Pivot - Will Netflix Buy Roku? Are You Ready for Antitrust Summer? And More.

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Kara and Scott sounds off about the rumors of a Netflix-Roku deal. Also, the Senate could vote on two antitrust bills this month. And Meta is delaying its rollout of AR glasses. Friend of Pivot, David Gelles to discuss his new book on Jack Welch, "The Man Who Broke Capitalism."You can find David’s book here. Send us your Listener Mail questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or via Yappa at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Pivot comes from Virgin Atlantic. Too many of us are so focused on getting to our destination that we forgot to embrace the journey. Well, when you fly Virgin Atlantic, that memorable trip begins right from the moment you check in. On board, you'll find everything you need to relax, recharge, or carry on working. Buy flat, private suites, fast Wi-Fi, hours of entertainment, delicious dining, and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. delicious dining and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. Check out virginatlantic.com for your next trip to London data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Listeners of this show can get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast.

Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher from Vox HQ in New York.

How are you doing, Scott? Congratulations. The before times. I'm Scott Galloway. It's the before times. There's nobody here but us pivot people. So, you know, I was at your apartment. I'm in Scott's apartment, which is very lovely. But I came down here to see people in IRL, as they say. And it's quite nice to see actual people because I need you to prove to me, Scott, that you're sentient. It's easy. But how?

I hate myself. How do you know that sentient beings that we create from AI do not hate themselves too? I'm only asking because a Google engineer says the company has created a sentient AI. Google showed him out the pod babe door for doing so. The engineer claims that a chat box called Lambda, which is

interesting, has achieved sentience. Google and the wider AI community disagree with the claim, but Google has put the engineer on paid leave saying these violated the company's confidentiality policy. The engineer says he passed documents about the AI to a U.S. senator's office. Essentially, he's saying Soylent Green is people. So what do you think about this? Well, so the basic notion was a bunch of, I think it was 17th century philosophers said that what makes us human is the ability to have emotions or feel something, right? To feel pain, to feel sadness. And I've always thought that we should be less obsessed with this notion of creating a

sentient machine. In other words, this value of, okay, I can think, but I can't feel. And the ultimate objective of technology or the real fear would be when something that thinks faster than us can actually feel. And I think the thing that plagues our society is that too many people feel something and mistake it for thinking. I think we need to be more focused on going the opposite way. Like, oh, they stole the steel.

And it's like, well, let's slow down and actually think about that. So I've never understood. Also, I just don't believe that it seems to me that it also comes down to intention. Like, I have predetermined intention that maybe is programmed by DNA or a set of shared experiences. But I've never bought, I've never been worried, you know, Elon Musk's fear that the kind of Skynet thing, I've never bought it. But I'm probably not thinking it through deeply enough.

Well, you know, actually, he's changed his thinking. I interviewed him relatively recently on this, and he thinks it's not going to be necessarily angry at humanity, sentient beings, computer beings, or AI that has feelings. It'll not care for us one way or the other the way we don't think about ants and anthill. And if they want to build a highway, they'll build over us. But you don't ever think about an anthill. And you don't want to kill it. You don't want to, maybe some kids who have problems later want to do it. You just don't think about it. And he thinks that more like, he said, we're going to be more like house cats to it.

And that's what his feeling was. So it's not quite that sort of Terminator idea of these beings having intention and everything else. But talk about the hate thing, because I don't like that you say you hate yourself, but if that's how you feel. Well, more importantly, you know what the donut said once it had achieved sentience.

This is the part where you say, no, what did the donut say when it achieved sentience? No, what did the donut say? I don't even want to hear it, because I just spent two weeks with my brother and dad jokes. But go ahead.

Go ahead. There are dozens of us. I don't even know what to say. Come on. I don't. Come on. In any case, this is a really interesting question. Obviously, people will claim it.

Interestingly, I just interviewed Jennifer Egan, who is that wonder who wrote A Visit from the Goon Squad. She won a Pulitzer Prize for it and all kinds of awards. And this is her sequel, The Candy House, which is about someone who's like a Mark Zuckerberg-like character who creates the big social network. And then the second thing he does is a cube that can download all your consciousness, all your history, all your memories, and you can access them. And the only way you can access them is if you do it, and then you can access other people's memories. So I could see what it was like for you as a young man, et cetera. So it's kind of interesting to think about this idea of where our consciousness is. I think that there's a term for that, and that's Google.

I think with a thin layer of AI, you could start to really understand. I mean, the ultimate hack would be, I've always said it would be of AI, you could start to really understand. I mean, the ultimate hack would be, I've always said it would be of Google, because not only would it know if you're contemplating divorce or marriage or if you've terminated a pregnancy or, I mean, it just, it knows everything about you, but its ability to register emotions, I think it could get pretty scary, pretty bad. I've always thought Google would, if it didn't have such an amazing business, it would probably be the most amazing hedge fund ever. It can just anticipate so much. I mean, it is the collective sponge of everything, of all intention.

I call it the database of human intention. That was how I phrased it. That's exactly right. But this is about the past. If you could download your consciousness into a computer, what memory would you go back to? What, memory? Yeah.

And maybe it isn't true. Well, the whole thing in this book is that some of them aren't the memories people thought they were, of course. This is sort of like, you ever see Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks? Oh, yeah, with Albert Brooks. It's a great film. Yeah, I know. And Meryl Streep.

How did she do that? Yeah, that's the funny version. The Black Mirror had one where people could download their, could scroll back to their memories. What memory would you do? I would pick seeing my dad. I don't know. Probably some, I don't know about you, but occasionally I get very majestic and it's a good feeling. But I was looking at pictures, my 14-year-old just graduated from middle school, and there were all these pictures of him.

And I'm so sad because I forget how little he looked just a few years ago. And I'm like, oh, my God, look at that. Look at that little guy. And I'm upset that I forget that. And it's weird, kids. I think the reason that—and there's a business learning here. I think most marketing comes down to the ability to create the perception of scarcity. Like, okay, there's not enough Panerai watches. They purposely choke scarcity. They give

you the sense that, okay, there's not that much of it. Because once something becomes scarce, you become obsessed with it. And I think part of the reason we fall so deeply in love with our kids is that if I see you in five years, you're going to be Kara. You'll be a little older, but you're going to be Kara. You take an eight-year-old, and then you take a 13, that eight-year-old's gone. And you start developing. You're having a little moment here. You're having a little moment with your teen, your young son becoming a man.

