Book Discussion: The podcast focused on the memoir "Born to be Wired" by John Malone, highlighting his strategic prowess in the media and cable industry.
Investment Strategy: Malone's ability to optimize across tax and strategic value was emphasized, particularly his use of EBITDA as a financial metric over traditional GAAP numbers.
Market Dynamics: The discussion touched on Malone's view of the media landscape, including his criticism of big tech companies and their regulatory advantages.
Company Insights: Liberty Media's holdings, such as Formula 1 and Liberty Global, were analyzed, with a focus on their strategic positioning and future potential.
Regulatory Environment: Malone's libertarian views were contrasted with his support for certain regulations that benefited his business interests, such as those affecting big tech.
Succession and Legacy: The podcast explored Malone's concerns about succession planning and the performance of Liberty's stock under new leadership.
Media Evolution: The shift in media consumption from traditional cable to streaming and digital platforms was discussed, along with Malone's historical and current perspectives.
Key Takeaway: The podcast highlighted Malone's impact on the media industry and the challenges of adapting to a rapidly changing market environment.
Transcript
You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast with your host me, Andrew Walker. Today it is time for my monthly book club with my friend Burnern Hobart from the diff. I have been really looking forward to this one. We read Born to be Wired, the John Malone memoirs that came out earlier this month, September 2025. It was a fascinating read. I've been a longtime follower of Liberty and Malone. And I I just had so many thoughts. I was so excited to hop on the podcast and talk to Burn about that. We really enjoyed it. As always, nothing on this podcast investing advice yada yada. See the full disclaimer at the end, but I think you're really gonna enjoy it, too. It was a really interesting memoir style where, you know, the first half he does all his history and the second half he kind of lays out what Liberty owns right now and his thoughts on it. But I I had a ton of fun talking to Burn about it. I think you're going to enjoy it. Uh I hope you read it. If you haven't, you're still going to enjoy this podcast, but if you haven't, you should probably go buy it if you're into media, cable, investing. I I I think it's awesome. So, we're going to get there in one second, but first, a word from our sponsor. This podcast is sponsored by AlphaSense. Look, AlphaSense has been a longtime sponsor of the podcast. I am a super happy user of the AlphaSense products. Everything ranging from their AI platform for investing, but particularly the expert calls that I use on a daily basis to look at companies and kind of see what industry insiders who are doing more than I'm doing, which is just being a dummy and reading the publicly traded filings and reading trade industry insiders are telling me about how business is actually working on the inside and how they're viewing trends and everything inside it. So super huge fan of the platform. If you're interested, AlphaSense was kind enough. They just sponsored a free webinar with me and a former at Mastercard where we talk about the future of finance. In particular, we're talking about stable coins and their effect on the overall economy, how they could impact remittances, how they could impact particularly payment networks because he's a former Mastercard. I think it's a really fascinating interview. I think you're going to, whether you're a journalist or a specialist who focuses on that, I think you're going to learn a lot listening to it. And if you listen to it, I think you're going to, you know, see why I think expert call networks are kind of the most revolutionary product for investing, for journalists, for specialists, for everything to come along in the past 10 to 15 years. So, if you're interested, I'll include a link in the show notes to go check out that webinar. But, uh, thank you to Officer for sponsoring this podcast. And now, on to the podcast. All right. Hello and welcome to yet another value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, it's our monthly book club. So, I'm excited to have my co-host, Burn Hobart. Burn, how's it going? >> It's going great. >> Going great over here as well. Before we hop into book club disclaimer, remind everyone nothing on this podcast, Investing Advice. Uh, see the full disclaimer at the end. We're going to be talking about I'm so excited to talk about this book today. John Malone, uh, one of the people I studied the most in history. He wrote memoirs, Born to be Wired. We both read it. I'm super excited. I can go a thousand which ways, but I I'll just start with this, Bern. How did you feel about the book? What were you thinking about when you were reading it? >> What was I thinking about? I I one of the things I was thinking was that Malone was a man built for a particular time period in US capital markets and that from the 80s to I would say from the three decades starting 1980 he did amazingly well. He was just perfectly suited for that moment. um in part because he's able to think in so many different dimensions and he's able to optimize across you know tax and optimize for strategic value sometimes and able to assemble these eclectic mixes of assets but then because he's under the US tax code he has to do weird unnatural things to realize the value of some of those investments and um was also very perceptive on media um and there there are pieces of the book where he's just it's just not quite his time. Some of them are some of the more recent things and you know if you look at a chart of pretty much any of the Liberty associated companies over probably um the last 10 years you know you you see some good things you see some bad things you see some difficult times but >> that was a real snatch to the kidneys you just hit me with right >> I know I mean I yeah like I've I've been burned on some of these names myself um I I truly believed in the Liberty Latam thesis for a while and then I realized that everything I was betting on wasn't happening and all the risk factors I was thinking about were in fact happening. But like earlier in his life, before all of this was really a possibility, like before we had the kind of financial markets that really supported his his approach, he was the same guy. And to me, one of the most impressive parts of the book is actually a part where nothing happens because he is asked to do a study of AT&T's financials and of their capitalization things. And this is what 1950s, right? Um >> I think it's the 60s, but it's around there. Yeah, where he says, "Okay, we should be cutting the dividend, levering up, buying back lots of stock." And this is just totally shocking to the AT&T people, but he was just looking at the numbers and he realized that the cheapest uh, you know, cheapest telecom equipment you could buy is the stuff that's already on AT&T's balance sheet and that AT&T is a really good business and is not going anywhere. um you know only threat would be US government and um that that's the way to do things is uh buy back a ton of stock. It's very c very tax efficient and if the stock is cheap that's even better. Um and I think that was just the wrong thing to say at AT&T. Um they I think during the depression they were kind of famous for having a $9 share dividend they just never cut and they're one of the rare companies that was able to just keep paying a steady like there were companies where they stayed profitable but they had to cut the dividend. AT&T was able to keep that dividend going and it was just of toemic importance to their shareholder base and they had lots of retirees who had all their money in bonds and then owned a few shares of AT&T. Um so they they had some kind of moral obligations maybe to their stockholders where those obligations did entail them to do some capital inefficient stuff. And actually, I think um Buffett maybe a maybe a decade earlier than that had actually written or maybe it was around that time had written about AT&T and their dividend being really inefficient because apparently a lot of AT&T investors would sign up for a dividend reinvestment plan. And Buffett was pointing out that you get your $9 a share, the government gets a piece of it, and then you buy some more shares of AT&T and AT&T could just buy those for you and you wouldn't be paying the extra taxes on it. So, um, a lot of really smart, like I said, it was like a it was a great predictor of future success, um, as both an investor and as a member of the value investing pantheon that if you felt like AT&T's dividend was too high and they should find a different way to return capital to shareholders in the 1950s, you were destined for greatness. So, you hit on a lot of the points I I wanted to hit on and I think one of the funny through themes of this book I tweeted out over the weekend, but it's every decade Malone has a runin with AT&T or AT&T does something and every decade AT&T makes the absolutely wrong call with acquisitions. I mean I mean it starts with this when Malone is like literally fresh out of college and says, "Hey, we should do this." And I I remember the chairman pulls him aside and says, "Son, that was a great presentation. There's no chance in heck we're going to do it. If in your life you can get one thing done at AT&T, one thing changed, your career will have been a smashing success. Which, oh, you can just feel an ambitious, smart young person be like, in my whole life I get one thing changed at AT&T. But throughout his entire career, it's AT&T making the wrong moves and getting their pants pulled down. But let me start with one the thing you said at the end. We can come back to AT&T. There's AT&T. You know, you and I, I believe we talked previously about how John Malone kind of was optimized for the environment he grew up in, right? He kind of comes to power in the early 70s. Interest rates are high, taxes are high, and he uh people are obsessed with gap numbers. And he is the one I thought it was Mario Gabell who makes it, but maybe it's him who comes up with IBIDA and says, "Hey, judge us on our cash flow, not our gap numbers." He famously says at a shareholder meeting, somebody asks about gap income, and he says, "If you're here for gap income, you're in the wrong meeting." So he optimizes for cash flow, he optimizes for taxes, and he optimizes for leverage. And all of those benefit because taxes are high, interest rates are high, and industry, you know, uh, cable, it starts out as wires and television, and the industry makes a big tech shift and it ends up being the dominant way to do broadband. I was kind of wondering if he had come along today, taxes are generally low, interest rates are generally low. I don't know if his skill set, you know, cable is completely built out. I don't know if his skill set is optimized now. Maybe maybe he goes and he does AI something and he you know optimizes core weaves capital structure something but how much do you think he's a product of his generation versus the past two decades saying hey if it wasn't for these tailwinds he was riding he doesn't do anything well I think media becomes media is a really interesting business and um I I years ago articulated just my general theory of success in media companies because I was writing about Buzzfeed and I was trying to figure out okay why do they do well and then why did they start doing badly. And the why did they do well is really easy to answer, which is that there were a lot of um newspapers and magazines that were producing content. They were basically just translating the idea, translating the print model to the internet. This is a new way, you know, the ink is cheaper, but the ads make you less money, but maybe you can get people to pay to subscribe to things and you could still show them ads. And um BuzzFeed realized there's just there are these new distribution channels, attention spans are shifting, and that the the article is not the ideal unit of content. It's not the only unit of content anymore. And that essentially every piece of highquality content needs its own little marketing campaign in order to get attention as opposed to we're going to send this bundle. You know, it'll be a magazine. It'll have articles by 20 different people and you know at least there will be at least one article that you're just you skim and it's not that interesting to you and then there will be one that is potentially really really great. Um but BuzzFeed they could do that when they understood the distribution model really well and there was a lot of content out there to um rehash, rewrite, redistribute, etc. And then the New York Times actually had this big internal meeting. They produced a a nice paper on this where they pointed out that there was some article that they had written where BuzzFeed actually got more traffic than the New York Times because BuzzFeed found a way to make the article famous. And so they actually beat the Times. And the Times was like, it's actually a lot harder to write a really deeply reported article on something nobody realizes in news and tell this amazing story that actually shifts people's perceptions. Like that's the hard part. Tweeting a link to it is not the hard part. and making sure that there's an SEO friendly headline so that people who are looking for that article find the Times version ahead of the Buzzfeed version also not super challenging especially because all this stuff is happening in public like BuzzFeed is basically showing you their social media and search strategy every time they post something so you can copy that really easily whereas when the times like you know New York Times it still does these amazing articles they had one um a couple weeks back where they talked about the business of smuggling drugs into the US and they were able to interview guys who drive who get a truck that's loaded with heroin and drive it across the border and they have photos of this guy actually and the guy's face is not show but they have photos showing you here's where they put it in the vehicle and um they did a little ride along and talked about how there's a guard you know every so often and sometimes the guard will say no the cops are here this time just turn around um like all that stuff it's it's going to be really hard for Buzzfeed to get to the point where they can do that um so Times has this content advantage and then they can catch up on distribution. And so there are times when the distribution piece is what matters and there are times when the content piece is what matters. But a lot of media companies, it's a bundle of both. You know, you are if you're buying a newspaper, you're buying um you know, the newsroom and the culture and the journalist superstars and the ones who are maybe not superstars, but they they know their topic well and they have good sources and things. Then you're also buying trucks and you know newsprint and all of this all of this physical stuff. Um and if if things are usually bundled, you actually have this opportunity to periodically strategically unbundle them. And that's like the signature deal in Malone's career is TCI had been cobbling together this portfolio of varying amounts of ownership in varying content platforms and they had um they had a nice set of these things and they were also being valued more on a u more on a multiple appropriate to just a company that owns these pipes and has qu you know regul regulated monopoly economics in monetizing them. and he realized these are actually two different things and um the contents the valuable underpriced part so let's let's separate that out and uh put a price tag on it and then um then merge it back in and like you know you could look at this deal I feel like if you if you came at this and you didn't know who Malone was and you didn't have a ton of respect for him as a capital allocator and things you could look at this you could say this is actually a really shady transaction this guy splits this company up he takes warrants in one piece of it he ends up owning a huge chunk of that and then they merge it back together. >> For those who for those who don't know, Burn is referring to who haven't read the book or haven't read it. Burton is referring to the about 1991 split. Uh TCI has built 20% ownership in basically every cable channel they own. He splits that into Liberty Media through a famously I mean even in the book he paints himself in a very positive light along this deal. Even the book he's like, "Oh, we got a lot of who are like this is the most complicated transaction I've ever done." But he does it through this really complicated rights offering with warrants. He way overs subscribes and he's bragging about how the stock price does great through this. But because you know if Burn and I own 10% of a company, we did this super complicated transaction and we took our ownership from 10 to 40% of the spin-off and then the spin-off worked really well. We could say, "Hey, great spin-off." But we can all say, "Oh, hey, maybe we cost, you know, the other shareholders 30%." Because a spin-off should be like kind of distributing the pie in different ways. But this is what you're referring to. he does this crazy complicated transaction that is kind of how he makes his fortune o overall. >> Uh let me go back to a point you're making. Let me talk about the unbundling to rebundling. Obviously when we're talking the Liberty Media 90 spin that's a kind of unbundling transaction. You know there are few through themes of the book. One of them is hatred of taxes, hatred of regulation. AT&T is getting his pants down. But towards the end I think just kind of building off your bundling to unbundling. >> You can sense his hatred of big tech right? Multiple times he talks about how >> regulations