Raging Moderates: Why Jimmy Kimmel Returned

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1:31With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarlov. Jess, how are you? It's time for banter. Shana Tova. Yes. Let's ju it up. Right back at you. I did not know this, but our producer, David Toledo, grew up near me in the valley. Oh, I didn't know that either. Yeah, and went to school with all my buddies who ended up populating my fraternity at ZBT, where I ended up rushing because I heard they had to live in spaces, and I didn't want to live with my mom the rest of my life.

2:16And it ended up being a Jewish fraternity. And anyways, David, is David Jewish? He doesn't look Jewish. He looks a little too cool. No, he's not. Honorary, though. So David's like an employee and kind of a second son because he comes from this area that your friends populated. Yeah, I immediately think of him as the son I never had. You put words in my mouth. Yes, David, you're a huge disappointment to me and the best part of you ran down my leg. That's what I tell my sons. Is that wrong? Don't say that during Rosh Hashanah. Is that wrong? Yeah. You had to bring religion into it? Well, yeah, we started with Chanatova.

2:56Yeah, no, if he's going to be my son, I've got to figure out a way to constantly communicate what a disappointment it is to me. As long as you leave him money, which I think is what we're all working towards. Yeah, I plan to spend it all. And I think I'm tracking. I think I'm kind of leaving with almost nothing. Do they know that? My kids, well, your kids are too young. My kids are shockingly, I don't know where they got it. They have really good values around money. I took my son, you know, I want to live my life. The bad news is talking to my kids for a minute, and I think you'll find this, or I found it.

3:35I have a favorite. That's the bad news. What? Yeah, I have a favorite. You know we're in public. Yeah, I know, I know. Whatever. At this point, you know, whatever. Counsel me, Bob Iger. So, but that's the bad news. The good news is it switches. like I go through phases where I'm really into an Alec phase and I'm really into a Nolan phase and the reason I think I'm I'm so fond of my oldest is that he's a mini me I mean literally like when I hug him it's like hugging my 18 year old self and he just looks like me he kind of acts like me he's just me as a younger man and then the reason I'm so sort of just fascinated by his younger brother, Nolan, is it's as if we're from a different species.

4:22He's just so he couldn't be more different than me. And I just find him. Is he just your partner? Like, is he a total reflection of her or he's an alien to everyone? Yeah, he's he's I guess. But I didn't know her as a child. So he's just so different. I mean, I'm just he doesn't look like me. He doesn't in no way behaves like me, interested in different things. And it's it's just kind of fascinating to watch someone see the world with a totally different perspective than yours. So, but yeah, I'm, uh, it is the fun of it. Yeah. Anyways, this has been, this has been a unusual banter, but I think we should get to the, get to the actual news of the day, slow news day.

5:05We're going to talk about why Jimmy Kimmel returned Trump's unproven medical advice on autism, acetaminophen, you fucking idiot, and how the white house is being remodeled in Trump's taste. All right, let's get into it. On Monday, we got a Rosh Hashanah miracle. There's that, there's that David Toledo. That's right. There's that Judaism creeping in. ABC and the Walt Disney Company announced Jimmy Kimmel would return after a brief suspension that set off a nationwide backlash. Media critics, Hollywood unions, celebrities, and even some Republican leaders, including Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, condemned it as an attack on free speech.

5:42online fans threaten boycotts of disney next star and sinclair station streaming the decision is a dangerous precedent for political pressure on the media jess what do you think of disney's walking this decision back brendan carr really fucked up huh i mean this the need to run to get in front of a camera will always be the downfall of these trump appointees and people in Trump's orbit. If he had just kept his mouth closed, he perhaps could have gotten away with it and find some other way to signal to, you know, Sinclair and Nexstar what was being planned. But I think there's a good pro-democracy message laced in here, which is you are not powerless.

6:29And that has been the big concern since Trump came back into office. Like, what can we do? and you can cancel your subscription. If you're one of those adults that wants a Disney wedding, you can cancel your$150 ,000 wedding and guess what? They're going to pay attention to that. I also think it's a very bad day for those folks who were arguing that this was just a straight up business decision because it's very clear that that is not the case and that Brendan Carr played such an important role in pulling Jimmy Kimmel off air and then getting him back on air. So net net, you know, good day for democracy, good day for the First Amendment.

