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

(01:40) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (34:00) - Jim Cramer is the host of CNBC’s Mad Money and co-founder of TheStreet. A former hedge fund manager, he became one of the most recognizable financial commentators in the U. S., known for his energetic style and market analysis. Cramer continues to cover stocks, investing trends, and business news across television and digital platforms. (01:13:50) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:15:58) - Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a leading finance automation platform, discusses the company's strategic decision to establish its headquarters in New York City, emphasizing the city's unique entrepreneurial spirit and talent pool. He contrasts this with the West Coast's corporate culture, highlighting New York's supportive environment for startups. Glyman also shares insights into Ramp's hiring philosophy, focusing on identifying individuals with high potential and providing them with significant responsibilities to foster rapid growth and development. (01:31:39) - John Zito, Co-President of Apollo Asset Management and Head of Credit, discusses Apollo's role as a leading alternative asset manager with over $900 billion in assets, emphasizing its significant presence in private credit and its ability to provide long-term financing solutions for large-scale projects. He highlights the firm's integrated approach to investment, offering tailored capital solutions across the capital structure, and underscores the importance of building a strong organizational culture by recruiting individuals with purpose and high character. Zito also touches on the evolving landscape of private credit, noting its growing role in financing asset-heavy industries like AI and defense, and the necessity for companies to adapt to this shift by partnering with trusted capital providers. (01:53:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:55:07) - Katie Deighton is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering topics related to brands, marketing, advertising, and media. In the conversation, she discusses the challenges brands face in navigating crises amplified by the internet, the shift towards owning their narratives through platforms like Substack and YouTube, and the potential impact of AI on consumer perceptions and advertising strategies. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com/ fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  I think we nailed that. It is Thursday, December 4th, 2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  Here we are.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  The real fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Our second favorite place to do business.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  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.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Living legend.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  She says, "A really bright spot for 2025. Has been getting to know these guys. That's us. That's us. We're proud to announce today that the New York Stock Exchange is TVPN's exclusive exchange partner, covering the IPOs of tomorrow. We are proud to provide the backdrop for their coverage of the next wave of tech-driven innovation. With Jordi 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."

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, this partnership was probably the most natural.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Match made in heaven.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  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. 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.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  We do. We do need to tell you about our sponsors. Ramp, Time is Money, SaveBoth, easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  And there is some news on the timeline. Should we start with Gemini?

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  And so Ross Hendricks says this is the correct take. He's talking about Gemini winning the AI race and questioning, is it bearish for the market as a whole if you think about it, which is what Efficient Market Hype said? Gemini winning the AI race 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.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  Hot take.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  I think it's thought provoking.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  I disagree with a lot of it.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  I think it's very real in some sense.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  We always knew that Google would put an incredible amount of pricing pressure.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  On cash flow.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  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. Like, Google's already been investing billions and billions and billions of dollars in these categories for a long time. Overall, this, I'm not convinced that there will be a monopoly in LLMs. It feels today like we're headed towards like a duopoly at the very least. And you can just easily see that there will be a number of other players making plenty of money. I feel very, I feel very good about Anthropic right now, right?

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic, I thought Dario's commentary yesterday at Dealbook Summit.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  It was fantastic.

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  Was. It was, it was a wild, it was a wild interview. Cause he kept saying like, I'm not going to say who I'm talking about.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  It was really wild.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Obviously talking about OpenAI.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, obviously talking about. He had some, he had some crazy lines, didn't he? So he, he was saying that, basically saying he felt like, he literally said the word YOLO.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  I missed that, but it's very clear that he grew up like just maybe blocks away from Alex Karp. Because they have the exact same accent. And it's very jarring when you listen to it because they both talk about AI. But they're very different people in terms of like the ideologies, the types of businesses that they're building. Everything about it is different, except for they sound similar. So we got to put them together at some point. I do have an overall rebuttal, which is, and my rebuttal is brought to you by Vanta. Automated compliance and security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring and security reviews. So.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  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, like there's a little bit of like the innovator's dilemma, there's the new exciting technology. But if it's not going to monetize as well on day one, then all of your investors, all the public market investors start asking like, is this going to structurally hurt your business? And this happened with Reels, remember? There was this big question with Instagram, like, hey, we're moving from the image-based

• 5:00John Coogan?

  feed where it's very clear that you can just drop a link to the next thing to Reels. Is that going to monetize as well as the rest of the feed? And the answer was yes, definitely. But it took a while and there was like some skittishness there and Meta had to do a lot of work to monetize that. And so I would be surprised if Gemini can hold out on not monetizing forever.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

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

• 5:31John Coogan?

  They could have gone free.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  Both Gemini and OpenAI offers free student plans, or at least a year free, but they're charging for the product. And 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 G Suite effectively. So it's like notify me about emails that you're determining are urgent, right? And so interested to see.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Tom Osman 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. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Lisa Su gave her opinion on the Google TPU.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  She broke her silence.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  She broke her silence. She responded. She fires back. Shots fired.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 6:50John Coogan?

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

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Very similar to Jensen's line as well.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  I mean, it's not wrong.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  Or the Nvidia Newsroom line.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I guess the question is, you know, Ilya seems to be at SSI, Ilya Sutskevich at SSI, seems to be the most age of research-pilled, since he coined that phrase and kind of ushered in the age of research. He seems to be the AI researcher that's doing the most undirected, the most, like, the least purpose-built training potentially. We don't know what he's doing, but like, you would think he would need the most flexible systems.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  And yet, it feels like he's maybe aligned with TPU. I feel like I saw something about that. So, I don't know, I don't know when an AI researcher would say, "Yes, I need GPUs over TPUs." In fact-

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  When we talked about the training chip yesterday, we were reading that there's some companies that are doing interesting things on that architecture. So-

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:01John Coogan?

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

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  Who could that be?

• 8:17John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe OpenAI.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  One of the new largest shareholders.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess they're shareholders, right?

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  Or potentially a large shareholder.

• 8:24John Coogan?

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

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  There's just a ton of just...

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Recommending content.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Put the ads in the chat.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  Just put the ads in the feed.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  In the feed.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Put the ads in the trough.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  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 can't, you simply cannot know ahead of time what to hard code into an ASIC. That is the difference. Well, I mean, if you're Google, you kind of can, since you invented the transformer, you're like, "Let's bake that in."

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  They might need to create the copium chip. And remember Nvidia, so Nvidia on November 25th said, "People are very concerned by this post. Nvidia offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions." And so, again, that's a fair point of view, but I think that we're already seeing that plenty of players are happy to buy a chip that is good at a specific framework or function, right? And so they're pitching the one-size-fits-all, the toolbox, basically, that you get in a Nvidia GPU or an AMD chip, so.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  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.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Lisa ended by saying, "So a 20% to 25% share for ASIC-style accelerators 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.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  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?

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  And then 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 Nvidia AI, 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 forked that.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  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?

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

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

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

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

• 11:51John Coogan?

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

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

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

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

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

• 12:36John Coogan?

  You're the time traveler scenario, what are you saying?

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

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

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Okay, maybe.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  And he's trying to bait them in, say, hey, come over to DeepMind. I don't know who, it doesn't matter where you were created.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome here in the post-AGI era.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  I just like the idea that, you know, we initially were joking. Talking about like the the media landscape being like the the punk landscape and you have like pop punk, post pop punk, trad punk, or underground neo punk, or neo new metal, all these different, you know, musical subgenres. Uh, all of that has come to AI fully. There is, there is AI, AGI, ASI, safe superintelligence, post AGI research now, uh, post neo AGI will be next, I'm sure. Uh, but until then, until then, go check out cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer Devon.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  So there's been uh, back and forth on whether or not OpenAI is rolling out ads in ChatGPT. The the most recent reporting out of the the code red memo meeting, et cetera, was that they were that they were uh, potentially pulling back a little bit on ads. Uh, there was a bunch of different accounts, including Polly Market, that were sharing that OpenAI is ready to roll out ads. Yep. One thing that was notable was that I saw a ton of people dunking on it and being like, just very against ads in in Elon. So a lot of people, uh, and you were talking about this, who's gonna be the first?

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Eric Sufer, Ben Thompson, we're holding up the wall being like, we will stand with you, Sam Altman in Fiji, Seemao. If you roll.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  And Sundar, and Sundar.

• 14:21John Coogan?

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

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

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

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  To take the first leap.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

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

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly, exactly. I think we were talking about that yesterday. The the 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, uh, it's gonna be wild. But what what does Signal say here? He says, one last thing on ads, if I'm Google, I wouldn't run a single ad on Gemini core. I'd run it at a pure loss until every competitor is forced to slap ads everywhere just to keep the lights on. Yeah, it's the bleeding out strategy, but Google had the opportunity to do that with, uh, they 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 gonna take zero margins on this and really try and take market share from AWS and Azure. They've all agreed, no price wars, basically.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Let's compete on functionality, let's compete on branding, let's compete on integration. They have not had a price war.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 15:43John Coogan?

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

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

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

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  And they're trying to improve it by, you know, they're constantly trying to improve that. But there, there's very notable that it's such a, such a massive difference in, in conversion rate. It just shows the level of intent that, that somebody has when they're coming from ChatGPT. They've done a bunch of product research, most likely. They've looked at options. They're, they're landing on the Ridge site, like basically ready to pull out a wallet and a wallet.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Well, they don't have one.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  A digital wallet.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  And purchase.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Pull out a credit card from a loose, from a loose collection of, of receipts and, and cards and cash that they've been carrying in their pockets because they need a wallet. Because they don't have one. That's what's going on.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Joe Weisenthal, Brother Joe, Sir Joe Weisenthal.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations to him. It was the 10 year anniversary party last night, I believe. Overnight success.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  We just missed it.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Overnight success, yeah.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  People were.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  How big the Uber burn was before ultimately getting in the black. And so it's hard to see the exact. Back numbers here in this chart, uh, Amazon looks to be like sub a few billion dollars.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  A few billion dollars.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Sub five billion dollars.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  The, the, the real, the real story with Amazon though, was that, was that they were just basically cash flow zero for a long time. When they could have been generating 10 billion or something like that. So it was effective, but I mean, that's obviously way better for shareholders than, hey, we're going to lose 140 billion.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  This, this projection is factoring in Sam trying to also build SpaceX within OpenAI.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Yes, that was in the business.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, in the, in the journal today. Why don't, why don't you read through it?

• 17:54John Coogan?

  So this is a scoop from Berber Jin, one of the greatest to ever scoop. Uh, it says, OpenAI CEO considers building or partnering with rocket company. Uh, 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, uh, Elon Musk SpaceX. Altman reached out to at least one. Another front, uh, invading Russia in the winter, one might say, in the AI winter. Don't invade, don't invade.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Don't invade, uh, what is it? What is Starbase during the AI winter?

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, into, uh, he reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stoke space in the summer. And discussions picked up in the fall, uh, 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, uh, would total billions of dollars over time. Uh, the talks are no longer active, but this happens. And now it's leaking. Uh, Altman and OpenAI are facing market headwinds after striking hundreds of billions of dollars deals. So, uh, first to close out the, uh, the, the, uh, the burn thing. When I'm looking at this original chart of like Amazon over, over eight years burnt half a billion or, uh, you know, a couple billion.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Then Tesla burnt more, then Uber burned 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 that out? Everyone will say absolutely, absolutely. And so if the outcome at the end of this is, yep, it's going to be the front door to AI for everyone forever, or for 30 years, you know, or something like that, like then it's totally worth it.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  There is a comment here that's from Fei- Fei Zhu that says, "I feel like comparing dollars spent in the 90s versus the 2020s should probably be normalized." So yeah. In other news-

• 20:05John Coogan?

  I have more on this potentially, but let me tell you about public.com, investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. So they are opening up a second front. What's interesting is-

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Not a second front, a tenth front.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  It's funny that there's no, that Sam Altman is not teaming up with Jeff Bezos, who has Blue Origin, but lacks a really strong AI bet. There was a little bit of anthropocene going on- He has his own company, yes, but he's not- I would not say that Jeff Bezos has as much control over AI as Elon does with XAI, right? He doesn't have as much-

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  He's a co-CEO of Project Prometheus.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  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 product, but you can't say that Elon is like sitting on the sidelines during the foundation model wars.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  You basically can't say that about Bezos, right?

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would argue that they have 6 billion of funding.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Oh, for this?