Well, you just realize. You see these pictures of this gorgeous little boy who was on the beach with you, and you're like, that guy's gone. Yep, he's not gone. I will get you a cube that you can have this all downloaded to yourself. Good, I'm ready. Send the cube. Also, bring the donut army. Yes, I will. Anyway, it's interesting.

Today, we'll look at everything in the Senate, from gun legislation to ant antitrust legislation and talk about the prospect of Netflix buying Roku. We'll speak with author David Gellis about his new book on Jack Welch. It's called The Man Who Broke Capitalism. But first, Meta is delaying an important step toward the metaverse. The company is pushing back on the rollout of the AR glasses that were supposed to come out. It had planned to release the first version in 2024. That was a big, you know, heralded thing. But employees were notified that Meta no longer has a plan

to commercially release the version due to investment cutbacks in the division, ARVR division. Obviously, Snapchat has been doing this, and they were never going to release them. They're trying them out with creators and different businesses and things like that. So what do you think? This is sort of a, uh-oh, Spaghetti-O kind of thing.

Yeah, but you've always said this. Yeah, they would. I mean, Meta had one good idea, the Facebook platform, and then they're probably arguably the best acquirer in the world. They're graded swooping in saying WhatsApp and Instagram were amazing ideas and we're going to buy it. But in terms of homegrown innovation, whether it's the Portal or Diem or Oculus. Portals also have been sidelined to enterprise, yeah.

Yeah, they supposedly have shelved their watch. They had a vision for a watch. And with these declining stock prices, it's sort of a downward spiral. And a lot of people have said to me, Scott, antitrust, you're constantly on this antitrust rant, the market's going to take care of itself. And to just nod to them, the market seems to be taking care of meta because what you have is when you have a stock price cut in half, a lot of people no longer feel the change they felt to their desk or to one employer.

I'm no longer investing a million dollars in equity a year. So I no longer have these golden handcuffs. So they have a lot of probably talented people looking around. The stock price has been cut in half. They have to show the market a certain level of focus. And a lot of these things just aren't showing. I mean, to a certain extent, Ruth Peratt brought this kind of focus to Google. Remember this about 10 years ago? This is Google's CFO who I had her on stage talking about it

many years ago when she got there. Remember Google was going to try and cure death? Yeah. Oh, yeah. She put the kibosh on a lot of stuff.

She kiboshed. And very much pilloried for doing it, but I was like, go Ruth. No, she was the adult in the room. They had like barges

in San Francisco Bay that they were, I don't know, going to do interpretive dance parties. Don't you remember balloons that were going to bring internet to the world and yeah all kinds of crazy shit they had a lot more than that yeah but the thing about the thing about facebook is that i mean the big thing here is that meta or reality labs 10 billion dollars

and it just doesn't it just doesn't look like it's working. I think the next shoe to drop, supposedly Apple is working on VR glasses. They are. I'd be very curious if that continues. I don't know. I think this is a big interest of Tim Cook's, very big. As I told you, when we had lunch, that's all he talks about is AR. Well, AR is different. AR is holding up your phone.

I know, but I think he feels like there needs to be a device like AirPods with the eyes. There's no question. I think they're going to go into that, I would think. That's my impression. My feeling is these guys don't have enough evolutionary anthropologists walking around the hallway. And that is, I was getting my teeth cleaned, and they give you these new VR headsets where you can watch a movie. And I find that it's uncomfortable. And it goes back for me to when your peripheral vision is taken from you, you have a level of unease

because the things you could eat and the things that can eat you don't come straight at you. They come from the sides or behind you. When you enter into a fully immersive experience where you don't have any peripheral vision, most people are more comfortable watching Top Gun 2, Maverick, in a theater or at home where they have still control of their peripheral vision and they can see what else is going on around them. I find putting a totally immersive experience on very highly sensory, but exhausting and uncomfortable. And I can't do it for very long.

And I think the majority of the people feel the same way. I tried it at Sony. I went to Sony 10 years ago and had a headset put on me of a, it was a game. It was one of the, it was sort of, I think, a war game kind of thing. And I remember going like moving my head around a lot, like, where am I? And I know I looked ridiculous. I was also aware of how ridiculous I must have looked. So that was another thing. No more ridiculous than without

them, just so you know. Fair, thank you. Any case, we'll see where it's going. I think eventually there'll be some heads-up display of some time. I just found my Google Glass the other day. They were kind of cool. I put it on and wandered around. They looked okay, but they were useless. They were useless on every level. I think there is a heads-up display of

some sort coming, whether it's for just voice or something like that, but it will have some AR element. They'll be looking out into the world. Like you said, cameras in the iPods, AirPods. Anyway, we'll see. We know this has been a big bet, and we'll see. It's a long-term bet for sure, and it's a short-term world, unfortunately, for Facebook or Meta.

Okay, let's get to our first big story. Netflix might finally get a Roku for the basement. At least that's what Roku employees are saying. Rumors are swirling inside the company about a possible acquisition by Netflix, which you discussed. The deal would give Netflix access to Roku's lucrative advertising platform, which they've been trying to get into. It makes sense, as the streaming company plans to sell ads. In recent weeks, Roku abruptly closed the trading window for all employees, blocking any sales of vested stock. We're recording this on Monday, so if the deal happens before we publish, just know we were

right, including Scott Galloway. Talk about this. Why does it want the hardware? Is it just advertising? Obviously, Roku is now making content, too, so that fits into Netflix. It's kind of a nice—that's why you thought that, I think, for a number of reasons. It brought in $647 million in ad sales. That's crazy. Seven times the size of its hardware business. As Twitter points it out, we get it wrong a lot. But I think, I mean, literally two or three weeks ago, I think we said that Roku would be an acquisition, a great acquisition for Disney or Netflix.

or three weeks ago, I think we said that Roku would be an acquisition, a great acquisition for Disney or Netflix. Roku offers a vertical distribution to Netflix and or Disney and is way off its high and now has a $12 billion market cap. That is a very interesting acquisition for Netflix or Disney. And what Netflix has, what's so powerful about Netflix, in addition to the budget and incredible culture that produces great content, they get really powerful signal liquidity that HBO didn't get from the cable companies. HBO wasn't going to let them watch or let them know whether people watch Euphoria all the way through or if they were watching the same episode again, what have you. Netflix has that.

