Mamdani Election, Shell in Talks to Acquire Rival BP | David Senra, Yancey Strickler, Joe Weisenthal, Alex Atallah, Michael Moriarty, Nikunj Kothari, Alex Kehr

28:02A Harvard fellow and another activist allegedly wanted to buy AK-47s stinger missiles and grenades to topple South Sudan's government. What they lacked was enough cash. Now Jane Street co-founder Robert Granary concedes he put up the money, saying he was duped into funding the alleged coup plot. The role played by the wealthy recluse behind a Wall Street trading powerhouse emerges from the U.S. prosecution of Peter Ajak, the Harvard fellow who was accused last year of scheming to install himself atop the East African nation. What a, what, yeah, I mean, yeah, it does seem like something out of a, out of a movie.

28:40Granieri is a longtime supporter of human, human, human rights causes, his lawyer said in a statement. In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist defrauded Rob and lied about his intentions. The case came to light in March of 2024 when federal prosecutors in Arizona charged Ajak and Abraham Keech with with conspiring to illegally export arms to their home country. Both have pleaded not guilty. While prosecutors haven't said where the defendants obtained several million dollars for an attempt to buy military-grade weaponry, Ajax lawyers pointed to Granary in a recent filing, saying the 53-year-old financier was vital to the plan.

29:18Without the significant financing that Mr. Granary couldn't agree to provide, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible. And somehow George Clooney's involved? We're gonna get to that in a second. They wrote in the document late May. Did he provide the lubricant, the tequila? I don't, yeah, I don't know. Here he is. He's got to be pretty. Yeah, yeah, we'll get to it. I mean, this is a fascinating story. So, the lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two black men, even though support also came from Grunarian Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and prominent Russian dissident.

29:54The U.S. hasn't accused either of them of wrongdoing. Well, yeah, I mean that makes sense because like somebody comes to you and they ask you to raise I'm starting a company you rewire them a million dollars to build that and then they go off and do something completely different with the money Like you're definitely a victim in that scenario But I guess the question is like did they know more and that's what this article is digging into but it feels a little I don't know. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence here. Let's let's continue to dig in So Kasparov came to know Ajak when the chess master was the chair of the human rights foundation He later connected Ajak with Granary, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified.

30:30My record and my values are clear and they remain unchanged, Kasparov said in a statement sent by a spokesperson. I have spent much of my life standing up for civil rights and promoting democracy around the world. To industry outsiders, Jane Street is probably best known as the former employer of Sangban and Fried. That's not how people know Jane Street. They know them as the maintainer of OCaml. Of course, the programming language. Of course. And also a high-frequency trading firm. You should know about Jane Street. But yes, SBF did intern there. Also sponsor of Dwarakash. Patel's podcast. That's right.

31:02There's so many different reasons to know Jane Street besides SBF. That's ridiculous. But I guess SBF is the most headline-grabbing, so Bloomberg needs to write it that way. But across Wall Street, the market-making firm is a source of fascination known for turning mathematicians into traders who mint profits. It generated$20 billion in net trading revenue last year, helping it leap past the likes of Bank of America and Citigroup. Wow, they're making more money than B of A. That is crazy. Magged. Despite Jane Street's ascent in the industry, Granary has kept a low profile. He's got to go on the DoorCash podcast.

31:43You know they're connected. Founders podcast. The new show. Yeah, the new show would be great for that. I mean, there's a bunch of shows that invest like the best he'd be great on. Hopefully, he can come out and tell the full story here. He might have to do a press tour. He should. I mean, he should just to talk about OCaml and I was a trader. He's like, the coup was a small bet in a large portfolio, and I was misled. I don't think there's any evidence of that. It's alleged, alleged, alleged. Alleged, of course. Anyway. No, I think it's totally believable that he would meet some charismatic young people that have a record of caring about human rights abuse and make some type of donation to them for their cause.

32:24And then they could turn around and use those funds for, you know, something that he had no awareness of. So, yeah, I mean, it's frustrating. It makes sense that people that would try to overthrow a government would want to drag down, you know, anybody that they could and try to drag them into the mud and start wrestling. Yeah. I mean, this happens literally all the time, because once the money is wired into a nonprofit, it's very hard to track like, OK, did you hand out the mosquito nets or did you buy a yacht? Like, okay, now I need a, now I, you know, you wire, part of what makes Silicon Valley so great is like, you have a handshake deal, you sign a safe, and there's kind of an expectation that I don't need to check up and make sure that you're not defrauding me.

33:09It's pretty rare that true fraud happens because Silicon Valley is built on trust. But when you're gallivanting around the world, even if you are trying to invest in humanitarian efforts all over the place, much harder to keep tabs on every single deal you've done or every single donation you've made. It's very hard. Yeah. And if it was effectively a donation, I don't know the exact mechanic, then he's way less likely to pay attention to it because he thinks he's donating to a good cause. Yeah, totally, totally. And he's not trying to generate a return. He might be more inclined to be like, hey, investor update, what's going on?

