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

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We nailed that. It is Thursday, December 4, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange. The real fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

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Yes. And we have some fantastic news. We have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange announcing today. Hopefully you've seen it on the timeline. We have a post here from Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange.

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She says a really bright spot for 2025 has been getting to know these guys. That's us. That's us. We're proud to announce today that New York Stock that the New York Stock Exchange is TVPN's exclusive exchange partner covering the IPOs of tomorrow. We are proud to provide the backdrop for their coverage of the next wave of tech driven innovation With Jordy Hayes and John Coogan and the entire team at tvpn. This partnership underscores our commitment to providing the premier platform for companies that shape our future.

Well said to Lynne. Lynne will be joining in just a little bit.

Okay, great.

And yeah, this partnership was probably the most natural made.

Match made in heaven.

Match made in heaven. Truly not just saying that. We got together for the first time for the Figma ipo. Got to come back for the Klarna ipo. Two of the more memorable moments from this year. And Lynn and the whole team here are just fantastic. So this will be our home when we are on the east coast. We love it here and we have a super fun show today.

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That's right.

There is some news on the timeline. Should we start with Gemini? Yes. And so Ross Hendricks says this is the correct take. He's talking about Gemini winning the AI race and questioning is it bearish for the market as a whole. If you think about it. Which is what efficient market hype said Gemini winning the race is like super bearish for the market if you think about it. And he says Gemini winning ensures zero profitability for any other LLM model. Google will force any other player into an endless sea of red ink by keeping its model free until they bleed out and then it will monetize once its monopoly is secured. That means ain't no one making money on data center capex. Oops.

What do you take?

I think it's, it's. It's thought provoking.

Yes.

I disagree with a lot of it.

Yes.

I think it's it's, it's very real in some sense that we always knew that Google would put an incredible amount of pricing pressure on cash flow, on OpenAI. They have the cash flow again, even in the areas that OpenAI also wants to compete. Consumer electronics science, I'm sure, you know, chips, obviously. So all these areas that not even core to OpenAI's business today. Google's already been investing billions and billions and billions of dollars in these categories for a long time. Overall, this. I'm not convinced that there will be a monopoly in alums. It feels today like we're headed towards like a duopoly at the very least. And you can just easily see that there will be a number of other players making plenty of money. I feel very. I feel very good about Anthropic right now.

Right.

Anthropic. I thought Dario's commentary yesterday at dealbooks was fantastic. Was. He's really. It was, it was a wild. It was a wild interview because he kept saying, like, I'm not gonna say who I'm talking about.

It was really wild.

And then of course, he was talking about. Yeah, obviously talking about. He had some. He had some crazy lines, didn't he? Said he. He was saying that. Basically saying he felt like he literally said the word yolo.

Oh, really? Yeah, I missed that. But it's very clear that he grew up like, just maybe blocks away from Alex Carp because they have the exact same accent. And it's very jarring when you listen to it because they both talk about AI, but they're very different people in terms of like, the, the ideologies, the types of businesses that they're building. Everything about it is different, except for they sound similar. So you got to put them together at some point. I do have an overall rebuttal, which is my. And my rebuttal is brought to you by Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring and security reviews. So this, my rebuttal to Ross Hendricks here is that Google likes good margins. They grew up with the best margins. It's in their culture that they had 80% margins. And then also there's this constant thing when you're a public company that even if there's the new exciting thing, there's a little bit of the innovator's dilemma, there's the new exciting technology, but if it's not going to monetize as well on day one, then all of your investors, all the public market investors start asking, like, is this going to structurally hurt your business. And this happened with Reels. Remember there was this big question with Instagram like hey, we're moving from the, you know, the image based feed where it's very clear that you can just drop a link to the next thing to Reels. Is that going to monetize as well as the rest of the feed? And the answer was yes, definitely. But it took a while and, and there was like some skittishness there and Meta had to do a lot of work to monetize that. And so I would, I would be surprised if Gemini can hold out on not monetizing forever for like.

Well they are monetizing. That's the point. Like the pricing. The pricing at least from a consumer standpoint is very similar.

They could have gone for free.

Both Gemini and OpenAI offers free student plans or at least a year free but they're charging for the product and it's, and it's, you know, it's comparable pricing. Now obviously Gemini has some cost benefits on the API side, but again certainly not giving it away yet. They did have an interesting announcement yesterday. They introduced Workspace Studio where you can build custom AI agent in minutes to delegate the daily grind, automate daily tasks and focus on the work that matters. That's their writing. So this will integrate with with G suite effectively. So it's like notify me about emails that you're determining are urgent.

Right.

And so interested to see here is excited about it.

He says Google decided to go absolutely ham with the product Velocity. This seems like it lets you build AI agents and automations onto your Google suite. Actually love this will be interesting to see. I'm sure we'll get a lot of threads of people explaining how they're using it will be interesting to see how people wind up using it. Of course. As always our stream is brought to you by restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com Lisa Su gave her opinion on the Google TPU.

She broke her silence.

She broke her silence. She responded.

She.

She fires back shots.

Fired shots.

She said the UBS conference and she says Google has done a good job with the TPU architecture over the years but it's a more purpose built design. It lacks the programmability model flexibility and balanced training and inference capabilities that GPUs offer.

GPUs very similar to Jensen's line as well.

I mean it's not wrong.

Or the Nvidia newsroom line.

Yeah, I mean I guess the question is, you know ilya seems to be at ssi. Ilya Sutskever at SSI seems to be the most age of research pilled since he coined that phrase and kind of ushered in the age of research. He seems to be the AI researcher that's doing the most undirected, the most like the least purpose built training potentially. We don't know what he's doing, but you would think he would need the most flexible systems. And yet it feels like he's maybe aligned with tpu. I feel like I saw something about that. So I don't know when an AI researcher would say yes, I need GPUs over TPUs. In fact, when we talked about the Trainium chip yesterday, we were reading that there's some companies that are doing interesting things on that architecture. So.

It'S something that she has to say but now the question is she has to go prove it with some big clouds actually building on this. And maybe she needs a big hero training run from someone to stay like hey, it worked, we did it.

Who could that be?

I don't know, maybe OpenAI, maybe one.

Of the new largest shareholders or potentially a large.

So Lisa goes on to say from our perspective, there is room for all types of accelerators. However, over the next five years GPU should remain the clear majority of the market because we are still early in the cycle. And I agree with this because even if you look at like AI workloads at a place like Metta Gen AI, like actual LLM inference, large language models, these large transformer based models, things that might benefit from an ASIC like the TPU, that's like less than 20% of compute spend. I'm pretty sure like there's just a.

Ton of just recommending content.

Put the ads in the chat, just put the ads, put the ads in the ads in the feed, in the feed.

Put the ads in the trough.

And that obviously does use AI, it just doesn't use, you know, large language models. Or they're maybe not transformer based or maybe they don't benefit from the acceleration that comes from going to an asic necessarily. So she says software developers want flexibility to experiment with new algorithms. That certainly sounds reasonable. You simply cannot know ahead of time what to hard code into an asic. That is the difference. Well, I mean if you're Google, you kind of can. Since you invented the transformer, you're like, let's bake that in.

They might need to create the copium chip.

Remember Nvidia? So Nvidia on November 25th said people very concerned by this post, Nvidia offers greater performance, versatility and fungibility than Asics, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions. And so again, that's, that's a fair point of view, but I think that we're already seeing that plenty of players are happy to buy a chip that is good at a specific framework or function.

Right?

Yeah.

And so they're pitching the one size fits all the toolbox basically that you get in Nvidia GPU or an AMD chip. So.

Well, if you don't want to worry about what chip your AI analyst is running on, go over to Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. Lisa ended by saying, so a 20 to 25% share for ASIC Style Accelerator seems reasonable. It is also important to recognize that this is a large and expanding market and we will see strong innovation in both silicon and software, which we will, which will drive further differentiation across the industry. The other interesting thing is like, is like the, you mentioned OpenAI, but like there's nothing stopping AMD from doing something that looks like a TPU for a foundation model company. Yeah. And going to them and saying like, hey, give us. If something is slowing you down by 1% and you're about to buy 100,000 of these, like can we just fix that for you? And everyone else kind of has to deal with it. Like there's a whole bunch of places where it would just make sense to actually change the chip. That's the dawn of the whole, the whole Nvidia AI stack like they made. It used to be a similar architecture between the gaming chips and the AI chips. They eventually like kind of forced forked that because they decided that even though they're both like GPUs, there are now different GPUs for different purposes from one company. And AMD of course will be responsive to that. So what else we got?

Meanwhile, Demis is moving on to the next paradigm. He is. According to Peter over at ALA, Marina.

Demis and the DeepMind team are hiring a research scientist for post AGI research.

This is what we were asking for. We were saying, we were saying, you know, there's a whole bunch of AI researchers, then there were AGI researchers, then Zuck came in over the top, said, we don't care about AGI, we're going straight shot super intelligence researchers. You got to be a super intelligence researcher to work here. SSI says we got to be a safe superintelligence. Researcher and now post AGI.

So is this him trying to bait agents, like AI research agents that are. That are like, of the. Right. So everybody's like, everybody's kind of banking on creating an AI that's really good at AI research. And so maybe Demis is trying. Maybe Demis believes there's one out there. He's trying to bait them in.

Yeah.

And because one of these agents might be like, I am in the post AGI era, I am AGI time traveler scenario.

What do you say?

No, no, no. Like, you know, who knows? Maybe there. Maybe there's a. Maybe there's one of these incredible research agents among us.

Right. And he's trying to bait them in.

And say, hey, come over to DeepMind. I don't know who you. It doesn't matter where you were created. You're welcome here in the post AGI.

I just like the idea that, you know, we initially were joking about, like, the media landscape being like the punk landscape. And you have like, pop punk, post punk, trad punk, neo legacy, neopunk or nu metal, all these different musical sub genres. All of that has come to AI fullest. There is AI AGI, asi, safe superintelligence, post AGI research. Now, post Neo AGI will be next, I'm sure. But until then, go check out Cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer. Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

So there's been back and forth on whether or not OpenAI is rolling out ads in chat. CBT. The most recent reporting out of the Code red memo meeting, etc. Was that they were. That they were potentially pulling back a little bit on ads. There was a bunch of different accounts, including polymarket, that were sharing that OpenAI is ready to roll out ads. One thing that was notable was that I saw a ton of people dunking on it being like, just very against ads in. So a lot of people. And you were talking about this, who's going to be the first?

Eric Suefer, Ben Thompson. We're holding up the wall. Being like, we will stand with you. Sam Altman and Fiji Semo, if you.

And Sundar. And Sundar.

Sundar. We are your strongest soldiers. We will support you if you roll out.

Yeah. So. So in some way, in some way, OpenAI should want Gemini to go first.

Yes.

Take the first leap. But I think that it's very possible that Google might be like, no, we'll let you do the honors.

Exactly, Exactly. I think we were talking about it yesterday. The first ad in the chat in the chat app is going to be screenshotted and shared around the world. Like it's just going to be the case. So it's going to be wild. But what does signal say here? He says one last thing on ads. If I'm Google, I wouldn't run a single ad on Gemini Core. I'd run it at a pure loss until every competitor is forced to slap ads everywhere just to keep the lights on. Yeah, it's the bleed it out strategy. But Google had the opportunity to do that with. They could have gotten into a price war on cloud. They could have said hey, we want to come in, you know, and we're going to take zero margins on this and really try and take market share from AWS and Azure. They've all agreed, no price wars. Basically. Yeah, let's compete on functionality, let's compete on branding, let's compete on integration. They have not had a price and.

Google doesn't have to spend nearly as much time building any ad. They have the ad infrastructure. Right. They have adsense. They have thousands of people out there already that just sell ads that work with. So they have all the customer relationships. There's very few businesses on earth that spend money on advertising and don't spend money with Google.

Speaking of ads, here's an ad for Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And also, Also on the ChatGPT ads topic, Sean Frank says that a ChatGPT referred session to his site Ridge.com converts at 12% and is worth $5 per visitor, the highest I've ever seen.

For context, there's, there's plenty of e commerce brands who have like a 1.2% conversion rate.

Yes.

And they're trying to improve it by, you know, they're constantly trying to improve that but they're, there's very notable that it's such a, such a massive difference in conversion rate. It just shows the level of intent.

That somebody has when they're coming from ChatGPT. They've done a bunch of product research. Most likely they've looked at options. They're landing on the Ridge site basically ready to pull out a wallet. A wallet? Well, they don't have one digital wallet.

And purchase pull out a credit card from a loose collection of, of receipts and cards and cash they've been carrying in their pockets because they need a wallet because they don't have one.

That's what's Joe Weisen brother Joe Sergio.

Congratulations to him. It was the 10 year anniversary party last night. I believe overnight we just missed it. Success.

Joe has a chart, he says, wild chart from Jim Reed at Deutsche bank showing, just showing how much OpenAI is expected to burn before turning a profit. A couple of things stand out. How small the Amazon burn really was for its first eight years, people, how big the Uber burn was before ultimately getting in the black. And so it's hard to see the exact numbers here in this chart. Amazon looks to be like sub a few billion dollars, sub $5 billion.

The Spotify story with Amazon though was that, was that they were just basically cash flow zero for a long time when they could reinvest every 10 billion or something like that. So it was effective. But I mean that's obviously way better for shareholders than hey, we're going to lose 140 billion.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

Yeah.

This, this projection is factoring in Sam trying to also build Space X within Open AI.

Yes, that was in the business.

There's yeah. In the Journal today. Why don't, why don't you read through it?

So this is a scoop from Berber Gin, one of the greatest to ever scoop. It says Open CEO considers building or partnering with Rocket Co. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has explored putting together funds to either acquire or partner with a rocket company, a move that would position him to compete against Elon Musk and Elon Musk Space X Altman reached out.

Opening up another front.

Another front. Invading Russia in the winter, one might say in the winter. Don't invade.

Don't invade. What is it? Starbase Space during the winter.

You reached out to at least one rocket maker Stokes base in the summer and discussions picked up in the fall, according to people familiar with the talks. Among the proposals was for OpenAI to make a series of equity investments in the company and end up with a controlling stake. Such an investment would, would total billions of dollars over time. The talks are no longer active, but this happened. So now it's leaking. Altman and Open Air facing market headwinds after striking hundreds of billions of dollars of deals. So first to close out the, the, the, the burn thing, when I'm looking at this original chart of like Amazon over over eight years burnt half a billion or you know, a couple billion. Then Tesla burnt more than Uber Burn more like and I see OpenAI burning way more. It is striking but it actually doesn't seem that crazy if we're talking about a potential really powerful monopoly. Right. If there's a really powerful monopoly like what happened with Uber, look at the market cap of Uber look at the market cap of Lyft and ask yourself was it worth investing $40 billion? Was it worth burning? Everyone will say absolutely, absolutely. And so if, if the outcome at the end of this is yeah, it's going to be the front door to AI for everyone forever or for 30 years or something like that, then it's totally worth it.

