Live @ NYSE, Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. | Keith Rabois, Emily Sundberg, Adam Faze

(00:43) - Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. (21:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (40:44) - Keith Rabois is a veteran Silicon Valley operator and investor, known for senior roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square, and as a general partner at top venture firms including Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. He’s recognized for his sharp strategic instincts, contrarian takes on markets and company building, and for backing category-defining startups across fintech, real estate, and AI. (01:23:27) - Lynn Martin, the 68th president of the New York Stock Exchange and chair of Fixed Income & Data Services at Intercontinental Exchange, discusses the NYSE's annual tree lighting ceremony, highlighting the participation of celebrities, mascots, and charitable organizations, and emphasizes the event's role in fostering community engagement and supporting listed companies. She also touches on the significance of ETFs, noting their impact on financial markets by providing liquidity and transparency, and anticipates a busy start to 2026 for IPOs, acknowledging potential market volatility due to upcoming midterm elections. (01:36:50) - Emily Sundberg is a New York–based writer and director, best known for her daily business newsletter, "Feed Me," which has grown into a seven-figure Substack enterprise with over 150,000 readers. In the conversation, she discusses the expansion of "Feed Me" into podcasting with the launch of "Expense Account," hosted by resident food critic J Lee, and her plans to extend coverage to California, acknowledging the significant portion of her readership based there. Additionally, Sundberg reflects on the competitive landscape between platforms like Substack and Patreon, emphasizing the importance of nurturing new talent rather than poaching existing creators. (02:03:00) - Adam Faze is a 28-year-old American film producer and entrepreneur, known for co-founding the production company Must Be Nice and serving as studio chief at FazeWorld. In the conversation, he discusses the merger between Warner Brothers and Netflix, expressing support for the consolidation as a strategic move to compete with tech giants like Meta, Google, and TikTok. Faze emphasizes that combining Warner Brothers' rich intellectual property with Netflix's powerful distribution network positions the entertainment industry to better capture audience attention in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. And today's Friday, December 5th, 2025. We are live again from the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for the boats found, Jody.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  It's good to be back.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  This is the real fortress of finance, the capital of capital. The Temple of Technology is back in Hollywood. We'll be there on Monday, but we have a great show for you today, folks. We have Keith Roy joining us in person. We have Lynn Martin, President of the New York Stock Exchange. We have Emily Sundberg. And do we have one more?

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Adam Faze.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Adam Faze, again.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  He's had some hot takes on the WB acquisition.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Which is the top story today, other than, of course, ramp, time is money, say both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Let me give you some facts about Netflix. They're going to be bought by, or they're going to buy Warner Brothers and HBO Max for an $82.7 billion deal. The acquisition is expected to close following Warner Brothers Discovery spinoff of Discovery Global TV Networks' division in Q3 2026. There's a bunch of fun, interesting things fitting the timeline. Obviously, this is a tech story because of Netflix. It's also a media story and, you know, a public market story as well.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  And it is a story that we will be talking about for quite a while because although this has gotten announced in the last 24 hours, it's very likely that this is going to be a very long, drawn out process before it actually gets regulatory approval.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me read through Variety that had a great summary of the deal. But first, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So it's official. In a move that will dramatically reshape the entertainment business, Netflix and Warner Brothers, or WB, don't call it Warner Bros., although we want to, the insiders, they call it Warner.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Warner Brothers or WB. Warner Brothers Discovery announced an agreement Friday under which Netflix will acquire Warner Brothers, including its film and TV studios HBO Max and HBO. The deal has a total enterprise value, including debt of 82.7 billion, with an equity value of 72 billion, the company said. The announcement of Netflix's deal to buy the Warner Brothers streaming and studio business came after a weeks-long bidding war that pitted the streaming giant against David Ellison's Paramount Skydance and Comcast. News broke Thursday evening that Netflix had entered into exclusive negotiations with WBD on a deal for Warner Brothers and HBO Max. Quote from Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, he said,

• 2:38John Coogan?

  "I know some of you are surprised we're making this acquisition." And I think people were surprised because didn't Netflix's stock trade down on this news?

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  People are worried about the debt. Some people are excited about it. Yeah, some people are, plenty of people are not excited about it for various reasons. Some people don't think it'll get approved. Other people think this is, you know, it's quite an extension. WB obviously does theatrical releases. They have a movie theater business. It's not, it's definitely will be quite an extension to Netflix's core business today.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, Netflix, for reference, $425 billion company, down 2.6% today, so not falling off a cliff or anything. But certainly people taking note of this. There's also a number of op-eds about this already out on the timeline. We can go through some of those, but first let me tell you about Vanta, bottom-of-the-compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  So Netflix expects it, said it expects to, quote, "maintain Warner Brothers."

• 3:45John Coogan?

  He said, uh, said, "The company has historically been more of a builder than a buyer." And so Netflix is trying to like, sort of reassure both fans, employees, even people who might just see Warner Brothers Discovery as like a fantastic asset that doesn't need to be like stripped for parts. He's trying to push back against a potential narrative that Netflix will, will be very ruthless in cost cutting and, and lose some of that, you know, what people think made WB amazing art. Uh, so he said, uh, Netflix expects to maintain Warner Brothers' current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films. I know this doesn't matter to you because you never go to the theater and you never see it.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we went and saw Dune.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  That was like two years ago.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  But we got a, we, we got a, when we did that, it was a lot of fun. We got a bunch of the guys. We got a bunch of the guys together. We said, "We're gonna make the monthly thing."

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were close. At the, at the start of the year, we were doing that. We were doing that. We were getting everyone together, just like guys night out kind of, but to the movie theater. Because we were like, okay, what do you do if you're a guy and you have a bunch of guy friends and you wanna, you know, go meet up, but you don't really like drinking? You don't know anything about sports? Like, what can you do on a Tuesday night?

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Suit up and head to your local movie theater.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Head to the local movie theater. And fortunately, it feels like Netflix must have heard what we said. They probably, this seems like a direct reaction to us.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, potentially.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  We do need to go back to the theater though, because, uh, we have not been supporting them, uh, nearly enough recently. Um, but it is a good time. And it, and I do think it is important to set this tone. Like, I mean, the reality is that, like, like theaters are going to change. They are, like, there's a question of like, you know, fast takeoff in AI, fast takeoff in streaming. Like, it's been 20 years since you've been able to watch things on the internet. So you've been able to watch, uh, home box office was a way to watch a movie at home. Uh, in, in some ways, the ability to put a TV in someone's house was the beginning of the end for the theater. Because they were immediately substitutes, although the difference was massive screen versus tiny CRT. And then it was like, okay,

• 5:54John Coogan?

  42 inch TV, flat screen. Now that might cost a couple grand, you know, 10 years ago. Now, I was at, I was somewhere, I think I was at Target. And I saw a 42 inch TV. I think it advertised for like 75 bucks or something. It's like suspiciously cheap. It was so cheap.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  It's like a rotisserie chicken. It's just trying to get you in the door.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  I mean, in college for me, like the 42 inch TV was the gold standard. We weren't in the era of the 65, the 75, the 85, like the big TVs hadn't arrived, but the 42 inch TV was.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  I was like, you're the king of the castle.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were the king of the castle. You had a 42 inch and it was like a serious expense. It was a couple of grand. Now they're practically giving them away. And so of course that's going to be a competitive pressure. But also it's not going to destroy the theater immediately, but it's going to have an erosion effect over decades. And that's exactly what's happening. But it's nice that Netflix is not declaring this the end of the theater. They're going to continue to invest in support and I think this will, you know, certainly, you know, encourage everyone to continue supporting Warner Brothers and Discovery and Netflix. So Netflix signaled they would keep HBO Max as a discreet service. While it also touted the addition of HBO and HBO Max content to its lineup.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  And so we're going to add the deep film and TV libraries and HBO to an HBO Max programming. Netflix members will have even more high.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  Will it be called Netflix Max?

• 7:18John Coogan?

  You need to be Netflix maxing. Maybe that's, is that why they did HBO Max? Because they wanted it to be like, oh, if you're HBO maxing, you get HBO Max.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Then it was HBO Max, then it was Max, then it was back to HBO.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  People, people give them so much, they talk so much trash about HBO with the, with the rebrand chaos. But Max is a great term as opposed to, because they could have done HBO Plus.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, the critique there was HBO has built up such an incredible brand.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Yes, they never should have gone purely Max.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  And credit to Scott Galloway. I remember he went so hard on them for dropping HBO. You've spent like, you've spent decades building up this incredible brand and you're just like, see ya. We'll just be called Max.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  They spent like two years HBO maxing. Well, they spent two decades HBO maxing and then two years HBO Max maxing. And then they just went Max maxing and that was the end, the beginning of the end. But the article goes on, "This allows Netflix to optimize plans for consumers, enhancing viewing options and expanding access to content. Netflix says it expects to see $2 to $3 billion in cost savings annually by the third year after the Warner Brothers Discovery deal closes." Let's see, "The company expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings per share by

• 8:38John Coogan?

  year two." The cash and stock transaction was valued at $27 per share and the timeline is going back and forth on this.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Leia, let's get into some takes. So the counter side of this, the information actually had a pretty scathing, a scathing kind of analysis.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Before you read that, I'm going to tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing and they're trusted by millions.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  So I read through this earlier. This is from Martin Piers. He says Netflix's Warner purchase is an $82.7 billion blunder.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  He's calling it a blunder.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  He says it will likely, announced Friday morning, will likely prove a stupendous error by a management team that until now has rarely put a wrong foot. Netflix paying a huge price, 27 and a half times next year's expected earnings, well above prevailing multiples for film and TV companies for businesses that likely won't help it add many subscribers, right? Like Netflix has like saturation, a lot of people today. So from a consumer standpoint, if you subscribe to Netflix and HBO Max, you're going to be like, cool, I can churn off of one of these services and just switch over to here. The question is, well, then Netflix, will they be incentivized to just keep pushing the price of the subscription? They're adding more content, more IP. And so I would expect them to do that. Martin

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  continues, "More over the deal is likely to face severe regulatory obstacles." Again, so Netflix is not exactly Trump aligned, right? They, Netflix had the deal with the Obamas. And so I think that...

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  In a world where Netflix was going to, uh, uh, sorry, uh, WB is going to Paramount. I could see that, uh, uh, much more likely to, to get through. Whereas this, uh, this is going to make, make sure the, the Netflix like team is going to be spending like at least the next year. I would assume working on this and then since we started.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  What do you mean regulatory approval?

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just trying to get this across the line.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it, it feels like it's so hard to make the case that this creates some sort of monopoly. Because Disney owns, it's like, yes, okay, now Netflix has squid game and they also have Batman, but.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Jason, uh, Kilar, who's a former Warner media CEO says, if I were tasked with doing so, I could not think of a more effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood than selling WBD to Netflix.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  What about selling it to Disney? You literally have Batman, Superman and all the Marvel characters. You have Spider-Man and Star Wars. That feels like that would be less competitive than having, right, right now, from my perspective, you have, you have Batman and Superman kind of off on an island. They haven't really been able to get that, that, that engine going to the same degree as Marvel, the Avengers, Thanos, Spider-Man.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Somebody named Ben Weiss says, disagree. Hollywood is competing with Silicon Valley, Apple, Amazon, Google Meta, preserving some notion of competition in and between legacy Hollywood. Risks, winning a battle and losing a war. The old media companies need to, uh, more of the right type of scale. This does it for WB. Jason says, when I use that phrase competition in Hollywood, I'm referring to having a sufficient number of vibrant and robust entities that can and will aggressively compete against each other to produce and distribute films, series, live events, and more for decades to come. I'm not focused on the legacy of it all. So.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I would still, I would still say this is like number two.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  But it, I mean, it might be high, uh, but it, just in terms of like Hollywood filmmaking, these feel like extremely competitive areas. There are so many different, uh, there are so many different, uh, streaming services and, and bundles that you can piece together. There are folks who are like, yeah. You know what? I order from Amazon, so I have Amazon Prime. That's where I watch everything. There are still people that just go to Apple, you know, Apple TV and just buy a movie. You know, you can still just do that. You can be off in the Netflix ecosystem. You can be in the Hulu ecosystem. Like, it doesn't feel like there's a crazy lack of competition

• 12:42John Coogan?

  in media right now. So, I don't know. I would be somewhat surprised if this doesn't go through, but I mean, you never know.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I think Netflix, again, we were, before this, we were having lunch with a cable exec. And he was kind of bringing up how Netflix had gotten caught up a little bit in kind of some of the woke stuff.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  And again, I just think in Trump America, it just feels far more likely that the Allison's could get a deal done. And they're notoriously absolute dogs.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a rumor that they're gonna go, that they're gonna like, they're gonna try it out bid, right?

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so right now, this is Chris Gasparin over at Fox says, Scoop, as reported, Paramount and Skydance. Skydance is now looking to launch a hostile bid for WBD because it feels its $30 a share all cash offer is actually higher than what Netflix offered in terms of cash stock and the value of the spinoff of the cable business. So, this is still developing, but anyways.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Trump fan had some interesting backstory. He says, wild outcome, especially after these three wild what ifs before Netflix IPO'd in 2002. Before Netflix IPO'd in 2002, apparently Bezos offered $12 million to buy it. Can you imagine if Netflix had sold for 12 billion?

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, they also tried to sell the Blockbuster during the...

• 14:06John Coogan?

  So Blockbuster had a chance to buy it for 50 million and they laughed it off. But then it was just a DVD delivery service and they were like, we can build this. We have DVDs. We have all the infrastructure. We can just take it from the stores. Like, we don't need to do this. But what they didn't realize was that... Actually building technology, actually building a real tech like streaming service and scaling that platform. I mean Netflix has some of the greatest like just infrastructure.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, and even the early recommendation engines. Like I remember my dad being like, yeah, Netflix just recommended it. It knows what I like and it just said it sent me this. They said, you're gonna enjoy this.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Bernardo Arnau saved it with a $30 million check. Did you know this? Netflix and Bernardo Arnau.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  Over the top.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Um, I was, I was thinking about the actual value of putting these things together because like you were making the point that putting Netflix and Warner Brothers together, it doesn't like everyone's already subscribed to Netflix. I don't know. I don't know if that's true. If, if the trends continue. Like Netflix has a fair amount of like, like they have the squid games. They have some big, they have some big IP. But if you just think about like the drumbeat of HBO comeback every season. Oh, you're not watching Game of Thrones? You're out of the loop. Oh, you're not watching Succession? You're out of the loop. Like the conversation driving shows,

• 15:35John Coogan?

  I feel like are on HBO much more consistently than Netflix. And in fact, I don't even know if I'm logged into Netflix on my phone right now. I know I'm still paying, but I really don't watch it very much. And I think that the reason is because I just haven't had, oh, you're missing

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  out. I, as somebody, so you're, you're a true enthusiast. For me, as someone who's not an enthusiast, I'll go to Prime because I'm like, I rarely watch movies. If I'm gonna watch a movie, I wanna just, I'm happy to just buy. I'm not like going like, let me get the, let me get the, the free option on Netflix. I'm like, I will just buy the thing that I want to fill this 90 minutes with.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so the deal doesn't include WBD's cable channels such as CNN, TNT, TBS and Discovery, which are being spun off.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Okay. And we don't know where that will land yet? Or where people speculate?

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Even if Netflix gets regulatory approval, it will have to take on 50 billion in debt to complete the deal. And we'll spend a couple of years cutting costs to reduce that debt. Netflix does do around 10, nine or 10 billion in free cash flow. And so they can certainly service the debt.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, in the first nine months of this year, WBD's studio and streaming operations generated 2.3 billion in earnings in EBITDA. Next year, Netflix executives said they expected the Warner business to generate 3 billion in EBITDA. That's a price of 27.5 times EBITDA, after taking into account cost savings of 2.5 billion they expect to make. Netflix says the deal value represents a multiple of 14.3 times. WBD's traditional rivals Disney and Paramount Skydance are each trading around 11 times. Anyways, we can kind of skip over this.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Kramer said, "So out of the box, Netflix as the world's biggest content creator by far. Exciting, but not necessarily in a good way for shareholders." That's so funny. Let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Adam Faze is coming on the show in just an hour or two. He says, "I don't think people realize the licensing business Netflix is about to have if this deal goes through. Warner Brothers animated IP library alone would bring in billions in new merchandising revenue, coupled with new versions of these iconic shows on the platform. Game over." And he lists some of these out, and one of them, I think is hilarious, is Foghorn Leghorn. They own Looney Tunes. So they have Bugs Bunny,

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote. These are, yeah, these are time honored iconic, iconic characters. I just think it's funny because very clearly there are a series of bankers out there that have a spreadsheet and somewhere they have a row, and on that row is Foghorn Leghorn, and attached to Foghorn Leghorn is the value of the intellectual property of Foghorn Leghorn, who's like a large rooster who talks with a funny accent. And I just imagine that they're out there saying like, "Yeah, Foghorn Leghorn, that's like 30 million, that's a $30 million business. Like, okay, Yosemite Sam, that's a $50 million business. Porky Pig? Porky Pig's 80 million." Let's view some of the

• 18:46John Coogan?

  parts. I really hope that someone on Wall Street, some, some investment banker.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Actually, Adam Ant is being really undervalued. We actually think this is a $2 billion property.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Oh, Dick Dastardly? You think Dick Dastardly is worth 8 million in intellectual property value? Yeah, right. What about Snagglepuss?

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I thought you were making some of these up.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  No, this is part of the Hanna-Barbera. Quick Draw McGraw, Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, The Herkyloids. Herkyloids sounds like some crazy, crazy anon meme.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  Boo boo.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Herkyloids seems like someone with a, with a Roman statue avatar.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, so Polly Market has, who will acquire WB at eighty-six percent today? Paramount is still only sitting at six percent.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Six percent. So the company behind.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Amazon, uh, Amazon is still up there.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Um, the DC comic books, uh, I feel like there's the, like, I feel like Netflix could do something cool here. I feel like Batman, Joker, Harley Quinn, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash. Like, these are iconic characters. These are, these are cost, these are Halloween costume characters. They, they are still really known. And, but the last round of, of DC, it just didn't break through in the way the, the Marvel, uh, series did. And Marvel broke through in such a massive way. It didn't have the cachet of the Dark Knight and the Nolan films, but is there any way that they can get Nolan back

• 20:22John Coogan?

  in the seat to actually do a full arc or something? I don't know. I, I would just hope that, uh, I, I just grew up with the, with the Nolan era of DC and I would have loved him to go on and do more of that with Superman, with, you know, uh, the, the whole crew, uh, everyone coming together. And instead, they got just really over the top with the CGI and the slow mo and those, and the, the Zack Snyder era. And I think a lot of people sort of got, got, they got tired of it. And, uh, um, I'm looking forward to whatever they, whatever they wind up, uh, doing next. Well, they have Metalocalypse. That's a great one. I like Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They got a, they got a ton of stuff. So it'll be interesting to keep following it. Anyway. Well, you want to go to possum?

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Oh, what's Mike Miraflores saying?

