What the Air India Crash Means for Boeing, Google Buyouts & Private Equity’s Big Slump
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Today's number 3.3%. That's how much banana prices rose in May from the month prior. I walked into my son's room last week for a sex ed talk with a condiment of banana and he said, what's the banana for? And I said, I can't get hard on an empty stomach. Yes, I've told that joke many times. I want it on my tombstone. I want that joke told at my funeral over and over.

Ed, how are you? I'm doing well. I think that's number three. I think that's the third time we've heard that joke on this podcast. I love that. But I like the self-awareness and, you know, putting it on the tombstone. That's new. That's interesting. I'm feeling crisper. I'm feeling less foggy. I'm back on my NAD treatments.

I got the NAD, the testosterone, the... What else am I taking? I got a lot of shit going on right now. My head is a chemistry set right now. You take any supplements? Are you kidding? Do you know who you're talking to? I'm like fish oils and creatine and... How long you been on the creatine? I take five milligrams before I work out. I think if there's any one supplement, so I'm not a doctor. This is just what I do.

If there's any one supplement that it seems like most of the feedback is pretty positive, it's creatine. And I started taking it when I was younger. I have body dysmorphia. I always feel like I'm too—I grew up very, very skinny. And so I always feel like I'm not—especially when I was younger, I always felt like I was not big enough. And I found creatine, and I got very big, and it made me feel good. So I've been taking it since then, although I've slimmed down. I'm more lithe. I'm more svelte now, Ed. I'm more svelte. I'm more—

you know, like a jungle cat. Now I'm focused on agility and speed. You're focused on agility and speed. I love that. That's great. What do you do? You're in great shape. What do you do, Ed? I lift weights. I used to take creatine as well, but because I have the same issue as you, I'm skinny and I need to put on weight. But I found I just looked kind of bloated and almost like gross or something. Maybe I have body dysmorphia as well. Buddy, that's not the creatine.

That's something else. That's just self-awareness. So creatine makes you more self-aware. So creatine increases your vision. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

How tall are you and how much do you weigh? 6'3", 187 is where I'm at. What do you think of that? I'm 6'2", 190. You look so much bigger than me. That's the body dysmorphia. No, I do not. You're huge. Everyone agrees you're huge. I mean, it's really weird. I feel really skinny. Like, I look at you. I used to be 6'3". This is a really wonderful thing. When you're my age, you'll be 6'2". I was 6'3". When I was on crew, I was 6'3". And heavier because I was all muscle, but...

I'm now 6'2". You shrink an inch when you get to my age, which is really, isn't that weird? But yeah, we're the exact same height and weight. It's just crazy. It's kind of distributed differently, though. Way to get older. Just so awful. By the way, as we had this conversation, I just looked in the corner and our producer Claire has her, she's literally face palming. After I said, well, you're huge. Everyone agrees you're huge. I look over and her head is in her hands.

What's that all about? She's just a little jelly. All right, Clara, how tall are you and how much do you weigh? I'm 4'11 and 3 quarters. You're really 4'11 and 3 quarters? Well, according to the state of New York, I'm 5 feet. So we'll go with that. Well, I got to give it to you, Clara. You present as 5'1". Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you.

That's a good compliment. I wouldn't even ask you. Are you less than a buck? I didn't realize you were that tiny. It's all that hair. The hair definitely shows up. You can't ask me that. I'm calling the lawyer. All right. We won't do a guess your weight contest at the next Prop G dinner. It's definitely not happening, just so you know. Yeah, it did not go over well last time. All right, Ed, should we get to the headlines? Let's get into our first story. It's time to fly.

I hope you have plenty of the world at home. Google is offering voluntary buyouts across several divisions, including search and ads, as part of its ongoing effort to reduce headcount. At the same time, it is tightening its return to office policy, with some teams now requiring in-person work for employees living within 50 miles of an office. So this is interesting. I always find these employee buyouts to be a little bit strange. The idea that you would...

pay your workers to leave the company. And we actually saw this earlier in the year with the US government. But that is what Google is doing right now. They are offering up to 14 weeks of pay for those that choose to leave. And many people are saying, and many people believe, that this is a precursor to layoffs, potentially mass layoffs at Google. And where would those layoffs likely take place? According to reports,

the search division, people who are working on Google search. So Scott, your reactions to this news, these buyouts at Google, what does it say about Google's business right now? Why do you think Google is doing this? I've said for a long time that Google aggregated the greatest concentration of IQ in history, probably since NASA or the Manhattan Project. And they see the future of AI and they are very in touch with their workforce. And they've basically said, okay, a lot of these jobs are going away.

And also, they're probably a fan of the great taste of revenue growth without the calories of higher costs through hiring more people. There's no elegant way to fire people is what I figured out. It's just it always sucks. It never works out the way you thought it was going to. Now, this is one way, the kind of layoff, voluntary buyout.

And we used to do that in the newspaper business a lot, and that is offer people voluntary buyouts. It's a humane way to do things, because basically they decide that they're going to leave. Okay, that's fine. Peace with honor. We'd still throw you a party. You feel good about us. You signed a non-disparagement agreement. You're agreeing to leave, and you're out, and everyone's happy. That's the nice thing, is it's the exit wound here is less brutal, if you will. The downside is that the people who take these offers are usually your best people, the ones with the most options.

