Dell PCs with Intel Inside are built for every moment. With long-lasting battery life and built in intelligence, you can stay focused on what matters most. Dell Technologies, built for you. Dell.com slash Dell PCs. Dell PCs with Intel Inside are built for the moments you plan, and for the ones you don't. For those early morning news sessions, or when you're on the go and leave your charger at home, or even the times you need the best processing speed to just get the job done. Dell built tech that adapts to you. Built with a long-lasting battery, so you're not scrambling for an outlet. And with built-in intelligence, that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.co.uk forward slash dell PCs. Built for you. Dell PCs with Intel Inside are built for the moments you plan, and the ones you don't. There for those all-night study sessions. The moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet's taken. The times you're deep in your flow and can't be interrupted by an auto update. That's why we build tech that adapts to you. Built with a long-lasting battery, so you're not scrambling for an outlet, and built with a long-lasting battery. You're not scrambling for an outlet, and built-in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.co.uk forward slash dell PCs. Built for you. Welcome to Raging Models, I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarlev. If you aren't already, please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube page to stay up to date on all the news politics. All right, let's get into it. A day after President Trump extended a ceasefire, tensions in the Middle East are flaring again in one of the world's most critical choke points. The Pentagon says US forces have boarded a second sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean, carrying oil from Iran. At the same time, Trump posted that he's ordered the Navy to shoot and kill any boat. You can kill a boat in the Strait of Hormuz that is laying mines, adding that US minesweepers are already clearing the passage. The escalation follows claims from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that it sees two cargo ships near the Strait while UK maritime monitors report gunfire and attacks on commercial vessels in the same area. Notably, the White House has said that these seizures do not violate the ceasefire. And all of this is now unfolding amid fresh turmoil inside of the Pentagon. Navy Secretary John Feehlen was abruptly fired after months of infighting with senior defense officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Term oil that comes as the Navy is actively engaged in the standoff of Iran. Jesus, I mean, it is, it is. It's so nuts. Same more, Jess? It's so nuts. Can I just repeat that for half an hour? Sure. I mean, it's confusing, it's nuts. And mixed signals is too generous of a term for what we're getting here. But we're basically at a point where you can't take anything that the president is saying about this. And I'm sure people immediately are gonna be like, of course you can't take the president seriously about anything. This has been the problem forever. But like where there is not even a kernel of truth breaking through in any of these truth social posts. Like I don't, the FT reports that 34 Iranian link tankers have gotten through. And we're saying that the blockade is still in place. I don't understand how that's possible. I don't understand how firing on ships is not a violation of the ceasefire. It feels like we are also not spending enough time talking about the conflict within the IRGC. And the different groups that are vying for power right now and the hardliners versus the negotiating team who was still part of this, that did the 2015 JCPOA. I mean, the Iranians are definitely getting the message that they've got time. I think that I should have led with that. And not my second, this is nuts. Because we have not, I don't wanna use taco because like this is too big of a deal when you talk about destroying civilizations to just say taco. But Trump has been bluffing a lot and they are calling all of his bluffs and it has ended up generally being fine for them. All things considered here. I don't know if we're going to get back to the air campaign or maybe we're gonna use some of the thousands of troops. I mean, we're moving tons of carriers still into the region. Many more soldiers, Marines showing up for this. But are we actually going to do anything using military force to try to properly reopen the strait? That is still on offer, I guess is an opportunity that we could take in all of this. I would love to hear more about that, what that would actually require. I'm not saying ask for our permission, but it feels like we are getting absolutely no updates at this point. The one thing that they did do though, there was a Pentagon briefing from lawmakers and the Washington Post had the exclusive on this, what came out of it, that it could take up to six months to clear all the mines out of the strait. So you're talking about a global oil shock that cannot