Things Scott Says on Podcasts

And I'm like, oh my God, I've made my partner. It was, my show was so. So bad. Your show.

It was also not great. I had AOC as my first guest. So that gave it a lift. I had you as a guest, which gave it a lift. Here's what happened with my show. Probably the same with yours. It was kind of developed and set up like winter of 2019, turn of 2020, all set, contracts, ready to go. Let's start filming in February, March, whatever. And COVID strikes. And I've never had a TV show before. Spoiler alert, I've never had one since. And COVID hits. And I was like, well, I guess we're not doing a TV show. They're like, no, no, no, we can just make it in this new reality, whatever it may be. And so my daughter had a very severe lung condition. She was like two years old. So I had to go to this remote location because of her. And so then I didn't have proper internet, which was kind of important for making a TV show. So I was filming things on iPads and cameras, you know, and then I had to hire someone to pick up USB drives with the filmed video. Like it was like drug deals of data. And then they would come to my house and pick up the USB drive like from the driveway because we didn't want to have contact with each other and then drive it up to their house and upload it on some faster Wi-Fi that they had. I mean, it was, it was so surreal. So much energy to make something that wasn't good.

I know, not my own thing. I go talk about things I've written on MS Now. You're

on MS Now, yeah. And I all the time.

But I, and particularly Morning Joe is sort of my home court there. But I have always tried to maintain the discipline of going there to talk about things I have written and not going there to talk about, you know, like things that might be in my head.

on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/slash AF

Support for the show comes from Apollo. The world's leading companies don't need off-the-shelf financing solutions, whether it's funding growth, modernizing operations, or strengthening their balance sheet. CEOs and CFOs need more than capital. They need a financing partner with scale, flexibility, and certainty to help them execute. That's where Apollo comes in. Through its integrated global platform, Apollo provides access to long-duration capital and a broad range of financing capabilities, helping companies develop customized financing solutions designed around their strategic objectives and structured at an efficient cost of capital. Custom-made investment grade. Learn more at Apollo.com/slash capital. Apollo Global Management, Capital Provider, Asset Manager, Wealth and Retirement Solutions.

Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, not with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy August 2026, visit apple.com/slash Apple Watch Series 12.

Support for the show comes from Yahoo Scout. Life comes with plenty of big questions, especially when you're taking your first steps into adulthood. When those questions get complicated, you want more than a quick answer. You want reliable information without spending hours searching for it. That's where Yahoo Scout comes in. Yahoo Scout is an AI-powered answer engine built to help you navigate life's big decisions from comparing job offers and planning a trip to learning to manage your finances and so much more. Instead of simply spitting out an answer, Yahoo Scout helps you understand your options, weigh the trade-offs, and see the sources behind the information with simple visual

answers. I have been using

Live takes about 5% of the roughly $20 billion content budget, around $1 billion, and generates about 1% of viewing. Sarandos admits that the ROI isn't there, but he says the signups drive sign-ups and retention and ads. HSSBC downgraded the stock to hold, arguing YouTube's gains are partly coming at Netflix. Netflix isn't competing against Hulu or HBO. It's competing against YouTube, full stop.

YouTube, yeah.

What do you do then?

I just said it. I think they, I think they need to take what are their assets. Bella and Ted and his co-CEO, they produce probably not the best content, but the most gross tonnage of it. They're the Russian army. I mean, they're just, no one has a, they have the biggest content budget in the world. They do produce great content. They need to create a platform and technology to start slicing and dicing it and move to where the puck is headed. And that is a generation of people that wants to watch it in two, five, and 10 minutes. I watched.

So right. The Quibby turned out to be a good idea. That was

I think everything comes down to warfare and that is Netflix. Netflix is, they own the arms race. They have the biggest army. And then they looked up and YouTube Ed owns the skies and asymmetric warfare.

Yeah.

what about like, I've noticed, I don't look at any other podcasts there. I mean, the only one that's doing well, as I said, was Charlemagne, the God.

Is that right?

