Prof G Markets: The UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting, Amazon Takes On Nvidia, & 12 Days of OpenAI

Follow Prof G Markets: Apple Podcasts Spotify Scott and Ed open the show by discussing Saleforce’s earnings, Meta’s venture into nuclear energy, and the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Then Scott breaks down Amazon's decision to build a supercomputer, explaining why it’s a win for shareholders and a potential game-changer for reducing AI infrastructure costs. Ed explains why he thinks Amazon could be one of the first companies to truly disrupt the semiconductor market. Finally, they discuss OpenAI’s decision to go into livestreaming and explain what its surge in popularity could mean for the future of content creation. Order "The Algebra of Wealth," out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

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• 1:29Scott Galloway?

  Today's number, 170,000. That's how many unique drinks you can order at Starbucks. True story, Ed, I walked into a Starbucks with my ex-wife and the barista said, "We don't recommend caffeine for pregnant women." And she said, "Well, I'm not pregnant." And he said, "Well, we do have diet-free lattes."

• 1:56Ed Elson?

  Diet-free lattes does not make sense.

• 1:59Scott Galloway?

  Diet-free, sugar-free. Fuckin' A, I'm in the Cotswolds. Let's skip to the banter part. I'm in the Cotswolds with my dogs.

• 2:07Ed Elson?

  Oh, lovely.

• 2:08Scott Galloway?

  And we're moving, so my job is to leave, take the dogs out to the countryside and stay in some bougie place and just be out of the way. So here I am.

• 2:19Ed Elson?

  Are you staying in a hotel or you got a house? What's, what's the deal? It looks pretty nice that what you got behind you.

• 2:25Scott Galloway?

  It's called Heckfield Place and I was gonna go to Manor Estelle, but they didn't have any room. And then so Farmhouse can put up the dogs. So Heckfield's kind of a, it's the Lexus.

• 2:34Ed Elson?

  So Farmhouse has a no dogs policy?

• 2:37Scott Galloway?

  No, only certain rooms, only certain sheds allow dogs. They all claim to be dog friendly and they have like two rooms for dogs. And I can kind of understand because don't tell anyone, my dogs have ripped up this place. Jesus Christ. But it's, it's, we go on long walks. We're in the British countryside. I keep thinking I'm gonna run into Ellen. Supposedly Ellen lives out here with her wife, Portia de Rossi. Yeah.

• 3:00Ed Elson?

  She escaped once she got kicked out of the US, basically. Isn't the British countryside the best? It really is incredible, right?

• 3:10Scott Galloway?

  Let me think. Let me pour some tea first.

• 3:15Ed Elson?

  And I go with a no from you there. You just don't really like the, the outdoors. I think that's the problem.

• 3:20Scott Galloway?

  I don't like the UK from November to May. It's 40 degrees and just wet. I don't even see it rain. I just walk outside and it's wet. I'll give you this. When I first moved to New York, people said, oh, there's beautiful beaches in Long Island and the Hamptons. And I thought, I'm from California. These won't be beautiful beaches. And I went out there and found out that the beaches are beautiful. People constantly talk about the British countryside and I thought, you know, yeah, right. And I came out here. It is beautiful. It's just, it's dark at 3:30 today.

• 3:47Ed Elson?

  That's all part of the vibe. You just gotta get involved with that and get on board.

• 3:50Scott Galloway?

  No, I just wanna, you listen to Simon and Garfunkel and self harm. It's just.

• 3:56Ed Elson?

  That's not the vibe. Simon and Garfunkel, get inside, have some tea, head to bed pretty early.

• 4:03Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. What, what have you been up to out here? We're always talking about me. Let's talk about you, but keep it short because I'm not that interested.

• 4:10Ed Elson?

  Well, speaking of weather, it snowed for the first time today, which is pretty exciting. So New York is getting cold. And that's the long and short of it in New York.

• 4:19Scott Galloway?

  Well, are you engaging?

• 4:22Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, he's a charmer. He's a charmer. Get to the headlines. Uh, Jesus Christ.

• 4:28Ed Elson?

