WSJ's Katie Deighton on brand crisis as the word of the year, owning your narrative, and whether consumers will care about AI in ads

Hi,

good to see you. Welcome to hang out.

Congratulations. [music]

Day number one hasn't been going.

Fantastic. We love this place. It's fun as a med as a media person to be here because it it's become just the center for media.

Yeah. Anyways,

Kazaria.

It was him, wasn't it?

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

lady. And with the buildaria, I don't know. I don't know much about movies. I was like, I have no watch TV.

No, he watches no movies. No TV really

very very rarely.

He was seeing one movie Borat and that's it pretty much. Pretty much

I saw a new movie Mountain Gate and I felt like I need to give a review for the show was about it was about some AI founders that go to the that go to I felt like loosely based on the All-In podcast. I feel like I need to give a review.

Um anyways, so great to have you.

What's your go-to holiday movie?

Oh my goodness. Um can I say The Sound of Music? I don't know if that's technically a holiday movie, but it's the one I watch around that time. I feel it's nostalgic in an old way that like it's appropriate. If you threw it on people, it doesn't scream Christmas, but people would be accepting of it as a

um my controversial opinion is I don't like It's a Wonderful Life.

Oh, that one is a little bit of a tooth.

H

elf.

Elf.

Elf. Yeah, I'll go for like is that a movie?

Someone told me, "What's your favorite color?"

Um,

okay. So, anyway, uh please introduce yourself for the stream for those who might not know you. What's your dayto-day like?

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

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

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

the red antler trade didn't last.

Yeah. The red antler era was like you need $500,000 for a brand and you need a product

and it worked for him. He is a public company and is doing fine with

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

So I bought my first WBY Parker glasses last week and I thought God I'm a bit late to this one as well but that was that era for a while. I mean, I think that's what's so interesting right now is that there is no playbook anymore. Even if you're a humongous brand, you know, you're sort of when you're managing any kind of decline, there's no playbook for that. And there's no playbook for a a young DTOC brand because, you know,

we heard about an apparel brand that has scaled from 0 to 700 million of revenue in like 2 years. Uh, all on Tik Tok. We never we never heard of it. I don't know if they're public, so I I don't I don't know if the the numbers are public, so I won't share the name. I'll share it with you uh after. But remarkable but what what has been the big trend of the year in terms of your coverage? What's been the biggest story or the biggest theme?

What's your word of the year?

My word of the year crisis. I think I think we have seen I think every brand right now uh if you look at American Eagle, if you look at Cracker Barrel just happening in the last you know in this sort of a space of a few months of each other

two very similar case studies

two very different accusations being leveled at them

getting sucked into politics and then the crisis comes comes out

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

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

What are you looking at for 2026? I think well it'll be a lot more of that and I think it's going to be a lot more of brands kind of shifting their budgets maybe a little bit away from you know your traditional advertising into maybe some more PR. I think it's really important for brands at the moment to be owning their narrative. I think they're obsessed with that. They want to be this is the whole reason they're all moving to Substack. You know they're writing they're running their own YouTube channels, their own podcasts. You know they want to be ahead of the game. they want to be themselves before anyone else. So, I think we're going to see like a big shift in like what comms looks like in general, which will be quite interesting to see. And then the AI piece of it all kind of fits in with that because I think the big question is going to be

do consumers care

if a brand is using AI and if they do like how badly is that going to actually affect any revenue? Well, it's going to be interesting because it's going to happen at the ad level, too, because the social platforms know the political leaning of the users. And it's very possible that a brand will be like, "Here's the product. You can figure out how to make the best ad for the end for the end user." And then you'd have one brand with one product that's running political leading ads this way. I do wonder I do wonder there's been some brands over the last kind of coming out of the the uh the kind of original Trump era that were just like right-wing brands or right-wing neo bankank. We saw we saw some of these. I wonder if we'll see more

rifle coffee was kind of proto example. This my pillow. I wonder if we'll see more more uh consumer brands just like basically put the political party in the footer and just be like even more uh

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

I mean I'm sure that's probably already happening. Well, it naturally happens in the supply chain, right? Cuz no one's digging through the supply chain to figure out where their coffee beans came from.

