Tech Valuations and The State of The Market — with Aswath Damodaran

Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at NYU Stern, joins Scott to discuss Twitter and Meta, his outlook on the economy and valuations. He also shares his thoughts on the state of the crypto market. Follow Aswath on Twitter, @AswathDamodaran. Scott opens with his thoughts on zero-covid policies in China, Twitter and the rage machine, as well as what he’s watching on TV right now. Algebra of Happiness: Freudenfreude 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.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Northwest Registered Agent. Your business identity is everything that makes your business legitimate and professional. With Northwest Registered Agent, you don't just form a business, you start a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. That includes registered agent service, a business address, operating agreement, domain, website, professional email, phone number, and built-in privacy. In other words, your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/aplewatchseries12.

• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 216. 216 is the area code for Cleveland, Ohio. In 2016, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his first Oscar for The Revenant. Outstanding film, by the way. And everyone was playing Pokemon Go. True story, Titanic turns 25 this week. Leonardo is supposedly not interested in seeing it. I never question what I'm subconsciously attracted to.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Go, go, go!

• 1:52Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 216th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with our colleague Aswath Damodaran. If you've been following the show long enough, you know that we are huge fans of Professor Damodaran. He's been on the show, I think, seven or eight times. We discussed with Professor Damodaran a wide range of topics, including Twitter, his outlook on the economy, and valuations. All right, what's happening? Well, over in China, by the way, would you really want to be anywhere else in America right now? Where would you want to be exactly? I mean, other than being in Saint-Tropez? Actually, that sounds about nice this time of year. I was in Morocco this weekend. Let's get back to me. It was quite warm. It was quite nice. Enjoyed it. I don't really have any insight here, other than it's the closest place that's warm to the UK right now.

• 2:34Scott Galloway?

  And we stayed at a place called the Royal Mansour, which was lovely, which was lovely. But we really didn't leave our raya. Is that what it's called? And we just watched World Cup nonstop, which was also very rewarding. But when we did leave our raya one hour a day, it was very pleasant out. It was very nice. Anyways, enough of that. What an ugly American. Goes to Morocco to watch World Cup. Worth it. Anyways, what's happening? In China, as we were talking about, about a quarter of the nation's populace is under either partial or full lockdown, and there appears to be some relatively serious pushback. This is all coming down shortly after President Xi Jinping secured his third term leading the communist country as the Chinese head into year three of strict pandemic lockdowns

• 3:19Scott Galloway?

  and testing regimes. It's probably logical from a strictly analytical standpoint. They have a large portion of their elderly population that's not vaccinated. They have one of the lowest ratio of nurses to the populace, meaning that if this thing gets out of control, you can see a lot of death. A lot of people would argue, though, that this is the wrong strategy. When the virus was not that contagious and highly lethal, a total lockdown made sense. But now that it's less lethal, but more contagious, a lockdown doesn't make sense. And if you were to track, or if the Dow were to track what the Hang Seng has done the last 24 months, the Dow would be sitting around 10,000 or 12,000. So again, see above. Where would you rather be than the United States? What's going on? Simple. I think...

• 4:04Scott Galloway?

  The Chinese leadership has very closely tracked America and said, okay, these megalomaniacal, Jesus-like figures that have more power than the government, Xi Jinping, Bezos, Musk. But effectively, they've decided capitalism is not what they want. And we are so narcissistic, we assume that, okay, the markets should drive everything. Money is everything. And they've essentially decided, no, stability is everything and the middle class is important. They have put entire industries out of business. Okay, Didi, you don't want to share your data with us? Well, fuck you, we'll put you out of business. Okay, industrial tutoring complex that is beginning to create income inequality and accede advantage to wealthy people whose kids are getting to the top university, which by the way, has less than a 1% acceptance rate in China. I think Harvard's is five. Imagine that, a university is five times as difficult to get into as Harvard.

• 4:48Scott Galloway?

  They've said, no, we're not down for that. So they've said capitalism, no, we see how it's panning out in the US and we're not going that way. I would argue that's the wrong move. You know, eventually our key to stability there is that they have to continue to bring tens of millions of people out of poverty. And without these economic juggernauts getting to run, if you will, or letting them run, I think that's threatened. The Chinese market has ticked up and then is ticking back down over these huge lockdown or over these lockdown policies. The Biden administration has been very cautious to say anything about the protests as he tries to continue the thawing of the relationship when they got together. By the way, we speak a lot about the importance of people getting together.

• 5:30Scott Galloway?

  The kids need to socialize, the young people need to be in a position to find mentors and colleagues and mates. But the power of getting together, the power of socialization was on full display at the G20. I believe just Biden shaking the hand of Xi and having them both speak to each other in a semi-alone environment with only about seven interpreters, I would imagine, is important. They see, okay, this guy's not evil. Maybe we can get along. Maybe we might even exchange cellphone numbers. In case shit gets real, we call each other. That stuff's important. It's important to get. People together analysts at Goldman see a 30% probability China relents the restrictions before Q2 of 2023 regarding their lockdowns and Chinese stocks had their worst day in

• 6:10Scott Galloway?

  a month on Monday. The jobless rate in China for those aged 16 to 24 is nearly 20%. Oh my gosh, revolution with a small r and that's the problem or one of the many problems or risks for an autocracy and that is about every four or eight years we kick the current party out thinking that somehow things are going to get different or be changed and we usually find out now everyone's kind of similar although I will argue that the parties are do seem to be getting more different over the last 20 years. Anyways, there is no changing parties in China. Voting this government out of office is called revolution and it likely involves potentially millions of deaths. So this is a fascinating study

• 6:51Scott Galloway?

  in how China has decided, you know, we're we kind of incorrectly believed that they would follow us down this path of capitalism which appeared to be paying huge dividends in China. I'm like, no, we've decided to go another way. What did they think in Germany? Well, if we incorporated Putin into the great world of capitalism and became mutually dependent economically, them on our euros and us on their natural gas and oil, that we would be less likely to declare war on each other. Well, it appears that that didn't work either. So this notion of deglobalization is a very real thing over the last 12 months. And yet, Aswath will claim that regardless of attempts to separate politically, we are economically as intertwined as ever and he uses inflation as an example where inflation

• 7:34Scott Galloway?

  has been within a band for anyone all over the world, except for some of these developing nations that have absolutely no economic policy or are very unstable. The majority of the modern world is seeing inflation somewhere between, call it 8 and 12 or 13%. So we are all, as Aswath said, connected at the hip. Okay, what else is happening? What else could we talk about? I don't know. Query me this. All right, Twitter, Twitter, we never get enough. It's the gift that keeps on giving. So let's try and look at this through a sober lens. Let's call balls and strikes. So let's call a strike, if you will. I don't know how the metaphor extends to balls and strikes anyways. Just go with it. What he's gotten right? The firm was incredibly inefficient. The site has not crashed.