They get that data. But what Netflix doesn't have is what you do when you leave Netflix. And also, I mean, you get a few things with vertical distribution. You get to control. When Apple says, I don't like meta or I don't like Mark Zuckerberg, because they control the end distribution, they can put a pop-up window on everyone's phone saying, would you like to opt out of tracking on metal? Exactly. And so there's just a certain level of control that it's very hard to maintain the kind of brand that Netflix has without controlling your distribution.

I would agree. It's the same thing with Facebook and phones, remember? Like, that was sort of a fatal flaw for that company not to be successful in phones. So is this, I think it's a great move. I don't, some people thought it might be desperate. I don't. I think it's actually quite smart. Even though, let me just, I'm going to play something. Reed Hastings has previously said that he doesn't want to do hardware. Here's what he told me and Peter Kofkin in an interview in 2014. And would you ever make a device?

No, definitely not. I mean, we're working on, you know, I think it's over a thousand devices now that we're on and we work really well with all of them. There's no value add to us doing a device. When you look at the Apple TV, the Chromecast, the Roku, I mean, there's just so many of these. Amazon Fire with its, you know, voice interaction. When was that, Kara? 2014. He can change his mind. I'm fine with it. That was literally the before times. The before times. I mean, yeah. Big acquisitions. So talk about the acquisitions.

$10.5 billion market cap. Netflix is just over $80 billion now since it's been hit. It has $6 billion of cash on hand. The price target is low for Netflix. So what do you think? I think it makes a lot of sense. And the thing we didn't mention that Netflix would get if it acquired Roku is they would get hundreds, if not thousands, of relationships with advertisers. Yeah, that's it. And an advertising engine.

It's a big business. I personally think that Netflix shouldn't be in the business of advertising. advertising, but if it was going to create a different brand or a sub-brand or a tiered offering with advertising, they have their advertising. I mean, look at what we do. The reason you're starting a new podcast, I have PropG, and one of the reasons we work with Vox is Vox has relationships and a well-oiled advertising machine, monetization machine. Netflix doesn't have that. They don't know who buys media at Procter & Gamble. And all of a sudden when they show up, Roku can show up and go, hey, how'd you like to reach people watching Euphoria this Thursday's drop?

It's good for Roku too. Ad buyers for over-the-top devices could be, have had problems with this, that one study found that streaming devices like rohu continue playing even after you just switched off their tvs serving ads to an empty house so this you know they this would give them help in that regard um given you don't know whether they've turned them off but netflix has a lot of content to put these ads against so i spoke to the roku um i did in all hands with roku i think about two three months ago and someone in the audience, you got to like the culture. The culture is clearly very open. Someone said, what do you think happens to our stock price? And the stock price was already off like two-thirds.

And I said, I think there's a floor on your stock because you'd make a great acquisition for Disney or Netflix that don't have vertical distribution. And are huge content companies and the only ones that really don't have any sort of vertical distribution. But I think this is a marriage. I mean, I think the story's got out a little bit in front of themselves. It's a rumor right now. I don't think anyone's announced anything. It's weird that they've stopped trading. Yeah.

Where is Warner or Disney in this? Or, you know, could they come in here? I think the folks at Disney and the investment banks that represent them have said, okay, if this is true, we should sharpen our pencils. And no one likes to get into a bidding war. But I think this makes as much sense for Disney as Netflix. And Netflix— What about Warner? Warner doesn't have the money.

Yeah. Warner can't— Did you know? I mean, Warner's already got an enormous merger thing to digest. And I think they've got to digest this meal before figuring out another big transaction. I just don't think they can do it. But Disney's got- Disney's coming in hot with a lot of movies this year too, this summer. That's right. And vertical distribution, Rook who's built in just an incredible business.

I use it all the time. You like Roku? Yeah, I use Apple TV sometimes, but I find it harder to use. I never thought Apple was very good on software, whether it's QuickTime. Anything they do is very hard to figure out. And Roku is real easy. I use Apple. I use Amazon's Fire Stick sometimes, but not that much.

But I often access all these things either through Xfinity or Apple or Roku. But Roku is the easiest one to use. I have to say. I mean, that's at the end of the day. As I said, the new technology is design and UI. And your ability to create a visual language that feels instinctual is kind of the new. I think that's, you know, when you're in a VC pitch meeting, the VCs will say, who's the tech guy or gal? I think pretty soon they're going to

say, who's the UI guy or gal? I think that's the genius of Snap. I think it's the genius of Airbnb. It just feels intuitive. Agrees. And also one of the things is when you go to Apple or Xfinity, there's so much other stuff there. It's like, what? Like Xfinity, I suppose I would, I would rank Roku one, Xfinity two and Apple. I just, there's suddenly there's iTunes there. There's like, there's a lot going on. Steve, interestingly, I was just reminded, I had a dinner with Walter Isaacson recently, and we were talking about the idea of Steve wanting to fix TV at the end of his life. That's what he talked about in an interview with me just before

he died, talked to Walter about it. And one of the things he would have done is he would have made a great TV interface finding, and all the content would have been on there. I just feel like he would have solved that problem. But Apple has not done that. I think the thing that's missing, or the innovation around TV in terms of interface, is voice. And that is, I find I don't watch live TV anymore. I wanted to watch live TV anymore. I wanted to watch the hearings.

I've pretty much given up on live TV because I now get it through, I think, Hulu. And Hulu only says, all right, you're not at home. I mean, I'm at home. I'm never at home. And so I have to figure out a new login or if I want to pay more money. And I've just given up on it. And I find what Spotify did, putting everything sortable and easy on one button, TV just, I think streaming is just a shit show of passwords.

People have tried. There's been lots of companies. The guy who runs Yahoo now, Jim Lanzone, had one, if you remember. They all have tried, and I forget the names of all of them. In any case, it's a good, we like this match, and we hope it happens, because it'll be good for Netflix, it'll be good for Netflix. It'll be good for Roku. We'll see if Disney tries to spoil the party. What do you think? What's your prediction there?

I don't know. I mean, right now, it's still early days. It's not even—I wouldn't be surprised. What's interesting is I don't think Netflix came out and discredited the rumor. And if there was no truth to it, I think they would have come out and said, this is pure rumor. I think they've been oddly silent around this, which probably they are in discussions i believe they're doing it and guess what's next week what's that the big advertising festival con lion i'm gonna be there in france oh you're going to the creativity festival yeah guess who i'm interviewing the ceo

ted sarand i'm interviewing ted sarandos well good for you i don't know he hasn't told me anything yeah but there you go i've been there a lot. Go to, well, anyways, I'll give you some tips. All right. Okay, good. I've been there several times. I always end up on a Bob Pittman yacht with, like, very attractive people. And I'm like, get me the fuck off this yacht, essentially. What?

