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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. We nailed that. It is Thursday, 12/04/2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange.
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Speaker 1:Yes. And we have some fantastic news. We have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange announcing today. Hopefully, you've seen it on the timeline. We have a post here from Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange.
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Speaker 2:And, This partnership was Yeah. Probably the most natural.
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Speaker 1:There is some news on the timeline. Should we start with Gemini?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And so Ross Hendrix says this is the correct take. He's talking about Gemini winning the AI race and and questioning, is it bearish for the market as a whole If you think about it, which is what efficient market hype said. Gemini winning the AI race is like super bearish for the market if you think about it. And he says, Gemini winning ensures zero profitability for any other LLM model. Google will force any other player into an endless sea of red ink by keeping its model free until they bleed out, and then it will monetize once its monopoly is secured.
Speaker 1:That means ain't no one making money on data center CapEx. Oops. What do
Speaker 2:Hot take. I think it's it's it's thought provoking.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I disagree with a lot of it. Yes. I I think it's it's it's very real in some sense that we we always knew that Google would put an incredible amount of pricing pressure
Speaker 1:The cash flow.
Speaker 2:They have the cash flow. Yeah. Again, even in the areas that OpenAI also wants to compete, consumer electronics, science.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm sure, you know, chips, obviously. Yeah. So all these areas that not even core to OpenAI's business today, Google's already been investing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Billions and billions and billions of dollars in these categories for a long time. Overall, this I'm not convinced that there will be a monopoly in LLMs. It feels today like we're headed towards like a duopoly
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:At the very least. Mhmm. And you can just easily see that there will be a number of other players making plenty of money. I feel very I feel very good about Anthropic right now. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Anthropic, I thought Dario's commentary yesterday at Deal Book
Speaker 1:Summit It fantastic.
Speaker 2:Was He was really He was He's still thinking about was a wild interview because he kept saying like, I'm not gonna say who I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:It was really
Speaker 2:wild. Then, of course AI? Yeah. Obviously, talking about he had some he had some crazy lines, didn't he? He he he was saying that basically saying he felt like he literally said the word YOLO.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Yeah. I I missed that, but it's very clear that he grew up, like, just maybe blocks away from Alex Carr because they have the exact same accent. And it's very jarring when you listen to it because they both talk about AI, but they're very different people in terms of, like, the I the ideologies, the types of businesses that they're building. Everything about it is different except for they sound similar.
Speaker 1:So we gotta put them together at some point. I do have an overall rebuttal, which is my and my rebuttal is brought to you by Vanta, automate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring and security reviews. So this the the my rebuttal to Ross Hendrix here is that, Google likes good margins. They grew up with the best margins. It's in their culture that they had 80% margins.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and then also, there's there's this constant thing when you're a public company that even if there's the new exciting thing, like, there's a little bit of, like, the innovator's dilemma. There's the new exciting technology. Yeah. But if it's not gonna monetize as well on day one, then all of your investors, all the public market investors start asking, like, is this going to structurally hurt your business?
Speaker 1:And this happened with reels. Remember? There was this big question with Instagram, like, hey. We're moving from the, you know, the the the image based feed where it's very clear that you can just drop a link to the next thing to Reels. Is that gonna monetize as well Yep.
Speaker 1:As the rest of the feed? And the answer was yes. Definitely. But it took a while, and there was, like, some skittishness there, and Meta had to do a lot of work to monetize that. And so I would I would be surprised if Gemini can hold out on not monetizing forever for like
Speaker 2:monetizing. That's the point. Yeah. Like the pricing the pricing at least from a consumer standpoint Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is very similar. They could go on free.
Speaker 2:Both Gemini and OpenAI offers free student plans Yeah. Or at least a year free. Yeah. But they're charging for the product. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's and it's, you know, it's it's comparable pricing now. Yeah. Obviously, Gemini has some cost benefits on the API side. Yeah. Again, certainly not giving it away yet.
Speaker 2:Okay. They did have an interesting announcement yesterday. They they introduced Workspace Studio where you can build custom AI agent in minutes to delegate the daily grind, automate daily tasks, focus on the work that matters. That's their writing. So this will integrate with with g Suite effectively.
Speaker 2:So it's like, notify me about emails that you that that you're determining are urgent. Right? And so interested to
Speaker 1:see here is excited about it. He says Google decided to go absolutely ham with the product velocity. This seems like it lets you build AI agents and automations onto your Google Suite. Actually love this. Will be interesting to see.
Speaker 1:I'm sure we'll get a lot of threads of people explaining how they're using it. Will be interesting to see how people wind up using it. Of course, as always, our stream is brought to you by Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com. Lisa Sue gave her opinion on the Google TPU.
Speaker 2:She broke her silence.
Speaker 1:She broke her silence. She responded. She she fires back. Shots fired.
Speaker 2:Shots
Speaker 1:fired. She's the UBS conference, and she says Google has done a good job with the TPU architecture over the years, but it's a more purpose built design. It lacks the programmability, model flexibility, and balanced training and inference capabilities that GPUs offer.
Speaker 2:GPUs combine very similar to Jensen's line as well.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's not wrong.
Speaker 2:Or or the NVIDIA newsroom line.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, I guess the the the question is, you know, Ilias seems to be at SSI. Ilias Setskiru at SSI seems to be the most age of research pilled since he coined that phrase and kind of ushered in the age of research. He seems to be the AI researcher that's doing the most undirected, the most like, the the least purpose built training potentially. We don't know what he's doing, but, like, you would think he would need the most flexible systems.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And yet it feels like he's maybe aligned with TPU. I feel like I saw something about that. So I don't know I don't know when an an AI researcher would say, yes. I need GPUs over TPUs.
Speaker 1:In fact Yeah. When we talked about the Tranium chip yesterday, we were reading that there's some companies that are doing interesting things on on that architecture.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it it's it's it's something that, like, she has to say, but now the question is, like, she has to go prove it with some big clouds actually building on this. And maybe she needs, a big hero training run from someone to to stay, hey. It worked. We did it.
Speaker 2:Who could that be?
Speaker 1:Don't know.
Speaker 2:Maybe OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Maybe. One of the new largest shareholders. They they
Speaker 2:could say the shareholders. Potentially a large shareholder.
Speaker 1:So Lisa goes on to say, from our perspective, there is room for all types of accelerators. However, over the next five years, GPU should remain the the clear majority of the market because we are still early in the cycle. And and I agree with this because even if you look at at, like, AI workloads at a place like Meta, Gen AI, like, actual LLM inference, large language models, these large transformer based models, things that might benefit from an ASIC like the TPU, that's like less than 20% of compute spend, I'm pretty sure. Like Makes sense. There's just a ton of just Recommending content.
Speaker 1:Put the ads in in the chat.
Speaker 2:Just put the
Speaker 1:ads Put the ads in the ad.
Speaker 2:The
Speaker 1:feed. In the feed.
Speaker 2:Put the ads in
Speaker 1:the drop. And that obviously does use AI. It just doesn't use, you know, large language models or they're they're maybe not transformer based. Or maybe they don't benefit from the acceleration that comes yeah, going to an ASIC necessarily. So she says software developers want flexibility to experiment with new algorithms.
Speaker 1:That certainly sounds reasonable. You can't you simply cannot know ahead of time what to hard code into an ASIC. That is the difference. Well, I mean, if you're Google, you kind of can since you invented the transformer. You're like, let's bake that in.
Speaker 1:They might need
Speaker 2:to create the copium chip. And remember NVIDIA so NVIDIA on November 25 said Yeah. People are very concerned by this post. NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so, again, that's that's a a fair point of view. Mhmm. But I think that we're already seeing that plenty of players are happy to buy a chip that is good at a specific framework or function. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so they're pitching the the one size fits all the the toolbox Yeah. Basically that you get in a NVIDIA GPU or or an AMD chip. So
Speaker 1:Well, if you don't wanna worry about what chip your AI analyst is running on, go over to julius.ai, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Lisa ended by saying, so a 20 to 25 share for ASIC style accelerator seems reasonable. It is also important to recognize that this is a large and expanding market, and we will see strong innovation in both silicon and software, which we will which will drive further differentiation across the industry. The other interesting thing is, like, is, like, the the you mentioned OpenAI, but, like, there's nothing stopping AMD from doing something that looks like a TPU for a for a foundation model company.
Speaker 1:Yep. And going to them and saying like, hey. Give us if something is slowing you down by one percent and you're about to buy a 100,000 of these, like, can we just fix that for you and then everyone else kinda has to deal with Like, there's a whole bunch of places where it would just make sense to actually change the chip. That that that's the dawn of the whole the whole NVIDIA AI AI stack. Like, they made they used to be a similar architecture between the gaming chips and the AI chips.
Speaker 1:They eventually, like, kinda forked that Yep. Because they decided that even though they're both, like, GPUs, there are now different GPUs for different purposes from one company. And and AMD, of course, will be responsive responsive to that.
Speaker 2:So what else we got? Meanwhile, Demis, is moving on to the next paradigm. He is, according to Peter over at Alamarina. Demis, and the DeepMind team are hiring a research scientist for post AGI research.
Speaker 1:This is this is what we were asking for. Were saying we were saying, you know, there's a whole bunch of AI researchers, then there were AI AGI researchers. Then Zuck came in over the top said, we we don't care about AGI. We're going straight shots, super intelligence researchers. You gotta be a super intelligence researcher to work here.
Speaker 1:SSI says we gotta be a safe super intelligence researcher. And now post AGI
Speaker 2:research Is this him trying to bait agents, like AI research agents that are that are, like, of the few right. So everybody's like everybody's kind of banking on
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Creating an AI that's really good at AI research. Mhmm. And so maybe Demis is trying maybe the maybe Demis believes there's one out there. He's trying to bait them in. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And because one of these agents might be like, I am in the post AGI era. I am AGI.
Speaker 1:Time traveler scenario? What do you say?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. Like, you know, who who knows? Maybe there maybe there's a maybe there's a Sure.
Speaker 2:One of these incredible Yeah. Research agents among us.
Speaker 1:Okay. Trying to bait them in
Speaker 2:and say, come over to DeepMind. I don't know who doesn't matter where you Yeah. You were created.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:You're welcome here in the post AGI.
Speaker 1:I I just like the idea that, you know, we we initially were joking about, the the media landscape being like the the punk landscape. And you have, like, pop punk, post punk trad. Trad punk
Speaker 2:Neo legacy.
Speaker 1:Neo punk or neo new metal, all these different, you know, musical subgenres. All of that has come to AI fully. There is there is AI, AGI, ASI, SAFE Superintelligence, post AGI research now. Post neo AGI will be next, I'm sure. But until then until then, go check out Cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer Oh, absolutely renewed.
Speaker 1:Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:So What else? So there's been back and forth on whether or not OpenAI is rolling out ads in ChatGPT. The the most recent reporting out of the Code Red memo meeting, etcetera Yes. Was that they were that they were potentially pulling back a little bit on ads. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:There was a bunch of different accounts including Polymarket that were sharing OpenAI's ready to roll out ads. Yep. One thing that was notable was that I saw a ton of people dunking on it and being like, just very against ads in a lot of people and you were talking about this. Who's gonna be the Eric
Speaker 1:Soufford, Ben Thompson were holding up the wall. They're like, we will stand with you, Sam Almond and Fiji Simo. If you roll
Speaker 2:And Sundar. And Sundar.
Speaker 1:And Sundar, we are your strongest soldiers. We will support you if you roll out
Speaker 2:in way in some way, OpenAI should want Gemini to go first. Yes. Yes. Take the first leap.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I think that it's very possible that Google might be like, no. We'll we'll let you do the honors. We'll let you do the honors.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I think we were talking about it yesterday. The the the first ad in the chat in the chat app is going to be screenshotted and shared around
Speaker 2:the world.
Speaker 1:Like, it's just going to be the case. So it's gonna be wild.
Speaker 4:But I
Speaker 1:What what what does Signal say here? He says, one last thing on ads. If I'm Google, I wouldn't run a single ad on Gemini core. I'd run it at a pure loss until every competitor is forced to slap ads everywhere just to keep the lights on. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the bleed it out strategy, but Google had the opportunity to do that with, they they could have gotten into a price war on cloud. They could have said, hey. We wanna come in, you know, and we're gonna take zero margins on this and really try and take market share from AWS and Azure. Yeah. They've all agreed.
Speaker 1:No price wars, basically. Yeah. Let's compete on functionality. Let's compete on branding. Let's compete on integration.
Speaker 1:They have not had a price where
Speaker 2:And Google doesn't have to spend nearly as much time building any ad. They they have the ad infrastructure. Right? They have AdSense. They have thousands of people Yeah.
Speaker 2:Out there already that just sell ads that work with so they have all the customer relationships. There's very few businesses on Earth that spend money on advertising and don't spend money with Google. Right?
Speaker 1:Speaking of ads, here's an ad for Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And also on the ChatGPT ads topic, Sean Frank says that a ChatGPT referred session to his site ridge.com converts at 12% and is worth $5 per visitor, the highest I've ever seen.
Speaker 2:For context, there's there's plenty of ecommerce brands who have, like, a 1.2% conversion rate.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And they're trying to improve it by, you know, they're they're constantly trying to improve that, but they're they're very notable that it's such a such a massive difference in in conversion rate. It just shows the level of intent that that somebody has when they're coming from Chad GPT. They've done a bunch of product research most likely. They've looked at options. They're they're landing on the Ridge site, like, basically ready to pull out a wallet and a wallet Well, they don't have one.
Speaker 2:Digital wallet.
Speaker 1:They did. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And purchase.
Speaker 1:Pull out a credit card from a loose from a loose collection of of receipts and and cards and cash that they've been carrying in their pockets because they need
Speaker 2:a wallet because they don't have one. That's what's going on. Joe Weisendahl Wiseendahl
Speaker 1:say it.
Speaker 2:Brother Joe, Sergio Weisendahl.
Speaker 1:Congratulations to him. It was the ten year party last night, I believe. Overnight
Speaker 2:success. Yeah. Joe has a chart. He says wild chart from Jim Reed at Deutsche Bank showing just showing how much OpenAI is expected to burn before turning a profit. A couple things stand out, How small the Amazon burn really was for its first eight years.
Speaker 2:People were big the Uber burn was before ultimately getting into black. Mhmm. And so it's hard to see the exact numbers here in this chart. Yeah. Amazon looks to be like sub a few billion dollars.
Speaker 1:A few
Speaker 4:billion dollars.
Speaker 2:Sub $5,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:The the
Speaker 2:the the real the
Speaker 1:real story with Amazon, though, was that was that they were just basically cash flow zero for a long time when they couldn't even generate every 10,000,000,000 or something like that. Yeah. So it was a big but, I mean, that's obviously way better for shareholders than, hey. We're gonna lose a 140,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Pretty impressive. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This this projection is factoring in Sam trying to also build SpaceX within Open
Speaker 1:Yes. That was
Speaker 2:in the business Because there's finance section. In in the journal today. Why don't why don't you read through
Speaker 1:it? So this is a scoop from Berber Jin, one of the greatest to ever scoop. It says OpenAI's CEO considers building or partnering with Rocket Company. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has explored putting together funds to either acquire or partner with a Rocket Company, a move that would position him to compete against Elon Musk and Elon Musk's SpaceX. Altman reached out Opening up another front.
Speaker 1:Front into invading Russia in the winter, one might say, in the AI winter. Don't invade.
Speaker 2:Don't Don't invade Don't Don't invade, what is it? Starbase. Starbase during the AI winter.
Speaker 1:During the AI winter. You reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stokes space, in the summer, and discussions picked up in the fall. According to people familiar with the talks, among the proposals was for OpenAI to make a series of equity investments in the company and end up with a controlling stake. Such an investment would would total billions of dollars over time. The talks are no longer active, but this happens, and now it's leaking.
Speaker 1:Altman and OpenAI are facing market headwinds after striking hundreds of billions of dollars of deals. So first, to close out the the the the burn thing. When I'm looking at this original chart of, like, Amazon over over eight years burnt half 1,000,000,000 or, you know, a couple billion, then Tesla burnt more, then Uber burned more. Like, I like and I see OpenAI burning way more. It is striking, but it actually doesn't seem that crazy if we're talking about a potential really powerful monopoly.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. If there's a really powerful monopoly like what happened with Uber, look at the market cap of Uber, look at the market cap of Lyft, and ask yourself, was it worth investing $40,000,000,000? Was it worth burning down? Everyone will say, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And so if if the outcome at the end of this is, yep, it's gonna be the front door to AI for everyone
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Forever or for thirty years, you know, or something like that. Like, then it's totally worth it.
