TBPN - Live @ NYSE, Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. | Keith Rabois, Emily Sundberg, Adam Faze

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

(00:43) - Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. (21:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (40:44) - Keith Rabois is a veteran Silicon Valley operator and investor, known for senior roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square, and as a general partner at top venture firms including Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. He’s recognized for his sharp strategic instincts, contrarian takes on markets and company building, and for backing category-defining startups across fintech, real estate, and AI. (01:23:27) - Lynn Martin, the 68th president of the New York Stock Exchange and chair of Fixed Income & Data Services at Intercontinental Exchange, discusses the NYSE's annual tree lighting ceremony, highlighting the participation of celebrities, mascots, and charitable organizations, and emphasizes the event's role in fostering community engagement and supporting listed companies. She also touches on the significance of ETFs, noting their impact on financial markets by providing liquidity and transparency, and anticipates a busy start to 2026 for IPOs, acknowledging potential market volatility due to upcoming midterm elections. (01:36:50) - Emily Sundberg is a New York–based writer and director, best known for her daily business newsletter, "Feed Me," which has grown into a seven-figure Substack enterprise with over 150,000 readers. In the conversation, she discusses the expansion of "Feed Me" into podcasting with the launch of "Expense Account," hosted by resident food critic J Lee, and her plans to extend coverage to California, acknowledging the significant portion of her readership based there. Additionally, Sundberg reflects on the competitive landscape between platforms like Substack and Patreon, emphasizing the importance of nurturing new talent rather than poaching existing creators. (02:03:00) - Adam Faze is a 28-year-old American film producer and entrepreneur, known for co-founding the production company Must Be Nice and serving as studio chief at FazeWorld. In the conversation, he discusses the merger between Warner Brothers and Netflix, expressing support for the consolidation as a strategic move to compete with tech giants like Meta, Google, and TikTok. Faze emphasizes that combining Warner Brothers' rich intellectual property with Netflix's powerful distribution network positions the entertainment industry to better capture audience attention in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. 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 TVPN. Today's Friday, December 5th, 2025. We are live again from the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for the boats found journey. It's good to be back. This is the real fortress of finance, the capital of capital. The Temple of Technology, it's back in Hollywood. We'll be there on Monday. But we have a great show for you today, folks. We have Keith Rubei joining us in person. We have Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange. We have Emily Sunberg. And we have one more. Adam Faze, again. It's had some hot takes on the WB acquisition. Which is the top story today. Other than, of course, RAM, but time is money. Say both, these use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Let me give you some facts about Netflix. They're going to be bought by, or they're going to buy Warner Brothers in HBO Max for an $82.7 billion deal.

The acquisition is expected to close following Warner Brothers Discovery spinoff of Discovery Global TV networks. division in Q3, 2026. There's a bunch of fun, interesting things hitting the timeline. Obviously, this is a tech story because of Netflix. It's also a media story and, you know, a public market story as well. And it is a story that we will be talking about for quite a while because although this has gotten announced in the last 24 hours, it's very likely that this is going to be a very long, drawn out process before it actually gets regulatory approval. Yeah. Well, let me read through variety that had a great summary of the deal. But first, let me tell you about Graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality

software faster. So it's official in a move that will dramatically reshape the entertainment business, Netflix and Warner Brothers or WB. Don't call it Warner Bros. Although we want to. The insiders, they call it Warner Brothers or WB. Warner Brothers Discovery announced an agreement Friday under which Netflix will acquire Warner Brothers, including its film and TV studios, HBO Max, and HBO. The deal has a total enterprise value, including debt of 82.7 billion, with an equity value of 72 billion. The company said the announcement of Netflix's deal to buy the Warner Brothers streaming and studio business came after a week's long bidding war that pitted the streaming giant against David Ellison's Paramount Skydance and Comcast. News broke Thursday

evening that Netflix had entered into exclusive negotiations with WBD on a deal for Warner Brothers and HBO Max. A quote from Netflix co-CEOO Ted Sarandos, he said, I know some of you are surprised we're making this acquisition. I think people were surprised because didn't Netflix's stock trade down on this news? People down. Some people are. Some people are excited about it.

Yeah. Some people are, plenty of people are not excited about it for various reasons. some people don't think it'll get approved. Other people think this is, you know, it's quite an extension. WB obviously does theatrical releases. They have a movie theater business. It's definitely will be quite an extension to Netflix's core business today. Yeah, Netflix, for reference, $425 billion company down 2.6% today.

So not falling off a cliff or anything, but certainly people taking note of this. There's also a number of op-eds about this already out on the timeline. We can go through some of those. But first, let me tell you about Vanta, bottom-Mate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews. So Netflix expects it,

said it expects to, quote, maintain Warner Brothers. He said, he said, the company has historically been more of a builder than a buyer. And so Netflix is trying to, like, sort of reassure both fans, employees, even people who might just see Warner Brothers Discovery is like a fantastic asset that doesn't need to be like stripped for parts. He's trying to push back against a potential narrative that Netflix will will be very ruthless in cost cutting and lose some of that, you know, what people think made WB amazing art. So he said,

Netflix expects to maintain Warner Brothers current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films. I know this doesn't matter to you because you never go to the theater and you never see it. Hey, we went and saw Dune. That was like two years ago. But we got a, we got a, when we did that,

it was a lot of fun. We got a bunch of the guys together. We got a bunch of the guys together. We said we're going to make the monthly thing. Yeah. We were close. At the start of the year, we were doing that. We were doing that.

We were getting everyone together just like guys night out, kind of, but to the movie theater. Because we were like, okay, what do you do if you're a guy and you have a bunch of guy friends and you want to, you know, go meet up, but you don't really like drinking. You don't know anything about sports. Like, what can you do on a Tuesday night? You can suit up and head to your

local movie theater. Head to the local movie theater. And fortunately, it feels like Netflix must have heard what we said. They probably react. This seems like a direct reaction to us. Potentially. We do need to go back to the theater, though, because we have not been supporting them nearly enough recently. But it is a good time. And I do think it is important to set this tone. Like, I mean, the reality is that, like, theaters are going to change. They are, like, there's a question of, like, you know, fast takeoff in AI, fast takeoff in streaming. Like, it's been 20 years since you've been able to watch things on the internet. So you've been able to watch home box office was a way to watch a movie at home.

Yeah. In some ways, the ability to put a TV in someone's house was the beginning of the end for the theater. Yeah. Because they were immediately substitutes, although the difference was massive screen. versus tiny CRT. And then it was like, okay, a 42-inch TV, flat screen. Now that might cost a couple grand, you know, 10 years ago. Now I was at, I was somewhere, I think I was at Target. And I saw a 42-inch TV, I think it advertised for like 75 bucks or something. It's like suspiciously cheap. It was so cheap. It's like a rotisserie chicken. It's just trying to get you in the door. I mean, in college for me,

like the 42-inch TV was the gold standard. Yeah. We weren't in the era of the same. 65, the 75, the 85, the big TVs hadn't arrived, but the 42-inch TV was good. It was like you're the king of the castle. Yeah, you were the king of the castle. You had a 42-inch, and it was like a serious expense. It was a couple grand. Now they're regularly giving them away. And so, of course, that's going to be a competitive pressure.

But also, it's not going to destroy the theater immediately, but it's going to have an erosion effect over decades, and that's exactly what's happening. But it's nice that Netflix is not declaring this the end of the theater. They're going to continue to invest in support. and I think this will certainly encourage everyone to continue supporting Warner Brothers and Discovery and Netflix.

So Netflix signal they would keep HBO Max as a discreet service, while it also touted the addition of HBO and HBO Max content to its lineup. And so we're going to add the deep film and TV libraries and HBO to an HBO Mac programming. Netflix

members will have even more high quality tires. Will it be called Netflix Max? You need to be Netflix maxing. Maybe that's... Wait, is that why they did HBO Max? Because they wanted it to be like, oh, if you're HBO maxing, you get HBO back. Then it was HBO Max, then it was Max, then it was back to HBO. People give them so much, they talk so much trash about HBO with the rebrand chaos.

But Max is a great term as opposed to, because they couldn't have done HBO Plus. No, I mean, the critique there was HBO has built up such an incredible brand. Yes, they never should have gone purely max. And credit to Scott Galloway, I remember he went so. hard on them for dropping HBO. Oh, that's crazy. You've spent, like, you've spent decades building up this incredible brand, and you're just like, see ya, we'll just be called Max. They spent, like, two years HBO Maxing.

Well, they spent two decades HBO Max Max. And then they just were Max. And then they just went Max Max. And then they just went Max Max. And that was the end to the beginning of the end. The article goes on. This allows Netflix to optimize plans for consumers enhancing viewing options. and expanding access to content Netflix,

says it expects to see $2 to $3 billion in cost savings annually by the third year after the Warner Brothers Discovery deal closes. Let's see. The company expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings per share by year two. The cash and stock transaction was valued at $27 per share, and the timeline is going back and forth on this. Okay, Leah, let's get into some takes. So the counter side of this, the information actually had a pretty scathing, a scathing kind of analysis.

Before you agree that, I'm going to tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. We have multi-assad investing. And they're trusted by millions. So I read through this earlier. This is from Martin Pears. He says Netflix's Warner purchase is an $82.7 billion. Blunder. He says it will likely, announce Friday morning will likely prove a stupendous error by a management team that until now has rarely.

put a wrong foot. Netflix paying a huge price, 27 and a half times next year's expected earnings well above prevailing multiples for film and TV companies for businesses that likely won't help it add many subscribers, right? Like Netflix has like saturation a lot of people today. So from a consumer standpoint, if you subscribe to Netflix and HBO Max, you're going to be like, cool, I can churn off of one of these services and just switch over to here. The question is, well, then Netflix will they be incentivized to just keep pushing the price of the subscription? They're adding more content, more IP. And so I would expect them to do that.

Martin continues, moreover, the deal is likely to face severe regulatory obstacles. Again, so Netflix is not exactly Trump aligned, right? The Netflix did the deal with the Obamas. And so I think that in a world where Netflix was going to, sorry, WB is going to Paramount, I could see that much more likely to get through, whereas this is going to make sure the Netflix team is going to be spending at least the next year, I would assume, working on this. And then since we started... Were you mean regulatory approval? Yeah, just trying to get this across the line.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it feels like it's so hard to make the case that this creates some sort of monopoly because Disney owns... It's like, yes, okay, now Netflix has Squidin and they also have Batman, but... Jason Kilar, who's a former Warner Media CEO, says if I were tasked with doing so, I could not think of a more effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood than selling WBD to Netflix. What about selling it to Disney? You literally have Batman, Superman, and all the Marvel characters. You have Spider-Man and Star Wars.

That feels like that would be less competitive than having... Right now, from my perspective, you have Batman and Superman kind of off on an eye. Island. They haven't really been able to get that, that engine going to the same degree as Marvel, the Avengers, Thanos, Iron Man. Somebody named Ben Weiss says, disagree. Hollywood is competing with Silicon Valley, Apple, Amazon, Google meta, preserving some notion of competition in and in between Legacy Hollywood. Risk winning a battle and losing a war the old media companies need to more of the right type of scale. This does it for WB. Jason says, when I use that phrase competition in Hollywood, I'm referring to having a sufficient number of vibrant and robust entities that Canon will

aggressively compete against each other to produce and distribute films. Okay. Series live events and more for decades to come. I'm not focused on the legacy of it all. Yeah, I would still say this is like number two. But it, I mean, it might be high. But just in terms of like Hollywood filmmaking, these feel like extremely competitive areas.

There are so many different, there are so many different streaming, and bundles that you can piece together. There are folks who are like, yeah, you know what, I order from Amazon, so I have Amazon Prime. That's where I watch everything. There are still people that just go to Apple, you know, Apple TV and just buy a movie. You know, you can still just do that. You can be off in the Netflix ecosystem.

You can be in the Hulu ecosystem. Like, it doesn't feel like there's a crazy lack of competition in media right now. Yeah. So, I don't know. I would be somewhat surprised if this doesn't go through, but I mean, you never know. I don't know. I think Netflix, again, we were before this,

we were having lunch with cable exec, and he was kind of bringing up how Netflix had gotten caught up a little bit in kind of some of the woke stuff. Sure. And again, I just think in Trump America, it just feels far more likely that Allison's could get a deal done and they're notoriously absolute dogs. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's a rumor that they're going to go, that they're going to try it out bid. Yeah, so right now, this is Chris Gaspring over at Fox says, Scoop, as reported, Paramount and Skydance, Skydance is now looking to launch a hostile bid for WBD because it feels it's $30 a share all cash offer is actually higher than what Netflix offered in terms of cash stock and the value of the spinoff of the cable business. So this is still developed. thing, but, uh, yeah, anyways. Trump fan had some interesting, uh, backstory. He says, wild outcome, especially after these three, uh, wild what ifs before Netflix IPOed in 2002.

Uh, before Netflix IPOed in 2002, apparently Bezos offered $12 million to buy it. Can you imagine if Netflix had sold for $12 billion? Well, they also tried to sell the Blockbuster during the, so Blockbuster had a chance to buy it for $50 million and they laughed it off. But then it was just a DVD delivery service. And they, and they, were like, we can build this. We have d'is. We have all the infrastructure. We can just take it from the stores. Like, we don't need to do this. But what they didn't realize was that actually building technology, actually building a real tech, like, streaming service and scaling that platform. I mean, Netflix has some of the greatest, like, just infrastructure.

And even the early recommendation engines. I remember, I remember my dad being like, yeah, Netflix just recommended it knows what I like. And it just said, it sent me this. They said, you're going to enjoy this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Bernard on our nose. saved it with a $30 million check. Do you know this? Netflix and Bernard Arnaud? Over the top. I love it.

I love it. I was thinking about the actual value of putting these things together because like you're making the point that putting Netflix and and Warner Brothers together, it doesn't like everyone's already subscribed to Netflix. I don't know. I don't know if that's true. If the trends continue. Like Netflix has a fair amount of.

like they have their squid games. They have some big, they have some big IP. But if you just think about like the drum beat of HBO, come back every season. Oh, you're not watching Game of Thrones. You're out of the loop. Oh, you're not watching Succession. You're out of the loop. Like the conversation driving shows, I feel like are on HBO much more consistently than Netflix.

And in fact, I don't even know if I'm logged into Netflix on my phone right now. I know I'm still paying. but I really don't watch it very much. And I think that the reason is because I just haven't had, oh, you're missing out a homo shows. So you're a true enthusiast. For me, as someone who's not an enthusiast, I'll go to prime because I'm like, I rarely watch movies. If I'm going to watch a movie, I want to just, I'm happy to just buy. I'm not like going like, let me get the, let me get the free option on Netflix.

I'm like, I will just buy the thing that I want to fill this 90 minutes with. Yes. Anyway, so the deal doesn't include WDWBD's cable channels such as CNN, TNT, TBS, and Discovery, which are being spun off. Okay. And we don't know where that will land yet, or where people speculate it? Even if Netflix gets regulatory approval, it will have to take on 50 billion in debt to complete the deal, and we'll spend a couple of years cutting costs to reduce that debt. Netflix does do around 9 or 10 billion of free cash flow. Yeah.

And so they can certainly service the debt. but anyways in the first nine months of this year WBD's studio and streaming operations generated 2.3 billion in EBDA next year Netflix executives said they expected the Warner business to generate $3 billion in EBDA that's a price of 27 and a half times EBDA after taking into account cost savings of $2.5 billion they expect to make Netflix says the deal value represents a multiple of 14.3 times. WBD's traditional rivals, Disney and Paramount Skydance are each trading around 11 times. Anyways, we can kind of skip over this.

