🔴 Live @ NYSE with Keith Rabois, Emily Sundberg, Adam Faze

97. Quad Gymnastics is headed north. Stand by. 2. You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, December 5th, 2025. We are live again from the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for the boat sound Jordy. This is the Real Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. The Temple of Technology. It's back in Hollywood. We'll be there on Monday. But we have a great show for you today, folks. We have Keith Rabois joining us in person. We have Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange. We have Emily Sunberg and do we have we have one more Adam Faze again had some hot takes on the WB which is the top story today other than of course RAMP time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards bills 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 dollar deal. The acquisition is expected to close following Warner Brothers Discovery spin-off of Discovery Global TV Network's division in Q3 2026. There's a bunch of fun interesting things hitting the timeline. Obviously, this is a tech story because of Netflix. It's also a media story and a public market story as well. 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.

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 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 week's long bidding war that pitted the streaming giant against David Ellison's Paramount Skyance 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 Sandos. He said, 'I know some of you are surprised we're making this acquisition and I think people were surprised because didn't Netflix's stock trade down on this news down. People are worried about the... Some people are excited about it. 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 quite an extension. WB obviously does theatrical releases. They have a movie theater business. It's definitely will be quite an extension to Netflix's core business today.'

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 opads about this already out on the timeline. We can go through some of those but first let me tell you about Vanta automate compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews. So Netflix expects it said it expects to maintain Warner Brothers. He 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 stripped for parts. He's trying to push back against a potential narrative that Netflix will be very ruthless in cost cutting and lose some of that, you know, what people think made WB amazing art. So he said Netflix expects to maintain Warner Brothers current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films. I know this doesn't matter to you because you never go to the theater and you never receive.

Hey, we went and saw Dune. We got that was like 2 years ago. But we got a bunch of the guys together. We said we're going to make a monthly thing. Yeah. We were close at the start of the year. 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 want to 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? Suit up and head to your local movie theater. And fortunately, it feels like Netflix must have heard what we said. They probably re this seems like a direct reaction to us potentially. We do need to go back to the theater though because we have not been supporting them nearly enough recently. But it is a good time and I do think it is important to set this tone like I mean the reality is that like theaters are going to change. 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 you've been able to watch home box office was a way to watch a movie at home 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 42in TV flat screen. Now, that might cost a couple grand, you know, 10 years ago. Now, I was at Target and I saw a 42-in TV. I think it advertised for like 75 bucks or something. It's like suspiciously cheap. It was so cheap. It's like a rotisserie chicken. It's just trying to get you in the door. I mean, in college for me, like the 42-in 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 good. It was like you're the king of the castle. Yeah, you were the king of the castle if you had a 42 in. And it was like a serious expense. It was a couple 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 certainly encourage everyone to continue supporting Warner Brothers and Discovery and Netflix. So, Netflix signaled it would keep HBO Max as a discrete service while it also touted the addition of HBO and HBO Max content to its lineup. And so, they're going to add the deep film and TV libraries and HBO to and HBO Max programming. Netflix members will have even more high quality. Will it be called Netflix Max? You need to be Netflix maxing. Maybe that's Wait, is that why they did HBO Max? Because they wanted it to be like, 'Oh, if you're HBO Maxing, you get HBO.' Then it was HBO Max, then it was Max, and it was back to HBO. People give them so much they talk so much trash about HBO with the rebrand chaos, but Max is a great term as opposed to because they could have done HBO Plus. No, I mean the critique there was HBO has built up such an incredible brandity and credit to Scott Galloway. I remember he went so hard on them for dropping the HBO. You've spent decades building up this incredible brand and you're just like see you. We'll just be called Max. They spent like two years HBO Maxing. Well, they spent two decades HBO Maxing and then they just max HBO Maxing and then they just went 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. The company expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings per share by year two. The cash and stock transaction was valued at $27 per share and the timeline is going back and forth on this. But okay, Leia, let's get into some takes. So counter side of this, the information actually had a pretty scathing analysis of the acquisition. I'm going to tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multiasset investing. They're trusted by millions. So I read through this earlier. This is from Martin Piers. He says, 'Netflix's Warner purchase is an $82.7 billion blunder.' Calling it a blunder. 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 turn off of one of these services and just switch over to here.' 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 continues, 'Moreover, the deal is likely to face severe regulatory obstacles.' Again, so Netflix is not exactly Trump aligned, right? They Netflix did the deal with the Obamas. And so I think that in a world where Netflix was going to sorry WB is going to Paramount. I could see that much more likely to get through. Whereas this is going to make sure the Netflix team is going to be spending like at least the next year I would assume working on this and then since we started what you mean regulatory approval?

Yeah. Just trying to get this across the line. Yeah. I mean 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 and they also have Batman. But Jason Kar, 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.' 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 Batman and Superman kind of off on an island. They haven't really been able to get that engine going to the same degree as Marvel, the Avengers, Thanos. 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 risk winning a battle and losing a war. The old media companies need to more of the right type of scale. This does it for WB. Jason says, 'When I use that phrase competition in Hollywood, I'm referring to having a sufficient number of vibrant and robust entities that can and will aggressively compete against each other to produce and distribute films, okay, series, live events, and more for decades to come. I'm not focused on the legacy of it all.' So yeah, I would still say this is like number two, but it might be high. But just in terms of Hollywood film making, these feel like extremely competitive areas. There are so many different streaming services 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 TV and just buy a movie. You can still just do that. You can be over off in the Netflix ecosystem. You can be in the Hulu ecosystem. Like there doesn't feel like there's a crazy lack of competition 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. 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. 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 in Washington. Yeah, there's rumor going to go that they're going to try and out bid, right?

