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

26:47Instead, you're going to be able to say, hey, the data center, yeah, it's generating sometimes helpful math homework help, sometimes creative writing stuff, sometimes some weird stuff. Sometimes it's curing cancer. Sometimes it's curing cancer. Sometimes it's doing weird stuff. Whatever. It does a bunch of different stuff, but at least it's not increasing my power bill because it's in space, and it's not an eyesore. It's not in my backyard, and it's not using any water because it's up in space. You think that would help? I think it would. I think it has to. Probably. But I agree. Then the discourse will be just blocking out the stuff.

27:19But it is notable that every time the concept of a space data center hits a timeline, it goes viral for people dunking on it, and yet so many people want to play. But they're dunking on it as a violation of the laws of physics or not a good... Too futuristic. Too futuristic. It's not going to work in the near term. The economics are going to work. Feels right for a moonshot. I haven't seen... There are viral dunks that are going on right now around the prediction markets. And those viral dunks are like, this is a bad thing. I haven't seen people dunk on space data centers saying, I'm not morally okay with putting data centers in space.

27:55and 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.

28:36Their whole thing is their anti-data center. And so, you know, get ready. Get ready to testify, brother. Anti-data center and anti-prediction market. Yeah. I don't know that I've seen any politicians really run on the anti-prediction market thing yet. Not that it's not going to happen. I think there are a number of enterprising young politicians. Sure, that will pick it up. Politicians of all ages that are looking at this and being like, wow, a lot of people don't like this. I should make this part of my platform. Which is less popular? We should have a prediction market. Our prediction markets are data centers less popular.

29:12Yeah. I don't know. I think data centers might be less popular. I don't know. The hard, the hard, uh, one of the things is like, you can just not participate, but with the data center, if it's in your backyard, 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. You don't, you don't, you don't need this resource. I like this. Whereas prediction markets, there's some people that just get, they don't, they're not interested in the data.

29:48Even I've seen a lot of 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 making it like, 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 OpenAI mega deal still isn't signed two months after it helped fuel an AI rally. I can see why people are very... This is just an update to what was in the earnings release.

30:26So this news, the language was in the earnings release that this deal had not been signed. And it's more of an LOI phase. They did say during the launch, we have a, what was the exact wording? It was like, we have direction, it was like, we basically like, this is like, 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 OpenAI. It isn't like Dylan Patel laid out how this particular equity investment deal can wind up resulting in effectively a 30 % discount or something like that.

31:12So I'm not surprised if this winds up going through in one way or another, although I do think it will need 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 about TPU. 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.

31:54I listened to it on a plane. There was a good excerpt here from A Capital. They say, Jensen Huang, in 2016, OpenAI 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 the tech leaders to go on Rogan and kind of just 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 thanking him for bringing on this guy who's working on something that's pretty opaque in the economy.

32:46It's very abstract. I think it makes a lot of sense. and Jensen's coming and explaining it at one level and then Rogan's asking him to zoom out, tell me more of your story, why are you successful? Talks about the value of hard work. Yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought they had a good time together and it didn't seem like there was any undercurrent of adversarialness. It felt good overall, I enjoyed it. It wasn't like, you shouldn't go into it thinking you're going to get Jensen on Dwarkesh and you're just not going to get like a really deep insight into NVIDIA's strategy, but that's not the point of this particular interview.

33:25It'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 Cramer in the... A living legend at the New York Stock Exchange. He just celebrated 30 years in the business. He is the author of How to Make Money in Any Market. And we will bring him in. We got the book. Come on in. Come on in. Welcome to the show. Good to see you.

34:02It's been too long. Thank you so much. Where's the gog? Where's the gog? Hit the gog on the... I mean, really. There we go. He was so ready. He was so ready. Thank you, gentlemen. Hit it again. Hit it again. Hit it again. Get a clean hit. Get a clean hit. There we go. That's a big hit. That's fantastic. There's an entry. You guys look fabulous. I love it. You look fantastic, too. This is a great home for you. It is. We love it. We love it. Every time we're here, we're enjoying it very much. Thank you for having us. You're basically the mayor. Are you the mayor? I'm more of an official greeter.

34:39I'm sort of an ambassador. So 20 years on Mad Money, correct? Yeah. How many years in this building? How long have you been working here? We were here for about, I guess, like four. We were in Inglewood Cliffs for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we had a studio for us. It's very interesting to ask this, 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 the 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.

35:15It's more tourist now, taking a look at it. But I still find it fascinating, the companies that come public, the companies that you know that I'm trying to learn about. And it's exciting. It truly is exciting. My dad walked in 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.

35:44remotely. Talk to me about 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 on this. I did think, as I was telling your terrific people out there, that there would be more execs that just would come through and they don't. We were near Teterboro at the other place and they do. I like to be out in person on the road all the time. The issue, of course, is we do three segments, their interviews, The issue is there's no time in the day. Yeah. You're always on TV. It's hard. We wrestle with this, too.

36:21You 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. 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. You'd be looking at the markets, and you would be able to just constantly be traveling around.

36:50Yes. When you guys do stuff where you did, you said something the other day. There was a guy who said you thought he was in a booth at that incredible reinvention, right? Yeah. Reinvent. But he was really not at the booth, but the other guy would say, oh, yeah, he's around here somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a Simon from Turbo Puffer. 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 niceness here that's almost like written in and it's so non-New York. But I like it. What about when you can't be perfectly nice because things just aren't going well for a CEO?

37:28And maybe you, I always think back to that interview you did with Tim Cook. I think it was about a decade ago. They'd missed, I think they'd missed earnings and the stock was selling off and you needed to ask the hard question. what the street was saying, but you didn't want to come at him 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? She goes, no, you're killing the guy. How about I add this? She goes, oh yeah, that's great. You're killing the guy, you're asking about his wife.

38:01I mean, I do find that what happens is the facts dictate the graciousness. Sure. And if a guy misses a quarter and says that the quarter's good, Well, he's a free fire. OK, 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 thirty thousand dollars 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? You nailed him.

38:35You nailed him. 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? If you have respect for a person, it means you're going to be fair, right? They're not your enemy. You're just trying to have a real conversation and understand. Well put. And then I'm sure plenty of times you've had people coming on that you got a little beef with behind the scenes. But for the most part, it's like you want to you want to you want to have people you want to invite people on that.

39:06You're genuinely excited to have a conversation with, even if you might be a little bearish, might be might be more bullish. Well, let's talk about Benioff. I'm interviewing him tonight. The previous quarter I did not like. OK. 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, for show. It's like, oh, he's a little Broadway action.

39:40No, it was like, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying what you're selling. And then, like, in the middle of it, I thought that Mark realized, geez, I think Jim Crow's a bad 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. What opinions have you had with Benioff live on the air? Probably 500? Maybe, yeah. Probably, I guess, 50, 60. Yeah. But there was a period during the, I was going to call it the plague, that I talked to him every day. Every day. Well, we were trying to develop a contest to develop the best mask.

40:19Sure. And it got waylaid, but we just wanted awareness. Sure, sure, sure. So you're working together on a project. Yeah. But look, I've identified him as a friend, because he was one of the, I guess, two CEOs that came to my wedding, and there were 503 people there. Only two, that's a small club. And with 503 people, you figured just throw a stody at a couple of them. Yeah, yeah. This is cool, man. You gotta ask him.

40:50I'm sorry. This is exciting. You guys are exciting, okay? No, you're exciting. So you are genuinely, people in our world do ask us time to time, they're like, you guys are crazy. You started a business that you can't stop working on. Like, we are, we make the business every day. And I see it. And we tell people, like, do you think, you see Kramer, you don't think he loves what he does? And that's exactly what we want to do. We love that we get to meet up every day and talk about the stuff that we're interested in. And I could see doing it for decades and decades and decades. Absolutely. I mean, it's a little like my buddy Schefter from ESPN.

41:30Schefter 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? What's that person thinking? But most of the people are just kind of, okay, I'm on TV. And 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 a 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.

42:04And 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 the world, best in the world. But Jesse, good guy. Even Amazon, my book came. So, obviously, anything in the chip space is tough. but even harder and I think something that maybe the East Coast hasn't been quite as tapped into is determining which hard tech and deep tech companies are real. Because there's a lot of companies that are, the West Coast calls them like render companies. They make really cool visual renders. CGI. Yeah, they don't actually ship anything. Like sci-fi experiences and then nothing ever comes to fruition.

42:43And so it's easier to clock those companies from the West Coast because of just the whisper networks and you might know somebody that worked at the company. You might know their investors. If a company gets to Series D and they haven't had a single Tier 1 ever investor participate, it starts to get... You know this so well. I mean, people say, well, it was a Series C, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like thinking, Series C, okay. 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.