33:47Yeah, if you're a seed investor in FTX, and the company grows and grows and grows, and then you're starting to see that, wait, how is Alamedia linked exactly? Like, this is material, this is$500 million to me now. It's not just a flyer anymore. You wake up four years later. You're surrounded by journalists. What's your position? Well, Granieri is certainly worried about being surrounded by journalists. He's kept a low profile. He's one of the firm's four founders. I didn't know this. He's the only one still there. He's not featured on the company's website in public photos of him. We've got to figure out what the other three founders are doing.

34:22Because if they're building a company that's generating more money. Imagine they just made no money and they're just like PMs at Big Tech or something. Yeah, just making like a million of money. They just didn't best out. They're just like, yeah, we had a cliff and I didn't hit it. And I bailed. Somehow I don't think that's what's going on. The firm's success has allowed Granary to pour money into other ventures and causes. He helped build the Scarlet Pearl, a casino resort on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. What a funny place to put your money. I mean, it's probably a good business. It's voted best casino resort.

34:55We got to go to the Jane Street Casino. Get in there. Do some high frequency slots. Let's do it. He was a major financial backer for Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and has donated to the Equal Justice Initiative and the Institute for Justice. He also channeled money into causes Kasparov backed around the globe, so he's buddies with Garry Kasparov. South Sudan is slightly larger than France, became the world's youngest country after seceding from Sudan in 2011 following more than 20 years of civil war. And there's a photo of George Clooney here. The bloody regional conflict. George, it's like, how did I get dragged into that?

35:33We're getting to George Clooney. We're going to explain how George Clooney is related. So, So the bloody regional conflict displaced millions of people, drew attention from human rights activists, and gained mainstream awareness after actor George Clooney championed intervention in the early 2000s. Despite emerging as an independent nation, stability still eludes its people. Big lesson in there for regime change. This stuff is hard. Clearly, in this scenario, there was enough momentum to create an entirely new country, and they were still actually setting up a robust democracy. It was difficult.

36:09They didn't get there. So Ajak aimed to change that. After escaping life as a child soldier in Sudan in the 1990s, he resettled in the United States as one of the lost boys. He went to study at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government before returning to Sudan as a World Bank economist. Pretty sick. After South Sudan's independence, Ajak became a prominent opposition activist and political prisoner there, later seeking asylum in the United States. One sticking point in the court case is how much, if anything, the U.S. authorities knew about AJAC and Keech's alleged plan to topple South Sudan's government.

36:43Attorneys for both men have signaled in court that they plan to pursue a public authority defense, essentially claiming that U.S. officials had supported their plan. Prosecutors said AJAC was told by the State Department in October of 2023 that it wouldn't fund plans for non-democratic regime change. AJAC and Keech are accused of forging ahead regardless. For that, they needed financial backing. The financing took shape early last year amid a flurry of meetings. Some were at the law firm of Paul Hastings, where Ajax's former pro bono attorney, Renata Paras, worked, according to a May filing. Another attendee was public relations specialist, Michael Holtzman, who previously advised the State Department.

37:22Is Michael the, is he like the Lulu of overthrowing governments? Of the deep state, of the State Department. Something like that. Maybe. Based on the government's indictment of Peter, it would seem he lied to me and others about his intentions from the outset, Holtzman said in a statement. Paris didn't respond to a quest for comment. The search for cash culminated in a midtown Manhattan condominium building that February, according to prosecutors. That's where Granary first met Ajak. The next day, charging documents allege, Ajak sent an encrypted message to an undercover agent writing, we are getting the funding.

37:59The financier later transferred$7 million in two stages, according to people with knowledge of the payments. Within a few weeks of the condo meeting, prosecutors say Ajak and Keech inspected a cache of weaponry inside a Phoenix warehouse. They were soon arrested. That is so gnarly, and I'm disappointed that the story is ending here. I know, I know. I was like, but certainly there's six more pages of this story. This This is fascinating. Cliffhanger. Anyway, let's take a break to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

38:45Anyway, there is an M &A bombshell hitting the timeline that, no pun intended, Shell is in early talks to acquire rival British Petroleum, BP, but Shell denies the Wall Street Journal's report that it's in talks to acquire BP. So we have a little bit of an update to the story. And M &A just in the last 20 months, Morning Brew's breaking it down here, Shell BP is clocked at maybe 80 billion, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a$60 billion M &A deal. Chevron and Hess, deal's still pending, but it's at 53 billion. D-back and Endeavor, don't even know those companies, but$26 billion deal there.

39:30ConocoPhill and Marathon at$17 billion, and Occidental and Crown Rock at$12 billion. So if you think the AI M &A deals are hot, you got to go over to big oil. Big oil, oil and gas. Big tech, big oil, big pharma. These are the industries where the big dollars get thrown around. They don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the Decacorn exchanging business. True. Pretty interesting. So the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP. BP jumped 7 % and Shell dropped 2.6%. I want to know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5 % on the day. How is BP doing over the week?

40:17or the month. This is the week? Okay. Yeah, they've both kind of retraced since Shell said, nah, we're not talking at all. So by market cap, Shell's around 207 billion, BP's around 87 billion. Those are big companies. Big, big companies. Anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here. But first, if you're planning a complex post-merger integration, you got to get on a linear. John, your commitment to just using linear for everything is incredible. No, but of course, if you're building modern software, if you need to streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps, you've got to get on linear.

