TBPN Live - NYSE Gigastream, Jim Cramer Joins, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Eric Glyman, John Zito, Katie Deighton

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

(01:40) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (34:00) - Jim Cramer is the host of CNBC’s Mad Money and co-founder of TheStreet. A former hedge fund manager, he became one of the most recognizable financial commentators in the U.S., known for his energetic style and market analysis. Cramer continues to cover stocks, investing trends, and business news across television and digital platforms. (01:13:50) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:15:58) - Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a leading finance automation platform, discusses the company's strategic decision to establish its headquarters in New York City, emphasizing the city's unique entrepreneurial spirit and talent pool. He contrasts this with the West Coast's corporate culture, highlighting New York's supportive environment for startups. Glyman also shares insights into Ramp's hiring philosophy, focusing on identifying individuals with high potential and providing them with significant responsibilities to foster rapid growth and development. (01:31:39) - John Zito, Co-President of Apollo Asset Management and Head of Credit, discusses Apollo's role as a leading alternative asset manager with over $900 billion in assets, emphasizing its significant presence in private credit and its ability to provide long-term financing solutions for large-scale projects. He highlights the firm's integrated approach to investment, offering tailored capital solutions across the capital structure, and underscores the importance of building a strong organizational culture by recruiting individuals with purpose and high character. Zito also touches on the evolving landscape of private credit, noting its growing role in financing asset-heavy industries like AI and defense, and the necessity for companies to adapt to this shift by partnering with trusted capital providers. (01:53:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:55:07) - Katie Deighton is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering topics related to brands, marketing, advertising, and media. In the conversation, she discusses the challenges brands face in navigating crises amplified by the internet, the shift towards owning their narratives through platforms like Substack and YouTube, and the potential impact of AI on consumer perceptions and advertising strategies. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.com/fal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. I think we nailed that. It is Thursday, December 4th, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange. Here we are. The Real Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Our second favorite place to do business. Yes, and we have some fantastic news.

We have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. Announcing today, hopefully you've seen it on the timeline. We have a post here from Lynn Martin, President of the New York Stock Exchange. Living Legend. She says a really bright spot for 2025 has been getting to know these. has been getting to know these guys. That's us. That's us. We're proud to announce today that the New York Stock Exchange is TBPN's exclusive exchange partner covering the IPOs of tomorrow.

We are proud to provide the backdrop for their coverage of the next wave of tech-driven innovation with Jordy Hayes and John Coogan and the entire team of TBPN. This partnership underscores our commitment to providing the premier platform for companies that shape our future. Well said to Lynn. Lynn will be joining in just a little bit. And, yeah, this partnership was probably the most natural. It made match made in heaven. Match made in heaven, truly, not just saying that. We got together for the first time for the Figma IPO, got to come back for the Klarna IPO,

two of the more memorable moments from this year. And Lynn and the whole team here are just fantastic. So this will be our home when we are on the East Coast. We love it here. And we have a super fun show today. We do. We do need to tell you about our sponsors, Ramp. Time is money, say both.

These are used corporate cards, bill pay accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. That's right. There is some news on the timeline. Should we start with Gemini? Yes. And so Ross Hendricks says this is the correct take. He's talking about Gemini winning the AI race and questioning, is it bearish for the market as a whole if you think about it, which is what efficient market hype said.

Gemini winning the AI race is like super bearers for the market if you think about it. And he says, Gemini winning ensures zero profitability for any other LLM model. Google will force any other player into an endless sea of red ink by keeping its model free until they bleed out. And then it will monetize once its monopoly is secured. That means ain't no one making money on data center capax. Oops. What do you think? Hot take.

I think it's thought-provoking. I disagree with a lot of it. Yes. I think it's very real in some sense that we always knew that Google would put an incredible amount of pricing pressure on OpenAI. They have the cash flow. Again, even in the areas that Open AI also wants to compete, consumer electronics, science, I'm sure, chips, obviously. So all these areas that not even core to Open AI's business today, Google's already been investing billions and billions and billions of dollars in these categories for a long time. overall this

I'm not convinced that there will be a monopoly in LLMs it feels today like we're headed towards like a duopoly at the very least and you can just easily see that there will be a number of other players making plenty of money I feel very I feel very good about Anthropic right now right Anthropic I thought Dario's

commentary yesterday at Deal Book Summit was fantastic was, it was a wild, it was a wild interview because he kept saying like, I'm not going to say who I'm talking about. It was really wild. And then, of course, he was, obviously talking about, he had some crazy lines. Didn't he say, he was saying that, basically saying he felt like he literally said the word yolo. Oh, really? Yeah. I miss that.

But it's very clear that he grew up like just maybe blocks away from Alex Carp because they have the exact same accent. And it's very jarring when you listen to it because they both talk about AI. But they're very different people in terms of like the ideologies, the types of businesses that they're building. Everything about it is different except for they sound similar. So we've got to put them together at some point. I do have an overall rebuttal, which is my end my rebuttal is brought to you by Vantta. Automate compliance and security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitor and security reviews.

So this, my rebuttal to Ross Hendricks here is that Google likes good margin. They grew up with the best margins. It's in their culture that they had 80% margins. And then also, there's this constant thing when you're a public company that even if there's the new exciting thing, like there's a little bit of like the innovator's dilemma, there's the new exciting technology. But if it's not going to monetize as well on day one, then all of your investors, all the public market investors start asking, like, is this going to structurally hurt your business? And this happened with reels. Remember, there was this big question with Instagram, like, hey, we're moving from the, you know, the image-based feed where it's very clear that you can just drop a link to the next thing to reels. Is that going to monetize as well as the rest of the feed? And the answer was yes, definitely, but it took a while. And there was like some skittishness there and meta had to do a lot of work to monetize that. And so I would be surprised if Gemini can hold out on not monetize. forever for like well they are monetizing that's a point yeah like the

pricing the pricing at least from a consumer standpoint is very similar both Gemini and open AI offers free student plans or at least a year free but they're charging for the product yeah and it's and it's you know it's comparable pricing now obviously Gemini has some cost benefits on the API side but again certainly not giving it away yet they did have an interesting announcement yesterday they they introduced workspace studio where you can build custom AI agent in minutes to delegate the daily grind, automate daily tasks and focus on the work that matters.

That's their writing. So this will integrate with G Suite effectively. So it's like notify me about emails that you're determining are urgent, right? And so I'm interested to see. Tom, Osmond here is excited about it. He says Google decided to go absolutely ham with the product velocity. This seems like it lets you build AI agents and automations onto your Google Suite. actually love this. We'll be interesting to see. I'm sure we'll get a lot of threads of people

explaining how they're using it. We'll be interesting to see how people wind up using it. Of course, as always, our stream is brought to you by re-stream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. Lisa Sue gave her opinion on the Google TPU. She broke her silence. She broke her silence. She responded. She fires back. Shots fired. She said the UBS conference and she says, Google has done a good job with the TPU architecture over the years, but it's a more purpose-built design. It lacks the programmability, model flexibility, and balanced training and inference capabilities that GPUs offer. GPUs combine.

Very similar to Jensen's line as well. I mean, it's not wrong. Or the NVIDIA Newsroom line. Yeah. I mean, I guess the question is, you know, Ilya seems to be at SSI, Ilya said it's career at SSI, seems to be the, most age of research pilled since he coined that phrase and kind of ushered in the age of research.

He seems to be the AI researcher that's doing the most undirected, the most, like, the least purpose built training potentially. We don't know what he's doing, but like you would think he would need the most flexible systems. And yet it feels like he's maybe aligned with TPU. I feel like I saw

something about that. So I don't know when an AI researcher would say, yes, I need GPUs over TPU. In fact, when we talked about the Traneum chip yesterday, we were reading that there's some companies that are doing interesting things on that architecture. So it's something that, like, she has to say, but now the question is, like, she has to go prove it with some big clouds actually building on this. And maybe she needs, like, a big hero training run from someone to stay, like, hey, it worked, we did it. Who could that be?

I don't know. Maybe Open AI. Maybe. One of the new largest shareholders. Or potentially a large shareholder. So Lisa goes on to say, from our perspective, there is room for all types of accelerators. However, over the next five years, GPU should remain the clear majority of the market because we are still early in the cycle. And I agree with this because even if you look at like AI workloads at a place like meta, Gen AI, like actual LLM inference, large language models, these large transformer-based models, things that might benefit from an ASIC like the TP.

That's like less than 20% of compute spend, I'm pretty sure. There's just a ton of just recommending content. Put the ads in the chat. Just put the ads in the feed. In the feed. Put the ads in the trough. And that obviously does use AI. It just doesn't use large language models.

They're maybe not transformer base. Or maybe they don't benefit from the acceleration that comes from going to an ASIC necessarily. So she says software developers want flexibility to experiment with new algorithms. that certainly sounds reasonable. You can't, you simply cannot know ahead of time what to hard code into an ASIC. That is the difference. Well, I mean, if you're Google, you kind of can

since you invented the transformer, you're like, let's make that in. They might need to create the copium chip. And remember, Nvidia, so Nvidia on November 25th said, people are very concerned by this post. NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions.

And so, again, that's a fair point of view, but I think that we're already seeing that plenty of players are happy to buy a chip that is good at a specific framework or function, right? And so they're pitching the one-size-fits-all, the toolbox, basically, that you get in a Nvidia GPU or an AMD chip. Well, if you don't want to worry about what chip your AI analyst is running on, go over to Julius.ai, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data.

Ask questions and get insights in seconds. Lisa ended by saying, so a 20 to 25% share for A6-style accelerator seems reasonable. It is also important to recognize that this is a large and expanding market, and we will see strong innovation in both silicon and software, which we will drive further differentiation across the industry. The other interesting thing is like, you mentioned open AI, but like, there's not. nothing stopping AMD from doing something that looks like a TPU for a foundation model company. And going to them and saying, like, hey, give us, if something is slowing you down by 1%, and you're about to buy 100,000 of these, like, can we just fix that for you? And everyone else kind of has to deal with it?

Like, there's a whole bunch of places where it would just make sense to actually change the chip. That's the dawn of the whole, the whole Nvidia AI stack. Like, they made, they used to be a similar architecture between the gaming chips and the AI chips. They eventually, like, kind of forked that. Yeah. Because they decided that even though they're both like GPUs, there are now different GPUs for different purposes from one company. And AMD, of course, will be responsive to that. So, what else we got?

Meanwhile, Demis is moving on to the next paradigm. He is, according to Peter over at Alam Arena, Demis and the DeepMind team are hiring a research. scientist for post-AGI research. This is what we were asking for. We were saying, we were saying, you know, there's a whole bunch of AI researchers. Then there were AI, AGI researchers. Then Zuck came in over the top, said, we don't care about AGI. We're going straight shot super intelligence researchers.

You've got to be a super intelligence researcher to work here. SSI says we've got to be a safe super intelligence researcher. And now post-AGI research. So is this him trying to bait agents, like AI research agents that are that are, like, of the future, right? So everybody's like, everybody's kind of banking on creating an AI that's really good at AI research. And so maybe Demis is trying, maybe Demis believes there's one out there.

He's trying to beat them in. Yeah. And because one of these agents might be like, I am in the post-AGI era. I am AGI. You get a time traveler scenario? What do you say? No, no, no. Like, you know, who knows?

Maybe there's, maybe there's one of these incredible research agents among us, right? And he's trying to bait them in and say, hey, come over to DeepMind. I don't know who, it doesn't matter where you were created, you're welcome here in the post-AGI era. I just like the idea that, you know, we initially were joking about, like, the media landscape being like the punk landscape. You have like pop punk, post-pop-prong, trad, punk, or underground, neo-punk, or new metal, all these different, you know, musical subgenres. All of that has come to AI fully. There is AI, AGI, ASI, safe superintelligence, post-AGI research now, post-Neo AGII will be next, I'm sure. But until then, until then, go check out Cognition.

The team behind the AI software engineer, Devon, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So, there's been back and forth on whether or not Open AI is rolling out. Ads in ChatGPT, the most recent reporting out of the Code Red memo, meeting, et cetera, was that they were potentially pulling back a little bit on ads. There was a bunch of different accounts, including Pauly Market, that we're sharing, that Open AIs ready to roll out ads. One thing that was notable was that I saw a ton of people dunking on it being like just very against ads in L.A. So a lot of people, and you were talking about this, who's going to be the first?

Eric Seufford, Ben Thompson, we're holding up the wall be. Like, we will stand with you, Sam Alman in Fiji, Simo. If you roll... And Sundar, and Sundar. And Sundar, we are your strongest soldiers. We will support you if you roll out of ads. So in some way, in some way, opening eyes should want Gemini to go first. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

To take the first leap. Yeah. But I think that it's very possible that Google might be like, no, we'll let you do the honors. We'll let you do the honor. Exactly. Exactly. I think we were talking about that yesterday. The, the first ad in the chat, in the chat app is going to be screenshoted and

shared around the world. Like, it's just going to be the case. So it's going to be wild. But what a signal say here? He says, one last thing on ads. If I'm Google, I wouldn't run a single ad on Gemini core. I'd run it at a pure loss until every competitor is forced to slap ads everywhere just to keep the lights on. Yeah, it's the bleed-ed-out strategy. But Google had the opportunity to do that with, they could have gotten into a price war on cloud. They could have said, hey, we want to come in, you know, and we're going to take zero margins on this and really try and take market share from AWS and Azure. They've all agreed no price wars basically. Let's compete on functionality. Let's compete on branding. Let's compete on

integration. They have not had a price work. And Google doesn't have to spend nearly as much time building any ad. They have the ad infrastructure, right? They have AdSense. They have thousands of people out there already that just sell ads that work with. So they have all the customer relationships. There's very few businesses on earth that spend money on advertising and don't spend money with Google. Well, speaking of ads, here's an ad for Adio, the AI Native CRM. Adio, build, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And also on the chat GPT ads topic, Sean Frank says that a chat GPT referred session to his site, ridge.com, converts at 12% and is worth $5 per visitor, the highest I've ever seen. For context, there's plenty of

e-commerce brands who have like a 1.2% conversion rate. Yes. And they're trying to to improve it by, you know, they're constantly trying to improve that, but there's very notable that it's such a massive difference in conversion rate. It just shows the level of intent that somebody has when they're coming from ChadGBT. They've done a bunch of product research, most likely. They've looked at options. They're landing on the ridge site, like basically ready to pull out a wallet and a wallet and a digital wallet and purchase.

Pull out a credit card from a loose first. a loose collection of receipts and cards and cash that they've been carrying in their pockets because they don't have one. That's what's going to end. Joe Wisenthal, brother Joe, Sir Joe, Wisenthold. Congratulations to him. It was the 10-year anniversary party last night, I believe. We just missed it. Overnight success, yeah. Joe has a chart. He says wild chart from Jim Rita at Deutsche Bank showing just showing how much open AI is expected to burn before turning a profit. A couple things stand out. How small the Amazon burn really was for its first eight years.

how big the Uber burn was before ultimately getting into black and so it's hard to see the exact numbers here in this chart. Amazon looks to be like sub a few billion dollars, sub five billion dollars. Spotify actually... The real story with Amazon though was that

they were just basically cash flow zero for a long time when they could have been in January 10 billion or something like that. So it was effective, but I mean that's obviously way better for shareholders than maybe we're going to lose 140 billion. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. this projection is factoring in Sam trying to also build SpaceX within OpenAI.