• 8:18Scott Galloway?

  A lot of people say, well, you don't know that yet. Agreed, we don't know. There will definitely be some ramifications. But it looks as if Twitter could continue to operate at a minimal acceptable standard with 25% of the employees it had just six months ago. Now, now, he got that right. What did he get wrong? I think he thought I can reduce expenses 50, 60, 70% and hold on to 70, 80, 100% of the revenues and maybe juice those ad revenues with subscription. He's gotten both of those things wrong. There has been no cogent strategy to subscription and also supposedly 50 of the 100, or it was reported that 50 of the 100 biggest advertisers on Twitter have stopped advertising and gone to zero, which likely means the other 50 have reduced their spending, which if

• 9:01Scott Galloway?

  you believe that as a proxy for the rest of the market or the rest of advertisers on Twitter, we're talking about a 60 or 70 or 80% decline in revenues. Twitter doesn't have any other revenues. I mean, I think they sell some data. I think they have some, they had Twitter Blue some revenue, but it was 90, 95, maybe 98% advertising, which means that their revenues are off 70, 80%. In addition, in addition, you have a new expense called interest payments, which are probably a quarter of a billion dollars every quarter. So what do we have? Yeah, maybe he's been able to cut costs 50 or 60% and you won't see that in this quarter's numbers because they still have to pay severance, so they won't recognize it for another three or six months.

• 9:42Scott Galloway?

  But you're going to see an immediate decline of 50, 60, 80% in revenues and you're going to see this new cost line called debt interest. This company might be insolvent in the next six to 12 months. What does that mean? This company could likely go through a prepackaged bankruptcy, meaning the debt holders, which now hold bonds worth $13 billion or were supposed to be worth $13 billion, are probably going to see those bonds start to decline in value and you could see a reorganization. How that pans out will be really interesting. Could Elon Musk start buying the debt? I think there's some conflict of interest. Issues that might get in the way there. I don't know how the courts handle debt. I need to do some research on that, but this is about to get even more interesting. What else has he gotten right? The rage machine continues to work.

• 10:27Scott Galloway?

  We're all talking about this shit. He puts out these anti-Semitic tropes and we're so disappointed. And by the way, by the way, we have incorrectly conflated masculinity with these ridiculous hateful tropes, jokes. Here are my pronouns, kiss my ass. That's what Ted Cruz said and it gets huge applause and everyone goes, oh, Ted's a dude. He's a guy, isn't he? No, he's not. No, he's not. You know what masculinity is? Masculinity is garnering strengths and skills such that you can protect and advocate for others. Others. Whatever you think about the trans community, whatever you think about the important conversation we should be having around gender affirmation and therapy, whatever you think about these issues.

• 11:11Scott Galloway?

  Can't we all agree to be more Jesus-like, to be a little bit more empathetic, a little bit more loving and to say, okay, whatever you think about this community, they have taken a lot of shit and maybe we should show some grace. Can't we be more GOP-like and decide with really difficult issues like this, we should defer to the family? We should defer to their doctors? We should defer to their personal decisions? No. Let's take a tiny community that we can demonize and let's pass laws protecting girls' sports, even though there's absolutely no instance, not a single instance of a trans athlete trying to compete in a girl's sport at a high school level. Hello, governor of South Dakota. What a hateful, weird, perverted, strange thing to spend

• 11:53Scott Galloway?

  your time on. Protecting us from demons and situations that don't exist. And the same thing is happening here. We're conflating, we're conflating masculinity with terrible behavior. That was a bit of a riff. Okay, let's wrap up with an interesting move by Netflix. Netflix premiered with a Knives Out sequel in theaters over the week of Thanksgiving, a month before it'll be available on the platform in the US. This is interesting. This is interesting. Bloomberg reported that the film brought in 13 million over five days and is projected to reach 15 million in the US and Canada once it completes its seven-day run. I find this fascinating. I find this fascinating. I think what they've decided is, okay, our subscriber base pays the bills. The faster we grow subscribers, the more people

• 12:35Scott Galloway?

  bid up our stock. Okay, fine. But how do we create a lot of marketing for the film? How do we create cloud cover for it? And by the way, maybe clock, two, three, 800 million dollars in revenues? I know. Let's release it. Let's give it the big burst. There's so few movies now that are ten pole movies that can get butts in seats on a Saturday or three or four Saturdays in a row, then why not take the ten pole like or the franchise like movies or the movies with franchise like possibility? Put them in the theaters, get a lot of awareness. The majority of us won't go see it in the theater, but we hear about it because it's in the theater. And for whatever reason, Variety and The New York Times are obsessed with reporting domestic box office receipts, even though they're only about seven or nine billion a year versus 120 billion dollars for the video game industry.

• 13:19Scott Galloway?

  For some reason, we've decided this industry is really important. By the way, that industry is absolutely going away. I shouldn't say that. It's going to decline. We're still going to go to the movies, just the way we still go to Magic Mountain. Do we still go to Magic Mountain? Just the same way we still go to the mall, just not as much. This is a melting ice cube, but it gets a lot of awareness. You see lists everywhere. We're the top 10 grossing films of the year. What's the top grossing film this last weekend? It creates a lot of awareness. And if you don't see it in the theaters, I don't mind waiting two weeks. I'll watch one of 200 other shows. By the way, by the way, let's take a break to talk a little bit about the dogs scripting or original scripted programming recommendations. One, something I'm in the midst of, The Staircase. Outstanding. What

• 14:02Scott Galloway?

  else has the dog enjoyed? Oh, my God. C. Blackbird. Wow. Wow. The guy who plays the serial murderer. Let's just stop everything right now and give him all awards. He was in another wonderful movie called I, Tonya. I should know enough to know his name, but I don't. But he's outstanding and he's a lock, in my opinion, for best supporting actor. What else have I enjoyed? I made some recommendations this morning. If you want a little piece of candy and you haven't seen it, watch Killing Eve. It's basically European porn. They pick a city and they just dress it up with fashion. Sandra Oh is excellent in it. She plays sort of the foil there and it's really well done. I've been sort of losing steam around some of the Star Wars spinoffs. I think they've gone a bridge too far.