41:00Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. And plus, they've got linear for agents. But, you know, oil and gas companies do need to build software. If you're worried about getting paper clipped, they should be on linear. If you're worried about getting paper clipped, get your agents on linear. They will thank you for it. Yeah. So a deal for BP, which has a market value of roughly 80 billion, would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies. Super major is a better term than MAG7, in my opinion. We need that for the tech companies, the super majors. Super major.

41:32Oh, you're in the major leagues? I'm in the super majors. So good. So talks between company representatives are active, according to people who are familiar with the matter leak into the Wall Street Journal, and BP is considering the approach carefully. Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors, such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron. It would be a landmark combination of two so-called super major oil companies, a group of multinational behemoths that dominate the production of the world's most important energy sources. Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned, and a tie-up is far from certain, but the discussions are moving slowly.

42:13BP is currently valued around 80 billion, taking into account a premium. A deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the 83 billion dollar mega merger that created Exxon Mobil at the turn of the century. It would also be easily the biggest M &A deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by President Trump's antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the... Do you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon spill? I do. Yeah, I remember tracking it very closely in the Thunderhorse Tract. Were you monitoring the situation? I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the sell-side banks.

42:53And I understood it to the level of knowing that the tract that they were drilling into was called the Thunderhorse Tract, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into. So crazy. So BP's total costs associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup fines and settlements, reached approximately$65 billion. So nearing their total enterprise value at the moment. Also, great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie, Deepwater Horizon. Is it a documentary? No, it is a nonfiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the oil rig.

43:35and I believe Mark Wahlberg's in it. I like movies like that. It's awesome. It's a really, really great movie. I highly recommend it. A Shell spokesperson said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification. Wow, nice. Yeah, fantastic. Basically saying like, hey, no comment, but also we're shilling for Shell over here. We're shilling for shell. A TBPN spokesman said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in TBPN through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification, John.

44:16We should never, you should never decline to comment. You should always just do an ad read. Leave a comment like that. Just do an ad read. Bake it into the LLM. Switch your business to ramp.com. Do you have any comments on your intern allegedly contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business. As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Shell comes into the talks operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years.

44:55Shell, which like BP is based in the United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than$200 billion. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill-fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. It's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters. And so it seems like actually their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because those M &A sell-side research reports that I was reading during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the long-term impact of that crisis on the stock immediately.

45:39So it was priced into the stock very quickly and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off. But then they were kind of set up to kind of rebuild. And there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years. And so more recently, Elliott Management, which owns more than 5 % of BP shares, has pushed for changes at the energy company. It's interesting though, BP had been performing, had basically been down only since the financial crisis, and then Deepwater Horizon hit, and it was just down even. When asked publicly, Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big deal making would be high.

46:24Shell in May announced a multi-billion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases. Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and the U.S., the Wall Street Journal previously reported. For Shell, acquiring BP would take years of integration, complicated by culture clashes and possibly the sale of overlapping assets, but a deal could give Shell's global trading business greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas like liquefied natural gas. Analysts and investors also see a good matchup in the company's Gulf of Mexico operations, which the U.S.

46:57now calls the Gulf of America. That's right. All of the oil companies had to change all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg News reported this earlier. I think it's sticking, yeah, until the next election and there'll be a new EO and it'll go back to something else. Well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it something other than the Gulf of America. Well, there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing. I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund, and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going.

47:43And media is obviously evolving very quickly, and I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things. but what I came to was maybe this idea that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that it is not available to everyone. They are in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it. And so that kind of puts it in the same league as ultra high net worth wealth management products or even high horology Rolexes that are in demand. People, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them at LAX, the clocks, or Rolexes. Or if you go to an F1 match, you'll see a lot of advertisements.

48:27Yeah, Patek will put an ad for the Cubitus in an airport. Every issue of The Economist comes with an ad for basically a Holy Trinity watch on the back, whether it's Vacheron or AP or Patek. But you can't just go and buy those. And so it's very odd that they're doing this like luxury brand building without a product that you can just immediately go buy. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my thought was that maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into. Well, yeah. Let's talk about the current strategy, right? Yes. The current strategy is post on X.

49:05Yes. Go on podcasts. Yes. You can start your own podcast. Yes. Many people have done that. Yes. The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted by making a wide variety of investments. And that has to inform their opinion on different markets. And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard. Because you can't go on there and say XYZ company is clearly dominating. You know, if you look at the data and you look at, you know, what customers are saying, when if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back.

49:44And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great media products because of that conflict. Now, you can still get around this, right? And there's different ways and there's different approaches. You can do an interview show, which allows you to, but that's just like one type of content. And the problem with that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guest. person. And so it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe? Yeah. Yeah. So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing.

50:16You can't get away from it. It's all marketing all the way down. Um, now the sort of subcategories I think that are interesting. I've always said that, uh, Sam lesson, right. He's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates, he has a unique media product and the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord and some people it resonates with them other people want to dunk but it is an effective format in order to provide commentary and it's very efficient right he doesn't need a big marketing team to actually pull that off so i think it's super key to find a specific format but then the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves you could do something like what you're talking about.

