Meta’s Prediction Market App, Europe vs. Big Tech, and Hollywood’s Comeback

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Plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. You love me. I do. You love the dog. Sadly, sadly, sadly, it's the worst relationship of my life and my finest. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Scott Galloway. Wow, that was really good. And we're recording this episode in front of a live audience here at the Adweek House at Cannes Lions International. International Festival of Creativity, is that what it's called? All right, fine. We're doing that. Welcome, everybody. So, let's just start. Scott, we haven't seen each other at all, correct? Not even slightly. Yeah, no, it's a great can. I mean, we'd love to see you. It's great for both of us that we don't have to see each other. I brought my children. We're having a lovely time. They were just in the Mediterranean this morning. And I've had a lovely time with them, except for the heat. But how is your con going? Man, sorry, Jesus Christ. I love it here. But I don't know if you saw that crazy drone show. Yeah, that was Cargo, yeah. It's actually, the word is, and I can validate this, it's an alien craft. It's an alien species of women who are, no joke, are abducting guys with enormous dicks. So, you're safe. But also, just so you know, the spaceship is incredible. Oh, yeah. Hello, France! That took like five seconds to get to a penis joke. And a highly complimentary one to yourself, which is inaccurate. But, nonetheless. Don't ask me my nickname in a fraternity. Just don't. Just don't. Traypod. Yeah. Tripod? Anyway, sorry. It's twa. It's twapod. Traypod is fairypod. It's like, you should. You should take. Take intentions or gestures with the intentions that they're made or that they're intended or doing. Okay. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, okay. No, I don't. All right. Let me just, how is your can gone? How is it gone? It's great. It's the first time I've left my hotel. Okay. All right. You're staying at the hotel. When I was their age, I used to have to work here and like, you know, meet with Martin Sorrell. I'd have lunch with him and he'd take calls and just go, one minute, one minute. And now it's like, Mr. Beast is the man. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I absolutely love it here. Yeah. What's, what, what do you think? What are the big takeaways so far? So hands down, the biggest trend is the creator economy. There's 500 here this year. There were 400 last year. It used to be, it's sort of ironic that this is meant to be a gathering. It's 13,000 people from 90 countries. It's meant to be a gathering to celebrate the industry, but the industry hasn't yet recognized they're no longer the protagonist. And that the industry, if you think of it as the means of production, talent used to command 10 or 15% of the total revenue. Because in between there were these means of production or moats, an ad agency, a distribution, a studio, makeup, unions, a cable going into people's homes. And now people with these few platforms that command a disproportionate margin, they do really well, but you have thousands. It's no longer Madison Avenue. It's a bunch of studios and the celebrities here are no longer, when I used to come here, Maurice Levy, Martin Sorrell, John Wren, they owned the closet. Now it's some creator. Yeah. Who's talking about food, you know? So it's, it really has, there's a distribution from institutions to individuals. AI last year was what do we do with AI? Now it's how do we organize a company around AI and how do we get an ROI there? I think there's been, people have come to the conclusion that AI is all chip and no salsa and that creativity has never been more important. Where social media takes people to the extremes, AI takes everyone to the middle. And it's very moderated. And so creativity has never been more important. Remember AI was going to produce commercials. There's more designers now at IBM as a percentage of their employment and creatives than there was last year. So creativity appears to have made a comeback. Yeah, I have noticed the sort of fall off in the AI dementia that was here last year. I mean, it's really, I mean, it's, that's, that's everywhere actually, whenever everyone's sort of coming to the conclusion that they're not really clear what efficacy this stuff has instead of having to, I mean, the drone show did do AI and it was, it was not AI. It was, it wasn't artificial intelligence. It was something else. They had another word, uh, what it was, art and intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. Yeah. And the other, and the other big trend is sports. Yeah. There wasn't a sport beach here, a sport. It really is the cultural religion now. And it's, it's one of the, I mean, the biggest, I think the two biggest stories taking place right now, one's positive and one's negative and the things we'll be talking about in two weeks, I like to predict what will be the biggest business stories that are happening. The biggest cultural story would be the coming together that basically the world cup is doing what the UN was supposed to do and these wonderful creators and this content that makes us feel better about the world when we really needed it, we needed to feel better about America and waffle house and how wonderful Norwegians and the Scottish are go team Scotland against Brazil. It could happen tomorrow night. Mm-hmm. Um, that is the best cultural story unfolding right now. The biggest story that will, that's taking place right now, you're going to see that predictions markets have a scary fucking amount of betting on the world cup right now, mostly from young men whose prefrontal cortices is very immature and a prone to addiction. I think that's the biggest story playing out right now. You're going to see that one third, two thirds of young men in the United States bet on the world cup and you're going to see poly market and Cal sheet basically show the kind of numbers that get Goldman and JP Morgan saying we're ready to go public. That's the biggest story. Of course, Zuckerberg waiting into it. He's going to start a prediction. wanted to get into that market, I would pick up one of those two players for 20 to 60 billion which at this point would be a minor dilution is it a particularly good thing for their corporate image to go into an area that's under it's clearly going to be under attack in the next two years i don't think they give a shit i don't think they're worried about their image