Yet Another Value Podcast - John Malone's Memoirs: Born to be Wired book club

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

In this episode of Yet Another Value Podcast, host Andrew Walker is joined by Byrne Hobart from The Diff for the monthly book club. They discuss Born to Be Wired, the newly released memoir of John Malone. The conversation explores Malone’s strategic mastery, his historical and modern media investments, thoughts on taxation, and media regulation. Andrew and Byrne also reflect on Liberty’s recent underperformance, Malone’s approach to succession, and the evolving media landscape. They close with a playful debate on the future of CNN, potential Saudi buyouts, and what book to read next. Listeners interested in media, cable, and investing will enjoy this deep exploration of Malone's career and legacy._______________________________________________________[00:00:00] Intro to book and guest[00:02:52] Malone fit for 1980s market[00:04:49] AT&T’s dividend inefficiency analysis[00:08:49] Malone’s era-optimized strategies explained[00:13:17] Liberty Media’s big split strategy[00:16:32] Malone’s regulation views criticized[00:22:02] C-SPAN’s cable subsidization dynamics[00:24:36] Cable Labs and hostile deals[00:28:01] Media write-offs and strategic bidding[00:34:03] Media titan nostalgia and shifts[00:37:37] Infinite channels end titan era[00:39:04] Greg Maffei’s underwhelming portrayal[00:44:13] AI and regulatory survival urgency[00:45:24] Formula One bullishness and strategy[00:50:13] Liberty Global optimism despite history[00:54:31] Timeless themes in cable media[00:56:18] CNN objectivity vs market demand[01:00:17] Halloween book club next picks[01:02:15] Disclaimer and episode wrap-upLinks:Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.comSee our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

We're about to listen to the Yet Another Value podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Today, it is time for my monthly book club with my friend, Byrne Hobart from The Diff. I have been really looking forward to this one. We read Born to Be Wired, the John Malone memoirs that came out earlier this month, September 2025. It was a fascinating read. I've been a longtime follower of Liberty and Malone, and I just had so many thoughts. I was so excited to hop on the podcast and talk to Burn about that.

we really enjoyed it as always nothing on this podcast investing advice yada yada see the full disclaimer at the end but I think you're really going to enjoy it too it was a really interesting memoir style where you know the first half he does all his history and the second half he kind of lays out what liberty owns right now and his thoughts on him but I had a ton of fun talking to burn about it I think you're going to enjoy it I hope you read it if you haven't you're still going to enjoy this podcast but if you haven't you should probably go buy it if you're into media cable investing I think it's awesome so we're going to get there in one second but first a word from our sponsor this podcast this podcast this podcast is sponsored by Alpha Sense. Look, Alpha Sense has been a longtime sponsor of the podcast. I am a super happy user of the OfficeSense products, everything ranging from their AI platform for investing, but particularly the expert calls that I use on a daily basis to look at companies and see what industry insiders who are doing more than I'm doing, which is just being a dummy and reading the publicly traded filings and reading industry insiders are telling about how business is actually

working on the inside and how they're viewing trends and everything inside it. So it was super a huge fan of the platform. If you're interested, Alpha Sims was kind enough. They just sponsored a free webinar with me and a former at MasterCard where we talk about the future of finance. In particular, we're talking about stable coins and their effect on the overall economy, how they could impact remittances, how they could impact particularly payment networks because he's a former at MasterCard. I think it's a really fascinating interview. I think you're going to, whether you're a generalist or a specialist who focuses on that, I think you're going to learn a lot listening to it. And if you listen to it, I think you're going to, you know, see why I think

expert call networks are kind of the most revolutionary product for investing, for generalists, for specialists for everything to come along in the past 10 to 15 years. So if you're interested, I'll include a link in the show notes to go check out that webinar. But thank you to Alpha Sense for sponsoring this podcast. And now on to the podcast. All right, hello, and welcome to get another value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, it's our monthly book club. So I'm excited to have my co-host, Byrne Hobart. Burn, how's it going? It's going great. going great over here as well before we happen to book club disclaimer remind everyone nothing on this podcast investing advice uh see the full disclaimer at the end we're going to be talking

about i'm so excited to talk about this book today john malone uh one of the people i've studied the most in history he wrote memoirs born to be wired we both read it i'm super excited i can go a thousand which ways but i'll just start with this burn how did you feel about the book what were you thinking about when you were reading it what was i thinking about i i one of the things i was thinking was that Malone was a man built for a particular time period in U.S. capital markets and that from the 80s to, I would say from the three decades starting 1980, he did amazingly well. He was just perfectly suited for that moment, in part because he's able to think in so many different dimensions and he's able to optimize across, you know, tax and optimized for

strategic values sometimes and able to assemble these eclectic mixes of assets, but then because He's under the U.S. tax code. He has to do weird, unnatural things to realize the value of some of those investments. And it was also very perceptive on media. And there are pieces of the book where he's just, it's just not quite his time. Some of them are some of the more recent things. And if you look at a chart of pretty much any of the Liberty Associated Companies over probably the last 10 years, you know, you see some good things.

you see some bad things, you see some difficult times. That was a real stats of the kidneys you just hit me with, right? I know. I mean, yeah, like, I've been burned on some of these names myself. I truly believed in the Liberty Latam thesis for a while. And then I realized that everything I was betting on wasn't happening. And all the risk factors I was thinking about were in fact happening. But like earlier in his life, before all of this was really a possibility, like before we had

the kind of financial markets that really supported his approach, he was the same guy. And Jimmy, one of the most impressive parts of the book is actually a part where nothing happens because he is asked to do a study of AT&T's financials and of their capitalization things. And this is what 1950s, right? I think it's the 60s, but it's around there, yeah, where he says, okay, we should be cutting the dividend, levering up, buying back lots of. of stock. And this is just totally shocking to the AT&T people, but he was just looking at the numbers and he realized that the cheapest, you know, cheapest telecom equipment you could buy is the stuff

that's already on AT&T's balance sheet and that AT&T is a really good business and is not going anywhere. You know, only threat would be U.S. government. And that's the way to do things is buy back a ton of stock. It's very tax efficient. And if the stock is cheap, that's even better. And I think that was just the wrong thing to say at AT&T. They, I think during the Depression, they were kind of famous for having a $9 share dividend. They just never cut. And they're one of the rare companies that was able to just keep paying. Like there were companies where they stayed profitable, but they had to cut the dividend.