So typically what happens in a quote-unquote buyout slash layoff is that you identify the manager is asked to identify the people they don't want to lose. And then they're given sort of a heads up and a wink wink that, by the way, just so you know, we love you. We value you. You're going to do really well here. And tomorrow a letter is going out offering a buyout. You're not part of that process because we have big plans for you.

And so typically there's a bit of a heads up to the people they want to make sure don't leave because the problem with a buyout is the people who already are talking to Salesforce about a bigger, better job, and then you offer them six months severance if they leave, boom, I'm out. Hey, Salesforce, I'm in. So I don't like buyouts, if you will. In a big company, you could argue it's a more humane way to do things, but it's

It's interesting that Google sees the future and the future as fewer employees. Why not just lay people off? I don't understand. I mean, you're saying it's humane, but I don't think firing someone is inhumane. Why wouldn't you just fire someone? Spoken like someone who's never been fired. Or fired anyone. Yeah, it is inhumane. I think I've hired 11 or 1,200 people and I bet I've fired two or 400 people.

And I don't think I've ever fired someone when I was supposed to. No one should ever be surprised they're getting fired. They should have had a series of hard conversations. But you're just disrupting someone's life. And you're creating, they're going to have to go home and have a really uncomfortable conversation with their spouse and call their parents. And I mean, there's just no getting around it. I'm trying to think if that's the thing I hate most about

Yeah, I don't think there's much worse than firing people. So yeah, it is tough. And when you offer people buyouts, they're raising their hand and they're like, yeah, I was thinking of retiring or I want to go teach high school and I'm going to get six or 12 months. A company like Alphabet can afford to give them a pretty attractive severance package.

I also think you're going to see a lot more, and this is sort of unrelated. I was just thinking about AI today. I just did this AI talk for a section, our ed tech company that upskills people for AI. But yeah, I was on with the chief scientist from Microsoft. I think AI is going to become the kind of the new surveillance state, and that'll be good and bad for some people. But if you were to upload everyone's

Slack communications and emails to you and the work they're working on and ask AI, ask ChatGPT and Anthropix, say, how good is this person? How many hours a week are they working? Are they under or overcompensated? AI will have a very adroit, straightforward opinion. Everybody talks about this in the context of it's a thought partner. It's going to be pretty hardcore work.

surveillance. And if you are doing really good work that no one's watching, you want surveillance. It's a feature, not a bug.

But if you're just sort of phoning it in, surveillance is bad. Anyways, I don't know how I got here, Ed. Well, no, I think it's important because why is Google laying so many people off? I mean, it's cost-cutting measures, but clearly they believe that they can get as much work done or more if they just use AI to power their business. And what we're finding is that industries that are seeing significant AI exposure are

they're reporting that they're getting three times higher growth in revenue per employee. And the share of jobs that can be done by AI today, that share has declined 19% in the past three years. So I think AI is part of this story. And it's funny, like, AI is coming for your job. It just depends what job you have. And I think the question that we have to kind of ask yourself is like,

what are the kinds of jobs that can be done by AI? And as a general rule of thumb, I think if your work feels dumb and it feels rote and it feels meaningless. I think you just described my life. Actually, there's data on this. Number three is coder, number two is administrative assistant, and the number one most replaceable job from AI is podcast co-host. Yeah.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a lot of meaning from this. Good, good. But that's the way I see it, at least, is anything that just feels like your brain is kind of on autopilot, that is a good signal that AI could be doing your job. And, you know, I was just speaking with a founder on the First Time Founders podcast, this AI founder, and we were talking about the idea that, you know, there are some jobs where your heart is in it.

And it's important that in order to be good at the job, that your heart is in it, that you feel emotionally invested in that job and the tasks you're doing. And I think those jobs are safe because those are the kinds of jobs where you need some level of creative energy that only a human can pull off. I mean, generally, okay, so we know it's for repetitive, predictable tasks, things like data entry, rules-based decision-making, whether it's basic tax prep or...

you know, logistics reading. I remember talking to your buddy from the logistics company, right? Ryan Peterson, Flexport. Yeah, Flexport. The humans calling people and coordinating ships and making sure that the components are on the ship. Text and language heavy work, customer service, technical writing, things like that. What I also, I was thinking about my first job out of UCLA was at Morgan Stanley. And I bet they would still, my analyst class was 80 people.

And I would bet with AI, you really only need 20 or 30. I was putting together decks. I was proofing prospectuses late night at the printer for IPOs and constantly putting together decks to pitch people on why they should issue bonds and use Morgan Stanley. And I think a talented person could probably do the work of one and a half to three analysts now. And so those jobs are going to go away. The problem is the people who sort of see the matrix, right?

and are really good and can creatively sit down with the client and say, "This is why I think you should hold off on your IPO or your bond offering, or should think about M&A here." The only way they ever gather that sort of perspective or ability to see the forest for the trees is by doing a lot of that rote labor. Like having been in the weeds, understanding the true interest cost of a three-year versus a five-year bond and deep into an Excel spreadsheet,

It's part of the reason I'm okay, you know, I can talk about the credit markets now in a thoughtful or semi-thoughtful way, right? Yeah. So I wonder what's going to happen to job training or maybe they're going to have AI upskill people. It's a great point. You're going to have this whole generation of people who haven't really done the homework in their respective jobs and they're just going to be out there kind of spraying from the hip.

The same with people and students in school. I mean, no one's learning how to write an essay and go through the motions and the, I guess you're right, the rote labor of figuring out how do you structure a sentence, how do you write a paragraph, what is a thesis statement, all the boring stuff. I have lawyers. I have lawyers freaking everywhere doing shit for me.