• 14:44Scott Galloway?

  With Obi-Wan, but anyways, my kids still, still love it. And there was something else I was really enjoying. Oh, I'm rewatching Breaking Bad. Anyways, enough of my original scripted dramas. That should keep you busy for a while. Outstanding, but seriously, The Staircase and Blackbird. If you haven't seen either of those things. Also, Best of Last Year, if you haven't seen it. If you haven't seen it, Best Original Scripted Drama of Last Year, hands down. Dope-sick. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Anyways, anyways, Netflix has about a quarter of a billion subscribers. Total revenue during Q3 was around $8 billion, a 6% increase year over year. What do we have? What do we have? We have the best time in history to be into edibles and have a great couch. I mean, let's be, I mean, what happens there? Apple and Amazon survive because they have the deepest pockets in the world.

• 15:29Scott Galloway?

  Netflix obviously survives. Disney Plus, yeah, they have incredible bank. What happens to Peacock? What happens to Hulu? Shit, who knows? I think they go away or I think they get consolidated or sucked up into something else. This is an environment or an ecosystem where they are spending more than they are making. Something like $2,000 a year per household is spent on original streaming content. Think about that. Think about that. What does that mean? What does that mean? That's not your cable bill. That's not technology. That is literally the content that comes in over the cable wires. These companies are spending $2,000 per household to bring you Euphoria, right? To bring you Bridgerton. I mean, that's just crazy. That is just unsustainable. And what are we seeing? What are we seeing? Why did everyone abandon Twitter? Why have the advertisers abandoned Twitter?

• 16:14Scott Galloway?

  One, see above Elon Musk racist tweets, but also, also, every advertiser is looking for an excuse to reduce their spending. Why? Because their options around spending are increasing. Pretty soon Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple are all going to start knocking on P&G Unilever and Ford's door, saying, hey, we have other options for you to run ads. You don't think LVMH and BMW are going to want, are going to want to run ads against Euphoria? Oh, my God. And by the way, they're not going to increase their advertising budgets. They're just going to take it from somewhere else. And everyone is looking for an excuse to pull their advertising revenue from a platform. And Elon is giving them excuses seven days a week.

• 16:58Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back for our conversation with Aswath Damodaran.

• 17:03Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from NetSuite. They say every day your business is late to AI. You might fall two days behind. So how do you keep up with the competition when they're only moving faster? Enter NetSuite Next. You probably know NetSuite, the AI-powered business management suite that securely connects all your data. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into a single source of truth, trusted by over 44,000 customers. NetSuite Next is the next big leap in how business gets done. Because AI is built into everything you do. It automatically surfaces customer insights throughout your day. AI agents work alongside you to solve problems and handle routine work. And anytime you have questions about anything, you can ask, just like you're having a conversation with a colleague.

• 17:47Scott Galloway?

  NetSuite is customized for a wide range of industries, so it supports the way your business truly works. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite Next, where your business meets AI. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/prog. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/prog. netsuite.com/prog.

• 18:20Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Agentic Trust Platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 19:05Scott Galloway?

  Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Ryder, and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/prog and get $1,000 off. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A dot com slash prop G for $1,000 off.

• 19:35Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at NYU Stern School of Business. Aswath, where does this podcast find you?

• 19:46Aswath Damodaran?

  In San Diego. Looking out of my window, I see the Pacific Ocean. It's a sunny day, so no complaints here.

• 19:51Scott Galloway?

  So I was saying off mic that you're sort of my secret weapon, and I'm not exaggerating. Every 48 hours, somebody calls me or emails me and says, can you introduce us to Aswath Damodaran? We'd like him on our board, or we would like his advice, or we'd like him on our podcast. And I'm always sort of reticent to give up, to provide the intro. But anyways, Aswath, it's good to have you back. I think you're the first five or six time guest on the pod. Tell me what we should be thinking about, or what is underreported, and your thoughts on it in the markets.

• 20:20Aswath Damodaran?

  I think the, you know, inflation has clearly been the big story this year, but hidden behind the inflation story is a story about risk capital. And what I mean by risk capital is, and I think of the world as composed of safety capital and risk capital. Safety capital is the money that gets invested in treasuries and high dividend paying stocks, all time value investing companies. Risk capital is what's invested in the riskiest parts of every market. Now, young, you know, the VCs, it's the startups which are angel financing, it's in the public equity market, it's young companies that are losing money with lots of potential. In real estate, it's the most levered, riskiest real estate, even in the crypto space. If you think about, you know, cryptos as today's collectibles,

• 21:05Aswath Damodaran?

  they're untested collectibles. So for almost 12 years now, risk capital has been free and easy. It's allowed people to raise money as private companies, it's pushed up the prices of the riskiest assets. And I think personally, and this is just my view, it's become too easy and too accessible. It became too easy for companies to go out and raise capital. It became too easy for companies who are money losing to keep scaling up without making profits. And I think the story of the year is that finally, we're seeing risk capital move to the sidelines, not just for a short period, but perhaps for the longer term. And that's going to have consequences, not just for what we see next year, but perhaps for the rest of this decade.

• 21:50Scott Galloway?

  You really were the first to sort of call, I remember, and I wish I'd invested behind this, but you said, I think it was 12 or 15 months ago, that when a company feels it needs to change its name, it means the context around it is so ugly that it's a negative-looking-forward indicator. And you were talking about Meta. Any thoughts on what has happened at Meta over the last year?

• 22:11Aswath Damodaran?