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  Mike Miraflores says we already have Nana, uh, Nano Banana Pro TVC commercials with decent paid media budgets behind them. Everything is moving so, so quickly.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so James Harden, uh, is in an ad for my prize. I don't know what my prize is. Uh, said, this is the best commercial he's ever been in and he never stepped foot on the set. Uh, let me show you how to crack the code on celeb deep fakes for this my prize ad we did with James Harden. So this is a guy named Billy, uh, Woodward.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, who's been doing some.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  They're actually putting behind this, uh, this ad on TV because it looks like a TV commercial, but this also could just be a viral marketing campaign on.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Wow. My prize is a premium online casino games.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Wow. James Harden is getting in on the, the gambling trade. Uh, there's.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  Surprised he doesn't have an official prediction market partner yet. Um, in other news, uh, this almost seems like, uh, it could be fake.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  You share this news. Let me tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Um, so what is it? There is, uh, there, there's news out of, uh, the Truth Social.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if this is real because not, not a single, there, there's a very viral post right now that says breaking. President Trump set to announce a new AI platform called Truth AI. There's not a single, not a single, uh, legacy media institution has reported on this that I've found. So I would, uh, given that this is a story that they'd be very excited to cover.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  I would be, uh, wary that it's real.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yet, uh, but, uh, that's not stopping, uh, Jay Bull, uh, T A R D, uh, from saying, uh, and you guys think Google won the AI race. Talking about how Trump is set to unveil new AI platform, Truth AI. I wonder if Truth Social, uh, pops at all today off of, uh.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  Truth Social.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  No, it's down.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Down 3%.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, like he's splitting his.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Lack of focusing.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should be focused. You have to lock it on one thing. If you're a social media entrepreneur, I mean, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is getting dinged for going on.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  Walking some of the metaverse stuff back.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  You know, maybe the Truth Social team's getting dinged for heading over to AI land instead of just doing a partnership. You know what? You know what the crazy thing is? Like, I keep laughing about this fact that like, it has got to be so hard to justify an in-house AI foundation model training run now if you're a big platform. When the rebuttal has to be, okay, so you're saying that you need to do something special. You need to do something creative. You need to do some weird deal with some other people, put something together. But Apple can just work with Google.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  It's enough for Apple to, Apple gets to work with Google. Apple works to just buy tokens from Gemini, from Google, but you,

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Few billion a year.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Your business is more, more special than Apple.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think Apple is in the position where like, they're like, we don't need to prove to like, I feel like an analyst can look at Apple and say like, they will have leverage in AI.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  Whereas where there's other businesses that feel like, okay, we need an AI strategy. It's not enough to just announce a partnership with a lab.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  We need to like actually own the weight.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we should, we should actually get into some of the, uh, the Apple departures. Cause we talked about this briefly, um, but, uh, but the Wall Street Journal is saying that, uh, Apple departures point to challenges for iPhones dominance. And I'm, I think it's too early to call the iPhone challenged. I, I feel like the iPhone's dominance has not been challenged yet. Maybe that is coming, but, uh, you know, there have been several top lieutenants who have left in the past 12 months. And, uh, dozens of others have defected to rival. So there are some facts that are important to consider and, and walk through here. So, uh, the Wall Street Journal is summarizing it this way. They say, "Apple is facing a wave of executive departures as the company continues a period of transition,

• 25:12John Coogan?

  not only among its leadership, but if rivals have their way for its businesses as well." On Thursday, the company announced that its general counsel and head of policy will both retire next year. On Wednesday, a top designer left for Meta Platforms. On Monday, Apple said its head of artificial intelligence strategy would retire. Its chief operating officer announced its retirement in July and the CFO has transitioned into a new role. So lots of head, lots of, you know, are the heads rolling or are these retirements? There's a lot of like, you know, sort of management. It feels like Apple's just like not the place to let the drama kind of come to them. They're like, look, if you, even if you got poached, maybe we just.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, it was notable because Apple, Apple came out with an announcement after the guy left for Meta and said, we're basically tried to make it sound like it was, it was, like they were positioning it as like mutual, like this was the right time for him to go on. And I'll let anyone else kind of like read into whether or not it was really. DHH was getting over 37 signals, but says, "Apple was overdue for a full executive reset. Just need to add Cook to the list and for a replacement, Forstall is only 56. Time for a comeback."

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Ooh, oh, that'd be very interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of Forstall fans out there who think that he didn't get it, he didn't get it right. Or he didn't get the, the opportunity he deserved.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  Cook can't catch a break. He's like.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  I still think, I still think Cook's done a lot of good, good stuff. I'm, I'm still, I'm still bullish on Cook.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  But I don't know. Um, let's see. It says, "The executive departures underscore a changing of the guard underway at Apple. Even as executive, uh, chief executive officer Tim Cook himself shows no sign of stepping down, even though everyone is leaking a variety of rumors to the contrary. Uh, Cook and his new lieutenants face a critical test preparing Apple for the AI era and a wave of new competitive devices that result."

• 27:12John Coogan?

  We haven't seen the wave of new competitive devices just yet. He, I mean, Apple, if you, there's another way to tell the story, which is like, Apple defeated the, uh, the rabbit R1. They defeated the friend attack. They defeated, you know, like, uh, what was the other one that, that, that was, uh, the humane pin. Oh, they're singing the happy birthday. I'm singing a happy birthday.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  It's someone's birthday. It's one of the guys down on the trading floor.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Oh, he's got a whole cake out there. That's great. Good guy. Well.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  Very sweet. Um, why don't you, uh, tell us about your phone?

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Turbo Puffer. Circle is not during full time search.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  Turbo Puffer?

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x, cheaper, and extremely scalable. We love Turbo Puffer.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  That was really funny yesterday, having Jim Cramer reference the, uh, the assignment and the Turbo Puffer team.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  That was like.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Crazy crossover.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  That was a very.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  That was a deep, that was a deep cut, Cramer.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was a deep cut.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, we have some, uh, uh, Jacob, uh, Rinzi Maki tagged us in a post here. SpaceX tells investors it's aiming for a late 2026 IPO. Uh, Katie Roof over at, uh, the information.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  Has a scoop?

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, has a scoop. Uh, apparently Elon Musk SpaceX has told investors and financial, uh, institutions that it is aiming for an IPO in the second half of next year. The talk comes as SpaceX considers holding a sale of shares held by investors and employees that would value the company at 800 billion. Uh, quite the markup, um, double its valuation in a sale this summer and what would make it the most valuable private company? He's gotta be the most valuable private company. It probably, uh, candidly makes him sick that, that OpenAI has briefly, uh, eclipsed. Um, the company is considering a li- a public listing of the entire company, including Starlink, uh, which, which makes sense.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't, I think like Starlink is, is a, a huge part of, uh, uh, obviously the value of the business. And I just don't think it goes out anywhere near 800 without it. And they're very interlinked. Um, that is a change though, from a few years ago when Musk said he expected SpaceX would eventually spin off, uh, Starlink and take it public. But executives have shelved the idea of a Starlink spinoff as its rocket business has improved. Uh, apparently the Wall Street Journal, uh, reported on the, uh, share sale at 800. Uh, so anyways, um, in other news, uh, Mark Benioff is saying that he might rename the company Agent Force.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Trace Cohen says just force. Why not just force?

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Ooh, force.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Well, isn't there a, uh, isn't there Force India, the F1 team from a couple of years ago? BYT or BWT, Force India? That was like a team, uh.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  I think they struggled.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  I gotta find that. What was Force India? Was that Force India?

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Benioff is, is on a tear. His, his pinned tweet right now. LLMs are the new disk drives, commodity infrastructure you hot swap for whoever's cheapest and best. The fantasy that the model is a moat just expired.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  They're going off down here.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Do you think he does it? Is there a prediction market yet up for renaming of Salesforce? I think Salesforce is such a strong name, even if they do more than sales at this point. It's transcended the, like, the company has definitely transcended what they do. Like, I think people know.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  Why not just sales? I like just sales. Just be sales-ing.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  I don't think you can be. I think that's too generic.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  For what you do.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he would have to update the ticker too.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  The ticker is the bigger one.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Because Salesforce is...

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  Because everyone wants to be like, CRMs are dead. You're gonna just be able to just generate a CRM.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  On the fly.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Buco Capital says, "F it, nothing else is working. Go for it, brother."

• 31:04John Coogan?

  A name change? Sometimes we'll fix you. Just let it run.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Ethan Ding was coming in with some commentary.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  He said yesterday, "It should be extremely alarming to Salesforce investors that no exec at Salesforce is telling him that's not a lot of tokens." Of course, they talked about generating 3.2 trillion tokens. Sounds like a big number. Ethan says, "For anyone who doesn't understand, Cursor processes more tokens than Salesforce's all-time figure every six days." Salesforce has 20 million users.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Credit Cursor has a similar amount of users, I think.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Assuming same average token count per active agent force user count is 40,000 to 60,000 truly active users, AKA 0.2 to 0.3% adoption three years after launch.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder, I won't like the like all tokens are not created equal. Like you can, you can generate so many, so many tokens if you're doing these like deep research reports and uh like if you had agent force going around and basically effectively running a deep research report on every contact in every CRM under like under

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  Every conversation.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Every

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  Every time you get a new email from a lead, right?

• 32:17John Coogan?

  Like the, the, the token generation could be incredibly high and also deliver very little value on the flip side. Uh, you could have a really fine tuned model that is, you know, laser focused, more of a scalpel.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  And you can be getting a lot of value out of those tokens that you are generating. So I don't, I don't really know.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  On the, on the app layer debate, are CRMs cooked? Uh, there's a post here from Kalen. He says, just met a company that vibe coded an entire CRM to avoid paying for HubSpot over the last year. It's now become a burden to maintain and missing key functionality, third-party interoperability as they scale. They're now migrating to HubSpot. App layer is fine. We experienced this. Uh, I think it's so easy to make a V1.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  You can make a V1 in a day. And so you assume like, okay, you'd be spend like another few days really building out like more of a feature set. And the reality is like the thing that you generate in one day could take 10, at least for now, hours and hours and hours every week, just to like maintain it and make like incremental improvements.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool. Uh, meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. Uh, I actually, I didn't vibe code a CRM, but uh, back in college, I built a CRM inside of Microsoft Excel. And so I

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's like the classic.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  That's the real competitor for a startup.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  It was like, okay, you could go from X Sheets or Excel.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  To maybe an Airtable, slightly more robust than to, to a Adio or a HubSpot or, or, or then, and then eventually get over to Salesforce.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, I mean, they, uh, yeah, the question about like the value of the platform and the value of the app layer. Um, I mean, we, we were talking about this with, with Shopify folks. Like there are so many companies, I've worked at these companies, I've run these companies where we said like, no, no, no, no, our use case is special. No one's going to build an ecommerce site exactly the way we want to build it. And so we wind up building an entire ecommerce stack custom. And then a couple of years later Shopify just catches up and then boom, you're on, you're back on Shopify. Uh, and, and that just happened time and time again. I, I lived it at Soylent. Uh, it was a wild, wild time.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is some wild news. Logan Paul, Jake Paul and Jeff Wu are starting an eight week accelerator. It's a 25K safe followed by a hundred thousand dollar price round for a total of seven percent equity. Uh, a lot of people are confused about, uh, doing it as a price round for a hundred K. Uh, a founder could easily end up spending like 30 grand, you know, like depending on who their lawyer is, like actually.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that is tricky.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  So it's like a hundred K investment and then you have like, let's assume you're like super efficient and it's like 10 grand. It's like.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of annoying.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  And then, yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's annoying. Um, that said, I think there's a lot of interesting businesses that could go through this that would really benefit from working with Jake and, and Logan and Jeff, right?

• 35:18John Coogan?

  It's so interesting that it's a 25K safe and then a hundred thousand dollar price round. Like why not just 125 for seven percent? Like on a, on a, on a safe with a cap that ensures they get seven percent no matter what? Like, uh, that feel, I would love to talk to them. I, I think hopefully we're going to be able to get Jeff Wu on the show at some point. We can ask him about how he is, you know, thinking about that particular term. I know a lot of people here are saying like, oh, seven percent for a hundred twenty five K, that's low. Uh, and that's certainly lower than YC. YC you come in with like, I think a $10 million valuation. This is more like a $1 million valuation. Um, but, uh, you know, if you're an earlier in your career, you're not ready to go to a different, higher valuation. Like this could still be a good.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  Or you don't need a lot of capital for your business, but you do need a lot of attention. Like I could see some consumer brands getting started this way.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  I, I mean, I just remember like, like YC was my North Star for like what I wanted to get into with my first business. But like, I got denied the first time I applied and I was like. If you gave me $5,000 for 10% of the business, like I would take it because I want to work on my thing and I want to keep going. And like, yes, at some point it can be predatory, but like with some of the first ideas that I was coming up with, like, I definitely didn't deserve 125K for 7% because they're like slop companies that were like very unlikely to succeed. So I don't know, there's something interesting. I do wonder if they will position this as, okay, you're going to be able to accelerate on the go to market side. You're going to be able to accelerate on the creator side, creator partnerships.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  This will be, there's a whole bunch of different ways. It could be something where you are, you're going through this accelerator because you get to ask Logan and Jake about their media creation, their creator work. And then you're, you're launching your company, you're more likely to go viral because these guys really understand virality. On the other side, it could be you're coming in and you're taking a crack at building something that might wind up being more like an incubation for them. Because I'm sure that they want to launch a bunch of products. This is a way to just kind of take swings and get to get close to working with people. And then if something lines up, they could say, hey, we actually want to do like a 50 50 deal. And this is going to be like Logan and Jake as co-founders of the next thing that they're working on together. And we're going to really, really push this for you. We'll be your marketing arm.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  And so I, it'll be interesting to see where these companies go.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  Jeff and Jake, I think are coming on the show in the next couple of weeks before the end of the year. So we will be able to ask them more about that.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  Before we move on, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT and more. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  Aaron has a good post here. It says the remaining, remaining Apple leadership team.

• 38:01John Coogan?

  Who is this?

• 38:02Jordi Hays?

  Travis Scott, Tim Cook.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  And Mr. Beast? Mr. Beast did say that he's going to film on iPhones. I'm not sure what the Travis Scott connection is. Has he done a partnership with Apple? No, there are still plenty of folks. Eddie Q is still there. The Apple leadership team is still stacked. Don't you worry. Don't you worry. There are still people here. And we have our first guest.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Boy in the in the restream waiting room.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Right up in there. Physical restream waiting room.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  They put the moon on the sphere. They put cheese on the sphere.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  No.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  We're the sphere Vegas says, we're sending out the last super moon of 2025 with something special. Using NASA's public domain lunar data, our team built a true to science moon that is that's lighting up this Las Vegas skyline. This looks absolutely insane.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  I still think the super the sphere is like underrated. It's so cool.

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to build beautiful things anymore.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Make it make sense.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we do. We do.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  People look at this and they think, you know, the New York Stock Exchange, how did they build this? Was this built by humans? There's a lot of debate. But the sphere really, really reinstates, yes, we can build amazing things.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, humans built that. Humans built the sphere.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Have you heard about the heating, like the the level of of like engineering that went into actually driving the screens on the outside? Because so at that scale, like the each pixel is not like your laptop. It's not like your phone. It's like a bright light, like each pixel is like this big and it's a light.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Then and so that light, even if it's LED, it still produces heat. And then you have, so you have a whole bunch of them that are all heating each other up.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  For each other.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  And then you put it in the hottest place in the world, the desert. And so there's just been like a phenomenal amount of energy. And I'm surprised, you know, people are so ready to dunk on this and be like, oh, it failed. Like if it if it shut off, if it showed like a blue screen of death or like an error message, that would be so viral. That would actually be a good campaign. That'd be a great campaign. If you were marketing it and the video that you put up showed the the like the Windows blue screen of death, like the fail, oh, it broke. Because then you'd go viral. If if someone was like, oh, wow, like, what were they advertising? Oh, they were running an ad for TVPN and the ad was too good and it crashed the whole software or something. Because you know, the Shopify guys came on, they were like, we're doing this live, we're live streaming to the sphere is very cool.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  But but if you if you if you can figure out how to crash the sphere, at least make it look like you crashed the sphere, I think you have some. Viral potential. Well, let me tell you about numeralhq.com compliance handled numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance. So you can focus on growth and we have our first guest of the show. We have Keith Rabois here in New York City coming on down. Oh, look at this. Thank you, Keith. Good to see you. How are you doing? Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. You are the mayor of New York now. We have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. It's a great setup. It looks great. And obviously it gives us easy access to folks like you.

• 41:04Keith Rabois?

  That's true.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  So thanks so much for coming on down. How have you been? What's new in your world?

• 41:10Keith Rabois?

  Great. Pretty busy. You know, you might have heard ventures pretty busy right now. People doing deals every day, investing left and right, crazy valuations.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Is that a green flag for you or is that a red flag?

• 41:20Keith Rabois?

  It's hard to tell. Like, I think a lot of people are gonna lose money.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Keith Rabois?

  Hopefully we're not included.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:24Keith Rabois?

  But the valuations have an extra zero.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:27Keith Rabois?

  You know, like

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Two.

• 41:28Keith Rabois?

  Literally, before this recent like sort of trend, I had never invested an entry price for like any normal company above an $86 million valuation.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:41Keith Rabois?

  And, you know, that whole world is completely different.

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Keith Rabois?

  So like everything seems to have

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  How many deals a year are you trying to get in under, under 10? Like, because I would imagine you still No, no, I know, I know. But realistically, like in the last years, it may be like one, one a year. Yeah. As somebody you knew well, so you can

• 41:58Keith Rabois?

  My philosophy is bold, early, impactful. So bold, early impactful. That's the KV mantra. You know, I, I love that. So early means first institutional capital. Even today, if you're right, bold and early, that's still maybe over $10 million. It used to be, you know, 500K. When I invested Airbnb, it was 500K, 3.5 million posts.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 42:24Keith Rabois?

  DoorDash was something like eight to 10 posts.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Keith Rabois?

  So, you know, the world's very, very different. Now, there are going to be epic companies. Like, what is very clear is some of these companies are absolutely iconic. It will be iconic for decades. I doubt there's as many as people think. So the argument goes that, you know, we've changed the physics and there's going to be 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 billion dollar plus companies. I don't believe that stuff. Uh, so you're on the consumer side. I don't believe in on the consumer side. Possibly in enterprise, if you believe AI is going to transform every business everywhere. Possibly, but the consumer side, consumers are busy. They have twenty, there's only twenty-four hours in a day. Tech doesn't change that yet.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Keith Rabois?

  And so every time someone adopts a new app, a new product as a consumer, they have to substitute from their friends.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:10Keith Rabois?

  From their family, from church, from basketball.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Keith Rabois?

  And so the bar just keeps going up. So I don't really believe there's going to be too many breakthrough consumer companies. Chat GPT, OpenAI will be one.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Keith Rabois?

  Not really sure who else.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  And it just feels like we're in this era where if you do have a breakthrough, the big tech companies are in an offensive position. They're in wartime mode. Some of them, like Meta, are, are, uh, they're founder-led still. They're still in founder mode. And so you're going to have a pretty good copycat on your tail within six months of you going viral, within a year.

• 43:43Keith Rabois?