Speaker 2:On the There there is a there is a a comment here that that's from Faye Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:That says
Speaker 1:It's a point.
Speaker 2:I feel like comparing dollars spent in the nineties versus the 2020 should probably be normalized. So yeah. Yeah. Well In other news I
Speaker 1:have I have more on on this potentially, but let me tell you about public.cominvesting for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. So they are opening up a a second front. What's interesting is
Speaker 2:Not a second front.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. A tenth front. It's a tenth front. It's it's funny that there's no that Sam Altman is not teaming up with Jeff Bezos, who who has Blue Origin but lacks a really strong AI bet. There was a little bit of
Speaker 3:an No. He has his
Speaker 2:own company now.
Speaker 1:He has his own company. Yes. But he he's he's not
Speaker 2:What's he called now?
Speaker 1:I would not say that Jeff Bezos has as much control over AI as Elon does with XAI. Right? He doesn't have
Speaker 2:as much of project for maintenance.
Speaker 1:But this just started.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This just started. Whereas XAI has actually scaled, has large data centers. Sure. They might be a little bit behind on certain benchmarks and might be ahead on some other things. They might need to, you know, actually ramp the usage of this of this product, but you can't say that Elon is, like, sitting on the sidelines during the foundation model wars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically can't say that about Bezos.
Speaker 2:Right? Argue that they have 6,000,000,000 of funding.
Speaker 1:Oh, for this? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. It So helps when when your co CEO is Works started Amazon.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I I would just I would I would see them as potentially, like, natural. There's a natural alliance there. Bezos has has a copy of everything Elon's done, basically. Like, Bezos has Rivian to compete with Tesla Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is interesting. He's now he's not the founder of it, but he's invested. He has Blue Origin, obviously, to compete with SpaceX. And he has he has a number of other companies that feel like they mirror Elon, and it feels like they've been going back and forth for a long time.
Speaker 2:In other news, Metz owner Steve Cohen
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Has officially been awarded a casino license in New York, enabling him to build an $8,000,000,000 hotel and casino complex next to Citi Field. That's a thousand room luxury hotel, 5,000 slot machines. So for those not familiar
Speaker 1:So slot machines, yeah, you can't normally do that in New York. Right?
Speaker 2:I don't think there's slots in
Speaker 1:New feel like when I think of slot machines, think of Las Vegas, and I think of that's the only place. Then maybe Atlantic City. Yeah. Atlantic City, I feel like.
Speaker 2:You had an idea which was to somebody to set up a slot machine in real life, point a video camera on it, and then have somebody set up prediction markets Yes. Predict what happens with the next poll.
Speaker 1:Yes. Because that would help you understand what's likely to happen.
Speaker 2:And you could hedge any type of risk that that
Speaker 1:the slot machine might
Speaker 2:encounter. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You know, if you're in the slot if you're in the slot, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you're you don't wanna be on the other side of that slot machine too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That could you get wiped out.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's gonna have restaurant bars and a theater for shows and 25 acres of public parks and playgrounds. Okay. Young? Fun for the whole family. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The kids will be climbing on
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:On the jungle gym and they'll accidentally be pulling all the imagine a jungle gym
Speaker 1:practices Yeah. Young bandits. You get used to the muscle memory.
Speaker 2:Throwing throwing dice. Yes. Comically large cards that you could play.
Speaker 1:That's true. Yeah. We can make a whole casino themed playground using generative AI and then use that to
Speaker 2:Joe Pompliano says, Cohen is essentially taking an under monetized asset, 50 acres of parking lots around the stadium trying to transform it into a year round that produces consistent returns, independence of how the Mets perform. Yeah. And with the New York State Gaming Commission predicting that the property predicting. Mhmm. Predicting.
Speaker 1:Wink. Wink.
Speaker 2:Wink. That the property will generate 3,900,000,000.0 in annual revenue. Cohen's 50 acre complex would instantly be one of the top 10 largest US casinos by revenue. Anyways let
Speaker 1:me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel with fin dot a I.
Speaker 2:We missed a post on the on the SpaceX competition. Oh, we did. Buko says, friend dear friend of the show says, overeating. Gonna get their faces ripped off if they don't just focus focus focus. Equity deals and other bets will not win the great game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That feels to be the consensus
Speaker 1:view. Was talking a lot about the the the comparison to Google and tracking. When did Google monetize? Google wound up monetizing, I think, sooner than Chatuchi BT has. They put ads in it, I think, in year two.
Speaker 1:It's now been
Speaker 2:three years twenty '18. Effectively trying to encourage employees to do to eat more and to have more massages so that it didn't they looked less like a monopoly. Right?
Speaker 1:Like Maybe. But but I mean, Google did did get did earn the right to do other bets by just so solidifying their market in the search engine world that then they could go and do Gmail, and they could go and do GCP, and they could go and do Waymo. But it's just like all of that happened after becoming cash flow positive, and I think that's why people have a little bit of, like, nervous energy around going to space even though space data centers and this is what I wanted to go back to in the journal, was is there a world where, you know, it okay. It's good to have a space data center bet, and so you need a partnership. And realistically, Sam's not gonna partner with SpaceX on it.
Speaker 1:I don't know why he's not just going by and launch capacity from Blue Origin, but maybe Stokes Space is the is the better option for him. But put aside all the dynamic, all the competitive dynamics
Speaker 2:I think it's possible that Sam was looking at Stokes Space, which most recently, as of October, was valued at 2,000,000,000. And he was like, well, I bought Johnny Ive for, what was it, 6? Can I absorb another another $2,000,000,000 company?
Speaker 1:I mean, I okay. Yeah. Like like
Speaker 2:He wants to own the full stack.
Speaker 1:Yes. Which is getting stackier and stackier every single day. You're gonna need to start buying land to buy the the the silicon to buy the sand. But do you think there's obviously an immense amount of pressure right now on data center build outs. They're using too much energy.
Speaker 1:They're using too much water. If you put them in space, do you think that helps the discourse at all?
Speaker 2:I think people hate rockets.
Speaker 1:So Do we want
Speaker 2:Damned if you do.
Speaker 1:Damned if you don't. But but but truly, it's gonna be much harder to say, like, hold up an electricity bill in Memphis and say, hey. My electricity bill went up, and it's because of Annie over there in the data center
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who's just, you know, slopping it up. Instead, you're gonna be able to say, hey. The data center that yeah. It's generating sometimes helpful math homework help, sometimes creative writing stuff, sometimes some weird stuff. Sometimes curing cancer.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:I think it would. Who knows? Has to. Probably.
Speaker 1:But but I agree then the then the discourse will be as blocking out
Speaker 2:But it is notable that that every time every time a the concept of a space data center hits a timeline, it goes viral for people dunking on it, and yet so many people wanna play it.
Speaker 1:But they're dunking on it as as, like, a a violation of laws of physics or, like, not a good
Speaker 2:Too futuristic.
Speaker 1:Futuristic. Like, it's not gonna work in the near term. The economics
Speaker 2:Feels right for a moon shot.
Speaker 1:Haven't seen like, like like, there there there are viral dunks that are going on right now around the prediction markets, and those are like those viral dunks are like, this is a bad thing. Yeah. I haven't seen people dunk on space data centers saying, like, I'm not morally okay with putting data centers in space. And I think people should be more morally okay with putting data centers in space.
Speaker 2:What did Sager say about prediction markets?
Speaker 1:Well, you look 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?
Speaker 2:Sauder 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
Speaker 1:There there really are, like, like, active political candidates that will be in congress in eighteen months that where this is their whole thing. Their whole thing is their anti data center. And so, you know, get ready. Get ready to testify, brother.
Speaker 2:Anti data center and anti prediction market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I don't know that I've seen any politicians really run on the anti prediction market thing yet. Not that it's not gonna happen.
Speaker 3:Think it
Speaker 1:will I I think I think think
Speaker 2:there 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.
Speaker 2:It is
Speaker 1:Which is less popular? We should have a prediction market to understand. Are prediction markets or data centers less popular?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think data centers might be less popular. I don't know.
Speaker 2:The hard the hard Because of one of the things is
Speaker 1:can like just not participate, but with the data center, if it's in your backyard, your power goes up, your power
Speaker 5:will go to
Speaker 2:the garden. 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 Sure. Sure. Benefit like, is benefiting from them.
Speaker 2:It's like, okay, like, pull out pull out your phone. Let me see the apps on your phone.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you don't you don't you don't need this resource. I like this. I like this. Whereas prediction markets, there's some people that just get they they don't they're not interested in the data. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even I've seen a lot of polling polling people that run polling firms
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are like very against prediction Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I saw that. That was very funny.
Speaker 2:Obvious reasons because it's like, hey, you're kinda open sourcing my whole my whole thing. Making it like you're doing a decentralized version of what I'm doing Yeah. Yeah. But providing a lot of the same kind of results.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In other news, this was hitting the timeline. Two days ago, Fortune said, NVIDIA's CFO admits the $100,000,000,000 OpenAI mega deal still isn't signed two months after it helped fuel an AI rally. I I can see why people are
Speaker 1:very in the earnings release. So this Yeah. News was the language was in the earnings release that that that this deal had not been signed, and it's more in an LOI phase.
Speaker 2:They did say during the launch, we have a Yeah. They what what was the exact wording? It was like we have we have direction it was like we basically, like, this is like direct we've directionally aligned. I think it's directionally gonna happen
Speaker 1:or 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 the how the this particular equity investment deal can wind up resulting in a effectively a 30% discount or something like that. So I'm not I'm not surprised if this winds up going through in in one way or another. Although I do think it will need a, you know, tweak And and might right now might not be the perfect time for Jensen to come out and say, yes. I'm actually gonna be spending a lot of money.
Speaker 1:I have to invest. I have to keep OpenAI on on NVIDIA GPUs as opposed to letting him go over the TPU. Like, he's sort of like fighting on defense a little bit Yeah. Right now because people are are talking
Speaker 2:it was a good time to go on Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1:It was.
Speaker 2:Just another pod guy says, another Jensen interview. Now I'm nervous. A lot of people were saying that this was somewhat bearish. I listened to there was a good excerpt here from a capital. They say Jensen Huang.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Jensen goes, yeah. Yeah. But anyhow
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there are some wild wild exchanges. I I just liked the way I I've been calling for Jensen to go on Rogan for years. I've wanted more of, like, the tech leaders to go on Rogan and kind of just, like, cross pollinate the two communities. And as I read the comments on the YouTube video, there were a lot of fans of Rogan who really were, like, thanking him for bringing on this guy who's working on something that's, like, pretty opaque in the economy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very abstract.
Speaker 2:You've heard about sense.
Speaker 1:And he and and Jensen's coming and explaining it at one level, and then Rogan's asking him to to, you know, like, zoom out, tell me more of your story, why are you successful.
Speaker 2:Were the value of hard work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I thought it was cool. I I I thought they had a good time together, and it didn't seem like there was any, like, undercurrent of adversarialness. It it it felt it felt good overall. I I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:It wasn't it wasn't like you shouldn't go into it thinking you're going to get Jensen on Dwarkesh, and you're like, you're just not going to get, like, a really deep insight into NVIDIA strategy, but that's not the point of this particular interview. It's to understand who Jensen is as a human and what he's kind of, like, thinking of broadly for the industry. Yeah. Well, before we bring in our next guest or first guest, let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level value coding, and deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 1:We have Jim Kramer in the
Speaker 2:A living legend.
Speaker 1:In the at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Celebrated thirty years.
Speaker 1:He is the author of how to make money in any market, and we will bring him in.
Speaker 2:He is.
Speaker 1:We got the book. Come on in. Come on in. Welcome to the show. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:It's been too long. Thank you so much. Where's it going?
Speaker 2:Where's it
Speaker 3:it going? I'm like mean, really. There we
Speaker 1:go. He was so ready. Was so ready.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Joe.
Speaker 1:He's coming coming again. He's hit. He's getting a clean hit. There we go.
Speaker 3:That's a whole boot.
Speaker 2:There's a That's fantastic. There's an entry.
Speaker 3:You guys look fabulous. Love it.
Speaker 1:You're great just home for We love it. We love it. Every time we're here, we're we're we're enjoying it
Speaker 2:very much. For having us. You're basically the are you the mayor?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm more of an official greeter.
Speaker 1:I'm sort
Speaker 3:of an ambassador.
Speaker 1:So so twenty years on Mad Money. Correct? Yeah. How many time how many years in this building? How how how long have you been working here?
Speaker 3:For about, I guess, like, four. We were in the neighborhood Cliffs for a
Speaker 1:long time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we had a studio for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:As far as asked this because Sure. Now this is our studio.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You can't control the sound levels of who's here or whatever. But I I kinda still feel it's some heart capitalism. I really do.
Speaker 2:I It's a spiritual Yes.
Speaker 3:And I do like wall, and I do like broad, and I do think that 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. Mhmm. It's more tourist now, taking a look at it. But I still find it fascinating, the companies that come public.
Speaker 3:The companies that you know Yeah. That I'm trying to learn learn about. Yeah. And and it's exciting. Truly is exciting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Walking
Speaker 1:the boat. Do you 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 really cool moment.
Speaker 1:Also think about you beefing with I also think about you, you know, going back and forth with Benioff remotely. Talk to me about, like, when do you wanna go to a person? When do you want them to come to you? When do you when are you okay having just a phone call?
Speaker 3:This is a fabulous question. Yeah. Because I waffle in this. Yeah. I did think, as I was telling you, terrific people out there, that there will be more execs that just would come through Sure.
Speaker 3:And they don't. And we were near Cheetah Borough at the other place Yeah.
Speaker 4:And they
Speaker 3:do. Okay. Yeah. I like to be out in person on the road all the time. The issue, of course, is we do three segments.
Speaker 3:There are interviews. We do a
Speaker 1:lot of this. The issue is
Speaker 2:there's no time in the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's always on TV. It's hard to wrestle with this too. You know, like, where you can go and travel to someone, make a big performance out of it.
Speaker 1:We we we were we're in Los Angeles, which is not a great place, but
Speaker 3:it's No.
Speaker 1:It works it works in many ways. Yeah. But it's also odd, like, we would assume that we're in San Francisco or at least New York. In
Speaker 2:the 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 twenty four seven. You'd have your phone open. You'd be looking at the markets, and you would be able to just constantly be traveling Yes.
Speaker 3:But it's When you guys do stuff where you did you said something the other day, there was a guy who said you thought he was at a booth Yeah. At that incredible reinvention. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Reinvent. But he was really not at the booth, but the other guy was saying, oh, yeah. He's around here somewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's just Simon from Turbo Puffer.
Speaker 3:You you could pretend to be in the booth all of the time. I I do find that the the people in general are really nice. There's a a code Yeah. Of niceness here. That's almost, like, written in, and it's so non New York.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But I like it.
Speaker 1:What about when you when you can't be perfectly nice because things just aren't going well for a CEO? And and maybe you I always think back to that interview you did with Tim Cook. It was about a decade ago. They'd missed I think they'd missed earnings, and and the stock was selling off, and you needed to ask the hard question
Speaker 3:No. You do.
Speaker 1:What the re what the what the street was saying, but you didn't wanna, you know, come at them too aggressively. How do you think about that?
Speaker 3:What's very funny? Yeah. I often go over these with my wife who's my partner. Okay? And I'll say, look, I wanna be gracious.
Speaker 3:Does this sound gracious? No. You're killing it. About I add this? She goes, oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's great. You're me about your arresting about his wife. I mean, I 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, sir.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Okay? Okay. A woman comes on and and says, look We we had a founder
Speaker 2:who said that he was making, you know, 30 he was basically selling a product for $30,000, and he was telling customers, we have so much demand. I can't support you. And then a minute later, he was like, well, we've expanded capacity so much. And I was like, well, why don't you call the people you told you didn't have capacity?
Speaker 1:It's crazy. It's a free fire You nailed them. Free fire and
Speaker 2:and it's like I don't know. I 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.
Speaker 2:Right? That that that if you if you have respect for a person, it means you're gonna be fair. Right? You're not they're not your enemy. You're just trying to have a real conversation Well to understand.
Speaker 2: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 wanna you wanna have people You wanna invite people on that you're genuinely excited to have a conversation with, even if you might be a little bearish, might be might be more bullish. Right?
Speaker 3:Well, let's talk about Benioff. I'm interviewing him tonight. Yeah. The previous quarter, I did not like. Okay?
Speaker 3:And he came on like gangbusters that it was a great quarter. Mhmm. And that caused me to do something I don't like to do, which is interrupt mid sentence. Because someone's talking and it we all we grew up thinking, our mothers told us that would be rude. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So now I'm into the rude element. Right? And first he thinks that the rude element is a bit of for show. Yeah. It's like, oh, he's a little Broadway action.