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

Yeah. It was like a clothing brand that was all about ocean plastic.

And then and then I think people realized at some point or another they wanted to buy

the majority of consumers just want to buy a great product. Uh and so it kind of flipped back where brands stop saying 1% of every dollar.

Do you think any big brands will intentionally try and throw their brand into crisis? Because we see this in Silicon Valley all the time. It's ragebait marketing where a startup will come out with a video that's designed to get cancelled because no one knows them. And if they're getting cancelled, sure 100,000 people might hate them, but at least if they they thousand might thousand sign up, it's better than nothing.

Are you talking about the uh that Black Mirror one that came out a few weeks ago that was um there's a bot farm.

Very good point.

There was a bot farm one. There was Tik Tok for sports betting or gambling. There was one that was a uh a coding environment that would let you gamble and watch subway servers [laughter] brain

like illegal online casinos.

There was there was the whole clue saga which was a an app that allowed you to cheat on everything. Of course, people don't like cheating.

I was thinking I was thinking of the you know uh you know dead relative to that one was very on the

partnered with like a Disney star. Disney star. That was crazy

to the point where I thought this has got to be well or it doesn't exist and it's it's you know some kind of uh

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

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

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

it was not meant to be political. It was not that. And anyone that thought it was was in the minority and it was a lot of bot traffic that was driving. So, you know, and I think they came out of it and they they think they came out of it because they stood by it and they didn't try and roll it back and confuse the messaging and they just sort of

didn't like pay too much attention to it. They didn't give it too much fuel. It kind of burnt itself out that way. I think we're going to be seeing like some more of those tactics. Whereas before, if anyone was upset, brands would like immediately pull something and, you know, do the notes apology. friend of ours uh who's been on the show before, Lulu Msurvi, she does comms or or helps on comms for a lot of startups. She said yesterday, "Every media headline about a tech company is basically like this founder archetype is building the summary of your company or product. Can it overcome common skepticism?" Is [snorts] that like has that been is that evergreen or is that like do you think that kind of do you agree with that? Do you think that kind of format is like having a moment right now? I certainly have been seeing that quite a lot on like the cover stories of different uh like magazines like Forbes and Fortune. I think

there was a there was a there was a a journal piece on Cursor recently that was like similar. It was basically like they grew from 3 to 30 billion in 9 months. Like

I'll let you answer, but I have a

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

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

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

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

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

stories need conflict. And I I know I know friends who have uh time and time again been in in industry in tech in technology protek and then they say we want to make protek stories and what you realize is that uh well you need an antagonist in a story and if you don't have an antagonist you don't have a story you don't have strife if you don't have a low point and so when I would when I would talk to friends who were running companies I would say

look

like I know that you've had failures I know that you tried to raise money 5 years ago you're super successful now, but 5 years ago you tried to raise money and the investor pulled out at the last second and that employee that you wanted to hire said no and the product that you released crashed and no one bought it. Like I know that you've been through trials and tribulations. You have two options. One is is hide those and try and tell the story of everything went perfectly the whole way and it will be a boring story that no one listens to. Or you can tell the real story of the highs and lows and the ups and downs and you'll have a riveting story that actually makes you look more heroic because who who wants to watch Star Wars without any strife without you know

when you tell people that Jedi are just

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

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

and give the journalers something to work with uh that has friction like you said. Otherwise, they're just going to go off and find it anyway. some disgruntled employees going to come to us and risk of trying to over control with the owned media is if your own media doesn't have any conflict ever

because anytime something bad happens to you, you don't post.

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

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

I think the Astronomer example again from this year that's a perfect example. But he went ahead straight away. That was

master class.

Master class.

Master class.

We had the We had the founder on

the founder, Pete. Pete, right? Petroy.

Yeah.

Yeah. We had him on the show on our show a little bit later.

And it was funny. We were joking because they had the day before that controversy broke, they had published like a case study with RAM. Oh yeah.

We were joking. Who's who's our presenting sponsor? We were joking. were like, "Did Ramp somehow like [laughter]

um how many stories do you like how many pieces do you actually do you publish a year?"

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

What does it take to get in the four to six?