And the way I would describe my lawyers is when I have shit work that needs somebody smart, I give it to my lawyer. I want someone like that. Can you get me a lawyer? That sounds great. I could review most of these contracts, get them to 90% of where they need to be, review. I'm making an investment right now. I got the investment documents back. I used to review them myself, make a couple of changes, redline them, send them back. Now I'm like, okay, this is awful work. I'm going to pay somebody, I don't know, four, 600 bucks an hour or whatever it is.

If it's low-level work, if it's something that's stop-line, you need to pay someone $1,200 an hour to do it.

I think that it is a really difficult time to be a mediocre lawyer right now. And when I say mediocre, I mean just kind of lower level. Because now I'm already thinking, okay, I'm just going to give a prompt on all my legal contracts and I'll start the first draft. And unless it's really kind of high-end, thoughtful work where I need someone really strategic of counsel. And by the way, I've had those lawyers. I worked with a guy at Hogan & Hartson named Stuart Stein, who was just brilliant.

And I started calling Stuart just for like almost like advice on life issues. He really was counsel, like he fit that word. But oh my gosh, the junior level, mid-level lawyers, they're gonna get whacked. But here's the thing, the partner or the senior associate who's really good with AI, who's smart,

They're going to make more money. I mean, basically, AI is going to speedball America. What do I mean by that? America slowly but surely has been an economy that is optimized for the top 10% at the cost of the bottom 90, right? If we can find someone to work for $7.25 an hour and they can't afford food, fuck you, that's too bad. That's going to help me get richer if I can figure out how to hire a bunch of people at $7.25.

Right. Our tax policy. Let's keep cutting taxes. Let's come up with more ways to cut taxes for the wealthiest. We are optimizing for the top 10 percent. AI basically optimizes for the top 10 percent. The top 10 percent at anything, if that means learning and understanding AI, are going to aggregate more and more spoils and the bottom 90 are going to see their power diminish. This is AI is AI is making America more like itself.

A Boeing 787 Dreamliner carrying 240 passengers crashed into a building in India last week. That was the first fatal incident involving that model. Boeing stock fell 8% in pre-market trading. So, Scott, obviously, terrible news. I think we should just probably focus for now on what this means for Boeing, because this is...

another tragic accident that has happened on a Boeing aircraft. We don't know yet whether it was Boeing's fault, but the fact remains, this keeps on happening to Boeing. We had the Boeing 737 crash in 2018, which killed 189 people. We had another Boeing crash in 2019, which killed 157 people.

There was the malfunction we saw last year where the door literally flew off of the plane. No one died, but it was still very scary. And now this with more than 200 deaths. And the difference is this is a 787. The crashes that we've seen before and the malfunctions we've seen, they've all been 737 aircraft models. But this is a 787, much larger plane. Awful news. Scott, where does Boeing go from here?

There's this widely cited analysis that shows that Boeing aircraft have double the amount of crashes as Airbus. But even a double, that means they have one crash for every 184 million flights. So this is still the safest form of transportation in history. The thing about these airline crashes is they're so...

They're such dramatic events. People flipping their car and breaking their neck and an ambulance shows up and pronounces them dead on. It's not nearly as dramatic. It's not nearly as cinematic and not nearly as scary as the idea of, you know, a plane takes off and it crashes. So in terms of impact on Boeing, Boeing has been one of those stocks that's been a huge underperformer.

My favorite plane in the world is this plane. I fly a lot. The 787, the Dreamliner, what they've done in terms of space and lighting and ergonomics, I think it's an incredible plane. But we don't know what happened here, so it's just sort of hard to...

Hard to speculate what's going on here. Do you have any thoughts? Well, I think that's exactly the right approach from an investment perspective, too. I mean, the stock obviously fell, but I think if you're being sober about this, you don't do anything with your Boeing shares until you know exactly what happened.

and I don't think you should re-rate or I don't think your thesis on Boeing should change until we know what actually happened on that plane. If it turns out that there was some serious malfunction with the plane itself,

then we can begin to have a conversation there. But the idea of Boeing was in a crash, let's sell now, I just don't think that that makes any real investment sense or logical sense. But I would like to get your views just from a crisis management perspective. I mean...

You taught a class on crisis management, and you have kind of like a playbook for what you're supposed to do in a crisis, which I think we've discussed on this show. But I guess my question would be, when the same crisis keeps happening over and over again...

At what point do you sort of throw your playbooks, your previous playbooks out of the window? At what point is it no longer a question of managing the PR versus making sure that this never happens ever again? We have an entire session at NYU, my brand strategy course on crisis management. And there's only three things you need to remember, but it's hard to do them. The first is you have to acknowledge the issue.

We had an air disaster. 250 people died. This is a tragedy. It's unacceptable. Two, you have to take responsibility. This was a Boeing aircraft. We need to get to the bottom of this. And three, overcorrect, and the person communicating that overcorrection needs to be the CEO. So jet manufacturers and airlines have a playbook here. They usually immediately fly the CEO. The CEO has to be on call 24 by 7. They usually typically fly the CEO to the

to the location of the disaster. They have a very methodical, systemic way of reaching out to the families, handling the press. But if you think about kind of the ultimate example of crisis management was Tylenol with Johnson & Johnson.

