The Next Inflation Wave Is Already Here

Summary

Prof G Markets
Episode: "The Next Inflation Wave Is Already Here"
Date: March 23, 2026
Hosts: Scott Galloway & Ed Elson

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the sudden resurgence of inflation as a direct result of the Iran war, surging commodity prices, and supply shocks reverberating through global markets. Scott Galloway and Ed Elson analyze the interconnected nature of oil, shipping, housing, and inflation, unpack how markets are (and aren't) reacting, critique policy responses, and pivot into business strategy lessons, with deep dives on OpenAI’s focus shift and the fate of side projects like Meta’s Metaverse and Disney’s transformation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. War in Iran and the New Inflation Wave

• Economic Fallout (07:38–11:30):

  • Trump administration seeks $200B for the Iran war.
  • U.S. national debt hits $39T.
  • Huge spikes: fertilizer +25%, gas/diesel +30%, jet fuel +50%.
  • Shipping/freight and construction costs up ~30%; food and housing price increases anticipated.
  • Americans are paying $300M/day more for gasoline than a month ago.

  “Since the strikes began 23 days ago, fertilizer prices are up 25%. Gas and diesel have both jumped more than 30%. And jet fuel has surged roughly 50%.”
  — Ed Elson (07:45)

• Stagflation Risks (09:03–11:30):

  • Scott highlights fears of “stagflation”—the toxic mix of low growth and high inflation.
  • PPI up 3.4%; core PPI up 3.9% (biggest rise in 3 years).
  • Rate cuts once priced in are off the table; higher borrowing costs loom.

  “This is now potentially brought up a word that your generation has never had to deal with: stagflation... it's nitro and glycerin. It's really a toxic cocktail.”
  — Scott Galloway (09:57)

• Market and Political Reactions (11:33–16:15):

  • Ed: Focus on the “dollar impact” over human impact, especially given the current administration’s money-centric worldview.
  • No consensus on how long the crisis lasts—the risk of no 2026 Fed rate cuts, possibly even hikes.
  • Looming risk: recession odds now pegged at 49% (per Mark Zandi).

2. Interdependencies: Freight, Fertilizer, and Construction

• Fuel as the “Domino”:

  • Over 50% of shipping costs are fuel; freight prices up 30%.
  • Gulf states provide 49% of urea, 30% of ammonia; ammonia up 92% YoY globally.
  • U.S. house building costs and prices set to spike again.

• Paralysis in Markets (16:15–21:16):

  • Markets largely unchanged except oil; suggests investors are traumatized by prior “false” panic-selling.
  • Waiting for clarity on the war; “wait and see” trumps panic.

  “The market has gotten very traumatized by their previous bouts of panic selling… investors are in a very wait and see mentality.”
  — Ed Elson (18:16)

3. Prospects and Perils: Recession’s Role

• Cycle Argument (21:17–23:36):

  • Galloway: U.S. “so due” for a recession; “transfers wealth from owners to earners.”
  • For millennials and Gen Z: falling asset prices could create overdue opportunities (housing, stocks).

  “If the market went sideways or down substantially and all of a sudden real estate in Brooklyn was off 20, 40%, is that bad? ...recessions are a healthy part of a cycle.”
  — Scott Galloway (22:30)

4. Policy Critique: Housing and Energy

• Failures & Ironies (24:22–25:59):

  • U.S. should focus on “build baby build” not “drill baby drill.”
  • Trump policies—tariffs, anti-immigration, and now war—are harming precisely the sectors (housing, construction) they claim to help.

  “If you were a Bond villain saying, how do you take housing prices up even more… make immigration nearly impossible for the people who are actually building the homes. Let's take the supplies of building a home way up. Right. And let's take interest rates way up.”
  — Scott Galloway (24:50)

• Alternative Energy Silver Lining? (25:59–27:44):

  • Could the crisis accelerate renewable energy adoption, as national security stakes are clearer than ever?
  • Shoutout to Texas: “60% of its electricity from wind, 18% from solar on a Friday afternoon.”

5. Corporate Focus: OpenAI’s Side Projects and Focus Shift

• OpenAI’s Strategy Dilemma (31:33–36:05):

  • OpenAI under pressure for “doing too much”—from Sora to hardware.
  • CEO of Applications: “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests.”
  • Scott: Core strategic insight for leaders is deciding what not to do.

  “The difference between being wealthy and being very wealthy is the last 10%. And that comes from extreme focus.”
  — Scott Galloway (33:25)

• Comparison with Google:

  • CFO Ruth Porat: reined in extraneous “moonshot” projects, focused on Search, improved profitability and focus.

6. Lessons from Failed Side Projects (Meta & Others)

• Meta’s Metaverse Flop (36:06–41:01):

  • Meta spent upwards of $70B+ on the metaverse/Horizon Worlds; now winding down.
  • Galloway: Metaverse was “the mother of all distractions.”

  “It went back to just this basic anthropological truism… Our species is really used to and really fond of, of this universe and this notion that these weirdos want to take us into another universe.”
  — Scott Galloway (38:25)

• What Makes a Good Side Project? (41:01–48:38):

  • Bad projects: Metaverse, Google Glass, Amazon Fire Phone.
  • Good projects: AWS, Waymo, 3M’s Post-its.
  • Lessons:
    • “Do you have the money to make the bet?”
    • “Does it leverage your existing infrastructure?”
    • “Is it actually a good idea—solving a real problem?”

  “No amount of capital, as we saw, will turn a very stupid idea, a very bad idea, into a good idea.”
  — Ed Elson (47:23)

  • Sunk cost fallacy: “From a standing start, here and now... would we continue to fund this?”

7. Disney: New Leadership, Old Problems, and the Rise of the Clip Economy

• Disney’s Strategic Crossroads (53:49–59:37):

  • Josh D’Amaro named CEO—faces headwinds in tourism (Iran war), studios, and cable.
  • Galloway: Disney should merge with Netflix (not likely, but logical from a business perspective).
  • Shift focus to parks and studios; shed declining cable assets.

  “Disney's stock is lower than it was 10 years ago... This is a mixed legacy.”
  — Scott Galloway (54:36)

• Oscars Ratings Collapse & The Clip Economy (59:37–66:14):

  • Oscars viewership hit new lows; GenZ/Millennials watch highlights on TikTok/YouTube.
  • “This is a clip economy. Maybe people didn’t watch the Oscars on ABC, but I know that they watched it on TikTok.”
    — Ed Elson (61:00)
  • 74% of young sports fans say they consume sports via social clips, not live matches.

  “If you're watching the Oscars on abc, it means you're also at that point where you need opiate-induced constipation medication.”
  — Scott Galloway (64:20)

  • Advice: Disney must monetize clips directly, own advertiser relationships, and get more aggressive in social strategy.

• Monetization & Tech Platform Risks (67:42–75:06):

  • Scott: Tech platforms eventually “come for your margin”; direct advertiser and consumer relationships are essential.
  • Suggests Disney build “the ultimate family loyalty program” integrating park access, streaming, and exclusive experiences into a high-value subscription bundle.

  “Eventually they come for you. Eventually they fuck you. And that has happened to almost every brand.”
  — Scott, speaking about Meta, Alphabet, and platform dependency (71:00)

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Notable and Memorable Quotes

• “It's all downhill [after 27]. Your prostate starts to blow up like a grapefruit. Your dick doesn't work nearly as well. Just, you know, 27, get ready to wake up in the middle of the night and go, do I need to pee? I think the answer is yes.”
  — Scott Galloway (03:56)

• “This is now potentially brought up a word that your generation has never even really had to deal with... and it's called stagflation, which is nitro and glycerin.”
  — Scott Galloway (09:57)

• “If you were a Bond villain saying, how do you take housing prices up even more... make immigration nearly impossible for the people who are actually building the homes. Let's take the supplies... way up. And let's take interest rates way up.”
  — Scott Galloway (24:50)

• “The Metaverse... the mother of all distractions and hallucinations... MySpace currently gets more traffic than Facebook's version of the Metaverse.”
  — Scott Galloway (38:41)

• “No amount of capital... will turn a very stupid idea... into a good idea.”
  — Ed Elson (47:23)

• “Eventually they come for you. Eventually they fuck you. And that has happened to almost every brand.”
  — Scott Galloway (71:00)

• “Oscars is a dying thing... it'll be clipped up... but the company that can make money on those clips is the new host of the Oscars and that's YouTube.”
  — Scott Galloway (66:14)

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Topic Timestamps

07:38 — Inflation spikes and war’s effect on everyday prices
09:57 — Stagflation rears its head
16:15 — Shipping, fertilizer, construction price crunch
18:15 — Market’s "wait and see" response
21:17 — The cyclical nature of recession, youth and asset prices
24:22 — Housing, tariffs, immigration, and economic irony
25:59 — Possible renewable energy tailwinds
31:33 — OpenAI: Too many side quests?
36:06 — Meta’s Metaverse: $70B flop
41:01 — What makes a good side project?
53:49 — Disney’s new CEO and strategy questions
59:37 — Oscars, ratings decline, and the rise of the “clip economy”
67:42 — Monetization challenges; platform dependency
75:06 — Disney and subscription mega-bundle idea
77:07 — OpenAI Sora: likely to shutter soon

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Closing Thoughts

This episode underscores both the complexity and fragility of modern markets—where geopolitics, policy, and consumer sentiment can upend expectations virtually overnight. The hosts argue for strategic focus, healthy skepticism of leadership fads (AI, VR, Metaverse), and urgent adaptation to new consumer realities, especially as content consumption fractures.