towards big tech or lack thereof are unfair which I think is quite funny. >> Oh that was the funniest chapter was where he you know he he takes off his libertarian hat for just one chapter to say by the way obviously we should be regulating these big tech companies and obviously we need them to be you know paying paying for the bandwidth that they consume and they're just unfairly exploiting us. >> You know the the the spent billionaires are just ruthlessly exploiting the the helpless decad billionaire class. The if you read this Sumalone famously a libertarian if you read this it is actually a laugh because he'll he deculations like all these barriers all this sort of stuff blah blah blah blah blah and he says but John McCain when John M McCain sponsored the uh the alleart cable channel that would have been a great piece of regulation you're like he's against all regulation except for when it's in his favor right so the McCain this is unbundling cable channels in the mid200s he's super for that regulation. Okay. I'm sure real libertarian on on you there. And then with the uh tech companies where it's going to go. But the other place with the tech companies, he hits on regulation. But I think it's really interesting for a you know free markets guy. He just decries, oh these cable companies, we have spent billions and billions of dollars building out this cable infrastructure that connects the uh connects the the world that connects America to the internet. and all these Netflix, Facebook, Google, they kind of all go over the pipes for free and have built these fortunes on it. And I thought it was really interesting. You know, it's akin to the the electricity company decrying, hey, we provide you regulated uh electricity and XYZ fa Facebook over there is going off and building an AI data center that's going to make tens of billions of dollars off of our electricity. I just I thought it was really interesting that, you know, he really was speaking in his own book, but he just really decrieded it throughout the book. >> Yeah. And I I find that kind of stuff endearing. Like it is just it is a very very natural human instinct that you when you look at regulations you don't think about the ones that just don't have any impact on your life and you the ones that are mostly positive for you that just feels like that's the natural order of things like what government wouldn't want to sub support this and then the ones that actually actively inconvenience you you're like what these these people in DC have no idea what they're doing there must be some really highowered lobbyists we're getting them to write these stupid laws at my expense like that's totally natural and I I feel like what that actually like my view is that just morally obligates you to structure your life such that the policies that you support will actually be good for the world and um you you know that it's actually harder to do that than to think honestly about the difference between your own personal interests and how the economy ought to be structured. >> I think you read more memoirs than me. You just said structure your life in a way that the policies you argue for are good for the world. Have you ever read a memoir where someone admits, "Hey, the policies I'm lobbying for would be great for me, but bad for the world." I mean, everyone kind of thinks the policies they're arguing for would make the world a better place. >> Yeah. Yeah. I I guess nobody nobody really comes to mind there. I guess there are a handful of cases where someone does some someone declines to use some kind of opportunity that they could use. like there's um there's this brief mention in the snowball, right, of um how Berkshire um there was this grandfathering in period where you could turn a publicly traded Ccorp into a pass through entity. >> This was in the 80s when Buffett has to decide if he wants to stay CC corp or kind of become a hedge fund manager is I think what you're Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. And if it's a pass through entity, he would have made a lot more money. And he would probably I I suspect he would have sold more Coca-Cola if you know if Berkshire Bergkshire Hathaway LP had most of its capital from pension funds and endowments and foreign nationals and other people who are not going to be facing a tax hit. Like >> I don't I don't think he was super excited to own Coca-Cola at 70 times earnings. But I also think that he felt like you're selling Coca-Cola at like 45 times earnings after taxes because you cost basis was close. I think it had gone up more than 10x that point. So um you know even if you wouldn't be buying it at 70 times earnings maybe you would be reluctant to sell it at 45. So, um it does it does work some of their decision like for for Buffett and um and for Malone it works some of their decisions that they're doing this in the structure of a CC corp and they they don't have some of the tax advantages that a hedge fund might. So, um but that's I think that's the closest you get to someone saying, "Hey, I lobbyed in my own interests and I did it because I could." Like it's just it's a very distasteful thing to admit, even if it is somewhat true. But it's also, maybe this is part of the job of a lobbyist, is not just tell Congress how to write rules that are favorable to cable companies, but actually tell cable CEOs, here's why this rule is actually favorable for the country, like you're in the right here, and you know, we're we're doing something good for the country and we're informing Congress because we're industry experts. We're informing them of how things work. Um, and I guess like in the end, I think the equilibrium you get to is he's got lobbyists, so does Netflix. those lobbyists are going to hash things out. If if if the charter lobbyist is just actively lying about something, the Netflix lobbyist is going to call him on that and that's going to hurt his credibility. So both sides do at least have an incentive to be honest in the information they present and then the dishonesty like the incentive to be less honest is in how they frame the discussion and you know where what they emphasize what they don't emphasize. like to the point on electricity like you could you could hypothetically imagine a world where the um the power utilities are all getting some piece of the upside of the things that they're being um and things that they're using. But what you actually see is that sometimes sometimes the incentive structure works another way like there's this minor detail that gets mentioned early on in the early so this is in the the ' 60s7s period I think where um he's talking about some of the early cable networks and he mentions that one of them was actually subsidized by TV retailers in the nearest big city. >> Um >> oh I don't I don't remember that one. They just sound weird. >> It was like it was a really minor thing. Like he didn't make a big deal about this, but I thought that was interesting because this is a case where the it actually makes sense. The incentives are aligned like more TVs will be sold if there are more households that can get TV. So, of course, the cost of capital to a TV company for investing in cable is lower than the cost of capital for random cable. Speaking of subsidizing, one of the interesting ones I think is he notes I I did not realize this that the cable companies uh pay pay for C span pay the whole thing and that this this is huge for them and obviously it scores them lots of political points and gives them lots of power. I think one of the interesting things later on in the book is he decides YouTube and a lot of the tech companies don't carry C-SPAN and he he really hits them for it and I I thought that was really interesting and I do kind of wonder is YouTube making a tactical mistake not carrying C-SPAN like how much would it really cost them to subsidize C-SPAN versus you know if if as cable goes away and Senator X comes to them and says hey why am I not why is nobody able to watch my speech so anymore then again maybe everybody just watches them on streaming but I I I thought The C-SPAN piece was interesting. >> Yeah, it was. And you can kind of see from that like the cable industry was big enough and consolidated enough by that point that, you know, probably there were some holdouts and some people who didn't really want to put their pro rata share in or you probably had people, you know, the less profitable networks are saying, well, yeah, we should all invest the same portion of our EBIDA. And then the really profitable ones are saying no, let's let's do it on the basis of revenue or of customer count or something something like you know saying we're all going to back this and we're going to do this collectively is different from figuring out exactly what collective means to everybody. Um so so yeah like you and you know C-SPAN it was this sort of form of lobbying for them right where they they always get to say you know to a congressman the reason that your constituents were able to watch that speech is because we made this citizens. Yeah. >> And I'm sure every one of your constituents watched and loved it, sir. I'm sure. >> Of course. >> You mentioned something uh with the collaboration, right? And let me just go off track a little bit here. I think it's really interesting through the book. I mean, Malone talks all the time about how he collaborates with these guys is Rupert Murdoch would be the number one where sometimes they're enemies, sometimes they're friends to collaborate, come up together, get apart. But he talks all the time and he really decries the state of the world now where business leaders kind of aren't collaborating. And I thought it was interesting. The two I would throw out there, well CPAN would be one, but the other two I throw out there is uh Cable Labs where the government passes a rule that says, "Hey, competitors can form R&D labs together." And Cable Labs has been famously very successful. I mean, cable is not in the place where it is today. Today, it faces challenges from fiber home and fix wireless, but you know, it could have ended in the '9s if they hadn't leaped from cable TV to internet. Cable ads would be one. And then the other places every time a deal goes hostile, he says, "Hey, I don't get why, you know, why did AT&T buy this instead of for a huge premium instead of going to Comcast and saying, "Hey, we'll take the networks that make sense for you. You take the networks that make sense for you and let's not pay a huge premium and get into a big fight about it." So, those were the two I just I thought it was interesting how he really decries. He says the partnerships really work for him and he decries how the world doesn't seem to work that way anymore. >> Yeah. Yeah. And there was there was a really interesting bit where he talks about there was a cable system that he knew about. I think they had borrowed a bunch of money from life insurance companies and other lenders and it wasn't making any money and he says okay we'll run it for you and you know we'll we'll do that for free and you'll owe us a favor. Um I I was very I I would love to know what the actual discussion was like internally at TCI when they decided to do that because that that sounds pretty crazy to me. my my eyes got very wide and I was wondering if it was like let's say you had 100,000 subs and I had 100,000 subs. I could imagine saying, "Burn, I'll run your 100,000 subs for free if I can get like programming pricing power, right? You go to ESPN, you go see for 200 instead of 100, you can I wonder if they the real thesis there was we'll run it for free, but we get their programming pricing power, you know, we go to we can buy more modems at that cost. I wonder if they were seeing scale across the business." Uh, I don't know because I remember that story very well and I was like, they did it for no management contract, no nothing. Like that's really relying on the kindness of strangers in the long run. >> Yeah. Yeah. Like you you just don't hear stories of, you know, the local Burger King was short staffed one morning and so the nearest McDonald's sent some people over to flip burgers for them. >> Um you know, even though that would be a nice gesture. It's uh yeah, totally out of the ordinary. Um, and it did seem like there was there was probably some quid proquo, like there's probably no explicit contract, but also an understanding that, hey, if this works out, we're going to be buying it from you at, you know, four times Ebida DA instead of six times Ebida DA or something. And that in the meantime, it's not going to default and you'd get in a lot of trouble with your regulators if you're making these crazy loans to overbuilt cable companies and they're all going bad. So, like, you can definitely see a case where value could be exchanged there. Um, yeah, I do think the the scale piece probably makes sense and it could have been something as prosaic as they thought they were going to close another acquisition, they'd already hired a good manager for it. That acquisition falls through, they've got this guy who's brilliant and just itching to do something and they realize that, hey, maybe maybe this is actually an opportunity for free training. Like the best way to learn to run a cable system is to run one. And this one isn't ours, so it's not the end of the world if it doesn't go well. cuz like that that in that sense it's a really asymmetric bet because if the system's already failing, if it's already losing money and they're just wondering when they will write down the loans, if they just end up writing down the loans, everyone can say, "Well, that that's a really tough situation. It's a hard business and uh it's too bad things went the way they did." But if there's a turnaround, then you get some credit for that. >> And it's Malone, so he says we did it for free. I mean, they could have gotten warrants on top of it and he said for free with an upside kicker. They could I'm not sure. Uh, one thing I I I wanted to come back to, you mentioned BuzzFeed earlier. I think the the main thing I I took away from this book, and I can't I hate to keep saying the main thing, but honestly, the main thing I take away was how frequently you will see bidding wars. I mean, flatout bidding wars, and this happens a lot during the bubble, but it happens a lot throughout the book. You will see flatout bidding wars for properties that not even decades later, years later, sometimes months later are just writeoffs. And I know this happens in business obviously, but I it's just shocking going back and looking. I mean, you are talking the titans of in industry. Summer Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, uh Ted Turner, all of them. And I mean, you're just talking these multi-billion dollar blenders and they're competing with each other. You know, they're in these huge bidding wars. I I think that was the really interesting thing to me just as I'm thinking with my investor hat on. And I just want to I I want to put that thought out there and ask you like do you think it's endemic to it could be endemic to media. It could be endemic to media is shifting and it's shifting at a much more accelerated clip as kind of the years go on. Is it unique to that? Maybe I'm under base rating how many of these huge acquisitions are right off. What did you kind of think about just that tendency for write offs and stuff? >> So like it it's this weirdly scaled up version of the fact that media is often distributed in a bundle. And I think there there two two big drivers of the bidding wars on the infrastructure and and distribution side. You will sometimes have companies where they're just really paranoid that they're going to lose access to their customers and they absolutely need to have some position. like it wasn't a bidding war for assets, but it was a bidding war for talent and for equipment when everyone every channel apparently and every network decided they need to have their own standalone streaming service um after Disney Plus launched and they all felt like we're just we'll be subscale and our core business is dying. You know, the cords that are getting cut are not the cords that bring in most of the video content for most households. It's the cords that bring in our video content. So, we just, you know, we have to do Paramount Plus and we have to do, you know, Discovery, the Discovery Stream thing or whatever it was. And some of those will work. It seems like HBO Max is kind of, you know, it it it makes sense as a business. Um, obviously Disney Plus makes sense as a business, but then as you move more subscale, I think the realization a lot of these companies have had to have and they're still getting there is like, no, you're actually just a content company. You did miss the boat in distribution. On the other hand, the content is good. Now, content based bidding wars, I think that is just a simpler thing where someone likes the idea of owning a particular show, owning some particular IP, like they've always dreamed of it. As the lifespan of IP gets longer, you have a lot more people where they grew up reading Marvel books and or reading Marvel comics and watching Spider-Man cartoons and knowing that they can actually buy Spider-Man and be the owner of Spider-Man is just pretty cool. And, you know, it it allows them to to be the the person their six-year-old self always hoped they would be. So, um you probably get some of that, too. And um you see that sometimes when just very rich people take over very established magazines and they tend to know what they're getting into. Like you don't buy the New Republic thinking that this is how you make your money. You buy the New Republic thinking that it's sure nice to have money and this is something good you can spend it on. So um that tends to that tends to inflate some of those prices. But I think there's also like people will just believe that this content that they