A lunatic puts cyanide in Tylenol bottles. Someone dies. These people take them to the morgue, and then on the way home, they come back and add tragedy on tragedy. They have headaches, so they take more of these pills and they die. Tylenol decides to clear. They're like, this is a problem. Somebody took Tylenol and died.

They acknowledged the issue. The CO was absolutely out in front, and then they overcorrected. That's the hard part. They went and cleared all shelves across all 50 states of all Tylenol. The temptation is to say, "This is an isolated incident, and don't worry. Tylenol's safe," and not go through the expense and the shareholder interruption and make excuses around why this isn't a big deal, to try and play it down.

The overcorrection part is what restores confidence. And actually, people felt better about Tylenol after the tragedy than before. But airline companies, just to give you a sense for—I don't think this is going to hurt them or the industry, to give you a sense—your chances of dying in a commercial plane crash are 1 in 11 million. All right? Yeah.

your chance of getting killed by a lawnmower are one in 12 million. So the lawnmower is as dangerous to you as flying on an aircraft. Choking on food, one in 2,500. I was with someone that choked the other night, by the way, it was very scary. And I went home and like started watching all these YouTubes on how to give the Heimlich. And I was trying to practice on my sons and they were like freaked out, like get the fuck away from me. I'm like, pretend you're choking. Like dad's freaking out. I've turned into that weird dad.

doing the Heimlich on my sons who are literally hiding from me. One locked the door. That's not a thing. It's not like that dad. This is a new trope you've just invented. That's not a thing. I'm not that dad. I went into the room the other night. I got the kids this week and I went into the room to wake them up the other day and he heard me walk in and he's like, no! He thought I was going to try and do the Heimlich on them. Anyway, taking this down, this tragedy, down just to the markets, it's probably a buying opportunity for Boeing. I don't think...

I don't think airlines are going to stop buying from Boeing. It's a duopoly. They have no choice. They have to buy from Airbus and Boeing. I would bet 95%, 98% of people boarding a plane don't know what plane they're getting on, much less who the manufacturer is. Agreed. The airline industry has just been this hodge of commoditization other than the top 1%.

Everyone else, the bottom 99, if you will, just wants to get from Dallas to Denver as inexpensively as possible, and they don't care what the plane is or what the airline is. So Boeing had a terrible year last year, down 31% on the year. That was the worst performer in the Dow Jones. But it's been in recovery in 2025. It was up 10%.

20% year-to-date before this crash happened. So it'll be interesting to see if it can continue. But more importantly, Claire, how tall is your girlfriend? I don't know. I think she's 5'1 or 5'2. Oh.

Oh. You want me to text her and ask? You really don't know your... Okay. All right. No jokes. Why does that matter? It doesn't matter. No jokes about Lollipop King. No jokes about Lollipop King. How tall is your girlfriend, Ed? Five, seven. Carmen answers, why are you asking me? Exhibit 33 in the discrimination suit against my boss. It's going to make us rich.

Ed, I need you and your girlfriend at 40 kids. I'm going to weaponize them and take over Australia. Let's keep talking about the markets. Okay, back to markets. Sorry. We'll be right back after the break. If you're enjoying the show so far and you haven't subscribed, be sure to give ProfitMarket to follow wherever you get your podcasts.

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We're back with Prof G Markets. We saw some interesting developments in the private equity world last week. First, Blackstone announced plans to invest up to $500 billion in Europe over the next decade, calling the region a major opportunity for growth. The firm has already poured $100 billion into the UK, and it is now the largest fund manager in European real estate. Meanwhile,

Yale's endowment is looking to offload up to $6 billion in its private equity and venture fund stakes. So far, it has nearly finalized the sale of about $3 billion worth at a slight discount. Scott, a few things are happening here that relate to a lot of what we've been talking about this year. The first is

this shift from America to Europe, which we've largely been talking about in the context of stocks and public markets. But here we have Blackstone shifting its alternative investment strategy away from America and towards Europe. That's one thing. We also have this private equity sell-off by elite universities, which we discussed a couple weeks ago, and we were discussing it in the context of Harvard and Princeton, who are doing the same thing.

And this is indicative of both the Ivy League's desperation for liquidity right now as Trump cuts off their funding and also their overexposure to private equity as an asset class. That's the second thing. And then the third thing, which is probably the most important, is just the overall underperformance of private equity right now. And the most important stat to me is the following.

Private equity, on average, returned 7% last year. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 returned 25%. And then maybe you'll say, well, it was a different year. It was a

It was a strange year. Well, actually, even on a three and five and 10-year time horizon, private equity has, on average, still underperformed compared to the S&P 500. So what you have right now is an asset class that is struggling both in the short and the long term, which is now forcing Blackstone to look across the ocean for new opportunities. And it's also forcing these massive endowments who got very highly exposed assets

to private equity over the last 10, 15, 20 years, it's forcing them to flat out sell. And in many cases, as we have with Yale, at significant discounts. So many avenues to explore here. I'll pass it back to you. Where do you want to start? So every asset class has its time in the sun and its time in the shade.

And private equity was kind of the gift they kept on giving. And all of these endowments thought, all right, we have large capital bases. We have patient capital, which means we should go to the place where we're going to get return for that patient capital and large capital allocations, which all spells private equity. And typically, private equity should kind of get back

get you some liquidity. And typically, I think it's like five to seven years. But that has been extended. And now these things are taking 10 to 12 years to get to liquidity. But along the way, they make more and more capital commitments for new private equity investments. So there's mismatched durations. And that is, I was expecting a certain amount of liquidity this year. It's going to take two or three more years to get it. But the capital commitments I made two years ago are coming due this year. So these guys are in a bit of a cash crunch.