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

Yeah. Like well we are and my favorite line to use is we are the Wall Street Journal. So you know you got to you got to give us some dollar signs. I like that. Awesome percentage.

This is a lesson for us. We need to when we tell someone well we are TVPN. We need to know what that means.

Maybe maybe we can impress upon people. Don't come with your talking points is conversation. We are TVPN. Like you talking you can't come with talking points because this is TVPN. Oh, we're we're still

your PR outside knocking on the window. Exactly. [laughter] We were talking to Kramer about that. That's the number one thing we want to do.

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

uh as a trend has been so impactful now that young people are proudly throwing up their hand. I don't drink alcohol. I never drink.

Is the unwell network doing well?

Uh isn't that antithesis? That's the pendulum swinging back from wellness to

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

Well, it's f it's difficult cuz you know what you you guys live in LA, I live here. Um I feel like I feel I go out on a Friday night in the West Village, no one is looking very well, you know, like [laughter] the kids are drinking, they're smoking, smoking school again apparently. Um, you know, I think but then the rest of the country, I don't know. I think it's probably still the wellness is probably still sort of show that people aren't drinking very much, especially in the younger demos. Uh,

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

I mean it's very difficult to break out and I'm sure someone has whether a time with the economy is like it is it because of you go to a restaurant are you going to go well I can't really afford it so therefore this is like the one thing I can like take off my bill or is it because I'm actually stopping drinking um and it's difficult to know that causation but I think uh you know, it's alcohol the the CMOs I speak to in the alcohol world, they all having a a pretty

not difficult time, but they they know that change is coming and you know, they're making little alterations and um they never if you've got an advertising budget, they've never been able to say, "Hey guys, drink loads." You know, go out, have get absolutely plastered, have a great time. So, you know, they haven't had to change their marketing too much because of that. But I think in terms of, you know, where they're showing up and uh how they're presenting themselves in the real world, that will be quite interesting, you know.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, let's do it again soon. Good to meet you. Great. Congratulations. Thank you for coming on. Such a special place. Um I I'm enjoying these ramp um these uh

Good call not lighting a fire a candle in

Yes. You can tell that I'm not a pyromaniac cuz a pyromaniac just one mact one more burn your receipts times money save both. I like these.

Um these are very fun. Well,

how much time do we have to do timeline? We are going to an event uh later. We can pull up this

do 10 minutes from Lulu. I haven't seen these. She says, "It's worth signing up for Blueprint just to study the marketing emails. They are fun and easy to read. Uh, no corpo slop. Educational, so you're getting useful info rather than just being marketed to. Great at building trust through transparent and proactive communication. Why, Brian and Kate, write them personally, and you can pull some of these up. Uh, I do uh I do think that um it's possible that Brian Johnson is the best marketer in the world right now.

He's incredible. uh he's competing uh and like actually you know the team are like innovating at a bunch of different levels like just like in creating uh uh you know plenty of people like you know want to critique him or disagree with his philosophy or approach or whatever but as a business person you have to appreciate how uh he is just makes uh finds a way to make him the center of a lot of attention uh pretty much every single Organic

king of organic and I know that I'm sure they spend a ton on on on traditional ads too for blueprint.

It's going to be a monster of business like and he has a CEO in the seat right now too, right? Didn't he hire?

Yeah.

Or maybe he was going to hire but like there's going to be some operating

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

and it's like about so many celebrities throughout the throughout the years. Uh all sorts of all sorts of

There's definitely precedent for it

about it. Um in uh in other news uh did you see there uh

K trucks are coming back?

Yeah. So something about um

basically eliminating like Biden

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

Yeah. So they were buy era vehicle fuel efficiency rules. I feel like you haven't been able to buy one of these in a long time and it never made sense because it should be the most efficient.

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

Um

just took a lot of these off the road

and uh yeah, it's the cafe the corporate average fuel economy standard. [laughter]

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

I wonder if this will drive people back to Tesla and saying like I

I bought this after Elon went crazy and then Trump went uh [laughter]

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

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

Yep.

At scale. Uh and they're super reliable.