yeah yeah yeah i mean there's as we sit here there's a bunch of 14 year old girls self-cutting because of cheryl sandberg's business model and too much yeah uh so i don't i don't i think they're i think they're very willing to endure hits to their image i don't think that's their first priority so they will go this is an area they should go into their image the only thing that fucking matters is mark zuckerberg keeps delivering unbelievable shareholder returns that's the only image that matters in a capitalist america with no regulation and we can sit here and talk about purity tests no one gives a fuck all right well in europe let me just they're trying to break up uh us big tech here in france the budget minister called for a country to break free of american systems sort of on trend with the europeans feeling the american century is over which i think is very clear they've stepped up in a ukraine they've sort of pulled away from the u.s you have georgia maloney every day insulting trump which is really enjoyable um uh and the eu just rolled out a new sovereignty package to boost homegrown tech a very difficult thing to do google microsoft and amazon control 70 of europe's cloud market and 80 of european software spend goes to u.s companies um you know it also has to deal with these climate policy issues but i think it's really important for the european community to think about what they're doing and i think it's really important for the european community to think about what um is that something you see happening this is not the direction europe had gone in and has had much less success obviously all these u.s companies whether it's open ai or or or anthropic or all u.s all the latest basket of them whether they're going to make it or not are u.s companies yeah so america used to be the uncle who showed up who was obnoxious he showed up to the european you know picnic obnoxious but nice paid for your kids tuition generally heart was in the right place now the uncle's showing up he's on meth and he's doing his karate moves and he's hitting on and he's hitting on underage girls at the park i mean we are we have become so unreliable and quite frankly just gross that the eu has finally come to the realization we can't count on this guy any longer and it can go one of two ways the good way is that they figure out a way germany are i think 30 40 debt to gdp uh netherlands they need to probably go into some deficit spending ramp up their technology investment in their own military support their own companies mistral vertical aerospace daniel eck is in a big investor in a european defense company i think that would be good if they use this as yet another excuse to slow down their thoroughbreds with over-regulation which is what europe does you'll great be righteous worried about the environment and will kick your ass from a shareholder standpoint and that's the story of europe thoughtful regulation that gets in the way of every company killing it and america makes the mistake of under-regulating europe makes the mistake of over-regulating and you'd rather be the former because then you have the capital and the strength to fund a navy when you do get a good leader in place economic growth i mean it's kind of everything you have to have the uk has its heart in the right place super smart and they can't do any of this because the economy is not growing so there's a medium if they use it as an excuse to support to force companies to purchase their own models support european-born native internet e-commerce ai companies defense companies great if they use it as yet another excuse to increase regulation where talented entrepreneurs and capital just shrug their arms but is it even possible at this point because these companies are sort of barreling to ipos despite the fact that for example spacex has really taken yet another fall we talked on monday about this but it took it took a decent fall again and it's still up from the ipo it's trading at 120 times revenues we kill for their problems yeah i get that but do you see it um is there a way to catch up in any way for other parts of the world to do so or are these the companies that will well europe europe has some great companies and i'm actually my prediction i'm going to talk about i think the hottest ipo of the digital of this month is actually going to be a european company and i'll talk about predictions look they have some they have some great companies the i do think there's going to be a lot of talent the team of the best players wins and i think you're going to see a trend where the most talented people in europe used to have one goal get out it's like my homeland or my father's homeland scotland my dad used to joke what are the most talented people in scotland have in common they left and i do think that the rivers of flow of human capital benefit europe right now i think there's a lot of people are thinking you know what maybe i'll put off going to the bay area maybe i'll put off going to the gulf uh moving the most the youngest talented most aggressive ambitious people used to get to the biggest city in their nation then to london then to san francisco and new york i think a lot of human capital and financial capital is going to come back to europe because of lifestyle and two because europe has been left for dead the valuations are really low so they're low so you can take advantage of this but they've got to have a government that gets out of the way in some fashion although not to the extent that ours does presumably there's got to be a sweet spot we've gone too far to free markets the eu is way too over i mean the european union it's not a union it's a disunion where nobody has control but everyone has veto authority right and it creates just it supposedly takes about there's a measure of how long it takes to start a company to get all the filings the permits hire people it takes six weeks in the u.s supposedly it takes 16 months in france i mean that's just a problem right so i think there's a sweet spot although i i do think in the u.s there is pushback coming whether it's you know elon musk threatening rokhana over normal statements about usaid to what's what happened in new york with mondami there's a real push against a lot of this billionaire power unfettered capitalism that's coming i think hard and fast and they're starting to win elections they're starting to have have a say and you know you wouldn't normally see a politician like rokhana push back against elon musk at this point given well he's not maybe he's not