Yeah. Right now. This is Chris Gasprine over at Fox says Scoop as reported Paramount and Sky Dance is now looking to launch a hostile bid for WBD because it feels its $30 a share all-cash offer is actually higher than what Netflix offered in terms of cash stock and the value of the spin-off of the cable business. So this is still developing but anyways fan had some interesting backstory. He says, 'Wild outcome, especially after these three wild whatifs before Netflix IPO'ed in 2002. Before Netflix IPO'ed in 2002, apparently Bezos offered $12 million to buy it. Can you imagine if Netflix had sold for 12 billion?' Well, they also tried to sell the Blockbuster during the 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 just infrastructure and even the early recommendation engines like I remember my dad being like yeah Netflix just recommended it knows what I like and it just said it sent me this they said you're going to enjoy this and then Bernard Arno saved it with a $30 million check you know this Netflix and Bernard Arno over the top. I love it. I love it. 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 if that's true if the trends continue. Like Netflix has a fair amount of like they have their Squid Games. They have some big IP, but if you just think about the drum beat of HBO come back 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 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 out on somebody. So, 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 going to watch a movie, I want to just I'm happy to just buy. I'm not like going, let me get the free option on Netflix. I'm like, I will just buy the thing that I want to fill this 90 minutes with. Anyway, so the deal doesn't include WBD's cable channels such as CNN, TNT, TVS, and Discovery, which are being spun off. We don't know where that will land yet or people speculating. 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 9 or 10 billion of free cash flow and so they can certainly service the debt but anyways in the first 9 months of this year WBD studio and streaming operations generated 2.3 billion in earnings in IBIDA next year Netflix executives said they expected the Warner business to generate 3 billion in IBIDA that's a price of 27 1/2 times IBIDA 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 Skyance are each trading around 11 times. Anyways, we can kind of skip over this. 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, who's coming out on the show in just an hour or two, he says, 'I don't think people realize the licensing business Netflix is about to have if this deal goes through. Warner Brothers animated IP library alone would bring in billions in new merchandising revenue coupled with new versions of these iconic shows on the platform. Game over.' And he lists some of these out and one of them I think is hilarious is Fogghorn Legghorn. They own Looney Tunes. So they have Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Roadrunner, Wy Coyote. These are time-honored 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 Fogghorn Legghorn and attached to Fogghorn Legghorn is the value of the intellectual property of Fogghorn Legghorn who's like a large rooster who talks with a funny accent. And I just imagine that they're out there saying like, 'Yeah, Fogghorn Legghorn, that's like 30 million. That's a $30 million business.' Like, okay, Yusede Sam, that's a $50 million business. Porky Pig. Borgie pegs 80 million. Let's view a sum of the parts. I really hope that someone on Wall Street, some investment banker, it's actually Adam Ant is being really undervalued. We actually think this is a $2 billion property. Oh, Dick Dastardly. You think Dick Dastardly is worth 8 million in intellectual property value? Yeah, right. What about Snaggle Puss? I don't know. This is part of the Hannah Barbara. Quick Draw McGrath, Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, the Hercuoids. Hercuoid sounds like some crazy anon meme. Boooo. Hercuoid seems like someone with a Roman statue avatar. Okay. So, Poly Market has who will acquire WB at 86% today. Paramount is still only sitting at 6%. 6%. So the company behind Amazon is still up there. Yes. Anyways, so well let me tell you about Adio the AI native CRM. Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. The DC comic books. 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 Halloween costume characters. They are still really known but the last round of DC just didn't break through in the way the Marvel series did and Marvel broke through in such a massive way. It didn't have the cache of the Dark Knight and the Nolan films. But is there any way that they can get Nolan back in the seat to actually do a full arc or something? I don't know. I would just hope that I grew up with the Nolan era of DC and I would have loved him to go on and do more of that with Superman, with the whole crew, everyone coming together, and instead they got just really over the top with the CGI and the slow-mo and the Zack Snider era. And I think a lot of people sort of got tired of it. And I'm looking forward to whatever they wind up doing next. Oh, they have Metal Aocalypse. That's a great one. I like Robot Chicken Aquatine Hunger Force. They got a ton of stuff. So it'll be interesting to keep following it. Anyway, you want to go to Pawsum? Oh, what's Mike Mirllor saying? Mike Mirlo says, 'We already have Nana Nano Banana Pro TVC commercials with decent paid media budgets behind them. Everything is moving so quickly.' Okay. So, James Harden is in an ad for My Prize. I don't know what My Prize is. Said, 'This is the best commercial he's ever been in, and he never stepped foot on the set. Let me show you how to crack the code on Celeb Deep Fakes for this My Prize ad we did with James Harden.' So, this is a guy named Billy Woodward. Yeah. Who's been here? What do you think they're actually putting behind this ad on TV? Cuz it looks like a TV commercial, but this also could just be a viral marketing campaign on Oh, wow. My prize is a premium online casino games on the gambling trade. Surprised he doesn't have an official prediction market partner yet. In other news, this almost seems like it could be fake. You share this news. Let me tell you about Reream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multiream, go to reream.com. So, what is it? There is news out of the truth. I don't know if this is real because not a single 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 legacy media institution has reported on this that I've found. So, I would given that this is a story that they'd be very excited to cover, I would be wary that it's real yet. But that's not stopping J Bull T A R T from saying and you guys think Google won the AI race talking about how Trump is set to unveil new AI platform Truth AI. I wonder if Truth Social popped at all today off of Truth Social.