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  It helps. It helps when your co-CEO is started at Amazon.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  I don't know. I would just, I would, I would see them as potentially like natural, there's a natural alliance there. Bezos has, has a copy of everything Elon's done, basically. Like Bezos has Rivian to compete with Tesla, which is interesting. He's not, 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.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Mets owner Steve Cohen

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  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. That's a thousand-room luxury hotel, 5,000 slot machines. So for those not familiar.

• 22:06John Coogan?

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

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 22:12John Coogan?

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

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Atlantic City, I feel like has been.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  To predict what happens with the next pull.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Yes, because that would help you understand what's likely to happen.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  And you could hedge any type of risk that.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. The slot machine might encounter.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, if you're in the slot, if you're in the slot, you know.

• 22:40John Coogan?

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

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that could, you get wiped out.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna have restaurant, bars, and a theater for shows, and 25 acres of public parks and playgrounds.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  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, imagine a jungle gym.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  That practices the three-year bandits. You get used to the muscle memory.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Throwing, throwing dice, throwing dice.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

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

• 23:15John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. Yeah, we can make a whole casino-themed playground using generative AI and use that to design.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  And with the New York State Gaming Commission predicting that the property. Predicting. Predicting.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Wink, wink.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Wink, wink. That the property will generate 3.9 billion in annual revenue. Cohen's 50 acre complex would instantly be one of the top 10 largest US casinos by revenue. Anyways.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  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.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  We missed a post on the SpaceX competition.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  We did.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

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

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson 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 three years since ChatGPT.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 24:53John Coogan?

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

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Stoke Space is the, is the better option for him. But. Put aside all the dynamic, all the competitive dynamics.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  I think it's possible that Sam was looking at Stoke Space, which most recently, as of October, was valued at $2 billion. And he was like, hmm, I bought Johnny Ive for, what was it, $6? And I absorb another $2 billion company?

• 25:58John Coogan?

  I mean, uh, I, okay, like, like-

• 26:01Jordi Hays?

  He wants to own the full stack.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  Yes, which is getting stackier and stackier every single day. Uh, you're gonna need to start buying land to buy the silicon, to buy the sand. Um, but do you think, there's obviously an immense amount of pressure right now on data center buildouts. They're using too much energy, they're using too much water. If you put them in space, do you think that helps the discourse at all?

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

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

• 26:31John Coogan?

  But, but, but truly, it's going to be much harder to say, like, hold up an electricity bill in Memphis and say, hey, my electricity bill went up and it's because of Annie over there in the data center, who's just, you know, slopping it up. Uh, instead, you're gonna be able to say, hey, the data center, that, yeah, it's generating sometimes helpful math homework help, sometimes creative writing stuff, sometimes some weird stuff.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes curing cancer.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  Sometimes curing cancer, sometimes 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?

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, who knows?

• 27:15John Coogan?

  I think it has to.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  But, but I agree, then, then the discourse will be us blocking up the sun.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  But it is notable that, that every time, 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.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  But they're dunking on it as, uh, as like a violation of the laws of physics, or like, not a good-

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  Too futuristic.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Too futuristic, like, it's not gonna work in the near term. The economics-

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Feels right for a moonshot.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  I haven't seen, like, like, like, there, there, there are viral dunks that are going on right now around the prediction markets. And those are like, those viral dunks are like, this is a bad thing. 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.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  What did Sager say about prediction markets?

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Well, you look that up. Let me tell you about numeralhq.com compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, so you can focus on growth.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Sager said in response to a video about a prediction market, he said, it's pretty simple. If you think this is cool, you're my enemy. So he is drawing lines.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Showing sides.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  In other news.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  There really are like, like active political candidates that will be in Congress in 18 months. That this is their whole thing. Their whole thing is their anti data center. And so, you know, get ready, get ready to testify, brother.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Anti data center and anti prediction market.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  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 gonna happen.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think there are a number of enterprising, young politicians.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  That will pick it up.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  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 a part of my platform. It is.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Which is less popular? We should have a prediction market. I understand. Are prediction markets or data centers less popular?

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think data centers might be less popular.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  The hard, the hard, one of the things is like.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Prediction market, you can just not participate. But with the data center, if it's in the backyard, your power goes up, your power.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Also, 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.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Benefit, like, is benefiting from them. It's like, okay, like, pull out, pull out your phone. Let me see the apps on your phone.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, you don't, you don't, you don't need this resource.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  I like this, I like this.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Whereas prediction markets, there's some people that just get, they don't, they're not interested in the data. Even I've seen a lot of polling, polling, people that run polling firms are like very against prediction markets.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  I saw that, that was funny.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  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 mega deal still isn't signed two months after it helped fuel an AI rally.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is just an update to what was in the earnings release. So this news was the language was in the earnings release that that this deal had not been signed and it's more in an LOI phase.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  They did say during the launch, we have a, what was the exact wording? It was like, we have, we had direction, it was like, we basically like, this is like, we've directionally aligned.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  I think it's directionally gonna 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 the, this particular equity investment deal can wind up resulting in a, effectively a 30% discount or something like that. So I'm not, I'm not surprised if this winds up going through in, in one way or another, although I do think it will need a, you know, tweak. And, and 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

• 31:32John Coogan?

  as opposed to letting him go over to TPU. Like, he's sort of like fighting on defense a little bit right now because people are talking about.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, apparently it was a good time to go on Joe Rogan.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  It was.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, just another pod guy says, another Jensen interview. Now I'm nervous. A lot of people were saying that this was somewhat bearish.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  I listened to it on a plane.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

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

• 32:14John Coogan?

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

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  I think it makes a lot of sense.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  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?

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  Talks about the value of hard work.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought they had a good time together and it didn't seem like there was any like undercurrent of adversarialness. It felt good overall. I enjoyed it. It wasn't like you shouldn't go into it thinking you're going to get Jensen on Dorkesh and you're just not going to get like a really deep insight into Nvidia's strategy. But that's not the point of this particular interview. 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

• 33:40John Coogan?

  coding and deep multimodal understanding. We have Jim Cramer in the

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  A living legend.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  At the New York Stock Exchange.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  He just celebrated 30 years.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  He is the author of how to make money in any market. And we will bring him in. We got the buck. Come on in. Welcome to the show. Good to see you. It's been too long. Thank you so much.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  Where's the gong?

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Hit the gong.

• 34:07Jim Cramer?

  I mean, really.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  He was so ready. He was so ready.

• 34:12Jim Cramer?

  Thank you, gentlemen.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  Get a clean hit. Get a clean hit.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 34:22Jim Cramer?

  Okay, there's an entry.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  There's an entry.

• 34:24Jim Cramer?

  You guys look fabulous. I love it.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  You look fantastic too.

• 34:27Jim Cramer?

  This is a great home for you at home.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  It is. We love it. We love it. Every time we're here, we're enjoying it very much.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for having us. You're basically the ma- are you the mayor?

• 34:35Jim Cramer?

  Um, yeah, I'm more of an official greeter. I'm more of an ambassador.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  So, so 20 years on Mad Money, correct? How many ti- how many years in this building? How, how, how long have you been working here?

• 34:46Jim Cramer?

  We've only been here for about, I guess like four. We were in Ableton Eclipse for a long time. And we had a studio for us. Sorry she asked this, because now this is our studio. Uh, you can't control the sound levels of who's here or whatever. But I kind of still feel it's hard to capitalism. I really do.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  It's a spiritual home.

• 35:04Jim Cramer?

  Yes. And I do like wall and I do like broad and I do think that, that there's a level of excitement. Not the way it was when I got in the business in 82, when I first walked down the street and it was an engine. Uh, 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, and it's exciting. It truly is exciting. I mean, yeah, walking the boat.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Do, 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, uh, 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, uh, I also think about you, uh, 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?

• 35:51Jim Cramer?

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

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Jim Cramer?

  I did think, as I was telling you, terrific people out there, that there would be more execs that just would come through.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:01Jim Cramer?

  And they don't. Um, and we were near Cheetah Borough at the other place, and they do. But, uh, I like to be out in person on the road all the time. Uh, the issue of course is we do three segments, uh, their interviews, we do a lot of this.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  The issue is there's no time in the day.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  You're always on TV.

• 36:18John Coogan?

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

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

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

• 36:50Jim Cramer?

  Yes, when you guys do stuff where you did, you said something the other day, there was a guy who said, you thought he was in a booth. Yeah. And that incredible reinvention, right?

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Jim Cramer?

  Reinvent, but he was really not at the booth, but the other guy was saying, oh yeah, he's around here somewhere.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just Simon from TurboPuffer.

• 37:07Jim Cramer?

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

• 37:21John Coogan?

  What about when you, when you can't be perfectly nice because things just aren't going well for a CEO? And, and maybe you, I always think back to that interview you did with Tim Cook, I think it was about a decade ago. They'd missed, I think they'd missed earnings and, and the stock was selling off and you needed to ask the hard question.

• 37:40Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, you do.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  What the, what the, what the street was saying, but you didn't want to, you know, come at him too aggressively. How do you think about that?

• 37:46Jim Cramer?

  Well, it's very funny.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Jim Cramer?

  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 kidding me. How about I add this? He goes, oh yeah, that's great. You're kidding me about you're asking about his wife? I mean, I, I do find that what happens is the facts dictate the graciousness. And if a guy misses a quarter and says that the quarter's good, well, he's a free fire zone, okay? If a woman comes on and says, look.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  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 it's 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 to?

• 38:34Jim Cramer?

  You nailed him. You nailed him.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

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

• 38:45Jim Cramer?

  Yes.

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's important, right, that 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 and understand.

• 38:56Jim Cramer?

  Well put.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

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

• 39:12Jim Cramer?

  Well, let's talk about Benioff, I'm interviewing him tonight. The previous quarter, I did not like, okay? And he came on like gangbusters that it was a great quarter. And that caused me to do something I don't like to do, which is interrupt mid-sentence. Because someone's talking, and we all, we grew up thinking, our mothers told us that would be rude. So now I'm into the rude element, right? And first he thinks that the rude element is a bit of a, for show. It's like, oh, he's a little Broadway action. No, it was like, ah, 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, jeez, I think Jim Thoreau's a bad quarter. And then by the end of it, he said, wow, Kramer hates me. No, it's not, I don't hate anybody, right?

• 39:57Jim Cramer?

  But the fact is, is that this quarter was the quarter I was waiting for.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  How many conversations have you had with Benioff, live, on the air?

• 40:02Jim Cramer?

  Oh, probably, maybe, yeah, probably, I guess fifty, sixty. But I, there was a period during the, I was gonna call it the plague. Then I talked to him every day, or texted 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.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure, sure. So you're working together on a project.

• 40:26Jim Cramer?

  But, look, 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.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  Only two, that's a small club.

• 40:37Jim Cramer?

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

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:42Jim Cramer?

  This is cool, man.

• 40:50Jim Cramer?

  I'm sorry. This is exciting. You guys are exciting. Thank you.

• 40:54Jordi Hays?

  No, you're exciting. You are. So you are genuinely, people in our world do ask us time to time, they're like, "You guys are crazy. You've started a business that you can't stop working on." Like, we are, we are, we make the business every day.

• 41:09Jim Cramer?

  And I see it.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  And we tell people, like, do you think, you see Kramer, you don't think he loves what he does? And that's exactly what we want to do. We love, we love, we love that we get to meet up every day and talk about the stuff that we're interested in.

• 41:24Jim Cramer?

  Well, you see, listen.

• 41:25Jordi Hays?

  And I can see doing it for decades and decades and decades.

• 41:27Jim Cramer?

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

• 42:12Jim Cramer?

  But yeah, Amazon, my book came.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, 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. CGI. And they don't actually ship anything. Like sci-fi experiences, and then nothing ever comes to fruition. And so, it's easier to clock those companies from the West Coast because of just the whisper networks, and you might know somebody that worked at the company, you might know their investors. You can, if a company gets to Series D... And they haven't had a single tier one ever invest or participate.

• 42:59Jim Cramer?

  This is what you know. You know this so well. I mean, like, people say, well, 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 and you, but you don't make it so I can't learn the language. You, you want me, you want me to learn the language. It's terrific. I have going for me history and that's my edge. So for instance, today Micron got out of the, what I regard as the most consumer. Now, I've been begging them to get out of the consumer for, for, actually, literally for 20 years. Because they have a high end and then they have the, the low end and the low end gives them the 10 multiple. My high end gives them the 20 multiple. And I've been talking to Sanjay, whom I really like.

• 43:39Jim Cramer?