AT&T was able to keep that dividend going. And it was just of totemic importance to their shareholder base. And they had lots of retirees who had all their money in bonds and then owned a few shares of AT&T. So they had some kind of moral obligations, maybe to their stockholders, where those obligations did entail them to do some capital inefficient stuff. And actually, I think Buffett, maybe a decade earlier than that had actually written, or maybe it was around that time, had written about AT&T and their dividend being really

inefficient because apparently a lot of AT&T investors would sign up for a dividend reinvestment plan. And Buffett was pointing out that you get your $9 a share, the government gets a piece of it, and then you buy some more shares of AT&T, and AT&T could just buy those for you and you wouldn't be paying the extra taxes on it. So a lot of really smart, like this, it was a great predictor of future success

as both an investor and as a member of the value investing pantheon that if you felt like AT&T's dividend was too high and they should find a different way to return capital to shareholders in the 1950s, you were destined for greatness. You had on a lot of the points I wanted to sit on. And I think one of the funny through themes of this book, I treat it out over the weekend, but it's every decade, Malone has a run in with AT&T or AT&D does something.

And every decade, AT&T makes the absolutely wrong call with acquisitions. I mean, it starts with this when Malone is like literally fresh out of college and says, hey, we should do this. And I remember the chairman pulls him aside and says, some, that was a great presentation. There's no chance in heck, we're going to do it. But if in your life you can get one thing done at AT&T, one thing changed, your career will have been a smashing success, which, oh, you can just feel. an ambitious, smart young person, be like, in my whole life, I get one thing changed at 18T.

But throughout his entire career, it's 18T making the wrong moves and getting their pants pull down. But let me start with the thing you said at the end. We can come back to 18T. There's some of 182. You know, you and I, I believe we talked previously about how John Malone kind of was optimized for the environment he grew up in, right? He kind of comes to power in the early 70s.

Interest rates are high. Taxes are high. and people are obsessed with gap numbers. And he is the one, I thought it was Mario Gobelle. He makes it, but maybe it's him who comes up with EBITA and says, hey, judge us on our cash flow, not our gap numbers. He famously says at a shareholder meeting, somebody asks about gap income, and he says, if you're here for gap income, you're in the wrong meeting. So he optimizes for cash flow, he optimizes for taxes, and he optimizes for leverage. And all of those benefit because taxes are high, interest rates are high.

And industry, you know, cable, it starts out as wires and television. the industry makes a big tech shift and it ends up being the dominant way to do broadband. I was kind of wondering if he had come along today, taxes are generally low, interest rates are generally low. I don't know if his skill set, you know, cable is completely built up. I don't know if his skill set is optimized. Now, maybe he goes and he does AI something and he optimizes core, we use capital structure or something. But how much do you think he's a product of his generation versus the past two decades say,

hey, if it wasn't for these tailwinds he was writing, he doesn't do anything. Well, I think media becomes, media is a really interesting business, and I, I, years ago, articulated just my general theory of success in media companies, because I was writing about BuzzFeed, and I was trying to figure out, okay, why did they do well? And then why did they start doing badly? And the why did they do well is really easy to answer, which is that there were a lot of newspapers and magazines that were producing content. They were basically just translating the idea, translating the print model to the internet.

This is a new way, you know, the ink is cheap. but the ads make you less money, but maybe you can get people to pay to subscribe to things, and you can still show them ads. And BuzzFeed realized there's just, there are these new distribution channels, attention spans are shifting, and that the article is not the ideal unit of content.

It's not the only unit of content anymore, and that essentially every piece of high-quality content needs its own little marketing campaign in order to get attention, as opposed to we're going to send this bundle, you know, it'll be a magazine, it'll have articles by 20 different people, and, you know, at least, there will be at least one article that you're just, you skim, and it's not that interesting to you, and then there will be one that is potentially really, really great. But BuzzFeed, they could do that when they understood the distribution model really well, and there was a lot of content out there

to rehash, rewrite, redistribute, et cetera. And then the New York Times actually had this big internal meeting. They produced a nice paper on this, where they pointed out that there was some article that they had written where BuzzFeed actually got more traffic than the New York Times because BuzzFeed found a way to make the article famous. And so they actually beat the Times. And the Times is like, it's actually a lot harder to write a really deeply reported article on something nobody realizes a news and tell this amazing story that actually shifts people's perceptions. Like, that's the hard part.

Tweeting a link to it is not the hard part. And making sure that there's an SEO-friendly headline so that people who are looking for that article, find the Times version ahead of the BuzzFeed version, also not super challenging, especially because all this stuff is happening in public. Like, BuzzFeed is basically showing you their social media and search strategy every time they post something. So you can copy that really easily. Whereas when the Times, like, you know, New York Times still does these amazing articles.

They have one a couple weeks back where they talked about the business of smuggling drugs into the U.S. And they were actually able to interview guys who get a truck that's loaded with hair. and drive it across the border. And they have photos of this guy, actually, the guy's base is not show, but they have photos showing you, here's where they put it in the vehicle,

and they did a little ride-along and talked about how there's a guard, you know, every so often, and sometimes the guard will say, no, the cops are here this time, just turn around. Like, all that stuff, it's going to be really hard for BuzzFeed to get to the point where they can do that. So Times has this content advantage, and then they can catch up on distribution.

And so there are times when the distribution piece is what matters, and there are times in the content piece is what matters, but a lot of media companies, it's a bundle of both. You know, you are, if you're buying a newspaper, you're buying, you know, the newsroom and the culture and the journalist superstars and the ones who are maybe not superstars, but they know their topic well, and they have good sources and things. And you're also buying trucks and, you know, newsprint and all of this, all of this physical stuff. And if things are usually bundled, you actually have this opportunity to periodically, strategically unbundle them. And that's like the signature deal in Malone's career is TCI had been cobbling together this portfolio of varying amounts of ownership in varying content platforms.

And they had a nice set of these things. And they were also being valued more on a more on a multiple appropriate to just a company that owns these pipes and has quasi. regulated monopoly economics in monetizing them. And he realized these are actually two different things. And the contents, the valuable underprice part. So let's separate that out and put a price tag on it and then merge it back in. And like, you know, you can look at this deal. I feel like if you came at this, you didn't know who Malone was and you didn't have a ton

of respect for him as a capital allocator and things, you could look at this. You could say this is actually a really shady transaction. This guy splits this company up. He takes warrants in one piece. of it he ends up owning a huge chunk of that and then they merge it back together and he gets checked out for those you for those you don't know burn is referring to who haven't read the book or haven't read it burgerner is referring to the about 1991 split uh tci has built 20 percent ownership and basically every cable channel they own he splits that into liberty media

through a famously i mean even in the book he paints himself in a very positive light along this deal even the book he's like oh we got a lot of minutes who are like this is the most complicated transaction I've ever done, but he does it through this really complicated rights offering with warrants. He way over subscribes and he's bragging about how the stock price does great through this. But because, you know, if Byrne and I own 10% of a company, we did this super complicated transaction and we took our ownership from 10 to 40% of the spinoff and then the spinoff worked really well, we could say, hey, great spin off, but we can all say, oh, hey, maybe we cost, you know, the other shareholders 30% because a spinoff should

be like kind of distributing the pie in different ways. But this is what you're referring to. does this crazy, complicated transaction that is kind of how he makes his fortune overall. Let me go back to a point you're making. Let me talk about the unbundling to re-bundling. Obviously, when we're talking to the Liberty Media 90s spin, that's a kind of unbundling transaction. You know, there are a few through themes of the book. One of them is hatred of taxes, hatred of regulation, AT&T's giving his pants pulled down. But towards the end, I think just kind of building off your bundling to unbundling,

you can sense his hatred of big tech, right? multiple times he talks about how regulations towards big tech or lack their offer unfair, which I think is quite funny. Oh, that was the funniest chapter was where he, you know, he takes off his libertarian hat for just one chapter to say, by the way, obviously we should be regulating these big tech companies. And obviously, we need them to be, you know, paying for the bandwidth that they consume and they're just unfairly exploiting us.