Yes, that was in the business and finance section. In the journal today. Why don't you read through it? So this is a scoop from Berber Jin, one of the greatest to ever scoop. It says Open AI CEO considers building or partnering with rocket company. Open AI chief executive Sam Altman has explored putting together funds to either acquire or partner with a rocket company, a move that would position him to compete against. to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Altman reached out to at least one, another front, invading Russia

in the winter, one might say, in the AI winter. Don't invade, don't invade, what is it, star base during the AI winter. He reached out to at least one rocket maker Stoke space in the summer, and discussions picked up in the fall, according to people familiar with the talks, among the proposals, was for Open AI to make a series of executive. investments in the company and end up with a controlling stake, such an investment would total billions of dollars over time. The talks are no longer active, but this happens, so now it's leaking. Altman and Open AI are facing market headwinds after striking hundreds of billions of

dollars of deals. So first, to close out the burn thing, when I'm looking at this original chart of like Amazon over eight years burnt half a billion or, you know, a couple billion, then Tesla burnt more, then Uber burned more. Like, and I see Open AI burning way more. It is striking, but it actually doesn't seem that crazy if we're talking about a potential really powerful monopoly, right? If there's a really powerful monopoly, like what happened with Uber, look at the market

cap of Uber, look at the market cap of Lyft, and ask yourself, was it worth investing $40 billion? Was it worth burning that? Everyone will say, absolutely, absolutely. And so if the outcome at the end of this is, yeah, It's going to be the front door to AI for everyone, forever, or for 30 years, you know, or something like that. Like, then it's totally worth it. On the, there is a, there is a comment here that that's from Fajju, that says, I feel like comparing dollars spent in the 90s versus the 2020s should probably be normalized.

So, yeah. In other news, I have more on this potentially, but let me tell you about public.com investing for those to take it seriously. they got multi-asset investing industry in yields and they're trusted by millions. So they are opening up a second front. What's interesting is... Not a second front. A 10th front. It's funny that there's no...

that Sam Altman is not teaming up with Jeff Bezos, who has Blue Origin, but lacks a really strong AI bet. There was a little bit of anthropics going on. He has his own company now. He has his own company, yes. But he's not, I would not say that Jeff Bezos has as much control over AI as Elon does with XAI, right? He doesn't have as much of- He's a co-CEO of Project Hermetius. But this just started.

This just started. Whereas X-AI has actually scaled, has large data centers. Sure, they might be a little bit behind on certain benchmarks. They might be ahead on some other things. They might need to, you know, actually ramp the usage of this product. But you can't say that Elon is like sitting on the sidelines during the. foundation model wars. Yeah.

You basically can't say that about Bezos, right? I would argue that. They have $6 billion of funding. Oh, for this? Yeah. Yeah. It helps when your co-ceo is started Amazon. I don't know.

I would just, I would see them as potentially like natural, there's a natural alliance there. Bezos has a copy of everything Elon's done, basically. Like, Bezos has Rivian to compete with Tesla, which is interesting. He's not the founder of it, but he's invested. He has Blue Origin, obviously, to compete with SpaceX, and he has a number of other companies that feel like they mirror Elon, and it feels like they've been going back and forth for a long time. In other news, Met's owner, Steve Cohen, has officially been awarded a casino license in New York, enabling him to build an $8 billion hotel and casino complex next to City Field. That's a thousand-room luxury hotel, 5,000 slot machines. So for those not familiar...

So slot machines, you can't normally do that in New York, right? I don't think there's slots in New York. I feel like when I think of slot machines, I think of Las Vegas, and I think if that's the only place. And then maybe Atlantic City. Yeah. Atlantic City, I feel like. You had an idea, which was to somebody to set up a slot machine in real life, point a video camera on it, and then have somebody set up prediction markets to predict what happens with the next poll.

Yes, because that would help you understand what's likely to happen. And you could hedge any type of risk that the slot machine might be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, if you're in the slot, if you're in the slot, you know. Yeah, you don't want to be on the other side of that slot machine, too? Yeah, that could, you get wiped out. Exactly. It's going to have restaurant bars and a theater for shows and 25 acres of public parks and playgrounds.

Okay. So fun for the whole, fun for the whole family. The kids will be climbing on the jungle gym and they'll accidentally be pulling all, imagine a jungle gym. It practices of the three-old bandits, so you get used to the muscle memory. Throwing dice. Yes, yes, yes. Comic, maybe like comically large cards that you can play. That's true. That's true.

Yeah, we can make a whole casino-themed playground using generative AI and use that to his other. Joe Pompliano says Cohen is essentially taking an under-monetized asset, 50 acres of parking lots around the stadium and trying to transform it into a year-round revenue engine that produces consistent returns. independence of how the Mets perform. And with the New York State Gaming Commission predicting that the property predicting, predicting. Wink, wink, wink. Who knows?

The property will generate 3.9 billion in annual revenue. Cohen's 50-acre complex would instantly be one of the top 10 largest U.S. casinos by revenue. Anyways. Well, let me tell you about fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries

on every channel. with fin dot a i we missed a post uh on the on the spacex uh competition we did uh buco says uh friend dear friend of the show says overeating going to get their faces ripped off if they don't just focus focus focus equity deals and other bets will not win the great game that feels to be uh the consensus consensus was talking a lot about the the comparison to google and tracking when did Google monetize? Google wound up monetizing, I think, sooner than Chachapiti

has. They put ads in it, I think, in year two. It's now been three years for Chachity. Google was trying to figure out, effectively trying to encourage employees to do, to eat more and have more massages so that it didn't, they looked less like a monopoly, right? Maybe, but

I mean, Google did earn the right to do other bets by just so solidifying their market in the search engine world, that then they could go and do Gmail and they could go and do GCP and they could go and do Waymo. But it's just like all of that happened after becoming cash flow positive. And I think that's why people have a little bit of like nervous energy around going to space,

even though space data centers, and this is what I wanted to go back to in the journal, was is there a world where, you know, okay, it's good to have a space data center bet. And so you need a partnership and realistically Sam's not going to partner with SpaceX on it. I don't know why he's not just going by in a launch capacity from Blue Origin, but maybe Stoke Space is the better option for him. But put aside all the dynamic, all the competitive dynamics. I think it's possible that Sam was looking at Stoke Space, which most recently as of October was valued at $2 billion. And he was like, hmm, I bought Johnny I for, what was it, six? Can I absorb another $2 billion company?

I mean, okay, like, like. He wants to own the full stack. Yes, which is getting stackier and stackier every single day. You're going to need to start buying land to buy the silicon to buy the sand. But do you think there's obviously an immense amount of pressure right now on data center buildouts? They're using too much energy. They're using too much water. If you put them in space, do you think that helps the discourse at all?

I think people hate rockets. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But truly, it's going to be much harder to say, like, hold up an electricity bill in Memphis and say, hey, my electricity bill went up. And it's because of Annie over there in the data center who's just, you know, slopping it up. Instead, you're going to be able to say, hey, the data center that, yeah, it's generating sometimes helpful math homework help, sometimes creative writing stuff, sometimes some weird stuff. Sometimes it's curing cancer, sometimes it's doing weird stuff, whatever. it does a bunch of different stuff, but at least it's not increasing my power bill

because it's in space and it's not an eyesore, it's not in my backyard, and it's not using any water because it's up in space. You think that would help? I think it would. I think it has to. But I agree, then the discourse will be

as blocking up. But it is notable that every time the concept of a space data center hits the timeline, it goes viral for people dunking on it, and yet so many people want to play. But they're dunking on it as like a, violation of the laws of physics or, like, not a good...

Too futuristic. Too futuristic. Like, it's not going to work in the near term. The economics. It feels right for a moonshot. I haven't seen, like, there are viral dunks that are going on right now around the prediction markets. And those are like, those viral dunks are like, this is a bad thing.

Yeah. I haven't seen people dunk on space data centers saying, like, I'm not morally okay with putting data centers in space. And I think people should be more morally okay with putting data centers in space. What did Saugger say about prediction markets? Well, you looked that up. Let me tell you about numeral.com compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth.

What do you say? Sauger said in response to a video about a prediction market, he said it's pretty simple. If you think this is cool, you're my enemy. So he is drawing lines. Showing the sides. In other news. There really are like active political candidates. that will be in Congress in 18 months that this is their whole thing.

Their whole thing is their anti-Data Center. And so, you know, get ready. Get ready to testify, brother. Anti-data center and anti-prediction market. Yeah. I don't know that I've seen any politicians really run on the anti-prediction market thing yet. Not that it's not going to happen. I think there are a number of enterprising young politicians.

Sure. That will pick it up. politicians of all ages that are looking at this and being like, wow, a lot of people don't like this. I should make this part of my platform. Which is less popular? We should have a prediction market. I understand. Are prediction markets are data centers less popular? Yeah. I don't know. I think data centers might be less popular. I don't know. The hard, the hard, one of the things is like, people, you can just not participate, but with the data center, if it's in your backyard, your power goes up.

Your power bill goes up. Also, it's hard for people to say, like, I don't, you use data centers, so I don't want them. Like, everybody in some way benefit, like is benefiting it's like, okay, like pull out your phone. Let me see the apps on your phone. Oh, yeah. Like, you don't, you don't need this resource. Whereas prediction markets, there's some people that just get, they don't, they're not interested in the data. Even I've seen a lot of polling, polling, people that run polling firms are like very against prediction markets for obvious reasons because it's like, hey, you're kind of open sourcing my whole, my whole, my whole. thing. You're doing a decentralized version of what I'm doing, but providing a lot of the same

kind of results. In other news, this was hitting the timeline. Two days ago, Fortune said NVIDIA's CFO admits the $100 billion open AI mega deal still isn't signed two months after it helped fuel an AI rally. I can see what was in the earnings release. So this news was the language was in the earnings release that this deal had not been signed, and it's more than LOI phase. They did say during the launch, we have a, what was the exact wording? It was like, we have direction, it was like, we basically like, this is like direct, we've directionally aligned.

I think it's directionally going to happen, or at least it makes sense as a way for Nvidia to discount chips as they're building out gigawatts and more. more gigawatts for open AI. It doesn't, like, Dylan Patel laid out how the, how the, this particular equity investment deal can wind up resulting in a, effectively a 30% discount or something like that. So I'm not, I'm not surprised if this winds up going through in, in one way or another, although I do think it will need a, you know, a tweak. And, and might, right now might not be the perfect time for Jensen to come out and say, yes, I'm actually, going to be spending a lot of money. I have to invest. I have to keep open AI on on vitiate GPUs as

opposed to letting him go over to TPU. Like he's sort of like fighting on defense a little bit right now because people are talking about TEPA. Well, apparently it was a good time to go on Joe Rogan. It was. Just another pod guy says another Jensen interview. Now I'm nervous. A lot of people were saying that this was somewhat bearish. I listened to it on a plane. There was a, there was a good excerpts here from a capital. They say Jensen Huang in 2016 Open AI was just a bunch of people sitting in a room. Joe Rogan

says they're not a non-profit anymore, right? Jensen says they're not a non-profit anymore. Joe says, weird how that works. Jensen goes, yeah, yeah, but anyhow. Yeah, there are some wild exchanges. I just liked the way I've been calling for Jensen to go on Rogan for years. I've wanted

more of like the leaders to go on Rogan and kind of just like cross-pollinate the two communities. And as I read the comments on the YouTube video, there were a lot of fans of Rogan who really were like thanking him for bringing on this guy who's working on something that's like pretty opaque in the economy. Yeah. It's very abstract. I think it makes a lot of sense. And he and, and Jensen's coming and explaining it at one level and then Rogan's asking him to to, you know, like zoom out, tell me more of your story. Why are you successful? Talks about the value of hard work.

Yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought they had a good time together. And it didn't seem like there was any undercurrent of adversarialness. It felt good overall. I enjoyed it. It wasn't like you shouldn't go into it thinking you're going to get Jensen on Dorcasch

and you're just not going to get a really deep insight into Nvidia's strategy, but that's not the point of this particular area. It's to understand who Jensen is as a human and what he's kind of like thinking of broadly for the industry. Well, before we bring in our next guest, our first guest, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

We have Jim Kramer in the... A living legend. At the New York Stock Exchange. He just celebrated 30 years in the business. He is the author of how to make money in any market. And we will bring him in. We got the buck. Come on in.

Welcome to the show. Good to see you. It's been too long. Thank you so much. Where's the gong? Here's a gong. I mean, really. There we got.

You were so ready. You're so ready. Thank you, gentlemen. Hit the gun. Get a clean. Get a clean hit. Get a clean hit. There we go.

That's a big. That's fantastic. There's an injury. look fabulous. I love it. You look fantastic. This is a great home for you at home. We love it. We love it. Every time we're here, we're enjoying it very much. Thank you for having us. You're basically the mayor. Are you the mayor? I'm more of an official greeter. I'm more of an ambassador. So, so 20 years on Mad Money, correct? How many times? How many years in this building? How long have been here?

We've been here for about, I guess, like four. We were in England with Cliffs for a long time. And we had a studio for us. It's very interesting asked us because now this is our studio. You can't control the sound levels of who's here, whatever. But I kind of still feel it's not hard at capitalism. I really do. It's a spiritual home. Yes. And I do like wall and I do like broad and I do think that there's a level of excitement.

Not the way it was when I got in the business in 82 when I first walked down the street and it was an engine. It's more tourist now, taking a look at it. But I still find it fascinating. The companies that come public, the companies that you know that I'm trying to learn about. and it's exciting. It truly is exciting. It truly is exciting to be down walking the boat. Do you think there's an advantage to being here?

Do you think there's an advantage to getting guests in person? When I think about the highlights just from this year, I think about you going to Tim Cook and touring the iPhone factory. That was a really cool moment. I also think about you beefing with, I also think about you, you know, going back and forth with Benioff remotely. Talk to me about, like, when do you want to go to a person? When do you want them to come to you?

When are you okay having just a phone call? This is a fabulous question. because I waffle in this. I did think, as I was telling you, terrific people out there, that there would be more execs that just would come through, and they don't.

And we were near Teterboro at the other place that they do. But I like to be out of person on the road all the time. The issue, of course, is we do three segments, their interviews, we do a lot of the issues. The issue is there's no time in the day.

Yeah, yeah. You're always on TV. It's hard. We wrestle with this, too. You know, like, you can go and travel to some. make a big performance out of it. We're in Los Angeles, which is not a great place,

but it works. It works in many ways, but it's also odd. Like, we would assume that we're in San Francisco, or at least New York, we're in neither. Well, the funny thing, if you were getting started today, it's very possible that you would be walking around, like one of these live streamers, who I know, I know like speed came through here at one point.

You'd be walking around, you'd be on basically 24-7, you'd have your phone open, you'd be looking at the markets, and you would be able to just constantly be traveling around. Yes. When you guys do stuff where you did, you said it said you thought he was in a booth at that incredible reinvention, right? But he was really not at the booth,

but the other guy was saying, oh, yeah, he's around here somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a Simon from Turbo Popper. You could pretend to be in the booth all of the time. But I do find that the people in general are really nice. There's a code of niceness here that's almost like written in and it's so non-New York. but I like it. What about when you can't be perfectly nice

because things just aren't going well for a CEO? And maybe you, I always think back to that interview you did with Tim Cook, I think it was about a decade ago. They'd missed, I think they'd missed earnings, and the stock was selling off, and you needed to ask the hard question what the street was saying, but you didn't want to come at them too aggressively.