The tone is sharp, irreverent, and direct—“no mercy, no malice”—with wide-ranging, actionable insights useful for investors, managers, and anyone navigating our increasingly tumultuous markets and business landscape.

Transcript

[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

That bad?

[Ed Elson]

Maybe.

[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

Create the video in the Vampire theme and make it the funniest meme.

[Ed Elson]

It went viral. Bob's Business Business a Revival now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to [e-mail] this episode is

[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Today's number 10. That's how many grams of protein are in Buffalo Wild Wings Espresso Protini, a cocktail infused with Buffalo dry rub. Ed, let me give you a little advice on how to keep things fresh in your relationship. The next time your girlfriend asks you if you've loaded the dishwasher, say of course. And take a sip of coffee from a vase.

[Ed Elson]

How much would you have to be paid to drink the Buffalo Wild Wings Espresso Protini?

[Scott Galloway]

For some reason I got in my head the coffee was bad for you, so I never had a pill I don't think I had. I think I went to the doctor three times before the age of 40. I just no external items whatsoever. I think that's why I don't get sick now. But anyways never had coffee and oh my God, what have I been missing? It's fucking amazing. Coffee is amazing, but I'm highly sensitive to it. So one you would never find me at a Buffalo Wild Wings. Is that a Restaurant. What the fuck is that?

[Ed Elson]

Yes. Never been to Buffalo Wild Wings?

[Scott Galloway]

I've never been to Buffalo Wild Wings.

[Ed Elson]

It's a terrible place.

[Scott Galloway]

Yeah, I've never. I've never been there. I'd go to Hooters, but I wouldn't go to Buffalo Wild Eggs.

[Ed Elson]

It's Hooters without the girls. Oh, that.

[Scott Galloway]

Okay, that's like beach without the scent. What's the.

[Ed Elson]

By the way, Scott, where are you?

[Scott Galloway]

I'm in Tulum, Ed.

[Ed Elson]

Why?

[Scott Galloway]

Why? That's a good question. I started coming here about. I did an annual trip with guys. My closest friend Adam, who I've known for 50 years. My other friend Augusto, who I've known for 25 years. And my friend Scott Sabah, who I had known for 15 years, used to come here every year in March. And we stopped doing it because Scott pasta a couple years ago and we decided to come down again. So anyways, I'm in. I'm in Tulum.

[Ed Elson]

That's very exciting. Are you ready for the big day tomorrow?

[Scott Galloway]

What am I missing? What's the big day?

[Ed Elson]

You didn't hear? It's my birthday tomorrow.

[Scott Galloway]

Oh, you're turning 27. Is that what it is? 27?

[Ed Elson]

That's right. 27, baby. It's going to be a big year.

[Scott Galloway]

You know what I tell everybody? I'm not exaggerating. When anyone says, oh, I love A.D. i just go, he's 26. That's the most impressive thing about you is that you're 26. Let me tell you, 27, it's all downhill. Your prostate starts to blow up like a grapefruit. Your dick doesn't work nearly as well. Just, you know, 27, get ready to wake up in the middle of the night and go, do I need to pee? I think the answer is yes.

[Ed Elson]

I'm actually already there. I've been trying to figure out what it is. I think it's because I'm drinking too much coffee. But I'm getting up to go to pee at least once a night. Sometimes twice a night. I've where I go three times. It's quite concerning, to be honest.

[Scott Galloway]

You're peeing three times at night.

[Ed Elson]

It's happened. It's happened. It doesn't happen. But it has happened before.

[Scott Galloway]

Is it after drinking or.

[Ed Elson]

Yeah, it's after drinking.

[Scott Galloway]

Well, all I gotta say is worth it. Worth it. Because when you're your age, you can go right back to sleep when I'm up. Like I get up, it's like, that's it, I'm awake. I'm awake. People think old people need less sleep. We don't. We just don't sleep well. I just walk around slightly tired all the time. Yeah, I'm jealous.

[Ed Elson]

He's constantly grumpy.

[Scott Galloway]

Yeah. Yeah, well, there's nothing that Tulum can't fix. Happy birthday. I think that's very excited you. You know, it's gl. I'm glad to see you finally got your professional life sort of on track. Sort of on track. We're a little worried about you, but, yeah, that's.

[Ed Elson]

We're going somewhere.

[Scott Galloway]

You're doing.

[Ed Elson]

Yep.

[Scott Galloway]

Ed Elson. You're doing very well.

[Ed Elson]

And then I'm also. My final update. I'm heading to Vegas for a bachelor party. And I know you're a. You're a connoisseur of. Of Las Vegas. So any. Any advice? Any tips?

[Scott Galloway]

Where are you staying?

[Ed Elson]

We're staying at the Encore.

[Scott Galloway]

Oh, that's. That's the place to go. And you'll meet a bunch of rich people from Texas. It feels a little bit lame, but it's. It's hands down the best. The aria felt good, but it felt, like very modern. It felt like if you got off from the wrong floor, you might, like, wake up with stitches in your back and one less kidney. It feels very sort of dystopian. It's good, though. It's good that you're going with. I'm a big believer in guys weekends and girls weekends. I just think that big guys weekend. How many. How many of you?

[Ed Elson]

First one in A. I think it's 10 of us.

[Scott Galloway]

And here's the question. Is your girlfriend supportive or sort of making noises that she doesn't like these weekends?

[Ed Elson]

She's supportive, but I'm not sure how much I believe her. She says she's supportive.

[Scott Galloway]

Uh oh, just start drinking coffee from a vase.

[Ed Elson]

Way to bring it back.

[Scott Galloway]

My partner literally wants me out of the house as much as possible. She's in Courchevel right now, and I'm in. Where am I? Tulum. Anyways, just be awful to be around and it gets easier for them to let you go.

[Ed Elson]

Okay, wait, hold on.

[Scott Galloway]

Claire, do you have girls weekends? Notice how I say that because I'm. I'm unconsciously homophobic. Why would I even ask that? Yeah, last girls weekend I went to was in the North Fork. It was delightful trying to get one going for Canada because I haven't been there yet. And these are friends from college. College internships all over the place. Yeah. And the key is your partner does not come right no, that's not true. I mean, that's. Then it's not a girls. We can. Okay. No, but the fun thing is that we're both girls, so that's a great point. We all get to be friends together.

[Ed Elson]

It's kind of a hack.

[Scott Galloway]

It's impossible for me to respond to this. This is how the podcast ends right here. Just cannot relate.

[Ed Elson]

This is why we need to be gay, Scott. We could just do boys weekends forever.

[Scott Galloway]

There you go. So, yeah. So it's. Should we get to the headlines? It's time to move on.

[Ed Elson]

Let's do it.

[Scott Galloway]

Now is the time to buy. I hope you have plenty of the wherewithal.

[Ed Elson]

The Trump administration has requested funding of up to $200 billion for the Iran war. Meanwhile, the US national debt soared to a record $39 trillion last week. Still, the clearest, most immediate impact for people at home is on actual prices. Since the strikes began 23 days ago, fertilizer prices are up 25%. Gas and diesel have both jumped more than 30%. And jet fuel has surged roughly 50%. So, Scott, new implication of the war, which we have been sort of hinting at before, but now it's getting very real, and that is the impact on prices. Price of gas is skyrocketing. Price of diesel is skyrocketing. Americans are now spending $300 million more on gasoline per day compared to a month ago. And it appears that this is going to start trickling down into other things, too. We talked about fertilizer prices, which are up. Freight prices are also up around 30%. Construction materials prices are up 30% as well. I'm waiting for all of this to sort of come through in the bills themselves. At the end of the month, we'll probably see higher food prices, potentially higher housing costs as well. In sum, it's not looking great on the inflation front. And it appears it won't improve until this Iran war is at least at an end in some capacity. What do you make of what's happening here?