You know, the stents of billionaires are just ruthlessly exploiting the helpless deck of billionaire class the if you read this so malone famously a libertarian if you read this it is actually a laugh because he'll he decries regulations like all these barriers all this sort of stuff blah blah blah blah blah and they said but john mccain when john mccain sponsored the uh the a la carte cable channel that would have been a great piece of regulation you're like he's against all regulation except for when it's in his favor right so the mcane this is unbundling cable channels in the mid two He's super for that regulation. Okay, I'm sure a real libertarian on you there.

And then with the tech companies where he's going to go. But the other place with the tech companies, he hits on regulation. But I think it's really interesting for a free markets guy, he just decries, oh, these cable companies, we have spent billions and billions of dollars building out this cable infrastructure that connects the world that connects America to the Internet. And all these Netflix, Facebook, Google, they kind of all go over the pipes. for free and have built these fortunes on it. And I thought it was really interesting.

You know, it's akin to the electricity company decrying, hey, we provide you regulated electricity and XYZ Facebook over there is going off and building an AI data center that's going to make tens of billions of dollars off of our electricity. I just thought it was really interesting that, you know, he really was speaking in his own book, but he just really decried it throughout the book. Yeah, and I find that kind of stuff endearing. Like, it is just, it is a very, very natural human instinct that you, you, when you look at regulations, you don't think about the ones that just don't have any

impact on your life. And the ones that are mostly positive for you, that just feels like that's the natural order of things, like what government wouldn't want to support this. And then the ones that actually actively inconvenience you, you're like, what these people in D.C. have no idea what they're doing. There must be some really high-powered lobbyists. We're getting them to write these stupid laws at my expense. Like, that's totally natural. And I feel like what that actually, like my view is that just morally obligates you to structure your life such that the policies that you support will actually be good for the world. And you know that it's actually harder to do that than to think honestly about the difference

between your own personal interests and how the economy ought to be structured. I think you read more memoirs than me. You just said structure your life in a way that the policies you argue for are good for the world. Have you ever read a memoir where someone admits, hey, the policies I'm lobbying for would be great for me but bad for the world? I mean, everyone kind of thinks the policies they're arguing for would make the world a better place. Yeah, yeah. I guess nobody really comes to mind. I guess there are a handful of cases where

someone does, someone declines to use some kind of opportunity that they could use. Like there's this brief mention in the snowball, right, of how Berkshire, there was this grandfathering in period where you could turn a publicly traded C-Corp into a pass-through entity. This was in the 80s when Buffett has to decide if he wants to stay C-Corp or kind of become a hedge fund manager, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and if it's a pass-through entity, he would have made a lot more money and he would probably, I suspect he would have sold more Coca-Cola if, you know, if Berkshire Hathaway LP had most of its capital from pension funds and endowments and foreign nationals and other people who are not going to be facing a tax hit. Like, I don't, I don't think he was super excited to own Coca-Cola at 70 times earnings,

but I also think that he felt like you're selling Coca-Cola at like 45 times earnings after taxes because you cost basis was close. I think it had gone up more than 10x by that point. So, you know, even if you wouldn't be buying it at 70 times earnings, maybe you would be reluctant to sell it at 45. So it does, it does work some of their decision. For Buffett and for Malone, it works on their decisions that they're doing this in the structure of a C-court and they don't have some of the tax advantages that a hedge fund might.

But I think that's the closest you get to someone saying, hey, I lobbied in my own interests and I did it because I could. Like, it's just, it's a very distasteful thing to admit, even if it is somewhat true. But it's also, maybe this is part of the job of a lobbyist is not just tell Congress, how to write rules that are favorable to cable companies, but actually tell cable CEOs, here's why this rule is actually favorable for the country. Like, you're in the right here, and, you know, we're doing something good for the country, and we're informing Congress, because we're industry experts, we're informing them

of how things work. And I guess, like, in the end, I think the equilibrium you get to is he's got lobbyists, so does Netflix. Those lobbyists are going to hash things out. If the charter lobbyist is just actively lying about something, then that's, Netflix lobbies is going to call him on that, and that's going to encourage credibility. So both sides do at least have an incentive to be honest in the information they present. And then the dishonesty, the incentive to be less honest is in how they frame the discussion

and, you know, where what they emphasize, what they don't emphasize, like to the point on electricity, like you could you could hypothetically imagine a world where the power utilities are all getting some piece of the upside of the things that they're being. and things that they're using. But what you actually see is that sometimes, sometimes the incentive structure works another way. Like, there's this minor detail that gets mentioned early on in the early, so this is in the 60s, 70s period, I think, where he's talking about some of the early cable networks.

And he mentions that one of them was actually subsidized by TV retailers in the nearest big city. Oh, I don't remember that one. Yeah. It was a really minor thing. He didn't make a big deal about this, but I thought that was interesting because this is a case. where the, it actually makes sense, the incentives are aligned, like more TVs will be sold

if there are more households that could get TV. So, of course, the cost of capital to a TV company for investing in cable is lower than the cost of capital for just random cable cable. Speaking of subsidizing, one of the interesting ones, I think, is he notes, I did not realize this, that the cable companies pay, pay for C-Ban, pay the whole thing, and that this is huge for them, and obviously, it scores them lots of political points and gives them lots of power. I think one of the interesting things later on in the book is he decries. YouTube and a lot of the tech companies don't carry C-SPAN,

and he really hits them for it. I thought that was really interesting. And I do kind of wonder, is YouTube making a tactical mistake not carrying C-SPAN? Like, how much would it really cost them to subsidize C-SPAN versus, you know, as cable goes away and Senator X comes to them and says, hey, why am I not, why is nobody able to watch my speech anymore? Then again, maybe everybody just watches them on string. But I thought the C-SPAN piece was interesting. Yeah, it was.