a trillionaire right now he came down to 996 billion dollars um which i feel bad for the guy um but one of the things that i do see coming is a massive amount of payback to these guys i just see it i see it everywhere you go and i think they're not going to be able to attack trump in the same way they might like to but this is going to be their vehicle of attack is these guys as as and these companies are going to be in a world of hurt and you'll see you're seeing pushback from disney to the trump administration you're seeing pushback from politicians like roe you're seeing you're seeing pushback all over the place by average citizens across and you're seeing winning by democratic socialists around this billionaire issue that i think is really growing in a way that is significant and when the democrats come back if it's if they sort of shove the old democratic establishment to the side there's you know a lot of the republicans or a lot of the tech people don't think there's going to be payback but i do feel like there probably is i you know i hope so i i think i think since the 80s america has been obsessed with how to create wealth i think the next 10 years the dominant conversation is going to be what do you do with wealth yeah and what are the expectations of wealth and tax policy i mean we talk about rich versus poor i don't think that's right i've talked a lot about young versus old i'm not sure that's right i think the conversation is going to be around entrance versus engagement and i think that's going to be really important and i incumbents. If you already own assets, if you already have a company that's weaponized regulation, if you already own a home, if you already have a college degree, there's been this unhealthy zeitgeist among the incumbents to create scarcity such that entrants can't get a house, can't get a college degree, can't get out of the crib and get customers because the incumbents have weaponized government to basically make it impossible for entrants. And the entrants who typically are younger, middle class are just fed up. Although it was interesting, there's an interesting story in the New York Times this week. It was a column that I thought was great talking about, let me be more educated than you are, Socrates and what was happening in- He's playing tonight at Spotify, no? You love me. I do. You love the dog. Sadly, sadly, sadly, it's the worst relationship of my life and my finest, oddly enough. Come on. No, it's true. It's true. I do. I have weird affections. Someone literally can't- Someone came up to me. I'm so your bottom. This is what's happened to me here. You're going to laugh and I go, wait, I'm not supposed to laugh. You need to stop objectifying me, Scott. Okay. Someone came up to me last night and literally just went like this, Scott, how do you do it? I was like, I like him. And they're like, so do I. That woman said, so do I. It was weird. Was it Emily Ratajkowski? You can be honest. No, yeah. She's been asking about me, right? Never in your life will that ever happen. She's playing that game, right? You know what? I'm going to do something about it. No, she's probably called security on you at this point. Anyway, in any case, but the point I was making was that they had these issues back in ancient times where the oligarchs and the regular people, the equality got out of control in a way that was really significant. And that's exactly when you had pushbacks and pushbacks and push from both sides. And I think we are absolutely at that time. And I don't think it's particularly helpful to say, you know, eat the rich, but there is a real movement in our country that is significant. Again, New York elections are New York elections, but it says something when there's pushback. So we'll see what happens. I'm not worried for them, but they're going to have to armor plate their Teslas at some point if it starts to get ugly. And there is going to be an ugly moment, unfortunately, for them. And I think it's just, it's inevitable if they continue to sort of take everything and damage everything in the thing. Like, that's a nice story. I hope it comes true. I hope we see the manifestation of that at the ballot box. But the reality is, I think Donald Trump is going to sleep well and die a Mar-a-Lago. And I think Bezos and all these guys are going to have really nice lives. And I think we've just got to decide what we want moving forward. But the notion that they're going to pay a price for this, money buys you a lot of protection. Well, it does. We'll have to see what happens. But I'm really interested in U.S. elections coming up. All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about Hollywood's record-breaking year. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Do you hear that? That sound, right? It means that grown adults just spring. We went into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Scott, we're back. We're live at Adweek House at Conn Lyons. We're officially in the summer movie season and Hollywood is hitting new heights, which is really interesting. Toy Story 5 just opened to $312 million globally. Total domestic box office of the year is estimated $4.46 billion, the highest since 2019. It's recovered. And you predicted this. Yes, I did. Lots of movies brought in the big bucks. Project Hail Mary, Michael, The Devil Wears Prada, which I'm starring in, plus low-budget horror movies, Backrooms and Obsession, and they're becoming blockbusters. But it's the first movie since E.T. where the box office has moved up. And I noted my son went to see both these movies, and he's not gone to the movies since I took him to Toy Story 3, I think, at that point. Talk about this trend, because these theaters, these movies, it's actual movie theater experience. It's a range of movies. It's not these big blockbusters. It's not an Avenger movie, though there's one of those coming. It's a lot of, I would say, smaller movies in a lot of ways. And they seem to have been really spurring people not just to go to the movies. And of course, Toy Story 5 is five, is the fifth one. And it's apparently why I haven't seen it. Really? It's the fifth? The fifth, yes. Toy Story 5, yes. Anyway, what do you make of this? And how right was I about this situation? You called this. You went like this. That's ridiculous. Well, the question is, is it a trend or is it a dead cat bounce? So, look, the movie industry, to be fair, some of the best performing stocks in media are actually theater stocks. Cinemark and IMAX are up. Theater is at 40 and 45 