[Scott Galloway]

As you know, I was more hopeful about military action than most people, but there's just no getting around it. It feels as if this shit is spinning out of control. And the ramifications are pretty immediate and pretty. You know, how often had you heard the term fertilizer before? And now fertilizer costs are soaring. It appears that the administration didn't do any real scenario planning around what happens if the Straits of Hormuz are blocked. And we were. The markets were pricing in two rate cuts. That's gone away so we're going to have higher borrowing costs for longer elevated across the board for mortgages, car loans, credit cards, small business credit. And we're just talking about the economics here. Obviously we're not talking about the loss of life. But this is now potentially brought up a word that your generation has never even really had to deal with. And that's the idea of low growth and inflation and it's called stagflation, which is nitro and glycerin. It's really a toxic cocktail. Real GDP growth has been revised down from 1.4 to 0.7% in Q4 2025. At the same time, inflation is accelerating. The PPI rose 3.4% year on year last month while core PPI jumped 3.9%. That's the biggest increase in three years. There's just no getting around it. And you've been doing a lot of good work on this. I've been following your social feed, which gets served to me a lot, let me just say a lot. Look, the costs here are what's interesting about this war is we don't talk about it as much in human terms. We talk about it more in economic terms, which I think is important. But it kind of goes to this notion that the idolatry of dollar and everything's about money now. But I look back on previous Gulf wars and kind of Gulf one with George Herbert Walker Bush, 30 nations, 70 billion, 62 billion paid back by our allies, UN resolution. That's what a coalition sounds like. And then W sort of had a coalition, mostly symbolic UK troops, Australian troops, but mostly US and then obviously that went cost trillions of dollars and 4,500 US service men and women killed. This we've decided it's us in Israel. And it just goes to this basic notion that I think the fundamental mistake the Trump administration is believing that cooperation is not the key to the West's prosperity. Anyways, your thoughts, Ed?

[Ed Elson]

Yeah, I think the dollars point is quite interesting that we are quite focused on the dollars. We're focused on it on this show, especially because we're a markets show. But I think it's true that that's the way that a lot of people are talking about it. And I think the reason that that is happening at least in the conversations in America is that it seems like the loss of life as some sort of preventative measure isn't that powerful, at least to this administration or at least to our government and to Americans at large. It seems like when you see these death tolls, I Mean, as the saying goes, it becomes a statistic and it doesn't seem to be something that really impacts people. But the point that you've been making as well is that Trump does care about money. He does care about how the markets react. And so it does seem, I mean, we're in this very interesting place where we're looking at what's happening in the markets. But we also know in the back of our minds that what happens on a dollar basis may actually fundamentally adjust and alter the trajectory of what is going to happen in the Middle East. Because if we can make the argument that this is going to be really bad for markets, this is going to be really bad for bonds, this is going to be a huge inflationary crisis, then maybe it kind of gets through to the administration. Maybe Trump decides, as he did with the tariffs, that actually this is a bad idea because he does seem to be so motivated by money. But it is a fundamentally ridiculous position to be in, to be having to make that argument. But let's just put arguments aside. Let's just look at it at a completely unbiased way. Let's just look at what is happening on the ground. The reality is prices are just rising. So regardless of your political views, the reality is your bills are about to get a lot more expensive. And something that I've been thinking about, and I'm not sure this is the right analogy yet, but I do think back to just a few years ago when in 2022, the S&P erased around 25% of its value. And it was the worst year for the stock market since 2008. It was a really, really bad year. And the reason it was so bad was really because of inflation. It was because we had this Covid problem which we thought was going to be a problem for various reasons, turned out to be kind of okay. We had a few good years coming out of COVID but then we had this supply ch issue where we realized that supply chains were completely messed up. Everything was gunked up, as you've said in the past. And it resulted in ridiculous inflation which caused and forced every central bank around the world to initiate this extreme rate hiking cycle, which was eventually what sucked out all the energy out of the room. And then eventually investors started to sell. That was what we saw in 2022. And I look at what is happening now. Inflation is rising. We are already at, I mean, people say two and a half, but as Mark Zandi has told us, it's actually closer to 3%. The expectation is that inflation is only going to remain elevated. And that's just assuming that everything kind of sorts itself out eventually in the next few months or so. But then again, no one really has a real hold on what the timeframe on this thing actually is, because it's all up to Trump at this point. But the point being inflation is very much back on the table. It already was on the table, but now it's back on the table doubly so. And now we are facing the possibility of we're not probably going to see as many rate cuts as we thought. Maybe we'll see no rate cuts in 2026. And now people are starting to talk about rate hikes. That is genuinely becoming a real possibility. In which case maybe all of the tailwinds that we were expecting for 2026 in the stock market, maybe those aren't going to materialize. I mean, the two big tailwinds that we identified, we had all of these issues that we were worried about, the geopolitical issues, the AI issues, But the two big tailwinds that we identified, which is why we thought that the stock market would perform okay this year, was one, big beautiful bill spending, which will still happen and we'll still pump money into the economy that way. We'll pay for it later down the line when we have to pay for our debts and deficits, but for now it's a good thing. And two, lower interest rate environment that might not be happening anymore. And so I do think that we're approaching a moment where we need to start considering the possibility that actually this will have a really negative impact, not just on prices, but also on portfolios. I don't think we're necessarily there yet, but we are certainly approaching that point.

[Scott Galloway]

With energy, there's just a huge domino effect because fuel prices account for more than 50% of the total cost of shipping. I mean, ships are basically cheap containers that float. And the primary costs, and they're manned by like eight people. I don't know if that's true, but there's shocking few people on a piece of equipment that big. It's fuel. And so freight prices are up 30%. And when freight rates double, inflation increases by another, another 70bps. And there's all sorts of costs here. War risk insurance premiums for vessels traveling through the Persian Gulf have increased by about 50%. Traffic has decreased by about 3/4. Fertilizer costs up 25%. Who thought we were going to use the term fertilizer over and over? And what's interesting, Gulf states produce nearly 49% of the world's urea, a critical nitrogen fertilizer, and about 30% of its ammonia. Ammonia's up 92% year on year. In the U.S. ammonia prices are 41% higher than March and up more than 21%. And then construction material prices might go up as much as 30%. So according to the NAHB, when lumber prices tripled post Covid, it caused the price of a new house to increase 35,000. So this is just ugly on every level. And America is probably this year in for a rough road. What I just asked Mark Zandi and we talk a lot about is, okay, what could go right? And what's interesting is if you look at the markets, the markets are sort of yawning right now in the US Other than the price of oil, what the S and p is off 5% since its all time high. It feels like there's a disconnect right now between the markets and what's going on. And I don't quite understand. Feels as if the market is basically saying, hold my beer.

[Ed Elson]

I think the market has gotten very traumatized by their previous bouts of panic selling. And so I think that they look back at something like the tariffs as an example, where if you decided to sell because Trump decided to pursue this strategy, then you looked very stupid all of a sudden because then the markets rebounded and he started to start to taco and then things changed and ultimately just panic selling on that news was not the right thing to do. So I think that what investors are doing right now is they're in a very wait and see mentality where they're like, well, he's done this crazy thing and it is kind of crazy. And history would tell us that, yes, we're probably going to be in there for a lot longer than they're telling us now. But let's just find out what the conclusion actually is on this war. He told us that the war was very complete. Pretty much maybe it is very complete, in which case it would be a very bad idea to sell. So I think that investors are trying to find reasons, and understandably so, to not view this as such a bad thing. Because if you went with the, the worst case scenario, if that was your instinct in the past, you got kind of punished for it. So I think the question is increasingly becoming like, well, when are we going to determine what the consensus is on this Iran war? Are we going to stay there for longer? Is it going to escalate? Are we going to see escalations on the nuclear front? I Mean, these are all very much possibilities. But I think that there has been an incentive among the investment community right now to err on the side of optimism because if you take the, the more negative view then, you know, as, as we've seen you get kind of, you get kind of banged up in the market. So they're not doing it right now. So I think that partially explains the market's behavior at the moment. I think the question then becomes like at what point is a recession actually on the table? And Mark Zandi, as you mentioned, he has the odds of a recession at 49% now and it's been steadily rising.