  It's amazing how quickly trust has dissipated in the company. I mean, when you take these tech companies, a lot of the value and pricing that you see in markets is built on trusting management to do the right things. Again, for a period, they were trusted to do everything. You know, the Googles, the Facebooks, the founder worship that lay behind people pushing up prices is Mark Zuckerberg is a smart guy, he'll figure out a way. And even as short as, you know, a year and a half ago, when it hit a trillion dollars, you could argue that people were trusting Facebook to somehow find a way. Shows you how quickly trust changes, though. 18 months later, you look at Facebook, it's almost like people trust them to do nothing. In fact, I recently valued the Meta bet,

• 22:54Aswath Damodaran?

  which is basically Facebook has been open about the fact that they're going to invest about $100 billion in the metaverse. So I decided to... I'm not even sure what that means or what business they're going after. And I think they've been very remiss in even filling in the details. So I recently priced out what the market is expecting that metaverse investment to add to Facebook's value. My estimate is that the market is estimating that the metaverse investment that Facebook is making is worth minus $86 billion. In effect, they're acting as if Facebook is opening a hole in the ground, throwing $100 billion down, and we'll get nothing. Not even, you know, we're not even talking about making enough earnings, that they will get nothing from it.

• 23:39Aswath Damodaran?

  That's remarkable. I mean, I think that's, you know, that's almost an extraordinary loss of trust. And I think, in a sense, Facebook has lost the script. There's no story holding the company together again. People don't trust the company. And worst of all, we've given up any power to change the way the company is run by the way we've allowed corporate governance to be structured in the company.

• 24:01Scott Galloway?

  And let's talk a little bit more about big tech. It strikes me that Twitter, what's going on at Twitter and the slowdown in revenues has given them extraordinary cloud cover to lay off tens of thousands of people. Is this, A, what are your thoughts on the layoffs? And B, could they be setting themselves up for record profits? Because, you know, the expenses here should be dramatically decreased now.

• 24:23Aswath Damodaran?

  I think it depends on how much advertising drops off. There's so much opacity around exactly what's happening at Twitter. We have no idea. We know that big advertisers have pulled back, but we don't know how much advertising will drop. But you're right, if you take away 80% of your expenses, which is what I mean, it's labor costs, if not in this quarter, because you're still going to get the 90 days, I think in much of the, much of the world, they still have to pay many of these people they've laid off for 60 days or 90 days. In the quarter after, you should see a dramatic drop off in expenses. But while that might set them up for profits without a new business model, this is not going anywhere.

• 25:02Aswath Damodaran?

  You can't make back a $44 billion investment by making Twitter a leaner advertising machine. So in a sense, it's almost like a work in process. You're seeing a company try different things out. And I should take the word company out. Elon must try different things out in public, hoping that something works, because you, you know, you need to make a lot of money to get $44 billion back. And I don't see a leaner machine alone doing enough to get them there.

• 25:32Scott Galloway?

  Hasn't he already immolated the entire equity investment here? I mean, isn't, isn't the $33 billion in equity already gone?

• 25:39Aswath Damodaran?

  Well, I think, you know, that's, you know, the advertising business is very, is on its way to some end game that is either much smaller, non-existent. The subscription business is a non-starter. The $8 doesn't seem to be going anywhere. So I'm not sure what that new business model is that Twitter hopes to accomplish here. But I'll probably give it some time before I make a final judgment. But it, you know, if I were, the people who should be really worried are the people who lent money on this deal, because they're going to be left holding the bag. And guess what? I feel absolutely no sympathy for them, because they do this over and over and over again, is lend money on these heavily levered transactions where they let equity investors

• 26:22Aswath Damodaran?

  run the company and they say, oh, my God, I never saw this coming.

• 26:26Scott Galloway?

  But my understanding is the debt is about 12 of the 45. You think that 12 is a risk? You think that this company could recognize an enterprise decline in value of 75% plus and that the debt might be a risk?

• 26:37Aswath Damodaran?

  It could very well, because if you decide to liquidate the company, what are you going to get, right? In a sense, you know, it's getting the cash flows to cover the debt payments is going to be problematic. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the lenders ended up becoming equity investors in a failing enterprise, because that's the only exit that might be available to them. It's a take it or leave it proposition, because what assets are you going to go after?

• 27:02Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, that's what I've been trying to figure out is if you believe, the reports are that 50 of the 100 biggest advertisers have stopped advertising, which probably means the other 50 have decreased the advertising. And if the top 100 are a proxy for the other advertisers, you're looking at a 70 or 80% decline in advertising revenues. And I just don't think you can cut costs fast enough. Then you look at the additional, what feels like, what, a quarter of $250 million a quarter in expenses they didn't previously have because of the additional debt. Don't all roads lead, or a lot of roads, lead to a prepackaged bankruptcy filing here?

• 27:44Aswath Damodaran?

  Well, it's in the interest of the lenders to keep lengthening the game here, because if they force the company into liquidation, there's nothing there. So that's why the number to really watch.

• 27:56Scott Galloway?

  You really think there's nothing there? I would just push back on that. There's some IP, there's a quarter of a billion users. You don't think someone, you don't think Apollo, or I don't know who owns the debt, would say, "Yeah, we'll take a run at this. Well, for 6 or 7 billion, or whatever the debt gets marked down to, we think we can make money here?"

• 28:12Aswath Damodaran?

  That's I, I think that the key is the number of users. Because if, I mean, again, there's so much opacity. We don't know exactly what's happening there. But if the number of users stays at two fifty million, three hundred million, whatever the number is, I have a feeling that some of that advertising will come back, maybe from companies that did not, you know, did not advertise that much on Twitter. They'll be advertising to a different market, a different audience. I think the real challenge here is if you see a meltdown in number of users, which might be happening under the surface. Again, we have no way of knowing now because we don't know when or how many people are leaving, whether they, whether they stay, because it's not just the number of users,

• 28:56Aswath Damodaran?

  it's the intensity of views. Right now, I think there's still a lot of people coming on just because of curiosity value. I've often described Twitter as the equivalent of a car accident on a highway that people slow down to, to take a look at. And right now, you've got the car accident to end all car accidents, basically a ten-car pileup. And people are slowing down. But once that passes, the question is, how many people will stay on Twitter?

• 29:23Scott Galloway?

  So the second order impact here, if you're right, it is a car accident. It's impossible to look away, but a company that's worth, you know, I don't know, ten, twenty X times what Twitter is or was worth, is Tesla. What do you think are the knock-on effects here at Tesla? And what is the most recent valuation you've done on Tesla? And is the company overvalued, undervalued?

• 29:45Aswath Damodaran?

