Josh Elman on Apple, AI Agents & Why Startups Can Still Win

19:29He had that vision all the way back then and in selling to ByteDance was able to really go into the company and realize it. Look, now we're at a point where between reels and shorts and TikTok and Douyin, which is in China and the same from ByteDance as well. This is now a foundational paradigm of what people do to spend time. And it's often like, do I want to sit and lean back and watch a big screen TV or just on my phone, watch a few things and have a good moment? It's been so amazing to that. And yeah, I don't think there's room necessarily for, I'm going to be another short video network because i think we're very well served by the products that we have however there's things that spin off the short video network that are actually you know incredible new businesses themselves i'm not sure how much you've been following micro dramas micro drama this isn't

20:13Eric Newcomer:the sort of i saw the ai vegetable thing that's a different trend i mean the ai vegetable thing is a small part of it but there are companies like real shorts drama fever drama box that are creating short stories that are maybe 20 30 60 minutes in length chunked into multiple episodes and you might on tick tock see or on instagram real see the first episode or two or the first trailer for this wonderful story some of them are like soap operas some of them are little fantasy things some of them are mystery and horror but they kind of get you in and instead of just kind of again flipping one show to the next that sort of becomes this feed of constant attention switching this is watching a little bit longer this might not quite be a eight hour netflix series that's costing you know hundreds of millions to produce but this is a thing that is cheaper to produce but it still requires great storytelling and are they mostly ai generated you know right now these got big even before the ai wave so a lot of them were actually just filming people and doing things you know a little bit on the cheap but we're creating real shows that made sense or using animation.

21:20We're seeing a lot more of them now use AI in order to do this and to create these videos. There's like one called Shorticle that I think is primarily AI generated that is, they're great stories. Like you go to watch the stories and at least me, I always get hooked and I'm enjoying, you know, just what I'm watching. And again, it's, they're short, they're easily to consume, but you kind of go on the whole narrative arc. And I think with AI, we're democratizing creation of these so much that we're going to see massive new platforms for storytellers, not just for a short video that's a little bit gimmicky, but a real story.

21:56And so we'll still have our TikToks and our YouTubes to kind of watch the kind of clips and the things that we watch there. But when we want to go through something that's a little bit more story mode, maybe instead of Netflix and Hulu, we'll still go watch Game of Thrones on HBO and we'll still go watch, you know, a squid game on Netflix. But when you just want to watch something that's kind of in your zone and in your area and just be able to watch it on your phone and just flip through it, these micro drama platforms, I think are going to become so much bigger.

22:26Eric Newcomer:They need to be able to sort of build a standalone app to be sort of venture worthy. Or do you think a studio model, like if they were just on TikTok, could they? So most of these already are standalone apps because what you'll do is on TikTok, you'll see the beginning of the show or a trailer for it. You'll get your hook. You'll be hooked to go finish this, go download this. And they actually all monetize mostly through subscriptions. And so, I mean, there's billions of dollars already flowing into this category. If you go dig into like the data or other things, many of them are actually Chinese companies that have kind of figured out the model.

23:00It looks a little bit like mobile gaming and they crank through these stories. but I think with AI, we're going to be able to elevate the storytelling, elevate the creativity and create platforms that allow anybody with a story they want to tell to be able to put it into one of these platforms. And just like TikTok, let anybody be a creator of a short video. This will let anybody who's a storyteller put something out there that can get a larger and larger audience. Are you optimistic about AI generated feature films?

23:28Eric Newcomer:The shorter content, you can test it more. You can see, oh, are people responding to it, lean into it, build the next segment, like, do you think we'll have movies that are AI generated? I mean, the long term answer is sure. I tend to think we always try to jump to the end game. And what's beautiful about startups and the startup ecosystem and the venture ecosystem is that we don't always need to boil the ocean on day one. We build something that meets today and that can deliver a great experience today. But it may not be the biggest thing. I remember the early days of YouTube, one of the best quotes that was told to me was we're not you know it's like how are you ever going to compete with like network tv and it was like we're not aiming to beat the best hour of network tv but you know if you still want to watch an incredible you know i think gray's anatomy was a really popular show at the time gray's anatomy you should still watch gray's anatomy but we're trying to beat the worst hour of tv because if we're more interesting to find things on youtube than your worst hour of tv you'll start to spend that hour on youtube instead of on tv and so i think that's very much true is again you don't need to beat Netflix and Hulu today but you need to beat the I don't really know what to watch I'm just kind of surfing around I wish I had a little bit better story be that better story now you start to fill from the bottom and then as you build new franchises you build stories as you build characters it can move all the way up I'm curious for your reflections on meerkat house party and then sort of clubhouse is a different phenomenon To me, I'd bucket them as sort of like things that were, they tried to sort of build energy and sort of an ecosystem and will them to be people of, you know, some people wonder if instinct has clubhouse vibes and that, you know, VCs are very excited about it.