43:17which is 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, and the high end gives them the 20 multiple. And I've been talking to Sanjay, whom I really like, and I was like, Sanjay, you have to do this. And he's like, Jim, I don't need to do that. And so today he does it. The stock's down 12. So I texted him. I said, come on. He goes, I'm in quiet.

43:49And I wrote, I'm not in quiet. I think you're fabulous. But that's because I remember the 95 breakdown where what happened is that that ultimate piece of capital goods, equipment came out that could make a little more than we needed of the memory chips. And then it goes like that. And his stock had been number one and then 500, number one. Do you remember some of this stuff better than the CEOs and the management teams? Always. if it's the 90s absolutely if it's the 90s like for Intel when I speak with them I mean look 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 collapse in 95 but that's because it's all wrong I have a memory for some things and they're the wrong things except for when we're in here what are they doing out there do we hear that there's your sound It must be a trispet.

44:43You guys should go light the tree at six. We'd love to. We'd love to. The show will be wrapped up by then. One thing later with Benioff. You've got to ask him about token consumption because he came out with really big numbers. 3.5 trillion. 3.2 trillion. 3.2 trillion. Was it three or one? No, it was 3.2, I think. I don't remember the exact number, but it sounds like a big number. But it's not. But there were some other companies. There was AlphaSense. Somebody at AlphaSense was sharing. They were sharing that they use around half the tokens. is obviously not quite the same scale, much smaller company.

45:13You know, Jensen wouldn't give you that rap. I mean, I remember when he did a me, when I walked in, there was me, and he said, look, this was, you know, you don't know how many tokens we're using. And all it really came down to, there was this 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 Winslet said the same thing. This man is Da Vinci. He knows acting. He knows plays. He knows, you know, he's a well-rounded guy, but all he does now is like. Got good taste in jackets.

45:48But how about all the stuff he has to talk about? You guys are talking about a lot when you're at the top. How have you been processing all, you know, everybody competing to say the biggest number, right? Oh, God. I have a piece tonight that starts, and I mentioned you guys right at the top because I'm like. We thank you. It's awesome. No, because like I say, that this is what you guys do, and I don't want to do it. Because I can't. I can't do it like you. You don't want to aspire to be someone who's not as good as you. Hey, I came in today, you know, I'm like, I'm not as good as Jordy. What a day.

46:19Your 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, Like OpenAI's got a new chat GPT that's better than Gemini. If you just said, holy yes, Gemini's the best. You don't want to be in that world. And yet you guys know that that world is fluid. And I don't want to be in a world where suddenly, I'll give you an example. Broadcom is a general contractor for a lot of these chips. But what's the general contractor? Does that work? Does that mean that they really had a lot of say?

46:53I don't know. You guys would literally know what it means to be what Broadcom is in the chain. I, on the other hand, am saying, hey, Broadcom should go big because of this. One is like, hey, you know what? I think that one's no line and one is a line. Hey, you know, guess what? I think the Patriots have a better chance than Cleveland. Yeah, no kidding. That's why there's a line. You guys set the line, okay? I'm money line on everything. Well, yeah, we know 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.

47:32We, I think, are much more focused 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 my mother, I happen to think, there's a sound right at the bottom right, which was from Office Depot. Okay. That was easy. That was easy. That was easy. But that was when the show started. People just say, like, what was that? I don't remember that. I don't remember that. The store, you got paper there. The button. The button. There's the big red button. That's what I was underrated. But I think it's so cool. People are saying, like, what is that?

48:12Was that a chain or something? Yeah. It's become a relic, but it's a good one. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to keep the lore going. I mean, we are in a period of time. Listen to this sound. Listen to this sound. You know what this sound is?

48:26That's Call of Duty. Night Vision goggles going on. Okay. We grew up on Call of Duty. I still don't understand why he does that one so much. I grew up on Pong. Okay. Right? I mean, Pong was great. I thought Pong was incredible until Donkey Kong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, Donkey Kong was incredible. Well, these things were incredible because they replaced crossword puzzles in Tic Tac Toe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Twitch. Who owns Twitch? Amazon. Amazon. Of course. We've got to get Andy Jassy on Twitch. Amazon. You know what? I want him to do earnings. I want him to do post earnings on Twitch live.

48:54You know what? Mark Zuckerberg's on Instagram doing front-facing videos. Get Andy Jassy on Twitch. But Zuckerberg. Andy Jassy. Zuckerberg. He's got no salary cap. No salary cap. It's unbelievable. Oh, my God. Right? Everyone else had this kind of sort of bunch of salary cap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't exist. You thought Howie Roseman was good. No, he sucks compared to Zuckerberg because he's got the salary cap. You know, something interesting on the Amazon front, the Tranium, when they were talking about their new chip, they specifically mentioned doing a training run for a company called Descartes.

49:30Dean, the founder, has been on our show. Which I only know because of you guys. They do real-time video, and they're working with a lot of Twitch streamers. So that training run felt meaningful, and I don't think a lot of people picked up on that. There could be something moving there. That's a good example of what I would describe as why I never lose sight that I'm a generalist. Because I wouldn't know that in the same way that I wouldn't necessarily know if we were doing steel companies. Whether it's something's cold rolled or hot rolled. Cold rollers have got a high multiple, and hot rollers are low.

50:00You know, the steel is 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 Andy Jassio called me, 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 repeatedly? Okay, I'm going to give you a crazy one. I'm going to give you a crazy one because it's going to be, I have to make it so it's enjoyable.

50:36I haven't gotten it yet. It's Lepchin. Max Lepchin. There we go. I intend to get him where I need him. You've got to talk him about espresso. Espresso. He wants to talk about coffee. He's obsessed with coffee. Yeah. We spent like 10 minutes talking about it. We'll send you the clip. You're kidding me. Yeah, yeah. This is the alpha. I didn't do that. Shoot. Shoot. And he also likes long distance biking and riding. Oh my God. He's a very healthy guy. But he's not carp. He doesn't want to kill anyone. I mean, here's the tough thing. You've got a three-minute segment. It's hard to spend three minutes talking about coffee.

51:06Then 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 in a country where you still have to care about democracy. He's, you know, like everyone said, well, I'm democratizing. I'm democratizing blue jeans. I'm democratizing t-shirts. No, he's democratizing capital. And why not? His algo is better. I just think he's that's the guy I intend to be able to get him out of it's not a shell, I don't know what it is I think my sense was like the conversation for us, we had 30 minutes you don't have the luxury of having that much time with some of these guests but some people take a while to warm up and that's why traditional podcasts are so great.

51:51You can do a bunch of pre-calls, get to know someone then hop on and even if it's a shorter segment you can do it. Well good, that's a 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 when the stock, I told him, come on the show when you think it's going to break out, will you? Who's going down? He said, 33, he 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. No one. They never come back. They're like, oh, well, Jim, that's you.

52:19That's out there. We don't know. No, he said, well, the stock's now done going down. And it's like, at the end of the interview, I said, that was a gutsy call. And he goes, what? I said, that is done going down. He goes, why is that gutsy? There's my guy. That's extremely gutsy. I love it. That's good. I love it. How do you think about market structure, oligopolies, monopolies? Because the real interesting side of Max Levchin and Affirm is looking at Sebastian and Klarna, because now there's two companies in the same space. You can comp them. It's a little bit of a horse race. That feels like good content, feels like good opportunity for investors.

52:52How do you think about a market like that? All right. So I'm out of the closet on this one. I'm just going to say it here. I always tell people, look, what I'm looking for are companies that in many ways are the worst thing that could ever happen for our country. I'm looking for monopolies. Because monopolies, monopolies just, they've got the gross margin. I just want big gross margins. Nothing like, did you guys ever read Rockefeller by Chernow? Yeah. Yeah, the guy had 100%. Yeah, yeah. And nobody had 100 % of the oil market. You know, that's my guy. And when they broke it up, they created just a huge amount of wealth.

53:21But no, I look for monopolists. Yeah. And I'm happy with oligopolists. Like right now, Lindy, which is an energy company, industrial gas and air products, they're a slap-happy duopoly right now. They should be raising prices. They're like not being good duopolis. But that's kind of what I like. 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. Bastion's the man. Bastion was the first guy to come on and give me a hat.

53:55No way. I said, what am I going to do with that? He goes, this is called swag. What am I going to do with swag? Well, you put it on your head. Shocker. Shocker. Wait, how have you been processing Google then? Because Google, everyone... Oh, my God. Okay, I 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 Caan was in, in the show Misery. Sure. You know, we're going to hobble him. And he said, listen, we're going to hobble him. I mean, like, you know, make it so he can't walk.

54:26Yeah, that's it. And I took him seriously. And I spoke to Google's attorney, who was, of course, much smarter than 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 monopolist.

54:57Like, man, I've got to get out of this thing. This is bad news. And then the judge, like, three months later says technology's overtaken 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 dead. I was flat and I was roadkill. It didn't matter. Whatever I did was right. And since then, all I do is look at it and say, I'm stupid. I'm stupid. I'm stupid. I'm stupid. I'm stupid. I'm stupid.

