Why The Stock Market Is Booming — But Your Paycheck Isn't

Scott Galloway and Ed Elson break down the latest inflation report, explaining why they think the consumer spending data may be misleading and why real wage growth is the economic indicator that matters most. Then, they examine the latest moves in AI stocks and Anthropic’s financials, including the growing divide between public and private markets. Finally, they discuss Bumble’s reported move toward going private and whether the struggles of dating apps point to a broader shift toward in-person socializing. You can find more information about Ramp’s data here Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel Subscribe to the Prof G Markets newsletter Order "Notes on Being a Man," out now Note: We may earn revenue from some of the links we provide. Follow the podcast across socials @profgmarkets Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Send us your questions or comments by emailing [email protected] 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.

• 0:01Ed Elson?

  Support for the show comes from AlphaSpace by Yahoo Finance. AlphaSpace by Yahoo Finance is the advanced investing platform you've been waiting for. My co-host Scott Galloway is a fan of the platform. Here is what he had to say.

• 0:14Scott Galloway?

  So I have been using Yahoo Finance as my portal for finance for, I'm not exaggerating, about 30 years. I think they do a great job.

• 0:23Ed Elson?

  You can explore AlphaSpace with a Yahoo Finance Gold subscription. And right now, your first year is 50% off. Head to yahoofinance.com/profg. That's yahoofinance.com/profg. Bill, there's $239.70 for the first year, then $479.40 thereafter. Offer valid for new subscribers in the US. Offer ends October 31st, 2026.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  How far would you go to have a healthy baby?

• 1:33Speaker 04

  Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. But there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  This week on Explain It To Me, the ethics of embryo maxing. Listen to new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:59Scott Galloway?

  Today's number three. Americans are three times more likely to purchase an audiobook read by a British narrator than an American one. Just a case in point here, when Ed says inflation is at 3.6%, he sounds like the governor of the Bank of England. When I say it, I look like a divorced dad yelling at a bank teller.

• 2:32Ed Elson?

  My favorite opening number. Really, that's my career in a number, right there.

• 2:37Scott Galloway?

  I don't know if you remember the first time as a child you actually discovered nuance in it. I remember my dad's 40th birthday party. I was five. And they had all these people and they put notes on the back. They put note cards describing people and taped them to the back. And I remember one of my dad's friends got offended. I remember that, about what they said about him. But I remember going to my mom, I remember seeing, men would laugh at anything my dad said. If he stopped and laughed like it was a joke in his deep glass Ouija. When he got drunk, it sounded like, when he spoke, it sounded like a dead language that twins can only understand.

• 3:16Ed Elson?

  So good.

• 3:17Scott Galloway?

  But he would tell a joke and then pause and look around and start laughing, and everyone would laugh. And I noticed women were constantly touching my dad's arm when he'd talk. And I went back to my mom and I said, Mom, what dad says isn't that interesting? And yet, everyone finds him fascinating. What's going on? And my mother said, he's charming. And I've said that part of the reason I'm so traumatized, let's bring this back to me, is because my dad started banging a flight attendant on Continental Airlines while I was still married to my mom. But the reason he got to do that is that when you're in 70s California with a strong jawline and a glass Ouija accent, you can not only think with your dick, you can listen to it.

• 4:02Scott Galloway?

  My dad, I'm convinced my dad ended up penniless and alone because of his Scottish accent. Any thoughts, Ed?

• 4:12Ed Elson?

  No, I think this is just incredible analysis. There is something about those people who they tell a joke, and then they start the laughter, and then it triggers everyone else's laughter. And it feels like you're cheating. It's like, isn't it supposed to be up to us? But it works.

• 4:26Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Ed Elson?

  And I mean, honestly, I love those people. I have friends who do the same way. They say something, then they start bursting out laughing, and then suddenly you're like, fuck it, like, this guy's hilarious, I love this. So that's sort of the cheat code. If you can kind of figure out how to be the loudest laugher at your own jokes and time it right, I think it is very powerful. And your dad is case in point. Also helps to have a Scottish accent because those accents are crazy.

• 4:53Scott Galloway?

  I want to stay on this topic of anthropology and mating, because after listening to Paul Kudrowski and Mark Zandi, it's clear I know fucking nothing about the markets yesterday and I can add no value to the show. So I want to talk about mating and lessons for young people. The three things women find most attractive in men, and by the way, about 82% of our listenership is males under the age of 40, is, one, signaling resources. And the key word there is signal. Don't have to have the Range Rover now, you have to have your shit together. I get Alison, you signal a lot of future resources. Two, and the British accent, two, intelligence. It's anthropological. The person who makes a better decision for his family, the family's more likely to survive. And the fastest way to communicate intelligence is humor.

• 5:36Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Scott Galloway?

  And it's hard to tell someone to be funny. Like, I'm naturally funny. I won most comical in the ninth grade. I don't know if I brought that up before.

• 5:47Scott Galloway?

  Anyways.

• 5:47Ed Elson?

  I think that is your proudest achievement, by the way, is the...

• 5:50Scott Galloway?

  Oh, hands down.

• 5:51Ed Elson?

  Hands down. Better than New York Times Bestseller.

• 5:54Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, but the thing is, you can't tell someone, you can't advise a young man, will be funny. But what you can do is say, have a great sense of humor. And that is, laugh at yourself, and when someone else says something funny, or you try to be funny, laugh.

• 6:08Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 6:08Scott Galloway?

  Laughter is infectious.

• 6:10Ed Elson?

  100%. Laugh a lot, have a good laugh, maybe you work on your laugh a little bit. And also, don't take yourself seriously. I think, I agree, you can't be like, okay, you need to be funny now, figure it out. But the path to having that sort of, having those characteristics is if you can take yourself unseriously, then I think people appreciate that. I think it works. So.

• 6:33Scott Galloway?

  I think that's right. Laugh at yourself, have a good laugh.

• 6:35Ed Elson?

  Okay, well, now that we've figured out how to increase the prospects of men's dating lives, shall we get into the markets?

• 6:44Scott Galloway?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:44Ed Elson?

  All right. And by the way, if you like this show, please be sure to hit follow wherever you're listening, or subscribe to us on YouTube and hit the bell icon. That way you get notifications to all of our latest episodes. We appreciate it a lot.

• 6:56Scott Galloway?

  Oh, by the way, Ed, I don't know if you know this, but I have another podcast called Pivot, and we're going on a tour.

• 7:03Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 7:04Scott Galloway?

  Starting November the 2nd, I believe, we're going to, we're going to be in New York, Toronto, Toronto's already sold out, Minneapolis, LA, San Francisco, and I got to choose a city this time. They throw me bones every once in a while. I picked Denver, so we're going to the great state of Colorado.

• 7:22Ed Elson?

  I like it.

• 7:23Scott Galloway?

  So we're almost sold out on three of the six or seven cities. So if you're interested, go to pivottour.com. We'll have live Q and A. We always have special guests. Cara does have a Rolodex deeper than, I don't know, deeper than someone with a very deep Rolodex. So we'll have a great, we'll have a great guests.

• 7:39Ed Elson?

  Any hints on the special guests? Any, anything?

• 7:42Scott Galloway?

  We might have the infamous Ali G, but I'm just saying.

• 7:45Ed Elson?

  Wow.

• 7:46Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, which would be fun.

• 7:47Ed Elson?

  That would be great.

• 7:48Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, no, Cara was, I gotta be honest, Cara always brings it on the guest. Cara's, I think Cara's secretly the most powerful person in the world. I'll be like, oh, you know, what do we think of, what do we think of Secretary Rubio? She's like, I don't know, let me text him.