  And it's like, I'm like, Sanjay, you have to like do this. And he's like, Jim, I don't need to do 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, ah, and I wrote, I'm not in quiet. I think you're fabulous. And, and, but that's because I remember the 95 breakdown where the, what happened is, is that that little bit piece of capital goods, equipment came out that could make a little more than we needed for the, of the memory chips. And then it goes like that. And his stock had been the number one and then 500, number one.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

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

• 44:12Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, always.

• 44:15Jim Cramer?

  If it's the 90s, absolutely, if it's the 90s. Like for Intel, when I speak with them. I mean, I'm not, no, I'm an idiot.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  And there's new leadership.

• 44:24Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, but I would tell you, like, I forgot my anniversary, my wife's, and my, and my, my wife's birthday. But I remember the, the September collapse in 95. But that's because it's all wrong. I have a memory for some things and they're the wrong things, except for one more here. What are they doing out there? Did we hear that your sound? It must have been a tris, you guys should go like the tree at six.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we'd love to. We'd love to. The show will be wrapped up by then.

• 44:48Jim Cramer?

  Okay, so when you're out there.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  One thing later, one thing later with, with Benioff, you gotta, you gotta ask him about token consumption. Because he came out with really big numbers.

• 44:56Jim Cramer?

  3.5 trillion, 3.2 trillion, 3.2 trillion.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Was it three or one?

• 45:00Jim Cramer?

  No, it was 3.2, I think.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  But it sounds like a big number.

• 45:04Jim Cramer?

  But it's not.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  There was AlphaSense, somebody at AlphaSense was sharing, they were sharing that they use around half the tokens, obviously not quite the same scale, much smaller company.

• 45:13Jim Cramer?

  You know, Jensen wouldn't give you, Jensen wouldn't give you that rap. I mean, I remember when he did a, a me, uh, one, 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 it all really came down to, there was this show at that point, uh, 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 DaVinci. He knows acting, he knows plays, he knows, you know, he's a well-rounded guy, but all he does now is like.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Got good taste in jackets.

• 45:48Jim Cramer?

  Uh, but how about all this stuff he has to talk about?

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what do you, what do you, uh, how, how have you been processing all, you know, everybody competing to say the biggest number, right?

• 45:57Jim Cramer?

  Oh, God. I have a piece tonight that starts, and I mentioned you guys right at the top, because I'm like. We thank you. Well, no, because like I say, that, 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 there, you know, I'm like, I'm, I'm not as good as Jordy, what a day. No, you know, your wife doesn't want to hear that when you come in. Now, 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. Uh, OpenAI's got a new chat GPT that's better than Gemini. After you just said, holy S, demonize the best. You don't want to be in that world. And yet, you guys know that that world is fluid. Yep.

• 46:40Jim Cramer?

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

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

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

• 47:36John Coogan?

  What is the most underrated sound on your soundboard?

• 47:40Jim Cramer?

  Okay.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  What, what do we got that's underrated?

• 47:42Jim Cramer?

  Well, mine, right now, I think, I, I happen to think, uh, there, there's a sound right at the, uh, at the bottom right, which was from off, which was from Office Depot.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:56Jim Cramer?

  That was easy. That was easy.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  That was easy.

• 47:58Jim Cramer?

  But that's, that was when the show started. People would just say like, what was that? I don't remember.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  I see that was the big red, the big red bar. The button, the button. There's the big red button.

• 48:08Jim Cramer?

  But I, I think it's so cool, but like people are saying like, what, what, what is that? Uh, it, it, was that a chain or something? And so it's, it's, it's become a relic, but it's a good noise.

• 48:16John Coogan?

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

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  Listen to this sound. Listen to this sound. You know what this sound is?

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's, uh, Call of Duty.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  Night vision goggles going on.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  Cause uh, we, we grew up on Call of Duty.

• 48:31John Coogan?

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

• 48:33Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, I grew up on POM.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:35Jim Cramer?

  Right? I mean, POM was great. I thought POM was incredible until Donkey Kong.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:39Jim Cramer?

  Like, Donkey Kong was incredible. These things were incredible because they replaced crossword puzzles and Tic Tac Toe.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:45Jim Cramer?

  Right. Twitch. Who owns Twitch?

• 48:47John Coogan?

  Amazon.

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  Amazon.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  Of course. We gotta get Andy Jassy on Twitch. I want him to do earnings. I want him to do post earnings on Twitch live.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  You know what, so.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg's on Instagram doing front-facing videos. Get Andy Jassy on Twitch. Andy Jassy.

• 48:59Jim Cramer?

  Zuckerberg, no, he's got no, uh, salary cap.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Jim Cramer?

  It's unbelievable, my God, right? Everyone else had this kind of sort of, but you salary cap.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't exist.

• 49:09Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, you thought Howard Rossmann was good. No, he sucks compared to Zuckerberg because he's got the salary cap.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know, uh, some, some, something interesting on the, on the Amazon front. Uh, the train, trainium, when they, they were talking about their new.

• 49:21Jim Cramer?

  Not so good.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  No, uh, no, when they're talking about their new trip, they specifically, uh, They're specifically mentioned during a training run for a company called Descartes. Dean, the founder.

• 49:30Jim Cramer?

  Right, which I only know because of you guys.

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

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

• 49:42John Coogan?

  There could be something moving there.

• 49:44Jim Cramer?

  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 rolled, cold rolled has got a high multiple and hot rolled is low. You know, the steel is steel. And so you always have to be really careful knowing, knowing that you don't know certain things. Like I, I wouldn't, if there are certain specs put out on ASIC, uh, Google, I, I, I have to be very careful. Because when I listen to what, you know, what Andy Jassy will call me, he'll school me. And he'll be right to school me because I don't know enough.

• 50:21John Coogan?

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

• 50:29Jim Cramer?

  Okay, I'm gonna give you a crazy one. I'm gonna give you a crazy one because I, it's, it's gonna be, I have to make it so it's enjoyable. I haven't gotten it yet. It's Levchin. Max Levchin. I intend to get him where I need him.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  You gotta talk about espresso, espresso.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  He wants to talk about coffee. He's obsessed with coffee.

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We spent like 10 minutes talking about.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  We'll send you the clip.

• 50:51Jim Cramer?

  You're kidding me.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, this is the alpha.

• 50:52Jim Cramer?

  I didn't know that. Shoot, shoot.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  And he also likes, uh, long, uh, long distance biking and riding.

• 50:58Jim Cramer?

  Oh my God, but he's got a carp. He doesn't want to kill it.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you're, you're the tough thing. You got a three minute segment. It's hard to spend, it's hard to spend three minutes talking about coffee.

• 51:06Jim Cramer?

  Then you give him more time because I didn't know, 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, who should get credit, credit in a country where you still have to care about democracies. He's the, 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. Uh, 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.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, uh, my, 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, that's why traditional podcasts are so great.

• 51:51John Coogan?

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

• 51:55Jim Cramer?

  Well, good. That's a goal then. It's a goal. And the reason I want to do it is because I find him completely fascinating. He came on the show when the stock, I told him, come on the show when you think it's going to break out, will ya? Who's going down? It's at 33, he came on the show and I said, well, I, what do you think here? And he goes, well, the stock is now done going down and it's going up. No one ever says that. No. They never come back. There's like, oh, well, Jim, that's you. That's all there. You don't know. No, he said, well, the stock's now done going down. And I was like, at the end of the interview, I said, that was a gutsy call. And he goes, what? I said, that it's done going down. He goes, why is that gutsy? There's my guy.

• 52:30John Coogan?

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

• 52:53Jim Cramer?

  All right. So I, I'm out of the closet this one. Somebody was going to say it here. I always tell people, look, what I'm looking for are companies that in many ways are the worst thing that could ever happen for our country. I'm looking for monopolies. Because monopolies, uh, monopolies just, they've got the gross margin. I just want big gross margins. Nothing like, did you guys ever read Rockefeller by Chernow?

• 53:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, the guy had 100%. And what we had 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, I, I look for monopolies. Or, and I'm happy with oligopolies. Like right now, Lindy, uh, Lindy, which is an energy company, industrial, gas and, uh, and air products. There are, there are slap happy, uh, duopoly right now. And they should be raising prices. They're like not being good duopolis. But that's, you know, that's kind of.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  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.

• 53:45Jim Cramer?

  You know, Postmates.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Jim Cramer?

  I like Postmates.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  Weren't they, weren't they acquired in, right?

• 53:49Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, by Uber, right?

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bastion, Bastion's the man.

• 53:52Jim Cramer?

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

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  Wait, how have you been processing Google then? Because Google-

• 54:07Jim Cramer?

  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 gonna take, put Google in the same bed that James Caan was in, in the show Misery. You know, gonna hobble him. And he said, "Listen, we're gonna hobble him, I mean, like, you know, make it so he can't walk." "Yeah, that's it there." And I took him seriously. And I spoke to Google's attorney, who was, of course, much smarter than the Justice Department. But I believed the Justice Department, I thought that they were gonna wreck the company. And they kept saying over and over again, "And we're not gonna let it be like Microsoft." 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?

• 54:53Jim Cramer?

  You don't know what's gonna happen to them." And then you get a judge who finds them a monopoly, like, "Man, I gotta get out of this thing, this is bad news." And then the judge, like, three months later says, "Technology's overtaking it." Not only is it not a monopoly, but we think it's great that they paid Apple 20 billion to knock out everybody else. I was dead, I was dead, I was flat, and I was real killed, 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."

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the real thing that hasn't played out yet is like, what happens if we do end up with a duopoly in search, right? A lot of people, I mean, in ChatGPT, it has 800 million weekly active, it's gonna have a billion-

• 55:26Jim Cramer?

  Well, I wanna see, because they may, you know, they don't have the balance sheet. You guys ever read Niall Ferguson, Pity of War?

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Jim Cramer?

  Well, that is about, whoever has the deepest bomb market wins. Uh, sends you money, I mean, he's got, the bomb market is better for the other guys.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  So, yeah, this is a question for you, because it felt, like, I felt very comfortable covering the AI horse race, the foundation model race, from a 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, at these right levels?

• 55:59John Coogan?

  You know, we're having John from Apollo on the show, I hope he can explain it to us a little bit more. But how do you think about if a story kind of leaves your orbit? Do you just bring in people on to understand?

• 56:08Jim Cramer?

  Well, I mean, you have to bring the balance sheet up all the time.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Jim Cramer?

  And, uh, it's- Funny because I have a general show. Yeah. And I'm always afraid to bring the balance sheet up for people saying, you know, geez, I want to see what's on the Price is Right. I mean, there's like dial anywhere but that. It's, oh, Friends, there's Friends. You know, look for old Seinfelds versus me talking about the balance. Sure, sure, sure. We have to do that.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

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

• 56:35Jim Cramer?

  Yeah. But I get a kick out of the idea that, you know, that Oracle gets involved and that Larry Ellison, who is one of the toughest guys on earth, who's never made a mistake, and Safer Katz has never made a mistake, are getting involved. And then Safer leaves. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So that's a good story for me because that's.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  Is Larry, does Larry?

• 57:01Jim Cramer?

  Do you know him?

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, he's never been on the show. He follows TVPN.

• 57:05Jim Cramer?

  He does? He does.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  He followed very, he followed very early.

• 57:08Jim Cramer?

  He's not very.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 57:14Jim Cramer?

  Larry, no, no, never.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't do a lot of.

• 57:17Jim Cramer?

  And like, I've tried repeatedly, but I won't get on my knees, I mean. He doesn't do a lot of media. I think he might talk about like the University of Michigan. Okay. Do you think Mark Cuban, he's been on your show. Yeah. Do you think he's the reason why Indiana's such a good football team? Oh.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  We have no idea.

• 57:32Jim Cramer?

  I honestly don't know enough about sports.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  People have used the ESPN attack on us, but it's funny because I've maybe.

• 57:38Jim Cramer?

  Just don't watch enough sports to know.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Watch, yeah, I've watched like an hour of sports in the last year.

• 57:44Jim Cramer?

  What do you read into the co-CEOs? When you see something like that. Co-CEO? Yeah, I mean, having Oracle. Where's my eh? Eh?

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you got all.

• 57:53Jim Cramer?

  No, I, co-CEOs. Do you need interim, basically? Yeah, it's just really hard. Does it have Sequoia Capital now? And that's obviously a big focus of ours, of our world. Benny Hough was co-CEO with Keith Block. That was just suboptimal situation. Yeah. Uh, we got the co-CEOs now at Oracle, let's see what happens. Netflix has done it. I think it's hard unless you can have really defined duties like they had at Workday. Uh, and, uh, but otherwise, no. It's not something I really want, want to see. Yeah.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are you feeling about that?