50:59Yeah. When I think of like the four really great or like a few really great VC marketing examples, I think of Zero to One by Peter Thiel. He's never tweeted, but he's tweeted once and it was a link to his book. And that book was such a good outcome that it sold in airport bookshops, right? And he just dropped an amazing book and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of building his brand. Naval has a similar story where his Twitter posts, the how to get rich without getting lucky, went so viral. And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book, but when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near-term thesis, or they're not news products.

51:50They're reflections on how the world works. Reflections on timeless principles. right? Then I think about Paul Graham's blog. It's not on a regular cadence. You know, it's not a weekly sub stack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on like, how did Steve Jobs run his company? And maybe he'll draw, maybe he'll like pump his bags a little bit by like talking about Airbnb, but he's talking about like what Airbnb did in like 2009 or something. And it's like, it's completely irrelevant and it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm getting a buy rating on the stock right now. It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct.

52:26Exactly. Some of the early writing, I feel like an even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true. Yeah, 100%. And he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release. He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago, and it's reflective. And I think that that works really Marc Andreessen similarly, the ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op-ed is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be formulated from a team necessarily.

53:08So there's this, I feel like we're going to see more of this barbell strategy where the future might be like when the GP has a really insightful piece of commentary, they take it to a Wall Street Journal op-ed or a book or a thread or a screenshot essay or you're just seeing the brand. And you're seeing the brand on the back of, and I was thinking like what is the equivalent of like the Patek Philippe ad that appears on the back of the Economist every week? I was thinking venture capitalists should go and buy the back of like the Stanford Review or like the Waterloo, you know, campus newspaper.

53:47Like that should have an ad for a venture capital firm. Or the Dick Thompson newsletter. Yeah, exactly. But I think aligning with these iconic properties. Yeah, people who are doing their life's work. Getting a full page ad in the journal. But most importantly, like when Patek Philippe sponsors The Economist, they are not trying to shift The Economist's coverage towards like being more bullish on Swiss watches. They're just like, we don't even know what you're going to put in this issue. We're just going to be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of the brand. So, John, a full-page color ad in the journal costs around$248 ,000.

54:24Yes. Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, like truly great producer for their own show. Yeah. And so is it going to be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day? Yeah. Or have your own podcast. Yeah, and there are more narrow properties too. The journal is extremely broad in all of business, but there really are more narrow products that would work. But every time they've gotten there, it's been misaligned around what the actual coverage is. But I don't know. Maybe we'll see an F1 team. Maybe we'll see JetSuiteX, the terminal, like sponsored by a VC firm.

55:12That would make a lot of sense. Like you get off in Silicon Valley at the JetSuiteX terminal and boom, you're presented with an ad for a VC firm. I don't know. We'll see. We'll keep covering it. Something there. Well, we have David Senra coming into the studio. We're going to ask him about VC marketing. We're going to ask him about the New York election. We're going to ask him about all the things that you've been just waiting to get Senra's opinion on because he cares so much about current events. that's all he cares about it's venture capital and current events yep that's his job uh what's going on can you hear me yeah yeah this is the great the great malibu blackout of 2025 so i went to our mutual friends and past esteemed past tpvn guest uh rob moore's house he's lucky enough to let me post up here on my laptop and talk to you guys so we gotta thank rob for this neighbor your neighbor i was wondering if you if you were renting a house how you got so many books uh lined up already but it makes could you imagine no i told him we were looking for places to to set up just now i was like dude you can't beat this background like this library that has this incredible yeah the only thing i the only thing i like is when people um they organize their bookshelves by color that drives me fucking insane so that's the only thing whoever designed this room did a great job that you don't actually read is just organize it by pretty colors it bothers me they should organize it by episode number like everybody else does like I do in my house.

56:35But if you're not making a podcast, what is the logical better way to order? Is it alphabetical? Is it by year? No, no, no. No, I used to do it by an order that I read it. And so you kind of see your interests evolve over time. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And then you have a separate intake shelf for things that you haven't read? Yeah, I mean, the bottom half of all my bookshelves is the one that I record at my home, like the studio they use it's all unread books so it's like an order by episode number then the bottom like i don't know two uh one third is just unread books and then anything out on any bookshelves in the living rooms it's all all unread books i have like 600 now i have to stop buying them yeah when are you gonna start are you gonna start like printing and binding the materials that you put together for the for the shows the episodes that you do that aren't based on a single book yeah i already do that so i used to put them in binders and now i actually send them to a print shop and they actually do like a spiral binding i actually have something i'll give you a preview i don't think i've talked about this publicly um i went to when i went to charlie munger's house i knew i was like a biography amateur because he he made his own biographies and so he i asked him like charlie can i go through your bookshelf and there's two realizations of why like i no matter how long i do this i'll never be as good as he was is he doesn't take notes so like he would have like a random like word in like every you know 100 pages where i have to like run through all this stuff.