How do you think about that? Well, it's very funny. Yeah. I often go over these with my wife, who's my partner, okay? And I'll say, look, I want to be gracious. Does this sound gracious? No, you're killing a guy.

How about I add this? You're saying, oh, yeah, that's great. You're killing him, you're asking about his wife. I mean, I do find that what happens is the facts dictate the graciousness. And if a guy misses a quarter and says that the quarter's good, well, he's a free fire. Okay. A woman comes on and says, look. We had a founder recently, who I won't name, who said that he was making, you know,

He was basically selling a product for $30,000, and he was telling customers, we have so much demand, I can't support you. And then a minute later, he was like, well, we've expanded capacity so much. And I was like, well, why don't you call the people you told you didn't have capacity too crazy? You nailed them.

Free fire. And it's like, I don't know, I think, I'm curious how you think about this. It's like, I would say most of the people coming on your show, you have some level of respect for what they're doing. And I think that's important, right? that if you have respect for a person,

it means you're going to be fair, right? They're not your enemy. You're just trying to have a real conversation and understand. Well put. And then I'm sure plenty of times you've had people coming on that you got a little beef with

behind the scenes, but for the most part, it's like you want to invite people on that you're genuinely excited to have a conversation with, even if you might be a little bearish, might be more bullish, right? Well, let's talk about Beniof.

I'm interviewing him tonight. The previous quarter, I did not like, okay? And he came on like gangbusters that it was a great quarter. And that caused me to do something I don't like to do, which is interrupt mid-sentence. Because someone's talking, and we grew up thinking, our mothers told us that would be rude. So now I'm into the rude element, right? And first he thinks that the rude element is a bit of a for show. It's like, oh, he's a little Broadway action.

No, it was like, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying what you're selling. And then, like, in the middle of it, I thought that Mark realized, Jesus, I think Jim Lowe's a bit, quarter. And then by the end of it, he said, wow, Kramer hates me. No, it's not. It's not, I don't hate anybody, right? But the fact is, is that this quarter was the quarter I was waiting for.

Are you guys having conversations have you had with Benioff live on the air? Probably 500. Maybe, yeah, probably, I guess 50, 60. Yeah. But there was a peer right during the, I was going to call it the plague. That I talked to him every day. Every day. Well, we were trying to develop.

a contest to develop the best masks. And it got waylaid, but we just wanted awareness. Sure, sure, sure. So you're working together on a project. Yeah. But look, do I, I've identified him as a friend because he came to my,

he was one of, I guess, two CEOs that came to my wedding. And there were 5003 people there. Only two. That's a small club. And with 5003 people, you could just throw a stod, you hit a couple of them.

Yeah, yeah. You got to ask you. I'm sorry It's exciting You guys are exciting Okay No, you're exciting You are so you are genuinely

People People in our world Do you ask us time to time They're like you guys are crazy You've started a business That you can't stop working on Like we are We make the business every day

And I see it And we tell people like Do you think You see Kramer You don't think he loves What he does And that's exactly what we want to do. We love, we love that we get to meet up every day

and talk about the stuff that we're interested in. And I can see doing it for decades and decades and decades. Absolutely. I mean, it's little like my buddy Schefter, but NesPN. Shefter couldn't stop no matter what. I mean, every time he looks at somebody, he's thinking about, is that person going to do a trade?

Is that what's that person thinking? But most of the people are just kind of, okay, I'm on TV. My executive producer is Regina Gilgland always says there's two kinds of people. There's people who are on TV because they want to. be on TV. And then there's people who are on TV because they have something to say. And you guys have something to say. And what I love about it is that you have much better BS detector, not to be like, I know that sounds prosaic. But the fact is, I'll hear that Amazon's chip is the best in the world from Amazon. And I'll say, hmm, maybe it's the best

in the world. I mean, I'll actually, in my head, they'll be like, best in world, best in world, but Jackson, good guy. Amazon, my book came. So, yeah. So obviously, anything in chip space is tough, but even harder, and I think something that maybe the East Coast hasn't been quite as tapped into is determining which hard tech and deep tech companies are real. Because there's a lot of companies that are, the West Coast calls them like render companies. They make really cool visual renders. CGI. Yeah, they don't actually shipping anything. Like sci-fi experiences, and then nothing ever comes to fruition. And so it's easier to clock those companies from the West Coast because of just the Whisper Networks and you might know somebody

that worked at the company. You might know their investors. If a company gets to Series D and they haven't had a single Tier 1 ever investor participate, it starts to get. You know this so well. I mean, like, people say, well, it was a Series C, blah, blah, blah, and I'm like thinking Series C, okay, like that was, didn't I take that exam to be able to walk on the floor? But you have, you, you speak the language and you, but you don't make it so I can't learn the language. You want me, you want me to learn the language. It's terrific. I have going for me history, and that's my

edge. So, for instance, today Micron got out of the consumer, the most consumer. Now, I've been begging them to get out of the consumer for actually literally for 20 years because they have a high end and then they have the low end, and the low end gives them the 10 multiple, high end gives them the 20 multiple.

And I've been talking to Sanjay, whom I really like, and it's like, I'm like, Sanjay. You have to like do this. And he's like, Jim, I don't need to do that. And today he does it. The stock's down 12. So I text somebody saying, come on, and he goes, I'm in quiet. And I'm like, I wrote, I'm not in quiet. I think you're fabulous.

But that's because I remember the 95 breakdown, where what happened is, is that that all the piece of capital goods, equipment came out that could make a little more than we needed of the memory chips. And then it goes like that. And his stock had been number one and then 500, number one.

Do you remember some of this stuff better than the CEOs and the management teams? Always. if it's the 90s absolutely if it's the 90s like for intel but I speak with them I mean

I'm an idiot's and there's new leadership yeah but I would tell you like I forgot my anniversary and my wife's birthday but I remember the the September collapsed in 95 but that's because it's all wrong

I have a memory for some things and they're the wrong things except for one we're in here what are they doing on there is your sale it must be a twist You guys should go like the tree at six. Oh, we love to.

We love to. The show will be wrapped up by then. Okay, so when you're up. One thing later, one thing later, with Benioff. You got to, you got to ask him about token consumption because he came out with really big numbers. 3.5 trillion. 10.2 trillion. Was it three or one?

No, 3.2, I think. But it sounds like a big number. But it's not. But there were some other companies, there was Alpha Sense. Somebody had Alpha Sense. They were sharing that they use around half the tokens, obviously not quite the same scale. much more. You know, Jensen wouldn't give you, Jensen wouldn't

give you that rap. I mean, I remember when he did a me when I walked in, there was me, and he said, look, this was, you know, you don't know how many tokens were using. And all really came down to, there was a show at that the mayor of East Town, but there's a new one called Task. And all

that Jensen wanted to talk about was when he was doing me, how hard that Philadelphia lilt was at the end. And Kate Winslow said the same thing. This man is Da Vinci. He knows. acting, he knows plays, he knows, you know, he's a well-rounded guy, but all he does now is like... Got good taste in jackets.

But how about all this stuff he has to talk about? You got talking about a lot when you're at the top? How have you been processing all, you know, everybody competing to say the biggest number, right? Oh, God. I have a piece tonight that starts, and I mention you guys right at the top because I'm like... We thank you. It's awesome.

No, because, like, I say that this is what you guys do, and I don't want to do it. Because I can't. I can't do it like you. You don't want to aspire to. to be someone who's not as good as you. Hey, I came in today. I'm like, I'm not as good as Jordy. What a day?

Your wife doesn't want to hear that when you come in. You know, John was like, I was so embarrassed. John happened to be. No, but when you're in these situations, you don't want to be in, well, next week. Open AI's got a new chat GPT that's better than Gemini if you just said, holy yes, demonize the best. You don't want to be in that world.

And yet, you guys know that that world is fluid. Yep. And I don't want to be in a world where suddenly, I'll give an example, Broadcom is a general contractor for a lot of these chips. But, you know, what's the general contractors? Does that work? Does that mean that they really had a lot of say? I don't know. You guys would literally know what it means to be what Broadcom is in the chain.

I, on the other hand, saying, hey, Brocom should go a big business. One is like, hey, you know what, I think that one's no line and one is the line. Hey, you know, guess what? I think the Patriots have a better chance than Cleveland. Yeah, no kidding. That's why there's a line. You guys set the line, okay? I'm money line on everything. Well, yeah, we know, we know our lane, too. I mean, being from the West Coast and coming from a private market's background, we focus on market cap. You focus on stock price. How the stock is moving day to day. We, I think, are much more, we're much more focused on the product side. What is the most underrated sound on your sound board? Okay. What do we got that's underrated?

Oh, mine, right now, I think my mother, I happen to think, there's a sound right at the bottom right, which was from office depot. Okay. That was easy. That was easy. But that was when the show started. People just say, like, what was that? I don't remember that.

I don't remember that. The store you got paper there. The button. Yeah, it's a core. But I think it's so cool, but like people are saying, like, what is that? Was that a chain or something? Yeah. It's become a relic, but it's a good release.

Yeah, yeah, it's hard to keep the lore going. I mean, we are. Listen to this sound. You know what this sound is? That's, that's, that's, uh, Call of Duty. Night vision goggles is going on? Because a lot of, we grew up on Call of Duty. I still don't understand why he does that one.

I grew up on Pomp. Okay. Right? I mean, Palm was great. I thought Palm was incredible until Donkey Kong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, Donkey Kong was incredible. These things were incredible

because they replaced crossword puzzles in Tick-Tac-Tow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Twitch, who owns Twitch? Amazon. Of course, we gotta get Andy Jassy on Twitter. You know what they?

I wanted to do earnings. I wanted to do post earnings on Twitch live. You know what that? Mark Zuckerberg's on Instagram doing front-facing videos. Get Andy Jassy on Twitch. Andy Jassie. He's got no salary cat.

He's got a salarcap. It's unbelievable like God. Everyone else had this kind of sort of bunch of salary cap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't exist. Yeah, you thought Hallie Rosenen was good. No, he sucks compared to Zuckerberg

because he's got this salary cap. You know, you know, something interesting on the Amazon front, the Traneum, when they were talking about their new... Not so good. No, no, when they're talking about their new chip, they specifically, they were specifically mentioned

doing a training run for a company called Descartes. Dean, the founder's been on our show. Which I don't know because of you guys. They do real-time video. and they're working with a lot of Twitch streamers. So that training run felt meaningful, and I don't think a lot of people picked up on that. There could be something moving there.

That's a good example of what I would describe as why I'm, look, I never lose sight that I'm a generalist. Because I wouldn't know that in the same way that I wouldn't necessarily know if we were doing steel companies. Whether something's cold roll or hot roll. Cold rollers have got a high multiple and hot rolls law. You know, steel, steel.

And so you always have to be really careful Knowing that you don't know certain things. Like, I wouldn't, if there are certain specs put out on ASIC, Google, I have to be very careful because when I listen to what, you know, what Annie Chasio called me, and he'll school me. And he'll be right to school me because I don't know enough. Who's the next, Mark Benioff, in the sense of a CEO that you could see yourself just enjoying interviewing? Okay, I'm going to give you a crazy one.

I'm going to give you a crazy one because it's, It's going to be, I have to make it so it's enjoying. I haven't gotten it yet. It's left shit. Max Lefitton. I intend to get him where I need him. You got to talk about espresso. He wants to talk about coffee.

He's obsessed with coffee. Yeah. We've got to do that. We spent like 10 minutes talking about it. You're kidding. Yeah, yeah, this is the alpha. I didn't do that. Shoot.

And he also likes long, long distance biking and riding. Oh, my God. But he's got a carp. He doesn't want to kill him. I mean, you're the tough thing. You got a three-minute second. it's hard to spend, it's hard to spend three minutes talking about coffee. Then you give him more time because I didn't know he, I didn't know he had that side. I know he cares passionately

about Ukraine. I know that he cares passionately about making people who should get credit, credit in a country where you still have to care about democracy. He's the, you know, like everyone's, oh, I'm democratizing, I'm democratizing blue jeans, you know. I'm democratizing T-shirts. No, he's democratizing capital. And why not? His, his algo is better. I just think he's, that's the guy I intend to be able to get him out of his It's not a shell. I don't know what it is. I think my sense was like the conversation for us, we had 30 minutes, right?

You don't have the luxury of having that much time with some of these guests. But some people take a while to warm up, and that's why traditional... That's why traditional podcasts are so great. You can do a bunch of pre-calls, get to know someone, then hop on, and even if it's a shorter segment, you can do it. Well, good. That's a goal, then. It's a goal. And the reason I want to do it is because I find him completely fascinating.

He came on the show in the stock. I told him, come on the show when you think it's going to break out, will you? Who's going down? He said, 33 came on the show, and I said, well, what do you think here? And he goes, well, the stock is now done going down and it's going up. No one ever says that stuff. No one.

They never come by. There's a guy. Oh, well, Jim, that's you. That's out there. No, he said, well, the stock's now done going down. And it's like, at the end of the interview, I said, that was a gutsy call. And he goes, what? I said, that it's done going down.

He goes, why is that gutsy? There's my guy. That's exactly. It's really good. I love it. I love it. How do you think about market structure, oligopolis, monopolies? Because the real interesting side of Max Levchen and a firm is looking at Sebastian and Klarna because now there's two companies in the same space. You can comp them. It's a little bit of horse race. That feels like good content, feels like good opportunity for investors. How do you think about a market like that? All right. So I'm out of the closet in this one. Somebody I's going to say it here. I always tell people, look, but I'm looking for our companies then in many ways. worst thing that could ever happen for a country. I'm looking for monopolies. Because monopolies just, they've got the gross margin. I just want big gross margins. I mean, nothing like, did you guys ever read Rockefeller by Chernell?

Yeah. Yeah, and the guy had 100%. And nobody had 100% of the oil market. That's my guy. And when they broke it up, they created just a huge amount of wealth. But no, I look for monopolists. Yeah. And I'm happy with Oligopoulos. Like right now, Lindy, it's an energy company. industrial gas, and air products. They're a slap-happy duopoly right now. They should be raising prices.

They're like not being good duopolis. But that's, you know, that's kind of... I just always take so much away from the Uber and Lyft saga that I sort of grew up with. I might be overfitting to that. You know, postmates. Yeah. I like Postmates.

Weren't they acquired in, right? Yeah, by Uber, right? I love, yeah. Bastion's the man. Bastion was the first guy to come on and give me a hat. No way. I said, what am I do that? He goes, it's called swag. When you put it on your head

Shocker Shocker Wait, how are you been processing Google then? Because Google everyone Everyone got out of Google, get this There was some guy I would call him a clown

But this is a serious show From the Justice Department Who convinced me that they were going to take Put Google In the same bed that James Kahn was in In the show Misery You know We're going to hobble him

And he's just we're going to hobble him I mean like you know Make it so he can't walk Yeah that's it there And I took him seriously And I spoke to Google's attorney, who was, of course, much smarter than the Justice Department. But I believe the Justice Department. I thought that they were going to wreck the company.

And they kept saying over and over again, and we're not going to let it be like Microsoft. You know, we let Microsoft off. This is not. And I got nervous. And I didn't panic. But when you have the Justice Department over and over saying, listen, why are you saying these things? You don't know what's going to happen to them. And then you get a judge who finds them in Monopoulos.

Man, I've got to get out of this thing. This is bad news. And then the judge, like, three months later, says technology is overtaking it. Not only is it not a monopoly, but we think it's great that they paid Apple $20 billion to knock out everybody else. I was dead. I was flat and I was real kill. It didn't matter. Whatever I did was Ryan.