Anyway. I'm trying to get on that yacht. No, I don't like it. I don't drink. I don't like, woohoo. I don't like the pulsing music. I just am like, let me go to my hotel room and watch TV. Anyway, Scott,

let's go on a quick break. When we come back, it's Antitrust Summer. We'll speak with a friend of Pivot, also David Gellis, about the legacy of GE's Jack Welch. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?

For the longest time, we'd have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists, and they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And

so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim. And we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at

risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash Zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Uncertainty. Self-doubt. Stressing about not knowing where to start. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Word art. Sorry, live laugh lovers. In.

Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Scott, we're back. This could be antitrust summer if a coalition of business and activist groups have their way. Fight for the Future's Evan Greer actually declared this, quote, wet hot antitrust summer. More than 120 organizations, including Yelp, Spotify and EFF, are pushing the Senate to pass two antitrust bills. The new campaign that looks like an ad for a summer festival says the groups say that, quote, big tech giants are violating our rights and undermining our democracy. Well, that's pretty stark. The Senate could vote on the bills this month. There's a lot of back and forth. I've heard a lot of real criticism from tech saying it's written in a way

that's really problematic. And the bill's sponsors say they have the votes, though, to pass it into law. Amy Klobuchar is involved, a whole bunch of people. It's safe to say you can leave the sunscreen at home for this one. So what think you? I think this is overdue. I think the notion that you can aggregate all the traffic as a platform and then start competing with your customers. You got to admire that Google's been able to pull it off. Another speaking gig I did, I was speaking to a platform. And then one of the booking engines said, you know, what happens to us? And we're so dependent upon the platform.

I'm like, over time? I mean, if you type in airfare hotel, Google has decided they want to be in that business. And the thing is, they're not as good at it as Kayak or Booking.com. But eventually, they'll get there. They're not bad. Eventually, they'll get there. And when Apple can track all the data and how much people are paying for Spotify or for Amazon Music and says, you know, we can be in this business and start managing their own, that's what it comes down to. Should you be able to advantage your own business when you're the platform?

Let me go into the two acts. One is the American Innovation and Choice Act prevents tech giants from favoring their own products and services, for example, self-preference. Also has some implications about interoperability. The second one, the Open Markets Act, allows developers to use outside payment processors. That's been a big deal. That's aimed at Apple and others. Blocks platforms from enforcing preferential pricing rules. Blocks platform owners from using third-party data to compete with apps on their platform.

Bars platforms of a certain size, by the way, from ranking their own apps ahead of competitors. Let me just say, the pushback from tech is that that like, look, TikTok doesn't have to do this. Why do like, it's unfair to certain companies over others. And they all mentioned TikTok, you know, in terms of not being subject to these things and that it's not equal. And there's a bunch of other things that they think is going to be the unintended consequences. That's their favorite word lately. So I'm just saying their point of view. And there's some things that they think is going to be the unintended consequences. That's their favorite word lately. So I'm just saying their point of view. And there's some of it.

They're going to have to change some things in the bills. But it will affect, it could affect the big ones, but not, say, a Netflix, Spotify, gaming companies and things like that. That would be good for them, presumably. What do you imagine here? This is that it will pass, that there finally will be a version of this that's not necessarily as watered down as people had worried about? Yeah, something's going to happen here. I think Senator Klobuchar is this rare breed of leader who has respect and cooperation and a certain level of civility to get things done. And I think, I don't know if it's Grassley's that co-sponsored, she's gotten-

There's a bunch. There's a bunch on all these. It's got a lot of Republican- Something's going to happen. The problem is that the lobbyists will come in and say, hey, we're here to help shape and craft this thing. And what you worry about is you end up with GDPR that just ends up advantaging or really damaging or inhibiting small and medium-sized media companies instead of the companies it was supposed to put a collar on. So there are ways to protect against that in these bills. But one of the things that

I think they are correct in that someone like a TikTok can just do whatever it wants versus these guys. It's a fair point. And I think it's a fair point. And how do you address that? How is that addressed?

And then some of the things around privacy, some things a lot to say. They always say they have to shut down certain things. They're not going to be able to do certain things. And it's not as simple as all that. Of course, these are companies that have been advantaged for so long that they don't like the advantage of being taken away. Yeah. Have you heard any?

I mean, have you talked to anyone there? I did. It was a lot of – I talked to people at YouTube. They're quite upset about it. I talked to Klobuchar at an event about it. I think the question is, can they pass anything? There's also the Transparency Act around academic research, which is sort of moving slowly. They had some hearings on it.

Casey Newton wrote a lot of really cool things about it, like good analysis of it. But are any of these going to pass? The transparency thing with academic research, I think, is very important, and how they do it. It seemed to be a pretty good situation. So, we'll see. We'll see where it goes. But one of the things that is in the Senate, the bipartisan group of senators reached a deal on gun safety over the weekend, although it's still not a bill. It passed into law, which they've got to write. The agreement would increase background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, fund, increase, but the thing is fund state grants for red flag laws, encouraging them to do so, provide funding for mental health and school safety programs. That seems good.

The deal, it's the minimum they can do here. The deal is already high profile supporters, including President Biden, who said, it's not everything I want, but it's a move forward. Chuck Schumer and 20 senators from both sides of the aisles. It's in word only. It hasn't been written down as a bill. And Mitch McConnell has not signaled that he's on board. Maybe he's hoping everyone will forget what happened in Ivalde. What do you think?

Some of it's not what everybody would like, but it's something. What thinks you? Yeah, look, at the end of the day, it's a start. And it just, it shows that we can, in fact, pass gun legislation. And so, you know, if I'm, if I have to raise my hand, I vote for it. There's a lot here that kind of like, I don't know, bothers me. I was asked to go on television and I agreed to talk about the connection between young men and aren't attaching and gun violence. And I said, I canceled last minute. I'm like, I'm worried I'm going to end

up being a loop on Tucker Carlson saying this is a mental health issue. Because here's the reality, violence in the US, 4% of it is committed by people who are mentally ill. And this yet again, I mean, more money for mental health, yeah. But the reason why you want to provide mental health is for a lot of reasons, including the notion that someone might kill themselves. So great, funding for mental health, fine. But I'm worried it's being weaponized as a distraction from the real problem here. And that is the best gun regulation we could have. The best gun regulation in the world is a 25th birthday. And what I would have liked to have seen is-

So age, not mental illness. Age is what you're talking about. Oh, 100%. It's age. And it's, okay, fine. We distract people by saying, and we do need more mental health counseling, but it's for a series of other things.