  Last year, I valued in November of twenty twenty-one, when Tesla had hit one point three two trillion, I think was its estimated value. I valued it about five hundred billion, which is, and it was built on a really big story of Tesla becoming the largest automaker in the world, having margins somewhere between a tech company and an auto company. And I said, look, this is the best I can do. I can't get above five hundred to six hundred billion. That's assuming that management was running Tesla the way it needs to be run. A year later, the, the stock prices dropped. But the bigger concern for me from a valuation perspective is who's running the company? What's happening here? Now, because for as long as Tesla's been around, it's a personality-driven company.

• 30:27Aswath Damodaran?

  The line between Tesla and Elon Musk has been a fuzzy one. And now that I see Musk on Twitter all the time. My question is, who's running Tesla? Who's making the big decisions? Maybe there's a management team we've never heard of that that can do a competent job. But unless somebody high profile steps up at Tesla and saying, I'm managing the store here. I'm a little concerned about direction at the company because to get to its value, this company needs to execute a, you know, huge number of things along the way. And I'm not sure there's anybody in the company who can carry off that execution. But you're right, the bigger value destruction here is not what's happened at Twitter,

• 31:09Aswath Damodaran?

  but what's happening at Tesla and SpaceX and the whole range of Musk enterprises, where people have attached values to these companies based on what they think about Elon Musk. And what they think about Elon Musk itself might have changed over the last few months. And they also worry about, is he paying attention to those companies? So you've lost a half a trillion dollars in market cap at Tesla. How much of that is because of the Twitter experiment? I don't know, but some of it clearly is.

• 31:40Scott Galloway?

  I look at Tesla as being the most overvalued company in the world over a hundred billion dollars. Still, where do I have that wrong? What's the bull case for Tesla right now?

• 31:48Aswath Damodaran?

  Because I think there's a plausible pathway, and it's a plausible pathway, not a probable one, where the bulk of the world goes to electric cars. And Tesla, and at which point Tesla finds a way to dominate that market. So that is the plausible pathway to get to a half a trillion is for that to happen. They'd have to sell almost five million cars a year for that to happen, which would make them larger than Volkswagen and Toyota right now. So that plausible pathway exists, but it's a very narrow pathway. It's a pathway where they have to focus on getting, I mean, they have the advantage of being, not the first mover, the mover with the most most recognition, the electric car business.

• 32:32Aswath Damodaran?

  No, because you look at the traditional automakers of a problem. The problem they face is their names actually get in the way of people buying their cars. I mean, um, my, my daughter in law is going to get a Chevy Volt. And I think Chevy Volt is actually an excellent electric car. The problem is the word Chevy in its name has kind of acted as an impediment for it to ever take off. Because people say, well, that's a Chevrolet. I don't know whether I want to buy an electric car from GM. So I think that the traditional automakers have had trouble getting traction with because of their history and their status as, you know, old time automakers. The new automakers have all been so flighty in terms of how they've set up strategy.

• 33:15Aswath Damodaran?

  That other than Neo, I don't think any of them have created the foundation to build this longstanding business. So Tesla's almost had by default the central role in the electric car business. But they could very easily lose that role if they get distracted. And that's the concern is they have a window of about two or three years where they can establish themselves as the electric car company. And that's the only way they get to that plausible pathway. But if they don't do that, they let other people preempt them. Or become recognized brand names, they very quickly are going to see a drop off in value. But there is, I think, there is a tech aspect to their automobile business, which is what's

• 33:57Aswath Damodaran?

  allowed them to earn higher margins than the rest of the auto business. The question is how long that'll hold up.

• 34:04Scott Galloway?

  So let's revisit a company we were just talking about Meta. It feels to me that Meta might be in the category of unfairly punished. I think it's got about a

• 34:12Aswath Damodaran?

  I think so. I think so. In fact, I did buy it last week after I did, because here's what I did. I said, let's take a worst case scenario. Let's take a scenario where they keep spending money on the Metaverse like they are, spending money on R and D like they never have. I mean, if you look at their R and D spending, it's almost doubled over the last four or five years. I don't know where the money is going or what they're spending it on. They're spending insane amounts of money in R and D and Metaverse. Let's assume it's all wasted. Now, it's, it's, it's, I call this my doomsday scenario. Let's also assume their advertising business is essentially a finite life business, that technology will fade, that they can keep making money in a sense, assume no growth.

• 34:52Aswath Damodaran?

  So if you take their advertising business, assume no growth, and they keep spending money on the Metaverse and everything else and get nothing from it, I, I get the value per share pretty close to where it is now, ninety to a hundred dollars per share. So you're basically getting twenty years of advertising cash flows with no growth at today's price. Anything they can do over and above that is icing on the cake. So for Tesla, you get very little upside. The case of Facebook, all you need Is some sense of direction in the company that they can make money back on the metaverse. A storyline that investors can latch on to and results that start backing it up for you to make money.

• 35:37Aswath Damodaran?

  So I do think that Meta is is undervalued right now. I think it is it's a not just a good buy. It's a good buy with significant upside if it can get investors to start trusting it even a little bit. And that's why I was willing to make a bet on Meta, you know, last week when I valued it. But I think that there's clearly a signal from the market. We don't trust you. We need change here. Be interesting to see if Mark Zuckerberg reacts to that or whether he keeps plowing on saying, now eventually I'll find a way and people are going to trust me.

• 36:11Scott Galloway?

  But isn't that to that point, it wouldn't that be the easiest way for the stock to go up forty, sixty, eighty percent? That is, he he wakes up from this fever dream and says, I'm going to give, I'm going to cancel some of that hundred billion dollar incremental investment. Wouldn't that be the path to a significant pop in the stock?

• 36:27Aswath Damodaran?

  Either that or he brings in a co-CEO and saying, look, you know, I think I've become, I've had too much tunnel vision. I need somebody else to come in and give us at least an opening that somebody will take a look at this hundred billion and tell us that. Because right now we're taking it entirely on his word. That's, I mean, I I started looking for Facebook documents that would justify what exactly they were planning to do in the metaverse. What's because after all, the metaverse is a space. It's not a business. So tell me what your business is. It's more advertising. Is it subscription business? Is it a transaction business? Is it an ecosystem business like Apple where you're going to charge people or in the Facebook metaverse? They've given us absolutely no indication of it.

• 37:10Aswath Damodaran?