57:59But at the very bottom, because he told me that he thought that the member, you always want to have me to come on here and have this debate about who's the greatest entrepreneur of all time. The goat debate. Charlie said that it's obviously Rockefeller and that Standard Oil is the best company ever created. And there was this interview that Rockefeller did at the end of his life. And the transcript of it is like 1700 pages long. And Charlie printed it out and put it into binders. And so I actually a friend of mine who does this podcast called the Rainmaker Pod, he found the 1700 page transcript for me and then so if you go to my house right now it's going to take me fucking months to do this but i have a 1700 page essentially 1700 pages of rockefeller's own words so that's probably gonna be the longest episode of founders i'll ever do it's probably you know it's probably like five hours long or something so yeah i already do make them why wouldn't you just break it up into multiple episodes

58:52maybe i should no i think i i don't think i think i'd break it up into multiple recordings because sitting down if if you see like if i do an hour-long episode right that you know usually i'll talk for like two or two and a half hours like i kind of do like you ever heard of rick rubin's idea of like the ruthless edit yeah i thought it was like really interesting he's got this highlight when he went on lex friedman's podcast i thought it was really good where he's working with an artist and he's like hey let's say you make 30 songs let's just assume we can only put five. They only put five on the album.

59:20What are the five best ones? And so then they put the five on that. And I'm like, OK, if we're going to add to these five, I mean, number six has to be really good. And so now you have 25 to pick through them. What's the next one that's just as good? And I think going through and ruthlessly editing everything is really important, especially if you want a high value audience, because they just don't have a bunch of time to just turn through shit. It's just like your job. It's like what you're doing for them. Yeah, there's something interesting there about like, I don't have all the numbers, but I feel like some recording artists, you'll hear stats like there were 12 songs on the album and they recorded 200 songs before they cut them down.

59:56So this is actually the episode I want to talk to you guys about, which is Michael Ferreira or Michele Ferreira, but I'm going to use the English translation. I mentioned that in the episode that being prolific is highly coordinated with greatness. Just because you're prolific doesn't mean you're great but if you're great at what you do you're undoubtedly prolific and so um i'm reading bruce freinstein's uh autobiography right now and there's a lot of crazy stuff in there other than like the thing is like this thick and he wrote it out by hand multiple times he wanted to make sure every sentence was like should be in the book and so he's like the only way to force him to do that is to rewriting like what kind of psycho does that the psycho that's probably you know recorded thousands of songs and only published maybe less than 10 percent uh i just read prince's autobiography which is the strangest autobiography ever read i can't even do an episode on it because i don't understand it but when he died he had so many uh unreleased songs in his fault that he could release a new album every year for the next century wow so you see this over and over again with like michael ferrero who essentially like i'll just give you like the high level thing uh because most people have never heard of him and there's no biographies in english of him so my friend cameron priest who's another psycho that reads all these other biographies he translated from a time for me and uh ferrero uh owned 100 of his company uh he the company does 20 billion dollars a year in revenue no outside shareholders um he worked on it from the age of 19 until he died at 89 so he has got 70 years of experience in building his company um he vertically integrated the entire thing he went to like absurd lengths he wound up monopolizing like hazelnut production in the world.

1:01:36So one out of every three hazelnuts went to his company, Ferrero. And then he also became the largest, not only producer of hazelnuts, but he also sold them to other companies. Super underrated nut, by the way. It is. It's a great one. Under discussed. This is the guy that invented Nutella, Tic Tacs, Ferrero Rocher, the Kinder brand of chocolate. He's like the real life Willy Wonka. He would commute to work by helicopter because he lived in Monaco. right this is something it sounds like Geordi would do Geordi came to my house yesterday and I'm watching up the hill and I see this the the TPVN all black Maybach so Michael for I was pulling into your palatial house so the funny thing is this guy lived in Monaco right and and he actually moved because he grew up from rural Italy.

1:02:30He grew up poor, which is really fascinating, but there was all these kidnapping attempts in Italy. So he's worried about, you know, being, he was the richest person in Italy for a very long time. One of the richest people in the world. The joke is like, I titled the episode like, oh, Michael Ferraro and his$40 billion, you know, chocolate empire. Cause if you Google him, they're like, oh, Ferraro is worth 40 billion. No, it's worth multiples of that. The guy's doing, like it's insane what that company would sell for. And his son still owns all of it. And so anyways, this guy would commute from, he was so obsessed with quality.

1:02:59he would commute from monaco by helicopter and go to every single one of his factories where the product was produced and insist on tasting the the like what they're producing that day himself because he says like you have to control the quality yourself he was completely obsessed but the reason i bring up the prolific part is because in his lifetime he ran tens of thousands of different experiments on different uh like mixtures of the stuff that he's making and in one case like they said hey he'd get in the tasting room which he considered a secret laboratory at like eight in the morning he'd stay till dusk they would cover like they'd run experiments all day on one single uh one of their products and they'd run like 70 to you know over 100 experiments on on one single product each day so this like idea of being prolific you see it over and over again like how many how many three-point uh uh shots of steph curry put up in practice?

1:03:52How many songs has Bruce Springsteen written? How many different iterations did Steve Jobs do on his products for his lifetime? It's just incalculable. Yeah, the prolific thing is fascinating. I feel like there's a massive underrated hack in just doing something daily, if you can work it into your lifestyle. I'll give you two funny examples. Are you familiar with the NFT artist. So he made a 3D rendering every day for the first thousand days. It was like, it was multiple years. It was almost like a decade of work. And then, and then he was, he was at a point where his career was, was taking off.