And the thing I don't like is that we fall into this trap of profiling young men that if they're loners and not very socially active, that for some reason they're more prone to pick up an AR-15. And mentally ill people are more likely to be the subjects and the victims of violence, not the perpetrators of violence. So, money for mental health is fine, but under the auspices of thinking this is going to solve mass shooting, and it's been watered down so much. It's loneliness. It's loneliness and isolation is not necessarily mental health, but it's a way people think. And then who gets to, like you said, you're not going to see a soccer mom running into

a school doing this. If you look at the mass shooters, they tend to be young, they tend to be male, they tend to be aggrieved, they're hugely upset about what they feel is social status, they feel aggrieved, they feel entitled, they feel rejected by women. And guess what? I hate to say that. If you started saying we're going to profile these people, you're going to have 2 million young men. That describes 50% of all men at some point their junior year in high school. So, the notion that these, that's part of growing up and the notion that that means they're going to pick up a gun is just not. What they're not passing is that people under 21 can't get these guns. And that's, they refuse to do that. That's very disappointing.

Yeah, it is. That's very disappointing. Age gating here. Age gating is, it's kind of my Yeah, it is. That's very disappointing. Age gating here. Age gating is kind of my new go-to around social media and guns. Best regulation against guns is the 25th birthday. Full stop. Yeah.

I don't think 20. Forget it. They're not going to go to 21. Yeah, I agree. So we'll see where it goes. These things have a way of petering out as people move on to the next big thing. What do you think?

Do you think it's going to pass, Cara? Do you think we're going to have it? They're going to pass something. I just think it's a lot of it. out as people become, move on to the next big thing. What do you think? Do you think it's going to pass, Kara? Do you think we're going to have it? They're going to pass something. I just think it's a lot of, we suggest that you do this. You know, we suggest you do red flag laws. I mean, mandating is my feeling on some of these things. They should have federal background checks, period, done. Kids under 21 can't buy, and I say kids, should not buy these kind of weapons.

We have it for other stuff guns and everything else we have some guns you can't buy until you're 21 so I would imagine putting especially these

you know I would like not to be able to buy these at all but those these particular guns weapons of war but that one's just a non-starter

I think and the mental health stuff should not be aimed at necessarily mental health but how to bring how to de-isolate young men, particularly from this society. For a host of reasons. Yeah.

But, I mean, let me, so, let me come out of the closet as one, as someone who considers themselves a liberal and warmly embraces that term. I think it's a positive, not a negative. I'm sick of conservatives bragging about trying to out-conservative they are and all liberals and progressives running from that term. I'm a proud liberal. And two, I would 100% like to see the Second Amendment repealed. And then we have an honest conversation around sane gun laws and gun safety. The notion somehow that liberals and the left have fallen into this notion that we have to preserve just as Twitter is a national treasure, no, it's not. And you know what? The Second Amendment can absolutely be repealed.

It's totally outdated. It ends up queering every conversation where we say, oh, but the Second Amendment. Well, we've repealed other amendments. Yeah, it does say well-regulated. It does say well-regulated. It's right in there. It's right in there.

Regulated means regulated. Look, I don't think it's going to be repealed. No, I agree with you. I agree with you. I think it could be well-regulated. It's right in there. It's right in there. Regulated means regulated. Look, I don't think it's going to be repealed. No, I agree with you. I agree with you. I think it could be well regulated. I'm just so sick of Democrats. Like, I believe in the Second Amendment. Well, do you really? I know. They kind of, they see the polling data. Like, you know what I mean? Start changing minds. Anyway. Well, yes, exactly. That is really the point.

Now I'm living in my fantasy sentient land. Yes, I see that. You and your computer can talk about that. Can I ask your advice on something? Because it's an opportunity to talk about me. Sure. I have my book coming out I think around Labor Day. You have another book? I have a book coming out. Daddy Likes to Write. I see that.

What is it called? It's a slim novel of what? Of love and betrayal? I've been depressed lately, which means it's going to be good. I see that. I can write when I'm down. Anyways. Okay. It's called Adrift America in 100 Charts. As you can imagine, it's not a message of hope.

No. God. I'm going to get my – send the plane stat and I will come find you. Go ahead. Okay. Good. Scramble the jets. I have less reason to be upset and depressed than anyone else.

First, let's start there. I agree. But that's not going to stop me. I got to go on my book promotions tour and all that stuff. Would you go on Tucker Carlson to promote your book? Or should I go on Tucker Carlson to promote my book? And I'll tell you, they asked me, and this is what I said. I'll tell you what I said after.

Wow. I would pick another Fox News host. I would not go on Fox, but not him because he'll twist everything you do. Aren't we adrift in America, Scott? I completely agree with you and it's because of him. So you're saying it's about mental illness and that the election was stolen. That's correct. Yeah, exactly.

I think he'll just – he's such a constant manipulative chode that he can't do anything but that. Huge audience. I know that. I know that. But it's not that huge. You know, I think you should – His audience is big i understand but you could you could pick there's other fox news hosts you could do um brett bear i think but i think you should go on the channel just not on that show sorry it's just so you landed on the same place i did i said said no. I don't like, I feel that Tucker Carlson especially,

I mean, this bullshit around Sheryl Sandberg under investigation for misappropriation of company resources. Have you noticed that it's the Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox? These coordinated attacks by Murdoch-owned properties after emerging progressive voices, it's happened to my friend Kara Swisher.

It's happened to my friend Stephanie Ruhl. I'm just not down with it. And Tucker is sort of the lead dog on this. So I ended up at the same place as you. I said, I think it's important to be engaged with conservative viewers. And I'm a huge fan of Neil Cavuto. Neil is great. And so I said, reach out and see if Neil will have me.

It's Steve Hilton. He has a Sunday, I think it's a Sunday show. I think Steve is very smart. Yeah. I think. They have several smart. There's a lot of shows there that you could.

Neil is my man. I'm a huge fan of Neil Cavuto. Neil is great. And he would get it. He would certainly. Anyways. Yeah. Don't go on Tucker Carlson.