  So either be more transparent about what you're doing and why you're doing it or scale back a hundred billion until people trust you with that investment. But I think the opening that markets are looking for is that it's not one man. It's vision that's driving all this with nobody operating as a check on it. And right now, that's a fear markets have, that this is Zuckerberg's dream, that nobody around him is able to tell him even. I mean, he could be the smartest guy on the face of the earth, but he's a human being with an ego. And if he somehow has latched on to a dream and spending a hundred billion dollars in a dream that is, that has no basis, and nobody is waking him up, then we're all going to pay the price.

• 37:55Aswath Damodaran?

  So if he can just show an indication that he's open to other people coming in and checking his dream out, I think it'll do wonders for this stock.

• 38:04Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I think you're speaking rationally. I mean, you, you, you reference corporate governance, and I don't think corporate governance gets enough honest discussion or credit. And that is, we might flirt with an autocracy, but then we vote, our, our democracy holds, our institutions hold, and we decide, you know, the whole autocracy thing is, is, was not what we were looking for. Whereas in the corporate world, where it's governance is supposed to mimic real governance, you might have Mark Zuckerberg for another forty years. You might have an individual running Twitter who decides that anti-Semitic tweets are okay. Uh, it just, isn't that the problem that we have these dual-class shareholder? I mean, we have a thirty-eight-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, who's already worth twenty or thirty billion dollars,

• 38:48Scott Galloway?

  doesn't have to listen to anybody, and might think, you know what? I'll take the risk and prove everyone wrong. I don't have incentives to do the rational thing as you've outlined. Don't we have essentially Kremlin-style governance in some of our most important companies?

• 39:03Aswath Damodaran?

  We get the corporate governance we deserve, and we dug, we created this environment twenty years ago, and you let, when we let Google.

• 39:11Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Aswath Damodaran?

  Open the door.

• 39:12Scott Galloway?

  Started, yeah.

• 39:12Aswath Damodaran?

  I mean, I blame Google for the whole pro, I, actually, I shouldn't blame Google. I blame the investors who bought Google's, yeah.

• 39:19Scott Galloway?

  I mean, New York Times had a dual-class shareholder, Sharpe. It was initially media companies, right? Google was the first tech.

• 39:24Aswath Damodaran?

  Companies have always done this, but they were grandfathered in. Ford had two classes of shares, but it was grandfathered in. In fact, I, in the, in the last century, the reason we didn't have dual-class shares is because the New York Stock Exchange said, if you're a new company, you couldn't have dual-class shares and be listed on the exchange. But then the exchanges started competing with each other, and the NASDAQ decided that one way it could get market share. Was by saying, hey, you can have whatever classes of shares you want. And guess what? It succeeded for them beyond their wildest dreams because the tech companies took that pathway. But I think we created an environment where essentially we let, again, this founder worship, this notion that these brilliant people who create companies say, hey, they'll stay brilliant forever.

• 40:06Aswath Damodaran?

  I, I mean, I described this essentially in the same words that I use to contrast democracies with dictatorships. We thought we were buying benevolent dictatorships when we allow these classes of shares to be created. We forgot our history. Every malevolent dictator at some point in time was viewed as a benevolent dictator. It's as, you know, your ego gets to your head and that's exactly what we're finding out, not just at Facebook. But I think we'll find it, we'll find it out at Google and other companies. Because the only time you really figure this out is when they're tested. Is when things are going well, you don't notice that you've given up power. It's when they're tested that you realize that nobody's listening to me. And you realize, recognize why they're not listening to you.

• 40:50Aswath Damodaran?

  They don't care what you think. So you're right, we've created corporate dictatorships where there is no challenge. That is, you know, we, I mean, we saw this even before the tech with Viacom, where when Sumner Redstone was viewed as this genius. And we said, you know what? Who cares that Viacom has two classes of shares? Thirty years later, when he had dementia and his daughter took over, we realized why we should have cared in the first place. But we don't seem to learn this lesson. We seem to kind of relive history over and over again, giving up too much power to management essentially in perpetuity and then wondering why we gave up that power.

• 41:28Scott Galloway?

  Do you think we may have hit peak founder worship? I keep saying that. And then we find another founder to decide that, okay, he doesn't need to shower or put on pants when it comes to a conference. And this $37 billion valuation based on.

• 41:45Scott Galloway?

  Him levering up a quasi fake currency called FT. It seems like we keep going deeper and deeper into the Mariana Trench here, looking for this lost, looking for Atlantis. Have we reached peak founder in the private markets with Sam Bankman Fried? Is this, do you think we're at a turning point here? Because every time I say that, it gets worse.

• 42:11Aswath Damodaran?

  For the moment is how I'd answer this because it's almost, I think it's built, it's almost built into human beings that we want messias. We want, we don't want democracies where we save our own fate. We want messias to save us. And in a sense, founder worship will always be with us. And all we can do is create systems where at some point in time, we want to challenge founders we can. And increasingly, we're creating systems that becomes more and more difficult to do. So what I think we need to do is work on the systems because the founder worship is going to come back. For a few years, people are going to say, never again. But I've discovered that never again just means not for the next few years. And then another founder comes up and they create a company and all of a sudden we're back in the cycle again.

• 42:56Aswath Damodaran?

  I've seen the cycle already three times in my lifetime. And you know, it's, and I wouldn't be surprised if I see it a fourth time. So I think we need to create systems that will not stop founder worship, but protect us when founder worship falls apart. And my worries were creating systems that work in the opposite direction.

• 43:18Scott Galloway?

  Well, ideally, those systems are regulation. Like you referenced, the dual class shareholder companies used to have trouble getting public. There was so much money on the line with Google that people kind of put, you know, ignored it or put their hands over their ears and eyes and said, fine, Google can be dual class shareholder structure. But I see, I'm thinking about into that void. There's been a void of systems or systemic regulation, whatever you want to call it. Into that void has stepped other parties. And I mean, in a weird way, Taylor Swift might be the closest thing to breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, not the DOJ. And then I look at Tim Cook. He's become the de facto regulator. He's the one that kneecapped Meta. And it looks like there's gearing up to be a fight between him and Musk.

• 44:02Scott Galloway?

  He might be the one that takes down Twitter. So I'd love to use that as a backdoor means into, A, I'd love to get your sense of Apple, its valuation, and Tim Cook's role, and if you will, serving as a de facto regulator.

• 44:15Aswath Damodaran?