  That's right. Let's start with our weekly review of market vitals.

• 4:38Ed Elson?

  The S and P 500 rose, the dollar rose on Trump's tariff threats, but declined at the end of the week. Bitcoin hit, wait for it, $100,000 for the first time.

• 4:47Scott Galloway?

  God.

• 4:47Ed Elson?

  And the yield on 10-year treasuries was volatile, shifting to the headlines. Salesforce shares rose more than 10% after the company issued higher-than-expected guidance for the current quarter. Revenue also beat expectations, up 8% from a year earlier, as the company secured more than 200 deals for its AI chatbot suite called Agent Force. Meta is seeking proposals from developers to construct nuclear power plants. The initiative aims to get the plants online by the early 2030s to help power the company's data centers. United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in what the authorities are calling a brazen targeted attack. The incident occurred just before the company's highly anticipated Investor Day in New York.

• 5:30Ed Elson?

  I don't really know what to make of this, Scott. We've never covered anything like this. I guess the first question I'd ask you is, what do you think this means for United Health? Like, how is United Health supposed to respond to a crisis like this?

• 5:47Scott Galloway?

  Well, it's a tragedy for the family, no doubt about it. I think United's gonna be fine. But what's come out, which was really interesting, I found, is that the etchings on the casing said "deny, defend, oppose." And this is the name of a book that's about how insurance companies get out of claims. And so, this appears to be politically motivated or thematically motivated. What's been shocking to me has been the response online. And to say there's been a lack of empathy is an overstatement. People are circulating memes and acting as if, kind of quite frankly, the company and this person had it coming, is the way I read some of the memes I've been seeing.

• 6:29Scott Galloway?

  And in the US, what you have is a healthcare system that is essentially bankrupting a lot of people. 40% of Americans have some form of debt as a function of dental or medical bills that they can't pay off. And the largest source of, or largest cause of bankruptcy is medical debt. And there's just no getting around it. The American healthcare system, in my view, is optimized for the top 10%. If you're in the top 10%, You have the best healthcare in the world. If you're in the bottom 90%, you have expensive but bad healthcare. When income inequality gets to the point it's at, it usually self-corrects. But it self-corrects in a, you know, small number of ways, either through war, famine, or revolution. And I think this is an example.

• 7:13Scott Galloway?

  When you have, you know, the CEOs of companies being murdered and it looks like it was politically motivated. It looks like it has some connection or link to the company and a viewpoint around the behavior of these types of companies. The healthcare system in the United States, in this in no way justifies violence, but it does create a lot of despair and disability in our economy.

• 7:36Ed Elson?

  What do you think the conversations in the boardroom are right now? Like, do you think if this is indeed politically motivated, and it looks like it was, do you think the boardroom is like, okay, people are angry, we're going to change the way we do things? Or is the boardroom thinking we need to up our security? I mean, just some statistics here. Meta spends $23 million on protecting the personal safety of Mark Zuckerberg, and Google spends $7 million. So a lot of other companies know that people are kind of out to get their CEOs. And UnitedHealth, I don't believe, spends any money on executive personal safety or security.

• 8:21Ed Elson?

  So like, what do you think is the response at the board level from UnitedHealth when something like this happens? Does it actually force them to sort of take a look at their business and how they make money? Or is it more like, we need to do a better job of protecting our executives?

• 8:39Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I would imagine the first reaction is, we need to keep our executives safe. Those numbers that you quoted around CEO security are about to explode. That's a good business to be in right now, offering executive security. This isn't going to be a moment of reflection for them. Like most for-profit companies, they do whatever they can to try and maximize their profits. And rationalize like, I know, let's get some insulin, let's put a brand on it and let's quadruple the price or whatever it is. But they're not going to say, we need to really think through healthcare in the United States.

• 9:10Ed Elson?

  Yeah, exactly. But that's what everyone online seems to think is happening here. It's like all those trolls that you mentioned, they're like, oh yeah, well, someone finally showed them.

• 9:20Scott Galloway?