Kramer said so out of the box, Netflix as the world's biggest content creator by far, exciting, but not necessarily in a good way for shareholders. I think that's so funny. Let me tell you about fin.com. The number one AI agent for customer service. automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Adam Faze is coming out on the show in just an hour or two. He says,

I don't think people realize the licensing business Netflix is about to have if this deal goes through. Warner Brothers animated IP library alone would bring in billions in new merchandising revenue coupled with new versions of these iconic shows on the platform. Game over. And he lists some of these out. And one of them, I think is hilarious, is Foghorn Leghorn. They own Looney 2. So they have Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Roadrunner, Wiley Coyote.

These are, yeah, these are time-honored, iconic characters. I just think it's funny because very clearly there are a series of bankers out there that have a spreadsheet and somewhere they have a row and on that row is Foghorn Leghorn. And attached to Foghorn Leghorn is the value of the intellectual property of Foghorn Leghorn, who's like a large rooster who talks with. a funny accent. And I just imagine that they're out there saying like, yeah, foghorn, leghorn, that's like 30 million. That's a 30 million dollar business. Like, okay, Yosemite Sam, that's a 50 million business. Porky Pig? Borgie Pig,'s 80 million. Let's view some of the parts. I really hope that

someone on Wall Street, some investment banker. It's actually Adam, Ann, is for being really undervalued. Exactly. We actually think this is a $2 billion property. Oh, Dick Dastardly? You think Dick Dastardly is worth $8 million in intellectual property value? Yeah, right. What about Snaggle? I don't know. I thought you were making some of these. No, this is part of the Hannah Barbera. Quick draw McGraw.

Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, the Herculoids. Herculoid sounds like some crazy Anon meme. Boo-boo. Herculoid seems like someone with a Roman statue avatar.

Okay, so Polymarket has who will acquire WB at 86% today. Paramount is still only sitting at 6%. Six percent. So the company behind? Amazon is still up there. Yes. Anyways.

Okay. Well, let me tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. The DC comic books, I feel like there's the, like, I feel like Netflix could do something cool here. I feel like Batman, Joker, Harley Quinn, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash. Like, these are iconic characters. These are, these are Halloween costume characters. They are still really known.

But the last round of DC, it just didn't break through in the way the Marvel series did. And Marvel broke through in such a massive way. It didn't have the cachet of the Dark Knight and the Nolan films. But is there any way that they can get Nolan back in the seat to actually do a full arc or something? I don't know. I would just hope that I just grew up with the Nolan era of DC. and I would have loved him to go on and do more of that with Superman, with, you know, the whole crew,

everyone coming together. And instead, they got just really over the top of the CGI and the slow-mo and the Zach Snyder era. And I think a lot of people sort of got tired of it. And I'm looking forward to whatever they wind up doing next. Oh, they have metal oculoplyphillips. That's a great one. I like robot chicken, Aquitine Hunger Force.

They got a ton of stuff. So it'll be interesting to keep following it. Anyway. You want to go to Possum? Oh, what's Mike Mirrefloor saying? Mike Mirafloor says we already have nano-banana Pro TVC commercials with decent paid media budgets behind them. Everything is moving so, so quickly. Okay.

So James Hardin is in an ad for my prize. I don't know what my prize is. He said this is the best commercial he's ever been in. He never stepped foot on the set. let me show you how to crack the code on Celeb Deepfakes for this My Prize ad we did with James Hardin. So this is a guy named Billy Woodward.

Yeah. I was doing they're actually putting behind this this ad on TV because it looks like a TV commercial but this also could just be a viral marketing campaign on Well, my prize is a premium online casino games. Wow, James Hardin is getting in on the gambling trade. Surprise he doesn't have a fish. prediction market partner yet. In other news, this almost seems like it could be fake. Before you share this news, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations.

If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So what is it? There is, there's news out of the truth social. I don't know. I don't know if this is real because not a single, there's a very viral post right now that says breaking. President Trump set to announce a new AI platform called Truth AI. There's not a single legacy media institution has reported on this that I've found. So I would, given that this is a story that they'd be very excited to cover, I would be wary that it's real yet. But that's not stopping J. Bull, T-A-R-D from saying, and you guys think Google won the AI race talking about how Trump is set to unveil

new AI platform truth AI. I wonder if truth social pops at all today off of True social. No, it's down. Down 3%. Like he's splitting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lack of focusing. Yeah, you should be focused. You have to lock it on one thing. If you're a social media entrepreneur, I mean, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is getting dinged for going on. He's walking some of the metaverse stuff back.

You know, maybe the truth social team is getting dinged for, heading over to AI land instead of just doing a partnership. You know what the crazy thing is, like I keep laughing about this fact that like it has got to be so hard to justify an in-house AI foundation model training run now if you're a big platform when the rebuttal has to be, okay, so you're saying that you need to do something special, you need to do something creative, you need to do some weird deal with some other people, put something together, but Apple can just work with Google. Yeah. It's enough for Apple to, Apple gets,

It's not a good enough for you. Apple works to just buy tokens from Gemini from Google, but you, your business is more special than Apple. I think Apple is in the position where they're like, we don't need to prove to, like, I feel like an analyst can look at Apple and say, like, they will have leverage in AI. Yes. Yeah, yeah. This is a tough. Where there's other businesses that feel like, okay, we need an AI strategy. It's not enough to just announce a partnership with a lab. Yes, yes, yes. We need to like actually own the weights. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should, We should actually get into some of the Apple departures because we talked about this briefly. But the Wall Street Journalist saying that Apple departures point to challenges for iPhone's dominance.

And I think it's too early to call the iPhone challenged. I feel like the iPhone's dominance has not been challenged yet. Maybe that is coming. But, you know, there have been several top lieutenants who have left in the past 12 months. and dozens of others have defected to rivals. So there are some facts that are important to consider and walk through here. So the Wall Street Journal is summarizing it this way. They say Apple is facing a wave of executive departures as the company continues,

a period of transition, not only among its leadership, but if rivals have their way for its businesses as well. On Thursday, the company announced that his general counsel and head of policy will both retire next year. on Wednesday, a top designer left from meta platforms. On Monday, Apple said its head of artificial intelligence strategy would retire. Its chief operating officer announced its retirement in July, and the CFO has transitioned into a new role.

So lots of, you know, are the heads rolling or are these retirements? There's a lot of like, you know, sort of management. It feels like Apple's just like not the place to let the drama kind of come to them. They're like, look, if you. even if you got poached, maybe we just... Well, it was notable because Apple, Apple came out with an announcement after the guy left for meta and said,

we're basically tried to make it sound like it was, it was, like, they were positioning it was like mutual, like this was the right time for them to go on. And I'll let anyone else kind of like read into whether or not it was really... DHH was getting over 37 signals which says, Apple was overdue for a full executive reset. Just need to add cook to the list.

And for a replacement, Forstall is only 56. Time for a comeback. Ooh. Oh, that would be very interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of Forstall fans out there who think that he didn't get it, he didn't get it right, or he didn't get the opportunity he deserved. Cook can't catch a break. He's like, I still think, I still think Cook's done a lot of good stuff. I'm still bullish on Cook. But I don't know. Let's see. It says the executive departures underscore a changing of the guard underway at Apple. even as Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook himself shows no sign of stepping down, even though everyone is leaking a variety of rumors to the contrary. Cook and his new lieutenants face a critical test preparing Apple for the AI era

and a wave of new competitive devices that result. We haven't seen the wave of new competitive devices just yet. I mean, Apple, there's another way to tell the story, which is like Apple defeated the Rabbit R1. They defeated the friend attack. They defeated, you know, like, what was the other one that was the humane pin? Oh, they're singing a happy birthday after. They're singing a happy birthday.

It's someone's birthday. It's one of the guys down on the trading floor. Oh, he's got a whole cake out there. That's great. You got it. Very sweet. Why don't you tell us about your phone, John? Serverless vector in full tax search.

Turbo puffer. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast. 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. That was really funny yesterday, having Jim Kramer referenced the Simon and the Turbo Puffer team. That was a crazy crossover. That was a deep, that was a deep cut, Kramer. Yeah, that was a deep cut.

We have some Jacob Rintamaki tagged us in a post here. SpaceX tells investors it's aiming for a late 2026 IPO. Katie Roof over at the information. has a scoop. Apparently, Elon Musk, SpaceX has told investors and financial institutions that it is aiming for an IPO in the second half of next year. The talk comes as SpaceX considers holding a sale of shares held by investors and employees that would value the company at $800 billion. Quite the markup, double its valuation in a sale this summer and would make it the most valuable private company. He's got to be the most valuable private company. It probably candidly makes him sick that Open AI. briefly eclipsed.

The company is considering a public listing of the entire company, including Starlink, which makes sense. I think Starlink is a huge part of obviously the value of the business, and I just don't think it goes out anywhere near 800 without it, and they're very interlinked. That is a change, though, from a few years ago when Musk said he expected SpaceX would eventually spin off Starlink and take it public, but executives have shelved the idea of a Starlink.

spin-off as its rocket business has improved. Apparently, the Wall Street Journal reported on the share sale at 800. So anyways, in other news, Mark Benioff is saying that he might rename the company Agent Force. Trace Cohen says, just Force. Why not just Force? Oh, Force. Well, isn't there a Force India, the F-1 team from a couple years ago?

WIT or BWT, Force India. That was like a team. I think they struggled. I got to find that. What was Force India? Was that? The Force India. Benioff is on a tear.

His pin tweet right now. LLMs are the new disc drives. Commodity infrastructure, you hot swap for whoever's cheapest and best. The fantasy that the model is a moat just expired. Ooh. They're going to go wild. They're going off down here.

Do you think he does it? Is there a prediction market yet up for renaming of Salesforce? I think Salesforce is such a strong name, even if they do more than sales at this point. It's transcended. The company has definitely transcended what they do. I think people know. Why not just sales? I like just sales.

Just be sales ink. I don't think you can be. I think that's too generic. I don't know. I mean, he would have to update the ticker to. The ticker is the bigger one. Yeah. Because everyone wants to be like CRMs are dead.

You're going to just be able to just generate a CRM on the fly. Bucco Capital says, F it, nothing else is working. Go for it, brother. A name change? Sometimes we'll fix you. Just let it. Ethan Ding was coming in with some commentary. Yeah.

He said yesterday it should be extremely. extremely alarming to Salesforce investors that no executive Salesforce is telling him that's not a lot of tokens. Of course, they talked about January, $3.2 trillion. Token sounds like a big number. Ethan says for anyone who doesn't understand, cursor processes more tokens than Salesforce all-time figure every six days. Salesforce has 20 million users. I mean, Credit cursor has a similar amount of users, I think. Sure.

Assuming same average token count per active. Agent Force user count is 40 to 60,000 truly active users, a.k.a. 0.2 to 0.3% adoption three years after launch. Yeah, I wonder. I wonder. Like, all tokens are not created equal. Like, you can generate so many, so many tokens if you're doing these, like, deep research reports. And, like, if you had Agent Force going around and basically effectively running a deep research report on every contact and every CRM under, like, under. Every conversation. Every time you get a new email from a lead, right?

Like the token generation could be incredibly high and also deliver very little value. On the flip side, you could have a really fine-tuned model that is laser-focused, more of a scalpel. And you can be getting a lot of value out of those tokens that you are generating. So I don't really know. On the app layer debate, RCRM's cooked.

There's a post here from Kalin. He says, just met a company that vibe-coded an entire CRM to avoid paying for HubSpot over the last year. It's now become a burden to maintain and missing key functionality, third-party interoperability as they scale. They're now migrating to HubSpot app layer is fine. We experienced this. I think it's so easy to make a V1.

You can make a V1 in a day. And so you assume like, okay, you can spend like another few days really building out more of a feature set. And the reality is like the thing that you generate in one day could take 10, at least for now, hours and hours and hours every week just to like maintain it and make like incremental improvements yeah um let me tell you about linear linear's purpose built tool uh meet the system for modern software development linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release uh i actually

i didn't vibe code a CRM but uh back in college i built a CRM inside of Microsoft Excel and so I yeah that's like the classic yeah so I wrote a bunch of visual for a startup yeah it was like okay, you could go from sheets or Excel to maybe an air table, slightly more robust than to Adio or a HubSpot or and then eventually get over to Salesforce.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, I mean, yeah, the question about like the value of the platform and the value of the app layer, I mean, we were talking about this with Shopify folks, like there are so many companies. I've worked at these companies. I've run these companies where we said like,

no, no, no, no. Our use case is special. No one's going to build an e-commerce site exactly the way we want to build it. And so we wind up building an entire e-commerce stack, custom. And then a couple of years later, Shopify just catches up. And then boom, you're back on Shopify. And that just happened time and time again.

I lived it at Soreland. It was a wild, wild time. This is some wild news. Logan Paul, Jake Paul, and Jeff Wu are starting an eight-week accelerator. It's a 25K safe followed by $100,000. price round for a total of 7% equity. A lot of people are confused about doing it as a price round for 100K. A founder could easily end up spending like 30 grand, you know, like depending on who their

lawyer is, like actually. Yeah, that is tricky. So it's like 100K investment and then you have like, let's assume you're like super efficient and it's like 10 grand. It's like, is that? Yeah, it's kind of annoying. And then, yeah, it's, it's annoying. That said, I think.

there's a lot of interesting businesses that could go through this that would really benefit from working with Jake and Logan and Jeff. It's so interesting that it's a 25 case safe and then a $100,000 price around. Like, why not just $125 for 7% like on a safe with a cap that insures big at 7% no matter what? Like that feel, I would love to talk to them. I think hopefully we're going to be able to get Jeff Wu on the show at some point. We can ask him about how he is, you know, thinking about that particular term. I know a lot of people here are saying like, oh, 7% for 125K, that's low. And that's certainly lower than YC. YC, you come in with like, I think a $10 million valuation. This is more like a $1 million valuation. But, you know,

if you're an earlier in your career, you're not ready to go to a different higher valuation, like this could still be a good deal. Or you do need a lot of capital for your business, but you do need a lot of attention. Like, I could see some consumer brands getting started this way. I mean, I just remember, like, Y.C was my North Star for, like, what I wanted to get into with my first business. But, like, I got denied the first time I applied. And I was, like, if you gave me $5,000 for 10% of the business, like, I would take it because I want to work on my thing and I want to keep going. And, like, yes, at some point it can be predatory. But, like, with some of the first ideas that I was coming up with, like, I definitely didn't deserve $125K for 7%.

Because they were, like, slop companies that were, like, very unlikely to succeed. So I don't know. There's something interesting. I do wonder if they will position this as, okay, you're going to be able to accelerate on the go-to-market side. You're going to be able to accelerate on the creator side, creative partnerships. This will be, there's a whole bunch of different ways. It could be something where you are, you're going through this accelerator because you get to ask Logan and Jake about their media creation, their creator work. And then you're launching your company. more likely to go viral because these guys really understand virality. On the other side, it could be you're coming in and you're taking a crack and building something that might wind up being more like an incubation for them because I'm sure that they want to launch a bunch of products. This is a way to just kind of take swings and get to get close to working with people. And then if something lines up, they could say, hey, we actually want to do like a 50-50 deal. And this is going to be like Logan and Jake as co-founders of the next thing that they're working on together. And we're

going to really, really push this for you. We'll be your marketing arm. Yeah. So I, I, I, I, It'll be interesting to see where these companies got. Jeff and Jake, I think, are coming on the show in the next couple weeks before the end of the year. So we will be able to ask them more about that. Before we move on, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT, and more. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Aaron has a good post here.

What Aaron said? The remaining Apple leadership team. Who is this? Travis Scott, Tim Cook. And Mr. Beast? Mr. Beast did say that he's going. to film on iPhones. I'm not sure what the Travis Scott

connection is. Has he done in partnership with Apple in one of us? No, there are still plenty of folks. Eddie Q's still there. Apple leadership team is still stacked. Don't you worry, don't you worry. There are still people here. And we have our first guest. We have Keith or boy in the restream waiting room.