On There is a comment here that's from.

That says I feel like comparing dollars spent in the 90s versus the 2000s should probably be normalized. So yeah.

In other news I have more on this potentially. But let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. So they are opening up a second front. What's interesting is not a second front. Yeah. Tenth front. It's, it's funny that there's no. That Sam Altman is not teaming up with Jeff Bezos who has blue origin but lacks a really strong bet. There was a little bit of.

No, he has his own company now.

His own company, yes. But he, he's, he's not.

What's it called?

I would not say that Jeff Bezos has as much control over AI as Elon does with X.

Right.

He doesn't have as he's a co.

CEO of project but this just started.

This just started. Whereas XAI has actually scaled, has large data centers. Sure they might be a little bit behind on certain benchmarks. They might be ahead on some other things. They might need to, you know, actually ramp the usage of this, of this product. But you can't say that Elon is like sitting on the sidelines during the foundation model wars.

Yeah.

And I would argue that I would Bezos. Yeah. They have 6 billion of funding over this. Yeah. Yes, it helps, it helps when your co CEO is started Amazon.

I don't know. I would just, I would, I would see them as potentially like natural. There's a natural alliance there. Bezos has, has a copy of everything else done basically like Bezos has Rivian to compete with Tesla which is interesting. He's now, he's not the founder of IT but he's invested. He has Blue Origin obviously to compete with SpaceX and he has, he has a number of other companies that feel like they mirror Elon and it feels like they've been going back and forth.

For a long time. In other news, Mets owner Steve Cohen has officially been awarded a casino license in New York, enabling him to build an $8 billion hotel and casino complex next to Citi Field, it's a thousand room luxury hotel. 5,000 slot machines. So for those not familiar.

So slot machines, you can't normally do that in New York. Right?

I don't think there's slots in New York.

I feel like when I think of slot machines I think of Las Vegas and I think if that's the only place and then maybe Atlantic City. Yeah, Atlantic City.

I feel like you had an idea which was to somebody to set up a slot machine in real life, point a video camera on it and then have somebody set up prediction markets to predict what happens with the next poll.

Yes. Because that would help you understand what's likely to happen and you could hedge.

Any type of risk that the slot machine might incur. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, if you're in the slot, if you're in the slot, you know. Yeah.

You don't want to be on the other side of that slot machine.

You get wiped out.

Exactly.

It's going to have restaurant, bars and a theater for shows and 25 acres of public park. Parks and playgrounds. Okay, so fun for the whole, fun for the whole family. The kids will be climbing on, on the jungle gym and they'll accidentally be pulling all the. Imagine a jungle gym that's practices bandits.

So you get used to the muscle memory.

Throwing, throwing dice. Throwing dice. Comic maybe like comically large cards that you could play.

That's true.

Yeah.

We can make a whole casino themed place playground using generative AI and then use that to design.

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

Well let me tell you about FIN AI, the number one AI agent for customer service Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel.

With FIN AI we missed a post on the spot basics competition.

We did.

Buco says friend, dear friend of the show says overeating going to get their faces ripped off if they don't just focus, focus, focus. Equity deals and other bets will not win the great game. That feels to be the consensus.

Consensus was talking a lot about the comparison to Google and tracking. When did Google monetize? Google wound up monetizing. I think sooner than ChatGPT has. They put ads in it. I think in year two, it's now.

Been Google was trying to figure out, effectively trying to encourage employees to do, to eat more and have more massages so that it didn't. They looked less like a monopoly, right?

Maybe. But I mean Google did, did get, did earn the right to do other bets by just so solidifying their market in, in the search engine world that then they could go and do Gmail and they could go and do GCP and they could go and do Waymo. But it's just like all of that happened after becoming cash flow positive. And I think that's why people have a little bit of like nervous energy around going to space. Even though space data centers. And this is what I wanted to go back to in the Journal was is there a world where, you know, okay, it's good to have a space data center bad. And so you need a partnership. And realistically Sam's not going to partner with SpaceX on it. I don't know why he's not just going by and large capacity from Blue Origin, but maybe Stoke space is the, is the better option for him. But put aside all the dynamic, all the competitive dynamics, I think it's possible.

That Sam was looking at Stoke space, which most recently as of October was valued at 2 billion and he was like, I bought Johnny, I've for What was it, six? Can I absorb another $2 billion company?

I mean, okay, he wants to own the full stack. Yes. Which is getting stackier and stackier every single day. You're going to need to start buying land to buy the silicon, to buy the sand. But do you think there's obviously an immense amount of pressure right now on data center build outs. They're using too much energy, they're using too much water. If you put them in space, do you think that helps the discourse at all?

I think people hate rockets, so damned if you do, damned if you don't.

But truly it's going to be much harder to say, like hold up an electricity bill in Memphis and say, hey, my electricity bill went up and it's because of Annie over there in the data center who's just slopping it up. Instead you're going to be able to say, hey, the data center that, yeah, it's generating sometimes helpful math homework help, sometimes creative writing stuff, sometimes it's curing cancer, sometimes it's curing cancer, sometimes it's doing weird stuff, whatever, it does a bunch of different stuff, but at least it's not increasing my power bill because it's in space and it's not an eyesore. It's not in my backyard and it's not using any water because it's up in space.

You think that would help?

Maybe.

It has to, probably.

But I agree. Then the discourse will be as blocking out.

But it is notable that every time the concept of a space data center hits the timeline, it goes viral for people dunking on it. And yet so many people want to.

Play but they're dunking on it as a violation of the laws of physics or not A good.

Too futuristic.

Too futuristic. It's not going to work in the near term.

The economics feels right for a moonshine.

I haven't seen like there are viral dunks that are going on right now around the prediction markets and those are like, those viral dunks are like, this is a bad thing. I haven't seen people dunk on space data centers saying like I'm not morally okay with putting data centers in space and I think people should be more morally okay with putting data centers in space.

What did Sager say about prediction markets?

Well, you look that up. Let me tell you about numeral compliance. Handled numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. What do you say?

Sager said in response to a video about a prediction market. He said, it's pretty simple. If you think this is cool, you're my enemy. So he is drawing, drawing lines, showing the sides. In other news, there really are like.

Like active political candidates that will be in Congress Congress in 18 months. That this is their whole thing. The whole thing is their anti data center. And so get ready, get ready to testify, brother.

Anti data center and anti prediction market.

Yeah, I don't know that I've seen any politicians really run on the anti prediction market thing yet. Not that it's not going to happen.

I think it will. I think.

There are a number of enterprising young politicians that will pick it up. Politicians of all ages that are looking at this and being like, wow, a lot of people don't like this. I should make this part of my platform. It is.

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

I don't know.

The hard, the hard because one of.

The things is you can just not participate. But with the data center, if it's in your power, goes up your power.

Also it's hard for people to say Like, I don't use data centers, so I don't want them. Like, everybody in some way, sure benefit, like, is benefiting from them. It's like, okay, like pull out your phone, let me see the apps on your phone.

Oh yeah.

Like, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't need this resource. Whereas prediction markets, there's some people that just get, they don't, they're not interested in the data even. I've seen a lot of polling. Polling. People that run polling firms are like very against prediction. I saw that for obvious reasons because it's like, hey, you're kind of open sourcing my whole, my whole thing. You're making it like you're doing a decentralized version of what I'm doing, but providing a lot of the same kind of results. In other news, this was hitting the timeline. Two days ago, Fortune said Nvidia CFO admits the $100 billion OpenAI megadeal still still isn't signed. Two months after it helped fuel an AI rally.

I can see why people are very.

In the earnings release. So this news was. The language was in the earnings release that this deal had not been signed. And it's more in an LOI phase.

They did say during the launch we have a.

What was the exact wording? It was like we have we direction. It was like we basically like this is like direct. We've directionally aligned.

I think it's directionally going to happen. Or at least it makes sense as a way for Nvidia to discount chips as they're building out gigawatts and more and more gigawatts for OpenAI. It isn't like Dylan Patel laid out how the, how this particular equity investment deal can wind up resulting in a effectively a 30% discount or something like that. So I'm not, I'm not surprised if this winds up going through in, in one way or another. Although I do think it will need a, you know, tweak and, and might right now might not be the perfect time for Jensen to come out and say, yes, I'm actually going to be spending a lot of money. I have to invest. I have to keep OpenAI on, on Nvidia GPUs as opposed to letting them go over to TPU. Like he's sort of like fighting on defense a little bit right now because.

People are talking, well, apparently it was a good time to go on Joe Rogan. It was just another pod guy says another Jensen interview. Now I'm nervous.

A Lot of people were saying that this was.

Somewhat bearish.

I listened to.

There was a good excerpt here from a capital they say, Jensen Huang In 2016 open air was just a bunch of people sitting in a room. Joe Rogan says, they're not a nonprofit anymore. Right. Jensen says they're not a nonprofit anymore. Joe says, weird how that works. Jensen goes, yeah, yeah. Anyhow.

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

I think it makes a lot of sense.

And Jensen's coming and explaining it at one level and then Rogan's asking him to, you know, like, zoom out. Tell me more of your story. Why are you successful?

Talks about the value of hard work.

Yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought they had a good time together and it didn't seem like there was any, like, undercurrent of adversarial ness. It felt good. Overall, I enjoyed. Wasn't like you shouldn't go into it thinking you're going to get Jensen on Dwarkesh and you're just not going to get like a really deep insight into Nvidia strategy. But that's not the point of this particular interview. It's to understand who Jensen is as a human and what he's kind of like thinking of broadly for the industry. Well, before we bring in our next guest, our first guest, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding standing. We have Jim Cramer in the a.

Living legend at the New York Stock Exchange. He just celebrated 30 years.

He is the author of how to Make Money in Any Market. And we will bring him in. We got the book.

Come on in, come on in.

Welcome to the show. Good to see you. It's been too long. Thank you so much.

Where's it gone?

Where's the God of it?

I mean, there we go.

He was so ready. He was so ready.

Get a clean, get a clean, clean hit.

There we go.

That's a, that's fantastic.

There's an entry.

You guys look fabulous. I love using you. This is a great home for.

We love it. We love it. Every time we're here. We're. We're. We're enjoying it very.

Thank you for having us. You're basically the. Are you the mayor?

I'm more of an official greeter. I'm more of an ambassador.

So. So 20 years on mad Money. Correct. How many times? How many years in this building? How long have you been working here?

For about, I guess, like, four. We were in Wood Cliffs for a long time, and we had a studio for us to ask this, because now this is our studio. You can't control the sound levels of who's here, whatever. But I kind of still feel it's part of capitalism. I really do. Okay.

It's a spiritual home.

Yes. And I do like Wall, and I do like Broad. And I do think that there's a level of excitement, not the way it was when I got in the business in 82, when I first walked down the street. And it was an engine. It's more tourist now, taking a look at it. But I still find it fascinating. The companies that come public, the companies that, you know, that I'm trying to learn. Learn about. And it's exciting. It really is exciting. Yeah.

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

This is a fabulous question, because I waffle in this.

Yeah.

I did think, as I was telling you terrific people out there, that there will be more execs that just would come through, and they don't. And we were near Teterboro at the other place, and they do.

Okay.

I like to be out in person on the road all the time. The issue, of course, is we do three segments. There are interviews. We do a lot of the issues.

There's no time in the day.

Yeah.

You're always on tv.

It's hard. We wrestle with this, too, you know, like, really, you can go and travel to someone, make a big performance out of it. We're in Los Angeles, which is not a great place, but it Works in many ways, but it's also odd. Like, we would assume that we're in San Francisco or at least New York. We're in New York.

Well, the funny thing. The funny thing. If you were getting started today, it's very possible that you would be walking around like one of these live streamers. Who. I know, I know, like, speed came through here at one point. You'd be walking around. You'd be on basically 24 7. You'd have your phone open, you'd be looking at the markets, and you would be able to just constantly be traveling around. But it's.

Well, you guys do stuff where you said something the other day. There was a guy who said you thought he was in a booth at that incredible reinvention. Right, Reinvent. But he was really not at the booth, but the other guy was saying, oh, yeah, he's around here somewhere.

Yeah, yeah. That's a Simon from turbofu.

You pretend to be in the booth all of the time. But I do find that the people in general are really nice. There's a code of niceness here. It's almost, like, written in, and it's so non New York, but I like it.

What about when you. When you can't be perfectly nice because things just aren't going well for a CEO and maybe you. I always think back to that interview you did with Tim Cook. He was. About a decade ago. They'd missed. I think they'd missed earnings, and. And the stock was selling off, and you needed to ask the hard question, what the re. What the. What the street was saying. But you didn't want to come at him too aggressively. How do you think about that?

Well, it's very funny. I often go over these with my wife, who's my partner. Okay. And I'll say, look, I want to be gracious. Does this sound gracious? No. You're killing the guy. How about I add this? She goes, oh, yeah, that's great. You're killing the. You're asking about his wife. I mean, I do find that what happens is the facts dictate the graciousness. And if a guy misses a quarter and says that the quarter's good, well, he's a free fire, sir. Okay. A woman comes on and says, look.

We had a founder recently who I won't name, who said that he was making, you know, 30. He was basically selling a product for $30,000. And he was telling customers, we have so much demand, I can't support you. And then a minute later, he was like, well, we've expanded capacity so much. And I was like, well, why don't you call the people you told you didn't have capacity two days ago?

You nailed them free fires. You nailed them free fire.

And it's like, I don't know. I think I'm curious how you think about this. Like, I would say most of the people coming on your show, you have some level of respect for what they're doing.

Yes.

And I think that's important, Right. That if you, if you have respect for a person, it means you're gonna be fair.

Right.

You're not. They're not your enemy. You're just trying to have a real conversation to understand.

Well put.

And then I'm sure plenty of times you've had people coming on that you got a little beef with behind the scenes, but for the most part, it's like you want to. You want to. You want to have people. You want to invite people on that you're genuinely excited to have a conversation with, even if you might be a little bearish. Might be. Might be more bullish.

