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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 TVPN. Today is Friday, 12/05/2025.
Speaker 2:We are live again from the
Speaker 1:New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for the boats,
Speaker 3:It's good to be
Speaker 1:the real fortress of finance, the capital of capital. The temple of technology, it's back in Hollywood. We'll be there on Monday, but we have a great show for you today, folks. We have Keith Raboy joining us in person. We have Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:We have Emily Sunberg. And do we have we have one more. Adam Faze, again. It's had
Speaker 3:some hot takes on the WB.
Speaker 1:Which is
Speaker 3:the top
Speaker 1:story today other than, of course, Ram, Patanya's money, save both. He's used corporate cards,
Speaker 2:Bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot
Speaker 1:more all in one place. Let me give you some facts about Netflix. They're gonna be bought by or they're gonna buy Warner Brothers and HBO Max for an $82,700,000,000 deal. The acquisition is expected to close following Warner Brothers Discovery spin off of Discovery Global TV Networks division in q three twenty twenty six. There's a bunch of fun, interesting things hitting the timeline.
Speaker 1:Obviously, there's a tech story because of Netflix. It's also a media story and, you know, a public market story as well.
Speaker 3:And it is a story that we we will be talking about for quite a while because Yes. Although or although this gotten announced in the last twenty four hours, it's very likely that this is gonna be a very long drawn out process before it actually gets regulatory approval.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let me read through Variety that had a great summary of the deal. But first, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI, graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So it's official.
Speaker 1:In a move that will dramatically reshape the entertainment business, Netflix and Warner Brothers or WB. Don't call it Warner Bros, although we we want to. The insiders, they call it Warner Brothers or WB. Warner Brothers Discovery announced an agreement Friday under which Netflix will acquire Warner Brothers, including its film and TV studios, HBO Max and HBO. The deal has total enterprise value, including debt of 82,700,000,000.0 with an equity value of 72,000,000,000, the company said.
Speaker 1:The announcement of Netflix's deal to buy the Warner Brothers streaming and studio business came after a weeks long bidding war that pitted the streaming giant against David Ellison's Paramount, Skydance, and Comcast. News broke Thursday evening that Netflix had entered into exclusive negotiations with WBD on a deal for Warner Brothers and HBO Max. Quote from Netflix co CEO Ted Sarandos. He said, I know some of you are surprised we're making this acquisition, and I think people were surprised because didn't Netflix's stock trade down on this news?
Speaker 3:People It's down. People are
Speaker 1:Are worried about the
Speaker 3:some people are excited about it. Yeah. Some people are plenty of people are not excited about it for various reasons. Some people don't think it'll get approved. Other people think this is, you know, it's quite an extension.
Speaker 3:Obviously does theatrical releases. They have a movie theater business. It's not it's definitely will be an ex quite an extension
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:To Netflix's core business today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Netflix for reference, $425,000,000,000 company down 2.6% today. So not falling off a cliff or anything, but certainly people taking note of this. There's also a number of op eds about this already out on the timeline. We can go through some of those.
Speaker 1:But first, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews. So Netflix expects it excited expects to, quote, maintain Warner Brothers. It said said the company has historically been more of a builder than a buyer, and so Netflix is trying to, like, sort of reassure both fans, employees, even people who might just see Warner Brothers Discovery as, like, a fantastic asset that doesn't need to be, like, stripped for parts. He's trying to push back against a potential narrative that Netflix will will be very ruthless and cost cutting and and lose some of that, you know, what people think made WB amazing art. So he said, Netflix expects to maintain Warner Brothers' current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films.
Speaker 1:I know this doesn't matter to you because you never go to the theater and you never
Speaker 3:Hey. What? We went and saw Dune.
Speaker 1:We got That was, like, two years ago.
Speaker 4:But we got a we we got a when we did that, it was a
Speaker 3:lot of fun. We got a bunch of the guys we got a bunch of the guys together. We said we're gonna make the monthly thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were close.
Speaker 3:Done in six. At at
Speaker 1:the start of the year, we were doing that. We were doing that. We were getting everyone together, just like guys night out kind of, but to the movie theater because we were like, okay. What do you do if you're a guy and you have a bunch of guy friends and you wanna, you know, go meet up, but you don't really like drinking? You don't know anything about sports?
Speaker 1:Like, what can you do on a Tuesday night?
Speaker 3:Suit up and head to your local movie
Speaker 1:theater. To the local movie theater. And, fortunately, it feels like Netflix must have heard what we said. They probably this this seems like a direct reaction to us.
Speaker 3:Potentially. Potentially.
Speaker 1:We do need to go back to the theater, though, because we have not been supporting them nearly enough recently. But it is a good time, and it and I do think it is important to set this tone. Like, I mean, the reality is that, like, like, theaters are going to change. They are that like, the it there's a question of, like, you know, fast takeoff in AI, fast takeoff in streaming. Like, it's been twenty years since you've been able to watch things on the Internet, so you've been able to watch, home box office was a way to watch a movie at home.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In some ways, the ability to put a TV in someone's house was the beginning of the end for the theater Yeah. Because they were immediately substitutes, although the difference was massive screen versus tiny CRT. And then it was like, okay. A 42 inch TV flat screen.
Speaker 1:Now that might cost a couple grand, you know, ten years ago. Now I was at I was somewhere I think I was at Target, and I saw a 42 inch TV. Think it advertised for, like, $75 or something. It's, like, suspiciously cheap. It was so cheap.
Speaker 3:It's like a rotisserie chicken. I was just trying to get you in the door.
Speaker 1:I mean, in college for me, like, the 42 inch TV was the gold standard. Yeah. We weren't in the era of the '65, the '75, the '85. Like, the big TVs hadn't arrived, but the 42 inch TV
Speaker 3:was good. Like you're the king of the castle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You were the king of the castle. You had a 42 inch, and it was, like, a serious expense. It was a couple grand. Now they're practically giving them away.
Speaker 1:And so, of course, that's gonna be a competitive pressure, but, also, it's not gonna destroy the theater immediately, but it's going to have an erosion effect over decades, and that's exactly what's happening. But it's nice that Netflix is not declaring this the end of the theater. They're gonna continue to invest in support. And and I I I think this will, you know, certainly, you know, encourage everyone to continue supporting Warner Brothers and Discovery and Netflix. So Netflix signaled it would keep HBO Max as a discrete service while it also touted the addition of HBO and HBO Max content to its lineup.
Speaker 1:And so we're gonna add the deep film and TV libraries and HBO to and HBO Max programming. Netflix members will have even more high
Speaker 3:quality service. Netflix Max.
Speaker 1:You need to be Netflix Maxing. Maybe that's wait. Is that why they did HBO Max? Because they wanted it to be like, oh,
Speaker 3:you're HBO Maxing? You get HBO Max. Then it was Max. Then it was back to HBO.
Speaker 1:People people give them so much they talk so much trash about HBO with the with the rebrand chaos, but Max is a great term as opposed to because they could've done HBO Plus.
Speaker 3:No. I mean, the critique there was HBO has built up such an incredible brand.
Speaker 1:Yes. They never should've gone
Speaker 3:purely Max. And credit to Scott Galloway, I remember he went so hard on them for dropping HBO.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's crazy.
Speaker 3:You've you've spent, like, you've spent decades building up this incredible brand, and you're just like, see you. We'll just be called Max.
Speaker 1:They spent, like, two years HBO Maxing. Well, they spent two decades HBO Maxing, and then And they just went Max Maxing. HBO Max Maxing, and then they just went Max Maxing. And that was that was the end the beginning of the end. The But article goes on.
Speaker 1:This allows Netflix to optimize plans for consumers, enhancing viewing options, and expanding access to content. Netflix says they expect to see 2 to $3,000,000,000 in cost savings annually by the third year after the Warner Brothers Discovery deal closes. Let's see. The company expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings per share by year two. The cash and stock transaction was valued at $27 per share, and the timeline is going back and forth on this.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Leia, let let let's get into some takes. So Yeah. The counter side of this, the information actually had a pretty scathing a scathing kind of analysis Before the
Speaker 1:reason I'm gonna tell you off public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, and they're trusted by millions.
Speaker 3:So I read through this earlier. This is from Martin Pearce. He says Netflix's Warner purchase is an 82,700,000,000.0 Warner. Blunder.
Speaker 1:He's calling it a blunder.
Speaker 3:He says it will likely announced Friday morning will likely prove a stupendous error by a management team that until now has rarely put a wrong foot. Netflix paying a huge price, 27 and a half times next year's expected earnings well above prevailing multiples for film and TV companies for businesses that likely won't help it add many subscribers. Right? Mhmm. After like Netflix has like saturation.
Speaker 3:A lot of people today, so from a consumer standpoint, if you subscribe to Netflix and HBO Max, you're gonna be like, cool. I can churn off of one of these services and just switch over to here. Question is, will then Netflix, will will they be incentivized to just keep pushing the the price of the subscription? Yep. They're adding more content, more IP, and so I would expect them to do that.
Speaker 3:Martin continues, moreover, deal is likely to face severe regulatory obstacles. Again, so Netflix is not exactly Trump aligned. Mhmm. Right? They the Netflix did the deal with the Obamas.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so I think that in a world where Netflix was going to sorry. WB is going to Paramount, I could see that much more likely to to get through. Whereas this Yeah. This is gonna make make sure the the Netflix, like, team is gonna be spending, at least the next year, I would assume working on this.
Speaker 3:And then since we started
Speaker 1:What do mean regulatory approval?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Just trying to get this across the line.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it it feels like it's so hard to make the case that this creates some sort of monopoly because Disney owns it's like, yes. Okay. Now Netflix has Okay.
Speaker 3:That's said.
Speaker 1:And they also have Batman. But
Speaker 3:Jason Kilar, who's a former Warner Media CEO, says, if I were tasked with doing so, I could not think of a more effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood than selling WBD to Netflix.
Speaker 1:What about selling it to Disney? You literally have Batman, Superman, and all the Marvel characters. You have Spider Man and Star Wars. That feels like that would be less competitive than having right right now, from my perspective, you have you have Batman and Superman kind of off an island. They haven't really been able to get that that that engine going to the same degree as Marvel, the Avengers, Thanos, Iron Man,
Speaker 3:and so forth. Named Ben Weiss Right. Says, disagree. Hollywood is competing with Silicon Valley, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, preserving some notion of competition in and between legacy Hollywood. Risks winning a battle and losing a war the old media companies need to Mhmm.
Speaker 3:More of the right type of scale. This does it for WB. Jason says, when I use that phrase competition in Hollywood, I'm referring to having a sufficient number of vibrant and robust entities that can and will aggressively compete against each other to produce and distribute films Okay. Series, live events, and more for decades to come. I'm not focused on the legacy of it all.
Speaker 3:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I would still I would still say this is, like, number two. But it I mean, it might be high. But just in terms of, like, Hollywood filmmaking, these feel like extremely competitive areas. There are so many different there are so many different streaming services and and and bundles that you can piece together. There are folks who are like, yeah.
Speaker 1:You what? I ordered from Amazon, so I have Amazon Prime. That's where I watch everything. There are still people that just go to Apple, you know, Apple TV and just buy a movie. You know?
Speaker 1:You can still just do that. You can be over off in the Netflix ecosystem. You can be in the Hulu ecosystem. Like, there it it doesn't feel like there's a a a crazy lack of competition in media right now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I I don't know. I I'm I'm I'm I I would be I would be somewhat surprised if this doesn't if this doesn't go through, but, I mean, you never know.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I think Netflix again, we were we were before this, were having lunch with cable exec Mhmm. And he was kind of bringing up how Netflix had gotten caught up a little bit in kind of some of the the the woke stuff. Sure. And again, I just think in in in a in Trump America, I just feel far more likely Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That the Allisons could get a deal done. And they're notoriously absolute dogs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So that's that they're go that they're gonna, like No. So yes. They're gonna try and outbid.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 3:So right now, this is Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's on?
Speaker 3:Chris Gasparino over at at Fox says, Scoop, as reported, Paramount and Skydance Skydance is now looking to launch a hostile bid for WBD because it feels its $30 a share all cash offer is actually higher than what Netflix offered in terms of cash stock and the value of the spin off of the cable business. So this is still developing. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyways, our fan had some interesting backstory. He says, wild outcome, especially after these three wild what ifs before Netflix IPO ed in 2002. Before Netflix IPO ed in 2002, apparently Bezos offered $12,000,000 to buy it. Can you imagine if Netflix had sold for 12,000,000,000?
Speaker 3:Well, they also tried to sell the Blockbuster during the
Speaker 1:So Blockbuster had a chance to buy it for 50,000,000, and they laughed it off. But then it was just a DVD delivery service, and they were like, we can build this. We have DVDs. We have all the infrastructure. We can just take it from the stores.
Speaker 1:Like, we don't need to do this. But what they didn't realize was that actually building technology, actually building a real tech, like, streaming service and scaling that platform, I mean, Netflix has some of the greatest, like, just
Speaker 3:infrastructure Well, and even the early recommendation engines.
Speaker 4:It's like I
Speaker 3:I I remember my dad being like, yeah. Netflix just recommended. It knows what I like, and it just said it sent me this. They said you're gonna enjoy this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then Bernard Arnaud saved it with a $30,000,000 check. Did you know this?
Speaker 1:Netflix? And Bernard Arnaud Over the top. I love it. Love it. I was I I was thinking about the actual value of putting these these things together because, like, you're you were making the point that putting Netflix and and and Warner Brothers together, it doesn't like, everyone's already subscribed to Netflix.
Speaker 1:I don't know I don't know if that's true, if if the if the trends continue. Like, Netflix has a fair amount of, like like, they have their Squid Games. They have some big they have some big IP. But if you just think about, like, the drumbeat of HBO come back every season, oh, you're not watching Game of Thrones? You're out of the loop.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're not watching Succession? You're out of the loop. Like, the conversation driving shows, I feel like are on HBO much more consistently than Netflix. And in fact, I don't even know if I'm logged into Netflix on my phone right now. I know I'm still paying, but I really don't watch it very much.
Speaker 1:And I think that the reason is because I just haven't had Oh, you're missing out.
Speaker 3:True enthusiast. For me, as someone who's not an enthusiast
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'll go to Prime because I'm like, I rarely watch movies. If I'm gonna watch a movie, I wanna I'll I'm happy to just buy. I'm not Yes.
Speaker 1:Going do the same thing on
Speaker 3:Let get the let me get the the free option Sure. On Netflix. I'm like, I will just buy Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:The the thing that I wanna fill this ninety minutes with.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Anyway, so But they the deal doesn't include w d d Okay. WBD's cable channels such as CNN, TNT, TBS, Discovery Yeah. Are being spun off. Okay.
Speaker 1:But we don't know where that will land yet or or are people speculating?
Speaker 3:Even if Netflix gets regulatory approval, it will have to take on 50,000,000,000 in debt to complete the deal and we'll spend a couple of years cutting costs to reduce that debt. Mhmm. Netflix does do around $10.09 or 10,000,000,000 of free cash flow. Yeah. And so they can certainly service the debts.
Speaker 3:Yep. But anyways, in the first nine months of this year, WBD's studio and streaming operations generated 2,300,000,000.0 in earnings Mhmm. In in EBITDA. Next year, Netflix executives said they expected the Warner business to generate 3,000,000,000 in EBITDA. That's a price of 27 and a half times EBITDA after taking into account cost savings of 2 and a half billion they expect to make.
Speaker 3:Netflix says the deal value represents a multiple of 14.3 times. WBD's traditional rivals Disney and Paramount Skydance are each trading around 11 times. Mhmm. Anyways, we can kind of skip over this.
Speaker 1:Kramer said, so out of the box, Netflix as the world's biggest content creator by far. Exciting, but not necessarily in a good way for shareholders. I think that's so funny. Let me tell you about Fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel.
Speaker 1:Adam Faiz is coming out on the show in just an hour or two. He says, I don't think people realize the licensing business Netflix is about to have if this deal goes through. Warner Brothers animated IP library alone would bring in billions in new merchandising revenue coupled with new versions of these iconic shows in the platform. Game over. And he list some of these out, and one of them I think is hilarious is Foghorn Leghorn.
Speaker 1:They own Looney Tunes. So they have Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote. These are, yeah, these are these are time honored iconic iconic characters. I just think it's funny because very clearly, there are a series of bankers out there that have a spreadsheet, and somewhere they have a row, and on that row is Foghorn Leghorn.
Speaker 1:And attached to Foghorn Leghorn is the value of the intellectual property of Foghorn Leghorn, who's like a large rooster who talks with a funny accent. And I just imagine that they're out there saying, yeah, foghorn leghorn. That's, like, 30,000,000. That's a $30,000,000 business. Like, okay.
Speaker 1:Yosemite Sam, that's a $50,000,000 business. Porgy pig? Porgy pig's 80,000,000. So let's give us some of the parts. I really hope that someone on Wall Street, some some investment banker
Speaker 3:It's actually Adam Ant is for being really undervalued. Exactly. Actually think this is a $2,000,000,000 property.
Speaker 1:Oh, Dick Dastardly? You think Dick Dastardly is worth 8,000,000 in in intellectual property value? Yeah. Right. What about Snagglepuss?
Speaker 3:I don't even know. I thought you were making some
Speaker 1:these up. No. This is I know you're like the Hannah Barbera, Quikdraw McGraw, Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, the Herculoids. Herculoids sounds like some crazy crazy non meme. Boo boo.
Speaker 1:Herculoid seems like someone with a with a Roman statue avatar. Okay.
Speaker 3:So so Polymarket has who will acquire WB at Yes. 86% today. Paramount is still only sitting at 6%.
Speaker 1:6%. So
Speaker 3:the Amazon behind? Amazon Amazon is still up there at Yes. Anyways Okay. So
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, grows your company to the next level. The DC comic books, I feel like there's the the like, I feel like Netflix could do something cool here. I feel like Batman, Joker, Harley Quinn, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash. Like, these are iconic characters.
Speaker 1:These are these are cost these are Halloween costume characters. They they are still really known. And but the last round of of DC, it just didn't break through in the way the the Marvel, series did. And Marvel broke through in such a massive way. It didn't have the cache of the Dark Knight and the Nolan films, but is there any way that they can get Nolan back in the seat to actually do a full arc or something?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I would just hope that I I I just grew up with the with the Nolan era of DC, and I would have loved him to go on and do more of that Yeah. With Superman, with, you know, the the whole crew, everyone coming together. And instead, they got just really over the top of the CGI and the slow mo and those and the the Zach Snyder era, and I think a lot of people sort of got got they got tired of it, and I'm looking forward to whatever they whatever they wind up doing next. Oh, they have Metallocalypse.