No, it's down% lack of focus. Lack of focusing. Yeah, you should be focused. You have to lock on one thing if you're a social media entrepreneur. I mean, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is getting dinged for going some of the stuff back, 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. Yeah, it's enough for Apple to Apple gets to work for you. Apple works to just buy tokens from Gemini, from Google, but you your business is more special than 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 at least. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Yes, we need to like actually own the weight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We should we should actually get into some of the Apple departures cuz we talked about this briefly. But the Wall Street Journal is saying that Apple departures point to challenges for iPhones dominance. And I'm I think it's too early to call the iPhone challenged. I feel like the iPhone's dominance has not been challenged yet. Maybe that is coming. But there have been several top lieutenants who have left in the past 12 months and dozens of others have defected to rivals. So there are some facts that are important to consider and walk through here. So 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 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 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 Well, it was notable because 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 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. For stall is only 56. Time for a comeback. Oh, that would be very interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of Forest Doll fans out there who think that he didn't get it right or he didn't get the opportunity he deserves. Cook can't catch a break. He's like I still think Cook's done a lot of good stuff. I'm still bullish on Cook. But I don't know. Let's see. It says the executive departures underscore a changing of the guard underway at Apple. Even as executive chief executive officer Tim Cook himself shows no sign of stepping down even though everyone is leaking a variety of rumors to the contrary. Cook and his new lieutenants face a critical test preparing Apple for the AI era and a wave of new competitive devices that result. 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 rabbit R1. They defeated the friend attack. They defeated you know like what was the other one that was the humane pin. Oh, they're singing happy birthday out there. Sing happy birthday. It's someone's birthday. It's one of the guys down on the trading floor. Oh, he's got a whole cake out there. That's great. Good guy. Well, very sweet. Why don't you tell us about your first turbo puffer serverless vector in full text turbo puffer built from first principles on object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. We love turbo. That was really funny yesterday having Jim Kramer reference the puffer team crazy crossover that was a deep cut. Yeah, that was a deep cut. We have some Jacob Rentaki tagged us in a post here. SpaceX tells investors it's aiming for a late 2026 IPO. Katie Roof over at the information the scoop has a scoop. Apparently Elon Musk SpaceX has told investors and financial institutions that it is aiming for an IPO in the second half of next year. The talk comes as SpaceX considers holding a sale of shares held by investors and employees that would value the company at 800 billion. Quite the markup. Double its valuation in a sale this summer and what would make it the most valuable private company. He's got to be the most valuable private company. It probably candidly makes him sick that that OpenAI has briefly eclipsed. The company is considering a public listing of the entire company including Starlink. Which makes sense. I think Starlink is a huge part of the value of the business and I just don't think it goes out anywhere near 800 without it and they're very interlin. That is a change though from a few years ago when Mus said he expected SpaceX would eventually spin off Starlink and take it public, but executives have shelved the idea of a Starlink spin-off as its rocket business has improved. Apparently the Wall Street Journal reported on the share sale at 800. So anyways, in other news, Mark Beni off is saying that he might rename the company Agent Force. Ha. Trace Cohen says, 'Just Force. Why not just Force?' Ooh, Force. Well, isn't there a Force India, the F1 team from a couple years ago? BYT or BWT? Force India. That was like a team. I think they struggled. I got to find that. What was Force India? Was that Force India? Ben Off is on a tear. His pinned tweet right now. LLMs are the new disc drives. commodity infrastructure you hot swap for whoever's cheapest and best. The fantasy that the model is a moat just expired. People are really going wild. They're going off down here. Do you think 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. Why not just sales? I like just sales just be sales. I don't think it can be. I think that's too generic. I don't know. Not what you do. I mean he would have to update the ticker. Ticker is the bigger one because sales because everyone wants to be like CRM are dead. You're going to just be able to just generate a CRM on the fly. Buco Capital says, 'F it. Nothing else is working. Go for it, brother.' A name change sometimes will fix you. Just let it run. Ethan Ding was coming in with some commentary. Yeah. 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 all-time figure every 6 days. Salesforce has 20 million users.' I mean, credit cursor has similar amount of users, I think. Sure. Assuming same average token count per active agent force user count is 40 to 60,000 truly active users aka 2 to.3% adoption 3 years after launch. Yeah. I wonder I wonder like the like all tokens are not created equal. like you can generate so many tokens if you're doing these deep research reports and if you had agent force going around and effectively running a deep research report on every contact in every CRM under like under every conversation every time you get a new email from a lead the token generation could be incredibly high and also deliver very little value. On the flip side, you could have a really fine-tuned model that is laser focused, more of a scalpel, and you could be getting a lot of value out of those tokens that you are generating. So, I don't really know on the app layer debate. Our CRM's cooked. There's a post here from Kalin. 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. I think it's so easy to make a V1. Totally. you can make a V1 in a day. And so you assume like okay, you could be spend like another few days really building out 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 maintain it and make incremental improvements. Let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. I actually I didn't vibe code a CRM but back in college I built a CRM inside of Microsoft Excel and so I yeah that's like the classic that's the real competitor for a startup. It was like okay you could go from X sheets or Excel to maybe an Air Table slightly more robust then to adio or a HubSpot or or then and then eventually get over to Salesforce. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also I mean they yeah the question about like the value of the platform and the value of the app layer. I mean we were talking about this 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 e-commerce site exactly the way we want to build it. And so we wind up building an entire e-commerce stack custom and then a couple years later Shopify just catches up and then boom, you're on back on Shopify. And that's just happened time and time again. I lived it at Soilent. It was a wild time. This is some wild news. Logan Paul, Jake Paul, and Jeff Woo are starting an 8-week accelerator. It's a 25K safe followed by a $100,000 price round for a total of 7% equity. A lot of people are confused about doing it as a price round for 100k. A founder could easily end up spending like 30 grand, you know, like depending on who their lawyer is like actually working through. So it's like 100k investment and then you have like let's assume you're like super efficient and it's like 10 grand. It's like is it kind of annoying. And then yeah, it's annoying. That said, I think there's a lot of interesting businesses that could go through this that would really benefit from working with Jake and Logan and Jeff. It's so interesting that it's a 25 safe and then a $100,000 price round. Like, why not just 125 for 7% like on a safe with a cap that ensures they get 7% no matter what. Like, that feel I would love to talk to them. I think hopefully we're going to be able to get Jeff Woo on the show at some point. We can ask him about how he is thinking about that particular term. I know a lot of people here are saying like, oh, 7% for 125k, that's low. 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. But if you're earlier in your career and you're not ready to go to a different higher valuation, like this could still be a good 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. No, I I mean I just remember 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, it's so 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% cuz they were like slop companies that were 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. This will be there's a whole bunch of different ways. It could be something where you are working through this accelerator because you get to ask Logan and Jake about their media creation, their creator work, and then you're launching your company. Because it could be a crack incubation 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 close to working with people and then if something lines up, they can 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 push this for you. We'll be your marketing arm.' Yeah. So, it'll be interesting to see where these companies go. Jeff and Jake, I think are coming on the show in the next couple weeks before the end of the year. So, we will be able to ask them more about that. Before we move on, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT, and more. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Aaron has a good post here. The remaining Apple leadership team, who is Travis Scott, Tim Cook, Mr. Beast, Mr. Beast, Mr. 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? Just there are still plenty of folks. Eddie Q is still there. Apple leadership team is still stacked. Don't you worry. Don't you worry. There are still people here. And we have our first boy in the reream waiting room. Physical reream waiting room. They put the moon on the sphere. They put cheese on the sphere. We're the sphere of Vegas says, 'We're sending off 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 lighting up this Las Vegas skyline. This looks absolutely insane. Building the sphere is like underrated. It's so cool.' Like when I We don't know how to build beautiful things anymore. Make it make sense. Yeah, we do. 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 reinstates yes we can build amazing things. Yeah. Humans built that. Yeah. Humans built the sphere. You heard about the heating the like the level of engineering that went into actually driving the screens on the outside cuz 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. Yeah. Then and so that light even if it's an LED, it still produces heat. And then you have So you have a whole bunch of them that are all heating each other next to each other. And then you put it in the hottest place in the world in the desert. And so there's just been like a phenomenal amount of energy. And I'm surprised you know people are so ready to dunk on this and be like, 'Oh, it failed.' Like 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 would be a great campaign if you were marketing it and the video that you put up showed the Windows blue screen of death, like the fail like, 'Oh, oh, it broke.' Because then you'd go viral if someone was like, 'Oh, wow.' Like, what were they advertising? Oh, they were running an ad for TBPN 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.' It's very cool. But if you can figure out how to crash the sphere or at least make it look like you crashed the sphere, I think you have some viral potential. Well, let me tell you about numeral.com. Compliance handled numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. And we have our first guest of the show. We have Keith Rabois here in New York City coming on down. Look at this. Thank you, Keith. Good to see you. How you doing?