Since then, I always do us look at it and say, I'm stupid, I'm stupid, I'm stupid. Yeah, but the real thing that hasn't played out yet is, like, what happens if we do end up with a duopoly in search, right? A lot of people, I mean, in Chachipida, he has 800 million weekly active. is going to see because they may, you know, they don't have the balance of you. You guys, you ever read Nile Ferguson, pity of war? Yeah. Well, that is about whoever has the deepest bomb market wins, sent your money. I mean, the bomb market is better for the other guys.

So, yeah, this is a question for you because it felt, like, I felt very comfortable covering the AI horse race, the foundation model race from a technology's perspective, from venture capital perspective. But once the discussion moved to, is there enough private credit, is Blue Owl going to underwrite these right, At these right levels, you know, we're having John from Apollo on the show. I hope you can explain it to us a little bit more. But how do you think about if a story kind of leaves your orbit, do you just bringing people on to understand? Well, I mean, you have to bring the balance sheet up all the time. Yeah.

And it's funny because I have a general show. And I'm always afraid to bring the balance sheet up for people saying, you know, geez, I want to see what's on. The price is right. I mean, there's, I mean, there's like, oh, friends, there's friends. You know, like look for old Seinfelds versus me talking about the balance. Sure, sure, sure. We have to do that. But for some people out there, that's

their Super Bowl, right? They love it. But look, I get a kick out of the idea that you know, that Oracle gets involved and that Larry Ellison who is one of the toughest guys on Earth who's never made a mistake and Saffra Katz has never made a mistake are getting

involved. And then Saffer leaves and the FT says she leaves because she doesn't want what's happening to the balance sheet, her precious balance, she's Oracle, which is not that good to begin with. So that's a good story for me, because that's- Is Larry? You know him?

No, he's never been on the show. He follows TBPN. He does? He followed very early. But what was your relationship like with Larry? Did he come on? Did he come on? Larry, no, no, never. He doesn't do a lot.

And like, I've tried repeatedly, but I won't get on my knees. He doesn't do a lot of media. I think he might talk about, like, University of Michigan. Michigan. Do you think to Mark Cuban, he's been on your show? Do you think he's the reason why Indiana is such a good football team? Oh. We have no idea. I honestly don't know about sports team. People have used the ESPN of tech on us, but it's funny because I've maybe, I've genuinely, we watch, yeah, maybe I've watched, yeah, me, I've watched, like an hour of sports in the last year. What do you read into the co-CEOs? When you see something like that? Co-C-L? Yeah, I mean, I have an oracle. Where's my, eh, yeah. No, coceo... Did it be interim, basically?

Yeah, it's just really hard. Does it happen in Sequoia Capital now, and that's obviously a big focus of ours of our world? Beniof was Coceo with Keith Locke. That was just suboptim situation. We got the coceos now at Oracle. Let's see what happens. Netflix has done it. I think it's hard, unless you can have really defined duties like they had at workday.

But otherwise, no. It's not something I really want to see. Yeah. How are you feeling about the IPO market? I think it's too robust. We're seeing a lot of junk. We're seeing a lot of biotech, by the way, which is why the biotech instrument companies are doing well.

But a lot of these are one-trick ponies, and that's really dangerous. Look, I don't want to protect anybody from investing in anything because everybody has the right to invest in everything. But, you know, if you were to do a uranium company right now, a company which just is, and all it does is say we will find uranium and you use a really funny symbol, like, you know, five users. state out of four. I mean, look, you know, you price it at 15 and it opens at 24, and then you wait six months and you sell every share. Wow. And that's what I'm afraid of. Yeah.

That's what I'm afraid is going to happen. Are the biotech companies taking advantage of the AI narrative or is there a particularly different narrative? No, I think there's just been a lot of, I shouldn't say it. There's been... Because I'm starting to bubble up in in tech, in Silicon Valley, folks saying, hey, in the future, drug discovery is going to be accelerated. The timeline's going to be way shorter. It's going to be completely different. But the big companies are just... They're just... They're just... companies, because when you go to the unbelievably cool, great person

who does health care and, you know, and Invidia, say, that person doesn't, they're not, you know, Bristol Mars is get me, get me, get me help. It's not those guys. It's not those guys. And it really bothers me

because if you're going to accelerate what's going on with cancer, okay, so that you can do, you know, look at every single data point and know everything within five minutes, you should be able to come up with the Holy Grail drug, you know, blood tests. They're getting a blood test for prostate cancer.

So a guy down here saying that today is going to become public a hope. But they should be using it, and we should be making far more progress than we're doing in health care. It's just, you know, when Jensen came on with synopsis, I mean, it's pretty clear they're doing the digital twin. By the way, you know, I thought the digital twin would have been good with Vision Pro, but I guess relic. Yeah, yeah. But I do think that that's the missing link. And I think if anybody does it It's going to be Willie and Dave Ricks

Because he can get outside himself And think about some ideas Yeah, I like him a lot You do? Has he been on the show? No, not yet But he hit a trillion dollars We rang the gong for him

Because he hit a trillion dollar evaluation Yeah, wasn't that great? It's fantastic Walmart's at 900 Oh, they're close That guy, Doug Mcvillan, the guy's retiring I mean he cratered the stock When he came in

He gave huge bonuses You want to crater when you leave You want a crater when you leave. That have been to Walmart lately? There's an interesting bull case for Walmart is that they are leaning in with ChatGPT, well, Amazon's leaning out. And so if the agentic commerce thing happens

and people are just opening up their phone and saying, hey, order, it will probably be routed through Walmart in the short term. Is that really? Yeah, so Etsy and Walmart have leaned in. Eventually, Amazon will have leaned in. So Etsy and Walmart have leaned in.

eBay and Amazon have leaned out. Wow. They had a good quarter. Etsy had a bad quarter. Amazon, we know. And so it's the laggards in the markets that are trying to catch up by saying, hey, maybe we missed the, you know, the real power law outcomes in the internet. I thought it was interesting in Costco's deep into Agent Force.

Do you think Mark's going to rename the company Agent Force? This is my first question to him. Look at all the different silos. Go to the page 18 on the deck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there it is, 17 they did. It's like everything's Asian, you know, all the different size things he has. The big question is, they're now old old Asian.

But the thing is he's still hiring salespeople like crazy. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to rename Meta? Did you see the rumor today? That he ought to rename. He ought to rename. He ought to just re-named. That was a dumb rename. But my whole thing is, I think it's actually, I think it's a good name. It actually is the Metaverse.

People spend so many hours in it. It doesn't matter that it's not in goggles. They're spending it on their phone. They're on their computer. It doesn't matter that it's not in a heads-up display yet. It is a universe with multiple touchpoints. It's like they even adapted the app, so it is messaging focus. It's not even, like, it's hard to post content on Instagram now.

It's a metaphorical universe. Maybe with Vera Rubin, they can do high speed, a video, short 10-second clip for an ad or an insta, and that might work. I mean, right now, I would put it in Reddit. I don't know. Have you seen the rates for Reddit, the rate card? No. It's like a fraction, and it's very targeted, and it's really good. Reddit ads.

Reddit ads are the cheapest bargain for any consumer package because you're right targeted. Like, my wife has this NASCal business. Boom, there's like a mescal love you. It's like, mescal love it, melanomy. My daughter's unfortunately, she beat it. But that's like targeted, targeted targets. I really like that because the rates, I told Hoffman he's charging too little.

Is he making much money from selling data? Isn't he making a lot of money from selling data? Yes, he is. And then Cloudflare's doing their best to be able to block. You think Cloudflare you did the implications of their billion? See, now there, did Matthew not do? don't call me, Matt, did he call you? He came, Matthew came up once, right?

Was he good? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's great. I think he's real smart. Yeah. He should talk about, like, who's a really good guess and who's bad. And we won't mention the name of the band, but just say the good, you know?

Oh, yeah, that guy. Yeah, he sent a major consumer back. The team that you've got to have on, you got to have the semi-analysis team on. The piece was too long, the one that you told me to read, the 10,000 word. Yeah, it was too long. I was like, oh, my God, look at that.

Look what's on. It's the jet game. I got to go watch it. Dillam will always call in. He'll be at some data center, usually, outside, in the back of a pickup truck, he'll call in, and he's absolutely, the whole team there is absolutely fantastic. They are.

They're very good. They're really, I trust them implicitly for when you have something on Jensen. Look at these two. You know, have you met Eric Kleiman yet? Going after. Wow. That's fantastic. Look at that.

26 ramp, yeah. That's a, isn't that doing a C round? 26 Ramp? They're waiting for a C. They're going to be here any day. Oh, and then what should I say, if I want to impress people about how far or long I am, and should I say I just hit myself in what round? Series E.

Series E, probably. I'm just in a series E round. But companies are going series G, series F. Geez. People go really deep. How about Down round? Because people don't, that down rounds bad. People don't like, people don't like go in public.

It's a hassle. They don't want to deal with the SEC. They don't want to deal with the place. What do you think about it? If Stripe stays private forever? Johnny Cowleson? No, people don't really like that. He was a great right filter.

He was a great right filter for the Phil Luffet Killers. You know, so he's a home run in the 64 World 604 All-Star game to win. So what do you think if a great American company stays private forever? Is that going to bring tears? I think they should. I mean, we've got, you know, Asplon, the orange trucks that cut down all the trees. They've been private forever and they're really, really rich.

Yeah. There's a variety of private companies. I don't know. I think if you're public, you have to, there's some slings and arrows. You've got to answer to you. No. You're more likely to get talked about on that money. If the stock's moving, you're not.

When you have like a Wells Fargo and the guy comes on and he's got this like all these flowering coats, they've got quotes at the beginning about Lombardi. Lombardi was always saying, listen, if there's a mistake, there's me. And then the first thing he says is like, you know, actually there were these employees that did it bad and don't pay attention to them. I was like, no, you're in your hand?

Let me see that. Let me see that. How do you get people off your talking point, off their talking points? I would say like the only thing, the guests that we don't like, the guests that we don't like. The worst guests are the ones that are trying to get in rescripted lines. And that's the only time that we don't like doing the show. I had one the other day. It was doing it. And I made a joke.

And I stopped. And it was just like, that was a joke. Now, and the person didn't laugh and went right on the talking points. I interviewed Jensen and he says he's doing a talking buddy saying something and I make a joke and he has to say anything

and I said by the way that was a joke he was laughing on the inside boom see that guy can do it all he can do it all he's just you know what do you do with a guy who's lovable and you're trying to be tough

you're trying to be tough you really want to nail him you know and then he's just charming charming is the end of book talking points and charm Are those of the, like, the psil and chrybdis that we have to really avoid, right? Funny story with Jensen. We were in, we were in D.C., and we were sitting there talking with Shane Copeland from Polly Market, who has a partnership with ICE.

And Jensen came in, and Shane goes, hey, I'm, hey, good to meet you. And he's like, Jensen's like, oh, what do you do? He's like, I'm the CEO of Polly Market, and Jensen doesn't, he doesn't know it. And Shane afterwards, he's like, oh, I got to work harder. I got to work harder. Well, that's him. He gets up in four, he does the emails, and now he probably sets it at 3.45

And checks all the things he doesn't know that are related. Jensen's up at 4? Yeah, I'm sure he knows that. No, 345. Oh, but who's counted? He gets up before. He's getting up 15 minutes after you. Oh, I'm supposed to get up after him.

You wake up 15 times before him and I have got him so much. Wait, yes, do you genetically just need less sleep? Yeah, what's going on? How is this possible? Because there's a hand, it's like some 5% of the population can just thrive on like 4. Okay, well, here's... Okay, so, because we're not on air. I'll tell you what the things I take.

So I take clonapin, I take melaton, and I take a gummy, and I can't stay asleep. See, it has to do with staying asleep. How much more do I take? I can't care. These are all, like, illegal substances to some degree. Now, they're actually controlled substances. But I, I, I, that's what I do to be able to stay asleep to a quarter of four. So it's more about trying to stay asleep.

That's what it is. I was like, oh, look what time it is. Oh, I went to bed seven minutes ago. I got to get, I get this picture with me and my wife. You have your Apple Watch set up with, like, different alerts on... It has roving pictures of my wife. What about, what about Martin when the markets are moving? No, that's great.

It's wedding pictures, incredible. Making some sauce. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Whoa. Yeah. Incredible. She doesn't watch anything that I do. Tell us about the book.

Tell us about the book. What was the process like? The book was about trying to get it so that people could, let's say, listen to you. Yeah. And say, you know what? These guys really seem to like so-and-so. I'll go on chat. I'll go on Gemini 3.

I'm going to learn about it. Maybe I own a share. Right now, that's streck and verboten. People feel if you do more than own an index fund, you don't know what you're doing. I come back and say the information is never been easier to find. All these people believe only in index funds are just dog batis. And what really you should be able to do is do index fund and do side by side. Or otherwise, we just think, you know what, all that information that you guys put out of me and it.

And it can't be like that. We can't make people feel stupid. It's not right. If you have an observation that you think that a company that was on your show really knows what it's talking about, why can't you do the research, look at the website, and buy a share. Why is that to heresy? Yeah, it's just portfolio allocation too. Take 10% of your assets and invest in things that you're interested in.

Do you know how much resistance I've gotten on this, well, the alleged tour, because I don't really want a tour, but I did some. You know, people say, Jim, you say that people should own individual stocks, but over and over again, it's been proven that that's stupid. And I said, like, I was, I worked with private wealth. I've seen people make tens of millions of dollars. So what we end up doing, we have a millionaire's lunch with Jensen, you know, firefighters, police. People who listened, now, some of them were because I named my dog, Invidia.

Yeah, well, that worked, that actually was pretty, that's. A lot of people got, it was $1.90 when it was a, and I told, I said, they said, I told Jensen. He says, no one knows me. What's going on? So you know what? I'm like doing this stuff and it's like to quit. Now he's at the top. Yeah, I got you back. I got you back. And I said, listen, I just came back from California. I got to tell you, I had this dog named Everest. Uh-uh. No more. The dog is Envidia. And that's when. There was a police officer who came to the show. He goes, look, I bought, I'm a millionaire. I bought Nvidia. I said, when? He goes, when you named your dog

you know really kind of what it does you know really kind of what it does you name your dog after you don't name your dog after something if you think it's a fly-by-night thing boom right that's an amazing can I stay on forever?

I wish we would love you but they're chewing up I think it's your people it's not our people these people I think it's our people no

oh you're welcome what is it all these sweater too with this month yeah it's San Juan Barclay Ram investor Yeah, you know, why can't you get more than 2.2 yards? 2.2 yards you're averaging. Let's make this a normal thing.

This was fantastic. You know, honestly, you guys are what I hope would occur, okay? I kind of always hope that this would occur, but I didn't know who would do it. This would occur, meaning a sophisticated show, but it didn't take yourselves too seriously or I could learn. And it hadn't occurred until you. Thank you. And it was almost like, I always thought, what did people, they have to just make trillions, they can't stop and have some fun and tell us things?

But you came. You happened. And the fact that you happened, I, okay, I'm going to be, the only time I want to be a little immodest. I'd like to think that maybe in some way you happen because like sometimes you saw me. Yeah, of course. I think that you are, you're not 2.0. You're sui generis. But I just feel like that it occurred and that people, you're another reason why the book's right.