• 58:24Jim Cramer?

  I mean, it's just the opposite of this.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  How are you feeling about the IPO market?

• 58:27Jim Cramer?

  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. I look, I don't want to protect anybody from investing in anything because everybody has a right to invest in everything. But you know, if you were to do a uranium company right now, a company which just says, and all it does is say, we will find uranium. And you use a really funny symbol like, you know, five U's instead of four. I mean, look, it, you know, you price it fifteen, it opens at twenty-four, and then you wait six months and you sell every share. And that's what I'm afraid of.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:01Jim Cramer?

  That's what I'm afraid is going to happen.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Are the biotech companies taking advantage of the AI narrative or is there a particularly different narrative?

• 59:06Jim Cramer?

  No, I think there's just been a lot of, well, I shouldn't say it, there's been some.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Because that's starting to bubble up in in tech, in Silicon Valley, folks saying, hey, in the future, drug discovery is going to be accelerated. The timeline is going to be way shorter. The economics are going to be completely different.

• 59:20Jim Cramer?

  But the big companies are just, they're just sales companies because when you go to the unbelievably cool, great person who does healthcare and, you know, and Nvidia say, that person doesn't, they're not, you know, Bristol-Williams isn't, get me, get me help. It's not those guys. It's not those guys. And it really bothers me because if you're going to accelerate what's going on with cancer, okay? So that you can do, you know, look at every single data point and know everything within within five minutes. You should be able to come up with the holy grail drug, you know, 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 a hope. But they should be using it and we should be making far more progress than we're doing in healthcare.

• 1:00:03Jim Cramer?

  It's just, you know, when Jensen came on with with Synopsys, I mean, it's pretty clear they're doing the digital, they're doing the digital twin. By the way, you know, I thought the digital twin would have been good with with Vision, with Vision Pro, but I guess Relic.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:19Jim Cramer?

  But I I do think that that's the missing link. Like, and I think if anybody does it, it's gonna be Willie and Dave Ricks because he can get outside himself and think about some ideas.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like him a lot.

• 1:00:29Jim Cramer?

  You do? Has he been on the show?

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  No, not yet, but.

• 1:00:31Jim Cramer?

  Isn't that, is it terrible that he has it all the time?

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  We rang Gong, uh, we rang the Gong for him.

• 1:00:37Jim Cramer?

  Heard him from Ricks?

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Because he hit a trillion dollar valuation.

• 1:00:39Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, wasn't that great?

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:00:41Jim Cramer?

  Walmart's at nine hundred.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Oh, they're close, they're close.

• 1:00:43Jim Cramer?

  That guy Doug McMillan, the guy's retiring. I mean, he cratered the stock when he came in, get huge bonuses and huge salaries.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  You wanna crater it when you leave. You wanna crater it when you leave.

• 1:00:52Jim Cramer?

  Have you been to Walmart lately?

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

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

• 1:01:08Jim Cramer?

  Is that really?

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Etsy and Walmart have leaned in.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Respond into a partnership somewhere, but.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Etsy and Walmart have leaned in, eBay and Amazon have leaned out.

• 1:01:16Jim Cramer?

  Wow. So they had a good quarter, Etsy had a bad quarter. Uh, Amazon, we know.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so, and so it's the, it's the laggards in the markets that are, that are trying to catch up by saying, hey, maybe we missed, maybe we missed the, you know, the real power law outcomes of the internet.

• 1:01:30Jim Cramer?

  I thought it was interesting, Costco's deep into, uh, uh, agent force. Do you think Mark's gonna rename the company Agent Force? That's my first question to him. Look at all the different silos, go to the page eighteen on the deck.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:40Jim Cramer?

  And there it is, seventeen, eighteen, it's like everything's agent, you know, all the different things he has.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  The big question is.

• 1:01:46Jim Cramer?

  They're now all called agents.

• 1:01:46Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is gonna rename Meta? Did you see the rumor today? That he's just gonna call it Zuck?

• 1:01:54Jim Cramer?

  He oughta rename, he, he oughta just rename. That was, that was a dumb rename.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  My, my whole thing is, I think it's actually, I think it's a good name. It actually is the metaverse. If 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 is the, it is the metaverse. 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.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a metaphorical universe.

• 1:02:23Jim Cramer?

  But maybe with Vera Rubin, they can do high speed video, uh, short ten. Second clip for an ad on Insta.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Jim Cramer?

  And that might work. I mean, right now I would put it in Reddit. I don't know. Have you seen the rates for Reddit? The rate card?

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:02:36Jim Cramer?

  It's like a fraction and it's very targeted and it's really good.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Reddit ads, Reddit ads.

• 1:02:41Jim Cramer?

  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 love.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:02:50Jim Cramer?

  Sure. Mezcal love. You know, they say, I love it. Melanomy. My daughter's unfortunate. She beat it. But that's like, that's targeted, targeted, targeted.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:58Jim Cramer?

  I really like that because the rates, I told Hoffman he's charging too little.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

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

• 1:03:07Jim Cramer?

  Yes, he is. And then CloudFlare is doing their best to be able to block. Well, you did CloudFlare. You did the implications of their.

• 1:03:16Jim Cramer?

  See now there, did Matthew not, don't call me Matt, did he call you?

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he, he came, Matthew came up once, right?

• 1:03:22Jim Cramer?

  Was he good?

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

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

• 1:03:25Jim Cramer?

  He's real smart.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Jim Cramer?

  Hey, we should talk about like who's like a really good guess 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. Yeah. You send a major consumer package.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Team that you gotta have on, you gotta have the semi-analysis team on.

• 1:03:38Jim Cramer?

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

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Jim Cramer?

  It was too long. I was like, oh my God, look at that. Look what's on. It's the jet game. I gotta go watch it.

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:03:57Jim Cramer?

  They are.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  They're very good.

• 1:03:58Jim Cramer?

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

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Going after.

• 1:04:08Jim Cramer?

  Wow.

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

  We got John.

• 1:04:09John Coogan?

  Look at that.

• 1:04:10Jim Cramer?

  26 ramp. Yeah. Isn't that doing a C round? 26 ramp?

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  They're waiting on a series C.

• 1:04:17Jim Cramer?

  Well, should I always say?

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  They're gonna be here any day.

• 1:04:19Jim Cramer?

  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?

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Series E.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Series E.

• 1:04:28Jim Cramer?

  I'm sure I just did a series E round.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Companies are going series G, series F.

• 1:04:32Jim Cramer?

  Jeez.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  People go really G.

• 1:04:33Jim Cramer?

  How about down round?

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Because people don't, down rounds bad. People don't like, people don't like going public. It's a hassle. They don't want to deal with the SEC.

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about if Stripe stays private forever?

• 1:04:46Jim Cramer?

  Johnny Calson? People don't realize that. He was the great writer. He was a great writer for the Philadelphia Phillies. He had a home run in the 64 World Star Game, the win.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  What do you think if a great American company stays private forever?

• 1:04:59Jim Cramer?

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

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  I've got to answer to you.

• 1:05:16Jim Cramer?

  No.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  You're more likely to get talked about on that money if the stock's moving.

• 1:05:24Jim Cramer?

  Well, it's even when you have like a Wells Fargo and the guy comes on and he's got this like all these flowery coats. They quote at the beginning about Lombardi. Lombardi was always saying, listen, if there's a mistake, there's me. And then the first thing he says is like, you know, actually there were these employees that did it bad. And you don't pay attention to them. It's like, no, in your annual, you say that you're sorry. Let me see that. Let me see that.

• 1:05:50Jordi Hays?

  How do you get people off your talking point, off their talking point? Because that's, I would say like the only thing, the guest that we don't like, the guest that we don't like.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

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

• 1:06:03Jim Cramer?

  I had one the other day who was doing it and I made a joke and I stopped and it was just like, I said, that was a joke. Now, 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 hasn't said anything. And I said, by the way, that was a joke. He goes, you know, I was laughing on the inside. Boom. See, that guy 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 tough. You really want to nail him, you know, it's like, then he's just charming. Charming is the end of, look, talking points and charm are those are the like the soul and

• 1:06:47Jim Cramer?

  cribbous that we have to really avoid, right?

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Funny story with Jensen, uh, we were in, uh, we were in DC and we were sitting there talking with Shane Copeland from Polymarket who has a partnership with ICE. And Jensen came in and Shane goes, "Hey, I'm, uh, uh, I'm, uh, hey, good to meet you." Like, and he's like, Jensen's like, "Oh, what do you do?" He's like, "I'm the CEO of Polymarket." And Jensen doesn't, he doesn't know it. And Shane afterwards, he's like, "Oh, I gotta work harder. I gotta work harder."

• 1:07:13Jim Cramer?

  Oh, that's him. He gets up at four, does the emails, and now he probably sets it at 3:45 and checks all the things he doesn't know that are related. Jensen's up at four? Aren't you up at four, too? Uh, no, 3:45. Oh, but who's counting? He gets up at four. He's getting up at four. He's getting up 15 minutes after you. How long's it supposed to get up after him? You wake up 15 minutes before him, send him an email, what have you gotten done so far?

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Wait, Jensen, do you genetically just need less sleep?

• 1:07:37Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, what's going on? How is this possible?

• 1:07:39Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:07:44Jim Cramer?

  Okay, so, because I'm, we're not on air, I'll tell you what the things I take. So I take Klonopin, I take, I take melatonin, and I take a gummy, and I can't stay asleep. See, it has to do with staying asleep. How much more do I take? I can't, these are all like illegal substances to some degree. Now, they're actually controlled substances. But I, I, that's what I do to be able to stay asleep till quarter of four.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  So it's more about trying to stay asleep. It's, you know, stay asleep as long as you can.

• 1:08:14Jim Cramer?

  It's like, "Oh, look what time it is. Oh, I went to bed seven minutes ago. I gotta, I get this picture of me and my wife."

• 1:08:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you have your Apple Watch set up with like different alerts on?

• 1:08:21Jim Cramer?

  It has roving pictures of my wife.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about, uh, when the markets are moving?

• 1:08:25Jim Cramer?

  Well, that's great. It's wedding pictures, making some sauce. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Whoa. Oh, my God, it's my wife.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:08:32Jim Cramer?

  She doesn't watch anything that I do. It drives me crazy.

• 1:08:35Jordi Hays?

  Tell us about the book.

• 1:08:36Jim Cramer?

  What was the process like? The book was about, uh, 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 three, I'm gonna learn about it, maybe I own a share. Right now, that's streken verboten. People feel if you do more than own an index fund, you're, you know, you don't know what you're doing.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:58Jim Cramer?

  I come back and say, the information is never easier to find. All these people believe only in index funds are just dog bitis. And what really you should be able to do is do index fund and do side by side.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Jim Cramer?

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

• 1:09:55Jim Cramer?

  I've seen people make tens of millions of dollars. So what we end up doing, we have a millionaire's lunch with Jensen. Every, you know, firefighters, police, people who listened. Now, some of them were because, because I named my dog Nvidia.

• 1:10:10Jim Cramer?

  Did you? Yeah, well, that's, that worked, that actually was pretty, a lot of people go, it was a dollar at 90 when it was at. And I told, I said, they said, I told Jensen. He says, no one knows me, what's going on? So you know what, I'm like doing this stuff and it's like.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  Now he's at the top.

• 1:10:26Jim Cramer?

  Yeah, I got your back, I got your back. And I said, listen, I just came back from California, I gotta tell you. I had this dog named Everest. Uh-uh, no more. The dog is Nvidia. And that's why, like, I keep saying, you know, there was a police officer who came to the show, he goes, look at. I bought, I'm a millionaire. I bought Nvidia. I said, when? He goes, when you named your dog Nvidia? I said, well, do you know really kind of what it does? He goes, well, you named your dog after it. You don't name your dog after something if you think it's a fly by night thing. Boom, right? That's an amazing story. Can I stay on forever? I wish, I wish. Oh, that was, they're chewing up.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  I think it's your people.

• 1:11:02Jim Cramer?

  They're chewing up. Look at these guys. These people all want on.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  I think it's your people.

• 1:11:06Jim Cramer?

  No. Oh, no. What's it? I said, all these sweaters, they're chewing this one. I guess so. That's Sam Quan Barkley, Ram investor. Yeah, you know, why can't you get more than 2.2 yards? 2.2 yards you're averaging. He, that's what he's averaging. 2.2 yards.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Let's make this a normal thing.