[Scott Galloway]

49%. That's such a wimp protect that's he can declare victory no matter what happens when. 49%. But your point, I think your point is exactly the right one. And that is if you look at the history of recent conflicts or wars and the markets, what's happened is there's been a dip. Oh no, it's war. And then the markets actually go way up the following year. So it feels like the markets have said every time there was a dip in the markets because of the outbreak of hostilities overseas, usually caused by us, it's been a buying opportunity when the market goes down. So it feels like the market's like let's just skip to the buying opportunity or we don't buy that. No one wants to panic sell like they aren't panic sell. No one wants to sell like they have in previous. So. But again, past performance is not an indication of future performance.

[Ed Elson]

Exactly.

[Scott Galloway]

And in terms of recession, even distinct of the war in Iran, I love what Jamie Dimon said, that a recession is something that happens every seven years. We haven't really had one in 17 years or 18 years or is that right? 2008. I mean it's just been, we're just so due. And again I go to for you and Claire, I don't think that would be the worst thing that could happen. You know, the cost of your lives respectively and of other young people have gotten so crazy and recessions, depressions. Don't want a depression. A recession, an exogenous event. They have a tendency, generally speaking, they're a healthy part of the cycle that transfers wealth from owners to earners. And so I don't, you know, you don't want to root for stocks to go down. But just it's basic math, folks. If you're investing, you and Claire are in the investing portions of your life because of an exceptionally generous 401 matching program by your employer, but you're, you're in the investing part of your life. So do you want stocks up or down?

[Ed Elson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Scott Galloway]

You want them down. And what is so dangerous about what we continue to do here is to print money and go back to and ask for Congress as if we're just drunken sailors spending more and more and racking up debt, which increases inflation, of which the majority of that burden is shouldered by lower income households and especially the young. So I'm not rooting for a recession, but at some point we have to stop propping up the market with your credit card. And if all of a sudden, I would imagine you and Claire, neither of you are homeowners, right? No, I would imagine both of you would like to be homeowners. So if the market went sideways or down substantially and all of a sudden real estate in Brooklyn was off 20, 40%, is that bad? So I'm of two minds on this. I don't want to see there's a lot of pain in a recession, but it feels like we're due. And quite frankly, recessions and down cycles are a healthy part of a cycle. Otherwise it's not a cycle.

[Ed Elson]

I'm not rooting for a recession, but if it's a choice between a recession and uncontrolled inflation, I'll take the recession every time. I mean, the inflation's what's going to hit young people and lower income people the hardest. That's just you losing your purchasing power. But I think the people in charge, specifically Trump, has decided he really likes when stocks go up. And I guess he doesn't really care that much if prices go up. He seems to pretend like he cares. He says that he, oh, I'm taking the affordability crisis seriously now. But then he does everything in his power to make it even worse. And then when it comes to housing, he says that he actually wants the price of housing to go up.

[Scott Galloway]

That made no sense.

[Ed Elson]

So he spends all of this money to just. It was just ridiculous. So he doesn't actually care about affordability, he doesn't actually care about prices. And he's going to get absolutely clobbered for it.

[Scott Galloway]

We have to figure out a way such that the average household income of $77,000 can afford a home. It shouldn't be drill baby drill, which the Trump administration proposed. It should be build baby build. We absolutely need housing prices through YIMBY legislation and through tax subsidies to developers to unleash the private sector. We need a massive amount of construction. And unfortun, back to the original Story construction costs through tariffs, anti immigration policy. I mean, you could almost argue if you were a Bond villain saying, how do you take housing prices up even more after an unbelievable acceleration? Okay, let's make immigration nearly impossible for the people who are actually building the homes. Let's take the supplies of building a home way up. Right. And let's take interest rates way up.

[Ed Elson]

And then let's bomb the one place where all of the oil and gas is transported through throughout the world. As we're learning, literally the basis of the entire economy. I mean, that's what we're really learning is we all need oil and gas a lot more than we would like. It literally funnels through to everything. The transport to get the food from the farm to the grocery store and then the fuel that goes into the airplane and then the diesel that goes into the fertilizer which is used to grow the food. I mean, we rely on this for literally everything. And so, yeah, we have figured out a way somehow, as you say, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We had inflation going down, it was trending down. We figured it out, and now it's going way back up again. And it seems like that will continue

[Scott Galloway]

just going to what could go right. There is an argument, and it's not nearly the compensation for inflation and increased interest rates, but I wonder if this is going to put renewed wins in the sales of alternative energy.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Scott Galloway]

And someone. Absolutely. From a national security standpoint. Right. Just. Okay. Unless we start bombing our own windmills or the sun gets blocked, it's much easier to block the Straits of Hormuz than the sun. The one stat that just blew me away. My Kara Swisher's ex wife, Megan, who's this incredibly smart person, chased me out of a session and said, I have data you're going to love. And she showed it to me. There's this incredible site that shows where at that moment where Texas is getting its electricity and the source of that electricity, is it coal? Is it LNG? What is it? And at that moment, at 1pm on a Friday, whenever it was, Texas was getting 60% of its electricity from wind power and 18% from solar. So the state that is, you know, the backdrop to Landman, and we always think of Exxon and oil and gas is really leading the nation in alternatives. And I thought, okay, if there's. I'd like to think there's several silver linings here. I'd like to think what could go right. But one of them might be, okay, does this a get us thinking about more secure pipelines where we don't have vulnerable ships and two just organically built. I mean, if you're South Korea, I would imagine there's a lot of new solar startups being pitched right now, right? It shows countries just how vulnerable they are when they don't have their own sources of energy.

[Ed Elson]

We'll be right back after the break, and if you're enjoying the show so far, send it to a friend and please follow us if you haven't already.

[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

We're back with Profgue Markets. A big criticism of OpenAI right now is that it's doing too much at once. The company is juggling a wide range of projects, from Sora, its video generator, to a new web browser to hardware, according to the Wall Street Journal. Employees say that this do everything approach has created a lack of focus and made it harder to understand the company's strategy. That concern is now starting to surface among the leadership as well. The CEO of Applications recently told employees, quote, we cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests. So all of this raises a broader question. How does a company decide when to double down on its core business or when to chase new opportunities? Scott, I was very interested to see this and I wanted to get your views on it because you've run multiple businesses in the past. Some have been very successful, some have been less successful. You know what it takes to either win or fail. What do you think of this dilemma? It's sort of a classic business strategy question that OpenAI, the number one AI company in the world right now is facing, and that is do we focus on the core thing or do we go have fun in these side projects and see if, if something good can happen?

[Scott Galloway]

Well, the majority of my businesses have been advising CMOs and CEOs. And the real question every good CEO needs to ask or the gestalt he or she needs to. When you're a junior level or mid level employee, you're trying to think about, what could we do, what could we what new markets, what new geographies? And you're trying to find areas of growth. How do I create more efficiency, how do I grow the company, what could do, what should we do? When you become a CEO, the bigger question is not what to do, it's what not to do. Because every day you're going to be pitched on great ideas from vendors, investment bankers that want you to make acquisitions, new employees trying to make a or existing employees trying to make a name for themselves. Everyone wants to be generous and visionary with your capital. And if you look at this is a really good move on the part of Sam Altman and OpenAI, because the, the specific crowds out. The general focus is the key component of almost any strategy if it wants to work. I even think on a personal level, I hate side hustles. You want to be successful, find something you're good at and go 110% in. And the difference between being wealthy and being very wealthy is the last 10%. And that comes from extreme focus. And if you have side hustles, it means you haven't found the right main hustle. So if you have side hustles, that means of exploring something until it becomes a main hustle, fine. But if you look at Alphabet or Google, they brought in Eric Schmidt, a fantastic manager to help scale the company. But then the adult in the room who actually ended up growing shareholder value a great amount and doesn't get the credit she deserves is Ruth Peratt, the cfo. They brought her in from Morgan Stanley and the first thing she did was like, what the fuck is all this shit? What are all these pet projects from Sergey and Larry that nobody wants to say no to? They literally had a project whose mission was to cure death. And Ruth said, okay, do that with your own money and on your own time. And she killed a ton of projects and focused people on this unbelievable greatest cash machine tollbooth in the history of mankind called Search, and then said, you know, another dollar in Search creates a shit ton of money. So don't bring anything to me that you can't convince me isn't going to create a shit ton of money with some reasonable timeline. So they have gone in way too many directions, and it's a credit to Sam and their leadership that they're focusing. And also they have huge incentive to focus because in the enterprise market, which I think is the more important part of the market here, Anthropic is kicking the shit out of OpenAI. And so they are doing what they should be doing. They are focusing. So this is. This is sort of a. I think this is a really smart move for OpenAI. I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. And speaking of distractions, can we talk a little bit about the Metaverse? Ed, can we talk a little bit about the Meta? I don't know if you saw this, but it ends up that the good people at Meta have decided they. They renamed the company incorrectly.