Yeah, that's what I understand. Like doing like really well. I mean, I'm sure they do fine. But I never, I see it there and I never think of it for them. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know why. It's

Hold on. Just our listeners need to qualify this. This is from a man whose business mentor is Pete from Madman. That guy was a great character. He was

a great character. Well, have you made your smart home pitch? You really think this is going to do it for Apple?

Sorry. I'm having trouble. Shut the fuck up. Please try a little later.

Daddy doesn't love you.

This is taking the award for longest prediction in the history of this show. I'm

Well, my prediction is that Apple's move into the home hits well. The hub is a speaker plus smart home control panel centered on Siri. I would actually retire the Siri brand. I think it's been a total fucking disaster. You know, disaster. And I'd call it something. I'd just. Call it all, you know, dots or call it Gloria. Jay!

Jay!

It's basically like banging all of Sen, Bose. Sonos. I mean, these are not. I mean, they're not great brands. They're not good. Well, they're not great businesses.

You know what? The greatest example of the white space that is building a great brand or bringing a great brand into the home? You can be selling a $20 million home and they'll put on the tear sheet Sub-Zero refrigerator. Sub-Zero. Wait, a 5,000-piece appliance is what you're talking about? There just aren't very many brands in the home. And I think you put, I think Apple, and not only that, a lot of people have struggled or have concerns about having Alexa or Meta in their home, right? Because of privacy concerns. Apple is the most trusted or the least distrusted.

That's true.

Well, let me, okay. So let me just try and set the table. They generated about $5 billion in revenue up 25 in 2025. That's up 12x, but they lost nearly 8 billion. The headline, 42 billion loss, is a bit of it, hasn't big asterisks because 34 billion of it is accounting charges. So maybe that's not relevant. It wants a valuation north of $2 trillion or roughly 435 times last year revenue. It's committed $518 billion in future compute infrastructure obligations. That's more than 110 years of its 2025 growth or revenue, excuse me. And then again, one quarter of revenue came from two customers, and 47% of sales were rooted through big tech partners that are simultaneously suppliers, investors, and potential competitors. As you noted, the prospectus devotes roughly 80 pages to risks and 48 pages to the business. That's remarkable. And the kicker here is that Anthropic says AI may cause catastrophic harm while arguing the solution is more powerful is a more powerful Anthropic AI. And Reuters identifies this exactly as this whole paradox of this whole movement right now. We could

kill you, but you need us to stop us from continuing.

So, what would you do? Because it may go soaring upwards, right? Wall Street, on a tear, right? And the economy is relatively stable. The growth is relatively stable. So, what would you do here?

Oh, if you're a shareholder, you should be selling everything you can in the secondary markets. This market is so, first off, the IPO market is not strong. I made a prediction that Aura would have a successful IPO. I don't know if you saw it, but Aura actually pulled their IPO. So, the IPO market, I wouldn't say that's a chill, but it's definitely not as frothy as I thought. This other piece of shit, Softman company got pulled, but that was just ridiculous. That was like we work with a software or we work with a softman logo on it. And so, what I would be doing, if you're a shareholder and you can get $1.4 trillion in the secondary market, oh my God, sell everything because the multiple on revenues here, the fragility, the concentration of a customer base, not only the existential threats to humanity from Anthropic, but the existential threats that the market and regulation and the public and the media represent to Anthropic right now. If all of a sudden, I've said that I used this example before. I'm at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica. If an AI bot that said, here's incentive or be creative to shut off the lights, the signals for five minutes at the crossroads or the intersection between Santa Monica and Wilshire, if it was successful in doing that and eight cars crash, I think Congress might get whipped up into a frenzy and say, you guys need to shut all of this down for 14 days.

Yeah, especially if the Democrats sees the Senate, like it'll be Elizabeth Warren all day long doing a proctology exam of them. It literally would be Elizabeth Warren at her finest, right? Like with her. Oh,

don't set their own capital requirements. Boeing doesn't certify its own plan. We're asking the guys building Jurassic Park to serve as the park rangers. We're asking the tram stores recs to be the park ranger here.