7:13A lot of pressure on Jimmy Kimmel, though. It'll be interesting to see, you know, what he has in his monologue. And when we recorded that rapid response video, organic plug for our YouTube, please subscribe to the Raging Moderates YouTube channel because Scott and I are posting there all the time. You know, I said, what's been nice about this is it's really felt like a grassroots movement. I think that that letter that the ACLU organized with over, you know, 400 artists and entertainers, actors, et cetera, that signed on Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Selena Gomez, et cetera, made a big impact. And things like Zoran Mamdani saying that he wouldn't participate in a town hall that would be televised on ABC because ABC doesn't support the First Amendment.

7:55You know, people hear about those things and they take stock of it. And ABC has already capitulated to Trump once in paying the settlement over George Stephanopoulos. And hopefully this is the start of, you know, saying I'm not so fast. I'm not going to bend the knee that easily. What's your updated thinking? Yeah, I just I'm fascinated by corporate communications and corporate communications has been one of the greatest ROIs for corporate America. And that is they are spending money on AI, obviously increasing that, increasing money, you know, on direct-to-consumer technologies, what have you.

8:31But the greatest increase on a percentage level across corporate America has been in corporate comms. And that is they recognize that increasingly companies used to, a stock that was in the steel sector or in the weapons sector or in the technology sector would trade within a fairly narrow bound of a multiple in EBITDA. And who traded at the high end usually had better positioning, better brands, and a CEO who's a little bit more charismatic. Now the band of the multiple on EBITDA or earnings is so dramatic. And much of it is about the storytelling capabilities of the CEO. Amazon was essentially a company built on a story.

9:13And that is, if you read Amazon's or Jeff Bezos' 1997 letter to shareholders, you just wanted to go out and buy stock. And you did, which gave them access to such incredibly cheap capital. They could buy more planes, build more warehouses, hire more logistics people, and get you basically anything in the world for free with Amazon Prime within 48 hours. And no one else had the capital to go to war with Amazon, and they just kind of blew everyone out of the water. So your storytelling capabilities here have become incredibly powerful. And so corporate communications departments have been just booming and hiring more people.

9:52It's all about the story. And then when Alexander Karp, is that his name, the CEO of Palantir, does this really innovative thing where he walks around his office doing the earnings call live on Instagram, everyone's like, wow, this company is so innovative. And the company trades at 100 times revenues, which makes absolutely no sense. So and also Elon Musk commands one to three billion dollars in earned media by just being crazy and being on Twitter all the time and has a huge advantage versus General Motors. and no one really cares what Mary Barra says or threads or tweets. So Tesla gets all this incredible free advertising because of, in some ways, storytelling or just having a blowhorn.

10:35So this press release from Disney, it can go wrong, though. And this press release I would describe as being gangbanged by what must have been two dozen crisis management experts who were parsing every word and ended up with a press release that was milquetoast and totally disingenuous. They said after discussions with Jimmy Kimmel, we further understand, you know, we decided to bring him back. They don't give a flying fuck what Jimmy Kimmel thought. I mean, what, they didn't think to do this before they fired him? And then they'd also said that because of some ill-timed and insensitive comments, they decided to bring the show.

11:13Ill-timed and insensitive? We have said, there isn't a, I don't think there is a progressive media personality or even a conservative comedian who hasn't said things much more quote unquote insensitive. And here's the thing. You don't need a First Amendment when people say things slightly insensitive. You need a First Amendment when people say really stupid, provocative, angry shit. There are some limits. You can't incite violence. You can't spread lies about somebody that hurt their economic livelihood. That's defamation. But other than that, a hallmark of a free society is you can pretty much say anything about pretty much anyone at pretty much any time.

11:55And so the infraction here of not even a speeding ticket and then firing him and then pretending that after speaking to him and that these were ill-time comments, they're not, they continue to lie. This is the bottom line. this is about money full stop and that is they recognized someone called and said our site is crashing because so many people are trying to cancel hulu espn and disney plus we are getting calls from our cruise line saying people are canceling we just heard from i don't know zendaya that she doesn't she's her agent is worried that she should pull out of a a movie because of what is going on here?