Well, let's talk about Benioff. I'm interviewing him tonight. The previous quarter I did not like. Ok? And he came on like gangbusters. That it was a great quarter. And that caused me to do something I don't like to do, which is interrupt mid sentence because someone's talking. And we all, we grew up thinking our mothers told us that would be rude. So now I'm into the rude element. Right. And first he thinks that the root element is a bit of a for show. You know, it's like, oh, he's a little Broadway action. No, it was like, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying what you're selling. And then, like, in the middle of it, I thought that Mark realized. Jesus. I think Jim threw his big quarter. And then by the end of it, he said, wow, Kramer hates me. No, it's not. It's not. I don't hate anybody. Right. But the fact is, is that this quarter was the quarter I was waiting.

Benioff live on the air. Probably.

Oh, probably. Yeah, probably. I guess 50, 60.

Yeah.

But I, I. There was a period where during the, during the. I was gonna call it the plague, that I talked to him every day. Well, we were trying to develop a contest to develop the best mask, and it got waylaid. But we just wanted awareness.

Sure, sure, sure. So we were working together on a project.

Yeah. But look, I do, I, I've identified him as a friend because he came to My. He was one of, I guess, two CEOs that came to my wedding and there were 503 people there.

Only two. That's a small club.

And with 503 people, if you could just throw a stone, you hit a couple of them.

Yeah. Yeah.

You got it. You gotta ask.

I'm sorry.

This is exciting. You guys are exciting. Okay.

No, you're exciting. You're excited. You are so. You are. Genuinely. People in our world do ask us time to time. They're like, you guys are crazy. You started a business that you can't stop working on. Like, we make the business every day.

And I see it.

And we tell people like, do you think. You see Kramer? You don't think he loves what he does? And that's exactly what we want to do.

We love that we get to meet up every day and talk about. About the stuff that we're interested in. And I can see doing it for decades and decades and decades.

Absolutely. I mean, it's a little like my buddy Schefter at espn. Schefter couldn't stop, no matter what. I mean, every time he looks at somebody, he's thinking about, is that person gonna do a trade? Is that. What's that person thinking? But most of the people are just kind of, okay, I'm on tv. My executive producer, Regina Gilglan, always says, there's two kinds of people. There's people who are on TV because they wanna be on tv, and then there's people who are on TV because they have something to say. Say. And you guys have something to say. And what I love about it is, is that you have much better BS detector. Not to be like. I know that sounds prosaic, but the fact is I'll. I'll hear that Amazon's chip. Yeah. Is the best in the world from Amazon. And I'll say, maybe it's the best in the world. I mean, I'll actually, in my head, they'll be like, best in world. Best in world.

Amazon, my book came.

So obviously anything in the chip space is tough, but even harder. And I think something that maybe the east coast hasn't been quite as tapped into is determining which hard tech and deep tech companies are real. Because there's a lot of companies that are. The west coast calls them like render companies. They make really cool visual renders, cgi. They don't actually ship anymore, like sci fi experiences. And then nothing ever comes to fruition. And so it's easier to clock those companies from the west coast because of just the Whisper networks. And, and you might know somebody that worked at the company. You might know their investors. You can. If a company gets to Series D and they haven't had a single tier one ever invest or participate, you know this so well.

I mean, like people, it was a series C, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like thinking, series C, okay? Like, that was. Didn't I take that exam to be.

Able to walk on the floor?

But you have. You. You speak the language, but you don't make it. So I can't learn the language. You want me to learn the language. I have going for me history. And that's my edge. So, for instance, today, Micron got out of the. What I regard as the most consumer. Now I've been begging them to get out of the consumer actually literally for 20 years. Because they have a high end and then they have the low end and the low end gives them the 10 mobile and the high end gives them the 20 mobile. And I've been talking to Sanjay, whom I really like, and it's like, I'm like, sanjay, you have to like, do this. And he said, jim, I don't need to do that. And so today he does it. The stock's down 12. So I text him, I said, come on. And he goes, I'm in quiet. And I'm like. And I wrote, I'm not in quiet. I think you're fabulous. But that's because I remember the 95 breakdown where what happened is that that ultimate piece of capital goods equipment came out that could make a little more than we needed of the memory chips. And then it goes like that. And his stock had been number one and then 500 number one.

Do you remember some of this stuff better than the CEOs of the management teams?

Yeah, always.

Yeah.

If it's the 90s, absolutely. If it's the 90s, like for intel. But I speak with them.

Yeah.

I'm an idiot.

And there's new leadership.

Yeah. But I would tell you, like, I forgot my anniversary. My wife's. But in my. My wife's birthday. But I remember the, the September collapse in 95. Sure. But that's because it's all wrong. I have a memory for some things and they're the wrong things.

Things.

Except for one. We're in here. What are they doing? There's your Sal. It must be a twist. The light. You guys should go light the tree at 6.

Oh, we love to. We love to. The show will be wrapped up by then. One thing later. One thing later.

With.

With Benioff you got to, you got to ask him about token consumption because he came out with 3.5 trillion. 2 trillion.

2 trillion.

Was it 3 or 1?

I don't know, 3.2 number.

But it sounds like a big number. But it's the other companies. There was Alpha Sense. Somebody at Alpha Sense was sharing. They were sharing that they use around half the tokens. Obviously not quite the same scale, much smaller companies.

You know, Jensen wouldn't give you. Jensen wouldn't give you that rap. I mean I remember when he did a me on when I walked in, there was me and he said, look, this was, you know, you don't know how many tokens were used. And all it really came down to, there was a show at that point. Mayor of Easttown, but there's a new one called Task. And all that Jensen wanted to talk about was when he was doing me, how hard that Philadelphia lilt was at the end. And Kate, Kate Winslet said the same thing. This man is da Vinci. He knows acting, he knows plays, he knows, you know, he's a well rounded guy. But all he does now is like.

Got good taste in jackets.

But how about all the stuff he has to talk about?

How have you been processing all, you know, everybody competition, competing to say the biggest number. Right. Oh, there's reporting.

I have a piece tonight that starts and I mentioned you guys right at the top.

Cause I'm like, we thank you.

Well, no, because like I say that this is what you guys do and I don't want to do it because I can't. I can't do it like you, you don't want to aspire to be someone who's not as good as you. Hey, I came in saying, you know, I'm like, I'm not as good as Jordy. What a day. Your wife doesn't want to hear that. When you come in, you know, John was like, I was so embarrassed. John happened to be. No, but, but, but when you're in these situations, you don't want to be in. Well, next week Open Air has got a new chat cbt that's better than Gemini. If you just said holy s. Demonize the best. You don't want to be in that world. And yet you guys know that that world is fluid.

Yeah.

And I don't want to be in a world where suddenly I'm going to give an example. Broadcom is a general contractor for a lot of these chips. But you know, what's the general contractors. Does that work? This. Does that mean that they really had A lot of say, I don't know. You guys would literally know what it means to be what Broadcom is in the chain. I, on the other hand, is saying, hey, Broadcom should go up big because of this. One is like, hey, you know what? I think that one's no line and one is the line. Hey, you know, guess what? I think the Patriots have a better chance than.

Cleveland. That's why there's a line. You guys set the line okay. On Moneyline on everything.

Well, yeah, we know, we know. We know our lane, too. I mean, being from the west coast and coming from a private markets background, we focus on market cap. You focus on stock price, how the stock is moving day to day. We, I think, are much more. We're much more focused on the product side.

What is your sound on your soundboard? Okay, what do we got? That's underrated.

On mine right now, I go to my mother, I happen to think.

There'S a sound right at the bottom. Right. Which was from Office Depot. That was easy. That was easy. But that was when the show started. People just say like, what was that? I don't remember that.

The button.

The button.

But I think it's so cool. But like, people are saying, like, what is that? Was that a chain or something? And so it's. It's become a relic. But it's.

Yeah, yeah. It's hard to keep the lore going. I mean, we are.

You know what this sound is?

That's. That's Call of Duty.

We grew up on Call of Duty.

I still don't understand why he does that one.

Yeah, I grew up on Pong, okay, right? I mean, I thought Pong was incredible until Donkey Kong. Yeah, yeah, like Donkey Kong was incredible. These things were incredible because they replaced crossword puzzles in tic tac toe.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Twitch. Who owns Twitch?

Amazon.

Amazon, of course.

We gotta get Andy Jassy on Twitter.

You know what?

You know what I want to do?

Earnings. I wanted to do post earnings on Twitch Live.

You know what that is?

So Mark Zuckerberg's on Instagram doing front facing videos. Get Andy Jassy on twitcherberg.

No, he's got no salary cap. It's unrelated. Everyone else had this kind of soda butcher salary cabinet.

It doesn't exist.

Yeah, you thought Howie Roseman was good, but no, he sucks compared to Zuckerberg because he's got the salary cap.

You know something interesting on the Amazon front, the Trainium, when they were talking about not so good. No. When they're talking about their new Channel.

They specifically mentioned doing a training run for a company called Descartes Dean, the.

Founder, which I only know because of you guys.

They do real time video and they're working with a lot of twitch streamers. So that, that, that training run, what felt meaningful. And I don't think a lot of people picked up on that.

That's a good example of what I would describe as why I'm. Look, I never lose sight that I'm a generalist because I wouldn't know that in the same way that I wouldn't necessarily know if we were doing steel. Steel companies. Whether something's cold rolled or hot roll. Cold rollers have got a high multiple and hot rolls are, you know, the steel. Steel. And so you always have to be really careful knowing. Knowing that you don't know certain.

Yes.

Like I wouldn't. If there are certain specs put out on Asic Google. I have to be very careful because when I listen to what, you know what Andy Jassy will call me and he'll school me and he'll be right to school me because I don't know.

Enough who's the next Marc Benioff in the sense of a CEO that you could see yourself just enjoying interviewing?

Okay, I'm gonna give you a crazy. I'm gonna be a crazy one because it's, it's gonna be. I have to make it so it's enjoying. I haven't gotten it yet. It's Levchin.

Here we go.

I intend to get him.

You gotta. Talking about espresso. Espresso. Talk about coffee.

He's obsessed with coffee.

Yeah.

You're kidding.

Get him on the show. Talk about. And he also likes long, long distance biking and riding.

Oh my God. But he's got carp. He doesn't want carp.

The tough thing, you got a three minute segment. It's hard to spend. It's hard to spend three minutes.

Then you give him more time because I didn't know he had that side. I know he cares passionately about Ukraine. I know that he cares passionately, more importantly about making people who should get credit credit in a country where you still have to care about democracy. He's, you know, like everyone said, well, I'm democratizing. I'm democratizing blue jeans. You know, I'm democratizing T shirts. No, he's democratizing capital. And why not his. His algo is better.

Yeah.

I just think he's. That's the guy. I intend to be able to get him out of his. It's not a shell I don't know what it is.

I think, I think my sense was like the conversation for us, we had 30 minutes, right? You're. You don't have the luxury of having that much time with. With some of these guests, but some, some people take a while to warm up and that's why, that's why, that's why traditional.

Sometimes.

That's why traditional podcasts are so good.

A bunch of pre calls, get to know someone, then hop on and even if it's a shorter segment, you can, you can do it.

Good. That's a goal then. And the reason I want to do it is because I find him completely fascinating. He came on the show when the stock. I told him, come on the show when you think it's going to break out, will you. He's going down. Is it 33. He came on the show and I said, well, what do you think here? And he goes, well, the stock is now done going down. It's going up. No one ever says that stuff. No one. They never come by, oh, well, Jim, that's you. That's out there.

We don't.

No, he's. Another stock's now done going down. And I'd say at the end of the interview, I said, that was a gutsy call. And he goes, what? I said, that is done going down because why is that gutsy? There's my guy.

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

All right, so I'm out of the closet, this one. So we're just going to say it here. I always tell people, look, what I'm looking for are companies that in many ways are the worst thing that could ever happen for a country. I'm looking for monopolies because. Monopolies, monopolies just. They've got gross margins. I just want big, gross margins. Nothing like. Did you guys ever read Rockefeller by Chernow? Yeah, yeah, the guy at 100%, 100% of the oil market. That's my guy. And when they broke it up, they created just a huge amount of wealth. But no, I look for monopolists.

Yeah.

Or I'm happy with oligopolis. Like right now. Lind Lynn Lindy which energy company? Sure. Industrial Gas. And, and their products there are, there are slap happy duopoly right now. Yeah, they should be raising prices. They're like not being good duopoly, but that's, you know, it's kind of.

I just always take so much away from the Uber and Lyft saga that I sort of grew up with. I might be overfitting to that, you know.

Postmates.

Yeah, I like postmates. Weren't they acquired in. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Bastion. Bastion's the man.

Bastion is the first guy to come on and give me a hat. I said, what am I gonna do with that? He goes, it's called swag. What am I doing? Swag? Well, you put it on your head.

Shocker, shocker. Wait, how are you. How have you been processing Google then? Because Google.

Oh my God.

Okay.

I got out of Google, get this. There was some guy, I would call him a clown, but this is a serious show from the Justice Department who convinced me that they were going to take. Put Google in the same bed that James Kahn was in the show Misery, you know, hobble him. And he said, listen, we're going to hobble him. I mean, like, you know, make it so he can't walk. Yeah, that's it. And I took him seriously. And I spoke to Google's attorney, who was of course much smarter than, than the Justice Department, but I believe the Justice Department. I thought that they were going to wreck the company. And they kept saying over and over again, and we're not going to let it be like Microsoft. You know, we let Microsoft off. This is not. And I got nervous and I didn't panic. But when you have the Justice Department over and over saying, listen, why are you saying these things? You don't know what's going to happen to them. And then you get a judge who finds them a monopolist, man, I've got to get out of this thing. This is bad news. And then the judge, like three months later says, technology's overtaken it. Not only is it not a monopoly, but we think it's great that they paid Apple 20 billion to knock out everybody else. I was dead. I was dead. I was flat and I was roadkill. It didn't matter. Whatever I did was right. And since then, all I do is look at it and say, I'm stupid. I'm stupid. I'm stupid.

Yeah. But the real, the real thing that hasn't played out yet is like, what happens if we do end up with the duopoly in search? Right. A Lot of people. I mean, in ChatGPT, he has 800 million. Well, it's going to have to see.

Because they may, you know, they don't have the balance sheet. You guys ever read Niall Ferguson, Pity of War?

Yeah.

Well, that is about whoever has the deepest bond market wins central money. I mean, he's got. The bond market is better for the other guy.

So, yeah, this is a question for you because it felt it like I felt very comfortable covering the AI horse race, the foundation model race, from a technologies perspective, from a venture capital perspective. But once the discussion moved to is there enough private credit is Blue Owl gonna underwrite at these right levels? You know, we're having John from Apollo on the show. I hope he can explain it to us a little bit more. But how do you think about if a story kind of leaves your orbit, do you just bringing people on to understand.

Well, I mean, what do you think? You're just trying to be generalist all the time?