[Ed Elson]

Yes.

[Scott Galloway]

And that this legless world is not the future. Claire, by chance, per chance, do we have a clip about my views on this?

[Ed Elson]

Well, before we. Before we play, I just want to make sure everyone knows what we're talking about, which is that Meta's side project. I guess maybe they called it their main project, but the side project of the metaverse. They invested $80 billion into creating this Metaverse platform called Horizon Worlds. People may remember from 20, 21 and 20 when this is what all that Mark Zuckerberg was talking about. As of last week, they are shutting that platform down. Now let's cue the clip.

[Scott Galloway]

What is probably the biggest strategic misstep of the last five years was Meta deciding that the new growth engine would be the Metaverse. No, it's not. Doesn't matter what the name of your company is. This is not working. You got a guy who can't be controlled. He controls the company. He's all in on the Metaverse. He's going to. He's already rich. He doesn't care about money. So his attitude is, I'll show you. I'm going to prove everyone wrong and keep going all in and spending tens of billions of dollars on the Metaverse. And shareholders are in the backseat, buckled in and they can't get out, and the doors are locked on this crazy, nauseating ride called the Metaverse. As far as I can tell, the Metaverse is just a bunch of incel panic rooms created online for people who have. It just isn't working. I mean, my favorite stat about Horizons World or whatever it is, is that MySpace currently gets more traffic than Facebook's version of the Metaverse. So, look, this was the mother of all Distractions and hallucinations. And it wasn't even consensual hallucination. This never made any sense. And it went back to just this basic anthropological truism. And that is, throughout history, the things you could eat or could eat, you don't come straight at you, they come at you from your side or behind you. And so you get. Get uneasy and even nauseous if you can't. If your peripheral vision is moving too fast. And the idea that people are going to take their mixed reality headset with them and start watching. I mean, I remember Kara arguing with me about the future spatial computing. I put one of these things on for eight seconds and I'm like, this is so fucking stupid and so nihilistic that we want to go into another universe. Our species is really used to and really fond of, of this universe and this notion that these weirdos want to take us into another universe. Okay, I get immersive experiences. I like IMAX as much as the next person. It's a small business. I enjoy the sphere, but for only a couple hours. And I feel like a piece of beaten flank steak by the time I leave there. In terms of sensory overload, by the way, IMAX really hasn't been a good business. The sphere is supposedly still losing money. The way you want to live life is you want to have a series of experiences that are wonderful in this universe where you have control of your peripheral vision. And the reason why billboards are so incredibly still successful and get decent CPMs is despite the fact you're not reading a billboard on the side of the highway, you're very conscious of it because it's threats and opportunities. And just the most basic level of anthropological or behavioral research would have said that, okay, 40% of the people putting this nonsense, this condom on their head, that they're getting nauseous within 20 minutes. And yet he kept pouring. He poured $70 billion of capital into this thing. And so I just think this was. If it hadn't been for the fact that the guy is a business genius and has added probably $2 trillion in shareholder value since they started this nonsense. This is an enormous thud. It went way too long. Way too long. When you're a company like Meta and you have those cash flows, you can take big swings. 1 billion, 5 billion, 10 billion. But to keep pouring money up to

[Ed Elson]

70 billion and to rename the entire company, this is what we all forget. They renamed the whole thing. They were so confident about this. It's unbelievable.

[Scott Galloway]

Guys, breaking. As we record this horizon Worlds is not shutting down after all. According to Meta Bullshit. This is them trying to have peace with honor. This thing is dead. This thing is dead. They're going to try and make it happy and put it in hospice. Whatever. You lost Pop Pop a year ago. Maybe he still has a catheter and there's brain waves there. This thing's being done. This thing's being euthanized slowly. I don't care what their press release says.

[Ed Elson]

Let me just read you what I'm seeing on TechCrunch. Quote we have decided just today, in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR. Bosworth said as part of an Instagram stories Q and A after a fan of the app reached out to say they were quote, quote, heartbroken about the decision.

[Scott Galloway]

Let me just say goodbye to Nana, Ed. Say goodbye to Nana.

[Ed Elson]

The end is nigh. Yeah, it does bring up this question of what makes a good side project, because this one was Horizon Worlds Meta's Metaverse. Clearly a very bad side project. Did not work. Apple Vision Pro looks like it's going to be a very similar story. It's not really working. They're beginning to wind things down. Google Glass, I mean, we're seeing a theme here that wearables, or at least virtual reality wearables are not really great. Google Gloss was a similar story. Didn't work. Shut it down. Google was another interesting side project. That was Google's social media competitor, which they shut down in 2019 after trying to get it off the ground for literally 10 years. There are many examples of side projects being total failures and it doesn't work. At the same time, there are some side projects that have been really successful. For example, just to stick with Google, Waymo. Waymo started out as Google project chauffeur in 2009. I think the best example probably would be the best side project in history would have to be aws.

[Scott Galloway]

Great point.

[Ed Elson]

Which started out as this internal thing where Amazon realized, oh, it's kind of difficult to communicate across different teams. Let's build this digital infrastructure. They built it and then Andy Jassy realized is actually let's turn this into a business. And so he started to sell it and now it makes up more than half of the operating profit for the company. Jeff Bezos himself has called AWS quote, the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business. That was a great side project. So I think that becomes this interesting question, like, what makes a good side project? What? When does it work? When does it not work? And how can managers and executives take a framework moving forward to understand which things to greenlight and which things to say no to.

[Scott Galloway]

It comes down to management. And that is so. One of my first clients was Levi Strauss Co. And they launched Dockers which was the fastest zero to billion garment brand in history. And then they launched a new thing called Slates. And what happens is that a very senior person says, this is my vision, this is my baby. And the way you please that person and perhaps get promoted over two other people qualified is you tell them how amazing Slates is and what a visionary they are and you start to ignore the actual data. And it comes down to doing something really difficult. Post it. Notes from 3M was a side project, right? It comes down to holding yourself accountable and setting up up reasonable metrics at the outset. We are launching new podcasts, we launched China Decode and I said, okay, we launched Raging Moderates by x date within 3 months, 6 months, 12 months. These are the metrics that define success or not. And the problem is you talk yourself into believing that your ugly step headed child is your child and it's beautiful. No, you have to be able to perform infanticide. Facebook had a phone. Amazon went into auctions and they did it the right way. And I think Bezos is a very disciplined operator and said, okay, I think Amazon had a phone. They said, yeah, they had a phone.

[Ed Elson]

I just remembered.

[Scott Galloway]

They said, okay, if it doesn't get X pickup by Y date, we're pulling the plug. The key to successful side projects is not the ones that work. It's the ones you're willing to kill because you only have so much wood to put behind an arrow. Well, so absolutely look for growth battle, test the shit out of it. But also we just launched a substack strategy. Subscription revenue. We have realistic but yet at the same time aggressive benchmarks. And if we don't hit them, we're going to get together as a group and we're going to decide whether to pull the plug on it. Fortunately, it's very successful so far. Please visit us on substack. Very. But a co's job is to have the stones to try new things and to have the backbone to kill them when they're not working and to say, okay, Slates. That was actually a third brand from Levi's. I think it was called Slates. Okay, Slates, this was the right idea, we made the right decision. It's important we take risks. It's not working. Kill it and well, it just needs more time or it just needs more capital. Probably not these things. The most of them that work, they may get out of the gate slowly, but usually there's a lot of blinking green lights on the shit that works. But again, what happens is a senior manager sees it at their legacy and really appreciates anyone who's willing to go on their ayahuasca trip with them. So it just comes down to leadership. And that's to say, okay, you know, hbo. Go HBO now. Hbo, Joey, bag of donuts. All right, folks, I get all the sub brands trying to address different audiences and different technology platforms. It's not working. Let's just go back to hbo. So it comes down to leadership, because people you are paying, generally speaking, most of them will say whatever the fuck makes you feel good. Because if someone makes you feel good, you're more inclined to want to promote them. Well, that's not the litmus test. Is this person really good for shareholder value and setting up really tangible hard metrics and holding you and themselves accountable?