percent, respectively, in the last 12 months. The theater business is becoming like airlines. There's Southwest and JetBlue, which is streaming. Netflix serves you content for 30 cents an hour. That's an incredible deal. And then, there's Emirates and Qatar Airlines in Singapore. That's IMAX. That's an incredible experience. The guys in the middle, like AMC or Delta United, are getting crushed. So, people are willing to spend 20 or 30 or 40 bucks to go to IMAX or have a really, like, I love IPIC, although that just went bankrupt. But they want an experience or they just want 30 cents an hour and reasonably good content. But, I mean, the other biggest trend culturally right now is IRL. Coming out of COVID, people probably lost somebody. People do have disposable income. The economy has been fairly strong. And people want to get out and touch grass. And I think they're just having a really healthy gag reflex over isolation. Yeah, I do think there's a gag reflex over social media and everything else. It's really interesting. Gary Vaynerchuk here now says analog is in versus, which I was like, no shit, Sherlock. It's really, but the idea of the idea that this pushing away, I have long thought that social media is going to decline rather precipitously, especially among young people and become more of a, you know, because you're starting to see tech companies like Google just invested in A24, which I thought was in, everyone lost their minds in Hollywood. They thought they were going to pull their data. I think they're using it to try to figure out how to do better storyboarding, how to use AI and how to figure out how to change the movie making process, which isn't such a bad idea to use those tools. Although Hollywood does have a gag reflex to all of that. But I think it's going to decline rather precipitously, especially among young people. So I think it's going to decline rather precipitously, especially among in favor of these in real life cinema experiences. Yeah, I think both can be true because if you look at, I don't understand it. People go on Instagram to find out about a yogurt store they'll spend 40 minutes in line for. So that's a combination of the two things. The downside of the IRL trend is the following. And that is, I mean, there's a couple of things. You're about to see tables in Mykonos and Ibiza, you can increase 40, 50% in price this summer because there's about to be 12,000 new millionaires in the Bay Area through Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI. And if you're a 36-year-old who got a CS degree from Carnegie Mellon, quite frankly, haven't had, you know, you weren't, didn't have the most social capital in high school, quite frankly. And you wake up and you've been broke and you've been paying your student loans and you wake up after the IPO and you're worth $11 million. You're not going to Disneyland. You're going to Ibiza and you're seeing black coffee. The flush of douchebag money about to roll over, about to roll over Europe this summer is going to be just frightening. And the other thing that's really kind of sad about this is the reason why these concerts and these music festivals can charge two, three, five grand for VIP tickets is because 20 and 30-somethings, when I was 20-something and 30-something, you know what I was doing with all my money? I was saving for a house. And I worry that 20 and 30-somethings have just stopped saving for a house. They've just given up. They're like, okay, we are not going to save 200 grand for a house. Houses are 2 million, star homes are $2 million. I'm going to Coachella. Yeah. The smaller houses are a million. Yeah. Your point being? Oh, my, well, these are just fascinating trends about in real life, Cara. All right. Okay. In any case, what does that mean? Because one of the things- You know, I expose myself to you emotionally and you jab. Yes, I do. You jab. I was still on douchebags with money in Ibiza because you're the only person I know that goes to Ibiza. I was the only person. But he's having a fantasy moment. I pay for everything. What do you say to like a room full of- I love drugs. I love alcohol. We're going to get questions from you all. Who would want to roll with me in Ibiza? Seriously. That's right. Meet you there. Yeah. I absolutely would not. So- She literally texts me like, where are you? Where are you? What are you doing? No. Where are you? No. What are you doing? No. I said, I'm downstairs talking to Paris Hilton. I will not be coming upstairs to talk to you. You're an actress. He just made a Paris Hilton joke that was gross. Just try not to ignore it. Seen that movie 10, 12 times. Okay. All right. In any case, Instagram, I think a lot of the tech companies really are moving into media, not necessarily in the nefarious ways that they are also moving into media, but Instagram wants a spot in your streaming lineup. The app is testing horizontal video, long form content, episodic series, which I think is really interesting. I just met with some Instagram people recently. They're also reaching out to me. I'm like, out to creators, which they were doing in my case, to start making making not micro dramas, but what is the stuff you want to make? Short serialized episodes of one to three minutes each, which was a trend many moons ago and didn't really work out. If you recall, a bunch of creators were trying to do that. And obviously Quibi was the other one. Is this sort of back again? Do you think it'll succeed at this point? Well, the clip economy, whatever you want to call it, huge trend. I don't know about you. I'm absolutely, I hate to admit it, I'm absolutely addicted to Instagram Reels. And I think it's become my primary source of information. I think the algorithm is incredible. So do you think they can take it to the next step to create mini dramas? Because it didn't work the first several times. This is the third. I just don't think you ever, I hate to say that, I just don't think you ever bet against Mark Zuckerberg. I used to think TikTok was going to disrupt meta. Now I find myself spending less time, I don't know about you, on TikTok and more time on Reels. I think they'd look at it and said, I think Mark says, he looks at them and says, that's amazing. Steal it. Steal it. And then make it better. And then point our billion and a half person fire hose at it. So if you're marketers here, where do you start to point stuff at entertainment? It's there, right? It continues to be there. That's going to be entertainment. It's a hard one because any business dependent upon alphabet, unless you're the creator, if you try and get in the middle, your margin is their opportunity. 