0:02:13 the ProfG Markets podcast, which led to this post.
0:02:20 Deepseek, which has wiped out more than a trillion dollars in market value so far.
0:02:21 What is your view on Deepseek?
0:02:25 In a way, a genie has been let out of the bottle that cannot be put back in.
0:02:32 If it is in fact true that AI models are much cheaper to build and even run than we thought
0:02:36 before, people who are on the right side of this trade is everyone.
0:02:41 Now we have a vision of the AI industry where it is much more competitive.
0:02:44 Much of the value might be captured by consumers rather than companies.
0:02:53 A new technology emerges that ushers in remarkable productivity or, better yet, dopamine on demand.
0:02:58 A group of talented people builds a thick layer of innovation on top of the tech, financed
0:03:05 by government, and a small number of CEOs leverage storytelling to access cheap capital
0:03:09 and overwhelm the competition with brute force.
0:03:16 These companies engage in regulatory capture, i.e., they become johns for our elected whores,
0:03:19 and create trillions in shareholder value.
0:03:27 GPS, e-commerce, payments, search, social, streaming, all produced trillion-dollar-plus
0:03:28 entities.
0:03:35 AI is likely as transformative a technology as the aforementioned, and it’s already
0:03:39 setting records for consumer and enterprise adoption.
0:03:47 So the question is, which organizations will capture and sustain trillions in shareholder
0:03:48 value?
0:03:52 The answer may be no.
0:03:57 Mark Andreessen says DeepSeek is AI’s Sputnik moment.
0:03:59 That’s the wrong analogy.
0:04:05 This isn’t a rival flexing technological superiority, but dispelling the myth that we
0:04:09 the U.S. are the only game in town.
0:04:15 The Soviet Union did that before Sputnik in 1949 when it detonated its first nuclear
0:04:16 weapon.
0:04:24 Bicycles, sanitation, airplanes, vaccines, and CRISPR are just a few technologies that
0:04:30 have changed the world, but their benefits were dispersed across society rather than
0:04:33 being hoarded by a few shareholders.
0:04:38 I increasingly believe AI will join this roster.
0:04:45 It presents dynamics similar to most stakeholder versus shareholder innovations, government-backed
0:04:53 or university-developed like the internet, GPS, vaccines, open-source or public domain
0:05:04 like Linux, Python, Wikipedia, USB, and two foundational to be monopolized like bicycles,
0:05:07 sanitation, airplanes.
0:05:13 In sum, the winners here will be stakeholders, not shareholders.
0:05:16 Scan your emotions after reading the last sentence.
0:05:24 Did you reflexively grab your shareholder pearls and feel this was maybe a bad thing?
0:05:26 It isn’t.
0:05:32 America becomes more like itself every day, and our obsession with and idolatry of the
0:05:37 dollar has put the public good in the back seat.
0:05:42 Billions of stakeholders benefiting from AI versus one business becoming worth more
0:05:49 than every stock market on earth except Japan and the U.S. and one man being worth more
0:06:00 than Boeing feels less sexy, less American, hint, Nvidia, and Jensen Huang.
0:06:08 In December, Chinese hedge fund HiFlyer released an open-source AI chatbot called DeepSeek that
0:06:12 looks to be almost as good as OpenAI’s chat GPT.
0:06:17 It was reportedly designed in a matter of months by modestly paid millennial engineers
0:06:24 and doesn’t run on the expensive Nvidia chips the U.S. prohibits from being sold to China.
0:06:29 DeepSeek reportedly cost $5 million to train.
0:06:34 It cost $100 million to train OpenAI’s LLM.
0:06:42 Nvidia fell 17% on January 27, losing over half the trillion dollars in market cap.
0:06:49 In one day, the company shed the value of the entire global auto industry, not including
0:06:50 Tesla.
0:06:57 We don’t know if January 27 was a speed bump in AI or the beginning of a tech market correction
0:07:01 many have been expecting for 15 years.
0:07:06 Some air definitely came out of the balloon, but just some.
0:07:10 Nvidia fell to its October 2024 price level.
0:07:11 No big deal.
0:07:16 The DeepSeek revelation was shocking, but not surprising.
0:07:21 A Chinese company knocks off an expensive U.S. product at lower cost?
0:07:23 See above.
0:07:24 China.
0:07:29 In retrospect, it’s easy to identify the action that rang the bell at the apex of a
0:07:30 market.
0:07:37 I believe the gong may have been the news that SoftBank is close to leading a $40 billion
0:07:44 investment in OpenAI at a valuation of $340 billion.
0:07:49 This is double the valuation the firm raised at four months ago and a similar valuation
0:07:52 to TikTok parent ByteDance.
0:07:57 IP theft and addiction are both great businesses, however.
0:08:06 Time pays more as OpenAI is being valued at 92X revenues versus ByteDance at 2.3X.