be reversed when you flip that switch back on. This is gonna take months, if not years to fix. And I'm not even talking about what goes on at our pump. Like Lufthansa is in flying, I'm sure. I know you're in Europe. You're not sad that you're not in Europe anymore, but you know what I mean, you are abroad. So you know about what's going on with the jet fuel concerns. It's a disaster, what's going on here. That was very convoluted, I'm sorry. That's all right. Well, the whole thing is convoluted. I'm having trouble trying to determine who sees what ship, what does it mean. The energy markets will be roiled for years because now priced into these markets are the fact that, you know, not even closing the Strait of Hormuz, but threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz can sequester 11% of the world's oil market, which is just gonna create insecurity around the energy market and also massively benefit China, who has somewhere between 60 and 80% of EV, solar panel windmill production. David Ignatius said something I thought that was really insightful. He said that whether it was the Americans during the Revolutionary War, the Taliban, you know, the IRGC here, essentially all they need to do is survive. They don't have to win. Winning is surviving. So a group of people who are willing to kill 30,000 of their own citizens and quite frankly, just don't have the glass job of America. We talk about losing 14 servicemen, which is a tragedy for them and their families. They're willing to kill 30,000 of their own citizens. Russia's willing to throw 1,000 men a day into a meat grinder. And they have what feels like more of an iron grip on the populace than we had initially anticipated, at least at the outset of this war. So all they need to do to win is to survive. I do believe that blocking the ports in Iran does create a real threat to Iran. And that is probably indicative of what we probably should have continued to do. And that is the way to go after the IRGC is through money. If the IRGC, the way the IRGC maintains control over its population is that there are literally millions of families who are integrated into the economy of the IRGC who control all of the oil and all of the state-run companies. And so if you're dependent upon your livelihood, you're just less likely to riot. And if that money or those checks stop clearing or you can no longer cash a check, that's when people start talking about revolution. And so not enabling or blocking the ability to off-load oil. And the interesting thing I didn't know about oil infrastructure is that if you make it such that the oil has nowhere to go, it can actually queer the oil well. It can basically stop up the oil well and ruin it. I didn't realize that. The oil has to go somewhere. Otherwise the pressure builds up and it can actually reverse engineer back to the, I guess, whatever it is. It's a little use it or lose it. And it's an eight-week time one. Pump it, pump it or lose it. Pump it, distribute it or lose it. And not like that. You also not only lose the oil, you might lose the means of production. It backs up and it explodes. It's very difficult to tell what and where this goes. The market is saying that this is coming to an end. And yet there doesn't appear to be any diplomatic crossover here. There doesn't appear to be any reasonable, like level-headed players, any diplomacy, any of the good work that our diplomats do to try and take the temperature down. The president in a ridiculous statement saying that the seizure of two ships is not a violation of the ceasefire, that's an act of war. It's a total, that's a blatant act of war from one nation to another when you seize vessels in what's supposed to be international waters. So nothing he says has any credibility. The firing of the Navy secretary, who cares? This guy wasn't incompetent. He had almost no authority over. Trump donor, yeah. Yeah, he had almost no authority over how that Navy actually operated other than some logistics and administrative duties. Fine, it does also, sure, it does reflect continued chaos here. But this is, it's getting to the point where it's such a shit show that I worry that Americans in the world are becoming somewhat immune to it or confused or exhausted by it. But it does feel like this is definitely a clown car. The IRGC realizes every day this goes on, they get fatigued. It's like, what is it? Ho Chi Minh said, describing the war, he said, we will kill some of theirs. They will kill a lot of ours. They will tire and they will go home. I mean, that's effectively what's happening here. The IRGC has said, yeah, they can take out a lot of our infrastructure, they can kill a lot of our people, but they're gonna tire and go home. What is a non-zero probability that would be very dramatic and I think is being seriously considered, is Trump loved the Maduro extraction? Yes. And I wonder, I think it would be shocking, but not surprising as is most, as I think is the best way to describe the Trump administration tenure, if they tried to pull off coordinating