Speaker 3:No. It was like, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying what you're selling.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then like in the middle of it, thought that Mark realized, geez, I think think Jim Crow's a big quarter. And then by the end of it, said, wow, Kramer hates me. No. It's not. It's not.
Speaker 3:I don't hate anybody. Right? But the fact is is that this quarter What's the quarter I was waiting for?
Speaker 2:Have you had with Benioff live on air? Probably Oh, probably.
Speaker 3:Fifty, hundred? Maybe, yeah. Probably probably I guess fifty, sixty. Yeah. But I I there was a period during the during the I was gonna call it the plague.
Speaker 3:I talk to him every day. Every day. Well, we were trying to develop a contest to develop the best masks.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it it it got waylaid, but we just wanted awareness.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. So you're working together on a project.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But but I look. I do I I've identified him as a friend. Yeah. Because he came to my he was one of the, I guess, two CEOs that came to my wedding, and there were 500 Only two.
Speaker 2:People there. Only two? That's a small club.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And with 503 people, you figured just throw a stony at a couple
Speaker 1:of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta gotta ask for you.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry. You guys are exciting. Okay? No. You're exciting.
Speaker 2:You are you are so you are genuinely people 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 are we make the business every day.
Speaker 3:And I see it. And and
Speaker 2:and we tell people like, do you do you think you see Kramer, you don't think he loves what he does? And that's exactly what we want to do. Yeah. We love we love we love that we get to meet up every day and talk about the stuff that we're interested in.
Speaker 3:Well, you see
Speaker 2:And I can see doing it for decades and decades and decades. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:I mean,
Speaker 2:it's a
Speaker 3:little like my buddy Shefter Yeah. For an ESPN. Shefter couldn't stop no matter what. I mean, every time he looks at somebody, he see he's thinking about is that person gonna do a trade. Yeah.
Speaker 3:He said, what's that person thinking? Yeah. But most of the people are just kinda, okay, I'm on TV.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I my executive producer, Regina Gilpin, always says there's two kinds of people. There's people who are on TV because they wanna be on TV, and then there's people who are on TV because they have something to say.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you guys have something to say. Yeah. And what I love about it is is that you have much better BS detector. Not to be like, I know that sounds prosaic, but the fact is, I'll I'll hear that Amazon's chip Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is the best in the world from Amazon. Yeah. And I'll say, 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 But said it.
Speaker 5:Jared's a good guy.
Speaker 3:Even Amazon, my book came.
Speaker 2:So, yes. So obviously, anything anything in chip space is tough. But even harder and I think something that maybe the East Coast hasn't been quite as tapped into is determining which hard tech and deep tech companies are real. Right. Because there's there's there's a lot of companies that are the West Coast calls them like render companies.
Speaker 2:They make really cool visual sci fi experiences and then nothing ever comes to fruition. And so
Speaker 1:That stuff.
Speaker 2: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. Can if a company gets to series d and they haven't had a single tier one ever invest or This participate
Speaker 3:is what you
Speaker 2:know this
Speaker 3:so well. Yeah. I mean, like, people say, well, it was a series c blah blah blah. I'm, like, thinking series c. Okay.
Speaker 3:Like, that was didn't I take that exam to be able to walk on the floor? But you have you you speak the language, and you but you don't make it so I can't learn the language. You you want me you want me to learn language. Just terrific. I have going for me history.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's my edge. So for instance, today Micron got out of the what I've the most consumer. Now I've been begging them to get out of the consumer from for for actually literally for twenty years. Wow.
Speaker 3:Because they have a high end and then they have the the low end, and the low end gives them the 10 mobile. The bottom high end gives them the 20 mobile. And I've been talking to Sanjay, whom I really like. And it's like I'm like, Sanjay, you have to, like, do this. And he's like, Jim, I don't need to do it.
Speaker 3:And so today he does it, the stock's down 12. So I text him, I said, come on. He goes, I'm in quiet. And I'm like, oh, and I wrote, I'm not in quiet. I think you're fabulous.
Speaker 3:But that's because I remember the '95 break breakdown where the Yeah. What happened is is that that old bit piece of capital goods equipment came out that could make a little more than we needed for the of the memory chips and then it And goes like his stock had been number one and then lit 500 number one do
Speaker 2:you remember some of this stuff better than the CEOs and the management teams? Yeah. Always.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. If it's the '90 absolutely. If it's the nineties. Like for Intel, I speak with them? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, look, not I'm an idiot of bogs
Speaker 1:and and there's new leadership and
Speaker 3:stuff. Yeah. I would tell you, like, I forgot my anniversary of my wife's my wife's birthday. But I remember the the September in '95. Sure.
Speaker 3:But that's because it's all wrong. I have a memory for some things.
Speaker 1:It's all wrong.
Speaker 3:And they're the wrong things except for when we're here. What are
Speaker 2:they doing
Speaker 3:out there? You put it as your salad. It must be the truth. You guys should go light the tree at six.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We love it. Yeah. The show will be wrapped up by then. Okay.
Speaker 1:So one thing later one
Speaker 2:thing later with with Benioff, you gotta you gotta ask him about token consumption because he came out
Speaker 3:with trillion.
Speaker 2:It was 3,200,000,000,000.0. Yeah. 200,000,000,000.0. Was it three or one?
Speaker 3:I don't know. 3.2,
Speaker 2:I think. But it sounds like a big number. But it's not. Other companies, there was AlphaSense. Yes.
Speaker 2:Somebody at AlphaSense was sharing. They were sharing that they use around half the tokens. Obviously, not quite in the same scale much you know, Jensen
Speaker 3:wouldn't give you Jensen wouldn't give you that rap. I mean, I remember when he did a a me on when I walked in, there was me. And he said, look, this was you you don't know how many tokens we used. And all it really came down to, there was a show at that point, mayor of Easttown, but there's a new one called Task. And all that Jensen wanted to talk about was when he was doing me Mhmm.
Speaker 3:How hard that Philadelphia lilt was at the end. And Kate Kate Winslow said the same thing. This man is da Vinci. He knows acting. He knows plays.
Speaker 3:He knows you know, he's a well rounded guy, but all he does now
Speaker 2:is like Got good taste in jackets.
Speaker 3:Uh-uh. But how about all the stuff he has to talk about?
Speaker 2:How how have you been processing all, you know, everybody competing to say the biggest number? Right?
Speaker 3:Oh, god. I have a piece tonight that starts and I mentioned you guys right at the top because I'm like
Speaker 1:We thank you.
Speaker 3:No. Because like I say that Yeah. That this is what you guys do, and I don't want to do it. Wait. Because I can't.
Speaker 3:I can't do it like you. You don't wanna aspire to be someone who's not as good as you. Hey, I came in there I'm not as good as Jordy. What a day. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But your wife doesn't wanna hear that when you come in. You know, John was like, was so embarrassed. John happened to be no, but but but when you're in these situations, you don't wanna be in, well, next week, OpenAI's got a new chat GPT that's better than Gemini if you just said holy yes, Gemini's the best. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You don't wanna be in that world, and yet, guys know that that world is fluid.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And I don't wanna be in a world where suddenly I'm gonna give you example. Broadcom is a general contractor for a lot of these chips. Yep. But, you know, what's the general contractors? Does that work?
Speaker 3:Does that mean that they really had a lot of say? I don't know. You guys would literally know what it means to to be what Broadcom is in the chain. Yeah. I, on the other hand, am saying, hey, Broadcom's going big because of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. One is like, hey, you know what? I think that one's no line and one is a line. Yeah. Hey, know, guess what?
Speaker 3:I think I I I think the Patriots have a better chance than, you know, than than the Cleveland. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. That's why there's a line.
Speaker 3:You guys set the line. Mhmm. Okay? I'm money line on everything.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. We know we know we know our lane too. Mean, from being from the being from the West Coast and coming from a private markets background, we focus on market cap. You focus on stock price, how the stock is moving day to day. We, I think, are much more, we're much more focused on Quickly.
Speaker 2:Product side.
Speaker 1:What is the most underrated sound on your sound board?
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:What what do we got that's underrated?
Speaker 3:On mine, right now, I go through
Speaker 1:my throat.
Speaker 3:I I happen to think there's there's a sound right at the at the bottom right Yes. Which was from off which was from Office Depot.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:That was easy. That was easy. But that's well, that was when the show started. People just say like, what was that? I don't remember that.
Speaker 3:But I think it's so cool, but like people are saying like, what what is that? Was that a chain or something? And so it's it's it's become a relic, but it's gold release.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to keep the lore going. I mean, we are
Speaker 2:You know what this sound is? That's that's Call of Duty Call of Duty. Going on. Because a lot we of we grew up on Call of Duty.
Speaker 1:I still don't understand why he does that one such thing.
Speaker 3:I grew up on Palm.
Speaker 1:Okay. Right? I Palm was
Speaker 3:incredible until Donkey Kong.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, Donkey Kong was incredible. These things were incredible because they replaced crossword puzzles and tic tac toe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right. Twitch. Who owns Twitch?
Speaker 1:Amazon. Amazon. Of course. We gotta get Andy Jassy on Twitch. You what?
Speaker 1:I wanted to do post earnings on Twitch live.
Speaker 2:You know what? Is so
Speaker 1:Mark Zuckerberg's on Instagram doing front facing videos. Get Andy Jassy on Twitch. Andy Jassy.
Speaker 3:Something for no. He's got no salary cap. It's on the label. God. Right?
Speaker 3:Everyone else had this kind of son of a bunch of salary cap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It doesn't exist. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Thought Howard Rosemuth is good. No. He sucks compared to Zuckerberg because he's got this salary cap.
Speaker 2:You know, you know, some some something interesting on the on the Amazon front.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:The train Trainium when they they were talking about
Speaker 3:Not so good.
Speaker 2:No. No. When they're talking about their new specifically they were specifically mentioned doing a training run for a company called Descartes. Dean, the founder of they do they do real time video and they're working with a lot of Twitch streamers. So that that that that training run felt meaningful and I don't think a lot of people picked up on that.
Speaker 1:Something moving That's
Speaker 3:a good example of what I would describe as why I'm you know, look, I never lose sight that I'm a generalist. Because I wouldn't know that. Sure. The same way that I wouldn't necessarily know Yeah. If we were doing steel the steel companies.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Whether something's cold rolled or hot rolled. Cold rolled is a good high multiple and hot rolled is a lot. You know, the steel is steel.
Speaker 1:I do.
Speaker 3:And so you always have to be really careful
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 3:Knowing knowing that you don't know certain
Speaker 1:things. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, I I wouldn't if there are certain specs put out
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:On ASIC Yeah. Google, I I I have to be very careful because when I listen to what, you know, what Andy Chasseel called me, he'll school me. And he'll be right to school me because I don't know enough.
Speaker 1:Who's the next Mark Benioff in the sense of a CEO that you could see yourself just enjoying interviewing?
Speaker 3:Okay. I'm gonna give you a crazy one. I'm I'm gonna give you a crazy one because I it's it's gonna be I have to make it so it's enjoying. I haven't gotten it yet. It's Levchen.
Speaker 2:Oh. Max Levchen. We go. I intend to get him You gotta talk him about espresso. Espresso.
Speaker 1:We're talking about coffee. He's obsessed with coffee.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We'll send you
Speaker 3:the clip.
Speaker 1:You're kidding. Yeah. Yeah. This is alpha. I
Speaker 3:didn't know.
Speaker 1:That's shit. Another show talking about shit. And and he also likes long long distance biking and riding.
Speaker 2:Oh my god. But he's
Speaker 3:healthy. He's not carp.
Speaker 2:He doesn't want tough thing. You got a three minute segment. It's hard to spend it's hard to spend three minutes
Speaker 3:talking about more time because I didn't know he I didn't know he had that side. I know he cares passionately about Ukraine. I know that he cares passionately more importantly about making people who who should get credit in a country where you still have to care about democracy. He's the Yeah. He said, you know, get everyone's a well, I'm democratizing.
Speaker 3:I'm democratizing blue jeans, you know. Yeah. I'm democratizing t shirts. No. He's democratizing capital.
Speaker 3:And why not? Yeah. His his algo is better.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I just think he's that's the guy I intend to be able to get him out of his. It's not a shell. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2:What I think I think my sense was like the conversation for us, we had thirty minutes. Right? You're you don't have the luxury of having that much time with with some of these guests. But some some people take a while to warm up and that's why that's why that's why traditional blood counts are
Speaker 1:so great. Bunch of pre calls, get to know someone, then Right. Hop on and even if it's a shorter segment, you can you can do it.
Speaker 3:Good. That's a
Speaker 2:goal then.
Speaker 3:It's a goal. And the reason I wanna do it is I find him Yeah. Completely fascinating. He came on the show when the stock I told him, come on the show when you think it's gonna break out, will you? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Who's going down? He said, 33 came on the show and I said, well, I 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.
Speaker 3:They never come back. They're like, oh, well Jim, that's you. It all there. He said, no, the stock's now done going down. And I was like, at the end of the interview, I said, that was a gutsy call.
Speaker 3:And he goes, what? I said, that is done going down. He goes, why is that gutsy? There's my guy.
Speaker 1:That's extremely gutsy. Yeah. That's extremely gutsy. Love it. It's been.
Speaker 1:I love it. How do you think about about market structure, oligopolies, monopolies? Because the real interesting How do you think about a market like that?
Speaker 3:Alright. So I I'm out of the closet in this one, so I'm just gonna 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. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because monopolies monopolies just they've got gross margin. I just want big gross margins. Yep. Nothing like did you guys ever read Rockefeller by Chernow?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The guy had a 100%. He won't bring in a 100% of the oil market.
Speaker 1:You know,
Speaker 3:that's my guy. And when they broke it up, they created just a huge amount of wealth. But no, I I I look for Menopolis Yeah. Or and I'm happy with Oligopolos. Like, right now, Linde Linde, which is an energy company Sure.
Speaker 3:Industrial gas and and their products. They are they are slap happy duopoly right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they should be raising prices. They're like not being good duopolists. But that's Yeah. You know, it's kind
Speaker 1:of I just always take so much away from the Uber and Lyft saga that I sort of grew up with. I might be overfitting to that.
Speaker 3:You know, our Postmates.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like Postmates. Weren't they weren't they acquired in? Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. By Hooper. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Love yeah. Bastian Bastian's the man.
Speaker 3:Bastian's the first guy to come on and give me a hat. I said, how do I do that? He goes, that's called swag. What do I do with swag? When you put it on your head.
Speaker 1:Shocker. Shocker. How have
Speaker 2:you been processing Google then? Because Google
Speaker 3:Google. Get this. Mhmm. 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 gonna take put Google in the same bed that James Cobb was in in the show Misery. Sure.
Speaker 3:You know, we're gonna hobble him. And he said, listen, we're gonna hobble him. I mean, like, know, make it so he can't walk. Yeah. That's it.
Speaker 3:And I took him seriously. Yeah. And I spoke to Google's attorney who was, of course, much smarter than Mhmm. Than the justice department. But I believed the justice department.
Speaker 3:I thought that they were gonna wreck the company. And they kept saying over and over again, and we're not gonna let it be like Microsoft. Mhmm. You know, we let Microsoft off. This is not.
Speaker 3:And I got nervous, and I I didn't I didn't panic, but when you have the judge department over and over saying, listen. Don't why are you saying these things? You don't know what's gonna happen to them. And then you get a judge who finds them a monopolist, like, man, I gotta get out of this thing. This is bad news.
Speaker 3: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 20,000,000,000 to knock out everybody else. I was dead. I was dead. I was flat, I was roadkill.
Speaker 3:It didn't matter. Whatever I did was Ryan. Since then, all I do is look at it and I'm stupid. I'm stupid. I'm stupid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the real the real thing that hasn't played out yet is like what happens if we do end up with a duopoly in search. Right? A lot of people, mean, Chateapedia, it's 800,000,000. We they may
Speaker 3:you know, they don't have the balance sheet. You guys, every Niall Ferguson pity war Yeah. Well, that is about whoever has the deepest bond market wins.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Essential money. I mean, he's got Yeah. Bond market is better for the other guys.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, this is a question for you because it felt it felt like well, I felt very comfortable covering the AI horse race, the
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:The foundation model race from a technology's perspective, from a venture capital perspective. But once the discussion moved to is there enough private credit, is Blue Owl gonna underwrite these right at these right levels, You know, we're 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 if a story kind of leaves your orbit? Do you just bring in people on to understand?
Speaker 1:Well, mean, yeah. All the time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and it's funny because I have a general show Yeah. And I'm always afraid to bring the balance sheet up for people to say, you know, geez, I wanna see what's on The Price is Right. I mean, there's, like, dial anywhere but that. Oh, friends.