  I think in a sense, we've outsourced regulation and laws to the biggest companies, the CEOs of companies. I mean, it has always been my issue with ESG in the first place. Is ESG in a sense, takes things that were in the hands of legislatures and governments and put it in the hands of some of the most powerful CEOs and investment fund managers in the world. I've told people, look, I'm a JP Morgan Chase shareholder. I like, you know, Jamie Dimon, but I don't want him deciding good or bad and what's virtuous and what's not. I, you know, I don't like Larry Fink, but I definitely don't want Larry Fink deciding on goodness or badness or anything in between.

• 44:58Aswath Damodaran?

  But of a larger issue, which is, should we be turning these big decisions over to corporate CEOs? For the moment, if you don't like Elon Musk, you might think that Tim Cook is on your side. But remember, Tim Cook is a CEO of a company. He has fiduciary responsibilities to his shareholders. You cannot put this responsibility in the hands of even CEOs that you think are trustworthy. I think you're right. We need to bring back some of this where it belongs, which is, it starts with us as voters, as community organizers, as members of society. We need to reclaim responsibility for some of these decisions, who we work for, who

• 45:41Aswath Damodaran?

  we put in power, pushing for changes in laws and regulations that essentially cut across all businesses, not just businesses that we can pressure to change.

• 45:52Aswath Damodaran?

  But I think this has been going on for a while and I would trace it back. Two thousand and eight had a very insidious effect on all of us. And one of the things I think two thousand and eight created was a complete loss of trust in governments and regulators. For good reason, right? They screwed up in two thousand and eight. But the net effect of that is we've said we can't trust governments and regulators and laws, so instead we're going to trust big corporations to make these decisions for us and God help us. I don't think that is a trade off that's going to work well for us in the long term. So I'm agreeing with you, but I think, you know, part of this is coming from a loss of trust that's not easy to fix. You see this in the body politic where nobody trusts any centralized authority.

• 46:37Aswath Damodaran?

  In fact, we talked about crypto. Crypto was born out of this lack of trust. And guess where it's got us? It's got us to a space where we trust people like SBF instead of a central bank saying, you know, central banks are not trustworthy, they're controlled by governments. Instead, we get scammed by people that we think we can trust because they're really smart people who know their technology.

• 47:02Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls and playing catch up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The regentic trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over fourteen hundred automated tests across four hundred plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year round, cutting your audit prep by eighty two percent. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta

• 47:46Scott Galloway?

  every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof? Over sixteen thousand fast growing companies like Ramp, Ryder and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/profg and get a thousand dollars off. That's spelled V A N T A dot com slash prof G for a thousand dollars off.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.

• 48:50Scott Galloway?

  Any thoughts on what's happened in the crypto market? Are we getting towards the bottom of the delevering, or is it just gonna get worse from here?

• 48:59Aswath Damodaran?

  You know what? I think the crypto market needs to be cleansed of its strongest advocates. To me, the weakest link in the crypto market are all the people who speak up for crypto, because they tell the most awful stories about why I should be investing in crypto. I mean, starting with, it scares, therefore it should go up. That's an incredibly lazy rationale for investing in something that it scares. So I think this is long overdue, because I think people have been investing on a hope and a prayer in this market, because there's been no tangible movement among cryptos in actually filling needs that we might need in markets, as a currency that you use in transactions, as a collectible that holds a value.

• 49:45Aswath Damodaran?

  So I think there's gonna be a lot of cleaning up here. Whether it goes to zero or not, I don't know. But I think we're gonna test lows that we didn't think we would test. Now, because Bitcoin has been priced through its entire lifetime, and when you price something, there's no upper bound or lower bound for the price. We've tested the upper bounds, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars for Bitcoin. We could test the lower bounds, which is zero.

• 50:09Scott Galloway?

  So you don't buy Kathy Wood's statement that crypto comes out of this, or Bitcoin comes out of this smelling like a rose, and she has a price target of one million in 2030?

• 50:18Aswath Damodaran?

  I'm not sure whether Kathy says these things because it gets her attention, or whether she truly believes them, because either way...

• 50:29Aswath Damodaran?

  I worry because if she actually believes them, I think that, you know, the definition of insanity is you do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. She seems to try this out in every single one of her investments.

• 50:42Aswath Damodaran?

  But I think a lot of this is it gets her attention, which doesn't seem to hurt her because there are still people who invest in art in spite of its track.

• 50:51Scott Galloway?

  She's had inflows. She's had capital inflows this year.

• 50:54Aswath Damodaran?

  And so maybe it, as a sales pitch, maybe it's good to be hyperbolic in your forecast and throw out these numbers that are outlandishly high because people pick up on it. It gets picked up not just in CNBC, but in social media. And that doesn't seem to hurt business.

• 51:11Scott Galloway?

  So this might be a question for our colleague, David Yurmac, but I look at FTX and I wonder, okay, why wouldn't the same thing eventually play out with Binance? Have you looked at Binance?

• 51:23Aswath Damodaran?

  Yeah, I don't, I can't come up with a good reason why not. You've got these self-regulated, you know, essentially they're, they're playing the role of either exchanges or banks with no regulation on them. You're just taking them at trust, you know, and I think that's a very dangerous commodity to base your investing in. So I'm not, I don't know enough about Binance to claim that it's going to go the same route as FTX, but I worry about the lack of transparency in every single one of these entities. And with the lack of transparency, I, you know, I'm setting myself for all kinds of surprises down the road, which are potentially going to be negative surprises.

• 52:05Scott Galloway?

  So you've been teaching for better part of four decades now, is that right, Aswath? Any thoughts around if somebody, and there's so many new channels, and by the way, your YouTube channel, you do, you basically put all of your lectures online. Any thoughts on what skills or how skills have morphed if you want to make a living in finance or investing?

• 52:28Aswath Damodaran?

  I think first, I think you have to be cross disciplinary. I think that the best thinkers in finance happen to be people who remember history, understand psychology, you know, are good at statistics, can work with data. So I would say be less of a specialist and more of a generalist. Because I think there are too many specialists. Finance is full of people who have tunnel vision, who can understand one thing really well, but nothing else. And second, be adaptable, because no matter how good you are at what you do, things are going to change while you're doing it. So I think they're both skills we've somehow managed to lose over the last forty years because we've created an army of specialists, well rigid thinkers.

• 53:13Aswath Damodaran?