  I think that is an interesting dynamic. Typically, the large companies, we don't all make fun of. You know, all of us are entrepreneurs and we don't make fun of these old sluggish, you know, large companies with tens of thousands.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  Now they're our friends.

• 43:53Keith Rabois?

  They're, well, they may not be your friends, but they are fast. They are paying attention.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Keith Rabois?

  Like, they're usually sloppy and slow.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:58Keith Rabois?

  Like, I remember when we were doing PayPal, eBay was like the most incompetent organizational client.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:03Keith Rabois?

  Like, Google was literally being built underneath them.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:06Keith Rabois?

  And eBay hired, like, management consultants at Bain and told them, "Don't worry about Google." Like, that was the classic, like, large tech company.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:13Keith Rabois?

  And admittedly, Meg was worse than most, but like, still. Now, you know, all the large tech companies, except Apple.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Keith Rabois?

  It seemed to be paying attention.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:20Keith Rabois?

  Um, you know, Apple is behind the eight ball in AI.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, unpack that a little bit because there's a lot of departures and, you know, you're, you're wearing an Apple Watch today. Like, you're not giving it up.

• 44:30Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, I have my air. I love my, I love my air.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:33Keith Rabois?

  So the hardware is still the best.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  What's the nature of the risk? Because I don't see us actually going somewhere else because we're locked in, right?

• 44:40Keith Rabois?

  No, I think, you know, building vertically integrated products. So to do hardware well, you need hardware skills, supply chain, battery innovation. That's before you get to the software.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:50Keith Rabois?

  Um, but does somebody figure out how to do an AI unique, unique to AI, custom device?

• 44:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:56Keith Rabois?

  That is compelling? Possibly.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:58Keith Rabois?

  Depends on what timeframe you're talking. Next year, unlikely.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Keith Rabois?

  Ten years, I'd be willing to bet, you know, more, more likely than not.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Keith Rabois?

  So at some point, Apple will be.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  Bernard Urno has a best quote here. He's like, and he had something like, "In fifty years, will people be drinking champagne?" I think he has. "In fifty years, will, will we all be using iPhone?" He's like, "I'm not sure."

• 45:19Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, I'll take the champagne or at least tequila. But.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, how is your, how is your kind of view on Google's like competitiveness in AI changed over time if, if at all?

• 45:32Keith Rabois?

  Well, I, I do think we had a debate several, several years ago, is it, you know, a sustaining innovation, you know, disruptive innovation. After ChatGPT, it's clearly more disruptive potentially. And I do think though they're, they are paying attention, they're taking it seriously. That said, ChatGPT is still the fastest growing product, consumer product in the last like 15 years.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 45:52Keith Rabois?

  And I think if OpenAI plays its cards well and focuses on ChatGPT versus gets distracted as being a pure research lab, so there's probably this tension there.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Keith Rabois?

  Research lab, AGI, blah, blah, comes at sacrificing the quality of speed.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's, it's a, let's launch a short form video app, let's automate, let's do all the science, let's do they, Sam, I mean, I, I think.

• 46:14Keith Rabois?

  Hard work.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  Sam's answer to Brad, which kicked off like a broader discussion, he was saying, we're fine, we're going to do consumer electronics and we're going to do science and I didn't, I think a lot of people read into that and just say like, hey, Google does that, they lose a lot of money on it, it's not exactly.

• 46:32Keith Rabois?

  And those are their bets. Google mince money, like, so it's going to be clear so they can fund it. Yeah. I think there's some things that Sam has to do, hardware is probably one, because the risk that somebody else puts AI together on a consumer device before he does can rip them sort of out of the.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about, what do you, how, how are you processing Apple with Gemini as a risk to ChatGPT?

• 46:55Keith Rabois?

  I don't, I, I.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  Because to me, because, because like, to be clear, like Gemini has an amazing model, they're well be, behind on a, just a product, uh, product experience standpoint, but there are quite a lot of searches that I hit ChatGPT or Gemini with, that like a Siri integrated with Gemini, I'd be going there right away if it was like.

• 47:15Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, depends on the kind of query you're doing or prompt you're doing.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but right now, if I, if I hit like for a fact.

• 47:20Keith Rabois?

  Yes.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  That's not that far away from that's not that far away from doing a comp like a like.

• 47:25Keith Rabois?

  Sure, but then there's other kinds of prompts where you didn't use to maybe even use Google. Like for example, I asked you to be to write a book outline for me, a book proposal. I wouldn't have thought of.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  You could you could probably one shot a book with.

• 47:42Keith Rabois?

  Outline was actually good.

• 47:45Keith Rabois?

  And it was modernly creative. What I expected and this blew me away was that there was a spark of ingenuity. Yes. Proposal. It wasn't just like break down the middle.

• 47:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 47:54Keith Rabois?

  I tried it on Gemini.

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  Are you writing a book?

• 47:56Keith Rabois?

  No, but maybe one day. You see, the problem with long form content is apparently because of token ration ration ration.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Rationing.

• 48:03Keith Rabois?

  Rationing, yeah.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:04Keith Rabois?

  If you try long form content, they they only spend a certain amount of tokens on you.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:08Keith Rabois?

  So it degrades. So you have to write almost like a paragraph or a page at a time.

• 48:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:13Keith Rabois?

  Otherwise, the quality will degrade. But the outline, the proposal was actually quite good. I did try it on Gemini. It wasn't as good.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Keith Rabois?

  So I think five point one, chat GPT five point one thinking mode.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:23Keith Rabois?

  Actually still has a bit of a human personality and I don't see that when I try the same prompts in Gemini.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Keith Rabois?

  So I think you could build an excellent, cutting edge person, human personality product if you focus.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Keith Rabois?

  And then I think you do need to try a device just to make sure you know you're not blindsided by somebody else. Some of the other stuff, though, may interfere. There's only so much talent. There's only so much bandwidth. Sam only has so many hours in the day, etc. Um, may interfere with success with chat GPT. Chat GPT should be a four trillion dollar business if you maximize it.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Talk about uh hardware. It feels like we're in this weird era where everything is getting more capital intensive earlier and earlier there. We are talking John Sido.

• 49:05Keith Rabois?

  So this is a good question. I think there's some companies where that's true.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:09Keith Rabois?

  Some types of markets, some types of products. I think other people are raising capital for no apparent reason. Like, let's talk Harvey. Illegal AI. I have a competitor investment that doesn't need a lot of capital.

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  Which one are you in?

• 49:19Keith Rabois?

  Uh, it's called Small Book.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Small Book.

• 49:22Keith Rabois?

  They target somewhat different markets, but they're actually legal AI. But there's no real reason to spend that money. Like, in other words, their compute costs can't be that high.

• 49:30John Coogan?

  Sure, because they should be able to pass that through as gross margin. Like, they should have good gross margins on days.

• 49:34Keith Rabois?

  So, when I invest in AI companies, so two thirds or three quarters, somewhere between, of all my investments over the last eighteen months are AI-based.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:41Keith Rabois?

  Mostly application layer, but not all.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:43Keith Rabois?

  All the application layer ones, I expect them to have positive gross margins.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:47Keith Rabois?

  Extremely positive gross margins.

• 49:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:49Keith Rabois?

  I'm like, you have to build a business too.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Keith Rabois?

  And I don't believe in these excuses. Now, if you're building frontier models and cutting edge, or you're going to do hardware, you're clearly going to spend money, or infrastructure, clearly going to lose money intentionally. And that's always been true in tech. But if you're building an application layer, I don't buy that.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  There was this hilarious, there was this hilarious exposé on Hacker News about AI startups that aren't actually training their own models, they're just rappers, and they were breaking down the gross margin. I was like, this is a VC's like, celebration.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  It looked good, it looked good.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Because they were like.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  The only thing that was bad is they were kind of making the claim that they were like more of a research.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  They were saying that they were training models when they're not, but the, my takeaway was that like, the rapper market is extremely healthy in certain, in certain markets.

• 50:32Keith Rabois?

  Because workflow, like, you have to prioritize things.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Keith Rabois?

  Like, if I'm working as an investment banker.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Keith Rabois?

  Or an accountant.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Keith Rabois?

  Or a lawyer. You, it's not just the performance of the model I care about. It's like, how efficient, how improve, how, how does it improve my life?

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:47Keith Rabois?

  And that's a function of how intuitive is the UI?

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Keith Rabois?

  How easy does it make the entire job to be done, so to speak? You know, to be accomplished. So, it's not just a model performance. I think, when I'm looking for like a consumer, like an application layer CEO, I want them to really understand what they're building for, why, and what the P and L impact to their target customers are.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Keith Rabois?

  Like, in legal, like, it's actually a complicated question.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Keith Rabois?

  Because of the bill of power. You don't necessarily want to make your lawyers more efficient if you're in a law firm.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  We've been talking, we've been talking about this so much. We had a, I know a lawyer who switched firms because he knew, he was with a big, like, probably top thirty law firm. He's like, they are not going to adjust in time. Like, there's no, and so they're like, we like that our associates are just running up hours on tasks that could be one-shotted by AI.

• 51:31Keith Rabois?

  I billed three hundred, three thousand six hundred hours my last month as a lawyer.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and.

• 51:35Keith Rabois?

  What what is this last month? Yeah, well, next time someone tells you they're working too hard in tech, I've literally billed three, three thousand six hundred hours. Now, that was not average month, but still, I hit over three thousand a few months a year, though, usually.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  But an associate today will do like a few thousand, well, a year?

• 51:51Keith Rabois?

  Culture has degraded to like.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  Uh, how do you bill three thousand a month?

• 51:54Keith Rabois?

  I wasn't even in the year.

• 51:55Keith Rabois?

  I wasn't anywhere near the top five percent.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  You mean a year, right?

• 51:59Keith Rabois?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, three thou- three hundred six, oh, sorry, here it is, three hundred sixty hours in January two thousand.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, that makes sense.

• 52:08Keith Rabois?

  The top associates in S and C were over three thousand for the year.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:12Keith Rabois?

  I'd be like twenty six, twenty seven hundred, so I was a slot, slotter.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, you're a buyer of legal products as well as an investor in legal AI products. Are you advising your, uh, your portfolio companies to push harder on their law firms to get better deals?

• 52:26Keith Rabois?

  Well, they are. Well, so every founder I know actually uses Chat GPT for legal research. Then they call up their lawyer.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Keith Rabois?

  And their lawyer's giving them advice, and they're literally chatting. So they're actually screenshotting and saying, this is, what you're telling me is wrong.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  Does Chat GPT need some, like, legal, like, clearly, a lot of people are using it, but there was just a judgment today that was requiring Chat GPT to turn over a bunch of stuff.

• 52:46Keith Rabois?

  So it's not, technically not privileged.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 52:49Keith Rabois?

  So it's complicated to use it. They could, we'll see how the law, but it's probably the right decision as a legal matter. Um, but I do know, I had a conversation with the CEO of a hu- more than a hundred billion dollar company. And he has a legal team that spends forty million dollars a year, and he authorized all his lawyers to use Chat GPT.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 53:06Keith Rabois?

  He's just like, look, you need to, you need to, you need to adopt this tool.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  I mean, they all use Google.

• 53:11Keith Rabois?

  Efficient, right, of course.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  You know?

• 53:12Keith Rabois?

  So a lawyer technically uses Chat GPT, it might be privileged.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Keith Rabois?

  But if you, as a consumer, normal person, input stuff like, oh, you know, how do I hide the word a weapon? That is definitely not privileged.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  I, I wonder, I wonder if it, uh, there, there are certain businesses that, uh, start and, uh, build knowing that they're going to get sued a lot. I wonder if this level's a playing field for businesses like that, that are kind of going after markets that don't want innovation?

• 53:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  And they could just say like, yeah, we would have needed a team of twenty lawyers back in the day, but actually now we can have like a few, like, really efficient.

• 53:42Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, well, there are startups in the legal space that basically. Are a substitute for a lawyer.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:47Keith Rabois?

  And then there's the legal AI startups that make lawyers more efficient.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  And which is uh which is Spellbook?

• 53:51Keith Rabois?

  Spellbook is making lawyers, mostly making lawyers more successfully. For firms and now for companies.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 53:57Keith Rabois?

  We have a lot of like, uh, actually Fortune thousand companies.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:00Keith Rabois?

  Cause you think about the incentives of a corporate legal department.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:02Keith Rabois?

  They're different than the law firm frenziers.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:04Keith Rabois?

  Like corporate legal departments want to spend less and get faster responses.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:08Keith Rabois?

  So it makes tons of sense and then you can customize to the culture of that company.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Keith Rabois?

  So like eBay uses Spellbook for example, and they have their own preferences about how they want to practice law.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Keith Rabois?

  And we can implement that on software.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:20Keith Rabois?

  Versus like, Google's not a customer, but Google might have different preferences.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we uh we've been seeing this new trend. I mean, the the lineage here in legal is Clearspire and then Atrium. And and now people are trying it again. What do you think about folks who say, uh, I was on a particular track where I'd be at a firm? Now I'm gonna start an AI-powered firm. Should they be raising money or should they just go do that on their own?

• 54:45Keith Rabois?

  Usually the way they start though is a human, a ratio of humans and models.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Keith Rabois?

  It's not like just all model.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:51Keith Rabois?

  Right? So you're gonna have to pay lawyers for a while.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:53Keith Rabois?

  You want to take the ratio from eighty percent humans.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Keith Rabois?

  To eighty percent automation and like hopefully quickly. Atrium basically never did that.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:00Keith Rabois?

  And maybe they didn't have the technology to do it. They got hooked on the drug, I think.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Keith Rabois?

  Of just like.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  I knew some of the machine learning folks at Atrium at the time and they were like, we're we're close to understanding documents with AI. And but close doesn't pay the bills.

• 55:15Keith Rabois?

  Human in the loop technically for most of these products right now. That's gonna change and the ratio should be like one human for ninety nine customers or ninety nine documents or nine thousand documents.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:24Keith Rabois?

  And then the economics could work, but you I think you would need to raise venture money upfront.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:29Keith Rabois?

  Also maybe for credibility, there's some signaling, you know, like people are buying enterprise company, enterprise all across the globe, any vertical are buying AI products. That's what's allowed these, you know, vertical application companies to hit, you know, a hundred million in revenue quickly. Is there's top down demand at very large Fortune.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  How do you, how do you assess quality of revenue if a founder comes to you and says, yeah, I am raising it a hundred million uh, for my first round, but I have a five million. Deal with some Fortune 500 company. And so it's really not that crazy of a revenue multiple. But then you start wondering, obviously, is that going to stick? Or can they just bounce?

• 56:05Keith Rabois?

  Well, we asked for the contract, actually, because the terms may vary. You call the often ask to call the customer like, why are you buying this? What do you hope it does, you know, and achieve what are the business goals? How confident are you that you're achieving those business goals? Sure. So that's actually a pretty standard reference.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  Just as due diligence. Yeah. Yeah. Does that mean that, uh, like the level of, uh, the level of due diligence required on these deals? Even if the early stage, like the, the, the round numbers, it might still be a seed, but it's a bigger number. You're treating it with the due diligence that you would bring to an A.

• 56:34Keith Rabois?

  I think, I think you do need to look at what's the source of the revenue? What are the terms of that relationship? Are they a pilot, permanent, do they have cancellation rights? And then you can look at the underlying metrics like we always used to, which is what's the active usage? Yeah. Like ultimately, and everybody in your organization is using the product. Yeah. Even if you have the contractual right to cancel, you're not canceling it. So like you could look at MAUs, DAUs, all those kinds of things. And actually, we do tend to look at that. I tend to personally look at the engagement metrics as much as the revenue metrics. You also look at the margin metrics because ultimately like, yeah, if you give away, someone pays 5 million, that costs you 10.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Keith Rabois?

  It's a great deal. Like that's not a long-term business.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're, if you're a enterprise, uh, you know, uh, CIO or CTO, uh, you're probably getting pitched some stuff where you're like, wait, I was going to buy those tokens anyway.

• 57:19Keith Rabois?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Keith Rabois?

  And I don't even have the infrastructure to run it. So it's like, totally. I don't have to buy it. I don't have to.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  There was a lot of bearishness around certain verticals, specific AI tools and enterprise AI after that MIT report came in that nobody read the source material, uh, and, and, uh, just anecdotally, it feels incorrect. Uh, but, uh, I think the, the simplistic way to, to look at it is like, will large companies spend more on AI in 2026 than 2025? And I think like you'd lean like.

• 57:51Keith Rabois?

  Answers definitely yes. I mean, I think you could critique, you're right. Nobody read the report. You just read, look at the high line, you know, the X or something. But I think it comes down to, as Vinod just talked about, the quality of implementation. If you have the right people implementing it, you're going to get high quality results. If you just think the software is just going to show up out of the box, it's going to work in transformation. Highly unlikely unless the product was designed to be that way. There are a few products that you see that, you know, are designed for a consumer to just like or a user, like an average employee to just use out of the box. That's pretty rare. Usually you have some implementation hurdle and I suspect a lot of these things are getting trapped in the implementation sort of, you know, box somewhere.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You guys have stayed out of the prediction market wars?

• 58:34Keith Rabois?

  We have not invested in a prediction market.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  Was that, like, was there a moment where you wanted to and the dynamics of the round didn't work out or was that a conscious choice?

• 58:43Keith Rabois?

  It's a good, it's a good question. And I may have, maybe I've been burned because I helped start in like seed invested way back in the day, this thing called Blue Bat, which is an early prediction market. It's a really cool product. Kevin Hartz, Javin and I worked with this founder on back in the day. It was like 2005 or six. Was he from YouTube or something? Yeah, yeah, right.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  There's never any new, there's never any new ideas.

• 59:05Keith Rabois?

  We, we could never get it to work. The hardest part that made it work wasn't like on the better side or the wager side. It was actually getting enough bets and maybe now with AI you can scalyly create enough interesting bets. We had to do it by hand and we just never could get that treadmill working.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, you maybe didn't do sports bet, sports.

• 59:24Keith Rabois?

  Well, we didn't do sports, but it was illegal. So yeah, obviously there's a lot on ramp to traction has been sports and then cleverly politics. But we did have political bets there. Yep. Um, and so anyway, maybe I was burned by that. Then there's another question, which is, I like the political markets. How, you know, I said we're bold early and impactful. You do have to start thinking about which market segments are actually positive impact in society. Sure. Like just giving average Americans more place to gamble. Certainly it's not something I want to like invest in. Now there are markets that are illiquid and they, the byproduct of the liquidity is a good thing for society like politics. Yep. But I don't want too many people speculating, like Americans don't have a lot of money. They gamble, that's fine. They bet on sports now, which may be fine.

• 1:00:08Keith Rabois?

  They got on crypto, whether they called that or not. Yeah. Adding more speculation to the American, you know, consumer. I'm not sure is something I want to, you know, invest.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  How much, how much attention?

• 1:00:17Keith Rabois?

  We want healthy American consumer.

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  How much attention have you paid to just this tension between states clearly want to regulate this stuff? And yet the CFDC has decided like, hey, these are event contracts, like we're, it's under our jurisdiction. How, how have you kind of like watched that play?