personally love is actually universally beloved and could do better. And so I think that encourages them to to overpay at times. >> So I agree with all that. I mean, especially with movie studios, the most famous overpurchase is somebody gets really rich and buys a movie studio because they want to go hobnob with celebrities, right? Like like absolutely the most famous famous overpay happens all the time. And if you're a billionaire, that's what you do. If you're 100 millionaire, you finance a movie and you get robbed that way. Like this is just classic. >> There's one example I know of where this was actually a good strategic move. And sometimes like the strategic move is you you buy it from someone else who made a bad strategic move. But sometimes so the one case that I like there's this book Metalman which is a biography of Mark Rich. It's it it really emphasizes the partying and the metals traders in the 70s were uh pretty energetic parters. Um but it does mention that he was the part owner of Fox in the 70s. Um, and that what he would do is if he's negotiating some oil deal with, you know, the head of state of um, uh, of a Middle Eastern country, he can tell them, "Hey, do you want to go to the Fox studio, bring your kids, your son can meet C3PO and, you know, can see Yoda?" And, um, the the other oil trading companies, you know, they could offer really lavish dinners and lots of fun entertainment, but that was something they could not actually offer. So, something. It's something I've argued with sports teams for a while. A, historically, it won't work forever, but historically, sports teams have been an incredible investment because they are trophy assets. There are 30 of them and as media rights have exploded and everything, they they've claimed more. But even if you ignored the investment side, if you were a billionaire and like Steve Cohen, I he is having the most fun of his life run owning the Mets, right? Probably not today because the Mets got eliminated from the playoffs yesterday. But all these billionaires, they go by it and before you were a no-name billionaire and yes, you could do anything you wanted, but now you are the everyone in that city knows your name. You are politically important. Like you can do anything. All these doors that were weren't open to you before open up. So very similar to owning a movie studio. you know, movie studio in the 80s, owning the local newspaper today, owning the there are very few businesses that you can own that kind of make you a mini celebrity on their own. So, I I I completely believe that, hey, having that part ownership of the similar to have having a 1% ownership of the Clippers probably doesn't do you a lot, but if you can go to close deals and say, hey, I'm a VC, let me invest in you, and by the way, I'm going to take you court side to the Clippers game. Probably close a few more deals. Let me go to we we we kind of start you know you can feel his distaste for two things paying taxes and having succession issues right uh his kind of mentor and partner at TCI Bob Magnus dies and doesn't have a will settled and you can feel it just ripping Malone apart as this estate now he almost loses control of TCI because it but you can feel it ripping him apart. Uh, Summer Redstone has a huge drama over his legacy with Viacom and CBS and you can feel it ripping apart. So, I want to ask you about that, but then I also want to ask you, we talked about how the last 10 years have not been kind to Malone. You know, it is really interesting to look at the last 10 years as Malone has largely stepped aside, kind of become more of a chairman. He's taken on chairman and emer and liberty has dramatically underperformed over the last 10 years. So, I kind of want to think about those two uh together, right? Like he hates the succession issues. He obviously hates paying taxes, but then he's kind of handing all these things over and stock price, bro. All these things are dramatically underperforming. I have one more thing to say about that, but I I just want to toss that over to you because that was one of the things really I was thinking about as I read. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that was something like part of part when I was reading this, I just I felt nostalgic because there were a bunch of characters who I remember being these active live players, you know, cutting deals like, you know, he he gets Bill Gates to partly bail out the cable industry and he's dealing with all these larger than life figures and like a lot of them are retired or dead now. >> It's the titans of our youth, right? It's the titans of our youth, the guys who are 50s and 60s when you and I are just starting to read open up the Wall Street Journal and maybe only read the front page, >> right? So, it it does feel like maybe there was just a pretty special generation of media titans and maybe part of the reason for that was just that there were enough structural changes in media that there were just lots of ways you could make your fortune. like um there used to be lots of two paper towns and um this was part of Buffett's thesis for buying Buffalo News was those two paper towns are all going away and lots of things tied into that. Um, and if you go back and look at um, there's there's some data set on where newspapers got their revenue. And it turns out that classifides really started being a big deal in the 80s. And like I had always when people described the newspaper business, you know, in the early 2000s and why it's struggling, it was always they were heavily dependent on classifides because they're this regional monopoly. If you need to sell your used car, that's the only place to do it. And then Craigslist shows up, they're charging less, they get a larger audience, and that goes away. So I had kind of assumed that classifides were just always a core part of the newspaper business. But it turns out it was kind of a new newish thing and that it was a growth business for them. But if you were someone like a Murdoch or a Buffett where you start identifying newspapers, you understand these secular trends and you can just buy, you know, just makes it sound really easy. If you have the opportunity to buy what you think will be the surviving paper or buy a paper that you can make the surviving paper in a town that has room for 1.5 newspapers, you being being a company that has u is the supplier for um a market that needs 150% of what that company could get. You can mint money. being one of two companies where you're trying to each go after viability, but there's actually not enough business for both of you and where you're, you know, the classified ads could go to this paper or the other paper. They both have similar circulation. Um, so the market clearing price is going to be just what is the lowest amount that the most desperate paper accepts. So like that gave them a lot of opportunities to make a ton of money and to do it owning some core business where at the time 80s 90s it has pretty predictable cash flows and then you can do some fancier stuff later on. Um yeah like a lot of these guys they they did that and they were able to take just a media ecosystem where there was already such thing as a TV show. already knew how to do news and how to script um you know sitcoms and how to do cop shows and things like if if that's all known quantities and you could take that and scale it up being the person who figures out that there are a lot of ways to scale this and like if we keep adding cable channels maybe there will be a cable channel that's just all cop shows all the time maybe someone will be crazy enough to do literally 24-hour news um you know maybe there's room for cooking channels that are just all cooking all the time like if you knew that you saw that coming. You could position yourself really well for that. Like you're always betting on there's more demand for more shows and once there's a concept that concept will be synonymous if it work. You know, if the if the network works, that network's name is synonymous with the genre that it owns. Like lots of ways to own really good businesses and to to back them when they're young and a little bit risky and cheap. To your point, I think on your point on Titans, I think one of the things is the 80s was a unique time where you go from three cable channels basically to 500, right? He talks about five the cable plan for 500. Now 500 is still limited and there are economies of scale to owning cable channels just like owning cable companies. A lot of the media titles we think of, it's because they owned, you know, 20 of the 500 channels. And today, because we're living in the world of infinite, right? Doesn't matter who owns the channel, right? Yes, maybe people can say who the CEO of Netflix is, but people know the CEO of Disney, but you know, the these things don't matter as much. It's Joe Rogan who matters, but the the media fra landscape has just fragmented so much. I I think the age of the yestery year media titan is dead. But speaking of the media titan, uh, you know, we've talked about Malone's recent history. The thing as a longtime Malone watcher, the thing that I thought was really interesting is Greg Mafay, who is Malone's who is the CEO at Liberty Media for basically 20 years, is not in this book a lot. And when he is in this book, he is not mentioned very positively, right? In the 2005 2006 range, he uh he's mentioned for starting the war with Barry Diller, right? Malone basically blames MFY in 2012ish. MFY is the one who turns down the investment in Netflix according to John Malone. So those are two mentions and those are his two biggest mentions I would say. So he's not in this book positively. And as a longtime Malone watcher, I just wanted to ask just ask you about that. I thought that was very interesting. >> Yeah. Like I guess everyone's idea of who is in the Malone cohort kind of depends on just when did they first hear about Malone and what did he own at that time? Because like you could you could choose a different time frame and Diller and Malone are part of the same group of people, right? Um or at least they they collaborated more early on. >> They But I mean Mafay is the CEO of Liberty. Malone's the chairman. Maf is the city for 20 years and he's like I mean he is a bit character in this book who kind of gets gets pooped on. >> Yeah. Yeah, he does. And that is that is kind of weird like you you would think if you were actually bad at the job and Malone were good at the job of being chairman that he would have just fired him at some point you know very early like he's he's probably had a lot of stock options vest over that 20-year period and um so yeah that that was a little bit tacky like I would also think that if you have a model where you are just totally mentally flexible in terms of how you set up your financial relationship with someone like you can own equity you can lend them you can buy their business and then spin it out. Like it seems like that's the kind of thing you would design if you were worried about succession problems and just wanted a lot of CEOs who you spent a lot of time with, none of whom you bet the business on such that at the end you could say, you know, you've done such a good job with the serious piece or you've done so well with Formula 1, I think it makes sense for you to run the entire organization after I fully step down. Like you'd think that that works, but maybe what that actually means is that his incentive is to have quasi successors who are actually more media operators and that he's the dealmaker. And I feel like, you know, even even today, if I were in the Liberty Complex somewhere and I had some clever idea for a merger and I pitch it to Mr. Dr. Malone and he says, "No, that's not going to work. Here's why." I would just I would I would generally assume that he knows what he's talking about and that if he doesn't like some merger or restructuring or spin-off that he's probably right and I should figure out why he's right. So, he is probably the guy who he is still the guy who signs off on that kind of thing. And I think that that means that it's hard for him to have a successor for the thing he does. And this, you know, not an uncommon problem with companies and succession. Like Apple probably could not have handled being run by a Steve Jobs-like character after Steve Jobs left. They needed someone who was just really good about supply chains and really diligent and um you know, knew how to keep a lot of balls in the air and was maybe less perfectionist on the product. um you know as as the company gets bigger it's better for the product to be pretty appealing to a large number of people than to be just mind-blowing for a small set of customers and similar with um with Microsoft where you at the beginning they were just a lot more technically constrained and having someone who could just mentally like envision all the registers of the chip and say no this spell check product is not going to work in this version of word we've got to wait at least 2 years for Intel to ship a better chip but at that point it'll be great like that. That's the person you need early, you know, in the in the 70s, in the 80s. And then maybe by the 2000s, you actually need someone who is more of a dealmaker, someone who can hang out with lots of CIOS and make them feel really really good about how much money they're spending on Microsoft. And then then it toggles back and like actually Balmer I think he's he's underrated in many many ways. Um he is actually an incredibly smart guy. Has now made more money than Gates. So we know he's good at business, too. Balmer. I do not doubt he's an incredibly smart guy. This is way off track. I don't doubt he's an incredibly smart guy, but I would just point like everything he does, he does with a lot of enthusiasm. I I think but I Microsoft under him, I I I don't love the whitewashing of it because it was a disaster. I mean, the Nokia deal, every deal they did was a disaster. The company was not in great shape. They missed multiple things. I I think and then you look at his post career, the Los Angeles Clippers, I think he did a great job building it into its own. I haven't been, but I hear rave reviews, but you look at the Clippers like I haven't seen the championship. The team that just won the championship, the Oklahoma City Thunder, was built largely on the basis of robbing the Clippers in a trade. Like I I I think he's very enthusiastic. He's one good thing he did was he hopped onto Microsoft and he just never sold or gave away the stock, you know? But I I'm not he's crazy smart. I just I don't know if he's like genius business. I I think there was like one of the first things that Satia was able to accomplish, which he's also a really sharp guy, but one of the first things he was able to accomplish was just getting people to take a second look at Microsoft. And a lot of the stuff that has played out really well under his tenure was stuff that was started under the Balmer tenure. And you know, definitely there they did some really bad deals. But it's it's sort of like um some of the media deals we've talked about where when you're worried about getting disrupted like if you are worried that everyone's going to spend all of their time looking at a device that is this big instead of a monitor that is you know takes up a desktop like you get scared and it it makes it sense like you want to be really aggressive and just like own your piece of that future and sometimes you'll get it wrong. >> Both Google and Facebook I believe have said hey AI is existential to us. we will spend whatever it takes to make sure that it does not end us. And you know, we investors get really excited about the AI and everything. I don't think they care about ROI. They care about survival and making sure that they they do not miss the shift. I think that's really interesting. Let me uh >> the end of the book again, I really enjoyed this book. I did skip a little bit of I don't like reading the childhood years. And there was a chapter reminded me of Larry Ellison having multiple chapters on sailing. There was a chapter on horses. That was a fast skip for me. But I I did not uh did not deeply read about the the equestrian piece. >> But I think this book is really interesting structure because the first half you basically get the story of his career, the deals and stuff obviously with a very rosecolored view. And then the second half he basically says here's Liberty and my major holdings here. Here's where they are at this point in time. And he kind of gives you their outlook. So I just want to ask you, you know, he does a little piece on Formula 1. He does a piece on Liberty Global. He does a piece on Charter. He does a piece on Sirius. I might be for forgetting one or two other when you read these. I I'll just I'll put you on the spot in as when you read them. What was the one you were most bullish on when you were reading it? >> I mean, honestly, the the lazy answer is that Formula 1 is this amazing franchise. And I think that's true. Like people like seeing cars go around a track really, really fast. You have, you know, there there are not that many brand names in that space. the economics do get really interesting when it's also an advertisement for the car companies. So like there just a lot of things to really like about that business and it feels it has the feel of one of those Disneyesque platforms where you can make a lot of documentaries and you can really burnish the celebrity of some of these drivers. So um I did like that. Like it did feel like, okay, we have this this section where we're actually going to have a little impromptu Liberty Investor Day and just to run through run through all of her holdings. >> Can I what did you like? >> Well, I I I will come back to that, but I I want to Formula 1 I also think the way he talks about the Formula One deal, it was the only place in the book where