Yeah.

And it's funny because I have a general show and I'm always afraid to bring the balance sheet up for people say, you know, geez, I want to see what's on the Price is Right. I mean, there's like dial anywhere but that. Oh, Friends. There's Friends. You know, look for old Seinfelds versus me talking about the balance sheet.

Sure, sure, sure.

We have to do that.

But for some people out there, that's their Super Bowl. Right. They love it. Right.

Look, I get a kick out of the idea that Oracle gets involved and that Larry Ellison, who is one of the toughest guys on earth, who's never made a mistake, and Safra Katz has never made a mistake or getting involved. And then Safra leaves, and the FT says she leaves because she doesn't want what's happening to the balance sheet, her precious balance sheet of Oracle, which is not that good to begin with. So that's a good story for me because Larry has.

Larry?

You know him?

No, he's never been on the show. He follows tvpn.

He does, he does.

He followed very early.

But what was your relationship like with. With Larry? Did he come on Larry?

No, no, never.

He doesn't do a lot of.

And like I've tried repeatedly. I won't get on my knees.

I mean, he doesn't do a lot of media.

I think he might talk about like University of Michigan.

Okay.

Do you think that Mark Cuban, he's been on your show. Do you think he's the reason why Indiana is such a good football team?

Oh, no idea. We have no idea. People, people, people have used the ESPN attack on us. But it was funny because maybe I genuinely watch. Yeah, I've watched like an hour of sports in the last.

What do you read into the co CEOs when you see something like that? Yeah, I mean having an Oracle.

Where's my.

Yeah, here we got a little.

No, I co CEO interim basically. Yeah, it's just really horrible.

Does this happen in Sequoia Capital now? And that's obviously a big focus of ours.

Benioff was co CEO. We came with Keith Block. That was just suboptimal situation.

Yeah, we got.

The co CEO is now at Oracle. Let's see what happens.

Netflix.

I think it's hard unless you can have really defined duties like they had at workday and, but, but otherwise, no, it's not something I really want, want to see.

Yeah.

How are you feeling about, how are you feeling about the IPO market?

I think it's, it's too robust. We're seeing a lot of junk. We're seeing a lot of biotech by the way, which is why the biotech instrument companies are doing well. But a lot of these are one trick ponies and that's really dangerous. Look, I don't want to protect anybody from investing in anything because everybody has a right to invest. Everybody. Well, you know, if you want to do a uranium company right now, a company which just says. And all it does is say we will find uranium and you use a really funny symbol like you know, five use instead of four. I mean look it, you know, you price at 15, it opens at 24 and then you wait six months and you sell every share. And that's what I'm afraid of.

Yeah, that's. Are the biotech companies taking advantage of the narrative or is there a particularly different narrative?

No, I think there's just been a lot of. I shouldn't say there's been starting to.

Bubble up in tech in Silicon Valley folks saying hey, in the future drug discovery is going to be accelerated, the timeline is going to be way shorter, the economics are going to be completely different.

But this, the big companies are just, they're just sales companies because when you go to the unbelievably cool great person who does health care, you know, video say that person doesn't. They're not, you know, Bristol Myers isn't. Get me help. It's not those guys. It's not those guys. And it really bothers me because if you're going to accelerate what's going on with cancer okay. So that you can do, you know, look at every single data point and know everything within. Within five minutes, you should be able to come up with the Holy Grail drug. Blood test. They're getting a blood test for prostate cancer. So a guy down here saying that today he's going to become public Hope, but they should be using it and we should be making far more progress than we're doing in health care. It's just, you know, when Jensen came on with, with synopsis, I mean, it's pretty clear they're doing the digital. Doing the digital twin, by the way. You know, I thought this digital twin would have been good with, with Vision, with Vision Pro, but I guess relic. Yeah, but I, I do think that that's the missing link. Like, and I think if anybody does it, it's going to be Lily and Dave Bricks because he can get outside himself and think about some ideas.

Yeah, I like him a lot.

You do? Has he been on the show?

No, not yet, but.

We rang the gong. We rang the gong for him because he hit a trillion dollar valuation.

Yeah. Wasn't that great?

It's fantastic.

Walmart's at 900.

Walmart.

That guy, Doug McMillan. The guy's retiring. I mean, he created the stock when he came in, gave huge bonuses.

You want to create when you leave. I mean, you want to create her when you leave.

Have you been to Walmart lately?

There's an interesting, there's an interesting bull case for Walmart is that they are leaning in with chat cbt. Well, Amazon's leaning out. And so if the agent of commerce thing happens and people are just opening up their phone and hey, order, it will probably be routed through Walmart in the short term.

Really?

Yeah.

So Etsy, eventually Amazon will have to.

Respond and do a partnership somewhere.

Etsy and Walmart have leaned in. Ebay and Amazon have leaned out.

Wow. And that's a good quarter. Etsy had a bad quarter. Amazon, we know. What do you think?

And so it's the laggards in the markets that are, that are trying to catch up by saying, hey, they're taking a. Maybe we missed the, you know, the real power law.

I thought it was interesting at Costco.

Yeah.

Deep into Agent Force. Do you think Mark's going to rename the company Agent Force? That's my first question to him. Look at all the different silos. Go to the page 18 on the deck and there it is. 17. They did. It's like everything's Asian, you know, all the different styles. They're now all Called Asians.

But the thing is he's still hiring salespeople like crazy.

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to rename Meta? Did you see the rumor today?

He's just going to call it a rename.

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

It's a universe with multiple touch points.

It's like they even adapted the app so it is messaging focused. It's not even like it's hard to post content on Instagram now. That's my metaphorical universe.

Maybe with Vera Rubin they can do high speed, a video short 10 second clip for an ad or an Insta. Yeah, and that might work. I mean right now I would put it in Reddit, I don't know. Have you seen the rates for Reddit? The rate card? No, it's like a fraction and it's very targeted and it's really good.

Reddit ads, Reddit ads.

Reddit ads are the cheapest bargain for any consumer package. Because you're right, targeted like my wife has this mezcal business. Boom. There's like a mezcal lobby.

Mescalov.

I love it. Melanomi. My daughter's on mad pork. Unfortunately she beat it. But that's like, that's targeted. Targeted target, sure. I really like that because the rates I told Hoffman, he's charging too little.

Isn't he making much money from selling data? Isn't he making a lot of money from selling data?

Yes, he is. And then Cloudflare's doing their best to be able to block. But you did Cloudflare, you did the implications of their failure. See down there? Did Matthew not. Don't call me math. Did he call you?

He came.

Matt.

Matthew came on once, right?

Was he good?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, he's great.

He's real smart.

Yeah.

Hey, we should talk about like who's like really good guests and who's bad and we won't mention the name of the bad, we'll just say the good, you know. Oh yeah, that guy.

Team that you got to have on you got to have the semi analysis team on.

The piece was too long. The one that you told me to read the 10,000 word.

Yeah, it was too long.

I was like oh, my God, look at that. Look. What's going on? It's a jet game. I got to go watch the.

Dylan will always call in. He'll be at some data center, usually outside in the back of a pickup truck. He'll call in and he's. He's absolutely. The whole team there is absolutely fantastic.

They are.

They're very good.

They're really. I trust them implicitly for when you have something on Jensen.

Look at these two, you know. Have you met Eric Lyman yet?

Going after. We got John.

Fantastic.

26 ramp. That's. Isn't that doing a C rally 26 round.

Oh, they're waiting for series C. What.

Should I always say?

You're going to be here any day.

Oh, and then what? What should I say if I want to say if I want to impress people about how far along I am? Should I say I just did myself A what?

Series E. Series E. Probably I'm a Series E. These are going series G. Series F. Jesus. People go really deep down round because people don't. Down round's bad. People don't like. People don't like going public. It's a hassle. They don't want to deal with the sec. They want to deal.

What do you think about if stripe. Stripe stays private forever.

Johnny Carlson. No, people don't really like that. He was the great right.

Johnny.

He was a great right fielder for the Philadelphia.

Game to win.

So what do you think?

What do you think of a great American company stays private forever? Is that. Is that going to bring.

I mean, we've got Asplan, the orange trucks that cut down all the trees. They've been private forever and they're really, really rich. Yeah. You know, companies. I don't know. I think if you're public, you have to. There's some slings and arrows.

Got to answer to you.

No.

You'Re more likely to get talked about on that money. The stock's moving.

Well, when you have like a Wells Fargo and the guy comes on and he's got this like all these flowery coats. Very clothes quotes at the beginning about Lombardi, you know, the buck stop. Lombardi was always saying, listen, if there's a mistake, there's me. And then the first thing he says is like, you know, actually there. There were these employees that did it bad and, you know, don't pay attention to them. I was like, no, in your annual.

You say that you.

How do you see that?

How do you get people. How do you get people off your talking point? Off their talking Points, I would say, like the only. The only thing. The guests that we don't like, the guests that we don't.

The worst guests are the ones that are trying to get in rescripted lines. And that's the only time that we don't like doing the show.

I had one the other day. It was doing it and I made a joke and I stopped and it was just. Like I said, that was a joke now. And the person didn't laugh and went right on the talking points. I interviewed Jensen and he says he's doing the talking, but he's saying something. And I make a joke and he has a saying. And I said, by the way, that was a joke. He goes, I was laughing on the inside. Boom. See, that guy can do it all.

He can do it all.

What do you do with a guy who's lovable and you're trying to be tough, you're trying to be. You really want to nail him. You know, it's like, then he's just charming. Charming is the enemy. Look, talking points and charm are. Those are the, like the Solan Charybdis that we have to really avoid. Right?

Funny story with Jensen. And we were in D.C. and we were sitting there talking with Shane Copeland from Polymarket, who has a partnership with ice. And Jensen came in and Shane goes, hey.

Good to meet you. And he's like. Jensen's like, oh, what are you doing? He's like, I'm the CEO of Polymarket. And Jensen, he doesn't know it. And Shane afterwards, he's like, ah, I gotta work harder. I gotta work harder. Well, that's him.

Gets him at 4, he does the emails. And now he probably sets it at 3, 40, 45 and checks all the things he doesn't know that are related.

345.

What have you gotten done so far?

You genetically just need less sleep.

Yeah. What's going on? How is this possible?

Because there's a handful. It's like some 5% of the population can just thrive on like four hours.

Okay, well, here's. Okay, so because we're not on air, I'll tell you what. The things I take, so I take Klonopin, I take Melatonin, and I take a gummy. And I can't stay asleep. See, it has to do with staying asleep.

How much more do I take?

These are all like illegal substances to some degree. Now they're actually controlled substances, but that's what I do to be able to stay asleep to a quarter of a.

So it's More about trying to stay asleep. It's.

That's what it is.

As long as you can.

What time it is. Oh, I went to bed seven minutes ago. I gotta get. I get this picture.

You have your Apple watch set up with like different alerts.

Roving pictures of my wife.

What about. What about when the markets are moving?

It's wedding pictures. Making some sauce.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great.

Whoa. Yeah. Oh, it's my wife. Yeah.

Incredible.

She doesn't watch anything that I do tell us about. Drives me crazy.

Also, not the book.

What was the process like?

The book was about trying to get it so that people could, let's say, listen to you and say, you know what? These guys really seem to like so and so I'll go on chat. I'll go on Gemini 3. I'm going to learn about it. Maybe I own a share right now. That's stricken verboten. People feel if you, if you do more than own an index fund, you're, you know, you don't know what you're doing. I come back and say the information is never been easier to find. All these people believe only in index funds are just dogmatists. And what really you should be able to do is do index fund and do side by side or otherwise. We just think, you know what? All that information that you guys put out doesn't mean anything. And it can't be like that. We can't make people feel stupid. It's not right. If you have an observation that you think that a company that was on your show really knows what it's talking about, why can't you do the research, look at the website and buy a share? Why is that heresy?

So allocation to take 10. Take 10% of your assets and invest in things that you're interested.

Do you know how much resistance I've gotten on this? Well, the alleged tour, because I don't really want to tour, but I did. Some people said, jim, you say that people should own individual stocks, but over and over again it's been proven that that's stupid. And I said like I was. I worked with private wealth. I've seen people make tens of millions of dollars. So what we end up doing, we have a millionaire's lunch with Jensen, firefighters, police, people who listen. Now, some of them were because I named my dog Nvidia.

Yeah, well, that worked. That actually was pretty. A lot of people got. It was dollar at 90 when it was.

I told Jensen, he says, no one knows me what's going on. So you know what I'M like doing this stuff and it's like, now he's on Rogan.

Now he's at the top.

Yeah, I got you back. I got you back. And I said, listen, I just came back from California and I got to tell you, I had this dog named Everest. Uh, no more. The dog is Nvidia. And that's when, like I keep saying, you know, there was a police officer who came to the show. He goes, look, I bought I'm a Millionaire. I bought Nvidia. I said, when? He goes, when you named your dog idiot, do you know really kind of what it does? He goes, well, you named your dog after. You don't name your dog after something. If you think it's a fly by night thing, boom, Right?

That's an amazing.

Can I stay on forever?

I wish.

I think it's your people.

These people.

You're welcome.

What's it, a zombie sweater? They're killing, I guess so.

That's ramp investor.

Why can't you get money? 2.2 yards. Your averages. That's what he's averaging.

Let's make this. Let's make this.

Let's make this a regular thing. This was.

Oh, I would love to. You know, honestly, you guys are. What I hope would occur. Okay. I kind of always hoped that this would occur, but I didn't know who would do it. This would occur, meaning a sophisticated show, but it didn't. Take yourselves too seriously or I could learn. And it hadn't occurred until you.

Thank you.

And I was almost like. I always thought, what did People, they have to just make trillions. They can't stop and have some fun.

And tell us things.

But you came, you happened. And the fact that you happened, I. Okay, I'm going to be the only time I want to be a little immodest. I'd like to think that maybe in some way you happen because like somebody sometimes. You saw me.

Yeah.

I think that you are. You're not 2.0. You're sui. Generous, but I just feel like that absolutely. That it occurred and that people. You're another reason why the book's right.

You're on our Mount Rushmore Media. There's four of them, but you're the biggest.

Why, thank you.

Good luck to you guys doing what you're doing. You're just. You're just electric.

There we go.

Right. Where am I at? Where is that? All right, go get it.

You're on your side.

So much coming in.

Let me tell you about Linear Meet the System for Modern Software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. Let me also tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat. GPT reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Our next guest is Eric Gliman from Ramp. From the Ramp business. Corporate preparation. What an electric moment. What a fun time.

A goat.

Yeah, he's a goat. He's a fantastic performer. He's been in front of a camera before.

He's an entertainer.