10 years ago, some of the biggest firms here, and how did they do it? They did it. They did it. They did it. They did it. They did it. They did it. They did it. They did it. They did it. They did it. And then alphabet said the whole point of our technology is we eventually make you obsolete. So I'm very reticent. If you're a creator and you can displace Comcast or ABC or A&E with one of these platforms that will give you a greater share revenue, I think YouTube does that pretty well. But any business banking on. You're interviewing Meredith Levent. I'm interviewing Meredith Levent, the CEO of New York Times. I don't know if you know this host from the Port of the New York Times. But we owned something called about.com and it was worth a billion dollars. And then one night our revenues were down 60% because Google did some panda thing and basically just crushed our traffic. So a decent test anyone should ask themselves is what percentage of our revenue and margin is dependent upon one of these platforms? Because they'll keep you in business just long enough until you get real margin and then they'll come for you. So anyways, I'm droning on here. I think it's situational, but I think these guys are basically in the business of just finding, except for the creators, they do some there, but I wouldn't want to be in a business focused ever on these platforms. On these platforms, but that's exactly where it's going. This is the first time I've thought about creating stuff. I just did this television show, but now I'm thinking, how would I do it not with any of the regular TV entities? What would be the way to make, say, if we decide to make a pivot television? For example, what is a television show going forward? And that's something I'm thinking about a lot. Well, it would be on, yeah, you're right. It would be on YouTube with clips. But if you look at, why is podcasting drawing so much talent right now and growing so fast? It's not your looks, but go ahead. When we first started our- That was an easy one. So I'm very, that was a layup. So when we started this podcast almost eight, nine years ago, and I'm very transparent about it. I think rich people not talking about their money is nothing but an effort to suppress the middle and the lower class. Rich people talk about their money all the fucking time. Start talking about money. Anyway, when I first started on Pivot, I got 15% of the revenue because the means of production, a company with capital and a studio, I used to go into that lame studio on Broad Street and they knew how to do podcasts and it was technology and union people. And so the means of production, whether it's MSNBC or CNN or podcasts back then, meant that the technology and talent got 15%. You probably got more, you were the star. But now talent on podcasts gets 70% because the means of production just doesn't have the power. That's effectively the arbitrage that's taking place across all media, is the means of production is being arbitraged and getting people out of the middle such that creators with great content and the end consumer can enjoy. Podcasts are 80% of a television show for 5% of the production cost. So there's opportunity for advertisers. And creators. And the example I always use is Colbert, 60 million in revenue, 100 million in costs, a band, a theater, unions everywhere, makeup artists, five people on the guest booking team. It made 60 million, was not economic. He's going to go to a podcast. He'll take, he'll, six people will make it onto the podcast arc. He'll do 20 million his first year and it'll cost 4 million to produce. So that's a pretty good deal for Steven. Yeah, if that, absolutely. All right, we're going to go on a quick break. We have one more thing to talk about. Um, when we're back. Botox, on a botulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. Do you hear that? That sound, right? Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a month. For more information, visit mintmobile.com slash switch. $80 for 12 month plan required. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Okay, Scott, we're back with more news. World Cup right now, as you said, there's going to be a lot of gambling and the markets are a worry. But what do you imagine the effect of World Cup will be going forward? What is your thoughts on where, what are the takeaways from doing that? Because it really is. I think the most important, as you said, economic story right now across the globe. Yeah, I don't have any real insight other than what I said. I think the world and the West needed a reason to like each other again and recognize that Americans, distinct of our leadership, are an interesting, loving, kind people with really fattening but wonderful food. And that Europeans and all these nations have incredible cultures and they bring a little taste of that culture. Yeah. You're going to see the prices of teams go up. And even I go back to the wealth creation of these companies that just went public, that probably took the price of these companies going up because sex drives everything. And if you're a 45-year-old who quite frankly never got laid in high school, you're trying to figure out a way to become the sexiest man in Cleveland. And the way you do that is by buying the Cleveland Browns. And so all of a sudden, there are a ton of people who want to own sports teams right now that have capital. So you just saw the price of every, shitty football, cricket team, whatever, go up 20, 30%. SpaceX went up 20%. The price of most sports teams globally went up 30 or 40 because you're going to have midlife crisis money, which is irrational, chasing trophy assets. Very excellent. All right. Last thing, prediction, and then we'll get questions from the audience. My prediction is the following. The biggest IPO of this, the biggest tech IPO of this month, in terms of first day pop, is not SpaceX. It's actually a European tech media company that's pricing next week. This is a test. Any guesses? Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons is essentially the Berkshire Hathaway of beloved but forgotten internet brands. Evernote, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Meetup. All of these companies that were supposed to be the next Airbnb or- They were all the unicorns of the year. All the unicorns. Yeah. Super fat. And then this company out of Italy comes and buys them, consolidates the backend, which is a polite way of saying cuts costs dramatically, increases their prices. A lot of these companies have very strong margin power and consumer loyalty. Q1 2025, 270 million, 120 million losses. This quarter, 625 million, 28 million in profits. They're getting a ton of momentum. Yeah. - It's orphans brought together in one. - It's orphaned in one. internet companies with a lot of margin power that have been forgotten and they're rolling it up. And this is a callback to the most profitable disruptive company that used to own can't. This is a callback to WPP that used to buy companies for seven times EBITDA, cut costs on the back end, reduce key man risk, so to speak, and then take it to the public markets at 12 times EBITDA. I think this is an incredible company. It's out of Italy, which is interesting, really good human capital. And there's about a thousand of these companies that never quite made it across the goal line. And the most fascinating thing about their numbers is 88% of their revenue is recurring revenue. All of these companies are subscription. So basically this is SAS meets Berkshire Hathaway. I like the fact that it's out of Italy. I like the fact that it's not AI. So it's just a simple cleanup. Two and a half billion, two and a half billion in revenues. It'll go out at seven to eight times revenues. I don't know. I think this company will have the largest pop of any internet tech IPO of the month. That's pricing next week. It's a classic is what's happening here. Well, it's essentially, there's a value in these brands. They still have very loyal audiences. And they also grew up in a time where capital was cheap. So quite frankly, there's a lot of fat to cut. And these guys are executing like crazy. And once they have a public stock, think about how big the list is. Companies that were once hot, and they're still good companies. And they spent billions of dollars of venture capital aggregating audiences. Yeah, like Red Envelope, for example. Oh, sorry. Why are you so hostile to that? Jesus Christ. No, that was a good company. I sort of got that one. Yeah, thanks for that. It was. It was a good idea. You can have the kids every other weekend. No, but there are a lot of value in a lot of these companies. I'm teasing. My prediction is the biggest IPO in terms of first day pop is going to be a European, the Berkshire Hathaway. I've forgotten. Internet brands. And that's this company called Bending Spoons that I had not heard of until two weeks ago. I'm kind of fascinated with it. Anyway. All right. Questions from the audience. Where's the thing? Here we go. We're going to go around. Keep them tight so we can answer as many as possible. Hi, Kim McKenzie from Ladies to Strategize. So you guys often talk about polymarket. Do you think that it's going to be used as a legitimate polling data and predictions for the new US election? And should it? Legitimate. Now, so, I mean, people are on it, so you can't really stop it. I think people pay it. It's one of these things during elections, US people go and stare at them for a minute and then they go away from them. I think it's being used more as opposed to going to all the, there was a bunch of others that people would go to all the different polling accumulation sites. I think Scott's been very negative on polling. I think a lot of these prediction markets are easily gamed. And so I worry about their reality, but they often do reflect a sentiment, right? So I think it's just one of those other signals you have to get. But I definitely pay attention to them more than I should. And I know they're gamed in some fashion. I think they're also easily manipulated by a wealthy person, say, named Elon Musk, who has enormous amounts of funds that he's going to put towards the midterms to create all manner of confusion. And so that's the real danger in it. I'm not sure voters pay attention to it. Like, I just don't. I don't know if voters spend a lot of time. I think a lot of the pundit class certainly does. I use Cal. She all the time for, and I find, I think polling firms that are non-qualitative are basically out of business. Cal. She has never gotten an interest rate cut wrong. They have predicted every single Fed action, a hundred percent. I totally rely on the prediction market, specifically Cal. She for, because there's something about pundits saying what they think is going to happen. And then looking at where people actually put money that if you really want to know how someone feels, see where they're spending their money. So I think they're, I think they are. And I'm fascinated by the data. I think they're incredibly accurate and on. But they have to self-govern themselves more because they're, because the government's coming after you're seeing all these different arrests. And so if they don't self-govern sort of the gaming that goes on, I think it's going to be a, they're going to sort of shoot themselves in the foot in that regard because there's case after case of someone doing something funny. I hope you're right. That's the right thing. The internet is littered with companies that were supposedly going to be regulated. Yeah. That we're doing. I mean, we'll see. I, I hope there's regulation. States tend to want to go after these companies. You've noticed a lot more action very quickly as opposed to bigger social media companies right away. With the amount of big back end, the amount of money we're going to find out in two weeks, the amount of money being wagered on these markets around the world cup. Yeah. Huge. Staggering. Staggering. It's going to be bigger. It's going to be bigger than what was, what was gamed in Vegas during the same period. Yeah. I think more than $5 billion already been traded on the world cup outcomes across those two platforms. Enormous. Next question. Hello. Hi. Hi. Great episode. Ted from the agency, advertising agency, parking battery. Quick question. I love your unvarnished opinion on this. Do you see a big next act from some of the CEOs that were pushed out? I'm thinking Adam from WeWork, Travis from Uber, and they've gone on to do their own thing, but given all the dynamics and excitement, you know, that we've been seeing and talking about today. Yeah. Is there going to be a big next act from them and similar former CEOs? I mean, they've tried, like Adam's tried with that rental weird fucking thing. I don't know what that is. It's actually doing okay. It's doing okay. Yeah. I mean, they're fine. And Travis has done his ghost kitchen thing and now he's doing Robotics. Robotics, something around robots. They're going to try. I think most of these