• 8:04Scott Galloway?

  And she gets back, oh, he's making a dumb lesbian joke. Hold on. She's like, she knows, she literally knows everybody. When I went to the White House with her, God, this delaying is working really well. When I went to the White House with her, literally, everybody stopped and ran over and hugged her. People who I know hate her. People are very scared of her. They think she brings the militia Etheridge vote, and they're very...

• 8:24Ed Elson?

  Immediately commands the room.

• 8:27Scott Galloway?

  Oh, yeah, immediately. All right. Let's talk about AI or inflation.

• 8:32Ed Elson?

  Let's do it.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  Now is the time to fly. I hope you have plenty of the well at all.

• 8:41Ed Elson?

  The latest inflation data is raising some major red flags about the economy. Consumer prices rose 3.7% in September from a year earlier, which is the highest annual rate since May. Energy was a major driver with gas prices up more than 9% over the month and 34% over the past year. And producer prices also came out. They rose 6.3%, which was their largest jump in four years. At the same time, Americans inflation adjusted earnings have now declined for six consecutive months. In September, average hourly earnings fell 0.7% from a year earlier, meaning that workers' paychecks are not keeping up with rising prices. So, Scott, let's dig into this inflation report.

• 9:23Ed Elson?

  I would say probably the worst inflation report of the year, just given the fact that it appears that prices are not coming down. They continue to rise. It's been going on for a very long time. And most importantly, wages continue to fall behind. So wages grew 3%, which means that they grew slower than prices, which grew 3.7%, which means that when you adjust for inflation, your real earnings fell by 0.7% year over year. And that is the sixth straight month where that has happened. So Americans are continually getting poorer as a result of the rising prices, which is mostly due to, one, the war and, two, tariffs.

• 10:06Ed Elson?

  But we're really seeing the effects on energy with gas prices up 34% year over year. That is related to what's going on in Iran.

• 10:15Ed Elson?

  I mean, no, nothing good here, in my view. Your reactions to the inflation report?

• 10:22Scott Galloway?

  I think you're right. This is really ugly and it's terrible timing for the Trump administration heading into the midterms. A few bits of nuance or observations, and I'd like to get your response. Gas prices are just, no doubt about it, absolutely treacherous, increasing gas prices for the incumbent administration. Grocery stores will price diapers below cost in the store because they've done a ton of consumer research and women who do the majority of the shopping, for some reason, diapers are an enormous signal around the value of the store. If they see diapers as being inexpensive, they think everything at Whole Foods, including that $22, you know, bunch of grapes, is reasonably priced.

• 11:07Scott Galloway?

  It is a super strong signal. Think about just how incredibly powerful an indicator and signal, and probably, quite frankly, a bit of a false flag, as important as they are, is gas prices. I counted, I came back, I was at my son's grandparents yesterday for lunch, and on the way back, I counted how many times there was a giant, giant ad for Democrats called gas prices. And that is every time you go by a gas station, and there are literally every three blocks here in Florida, I'm down in Delray Beach, there's a giant, really pretty neon screen that is updated daily with a number on it.

• 11:51Scott Galloway?

  And so every day, sometimes a dozen times a day, the average consumer, American consumer, is hearing subliminally or consciously and subconsciously, this administration is failing. Because what I see, I'm driving and I think, Jesus Christ, diesel at 7.69 a gallon? So, gas prices are, are just such, A, they're important, and B, they have outsized importance in terms of consumer perception. And then, in addition, the anger, the justified anger among people your age is the following.

• 12:32Scott Galloway?

  Since 2022, just literally four years, wealth for Americans 75 and up is up 37%. For people 35 and under, it's down 23%. So when people get angry at me for talking about why socialism doesn't work, they just look at me and they say, bitch, whatever has worked for you is not working for me. And you can understand, inflation is a regressive tax. With a birth certificate, if you own assets, it's a tailwind, but if you're young and renting, it's a mugging. And America is being mugged right now.

• 13:13Ed Elson?

  Just on the, the idea of gas as, I mean, having outsized importance, I think what I would say is it has outsized exposure in public perception, which is why it really matters politically. And I think the same is true, by the way, of the stock markets. The stock market is one of those things that you're constantly getting an update in real time. You're constantly seeing the number. Generally speaking, you, you know what that number is. The same is true of gas prices. So if you have something go wrong in the stock market, people go, oh, my gosh, something's going wrong. If you have something go wrong with gas prices, same thing. I still think, though, that gas prices are, are actually very important in terms of actual inflation.

• 13:55Ed Elson?

  And we've seen this as a result of what's happened after, after the war or during the war, where you've had diesel prices rise close to 70% since the beginning of the war. And as we started to learn, it actually does trickle through to the rest of the economy because diesel is used for fertilizer, which is used to grow food. It's used for transportation, which is used to transport all of our products. And that, and we have seen price increases in, in the rest of the economy. We're seeing that, that core CPI is rising, close to 3%, over 2.5%. It's lower than we're seeing in the, in the price increases in energy, but it does all trickle down. And then, of course, gas is one of those things that, that

• 14:38Ed Elson?

  most Americans are using directly every day. So in that way, it really does matter. I think that there have been some other false flags that the administration is trying to point to as an indication that things are going well. One of them that I keep on seeing is they say consumer spending is rising, which is true. It rose 6.1%. And the idea when they say that is, well, everyone's spending money, so things must be good, right? Yeah, okay, inflation's up, but it's okay because you guys are spending, so clearly you have money. But there are some very important things to factor in there. One, spending is up because prices are up. So of course, we're spending more. Two, spending is also up because savings are down. When we look at the savings rate since Trump took office,

• 15:22Ed Elson?

  it was 5.7%. It's fallen down to 4.1%, which is the lowest in nearly four years. So in other words, yeah, people are spending more trying to keep up with inflation. And as a result, they are eating into their own savings. So, no, I don't look at the consumer spending and think, oh, that's a good thing. And then, of course, the other thing that, that we've talked extensively about with Mark Zandi is that increasingly, consumer spending is driven by the richest. It's driven by the top 10% who make up half of consumer spending at this point. So that is, that is a real false flag there. And which is why I think it's so important, when we look at inflation, we look at the economy, I think the most important number is real wage growth. I think that's the thing that matters.

• 16:04Ed Elson?

  If prices are up, but wages are, are rising higher, that's fine. People are getting technically getting richer. But that's not what we have right now. And as you pointed out, since Trump took office, the inflation adjusted wage growth for the average American has been zero. They're, they're standing still. And you might say, okay, so everything's sort of the same. What I would add on to that, look at what has happened to corporate earnings. Look at what's happened to profits. S and P 500 earnings in that same timeframe have grown almost 40% since he took office. And I think that right there shows you what is happening in this economy, which is that AI is happening, GDP is

• 16:48Ed Elson?

  growing, productivity is going up, corporate earnings are exploding. And we're seeing that reflected in the stock market itself, which is growing as well. But that's the point here. The economy is roaring only for corporations. And somehow, while that is happening, literally, zero of the gains have accrued to American workers. And I think it's the same thing that you and I have talked about for years now. It is the same K-shaped trend. It's the same trend that aligns also with what the data that you presented on different age groups, where young people who don't own as many stocks and who make their living through a wage or through a salary, they've seen their wealth decline over the past several years. And the people at the top, the, the boomers, 75 and older, they've seen their wealth explode.

• 17:33Ed Elson?

  So I, I look at these numbers and to me, it's like, this is the K shape on steroids. It's the same thing that we've been seeing for years. Trump came in and he has essentially made it worse. And now we're seeing it. It's verified in the data. People are getting poorer if they're making money on a salary.