55:22I'm stupid. I mean, in Chachipiti, he has 800 million weekly actives. He's going to have a billion. I want to see because they don't have the balance sheet. You guys ever read Niall Ferguson, Pity of War? Yeah. Well, that is about whoever has the deepest bond market wins. Yeah, yeah. Sent you money. I mean, the bond market is better for the other guys. So, yeah, this is a question for you because I felt very comfortable covering the AI horse race, the foundation model race from a technology perspective, from a venture capital perspective. But once the discussion moved to, is there enough private credit?

55:53Is Blue Owl going to underwrite at these right levels? You know, we're having John from Apollo on the show. I hope he 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 bring people on to understand? Well, I mean, you have to bring the balance sheet up all the time. And it's funny because I have a general show, and I'm always afraid to bring the balance sheet up. for people to say, you know, geez, I want to see what's on the price is right. I mean, there's like dial anywhere but that. Oh, friends, there's friends. Look for old Seinfelds versus me talking about the balance sheet.

56:28Sure, sure, sure. We have to do that. But for some people out there, that's their Super Bowl, right? They love it. Look, I get a kick out of the idea that Oracle gets involved and that Larry Ellison, who is one of the toughest guys on earth, who's never made a mistake, and Saffir Katz, who's never made a mistake, are getting involved. And then Saffir leaves, and the FT says she leaves because she doesn't want what's happening to her precious balance sheet of Oracle, which is not that good to begin with. So that's a good story for me. Is it Larry? Do you know him? No, he's never been on the show.

57:04He follows TBPN. He does? He does. He followed very early. But what was your relationship like with Larry? Did he come on? Larry, no, no, never. He doesn't do a lot of that. And, like, I've tried repeatedly, but I won't get on my knees. He doesn't do a lot of media. I think he might talk about, like, the University of Michigan. Okay. Do you think that Mark Cuban, he's been on your show. Yeah. Do you think he's the reason why Indiana's such a good football team? Oh. We have no idea. I honestly don't know enough about sports. People have used the ESPN of tech on us, but it was funny because I've maybe, I've genuinely watched, yeah, maybe I've watched, like, an hour of sports in the last year.

57:44What do you read into the co-CEOs when you see something like that? Co-CEO? Yeah, I mean, having Oracle. Where's my... Yeah, here we go. No, I mean, co-CEOs. Do you think it's interim, basically? Yeah, it's just really hard. Does it have an Ensecoia Capital now? And that's obviously a big focus of our world. Well, Venioff was co-CEO with Keith Block. That was just a suboptimal situation. We got the co-CEOs now at Oracle. Let's see what happens. Netflix has done it. I think it's hard unless you can have really defined duties like they had at workday. But otherwise, no. It's not something I really want to see.

58:23How 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 says, and all it does is say, we will find uranium. And you use a really funny symbol like, you know, five uses instead of four.

58:54I mean, look, you know, you price it at 15, it opens at 24, and then you wait six months and you sell every share. And that's what I'm afraid of. Yeah. That's what I'm afraid is going to happen. Are the biotech companies taking advantage of the AI narrative or is there a particularly different narrative? No, I think there's just been a lot of, well, I shouldn't say it. Because it's starting to bubble up in tech, in Silicon Valley, folks saying, hey, in the future, drug discovery is going to be accelerated. The timeline is going to be way shorter. The economics are going to be completely different.

59:20But 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, Nvidia, say, that person doesn't, they're not, you know, Bristol-Myers isn't, get me here. Give me help. But 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 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 test. They're getting a blood test for prostate cancer.

59:55So a guy down here saying that today is going to become public, I hope. But they should be using it, and we should be making far more progress than we're doing in health care. When Jensen came on with Synopsis, it's pretty clear they're doing the digital twin. By the way, 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 Lily and Dave Bricks 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?

1:00:31No, not yet. But he hit a trillion dollars at all the time. We rang the gong for him. You've been out of time. For Ricks? Because he hit a trillion dollar valuation. Yeah, wasn't that great? That's fantastic. Walmart's at$900. Oh, they're close. That guy at Walmart, that guy Doug McMillan, the guy's retiring. I mean, he cratered the stock when he came in. He gave huge bonuses. You want to crater it when you leave. You want to crater it when you leave. Have you been to Walmart lately? There's an interesting bull case for Walmart is that they are leaning in with ChatGPT while Amazon's leaning out.

1:00:59And so if the agentic commerce thing happens and people are just opening up their phone and saying, hey, order, it will probably be routed through Walmart in the short term. Is that really? Yeah. So Etsy and Walmart have leaned in. Eventually Amazon will have to respond and do a partnership somewhere. 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. What do you think? And so it's the laggards in the markets that are trying to catch up by saying, hey, maybe we missed the real power law. I thought it was interesting that Costco is deep into Agent Force.

1:01:33Do you think Mark's going to rename the company Agent Force? That's my first question to him. Look at all the different silos. Go to page 18 on the deck. And there it is, 17, 18. It's like everything's Asian. All the different silos. The big question 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 it. You think so? That was a dumb rename. 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.

1:02:05It 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 the metaverse. It's a universe with multiple touch points. It's like they even adapted the app, so it is messaging-focused. It's not even, like, it's hard to post content on Instagram now. It's a metaphorical universe. Maybe with Vera Rubin, they can do high-speed video, short 10-second clip for an ad on 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?

1:02:35No. It's like a fraction, and it's very targeted, and it's really good. Reddit ads. Reddit ads. Reddit ads are the cheapest bargain for any consumer package because you're right targeted. Like, my wife has this Mezcal business. Boom, there's like a Mezcal lovey. No way. It's like, Mezcal love. You know, everything's like, love it. Melanomy, my daughter's on, unfortunately, she beat it. But that's like, that's targeted, targeted, targeted. I really like that because the rates, I told Huffman he's charging too little. Isn't he making a bunch of money from selling data? Which one? Isn't he making a lot of money from selling data?

1:03:07Yes, he is. And then Cloudflare's doing their best to be able to block. You think Cloudflare, you did the implications of their... Yeah. See, now there, did Matthew not, don't call me Matt, did he call you? Matthew came up once, right? Was he good? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's great. He's real smart. Yeah. Hey, we should talk about who's a really good guest and who's bad. And we won't mention the name of the bad. We'll just say the good, you know? Oh, yeah, that guy. He's an amazing consumer package. The team that you've got to have on, you've 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.

1:03:42Yeah. It was too long. I was like, oh, my God, look at that. Look what's on. It's the jet game. I've got to go watch it. Dylan 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. Wow. We got John. That's fantastic. Look at that. Look at that. 26 ramp. Yeah. Isn't that doing a C-rally? 26 ramp?

1:04:16They're waiting for a C-rally. 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 along I am, should I say I just hit myself in what round? Series E. Series E, probably. I'm interested in a Series E round. But companies are going Series G, Series F. People go really deep. How about down rounds? Because people don't. Down rounds is bad. 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 it. What do you think about if Stripe stays private forever? Johnny Callison?

1:04:48No, people don't realize that. He was the great right fielder. Johnny Callison. He was the great right fielder for the Philadelphia Phillies. Yeah, so he's a home run in the 64 World. 64 All-Star game to win. What do you think of a great American company stays private forever? Is that going to bring tears to you? I think they should. I mean, we've got Asplund, the orange trucks that cut down all the trees. They've been private forever, and they're really, really rich. Mars is private. Yeah. There's a variety of private companies. I don't know. I think if you're public, you have to—there's some slings and arrows.

1:05:15I've got to answer to you. No.

1:05:20You're more likely to get talked about on that money if the stock's moving. Well, it's even when you have like a Wells Fargo and the guy comes on and he's got this, like all these flowery quotes. They had quotes at the beginning about Lombardi. Lombardi was always saying, listen, if there's a mistake, there's me. And then the first thing he says is like, you know, actually, there were these employees that did it bad. And don't pay attention. I was like, no, you're in your hand, or you say that you're in your show. Let me see that. How do you get people off your talking point, off their talking point?

1:05:52I would say the only thing, the guests that we don't like. The worst guests are the ones that are trying to get in rescripted lines, and that's the only time that we don't like doing the show. I had one the other day. It was doing it, and I made a joke, and I stopped, and it was just like, that was a joke. Now, and the person didn't laugh and went right on the talking points. I interviewed Jensen, and he says, he's doing a talking point, he's saying something. And I make a joke, and he doesn't say anything. I said, by the way, that was a joke. He goes, I was laughing on the inside. Boom! See, that guy can do it all.