Greg Greg Mafay comes off positive, but he says, look, Formula 1 is up for sale. It's a very complicated deal, right? If I remember correctly, CBC owns 60%. the Formula 1's old who there's lots of rumors of tax dodging eventually gets caught for it owns 30 there's and he has he says Liberty Global with Mike Freeze is working on a bid Liberty Media with Greg Mafay is working on a bid and I think one other piece of his empire is working on a bid I can't remember if they're but he has them all working in parallel and then he says hey Greg Mfay is the one who comes up and says you know he's really he knows his audience right he pitches hey John let's do a tracker with a rights offering to get these guys out of it taxfree and that's structure that ends up winning but I did think it was interesting just hearing him say he had different pieces of his empire kind of competing with each other. How did you think about that deal structure there? I think that's just like part of it is the nature of scale and part of it is that it's it's the nature of the bundle that if you own the distribution it really helps to have some key piece of content that means that people have to use your distribution channel gives you some leverage there and also just gives you some understanding of what do your counterparties think about what do they care about how's their business evolving and then it also makes sense that if you have this media thing this like content holding company that is also a financial engineering company and it has lots of different pockets to shift things around in and you can lend money across these different sub entities and you know take out margin loans on this tracking stock and not this other one. Um it's just a a more fun thing to play around with. So it did feel to me like it it made a lot of sense for Liberty Media to be there, but it it wasn't crazy for Liberty Global to at least be taking a look. And then I guess it's not incredibly hard if you're on the phone with both of these CEOs multiple times a day. It's just not super hard to tell them like please don't lob in a really high allcash bid with no conditions, you know, no financing conditions because that makes it harder for us to do this more complicated bid. Uh to to your question, to my question, I I think the piece it's hard not to walk away from it. I mean, the one you're least bullish on, he's clearly bearish on SiriusXM. He's like, "Oh man, we hit a home run, but the future does not look good over there." It has to be formula one, right? Like if you're just talking ignore valuation, just investing. He clearly, it's where all the pucks are going, right? He's talking about, hey, drive to survive success. They've got so much they're really starting to Formula One would have to be the answer. And it's you and I are taping this September 29th. EA announced the deal is get bought out by about $50 billion by Saudis, Silverlake, all these sort of stuff. Formula 1 would be such EA makes the Formula 1 video game. I believe Formula 1 would be such a fit for any Saudi wealth fund that you know to what we said about media companies earlier. They want to own they want to own it. They want to take all their friends. They want to say, "Hey, I own this. Let's go sit in the owner's box." I I think that's the long-term formula and it's where all the piece are going. Now, if you said, "Hey, risk adjustice for me alpha." I the thing I as a stock investor who's followed Liberty for a long time really thought was interesting was he speaks very highly of David Zazzloff. I think I would stock price you bro right I I pull up the Discovery stock price and say I don't think any of that sound very good. >> Uh but the one I thought was really interesting was Mike Freeze who runs Liberty Global. Liberty Global for those who don't know has been where value hedge fund guys have gone to die for the past 10 years. The stock price if I remember correctly is basically flat over the 10 years. I know it's fly over the past five, but he says, "Look, Mike's done a great job." And he points to a recent spin-off and he says, "Liberty Global trades really cheap." Uh, Mike's going to buy my class features when I I die, and Mike is 100% driven to unlocking all this value. Liberty Global is this huge corporate structure of lots of different cable assets in Europe. And some investment funds will he's like, "Mike is going to buy back a ton of shares. He's going to split it all up. He's going to create a ton of value." I I I was just interesting. This was a man putting in his memoir. I was kind of interested by that. Yeah. Yeah. And I I wonder what the incentives are there because on the one hand, this is your legacy. On the other hand, you're not going to be around to see it. So, who knows? Maybe maybe he just wants a really good capital gains basis step up when when he does finally depart. >> Look, I as I read this book and then I read went and read uh Mike Freeze, he was at I think it was a BFA conference two months ago and he comes and he's spiking the football. He says, "Look, we said we're spinning off some." This is the transaction. Uh John talks about in the book said, "We traded five and a half. We spun off Sunrise. Sunrise trades for ADX. Our stock's up 25% over the past 12 months. And I will tell you this, I'm not satisfied. This is not the end. More spin-offs, more deals are coming." He's just like pounding it. I read the book and then read that. I was like, >> it's pretty interesting from an event angle. Uh I I just I do agree with that. Like it's I guess for me, you know, one of the issues is just I I have to do a refresh on how cable works in all these different markets. It's like in some ways the business is the same business, in other ways, you know, every country is going to regulate media a little bit differently. So like maybe that's a fun homework project for me is to figure out is this uh is is it finally Liberty Media's moment do that and they they own 50% of some markets consolidate non-conolidate as you know from the lilac years. That's you know one other thing on that and then I have two other two follow I thought one interesting thing was the early 90s if you took the years away a lot of the stuff he says in the early 90s could apply in the mid2000s or it could apply today right there's lots of talk about convergence plays in the early 90s there's lots of talk about internet supplanting things like I I just thought it was interesting how a lot of these issues are kind of timeless I'll pause there >> yeah like I think the you know if you if you paint with really broad brush strokes you can that the the amount of bits we produce and then our ability to send those bits to the right eyeballs just keeps on rising and sometimes it's sometimes the distribution is doing a little bit better sometimes it's the total volume of content sometimes it's the quality of content and these all follow their own weird cycles like sometimes people you know I think show some of the dramas of the early 2000s like the Sopranos um and then or you know West Wing or something like they they showed people that TV can actually be good and it can be an art form and then you take you have some lag time there and people start thinking of okay what what is my version of the Sopranos and then you get something like Madmen and um like that that is I guess it's harder to bet on that other than just betting on whichever studio gives creators the most leeway when you feel like there is just room to do a better job with some genre or subg genre or kind of content. Um but you do yeah you just you have these big swings in the business and um but the the broad the broad theme is there's more media we need higher bandwidth we need more ways to sort it and to the extent that the story is kind of fading and dying out it is because he didn't Malone did not really bet on feeds and most people did not bet on feeds like news feeds as a default way to consume things. he has this indirect bet on video um streaming video just by owning some of the infrastructure but clearly the economic arrangements are not to his satisfaction in terms of how you divvy up Netflix's piece of the upside versus charters. So, um, yeah, he missed a big transition, but it's also a transition that you wouldn't necessarily expect someone to to to make in the same way that I'm sure a lot of the people who were running the smaller newspaper in a two newspaper town, like they knew they had challenges. They they didn't realize how things would go, how things would evolve, and that they would make a ton of money if they merged their business with the larger competitor and got a piece of the upside from from the new monopoly. Um and similarly like the cable channel operators like they the networks they were giving Malone equity stakes and I think if they had known just how valuable it would be and how how things would shake out and that there would be some channels where everybody has to pay to uh everybody has to pay for a bundle that has that channel and so it's just a tax on everyone because some people absolutely insist on you know >> I I do think that is a chicken or I think that is a chicken or the egg problem right because TCI had 20% of the market and remember if you weren't on TCI I you could not get into those markets that they had, right? So I do think it was a chicken and egg problem where they took 20% of your equity, but he was saying, "Hey, you give us 20%, we launch a TCI instantly. You've got basically nationwide scale." So maybe they could have negotiated harder, but I think a lot of these channels like there was competition. CNN, right? There was another news network that was launching at the time. He went with CNN because he liked Ted, but if CNN hadn't given him the equity, he would have gone with someone else. Let me um I quickly want to end oh speaking of CNN, I want to end with one thought in AT&T, but I do want to talk about CNN. I think it's really interesting multiple times and I've seen him alone to cry this over the year. He decries the state of CNN, right? He basically says, "Hey, this is a left-leaning uh media company that I want them to go back to straight just down the just down the pipes, just the facts, ma'am." And he lays out a vision for it, right? And I thought that was really interesting. He says, "And I know America would love it." Right? He ends with that and he says, "Walter Kronhite." I thought that was really interesting in the market to me has spoken, right? Like, yes, I'm sure everybody says, "I would like to watch non-biased news, but their preferences are revealed, right? Everybody watches non everybody watches biased news." I I was just really interesting that Malone was a crying. He really wants this nonbiased news. And >> I think that I I think it's ignoring the realities of the market. Like, you know, USA Today is is not really making it. the AP is struggling. People want to hear where the money is is where the eyeballs is. It's Twitter. It's the engagement. It's the rage bait. It's an unfortunate fact in my opinion. I'm sure in Malone's opinion, but that's just the fact. I was kind of surprised he had his head in this hand about that. >> Yeah. Like I think what happens with unbiased news is that everyone's idea of what that is is different. And that if you if you try to do it, what you actually have is all of your Republican viewers will be like, "I can't believe you said these horrible things about Trump." And then all of your Democratic viewers will be like, "I can't believe you failed to say this horrible thing about Trump that I was thinking." >> I did. Everybody complains about football announcers, right? I remember when I was growing up, all my friends, because they're all LSU friends, they'd be like, "Oh, CBS famously biased against LSU." So, I just took it as for granted CBS was biased against LSU. And then I grew up and I realized, no, every football team thinks that about whoever covers them because they're used to hearing the local guys who rave about them or only talk about them. And when they hear a national guy who's unbiased, they think that he's biased against them. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like I think you know you I think a more more direct and honest way to say it would be for Malone to say I'm a libertarian, tend to be conservative on a lot of issues. I like this country a lot and don't like people trashtalking it even though there are things to improve, etc., etc. And you know, there are a lot of guys like me. We have a lot of spending power. Maybe not as much as me, but a lot. And um maybe maybe there's more competition on left-leaning news than right-leaning news. And so just as a pure business decision, centerright CNN could make sense. Like there's there's definitely room just in the sense of there are a lot of people who are to the right of center but to the left of Fox and Newsmax or who just want things to be a little bit more straightforward and a little bit more honest. And like if Trump does something genuinely stupid, they don't want to hear about it for the first time from someone who watches a broader news source or someone who reads the New York Times. They want to actually know what's going on. Like that that audience does exist, but I think it's it's just media people. Some of them have incredible taste in just what the average American's taste will be. But that's a really hard thing to have. And the more that you are also a media theorist and you think economically and you are um aware of the details of really complex issues and incidentally one thing we didn't talk about that much but I that I liked in the book is that sometimes he gets pretty technical like he actually cares about things like here's how the hardware works for a set top box or here's how much you can >> well he's an electrical engineer by training right so like >> like yeah and you know I wouldn't think that you need that stuff to run a cable company but what it does what it does help with is he would know he would have a better sense of what's physically possible and if he sees some trend he would have a sense of does it is there some technical limitation that means we only ever have 30 channels therefore act accordingly or do we have effectively infinite channels like he knew that a little bit before maybe some of his peers did and it helped but anyway he he people who run these media companies just have a very distorted view of what does the average person want from the media um and people watch enough TV you you can't watch an average amount of TV and also run a media media company like you can't spend 4 to 6 hours watching network TV, cable news and um online clips and have enough time to actually run a company that does any of those things. So they they will always be somewhat guessing about what the taste of the average consumer is. But they are also human beings who will sometimes turn on the TV and they just cannot believe how dumb these people are being. It's just he has been involved because he ran TCI and he was involved with Charter for so long. He's been involved in the negotiations with these cable channels, right? And I'm just surprised like so he knows hey Fox News which has the largest cult following commands way more than there than a CNN because a yes there is no other right channel but b because their audience is so passionate because they're delivering strong opinion. So for him to just say hey CNN needs to lose the like you're basically saying give up your business because this is what I want. Uh Bern I had so much more to talk to you about. I had AT&T margin calls but we're at the hour mark. I I mean I really enjoyed this book. I I can't recommend it highly enough. I know that our listeners are going to be invested in stuff, but it's a really fun read. Pretty quick, too. I really enjoyed it. Skip the part about horses, but I loved it. Vern, what do you think we're going to read next next month? You got any ideas? >> What are we going to read next month? Let's see. So, we we kind of pingpong between profiles of people and more broad general interest stuff, but we've done two profiles. So yeah, we maybe um I don't know. We should find some semiclass. >> You know, this is a great segue. If you're a listener and you've gotten this far, it's been almost 75 minutes now. If you got an idea, shoot us a book. We might end up reading next month. Uh but Bren, this has been awesome. I'll hang on. We can finish our chat after this, but this has been so much fun and looking forward to Halloween book club next month. >> All right. Yeah, let's read something scary. Let's read When When Genius Failed or something like that or >> That's not a bad idea. We we could we should do something on the the uh 1929 crash or on 1987. I don't know if there's a good book on 87, but 29 has some some >> These are all these are all great ideas. I really like something a little spooky. A few years ago, I did the great fraud books of like uh when Genius Failed and then the uh now I'm forgetting the Bernie madeup one, the the one with the Singaporean fund that came and it was really fun. But I will tell you, I'd wake up I'd wake up in cold sweats at night and be like, I'm not running a fraud right now, am I? Like, it's really scary when you read these thing and the pressure these people are under. I'm not trying to sympathize with the fraudsters, but I I read them and I'd be I'd be waking up in sweat just thinking about pressure. >> Yeah. like some of the there there was that guy who kept um he he got caught because he had these backto-back meetings where one was with a law firm and then he gets the guy's business card and then he goes to the next meeting and introduces himself as that guy and hands the business card. Like I would not be able to do that. Just the boldness the it's just incredible. All right, we're way out. This is great. What time buddy? >> A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.