• 17:49Scott Galloway?

  American families are more behind on their finances than at any time since 2010, after the Great Financial Recession. And six months ago, Kyla Scanlon coined the term vibe session because she said, if you actually look at the data, the economy is doing okay and wage growth at the low end has outpaced wage growth everywhere else. Right now, you'd have to argue that the vibes are correct. And just on Zandi's point, and we've been talking about, about how the top 10% are driving 50% of consumer spending, it's the ultimate upward spiral because the stock market has boomed, mostly driven by hyperscalers and the AI trade. And that's come off a bit, but it's still way up. Stock market is way up. That has an enormous positive benefit and psychological

• 18:34Scott Galloway?

  benefit on the top 10% now responsible for 50% of consumer spending. In addition, I think the chaser effect is coming out of COVID. A lot of people are like, what the fuck am I waiting for? I'm going to take my husband to Africa. If I have the money, you know, I'm, I'm going to Ibiza. I, I do think there's an IRL, if you have the money. You know, people are going to spend and you see earnings growth way up. But the trade that marks the age or the event that marks the age is most recently Meta laid off 8,000 people to increase its capex, mostly to buy more chips, laying off 8,000 people,

• 19:19Scott Galloway?

  buy more chips, stock goes up. So it's great to be a shareholder of Nvidia, right? It's great to be one of the survivors at Meta. It sucks to be everybody else. And this kind of marks the AI age. If you're one of the few that's on the right side of the trade in the K, right? And the upward stick of the K, it's never been better. And I think that's across everything in our economy. I think travel, healthcare, services have never been better if you're on the right side, but we've outsourced all the pain to kind of the lower, you'd probably say the lower 60 or 70, because people would say the people in the 80th or 90th percentile are still doing pretty well.

• 20:03Scott Galloway?

  But this is, I mean, this is, people think a revolution starts because someone's not, doesn't have a job. If you look at history, it doesn't start when people don't have a job. It starts when people have to have a second and a third job to make their rent.

• 20:19Ed Elson?

  I think this is like the most important advertisement for why everyone needs to be

• 20:25Scott Galloway?

  Voting?

• 20:26Ed Elson?

  Laser focused on being, well, so that we'll get to that, voting, but also investing.

• 20:32Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Ed Elson?

  Like you have to be on the right side of this trade and you, like, I don't even, I don't really care where you are in terms of your career. You need to be thinking about how am I taking money out of my paycheck and how am I investing it in the stock market? Because we're seeing the divergence, people who forget to do that, or they're not disciplined enough to do it, or they don't make enough money to do it. I mean, whatever the reason is, those people are being screwed perpetually every single year and the effects are compounding. And that's essentially what this inflation report is telling us. Like if you are not investing into assets, if you're not investing into equities, you are not only falling behind, but you're falling miles and miles behind.

• 21:17Ed Elson?

  Like it is so essential to be thinking about that and be thinking about ways to make it easier for you, as you talk about a lot. Can you think about ways to automate your investments? Can you, can you build forced savings mechanisms such that you are, you know, without even thinking about it, investing in the stock market? But that's the learning here because if you're not, you're just, you're falling so far behind. And yes, the stock market has ripped and meanwhile, if you haven't invested, or if you're just making your paycheck, you're flat because prices are rising so fast and inflation appears to be something that's going to be here for a very long time. We've been, we've been way off 2% for several years now. I mean, it's almost a joke that the Fed's target is 2%.

• 22:00Ed Elson?

  Like I don't, I don't even take it, like even remotely take it seriously anymore. They keep saying it, but I just don't really believe it at this point. But that to me is the learning. As you say though, the other learning is vote.

• 22:14Scott Galloway?

  What Trump has done here and the impact on the economy is, is absolutely striking.

• 22:22Ed Elson?

  It's actually unprecedented.

• 22:24Scott Galloway?

  We actually haven't probably seen it since after the great, the great depression. We decided to, to constrain fiscal spending. That was probably the biggest mistake we could have made in the 20th century economically. But going back to just a learning for young people, whatever you can do, and I'm trying to instill this with my son, I tell him, he got into stocks and he got into crypto. I don't like crypto, but I'm like, if you want to buy it for every dollar, you earn through chores, I'll match it if you invest it. And then he got into Pokemon and I'm like, Pokemon is an asset. Buy cards and he saved up and he bought a $30 card. He, he goes and he waits in line with his friends and they WhatsApp each other for drops at different retailers around London to try and get the cards during the drops.

• 23:09Scott Galloway?

  Your job as a young person is to figure out what you're good at, to focus on it, to have some discipline, do everything you can. And like you said, try and make sure the money never gets into your hands. And by the way, do as I say, not as I did. When I was your age, Ed, I thought I was going to be such a baller. I had some really success. I'm like, I'm going to sell this company profit for 10 million. I'm going to take Red Envelope public and I didn't save. I'm like, I got, I had all my equity in my companies. I was always doubling down and I ended up 42 divorced and broke. And it was very, very anxious for me. And if I had just been a little less fucking stupid and taken 20, 30 grand a year, which

• 23:49Scott Galloway?

  I could have done fairly easily and just put it into a boring, low cost index fund.

• 23:55Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Scott Galloway?

  By the time I was 42, I'm like, oh shit, I'm fucked. Everything I've touched has turned to shit and my wife has kicked me to the curb. I could have turned to Vanguard and I would have had two or three million bucks such that I could have exhaled. Instead, I'm like, oh fuck, I gotta start a Joey Bagadonuts podcast with this merchant ivory voiced young douchebag to try and get back in the game. Did I just say that out loud? Did I just say that out loud? I should be on the beach right now. I should be playing shuffleboard with some, with a hot little 55 year old number from Boca. Anyways, you get where I'm headed here.

• 24:36Ed Elson?

  You're stuck with me. I think, I think you went there. I think, I think you got there.

• 24:40Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, slowly. It's never too late. You know, but back to the Democrats, I think the anger coming from your generation, I think some of it is misplaced, but I get it and this is your world. And to a certain extent, I think women with children should get three or four votes and I think young people should get more votes. By the way, Senator Chuck Grassley has decided to run again for Senate at the age of 93. Jesus Christ, Chuck, don't you have any fucking friends?

• 25:04Ed Elson?

  It's crazy.

• 25:05Scott Galloway?

  I mean, anyways, I, the anger, if anger is going to get you to the toll booth, the voting booth, get there. And then what I would say to people in my generation is if you're like, if you're anything like me, if you happen to be slightly white, slightly heterosexual, slightly male and slightly born in the 60s, you have had unearned wins in your sales. We have never been drafted. We've never been told to go fight in a foreign land against our will. We have never, we haven't had 80% tax rates like we had in the 80s. All we've had is the greatest technological and stock market boom in history. And what have we been asked to do for it? Pay the lowest taxes in history.

• 25:48Scott Galloway?

  So this is our moment for my generation to raise money, to highlight candidate quality and strength and to actually hit the ground and do some, do some work. Do you know someone down the street who's a senior citizen? Help them get to the voting booth. Do you, do you, can you have a rational conversation with your kids who may not vote in their twenties because young people don't vote, whatever it might be. But I do think there's a, I think so many generations before mine were willing to make investments that my generation thus far has not made. And it's not too late. This is, I feel like this is our moment to be, to be more involved.

• 26:32Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, my involvement is to go to a Lux Golf Resort in Arizona and talk about an astronaut named Mark Kelly. You know, invading Omaha Beach, going to, going to the Lowe's, Phoenix, same, same, same, same.

• 26:50Ed Elson?

  So inspiring.

• 26:51Scott Galloway?