Getting geared up. Physical restream waiting room. They put the moon on the sphere. They put cheese on the sphere. No. The sphere of Vegas says we're sending off the last super moon of 2025 with something special. Using NASA's public domain lunar data, our team built a true to science moon that's lighting up this Las Vegas skyline. This looks really cool.

Absolutely insane. I still think the sphere is like underrated. It's so cool. We don't know how to build beautiful things anymore. Make it make sense. Yeah, we do. We do. People look at this and they think, you know, the New York Stock Exchange.

How did they build this? Was this built by humans? There's a lot of debate. But the sphere really reinstates, yes, we can build amazing things. Yeah, humans built that. Humans build the sphere. Have you heard about the heating? Like the level of engineering that went into actually driving the screens on the outside?

So at that scale, like each pixel is not like your laptop. It's not like your phone. It's like a bright light. Each pixel is like this big and it's a light. Yeah. Then, and so that light, even if it's an LED, it still produces heat. And then you have, so you have a whole bunch of them that are all heating each other off. And then you put it in the hottest place in the world in the desert.

And so there's just been like a phenomenal amount of energy. And I'm surprised. You know people are so ready to dunk on this and be like, oh, it failed. Like if it shot off, if it showed like a blue screen of death or like an error message, that would be so viral. That would actually be a good campaign. That would be a great campaign. If you were marketing it and the video that you put up showed the like the Windows blue screen of death like the fail.

Oh, it broke. Because then you'd go viral. If someone was like, oh, wow, like what were they advertising? Oh, they were running an ad for TBPN and the ad was too good and it crashed the whole software or something. Because you know, the Shopify guys came on. They were like, we're doing this live. We're live streaming to the sphere. It's very cool.

But if you can figure out how to crash the sphere, at least it looks like you crashed the sphere. I think you have some viral potential. Well, let me tell you about numeral.com compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. And we have our first guest of the show. We have Keith Rabeau here in New York City coming on down. Ooh, look at this. What's going on?

Thank you, Keith. Good to see you. How are you doing? Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. You are the mayor of New York now. We love it here. We love it here.

We'll get a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. It's a great setup. It looks great. And obviously it gives us easy. access to folks like you. That's true. So thanks so much for coming on down. How have you been? What's new in your world? Great. Pretty busy. You know, you've read of her adventure is pretty busy right now. People doing deals every day. Yes. I'm sitting left and right. Crazy valuations. Is that a green flag for you or is that a red flag? It's hard to tell. I think a lot of people

are going to lose money. Yeah. Hopefully we're not included. Yeah. But the valuations have an extra zero. Yes. You know, like, what's two? Literally, before this recent like sort of trend, I had never invested in entry price for like any normal company above an 86 million dollar valuation. Yeah. And, you know, that whole world is completely different. Yeah. So like everything seems to have. How many deals a year are you trying to get in under under 10? Like, because I would imagine you still. No, no, I know. I know. But realistically, like in the last years, it may be like one, one a year. Yeah. Somebody you knew well. So you can. My philosophy is bold, early impactful. So bold, bold, early and pocketball. That's the KV mantra.

I love that. So early means first institutional capital. Even today, if you're right, bold and early, that still may be over $10 million. It used to be 500K. When I invested in Airbnb,

it was 500K, $300K, $3.5 million post. DoorDast was something like 8 to 10 post. So, you know, the world's very, very different. Now, they're going to be epic companies. Like what is very clear is Some of these companies are absolutely iconic and will be iconic for decades. I doubt there's as many as people think.

So the argument goes that we've changed the physics and there's going to be 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 billion dollar plus companies. I don't believe that stuff. Certainly on the consumer side. I don't believe it on the consumer side, possibly in enterprise if you believe AI is going to transform every business everywhere, possibly. But the consumer side, consumers are busy. There's only 24 hours in a day. tech doesn't change that yet. Yeah.

And so every time someone adopts a new app and new product as a consumer, they have to substitute from their friends, from their family, from church, from basketball. Yeah. And so the bar just keeps going up. So I don't really believe there's going to be too many breakthrough consumer companies. ChatGBTGBT, OpenAI will be one. Yeah. Not really sure who else.

And it just feels like we're in this era where if you do have a breakthrough, the big tech companies are in an offensive position. They're in wartime mode. Some of them, like meta, are, they're founder-led still. They're still in founder mode. And so you're going to have a pretty good copycat on your tail within six months of you going viral, within a year. I think that is an interesting dynamic. Typically, the large companies, we all make fun of all of us.

All of us are entrepreneurs. And we don't make fun of these old sluggish, you know, large companies who tens of thousands. Now they're our friends. Well, they may not be your friends, but they are fast. They don't pay attention. Yeah. Like, they're usually sloppy and slow. Yep.

Like, I remember when we were doing PayPal, eBay was like the most. competent organizational planet. Like Google was literally being built underneath them. Yes. And eBay hired like management consultants at Bain and told them, don't worry about Google. Like that was the classic like large tech company. Yes. And immediately Meg was worse than most.

But like still, now, you know, all the large tech companies, except Apple, yeah, it seemed to be paying attention. Okay. You know, Apple is behind the eight ball in AI. Yeah, unpacked that a little bit because there's a lot of departures. And, you know, you're wearing an Apple wash today. Like, you're not giving it up anytime. Yeah.

I have my air. I love my air. Okay. So the hardware is still the best. What's the nature of the risk? Because I don't see us actually going somewhere else. I don't see it, right? No, I think, you know, building vertically integrated products.

So to do hardware well, you need hardware skills, supply chain, battery innovation. That's before you get to the software. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But does somebody figure out how to do an AI unique, unique to AI custom device that is compelling, possibly? Sure. It depends on what time frame we're talking next year on. Yeah. 10 years, I'd be well at the bat, you know, more likely than not. Yeah. So at some point, Apple will be expert. Bernard Arnau has a best quote here. He's like, in something like in 50 years, will people be drinking champagne? I think is yes. In 50 years, will we all be using iPhone? He's like, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'll take the champagne or at least a kilo.

But how is your, how is your kind of view on Google's, like, competitiveness in AI changed over time? if at all. Well, I think we had a debate several, several years ago, is it, you know, a sustaining innovation, you know, disruptive innovation. After ChadGBT, it's clearly more disruptive, potentially. And I do think, though, they are paying attention. They are taking it seriously.

That said, Chad ChattGBT is still the fastest growing product, consumer product in the last, like, 15 years. Yep. And I think if Open AI plays its cards well and focuses on Chad GBT versus gets distracted as being a pure research lab, So there's probably this tension there. Yeah.

Research Lab, AGI, Bola, comes at sacrificing the quality of speed. It's not just that, but it's a let's launch a short firm video app. Let's automate. Let's do all the science. Let's do they, Sam, I mean, I think. Hard to. Sam's answer to Brad, which kicked off like a broader discussion, he was saying, we're fine.

We're going to do consumer electronics and we're going to do science. And I didn't, I think a lot of people read into that and just say like, hey, Google does that. They lose a lot of money on it. It's not exactly. And those are their bets. They will mince money. So it's going to be clear so they can fund it.

Yeah. I think there's some things that Sam has to do. Hardware is probably one because the risk that somebody else puts AI together on a consumer device before he does can rip them sort of out of the future. What do you think about? How are you processing Apple with Gemini as a risk to chat GPT? I don't. Because, like, to be clear, like, to be clear, like, Gemini has an amazing model.

They're well behind on a just a product, product experience standpoint. But there are quite a lot of searches that I hit ChatGPT or Gemini with that like a Siri integrated with Gemini. I'd be going there right away if it was like integrated. Yeah, it depends on the kind of query you're doing or prompt you're doing. Yeah, but right now if I hit like for a fact. Yes. And that's not that far away from doing a comp like a like sure. But then there's other kinds of prompts where you didn't use to maybe even use Google.

Like, for example, I asked Chachadip D to write a book outline for me, a book proposal. I wouldn't have fond of this. No, we're not Googling. You're not using Google for that. You could probably one shot a book with a great prompt because you had so many podcasts. That's just out of you. Al-line was actually a good thing. And it was moderately creative.

What I expected in this blew me away was that there was a spark of ingenuity to the proposal. It wasn't just like right down the middle. Totally. I tried it on Gemini. Are you writing a book? No, but maybe one day. You see, the problem with, long form content is apparently because of a token ration ration ration ration ration

rationing yeah if you try long form content they they only spend a certain amount of tokens on you sure so it degrades so you have to write almost like a paragraph or a page at a time otherwise the quality will degrade but the outline the proposal was actually quite good I did try it on Gemini it wasn't as good so I think 5.1 chat chip chip t 5.1's thinking mode actually still has a bit of a human personality and I don't see that when I try the same prompts in Jevonai. So I think you could build an excellent cutting-edge human personality product if you focus. And then I think you do need to try a device just to make sure you're not blindsided by somebody else. Some of the other stuff, though, may interfere. There's only so much talent.

There's always so much bandwidth. Sam only has so many hours in the day, et cetera, may interfere with success with Chachybt. Chit. Chitabit should be a $4 trillion business if you maximize it. Yeah. Talk about hardware. it feels like we're in this weird era where everything is getting more capital intensive earlier and earlier. We're talking to John Cito yesterday. So this is a good question. I think there's some companies where that's true. Okay. Some types of markets, sometimes on products. I think other people are raising capital for no apparent reason. Like let's talk Harvey. I have a legal AI. I have a competitor investment that doesn't need a lot of capital. Which one are you in? It's called Spell Book. Oh, Spell Book. They target somewhat different markets, but they're actually illegal AI. But there's no real reason to spend that money.

Like, in other words, their compute costs can't be that high. Sure, because they should be able to pass that through as gross margin. Like, they should have good gross margins on day. Exactly. So when I invest in AI companies, so two-thirds or three-quarters, somewhere between, of all my investments over the last 18 months are AI-based. Yes. Mostly application layer, but not all.

Yes. All the application layer ones, I expect them to have positive gross margins. Yes. Extremely positive gross margins, actually. I'm like, you have to build a business, too. Yeah. And I don't believe in these excuses. Now, if you're building frontier models and cutting edge or you're going to do hardware,

you're clearly going to spend money or infrasure. clearly going to lose money intentionally. And that's always been true in town. But if you're building an application layer, I don't buy the margin shit upside out. There was this hilarious expose on Hacker News about AI startups that aren't actually training their own models. They're just rappers. And they were breaking down the gross market. I was like, this is a VC's like celebration.

It looks good. It looked good. Because they were like. The only thing that was bad is they were kind of making the claim that they were like more of a research or training models when they're not. But my takeaway was that like the rapper market is extremely healthy in certain markets. Because a workflow, like if you think about it, you have to productize things. Yeah. Like if I'm working as an investment banker or an accountant or a lawyer, it's not just the performance of the model I care about.

It's like how efficient, how improve, how does it improve my life? Yes. And that's a function of how intuitive is the UI, how easy does it make the entire job to be done, to speak, be able to be accomplished. So it's not just a model performance. I think when I'm looking for like an application layer CEO, I want them to really understand what their ability for, why, and what the P&L impact to their target customers are. Like in legal, like it's actually a complicated question because of the bill of power.

You don't necessarily want to make your lawyers more efficient if you're on a law firm. We've been talking about this so much. We had a, I know a lawyer who switched firms because he knew he was with a big, like probably top 30 law firm. He's like, they are not going to adjust in time. Like, there's no, they're like, we like that our associates are just running up hours on tasks that could be one-shotted by AI. I built 300, 3,600 hours my last month is a lawyer. And what is...

There's also the last month. Yeah, next time someone tells you they're working too hard in tech. I literally billed three, three thousand thousand hours. Now, that was not an average month, but still, I needed it over 3,000 a few months a year, though, usually. But an associate today will do, like, a few thousand? Well, yeah, a year? Culture is degraded to, like... Wait, but how do you bill three thousand a month?

I wasn't even a third than a year. I wasn't anywhere near the top 5%. You mean a year, right? You mean a year, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry, here it is. 360 hours in January 2000. Okay, okay, that makes sense.

Because they're 30,000. But the top associates in S&C were over 3,000 for the year. I'd be like 26, 2700, so I was a slocker. I mean, you're a buyer of legal products as well as an investor in legal AI products. Are you advising your portfolio companies to push? harder on their law firms to get that deals? So every founder I know actually uses Chatsybt for legal research. Then they call up their lawyer. And the lawyer's giving them advice and they're literally trying to get to be incredible. Sometimes they're actually

screenshoting and saying what you're telling me is wrong. Does chat GPT need some like legal, like clearly a lot of people are using it, but there was just a judgment today that was requiring Chatsch BD to turn over a bunch of stuff. So it's not perfectly not privileged. Sure. So it's complicated to use it. We'll see how the law is, but it's probably the right decision as a legal matter. But I do know, I had a conversation with the CEO of more than a hundred billion dollar company. And he has a legal team that spends 40 million dollars a year. And he authorized all his lawyers to use chat TPT. He's just like, look, you need to adopt this tool. I mean, they all use Google. Right. Of course. You know. So a lawyer technically uses chat

CBT, it might be privileged. But if you as a consumer, normal person, input stuff like, oh, you know, how do I hide the word or weapon? That is definitely not privileged. I wonder if there's certain businesses that start and build knowing that they're going to get sued a lot. I wonder if this levels of playing field for businesses like that that are going to going after markets that don't want innovation. And they could just say, like, yeah, we would have needed a team of 20 lawyers back in the day. But actually now we can have like a few like really efficient. Yeah, well, there are startups in the legal space that basically are a substitute for a lawyer. Sure.

And then there's the legal AI startups that make lawyers more efficient. And which is which is spellbook? Spellbook is making lawyers, mostly making lawyers more successfully. For firms and now for companies. Got it. We have a lot of like, actually Fortune Thalison companies.

Because you think about the incentives of a corporate legal department, they're different than the law firm frenziers. Yep. Like corporate legal departments want to spend less and get faster responses. Yep. So it makes tons of sense.

And then you can customize to the culture of that company. Yeah. So like eBay uses Spellbook, for example. And they have their own preferences about how they want to practice law. And we can implement that on software versus like Google's not a customer,

but Google might have different preferences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we've been seeing this new trend. I mean, the lineage here in legal is Clear Spire and then Atrium. And now people are trying it again. What do you think about folks who say, I was on a particular track where I'd be at a firm. Now I'm going to start an AI powered firm.

Should they be raising money or should they just go do that on their own? Usually the way they start, though, is a ratio of humans and models. Yeah. It's not like just all the market. model. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So you're going to have to pay lawyers for a while. Like, you want to take the ratio from 80% humans to 80% automation and like hopefully quickly. Atrium basically never did that. And maybe they didn't have the technology to do it. They got hooked down the drug, I think. Yeah. I'm just like, I knew some of the machine learning folks at Atrium at the time and they were like,

we're close to understanding documents with AI. And but close doesn't pay the bills. It doesn't really. You still be human in the loop technically for most of these products right now. That's going to change. And the ratio should be like one. human for 99 customers or 99 documents or 9,000 documents. And then the economics could work. But I think you would need to raise venture money up front. Sure. Also, maybe for credibility.

There's some signaling, you know, like people are buying enterprise company. Enterprise all across the globe, any vertical, are buying AI products. That's what's allowed these, you know, vertical application companies to hit, you know, 100 million of revenue quickly. Is there top down demand at very large fortune? How do you, how do you assess quality of revenue if a founder comes to you and says, Yeah, I am raising it $100 million for my first round, but I have a $5 million deal with some Fortune 500 company. And so it's really not that crazy of a revenue multiple.