people don't have a second act. They just sort of wander around and pontificate. That's been my experience. They had one great moment, often fueled by anger. And I think, you know, they don't have a second act. And then they don't really, there's very few that have double acts that I've seen. I can't, can you think of one? Someone who like got sort of turned around and then came back? I think they get rich, happy. They surround themselves by enablers who violently agree with them at all times and saying, you got, you know, you got screwed, you know, or Karis, I wish it was mean to you, like, or something. You were right the whole time. And I think they just don't, most of them don't learn from their mistakes and they don't. And that's the way you develop the next thing to me, but that's The good money is on no. Cause a couple of things happen. One, one out of seven companies works is so much has to go right for the company. Just probability that if you nailed it in so many moons lined up for your success, you're kind of due for them not to line up. It is really hard to repeat really hard because so many things have to line up. And the other thing is. The majority of great artists stop. Can't, you know, they slip in the shower when they're 24 and they have a hit song and then they hit 30 and it just all stops because you have kids because your brain changes because you start evaluating risk. All of a sudden you stop thinking crazy and you have the guidelines of societal norms. You're not working 18 hours a day because you're rich and you don't need this shit and you want to spend time with your kids. So the mojo. And they. The mojo and the creative genius that's fucking. I mean, who told Michael Jackson to grab his crotch with a glitter glove? I'm telling you 40 old fathers don't think that way. It's this is so you lose that creative craziness. You lose some mojo and just statistically speaking to repeat. I've started nine businesses. I'm generously three, four, and two. And all of them seem like great ideas at the time and more of it than anything. It was just luck and timing. And it's very hard to hit the lottery twice. So the good money is usually on no. Yeah. I think most of the people who succeed are the like Zuckerberg continues to excel like or cook, whatever you think of the golden statue continued to excel. The people that stay at the companies tend to like, um, uh, such Nadella, like you've seen like that kind of thing. I don't see a lot of new rebirth. There's not many rolling stones out there. I would say right here. Uh, good day. The name's David. Um, I've got a question for you. U S related. Um, there's a lot of news about redistricting, um, voting rights, voting machines, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. We've noticed that you have noticed. So what's your prediction of how that will impact the elections I'm asking on behalf of the world. Well, I think a lot, you know, it's, I would agree. I, I have, I, I, I read a lot about, I'm not an expert in this area, but I, from what I understand. The Republicans have vastly overreached in this area and it's not working and they may live to regret their efforts. I don't think people like it. I don't think voters like it. That said, it's, they've done a lot of like, we've created all these partisan, like the note, if there's a chart of partisan, you know, purple areas and blue and red. And it's like, there used to be a lot of purple. Now there's not a lot of purple. They've managed to do it. And I, and then of course the Democrats reacted correctly to try to mute it in California and everything else. But that's not the way you want to go, right? You want these districts. And so I, I think I believe in Scott. I don't know how Scott feels about that. I believe in voters. I think they ultimately push back. And I think the Republicans have started to see some real losses in some of these redistricted areas. And you'll seeing a lot more. There was a story in the Washington post this week about the enthusiasm of democratic voters, even if they're not enthusiastic about Democrats, they're, they're turning out more. And Republicans are kind of -- they are disgusted with Trump. You know, they really are. He's losing base after base. after base until it's finally kid rock and that lean greenwood guy like essentially um he can't get entertainers to go he's losing latinas latinos he's losing all vast young men for sure um he's losing all the stupid comics so i i don't i don't know if it's going to work but it's not a good thing read just there's three things i think have hurt our country more than anything one is gerrymandering two is fox news and the third is social media if i had to pick the three things so yeah i would i would add i would add citizens united in there look the vibes are really good right now for democrats and for a pushback on trump uh you know he's i think the least second least popular president at this point no he was the least he was the least effective yeah the so things look good uh gerrymandering and just taking a grid and placing it over america or de-gerrymandering is a great talking point what happened for this election the x factors x factors the following this is what i think happened uh in the last couple months i think elon musk called president trump and said if you lean on the sec chair and the nasdaq to include me in the nasdaq 100 indices which will create an incremental 10 to 30 billion dollars in demand for my float which will take my net worth up 20 to 40 billion i'll spend 1 to 10 billion dollars on the midterms and there's nothing to stop them so i think the x factor is musk is musk because the reality is as much as we like voters and americans are smart and da da da the the elections are kind of won and lost in a 10 in the middle and those people are busy and have things to do and they're influenced by media and the good work you do and if you increase your net worth by 100 or 200 billion dollars because of sec and nasdaq anomalies that have never been granted to any other company and you have a direct line to the president who can make this shit happen and you're going to make this shit happen why wouldn't you say hey boss i'll spend 10 billion dollars 10 billion dollars is going to win a lot of he spent he influenced the last presidential election with 250 million and this is the power this this this is the problem this is why throughout history a no known is the following power corrupts an absolute power absolutely corrupts and in a democratic society with network effects