  Same thing. Call me a hero. Don't call me a hero, Ed. I am not a hero. Don't call me a hero. God, even I'm disgusted by my virtue signaling at this point. Wow. Good for you, Scott.

• 27:04Ed Elson?

  You had me right until the end. You just dropped me off a cliff there.

• 27:08Scott Galloway?

  There you go.

• 27:13Ed 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 on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:30Scott Galloway?

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• 28:13Scott Galloway?

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• 28:29Scott Galloway?

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• 29:43Speaker 05

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• 30:52Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. Last week, NeoCloud company CoreWeave hit a record, but it's not the kind that investors want to see. On Tuesday, the yield on one of its bonds touched 15%, its highest ever, raising concerns about whether the company can manage its massive debt load. Its stock then plunged more than 20%, dragging down other AI infrastructure players as well, including Oracle, Nebius, Broadcom, Nvidia, TSMC, and Micron, which all ended the day lower. Meanwhile, Anthropic gave potential investors a closer look at its financials during a day of presentations. The company said its third quarter revenue rose nearly 50% to $16.8 billion, but that

• 31:37Ed Elson?

  growth was slower than investors had expected, which raised concerns as the company reportedly eyes a public debut at a $2 trillion valuation. So Scott, bad week for AI stocks, and I think some people probably see that Anthropic number. They go, wow, $16.8 billion, up 45% from the previous quarter, which of course, those are big numbers. But you also have to remember that that is a pretty significant slowdown from the previous quarter where revenue had more than doubled. And that aligns with the data that we've seen from Ramp, which has showed that per employee spending on AI among the top spenders who drive most of these revenues for these businesses has actually come down since the summer.

• 32:21Ed Elson?

  And a lot of investors were kind of expecting that the line's not only going to go, continue to go up for Anthropic and for OpenAI, but it's going to go straight up. It's going to be literally like a rocket ship. And suddenly we're seeing, yes, growth is extremely strong, but not meteoric, the way that it has been before. So that was a problem, which actually sent AI stocks even lower towards the end of the week. And then we also got kind of a sense of their profitability, but not really. We got their gross margins, which were 85%, and that was on an unadjusted basis. However, the gross margins are excluding the training costs, which are the company's

• 33:06Ed Elson?

  largest expense. So I don't really care about the gross margin because I'm like, okay, how much does it cost to actually train your models and build these things? And if we're just going to take that out and be like, oh, it's all fine, it doesn't really work for me. And I think that's what investors felt as well. Then we got the kind of the BS. We got the adjusted operating margin of 11%. But what does the adjusted actually mean? We heard that they are profitable on an adjusted basis. Again, what does adjustment mean? What are the actual adjustments? I can say that I'm six foot six on an adjusted basis because I'm wearing lifts in my shoes. But what are we actually saying here? And so my reaction to these numbers, we haven't really learned anything. Again, I want to know what the adjustments are.

• 33:51Ed Elson?

  I still get the sense that this is a massively unprofitable company because of the training costs. Seems like they're a lot more diligent and responsible than OpenAI when it comes to spending, but still I haven't seen evidence that the unit economics makes sense here. And I think that that anxiety is being reflected in the AI trade right now. CoreWeave is its own separate issue. Maybe let's just start with your reactions to Anthropic's numbers.

• 34:17Scott Galloway?

  It feels like a string is being pulled here, and the string being pulled might be CoreWeave or the NeoCloud segment. They've all gotten, they've all traded down in sympathy. And the basic financial lesson that I don't think a lot of people have learned when they look at stocks is you got to look at the enterprise value. And that is, all right, right now, CoreWeave has a $37 billion market cap, but it has a $90 billion enterprise value because it has $52 billion in debt. So you've always got to look at the debt. And basically, when you have $90 billion in debt with a $37 billion market cap, if people were to decide that the AI trade is that the bloom is off the rose and CoreWeave

• 34:59Scott Galloway?

  as an enterprise were to lose a third of its value, essentially its equity goes to zero. Now, that's a little bit misleading because the debt is already 80 cents on the dollar. So technically the debt is 40 billion. But when you have a company where two thirds of its enterprise value is in the debt, you're basically, the equity is the tail of the whip. And you've always got to think, okay, what, you know, I am really in, you know, I am really absorbing a lot of risk here. And then when the debt's at 15%, that's basically saying there's a really decent chance these people aren't going to be able to pay back their debt. And what's so interesting, and this came up with Paul Kudrowski yesterday, is that

• 35:40Scott Galloway?

  demand for compute or demand for these tokens is still skyrocketing, but the cost of tokens has been cut by about 90%. So unless the demand is up 10x, you're running in place. And this goes back to a prediction we made earlier in the year that I'm doubling down on. I think she is coming for the jugular of the American economy and is dumping AI, compute, inference, LLMs, whatever you want to call it, and is reflected in the plummeting price of tokens, which is starting to weigh on these guys because the amount of debt they have taken out to buy these GPUs, to offer this compute, where the prices they get in

• 36:23Scott Galloway?

  the marketplace or they can command is dropping dramatically, is showing up in people's insecurity around the debt. And if the debt goes to, you know, if CoreWeave goes from whatever it is, 65 bucks to six bucks, it's not that it's lost 90% of its enterprise value or that the company's lost 90% of its value. It's that it's lost 40% or maybe 50%. The debt will go down, but the equity is the tail of the whip here. The more interesting question is, will this jump the lab? Will this go upstream into the LLM and app layer? Will it go downstream into the chips and infrastructure and even the power layer?

• 37:07Scott Galloway?

  A lot of power companies have seen their stocks surge, right? Could we end up, quite frankly, in a power glut where these chips get more efficient? There's not as much demand, they go bankrupt, 70, 80% of the data centers on the drawing board never leave the drawing board, and all of a sudden, you know, Constellation Energy sees its demand go down, whatever it might be, right? The NeoClouds or whatever we call this sector, it's, we have full-blown walking pneumonia right now, and the entire world is focused on these things. The question is, does it jump the lab and go upstream or downstream? And I'm curious, you've been following this trade much closer than me, if you think that might happen.

• 37:49Ed Elson?

  Well, I think we're starting to already see signs of it. And I think we got that, a little bit of that evidence in the past week where it started with CoreWeave, where the debt, the yield on the debt exploded, and then suddenly the equity comes down. And I'm just going to go through some of the stock returns that we saw over the past week, and this is data from one of our sponsors, AlphaSpace by Yahoo Finance, which we've been using in a lot of our analysis. The NeoCloud, so CoreWeave fell 26% last week. Nebius, also a NeoCloud, falls 22% last week. Then you go to the memory chip makers. Samsung, down 14%. Micron, 16%. SK Hynix, down 18%.

• 38:34Ed Elson?

  Then you go to the GPU makers, the processing chip makers. Nvidia fell 7% last week. AMD fell 12%. Intel fell 13%. You look at some of the data center providers like Oracle, which I think is sort of this hybrid between a hyperscaler and also kind of a NeoCloud because they're borrowing at levels like the NeoClouds, which fell 9%. So you have a lot of pain that is being reflected and triggered on the news of a single company because it says something about the entire trade itself. And I think that is really important. And by the way, you know, a lot of, this is something that makes me feel actually a little bit more confident in this market, which is that it seems that valuations, I

• 39:19Ed Elson?

  mean, they've certainly contracted from last year, and it's taken a little bit of time for investors to properly digest this. But it does seem like valuations in the public markets right now are getting a little bit more sensible. And so I'm actually a little bit less worried about some of the big names. I'm not so worried about Nvidia, for example, which is trading at, you know, 16 times forward PE. You know, that's, that's okay for me. I'm actually not terribly worried about, about the memory makers as well. Yes, they've had these huge run-ups, but on a multiple basis, they're still trading at like three, four, five times forward earnings. Here's where I do get worried. Anthropic and OpenAI. That, to me, is where the dislocation is.