Speaker 3:There's friends. Yeah. Know, they look for old old Seinfelds versus me talking about the balance. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. We have to
Speaker 2:do for some people out there, that's that's their Super Bowl. Right? They they love they love it.
Speaker 3:Right? So But look, get a kick out of the idea that, you know, that Oracle gets involved Yeah. And that Larry Ellison, who is one of the toughest guys on earth Yeah. Who's never made a mistake, and Safra Katz has never made a mistake, are getting involved. And then Safra leaves, and the Feet says she leaves because she doesn't want what's happening to the balance sheet or her precious balance sheet at Oracle, which is not that good to begin with.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So that's a good story for me because Has Larry did You know him?
Speaker 2:No. He's never been on the show. He follows TBPN.
Speaker 3:He does?
Speaker 1:He does. He followed early.
Speaker 2:He's not No. But but what what was your relationship like with
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:With Larry? Did he come on
Speaker 3:to Deepgram? Larry? No. No. Never.
Speaker 3:He doesn't no. And and like I've tried repeatedly my knees. I mean
Speaker 1:He doesn't do a
Speaker 2:lot of knees.
Speaker 3: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 is such a good football team?
Speaker 1:Oh. I mean, you have no idea. I honestly
Speaker 2:don't know
Speaker 1:enough about sports.
Speaker 2:People people have used the ESPN attack on us, but it's funny because I've I've I've maybe I've genuinely know. Watch yeah. Maybe I've watched, like, an hour of sports in the last
Speaker 1:What do you read into the co CEOs? When you see something like
Speaker 3:Co CEO?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, having an oracle.
Speaker 3:Where's my
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 3:No. I co CEO.
Speaker 1:Do need to interim, basically?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's just really hard.
Speaker 1:Does it happen in Sequoia Capital now? And that's obviously a big focus of ours of
Speaker 3:our world. Benioff was co CEO with Keith with Keith Block. That was just suboptimal situation. Yeah. We got the co CEOs now at Oracle.
Speaker 3:Let's see what happens.
Speaker 1:Netflix is not
Speaker 3:I think it's hard unless you can have really defined duties like they had at Workday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But but otherwise, no. Yeah. It's not something I really want wanna see. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How are you feeling about the IPO market?
Speaker 3:I think it's it's too robust. We're a lot of junk. Uh-huh. 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 Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's really dangerous. I I look. I don't wanna protect anybody from investing in anything because everybody has a right to invest in everybody. 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 views instead of four. I mean, look at it.
Speaker 3:You know, you you you price it at 15, it opens at 24, and then you wait six months and you sell every share.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:And that's what I'm afraid of.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's what
Speaker 1:I'm afraid of. Are biotech companies taking taking advantage of the AI narrative, or is there a particularly different narrative?
Speaker 3:No. I think there's there's just been a lot of well, I shouldn't say it. There's been
Speaker 1:because that's starting to bubble up in in tech in Silicon Valley, folks saying, hey. In the future, drug discovery is gonna be accelerated. The timeline's gonna be way shorter. It's gonna the economics are gonna be completely different.
Speaker 3:But this the big companies are just they're just sales companies because when you go to the unbelievably cool, great person
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Who does health care and, you know, in NVIDIA, say. Yeah. That person doesn't they're not you know, Bristol Myers isn't get me here. Get me here. It's not those guys.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's not those guys. And it really bothers me because if you're gonna accelerate what's going on with cancer, okay, so that you can do, you know, look at every single data point and know everything within five minutes, you should be able to come up with the holy grail drug, blood test. They're getting a blood test for prostate cancer, saw a guy down here saying that today, he's gonna become public a hoe. But they should be using it, and we should be making far more progress than we're doing in healthcare.
Speaker 3:It's just, you know, when Jensen came on with Synopsys, I mean, it's pretty clear they're doing digital twin. By the way, know, I thought the digital twin would have been good with with vision with VisionPro, but I guess relic. Yeah. But I I do think that that's the missing link. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think if anybody does it, it's gonna be Lily and Dave Ricks because he can get outside himself and think about some ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like him a lot. You do? Has he been
Speaker 3:on the show? No. Not yet. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's a I'm trying get a trillion dollars in the long time. We rang
Speaker 3:the Gong.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you We rang the Gong forum. You've as a Ricks? Because he hit a trillion dollar valuation.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Wasn't that great?
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Walmart's at 900. Oh, there's bunch of That guy Doug McMillan, the guy's retiring. I mean, cratered the stock when he came in. He gave huge bonuses when you leave.
Speaker 1:I mean
Speaker 2:You wanna create her when you leave.
Speaker 1:Have you been
Speaker 2:to Walmart lately? There's an interesting
Speaker 1:there's an interesting bull case for Walmart is that they are leaning in with ChatGPT while Amazon's leaning out. And so if the agentic commerce thing happens and people are just opening up their phone and saying, hey. Order. It will probably be routed through Walmart in the short term. Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So at Etsy and Walmart have leaned a partnership somewhere.
Speaker 2:But Etsy and Walmart have leaned in. EBay and Amazon have leaned out.
Speaker 1:Out. Wow.
Speaker 3:And that's that's they had a good quarter as she had a bad quarter. Amazon, we know.
Speaker 2:What do think?
Speaker 1:And so and so it's the it's the laggards in the markets that are that are trying to catch up by saying, hey. They're taking a bet. Maybe we missed the, you know, the real power line
Speaker 3:coming in. Thought it was interesting in Costco's Yeah. Yeah. Deep into Agent Force. Do you think Mark's gonna rename the company Agent Force?
Speaker 3:This is my first question to Look at all the different silos. Go to the page 18 Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:On the
Speaker 1:deck Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And there it is. 17 agents. It's like everything's agent. You know, all the different silos Well, the big
Speaker 1:big questions.
Speaker 3:Is all called agent.
Speaker 2:But the thing is he's still hiring salespeople like crazy.
Speaker 1:Do think Mark Zuckerberg is gonna rename Meta? Did you see the rumor today? That's But he's just gonna call it
Speaker 3:He's not a rename. He just rename.
Speaker 2:That was the my whole thing is I think it's actually I think it's a good name. Actually is the metaverse. People spend so many hours in it. It doesn't matter that it's not in goggles. They're spending it on their phone.
Speaker 2:They're on their computer. It doesn't it doesn't matter that it's not in a heads up display yet.
Speaker 1:It is It's a universe with multiple touch points.
Speaker 2:It's like even adapted the app so it it is messaging focused. Yeah. It's not even like, it's hard to post content on Instagram.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's my metaphorical universe.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, maybe with Vera Rubin, they can do high speed video, a short ten second clip for an ad on Insta. Yeah. And that might work. I mean, right now, I would put it in Reddit. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Have you seen the rates for Reddit, the rate card? No. It's like a fraction, and it's very targeted, and it's really good. Reddit ads. Reddit ads are the cheapest bargain for any consumer package because you're right targeted.
Speaker 3:Like, my wife has this Mezcal business. Okay. Boom. There's like a mezcal love you. Melanoma.
Speaker 3:Sure. Melanoma. My daughter's unfortunately she beat it. But Yeah. That's like that's targeted targeted target.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:I really like that because the rates I told Huffman he's charging too little.
Speaker 1:Well, isn't he making money from selling data? He making a lot of money from selling data?
Speaker 3:Yes, he is. And then Cloudflare's doing their best to be able to block. Well, you did Cloudflare. You did the implications of of their Yeah. Did.
Speaker 3:See that there. Did Matthew not Don't call me Matt. Did he call you?
Speaker 2:He he came Matthew came out once. Right?
Speaker 3:Was he
Speaker 1:good? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he's great.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 5:he's real smart.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Hey. We should talk about, like, who's a, like, really good guess and who's bad. And they won't mention the name of the bad, but we'll just say the good, you know. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Guy
Speaker 2:He said a major consumer team that you gotta have on. You gotta have the semi analysis team on.
Speaker 3:Oh, The piece was too long. The one that you told me to read, the 10,000 word. Yeah. That's too long. Was like, my god.
Speaker 3:Look at that. Look what's jet game. I gotta go watch it.
Speaker 2: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 he's absolutely the whole team there is absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1:They are. They're very good.
Speaker 3:They're really I trust them Yeah. Implicitly for when you have something on Jensen.
Speaker 2:Look at these two. You know, have you met Eric Lyman yet? Going after. Wow. You got John.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. John from that.
Speaker 3:26 Ramp. Yeah. That's that's isn't
Speaker 1:Series e. I'm serious. I'm serious. How many are going series g, series f? Jeez.
Speaker 1:People go really g.
Speaker 3:Up down round.
Speaker 1:Because people don't down round's bad. People don't like people don't like going public. Yeah. It's a hassle. They don't wanna deal with the SEC.
Speaker 1:They don't wanna wanna
Speaker 2:deal deal What the you think about if if Stripe Stripe stays private forever?
Speaker 3:Kyle? Johnny Callison? You'll be able to realize that. Was a great right fielder for the Philadelphia Phillies. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So he had home runs
Speaker 1:in the sixty four world founding sixty
Speaker 3:four Irish star game to win.
Speaker 2:So what do you think if a great American company stays private forever? Is that is that gonna bring serious?
Speaker 3:I mean, we've got
Speaker 1:We got mowers.
Speaker 3:The orange trucks that cut down all the trees. They've been private forever, and they're really, really rich. Private? Yeah. Companies.
Speaker 3:Don't know. Like, I think if you're public, you have to there's some slings and arrows.
Speaker 1:I gotta answer to
Speaker 3:you. No.
Speaker 1:You're more likely to get talked about on
Speaker 3:that money.
Speaker 2:Mean, look at me.
Speaker 1:Stocks moving.
Speaker 3:Well, it's know, it's even when you have a Wells Fargo and the guy comes on Yeah. And he's got this like all these flowery coats. They had quotes at the beginning about Lombardi. The Bucks Lombardi was always saying, listen, if there's a mistake, there's me. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then the first thing he says is, you know, actually, there there were these employees that did it bad and you know, don't pay attention. I was like, no, you you you say that you're showing us How do you see that?
Speaker 2:How do you get off your talking point, off their talking point? Because that's I would say like the only the only thing that guests that we don't like they guess that we don't
Speaker 1:The worst guests are the ones that are trying to get in rescripted lines and and and just that's the only time that we don't like doing the show.
Speaker 3:I I had one the other day who was doing it and I made a joke. And I stopped, and it was just like, I said that was a joke. Now, the the and the person didn't laugh and went right on the talking points. Yeah. I interviewed Jensen, and he says he's doing the talking, but he's saying something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and I I make a joke. Yeah. And he has a saying, and I said, by the way, that was a joke. Goes, you know, I was laughing on the inside. Boom.
Speaker 2:My god.
Speaker 3:See, that guy can do it all. He can do it all.
Speaker 1:He's laughing.
Speaker 3:He's just you know, what do
Speaker 2:you do with
Speaker 3:a guy who's lovable? And you're trying to be tough.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're
Speaker 3:trying to be you really wanna nail him. You know, it's like and then he's just charming. Yeah. Charming is the end of look, talking points and charm are those are the like, the sole encryptives that we have to
Speaker 2:really avoid. Yeah. Right? Funny story with Jensen. We were in we were in DC and we were sitting there talking with Shane Copeland from Polymarket who has a partnership with ICE.
Speaker 2:And Jensen came in and and and Shane goes, hey. I'm I'm hey, good to meet you. Like and he's like Jensen's like, oh, what are doing? He's like, I'm the CEO of Polymarket. And Jensen doesn't he doesn't know it.
Speaker 2:And Shane afterwards, he's like, oh, I gotta work harder. I gotta
Speaker 3:work harder. Well, that's him, man. He gets him before. He does the emails. And now he probably sets it at three forty five and
Speaker 2:Wait. You genetically just need less sleep?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's going on? How is this possible?
Speaker 3:Eat Well,
Speaker 2:you just There's a handful. It's like some five percent of the population can just thrive on like four hours.
Speaker 3:Okay. Well, here's okay. So because I'm we're not on air, I'll tell you what the things I take. So I take Klonopin, I take I take melatonin, and I take a gummy, and I can't stay asleep. See, it's it has to do with staying asleep.
Speaker 1:How much
Speaker 3:more do I take? I can't keep them because these are all like illegal substances to some degree. Now they're actually controlled substances. But I I I that's what I do to be able to stay asleep to quarter of
Speaker 2:So it's more about trying to stay asleep. It's That's
Speaker 3:what it is. Long as
Speaker 2:you can.
Speaker 3:Time it is. Went to bed seven minutes ago. I gotta get I get
Speaker 2:a picture of my Apple Watch set up with like
Speaker 3:different alerts on pictures of my wife.
Speaker 2:What about what about It's great.
Speaker 3:It's wedding pictures. They're incredible. Making some sauce.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 3:Woah. Yeah. Oh, that's my wife. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Incredible. She doesn't watch
Speaker 3:anything that I do.
Speaker 1:Tell us about the was the process
Speaker 3:The was about trying to get it so that people could, let's say, listen to you. Yeah. And say, know what? These guys really seem to like so and so. I'll go and chat.
Speaker 3:I'll go on Gemini three. I'm gonna learn about it, and maybe I own a share. Right now, that's striking verboten. People feel if you if you do more than own an index fund, you're you know, you don't know what you're doing. Yep.
Speaker 3:I come back and say the information is never ease been easier to find. All these people 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Or otherwise, we just think, you know what? All that information that you guys put out doesn't mean anything. And it can't be like that. We can't make people feel stupid.
Speaker 3: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 and buy a share. Why is that heresy?
Speaker 2:So allocation too. Take 10 take 10% of your assets That's it. And invest in things that you're interested in.
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 3: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. I know people say, Jim, you you say that they people should own individual stocks, but over and over again, it's been proven that that's stupid. And I said, like, I I was I worked with private wealth. I've seen people make tens of millions of dollars. So what we end up doing, we have a millionaire's lunch with Jensen.
Speaker 3:You know, firefighters, police
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:People who listen. Now, some of them were because because I named my dog Nvidia. Yeah. Well, that worked out actually was pretty that the lots of people got it. Was dollar dollar at 90 when it was I told I said, they said I told Jensen.
Speaker 3:He says, no one knows me. What's going on? So you know what? I'm like doing this stuff, and it's
Speaker 1:like It's not rocket. Bally's at the top.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I got your back. I got your back. And I said, listen, I just came back from California. I gotta tell you, I had this dog named Everest.
Speaker 3:Uh-uh. No more. The dog is NVIDIA. Oh, And know that's why like I keep you know,
Speaker 1:there was
Speaker 3:a police officer who came to the show. He goes, look, I bought a millionaire. I bought NVIDIA. Said, when? Goes, when when you you named your dog NVIDIA.
Speaker 2:And I said, well,
Speaker 3:do you know really kinda what it does? He goes, well, you named your dog after. You don't name your dog after something if you think it's a fly by night thing. Boom. Right?
Speaker 2:That's an amazing story.
Speaker 3:Can I stay on forever?
Speaker 1:I wish. We would love you.
Speaker 3:They're chewing up.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 3:it's European people. These people are warm.
Speaker 1:It's European people. No. Let's this make this thing. This was Oh, I was you
Speaker 3:know, honestly, you guys are what I hope would occur, okay? I kinda always hoped that this would occur, but I didn't know who would do it. This would occur, meaning a sophisticated show, but that didn't take yourselves too seriously where I could learn, and it hadn't occurred until you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. And I
Speaker 3:was almost like, I always thought, what did people they they would they have to just make trillions? They can't stop and have some fun and tell us things? But you came. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You happened. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the fact that you happened, I okay. I'm gonna be the only time I wanna be a little immodest. I like to think that maybe in some way you happened because like somebody sometime you just saw me.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Of I think that you are you're not two point o. You're you're sui generous.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 3:But I just feel like that you Absolutely. That it has occurred and that people you're another reason why the
Speaker 2:book's right. Yeah. You're on our Mount Rushmore media. There's four of them. But you're the biggest.
Speaker 3:Why, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 3:so Doing what you're doing. You're just you're just electric.
Speaker 1:There we go. Me also tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Our next guest is Eric Lyman from Ramp, from the Ramp Business Corporation.
Speaker 1:An electric moment. What a fun time.
Speaker 2:A goat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's a goat. My goat. He's a fantastic performer. He's been in front of a camera before.
Speaker 1:He's an entertainer. He's an entertainer. If there's ever been
Speaker 2:He's doing TV putting
Speaker 1:in the ten thousand hours gets you good results. It's obvious.