1:06:30He can do it all. He's just, what do you do with a guy who's lovable? And you're trying to be tough. You're trying to be tough. You really want to nail him. You know, it's like, and then he's just charming. Charming is the end of, you know, look, talking points and charm, are those are the, like, the soul and charybdis that we have to really avoid, right? Funny story with Jensen. We were in D.C., and we were sitting there talking with Shane Copeland from Polymarket, 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 are you doing?

1:07:06He's like, I'm the CEO of Polymarket. and Jensen, 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 at 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 four? Yeah, I'm sure he knows that. He's up at four too. No, 3.45. Oh, but who's counting? He gets up at four. But who's counting? He stands up at four. He's getting up 15 minutes after you. How long is he supposed to get up after him? You wake up 15 minutes before him sending an email.

1:07:33What have you gotten done so far? Wait, Jensen, do you genetically just need less sleep? Yeah, what's going on? How is this possible? Because there's a handful, it's like some 5 % of the population can just thrive on like four hours of sleep. Okay, well here's, okay, so, because we're not on air, I'll tell you what the things I take. So I take Klonopin, 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 keep, these are all like illegal substances to some degree. Now they're actually controlled substances. but I that's what I do to be able to stay asleep till quarter of four so it's more about trying to stay asleep that's what it is stay asleep as long as you can oh look what time it is oh I went to bed seven minutes ago I gotta get this picture of me and my wife do you have your Apple watch set up with like different alerts it has 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 that's great whoa oh that's my wife yeah incredible she doesn't watch anything that I do tell us about the book tell us about the book What was the process like?

1:08:37The book was about trying to get it so that people could, let's say, listen to you 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 has never been easier to find. All these people who believe only in index funds are just dogmatists. 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 doesn't mean anything.

1:09:14And 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 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. People say, Jim, you say that people should own individual stocks. But over and over again, it's been proven that that's stupid.

1:09:51And I said, like, 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 NVIDIA. Did you? Yeah, well, that worked. That actually was pretty, a lot of people got it. It was$1.90 when it was, and I told, I said, I told Jensen. He says, no one knows me. What's going on? So, you know what? I'm like doing this stuff, and it's like, I got you back. Now he's at the top. Yeah, I got you back. I got you back. And I said, listen, I just came back from California, and I got to tell you, I had this dog named Everest.

1:10:32Uh-uh, no more. The dog is NVIDIA. And that's why, like, I keep saying, 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 NVIDIA. I said, well, do 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, I wish. We would love you in the earth. They're queuing up. I think it's your people. They're queuing up.

1:11:02Look at these guys. It's not our people. These people all want one. I think it's your people. No. Oh, no. You're welcome. What is it? Is it all these sweaters there too? I guess so. That's St. Juan Barclay, Ram Investor. Yeah, you know, why can't you get more than 2.2 yards? 2.2 yards you're averaging. That's what he's averaging. 2.2 yards. Let's make this a normal thing. Let's make this a regular thing. This was fantastic. I would love to. You know, honestly, you guys are what I hope would occur, okay? I kind of always hoped that this would occur, but I didn't know who would do it. This would occur, meaning a sophisticated show that didn't take yourselves too seriously or I could learn.

1:11:39And it hadn't occurred until you. Thank you. And it's 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'm going to be a little immodest. I'd like to think that maybe in some way you happened because, like, sometimes you just saw me. Yeah, of course. Because I think that you are, you're not 2.0. You're sui generis. Of course. But I just feel like that it occurred and that people, you're another reason why the book's right.

1:12:11You're on our Mount Rushmore media. There's four of them. But you're the biggest. Why, thank you. Thank you so much. Good luck to you guys. Thank you so much. Keep doing what you're doing. You're just electric. There we go. There you go. Right? All right, go get it. Thank you so much. We're tenders coming in. Alert, alert, tenders coming in. Let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle, from roadmap to release. Let me also tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

1:12:52Our next guest is Eric Gleiman From Ramp From the Ramp Business Corporation What an electric moment What a fun time A goat Yeah, he's a goat He's a fantastic performer He's been in front of a camera before He's an entertainer If there's ever been evidence Putting in the 10 ,000 hours Gets you good results 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 Squawk Box has been on for 30 years. Yeah. And Mad Money for 20, which is remarkable.

1:13:41Well, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. That's right. Darren Rovell 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 Rovell 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 and there is illegal.

1:14:38I was looking this up because we were talking to Tariq and Kalshi about this and I just wanted to know more And apparently, let's say that you just are trading corn futures, and you just happen to know that there's going to be 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, you can actually get in trouble for doing insider trading, even in commodities. And you would think, what private information is there? And the issue is prediction markets become more accurate when insiders are trading on it. And so it's like this weird conflict.

1:15:11And so Brian Armstrong was kind of laying out the bull case for insider trading. He gave an interesting example of an admiral at sea. I mean, yes, it was sort of a bad example. But I liked that he's being philosophical about it. I mean, I feel like all of the crypto OGs are very philosophical in their analysis. And I think that that can be sort of clipped out of context to be like, he's promoting it. It's something we need to figure out. It is. It's something we need to figure out. It's happening. And he's also been in that, like, I think what people forget about Brian is that, like, he was in the legal gray area for like a decade, right?

1:15:43Yeah. Where 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 Bitcoin should be a commodity or a stock or something like that? And you have to be like, well, theoretically, here's this. Without further ado. Without further ado, we have Eric Lyman from the Ramp Business Corporation. Look at this. Good to see you. Great to see you too. I can't believe you made a sweater just for a Ramp investor. Yeah, it's fantastic. What is this? It's doing a tree lighting outside. Yeah, the holidays are here. What is this?

1:16:13Should we open this on air? The Sanquan Barkley X ramp collab sweater. Is that right? It's been a strong season, and I have a feeling it's going to get a lot stronger. I love it. And you've got the yellow socks on, too. You look fantastic. Fantastic to see you. How many of these exist in the world? Not enough. Yeah. I think probably a dozen or two. Limited merch. Wow, look at this, too. Yellow matches. Light waste on fire. I don't know if we can actually light this candle. We probably shouldn't start a fire in the night seat, but we will enjoy them. 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.

1:16:52There are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do because there's serious business happening. Well, you guys have a deep partnership. We do now. Can we ask Lynn if we can be the first show to enjoy a scented candle? A scented candle? Yes, yes, yes. But 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? By the book here. I'm doing great. Yes. I'm doing great. And congratulations. We're in New York City. Remind me how Ramp wound up in New York City. You're not from New York City. Well, this is the capital of capitals.

1:17:26So you had to be here. You know, this is... Exactly. I love that eagle sound. But, you know, Steel Man this for me. One of your investors might say that this is mimetic desire to wind up in the capital of capital. Why not be the contrarian and build a fintech company somewhere else? Look, I remember our last company, we had gone out west. It was YC Demo Day. Oh, you did? You went through YC? We went through there. And I remember towards the end of Y Combinator, we told the partners that we were going to be moving back to New York. And several of them looked at us like we had a hole in our head.

1:17:58But we did it. Were you three roommates during YC? Yeah. Of course. Of course. Of course. And those were tough times. I remember we lived on Sand Hill Circle. Sand Hill Circle? At the time, we don't cook all that well. We knew about Seamless, and the sad part was there were only two restaurants on Seamless. And so, like, what are we going to do today? What are we going to do? It was terrible. We lost a lot of weight that summer. Times were tough. And then at the very end, we discovered DoorDash, and we realized there were, in fact, ways. But I had kind of liked the West Coast, and Kareem said, you can stay out here, but I'm going.

1:18:33I'm gone. Okay, we're gone. Anyway, you understand the relationship. New York is, I feel like, celebrates the entrepreneur, the person that's just trying to make something in the world. And it's slightly, San Francisco celebrates the earnest hacker. We talked about this with Paul Graham yesterday, and that's kind of the YC ethos. and it's like probably one of the most important archetypes in the world, right? There's so much of the things and the products in our lives, 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.

1:19:15So I think that 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. It's two people in a garage. it had become very, very corporatized. Commercialized, yeah. 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.

1:20:03And 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. 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.

1:20:36So 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. 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-backed startup, Seed, Series A, there was like three. And so we were able to find extraordinary people. 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.

1:21:17MongoDB, Datadog, all the direct-to-consumer companies. And you had classically people who were in touch with culture, designers, marketers, people in finance. It was all kind of here. And so what happened was as I think the West Coast was becoming a very hard place to build a genuine company. Constant talent war. 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... People also wanted to live in New York. New York City. It's the greatest city in the world. It's still a meme among AI researchers, like, should I move to New York?

1:21:52Should I get out of the hustle and bustle almost of San Francisco? Probably not AI researchers, but engineers broadly. It feels like going to Hawaii. People are like, I'm ready for something different. Maybe I can go over there. That's fascinating. I think that this was part of the secret of RAMP. We set out to go and to be that definitive company where 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 interested in their products and we turn that into reality i think that there's lots of other great companies in new york um here uh and coming up and accelerating but uh it's great it's great we're here something i'm realizing recently of like tbpn we probably added like one person a month in the year or so that we've been in business.