• 40:04Ed Elson?

  And I think it's this divide between the public markets, which have a very different risk profile, similar to how bonds and stock, bond investors and stock investors have a very different risk profile. They're different people, as Katie Martin told us. They have different tolerance for risk. But the private investors, the VCs, the people in Silicon Valley, they live in a completely different world, where they don't really care about things like debt. They don't really care about things like profitability. They care about, is the technology good? And do we have a generational founder running the company? That's what they're focused on. And I think that we see that reflected in the valuations of Anthropic,

• 40:47Ed Elson?

  $2 trillion supposedly, and OpenAI, $1.5 trillion supposedly. But if you were to see the same level of skepticism that we're seeing reflected in public stocks right now, if you were to see the same multiples, you look at the chipmakers, which are trading at 10x sales right now. If you would apply that to Anthropic right now, which, based on its most recent ARR, is trading at more than 30x sales, then you're looking, if it starts to trade, like some of the big AI names in the public markets right now, you're looking at that company being valued at something like half a trillion dollars, between like $300 to $600 billion. That, I don't think, is an unreasonable assumption if these companies are to enter the arena

• 41:31Ed Elson?

  of public stock investors who care a lot more about how sustainable all your financials, does it make sense over the long term? What are your long-term debt obligations? Versus where they sit right now, which is a world where people just go, great, Sam Altman's smart, he's a genius, and he's got a crack team of AI engineers. I just think that they are in for a rude awakening as soon as they enter the public markets, which is where I think they're really going to face the music.

• 41:59Scott Galloway?

  There is some good news. According to AlphaSpace from Yahoo Finance, over the past week, Shopify rose 5%, SIPC rose 7%, and Salesforce rose 9%. Basically, the market has said, all right, why buy the picks and shovels when you can buy someone who's already figured out the mind? These companies continue to show resilience. And I've been using AlphaSpace to create baskets of stocks, and such that you can compare whole sectors to one another. And you know the basket that is underperforming every other basket, Ed?

• 42:34Ed Elson?

  What's up?

• 42:35Scott Galloway?

  Scott stocks, Ed. Scott stocks. Have you used AlphaSpace yet, our new partner?

• 42:42Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I have. It's been very helpful. I think the Yahoo Scout, the AI system, is actually pretty helpful because you can create this watch list of all of the stocks that you want to analyze. So, yeah, you can look at the AI data center stocks. You could create your Scott basket and see how that's doing. I pull up like the top 10 or so companies in each sector and create a dashboard. So that allows you to pull up the heat map with all the relative gains and the losses and the charts. It's all in one place, which is, honestly, it's, I mean, they're sponsoring us, but it has been very, very helpful.

• 43:13Scott Galloway?

  You know what's been my homepage for the internet for the last 30 years, not exaggerating?

• 43:17Ed Elson?

  What's up?

• 43:18Scott Galloway?

  Yahoo Finance.

• 43:19Ed Elson?

  Bang.

• 43:20Scott Galloway?

  I just like the look and the feel. Yahoo's finally getting its money's worth. I signed up for this thing. It's not cheap, but I think it's worth it. So I can see just what a fucking shitty investor I am. Thanks, AlphaSpace. No longer the Alpha Dog, according to AlphaSpace.

• 43:34Ed Elson?

  No, you're not. We were talking about software stocks.

• 43:35Scott Galloway?

  When you look at the revenues of these companies, you would know AI is out there and supposedly going to just disrupt it all.

• 43:41Ed Elson?

  That's what we said when this all went down, though. Remember, like, in February, when the SaaS apocalypse happened, everyone said that those names were done. Like, those were the AI losers.

• 43:51Scott Galloway?

  That was a good trade.

• 43:52Ed Elson?

  Exactly.

• 43:52Scott Galloway?

  That was a buying opportunity. And the thing that always, the data that always struck me that made me believe the SaaS apocalypse was more like, I don't know, a SaaS brushfire, if you will, at least in the short term. I understand the notion that the terminal value needs to be discounted because in five years, who knows? But the number that always stuck to me was they spend a maximum of about 20% of their revenues on actual tech, which means 80% of the value add or 80% of their expenditures are building client relationships through UI, customer service, debugging, events. You know, they have insurance. So if something, you want someone to sue if something goes wrong. You know, you want, you want to go to, you want to go to Dreamforce with all your friends.

• 44:36Scott Galloway?

  You want, you want a company that is supposedly scared of losing all its market cap so they debug the shit out of it. You like the guy who takes you to the Knicks game, right? Anyways, these, these companies are appealing, I think, are going to be a lot more resilient than people think. And with respect to your comments around public versus private, we need to do something, and you've been saying this for a while, to try and encourage, the number of public companies has been cut in half in the last 20 years, either through acquisition or companies are just saying private longer. Why? Because, and why do we want more public companies? Private markets are essentially opinions, and public prices are facts. And the pull data center, IPOs, Fermus, SP Energy, they were asking public investors

• 45:21Scott Galloway?

  to continue to pay their private market vibes. And public investors said no. And essentially, private markets have become where valuations go to avoid accountability. Now, so let's, let's talk about Anthropic. $16.8 billion in quarterly revenue is roughly $67 billion annual run rate. That's amazing. But at $2 trillion, that's about 30x revenue for a company growing roughly 50% a quarter by these figures. And so, again, the question is whether this is an amazing company. The technology, in my opinion, for AI is going to outlast the valuations. Whether you think valuations are going down or is there going to be a crash? The question is whether public investors will pay a growth multiple when growth is decelerating

• 46:04Scott Galloway?

  and the cost to finance that growth is going up. And so the question then becomes, well, are private market investors dumb money? No, they're not. They're actually smarter. They just don't want to be held accountable. The private markets are essentially more opaque, more about vibe, more about a charismatic CEO, more about who the lead investors are, and these guys never get it wrong. So I do think there's something to the notion. I wonder if AI, at some point, is going to let us tokenize all of this. And you either open via APIs or data streams or permissions to AI that is informed and dictated

• 46:48Scott Galloway?

  and the prompt is from the SEC. And you either sign up to be legitimate about this or you get a vastly lower valuation. And some, I think there's going to be a gray market with, I hate to say it, the blockchain or AI that creates a market in between public and private.

• 47:05Ed Elson?

  It needs to be based on financials. And so long as these companies don't release their financials properly or if the only financials that we get to see are these sort of adjusted bullshit numbers, then it's still going to be completely a murky, opaque gray zone. And I think what you're pointing to is like, there is no private, there is no price discovery in the private markets. Like, it's just Sequoia's leading the round. They chose a number. Get involved, get on the train. I talk with these guys, I talk with these venture investors. Like, a lot of them are like, oh, I'm doing it because this guy's doing it. And if they're doing it, that means that they're legit because Sequoia is the kingmaker. They choose who's going to be next. Like, that is genuinely how these companies are being priced today.

• 47:50Ed Elson?