Now, having said that, I don't think that, like you said before, it's not as if they're forced sellers. And I wonder how much of it is, okay, they need to raise capital, but they also might have decided this is not a bad time to sell. The markets are high. Whoever comes in and values these assets is going to go off our latest mark. And maybe it's just a good time. In other words, this might be more strategic than forced. It might be

these people going, "You know what? I think we can get a really good price for our portfolio right now." There's a limited set of buyers which would connote that they can get a good price which should push down prices because if you and I got called by Yale and said, "Do you want to buy a million dollars of our private equity stakes?" We would have a really difficult time doing the diligence to get enough confidence to put in a bid. Like the price discovery for us would be really difficult.

So I would imagine people like Apollo and other places are pulling together funds to go buy these things. They have the skills and the analysts to value what it means to buy, to look at a portfolio of 30 private equity investments at Yale and say, we think they're worth approximately this, and we need a 30% discount, whatever it is. I think the larger story here, though, is that there's a phenomena where rich people invest in

highly branded private equity companies that other people don't have access to from Charles Schwab or they can't get into if they're just a retail investor because they believe that as rich people, they of course have access to something superior. And if you add up all of the returns of these quote unquote fancy high-end hard to get into PE funds, isn't this exciting? I get to invest in Blackstone. They have underperformed the S&P by the amount of their fees. It's one of the biggest grifts

in consumer history, is the alternative investments industrial complex. And there'll always be articles in CNBC about people who outperformed the market, but that doesn't take into account the thousands of hedge funds that have started, have underperformed, and just gone away. And so people, including endowments, who have $54 billion, like to think that they're special and they can outperform the market. No, they can't.

And then the story I love that was in The Wall Street Journal is the guy who I think manages the Nevada State Pension Fund. And he makes a good living, not a great living. He's in a shitty office wearing a bad suit. And all he does is invest his funds in different Vanguard low-cost index funds. And by the way, he's outperformed something like 42 of the 50 state pensions. That's where this is all headed.

Because, okay, for a while they outperform fine, but they should have AI rebalancing their risk portfolio. They're caught in a weird spot right now. AI would have figured that out. You want to talk about who AI is coming for? Oh, my gosh. And they're going to figure out the same thing the markets have figured out, but rich people don't want to acknowledge that.

unless you have insider information, like Speaker Pelosi, Emerson, or you're totally fucking corrupt, the Trump family, you are not going to outperform the market unless you have real niche insight. And to outperform the market with $54 billion in capital over the medium and long term is near impossible. So what do you want to do? You want to reduce your costs and you want to go into low-cost index funds because the market is usually up and to the right over the medium and the long term. But I think these guys, I mean, if you think about the

The 100 biggest universities, I bet they employ 5,000 to 10,000 people directly in managing their money, probably 50,000 to 100,000 people in terms of brokers, advisors, consultants, lawyers. That ecosystem is about to get kicked in the nuts over and over and over. And we're even seeing that.

played out in terms of the business models of a lot of these funds where the firms that are winning, the firms that have won in private equity and in VC as well, it's the guys who went straight for the management fee. I mean, it's the 2 in 20 model. You get 20% on the carry and then 2% on just managing the portfolio. But the name of the game across every asset class is just grow your AUM.

And it's all starting to blend into sort of the public market strategy, which is why I think you're right. I think it's almost like the jig is up where people realize actually it's very, this game of trying to pick the best company, even in the private markets is mostly a game of luck.

And the real model that works is just accumulate as much assets under management as you possibly can, and then just take your 2%. And that's the same strategy. It's the same model as like a BlackRock or a Vanguard. And it's interesting to see that these firms are all kind of evolving into that model. But in terms of the structural issues of private equity itself, I think the main problem here is...

liquidity and exits. That's what they're struggling. I mean, there's the performance of the underlying businesses in your portfolio. That's one thing. But I don't get the sense that that's the real problem in the industry right now. The real problem is that these firms can't cash out. They can't exit.

And just some data here to support that. Last quarter, private equity exit volume hit its lowest level in two years. And last year, private equity exit value, the amount of money these firms are actually making from selling these companies, that hit its lowest level in five years.

So beyond the actual performance of the companies, the problem is no one wants to buy them, whether that's in the form of M&A or secondary sales, or as we've talked about a lot, IPOs. There is, for some reason, just this general lack of interest in acquiring mid to late stage companies. And that's been the real problem. And I think we are seeing, I'm not saying the whole thing is forced sales, but

But I think we are seeing increased volume of forced selling, or at least there are more sellers than there are buyers. And I guess I'm just wondering from your end, I know you're friends with a lot of these guys, like why do you think that's happening? To your point, the IPO market is really frosty right now. So there's just no exits in terms of IPO. The M&A market, there was a bit of a chill because of antitrust scrutiny. That's what they blame it on. I don't think it's that.

I think what we have right now in the private markets is a bit of a standoff, and it's the following. And I'm on the board of one of these companies. We raised money at a valuation of $1.1 billion about two years ago. All the people in there are hoping that they're going to—they were looking for three to five extra money. They're hoping this company gets acquired or goes public for $3 to $5 billion. I bet we could sell for $600 million today. But nobody wants to look at each other and go, oh, we're sitting on a company that's worth $600 million.