But then you start wondering, obviously, is that going to stick? Or can they just bounce? We ask for the contract, actually, because the terms may vary. Often ask to call the customer. Why are you buying this? What do you hope it does and achieve what are the business goals? How confident are you that you're achieving those business goals? So that's actually a pretty standard reference.

just as due diligence. Yeah. Yeah. Does that mean that like the level of, the level of due diligence required on these deals, even if the early stage, like the round numbers, it might still be a seed,

but it's a bigger number. You're treating it with the due diligence that you would bring to an A. I think you do need to look at what's the source of the revenue. What are the terms of that relationship? Are they a pilot, permanent, do they have cancellation rights? And then you can look at the underlying metrics

like we always used to, which is what's the active usage? Yeah. Like, ultimately, and everybody in your organization is using a product. Even if you have the contractual right to cancel, you're not canceling. So, like, you can look at M-A-Us, D-A-Us, all those kind of things. And actually, we do tend to look at that. I tend to personally look at the engagement metrics as much as the revenue

metrics. You also look at the margin metrics, because ultimately, like, yeah, if you give away someone pays $5 million, that costs you $10, it's a great deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not a long-term business. I mean, if you're, if you're a, if you're a enterprise, you know, uh, CIA or CTO, uh, you're probably getting pitched some stuff where you're like, wait, I was going to buy those tokens anyway. Yeah. There were going to give them a house. And I don't even have the infrastructure to run it, so it's like, totally.

I don't have to buy it. I don't have the fixed price. There was a lot of bearishness around certain vertical specific AI tools and enterprise AI after that MIT report came in that nobody read the source material. And just anecdotally, it feels incorrect. But I think the simplistic way to look at it is like, will large companies spend more on AI in 2026 than 2025, and I think like you've leaned like yes. Answer is definitely yes.

I mean, I think you could critique, you're right. Nobody read the report. They just read, look at the high line, you know, the X or something. But I think it comes down to, as you've noticed, talked about the quality of implementation. If you have the right people implementing it, you're going to get high quality results. If you just think the software is just going to show up out of the box, it's going to work in transform an information, highly unlikely, unless the product was designed to be that way, there are a few products that you see that, you know, are designed for a consumer to just, like, or. user, like an average employee to just use out of the box, that's pretty

rare. Usually you have some implementation hurdle and I suspect a lot of these things are getting trapped in the implementation sort of, you know, box somewhere. Yeah. Do you think that? No, sorry. You guys have stayed out of the prediction market wars? We have not invested in a prediction market. Was that, like,

was there a moment where you wanted to and the dynamics of the round didn't work out? Or was that a conscious choice? It's a good question. And maybe I've been burned because I helped start in like CED and invested way back of the day this thing called BlueBap, which is an early prediction market. It's a really cool product. Kevin Hart's Javan and I worked with this founder on back in the day.

It's like 2005 or six. Isn't you from YouTube or PayPal? Yeah. Yeah, right? There's never any new ideas. We could never get it to work. The hardest part that made it work wasn't it like on the better side or the wager side? It was actually getting enough bets.

And maybe now with AI you can scaleably create enough interesting bets. We had to do it by hand. We just never could get that treadmill working. Well, you maybe didn't do sports bet. Well, we didn't do sports, but it was illegal. So, yeah, obviously, there's a lot on-ramp to traction has been sports and then cleverly politics. We did have political bets there.

And so anyway, maybe I was burned by that. Then there's another question, which is, I like the political markets. How, you know, I said we're bold early and impactful. You do have to start thinking about which market segments are, actually positive impact in society. Sure. They're just giving average Americans more places to gamble. Certainly is not something I want to invest in.

Now, there are markets that are illiquid and the byproduct of the liquidity is a good thing for society like politics. Yep. But I don't want too many people speculating. Like Americans don't have a lot of money. They gamble. That's fine. They bet on sports now, which maybe it's fine.

They bet on crypto, whether they call it or not. Yeah. So adding more speculation to the American, you know, consumer, I'm not sure. I want to invest in time. How much attention have you. How much attention have you paid to just this tension between states clearly want to regulate this stuff? And yet the CFTC has decided like, hey, these are event contracts. Like, it's under our jurisdiction.

How have you kind of like watch that play? Well, obviously, the polymarket guys have played their cards really well. Controversial, you know, at the beginning, probably very high risk. You know, Alfred, I saw Alfred then talking about a little bit. I'm sure he probably opposed it. But the founder was pretty tenacious. and it worked out. You know, they all played the regulatory cards

in interesting different ways. So it's worked out well for them. Yeah. But the story's not over. Well, I think they're in pretty good shape. You know, the biggest issue they had historically was more U.S. citizens were using their products

before they were supposed to. But I think the statute of limitations might sort of be hitting on that. Sure. Yeah. It's fascinating. Do you think this will be a political issue in the next cycle?

In terms of tech stuff that we've been monitoring, it feels like the AI data center energy use, water use, like those are the questions that people want to answer in D.C. job displacement stuff. Job displacements, obviously top of them. That's a bigger question than, okay, yeah, like my uncle, he was always a sportsbetter. Now he uses a different platform. Like, it's kind of a step. I think unless people start losing a lot of money. So, you know, in sports betting, you definitely have this.

You have the opposite of Wales. You know, Wales to the company. but like people lose massive amount of money. And that becomes a really sad story for them, for their family, and it becomes a political issue then. If for some reason you get more people bending, bending, waiting, or whatever, predicting, but they're not like massively exposed.

I think then it won't be a political issue. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've been tracking AI diffusion. We're obviously excited about a lot of the products getting in people's hands, like spellbook, like law firm for like legal AI. At the same time, we're just not seeing that. much job displacement. Maybe it's coming, but it feels like there are, if whatever's happening when somebody lays people off, it's probably not because they're just, oh, now it's just a prompt.

But do you think tech needs to do a better job of telling that story or understanding how totally. I mean, you know, I was in a speech that President Trump gave and he says, like, I don't like the terms artificial intelligence. You guys need better branding. Yeah. And nobody's come up with a better answer. I think someone should. Like, artificial intelligence sounds scary. It does. It does bad. Yeah. Robots. When you say like you're having artificial intelligence. You're having an artificial sweeteners.

So, like, I think you can rebrand it. Something like that. Yeah. Right now it really is like a power up. Like, if you're a very creative. Co-pilot, credit to Sajianadella and the Microsoft folks, like, like, co-pilot feels like, okay, I have a helpful assistant that's alongside me. Does the copilot ever put the pilot out of business?

Never. Not yet. Not yet. Maybe it happens. But, like, in general. You have a long-tale kind of situational planes that makes it prudent. But I don't think there's, there's going to be job elimination. I think there's going to be job substitution.

Sure. You know, we're going to, we need more data centers. Well, to build data centers requires a lot of advanced plumbing. A lot of advanced electricians. These people get paid a lot of money. Like three times. Three times. Three to five acts easily the median income in the United States.

So we're going to be building a lot of infrastructure. Building infrastructure creates jobs. Are the people who, you know, are doing this now going to have to substitute something else? Maybe. But I don't, I do think. there is going to be some substitution for white-collar work, like accounting lawyers, maybe primary care doctors.

So what advice would you give to high school student? I think you're still like read, learn reading, writing, and math very well. Even though the computers can read, they can write, and they can definitely do math. You need to know the fundamentals. I mean, there's a research paper I retweeted this week about if you handwrite your notes

first type your notes in class on any metric can matchback. And where? If they're in middle school, if they're in high school, should they be fighting to the nail league in the Ivy League? Where are they going? Where are they learning? That's a good question. Chill fellows seem to work out well. It does. I'm a fan.

I'm a fan. You know, my kids are four. I hope by the time, they're better, they better not have to go to college by the time they grow up. It would be really sad. Because you're not saving for it? I know. Sorry, no college. We're spending it on AI.

We'll get them a little data center. What about for the next generation of entrepreneurs that are just getting to Silicon Valley right now? And they're seeing a trend of what we call like the deal guy Yuga, the deal guy era, this idea that it used to be you get to Silicon Valley and you're writing code. The Ernest Hacker. And you're in the basement or you're in the garage. You write the code. And then you put it on the internet and everyone shows up and your elegant algorithm just produces Google and you create a trillion dollars in value. And it's because you're the PhD scientist, you're the mathematician that you get rewarded.

And now it feels like you can maybe make it in Silicon Valley, maybe not caring so much about the technical aspects. but instead about the deals, putting pieces together. That's a little scary. So the funny thing, though, is, like, people use Sam as an example of this, but, like, he was running a research lab for years. Yeah. And so, like, even though, like, maybe he's... He was a CS dropout too.

Yeah, he was also CS dropout and, like, definitely built, like, an app. Yeah, he built an app. But now, moved. So the reason why it's scary, and this is maybe portraying my age, is back in the late bubble, Internet bubble, 96th. In Allison, there used to be all these, what we used to call business dev people running around all the companies. and all do all these deals.

And then the bubble collapsed. Yeah. And a lot of people ascribed the bubble and collapse to these Biz Dem people. Oh, interesting. So everybody stopped using the label. Was that also how you met a BizDF version. Yeah. Like, never.

Like for the last 25 years. They all rebranded. BDR, BDR, but they're like lower. Yeah. Well, BizDF was like higher. It was like, I come to you. I say, Keith, I'm going to give you $100 million of revenue. And you're like, funny enough, I'm also going to give you $100 million.

That's $100 million. That's $100 million in the company. I'm going to give you $100 million. That was the classic example. Totally. So that's how I started my career tech, actually, as a business dev person. And if you look at my LinkedIn profile, it's still there.

Okay. But it became like this, you know, sort of negative signal on your resume where it was business dev people running around. And so everybody's doing that now. That is a scary indication that maybe we're hitting, you know, some people. Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, would your advice to new entrepreneurs say, ignore the noise, ignore the frothy rounds, uh, retreat to what? Product Market Fit? Yeah. Well, product. I think ultimately deliver value. I think it's actually really simple, building a startup. It's like you create a value proposition. Yes. And then you explain the value proposition to people. You're pin post. And then you actually, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's product. There's market. You know, that's basically it. Like, what is my value proposition to who? Like, what do I do for you? That's good for you. It could be good for your business. It can be good for your life. And then can I articulate that in a way that causes you to interrupt your life and test it out and verify those claim. And then rinse your repeat. So you can create a value proposition through massive use of technology. You can create it through design.

You can create it through the intersection of humans' design and technology. It doesn't actually matter, but you have to have a very crisp, succinct, compelling value proposition. In business cases, you want to move the P&L of your customers. Like I had an enterprise company, maybe the only true enterprise company I ever have funded and joined the board of where our first customer is Walmart. Everybody's like, no, how's your Walmart going to be your first customer? And they spent $5 billion on us. The reason why was we figured out there was one of the top three priorities for the company we could address.

Our second customer was AT&T, another classic customer. Spent 10 million. It was a telecom. It was an ATD. It was a different telecom actually. We could, our technology allowed them to understand their churn better. What's the only issue in the telecom business? Sure.

Subscriber return. That's the only thing that matters because they all compete on like, churn. Somebody else is going to offer. Nobody had a technology that could literally. take all their data and actually figure out why people were returning. So if you have the correct value proposition, all of the rules are changed. So just dial into the value proposition and then figure out how to articulate it, which sometimes can be different per my post.

Sometimes you have actually marketing fit and sometimes you actually have your product positioning fit. And sometimes you actually have value proposition fit. Sometimes you start with both. But sometimes you're bad at one and it kind of masks and it is not clear that you're actually really good. Well, yeah. Marketing market fit. Marketing Market Fit will mask the lack of product market fit for about a year.

Yeah. The other one doesn't get masked. It's hard to fix. Like, you may go back to the product and think you don't have a value problem. You actually do. You just can't explain it because you only get a certain amount of attention to explain. You got to distill it. Once you distill it to the right people, then it might take off without changing the product.

But that's the art. True CRO is actually good at this art of trying relation. How do you, there's been some kind of coalitions or not really coalitions, but Walmart and Etsy have leaned into LLM commerce. They've partnered with OpenAI. Amazon and eBay have not yet. Shopify has. Who do you think is going to look smart in two years

for leaning into these platforms early? Well, I think leaning in to learn. So there's a question, are they leaning in? Or are they leaning in to learn? Lending in to learn is a great idea. Like if you're Shopify, of course, like will people use chattepe in a way

that leads to product discovery and product purchases? At least we had a friend of ours, has a Shopify brand. They do like 200 million of revenue. He says people that land on his site from chat ChbhpT convert at 12%. Which is like insane. That I agree with. I'm sure that's true.

Because it's authoritative, the recommendation. Sure. The signal, it's better than a bluing. However, the question is the volume and what's the increase of that volume? Yeah. Like how much of- Slow today. Yeah.

So that's the question is what does that change and what triggers that change? What catalyzes it? But, I mean, you know, we invested in a company called profound. They're a sponsor. They're a sponsor. Yeah, so they allow you as a brand to track how various, whether it's Gemini, chat TPD, et cetera, are showcasing your products and brands. That's critical to the future.

But what consumers ultimately decide to do, do they actually start using chat TEP to recommend the next TSU to them or not? I think it's some verticals for most surely yes. I want Christmas data so badly. I feel like this is the first year that we're really going to get an answer. at least the labs will now. I don't know if we'll figure it out, but about the agentic shopping,

just the propensity. So let me give me an example of something they can solve. So, like, think you're a guy and you want to buy a new blazer. Like, I need a blazer, so I don't look like ridiculous if you guys. And you're looking like a nice Christmas sweater. So I've got to figure out what blazer

is going to fit me off the rock. I don't have time to get a tailor. Sure. Almost an impossible task, like today. Yeah. Like, literally, like, you'd actually, even if you know your fashion, and almost an impossible task.

Like, you might know your brands. Roll on the dice. Right. I can imagine, though, chatyPD kind of knows what I buy, how it fits, what things I return, what things I don't over time.

It just says, Keith, go to Hugo Boss. Yep. 38 or 48 or 42. Well, it fits you off the rack. Like, that is something that doesn't exist online. And there's a lot of latent demand

for consumers not to go to retail. Like, the reason why I go to retail, typically, is I either need something immediately or I need to try it off. Yeah. There's also this interesting thing where chatypt, and basically every LLM has been only pull in the sense that you have to go and prompt it. It never just sends you a push notification and says, they're experimenting with pulse.

So they'll say, okay, we know that you like venture capital news and you like learning that data centers. I think they have deprioritized it. But I still think that there's a glimmer of something valuable there where they could proactively send you results. It's very compute intensive. And I don't know if they got the form factor right. but there's clearly a glimmer of something. There's a glimmer there. The grudgeon is going to be the quality.

Because that's magical. Yeah, totally magical, but I'm going to react to the first five they sent me and either love it or hate it and they're not going to get a second shot. Totally, totally. So I think that's hard to do in a beat off. No, no, no, no. It's hard, but I think over time, the scale, like all the math and like the actual value. We've seen it work with like some of the Instagram ads where you're like,

wow, I didn't even know I wanted that. It's really cool. People are satisfied. I think that will come. People are also more comfortable sharing data with chatypt than any other tech product I've ever seen. So I think, like, my sizing and things like that, you know, they allow me, if I put that in memory, it makes it a hell of a lot easier. So help me square that because I feel like that's true. I feel like people have these incredibly personal conversations with LLMs.

They use them for all these funny things. They're obviously seeing AI search results. And yet, AI as a whole, feels like the most unpopular technology in decades. And, well, I think it may be a 1% issue too. Like there's a lot of people who are motivated for their own reasons, you know, to cause, there's create negative feedback on age. Well, it's true. It's clear.

