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

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

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

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

We have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange announcing today. Hopefully you've seen it on the timeline. We have a post here from Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange. Living legend. She says a really bright spot for 2025 has been getting to know these guys. That's us. That's us. We're proud to announce today that the New York Stock Exchange is TVPN's exclusive exchange partner covering the IPOs of tomorrow. We are proud to provide the backdrop for their coverage of the next wave of tech-driven innovation with Jordy Hayes and John Coogan and the entire team of TBPN.

This partnership underscores our commitment to providing the premier platform for companies that shape our future. Well said to Lynn. Lynn will be joining in just a little bit. Okay. Great. And yeah, this partnership was probably the most natural. It made match made in heaven. Match made in heaven, truly, not just saying that. We got together for the first time for the Figma IPO. Got to come back for the Klarna IPO, two of the more memorable moments from this year.

And Lynn and the whole team here are just fantastic. So this will be our home when we are on the East Coast. We love it here. And we have a super fun show today. We do. need to tell you about our sponsors, Ramp, time is money, same boat. He's used corporate cards, bill, pay accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. And there is some news on the timeline. Should we start with Gemini? Yes. And so Ross Hendricks says this is the correct take. He's

talking about Gemini winning the AI race and questioning, is it bearish for the market as a whole if you think about it, which is what efficient market hype said. Gemini winning the AI race. race is like super bearish for the market if you think about it. And he says, Gemini winning ensures zero profitability for any other LLM model. Google will force any other player into an endless sea of red ink by keeping its model free until they bleed out. And then it will monetize once its monopoly is secured. That means ain't no one making money on data center capax. Oops. What do you think? Hot take. I think it's thought provoking. I disagree with a lot of it. Yes. I think it's it's, it's It's very real in some sense that we always knew that Google would put an incredible amount of pricing pressure on OpenAI.

They have the cash flow. Again, even in the areas that Open AI also wants to compete, consumer electronics, science, I'm sure, you know, chips, obviously. So all these areas that not even core to OpenEI's business today, Google's already been investing billions and billions and billions of dollars in these categories for a long time. overall this I'm not convinced that there will be a monopoly in LLMs it feels today like we're headed towards like a duopoly at the very least and you can just easily see that

there will be a number of other players making plenty of money I feel very I feel very good about Anthropic right now right anthropic I thought Dario's commentary yesterday at Deal Book Summit was fantastic was, he was a wild, it was a wild interview because he kept saying like, I'm not going to say who I'm talking about. It was really wild.

And then, of course, he was, obviously talking about. He had some crazy lines. Didn't he say, he, he was saying that, basically saying he felt like he literally said the word yolo. Oh, really? Yeah. I miss that. But it's very clear that he grew up, like, just maybe blocks away from Alex Carp because they have the exact same accent. And it's very jarring when you listen to it because they both talk about AI.

but they're very different people in terms of like the ideologies, the types of businesses that they're building. Everything about it is different except for they sound similar. So we've got to put them together at some point. I do have an overall rebuttal, which is my end my rebuttal is brought to you by Vantta. Automate compliance and security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitor and security reviews. So this, my rebuttal to Ross Hendricks here is that Google likes good margin. They grew up with the best margins.

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

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

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

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

I mean, it's not wrong. Or the Nvidia Newsroom line. Yeah. I mean, I guess the question is, you know, Ilya seems to be at SSI, Ilius that's career at SSI, seems to be. the most age of research pilled, since he coined that phrase and kind of ushered in the age of research. He seems to be the AI researcher that's doing the most undirected, the most, like, the least purpose built training, potentially. We don't know what he's doing, but, like, you would think he would need the most flexible systems. And yet it feels like he's maybe aligned with TPU.

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

I mean, I guess they're sure-were- Or potentially a large shareholder. So Lisa goes on to say, from our perspective, there is room for all types of accelerators. However, over the next five years, GPU should remain the clear majority of the market because we are still early in the cycle. And I agree with this because even if you look at

at like AI workloads at a place like meta, Gen AI, like actual LLM inference, large language models, these large transformer-based models, things that might benefit from an ACTA, like the TPU, that's like less than 20% of compute spend, I'm pretty sure. Like, there's just a ton of just recommending content. Put the ads in the chat. Just put the ads in the chat.

Just put the ads in the feed. In the feed. Put the ads in the trough. And that obviously does use AI. It just doesn't use, you know, large language models. They're maybe not transformer base. Or maybe they don't benefit from the acceleration that comes from going to an ASIC necessarily.

So she says software developers want flexibility to experiment. with new algorithms. That certainly sounds reasonable. You can't, you simply cannot know ahead of time what to hard code into an ASIC. That is the difference. Well, I mean, if you're Google, you kind of can since you invented the transformer. You're like, let's make that in. They might need to create the copium chip. And remember, Nvidia, so Nvidia on November 25th said people were very concerned by this post. Invita offers greater performance, versatility and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. And so, again, that's a fair point of view.

But I think that we're already seeing that plenty of players are happy to buy a chip that is good at a specific framework or function, right? And so they're pitching the one size fits all, the toolbox, basically, that you get in a Nvidia GPU or an AMD chip. So we'll see. Well, if you don't want to worry about what chip your AI analyst is running on, go over to Julius.AI, the AI, the AI data analyst that works for you, join millions who use Julius to connect their data ask questions and get insights in seconds. Lisa ended by saying, so a 20 to 25%

share for ASIC-style accelerator seems reasonable. It is also important to recognize that this is a large and expanding market, and we will see strong innovation in both silicon and software, which will drive further differentiation across the industry. The other interesting thing is like, is like the, you mentioned open AI, but like, there's nothing stopping AMD from doing something that looks like a TPU for a foundation model company. Yeah. And going to them and saying like, hey, give us, if something is slowing you down by 1% and you're about to buy a hundred thousand of these, like, can we just fix that for you? And everyone else kind of has to deal with it? Like, there's a whole bunch of places where it would just make sense to actually change the chip. That's

the dawn of the whole the whole Nvidia AI stack like they made they used to be a similar architecture between the gaming chips and the AI chips

they eventually like kind of forked that yeah because they decided that even though they're both like GPUs there are now

different GPUs for different purposes from one company and AMD of course will be responsive responsive to that so meanwhile

Demis is moving on to the next paradigm he is according to Peter over at Alam Arena Demis and the deep mind team are hiring a research scientist for post-AGI research. This is what we were asking for. We were saying, we were saying, you know, there's a whole bunch of AI researchers,

then there were AI, AGI researchers. Then Zuck came in over the top, said, we don't care about AGI, we're going straight shot super intelligence researchers. You've got to be a super intelligence researcher to work here. SSI says we've got to be a safe super intelligence researcher, and now post-AGI research. So is this him trying to bait agents, like AI research agents that are like of the future, right? So everybody's like, everybody's kind of banking on creating an AI that's really good at AI research.

And so maybe Demas is trying, maybe Demas believes there's one out there. He's trying to beat them in. Yeah. And because one of these agents might be like, I am in the post-AGI era. I am AGI.GI. You get time traveler scenario? What do you say? No, no, no.

Like, you know, who knows? Maybe there's a, maybe there's one of these. incredible research agents among us, right? And he's trying to bait them in and say, hey, come over to DeepMind. I don't know who, it doesn't matter where you were created. Yes, yes. You're welcome here in the post-AGI era. I just like the idea that, you know, we initially were joking about like the media

landscape being like the punk landscape. And you have like pop punk, post-pop-prong, trad, trad punk, or underground, neo-punk, or new metal, all these different, you know, musical subgenres. All of that has come to AI fully. There is AI, AGI, ASI, safe superintelligence, post-AGI research now. Post-A-G-I will be next, I'm sure. But until then, until then, go check out Cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devon, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

So, what else? So there's been back and forth on whether or not Open AI is rolling out ads in chat GPT, the most recent reporting out of the code red memo, meeting, etc., was that they were potentially pulling back a little bit on ads. There was a bunch of different accounts, including Polly Market, that were sharing that Open AIs ready to roll out ads. One thing that was notable was that I saw a ton of people dunking on it being like just very against ads in L.R.

So a lot of people, and you're really, and you're really, and you're not going to, and were talking about this. Who's going to be the first? Eric Suford, Ben Thompson, we're holding up the wall being like, we will stand with you, Sam Almond and Fiji Seymot. And Sundar, and Sundar, we are your strongest

soldiers. We will support you if you roll out of ads. So in some way, in some way opening eyes should want Gemini to go first. Yes, yes, yes. Take the first leap. But I think that it's very possible that Google might be like, no, we'll let you do the honors.

Exactly. Exactly. I think we were talking about yesterday. The first ad in the chat app is going to be screenshoted and shared around the world. Like, it's just going to be the case. So it's going to be wild. But what does signal say here? He says, one last thing on ads. If I'm Google, I wouldn't run a single ad on Gemini core.

I'd run it at a pure loss until every competitor is forced to slap ads everywhere just to keep the lights on. Yeah, it's the bleed-in-out strategy. But Google had the opportunity to do that with, they could have gotten into a price war on cloud. They could have said, hey, we want to come in, you know, and we're going to take zero margins on this and really try and take market share from AWS and Azure. They've all agreed, no price works, basically. Let's compete on functionality, let's compete on branding,

let's compete on integration. They have not had a price work. And Google doesn't have to spend nearly as much time building any ad. They have the ad infrastructure, right? They have AdSense. They have thousands of people out there already that just sell ads that work with. So they have all the customer relationships.

There's very few businesses on Earth that spend money on advertising and don't spend money with Google. Speaking of ads, here's an ad for Adio, the AI Native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And also on the chat GPT ads topic, Sean Frank says that a chat GPT referred session to his site, Ridge.com, converts at 12% and is worth $5 per visitor, the highest I've ever seen. For context, there's plenty of e-commerce brands who have like a 1.2% conversion rate.

Yes. And they're trying to improve it by, you know, they're constantly trying to improve that. But there's very notable that it's such a massive difference in conversion rate. It just shows the level of intent that somebody has when they're coming from Chad GPT. They've done a bunch of product research most likely. They've looked at options. They're landing on the ridge site, like basically ready to pull out a wallet and a wallet. Well, they don't have one.

Digital wallet. Yeah. And purchase. Pull out a credit card from a loose collection of receipts and cards and cash that they've been carrying in their pockets because they don't have one. That's what's going on. Joe Weisenthal. Brother Joe. Sir Joe Wisenthold.

Congratulations to him. It was the 10-year anniversary party last night, I believe. We just missed it. Overnight success. Joe has a chart. He says wild chart from Jim Reed at Deutsche Bank showing just showing how much open AI is expected to burn before turning a profit. A couple things stand out. how small the Amazon burn really was for its first eight years.

How big the Uber burn was before ultimately getting into black. And so it's hard to see the exact numbers here in this chart. Amazon looks to be like sub a few billion dollars, sub five billion dollars. Spotify actually. The real story with Amazon though was that they were just basically cash flow zero for a long time when they could have been generating $10 billion or something like that. So it was effective. But I mean, that's obviously way better for shareholders than maybe we're going to lose. 140 billion.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. This projection is factoring in Sam trying to also build SpaceX with an OpenAI. Yes, that was in the business and finance action. Yeah, in the journal today. Why don't why don't you read through it? So this is a scoop from Berber Jin, one of the greatest to ever scoop. It says Open AI CEO considers building or partnering with rocket company. Open AI chief executive Sam Altman has explored putting together funds to either acquire or

partner with a rocket company. a move that would position him to compete against Elon Musk's SpaceX. Altman reached out to at least one other front, invading Russia in the winter, one might say, in the AI winter. Don't invade. Don't invade, what is it, what's it, star base during the AI winter. He reached out to at least one rocket maker Stoke space in the summer, and discussions picked up in the fall,

according to people familiar with the talks, among the proposals, was for OpenAI to make a series of equity investments in the company and end up with a controlling stake. Such an investment would total billions of dollars over time. The talks are no longer active, but this happens. So now it's leaking. Altman and Open AI are facing market headwinds after striking hundreds of billions of dollars of deals. So first, to close out the burn thing, when I'm looking at this original chart of like, Amazon over eight years burnt half a billion or a couple billion, then Tesla burnt more than Uber burned more. And I see Open AI burning way more. It is striking, but it actually doesn't seem that crazy if we're talking about a potential really powerful monopoly, right? If there's a really

powerful monopoly like what happened with Uber, look at the market cap of Uber, look at the market cap of Lyft, and ask yourself, was it worth investing $40 billion? Was it worth burning now? Everyone will say absolutely, absolutely. And so if the outcome at the end of this is, yeah, it's going to be the front door to AI for everyone, forever, or for 30 years, you know, or something like that, then it's totally worth it. There is a comment here that's from Fajju that says, I feel like comparing dollars spent in the 90s versus the 2020 should probably be normalized. So yeah. Yeah. In other news. I have more on this potentially, but let me tell you about public.com, investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry in the yields,

and they're trusted by millions. So they are opening up a second front. What's interesting is not a second front. Yeah. A 10th front. It's funny that there's no, that Sam Altman is not teaming up with Jeff Bezos, who has Blue Origin, but lacks. a really strong AI bet. There was a little bit of anthropics going on. He has his own company now. He has his own company, yes. But he's not, I would not say that Jeff Bezos has as much control over AI as Elon does

with XAI, right? He doesn't have as much of the company. He's a co-CEO of Project for Mathyas. But this just started. This just started. Whereas XAI has actually scaled, has large data centers. Sure, they might be a little bit behind on certain benchmarks. It might be ahead on some other things.

They might need to, you know, actually ramp the usage of this. of this product, but you can't say that Elon is like sitting on the sidelines during the foundation model wars. Yeah. You basically can't say that about Bezos, right? I would argue that. They have $6 billion of funding. Oh, for this?