• 1:00:33Keith Rabois?

  Well, obviously the poly market guys have played their cards really well. Controversial, you know, at the beginning, probably very high risk, you know, Alfred, I saw Alfred Lynn talking about a little bit. I'm sure he probably opposed it, but the founder was pretty tenacious and it worked out or, you know, they all played the regulatory cards, you know, in interesting, different ways. So it's worked out well for them.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. But the story is not over.

• 1:00:55Keith Rabois?

  Well, I think they're in pretty good shape. You know, they, the biggest issue they had historically was more not, more US citizens were using their products before they were supposed to.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Keith Rabois?

  But I think the statute of limitations might sort of be hitting on that.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. It's fascinating. Do you think this will be a political issue in the next cycle? In terms of tech stuff that we've been monitoring, it feels like the, the, the AI data center, energy use, water use, like those are the questions that people want to answer in DC, job displacement stuff.

• 1:01:27Keith Rabois?

  Displacements, obviously.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  That's a bigger question than, than, okay, yeah, like my, you know, my uncle, he was always a sports better. Now he uses a different platform. Like, uh, it's kind of.

• 1:01:37Keith Rabois?

  Unless people start losing a lot of money. So, you know, in sports betting, you definitely have this. You have the opposite of whales, people, you know, whales, the company.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:01:45Keith Rabois?

  People use massive amount of money.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:46Keith Rabois?

  And that becomes a really sad story for them, for their family.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:50Keith Rabois?

  And it becomes a political issue then. If for some reason you get more, more people betting, betting, wagering, whatever, predicting. But they're not like massively exposed. I think then it won't be a political issue.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, we, I mean, we've been tracking AI diffusion. We're obviously excited about a lot of the products getting in people's hands, like, like spellbook, like law, like law firm for like legal AI. At the same time, we're just not seeing that much job displacement. Maybe it's coming, but it feels like there are, if whatever's happening, when somebody lays people off, it's prob. Probably not because they're just, oh, now it's just a prompt. But, but do you think tech needs to do a better job of telling that story or understanding?

• 1:02:29Keith Rabois?

  Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, I was in a speech that President Trump gave and he says like, I don't like the terms artificial intelligence. You guys need better branding.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Keith Rabois?

  And nobody's come up with a better answer. I think someone should, like, artificial intelligence sounds scary.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  It does.

• 1:02:42Keith Rabois?

  It sounds bad.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  Robots.

• 1:02:43Keith Rabois?

  When you say like you're having artificial sweeteners. So like, I think you could rebrand it.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 1:02:49Keith Rabois?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Right now, it really is like a power up.

• 1:02:51John Coogan?

  I have a co-pilot. Credit to Satya Nadella and the Microsoft folks, like, like, co-pilot feels like, okay, I have a helpful assistant that's alongside me. Does a co-pilot ever put the pilot out of business? Never.

• 1:03:03Keith Rabois?

  Not yet.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Not yet.

• 1:03:05Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, they have a long tail and kind of situational planes that makes it prudent. But I don't think there's, there's going to be job elimination. I think there's going to be job substitution.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:16Keith Rabois?

  You know, we're going to, we need more data centers. Well, to build data centers requires a lot of advanced plumbing. A lot of advanced electricians. These people get paid a lot of money, like, three times.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  They're getting fly around the jets.

• 1:03:28Keith Rabois?

  Yeah. Three to five acts easily the median income of the United States. So we're going to be building a lot of infrastructure. Building infrastructure creates jobs.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Keith Rabois?

  Are the people who, you know, are doing this now? Going to have to substitute something else? Maybe.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:41Keith Rabois?

  But I don't, I do think there is going to be some substitution for white collar work, like accounting, lawyers, maybe doc, primary care doctors.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  So what advice would you give to a high school student?

• 1:03:53Keith Rabois?

  I think you still like, read, learn, learn reading, writing and math very well.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Even though the computers can read, they can write and they can definitely do math.

• 1:04:01Keith Rabois?

  You need to know the fundamentals. Like, I mean, like, there's a research paper I retweeted this week about if you, if you handwrite your notes versus type your notes in class, on any metric, you can match back.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  And where? If they're in middle school, if they're in high school, should they be fighting to the nail again in the Ivy League? Where are they going? Where are they learning?

• 1:04:17Keith Rabois?

  Well, that's a good question. Chill fellows seem to work out well.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  It does.

• 1:04:19Keith Rabois?

  I'm a fan.

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  I'm a fan.

• 1:04:20Keith Rabois?

  You know, my kids are four. I hope by the time, they're better, they better not have to go to college by the time they grow up. It'd be really sad.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Are you not saving for it?

• 1:04:28Keith Rabois?

  I know.

• 1:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, no call.

• 1:04:31Keith Rabois?

  We're spending on AI.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  We'll give him a little data center.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  What about for the next generation of entrepreneurs that are just getting to Silicon Valley right now and they're seeing a trend of what we call like the deal guy, Yuga, the deal guy era? This idea that it used to be you get to Silicon Valley and you're writing code.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  The earnest hacker.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  And you're in the basement or you're in the garage, you write the code and then you put it on the internet and everyone shows up and your elegant algorithm just produces Google and then you create a trillion dollars in value and it's because you're the PhD scientist, you're the mathematician that you get rewarded and now it feels like you can maybe make it in Silicon Valley, maybe not caring so much about the technical aspects, but instead about the deals, putting pieces together.

• 1:05:13Keith Rabois?

  That's a little scary.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  So the funny thing though is like people use Sam as an example of this, but like he was running a research lab for years.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  And, and so like, even though like maybe he's.

• 1:05:23Keith Rabois?

  He was a CS dropout.

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  He was, yeah, he was also a CS dropout and like definitely built like an app.

• 1:05:27Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, yeah, he built an app. So the reason why it's scary and this is maybe portraying my age is back in the late bubble, internet bubble, 96, you know, and there used to be all these, what we used to call biz dev people running around all the companies and all doing all these deals and then the bubble collapsed.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Keith Rabois?

  And every, a lot of people ascribed the bubble and collapse to these biz dev people.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:05:48Keith Rabois?

  So they already stopped using the label. Was that how you met a biz dev person?

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Keith Rabois?

  Like never, like for the last 25 years.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  BDR, BDR, but they're like.

• 1:05:56Keith Rabois?

  They all rebranded. Well, biz dev was like hires, like partnerships.

• 1:05:59Jordi Hays?

  That was like, I come to you, I say, Keith, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a hundred million dollar of revenue and you're like, funny enough, I'm also gonna give you a hundred.

• 1:06:07Keith Rabois?

  That's a hundred million dollars in a company, I'm gonna give you a hundred million dollars of revenue.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  That was the classic, that was the classic example. Totally.

• 1:06:13Keith Rabois?

  So that's how I started my career in tech, actually, as a biz dev person.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:15Keith Rabois?

  And if you look at my LinkedIn profile, it's still there. But it became like this, you know, sort of negative signal on your resume, those biz dev people running around.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Keith Rabois?

  And so everybody's doing that now. That is a scary indication that maybe we're hitting, you know, some.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, would your advice to new entrepreneurs say, ignore the noise, ignore the frothy rounds, retreat to what, product market fit?

• 1:06:39Keith Rabois?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Programming.

• 1:06:40Keith Rabois?

  I think look ultimately deliver value. I think it's actually really simple to start. It's like you create a value proposition.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:06:47Keith Rabois?

  And then you explain the value proposition to people. And then you actually, yeah, yeah, yeah, you, you, there's product, there's market, you know, that's basically it. Like, what is my value proposition to who? Like, what do I do for you that's good for you? It could be good for your business, it could be good for your life. And then can I articulate that in a way that causes you to interrupt your life and test it out? And verify those claims? And then rinse and repeat. So you can create a value proposition through massive use of technology. Create it through design, you can create it through the intersection of humans, design and technology. It doesn't actually matter, but you have to have a very crisp, succinct, compelling value proposition. In business cases, you want to move the P and L of your customers. Like I had a enterprise company, maybe the only enterprise, true enterprise company I ever funded, enjoy the board of.

• 1:07:32Keith Rabois?

  Where our first customer was Walmart. Everyone's like, no, how's Walmart gonna be your first customer? And they spent five billion dollars on us. The reason why was we figured out there was one of the top three priorities for the company. We could address. Our second customer was AT&T. Another classic customer.

• 1:07:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Keith Rabois?

  Spent 10 million, or it was a telecom, it wasn't AT&T, it was a different telecom, actually.

• 1:07:54Keith Rabois?

  We could, our technology allowed them to understand their churn better. What's the only issue in the telecom business? Churn, subscriber churn. That's the only thing that matters, and like, you know, because they all compete on like churn.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Somebody else is gonna offer some.

• 1:08:06Keith Rabois?

  Nobody had a technology that could literally take all their data and actually figure out why people were returning. So if you have a right, the correct value proposition, all of the rules are changed. So just dial into the value proposition and then figure out how to articulate it, which sometimes can be different per my post. Sometimes you have actually marketing fit, and sometimes you actually have your product positioning fit, and sometimes you actually have value proposition fit. Sometimes you start with both, but sometimes you're bad at one. And it kind of masks and it is not clear that you're actually really good.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, marketing, market fit, marketing, market fit will mask the lack of product market fit for about a year.

• 1:08:41Keith Rabois?

  Yeah. The other one's harder, the other one doesn't get masked. It's harder, sometimes it's hard to fix, like you may go back to the product and think you don't have a value prop. You actually do, you just can't explain it. Uh, because you only get a certain amount of attention to explain, you gotta distill it. Once you distill it to the right people, then it might take off without changing the product. But that's the art, and true CRO is actually good at this art of triangulation.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how do you, uh, there's been some kind of coalitions or not really coalitions, but Walmart and Etsy have leaned into LLM commerce. They've partnered with OpenAI. Amazon and eBay have not yet. Shopify has. How do you, who you think is gonna look smart in two years for like leaning into these platforms early?

• 1:09:23Keith Rabois?

  Well, I think leaning in to learn. So there's a question, are they leaning in? Or are they leaning in to learn? Leaning in to learn is a great idea. Like if you're Shopify, of course, like will people use ChatGPT in a way that leads to product discovery and product purchases?

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  A friend of ours has a Shopify brand. They do like 200 million of revenue. He says, uh, people that land on his site from ChatGPT convert at 12%.

• 1:09:45Keith Rabois?

  That I agree with. I'm sure that's true because they take, they, it's authoritative in the recommendations. The signal it's better than a blue link. However, the question is the volume and what's the increase in that volume?

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Keith Rabois?

  Like how much of?

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  It's low today.

• 1:09:58Keith Rabois?

  Yeah. So that's the question is what does that change and what triggers that change? What catalyzes it? But I mean, you know, we invested in a company called Profound.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  They're a sponsor.

• 1:10:10Keith Rabois?

  Yeah. So they allow you as a brand to track how various, whether it's Gemini, ChatGPT, et cetera, are showcasing your products and brands. That's critical to the future. But what consumers ultimately decide to do, do they actually start using ChatGPT to recommend the next to issue to them or not? I think in some verticals, almost surely yes.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  I want, I want Christmas data so badly. I, I feel like this is the first year that we're really gonna get an answer, at least the labs will now. I don't know if we'll figure it out, but about the agentic shopping, just the propensity to.

• 1:10:42Keith Rabois?

  So let me give you an example of something they can solve. So like think that you're a guy and you want to buy a new blazer. Like I need a blazer so it don't look like ridiculous for you guys.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  You're looking like a nice Christmas sweater.

• 1:10:52Keith Rabois?

  So I gotta figure out what, what blazer is gonna fit me off the rock. I don't have time to get a tailor.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:58Keith Rabois?

  Almost an impossible task like today.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Keith Rabois?

  Like literally, like you would actually, even if you know your fashion, you'd almost impossible task like you might know your brands.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Roll the dice, yeah.

• 1:11:08Keith Rabois?

  I can imagine though, ChatGPT kinda knows, you know, what I buy, how it fits, what things I return, what things I don't over time. It just says, Keith, go to Hugo Boss.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:18Keith Rabois?

  Thirty-eight or forty-eight or forty-two, will it fit you off the rack?

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:22Keith Rabois?

  Like that is something that doesn't exist online and there's a lot of latent demand for consumers not to go to retail. Like the reason why I go to retail typically is I either need something immediately or I need to try it on.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's also this interesting thing where ChatGPT and basically every LLM has been only pull in the sense that you have to go and prompt it. It never just sends you a push notification and says, they're experimenting with with pulse. So they'll say, okay, we know that you like venture capital news and you like learning that data centers.

• 1:11:51Keith Rabois?

  Prioritize that.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  They have deprioritized it, but I still think that there's a glimmer of something valuable there where they could proactively send you results. It's very compute intensive and I don't know if they got the form factor right, but there's clearly, there's clearly a glimmer of something.

• 1:12:06Keith Rabois?

  There's a glimmer there, the question is gonna be the quality, right?

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Cause that's magical.

• 1:12:10Keith Rabois?

  If, yeah, it'd be totally magical, but I'm gonna react to the first five they send me and either love it or hate it. And they're not gonna get a second shot.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:12:18Keith Rabois?

  So I think that's hard to do in a beta.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, it's hard, but I think over time, the scale, like all the math and like the actual value. We've seen it work with like some of the Instagram ads where you're like, wow, I didn't even know I wanted that. It's really cool. People are satisfied. I think that will come.

• 1:12:33Keith Rabois?

  People are also more comfortable sharing data with ChatGPT than any other tech product I've ever seen. So I think like my sizing and things like that, you know, they allow me, if I put that in memory, it makes it a hell of a lot easier.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  So help me square that because I feel like that's true. I feel like people have these incredibly personal conversations with LLMs. They use them for all these funny things. They're obviously seeing AI search results and yet AI as a whole feels like the most unpopular technology in decades. And.

• 1:13:02Keith Rabois?

  Well, I think it may be a one percent issue too. Like there's a lot of people who are motivated for their own reasons, you know, to. Cause uh there's create negative feedback on AI.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, it's also because it's also because.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  People, for example.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Five years ago, there was a lot of interviews that happened where they were talking about job loss and and just like total.

• 1:13:19Keith Rabois?

  Well, even Sam like made the mistake of like talking about UBI. We need UBI. Like this is a mistake. We need UBI because there's gonna be job loss. Well, first of all, there's not gonna be job loss, as we were talking about arguably. But B, like highlighting that a decade before any of that happens makes no sense whatsoever. And UBI, by the way, is a terrible solution.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:13:34Keith Rabois?

  So for all those reasons, it created like more fear. And then the safety hoax people, the people are always creating hoax is about. The the it's literally a hoax. Safety is a complete hoax. There's this is my challenge.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Why?

• 1:13:45Keith Rabois?

  Name a single person who believes we have an AI safety issue to write about any political issue for 50 years. Every single person who's talking about safety has been wrong on the environment, has been wrong on equality and all that nonsense. So like, I just don't believe any of this because the people are all always finding excuse for bureaucrats to interfere with progression.

• 1:14:04John Coogan?

  So I mean, that that I I hear you. That's just like, that's kind of sad for our tech community because uh.

• 1:14:09Keith Rabois?

  Well, as you know, a lot of people, a lot of people in tech, though, have very sad views.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  I suppose, yeah. But what I mean is like, is like Mark Zuckerberg has dealt has dealt with a lot of attacks on like social media is bad, right? But at least you got five years of people kind of liking posting Instagrams, you know? People kind of liked social media before they started critiquing it. AI, day one.

• 1:14:29Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, meeting and.

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  Day one, immediately.

• 1:14:31Keith Rabois?

  Which is critical, like, you know, uh, there's this old, there's this old like line that's stuck in my brain from when uh. Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Keith Rabois?

  He said, you know, if the electric light had been invented today, it would absolutely be banned. Because it would have threatened the candle making industry, you know, the safety, you know, it actually was somewhat unsafe, actually. Thousands of people died. But we never would have allowed electricity. And think about society without electricity.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have a faster feedback loop on fear and and actually taking action and then monetizing that fear or one way or.

• 1:15:03Keith Rabois?

  And we saw this with nuclear power, like to some extent.

• 1:15:06Jordi Hays?

  If you see a a slot, an AI like video uh that was generated and it's bad. You're like, I don't want to lose my job to this thing that I don't like, you know? And so I I.

• 1:15:17Keith Rabois?

  Well, we have to remember, people, people also, there's a bell curve distribution of people's content. Let's take video.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Keith Rabois?

  Of all the humans, assume there's no technology. What fraction of human generated video is great or good?

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Keith Rabois?

  It's probably a fairly small fraction.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Keith Rabois?

  But then you see the AI, you're like, oh.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Keith Rabois?

  This is terrible.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  The guy that made this said, I'm going to lose my job and then I'm going to need UBI. Why don't we just stop all of this altogether?

• 1:15:40Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little bit like Paul Graham had this epic blog post about, you know, if someone, um, unfortunately like meets someone, you know, and sexually assaults them at a grocery store like Safeway. It's not like a front page news story for the New York Times that, I mean, this happens all across the country, unfortunately. God forbid, you know, someone meets someone on Instagram and a DM. Front page news story, you know, something bad, god awful happens, but it's the grocery, you know, versus the new technology. And so you have to always remember that people are going to critique the new technology differently than what the real risk in the real world is. That's actually probably more material.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we have a couple of minutes left, uh, and we're here at NICE. What's your IPO kind of like outlook? How are you thinking about 2026? You think a lot of companies?

• 1:16:23Keith Rabois?

  Got some good ones coming up for you, hopefully, uh, you know.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Twistle Ventures going out?

• 1:16:27Keith Rabois?

  No.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Well, I've heard rumors about some other funds.

• 1:16:29Keith Rabois?

  We are definitely not. Yeah, I can assure you, really.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  I'm sure you love it.

• 1:16:33Keith Rabois?

  We are not going to be, we have, we have never had the conversation about whether we should be a public company. We're the craft business.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  IPO rumors swirl, IPO rumors swirl.

• 1:16:41Keith Rabois?

  Absolutely not. We'll let someone else do that.

• 1:16:43John Coogan?

  Okay, but who else?

• 1:16:43Keith Rabois?

  But, um, you know, obviously we've been involved in really good companies. Ramp, your sponsor, obviously is phenomenal, can be a public company, whatever they choose to be. Um, got Aven, Trade Republic in Europe, not as many people paying attention to.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:54Keith Rabois?

  Great future company. Um, there's a bunch like I sound excited about the future.

• 1:16:59Jordi Hays?

  Saw there was some news that SpaceX is maybe thinking about going out next.

• 1:17:03Keith Rabois?

  I don't have any inside information there. I mean, I read the, I read the same thing. I think it would be great, you know, it's 22 years or something.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a long time and also just a lot of Elon fans have been riding with Tesla for a long time. And that's unlocked a lot of abilities.

• 1:17:17Keith Rabois?

  They need something new to invest in.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, they need something new.

• 1:17:19Keith Rabois?

  Well, actually, it's private. They'll take it back public probably at some point that you can invest in.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  Taking through, uh, what, what you're advising, uh, those portfolio founders without naming names, but, uh, uh, on whether or not, how they should be thinking about timing an IPO. You've obviously been along for the ride on many. What are you counseling them on where, when to do it?