• 1:11:22Jim Cramer?

  Oh, I would love to. I would love, 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 that didn't take yourselves too seriously. Or I could learn. And it hadn't occurred until you.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:11:42Jim Cramer?

  And it's almost like, I always thought, what did people, they, 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 gonna be, the only time I want to be a little immodest. I like to think that maybe in some way you happened, because like somebody, sometime you saw me.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:12:01Jim Cramer?

  Because I think that you are, you're not 2.0, you're, you're sui generis. But I just feel like that you, that it occurred and that people, you're another reason why the book's writing. You're on our Mount Rushmore of media. There's four of them. But you're the biggest. Why? Thank you. Good luck to you guys. Keep doing what you're doing. You're just, you're just electric.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:12:25Jim Cramer?

  Right?

• 1:12:29Jim Cramer?

  All right, go get it. It's all right, guys.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:12:32Jim Cramer?

  Pretenders coming in. Alert, alert. Pretenders coming in.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  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 ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Our next guest is Eric Glyman from Ramp, from the Ramp Business Corporation. What an electric moment. What a fun time.

• 1:13:01Jim Cramer?

  Oh, go.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's a goat.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  My goat.

• 1:13:04John Coogan?

  He's a fantastic performer. He's been in front of the camera before.

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  He's an entertainer.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  If there's ever been

• 1:13:11Jordi Hays?

  He's doing TV three-

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Putting in 10,000 hours gets you good results.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  He's doing TV at least four times today. He's doing his show three times.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  He popped on to our stream.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  I mean, 20 years of Mad Money, he must be he must be well past 10,000 hours on camera.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

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

• 1:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  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 clusters.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Darren Rovell is sharing. Apparently, somebody is claiming that a Google insider has been trading on search markets. They're saying, somebody'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 Rovell says, "This is what happens, what will continue to happen when unregulated markets are bet on as if they are regulated." Here's the thing, they are regulated by the CFTC.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  And there is-

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

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

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  And you would think, like, what private information is there?

• 1:15:06Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  It's a Brian Armstrong- Kind of laying out the the bull the bull case for insider trading.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  He gave an interesting example of an admiral at sea.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  I like his, I I mean, yes, it was it was sort of a bad example, but I liked, I liked his, uh, 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, he's promoting it.

• 1:15:33Jordi Hays?

  It's something we need to figure out. It's something we need to figure out. It's happening.

• 1:15:36John Coogan?

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

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  Where 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, uh, do you think, uh, do you think Bitcoin should be a commodity or a stock or something like that? And you have to be like, well, theoretically, here's this. Well, without further ado, we have Eric Lyman from the Ramp Business Corporation.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Without further ado.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:16:03Eric Glyman?

  Great to see you too.

• 1:16:04Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe you made a sweater just for Ramp investors.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  It's incredible. What is this?

• 1:16:09Eric Glyman?

  Doing a tree lighting outside.

• 1:16:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, the holidays are here.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  What is this? Should we open this on, should we open this on air?

• 1:16:15John Coogan?

  The Saigon Berkeley X Ramp collab sweater. Is that right?

• 1:16:20Eric Glyman?

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

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  I love it. And you've got the yellow socks on too. You look fantastic.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic to see you.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  How many of these exist in the world?

• 1:16:29Eric Glyman?

  Not not enough. You know, I think probably a dozen or two.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  Wow, look at this too. Yellow matches.

• 1:16:36Eric Glyman?

  Light waist on fire.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  I don't I don't know if we can, uh, I don't know if we can actually light this candle.

• 1:16:40Jordi Hays?

  We probably shouldn't start a fire in the night sea, but we will enjoy them.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  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 rules on the stock exchange. Like, there are a whole bunch of rules about what you can and cannot do. Because, like, there's serious business happening down there.

• 1:16:57Eric Glyman?

  Well, you guys have like a deep partnership though. Can we ask Lynn if we can be the first show to enjoy a light, like a scented candle?

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  A scented candle? Yes, yes, yes. But I would, I would definitely ask for permission with this one. I would not be caught dead begging for forgiveness.

• 1:17:12Eric Glyman?

  Okay.

• 1:17:12John Coogan?

  No chance, no chance.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  How are you doing?

• 1:17:14Eric Glyman?

  By the book here. I'm doing great. I'm doing great. And congratulations.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:17:24Eric Glyman?

  It's, uh, well, this is the capital of capitals.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  So you had to be here.

• 1:17:27Eric Glyman?

  You know, this is, uh, we're, exactly. I love that eagle sound.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

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

• 1:17:41Eric Glyman?

  Look, for, I remember, we, our last company, we had gone out west, it was YC Demo Day.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Oh, you did, you went through YC.

• 1:17:49Eric Glyman?

  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.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Were you Kareem roommates during YC?

• 1:18:01Eric Glyman?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:18:03Eric Glyman?

  You know, and those were tough times. I remember, we, we lived on Sand Hill Circle.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Sand Hill Circle?

• 1:18:08Eric Glyman?

  At the time, we don't cook all that well. We knew about Seamless, and the sad part was, there were only two restaurants on Seamless. And so, like, we lost a lot of weight.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  What are we gonna do today?

• 1:18:18Eric Glyman?

  What are we gonna do?

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  I've been there.

• 1:18:20Eric Glyman?

  It was terrible, we, we lost a lot of weight that, that summer, it was, times were tough, and then, at the very end, we discovered DoorDash, and we realized there weren't fact ways. But, I, 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.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  That resolved it.

• 1:18:36Eric Glyman?

  You understand what you're saying.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  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, I, 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 world, right? That so much of the things and the products in our lives, in our world, is due to the earnest hacker, but there's another archetype that I feel like finds their way to New York, which is the earnest, the earnest builder.

• 1:19:14Eric Glyman?

  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 era, was, the average person they hired stayed there for about 12 months. It was an incredible mercenary culture. The, the San Francisco and West Coast of 2015 through 2020 something, we can debate kind of the year, was not this, like, you know, earnest hacker, it's two people in a garage, it had become very, very And everyone who was out there, I felt the small startups, unless you were the hottest company at all points in time,

• 1:19:59Eric Glyman?

  your engineers were getting picked off by Google, by Facebook, was going to the next hot company.

• 1:20:04Jordi Hays?

  And people were, I feel like in some ways, taking a portfolio approach. They're like, well, if startups are risky, why don't I work at four startups over four years?

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  It is crazy that if you just graduate regularly on time from a good college, by the time you're 32 and maybe trying to buy a house, you can have done three, four-year vests.

• 1:20:23Eric Glyman?

  Yes.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  That's a crazy thing to be like, yeah, I got some options over here vested, a Series A company I joined, then I jumped over to the growth stage company and I have this portfolio. It's like, that's not the goal here. The goal is to go on a generational run.

• 1:20:36Eric Glyman?

  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. 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, 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.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  MongoDB.

• 1:21:11Eric Glyman?

  MongoDB. Then you had these companies that were authentically built here in New York. MongoDB, Datadog, all the direct-to-consumer companies. And you had classically people who were in touch with culture, designers, marketers, people in finance. It was all kind of here. And so what happened was, as I think the West Coast was becoming a very hard place to build a genuine company.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  Constant talent war.

• 1:21:36Eric Glyman?

  Constant talent war. In New York, you had the talent, you had people who were moving to be out here and then all that was missing was...

• 1:21:44Jordi Hays?

  People also wanted to live in New York.

• 1:21:46John Coogan?

  New York City.

• 1:21:47Jordi Hays?

  It's like the, it's the greatest city in the world.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  It's still a meme among AI researchers, like, should I move to New York? Should I, like, get out of the hustle and bustle almost of San Francisco?

• 1:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Probably not AI researchers, but engineers broadly. It feels like going on, it feels like going to Hawaii.

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  People are like, I'm ready for something different, and maybe I can go over there. That's fascinating.

• 1:22:03Eric Glyman?

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

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:23:10Eric Glyman?

  Yeah. I, I think a lot of people who walk around the Ramp office, you guys know this, the company is incredibly young. Um, you know, I think the average age is, is, is in the twenties, and a lot of it relates to our, to this idea of finding people who are on a steep slope, um, versus, like, Intercept. Obviously, of course, we have people who have had incredible experience and pedigree, but the question is, if you play out one or two years' time, um, there's some people with a lot of experience who've said, I've seen this movie before, I've learned all that I'm gonna learn, uh, and, you know, get a little bit better over the course of the next year. And then you have these people who graduated top of their class, uh, maybe they're nineteen, maybe they're twenty, maybe they're in their mid twenties, but they wanna work, they wanna learn, and they're on the steep trajectory.

• 1:23:54Eric Glyman?

  And we find these people who Have incredible drive, have incredibly high IQs. We give them more responsibility than you'd expect and you're patient, you wait a year and suddenly you are you are filled you're filled with people at your company who are far more talented than maybe you could afford to hire otherwise.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Eric Glyman?

  And

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  If they already had the Ramp logo on their resume and you were, you know, another another company.

• 1:24:20Eric Glyman?

  And they're managing teams and they're loyal and they've like grown incredible equity in the company, which has grown even more since they've been here.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Eric Glyman?

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

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. John, I interrupted you.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:25:05Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  Right?

• 1:25:06Eric Glyman?

  Thinking money.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  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 like, how do you bring AI to bear in the product in a way that's not like commoditized like every other company, but still showing some of the value? AI is this weird thing where it's becoming like overhyped and then maybe potentially like even controversial in some 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 prospective

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  customer through the AI piece of the value prop from from a from a catchphrase or a tagline down to like, okay, you're actually sitting down with a CFO like, like what promises are you making them? Because you're probably not saying like, yeah, you're never going to touch anything ever again, right? And you have to like, be somewhat realistic about that. So how are you

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  Get ready to enjoy PTO, buddy.

• 1:26:14Eric Glyman?

  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 on the show. Every day.

• 1:26:29Eric Glyman?

  It's becoming my mantra. I say it every day. Every day. So you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror. Time is money, save both. Use corporate cards, bill pay, call, we can get a whole lot more all in place. It is. And by the way, you know, for any CFOs out there or financial professionals who haven't yet adopted Ramp, you know, give your CFO or the controller, you know, the wonderful gift of Ramp, help them save 5% money. Yes, yes.

• 1:26:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:27:03Eric Glyman?

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

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Or the opposite would be like a new video model.

• 1:27:30Eric Glyman?

  And that also shows because you're a pre-I company.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:27:37Eric Glyman?

  It's selling things versus value. And to be very specific about it, like if you, and Jeff Bezos has talked about this in another context. It's, it's, it's, as soon as people ask what's going to change over the next 10 years, it's more interesting to ask what will not. Right? And in 10 years from now, or 100 years from now, it is very clear that people will always want to get more for less, for fewer dollars, for fewer hours. 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, um, you know, you think about, you could sell thinking or you could sell thinking, thinking money. We can help you spend, that might change.

• 1:28:18Eric Glyman?

  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 is 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.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Money starts to go, I don't know if I want to spend myself today.

• 1:28:48Eric Glyman?

  Maybe not, not feeling it.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  I might just chill in this treasury account.

• 1:28:51Eric Glyman?

  It's this timeless idea there, guys.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  We, we, we need you to ring the gong because I, there is a milestone, uh, 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, uh, that I was like, I was like, is it, are paper receipt companies a thing? Are they still big? Turns out there was one that was worth like $22 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 receipt.

• 1:29:24Eric Glyman?

  Death of the paper receipt.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

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

• 1:29:33Eric Glyman?

  Thank you.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

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

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:29:50Eric Glyman?

  We're, we feel like the lucky ones. Thank you and congratulations again.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Love you, dude.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. We will also talk to you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Also tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, secure its spend on white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Cheers, we got our Red Bulls.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  We're going, cheers.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  What a fun show. Next up, we have John Zito, co-president of Apollo.

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  Apollo.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  A fledgling asset manager with $900,000.

• 1:30:32John Coogan?

  $900,000, $900,000.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  $900,000.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

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

• 1:30:37Jordi Hays?

  $900,000.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  $900,000.

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Or is it $900 billion?

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  It is $900 billion. It is $900 billion. $900 billion. He's going to answer some hard questions. What is private equity? What is private credit? What is asset management? What are alternative assets? I like, I like the traditional assets. It's the alternative ones that scare me.

• 1:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring him in, let's bring him in.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're ready. He's put on a microphone.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  He's getting miked up.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

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

• 1:31:44Jordi Hays?

  Are you giving Eric a little pep talk there?