  And I blame the way we teach things in class, but I also blame the way that when they go out, their work is structured. And I think we need more Renaissance thinkers, people who can think out of the box, think across disciplines, be willing to change. And I think the one quality that I would not want in a portfolio manager or an investor right now is arrogance. Anybody who claims to have the answer to anything, I think, is either lying or being delusional. Because we're at a point in time where we really don't know the answers too much. And all we can do is figure out the answer for the next three minutes and hope that we learn enough in those three minutes to kind of adapt and move along.

• 53:55Scott Galloway?

  Switching gears as we wrap up here, Aswath, how old are your kids?

• 53:59Aswath Damodaran?

  My oldest is thirty-two, my youngest is twenty-three.

• 54:03Scott Galloway?

  Any thoughts on parenting?

• 54:05Aswath Damodaran?

  Yeah, they're born with a personality. All you can do is kind of, you know, make small changes in their path. We have discovered that, you know, none of us has the power to change the way our kids actually make big decisions. All we can do is kind of model out how you make decisions and kind of make small changes in their decision. And if there's one thing that I hope I've got my kids to do is keep their options open. Don't lock and load, don't have this thing of if I have conviction, I've decided to do something for the rest of my life. Be willing to admit you're wrong and kind of move on when you make a mistake. Because sunk costs, the sunk cost phenomenon, where you think, I've spent seven years doing this, I've got to do this for the rest of my life,

• 54:49Aswath Damodaran?

  is what gets us into so much trouble.

• 54:52Scott Galloway?

  Any thoughts on being a good husband or a good partner?

• 54:54Aswath Damodaran?

  I'm working on it every day. Some days I'm better than others. So, you know, I think that listening to your spouse and, um, no, I'm not very good at catching emotional cues. Now, I've never been that good. So I've worked hard on my, on the things I do badly, but it's, it's, it's a work in progress.

• 55:18Scott Galloway?

  And you're, in addition, I mean, your talent speaks for itself, but it's stern and I can say that, I haven't been your colleague for 20 years. You're universally kind of admired and generally people are fond of you. Any thoughts on how to be a good participant and a good colleague in an organization?

• 55:34Aswath Damodaran?

  I mean, I think that I want people around me to succeed. I mean, yesterday I, I heard of a word that I'd never heard of before, which is the opposite of schadenfreude.

• 55:44Scott Galloway?

  Schadenfreude, I read the same thing.

• 55:46Aswath Damodaran?

  And I said, that's an amazing word. It's a word that I want to put into practice every day of my life is I want people around me to succeed because I gain nothing by bringing people down around me. And once in a while I do say things that bring some, somebody down and I say, why did I do that? Because I've always regretted doing it. So one of the reasons I have not a big, I mean, I have a Twitter account. I have, you know, three 25 million. I, I tweet like four times a month is I find that when I say things in the moment, I sometimes forget that lesson of, you know, bringing somebody down even for that momentary, you know, happiness you get, hey, I brought that person down is not

• 56:29Aswath Damodaran?

  worth it. So I'm going to work hard at it. I'm not, no, I'm not perfect at it, but I'm going to try to work to make people around me, you know, succeed because if I do that, I get the bonus. I get the dividends from their success.

• 56:44Scott Galloway?

  Aswath Damodaran holds the Kirshner Family Chair in Finance Education and is Professor of Finance at NYU Stern School of Business, where he teaches corporate finance and valuation. He's written extensively on valuation, corporate finance and portfolio management, and his blog, Musings on Markets, was selected by the Times of London as one of the top 10 stock market blogs in the world. And most importantly, he has been voted Professor of the Year

• 57:10Scott Galloway?

  across 190 faculty by the graduating MBA class nine times during his career at NYU. He joins us from his home in San Diego. As always, Aswath, really appreciate your time.

• 57:21Aswath Damodaran?

  Thanks, God.

• 57:32Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of Happiness, Aswath's comment on schadenfreude and freudenfreude, I think, is wonderful. The same thing happened to me. I read this thing yesterday that there's everyone knows what schadenfreude is. Schadenfreude is basically you sort of revel in or enjoy other people's misfortune. I am really guilty of that. We have this email chain or this text chain of all my fraternity brothers from UCLA, and it struck me about 10 years ago, a friend of ours was really struggling professionally and had to borrow money from us. And the text chain just came alive. Everyone was so fascinated with the struggles that this friend of ours was having. And we weren't close with them, but we all knew them. And it just struck me. I'm like,

• 58:17Scott Galloway?

  this is such schadenfreude. Everybody on this text chain, including myself, is sort of reveling in and fascinated by this pornography of misfortune, that this person got really unlucky, was having trouble in his marriage, having trouble in his job, and was economically super strained. And I thought, this is just so ugly. Like, how did we get here that we decide that we're going to spend more time talking about our friend's misfortune than our own blessings, or our friend's achievements, or talking about our kids? And I remember thinking, I just don't want to be like that. And I am like that. I'm fascinated with other people's disappointments,

• 58:58Scott Galloway?

  or, you know, poor blessings. And it's a really ugly side of me, and I think of human nature. I've tried to get better at it, but the idea of really leaning in to people's accomplishments, and really going out of your way to congratulate people and try and be happy for them, that it is, you know, there is an ROI there. And so get to freudenfreude as fast as possible. The schadenfreude is tempting, but it's not rewarding, and it's a downward spiral. Freudenfreude.

• 59:34Scott Galloway?

  Our producers are Caroline Shager and Claire Miller and Drew Burrows. Sammy Resnick is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week.

• 59:56Scott Galloway?

  True story, in the middle of watching the Titanic, I had to go to the emergency room as the bub plug went up my ass. And the doctor said, how far did it go up there?

• 1:00:09Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, you know, come on. I mean, who hasn't had that happen in the midst of a movie?

• 1:00:16Speaker 06

  Afternoon glare totally ruined my watch party for the big game. That's when my buddy recommended blinds.com.

• 1:00:23Speaker 07

  With custom window treatments made to fit your style, space and budget, customers who shop at blinds.com experienced overwhelming satisfaction. Side effects may include a fuller, deeper night's sleep and a sudden urge to host the watch party again. Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Visit blinds.com to order your free samples today.

• 1:00:45Speaker 08

  When you shop pickup at Kroger, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries selected just for you. Our associates are committed to getting every detail right, carefully handpicking your items, checking for quality and freshness and packing your order with care. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger, fresh for everyone.