Yeah. Yeah. It helps when your co-ceo is, uh, started Amazon. I don't know. I would just, I would, I would see them as potentially like natural, there's a natural alliance there. Bezos has, has a copy of everything Elon's done, basically. like Bezos has Rivian to compete with Tesla, which is interesting.

He's not the founder of it, but he's invested. He has Blue Origin, obviously, to compete with SpaceX. And he has a number of other companies that feel like they mirror Elon, and it feels like they've been going back and forth for a long time. In other news, Met's owner, Steve Cohen, has officially been awarded a casino license in New York, enabling him to build an $8 billion hotel and casino complex next to City Field. That's a thousand room luxury hotel, 5,000 slot machines.

So for those not familiar... So slot machines, you can't normally do that in New York, right? I don't think there's slots in New York. I feel like when I think of slot machines, I think of Las Vegas, and I think if that's the only place. And then maybe Atlantic City. Yeah. Atlantic City, I feel like. You had an idea, which was to somebody to set up a slot machine in real life,

pointed video camera on it, and then have somebody set up prediction markets... Yes, to predict what happens with the next poll. Yes, because that would help you understand. what's likely to happen. And you could hedge any type of risk that the slot machine might in power. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, if you're in the slot, if you're in the slot, you know. Yeah, you don't want to be on the other side of that slot machine, too.

Yeah, you get wiped out. Exactly. It's going to have restaurant bars and a theater for shows and 25 acres of public parks and playgrounds. So fun for the whole family. The kids will be climbing on the jungle gym. and they'll accidentally be pulling all the, imagine a jungle gym. It practices of the three armed bandits,

so you get used to the muscle memory. Throwing, throwing dice. Comic, maybe like comically large cards that you can play. That's true. That's true. Yeah, we can make a whole casino themed playground using generated AI and use that to design it. Joe Pompliano says,

Cohen is essentially taking an under-monetized asset, 50 acres of parking lots around the stadium and trying to transform it. into a year-round revenue engine that produces consistent returns, independence of how the Mets perform. And with the New York State Gaming Commission predicting that the property, predicting, wink-wink, wink, wink, that the property will generate $3.9 billion in annual revenue. Cohen's 50-acre complex would instantly be one of the top 10 largest U.S. casinos by revenue.

Anyways. Well, let me tell you about fin.com. AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel with fin dot a i we missed a post on the on the spacex competition we did uh buco says uh friend dear friend of the show says overeating going to get their faces ripped off if they don't just focus focus focus equity deals and other bets will not win the great game that feels to be uh be consensus consensus Thompson was talking a lot about the comparison to Google and tracking, when did Google monetize? Google wound up monetizing, I think, sooner than Chatschapit has.

They put ads in it, I think, in year two. It's now been three years from Chachapit. Google was trying to figure out, effectively trying to encourage employees to do, to eat more and have more massages so that it didn't, they look less like a monopoly, right? Maybe, but, I mean, Google did get, did earn the right to do other bets by, just so solidifying their market in the search engine world that then they could go and do Gmail and they could go and do GCP and they could go and do Waymo. But it's just like all of that happened after becoming cash flow positive. And I think that's why people have a little bit of like nervous energy around going to space,

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

And he was like, hmm, I bought Johnny I for, what was it, six? And I absorb another $2 billion company. I mean, okay. He wants to own the full stack. Yes, which is getting stackier and stackier every single day. You're going to need to start buying land to buy the silicon to buy the sand. But do you think there's obviously an immense amount of pressure right now on data center buildouts? They're using too much energy.

They're using too much water. If you put them in space, do you think that helps the discourse at all? I think people hate rockets. so damned if you do but but truly it's going to be much harder to say like hold up an electricity bill in Memphis and say hey my electricity bill went up and it's because of Annie over there

in the data center who's just you know slopping it up instead you're going to be able to say hey the data center that yeah it's generating sometimes helpful math homework help sometimes creative writing stuff sometimes some weird stuff Cancer. Sometimes it's curing cancer, sometimes it's doing weird stuff, whatever.

It does a bunch of different stuff. But at least it's not increasing my power bill because it's in space, and it's not an eyesore. It's not in my backyard. And it's not using any water because it's up in space. You think that would help? Maybe it would. I think it has to. Probably.

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

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

this is a bad thing. I haven't seen people dunk on space data centers saying like I'm not morally okay with putting data centers in space. And I think people should be more morally okay with putting data centers in space. What did Sager say about prediction markets? Well, you looked that up.

Let me tell you about numeral.com compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. What did he say? Sager said in response to a video about a prediction market, he said it's pretty simple. If you think this is cool, you're my enemy. So he is drawing lines.

Showing the sides. In other news. There really are like active political candidates that will be in Congress in 18 months that this is their whole thing. Their whole thing is their anti-data center. And so get ready. Get ready to testify, brother. Anti-data center and anti-prediction market. Yeah.

I don't know that I've seen any politicians really run on the anti-prediction market thing yet. Not that it's not going to happen. I think there are a number of enterprising young. politicians. Sure. That we'll pick it up. Politicians of all ages that are looking at this and being like, wow, a lot of people don't like this, I should make this part of my platform.

It is... Which is less popular? We should have a prediction market to understand. Are prediction markets or data centers less popular? Yeah. I don't know. I think data centers might be less popular.

I don't know. Because the prediction market, you can just not participate, but with the data center, if it's in the backyard, your power goes up. Your power goes up. Also, it's hard for,

people to say, like, I don't use data centers, so I don't want them. Like, everybody in some way is benefiting from them. It's like, okay, like, pull out your phone. Let me see the apps on your phone. Oh, yeah. Like, you don't, you don't need this resource. Whereas prediction markets, there's some people that just get, they don't, they're not interested in the data. Even I've seen a lot of polling, polling, people that run polling firms are like very against prediction markets. Oh, yeah, I saw that. That was very funny. For obvious reasons, because it's like, hey, you're kind of open, sourcing my whole thing. You're doing a decentralized

version of what I'm doing, but providing a lot of the same kind of results. In other news, this was hitting the timeline. Two days ago, Fortune said NVIDIA's CFO admits the $100 billion dollar open AI

mega deal still isn't signed two months after it helped fuel an AI rally. I can see why people are very... In the earnings release. This news was, the language was in the earnings release that this deal had not been signed

and it's more than LOI phase. They did say during the launch we have a what was the exact wording it was like we have we have direction it was like we basically like this is like direct we've directionally aligned

I think it's directionally going to happen or at least it makes sense as a way for Nvidia to discount chips as they're building out gigawatts and more and more gigawatts for Open AI. It doesn't, like, Dylan Patel laid out how the, how this particular equity investment deal can wind up resulting in a, effectively a 30% discount or something like that. So I'm not, I'm not surprised if this winds up going through in, in one way or another, although I do think

it will need a, you know, a tweak. And now might not be the perfect time for Jensen to come out and say, yes, I'm actually going to be spending a lot of money. I have to invest. I have to keep OpenAI on Nvidia GPUs as opposed to letting him go over to TPU. Like, he's sort of like fighting on defense a little bit right now because people are talking to people. Well, apparently it was a good time to go on Joe Rogan. It was.

Just another pod guy says, another Jensen interview. Now I'm nervous. So a lot of people were saying that this was somewhat bearish. I listened to it on a plane. There was a good excerpt here from a capital. They say Jensen Huang in 2016, Open AI was just a bunch of people sitting in a room. Joe Rogan says they're not a nonprofit anymore, right? Jensen says they're not a nonprofit anymore.

Joe says, weird how that works. Jensen goes, yeah, yeah, but anyhow. Yeah, there are some wild exchanges. I just liked the way I've been calling for Jensen to go on, Rogan, for years. I've wanted more of like the tech leaders to go on Rogan and kind of just like cross-pollinate the two communities. And as I read the comments on the YouTube video, there were a lot of fans of Rogan who really were like thanking him for bringing on this guy who's working on something that's like pretty opaque in the economy. Yeah. It's very abstract.

I think it makes a lot of sense. And he and Jensen's coming and explaining it at one level. and then Rogan's asking him to, you know, like, zoom out, tell me more of your story. Why are you successful? Talks about the value of hard work. Yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought they had a good time together. And it didn't seem like there was any, like, undercurrent of adversarialness.

It felt, it felt good overall. I enjoyed it. It wasn't, like, you shouldn't go into it thinking you're going to get Jensen on Dorcas. And you're just not going to get, like, a really deep insight into, NVIDIA strategy, but that's not the point of this particular area. It's to understand who Jensen is as a human and what he's kind of like thinking of broadly for the industry. Well, before we bring in our next guest, our first guest, let me tell you about Gemini

3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. We have Jim Kramer in the... A living legend. At the New York Stock Exchange. He just celebrated 30 years. He is the author of how to make money in any market. And we will bring him in.

We got the buck. Come on in. Welcome to the show. Good to see you. It's been too long. Thank you so much. Where's the gong? Here's the gong.

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

Get a clean hit. There we go. That's a big good. That's fantastic. There's an injury. You guys look fabulous. I love it. You look fantastic.

This is a great home for you at home. We love it. We love it. Every time we're here, we're enjoying it very much. Thank you for having us. You're basically, are you the mayor?

I'm more of an official greeter. I'm serving ambassador. So 20 years on Mad Money, correct? How many years in this building? How long have been working here? I guess like four. We were enabled with cliffs for a long time. and we had a studio for us.

It's very interesting asked us because now this is our studio you can't control the sound levels of who's here or whatever but I kind of still feel it's a heart of capitalism

I really do It's a spiritual home Yes And I do like wall And I do like broad And I do think that there's a level of excitement Not the way it was

when I got in the business in 82 When I first walked down the street And it was an engine It's more tourist now I can look at it But I still find it fascinating, the companies that come public, the companies that you know that I'm trying to learn about, and it's exciting. It truly is exciting to me down walking the boat. Do you think

there's an advantage to being here? Do you think there's an advantage to getting guests in person? When I think about the highlights, just from this year, I think about you going to Tim Cook and touring the iPhone factory. That was a really cool moment. I also think about you beefing with, I also think about you, you know, going back and forth with Benioff remotely. Talk to me about, like, When do you want to go to a person? When do you want them to come to you? When are you okay having just a phone call? This is a fabulous question because I waffle in this.

I did think, as I was telling you, people out there, that there would be more execs that just would come through, and they don't. And we were near Teterboro at the other place that they do. Okay. I like to be out of the person on the road all the time. The issue, of course, is we do three segments. Their interviews, we do a lot of the issues.

The issue is there's no time in the road. the day. Yeah. You're always on TV. It's hard. We wrestle with this too. You know, like you can go and travel to someone, make a big performance out of it. We're in Los Angeles, which is not a great place, but it works. It works in many ways. But it's also odd. Like, we would assume that we're in San Francisco or at least New York. We're in neither. Well, the funny thing, the funny thing, if you were getting started today, it's very possible that you would be walking around, like one of these live streamers who I know, I know like speed came through here at one point. You'd be walking around. You'd be on basically 24-7. You'd have your phone open.

at the markets and you would be able to just constantly be traveling around. Yes. When you guys do stuff where you did, you says of the other day there was a guy who said, you thought he was in a booth at that incredible reinvention, right? Yeah. But he was really not at the booth, but the other guy was saying, oh yeah, he's around here somewhere. Yeah, yeah, that's a Simon from TurboPuffer. You can pretend to be in the booth all of the time.

But I do find that the people in general are really nice. There's a code of nice. here. It's almost like written in, and it's so non-New York, but I like it. What about when you can't be perfectly nice because things just aren't going well for a CEO? And maybe you, I always think back to that interview you did with Tim Cook. I think it was about a decade ago. They'd missed, I think they'd missed earnings, and the stock was selling off, and you needed to ask the hard question what the street was saying, but you didn't want to, you know, come at them too aggressively. How do you think about that?

Well, it's very funny. I often go over these with my wife, who's my partner, okay? And I'll say, look, I want to be gracious. Does this sound gracious? No, you're killing it. How about I add this? You're going to. You're telling me about you're asking about his wife.

I mean, I do find that what happens is the facts dictate the graciousness. And if a guy misses a quarter and says that the quarter's good, well, he's a free fire zone. Okay. If a woman comes on and says, look. We had a founder recently, who I won't name, who said that he was making, you know, 30, he was basically selling a product for $30,000. And he was telling customers, we have so much demand, I can't support you. And then a minute later, he was like, well, we've expanded capacity so much.

And I was like, well, why don't you call the people you told you didn't have capacity too crazy? You nailed them. Free fire. And it's like, I don't know, I think, I'm curious how you think about this. It's like, I would say most of the people coming on your show, you have some level of respect for, what they're doing. Yes. And I think that's important, right? That, that, if you, if you have respect for a person, it means you're going to be fair, right? You're not, they're not your enemy. You're just trying to have a real conversation and understand. Well put. And then I'm sure

plenty of times you've had people coming on that you got a little beef with behind the scenes. But for the most part, it's like you want to, you want to have people, you want to invite people on that you're genuinely excited to have a conversation with, even if you might be a little bearish, might be, might be more bullish, right? Well, let's talk about Benio. I'm interviewing him tonight. The previous quarter, I did not like, okay? And he came on like gangbusters that it was a great quarter. And that caused me to do something I don't like to do, which is interrupt mid-sentence. Because someone's talking, and we all, we grew up thinking, our mothers told us that would be rude. So now I'm into the rude element, right? And first he

thinks that the rude element is a bit of a, uh, uh, uh, for show. You know, it's like, oh, he's a little Broadway action. No, it was like, uh, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying what you're selling. And then like in the middle of it, I thought that Mark realized, she's a neat, I think Jim Ler was a big quarter. And then by the end of it, he said, wow, Kramer hates me. No, it's not. It's not. I don't hate anybody, right? But the fact is, is that this quarter was the quarter I was waiting for. Are you guys having conversations have you had with Benioff live on the air? Probably 500. Maybe, yeah, probably, probably, I guess 50, 60. But I, there was a period during the, I was going to call it the plague.