Born to be wired (September 2025 Book Club)
Summary
Transcript
You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast with your host me, Andrew Walker. Today it is time for my monthly book club with my friend Burnern Hobart from the diff. I have been really looking forward to this one. We read Born to be Wired, the John Malone memoirs that came out earlier this month, September 2025. It was a fascinating read. I've been a longtime follower of Liberty and Malone. And I I just had so many thoughts. I was so excited to hop on the podcast and talk to Burn about that. We really enjoyed it. As always, nothing on this podcast investing advice yada yada. See the full disclaimer at the end, but I think you're really gonna enjoy it, too. It was a really interesting memoir style where, you know, the first half he does all his history and the second half he kind of lays out what Liberty owns right now and his thoughts on it. But I I had a ton of fun talking to Burn about it. I think you're going to enjoy it. Uh I hope you read it. If you haven't, you're still going to enjoy this podcast, but if you haven't, you should probably go buy it if you're into media, cable, investing. I I I think it's awesome. So, we're going to get there in one second, but first, a word from our sponsor. This podcast is sponsored by AlphaSense. Look, AlphaSense has been a longtime sponsor of the podcast. I am a super happy user of the AlphaSense products. Everything ranging from their AI platform for investing, but particularly the expert calls that I use on a daily basis to look at companies and kind of see what industry insiders who are doing more than I'm doing, which is just being a dummy and reading the publicly traded filings and reading trade industry insiders are telling me about how business is actually working on the inside and how they're viewing trends and everything inside it. So super huge fan of the platform. If you're interested, AlphaSense was kind enough. They just sponsored a free webinar with me and a former at Mastercard where we talk about the future of finance. In particular, we're talking about stable coins and their effect on the overall economy, how they could impact remittances, how they could impact particularly payment networks because he's a former Mastercard. I think it's a really fascinating interview. I think you're going to, whether you're a journalist or a specialist who focuses on that, I think you're going to learn a lot listening to it. And if you listen to it, I think you're going to, you know, see why I think expert call networks are kind of the most revolutionary product for investing, for journalists, for specialists, for everything to come along in the past 10 to 15 years. So, if you're interested, I'll include a link in the show notes to go check out that webinar. But, uh, thank you to Officer for sponsoring this podcast. And now, on to the podcast. All right. Hello and welcome to yet another value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, it's our monthly book club. So, I'm excited to have my co-host, Burn Hobart. Burn, how's it going? >> It's going great. >> Going great over here as well. Before we hop into book club disclaimer, remind everyone nothing on this podcast, Investing Advice. Uh, see the full disclaimer at the end. We're going to be talking about I'm so excited to talk about this book today. John Malone, uh, one of the people I studied the most in history. He wrote memoirs, Born to be Wired. We both read it. I'm super excited. I can go a thousand which ways, but I I'll just start with this, Bern. How did you feel about the book? What were you thinking about when you were reading it? >> What was I thinking about? I I one of the things I was thinking was that Malone was a man built for a particular time period in US capital markets and that from the 80s to I would say from the three decades starting 1980 he did amazingly well. He was just perfectly suited for that moment. um in part because he's able to think in so many different dimensions and he's able to optimize across you know tax and optimize for strategic value sometimes and able to assemble these eclectic mixes of assets but then because he's under the US tax code he has to do weird unnatural things to realize the value of some of those investments and um was also very perceptive on media um and there there are pieces of the book where he's just it's just not quite his time. Some of them are some of the more recent things and you know if you look at a chart of pretty much any of the Liberty associated companies over probably um the last 10 years you know you you see some good things you see some bad things you see some difficult times but >> that was a real snatch to the kidneys you just hit me with right >> I know I mean I yeah like I've I've been burned on some of these names myself um I I truly believed in the Liberty Latam thesis for a while and then I realized that everything I was betting on wasn't happening and all the risk factors I was thinking about were in fact happening. But like earlier in his life, before all of this was really a possibility, like before we had the kind of financial markets that really supported his his approach, he was the same guy. And to me, one of the most impressive parts of the book is actually a part where nothing happens because he is asked to do a study of AT&T's financials and of their capitalization things. And this is what 1950s, right? Um >> I think it's the 60s, but it's around there. Yeah, where he says, "Okay, we should be cutting the dividend, levering up, buying back lots of stock." And this is just totally shocking to the AT&T people, but he was just looking at the numbers and he realized that the cheapest uh, you know, cheapest telecom equipment you could buy is the stuff that's already on AT&T's balance sheet and that AT&T is a really good business and is not going anywhere. um you know only threat would be US government and um that that's the way to do things is uh buy back a ton of stock. It's very c very tax efficient and if the stock is cheap that's even better. Um and I think that was just the wrong thing to say at AT&T. Um they I think during the depression they were kind of famous for having a $9 share dividend they just never cut and they're one of the rare companies that was able to just keep paying a steady like there were companies where they stayed profitable but they had to cut the dividend. AT&T was able to keep that dividend going and it was just of toemic importance to their shareholder base and they had lots of retirees who had all their money in bonds and then owned a few shares of AT&T. Um so they they had some kind of moral obligations maybe to their stockholders where those obligations did entail them to do some capital inefficient stuff. And actually, I think um Buffett maybe a maybe a decade earlier than that had actually written or maybe it was around that time had written about AT&T and their dividend being really inefficient because apparently a lot of AT&T investors would sign up for a dividend reinvestment plan. And Buffett was pointing out that you get your $9 a share, the government gets a piece of it, and then you buy some more shares of AT&T and AT&T could just buy those for you and you wouldn't be paying the extra taxes on it. So, um, a lot of really smart, like I said, it was like a it was a great predictor of future success, um, as both an investor and as a member of the value investing pantheon that if you felt like AT&T's dividend was too high and they should find a different way to return capital to shareholders in the 1950s, you were destined for greatness. So, you hit on a lot of the points I I wanted to hit on and I think one of the funny through themes of this book I tweeted out over the weekend, but it's every decade Malone has a runin with AT&T or AT&T does something and every decade AT&T makes the absolutely wrong call with acquisitions. I mean I mean it starts with this when Malone is like literally fresh out of college and says, "Hey, we should do this." And I I remember the chairman pulls him aside and says, "Son, that was a great presentation. There's no chance in heck we're going to do it. If in your life you can get one thing done at AT&T, one thing changed, your career will have been a smashing success. Which, oh, you can just feel an ambitious, smart young person be like, in my whole life I get one thing changed at AT&T. But throughout his entire career, it's AT&T making the wrong moves and getting their pants pulled down. But let me start with one the thing you said at the end. We can come back to AT&T. There's AT&T. You know, you and I, I believe we talked previously about how John Malone kind of was optimized for the environment he grew up in, right? He kind of comes to power in the early 70s. Interest rates are high, taxes are high, and he uh people are obsessed with gap numbers. And he is the one I thought it was Mario Gabell who makes it, but maybe it's him who comes up with IBIDA and says, "Hey, judge us on our cash flow, not our gap numbers." He famously says at a shareholder meeting, somebody asks about gap income, and he says, "If you're here for gap income, you're in the wrong meeting." So he optimizes for cash flow, he optimizes for taxes, and he optimizes for leverage. And all of those benefit because taxes are high, interest rates are high, and industry, you know, uh, cable, it starts out as wires and television, and the industry makes a big tech shift and it ends up being the dominant way to do broadband. I was kind of wondering if he had come along today, taxes are generally low, interest rates are generally low. I don't know if his skill set, you know, cable is completely built out. I don't know if his skill set is optimized now. Maybe maybe he goes and he does AI something and he you know optimizes core weaves capital structure something but how much do you think he's a product of his generation versus the past two decades saying hey if it wasn't for these tailwinds he was riding he doesn't do anything well I think media becomes media is a really interesting business and um I I years ago articulated just my general theory of success in media companies because I was writing about Buzzfeed and I was trying to figure out okay why do they do well and then why did they start doing badly. And the why did they do well is really easy to answer, which is that there were a lot of um newspapers and magazines that were producing content. They were basically just translating the idea, translating the print model to the internet. This is a new way, you know, the ink is cheaper, but the ads make you less money, but maybe you can get people to pay to subscribe to things and you could still show them ads. And um BuzzFeed realized there's just there are these new distribution channels, attention spans are shifting, and that the the article is not the ideal unit of content. It's not the only unit of content anymore. And that essentially every piece of highquality content needs its own little marketing campaign in order to get attention as opposed to we're going to send this bundle. You know, it'll be a magazine. It'll have articles by 20 different people and you know at least there will be at least one article that you're just you skim and it's not that interesting to you and then there will be one that is potentially really really great. Um but BuzzFeed they could do that when they understood the distribution model really well and there was a lot of content out there to um rehash, rewrite, redistribute, etc. And then the New York Times actually had this big internal meeting. They produced a a nice paper on this where they pointed out that there was some article that they had written where BuzzFeed actually got more traffic than the New York Times because BuzzFeed found a way to make the article famous. And so they actually beat the Times. And the Times was like, it's actually a lot harder to write a really deeply reported article on something nobody realizes in news and tell this amazing story that actually shifts people's perceptions. Like that's the hard part. Tweeting a link to it is not the hard part. and making sure that there's an SEO friendly headline so that people who are looking for that article find the Times version ahead of the Buzzfeed version also not super challenging especially because all this stuff is happening in public like BuzzFeed is basically showing you their social media and search strategy every time they post something so you can copy that really easily whereas when the times like you know New York Times it still does these amazing articles they had one um a couple weeks back where they talked about the business of smuggling drugs into the US and they were able to interview guys who drive who get a truck that's loaded with heroin and drive it across the border and they have photos of this guy actually and the guy's face is not show but they have photos showing you here's where they put it in the vehicle and um they did a little ride along and talked about how there's a guard you know every so often and sometimes the guard will say no the cops are here this time just turn around um like all that stuff it's it's going to be really hard for Buzzfeed to get to the point where they can do that um so Times has this content advantage and then they can catch up on distribution. And so there are times when the distribution piece is what matters and there are times when the content piece is what matters. But a lot of media companies, it's a bundle of both. You know, you are if you're buying a newspaper, you're buying um you know, the newsroom and the culture and the journalist superstars and the ones who are maybe not superstars, but they they know their topic well and they have good sources and things. Then you're also buying trucks and you know newsprint and all of this all of this physical stuff. Um and if if things are usually bundled, you actually have this opportunity to periodically strategically unbundle them. And that's like the signature deal in Malone's career is TCI had been cobbling together this portfolio of varying amounts of ownership in varying content platforms and they had um they had a nice set of these things and they were also being valued more on a u more on a multiple appropriate to just a company that owns these pipes and has qu you know regul regulated monopoly economics in monetizing them. and he realized these are actually two different things and um the contents the valuable underpriced part so let's let's separate that out and uh put a price tag on it and then um then merge it back in and like you know you could look at this deal I feel like if you if you came at this and you didn't know who Malone was and you didn't have a ton of respect for him as a capital allocator and things you could look at this you could say this is actually a really shady transaction this guy splits this company up he takes warrants in one piece of it he ends up owning a huge chunk of that and then they merge it back together. >> For those who for those who don't know, Burn is referring to who haven't read the book or haven't read it. Burton is referring to the about 1991 split. Uh TCI has built 20% ownership in basically every cable channel they own. He splits that into Liberty Media through a famously I mean even in the book he paints himself in a very positive light along this deal. Even the book he's like, "Oh, we got a lot of who are like this is the most complicated transaction I've ever done." But he does it through this really complicated rights offering with warrants. He way overs subscribes and he's bragging about how the stock price does great through this. But because you know if Burn and I own 10% of a company, we did this super complicated transaction and we took our ownership from 10 to 40% of the spin-off and then the spin-off worked really well. We could say, "Hey, great spin-off." But we can all say, "Oh, hey, maybe we cost, you know, the other shareholders 30%." Because a spin-off should be like kind of distributing the pie in different ways. But this is what you're referring to. he does this crazy complicated transaction that is kind of how he makes his fortune o overall. >> Uh let me go back to a point you're making. Let me talk about the unbundling to rebundling. Obviously when we're talking the Liberty Media 90 spin that's a kind of unbundling transaction. You know there are few through themes of the book. One of them is hatred of taxes, hatred of regulation. AT&T is getting his pants down. But towards the end I think just kind of building off your bundling to unbundling. >> You can sense his hatred of big tech right? Multiple times he talks about how >> regulations towards big tech or lack thereof are unfair which I think is quite funny. >> Oh that was the funniest chapter was where he you know he he takes off his libertarian hat for just one chapter to say by the way obviously we should be regulating these big tech companies and obviously we need them to be you know paying paying for the bandwidth that they consume and they're just unfairly exploiting us. >> You know the the the spent billionaires are just ruthlessly exploiting the the helpless decad billionaire class. The if you read this Sumalone famously a libertarian if you read this it is actually a laugh because he'll he deculations like all these barriers all this sort of stuff blah blah blah blah blah and he says but John McCain when John M McCain sponsored the uh the alleart cable channel that would have been a great piece of regulation you're like he's against all regulation except for when it's in his favor right so the McCain this