0:08:11 Jesus, after reading the last sentence, I wonder if Sam Altman is going to begin using
0:08:16 terms such as “community-based EBITDA”.
0:08:23 Masayoshi Sahn’s limited partners, i.e. his investors, are looking for venture-type returns
0:08:33 – 3X to 5X in 7 to 10 years, meaning MASA’s LPs, i.e. masachists, believe OpenAI will
0:08:38 be one of the 10 most valuable firms in the world… soon.
0:08:46 Yesterday, I skirted along the edge of the atmosphere at 4/5 the speed of sound, traveling
0:08:50 from London to New York in 7 hours.
0:08:54 The least expensive tickets were $400.
0:08:59 Jet transport technology has changed the world.
0:09:03 Sixty years ago, my mother crossed the Atlantic in a steamship.
0:09:08 It took seven days and cost 4X what flying does today.
0:09:11 Commercial aviation has created enormous value.
0:09:18 However, the vast majority of that value has been captured by consumers and society
0:09:20 versus airlines.
0:09:27 Since 1945, the industry has experienced years of low-margin profitability only to have its
0:09:36 gains wiped out by periods of huge losses, like $128 billion in 2020.
0:09:42 Starting in the 1980s, personal computers put technology that had cost tens of millions
0:09:46 twenty years earlier on nearly every person’s desk.
0:09:52 The gains in productivity globally have been substantial.
0:09:57 I was on the board of Gateway Computer in 2006, weak flex.
0:10:03 We were the second largest manufacturer by unit volume of a technology that at the time
0:10:08 had greater adoption and a bigger impact than AI has at this moment.
0:10:15 I raised and purchased 18% of the firm for $90 million.
0:10:22 18 months later, we sold it to Acer for $900 million.
0:10:23 Why?
0:10:31 A. The CEO urged us to sell, as he felt there was a real risk we might run out of money.
0:10:33 Think about this.
0:10:40 NVIDIA shed 600 gateways on the deep-seek news.
0:10:46 AI could be enormously valuable and at the same time a lousy business.
0:10:53 As with email, the user may capture 99% of the value and the manufacturer 1%.
0:10:59 What looked at first, like a proprietary asset, may turn out to be a public good.
0:11:03 By the way, isn’t this how education and healthcare are supposed to work?
0:11:06 But that’s another post.
0:11:09 Vaccines may be a useful analog here.
0:11:13 I have a stock screen looking for potential fallen angels to buy.
0:11:15 One of them is Moderna.
0:11:21 At the height of the pandemic, the company’s stock was nearly $500 a share.
0:11:25 As I write this, it’s $33.
0:11:30 Vaccines may be the greatest innovation in modern history, however their value to shareholders
0:11:34 is fleeting.
0:11:39 Common assets can transform into public ones for a variety of reasons.
0:11:43 Economists have different words for the process depending on the details.
0:11:52 It might be called decommodification, non-excludability through diffusion or commonization.
0:11:57 They’re all Latin for “there is no money here.”
0:12:01 The ironies of deep-seek are pretty rich.
0:12:08 The biggest is, as John Stuart pointed out, AI stole AI’s job.
0:12:13 Another one is the way Sam Altman has been bitching that deep-seek stole some of his
0:12:20 IP, distilling big open AI models to produce its own smaller, more efficient version.
0:12:26 This conjures Steve Jobs whining that Bill Gates stole the idea of a graphic user interface
0:12:28 from Apple.
0:12:33 Gates responded that Apple had stolen the idea too, when Xerox Park left its garage
0:12:36 door open.
0:12:42 Open AI is built on data it took from other people under the banner of fair use.
0:12:47 Hannibal Lecter is a rate that his neighbors aren’t vegan.
0:12:52 Another irony is that the US’s attempt to keep American-made ships out of China may
0:12:56 turn out to be a powerful argument in favor of free trade.
0:13:03 NVIDIA is now in a reasonable position to tell the US government “you’ve only created
0:13:11 an incentive for adversaries to develop workarounds, destabling the AI industry and US-China relations.”
0:13:16 Anyways, it’s an argument.
0:13:22 Finally though, what looks like it may be very bad for business has the potential to
0:13:25 be wonderful for the rest of us.
0:13:28 Not just for the public, but also for the tech industry.
0:13:35 Since the rise of Amazon and then Netflix, valuations have been driven not by innovation
0:13:38 but capital.
0:13:44 We thought King Kong was singular and under US control.
0:13:49 And then a prehistoric reptile appeared on our shores, empowered by many years of exposure
0:13:51 to nuclear radiation.
0:14:00 FYI Godzilla #awesome was meant to be a metaphor for nuclear weapons.
0:14:10 Feels weird, but recently I find myself rooting for Canada, Denmark and the Lizard.
0:14:12 Life is so rich.
0:14:22 [Music]