Speaker 1:That's a great one. I like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They got a they got a ton of stuff, so it'd be interesting to keep following it. Anyway Wait. You wanna go to Possum?
Speaker 1:Oh, what's Mike Mirafloor saying?
Speaker 3:Mike Mirafloor says we already have nana nano banana pro t b c commercials with decent paid media budgets behind them. Everything is moving so so quickly.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So James Harden is in an ad for my prize. Mhmm. I don't know what my prize is. Said this is the best commercial he's ever been in, and he never stepped foot on the set. Let me show you how to crack the code on celeb deepfakes for this My Prize ad we did with James Harden.
Speaker 3:So this is a guy named Billy Woodward Yeah. Who's been
Speaker 1:doing they're actually putting behind this this ad on TV because it looks like a TV commercial, but this also could just be a viral marketing campaign on
Speaker 3:Well, my prize is a premium online casino games. Wow. My games It's hard
Speaker 1:to get in on the the gambling trade.
Speaker 3:He doesn't have a prediction market partner yet. In other news, this almost seems like it could be fake.
Speaker 1:You share this news. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com. So what is it?
Speaker 1:There is there there's news out of the truth
Speaker 3:I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 4:if this is real because not not a
Speaker 3:single there there's a very viral post right now that says breaking. President Trump set to announce a new AI platform called truth AI. There's not a single not a single legacy media institution has reported on this that I've found. So I would given that this is a story that they'd be very excited to cover Yep. I would be wary that it's real Yep.
Speaker 3:Yet. But Say. That's not stopping j bol, t a r d, from saying and you guys think Google won the AI race talking about how Trump is set to unveil new AI platform Truth AI. I wonder if Truth Social pops at all today off of
Speaker 1:Truth Social.
Speaker 3:No. It's down. Down?
Speaker 2:It's down.
Speaker 3:2%. Well, like, he's splitting his yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Focus.
Speaker 3:Lack of focusing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You should be focused. You have to lock in one thing. If you're a social media entrepreneur I mean, you know, it's Mark Zuckerberg getting dinged for
Speaker 3:for going just walking some of the We're going to metaverse stuff. Back.
Speaker 1:You know, may may maybe the true social team's getting dinged for heading over to AI land instead of just doing a partnership. You know what you know what the crazy thing is? Like, I keep laughing about this fact that, like, it has gotta be so hard to justify an in house AI foundation model training run now if you're a big platform when the rebuttal has to be okay. So you're saying that you need to do something special. You need to do something creative.
Speaker 1:You need to do some weird deal with some other people, put something together, but Apple can just work with Google. Yeah. It it it's enough for Apple to Apple gets
Speaker 3:some good approval. For you. Apple works to
Speaker 1:just buy tokens from Gemini from Google, but you
Speaker 4:because you build it
Speaker 3:a year.
Speaker 1:Your your business is more more special
Speaker 3:than Apple. I think Apple is in the position where, like, they're like, we don't need to prove to like, I feel like an analyst can look at Apple and say, like, they will have leverage in AI.
Speaker 1:Yes. At least Yeah. Yeah. This is
Speaker 3:the. Where there's other businesses that feel like, okay. We need an AI strategy. It's not enough to just announce a partnership with Alexa.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:We need to, like, actually own the weights.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We should we we should actually get into some of the the Apple departures because we talked about this briefly, but but the the Wall Street Journal is saying that Apple departures point to challenges for iPhones' dominance.
Speaker 1:And I'm I think it's too early to call the the iPhone challenged. I I feel like the iPhone's dominance
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Has not been challenged yet. Maybe that is coming, but, you know, there have been several top lieutenants who have left in the past twelve months, and, dozens of others have defected to rivals. So there are some facts that are important to consider and and walk through here. So, The Wall Street Journal is summarizing it this way. They Apple is facing a wave of executive departures as the company continues a period of transition not only among its leadership, but if rivals have their way for its businesses as well.
Speaker 1:On Thursday, the company announced that its general counsel and head of policy will both retire next year. On Wednesday, a top designer left for Meta Platforms. On Monday, Apple said its head of artificial intelligence strategy would retire. Its chief operating officer announced its retirement in July, and the CFO has transitioned into a new role. So lots of head of you know, are the heads rolling, or are these retirements?
Speaker 1:There's a lot of, like, you know, sort of management. It feels like Apple's just, like, not the place to let the drama kind of come to them. They're like, look. If you even if you got poached, maybe we
Speaker 3:just Well, it's notable because Apple Apple came out with an announcement after the guy left for Meta and said were basically trying to make it sound like it was it was like, they were positioning it as, like, mutual, like
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:This was the right time
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Time to go on.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 3:And I'll let anyone else kind of, like, read into whether or not Yeah. It it was really DHH was getting over 37 signals, which says Apple was overdue for a full executive reset. Just need to add Cook to
Speaker 4:the list. And for a
Speaker 3:replacement, Forestall is only 56. Time for a comeback?
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh, that would be very interesting. Yeah. There's a of Forestall fans out there who think that he didn't get it he didn't get it right or or he didn't get the the opportunity he deserved.
Speaker 3:Cook can't catch a break. He's like,
Speaker 1:I still think I still think Cook's done a lot of good good stuff. I'm I'm still I'm still bullish on Cook. But I don't know. Let's see. It says the executive departures underscore a changing of the guard underway at Apple.
Speaker 1:Even as executive chief executive officer Tim Cook himself shows no sign of stepping down even though everyone is leaking a variety of rumors to the contrary. Cook and his new lieutenants face a critical test preparing Apple for the AI era and a wave of new competitive devices that results we haven't seen the wave of new competitive devices just yet. He I mean, Apple, if you there's another way to tell the story, which is like Apple defeated the the rabbit r one. They defeated the friend attack. They defeated you know, like, what was the other one that that that that was the the humane pin.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're singing happy birthday. Singing happy birthday. It's someone's birthday.
Speaker 3:It's one of the guys down on the trading floor.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's got a whole cake out there. That's great. Good guy. Well
Speaker 3:Very sweet. Why don't you tell us about your
Speaker 1:Turbo Puffer. Serverless vector and full
Speaker 4:text search. Turbo Puffer.
Speaker 1:Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. We
Speaker 3:love Turbo. That was really funny yesterday having Jim Kramer reference the Yeah. The Turbo Puffer. Simon and the Turbo Puffer team.
Speaker 1:That was a, like, a
Speaker 3:crazy crossover.
Speaker 1:That was a
Speaker 3:very That was a deep that was a deep cut, Kramer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was a deep cut, actually.
Speaker 3:We have some Jacob Brintamaki tagged us in a post here. SpaceX tells investors it's aiming for a late twenty twenty six IPO. Katie Roof over at the information Has the scoop. Has the scoop. Apparently, Elon Musk, SpaceX has told investors and financial institutions that it is aiming for an IPO in the second half of next year.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The talk comes as SpaceX considers holding a sale of shares held by investors and employees that would value the company at 800,000,000,000. Quite the markup. Double its valuation in a sale this summer, and what would make it the most valuable private company, he's gotta be the most valuable private company. It probably candidly makes him sick that that OpenAI eclipsed. The company is considering a public listing of the entire company including Starlink, which which makes sense.
Speaker 3:I don't I I think like Starlink is is a a huge part of, obviously, the value of the business, and I just don't think it goes out anywhere near 800 without it, and they're very interlinked. That is a change, though, from a few years ago when Musk said he expected SpaceX would eventually spin off Starlink and take it public, but executives have shelved the idea of a Starlink spin off as its rocket business has improved. Apparently, the Wall Street Journal reported on the share sale at 800. So anyways, in other news, Mark Benioff is saying that he might rename the company Agent Force. Trace Cohen says just Force.
Speaker 3:Why not just Force? Oh, Force. Well,
Speaker 1:isn't there a isn't there Force India, the f one team from a couple years ago? BYT or BWT, Force India? That was like a team. I think they struggled. I gotta fight, man.
Speaker 1:What what was Force India? Was that just I love Force India.
Speaker 3:Benioff is is on a tear. His his pinned tweet right now, LLMs are the new disk drives. Commodity infrastructure, you hot swap for whoever's cheapest and best. The fantasy that the model is a moat just expired.
Speaker 1:People are really going wild.
Speaker 3:They're going off down here.
Speaker 1:Do you think he does it? Is there is there a prediction market yet up for renaming of Salesforce? I think Salesforce is such a strong name even if they do more than sales at this point. It's it's transcended the it's it like like, the the company has definitely transcended what they do. Like, I think people know.
Speaker 3:Why not just sales? I like just sales. Just be Sales Inc.
Speaker 1:I don't think you can be. I I think that's too generic.
Speaker 3:I don't know. Not if
Speaker 1:you're you do?
Speaker 3:I mean, he he would have to update the the ticker too. Still here.
Speaker 1:The bigger one. Yeah. Because sales because
Speaker 3:everyone wants to be like, CRMs are dead. You're gonna just be able to just generate a CRM Yeah. On the fly. Yeah. Bucco Capital says, f it.
Speaker 3:Nothing else is working. Go for it, brother.
Speaker 1:A name change sometimes will fix you. Just just let it let it rip.
Speaker 3:Ethan Ding was coming in with some commentary.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:He said yesterday, it should be extremely extremely alarming to Salesforce investors that no exec at Salesforce is telling him that's not a lot of tokens. Of course, he he they they talked about generating 3,200,000,000,000.0 tokens. Sounds like a big number. Ethan says, for anyone who doesn't understand, Cursor processes more tokens than Salesforce all time figure every six days. Every six Salesforce has 20,000,000 users.
Speaker 3:Yep. I mean, Credit Cursor has similar amount of users, I think. Sure. Assuming same average token count per active agent force user count is 40 to 60,000 truly active users a k a point two to point 3% adoption three years after launch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I wonder I wonder I want like, the like, all tokens are not created equal. Like, you can you can generate so many so many tokens if you're doing these, like, deep research reports. And, like, if you had agent force going around and base effectively running a deep research report on every contact in every CRM under, like, under
Speaker 3:Every conversation.
Speaker 1:Every time you get
Speaker 3:a new email from a
Speaker 1:lead. Right? Like, the the the token generation could be incredibly high and also deliver very little value. On the flip side, you could have a really fine tuned model that is, you know, laser focused, more of a scalpel. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you could be getting a lot of value out of those tokens that you are generating. So I don't I don't really know.
Speaker 3:On the on the app layer debate, are CRMs cooked? Yes. There's a post here from Kalen. He says, just met a company that vibe coded an entire CRM to avoid paying for HubSpot over the last year. It's now become a burden to maintain and missing key functionality, third party interoperability as they scale.
Speaker 3:They're now migrating to HubSpot app layer sign. We experienced I think it's so easy to make a a v one. Totally. You can make a v one in a day. And so you assume like, okay, you could be spend like another few days really building out like more of a feature set and the reality is like the thing that you generate in one day could take 10, at least for now, hours and hours and hours every week just to, like, maintain it and make, like, incremental improvements.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let me tell you about Linear. Linear's purpose built tool. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from road map to release.
Speaker 1:I actually I didn't vibe code a CRM, but back in college, I built a CRM inside of Microsoft Excel.
Speaker 3:And so I Yeah. That's like the classic Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's why I wrote a bunch of visual for
Speaker 3:a startup. Yeah. It it was like, You could go from x sheets or Excel
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:To maybe an Airtable Yeah. Slightly more robust Sure. Then to to Adio or a HubSpot or or or and then and then eventually get over to Salesforce.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I mean, they yeah. The question about, like, the value of the platform and the value of the app layer.
Speaker 1:I mean, we we were talking about this with with Shopify folks. Like, there are so many companies. I've worked at these companies. I've run these companies where we said, like, no. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. Our use case is special. No one's gonna build an ecommerce site exactly the way we wanna build it. And so we wind up building an entire ecommerce stack custom.
Speaker 1:And then a couple years later, Shopify just catches up, and then boom. You're on you're back on Shopify. And and and that just happened time and time again. I I lived it at Soylent. It was a wild wild time.
Speaker 3:This is some wild news. Logan Paul, Jake Paul, and Jeff Wu are starting an eight week accelerator. It's a 25 k safe followed by a $100,000 price round for a total of 7% equity. A lot of people are confused about, doing it as a price round for a 100 k. A founder could easily end up spending, like, $30, you know, like depending on who their lawyer is.
Speaker 3:Like Oh, actually yeah. It is tricky. So it's like a 100 k investment and then you have like let's assume you're like super efficient and it's like $10. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's kind of annoying.
Speaker 3:And then yeah. It's it's it's it's annoying. That said, I think there's a lot of interesting businesses that could go through this that would really benefit from working with Jake and and Logan and and
Speaker 1:Jeff. Right? So interesting that
Speaker 4:it's a
Speaker 3:25 k
Speaker 1:safe and then a $100,000 price around. Like, why not just $1.25 for 7%, like, a on a on a safe with a cap that ensures they get 7% no matter what? Like, that feel I would love to talk to them. I I think, hopefully, we're gonna be able to get Jeff Wu on the show at some point. We're gonna ask him about how he is, you know, thinking about that particular term.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of people here are saying, like, oh, 7% for a 125 k. That's low, and that's certainly lower than y c. Y c, you come in with, like, I think, $10,000,000 valuation. This is more like a $1,000,000 valuation. But, you know, if you're an earlier in your career, you're not ready to go to a different higher valuation, like, this could still be a good
Speaker 3:Or you do need a lot of capital for your business, but you do need a lot of attention. Like, I could see some consumer brands getting started this way.
Speaker 1:No. I I I mean, I just remember, like like, YC was my North Star for, like, what I wanted to get into with my first business, but, like, I got denied the first time I applied. And I was like, if you gave me $5,000 for 10% of the business, like, I would take it because I want to work on my thing, and I wanna keep going. And, like, yes, at some at some point, it can be predatory, but, like, with some of the first ideas that I was coming up with, like, I definitely didn't deserve a 125 k for 7% because they're, like, slop companies that were, like, very unlikely to wit to to succeed. So I don't know.
Speaker 1:There there there's something interesting. I do wonder if they will position this as, okay. You're you're you're going to be able to accelerate on the go to market side. You're gonna be able to accelerate on the on the creator side, creator partnerships. This will be there's a whole bunch of different ways.
Speaker 1:It could be something where you are work you're you're going through this accelerator because you get to ask Logan and Jake about their media creation, their creator work, and then you're you're launching your company Yeah. More likely to go viral because these guys really understand virality. On the other side, it could be you're coming in and you're taking a crack at building something that might wind up being more like an incubation for them because I'm sure that they want to launch a bunch of products. This is a way to just kind of take swings and and get to get close to working with people. And then if something lines up, they could say, hey.
Speaker 1:We actually wanna do, a fifty fifty deal, and this is going to be, like, Logan and Jake as cofounders of the next thing that they're working on together. And we're gonna really, really push this for you. We'll be your marketing arm. Yeah. So I I I it'll be interesting to see where these companies go.
Speaker 3:Jeff and Jake, I think, are coming on the show in the couple weeks before the end of the year.
Speaker 1:So Yes.
Speaker 3:We will be able to ask them more about that.
Speaker 1:Before we move on, let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GPT and more. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.
Speaker 3:Aaron has a good post here. Aaron? Remaining remaining Apple leadership team. Who is Travis Scott, Tim Cook. And mister Beast?
Speaker 3:Mister Beast
Speaker 1:Mister Beast did say that he's going to film on iPhones. I'm not sure what the Travis Scott connection is. Has he done a partnership with Apple and
Speaker 3:what No. Just
Speaker 1:No. There are still plenty of folks. Eddie Q is still there. Their Apple leadership team is still stacked. Don't you worry.
Speaker 1:Don't you worry. There are still people here. And we have our We
Speaker 3:have Keith boy in in the restream
Speaker 1:In the
Speaker 3:restream waiting room. Room. Get in there.
Speaker 1:Geared up. Physical restream waiting room.
Speaker 3:They put the moon on the sphere. Oh. They put cheese on the sphere. No. We're the sphere of Vegas says, we're sending off the last supermoon of 2025 with something special.
Speaker 3:Using NASA's public domain lunar data, our team built a true to science moon that is that's lighting up this Las Vegas skyline. This looks That's really cool. Absolutely insane.
Speaker 1:I I I super the sphere is, like, underrated. It's so cool. I I what I
Speaker 3:You don't know how to build beautiful things anymore.
Speaker 1:Make it make sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We do. We do.
Speaker 1:People look at people look at this and they think, you know, the New York Stock Exchange, how did they build this? Was this built by humans? There's a lot of debate. But the sphere really really reinstates, yes, we can build amazing things.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Humans built that. Yeah. Humans built the sphere.
Speaker 1:About the heating? The like, the the level of of, like, engineering that went into actually driving the screens on the outside because so
Speaker 3:Oh, I
Speaker 1:mean at that scale, like, the each pixel is not like your laptop. It's not like your phone. It's like a bright light. Like, each pixel is like this big, and it's a light. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then and so that light, even if it's an LED, it still produces heat. And then you have so you have a whole bunch of them that are all heating each other up.
Speaker 3:To each other.
Speaker 1:And then you put it in the hottest place in the world in the desert. And so there's just been like a phenomenal amount of energy. And I'm surprised. You you know people are so ready to dunk on this and be like, oh, it failed. Like, if it if it shut off, if if it showed, like, a blue screen of death or, an error message A feature.
Speaker 1:That would be so viral. That would actually be a good campaign. That'd be a great campaign if you were marketing it, and the video that you put up showed the the the the, like, the Windows blue screen of death, like, the fail. Like, oh oh, it broke. Because then you'd go viral.
Speaker 1:If if someone was like, oh, wow. Like, what were they advertising? Oh, they were running an ad for TVPN, and the ad was too good, and it crashed the whole software or something. You because, know, the Shopify guys came on. Were like, we're doing this live.
Speaker 1:We're live streaming to the sphere. It's very cool. But but if you if you if can figure out how to crash the sphere, at least and you look like you crashed the sphere, I think you have some viral potential. Well, let me tell you about numeral.com compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth.
Speaker 1:And we have our first guest of the show. We have Keith Raboy here in New York City coming on down. Oh, look at this.
Speaker 3:Spice it on.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Keith. Good to see you. Welcome. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome to
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. You are the mayor of New York here.
Speaker 4:We We love it.
Speaker 1:Partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. It's a great setup. It looks great. And, obviously, it gives us easy access to folks like you. That's true.
Speaker 1:So thanks so much for coming on down. How have you been? What what's new in your world?
Speaker 2:Great. Pretty busy. You know, you might have heard ventures pretty busy right now. It is. People are doing deals every day.