• 1:17:35Keith Rabois?

  Well, I'm always a fan of go public as early as possible.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:38Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, so I wrote a whole chapter in Eli Gill's book, High Growth Handbook, that explains why.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  One of the best books.

• 1:17:44Keith Rabois?

  It's a great book. I have two chapters, one about hiring and then one about going public. Sure. But my general view is $50 million in revenue plus predictability, you should be a public company.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:17:54Keith Rabois?

  There's so many benefits of being public. So I'll always counsel when you're, as soon as you possibly can, go early, not late.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  What about, what about burning money? I feel like there's another bar which says, hey, if you're a public company, you shouldn't need to raise money anymore. Has that changed?

• 1:18:09Keith Rabois?

  Well, it depends on the company. Some businesses are profitable, like Trade Republic wouldn't need to raise money, for example. We actually pay taxes already.

• 1:18:19Keith Rabois?

  That happened to me. I've never been on board of a company that's actually paying taxes. Because you know, to pay corporate taxes, you actually have to offset all of the profits. So like, we're such a great company.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  You burn through all your care for it, so you're done. Wow. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else?

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  No, this is super fun.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  We really appreciate you coming down.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Why, why New York? Why are you here? Is it the Ramp mafia? You want to make sure you pick off all that?

• 1:18:41Keith Rabois?

  So we actually looked at my geographic investments. I mentioned AI is two thirds, three quarters. New York is the number one geo, has been the number one geo for me for five or six years. It's about 60% of all my investments, application layer stuff, financial services, you know, like imprint, ramp, a lot of great companies, Basis, accounting AI, Rogo, investment banking AI, Trabas here, you know, Ramp. They were a great set of companies here. So, and then it's better for me to be on the East Coast for like personal reasons.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come down. This is fantastic.

• 1:19:14Keith Rabois?

  Good to see you.

• 1:19:14John Coogan?

  I'm sure we'll catch up with you soon.

• 1:19:15Keith Rabois?

  Thanks for the invite.

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. I'm going to tell you about Numeral. Compliance handled. I think I already told you about Numeral, so I'm going to tell you about Figma.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Again.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. And our next guest is Lynn Martin, the president of the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Dan Soroker's company, Limitless, has been acquired by Meta.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  Ooh, congratulations to him.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  There's a video here that we cannot play, but Meta acquires AI wearable. Startup Limitless.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  Ooh, we were talking about, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in the AI wearable space. There's a lot of cool stuff happening and like, it just feels like fertile playground. I feel like it'd be a fun time to be a hardware hacker. We talked about that transcription hard piece of hardware that's making $250 million out of nowhere. Very interesting companies. There's obviously cool things to do. A lot of the, a lot of the, you know, the, the, the, the, a lot of the attention goes to the rabbit R1, the, uh, the friend pin, the humane AI pin, but there's cool stuff happening all over the industry. And so.

• 1:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  It's a voice recorder.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Again, voice recorder, they had a hardware device.

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, notable that, yeah, again, Limitless, I don't think was able to crack, uh, like real growth with the hardware, but that company Plod has.

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but again, this is a great outcome for, for them. Uh, I'm sure the whole Limitless team is, uh.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  And let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spend white label wallets, assign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  What else is going on in the timeline, Jordy?

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's see here. Uh, yeah, I, I mentioned this briefly in the conversation with, uh, with Keith, but apparently OpenAI must turn over 20 million chat logs to plaintiffs. Judge, uh, Ona Wang has ruled.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. You have to send an email to a, to a server that adds a chat GPT response in with your lawyer CC'd. That's how you maintain confidentiality.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Harvey, who Keith also, also mentioned.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, raised 160 million at an $8 billion valuation.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  This is why Keith was talking about.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Two percent dilution round.

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  From A16Z.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  I mean, you gotta take that money.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  This year to 150 million.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  They raised 300 million from Sequoia at 3 billion in January, 300 million at 5 billion from K2 and KP in June.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  And then 160.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  And then 168 from A16Z.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to Spencer and the boys at Co2.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  A little markup there.

• 1:21:46John Coogan?

  And I feel like, I feel like law firms have got to be pretty discerning on making this purchase decision at this point. Like, it's not, it's not entirely exploratory budget anymore. And it's not viral, like, something that's like, oh, it's like a flash in the pan and then all of a sudden, like, they're not going to be able to monetize.

• 1:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my question is like, do you, like, if, if anybody that wants to say, like, oh, this is, like, out of control. It's like, do you think they'll be able to get to, like, eight, a billion dollars of revenue?

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Legal industry is pretty big and, and it's been traditionally pretty hard.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  And they actually, they actually, so, so the labor displacement thing does feel real here because I do think a law firm would say, "Hey, currently we have a hundred associates. We can condense that down to about 20 and do the same amount of work by working with, uh, with something like Harvey." And again, the, the vibe had, had, uh, at least, uh, with a lawyer buddy of mine, had shifted drastically with Harvey. A year ago, he was saying, "Ah, we're like, using it a little bit now." He's like, "It's one-shotting stuff that I didn't think it would."

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  He says, "I'm, I'm one-shot it actually by it."

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm one-shot.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Well, one-shot your data, your data analysis with Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is-

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  We should have gone to Rahul here. He should have, we should have told him to come here and be in the Capitol with us.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  We'll do that soon.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  YC has a new company called The Hog.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, really?

• 1:23:10Jordi Hays?

  It's called The Palantir for GoToMarket. We were just talking, we were just talking about-

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, we were talking about swine-themed startup names. You have Pig, you have-

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Carrie no interest. Watched their launch video twice. I evaluate software businesses for a living. Still no idea what Hog does.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Thank you so much.

• 1:23:35Lynn Martin?

  Green sandwich.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes, a green sandwich.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  But it is, I mean, yesterday, uh, we were greeted by a number of folks in your team. Everyone was dressed to the nines. What is truly festive and fantastic was the tree lighting, right? So this is every year. Walk us through exactly what happened. There were mascots, there were celebrities, everything.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  There were singing.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Oh, I seen the tree outside, it's massive.

• 1:23:54Lynn Martin?

  CFOs, celebrities, mascots, charitable organizations, um-

• 1:24:00Lynn Martin?

  All celebrating the holiday season. We had about 10,000 people.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  10,000, we heard.

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  No, it was crazy because we walked in, we walked in yesterday, it felt like there was an IPO going on.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  It felt like IPO.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  It felt like Sienna was IPO-ing and then, and then today.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  We were like, oh, okay, actually, this is a huge event.

• 1:24:17Lynn Martin?

  You know, Hank Azaria actually made a joke that he was IPO-ing yesterday. He was part of the celebrities. He did a spot.

• 1:24:24John Coogan?

  That was great.

• 1:24:25Lynn Martin?

  But, I mean, it's a great opportunity for our listed companies to get some visibility, particularly the consumer.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:30Lynn Martin?

  Focus brands. There were about 30 different tents outlining Wall Street. It celebrates the downtown community. It's a great opportunity to

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Lovely.

• 1:24:38Lynn Martin?

  generate business and give a bit back.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  What other big events like tree lighting that are kind of off of, like, like, things that you can count on happening every year?

• 1:24:46Lynn Martin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  What's on the calendar regularly at the New York Stock Exchange?

• 1:24:50Lynn Martin?

  You know, we do a lot around the

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Is there like a 4th of July?

• 1:24:55Lynn Martin?

  We do a lot, 4th of July, Memorial Day, like those types of holidays to celebrate Veterans Day, to celebrate our military. Anytime there's something to celebrate our military,

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:25:06Lynn Martin?

  who have served this great country.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:08Lynn Martin?

  It's all about giving back and highlighting what makes this country great. Obviously, one of the things that makes this company, this country great is our phenomenal capital markets.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:25:21Lynn Martin?

  And it's really a unique differentiator.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:25:24Lynn Martin?

  There you go. Love that. But then also, like, our military, people who selflessly protect us every single day. And then the not-for-profit, the charitable organizations who so many of our listed companies support. As part of the tree lighting, we, we highlight the charitable organizations that our listed companies support. And this year, we have 400 of our listed companies that have contributed to that program. So all throughout the season, we like to, to highlight that. People who have done good things, but also Are paying it forward.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, and we heard that in 10 years, there has never been an IPO that landed exactly on the tree lighting.

• 1:26:10Lynn Martin?

  No, but some of it's close.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Some of it's close, okay.

• 1:26:13Lynn Martin?

  Have come close.

• 1:26:14Jordi Hays?

  What's the latest in December that you remember an actual IPO happening?

• 1:26:22Lynn Martin?

  The week before Christmas. I think New Bank.

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Lynn Martin?

  Oh, I don't know. Yeah, New Bank in 2021 was a pretty late IPO. I don't remember if it was the 19th or the 20th of December.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's late. That's basically that.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Ton of ads.

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that's basically the last day that I think the e-commerce brands can like, you can place an order and still get the product. That's kind of like the last day of business, basically.

• 1:26:49Lynn Martin?

  Exactly. The rush, right?

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is the holiday season? When is the stock exchange dark? How much time?

• 1:26:57Lynn Martin?

  You know, we're not really ever dark. If I look at the calendar for the next couple of weeks, for example, we have a ton of ETFs going out, which has actually not received as much coverage as the IPOs of operating companies.

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what does that process look like from even like the roadshow stage all the way to like listing?

• 1:27:21Lynn Martin?

  I mean, that one's a little bit different because you can just launch the ETF and then accumulate AUM.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  I know, but is there any like, I mean, but I'm assuming like you're building, well, I'm assuming you're trying to build like attention going into

• 1:27:33Lynn Martin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  Going into the process?

• 1:27:35Lynn Martin?

  A lot of times you're also spending the time looking at the index you're benchmarking against and backtesting the results and then going out to

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Okay, and continuing.

• 1:27:44Lynn Martin?

  People who are going to contribute the AUM and show them the performance of the ETF and how it would have performed under stress periods and different macroeconomic events.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  What trends are you seeing in some of these net new ETFs?

• 1:27:59Lynn Martin?

  You know, crypto ETFs have been a big unlock for that industry. You're seeing just a continuation of the various types of ETFs, equities, fixed income as well. Fixed income has also been a big unlock. ETFs have been probably one of the greatest financial innovations of our lifetimes, my lifetime in particular, where it allows someone to invest in an incredibly liquid vehicle that has incredibly illiquid constituent baskets. So if I think of like the fixed income markets, which is where I came from, like the Muni ETFs. They've been able to accumulate a good amount of assets. Crypto has been another unlock.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  So folks have been on our show talking about the future of, you know, putting graphics cards in an ETF or getting AI compute or data centers and giving folks more access to that. I know some of the private credit funds, we had John Zito on the show yesterday from Apollo, but some of the other funds have like taken different funds and IPO'd them separately so that they get more direct access. I would expect to see more of that, but I don't know.

• 1:29:09Lynn Martin?

  Yeah, I mean, there's been a fair amount of folks have talked about private instruments and putting them in an ETF wrapper. I know Vlad's talked about that from Roger quite a bit, that he's looking at that as an opportunity.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's been insatiable demand for private company stock all in Silicon Valley, but it's usually done through angel investing, never really through an ETF. But it seems

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  the structure and how you disclose information and whatnot and make sure you have a good basket of assets.

• 1:29:42Lynn Martin?

  And how, and do you actually have a voting share in the underlying basket? There's a lot more logistics to work out in that. But in general, ETFs are going to add a layer of transparency that a lot of these illiquid assets don't have, because they're mark to market every day. They have now at the end of the day, the fund.

• 1:30:03Jordi Hays?

  It's been some other experiments with trying to bring private shares into the public markets that aren't, that end up trading like, you know, three, four times NAV and then end up being like the underlying assets can be high quality, but if you're buying them at Forex or something like that, the actual valuation is like you're just actually lighting money on fire. 2026, everybody, everybody's super excited. We just talked to Keith, he

• 1:30:27Lynn Martin?

  It's gonna be a big year.

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a big year.

• 1:30:29Lynn Martin?

  It's gonna be a big year. You know, the year was going really, really well. And then you had various events such as Liberation Day in the beginning of the year that sort of shut the window, the IPO window, but obviously it reopened. So how we met you guys, here we are. And then the government shutdown temporarily closed the market as well. So a variety of our deals have now pushed into January, but January, it's gonna be a busy January. It's gonna be a really busy Q1. And now it feels like momentum because that narrative is out there and these deals are gonna go early in the new year. Momentum's truly building for, for the rest

• 1:31:11Lynn Martin?

  of 2026. But you gotta remember, you got midterms at the end of 26.

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. How have midterms historically impacted, just like whether or not it's kind of the windows open or close?

• 1:31:25Lynn Martin?

  Probably for a couple of weeks before, the window will be shut for a bit of time because people are gonna, they're, they're gonna be, they're not gonna want to go when there's potential volatility in the market. And anytime you have a large group of elections or a monumental election, like the election for a president, you're not gonna want to go just before, because you just don't know what's gonna happen around that election period.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep. That makes so much sense. Well, we just want to say thank you for welcoming us.

• 1:31:58Lynn Martin?

  I am so psyched to have you guys here.

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look at this. It's still, it's still surreal. And thank you for letting us, this be our home on the East Coast.

• 1:32:07Lynn Martin?

  Our home is your home.

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  Literally could not have picked a better place.

• 1:32:11Lynn Martin?

  Your interview yesterday with Kramer.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  It was so much fun.

• 1:32:14Lynn Martin?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  We came from Poland to China.

• 1:32:16Lynn Martin?

  Well, because he tweeted in the morning, he was like, it could be fun, it could be wild.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Could be wild.

• 1:32:22Lynn Martin?

  And it was all the above, all the above.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was amazing. We talked about the market, but we also just talked about interviewing, building relationship with CEOs over decades. And it just laid a groundwork, the groundwork. I remember we watched his interview with Tim Cook 15 years ago, a decade ago.

• 1:32:39Lynn Martin?

  And you guys mentioned that.

• 1:32:40John Coogan?

  And watch how he, how he built that relationship, really remarkable work. And a lot of it happened in this building, a lot of it happened right down there.

• 1:32:46Lynn Martin?

  A lot of it.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're looking forward to eventually joining, joining him on, on his show. And I just hope we can bring the same level of energy that he has.

• 1:32:56Lynn Martin?

  You can bring your gong and your panel alongside his panel. And I can't wait to see who's louder on that day.

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  We gotta hit.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta hit the gong for the partnership. Gong hit for the partnership. I will hold this.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is for you.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  We officially gong hitting. Go.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:33:18Lynn Martin?

  Now that's a gong.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  That's a gong, that's a gong. We're gonna leave these here for you, so if you're ever, you need a boost of energy.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Send the coffee, the gong.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  We appreciate you.

• 1:33:31Jordi Hays?

  We will be back soon.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  We are going.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait for you.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And I'm also going to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal integrations. What else is in the timeline? We of course have Emily Sundberg from Feed Me joining in just a second. We're very excited to have her on the show. But is there anything else in the timeline that we should run through before we bring in Emily?

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  Chrome Hearts.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  Chrome Hearts.

• 1:34:10Jordi Hays?

  Acquired, acquired, acquired one of my favorite hotels.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Wait, the Surf Rider?

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Clothing brand? Surf Rider.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  Oh, they did?

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  So I think it was the family, the Starks, the owners.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  We've been there. Dylan, Dylan will stay there sometimes when he's in LA.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they acquired, uh, yeah, one of my favorite hotels. I used to stay there a lot and then I moved like right near it. And so now I don't have any reason to, uh, to stay there unfortunately, but, uh, interesting pickup. It's an iconic hotel. They paid more than 1.8 million per room, uh, which puts it among Southern California's priciest hotel deals in years. Uh, it's just 20 rooms. Uh, and so, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't, uh, I, I was, it had been owned by, I know the guy who created the hotel. It was basically an impossible task to like redevelop this, like basically, uh, it was an old motel that was kind of crumbling. He redeveloped it, made it beautiful. Uh, many people said it couldn't be done just because of the coastal commission and just how hard it is to like,

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  uh, do any type of like development work in Malibu. He did it, sold it to private equity. I think this is it in trading hands again. Uh, but I'm excited to see what they do with it. They've been, um, they have, they've just been in Malibu for so long and have a great presence there. So.

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  It's a beautiful hotel. I love it.

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  And it's, I mean, it's cruel hearts now.

• 1:35:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, shout out to.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Fall, the generative media app platform for developers, developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, shout out to Jim O'Shaughnessy.

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  This is hilarious.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  He says, when I say I love Bach, I really mean it. He listened to 64,000 minutes of Bach last year, which puts him in the 0.001% of global fan.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  He's just on repeat. The repeat is like no Mozart. I don't even drift away. I'm loyal. I'm riding with Bach 24/7. How many minutes are in a year? Can you actually look that up? Uh, 60 times 24 times 365?

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Sometimes 24 times 365. He was listening. Okay, okay, so there's 525,000 minutes in a year, I think, if I got that right.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Um, and so he was listening for 60,000 minutes? 60,000 minutes. So more than 10% of his time. So that's, that's more than two hours every day. This guy's listening to just Bach?

• 1:36:32Jordi Hays?

  He's an absolute dog.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  This is the craziest thing. What happened?

• 1:36:35Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I feel, I didn't even, I think I was like, top 2% fan on my most played artist or something like that.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I actually haven't looked through my Spotify.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  He's a point 001%.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  This is hilarious. Okay, yeah, well, good. Well, let's bring in Emily Sundberg, and let's also tell you about getbezel.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury houses.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Fully authentic.

• 1:36:54Emily Sundberg?

  Hi.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Hello.

• 1:36:55Emily Sundberg?

  Hi, good to see you guys.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying welcome.

• 1:36:58Emily Sundberg?

  Same in New York.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, good to have you here.

• 1:36:59Emily Sundberg?

  How's it going?

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  Um, it's going great. Last night, we were at a, uh, an event and, uh, and the interviewer was asking us a bunch of questions about the business and stuff. But one of the questions that, it didn't faze me at the time, but then I talked about it with someone later, and I'll give you the question, and I want to see how you interpret it.

• 1:37:16Emily Sundberg?

  Okay.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  It was, uh, if you are on a desert island, you're stranded on a desert island, what are three Twitter accounts that you would follow?

• 1:37:26Emily Sundberg?

  Oh.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Maybe do that for Substack.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Emily Sundberg?

  Three Substack accounts?

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  You could do anything. I, I, I wound up listing a Substack as well.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  It was just technology analyst. John's just on a desert island, just like, reading Tompson and semi analysis.

• 1:37:39Emily Sundberg?

  I think I would need New York Times for Twitter.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  New York Times, okay.

• 1:37:41Emily Sundberg?

  Um, need, need, uh, Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go. You definitely need Joe Weisenthal, yes.

• 1:37:48Emily Sundberg?

  Need him. Um, and then a third, probably like a, uh, like a Frank O'Hara bot or something.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:37:54Emily Sundberg?

  That just like automatically gives me some poetry.

• 1:37:56John Coogan?