  This doesn't help the problem. It makes it worse. It makes it seem like the people who, I mean, this is just, in any way, if the murder of a, of a 50 year old man with, you know, with a family is rationalized, you had a pretty serious chaos. And just the fact that these folks need security now is really, you know, it's disappointing. So the short term, it's just going to be those numbers are going to go way up. You're going to see security across every, I got to imagine every CEO of a health company is saying, should, do I need security now? Should it inspire a moment of reflection of why does everybody hate me? Or why are there so many people that hate me? Yeah. Will that happen? No.

• 10:01Scott Galloway?

  And the guilty party here is not the CEO of these companies. The guilty party is the electorate who continue to let their elected representatives be weaponized by lobbyists from the pharmaceutical and the healthcare industrial complex such that they can charge more for pharmaceuticals, they can charge more for diabetes medication, they can let insurance companies, you know, deny all sorts of claims. So the US healthcare system is the most disruptible business in the history of business. It's raised prices faster than inflation. At 17% of GDP, it used to be 5%. I think as recently as 1962. So in 60 years, it's now almost four times the amount of our government. It's the biggest business in the US. And we need to turn folks into consumers again, where they actually look

• 10:45Scott Galloway?

  at the price and they demand more. But this is, this is gonna, it's gonna inspire a lot of very interesting conversations. I'll just leave it at that.

• 10:52Ed Elson?

  Let's move on to Salesforce earnings now.

• 10:55Scott Galloway?

  There we go. Salesforce, the agentic layer. They're killing it. They're reeking or getting efficiencies internally. Their quarterly earnings increased 8%, which isn't amazing, but it beat expectations and their operating margins hit their highest number ever. And current quarter guidance came in strong overall. Full year guidance for revenue growth stayed the same. Is this a little bit of rah rah? Yeah, because if demand for the agent force was really as revolutionary as Marc Benioff described it, they probably would have guided up. I mean, Nvidia says this is revolutionary and we're taking our guidance up. They're like, this is amazing. It's revolutionary, but we're maintaining guidance.

• 11:38Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I think the story of this earnings call was AI. They mentioned the word AI 21 times and they mentioned the word agent force 67 times. So they are very optimistic about AI. The question is whether that will actually pan out in the numbers themselves because they talked a lot about agent force and they said that they've signed a lot of deals with agent force. And Salesforce only launched agent force a month ago, so we don't know yet. So I think the thing that we'll want to keep an eye on over the next few quarters is whether or not agent force, this new AI bot army is hype or if it actually is going to have a meaningful impact on revenue because just saying over and over again, it's great,

• 12:21Ed Elson?

  it's great, it's great. We're so excited to deploy it. That's just not really, that's not really enough for Wall Street, I don't think. And let's just wrap up here with Meta's new proposal for nuclear power plants, or at least they're seeking proposals from other development companies to construct nuclear power plants. Do you have any initial thoughts on that?

• 12:42Scott Galloway?

  Well, it's interesting. These companies are now kind of taking on the role of government in the sense that the only people who have the capital to build nuclear power plants is either be the government or a giant utility that was government regulated and given a monopoly. I mean, nuclear has just had such a terrible brand. I remember I was in fixed income at Morgan Stanley and going up to Washington for a dinner and there was something called the Washington Public Power Supply, which was supposed to build a nuclear power plant. It overran and it ended up being just this giant hole in the ground. I'm not sure if it ever finished or not. And they used to call the bonds whoops bonds. And there's just been, it's been so out of favor and all of a sudden it is white hot because the friction in AI isn't people, it isn't customers, it's something unusual.

• 13:25Scott Galloway?

  It's energy to power it all. And we said in our predictions deck that nuclear would be the technology of 2025. Why nuclear? It's reliable, efficient, carbon free and powerful. One nuclear plant produces as much energy as three million solar panels or 430 wind turbines. And there's just few ways, you know, to, to kind of spin up in three to five years, something that could potentially power 750,000 to three million homes, which is what AI is going to require. Meta's energy consumption increased 1500% in the last 10 years. And in August Zuckerberg said Llama 4, Meta's next generation of their AI model will need 10 times more compute to train than the previous generation.

• 14:08Ed Elson?