25:11Eric Newcomer:They're obviously, you know, what, like Foursquare and Twitter launched at South By. This sort of had this sort of insider community is going to will intervene. What's your reflection? Like, will there be another, like, the venture community, the Silicon Valley community of insiders sort of gets excited and that catapults it? Or is that passed? Or what's your reflection on that? I mean, I think there's two different things. because I think with things like Meerkat that was so tied to Twitter and Clubhouse, that definitely started from a vibe of people who were very much in the tech and Twitter ecosystems and able to grow.

25:43And they were all about bringing people together live. And I think what both of these companies showed is how magical that moment is, how magical that experience is when we're having live, but also how hard it is to scale when you're only live. Most of the products we've talked about, TikTok and Instagram and everything else are very much async. And so how do you combine a product that is async and live to be a large platform? What has turned out is that the platforms that are large and async can add live components and have those work rather than a fully live network becoming the next big thing.

26:12And I think that's always been the challenge with some of those companies. To separate your other part of your question, I sense you're talking about kind of the Silicon Valley energy of technology and technologists discovering something new and bringing that to the world. And I actually think the magic's back. Like I think with AI, the beginning people who really understood AI were the tinkerers, were the ones who would not just get Chachiputin and be like, I can type in what I type into Google. Ooh, that's a little bit better result. But I can type in really complex incantations and start to get really thoughtful, different responses.

26:47You know, remember all those prompts that were shared in the early days of people with Chachiputin? Imagine that you're a detective and you're trying to solve this problem. Well, here's all the evidence I have. Can you please help me figure out what's going on or what are the three steps that I should do next? You know, with Google, if you ever type that into Google, it would like throw up in there, you know, before they really added their AI mode. And with ChatGPT, it would give you a great answer. And the more and more complex prompts. And as technologies were figuring that out and then they were figuring out what they could build on top of these APIs.

27:17Things like OpenClaw were very much a tech phenomenon. We're discovering things again that reminds me of the very earliest days of the tech ecosystem. them where technologists, you know, builders, tinkerers get this first. And now we're at this incredible wave. Part of why I came back to VC is turning from that moment to how do we consumerize this? How do we truly make it available to most people? And I look at instinct is one of the coolest phenomenons of a startup that is like taking a bunch of this complex technology. It's one of the first that really was like, how do I make it super easy? I'll give Pokes some credit, they discovered putting this just through texting, through iMessage, it made it so much easier to interact even than going to a complex website and other things.

28:01And so we're at this great wave where, sure, it gets exciting in the tech community, but that's because we've already been tinkering for so long. The rest of the world hasn't been on that journey in the same way. Many of them are very heavy users of AI now, ChatGPT, other things. There's also a lot of resistance to AI because we're telling such bad narratives about how this could replace all jobs or kill everybody as opposed to enable the next incredible wave of innovation, which I very much believe in. Well, yeah.

28:29Eric Newcomer:One of the reasons I'm excited you're back is to me in Silicon Valley, you were very optimistic. And I feel like my journey as a reporter, it's like I was more skeptical in the beginning. The information where I really came up was more skeptical than most because we're in the age of gadget reporters and all that. And then at some point, while I'm at Bloomberg, Silicon Valley became, or the press, and the mood generally just became sort of oppressively negative. And then by the time I'm launching Newcomer in 2020, I'm like, oh, we should have more optimism. And now we're almost in this world where I'd say the public, honestly, is the most negative of all.

29:10Eric Newcomer:Yeah, I don't know. I guess to ask directly about the public piece of it, But like, why are people, do you believe that people are so negative about it? I mean, a tech response has been sort of, you know, their revealed preferences and then, you know, stated preferences. People use TikTok and Instagram all the time, which are algorithmically generated. They like these stories you're talking about, which AI is creating. Obviously, billions of people are using chatbots, but then Americans say they're very negative on AI. Like, what do you make about that in terms of building the next generation of consumer apps?