Speaker 2:Yes. I see left and right, crazy valuations.
Speaker 1:Is that a green flag for you or is that a red flag?
Speaker 3:Like, are
Speaker 2:you thinking? It's hard to tell. Like, I think a lot of people are gonna lose money. Yeah. Hopefully, we're not included.
Speaker 2:Yep. But the valuations have an extra zero. Yes. Know, like Sometimes too. Literally, before this recent, like, sort of trend, I had never invested in entry price for, like, any normal company above an $86,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, you know, that whole world is completely different. Yeah. So, like, everything seems to have
Speaker 3:How many deals a year are you trying to get in under under 10? Like How many deals all
Speaker 5:of them. No. No. I know.
Speaker 3:But realistically, like, in the last years, it may be, like, one one a year. Yeah. It's somebody you knew well, so you can My
Speaker 2:philosophy is bold, early, impactful. So Bold? Bold, early, impactful. That's the k v mantra. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, I I I love that. So early means first institutional capital. Even today, if you're right, bold and early, that's You're be pretty over $10,000,000. Yeah. It used to be, you know, 500 k.
Speaker 2:When I invested in Airbnb, was 500 k, 3,500,000.0 post. Wow. DoorDash was something like eight to 10 post. Yeah. So, you know, the world's very, very different.
Speaker 2:Now, they're gonna be epic companies. Like, what is very clear is some of these companies are absolutely iconic and will be iconic for decades. I doubt there's as many as people think. Mhmm. So the argument goes that, you know, we've changed the physics.
Speaker 2:And there's gonna be $40.50, $60.70, $80,100,000,000,000 dollar plus companies. I don't believe that stuff. Surely not on the consumer side. I don't believe it on the consumer side, possibly in enterprise. If you believe AI is gonna transform every business everywhere, Possibly.
Speaker 2:But the consumer side, consumers are busy. They have twenty there's only twenty four hours in a day. Tech doesn't change that yet. Yeah. And so every time someone adopts a new app, a new product as a consumer, they have to substitute from their friends.
Speaker 2:Yep. From their family, from church, from basketball. Yeah. And so the bar just keeps going up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I don't really believe there's gonna be too many breakthrough consumer companies. ChatGPT, OpenAI will be one. Yeah. Not really sure who else.
Speaker 1:And it just feels like we're in this era where if you do have a breakthrough, the big tech companies are in an offensive position. They're in wartime mode. Some of them, like Meta, are are are they're founder led still. They're still in founder mode, and so you're gonna have a pretty good copycat on your tail within six months of you going viral, within a year. I think that is an
Speaker 2:interesting dynamic. Typically, the large companies, we don't all make fun of. You know, all of us are entrepreneurs. Yeah. And we don't make fun of these old, sluggish, you know, large companies with tens of thousands.
Speaker 3:Now they're our friends.
Speaker 2:They're well, they may not be your friends, but they are fast. They are paying attention. Yeah. Like, they're usually sloppy and slow. Yep.
Speaker 2:Like, I remember when we were doing PayPal, eBay was, like, the most incompetent organization on the planet. Yes. Like, Google was literally being built underneath them. Yes. And eBay hired, like, management consultants at Bain and told them, don't worry about Google.
Speaker 2:Like, that was the classic, like, large tech company. Yes. And, admittedly, Mag was worse than most. But Yes. Still.
Speaker 2:Now, you know, all the large tech companies, except Apple Yeah. Seem to be paying attention. Okay. You know, Apple is behind the eight ball in AI. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Unpack that a little
Speaker 1:bit because there's a lot of departures. And we you know, are you're you're wearing an Apple Watch today. Like, you're not giving it up anytime soon. Have my air.
Speaker 2:I love Okay. My So the hardware is still the best.
Speaker 1:What's the nature of the risk? Because I don't see us actually going somewhere else because we're locked in.
Speaker 2:Right? No. I think, you know, building vertically integrated products. So to do hardware well, you need hardware skills Yeah. Supply chain, battery innovation.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That's before you get to the software integration.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But does somebody figure out how to do an AI unique unique to AI custom device Sure. That is compelling? Possibly. Sure.
Speaker 2:Depends on what time frame we're talking. Next year, unlikely. Yeah. Ten years, I'd be willing to bet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, more more likely than not. Yeah. So at some point, Apple will be
Speaker 3:Bernard Erno has a best quote here. He's like, in he had something like in fifty years, will people be drinking champagne? I think, yes. In fifty years, will will we we all be using iPhone? Like, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'll take the champagne or at least tequila. But
Speaker 3:Well, how is your how is your kind of view on Google's, like, competitiveness in AI changed over time, if if at all?
Speaker 2:Well, I I certainly we had a debate several, years ago. Is it, you know, a sustaining innovation, you know, about disruptive innovation? After ChatGPT, it's clearly more disruptive potentially. And I do think, though, they're they are paying attention. They are taking it seriously.
Speaker 2:That said, ChatGPT is still the fastest growing product, consumer product in the last, like, fifteen years. Yep. And I think if OpenAI plays its cards well and focuses on ChatGPT versus gets distracted as being a pure research lab Mhmm. So there's probably this tension there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Research lab, AGI, blah blah, comes at sacrificing the But quality of
Speaker 3:it's it's a let's launch a short form video app. Let's automate. Let's do all the science. Let's do the Sam, I mean, I I think Pardon me. Sam's answer to Brad, which kicked off like a broader discussion, he was saying, we're fine.
Speaker 3:We're gonna do consumer electronics and we're gonna do science. And I didn't I think a lot of people read into that and just say like, hey, Google does that. They'd lose a lot of money on it. It's not exactly
Speaker 1:and those are their bets.
Speaker 2:Google mince money. Yeah. So that it should be clear so they can fund it. Yeah. I think there's some things that Sam has to do.
Speaker 2:Hardware's probably one. Mhmm. Because the risk that somebody else puts AI together on a consumer device
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Before he does can rip them sort of out
Speaker 1:of the
Speaker 4:do think about what
Speaker 3:do you how are you processing Apple with Gemini as a risk to ChatGPT?
Speaker 2:I don't I I because
Speaker 3:because because like to be clear, like Gemini has an amazing model. They're well be behind on a just a product product experience standpoint, but there are quite a lot of searches that I hit ChatGPT or Gemini with that like a Siri integrated with Gemini, I'd be going there right away if it was like
Speaker 2:depends on the kind of query you're doing or prompt you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But if I if I hit like for a fact Yes. That's not that far away from that's not that far away from doing comp like a a like Sure.
Speaker 2:But then there's other kinds of prompts where you didn't use to maybe even use Google. Like Yeah. For example, I asked Chachi Biddy to write a book outline for me. A book proposal. I wouldn't have thought of this like
Speaker 3:you're you could you could probably one shot a book with somebody actually
Speaker 2:I guess you're you're retrained. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was
Speaker 2:ideas that was moderately creative. What I expected, and this blew me away Yeah. Was that it there was a spark of ingenuity Yes. To the proposal. Yes.
Speaker 2:It wasn't just, like, right down the middle. Totally. I tried it on Gemini.
Speaker 3:So you're writing a book?
Speaker 2:No. But maybe one day. You see the problem with long form content is apparently because of token ration ration ration rationing. Rationing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. If you try long form content Yeah. They they only spend a certain amount of tokens on you. Sure. So it degrades.
Speaker 2:Oh. So you have to write almost like a paragraph or a page at a time. Okay. Otherwise, the quality will degrade. Sure.
Speaker 2:But the outline, the proposal was actually quite good. I did try it on Gemini. It wasn't as good. Yeah. So I think 5.1, ChatGit 5.1 thinking mode
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Actually still has a bit of a human personality. Yeah. And I don't see that when I try the same prompts in Gemini. Yeah. So I think you could build an excellent cutting edge person human personality product if you focus.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I think you do need to try a device just to make sure, you know, you're kind of like not blindsided by somebody else. Some of the other stuff though may interfere. There's only so much talent. There's only so much bandwidth. Sam only has so many hours in the day, etcetera.
Speaker 2:May interfere with success with ChatGPT. ChatGPT should be a $4,000,000,000,000 business if you maximize it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talk about hardware. It feels like we're in this weird era where everything is getting more capital intensive earlier and earlier. There we are talking to guys today.
Speaker 2:I think there's some companies where that's true. Okay. Some types of markets, some types of products. I think other people are raising capital for no apparent reason. Like, let's talk Harvey, illegal AI.
Speaker 2:I have I have a competitor investment that doesn't need a lot of capital.
Speaker 3:Which one are you in?
Speaker 2:It's called Small Book.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's about yeah. Remember.
Speaker 2:They target somewhat different markets, but they they're actually legal AI. But there's no real reason to spend that money. Like like, in other words, their compute costs can't
Speaker 1:be that high. Sure. Because they should be able to pass that through as gross margin. Like, should have good gross margins on day one. Exactly.
Speaker 2:So when I invest in AI companies, so two thirds or three quarters, somewhere between, of all my investments over the last eighteen months are AI based. Yes. Mostly application layer, but not all. Yes. All the application layer ones, I expect them to have positive gross margins.
Speaker 2:Yes. Extremely positive gross margins, actually. I'm like, you have to build a business too. Yeah. And I don't believe in these excuses.
Speaker 2:Now if you're building frontier models Yeah. And cutting edge or you're do hardware, you're clearly gonna spend money or infrastructure. Yeah. Clearly, you're gonna lose money intentionally. That's always been true to me.
Speaker 2:But if you're building an application layer Yeah. I don't buy the margin upside down.
Speaker 1:There was this hilarious expose on Hacker News about AI startups that aren't actually training their own models. They're just rappers, and they were breaking down the gross margin. I was like, this is a VC's, like, like, celebration. And looks Good. So happy.
Speaker 1:Good. Because they were like
Speaker 3:The only thing that was bad is they were kind of making the claim that they were, like, more of a research or a
Speaker 1:training models when they're not. But the the my takeaway was that, like, the wrapper market is extremely healthy in certain in certain markets.
Speaker 2:Because workflow, like, if anybody, you have to productize things. Yeah. Like, if I'm working as an investment banker Yeah. Or an accountant Yeah. Or employer, you it's not just the performance of the model I care about.
Speaker 2:It's like how efficient, how include how how does it improve my life. Yes. And that's a function of how intuitive is the UI Yeah. How easy does make the entire job to be done, so to speak, you know, to be accomplished. So it's not just a model performance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think when I'm looking for, like, a an application layer CEO Yeah. I want them to really understand what they're building for, why, and what the p and l impact to their target customers are. Yeah. Like, in legal, like, it's actually a complicated question Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because of the billable hour. You don't necessarily wanna make your lawyers more efficient if you're on a law firm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We've been talking we've been talking about this so much. We had a a I know a lawyer who switched firms because he knew he was with a big, like, probably top 30 law firm. He's like, they are not gonna adjust in time. Like, there's no and so they're like, we like that our associates are just running up hours on tasks that could be one shotted by AI.
Speaker 2:I built 300 3,600 my last month as a lawyer.
Speaker 3:And and and what what
Speaker 2:what is there's an awesome last month
Speaker 1:is yeah. A Well, next
Speaker 2:time someone tells you they're working too hard in tech, I'll think I literally billed $33,600 hours. Wait. How
Speaker 1:do do you bill 3,000 I wasn't even as we can afford it in a year.
Speaker 2:I wasn't in the anywhere near the top 5%. You mean in a for gold dollar. There are Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. 3 thou 306 oh, sorry. Here it is. Three hundred sixty hours in January 2000.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. That makes because you can't
Speaker 2:Yeah. 360 But the top associates in SNC
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Were over 3,000 for the year. Yeah. I'd be, like, 26, 2,700. So I was a slacker
Speaker 1:slacker. I mean, you're a buyer of legal products as well as an investor in legal AI products. Are you advising your your portfolio companies to push harder on their law firms to
Speaker 2:get deals? So every founder I know actually uses ChatGeVici for legal research. Then they call up their lawyer. Yep. The And lawyer's giving them advice, they're literally I think it's retardable.
Speaker 2:That's it. Sometimes they're actually screenshotting and saying this is what you're telling me is wrong.
Speaker 3:Does ChatGPT need some, like, legal like, clearly, a lot of people are using it, but there was just a judgment today that was requiring Chad Schibaldi to turn over a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2:So it's not it's not privilege. Not privilege. Sure. So it's complicated Okay. To use it.
Speaker 2:They could we'll see how the law it's probably the right decision as a legal matter. But I do know I just had a conversation with the CEO of a more than a $100,000,000,000 Yeah. Company. And he has a legal team that spends $40,000,000 a year. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he authorized all his lawyers to use ChatGPT. Wow. He's just like So it's you need to need to you need to adopt this tool. I mean, they don't use Google. Proficient.
Speaker 2:So You know? So a lawyer technically uses chat GBT. It might be privileged.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if you as a consumer, normal person, input stuff like, oh, you know, how do I hide the word of weapon? Yeah. That is definitely not privilege.
Speaker 1:You know, that's
Speaker 3:not I I wonder I wonder if it there there are certain businesses that start and build knowing that they're gonna get sued a lot. I wonder if this levels the playing field for businesses like that that are kind of going after markets that don't want innovation. Yeah. And they could just say, yeah. We would have needed a team of 20 lawyers back in the day, but actually now, we can have, a few really efficient
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, there are startups in the legal space that basically are a substitute for a lawyer. Sure. And then there's the legal AI startups that make lawyers more efficient. And which is is Spellbook?
Speaker 2:Spellbook is making lawyers mostly making lawyers more successful. For firms and now for companies. Got it. We have a lot of, like, actually, Fortune 1,000 companies. Okay.
Speaker 2:Because you think about the incentives of a corporate legal department, they're different than the law firm frenziers. Yep. Like, corporate legal departments wanna spend less and get faster responses. Yep. So it makes tons of sense, and then you can customize to the culture of that company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like, eBay uses Spellbook, for example, and they have their own preferences about how they wanna practice law. Yeah. And we can implement that on software Yeah. Versus, like, Google's not a customer, but Google might have different preferences.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we've been seeing this new trend.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the the lineage here in legal is Clearspire and then Atrium, and and now people are trying it again. What do you think about folks who say, I was on a particular track where I'd be at a firm. Now I'm gonna start an AI powered firm. Should they be raising money, or should they just go do that on their own? Well, what what
Speaker 2:do think? Usually, the way they start, though, is a human a ratio of humans and models.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's not, like, just all models.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? So you're gonna have to pay lawyers for a while. Okay. Like, you wanna take the ratio from 80% humans
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To 80% automation Sure. And, like, hopefully quickly. Atrium basically never did that. Sure. And maybe they didn't have the technology to
Speaker 1:do it.
Speaker 2:They got hooched on the drug, I think Yeah. Of just, like I knew some
Speaker 1:of the machine learning folks at Atrium at the time, and they were like, we're we're close to understanding documents with AI. And but close doesn't pay the bills. Doesn't pay
Speaker 2:the bills. You still be human in the loop technically for most of these products right now. That's gonna change, and the ratio should be, like one human for 99 customers or 99 documents or 9,000 documents. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then the economics could work. But you I think you would need to raise venture money upfront. Sure. Also, maybe for credibility, there's some signaling. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, like people are buying enterprise company. Enterprise all across the globe, any vertical are buying AI products. That's what would allow these, you know, vertical application companies to hit, you know, 100,000,000 of revenue quickly is there's top down demand
Speaker 1:Yeah. At very large How do you how do you assess quality of revenue if a founder comes to you and says, yeah. I am raising at a 100,000,000 for my first round, but I have a $5,000,000 deal with some Fortune 500 company. And so it's really not that crazy of a revenue multiple. But then you start wondering, obviously, is that gonna stick, or can they just balance?
Speaker 2:Well, we for the contract, actually, because the terms may vary. Yeah. Call the often ask to call the customer. Like, why are buying this? Sure.
Speaker 2:What do you hope it does, you know, and achieve? What are the business goals? Yeah. How confident are you that you're achieving those business goals? Sure.
Speaker 2:So that's actually a pretty standard reference.
Speaker 1:Just as due diligence? Yeah. Yeah. Does that mean that, like, the level of the level of due diligence required on these deals, even if the early stage like, this the the the round numbers, it might still be a seed, but it's a bigger number. You're treating it with the due diligence that you would bring to an a.
Speaker 2:I think I think you do need to look at what's the source of the revenue, what are the terms of that relationship, are they a pilot, permanent, do have cancellation rights, and
Speaker 4:then you can look at
Speaker 2:the underlying metrics like we always used to, which is what's the active usage. Yeah. Like, ultimately, and everybody in your organization is using the product. Yeah. Even if you have the contractual right to cancel, you're not canceling it.
Speaker 2:So, like, you can look at MAUs, DAUs, all those kind of things. And actually, we do tend to look at that. I tend to personally look at the engagement metrics as much as the revenue metrics. Sure. You also look at the margin metrics because ultimately, like, yeah, if you give away someone pays 5,000,000 that costs you 10
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a great deal. Like Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, that's not a long
Speaker 1:term business. I mean, if you're if you're a enterprise, you know, CIO or CTO, you're probably getting pitched some stuff where you're like, wait. I was gonna buy those tokens anyway. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They were gonna give them
Speaker 2:a half dollars. It's gonna be and I don't even have the infrastructure to run it, so it's like Totally. I don't have to buy it.
Speaker 1:I don't have them to Totally. And then so
Speaker 3:There was a lot of bearishness around certain vertical specific AI tools and enterprise AI after that MIT report came out that nobody read the source material, and and, just anecdotally, it feels incorrect. But I think the the simplistic way to to look at it is, like, will large companies spend more on AI in 2026 than 2025? And I think, like, you've lean,
Speaker 2:like Answer is definitely yes. I mean, I think you could critique you're right. Nobody read the report. They just read, like, at the high line, you know, x or something. But I think it comes down to, as Vinod has talked about, the quality of the implementation.
Speaker 2:If you have the right people implementing it, you're gonna get high quality results. If you just think the software is just gonna show up out of the box, it's gonna work and transform your organization, Highly unlikely, unless the product was designed to be that way. There are a few products that you see Yeah. That, you know, are designed for a consumer to just like, or a user, like an average employee to just use out of the box. That's pretty rare.
Speaker 2:Usually, you have some implementation hurdle, and I suspect a lot of these things are getting trapped in the implementation sort of, you know, box somewhere. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think No.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry. You guys have stayed out of the prediction market wars?
Speaker 2:We have not invested in a prediction market.
Speaker 3:Was that was that like was there a moment where you wanted to and the dynamics of the round didn't work out or was that a conscious choice?