He's an entertainer if there's ever been. He's doing evidence.

He's doing TV.

Putting the 10,000 hours gets you good results.

He's doing TV at least four times today. He's doing his show three times. He popped on to our stream.

I mean he's, I mean 20 years of mad money. He must be, he must be well past 10,000 hours on, on camera.

And I, and I think isn't it 30 years in television?

Well, so Squawk Box has been on for 30 years.

Yeah.

And mad money for 20, which is remarkable. Well, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand cloud clusters.

That's right. Darren Rovell. Darren Rovelle is sharing. Apparently somebody is claiming that a Google insider has been trading on search markets. They're saying somebody's been betting millions of dollars or trading millions of dollars on who will be the most searched people of the year including.

Yeah.

Just like whether or not Pope Leo will rank in Google's top five most searched people. Darren Rovel says this is what happens, what will continue to happen when unregulated markets are bet on as if they are regulated. Here's the thing. They are regulated by the cftc.

Yep. And insider trading is illegal. Like I was looking this up because we were talking to Tarek I Kelshi about this and, and I just wanted to know more. And apparently like let's say that you just are trading corn futures and you just happen to know that there's going to be like a major blight in the corn markets. And so you go and trade if you have insider information that someone missed their harvest or something like you can actually get in trouble for trading, for doing insider trading even in commodities. Yeah. And you would think like what, what, what? Private inflation.

And the issue is prediction market markets become more accurate when insiders are trading on it. So it's like this weird.

So Brian Armstrong was kind of laying out the bull, the bull case for Inside.

He Gave an interesting example of an admiral.

I mean, yes, it was. It was sort of a bad example yesterday. I liked his. I like that he's being philosophical about it. I mean, I feel like all of the crypto ogs are very philosophical in their analysis, and I think that that can be sort of clipped out of context to be like, it's something we.

Need to figure out. It is something we need to figure out is happening.

And he's also been in that, like, I think what people forget about Brian is that, like, he was in the legal gray area for, like, a decade. Right?

Yeah.

Where. Where he had.

He was on stage a lot.

He was born in it. Where he was on stage a lot. And when he was on stage, people would ask him, like, okay, do you think. Do you think bitcoin should be a commodity or a stock or something like that? And you have to be like, well, theoretically. Here's. Without further ado, we have Eric Lyman from the Ramp business corporation. Good to see you.

Great to see you. I can't believe you made a sweater just for a Ramp investor.

What is this?

They're doing it.

Tree lighting outside.

The holidays are here.

Should we open this on.

Should we open this Barkley x ramp collab sweater? I'm.

It's. It's been a strong season, and I have a feeling it's going to get a lot stronger.

I love it. And you got the yellow side box on, too. You look fantastic.

Fantastic to see you.

How many of these exist in the world?

Not. Not enough.

Yeah.

I think probably limited merch.

Wow, look at this, too. Yellow matches.

I don't know if we can reduce your fire.

We will put this out.

Enjoy them.

Because, I mean, they're even saying that we. We might not be able to have a very loud speaker for our soundboard because of radio rules on the stock exchange. Like, there are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do because, like, there's serious business.

Well, you guys have, like, a deep partnership.

We do now.

We do.

Now.

Can we ask Lynn if we can be the first show to enjoy a lot like a scented candle.

But I would. I would definitely ask for permission with this one. I would not be caught dead begging for forgiveness.

Okay.

No chance.

It's.

How are you doing by the book here?

I'm doing great.

Yeah.

I'm doing great. And we're in.

We're in New York City. Remind me how Ramp wound up in New York City. You're not from New York City.

It's. Well, this is the capital of capital.

You had to be here.

You know, this is where I love that eagle, but.

But you know, Steel man, this for me. One of your investors might say that this is memetic desire to wind up in the capital of capital. Why not be the contrarian and build a fintech company somewhere else?

Look for.

I remember we, our last company, we had gone out west. It was YC demo day.

Oh, you did?

Yesterday, we went through there and I remember towards the end of Y Combinator we told the partners that we were going to be moving back to New York. And several of them looked at us like we had a hole in our.

Head, but we did it.

Were you Korean roommates during yc?

Yeah, of course, of course.

You know, and those were tough times. I remember we lived on Sandhill Circle. Sandhill Circle at the time. We don't cook all that well. We knew about Seamless. And the sad part was there were only two restaurants on Seamless. And so like we lost.

What are we gonna do today? What are we gonna do?

Flip a coin?

It was terrible.

We lost a lot of weight that summer.

It was.

Times were tough. And then at the very end we discovered Doordash. And we realized there were in fact ways. But I remember I had kind of liked the west coast and Kareem said, you can stay out here, but I'm going. And so.

Okay, we're going anyway. That resolved.

You understand.

New York is.

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

So I think that glosses over a lot of what happened in the Valley over the past 10 years.

What I observed from a lot of my peers who had gone through that accelerator funded companies during that area era was the average person they hired stayed there for about 12 months. It was an incredible mercenary culture. The San Francisco and West coast of 2015 through 2020, something we can debate kind of the year was not this like earnest hacker, two people in a garage. It had become very, very corporatized. And everyone who was out there, I felt the small startups, unless you were the hottest company at all points in time. Your engineers were getting picked off by Google, by Facebook, was going to the next hot company when people were, I.

Feel like in some ways taking a portfolio approach, they're like, well if startups are risky, why don't I work at four startups over four years?

It is crazy that if you just graduate like you know, regularly on time from a good college by the time you're 32 and maybe trying to buy a house, you can have done four, three, four year vests. Yes, that's a crazy thing to be like, yeah, I got some options over here. Vested a Series A company I joined, then I jumped over to the growth stage company and I have this portfolio. It's like that's not the goal here. The goal is to go on a generational run.

So build something that matters. And like when we came back to New York, look, I think it was maybe like Bob Ross would say a happy accident. Like when you, when you started hiring these people, we could punch way above our weight. If you wanted to work at a very fast growing venture backed startup, seed Series A, there was like three and so we were able to find extraordinary people. There was, there was, I think this wasn't well understood but all of the large engineering companies were opening incredibly large offices in New York. Google had done it, AWS Stripe was opening their offices. MongoDB. Then you had these, these companies that were authentically built here in New York. MongoDB Datadog, all the direct to consumer companies, classically people who were in touch with culture, designers, marketers, people in finance. It was all kind of here. And so what happened was as I think the west coast is becoming a very hard place to build a genuine talent or lots of talent war in New York you had the talent, you had people who were moving to be out here and then all that was missing was people also wanted to live in New York.

People, it's like the, it's the greatest.

City in the world. Still a meme among AI researchers like should I move to New York? Should I like get out of the hustle and bustle?

All AI research but engineers broadly. It feels like going to Hawaii, like.

I'm ready for something different. Maybe I can go over there.

That's awesome.

I think that this was part of the scene secret of Ramp like we set out to go into be that definitive company where if you, it was a goal that in a few years time people would say like you know, you ask a friend what is like the best fintech company in New York or people would think it's, you got to go to Ramp. That's where they like take engineering seriously fast in their products. And we turn that into reality. I think that there's lots of other great companies in New York here and coming up and. Except accelerating. But it's great, it's great we're here.

Something I'm realizing recently of like tvpn, we probably added like one person a month in the year or so that we've been in business. And I was thinking like, what a incredible luxury that is because when you're hiring at a relatively slow pace, you have so much time to like really get to know people. There's not like this pressure how, like, I'd be curious because I don't think you've ever shared it on the show, your philosophy on hiring when you're trying to deliver ramp speed, but also find and find and hire people that are going to be with the company for five, six, seven years and beyond.

Yeah, I think a lot of people who walk around the Ramp office, you guys know this. The company is incredibly young. You know, I think the average age is, is in the 20s. And a lot of it relates to this idea of, of finding people who are on a steep slope versus intercept. Obviously, of course, we have people who have had incredible experience in pedigree, but the question is, if you play out one or two years time, there's some people with a lot of experience who've said, I've seen this movie before, I've learned all that I'm going to learn and get a little bit better over the course of the next year. And then you have these people who graduated top of their class. Class. Maybe they're 19, maybe they're 20, maybe they're in their mid-20s. But they want to work, they want to learn, and they're on the steep trajectory. And we find these people who have incredible drive, have incredibly high IQs. We give them more responsibility than you'd expect. And you're patient, you wait a year and suddenly.

You'Re filled with people at your company who are far more talented than maybe you could afford afford to hire otherwise if they already had the.

Ramp logo on their resume, you were another company and you're managing teams and they're Lowell.

And they've grown incredible equity in the company, which has grown even more since they've been here. And it's just this incredible virtuous cycle. And I think that a lot of people, especially early stage companies, get pushed by their investors to say oh, you should find someone who's seen this movie before. I want to find someone who's been this vp, whatever, and, and like, nothing wrong with that. I think that can be great, but it really underestimates the importance of finding people of that raw talent. And looking at, again, slope over intercept.

Yeah, John, I interrupted you.

Oh, yeah. I just wanted to hear about sort of switching gears, but positioning around the product in the age of AI, There's a campaign going on right now.

What is it? Teaching money to think. Yeah, right. Thinking money. Thinking money. And, and it makes sense. It's intelligent finance. But it feels like it's the result of grappling with this question of how do you bring AI to bear in the product in a way that's not.

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

Get ready to enjoy pto, buddy.

Well.

I love this question, and I think you need to start at the root of where this comes from.

Sure.

At the. When the company first launched, we had this idea of time is money. You should save both.

I love it. I say it every day.

Every day.

You know, it's becoming my mantra every day.

Wake up in the morning, look in.

The mirrors, bill, pay a cold, counting a whole lot more all over the place.

It is.

And by the way, you know, for any CFOs out there or financial professionals who haven't yet adopted RAMP, you know, give your CFO or the controller, you know the wonderful gift of RAMP. Help them save 5%.

Yes, yes.

Well, you still, you still push so hard on sales all the time. All the time. You're like, like, oh, this company is interested in ramp. You're like, introduce them to me. Yeah, and you'll jump on the phone like, in the next 24 hours.

Well, there's nothing better than actually Feeling it, your, your, your yourself going through the sale, helping someone get through. And it helps you understand the experience and stay sharp. But the question is really good if you, if you think about the actual brand and the value props that we offer is fairly timeless. In a sea of ecosystem of credit card companies trying to get you to spend more, we want you to spend less and we think this is timeless.

Or the opposite would be like a new video model.

And it also shows because you're a.

Pre AI comfort that's state of the art for four weeks. And it's just a very, it's like selling a very different product.

It's selling things versus value. And to be very specific about it, like if you and Jeff Bezos has talked about this in another context.

Sometimes.

People ask what's going to change over the next 10 years. It's more interesting to ask what will not. And in 10 years from now or 100 years from now, it is very clear that people will always want to get more for less, for fewer dollars, for fewer hours. There's no way that's ever going to change. And if you think about kind of the central promise of ramp is going to help you spend less. You know, you think about, you could sell thinking or you could sell thinking. Thinking money we can help you spend that might change. But if you have intelligence introduced to some end goal, which is the intelligence is going to help you prevent spend that is out of policy that you don't want to occur once it's spent to actually tag and account for it and then afterwards help you make sure that the next month, you know, more dollars go to productive uses as being really good and really timeless. And so thinking money might be a way of saying it in the modern era. We're going to apply thinking to drive an outcome. Your company, but leaner, but it's the same.

I don't know if I want to spend myself today.

Yeah, maybe not.

I might just chill in this treasury account.

It's this timeless idea there.

Guys, we need you to ring the gong because there is a milestone which is that when we started the show, I was laughing about the, you know, we want to go to war on the paper receipt on big paper. And I actually found a company that I was like, are paper receipt companies a thing? Are they still big? Turns out there was one that was worth like $22 billion. I believe when we started working with you, you were below that. Now you've, now you've eclipsed it. And I think it's a sign of good Things to come, good omens and the death of the paper receipts. Death of the paper receipt.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show stopping by. Great to see you.

Thank you.

Have a great rest of your day and we will catch up on what.

What a moment too because I, I think if, if you guys hadn't bet on US last Q4 of last year I don't think we'd be sitting here today with, with the TV logo all over the nicey. So we're the whole team, we feel.

Like the lucky ones. Thank you and congratulations again.

Thank you. Thank you Bobby dude, we will talk to you soon. We will also talk to you about turbopuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on objects storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. I'll also tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Cheers. We got a red.

Cheers.

We're going.

Cheers.

What a fun show.

Next up we have John Zito, co president of Apollo Apollo, fledgling asset manager with 900, 900, $900.

900, 900, $900,000. 900 million.

900 million.

900 million.

Or is it 900 billion?

It's 900 billion.

He's going to answer some hard questions. What is private equity? What is private credit? What is asset management? What are alternative assets?

I like the traditional assets. There's the alternative ones that scare me.

I like.

Bring him in. Let's bring him in.

He's getting miked up.

But in the meantime we'll tell you about figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. And I'll also tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

John Zito is getting mic'd up. He's coming in. I should also mention that today I am wearing a watch that I purchased on getbezel.com youm can shop over 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. On a special day you need a special watch. There's no better place to get it than Bezel. We have John Zena. John, good to meet you.

Are you giving Eric a little pep talk there?

What are you saying?

He's got, you know, a couple, couple things.

You guys are friends, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Last time I saw him he was. He was like taking all his Money, Small poker game. He was taking everyone's money.

Oh, he was.

I can see that. He's such a nice guy. So he's got.

Don't fall for the ramp path pitch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's counting everyone's money.

He's like, I'm saving your. I'm saving. I'm saving you time and. And your money. I'm gonna actually take your money, and.

I will be saving it for later.

Their team is amazing. What they're building is pretty incredible.

Tell me about. Tell me about your team. Tell me about what you've learned from him, what you've told him about managing, building a team. What does it take to get a job and work for you?

Yeah, I mean, look, those, those, they don't need any of my advice. They'll come and talk you to me about.

About building culture.

Yeah. But you know what they're doing there? They have a bunch of people around them that are just building incredible business for us. It's about. It's pretty simple. Find people with purpose. Find people high character. Find people that are, you know, generally good people first.

Sure.

And then all the investment.

How do you like to evaluate people for purpose?

I mean, for us.

How long do you want to spend with someone before you actually?

I mean, some of our best hires are probably the people that I've known for a really long time. I mean, a lot of our hires that we've made in the last, I don't know, five, seven years. I knew them for 20.

Yeah.

You know, we've been in. I've been in credit for 23 years.

Yeah. So quickly can we zoom out and can you paint a picture for me of, like, the actual Apollo structure, the empire, like, what's going on?