It's also because, it's also because, for example. Five years ago, there was a lot of interviews that happened where they were talking about job loss and just like total. Well, even Sam, like, made the mistake of, like, talking about UBI. We need UBI. Like, this is a mistake. We need UBI because it's going to be job loss. Yeah. Well, first of all, there's not going to be job loss when we were talking about arguably.

But B, like, highlighting that a decade before any of that. happens makes no sense whatsoever. And UBI, by the way, is a terrible solution. Sure. So for all those reasons, it created like more fear. And then the safety hoax people, the people are always creating folks is about, it's literally a hoax. Safety is a complete hoax. This is my challenge. Name a single person who believes we have an AI safety issue to write about any political issue for 50 years. Every single person who's talking about safety has been wrong on the environment, has been wrong on equality and all that nonsense. So like, I just don't believe any of this because the people,

are always finding an excuse for bureaucrats to interfere with progression. I mean, I hear you. That's just like, that's kind of sad for our tech community because, uh, well, as you know, a lot of people a lot of people in tech, though, have very sad views. I suppose, yeah, but, uh, what I mean is like, is like, Mark Zuckerberg has dealt with a lot of attacks on like social media is bad,

right? But at least you got five years of people kind of liking posting Instagrams, you know, people kind of liked social media before they started critiquing it. AI, day one. Yeah, meaning it with a critique. Immediately, which is critical. Like, you know, there's this old, there's this old, like, a line that's

stuck in my brain from when Newt Gingrich was speaker of the house. He said, you know, if the electric light had been invented today, it would absolutely be banned. Because it would have threatened the candle making industry. Sure, sure, sure. The safety, you know, it actually was someone unsafe, actually. A thousand of people died.

But we never would have allowed electricity. I think about society without electricity. Yeah, we have a faster feedback loop on fear and actually taking action. and then monetizing that fear or one way. And we saw this with nuclear power, like, to some extent. If you see an AI, like, video that was generated and it's bad, you're like, I don't want to lose my job to this thing that I don't like, you know?

And so I understand. People also, there's a bell curve distribution of people's content. Let's take video. Yeah. Of all the humans, let's assume there's no technology. What fraction of human-generated video is great? Or good. Yeah.

It's probably a fairly small fraction. But then you see the AI, you're like, oh, this is terrible. It's a sloth. The guy that made this said, I'm going to lose my job, and then I'm going to need UBI. Why don't we just stop all of this altogether? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little bit like Paul Graham had this epic blog post about, you know, if someone, unfortunately, like, meets someone, you know, and sexually assaults them at a grocery store,

like Safeway. It's not like a front page news story for the New York Times that, I mean, this happens all across the country, unfortunately. God forbid, you know, someone meets someone on Instagram and at DM. Fun page news story, you know, something bad, God awful happens. But it's the grocery, you know, versus the new technology. And so you have to always remember that people are going to critique the new technology differently than what the real risk in the real world is. That's actually probably more material.

We have a couple minutes left and we're here at NIC. What's your IPO kind of like outlook? How are you thinking about 2026? You think a lot of companies get. Got some good ones coming up for you, hopefully. You know, we've got some adventures going out. I've heard rumors about some other funds. We are definitely not.

I can assure you. I'm sure you're like, we are not going to be, we have never had the conversation about whether we should be a public company. We're the craft business. IPO rumors swirle. No, absolutely not. We'll let someone else do that. But who else? But, you know, obviously we've been involved in really good companies.

Ramp, your sponsor, obviously is phenomenal. It can be a public company whenever they choose to be. Got Avin, Trade Republic in Europe, not as many people are paying attention to. Great future company. There's a bunch. Like, I'm excited about the future. So there was some news that SpaceX is maybe thinking about going out next week. I don't have any inside information there.

I mean, I read the same thing. I think it would be great. You know, it's 22 years or something. It would be a long time and also just a lot of Elon fans have been riding with Tesla for a long time. Yeah, they need a lot of them. They need something new to invest in. Well, actually, they took ex-private. They'll take it back public probably at some point that you can invest in X.

What you're advising those portfolio founders, without naming names, but on whether or not how they should be thinking about. timing and IPO. You've obviously been a long for the ride on many. What are you counseling them on when to do it? Well, I'm always a fan of go public as early as possible. Okay. Interesting. I wrote a whole chapter in Eli Gilles' book, a high-growth handbook, that explains why. One of the best books in the industry.

It's a great book. I have two chapters, one about hiring and then one about going public. Sure. But my general view is $50 million in revenue plus predictability. You should be a public company. Wow. There's so many benefits of being public. So I'm always constantly As soon as you possibly can Go early and not late

What about burning money? I feel like there's another bar Which says, hey, if you're a public company You shouldn't need to raise money anymore Has that changed? Well, it depends on the company Some businesses are profitable Like trade republic

It wouldn't need to raise money For example. We actually pay taxes already Yeah, wow That happened to me I've never been on a board of a company That's actually paying taxes You know, to pay corporate taxes

You actually have to offset all the more than a profit So, like, we're such a great company. Yeah, you burn through all your care forward. Yeah, exactly. Wow, that's fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else?

No, this is super fun. We really appreciate you. The end of you. Why, New York? Why are you here? Is it the ramp mafia? You want to make sure you pick off all that? So we actually looked at my geographic investments.

I mentioned AI's two-thirds, three-quarters. New York is the number one geo. It has been the number one geo for me for five or six years. It's about 60% of all my investments. Application layer stuff, financial services, you know, like imprint, Ramp, a lot of great companies. Basis, accounting AI, Rogo, investment banking AI,

Traba's here, you know, Ramp. It was a great set of companies here. And then it's better for me to be on the East Coast for personal reasons. Yeah, of course. Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come there. This is fantastic. I'm sure we'll catch up with you saying.

Thanks for the invite. Have a good rest of your day. I'm going to tell you about Numeral. Compliance handled. I think I already told you about Numeral. So I'm going to tell you about Figma. Again. Think bigger, build faster.

Figma helps design and development. teams build great products together. And our next guest is Lynn Martin, the president of the New York Star Trek. While we wait, Dan Sorokers Company Limitless has been acquired by Meta. Oh, congratulations to him. There's a video here that we cannot play, but Meta acquires AI Wearable startup Limitless. We were to talk about, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in the AI wearable space. There's a lot of cool stuff happening.

And like it just feels like fertile playground. I feel like it would be a fun time to be a hardware hacker. We talked about that transcription, piece of hardware that's making $250 million out of nowhere. Very interesting companies. There's obviously cool things to do. A lot of the, a lot of the, you know, the, a lot of the attention goes to the rabbit R1, the friend pin, the humane AI pin, but there's cool stuff happening all over the

industry. It's a voice recorder. Again, voice recorder. They had a hardware device. Amazing. Notable that, yeah, again, let me listen. I don't think it was able to crack like real growth with the hardware. but that company Plod has.

Sure, sure. But again, this is a great outcome for them. I'm sure the whole limitless team is. And let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spam white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure

all through one simple API. What else is going on in the timeline, Jorny? Let's see here. Yeah, I mentioned this briefly in the conversation with, with Keith, but apparently OpenAI must turn over 20 million chat logs to plaintiffs. Judge Oana Wang has ruled. You have to send an email to a server that adds a chat-tipt response in with your lawyer c-seed.

That's how you maintain confidentiality. Harvey, who Keith also mentioned, raised 160 million at an $8 billion valuation. This is why Keith was talking about. A3 percent dilution round from A16C. A 3x revenue this year to 150 million. Yeah. They raised 300 million from Sequoia at 3 billion in January. 300 million at 5 billion from K2 and KP in June.

And then 160 at 8 from A16Z. Shout out to Spencer and the boys at Koto. Yeah. A little markup there. And I feel like law firms got to be pretty discerting on making this purchase decision at this point. Like it's not entirely exploratory budget anymore. And it's not viral, like, something that's like, oh, it's like a flash in the pan. And then all of a sudden, like, they're not going to be able to monitor.

Yeah, my question is like, do you, like, if anybody that wants to say like, oh, this is like out of control, it's like, do you think they'll be able to get to like $8 billion of revenue? Legal industry is pretty big. And it's been traditionally pretty hard. And they actually, they actually, so the labor displacement thing does feel real here because I do think a law firm would say, hey, currently we have 100 associates. Yeah. We can condense that down to. about 20 and do the same amount of work by working with with something like Harvey. And again, the vibe had had at least with a lawyer buddy of mine had shifted drastically with Harvey a year

ago. He was saying, uh, we're like using it a little bit. Now he's like it's one-shotting stuff. Yeah. I didn't think it would. He says, I'm one-shoted actually by it. I'm one-shot. Well, one-shot your data analysis with Julius AI, the AI data analyst. that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions. We should have gone to Rahul here. You should have, we should have told them to come here and be in the capital with us.

We'll do that soon. YC has a new company called The Hog. Oh, wait, really? The Palantir for Go to Market. We were just talking about, yeah, we were talking about swine theme startup names. You have pig. You have. Apparently, carry no interest, watch their launch video twice.

I evaluate software businesses for a living. no idea what hogs does. Lynn, good to see you. What's happening. What's awesome. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Oh, yes. Green sandwich. But it is. I mean, yesterday we were greeted by a number of folks in your team. Everyone was dressed to the nines.

What is trees really festive and fantastic. It was the tree lighting, right? So this is every year. Walk us through exactly what happened. There were mascots, there's celebrities. They were singing. Oh, he's seen the tree outside.

It's massive. CFO. celebrities, mascots, charitable organizations, all celebrating the holiday season. We had about 10,000 people. 10,000 outside.

We heard. No, it was crazy because we walked in. We walked in yesterday. It felt like there was an IPO going on. It felt like a IPO. It felt like Santa was IPOing. And then today, we were like, oh, okay, actually,

this is a huge event. You know, Hank Azaria actually made a joke that he was IPOing yesterday. He was all of the celebrities. He did a spot. That was great. But, I mean, it's a great opportunity for our list of companies to get some visibility, particularly the consumer. Sure.

Focus brands. There are about 30 different tents outlining Wall Street. It celebrates the downtown community. It's great opportunity to generate business and give a bit back. What other big events like tree lighting that are kind of off of, like things that you can count on happening every year? Yeah. What's on the calendar regularly at the New York Stock Exchange? You know, we do a lot around the...

Is it like a Fourth of July? We do a lot, Fourth of July Memorial Day, like those types of holidays to celebrate Veterans Day to celebrate our military. Anytime there's something to celebrate our military and people who have served this great country. It's all about giving back and highlighting what makes this country great. Obviously, one of the things that makes this company, this country great is our phenomenal capital markets. Yes. And it's really a unique differentiator. There you go. Love that.

But then also like our military, the people who selflessly protect us every single day. And then the not-for-profit, the charitable organizations who so many of our listed companies support as part of the tree lighting, we highlight the charitable organizations that are listed companies support. And this year we have 400 of our listed companies

that have contributed to that program. So all through, throughout the season, we like to highlight that. People who have done good things, but also are paying it forward. Yeah. And we heard that in 10 years, there has never been an IPO that landed exactly on the tree lighting. No, but some of us close. Some of it's close.

Okay. So what's the latest in December that, that you remember an actual, like, IPO happening? The week before Christmas, I think NewBank. Yeah. Oh, good way. Yeah, New Bank in 2021 was a pretty late IPO. I don't remember if it was the 19th or the 20th of December. Oh, that's late.

That's basically that. Well, and that's that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's basically the last day that I think the e-commerce brands can like, you can place an order and so get the product. That's kind of like the last day of business. Exactly. The rush. The rush. Right. Right. Yeah, what is the holiday season? When is the stock exchange dark? How much time?

You know, we're not really ever dark. If I look at the calendar for the next couple of weeks, for example, we have a ton of ETFs going out, which is actually not received as much coverage as the IPOs of operating companies. Yeah, what is that process look like from even like the roadshow stage all the way to like listing? I mean, that one's a little bit different because you can just launch the ETF and then accumulate AUM. I know, but is there any like, I mean, but I'm assuming like you're building, well, I'm assuming you're trying to build like attention going into, going into the process. A lot of times you're also spending the time looking at the index you're benchmarking against and back testing the results and then going out to. Okay. And continue to the people who are going to contribute the AOM and show them the performance of the ETF. And how it would have performed under.

stress periods and different macroeconomic events. What trends are you seeing in some of these net new ETFs? You know, crypto ETFs have been a big unlock for that industry. You're seeing just a continuation of the various types of ETS equities. Fixed income as well. Fixed income has also been a big unlock. ETFs have been probably one of the greatest financial innovations of our lifetime. my lifetime in particular, where it allows someone to invest in an incredibly liquid vehicle

that has incredibly illiquid constituent baskets. So if I think of like the fixed income market, it's where I came from, like the Muni ETFs, they've been able to accumulate a good amount of assets. Crypto has been another online. Some folks have been on our show talking about the future of, you know, putting graphics cards in an ETF or getting AI compute or data centers and giving folks more access to that. I know some of the private credit funds, we had John Zito on the show yesterday from Apollo, but some of the other funds have taken different funds and IPOed them separately so that they get more direct access.

And I would expect to see more of that, but I don't know. Yeah, I mean, there's been a fair amount of folks who've talked about private instruments and putting them in an ETF wrapper. I know Vlad's talked about that from Robin. quite a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he's looking at that as an opportunity. Yeah, I mean, there's been insatiable demand for private company stock all in Silicon Valley,

but it's usually done through angel investing. Yeah. Never really through an ETF, but it seems a structure and how you disclose information and whatnot and make sure that you're having a good basket of assets. And how, and do you actually have a voting share in the underlying basket? There's a lot more logistics to work out in that. But in general, ETFs are going to add a layer of transparency that a lot of these illiquid assets don't have because they're marked to market every day. They have NAV at the end of the day.

The fund has. There's been some other experiments with trying to bring private shares into the public markets that end up trading like three, four times NAV and end up being like the underlying assets can be high quality. But if you're buying them at 4x or something like that, the actual valuation is like you're just, I'm just lighting money on fire. 2026. Everybody's super excited. We just talked to Keith. It's going to be a big year.

It's going to be a big year. It's going to be a big year. You know, the year was going really, really well, and then you had various events, such as Liberation Day. In the beginning of the year, that sort of shut the window, the IPO window, but obviously it reopens how we met you guys. Here we are. And then the government shut down temporarily closed the market.

as well. So a variety of our deals have now pushed into January. But January, it's going to be a busy January. It's really busy Q1. And now it feels like momentum because that narrative is out there and these deals are going to go early in the new year. Momentum's truly building for the rest of 2026. But you got, remember you got midterms at the end of 26. Oh, yeah. How have midterms historically impacted? just like whether or not it's kind of the window's open or close.

Probably for a couple weeks before the window will be shut for a bit of time because people are going to... They're going to be... They're not going to want to go when there's potential volatility in the market.

Anytime you have a large group of elections or a monumental election like the election for a president, you're not going to want to go just before because you just don't know what's going to happen around that election period. Yep. That makes sense. Well, we just want to say thank you for welcome us. I am so psyched to have. It was so sorry. I mean, look at this. It's still

it's still surreal. And thank you for letting us this be our home on the East Coast. It's no better. It was your home. Literally could not have picked a better place. Your interview yesterday with Kramer. It was so much fun. Oh my gosh. We came from pulling a chart. Off the chart. He tweeted in the morning. He was like, it could be fun. It could be wild. Could be wild. And we got wild. It was all the above. All the above. But he's just... We talked about the market, but we also just talked about interviewing, building relationship

with CEOs over decades. And it just laid a ground, the groundwork. I remember we watched his interview with Tim Cook 15 years ago, a decade ago. And you guys mentioned that. And watch how he built that relationship. Really remarkable work. And a lot of it happened in this building. A lot of it happened right down there. A lot of it. Right down there. Well, we're looking forward to. eventually joining joining him on his show and I just hope

we can bring the same level of energy that he has. You can bring your gong and your panel alongside his panel and I can't wait to see who's louder on that day. We got to hit...