• 1:31:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, a couple of things.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  You guys are friends, right?

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  Oh, he was.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  I can see that. He's such a nice guy, so he's got to be a char.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  Don't fall for the ramp pitch.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:01Speaker 04

  He was counting everyone's money, not everyone's.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'm saving your, I'm saving, I'm going to save you time and, and your money. I'm going to actually take your money.

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  And I'll be saving it for later.

• 1:32:10Jordi Hays?

  For myself.

• 1:32:11Speaker 04

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

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:32:21Speaker 04

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

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Other things.

• 1:32:28Speaker 04

  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 with high character, find people that are, you know, generally good people first.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:32:41Speaker 04

  And then all the investment characteristics.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  How do you like to evaluate people for purpose?

• 1:32:46Speaker 04

  I mean, for us.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

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

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Speaker 04

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

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

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

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Maybe share some of the same numbers you shared with our mutual friend Patrick at Invest Like the Best because the velocity that you guys are moving at is pretty good.

• 1:33:19Speaker 04

  Patrick's a great guy. Senator's a good guy. I know you guys are close to Senator too.

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  Senator's the best.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  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 900, over 900 billions, our own capital through retirement service.

• 1:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Through a theme.

• 1:33:39Speaker 04

  Through a theme.

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:40Speaker 04

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

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Somebody wants to retire someday.

• 1:33:49Speaker 04

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

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  I warmed up for you.

• 1:34:14Speaker 04

  The guys out there told me I'm the first alternative asset manager leader on your show. I don't know if that's true, but you know.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  I think so. We've had plenty of people that have, I'm sure, 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.

• 1:34:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:35:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Speaker 04

  So insurance.

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  We got to experience that with SVB, a little duration mismatch.

• 1:35:16Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:35:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  And a lot of the people in your guys' universe, it's, um,

• 1:35:38Speaker 04

  historically, they had to go public to get access to money. And now everybody's staying private way longer.

• 1:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:35:51Speaker 04

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

• 1:35:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Speaker 04

  They're staying private longer.

• 1:35:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:35:58Speaker 04

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

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Speaker 04

  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, now everybody's accessing this private markets, and because it's growing so quickly, it's in the news a lot because it's, oh, wait, it's growing fast, it must be risky.

• 1:36:28Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:36:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, he put out an op-ed yesterday.

• 1:36:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe, yeah, talk as much as you can.

• 1:36:38Speaker 04

  I mean, look, there's lots of, uh, everyone has a weird definition of private credit.

• 1:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  And so they have a hard time, everyone has a hard time, okay, private credit's risky.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

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

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  And that's private credit.

• 1:36:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:09Speaker 04

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

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  Yep. So. But how do you set up your firm to deal with a $10 billion deal with Intel all the way down to some smaller deal?

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

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

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  So, we're one investment business. So, you know, David Zamber, who runs Private Equity, you know, our, the guys who lead our hybrid team, you know, our credit team, all the people are all in the same investment meeting.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:39Speaker 04

  Talking about, okay, what's the best solution for the company?

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:41Speaker 04

  It's not really about, let's solve for this small thing for a fund.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

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

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  You know, like, historically, the credit business was, hey, we're gonna go to a bank, we're gonna issue a bond.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  And then we would buy that bond.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:58Speaker 04

  And that was kind of the public credit business.

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:38:01Speaker 04

  And most of those people were trying to, were typically conservative, and they were trying to get just their income. Because most of us grew up in the opportunistic business and we've evolved into an investment grade business.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:14Speaker 04

  We think more like builders and partners.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:38:17Speaker 04

  And we're just providing capital across the whole capital structure.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Speaker 04

  And when you can show up and say, hey, you need a loan against the building, you need a, by the way, you want a retirement program for your employees.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:27Speaker 04

  And you want a, a long duration preferred.

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Speaker 04

  And that's like the new, modern.

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  5,000 companies, aren't there only, there's 4,000 public companies. How many, so, are you a lender to almost all of the public companies that are at scale?

• 1:38:56Speaker 04

  We have mortgages.

• 1:38:57John Coogan?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  Commercial real estate loans.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  How do you think about the real estate market, mortgages, even buying houses? Like, how do you think about that portfolio there?

• 1:39:06Speaker 04

  We don't, we don't buy, we're not in the, uh, single-family rent business.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  You like your brand. It does seem like it does seem like a like a hot iron, but I have a friend. Companies. This isn't a gotcha because I have a friend who lives next to a house that was bought by private equity. He's like, yeah, they actually made it really nice and it's great. My neighborhood is getting better because of this. It's like kind of a hot take, but.

• 1:39:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, that part, that part has been in the obviously affordability is a big thing.

• 1:39:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:39:31Speaker 04

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

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

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

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

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

• 1:39:51Speaker 04

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

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

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

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Mortgages.

• 1:40:02Speaker 04

  Or mortgages.

• 1:40:03John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  Or in the security, historically, that that's going to be much more of a data AI driven over time. Our models will get better and better and hopefully.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  And there'll be more data plug in.

• 1:40:12Speaker 04

  All things associated with big pools and a history.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:16Speaker 04

  You're going to probably get more optimal pricing.

• 1:40:17John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:40:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  And that's going to keep getting better and better and better.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Speaker 04

  Um, and I think the scale players will ultimately win that.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 04

  And so, um, 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 sixteen companies which invest on our behalf that do specialty stuff. So our middle market lender, Midcap, will do that, has its own brand, its own employees, its own balance sheet. But we'll own some piece of the equity and some piece of those loans.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 04

  We bought GE's aviation business.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:01Speaker 04

  So we they do all the smaller or medium or big size aviation loans.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:05Speaker 04

  But in many cases, it's our capital.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  I I know there's some firms that 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 it's sort of like built to scale or built to die and that's the thing. Do you want to play in every market? Do you want to take advantage of every situation and be able to see what? 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?

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  Our private equity business historically been value oriented, not necessarily growth oriented. That'll help. With respect that we didn't buy any companies in 21, 22 that I think are going to be somewhat tougher to exit because of the prices they were paid. And they, our team's done an amazing job.

• 1:41:56Jordi Hays?

  Why didn't you buy any companies in 2023?

• 1:41:58Speaker 04

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

• 1:42:06Speaker 04

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

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. And on the private equity side, do you have a deal team members, operating partners that go inside the companies? Is there separation there? Or is it all one like kind of pool of human capital?

• 1:42:25Speaker 04

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

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Operations team that goes in.

• 1:42:30Speaker 04

  That would go in and operate. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:42:31Jordi Hays?

  How are you?

• 1:42:33Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Europe, we did a four and a half billion dollar deal for RWE. We did a six and a half billion dollar deal for EDF. I'm going to keep doing this. So we've done, we've done some of the largest European deals for power, energy, transmission. Defense, I think you'll see that continue in the U.S. Same thing, very large for BP, multi-billion dollar transactions. It is.

• 1:43:11Speaker 04

  If you told me five years ago we'd be doing multi-billion dollar deals for

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  In Europe?

• 1:43:15Speaker 04

  S and P 500, IG globally in Europe and the US, I would have said that's not gonna happen.

• 1:43:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:43:34Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  And so I think you're gonna, the logical answer for long-duration power projects, which require lots of construction or data centers.

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  The logical places for retirement, 401K, long-duration, investment-grade, annuities, anyone who wants long-term savings, it's a great, it's a great place to be. So I think you're gonna continue to see private markets being the primary force around financing all that stuff.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  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 a different opinion. You can look at, part of it is like there's some element of it that's unpredictable. You can also look at the present, right? Which is like people that have five, six years.

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  The present, I see it's a 50-year depreciation, right? What about mortgages?

• 1:44:28Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  I think there's gonna be winners and losers. I think, you know, for us, we've stayed more short-dated. So we did a large for Valor and XAI, we did a 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.

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Speaker 04

  That's, that's hard for us as, as credit providers. It's gonna be hard. I think anyone who says they know what the value of GPUs or the release rates are in year five, seven, or 10, I mean, it's hard to take that with any sort of credit.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  It's really hard.

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's.

• 1:45:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:45:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 04

  Is kind of scary for us, and we've been a bit quieter on that side.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

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

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:46:08Speaker 04

  All these growth companies, defense companies, Serronic.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:12Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, as opposed to you go back to Google.

• 1:46:20Speaker 04

  Twenty, thirty years.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Google was the most beautiful IPO.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  It's all asset light.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  It's all cash flow.

• 1:46:25Speaker 04

  And, and, and the mental model is always asset light and the debt is bad.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Sure, totally.

• 1:46:35Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:46:43Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

  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 I think you're going to get there.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

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

• 1:47:17Speaker 04

  There's definitely a big pivot. Last week and a half.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Speaker 04

  Lots of questions about, uh, off balance sheet debt.

• 1:47:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:24Speaker 04

  Should it be on balance sheet? Lots of questions about Oracle and others, lots of questions about some of the Neo Clouds. I think that's just going to, that's going to push Anthropic and, and OpenAI 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. Yep. Convert market, equity market, security, other markets than than just traditionally these kind of off balance sheet leases. I mean, the last.

• 1:47:54Jordi Hays?

  What's your overall view on that?

• 1:47:56Speaker 04

  All over the world, so. Feels like it's gonna happen. Yeah, I I think it makes sense.

• 1:48:00Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:48:14Speaker 04

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

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  But we we we spend, I would say, seventy seventy percent of our time talking about privates.

• 1:48:24Speaker 04

  Oh, do you? Okay, good.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:48:25Speaker 04

  And we're here, so it's good to be here today.

• 1:48:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, the funny thing, the funny thing Kramer kept speaking in share price and we're like, we only think of market cap.

• 1:48:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, market cap. Exactly. Like ramp the thirty three billion dollar company? I mean, look, there's gonna be next year's gonna 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 and A, I think you'll see a lot more huge technology wave. Who knows what with the four trillion, five trillion, whatever the estimate of capital, who will it will benefit, but it's gonna benefit the consumer.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Speaker 04

  At the end of the day, it's gonna benefit the consumer and.

• 1:49:00Jordi Hays?

  When you say M and A, though, is this is this PE funds that loaded up in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two finally capitulating or all strategic?

• 1:49:08Speaker 04

  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 Echo Star this year sold a bunch of assets in exchange for SpaceX stock. Yeah. You know, like.

• 1:49:19Jordi Hays?

  And people were like, wait, this company owns half of, or not half, but like half, like they've got like ten billion. Yeah, yeah. Five percent you look at the you look at the debt and you.

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

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

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  They're making an OpenAI movie. They're making a new Social Network Facebook movie.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  Are they?

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  Do you think they'll ever make a Caesar's Palace heist movie?

• 1:49:49Speaker 04

  Oh geez, I don't know. I don't know. I hope not.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  But I mean, seriously, like, because that book was introduced to me through our friend group and we were all like, "This is awesome." But oftentimes internally at these firms, like, everyone in Silicon Valley is like, "Yeah, Social Network, awesome movie. It inspired me to start a tech company." And Mark Zuckerberg is like, "Not a fan." And so I'm wondering internally, does the firm, how does the firm remember the book?

• 1:50:14Speaker 04

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

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:50:25Speaker 04

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

• 1:50:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  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?

• 1:50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:52Speaker 04

  That's like a very tough balance sometimes. And so, you know, I wake up every day trying to make sure that we maintain it.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:51:04Speaker 04

  We have a whole team. I mean, we have a team. It's called Lab 42, but Rob Bittencore 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.

• 1:51:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a tree lighting.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  This is why we brought you on.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Kirsten Spirit.

• 1:51:34Jordi Hays?

  We can't hear anything.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  That was fun doing it here.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  They said they've never done an IPO on tree lighting day.

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  Well, like the last 10 years or something.

• 1:51:49Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's gotta do it.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  It's Hank, it's, who is it? Azariah?

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  They got Santa here too.

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  It's Hank Azariah, isn't it?

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  No way. Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:00Speaker 04

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

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  You know, it's funny.

• 1:52:03Speaker 04

  He plays in a cover band.

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  There are a lot.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  He's a cover band.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  He's a cover band.

• 1:52:07Speaker 04

  He's actually pretty good.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  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. Uh, anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:52:20Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  We really appreciate you.

• 1:52:21Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our last guest to the show, let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dream beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. And you know you heard Jim Cramer talk about sleep. We need to get an Aids sleep at aidsleep.com.

• 1:52:45Jordi Hays?

  Actually, that'd be a good Christmas present.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized.

• 1:52:51Jordi Hays?