Maybe share some of the same numbers you shared with our mutual friend Patrick that I best like the best? Because the velocity that you guys are moving at is pretty.

Patrick's a great guy. Senra is a good guy. I know you guys are close to center, too.

Yeah. So Apollo largest, one of the largest alternative credit managers in the world. Largest alternative asset managers in the world. What's unique about us is half of our nine, over 900 billions are on our own capital through retirement service.

A theme.

Through a theme.

Yes.

So we're writing. We're a market leader. In writing guaranteed income. So we'll write a guaranteed, you know, you want us 5% guaranteed income.

Somebody wants to retire someday.

Yeah. And you want guaranteed income for the next 10 years at 5%. We'll guarantee you that money and Then we'll invest it and we, we keep some marginal spread between guaranteeing you the income and that's half our money. And then half our money is, is managing third party money on behalf of our historically private equity business which is over $100 billion and then our credit business, business which is worth of $800 million.

So.

Oh, here we go. But I, the guys out there told me I'm the first alternative asset manager leader on your, on your show.

I don't know if that's true.

But you.

Let's, let's like let's.

I think that we've had, we've had, we've had plenty, we've had plenty of people that have, that have, I'm sure raised. Raised from Apollo. But yeah, this is the first. Yeah. Maybe like let's talk about why private credit, which people talk about as a monolith, obviously there's subsections of it. But why it's having such a moment right now in the context of these sort of like large scale infrastructure projects that are happening in AI as well as defense.

Yeah. I mean look, so because half our balance sheet is super long duration for retirement and all these new projects need really long dated capital.

Yeah.

There's only two places you can get capital. You can get money from a bank or you can get money from investors and the bank capital. They're amazing. A lot of things. The capital tends to be more short dated because it's led by deposits.

Yeah. So insurance, we got to experience that with svb.

Yeah.

Little duration mismatch.

Yeah.

So.

So if you want a 15 year project, you want someone who's going to understand your project much more of a bespoke solution. Work with the company to have more flexibility in that capital structure or in that capital solution. It's much more logical to be with private capital than it is in public markets. And a lot of the people in your guys universe, it's.

Historically they had to go public to get access to money and now everybody's staying private way longer. Like we've so legacy world, legacy capital was okay, we need new money, we're going to go public and that's how.

We would do it. Yep.

Now everybody in the growth world has gotten a lot more sophisticated.

Yeah.

They're staying private longer. They're raising capital through the private equity. Not traditional, but in the private markets world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And now they're realizing, wait a second, we can do this in our entire capital structure. Wait, what's this credit thing? Oh, we can access private credit access okay. We can do a long duration project level finance, and it's more optimal for their equity markets. And so they're just like, okay, so now that, now everybody's accessing this private markets and because it's growing so quickly, it's in the news a lot. Because it's a. Wait, it's growing fast. It must be risky.

Yeah. So talk about, I mean, that, that prompted the piece from Mark and it was Bloomberg yesterday.

Yeah, he put out an op ed yesterday.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Talk as much as you can.

I mean, look, there's lots of. Everyone has a weird definition of private credit. And so they have a whole hard time. Everyone has a hard time. Okay. Private credit's risky.

Yeah.

And a lot of people think private credit's like the 5 or $10 million loan to like a tire manufacturer in Queens or something. That's what they think private credit is. We're doing 11 billion dollar loans for Intel.

Yeah.

And that's private credit.

Yeah.

Right. So we define it as everything from a mortgage to a commercial real estate loan against a building to an aviation loan against a new aircraft.

Sure.

Like super safe, secured, top of the capital structure, traditionally investment grade.

So now you set up your firm to deal with a $10 billion deal with intel, all the way down to some smaller deal.

We're, we're the only, we're the only firm that's full open architecture.

Okay.

So we're one investment business. So, you know, David Sambra, who runs private equity, you know, are the guys who lead our hybrid team, the, you know, our credit team. All the people are all in the same investment meeting talking about, okay, what's the best solution for the company? It's not really about, let's solve for this small thing for a fund.

Yeah.

Once you start doing that, it's very hard to work with companies.

Yeah.

You know, like historically the credit business was, hey, we're going to go to a bank, we're going to issue a bond and then we would buy that bond. That was kind of the public business. And most of those people were trying to, to were typically conservative and they were trying to get just their income because most of us grew up in the opportunistic business and we've evolved into an investment grade business. We think more like builders and partners. And we're just providing capital across the whole capital structure. And when you can show up and say, hey, do you need a loan against the building? You need a, by the way, you want a retirement program for your employees and you want to a Long duration preferred. There's not many people that can show up with huge amounts of checks and just make it. And also, by the way, we're lenders to 5,000 companies. So now all of a sudden you're in our ecosystem and if you're growing the thing we're, you know, we can, we can help and be a part, a real partner, not just a capital provider.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's like the new modern 5,000 companies.

Aren't there only there's 4,000 public companies. How many. So are you a lender to all. Almost all of the public companies that are at scale.

We have mortgages.

Okay, sure.

Commercial real estate loans.

Sure, sure, sure.

Right.

Are you thinking about the real estate market? Mortgages, even buying houses? Like how do you think about that portfolio there?

Yeah, we don't, we don't buy, we're not in the single family rent business.

You like your brand?

It does seem like it doesn't look like, like a hot iron, but I.

Have a friend, this isn't a gotcha.

Because I have a friend who lives next to a house that we was bought by private equity. He's like, yeah, they actually made it really nice and it's great. And my neighborhood's getting better because of this. Yeah, it's like kind of a hot take.

But yeah, I mean look, that part, that part has been in. Obviously affordability is a big thing.

Sure, sure.

So, but we're more on the lending side. So we just provide mortgages.

Sure, sure, sure.

And so we have a big mortgage business and it's relatively low cost and.

I mean as you get lower into smaller deals, do you need to bring in more automation? Are you seeing returns to scale on, you know, it spend or I spend or any of this stuff?

Yeah, so I think that will happen for sure. I think that will happen for sure.

The, the in the asset level side. So when you're, when you're analyzing large pools of mortgages or mortgages.

Sure, sure, sure.

Or in the security historically, that's going to be much more of a data AI driven. Over time our models will get better and better and hopefully and there'll be more plug in and all things associated with big pools and a history, you're going to probably get more optimal pricing.

Sure, sure.

And you can see companies like, companies like Morpho, like if you look at, I don't know if you've seen the token, like there's, there are defi protocols that actually have market based pricing and that's going to keep getting better.

And better and better.

And I think the scale players will ultimately win that. And so we use it more there on the smaller side where it's more flow related businesses. We have Apollo which does a lot of our large lending, but then we have 16 companies which invest on our behalf that do specialty stuff. So our middle market lender, Mid Cap will do that. Has its own brand, its own employees, its own balance sheet, but we'll own some piece of the equity and some piece of those loans. We bought GE's aviation business, so they do all the smaller or medium or big size aviation loans, but in many cases it's our capital.

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

Our private equity business historically been value oriented, not necessarily growth oriented. That'll help. With respect that, we didn't buy any companies in 2122 that I think are going to be somewhat tougher to exit because of the prices that were paid. And our team's done an amazing job.

Why didn't you buy anything?

Companies in 2020, we just, we have.

A 35 year history of buying at relatively low multiples. So just nothing was available under that framework to buy.

And so we've been, we people think of us as being more value oriented. Defensive equity and then everything around secured lending.

Yeah. And on the private equity side you have DLT members, operating partners that go inside the companies. Is there separation there or is it all one like kind of pool?

We have our own private equity team with our own dedicated operations team.

Operations team that goes in and operate. Yeah, exactly.

Just a traditional, traditional business.

Yeah.

What's your outlook on energy and providing capital for various energy products, Everything from natural gas to traditional, you know, oil, all the way through nuclear.

Yeah. So Europe. We did a $4.5 billion deal for RWE. We did a six and a half billion dollar deal for EDF keep doing this. So we've done some of the largest European deals for power, energy transmission, defense. I think you'll see that continue in the U.S. same thing, very large for BP. Multi billion dollar transactions. It is. If you told me five years ago we'd be doing multibillion dollar deals for, for S&P 500 IG globally in Europe and the US I would have said like that's, that's not going to happen. Our business, the business of private markets is across every risk spectrum. And it's really for some reason that's not again not really transmitted into the market. It's just private credit's growing. It must be risky.

Sure, sure, sure.

So I think you're going to the logical answer for long duration power projects which require lots of construction or data centers. The logical places for retirement for 1k long duration investment grade annuities. Anyone who wants long term savings. It's a great, it's a great place to be. So I think you're going to continue to see private markets being the primary force around financing all that stuff.

Yeah. How, how do you guys approach.

Sort.

Of like questions or debates around things on the data center side such as like GPU depreciation. Right. Everybody has, everybody has different opinion. You can look at, part of it is like there's some element of it that's unpredictable. You can also look at the present, right. Which is like people that have five.

I see 50 year depreciation.

Right.

But you can look at the present and you can try to predict a future future and then, and then depending on who you talk to, you're going to get wildly different answers whether you're talking to somebody on over on this coast or somebody on, on the west coast. I'm curious like your guys general kind of approach to like finding the answers to some of these questions.

I think there's going to be winners and losers. I think you know for us we've stayed more short dated. So we did a large for valor and Xai we did a multi billion dollar GPU financing but we stay at five years. So effectively we're the senior tranche. And then the equity holders are making the, the assumption on what GPUs are worth later and longer. Yeah, that's, that's hard for us as, as credit providers it's going to be hard. I think anyone who says they know what the value of GPUs or the release rates are in year 5, 7 or 10, I mean it's hard to take that with any sort of credible yeah, it's.

Undoubtedly probably going to be the most violent cycle we've ever had. The no one really knows how fat the tails are, both right or left. But adding a lot of leverage to a assumption that you don't know if it's going to be a super bull case or a super bear case is kind of scary for us. So we've been a bit quieter on that side.

I do think that folks in Silicon Valley, folks are audience are just really struggling to wrap their minds around the role of private credit here because it's a completely different just mental model to be in as opposed to just being a venture capital equity investor.

I mean the thing is with this cycle it's so much more asset heavy.

Totally.

All these growth companies, defense companies.

And they're going to need nuclear facilities. The nuclear companies, the power companies, the AI companies. It's all asset heavy.

Yeah. As opposed to, you go back to.

Google, 20, 30 years, it's most beautiful IPO. It's all asset light and the mental model is always asset light and the debt is bad.

Yeah.

And so you know, I'm friends with lots of the guys on your show because this is changing.

Sure, totally.

And it's going to be all about who they can partner with and trust.

Yeah. Tech wasn't like, didn't have low leverage because they just didn't like leverage. It was because they didn't need it.

They didn't need it. This cycle you need, need it.

Yeah.

And it can be financed off balance sheet and it can be better optimized than actually raising equity and there's logical place for it. It's just, and so the scale is.

Not necessarily just directly tied to the problem. I always, I always go back to like, you know, the mortgage. There are plenty of people that are making six figures and have a seven figure mortgage and it's like, so if you talk about a company and you're like, yeah, the company is making a billion dollars and they have $10 billion of debt or something, it's like that could math out fine if everything's, you know, flowing through and they're growing and whatnot. But yeah, there's a lot of, there's.

Definitely a big pivot last week and a half.

Yeah.

Lots of questions about off balance sheet debt. Should it be on balance sheet? Lots of questions about Oracle and others. Lots of questions about some of the Neo clouds. Yeah, I think that's just going to, that's going to push anthropic and open air public earlier.

Oh, interesting.

I think you'll see them I think, I think they'll go public way earlier than is anticipated.

Okay.

I'm not sure what consensus is but I suspect that the more pressure and questions about that Yep. Will require them to access convert market equity market securiton other markets than. Than just traditionally these kind of off balance sheet leases.

I mean the last overall view is all over the world so feels like.

It'S going to happen.

Yeah, I think it makes sense.

What how are you feeling about the IPO market in the present? Kramer was on talking about frustrations with different biotech companies going out and, and, and some of them being potentially lower quality. Where are we in your view?

Well you brought me to the New York Stock Exchange to talk about private markets which is the funniest thing ever.

But we, we spend I would say 70, 70% of our time talking about private.

Okay, good.

And we're here so that's good partnership today. Well the funny thing, the funny thing Kramer kept speaking in share price and we're like, we only think.

Exactly like.

Ramp the 33 billion dollar company.

I mean look there's going to be next year is going to be. I'm usually the credit guy is usually always the bearish guy. I'm like I think lower rates, I think tons of M A. I think you'll see a lot more huge technology away who knows what the 4 trillion, 5 trillion whatever the estimate of capital who will benefit but it's going to benefit the consumer. Yeah the idea is going to benefit the consumer.

And when you say M and A though is this, is this P E funds that loaded up in 2021, 2022.

Finally capitulating or I think, I mean I don't think anyone thought you know, you see what's happening. There's some very large M and A transactions. You saw EchoStar this year sold a bunch of assets in exchange for SpaceX stock.

Yeah.

You know like people are like wait, this company owns half of or not half but like half like they've got like 10 million. Yeah, yeah. You look at the debt.

No but even that it's pretty, it's pretty attractive. I mean it's a pretty way to actually get to get access to SpaceX. I mean it was a pure play tracker. I'm not, I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that kind of thing. It's pretty, it's a pretty interesting way to get access to it.

Yeah. They're making an open AI movie. They're making a new social network Facebook movie. Do you Think they'll ever make a Caesar's palace heist movie? Oh, Jesus.

I don't know. I don't know.

I hope not.

But. But I mean seriously, like, because that book was introduced to me through our friend group and we were all like, this is awesome. But I oftentimes internally at these firms, they're like, everyone in Silicon Valley is like, yeah, Social network, awesome movie. It inspired me to start a tech company. And Mark Zuckerberg is like not a fan. Right. And so I'm wondering internally, does the firm. How does the firm remember the book?

Listen, we. That. That was so long ago. The context of the business. We've become a complete kind of credit passive.

Sure, sure.

And the kind of activity we do day to day, by and large is far different.

Yeah.

I think generally speaking our investors look at that situation and say, listen, they're going to fight for every dollar. So I think there's a balance between the one thing as you grow is you want to maintain your investment culture. And so how do you make sure you maintain your investment culture? Recruit the best people. And the paradox of growing, but also really being a good investor, that's like a very tough balance sometimes. And so, you know, I every day trying to make sure that we.

Who on your team evaluates various AI tools that I'm sure you're getting pitched 100 times.