12:39And they got together and said, oh, it's costing money. Let's backtrack. This is a prime example of how societies continue a downward spiral into fascism. They have a strong man. And this isn't the first time Bob Iger has really fucked up. You know, he's the one who initially started this bullshit by settling with, you know, hold George Stephanopoulos settling with Trump. And when you throw, you know, when you think the alligators around you and if you just cut off a finger and give it to them, be clear, they're going to come back for the arm. And so they started this. They were the first ones.

13:19They could have been the front lines and said no and sent a signal. And just FYI, Jess, I'm going to buy$10 million in equity and then be the beneficial owner of another$10 million in Disney stock, file a 13-D to replace the entire board and fire Bob Iger, who has shown that he is not only a terrible fiduciary for all Americans, has no fidelity to the principles that have made him a billionaire so he could walk around in cashmere sweaters and go to the Oscars, but he should be fired. They fired the wrong guy. This guy, okay, any one of these things, you could say, all right, he made a mistake.

13:59This guy is clearly, this 73-year-old Bob Iger, clearly doesn't understand the atmosphere. Let's ignore the fact that he is a terrible American. Bob Iger, you are a terrible American. You have turned your back on the ideals and the principles that have made you a fucking billionaire and have given you an extraordinary life. But in addition to that, he clearly has lost all ability to read the room and read the culture and understand new technology and new platforms and what it means to be in the business of media. There has never been, I can't think of a CEO in the Fortune 500 that is more ripe to be fired.

14:45There absolutely is someone at Disney right now that should be canceled. And it should be the CEO. And also there should be more scrutiny on the board. A board is there to save the CEO from him or herself to go, this could be really bad for us. and instead they were listening entirely to their, what they thought were their consumers and that is the broadcast station Sinclair and Nextar who distribute Jimmy Kimmel across local TV stations. But this indicates to me that Bob Iger absolutely needs to go. A terrible American, a terrible fiduciary for shareholders and someone whose judgment, that expiration date has clearly passed.

15:32Your thoughts? Well, I mean, you made a pretty clear case there. I wonder if there'll be some scrutiny of Dana Walden as well, who I think is the one that has really the close relationship with Kimmel and was the one who like went and met with him right after the Brendan Carr comments, et cetera. But I'm sure, and I don't know Bob Iger personally, but he's been rumored to have pretty thin skin and seeing Michael Eisner, the ex-CEO of Disney, coming after him and saying, you know, what a capitulation. How could you possibly do something like this? Really stung. I'm curious to get your take on the fact that Sinclair is saying that they are not going to start airing Jimmy Kimmel again.

16:14They're in charge of 31 of the affiliates, right, that would normally air it. When they took Jimmy off air last week, they aired a Charlie Kirk kind of documentary that made him out to be a prophet. The CEO of Sinclair donated a quarter of a million dollars to Turning Point and I believe is waiting on Kimmel's donation, which I imagine is not coming. I could see a world in which Kimmel makes a donation to a cause in Charlie Kirk's memory or something like that. But I assume that he's not going to just say, oh, yeah, you know, you said jump. I say how high. And now I'm going to give, you know, gobs of money to an organization just because you said so versus it's something that I really believe in.

16:58What do you think the future is of the deal that actually set all of this off? Because, you know, Brendan Carr was speaking on Monday at the Concordia summit and tried to backtrack and say, you know, I wasn't, you know, right out of Goodfellas, as Ted Cruz put it. I was just saying that the hard way is when you have to actually lodge an FCC complaint. I mean, everyone sees through it. Donald Trump sees through it, I'm sure, as well and knows exactly what's going on here. But do you do you think the merger will still go through or what are the kind of business implications of Sinclair saying we're not going to be airing Kimmel?

17:31I think the merger will likely go through because the merger is a function of consolidation and cost cutting, which is happening across this industry because, you know, their audience is literally dying. Local TV stations, people tune into local TV stations to see a guy who's in his 60s or 70s that they trust and a hot woman in her 30s in a sleeveless dress to find the weather, basically, you know, to get the weather. And the only reason these things have survived is that two or three out of every 24 months, they quintuple their ad rates and they get a tsunami of political spending because political campaigns are under the impression that old people vote and that old people still watch the local news.