And you can kind of see from that, like the cable industry was big enough and consolidated enough by that point that, you know, probably there were some holdouts in some people who didn't really want to put their pro rata share in. Or you probably had people, you know, the less profitable networks are saying, well, yeah, we should all invest the same portion of our EBITDA. And then the really profitable loans are saying, no, let's do it on the basis of revenue or of customer count or something, something.

like, you know, saying we're all going to back this and we're going to do this collectively is different from figuring out exactly what collective means to everybody. So, so, yeah, like, you know, C-SPAN, it was this sort of form of lobbying for them, right? Where they always get to say, you know, to a congressman, the reason that your constituents were able to watch that speech is because we made this. We carried it. Yeah. And I'm sure every one of your constituents watched and loved it, sir.

I'm sure. Of course. You mentioned something with the collaboration, right? And let me just go off track a little bit here. I think it's really interesting to do the book. I mean, Malone talks all the time about how he collaborates with these guys. Rupert Murdoch would be the number one where sometimes they're enemies, sometimes they're friends, to collaborate, come together, get apart.

But he talks all the time, and he really decries the state of the world now where business leaders kind of aren't collaborating. I thought it was interesting. The two I would throw out there, well, Ciseman would be one, but the other two I throw out there is Cable Labs, where the government passes a rule that says, hey, competitors can form R&D labs together, and cable labs has been famously very successful.

I mean, cable is not in the place where it is today. Today, it faces challenges from fiber of the home and fixed wireless, but it could have ended in the 90s if they hadn't leaped from cable TV to internet. Cable labs would be on. And then the other places, every time a deal goes hostile, he says, hey, I don't get why, you know, why did AT&T buy this instead of, for a huge premium, instead of going to Comcast and saying, hey, we'll take this network,

that makes sense for you. You take the networks that make sense for you. And let's not pay a huge premium and give them to a big fight about it. So those were the two. I thought it was interesting how he really decries. He says the partnerships really were for him and he decries how the world doesn't seem to work that way anymore. Yeah. And there was a really interesting bit where he talks about there was a cable system that he knew about. I think they borrowed a bunch of money from life insurance companies and other lenders and it wasn't making any money. And he says, okay, we'll run it for you and we'll do that for free. and you'll owe us a favor, I was very, I would love to know what the actual discussion was like internally at TCI when they decided to do that, because that sounds pretty crazy to me.

My eyes got very wide. And I was wondering if it was like, let's say you had 100,000 subs and I had 100,000 subs. I could imagine saying, Byrne, I'll run your 100,000 subs for free if I can get like programming and pricing power, right? You go to ESPN, you can go see for 200 instead of 100. You can, I wonder if they, the real thesis there was, we'll run it for free, but we get their programming pricing power. You know, we go to, we can buy more modems at that cost. I wonder if they were seeing scale across the business. I don't know, because I remember that story very well.

And I was like, they did it for no management contract, no nothing. Like, that's really relying on the kindness of strangers in the long run. Yeah, yeah. Like, you just don't hear stories of, you know, the local Burger King was short-staffed one morning. And so when you're as McDonald's sent some people over to flip burgers for them, you know, even though that would be a nice gesture, it's, yeah, totally out of the ordinary. And it did seem like there was probably some quid pro quo, like there's probably no explicit contract, but also an understanding that, hey, if this works out, we're going to be buying it from you at, you know, four times EBITDA instead of six times EBITDA or something. And that in the meantime, it's not going to default. And you'd get in a lot of trouble with your regulators if you're making these crazy loans to overbuilt cable companies.

and they're all going bad. So, like, you can definitely see a case where value could be exchanged there. Yeah, I do think the scale piece probably makes sense. And it could have been something as prosaic as they thought they were going to close another apposition. They'd already hired a good manager for it. That acquisition falls through. They've got this guy who's brilliant and just itching to do something.

And they realize that, hey, maybe this is actually an opportunity for free training. Like, the best way to learn to run a cable system is to run one. And this one isn't ours. So it's not the end of the world if it doesn't go well. Because in that sense, it's a really asymmetric bet because if the system's already failing, if it's already losing money and they're just wondering when they will write down the loans, if they just end up writing down the loans, everyone would say, well, that's a really tough situation.

It's a hard business, and it's too bad things went the way they did. But if there's a turnaround, then you get some credit for that. And it's Malone. So he says we did it for free. I mean, they could have gotten warrants on top of it. And he said, for free with an upside kicker. They could. I'm not sure. one thing that I wanted to come back to you. You mentioned bus speed earlier. I think the main thing I took away from this book, and I hate to keep saying the main thing, but honestly, the main thing I take away was how frequently you will see bidding wars. I mean, flat out bidding wars. And this happens a lot during the dot-com bubble, but it happens a lot throughout the book. You will see flat-out bidding wars for properties that not even decades later, years later, sometimes months later, are just write-offs. And I know this happens in business, obviously, but I

I, it's just shocking going back and looking, I mean, you are talking to titans of industry, Salma Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, all of them. And I mean, you're just talking to these multi-billion dollar builders. And they're competing with each other. You know, they're in these huge bidding wars. I think that was the really interesting thing to me, just as I'm thinking with my investor hat on. And I just want to, I want to put that thought out there and ask you, like, do you think it's endemic to, it could be endemic to media? It could be endemic to media is shifting and it's shifting at a much more accelerated clip as kind of the years go on.

Is it unique to that? Maybe I'm under base rating how many of these huge acquisitions are right off. What did you kind of think about just that tendency for write-offs and bidding wars? So it's this weirdly scaled-up version of the fact that media is often distributed in a bundle. And I think there are two big drivers of the bidding wars

on the infrastructure and distribution side. You will sometimes have companies where they're just really paranoid that they're going to lose access to their customers. And they absolutely need to have some position. Like, it wasn't a bidding war for assets, but it was a bidding war for talent and for equipment when everyone, every channel apparently and every network decided they need to have their own standalone streaming service after Disney Plus launched. And they all felt like we're just, we'll be subscale and are core businesses dying. You know, the cores that are getting cut are not the courts that bring in most of the video.

content for most households. It's the cords that bring in our video content. So we just, you know, we have to do Paramount Plus and we have to do, you know, Discovery, the Discovery Stream thing or whatever it was. And some of those will work. It seems like HBO Max is kind of, you know, it makes sense as a business. Obviously Disney Plus makes sense as a business. But then as you move more subscale, I think the realization a lot of these companies have had to have. and they're still getting there. It's like, no, you're actually just a content company. You did miss the boat on distribution.

On the other hand, the content is good. Now, content-based bidding wars, I think that is just a simpler thing where someone likes the idea of owning a particular show, owning some particular IP, like they've always dreamed of it. As the lifespan of IP gets longer, you have a lot more people where they grew up reading Marvel books and reading Marvel comics and watching Spider-Man cartoons and knowing that they can actually buy Spider-Man and be the owner of Spider-Man is just pretty cool.

And, you know, it allows them to be the person their six-year-old self always hoped they would be. So you probably get some of that, too. And you see that sometimes when just very rich people take over very established magazines. And they tend to know what they're getting into. Like, you don't buy the New Republic thinking that this is how you make your money. You buy the New Republic thinking that it's sure nice to have money. And this is something good you can spend it on. So that tends to inflate some of those prices.