  So you answered the question exactly how I answered the question. And then someone came up to me after and was like, no, like, if you're stranded, you need to be hot, you need to be following like, alert services, or like, the Coast Guard, or like...

• 1:38:07Emily Sundberg?

  New York Times, oh, right.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  You know, like a pilot.

• 1:38:10Emily Sundberg?

  A pirate.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  A pilot, like someone with a plane.

• 1:38:11Emily Sundberg?

  But also pirate wires.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Stop analyzing technology.

• 1:38:14Jordi Hays?

  You're just waving, you're waving the Joe Weisenthal post.

• 1:38:18John Coogan?

  What is Joe Weisenthal gonna do to get you off that island? Joe would figure it out. He's not gonna help you. Joe would figure it out.

• 1:38:23Emily Sundberg?

  He would know that I was missing, though. And have like task force.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. And you want to know that he's coming for you.

• 1:38:28Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah, he would give me the update.

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  Speaking of Joe Weisenthal, he recently made an appearance on your new podcast.

• 1:38:35Emily Sundberg?

  He did.

• 1:38:36John Coogan?

  Expense Account.

• 1:38:37Emily Sundberg?

  Right.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  And he had a take that I thought crossed journalistic lines. I thought he...

• 1:38:42Emily Sundberg?

  Let's hear it.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  He said that Malaysia has the best food in the world.

• 1:38:46Emily Sundberg?

  Have you been?

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:38:47Emily Sundberg?

  So how would you know?

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  Because I'm from America and I know America has the best food in the world.

• 1:38:51Emily Sundberg?

  I went to a birthday party at a Malaysian bar last night.

• 1:38:54John Coogan?

  Okay, was it the best food?

• 1:38:55Emily Sundberg?

  It was great.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  Is Malaysian food actually that good? What is Malaysian food?

• 1:38:58Emily Sundberg?

  It's...

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  Name every, name every meal.

• 1:39:00Emily Sundberg?

  Spicy, green, it's... Do you like spice?

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I like spice. I'm just saying that like, like Malaysia has one type of food.

• 1:39:07Emily Sundberg?

  It's delicious, you should go.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  They have beef, they have beef saute.

• 1:39:11Emily Sundberg?

  A lot of beef.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  I love beef saute, I love beef.

• 1:39:13Emily Sundberg?

  And then like sauces and greens.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  But America, we have pizza, we have McDonald's, we have the Doritos Locos Taco.

• 1:39:18Emily Sundberg?

  Do you have pizza in LA?

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  No, but in New York, which is again in America. He, he would say on a country by country basis.

• 1:39:25Emily Sundberg?

  But if you're in New York, you can make things like that.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  We have San Francisco, we have French, we have French laundry, we have all sorts of restaurants.

• 1:39:30Emily Sundberg?

  Have you guys had any great dinners while you've been here?

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Uh, we had a pretty good dinner last night. Where'd we go? We went to a steakhouse, it was delicious.

• 1:39:36Emily Sundberg?

  Which one?

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  I don't know. Hawks something?

• 1:39:39Emily Sundberg?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:40John Coogan?

  Uh, but I just think that the variety that you get, like, I, I will give Joe Weisenthal, I've never been, but let's give him Malaysia is an A+. It's an A+.

• 1:39:49Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:50John Coogan?

  It's like, well then, America has got to be B+ in steak and B+ in French and B+ in sushi and B+ in, uh, you know, Italian and all the different, all the different genres, cuisines.

• 1:40:00Emily Sundberg?

  Malaysia is awesome, I understand all that.

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, you're defending, you're defending your guest.

• 1:40:04Emily Sundberg?

  But I think what he was really probably saying was like a great, this like, like probably one or two specific great Malaysian places in New York. Because he has his spots.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  No, no, he was talking about going to Malaysia physically and saying that that, being in Malaysia, that's the best food in the world. Yeah, we went to Hawks, Hawksmore. We went to Hawks. It was good, it was good. You're not, you're not...

• 1:40:22Emily Sundberg?

  I mean, I haven't been yet, but I'll make, I'll make a trip.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:25Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  Well, uh, how, how, how is Expense Account going as a new podcast? Are you excited about it?

• 1:40:31Emily Sundberg?

  It's great, it's a blast. You know, it started, um, Jason, my restaurant columnist, he started writing a column for me a little bit over a year ago called Expense Account. And it's sort of about like business guy restaurants, like places where somebody slams the card down.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:46Emily Sundberg?

  And it was a great column and I was reading one of them. He joked about having a podcast.

• 1:40:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:52Emily Sundberg?

  Called him and I was like, are you making a show with someone else?

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Emily Sundberg?

  And he said, he wasn't.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:58Emily Sundberg?

  But then I said, do you want a show?

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Emily Sundberg?

  And we made it and Substack and Silver Oak Wines.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:41:04Emily Sundberg?

  Sponsored season one.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  That's a great sponsor.

• 1:41:07Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, they're great.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:41:08Emily Sundberg?

  The ones who Substack for growth, yeah.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  Wait, Substack sponsored?

• 1:41:12Emily Sundberg?

  They're the presenting sponsor of season one.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:41:15Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, love Substack.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, what I liked about it was the fact that I am not really a foodie, as you can tell from my...

• 1:41:23Emily Sundberg?

  You say that, but you've been having more culinary conversations.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Yes, but my example of good food in America was the Doritos Locos Taco.

• 1:41:30Emily Sundberg?

  Great.

• 1:41:31Jordi Hays?

  Or Baja Blast is a fantastic drink.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  I like a Baja Blast. I like a Diet Coke. I like a Red Bull.

• 1:41:36Emily Sundberg?

  Same, we're on the same page.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  So, but, but, so, so I was worried that I was gonna open up the RSS feed and see a bunch of names that I didn't recognize. And when I saw Joe Weisenthal, I was like, I'm in.

• 1:41:44Emily Sundberg?

  And he has great takes on food.

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Yes, and it was great because I'm...

• 1:41:47Emily Sundberg?

  He's one of New York's best food reporters.

• 1:41:48John Coogan?

  I'm used to him in one context, talking about the markets, about what's happening with the latest news in the Fed.

• 1:41:55Emily Sundberg?

  Trade.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Talking to founders, talking to entrepreneurs, CEOs. It was really cool to see just a different side of him.

• 1:42:02Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  So I think if you can keep doing that, like, I'm hooked.

• 1:42:05Emily Sundberg?

  That's the, that's the idea.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And I think a lot of people will jump, and honestly, a lot of people should be trying to get on the show because it shows them a different side of them. And I don't know, it just seems like it's a recipe for success.

• 1:42:16Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  What about the West Coast expansion? You're looking west.

• 1:42:20Emily Sundberg?

  I need your advice.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:21Emily Sundberg?

  So I, I found out Substack is very limited analytics. They're great for other reasons, but in terms of like the demographics of my readers.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:29Emily Sundberg?

  It's limited, but I do know that about 20% of my readers are in California.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:35Emily Sundberg?

  Um, it, it feels like a loss to not, it, it feels like a miss to not do some sort of California product. Uh, when I was there on my last trip, everybody was saying like, we want something, like, we read Feed Me religiously, but we want something in California. So I decided next year I'm just gonna go out there more, like there as a state.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:56Emily Sundberg?

  Um, and I, I think it will probably start as like a monthly letter, but all of these readers of mine, they like have tips for me. They have stories they want to tell. I'm not sure exactly... How I'm gonna focus it, but I was putting together like a small newsroom or thinking about people to help me with it and then I realized I can just go and do it. I think that's what people want.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:43:18Emily Sundberg?

  So I'm going to San Francisco at the end of January.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:43:22Emily Sundberg?

  I asked my Twitter followers where to stay.

• 1:43:24Jordi Hays?

  We need a prediction market on how long you're actually staying.

• 1:43:28Emily Sundberg?

  Right now it's three nights.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you're making it sound like it was gonna be like three weeks.

• 1:43:33Emily Sundberg?

  No, no, three nights. I mean, maybe I'll never leave.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're going in January, not for January.

• 1:43:38Emily Sundberg?

  In January. My husband would not want me to go for that long. I don't think he would miss me.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Emily Sundberg?

  And my readers would miss me in New York.

• 1:43:46Jordi Hays?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:43:47Emily Sundberg?

  But yeah, I'm not sure where to start, but my Twitter community of my reply people in SF have been very welcoming and generous and have invited me to a few

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  I reply people.

• 1:43:59Emily Sundberg?

  Dinner parties and bars.

• 1:44:02Jordi Hays?

  You'll probably leave with a scout fund.

• 1:44:04Emily Sundberg?

  I'm looking for like some hidden doors.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:44:08Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  So I mean, that sounds like sort of restaurant focused, but other cultural touchpoints?

• 1:44:12Emily Sundberg?

  All kinds of establishments have doors.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Go to Sand Hill Road and just start trying doors, like I guess the side of some of the buildings.

• 1:44:20John Coogan?

  I think the Feed Me Report on the Rosewood Bar on a Thursday night would really go

• 1:44:26Emily Sundberg?

  That would go great.

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  I think it'd be a great piece.

• 1:44:29Jordi Hays?

  Definitely go, definitely go on Thursday.

• 1:44:30Emily Sundberg?

  I'll be there on Thursday. I'll do that on a Thursday night. But there's a lot that I don't understand. I mean, the only other time I went to SF was for WWDC. Thank you, Apple, for bringing me earlier this year. Got a selfie with Tim Cook.

• 1:44:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but Cupertino is a very different environment than San Francisco. I know you probably spied sometimes, but it's its own.

• 1:44:52Emily Sundberg?

  A neighborhood called, what's the neighborhood that you don't, that not everyone always likes to know?

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  The Tenderloin?

• 1:44:57Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I lived there. That's rough.

• 1:44:59Emily Sundberg?

  Really?

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  We walked through there at night after dinner.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, through the Twitter headquarters for a while, we're there.

• 1:45:06Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't fine when we were walking through. I had John as kind of like security.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Any plans to take a trip to the the Hamptons of San Francisco?

• 1:45:15Emily Sundberg?

  Which is?

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Tahoe.

• 1:45:17Emily Sundberg?

  Oh Tahoe.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  I would say Tahoe, right? Or maybe Martha, wait, no, uh, not Martha's Vineyard, that's, what's the Martha's Vineyard of San Francisco? I don't know.

• 1:45:23Emily Sundberg?

  I said Marin.

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  Marin, yeah, wine country, but I think Tahoe is more of the Hampton. Cause I, when I think of like the Hamptons of, I think like two hours, three hours, four hours.

• 1:45:34Emily Sundberg?

  Is that skiing?

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can ski, you can boat, you can do a bunch of different things.

• 1:45:37Emily Sundberg?

  Do you guys ski?

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Occasionally, I'm not super into it, but it's fine.

• 1:45:41Emily Sundberg?

  Wow, that's awesome.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  And we're into the track right now, we're in very much in a, in a race car phase, uh, less of the skiing phase. I, the, the most recent experience of being on the track just completely reset my expectations for what's possible with recreational sports.

• 1:45:54Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm, I'm, uh, find me in thermal, not, you know, uh, what?

• 1:45:59Emily Sundberg?

  And you're, you're getting, um, ad deal ideas also from F1.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  Oh yes, of F1.

• 1:46:06Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  It's the best.

• 1:46:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Back to Substack.

• 1:46:09Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Jack Conti at Patreon is trying to poach Substack writers. What do you think he's thinking? What do you think he needs to do? How do you think about the positioning of Substack versus Patreon? Just like from a vibe and cultural perspective maybe first, like how, how do you interpret? Like a Substack creator versus hi, I'm a Patreon creator?

• 1:46:29Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I think the medium is like you think Patreon, you think news, or you think Patreon, you think podcasts.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  I think one on one model, the red scare model, right?

• 1:46:39Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah. Otherworld, you know, my favorite podcast, Otherworld?

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Jack, uh.

• 1:46:43Emily Sundberg?

  Jack.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, from, uh, yeah, he was originally.

• 1:46:46Emily Sundberg?

  Tomogachi, Versace, whatever.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:46:48Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, he rocks. I think if they keep him, that's a good first step.

• 1:46:52John Coogan?

  He was with, uh, Bernard L.

• 1:46:53Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  On that show, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:55Emily Sundberg?

  I love Otherworlds.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:46:56Emily Sundberg?

  I listen to.

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  I've never listened to a podcast on Patreon.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:00Emily Sundberg?

  Like little.

• 1:47:01Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, I never, I, I've never watched a full horror movie.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  No, you don't want to go to a story.

• 1:47:07Emily Sundberg?

  You're not into that.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  He just turns into a ghost, he's, he's, he's too afraid.

• 1:47:10Emily Sundberg?

  You're missing out, it's a world of wonder and mystery.

• 1:47:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm a scaredy cat.

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  A scaredy cat.

• 1:47:17Emily Sundberg?

  Um, okay. I think if they keep them, you know, they keep some of the big hitters like Red Scare, whatever.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:22Emily Sundberg?

  But I don't think, I think what both of these platforms are doing wrong is when they try to do like the sports team trade thing like.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Emily Sundberg?

  And I was feeling a bit of FOMO for a while.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Why not go try to get new people on your platform?

• 1:47:34Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah, incubate.

• 1:47:35John Coogan?

  Don't try and, if you're Patreon, yeah, if you're Patreon, don't go poach from, from Substack. Go find someone who's working in legacy media way under, way underpaid relative to the value they create.

• 1:47:48Emily Sundberg?

  Right.

• 1:47:48John Coogan?

  Have them come over and do their new thing. And, and that was the lineage of some of the early Substack deals was, we'll, we'll help you get set up, we'll, we'll give you enough money that you can pay for healthcare, pay for your first thing, and then get your business up and running.

• 1:47:59Emily Sundberg?

  Right. Um, I was feeling a lot of FOMO that I wasn't getting the email from the Patreon team saying, come over here, it'll be a big trek. And then I got one the other day and it had the, um, it had the term, I haven't responded yet.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  Post, post, post, video trading card, attempted poaching happening.

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  You're way too, you're way too loyal. I genuinely think you're, I feel like your audience would have a mutiny. They'd be like.

• 1:48:25Emily Sundberg?

  It wouldn't work.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  I think you're Substack coded, that's the thing. I think you're a Substack writer.

• 1:48:29Emily Sundberg?

  But also when you see certain terms like, we're rolling out new features that we want to tell you. The roll is like a slow thing. It's not like we're launching this.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:39Emily Sundberg?

  And that, the email kind of just fuzzed out after that. And then he followed up, or they, I won't, I won't, I'll, I won't out who emailed me, but, um.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 1:48:50Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:48:51Emily Sundberg?

  Uh, but I think, I think like, it's okay for Substack to be a newsletter platform. It's okay for Patreon to be.

• 1:48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:56Emily Sundberg?

  Podcast platform. And I, I would, I'm very curious to see what an email CMS on Patreon looks like.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Do you have Netflix?

• 1:49:06Emily Sundberg?

  Do I have Netflix? Sure do.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  Are you like, did I pay for it? But I'm not logged into my phone. Like, I'm not like a regular watcher?

• 1:49:12Emily Sundberg?

  No.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you ever watched it?

• 1:49:14Emily Sundberg?

  Like watching on the plane?

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, on the plane.

• 1:49:15Emily Sundberg?

  No.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  I won't do that. I don't do that.

• 1:49:17Emily Sundberg?

  Apple TV, baby.

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  Okay, there you go. So, uh, but do you think you'd ever watch a podcast on Netflix? You've seen that they're doing this?

• 1:49:25Emily Sundberg?

  Yes.

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  They're starting to buy podcasts and put them on Netflix?

• 1:49:27Jordi Hays?

  More like distribute them.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Distribute them. They got the ringer.

• 1:49:30Emily Sundberg?

  I would not, but these kids are really watching a lot of podcasts.

• 1:49:34John Coogan?

  They're into podcasts on TVs, on, on the wall.

• 1:49:38Emily Sundberg?

  Wherever they can get them.

• 1:49:38John Coogan?

  Going off for a couple hours.

• 1:49:39Emily Sundberg?

  I'm not setting my mic. I hope I did.

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  While podcasts.

• 1:49:43Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I, they're all watching podcasts. Like, people are watching expense account as much as listening to it.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  And, and do you think they're also watching it on like smart TVs, basically? Like, they throw it on, on the TV? The way they might throw on, uh, you know, reality TV show, or a movie, or the news?

• 1:49:59Emily Sundberg?

  With all the, like, working from home.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  Okay, it's the close.

• 1:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Another, another week.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  People at work from home here, they're closing the stock exchange. Who is it? It's Wells Fargo. Well, I'm at.

• 1:50:11Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got one tower still up here, guys. We got one tower.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  Shout out to Wells Fargo. Look, look, John, we're holding on. We're holding on to one tower. Yeah, we got one, we got one tube left over there, that one. Yeah, there we go. Well, and that's a management. They cut to the close. We're here, Lars, at the New York Saturday Street.

• 1:50:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Wells Fargo.

• 1:50:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Wow, she is going for it.

• 1:50:35Emily Sundberg?

  It was great.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  Maybe future feeding me sponsor there, who knows?

• 1:50:38Emily Sundberg?

  Who knows?

• 1:50:40John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, you were saying people watching Netflix shows at, uh.

• 1:50:44Emily Sundberg?

  I think, I think more and more people are sort of using their TVs as like that always on thing in the office, but in their house. So it's like, uh, you know, like the Harry Potter moving picture frame almost. It's just like the TV is on, the podcast is on while they're doing whatever else they're doing.

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:51:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, holiday gifting.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, our gift, our, our, our, do gift guides matter in a world where you can tell the LLM, uh, describe the person and say, generate a gift guide at, you know, every possible price point all the way through?

• 1:51:14Emily Sundberg?

  Did you guys see the gift guide that I wrote about that, um, Evercore sent out to everyone? It's like what to buy the, I think last year the sub.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  You wrote it for Evercore?

• 1:51:23Emily Sundberg?

  Some of it, Evercore sends it to.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Cause I feel like Ever, that's a, that's a premier product.

• 1:51:27Emily Sundberg?

  It's great. I'll forward it to you guys. I looked up the person who makes it. They've been doing it for many years. Last year it was like what to buy the women in your life, and this year they changed the subject to what to buy the people in your life. But it's like luxury.

• 1:51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:40Emily Sundberg?

  Items.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  This sounds amazing.

• 1:51:41Emily Sundberg?

  Who lists men?

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:51:43Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, so I, I like the idea of sort of like this word of mouth kind of gift guide if it becomes a little bit more secret.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:51Emily Sundberg?

  Substack has become a storm of gift guides this time of year. And it's a lot of clothes. I didn't realize that like that's what people want so much. What do you, are you guys gonna make a gift guide?

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, but we're gonna stick no clothes, more hardware, more like what track car to buy.

• 1:52:07Emily Sundberg?

  Are you gonna get some affiliate from that?

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  What plane to buy.

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, we don't.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  No ShopMy. Love of the game, love of the game.

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, ShopMy, we gotta have the ShopMy.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  Is Ghosts doing on ShopMy?

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  If they get on ShopMy, I think we could do that.

• 1:52:18Emily Sundberg?

