Not being led by the trump trades but led by things like technology, which quite frankly you could even look at some of these names as antitrump trades. These are the companies that require Foreign Workers in large numbers in order to fill engineering and programming jobs. These are companies that maybe didnt get off on the right foot are mr. Trump. The Leadership Teams at these firms were in fact opposed to him prior to the election. So these are leaders it shows what you can do with narratives. You can toss them out and focus on trend. Theres a lot of momentum here. One of the more interesting aspects to the Software Names running, scott, we talk about semis all the time. Software companies, big ones, transitioned to subscription model. Adobe is the latest example to have just absolutely ripped the cover off the ball going from selling a piece of software to bringing in licensing fees on an ongoing basis and firms that have done that are being rewarded a higher multiple on the street. Thats important to keep in mind. Banks are doing well. If theyre not carrying the water anymore for the entire sector, apple, chips, you go down the list. The smh is up 11 yeartodate. Im not so sure its the antitrump trade because what happens is when the economy moves or improves, you hire more people. They need more i. T. So they need more chips. They need more computers. If the consumer is doing better, theyre going to buy more technolo technology. I dont think trump drove it. I think theres a way that its helped with the market moving higher. So, look, its still stock selection. Subscription models are perfect. Theyre great because adobe did a major job there. Adobe up 25 yeartodate. There are going to be winners and losers. You have to be careful. It feels good. An area that leads the market. Volatility in the sector so that brings in a lot of traders and hedge funds and im sure erin has visibility in that sector and what theyre doing. I like it. I stuck with the same names. Apple has been a favorite of mine for the last month. For the last two weeks maybe. Apple breaking out to a new high so ill be there for a while. New high google and facebook today and for amazon last seven days the stock has been hanging in there within 1 of its alltime high. Its oilecoiled. Netflix is great. Great story still. I think this is part of a structural trend where you see peoplear to Online Retail and online space. This a sector that has growth and thats why people are buying it. People i dont think fully bought into the trump trade yet. I think that josh is right in that where people are experiencing growth right now is in the tech sector. Thats why it will continue to run. Bring in a guy who knows a thing or two about technology and all things tech. Ross is with us now. We call him a tech insider. Former interim ceo at yahoo and a number of other things on his plate as well. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming in here. Are you surprised at how well some of these Technology Stocks have done this year . No. Not at all. You look at massive consumer shifts and where people are spending their time. Think about how you make money with that through advertising and now through subscriptions and skinny bundles over the top for Media Companies and tech companies, thats the future. We had a huge move with snap coming out on nyse and big moment and we can talk about that as well. I would like to talk about that. What is your view of a stock thats really gotten the haters going crazy on wall street over it, most but not all. Whats your view . Unfair. Flawless execution when they came out. Great moment for nyse to come out and get a big name like this reemerges in tech. Facebook wobbled after it came out. Im not talking about the ip. Im saying the business went up. The stock started trading down until they came out with a role mobile strategy, which good on them for doing it. The thing that strikes me about snap aside from the massive engagement from young people, right, and i have a 14yearold daughter who lives on it, and it was instagram two years ago. Now shes on snapchat. You would say whats two years from now . Heres the one statistic that i saw that really interests me. Snapchat has about 31 of social media users. And about 2 of the ad dollars. If we think back to mary who gives her state of the state presentation, theres always been that one slide that says Internet Usage is here. Ad dollars are here. And now its mobile. Mobile usage is here. Ad dollars are here. Heres snapchat. Usage here. Ad dollars here. Fill that gap. My guess is facebook right now is 16 billion projected in display ads this year. So if snapchat projected to do a billion dollars this year, 970 was just dropped by 30 million. That variance, the ability for them to make money there in usage is monstrous. How does that differ from twitter when twitter you had a up year and down year. Lets not forget twitter came out. Stock went way up. Lots of optimism. Look back now a couple years later and say ten quarters of no growth, quarter to quarter no growth. Growing the macro number. No growth quarter to quarter. Thats years and years after the ipo. Heres the next one. Great engagement from snapchat. Huge runway in the display. Display is all they got right now. Camera company, glass company, whatever. Its a display business right now. There are two leaders in the display business. Facebook continues to just kill it in the display business. Theyre going to be 16 billion this year. Google is number two. And then you got yahoo aol 2. 6 billion. Display. Not talking macro market. You have twitter. Flat at 2. 