Speaker 2:It's a it's a good question and I may have the maybe I've been burned because I helped start and like seed invested way back in the day, this thing called Bluebat,
Speaker 3:never any new ideas.
Speaker 2:We we could never get it to work. The hardest part that made it work wasn't like on the better side or the the wager side. It was actually getting enough bets. And maybe now with AI, you can scalably create enough interesting bets. We're gonna do it by hand.
Speaker 2:Sure. We just never could get that treadmill working.
Speaker 3:Or you maybe didn't do sports bet. Sports
Speaker 2:Well, we didn't do sports bet. Was illegal. So, yeah, obviously, there's a lot on ramp. Traction has been sports and then cleverly politics. But we did have political bets there.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so, anyway, maybe I was burned by that. Then there's another question, which is I like the political markets. Yeah. How you know, I said we're bold early and impactful.
Speaker 2:You do have to start thinking about which market segments are actually positive impact in society. Sure. They're just giving average Americans more places to gamble. Certainly, it's not something I wanna, like, invest. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now there are markets that are illiquid, and they the byproduct is the liquidity is a good thing for society like politics. Yep. But I don't want too many people speculating. Like, Americans don't have a lot of money. They gamble.
Speaker 2:That's fine. They bet on sports now, which may be fine. They bet on crypto whether they called that or not. Yeah. So adding more speculation to the American, you know, consumer, I'm not sure is something I wanna, you know, invest
Speaker 3:in time. Attention How
Speaker 1:We want both of you,
Speaker 3:American consumer. How much attention have you paid to just this tension between states clearly wanna regulate this stuff and yet the CFTC has decided like, hey, these are event contracts, like, we're it's under our jurisdiction. How how have you kind of, like, watched that play?
Speaker 2:Well, obviously, the polymarket guys have played their cards really well. Mhmm. Controversial, you know, at the beginning Yeah. Probably very high risk. You know, Alfred I saw Alfred Lin talk about a little bit.
Speaker 2:I'm sure he probably opposed it, but the founder was pretty tenacious
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it worked out or you know, they all played the regulatory cards, you know, in interesting different ways. So it's worked out well for them. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But the story is not over.
Speaker 2:Well, I think they're in pretty good shape. You know, the biggest issue they had historically was more not more US citizens were using their products before they were supposed to. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it
Speaker 2:I think the statute of limitations
Speaker 1:might
Speaker 2:sort
Speaker 1:of be hitting Sure. Yeah. It's fascinating. Do you think this will be a political issue in the next cycle? I it is in terms of tech stuff that we've been monitoring, it feels like the the the AI data center energy use, water use, like, those are the questions that people wanna answer in DC, job displacements.
Speaker 1:Job displacements, honestly, top of That's a bigger question than than okay. Yeah. Like, my, you know, my uncle, he was always a sports bettor. Now he uses a different platform. Like,
Speaker 2:it's
Speaker 1:kinda
Speaker 2:I think unless people start losing a lot of money. So what you know, in sports betting, you definitely have this. Yep. Yep. The opposite of whales people you know, whales the company Totally.
Speaker 2:People lose massive amount of money. Yep. And that becomes a really sad story for them, for their family Yep. And becomes a political issue then. If for some reason you get more more people betting, betting, wager, whatever Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Predicting, but they're not, like, massively exposed, I think then it won't be a political
Speaker 1:issue. Yeah. Yeah. We I mean, we've been tracking AI diffusion. We're obviously excited about a lot of the products getting in people's hands, like like Spellbook, like law like law firm for, like, legal AI.
Speaker 1:At the same time, we're just not seeing that much job displacement. Maybe it's coming, but it feels like there are if whatever's happening when somebody lays people off, it's probably not because they're just, oh, now it's just a prompt. But but do you think tech needs to do a better job of telling that story or understanding
Speaker 2:how Absolutely. Tech is not the future. I mean, you know, I was in a speech that president Trump gave, he says, like, I don't like the terms artificial intelligence. You guys need better branding. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nobody's come up with a better answer. I think someone should. Like, artificial intelligence sounds scary. It does.
Speaker 1:It's bad. Yeah. Artificial shots.
Speaker 2:When you say, like, you're having artificial sweeteners, everybody's, you know Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I think super could rebrand it.
Speaker 3:Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Right now, it really is like a power up. Like, if you're a very creative
Speaker 1:Copilot. Credit to Satya Nadella and and the Microsoft folks. Like like, Copilot feels like, okay. Have a helpful assistant that's alongside me. Does does a Copilot ever put the copilot on a business?
Speaker 1:Not yet. Not yet. May be. It happens by, like Yeah. You have
Speaker 2:a long tail kind of situational planes that Yes. Fit prudent, but I I don't think there's there's gonna be job elimination. I think there's gonna be job substitution.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:You know, we're gonna we need more data centers. Well, to build data centers requires a lot of advanced Mhmm. Plumbing. Mhmm. A lot of advanced electricians.
Speaker 2:These people get paid a lot of money. Like three times story. They're getting Three times some DJs.
Speaker 1:Off the jets. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Three to five x easily the median income in The United States. Yeah. So we're gonna be building a lot of infrastructure. Yeah. Building infrastructure creates jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are the people who, you know, are doing this now Yeah. Gonna have to substitute something else? Maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I don't I do think there is gonna be some substitution for white collar work like accounting lawyers, maybe primary care doctors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what advice would you give to a high school student?
Speaker 2:I think you should still like read. Learn learn reading, writing, and math very well.
Speaker 1:Even though the computers can read, they can write, and they can definitely do math.
Speaker 2:But you need to know the fundamentals. Like, I mean, like there's a research paper I I I retweeted this week about if you if you handwrite your notes versus type your notes in class, you on any metric you
Speaker 1:can match back. And where? If they're in middle school, if they're in high school, should they be fighting to the nail to get in the Ivy League? Where are they going? Where are they learning?
Speaker 2:That's good question. Chill Fellows seem to work out well. It does. I'm a fan.
Speaker 1:I'm a fan.
Speaker 2:You know, my kids are four. I I hope that it's high. They're better they better not have to go to college by the time they grow home. It'd be really sound
Speaker 1:because you're not saving for it?
Speaker 4:I know. Sorry.
Speaker 1:No college We're spitting on AI. Yeah. Yeah. We'll
Speaker 3:We'll get them a little data center.
Speaker 1:What about what about for the the the next generation of entrepreneurs that are just getting to Silicon Valley right now, and they're seeing a trend of what we call, like, the deal guy Yuga, the deal guy era. This idea that it used to be you get to Silicon Valley and you're writing code
Speaker 3:The Ernestacker.
Speaker 1:And you're in the basement or you're in the garage. You write the code, and then you put it on the Internet, and everyone shows up. And your elegant algorithm just produces Google, and then you create a trillion dollars in value. And it's because you're the PhD scientist, you're the mathematician that you get rewarded. And now it feels like you can maybe make it in Silicon Valley, maybe not caring so much about the technical aspects, but instead about the deals, putting pieces together.
Speaker 3:That's little scary. So the funny thing though is, like, people use Sam as an example of this. Sure. But, like, he was running a research lab for years.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:And and so, like, even though
Speaker 1:And also he's
Speaker 2:like he was a CS dropout.
Speaker 1:He was a yeah. He was also a CS dropout and, like, definitely built, like, an app. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He built an app. But now, Luke, so the reason why it's scary and this is maybe portraying my age is back in the late bubble, Internet bubble ninety six, two thousand, there used to be all these what we used to call biz dev people running around all the companies, you know, all doing all these deals, and then the bubble collapsed. Yeah. And every a lot of people ascribed the bubble and collapse to these biz dev people. Interesting.
Speaker 2:So they already stopped using the label. When was the last time you met a biz dev version? Yeah. Like, never. Like, for the last twenty five years.
Speaker 3:So see, we all rebrand BDR or BDR, but they're
Speaker 2:all like Well, biz dev was like higher as like Yeah. And that was how everybody I come
Speaker 3:to you and say, Keith, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a $100,000,000 of revenue. Yeah. And you're like, funny enough, I'm also gonna give you a 100 Well, you're gonna
Speaker 2:have to $100,000,000 in the company. I'm give you a $100,000,000. Right? That the classic that was a classic example. Totally.
Speaker 2:So that's how I started my career in tech,
Speaker 1:actually, as
Speaker 2:a business person.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:And if
Speaker 2:you look at my LinkedIn profile, it's still there. Okay. You have this. But it became like this, you know, sort of negative signal on your resume. It was business people running around.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so everybody's doing that now. That is a scary indication that maybe we're hitting, you
Speaker 1:know, something. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, would your advice to new entrepreneurs say, ignore the noise, ignore the frothy rounds, retreat to what? Product market fit Yeah.
Speaker 1:Programming
Speaker 2:Well, I think, look, ultimately, deliver value. I think it's actually really simple, building a start. Mhmm. It's like you create a value proposition. Yes.
Speaker 2:And then you explain the value proposition to your people. Post. It's And then you actually yeah. Yeah. There's product there's market you know, they that's basically it.
Speaker 2:Like, what is my value proposition to who? Like, what do I do for you that's good for you? It could be good for your business. Could be good for your life. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then can I articulate that in a way that causes you to interrupt your life and test it out Yeah? And verify those claims. Mhmm. And then rinse and repeat. So you can create a value proposition through massive use of technology.
Speaker 2:You create it through design. You can create it through the intersection of humans design and technology. It doesn't actually matter, but you have to have a very crisp, succinct, compelling value proposition. In business cases, you wanna move the p and l of your customers. Like, I had a enterprise company, maybe the only enterprise true enterprise company I ever funded and joined the board of, where our first customer is Walmart.
Speaker 2:Everybody's like, no. How's Walmart gonna be your first customer? And they spent $5,000,000,000 on us. Mhmm. The reason why was we figured out there was one of the top three priorities for the company we could address.
Speaker 2:Our second customer was AT and T. Mhmm. Another classic customer. Yeah. Spent 10,000,000 or it was a telecom.
Speaker 2:It wasn't ATD. It was a different telecom, actually. We could our technology allowed them to understand their churn better. What's the only issue in the telecom business? Churn.
Speaker 2:Subscriber churn. That's the only thing that matters in, like, you you know, because they all compete on, like, churn.
Speaker 3:Somebody else is gonna
Speaker 2:offer something. Nobody had a technology that could literally take all their data and actually figure out why people were returning. So if you have a right the correct value proposition Mhmm. All of the rules are changed. So just dial into the value proposition and then figure out how to articulate it, which sometimes can be different per my post.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you have actually marketing fit and sometimes you actually have your product positioning fit and sometimes you actually have value proposition fit. Mhmm. Sometimes you start with both Mhmm. But sometimes you're bad at one and it kind of masks and it not clear that you're actually really good at
Speaker 3:marketing market fit will mask the lack of product market fit for about a year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other one doesn't get masked. It's hard sometimes it's hard to fix. Like, may go back to the product and think you don't have a value prop. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You actually do. You just can't explain it Mhmm. Because you only get a certain amount of attention to explain. You gotta distill it. Once you distill it to the right people, then it might take off without changing the product, but that's the art.
Speaker 2:A true CRO is actually good at this art of triangulation.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:How do you there's been some kind of coalitions or or not really coalitions, but Walmart and Etsy have leaned into LLM Commerce. They've partnered with OpenAI. Amazon and eBay have not yet. Shopify has. How do you who do you think is gonna look smart in two years for, like, leaning into these platforms early?
Speaker 3:Because Well, as we
Speaker 2:talked about to learn. So there's a question, are they leaning in or are they leaning in to learn? Leaning to learn is a great idea. Like, if you're Shopify, of course, like, will people use ChatGPT in a way that leads to product discovery and product purchase? We a we had
Speaker 3:a friend of ours as a Shopify brand. They do, 200,000,000 of revenue. He says, people that land on his site from ChatGPT convert at 12%.
Speaker 2:Incredible. That agree with. I'm sure that's true. Yeah. Because they take they it's authoritative at the recommendation
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:That the signal is better than a blue link. However, the question is the volume and what's the increase of that volume? Yeah. Like, how much of
Speaker 3:Slow today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's the question is what does that change and what triggers that change? What catalyzes it? But I mean, you know, we invested in a company called ProFound. They're sponsor.
Speaker 2:Know. They're sponsor. Yeah. So they allow you as a brand to track how various whether it's Gemini or ChatTP, etcetera, are showcasing your products and brands. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's critical to the future. But what consumers ultimately decide to do, do they actually start using ChatTP to recommend the next issue to them or not? I think in some verticals, almost surely, yes.
Speaker 1:I want I want Christmas data so badly. I I I feel like this is the first year that we're really gonna get an answer. At least the labs will now. I don't know if we'll figure it out, but about the agentic shopping, just the propensity. So let me give
Speaker 2:you an example of something they can solve.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, like, think
Speaker 2:of you're a guy and you want to buy a new blazer. Yeah. Like, I need a a blazer so it'll look like ridiculous for you guys.
Speaker 4:And you're looking like a nice Christmas sweater.
Speaker 2:So I gotta figure out what what blazer is gonna fit me off the rack. I don't have time to get a tailor. Sure. Almost an impossible task, like today. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Like, literally, like, you'd actually even if you know your fashion, you'd almost an impossible task.
Speaker 3:Like, you might know your brand. Nice.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. I can imagine that Chattypede kinda knows Yeah. You know, what I buy, how it fits, what things I return, what things I don't over time. And just says, Keith, go to Hugo Boss.
Speaker 2:Yep. 38 or 48 or 42. Will it fit you off the rack? Yep. Like, that is something that doesn't exist online.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. And there's a lot of latent demand for consumers not to go to retail. Yeah. Like, the reason why I go to retail typically
Speaker 3:Try something.
Speaker 2:I either need something immediately or I need to try it
Speaker 1:on. Yeah. Yeah. There's also this interesting thing where Chattypetit and basically every LLM has been only pull in the sense that you have to go and prompt it. It never just sends you a push notification and says, here they they're they're experimenting with with Pulse.
Speaker 1:So they'll say, okay. We know that you like venture capital news, and you like learning that data centers.
Speaker 2:Prioritized that.
Speaker 1:They have deprioritized it, but I still think that there's a glimmer of something valuable there where they could proactively send you results. It's very compute intensive, I don't know if they got the form factor right. But there's clearly there's clearly a glimmer of something. There's a glimmer there.
Speaker 2:The question is gonna be the quality.
Speaker 1:Because that's
Speaker 2:that's magical. If yeah. It'd be totally magical, but I'm gonna react to the first five they sent me Yep. And either vomit or hate it. Yep.
Speaker 2:And they're not gonna get a second shot.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:So I think that's hard to do in a beat No.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's hard, but I think over time, the scale, like, all the math and, like, the actual value we've seen it work with, like, some of the Instagram ads where you're like, wow. I didn't even know I wanted that. It's really cool.
Speaker 1:People are satisfied. I think that will come.
Speaker 2:People are also more comfortable sharing data with ChatGPT than any other tech product we've ever seen. So I think, like, my sizing and things like that, you know, they allow me if I put that in memory, it makes it a hell of
Speaker 1:a lot easier. So help me square that because I feel like that's true. I feel like people have these incredibly personal conversations with LLMs. They use them for all these funny things. They're obviously seeing AI search results, and yet AI as a whole feels like the most unpopular technology in decades.
Speaker 1:And Well, I think it may
Speaker 2:be a 1% issue too. Like, there's lot of people who are motivated for their own reasons, you know, to cause they create negative feedback on AI.
Speaker 3:Well, it's to be clear.
Speaker 2:It's also because example.
Speaker 3:Five years ago, there was a lot of interviews that happened where they were talking about job loss Yeah. And and just like total
Speaker 2:Well, Sam, like, made the mistake of, like, talking about UBI. We need UBI. Like, this is a mistake. We need UBI because it's gonna be job
Speaker 1:loss.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, first of it's not gonna be job loss, which we were talking about arguably. But, b, like, highlighting that a decade before any of that happens makes no sense whatsoever. And UBI, by the way, is a terrible solution. Sure.
Speaker 2:So for all those reasons, it created, like, more fear. And then the safety hoax people, the people are always creating hoaxes about it's literally a hoax. Yeah. Safety is a complete hoax. There's this is my challenge.
Speaker 2:Why? Name a single person who believes we have an AI safety issue that's been right about any political issue for fifty years. Every single person who's talking about safety has been wrong on the environment, has been wrong on equality, and all that nonsense. So, like, I just don't believe any of this because the people are all always finding excuse for bureaucrats to interfere with progression.
Speaker 1:So, I mean, that that I I hear you. That's just like that's kinda sad for our tech community because
Speaker 2:Well, as you know, a lot of people like a lot of people in tech, though, have very sad views.
Speaker 1:I suppose. Yeah. But what what I mean is, like, is, like, Mark Zuckerberg has deal has dealt with a lot of attacks on, like, social media is bad. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:But at least you got five years of people kind of liking posting Instagrams. You know? People kind of liked social media before they started critiquing it. AI, day one
Speaker 2:Yeah. Meeting in Day one. With the critique. Which is critical. Like, you know, there's this old there's this old, like, line that's Yeah.
Speaker 2:Stuck in my brain from when Newt Gingrich was speaker of the house. Yeah. He said, you know, if the electric light had been invented today, it would absolutely be banned. Because it would have threatened the candle making industry. You know?
Speaker 2:The safety, you know, it actually was somewhat unsafe, actually. Thousands of people died. Exploding and didn't possible But then we never would have allowed electricity. You think about society without electricity. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have a vast We have huge
Speaker 1:back loop on fear. Yep. And and actually taking action Exactly. And then monetizing that fear or one way or another.
Speaker 2:With nuclear power. Like, just so much sense.
Speaker 3:If a a you an AI, like, video that was generated and it's bad, you're like, I don't wanna lose my job to this thing that I don't like. You know? And so I I I Well, we have
Speaker 2:to remember people reaction. People also there's a bell curve distribution of people's content. Let's take video.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of all the humans, listen, there's no technology. What fraction of human generated video is great or good? Yeah. It's probably a fairly small fraction.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then you see the AI, you're like, oh. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 3:This is terrible. It's slob. The guy that made this said I'm gonna lose my job, and then I'm gonna need UBI. Why don't we just stop all of this altogether?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit like Paul Graham had this epic blog post about, you know, if someone unfortunately, like, meets someone, you know, and sexually assault them at a grocery store like Safeway. It's not like a front page news story for the New York Times that I mean, this happens all across the country, unfortunately. God forbid, you know, someone meets someone on Instagram in a DM.