  And people are not being coy about it. Investors know that that is happening. So what you have then is a rigged game where the price discovery is near to zero because it's all being controlled by a very small handful of individuals. And there is not enough liquidity or, liquidity is probably the wrong word here. The float on these companies is so small that you can rig the game as much as you'd like. And the people who are controlling these flows are these whales who can pretty much set terms the way, however they please. And I think a good example of a company that has gamed that system in the public markets, like the exception to the public markets rule,

• 48:34Ed Elson?

  would be SpaceX, which is, I mean, yes, it got cut in half, as we predicted and as we thought, but it has come back up. And I think one of the things that is going on with SpaceX, which I think is honestly bullshit, is the fact that the float is so extraordinarily low, so low that they actually had to make exceptions for including it in the NASDAQ. They had to change the rules because it had such a low float, which essentially means that you're not getting proper price discovery. You don't actually have $2 trillion worth of outstanding shares that are being traded on the open market. You've only got a small fraction of those shares trading, which means, again, that it can be more manipulated and more easily controlled by a smaller handful of players. And so I think that the only way

• 49:18Ed Elson?

  that Anthropic and OpenAI don't have to face the music if they go public is if they do the same move that SpaceX did, which is they go for an extraordinarily small float. And then if they do that, then maybe then they can set a price at an extraordinarily high level, and people will be okay with it because you won't have enough liquidity in the system to actually properly price that thing. I think that that's likely to happen. And I think, honestly, like, if I was Sam Altman, if I were Dara Hamidi, if I was running this IPO, that's probably what I would do. Because I think if you were to flood the market with all of the shares and if you would actually go to the public markets investors and say, yes, this is a $2 trillion company, they would say, this is a joke.

• 50:03Ed Elson?

  I mean, I'm not going to price Nvidia at 10 and price you guys at 30. If you guys have not shown even remotely that this is going to be a sustainable business over the long term. If you're still burning billions of dollars every year and then trying to tell me that there's an adjusted metric that makes that okay, I just don't think that, that, that publics are going to be down with that.

• 50:29Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. By the way, I thought yesterday's episode that you did with Kudrowski and Xandy was just so, so good. And Kudrowski pointed out that one of the miracles of the American market is capital formation. Someone did an analysis looking at private tech companies in Brazil, which is a big economy, and very similar companies growing at the same rate, with the same revenue run rate, with the same kind of technical infrastructure or offering, trade at 1/10th the valuation of companies headquartered in San Francisco. And that's because capital formation in the US is just extraordinary. If Anthropic were founded in Europe, it'd be one of the three or four most valuable companies in Europe right now.

• 51:11Scott Galloway?

  The ability for a Series B to be 50 or 100 million only happens in one place, in the US and typically in one of maybe two or three cities here in the US. It's extraordinary. So in China, if they want this sort of... Capital, they have to go public. So the majority, the majority, I think of AI companies beyond a certain revenue level are public in China. And I would argue that's actually healthier.

• 51:34Ed Elson?

  So much healthier.

• 51:36Scott Galloway?

  Now, there's a countervailing force in that the SEC isn't as good there. And there's a lot of shenanigans around reporting, but it's still better than this private market hand waving where you have an S1. The S1s on these things are just so weird in that is they spend 58 pages talking about the business and then 68 talking about the risks. And typically, a prospectus is here's the business and here are the risks to the business. The OpenAI and Anthropic prospectuses will be, here's the business and the risk is the

• 52:14Scott Galloway?

  business is so successful, it might kill us all. And but give us $2 trillion? It's just so, this is just so strange. And I'm getting to the point where I wonder if, if a Democrat is elected president, if there is essentially, I mean, I don't know if you saw the espionage case, but essentially what you have is state level, kind of defense level important companies with WeWork like security.

• 52:48Scott Galloway?

  And to their credit, the best product demo for OpenAI was they used AI to find the perpetrator. And what people don't realize, and I'm getting a bit off script here, but the amount of corporate espionage dwarfs what we think of as real espionage, because here is the war being played out. There's a huge battle, a huge war in Iran, or hopefully it's waning. There's an enormous war in Ukraine as they begin to be the only people standing between us and fascism defending the West. But the war that's ongoing, and it's probably the biggest war, is an economic war between China and the US. And IP theft and corporate espionage.

• 53:28Ed Elson?

  Huge.

• 53:30Scott Galloway?

  We did it in the 19th century. We literally kidnapped artisans and stole manufacturing technology and built factories up and down the eastern seaboard. There is no economic model like IP theft. And so the fact that these companies basically, you know, the snack guys here, if you want to go into CIA headquarters or the CIA, or even the CIA office in Manhattan, the employees of the CIA who have gone through five levels of defense clearances and have to take lie detector, polygraph tests every quarter, they're not even allowed to take their phones into the building. But there's going to be an interesting movie or series about corporate espionage. People do not realize how, how rife it is. And this is just, this is just an example of it. Anyways, I thought that was the most

• 54:15Scott Galloway?

  interesting story of the week that people haven't been talking about.

• 54:17Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I know. I think, I think it's super interesting. And I think that your point about the economic war between China and the US when it comes to AI is bang on. Like, I feel as close to certain that your theory of Chinese AI dumping is true, that it is intentional, and that we are seeing the sustainability of these businesses deteriorated by the hand of China, who is subsidizing the shit out of these open, open weight AI models, and that it is causing real pain in the US AI trade. But just to bring it back to the markets, again, that is being reflected in stock prices right now. Like, all of that

• 55:00Ed Elson?

  pain that we're seeing, all of the risks, I mean, all it might be too much, but the risks are beginning to be reflected in the valuations of publicly traded AI stocks. That's what we saw this week. They're not being reflected in the valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI. That, to me, is where the dislocation is. That, to me, is where the problem is because of all of the opacity and all of the manipulation that is so much easier to employ when you remain private. That's why they're going to have so much trouble going out. I mean, I don't, I don't actually know if, if this Anthropic IPO is going to happen when they say it will. Apparently, it's going to happen in November.

• 55:37Scott Galloway?

  Well, it's already been delayed. Yeah, I don't think it happens this year.

• 55:41Ed Elson?

  Oh, you don't? That's a hot take right now. Just, just FYI.

• 55:45Scott Galloway?

  Well, okay, but, but what's not been priced in, unless they're willing to lower the valuation dramatically, at which point the mediocre ape shit saying, I thought it was going to be $2 trillion. But what none of these companies are pricing in or coming out of the closet about is the fact that interest rates have accelerated. Because if you're CoreWeave, just to use a public, and we know they have $52 billion in debt, when their debt service payments go from, you know, 10% to 15%, 5% on 50, that's, that's an additional $200 million a month in interest payments. So what had, they have not priced in, what the market has not priced in, and what none of these companies want to acknowledge is the cost of their massive capex build out to sustain their growth and business models has gotten extraordinarily more expensive, which increases their borrowing costs, which

• 56:28Scott Galloway?

  takes their enterprise value down. And because they're not willing to decrease their capex, that means the equity value comes down, see above enterprise value. And none of them, none of them have come out and said, we may have to lower our, our offering, our valuation on the IPO, because obviously interest costs, we're committed to building out the infrastructure that's expensive, and our borrowing costs have gone up. So naturally, the enterprise value and the, and the equity. And none of them are willing to, to have that adult conversation right now. But I think what happens is they're all stuck on the $2 trillion number. Everyone's buying houses in San Francisco. Dario, his manliness is now pegged to a $2 trillion number in a success or failure. And the, and they're basically saying to the bankers,

• 57:11Scott Galloway?

  and this is a tussle, we need a $2 trillion valuation. Pull out your AI, figure out how many shares we can offer to engineer and manufacture a SpaceX like scarcity.

• 57:19Ed Elson?

  We didn't make our employees happy. We promised them the universe.

• 57:22Scott Galloway?

  Well, and our series FGH.

• 57:25Ed Elson?

  Those guys do.

• 57:26Scott Galloway?