1:04:30He had been mentioned on Joe Rogan, his Instagram was growing. He was getting a consulting gigs to do motion design and rendering consultancy for like the Super Bowl. So he was like making good money as a commercial artist. But then when his work went to auction during the NFT boom, he made$70 million like that. Yeah. And it was just all of that. I think it was 69 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Classic. But he sold some other stuff. So I think he walked away with like 70 million. He famously like swapped it into USD immediately because he was like, I don't think he was like a crazy crypto person, but he just realized that like, I've been building for this forever.

1:05:10This is the time to value capture. And so I'm going to do it. The other funny one is Jake Paul. Jake Paul has that rap song. It's every day, bro, often lampooned online. But it really does, if you flip it around to instead of asking the question of like, do you like Jake Paul's work personally as an artist to just why is jake paul successful why is he the name that we know uh it's very clear that he was vlogging every single day for years and got extremely extremely good at it and and it built up this muscle where he can produce something and it just got better and better and better and better and better until he was able to just dominate the internet there's a quote there's a clip going around about michael phelps about this where he you know on his run when he became the most dominant swimmer of all time he's just like if you any day that i took off i was put me behind two days and so there's this idea of just and he went through like his schedule and he's i forgot he had the numbers like you know a couple thousand workouts yeah for every like to get ready for olympics like he counted counted how many workouts that he did yeah there's actually um the idea of being prolific have you guys had jackson doll on the show yet not yet we got no we've invited him a couple times but it we're working on it our people are talking to his people okay perfect because he actually has a tweet about this that I think is really important.

1:06:31And I think Jackson's doing an excellent job. He has one of the best new podcasts, Dialectic. And I've been talking to him a lot about his podcast as much as possible. I just saw him in New York last week. But he talked about that. I'm just going to read this tweet. He says, when you never linger anywhere on anything, you don't get the chance to sink into the feeling of it, to trace the grooves, to notice what little details you love can be improved. And so Jackson from his posts and his podcast, obviously, he's a very soulful dude. But I think one of the things I took away from Ferrero and any really like what I'm trying to do with the podcast is like, hey, they don't write biographies about people's lives that do something for like a year or two or five years.

1:07:12it's like in almost any case at the very minimum you know it's two three four decades of their lives that they dedicated something and in ferro's case it's like seven decades so when he was able to improve i mean when i talk about vertical integration it's like he took it to another extreme where it's like i'm going to monopolize all the uh raw materials that my product needs but then like he wouldn't he also had to be one of the first people to mass produce chocolate and so he invented his own machines and so it starts out like you don't do that unless you're spending so much of your life thinking about what you're doing and focus this extreme level of focus and he applied it to marketing to distribution logistics to the machines that he built and he talked about having a love affair he thought like the robots he built had soul the way he talked about it's really funny because he comes of age and after world war ii right so he's in his early 20s in post-World War II Italy, where there's not even electricity.

1:08:09It's like hard. There was two machines that the company had that could had enough power to run on electricity at the beginning. Everything else had to be done by hand. And then when he started talking about this love affair that he has with these robots that make this product that he deeply loves and cares about, I'm like, oh, there's another obsessive guy that came of age after World War II, it was almost the same age, that was in italy and it built one of the best brands in the world and worked until he died until he died it's enzo ferrari literally yeah when enzo built his first car it talks about in his biography it's like he couldn't even find electricity and master trying to build the best race car and you don't don't even access to electricity wow it's just incredible it's incredible and then if there's a great post uh picture on twitter that's that i think i've retreated one time where it's like enzo ferrari's house that he builds right here and then around his house is the test track what work-life balance does this guy have he's just like he's in his kitchen my my favorite thing you know uh people people hit 30 and they're like oh is it too late for me it's like enzo didn't start ferrari until he was 45 that's well he i don't know if he was he was working he was working in in racing yeah the brand didn't start well he the funny part about that is he didn't actually give a about the cars other than like he cared that they went fast and they won races but he realized i just have to sell them to rich americans so i can fund the racing and so like there's we talked about this a few weeks ago when i was on here he has that great quote he's just like i don't care if the door gap is there i just care that when the driver hits the gas he shits his pants because he just wanted to go fast yeah i want to dig into the idea of focus more uh i was I was texting with someone earlier today and they were, they were asking, I was like, they were like, you have so many opportunities.

1:09:59You can start companies, you can raise funds. Like, why are you just focused on media? And I was like, well, really like probably David Senra. Like I've studied all the history's greatest entrepreneurs and just kind of realized that they all focus. David Senra studied history. Yeah. So we can study David Senra. Exactly. Exactly. But, but really, but I felt like I was saying something so stupid and because I was just like, well, it's the pattern of success everywhere is that there's focus. And it's like, it should be mind-blowing. And yet we're talking about people all day long who love your podcast, but don't actually go in focus and they don't actually do it.

1:10:36And so I'm interested in the parameters of focus because Michael Ferraro did branch out into Nutella and Kinder and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs, but it's all within the same empire. and you've seen that with Steve Job. And so there are areas where you can have multiple products within the same organization, the same focus, but your impact or the output is slightly different. And I think that people struggle with that because the people will often justify, well, like having a fund and you gain a startup and actually like three startups is all part of my focus on my massive empire. And it's like, are you really focusing is always the question.