Speaker 2:Front page news story, you know, if something bad, god awful happens, but it's the grocery, you know, versus the new technology. And so you have to always remember that people are gonna critique the new technology differently than what the real risk in the real world is that's actually probably more material. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We have a couple minutes left, and we're here at NICE. What's your IPO kind of, like, outlook? Are How you thinking about 2026? You think a lot
Speaker 2:Got some good ones coming up for you, hopefully. You know, we wish
Speaker 1:the venture is coming out. I know. I've heard rumors about some other funds.
Speaker 2:We are definitely on. What are we getting? I I can assure you, we're like I'm sure
Speaker 1:you're are lucky. Lucky. We have never had
Speaker 2:the conversation about whether we should be a public company. We're the craft business.
Speaker 1:Rumors swirl. IPO rumors swirl.
Speaker 2:Absolutely not. We'll let someone else do that. Okay. But who else? But, you know, obviously, we've been involved in really good companies.
Speaker 2:Ramp, your sponsor, obviously, is phenomenal. It can be a public company whenever they choose to be. Got AVEN, Trade Republic in Europe, not as many people paying attention to.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Great future company. Yeah. There's a bunch. Like, I said, I'm excited about the future.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Saw there was some news that SpaceX is maybe thinking about going out next week.
Speaker 2:I don't have any inside information there. I mean, I read the I read the same I think it would be great, you know, it's twenty two years or something. And, yeah, yeah, a
Speaker 1:long time and also just a lot of Elon fans have been riding with Tesla for a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's unlocked a lot do to invest. Yeah. They need something They took it private. They'll take it public probably at some point that you can
Speaker 1:invest what what you're advising those portfolio founders, without naming names, but on whether or not how they should be thinking about timing an IPO. You've obviously been along for the ride on many. What are you counseling them on where when to do it?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm always a fan of go public as early as possible. Okay. Yeah. Because I wrote a whole chapter in Eli Gill's book Yeah. High Growth Handbook that explains why.
Speaker 3:One of the best books in
Speaker 2:the industry. It's a great book
Speaker 3:to produce.
Speaker 2:I have two chapters, one about hiring and then Yeah. One about going public. Sure. But my general view is $50,000,000 in revenue plus predictability, you should be a public company. Wow.
Speaker 2:There there are so many benefits of being public. So I'll always counsel, like, when you're as soon as you possibly can Yeah. Go early, not late.
Speaker 1:What about what about burning money? I feel like there's another bar which says, hey. If you're a public company, you shouldn't need to raise money anymore. Has that changed?
Speaker 2:Well, it depends on the company. Some businesses are profitable. Like Yeah. Trade republic wouldn't need to raise money, for example. Sure.
Speaker 2:We actually pay taxes already. Yeah. I know. Wow. They happen to me.
Speaker 2:I've never been on board of a company that's actually paying taxes. Yeah. Because you, you know, you know, debate debate corporate taxes, you actually have to offset all the more such a profit. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like, recession, you're, like, company.
Speaker 1:You burn through all your carry forwards, and you're done. Exactly. Wow. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else we
Speaker 2:should talk about? Super fun. We really appreciate you being with you.
Speaker 3:Well Why why New York? Why are you here? Is it the ramp mafia? You wanna make sure you pick off all? Pick off all.
Speaker 2:So we actually looked at my geographic investments. I mentioned AI is two thirds, three quarters. Yeah. New York is the number one geo has been the number one geo for me for five or six years. Okay.
Speaker 2:It's about 60% of all my investments. Application layer stuff, financial services Yeah. You know, like Imprint, Ramp, a lot of great companies. Basis Yeah. Accounting AI, Rogo, Investment Banking AI Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Trabba's here.
Speaker 1:A lot stuff.
Speaker 2:You know, Ramp. They were a great set of companies here. So and then it's better for me to be on the East Coast for, like, personal reasons.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come there. This is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Good see you.
Speaker 1:See I'm sure we'll catch up with you soon. Thanks for the invite. Have a good rest of your day. I'm gonna tell you about Numeral, compliance handled. I think I already told you about Numeral, so I'm gonna tell you about Figma.
Speaker 1:Again. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. And our next guest is Lynn Martin, the president
Speaker 4:of the New
Speaker 3:York Stock Exchange. Wait, Dan Soroker's company Limitless has been acquired by Meta.
Speaker 1:Oh, congratulations, discount.
Speaker 3:There's a video here that we cannot play, but Meta acquires AI wearable startup Limitless.
Speaker 1:Oh, I we were just talking about I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in the AI wearable space. There's a lot of cool stuff happening, and, like, it just feels like fertile playground. I feel like it'd be a fun time to be a hardware hacker. We talked about that transcription hard piece of hardware that's making $250,000,000 out of nowhere. Very interesting companies.
Speaker 1:There's obviously cool things to do. A lot of the a lot of the the, you know, the the the the the a lot of the attention goes to the Rabbit r one, the Friend pin, the Humane AI pin, but there's cool stuff happening all over the industry. And so
Speaker 3:Yeah. So voice again, voice recorder, they had a hardware device. Amazing. Notable that yeah. Again, Limitless, I don't think was able to crack Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, growth with the hardware, but that company Plaud has. Sure. But, again, this is a great outcome for for them. I'm sure the whole Limitless team is
Speaker 1:And let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spend white label wallets, assign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. What else is going on in the timeline, Jordy?
Speaker 3:Let's see here. Yeah. I I mentioned this briefly in the conversation with with Keith, but apparently, OpenAI must turn over 20,000,000 chat
Speaker 4:logs to plaintiffs.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay. Judge Ona Wang has ruled. Yeah. You
Speaker 1:have to send an email to a to a server that adds a ChatGPT response in with your lawyer cc'd. That's how you maintain confidentiality.
Speaker 3:RV, who Keith also mentioned
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Raised a 160,000,000 at a $8,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:This is why Keith was talking
Speaker 3:about round Wow. From a 16 z. I mean, They're three x revenue this year to a 150,000,000. Yeah. They raised 300,000,000 from Sequoia at 3,000,000,000 in January.
Speaker 3:300,000,000 at 5,000,000,000 from Kotu and KP in June.
Speaker 1:Then a 160.
Speaker 4:And then
Speaker 3:a 160 at eight from a 16 z.
Speaker 4:Shout out
Speaker 3:to Spencer, the boys at at Kotu Yeah. For a little markup there.
Speaker 1:And I feel like I feel like law firms gotta be pretty discerning on making this purchase decision at this point. Like, it's not it's not entirely exploratory budget anymore, and it's not viral, like, something that's like, oh, it's like a flash in the pan, and then all of a sudden, like, they're
Speaker 3:not gonna be able to monitor. Yeah. My question is, like, do you like, if if anybody that wants to say, like, oh, this is, out of control, it's, like, do you think they'll be able to get to, $81,000,000,000 of revenue?
Speaker 1:Legal industry is pretty big and and it's been traditionally pretty hard.
Speaker 3:And they actually they actually so so the labor displacement thing does feel real here because I do think a law firm would say, hey, currently we have a 100 associates. Yeah. We can condense that down to about 20 and do the same amount of work by working with Yeah. With something like Harvey. And again, the the vibe had had at least with a lawyer buddy of mine had shifted drastically with Harvey Yeah.
Speaker 3:A year ago. He was saying, we're like we're using it a little bit now. He's like, it's one shotting stuff
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That I didn't think it would.
Speaker 1:He says, I'm I'm one shot it actually by it.
Speaker 3:I'm one shot.
Speaker 1:Well, one shot your data your data analysis with Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Is Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions.
Speaker 3:We should've gotten Rahul here. We should've we should've told him to come here and be in the capital with us.
Speaker 1:We will do that soon.
Speaker 3:YC has a new company called The Hog. Oh, wait. Really? It's got the Palantir for go to market. We were just talking we were just talking
Speaker 1:about yeah. We were talking about swine theme startup names. You have pig. What is truly festive and fantastic was the tree lighting. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. It was. So this is every year. Walk us through exactly what happened. There were mascots.
Speaker 1:There were celebrities. Everything.
Speaker 3:They were singing.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're seeing the tree outside. It's massive.
Speaker 6:CFOs Okay. Celebrities, mascots, charitable organizations, all celebrating the holiday season. We had about 10,000 people
Speaker 1:10,000? Outside. We heard.
Speaker 3:No. It was crazy because we walked in we walked in yesterday. It felt like there was an IPO going
Speaker 1:an IPO. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It felt like Santa was IPO ing. And then and then today
Speaker 1:It was, definitely. We were literally we were oh, okay. Actually, this is a huge event.
Speaker 5:So it was wonderful.
Speaker 6:Hank Azaria actually made a joke that he was IPO ing yesterday. Was one of the celebrities. He he did a spot.
Speaker 1:That was great.
Speaker 6:But, I mean, it's a great opportunity for our list of companies to get some visibility, particularly the consumer
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:Focused brands. There were about 30 different tents outlining Wall Street. It celebrates the downtown community. It's a great opportunity to
Speaker 1:It's lovely.
Speaker 6:Generate business and give give a bit back.
Speaker 1:What other big events like tree lighting that are kind of off of like, like, the things that you can count on happening every year? Yeah. What's on the calendar regularly at the New York Stock Exchange?
Speaker 6:You know, we do a lot around the
Speaker 1:Is it, like, fourth of July?
Speaker 6:We do a lot Fourth of July, Memorial Day, like, those types of holidays to celebrate Veterans Day, to celebrate our military. Anytime there's something to celebrate our military
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:Who have served this great country.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's all about giving back and highlighting what makes this country great. Yeah. Obviously, one of the things that makes this company this country great is our phenomenal, capital markets.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 6:And it's really a unique differentiator.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:There you go. Love that. But then also, like, our military, people who selflessly protect us Yeah. Every single day, and then the not for profit, the charitable organizations who so many of our listed companies support as part of the tree lighting. We we highlight, the charitable organizations that our listed companies support.
Speaker 6:And this year, we have 400 of our listed companies that Amazing. Have contributed to that program. So all throughout the season, we like to to highlight that people who have done Yeah. Good things, but also are paying it forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we and we we heard that in in ten years, there has never been an IPO that landed exactly on the tree lighting. No.
Speaker 6:Some of some of it's close.
Speaker 1:Some of it's Some of it's close. Okay. Have come close.
Speaker 3:So what's the latest what's the latest in December that that that that you remember an I an actual, like, IPO happening?
Speaker 6:The week before Christmas. I think was time period. New Bank.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, a good way.
Speaker 6:Yeah. New Bank.
Speaker 1:Know that.
Speaker 6:2021 was a pretty late IPO. I don't remember if
Speaker 3:it
Speaker 6:was the nineteenth or the December 20.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's late. That's basically the ton of ads. Well, and that's that's that's the
Speaker 1:No kidding.
Speaker 3:That's basically the last day that I think the ecommerce brands can, like you can place an order and still get the product. That's kind of like the last day of business.
Speaker 6:The rush.
Speaker 3:The rush.
Speaker 6:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:What what is the holiday season? When when is the stock exchange dark? How much time?
Speaker 6:You know, we're not really ever dark. If I look at the calendar for the next couple of weeks, for example, we have a ton of ETFs going out, which is actually not received as much coverage
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:As the IPOs of operating companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is that what a
Speaker 3:what does that process look like from from even, like, roadshow stage all the way to, like, listing?
Speaker 6:I mean, that one's a little bit different because you can just launch the ETF and then accumulate AUM.
Speaker 3:I know. But is there any, like, more I mean, but I I'm assuming, like, you're building well, I'm assuming you're trying to build, like, attention going into
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Going into the process?
Speaker 6:A lot of times you're also spending the time looking at the index you're benchmarking against and back testing the results and then going out
Speaker 2:to Okay. And continually
Speaker 6:people who are going to contribute the AUM and show them the performance of the ETF and how it would have performed under stress periods and different macroeconomic events.
Speaker 3:What what trends are you seeing in some of these net new ETFs?
Speaker 6:You know, crypto ETFs have been a big, a big unlock for that industry. Yeah. You're seeing just a continuation of the various types of ETFs, equities, fixed income Oh, interesting. Well. Fixed income has also been a big unlock.
Speaker 6:ETFs have been probably one of the greatest financial innovations of our lifetimes Yeah. My lifetime
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:In particular, where it allows someone to invest in an incredibly liquid vehicle
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That has incredibly illiquid constituent basket. So if I think of, like, the fixed income market Sure. Where I came from, like, the muni ETFs. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:They've been able to accumulate a good amount of assets. Crypto
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Has been another unlock.
Speaker 1:And some folks have been on our show talking about the future of, you know, putting graphics cards in an ETF or getting AI compute or data centers and giving folks more access to that. I know, some of the private credit funds we had John Zito on the show yesterday, from Apollo, but some of the other funds have, like, taken different funds and IPO them separately so that they get more direct access. And I I would expect to see more of that, but I don't know what you're saying.
Speaker 6:I mean, there's been a fair amount of folks have talked about private private instruments and putting them in in an ETF wrapper. I know Vlad's talked about that from Robin
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Quite a
Speaker 1:bit Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That he's looking Yeah. At that as an opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's been insatiable demand for, for private company stock all in Silicon Valley, but it's usually done through angel investing Yeah. Never really through, an ETF. But it seems structure and how you disclose information and whatnot and make sure that you have a basket of assets.
Speaker 6:And how and do you actually have
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:A voting share Totally. In the ass in the underlying basket? Yep. There's a lot more logistics to work out in that. But Yeah.
Speaker 6:In general, ETFs are gonna add a layer of transparency Sure. That a lot of these illiquid assets Sure. Don't have. Because they're mark to market every day. They have NAV Yeah.
Speaker 6:At the end of the day. The fund the fund has
Speaker 3:There's been some other experiments with trying to bring private shares, into the public markets that aren't, that that end up trading, like, you know, three, four times NAV and then end up being, like, the underlying assets can be high quality. But if you're buying them at four x or something like that, the actual evaluation is, like, you're just much. I'm lighting money on fire. 2026. Every everybody's super excited.
Speaker 3:We just talked to Keith. He It's
Speaker 6:gonna be a big year.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 6:You know, the year was going really, really well, and then you had various events such as Liberation Day. The beginning of the year, that sort of shut the window, the IPO window, but, obviously, it reopened.
Speaker 3:So Happy we're here.
Speaker 6:How we met you guys. Here we are. And then the government shutdown Yeah. Temporarily closed the market as well. So a variety of our deals have now pushed into January, but January it's gonna be a busy January.
Speaker 6:It's gonna a really busy q one. Yeah. And now it feels like momentum because that narrative is out there and these deals are gonna go early in the New Year. Momentum's truly building for for the rest of 2026. But you gotta remember, you got midterms at the '26.
Speaker 3:Oh, yes. How how how have midterms historically it just like whether or not I it's kind of the the windows open or closed?
Speaker 6:Probably for a couple weeks before the window will be shut
Speaker 1:for
Speaker 2:a bit
Speaker 6:of time because people are gonna man. They're they're gonna be Sure. They're not gonna wanna go when there's potential volatility in the market. Anytime you have a large group of elections or a monumental election like the election for a president Yep. You're not gonna want to go just before because you just don't know what's gonna happen around that election period.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:Well, we just wanna say thank you for Thank you. Welcoming
Speaker 1:am you. So psyched to have
Speaker 3:you It's surreal. And thank you for letting us this be our home on the East Coast. It's Our
Speaker 2:no better. It was
Speaker 1:your home. Literally, we could not have picked a better place.
Speaker 6:Your interview yesterday with Kramer
Speaker 1:It was so much fun.
Speaker 6:Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 1:You pulling a chat box? Off
Speaker 3:the top. He tweeted in the morning. He was like, it could be fun. It could be wild.
Speaker 2:Could be wild. And we
Speaker 1:didn't know. We got all all
Speaker 3:the above. But that was a piece of just
Speaker 1:We talked about the market, we also just talked about interviewing, building relationship with CEOs over decades, and it just laid a ground the groundwork. I remember we watched his interview with Tim Cook fifteen years ago, a decade ago. And got how he how he built that relationship. Really remarkable work. And a lot of it happened in this building.
Speaker 1:A lot of it happened right down there. Lot A
Speaker 3:of it. We're we're looking forward to eventually joining joining him on on his show, and we'll we'll I just hope we can bring the same level of energy that that he has.
Speaker 6:You can bring Yiragong
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:And your panel alongside his panel. Yes. Yes. Wait to see who's louder on that day.
Speaker 3:We gotta hit That's Yeah.
Speaker 1:We gotta hit the dong for the partner for the partner partnership. On hit for the partnership. I will hold this.
Speaker 4:Is this is for you.
Speaker 1:The official Gong hitting. Go. There we go.
Speaker 3:That's a Gong. That's a Gong. We're gonna leave we're gonna leave these here for you. So if you're ever you need a boost of energy
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It to you. Coffee. Oh, thank you so you so much.
Speaker 1:To be a partner. We appreciate you.
Speaker 3:We will be back soon.
Speaker 1:We are going Can't wait for two. Off. Cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And I'm also gonna tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal integrations.
Speaker 1:What else is in the timeline? We, of course, have Emily Sundberg from Feed Me joining in just a second. We're very excited to have her on the show. But is there anything else in the timeline that we should run through before we bring in Emily? Chrome
Speaker 3:Hearts.
Speaker 1:Chrome Hearts? Acquired acquired
Speaker 3:one of my favorite hotels.
Speaker 1:Wait. The Surf Rider.
Speaker 3:The Surf Rider.
Speaker 2:Oh, they did?
Speaker 3:So the I I think it was the family, the Starks, the the owners. Yeah. We've been there. Dylan Dylan will stay there sometimes when he's in LA. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They acquired, yeah, one of my favorite hotels. I used to stay there a lot, then I moved, like, right near it, and so now I don't have any reason to to stay there, unfortunately. But interesting pickup, it's an iconic hotel. They paid more than 1,800,000.0 per room, which puts it among Southern California's priciest hotel deals in years. It's just 20 rooms.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, I don't I don't I I was it had been owned by I know the guy who created the hotel. Mhmm. It was basically an impossible task to, like, redevelop this, basically, it was an old motel that was kind of crumbling. He redeveloped it, made it beautiful. Many people said it couldn't be done just because of the coastal commission and just how hard it is to like do any type of like development work in Malibu.
Speaker 3:He did it, sold it to private equity. I think this is in trading hands again. But I'm excited to see what they do with it. They've been they have they've just been in Malibu for so long and and have a great presence there. So It's
Speaker 1:a beautiful hotel. I love it. And it's fun that it's Krill Hearts now. Shout out Let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, developing fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 3:Shout out to Jim O'Shaughnessy.
Speaker 1:This is hilarious.
Speaker 3:He says, when I say I love Bach, I really mean it. He listened to sixty four thousand minutes of Bach last year, which puts him in the point o o 1% of global fan.