  I, I think the thing that jumped out to me is the point that you made about the idea that you have Meta basically taking on the role of the government at this point. Because the thing that Jigar Shah told us, and this was the head of the loan office at the Department of Energy, as he said, you know, we need the government to be funding this because we're the only ones with the capital to make these, these risky investments. I mean, you look at Vogtle, the new big nuclear plant in Georgia that was just built. That thing cost $35 billion to build and it went $17 billion over budget. So these things are extremely capital intensive. But to your point, it's like, actually, there

• 14:52Ed Elson?

  is another entity that can make these forward leading investments and it is big tech. You know, it's, it's Meta, it's Amazon, it's Google, it's potentially Apple at some point. And I guess where my mind goes, it feels a little bit dystopian.

• 15:12Ed Elson?

  That we're at a place in society where the two gatekeepers of the future of our energy industry are, one, the government, and then, two, like a handful of tech executives. Like, the idea that Mark Zuckerberg, who originally was the guy who built a social media network, and now he's kind of shepherding the direction of clean energy in America, which will just give him even greater and an even tighter grip on all of the infrastructure in the US, from advertising to computing power, and now to just pure raw energy. Maybe I'm being a little bit, you know, tin hat, but it just feels like we're going into

• 15:56Ed Elson?

  a slightly scary place.

• 15:58Scott Galloway?

  Well, you gotta ask yourself, what's next? They control the news, or can elect a president? You're just figuring this out, Ed? Wait, let me get this. Your thesis is that tech executives are growing too powerful, that there might be a problem here. Huh, really? It's almost, this is the least mendacious thing that Meta's done. I mean, if they, I don't know if there's a way for the government to get in the middle and say, okay. It's like when they build a building, or a developer wants to build a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco, they say, fine, but it's not going to be as big as you want, and you have to build a park. Or 10% of the residences have to be for artists, or whatever, for people raising allergy fee labradoodles, or whatever.

• 16:43Scott Galloway?

  I think this is a good thing. I think that AI, similar, that, one of the things that always bothered me about crypto is it seems like we have this self-invented incremental usage of electricity that's equivalent to Argentina, and that it's, I'm not sure that we really needed that. But this is going to make our, that energy consumption look like a walk in the park. This, in my view, is the most exciting technology outside of GLP-1 drugs. I think it's, I think it's really exciting, and I'm glad they're making these sorts of investments. The key is, do we need some sort of oversight to make sure they don't begin to sequester all power to a small number of companies, and then use that as a weapon where other companies are basically dealing with brownouts every day?

• 17:26Ed Elson?

  We'll be right back after the break with a look at how Amazon might start competing with Nvidia. If you're enjoying the show so far, hit follow and leave us a review on Prof G Markets.

• 17:46Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Built. Most of us work hard to earn our keep, but usually there's no one around to hand you a cookie when you successfully pay your monthly housing bill. No one except Built, that is. Built has expanded from their original Rent a Rewards program, and they have a lot more going on for members now. For example, members can earn points on mortgage payments, too. Every housing payment gets you points that get you a lot more than baked goods, such as flights with top travel partners, including United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and much, much more. Here's another benefit of Built membership. You also get access to what they call a neighborhood concierge. You can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, all while rewarding you at more than 45,000 merchant partners. It's simple. Being a renter and now owning a home feels a lot better with Built.

• 18:31Scott Galloway?

  You can download the Built app and join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com/profg. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com/profg. Use our link so they know we sent you.

• 18:46Scott Galloway?

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• 19:31Scott Galloway?

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• 19:57Scott Galloway?

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• 20:42Scott Galloway?

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• 21:09Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. Amazon is building an AI supercomputer known as an Ultra Cluster that will be powered by hundreds of thousands of its own Tranium 2 semiconductors. The chip cluster will quintuple the processing power for AI startup Anthropic, which recently received an additional $4 billion investment from Amazon. And when the cluster goes live next year, it will be one of the largest AI training clusters in the world. So Scott, I think the most important thing here is the fact that Amazon is deciding to build a giant supercomputer not with Nvidia chips, but with its own chips, these Tranium 2 chips. Your thoughts on this news?