You are the mayor of New York now. We have 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. So thanks so much for coming on down. How have you been? What's new in your world?

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

How many deals a year are you trying to get in under under 10?

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

But how is your view on Google's competitiveness in AI changed over time if at all?

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

So many hours in the day etc. May interfere with success with ChatGPT. ChatGPT should be a $4 trillion business if you maximize it. Yeah. Talk about hardware. It feels like we're in this weird era where everything is getting more capital intensive earlier and earlier.

Which one are you in?

Sure.

Yes.

There was this hilarious expose on HackerNews about AI startups that aren't actually training their own models. They're just wrappers. And they were breaking down the gross margins. It was like a VC's celebration because the only thing that was bad is they were kind of making the claim that they were training models when they're not. But my takeaway was that the wrapper market is extremely healthy in certain markets because workflow. If you have to productize things.

Like if I'm working as an investment banker, or an accountant, or a lawyer, it's not just the performance of the model that I care about. It's like how efficient, how does it improve my life.

We've been talking about this so much. We had a lawyer who switched firms because he knew he was with a big, probably top 30 law firm. He's like, they are not going to adjust in time. They like that their associates are just running up hours on tasks that could be one-shotted by AI. I built 3,600 hours my last month as a lawyer.

Yeah. Next time someone tells you they're working too hard in tech. Although I literally built 3,600 hours. That was not my average month, but still I hit over 3,000 a few months a year though. Usually today we'll do like a few thousand. The culture has degraded.

Yeah. 3,000? Oh, sorry. Here it is. 360 hours in January 2000.

Yeah, I'd be like 26, 2700. So, I was a slacker. You're a buyer of legal products as well as an investor in legal AI products. Are you advising your portfolio companies to push harder on their law firms to get?

Does ChatGPT need some like legal? Clearly a lot of people are using it, but there was just a judgment today that was requiring ChatGPT to turn over a bunch of stuff. So it's not technically privileged. So it's complicated to use it.

Wow.

So if a lawyer technically uses ChatGPT it might be privileged, but if you as a consumer input stuff like, 'Oh, how do I hide the murder weapon,' that is definitely not privileged.

Yeah.

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

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

There's some signal. People are buying enterprise AI products all across the globe, any vertical. That's what's allowed these vertical application companies to hit $100 million of revenue quickly. There's top-down demand at very large companies. How do you assess quality of revenue if a founder comes to you and says, 'I am raising at $100 million for my first round but I have a $5 million deal with some Fortune 500 company, so it's really not that crazy of a revenue multiple.' But then you start wondering, is that going to stick or can they just bounce?

Does that mean that the level of due diligence required on these deals, even if it's early stage, the round numbers 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?

If you're an enterprise CIO or CTO, you're probably getting pitched some stuff where you're like, 'Wait, I was going to buy those tokens anyway.' I don't even have the infrastructure to run it. There was a lot of bearishness around certain vertical specific AI tools and enterprise AI after that MIT report came out that nobody read the source material and anecdotally it feels incorrect. The simplistic way to look at it is, will large companies spend more on AI in 2026 than 2025? I think the answer is definitely yes.

You guys have stayed out of the prediction market wars. We have not invested in a prediction market. Was there a moment where you wanted to and the dynamics of the round didn't work out or was that a conscious choice?

Yeah.

Or you maybe didn't do sports bets.

How?

How much attention have you paid to this tension between states clearly wanting to regulate this stuff and yet the CFTC has decided like these are event contracts, it's under our jurisdiction. How have you watched that play out?

I think they're in pretty good shape. The biggest issue they had historically was more US citizens using their products before they were supposed to.

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

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 AI data center energy use, water use, those are the questions that people want to answer in DC. Job displacement is obviously top. That's a bigger question than this.

Yeah. We've been tracking AI diffusion. We're obviously excited about a lot of the products getting in people's hands like Spellbook, like legal AI. At the same time, we're just not seeing that much job displacement. Maybe it's coming, but it feels like when somebody lays people off, it's probably not because they're just using a prompt. Do you think tech needs to do a better job of telling that story or understanding how?

Yeah.

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

If they're in middle school, if they're in high school, should they be fighting tooth and nail to get into the Ivy League? Where are they learning?

You're not saving for it.

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 the deal guy era. This idea that it used to be you get to Silicon Valley and you're writing code in the basement or 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 you create a trillion dollars in value because you're the PhD scientist, the mathematician. 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.

BDR rebranded.

So would your advice to new entrepreneurs be to ignore the noise, ignore the frothy rounds, retreat to product market fit, programming?

There's been some 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. Who do you think is going to look smart in two years for leaning into these platforms early?

Incredible.

They're a sponsor.

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, 'Here they are.' They're experimenting with push. So they'll say, 'Okay, we know that you like venture capital news and you like learning about data centers.' 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 a glimmer of something.

Totally. That's hard to do in a beta.

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.

I hear you. That's kind of sad for our tech community because a lot of people in tech have very sad views.

It's a little bit like Paul Graham had this epic blog post about if someone unfortunately meets someone and sexually assaults them at a grocery store like Safeway, it's not a front page news story for the New York Times. This happens all across the country unfortunately. God forbid someone meets someone on Instagram in a DM. Front page news story. Something bad, god awful happens. But it's the grocery store versus the new technology. 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.

We are definitely, I can assure you, we are not going to be. We have never had the conversation about whether we should be a public company. We're in the craft business. IPO rumor swirl. Absolutely not. We'll let someone else do that. But we've been involved in really good companies. Ramp, your sponsor, obviously is phenomenal. Can be a public company whenever they choose to be. Trade Republic in Europe, not as many people are paying attention to. Great future company. There's a bunch. So I'm excited about the future. Saw there was some news that SpaceX is maybe thinking about going out next year. I don't have any inside information there. I read the same thing. I think it would be great. It's 20 years or something.

What are you advising those portfolio founders, without naming names, 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?