1:11:22I mean, I think the person that's built the most impressive company in our lifetime is Jeff Bezos. You know, like obviously I love SpaceX and I have Starlink in my house and all that other stuff. It's just like if you look at like what he started out at, the just financial performance of it, like all the complex logistics behind it and all the different businesses. And so like I just if you're going to do that, I just think you just just follow Bezos as the lead. Literally reread his shareholder letters, which I'm going to do every year. I think I've done four episodes on the now. I think, you know, I think the greatest description of that was just like reading Bezos to share whole letters is like the person like getting a like a history lesson from the person that mastered a high growth Internet startup before the playbooks were written.

1:12:03You know, he kind of like just tells you what he's going to do and then just goes and does it. But for like Ferraro, in his case, it's like it depends on your level of ambition. And I don't mean this isn't like a derogatory way at all. Like, I'm just happy, like building like my little podcast that I'm completely obsessed with. Now, my business can scale. There's like millions and millions of people listen to it. So like my impact can grow, assuming I'm good at it and other people tell. But like there's another life where I think Ferraro would be like a Giro, where he's just like, no, I'm just going to Giro Dreams of Sushi.

1:12:29I'm going to have a 10 seat sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway. And I'm going to be the best in the world. but ferrero had different ambitions where like he grew up poor he never forgot what it was like to be impoverished and his and everybody around him was like hey you're dominating italy like why don't you just stay there and he's like no i'm going to build a global brand if we don't he said this multiple times he's like if we don't expand outside of italy then we have failed and he wanted to be one of the not only the best chocolate company but he wanted to be one of the biggest And when he died, the day before he died, he actually died on Valentine's Day, which is, you know, somewhat like ironic.

1:13:08Maybe it's the wrong word, but he wound up being the third largest confectionery business in the world the day before he died. And so, yeah, I think it just really depends on like what you do. Now, there's also this really interesting thing where like people do a bunch of small things and are like they'll do like a bunch of small startups. It just depends on who you are as a person, though. like i don't even have an opinion on them other than like i am the kind of person that just wants to focus on one thing work on a 70s a week think about when i wake up think about when i go to bed i can't i'm just not interested in working on multiple things but i think so when people hear my lifestyle and how i try to focus like i've heard people have literally told me they're like they find it disgusting like that lifestyle like they literally that's the word they use like this is disgusting i like the world's a big place i have other interests and i'm like that's fine but I'm trying to like be narrowly focused and the best in the world at what I do.

1:14:01And so I think if you got distracted and you were, you had a fund and you were spending all this time with LPs, you wouldn't have spent yesterday, part of yesterday, just reading, which is allows you to just every day reading. Like before I met with Rob just now, like, you know, we picked this time for a certain reason because every morning, if you call me in the morning, you know what I'm doing? First of all, it's going right to fucking voicemail because my phone's on D and D and I'm reading. My job is very simple. It's just like, wake up every day, wake up, work out, then read one of the biography of history's case numbers for three to four hours.

1:14:34Then you can have lunch and then reread past highlights in the afternoon and then do it again over and over again, seven days a week. It's just like, you couldn't get more simple than that. Yeah. There's also the element of like, you probably shouldn't add a second thing or a second project until you've really nailed the first and you're creating something that's great and then you kind of earn the right to work on the second thing. Like I'm sure that if I go through for the history here, like it's not like Nutella and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs. Those were all the same year. It's probably that Nutella was absolutely an oiled machine, a banger company doing great.

1:15:15And then that earned the right to go kind of add on the second skew. And still that's all within the same company so let me give a perfect example everybody i have this week last week two months ago two years ago i have all the big publishers in my inbox saying please write a book please write a book because i also sell the podcast obviously sells a lot of books the audience is full of entrepreneurs investors entrepreneurs investors probably read a hundred times as much as the average population the average population doesn't read at all and all the best entrepreneurs and investors are reading all the time um and my idea was just like i'm never going to write a book because that's not a podcast.

1:15:51Now, there's a founder's book being written right now. I can actually tell a story because this has to do with this little company that I know you guys happen to know and are a big fan of called Ramp. Let's go. So let me tell you a Ramp story. And I wish you guys would repost that video you had when you did the Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp. Oh, we got it on the soundtrack right here. You want to hear it? Yes, can I hear it? Using Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp. We'll send you the file. We'll get it on Spotify. No, no, you should go to Spotify. I played, I saved the video and I play it for my son.

1:16:24And like for a few days after that, dude, he ran around the house. Ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp. He doesn't know what it is. And he knows like Kareem and everybody else. Like he plays it. Our sons play together. So the funny part was, I'll tell you about the founder's book and the issue of focus is me and Patrick did this event at ramps headquarters in New York. And it's a guy named like Wouter. I can't pronounce his name. Oh, yeah. But he's like this new podcaster guy. And he's like, he went and spent like thousands of dollars. He listened to every single episode of Founders, spent thousands of dollars in design work, and then flew from like the Netherlands or some shit to New York to hand me the book.