Then I talked to him every day. When we were trying to develop a contest, he'd develop the best mask. And it got way laid, but we just wanted awareness. Sure, sure, sure. So you were working together on a project. But look, do I, I've identified him as a friend.

Because he came to my, he was one of, I guess, two CEOs that came to my wedding. And there were five hundred three people there. Only two. That's a small club. And with 500 three, people you figure to throw a story you hit a couple of them. Yeah. This is cool.

You got to ask you. You got to ask you. I'm sorry. It's exciting. You guys are exciting. Thank you. You're exciting. You are, so you are genuinely, people in our world do ask us time to time.

They're like, you guys are crazy. You've started a business that you can't stop working on. Like we are, we are, we make the business. We make the business every day. And I see it. And we tell people like, do you think, you see Kramer? You don't think he loves what he does? And that's exactly what we want to do.

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

is that what's that person thinking. But most of the people are just kind of, okay, I'm on TV. My executive producer, Regina Gilgland, always says there's two kinds of people. There's people who are on TV because they want to be on TV. And then there's people who are on TV because they have something to say.

And you guys have something to say. And what I love about it is that you have much better BS detector, not to be like, I know that sounds prosaic. But the fact is, I'll hear that Amazon's chip is the best in the world from Amazon. And I'll say, hmm, maybe it's, The best in the world. I mean, I'll actually, in my head, they'll be like, best in world, best in world.

I said it. I'm a good guy. Even my book came. So, yeah, so obviously anything in chip space is tough, but even harder. And I think something that maybe the East Coast hasn't been quite as tapped into is determining which hard tech and deep tech companies are real. Because there's a lot of companies that are, the West Coast calls them like render companies. They make really cool visual render. There's CGI.

Yeah. They're like very cool, like sci-fi experiences, and then nothing ever comes to fruition. And so it's easier to clock those companies from the West Coast because of just the whisper networks. And you might know somebody that worked at the company. You might know their investors. You can, if a company gets to Series D and they haven't had a single Tier 1 ever investor participate, it starts to get. You know this so well. I mean, like, in people who believe it was a Series C, blah, blah, blah.

And I'm like thinking Series C, okay, like, that's, like, that. Didn't I take that exam to be able to walk on the floor? But you speak the language, but you don't make it so I can't learn the language. You want me to learn the language. It's terrific. I have going for me history, and that's my edge. So, for instance, today Micron got out of the most consumer. Now, I've been begging them to get out of the consumer actually literally for 20 years,

because they have a high end and then they have the low end, and the low end gives them the 10 multiple, high end gives them the 20 multiple. And I've been talking to Sanjay, whom I really like. And it's like, Sanjay, you have to like do this. And he's like, Jim, I don't need to do that. And today he does it. The stock's down 12. So I text him and I said, come on.

And he goes, I'm in quiet. And I'm like, I wrote, I'm not in quiet. I think you're fabulous. But that's because I remember the 95 breakdown where the, what happened is that that old big piece of capital goods equipment came out that could make a little more than we needed for the of the memory chips. And then it goes like that. And his stock had been the number one.

and then 500, number one. Do you remember some of this stuff better than the CEOs and the management teams? Always. If it's the 90, absolutely if it's the 90s. Like for Intel, but I speak with them? Yeah. I mean, look, I'm not, no, I'm an idiot.

And there's new leadership. Yeah, but I would tell you, like, I forgot my anniversary and my wife's birthday, but I remember the September collapsed in 95. Sure. But that's because it's all wrong. I have a memory for some things. and they're the wrong things except for when we're in here.

What are they doing out there? You guys should go like the tree at 6. Oh, we love to. We love to. The show will be wrapped up by then. Okay, so when you're up there. One thing later, with Benioff, you got to ask him about token consumption because he came out with really big numbers. 3.5 trillion.

3.2 trillion. Was it 3 or 1? No, 3.2, I think. But it sounds like a big number. But it's not. Some other companies, there was Alpha Sense. Somebody had Alpha Sense. They were sharing that they use around half the tokens, obviously not quite the same scale, much smaller company.

You know, Jensen wouldn't give you that wrap. I mean, I remember when he did a me on when I walked in, there was me. And he said, look, this was, you know, you don't know how many tokens were using. And all really came down to, there was a show at that point, Mayor of Easttown, but there's a new one called Task. And all that Jensen wanted to talk about was when he was doing me, how hard that Philadelphia lilt was at the end. And Kate Winsler said the same thing. This man is Da Vinci.

He knows acting. He knows plays. He knows, you know, he's a well-rounded guy, but all he does now is like... You got good taste in jackets. But how about all this stuff he has to talk about? You got talking about when you're at the top. How have you been processing all, you know, everybody competing to say the biggest number, right? Oh, God.

I have a piece tonight that starts, and I mention you guys right at the top because I'm like... We thank you. It's awesome. Because, like, I say that this is what you guys do, and I don't want to do it. Because I can't. I can't do it like you. You don't want to aspire to be someone who's not as good as you. Hey, I came in a day.

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

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

I don't know. You guys would literally know what it means to be what Broadcom is in the chain. I, on the other hand, saying, hey, brook, I'm going to go a big because of this. Yeah. Yeah. One is like, hey, you know what, I think that one's no line and one is the line. Hey, you know, guess what? I think, I think the Patriots

have a better chance than Cleveland. Yeah, no kidding. That's why there's a line. You guys set the line, okay? I'm money line on everything. Well, yeah, we know, we know our lane, too. I mean, being from the West Coast and coming from a private markets background,

we focus on market cap. You focus on stock price, how the stock is moving day to day. We, I think, are much more focus on the product side. What is the most underrated sound on your soundboard? Okay. What do we got that's underrated? Oh, mine, right now, I think

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

I don't remember that. The story you got paper there. The button. The button. Yeah, it's a door. But I think it's so cool. But people are saying, like, what is that? Was that a chain or something?

And so it's become a relic, but it's a good news. Yeah, yeah, it's hard to keep the lore going. I mean, we are. You know what? You know what? Listen to this sound. You know what this sound is? That's, that's, that's, uh, Call of Duty.

Call of Duty. Oh, my God. Because a lot, we grew up on Call of Duty. I still don't understand why he does that one so much. I grew up on POM. Okay. Right? I mean, Palm was great.

I thought POM was incredible until Donkey Kong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, Donkey Kong was incredible. These things were incredible because they replaced cross-word puzzles in Tic-Tac-Tow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Twitch, who owns Twitch? Amazon.

Of course, we got to get Andy Jassy on Twitch. You know what? You know what? You know what? I wanted to do earnings. I wanted to do post earnings on Twitch live. You know what? Mark Zuckerberg's on Instagram with front-facing videos.

Get Andy Jassy on Twitch. Andy Jasssy. Let's do it. No, he's got no. salary cat. It's unbelievable that guy, right? Everyone else had this kind of sort of bunch of salary cat?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't exist. Yeah, you thought Hallie Rosemomom was good. No, he sucks compared to Zuckerberg because he's got this salary cat. You know, you know, something interesting on the Amazon front, the Traneum, when they were talking about their new...

Not so good. No, no, when they're talking about their new chip, they specifically... They were specifically mentioned doing a training run for a company called Descartes. Dean, the founder's been on... I don't know because of you guys. They do real-time video, and they're working with a lot of Twitch streamers.

So that training run felt meaningful, and I don't think a lot of people picked up on that. There could be something moving around. That's a good example of what I would describe is why I'm – look, I never lose sight that I'm a generalist. Because I wouldn't know that in the same way that I wouldn't necessarily know if we were doing steel – the steel companies. Whether something's cold roll or hot roll. Cold rollers have got a high multiple, and hot rolls a lot. You know, steel, steel. And so you always have to be really careful knowing that you don't know certain things.

Like, I wouldn't, if there are certain specs put out on ASIC, Google, I have to be very careful because when I listen to what, you know, what Annie Jassy will call me, and he'll school me. And he'll be right to school me because I don't know enough. Who's the next Mark Benioff in the sense of a CEO that you could see yourself just enjoying interviewing? Okay, I'm going to give you crazy. I'm going to give you a crazy one because it's going to be, I have to make it so it's enjoying. I haven't gotten it yet. It's left shit. There we go.

I intend to get him where I need him. You got to talk about espresso. He wants to talk about coffee. He's obsessed with coffee. Yeah. We've got to do that. We spent like 10 minutes talking about it. You're kidding.

You're kidding. Yeah, yeah. This is the alpha. I didn't know. That's shoot. And he also likes long, long distance biking and riding. Oh my God. He's a very healthy guy.

He doesn't want a carp. He doesn't want. I mean, you're going to have a tough thing. You got a three-minute segment. It's hard to spend it. It's hard to spend three minutes talking about coffee. Then you give him more time because I didn't know he had that side. I know he cares passionately about Ukraine.

I know that he cares passionately more importantly about making people who should get credit, credit. In a country where you still have to care about democracy. He's the, you know, like everyone said, well, I'm democratizing blue jeans. You know, I'm democratizing T-shirts. No, he's democratizing capital. And why not? His algo is better. I just think that's the guy

I intend to be able to get him out of his It's not a shell I don't know what it is What the hell is you have? I think my sense was like The conversation for us We had 30 minutes, right? You don't have the luxury

Of having that much time With some of these guests But some people take a while To warm up and that's why That's why traditional That's why traditional podcasts are so great You can do a bunch of pre-calls Get to know someone

Then hop on And even if it's a shorter segment You can do it But good It's a goal then It's a goal. And the reason I want to do it is because I find him completely fascinating. He came on the show and the stock. I told him, come on the show when you think it's going to break out, will you? Who's going down? It's 33 came on the show and I said, well, what do you think here?

And he goes, well, the stock is now done going down and it's going up. No one ever says that stuff. No one. They never come by. There's a guy. Oh, well, Jim, that's you. That's out there. We don't know. No, he's done going down. And it's like, at the end of the interview, I said, that was a gutsy call. And he goes, what? I said that it's done going down. He goes, why is that gutsy? There's my guy. That's extremely gutty. I love it.

I love it. How do you think about market structure, oligopolis, monopolies, because the real interesting side of Max Levchen and a firm is looking at Sebastian and Klarna, because now there's two companies in the same space. You can comp them. It's a little horse race. That feels like good content, feels like good opportunity for investors. How do you think about a market like that?

All right. So I'm out of the closet in this one. somebody I was going to say it here. I always tell people, look, but I'm looking for our companies that in many ways are the worst thing that could ever happen

for our country. I'm looking for monopolies. They've got the gross margin. I just want big gross margins. I mean, nothing like, did you guys ever read Rockefeller by Chernow? Yeah.

You know, I did 100% of the oil market. That's my guy. And when they broke it up, they created just a huge amount of wealth. But no, I look for monopolists. And I'm happy with oligopolis. Like right now,

Linda, Lindy, which energy company, industrial gas, and air products. There are slap-happy duopoly right now. They should be raising prices.

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

You know, postmates. Yeah. I like Postmates. weren't they acquired in, right? Yeah, by Uber, right? I love, yeah. Bastion's the man. Bastion was the first guy

to come on and give me a hat. I said, what am I do that? He goes, this is called swag. Swag. When you put it on your head? Shocker! Wait, how are you been processing Google then? Because Google, everyone...

Oh my God, okay, got out of Google. Get this. There was some guy. I would call him a clown, but this is a serious show from the Justice Department who convinced me that they were going to take, put Google in the same bed that James Com was in in the show,

Misery. You know, p, we're going to hobble them. And he said, we're going to hobble them. I mean, like, you know, make it so he can't walk. Yeah, that's it. And I took him seriously. And I spoke to Google's attorney, who was, of course, much smarter than the Justice Department. But I believe the Justice Department.

I thought that they were going to wreck the company. And they kept saying over and over again, and we're not going to let it be like Microsoft. You know, we let Microsoft off. This is not. And I got nervous. And I didn't panic. But when you have the Justice Department over and over saying, listen, why are you saying these things? You don't know what's going to happen to them.

And then you get a judge who finds them a monopoly. Like, man, I've got to get out of this thing. This is bad news. And then the judge, like, three months later, says technology is overtaking it. Not only is it not a monopoly, but we think it's great that they paid Apple $20 billion to knock out everybody else. I was dead. I was flat. No, it was real kill.

It didn't matter. Whatever I did was Ryan. Since then, I always do us look at it and say, I'm stupid, I'm stupid, I'm stupid. I'm stupid. Yeah, but the real thing that hasn't played out yet is, like, what happens if we do end up with a duopoly in search, right? A lot of people, I mean, in Chachipida, he has 800 million weekly active. I want to see. I want to see, because they may, you know, they don't have the balance.

You guys, they read Nile Ferguson, pity of war. Yeah. Well, that is about whoever has the deepest bomb market wins, sent your money. I mean, the bomb market is better for the other guys. So, yeah, this is a question for you because it felt, like, I felt very comfortable covering the AI horse race, the foundation model race from a technology's perspective, from venture capital perspective. But once the discussion moved to, is there an. enough private credit, is Blue Owl going to underwrite these right at these right levels?