Speaker 2:He's doing he's doing this is he's doing TV at least four times today. He's doing his show three times.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. He hopped on Yeah. Yeah. To our stream. I mean, he's I I mean, twenty years of of Mad Money, he must be he must be well past ten thousand hours on on camera.
Speaker 2:I and I think it isn't it thirty years in television?
Speaker 1:It it well well, so Squatbox has been on for thirty Yeah. And and Mad Money for twenty, which is remarkable. Well, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, developing fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 2:That's right. Stingers. Darren Rovel is sharing apparently, somebody is claiming that a Google insider has been trading on search markets. They're saying somebody's 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.
Speaker 2:Is win. Darren Rovel says, this is what happens, what will continue to happen when unregulated markets are bet on as if they are regulated. Here's the thing. They are regulated by the CFTC. Yep.
Speaker 2:And their
Speaker 1:base trading is illegal. Like, I I was looking this up, because we were talking to Tarek and Kalshi about this, and, and I just wanted to know more. And, apparently, like, let's say that you just are trading corn futures and you just happen to know that there's going to be, like, a major blight in the corn markets. Yeah. And so you go and trade if you have insider information that someone missed their harvest or something, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can actually get in trouble for trading for doing insider trading even in commodities. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, yeah,
Speaker 1:you would think, like, what what what private information
Speaker 2:issue is prediction markets become more accurate when insiders are trading on it. And so it's like this weird And
Speaker 1:so Brian Armstrong was kind of laying out the the bull the bull case for insider
Speaker 2:interesting example of an admiral at sea.
Speaker 1:I mean, yes. It was it was sort of a bad yesterday. I liked his I like that he's being philosophical about it. I mean, I feel like all the crypto OGs are very philosophical in their analysis, and I think that that can be sort of clipped out of context to be
Speaker 2:like
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:something we need to figure out. It is. Something we need to figure out is happening.
Speaker 1:And he's also been in that like, you know, I think what people forget about Brian is that, like, he was in the legal gray area for like a decade. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where where where he had
Speaker 2:he was board.
Speaker 1:He was born in it. Where he was on stage a lot. And when he was on stage, people would ask him, like, okay. Do you think do you think Bitcoin should be a commodity or a stock or something? And you have to be like, well, theoretically, here's this.
Speaker 1:Further ado without further ado, we have Eric Lyman from the Ramp Business Club. Look at this.
Speaker 3:Good to
Speaker 5:see Great to see you too.
Speaker 2:I can't believe you made a sweater just for a ramp investor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Whole thing incredible. What is this? They're doing it.
Speaker 2:What are guys?
Speaker 1:You lighting outside? Yeah. Holidays are here.
Speaker 5:What is this? They're among us.
Speaker 2:Should we open this on? Should we open this on
Speaker 1:Barclay x ramp collab It's sweater?
Speaker 5:I'm pumped. It's it's been a strong season, and I have a feeling it's gonna get a lot stronger.
Speaker 1:I love that. And you got the yellow socks on too. Of course. You look fantastic.
Speaker 2:Fantastic to see you.
Speaker 1:How many of these exist in the world?
Speaker 5:Not not enough. Yeah. I think probably Limited merch. Wow.
Speaker 1:Look at this too. Yellow matches.
Speaker 5:Light fire.
Speaker 1:I don't I don't know if we can
Speaker 2:Reduce your can actually start a fire
Speaker 1:in the next safe. We won't do it. Will. Put this out enjoy them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, they're even saying that we we might not be able to have a very loud speaker for our sound board because of rules on the stock exchange. Like, there are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do because, like, they're serious business out
Speaker 5:of Well, you guys have, like, a deep partnership now. Do now. Can we ask Lynn if this can be the first show to enjoy a lot, like a scented candle?
Speaker 1:A scented candle. Yes. Yes. Yes. But I would I would definitely ask for permission with this one.
Speaker 1:I would not be caught dead begging for forgiveness. Okay. No
Speaker 2:chance. No chance. It's How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Buy the book here. I'm doing great. Yes. I'm I'm doing great and
Speaker 1:New we're York City. Remind me how ramp wound up in New York City. You're not from New York City.
Speaker 5:It's, well, this is the capital of capitals.
Speaker 1:So you had to be here.
Speaker 5:You know, this is, we're exactly. I love that that eagle sign.
Speaker 1:But but, you know, steel man this for me. One of your investors might say that this is memetic desire to wind up in the capital of capital. Why not be the contrarian and and build a fintech company somewhere else?
Speaker 5:Look. For I remember we we our last company, we had gone out west. It was YC demo day.
Speaker 1:Oh, you did.
Speaker 5:Yes. You
Speaker 1:went through YC.
Speaker 5:We went we went through there, and I remember towards the end of Y Combinator, we told the partners that we were gonna be moving back to New York and several of looked at us like we had a
Speaker 4:hole in our head.
Speaker 5:But we did it.
Speaker 1:Were you hearing roommates during YC?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course. Of course.
Speaker 5:You know, those were tough times. Yeah. I remember we we lived on Sandhill Circle.
Speaker 1:Sandhill Circle?
Speaker 5:All at the time, we don't cook all that well. Yeah. We knew about Seamless and the sad part was there were only two restaurants on Seamless.
Speaker 2:And so like gonna do today?
Speaker 1:What are
Speaker 2:we gonna do? It was
Speaker 5:terrible. We we lost a lot of weight that summer. It was times were tough and then at the very end we discovered DoorDash and Yeah. We realized there were in fact ways. Okay.
Speaker 5:But I I remember I I had kind of liked the West Coast and Kareem said you can stay out here but I'm going. I said okay we're going. That resolved it.
Speaker 1:You understand
Speaker 2:The the the New York is I feel like celebrates the entrepreneur, the person that's just trying to make make something in the world. Yep. And it's slightly I'd San Francisco celebrates the earnest hacker. Paul Graham yesterday and and that's kind of the the y c ethos and it's like probably one of the most important archetypes in the world. Right?
Speaker 2: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 the earnest builder.
Speaker 5:I so I think that glosses over a lot of what happened in the Valley over the past ten years. Mhmm. What I observed from a lot of my peers who had gone through that accelerator funded companies during that era
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Was the average person they hired stayed there for about twelve months. It was an incredible mercenary culture. The San Francisco and West Coast of 2015 through twenty twenty something, we can debate kind of the year
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Was not this like, you know, earnest hacker. Two people in a garage. It had become very very corporatized. Commercialized. And everyone who was out there, I 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.
Speaker 2:When And people were, I feel like, in some ways, taking a portfolio approach. They're like, well, if startups are risky, why don't I work at four startups over four years?
Speaker 1:That that that if you just graduate, like, you know, on regularly on time from a good college, by the time you're 32 and maybe trying to buy a house, you can I've done four three, four year vests. Yes. That's a crazy thing to be like, yeah. I got some options over here vested at 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.
Speaker 1:The goal is to go on a generational run.
Speaker 5:So build something that matters. And like, when we came back to New York look, I I think it was maybe like Bob Ross would say a happy accident. Sure. Like, when when you when you started hiring these people, we could punch way above our weight. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:If you wanted to work at a very fast growing venture backed startup seed series a, there was like three. Mhmm. And so we were able to find extraordinary people.
Speaker 2:There was there was I
Speaker 5: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. Yeah. Stripe was opening their offices.
Speaker 5:MongoDB. MongoDB. It's these these companies that were authentically built here in New York. MongoDB, Datadog, all the direct to consumer companies classically people who were in touch with culture, designers, marketers, people in 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 war.
Speaker 5:Lots of 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 wanted to live in
Speaker 2:New York. It's like the it's a great
Speaker 1:still a meme among AI researchers like, should I move to New York? Should I like get out of the hustle and bustle?
Speaker 2:Going to Hawaii different. Yeah. Maybe I can go over there.
Speaker 5:That's awesome. I I think that this was part of the secret of RAMP. Like we set out to go into be Mhmm. That definitive company where if you it was a goal that in in a few years time people would say like, you know, you ask a friend what is like the best fintech company Yep. In New York or people would think it's you gotta go to RAMP.
Speaker 5:That's where they like engineering seriously and we turn that into reality. I think that there's lots of other great companies in New York Yeah. Here, and coming up and accelerating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's
Speaker 5:great it's great we're
Speaker 1:here. Yeah.
Speaker 2: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. And I was thinking, like, what a incredible luxury that is because when you're hiring at a relatively slow pace, you have so much time to, like, really get to know people. There's not, like, this pressure. How like, I'd be curious because I I don't think you've ever shared it on the show, your philosophy on hiring when you're trying to deliver ramp speed, but also find and find and hire people that are gonna be with the company for five, six, seven years and beyond.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think a lot of people who walk around the ramp office, you guys know this, the company is incredibly young. Yeah. You know, I think the average age is is is in the twenties and a lot of it relates to our to this idea of finding people who are on a steep slope Yeah. Versus inter like Intercept.
Speaker 5:Obviously, of course, we have people who have had incredible experience and 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 gonna learn and, you know, get a little bit better over the course of the next year. And then you have these people who graduated top of their class. Maybe they're 19, maybe they're 20, maybe they're in their mid twenties, but they wanna work, they wanna learn, and they're on this steep trajectory. And we find these people who have incredible drive, have incredibly high IQs.
Speaker 5:We give them responsibility than you'd expect, and you're patient, you wait a year and suddenly you are you are filled you're filled with people at your company who are far more talented than maybe you could afford to hire otherwise. Yeah. And
Speaker 2:If they already had the ramp logo on their resume and you were, you know, another another company.
Speaker 5:And you're managing teams and they're loyal and they've like grown incredible equity in the company which has grown even more since they've been here. Yeah. And it's it's just this incredible virtuous cycle and I think that a lot of people, especially early stage companies get pushed by like their investors to say, oh, you should find someone who's seen this movie before. I wanna find someone who's been this VP whatever and like nothing wrong with that. I I think that can be great, but it really underestimates the importance of finding people out of that raw talent and looking at, again, slope over intercept.
Speaker 2:Yep. John, I interrupted you.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I I just wanted to hear about, sort of switching gears, but positioning around product in the age of AI. There's a campaign going on right now. What what is it? Teaching money to think?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? And I
Speaker 4:Teaching money.
Speaker 1:Thinking money. And and it it makes sense. It's intelligent finance, but it it feels like it's the result of grappling with this question of, like, how do you bring AI to bear in the product in a way that's not, like, commoditized like every other Mhmm. Company, but still showing some of the value. AI is this weird thing where it's becoming, like, overhyped and then maybe potentially, like, even controversial in some.
Speaker 1:Like, is it using all the water? People are grappling with that. And and so I I wanted to know how how you landed on that campaign. Like, how you're actually, like, like, how you're thinking about walking a perspective customer through the AI piece of the value prop from from a from a catchphrase or a or a tagline down to, like, okay, you're actually sitting down with a CFO like like what promises are you making them? Because you're probably not saying like, yeah, you're never gonna touch anything ever again.
Speaker 1:Right? And you have to like be somewhat realistic about that. So how how are
Speaker 2:you ready to enjoy PTO, buddy.
Speaker 5:Well, I I love this question and I think you need to start at the root of where this comes from. Sure. At the when the company first launched, we had this idea of time is money, you should save both.
Speaker 1:I love it. I'm saying every day. Every day. As soon as I'm, you know, if you're right. Becoming my mantra.
Speaker 1:Say it every day. Every day.
Speaker 5:So you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror
Speaker 1:Tired as money says money. Save both. These these corporate cards bill pay at Colton County and whole lot more all
Speaker 5:over the place. It is and and by the way, you know, for any CFOs out there or financial professionals who haven't yet adopted RAM, you know, give your CFO or the controller the you know, the wonderful gift of RAMP, help them save 5%.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Push
Speaker 2:so hard on sales. All the time all the time you're like like, this company is interested in Ramp. You're like, introduce them to me. Yep. And you just you'll jump on the phone like in the next twenty four hours.
Speaker 5:Well, there's nothing better than than actually feeling it your your your yourself going through the sale, helping someone get through, and and it helps you understand the experience and stay sharp. But the the the question is really good. Sure. If you if you think about the actual brand and the value props that we offer, it's fairly timeless. In the sea of, you know, ecosystem of credit card companies trying to get you to spend more, we want you to spend less.
Speaker 3:And we
Speaker 5:think this is timeless.
Speaker 2:Or the opposite would be like a new Yeah. Video model.
Speaker 1:And it also shows that it's like a pre AI company.
Speaker 2:The state of the art for four weeks. Yeah. It's like it's just a very it's it's it's like selling a very different product.
Speaker 5:It's selling things versus value. And and and and to be very specific about it, like if you and Jeff Bezos talked about this in in in another context. It's it's it's sometimes people ask what's gonna change over the next ten years, it's more interesting to ask what will not. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 5:And in ten years from now, or a hundred years from now, it is very clear that people will always want to get more for less, for fewer dollars, for fewer hours. There's no way that's ever gonna change. And if you think about kind of the central promise of ramp is gonna help you spend less, you know, you think about you could sell thinking or you could sell thinking thinking money. We we can help you spend, that might change, but if you have intelligence introduced to some end goal, which is the intelligence is gonna help you prevent spend that is out of policy that you don't want to occur Once it's spent, to actually tag and 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.
Speaker 5:And so thinking money might be a way of saying it Oh, yeah. In the modern era, we're gonna apply thinking to drive an outcome, your company but leaner. It's this Money starts
Speaker 2:to go,
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:know if I wanna spend myself today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe not. Not
Speaker 2:I might just chill in this treasury account.
Speaker 5:It's this timeless idea there, guys.
Speaker 1:We we we need you to ring the gong because I there is a milestone, which is that when we started the show, I was laughing about the, you know, we wanna go to war on the paper receipt on big paper. And I actually found a company that that and I was like I was like, is it are paper receipt companies a thing? Are they still big? Turns out there was one that was worth, like, $22,000,000,000. Believe when we started working with you, you were below that.
Speaker 1:Now you've 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
Speaker 2:Well, the
Speaker 1:thank you so much for coming on the show and stopping by. Great to see you.
Speaker 5:Thank you. Have a
Speaker 1:great rest your day. And we will
Speaker 2:And we'll a a moment too because I I think if if you guys hadn't bet on us last q four of last year, I don't think we'd be sitting here today with with the TVN logo all over the. So We're we're the whole team.
Speaker 5:We're we feel like the lucky ones. Thank you, and congratulations again.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you. Love you, dude. We will talk to you soon. We will also talk to you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search.
Speaker 1:We're built from first principles on object
Speaker 2:storage. Alert.
Speaker 1:Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. I'll also tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Secure is gonna white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Cheers.
Speaker 1:We got our Red Bulls. We're going.
Speaker 2:Cheers. What a fun show.
Speaker 1:Well, next
Speaker 2:up, we have, John Zito, co president of Apollo. Apollo. Fledgling asset manager with Yeah. $909,100 dollars.
Speaker 1:$900. $909,100,000,000,000. Thousand dollars. $909,100,000,000.
Speaker 2:900,000,000.
Speaker 1:900,000,000?
Speaker 2:Or is it 900,000,000,000?
Speaker 1:It it is 900,000,000,000. It is 900,000,000,000. It's 900,000,000,000. He's gonna answer some hard questions. What is private equity?
Speaker 1:What is private credit? What is asset management? What are what are alternative assets? The I like I like the traditional assets. It's the alternative ones that scare me.
Speaker 1:I like
Speaker 2:Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're ready. We're ready. He's putting on a microphone. He's getting miked up. But in the meantime, we'll tell you about Figma.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:He's coming in. I should also mention that today, I am wearing a watch that I purchased on getbezel.com. You can shop over 26,000 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 it than Bezel.
Speaker 1:We have John Zito. John, good to
Speaker 2:meet you too. Are Eric you a little pep talk there?
Speaker 4:What do say? He's got, you know, a couple couple things here.
Speaker 2:Guys are friends. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Last time I saw him, he was he was, like, taking all his money. It's a small poker game. Was taking everyone's money
Speaker 1:Oh, he was.
Speaker 2:Oh, I can see that. He's such a nice guy, so he's gotta
Speaker 4:be No fall for the ramp pitch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. He's counting everyone's money now.
Speaker 2:He's like, I'm I'm saving your I'm saving I'm save you time and and your money. I'm gonna actually take your money. Just kidding.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna be saving it for later.
Speaker 4:Their team is amazing. It is. What they're building is pretty incredible.
Speaker 1:Tell me about tell me about your team. Tell me about what you've learned from him, what you've told him about managing, building a team. Yes. What does it take to get a job and work for you?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, look, those those they don't need any of my advice. They'll come and talk to me about about building Yeah. You know, what they're doing there, they have a bunch of people around them that are just building incredible business. For us, it's about it's pretty simple.