But I think there's also, like, people will just believe that this content that they personally love is actually universally beloved and could do better. And so I think that encourages them to overpay at times. I agree with all that. I mean, especially with movie studios, the most famous overpurchase somebody gets really rich and buys a movie studio because they want to go hobnob with celebrities, right? Like, absolutely the most famous overpay happens all the time. And if you're a billionaire, that's what you do.

If you're a hundred millionaire, you finance it. movie and you get robbed that way like this is just classic there's one example i know for this was actually a good strategic move and sometimes like the strategic move is you you buy it from someone else who made a bad strategic move but sometimes so the one case that i like there's this book metalman which is a biography of mark rich it's it really emphasizes the partying and the metals traders in the 70s were pretty energetic partiers but it does mention that he was the park owner of fox in the 70s, and that what he would do is if he's negotiating some oil deal with, you know, the head of state of a Middle Eastern country, he can tell them, hey, do you want to go to the Fox

studio, bring your kids, your son can meet C3PO and, you know, can see Yoda. And the other oil trading companies, you know, they could offer really lavish dinners and lots of fun entertainment, but that was something they could not actually offer. So it's something I've argued with sports teams for a while. A, historically, it won't work forever, but historically sports teams have been an incredible investment because they're trophy assets. There are 30 of them.

And as media rights have exploded and everything, they've claimed more. But even if you ignored the investment side, if you were a billionaire and like Steve Cohen, he is having the most fun of his life running the Mets, right? Probably not today because the Mets got eliminated from the playoffs yesterday. But all these billionaires, they go by, And before you were a no-name billionaire, and yes, you could do anything you wanted.

But now you are the everyone in that city knows your name. You are politically important. Like you can do anything, all these doors that weren't open to you before opened up. So it very similar to owning a movie studio, movie studio in the 80s, owning the local newspaper today, owning the, there are very few businesses that you can own that kind of make you a mini celebrity on their own. So I completely believe that, hey, having that part ownership of the similar time. having a one percent ownership of the clippers probably doesn't do a lot but if you can go to close deals and say hey i'm a bc let me invest in you and by the way i'm going to take you court sides of the clippers scheme probably close a few more deals let me go to we we kind of

sort of you know you can feel his distaste for two things paying taxes and having succession issues right uh his kind of mentor and partner at tc i bob magnus dies and doesn't have a will settled, and you can feel it just ripping Malone apart as this estate. Now, he almost loses control of TCI because of it, but you can feel it ripping him apart. Summer Redstone has a huge drama over his legacy with Viacom and CBS, and you can feel it ripping apart. So I want to ask you about that, but then I also want to ask you, we talked about how the last 10 years have not been kind to Malone. You know, it is really interesting to look at the last 10 years as Malone has largely stepped aside, kind of become more of a chairman. He's taken on chairman and emerged. And Liberty

has dramatically underperformed over the last 10 years. So I kind of want to think about those two together, right? Like, he hates the succession issues. He obviously hates paying taxes. But then he's kind of handing all these things over and stock price, bro. All these things are dramatically underperforming. I have one more thing to say about that. But I just want to talk that over to you because that was one of things really I was thinking

about as I read this. Yeah, and that was something like part of when I was reading this, I just felt nostalgic because there were a bunch of characters who I remember being. these active live players, you know, cutting deals. Like, you know, he gets Bill Gates to partly bail out the cable industry and he's dealing with all these larger-than-life figures. And like a lot of them are retired or dead now. It's the Titans of our youth, right?

It's the Titans of our youth, the guys who are 50s and 60s when you and I are just starting to reopen up the Wall Street Journal and maybe you're only read the front page. Right. So it does feel like maybe there was just a pretty special generation of media Titans. And maybe part of the reason for that. was just that there were enough structural changes in media, that there were just lots of ways you could make your fortune. Like there used to be lots of two-paper towns,

and this was part of Buffett's thesis for buying Buffalo News, was those two-paper towns are all going away. And lots of things tied into that. And if you go back and look at there's some data set on where newspapers got their revenue, and it turns out that Classifieds really started being a big deal in the 80s. And like I had always, when people described the newspaper business, you know, in the early 2000 and why it's struggling, it was always, they were heavily dependent on

classifieds because they're this regional monopoly. If you need to sell your used car, that's the only place to do it. And then Craigslist shows up. They're charging less. They get a larger audience. And that goes away. So I had kind of assumed that classifieds were just always a core part of the newspaper business. But it turns out it was kind of a new, new-ish thing. And that it was a growth business for them. But if you were someone like a Murdoch or a Buffett where you start identifying newspapers, you understand these secular trends, and you can just buy, you know, just makes it sound really easy. But if you have the opportunity to buy what you think would be the surviving paper or buy a paper that you can make the surviving paper in a town that has

room for 1.5 newspapers, being a company that has a supplier for a market that needs 150% of what that company could get, you can mint money, being one of two companies where you're trying to each go after viability, but there's actually not. enough business for both of you and where you're you know the classified ads could go to this paper or the other paper they both have similar circulation so the market claim price is going to be just what is the lowest amount that the most desperate paper accepts so like that gave them a lot of opportunities to make a ton of money and to do it owning some core business where at the time 80s 90s it has pretty predictable cash flows and then you can do some fancier stuff later on yeah like a lot

of these guys, they did that and they were able to take just a media ecosystem where there was already such thing as a TV show. We already knew how to do news and how to script sitcoms and how to do cop shows and things. If that's all known quantities and you can take that and scale it up, being the person who figures out that there are a lot of ways to scale this and like if we keep adding cable channels, maybe there will be a cable channel that's just all cop shows all the time. maybe someone would be crazy enough to do literally 24-hour news maybe there's room for cooking channels that are just

all cooking all the time like if you knew that you saw that coming you could position yourself really well for that like you're always betting on there's more demand for more shows and once there's a concept that concept will be synonymous if it worked if the network works that network's name is synonymous with the

genre that it owns like lots of ways to own really good businesses and to back them when they're young and a little bit risky and cheap. To your point, on Titans, I think one of the things is the 80s was a unique time where you go from three cable channels basically to 500, right? He talks about the cable plan for 500. Now, 500 is still limited.