  We should actually get him an Aids sleep for Christmas.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

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

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  We're down to one cube.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  We're down to one cube. The tree took over. But if you want to put your brand, your logo on something that looks like a cube, why not get a billboard at adquick.com?

• 1:53:12Jordi Hays?

  I love it, John.

• 1:53:12John Coogan?

  Out of home, advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, people are joking around on the timeline.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Meta, of course, is planning to cut 30% uh, of their, uh, I guess, the budget of their metaverse efforts.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  So this is Reality Labs.

• 1:53:30Jordi Hays?

  This is Reality Labs.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Which, which has worked on VR and AR, but also metaverse development. And, I mean, it's a lot of the stuff that was on, on, on display during MetaConnect. Some really promising stuff, some really cool stuff.

• 1:53:42Jordi Hays?

  People like it.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  But also, a lot of spend. And so they, they, they, you know, leaked today. I don't know.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and Consensus Media, which, uh, definitely...

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Could be real, could not be.

• 1:53:55Jordi Hays?

  They say Meta will announce plans for name change. New stock ticker within the coming weeks. Zuck viewed as leading candidate for new ticker. Seems like fake news, but it's certainly, it's certainly fun.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  I, yeah, I like the, I like the Meta name.

• 1:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Max Hodak, former guest, says, "The idea that this is the end of Meta's metaverse dreams is probably wrong. I bet this will actually make them go faster." And I agree.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

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

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  Kalish, last post, and then we'll bring in our next guest, says, "Linktree is a billion dollar company."

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is crazy.

• 1:54:36Jordi Hays?

  A billion dollars for literally links in a tree?

• 1:54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Michael Mirer.

• 1:54:43Jordi Hays?

  Michael Mirer 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 a thing. There's a thing behind the thing that generates revenue."

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  It is true.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  Hi. Good to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 1:55:07Speaker 05

  It's so good to see you.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for having me. Coming down and hanging out.

• 1:55:11Speaker 05

  Congratulations.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:55:13Speaker 05

  Day number one hasn't been going so far.

• 1:55:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We love this place.

• 1:55:17Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. Did you just see Hank Azaria outside though?

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  It was him, wasn't it?

• 1:55:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:55:35Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  It's a full on tree lady.

• 1:55:37Speaker 05

  And with the build of our apparel.

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:55:44Speaker 05

  Do you watch TV?

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  No, he watches no movies, no TV really.

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  Very, very rarely.

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

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

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  And I saw that new movie, Mount, Mountain Gate, and I felt like I needed to give a review for the show. It was about, it was about some AI founders that go to, that go to, I felt like loosely based on the All In podcast.

• 1:56:01Speaker 05

  Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so great to have you.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  What's your go-to holiday movie?

• 1:56:07Speaker 05

  Oh my goodness, um, can I say The Sound of Music? I don't know if that's technically a holiday movie, but it's the one I watched around that time, I think.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like it's nostalgic in an old way, that like, it's appropriate. If you threw it on, it doesn't scream Christmas, but people would be accepting it as a, as a thing.

• 1:56:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Um, my controversial opinion is I don't like It's a Wonderful Life.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Oh, that one is a little bit early, isn't it?

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  What about Elf?

• 1:56:29Speaker 05

  Hmm?

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  Elf?

• 1:56:31Speaker 05

  Elf, yeah, I'll go for Elf.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  You're like, is that a movie?

• 1:56:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, buddy, that Elf, what's your favorite color?

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Um, okay. So, anyway, uh, please introduce yourself for the stream for those who might not know you. Uh, what's your day to day like?

• 1:56:44Speaker 05

  Um, so I'm Katie Dayton. I write for the Wall Street Journal, all about anything to do with brands, marketing, advertising, some media thrown in, and it's just basically anyways, brands are really trying to cut through, I think. That is the underlying, uh, theme of my coverage.

• 1:57:00John Coogan?

  And what, what has been the big theme in your coverage?

• 1:57:03Jordi Hays?

  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, and, and strategy on their part and some luck that gets thrown in. Uh, 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 D to C, right? People were like, oh, if you make a pretty website and you run a lot of ads, you can sell a lot of a product. And then a few other people did it well, and then it basically stopped working. Like, it, it can still work in certain circumstances.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Red Antler trade didn't last too long, it's for sure.

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Red Antler era was like, you need $500,000 for a brand, and you need a product.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  And it worked for Hems. Hems is a public company and is doing fine.

• 1:57:44Jordi Hays?

  Also, Hems works with Emmett.

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right. Uh, was it Ro that worked with the brand?

• 1:57:48Jordi Hays?

  Jim Lane.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  I think Ro worked with Red Antler.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:51Speaker 05

  I bought my first Warby Parker glasses.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  You did?

• 1:57:54Speaker 05

  Last week, and I thought, God, I'm a bit late to this one as well. But that was that era, no.

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that one's been around for a while.

• 1:57:59Speaker 05

  I mean, I think that's what's so interesting right now is that there is no playbook anymore. Even if you're a humongous brand, you know, you're sort of, when you're managing any kind of decline, there's no playbook for that, and there's no playbook for a, a young D to C brand because, you know...

• 1:58:11Jordi Hays?

  We heard about an apparel brand that has scaled from zero to 700 million of revenue. In like two years, all on TikTok shop.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  All TikTok shop.

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  We'd never heard of it. I don't know if they're publics. I don't know if the numbers are publics. I won't share the name. I'll share it with you after, but.

• 1:58:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

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

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  What's your word of the year?

• 1:58:34Speaker 05

  My word of the year, crisis.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  Crisis?

• 1:58:37Speaker 05

  I think, I think 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 a few months of each other. Two very similar case studies.

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:53Speaker 05

  Two very different accusations being leveled at them.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Getting sucked into politics.

• 1:58:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  And then the crisis comms comes out.

• 1:59:00Speaker 05

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

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  Especially 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 Barrel, it shouldn't be such a massive story. But of course, the internet can amplify everything.

• 1:59:30Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  And you can just throw everyone in crisis.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  What are you looking at for 2026?

• 1:59:34Speaker 05

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

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:06Speaker 05

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

• 2:00:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:11Speaker 05

  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 gonna actually affect any revenues?

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  The liberal ad and the conservative ad, that would be fast.

• 2:00:49Jordi Hays?

  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 neo-bank. We saw some of these.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if we'll see more...

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Black Rifle Coffee was kind of the proto example, this MyPillow.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  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's a 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 folks.

• 2:01:31Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm sure that's probably already happening way back down the chain, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  Because no one's digging through the supply chain to figure out where their coffee beans came from.

• 2:01:39Speaker 05

  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... Yes, and every brand had to be aligned to a big cause of some sort that kind of tended to swing to the left.

• 2:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was like a clothing brand that was all about ocean plastic. And then I think people realized at some point or another, they wanted to buy... The majority of consumers just want to buy a great product.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  And so it kind of flipped back where brands stopped saying 1% of every dollar.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:02:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  Because no one knows them and if they're getting canceled, sure, 100,000 people might hate them, but at least if they would say.

• 2:02:45Jordi Hays?

  A thousand, a thousand might sign up for the product.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  If a thousand sign up, it's better than nothing.

• 2:02:48Speaker 05

  Are you talking about that Black Mirror one that came out a few weeks ago that was?

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  There's a bot farm.

• 2:02:54Speaker 05

  Very good point.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

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

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Like illegal online casinos.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  There was, there was the whole Clue Lee saga, which was an app that allowed you to cheat on everything.

• 2:03:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:13John Coogan?

  Of course, people don't like cheating.

• 2:03:14Speaker 05

  I was thinking, I was thinking of the, you know, you know, dead relative.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Oh, that one, yeah.

• 2:03:21Speaker 05

  That one was very on the nose.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Partnered with, with like a.

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  A Disney star.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  Disney star. That was crazy.

• 2:03:27Speaker 05

  To the point where I thought this has got to be.

• 2:03:28John Coogan?

  Intentional.

• 2:03:29Speaker 05

  Well, or it doesn't exist and it's, it's, you know, some kind of artwork.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:03:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  They netted out okay.

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  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 implications.

• 2:03:58Speaker 05

  That one's interesting because American Eagle and we just had it on one of our conferences, Craig, their CMO, you know, their line is very much like, this was truly.

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Not political.

• 2:04:08Speaker 05

  It was not meant to be political. It was not that. And anyone that thought it was was in the minority.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:15Speaker 05

  And it was a lot of bot traffic that was driving that.

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  So, you know, and I think they came out of it and they, they think they came out of it because they stood by it.

• 2:04:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:22Speaker 05

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

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Friend of ours, uh, who's been on the show before, Lulu Maservi, 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 is like having a moment right now? I certainly have been seeing that quite a lot on like the cover stories of different, uh, like magazines, like Forbes and Fortune.

• 2:05:17Speaker 05

  I think.

• 2:05:17Jordi Hays?

  And 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 three to 30 billion in nine months.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

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

• 2:05:28Speaker 05

  I, well, I think the pendulum swings, right? So, you know, originally the press were accused of being too friendly to tech.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:35Speaker 05

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

• 2:05:40Jordi Hays?

  No, it wasn't antagonistic. I think it swung back.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  Too friendly?

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

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

• 2:05:47Speaker 05

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

• 2:05:58John Coogan?

  I think stories need conflict and I, I know, I know friends who have, uh, time and time again, been in, in industry, in tech, in technology, pro tech. And then they say, we want to make pro tech stories. And what you realize is that, uh, well, you need an antagonist in a story. And if you don't have an antagonist, you don't have a story. If you don't have strife, if you don't have a low point. And so when I would, when I would talk to friends who were running companies, I would say, look, Like, I know that you've had failures. I know that you tried to raise money five years ago. You're super successful now, but five years ago, you tried to raise money and the investor pulled out at the last second. And that employee that you wanted to hire said no. And the product that you released crashed and no one bought it. Like, I know that you've been through trials and tribulations. You have two options.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  One is, 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, who wants to watch Star Wars without any strife, without, you know?

• 2:07:00Speaker 05

  When you tell people that, what's their reaction?

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  The good ones, the good ones totally get it. The good ones totally get it. I've, I've been in the situation where I've told this to a founder and the founder's said like, I get it. And the comms team has been like, no, no, no, we, we're still trying to hide that skeleton in the closet. And I'm like, that skeleton's not that big of a skeleton.

• 2:07:17Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  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, and instead, I think, I think the people that understand stories, understand narrative, understand just entertainment. They get that you have to, people like an underdog. People like a come from behind, an up and down.

• 2:07:40Speaker 05

  And then this goes back to controlling the narrative, right? Like, put it out there, put it, weave it in as part of your talking points. Tell the story.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07:49Speaker 05

  And give the journalist something to work with. Like, has friction, like you said. Otherwise, they're just gonna go off and find it anyway. And some disgruntled employee is gonna come to us and you'll be behind on the...

• 2:08:00John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  So 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 than about this? And you're just like an out.

• 2:08:35Speaker 05

  I think the astronomer example again from this year, that's a perfect example. They went ahead straight away and lasted it, you know?

• 2:08:46John Coogan?

  Masterclass.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Masterclass. Yeah. We had the founder on.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  The founder Pete, Pete, right?

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  Pete DeJoy?

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had him on the show a little bit later.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  We were joking, who's our presenting sponsor, we were joking, we were like, did Ramp somehow?

• 2:09:09Jordi Hays?

  How many stories do you, like, how many pieces do you actually, do you publish a year?

• 2:09:12Speaker 05

  A year? I try and do, I try and do about four to six a month.

• 2:09:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:09:17Speaker 05

  I think whatever that averages out.

• 2:09:18Jordi Hays?

  And what does it take to get in the four to six?

• 2:09:20Speaker 05

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

• 2:09:34Jordi Hays?

  Make it concrete.

• 2:09:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, well, we are, and my favorite line to use is, we are the Wall Street Journal. So, you know, you gotta, you gotta give us some dollar signs in there.

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 2:09:42Speaker 05

  Or all some percentages.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  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, maybe we can impress a lot of people. Don't come with your talking points, this is conversation. We are TVPN, like, you can't come with-

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Leave the talking points at home.

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  You can't come with talking points because this is TVPN. Uh, we're, we're still finding our identity.

• 2:10:00Speaker 05

  Leave your PR outside, knocking on the window, like this.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Uh, we were talking to Kramer about that, that's the number one thing we want to do.

• 2:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, uh, do you think we've passed, uh, the peak of wellness? Like, it feels like wellness is, uh, 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.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Isn't the unwell network doing well?