[Ed Elson]

Yeah, it's such a good point. We were discussing this as a team and there were some basic questions that we think are pretty crucial to if you're going to launch a side project, if it makes sense. Three questions that we think are relevant here. One, do you have the money to make the bet? And that's a very important, fundamental question. Like, you need to have of cash coming in the door. I mean, that's. Amazon had figured that out before they launched aws. They had significant cash flows at that point, and then they were able to make that bet. You could argue that Meta had that positioning as well. The second question is, is it leveraging existing infrastructure? Like, are you the right person to be doing it if you're like a clothing brand, like, no, you shouldn't launch like a candy company just because you think it's a good idea. That's not your wheelhouse, so you shouldn't be getting into. And then the third thing, and this is the thing that I think Meta didn't really question that Meta did not answer correctly or perhaps never even asked themselves. And that is, is it actually a good idea? It's not that helpful, but maybe we could put it in terms of is it actually solving a problem, a real problem that people have? And if the answer is no, you just can't do it, because no amount of capital, as we saw, will turn a very stupid idea, a very bad idea, into a good idea. The money doesn't solve the problem if the idea is stupid. And that seems to be this mistake that Meta made, is they Never really thought to ask themselves, is this even a good idea? Are we actually solving a problem here that people want to be solved? The answer was no. And then they invested so much money into it, probably so much pride and ego into it as well. Victims of the sunk cost fallacy to the point where they decided like we have to keep going because we've bet the ranch, we've bet the farm on it, we've literally bet the name of the company on this working out. And here we are in 2026 and it didn't work.

[Scott Galloway]

The only nuance I would add to that is that a good versus a bad idea. Sometimes the best ideas are just fucking crazy and feel like a bad idea at the same time. And sometimes logical stuff just doesn't work out. I think that it you need to veer away from the subjective and the qualitative towards the objective and the quantitative. And that is a good manager and a good CEO says all right, what does success look like? And then put hard metrics around it and say in 90 days we're going to look at what we think success would look like. And also what does failure look like? And constantly reevaluate whether we're and also a basic economic term that management and CEOs understand but they don't really live by is the notion of sunk costs. And that is we've put so much energy and so much capital into this thing, we love it. No, that's gone from this point forward. If we were at a standing start, would we put more money into this? That's the only question that matters. That money's gone. It doesn't matter. That effort gone, the time spent on it doesn't fucking matter. From a standing start, here and now, where this project is, how it's going, how well or how not well it's going. Would we continue to fund this if we were outside investors who had no legacy investment, no effort, no affinity, no affection for it?

[Ed Elson]

We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, Sign up for our [e-mail]. Support for the show comes from ShipStation. When your company is growing, nothing stops that growth quite like a bad customer experience because they couldn't get your product. Luckily, ShipStation's intelligence driven platform brings order management, rate shopping, inventory and returns, warehouse systems and comprehensive analytics all in one place. They say they can even save you up to 15 hours of time per week on order fulfillment. ShipStation automatically chooses the right carrier, finds the best rate, prints labels in bulk, and even sends tracking updates to your customers. Shipstation even compares rates across major global carriers like USPS, UPS and FedEx, including any discounts you already have to select the best shipping option for every order order with savings of up to 90% off. You can try ShipStation free for 60 days with full access to all features. No credit card needed. Go to shipstation.com and use code markets for 60 days for free. 60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment. That's shipstation.com code markets shipstation.com code markets

[Scott Galloway]

support for today's show comes from Grammarly. From emails and reports to proposals and updates, work today demands clear thinking and confident communication. And when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic just doesn't cut it. Grammarly gives you one place to think, write and finish your work, and it's loaded with agents that help you sound natural and engaging. With Grammarly AI, you get ideas down faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use AI Chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft and refine it with context aware suggestions that fit what you are working on. Grammarly AI also allows you to communicate more effectively by getting a gut check on how readers might react. Adjust phrasing clarity and style so your writing sounds like you, not generic AI. You can even simplify complex ideas so your message lands clearly and quickly. Plus, Grammarly says that 90% of professionals have saved time writing and editing their work. Grammarly works seamlessly across more than 500,000 apps and websites, so your support is always there when you need it. In a world of generic AI don't sound like everyone else. With Grammarly you never will. Download Grammarly for [e-mail] that's Grammarly.com. Support for the show comes from SoFi. To stay ahead in this economy, your number one priority should be staying on top of your finances. With inflation and market share shifts, you can't afford to be passive. You need to be proactive about where every dollar is going, and part of that is having a bank that actually works for you. Enter SoFi. SoFi plus is a premium membership, a smart way to get more for your money. SoFi plus is packed with benefits and unlock a thousand or more in annual value with qualifying activities values including a competitive APY on savings and investment match for your IRA and access to one on one sessions. With SoFi Wealth Financial Planners. You can get started for $10 a month and if you join SoFi plus between now and April 15th, you'll have a chance to win over $75,000 in cash. SoFi is also giving 20 individuals $1,000 in cash prizes and 50 winners free SoFi plus memberships for a year. Head to sofi.comscottg to enter. Terms and conditions apply. To learn more about SoFi plus, head to sofi.com sofi-plus foreign.

[Ed Elson]

We're back with property markets. Disney finally has a new CEO. Josh d' Amaro officially took the helm on Wednesday, stepping in at a difficult time for the company. External risks, including the war in Iran, weigh on its tourism business. Its studio business faces headwinds. And of course, its linear assets continue to decline. Just as an example, after four years of steady ratings gains, the Oscars stumbled last Sunday with viewership on ABC falling 9% from a year earlier. So, Scott, Josh D' Mauro has taken over as of last week. He has, you know, a steep road ahead. What would be your advice to the CEO? How would you get Disney back on track at this point?

[Scott Galloway]

I think they should merge with Netflix. I think that this is a business that's consolidating that requires so much heft. I don't think that's a good idea. If I were the head of the FTC or the doj, but you asked me for advice. The parks is just an unbelievable business. I'd build from the parks out parks in the studios. They'll do what they need to do. They'll shed the declining cable assets. So then go good bank, bad bank. This should be an events experiential parks company with a really strong studio and a fantastic, really clear positioning around family, around streaming. I feel like Netflix and Disney are kind of the only ones I think I know will be around in 10 years. It's an incredible company. It kind of identified. It's sort of a bit of a proxy for how Hollywood has done the last 10 years. And that is great content. Product's never been better. Enormous disappointment from a shareholder perspective, Disney stock is lower than it was 10 years ago. What is the S and P? The S and P is what, I don't know, tripled since then or doubled and the NASDAQ's tripled. And meanwhile, if you invested in Disney or worked at Disney and have options, a huge disappointment. And if Bob Iger also just to reverse engineer this to a, a learning for executives, you're always better off leaving too early than too late. And Bob Iger represents that in spades. Bob Iger came home from Vietnam eight years ago after a tour, medals pinned to his chest, total Hero, one of the most respected people in media history. And then he got bored, started heckling from the cheap seats, performed a coup from outside of the palace and went back to Vietnam and is coming back with, you know, massive injury. His reputation has really been diminished. If he had just stayed away, he would probably be one of the people everyone's talking about to run for the Democratic nomination for president. He had that kind of credibility, he had that kind of luster. And to be fair, he faced a lot of headwinds in the broadcast market and Disney's. He's at a good launch, but there's just no getting around it. The way you're evaluated as a CEO is on the shareholder price, and the shares have vastly underperform in the last 10 years. I think Netflix is up four or five fold. Disney is flat. So this is a mixed legacy. And I think at this point, I called or I saw Ted Sarandos at one of these fancy award shows. I'm like, okay, you save 120 billion by not buying Warner Brothers. Your stock's up 10, 15%, you've got another 60 billion. 120 billion plus. 60 is 180 billion. I'm like, here's an idea. Disney's 178 billion. Why wouldn't you merge? I mean, while the FTC and the DOJ are asleep, why wouldn't you? Which I think is a bad thing. Why wouldn't you just. Can you imagine Netflix and Disney? Can you imagine Disney getting to incorporate the IP of Wednesdays and Stranger Things into their parks? Who in the world could not have a subscription that involves either Disney, Disney plus or Netflix? They would just kind of. I mean, in some. That merger shouldn't happen. But I said to Ted, and I don't know Bob, and he's probably sick of me shitposting him, although he does wear lovely cashmere sweaters. But I think that if I were him, my ultimate swan song would have been merging with Netflix, the new guy. I think Disney's a great buy right now because I think the parks are arguably the largest business with the largest moat. I think Disney has real pricing power and they're paying a conglomerate tax right now. And that is because basically the earnings call goes like this. Streaming media platform finally paying off. We're getting real operating leverage there. The parks continue to be one of the most dominant, dominant entertainment assets, experiential assets in the history of the business. You know, you're. You people call child services. If you don't take your kid to Disney and spend Twelve hundred dollars for a shitty hotel room by the time they're five, right? And then, and then it's like, okay. And then they go on to apologize for all of their broadcast shit. Espn, abc, Disney Channel, et cetera. As soon as they get rid of that shit, they could sell all their broadcast and cable stuff for a dollar and the stock would be up 20% in the next year. Because what happens is you pay a conglomerate tax, and that is when you have a company with multiple entities, basically the market finds the shittiest asset and assigns that multiple to the whole business. And that's what's happening to Disney. If Disney were just parks streaming in the studio, you know, champagne, cocaine with an eight ball of ketamine. That's a good time. That's a good time. Ed, did I tell you I'm in tulum? Did I tell you I'm into loom?