You're on our Mount Rushmore media. There's four of them. But you're the biggest. Thank you. Good luck to you guys. Keep doing what you're doing. You're just, you're just electric. There we go.

Right? All right, go get it. All right, go get it. You're alive, guys. Thank you so much. For tenure's coming in. Alert, alert. Let me tell you about linear, meet the system

from modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development. I'm in cycle from Roadmap to Release. Let me also tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Our next guest is Eric Gleiman from Ramp, from the Ramp of Business Corporation. What an electric moment.

What a fun time. A goat. Yeah, he's a goat. My goat. He's a fantastic performer. He's been in front of a camera before. He's an entertainer. He's an entertainer.

If there's ever been evidence and putting in the 10,000 hours gets your good results, it's obvious. He's doing TV at least four times today. He's doing his show three times. He popped on to our stream. I mean, 20 years of Mad Money, he must be well past 10,000 hours on camera. And I think isn't it 30 years in television? Well, so Squat Box has been on for 30 years. Yeah.

And Mad Money for 20, which is remarkable. Well, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs, and on-demand clusters. That's right. Darren Rovel is sharing, apparently somebody is claiming that a Google Insider has been trading on search markets. They're saying somebody has been betting millions of dollars or trading, millions of dollars on who will be the most searched people of the year, including, yeah, just like whether or not Pope Leo will rank in Google's top five most searched people.

Daron Rovel says, this is what happens, what will continue to happen when unregulated markets are bet on as if they are regulated. Here's the thing, they are regulated by the CFTC. Yep. And there is. Is it illegal. I was looking this up because we were. talking to Tarek at Kalshi about this. And I just want to know more. And apparently, like,

let's say that you just are trading corn futures and you just happen to know that there's going to be like a major blight in the corn markets. And so you go and trade, if you have insider information that someone missed their harvest or something, like you can actually get in trouble for trading, for doing insider trading, even in commodities. And you would think, like, what private information is they're not oil? And the issue is prediction markets become more accurate when insiders are trading on it. And so it's like this weird conflict. And so Brian Armstrong was kind of laying out the bull the bull case for inside of training. He gave an interesting example of an admiral at sea. I mean, yes, it was sort of a bad example. But I liked, I liked his, uh, I liked that he's being

philosophical about it. I mean, I feel like all of the crypto OGs are very philosophical in their analysis. And I think that that can be sort of clipped out of context to be like, it's something we need to figure out. It's something we need to figure out. It's happening. And he's also been in that, like, you know, I think what people forget about Brian is that like, He was in the legal gray area for like a decade, right? Yeah. Where he had, he was on stage a lot. He was born in it.

Where he was on stage a lot. And when he was on stage, people would ask him, like, okay, do you think, do you think Bitcoin should be a commodity or a stock or something like that? And you have to be like, well, theoretically, here's this. Without further ado. Without further ado, we have Eric Lyman from the Ramp Business Corporation. Good to see you. It's great to see you, too. I can't believe you made a sweater just for a ramp investor.

It's incredible. What is this? It's doing a tree lighting outside. Yeah, the holidays are here. What is this? Should we open this on air? The San Juan Berkeley X Ramp Collab sweater? Is that right?

It's been a strong season and I have a feeling it's going to get a lot stronger. I love it. And you got the yellow socks on too. You look fantastic. Fantastic to see you. How many of these exist in the world? Not enough. Yeah.

I think probably a dozen. Wow, look at this too. Yellow matches. Light waste on fire. I don't know if we can. I don't know if we can actually light this candle. We won't, we won't do it, but we will put this out of it. Because, I mean, they were even saying that we might not be able to have a very loud speaker for our soundboard because of rules on the stock exchange.

Like, there are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do because, like, they're serious business happening. Well, you guys have, like, a deep partnership. We do now. We do now. Can we ask Lynn if we can be the first show to enjoy a light, like a scented candle? A scented candle? Yes, yes, yes, but I would definitely ask for permission with us. I would not be caught dead begging for forgiveness.

Okay. No chance. No chance. How are you doing? Buy the book here. I'm doing great. I'm doing great. And congratulations.

We're in New York City. Remind me how Ramp wound up in New York City. You're not from New York City. Well, this is the capital of capitals. So you had to be here. You know, this is, we're, exactly. I love that eagle sound. But, you know, steel manned this for me.

One of your investors might say that this is memetic desire to wind up in the capital of capital. Why not be the contrarian? and build a fintech company somewhere else. Look, for, I remember, we, our last company, we had gone out west. It was YC Demo Day. Oh, you did. You went through YC. We went through there.

And I remember towards the end of Y Combinator, we told the partners that we were going to be moving back to New York and several of them looked at us like we had a hole in our head. But we did it. Were you Korean roommates during YC? Yeah. Of course. Of course. You know, and those were tough times.

I remember we lived on Sand Hill Circle. Sand Hill Circle. At the time, we don't cook all that well. We knew about Seamless, and the sad part was there was only two restaurants on Seamless. And so, like, we lost one of them today. What are we going to do today? It was a lot of weight. It was, it was, that summer.

It was times were tough. And then at the very end, we discovered DoorDash. And I realized there were, in fact, ways. But I remember, I had kind of liked the West Coast, and Kareem said, you can stay out here, but I'm going. I'm going. That resolved it. You understand the relationship. New York is, I feel like, celebrates the entrepreneur, the person that's just trying to make something in the world.

And it's slightly, San Francisco celebrates the earnest hacker. We talked about this with Paul Graham yesterday, and that's kind of the YC ethos. And it's like probably one of the most important archetypes in the world, right? There's so much of the things and the products in our lives and our world is due to the earnest hacker, but there's another archetype that I feel like finds their way to New York, which is the earnest builder. So I think that it glosses over a lot of what happened in the Valley over the past 10 years. What I observed from a lot of my peers who had gone through, that accelerator funded companies during that era, was the average person they hired

stayed there for about 12 months. It was an incredible mercenary culture. The San Francisco and West Coast of 2015 through 20-20-something, we can debate kind of the year, was not this like, you know, earnest hacker, two people in a garage. It had become very, very corporatized. And everyone who was out there,

I felt the small startups, unless you were the hottest company at all points in time, your engineers were getting picked off by Google, by Facebook, was going to the next hot company. And people were, I feel like in some ways taking a portfolio approach. They're like, well, if startups are risky, why don't I work at four startups over four years? It is crazy that if you just graduate, like, you know, regularly on time from a good college, by the time you're 32 and maybe trying to buy house, you can have done three, four-year vests. That's a crazy thing to be like, yeah, I got some options over here vested, a Series A company I joined,

Then I jumped over to the growth stage company, and I have this portfolio. It's like, that's not the goal here. The goal is to go on a generational run. So build something that matters. And like when we came back to New York, look, I think it was maybe like Bob Ross would say a happy accident. Sure. Like when you started hiring these people, we could punch way above our weight. If you wanted to work at a very fast-growing venture-back startup, C Series A, there was like three.

And so we were able to find extraordinary people. There was, there was, I think this wasn't well understood, but all of the large engineering companies were opening incredibly large offices in New York. Google had done it, AWS, Stripe was opening their offices. MongoDB. MongoDB. Then you had these, these companies that were authentically built here in New York. MongoDB, Datadog, all the direct-to-consumer companies. And you had classically people who were in touch with culture, designers, marketers, people in finance.

It was all kind of here. And so what happened was, as I think the West Coast was becoming a very hard place to build a genuine company. Constant Talent War. In New York, you had the talent. You had people who were moving to be out here. And then all that was missing was a company. People also wanted to live in New York. It's like the greatest city in the world.

I mean among AI researchers, like, should I move to New York? Should I, like, get out of the hustle and bustle almost of San Francisco? Probably not AI researchers, but engineers broadly. It feels like going to Hawaii. People are like, I'm ready for something different. Maybe I can go over there. That's fascinating. I think that this was part of the secret of a ramp.

Like, we set out to go and to be that definitive company where if you, it was a goal that in a few years' time, people would say, like, you know, you ask a friend, what is, like, the best fintech company in New York or people would think it's, you got to go to ramp. That's where they, like, take engineering seriously. They move fast management of their products. And we turn that into reality. I think that there's lots of other great companies. companies in New York here and coming up and accelerating.

But it's great, we're here. Talk to me. Something I'm realizing recently of like TBPN, we've probably added like one person a month in the year or so that we've been in business and I was thinking like what a incredible luxury that is because when you're hiring at a relatively slow pace, you have so much time to like really get to know people, there's not like this pressure. How, like, I'd be curious because I don't think you've ever shared it on the show, your philosophy on hiring when you're trying to deliver ramp speed, but also find and find and hire people that are going to be with the company for five, six, seven years and beyond. Yeah.

I think a lot of people who walk around the ramp office, you guys know this. The company is incredibly young. You know, I think the average age is in the 20s, and a lot of it relates to this idea of finding people who are on a steep slope. versus intercept. Obviously, of course, we have people who have had incredible experience in pedigree, but the question is, if you play out one or two years' time,

there's some people with a lot of experience who've said, I've seen this movie before, I've learned all that I'm going to learn and, you know, get a little bit better over the course of the next year. And then you have these people who graduated top of their class, maybe they're 19, maybe they're 20,

maybe they're in their mid-20s, but they want to work, they want to learn, and they're on the steep trajectory, And we find these people who have incredible drive, have incredibly high IQs. We give them more responsibility than you'd expect. And you're patient, you wait a year, and suddenly you are filled with people at your company who are far more talented than maybe you could afford to hire otherwise. If they already had the ramp logo on their resume, and you were, you know, another company.

And they're managing teams and they're little. and they've, like, grown incredible equity in the company, which has grown even more since they've been here. And it's just this incredible virtuous cycle. And I think that a lot of people, especially early stage companies, get pushed by, like, their investors to say, oh, you should find someone who's seen this movie before. I want to find someone who's been this VP, whatever.

And, like, nothing wrong with that. I think that can be great, but it really underestimates the importance of finding people of that raw talent and looking at, again, slope over intercept. John, I interrupted you. Oh, yeah. I just wanted to hear about sort of switching gears, but positioning around the product in the age of AI, there's a campaign going on right now. What is it? Teaching money to think.

yeah right uh and i just thinking money and and it makes sense it's intelligent finance but it feels like it's the result of grappling with this question of like how do you bring AI to bear in the product in a way that's not uh like commoditized like every other company but still showing some of the value AI is this weird thing where it's becoming like overhyped and then maybe potentially, like, even controversial in some? Like, is it using all the water? People are grappling with that. And so I wanted to know how you landed on that campaign,

like, how you're actually, like, how you're thinking about walking a prospective customer through the AI piece of the value prop from a catchphrase or a tagline down to, like, okay, you're actually sitting down with the CFO, like, like, what promises are you making them? Because you're probably not saying, like, yeah, you're never going to touch anything ever again, right? And you have to, like, be somewhat realistic about that. So how are you wondering?

Get ready to enjoy PTO, buddy. Look, I love this question. And I think you need to start at the root of where this comes from. Sure. At the, when the company first launched, we had this idea of time is money. You should save both. I love it.

I'm saying every day on the show. Every day. As soon as I, you know, if you're out. It's becoming my mantra. I say it every day. Wake up in the morning, look in the mirror. Time his money save both. These corporate cards,

Bill Pay a cold accounting a whole lot more all in place. It is, and by the way, you know, for any CFOs out there or financial professionals who haven't yet adopted, Ramp, you know, give your CFO or the controller,

you know, the wonderful gift of Ramp, help them save 5%. Yes, yes. You still push so hard on sales. All the time, you're like, oh, this company is interested in Ramp. You're like, introduce them to me. And you'll jump on the phone, like, in the next 24 hours.

Well, there's nothing better than actually feeling it yourself going through the sale, helping some get through, and it helps you understand the experience and stay sharp. But the question is really good. So if you think about the actual brand and the value props, it we offer is fairly timeless in the sea of, you know, ecosystem of credit card companies trying to get you to spend more. We want you to spend less. And we think this is timeless.

Or the opposite would be, like, a new video model. also shows because of the state of the art for four weeks. And it's like, it's just a very, it's like selling a very different product. It's selling things versus value. And to be very specific about it, like if you, and Jeff Bezos has talked about this in another context, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, so many people ask what's going to change over the next 10 years, it's more interesting to ask what will not, right? And in 10 years from now, or 100 years from now, it is very clear that people will always want to get more for less, for fewer dollars, for fewer hours. There's no way that's ever going to change.

And if you think about kind of the central promise of Ramp is going to help you spend less, you know, you think about you could sell thinking or you could still thinking money. We can help you spend. That might change. But if you have intelligence introduced to some end goal, which is the intelligence, is going to help you prevent spend that is out of policy that you don't want to occur, once it's spent to actually tag an account for it, and then afterwards help you make sure that the next month, you know, more dollars go to productive uses as being really good and really

timeless. And so thinking money might be a way of saying it in the modern era. We're going to apply thinking to drive an outcome your company but leaner. But it's the same. Money starts to go, I don't know if I want to spend myself today. I'm not feeling. I might just chill in this treasury account. It's this timeless idea there, guys. We need you to ring the gong because there is a milestone which is that when we started the show I was laughing about

the, you know, we want to go to war on the paper receipt, on big paper, and I actually found a company that, and I was like, are paper receipt company's a thing? Are they still big? Turns out there was one that was worth like $22 billion. I believe when we started working with you,

you were below that. Now you've eclipsed it, and I think it's a sign of good things to come good omens and the death of the paper receipt death of the paper receipt well thank you so much for coming on the show stopping by it's great to see you thank you have a great nice of your day and uh we will and what a moment too because i think if if you guys hadn't bet on us last uh q4 of last year i don't think we'd be sitting here today with with the tvpn logo all over the nicey so we're we're we feel like the lucky ones we're we feel like the lucky ones. Thank you and congratulations again.

Thank you. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. We'll also talk to you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full-tech search. We're built from first principles on object storage. New Red Bull alert. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. I'll also tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build

on crypto rail. Securely spent up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Cheers. We got our Red Bulls. We're going. Cheers. What a fun show. Joe. Next up, we have John Zito, co-president of Apollo, a fledgling asset manager with $900, $900,000. $900,000. $900,000. $900,000. $900 million. Or is it

$900 billion? Or is it $900 billion? It is $900 billion. He's going to answer some hard questions. What is private equity? What is private credit? What is asset management? What are alternative assets. I like the traditional assets. It's the alternative ones that scare me. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Hey, hey. Yeah, we're ready. He's put on a microphone. He's getting miced up. In the meantime, we'll tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. And I'll also tell you about graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

John Zito is getting miced up. He's coming in. I should also mention that today I am wearing a watch that I purchased on getbezzle.com. You can shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezell's team of experts. On a special day, you need a special watch.

There's no better place to get it than Bezal. We have John Zito. John, good to meet you. Are you giving Eric a little pep talk there? Yeah, he's got a couple things there. Yeah, yeah. Last time I saw him, he was, like, taking all his money. It's a small poker game. He was taking everyone's money. Oh, he was. I can see that. He's such a nice guy, so he's got to be a sharp.

Don't fall for the ramp pitch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's counting everyone's money. He's like, I'm saving your, I'm going to save you time and your money. I'm going to actually take your money. I'm not going to be saving it for later. Their team is amazing. Their team is, what their building is pretty incredible. Tell me about, tell me about your team, tell me about what you've learned from him, what you've told him about managing, building a team. What does it take to get a job and work for you? Yeah, I mean, look, those, they don't need any of my advice. They'll come and talk to me about building a culture.