Yeah, we got to hit the for the partnership. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The gong hit for the partnership. I will hold this of... This is for you. The official gong hitting. Go!

There we go. Now, that's a gong. That's a gong. That's a gong. We're going to leave these here for you, so if you're ever, you need a boost of energy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally do. Coffee.

Well, thank you so much. Thank you. We appreciate you. We'll be back soon. We are going to come back to you out. Cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

And I'm also going to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding. deep multimodal integrations. What else is in the timeline? We, of course, have Emily Sundberg from Feed Me, joining in just a second. We're very excited to have her on the show. But is there anything else in the timeline that we should run through

before we bring in Emily? Chrome Hearts. Chrome Hearts. Acquired, acquired one of my favorite hotels. Wait, the surf rider. The surf rider. Oh, they did. I think it was the family, the Stark,

the owners. We've been there. Dylan, Dylan will stay there sometimes when he's in LA. They acquired one of my favorite hotels. I used to stay there a lot and then I moved right near it. And so now I don't have any reason to stay there, unfortunately. But interesting pickup. It's an iconic hotel. They paid more than $1.8 million per room, which puts it among Southern California's priciest hotel deals in years. It's just 20 rooms. And so, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't I was, it had been owned by, I know the guy who created the hotel. It was basically an impossible task to like redevelop this like basically, it was an old motel that was kind of crumbling.

He redeveloped it, made it beautiful. Many people said it couldn't be done just because of the Coastal Commission and just how hard it is to like do any type of like development work in Malibu. He did it, sold it to private equity. I think this is it in trading hands again. But I'm excited to see what they do with it. They've been, they have, do they've just been in Malibu. for so long and have a great presence there.

It's a beautiful hotel. I love it. And it's fun that it's cruel hearts now. Before we move on, let me tell you about Fall, the genera Media app platform for developers, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Shout out to Jim O'Shaughnessy.

Yeah, this is hilarious. He says, when I say I love Bach, I really mean it. He listened to 64,000 minutes of Bach last year, which puts him in the 0.0.01%. of global fan. He's just on repeat. It's like no Mozart. I don't even drift away.

I'm willing. He never. I'm riding with Bach 24-7. How many minutes are in a year? Can you actually look that up? 60 times 24 times 365. He was listening. Okay, so there's 525,000 minutes in a year, I think, if I got that right?

Yep. And so he was listening for 60,000 minutes. 60,000 minutes. So more than 10% of his time. So that's more than two hours every day. This guy's listening to Just Bach. He's an absolute dog. This is the craziest thing.

What happened? I mean, I feel I didn't even, I think I was like top 2% fan on my most played artist or something like that. I actually haven't worked through my top 1%. He's the point 0.0.1%. This is hilarious. Okay, yeah, we're good. Well, let's bring in Emily Sun. and let's also tell you about getbezzle.com.

Shop over 26,500 luxury. Great to see you. Hi. Welcome. Hello. Welcome to nice. I see you. I'm not saying welcome.

New York. Yeah, good to have you here. How's it going? It's going great last night. We were at an event and the interviewer was asking us a bunch of questions about the business and stuff. But one of the questions that it didn't phase me at the time, but then I talked about it with someone later, and I'll give you the question. And I want to see how you interpret it. It was, if you are on a desert.

Island, you're stranded on a desert island, what are three Twitter accounts that you would follow? Oh. Maybe do that for substack. Yeah. Three substack accounts? You can do anything. I wound up listing a substack as well. It was just technology analyst.

John's just on a desert island, just like, reading some of you know. New York Times for Twitter. Need Joe Wisenthall. Yeah, let's go. You definitely need Joe Wisenthall. I need him. And then a third, probably like a, like a Frank O'Hara bot or something. That just automatically gives me some poetry.

So you answered the question exactly how I answered the question. And then someone came up to me after it was like, no. Like if you're stranded, you need to be following like alert services or like the Coast Guard. Oh, right. A pilot. Like someone with a plane. But also pirate wires. Stop analyzing technology.

You're just waving the Joe Wisenthall post at the sky. What is Joe Weisandthal going to do to get you off that? Joe would figure it out. He's not going to help you. He didn't know that I was missing though and have like task force. Okay, okay. And you want to know that he's coming for you. Yeah.

Yeah, he would give me the update. Speaking of Joe Weisenpahl, he recently made an appearance on your new podcast. He did. Expense account. Right. And he had a take that I thought crossed journalistic lines. I thought he... Let's hear it.

He said that Malaysia has the best food in the world. Have you been? So how would you know? Because I'm from America, and I know America has the best food in the world. I went to a birthday party at a Malaysian bar last night. Okay, was it the best food? It was great. Is Malaysian food actually that good?

What is Malaysian food? It's like spicy, green. It's, uh, do you like spice? Yeah, yeah, I like spice. I'm just saying that like, like, Malaysia has one type of food. It's delicious. You should go. There's beef.

A lot of beef. I love beef. Yeah. And then like sauces and greens. But America, we have pizza. We have McDonald's. We have the Dorea. Don't Los Los Casco.

Do you have pizza in L.A.? No, but in New York, which is again in America, he would say on a country by country basis. But in Las Vegas. We have San Francisco. We have French laundry. We have all sorts of restaurants. Have you guys had any great dinners while you've been here?

We had a pretty good dinner last night. We went to a steakhouse. It was delicious. Which one? I don't know. Hock something. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I just think that the variety that you get,

like I will give Joe Wisenthal. I've never been, but let's give him. Malaysia is an A plus. It's an A plus. It's like, well, then America has got to be B plus in steak and B plus in French and B plus in Sushi and B plus in Italian and all the different, all the different

genres and cuisines. And you add all that. Okay, okay, you're defending. But I think he was really probably saying was like a great, this like probably one or two specific great Malaysian places in New York. Because he has his spots. No, no. He was talking about going to Malaysia physically and saying that being in Malaysia, that's the best

food north. Yeah. We went to Hawksmoor. Yeah. It was good. It was good. You're not, you're not. I mean, I haven't been yet, but I'll make, I'll make a trip. Okay. Well, how, how is expense account going as a new podcast? Are you excited about it? It's great. It's a blast. You know, it started, um, Jason, my restaurant columnist, he started writing a column for me a little bit over a year ago called expense account. And it's sort of about like business guy restaurants, like places where somebody slams the card down. Yes. And it was a great column

And I was reading one of them He joked about having a podcast He called him and I was like Are you making a show with someone else? And he said he wasn't Yeah yeah yeah But then I said do you want a show? Yeah

And we made it in Substack And Silver Oak Wines Oh no way Sponsored season one That's a great sponsor Yeah, they're great That's amazing Substack for the road

Yeah I like that Substack sponsored They're the presenting sponsor of season one Very cool Yeah Love subsdeck. Yeah. What I liked about it was the fact that I am not really a foodie, as you can tell.

You guys say that. You've been having more culinary conversations. Yes, but my example of good food in America was the Doritos Locos Taco. Great. Or a Baja Blas is a fantastic thing. I like a Baja Blas. I like a Diet Coke. I like a Red Ball.

Same. We're on the same page. So I was worried that I was going to open up the RSS feed and see a bunch of names that I didn't recognize. And when I saw Joe Wisenthal, I was like, I'm in. And he was great. takes on food. Yes, and it was great because he's one of New York's best food reporters. I'm used to him in one context talking about me about the markets, about what's happening with the latest news in the Fed, trading, talking to founders, talking to entrepreneurs, CEOs. It was really cool to see just a different side of him. So I think if you can keep doing that, like I'm hooked. That's the, that's the idea.

Yes, yes. And I think a lot of people will jump. And honestly, a lot of people should be trying to get on the show because it shows them a different side of them. And I don't know. It just seems like it's a That's me for success. I love it. What about the West Coast expansion? I need your advice here. So I found substack is very limited analytics. They're great for other reasons.

But in terms of like the demographics of my readers, it's limited. But I do know that about 20% of my readers live in California. Yeah. It feels like a loss to not, it feels like a miss to not do some sort of California product. When I was there on my last trip, everybody was saying, like, we want something. Like, we read, feed me religiously, but we want something in California. So I decided next year I'm just going to go out there more, like, there as a state.

Sure. And I think it will probably start as, like, a monthly letter, but all of these readers of mine, they, like, have tips for me. They have stories they want to tell. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to focus it, but I was putting together, like, a small newsroom or thinking about people to help me with it. And then I realized I can just go and do it. I think that's what people want.

Yeah, for sure. So I'm going to San Francisco at the end of January. Great. I asked my Twitter followers. We need a prediction market on how long you're going to actually stay in that. Right now it's three nights. Okay. You're making it sound like it was going to be like three weeks.

No, no. Three nights. I mean, maybe I'll never leave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going in January, not for January. In January. My husband would not want me to go for that long. I don't think you would miss me.

Yeah. And my readers would miss me in New York. Of course, of course. But, yeah, I'm not sure where to start, but my Twitter community of my, like, reply people in SF have been very welcoming and generous. And I've invited me to a few dinner parties and bars. You'll probably leave with the Scout Fund. I'm looking for, like, some hidden doors. Sure, sure.

Yeah. So, I mean, that sounds like sort of restaurant-focused, but other cultural touch points? All kinds of establishments have doors. Okay. Go to Sand Hill Road and just start trying doors, like against the side of some of the other things. Yeah, I think the Feed Me report on the Rosewood Bar on a Thursday night would really go perfectly. That would go great.

I mean, it would be a great piece. Definitely go, definitely go on Thursday. I'll do that on a Thursday night. But there's a lot that I don't understand. I mean, the only other time I went to SF was for WWDC. Thank you, Apple. for bringing me earlier this year. Got a selfie with Tim Cook.

Yeah. But Gubertino is a very different environment than San Francisco. I know you probably spent sometimes. It was a own. What's the neighborhood that you don't, that not everyone always likes to stay? The tenderloin? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, I live there. That's rough. Really? Yeah. We walked through there at night after dinner. Yeah, but I mean, the Twitter headquarters for a while we're there. It wasn't fine when we were walking through. Yeah.

I had John as kind of like security. How do you plan to take a trip to? to the Hamptons of San Francisco. Which is Tahoe? Oh, Tahoe. I would say Tahoe, right?

Or maybe Martha, wait, no, not Martha's Vineyard. What's the Martha's Vineyard of San Francisco? I don't know. I said Marin. Marin.

Yeah, yeah. Wine country. But I think Tahoe is more of the Hamptons of, because when I think of like the Hamptons of, I think like two hours, three hours,

four hours. Is that skiing? Yeah, you can ski, you can boat and do a bunch of different things. Do you guys? Occasionally. I'm not super into it.

Right. It's fine. Yeah, I'm into the track right now. We're into very much in a race car phase, less of the skiing phase. The most recent experience of being on the track just completely reset my expectations for what's possible with recreational sports. Find me in thermal, not, you know, what? And you're getting ad deal ideas also from F1.

Oh, yes. Always. Always. It's the best. Back to Substack. Yeah. Jack Conti at Patreon. trying to poach substack writers.

What do you think he's thinking? What do you think he needs to do? How do you think about the positioning of substack versus Patreon? Just like from a vibe and cultural perspective, maybe first. Like how do you interpret like a substack creator versus hi, I'm a Patreon creator? Yeah. I think the medium is like you think Patreon and you think news or you think Patreon. I think podcast.

I think one in one model, the lead scare model. Yeah. Yeah. Other world. You know my favorite. podcast of Otherworld? Jack. Jack. Yeah, from, yeah, he was originally.

Tomicacci, Versace, whatever. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, he rocks. I think if they keep him, that's a great first step. He was with the Viner Wardell. Yeah. On that show. Yeah, yeah.

I love Other Worlds. It's amazing. I listen to a podcast on the paranormal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I'm not, no, no, no, I never, I've never watched a full horror movie. Yeah, I'm not into any of that. You just turns into a ghost. He's too afraid.

You're missing out. It's a world of wonder and history. Yeah, yeah, I'm a scary cat. I'm a scary cat. Okay, I think if they keep them, you know, they keep some of the big hitters, like Red Scare or whatever. Yeah. But I don't think, I think what both of these platforms are doing wrong

is when they try to do like the sports team trade thing. Like I... Yeah. And I was feeling a bit of fomo for a while. It's like, why not go try get new people on your platform? Yeah, yeah, incubate. Don't try and... If you're Patreon, if you're Patreon, don't go pouch from...

from substack, go find someone who's working in legacy media way under paid relative to the value they create, have them come over and do their new thing. And that was the lineage of some of the early substack deals was, we'll help you get set up, we'll give you enough money that you can pay for health care, pay for the first thing, and then get your business up and run. Right. I was feeling a lot of FOMO that I wasn't getting the email from the Patreon team saying, come over here, we'll be a big check. And then I got one the other day and it had the, um, it had, it had The term, I haven't responded yet. Post.

Poached. Pooched. Attempted poaching happening. You're way too, you're way too loyal. I genuinely think you're, I feel like your audience would have a mutiny. They would be like. It wouldn't work. I think you're substack coded.

That's the thing. I think you're a substack writer. But also when you see certain terms, like we're rolling out new features that we want to tell you. That roll is like a slow thing. It's not like we're launching this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The email kind of just fuzzed out after that And then he followed up

I won't out I won't out who emailed me But um This is amazing Yeah I love it But I think I think like it's okay Or substack to be a newsletter platform

It's okay for Patreon to be Yeah Podcast platform And I I'm very curious to see What an email CMS on Patreon even looks like Do you have Netflix? Do I have Netflix?

Sure do Are you like like Because I pay for it but I'm not logged into my phone. Like I'm not like a regular watcher. Oh. Yeah. If you ever watch it on the plane?

Yeah, on a plane. No. I won't do that. I don't do that. Apple TV, maybe. Okay, there you go. So, uh, but do you think you'd ever watch a podcast on Netflix? You've seen that they're doing this?

Yes. They're starting to buy podcasts and put them on Netflix. More like distribute them. Yes. Distribute them. They got the ringer. I would not. But these kids are really watching a lot of podcasts.

They're into podcasts on TV's on, on the wall. Wherever they get them. for a couple hours. I just not my mic. I hope I did. No, I think you're. Wall podcasts. Yeah, I,

they're all watching podcast. Like, people are watching expense account as much as listening to it. And do you think they're also watching it on, like, smart TVs, basically? Like, they throw it on on the TV, the way they might throw on, you know, reality TV show or a movie or...

With all the, like, working from home... Okay. It's the close. Another week. They're going to go home here. They're closed in the stop exchange. Who is it? It's Wells Fargo.

We got one tower still up here, guys. We got one tower. Shout out to Wells Fargo. Look, look, John, we're holding on. We're holding on to one column. Yeah, we got one two. We got one huge left over there, that one. Yeah, there we go.

We'll get some management. They cut to the clause. We're here, Lowe's at the New York Stavitt Street. Let's give it up for Wells Fargo. Yes, yes. Wow. She is going for it. That was great.

Maybe future feed me sponsor there. Who knows? Who knows? Impossible. Anyway, you were saying people watching Netflix shows at... I think more and more people are sort of using their TVs as like that always-on thing in the office, but in their house. So it's like the Harry Potter moving picture frame almost. It's just like the TV is on, the podcast is on while they're doing whatever else they're doing.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Holiday gifting. Yes. Do gift guides matter in a world where you can tell the LLM, describe the... describe the person and say generate a gift guide at, you know, every possible price point all the way through. Did you guys see the gift guide that I wrote about that Evercore sent out to everyone? It's like what to buy the, I think last year, the subject. You wrote it for Evercore?