• 21:51Scott Galloway?

  I was really, well, one, you know, I haven't participated in the kind of the Bitcoin explosion, and I haven't really participated in the AI explosion. And I was happy to see this because I own Amazon stock and I just thought this was brilliant and really exciting. And I love the, I love the idea of Nvidia having a competitor. I wish it was a smaller company, but it reminds me that some kid or some PhD student, you're too young to remember this, 10 or 20 years ago, strung together a bunch of Nintendo game sets or game consoles and created like a supercomputer, just stringing these things all together. And this architecture just seems really fascinating. And as you said,

• 22:29Scott Galloway?

  if they can in any way, in any way, somehow create a credible competitor around their chips, even in the same universe as Nvidia, just their operational excellence, their B2B, their cloud offering, you gotta think they're going to take a trillion dollars in market cap away from Nvidia. So I thought, wow, this is really exciting for Amazon shareholders. And, and they're kind of offering cost reduction and control by reducing reliance on Nvidia. Amazon can now lower AI infrastructure costs for its business customers while gaining greater control over its supply chain. I mean, this is, I just thought this was, you

• 23:11Scott Galloway?

  know, whenever you get a company that comes out of nowhere and becomes the most valuable company in the world, it's just, imagine, you know, Lake Erie of blood being poured into the water and the megalodon that attracts. And this has attracted one of the scariest megalodons in the history of business, and that is Amazon. And they have the money to do this. The firm's most recent $4 billion investment in Anthropic included an agreement that Anthropic would use Amazon's AI chips. So the number two in LLMs is about to use Amazon chips, which will train the chips, they'll get better on it. Nvidia's stock fell 3%, but that's not that big a deal. And just one add on here, Amazon is already trading at a pretty rich valuation, but it's potentially going to get some of that Nvidia

• 23:55Scott Galloway?

  or that GPU magic. We did a predictions podcast on Pivot and we asked Anthony Scaramucci, our friend, to come up with a prediction. And his big prediction is that he thinks that IBM is going to explode because IBM actually has some really strong IP and scientists around AI that effectively Watson was the first kind of AI offering. And then he thinks with their CEO and their current offering that this stock is going to explode. And I thought, wow, that's a really interesting take. But it'll be interesting to see what companies are able to draft off of or kind of become remora fish on Nvidia and OpenAI success. But I just thought this was genius. I mean, you got to give it to the folks in Amazon. This is, I feel like this is a master stroke.

• 24:36Ed Elson?

  Yeah. It's also just like the perfect marketing message, too. Because, I mean, you think about standard marketing, the standard players that you go out in public and you'll just like say out loud or you'll advertise like we have the best chips in the world. Or maybe you'll like have some research report that says, you know, our chips are, you know, 5% faster than Nvidia's or whatever. And that's what we've been seeing most of these chipmaker competitors doing right now. You just sort of make a statement about your chip. Ours is more efficient. It's cheaper. It's faster, whatever. And then you just hope that the market believes you. But this is so much more compelling because to go out and build a supercomputer that is this big and this expensive with only your own

• 25:21Ed Elson?

  chips, not with Nvidia's, implicit in that investment is a belief that your chips are better than Nvidia's. Like, it's the perfect show don't tell strategy, which I find so much more compelling. And I would also assume that the market is going to find this a lot more compelling, especially, you know, the AI companies who want to to use these chips. And that's sort of the most important thing here. So we've been talking a lot about all of these different chipmakers. We talked about Cerebrus, who came out and said, you know, we have the biggest chips in the world and therefore ours are the best. And I didn't really buy it. And this thing, I'm suddenly like, okay, this, this, this is really going

• 26:05Ed Elson?

  to shake things up for the first time in a market where Nvidia has 95% market dominance. It feels like Amazon could be the first one to actually disrupt this.

• 26:16Scott Galloway?