Yeah, but, you know, what they're doing there, they have a bunch of people around them that are just building an incredible business. For us, it's about, it's pretty simple. Find people with purpose. Find people high character, find people that are, you know, generally good people first, and then all the investment characteristics. How do you like to evaluate people for purpose?

I mean, for us. How long do you want to spend with someone before you actually? I mean, some of our best hires are probably the people that I've known for a really long time. I mean, a lot of our hires that we've made in the last, I don't know, five, seven years. I knew them for 20. Yeah. You know, I've been in credit for 23 years. Yeah, so quickly, can we zoom out and can you paint a picture for me of, like, the actual Apollo structure, the empire?

Like, what's going on there? Maybe share some of the same numbers you shared with our mutual friend Patrick that invest, like the best, because the velocity that you guys are moving at is pretty unbelievable. Senator is a good guy. I know you guys are close to Senator is the best. Yeah, so Apollo largest, one of the largest alternative credit managers in the world, largest alternative asset managers in the world. What's unique about us is half of our over $900 billion, our own capital through retirement service. Through a theme. Yes. So we're writing, we're a market leader in writing guaranteed income.

So we'll write a guaranteed, you know, you want a 5% guaranteed income. Somebody wants to retire someday. Yeah, and you want guaranteed income for the next 10 years at 5%. We'll guarantee you that money, and then we'll invest it, and we keep some marginal spread between guaranteeing the income, and that's half our money, and then half our money is managing third-party money on behalf of our historically private equity business, which is over $100 billion, and then our credit business, which is worth of $800 billion. So, oh, here we go.

But the guys out there told me I'm the first alternative asset manager leader on your, your show. I don't know if that's true, but, you know, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, we've had, we've had, we've had, we've had plenty of people that have, that I'm sure raised, raised, uh, uh, from Apollo, but, uh, yeah, this is the first. Uh, yeah, maybe, like, let's talk about why private credit, which people talk about as a monolith, obviously there's subsections of it, but why it's having such a moment right now, uh, in the context of these sort of, like, large scale, uh, infrastructure projects that are happening, uh, uh, uh, uh, In AI, as well as defense. I mean, look, so because half our balance sheet is super long duration for retirement, and all these new projects need really long-dated capital. There's only two places you can get capital. You can get money from a bank or you can get money from investors. And the bank capital, they're amazing a lot of things.

The capital tends to be more short-dated because it's led by deposits. So insurance. We got to experience that with SVB, a little duration mismatch. Yeah. So if you want a 15-year project, you want someone who's going to understand your project, much more of a bespoke solution, work with the company to have more flexibility in that capital structure or in that capital solution, it's much more logical to be with private capital than it is in public markets. And a lot of the people in your guys' universe, historically, they had to go public to get access to money. And now everybody's staying private way longer. Like we've, so legacy world, legacy capital was, okay, we need new money, we're going to go public and that's how we would do it.

Now everybody in the growth world has gotten a lot more sophisticated. They're staying private longer. They're raising capital through the private equity, not traditional, but in the private markets world. And now they're realizing, wait a second, we can do this in our entire capital structure. Wait, what's this credit thing? Oh, we can access private credit access. Okay, we can do a long duration. project-level finance and it's more optimal for their equity markets.

And so they're just like, okay, so now everybody's accessing this private markets. And because it's growing so quickly, it's in the news a lot because it's, oh, wait, it's growing fast, it must be risky. Yeah, so talk about, I mean, that prompted the piece from Mark and it was Bloomberg yesterday. Yeah, he put out an op-ed yesterday. Yeah, maybe, maybe, yeah, talk as much as you can share on that. I mean, look, there's lots of, everyone has a weird definition of private credit. And so they have a hard time.

Everyone has a hard time. Okay, private credit's risky. And a lot of people think private credit's like the $5 or $10 million loan to like a tire manufacturer in Queens or something. That's what they think private credit is. We're doing $11 billion loans for Intel. Yeah, yeah. And that's private credit. So we define it as everything from a mortgage to a commercial real estate loan against a building

to an aviation loan against a new aircraft, like super safe, secured, of the capital structure, traditionally investment grade. So... But how you set up your firm to deal with a $10 billion deal with Intel all the way down to some smaller deal? We're the only firm that's full open architecture. Okay. So we're one investment business. So, you know, David Samber who runs private equity, you know, the guys who lead our hybrid team,

you know, our credit team, all the people are all in the same investment meeting, talking about, okay, what's the best solution for the company? It's not really about... about let's solve for this small thing for a fund. Once you start doing that, it's very hard to work with companies. Yeah. You know, like, historically the credit business was,

hey, we're gonna go to a bank, we're gonna issue a bond, and then we would buy that bond. That was kind of the public credit business. And most of those people were trying to, were typically conservative, and they were trying to get just their income. Because most of us grew up in the opportunistic business and we've evolved into an investment-grade business.

We think more like builders and partners. And we're just providing capital across the whole capital structure. And when you can show up and say, hey, you need a loan against the building, you need a, by the way, you want a retirement program for your employees, and you want a long duration preferred. There's not many people that can show up with huge amounts of checks and just make it. And also, by the way, we're lenders to 5,000 companies. So now all of a sudden you're in our ecosystem,

and if you're growing the thing, we can help and be a real partner, not just a capital provider. Yeah. And that's like the new modern. 5,000 companies. Aren't there only, there's 4,000 public companies. How many, so are you a lender to almost all of the public companies that are at scale? We have mortgages, commercial real estate loans.

Sure, sure, sure, right. How do you think about the real estate market, mortgages, even buying houses? Like, how do you think about that portfolio there? We don't buy, we're not in the single, family rent business. You like your brand. It doesn't seem like a hot iron, but I have a friend. Let the companies that start with me.

This isn't I got you because I have a friend who lives next to a house that was bought by private equity. He's like, yeah, they actually made it really nice and it's great. And my neighborhood's getting better because of this. It's like kind of a hot take. Yeah, I mean, look, that part has been in, obviously, affordability is a big thing. Sure, sure. So, but we're more on the lending side.

So we just can provide mortgages. Sure, sure, sure. And so we have a big mortgage business and it's relatively low cost. And, I mean, as you get lowered into smaller deals, do you need to bring in more automation? Are you seeing returns to scale on, you know, IT spend or AI spend or any of this stuff? Yeah, so I think that will happen for sure. I think that will happen for sure. The, in the asset level side, so when you're when you're analyzing large pools of mortgages, or mortgages, or in the security, historically, that's going to be much more of a data AI driven over time.

and their models will get better and better. And hopefully consumer credit. All things associated with big pools and a history, you're going to probably get more optimal pricing. Sure, sure. And you can see companies like morpho. Like if you look at, I don't know if you've seen the token. Like there's, there are DFI protocols that actually have market-based pricing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's going to keep getting better and better and better. And I think the scale players will ultimately win that. And so we use it more there. On the smaller side, where it's more flow-related businesses, we have Apollo, which does a lot of our large lending, but then we have 16 companies which invest on our behalf that do specialty stuff. So our middle market lender, mid-cap will do that, has its own brand, its own employees, its own balance sheet, but we'll own some piece of the equity and some piece of those loans. We bought GE's aviation business. So they do all the smaller or medium or big-sized aviation loans, but in many cases it's our capital.

I know there's some firms that tend to brand themselves is like, we will do a take private, and we specifically want to focus on growth. And then we know some other folks who will just buy stuff that's basically, look, the business has done everything it's going to do. We're winding it down. And so we're just kind of cash flowing it out. And eventually that thing will just put on life support and sort of like built to scale or built to die.

And that's the thing. Do you want to play in every market? Do you want to take advantage of every situation and be able to see what the trajectory of a business is and then just accelerate it along? that or do you find a particular niche works well for you? Our private equity business historically been value oriented, not necessarily growth oriented. That'll help with respect that we didn't buy any companies in 21, 22, that I think are going to be somewhat tougher to exit because of the prices that were paid.

And our team's done an amazing job. Why didn't you buy any companies in 20%? We have a 35-year history of buying at relatively low multiples. So just nothing was available under that framework to buy. Yeah, that's great. And so people think of us as being more value-oriented, defensive equity, and then everything around secured lending. Yeah. And on the private equity, so I do you have deal team members, operating partners that go inside the companies?

Is there separation there, or is it all one, like, kind of pool of Cuban capital? We have our own private equity team with our own dedicated operations team. Operations team that goes in. Yeah, exactly. Just a traditional business. What's your outlook on energy and providing capital for various energy products, everything from natural gas to traditional, you know, oil, all the way through nuclear? Yeah. So Europe, we did a $4.5 billion deal for RWE.

We did a $6.5 billion deal for EDF. We keep doing this. So we've done some of the largest European deals for power, energy, transmission, defamation. defense, I think you'll see that continue in the U.S. same thing. Very large for BP, multi-billion dollar transactions. If you told me five years ago, we'd be doing multi-billion dollar deals for S&P 500 IG globally in Europe and the U.S. I would have said that that's not going to happen.

The business of private markets is across every risk spectrum. And it's really, for some reason, that's not, again, not really transmitted into the market. It's just private credit's growing. It must be risky. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think you're going to, the logical answer for long-duration power projects, which require lots of construction or data centers, the logical places for retirement, 401K, long-duration, investment grade, annuities, anyone who wants long-term savings, it's a great, it's a great place to be. So I think you're going to continue to see private markets being the primary force around

financing all that stuff. Yeah. How do you guys approach sort of like questions or debates around things on the data center side such as like GPU depreciation, right? Everybody has different opinion.

You can look at, part of it is like there's some element of it that's unpredictable. You can also look at the present, right? Which is like people that have five, six years. The present is a 50 year depreciation, right? No, there's mortgages. But, but But you can look at the present and you can try to predict the future, and then depending on who you talk to, you're going to get wildly different answers, whether you're talking to somebody over on this coast or somebody on the West Coast.

I'm curious, like, you're guys' general kind of approach to, like, finding the answers to some of these questions. I think there's going to be winners and losers. I think, you know, for us, we've stayed more short-dated, so we did a large, for Valor and X-AI, we did a multi-billion-dollar GPU finance. but we stay at five years, so effectively we're the senior tranche, and then the equity holders are making the assumption on what GPUs are worth later and longer. That's hard for us as credit providers. It's going to be hard.

I think anyone who says they know what the value of GPUs or the release rates are in year 5, 7, or 10, I mean, it's hard to take that with any sort of credible view. It's undoubtedly probably going to be the most violent violent cycle we've ever had. No one really knows how fat the tails are, both right or left. But adding a lot of leverage to a assumption that you don't know if it's going to be a super bull case or a super bear case is kind of scary for us, so we've been a bit quieter

on that side. I do think that folks in Silicon Valley, folks in our audience, are just really struggling to wrap their minds around the role of private credit here because it's a completely different just mental model to be in as opposed to just being a venture capital equity investor. Yeah, I mean the thing is with this cycle, it's so much more asset heavy. Totally. All these growth companies. Yeah. Defense companies. Seronic. Yep. And they're going to need the nuclear companies. The nuclear companies. The power companies. The AI companies. Yeah. It's all asset heavy. Yeah. As opposed to you go back to Google. In the last 20, 30 years, it's all

asset life. It's all asset life. And the mental model is always asset heavy. Yeah. And the mental model is always asset light and the debt is bad. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm friends with lots of the guys on your show because this is changing. Sure, totally. And it's going to be all about who they can partner with and trust. Yeah, tech wasn't, like, didn't have low leverage because they just didn't like leverage. It was because they didn't need it.

They didn't need it. They didn't need it. Yeah. And it can be financed off balance sheet and it can be better optimized than actually raising equity. And there's logical place for it. It's just, and so I think you're going to get there. And also, the scale is not necessarily just directly tied to the problem. I always go back to like, you know, the mortgage.

There are plenty of people that are making six figures and have a seven figure mortgage. And it's like, so if you talk about a company and you're like, yeah, the company is making a billion dollars and they have $10 billion of debt or something. It's like that could math out fine if everything's, you know, flowing through and they're growing and whatnot. But yeah, it's a new territory. There's definitely a big pivot. The last week and a half, lots of questions about off balance sheet debt, should it be on balance sheet, lots of questions about Oracle and There's lots of questions about some of the neoclouds. I think that's just going to push Anthropic and Open AI public earlier.

Oh, interesting. I think you'll see them. I think they'll go public way earlier than is anticipated. I'm not sure what consensus is, but I suspect that the more pressure and questions about that will require them to access convert market, equity market, security markets, other markets than just traditionally these kind of off-balance-sheet leases. I mean, what's your overall view on the world? It feels like it's going to happen.

Yeah, I think it makes sense. How are you feeling about the IPO market in the present? Kramer was on talking about frustrations with different biotech companies going out and some of them being potentially lower quality. Where are we, in your view? You brought me to the New York Stock Exchange to talk about private markets, which is the funniest thing ever. We spend, I would say, 70% of our time talking about privates.

Oh, they do you? Okay, good. I work here, so that's good. Well, the funny thing, the funny thing, Kramer kept speaking in share price, and we're like, we only think in market caps. Yeah, market cat, yeah. Exactly. Like, ramp, the $33 billion company? I mean, look, there's going to be, next year's going to be, I'm usually, the credit guy is usually always the bearish guy.

I'm like, I think lower rates, I think tons of M&A, I think you'll see a lot more huge technology away. Who knows what the $4 trillion, $5 trillion, whatever the estimate of capital, who will it will benefit, but it's going to benefit the consumer. The end of the day, it's going to benefit the consumer. When you say M&A, though, is this PE funds that loaded up in 2021, 2021, 2022, finally

capitulating, or all strategic? I think, I mean, I don't think anyone thought, you know, you see what's happening. There's some very large M&A transactions. You saw Echo Star this year sold a bunch of assets in exchange for SpaceX stock. Yeah. And people were like, wait, this company owns half of, or not half, but like half, like

they've got like $10 billion. Yeah, yeah, But then you look at the debt. No, but even that, it's pretty, it's pretty attractive. I mean, it's a pretty way to actually get access to SpaceX. I mean, it was a pure play tracker. I mean, I'm not supposed, I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that kind of thing. It's a pretty interesting way to get access to it. Yeah.

They're making an open AI movie. They're making a new social network Facebook movie. Do you think they'll ever make a Caesar's Palace Hise movie? Oh, Jesus. I don't know. I don't know. I hope not. But, I mean, seriously, like, because,

that book was introduced to me through our friend group and we were all like this is awesome but oftentimes internally at these firms, like everyone in Silicon Valley is like yeah social network awesome movie. It inspired me to start a tech company and Mark Zuckerberg is like not a fan, right? And so I'm wondering

internally does the firm, how does the firm remember the book? Listen, we that was so long ago in the context of the business we've become a complete kind of credits, passive and the kind of activity we do day-to-day buy-in-lar is far different. I think generally speaking, our investors look at that situation and say,

listen, they're going to fight for every dollar. So I think there's a balance between the one thing as you grow is you want to maintain your investment culture. And so how do you make sure you maintain your investment culture, recruit the best people, and the paradox of growing but also really being a good investor? That's like a very tough balance. times and so you know that's the game every day trying to make sure yeah who we who on your team evaluates various AI tools and I'm sure you're getting pitched a hundred times we have a whole team I mean we have a team it's called Lab 42 but Rob Bittencourt

really leads the thematic investing you should have them on I mean he spends all his time assessing all the hyperscale all the entire ecosystem both that all equity yeah it's a tree lighting a tree lighting it's not a tree you have a new tree is a tree This is why we brought you on together. There we go. Curse's spirit. That's all fun. It's four p.m.