And buyers are saying, yeah, I'll buy this company for $600 million. And just because you entered in a consensual hallucination with investors in 2021 that this thing was worth $1.1 billion, you know, honey badgers don't care. The market is totally indifferent to what you think your last mark was. That's interesting, yeah. So I think there's a shit ton of good companies in the private market that

They'd manage to talk the markets into funding them and doing a round. When you put $100 million into a company at a $1 billion valuation, $1.1 billion, and then the CEO comes back and says, you know, it sucks to be a grown-up, but I think the company's worth $600 million and we could sell maybe for $500 to $700 and it's time to get liquidity. We should do it. And, you know, things we need to scale, da-da-da. The person's going to go, fuck you. You told me to invest at $1.1.

And no, hold on, hold on. Because that person who works for a private equity fund or an investor or an endowment, guess how they get compensated? They get compensated on the value of their investments. And the way they value their investments every year is a mark. So the last thing they want to do is take a mark down by agreeing to sell the company for $600 million, even if it's only worth $600 million. That's a great point. They'd rather maintain, stay in a sense of

Absolutely. And just as one stat that I should have mentioned, fundraising for traditional PE funds dropped 24% last year, making that the third straight year.

What did we get right though, Ed? What part of the story did we just get right? Oh, good point. Yeah, let's talk about that. Europe. Blackstone's investing into Europe. And that was your big thesis. One of our big themes for 25 was that the rivers would reverse. We'll see multiple contraction,

and that that is a very negative forward-looking indicator for U.S. stocks. Yeah, my prediction is that the flows of capital into Europe begin to infect not just the defense contractors, but start to infect the other sectors in the economy. And that we're going to see, I think so far, European markets are up 13% or 16%. I think they're going to be up 30% plus this year. I think this is a trade, a momentum trade. And I think there's probably a lot of fund managers right now thinking, okay,

I missed this, but it's not too late. And you're going to see just an entirely different willingness and promiscuity around allocating big pools of capital. Let's just look at the stock market returns so far this year. So the FTSE 100, which is the London stock market, that's up 8% year-to-date. The Eurostox 50 is up 11% year-to-date. Germany's DAX is up 21% year-to-date. And you compare those returns to the S&P 500, which is up 11% year-to-date.

which is up less than 3% year to date. So yeah, as of now, your Europe trade is working. I mean, maybe you led the charge and you inspired Schwarzman at Blackstone to get into Europe too. Yeah, that's right. Guys, call me. Yeah, they're listening to us.

The time to buy is when people have sort of left stuff for dead. And I remember the rhetoric around Europe last year that it was a museum and nobody could make the bull case for Europe. And that's exactly when you go in. And again, our big thesis is that defense spending, which is supposedly gonna escalate by 150 to 200 billion in incremental spend that wasn't planned, is gonna be a catalyst for economic growth, which I think is gonna take all the stocks up. And if you look at European stocks,

They're still relatively cheap compared to other markets. So I'm still very bullish. And my friend Orlando, who runs Atlanta Partners, was saying to me that these cycles are usually seven to 10 year cycles. So it's not like you missed it. You've probably missed defense stocks, but European stocks are still relatively cheap compared to even to U.S. stocks that haven't, you know, have been flat year to date. I also want to clarify that what you also did not say is

And what you have not been saying is, oh, I'm short America, like short America, long Europe. No, what you've been saying is that the returns in America will be lackluster, not that we'll see flat out declines in the US stock market. And that is...

exactly what's happened. And I'm just bringing that up now because I found that after we saw some bounce back in the U.S. stock market, there were people saying, oh, Scott was wrong. He was short America. No, Scott was never short America. Scott was long Europe. And so far, that has been correct. I mean, I'm moving back to the U.S. The majority of my biggest asset in terms of my own wealth is U.S. real estate.

I'm also really long in the U.S. by virtue of the fact that my books, my podcasts, my career are very U.S.-centric. Some of the biggest investments I make are Annette Elson and Claire Miller, and they're U.S. citizens. So I'm very, very invested in the U.S. I mean, even as much as I have tried to diversify, realistically, I'm probably 70%, 80% still invested in the U.S. by virtue of my human capital, my businesses, my

So what I tell people is you should probably be more aggressive in terms of your international exposure because at the end of the day, if the U.S. boom—say I'm wrong, right? Say Ed Elson puts a ton of money into European and Chinese stocks, and I'm wrong, the U.S. continues to boom for five or seven years. You're going to participate in that because you work for an American company.

you're going to get upside there. There's going to be American companies that are going to want to buy U.S. media companies. The advertisers in the U.S. are going to be more confident and buy more ads on your podcast. By virtue of the fact of your age and where you're working, you're hugely invested in the U.S. I'm never bearish on America, despite our slow descent into fascism, but over the medium and the long term, America is absolutely always a great place to

to invest and in my opinion the best place in the world to live but to think that you know if you own 10% of if 10% of your equity portfolio is in Europe or Asia that means you're 2% diversified we'll be right back after the break if you're enjoying the show so far hit follow leave us a review on Profiting Markets

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We're back with Profit Markets. Scott, when this episode airs, you will be at Cannes. Cannes, Cannes. We will build an impenetrable force called the Maginot Line. Don't know what that accent is, and I don't know what you just said, but I'm going to move on. The part of my brain that manages calendars, passwords, keys, and I used to do amazing accents, it's just died. That part of my brain has just died. That's a shame. We'll bring it back. Well, when this episode airs, you will be at Cannes.

which is one of the biggest stages for the advertising industry. And this is an interesting time to be there because we're seeing a lot of seismic shifts in the sector right now. First off,

WPP is forecasting that social media creators are on track to overtake traditional media companies in ad revenue this year. Creator-driven advertising is expected to grow 20% this year and more than double by 2030. At the same time, WPP is preparing for a leadership change. The CEO, Mark Reed, who's led the company since 2018, he announced that he will step down at the end of this year.