Speaker 1:He's just on repeat. The repeat is like no Mozart. I don't even drift away. I'm Never. He never I'm riding with Bach twenty four seven.
Speaker 1:How many minutes are in a year? Can you actually look that up? 60 times 24 times three sixty five. 60 times 24 times three sixty five. He was listening okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. So
Speaker 3:So you spent
Speaker 1:hundred and twenty five thousand minutes in a year, I think, if I got that right. Yep. And so he was listening for sixty thousand minutes. Sixty thousand minutes. So more than 10% of his time.
Speaker 1:So that's that's more than two hours every day. This guy's listening to just Bach.
Speaker 3:He's an absolute dog.
Speaker 1:This is the craziest thing. What happened?
Speaker 3:I mean, I feel I I didn't even I think I was, like, top 2% fan on my most played artist
Speaker 1:or something like that. Like, I I I actually haven't worked through
Speaker 3:my stuff. Percent. He's a point o o 1%.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Okay. Yeah. We're good. Well, let's bring in Emily Sunberg and let let's also tell you about getbezel.com.
Speaker 1:Shop over 26,500 luxurious.
Speaker 3:To you. Fully authentically.
Speaker 1:Hey. Welcome. Hello. Hi.
Speaker 3:Welcome to nice to see you.
Speaker 1:To see you.
Speaker 3:I'm not saying welcome.
Speaker 1:New York. Yeah. Good to have you here.
Speaker 5:How's it going?
Speaker 1:It's going great. Last night, we were at a an event, and, and the interviewer was asking us a bunch of questions about the business and stuff. But one of the questions that it didn't phase me at the time, but then I talked about it with someone later, and I'll give you the question, and I wanna see how you interpret it. It was, if you are on a desert island, you're stranded on a desert island, what are three Twitter accounts that you would follow?
Speaker 3:Oh. Maybe do that for Substack.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Three Substack accounts?
Speaker 1:You could do anything. I I I wound up listing a Sub stack as well.
Speaker 3:It was just technology analyst. John's just on a desert island just, like, reading some content something else.
Speaker 5:York New York Times. For Twitter. Okay. Need need Joe Weisenthal
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's covered in Joe. You definitely need Joe Weisenthal. Yes.
Speaker 5:Him. Yes. And then a third, probably, like a like a Frank O'Hara bot
Speaker 6:or something.
Speaker 5:Okay. Just, like, automatically gives you some poetry. So you
Speaker 1:answered the question exactly how I answered the question. And then someone came up to me after and was like, no. Like, if you're stranded, you need to be you need to be following, like, alert services or, like, the coast guard or, like
Speaker 5:You're taught oh, right.
Speaker 1:Know what talking pirates. A pilot. Like, someone with a plane.
Speaker 5:But also a pirate. Why?
Speaker 1:Analyzing technology. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're just waving you're waving the Joe Weisenthal post.
Speaker 1:What is Joe Weisenthal gonna do to get you off that at a fight?
Speaker 3:Joe would figure out.
Speaker 1:He's not gonna help you.
Speaker 3:Joe would figure out.
Speaker 5:That I was missing, though. You would have, like, task force.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 5:You know?
Speaker 1:And you wanna know that he's coming for you.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He would give me the update.
Speaker 1:Wait. Speaking of Joe Weisenthal, he recently made an appearance on your new podcast
Speaker 5:He did.
Speaker 1:Expense Account.
Speaker 5:Right.
Speaker 1:And he had a take that I thought crossed journalistic lines. I thought he
Speaker 5:Let's hear it.
Speaker 1:He said that Malaysia has the best food in the world.
Speaker 5:Have you been?
Speaker 1:No. So how would you know? Because I'm from America, and I know America has the best food in the world.
Speaker 5:I went to a a birthday party at a Malaysian bar last night.
Speaker 1:Okay. Was it the best food?
Speaker 5:It was great.
Speaker 1:Is Malaysian food actually that good?
Speaker 3:What is Malaysian food? It's Name every name every
Speaker 5:green. It's do you like spice? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like spice. I'm just saying that, like, like, Malaysia has one type
Speaker 5:food. It's delicious. You should go
Speaker 3:all there. Saute.
Speaker 5:A lot of beef.
Speaker 1:Saute. I love beef. Yeah. I love beef saute.
Speaker 5:And then, like, sauces and greens.
Speaker 1:We have pizza. We have McDonald's. We have the Doritos Locos taco.
Speaker 5:Do you have pizza in LA?
Speaker 1:No. But in New York, which is, again, in America. He he would say on a country by country basis. But he's here in Las Vegas. We have French we have French laundry.
Speaker 1:We have all sorts of restaurants.
Speaker 5:Have you guys had any great dinners while you've been here?
Speaker 1:We had a pretty good dinner last night.
Speaker 4:Where'd we go
Speaker 1:to the We went to a steakhouse. It was delicious.
Speaker 5:Which one?
Speaker 3:I don't know. Hawks something.
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I just think that the variety that you get like, I I will give Joe Weisenthal I've never been, but let's give him Malaysia as an a plus. It's an a plus. Yeah. It's like, well, then America has gotta be b plus in steak and b plus in French and b plus in sushi and b plus in, you know, Italian and all the different all the different genres, cuisines. Awesome.
Speaker 1:You add all that. That. Okay. Okay. You're defending But I
Speaker 5:think defending your guests. Really probably saying was, like, a great this, like, like, probably one or two specific great Malaysian places in New York because he has his spots.
Speaker 1:No. No. He was talking about going to Malaysia physically and saying that that being in Malaysia, that's the best food north.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We went to Hawx Hawxmore. We went to Hawx. It was good. Was good.
Speaker 3:You're not you're not
Speaker 5:I mean, I haven't been yet, but I'll make I'll make a trip.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Well, how how how is Expense Account going as a new podcast? Are are you excited about it?
Speaker 5:It's great. It's a blast. You know, it started Jason, my restaurant columnist, he started writing a column for me a little bit over a year ago called Expense Account. Yeah. And it's sort of about, like, business guy restaurants, like places where somebody slams the car down.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 5:And it was a great column, and I was reading one of them. He joked about having a podcast. Yeah. I called him, and I was like, are you making a show with someone else? Yeah.
Speaker 5:And he said he he wasn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But then I said, do you want a show? Yeah. And we made it. And Substack and Silver Oak Wines
Speaker 2:Oh, no way?
Speaker 5:Sponsored season one.
Speaker 1:That's a great sponsor.
Speaker 5:They're great. That's amazing. To Substack for the road. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like Substack sponsored?
Speaker 5:They're the presenting sponsor of season one.
Speaker 3:Very cool.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Very cool. Love Substack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What I liked about it was the fact that I am not really a foodie, as you can tell from my
Speaker 5:Say that. You've been having more culinary conversations.
Speaker 1:But my example of good food America was the Doritos Locos Taco.
Speaker 2:Great. That's my Baja blast.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. I like a I like a Baja blast. I like a Diet Coke. I like a Red Bull.
Speaker 5:We're on the same page.
Speaker 1:So but but so so I was worried that I was gonna open up the RSS feed and see a bunch of names that I didn't recognize. And when I saw Joe Weisenthal, was like, I'm in.
Speaker 5:And he has great takes on
Speaker 1:food. Yes. And it was great
Speaker 5:because New York's best
Speaker 1:food report. I'm used to him in one context talking about me about the markets, about what how what's happening with the latest news in the Fed
Speaker 5:Trade.
Speaker 1:Talking to founders, talking to entrepreneurs, CEOs. It was really cool to see just a different side of him. So I I think if you can keep doing that, like, I'm I'm hooked.
Speaker 5:That's the that's the idea.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And I think a lot of people will jump. And, honestly, a lot of people should be trying to get on the show because it shows them a different side of them, and I I don't know. It just seems like it's a it's a recipe for success.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it.
Speaker 3:What about the West Coast expansion?
Speaker 5:You're I need your advice here. So I I found that Substack is very limited analytics. They're great for other reasons, but in terms of, like, the demographics of my readers
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 5:It's limited. But I do know that about 20% of my readers live in California.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It it feels like a loss to not it it feels like a miss to not do some sort of l or California products. Mhmm. When I was there on my last trip, everybody was saying, like, we want something, like Mhmm. We read Feed Me religiously, but we want something in California. So I decided next year, I'm just gonna go out there more Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, as a state. Sure. And I I think it will probably start as, a monthly letter, but all of these readers of mine, they like have tips for me. They have stories they wanna tell. I'm not sure exactly how I'm gonna focus it, but I real I was I was putting together like a small newsroom or thinking about people to help me with it, and then I realized I can just go and do it.
Speaker 5:I think that's what people want.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 5:So I'm going to San Francisco at the January.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 5:I asked my
Speaker 3:I wonder. I we need a prediction market on how long you're gonna actually stay in that.
Speaker 5:So Right now, it's three nights.
Speaker 3:Okay. You're making it sound like it was gonna be like three weeks.
Speaker 5:No. It could I mean, maybe I'll never leave.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going in January, not for January.
Speaker 5:In January. My husband would not want me to go for
Speaker 1:that long. He
Speaker 5:would miss me. Yeah. And my readers would miss me in New York.
Speaker 6:Of Of course.
Speaker 5:But yeah. I don't I'm not sure where to start, but my my Twitter community of my, like, reply people in SF have been very welcoming and generous and have invited me to a few I
Speaker 3:reply people.
Speaker 5:Dinner parties and bars. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You'll probably leave with a scout fund.
Speaker 5:I'm looking for, like, some hidden doors.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, I mean, that sounds like sort of restaurant focus, but are there other cultural
Speaker 5:touch All kinds of establishments have tours.
Speaker 3:Okay. Go to Sand Hill Road and just start trying doors, like, I guess, to the side of some of the buildings.
Speaker 1:I think the Feed Me report on the sand the Rosewood bar on a Thursday night would really go
Speaker 5:That would go great.
Speaker 1:I think it'd be a great piece.
Speaker 5:Definitely go definitely go on Thursday. I'll do that on a Thursday night.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 5:there's a lot that I don't under I mean, the only other time I went to SF was for WWDC. Thank you, Apple
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:For bringing me earlier that this year. Got a selfie with Tim Cook.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Cupertino is a very different environment than San Francisco.
Speaker 2:I know you probably spend some time in neighborhood called
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:What's the neighborhood that you don't that not everyone always likes
Speaker 1:to The Tenderloin? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I live there. That's rough.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We walked we walked through there at night after dinner.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the Twitter headquarters for a while we're there.
Speaker 3:It wasn't fine when we were walking through. Yeah. I had John as kind of to
Speaker 1:take a trip to the the Hamptons Of San Francisco.
Speaker 5:Which is Tahoe? Oh, Tahoe.
Speaker 1:I would say Tahoe. Right? Or maybe Martha I mean, no. Not Martha Vineyard. What's the Martha's Vineyard of San Francisco?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 5:I said Marin.
Speaker 1:Marin? Yeah. Yeah. Country. I think Tahoe is more of the Hampton.
Speaker 1:Because I when I think of, like, the Hamptons of, I think, like, two hours, three hours skiing? Yeah. You can ski. You can boat. You
Speaker 3:can You
Speaker 1:can do
Speaker 3:a lake at different times.
Speaker 5:Do you guys ski?
Speaker 1:Yes. Occasionally. I'm not super into it.
Speaker 2:Right. It's fine.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's We're into the track right now. We're in a very much in a in a race car phase Mhmm. Less of the skiing phase. I I Mhmm.
Speaker 1:The the most recent experience of being on the track just completely reset my expectations for what's possible with recreational sports. Yeah. I'm I'm find me in thermal, not, you know, what
Speaker 5:And you're that's an old. You're getting ad deal ideas also from f one.
Speaker 3:Right? Oh, yes. Always. Love f one. Always.
Speaker 1:It's the best.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Back to Substack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jack Conte at Patreon is trying to poach Substack writers. Yes. What do you think he's thinking? What do think he needs to do?
Speaker 1:How do you think about the positioning of Substack versus Patreon? Just, like, from a vibe and cultural perspective maybe first, like, how how do you interpret, like, a Substack creator versus, hi. I'm a Patreon creator.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think the medium is, like, you think Patreon, you think news or you think Patreon, you think podcast.
Speaker 1:I think think so. Model. The red sphere model. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Otherworlds, you know, my favorite podcast, Otherworlds?
Speaker 1:Jack
Speaker 5:Jack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. From, yeah. He was originally
Speaker 5:Tamagotchi, Versace, whatever. Yes. Yeah. He rocks. I think if they keep him, that's enjoyed
Speaker 2:the stuff. Daniel Wardell Yeah.
Speaker 1:On that show. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I love Otherworlds.
Speaker 1:This is amazing.
Speaker 5:I listen to
Speaker 3:I've never been doing podcast
Speaker 1:on Patreon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, literally I I I
Speaker 3:I never I I I've never watched a full horror movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know I'm not into it.
Speaker 5:You're not into that.
Speaker 1:He just turns into a ghost. He's he's
Speaker 3:he's too too afraid.
Speaker 5:You're missing out. It's a world of wonder and strange. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm a scary
Speaker 1:A scary guy.
Speaker 5:Okay. I think if they keep them, you know, they keep some of the big hitters like Red Scare or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I I don't think I think what both of these platforms are doing wrong is when they try to do, like, the sports team trade thing. Like, I Yeah. And I was feeling a bit of FOMO for a while.
Speaker 1:Go try get new people on your platform.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Incubate Don't try and be a new
Speaker 1:you're Patreon. Yeah. If you're on Patreon, don't go poach from from Substack. Yeah. Go find someone who's working in legacy media way under way way underpaid relative to the value they create.
Speaker 1:Right. Have them come over and do their new thing. And and that was the lineage of some of the early Substack deals was we'll we'll help you get set up. We'll we'll give you enough money that you can pay for health care, pay for the first thing, and then get your business up and running.
Speaker 5:Right. I was feeling a lot of FOMO that I wasn't getting the email from the Patreon team saying, come over here. I'll share a bank check. And then I got one the other day, and it had the it had the term I haven't responded yet. Poached.
Speaker 5:Poached. I'm worried
Speaker 1:about trading card. Attempted poaching happening.
Speaker 3:You're way too you're way too loyal. I I genuinely think you're I feel like your audience would have a mutiny. They would be like
Speaker 5:It wouldn't work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I you're substack coded. That's the thing. I think you're a substack writer.
Speaker 5:But also when you see certain terms, like, we're rolling out new features that we wanna tell you. That role is like a slow thing. It's not like we're launching this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That the email kind of just fuzzed out after that. And then he followed up or they I won't I won't out I won't out who emailed me, but This
Speaker 1:is amazing.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 5:But I think I think, like, it's okay for Substack to be a newsletter platform. It's okay for Patreon to be Yeah. Podcast platform. And I I would I'm very curious to see what an email CMS on Patreon even looks like.
Speaker 1:Do you have Netflix? Do I have Netflix?
Speaker 5:Sure do.
Speaker 1:Are you, like, log because I pay for it, but I'm not logged in to my phone. Like, I'm not, like, a regular watcher. Phone. Yeah. Have you ever watched
Speaker 5:Like, watching on the plane? Yeah. On a plane.
Speaker 1:No. I won't do that. I won't do that.
Speaker 5:Apple TV, baby.
Speaker 1:Okay. There you go. So but do you think you'd ever watch a podcast on Netflix? You've seen that they're doing this? Yes.
Speaker 1:They're starting to buy podcasts and put them on Netflix?
Speaker 3:Yes. More like distribute them.
Speaker 1:Yes. Distribute them. They got the ringer.
Speaker 5:I would not, but these kids are really watching a lot of podcasts.
Speaker 1:They're into podcasts on TVs on on the wall.
Speaker 3:Wherever they
Speaker 1:for a couple hours.
Speaker 5:Messed up my mic.
Speaker 1:I hope No.
Speaker 5:I think you're right. Yeah. I they're all watching podcast. Like, people are watching Expense Account as much as listening to it.
Speaker 1:And and and do you think they're also watching it on, like, smart TVs, basically? Like, they throw it on on the TV the way they might throw on, you know, reality TV show or a movie or
Speaker 5:all the, like, working from home.
Speaker 1:Okay. Here's the clothes. And now there are people here. They're closing the stock exchange. Who is it?
Speaker 1:It's Wells Fargo. Wealth man
Speaker 4:We got we got one tower still up here. We got one To Wells
Speaker 1:Two Wells Fargo. Smart.
Speaker 3:Left left. We're holding on.
Speaker 2:We're holding on to one tower. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We got one we got one field left over there. That one. Yeah. There we go. Wealth and that's amazing.
Speaker 1:They caught to the close. We're
Speaker 4:here
Speaker 1:at Lars at the New York Stabbard Street.
Speaker 3:Let's give it up for Wells Fargo. Yes. Yes. Wow. She is going for it.
Speaker 5:That was great.
Speaker 1:Maybe future Feed Me sponsor there. Who knows? Knows? Possible. Anyway, you were saying people watching Netflix shows at
Speaker 3:think I think more
Speaker 5:and more people are sort of using their TVs as, like, that always on thing in the office Yeah. But in their house. So it's like a you know, like the Harry Potter moving picture frame almost. Sure. TV is on, the podcast is on while they're doing whatever else
Speaker 3:they're doing. That makes sense. Yeah. Holiday gifting. Yes.
Speaker 3:Our gift our our our do gift guides matter in a world where you can tell the LLM, describe the person and say, generate a gift guide at, you know, every possible price point all the
Speaker 2:way through.
Speaker 5:Guys see the gift guide that I wrote about that Evercore sent out to everyone? It's like what to buy the I think last year, the sub I You had
Speaker 1:wrote it for
Speaker 5:before? Somebody at Evercore sends it
Speaker 1:to because I feel like Evercore that's a that's a premier
Speaker 5:It's great. I'll forward it to you guys. I looked up the person who makes it. Mhmm. They've been doing it for many years.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 5:Last year, it was like what to buy the women in your life, and this year, they changed the subject to what to buy the people in your life. But it's like luxury
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Items
Speaker 1:This starts amazing.
Speaker 5:Men.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I I like the idea of sort of, like, this word-of-mouth kind of gift guide if it becomes a little bit more secret.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 5:Substack has become a storm of gift guides
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:This time of year, and it's a lot of clothes. I didn't realize that, like, that's what people want so much. What do you do you are you guys gonna make a gift guide?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But we're gonna strict no clothes, more hardware, more, like, what track cards
Speaker 5:Are you gonna get some affiliate?
Speaker 1:What plane to buy.