And there are economies of scale to owning cable channels just like owning cable companies. A lot of the media titans we think of, it's because they owned, you know, 20 of the 500 channels. And today, because we're living in the world of infinite, right, it doesn't matter who owns the channel, right? Like, yes, maybe people can say who the CEO of Netflix is, but people know the CEO of Disney. But, you know, these things don't matter as much. It's Joe Rogan who matters, but the media franchise landscape has just fragmented so much. I think the age of the yesteryear media titan is dead. But speaking of the media titan, you know, we've talked about Malone's recent history. The thing as a longtime Malone watcher, the thing that I thought was really

interesting, is Greg Maffa, who is Malone's, who is the CEO at Liberty Media for basically 20 years is not in this book a lot. And when he is in this book, he is not mentioned very positively, right? In the 2005-2006 range, he, he's mentioned for starting the war with Barry Diller, right? Malone basically Britting Smithay. In 2012, Maffay is the one who turns down the investment in Netflix, according to John Malone. So those are two mentions, and those are his two biggest mentions, I would say. So he's not in this book positively. And as a long time, Malone watcher, I just wanted to ask, just ask you about that. I thought, I thought that was very interesting.

Yeah, like, I guess everyone's idea of who is in the Malone cohort kind of depends on just when did they first hear about Malone and what did he own at that time? Because, like, you could choose a different time frame, and Diller and Malone are part of the same group of people, right? Or at least they collaborated more early on. But, I mean, Moufay is the CEO of Liberty Media. Malone's the chairman of Mofais and said it for 20 years.

And he's like, I mean, he's, is a bit character in this book who kind of gets, he gets pooped on. Yeah, yeah, he does. And that is, that is going to weird. Like, you would think if you were actually bad at the job, and Malone were good at the job of being chairman, that he would have just fired him at some point, you know, very early. Like, he's probably had a lot of stock options vest over that 20-year period.

And so, yeah, that was a little bit tacky. Like, I would also think that if you have a model where you are just totally mentally flexible in terms of how you set up your financial relationship with someone. You can own equity. You can lend the money. You can buy their business and then spin it out. It seems like that's the kind of thing you would design if you were worried about succession problems. It just wanted a lot of CEOs who you spent a lot of time with none of whom you bet the business on, such that at the end, you could say, you know, you've done such a good job with the serious piece or you've done so well with Formula One. I think it makes sense for you to run the entire

organization after I fully stepped down. Like, you'd think that that works, but maybe what that actually means is that his incentive is to have quasi successors who are actually more media operators and that he's the dealmaker. And I feel like, you know, even today, if I were in the Liberty Complex somewhere and I had some clever idea for a merger and I pitch it to Mr. Dr. Malone and he says, no, that's not going to work. Here's why. I would just, I would generally assume that he knows what he's talking about and that if he doesn't

like some merger or restructuring or spinoff, that he's probably right. And I should figure out why he's right. So he is probably the guy who, he is still the guy who signs off on that kind of thing. And I think that that means that it's hard for him to have a successor for the thing he does. And this, you know, not an uncommon problem with companies and succession. Like Apple probably could not have handled being run by a Steve Jobs-like character after Steve Jobs left. They needed someone who was just really good about supply chains and really diligent and knew how to keep a lot of balls in the air and was maybe less perfectionist on the product.

As the company gets bigger, it's better for the product to be pretty appealing to a large number of people than to be just mind-blowing for a small set of customers. And similar with Microsoft, where at the beginning, they were just a lot more technically constrained and having someone who could just mentally like envision all the registers of the chip and say, no, this spell check product is not going to work in this version of word. We've got to wait at least two years for Intel to ship a better chip. But at that point, it'll be great. Like that's the person you need early, you know, in the 70s and the 80s.

And then maybe by the 2000s, you actually need someone who is more of a dealmaker, someone who can hang out with lots of CIOs and make them feel really, really good about how much money they're spending on Microsoft. And then it toggles back. And like, actually, Balmer, I think he's underrated in many, many ways. He is actually an incredibly smart guy, has now made more money than Gates. So we know he's good at business, too. Balmer, I do not doubt he's an incredibly smart guy.

This is way off track. I don't doubt he's an incredibly smart guy. But I would just point, like, everything he does, he does with a lot of enthusiasm. But Microsoft under him, I don't love the whitewashing of it because it was a disaster. I mean, the Nokia deal, every deal they did was a disaster. The company was not in great shape. They missed multiple things. And then you look at his post career, the Los Angeles Clippers,

I think he did a great job building it into it during them. I haven't been about to hear of rave reviews. But you look at the Clippers, like, I haven't seen the championship. The team that just won the championship, the Oklahoma City Thunder was built largely on the basis of robbing the Clippers in a trade. Like, I think he's very enthusiastic. His one good thing he did was he hopped onto Microsoft and he just never sold our game. the stock, you know, but I'm not down he's crazy smart.

I just, I don't know if he's like genius business. I think there was like one of the first things that Satya was able to accomplish, which he's also a really sharp guy. But one of the first things he was able to accomplish was just getting people to take a second look at Microsoft. And a lot of the stuff that has played out really well under his tenure was stuff that was started under the Balmer tenure. And, you know, definitely they did some really bad deals.

But it's sort of like some of the media deals we've talked about where, when you're worried about getting disrupted, like if you are worried that everyone's going to spend all of their time looking at a device that is this big instead of a monitor that takes up a desktop, like you get scared. And it makes it make sense. Like you want to be really aggressive and just like own your piece of that future. And sometimes you get it wrong.

But with Google and Facebook, I believe, have said, hey, AI is existential to us. We will spend whatever it takes to make sure that it does not end us. And, you know, we, investors get really excited about the AI and everything. I don't think they care about ROI. They care about survival and making sure that they do not miss this shift. I think that's really interesting. Let me, at the end of the book, again, I really enjoyed this book.

I did skip a little bit of, I don't like reading the childhood years. And there was a chapter reminded me of Larry Ellison having multiple chapters on sailing. There was a chapter on horses. That was a fast get for me. I did not deeply read about the equestrian piece. I think this book is really interesting instruction because the first half you basically get the story of his career, the deals and stuff, obviously with a very rose-colored view. And then the second half, he basically says, here's Liberty and my major holdings here. Here's where they are at this point in time.

And he kind of gives you their outlook. So I just want to ask you, you know, he does a little piece on Formula One. He does a piece on Liberty Global. He does a piece on Charter. He does a piece on Sirius. I might be forgetting one or two other. When you read these, I'll just, I'll put you on the spot in his in us. But when you read them, what was the one you were most bullish on when you were reading it?

I mean, honestly, the lazy answer is that Formula One is this amazing franchise. And I think that's true. Like, people like seeing cars go around a track really, really fast. You have, you know, there are not that many brand names in that space. The economics do get really interesting when it's also an advertisement for the car companies. So, like, there are just a lot of things to really like about that business. It feels, it has the feel of one of those Disney S platforms where you can make a lot of documentaries and you can really burnish the celebrity of some of these drivers.