29:46Yeah, I mean, I think if there's any one thing that I learned from Apple, it's we have such a responsibility in our industry to be grounded in building technology that benefits humanity. And we have to think about it. And when we think about it from that perspective, we make choices and we focus and we tell our stories about how we try to deliver things that benefit humanity, whether that's helping our health. I mean, the Apple Watch is one of the most incredible health devices that's ever been made. And the number of people that it's prevented from various falls or heart issues or other things, it's extraordinary.

30:20But even just the number of people who rely on their iPhones to get them through their day. And so how do we think about technology from the standpoint of benefiting humanity? For some reason, with AI, a lot of the early tech bravado has seemed to be about how this, well, it's going to be so good, it's going to eliminate jobs. Well, when I go to anybody outside of the tech industry and I'm like, eliminate jobs, that is like red alert warning and scary, right? And it should be because that's not the way that we should think about what we're trying to do. It's empower people to do their jobs better.

30:52And if there are certain tasks that are easier to automate, then that helps you move to higher order thinking. And so I think moving from this world where we'll deliver it with proof, we'll deliver it with products that truly benefit people's lives. That's one part. The other part is a lot of the early things people figured out how to do with AI were cheat on homework and create sloppy things that didn't sound like they were human written and just spew them out. And again, if you're going to put something out, even if you use AI to help you write it, it should stand for you and you should stand behind every word.

31:25I certainly use AI to help me write things now and build decks and everything else, but I never put it out if I don't control every single word. And if I decide I like the words that I iterated back and forth with AI, fantastic. And if I don't, I change words here and there and change sentence phrasing and move paragraphs around. And we just got to a point where people got lazy. And AI should not make you lazy, like to cheat on your homework and to spew out something that you didn't take seriously enough, but it should empower you to do better. And I feel like more of that, how we think about it, how we build for it, how we pitch it to people.

32:00And then to your point, they'll use it however they want.

32:03Eric Newcomer:But we've got to start from there. I mean, part of the opportunity, I think, that we see with AI right now is these models are capable of so much that people haven't sort of really defined, built the data around, marketed. And so then people are just shouting AI. And it feels like, you know, sort of like, well, what do you want me to do? And it's like, well, it actually takes time to build the companies and figure out each individual use case, which is some of the exciting opportunity ahead of us, which is it's almost people yearn for like the storytelling of like, what am I supposed to do with this?

32:35Eric Newcomer:And it's too much for like OpenAI and Anthropic to deliver it all because they just sort of want to be, it's a Swiss Army nice. I don't know, figure out what you do with it in some ways. I joke sometimes that giving you a blank open edit field is an incredibly powerful thing, but in fact, sort of the worst thing in the world to use for onboarding and getting to know a product. And we have not built the tools that help the people who really get this bring other people along on the journey. The product experiences have gotten so simple that you just type in. Now, Google got there, and I'm going to give Google a ton of credit.

33:08Over time, people learned to search, and people learned how to search better, and people showed each other. but not every product needs to be Google or certainly not at the beginning when we're doing this. And even if you look at early Google, they used to have a lot more things on their website to teach people. And over time it got sparer and sparer as people got familiar with it. And I feel like we keep starting there with a lot of these AI products and ask anything because it can do anything. I don't know what to ask as opposed to really taking people on a journey.

33:37Eric Newcomer:I'd love some reflections from your time at Apple. On the one hand, it seems like Like Siri has gotten much better. I'm not like a deep user, but that is, I think, the word. I am an iPhone user. Yeah, getting into voice, but not fully switched over. And then on the other hand, I mean, I feel like, you know, Apple intelligence has sort of a marketing frame, sort of veered from some of what you said, which is I think Apple is traditionally good at what are we doing for you? And like, who cares what technology we're using for it? It's like, it's helpful for you. You should use it. I don't know. What did you learn from sort of your Apple experience?

34:20I mean, I had such an incredible time getting to work at Apple. Obviously, I was an Apple fanboy since I was a kid. I edited my high school newspaper on my Macintosh SE. I took a Mac LC2 to college with me. So getting to work at Apple was kind of like living a lifelong dream. and getting to go work on Apple and Siri and Apple intelligence figure how do we tell the story of Apple's place in this AI wave was was just such a privilege over the last couple years you know and getting to launch Siri AI and kind of this latest version of Apple intelligence which we announced at WWDC that happened to be my last week at Apple was kind of going out with that big announcement was it was really a dream come true and now I think it's available for everybody I'm one of people recommending update the operating system now it's fantastic to get what to get um iOS 27 or Mac OS 27 or iPad OS 27 or the other operating systems because I think really you have a you know incredible work that went into the operating system last year for stability and resilience but also a ton of work to really make Siri deliver on a lot of the promise that it always did and I think you know, Siri was never like a chat bot.