You know, we're having John from Apollo on the show. I hope you can explain it to us a little bit more. But how do you think about if a story kind of leaves your orbit, do you just bringing people on to understand? Well, I mean, what do you think? You just try to be a generalist? And it's funny because I have a general show. And I'm always afraid to bring a balance sheet up for people saying, you know, geez, I want to see what's on. The price is right. I mean, there's like dial anywhere. that. It's friends. There's friends. You know, look for old

Seinfelds versus me talking about the balance. Sure, sure, sure. We have to do that. But for some people out there, that's their Super Bowl, right? They love it. They love it. Look, I get a kick out of the idea that you know, that Oracle gets involved

and that Larry Ellison, who is one of the toughest guys on Earth, who's never made a mistake, and Saffra Katz has never made a mistake, are getting involved. And then Saffer leaves. And the F.T says she leaves, because she doesn't want what's happening to the balance.

Her precious balance, she's Oracle, which is not that good to begin with. So that's a good story for me. Did Larry, has Larry? You know him? No, he's never been on the show. He follows TBPN.

He does? He does. He followed very early. But what was your relationship like with Larry? Did he come on? Did he come on? Larry, no, no, never. He doesn't do a lot of.

And like, I've tried repeatedly, but I won't get on my knees. He doesn't do a lot of media. I think he doesn't do a lot of media. I think he might talk. about the University of Michigan. Okay. Do you think you're Mark Cuban, he's been on your show?

Yeah. Do you think he's the reason why Indiana is such a good football team? Oh. We have no idea. I honestly don't know about sports team. People have used the ESPN of tech on us, but it's funny because I've maybe, I've genuinely watch, yeah, I mean, I've watched like an hour of sports in the last year. What do you read into the co-CEOs?

When you see something like that? Co-C-L? Yeah, I mean, have an Oracle. Where's my, eh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, here we got old. No, I, COCIOS.

Do they have to interim, basically? Yeah, it's just really hard. Because it's happening in Sequoia Capital now, and that's obviously a big focus of ours of all the world. Venniop was CoCio with Keith Block. That was just suboptim situation. We got the co-Cos now at Oracle. Let's see what happens. Netflix is done.

I think it's hard, unless you can have really defined duties like they had at work day. But otherwise, no. It's not something I really want to see. How are you feeling about the IPO market? I think it's too robust. We're seeing a lot of junk. We're seeing a lot of biotech, by the way, which is why the biotech instrument companies are doing well.

But a lot of these are one-trick ponies, and that's really dangerous. Look, I don't want to protect anybody from investing in anything because everybody has a right to invest in everything. But, you know, if you were to do a uranium company right now, a company which just is, and all it does is say, we will find uranium and you use a really funny symbol, like, you know, five views instead of four. I mean, look, you know, you

price it at 15 and it opens at 24, and then you wait six months and you sell every share. Wow. And that's what I'm afraid of. Yeah. That's what I'm afraid's going to happen. Are the biotech companies taking advantage of the AI narrative, or is there a particularly different narrative? No, I think there's just been a lot of, I shouldn't say it. There's been... Because I'm starting to bubble up in tech, in Silicon Valley, folks saying,

hey, in the future, drug discover is going to be accelerated. The timeline's going to be way shorter. The economics are going to be completely different. But the big companies, are just, they're just sales companies because when you go to the unbelievably cool, great person who does health care and, you know,

and Invidia say, that person doesn't, they're not, you know, Bristol Myers isn't, get me, get me help. It's not those guys. It's not those guys. And it really bothers me because if you're going to accelerate what's going on with cancer, okay, so that you can do, you know, look at every single data point

and know everything within five minutes, you should be able to come up with the Holy Grail drug blood tests. They're getting a blood test for prostate cancer, so a guy down here saying that today is going to become public a hope. But they should be using it, and we should be making

far more progress than we're doing in health care. It's just, you know, when Jensen came on with synopsis, I mean, it's pretty clear they're doing the digital twin. By the way, you know, I thought the digital twin would have been good with Vision Pro, but I guess

relic. Yeah, yeah. But I do think that that's the missing link. And I think if anybody does it, it's going to be Willie and Dave Ricks, because he can get outside himself and think about some ideas. Yeah, I like him a lot. You do? Has he been on the show? No, not yet. But he hit a trillion

dollars at all the time. We rang the gong for him. Because he hit a trillion dollar evaluation. Yeah, wasn't that great? It's fantastic. On Walmart's at 900. That guy, Walmart, that guy, Doug Mcvillan, the guy's retiring. I mean, he cratered the stock when he came in. He gave huge bonuses

and huge share when you leave. You want a crater when you leave. That would have been to Walmart lately? There's an interesting bull case for Walmart is that they are leaning in with chat GPT, well, Amazon's leaning out. And so if the agentic commerce thing happens and people are just opening up their phone and saying, hey, order, it will probably be routed through Walmart in the short term. Is that really?

Yeah. Eventually, Amazon will have leaned in. So Etsy and Walmart have leaned in. eBay and Amazon have leaned out. Wow. And that's a good quarter. Etsy had a bad quarter. Amazon, we know.

And so it's the laggards in the markets that are trying to catch up by saying, hey, maybe we missed the real power lot. I thought it was interesting in Costco's deep into Agent Force. Do you think Mark's going to rename the company Agent Force? This is my first question to him. Look at all the different silos. Go to the page 18 on the deck. And there it is. 17 they did.

It's like everything's Asian. You know, all the different size things he has, they're now all called Asians. But the thing is he's still hiring salespeople like crazy. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to rename Meta? Did you see the rumor today? That he's just going to call it Zuck? He ought to rename. He ought to just re-knit. That was a done rename.

But my whole thing is, I think it's actually, I think it's a good name. It actually is the Metaverse. People spend so many hours in it. It doesn't matter that it's not in goggles. They're spending it on their phone. They're on their computer. It doesn't matter that it's not in a heads-up display yet. It is a universe with multiple touch points.

It's like they even adapted the app, so it is messaging focus. It's not even, like, it's hard to post content on Instagram now. That's my only, my... It's a metaphorical universe. It's a metaphor. Maybe with Vera Rubin, they can do high-speed video, a short 10-second clip for an ad or an Insta, and that might work.

I mean, right now I would put it in Reddit. I don't know. Have you seen the rates for Reddit, the rate card? No. It's like a fraction, and it's very targeted, and it's really good. Reddit ads. Reddit ads are the cheapest bargain for any consumer package

because you're right targeted. Like my wife has this NASCal business. Boom, there's like a mescal love you. It's like, mescal love it. Melanomi, my daughter's unfortunately, she beat it. But that's like targeted, targeted targets. I really like that because the rates, I told Hoffman he's charging too little.

What are? Isn't he making much money from selling data? Is he making a lot of money from selling data? Yes, he is. And then Cloudflare's doing their best to be able to block. You think Cloudflare, you did the implications of their failure? See, now there, did Matthew not do? Don't call me Matt? Did he call you?

He came, Matthew came up once, right? Was he good? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, he's great. He's real smart. Yeah. He pretty should talk about, like, who's a really good guess and he's bad. And we won't mention the name of the bad,

we'll just say the good, you know? Oh, yeah, that guy. Yeah, he's an amateur consumer package. The team that you got to have on, you got to have the semi-analysis team on. The piece was too long, the one that you told me to read, the 10,000 word. Yeah, it was too long.

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

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

26 Ramp. Isn't that doing a C-Ratling? 26 Ramp? They're waiting a C. They're going to be here any day. Oh, and then what should I say if I want to say, if I want to impress people about how far or long I am, and should I say I just hit myself a what round?

Series E. Series E, probably. I'm serious a series E. But companies are going series G, series F. Jeez. People go really deep. How about down rounds? Because people don't, that down around is bad.

People don't like, people don't like going public. It's a hassle. They don't want to deal with the SEC. They don't want to deal with the place. What do you think about it? If Stripe stays private forever? Johnny Cousson? No, people don't know what I'm like that.

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

They've been private forever and they're really, really rich. Yeah. There's a idea of private companies. I don't know. I think if you're public, you have to, there's some slings and arrows. You've got to answer to you. No. You're more likely to get talked about on that money.

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

say that you're in charge. Let me see that. How do you get people off your talking point, off their talking points? I would say like the only thing, the only thing, the guests that we don't like, the guess that we don't like. The worst guests are the ones that are trying to get in

rescripted lines, and that's the only time that we don't like doing the show. I had one the other day. It was doing it, and I made a joke. And I stopped, and it was just like, that was a joke. Now, and the person didn't laugh and went right on the talking points.

I interviewed Jensen and he says he's doing a talking but he's saying something and I make a joke and he has a saying anything and I said by the way that was a joke

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

you're trying to be done you really want to nail him you know it's like then he's just charming yeah charming is the end of book talking points and charm Are those of the, like, the soul and crib this that we have to really avoid, right? Funny story with Jensen.

We were in, we were in D.C., and we were sitting there talking with Shane Copeland from Polly Market, who has a partnership with ICE. And Jensen came in, and Shane goes, hey, I'm, hey, good to meet you. And he's like, Jensen's like, oh, what do you do? He's like, I'm the CEO of Polly Market, and Jensen doesn't, he doesn't know it. And Shane afterwards, he's like, I got to work harder. I got to work harder. Well, that's him. He gets up in four, he does the emails,

and now he probably sets it at 3.45 and checks all the things he doesn't know that are related. Jensen's up at 4? Yeah, I'm sure he knows that. But 3.45. Oh, but who's counting? He gets up in 4. He's getting off the 4.

He's getting up 15 minutes after you. I'm supposed to get up after him. You wake up 15 minutes before him, and send him in a email. What are you gotten done so far? Wait, yes, do you genetically just need less sleep? Yeah, what's going on? How is this possible?

Because there's a hand, it's like some 5% of the population can just thrive on, like, Okay, well here's... Okay, so, because we're not on air, I'll tell you what the things I take. So I take clonapin, I take melatonin, and I take a gummy,

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

So it's more about trying to stay asleep. That's what it is. It's like, oh, look what time it is. I went to bed seven minutes ago. I got to get a picture. You have your Apple Watch set up with like different alerts on... Roving pictures of my wife. What about when the markets are moving?

No, that's great. It's wedding pictures. Incredible. Making some sauce. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Whoa. Yeah. Oh, it's my wife.

Incredible. She doesn't watch anything that I do. Tell us about the book. Tell us about the book. What was the process like? The book was about trying to get it so that people could, let's say, listen to you. Yeah. And say, you know what?

These guys really seem to like so-and-so. I'll go on chat. I'll go on Gemini 3. I'm going to learn about it. Maybe I own a share. Right now, that's streck and verboten. People feel if you do more than own an index fund, you don't know what you're doing. I come back and say the information is never been easier to find.

All these people believe only in index funds are just dog batis. And what really you should be able to do is do index fund and do side by side. Or otherwise, we just think, you know what, all that information that you guys put out of me and And it can't be like that. We can't make people feel stupid. It's not right. If you have an observation that you think that a company that was on your show really knows what it's talking about, why can't you do the research, look at the website,

and buy a share. Why is that to heresy? Yeah, it's just portfolio allocation too. Take 10% of your assets and invest in things that you're interested in. Do you know how much resistance I've gotten on this, well, the alleged tour, because I don't really want a tour, but I did some? You know, people say, Jim, you say that people should own individual stocks, but over and over again, it's been proven that that's stupid. And I said, like, I was, I worked with private wealth.

I've seen people make tens of millions of dollars. So what we end up doing, we have a millionaire's lunch with Jensen. You know, firefighters, police, people who listened. Now, some of them were because I named my dog, Invidia. Yeah, well, that worked. That actually was pretty. A lot of people got, it was $1.90 when it was a... And I told, I said, I told Jensen.

He says, no one knows me. What's going on? You know what? I'm like doing this, no one knows him. It's like, you're going. Now he's at the top. Yeah, I got you back. I said, listen, I just came back from California.

I got to tell you, I had this dog named Everest. Uh-uh. No more. The dog is Envidia. In video. And that's where I keep selling. You know, there was a police officer who came to the show. He goes, look, I bought, I'm a millionaire.

I bought Nvidia. I said when, he goes, when you named your dog, idiot. You know really kind of what it does? He goes, well, you named your dog after it. You don't name your dog after something if you think it's a fly-by-night thing. Boom, right? That's an amazing story. Can I stay on forever?

I wish. We would love you. They're chewing up. I think it's your people. It's not our people. These people all-on-one. No. You're welcome.

What is it? Is it ugly sweater day, too? I guess so. That's San Juan Berkeley. It's Christmas. investor. Why can't you get more than 2.2 yards? Two point two yards are averaging.

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

they can't stop and have some fun and tell us things? But you came. You happened. And the fact that you happened, I, okay, I'm going to be, the only time I want to be a little immodest. I'd like to think that maybe in some way you happen because like sometimes you're still in me. Yeah, of course. I think that you are, you're not 2.0. You're sui generis.

But I just feel like that it occurred and that people, you're another reason why the books are right. You're on our Mount Rushmore media. There's four of them. But you're the biggest. Thank you. Good luck to you guys. Keep doing what you're doing. You're just electric.

There we go. Right? There are you. All right, go get it. You're alive, guys. Thank you so much. For tenders coming in. Alert, your tenders coming in.

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Our next guest is Eric Gleiman from Ramp, from the Ramp of Business Corporation. What an electric moment. What a fun time. A goat. Yeah, he's a goat. My goat. He's a fantastic performer. He's been in front of a camera before.

He's an entertainer. He's an entertainer. If there's ever been evidence that putting in the 10,000 hours gets your good results. It's obvious. He's doing, he's doing TV at least four times today. He's doing his show three times. He popped on to our stream. I mean, 20 years of Mad Money, he must be well past 10,000 hours on camera.

And I think, isn't it 30 years in television? Well, so Squat Box has been on for 30 years. Yeah. And Mad Money for 20. Which is remarkable. Well, let me tell you about fall, the generative media platform for developers, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs, and on-demand clusters. That's right.