6 billion. Heres snapchat from nowhere two years ago to a billion dollars. So when i scroll through instagram, i come across an ad for the shoes which did a better job than any other company i would think of with advertisement and instagram crushing it. I can click it. I can get taken to a page. Im not sure if its still host with instagram but i can do a transaction. The mechanism on snap right now is not allowing for me to get to a website, me to click, me to buy something. Im sure thats something theyre hard at work on. What if it doesnt work . Im not buying things off twitter to this day. Stock will go down and company will suffer. Instagram did nothing for years. I think the execution theyve come out with is terrific. They took their time. Nobody beat them up over when are you going to make money. I do remember when facebook bought them, a billion dollars for that business, are you kidding me . Its a picture company. Biggest picture company already. What do you need them for . They had that luxury. I dont know that snap does. I agree with that. My own recommendation is take a deep breath. Congratulate evan and team on an amazing job. And im going to be bias here. Okay. I think naturally as former new jersey guy but now an l. A. Guy, l. A. Gets beat up all the time because Silicon Valley couldnt believe there could be a company in los angeles that works in the tech world. Give them a lot of credit for doing it. Take a breath. Look at that statistic. You tell me, can you close that gap from users, the amount of engagement on that platform to ad dollars . Now, they have to dont know if they can. They hired jeff lucas. A real pro to run ad sales. Give them a little bit of time. To me, if i were an investor, steve burke, who runs the network, they made 5 Million Investment at ipo with a year lockup on it or something. This is a longterm trade. I would like to come back here a year from now and say how did they do . Did they close that gap . Get advertisers to embrace them . If they havent, theyll suffer a nasty fate. Give them credit. Let them take a breath. Will advertisers give them both the credit and the time because obviously all of the folks that we listen to, ross, that are talking about where they put their ad dollars as you just did, theyre putting them in facebook. Theyre putting them in google. Are they going to put them into snap . 100 . They will and even though demographic is so young. Customer patterns are established when theyre pre18. Do they continue to use it . Youve seen them drop off. And millennials brand loyalty is much less than prior generations but at the same time this is the one chance that you got as an advertiser to adopt new millennials and new user base. The cautionary to sell them what though . To sell them the wool and shoes. You cant reach my daughter and all of her friends not on tv. You cannot reach them doctor. Theyre on tablets and phones. Unless you are where they are. Thats a really important market. Shes on netflix. She watches netflix. She doesnt watch Network Television as we grew up to know it. She is on snapchat 72 times a day. That can change. For sure. Because already theyre now on house party and now theyre on a new platform every month i have to go in and check parental groe controls on and kids are 11 and discovering like this. Not just execution on the ad side. How cool could snap be if im on there first of all . Youve heard the story. Nobody cool is on facebook anymore. Its the joke. Ive said it many times. Except everyone. Yahoo is dead except for 800 Million People that are on it. So give snap a minute. Lets see how they execute. Thats the key. Will evan bring in give them time to bring ad sales in. Give them time just not while you hold the stock. If its 160 a share a year from now, i wouldnt be surprised. If its 5 a share a year from now, i would be surprise esurpr. Where does all this leave twitter and maybe some of the criticism or the negativity around snap is just because theres this overhang of the last session media giant to go public and now look at whats happened with twitter . Gasping for air. Give them credit. Again, they built it from nowhere. They got a single product. I think the hope with jack coming in was were going to reinvent the product and reimagine it. Theyve done some good things. I said it here three times. Pick a company you want to run. Hes an amazingly brilliant guy. I just dont think you can run two companies. You know, theyve had some real talent loss. Adam left. To me that was a significant loss. They lost some product people. Its still a big company. 2. 3 billion maybe in that range of revenue. Its just not growing. You know, snapchat is the new shiny object in the room. You think somebody ultimately takes twitter out . Yes. I said it last time i was here. For sure. Its still a high engagement platform thanks to our new president he makes it more and more relevant. Hes done two great things. Made twitter more relevant and provided an incredible boost to the newspaper industry. Its now more important than ever for quality journalism. The l. A. Times the only paper that got the election right, the polls right, done great job covering him. He would tell you critically the New York Times reinvigorated and the Washington Post skyrocketing. The importance of quality journalism and facts, more important now than ever. Hes reinvig vorated the print business and twitter somewhere you need to go to see him. Since were on that topic, you are a board member of tribune. Reports that sinclair approached tribune about doing a deal. I think we can say thats a fact and thats true . Its been reported. I dont want to end up in jail or the s. E. C. Calling me. Its reported that happened. Ill say this as a board member. The company got really focused over the last year. Peter peter got the business focused on what its core is. We disposed, sold gracenote to nielsen. Its now a true local television station business with wgn america. Now peter is interim ceo focused on really operating this business well in a moment where all of the rumors and everything i read in the press and on twitter is that the fcc is going to loosen the laws for station ownership, which would be probusiness and something that fits within the trump narrative. If that happens, i think local television station businesses probably get more valuable and theres probably more consolidation. Can you address whether you and the board