  Well, see above, the biggest megalodon's gray white sharks in the world are coming for that 95% market share. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are all developing custom AI chips. To reduce their dependence on the market leader. And then there's just a suite of AI startups looking to get a piece of the pie. You mentioned Cerebras. There's Grok, Accelerator and Tenserent, which recently raised nearly 700 million in new funding from investors, including Bezo. So there's a three and a half trillion dollar carcass that everybody wants a piece of, and that's Nvidia.

• 26:50Ed Elson?

  There's also just this one quote from the chief executive of AWS, which I find so compelling because it's so understated and so simple compared to all of the other marketing messages of these other chip startups. He said, quote, "Today, there's really only one choice on the GPU side, and we think customers would appreciate having multiple choices." That was the statement. It's just so simple and so compelling.

• 27:16Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, there you go. And kudos to them. Kudos to them. They're out first, right?

• 27:21Ed Elson?

  Yeah, exactly. But you mentioned some of those other companies that are building. So you talked about Google. They're working on their, what's known as their tensor processing units. Microsoft is working with OpenAI on chips. Meta is working on a chip called Optimus. These companies are all not dipping their toes, but maybe dipping their ankles into chip making. But the wrinkle is that they all still have big partnerships with Nvidia. They all still heavily rely on Nvidia. And so we're getting to this point now where they're all working with Nvidia because they have to.

• 28:05Ed Elson?

  But on the side, they're starting to build out their own businesses because they all recognize, well, we rely on Nvidia too much. So I would be interested to get your perspective on how is that all going to play out? And have you ever seen a dynamic before where sort of you're friends with the big company, but then you start trying to nip it their heels and ultimately you're trying to compete with them?

• 28:27Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it was a similar dynamic back in, I think in the 90s. I think Apple got sick of being so reliant on Intel and they started developing their own chips. So yeah, you have seen this before. Nvidia clearly doesn't have the power. They'd be worried about antitrust concern. If Nvidia wanted to play hardball, they'd say, well, if you're in the business of building your own chips, we're out. I think that would probably create antitrust scrutiny, given their dominance in the market. So. All of these guys, they, they, every year, they spend more and more money on Nvidia. They're waiting in line. They're price takers. These folks are not used to being price takers. These folks are the biggest, you know, they're the kind of the, they're the biggest gorilla in the room. And when they meet with their vendors, they're used to saying, no, I want you to cut your

• 29:10Scott Galloway?

  prices by 10% this year, and I need it faster, and I'm going to delay my payment terms. They're used to dictating terms. And so when a company shows up and starts dictating terms to them, they are just, they're just not used to it. They just, they can't imagine what world they're in all of a sudden. It's like, oh, wait, all of a sudden, I'm not the hot, the hot girl at the party, and I have to kiss your ass, and you're ignoring my texts? I mean, it's just, this is an alien place for these guys.

• 29:38Ed Elson?

  We'll be right back after the break with a look at an interesting new take on product launches from OpenAI.

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• 30:24Speaker 06

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• 30:54Scott Galloway?

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• 32:05Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. OpenAI has unveiled a new initiative for December called 12 Days of OpenAI, where it'll showcase upcoming products through live streams held on its website across those 12 days. The event has already gained traction with the company's tweet about the initiative racking up 2.6 million views and attracting coverage from more than 10 different media outlets. Scott, we've been talking a lot about public relations and investor relations and how that's all changing this year. What's your take on OpenAI's strategy here, specifically the fact that they are deciding to go into live streaming?

• 32:43Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, so first off, I hear the term 12 days of OpenAI, and I want to go into the garage, close the door, turn on the car. I mean, 12 days of OpenAI. It's like, okay, couldn't they have gone with like three days of OpenAI? I mean, so two weeks of this shit? Anyways, you've been talking a lot about this and how the earnings call needed to be disrupted or investor relations, and whether, I think it was Alexander Karp walking around, live stream, Instagram, going direct to kind of retail investors. There's a ton of innovation around investor communications right now, and this isn't investor communications as much as it is a product launch. And Apple sort of redefined the tech product launch and they literally ripped off

• 33:27Scott Galloway?

  fashion brands. They said, all right, highly curated, highly orchestrated lighting, celebrities, big reveal. And instead of having Gisele Bundchen come down the aisle, we have Steve Jobs. He has a uniform. I mean, the lighting, the production value is capturing a perfect moment in time. And it's now moved to, they've kind of zagged to their zig and that they want it to be more authentic. I'm sure they rehearsed, but they want it to feel raw and they want it to feel genuine. And bottom line is, this is a prediction. I bet more people watch this product launch than watch CNN during those days. This will get, this will get more viewership from a more valuable audience than any cable network. Maybe not

• 34:09Scott Galloway?