Darren Rovel is sharing, apparently somebody is claiming that a Google Insider has been trading on search markets. They're saying somebody has been betting millions of dollars. or trading millions of dollars on who will be the most searched people of the year, including, yeah, just like whether or not Pope Leo will rank in Google's top five

most searched people. Darren Rovel says, this is what happens, what will continue to happen when unregulated markets are bet on as if they are regulated. Here's the thing, they are regulated by the CFTC.

Yep. And there is... Is it illegal. Like, I was looking at this. up because we were talking to Tarak at Kalshi about this. And I just wanted to know more. And apparently, like, let's say that you just are trading corn futures and you just happen to know that there's going to be like a major blight in the corn markets. And so you go and trade, if you have insider information that someone missed their harvest or something, like, you can

actually get in trouble for trading, for doing insider trading, even in commodities. And you would think, like, what private information is there not real? And the issue is prediction markets become more accurate when insiders are trading on it. And so it's like this weird conflict. Brian Armstrong was kind of laying out the bull case for insider training. He gave an interesting example of an admiral at sea. I mean, yes, it was sort of a bad example. It was a deal book yesterday.

I liked his, I like that he's being philosophical about it. I mean, I feel like all of the crypto-o-gs are very philosophical in their analysis. And I think that that can be sort of clipped out of context to be like, he's promoting it. It's something we need to figure out. It is. It is. And he's also been in that, like, you know, I think what people for about Brian is that like he was in the legal gray area for like a decade, right?

Yeah. Where he had he was on stage a lot, he was born in it, where he was on stage a lot and when he was on stage, people would ask him like, okay, do you think, do you think Bitcoin should be a commodity or a stock or something like that? And you have to be like, well, theoretically here's this. Without further ado, we have Eric Lyman from the Ramp Business Corporation. Good to see you. I can't believe you made a sweater just for a ramp investor. You know, the hall is this? What is this? What are doing? Yeah, the holidays are here. What is this? Should we open this on air? The Sechuan Barclay X ramp collab

sweater? Is that right? It's been a strong season and I have a feeling it's going to get a lot stronger. I love that. And you got the yellow socks on too. You look fantastic. Fantastic to see you.

How many of these exist in the world? Not enough. Yeah. I think probably a... Wow, look at this too. Yellow matches. Light. I don't know if we can

reduce your... We probably shouldn't start a fire in the nice seat, but we won't do it, but we will put this out of it. Because I mean, they were even saying that we might not be able to have a very loud speaker for our soundboard because of rules on the stock exchange. Like, there are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do

because, like, there's serious business happening. Well, you guys have, like, a deep partnership, though. We do now, we do now. Can we ask Lynn if we can be the first show to enjoy, like, a scented candle? A scented candle? Yes, yes, yes, but I would, I would definitely ask for permission with this one.

I would not be caught dead begging for forgiveness. Okay. No chance. No chance. How are you doing? Buy the book here. I'm doing great. I'm doing great.

And congratulations again. We're in New York City. Remind me how ramp wound up in New York City. You're not from New York City. Well, this is the capital of capitals. You have to be here. You know, this is, we're, exactly. I love that eagle sound.

But, you know, steel man this for me. One of your investors might say that this is memetic desire to wind up in the capital of capital. Why not be the contrarian and build a fintech company somewhere else? Look for I remember we our last company We had gone out west. It was YC demo day. Oh, you did. You went through YC? We went through there and I remember Towards the end of Y Combinator we told the partners that we were going to be moving back to New York and several them looked at us like we had a hole in our head But we did it and we're doing roommates during YC

Yeah, of course, of course, you know and those were tough times. I remember we lived on Sand Hill Sandhill Circle. At the time, we don't cook all that well. We knew about Seamless, and the sad part was there were only two restaurants on Seamless. And so, like, we lost a lot of them. What are we going to do today? It was... It was... We lost a lot of weight that summer. It was times were tough. And then at the very end, we discovered DoorDash. And I realized there were in fact ways. But I remember I had kind of liked the West Coast and Kareem said, you can stay out here, but I'm going. I'm going. That resolved. You understand. New York is, I feel like, celebrates the entrepreneur,

the person that's just trying to make something in the world. And it's slightly, San Francisco celebrates the earnest hacker. We talked about this with Paul Graham yesterday, and that's kind of the YC ethos. And it's like probably one of the most important archetypes in the world, right? There's so much of the things and the products in our lives. in our world is due to the earnest hacker, but there's another archetype that I feel like finds their way to New York, which is the earnest builder.

So I think that it glosses over a lot of what happened in the Valley over the past 10 years. What I observed from a lot of my peers who had gone through, that accelerator funded companies during that era, was the average person they hired stayed there for about 12 months. It was an incredible mercenary culture. The San Francisco and West Coast of 2015 through 2020-something, we can debate kind of the year, was not this like, you know, earnest hacker, two people in a garage. It had become very, very corporatized. And everyone who was out there, I felt the small startups, unless you were the hottest company at all points in time,

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

The goal is to go on a generational run. So build something that matters. And like when we came back to New York, look, I think it was maybe like Bob Ross would say a happy accident. Sure. Like when you started hiring these people, we could punch way above our weight. If you wanted to work at a very fast-growing venture-back startup, CED Series A, there was like three. And so we were able to find extraordinary people. There was, I think this wasn't well understood, but all of the large engineering companies

were opening incredibly large offices in New York. Google had done it. AWS, Stripe was opening their offices. MongoDB. MongoDB. Then you had these companies that were authentically built here in New York. MongoDB, Datadog, all the direct-to-consumer companies. And you had classically people who were in touch with culture, designers, marketers, people in finance.

It was all kind of here. What happened was as I think the West Coast was becoming a very hard place to build a genuine company. Constant talent war. In New York, you had the talent. You had people who were moving to be out here and then all that was missing was a- Oh, people also wanted to live in New York. New York City.

It's like the greatest city in the world. It's still a meme among AI researchers, like should I move to New York? Should I like get out of the hustle and bustle almost of San Francisco? Probably not AI researchers, but engineers broadly. It feels like going on. It feels like going to Hawaii. People are like, I'm ready for something different. Maybe I can go over there.

That's fascinating. I think that this was part of the secret of a ramp. Like we set out to go and to be that definitive company where if you, it was a goal that in a few years' time, people would say like, you know, you ask a friend, what is like the best fintech company in New York or people would think it's you got to go to ramp. That's where they like take engineering seriously. They move fast, they're just in their products. And we turn that into reality.

I think that there's lots of other great company. companies in New York here and coming up and accelerating. But it's great, it's great we're here. Talk to me. Something I'm realizing recently of like TBPN, we've probably added like one person a month in the year or so that we've been in business. And I was thinking like what a incredible luxury that is because when you're hiring at a relatively slow pace, you have so much time to like really get to know people.

There's not like this pressure. How like, I'd be curious because I don't think you've even if you're really to really get to know people. because I don't think you've ever shared it on the show, your philosophy on hiring when you're trying to deliver ramp speed, but also find and find and hire people that are going to be with the company for five, six, seven years and beyond. Yeah. I think a lot of people who walk around the ramp office, you guys know this. The company is incredibly young. You know, I think the average age is in the 20s, and a lot of it relates to this idea of finding people who are on a steep slope versus intercept.

Obviously, of course, we have people who have had incredible experience in pedigree, but the question is if you play out one or two years' time, there's some people with a lot of experience who've said, I've seen this movie before, I've learned all that I'm going to learn and get a little bit better over the course of the next year. And then you have these people who graduated top of their class. Maybe they're 19, maybe they're 20, maybe they're in their mid-20s, but they want to work, they want to learn, and they're on the steep trajectory.

And we find these people who have incredible drive, have incredibly high IQs. We give them more responsibility than you'd expect. And you're patient, you wait a year, and suddenly you are filled with people at your company who are far more talented than maybe you could afford to hire otherwise. If they already had the ramp logo on their resume and you were another company. And you're managing teams and their role. and they've grown incredible equity in the company, which has grown even more since they've been here. And it's just this incredible virtuous cycle.

And I think that a lot of people, especially early stage companies, get pushed by their investors to say, oh, you should find someone who's seen this movie before. I want to find someone who's been this VP, whatever. And like nothing wrong with that. I think that can be great, but it really underestimates the importance

of finding people have that raw talent and looking at, again, slope over intercept. John, I interrupted you. Oh, yeah. I just wanted to hear about sort of switching gears, but positioning around the product in the age of AI, there's a campaign going on right now. What is it? Teaching money to think. Yeah.

Right? And I just thinking money. And it makes sense. It's intelligent finance. But it feels like it's the result of grappling with this question of like, how do you bring AI to bear in the product in a way that's not like commodity. like every other company, but still showing some of the value. AI is this weird thing where it's becoming overhyped and then maybe potentially like even controversial in some.

Like is it using all the water? People are grappling with that. And so I wanted to know how you landed on that campaign, like how you're actually like, like how you're thinking about walking a prospective customer through the AI. piece of the value prop from from a from a from a from a catchphrase or a tagline down to like okay you're actually sitting down with the CFO like like what promises are you making them because you're probably not saying like yeah you're never gonna touch anything ever again right and you have to like be

somewhat realistic about that so how are you ready to enjoy PTO buddy look I I love this question and I think you need to start at the root of where this comes from sure at the when the company first launch we had this idea of time is money, you should save both. I love it. I'm saying it every day on the show. As soon as I, you know, if you're right. It's becoming my mantra.

I say it every day. Every day. So you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror. Time's money, save both. These, you know, corporate cars, bill pay a cold encounter, a whole lot more all in place. It is, and by the way, you know,

for any CFOs out there or financial professionals who haven't yet adopted, ramp, you know, give your CFO or the controller, you know, the wonderful gift of a ramp, help them save 5%. Yes, yes. It is. Well, you still push so hard on sales.

All the time, all the time you're like, oh, this company is interested in Ramp. You're like, introduce them to me. Yeah. And you'll jump on the phone like in the next 24 hours. Well, there's nothing better than actually feeling it yourself going through the sale, helping some get through. And it helps you understand the experience and stay sharp. But the question is really good.

So if you think about the actual brand and the value props that we offer, it's fairly timeless in the sea of, you know, ecosystem of credit card companies trying to get you to spend more. We want you to spend less. And we think this is timeless. Or the opposite would be like a new video model. And that also shows because of the state of the art for four weeks. And it's like it's just a very, it's like selling a very different product. It's selling things versus value. And to be very specific about it, like if you, and Jeff Bezos has talked about this in another context. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, sometimes people ask what's going to change over the next 10 years. It's more interesting to

what will not, right? And in 10 years from now, or 100 years from now, it is very clear that people will always want to get more for less, for fewer dollars, for fewer hours. There's no way that's ever gonna change. And if you think about kind of the central promise of ramp is gonna help you spend less, you know, you think about, you could sell thinking

or you could still thinking money. We can help you spend, that might change, but if you have intelligence introduced to some end, which is the intelligence is going to help you prevent spend that is out of policy that you don't want to occur once it's spent to actually tag an account for it. And then afterwards help you make sure that the next month, you know, more dollars go to productive uses as being really good and really timeless. And so thinking money might be a way of saying it in the modern era.

We're going to apply thinking to drive an outcome your company but leaner. But it's the same- Money starts to go, I don't know if I want to spend myself today. Maybe not. I'm not feeling. just showing this treasury account. It's this timeless idea there, guys. We need you to ring the gong because there is a milestone, which is that when we started the show, I was laughing about the, you know, we want to go to war on the paper receipt, on big paper, and I actually found a company

that, and I was like, is our paper receipt company is a thing? Are they still big? Turns out there was one that was worth like $22 billion. I believe when we started working with you, you were below that. Now you've eclipsed it, and I think it's a sign of good things to come, good omens, and the death of the paper receipt. Death of the paper receipt. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, stopping by. Great to see you. Thank you. Have a great of your day.

And we will catch up here soon. What a moment, too, because I think if you guys hadn't bet on us, last Q4 of last year, I don't think we'd be sitting here today with the TVPN logo all over the nice. So thank you to the whole team. We feel like the lucky ones. Thank you and congratulations again. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. We will also talk to you about TurboPuffer.

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and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Cheers. We got our red bears. We're going. Cheers. What a fun show. Oh. Next up we have John Zito, co-president of Apollo. Apollo. A fledgling asset manager with $900, $900. $900,000. $900,000. $900,000. $900,000. $900,000. $900 million. $900 million? Or is it $900 billion? It is $900 billion. He's going to answer some hard questions.

What is private equity? What is credit credit? What is asset management? What are alternative assets? I like the traditional assets. It's the alternative ones that scare me. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Yeah, we're ready.

He's put on a microphone. He's getting mic'd up. In the meantime, we'll tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams, build great products together. And I'll also tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

John Zito is getting miced up. He's coming in. I should also mention that today I am wearing a watch that I purchased on getbezzle.com. You can shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezell's team of experts. On a special day, you need a special watch. There's no better place to get at the Bezal. We have John Zito. John, good to meet you.

Are you giving Eric a little pet talk there? Talk there? What are you saying? You know, a couple things there. You guys are friends, right? Yeah, yeah. Last time I saw him, he was, he was like taking all his money. It's a small poker game.

He was taking everyone's money. Oh, he was. Oh, I can see that. He's such a nice guy, so he's got to be a chart. Don't fall for the ramp pitch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's counting everyone's money. He's like, I'm saving your, I'm going to save you time and your money.

I'm going to actually take your money. I'm not. I'm not. I'll be saving it for later. Their team is amazing. It is. What they're building is pretty incredible. Tell me about, tell me about your team.