is unbundling cable channels in the mid200s he's super for that regulation. Okay. I'm sure real libertarian on on you there. And then with the uh tech companies where it's going to go. But the other place with the tech companies, he hits on regulation. But I think it's really interesting for a you know free markets guy. He just decries, oh these cable companies, we have spent billions and billions of dollars building out this cable infrastructure that connects the uh connects the the world that connects America to the internet. and all these Netflix, Facebook, Google, they kind of all go over the pipes for free and have built these fortunes on it. And I thought it was really interesting. You know, it's akin to the the electricity company decrying, hey, we provide you regulated uh electricity and XYZ fa Facebook over there is going off and building an AI data center that's going to make tens of billions of dollars off of our electricity. I just I thought it was really interesting that, you know, he really was speaking in his own book, but he just really decrieded it throughout the book. >> Yeah. And I I find that kind of stuff endearing. Like it is just it is a very very natural human instinct that you when you look at regulations you don't think about the ones that just don't have any impact on your life and you the ones that are mostly positive for you that just feels like that's the natural order of things like what government wouldn't want to sub support this and then the ones that actually actively inconvenience you you're like what these these people in DC have no idea what they're doing there must be some really highowered lobbyists we're getting them to write these stupid laws at my expense like that's totally natural and I I feel like what that actually like my view is that just morally obligates you to structure your life such that the policies that you support will actually be good for the world and um you you know that it's actually harder to do that than to think honestly about the difference between your own personal interests and how the economy ought to be structured. >> I think you read more memoirs than me. You just said structure your life in a way that the policies you argue for are good for the world. Have you ever read a memoir where someone admits, "Hey, the policies I'm lobbying for would be great for me, but bad for the world." I mean, everyone kind of thinks the policies they're arguing for would make the world a better place. >> Yeah. Yeah. I I guess nobody nobody really comes to mind there. I guess there are a handful of cases where someone does some someone declines to use some kind of opportunity that they could use. like there's um there's this brief mention in the snowball, right, of um how Berkshire um there was this grandfathering in period where you could turn a publicly traded Ccorp into a pass through entity. >> This was in the 80s when Buffett has to decide if he wants to stay CC corp or kind of become a hedge fund manager is I think what you're Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. And if it's a pass through entity, he would have made a lot more money. And he would probably I I suspect he would have sold more Coca-Cola if you know if Berkshire Bergkshire Hathaway LP had most of its capital from pension funds and endowments and foreign nationals and other people who are not going to be facing a tax hit. Like >> I don't I don't think he was super excited to own Coca-Cola at 70 times earnings. But I also think that he felt like you're selling Coca-Cola at like 45 times earnings after taxes because you cost basis was close. I think it had gone up more than 10x that point. So um you know even if you wouldn't be buying it at 70 times earnings maybe you would be reluctant to sell it at 45. So, um it does it does work some of their decision like for for Buffett and um and for Malone it works some of their decisions that they're doing this in the structure of a CC corp and they they don't have some of the tax advantages that a hedge fund might. So, um but that's I think that's the closest you get to someone saying, "Hey, I lobbyed in my own interests and I did it because I could." Like it's just it's a very distasteful thing to admit, even if it is somewhat true. But it's also, maybe this is part of the job of a lobbyist, is not just tell Congress how to write rules that are favorable to cable companies, but actually tell cable CEOs, here's why this rule is actually favorable for the country, like you're in the right here, and you know, we're we're doing something good for the country and we're informing Congress because we're industry experts. We're informing them of how things work. Um, and I guess like in the end, I think the equilibrium you get to is he's got lobbyists, so does Netflix. those lobbyists are going to hash things out. If if if the charter lobbyist is just actively lying about something, the Netflix lobbyist is going to call him on that and that's going to hurt his credibility. So both sides do at least have an incentive to be honest in the information they present and then the dishonesty like the incentive to be less honest is in how they frame the discussion and you know where what they emphasize what they don't emphasize. like to the point on electricity like you could you could hypothetically imagine a world where the um the power utilities are all getting some piece of the upside of the things that they're being um and things that they're using. But what you actually see is that sometimes sometimes the incentive structure works another way like there's this minor detail that gets mentioned early on in the early so this is in the the ' 60s7s period I think where um he's talking about some of the early cable networks and he mentions that one of them was actually subsidized by TV retailers in the nearest big city. >> Um >> oh I don't I don't remember that one. They just sound weird. >> It was like it was a really minor thing. Like he didn't make a big deal about this, but I thought that was interesting because this is a case where the it actually makes sense. The incentives are aligned like more TVs will be sold if there are more households that can get TV. So, of course, the cost of capital to a TV company for investing in cable is lower than the cost of capital for random cable. Speaking of subsidizing, one of the interesting ones I think is he notes I I did not realize this that the cable companies uh pay pay for C span pay the whole thing and that this this is huge for them and obviously it scores them lots of political points and gives them lots of power. I think one of the interesting things later on in the book is he decides YouTube and a lot of the tech companies don't carry C-SPAN and he he really hits them for it and I I thought that was really interesting and I do kind of wonder is YouTube making a tactical mistake not carrying C-SPAN like how much would it really cost them to subsidize C-SPAN versus you know if if as cable goes away and Senator X comes to them and says hey why am I not why is nobody able to watch my speech so anymore then again maybe everybody just watches them on streaming but I I I thought The C-SPAN piece was interesting. >> Yeah, it was. And you can kind of see from that like the cable industry was big enough and consolidated enough by that point that, you know, probably there were some holdouts and some people who didn't really want to put their pro rata share in or you probably had people, you know, the less profitable networks are saying, well, yeah, we should all invest the same portion of our EBIDA. And then the really profitable ones are saying no, let's let's do it on the basis of revenue or of customer count or something something like you know saying we're all going to back this and we're going to do this collectively is different from figuring out exactly what collective means to everybody. Um so so yeah like you and you know C-SPAN it was this sort of form of lobbying for them right where they they always get to say you know to a congressman the reason that your constituents were able to watch that speech is because we made this citizens. Yeah. >> And I'm sure every one of your constituents watched and loved it, sir. I'm sure. >> Of course. >> You mentioned something uh with the collaboration, right? And let me just go off track a little bit here. I think it's really interesting through the book. I mean, Malone talks all the time about how he collaborates with these guys is Rupert Murdoch would be the number one where sometimes they're enemies, sometimes they're friends to collaborate, come up together, get apart. But he talks all the time and he really decries the state of the world now where business leaders kind of aren't collaborating. And I thought it was interesting. The two I would throw out there, well CPAN would be one, but the other two I throw out there is uh Cable Labs where the government passes a rule that says, "Hey, competitors can form R&D labs together." And Cable Labs has been famously very successful. I mean, cable is not in the place where it is today. Today, it faces challenges from fiber home and fix wireless, but you know, it could have ended in the '9s if they hadn't leaped from cable TV to internet. Cable ads would be one. And then the other places every time a deal goes hostile, he says, "Hey, I don't get why, you know, why did AT&T buy this instead of for a huge premium instead of going to Comcast and saying, "Hey, we'll take the networks that make sense for you. You take the networks that make sense for you and let's not pay a huge premium and get into a big fight about it." So, those were the two I just I thought it was interesting how he really decries. He says the partnerships really work for him and he decries how the world doesn't seem to work that way anymore. >> Yeah. Yeah. And there was there was a really interesting bit where he talks about there was a cable system that he knew about. I think they had borrowed a bunch of money from life insurance companies and other lenders and it wasn't making any money and he says okay we'll run it for you and you know we'll we'll do that for free and you'll owe us a favor. Um I I was very I I would love to know what the actual discussion was like internally at TCI when they decided to do that because that that sounds pretty crazy to me. my my eyes got very wide and I was wondering if it was like let's say you had 100,000 subs and I had 100,000 subs. I could imagine saying, "Burn, I'll run your 100,000 subs for free if I can get like programming pricing power, right? You go to ESPN, you go see for 200 instead of 100, you can I wonder if they the real thesis there was we'll run it for free, but we get their programming pricing power, you know, we go to we can buy more modems at that cost. I wonder if they were seeing scale across the business." Uh, I don't know because I remember that story very well and I was like, they did it for no management contract, no nothing. Like that's really relying on the kindness of strangers in the long run. >> Yeah. Yeah. Like you you just don't hear stories of, you know, the local Burger King was short staffed one morning and so the nearest McDonald's sent some people over to flip burgers for them. >> Um you know, even though that would be a nice gesture. It's uh yeah, totally out of the ordinary. Um, and it did seem like there was there was probably some quid proquo, like there's probably no explicit contract, but also an understanding that, hey, if this works out, we're going to be buying it from you at, you know, four times Ebida DA instead of six times Ebida DA or something. And that in the meantime, it's not going to default and you'd get in a lot of trouble with your regulators if you're making these crazy loans to overbuilt cable companies and they're all going bad. So, like, you can definitely see a case where value could be exchanged there. Um, yeah, I do think the the scale piece probably makes sense and it could have been something as prosaic as they thought they were going to close another acquisition, they'd already hired a good manager for it. That acquisition falls through, they've got this guy who's brilliant and just itching to do something and they realize that, hey, maybe maybe this is actually an opportunity for free training. Like the best way to learn to run a cable system is to run one. And this one isn't ours, so it's not the end of the world if it doesn't go well. cuz like that that in that sense it's a really asymmetric bet because if the system's already failing, if it's already losing money and they're just wondering when they will write down the loans, if they just end up writing down the loans, everyone can say, "Well, that that's a really tough situation. It's a hard business and uh it's too bad things went the way they did." But if there's a turnaround, then you get some credit for that. >> And it's Malone, so he says we did it for free. I mean, they could have gotten warrants on top of it and he said for free with an upside kicker. They could I'm not sure. Uh, one thing I I I wanted to come back to, you mentioned BuzzFeed earlier. I think the the main thing I I took away from this book, and I can't I hate to keep saying the main thing, but honestly, the main thing I take away was how frequently you will see bidding wars. I mean, flatout bidding wars, and this happens a lot during the bubble, but it happens a lot throughout the book. You will see flatout bidding wars for properties that not even decades later, years later, sometimes months later are just writeoffs. And I know this happens in business obviously, but I it's just shocking going back and looking. I mean, you are talking the titans of in industry. Summer Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, uh Ted Turner, all of them. And I mean, you're just talking these multi-billion dollar blenders and they're competing with each other. You know, they're in these huge bidding wars. I I think that was the really interesting thing to me just as I'm thinking with my investor hat on. And I just want to I I want to put that thought out there and ask you like do you think it's endemic to it could be endemic to media. It could be endemic to media is shifting and it's shifting at a much more accelerated clip as kind of the years go on. Is it unique to that? Maybe I'm under base rating how many of these huge acquisitions are right off. What did you kind of think about just that tendency for write offs and stuff? >> So like it it's this weirdly scaled up version of the fact that media is often distributed in a bundle. And I think there there two two big drivers of the bidding wars on the infrastructure and and distribution side. You will sometimes have companies where they're just really paranoid that they're going to lose access to their customers and they absolutely need to have some position. like it wasn't a bidding war for assets, but it was a bidding war for talent and for equipment when everyone every channel apparently and every network decided they need to have their own standalone streaming service um after Disney Plus launched and they all felt like we're just we'll be subscale and our core business is dying. You know, the cords that are getting cut are not the cords that bring in most of the video content for most households. It's the cords that bring in our video content. So, we just, you know, we have to do Paramount Plus and we have to do, you know, Discovery, the Discovery Stream thing or whatever it was. And some of those will work. It seems like HBO Max is kind of, you know, it it it makes sense as a business. Um, obviously Disney Plus makes sense as a business, but then as you move more subscale, I think the realization a lot of these companies have had to have and they're still getting there is like, no, you're actually just a content company. You did miss the boat in distribution. On the other hand, the content is good. Now, content based bidding wars, I think that is just a simpler thing where someone likes the idea of owning a particular show, owning some particular IP, like they've always dreamed of it. As the lifespan of IP gets longer, you have a lot more people where they grew up reading Marvel books and or reading Marvel comics and watching Spider-Man cartoons and knowing that they can actually buy Spider-Man and be the owner of Spider-Man is just pretty cool. And, you know, it it allows them to to be the the person their six-year-old self always hoped they would be. So, um you probably get some of that, too. And um you see that sometimes when just very rich people take over very established magazines and they tend to know what they're getting into. Like you don't buy the New Republic thinking that this is how you make your money. You buy the New Republic thinking that it's sure nice to have money and this is something good you can spend it on. So um that tends to that tends to inflate some of those prices. But I think there's also like people will just believe that this content that they personally love is actually universally beloved and could do better. And so I think that encourages them to to overpay at times. >> So I agree with all that. I mean, especially with movie studios, the most famous overpurchase is somebody gets really rich and buys a movie studio because they want to go hobnob with celebrities, right? Like like absolutely the most famous famous overpay happens all the time. And if you're a billionaire, that's what you do. If you're 100 millionaire, you finance a movie and you get robbed that way. Like this is just classic. >> There's one example I know of where this was actually a good strategic