The company's stock is down 34% year to date and has lost more than half of its value during his tenure.

I will just pause there to get your reactions. As a reminder, WPP is one of the largest and most famous ad agencies. It is part of what is known as the big six in advertising. Your thoughts, Scott? First off, Cannes Lions is my favorite conference in the world. I would go for free. I get paid because people try to need to fill content. They're like, I'm bringing the angry guy. But

I love it there. I don't think Cannes is that interesting. I don't think Lyons is that interesting, but the two together, it's like peanut butter and chocolate. I hole up at my favorite hotel in the world. I bomb in. I hire this guy named Andre, who has got a pot belly like you wouldn't imagine, and he has a speedboat, and he's capable of operating that speedboat while smoking not one but two cigarettes at a time. He picks me up at the Hotel de Cap.

And then he, I always ask him to bomb. You need security and badges to get onto these big tech things.

beach parties. I bomb in from the beach, like fucking D-Day, like the American troops in Normandy. I always ask them to take me to Meta Beach, and I just bomb in there. And it makes me feel important. And I get off my Zodiac, and it's like, I literally feel like James Bond. And then I go back and I order a $28 latte at the Hotel Du Cap. But it's my favorite conference. But it's essentially...

I mean, it's like, you know, it's basically a bunch of people fly 6,000 miles to give each other awards for making a Pepsi ad that no one remembers. I mean, it's like, it's literally a bunch of ad execs go to the beach and

entering four glasses of rosé and are like, I'm relevant. I'm still relevant. And then they go to a party sponsored by their executioner. They go see Kygo and

at the Google party as Google runs their fingers through their heads before they shoot them in the fucking face. WPP is out of business. They just don't know it yet. Do you think they don't know it yet? I took brand strategy in 1992 and it changed my life. David Ocker. I thought, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. The fact that intangible associations had built so much shareholder value because manufacturing had been reverse engineered and until digital came in and unlocked, created this new age of product innovation through digital,

It was all about brand. It was all about figuring out a way to produce a shitty shoe, salty snack, or car, and then wrap it in brand codes of American masculinity or European elegance, and then garner unearned margin. And the way you did that was by trapping people five hours a day on one of three TV stations and then just hammering them with TV ads, which were really inexpensive. And the key was to find really handsome, creative, thoughtful people who pretended to like you and

And you would give them your ad budget and they would give you awards for being a visionary. And everybody was happy. And then Google came along and said, okay, playtime's over, right? And now, and so I started Profit Brand Strategy. And I sold it to Dentsu, the biggest ad agency in Japan.

in 1990, when was it, 2000. But I saw the writing on the wall. I'm like, okay, the internet, everything's going on the internet. I just, I was smart enough. I didn't know. I started a bunch of companies that went out of business on the internet. Some worked, some didn't, but I'm like, this is it. In this era, the sun has passed midday on Don Draper and all this brand shit. But the kings of the industry were Martin Sorrell, Maurice Levy, and John Wren. And all three of them at one point put in offers for profit. And they were very disciplined buyers, which I didn't want. I wanted an irrational buyer.

But these were literally the gods of business. These guys were so important and they were dictating trends and

And now no one gives a shit what they think. WPP has a $9 billion market cap. DoorDash, the people bringing you your burrito bowl, has a $90 billion market cap. Fucking food delivery, one food delivery company with a mediocre brand is worth three times as much as WPP, Publisya, and Omnicom combined. I mean, these guys are a shadow of a shadow.

of themselves. And by the way, it's funny you mentioned DoorDash because they literally just bought Symbiosis, which is this ad tech firm for $175 million. I mean, essentially what they're doing is they're

becoming a food delivery service that is also an ad agency. They're basically about to do what WPP does, but for restaurants and for food companies. So it's just funny you bring that up. These things are just sort of hilarious because now Google, Spotify, and Meta have the best parties. I don't get invited to Meta parties. I'm not sure why I had, but these guys have, you know, WPP, I don't even think WPP, I'm not even sure they have like a beach anymore. I think they've been priced out of it

But yeah, but the WPP, the other guys, it's like, it's just wild that we're even talking about them. And I think what you're going to see with these latest WPP results or a prediction, I think it's going to attract an activist, kind of a mid-tier activist, who's going to say, this shit isn't working, and the conglomerate structure isn't.

initially pioneered by Sir Martin. It's outdated. And I would bet, I would love to do a sum of the parts analysis of WPP because my thesis is there's some analytics companies, some influencer marketing shit, all that stuff that's probably worth more than the entire company is trading at. The crown jewel is GroupM.

that manages about 60 billion in media buying, and that's about 40% of WPP's revenue, grew 3% while the rest of WPP's revenue shrank. - 3%, great. - Yeah, but if Group N was sold off, I think an activist is gonna come in here and say, "Go good bank, bad bank," and take Group N and spin it off