Somebody at Evercore sends it to the whole team. Because I feel like Evercore, that's a premier product. It's great. I'll forward it to you guys. I looked up the person who makes it. They've been doing it for many years. Last year it was like what to buy the women in your life. And this year they changed the subject to what to buy the people in your life.

but it's like luxury items, list men. Love it. Yeah. So I like the idea of sort of like this word of mouth kind of gift guide. It becomes a little bit more secret. Sure. Substack has become a storm of gift guides this time of year. And it's a lot of clothes.

I didn't realize that that's what people want so much. Are you guys going to make a gift guide? Yeah, but we're going to strict no clothes, more hardware, more like what track cards do you buy. Are you going to get some affiliate? What plane to buy? No, no, no. We don't. No,

you're a love of the game. Love of the game. Oh, yeah, Shopmye. We got to have the Shopmine. Is he on Shopmine? Yeah. We should get on. We should get that one.

We have a lot on there now. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. If they get Ferrari Challenge cars on there. Shotmine. Hold on. Word of the year.

Word of the year. Phoebe needs a word of the year. Every publication has a word of the year. The Economist has a word of the year. Do you? We do. We haven't disclosed it yet. The economist's word of the year.

The economist's word of the year is. Slop. Right. I saw that. And that feels like appropriate, but also potentially could have been last year's word of the year. We were talking about slop as a term that was sort of, you know, I think you called the top on slop in February.

Yeah. So it really was an important word. It became the word of the year. I think the economists did a good job picking that. And then Oxford had rage bait. Oh, yeah, they did. Rage bait. That's two words.

I know, I know. For the term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, one word put together, I guess. I want to say our words so much, but we need to introduce it in the right way. You can, you can... Have you been hearing everybody saying flow state now? That's like very hot over the last week.

I like flow state. That's like such an old... I feel like that's like a 2018 era. Yeah, but slop is negative. Rage bait's negative. Floose state, yeah. We're moving... I remember when I was like in college, when I was in college listening to

like Tim Ferriss, who's always trying to get in flow state. I was like, I was like... say like Liz Khalifa. Okay. In the PLOSTA is good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I would encourage you to drop Feed Me's word of the year.

Okay. I think you should think about it. I've been thinking of doing some sort of list at the end of the year. Like the, I was going to do a man of the year thing after GQ did theirs and left you off. Oh, yeah. Crazy. Well, didn't they give it to Sydney Sweeney instead? Yes.

She was at the event. It's funny. You said... Did you get the invite? There was another... No, we didn't even get it. the invite. No, there was another. You guys would be a my man at the year

party. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'd make the list. What do you have? Are you having a holiday party? I mean, I, we've really, like, dropped the ball on events, like, since the event we did. Yeah, without your help, it's impossible. Do you, you know, with our event, we were like, we're doing

an event, we picked it, like, a rough time and then did nothing else until the day of, but you pulled it off. Did you? It was, it was fabulous. Did you guys ever go into any, to any, like, 2016 awesome SF world holiday parties? Like, I feel like the budgets have kind of vanished and things have changed. Vanished? What do you mean? Holiday parties don't really feel the same.

Wait, how so? Maybe I'm talking about the media ones. Oh, okay. Okay, okay, yeah, because, I mean, so that does make sense. Like, the biggest, there's more money than ever. Yeah, so, like, we're, like, the next two weeks, like, basically the, the holiday parties have begun

yeah tech is obviously like taken the they saw the media companies with their big holiday parties and I said like that's actually our money like we're going to take that

right and now but I was wondering how you would how you would handle room blocks for as like feed me if you're going to put on a big event how would you handle room blocks

because there's been a big hotel recommendations well you have a very big team yes so you're saying how do we transport the team if something was happening in New York. Yeah.

So we travel light. We travel light. There was just four of us. There was four of us. Yeah. I mean, do people, do, there's like two questions here. One, how do you, how does, how does, who has to put up that many people, like in a different city?

Like, like if a media company is doing, if they're doing a, I'm somewhat doing a bit. I think you guys need to open a New York office. We should. Well, this is our New York office. We're partnering with the New York Stock Exchange now. But I'm just saying if you were doing an event in New York and you're in inviting people and you're like, I'm going to pay for your accommodation because you're speaking in my event. What would, what hotel would you choose? We need a high low strategy. We need a high low strategy.

What we need is a sleeping bag on the floor of this booth. When we come to New York, we crash in the booth and we're like, we are grabbing harder than anyone in Manhattan. Or like a vice warehouse strategy. Do you guys know the media company in D.C. Punchbowl? Like they own a round show. Oh, yeah. That's cool. Their office is there. And I'm sure someone has slept there before. But you might need to, you know, look, check out, like, the real estate. Where would Punch Bowl go on my media map, which was 100% accurate? And I think I got it touched about. We still are getting, we still are getting notes from people saying, like, you didn't put me on. We did this Axios event last day.

We thought that was like the Magna Carta. It was like. It was so crazy. It was so crazy. It was so crazy because Tyler put it together. We, like, glanced at it. We're like, oh, it looks pretty funny. And you, and then we're like, all right, we'll have Emily.

basically to be the heat shield and put this out in the world. Yeah, that was great. And people tried to make their own, and it didn't hit the same, obviously. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that these formats, when they hit, they hit really well, and they're very shareable.

Yeah. I would say that stuff can get overdone, but I would be excited to read the Feed Me, holiday gift guide, also just the recap of the top 10 moments from the year, pieces that I might not have read, or little snippets that I missed, things like that.

Like the scoops that you've gotten or interviews, things you learn. I have a question for you guys. Predictions for next year. All of this stuff, like the formats are, they're played out, but they work still. They work and it's just a good way to enjoy information. I like seeing a market on a map. Yes. I like seeing a list of top things, whether it's people or companies.

Like people like ranking lists and stuff. Yeah, it's very easy to digest. Yeah, you need a little bit of H-Shield, but, you know, that's been here. Can I ask you guys a question? I was at Deal Book this year, and Andrew interviewed, Mr. Mr. Beast. Yeah. And he was playing the videos that he made 10 years ago with, like, Cam Quarters,

like early stuff, that video that went viral this week, me in 10 years or something. Yeah. And I'm curious, are you guys, I got like a pang of regret that I'm not capturing more, like how I built this style stuff. Are you guys capturing that as well? Like, are you guys getting behind the scene stuff? Yeah, we have a little bit of behind the scene stuff. We've seen it.

The thing is, we put our entire studio on the stream. Right. And so, like, it's in some ways, like, you get a behind-the-scenes look every episode. Or, like, back in the car on the way home, like. Ben get some of that stuff. Ben brought a camcorder. Crazy about it. Because, like, you could tell, like, if you were trying to just make the documentary about,

we actually thought it would just be hilarious to make a two-hour documentary about TEPN and release it in one year. Like, it just, because you could just put a documentary on Amazon Prize. Totally. Yeah. But you could tell the story through the show. pretty effectively. And we have ISOs for everything. And we often have meta-conversations like this one about the show on the show. And so right here, we're talking about the decision to put,

to do behind the scenes. There aren't that many discussions that we're like, oh, we should capture that off, off camera. Maybe there's a little bit more where we should be doing stuff. I think that the lower hanging fruit for us is just, uh, like, I think you should become one of those live streamers that just spends all day long walking around and being like, yo, no, no, all around New York, you just have somebody following you with a camera, you're just doing stories, scooping. I could. I mean, that, like, photo in the New York Times where I'm in the back of the car is kind of

that vibe. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe we should do more behind the same shots, but it's just hard to figure out, like, how would we productize that? Because it's a lot of effort. I think it's more for the time capsule. Yeah. But I think for us, like, think about the time capsule is 30 years from now.

You'll be able to do a second from every single show forever and you'll be able to see those. Memory traits. Yeah, there are a lot of stuff. It's not exactly like building silently. Like, it's very much in public. Anyway. Building very publicly. Well, very excited.

Massive year for you. Yeah, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming in the show. You're going to come to New York more? Yes. I mean, that's exactly. There'll be a lot of IPOs next year. This New York Stock Exchange partnership is all about.

Look, we got Adam over here. He's suited up. He's suited up. But thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining. You're having me. This is so fun. I'll see you guys. Bye, guys. While she hops off, let me tell you about wander.com.

We'll go wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. And I'm also going to tell you about 8th sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper and wake up energized. What are you laughing at? What do you got on the timeline? Can't share that one. Okay. But Varda is flying

its fourth mission Home to Earth That's exciting Varda has been on an absolute Terrell Brewee sharing a photo of the

C. Ysouiniba Go W4 Somebody was joking about how Varda names their their missions W-Dash the number

they're now on four someone was making the joke that eventually it's going to start sounding like tax forms

like W-9 1099. 1099. I mean, that would be a funny bit. Is the W.S. For Winnebago? I know that they have this whole like Breaking Bad theme

internally that they like to joke about, but I don't know. Where were we? T.J. Parker's quoting Granola did crunched, which is a great name for their version of rap. Oh, that is good. T.J. Parker says,

you're 2025. Deposed. What did you mean by this? That actually, I mean, a wrapped style product for all of your meeting notes is extremely interesting for the corporate athlete out there. Really, really, if you're a corporate athlete and you put up historic numbers in Renoa, please send us.

Keith is like, I did 3,200 hours in a month. It's just like you can't possibly work 3,000 hours in a month. There are 3,000 hours in a month. Because I know a full work year is 2,000. hours and if you're working 80 hours a week that's 4,000 hours. It's a, yeah, that's... Andrew Reed says when your vendor sends out their forward-deployed engineers, they're leaving their flank exposed to a pincer movement by your cavalry.

It's ridiculous with the metaphors. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan by measure out-of-home with precision with adquick.com. Conta announced a $15 million series a yesterday led by Excel and launched Prism, agentic reporting that can explain your finances. Yeah, we got Adam Faze in the New York Stock Exchange. Wow, wow, wow, wow.

In the mood. Can we get a suit check real crazy? He looks great. Yes, you look great. Thank you so much for doing it. Are you like a tailoring guy? You get it off the rack. No, I am like you buy a suit and you get it tailored.

Okay, okay, yes. That's great. I'm not at the level yet. You can get like a custom suit. Yeah. We're getting there. Getting there. Well, you had some thoughts on the timeline.

I do. Yeah. About the news breakdown. What happened today? How did you find out about it? I found out from someone telling. I'd been in favor of this merger from the day it was announced. So I think like when there was conversations around who might be the new owner of Warner Brothers,

Netflix for me was always the best option. And so I was having dinner with the front two nights ago. I was saying this. And the next day, last night, he texted me. He's like, it happened. I was like, wait, what? And I was shocked. I really did actually think this was possible.

But I think I'm one of the few people on Hollywood that actually think this is good for him. Okay. Why? You say in Hollywood, but you're here in New York. You know, Hollywood is kind of everywhere you are. Hollywood is a state of mind. The state of mind.

Hollywood is a state of mind. Okay, so, yeah, why is it good? Why is it? I think everyone is still stuck in 2015 and thinks that we are in a battle with Netflix. The reality is like we're in a battle for attention. Okay. With Netta, Google, TikTok, the AI companies.

And I think whatever's best for this IP is what's best for Hollywood. And we as content creators, IP owners? I think it's people that love our industry. I think the IP that Warner Brothers own is so rich. And at the end of the day, Netflix has the most powerful distribution arm in entertainment. And so when you look at the force of like a K-pop Demon Hunters, for instance, which is like arguably the biggest movie of the year. You think that Warner Brothers is the second most important animated IP library, second to Disney. Right? This is Looney Tunes.

We're talking Hannah Barberra. We're talking Rick and Langehor. Right? These are titles that are gathering dust on platforms. And it would gather dust on Paramount Plus as well. And Netflix now has the IP to match the distribution that they already have. Why do you, why do you don't think Paramount would be able to put it to use? Not to the power of Netflix.

And I think at the end of the day, Netflix has wanted a licensing business for a very long time. But I think what they figured out is that IP is really hard to make. I think after 10 years, there's like three titles you can actually say are IP. Stranger things. Squid game. And I think you could say Kerman. I agree. But like they spend $15 billion.

But it really is remarkable because hard. I feel like Netflix, I feel a very positive association with Netflix. I always had a good time with it. I've always enjoyed it. And then, but when I actually look through, I can name 10 HBO shows that I love and revere as like fine art relative to like, that's good times on Netflix, but it's not like, oh, you're not watching, you've never seen the Sopranos. Exactly. You're not watching Game of Thrones.

Exactly. It's not the FOMO TV. And I think at the end of the day, we're matching now the most powerful audience in streaming with the greatest library on art. So I think, like, in revenue alone... Wait, greatest library on Earth. Hey, I really do think Warner Brothers has the greatest library. When you include HBO as well. Okay, sure.

You know. I mean, there's some good stuff, yeah. And I do think when you think about the licensing revenue, they're going to start making for merchandising. I mean, we're talking Netflix now owning Harry Potter. The merchandising on that alone is the reason why this is the best deal. Okay, okay. Yeah.

So you're not worried about the debt. You're not worried that everybody that subscribes to HBO Max is already probably paying Netflix. And there's just like... Well, I don't mean it'll be cheaper for all of it. of us, right? I mean, I think you're going to get two for a little bit more expensive than that. A little bit more expensive, but then you can just keep bringing it up, bringing it up, bringing it up. I mean, I've always, yeah, I've always always been, like, Netflix has felt like such a good value proposition for so long. I've always been interested to see how people will

churn if there's not like a hot show on Netflix at that exact moment that they're engaged with because there's just so much content. Help me wrestle with this. There was someone on the, on the timeline who was saying, like, I cannot imagine another place where Warner Brothers would land that would be more of a, we'd create more of a monopoly. And they were saying they're going to face antitrust concerns. Jason, Jason Collar, who was a founding CEO of Hulu. That's right. Warner Media CEO. He says, if I was tasked with doing so, I could not think of a more effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood. Reduce competition is particularly an antitrust phrase. Right. But I was saying, like, what about selling it to Disney?

Like, if it was... Wait, what about selling it to Paramount? At the end of the day, there'd be a lot worse consolidation with the Paramount and Warner Brothers combined merger and a lot more lost jobs. Okay, so explain that angle, because I was talking about Disney and it just seems crazy to put Superman next to Spider-Man.

I think at the end of the day, as much as people usually like to say that they'd like to keep the teams of both studios, at the end of the day, if Paramount and Warner Brothers were to merge, they'd have the same film studio. Oh, sure, sure, sure. And so I think what we're really talking about here is the consolidation for the...

survival of a 100-year-old industry. That's going to continue to happen. Sure. But again, we are in a war for attention with the digital platforms that are free to watch, which is YouTube, which is Instagram, which is TikTok. So I think that at the end of the day, we are trying to keep alive an industry that is not thriving, but still is a very powerful industry. I think that this puts it in a much better direction going forward.

Yeah. What about actual physical theaters? It seemed like Netflix was trying to get ahead of some narrative that, you know, movies that you love with the next Harry Potter maybe, whatever that is or the next superman movie? Well, that's about to be an HBO TV show. That's been in development, which is really funny. So it is going out of theater. But you understand. Well, you say that, but like it still feels like like this deal has a long way to go. Has a long way to go. And it still feels like there's a number of different scenarios. But I think most likely this is just held up for a few years. So that's probably

more likely the option. But I do think we're probably going to look similar to like an AT&T time one or situation. Sure. But on the idea of Netflix choosing to say, hey, yep, obviously the next great movie we have, we could just put on Netflix, maybe get a couple more subs, we are going to consciously make an effort to put it into theaters. Do you think that's lip service? Do you like that plan?