[Ed Elson]

You wrap that up there? Yeah, look, I mean, Disney's parks business is. That's, that's the crown jewel at this point. And it is really, really interesting how that has changed over the last few years where there is now a premium on these, as Josh Brown puts it, heavy asset, low obsolescence assets. I mean, things that are, in the physical world, people will pay a lot of money for. That's the premium that investors are paying for. So they have that. And as we've talked before, like, Netflix wants to get into in person experiences too. And probably a year ago, maybe two years ago, we had a whole conversation where Netflix was trying to open up kind of like a Netflix park, some sort of experience. I'm not sure what's happened since then, but I know that it's something that they're interested in. And if they had a strategy on that front, it is something that investors would certainly reward them for. Plus, if you can have a duopoly, you might as well take it. And it seems that the FTC and the doj, at least under this administration, have no interest in actually regulating monopolies and duopoly. So if you can do it, you should do it. You should make it happen. So I would agree with that. I do find it really interesting what happened with Oscar's viewership, where it fell 9%. It was the lowest viewership since 2022among the key demographic, which is 18 to 49 year olds. It fell even harder. It was down 14%. We saw the same thing with the Golden Globes. This year. We saw the same thing with the Grammys. And as everyone knows, the linear network is just getting Crushed at the moment. But just anecdotally something that was really interesting. I wanted to watch the Oscars and I had dinner with my girlfriend that night and I said, let's watch the Oscars today night. And she said, really? And I was like, yeah. Like, you, you don't want to watch the Oscars? She said, no, I don't really want to watch. I was like, why? You love this stuff. This isn't someone she likes. She's interested in celebrity news. Like, she likes this stuff. Why don't you want to watch it? And she said, because I'll just watch it tomorrow on TikTok. I'll just watch the clips because then I don't have to watch all the bullshit for three hours. And that was when I suddenly realized, like, like, I mean, this is a clip economy at this point and that's the big problem, which is that these, I mean, maybe people didn't watch the Oscars on ABC, but I know that they watched it on TikTok. I know that they watched it on Instagram, I know that they watched it on YouTube. Those are the platforms where people are consuming this information and consuming the content. And in a lot of ways, the, the live Oscars on abc, that's just sort of a Trojan horse. That, that is a Trojan horse. That is a vehicle for the clips that get put out on social media the day after and the day after that. And that's where people are consuming all of this content. And so we've been looking into this and it is becoming a lot more of a thing. I mean, you look at sports as an example, which is all about live. It's about watching the match. Only 31% of young sports fans today say they watch full length live matches. 74% of them them see that they get most of their sports content from social media platforms. I look at my own behavior, I suddenly realize I'm watching the Premier league basically on YouTube because I'm just watching the highlights. And so I think if I had to give advice to Disney, if you want to fix this Oscars problem, you need to start investing in the clip economy. You need to start figuring out, okay, yes, we've got this live thing called the Oscars, but that doesn't really matter. What matters most is clipping it up, up and packaging it and spraying it all across social media the day after. That's where we're going to try to make the money. And that's where we should try to sell the ads too. We needed to develop a very real ad Strategy around social media that isn't so dependent on beaming this onto, onto the linear networks. That would be my advice.

[Scott Galloway]

I did a meeting with the Academy or the board of governors for the Academy and they asked for advice. Everything you're saying makes sense, but unfortunately Alphabet has other ideas. And that is if you want to display their stuff on YouTube, they'll give you just enough money to kind of make it worth your while. But not enough money to any anywhere justify the amount of money that ABC used to play to broadcast the Academy Awards. First off, movie theaters. And it's anathema to say this, and all these producers and directors talk about the collective of going to the movies. I think movie attendance is down 40 since COVID My kids don't go to movies. I mean, we used to go when they were little for kids movies. I've been to two movies this year. I went and saw Roofman because my friend produced it and I'm a huge Channing Tatum fan and it was great and I loved the paternal theme in it. And I went and saw one battle after the other, which is a good film, but it's sort of like $350 million artistic masturbation. It won everything. Okay. I'd be shocked if that movie gets its money back. And what a shocker. People don't want to watch a three hour show interrupted by commercials of a bunch of high school graduates lecturing us on geopolitics. It's just, what a shocker. That's not exciting. At the Vanity Fair Oscars party, I tracked down the, you know, I'm good at running other people's businesses. I'm even better at running other people's lives. I can't help but give advice to people. I tracked him down. I'm like, dude, let's be honest, the magazine business was dead 10 years ago. You just didn't realize it. It what you should be doing. That party, that experience. They should be running live Oscar viewing parties all over the world with an aspirational guest list where they get influencers and brands to parties similar. Similar to what Bustle does charge them a ton of money. Hey, you're patron and you want to sponsor Russell Crowe, who's in Sydney, he can't be in la, whatever. Or upand cominging Australian actors, whoever they are. And we're just gonna print money they could make. So Vanity Fair could have. And maybe they did this, but I didn't see many brands. They could make 10 million bucks off that party and they could make 2 or 3 million bucks easy at different experiential events all over the world for viewing parties of the Oscars or different things. But the actual business of airing the Oscars for three hours, if you're watching the Oscars on abc, it means you're also at that point where you need opiate induced constipation medication. It's not a, it's not a good reflection on where you are in life. And the only reason you want to watch it out is because you're in this business. So it's not. And by the way, they don't want to invest in it right now because where is it going? It's going to YouTube. So that's where the world's going. You know, Conan O', Brien, one of the most talented people in the world, summarized it perfectly that the next host is going to be Mr. Beast and he was joking, but it's kind of true.

[Ed Elson]

So

[Scott Galloway]

the future for awards ceremonies broadcast is going to decline. The future for experiential events. I mean, even just at a demographic level, the top 10% of all the money. I don't want to go. I don't want to watch the Oscars. I don't even want to go to the Oscars. I'd love to. Going to a great viewing party and meeting interesting people and having an excuse to get dressed up and feeling interesting and fabulous. You pay a lot of money for that. And why wouldn't the Disney parks have like a big viewing party or. Anyways, I think there's a healthy willingness to spend real money. You know, my son was super excited and I was super excited to do this. He and his other buddies who are seniors in high school went to Universal for their Halloween night and they went for a full weekend. They did Halloween for a weekend and I'm sure they spent a lot of money, but I love that. As opposed to watching going to a movie and watching Halloween 11 with Jamie Lee Curtis, the absolute hottest woman of the 80s. Ed, I'm sad you're not older that you missed out on that. Anyways, yeah, the Oscars, look, it's a dying thing and you're right, it'll be clipped up, up. But the company that can make money on those clips is the new host of the oscars and that's YouTube.

[Ed Elson]

I think this is where media companies need to get a lot more aggressive though, in their social media strategy, which is because it's true. It's like you're gonna, you're playing on YouTube's terms. And we have this in our own business. We make way less money from the automatic ads that YouTube feeds the viewer when, when they watch one of our videos. Which is why we have decided to do something a little different, which is that we own the relationship with the advertiser ourselves and we place the ads that we want directly into the video. And maybe the YouTube audience will say, that's annoying, to which I would say just skip past it. So whatever. But the point is, because we own that relationship, that's allowing us to. To negotiate the price for ourselves, which means that we're not having to throw money away to the big tech overlords over at YouTube or at Instagram or any of these other other sort of social media, neo media platforms. And that's what all of these companies need to do. Without the Oscars, without Timothy Chalamet, without all of these superstars, Michael B. Jordan, no one's going to watch anything. You need these people and you need the Oscars and you need Vanity Fair to get them together and get the cameras out and put it on the platforms. And then the question is, how do you monetize that? You're not going to make a lot of money if you just post the Instagram clips and they just. You just get the money from, from Instagram and Instagram' control of the relationship with the advertiser. Which is why unfortunately, you're going to need to get a lot more aggressive on negotiating and owning the relationship with the advertiser and placing the advertisements directly into your videos. The audience isn't going to like it very much. That's on you to figure out how to make the audience okay with it. But that's what you have to do if you want to stop getting crushed by these social media companies. Because this is the future of media. It's all on, on these platforms. It's all in the clips. And that's where you have to make the money.