Anyway. Adrift, American 100 charts. Adrift. Oh, I could just see it. Oh God, he'd exhaust me. Don't go on Tucker Carlson. Anyway. Adrift. American 100 charts. Oh, I could just see it. Oh, God. He'd exhaust me. And you'd be mad. And then you'd be depressed more.

All right. So now let's bring on our friend of Pivot. David Gellis is a reporter and columnist for The New York Times. He's also the author of a new book about the former CEO of GE called The Man Who Broke Capitalism, How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America. Wow. Okay. And how to undo his legacy.

Welcome, David Gellis. Thanks so much. Hi. I saw you in person recently, and this title of this book is something else. Like, wow, that's something else. So why don't you start to talk about it, the legend of Jack Welch. There's a legend of Jack Welch, and then there's the reality of Jack Welch. He was a tough kid from Boston suburb, rose through the ranks with his fierce management style and became one of the most important CEOs in America and possibly the world for a long time.

So talk about the myth versus the reality. Well, the myth of Jack Welch was maybe best summarized by Fortune magazine, which at the end of his career crowned him manager of the century, you know, bestowing this ultimate capitalist honorific on him, essentially suggesting that everything he had done along the way for 20 years running GE was the right thing to do. He was the guy, they seem to say. But we need only look to the beginning of his career when other people were calling him Neutron Jack to understand that there was a much darker side to this story. Right, right. And so talk a little bit about that because he, you know, this management style, which everyone revered, explain what his management style was. It was the, oh, they have all kinds of names for it, and I'm blanking. There was Six Sigma. There was the vitality curve, right? There's all- Neutron Jack. Neutron Jack. But overriding all of that was this alpha male, I would argue, toxic, fear-based, top-down, hierarchical leadership, which of course is still familiar to so many of us today who have worked at any company, because it became the norm. But we can talk about his management style, which was very aggressive. He would argue even with people who agreed with him. But more important than that,

I believe, are the tactics he used to make GE such an influential, and we got to add, give him credit where it's due, the most valuable company in the world. And I look beyond the style to the substance and the way he treated his employees, his workers, not just the way he interacted with his colleagues, but what was the actual effect on the ground. And that Neutron Jack title gives you a clue. He was merciless. He was the downsizer in chief, and he set the precedent for the rest of corporate America to do the same sort of thing. First off, David, congratulations on writing a book while still in high school. How old are you? I think I'm 42. I think I'm 42. Okay, 42 going on 18. What's your secret? Oh my God. Do not ask about his skin regimen. Can you move to the book, please? Move

along. Meditation. Meditation. That was my first book. I was a meditator. You guys know this. Meditation. There you go. Meditation. So my sense of GE is every time we peel the onion back from his tenure, it begins to get closer and closer to fraud.

That if you look at his gymnastics and the way they reported numbers and the way they leveraged the complexity of the tax code. And then Jeff Emelt basically had a decade of unwinding all this bullshit and then disclosing all the actual reality. I don't know if that's fair, but it seems like you look back on this era and there was not only behavior that wouldn't survive the tests today, which is fine. And he did, he had some really interesting things. We want to be one or two, but this doesn't, a lot of it now feel like, okay, this was, this, this shit was like bordered on, on fraud, quite frankly. And I want to know who else said that almost immediately after Welch

retired was Bill Gross. And Bill Gross is a complicated guy we know, but he was also a pretty savvy investor. And it was right then at the moment after Welch retired that he said, you know what? All of this absolutely relentless earnings management, which has delivered meet or beat quarters for something like 80 quarters in a row, like that's not possible. It's not possible. Unless you can control consumers. And so he called it then, but want to know what had not become reality at that point was Sarbanes-Oxley.

And so this, we have to remember in the 80s and 90s, companies just had, they didn't have to disclose as much. This was an era of far lesser corporate transparency than the one we live in today. And you're darn right. We're never going to know all the details. But it seems clear now, and it seemed clear to Bill Gross, even in 2002, that something unusual was happening inside the books at GE.

So talk a little bit about how that unfolded, because Immelt sort of was left carrying the bag of shit. And of course, there were criticisms of his tenure also, but a lot of it had to do with he didn't keep up the facade, correct? And we should note, Cara, that you were quoting Jeff Immelt there. That's how he described GE with a little hindsight when he understood exactly what kind of shape this company was in after he inherited it from Welch. Now, there's a few different ways to look at Immelt's 16-year tenure. You can give him credit for some of the things he did, which was trying to reshore

some of the jobs that Jack offshored. You can give him credit for building up things like the wind business and the medical business. But you got to note in the same breath that he let GE Capital get even bigger. He was the one that bought WMC, one of the nation's biggest provider of subprime mortgages in 2005. And when I interviewed him out in the reporting for this book, he said it was so seductive. Those were his terms, right? It was impossible not to just keep going one more quarter, one more meet or beat. And you do whatever you could to make those numbers work. So in the next few years, GE is splitting into three companies, aviation, healthcare, and energy.

It hasn't made appliances or light bulbs in years, sold that off. How much of that Jack Welch is doing and how much is just a business environment in the 21st century that the idea that this has to now be unwound? Because this massive, the idea of a massive corporation that does everything and controls everything and controls politics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, you guys both know the history of business. And we do go through these waves of where conglomerates in vogue, and then they're not in vogue. And investors really want specialized companies. We seem to be in one of those specialized eras, have been for the last 10 years. We've seen this in all the deal making. But listen, we can't know the counterfactual, right? The counterfactual I always

imagine is what if in the early 80s, instead of going full neutron Jack and saying to hell with American manufacturing, Welch had said, we're going to win American manufacturing. We're going to invest in manufacturing. And we can't know the answers to those questions. So to what extent was this the inevitable result of Jack? Listen, we don't know what it would have looked like if he had invested in R&D all those years. We don't know what it looked like if Immelt had made better deals during his 16 years. So I don't want to dispute the fact that we live in a different age and conglomerates come and go. But I think it's clear that neither Welch nor Immelt set this company up for success as a combined entity in this day and age. Are there any companies out there right now that smell like GE 20 years ago?

It was such a unique set of circumstances. But listen, in the book, I point to companies where not only some in which the CEOs learned at Jack's knee and are still using him. Say who they are. because I wrote this corner office column at the New York Times. I interviewed CEOs for years and years. His name kept coming up. That just bugged me. It was weird. Like, why is this guy living rent-free in the minds of CEOs?