1:22:42And I was thinking like what a incredible luxury that is because when you're hiring at a relatively slow pace, you have so much time to like really get to know people. There's not like this pressure. How like, I'd be curious because I don't think you've ever shared it on the show, your philosophy on hiring when you're trying to deliver ramp speed, but also find and 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. I think the average age is in the 20s.

1:23:19And 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.

1:23:54And 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 they're managing teams and they're loyal 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.

1:24:39I want to find someone who's been this VP, whatever. And nothing wrong with that. I think that can be great. But it really underestimates the importance of finding people that 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 commoditized like every other company, but still showing some of the value?

1:25:28AI is this weird thing where it's becoming overhyped and then maybe potentially even controversial in some. Is it using all the water? People are grappling with that. And so I wanted to know how you landed on that campaign, like how you're actually like how you're thinking about walking a perspective customer through the AI piece of the value prop from a catchphrase or a tagline down to like, OK, you're actually sitting down with a CFO. Like what promises are you making them? Because you're probably not saying like, yeah, you're never going to touch anything ever again. Right. And you have to be somewhat realistic about that.

1:26:10So how are you working? Get ready to enjoy PTO, buddy. Look, I love this question. And I think you need to start at the root of where this comes from. Sure. When the company first launched, we had this idea of time is money, you should save both. I love it. I say it every day on the show. Every day. As soon as I, you know, if you're out. It's becoming my mantra. I say it every day. Every day. So you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror. Time is money, save both. Use Corbicard's Bill Faye, Colby County, and a whole lot more all over the place. And by the way, for any CFOs out there or financial professionals who haven't yet adopted Ramp, give your CFO or the controller the wonderful gift of Ramp.

1:26:48Help them save 5%. Yes, yes. You still push so hard on sales. All the time, you're like, oh, this company is interested in Ramp. You're like, introduce them to me. And you'll jump on the phone in the next 24 hours. Well, there's nothing better than actually feeling it yourself. going through the sale, helping someone 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 a sea of ecosystem of credit card companies trying to get you to spend more, we want you to spend less.

1:27:26And we think this is timeless. Or the opposite would be like a new video model. And it also shows because you're a pre-AI company. That's state-of-the-art for four weeks. And 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. Sometimes people ask what's going to change over the next 10 years. It's more interesting to ask what will not. Right. And in 10 years from now or 100 years from now, it is very clear that people will always want to get more for less, for fewer dollars, for fewer hours.

1:28:04There's no way that's ever going to change. And if you think about kind of the central promise of Ramp is going to help you spend less, you know, you think about you could sell thinking or you could sell thinking money. We can help you spend. That might change. But if you have intelligence introduced to some end goal, which is the intelligence is going to help you prevent spend that is out of policy that you don't want to occur once it's spent to actually tag an account for it. And then afterwards, help you make sure that the next month, you know, more dollars go to productive uses as being really good and really timeless.

1:28:38And 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 might just chill in this treasury account. It's this timeless idea there, guys. We need you to ring the gong because there is a milestone, which is that when we started the show, I was laughing about the, you know, we want to go to war on the paper receipt on big paper. And I actually found a company that, I was like, are paper receipt companies a thing?

1:29:11Are 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 and stopping by. Great to see you. Thank you. Have a great rest 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 Q4 of last year, I don't think we'd be sitting here today with the TVPN logo all over the nicey.

1:29:48So thank you to the whole team. We feel like the lucky ones. Thank you and congratulations again. Thank you. Thank you. Love you, dude. We will talk to you soon. And we will also talk to you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles on object storage. New Red Bull alert. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. We'll also tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Securely spin up white-label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Cheers. We got our Red Bulls. We're going.

1:30:19Cheers. What a fun show. Oh. Next up, we have John Zito. co-president of Apollo, a fledgling asset manager with$900 ,000. $900 ,000. $900 million. $900 million. $900 million. $900 million? Or is it$900 billion? I think it's$900 billion. It is$900 billion. $900 billion. He's going to answer some hard questions. What is private equity? What is private credit? What is asset management? What are alternative assets? I like the traditional assets. It's the alternative ones that scare me. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Hey, hey. Yeah, we're ready. He's getting mic'd up. He's getting mic'd up.

1:31:04In 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 mic'd up. He's coming in. I should also mention that today I am wearing a watch that I purchased on get bezel.com You can shop over twenty six thousand luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts On a special day. You need a special watch There's no better place to get the bezel.

1:31:42We have John Zeta John good to Are you giving Eric a little pep talk there? What are you saying? You know a couple of things there. You guys are friends, right? Yeah, yeah last time I saw him he was taking all his money. It's a small poker game. He was taking everyone's money. Oh, he was? I can see that. He's such a nice guy. Don't fall for the ramp pitch. He's counting everyone's money. He's like, I'm going to save you time and your money. I'm going to actually take your money. I will be saving it for later. Their team is amazing. What they're building is pretty incredible. Tell me about your team.

1:32:16Tell 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, they don't need any of my advice. They'll come and talk to me about building a culture. Yeah, but what they're doing there, they have a bunch of people around them that are just building an incredible business. For us, it's pretty simple. Find people with purpose, find people with high character, find people that are generally good people first, and then all the investment characteristics. How do you like to evaluate people for purpose?

1:32:46I mean, for us... How long do you want to spend with someone before you actually do start doing 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. Yeah. You know, I've been in credit for 23 years. Yeah, so quickly, can we zoom out and can you paint a picture for me of, like, the actual Apollo structure, the empire? Like, what's going on there? Maybe share some of the same numbers you shared with our mutual friend Patrick. Yeah. That's like the best because the velocity that you guys are moving at is pretty unbelievable.

1:33:19Yeah, Patrick's a great guy. Yeah, Senra's a good guy. I know you guys are close to Senra, too. Senra's the best. Yeah, so Apollo, one of the largest alternative credit managers in the world, largest alternative asset managers in the world. What's unique about us is half of our over$900 billion is our own capital through retirement service. That's through a theme. Through a theme. Yes. So we're a market leader in writing guaranteed income. So we'll write a guaranteed, you know, you want a 5 % guaranteed income. Somebody wants to retire someday. Yeah, and you want guaranteed income for the next 10 years at 5%, we'll guarantee you that money, and then we'll invest it, and we keep some marginal spread between guaranteeing you the income.

1:33:58And 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 hair for you. But I, the guys out there told me I'm the first alternative asset manager leader on your, on your show. I don't know if that's true, but let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, we've had plenty of people that have, that have, I'm sure raised, 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.

1:34:43in 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 it 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 banker. 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. Yep. So insurance. We got to experience that with SVB. Yeah. Little duration mismatch. Yeah.

1:35:17So 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.

1:35:56They'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 activity in markets. And so they're just like, okay, so now everybody's accessing these 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.

1:36:28Yeah, 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, yeah, talk as much as you can share on that. I mean, look, there's lots of, everyone has a weird definition of private credit. 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. Sure. That's what they think private credit is. We're doing$11 billion loans for Intel. And that's private credit.

1:36:59So we define it as everything from a mortgage to a commercial real estate loan against a building to an aviation loan against a new aircraft. Super safe, secured, top of the capital structure, traditionally investment grade. 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. So we're one investment business. So, you know, David Sambra, who runs private equity, the guys who lead our hybrid team, our credit team, all the people are all in the same investment meeting talking about, okay, what's the best solution for the company?

1:37:40It's not really about let's solve for this small thing for a fund. Once you start doing that, it's very hard to work with companies. 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.

1:38:19And 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?

1:38:56We have mortgages, commercial real estate loans. Sure, sure, sure. How do you think about the real estate market, mortgages, even buying houses? 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. 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 is getting better because of this. It's like kind of a hot take. But yeah, I mean, look, that part, that part has been in obviously affordability is a big thing.

1:39:31Sure. So, but we're more on the lending side. So we just can provide mortgages. Sure. Sure. Sure. And so we have a big mortgage business and it's relatively low cost. And I mean, as you get lowered into smaller deals, do you need to bring in more automation? Are you seeing returns to scale on 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... I'm analyzing large pools of mortgages. Or mortgages. Sure, sure, sure. Or in the security. Historically, that's going to be much more of a data AI driven over time.

1:40:09Sure. And our models will get better and better. And hopefully consumer credit. And there'll be more data plug in. All things associated with big pools and a history, you're going to probably get more optimal pricing. Sure, sure. And you can see companies like Morpha. I don't know if you've seen the token. There are DeFi protocols that actually have market-based pricing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's going to keep getting better and better and better. Yeah. 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.

1:40:44But then we have 16 companies which invest on our behalf that do specialty stuff. So our middle market lender, Midcap, will do that. It 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 as 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.