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

I've never had that happen to me. I've never been on a board of a company that's actually paying taxes because to pay corporate taxes, you actually have to offset loan and profit.

Wow. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else we should talk about? Why New York? Why are you here? Is it the Ramp mafia? You want to make sure you pick off all?

Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come down. This is fantastic. I'm sure we'll catch up with you soon.

And have like task force. Okay. Okay. And you want to know that he's coming for you. Yeah. Yeah. He would give me about

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

Have you been? No. So, how would you know? Because I'm from America and I know America has the best food in the world. I went to a birthday party at a Malaysian bar last night. Okay. Was it the best food? It was great. Is Malaysian food actually that good? What is Malaysian food?

Yeah, I like spice. I'm just saying that like Malaysia has one type of food. It's delicious. You should have beef sauté. Beef sauté. I love beef. I love beef sate. And then like sausage, but we have pizza. We have McDonald's. We have the Doritos Locos Taco. Do you have pizza in LA? No, but in New York, which is again in America, he was saying on a country by country basis, we have Las Vegas. We have San Francisco. We have French Laundry. We have all sorts of restaurants. Have you guys had any great dinners while you've been here?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I just think that the variety that you get... I will give Joe Weisenthal. I've never been. But let's give him Malaysia is an A+. It's an A+. Yeah. It's like, well, then America has got to be B+ in steak and B+ in French and B+ in sushi and B+ in Italian and all the different genres of cuisines. Awesome. And you add all that. Okay. Okay. You're defending really probably saying was like a great... this like probably one or two specific great Malaysian places in New York because he has his stops.

Yeah, we went to Hawkmore. We went to it. It was good. You're not... I mean, I haven't been yet, but I'll make a trip. Okay. Well, how is Expense Account going as a new podcast? Are you excited about it?

Congratulations. I like that. Great. Substack sponsored. They are the presenting sponsor of season one. Very cool. Love Substack. Yeah. What I liked about it was the fact that I am not really a foodie as you can tell from my... You guys say that, but you've been having more culinary conversation. Yes. But my example of good food in America was the Doritos Locos Taco. Baja Blast. I like a Baja Blast. I like a Diet Coke. I like a Red. Same. We're on the same page. So, but I was worried that I was going to 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 and he has great takes on food. Yes. And it was great because he's one of New York's best food. I'm used to him in one context talking about the markets, about what's happening with the latest news in the Fed, talking to founders, talking to entrepreneurs, CEOs. It was really cool to see a different side of him. So, I think if you can keep doing that, I'm hooked.

What about the West Coast expansion? You're looking... I need your advice here. So I found out Substack is very limited analytics. They're great for other reasons, but in terms of the demographics of my readers, it's limited, but I do know that about 20% of my readers live in California. Yeah. It feels like a loss to not do some sort of California product. When I was there on my last trip, everybody was saying we want something like we read Feed Me religiously, but we want something in California. So I decided next year I'm just going to go out there more. I think it will probably start as a monthly letter, but all of these readers of mine, they have tips for me. They have stories they want to tell. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to focus it, but I was putting together 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. Yeah, for sure. So, I'm going to San Francisco at the end of January.

It could... I mean maybe I'll never leave. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going in January, not for January. In January. My husband would not want me to go for that long. He would miss me. And my readers would miss me in New York. 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 dinner parties and bars.

So, I mean that sounds like sort of restaurant focused, but are there other cultural touch points? All kinds of establishments have doors.

I think the Feed Me Report on the Rosewood Bar on a Thursday night would really go... that would go great. I think that'd be a great piece. Definitely go there. I'll do that on a Thursday night. But there's a lot that I don't... 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. Yeah, but Cupertino is a very different environment than San Francisco. I know you probably spent some time in a neighborhood called... What's the neighborhood that not everyone always likes to see? The Tenderloin. Oh, yeah. I live there. That's rough. Really? Yeah. We walked through there at night after dinner. The Twitter headquarters for a while were there. It wasn't fine when we were walking through. I had John kind to take a trip to the Hamptons of San Francisco which is Tahoe. Oh, Tahoe. I would say Tahoe, right? Or maybe Martha... Wait, no. Not Martha's Vineyard. That's what's the Martha's Vineyard of San Francisco. I don't know. I said Marin. Marin. Yeah. One country. But I think Tahoe is more of the Hamptons because when I think of the Hamptons, I think like 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours. Skiing. Yeah. You can ski, you can do a bunch of different things. You guys ski occasionally.

You're getting ad deal ideas also from F1, right? Oh, yes. Love F1. Always. He's the best. Back to Substack. Yeah, Jack 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 from a vibe and cultural perspective maybe first, like how do you interpret a Substack creator versus a Patreon creator?

You're not into that. He just turns into a ghost. He's too afraid. You're missing out. It's a world. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a scary guy. A scary guy. Okay. I think if they keep them, you know, they keep some of the big hitters like Red Scare, whatever. But I don't think... I think what both of these platforms are doing wrong is when they try to do the sports team trade thing and I was feeling a bit of FOMO. Why not go try get new people on your platform? Yeah. Yeah. Incubate if you're Patreon. Yeah. If you're Patreon, don't go poach from Substack. Go find someone who's working in legacy media way underpaid relative to the value they create. Have them come over and do their new thing. And that was the lineage of some of the early Substack deals was we'll help you get set up. We'll give you enough money that you can pay for healthcare, pay for the first thing, and then get your business up and running, right? I was feeling a lot of FOMO that I wasn't getting the email from the Patreon team saying, 'Come over here check.' And then I got one the other day and it had the term... I haven't even responded yet.

You're way too loyal. I genuinely think you're... I feel like your audience would have a mutiny. They would be like it wouldn't work. I think you're Substack coded. That's the thing. I think you're a Substack writer, but also when you see certain terms like we're rolling out new features that we want to tell you that roll is like a slow thing. It's not like we're launching this and that the email kind of just fuzzed out after that and then he followed up or they... I won't out who emailed me but this is amazing. Yeah, I love it. But I think it's okay for Substack to be a newsletter platform and it's okay for Patreon to be a podcast platform and I'm very curious to see what an email CMS on Patreon even looks like. Do you have Netflix?