How are you feeling about the theater business and where it goes from here? Do you see Netflix putting a pop-up that's like, hey, this isn't movies now, but if you pay $100, you can watch it today? No. But I will say I think this year we've seen Netflix kind of go back on things they've set. I mean, they put K-pop Demon Hunters in theaters and made $19 million in the span of one weekend. So I do think they understand the force is you can make a digital. There's something about a musical in a theater too, because everyone's seeing, especially with kids.

Yeah, and you're seeing it with a shared audience. Companies here, you laugh. But I do think that at the end of the day, Warner Brothers, you know, has to continue having their releases come out in theaters if they're going to want to still make movies with people like Paul Thomas Anderson. And so I think what you will more likely see is the window being shortened. but I do think that they will have to keep and maintain this sort of theatrical exhibition release. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. I wonder where it goes.

There's been a trend that I've been a fan of where the movie theaters, at least in my town, have been reducing the number of seats, but then increasing the amenities and upsells and they'll try and sell you a whole dinner and drinks, and you get out of there and you spend 200 bucks, but I don't get to go to the movies that much, so it's like a fantastic experience for me.

So you like the eating in the theater. I love the eye pick. I love that. I like the eye pick. I don't like the eating in it. I like the luxury seat for sure. No, no, no. You bring a bottle of wine over. I mean, bring a...

How is the wine? Is it a good wine? I can't tell, but it doesn't... It's not... It's not enjoying. Yeah. Josh. No, no, somebody like the one's fine.

I don't know. But I think they should go all the way. French laundry, put a movie theater in. Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I think you look at something that the Lincoln Center, I miss, which is usually sold out for weeks on end. It's almost impossible at a seat when you have a one battle after another or a DC movie or something premiering there.

And so I think the trend is going to... You will only go to the theater What do you mean? Is it sold out during the day or just in the... It sold out like 10 a.m. No way. I mean, I actually tried to go see... I finally saw one back after other, like weeks after it had come out. And I had the shittiest seats on Earth because I couldn't find seats at any other given showtime. But I do think the trend's going to be the only reason you will go to a theater is to have an experience you cannot have at home. So if that's the ultra luxury sort of beautiful screening room that you have a steak dinner at, great. If that's the biggest screen in North America, then that's also amazing too.

And I think a lot of this is sort of repeating what the movie experience was 100. years ago. We used to build like palaces to watch movies and it went to the multiplex in the mall which really does mirror probably a worse version of what you could watch Netflix at home and so I'm in support of kind of going back to that original experience and making it something

that's just like spectacular as a way of getting people back in those seats. What other media stories are you tracking? I mean this is the biggest one of the week. This is history. This is like actual history and I do, I am sensitive to that fact. I think there's a lot of people in

Hollywood that are scared about sort of what is next for our industry. You know, we had a very long strike that then came to an industry that was sort of smaller than it was at the beginning of which. But at the end of the day, I do think that this is an exciting story. And I also think that it's going to be, as someone who's a fan of, like, Looney Tunes, for instance, I would rather a newer version of Looney Tunes be on these platforms and having kids watch, like, YouTube Kids AI Star. Favorite Looney Tunes character? It's a great question. Wiley Coyote. The influx of just pure AI content now to YouTube is actually crazy, specifically in the video essay kind of documentary space where they're just like, hey, like I'm going to just generate a deep research report, use 11 labs to like basically create an audio track and then just put pictures and some videos over it is actually crazy. I've only been, I like some of the history content on there and I'll just like search for a topic.

And then if I don't know the channels yet, I don't. know until I'm three minutes in the video and the and the in the video says this this move wasn't just uh this it was that and I'm like I'm like I'm like gotcha I go I'm like I'm like gotcha I go I go see like one of the scarier things I think we have in culture because like you might think your kid is safe because they're watching them it's Rachel video it's very cute and innocent but like the recommended feed I don't know if you ever spent time with YouTube kids it's terrifying I mean it's like a I slop it's like it's like they're not going to swear no but it's weird but it's weird it's weird

and it is like weirdly sensual at times. Yeah. And I think that like, I don't know when we decided that these tech companies could be the babysitter for your child, but I imagine that we're going to sort of reverse those trends. I completely agree. And I think the meme is already taking hold.

Like the whole iPad kid's meme is definitely something where parents are now proud to be like, oh yeah, my kid doesn't have an iPad. And it's like, if it becomes a status symbol, then all of a sudden everyone does it. And hopefully the matter. What about social media being banned? There's something in Australia.

I'm in favor of this. Whoa. I think under 16, they're banning social media in Australia, which I think is a great thing. I really do think we're nearing peak sort of consumption. Here's the issue with that. Kids are still going to have devices.

They're going to use various services. They'll use new networks that have less control. I think kids are still going to be social on the internet. And if you ban the platforms that actually invest billions of dollars a year, you're going to get them on these like places, like dark corners of the internet

that don't have any scrutiny, that don't have any whatever you want to call that's safety teams, whether you're in favor of them or not, I just think this is you cannot ban humans being social. They will always find a way. They will always find a way, but I mean, but you had a very similar conversation around cigarettes, right? And like, we know that the sort of laws we put around cigarettes has safe lies. Accountants elemental lies. And so I do think that like, regardless of what the solution is. But the comp would be like, it's, you ban cigarettes, which is your physical item that you need, that needs a supply chain, you need it. It's hard to like make a

cigarette. We're not banning kids' cell phones. They're still going to have a device. Roll with one hand. John is probably rolling his own. You're going to type actually back. Whittling, whittling a pipe. So I just think like you're going to end up in a situation where kids are probably going to make, they're going to just vibe code a crazy social network and it's going to invite in a lot of. Sure. I mean, I think, look, regardless, I think we're nearing that point where we need to have a national conversation about this. I don't think anyone out there can say that, like, kids are better off today as a result of the amount of brain rotten consumption they're doing on these platforms than they were before. And I think, like, on top of that, these platforms are in the business of getting you more addicted to their slop. There's a reason why Instagram moved the reels tab to where messages used to be. Because they know that once you're on the Reels tab, you're probably going to watch a few more Reels. That's 50 billion dollar. I was not, I was not on the Reels tab at all. I would just check my messages.

You swipe and now it's real. It's curse. It's curse. It is curse. So I just think that, like, this is a conversation. that needs to be parent-led, and we don't really have the data yet to show just how harmful it is. Yeah, I always just go back to my experience with video games. Like, you know, Halo, I think was like M for mature. I was not supposed to be able to play it until I was 17. I was probably able to get on my hands on it at 14. I think I turned out, okay, I'm not obsessed with like killing aliens and I not doing anything. No, I'm actually completely fine. And same thing with Call of Duty. I mean, I remember going to game set with my mom and trying to buy GTA 5, and they have to give you

that whole warning. Like, do you know this game includes every horrible thing you've ever heard your entire life? And it's like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So having some sort of warning system, I'm a big fan of MPAA ratings coming to tech products. I've been kind of beating that drum for a couple months. But I like, I think the MPA ratings, I hope that the MPAA figures out a way to work with the tech companies in a way that's like accretive to them. Like they get paid or whatever.

Because I think that there's just something about if I say, hey, like, like Instagram is R-rated, you'll be. like okay I know what that means or like Instagram's PG-13 rated or it's G-rated like I know intuitively and I'm ready as a parent to to decide when and maybe I want to say hey uh you know PG-13 rated movies like a little bit earlier because parental guidance is recommended it's okay it's like we can even with video games I'm I'm a big fan of like cooperative games being a wildly different dynamic than like solo online in like the toxic chat room whereas if it's like me and my son playing a co-op game together, like troubleshooting and stuff.

Even if like the screen images are a little bit like adult, it's like we're collaborating. And so it's a wildly different dynamic than being like lonely and then seeing imagery. I mean, I do think these are just sort of, unfortunately some of the problems we have to deal with with user generated content. We're talking about games that were made by hundreds, if not thousands of people that had to go for an approval system to get that rating. there are dangers when it is totally left up to the person of just making whatever type of content you want.

Of course, platforms like YouTube are going to police that content and you're not allowed to have, you know, can't murder somebody and have that video exist on YouTube. You can't on X though. So I think it's just a matter of figuring out like where do we want this conversation to go and like what approvals do we want to get the parents. Yeah. Want your take on the Marty Supreme Marketing Campaign. Oh, yeah. Because this feels like to me, I don't I don't pay much attention to movies. but I'm seeing a lot of

Marty Supreme content. That's good. It's Jordy's film of the year already. Have you seen it? No, no. I saw it. I mean, I saw it. I went to the premiere. I understood it came on Christmas from that.

But it's fucking, I mean, it's amazing. It's the best movie of the year. I will say it's the best movie of the year. Not to put a brother in the race between the two, but Josh Safty is the goat and he's the one. He's a football. It's the best score. It's the best acting.

the greatest cast. It's such a phenomenal movie. The best score? Best score. Really? Yeah. Interesting. I didn't anybody think about it? In the ping pong. No, no, no, like the best, like the music of the movie. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. 21 to zero.

I will say, I don't know. I think, you know, part of it's that they're dealing with Timmy has a, Timothy, not that I'm friends with him, has a very short amount of times. I think he's filming Dune right now. So I don't know he's that available for press. I think what they're doing is super creative. Totally. I worry that it's a little inside baseball.

And I think like you could be going more mass culture with this like he did with the Bob Dylan movie by going on Pat McCaffey and all these Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will just say the movies phenomenal. The blimp, I've been trying to get somebody to use it, do a blimp marketing campaign for so long. You want to do a blimp. Yeah. No, I was just pushing, like, ramp to do a blimp.

Yeah, I told the Gemini team do a blimp, right? Like, blimps are an amazing asset because you can physically put them over the air. Like, you're putting something that is, you cannot vent. They are. They are. And I think it was fun that it was connected to the instrument. Of course. Of course.

Yeah. It is, it is, it is the movie of the air. It is best picture. Okay. Well, Best picture. Whoa. What's the show of the year?

The show of the year? Honestly, I feel like I actually didn't catch up that much with television shows this year. I feel a little more. I'm rewatching Homeland, though, which I... Oh, Homeland. Wow, that's a throwback. It is a throwback in this point. Sort of like Obama era.

I remember season one having a great, like, cliffhanger. I was really into it. You're deeper in the seasons? No, no, I'm like episode seven, season one right now. This is like a new... Oh, and you've never seen it? I was kind of like in passing when I was a kid, but I don't really think I like went through it. No, I remember being really in there.

I didn't know when I watched it. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Of course. This is fantastic. Thank you for having. It's you. Congratulations on your booth. Look at this.

Yeah, look at this is crazy. This is crazy. We're here. We're doing it. So great to enjoy here. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. I'm going to tell you about adquick.com.

Out of home advertising an easy measure. We'll plan by and measure out of home with precision. Did you know the owner of AI.com is. deep seek. What? Apparently. It could be fake news. It's according to Google AI overview.

Wait, no, no. This is completely wrong. Completely wrong. Because it says it was owned by tech YouTuber YouTuber MKBHD who acquired it from Elon Musk. That doesn't make any sense. That's a complete nonsense. No, no, no. That's like completely unreliable.

I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it. Anyway, is there any other news that is, worth running through. There was a review in the Wall Street Journal of a book called Maintenance of Everything, Part 1, Review, Making of the Future by Stuart Brand. This is a striped press book. We should try and have them on the show. So it begins with this drama. This is an interesting thing. It's talking about the process of maintenance. And says the author recounts the stories of three contestants in the 1968 Golden Globe around the world solo sailboat race.

One was a former merchant Marine whose wooden 32-foot catch was barely adequate for a journey through the punishing Southern Ocean. Make-do and mend was his motto. Another competitor was a tech-wiz who packed his plywood trimorail. Yes, the tech-wigs got logged. Electronic gizmos. A dreamy optimist, he set sail in a rush, hoping for the best. The third and the most experienced racer sailed in a purpose-built steel-hulled. boat, which he maintained

with Zen-like discipline. He said he spent his days working calmly at the odd jobs that make up my universe. And so, while this story will be familiar to sailors and others who have read the many books written about the race, Mr. Brand minds the competitor's harrowing experiences for deep lessons.

Maintaining the technology that keeps us alive is more than a necessary... Josh Wolfs, remember, he was talking about his thesis for maintenance. I don't know. I think he was on the show, if I remember correctly. I mean, the idea is like everybody wants to build things. Nobody wants to maintain them. But we have a lot of things in the world that maybe aren't functioning the way

that you want them to. You can throw them out or you can like maintain them and bring them, revitalize them. So I'm excited to read the, did they give a proper review? I mean, the New Yorkers and the Wall Street Journal is not doing exactly like two thumbs up here. But they, they are, they are reviewing it and they say maintenance. will engage students of technology, challenge business readers, and inspire home tinkers, who will be happy to learn that fixing gadgets is also a path to enlightenment. Fittingly, the book was initially published in installments online, visible at books. org and works in progress.com.

As a kind of editorial DIY project, Mr. Brand tends to jump from topic to topic as he follows his passions. Some might find his digressions neandering. I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that. And the author of this post on The Wall Street Journal says, I found them delightful, reflecting that quirky organization, the book ends on a tangent rather than a big wrap-up. But that only raises expectations for part two. And so I think this is a positive review by Mr. Meigs,

the former editor of Popular Mechanics and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And I think that concludes our show. I found out AI.com. The owner is trying to sell it and they're redirecting it to a bunch of different sites to try to generate. Exactly. And so people are, people, so they'll send it to MKBHD for a couple days. To hope that he posts about it. And then, and then if you're in the analytics and you're Elon at XAI or something,

and you're like, oh, wow, I'm getting all this traffic from where. Oh, someone redirected at AI.com to me? I'd be curious how much value. Maybe I should buy it. It is a lot of traffic. I wonder how much traffic it actually gets. I have no idea. I can't imagine that there's that many people that are just going to AI.com.

Are those the best customers? Really? Like, people haven't made a decision. I mean, openAI botchat.com. So maybe these short, short domains make a lot of sense. I mean, doesn't, does Google own dot AI or something? Because they have AI. So I guess they own the, the TLD studio.

Google doesn't just buy domains. AI.com only got 93,000 visits in October. According to similar web, which does not seem super valuable. But you could do something fun with it. You could do something interesting with it. I'm sure that there's a way to make a sum about it. But it's not worth $100 million in any situation. Yeah.

Well, in other funding news, there's 350 million new funding for Castilian, who's been on the show. Whoa. And the Wall Street Journal is putting in context, there's alarm over the hypersonic missile gap. And it's fueling a startup. Boom. The Pentagon is getting serious about hypersonic weapons, a technology that have eluded the U.S. military for decades. It's looking to startups with no experience, but billions of dollars backing them to fill an increasingly glaring hole in the national arsenal. China and Russia both have stockpiles of these long-range, super-fast, maneuverable weapons.

The U.S. doesn't, even though officials consider them essential to winning future conflicts as the Defense Department belatedly looks to close that gap. Private investment is pouring in, and startups, many of which haven't built hypersonic systems at scale and haven't flown at hypersonic speeds are seeing their valuation soar. The latest is Torrance-based, Torrance-based Castilian, which on Friday said it raised $350 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. Wow. Congrats to the team over at Castilian.

Great progress. They were around, I remember they were around like 100 or 200 earlier this year. Oh, yeah. Big, big jump. We are in the back of our show, so I will pull up this post from Jason Freed, talking about the best back quarter in the last 50 years. What car is this? This is the Ashton Martin Zagato, which is probably an underrated car in general.

And just a fantastic color. Hopefully the team can pull it up. But Jason has incredible taste in all things in life and certainly in cars. but that's our show for today. We'll be back home on the West Coast on Monday. I can't wait. And thank you for tuning in with us today. And yesterday from the NICC, thank you to Lynn, Chloe, and the whole team.

They're all fantastic. And we will be back here soon. We'll see on Monday. Cheers. Thank you. Goodbye.