You use the expression all the time. We're allowing the arsonists to tell us about fire safety, essentially. And one of the things that's really interesting here is how much I'm just riveted. Like when it came out, I think I'm sure you went on TNO. I was like, this is just. Ridiculous. This is just, and of course they spelled the United States wrong, which is just like, who in the world is over there that can just like actually copy edit. But, but this Heg says thing, this thing with the president at the White House, it's all such theater. It's just ridiculous theater without anything. Meanwhile, these guys get to do whatever they want and sort of pretend that they're getting along. This is a Silicon Valley beef happening on asphalt in front of the White House. That's all it is. It's like how they, and they had poor Dario there. He looked like a hostage. I don't know if you noticed. They kept moving him around. Yeah. You know, he kept trying to run away. It was just the whole, I know he's trying now to cooperate because he's going public, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But I just, this is like so dangerous. It's both things are so dangerous in terms of what's happening. And this leaves us so vulnerable in so many ways. And especially the fact that he's doubling down, Scott, when every single poll says differently. What do you imagine is going on there? He just doesn't care or he's getting money? Or what is your explanation from a marketing point of view, even of pushing this stuff when everybody is against it?

I think he's going a different direction. He often does that, right? He wants to be the kind of, Bill is on a quest to be relevant and he is relevant, but I think he, there's a couple of people who are going to stake at a very different thing. And he doesn't have skin in the game, right? I assume he still owns Microsoft shares. The thing I like about Bill is he does say these things out loud. The thing I don't is he tends to be like very, he should be more strongly worded, I would say, but it's not in his nature. He likes to sort of get along in a lot of ways. And I think we need a leader from this group that says, hold on a second. This is existential. But in a very, someone who's not at one of these companies who has a lot of credibility.

He's saying that, though. I mean, he is. He still has Microsoft stock. And he's saying legal liability is not enough. They need regulation. The threats are very real here. I appreciate it. And also, for all the hits, deservedly, that the Gates brand has taken, how many, he would still be the richest man in the world for not for the fact that he saw an opportunity to nearly eliminate malaria and save millions of people. I agree. It's like he is, you know, he is the tallest little person, the fastest tortoise. I really have a lot of respect for, I've said the same thing over. I don't, I think millions of people who are still alive do not give a shit that Bill Gates was allegedly fucking prostitutes. I think those 5 million people give him a hall pass that are still alive because of Bill Gates. And then you look at the other side, a guy like Elon Musk, who you could argue is going to go down as not putting a colony on the moon and Mars so him and his buddies can pick a series of sexually attractive mates to repopulate the world after we fight it out here on Earth and is potentially going to be found responsible for what might be the largest indirect cause of death, disease, and disability in Africa after we cut off USA.

They are quite opposite figures, you know, on so many levels.

That's right. That's after the kids have already died, right? So you have to have these companies don't police themselves, right? No. Restaurants don't expect themselves. Banks

don't expect themselves. Banks

You use the expression all the time. We're allowing the arsonists to tell us about fire safety, essentially. And one of the things that's really interesting here is how much I'm just riveted. Like when it came out, I think I'm sure you went on TNO. I was like, this is just. Ridiculous. This is just, and of course they spelled the United States wrong, which is just like, who in the world is over there that can just like actually copy edit. But, but this Heg says thing, this thing with the president at the White House, it's all such theater. It's just ridiculous theater without anything. Meanwhile, these guys get to do whatever they want and sort of pretend that they're getting along. This is a Silicon Valley beef happening on asphalt in front of the White House. That's all it is. It's like how they, and they had poor Dario there. He looked like a hostage. I don't know if you noticed. They kept moving him around. Yeah. You know, he kept trying to run away. It was just the whole, I know he's trying now to cooperate because he's going public, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But I just, this is like so dangerous. It's both things are so dangerous in terms of what's happening. And this leaves us so vulnerable in so many ways. And especially the fact that he's doubling down, Scott, when every single poll says differently. What do you imagine is going on there? He just doesn't care or he's getting money? Or what is your explanation from a marketing point of view, even of pushing this stuff when everybody is against it?