Speaker 4:Find people with purpose. Mhmm. Find people with high character. Find people that are, you know, generally good people first. Sure.
Speaker 4:And then all the investment evaluate people for purpose? I mean, for us How long do
Speaker 1:you wanna spend with someone before you actually
Speaker 4:do search? Best hires are probably the people that I've known for a really long time. Yeah. 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 twenty. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, we've been in I've been in credit for twenty Yeah. Yeah. Three years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We so quickly, can we zoom out and can you paint a picture for me of, like, the actual Apollo structure, the Empire? What like, what what's going on there?
Speaker 2: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
Speaker 4:is pretty Patrick's great guy. Center is a good guy.
Speaker 2:Know you guys
Speaker 4:are close to Center too.
Speaker 1:Center is the best.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So Apollo, largest one of the largest alternative credit managers in the world, largest alternative asset managers in the world. Yeah. What's unique about us is half of our over $900,000,000,000 is our own capital through Through retirement a Through a theme. Yes.
Speaker 4:So we're writing we're a market leader in writing guaranteed income. So we'll write a guaranteed you know, you want a 5% guaranteed income.
Speaker 2:Somebody wants to retire someday.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And you want guaranteed income for the next ten years at 5%, we'll guarantee you that money, and then we'll invest it. And we we keep some some marginal spread
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Between guaranteeing the income. And that's half our money. And then half our money is is managing third party money on behalf of our historically private equity business, which is over a $100,000,000,000, and then our credit business, which is worth a $100,000,000,000. So oh, here we go.
Speaker 1:I got that
Speaker 4:there for you. Formed up
Speaker 1:for you.
Speaker 4:I the guys out there told me I'm the first alternative asset manager leader on your on your I don't if that's true, but you know, let's let's
Speaker 2:let's we've let's plenty of people that have that have come sure raised raised from Apollo. But Yeah. Yeah, this is the first. Yeah. May maybe, like, let's talk about why private credit, which people talk about as a monolith.
Speaker 2:Obviously, there's subsections of it, but Yeah. Why it's having such a moment right now in the context of these sort of like large scale infrastructure projects that are happening in AI as well as defense.
Speaker 4: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 bank or you can get money from investors.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The bank capital, they're amazing a lot of things. The capital tends to be more short dated because it's led by deposits.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:So insurance
Speaker 2:We got to experience that with SVB. Yeah. Little duration mismatch.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so if you want a fifteen year project Mhmm. You want someone who's gonna understand your project Mhmm. Much more of a bespoke solution Yeah. Work with the company to have more flexibility in that capital structure or in that solution, it's much more logical to be with private capital than it is in public markets.
Speaker 4:A lot of the people in your guys' universe, historically they had to go public to get access to money and now everybody is staying private way longer. Legacy capital was, okay, we need new money. We're going to go public and that's how we would do it. Now everybody in the growth world has gotten a lot more sophisticated. They're staying private longer.
Speaker 4:They're raising capital through the private equity, not traditional, but in the private markets world. Now they're realizing, wait a second. We can do this in our entire capital structure. Wait. What's this credit thing?
Speaker 4:Oh, we can access private credit access. Okay. We can do a long duration project level finance and it's more optimal for their equity markets. 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.
Speaker 4:It's growing fast. It must be risky.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So talk about I mean, that that prompted the piece from Mark and it was Bloomberg yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. He he put
Speaker 4:out an op ed yesterday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe yeah. Talk as much as you
Speaker 4:can there's lots of everyone has a weird definition of private credit. For sure. And so they have a hard time. Everyone has a hard time. Okay.
Speaker 4:Private credit's risky. Yeah. And a lot of people think private credit's like the 5,000,000 or $10,000,000 loan to, like, a tire manufacturer in Queens or something.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 4:That's what they think private credit
Speaker 1:is. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We're doing $11,000,000,000 loans for Intel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And that's private credit. Yeah. Right? So we define it as everything from a mortgage to a commercial real estate loan against a building
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:To an aviation loan against a new aircraft. Sure. Like super safe, secured, top of the capital structure, traditionally investment grade. Yep. So how do
Speaker 1:you set up your firm to deal with a $10,000,000,000 deal with Intel all the way down to some smaller deal?
Speaker 4:We're for we're the only we're the only firm that's full open architecture. Okay. So we're one investment business. So, you know, David Samber, runs private equity, the guys who lead our hybrid team, our credit team, all of the people are all in the same investment meeting talking about, okay, what's the best solution for the company? It's not really about, let's solve for this small thing for a fund.
Speaker 4:Once you start doing that, it's very hard to work with companies.
Speaker 1:Historically,
Speaker 4: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 credit business. 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
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 4:And we're just providing capital across the whole capital structure. And when you can show up and say, hey. Do you need a loan against the building? You need a by the way, you want a retirement program for your employees
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And you want long a duration preferred
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:There's 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. Mhmm. So now all of a sudden, you're in our ecosystem, if you're growing the thing, we're, you know, we can we can help and let be a part a real partner, not just a capital provider.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And that's like the new modern
Speaker 1:5,000 companies. Aren't there only there's 4,000 public companies. How many so so are you a lender to almost all of the public companies that are at
Speaker 4:scale? We have mortgages. Okay. Sure. Commercial real estate loans.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. Right? Are you thinking
Speaker 1:about the real estate market, mortgages, even buying houses? Like, how how do you think about that portfolio there?
Speaker 4:We don't we don't buy. We're not in the single family rent business. Okay. You like brand.
Speaker 1:It does seem like it doesn't look like an like a hot iron, but I
Speaker 2:have a friend the companies that
Speaker 1:I got you because I've got I've a friend who lives next to a house that was bought by private equity. He's like, yeah, actually made it really nice and it's great. My neighborhood's getting better because of this. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's
Speaker 1:like kind of hot take. But Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, look. That part that part has been and, obviously, affordability is a big thing. Sure. Sure. So but we're we're more on the lending side.
Speaker 4:So we just do provide mortgages.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. And so we have a big mortgage business, and we'll it's it's Okay. Relatively low cost.
Speaker 1:And and and, I mean, as you get lowered into smaller deals, do you need to bring in more automation? Are you seeing returns to scale on, you know, IT spend or or AI spend or any of this stuff?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think that will happen for I think that will happen for sure. The the in the asset level side, so when you're when you're analyzing large pools of Mortgages. Or mortgages Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Okay.
Speaker 4:Or in the security, historically, that that's gonna be much more of a data AI driven over time. Our Models will get better and better, and hopefully And there'll be more data to plug in. All all things associated with big pools and a history Yep. You're gonna probably get more optimal pricing. Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. And you can see companies like companies like Morpho. Like, if you look at I don't know if you've seen the the token like, there's there are DeFi protocols Sure. That actually have market based pricing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And that's gonna keep getting better and better and better. Yeah. And I think the scale players will ultimately win that. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so we use it more there. Mhmm. On the smaller side where it's more flow related businesses, we have Apollo which does a lot of our large lending, but then we have 16 companies which invest on our behalf that do specialty stuff. So our middle market lender, MidCap, will do that, has its own brand, its own employees, its own balance sheet. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But we'll own some piece of the equity and some piece of those loans. Yeah. We bought GE's aviation business.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:So we they do all the smaller or medium or big sized aviation loans. Yep. But in many cases, it's our capital.
Speaker 1:I I I know there's some firms that that tend to brand themselves as like, we will do a take private, and we specifically wanna 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 gonna do. We're winding it down, and so we're just kind of cash flowing it out, and eventually that thing will just put on life support and sort of like built to scale or built to die, and that's the thing. Do you wanna play in every market? Do you wanna take advantage of every situation and be able to see what what the trajectory of a business is and then just accelerate it along that?
Speaker 1:Or Yeah. It depends. Do you find a particular niche works well for you?
Speaker 4:Our private equity business historically been value oriented Sure. Not necessarily growth oriented. Sure. That that'll help with respect that we didn't buy any companies in 2021, '22 that I think are going be somewhat tougher to exit because of the prices that we paid. And our team has
Speaker 2:done an amazing job. Why didn't you buy any companies in 2020
Speaker 4:We have a thirty five year history of buying at relatively low multiples. So just nothing is available under that framework to buy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 4:And so we've been we've people think of us as being more value oriented, defensive equity
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then everything around secured lending.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And on on the private equity side, you have deal team members, operating partners that go inside the companies. Is there a separation there, or is it all one, like, kind of
Speaker 4:pool human capital? We have our own equity team with our own dedicated operations team. Operations team that goes in and operate. Yeah. How are you?
Speaker 4:Just a traditional traditional business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what's your outlook on energy and and providing capital for various energy products, everything from natural gas to traditional, you know, oil all the way through nuclear.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So Europe, we we did a 4 and a half billion dollar deal for RWE. Mhmm. We did a 6 and a half billion dollar deal for EDF. We keep doing this.
Speaker 4:So we've done we've done some of the largest European deals for power, energy, transmission, defense. I think you'll see that continue. In The US, same thing. Very large for BP multibillion dollar transactions. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It is if you told me five years ago we'd be doing multibillion dollar deals for
Speaker 2:In Europe.
Speaker 4:S and P 500 IG globally in Europe and The US, I would have said to them, that's that's not going to happen. The business of private markets is across every risk spectrum and it's really, for some reason, that's not, again, not really transmitted into the market. It's just private credit's growing. It must be risky.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. That makes sense.
Speaker 4:I think you're gonna the logical answer for long duration power projects, which require lots of construction or data centers
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The logical places for retirement, four zero one k, long duration, investment grade, annuities, anyone who wants long term savings Mhmm. It's a great it's a great place to be. So I think you're gonna continue to see private markets being the primary force around financing all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How 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 everybody has different opinion. You can look at a part of it is like there's some element of it that's unpredictable.
Speaker 2:You can also look at the present. Right? Which is like people that have five
Speaker 1:I see it's a fifty year depreciation. Right? But but
Speaker 2:you can look at the present and you can try to predict the future, and then and then depending on who you talk to, you're gonna get wildly different answers whether you're talking to somebody on Yeah. Over on this coast or somebody on on on the West Coast. I'm curious, like, your guys' general kind of approach to, like, finding the answers to some of these questions.
Speaker 4:I think there's gonna 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 multibillion dollar GPU financing, but we stay at five years. So effectively, we're the senior tranche, and then the equity holders are making assumption on what GPUs are worth later and longer.
Speaker 4:That's hard for us as as credit providers. It's gonna be hard. I think anyone who says they know what the value of GPUs or the release rates are in year five, seven, or ten, I mean, it's hard to take that with any sort of credible view. It's undoubtedly probably gonna be the most violent cycle we've ever had. The no one really knows how fat the tails are both right or left.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But adding a lot of leverage to a assumption that you don't know if it's gonna be a super bull case or a super bear case
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Is kind of scary for us, so we've been a bit quieter on that side.
Speaker 1:I do think that folks in Silicon Valley, folks in our audience are just really struggling to wrap their minds around the role of private credit here because it's a completely different just mental model to be in as opposed to just being a venture capital equity investor.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, the the thing is with this cycle Yeah. It's so much more asset heavy. Totally. All these growth companies Yeah.
Speaker 4:Defense companies Yeah. Cyronic Yep. And And they're all Okay. They're gonna need manufacturing companies, nuclear companies, the power companies, the AI companies. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's all asset heavy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:As opposed to you go
Speaker 4:back to the last twenty, thirty years, it's all
Speaker 1:beautiful IPO. It's all asset light. It's all
Speaker 4:and and and the mental model is always asset light and the debt is bad. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm friends with lots of the guys on your show Yeah. Because this is changing.
Speaker 1:Sure. Totally.
Speaker 4:And it's gonna be all about who they can partner with and trust. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tech wasn't tech wasn't like didn't have low leverage because they just didn't like leverage or
Speaker 1:because they didn't need it.
Speaker 3:They didn't need it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. This cycle, you need it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it can be financed off balance sheet and it can be better optimized than actually raising equity. And there's logical place for it. Yeah. It's just and so
Speaker 1:And also, scale is not necessarily just directly tied to the problem. I always I always go back to, like, you know, the mortgage. There are plenty of people that are making 6 figures and have a 7 figure mortgage. Yeah. And it's like so if you talk about a company and you're like, yeah.
Speaker 1:The company is making a billion dollars and they have $10,000,000,000 of debt or something. It's like, that could math out fine if everything's, you know, flowing through and they're growing and whatnot. But, yeah, there's a
Speaker 2:lot mean, it's a new territory.
Speaker 4:Definitely a big pivot. Last week and a half
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Lots of questions about off balance sheet debt. Yep. Should it be on balance sheet? Yep. Lots of questions about Oracle and others.
Speaker 4:Yep. Yep. Yep. Of questions about some of the neo clouds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think that's just gonna that's gonna push Anthropic and and OpenAI Yeah. Public earlier.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4:I I think you'll see them I think I think they'll go public way earlier than is anticipated.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:I'm not sure what consensus is, but I I suspect that the more pressure and questions about that Yep. Will require them to access
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Convert market, equity market, securitized, other markets than than just traditionally these kind of off balance sheet leases.
Speaker 1:I mean, the last and dropped overall view on all over world.
Speaker 4:So Feels like it's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think it
Speaker 2:makes sense. What how are you feeling about the IPO market in the present? Kramer was on talking about frustrations with different biotech companies going out and Yeah. And and some of them being potentially lower quality. Where are we in your view?
Speaker 4:Well, you brought me to the New York Stock Exchange to talk about private markets, is the funniest thing ever.
Speaker 2:But We we we spend, I would say, 7070% of our time talking about privacy.
Speaker 1:Oh, they do. Yeah. Okay. Good. And
Speaker 4:But we're here, so it's a partnership today.
Speaker 2:Well, funny thing funny thing, Kramer kept speaking in share price and we're like, we only think it Exactly.
Speaker 1:Like, Ramp, the $33,000,000,000 company?
Speaker 4:I mean, look, there's gonna be next year's gonna be I'm the credit guy's usually always the bearish guy. Mhmm. I'm like, I think lower rates Mhmm. I think tons of m and a. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I think you'll see a lot more huge technology wave. Who knows what with the the 4,000,000,000,000, 5,000,000,000,000, whatever the estimate of capital, who will it will benefit, but it's gonna benefit the consumer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The end the
Speaker 4:day, it's gonna benefit the consumer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And When you say m and a though, is this is this PE funds that loaded up in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two
Speaker 4:finally capitulating or all strategic? I think I mean, I don't think anyone thought you know, you see what's happening. There's some very large m and a transactions. You saw EchoStar this year sold a bunch of assets in exchange for SpaceX stock. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, like And people
Speaker 2:are like, wait. This company owns half of or not half, but, like, half like, they've got like 10,000,000,000 yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Then you look
Speaker 2:at the you look at the debt Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's pretty it's pretty attractive. Mean, it's a pretty way to actually get Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get access to space. I mean,
Speaker 4:it was a pure play tracker. I I'm not I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that kind of thing. It's pretty it's a pretty interesting way to get access to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're making an OpenAI movie. They're making a new social network Facebook movie.
Speaker 4:Are they?
Speaker 1:Do you think they'll ever make a Caesar's Palace heist movie?
Speaker 4:Oh, jeez. I don't know. I don't know. I hope not.
Speaker 1:But But I I mean, seriously, like because that that book was introduced to me through our friend group, and we were all like, this is awesome. But oftentimes, internally at these firms, they're like, everyone in Silicon Valley is like, yeah, Social Network, awesome movie. Yeah. It inspired me start a tech company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and Mark Zuckerberg is like, not a fan. Right? Yeah. And so I'm wondering internally, does the firm how does the firm remember the book?
Speaker 4:Listen. We we that that that was so long ago
Speaker 1:in terms
Speaker 4:of the of the business. Sure. We've become a complete kind of credit passive.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure.
Speaker 4:And the kind of activity we do day to day by and large is far different. Think generally speaking, our investors look at that situation and say, listen, they're going fight for every dollar and everything. So think there's a balance between what the one thing as you grow Yeah. Is you wanna maintain your investment culture. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so how do you make sure you maintain your investment culture, recruit the best people Yeah. And the paradox of growing but also really being a good investor. Yeah. That's like a very tough balance sometimes. And so, you know, I I wake up every day trying to make sure Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who that we on your team evaluates various AI tools that I'm sure you're getting pitched a 100 times
Speaker 4:a whole team. I mean, have a team. It's called Lab forty two, but Rob Bittancourt really leads the thematic investing. You should have him on. Mean, he spends all his time assessing all the hyper scale all all the entire ecosystem, both the equity.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Let's go.