[Scott Galloway]

I like your vision. I think it's optimistic. This is unfortunately what I think the reality is. And that is, so we're on YouTube, we're getting 100 to 200,000 views per episode. AdSense, we make almost no money from. It's $3 CPMs. It's a shitty business unless you have the scale of tens of billions of people watching videos every day, which Alphabet does. I think they split the revenue with you. I think it's 50, 50. If you're in the podcast business, you get 70% by having an ad distribution network or a partner like Vox. So already Alphabet is flexing their muscles. But here's What I have seen every time when you partner with a big tech platform and it's the following. They fuck you. And that is you build a business, you're getting revenue, and then Alphabet and what you say makes all the sense in the world. Bake the ads into the actual video itself. My prediction. And Neil Mohan has been more. More generous to the creative community, or not generous, but he realizes in order to inspire more and more content, we need to give more and more revenue to the creators. Eventually, eventually the history of big tech, give them enough money such that they will devote resources and then overnight they do a Panda. They do away with brand pages and they fuck you.

[Ed Elson]

Well, what are we going to do? We're just going to sit here and get fucked or are we going to do something about it? I am advocating for do something about it.

[Scott Galloway]

We sell ads, right? We sell out directly to the advertiser, we insert them to our audio product, of which there's no monopoly platform that can get in the way, right? The distribution here is not controlled across a monopoly. We have substack and there's several competitors to substack, where we get a subscription strategy which is already creating real revenue newsletters, getting people to pull out their credit card and pay whatever it might be. There are means of making money in the MEO ecosystem. What I'm suggesting is the moment you have Meta. I was on the board of the New York Times and we were making a shit ton of money on something called About Dot Com. We did all this. We get creators to do something on Southern cooking, optimize it for Google. Google would send a ton of traffic and send a ton of traffic to us and we'd have links to buy stuff. And we made money overnight. Alphabet does a Panda release and we wake up the next morning and our revenue's down 40 to 60%. I love Jessica Yellen at News Not Noise. I think it's a really important organization. I think she does incredible work and I'm an informal advisor to her. And I'm like, you're too dependent on Instagram. And this is what Mark Zuckerberg the moment you have any margin, he will come for your margin. And this would be my prediction on Alphabet. Neil has a different vision so far and I respect and appreciate it. We love being on YouTube and it's been great for us. At some point, if the same behavior continues to, to cycle through the DNA of big tech, they'll go, oh, you're baking videos into your thing. No, fuck you. We have technology to starch those out or you have to pay us 90% of that revenue. Eventually they come for you. Eventually they fuck you. And that has happened to almost every brand. Facebook used to have brand pages and they encourage Adidas. You have to have a bigger brand page than Nike. So they spent all this money. Company like Buddy, there was all sorts of ecosystems around it. And as soon as your ecosystem gets big enough that it's real margin, they come for you. So I think they've got to establish direct relationships, as you said, with the consumer. They do that in streaming media. No monopoly controls, you know, controls their access, if you will. There's still a lot of bidders for their content. If I were. So let's. I apologize for the word salad. If I were on the board of Disney or if I were running Disney, we need something called Disney. What does that mean? 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks. 100 bucks a month. You get all the Disney properties, ESPN, everything, all the streaming media, and you have access to Disneyland for free on certain days when it's only Disney members. And you don't have to wait in line three fucking hours for the avatar rush. And you get special products, special merch. But you are a Disney plus household because people think, wow, we go to Disney once a year, we should do this. It's a great. No, no you don't. You go once every three years. It just feels like once every month because it's the seventh circle of hell. But they could wrap all of that special access to one of a kind merch days at Disney that aren't a fucking nightmare, where it's like a reasonable crowd, special birthday celebrations for your kid. Maybe at Disney that princess experience. And so many households would sign up for that. Instead they have the seven dwarves of businesses all competing with each other. They should have. Disney is in a position to have the ultimate family loyalty program. And the market loves recurring revenue. The money you give up at the till at the entrance gate at Disney, the money you give up from merchandise, the money you give up in the theaters, we're paying 12 bucks. That revenue is valued at whatever one to three times revenues. The recurring revenues you would get from a loyalty program would be valued at five times revenues. So you could lose 10 or 20% of your ad revenue from those shitty businesses at ABC or ESPN or even at the turnstile. And you can Increase shareholder value 40 to 70% by moving everything into the mother of all loyalty program.

[Ed Elson]

I think that's a good idea. And I'll just end with my advice to them, which is you should never post a clip on social media ever again unless an advertiser is directly paying you for it. You should have a relationship with an advertiser, get it in the clip, somehow negotiate a deal, get paid for it. Because the current system is that we just do it for free. We do it for free. We think that it's marketing, but ultimately we realize, actually, no, this isn't marketing. This is the content. This is where all the money is being made. And yet we're not seeing any of it because it's all going to Instagram or It's going to YouTube. It's going to a tech platform. Own the relationship with the advertiser and get paid for every single clip you put out would be my advice. And then my final thing I'm going to disagree with you on, Scott, is that one battle after another was autistic masturbation. That was an incredible movie. I loved every minute of it.

[Scott Galloway]

A third of a billion dollars.

[Ed Elson]

Expensive if it did.

[Scott Galloway]

If it didn't have Leo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro and that one woman who's literally the hottest woman in the world right now, I would say that thing cost $3 million to make. I mean, yeah, good film.

[Ed Elson]

Fair.

[Scott Galloway]

Good film cost $330 million.

[Ed Elson]

I wouldn't invest in it, but I would watch it several times. In fact, I have. I've watched it again. I loved that movie.

[Scott Galloway]

All you need to do to be in the movie business is marry a rich man and be a documentary filmmaker. Whenever anyone comes up to me and says I'm a documentary filmmaker, I'm like, okay, so you've married a rich husband in a boring business and they're offended. I'm like, okay, let me guess.

[Ed Elson]

Offended by that.

[Scott Galloway]

You mar.

[Ed Elson]

No.

[Scott Galloway]

You married a guy 30 years older than you that made his billions in iron ore smelting, and now you're changing the world with documentaries.

[Ed Elson]

That's me. That's my next life. 27. That's what I'm doing in 27.

[Scott Galloway]

I'm just angry because I have been so unsuccessful in Hollywood.

[Ed Elson]

Probably makes sense, too. All right, let's take a look at the week ahead. We will see consumer sentiment for multiple march. We'll also see earnings from GameStop and Carnival and earning season will wind down. Scott, any predictions?

[Scott Galloway]

OpenAI Sora Social media app is going to be shut down soon. So Sora is the kind of OpenAI TikTok version, kind of the social media platform of AI generated content where users upload video on models generated from Sora. It's short form content and you can share with your friends. And when it came out, it was number one in the App Store and it garnered 1 million downloads, actually faster than ChatGPT. In the beginning it was growing faster than ChatGPT, but the party's over. Downloads fell 22% month over month in December and another 49% in January. Downloads are collapsing and effectively I think what you have here, again it goes to the notion of knowing when to shut something down. And with the renewed focus on focus, you're going to see this thing be shut down. Users are dropping like flies. OpenAI spent an extreme amount of time and money to keep the lights on here. Estimates are that it costs $15 million a day to run Sora, or $5 billion a year, and that it's only bringing in less than half a million dollars per month. So essentially the app is a venture that is not central to OpenAI's core competencies. It's not attracting users or revenue, it's generating massive losses and it's a distraction. So in addition, it's kind of bad for the brand. Two thirds of Americans disapprove of online videos created by AI. It's the definition of AI slob. And about three quarters of users say they would be uncomfortable consuming fully AI generated creative content. In sum, the correct strategy of focus the first victim of that is going to be OpenAI Sora app, which is going to be shut down.

[Ed Elson]

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carty. Our research team is Danchalon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O' Donoghue and Mia Silverio. Jake McPherson is our social producer, Drew Burrows is our Technical director and Catherine Dillon is our Executive producer. Thank you for listening to Priority Prof. G Markets from Profg Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and tune in tomorrow for a fresh take on the markets.

[Scott Galloway]

Support for today's show comes from Framer. Let's say your marketing team wants a new landing page so the design team mocks it up and then your engineering department, who's already got too much on their plate, responds with yeah, we'll get to it. Thousands of businesses, from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their sites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days to solve this very problem. Framer's enterprise grade no code website builder used by teams at companies including Perplexity and Miro to move faster with real time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated A B testing. Your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your.com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages or migrate your full.com framer has programs for startups, scale ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and as fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building for free [e-mail] markets for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com markets for 30 percent off framer.com markets rules and restrictions may apply.

[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

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[Ed Elson]

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[Scott Galloway]

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