Tell me about what you've learned from him, what you've told him about managing, building a team. What does it take to get a job and work for you? Yeah, I mean, look, those, they don't need any of my advice. They'll come and talk to me about building the culture. Yeah, but what they're doing there, and they have a bunch of people around them that are just building an incredible business.

For us, it's about, it's pretty simple. Find people with purpose. Find people high character, find people that are generally good people first. Sure. And then all the investment characteristics. How do you like to evaluate people for purpose? I mean, for us How long do you want to spend with someone before you

actually do start your business? Some of our best hires are probably the people that I've known for a really long time. I mean, a lot of our hires that we've made in the last, I don't know, five, seven years, I knew them for 20. You know, I've been in credit for 23 years. Yeah, so quickly, can we zoom out and can you paint a picture for me

of like the actual Apollo structure, the empire? Like, what's going on there? Maybe share some of the same numbers you shared with our mutual friend Patrick that invest like the best because the velocity that you guys are moving at is yeah Patrick's a great guy center is a good guy I know you guys are close to center too is the best yeah so Apollo largest one of the largest alternative credit managers in the world largest alternative asset managers in the world yeah what's

unique about us is half of our nine hundred over 900 billions our own our own capital through retirement service through a theme yes so we're writing we're a market leader and writing guaranteed income so we'll write guaranteed, you know, you want a 5% guaranteed income. Somebody wants to retire someday. Yeah, you want guaranteed income for the next 10 years and 5% we'll guarantee you that money and then we'll invest it and we keep some

marginal spread between guaranteeing the income. And that's half our money. And then half our money is managing third party money on behalf of our historically private equity business which is over $100 billion. And then our credit business which is worth of $800 billion. So, oh, here we go. I got that airport.

Formed up for you. The guys out there told me I'm the first alternative asset manager leader on your show. I don't know if that's true, but let's let's let's let's let's play some. We've had plenty of people that have, I'm sure, raised from Apollo. But yeah, that's the first. Yeah, maybe like let's talk about why private credit, which people talk about as a monolith, obviously there's subsections of it, but why it's having such a moment right now in the context of these sort of like large scale infrastructure projects that are happening in AI as well as defense.

Yeah, I mean, look, so because half our balance sheet is super long duration for retirement, and all these new projects need really long-dated capital. Yeah. There's only two places you can get capital. You can get money from a bank or you can get money from investors. And the bank capital, they're amazing a lot of things. The capital tends to be more short-dated because it's led by deposits. Yeah.

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

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

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

Everyone has a hard time. Okay, private credit's risky. Yeah. And a lot of people think private credit's like the $5 or $10 million loan to like a tire manufacturer in Queens or something. That's what they think private credit is. We're doing $11 billion loans for Intel. Yeah, yeah. And that's private credit.

Yeah. Right? So we define it as everything from a mortgage to a commercial real estate loan against a building, to an aviation loan against a building, to an aviation loan. against a new aircraft. Sure. Like super safe, secured top of the capital structure,

traditionally investment grade. Yep. So. But how do you set up your firm to deal with a $10 billion deal with Intel all the way down to some smaller deal? We're the only firm that's full open architecture. Okay.

So we're one investment business. So, you know, David Samber who runs private equity, you know, the guys who lead our hybrid team, you know, our credit team. All the people are all in the same investment meeting.

Yep. talking about, okay, what's the best solution for the company? It's not really about, let's solve for this small thing for a fund. Yeah. Once you start doing that, it's very hard to work with companies. Yeah. You know, like, historically, the credit business was, hey, we're going to go to a bank, we're going to issue a bond, and then we would buy that bond.

That was kind of the public business. And most of those people were trying to, were typically conservative, and they were trying to get just their income. because most of us grew up in the opportunistic business and we've evolved into an investment grade business, we think more like builders and partners. And we're just providing capital across the whole capital structure. And when you can show up and say,

hey, you need a loan against the building, you need a, by the way, you want a retirement program for your employees and you want a long duration preferred, there's not many people that can show up with huge amounts of checks and just make it. And also, by the way, we're lenders to 5,000 companies.

So now all of a sudden you're in our ecosystem and if you're growing the thing, we can help and be a real partner, not just a capital provider. And that's like the new modern. 5,000 companies, aren't there only, there's 4,000 public companies. How many, so are you a lender

to almost all of the public companies that are at scale? We have mortgages, commercial real estate loans. Sure, sure, sure, right. How are you thinking about the real estate market, mortgages, even buying houses, Like, how do you think about that portfolio there? We don't buy, we're not in the single-family rent business.

You like your brand. It does seem like a hot iron, but I have a friend. Let the companies that start with me. Because I have a friend who lives next to a house that was bought by private equity. He's like, yeah, they actually made it really nice. And it's great. And my neighborhood's getting better because of this. It's like kind of a hot take.

Yeah, I mean, look, that part has been, obviously affordability is a big thing. Sure, sure. But we're more on the lending center. So we just can provide mortgages. Sure, sure, sure. And so we have a big mortgage business, and it's relatively low-cost. And, I mean, as you get lowered into smaller deals, do you need to bring in more automation? Are you seeing returns to scale on, you know, IT spend or AI spend or any of this stuff?

Yeah, so I think that will happen for sure. I think that will happen for sure. In the asset level side, so when you're analyzing large pools of mortgages. or mortgages or in the security. Historically, that's going to be much more of a data-a-i-driven over time. Sure. Our models will get better and better. And there'll be more data and plug-in.

All things associated with big pools and a history, you're going to probably get more optimal pricing. Sure. And you can see companies like morpho. Like, if you look at, I don't know if you've seen the token. There are DFI protocols that actually have market-based pricing. Yeah, yeah. And that's going to keep getting better and better and better. And I think the scale players will ultimately win that.

And so we use it more there. On the smaller side where it's more flow-related businesses, we have Apollo, which does a lot of our large lending. But then we have 16 companies which invest on our behalf that do specialty stuff. So our middle market lender, mid-cap, will do that, has its own brand, its own employees, its own balance sheet. But we'll own some piece of the equity and some piece of those loans. We bought GE's aviation business. So they do all the smaller or medium or big size aviation loans, but in many cases, it's our capital. I know there's some firms that tend to brand themselves is like, we will do a take private,

and we specifically want to focus on growth. And then we know some other folks who will just buy stuff that's basically, look, the business has done everything it's going to do. We're winding it down, and so we're just kind of cash flowing it out, and eventually that thing will just put on life support, and it's sort of like built to scale or built to die, and that's the thing. Do you want to play in every market? Do you want to take advantage of every situation and be able to see what the trajectory of a business is and then just accelerated along that?

Or do you find a particular niche works well for you? Our private equity business historically been value oriented, not necessarily growth oriented. That'll help with respect that we didn't buy any companies in 21, 22 that I think are going to be somewhat tougher to exit because of the prices that were paid. And our team's done an amazing job. Why didn't you buy any companies in 20%?

We have a 35-year history of, buying at relatively low multiples. So just nothing was available under that framework to buy. Yeah, that's great. And so we've been, people think of us as being more value-oriented, defensive equity, and then everything around secured lending. Yeah, and on the private equity side, do you have a deal team members, operating partners that go inside the companies,

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

So Europe, we did a $4.5 billion deal for RWE. We did a $6.5 billion deal for EDF. There we go. We keep doing this. So we've done some of the largest, European deals for power, energy, transmission, defense. I think you'll see that continue in the U.S., same thing. Very large for BP, multi-billion dollar transactions.

If you told me five years ago, we'd be doing multi-billion dollar deals for S&P 500, IG globally in Europe and the U.S., I would have said that that's not going to happen. The business of private markets is across every risk spectrum. And it's really, for some reason, that's not, again, not really transmitted into the market. It's just private credit's growing. It must be risky. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, makes sense. I think you're going to, the logical answer for long-duration power projects, which require lots of construction or data centers.

The logical places for retirement, 401K, long-duration, investment grade, annuities, anyone who wants long-term savings, it's a great, it's a great place to be. So I think you're going to continue to see private markets being the primary force around financing all that stuff. Yeah. How do you guys approach sort of like questions or debates around things on the data center side, such as like GPU depreciation, right? Everybody has different opinion. You can look at part of it is like there's some element of it that's unpredictable. You can also look at the present, right, which is like people that have five. The president is a 50-year depreciation, right?

No, there's mortgages. But you can look at the present and you can try to predict the future. And then depending on who you talk to, you're going to get wildly different answers, whether you're talking to somebody over on this coast or somebody on the West Coast. I'm curious, like, your guys' general kind of approach to, like, finding the answers to some of these questions. I think there's going to be winners and losers. I think, you know, for us, we've stayed more short-dated.

So we did a large, for Valor and XAI, we did a multi-billion dollar GPU financing, but we stay at five years. So effectively, we're the senior trunch, and then the equity holders are making the assumption on what GPUs are worth later and longer. That's hard for us as credit providers. It's going to be hard. I think anyone who says they know what the value of GPUs or the release rates are in year 5, 7, or 10, I mean, it's hard to take that with any sort of credit. view. It's undoubtedly probably going to be the most violent

cycle we've ever had. No one really knows how fat the tails are, both right or left. But adding a lot of leverage to a assumption that you don't know if it's going to be a super bull case or a super bear case is kind of scary for us, so we've been a bit quieter on that side. I do think that folks in Silicon Valley, folks in our audience are just really struggling to wrap their minds around the role of private credit here because it's a completely different just mental model to be in as opposed to just being a venture

capital equity investor. Yeah, I mean, the thing is with this cycle, it's so much more asset heavy. Totally. All these growth companies, defense companies, Seronic, and they're going to need the nuclear companies, the nuclear companies, the power companies, the AI companies, it's all asset heavy. Yeah, as opposed to you go back to Google. 20, 30 years. It's all asset life.

It's all asset life. It's all cash-law. And the mental model is always asset light and the debt is bad. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm friends with lots of the guys on your show because this is changing. Sure. Totally. And it's going to be all about who they can partner with and trust.

Yeah. Tech wasn't, like, didn't have low leverage because they just didn't like leverage. It didn't need it. They didn't need it. This cycle, you need it. Yeah. And it can be financed off balance sheet and it can be better optimized than actually raising equity. And there's a lot of.

It's just and so I think you're gonna get there. And also the scale is not necessarily just directly tied to the problem. I always I always go back to like, you know, the mortgage. There are plenty of people that are making six figures and have a seven figure mortgage. And it's like, so if you talk about a company and you're like, yeah, the company is making a billion dollars and they have ten billion dollars of debt or something. It's like that could math out fine if everything's, you know, flowing through and they're growing and whatnot. But yeah, it's a new territory. There's definitely a big pivot.

Last week and a half. Yeah. Lots of questions about off-balance sheet debt. Should it be on balance sheet? Lots of questions about Oracle and others. Lots of questions about some of the neoclouds. I think that's just going to push Anthropic and Open AI public earlier. Oh, interesting.

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

How are you feeling about the IPO market in the present? Kramer was on talking about frustrations with different biotech companies going out and some of them being potentially lower quality. Where are we in your view? You brought me to the New York Stock Exchange to talk about private markets, which is the funniest thing ever. I don't know. We spend, I would say, 70% of our time talking about privates. Oh, they do you? Okay, good. I work here, so that's good. Good partnership today.

Well, the funny thing, the funny thing, Kramer kept speaking in share price, and we're like, we only think in market caps. Yeah, market cat. Exactly. Like, ramp, the $33 billion company? I mean, look, there's going to be, next year's going to be, I'm usually, the credit guy is usually always the bearish guy. I'm like, I think lower rates, I think, tons. of M&A, I think you'll see a lot more huge technology. Who knows what the $4 trillion, $5 trillion, whatever, the estimate of capital, who will it will benefit, but it's going to benefit the consumer. Yeah.

The end of the day it's going to benefit the consumer. When you say M&A though, is this PE funds that loaded up in 2021, 2022 finally capitulating or all strategic? I think, I mean, I don't think anyone thought, you know, you see what's happening. There's some very large MNA transactions. You saw Echo Star this year sold a bunch of assets in exchange for SpaceX stock. SpaceX stock. Yeah.

You know, like, people are like, wait, this company owns half of, or not half, but like half, like they've got like $10 billion. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. But then you look at the, you look at the debt. No, but even that, it's pretty, it's pretty way to actually get, get access to SpaceX.

It was a pure play tracker. I mean, I'm not, I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that kind of thing. It's a pretty, it's a pretty interesting way to get access to it.

Yeah. They're making an open AI movie. They're making a new social network, Facebook movie. Oh, they? Do you think they'll ever make a Caesar's Palace Hice movie?

Oh, Jesus. I don't know. I don't know. I hope not. But I mean, seriously, like, because that book was introduced to me through our friend group, and we were all like, this is awesome. But oftentimes,

internally at these firms, like, everyone in Silicon Valley is like, yeah, social network, awesome movie. It inspired me to start a tech company. And Mark Zuckerberg is like, not a fan, right? And so I'm wondering internally, how does the firm remember the book? Listen, we, that was so long

in the context of the business. We've become a complete kind of credit, passive, sure, sure. And the kind of activity we do day to day by and long is far different. I think generally speaking, our investors look at that situation and say, listen, they're going to fight for every dollar. So I think there's a balance between the one thing as you grow is you want to maintain your investment culture.

And so how do you make sure you maintain your investment culture, recruit the best people, and the paradox of growing, but also really being a good investor. That's like a very tough balance sometimes. And so, you know, I think of them every day trying to make sure that we. Who on your team evaluates various AI tools, and I'm sure you're getting pitched 100 times a day? We have a whole team. I mean, we have a team. It's called Lab 42, but Rob Bittencourt really leads the thematic investing.