move. And sometimes like the strategic move is you you buy it from someone else who made a bad strategic move. But sometimes so the one case that I like there's this book Metalman which is a biography of Mark Rich. It's it it really emphasizes the partying and the metals traders in the 70s were uh pretty energetic parters. Um but it does mention that he was the part owner of Fox in the 70s. Um, and that what he would do is if he's negotiating some oil deal with, you know, the head of state of um, uh, of a Middle Eastern country, he can tell them, "Hey, do you want to go to the Fox studio, bring your kids, your son can meet C3PO and, you know, can see Yoda?" And, um, the the other oil trading companies, you know, they could offer really lavish dinners and lots of fun entertainment, but that was something they could not actually offer. So, something. It's something I've argued with sports teams for a while. A, historically, it won't work forever, but historically, sports teams have been an incredible investment because they are trophy assets. There are 30 of them and as media rights have exploded and everything, they they've claimed more. But even if you ignored the investment side, if you were a billionaire and like Steve Cohen, I he is having the most fun of his life run owning the Mets, right? Probably not today because the Mets got eliminated from the playoffs yesterday. But all these billionaires, they go by it and before you were a no-name billionaire and yes, you could do anything you wanted, but now you are the everyone in that city knows your name. You are politically important. Like you can do anything. All these doors that were weren't open to you before open up. So very similar to owning a movie studio. you know, movie studio in the 80s, owning the local newspaper today, owning the there are very few businesses that you can own that kind of make you a mini celebrity on their own. So, I I I completely believe that, hey, having that part ownership of the similar to have having a 1% ownership of the Clippers probably doesn't do you a lot, but if you can go to close deals and say, hey, I'm a VC, let me invest in you, and by the way, I'm going to take you court side to the Clippers game. Probably close a few more deals. Let me go to we we we kind of start you know you can feel his distaste for two things paying taxes and having succession issues right uh his kind of mentor and partner at TCI Bob Magnus dies and doesn't have a will settled and you can feel it just ripping Malone apart as this estate now he almost loses control of TCI because it but you can feel it ripping him apart. Uh, Summer Redstone has a huge drama over his legacy with Viacom and CBS and you can feel it ripping apart. So, I want to ask you about that, but then I also want to ask you, we talked about how the last 10 years have not been kind to Malone. You know, it is really interesting to look at the last 10 years as Malone has largely stepped aside, kind of become more of a chairman. He's taken on chairman and emer and liberty has dramatically underperformed over the last 10 years. So, I kind of want to think about those two uh together, right? Like he hates the succession issues. He obviously hates paying taxes, but then he's kind of handing all these things over and stock price, bro. All these things are dramatically underperforming. I have one more thing to say about that, but I I just want to toss that over to you because that was one of the things really I was thinking about as I read. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that was something like part of part when I was reading this, I just I felt nostalgic because there were a bunch of characters who I remember being these active live players, you know, cutting deals like, you know, he he gets Bill Gates to partly bail out the cable industry and he's dealing with all these larger than life figures and like a lot of them are retired or dead now. >> It's the titans of our youth, right? It's the titans of our youth, the guys who are 50s and 60s when you and I are just starting to read open up the Wall Street Journal and maybe only read the front page, >> right? So, it it does feel like maybe there was just a pretty special generation of media titans and maybe part of the reason for that was just that there were enough structural changes in media that there were just lots of ways you could make your fortune. like um there used to be lots of two paper towns and um this was part of Buffett's thesis for buying Buffalo News was those two paper towns are all going away and lots of things tied into that. Um, and if you go back and look at um, there's there's some data set on where newspapers got their revenue. And it turns out that classifides really started being a big deal in the 80s. And like I had always when people described the newspaper business, you know, in the early 2000s and why it's struggling, it was always they were heavily dependent on classifides because they're this regional monopoly. If you need to sell your used car, that's the only place to do it. And then Craigslist shows up, they're charging less, they get a larger audience, and that goes away. So I had kind of assumed that classifides were just always a core part of the newspaper business. But it turns out it was kind of a new newish thing and that it was a growth business for them. But if you were someone like a Murdoch or a Buffett where you start identifying newspapers, you understand these secular trends and you can just buy, you know, just makes it sound really easy. If you have the opportunity to buy what you think will be the surviving paper or buy a paper that you can make the surviving paper in a town that has room for 1.5 newspapers, you being being a company that has u is the supplier for um a market that needs 150% of what that company could get. You can mint money. being one of two companies where you're trying to each go after viability, but there's actually not enough business for both of you and where you're, you know, the classified ads could go to this paper or the other paper. They both have similar circulation. Um, so the market clearing price is going to be just what is the lowest amount that the most desperate paper accepts. So like that gave them a lot of opportunities to make a ton of money and to do it owning some core business where at the time 80s 90s it has pretty predictable cash flows and then you can do some fancier stuff later on. Um yeah like a lot of these guys they they did that and they were able to take just a media ecosystem where there was already such thing as a TV show. already knew how to do news and how to script um you know sitcoms and how to do cop shows and things like if if that's all known quantities and you could take that and scale it up being the person who figures out that there are a lot of ways to scale this and like if we keep adding cable channels maybe there will be a cable channel that's just all cop shows all the time maybe someone will be crazy enough to do literally 24-hour news um you know maybe there's room for cooking channels that are just all cooking all the time like if you knew that you saw that coming. You could position yourself really well for that. Like you're always betting on there's more demand for more shows and once there's a concept that concept will be synonymous if it work. You know, if the if the network works, that network's name is synonymous with the genre that it owns. Like lots of ways to own really good businesses and to to back them when they're young and a little bit risky and cheap. To your point, I think on your point on Titans, I think one of the things is the 80s was a unique time where you go from three cable channels basically to 500, right? He talks about five the cable plan for 500. Now 500 is still limited and there are economies of scale to owning cable channels just like owning cable companies. A lot of the media titles we think of, it's because they owned, you know, 20 of the 500 channels. And today, because we're living in the world of infinite, right? Doesn't matter who owns the channel, right? Yes, maybe people can say who the CEO of Netflix is, but people know the CEO of Disney, but you know, the these things don't matter as much. It's Joe Rogan who matters, but the the media fra landscape has just fragmented so much. I I think the age of the yestery year media titan is dead. But speaking of the media titan, uh, you know, we've talked about Malone's recent history. The thing as a longtime Malone watcher, the thing that I thought was really interesting is Greg Mafay, who is Malone's who is the CEO at Liberty Media for basically 20 years, is not in this book a lot. And when he is in this book, he is not mentioned very positively, right? In the 2005 2006 range, he uh he's mentioned for starting the war with Barry Diller, right? Malone basically blames MFY in 2012ish. MFY is the one who turns down the investment in Netflix according to John Malone. So those are two mentions and those are his two biggest mentions I would say. So he's not in this book positively. And as a longtime Malone watcher, I just wanted to ask just ask you about that. I thought that was very interesting. >> Yeah. Like I guess everyone's idea of who is in the Malone cohort kind of depends on just when did they first hear about Malone and what did he own at that time? Because like you could you could choose a different time frame and Diller and Malone are part of the same group of people, right? Um or at least they they collaborated more early on. >> They But I mean Mafay is the CEO of Liberty. Malone's the chairman. Maf is the city for 20 years and he's like I mean he is a bit character in this book who kind of gets gets pooped on. >> Yeah. Yeah, he does. And that is that is kind of weird like you you would think if you were actually bad at the job and Malone were good at the job of being chairman that he would have just fired him at some point you know very early like he's he's probably had a lot of stock options vest over that 20-year period and um so yeah that that was a little bit tacky like I would also think that if you have a model where you are just totally mentally flexible in terms of how you set up your financial relationship with someone like you can own equity you can lend them you can buy their business and then spin it out. Like it seems like that's the kind of thing you would design if you were worried about succession problems and just wanted a lot of CEOs who you spent a lot of time with, none of whom you bet the business on such that at the end you could say, you know, you've done such a good job with the serious piece or you've done so well with Formula 1, I think it makes sense for you to run the entire organization after I fully step down. Like you'd think that that works, but maybe what that actually means is that his incentive is to have quasi successors who are actually more media operators and that he's the dealmaker. And I feel like, you know, even even today, if I were in the Liberty Complex somewhere and I had some clever idea for a merger and I pitch it to Mr. Dr. Malone and he says, "No, that's not going to work. Here's why." I would just I would I would generally assume that he knows what he's talking about and that if he doesn't like some merger or restructuring or spin-off that he's probably right and I should figure out why he's right. So, he is probably the guy who he is still the guy who signs off on that kind of thing. And I think that that means that it's hard for him to have a successor for the thing he does. And this, you know, not an uncommon problem with companies and succession. Like Apple probably could not have handled being run by a Steve Jobs-like character after Steve Jobs left. They needed someone who was just really good about supply chains and really diligent and um you know, knew how to keep a lot of balls in the air and was maybe less perfectionist on the product. um you know as as the company gets bigger it's better for the product to be pretty appealing to a large number of people than to be just mind-blowing for a small set of customers and similar with um with Microsoft where you at the beginning they were just a lot more technically constrained and having someone who could just mentally like envision all the registers of the chip and say no this spell check product is not going to work in this version of word we've got to wait at least 2 years for Intel to ship a better chip but at that point it'll be great like that. That's the person you need early, you know, in the in the 70s, in the 80s. And then maybe by the 2000s, you actually need someone who is more of a dealmaker, someone who can hang out with lots of CIOS and make them feel really really good about how much money they're spending on Microsoft. And then then it toggles back and like actually Balmer I think he's he's underrated in many many ways. Um he is actually an incredibly smart guy. Has now made more money than Gates. So we know he's good at business, too. Balmer. I do not doubt he's an incredibly smart guy. This is way off track. I don't doubt he's an incredibly smart guy, but I would just point like everything he does, he does with a lot of enthusiasm. I I think but I Microsoft under him, I I I don't love the whitewashing of it because it was a disaster. I mean, the Nokia deal, every deal they did was a disaster. The company was not in great shape. They missed multiple things. I I think and then you look at his post career, the Los Angeles Clippers, I think he did a great job building it into its own. I haven't been, but I hear rave reviews, but you look at the Clippers like I haven't seen the championship. The team that just won the championship, the Oklahoma City Thunder, was built largely on the basis of robbing the Clippers in a trade. Like I I I think he's very enthusiastic. He's one good thing he did was he hopped onto Microsoft and he just never sold or gave away the stock, you know? But I I'm not he's crazy smart. I just I don't know if he's like genius business. I I think there was like one of the first things that Satia was able to accomplish, which he's also a really sharp guy, but one of the first things he was able to accomplish was just getting people to take a second look at Microsoft. And a lot of the stuff that has played out really well under his tenure was stuff that was started under the Balmer tenure. And you know, definitely there they did some really bad deals. But it's it's sort of like um some of the media deals we've talked about where when you're worried about getting disrupted like if you are worried that everyone's going to spend all of their time looking at a device that is this big instead of a monitor that is you know takes up a desktop like you get scared and it it makes it sense like you want to be really aggressive and just like own your piece of that future and sometimes you'll get it wrong. >> Both Google and Facebook I believe have said hey AI is existential to us. we will spend whatever it takes to make sure that it does not end us. And you know, we investors get really excited about the AI and everything. I don't think they care about ROI. They care about survival and making sure that they they do not miss the shift. I think that's really interesting. Let me uh >> the end of the book again, I really enjoyed this book. I did skip a little bit of I don't like reading the childhood years. And there was a chapter reminded me of Larry Ellison having multiple chapters on sailing. There was a chapter on horses. That was a fast skip for me. But I I did not uh did not deeply read about the the equestrian piece. >> But I think this book is really interesting structure because the first half you basically get the story of his career, the deals and stuff obviously with a very rosecolored view. And then the second half he basically says here's Liberty and my major holdings here. Here's where they are at this point in time. And he kind of gives you their outlook. So I just want to ask you, you know, he does a little piece on Formula 1. He does a piece on Liberty Global. He does a piece on Charter. He does a piece on Sirius. I might be for forgetting one or two other when you read these. I I'll just I'll put you on the spot in as when you read them. What was the one you were most bullish on when you were reading it? >> I mean, honestly, the the lazy answer is that Formula 1 is this amazing franchise. And I think that's true. Like people like seeing cars go around a track really, really fast. You have, you know, there there are not that many brand names in that space. the economics do get really interesting when it's also an advertisement for the car companies. So like there just a lot of things to really like about that business and it feels it has the feel of one of those Disneyesque platforms where you can make a lot of documentaries and you can really burnish the celebrity of some of these drivers. So um I did like that. Like it did feel like, okay, we have this this section where we're actually going to have a little impromptu Liberty Investor Day and just to run through run through all of her holdings. >> Can I what did you like? >> Well, I I I will come back to that, but I I want to Formula 1 I also think the way he talks about the Formula One deal, it was the only place in the book where Greg Greg Mafay comes off positive, but he says, look, Formula 1 is up for sale. It's a very complicated deal, right? If I remember correctly, CBC owns 60%. the Formula 1's old who there's lots of rumors of tax dodging eventually gets caught for it owns 30 there's and he has he says Liberty Global with Mike Freeze