35:31Siri was always supposed to be an assistant that helps you get things done on your device. Set a calendar appointment, set a reminder, send a text to somebody. But like most of the early things that we were talking about earlier, like Messenger M and other early AI attempts, you had to basically know the commands to tell it. And if you knew the commands, it worked really well. But if you veered too far in your language, or were trying to put things together that didn't quite work or you didn't quite get the the statement right it couldn't deliver on that and if you ask it questions outside of his domain it couldn't deliver on that when chai gbt came out it obviously showed a whole new paradigm of being able to have the llm reason over everything but to reason over everything and then still figure out how to understand all the data on your device your personal context and take actions and the exact steps that it needs to do for you was a hard thing even then for the llms to put together And so I think the Apple journey was one of like, everybody was like, well, just can't you be ChatGPT and Siri all at once?

36:28And it was like, no, it actually took a lot more time and care and work to really build it and not just build it to a level that could work sometimes, because that was actually not that hard to do. And that was part of when I think some of the initial Siri stuff got announced. Things worked and there was a system that could work, but it wasn't at the quality level that Apple needed to be to bring this really mainstream. And so, you know, I think it was really impressive to watch a company not just say, okay, well, that didn't work. Shut it down. It was put your heads down, work harder, figure this out, actually deliver on that promise that you made.

37:02And now you truly have a Siri that understands information on your device. You can take a number of actions across the apps on your device. You know, I used to all the time when somebody texts me their email address, I just say, hold the Siri button. And I say, add that email address to their contact. And it just works. You know, when I.

37:19Eric Newcomer:How do you teach the user to have confidence again? I mean, I think this is going to be a really interesting journey and one that I am probably going to, or I'm sad to miss out on, but an incredibly strong team behind it. How do they go tell those stories again and bring people back to Siri? It's called Siri AI to kind of give you the sense that, hey, this is a little bit of a different version of Siri. It's Siri with Apple intelligence. It actually brings you all this personal context and actions and you can try it again and it's new. It teaches you a bunch of examples, but I'm sure there's going to be a huge learning curve and a huge trust curve for people to come back to.

37:57But if they do, I think they're going to have this great experience. And then I still think this is a platform. This is an ecosystem. Siri is not going to be everything to everybody. You'll use ChatGPT for other things, or you might use Muse or Instinct or Town for things in your, you know, Town and your work life and other personal things because you are still, you know, get to use lots of tools on your device, but you'll have this base level on your device that's going to be amazing.

38:23Eric Newcomer:Was there some impulse to AI as a verb? I mean, I never understood the text summary feature, or that was one that was very visible to me, where it's like you'd get a text and Apple AI would say, oh, it's like texts are short, or I don't know. I think one of the really cool things with the operating system is obviously Siri and the assistant is a very important part of it, but there's so many other things you do every day that AI can help. You know, some of that is sometimes you get 30 notifications and they stack up and actually having a summary that gives you a little bit of a lens and what's in there before you tap and expand can be helpful.

39:01You know, text, it has to be like 200 characters or more or something before they actually get summarized. And if someone sends you a diatribe, it's sometimes nice to get the quick glance and you can always, again, tap to expand it. And so I think what Apple did really well with Apple Intelligence was not just was focused on the assistant, which took longer than it needed to, but also focus on a supporting cast of other features around the operating system that are just better with AI, whether that's writing tools right in the moment to help you rewrite things, whether that's in the photos app, being able to, you know, edit your photos or clean them up, or, you know, expand them now, which just got launched, or this really cool feature around spatial reframing, where you can actually tilt the camera a little bit because it has a lot of spatial knowledge, it can fill in any gaps even after you took the photo.

39:45I've used it to like I left a sign sticking out of my daughter's head and was able to move it around so it didn't look as funny because otherwise a great picture of her. There's so many other things that you want, but it's not AI for the sake of AI, it's AI for the sake of features you always wanted to build that makes life easier. That think, now that there are these LLM tools, we can actually power them.

40:07Eric Newcomer:So you've left the device company in the world. You know, they're clearly open AIs working on devices. I think there are startups who are thinking about it. Are you optimistic? I guess if I say optimistic, you're going to say yes. No. Yes. I don't know. What device category? Do you think we will have new sort of AI devices or do you think existing devices will become imbued with AI powers? Do we yearn for a pen or earpods, whatever we're calling them, that are AI native or people have talked about sort of a portable disk? I don't know. Do you have a view on what types of devices lend themselves to AI?