So I did like that. It did feel like, okay, we have this section where we're actually going to have a little impromptu Liberty Investor Day and just to run through all of our holdings. What did you like? Well, I will come back to that, but I want to push you there. Formula One, I also think the way he talks about the Formula One deal, it was the only place in the book where Greg Maffa comes off. positive. But he says, look, Formula One is up for sale. It's a very complicated deal, right? If I remember

correctly, CBC owns 60%. Formula One's old CEO. There's lots of rumors of that's dodging. He eventually gets caught for it. Owns 30%. And he has, he says, Liberty Global with Mike Freeze is working on a bid. Liberty Media with Greg Maffa is working on a bid. And I think one other piece of his empire is working on a bit. I can't remember third. But he has them all working in parallel. And then he says, hey, Greg Maffa is the one who comes up and says, you know, he's really, he knows his audience, right? He pitches, hey, John, let's do a tracker with a rights offering to get these guys out of it tax-free and that's a structure that ends up winning. But I did think it was interesting just hearing him say he had different pieces of his empire kind of competing with each

other. How did you think about that deal structure there? I think that's just like part of it is the nature of scale and part of it is that it's it's the nature of the bundle. That if you own the distribution, it really helps to have some key piece of content that means that, that people have to use your distribution channel, it gives you some leverage there and also just gives you some understanding of what do your counterparties think about, what do they care about, how's their business evolving?

And then it also makes sense that if you have this media thing, this like content holding company that is also a financial engineering company and it has lots of different pockets to shift things around in and you can lend money across these different sub-entities and, you know, take out margin loans

on this tracking stock and not this other one. It's just a more fun thing to play around with. So it did feel to me like it made a lot of sense for Liberty Media to be there, but it wasn't crazy for Liberty Global to at least be taking a look. And then I guess it's not incredibly hard if you're on the phone with both of these CEOs multiple times a day. It's just not super hard to tell them, like, please don't lob in a really high all-cash bid with no conditions, no financing conditions, because that makes it harder for us to do

this more complicated bid. To your question, to my question, I think that it's hard not to walk away from it. I mean, the one you're least bullish on, he's clearly bearish on Sirius XM. He's like, oh, man, we hit a whole run, but the future does not look good over there. It has to be Formula One, right? Like, if you're just talking, ignore valuation, just investing, he clearly, it's where all the pox are going, right? He's talking about, hey, drives just a five success.

They've got so much. They're really starting to have. Formula one would have to be the answer. and it's you and I are taped me this September 29th. EA announced that you also get brought out by about $50 billion by Saudis, silver like all these sort of stuff like Formula One would be such, EA makes the Formula One video game, I believe. Formula One would be such a fit for any Saudi wealth fund that, you know,

to what we said about media companies earlier. They want to own, they want to own it. They want to take all their friends. They want to say, hey, I own this. Let's go sit in the owner's box. I think that's the long term for formula. It's where all the pieces are going. Now, if you said, hey,

risk of justice for me alpha. The thing I as a stock investor who's followed Liberty for a long time really thought was interesting was he speaks very highly of David's Asloff. I think I would stock price you bro, right? I pull up the discovery stock price to say I don't think I know that's not very good. But the one I thought was really interesting was Mike Freeze who runs Liberty Global. Liberty Global for those you don't know has been where value hedge fund eventie guys have gone to die for the past 10 years. The stock price, if I remember correctly, is basically flat over the 10 years. I know it's flat over the past five, but he says, look, Mike's done a great job, and he points to a recent spinoff, and he says Liberty Global trade's really cheap.

Mike's going to buy my class B shares when I die, and Mike is 100% driven to unlocking all this value. Liberty Global is this huge corporate structure of lots of different cable assets in Europe, and some investment funds will. He's like, Mike is going to buy back a ton of shares. He's going to split it all up. He's going to create a ton of value. I was just interesting. This was a man putting in his memoir.

I was kind of interested by that. yeah yeah i wonder what the incentives are there because on the one hand this is your legacy on the other hand you're not going to be around to see it so who knows maybe maybe he just wants a really good capital gains basis step up when when he does finally depart look i as i read this book and then i read when i read uh mike freeze he was at i think it was a b of a conference two months ago and he comes and he's spiking the football he says look we said we're spinning off some this is the transaction, John talks about in the book, said, we traded five and a half. We spun off sunrise, Sunrise trades for ADACs. Our stocks up 25% over the past 12 months. And I will tell you this.

I'm not satisfied. This is not the end. More spinoffs, more deals are coming. He's just like pounding it. I read the book and then read that. I was like, it's pretty interesting from an event angle. I just know, I do agree with that. Like, it's, I guess for me, you know, one of the issues is just I have to do a refresh on how cable works in all these different markets. Like, some ways the business is the same business and other ways, you know, every country's going to regulate media a little bit differently. So, like, maybe that's a fun homework project for me is to figure out is this, is it finally a Liberty Media's moment? We can co-do that. And they, you know, 50% of some markets consolidate, non-contolidated, as you know from the

lilac years, that's, you know, one other thing on that. And then I have two other two, Paul, I thought one interesting thing was the early 90s. If you took the years away, a lot of the stuff he says in the early 90s could apply in the mid-2000s or it could apply today, right? There's lots of talk about convergence plays in the early 90s. There's lots of talk about internet supplanting things. I just thought it was interesting how a lot of these issues are kind of timeless. I'll pause there. Yeah, like I think if you paint with really broad brushstrokes,

you can say that the amount of bits we produce and then our ability to send those bits to the right eyeballs just keeps on rising. And sometimes it's, sometimes the distribution is doing a little bit better. Sometimes it's the total volume of content. Sometimes it's the quality of content. And these all follow their own weird cycles. Like sometimes people, you know, I think show some of the dramas of the early 2000s like the Sopranos. And then, or, you know, West Wing or something.

Like they show people that TV can actually be good and it can be an art form. And then you take, you have some lag time there and people start thinking of, okay, what is my version of the Sopranos, and then you get something like Mad Men. And like that is, I guess it's harder to bet on that other than just betting on whichever studio gives creators the most leeway when you feel like there is just room to do a better job with some genre or subgenre or kind of content. But you do, yeah, you just, you have these big swings in the business. But the broad theme is there's more media, we need higher bandwidth, we need more ways to sort it.

And to the extent that the story is kind of fading and dying out, it is because he didn't, Malone did not really bet on feeds. And most people did not bet on feeds like news feeds as a default way to consume things. He has this indirect bet on video, streaming video, just by owning some of the infrastructure. but clearly the economic arrangements are not to his satisfaction in terms of how you divvy up Netflix's piece of the upside versus charters. So, yeah, he missed a big transition, but it's also a transition that you wouldn't necessarily expect someone to make in the same way that I'm sure a lot of the people who were running the smaller newspaper in a two newspaper town, like they knew they had challenges.

They didn't realize how things would go, how things would evolve, and that, they would make a ton of money if they merged their business with the larger competitor and got a piece of the upside from the new monopoly. And similarly, like the cable channel operators, like the networks, they were giving Malone equity stakes. And I think if they had known just how valuable it would be and how things would shake out and that there would be some channels where everybody has to pay for a bundle that has that channel. And so it's just a tax on everyone because some people absolutely insist on, you know, I do think that is a chickener, I think that is a chicken or the egg problem, right?