with Mossad Intelligence an extraction of IRGC leadership, I would be very reticent to try that again, because there's only so many times you get really lucky in that operation while demonstrating incredible military excellence, there had to be a lot of luck involved in that, but I wouldn't be surprised if Trump decides he's gonna pull that off. And then trying to stick your head even further up your ass in create, okay, let's move further and further down the Wearness Channel, he says on Air Force One, Cuba is next. Yeah. Anyways, I'll stop there. Any comments on this before we move on? Well, the Cuba thing's been going on for a couple of weeks and I think that that was the marker of the toddler in chief is bored, right? So now he's gotta talk about something else and also something that I can accomplish much more easily. I think you could be right about wanting to extract some leadership because we know how he loves to have proverbial heads on his wall, but it's all about what is a feasible quick win at this point, because the long game wins, which is why we were told this was actually about, totally dismantling their nuclear program regime change, freeing the people of Iran, making sure that they don't support proxy terror forces in the region. We don't talk about any of that anymore. We talk about the straight of hormones. That's it. The thing that was wide open before all of this happened and that the RRGC was never charging for it, right? It was just a free waterway. And that has become the linchpin of this conflict. And I do think, going back to what I was saying about the bluffing and not taking him seriously, that Trump is now saying there is no timeframe for negotiations. What a gift to the Iranians. What a headache for the Pakistanis that seem to be wanting to actually help a negotiation in some degree of good faith here, because when you live by stringent deadlines at least, you can get people to Islamabad, but Iran is calling the shots on when they even meet, right? They were supposed to go. It was JD Vance was gonna get on the plane and head over there. And then the Iranians weren't going to show up for it. And then of course they made another great AI slop video mocking our side for basically sitting at the table waiting for them to come, because Trump even said he was taking another victory lap. Like, oh, you know, I might go sign the deal, right? I might go over to Islamabad if we're gonna have a deal. And it's the perfect framing for them to be able to say, your narrative is wrong. Your military is more powerful than ours for sure. But we're in control of this thing that you can't live without, the Strait of Hormuz. And you have someone in charge of your country that wants this more than we do at this point. That doesn't go on forever. You're totally right about the oil and needing to pump it. The estimates are that they can go about eight weeks. Is that right? Before having to extract it in some way. And that's a big deal because that's their money. But every time that this gets extended three to five days, maybe there's no limit at all. It's more opportunity to confab with the Russians and the Chinese and figure out how to get out of this without surrendering as much as possible. And there are leaks. I mean, the White House is like a sieve right now. When you read these stories specifically about how much of the ballistic missile capabilities the Iranians still have, 50% plus apparently, they told us it was completely decimated. Big parts of the IRGC Navy is actually still intact. That was not what we were told. This was like four dough back, a last summer complete obliteration. So what are we leaving with them if we get out? And we all agree that that's in our best interest. I'm not saying necessarily in the Chris Murphy sense of like we're gonna pack our toys and go tomorrow, but we all agree like we're not supposed to be there and certainly not at any kind of forever war. So we're just talking about in a couple of years, they're gonna be back to no good potentially. Everything I learned about the oil and gas industry I learned from Landman. And essentially I can tell you. I've heard great things about that show. It's great. It really is great. It's very dangerous. People die. And there's a ton of hot people everywhere. So it's a great series and I really enjoy it. And my favorite is I'm going off script here is Sam Elliott. He's I think he's a fantastic actor, great voice. But anyways, if you want to know more about oil and gas in West Texas, much, watch Landman. All right, let's move on. Okay. Let's take a quick break. Stay with us. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharapova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugar coat something for me. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty Tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Honest to God, like f*** skinny. I want to be jacked. Without context, tone and sculpt are rooted in diet culture. We're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes specifically women feel like they have to shrink in order to expand. And I'm just saying, no, let's just like lift heavy sh** and like take up space. That's the expansion. I'm Rebana Artsun and this week on Project Swagger, I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body, especially after two babies. Listen now at Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Midge First, two-time in the Brazil champion, championship MVP, and forward for the US women's national team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset, and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Spirited Airlines is an advanced stocks to secure a 500 million government back loan from the Trump administration, and a last-ditch effort to avoid collapse after its second bankruptcy in two years. The deal could also give Washington senior claims on the airline's assets, deepening federal involvement and yet another private sector rescue and rising fuel costs and ongoing industry stress. Do you mind if I go first here, Jess? No, I would welcome it. I was gonna say, I wanna hear what you have to say. So bankruptcy is a feature, not a bug in the United States. And one of the great things about America is our risk profile. And that is we encourage people to be aggressive, put capital to a crazy idea, be aggressive, which results in higher returns, but also the risks are substantial. And in the US, we have this wonderful zeitgeist philosophically of second chances that if I had been raised in Europe, I would not be in the position I'm in right now because I've had several businesses fail, but I've always been able, as long as you're a good person and you try hard, you have a very good chance of being able to raise money and hire new people again. I'm not sure that's the same in Europe. I think it's kind of one strike and you're out, or at least that's the way it's been traditionally. The corporate legal embodiment of that is bankruptcy law, where all right, you get out over your skis and your obligations are greater than your assets, you declare bankruptcy, the equity gets wiped out, but the assets are repackaged to new investors. And that's the whole point of capitalism, is that we let businesses go out of business. And when you don't let businesses go out of business, you end up with businesses who do everything they can to stay in business, getting less competitive and making less money. And for some reason we have identified airlines as some sort of precious industry that we should bail out. We did this during COVID, when the CEOs of three airlines took $150 million in additional compensation by using all of their free cashflow when times were good and pre-COVID times to buy back stock, artificially inflating the stock and increasing their compensation. And then when shit gets real and the airline industry shuts down because of COVID, they all decide we're fucking socialists and go running hat and hand to America saying shit, like we're all in this together. Fuck that, burn baby burn. These companies should go out of business. They should be repackaged. They should absolutely rationalize their cost structure, their employee base, sell the planes and the routes and the gates that aren't making any money and emerge as a stronger company. And yet we keep propping up these fucking industries. If you either, if you believe in capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down, that's neither. That's called cronyism. So spirit airlines burn fucking baby burn, go bankrupt and emerge a stronger company. And there are dozens of companies that are much more important, much better companies than spirit who we will let go bankrupt because they're not seen as American icons. The airline industry for some reason garners this affection. No, let it go out of business. Let the vulture investors come in. They serve a purpose. I have taken companies through bankruptcy. I've invested in companies that have gone bankrupt. And it is a really productive system for strengthening and for refurbishing and for rejuvenating and giving companies a second life. When you keep propping up companies that don't deserve to survive, you just create a bunch of zombie companies. This is another example of this cronious, autocratic bullshit turn away from capitalism that is the Republican party. That's my TED talk. I like it. Does this mean though that Donald Trump is like a secret genius for going bankrupt like seven or eight times? Well, no, he didn't wanna go bankrupt but he kept using it as a means to get out of his debts. What it shows is that, I mean, Donald Trump, it's just amazing how he's been able to reinvent his brand. If Donald Trump had taken his inheritance from his father and just invested in an SPY and played golf at the time, he'd be wealthier than he was, with the exception of the crypto fraud he's managed to pull off. So... And we'd be a lot safer. Yeah, he's a terrible business person. I mean, he just does not understand how to build businesses. He's led a trail of bankruptcies and of unpaid subcontractors. In certain instances, his company didn't