  They have a lot on there now.

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:20Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, if they get Ferrari Challenge cars on there.

• 1:52:23Emily Sundberg?

  ShopMy, hold on.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Word of the year.

• 1:52:27Emily Sundberg?

  Word of the year?

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  FeedMe needs a word of the year. Every publication has a word of the year. The Economist has a word of the year.

• 1:52:33Emily Sundberg?

  Do you?

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  The Economist's word of the year.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  We do, we haven't disclosed it yet.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  The Economist's word of the year is slop.

• 1:52:38Emily Sundberg?

  Right, I saw that.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  And that feels like appropriate, but also potentially could have been last year's word of the year. We were talking about slop as a term that was sort of, you know, I think you called the top on slop in February.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  So it really was an important word.

• 1:52:54Jordi Hays?

  It became the word of the year.

• 1:52:55John Coogan?

  I think the Economist did a good job picking that.

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  And then Oxford had Ragebait.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  Wait, oh yeah, they did Ragebait.

• 1:53:01Emily Sundberg?

  That's two words.

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know.

• 1:53:03Emily Sundberg?

  For the term of the year.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, one, one word put together, I guess.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  I wanna say our word so much, but we need to introduce it in the right way. You can, you can.

• 1:53:11Emily Sundberg?

  Have you been hearing everybody saying FlowState now? That's like the very hot over the last two weeks.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  No, but that's like such an old, I feel like that's like a 2018 era.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, but slop is negative, Ragebait's negative, FlowState's positive.

• 1:53:25Emily Sundberg?

  FlowState, yeah, we're moving, we're moving.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  I remember, I remember when I was like in college, when I was in college, listening to like Tim Ferriss. He was always trying to get in FlowState.

• 1:53:35Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I was gonna say like Wiz Khalifa.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  FlowState's good.

• 1:53:41Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, yeah, I would encourage you to, to drop FeedMe's word of the year.

• 1:53:45Emily Sundberg?

  Okay.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  I think you should think about it.

• 1:53:46Emily Sundberg?

  I've been thinking of doing some sort of list at the end of the year, like the, I was gonna do a man of the year thing after GQ did theirs and left you off.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Well, didn't they give it to Sydney Sweeney instead?

• 1:54:00Emily Sundberg?

  Yes.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  She was at the event. It's funny, you said.

• 1:54:03Emily Sundberg?

  Did you get the invite?

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  There was another.

• 1:54:05Jordi Hays?

  No, we didn't even get the invite.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  No, there was another.

• 1:54:08Emily Sundberg?

  You guys would be at my man of the year party.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:54:11Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. I would make, make the list.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  What do you have?

• 1:54:18Emily Sundberg?

  Are you having a holiday party?

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  I mean, I

• 1:54:19Jordi Hays?

  No, we've really like dropped the ball on events like since the event we did.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, without your help, it's impossible.

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  You here with our event, you're like, we're doing an event, we picked it like a rough time and then did nothing else until the day of, but you pulled it off.

• 1:54:34Emily Sundberg?

  Did you, it was, it was fabulous. Um, did you guys ever go into any, to any like 2016 awesome SF World holiday parties? Like, I feel like the budgets have kind of vanished and things have changed.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Vanished? What do you mean?

• 1:54:49Emily Sundberg?

  Holiday parties don't really feel the same.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  Wait, how so?

• 1:54:53Emily Sundberg?

  Maybe I'm talking about the media ones.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, yeah, cuz, I mean, so, that does make sense, like the biggest, the biggest

• 1:55:00John Coogan?

  There's more money than ever.

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so, like, we're, like, the next two weeks, like, basically, the, the holiday, holiday parties have begun.

• 1:55:07Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:09Jordi Hays?

  Tech has obviously, like, taken the, they saw the media companies with their big holiday parties and they said, like, that's actually our money, like, we're gonna take that.

• 1:55:15Emily Sundberg?

  Right.

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  And now, um, but I was wondering, uh, how you would, how you would handle, uh, room blocks for, uh, as, as like, feed me? If you're gonna put on a big event, how would you handle room blocks? Cuz there's been a big

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Hotel recommendations.

• 1:55:29Emily Sundberg?

  Well, you have a very big team.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:55:32Emily Sundberg?

  So you're saying, how do we transport the team if something was happening in New York?

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, we travel light, we travel light. There was just four of us. There was four of us.

• 1:55:40Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I mean, do people, do, there's like two questions here. One, how do you, how does, who has to put up that many people, like, in a different city?

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like, like, if a media company is doing, uh, if they're, if they're doing, uh, I'm, I'm somewhat doing a bit

• 1:55:57Emily Sundberg?

  I think you guys need to open a New York office.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  We should. Well, this is our New York office. We're partnering with the New York Stock Exchange now.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  But I'm just saying, if you're doing an event in New York and you're inviting people and you're like, I'm gonna pay for your accommodation because you're speaking at my event, what, what, what would, what hotel would you choose?

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  We have a high-low strategy. We need

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, high-low strategy.

• 1:56:13John Coogan?

  We, we, what we need is a sleeping bag on the floor of this booth. When we come to New York, we crash in the booth and we're like, we are grinding harder than anyone in Manhattan.

• 1:56:21Emily Sundberg?

  Or like a Vice warehouse strategy?

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  That'd be good, too.

• 1:56:24Emily Sundberg?

  Do you guys know the media company in DC Punchbowl? Like, they own a brown seal.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's cool.

• 1:56:29Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:56:29Emily Sundberg?

  Their office is there, and I'm sure someone has slept there before. Um, but you might need to, you know Look, check out like the real estate.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  Where would Punchbowl go on my media map, which was 100% accurate?

• 1:56:43Emily Sundberg?

  I mentioned that one, and I didn't make the map, and I think I gotta talk about it.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  We still, we still are getting, we still are getting notes from people saying like, you didn't put me on.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  We did this Axios event last night.

• 1:56:49Emily Sundberg?

  People thought that was like the Magna Carta. It was like...

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  It was slummed together. It was so crazy.

• 1:56:54Emily Sundberg?

  It did have like some texture.

• 1:56:56Jordi Hays?

  It was so crazy because Tyler put it together. We like glanced at it. We're like, oh, it looks pretty funny. And you, and then we're like, all right, we'll have Emily basically to be the heat shield and put this out to the world. So.

• 1:57:07Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, that was great. And then people tried to make their own, and it didn't hit the same, obviously.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, yeah, I mean, I, I think that these formats, they, they, when they hit, they hit really well, and they're very shareable.

• 1:57:18Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:18John Coogan?

  I, I would, I, I would say that stuff can get overdone, but I would be excited to read the Feed Me Holiday Gift Guide. Also, just the recap of the top 10 moments from the year.

• 1:57:29Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Pieces that I might not have read, or snippets that I missed.

• 1:57:32Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  Things like that, like the, the scoops that you've gotten, or your interviews, things you learned.

• 1:57:38Emily Sundberg?

  I have a question for you guys.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Predictions for next year. All of this stuff, like, the formats are, they, they, they're played out, but they're, they work still.

• 1:57:45Emily Sundberg?

  They work, yeah.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  They work, and it's just a good way to enjoy information. I like seeing a market on a map.

• 1:57:49Emily Sundberg?

  Yes.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  I like seeing a list of top things, whether it's people or companies. Like, people like ranking lists and stuff.

• 1:57:55Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, it's very easy to digest.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you need a little bit of heat shield, but, you know.

• 1:57:58Emily Sundberg?

  Um, can I ask you guys a quick question?

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Please, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:00Emily Sundberg?

  I was at Dealbook this year, and Andrew interviewed Mr. Beast.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:04Emily Sundberg?

  And he was playing the videos that he made 10 years ago with like Cam Porter's, like early stuff. That video that went viral, does he, me in 10 years or something?

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Emily Sundberg?

  And I'm curious, are you guys, I, I got like a pang of regret that I'm not capturing more like how I built this style stuff. Are you guys capturing that as well? Like, are you guys getting behind the scenes stuff?

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have a little bit of behind the scenes stuff. Um, we, we, we've seen it.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  The thing is, we put our entire studio on the stream.

• 1:58:32Emily Sundberg?

  Right.

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  And so like, it's in some ways, like, you get a behind the scenes look every episode.

• 1:58:36Emily Sundberg?

  More like back in the car on the way home, like.

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Ben gets some of that stuff.

• 1:58:40Emily Sundberg?

  Okay.

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  Ben brought a camcorder.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  We're not crazy about it because like, like you could tell, like if you were trying to just make the documentary about, we actually thought it would be hilarious to make a two hour documentary about TPN and, and, and release it in one year. Like, and just, because you could just put a documentary on, on Amazon Prime if you want.

• 1:58:58Emily Sundberg?

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  But, but you could, you could tell the story through the show pretty effectively. And we have ISOs for everything and we often have meta conversations like this one about the show on the show. And so right here, we're talking about the decision to put, to do behind the scenes. There aren't that many, there aren't that many discussions that we're like, oh, we should have captured that off, off camera. Uh, maybe, maybe there's a little bit more there where we should be doing stuff. I think that the, the lower hanging fruit for us is just, uh.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  I think you should become one of those live streamers that just spends all day long walking around and being like, yo, no, no, Emily, all around New York. You just have somebody following you with a camera. You're just doing stories, scooping.

• 1:59:40Emily Sundberg?

  I could. I mean, that like photo in the New York Times where I'm in the back of the car is kind of that vibe.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe we should do more, uh, behind the scenes shots, but it's just hard to figure out like, how would we productize that? Because it's a lot of effort.

• 1:59:53Emily Sundberg?

  I think it's more for the time capsule.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  But I think for us, like, think about the time capsule. In 30 years from now, you'll be able to do a second from every single show forever and you'll be able to see.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  And, and.

• 2:00:04Emily Sundberg?

  Memory.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, there are a lot of stuff. It's not exactly like building silently. Like, it's very much in public. Um, anyway.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Building very publicly.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Well, uh, very excited. Massive year for you. Congratulations.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 2:00:18Emily Sundberg?

  Thank you.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:00:19Emily Sundberg?

  You're gonna come to New York more?

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Yes. I mean, that's exactly.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be a lot of IPOs next year.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  This New York Stock Exchange partnership is all about.

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Look, we got Adam over here. He's suited up.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Coming in.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll suit it up. Uh, but thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining.

• 2:00:29Emily Sundberg?

  Thanks for having me. This is so fun. I'll see you guys soon. Take care.

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:00:32Emily Sundberg?

  Bye, guys.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  Um, while she hops off, let me tell you about wander.com. Go go wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. And I'm also going to tell you about eatsleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. What are you laughing at? What do you, what do you got on the timeline?

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Can't share that one.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  But, um.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Varda is flying its fourth mission home to Earth. That's exciting. Varda has been on an absolute tear. Well, Bruy is sharing a photo of the, uh, see you soon, Cuniba. Go W4. Uh, somebody was joking about how Varda names their, their, uh, Varda names their missions W dash the number. They're now, they're now on four. Someone was making the joke that eventually it's going to start sounding like tax forms, like W9, uh, like, you know, 1099.

• 2:01:29Jordi Hays?

  99. I mean, that would be a funny bit. Uh, memorable.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  Does the W stay for Winnebago? I know that they have this whole like Breaking Bad theme internally that they like to joke about, but I don't know. Um, well, we.

• 2:01:41Jordi Hays?

  TJ Parker's quoting, uh, granola, granola did crunch.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Which is a great name for their version of rap.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Oh, that is good.

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, TJ Parker says, you're 2025 deposed. What did you mean by this?

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  That actually, I mean, uh, a rap style product for all of your meeting notes is extremely interesting, uh, for the corporate athlete out there. Really, really, if you're, if you're a corporate athlete and you put up historic numbers in granola.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  I love how Keith is like, Keith is like, I did 3,200 hours in a month.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  It's just like, you can't possibly work 3,000 hours in a month. There aren't 3,000 hours in a month. This is like, cause I know, I know in full, a full work year is, is 2,000 hours. And if you're working 80 hours a week, that's 4,000 hours. Uh, it's a, yeah, it's a, that's.

• 2:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reed says, when your vendor sends out their forward deployed engineers, they're leaving their flank exposed to a pincer movement by your cavalry.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous with the metaphors. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, measure out of home with precision. With adquick.com.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Honda announced a $15 million Series A yesterday led by Excel and launched Prism, a Gentic reporting that can explain your finances.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got Adam Faze in the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Wow, wow, wow.

• 2:03:06Speaker 05

  In the suit.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  In the blue.

• 2:03:07Speaker 05

  Can we get a suit check real quick?

• 2:03:09John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 2:03:10Speaker 05

  And the press.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  It looks great. Yes, you look great. Thank you so much.

• 2:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Are you a like a tailoring guy? You get it off the rack?

• 2:03:18Speaker 05

  I know I am like you buy a suit and you get it tailored.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:03:21Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:03:22Speaker 05

  I'm not at the level that you can get like a custom suit.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're getting there.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  Getting there. Well, you had some thoughts on the timeline.

• 2:03:30Speaker 05

  I do, yeah.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  About about the news breakdown. What happened today? How'd you find out about it?

• 2:03:35Speaker 05

  I found out from someone telling I'd been in favor of this merger from the day it was announced. So I think like when there was conversations around who might be the new owner of Warner Brothers, Netflix for me was always the best option. And so I was having dinner with a friend two nights ago and I was saying this and the next day, last night, he texted me, he's like, it happened.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:53Speaker 05

  It's like, wait, what? And I was shocked. I really did actually think this was possible. But I think I'm one of the few people on Hollywood that actually think this is good for.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  Okay, why?

• 2:04:01Jordi Hays?

  You say you say in Hollywood, but you're here in New York.

• 2:04:04Speaker 05

  You know, Hollywood is kind of everywhere.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Hollywood is a state of mind.

• 2:04:07Speaker 05

  It's a state of mind.

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Hollywood is a state of mind. Okay, so yeah, why is it good?

• 2:04:10Speaker 05

  Why is it? I think everyone is still stuck in 2015 and thinks that we are in a battle with Netflix. The reality is like we're in a battle for attention with Meta, Google, TikTok, the AI companies. And I think whatever's best for this IP is what's best for Hollywood.

• 2:04:22John Coogan?

  And we as content creators, IP owners.

• 2:04:25Speaker 05

  I think it's people that love our industry. I think the IP that Warner Brothers owns is so rich. And at the end of the day, Netflix has the most powerful distribution arm in entertainment. And so when you look at the force of like a K-pop Demon Hunters for instance, which is like arguably the biggest movie of the year. You think that Warner Brothers is the second most important animated IP library, second to Disney. Right, this is Looney Tunes. We're talking Hanna-Barber. We're talking Rick and Morty, right? These are titles that are. Gathering dust on platforms and it would gather dust on Paramount Plus as well and Netflix now has the IP to match the distribution that they already have.

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Why do you, why do you don't think Paramount would be able to put it to you?

• 2:05:01Speaker 05

  Not to the power of Netflix and I think at the end of the day Netflix has wanted a licensing business for a very long time, but I think what they figured out is that IP is really hard to make. I think after 10 years, there's like three titles you can actually say are IP Stranger Things, Squid Game. Uh, and I think you could say Team Hunters, but like they spent 15 billion dollars.

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  But it, it, it really is remarkable because I feel like Netflix, I feel a very positive association with Netflix. I've always had a good time with it. I've always enjoyed it. And then, but when I actually look through, I can name 10 HBO shows that I love and revere as like fine art relative to like, that's a good times on Netflix, but it's not like, oh, you're not watching, you've never seen The Sopranos?

• 2:05:41Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  You're not watching Game of Thrones? It's not the FOMO TV.

• 2:05:44Speaker 05

  And I think at the end of the day, we're matching now the most powerful audience in streaming with the greatest library on earth. So I think like in revenue alone.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Greatest library on earth.

• 2:05:52Speaker 05

  Hey, I really do think Warner Brothers has the greatest library when you include HBO as well.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  Okay, sure. Sure. I mean, there's some good stuff. Yeah.

• 2:05:59Speaker 05

  And I do think when you think about the licensing revenue, they're going to start making from merchandising. I mean, we're talking Netflix now owning Harry Potter. The merchandising on that alone is the reason why this is the best deal.

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah.

• 2:06:10Jordi Hays?

  So you're not worried about the, you're not worried about the debt. You're not worried that everybody that, that subscribes to HBO Max is already probably paying Netflix and there's, there's just like.

• 2:06:18Speaker 05

  Look, I don't mean it'll be cheaper for all of us, right? I mean, I think you're going to get two a little bit more expensive than Netflix now.

• 2:06:23Jordi Hays?

  A little bit more expensive, but then you can just keep bringing it up, bringing it up, bringing it up. I mean, I, I've, I've always, uh, yeah, I've always, always been, uh, like Netflix has felt like such a good value proposition for so long. I've always been interested to see how people will churn if there's not like a hot show.

• 2:06:41Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  On Netflix at that exact moment that they're engaged with because there's just so much content.

• 2:06:47John Coogan?

  Help me wrestle with this. There was someone on the, on the timeline who was saying like, uh, I cannot imagine another place where Warner Brothers would land. That would be more of a, would create more of a monopoly.

• 2:07:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  They're saying they're gonna face antitrust.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Jason, Jason Kilar, who is a founding CEO of Hulu.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Warner Media CEO, he says if I was tasked with doing so, I could not think of a more effective way to reduce competition in Hollywood.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  Reduce competition is particularly an antitrust phrase.

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  But I was saying like, what about selling it to Disney? Like if it was.

• 2:07:22Speaker 05

  What about selling it to Paramount? At the end of the day, there'd be a lot worse consolidation with the Paramount and Warner Brothers combined merger and a lot more lost jobs.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  Okay, so, so explain, explain that angle. Cause I was talking about Disney and it just seems crazy to put Superman next to Spider-Man. Like you have a full monopoly.

• 2:07:37Speaker 05

  I think at the end of the day, as much as people usually like to say that they'd like to keep the teams of both studios, at the end of the day, if Paramount and Warner Brothers were to merge, they'd have the same film studio.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 2:07:46Speaker 05

  And so I think what we're really talking about here is the consolidation for the survival of a 100-year-old industry.

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:07:52Speaker 05

  That's going to continue to happen.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:53Speaker 05

  But again, we are in a war for attention with the digital platforms that are free to watch, which is YouTube, which is Instagram, which is TikTok. So I think that at the end of the day, we are trying to keep alive an industry that is not thriving, but still is a very powerful industry. I think that this puts it in a much better direction going forward.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what about actual physical theaters? It seemed like Netflix was trying to get ahead of some narrative that, you know, movies that you love with the next Harry Potter, maybe, whatever that is, or the next Superman movie.

• 2:08:22Speaker 05

  Well, the next Harry Potter, it is about to be an HBO TV show. That's been in development, which is really funny.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  So it is going out of theater. But, but, but you, you understand.

• 2:08:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, you say that, but like it feels, still feels like this deal has a long way to go.

• 2:08:33Speaker 05

  Has a long way to go.

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  And it still feels like there's a number of different scenarios.