Are you like... I pay for it but I'm not logged in on my phone. Like I'm not a regular watcher. Phone. Yeah. If you ever watch on the plane? Yeah. On a plane. I won't do that. I won't do that. Apple TV maybe. Okay. There you go. So, do you think you'd ever watch a podcast on Netflix? You've seen that they're doing this? Yes. They're starting to buy podcasts and put them on Netflix. Yeah. More like distribute them. Distribute them. They got The Ringer. I would not, but these kids are really watching a lot of podcasts. They're into podcasts on TVs on the wall. Throw it on for a couple hours. I just messed up my mic. No, I think you're... wall podcasts. Yeah, they're all watching podcast like people are watching Expense Account as much as listening to it. And do you think they're also watching it on smart TVs basically like they throw it on the TV the way they might throw on a reality TV show or a movie with all the working from home.

Anyway, you were saying people watching Netflix shows... I think more and more people are using their TVs as that always on thing in the office but in their house. So, it's 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. Yeah, that makes sense. Holiday gifting. Yes. Are gift guides matter in a world where you can tell the LLM describe the person and say generate a gift guide at every possible price point all the way through. Did you guys see the gift guide that I wrote about that Evercore sent out to everyone. It's like what to buy the... I think last year this... I wrote it for somebody at Evercore sends it to... I feel like that's a premier product. That'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 items men. Love it. Yeah. So I like the idea of this word of mouth kind of gift guide. I think becomes a little bit more secret. Sure. Substack has become a storm of gift guides this time of year and it's a lot of clothes. I didn't realize that that's what people want. So much what do you do... Are you guys going to make a gift guide?

The Economist word of the year is slop, right? I saw that. 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, but so it really became the word of the year. I think the Economist did a good job picking and then Oxford had rage bait. We... Oh, yeah, they did. Rage bait. That's two words. Term of the year. Yeah. One word put together, I guess. I want to say our word so much, but we need to introduce it in the right way. You can... Have you been hearing everybody saying flow state now? That's like the very hot flow state. I like that's like such an old... I feel like that's like a 2018 era. Slump is negative. Range dates negative. Flow state. Yeah, we're moving our word. I remember when I was in college listening to Tim Ferriss, he was always trying to get in flow state. I was like... Whiz Khalifa. Flow state's good.

No, we didn't even get the invite. No, there was another... You guys would be at my man of the year party. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad we'd make the list. What do you have? Are you having a holiday party? I mean... No, we've really dropped the ball on events since the event we did. Yeah, we had... It's impossible. Do you know with our event we were like we're doing an event we picked a rough time and then did nothing else until the day of but you pulled it off. So did you... It was fabulous. Did you guys ever go into any 2016 awesome SF world holiday parties? Like I feel like the budgets have kind of vanished and things have changed. Vanished? What do you mean? Holiday parties don't really feel the same. Wait, how so? Maybe I'm talking about the media ones. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, because I mean, so that does make sense. Like the biggest more money than ever and stuff. Yeah. So, like the next two weeks basically the holiday parties have begun. Tech has obviously taken the... they saw the media companies with their big holiday parties and they said like that's actually our money like we're going to take that and now... But I was wondering how you would handle room blocks for Feed Me if you were going to put on a big event. How would you handle room blocks? Because there's been a big hotel room...

I was at Dealbook this year and interviewed Mr. Beast. Yeah. and he was playing the videos that he made 10 years ago with camcorders, like early stuff. That video that went viral this week, me in 10 years or something. Yeah. And I'm curious, are you guys... I got like a pain and regret that I'm not capturing more like how I built this style stuff. Are you guys capturing that as well? Like are you getting behind the scenes stuff?

I could... I mean that photo in the New York Times where I'm in the back of the car is kind of that vibe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we should do more behind the scenes shots, but it's just hard to figure out how would we productize that because it's a lot of effort. I think it's more for the time capsule. Yeah. But I think for us, 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 photos and memory. Yeah. There are a lot of stuff. It's not exactly like building silently like it's very much public. Anyway, building very publicly. Well, very excited. Massive year for you. Congratulations. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you so much for coming. You're going to come to New York more?

While she hops off, let me tell you about wander.com. Google 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 8.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. What are you laughing at? What do you got in the timeline? Can't share that one. Okay. But Varda is flying its fourth mission home to Earth. That's exciting. Varda has been on an absolute tear. Brewy sharing a photo of the Seun Kuniba. Go W4. Somebody was joking about how Varda names their missions W- the number. They're now on four. Someone was making the joke that eventually it's going to start sounding like tax forms like W9, like 1099. I mean that would be a funny bit. Does the W stand for Winnebago? I know that they have this whole Breaking Bad theme internally that they like to joke about, but I don't know. Where were we at? TJ Parker is quoting Granola. Granola did Crunch, which is a great name for their version of rap. Oh, that is good. TJ Parker says, 'You're 2025 deposed.' Deposed. What did you mean by this? That actually... I mean a wrapped style product for all of your meeting notes is extremely interesting for the corporate athlete out there. Really, really if you're a corporate athlete and you put up historic numbers in... I love how he is like I did 3,200 hours in a month just like you can't possibly work 3,000 hours in a month. There aren't 3,000 hours in a month because I know a full work year is 2,000 hours and if you're working 80 hours a week that's 4,000 hours. But it's... Andrew Reed says, 'When your vendor sends out their forward deployed engineers, they're leaving their flank exposed to a pincer movement by your cavalry.' What? It's ridiculous. The metaphors. I love it. 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. GA announced a $15 million Series A yesterday led by Excel and launched Prism Authentic reporting that can explain your finances. Yeah, we got Adam Faze in the New York Stock Exchange. Wow. In the suit. Can we get a suit check real quick? You look fantastic. Stock. Yes, you look great. Thank you so much. Are you a tailoring guy? You get it?

No, I am like you buy a suit then you get it tailored. Okay. That's great. I'm not at the level yet you can get a custom suit. We're getting there. Getting there.

Well, you had some rattling timeline. I do about the news breakdown. What happened today? How did you find out about it?