But if it was sold and achieved the same price-to-sales ratio of publicity, it would be at £10 billion, almost doubled its current market cap. This is peanuts in the overall ad market. So, I mean, I'm with you. I think there's probably an opportunity there. But it's like, yeah, we're talking about like $8, $9, $10 billion. Who really cares? Like, I would—I'd love to just—

go over again those numbers that they put out in that report where content creators are going to see a 20% increase in their revenue this year, whether it's ads or brand deals or brand sponsorships. The analysis said that in 2025, for the first time,

quote, more than half of content-driven advertising revenue will come from user-generated platforms and content rather than professionally produced content. So that's the big seismic shift that is going to definitely be discussed at Cannes this year. And this goes back to something that I've been thinking a lot about and which I wrote about on your blog last year, which is that all of these like

Traditional institutions and companies and brands, they're all losing credibility. And specifically, they are losing ground to individual people, content creators. Whether it's in the news, where CNN and MSNBC are losing all of that ad revenue because they're being beaten by individual podcasters like Joe Rogan, or maybe like us, but I won't toot our horn, or in Hollywood, where...

the traditional production studios, they're getting run over by individuals, YouTubers like Mr. Beast, who's now garnering more viewing time than many of the top shows on Netflix. Or even, and I made this point as well in the article, politics, where the GOP and the Republican Party has been, or it's sort of like given itself over to a person in Donald Trump. And my view has been that people are the new brands now.

And I want to get your views on that because I don't know if we've discussed it on the podcast, but that to me is where this is all headed. We're not seeing as much revenue being generated by the platforms where it's a brand or a company. The future of advertising to me looks like individual people talking to you about products. Yeah, I mean, everything you said is right. And people now as the new brands,

What they're able to do is extract more money from the ecosystem. If you look at, so think of us as a media property. We're able to get, you know, our deal, we get 70% of the revenues. And basically our means of production are really inexpensive. We have Drew and some equipment and not a lot. We don't have a studio in Midtown. We don't have makeup artists. We don't have sound people. The means of production was so expensive for traditional producers.

advertisers and content creators that they had a lot of power. I mean, just the ability to lay cable and negotiate these agreements and own the transmission rights was hundreds of millions of dollars. And now with us, the means of productions are so little and it's really all about the talent. The distribution has very little power. So we're able to garner the majority of the income. And then the advertisers come in and the ads can be tested so frequently and the ads don't need to be that

and there's not enough margin for the middlemen to kind of grab a ton of, you know, grab a ton of, to get 8% to 12% by just buying ads somewhere. And so, but to your point, it's like everything's being disintermediated, right? The guys in the middle, the people who do the creative, the logos, the media planning, the media buying, it's like, no, who's creating the content? I want to get them as much money as possible. They want to get as much money as possible. Right?

And then the digital guys who know how to place an ad to the right person at the right time and exactly, you know, exactly the right product. What is going to be your message at Cannes? Like, if you're a brand manager or a media buyer or you work in advertising, what is your message to those people? How do you win in advertising in 2025? If you're an agency, the asset you have is relationships. And it's a complicated time. So establishing relationships of trust, whether it's

helping them create activations or figuring out how to leverage AI across their media pie. I mean, the best consultants, the best vendors are people who have strong relationships, aggregate a bunch of smart people and say, what are your biggest problems in marketing or in supply chain?

or an influencer marketing, whatever it is, and how can we help you? And we'll figure out a way. I generally find that corporations are more generous than people. That when I had consumer companies, they'll just like, oh, I can get this product for five cents less. I'll go here. Whereas corporations, when I was working with P&G, they would always try and find out ways to be supportive of us and grow our business. I find corporations are more generous than people. So

If you have a good relationship, which a lot of these agencies do with great companies, they can say to them, and a lot of them do, and a lot of them still make a very good living, what are your biggest problems? I've aggregated a bunch of smart, thoughtful, creative people, and we'll help you solve those problems. And we'll charge you, and you'll pay us well. You want us to be successful. So the good agencies or the good people are basically just great thought partners. They're AI, but they're not as anodyne. They're smarter. They're more thoughtful.

And so the good agencies still find a way to make a living. They're just doing it differently and they're going into different areas. And my message, I'm speaking a bunch, you know, my message is I think the biggest opportunity in the consumer economy is for a company

to wrap themselves in the flag and say, we're an American company and we have fidelity to American values. And it may cost us in the short run. And if a malignant narcissist wants to come for us, fine. We're an American company. We stared down fascism. We made tanks.

We have supported people. We are not scared. We are an American company, and this is not American. The first company that does that and puts out a great ad, hey, by the way, who should do this? Fucking Nike. Jesus Christ, what an opportunity to talk about the role immigrants have played in sport and in competition and what it means to be a great American brand. This is the biggest opportunity in branding in a generation.

Let's take a look at the week ahead. We'll see U.S. retail sales and the import price index for May. And we'll also hear the Fed's interest rate decision for June. Any predictions, Scott? Well, I made my prediction, Ed. Some consumer company is going to find their backbone and come out with a campaign and a statement.

that says it's never the wrong time to do the right thing and they're going to garner a disproportionate amount of business and margin. This is, like I said, I'm waiting, but I think someone is going to step into that void.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Mia Silverio is our research lead. Isabella Kinsel is our research associate. Dan Chalon is our intern. Drew Burrows is our technical director. And Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Profiting Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tune in for a fresh take on the markets tomorrow.

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