• 2:08:38Speaker 05

  But I think most likely this is just held up for a few years. So I think that's probably more likely the option. But I do think we're probably gonna look at similar to like an AT&T Time Warner situation.

• 2:08:46John Coogan?

  Sure. But, but, but on the, on the idea of, you know, Netflix choosing to say, hey, yep, obviously the next great movie we have, we could just put on Netflix, maybe get a couple more subs. We are going to consciously make an effort to put it into theaters.

• 2:09:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Do you think that's lip service? Do you like that plan? Do you think, like, how are you feeling about the theater business and what it, where it goes from here?

• 2:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Netflix putting a pop up that's like, hey, this isn't movies now, but if you pay a hundred dollars, you can watch it today.

• 2:09:15Speaker 05

  That, no. But I will say, I think this year, we've seen Netflix kind of go back on things they've set. I mean, they put K-pop Demon Hunters in theaters and made nineteen million dollars in the span of one weekend. So I do think they understand the force is you can make a difference.

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  There's something about a musical in the theater, too, because everyone's seeing it, especially with kids.

• 2:09:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you see it with a shared audience.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Comedy's here, you laugh.

• 2:09:33Speaker 05

  But I do think that at the end of the day, Warner Brothers, you know, has to continue having their releases come out in theaters. If they're going to want to still make movies with people like Paul Thomas Anderson. And so I think what you will more likely see is the window being shortened.

• 2:09:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:45Speaker 05

  But I do think that they will have to keep maintaining this sort of theatrical exhibition release.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. I wonder, I wonder where it goes. There's been a trend that I've been a fan of where the movie theaters, at least in my town, have been reducing the number of seats, but then increasing the amenities and upsells and they'll try and sell you a whole dinner and drinks. And you get out of there and you spent two hundred bucks, but I don't get to go to the movies that much, so it's like a fantastic experience.

• 2:10:10Speaker 05

  You see, you like the eating in the theater.

• 2:10:11John Coogan?

  I love the iPic. I love that.

• 2:10:12Speaker 05

  I like the iPic. I don't like the eating in it. I like the like luxury seat for sure.

• 2:10:16John Coogan?

  No, no, you bring a bottle of wine over, you bring a steak.

• 2:10:19Speaker 05

  How is the wine? Is it good wine?

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  I can't tell, but it just makes me enjoy it.

• 2:10:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  No, no, sometimes the wine's fine. I don't know. But I, I, I think they should go all the way, French Laundry, put a movie theater in.

• 2:10:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I think you look at something at the Lincoln Center, IMAX, which is usually sold out for weeks on end. It's almost impossible to get a seat when you have a one battle after another or a DC movie or something premiering there. And so I think the trend is going to, you will only go to the theater to see an experience.

• 2:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Is it sold out during the day or just in?

• 2:10:46Speaker 05

  It's sold out like ten AM.

• 2:10:48Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:10:48Speaker 05

  I mean, I actually tried to go see, I finally saw one battle after other, like weeks after it had come out. And I had the shittiest seats on earth because I couldn't find seats at any other given showtime. But I do think the trend's going to be the only reason you will go to a theater is to have an experience you cannot have at home. So if that's the ultra luxury, sort of beautiful screening room that you have a steak dinner at, great. If that's the biggest screen in North America, then that's also amazing, too. And I think a lot of this is sort of repeating what the movie experience was a hundred years ago. We used to build like palaces to watch movies. And it went to the multiplex in the mall, which really does mirror probably a worse version of what you could watch on Netflix at home. And so I'm in support of kind of going back to that original experience and making it something that's just like spectacular as a way of getting people back in those seats.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:33Jordi Hays?

  What other media stories are you tracking?

• 2:11:36Speaker 05

  I mean, this is the biggest one of the week. This is history. This is like actual history. And I do, I am sensitive to that fact. I think there's a lot of people in Hollywood that are scared about sort of what is next for our industry. You know, we had a very long strike that then came to an industry that was sort of smaller than it was at the beginning of Bush. But at the end of the day, I do think that this is an exciting story. And I also think that it's going to be, as someone who's a fan of like Looney Tunes, for instance, I would rather a newer version of Looney Tunes be on these platforms than having kids watch like YouTube Kids AI.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  Favorite Looney Tunes character.

• 2:12:09Speaker 05

  It's a great question. Wile E. Coyote.

• 2:12:11Jordi Hays?

  The influx of just pure AI content now to YouTube is actually crazy, specifically in the video essay kind of documentary space where they're just like, hey, like, I'm gonna just generate a deep research report, use 11 labs to like basically create an audio track and then just put pictures and some videos over it. Is actually crazy. I've only been, I like some of the history content on there and I'll just like search for a topic. And if I don't know the channels yet, I don't know until I'm three minutes in the video and the, and the, and the video says, this, this move wasn't just this, it was that. And I'm like, I'm like.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Gotcha.

• 2:12:51Speaker 05

  I will say YouTube Kids is like one of the scarier things I think we have in culture because like you might think your kid is safe because they're watching him. It's Rachel video. It's very cute and innocent, but like the recommended feed, I don't know if you've ever spent time on YouTube Kids. It's terrifying. I mean, it's like AI slop coming from like Russia.

• 2:13:06John Coogan?

  They're not going to swear and there won't be nudity or adult content, but it's weird.

• 2:13:10Speaker 05

  It's weird and it is like weirdly sensual at times. And I think that like, I don't know when we decided that these tech companies could be the babysitter for your child, but I imagine that we're going to sort of reverse those trends.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  I completely agree. And I think the meme is already taking hold. Like the whole iPad Kids meme is definitely something where parents are now proud to be like, oh yeah, my kid doesn't have a iPad. And it's like, if it becomes a status symbol, then all of a sudden everyone does it and hopefully the.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  What about social media being banned? There's something in Australia.

• 2:13:36Speaker 05

  I'm in favor of this. I think under 16, they're banning social media in Australia, which I think is a great thing. I really do think we're nearing peak sort of consumption.

• 2:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's the issue with that. Like, kids are still gonna have devices. They're gonna use various services. They'll use new networks that have less control. I think kids are still gonna be social on the internet. And if you ban the platforms that actually invest billions of dollars a year, you're gonna get them on these like places, like dark corners of the internet that don't have any scrutiny, that don't have any, whatever you wanna call it, safety teams, whether you're in favor of them or not. I just think this is, you cannot ban humans being social. They will always find a way.

• 2:14:20Speaker 05

  They will always find a way, but I mean, you had a similar conversation around cigarettes, right? And like, we know that the sort of laws we put around cigarettes has saved lives, accountants element of lives. And so I do think that like, regardless of what the solution is.

• 2:14:31Jordi Hays?

  But the comp would be like, it's, you ban cigarettes, which is your physical item that you need, that needs a supply chain. You need it, it's hard to like make a cigarette. We're not banning kids' cell phones, they're still gonna have a device. Roll with one hand. John was probably rolling.

• 2:14:47Speaker 05

  You gotta type actually back.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Whittling a pipe. So I just, so I just think like, you're gonna end up in a situation where kids are probably gonna make, they're gonna just vibe code a crazy social network and it's gonna invite in a lot of.

• 2:15:02Speaker 05

  Sure, I mean, I think, look, regardless, I think we're nearing that point where we need to have a national conversation about this. I don't think anyone out there can say that like, kids are better off today as a result of the amount of brain rot and consumption they're doing on these platforms than they were before. And I think like, on top of that, these platforms are in the business of getting you more addicted to their slop. There's a reason why Instagram moved the reels tab to where messages used to be. Cause they know that once you're on the reels tab, you're probably gonna watch a few more reels.

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  I was not, I was not on the reels tab at all, I would just check my messages.

• 2:15:32Speaker 05

  Swipe and now it's real.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  Now I swipe it down there and I'm like, okay.

• 2:15:35Speaker 05

  It is cursed. So I just think that like this is a conversation that needs to be parent led and we don't really have the data yet. To show just how harmful.

• 2:15:44John Coogan?

  I always just go back to like my experience with video games like, you know, Halo, I think was like M for mature. I was not supposed to be able to play it until I was seventeen. I was probably able to get on my hands on it at fourteen. I think I turned out okay. I'm not obsessed with like killing aliens and I not doing like, no. I'm actually clearly fine. Same thing with Call of Duty.

• 2:16:03Speaker 05

  I mean, I remember going to GameStop with my mom and trying to buy GTA V and they have to give you that whole warning like, do you know this game includes? Every horrible thing you've ever heard in your entire life? And it's like, yeah.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so having some sort of warning system. I'm a big fan of MPAA ratings coming to tech products. I've been kind of beating that drum for, for a couple of months, but I, I like, I, I think the MPAA ratings, I hope that the MPAA figures out a way to work with the tech companies in a way that's like accretive to them, like they get paid or whatever. Because I think that there's just something about if I say, hey, uh, like, like Instagram is R rated. You'll be like, okay, I know what that means. Or like Instagram's PG thirteen rated or it's G rated. Like I know intuitively and I'm ready as a parent to to decide when, and maybe I want to say, hey, uh, you know, uh, PG thirteen rated movies like a little bit earlier because parental guidance is

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  recommended. It's okay. It's like we can, even with video games, I, I'm, I'm, I'm a big fan of like cooperative games being a wildly different dynamic than like solo online in like the toxic chat room, whereas if it's like me and my son playing a co-op game together. Like troubleshooting and stuff, even if like the, the, the screen images are a little bit like, like adult, it's like we're collaborating. And so it's a wildly different dynamic than being like lonely and then seeing imagery.

• 2:17:24Speaker 05

  I mean, I do think these are just sort of unfortunately some of the problems we had to deal with with user generated content. We're talking about games that were made by hundreds, if not thousands of people that had to go through an approval system to get that rating. There are dangers when it is totally left up to the person of just making whatever type of content you want. Of course, platforms like YouTube are going to police that content and you're not allowed to have. You know, can't murder somebody and have that video exist on, on. YouTube, you can't on X though. So I think it's just a matter of figuring out like where do we want this conversation to go? And like, what approvals do we want to give the parents?

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:55Jordi Hays?

  Want your take on the Marty Supreme marketing campaign?

• 2:17:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Cause this feels like to me, I don't, I don't, I don't pay much attention to movies, but I'm seeing a lot of Marty Supreme content.

• 2:18:07Speaker 05

  That's good.

• 2:18:07John Coogan?

  It's Jordy's film of the year already.

• 2:18:09Speaker 05

  Okay, have you seen it? No, no.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  I was gonna say on Christmas.

• 2:18:16Speaker 05

  I went to the premiere.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  I understood it came on Christmas from that.

• 2:18:19Speaker 05

  But it's fucking, I mean, it's amazing. It's the best movie of the year. I will say it's the best movie of the year. Not to put a brotherly race between the two, but Josh Safdie is, is the GOAT and he's, he's the one.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  He's the football.

• 2:18:31Speaker 05

  It's the best score. It's the best acting. It's the greatest cast. It's such a phenomenal movie.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  The best score?

• 2:18:36Speaker 05

  Best score.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:18:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Interesting. I didn't even think about it.

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  In the ping pong.

• 2:18:40Speaker 05

  No, no, no. Like the best, like the music of the movie. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. 21 to 0. I will say, I don't know. I, I think, you know, part is that they're dealing with Timmy, Timmy has a Timothy, not that I'm friends with him, has a very short amount of times. I think he's filming Dune right now. So I don't think he's that available for press. I think what they're doing is super creative.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:18:58Speaker 05

  I worry that it's a little inside baseball and I think like you could be going more mass culture with this, like he did with the Bob Dylan movie by going on Pat McAfee and all these.

• 2:19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:08Speaker 05

  I will just say the movie's phenomenal.

• 2:19:09Jordi Hays?

  The blimp. I've been trying to get somebody to use it, do a blimp marketing campaign for so long.

• 2:19:13Speaker 05

  You want to do a blimp?

• 2:19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  No, I was just pushing like ramp to do a blimp. I told the Gemini team, do a blimp, right? Like blimps are an amazing asset because you can physically put them over the air. Like you're putting something.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  And they're just naturally inspiring. You look up and it's a blimp. It's like amazing.

• 2:19:28Speaker 05

  They are. And I think it was fun that it was connected to the Instagram video and everything else. But it is, it is, it is the movie of the year. It is best picture.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Okay, wow.

• 2:19:35Speaker 05

  Best picture. Whoa, whoa.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  It's the show of the year.

• 2:19:38Speaker 05

  The show of the year. Um, honestly, I feel like I actually didn't catch up that much with television shows this year. I feel a little more caught up. I'm rewatching Homeland, though, which I

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Oh, Homeland. Wow, that's a throwback.

• 2:19:50Speaker 05

  It is a throwback at this point. Sort of like Obama era.

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  I remember season one having a great, like, cliffhanger. I was really into it. You're deeper in the season?

• 2:19:59Speaker 05

  No, no, I'm like episode seven, season one, right now. This is like a new

• 2:20:03John Coogan?

  Oh, and you've never seen it?

• 2:20:04Speaker 05

  I was kind of like in passing when I was a kid, but I don't really think I went through it.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  No, I remember being really into it when I watched it. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:20:12Speaker 05

  Of course. Thank you for having me. Grateful to see you. Congratulations on your boot. Look at this. This is crazy. This is crazy.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  We're here. We're doing it.

• 2:20:20Speaker 05

  So great to have you here.

• 2:20:21John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. Uh, I'm going to tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising that is easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision.

• 2:20:29Speaker 05

  Uh, did you know the owner of AI.com is DeepSeek?

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:20:35Speaker 05

  Apparently. It could be fake news. It's according to Google AI Overview. Uh, but, uh,

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  Wait, no, no, no. This is, this is completely wrong. Completely wrong because it says it was owned by tech youtuber MKBHD who acquired it from Elon Musk. That doesn't make any sense. That's complete nonsense. Um, no, no, no. That's, that's like completely unreliable. Uh, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it. Um, anyway, is there any other news that is worth running through? There was a review in the Wall Street Journal of a book called Maintenance of Everything, Part One, Review Making of the Future, uh, by Stuart Brand. This is a Stripe Press book. We should try and have him on the show. Um, so, uh, it begins with this drama. This is, this is interesting. It's talking about like the, the, the process of maintenance.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  And says, "The author recounts the stories of three contestants in the 1968 Golden Globe Around the World Solo Sailboat Race. One was a former merchant marine whose wooden 32-foot catch was barely adequate for a journey through the punishing Southern Ocean. Make, do, and mend was his, was his motto. Another competitor was a tech whiz who packed His plywood trimaran with electronic gizmos. A dreamy optimist, he set sail in a rush, hoping for the best. The third and the most experienced racer sailed in a purpose-built steel-hulled boat, which he maintained with zen-like discipline.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  He said he spent his days working calmly at the odd jobs that make up my universe. And so while this story will be familiar to sailors and others who have read the many books written about the race, Mr. Brand minds the competitors' harrowing experiences for deep lessons. Maintaining the technology that keeps us alive is more than a necessary

• 2:22:26Jordi Hays?

  So Josh Wolf, remember, he was talking about his thesis for maintenance. I think he was on the show, if I remember correctly. I mean, the idea is like, everybody wants to build things, nobody wants to maintain them. But we have a lot of things in the world that maybe aren't functioning the way that you want them to. You can throw them out, or you can like, maintain them, bring them, revitalize them. So I'm excited to read the, did they, did they give a proper review?

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  I mean, the New Yorker, or the Wall Street Journal is not doing exactly like two thumbs up here, but they, they, they are, they are reviewing it and they say, "Maintenance will engage students of technology, challenge business readers, and inspire home tinkerers who will be happy to learn that fixing gadgets is also a path to enlightenment." Fittingly, the book was initially published in installments online, visible at books dot work and works in progress.co. As a kind of editorial DIY project, Mr. Brand tends to jump from topic to topic as he follows his passions. Some might find his digressions neandering. I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  And the author of this post on the Wall Street Journal says, "I found them delightful." Reflecting that quirky organization, the book ends on a tangent rather than a big wrap-up.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  But that only raises expectations for part two. And so I think this is a positive review by Mr. Meigs, the former editor of Popular Mechanics and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And I think that concludes our show.

• 2:24:02Jordi Hays?

  I found out AI.com, the owner is trying to sell it and they're redirecting it to a bunch of different sites to try to generate interest.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so people are, people, so, so they'll show, they'll send it to MKBHD for a couple of days.

• 2:24:14Jordi Hays?

  To hope that he posts about it.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  And then, and then if you're in the analytics and you're Elon at XAI or something and you're like, oh, wow, I'm getting all this traffic from where? Oh, someone, someone redirected AI.com to me?

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  I'd be curious how much.

• 2:24:25John Coogan?

  And it's this valuable? Maybe I should buy it. It is a lot of traffic.

• 2:24:27Jordi Hays?

  I wonder how much traffic it actually gets.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  I have no idea. I can't imagine that there's that many people that are just going to AI.com. Are those the best customers? Really? Like, people haven't made a decision? I mean, OpenAI bought chat.com, so maybe these short, short domains make a lot of sense. I mean, doesn't, does Google own dot AI or something? Because they have AI.studio. So I guess they own, they own the, the TLD studio. Google, Google doesn't just buy domains?

• 2:24:58Jordi Hays?

  AI.com only got 93,000 visits in October.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  According to SimilarWeb, which is, that does not seem super valuable. But you could do something fun with it. You could do something interesting with it. I'm sure that there's a, there's a way to make some.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  But it's not worth a hundred million dollars in any situation.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, in other funding news, there, there's 350 million new funding for Castilian, who's been on the show.

• 2:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  Is, and, and the Wall Street Journal is putting in context, there's alarm over the hypersonic missile gap and it's fueling a startup. Boom. The Pentagon is getting serious about hypersonic weapons, a technology that have eluded the US military for decades. It's looking to startups with no experience but billions of dollars backing them to fill an increasingly glaring hole in the national arsenal. China and Russia both have stockpiles of these long range, super fast, maneuverable weapons. The US doesn't, even though officials consider them essential to winning future conflicts as the Defense Department belatedly To close that gap, private investment is pouring in and startups, many of which haven't

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  hasn't built hypersonic systems at scale and haven't flown at hypersonic speeds are seeing their valuations soar. The latest is torrents based, uh, torrents based Castilian, which on Friday said it raised $350 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. Wow. Congrats to the team over at Castilian. That is

• 2:26:22Jordi Hays?

  They were, they were around, I remember they were around like 100 or 200 earlier this year.

• 2:26:29John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Big, big jump.

• 2:26:31Jordi Hays?

  We are in the back of our show, so I will pull up this post from Jason Freed. He's talking about the best back quarter in the last 50 years.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  What car is this?

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  This is the Aston Martin Zagato.

• 2:26:42John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Which is probably an underrated car in general and just a fantastic color. Hopefully the team can pull it up. But Jason has incredible taste in all things in life and certainly in cars. But that's our show for today. We'll be back home on the West Coast on Monday. I can't wait. And thank you for tuning in with us today and yesterday from the NICE. Thank you to Lynn, Chloe and the whole team. They're all fantastic and we will be back here soon.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  We'll see you on Monday.

• 2:27:21Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  Thank you. Goodbye.