  Fox, because Fox still gets a lot of people. There's a lot of people in oxygen takes thinking, ah, she's a looker. I love that Brett Baer. I'd like to grab a staple. He reminds me of a guy I served in NOM with. Anyways, what was going with that? I think this is going to be hugely popular and redefine product releases.

• 34:34Ed Elson?

  And I think the main takeaway for me is that I think that companies should be thinking about their earnings and their product launches less as just press releases and announcements, but more as content. Like ultimately, that's what you're trying to do. They're trying to produce content in the same way that we're trying to produce content on this podcast that is engaging and that gets people excited and that gets people interested. And you're not going to do that with just a simple press release. The way you're going to do that is with videos and with podcasts. And I think it's just very impressive that OpenAI has really led this transformation here. And they said, well, why don't we do a live

• 35:15Ed Elson?

  stream? I mean, that they're sort of at the forefront of the transformation of, of content right now. So I'm very impressed by the fact that they're taking this route for a product launch. I would like to just get your thoughts on live streaming as a medium, which I'm just finding very fascinating right now. Like, I feel like live streaming was not very long ago, this very niche concept, this very niche kind of weird corner of the internet. The idea of a live streamer was not something that held much cultural currency at all. But in the past year, we've seen like an explosion of live stream, live streamers and live streaming.

• 35:58Ed Elson?

  I mean, we've seen like Aiden Ross, who is a big live streamer, who ended up interviewing Donald Trump before he was elected. And now Aiden Ross is all over the news. And we've seen Kai Sannat, who's built this gigantic following on Twitch. His last live stream reached 50 million viewers, which is around 15% of the United States population. And then here's this one stat that blew me away. More than a quarter of internet users today watch a live stream every week. So I would like to just get your take on live streaming as a medium. Why do you think we're seeing this explosion right now in media?

• 36:39Scott Galloway?

  The honest answer is I don't know. I kind of feel like live streaming is to original scripted television or video or just streaming what podcasting is to radio. And that is initially out of the gates. An old guy like me says, what's the difference? It's just radio. No, podcasting's different. Live streaming, I feel as if, you know, I hear this and think, okay, we should do a live stream, right? Like everybody else, but I'm sure it's hard.

• 36:59Ed Elson?

  I mean, you did a live stream like last week, right? You did it on Section.

• 37:03Scott Galloway?

  Actually, I did it earlier today. I'm just not thinking correctly. I did a live stream in AMA for Section, yeah. It's, look, the, it's been around a while, I guess celebs. I don't know what the, I guess, live streaming is going B to C, where it's mostly been B to B. You know, Section, we did a live stream on AI ROI. What a name! And 10,000 people registered and I think 3,500 showed up, but. That's a good audience. I guess when you have Robert Downey Jr. Or Terry Crews show up, I'd be kind of curious to understand what is the zeitgeist, what's working, what isn't. But it just feels like, again, it's all kind of the same thing. And that is if you're Walls

• 37:46Scott Galloway?

  and AOC and you go on a live stream, you're basically going direct to consumer and you're cutting out the means of production. And the means of production is CNBC or Fox or CNN. And so you can do it much more inexpensively. You get to dictate the terms of it. Any economic rewards, you get to reap the majority of it. So it just feels like it's another collapse of the media industrial complex where the creators get to garner more of the rewards because it's taking advantage of the infrastructure called DARPA and the internet as opposed to trying to kiss the ass of some means of production that gets in the middle, whether it's Netflix, whether it's CNBC, whether it's Comcast, whether it's Disney, and you can just go straight to these folks. And so it strikes me as if it's going to follow

• 38:29Scott Galloway?

  the arc of podcasting, it's going to grow substantially. It felt like it had a moment a few years ago with gaming and then it kind of went quiet again. And now it feels like it's coming back.