go chapter 11. Chapter 11 is when you wipe out your equity holders but your debt holders then seize the assets and try and repackage it. And they have license not to pay their bills in the short term. They have license to get out of contracts. So for example, when a retailer goes bankrupt, it's actually great for retailers because they can then go break all their leases and reemerge from bankruptcy with the stores that actually work. So a lot of companies emerge from bankruptcy stronger than they went in. It's a great system. What he did in oftentimes was fuck up a company or a casino so bad that nobody wanted it. It was like, there's nothing here. Let's just put a lock on the door and everyone is told to go home. What was especially gross about his bankruptcies is he knew he was going bankrupt or there were signals and stopped paying its subcontractors. And these people really got, these small and medium-sized businesses really got fucked. But anyways, I just... One of the things about the US is we believe in winners and losers. We need full body contact violence at a corporate level, such as we can great tax revenues, such that we can be a little bit more of an empathetic government to citizens. Corporations are not people. Spirit Airlines, if it goes out of business, it's gonna, no one's gonna cry. There's not gonna be a funeral. And in five years, there's a better chance that it can continue hiring and offering, charging people 25 cents to go to the bathroom, whatever it is they do on Spirit Airlines. That's probably not fair. That's easy jet, isn't it? Anyways, I can't remember. Easy jet, definitely. I remember, it was Ryan Erwin, I lived abroad, that tried out even paying for toilet paper. And I was like, I can't abide by this. I can't do that. You know. But on the spirit front, the descent into state-run capitalism that the Republican Party is just quietly abiding by is really astounding to me. Because this does feel like one of the spots where you could offer a little bit of pushback, right? Like, oh, why does the government own 10% of Intel? I mean, it was my understanding that there was a potential merger on the table with JetBlue for Spirit, and that got vetoed on monopoly grounds. But it seems like a much smaller fish than like Paramount Warner Brothers or other mergers that we've seen go through with much broader implications. Do you think that there will be any level of concerted pushback? I mean, we haven't seen it yet. There's kind of grumblings when people have been catching electeds as they're running around and say, like, what do you think about this? And they're like, I haven't read the details. But they know fundamentally what this is. It's a pattern of behavior. And also, your antenna goes up, that there's gotta be a way that he's going to personally profit off of this. I mean, this man is suing his own IRS, or I should say our own, but he treats everything just like it's his pet toy for like $10 billion. So where is the kickback coming from this? It's gotta be in there somewhere. Yeah, I agree with you. Should we talk about Apple? What do you wanna talk about? Yes, I would love to hear what you think about it. Huge news that Tim Cook is stepping down from Apple. Oh, Tim Cook will go down as the greatest or the most successful successor in history. He didn't have to feel big shoes. He had to feel the Jesus's frock. In the 80s and 90s, in America, we transitioned from the idolatry of athletes and our government leaders and our military heroes to the idolatry of tech innovators and billionaires. And the new Jesus Christ was Steve Jobs. And we just decided that these guys, because to a certain extent, technology is the closest thing we have to magic. Most people just don't understand how their phone works. And then you couple that with billions of dollars in articulate, interesting people and you have your new Jesus Christ. And he was that, despite the fact that he denied his own blood under oath to avoid child support payments. But that's neither here nor there. I didn't know that. But he grew this incredible innovator, grew the company from zero to 300 billion. Okay, Tim Cook, 10 X the company's value. I mean, Tim Cook added more shareholder value than any CEO in history with maybe with the exception of Jensen Huang. On an operational level, it's the boring shit that matters. And he did some incredible things. Again, see above First Ballad Hall of Fame for business. One, he built the most robust commercial supply chain in history. He managed to figure out a way to collapse or combine the advanced manufacturing technology of China with its low labor costs and create a 2000 part supercomputer called the iPhone for $400 in manufacturing costs. Whereas if he'd done it anywhere else in the West, it would have cost $2,000 or $3,000. And then the iPhone itself is the most successful single product in history as indicated by products are usually one of two things. They're either very differentiated in high margin, Ferrari or Hermes, or they're lower margin and lower costs and get huge