We're watching. We can't hear anything. That is fun doing here. They said they've never done an IPO on tree lighting day. Oh, really? So somebody's got to do it. Somebody's got to do it. It's Hank, it's, who is it?

It's, who is it, Azaria? They got Santa here, too. It's Hank Azaria, isn't it? No way. Oh, yeah. That's right. Last time I saw him, he was in, like, he's in a cover band. You know, it's funny.

He plays in a cover band. No way. There are a lot. He's a cover band. He's a cover band. It's actually pretty good. Really? That's amazing.

There are a ton of people here. This is as big as an IPO in terms of folks roam in the floor. There's a lot of folks. There's some mascots over there. They're having fun. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having a great. All right.

You love with everything else. We'll talk to you. We'll talk to you. Yeah. Talk soon. Before we bring in our last guest to the show, let me tell you about wander.com, book at wonder with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning in 24-7 concierge service. And you know you've heard Jim Kramer talk about sleep.

We need to get him an eight sleep at eightsleep.com. Actually, that would be a good Christmas present. Exceptional sleep without exception, fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. We should actually get him an eighth sleep. for Christmas. And you know, you're looking behind us. There's some, we're on the cubes. You can see us over there.

We're on that cube, actually. We're down to one cube. We're down to one cube. The tree took over. But if you want to put your brand, your logo on something that looks like a cube, why not get a billboard at adquick.com? I love it, John. Out of home advertising is easy and measurable.

Plan by and measure out of home with precision. People are joking around on the timeline. And meta, of course, is planning to cut 30% of their, I guess, a budget of their Metaverse efforts. So this is reality labs. This is reality labs. Which has worked on VR and AR, but also Metaverse development. And, I mean, it's a lot of the stuff that was on display during MetaConnect. Some really promising stuff, some really cool stuff.

People like it. But also, a lot of spend. And so they, you know, leaked today. I don't know. They announced. And consensus media. which definitely joking around. They say meta will announce plans for name change.

New stock ticker within the coming weeks. Zuck viewed as leading candidate for new ticker. Seems like fake news, but it's certainly fun. Yeah, I like the meta name. Max Hodak, former guest, says, the idea that this is the end of meta's metaverse dreams is probably wrong. I bet this will actually make them go faster.

and I agree. I'm very excited for the next VR headset. I think the quest for, I think James Cameron tried it and really enjoyed it. Calish, last post, and then we'll bring in our next guest, says Link Tree is a billion dollar company. That is crazy.

A billion dollars for literally links in a tree. Yeah, Michael Mirreflare says, you need to study business models. You have to be investigation maxing, value decoding. You should never think the consumer-facing product is a thing. There's a thing behind the thing that generates revenue. It's true. It's supposed to unlock cash flow at a certain scale.

That justifies valuation. There's a vision here. So, anyways, without further ado, let's bring in our next guest. Hi. Good to see you. Welcome to Australia. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Coming down and hanging out. Congratulations. Thank you. Day number one hasn't been going so far. Fantastic. We love this place. It's fun as a media person to be here because it's become just the center for media.

Yeah. Yeah. Did you just see Hank Hazaria outside of? It was him, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. Yes, our last guest was ideaing him, and I couldn't see from here, but it does appear that he's down there

walking around. It's a full-on tree lady. And with the builder, I like, I like it. Hank Azaria, I don't know much of my movies. I was like, I have no point. Do you watch his TV? No, he watches no movies, no TV, really.

Very, very rarely. He's seen one movie, Borat, and that's it. Pretty much. And I saw that new movie Mountain Gate, because I feel like I needed to give a review for the show. It was about some AI founders that go to the, I felt like loosely based on the all-in podcast. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyways, so great to have you. What's your go-to holiday movie? Oh, my goodness. Can I say the sound of music? I don't know if that's technically a holiday movie, but it's the one I watch around that time, I think. It's nostalgic in an old world. It's appropriate. If you threw it on, it doesn't scream Christmas, but people would be accepting.

Yeah, that's okay. My controversial opinion is I don't like It's a Wonderful Life. Oh, that one is a little bit of the tooth. Elf? Elf? Yeah, I'll go for Alf. You're like, is that a movie?

Someone told me that that's a movie. What's your favorite color? Okay, so anyway, please introduce yourself for the stream for those who might not know you. What's your day to day like? So I'm Katie Dayton. I write for the Wall Street Journal all about anything to do with brands, marketing,

advertising, some media thrown in, and it's just basically any ways brands are really trying to cut through, I think. That is the underlying theme of my coverage. And what has been the big theme in your coverage? It's interesting to coverage, because when a brand breaks through, it's almost always for a different reason.

Like, it's an interesting set of circumstances that allow them to bring, and strategy on their part and some luck that gets thrown in. And so, again, there's not like a playbook. If you're following a playbook, it's probably been done, and it could work if you're in another category.

We saw this in D2C, right? People were like, oh, if you make a pretty website and you run a lot of ads, you can sell a lot of a product, and then a few other people did it well, and then it basically stopped working. Like, it can still work in certain circumstances. Yeah, the Red Amler trade did last too long.

Yeah, the Redd Amler era. It was like you need $500,000 for a brand and you need a product. And it works for Hems. Hems is a public company. Yeah. And is doing fine. Hems is it worked with Emmett.

Oh, that's right. Was it Roe that worked with it? Jim Lane. I think Roe worked with it. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, I bought my first Warby Parker glasses You did? Last week and I thought, God, I'm a bit late to this one as well, but that was that era.

That one's been around for a while. I mean, I think that's what's so interesting right now is that there is no playbook anymore. Even if you're a humongous brand, you know, you're sort of when you're managing any kind of decline, there's no playbook for that, and there's no playbook for a young D to C brand. Sure. We heard about an apparel brand that is scaled from zero to 700 million of revenue in like two years, all on TikTok shop tonight. Yeah, we'd never heard of it.

I don't know if they're public, so I don't know if the numbers are public because I won't share the name. I'll share it with you after, after. Yeah. Remarkable. But what has been the big trend of the year in terms of your coverage? What's been the biggest story or the biggest thing? What's your word of the year? My word of the year, crisis.

Crisis? Wow. Why crisis? We have seen, I think, every brand right now, if you look at American Eagle, if you look at Cracker Barrel, just happening in the last, you know, in this sort of a space of the few. a few months of each other, two very similar case studies, two very different accusations being leveled at them. Getting sucked into politics.

And then the crisis calms comes out. And the snowballing of it all. And I think now it's sort of making brands realize that nobody is safe. You change your logo before this year, I'm sure nobody really thought. Especially, like, Cracker Barrel is not, I mean, it's a beloved brand, but it's not like in everyone's face constantly. It's not the Pepsi logo. which also went through a rebrand of the logo years ago,

and people didn't like it, and I think they tweaked it and whatnot. But Cracker Rose, it shouldn't be such a massive story, but of course the internet can amplify everything. And you can just throw everyone in crisis. What are you looking at for 2026? I think, well, it would be a lot more of that, and I think it's going to be a lot more of brands

kind of shifting their budgets, maybe a little bit away from, you know, your traditional advertising into maybe some more PR. I think it's really important for brands at the moment to be owning their narrative. I think they're obsessed with that. They want to be, this is the whole reason they're all moving to substack. Yeah. They're running their own YouTube channels, their own podcasts.

You know, they want to be ahead of the game. They want to be the ones that are talking about themselves before anyone else talks about that. So I think we're going to see like a big shift in like what comms looks like in general, which will be quite interesting to see. And then the AI piece of it all kind of fits in with that because I think the big question is going to be, do consumers care if a brand is using AI, and if they do, like, how badly is that going to actually affect any revenue? Well, it's going to be interesting because it's going to happen at the ad level, too,

because the social platforms know the political leaning of the users, and it's very possible that a brand will be like, here's the product, you can figure out how to make the best ad for the end user, and then you'd have one brand with one product that's running political leaning ads this way. conservative that would be fast. I do wonder, I would do wonder, there's been some brands over the last, kind of coming out of the kind of

original Trump era that were just like right-wing brands or right-wing Neo-Bank. We saw, we saw some of these. Yeah. I wonder if we'll see more. Black Rifle Coffee was kind of proto example, this, my pillow. I wonder if we'll see more consumer brands just like basically put the political party in the footer

and just be like even more. A trend that I was thinking was like more brands investing in becoming the supplier and then just having two like faces, two brands on top because I think it's a long in the long arc of history maybe the value accrues to the

company that's making pillows for both the left wing and the right wing first. I mean I'm sure there's probably already it naturally happens in the supply chain right? Because no one's digging through the supply chain to figure out where their coffee beans came from. I'm surprised we haven't actually seen more sort of out and out right wing brands coming

through. I mean we have you know the ones you mentioned, I guess they've been going down that route for a while now. And, you know, given that, what, 10 years ago, it was a lot of brand purpose. We always used to talk about brand purpose and how it was, yes, and every brand had to be aligned to a big cause of some sort that kind of tended to swing to the left. Yeah, it was like a clothing brand that was all about ocean plastic. And then I think people realized at some point or another they wanted to buy, the majority of consumers just want to buy a great product.

Sure. And so it kind of flipped back where brands stop saying 1% of every dollar. Do you think any big brands will intentionally try and throw their brand into crisis? Because we see this in Silicon Valley all the time. It's rage bait marketing where a startup will come out with a video that's designed to get canceled. Because no one knows them. And if they're getting canceled, sure, 100,000 people might hate them, but at least if they would say it. A thousand might sign up. If a thousand sign up, it's better than nothing. Are you talking about that black mirror one that came out a few weeks ago that was... There's a bot farm.

Very good point. There was a bot farm one. There was TikTok for sports betting or gambling. There was one that was a coding environment that would let you gamble and watch subway service. Brain rot, like kind of like illegal online casinos. There was the whole Cluley saga, which was an app that allowed you to cheat on everything. Of course, people don't like cheating. I was very incendiary.

I was thinking of the, you know, dead relative bring that to life, that one was very on the nose. And that was partnered with, like, a Disney Star. But that was crazy. To the point where I thought this has got to be. Intentional. Well, it doesn't exist. And it's, you know, some kind of artwork. Because I almost believe that, I don't know the actual numbers, but I think American Eagle might still be up on the, like, as a stock, even during all that chaos.

but they netted out okay. And I heard some people debating whether or not Sydney Sweeney would wind up winning on the day. I don't know how much she got paid and I don't know what the long term that one's interesting because American Eagle

and we just had it at one of our conferences, Craig, their CMO. Their line is very much. This was truly not political. It was not meant to be political. It was not that. And anyone that thought it was was in the minority

and it was a lot of bot traffic that was driving. So, you know, and I think they came out of it and they think they came out of it because they stood by it and they didn't try and roll it back and confuse the messaging and they just sort of didn't like pay too much attention to it.

They didn't give it too much fuel. It kind of burnt itself out that way. I think we're going to be seeing like some more of those tactics whereas before if anyone was upset brands would like immediately pull something and you know do the notes apology. A friend of ours who's been on the show before Lulu Maservi, she does

comms or helps on comms for a lot of startup. She said yesterday, every media headline about a tech company is basically like, this founder archetype is building the summary of your company or product. Can it overcome common skepticism? Is that, like,

has that been, is that evergreen or is that, like, do you think that kind of, do you agree with that? Do you think that kind of format is like having a moment right now? I certainly have been seeing that quite a lot on, like, the cover stories of different, like, magazines, like Forbes and Fortune. I think, you know what? There was a, there was a journal piece on Cursor recently that was, like, similar.

It was basically, like, they grew from three to 30 billion in nine months. I'll let you answer, but I have a... Well, I think the pendulum swings, right? So, you know, originally the press were accused of being too friendly to tech. Sure. And then we swung a little bit, maybe, and everyone's accused of being too antagonistic. No, it was antagonistic. I think it's swung back.

Too friendly? No, no, no. I just think it's like kind of healthy right now. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is kind of healthy. Well, that's what I think what's being tried, you know, they don't want to say this is going to fail, this is terrible, these are terrible people, but they want to tell the human interest story of it.

I think that's where the friction lies. I think stories need conflict. And I know, I know friends who have time and time again been in industry, in tech, in technology, pro tech. And then they say, we want to make pro tech stories. And what you realize is that, well, you need an antagonist. in a story. And if you don't have an antagonist, you don't have a story. You don't have strife. If you don't have a low point. And so when I would talk to friends who were running

companies, I would say, look, like, I know that you've had failures. I know that you tried to raise money five years ago. You're super successful now, but five years ago you tried to raise money and the investor pulled out at the last second. And that employee that you wanted to hire said no. And the product that you released crashed and no one bought it. Like, I know that you've been through trials and tribulations. You have two options. One is hide those and try and tell the story of everything went perfectly the whole way and it will be a boring story that no one listens to. Or you can tell the real story of the highs and lows and the ups and downs and you'll have a riveting story. It actually makes you look more heroic because who wants

to watch Star Wars without any strife, without, you know, when you tell people that, what's the reaction? The Jedi's are just hanging out. The good ones, the good ones to get it. I've been in the situation where I've told this to a founder and the founders said like, I get it, and the comm team has been like, no, no, no, we're still trying to hide that skeleton in the closet. And I'm like, that skeleton's not that big of a skeleton. No, exactly. You lost one contract or like one customer failed. But, you know, a lot of people are in damage control, and that's our whole business.

And so they're saying, don't let anything ever get out. And instead, I think the people that understand stories, understand narrative, understand just entertainment, they get that you have to, people like an underdog. People like a come from behind, an up and down. And then this goes back to controlling the narrative, right? Like put it out there, put it and weave it in as part of your talking points. Tell the story. Yes. And give the journalist something to work with that has friction, like you said.

Otherwise, they're just going to go off and find it anyway. And some disgruntled employees are going to come to us. And I think that's the risk of trying to over control with the owned media is if your own media doesn't have any conflict ever. because any time something bad happens to you, you don't post. There's a few VC podcasts lately that got into a situation and just stopped.

Stop posting. And so like imagine if you're American Eagle or Cracker Barrel and you have a substack that you've built up or a YouTube channel and then there's a big dust up and you're just,

it's the best content of the year about you. Everyone wants to hear from you. You have an audience in a channel that's ready. They're interested in American Eagle. What more would they want to know about this?

And you're just like, I'm out. I think the, astronomer example again from this year. That's a perfect example. They went ahead straight away. They did a great job. They did it. That was masterclass. Masterclass. We had the founder

on. The founder, Pete, right? Pete DeJoy? Yeah, we had him on the show a little bit later. And it was funny, we were joking because they had the day before that controversy broke, they had published like a case study with Ram. Oh yeah. We were joking, who's our presenting sponsor. We were joking, we were like, did Ram do this?

How many stories do you, like, how many pieces do you actually, do you publish a year? A year. I try and do, I try and do about four to six a month. Okay. I think whatever that average is out like. And what does it take to get in the four to six? I would say, come with some friction, come with a story. And I always say it doesn't have to be a huge brand.

You just got to give us some numbers. You know, the amount of people that say, I've got a great story I want to tell. We did this amazing marketing campaign. Make it concrete. Yeah, well, we are, and my favorite line to use is we are the Wall Street Journal. So, you know, you've got to give us some dollar signs and that. I like that. I like that.