I think it goes to a broader point, and that is the incentives here overwhelm morality. And the problem isn't that these people are evil. The problem is that they're capitalists. And we shouldn't build a regulatory architecture that requires CEOs to choose humanity over market share every Tuesday morning. This isn't their job. Their job is to be rapacious capitalists. And the government's job is to ensure, prevent a tragedy of the commons and then tax them so that we can reinvest in the middle class to actually buy their products and have a Navy and food stamps. And we're not doing either. So this is just really, in my opinion, really poor governance. And I think these guys, I can't imagine all of these guys aren't on Lexapro and Xanax to get to sleep at night. Okay, we don't know what's going to happen in the next administration comes in and says, oh, we've decided you're liable for everything, the bad thing that happened here. And there's a populist uprising against these guys. You could definitely see one or more of these guys on trial if something bad happens. So, and Bill Gates gave, I thought, an excellent interview in the New York Times and has me rethinking everything. I've always said there's no wizard behind the curtain. You know, there's always a wizard behind the curtain and that there's going to be more jobs created than destroyed. And he believes that once these, you know, and all of these professions, once they get to a quote-unquote acceptable level, you're just going to see entire industries employment goes away. And to be fair, Bill's been wrong before, but he's mostly right about technology. I found it very scary. Yeah,

I think he's going a different direction. He often does that, right? He wants to be the kind of, Bill is on a quest to be relevant and he is relevant, but I think he, there's a couple of people who are going to stake at a very different thing. And he doesn't have skin in the game, right? I assume he still owns Microsoft shares. The thing I like about Bill is he does say these things out loud. The thing I don't is he tends to be like very, he should be more strongly worded, I would say, but it's not in his nature. He likes to sort of get along in a lot of ways. And I think we need a leader from this group that says, hold on a second. This is existential. But in a very, someone who's not at one of these companies who has a lot of credibility.

I'll just remind people: you've never had an industry this large that's been allowed to police itself. Now, either we've been wrong all along and we should just let them do it. Planes, cars,

all those people, yeah. More

good. Well sentence.

There's a scene in Oppenheimer where they say, well, what if this starts, keeps igniting and it doesn't stop? And he said, well, we're confident that we've done the modeling, that it's going, that it is going to stop. Like, I don't, the anxiety is the following. Not that these companies, not that these companies are evil, not 1%, 10%. The anxiety is not knowing what's going on. And what do we know works for kids? Every parenting book seems to contradict the one before it, but the one consistent thing is that kids need guardrails. And this is effectively where we are. The CDC, the Center for Disease Control, is supposed to prevent an outbreak of measles, much less an existential health threat. What if, what would they say to Moderna? If Moderna, if a scientist in Moderna came out and said, you know what? The COVID vaccine, I think there's a one in 10 chance that the COVID vaccine turns offensive and turns into a pathogen that becomes infectious and kills 10% of the world's population. That's effectively what this guy said. And then when asked about it, the CEO of Moderna said the following, well, you know what? He might have a point. He might have a point.

What would we do? Who knows?

So I haven't been on Twitter in four years, but I'm going to guess if it was about me on Twitter, people were just super supportive and really think I'm a great guy.

Some days wishers

I think when they, when they, something that people thought when they saw that clip

and

they heard how much you're spending a month, the reaction is you're not off the hamster wheel. The reaction is you are spending the more wealth you have accumulated, the more you have roped yourself into spending. And I'd be curious to hear if that's how you feel about it, because I think, I think, I mean, when you, I mean, just reacting to that clip, it's like, oh, wow, I guess you could spend money on private travel because I guess that is great. I guess that is nice. And it starts getting you into a space where you're kind of like, what other things are there out there? And how else can I make my life better? And what more things and what more comfort can money buy? And so how do you think about it from that perspective? Because I think a lot of people would, based on that clip, assume that you have not gotten off the hamster wheel. Or maybe that's what you're saying.