shares. See above Toyota. The iPhone is effectively the margins of Ferrari with the production volumes of Toyota. And it's the most profitable producer of gross margin dollars of any product in history. And people criticized him Cook for not being an innovator around new products, but one, they leave out what is my favorite tech product in history, the AirPods, which on their own would be a Fortune 50 company. And rather than coming up with new gizmos and new devices, he said, I'm gonna take this thing called the iPhone and basically turn it into a supercomputer. We can pay from it, listen to music, consume media and sustain the margins on the best product ever. This guy, I mean, quiet, I think he handled himself a lot of grace, built a great team. There was never any shitposting or secret memos or people going on background. A great culture hired over a hundred thousand people during his tenure. Average compensation of an Apple employee in the US is $210,000, outsource the manufacturing to China. Nobody in the US wants to manufacture screwing iPhones. So Tim Cook, I mean, my God, this guy can ring the bell of success the size of Sistine Chapel or wherever they have a really big fucking bell. This guy from a business standpoint, just incredible. Also another gangster move while Jobs came up with the idea but Cook executed was he saw that the decline in broadcast media as it related to pre-purchase branding, they were spending billions. He transitioned seven and a half billion dollars a year out of pre-purchased advertising into distribution and built these 450 temples to the brand called Apple Stores. Think of another distribution vehicle that is a fraction of the aspirational value of an Apple store. Go into a Verizon, go into an AT&T store, go into a Samsung store and you're gonna see a guy with a name tag named Roy in bad lighting and bad carpeting. And then you go into an Apple store and you think I would really like to live here. If Apple opened a coffee bar and it stores, it would be the highest growing real estate. But here's the thing, Apple stores are already the highest grossing per square foot real estate having surpassed Tiffany in the odds. Distribution, incredible products, a great culture and 10X on shareholder value, most successful successor in history. Awesome. And what do you think about Ternus, the new guy? I don't know a bunch about him, but the thing it sounds really compelling about him and they're already manicuring his image is that he's the kind of guy who builds go-karts. He's a product guy, which is interesting. The services business, which grew to over $100 billion, there was rumors that they were gonna bring someone out of the services business, iTunes or Apple TV Plus, but he's clearly a product guy. And I think they've decided that hardware is our soul and is at the base of what we do. But for all intents and purposes, he started in the face recognition area. He immediately rose as a product manager and engineer that people just really enjoyed working with. He had huge internal support. So it seems like a great choice. And also kudos to Tim Cook. I always like to reverse engineer this to a personal learning. It's so much better to leave a little bit early than a little bit late. You know, Tim Cook could go another five years as CEO and the board would have no choice and embrace him and say, Jesus, this guy's a God. Of course, you can stay as long as you need to or want to. Instead, he's leaving a little early. And that's a lesson for all of us. There's a dignity in exiting stage left when the audience is still clapping. And it was just a historic run. Yeah, make them miss you. And we are discussing this the day after another Democratic congressperson died in office, Representative David Scott of Georgia, 80 years old. There had been pushes to get him to retire. Now I think the fourth Democrat that's died in office since the onset of the second Trump term and is unacceptable. You know, I mean, I feel terrible. I should have led with that. I feel terrible that somebody passed away. But also you don't need to be in office at 80 years old like that, pave the way for the new generation. People need to leave their jobs. Well, that's one way to leave feet first. Yeah, I didn't, maybe that was like a cruel thing to say about it, but it was on my mind from last night. And anyway, before we go, a reminder that Raging Moderates is now on sub-stack. Subscribers get ad-free episodes. I have a lot of friends that are doing this now. They are thrilled about the lack of ads. It's a great place to connect with me and Scott and the whole ProfG community. Our newsletter is there. It's called the Monday Rage. I think it's really good. We've gotten good feedback. I hope you guys like it. If you're over there, if not, sign up on sub-stack. Plus we're gonna be doing some more live streams that'll only be viewable to our sub-stack subscribers. Find us at RagingModerates.Profgmedia.com. That's all for this episode. Thank you so much for joining us today. Great, let's leave it there. See you soon.