  That we said, oh no, it makes sense to invest at 1.4 trillion. And then Goldman and the investor group are going to come back and say, let's go, let's get out, give me those fucking fees, bitch. Let's go, let's get out, but let's price it at 1.4. And the, and Dario and his board's like, fuck that. We want, it's $2 trillion, or, you know, it's, it's, it's go big or go home. And that's the tension. It could go out in November if they, if they pull back the valuation, but management has already said, management, you know, their fly is down, and they've claimed they have a $2 trillion member, and it's going to be embarrassing if they don't. They shouldn't have anchored off that $2 trillion number.

• 58:07Ed Elson?

  Just do it. Just come clean. Go public. Show us the numbers. Enough with the adjustments. Who cares?

• 58:14Scott Galloway?

  And let the good times roll.

• 58:17Scott Galloway?

  And float a reasonable number of shares in this thing.

• 58:20Ed Elson?

  And who cares if it goes down? Whatever. Like, let's just see what this thing's worth. Enough with the engineering. Enough with the bullshit. And he's sick of it.

• 58:27Scott Galloway?

  Enough with the bullshit, Ed.

• 58:32Ed Elson?

  We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at profgmarkets.com.

• 58:47Scott Galloway?

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• 1:01:11Scott Galloway?

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• 1:01:32Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. Bumble could soon be a private company. The dating app has reportedly agreed to a $1.3 billion acquisition by Ithaca Holdings, just five years after going public at a $14 billion valuation. Since then, Bumble has struggled with declining paying users, weaker revenue, and growing frustration with dating apps more broadly. At the same time, there are some signs that consumers may be gravitating back toward in-person experiences. Constellation Brands, the owner of Corona and Modelo, recently reported higher profits and revenues fueled by strong beer sales at bars and restaurants. Its wine and spirits business also saw sales increase by 17%. So Scott, we've kind of

• 1:02:13Ed Elson?

  merged two stories together here. One is Bumble, which is down 86% from its IPO price if this deal goes through. It seems like it will, $1.3 billion valuation. Dating apps have been kind of taken to the cleaners recently. It's not just Bumble, it's Match Group as well, which is down 80% from its peak. And then we were thinking, okay, well, it's kind of interesting that at the same time, you see this increase in beer sales in restaurants and in bars, people getting together in person. Maybe the tide is beginning to turn. People might be turning away from living their lives online and swiping, and

• 1:02:54Ed Elson?

  maybe they're actually getting together in person. More of a anthropological business story, but what do you make of this?

• 1:03:00Scott Galloway?

  So I'm fascinated by this story, or stories, I should say. So $14 billion to a $1.3 billion take private with Bumble. So that's not, you know, they've lost 90% of their value in five years. And essentially, Bumble's not going private, it's being rescued from the, from the public markets. And the people taking this private are smart people. They're gonna have to totally reconfigure the business model because the business model doesn't work. The business model is supposedly based on trying to lose your customer. Success equals churn. And so they're incentivized to keep you single and swiping. And then as it goes through the Constellation earnings, I think this is a good thing. I mean, I got

• 1:03:44Scott Galloway?

  a lot of shit a year ago for going on Bill Maher and saying, young people need to drink more. But Gen Z weekly bar going has risen from 26% in 2024 to 32%. People are getting off the apps and they're going out. And I think that's a wonderful thing. My idea is to lower the drinking age to 18, as long as you're in a group of four people and you can show them an Uber app. I'm serious. I think we gotta get people out and drinking and dancing. Wine and spirit sales are up 17%. And I mean, in some, the swipe is losing to the sip, if you will. Now, having said that, Constellation, is this a dead cat bounce? The stock is down 37% over five years versus the S and P up 86%. Diageo's down

• 1:04:27Scott Galloway?

  50%, it's been cutting, cut in half. And only AB Inbev is actually up 48%. So one good quarter doesn't reverse a secular decline. We're seeing a bounce, not a boom. But the bigger story here is the following, and that is, you know, and I'm, I'm a hammer everything I see as a nail. I do think the biggest risk of AI and the thing that, that, that is the manifestation of income inequality in our country is loneliness. 15% of men report having no close friends, up from 3% in 1990. The number of men who say they have no close friends has quintupled since 1990. In 2023, the Surgeon General compared the health risk of loneliness to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. So you'd, you'd rather have friends

• 1:05:12Scott Galloway?

  and smoke a pack a day than not have friends in terms of health. Time spent with friends in person has collapsed for young people since the early 2000s. About, in about 40% of couples met online as of 2017, the number one channel. The question is now whether that's peaked and people have said, all right, we need to meet in real life because the online dating ecosystem, at least for men, kind of mimics the stock market. And that is the top 10% of men are Nvidia and kept, keep getting bid up. And the bottom nine are a penny stock that no one wants anything to do with. And Bumble and Constellation are two sides of the same trade. They're digital substitutes for human connection versus the

• 1:05:53Scott Galloway?

  real thing. On a very, so let's bring this back to me. I have a three book deal. I try and write a book every 18 months. My next book was supposed to be on mating. And I said, no one wants to hear from a boomer like me who, who isn't dating, like, on dating. I mean, I want to write about policy. But the way, my organizing principle around policy in America is, goes back to the hominids. And that is the reason that the Cro-Magnon man bested Neanderthals is because of speech and communication skills and coordination. We were slower, we weren't as mean, we weren't as aggressive, we weren't as strong. But the means of communication, the means of cooperation is such that you can establish

• 1:06:33Scott Galloway?

  relationships. And absolutely, the most beneficial thing any person can do in their life is to commit to the energy to establish a relationship. And I'm not saying just sexual or romantic relationships. It's, it's a decision to move in with your sister and raise kids together. It's a decision to, to, to partner with someone and try and start a business and to enter into the relationship, not as a transaction, but as a commitment to each other. If you look at the homeless problem, I used to think that, oh, it must be veterans. Actually, veterans are only 4% of the homeless. HUD and the VFA have done a good job finding houses for veterans. Who the homeless are, are, are people without others in their

• 1:07:17Scott Galloway?

  lives. They're people that when you don't show up for work, no one notices. They're people that, that when they don't hear, there's no one, there's no one to notice they haven't heard from you. The answer is absolutely, in my view, in each other. And social programs, technologies, investments, we need to get people bumping off one another in real life such that they start to form more relationships, friendships, mentorships, parenting, romantic relationships. I absolutely think we should give an enormous tax credit to any place that encourages dancing. I'm a big fan. Be mindful of your addictions. Be mindful,

• 1:08:00Scott Galloway?

  don't ever drive. Be mindful when someone tells you your substance abuse is out of control. But for God's sakes, get out of the house. The phone and the house are your enemy. And, you know, ask someone out in person. We, 45% of men 18 to 24 have never asked a woman out in person. So, you know, and the good news for men out there, the bar has never been lower. I don't buy this bullshit that you're taking your professional life in your hands. You approach a woman and you're respectful, and she's not interested, and you politely excuse yourself, have a nice evening, you're both gonna be fine. And you are not putting your career at risk. And the upside is enormous, is enormous.

• 1:08:44Scott Galloway?

  Loneliness is the pandemic that never got a vaccine. The closest thing we've got is a cold Modelo and the courage to say hello. Where are you from? That is the vaccine here.

• 1:08:57Ed Elson?