Speaker 2:It's a tree lighting.
Speaker 1:We
Speaker 2:can't hear anything.
Speaker 1:That was fun doing here.
Speaker 2:They said they've never done an IPO on tree lighting day.
Speaker 4:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Ten years or something. Somebody's gotta do it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's Hank. It's who is it? It's Aria.
Speaker 1:They got Santa here
Speaker 4:too. It's Hank Azaria, isn't it?
Speaker 1:No way. Oh, yeah. Looks like
Speaker 4:Last time I saw him, he was in, like, a he's in a
Speaker 1:cover band. You know, it's funny. He plays in a cover band. No way. Are He's he's a cover band.
Speaker 1:He's a cover 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.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of folks. There there's some mascots over there. They're having fun. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:We love letting you
Speaker 3:know this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:People on. Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Before we bring in our last guest to the show, let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. And you know you heard Jim Kramer talk about sleep. We need to get him an Eight Sleep at 8sleep.com.
Speaker 2:Actually, that'd be a good Christmas present.
Speaker 1:Without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up
Speaker 2:and actually get him an Eight Sleep for Christmas.
Speaker 1:And hey. And, you know, you're looking behind us. There's some we're we're on the cubes. You can see us over there. We're on that cube, actually.
Speaker 2:We're down to one cube.
Speaker 1:We're down to one cube. The tree took over. But if you wanna put your brand, your logo on something that looks like a cube, why not get a billboard at adquick.com?
Speaker 2:I love it, John.
Speaker 1:Out of home advertising made easy and measurable, plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision.
Speaker 2:People are joking around on the timeline. Yes. Meta, of course, is planning to cut 30 of their, I guess, the budget of their metaverse efforts. So this is Reality Labs. This is Reality Labs.
Speaker 1:Which which has worked on VR and AR, but also metaverse development. And, I mean, it's a lot of the stuff that was on on on display during Meta Connect. Some really promising stuff, some really cool stuff.
Speaker 2:People like it.
Speaker 1:A lot of spend. And so they they they, you know, leaked today. I don't know. They announced it.
Speaker 2:And Consensus Media, which I definitely
Speaker 1:could not be.
Speaker 2:They say Meta will announce plans for name change. New stock ticker within the coming weeks. Zuck Yeah. Viewed as leading candidate for new ticker. Seems like fake news, but it's certainly fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like the meta name.
Speaker 2:Max Hodo. Think it's I think it's got Former guest says the idea that this is the end of meta's metaverse streams is probably wrong. I bet this will actually make them go faster. And I agree.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited for the next VR headset. I think the Quest four I think James Cameron tried it and really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:Kalish, last post, and then we'll bring in our guest says Linktree is a billion dollar company.
Speaker 1:That is crazy.
Speaker 2:A billion dollars for literally links in a tree? Yeah. Michael says you need to be you need to study business models. You have to be value decoding. You should never think that consumer facing product is a thing.
Speaker 2:There's a thing behind a thing that generates revenue.
Speaker 1:It is true.
Speaker 2:We're supposed to unlock cash flow at a certain scale. That justifies valuation. There's a vision here. So anyways, without further ado, let's bring in
Speaker 1:our Hi. Good to see you. Welcome to the job.
Speaker 6:So good to see you. Thank you so much for having hanging out. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 6:Day number one fantastic.
Speaker 1:We love this place.
Speaker 2:It's fun as a media as a media person to be here because it it's become just the center for media. Yeah. Anyways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Lot of people. Hank
Speaker 6:Azaria outside?
Speaker 1:It was him. Wasn't
Speaker 3:it? Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 1:Our last guest was was ID ing him, and I couldn't I couldn't see from here. But it does appear that he's down there walking around.
Speaker 6:There you go.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:pool on Tree Lady.
Speaker 2:And with the build of it's Hank Azaria. I don't know I don't know much movies. I was like, not. Do
Speaker 6:you watch TV?
Speaker 1:No. He watches no movies. No TV
Speaker 3:really. Very,
Speaker 1:very rare. He's seen one movie Borat and that's it. Pretty much. Pretty
Speaker 2:much. Movie Mountain Gate. Mountain Gate. Mountain feel like I needed to give a review for the show. It was about some AI founders go to the that go to I felt like loosely based on the All In podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, so great to have you.
Speaker 1:What's your go to holiday movie?
Speaker 6:Oh my goodness. Can I say The Sound of Music? I don't know if that's a holiday movie, but it's the one I watch around that time.
Speaker 1:Think nostalgic in an old way. Yeah. They're like, it's appropriate. If you threw it on, people it doesn't scream Christmas, but people would be accepting of it
Speaker 6:as well. My controversial opinion is I don't like It's a Wonderful Life.
Speaker 1:Oh, that one is a little bit
Speaker 2:elf? Elf?
Speaker 6:Elf. Yeah. I'll go for all.
Speaker 1:You're you're like, is that a movie? Yeah. I'm like someone told me that it's
Speaker 2:an elf. What's your favorite color?
Speaker 1:Okay. So anyway, please introduce yourself for the stream for those who might not know you.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:What's your
Speaker 3:day to day like?
Speaker 6:So I'm Katie Dayton. Yes. I write for The Wall Street Journal Yes. All about anything to do with brands Yes. Marketing, advertising, some media thrown in, and it's just basically any ways brands are really trying to cut through, I think.
Speaker 6:That is the underlying Yeah. Theme of my coverage.
Speaker 1:And what what has been the big theme in your coverage?
Speaker 2: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 and and strategy on their part and some luck that gets thrown in. Mhmm. And it's so, again, there's not like a playbook. Following a playbook, it's probably been done and it could work if you're in another category.
Speaker 2:We saw this in d to c. Right? People were like, oh, if you make a pretty website and you run a lot of ads, you can sell a lot of a product and then a few other people did it well and then it basically stopped working. Yeah. Like it it it can still work in certain Yeah.
Speaker 1:The red antler trade
Speaker 2:didn't last was like you need $500,000 for a brand Yeah. And you need a product.
Speaker 1:And it worked for HIMSS. HIMSS is a public company
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And is doing fine. Dammit. Oh, that's right. Was it Ro that worked with Jen Lane? I think Ro worked with anyways.
Speaker 6:So I bought my first Warby Parker glasses
Speaker 1:You did?
Speaker 6:Last week and I thought, god, I'm a bit late to this one as well. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But that
Speaker 6:was that era.
Speaker 1:Been around for a while.
Speaker 6:I mean, think I that's what's so interesting right now is that there is no playbook anymore. Mhmm. Even if you're a a humongous brand, you know, you're sort of when you're managing any kind of decline, there's no playbook for that and there's no playbook for a a young d to c brand because,
Speaker 1:you know
Speaker 2:We heard about an apparel brand that is scaled from 0 to 700,000,000 of revenue in, like, two years, all on TikTok shop. And I we never heard of it. I don't know if they're public. So I I don't I don't know if the the numbers are public, so I won't share the name. I'll share it with you after.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Remarkable.
Speaker 1:But but anyways What what has been the big trend of the year in terms of your coverage? What's been the biggest story or the biggest thing What's
Speaker 2:your word of the year?
Speaker 6:My word of the year, crisis. Crisis. Why I why think 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
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 6:Few months of each other. Two very similar case studies. Yeah. Two very different accusations being leveled at them.
Speaker 1:Getting sucked into politics. Yeah. And then the crisis calms, comes out.
Speaker 6:And the snowballing of it all. And I think now it's sort of making brands realize that nobody is safe. You know? You change your logo before the before this year, I'm sure nobody really thought.
Speaker 1:Especially, like, Cracker Barrel is not I mean, it's a beloved brand, but it's not, like, in everyone's face constantly. It's not the Pepsi logo, which also went through a rebrand of the logo years ago Mhmm. And people didn't like it, and I think they tweaked it and whatnot. But Cracker Barrels, it shouldn't be such a massive story, but, of course, the the Internet can amplify
Speaker 6:everything. No.
Speaker 1:And you can just throw everyone in crisis. What are
Speaker 2:you looking at for 2026?
Speaker 6:I think well, it would be a lot more of that. Mhmm. And I think it's gonna 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. Mhmm. I think it's really important for brands at the moment to be owning their narrative.
Speaker 6:I think they're with that. Yeah. They wanna be This is the whole reason they're all moving to Substack.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, they're writing they're running their own YouTube channels, their own podcast, you know, they wanna be ahead of the game. They wanna be the ones that are talking about themselves before anyone else talks about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, I think we're gonna see like a big shift in like what comms looks like in general Yeah. 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 gonna be, do consumers care Yeah.
Speaker 6:If a brand is using AI? And if they do, like, how badly is that gonna actually affect any revenues?
Speaker 2:Well, it's gonna be interesting because it's gonna 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 for the end user. And then you'd have one brand with one product that's running political leading ads this way. I do wonder I do wonder if there's been some brands over the last kind of coming out of the the the kind of original Trump era that were just like right wing brands or right wing neo bank.
Speaker 2:We saw we saw some of these. Yeah. I wonder if we'll see more Black
Speaker 1:Rifle Coffee was proto example. This My Pillow
Speaker 2:I wonder if we'll see more more consumer brands just like basically put the political party in the footer and just be, like, even more
Speaker 1:A trend that I was thinking was, like, more brands investing in, like, becoming the supplier and then just having two, like, faces, two brands on top. Because I I I think it's a long term in the long in the long arc of history, maybe the value accrues to the the company that's making pillows for both the left wing and the right wing.
Speaker 6:Mean, I'm sure there's probably already has been It naturally happens in supply chain. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because no one's digging through the supply chain to figure out where their coffee beans came from.
Speaker 6:I'm surprised we haven't actually seen more sort of out and out right wing brands coming through. I mean, we have, you know, the ones you mentioned.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I guess they're they've been going down that route for a while now. Yeah. And, you know, given that, what, ten years ago, it was a lot of brand purpose. We always used to talk about brand purpose and
Speaker 3:purpose. How it would Yes.
Speaker 6:And every brand had to be aligned to a big cause of some sort that's kind Yeah. Tended to swing Mhmm. To the left. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was like a clothing brand that was all about ocean plastic. Yeah. And then and then I think people realized at some point or another they wanted to buy the majority of consumers just wanna buy a great product. Sure. And so it kind of flipped back where brands stop saying 1% of every dollar Do
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Because no one knows them. If they're getting canceled, sure, a 100,000 people might hate them, but at least if they
Speaker 2:Thousand might sign up for that.
Speaker 1:A thousand sign up. It's better than nothing.
Speaker 6:Are you talking about the that Black Mirror one that came out a few weeks ago that There's was there's a bot farm. Very good point.
Speaker 1:There was a bot farm one. There was TikTok for sports betting or gambling. There was one that was a a coding environment that would let you gamble and watch subway servers
Speaker 2:Brain rot. Illegal online casinos.
Speaker 1:There was there was the whole Cluely saga, which was a an app that allowed you to cheat on everything. Yeah. Of course, people don't like cheating.
Speaker 6:I was thinking the, you know, you know, dead relative Oh, that one. Yeah. That one was very on the nose.
Speaker 1:Partnered with a with a good A
Speaker 2:Disney star. Disney star.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that was crazy. To the
Speaker 6:point where I thought this gotta be Intentional. Well, or it doesn't exist, and it's it's just Yeah. You know, some kind of
Speaker 1:Because I I I almost were. I almost believe that I I I don't know the actual numbers, but I think American Eagle might still be up on the like, as a stock even during all that chaos. Yeah. But they netted out okay.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I heard some people debating whether or not Sydney Sweeney would wind up winning on the day. I don't know how much she got paid, and I don't know what the long term Yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean, that one's interesting because American Eagle and and we just had it at one of our conferences, their CMO. You know, their line is very much like, this was truly Not political. Not meant to be political. It was not that. And anyone that thought it was was Sure.
Speaker 6:In the minority and it was a lot of bot traffic
Speaker 1:Sure. That was
Speaker 6:driving So, know, and I think they came out of it, and they they think they came out of it because they stood by it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And they didn't try and roll it back and confuse the messaging, and they just
Speaker 1:sort of
Speaker 6:didn't, like, pay too much attention to They didn't give it too much fuel. Yeah. They kind of burnt itself out that way. I think we're gonna be seeing like some more of those tactics. Whereas before, if anyone was upset, brands would like immediately pull something and, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Do the notes apology.
Speaker 2:Friend of ours who's been on the show before, Lulu Maservi, she does comms or or helps on comms for a lot of startups. She said yesterday, every media headline about a tech company is basically like, this founder archetype is building the summary of your company or product. Can it overcome common skepticism? 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?
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 2:there was a there journal piece on Cursor recently that was like similar. It was basically like they grew from 3 to 30,000,000,000 in nine months.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. I'll let you answer, but I have a
Speaker 6:pendulum swings. Right? So, you know, originally, the press were accused of being too friendly Sure. To tag Sure. And then we've swung a little bit Sure.
Speaker 6:Maybe, and everyone's accused of being I think it swung two antagonists. No.
Speaker 2:It was antagonistic. Think it swung back. Too friendly? I think no. No.
Speaker 2:I just like it's, like, kinda healthy right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It is it is kinda healthy.
Speaker 6:Well, that's what I think what's what's being tried you know, they don't wanna say this is gonna fail. This is terrible. These are terrible people, but they wanna tell the human interest story of it. I think that's where
Speaker 1:the think stories need conflict. And I I know I know friends who have, time and time again been in in industry, in tech, in technology, pro tech, and then they say, we wanna make pro tech stories. And what you realize is that, well, you need an antagonist in a story. Yeah. And if you don't have an antagonist, you don't have a story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't have strife, if you don't have a low point. And so when I would when I would talk to friends who were running companies, I would say, look. Like, I know that you've had failures. I know that you tried to raise money five years ago.
Speaker 1:You're super successful now, but five years ago, you tried to raise money and the investor pulled out at the last second. Mhmm. And that employee that you wanted to hire said no. Mhmm. And the product that you released crashed and no one bought it.
Speaker 1:Like, I know that you've been through trials and tribulations. You have two options. One is is hide those and try and tell the story of everything went perfectly the whole way Mhmm. 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 who wants to watch Star Wars without any strife, without, you know
Speaker 6:When you tell people that, what's their reaction?
Speaker 1:The ones the good ones totally get it. Time. The good ones totally get it. I've I've been in the situation where I've told this to a founder, and the founders have said, like, I get it. And the comms team has like, no.
Speaker 1:No. No. We 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.
Speaker 1:Like Nice. Exactly. You lost one contract or, like, one customer failed. But, you know, a lot of people are in damage control, and that's their whole business. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so they're saying, don't let anything ever get out. And and instead, I think I think the people that understand stories, understand narrative, understand just entertainment, they get that you have to people like an underdog. People like to come from behind an up
Speaker 6:and down. And then this goes back to controlling the narrative. Right? Like, put it out there.
Speaker 3:Put it
Speaker 6: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 gonna go off and find it anyway.
Speaker 6:And some disgruntled employees gonna come to us and
Speaker 1:And I think that's the risk of trying to over control with the owned media Yeah. Is if your own media doesn't have any conflict ever. Because anytime happens to you,
Speaker 2:you don't post. There's a few VC podcasts lately that got into a situation and just stopped
Speaker 1:Stopped posting.
Speaker 2:One time.
Speaker 1:And so, like, imagine if you're 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 Yeah. You're just it's the best content of the year about you. Mhmm. Everyone wants to hear from you.
Speaker 1:You have an audience and a channel that's ready. They're interested in American Eagle. What more would they wanna know Yeah. About this?
Speaker 3:I just like I'm out.
Speaker 6:I think the astronomer example again
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 6:yeah. This year. That's a perfect example. They went ahead straight You were very young. After it.
Speaker 6:You
Speaker 2:know? That was
Speaker 1:Masterclass. Masterclass. Masterclass.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We had the we had the founder
Speaker 1:on. The founder Pete Pete. Right? Yeah. Pete DeJoy?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. We had him on the show on our show a little bit later.
Speaker 2:And it was funny. We were joking because had the day before that controversy broke, they had published like a case study with RAM.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:We were joking. Who's who's our presenting sponsor. We were joking. We were like, did Ramp somehow? How many stories do you like, many pieces do you actually do you publish a year?
Speaker 6:A year. I try and do I try and do about four to six a month.
Speaker 1:Okay. I
Speaker 6:think whatever that averages out
Speaker 2:takes to get in the four to six?
Speaker 6: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 gotta give us some numbers. You know, the amount of people that say I've got a great story I wanna tell. We did this amazing marketing campaign concrete. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, well, we are and I my favorite line to use is we are the Wall Street Journal. So, you know, you gotta you gotta give us some dollar signs
Speaker 1:and that. That.