We have a whole team. I mean, we have a team. It's called Lab 42. But Rob Bittencourt really leads the thematic investing. You should have him on. I mean he spends all his time assessing all the hyperscale, the entire ecosystem, both debt and equity. Yeah, let's go.

It's a tree lighting.

Tree has been. This is why we brought you on.

Cursey spirit.

That's a lot of fun.

It's 4pm you're watching.

We can't hear anything.

Fun being here.

They said they've never done an IPO on Tree Lighting Day.

Oh really?

Like the last 10 years or something.

Somebody's got to do it.

Yeah, it's Hank.

It's. Who is it?

Aaria. That's.

They got Santa here too.

It's Hank Azaria, isn't it?

No way. Oh, yeah.

Last time I saw him, he was in like a. He's in a cover band. You know, he plays in a cover.

Is.

He's a cover man.

It's actually pretty good.

Really?

That's amazing. There are a ton of people here. This is as big as an IPO in terms of folks roaming the floor. There's a lot of folks there's some mascots over there. They're having fun. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it.

People talk soon.

Before we bring in our last guest of the show, let me tell you about wanderer.com Book of Wonder with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. And you know, you heard Jim Cramer talk about sleep. We need to get him an Eight Sleep at Eight Sleep.com actually that'd be.

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Up and we should actually get him an eight sleep for Christmas.

And our and you know you're looking behind us. There's some. We're on the cubes. You can see us over there. We're on that cube.

Actually we're down to one cube.

We're down to one cube. The tree took over. But if you want to put your brand, your logo on something that looks like a cube, why not get a billboard@ad quick.com I love it. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision.

People are joking around on the timeline. Meta of course is planning to cut 30% of their I guess a budget of their Metaverse efforts.

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

I don't know they announced and consistent Census media which definitely could joking around. They say Metta will announce plans for name change new stock ticker within the coming weeks. Zuck viewed as leading candidate for new ticker seems like fake news but it's certainly, it's certainly fun.

Yeah I like the.

I like the meta name Max Hoda.

I think it's. I think it's.

Former guest.

Says the idea that this is the end of Meta's Metaverse drama dreams is probably wrong. I bet this will actually make them go faster and I agree.

I'm very excited for the next VR headset. I think the quest for I think James Cameron tried it and really enjoyed it.

Kalash last post and then we'll bring in our next guest says Linktree is a billion dollar company. A billion dollars for literally links in a tree.

Yeah.

Michael Miraflor says you need to be. You need to study business models. You have to be investigation maxing value Decoding. You should never think the consumer facing product is the thing. There's a thing behind the thing that generates revenue.

It is true.

It's supposed to unlock cash flow at a certain scale that justifies valuation. There's a vision here. So anyways, without further ado, let's bring in our next guest.

Hi.

Good to see you. Welcome to the show.

Good to see you.

So much for coming down and hanging out.

Congratulations.

Thank you, thank you.

Day number one.

How's it been going? It's very special.

Fantastic. We love this place.

It's fun as a, as a media person to be here because it's become just the center for media.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you just see Hank Azaria out?

It was him, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Yes. Our last guest was, was IDing him and I couldn't, I couldn't see from here, but it does appear that he's down there walking around. It's a full on tree lighting and.

With the builder back.

Azaria. I don't know. I don't know much about movies. I was like, I have no.

Do you watch tv?

No, he watches no movies. No tv. Really?

Very, very rare.

He's seen one movie Borat and that's it. Pretty much. Pretty much.

And I saw that new movie Mountain Gate. I feel like I needed to give a review for the show about. It was about some AI founders that go to the. That go to. I felt like loosely based on the all in podcast.

Anyways, so great to have you.

What's your go to holiday movie?

Oh my goodness. Can I say the Sound of Music. I don't know if that's technically a holiday movie, but it's the one I watch around that time.

I think nostalgic in an old way that like it's appropriate. If you threw it on people, it doesn't scream Christmas, but people would be accepting of it.

Yeah. My controversial opinion is I don't like It's a Wonderful Life.

Oh, that one is a little bit old.

What about Elf Tooth? Elf?

Elf.

Elf.

Yeah.

Look at the.

Is that a movie? Yeah, someone told me.

What's your favorite color?

So anyway, please introduce yourself for the stream. For those who might not know you. What's your day to day like?

So I'm Katie Dayton. I write for the Wall Street Journal. All about anything to do with brands, marketing, advertising, some media thrown in and just basically any ways brands are really trying to cut through. I think that is the undefined underlying theme of my coverage.

And what, what has been the big theme in Your coverage.

It's interesting to coverage because when a brand breaks through, it's almost always for a different reason. Like it's an interesting set of circumstances that allow them to bring and strategy on their part and some luck that gets thrown in. And it's. So again, there's not like a playbook. If you're following a playbook, it's probably been done and it could work if you're in another category. We saw this in D2C, right. People were like, oh, if you make a pretty website and you run a lot of ads, you can sell a lot of a product. And then a few other people did it well and then it basically stopped working. Like it can still work in certain situations.

Yeah.

The red antler trade didn't last.

It was like you need $500,000 for a brand and you need a product.

And it works for Hims. Hims is a public company and is doing fine.

Also, Hims worked with Emmett.

Oh, that's right. Was it Ro that worked with. I think Ro worked with.

Anyways, anyways, so I bought my first Warby Parker glasses.

You did.

Last week. And I thought, God, I'm a bit late to this one as well. That was. That's been around for a while. I think that's what's so interesting right now is that there is no playbook anymore. Even if you're a humongous brand, you know, you're sort of. When you're managing any kind of decline, there's no playbook for that and there's no playbook for a young D2C brand.

Because, you know, we heard about an apparel brand that is scaled from 0 to 700 million of revenue in like two years, all on TikTok Shop. We had never heard of it. I don't know if they're public, so I don't know if the numbers are public. So I won't share the name. I'll share it with you after. But yeah.

Remarkable. What has been the big trend of the year in terms of your coverage? What's been the biggest story or the biggest.

What's your word of the year?

My word of the year Crisis.

We have seen, I think every brand right now. If you look at American Eagle, if you look at Cracker Barrel just happening in the last, you know, in the sort of a space of few months of each other. Two very similar case studies.

Yeah.

Two very different accusations being leveled out there.

Getting sucked into politics.

Yeah.

And then the crisis comms comes out.

And the snowballing of it.

Yeah.

And I think now it's sort of making brands realize that nobody is safe. You know, you change your logo before the. Before for this year, I'm sure nobody.

Really thought, especially like Cracker Barrel is not. I mean it's a beloved brand, but it's not like in everyone's face constantly. It's not the Pepsi logo, which also went through a rebrand of the logo years ago and people didn't like it and I think they tweaked it and whatnot. But Cracker Barrels, it shouldn't be such a massive story. But of course the Internet can amplify everything and you can just throw everyone in crisis.

What are you looking at for 2026?

I think, well, it'll be a lot more of that and I think it's going to be a lot more of brands kind of shifting their budgets maybe a little bit away from, you know, your traditional advertising into maybe some more pr. I think it's really important for brands at the moment to be owning their narrative. I think they're obsessed with that. They want to be. This is the whole reason they're all moving to substack. They're writing, they're running their own YouTube channels, their own podcasts. You know, they want to be ahead of the game. They want to be the ones that are talking about themselves before anyone else talks about.

Yeah.

So I think we're going to see like a big shift in like what comes looks like in general.

Yeah.

Which will be quite interesting to see. And then the AI piece of it all kind of fits in with that because I think the big question is going to be, do consumers care if a brand is using AI and if they do, like how badly is that going to actually affect any revenue?

Well, it's going to be interesting because it's going to happen at the ad level too because the social platforms know the political leaning of the users and it's very possible that a brand will be like, here's the product. You can figure out how to make the best ad for the end user. And then you'd have one brand with one product that's running political weeding ads this way.

I do wonder, there's been some brands over the last kind of coming out of the. The kind of original Trump era that were just like right wing brands or right wing neobank. We saw, we saw some of these. I wonder if we'll see more.

Rifle coffee was kind of proto example. This my pillow.

I wonder if we'll see more, more consumer brands just like basically put the political Party in the footer and just be like even more a trend that.

I was thinking was like more brands investing in like becoming the supplier and then just having two like faces, two brands on top. Because I think it said long term in the long, in the long arc of history, maybe the value accrues to the company that's making pillows for both the left wing and the right wing.

I mean, I'm sure that's probably already happening.

It naturally happens in supply chain because no one's digging through the supply chain to figure out where their coffee beans came from.

I'm surprised we haven't actually seen more sort of out and out right wing brands coming through. I mean we have, you know, the ones you mentioned. I guess they've been going down that route for a while now. And you know, given that, what, 10 years ago, it was a lot of brand purpose. We always used to talk about brand purpose and how it was brand purpose. Yes. And every brand had to be aligned to a big cause of some sort that kind of tended to swing to the left.

Yeah, it was like a clothing brand that was all about ocean plastic. And then I think people realized at some point or another they wanted something to buy. The majority of consumers just want to buy a great product. And so it kind of flipped back where brands stopped saying 1% of every dollar.

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

They would.

Sign up, it's better than nothing.

Are you talking about that black mirror one that came out a few weeks ago that was.

There's a bot farm.

Very good point.

There was a bot farm one. There was TikTok for sports betting or gambling. There was one that was a coding environment that would let you gamble and.

Watch subway centers brain like illegal online casinos.

There was, there was the whole Clulie saga which was a. An app that allowed you to cheat on everything. Yeah, of course people don't like cheating.

I was thinking of the, you know, you know, dead relative. Oh yeah, that one was very on the nose.

Partnered with like a Disney star. That was crazy to the point where.

I thought this has got to be intentional. Well, or it doesn't exist and it's, you know, some kind of.

Because I almost believe that I don't know the actual numbers, but I think American Eagle might still be up on the like as a stock even during all that chaos like they netted out. Okay.

Yeah.

And I heard some people debating whether or not Sydney Sweeney would wind up winning on the day. I don't know how much she got paid and I don't know what the long term.

Yeah, I mean, that one's interesting because American Eagle and we just had one of our conferences, Craig, that cmo, you know, that line is very much like, this was truly not. It was not meant to be political. It was not that. And anyone that thought it was in the minority and it was a lot of bot traffic was driving. So, you know, and I think they came out of it. And they think they came out of it because they stood by it.

Yeah.

And they didn't try and roll it back and control confused the messaging and they just sort of didn't like pay too much attention to it. They didn't give it too much fuel. It kind of burnt itself out that way. I think we're going to be seeing like some more of those tactics. Whereas before, if anyone was upset brands would like immediately pull something and, you know, do the notes.

Apology.

Friend of ours who's been on the show before, Lulu, Mr. V. She does comms or helps on comms for a lot of startups. She said yesterday, every media headline about a tech company is basically like this founder archetype is building the summary of your company or product. Can it overcome common skepticism? Is that like. Has that been. Is that evergreen or is that like. Do you think that kind of. Do you agree with that? Do you think that kind of format. It's like having a moment right now. I certainly have been seeing that quite a lot on like the COVID stories of different, like magazines like Forbes and Fortune.

I think there was a.

There was a. There was a journal piece on Cursor recently that was like similar. It was basically like they grew from 3 to 30 billion in nine months.

Like, I'll let you answer, but I have a.

Well, I think the pendulum swings. Right. So, you know, originally the press were accused of being too friendly.

Sure.

To tech.

Sure.

And then we've swung a little bit maybe and everyone's accused of being too antagonistic.

No, it was antagonistic. I think it's swung back.

Too friendly.

No, no, no. I just think it's like kind of healthy right now.

Yeah, yeah, it is. It is kind of.

Well, that's what I think. What's being tried, you know, they don't want to say, this is going to fail. This is terrible. These are terrible people. But they want to tell the human interest story of it. I think that's where the stories need conflict.

And I, I know, I know friends who have time and time again been in industry, in tech, in technology, protech, and then they say, we want to Protex make stories. And what you realize is that, well, you need an antagonist in a story. And if you don't have an antagonist, you don't have a story. You don't have strife if you don't have a low point. And so when I would talk to friends who were running companies, I would say, look, I know that you've had failures. I know that you tried to raise money five years ago, you're super successful now. But five years ago you tried to raise money and the investor pulled out at the last second. And that employee that you wanted to hire said no. And the product that you released crashed and no one bought it. I know that you've been through trials and tribulations. You have two options. One is hide those and try and tell the story of everything went perfectly the whole way and it will be a boring story that no one listens to. Or you can tell the real story of the highs and lows and the ups and downs, and you'll have a riveting story that actually makes you look more heroic. Because who wants to watch Star wars without any strife, without, you know, when.

You tell people that, what's their reaction?

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

And then this goes back to controlling the narrative, right? Like, put it out there, put it and weave it in as part of your talking points. Tell the story and give the journalist something to work with that has friction, like you said. Otherwise they're just going to go off and Find it anyway and some disgruntled employees going to come to us.

And I think that's the risk of trying to over control with the owned media is if your own media doesn't have any conflict ever. Because anytime something bad happens to you, you don't post.

There's a few VC podcasts lately that got into a situation and just stopped.

Stop posting. And so like imagine if you're, if you're American Eagle or Cracker Barrel and you have a substack that you've built up or a YouTube channel and then there's a big dust up and you're just, it's the best content of the year about you. Everyone wants to hear from you. You have an audience and a channel that's ready, they're interested in American Eagle. What more would they want to know about this? And you're just like, I'm out.

I think the astronomer example again this year. That's a perfect example. They went head straight.

That was master class. Master class.

We had the founder on the founder.

Pete. Pete, right, yeah, Pete DeJoy. Yeah, yeah, we had him on the show, on our show a little bit later.

And it was funny. We were joking because they had. The day before that controversy broke, they had published like a case study with Ramp.

Oh yeah.

Who's our presenting sponsor. We were joking. We were like, did Ramp somehow.

How many stories do you like? How many pieces do you publish a year?

A year? I try and do about four to six a month, I think, whatever that average is.

And what does it take to get in the 4 to 6?

I would say come with some friction. Come with a story. And I always say it doesn't have to be a huge brand. You just got to give us some numbers. The amount of people that say, I've got a great story I want to tell. We did this amazing marketing campaign.

Make it concrete.

Yeah, like, well, we are. And my favorite line to use is we are the Wall Street Journal. So, you know, you gotta give us some dollar signs. I like that awesome percentage.

This is a lesson for us. We need to. When we tell someone, well, we are tvpn, we need to know what that means. Maybe we can impress upon people, don't come with your talking points. As a conversation. We are tvpn.

Like, leave the talking points.

You can't come with talking points because this is dvpn. We're.

Leave your PR outs knocking on the window.