Speaker 3:No. No. No. We don't. I know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Shop. Loaded the game. Love the game.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:Shop My. We gotta have the Shop
Speaker 3:My store.
Speaker 2:Wants Shop My?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Shop My. Get that.
Speaker 5:Have a lot on there now.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If they if they get Ferrari challenge cars on there.
Speaker 5:Shop My. That would be
Speaker 3:our Word of the year. Two.
Speaker 5:Word of the year?
Speaker 1:DB needs a word of the year. Every publication has a word of the year. The Economist has a word of the year. The Economist's word of
Speaker 3:the disclosed it yet.
Speaker 1:The The Economist's word of the year is slop.
Speaker 5:Right. I saw that.
Speaker 1:And that feels like appropriate, but also potentially could have been last year's word of the year. We were talking about slop as a term that was sort of, you know, I think you called the top on slop in February. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it really was important.
Speaker 3:Became my word of the year.
Speaker 1:I think the economists did a good job
Speaker 3:And then and then Oxford had rage bait.
Speaker 1:Wait. Oh, yeah. They did. Rage bait.
Speaker 5:That's two words. I know. For the term.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. One one word put together, I guess.
Speaker 3:A common word. I wanna say our words so much, but we need to introduce it in the right way. You can you can
Speaker 5:Have you hearing everybody saying flow state now? That's, like, very hot over
Speaker 2:the last
Speaker 1:few weeks.
Speaker 3:Like flow state. That's, like, such an old I feel like that's, like, a 2018 era.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But slop is negative. Rage state's negative. Flow state's positive.
Speaker 3:We're moving I remember I remember when I was, like, in college when I was in college listening to, like, Tim Ferriss. Mhmm. He was always trying to get in flow state.
Speaker 5:Was like, was like say, like, Wiz Khalifa.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. I think I'm getting the flow state. Flow state's good.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, yeah, I would encourage you to to drop Feed Me's word of the year. Okay. I think you should think about it.
Speaker 5:I've been thinking of doing some sort of list at the end of the year. Yeah. Like, the I was gonna do a men of the year thing after GQ did theirs and left you off.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Crazy. Well, didn't they give it to Sydney Sweeney instead? Yes. She was at the event.
Speaker 1:I I it's funny. You you said
Speaker 5:get the invite?
Speaker 1:There was another No.
Speaker 3:We didn't even get the invite.
Speaker 1:No. There was another
Speaker 5:You guys would be a my man at the year party.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Appreciate it. We thought we'd make make the list. What
Speaker 1:do you have?
Speaker 5:Are you having a holiday party?
Speaker 1:I I mean, I
Speaker 3:No. We we really, like, dropped the ball on events, like, since the event we did. Without
Speaker 1:nudging our out, it's impossible.
Speaker 3:Do you you you knew with our event. You're like, we're doing an event. We picked it, like, a rough time and then did nothing else until the day of, but you pulled it off.
Speaker 5:So Did you it was it was fabulous. Yeah. Did you guys ever go into any to any, like, twenty sixteen awesome SF World holiday parties. Like, I feel like the budgets have kind of vanished and things have changed.
Speaker 1:Vanished? What do you mean?
Speaker 5:Holiday parties don't really feel the same.
Speaker 1:Wait. Well, how so?
Speaker 5:Maybe I'm talking about the media ones.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because, I mean, so that does make sense. Like, the biggest There's more money than ever and so Yeah.
Speaker 3:So so, like, we're like, the next two weeks, like, basically, the the holiday holiday parties have begun. Yeah. Tech has obviously, like, taken the they saw the media companies with their big holiday parties, and they said, like, that that's actually our money. Like, we're gonna take that.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:And now but I was wondering how you would how you would handle room blocks for as as, like, feed me. If you're gonna put on a big event, how would you handle room blocks? Because there's been a big Hotel reservations.
Speaker 5:Well, you have a very big team.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:So you're saying how do we transport the team if something was happening in New York?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we travel light. We travel light. There was just four of us. There was four of us.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, do people there's, like, two questions here. One, how do you how does a who has to put up that many people, like, in a different city?
Speaker 3:Like like, if a media company is doing if they're if they're doing I'm I'm I'm somewhat doing a bit
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 5:you guys need to open a New York office.
Speaker 1:We should. This is our New York office. Right. We're partnering with the New York Stock Exchange now.
Speaker 3:But I'm just saying if you were doing an event in New York and you're inviting people and you're like, I'm gonna pay for your accommodation because you're speaking at my event, what what what would what hotel would you choose?
Speaker 1:We have high low strategy. We need
Speaker 3:a high low strategy.
Speaker 1:What we need is a sleeping bag on the floor of this booth. When we come to New York, we crash in the booth, and we're like, we are grinding harder than anyone in Manhattan.
Speaker 5:Or like a vice warehouse strategy.
Speaker 1:That'd be good too.
Speaker 6:Do you
Speaker 5:guys know the media company in DC, Punch Bowl? Like, they own a Brownsville.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's cool. No way.
Speaker 2:Oh. They just bought
Speaker 5:Their office is there.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 5:And I'm sure someone has slept there before. It's pretty you might need to, know Yeah. Look check out, like, the real
Speaker 1:Punch Bowl go on my media map, which was
Speaker 5:I mentioned accurate. The map, and I think I gotta talk
Speaker 4:about that. We still are getting we still are getting
Speaker 3:notes from people saying, like, you did that for me.
Speaker 1:We did this Axios event last night.
Speaker 5:We thought that was, like, the Magna Carta. It was like
Speaker 3:It was thrown together. It was so crazy background. It was so crazy was because Tyler put it together. We like glanced at it. We're like, it looks pretty funny and you and then we're like, alright.
Speaker 3:We'll have Emily basically to be the heat shield and put this ass in the world. So
Speaker 5:Yeah. That was great. And like, people tried to make their own and it didn't hit the same, obviously.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, yeah. I mean, I I think that these formats, they they when they hit, they hit really well, and they're very shareable. Yeah. I I would I I would say that stuff can get overdone, but I would be excited to read the Feed Me holiday gift guide or just the recap of the top 10 moments from the year Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pieces that I might not have read or Right. Little snippets that I missed. Yeah. Things like that, like the the the scoops that you've gotten or the interviews, things you learned.
Speaker 5:I have a question for you, Raj.
Speaker 1:Predictions for next year. All this stuff, like, the formats are Mhmm. They're they they get they're played out, but they're they work
Speaker 5:They were.
Speaker 1:Still. They work, and it's just a good way to enjoy information. I like seeing a market on a map. Yes. I like seeing a list of top things, whether it's people or companies.
Speaker 1:Like, people like ranking lists
Speaker 5:and stuff. It's very easy to digest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need a little bit of heat shield, but,
Speaker 5:you know, that's Can I ask you guys
Speaker 1:a Yeah?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I was at DealBook this year, and Andrew interviewed mister Beast. Yeah. And he was playing the videos that he made ten years ago with, like, camcorders,
Speaker 4:like
Speaker 5:early stuff, that video that went viral this week, me in ten years or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I'm curious. Are you guys I I got, a pang of regret that I'm not capturing more, like, how I built this style stuff. Are you guys capturing that as well? Like, are you guys getting behind the scenes stuff?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have a little bit of behind the scenes stuff. We we we've seen
Speaker 3:it The thing is we put our entire studio on the stream. Right. And so, like, it's in some ways, like, you get a behind the scenes look every episode.
Speaker 5:We're, like, back in the car on the way home, like
Speaker 3:Here's Ben get some of that stuff. Okay. Really camcorder.
Speaker 1:Like crazy about it because, like like, you could tell like, if you were trying to just make the documentary about we actually thought it would be hilarious to make a two hour documentary about TPN and and and release it in one year. Like, it just because you can just put a documentary on on Amazon Prime if
Speaker 4:you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but you could you could tell the story through the show pretty effectively. We have ISOs for everything, and we often have meta conversations like this one about the show on the show. Mhmm. And so right here, we're talking about the decision to put Yeah.
Speaker 1:To do behind the scenes. There aren't that many there aren't that many discussions that we're like, oh, we should have captured that off off camera. Maybe there's a little bit more there where we should be doing stuff. I think that the the the lower hanging fruit for us is just like
Speaker 3:I think you should become one of those livestreamers that just spends all day long walking around and being like, yo. No. No. Emily, all around New York, you just have somebody following you with a camera. You're just doing stories, scooping.
Speaker 3:On
Speaker 5:I could. I mean, that, like, photo in the New York Times where I'm in the back of the car is kinda that bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. May maybe maybe we should do more behind the scenes shots, but it's just hard to figure out, like, how would we productize that because it's a lot of effort.
Speaker 5:I think it's more for the time capsule.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But I think for us, like, think about the time capsule. It's thirty years from now, you'll be able to do a second from every single show forever, and you'll be able to
Speaker 1:see those and and
Speaker 5:Memory kits.
Speaker 1:There there are a lot of stuff. It's not exactly like building building silently. Like, it's very
Speaker 2:much Right. Public. Anyway
Speaker 3:Building very publicly.
Speaker 1:Well, very excited. Massive year for you. Congratulations. Thank you so for coming on
Speaker 5:this to New York more?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I mean, that's exactly There's gonna be a of
Speaker 3:new videos next year.
Speaker 1:This New York Stock Exchange partnership is all
Speaker 4:We about got Adam over here.
Speaker 3:He's suited up. He's suited up. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 5:For having me. This is so fun. I'll see guys soon.
Speaker 1:See you soon.
Speaker 5:Bye, guys.
Speaker 1:Bye. While she hops off, let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. And I'm also gonna tell you about 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception.
Speaker 1:Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. What are you laughing at? What what what do you got on the timeline?
Speaker 3:Can't share that one. Okay. But
Speaker 1:Varda is flying its fourth mission home to Earth. That's exciting. Varda has been on an absolute Tearwell brewery. I'm sharing a photo of the See You Soon Kuneeba Go w four. Somebody was joking about how VARTA names their their VARTA names their missions w dash the number.
Speaker 1:They're now they're now on four. Someone was making the joke that eventually it's gonna start sounding like tax forms, w nine. Tell you, like, you know, ten ninety nine. 99.
Speaker 3:I mean, that would be a funny bit. Memorable.
Speaker 1:Does the w stand for Winnebago? I know that they have this whole, like, Breaking Bad theme internally that they like to joke about, but I don't know. Where were we? TJ
Speaker 3:Parker's quoting granola granola did crunch Oh. Which is a great name for their version of wrap.
Speaker 1:Oh, that is good.
Speaker 3:Oh, crunch. TJ Parker says, you're twenty twenty five. Deposed.
Speaker 1:Deposed is his What did you
Speaker 3:mean by this?
Speaker 1:That actually I mean, a a rap style product for all of your meeting notes is extremely interesting for the corporate athlete out there. Yeah. Really, really. If you're if you're a corporate athlete and you put up historic numbers in I
Speaker 3:love how Kia Kia like is like, I did three thousand two hundred hours
Speaker 1:in a month. Month. It's just like you can't possibly work three thousand hours in a month. There aren't three thousand hours in a month. This is like because I know I know in full a full work year is is two thousand hours.
Speaker 1:And if you're working eighty hours a week, that's four thousand hours. But
Speaker 3:it's yeah. It's that's Andrew Reed says when your vendor sends out their forward deployed engineers, they're leaving their flank exposed to a pincer movement by your cavalry.
Speaker 1:What? It's ridiculous with that metaphors. Love it. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
Speaker 1:Plan, buy, measure out of home with precision with adquick.com.
Speaker 3:Announced a $15,000,000 series a yesterday led by Excel and launched Prism, agentic reporting that can explain your finances.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We got Adam Faiz in the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 3:Wow. Wow. In the suit. In the Can we get a can we get a suit check real quick?
Speaker 1:Because you look fantastic.
Speaker 3:And the
Speaker 1:and the Trump is great. Stock exchange. Yes. You look great. Thank you
Speaker 4:so much for your Are
Speaker 3:you like a tailoring guy? You get it off
Speaker 4:the rack? No. I am like, you buy a suit, then you get it tailored.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I tell Yes.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 4:I'm not at the level yet that you can get, like, a custom suit,
Speaker 1:a square one.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. We're we're getting there.
Speaker 1:Getting there. Well, you had some You were just rattling timeline.
Speaker 3:I do. Yeah.
Speaker 1:About about the news breakdown. What happened today? How'd you find out about it?
Speaker 4:I found out from someone tell I've been in favor of this merger from the day it was announced. So I think, like, when there was conversations around who might be the new owner of Warner Brothers, Netflix for me was always the best option. And so I was having dinner with a friend two nights ago and I was saying this and the next day, last night, he texted me and he's like, it happened. Yeah. I was like,
Speaker 2:wait, what?
Speaker 4:Oh. And I was shocked. I really did not actually think this was possible. Yeah. But I think I'm one of the few people on Hollywood that actually think this is good for
Speaker 1:Okay. Why? Why?
Speaker 3:You say you say in Hollywood, but you're here in New York.
Speaker 4:You know? Hollywood is kind of everyone Hollywood
Speaker 1:is a state of mind.
Speaker 3:State of mind.
Speaker 1:Hollywood is a state of mind. Okay. So, yeah, why is it good? Why
Speaker 4:is it? I think everyone is still stuck in twenty fifteen and thinks that we are in a battle with Netflix. Okay. The reality is that we're in a battle for attention
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:With Meta, Google, TikTok, the AI companies. And I think whatever's best for this IP Yeah. Is what's best for Hollywood.
Speaker 1:And we as content creators, IP owners?
Speaker 4:Think it's people that love our industry. I think the IP that Warner Brothers own, it's it's so rich. Yeah. At the end of the day, Netflix has the most powerful distribution arm in entertainment. And so when you look at the force of like a k pop demon hunters for instance, is like arguably the biggest movie of the year.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You think that Warner Brothers is the second most important animated IP library, second disc. Sure. Right? Is Looney Tunes.
Speaker 4:We're talking Hanna Barber. We're talking
Speaker 1:Right? We're talking
Speaker 4:These are titles that are gathering dust on platforms. Yeah. And it would gather dust on Paramount Plus as well. And Netflix now has the IP to match the distribution that they already have.
Speaker 3:Why do you why do you don't think Paramount would be able to put it to use?
Speaker 4:Not to the power of Netflix. And I think at the end of the day, Netflix has wanted a licensing business for a very long time. But I think what they figured out is that IP is really hard to make. I think after ten years, there's, like, three titles you can actually say
Speaker 1:are IP. Yep.
Speaker 4:Stranger Things
Speaker 2:Squid Game.
Speaker 4:Squid Game. And I think you could say, hey. There's but, like, they spent $15,000,000,000
Speaker 1:But it it it really is remarkable because Hard. I feel like net I feel a very positive association with Netflix.
Speaker 3:I've always had
Speaker 1:a good time with it. I've always enjoyed it. And then but when I actually look through, I can name 10 HBO shows Yeah. That I love and revere as, like, fine art relative to, like there's some good times on Netflix, but it's not like, oh, you're not watching you never seen The Sopranos? Exactly.
Speaker 1:You're not watching Game of Thrones? Exactly. It's not the FOMO TV.
Speaker 4:And And I think at the end of the day, we're matching now the most powerful audience in streaming with the greatest library on earth. So I think, like, in revenue alone
Speaker 1:greatest library on earth, that's Hey.
Speaker 4:I really do think Warner Brothers has the greatest library when you include HBO as well.
Speaker 1:Okay. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's some good stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I do think when you think about the licensing revenue, they're gonna start making for merchandising. Yeah. I mean, we're talking Netflix now owning Harry Potter. The merchandising on that alone is the reason why this is the best deal
Speaker 1:Okay. Possible. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So the worried debt. You're not worried that everybody that that subscribes to HBO Max already probably paying Netflix and there's there's just Well,
Speaker 4:I don't mean it'll be cheaper for all of us. Right? I mean, I think you're
Speaker 3:gonna get too far a little bit more expensive than that. A little bit more expensive, but then you can just keep bringing it up, bringing it up, bringing it up. I mean, I I've I've I've always yeah. I've always always been like, Netflix has felt like such a good value proposition for so long. I've always been interested to see how people will churn if there's not like a hot show Totally.
Speaker 3:On Netflix at that exact moment that they're engaged with because there's just so much content. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Help me wrestle with this. There was someone on the on the timeline who was saying like, I cannot imagine another place where Warner Brothers would land that would be more of a would create more of a monopoly. Right. And and they're saying they're they're gonna face antitrust.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Jason Jason Kolar Yes. Who is a founding CEO of Hulu That's right. Warner Media CEO. He says if I was tasked with doing so, could not think of a effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood Reduce competition.
Speaker 1:To Netflix. Particularly an antitrust phrase.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:But I was saying, like, what about selling it to Disney? Like, if it was No. Wait. What about selling
Speaker 4:it to Paramount? At the end of the day, there'd be a lot worse consolidation with the Paramount and Warner Brothers combined merger and a lot more lost jobs.
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Wait. Okay. So so explain explain that angle because I was talking about Disney and it just seems crazy to put Superman next to Spider Man.
Speaker 1:Like, you have a
Speaker 4:whole I think at lot the end of the day, as much as people usually like to say that they'd like to keep the teams at both studios, at the end of the day, Paramount and Warner Brothers were to merge, they'd have the same film studio.
Speaker 3:Oh. Oh, sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. And so I think what we're really talking about here is the consolidation for the survival of a 100 year old
Speaker 2:industry. Okay.
Speaker 4:Okay. That's going to continue to happen. Sure. But again, we are in a war for attention with the digital platforms that are free to watch, is YouTube, which is Instagram, which is TikTok. Yep.
Speaker 3:So I
Speaker 4:think that at the end of the day, we are trying to keep alive an industry that is not thriving Mhmm. But still is a very powerful industry. Yeah. I think that this puts it in a much direction going forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about actual physical theaters? It seemed like Netflix was trying to get ahead of some narrative that, you know, movies that you love with the the next Harry Potter maybe, whatever that is, or the
Speaker 4:next it is about to be an HBO TV show. That's been in
Speaker 1:out of theater. But but but you you
Speaker 3:Well, you say that, but, like, it it feels still feels like it this deal has a long way to go.
Speaker 4:Has a long way to go. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and it still feels like there's a number of different scenarios. But I think most likely this has just held up for a few years.
Speaker 4:So I think that's probably more likely the option. But I do think we're probably gonna look at a similar like an AT and T Time Warner Sure. Situation.
Speaker 1:Sure. But but but on the on the idea of, you know, Netflix choosing to say, hey. Yep. Obviously, the next great movie we have, we could just put on Netflix, maybe get a couple more subs. We are going consciously make an effort to put it into theaters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think that's lip service? Do you like that plan? Do you think like, how are you feeling about the theater business and what it where it goes from here?