Speaker 6:I like awesome percentages. This is
Speaker 1:a lesson for us. We need to when we tell someone, well, we are TBPN, we need to know what that means. Maybe maybe we can impress about people. Don't come with your talking points. It's a conversation.
Speaker 1:We are TBPN. Like, you
Speaker 2:can't talking points. Can't come
Speaker 1:with talking points because this is TBPN. We're we're we're still finding your
Speaker 6:PR outside. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:We were talking to Kramer about that. That's the number one thing we wanna do.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Do you think do you think we've passed the peak of wellness? Like, it feels like wellness is, 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
Speaker 1:unwell network doing well? Isn't that antithesis? Yeah. Yeah. That's the pendulum swinging back from wellness to Iron Wow.
Speaker 2:I think I think you might be right. Maybe. But, yeah, we we we just been having this debate internally, like, how how how durable is the trend?
Speaker 6:Well, it's fun. It's it's difficult because, you know, what? You you guys live in LA. I live here. I feel like I feel I go out on a Friday night Mhmm.
Speaker 6:In the West Village, no one is looking very well, you know? Like, the kids are drinking, they're smoking, smoking's cool you know? I think but then the rest of the country, I don't know, I think it's probably still the wellness is probably still sort of
Speaker 1:people aren't drinking very much, especially in the younger demos.
Speaker 2:Well, especially in I mean, in restaurants. David Chang on the show. He was talking about how a lot of restaurants have are struggling just because they had this high margin Mhmm. Revenue from alcohol that was getting tacked on to every bill that's, you know, evaporated to
Speaker 6:very difficult to break out, and I'm sure someone has, whether a time when the economy is like it is. Is it because of you go in a restaurant, are you gonna go, well, I can't really afford it. Mhmm. So therefore, this is, like, the one thing I can, like, take off my bill. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Or is it because I'm actually stopping drinking?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And it's difficult to know that causation. Mhmm. But I think, you know, it's I've got the the CMOs I speak to in the alcohol world, they all have a a pretty not difficult time, but they they know that change is coming, and, you know, they're making little alterations. They never if you've got an advertising budget, they've never been able to say, hey, guys, drink loads, you know?
Speaker 6: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 Yeah. 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, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of other things that I'd love to talk about, but let's do it again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do it again soon.
Speaker 6:Let's it again.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic. Thank you for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Such a special place.
Speaker 1:I I'm enjoying these ramp
Speaker 2:these Good call not lighting a fire. Yes. Candle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you can tell that I'm not a pyromaniac. Because a pyromaniac
Speaker 2:But we only go to just one map.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's just one map.
Speaker 2:Oh, what about one more? What does that work?
Speaker 1:Burn your receipts times money save both. I like these. These are very fun.
Speaker 2:Well timeline? We are going to an event later.
Speaker 1:We can pull up this post. Another twenty or ten minutes
Speaker 2:or from Lulu. I haven't seen these. She says, it's worth signing up for Blueprint just to study the marketing emails. They're fun and easy to read. No corpo slop.
Speaker 2:Educationals, you're getting useful info rather than just being marketed to. Great at building trust through transparent and proactive communication. Why, Brian and Kate write them personally. You can pull some of these up. I do do think that it's possible that Brian Johnson is the best marketer in the world right now.
Speaker 2: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, wanna critique him or disagree with his philosophy or approach or whatever. But as a business person, you have to appreciate how he is just makes finds a way to make him the center of a lot of attention. Pretty much every
Speaker 1:single organic.
Speaker 2:Of organic. And I know that I'm sure they spend a ton on on on traditional ads too For sure. For Blueprint.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be a monster business. Like and he has a CEO in the seat right now too. Right? Didn't he hire?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or or maybe he was going to hire, but, like, there's gonna be some operating
Speaker 2:Somebody was claiming that his whole relationship with Kate was just a marketing stunt.
Speaker 1:And it's like, yeah. About so many celebrities throughout the throughout the years. Yeah. All sorts of all sorts
Speaker 2:of There's definitely presses for it. About it. Yeah. In in other news Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you see their The K trucks are coming
Speaker 2:back. Yeah. So something about basically eliminating, like, Biden era.
Speaker 1:Saying that so so so the news is that, apparently, you'll be able to buy a very small truck soon, which is a thing in Japan that supposedly not has been made illegal.
Speaker 2:So there were Biden era vehicle fuel efficiency rules.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:They're possible. Yearly 2% efficiency increase for cars made from 2027 to 2031. Oh.
Speaker 1:You just took a lot of these off the road?
Speaker 2:And, yeah, it's the CAFE, the corporate average fuel economy standards.
Speaker 1:The the the 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
Speaker 2:to these issues. Drive people back to Tesla and saying, like, I I bought this after Elon went crazy and then Trump went
Speaker 1:Trump and brought in these. I I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 5:I do think
Speaker 2:it's if if the the the I mean the real loser here, I would say, some people would say the environment, but potentially more direct Mhmm. Is that company like Slate Auto Slate Auto. Trying to make a $20,000 truck. Yep. Meanwhile, these manufacturers have been making the $20,000 truck
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:At scale. All the time. And they're super reliable.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, Americans have just voted with their wallets. They do not want a two door truck. It's just it's never worked. Like, the Land Rover Defender, there's there's so many examples of two two door SUVs that have just not gotten traction.
Speaker 2:Like the Nissan.
Speaker 1:The Nissan Murano cross cross Cabriolet also never took off. But even though I
Speaker 2:I and with with true enthusiasts, of course.
Speaker 1:Even the the Range Rover Evoque is a two door SUV, I believe. Not done well.
Speaker 2:I'm very interested to see two
Speaker 1:or G Waxes that you own.
Speaker 2:Do you think we're I there's some that I would love to own.
Speaker 1:Yes. But they're not exactly flying off the shelves. They're not being stocked on dealer lots. Because realistically, you're gonna be like, ah, I'd love the two door, but then you think about your family and you're like, I need the four door. And that's what everyone does.
Speaker 1:And that's why every Ford f one fifty, four doors. Did you see that Adam Fried? This is a hilarious bit by
Speaker 2:Adam like a really good bit. I'm this is the first time somebody has like done bit so well. He was asked to Vulture asked him a question on their year end culture roundup about a TV show that this that Charles here is assuming he hasn't seen. And the question is, was Bertha on the Gilded Age right to marry Gladys off to the Duke? Bertha 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.
Speaker 2:In that world, marriage was a strategic move, a way to cement social status and gain acceptance from old money elites who still look down on her family's new wealth. To Bertha, securing a duke as a son-in-law wasn't just about ego, it was survival. A declaration that she conquered conquered
Speaker 1:the various society claudible.
Speaker 2:That tried to exclude her.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Incredible bit. We
Speaker 1:And then and then and then they amplified it because they did a 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 wanna see the other 50. So hats off to them for
Speaker 2:for that
Speaker 1:project. In
Speaker 2:other news, Pomp is announcing a historic decision at BRR. Yes. A 100% of that. This is his digital digital asset treasury.
Speaker 1:It's a digital asset treasury. He's gonna buy Bitcoin and then buy companies that produce more Bitcoin or something?
Speaker 2:Yep. A 100% of equity compensation for the CEO Yep. Me and the board of directors will be tied to performance milestones. And boards shouldn't be making millions of dollars unless retail shareholders are also winning. Now that I am chart I am in charge of a public company, I hope to set the standard for what true shareholder alignment looks like.
Speaker 2:I I do believe this was in reaction to an activist that accumulated around 7%.
Speaker 1:Did he also set his milestone at 10,000,000,000,000? He doesn't get a dime unless it's 10,000,000,000,000?
Speaker 2:I can I can see that? He's he's he's a permabull.
Speaker 1:That would be impressive. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 2:think he's ever flipped bearish this this whole year. No. No. But anyways
Speaker 1:I mean, this is good. And and and the interesting and the interesting iteration on this is that it's Elon has set himself up with the equity compensation tied to share price, which went very well the first time, and now he set himself up to do it again with Tesla. And what's interesting here is that with Pump's BRR, ticker, he it's not just him. It's also the board of directors. And I think that at Tesla, that's not the case.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so he's saying, I'm taking it one step further. Now I'm still interested to see what are the targets. Like because if you're like, you know, hey. I'm the stock moves 2%, I get a $100,000,000. People aren't gonna be excited about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But if you design those equity comp packages appropriately, obviously, it's totally a win win win. So everyone can be very happy about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we'll see how it do does once you know, again, a lot of these digital asset treasury companies have performed horribly recently and unclear.
Speaker 1:Marvin was Marvin was texting me.
Speaker 2:Marvin Von Hagen is going He's
Speaker 1:the founder of
Speaker 2:the timeline. Poke, which is a social AI that lives in your messages. He says, saw 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, EU officially opened an antitrust investigation today, acts as unreal. He really is kind of met his met his worst nightmare today.
Speaker 2:Just directing he's basically you really that surprised that Martin Von Hagen Marvin. Marvin. Sorry. Sorry. Marvin Von Hagen is pulling the pulling the strings of the of the EU.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, pretty pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, good luck to we'll have to
Speaker 2:have Matt Slotnick says, maybe the best quote I've ever heard in an earnings call from Benioff, quote, we did 3,200,000,000,000.0 tokens. Let Bilbo Baggins know that we've got adoption and usages happening here. That was just a shout out to JRR token. My god. Token.
Speaker 2:That is so good. Of course, he's firing shots at Carb. Carb.
Speaker 1:That is hilarious.
Speaker 2:That is one of and
Speaker 1:he also made one at Oracle? What does he say?
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Nir says, today, I learned I use more tokens than Salesforce does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the the the I we didn't get into this in the corner, but the token thing, this could go so fantastically wrong if it turns into, like, eyeballs. Like, imagine if there's companies going out and publicly, they're talking about, like, their token multiples. It's like, yeah. Like, we we generate a 100,000,000,000,000 tokens, and so, of course, we should be a billion dollar company.
Speaker 1:And it's like, you're looking at, like, like, dollars of market cap per million tokens of generation.
Speaker 2:Something like that. I don't think we're gonna get there. I hope not. I think I think there is, like, there is a precedent through the eyeball.
Speaker 5:But you
Speaker 1:could you could do that, and you could think of that as a proxy. Of course, the correct proxy is is revenue, and we should stay in that world, but you never know.
Speaker 2:Yep. You never know. BUCO Capital says according to Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg kills goats with a laser gun and eats them.
Speaker 1:This is it's so funny.
Speaker 2:Question was what was your most memorable encounter with Zac? 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?
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2: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 their quote drops off.
Speaker 1:Imagine you have your buddy over, and you're like, hey. Look. I ran a social network. You ran a rival social network for a long time. I run Facebook.
Speaker 1:You ran Twitter.
Speaker 2:Let's just let's hang out. I'm gonna
Speaker 1:show you.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna no. No. No.
Speaker 1:That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I'm gonna show you a little bit of my culture, bro culture. You're the you're a hippie. You're you got hippie culture. I got bro culture.
Speaker 1:You're the big guy. The guy. You're the the big guy. I'm the UFC guy. I like to kill goats myself.
Speaker 1:But, you know, you're not supposed to go leak it. What's going on, Jack? Come on.
Speaker 2:Come on. Keep I I was off the record.
Speaker 1:I showed you my culture in confidence.
Speaker 2:What happens in Palo Alto? What happens to the goat the goat farm stays at the goat farm.
Speaker 1:Apparently not. Also hilarious
Speaker 2:we figured out that a that a somebody on the show that's come on multiple has hundreds of goats.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:And nobody knows about this. And people keep talking about the goat debate, this or that.
Speaker 1:The goat debate.
Speaker 2:We were talking to them and they're saying they need to keep quiet because there's a real
Speaker 1:Real goat collector.
Speaker 2:There's a
Speaker 1:real goat collector. Herd. That's right. The goat herd. What else we got?
Speaker 2:This is interesting. Google taps Replit Oh. In challenge to anthropic and cursor. Somewhat somewhat surprising Yeah. Considering
Speaker 1:that
Speaker 2:that Well
Speaker 1:well, no.
Speaker 2:Google's going really heavy with anti gravity. Yeah. But I think, like, Replit
Speaker 1:is Google's invested in Replit for a long time. Like like, they did they did a partnership or or investment back before Amjad was
Speaker 2:And it's capital like a
Speaker 1:couple million
Speaker 2:bucks in revenue. Is capital tied in in Replit?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I'm almost positive that that Google has invested in Replit at some point. We we should look it up, but we're we're doing the fake news now. We're done with the news.
Speaker 1: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 will manifest because you are kind of competing with a lot of the folks at AI dot studio, and there's a lot of different pieces of the Gemini team that you're kind of dealing with. But at the same time, like, Replit is a unique product, and Replit has never been has never been a foundation model company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it does make a lot of sense to I I actually I actually like this a lot in the sense that, you know, where where has Google been fantastic? Model
Speaker 2:development. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where have they been a little bit less speedy on the product rollout side, getting the product in the hands of people? Jon's great at that. The Repla 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.
Speaker 2:Two final posts. One, we missed this yesterday. Jake, Paul, and the team over at Antifund
Speaker 1:What are they?
Speaker 2:Have raised Jeff Jeff Wu have raised a new fund, $330,000,000. Almost I almost said I almost said 300,000,000. I'm sure they'll I'm sure they'll be there soon. But they are they say they're print account industry leaders like OpenAI, Andoril, Ramp, Cognition, and Physical Intelligence
Speaker 1:But look at this video. Twenty minute video. This is an interesting switch of a launch video. It's shot on the
Speaker 2:saying we this we were saying this like a year ago, like the way that we we told some company. I remember I remember the the I think I was saying to
Speaker 1:You don't have to say who?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was saying to Zach was we were talking to Zach Dell Sure. Who didn't end up doing this. Yeah. But I was do the twenty minute launch video.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Like, do a video that
Speaker 1:Well, you you have a different idea that you should not leave because of good.
Speaker 2:Don't leave that idea.
Speaker 1:But I love that this I love that this happened the way it did. And I think that this is a good format.
Speaker 2:And I think
Speaker 1:this probably suits. I think there's probably two to three more of these that will happen. I mean, this does this does in some way in some way mirror the Johnny Ive, Sam Altman video of, like, them getting coffee together. And, like, there's these interesting things that, like, they're not launching a podcast together. They're just dropping a one off conversation that's edited, kind of framing some of the history, explaining it.
Speaker 1:It's a really clear way to communicate. And, of course, because these guys are master communicators, they understand media. And so I see. Very excited. And what a portfolio.
Speaker 1:OpenAI, Anteral, Ramp, Cognition There's one person
Speaker 2:that will go unnamed that links all of those companies together. Fantastic. You know the person. Performance. You know
Speaker 1:the person. Of course, do.
Speaker 2:Final post
Speaker 1:Jeff Wu.
Speaker 2:From Tanae. Tanae, sorry. He's highlighting a company called Plaud. Plaud. This is apparently.
Speaker 2:But it sounds like they're absolutely ripping. Successful. They said wearables were cooked, but Plaud records, transcribes and summary of course, it's another meeting summarizing product. It's a physical product. 1,000,000 units sold largely to doctors, lawyers, and sales 250,000,000 of annualized revenue bootstrapped and now profitable.
Speaker 1:Literally and and it's crazy. Like, no no no drama, no launch videos, no crazy hype, no no rage bait. Just building in silence. We gotta get this done.
Speaker 2:They they raised around $5,000,000, but
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. But, know, the I think the more important thing is just that is that hardware is hard, and we see a lot of corpses in the in the consumer electronics world, but there are also major breakout successes. The Oura Ring, for example. Like, what a remarkable company to just show up doing revenue at their scale Yeah.
Speaker 1:Seemingly out of nowhere. Whoop has done really well. And there's something yeah. Aura, that's that's what I was mentioning. And then this this new company, this meeting summarizer, fantastic.
Speaker 1:And interesting that we I'm
Speaker 2:curious to what this does so well that your phone can't do in an app.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't know. We'll have to ask them. Might be
Speaker 2:a time to
Speaker 1:maybe we'll have to buy one. Touch it up.
Speaker 2:Well Thank you for tuning
Speaker 1:in today.
Speaker 2:Thank you
Speaker 1:for tuning in from
Speaker 2:the year. We stopped in the chat. Yeah. But we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We'll be
Speaker 2:back tomorrow. And thank you again to the NICEE team for hosting us. It's totally surreal It is. To be here, and thank you to everybody that has made this possible tuning in, enjoying the show, and supporting us however you have. So have a wonderful evening, and we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Take care. Good night.