You should have them on. I mean, he spends all his time assessing all the hyperscale, the entire ecosystem, both the Got an alacety? Yeah, let's go. It's a tree lighting. A tree is not an IPO. The tree has been a light. This is why we've probably got it.

There we go. Here we go. Curse's spirit. That's all fun. That was fun doing here. They said they've never done an IPO on tree lighting day. Oh, really? So somebody's got to do it.

It's, like the last 10 years or something. Somebody's got to do it. It's, who is it, Zaria? They got Santa here, too. It's Hank Azaria, isn't it? No way. Oh yeah Last time I saw him

He was in like a He's in a cover band You know it's funny He plays in a cover band He's a cover band He's actually pretty good Really? That's amazing There are a ton of people here

This is as big as an IPO In terms of folks Roaming the Floor There's a lot of folks There's some mascots over there They're having fun Anyway thank you so much For coming on the show

We really appreciate it All right Good love with you guys Yeah Thank you so much We'll talk to you soon Before we bring in our last guest to the show.

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Actually, that would be a good Christmas present. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. We should actually get him an eighth sleep for Christmas. I love it.

And, you know, you're looking behind us. There's some, we're on the cubes. You can see us over there. We're on that cube, actually. We're down to one cube. We're down to one cube. The tree took over, but if you want to put your brand, your logo on something that looks like a cube, why not get a billboard at adquick.com. I love it, John. Out of home advertising is easy and measurable, planned by and measure out of home with precision. People are joking around on the timeline. Meta, of course, is planning to cut 30% of their, of, I guess a budget of their Metaverse efforts.

So this is reality labs. This is reality labs. Which has worked on VR and AR but also Metaverse development. I mean, it's a lot of the stuff that was on display during MetaConnect. Some really promising stuff, some really cool stuff. People like it. But also a lot of spend. And so they, you know, leaked today.

I don't know. And consensus media, which definitely joking around. Could be real. They say meta well announced. plans for name change. New stock ticker within the coming weeks. Zuck viewed as leading candidate for new ticker. Seems like fake news,

but it's certainly fun. Yeah, I like the meta name. Max Hodak, former guest says the idea that this is the end of meta's metaverse dreams is probably wrong. I bet this will actually make them go faster.

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

Yeah, Michael Mirreflore. Michael Mirfleur says you need to be, you need to study business models, you have to be investigation maxing, value decoding. You should never think the consumer facing products is a thing. There's a thing behind the thing that generates revenue. It was true. It's supposed to unlock cash flow at a certain scale. That justifies valuation.

There's vision here. So anyways, without further ado, let's bring in our next guest. Hi. Good to see you. Welcome to Australia. Thank you. How's it going, guys? Congratulations.

Thank you. Day number one hasn't been going so far. Fantastic. We love this place. It's fun as a media person to be here because it's become just the center for media. Yeah. Did you just see Hank Khazaria outside of? Yeah.

It was him, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. Yes, our last guest was IDing him, and I couldn't see from here. But it does appear that he's down there walking around. There you go. It's a full-on tree lady. And with the builder, apparently. I like, Hank Azaria.

I don't know much about movies. I was like, I have never heard. Do you watch his TV? No movies, no TV, really. Very, very rarely. He's seen one movie Borat and that's it. Pretty much, pretty much. I saw that new movie Mountain Gate.

Mountain Gate. I feel like I needed to give a review for the show. It was about some AI, founders that go to the, I felt like loosely based on the all-in podcast. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, so great to have you.

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

My controversial opinion is I don't like it's a wonderful life. Oh, that one is a little bit earlier. What about Elf? What about Elf? Elf? Yeah. You're like, is that a movie? Yeah.

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

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

and strategy on their part and some lock that gets thrown in. And so, again, there's not like a playbook. If you're following a playbook, it's probably been done. And it could work if you're in another category. We saw this in D to C, right? people were like, oh, if you make a pretty website and you run a lot of ads, you can sell a lot of a product,

and then a few other people did it well, and then it basically stopped working. Like, it can still work in certain circumstances. Yeah, the Red Amler trade did last too long. Yeah, the Red Amler era. It was like you need $500,000 for a brand, and you need a product. And it works for Hems.

Hems is a public company. Yeah, and is doing fine. Also, Hymette. Oh, that's right. Was it Roe that worked with Red Amet? Jim Lane. I think Roe worked with Red Amler. Anyways.

I bought my first Walby Parker glasses. You did. Last week and I thought, God, I'm a bit late to this one as well. But that was that era. That one's been around for a while. I mean, I think that's what's so interesting right now is that there is no playbook anymore. Even if you're a humongous brand, you know, you're sort of when you're managing any kind

of decline, there's no playbook for that. And there's no playbook for a young D to C brand. Sure. We heard about an apparel brand that is scaled from zero to 700 million of revenue in like two years. All on TikTok shop. We'd never, we'd never heard of it. I don't know if they're public. I don't know if the numbers are problems

because I won't share the name. I'll share it with you after after. Yeah. Remarkable. But what has been the big trend of the year in terms of your coverage? What's been the biggest story or the biggest thing? What's your word of the year?

My word of the year, crisis. Crisis. Wow. Why crisis? We have seen, I think, every brand right now, if you look at American Eagle, if you look at Cracker Barrel, just happening in the last, you know,

in this sort of a space of a few months of each other, two very similar case studies two very different accusations being leveled at them getting sucked into politics and then the crisis columns comes out and the snowballing of it all and I think now

it's sort of making brands realize that nobody is safe you know you change your logo before this year I'm sure nobody really thought especially like Cracker Barrel is not I mean it's a beloved brand but it's not like in everyone's face

constantly it's not the Pepsi logo which also went through a rebrand of the logo years ago and people didn't like it and I think they tweaked it and whatnot. But Cracker Rose, it shouldn't be such a massive story, but of course the internet can amplify everything. And you can just throw everyone in crisis. What are you looking at for 2026? I think, well, it would be a lot more of that.

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

ahead of the game. They want to be the ones that are talking about themselves before anyone else talks about that. So I think we're going to see a big shift in what comms looks like in general, which will be quite interesting to see. And then the AI piece of it all kind of fits in with that because I

think the big question is going to be do consumers care if a brand is using AI and if they do like how badly is that going to actually affect any revenue. Well, it's going to be interesting because it's going to happen at the ad level too because the social platforms know the political leaning of the users and it's very possible that a brand will be like, here's the product, you can figure out how to make the best ad for the end user and then you'd have one brand with one product that's running political leading ads this

right. That would be fast. I do wonder, I would do wonder, there's been some brands over the last kind of coming out of the, the, uh, the kind of original Trump era that were just like, right wing brands or right wing neobank. We saw, we saw some of these. Yeah. I wonder if we'll see more. Black rifle coffee was kind of a proto example, this, my pillow. I wonder if we'll see more, more, uh, consumer brands just like basically put the political party in the footer and just be like even more.

A trend that I was thinking was like more brands investing in like becoming the support. and then just having two like faces, two brands on top. Because I think it's a long time, in the long arc of history, maybe the value accrues to the company that's making pillows for both the left wing and the right wing first. I mean, I'm sure there's probably already. It naturally happens in the supply chain, right? Yeah, yeah.

There's no one's digging through the supply chain to figure out where their coffee beans came from. I'm surprised we haven't actually seen more sort of out and out right wing brands coming through. I mean, we have, you know, the ones you mentioned. Yeah. I guess they've been going down that route for a while now. And, you know, given that, what, 10 years ago,

it was a lot of brand purpose. We always used to talk about brand purpose and how it was, yes. And every brand had to be aligned to a big cause of some sort that kind of tended to swing to the left. Yeah, it was like a clothing brand that was all about ocean plastic. And then I think people realized at some point or another they wanted to buy, the majority of consumers just want to buy a great product. And so it kind of flipped back where brands stop saying 1% of every dollar.

Do you think any big brands will intentionally try and throw their brand into crisis? Because we see this in Silicon Valley all the time. It's rage bait marketing where a startup will come out with a video that's designed to get canceled. Right. Because no one knows them. And if they're getting canceled, sure, 100,000 people might hate them, but at least if they would say... A thousand might sign up.

If a thousand sign up, it's better than nothing. Are you talking about that black mirror one that came out a few weeks ago? There's a bot farm. Very good point. There was a bot farm one. There was TikTok for sports betting or gambling. There was one that was a coding environment that would let you gamble and watch subway servers.

Brain rot, I did. Like illegal online casinos. There was the whole Cluley saga, which was an app that allowed you to cheat on everything. Yeah. Of course, people don't like cheating, so that was very incendiary. I was thinking of the, you know, dead relative bring that to life. That one was very on the nose. And that was partnered with a Disney Star.

That was crazy. To the point where I thought this has got to be. Intentional. Well, it doesn't exist and it's some kind of artwork. Because I almost believe that, I don't know the actual numbers, but I think American Eagle might still be up on the, like as a stock, even during all that chaos. Like, they netted out okay. Yeah.

And I heard some people debating whether or not Sydney Sweeney would wind up winning on the day. I don't know how much she got paid and I don't know what the long term. Yeah, I mean, that one's interesting because American Eagle and we just had it at one of our conferences, Craig, their CMO, you know, their line is very much. Like, this was truly not political. Not political. It was not that.

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

They didn't give it too much fuel. It kind of burnt itself out that way. I think we're going to be seeing like some more of those tactics whereas before if anyone was upset, brands would like immediately pull something and you know do the notes. A friend of ours who's been on the show before, Lulu, Misservi, she does comms or helps on comms for a lot of startup. She said yesterday, every media headline about a tech company is basically like, this founder archetype is building the summary of your company or product.

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

It was basically like they grew from three to 30 billion in nine months. I'll let you answer, but I have a little bit. Well, I think the pendulum swings, right? So, you know, originally the press were accused of being too friendly to tech. Sure. And then we swung a little bit. Sure. being, everyone's accused of being too antagonistic.

No, it was antagonistic. I think it swung back. Too fring? No, no, no. I just think it's like kind of healthy right now. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is kind of healthy. Well, that's what I think what's being tried, you know, they don't want to say this is

going to fail, this is terrible, these are terrible people, but they want to tell the human interest story of it. I think that's where the friction lies. I think stories need conflict. And I know, I know friends who have time and time again been in industry, in tech, in technology, pro tech. And then they say, we want to make. pro-tech stories and what you realize is that well you need an antagonist in a story

and if you don't have an antagonist you don't have a story you don't have strife if you don't have a low point and so when I would when I would talk to friends who were running companies I would say look like I know that you've had failures I know that you tried to raise money five years ago you're super successful now but five years ago you tried to raise money and the investor pulled out at the last second and that employee that you wanted to hire said no and the product that you crashed and no one bought it. Like I know that you've been through trials and tribulations.

You have two options. One is hide those and try and tell the story of everything went perfectly the whole way. And it will be a boring story that no one listens to. Or you can tell the real story of the highs and lows and the ups and downs. And you'll have a riveting story. It actually makes you look more heroic because who wants to watch Star Wars without any strife, without, you know. When you tell people that, what's that reaction? The Jedi's are just hanging out.

The good ones to get it. The good ones to totally get it. I've been in the situation where I've told. this to a founder and the founders said like, I get it and the comms team has been like, no, no, no, we're still trying to hide that skeleton in the closet. And I'm like, that skeleton's not that big of a skeleton. No, no, exactly. You lost one contract or like one customer failed. But, you know, a lot of people are in damage control and that's their whole business. And so they're saying, don't let anything ever get out. And instead, I think the people that understand stories,

understand narrative, understand just entertainment, they get that you have to, people like an underdog, people like a come from behind, an up and down. And then this goes back to controlling the narrative, right? Like put it out there, put it and weave it in as part of your talking points. Tell the story. Yes. And give the journalist something to work with that has friction, like you said.

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

built up or a YouTube channel and then there's a big dust up and you're just, it's the best content of the year about you. Everyone wants to hear from you. You have an audience and a channel that's ready. They're interested in American Eagle. What more would they want to know about this? And you're just like, I'm out. I think the astronomer example again from this year, that's a perfect example.

They went ahead straight away and laughed at it. They did a great job. That was masterclass. We had the founder on. The founder, Pete, Pete, right? Pete DeJoy? Yeah. Yeah, we had them on the show a little bit later.

And it was funny. We were joking because they had the day before that controversy broke, they had published like a case study with RAM. Oh, yeah. We're joking, who's our presenting sponsor, and we were joking, we're like, did Ramp somehow? How many stories do you, like, how many pieces do you actually, do you publish a year? A year. I try and do, I try and do about four to six a month.

Okay. I think whatever that average is out like. And what is it takes you get in the four to six? I would say, come with some friction, come with a story. And I always think it doesn't have to be a huge brand. You just got to give us some numbers. You know, the amount of people that say I've got a great. story I want to tell. We did this amazing marketing campaign.

Make it concrete. Yeah. Like, well, we are, and my favorite line to use is we are the Wall Street Journal. So, you know, you've got to give us some dollar signs. I like that. I like that. Awesome percentages. This is a lesson for us. We need to, when we tell someone, well, we are TBPN. We need to know what that means. Maybe, maybe we can impress about people. Don't come with your talking points as a conversation. We are TVPN. Like, you can't come with talking points out because this is DBPN. We're still finding our idea. are outside. Exactly. Knocking on the window like this. We were talking to Kramer about that. That's the number one thing we want to do. Do you think we've passed the peak of wellness? It feels like wellness as a trend has been so impactful now that young people are proudly throwing up their hand.

I don't drink alcohol. Isn't the Unwell Network doing well? Alex Cooper. Yeah. That's the pendulum swinging back from wellness to unwellness. I think you might be right. Maybe. But yeah, we've just been having this debate internally.