1:41:19We're winding it down and so we're just kind of cash flowing it out and eventually that thing will just put on life support and sort of like built to scale or built to die and that's the thing. Do you want to play in every market? Do you want to take advantage of every situation and be able to see what the trajectory of a business is and then just accelerate it along that? Or do you find a particular niche works well for you? Our private equity business has 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 we paid.

1:41:54And our team's done an amazing job. Why didn't you buy any companies in 22? We have a 35-year history of buying at relatively low multiples, so just nothing was available under that framework to buy. Yeah, that's great. And so people think of us as being more value-oriented, defensive equity, and then everything around secured lending. And on the private equity side, you have deal team members, operating partners that go inside the companies. Is there separation there, or is it all one kind of pool of human capital? We have our own private equity team with our own dedicated operations team. Operations team that goes in.

1:42:30Yeah, exactly. Just a traditional business. What's your outlook on energy and providing capital for various energy products, everything from natural gas to traditional 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. I 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, multibillion-dollar transactions. If you told me five years ago we'd be doing multibillion-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.

1:43:21our business. The business of private markets is across every risk spectrum. And it's really, for some reason, that's not, again, not really transmitted into the market. It's just private credit's growing. It must be risky. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. And so I think 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 place to be. So I think you're going to continue to see private markets being the primary force around financing all that stuff.

1:44:01Yeah. 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 a different opinion. You can look at, part of it is like, There's some element of it that's unpredictable. You can also look at the present, right, which is like people that have five, six years. I think it's a 50-year depreciation, right? No, it's mortgages.

1:44:29But 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 tranche.

1:45:03And then the equity holders are making the assumption on what GPUs are worth later and longer. That's hard for us as credit providers. It's going to be hard. I think anyone who says they know what the value of GPUs or the release rates are in year 5, 7, or 10, I mean, it's hard to take that with any sort of credible view. It's undoubtedly probably going to be the most violent 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 an 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.

1:45:47I 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, Sironic. Yep, and they're all. Okay, they're going to need manufacturing facilities, the nuclear companies, the power companies, the AI companies. It's all asset heavy. As opposed to, you go back to Google.

1:46:21In the last 20, 30 years, it's all asset light. Google was the most beautiful IPO. It's all asset light. It's all cash flow. And the mental model is always asset light and the debt is bad. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm friends with lots of the guys on your show because this is changing. Sure, totally. And it's going to be all about who they can partner with and trust. Yeah, tech wasn't like didn't have low leverage because they just didn't like leverage. It was because they didn't need it. They didn't need it. This cycle, you need it. Yeah. And it can be financed off balance sheet, and it can be better optimized than actually raising equity.

1:46:50And there's logical place for it. It's just, and so I think you're going to get there. And also, the scale is not necessarily just directly tied to the problem. I always go back to like, you know, the mortgage. There are plenty of people that are making six figures and have a seven-figure mortgage. And it's like, so if you talk about a company and you're like, yeah, the company is making a billion dollars and they have$10 billion of debt or something, it's like, that could math out fine if everything's flowing through and they're growing and whatnot. But yeah, it's a new character. There's definitely a big pivot.

1:47:18Last week and a half, 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 going to push Anthropic and OpenAI 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, security, other markets than just traditionally these kind of off-balance sheet leases. I mean, what's your overall view on this all over the world?

1:47:57It feels like it's going to happen. Yeah, I think it makes sense. How are you feeling about the IPO market in the present? Kramer was on talking about frustrations with different biotech companies going out and some of them being potentially lower quality. Where are we in your view? You brought me to the New York Stock Exchange to talk about private markets, which is the funniest thing ever. We spend, I would say, 70 % of our time talking about privates. Oh, do you? Okay, good. And we're here, so that's good. before I just said that. Well, the funny thing, Kramer kept speaking in share price, and we're like, we only think in market caps.

1:48:35Yeah, market caps. We only think in market caps. 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's 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 it will benefit, but it's going to benefit the consumer. At 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 also strategic?

1:49:08I don't think anyone thought, you see what's happening. There's some very large M &A transactions. You saw Echo Star this year sold a bunch of assets in exchange for SpaceX stock. People were like, wait, this company owns half of, or not half, but like half, like they've got like 10 billion. Yeah, yeah. You look at the debt. No, but even that, it's pretty attractive. I mean, it's a pretty way to actually get access to SpaceX. It was a pure play tracker. I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that. I don't know. It's a pretty interesting way to get access to it. They're making an open AI movie.

1:49:44They're making a new social network Facebook movie. Do you think they'll ever make a Caesar's Palace heist movie? Oh, jeez. 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. And so I'm wondering internally, does the firm, how does the firm remember the book? Listen, we, that was so long ago in terms of the context of the business.

1:50:20we've become a complete kind of credit passive and the kind of activity we do day to day by and large 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 wake up every day trying to make sure that we maintain that.

1:50:58Who on your team evaluates various AI tools that 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 Lab42. But Rob Bittencourt really leads the thematic investing. You should have him on. I mean, he spends all his time assessing all the hyperscale, the entire ecosystem, both that and equity. Yeah, let's go. It's a tree lighting. A tree lighting. Good tree. Good tree. Good work. This is why we brought you on together. Okay, there we go. You're not thinking to it. Curse of spirit. That's going to be fun. We're going to be a while. It's 4 p.m.

1:51:36We're going to stop the train. We can't hear anything.

1:51:44They said they've never done an IPO on tree lighting day

1:51:52It's Hank it's who is it Azaria they got Santa here to take Azaria isn't it no way

1:52:00Last time I saw him using like it. He's in a cover band. You know, it's funny. He plays in a cover No way. He's a cover man. He's a cover man. It's actually pretty good. Really? That's amazing. There are a ton of people here. This is as big as an IPO in terms of folks 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. Thanks for having me. We really appreciate it. Good luck with everybody else. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Before we bring in our last guest of the show, let me tell you about Wanderer.com.

1:52:30Book of Wanderer with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, DreamVads, top two. cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. And you know you heard Jim Kramer talk about sleep. We need to get him an 8th sleep at 8thSleep.com. Actually, that would be a good Christmas present. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. We should actually get him an 8th sleep for Christmas. And you know, you're looking behind us. 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?

1:53:12I love it, John. Out of home advertising, easy and measurable, plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. People are joking around on the timeline. Meta, of course, is planning to cut 30 % of their, I guess, a budget of their metaverse efforts. So this is Reality Labs. This is Reality Labs. Which has worked on VR and AR, But also metaverse development. And I mean, it's a lot of the stuff that was on display during MetaConnect. Some really promising stuff, some really cool stuff. People like it. But also a lot of spend. And so they, you know, leaked today. I don't know. They announced it.

1:53:49And Consensus Media, which definitely joking around. Could not be. They say meta will announce plans for name change. New stock ticker within the coming weeks. Zuck viewed as leading candidate for new ticker. seems like fake news but it's certainly fun 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 Kalish last post and then we'll bring in our next guest says link tree is a billion dollar company It's crazy a billion dollars for literally links in a tree

1:54:42Yeah, Michael Michael says you need to be study. You need to study business models You have to be investigation maxing value decoding. You should never think the consumer facing product is a thing There's a thing behind the thing that generates revenue It was true as opposed to unlock cash flow at a certain scale that justifies valuation. There's a vision here so anyways without further ado, let's bring in our next guest. Hi. Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Good to see you. Thank you so much for having me. How's it going, guys? Coming down and hanging out. Congratulations. Thank you. Day number one hasn't been going so far.

1:55:15It's a very special place. Fantastic. We love this place. It's fun as a media person to be here because it's become just the center for media. Yeah. Yeah. Did you just see Hank Azaria outside? It was him, wasn't it? 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 Build-A-Bara, apparently. I like it. It's custom. Hank Azaria. I don't know much about movies. I was like, I have no clue. He doesn't know who he is. Do you watch TV? No, he watches no movies, no TV, really.

1:55:47Very, very rarely. He's seen one movie, Borat, and that's it. Pretty much. Pretty much. And I saw that new movie, Mountain Gate, because I felt like I needed to give a review for the show. It was about some AI founders that go to, I felt like loosely based on the All In podcast. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like it's nostalgic in an old way. Like, it's appropriate.

1:56:16If you threw it on, it doesn't scream Christmas, but people would be accepting of it. Yeah, yeah. My controversial opinion is I don't like It's a Wonderful Life. Oh, that one is a little bit old. What about Elf? Hmm? Elf? Elf? Yeah, I'll go for Elf. 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 today 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.

1:56:57That is the underlying theme of my coverage. And what has been the big theme in your coverage? It's interesting to coverage because when a brand breaks through, it's almost always for a different reason. Like it's an interesting set of circumstances that allow them to bring, and strategy on their part and some luck that gets thrown in. And it's so, again, there's not like a playbook. If you're following a playbook, it's probably been done and it could work if you're in another category. We saw this in D2C, right? People were like, oh, if you make a pretty website and you run a lot of ads, you can sell a lot of a product.