money and technology create power on a level and a reach we've never seen before so a combination of citizens united a very smart guy understands technology and a willingness to spend one five or ten billion dollars in the election look out below the only thing is the quality of their candidates is really quite bad and that's that's a really and the some of the democratic candidates are very compelling i think has a better bench um and there is an element to that they've they've managed to pick really unattractive horrible people and in the musk case i do agree with him he's got enormous amounts of power the thing is a lot of reporters and i've seen a lot of reporters and i've seen a lot of people who have they've done a lot of work and they've done a lot of work and i've seen a lot of people who have and others are on to him and the more you expose him the more people are repelled by him and so there is an element to take advantage of there the more he looks like he's manipulating the elections the more people push back against it i he he and trump of the the brand has gone down i think he more than trump than anything okay last quick question uh we're right here i tend to get my news from blue sky but following dispersed creators and media like heather and i have a lot of questions about the way that you've been working with your cox richardson who just had on yes she's amazing um and sub stacks and things like that is there enough reach there to actually make a dent and and get in front of people or is that just kind of like a losing model it's subscription based and and it'll probably go nowhere given it's a lot of collections of little voices uh the the answer is yes i i think i think uh uh what is it blue note blue sky i'm sorry i think it's a cute and adorable and it's gonna die a slow death um i just don't think it's got i think it got some early traction this is just vibes i don't look at the day i haven't seen the data but a sub stack i think is a winner um and i do think that these platforms there's just too much creator content the most encouraging thing about creator content right now is 50 of the ad spend on creators is in nano or micro creators and that is people doing little niche things and so trust from institutions is leaking to trust the people who go after varying the specific crowds out the narrow i've been watching this dad who while he cooks talks about universal health care and i just find it fascinating uh so i i think some of them will win the one you brought up blue sky i'm not i'm not um i think it's a better brand than a business right now um but yeah i think there's gonna be a ton of cool little uh little niche platforms that will likely be swallowed up by the big players i'll make the final comment on that um i think they're the the increasing power of all these smaller things are gonna re are really becoming very strong at this point in terms of not just but numbers too and people listening and everything else and i do i but i do think we can't abandon certain central uh institutions like the new york times or cnn or all these things they have to be owned and run by people with responsibility towards actual journalism because you can go on and on about the lincoln memorial all you want i mean what's happening in the reflecting pool was just a fat flat out lie by president trump but it took the new york times to actually go and find all the data and do the reporting and so you that all that depends on a thriving journalistic community so it would be really great if we could have owners of these real journalistic institutions that aren't incompetent and you know who i'm talking about in this case but that we we support those and at the same time um push all these creators i have helped a lot of people leave big journalistic institutions but they're doing great work and the thing is that it's very hard to do investigative work it's very hard to do the really hard reporting without the support of institutions and there are economic models if we do it right that will continue to protect that and so i'm hoping there'll be a combination of big institutions that figure out their economics better which they can with owners that aren't incredibly idiotic and and then and then these smaller ones that are sort of spurring them to do so and a collection of them i think is incredibly powerful i think scott and i have a lot of influence that we never thought we'd have but it's beyond influence it has to be informed influence and reported analysis and so it's not just people doing takes hot takes all over the place because that doesn't that doesn't tell you things you need real reporters on the ground understanding what's happening and bringing it back to people in a fair way um and so i think i i do i i'm very pro on media right now i think it's one of the most undervalued uh stocks i think it's undervalued in a lot of ways so i'm hoping um that that at some i know there's this worries about these billionaires taking over and quashing them let them as mel robbins likes to say because we have lots of options and we have lots of choices and i do think everybody is very open to new ways of getting information so they can try their best but they're not going to be able to quash a really great reporting over a long period of time i don't think that and i believe in that okay all right thank you guys so much okay scott that's the show we'll be back on tuesday with more pivot uh read us out today's show was produced by lara neiman zoe marcus taylor griffin and todd weisman earning your child engineered this episode thanks also to drew bros mr vario laura stark will lee and jenna mcgill the shark cross box media executive producer roberto make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts thank you for listening to pivot from vox media you can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com pod we'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business go team scotland it could happen yeah it could happen thank you thank you hank joined bj's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30. i coach football now coach hank saves up to 25 off grocery store prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pre-game he knows teamwork and bj's knows savings this is your home coach home of the save join for just twenty dollars at bjs.com mesquite and save ten cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save do you hear that that sound right that means that summer's officially here it 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