are open to a transaction of any kind . I think the reports out there that there are people interested in the business are accurate. I think there have always been people interested in the tribune business since ive been a board member which is now four years. We periodically get people coming in. I know jeff smith from the yahoo experience. A serious man. He invests in things he thinks has growth potential. I think its a solid business. Its been fun to sit on that board. If someone wants to buy that business, first of all, its up to the government whether theyll allow it because there are still rules today. But i think those businesses get more and more valuable. This is a perfect conversation for a theme that we have networkwide today which is deregulation nation. And that is the prospects of dereg of a wide swath of industry. We wouldnt even be having this conversation if there werent expectations that trump is going to, the president , is going to deregulate everything under the sun. Correct. Clearly thats the pattern thats emerging. That said, i think weve seen in the first six, seven weeks of the presidency what happens today might not be the same that happens tomorrow. So it looks that way. The new fcc commissioner has said so in so many words that hes looking at some deregulation. If that happens, i think it opens up a whole not just local television. Net neutrality. Everything. Look, lets take 50,000foot view of the Media Business. Massive Tipping Point for the Media Business right now. If we had all sat here a couple years ago and said the people who are going to disrupt the Media Business are going to be technology companies, you would say they dont know anything about making content. Low and behold net flicflix ove last four years, 150 awards from emmys and sag and golden globes. They won 150 awards. They didnt exist five years ago. Amazon, three Academy Awards this year. Amazon. Isnt that a Commerce Company . The whole world is being disrupted. The thing that really struck me thats part and parcel to netflix hold your thought for a second. I want to take you to the white house where the president of the United States is meeting with the german chancellor Angela Merkel. Theyre going to have a News Conference a little bit later. Were having a technical issue with the video. It is certainly an important meeting today. Its Angela Merkels first visit to the white house. Shell have a joint News Conference with President Trump in about one hours time. Eamon javers is there. This is an important meeting. Trade, immigration, perhaps russias relationship in the world including of course with germany. Thats right. Ill tell you what. Give you a sense of just how important this meeting is. I interviewed the irish Prime Minister earlier this week. He said that he and Angela Merkel had actually talked by phone to sort of compare notes about their meeting with donald trump. He said that she had called him to just gauge his temperature on this because theyre both meeting with the president in the same week, and theyve both been political opponents of the president. Much to watch when we see the press conference with two leaders talking to german press here at the white house and American Press in terms of the body language, words that they use. This is a president who on the campaign trail was harshly critical of Angela Merkel. Well see if he continues with that kind of language today and see what her response is. Shes more of an internationalist type figure. Shes obviously proimmigration in her home country of germany. This president campaigned on America First and clamping down on immigration here in the United States. So many differences between these two leaders. Well see if they can smooth that over and there you see the pictures of the two leaders sitting there in the white house. This is just a few moments ago. Lets listen into the president. How did your talks go, mr. President . Very good. Many things. Short and sweet with the german chancellor. They wont front run their own News Conference coming up in almost one hour. We can always ask though. You got to ask. You never know. Good to see you. Well be back to eamon javers as necessary as we build up to that big news event a little bit later on this afternoon. Lets get back to our conversation with ross. As we were saying, let me just ask one more thing. Have you personally had conversations since jeff smith unveiled this stake . With who . Jeff smith . No. Do you anticipate that you would . No. Why not . Not appropriate for me. Theres a board. There are committees within the board. Thats not for an individual board member to have a conversation. I dont mean it so you have this individual conversation with him. The board. Has the board engaged with him at this point . Yes. The board has responded, but thats all public filing notices. Nothing out of the ordinary. Okay. I didnt mean to suggest that you were get me in trouble. Youre a troublemaker. I can be from time to time. Ive been known to be. Lets talk netflix. Weve made it our call the day today because bernstein initiated that stock as outperform. They have a headline that says either you believe or you dont. We do. Youve been a big believer. Are you still . Cautious. Since the last time we chatted about netflix, so much has happened. And i start to see buckets of things. Okay. So bucket number one is i now think of netflix as i think of hbo. I think thats the comp for netflix. Do you like hbo . I love hbo. They buy movies. Netflix buys movies. They have tv shows. They make originals. High quality stuff. I think thats a bucket. Are those the two guys that survive . Yes, i like it. Is there massive growth for that . Not sure. Why . Well, i start with wheres ap e apple. What is apple going to do . Nobody is talking about apple. Its a massive platform. Most important platform for content creators. They talk about apple tv. Is it a series of apps that sit on something . Do they start making their own . Jimmy is rumored to make quality content. There