18:14So these things get sold out and they basically lose money 18 to 21 months a year. It's like specialty retail. The dirty secret of special retail is that they lose money for basically 20, 50 weeks, 48 weeks a year. And then from Thanksgiving to Christmas, they just make a ridiculous shit ton of money. The same is true or becoming true with these local news stations. And that is they make a lot of money during the election. However, however, I think Trump has changed that. And that is, and it's the same reason MSNBC and CNN are dying. And that is a 70-year-old white woman, she knows who she's voting for.

18:54She's driving her old, you know, she's driving her, you know, her 2012 Audi A6, which is just fine for her. She doesn't need a car. And she's spending money on health care, some time with her grandkids and saving money. Advertisers hate those people. The politicians used to love them. and since Trump showed that you can win presidency by going on podcasts and ignoring cable news and broadcasts ad supported broadcast you're now seeing and I'm talking my own book here but it doesn't mean it's not true ad rates have gone through the roof and ad spending on podcasts have gone through the roof and I think you're going to see a dramatic transfer of capital from these local news stations to, as always, Google, Meta, but also podcasts, which are growing faster than any ad-supported medium out there.

19:46So what do you have to do when you're in a declining business? They can still be good businesses, but you have to consolidate. So Sinclair and Tegna will merge, and then there will be two CFOs, and whoever plays golf with the new CEO will get to hold his job, and the other will get a decent package and get out of there. But they will basically go in and they will have, you know, if there's 2 ,000 people at corporate at one and 1 ,500 another, 3 ,500, that'll go down to 2 ,400 or 2 ,300. It's what happens to mature industries that are in decline. It's consolidation and cost cutting. So that'll still happen.

20:20The question is, and this goes back to what I find most encouraging about all of this, is, you know, I've been thinking a lot about a national economic strike where consumers, especially wealthy consumers, make a concerted effort to slow their spend or target the slowing of their spend. This was exactly that. It wasn't that Bob Iger or anyone on the Disney board woke up one day and say, you know, I've rethought this decision. I've listened to our customers. I've talked to some people and I realized what we did is wrong. And to step back from the wrong decision or the wrong direction is a step in the right direction.

20:50No, it was none of that. It was, oh, fuck, people are flexing their economic muscles and canceling Disney Plus. So people and also artists could say, if Jerry Seinfeld raised his hand and said, and he may not have the ability here because he's probably sold his rights and I don't want Seinfeld on Sinclair or Tegna stations, you know, or Nexstar or whatever it is, that would scare the shit out of them. They'd be like, okay, maybe we should get out of the business of censorship. So the most exciting thing about this, the most heartening thing about this is that people, consumers are starting to flex their consumer muscles.

21:31And at the end of the day, everything these people do, and this is one of the reasons we love private companies and capitalism, is that they are totally focused on nothing but the value of their shares. Full stop. Full stop. And the unfortunate thing is that I don't think they recognize that they haven't read World War II history. They haven't read, you know, basically how people are perceived. And that is people are actually more hostile towards the cowards than the strong man themselves. And that is, you know, you hate Trump or you love them. That's not changing. The people who are really going to ruin their reputations are the people who are seen as cowards that facilitated this slow burn to fascism.

22:19The people who enabled it, the people who their whole lives pretended to give a flying fuck about America and American values and wrap themselves in the flag when it was convenient. And then when they were tested, they failed. I hope you're right. And we're going to take a quick break so we can talk about this war on Tylenol, but I think that same sentiment will be very valid in discussing all of those Republican senators that put Bobby Kennedy Jr. in one of the most important roles in America and the vast implications for the health and safety of Americans, especially American women. So let's take a quick break.

23:00Stay with us.

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26:03Welcome back. Trump announced Monday that the FDA will alert doctors that acetaminophen used during pregnancy can be associated with a very increased risk of autism, urging women to use Tylenol only when medically necessary, such as for a fever. Experts caution that autism has multiple causes, and the science linking Tylenol to the disorder is far from settled. Acetaminophen remains the safest, over-the-counter option for pain or fever in pregnancy, while alternatives, including ibuprofen or aspirin, can be risky, and untreated fevers can also harm mother and baby. Tylenol maker Kenview said there is no credible evidence linking the drug to autism and urged pregnant women to consult their health care providers before taking any medication.