1:57:28And 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 didn't last too long. Yeah, the Red Amler era was like, you need$500 ,000 for a brand and you need a product. And it worked for Hems. Hems is a public company and is doing fine. Hems is a 25th. Oh, that's right. Was it Roe that worked with Red? I think Ro worked with it. Anyways, anyways. So I bought my first Warby Parker glasses 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.

1:57:58I 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, when you're managing any kind of decline, there's no playbook for that, and there's no playbook for a young D2C brand. Sure. We heard about an apparel brand that has scaled from zero to 700 million of revenue in like two years. all on TikTok shop. We'd never heard of it. I don't know if they're public. I don't know if the numbers are public because I won't share the name. I'll share it with you after. Yeah. Remarkable. But what has been the big trend of the year in terms of your coverage?

1:58:32What's been the biggest story or the biggest thing? What's your word of the year? My word of the year, crisis. Crisis? 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. Yeah. Two very different accusations being leveled at them. Getting sucked into politics. Yeah. And then the crisis comms 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?

1:59:07You change your logo. Before this year, I'm sure nobody really thought. Especially, like, Cracker Barrel's 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 Barrel, it shouldn't be such a massive story, but of course the internet can amplify everything and you can just throw everyone in crisis. What are you looking at for 2026? I think, well, it would be a lot more of that. And I think it's going to be a lot more of brands kind of shifting their budgets, maybe a little bit away from, you know, your traditional advertising into maybe some more PR, I think it's really important for brands at the moment to be owning their narrative.

1:59:51I 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 podcasts. They want to be ahead of the game. They want to be the ones that are talking about themselves before anyone else talks about them. 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, how badly is that going to actually affect any revenue?

2:00:28Well, 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 way. That would be fast. I do wonder, there's been some brands over the last, kind of coming out of the original Trump era that were just like right-wing brands or right-wing neobank. We saw some of these. I wonder if we'll see more.

2:01:04Black Rifle Coffee was kind of a proto example. This, MyPillow. I wonder if we'll see more consumer brands just basically put the political party in the footer and just be even more... A trend that I was thinking was more brands investing in becoming the supplier and then just having two faces, two brands on top. I think 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. I'm sure that's probably already happening way back down the chain. It naturally happens in the supply chain. because no one's digging through the supply chain to figure out where their coffee beans came from.

2:01:39I'm surprised we haven't actually seen more sort of out-and-out right-wing brands coming through. I mean, we have the ones you mentioned. I guess they've been going down that route for a while now. And given that, what, 10 years ago, it was a lot of brand purpose. We always used to talk about brand purpose. Brand purpose. 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.

2:02:19And so it kind of flipped back where brands stopped 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?

2:02:53There'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 idea there was the whole Cluely saga which was an app that allowed you to cheat on everything and of course people don't like cheating so that was very incendiary I was thinking of the dead relative bring that to life that one was very on the nose and that was partnered with Disney Star to the point where I thought this has got to be Intentional. Well, or it doesn't exist, and it's some kind of artwork.

2:03:33Because I almost believe that, I don't know the actual numbers, but I think American Eagle might still be up as a stock, even during all that chaos. But they netted it out okay. And I heard some people debating whether or not Sidney 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 implications were. 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. It was not meant to be political. It was not that. And anyone that thought it was in the minority.

2:04:15And 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. Yeah. And they didn't try and roll it back and confuse the messaging. and they just sort of didn't 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 some more of those tactics, whereas before, if anyone was upset, brands would immediately pull something and do their notes apology. A friend of ours who's been on the show before, Lulu Maservi, she does comms or helps on comms for a lot of startups.

2:04:48She said yesterday, every media headline about a tech company is basically like this founder archetype is building the summary of your company or product. Can it overcome common skepticism? Is that like, has that been, is that evergreen? Or is that like, do you think that kind of, do you agree with that? Do you think that kind of format is like having a moment right now? I certainly have been seeing that quite a lot on like the cover stories of different like magazines, like Forbes and Fortune. I think, you know what? There was a journal piece on Cursor recently that was, like, similar. It was basically, like, they grew from$3 billion to$30 billion in nine months.

2:05:27I'll let you answer, but I have a opinion here, too. Well, I think the pendulum swings, right? So, you know, originally the press were accused of being too friendly to tech. Sure, sure. And then we've swung a little bit, maybe, and everyone's accused of being too antagonistic. No, it was antagonistic. I think it swung back. Too friendly? No, no, no. I just think it's, like, kind of healthy right now. Yeah, yeah, 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.

2:05:56I think that's where the friction lies. I think stories need conflict. And 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. If you don't have strife, if you don't have a low point. And so when I would talk to friends who were running companies, I would say, look, 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.

2:06:33And that employee that you wanted to hire said no. And the product that you released crashed and no one bought it. 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 that actually makes you look more heroic, because who wants to watch Star Wars without any strife, without Luke Skywalker? When you tell people that, what's their reaction?

2:07:02The Jedi's are just hanging out. The good ones totally get it. The good ones 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, exactly. You lost one contract, or one customer failed. But 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.

2:07:38People like a come from behind, an up and down. And then this goes back to controlling the narrative, right? Like, put it out there. 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 employee is going to come to us. And I think that's the risk of trying to over-control with the owned media. Yeah. Is if your owned media doesn't have any conflict ever. because anytime something bad happens to you, you don't post. There's a few VC podcasts lately that got into a situation and just stopped.

2:08:16Stopped posting. And so imagine if you're American Eagle or Cracker Barrel and you have a sub stack that you've built up or a YouTube channel, and then there's a big dust up and 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 than 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 a head straight away and laughed at it. That was master class. We had the founder on. The founder, Pete DeJoy.

2:08:51We had him on our show a little bit later. It was funny. We were joking because the day before that controversy broke, they had published a case study with RAMP. We were joking, who's our presenting sponsor. and we were joking, we were like, did Ramp do this? How many stories do you, like, how many pieces do you publish a year? A year? I try and do about four to six a month. I think whatever that average is out like. And what does it take to get in the four to six? I would say come with some friction, come with a story. And I always say it doesn't have to be a huge brand. You just got to give us some numbers.

2:09:29The 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 in there. I like that. I like that. Or some percentages at least. 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 we can impress upon people. Don't come with your talking points. It's a conversation. We are TBPN. Leave the talking points. You can't come with talking points because this is TBPN.

2:09:58We're still finding our identity. Leave your PR outside. Exactly. Knocking on the window. Exactly, exactly. 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? I think 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. I never drink. Isn't the Unwell Network doing well? I think so. Isn't that antithesis? That's the pendulum swinging back from wellness to unwell. I think you might be right. Maybe. But yeah, we've just been having this debate internally, like how durable is the trend?

2:10:37Well, it's funny. It's difficult because, you know, you guys live in L.A. I live here. I feel like I go out on a Friday night in the West Village. No one is looking very well, you know? The kids are drinking, they're smoking. Smoking's cool again, apparently. But then the rest of the country, I don't know, I think is probably still, the wellness is probably still sort of infiltrating. It's not sure that people aren't drinking very much, especially in the younger demos. Well, especially, 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.

2:11:20I 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 um and it's difficult to know that causation but I think uh you know it's I've got the 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 um they never if you've got an advertising budget they've never been able to say hey guys drink loads you know go out have get absolutely plastered have a great time so you know they haven't had to change their marketing too much because of that but i think in terms of you know where they're showing up and how they're presenting themselves in the real world that will be quite interesting yeah um a lot of other things that i'd love to talk about but let's do it again yeah let's do it again soon this is fantastic thank you so much you congratulations again thank you for coming on we'll talk to such a special place um i'm enjoying these ramp um these uh good call not lighting a fire yes yes you can tell that i'm not a pyromaniac because a pyromaniac but now it's just one match exactly it's just one man oh what about one more what about one more it says burn your receipts time is money save both i like these um these are very fun um how much time do we have to do timeline we are going to an event uh later we can pull up this post let's do another 20 or 10 minutes 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 uh no corpo 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 uh i do uh i do think that it's possible that Brian Johnson is the best marketer in the world right now.

2:13:21He's incredible. He's competing and, like, actually, you know, the team are, like, innovating at a bunch of different levels, like, just, like, in creating, you know, plenty of people, like, you know, want to critique him or disagree with his philosophy or approach or whatever. But as a business person, you have to appreciate how he just makes, finds a way to make him the center of a lot of attention. Pretty much every single month. King of organic. And I'm sure they spend a ton on traditional ads too. For sure. For Blueprint. It's going to be a monster of a business. And he has a CEO in the seat right now too, right?