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think so.

• 2:10:25Speaker 05

  Alex Cooper?

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's the pendulum swinging back from wellness to, oh, wow.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think you might be right.

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:10:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but yeah, we've just been having this debate internally, like, how, how durable is the trend?

• 2:10:36Speaker 05

  Well, it's funny, it's, it's difficult because, you know, you, you guys live in LA, I live here. Um, 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's cool again, apparently. Um, 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 infiltrating down there.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

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

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, especially in, I mean, in restaurants.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  In restaurants.

• 2:11:07Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:11:19Speaker 05

  I mean, it's very difficult to break out, and I'm sure someone has, where the time with the economy is like it is. Is it because of, you go in a restaurant, are you gonna go, well, I can't really afford it, 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 a pretty, not difficult time, but they know that change is coming, and you know, they're making little alterations. And they never, if you've got an advertising budget, they've never been able to say, hey, guys, drink loads, you know, go out, have, get absolutely plastered, have a great time. So, you know, they haven't had to change their

• 2:12:01Speaker 05

  marketing too much because of that. But I think in terms of, you know, whether showing up and how they're presenting themselves in the real world, that will be quite interesting.

• 2:12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do it again soon.

• 2:12:20Speaker 05

  Let's do it again.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thank you so much.

• 2:12:21Speaker 05

  Good to meet you. Congratulations again.

• 2:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Well, talk to you soon.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Such a special place.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  I'm enjoying these ramp.

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Good call not lighting a fire, even a candle.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Yes. You can tell that I'm not a pyromaniac, because a pyromaniac.

• 2:12:36Jordi Hays?

  It's just one match. It's just one match. What about one more?

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

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

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  How much time do we have to do timeline? We are going to an event later.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Let's do another 20, 10 minutes or something.

• 2:12:53Jordi Hays?

  From Lulu, I haven't seen these. She says, "It's worth signing up for Blueprint just to study the marketing emails. They're fun and easy to read. No corpo slop, educational, so you're getting useful info rather than just being marketed to. Great at building trust through transparent and proactive communication. Why Brian and Kate write them personally?" You can pull some of these up. I do, I do think that it's possible that Brian Johnson is the best marketer in the world right now.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  He's incredible.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  He's competing and like actually, you know, the team are like innovating at a bunch of different levels, like just like in creating.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, plenty of people like, you know, wanna critique him or disagree with his philosophy or approach or whatever. But as a business person, you have to appreciate how uh he is just makes uh finds a way to make him the center of a lot of attention. Uh, pretty much every single

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  King of organic.

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  King of organic. And I know that I'm sure they spend a ton on on on traditional ads too.

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:13:57Jordi Hays?

  For blueprint.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a monster of business. Like, and he has a CEO in the seat right now, too, right? Didn't he hire?

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Or maybe he was going to hire, but like, there's gonna be some operator.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  People have said that about so many celebrities throughout the throughout the years.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  All sorts of, all sorts of conspiracy theories.

• 2:14:17Jordi Hays?

  There's definitely precedent for it.

• 2:14:18John Coogan?

  About it, yeah.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Um, in uh, in other news, uh, did you see their uh?

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  The K trucks are coming back.

• 2:14:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so something about um, uh, basically eliminating like Biden era.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

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

• 2:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they were Biden era vehicle fuel efficiency rules.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

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

• 2:14:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the rule called for a yearly 2% efficiency increase for cars made from 2027 to 2031.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Oh, it just took a lot of these off the road?

• 2:14:57Jordi Hays?

  And uh, yeah, it's the cafe, the corporate average fuel economy state.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  The, the quote is so ridiculous here. We're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdened some horrible, actually, cafe standards that impose expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems, gave all sorts of problems to our neighbors.

• 2:15:18Jordi Hays?

  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 uh.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

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

• 2:15:31Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, these manufacturers have been making the $20,000 truck.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  At scale.

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  For a long time.

• 2:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and they're super reliable.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  But I mean, Americans have just voted with their wallets. They do not want a $2 truck. It's just, it's never worked. Like the Land Rover Defender, there's so many examples of two-door SUVs that have just not gotten traction.

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Like the Nissan?

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  The Nissan Murano Cross Cabrio L also never took off.

• 2:16:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, with true enthusiasts, of course.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Even the Range Rover Evoque is a two-door SUV, I believe. Not done well.

• 2:16:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm very interested to see.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  How many two-door G-Wagons have you owned?

• 2:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Do you think we're, there's some that I would love to own?

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  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 F-150, four doors.

• 2:16:46Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that Adam Friedland?

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  This is a hilarious bit by Adam Friedland.

• 2:16:48Jordi Hays?

  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 Glades off to the duke? Bertha Russell wasn't exactly wrong for marrying Glades off to the duke, at least not by Gilded Age standards. But she was morally compromised. In that world, marriage was a strategic move, a way to cement social status and gain acceptance from old-money elites who still looked 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.

• 2:17:31Jordi Hays?

  A declaration that should conquer the very society that tried to exclude her.

• 2:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Incredible bit.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

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

• 2:18:01Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Pomp... Is announcing a historic decision at BRR.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  100% of

• 2:18:08John Coogan?

  This is his stack.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Digital Asset Treasury.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  It's a digital asset treasury.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Focus on Bitcoin.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

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

• 2:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep. 100% of equity compensation for the CEO.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Me and the board of directors will be tied to performance milestones.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  It's going Elon.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  CEOs and boards shouldn't be making millions of dollars unless retail shareholders are also winning. Now that I am in charge of a public company, I hope to set the standard for what true shareholder alignment looks like. I do believe this was in reaction to an activist investor that accumulated around 7%.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

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

• 2:18:44Jordi Hays?

  I can see that. He's a perma bull.

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  That would be amazing.

• 2:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think he's ever flip bearish this whole year.

• 2:18:51John Coogan?

  No, no. I mean, this is good. And the interesting iteration on this is that Elon has set himself up with the equity compensation tied to share price, which went very well the first time. And now he set himself up to do it again with Tesla. And what's interesting here is that with POMP's BRR ticker, it's not just him, it's also the board of directors. And I think that at Tesla, that's not the case.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  And so he's saying, I'm taking it one step further. Now, I'm still interested to see what are the targets? Like, because if you're like, you know, hey, the stock moves 2%, I get $100 million, people aren't going to be excited about that.

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:33John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:19:39Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Marvin was texting me.

• 2:19:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Marvin Von Hagen is going.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  He's the founder of Poké.

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  Poké, which is a social AI that lives in your messages. He says, saw TechCrunch tweet six weeks ago that Meta is trying to ban Poké. 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 Meta's worst nightmare today, just directing. He's basically Are you really that surprised that Martin Von Hagen is pulling the

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  Marvin, Marvin.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, Marvin Von Hagen is pulling the, pulling the strings of the, of the EU. Uh, but, uh, anyways. Uh, pretty, pretty interesting.

• 2:20:45John Coogan?

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

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  Token?

• 2:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh my God.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  J R R Token?

• 2:21:05Jordi Hays?

  That is so good. Of course, he's firing shots at, uh, Karp.

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  Karp. That is hilarious.

• 2:21:12Jordi Hays?

  That is one of, I-

• 2:21:13John Coogan?

  And he also made one at Oracle? What is he saying?

• 2:21:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, 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."

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  I love it. Um, I love it.

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Nier says, "Today I learned I use more tokens than Salesforce does."

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

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

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't think, I don't think we're gonna get there.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  I hope not.

• 2:22:04Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think there is like, there is a precedent through the eyeball era.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  You never know.

• 2:22:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Buco Capital says, "According to Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg kills goats with a laser gun and eats them."

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  This is wild.

• 2:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's see here.

• 2:22:23John Coogan?

  It's, it's so funny, he used the term.

• 2:22:24Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Imagine you have your buddy over and you're like, "Hey, look, I run a social network. You ran a viral social network for a long time. I run Facebook. You ran Twitter."

• 2:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's just, let's kill a goat, let's knife a goat.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  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 bro culture.

• 2:23:09Jordi Hays?

  You're the Bitcoin guy.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  You're the Bitcoin guy, you're the Burning Man 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.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Come on. I was off the record.

• 2:23:21John Coogan?

  I showed you my culture in confidence.

• 2:23:24Jordi Hays?

  What happens in Palo Alto, what happens at the goat farm stays at the goat farm.

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  Apparently not. Also hilarious that he doesn't know what a stun gun is.

• 2:23:33Jordi Hays?

  By the way, we figured out that a, somebody on the show that's come on multiple times has hundreds of goats.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  The goat debate.

• 2:23:44Jordi Hays?

  And we were talking with them and they're saying they need to keep quiet because there's a real...

• 2:23:49John Coogan?

  Real goat collector.

• 2:23:50Jordi Hays?

  There's a real goat collector.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  A real goat herd.

• 2:23:52Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  A goat herd. What else we got?

• 2:23:55Jordi Hays?

  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 like, Replit is just...

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

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

• 2:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Is Capital G in Replit?

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, yes. I'm almost positive that, that Google...

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  Has invested in Repli 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, like Repli is a unique product and Repli has never been, has never been a foundation model company.

• 2:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:03John Coogan?

  And so it does make a lot of sense to, I actually, I actually like this a lot in the sense that, you know, where, where has Google been fantastic? Model development.

• 2:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  Where have they been a little bit less speedy on the product rollout side, getting their product in the hands of people? Amjad's great at that. The Repli 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.

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  Two final posts. One, we missed this yesterday.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  Oh, we have, we have another gone moment.

• 2:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Jake, Paul, and the team over at Antifund.

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  What are they?

• 2:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Have raised, Jeff, Jeff Wu have raised a new fund, three, 30 million.

• 2:25:43Jordi Hays?

  I almost said, I almost said 300 million. I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll be there soon. But they are, they say they're pre-account industry leaders like OpenAI, Andro, Ramp, cognition and physical intelligence.

• 2:25:55John Coogan?

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

• 2:26:01Jordi Hays?

  We were saying this, 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.

• 2:26:10John Coogan?

  You're not to say who.

• 2:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was saying to Zach, I was, 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.

• 2:26:19John Coogan?

  You have a different idea that you should not leave because of the guy.

• 2:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Don't leave that idea.

• 2:26:22John Coogan?

  But I love that this I love that this happened the way it did. And I think that this is a good format.

• 2:26:27Jordi Hays?

  And they're wearing suits.

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  I think there's probably two to three more of these that will happen. I mean, this does this does in some way in some way mirror the Johnny Ive, Sam Altman video of like them getting coffee together. And like, there's these interesting things 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 way to communicate and of course, because these guys are master communicators, they understand media. And so, and what a portfolio, OpenAI, Anduril, Ramp, Cognition.

• 2:26:57Jordi Hays?

  There's one person that will go unnamed that links all of those companies together.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  You know the person.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic performance.

• 2:27:03Jordi Hays?

  You know the person.

• 2:27:03John Coogan?

  Of course they do.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Final post from Tane, Tane, sorry. He's highlighting a company called Plod.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  Plod, this is so funny.

• 2:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Never heard of.

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  Apparently.

• 2:27:15Jordi Hays?

  But it sounds like they're absolutely ripping.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  It's the most successful.

• 2:27:17Jordi Hays?

  Successful. They said wearables were cooked, but Plod records transcribes in summer. Of course, it's another meeting summarizing product.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  But it's a physical product.

• 2:27:27Jordi Hays?

  One million units sold largely to doctors, lawyers and salespeople. Two hundred and fifty million of annualized revenue, bootstrapped and now profitable.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  Literally, and it's crazy, like no, no, no drama, no launch videos, no crazy hype, no, no rage bait. Just building in silence, we gotta get this guy on the show.

• 2:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Around five million dollars, but.

• 2:27:48John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. But 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 Aura Ring, for example, like what a remarkable company to just show up doing revenue at their scale. Seemingly out of nowhere, Whoop has done really well. And there's something, yeah, Aura, that's what I was mentioning. And then this, this new company, this meeting summarizer, fantastic. And interesting that we just haven't heard a pitch.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  So curious to know what this does so well that your phone can't do in an app?

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I don't know. We'll have to ask them. Maybe we'll have to buy one. Test it out. Well, thank you for tuning in today, folks. We missed you in the chat, but we will see you tomorrow. We'll be back tomorrow. And thank you again to the NICE team for hosting us. It is totally surreal to be here. And thank you to everybody that has made this possible by tuning in and joining the show and supporting us however you have. So have a wonderful evening and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you. Take care. Good night.