I found out from someone... I've been in favor of this merger from the day it was announced. So I think when there were conversations around who might be the new owner of Warner Brothers, Netflix for me was always the best option. And so I was having dinner with a friend two nights ago and I was saying this and the next day, last night, he texted me and he's like, 'It happened.' I was like, 'Wait, what?' And I was shocked. I really did not actually think this was possible. But I think I'm one of the few people in Hollywood that actually think this is good for Hollywood. Okay. Why? You say you're in Hollywood, but you're here in New York. You know, look, Hollywood is kind of a state of mind. It's a state of mind. Hollywood. Okay. So, why is it good? Why is it good? I think everyone is still stuck in 2015 and thinks that we are in a battle with Netflix. The reality is 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. And we as content creators, IP, I think as people that love our industry, I think the IP that Warner Brothers own is so rich. 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 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 Hannah Barbara. We're talking 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. Why do you think Paramount wouldn't be able to put it to use? 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. And I think you can say K-pop team, but they spent 15 billion dollars. It really is remarkable because I feel like I have a very positive association with Netflix. I've always had a good time with it. I've always enjoyed it. And then when I actually look through, I can name 10 HBO shows that I love and revere as fine art relative to... I had some good times on Netflix, but it's not like you're not watching The Sopranos. Exactly. You're not watching Game of Thrones. Like, it's not the FOMO TV. 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 in revenue alone, the greatest library on earth. Hey, I really do think Warner Brothers has the greatest library when you include HBO as well. Okay. Sure. Sure. I mean, there's some good stuff. Yeah. And I do think when you think about the licensing revenue they're going to start making for 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 possible. Yeah. You're not worried about the debt? You're not worried that everybody that subscribes to HBO Max is already probably paying Netflix and there's just... Well, I don't mean it'll be cheaper for all of us, right? I mean, I think you're going to get a little bit more expensive. A little bit more expensive, but then you can just keep bringing it up, bringing it up, bringing it up. I mean, I've always... Yeah, I've always been... 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 on Netflix at that exact moment that they're engaged with because there's just so much content. Help me wrestle with this. There was someone on the timeline who was saying like I cannot imagine another place where Warner Brothers would land that would be more of a monopoly and they're saying they're going to face antitrust. Yeah. So Jason Kilar who was a founding CEO of Hulu. That's right. 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.' Reduce WB to Netflix. Particularly an antitrust phrase, but I was saying like, what about selling it to Disney? Like if it was... What about to Paramount? At the end of the day, there'd be a lot worse consolidation with a Paramount and Warner Brothers combined merger and a lot more lost jobs. Okay. So, explain that angle because I was talking about Disney and it just seems crazy to put Superman next to Spider-Man. I think at the end of the day, as much as people usually like to say that they'd like to keep the teams at both studios, at the end of the day, if Paramount and Warner Brothers were to merge, they'd have the same film studio. Oh, sure. Sure. And so, I think what we're really talking about here is the consolidation for the survival of a 100-year-old industry. That's going to continue to happen. 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. Yeah. What about actual physical theaters? It seemed like Netflix was trying to get ahead of some narrative that movies that you love with the next Harry Potter maybe whatever that is or the next super... Well, the next is about to be an HBO TV show that's been in development which is really funny. But you understand... Well, you say that but it still feels like this deal has a long way to go. It has a long way to go and it still feels like there's a number of different scenarios but I think most likely this is just held up for a few years. So I think that's probably more likely the option. Similar time.