40:49I think we are at the dawn of what's hopefully an incredible explosion of new AI capabilities that are going to make a lot of these devices a lot more useful. What is really powerful with AI? when it senses data and it can get more information in, and then when it can use that to help compute things and deliver them back to you in a useful way and take action for you. So a lot of what we're seeing are things that look like more sensors, whether there's always-on recording, even the new Apple Watch can do some of that. I know, I'm shocked by that,

41:15Eric Newcomer:that they're gonna let you sort of just record ambiently. You know, I think it's very much in a privacy safe, very moderated way, but I think that's an incredible feature. But there'll be other devices that will help us do that. There'll be certainly other things that can be on the lookout for us you know whether that's eventually coming into smart glasses or things in our ears or things we'll wear on our shirts you know i'm not sure which things will catch i'm less the the perfect creator but i think the people who are designing these things and building them that have visions like we can very much you know andres and horace help them amplify those and this is a moment for new hardware just as much as new software and you know again the inputs you know it's still work to like pull your phone out of your pocket to say something and have it do something you know when you're wearing your airpods and you have siri there you can just quickly ask questions or get things out that you don't have to necessarily pull something out of your pocket that's the dream of the glasses and you can capture things right if we wear glasses i'd be happy to have smart glasses it's like why not i mean i focus on buying the most like unbreakable and lightest glass as possible these i break glasses at the hinge a lot so these actually have a hinge that i can reset so like on one hand like but once it's as light and easy as my glasses i would love it if they were ai my daughter is 11 months she rips off my glasses all the time so that's that's the new uh problem you are we about to enter a world where everything is recorded we have a transcript of everything i'm in some way i'm not so opposed but there are a lot of problems with that certainly in a business culture like are you optimistic that we're just gonna like ambiently record everything so that all these companies have the data they want to give us, you know, all this value?

43:00You know, I think we are definitely in a world of building new norms. And I think, you know, on video calls, it's very easy for people to have both a recorder that's visible to other people and even one that is not. In the world, we still haven't figured out the norms yet of when this is there. If something were to have a camera that could take pictures, being able to trust what the person is actually doing, where they're using it and what our new norms are. Like this is not something that's going to like be solved overnight. But I do think a world where we have these additive things to help us remember things and keep track of things and hold ourselves accountable to what we said we were going to do and recall cool things we heard about is a really, really useful pattern.

43:43And the right to forget and the right to not remember and not record and have safe spaces is really valuable too but there's so much trust that goes all you know all of it i mean the moment you tell someone a secret the secret is no longer yours um but you have trust in that person and and so we're gonna have to figure out with whatever tools and with whatever people that same level of trust and safety continues to be there much much more

44:08Eric Newcomer:meetings with like no no devices because there's so much ambient uh recording going on no device meetings in the sound room or if any one of us is recording this share it with everybody and trust that it's still chatham house rules right or whatever set of rules you know and and you know i have chat groups with people that sure everything's recorded in the chat group but everybody trusts each other and there is always some risk that one person could burn the chat group and you just have deep trust and deep vetting you know and that's why is that you know on chat that different than in person. But these are all norms and trusts that have to get built out.

44:45And a lot of it's not software, it's humans.

44:48Eric Newcomer:I'm curious, the decision to go to Andreessen Horowitz and I mean, both to get, there's one decision, get back into venture. I'd like to hear about that. And then how did you pick the venture firm you did? You know, as we talked about, this moment last fall of seeing OpenClaw reminded me for the first time that you can build consumer startups again, where the models are a piece of the puzzle, but are not the actual value. And the value is really in the software that's created around it. Before that, while I was working at Apple, I really wanted to make sure that we got Siri back and shipped. I also had the belief that like to build a great startup right now, you actually need model innovation.

45:24And if you don't have researchers on staff, you aren't building a startup that is truly differentiated. But once I saw OpenClaw and then all the things we've seen built since, and even what we were building with Siri, you know, Apple did a great partnership with Google to use some of Google's frontier models. but it still is so much software built into Siri that is way more complex than the model itself reminded me you can build consumer startups again. So that got me like, you know, as I spend, you know, my fifties, you know, I'd really rather be helping companies and I really want to help the startup ecosystem again.