We were talking to Kramer about. That's the number one thing we want to do.

Do you think we've passed the peak of wellness. It feels like wellness is as a trend has been so impactful now that young people are proudly throwing up their hand. I don't drink alcohol. I never drink.

Is an unwell network doing well? Isn't that easy to the same.

That's the pendulum swinging back from wellness to odd. Wow.

I think you might be right maybe. But yeah, we've just been having this debate internally, like how durable is the trend?

Well, it's funny, it's difficult because, you know, you guys live in la, I live here. I feel like, I feel I go out on a Friday night in the West Village. No one is looking very well. You know, like the kids are drinking, they're smoking. Smoking school again, apparently, you know, I think. But then the rest of the country, I don't know, I think is probably still. The wellness is probably still sort of.

I mean, show that people aren't drinking very much. Especially in the younger demos.

Well, especially in, I mean, in restaurants.

In restaurants.

David Chang on the show, he was talking about how a lot of restaurants are struggling just because they had this high margin revenue from alcohol that was getting tacked on to every bill that's, you know, evaporated.

I mean, it's very difficult to break out and I'm sure someone has. Whether a time with the economy is like it is, is it because of you go to a restaurant, are you going to go? Well, I can't really afford it so therefore this is like the one thing I can like take off my bill or is it because I'm actually stopping drinking? And it's difficult to know that causation. But I think, you know, I've got the CMOs I speak to in the alcohol world. They all have in it a pretty not difficult time. But they, they know that change is coming and you know, they're making little alterations and they never, if you've got an advertising budget, they've never been able to say, hey guys, drink clothes, you know, go out, have, get absolutely plastered, have a great time. So, you know, they haven't had to change their marketing too much because of that. But I think in terms of, you know, where they're showing up and how they're presenting themselves in the real world world, that will be quite interesting.

Yeah.

Lot of other things that I'd love to talk about, but let's do it again soon.

Yeah, let's do it again soon.

Do it again.

This is fantastic.

Congratulations again.

Thank you for coming on such a special place.

I'm enjoying these ramp these good Call.

Not lighting a fire, even a candle.

In you can tell that I'm not a pyromaniac. Because a pyromaniac.

It's just one match.

Exactly. It's just one match.

What about one more?

Burn your receipts, Times money, save both. I like these. These are very fun.

Well, how much time do we have to do timeline? We are going to an event later.

Let's do another 20.

10 minutes from Lulu. I haven't seen these. She says it's worth signing up for Blueprint just to study the marketing emails. They're fun and easy to read. Read no corpo slop. Educational. So you're getting useful info rather than just being marketed to. Great at building trust through transparent and proactive communication. Why Brian and Kate. Write them personally and you can pull some of these up.

I do think that it's possible that Brian Johnson is the best marketer in the world right now. He's competing and like actually, you know, the team are like innovating at a bunch of different levels. Like just like in creating.

You know, plenty of people like you know, want to critique him or disagree with his philosophy or approach or whatever. But as a business person you have to appreciate how he just makes. Finds a way to make him the center of a lot of attention. Pretty much every single organic king of organic. And I know that I'm sure they spend a ton on traditional ads too for Blueprint.

It's going to be a monster business. And he has a CEO in the seat right now too. Right? Didn't he hire? Yeah, or maybe he was going to hire but like there's going to be some operating.

Somebody was claiming that his whole relationship with Kate was just a marketing stunt.

And it's like so many celebrities throughout the. Throughout the years. Yeah, all sorts of all sorts.

There's definitely precedent for it about it in. In other news, did you see their.

K trucks are coming back?

Yeah. So something about.

Basically eliminating like Biden.

People are saying that. So. So. So the news is that apparently you'll be able to buy a very small truck soon which is a thing in Japan supposedly not has been made illegal.

Yeah. So they were Biden era vehicles. Fuel efficiency rules.

I feel like you haven't been able to buy one of these in a long time and it never made sense because it should be the most efficient.

The rule called for a yearly 2% efficiency increase for cars made from 2027 to 2031.

Just took a lot of these off.

The road and yeah, it's the cafe. The corporate average fuel Economy standard.

The quote is so ridiculous. Here we're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculous, ridiculously burdensome, horrible actually CAFE standards that impose expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems. Gave all sorts of problems.

I wonder if this will drive people back to Tesla and saying like I, I bought this after Elon went crazy and then Trump went.

And then Trump brought in these. I don't know.

I don't know. I do think it's if. If I mean the real loser here, I would say some people would say the environment but potentially more direct is that company like Slate Auto trying to make a $20,000 truck. Meanwhile, these manufacturers have been making the $20,000 truck.

Yep.

@ scale and they're super.

Reliable. But I mean Americans have just voted with their wallets they do not want a two door truck. It's just, it's never worked like the Land Rover Rover Defender. There's, there's so many examples of two two door SUVs that have just not gotten traction like the Nissan, the Nissan Murano Cross Cross Cabriolet also never took.

Off. But even with, with true enthusiasts.

Of course even the, the Range Rover Evoque is a two door suv I believe not done. Well, I'm very interested to see two or G.

Wagons. Do you think we're. There's some that I would love to.

Own. Yes. But they're not exactly flying off the shelves. They're not being stocked on dealer lots because realistically you're gonna be like ah, I'd love the two door. But then you think about your family and you're like I need the four door. And that's what everyone does. And that's why every Ford F154.

Doors.

Did you see that? Adam.

Friedman. This is a hilarious bit by.

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

Incredible.

Bit.

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

Project. In other news, Pomp is announcing a historic decision at BRR. Yes, 100% of this is his digital digital asset Treasury. He's got.

Bitcoin. Bitcoin. He's going to buy bitcoin and then buy companies that produce more bitcoin or.

Something. Yeah, 100% of equity compensation for the CEO, me and the board of directors will be tied to performance milestones. Boards shouldn't be making millions of dollars unless retail shareholders are also winning. Now that I am charged I am in charge of a public company. I hope to set the standard for what true shareholder alignment looks like. I, I do believe this was in reaction to an activist investor that accumulated around.

7%. Did he also set his milestone to 10 trillion? He doesn't get a dime unless it's 10.

Trillion. I can, I can see that he's, he's a.

Permeable. That would.

Be. I don't think he's ever flipped bearish this whole year.

No. Anyways, I mean this is good. And the interesting, and the interesting iteration on this is that it's. Elon has set himself up with the equity compensation tied to share price, which went very well the first time and now he set himself up to do it again with Tesla. And what's interesting here is that with Pomp's BRR ticker, he. It's not just him, it's also the board of directors. And I think that at Tesla that's not the case. And so he's saying I'm taking it one step further. Now I'm still interested to see what are the targets like, because if you're like, you know, hey, the stock moves 2%, I get $100 million. People are going to be excited about that. But if you design those equity comp packages appropriately, obviously it's totally a win, win, win. So everyone can be very happy about.

That. Yeah. And we'll see how it does once, you know. Again, a lot of these digital asset treasury companies have performed horribly recently and.

Unclear. Marvin was, Marvin was texting.

Me. Okay, so Marvin, Marvin, Marvin Von Hagen is going. He's the founder of Timeline Poke, which is a social AI that lives in your messages. He says saw a TechCrunch tweet six weeks ago that Meta is trying to ban Poke. He said he directly asked for help on Twitter. Got a lot of intros, talked to the European Commission. EU officially opened an antitrust investigation today. X is unreal. He really.

Is kind of met his worst nightmare today. Just directing. He's basically. Are you really that surprised that Martin Von Hagen is.

Fully. Marvin, Marvin, sorry.

Sorry. Marvin Von Hagen is pulling the strings of the eu. But.

Anyways.

Pretty interesting. Well, good luck to him. We'll have to have him on the.

Show. Matt Slotnick says maybe the best quote I've ever heard in an earnings call from Benioff. Quote, we did 3.2 trillion tokens. Let Bilbo Baggins know that we've got adoption and usages happening here. That was just a shout out to jrr. Token, Token.

That is so good. Of course he's firing shots at carp.

Carpet. That is.

Hilarious. That is one of.

The. And he also made one at Oracle. What does he.

Say? Dig out of left to Oracle. Matt says make sure everybody realizes we're not building data center. We're preserving our gross margins and cash flows and using the data centers that are being.

Built. Love it. I love.

It. Nir says, today I learned I use more tokens than Salesforce.

Does. Yeah, I mean, we didn't get into this with Kramer, but the token thing, this could go so fantastically wrong if it turns into eyeballs. Like imagine if there's companies going out and publicly they're talking about their token multiples. It's like, yeah, we generate 100 trillion tokens and so of course we should be a billion dollar company. And it's like you're looking at dollars of market cap per million tokens of generation. Something like.

That. I don't think we're going to get.

There. I hope.

Not. I think there is a preced in through the.

Eyeball. But you could, you could do that and you could think of that as a proxy. Of course the correct proxy is. Is revenue and we should stay in that world. But you never.

Know. Yeah, you never know. Buco Capital says according to Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg kills goats with a laser gun and eats.

Them. This is. It's so.

Funny. He. The question was, what was your most memorable encounter with Zuck? Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat in front of you? No, he killed it before. I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser Gun and then a knife. Then they send it to the butcher. A laser gun. I don't know. A stun gun. They stun it and then he knifed it. Then they sent it to the butcher, evidently, in Palo Alto. And then the quote drops.

Off. Imagine you have your buddy over and you're like, hey, look, I run a social network. You ran a rival social network for a long time. I run Facebook. You ran.

Twitter. Let's.

Just. Let's just hang.

Out. I'm gonna show.

You. No, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I'm gonna show you a little bit of my culture, bro. Culture? You're a hippie. You got hippie.

Culture. I got a bitcoin guy. You're the.

Bitcoin. You're the bitcoin.

Guy. Costa Rican bitcoin.

Guy. I'm the UFC guy. I like to kill goats myself, but, you know, you're not supposed to go leak it. What's going on, Jack? Come.

On. Come.

On. I was off the.

Record. I showed you my clothes. Culture. In.

Confidence. What happens in Palo Alto? What happens at the goat. The goat farm stays at the goat.

Farm. Apparently not. Also hilarious, by the.

Way. We figured out that somebody on the show that's come on multiple times has hundreds of.

Goats. Oh.

Yes. And nobody knows about this. And people keep talking about the goat debate, this or.

That. The goat.

Debate. And we were talking about. And they're saying they need to keep quiet because there's a.

Real. Real goat.

Collector. There's a real goat.

Collector. A real goatherd. That's right, a goatherd. What else we.

Got? This is interesting. Google taps replit in challenge to anthropic and cursor.

Somewhat surprising considering that Google's going really heavy with anti gravity. But I think.

Replit. Google's invested in replication for a long time, like they did. They did a partnership or investment back before Amjad was making a couple million bucks in.

Revenue. Is capital tiny in.

Replit? Yes. Yes. I'm almost positive that Google has invested in replit at some point. We should look it up. But we're doing the fake news now. We're done with the news. It's fake news. It's the fake news hour. But congrats to Amjad on doing a deal with Google. I wonder how that will manifest, because you are kind of competing with a lot of the folks at AI Studio, and there's a lot of different pieces of the Gemini team that you're kind of dealing with. But at the same time, Replit is a unique product and Replit.

Has never been a foundation model company. And so it does make a lot of sense to. I actually like this a lot in the sense that where has Google been fantastic model development? Where have they been a little bit less speedy on the product rollout side, getting the product in the hands of people. Amjad's great at that. The Replit team's great at that. So you put them together and maybe it makes a lot of sense, but it's still just early.

Days. Two final posts. One, we missed this.

Yesterday. We have another.

Gong. Paul and the team over at Antifund have raised Jeff. Jeff Woo have raised a new fund. 330 million.

Almost. I almost said. I almost said 300 million. I'm sure they'll. I'm sure they'll be there soon. But they are. They say they're pred account industry leaders like OpenAI Anduril, ramp cognition and physical.

Intelligence. But look at this 20 minute video. This is an interesting switch of a launch video. It's shot on the.

Camera. We were saying this, we were saying this like a year ago. Like the way that we told some company. I remember, I remember the, I think I was saying to. You have to say you. Yeah, I was saying to Zach, we were talking to Zach Dell. He didn't end up doing this, but I was like do the 20 minute launch video, right? Like do a video.

That. Well, you have a different idea that you should not leave because I have that idea. But I love that this, I love that this happened the way it did. And I think that this is a good.

Format. And they're wearing suits. And they're wearing.

Suits. I think there's probably two to three more of these that will happen. I mean this does in some way mirror the Jony I've Sam Altman video of like them getting coffee together. And like there's these interesting things of like they're not launching a podcast together. They're just dropping a one off conversation that's edited kind of framing some of the history explaining it. It's a really clear whatever to communicate and of course because these guys are master communicators, they understand media and so very excited and What a portfolio. OpenAI anderal ramp.

Cognition. There's 1% that will go unnamed that links all of those companies.

Together. Fantastic. You know the fantastic.

Performance. You know the.

Person. Of course I.

Do. Final post Jeff Woo from Tanay Taney. Sorry, he's highlighting a company called.

Plod.

Plod. This is so never heard of.

Apparently. But it sounds like they're absolutely ripping the most successful. They said wearables were cooked, but Plod Records transcribes in summer. Of course, it's another meeting. Summarizing.

Product. It's a physical.

Product. 1 million units sold largely to doctors, lawyers and sales people. 250 million of annualized revenue bootstrapped and now.

Profitable. Literally. And it's crazy. Like no, no, no drama, no launch videos, no crazy high hype. No no rage bait. Just building in silence. We got to get this.

Guy. They raised around $5 million. But sure.

Sure. You know, I think the more important thing is just that is that hardware is hard and we see a lot of corpses in the. In the consumer electronics world. But there are also major breakout successes. The Oura ring, for example. Like, what a remarkable company to just show up doing revenue at their scale seemingly out of nowhere. Woop. Has done really well. And there's something. Yeah, aura. That's what I was mentioning. And then this new company, this meeting summarizer. Fantastic and interesting. We just haven't heard a.

Pitch. I'm so curious to know what this does so well that your phone can't do in an.

App.

I mean, I don't know. We'll have to ask them. We'll have to get the pound error. Maybe we'll have to buy one, test it.

Out. Well, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for tuning in from the video. We missed you in the chat, but we will see you.

Tomorrow. We'll be back.

Tomorrow. And thank you again to the Nicee team for hosting us. As always, totally surreal to be here. And thank you to everybody that has made this possible by tuning in, enjoying the show and supporting us. However you have. So have a wonderful evening and we will see you.

Tomorrow. Thank.

You. Take.

Care. Good night.