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. 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 where it goes from here? Do you see Netflix putting a popup that's like, 'Hey, this is in movies now, but if you pay $100, you can watch it today.' That no, but I will say I think this year we've seen Netflix going to go back on things they've said. I mean, they put K-pop Demon Hunters in theaters and made $19 million in the span of one weekend. So, I do think they understand the force is you can make a difference. There's something about a musical in a theater, too, especially with kids. Yeah. and seeing with a shared audience. But I do think that at the end of the day, Warner Brothers 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. But I do think that they will have to keep and maintain this sort of theatrical exhibition release. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. 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 spend $200, but I don't get to go to the movies that much so it's like a fantastic experience. So, you like the eating in the theater. I love that. I like the iPic. I don't like the eating in it. I like the luxury seat for sure. No, you bring a bottle of wine over. You bring... How's the wine? Is it good wine? I can't tell, but it depends. Enjoy it. No, no, sometimes inspired. I don't know. But I think they should go all the way. French Laundry, put a movie theater in. Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I think you look at something like the Lincoln Center IMAX, which is usually sold out for weeks on end. It's almost impossible to get a seat when you have one battle after another or DC or something premiering there. So I think the trend is going to go to the theater during the day or just sold. I mean I actually tried to go see... I finally saw one after another 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 show time. 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 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 100 years ago. We used to build 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 going back to that original experience and making it something that's just spectacular as a way of getting people back in those seats. Yeah. What other media stories are you tracking? I mean, this is the biggest one of the week. This is history. This is actual history. And I am sensitive to that fact. I think there's a lot of people in Hollywood that are scared about what is next for our industry. We had a very long strike that then came to an industry that was smaller than it was at the beginning of. 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 Looney Tunes for instance, I would rather a newer version of Looney Tunes be on these platforms than having kids watch YouTube kids AI stuff. Favorite Looney Tunes character. It's a great question. Wile E. Coyote. 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, I'm going to just generate a deep research report, use 11 Labs to 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 search for a topic and then if I don't know the channels yet, I don't know until I'm 3 minutes into the video and the video says 'this move wasn't just... it was that' and I'm like 'they got you.' I will say YouTube Kids is like one of the scarier things I think we have in culture because you might think your kid is safe because they're watching a Rachel video. It's very cute and innocent but the recommended feed... I don't know if you ever spent time with YouTube Kids. It's terrifying. I mean, it's like AI slop coming from Russian. They're not going to swear and there won't be nudity or content, but it's weird. It's weird and it is like weirdly sensual at times as well. And I think that like I don't know when we decided that these tech companies could be the babysitter for your child. But I imagine that we're going to sort of reverse those trends. I completely agree. And I think the meme is already taking hold. Like the whole iPad kids meme is definitely something where parents are now proud to be like, 'Oh yeah, my kid doesn't have an iPad.' And it's like if it becomes a status symbol, then all of a sudden everyone does it and hopefully that matters. What about social media being banned? There's something in Australia. 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. So here's the issue with that. Kids are still going to have devices. They're going to use various services. They'll use new networks that have less control. I think kids are still going to be social on the internet. And if you ban the platforms that actually invest billions of dollars a year, you're going to get them on these dark corners of the internet that don't have any scrutiny, that don't have any safety teams, whether you're in favor of them or not. I just think you cannot ban humans being social, they will always find a way. They will always find a way. But I mean, we had a very similar conversation around cigarettes, right? And we know that the laws we put around cigarettes has saved countless lives. And so I do think that like regardless, but the comp would be like it's you ban cigarettes, which is a physical item that you need a supply chain. You need to... it's hard to make a cigarette. We're not banning kids cell phones. They're still going to have a device. John was probably rolling his own pipe actually back. Whittling a pipe. So I just think you're going to end up in a situation where kids are probably going to just vibe code a crazy social network and it's going to invite in a lot of... 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 kids are better off today as a result of the amount of brain rot consumption they're doing on these platforms than they were before. And I think 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 because they know that once you're on the reels tab, you're probably going to watch a few more reels. That's a $50 billion. I was not on the reels tab at all. I would just check my messages. You swipe and now it's reels. I swipe it down there. I'm like cursed. Okay. Well, it is cursed. It's cursed. So, I just think that this is a conversation that needs to be parent-led and we don't really have the data yet to show just how harmful it is. I always just go back to my experience with video games like Halo I think was M for mature. I was not supposed to be able to play it until I was 17. I was probably able to get my hands on it at 14. I think I turned out okay. I'm not obsessed with killing aliens. I'm actually completely fine. Same thing with Call of Duty. 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, yeah. Yeah. So, having some sort of warning system. I'm a big fan of MPAA ratings coming to tech products. I've been beating that drum for a couple months. But I like the MPAA ratings. I hope that the MPAA figures out a way to work with the tech companies in a way that's accretive to them, like they get paid or whatever. Because I think that there's just something about if I say, 'Hey, Instagram is R-rated,' you'll be like, 'Okay, I know what that means.' Or like Instagram is PG-13 rated or it's G-rated. I know intuitively and I'm ready as a parent to decide when and maybe I want to say, 'Hey, PG-13 rated movies a little bit earlier because parental guidance is recommended.' It's okay. It's like we can even with video games, I'm a big fan of cooperative games being a wildly different dynamic than solo online in the toxic chat room. Whereas if it's me and my son playing a co-op game together, troubleshooting and stuff, even if the screen images are a little adult, it's like we're collaborating and so it's a wildly different dynamic than being lonely and then seeing imagery. I mean, I do think these are just some of the problems we have 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, murder somebody and have that video exist on YouTube. You can on X, though. So, I think it's just a matter of figuring out where we want this conversation to go and what approvals we want to give the parents. Yeah. Want your take on the Marty Supreme marketing campaign. Oh, yeah. Because this feels like to me... I don't pay much attention to movies, but I'm seeing a lot of Marty Supreme content. That's good. And Josh's film of the year already. Oh, you haven't seen it. Have you seen it? No. No. I saw it a few weeks ago. You saw it on Christmas. I saw it. I went to the premiere. I understood it came on Christmas from that. But it's amazing. It's the best movie of the year. I will say the best movie of the year. Not to put a brotherly race between the two, but Josh Safdie is the GOAT and he's the one. It's the best score. It's the best acting. It's the greatest cast. It's such a phenomenal movie. The best score. Best score. Really? Yeah. Interesting. Like the game in the ping pong. No, no, no. Like the music of the movie. The music of the movie. 21 to zero. I will say I don't know. I think part of they're dealing with Tim. Timmy has a Timothy, not that I'm friends with him, has a very short amount of time. 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. I worry that it's a little inside baseball. And I think you could be going more mass culture with this like he did with the Bob Dylan movie by going on Pat McAfee and all these other programs. I will just say the blimp. The blimp. I've been trying to get somebody to use a blimp marketing campaign for so long. You want to do a blimp? No. I was just pushing 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. You're putting something naturally inspiring. You look up and it's a blimp and it's amazing. They are. And I think it was fun that it was connected to the instrument. It is. It is the movie of the year. It is best. Okay. Wow. Best picture. Whoa, whoa, whoa. It's the show of the year. The show of the year. Honestly, I feel like I actually didn't catch up that much with television shows. I'm re-watching Homeland though, which I... Oh, Homeland. Wow. That's a throwback. It is a throwback at this point. Sort of like Obama era scene. I remember season 1 having a great cliffhanger. I was really into it. You're deeper in the seasons. No, no. I'm like episode seven, season one right now. This is like a new... I kind of like in passing when I was a kid, but I don't really think I went through. No, I remember being really into it when I watched it. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic. Thank you for having me. Congratulations on your booth. Look at this. This is crazy. This is crazy. We're here. We're doing it. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. I'm going to tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising, easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. Did you know the owner of AI.com is DeepS? What? Apparently it could be fake news. It's according to Google AI overview. But wait, no, no, no. This is 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. That's fake news. That's completely unreliable. I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it. 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, by Stewart Brand. This is a Stripe Press book. We should try and have him on the show. So, it begins with this drama. This is interesting. It's talking about the process of maintenance 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 ft ketch was barely adequate for a journey through the punishing southern ocean. Make do and mend 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 hull boat which he maintained with zen-like discipline. He said he spent his days working calmly at the odd jobs that make up my universe. And so while this story will be familiar to sailors and others who have read the many books written about the race, Mr. Brand minds the competitor's harrowing experiences for deep lessons, maintaining the technology that keeps us alive is more than a necessary job.' Josh Wolf, remember he was talking about his thesis for maintenance. Like I think he was on the show if I remember correctly. I mean the idea is 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 maintain them and improve them, revitalize them. So I'm excited to read the... Did they give a proper review? I mean the Wall Street Journal is not doing exactly two thumbs up here but 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.work and worksandprogress.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 meandering. I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that. 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. But that only raises expectations for part two. And so, I think this is a positive review by Mr. Meeks, the former editor of Popular Mechanics and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And I think that concludes our show from... 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 income. Exactly. And so people will show... they'll send it to MKBHD for a couple days to hope that he posts 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 redirected ai.com to me. I'd be curious how much valuable. Maybe I should buy it.' It is a lot of traffic. I wonder how much traffic it actually gets. 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 domains make a lot of sense. I mean, doesn't Google own .ai or something because they have ai.studio. So I guess they own the TLD studio. Google doesn't just buy domain. See, ai.com only got 93,000 visits in October according to Similarweb which is not super valuable. But you could do something fun with it. You could do something interesting with it. I'm sure that there's a way to make some but it's not worth $100 million in any situation. Yeah. Well, in other funding news, there's $350 million new funding for Castelion, who's been on the show, 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 has 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 looks to close that gap, private investment is pouring in and startups, many of which haven't built hypersonic systems at scale and haven't flown at hypersonic speeds, are seeing their valuation soar. The latest is Torrance-based Castelion, which on Friday said it raised $350 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. Wow. Congrats to the team over at Castelion. That is crazy. They were around like 100 or 200 earlier this year. So big jump. 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. What car is this? This is the Aston Martin Zagato. Oh, 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 NY. Thank you to Lynn, Chloe, and the whole team. They're all fantastic. And we will be back here soon. We'll see you on Monday. Cheers. Thank you. Goodbye.