45:57And I believe it's possible. And then when I thought about that, you know, I had an incredible experience at Greylock. What a great set of partners, you know, they've decided they're not as focused right now on consumer and, you know, maybe they'll get back into that again. But as I talked to them, that was not their focus. And so I thought of all the firms that I've gotten to know over the years and seen, which one did I see really stand by founders always and was really built with a whole different way of supporting founders. And of all the bad things I've seen in venture, there's a lot of stuff that ends up becoming anti-founder that never gets talked about in the world.

46:31What's the firm that I felt really had never crossed those lines and that was andresen horowitz and so i i knew a couple of the folks there and was fortunate enough to kind of pitch them something that i wanted to to do and be part of the venture ecosystem and ended up like investing or there's another layer to this you know i'm doing a combination of supporting investments and helping companies and you know i'll be helping us do new deals but it's unclear i'm not necessarily going to lead a whole bunch of deals myself interesting

47:02Eric Newcomer:Like you want to sort of like give product advice to a startup? Yeah, really give product strategy, growth advice, and really be part of the team that's helping to support companies. Because that's really what Andreessen does is it's not just you get one person who you can call sometimes, but you get actually a team of support. And so I'm meeting a ton of founders, new founders. I like to say future founders and existing founders in the portfolio and helping them be great. And as I find new founders, I'll partner with them on getting, you know, new investments done with Andreessen Horowitz. and we'll get to go build great companies.

47:33Eric Newcomer:What is sort of the growth playbook at the moment? I mean, how do you, I mean, I care about this in my own business. It's like, oh, for a while, email was a core one. It's so hard to get customers and attention. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz has succeeded in sort of the launch. I feel like you guys deliver launch in a box. I think there's some pushback that, all right, that playbook has been done. And it only sustains if you keep coming up with like, what's the new one that's differentiated? And like, right, you've got the launch video. That's now a table stakes. What's the next thing? So there's always an arms race no matter like how good you get.

48:11Eric Newcomer:But I don't know if you were talking to, yeah, like a consumer, you know, seed startup that's like, I need to get it, you know, a thousand people on this app. Like, is there a platform you're bullish on or what sort of, yeah, what's your advice? It's a great question. And it's one of the things that it's not yet clear that there's some new growth distribution vector in AI. There really are the channels we all use to communicate and spend attention on. But I always tell people the first most important thing is have a great product. Have a product that people love, use, come back to, find a place in their life and use regularly.

48:45Now, for somebody like you who's doing a newsletter and a set of events, it's have a community that is like, I want to read what Eric is going to say next. every time I read what Eric has to say, it's smart. It enriches my life so that I want to keep coming back for a product that you use. It has to have that same experience. I am glad I used the product for this purpose and I want to keep doing it. I talk a lot about what is the action someone's doing in your product? What is the purpose of why they're coming to your product? What is the cycle at which you expect them to use your product? You need to deeply understand that.

49:13Without that, growth doesn't matter at all. Once you have that, then it's finding ways to tell your story. And there's different channels that depend on the product and who you're trying to reach. If you're trying to reach people in the tech community and the tinkerers and everything else, Twitter is an amazing platform to have conversation. And it's very obvious that as you have good conversations there, they can spread and they can grow. If you're trying to target teens, you need to be using the platforms that they're on and speak to them in a way that is meaningful to them, whether that's, you know, more on Instagram or on TikTok.

49:44And we've seen incredible growth that comes from engaging with creators who tell stories themselves about the products that they use and the creators are getting really really savvy now sometimes they are paid but even then they only advocate for things that they believe in and you know some of the best strategies i've heard are you know if you want to go talk about something that's health and fitness don't necessarily go to the health and fitness gurus go to the people who are telling stories about their daily lives the moms the you know young girls or whatever and introduce the health product to them and then they'll talk about how it enhances their life.

50:17And so now the people who follow them and are interested in them hear their regular stories of their day and the new products they're using too, as opposed to the health and fitness guru that just keeps pitching another health and fitness product every single week. And so there are so many different ways to take your story and the product and find ways to get it in the right hands of your users. But you fundamentally have to know what the, it has to deliver on that or the loop won't work at all. Josh Allman, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Eric, thanks so much for having me.

50:47Eric Newcomer:That's our episode. This is the Newcomer Podcast. Thanks for listening. Please like, comment, subscribe. Go find us on our sub stack at newcomer.co. If you're hungry for more podcasting, I also have a talk show called The Cerebral Valley Show. We love your comments. Thanks for all your support. And see you next week.