That just bugged me. Then I wrote the Boeing story. And I was, for a year, was one of the reporters at the time that dug into Boeing. What the hell had happened at that company to produce such a badly designed plane? We got the engineering answer quickly. We know that story. The deeper cultural answer and the more important story was Jack Welch. Over 25 years, three of his proteges, starting with Harry Stonecipher in 1997, then Jim McNerney in 2005, and Dave Calhoun today. Dave Calhoun. Dave Calhoun today. All three of these men had studied at Jack's knee at GE. And they

deliberately, explicitly, when I could talk to them about it, they would tell me they were trying to make the company just like Jack ran it at GE. And that was the wake up call to me. I was like, oh my gosh, this guy isn't just like a myth. He's still shaping the way companies behave today. So you can look at Boeing and you can look at companies like Kraft Heinz, where you got these Brazilian private equity billionaires behind it. And when you read all their books and read the interviews they've done over the year,

and they are asked, how do you run your companies? They say, we ran it like Jack ran GE. And now go tell me what kind of years Kraft Heinz has been. Scott, you mentioned, you know, like, it looks a little fishy. The SEC has come down on Kraft Heinz time and again over the last few years, because the numbers were fishy. So, but today's tech giants like Apple and Google are sort of trying to get into that position. They want to be in music, appliances, you know, everything, AR, aviation, healthcare, entertainment. Why couldn't GE

capitalize into that diversity? Like, where does that go now? Who is the GE of this era? Is it these tech companies that are trying to diversify in this rather significant way? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a fun parallel and sort of compare and contrast exercise we can do. It's important to remember the breadth of GE's diversity is, I would argue, quite unlike a media or tech company that is owning a bunch of the different media and tech appliances. They're adjacent. They're adjacent. Right.

Whereas GE was doing everything from subprime mortgages to aircraft engines. It's hard to point to a company, I think today, except you could argue maybe Berkshire Hathaway, which, of course, is a very different model. you know, common ownership, very little interoperability, common operations. It's hard to point to a company that has that sort of ambition to be so many things to so many people today. What can you say about the man or what surprised you about Jack Welch as, you know, a dad, a family man, a friend, a friend, as a citizen? I'll answer the question, but I want to note that I didn't go deep into his personal life.

I got into it a bit, but there's a whole lot more that I left off the page. And that's because this book to me is ultimately a book about a system, not a man. But as a man, here's what we can say. In the office, he was crude, he was crass, he was a bully, he terrorized people for lots of his career. I did not honestly just go into him as a family man. There's a famous episode shortly after he retires when he leaves his wife of many years, marries the woman who would be his wife until the end of his life. But more interesting to me than that is the way in which he tries to recast himself as this emotionally intelligent sort of CEO advisor type in retirement and tries to soften the edges because I think he understood. That was his second wife. That was a lot about his second wife too. She was

very savvy to his, as I recall, to his imagery. Yeah, I think he understood how history would ultimately judge him and all of this sort of, you know, wearing a sweater and talking about literally podcasts and audio books about emotional intelligence. Well, he started a business

school. And even more sort of mind melting is the fact that then he would go on to say things like shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world and take to LinkedIn and start write articles about why it's not good to stack rank, which is something he started. Yeah, yeah, of course. Well, that, you know, Andrew Carnegie gave us libraries. But one of the things I'm curious, you say broke capitalism, gutted the heartland and crushed the soul of corporate. Crushed the soul of corporate.

I like all these very aggressive verbs. You wrote that he embraced deregulation, union busting, outsourcing. Isn't that actually what capitalism is under a Jack Welch mentality of the world? Or perhaps not, because it's changed so much. There's shareholder capitalism. There's ESG. There's all kinds of things. But isn't that really what capitalism is? Was he not embracing? How did he break it? Well, you said the critic, you modified the question initially in a critical way. You said under the Jack Welch vision, and that's exactly

right. But it wasn't, and this is the point I tried to make in the book, it wasn't like this for the 35 years or so before he came on the scene. If you go back, which I did, and read the annual reports of GE in the 50s, and go back andately spelled out how they believe businesses should strike a balance with society. And it was a much more holistic vision. They talked about making a return. Yes, they were not blind to the necessity to make a profit, but they went on to say they had a responsibility, their work, to their employees, to their employees' families, to communities, to the government even. Gee, he bragged about how much it paid in taxes. Yeah, Jack was like, fuck that. Right, right. So it changed, right? And it changed first because there was sort of an

intellectual revolution that was percolating when Jack came on the scene. Friedman had written his essay in the New York Times Magazine 10 years earlier, but then he came along and he actually did it. He put this ideal into action, and then all the rest of corporate America got in line. And that's the world we still live in today. Yeah, we don't slap Mount Mitten Street around nearly enough. Oh, we should. We should. We should.pping. Next one. I have just one more question. How do you look at today when they're trying to, you know, there's a lot of people trying to break down ESG or shareholder capitalism. Obviously, Larry Fink likes it.

Elon Musk hates it. Elon Musk is kind of does that. Jeff Bezos is trying to break unions at his stuff. There's all kinds of people trying to do different things. Where do you find corporate? What is the soul of corporate America now, if there is one that you could pick? Yeah, there is something changing in the water, in the zeitgeist. You guys have been covering this, so have I, for the last 10 years, right? There's something shifted after the financial crisis,

where I think CEOs, and it was Occupy Wall Street, it was a whole bunch of things that led us to this moment where finally CEOs were having some modicum of self-reflection and saying, like, wait, are we really doing the right thing? We tell ourselves we are, but are we actually? And I think it was very hard for a lot of them to say, like, yeah, everything's going okay. Obviously not.

So thus enters the CSR and the ESG. Thus enters the arrival of stakeholder capitalism. In 2019, we have the business roundtable proclaiming the new purpose of a corporation is to look beyond the bottom line and do all these things. Yeah, I had a good laugh at that one. Laugh, laugh, laugh. Right. It's funnier. Right.

Show me the goods, people. And it's real hard to point to where big companies have fundamentally changed. But they have been pulled into social issues. Look at Disney in Florida and stuff like that. How is that? Like every minute of the day, they've got another political issue they have to grapple with in Texas or Florida or wherever. Yeah. I mean, I've been covering this change for five years.