Like how durable is the trend? Well, it's funny. It's difficult because, you know, look, you guys live in L.A. I live here. I feel like, I feel I go out on a Friday night in the West Village. No one is looking very well, you know?

Like, the kids are drinking, they're smoking. Smoking school again, apparently. You know, I think, but then the rest of the country, I don't know, I think it's probably still, the wellness is probably still, of infiltrating down there. The stats show that people aren't drinking very much, especially in the younger demos. Well, especially in, I mean, in restaurants.

In restaurants. We had David Chang on the show. He was talking about how a lot of restaurants are struggling just because they had this high margin revenue from alcohol that was getting tacked on to every bill that's, you know, evaporated to simply. I mean, it's very difficult to break out, and I'm sure someone has, whether a time with the economy is like it is? Is it because of, you go into a restaurant?

Are you going to go, well, I can't really afford it? So therefore this is like the one thing I can like take off my bill or is it because I'm actually stopping drinking And it's difficult to know that causation But I think you know it's I've got the CMOs I speak to in the alcohol world They all have in a pretty not difficult time But they they know that change is coming and you know they're making little alterations and They never if you've got an advertising budget they've never been able to say hey guys drink loads You know go out have get absolutely plastered have a great

time. So, you know, they haven't had to change their marketing too much because of that. But I think in terms of, you know, whether they're showing up and how they're presenting themselves in the real world, that will be quite interesting. Yeah. A lot of other things that I'd love to talk about, but let's do it again. Yeah, let's do it again soon. This is fantastic. It's so good to meet you.

Congratulations again. Thank you for coming on. See you soon. See you soon. See soon. See you soon. See you soon. to a special place.

I'm enjoying these ramp. Good call not lighting a fire. Yes. You can tell that I'm not a pyromaniac. It's a pyromaniac. It's just one match. It's just one match. It's just one match.

It's just one match. Oh, what about one more? It says burn your receipts times money, save both. I like these. These are very fun. How much time do we have to do timeline? We are going to an event later. Let's do another 20 or 10 minutes or something.

From Lulu. I haven't seen these. She says, it's worth signing up for Blueprint just to study the marketing emails. They're fun and easy to read. No corpus slop. Educational, so you're getting useful info rather than just being marketed to. Great at building trust through transparent and proactive communication. Why, Brian and Kate, write them personally.

You can pull some of these up. I do think that it's possible that Brian Johnson is the best marketer in the world right now. He's incredible. He's competing and, like, actually. the team are like innovating at a bunch of different levels, like just like in creating, you know, plenty of people like, you know, want to critique him or disagree with his philosophy or approach or whatever. But as a business person, you have to appreciate how he just makes, finds a way to make him the center of a lot of attention pretty much every single. King of organic. King of organic.

And I know that I'm sure they spend a ton on traditional ads too for Blueprint. It's going to be a monster of business. And he has a CEO in the seat right now too, right? Didn't he hire? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or maybe he was going to hire. But like there's going to be some operator. Somebody was claiming that his whole relationship with Kate was just a marketing stunt.

And it's like, you know what I do you know about so many celebrities throughout the years? Yeah. All sorts of all sorts of conspiracies. About it. In other news, did you see their. The K trucks are coming back. Yeah, so something about basically eliminating

Biden era. People are saying that so the news is that apparently you'll be able to buy a very small truck soon, which is a thing in Japan that supposedly not has been made illegal for some reason. They were Biden era vehicle fuel efficiency

rules. I feel like you haven't been able to buy one of these in a long time. And it never made sense because it should be the most efficient thing possible. The rule called for a yearly 2% efficiency increase for cars made from 2027 to 2031. Oh. Just took a lot of these off the road? And yeah, it's the cafe,

the corporate average fuel economy standards. The quote is so ridiculous here. We're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdensome, horrible, actually. Cafe standards that impose expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems. Gave all sorts of problems. I wonder if this will drive people back to Tesla

and saying, like, I bought this after Elon went crazy and then Trump went. And then Trump brought in these. I don't know. I don't know. I do think it's if the real loser here, I would say some people would say the environment, but potentially more direct is that company like Slate Auto that's trying to make a $20,000 truck. Meanwhile, these manufacturers have been making the $20,000 truck at scale.

a long time. And they're super reliable. But I mean, Americans have just voted with their wallets. They do not want a two-door truck.

It's just, it's never worked. Like the Land Rover Defender, there's so many examples of two-door SUVs that have just not

gotten traction. Like the Nissan. The Nissan Marano Cross Cabriolet also never took off. But even the... I mean, with true enthusiasts, of course.

Even the, the Range Rover Evoke is a two-door SUV, I believe, not done well. I'm very interested to see. How many tour G-wagons have you owned? Do you think there's some that I would love to own? Yes, but they're not exactly

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

bit. I'm surprised it. This is the first time somebody has like done this bit so well. He was asked to Volcher asked him a question on their year-end culture roundup about a TV show that this, that Charles here is assuming he hasn't seen. And the question is, was Bertha on the Gilded Age right to marry Glades off to the Duke? Bertha Russell wasn't exactly wrong for marrying Glades off to the Duke, at least not by Gilded Age standards, but she was morally compromised. In that world, marriage was a strategic move, a way to cement social status and gain acceptance from old money elites who still look down on her family's new wealth. To Bertha, securing a duke as a son-in-law wasn't just about ego. It was survival. A declaration that she'd conquer the very society

that tried to exclude her. Incredible bit. And then they amplified it because they did a video interviewing him, confronting him about it. And so Vulture has just done a great job drawing attention to their cultureati 50, which I would not have been following this year, and now I want to see the other 50. So hats off to them for that project.

In other news, Pomp is announcing a historic decision at BRR. Yes. This is his fact. This is his fact. This is his fact. Digital asset tragedy. He came on the show.

Bitcoin. He's going to buy Bitcoin and then buy companies Is that produce more Bitcoin or something? Yeah, 100% of equity compensation for the CEO, me, and the board of directors will be tied to performance milestones. Go to Elon. And boards shouldn't be making millions of dollars unless retail shareholders are also winning. Now that I am in charge of a public company, I hope to set the standard for what true shareholder alignment looks like.

I do believe this was in reaction to an activist investor that accumulated around 7%. Did he also set his milestone of $10 trillion? He doesn't get a dime unless it's $10 trillion? I can see that. He's a permiboult. That would be amazing. Yeah, I don't think he's ever flipped bearish this whole year. No, no. I mean, this is good.

And the interesting and the interesting iteration on this is that it's, Elon has set himself up with the equity compensation tied to share price, which went very well the first time. And now he sent himself up to do it again with Tesla. And what's interesting here is that with Pomp's BRR ticker, He, it's not just him, it's also the board of directors. And I think that a Tesla, that's not the case. And so he's saying, I'm taking it one step further.

Now, I'm still interested to see what are the targets? Like, because if you're like, you know, hey, the stock moves 2%, I get $100 million. People aren't going to be excited about that. But if you design those equity comp packages appropriately, obviously it's totally a win, win, win. So everyone can be very happy about that. Yeah, and we'll see how it does once, you know, again, a lot of these digital asset treasury companies have performed horribly recently and unclear. Marvin was,

Marvin was texting me. Okay, so Marvin Von Hagan is going, he's at the timeline, Pokey, which is a social AI that lives in your messages. He says, saw TechCrunch tweet six weeks ago that META is trying to ban Pokey. He said he directly asked for help on Twitter, got a lot of intro. talk to the European Commission. EU officially opened an antitrust investigation today. X is unreal. He really is kind of met his worst nightmare today.

Just directing... He's basically... Are you really that surprised that Martin von Hagan is pulling... Marvin. Marvin. Sorry, Marvin von Hagen is pulling the strings of the EU. But anyway... pretty interesting. Well, good luck to him.

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

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

Make sure everybody realizes we're not building data center. We're preserving our gross margins and cash flows and using the data centers that are being built. I love it. I love it. Neer says, today I learned I use more tokens than Salesforce does. Yeah. I mean, we didn't get into this with the camera, but the token thing, this could go so fantastically wrong if it turns into eyeballs. Like, imagine if there's companies going out and publicly, they're talking about, like, their token multiples.

It's like, yeah, like, we generate 100 trillion tokens. And so, of course, we should be a billion dollar company. And it's like, you're looking at, like, dollars of market cap per million tokens of generation. I don't think we're going to get there. I hope not. I think there is, like, there is a precedent through the eyeball era. But you could do that and you could think of that as a proxy. Of course, the correct proxy is revenue.

and we should stay in that world, but you never know. Yep. You never know. Bucco Capital says, according to Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg, kills goats with a laser gun

and eats them. This is wild. It's so funny. He used the term. The question was, what was your most memorable encounter with Zuck? Well, there was a year

when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat. In front of you? No, he killed it before. I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun

and then a knife. Then they send it to the butcher. A laser gun? I don't know, a stun gun. They stunned it and then he knifed it. Then they sent it to the butcher, evidently in Palo Alto, and then the quote drops off. Imagine you have your buddy over and you're like, hey, look, I run a social network. You ran a while social network for a long time.

I run Facebook. You ran Twitter. Let's just hang out. I'm going to show you. No, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, I'm going to show you a little bit of my culture, bro culture. You're a hippie. You're a hippie culture.

You're the Bitcoin guy. You're the Bitcoin guy. The Costa Rican Bitcoin guy. I'm the UFC guy. I like to kill goats myself. But you're not supposed to go leak it. What's going on, Jack? Come on.

Come on. I was off the record. I showed you my culture in confidence. What happens in Palo Alto? What happens at the goat farm? Stays at the goat farm. Apparently not. Also hilarious that he doesn't know what a stung guy is.

We figured out that somebody on the show that's come on multiple times has hundreds of goats. Oh, yes. And nobody knows about this. People keep talking about the goat debate, this or that. The goat debate. And we were talking with them and they're saying they need to keep quiet because there's a real. Real goat collector. There's a real goat collector.

That's right. A goat herd. What else we got? This is interesting. Google taps replet in Challenge to Anthropics and Cursor. Somewhat surprising, considering that Google is going really heavy with anti-gravity. but I think like Replet is just...

Google's invested in Replet for a long time. Like they did a partnership or investment. Back before Amjad was making a couple million bucks in revenue. Is capital G and in Replit? Yes. I'm almost positive that

Google has invested in Repleting at some point. We should look it up, but we're doing the fake news now. We're done with the news. It's fake news. It's the fake news hour. But congrats to Amjad on doing, doing a deal with Google, I wonder how that will manifest. Because you are kind of competing with a lot of the folks at AI.

Studio and there's a lot of different pieces of the Gemini team that you're kind of dealing with. But at the same time, like, Replit is a unique product, and Replit has never been a foundation model company. And so it does make a lot of sense to, I actually like this a lot in the sense that, you know, where has Google been famous? Fantastic. Model development.

Yeah. Where have they been a little bit less speedy on the product, rollout side, getting the product in the hands of people? Umjohn's great at that. The repleteen's great at that. So you put them together and maybe it makes a lot of sense. But it's still just early days. Two final posts.

One, we missed this yesterday. Oh, we have another gone moment. Jake, Paul, and the team over at Antifund have. What do they have? Have raised Jeff, Jeff Wu, have raised a new fund. 3.30 million. I almost said, I almost said 300 million. I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll be there soon. But they are, they say they're pre-account industry leaders like Open AI, Anderil, Ramp, Cognition, and physical intelligence. But look at this video. 20-minute video. This is an interesting switch of a launch video.

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

But I love that this happened the way it did. And I think that this is a good format. And they're wearing suits. And they're wearing suits. Do you see that? Two to three more of these. That will happen. I mean, this does in some way, in some way mirror the Johnny Ive, Sam Altman video

of, like, them getting coffee together. And, like, there's these interesting things that, like, they're not launching a podcast together. They're just dropping a one-off conversation that's edited, kind of framing some of the history, explaining it. It's a really clear way to communicate. And of course,

because these guys are master communicators, they understand media. And so, very exciting. And what a portfolio. Open AI, and a ramp, cognition. There's one person that will go unnamed that links all of those companies together. Fantastic.

You know the person. You know the person. You know the person. Of course they do. Final post. Jeff Wu. From Tenei, sorry. He's highlighting a company.

company called Plod. Plod. This is so funny. I've never heard of. Apparently. But it sounds like they're absolutely ripping. It's the most successful. They said wearables were cooked, but Plod records, transcribes, and summer.

Of course, it's another meeting summarizing product. But it's a physical product. One million units sold largely to doctors, lawyers, and sales people. 250 million of annualized revenue bootstrapped and now profitable. Literally. And it's crazy. Like, no, no drama, no launch videos. crazy hype, no rage bait, just building in silence. We got to get this guy on the show.

Apparently they raise around $5 million, but sure, sure. But I think the more important thing is just that hardware is hard and we see a lot of corpses in the consumer electronics world, but there are also major breakout successes. The aura ring, for example, like what a remarkable company to just show up doing revenue at their scale seemingly out of nowhere. Whoop has done really well. And there's something, yeah, Oro, that's what I was mentioning. And then this new company, this meeting summarizer, fantastic. And we just haven't heard a pitch.

I'm so curious to know what this does so well that your phone can't do in an app. I mean, I don't know. We'll have to ask them. We'll have to get the counter on. Maybe we'll have to buy one. Test it out. Well, thank you for tuning in today, folks. We missed you in the chat.

Yeah. But we will see you tomorrow. We'll be back tomorrow. And thank you again to the NICC team for hosting us. As always. Totally surreal to be here. And thank you to everybody that has made this possible by tuning in and joining the show and supporting us however you have.

So have a wonderful evening and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you. Good night.