But I mean, Americans have just voted with their wallets. They do not want a twodoor truck. It's just it's never worked. like the Land Rover Defender. There's there's so many examples of two twodoor uh SUVs that have just not gotten traction like the Nissan the Nissan Morano cross cabriolet also never took off but even with with true enthusiasts of course

even the uh the Range Rover Evoke is a twodoor SUV I believe not done well. Uh

I'm very interested to see how many tour GW have you owned. Do you think we're uh I there's some that I would love to own?

Yes. But they're not exactly flying off the shelves. They're not being stocked on dealer lots because realistically you're going to be like, "Ah, I'd love the twodoor." But then you think about your family and you're like, "I need the four-door." And that's what everyone does. And that's why every Ford F-150 four-doors.

Uh did you see that Adam Freed?

This is a hilarious bit by

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

a declaration that she'd con conquer the very tried to exclude her.

Uh, uh, an incredible bit. Uh we

and then and then and then then they amplified it because they did a they did a video interviewing him, confronting him about it. And so Vulture has just done a great job drawing attention to their uh Culturati 50 which I would not have been following this year and now I want to see the other 50. So hats off to them for for that project. In other news, uh Pomp is announcing a historic decision at BRR 100% of this is his digital digital asset treasury.

It's a digital ass bitcoin. He's going to buy Bitcoin and then buy companies that produce more Bitcoin or something.

Yeah. 100% of equity compensation for the CEO, me, and the board of directors will be tied to performance milestones. CEOs and boards shouldn't be making millions of dollars unless retail shareholders are also winning. Now that I am char I am in charge of a public company, I hope to set the standard for what true shareholder alignment looks like. Uh I I do believe this was in reaction to an activist investor that accumulated around 7%.

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

I can I can see that he's he's he's a permable bull.

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

Yeah. We'll see how it do does uh once uh you know again a lot of these digital asset treasury companies have performed uh horribly recently and unclear

Marvin was Marvin was texting me.

Okay so Marvin Marvin von Hagen is going to poke uh which is a uh social AI that uh lives in your messages. Uh he says saw a Techrunch tweet 6 weeks ago that Meta is trying to ban Poke. He said he directly asked for help on Twitter. Got a lot of intros. Talked to the European Commission. EU officially open an antitrust investigation today. X is unreal. Uh he really uh is kind of Meta's Meta's worst nightmare uh today. Uh just um directing. He's basically M. Are you really that surprised that Martin von Hagen is pulling Marvin Marvin?

Sorry, sorry. Marvin von Hagen is pulling the pulling the strings of the of the EU. Uh but uh anyways, [laughter]

uh pretty pretty interesting.

Well, good luck to him.

We'll have to Matt Slotnick says, "Maybe the best quote I've ever heard in an earnings call from Beni off. Quote, we did 3.2 trillion tokens. Let Bilbo Baggin know that we've got adoption and usages happening here." That was just a shout out to JRR token token token token. [laughter]

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

carp. That is hilarious.

That is one.

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

Uh dig out of left to Oracle. Matt says, "Make sure everybody realizes we're not building data center. We're preserving our gross margins and cash flows and using the data centers that are being built."

I love it.

Um

I love it. Near says, "Today I learned I use more tokens than Salesforce does."

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

I don't think I don't think we're going to get there. I think I think there is like there is a precedent through the eyeball,

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

Y

you never know.

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

This is It's so funny. What was your The question was, what was your most memorable encounter with Zach? Well, there was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat in front of you. No, he killed it before. I guess he kills it. He kills it with a laser gun and then a knife. Then they send it to the butcher. A laser gun? I don't know. A stun gun. They stun it and then he knifed it. Then they sent it to the butcher evidently in PaloAlto. And then the quote drops off. Imagine you have your buddy over and you're like, "Hey, look. I run a social network. You ran a rival social network for a long time. I run Facebook. You ran Twitter. Let's just hang out. I'm going to show you." No, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I'm going to show you a little bit of my culture. Bro culture.

You're the You're a hippie. You're You got hippie culture. I got bro culture. You're the Bitcoin guy. I'm the UFC guy. I like to kill goats myself. But, you know, you're not supposed to go leak it. What's going on, Jack? Come on.

Come on.

Keep I showed you my culture in confidence.

What happens in PaloAlto? What happens at the goat the goat farm stays at the goat farm.