Speaker 3:Look. I Do you see Netflix putting a pop up that's like, hey. This isn't movies now, but if you pay a $100, you can watch it today?
Speaker 4:That no. But I will say, I think this year, we've seen Netflix kinda go back on things they've set.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 4:they put k pop demon hunters in theaters and made $19,000,000 in the span of one weekend. So I do think they understand the force. Yeah. Is you can make a difference.
Speaker 1:There's something about a musical in the theater too because they're gonna see it, especially with kids.
Speaker 4:And you're seeing it with a
Speaker 1:shared audience. Comedy's here. You laugh.
Speaker 4:But I do think that at the end of the day, Warner Brothers, you know, has to continue having their releases come out in theaters if they're gonna wanna still make movies with people like Paul Thomas Anderson. And so Oh, sure. I think what you will more likely see is the window being shortened. Yep. But I do think that they will have to keep maintain this sort of theatrical exhibition release.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. I wonder I wonder where it goes. There's a been a trend that I've been a fan of where the movie theaters, least in my town, have been reducing the number of seats, but then increasing the amenities and upsells.
Speaker 1:And they'll try and sell you a whole dinner and drinks, and you get out of there and you spend $200. But I don't get to go to the movies that much, so it's like a fantastic experience.
Speaker 2:You see, you like the eating in the theater. IPic.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 4:I like the iPic. I don't like the eating in it. I like the, like, luxury seat
Speaker 1:for sure. No. No. You bring a bottle of wine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You bring a How's
Speaker 3:the wine?
Speaker 1:Is it good wine? I can't tell, but it doesn't like enjoy. Yeah. No. Somebody likes the wine's fine.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But I I I think they should go all the way. French laundry, put a movie theater
Speaker 3:in.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Mean, at the end of the day, I think you look at something that the Lincoln Center on Yeah. Which is usually sold out for weeks on end. It's almost impossible to get a seat when you have a one battle after another or something premiering there. And so I think the trend is going to you will only go to the theaters during the day or just in I mean, I actually tried to go see I finally saw one battle or other like weeks after it had come out.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I had the shittiest seats on earth because I couldn't find seats at any other given show time. Yeah. I do think the trend's gonna be the only reason you will go to a theater is to have an experience you cannot have at home. So if that's the ultra luxury sort of beautiful screening room that you have a steak dinner at Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. Great. If that's the biggest screen in North America, then that's also amazing too. And I think Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of this
Speaker 4:is sort of repeating what the movie experience was a hundred years ago. We used to build like palaces to watch movies. Yeah. And it went to the multiplex in the mall, which really does mirror probably a worse version of what you could watch on Netflix at home.
Speaker 2:And so Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm in support of kinda going back to that original experience and making it something that's just like spectacular Yeah. As a way of getting people back in those seats.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What other media stories are you tracking? Mean, this is
Speaker 4:the biggest one of the week. This is history.
Speaker 1:It was history.
Speaker 4:This is like actual history. Yeah. And I and I I do I am sensitive to that fact. I think there's a lot of people in Hollywood that are scared about sort of what is next for our industry. You know, we had a very long strike that then came to an industry that was sort of smaller than it was at the beginning of Butch.
Speaker 4:But Mhmm. At the end of the day, I do think that this is an exciting story, and I also think that it's gonna be as someone who's a fan of, like, Looney Tunes for instance, I would rather a newer version of Looney Tunes be on platforms than having kids watch like YouTube kids AI
Speaker 1:Looney Tunes character.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 3:great question. Wile E. Coyote.
Speaker 1:Wile E. Coyote.
Speaker 3:The influx of just pure AI content now to YouTube is actually crazy, specifically in the video essay kind of documentary space where they're just like, hey, like I'm gonna just generate a deep research report Yeah. Use 11 labs to like Yep. Basically create an audio track and then just put pictures and some videos over it is actually crazy. I've only been I like some of the history content on there and I'll just like search for a topic. And then if I don't know the channels yet, I I I don't know until I'm three minutes in the video and the and the and the video says, this this move wasn't just this, it was that.
Speaker 3:And I'm like
Speaker 1:We got you. I'm like We gotcha.
Speaker 4:I will say YouTube Kids is like one of the scarier things I think we have in culture because like you might think your kid is safe because they're watching him. It's Rachel's video. Yeah. It's very cute and innocent but like the recommended feed, I don't know if you ever spent time with It's you two terrifying. I mean, it's like AI slop like from
Speaker 2:like It's
Speaker 4:like Russian.
Speaker 1:They're not going to swear No. And there won't be nudity But it's all content, but it's weird.
Speaker 4:It's Yeah. Weird and it is like weirdly sensual at times.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well and I think that like I don't know when we decided that these tech companies could be the babysitter for your child, but I imagine that we're gonna sort of reverse those trends.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. And I think the meme is already taking hold. Like, the whole iPad kids meme is definitely something where parents are now proud to be like, oh, yeah. My kid doesn't have an iPad. And it's like, if it becomes a status symbol, then all of a sudden everyone does it and hopefully then
Speaker 3:What about social media being banned? There's something in Australia. I'm in favor of this.
Speaker 4:Woah. I think under under 16, they're banning social media in Australia, which I think is a great thing. I really do think peak sort of consumption
Speaker 3:here's the issue with that. Like, kids are still gonna have devices. They're gonna use various services. They'll use new networks that have less control. I think kids are still gonna be social on the Internet.
Speaker 3:And if you ban the platforms that actually invest billions of dollars a year, you're gonna get them on these, like, places, like, dark corners of the Internet that don't have any scrutiny, that don't have any whatever you want to call that safety teams, whether you're in favor of them or or not. I just think this is you cannot ban humans being social. They will always find a way.
Speaker 4:They will always find a way, but I mean conversation around cigarettes. Right? And like we know that the sort of laws we put around cigarettes has saved lives. The count outs elementalize. And so I do think that like
Speaker 3:the comp would be like it's you ban cigarettes, which is your physical item that you need that needs a supply chain. You need it. It's hard to like make a cigarette. We're not banning kids' cell phones. They're still gonna have a device.
Speaker 3:Roll with one hand. Yeah. John's John was probably rolling his own. He's supposed say, yeah. Pipe actually back whittling Whittling a pipe.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. I just I
Speaker 3:So I just think like you're gonna end up in a situation where kids are probably gonna make they're gonna just vibe code a crazy social network and it's gonna invite in a lot of
Speaker 4:Sure. I mean, I think, look, regardless, I think we're we're nearing that point where we need to have a national conversation about I don't think anyone out there can say that like kids are better off today as a result of the amount of brain rotten consumption they're doing in these platforms Yeah. Than they were before. And I think it like on top of that these platforms are in the business of getting you more addicted to their slop. There's a reason why Instagram moved the reels tab to where messages used to be.
Speaker 4:Because they know that once you're on the reels tab, you're probably gonna watch a few more reels. Billion dollar I
Speaker 1:I was not I was not on the reels tab at all. I would just check my messages.
Speaker 4:Swipe and now it's
Speaker 1:I swipe it down there. I'm like, It is cursed.
Speaker 5:It's cursed.
Speaker 3:So I just
Speaker 4:think that, like, this is a conversation that needs to be parent led, and we don't really have the data yet Yeah. To show just how harmful it
Speaker 1:is. I always just go back to, like, my experience with video games. Like, you know, Halo, I think, was, like, m for mature. I was not supposed to be able to play it until I was 17. I was probably able to get on my hands on it at 14.
Speaker 1:I think I turned out okay. I'm not obsessed with, like, killing aliens. Right. Not doing anything. No.
Speaker 1:I'm actually completely fine. Same thing with Call of Duty.
Speaker 6:I mean,
Speaker 4:I remember going to GameStop with my mom and trying to buy GTA five and they have to give you that whole warning. Like, do you know this game includes Yeah. Like every horrible thing you've ever heard in your entire life? It's yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So so having some sort of warning system I I'm a big fan of MPAA ratings coming to tech products. I've been kind of beating that drum for for a couple months, but I I like I I think the MPAA ratings I hope that the MPAA figures out a way to work with the tech companies in a way that's, like, accretive to them, like they get paid or whatever. Because I think that there's just something about if I say, hey.
Speaker 1:Like like, Instagram is r rated, you'll be like, okay. I know what that means. For sure. Or, like, Instagram's PG 13 rated or it's g rated. Like, I know intuitively, and I'm ready as a parent to to decide when and maybe I wanna say, hey.
Speaker 1:You know, PG 13 rated movies, like, a little bit earlier because guidance is recommended. It's okay. It's like we can even with video games, I I'm I'm I'm a big fan of, like, cooperative games being a wildly different dynamic than, like, solo online in, like, the toxic chat room. Whereas if it's, like, me and my son playing a co op game together, like, troubleshooting and stuff, even if, like, the the the screen images are a little bit, like like, adult, it's, like, we're collaborating. And so it's a wildly different dynamic than being, like, lonely and then seeing imagery.
Speaker 4:I mean, do think these are just sort of unfortunately some of the problems we had to deal with with user generated content. Yeah. We're talking about games that were made by hundreds if not thousands of people that had to go for an approval system to get that rating. There are dangers when it is totally left up to the person of just making whatever type of content you want. Of course, platforms like YouTube are gonna police that content and you're not allowed to have you know, can murder somebody and have that video exist on on YouTube.
Speaker 4:You can't un x though. So I think it's just a matter of figuring out like where do we want this conversation to go and like what approvals do we want to give the parents.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Want your take on the Marty Supreme marketing campaign. Oh, yeah. Because this feels like to me I don't I don't I don't pay much attention to movies but I'm seeing a lot of Marty Supreme content. That's good. And It's
Speaker 1:Jordy's film of the year already.
Speaker 3:I'll get I've I've You haven't
Speaker 4:seen it? Have you
Speaker 3:seen it? No. No. I got
Speaker 4:saw it. I I went to the premiere.
Speaker 1:I understood it came on Christmas from that.
Speaker 4:But it it it's fucking I mean, it's amazing. It's the best movie
Speaker 3:of the I will say
Speaker 2:it's was it is the best
Speaker 3:movie of the year.
Speaker 1:And it's and it's Mark Street.
Speaker 4:Not to put a a brother erased between the two, but Josh Safdie is is the GOAT, and he's he's the one. He's a fan of both. It's the best score. It's the best acting. It's the greatest cast.
Speaker 4:It's a such phenomenal movie. Best score?
Speaker 3:Best score.
Speaker 1:Really? Yeah. Interesting. Like, everybody can think
Speaker 3:about it. The ping
Speaker 1:pong.
Speaker 4:No. No. No. Like, the best like, the music of
Speaker 1:the movie. I'm using all
Speaker 3:the movies. Kidding. 21 to zero. I will say I don't know.
Speaker 4:I I think, you know, part is that they're dealing with Timmy has a Timothy, not that I'm friends with him Okay. Has a very short amount of times. I think he's filming Dune right now. Sure. I don't know
Speaker 2:if he's
Speaker 4:that available for press. I think what they're doing is super creative. Totally. I worry that it's a little inside baseball, and I think, like, you could be going more mass culture with this like he did with the Bob Dylan movie by going on Pat McAfee and all these other Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I will just say the
Speaker 3:movie blimp the blimp. I've been trying to get somebody to use it, do a blimp marketing campaign for so long. You wanna do a blimp? Yeah. No.
Speaker 3:I was just pushing, like, ramp to do a blimp. Yeah. I told the Gemini team do a blimp. Right? Like blimps are an amazing asset because you can physically put them over the air.
Speaker 3:Like you're putting something And that's naturally inspiring.
Speaker 1:You look up and it's a blimp and it's like amazing.
Speaker 4:They are. And I think it was fun that it was connected to the instrument. Yeah. It is it is it is the movie of the year. It is the It is.
Speaker 3:Okay. Wow. Best picture.
Speaker 1:Wow. What's the show of the year?
Speaker 4:The show of the year. Honestly, I feel like I actually didn't catch up that much with television shows this year.
Speaker 3:I feel a little more caught up.
Speaker 4:I'm rewatching Homeland though, which I
Speaker 1:Oh, Homeland. Wow. That's a throwback.
Speaker 3:It is a throwback. In hits.
Speaker 4:Sort of like Obama era scene.
Speaker 1:I remember season one having a great, like, cliffhanger.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:really into it. You're deeper in the seasons.
Speaker 4:Congratulations
Speaker 1:To the on your booth. Look at this. Yeah. Look at this.
Speaker 4:This is crazy. I know. This is crazy.
Speaker 1:We're here. We're doing it. It's so
Speaker 4:great to enjoy here.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. I'm gonna tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising, easy measure. Plan by and measure out of home with precision.
Speaker 3:Do you know the owner of ai.com is DeepSeek. What? Apparently. No way. It could be fake news according to Google AI overview.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 1:Wait. No. No. No. This is this is completely wrong.
Speaker 1:Completely wrong. Because it says it was owned by tech Huber YouTuber MKBHD who acquired it from Elon Musk. That doesn't make any sense. That's complete nonsense. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. That that's that's like you're completely unreliable. I I I'm I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, is there any other news that is worth running through? There was a review in the Wall Street Journal of a book called maintain maintenance of everything part one review making of the future, by Stuart Brand. This is a Stripe Press book. We should try and have them on the show. So, it begins with this drama.
Speaker 1:This is a this is interesting. It's talking about, like, the the the process of maintenance. And so as the author recounts the stories of three contestants in the nineteen sixty eight Golden Globe around the world solo sailboat race. One was a former merchant marine whose wooden 32 foot catch was barely adequate for a journey through the punishing Southern Ocean. Make do and mend was his was his motto.
Speaker 1:Another competitor was a tech whiz who packed his plywood trimer in.
Speaker 3:I guess, the tech Electronic
Speaker 1:gizmos. A dreamy optimist, he set sail in a rush hoping for the best. The third and the most experienced racer sailed in a purpose built steel hulled boat, which he maintained with zen like discipline. He said he spent his days working calmly at the odd jobs that make up my universe. And so while this story will be familiar to sailors and others who have read the many books written about the race, mister Brand minds the competitors' harrowing experiences for deep lessons.
Speaker 1:Maintaining the technology that keeps us alive is more than a necessary
Speaker 3:So Josh Josh Wolfe, remember, he was talking about his thesis for maintenance. I think he was on the show, if I remember correctly. I mean, the idea is like everybody wants to build things. Nobody wants to maintain them. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But we have a lot of things in the world that maybe aren't functioning the way that you want them to throw them out or you can like like, maintain them and Sure. Sure. Sure. Bring them revitalize them. So I'm excited to read the did they did they give a proper review?
Speaker 1:I mean, the the New Yorker isn't or the the the Wall Street Journal is not doing exactly like two thumbs up here, but they they they are they are reviewing it, they say, maintenance will engage students of technology, challenge business readers, and inspire home tinkerers who will be happy to learn that fixing gadgets is also a path to enlightenment. Fittingly, the book was initially published in installments online, visible at books.work and worksinprogress.co. As a kind of editorial DIY project, mister Brand tends to jump from topic to topic as he follows his passions. Some might find his digressions meandering. I personally wouldn't have a problem with that.
Speaker 1:And the author of this, post on the Wall Street Journal says, I found them delightful, reflecting the quirky organization. The book ends on a tangent rather than a big wrap up, but that only raises expectations for part two. And so I think this is a positive review by mister Meigs, the former editor of Popular Mechanics and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And I think that concludes our our show from
Speaker 3:I found out ai.com. Yes. The owner is trying to sell it, and they're redirecting it to a bunch of different sites to try to generate interest.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And so people are people so so they'll they'll send it to MKBHD for a couple days.
Speaker 3:To hope that he
Speaker 1:posts about it. And then and then if you're in the analytics and you're Elon at x AI or something and you're like, oh, wow. I'm getting all this traffic from where? Oh, someone someone redirected at ai.com to me? I'd
Speaker 3:be curious how
Speaker 2:much valuable.
Speaker 1:Maybe I shouldn't buy it. It is a lot
Speaker 3:of traffic. I I wonder how much traffic it actually gets.
Speaker 1:I have no idea. I can't imagine that there's that many people that are just going to ai.com. Are those the best customers? Really? Like, people haven't made a decision?
Speaker 1:I mean, OpenAI bought chat.com. So maybe these short short domains make a lot of sense. I mean, doesn't does Google own .ai or something? Because they have ai.studio. So I guess they own they own the the TLD studio.
Speaker 1:Google Google doesn't just buy domains.
Speaker 3:Ai.com only got 93,000 visits in October.
Speaker 1:According to SimilarWeb, which is Which is like does not seem super valuable. But you could do something fine with it. You could do something interesting with it. I'm sure that there's a
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a way to make it.
Speaker 3:But it's not worth a $100,000,000 in any situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, in other funding news, there there's 350,000,000 in new funding for Castilian, who's been on the show. Woah. Is and and The Wall Street Journal is putting in context, there's alarm over the hypersonic missile gap, and it's fueling a startup. Boom.
Speaker 1:The Pentagon is getting serious about hypersonic weapons, a technology that have eluded the US military for decades. It's looking to start ups with no experience but billions of dollars backing them to fill an increasingly glaring hole in the national arsenal. China and Russia both have stockpiles of these long range superfast maneuverable weapons. The US doesn't even though officials consider them essential to winning future conflicts as the defense department belatedly looks to close that gap. Private investment is pouring in and startups, many of which haven't has haven't built hypersonic systems at scale and haven't flown at hypersonic speeds are seeing their valuations soar.
Speaker 1:The latest is Torrance based Torrance based Castilian, which on Friday said it raised $350,000,000 at a $2,800,000,000 valuation. Wow. Congrats to the team over at Castilian.
Speaker 3:Progress. That is they were they were around a I remember they were around, like, a 100 or 200 earlier this year. Oh, yeah. Big big jump. We are in the back of our show, so I will pull up this post from Jason Fried.
Speaker 3:He's talking about the best back quarter in the last fifty years.
Speaker 1:What car is this?
Speaker 3:This is the Aston Martin Zagato. Oh, the Zagato. No way. Which is Really? Probably an underrated car in general.
Speaker 3:This is And just a fantastic color. Hopefully, the team can pull it up. But Jason has incredible taste in all things in life and certainly in cars. But that's our show for today. We'll be back home on the West Coast on Monday.
Speaker 3:I can't wait. And thank you for tuning in with us today and yesterday from the NICE. Thank you to Lynn, Chloe, and the whole team. They're all fantastic, and we will be back here soon.
Speaker 1:We'll see you on Monday. Cheers. Thank you. Goodbye.