This is a lesson for us. We need to, when we tell someone, well, we are a TBPN, we need to know what that means. Maybe we can impress about people. Don't come with your talking points as a conversation. We are a TVPN. Leave the talking points out of home. You can't come with talking points because this is DBPN. We're still finding your PR outside, knocking on the window like this.

We were talking to Kramer. about that that's the number one thing we want to do do you think uh do you think we've passed uh the peak of wellness i think it feels like wellness is uh as a trend has been so impactful now that young people are proudly throwing up their hand i don't drink alcohol isn't the unwell network doing well uh isn't that like stuithesis yeah that's the pendulum swinging back from wellness to unwow i think i think you might be right maybe um but yeah we've just been having this debate internally like how how how How durable is the trend?

Well, it's funny. It's difficult because, you know, look, you guys live in L.A. I live here. I feel like, I feel I go out on a Friday night in the West Village. No one is looking very well, you know, like the kids are drinking, they're smoking. Smoking is cool again, apparently. You know, I think, but then the rest of the country, I don't know, I think is probably still, the wellness is probably still sort of infiltrating down there.

I mean, the stats show that people aren't drinking very much, especially in the younger demos. Well, especially in restaurants. In restaurants. We had David Chang on the show. He was talking about how a lot of restaurants are struggling just because they had this high margin revenue from alcohol that was getting tacked on to every bill that's evaporated. I mean, it's very difficult to break out. And I'm sure someone has whether a time where the economy is like it is. Is it because of you go in a restaurant?

Are you going to go, well, I can't really afford it? So therefore, this is like the one thing I can take off my bill? or is it because I'm actually stopping drinking? And it's difficult to know that causation. But I think, you know, the CMOs I speak to in the alcohol world, they all have in a pretty not difficult time, but they know that change is coming and they're making little alterations.

And they never, if you've got an advertising budget, they've never been able to say, hey guys, drink loads, you know. Go out, have, get absolutely plastered, have a great time. So, you know, they haven't had to change their marketing, too much because of that, but I think in terms of, you know, where they're showing up and how they're presenting themselves in the real world, that will be quite interesting.

Yeah. A lot of other things that I'd love to talk about, but let's do it again. Yeah, let's do it again soon. This is fantastic. Thank you so much. So good to meet you. Congratulations again. Thank you for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.

See you soon. See you soon. I'm enjoying these ramp. These... Good cold, not lighting a fire. even a candle. You can tell that I'm not a pyromaniac because a pyromaniac It's just one match

It's just one match. It's just one match. Oh, what about one more? It says burn your receipts Times money save both. I like these. These are very fun. How much time do we have to do timeline?

We are going to an event later. We can pull up this post. Let's do another 20 or 10 minutes or something. From Lulu, I haven't seen these. She says it's worth signing up for blueprint just to study the marketing emails. They are fun and easy to read. No Corpo Slop.

So you're getting useful info rather than just being marketed to. Great at building trust through transparent and proactive communication. Why Brian and Kate write them personally. You can pull some of these up. I do think that it's possible that Brian Johnson is the best marketer in the world right now. He's incredible. He's competing and like actually, you know, the team are like innovating at a bunch of different levels. like, just like in creating, you know, plenty of people like, you know, want to critique him

or disagree with his philosophy or approach or whatever. But as a business person, you have to appreciate how he just makes, finds a way to make him the center of a lot of attention pretty much every single. King of Organic. King of Organic. And I know that, I'm sure they spend a ton on traditional ads too for Blueprint. It's going to be a monster business. And he has a CEO in the seat right now, too, didn't he hire?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or maybe he was going to hire, but, like, there's going to be some operator. Somebody was claiming that his whole relationship with Kate was just a marketing stunt. And it's like, you know what you know about so many celebrities throughout the, throughout the years. Yeah. All sorts of, all sorts of conspiracies. There's definitely a precedent for it. About it.

In other news, did you see their Trump? The K trucks are coming back. Yeah, so something about basically eliminating, like, Biden, People are saying that, so the news is that apparently you'll be able to buy a very small truck soon, which is a thing in Japan that supposedly not has been made illegal for some reason. Yeah, so they were buying an era vehicle fuel efficiency rules. I feel like you haven't been able to buy one of these in a long time. And it never made sense because it should be the most efficient thing possible, right?

Yeah, so the rule called for a yearly 2% efficiency increase for cars made from 2027 to 2031. Oh, just took a lot of these off the road. And, yeah, it's the cafe, the corporate average fuel economy standards. The quote is so ridiculous here. We're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdensome, horrible, actually. Cafe standards that impose expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems. Gave all sorts of problems. I wonder if this will drive people back to Tesla and saying, like, I bought this after Elon went crazy.

and then Trump went. And then Trump brought in these. I don't know. I don't know. I do think it's if the real loser here, I would say some people would say the environment, but potentially more direct is that company like Slate Auto. It's trying to make a $20,000 truck.

Meanwhile, these manufacturers have been making the $20,000 truck at scale. And they're super reliable. But I mean, Americans have just voted with their wallets. they do not want a two-door truck. It's just, it's never worked. Like the Land Rover Defender, there's so many examples of two-door SUVs that have just not gotten traction.

Like the Nissan. The Nissan Marano Cross Cabriolet also never took off. But even the, I mean, with true enthusiasts, of course. Even the Range Rover Evoke is a two-door SUV, I believe. Not done well. I'm very interested to see. How many tour G-wagons? Do you think we're, there's some that I would love to own?

Yes, but they're not exactly flying off the shelves. They're not being stocked on dealer lots. Because realistically, you're going to be like, ah, I'd love the two-door, but then you think about your family, and you're like, I need the four-door. And that's what everyone does. And that's why every Ford F-150, four doors. Did you see that Adam Friedland? This is a hilarious bit by Adam.

This is like a really good bit. I'm surprised that this is the first time somebody has, like, done this bit so well. he was asked to Volcher asked him a question on their year-end culture roundup about a TV show that Charles here is assuming he hasn't seen and the question is was Bertha on the Gilded Age right to marry Glades off to the Duke? Bertha Russell wasn't exactly wrong for marrying Glades off to the Duke at least not by Gilded Age standards but she was morally compromised in that world marriage was a strategic move a way to cement social status and gain acceptance from old

many elites who still looked down on her family's new wealth. To bertha, securing a duke as a son-in-law, wasn't just about ego. It was survival. A declaration that she'd conquer the very society that tried to exclude her. An incredible bit. And then they amplified it because they did a video interviewing him, confronting him about it. And so Vulture has just done a great job drawing attention to their culturalized. body 50, which I would not have been following this year, and now I want to see the other 50.

So, hats off to them for that project. In other news, Pomp is announcing a historic decision at BRR. Yes. 100% of, this is his digital asset treasury. It's a digital asset treasury. He came on the show. Bitcoin. He's going to buy Bitcoin and then buy companies that produce more Bitcoin or something?

Yeah. 100% of equity compensation for the CEO, me, and the board of directors will be tied to performance Mileson. boards shouldn't be making millions of dollars unless retail shareholders are also winning. Now that I am in charge of a public company, I hope to set the standard for what true shareholder alignment looks like. I do believe this was in reaction to an activist investor that accumulated around 7%. Did he also set his milestone of $10 trillion?

He doesn't get a dime unless it's 10 trillion. I can see that. He's a perma bull. That would be amazing. Yeah, I don't think he's ever flipped bearish this whole year. No, no. I mean, this is good. And the interesting and the interesting iteration on this is that it's, Elon has set himself up with the equity compensation tied to share price, which went very well the first time. And now he set himself up to do it again with Tesla. And what's interesting

here is that with Pomp's BRR ticker, it's not just him, it's also the board of directors. And I think that a Tesla, that's not the case. And so he's saying, I'm taking it one step further. Now, I'm still interested to see what are the targets? Because if you're like, you know, hey, the stock moves 2%, I get $100 million. People aren't going to be excited about that. But if you design those equity comp packages appropriately, obviously it's totally a win, win, win.

So everyone can be very happy about that. Yeah, and we'll see how it does once, you know, again, a lot of these digital asset treasury companies have performed horribly recently. and unclear. Marvin was texting me. Okay, so Marvin Von Hagan is going He's the founder of Pokey, which is a

social AI that lives in your messages. He says, saw a TechCrunch tweet six weeks ago that META is trying to ban Pokey. He said he directly asked for help on Twitter, got a lot of intros, talk to the European Commission, EU officially opened an antitrust investigation today.

X is unreal. He really is kind of met his worst nightmare today. Just directing, he's basically, are you really that surprise that Martin von Hagen? Is it Marvin? Marvin. Sorry, Marvin von Hagan is pulling the strings of the EU. But anyway, pretty interesting. Well, good luck to him. We'll have to have one of the show.

Matt Slotnick says, maybe the best quote I've ever heard in an earnings call from Benioff, quote, we did 3.2 trillion tokens. Let Bilbo Baggins know that we've got adoption and usage is happening here. That was just a shout out to J.R. Token? Oh, my God.

That is so good. Of course, he's firing shots at carp. Carp. That is hilarious. That is one. And he also made one at Oracle? What is he saying? Dig out of left to Oracle, Matt says.

Make sure everybody realizes we're not building data center. We're preserving our gross margins and cash flows and using the data centers that are being built. I love it. I love it. Neer says, Today I learned I use more tokens than Salesforce does. Yeah.

I mean, we didn't get into this with the camera, but the token thing, this could go so fantastically wrong if it turns into eyeballs. Like, imagine if there's companies going out and publicly, they're talking about, like, their token multiples. It's like, yeah, like, we generate 100 trillion tokens, and so, of course, we should be a billion dollar company.

And it's like, you're looking at, like, dollars of market cap per million tokens of generation. I don't think we're going to get there. I hope not. I think there is, like, there is a precedent through the eyeball era. But you could, you could do that and you could think of that as a proxy. Of course, the correct proxy is revenue, and we should stay in that world, but you never know. Yep. You never know. Bucco Capital says, according to Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg, kills goats with a laser gun and eats them.

This is wild. It's so funny. The question was, what was your most memorable encounter with Zuck? Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat. In front of you? No, he killed it before.

I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun and then a knife. Then they send it to the butcher. A laser gun? I don't know. A stun gun. They stun it. And then he knifed it.

then they sent it to the butcher, evidently in Palo Alto, and then the quote drops off. Imagine you have your buddy over, and you're like, hey, look, I run a social network. You ran a while social network for a long time. I run Facebook. You ran Twitter. Let's just hang out. I'm going to show you. No, no, no, that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying, I'm going to show you a little bit of my culture, bro culture. You're a hippie. You're a hippie culture. You're the Bitcoin guy. You're the Bitcoin guy. The Costa Rican Bitcoin guy. I'm the UFC guy. I like to kill goats myself.

But, you know, you're not supposed to go leak it. What's going on, Jack? Come on. Come on. I was off the record. I showed you my culture in confidence. What happens in Palo Alto? What happens at the goat farm?

Stays at the goat farm. Apparently not. Also, hilarious that he doesn't know what a stung on is. We figured out that somebody on the show that's come on multiple times has hundreds of goats. Oh, yes. And nobody knows about this. And people keep talking about the goat debate, this or that. The goat debate.

And we were talking with them and they're saying they need to keep quiet because there's a real. There's a real goat collector. There's a real goat herd. That's right. A goat herd. What else we got? This is interesting. Google taps replet in Challenge to Anthropics and Cursor.

Somewhat surprising, considering that Google's going really heavy with anti-gravity. Yeah. But I think like Replett is just. Google's invested in Replit for a long time. Like, they did, they did a partnership or investment back before Amjad was making like a couple million bucks in revenue. Is capital G in Replit? Yes, yes. I'm almost positive that Google has invested in Replit at some point.

We should look it up, but we're doing the fake news now. We're done with the news. It's fake news. It's the fake news hour. But congrats to Amjad on doing a deal with Google. I wonder how that will manifest. because you are kind of competing with a lot of the folks at AI. Studio and there's a lot of different pieces of the Gemini team that you're kind of dealing with.

But at the same time, like, Replit is a unique product, and Replit has never been a foundation model company. And so it does make a lot of sense to, I actually like this a lot in the sense that, you know, where has Google been fantastic? Model development. Where have they been a little bit less speed? on the product, rollout side, getting the product in the hands of people. Omjad's great at that. The Replit team's great at that. So you put them together

and maybe it makes a lot of sense. But it's still just early days. Two final posts. One, we missed this yesterday. Oh, we have another gone moment. Jake, Paul, and the team over at Antifund have raised Jeff, Jeff Wu, have raised the new fund. Three, 30 million. I almost I almost said I almost said 300 million I'm sure they'll I'm sure they'll be there soon but they are they say they're pre-account industry leaders like open AI andrel ramp cognition and physical intelligence but look at this video 20 minute video this is an

interesting switch of a launch video it's shot on the couch we were saying this we were saying this like a year ago like the way that we told some company I remember I remember the I think I was saying to uh you don't have to say you Yeah, I was saying to Zach, we were talking to Zach Dell. He didn't end up doing this. But I was like, do the 20-minute launch video, right? Like, do a video that... Well, you have a different idea that you should not leave because it's good.

I won't leave that idea. But I love that this, I love that this happened the way it did. And I think that this is a good format. And they're wearing suits. And they're wearing suits. I think there's probably two to three more of these that will happen. I mean, this does in some way, in some way mirror the Johnny Ive, Sam Altman video of, like, them getting coffee together. And, like, there's these interesting things of, like,

They're not launching a podcast together. They're just dropping a one-off conversation that's edited, kind of framing some of the history, explaining it. It's a really clear way to communicate. And, of course, because these guys are master communicators, they understand media. And so, very exciting. And what a portfolio.

Open AI, and a ramp, cognition, physical intelligence. There's one person that will go unnamed that links all of those companies together. Fantastic. You know the person. You know the person. Of course they do. Final post from Tenei, Tanei, sorry.

He's highlighting a company. called Plod. Plod. This is so funny. I've never heard of. Apparently. But it sounds like they're absolutely ripping.

It's the most successful. They said wearables were cooked, but Plodd records, transcribes, and summer. Of course, it's another meeting summarizing product. But it's a physical product. One million units sold largely to doctors, lawyers, and sales people. 250 million of annualized revenue, bootstrapped and now profitable. Literally. And it's crazy.

Like, no, no drama, no launch videos. no crazy hype no no rage bait just building in silence we got to get this guy on the show around five million dollars but sure sure but you know i think the more important thing is just that is that hardware is hard and we see a lot of corpses in the in the consumer electronics world but there are also major breakout successes uh the aura ring for example like what a remarkable company to just show up doing revenue at their scale, seemingly out of nowhere. Woop has done really well. And there's something, yeah, Oro, that's what I was mentioning.

And then this new company, this meeting summarizer, fantastic. And we just haven't heard a pitch. I'm so curious to know what this does so well that your phone can't do in an app. I mean, I don't know. We'll have to ask them. We'll have to get the counter. Maybe we'll have to buy one. Test it up.

Well, thank you for tuning in today, folks. We missed you in the chat. Yeah. But we will see you tomorrow. We'll be back tomorrow. And thank you again to the NICC team for hosting us. As always. Totally surreal to be here.

And thank you to everybody that has made this possible by tuning in and joining the show and supporting us however you have. So have a wonderful evening and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you. Good night.