2:14:03Didn't he hire? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or maybe he was going to hire, but there's going to be some operator running that. Somebody was claiming that his whole relationship with Kate was just a marketing stunt. People have said that about so many celebrities throughout the years. Yeah. All sorts of conspiracy theories. There's definitely a precedent for it. About it, yeah. In other news, did you see their Trump... The K-trucks are coming back. Yeah, so something about basically eliminating, like, 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 has been made illegal for some reason.

2:14:41Yeah, so 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, right? Yeah, so the rule called for a yearly 2 % efficiency increase for cars made from 2027 to 2031. Oh. Just took a lot of these off the road. And, yeah, it's the CAFE, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standard. 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.

2:15:17I wonder if this will drive people back to Tesla and saying like, I, I bought this after Elon went crazy and then Trump went, uh, and then Trump brought in these. I don't know. I don't know. I do think it's if, if, uh, the, the, the real, uh, loser here, I would say some people would say, uh, the environment, uh, but potentially more direct is that company like Slate Auto. Slate Auto. It's trying to make a$20 ,000 truck. Meanwhile, these manufacturers have been making the$20 ,000 truck at scale. For a long time. And they're super reliable. But, I mean, Americans have just voted with their wallets.

2:15:55They 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 Murano Cross Cabriolet also never took off but even 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 two or 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.

2:16:40And that's what everyone does. And that's why every Ford F-150, four doors. Did you see that Adam Friedland? This is a hilarious bit. This is like a really good bit. I'm surprised that this is the first time somebody has done this bit so well. He was asked to, Vulture asked him a question on their year-end culture roundup about a TV show that Charles here is assuming he hasn't seen. and the question is, was Bertha on the Gilded Age right to marry Gladys off to the Duke? Bertha Russell wasn't exactly wrong for marrying Gladys off to the Duke, at least not by Gilded Age standards, but she was morally compromised.

2:17:17In 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 should conquer the very society that tried to exclude her

2:17:39incredible 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 Culturati 50 which I would not have been following this year and now I want to see the other 50 so hats off to them for that project. In other news, Pomp is announcing a historic decision at BRR. Yes. 100 % of equity. This is his digital asset treasury. It's a digital asset treasury. He came on the show. Focus on Bitcoin. Bitcoin. He's going to buy Bitcoin and then buy companies that produce more Bitcoin or something? Yeah.

2:18:17100 % of equity compensation for the CEO, me, and the board of directors will be tied to performance milestones. CEOs 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 at$10 trillion? He doesn't get a dime unless it's$10 trillion. I can see that. He's a perma-bull. That would be amazing. Yeah, I don't think he's ever flipped bearish this whole year.

2:18:51No, no. But anyways. I mean, this is good. And the interesting iteration on this is that Elon has set himself up with the equity compensation tied to share price, which went very well the first time. And now he set himself up to do it again with Tesla. And what's interesting here is that with Pomp's BRR ticker, it's not just him, it's also the board of directors. And I think that at Tesla, that's not the case. And so he's saying, I'm taking it one step further. Now, I'm still interested to see what are the targets. Because if you're like, hey, the stock moves 2%, I get$100 million. People aren't going to be excited about that.

2:19:32But 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, again, a lot of these digital asset treasury companies have performed horribly recently and unclear. Marvin was texting me. We got out on the show. Marvin Von Hagen is going to the timeline. Poke, which is a social AI that lives in your messages. He says, saw a TechCrunch tweet six weeks ago that Meta is trying to ban Poke. He said he directly asked for help on Twitter, got a lot of intros, talked to the European Commission.

2:20:16EU officially opened an antitrust investigation today. x is unreal uh he really uh is kind of met his met his worst nightmare uh today uh just um directing he's basically mart are you really that surprised that martin von hagen is marvin marvin sorry sorry marvin von hagen is pulling the pulling the strings of the of the eu uh but uh pretty interesting well good luck to him Matt Slotnick says maybe the best quote I've ever heard in an earnings call from Benioff 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.R.

2:21:02token J.R.R.R. Token that is so good of course he's firing shots at CARP That is hilarious. That is one. And he also made one at Oracle. What is he saying? Dig out of left to Oracle, Matt says, make sure everybody realizes we're not building data center. We're preserving our gross margins and cash flows and using the data centers that are being built. I love it. I love it. Near says, today I learned I use more tokens than Salesforce does. Yeah. I mean, we didn't get into this with the current, but the token thing, this could go so fantastically wrong. if it turns into eyeballs. Imagine if there's companies going out and publicly they're talking about their token multiples.

2:21:49It's like, yeah, we generate 100 trillion tokens, and so of course we should be a billion-dollar company. And you're looking at 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 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. Buko Capital says, according to Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg kills goats with a laser gun and eats them. This is wild. Let's see here. It's so funny he used the term.

2:22:24The question was, what was your most memorable encounter with Zuck? Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat. In front of you? No, he killed it before. I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun and then a knife. Then they send it to the butcher. A laser gun? I don't know. A stun gun. They stun it and then he knifed it. Then they sent it to the butcher, evidently in Palo Alto, and then the quote drops off. Imagine you have your buddy over and you're like, hey, look, I run a social network. You ran a rival social network for a long time.

2:22:57I run Facebook. You ran Twitter. Let's just hang out. Let's knife it go. 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've got hippie culture. I've got bro culture. You're the Bitcoin guy. You're the Bitcoin guy. The Costa Rican Bitcoin guy. I'm the UFC guy. I like to kill goats myself. But, you know, you're not supposed to go leak it. What's going on, Jack? Come on. Come on. I was off the record. I showed you my culture in confidence. What happens in Palo Alto? What happens at the goat farm stays at the goat farm.

2:23:29Apparently not. Also hilarious that he doesn't know what a stunt gun is. By the way, we figured out that somebody on the show that's come on multiple times has hundreds of goats. Oh, yes. And nobody knows about this. And people keep talking about the goat debate, this or that. The goat debate. And we were talking with them and they were saying they need to keep quiet because there's a real goat collector. There's a real goat collector. A real goat herd. That's right. A goat herd. What else we got? This is interesting. Google taps Replit in Challenge to Anthropic and Cursor. somewhat surprising considering that Google's going really heavy with anti-gravity.

2:24:11But Google's invested in Replit for a long time. They did a partnership or investment back before Omjad was making a couple million bucks in revenue. Is capital G in Replit? Yes. I'm almost positive that Google has invested in Replit at some point. We should look it up, but we're doing the fake news now. We're done with the news. It's fake news. It's the fake news hour. But congrats to Amjad on doing a deal with Google. I wonder how that will manifest because you are kind of competing with a lot of the folks at AI.studio, and there's a lot of different pieces of the Gemini team that you're kind of dealing with.

2:24:55But at the same time, 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 where has Google been fantastic? Model development. Where have they been a little bit less speedy on the product rollout side, getting the product in the hands of people? Amjad's great at that. The Replit team's great at that. So you put them together, and maybe it makes a lot of sense. But it's still just early days Two final posts One, we missed this yesterday Jake, Paul And the team over at Antifund Have raised Jeff Wu Have raised a new fund $30 million I almost said $300 million I'm sure they'll be there soon But they say they're credit account industry leaders Like OpenAI, Andrel, Ramp, Cognition and physical intelligence in our portfolio.

2:25:55But 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 that. 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 Zach. You don't have to say who. 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. Don't leave that idea. But I love that this happened the way it did.

2:26:25And I think that this is a good format. And they're wearing suits. And they're wearing suits. I think there's probably two to three more of these that will happen. I mean, this does in some way 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.

2:26:53And so, very excited. And what a portfolio. Open AI, Android, Ramp, Cognition, Physical Intelligence. There's one person that will go unnamed that links all of those companies together. Fantastic. You know the person. Fantastic performance. You know the person. Of course I do. Final post from Tane. Tane, sorry. He's highlighting a company called Plod. Plod. This is so funny. Which I've never heard of. Apparently. But it sounds like they're absolutely ripping. It's the most successful. The most successful. They said wearables were cooked. but Plod records, transcribes, and of course it's another meeting summarizing product.

2:27:25But it's a physical product. One million units sold largely to doctors, lawyers, and salespeople. $250 million of annualized revenue, bootstrapped and now profitable. Literally, and it's crazy. Like no drama, no launch videos, no crazy hype, no rage bait, just building in silence. We got to get this guy on the show. Apparently they raised around$5 million, but bootstrapped is some amount of scale. 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 Oura Ring, for example.

2:28:06What 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, Oura. 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 founder. Maybe we'll have to buy one. Test it out. Well, thank you for tuning in today, folks. Thank you for tuning in from the New York Stock Exchange. We missed you in the chat.

2:28:44Yeah. But we will see you tomorrow. We'll be back tomorrow. And thank you again to the NYC team for hosting us. As always. It is totally surreal to be here. And thank you to everybody that has made this possible by tuning in, enjoying the show, and supporting us however you have. So have a wonderful evening, and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you. Take care. Good night.