  I wonder if it's, because I agree that that's what we should be, be encouraging. That's the whole ballgame. But I wonder if it's, if it's happening naturally. Like, I wonder if the decline of dating apps is maybe a signal that young people are saying, okay, enough with this BS. Like, they're kind of starting to get it. I mean, I don't want to get my hopes up because I think that the underlying numbers and the underlying trend around loneliness and our screen addictions is still really bad. But I do look at stories like this, where it's like, okay, there's like a little glimmer of hope that young people are kind of realizing, okay, this whole live my life on a screen thing is kind of a shitty deal and I'm not actually getting anything out of it. I'm gonna delete the

• 1:09:41Ed Elson?

  dating app. I'm gonna delete Hinge. I'm gonna delete Bumble. I'm gonna delete all of this stuff. And I'm actually gonna go outside and spend some time trying to talk to someone. And I don't know, maybe we're reading too much into it to say, oh, maybe the beer sales is a reflection of that. But I don't know, I think it's as, as close to, to an indicator that we could get from the markets as possible when it comes to this question of, are people getting together and interacting with each other? I mean, hopefully, the beer, beer sales aren't just people buying six packs and bringing it down to their basements and shotgunning while they vape. Hopefully, that's not what's going on. Hopefully, it's people getting together in person. But I guess my question for you, like, do you think that it's happening naturally? Like, are the dating apps just disappearing? Because-

• 1:10:26Scott Galloway?

  People are saying, we just don't like them anymore. The things that have plagued our society from a health standpoint, whether it's tobacco, whether it's social media, whether opiates, basically as a species and as an economy and as a society, we do figure it out. With tobacco, it took us 30 years. With opiates, it took us 20 years. With social media, it looks like it's going to be 20 years. Social went on mobile in 2013. I think by 2033, we'll have bitch slapped these guys hard enough that they're going to be, they're going to have age gating, they're not going to have character AI. And I think that loneliness is taken about, it's going to take about 20 years. I think it's got another five or seven years to fall before people say, we need, we need more programs focused on young men. We need some form of mandatory national service. We need to put more money in

• 1:11:11Scott Galloway?

  the pockets of all young people. We need to fund after school programs. We need to weigh in with mentorship with big brothers and big sisters when a child ends up in a single parent home without involvement or as much involvement from their parents. But let me make a totally counterintuitive prediction here. I think if you took a basket of ABM, Bev, Diageo and Constellation, I think those, that basket, the performance of those stocks is going to be inversely correlated to the suicide rate among young people. I love substances. I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me, which is a great Winston Churchill quote. 90% of people who consume alcohol and substances manage to integrate it into their life. Never do substances alone, right?

• 1:11:54Scott Galloway?

  I don't do them before, before 7pm or after 11pm. I just don't, my window's there and that's it. Any drinking after 11pm usually goes nowhere good. Any day drinking is not a very good idea. Drinking alone, smoking pot alone is not a good idea. But for God's sakes, get some friends together, go out, and if you're, if you're at a bar or if you're with friends, have a couple beers, loosen up, have some fun. If you have a problem with alcohol and you're one of those people who for whatever reason gets depressed or violent or just strange on alcohol, then it's not for you. But I would bet, I see this as a good thing. When I saw these constellation and ABM, Bev numbers, ABM, Bev has now returned to growth. I felt, I thought, you know, I think this is a

• 1:12:38Scott Galloway?

  good thing. We need absolutely more third places. 40% of the bars and the pubs have closed in the UK since COVID. Things are so fucking expensive for these guys. I'd love some sort of loyalty card that said, okay, we're going to preload it for certain people and you can spend it as long as it's spent in a third place as defined by a place you don't sleep or work. We have got to get people out bumping up against each other again. And I think the Bumble thing, I know that people are, I'm about to talk to people who took it private. I think it needs to move away from the promise of love to the promise of community and roll up running clubs, roll up athletic leagues

• 1:13:20Scott Galloway?

  and just say, pay us 20 bucks a month and we're going to get you out of the house and in the company of strangers. We're not going to try and sell you on the love of your life or hookup culture. We're going to say, look, you need to be out of the house two or three times and male mentors need to pay for this if the kid doesn't have it. And you get points the more you go. It can be nonprofits. Bumbles, you know, the Bumble Thursday, Sunday where you take a dog from a shelter out for a walk with someone else and you're paired randomly with someone.

• 1:13:58Ed Elson?

  And that's a better date. Like that's, there is a higher likelihood of romantic connection.

• 1:14:03Scott Galloway?

  Or just a chance to make a friend.

• 1:14:05Ed Elson?

  But just real connection with someone. The idea of like, okay, we're both going to go into this specifically with the question of, is this person going to be my partner? Are they the right fit? That's already like a, like an awkward, unsexy, lame setup. But if you go into things being like, oh, we just happen to have the same interest here. We're in the same location. Oh, we both are interested in, in running or we're interested in rock climbing or whatever it is. There's so much more capacity for real connection to happen in that situation, which is going to lead to better outcomes. So I'm a hundred percent with you on this community thing. And I think that I agree, it, it, it works for friendships, but I also think it can work for actual romantic

• 1:14:49Ed Elson?

  connection and they should double down on that.

• 1:14:51Scott Galloway?

  The answer is in each other. If we, we need a metric that tracks how many times you are in the company of others. Full stop, full stop. And it works the other way too. Now that my kids are out of the house, I am absolutely trying to figure out a way to be in the company of other people because I find when I come home and there's no one in the house, it is not a good vibe for me. It is not a good vibe for me to be alone. My mind starts going very weird places. I'm like, I'm like a Belgian Malinois with no tasks left at home. I'm going to rip the house apart and I'm going to get angry. And then when I do have other dogs around me, I'm going to get aggressive.

• 1:15:32Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, public policy, economic spending, innovation should all be around one word, others.

• 1:15:41Ed Elson?

  Agreed. Okay. Let's take a look at the week ahead. We've got the earnings hub on the screen here from Alpha Space by Yahoo Finance to run through this calendar. We will see earnings from GE, Netflix, Meta, Tesla, Procter and Gamble and Spotify. Earning season is kind of kicking off here. It's pretty exciting. Scott, do you have any predictions?

• 1:16:03Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, my prediction is pretty, pretty boring. And I made this prediction before. Failed war in Iran, tariffs that are taxing the shit out of people, an economy, the only bright spot for Donald Trump right now is the stock market. There's literally nothing else he can point, he can point to. Gas prices, inflation, corruption, criminality, his son getting parties paid for by Russian oligarchs, shutting off Starlink, deciding that a trillionaire should decide to get to decide battlefield technology and our ability to save the West is now dependent upon a trillionaire who's unelected, who sleeps with a loaded gun next to his bed, who is a ketamine addict. Everything

• 1:16:46Scott Galloway?

  is so awful for this guy. The only sort of silver lining here is the stock market. And I believe between now and the midterms, he's going to announce something that resembles a bailout cosplaying in investment. I think he's gonna, he may not enact it. He may just threaten it, but the next quote unquote, I'm going to send you $5,000 is, I am going to backstop or come up or figure out some way to prop up the hyperscalers. There's going to be some sort of lame attempt from the scent from treasury or Donald Trump before the midterms to say, okay, don't worry, don't worry hyperscalers, don't worry stock market investors, we're making a big investment in this.

• 1:17:30Scott Galloway?

  It's going to be a bailout cosplaying growth.

• 1:17:33Ed Elson?

  I could see it. He's done it before. My prediction, I think Anthropic and OpenAI are going to have a really tough time entering the public markets as they learn that this is a different type of investor. It's an entirely different group of people. So I think that will probably translate to, and you said it, so I'm agreeing with you, Anthropic delaying their current plan for going public. But generally speaking, I think when they do go public, it'll be a very shaky ride for them. I think they're in for a rude awakening.

• 1:18:06Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carti. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Kristin 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 Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and tune in tomorrow for a fresh take on the markets.