Apparently not. Uh, also hilariously,

by the way, I met we we figured out that a that a somebody on the show that's come on multiple times

has hundreds of goats.

Oh yes.

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

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

real goat collector.

There's a real goat collector.

The real goat herd.

That's right.

The goat herd.

Uh what else we got?

Uh this is interesting. Google taps uh Replet in challenge to anthropic and cursor. uh somewhat somewhat surprising uh considering that that Google's going really heavy with anti-gravity, but I think like Google's invested in Replet for a long time like like they did they did a partnership or or investment back before Amjod was making a couple million bucks in revenue in in

Replet. Uh yes. Yes. Uh I'm almost positive that uh that Google has invested in Replet at some point. We we should look it up. But um we're we're doing the fake news now. We're done with the news. It's fake news. It's the fake news hour. Um but congrats to Amjod on doing a deal with Google. I wonder uh how that will will manifest. Um because you are kind of competing with a lot of the folks at uh AI.studio and there's a lot of different pieces of the Gemini team that you're kind of uh uh dealing with. But at the same time like Replet is a unique product and Replet has never been um has never been a foundation model company. Yeah.

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

model development. Where have they been a little bit less speedy on the product roll out side getting the product in the hands of people? OMJ's great at that. The replet team's great at that. So, you put them together and maybe it makes a lot of sense, but uh it's still just early days.

Two final posts. Uh one, we missed this yesterday, but

we have we have another Paul uh and uh the team over at Antifund

uh have raised uh Jeff uh Jeff Woo have raised a new fund 330 million almost. I almost said I almost said 300 million. I'm sure they'll I'm sure they'll be there soon. Uh but they are they say they're put account industry leaders like OpenAI, Android and Android, RAM, cognition and physical intelligence portfolio.

20inut video. This is an interesting switch of a launch video. It's shot on the camera.

We were saying this we were saying this we were saying this like a year ago like the way that we we told some company I remember I remember the the I think I was saying to

uh yeah I was saying to Zack I we was talking to Zack Dell. You didn't end up doing this, but I was like, do the 20inut launch video, right? Like, do a video that uh

Well, you have a different idea that you should not leak because

I won't leak that idea.

But I love that this I love that this happened the way it did. And I think that this is a good format. I think there's probably I think there's probably two to three more of these uh that will happen. I mean, this does this does in some way in some way mirror the Johnny IV Sam Alman video of like them getting coffee together. Uh, and like there's these interesting things that like they're not launching a podcast together. They're just dropping a one-off conversation that's edited, kind of framing some of the history, explaining it. It's a really clear way to communicate. And of course, because these guys are master communicators, they understand media. And so, very excited. And what a portfolio. Open AAI Andrew Ramp Cognition.

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

Fantastic. You know, fantastic performance. You know the person? Of course I do. Um, final post from uh TA TA, sorry. Uh, he's highlighting a company called Plaude.

Plaude. This is something I've never heard of. Apparently,

but it sounds like they're absolutely ripping the most successful.

They said wearables were cooked, but Plaude records, transcribes, and sum. Of course, it's another meeting summarizing uh product.

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

literally and and it's crazy like no no no no no drama no launch videos no crazy hype no no no rage bait just building in silence we got to get this

they raised around $5 million but some amount you know I think the more important thing is just that is that hardware is hard

and we see a lot of corpses in the in the consumer electronics world but there are also major breakout successes. Uh the Aura Ring for example, like what a remarkable company to just show up doing revenue at their scale seemingly out of nowhere. Whoop has done really well. Um and there's something Yeah. Oro, that's that's what I was mentioning. And then this this new company, this meeting summarizer, fantastic. Um and

interesting heard a pitch. I'm so curious to know what this does so well that your phone can't do in an app.

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

Well,

um, thank you for tuning in.

Thank you for tuning in. We missed you in the chat.

Uh, but we will see you tomorrow. And, uh, thank you again to the NY team for hosting us. It is, uh, totally surreal,

uh, to be here. And uh thank you to everybody that uh has made this possible by uh tuning in enjoying the show and supporting us uh however you have. So have a wonderful evening and we will see you tomorrow.

Thank you.

Take care.

Good night.