• 38:37Ed Elson?

  Yeah, something I would add on to that, that I've been thinking a lot about recently in content. As I've said to you before, I've just become fascinated with YouTube. And I look at what's happening with our YouTube channel, which is growing enormously. I mean, we're getting like hundreds of thousands of views on our videos now. And I've been sort of wondering, why is that? Like, why would you opt to watch this podcast on YouTube versus just listen to it in your headphones? And I don't think it's because people want to see our faces. I don't think that adds that much to it. I was thinking about this. I think the big differentiator with YouTube and with live streaming is the comment section.

• 39:22Ed Elson?

  I feel like having a comment section is just an entirely different experience because you get to share your own opinions, you get to hear what other people think. And suddenly the experience transforms from not just consumption, but it actually becomes like a social experience. And so what I'm finding with live streams right now, my take is it feels like live streaming is the comment section on steroids. Like you're getting to participate in the content with a group of people who are watching it at the same time. And I'm starting to think that any form of content that doesn't figure out a

• 40:04Ed Elson?

  way to interact with the audience in a meaningful way where the audience can comment and have an opinion and engage interactively. I'm starting to think that any, any of that content is really just behind the ball.

• 40:18Scott Galloway?

  It's such an interesting point. You just inspired an analogy, and I don't know if it's the correct one, but the reason you go to Premier League games, you know, during COVID, they didn't have fans or they had a limited number of fans. And they're just, you watch it on TV and it's the same players and it's the same rules and the same game. And it just fell flat without the fans in the stadium. And I wonder if this is effectively a game, you know, traditional video now is a game where there's no fans. And that is when I was on this AI ROI live stream, I occasionally would stop and read a comment. And we tried to interact with the audience and it just had such a nice vibe. And the thing I love about Premier League is you go and the fans are just amazing. It creates such, they are so engaged in everything, you know, screaming and booing at every, every

• 41:03Scott Galloway?

  little thing and, you know, making fun and people and they're hilarious. But to your point, maybe that's what this is. Maybe the next level of kind of interaction and dope and entertainment is, all right, you have two streams. One stream is the content and the second stream is the fan reaction to the content. Because what I noticed myself doing today on this live stream was occasionally when someone put something really interesting or funny or asked a question in the chat. I would sort of selectively pull stuff out and highlight it.

• 41:34Ed Elson?

  And think how fun that is for for the viewer. I mean, it's it brings on a whole different dimension. The idea that you're watching the content and the guy who you're watching is actually interacting with you in real time. You compare that to just watching like Jimmy Fallon, where they have these very kind of awkward interviews. And it sort of feels like you're watching like robots put on a production. It's a completely, it's so much more human, I guess.

• 41:59Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I think that's I think that's a really interesting point. It's sort of, you know, this company I'm on the board of right now, Open Web manages the comment section of media companies. But comments are asynchronous. Someone posts a comment and then people comment on the comment. But it creates a lot more engagement and which creates incremental opportunity for advertising. This is, all right, if we we engage the audience, it's like the players yelling back or kicking the ball at an audience member, right? It's sort of.

• 42:28Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. And it's sort of like, or, you know, when the dad in left field catches catches the ball while holding his kid, right? It just sort of engages the whole audience. I think this is really neat. I think here we should announce now that we're going to do a live stream. So people, people can see you live, see how the edit really does impact our ability to make you sound intelligent.

• 42:52Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I don't know if we're cut out for live streams.

• 42:54Scott Galloway?

  No, we've got faces for podcasting and content for asynchronous.

• 42:59Ed Elson?

  Yeah. Yeah. It is very interesting that we're seeing companies start to embrace this. And I think this is all headed in one direction, which is that the press release is dead. And newer forms of of media like videos, TikToks, live streams, that is the future. That is the future of public relations.

• 43:24Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss, Mia Silverio is our research lead, Jessica Lang is our research associate, Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Tom Lee, only on Prof G Markets.

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