Because TCI had 20% of the market. And remember, if you weren't on TCI, you could not get into those markets that they had, right? So I do think it was a chicken or egg problem where they took 20% of your equity, but he was saying, hey, you go 20%. We launched a TCI instantly, you've got basically nationwide scale. So maybe they could negotiate a harder, but I think a lot of these channels, like, there was competition, CNN, right? There was another news network that was launching at the time.

He went with CNN because he liked Ted. But if CNN hadn't given him the equity, he would have gone with someone else. Let me quickly want to end. Oh, speaking of CNN, I want to end with one thought in 18C, but I do want to talk about CNN. I think it's really interesting multiple times, and I've seen him alone to cry this over the year. He decries the state of CNN, right? He basically says, hey, this is a left-leaning media company that I want them to go back to straight just down the pipes, just the facts, ma'am. and he lays out a vision for it, right?

And I thought that was really interesting. And he says, and I know America would love it, right? He ends with that and he says Walter Cronkite. I thought that was really interesting in the market to me has spoken, right? Like, yes, I'm sure everybody says I would like to watch non-biased news, but their preferences are revealed, right? Everybody watches non-everybody's biased news. I was just really interesting that Malone was a crying.

He really wants this non-biased news. And I think it's ignoring the realities of the market. you know, USA Today is not really making it. The AP is struggling. People want to hear where the money is, is where the eyeballs is. It's Twitter. It's the engagement. It's the rage bait.

It's an unfortunate fact, in my opinion, I'm sure in Malone's opinion, but that's just the fact. I was kind of surprised he had his head in this hand about that. Yeah, like, I think what happens with unbiased news is that everyone's idea of what that is different. And that if you try to do it, what you actually have is all of your Republican viewers will be like, I can't believe you said these horrible things about Trump. And then all of your Democratic viewers will be like, I can't believe you fail to say this

horrible thing about Trump that I was thinking. Everybody complains about football announcers, right? I remember when I was growing up, all my friends, they're all LSU friends. They'd be like, oh, CBS famously biased against LSU. So I just took it as for granted, CBS was biased against LSU. And then I grew up and I realized, no, every football team thinks that about whoever covers them because they're used to hearing the local guys who rave about them or only talk about them.

And when they hear a national guy who's unbiased, they think. think that he's biased against them. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I think, you know, I think a more, more direct and honest way to say it would be from alone to say, I'm a libertarian, tend to be conservative on a lot of issues. I like this country a lot and don't like people trash talking it, even though there are things to improve, et cetera, et cetera.

And, you know, there are a lot of guys like me. We have a lot of spending power, maybe not as much as me, but a lot. And maybe, maybe there's more competition on left-leaning news than right-leaning news. And so just as a pure business decision, center-right CNN could make sense. Like, there's definitely room just in the sense of there are a lot of people who are to the right of center, but to the left of Fox and Newsmax or who just want things to be a little bit more straightforward and a little bit more honest. And like, if Trump does something genuinely stupid, they don't want to hear about it for

the first time from someone who watches a broader news source or someone who reads the New York Times, they want to actually know what's going on. like that that audience does exist but i think it's it's just media people some of them have incredible taste and just what the average americans taste will be but that's a really hard thing to have and the more that you are also a media theorist and you think economically and you are aware of the details really complex issues and incidentally one thing we didn't talk about that much but i that i liked in the book is that sometimes he gets pretty technical like he actually cares about things like here's how the hardware works for a set top box or

here's how much you can put you in electrical engineer by training right yeah yeah like yeah and you know i wouldn't think that you need that stuff to run a cable company but what it does what it does help with is he would know he would have a better sense of what's physically possible and if he sees some trend he would have a sense of does it is there some technical limitation that means we only ever have 30 channels therefore act accordingly or do we have effectively infinite channels like he knew that a little bit before maybe some of his peers did, and it helped. But anyway, people who run these media companies just have a very distorted view of what does the average person want from the media?

And people watching up TV, you can't watch an average amount of TV and also run a media company. Like, you can't spend four to six hours watching network TV, cable news, and online clips and have enough time to actually run a company that does any of those things. So they will always be somewhat guessing about what the taste of the average consumer is, but they are also human beings who will sometimes turn on the TV and they just cannot believe how dumb these people are being. It's just, he has been involved, because he ran TCI

and he was involved in the Charter for so long, he's been involved in the negotiations with these cable channels, right? And I'm just surprised, like, so he knows, hey, Fox News, which has the largest cult following commands way more than a CNN because, A, yes, there is no other right in the channel, but B, because their audience is so passionate because they're delivering strong opinion. So for him to just say, hey, CNN needs to lose it.

Like, you're basically saying give up your business because this is what I want. Burn, I had so much more talk to you about. I had AT&T margin calls, but we're at the hour mark. I mean, I really enjoyed this book. I can't recommend it highly enough. I know our listeners are going to be investors and stuff, but it's a really fun read pretty quick to. I really enjoyed it.

Skip the part about horses, but I loved it. Byrne, what do you think we're going to read next month? You got any ideas? What are we going to read next month? Let's see. So we kind of ping pong between. profiles of people and more broad general interest stuff. But we've done two profiles.

So, yeah, maybe, I don't know. We should find some semi-classic. You know, this is a great segue. If you're a listener and you've gotten this far, it's been almost 75 minutes out. You got an idea? Shoot us a book. We might end up reading next month.

But Brent, this has been awesome. All hang on, we can finish our chat after this. But this has been so much fun and looking forward to Halloween book club next month. Right. Yeah. Let's read something scary. Let's read when genius failed or something like that. That's not a bad idea. We should do something on the 1929 crash or on 1987. I don't know if there's a good book on 87, but 29 has some solid. These are all great ideas. I really like to something a little spooky. A few years ago, I did the great fraud books of like when genius failed. And then the, now I'm forgetting it, the Bernie Madoff one, the one with the Singaporean fund that came.

And it was really fun, but I will tell you, I'd wake up, I'd wake up in cold sweats at night and be like, I'm not running a fraud right now. Am I? Like, it's really scary when you read these things and the pressure these people are under. I'm not trying to sympathize with the fraudsters, but I read them and I'd be, I'd be waking up and sweat just thinking about the pressure. Yeah, like some of the, there was that guy who kept, he, he got caught because he had these back-to-back meetings where one was with a law firm and then he gets the guy's business card and then he goes to the next meeting and introduces himself as that guy and hands the business card.

Like, I would not be able to do that. Just the boldness. The, it's just incredible. All right. We're way out. All right. We'll talk to anybody. A quick disclaimer.

Nothing on this podcast should be considered an investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial advisor. Thanks.