is working on a bid Liberty Media with Greg Mafay is working on a bid and I think one other piece of his empire is working on a bid I can't remember if they're but he has them all working in parallel and then he says hey Greg Mfay is the one who comes up and says you know he's really he knows his audience right he pitches hey John let's do a tracker with a rights offering to get these guys out of it taxfree and that's structure that ends up winning but I did think it was interesting just hearing him say he had different pieces of his empire kind of competing with each other. How did you think about that deal structure there? I think that's just like part of it is the nature of scale and part of it is that it's it's the nature of the bundle that if you own the distribution it really helps to have some key piece of content that means that people have to use your distribution channel gives you some leverage there and also just gives you some understanding of what do your counterparties think about what do they care about how's their business evolving and then it also makes sense that if you have this media thing this like content holding company that is also a financial engineering company and it has lots of different pockets to shift things around in and you can lend money across these different sub entities and you know take out margin loans on this tracking stock and not this other one. Um it's just a a more fun thing to play around with. So it did feel to me like it it made a lot of sense for Liberty Media to be there, but it it wasn't crazy for Liberty Global to at least be taking a look. And then I guess it's not incredibly hard if you're on the phone with both of these CEOs multiple times a day. It's just not super hard to tell them like please don't lob in a really high allcash bid with no conditions, you know, no financing conditions because that makes it harder for us to do this more complicated bid. Uh to to your question, to my question, I I think the piece it's hard not to walk away from it. I mean, the one you're least bullish on, he's clearly bearish on SiriusXM. He's like, "Oh man, we hit a home run, but the future does not look good over there." It has to be formula one, right? Like if you're just talking ignore valuation, just investing. He clearly, it's where all the pucks are going, right? He's talking about, hey, drive to survive success. They've got so much they're really starting to Formula One would have to be the answer. And it's you and I are taping this September 29th. EA announced the deal is get bought out by about $50 billion by Saudis, Silverlake, all these sort of stuff. Formula 1 would be such EA makes the Formula 1 video game. I believe Formula 1 would be such a fit for any Saudi wealth fund that you know to what we said about media companies earlier. They want to own they want to own it. They want to take all their friends. They want to say, "Hey, I own this. Let's go sit in the owner's box." I I think that's the long-term formula and it's where all the piece are going. Now, if you said, "Hey, risk adjustice for me alpha." I the thing I as a stock investor who's followed Liberty for a long time really thought was interesting was he speaks very highly of David Zazzloff. I think I would stock price you bro right I I pull up the Discovery stock price and say I don't think any of that sound very good. >> Uh but the one I thought was really interesting was Mike Freeze who runs Liberty Global. Liberty Global for those who don't know has been where value hedge fund guys have gone to die for the past 10 years. The stock price if I remember correctly is basically flat over the 10 years. I know it's fly over the past five, but he says, "Look, Mike's done a great job." And he points to a recent spin-off and he says, "Liberty Global trades really cheap." Uh, Mike's going to buy my class features when I I die, and Mike is 100% driven to unlocking all this value. Liberty Global is this huge corporate structure of lots of different cable assets in Europe. And some investment funds will he's like, "Mike is going to buy back a ton of shares. He's going to split it all up. He's going to create a ton of value." I I I was just interesting. This was a man putting in his memoir. I was kind of interested by that. Yeah. Yeah. And I I wonder what the incentives are there because on the one hand, this is your legacy. On the other hand, you're not going to be around to see it. So, who knows? Maybe maybe he just wants a really good capital gains basis step up when when he does finally depart. >> Look, I as I read this book and then I read went and read uh Mike Freeze, he was at I think it was a BFA conference two months ago and he comes and he's spiking the football. He says, "Look, we said we're spinning off some." This is the transaction. Uh John talks about in the book said, "We traded five and a half. We spun off Sunrise. Sunrise trades for ADX. Our stock's up 25% over the past 12 months. And I will tell you this, I'm not satisfied. This is not the end. More spin-offs, more deals are coming." He's just like pounding it. I read the book and then read that. I was like, >> it's pretty interesting from an event angle. Uh I I just I do agree with that. Like it's I guess for me, you know, one of the issues is just I I have to do a refresh on how cable works in all these different markets. It's like in some ways the business is the same business, in other ways, you know, every country is going to regulate media a little bit differently. So like maybe that's a fun homework project for me is to figure out is this uh is is it finally Liberty Media's moment do that and they they own 50% of some markets consolidate non-conolidate as you know from the lilac years. That's you know one other thing on that and then I have two other two follow I thought one interesting thing was the early 90s if you took the years away a lot of the stuff he says in the early 90s could apply in the mid2000s or it could apply today right there's lots of talk about convergence plays in the early 90s there's lots of talk about internet supplanting things like I I just thought it was interesting how a lot of these issues are kind of timeless I'll pause there >> yeah like I think the you know if you if you paint with really broad brush strokes you can that the the amount of bits we produce and then our ability to send those bits to the right eyeballs just keeps on rising and sometimes it's sometimes the distribution is doing a little bit better sometimes it's the total volume of content sometimes it's the quality of content and these all follow their own weird cycles like sometimes people you know I think show some of the dramas of the early 2000s like the Sopranos um and then or you know West Wing or something like they they showed people that TV can actually be good and it can be an art form and then you take you have some lag time there and people start thinking of okay what what is my version of the Sopranos and then you get something like Madmen and um like that that is I guess it's harder to bet on that other than just betting on whichever studio gives creators the most leeway when you feel like there is just room to do a better job with some genre or subg genre or kind of content. Um but you do yeah you just you have these big swings in the business and um but the the broad the broad theme is there's more media we need higher bandwidth we need more ways to sort it and to the extent that the story is kind of fading and dying out it is because he didn't Malone did not really bet on feeds and most people did not bet on feeds like news feeds as a default way to consume things. he has this indirect bet on video um streaming video just by owning some of the infrastructure but clearly the economic arrangements are not to his satisfaction in terms of how you divvy up Netflix's piece of the upside versus charters. So, um, yeah, he missed a big transition, but it's also a transition that you wouldn't necessarily expect someone to to to make in the same way that I'm sure a lot of the people who were running the smaller newspaper in a two newspaper town, like they knew they had challenges. They they didn't realize how things would go, how things would evolve, and that they would make a ton of money if they merged their business with the larger competitor and got a piece of the upside from from the new monopoly. Um and similarly like the cable channel operators like they the networks they were giving Malone equity stakes and I think if they had known just how valuable it would be and how how things would shake out and that there would be some channels where everybody has to pay to uh everybody has to pay for a bundle that has that channel and so it's just a tax on everyone because some people absolutely insist on you know >> I I do think that is a chicken or I think that is a chicken or the egg problem right because TCI had 20% of the market and remember if you weren't on TCI I you could not get into those markets that they had, right? So I do think it was a chicken and egg problem where they took 20% of your equity, but he was saying, "Hey, you give us 20%, we launch a TCI instantly. You've got basically nationwide scale." So maybe they could have negotiated harder, but I think a lot of these channels like there was competition. CNN, right? There was another news network that was launching at the time. He went with CNN because he liked Ted, but if CNN hadn't given him the equity, he would have gone with someone else. Let me um I quickly want to end oh speaking of CNN, I want to end with one thought in AT&T, but I do want to talk about CNN. I think it's really interesting multiple times and I've seen him alone to cry this over the year. He decries the state of CNN, right? He basically says, "Hey, this is a left-leaning uh media company that I want them to go back to straight just down the just down the pipes, just the facts, ma'am." And he lays out a vision for it, right? And I thought that was really interesting. He says, "And I know America would love it." Right? He ends with that and he says, "Walter Kronhite." I thought that was really interesting in the market to me has spoken, right? Like, yes, I'm sure everybody says, "I would like to watch non-biased news, but their preferences are revealed, right? Everybody watches non everybody watches biased news." I I was just really interesting that Malone was a crying. He really wants this nonbiased news. And >> I think that I I think it's ignoring the realities of the market. Like, you know, USA Today is is not really making it. the AP is struggling. People want to hear where the money is is where the eyeballs is. It's Twitter. It's the engagement. It's the rage bait. It's an unfortunate fact in my opinion. I'm sure in Malone's opinion, but that's just the fact. I was kind of surprised he had his head in this hand about that. >> Yeah. Like I think what happens with unbiased news is that everyone's idea of what that is is different. And that if you if you try to do it, what you actually have is all of your Republican viewers will be like, "I can't believe you said these horrible things about Trump." And then all of your Democratic viewers will be like, "I can't believe you failed to say this horrible thing about Trump that I was thinking." >> I did. Everybody complains about football announcers, right? I remember when I was growing up, all my friends, because they're all LSU friends, they'd be like, "Oh, CBS famously biased against LSU." So, I just took it as for granted CBS was biased against LSU. And then I grew up and I realized, no, every football team thinks that about whoever covers them because they're used to hearing the local guys who rave about them or only talk about them. And when they hear a national guy who's unbiased, they think that he's biased against them. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like I think you know you I think a more more direct and honest way to say it would be for Malone to say I'm a libertarian, tend to be conservative on a lot of issues. I like this country a lot and don't like people trashtalking it even though there are things to improve, etc., etc. And you know, there are a lot of guys like me. We have a lot of spending power. Maybe not as much as me, but a lot. And um maybe maybe there's more competition on left-leaning news than right-leaning news. And so just as a pure business decision, centerright CNN could make sense. Like there's there's definitely room just in the sense of there are a lot of people who are to the right of center but to the left of Fox and Newsmax or who just want things to be a little bit more straightforward and a little bit more honest. And like if Trump does something genuinely stupid, they don't want to hear about it for the first time from someone who watches a broader news source or someone who reads the New York Times. They want to actually know what's going on. Like that that audience does exist, but I think it's it's just media people. Some of them have incredible taste in just what the average American's taste will be. But that's a really hard thing to have. And the more that you are also a media theorist and you think economically and you are um aware of the details of really complex issues and incidentally one thing we didn't talk about that much but I that I liked in the book is that sometimes he gets pretty technical like he actually cares about things like here's how the hardware works for a set top box or here's how much you can >> well he's an electrical engineer by training right so like >> like yeah and you know I wouldn't think that you need that stuff to run a cable company but what it does what it does help with is he would know he would have a better sense of what's physically possible and if he sees some trend he would have a sense of does it is there some technical limitation that means we only ever have 30 channels therefore act accordingly or do we have effectively infinite channels like he knew that a little bit before maybe some of his peers did and it helped but anyway he he people who run these media companies just have a very distorted view of what does the average person want from the media um and people watch enough TV you you can't watch an average amount of TV and also run a media media company like you can't spend 4 to 6 hours watching network TV, cable news and um online clips and have enough time to actually run a company that does any of those things. So they they will always be somewhat guessing about what the taste of the average consumer is. But they are also human beings who will sometimes turn on the TV and they just cannot believe how dumb these people are being. It's just he has been involved because he ran TCI and he was involved with Charter for so long. He's been involved in the negotiations with these cable channels, right? And I'm just surprised like so he knows hey Fox News which has the largest cult following commands way more than there than a CNN because a yes there is no other right channel but b because their audience is so passionate because they're delivering strong opinion. So for him to just say hey CNN needs to lose the like you're basically saying give up your business because this is what I want. Uh Bern I had so much more to talk to you about. I had AT&T margin calls but we're at the hour mark. I I mean I really enjoyed this book. I I can't recommend it highly enough. I know that our listeners are going to be invested in stuff, but it's a really fun read. Pretty quick, too. I really enjoyed it. Skip the part about horses, but I loved it. Vern, what do you think we're going to read next next month? You got any ideas? >> What are we going to read next month? Let's see. So, we we kind of pingpong between profiles of people and more broad general interest stuff, but we've done two profiles. So yeah, we maybe um I don't know. We should find some semiclass. >> You know, this is a great segue. If you're a listener and you've gotten this far, it's been almost 75 minutes now. If you got an idea, shoot us a book. We might end up reading next month. Uh but Bren, this has been awesome. I'll hang on. We can finish our chat after this, but this has been so much fun and looking forward to Halloween book club next month. >> All right. Yeah, let's read something scary. Let's read When When Genius Failed or something like that or >> That's not a bad idea. We we could we should do something on the the uh 1929 crash or on 1987. I don't know if there's a good book on 87, but 29 has some some >> These are all these are all great ideas. I really like something a little spooky. A few years ago, I did the great fraud books of like uh when Genius Failed and then the uh now I'm forgetting the Bernie madeup one, the the one with the Singaporean fund that came and it was really fun. But I will tell you, I'd wake up I'd wake up in cold sweats at night and be like, I'm not running a fraud right now, am I? Like, it's really scary when you read these thing and the pressure these people are under. I'm not trying to sympathize with the fraudsters, but I I read them and I'd be I'd be waking up in sweat just thinking about pressure. >> Yeah. like some of the there there was that guy who kept um he he got caught because he had these backto-back meetings where one was with a law firm and then he gets the guy's business card and then he goes to the next meeting and introduces himself as that guy and hands the business card. Like I would not be able to do that. Just the boldness the it's just incredible. All right, we're way out. This is great. What time buddy? >> A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.