They hate it, right? They do not want to be doing this. Some of them might have like, you know, a little angel on their shoulder saying it's the right thing to do, but by and large, they would love to not have to deal with that. I think there's a difference though, between issues like, are you going to take a stand on a Texas abortion law? And are you going to give your people a raise? Because it's that second one, right? Are you taking good care of your people? That is the one that has just been neglected for 40 years now. If the minimum wage had kept pace just with inflation for the last 40 years, it would be over $25 an hour today. And so like, listen, we can talk about

all the woke capitalism stuff and all the crazy social and political issues that companies get dragged into. I'm much more interested in making CEOs have a frank accounting of how they treat their people, how they treat their communities, and what kind of impact the wealth they create, all these billions and trillions of dollars in profits. What kind of impact is that actually having on the country that we all have to live in? David, what CEOs do you admire? Oh, that's a hard question to ask, Scott. Good one. Listen, I cite a few in the book. Paul Pullman, who was CEO of Unilever for many years, I think did an admirable job of, first thing he did, he said, I'm stopping quarterly guidance, right? And just there, he was changing the incentives. He said, that's not what I'm going to let you measure by. And I think that's such a critical first step. Paul then went on to have a good

10-year run and do a lot of pretty admirable things, including late in his tenure as CEO, rebuffing a takeover attempt by Kraft Heinz because he knew exactly what those self-professed Jack Welch protégés were going to do to his company, and he fended them off. I think Dan Shulman is doing pretty good work at PayPal in some ways. He has this financial wellness program for his employees where he realized, and this is this critical insight that CEOs, I love it when they have it, he realized that the lowest paid people in his organization were not really benefiting from the wealth PayPal created. They were having to choose between gas money and textbooks for their kids, right? And they were

like, how is that possible for a PayPal employee to be like that? But these were call center employees in Phoenix or wherever. And so he raised their wages. He gave them stock. He gave them a financial literacy program so they could learn how to save and invest real well. But critically, he cut their healthcare costs, out-of-pocket healthcare costs by something like 60%. And guess what? It costs PayPal a little money, but it's nothing. And guess what? KPI scores went up. Net promoter scores went up. People were happier. Retrition went down. There's loyalty and consumers are happier. So it might cost a little money in the short term, yes. But in the long term, CEOs like Shulman, like Pullman, who can actually realize there's some merit to doing this in the long run, I think they're the

winners. Can I ask you one more quick question? The departure of Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook. Any thoughts? Silence. Silence. I mean, where do you begin, right? Like, where do you begin? Positive and negative. Give me one thing she did you think was the correct thing, one thing, wow, that was a problem. I would say they're two sides of the same coin. And it's the degree to which she turned Facebook into an absolutely advertising powerhouse, right?

The positive and negative sides of that coin are going to be her legacy. And we're all reckoning with them, right? You cannot dispute the business results. One of, some people would argue, the all-time great business success stories. Just look at the sheer revenue trajectory. Astonishing. Few have ever accomplished that. But look what it did to Facebook.

And look at how the reliance on advertising changed the algorithm. And what that changed the algorithm over the years did to our society. Yep. There it is, right? It's the same metric. And like you hold that diamond up and you look at it and it tells all sorts of stories. That is absolutely true. Anyway, David Gellis is a wonderful writer for the New York Times, but he's written a

book about Jack Welch who can, let's pull down that statue. And he does. It's called The Man Who Broke Capitalism. It's out now. Thank you, David Gellis. Thank you, guys. Thanks, David. Best of luck in your senior year.

All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply.

Details at Fizz.ca. Okay, Scott, let's hear some predictions. Any predictions around whatever you want to predict around? Well, I think Roku's in play, and I think there's going to be – it's interesting, though. It's actually down. I mean, everything's down today. We're recording on Monday, but it's down 5% or 6%. But at a $10 billion market cap, its distribution, what you referenced around its user interface, its relationship with advertisers.

We should buy it. It has carved out. No, I'm kidding. You always say that. Some day. It's carved out a really formidable positioning. I think it's the number one hardware streaming device ahead of Amazon. Sony can compete with the best of them.

The interesting thing is, so Netflix and Disney are the obvious suitors, but the thing, the downside to a Netflix, one of the reasons for Roku's success is it's seen as Switzerland because it doesn't produce its own content. I mean, it bought some content. Well, no, it's starting to. It's starting to. Yeah, but Disney and Amazon and Apple aren't threatened by it. If Netflix owned Roku, I wonder if Roku would still be distributing Disney and Apple content or whatever content. So you might see other players come in here.

I don't know if it's a Comcast. Oh, Comcast, that's smart. But at $10 billion, this company having so much fantastic data, so much vertical distribution, such rich advertiser relationships. It just strikes me that a lot of people— Yeah, calling Brian Roberts. Ring, ring. Ring, ring. Yeah, it feels like—so my prediction is Roku and the dinner bell has rung and will not be unrung. And I think you're going to see a variety of potential suitors come in here. It might even be a private equity firm might even want to take it private.

No, it's got to be attached to something. I. No, it's got to be attached to something. I got to think it's got to be attached to something. Anyway, we'll see. That's a very good prediction. That's an excellent prediction. It's very good. I'll do a short one. So the SEC is investigating this back deal between Trump and Digital World Acquisition Corp to see if the two negotiated before DUAC went public.

Oh, God. She's so tall. I don't think anything's going to happen. I don't think. It's like the Musk thing. Slap on the wrist, slap on the wrist kind of thing. No, we can't decide. He encouraged insurrection and sedition, and we're still unsure on that.

We're still not entirely sure what happened there. Although I did run into someone from the SEC, and they all listen to this show, and they're like, we are watching, Kara. And I'm like, yeah, stop watching and start doing. Yeah, start doing. Anyway, we want watching, Kara. And I'm like, yeah, stop watching and start doing. Yeah, start doing. Anyway, we want your dating questions. By the way, speaking of what's going to happen in this show, that should be interesting. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit your question for us or call 855-51-PIVOT. The link is also in our show notes. We're going to be doing a special dating show, which is possibly disastrous for our careers, but we'll see. Okay, Scott, that's it for the show.

We'll be back on Friday for more. Can you read us out? Today's show is produced by Lara Naim and Evan Engel and Taylor Griffin, Ernie Andretat, engineer of this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Neil Saverio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown

of all things tech and business. Kara, have a great week. You too, and scramble the jets. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Kara, have a great week. You too. And scramble the jets. We'll be right down there with all the children. There you go.