1:17:02He's trying to launch a podcast. And like we, you know, we talk about this all the time. Most people get in podcasting really lazy. This guy like tried to do an episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew's like, oh, sorry. He like pushed him off. He's like, oh, I only do it in person. He goes, okay, that's fine. Wouter flies 15 hours, microphone in hand, does that. He interviews Eric Gleiman, writes a 40-page book on the history of Ramp, and gives it to him before the podcast. So I think I'm attracted to people that take what they do seriously, and effort's always rewarded. So what happened was he shows up at this event, and Patrick now knows what he did.

1:17:35I introduced him to Kareem, and Kareem was there. Eric already knew him. And so after the event, me, Patrick, Kareem, and Eric spent time with this young kid. I think he's in his early 20s. they think about the value of like getting eric and kareem's time they're running a 16 billion dollar company like all the crazy shit that's going on those guys work seven days a week and now because you were so you had so much effort you have these guys literally like counseling you and giving you advice for free and so what i told him i was like listen if you are willing to make a world-class book i'm talking about like like what our friend eric jorgensen did with the almanac and a ball that book changed my life like i read that all the time i hand it out like it's candy as like if you want to build that for the stuff you feel you've learned on founders and it's you make something i'm comfortable reading that i want myself i will advertise it for you for free on the podcast well we have to put it for free just like what neval did you put if anybody can read it for free online if you want to buy a copy you can buy a copy and any money you make off the book is yours to keep i don't want to make money off of the fucking book i don't care about that but i am interested in because people have asked for it uh one i i can't be a bottleneck uh two you're willing to do all the work and then i want something out there that you know it's a tangible like lessons for the podcast and i think it'd be cool to help this like young kid that's really trying to hustle and trying to like do something with his life and to be like to the degree that i can be like hey and i already hear the ad in my head like i'll tell the story and just like if you you know have 20 bucks burning a hole in your product or whatever it is or in your pocket whatever it is like let's fucking support this kid like buy companies buy for your entire company but uh yeah that i i think that's a way to like get something into the world but not take away from the focus i must have on you know what i feel i was put on this earth to do love it fedex oh yeah bro i am so sad me and rob were talking about that like that i didn't get a chance to meet fred smith when he passed away he's got the craziest i'm gonna um what i'm gonna do is uh i'm gonna re-edit that it's episode 151 of founders when i read fred smith's biography which is one of the craziest biographies you can ever find it's really hard the book is out of print um i i will read the opening paragraph for your audience real quick because i think it's like worth it's just people don't understand like everybody sees the planes everybody sees the trucks but they don't understand how difficult it was to build that company the opening paragraph When we were reviewing what the initial operation looked like, how capital intensive it was, how crazy just like managing the logistics.

1:20:08It's insane logistics dance. The idea that you could do that and make money. The hub and spoke models. The guy that wrote the book, his name is Vance Trimble. He also wrote a biography of Sam Walton. And he wrote Sam Walton first, then Fred Smith. And he goes, oh, my God. Like, I thought Walmart was difficult to build. but FedEx is like if you had to build Walmart you could build one Walmart at a time and expand he's like uh the analogy he used in the book was like FedEx is like if you had to from day one you had to have a thousand Walmarts or it doesn't work yeah let me just read this opening paragraph because it's so nuts um the guy that does my short form videos which I think are really really good and I think he's a fucking genius just sent me literally right before I got on he texted me one that he did on Fred Smith so I'll put it out later today um but this is the opening paragraph of the This is still the craziest beginning of any biography that I've ever read.

1:20:56And it says, At age 30, Fred Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father's Greyhound bus millions. He was in Hawk for$15 or$20 million more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also his wife. His own board of directors had fired him as CEO, and now the FBI accused him of forging papers to get a$2 million bank loan and trying to send him to prison. He thought of suicide. That's the first paragraph in the book. Insane. He lost his dad at four. He's a Vietnam War veteran. He had written about FedEx in college, got an average grade on it.

1:21:38Took a decade to go from the paper to the actual business corporation. You have people like Michael Dell, who's one of my personal heroes and wrote one of the best biographies I've ever read. And in his autobiography, he talks about Fred Smith being a hero of his. Like, it's just insane. And there's another paragraph that says, you know, thinking of suicide is ridiculous. He's much more likely, instead of jumping out a window, he's more likely to throw you out of a window. He was just like a relentless dude that was like, you know, just unbelievable high tolerance for pain and just refused to quit on this dream of his.

1:22:14And again, like, I just personally find those stories like very inspiring. It's like, dude, if this guy can succeed under those circumstances, surely we can keep going on whatever B2B SaaS app we're building. Come on. That's amazing. You want to wrap it up there? Move on? What are you thinking? No, that was great. This was fantastic. We'll see you soon, David. I'll see you later. Real quick, I just tell you guys every time I see you, I'm excessively proud of everything you guys have done over the last six months. I absolutely love what you've done with TPBN. I'm going to say it every single time you let me on your show.

1:22:49I think you guys are killing it. And I don't expect to see anything different or any, I expect to see you continue to do that for many, many years in the future. But I tell you guys privately, I'm really proud of you, but I want to tell you publicly, super proud of you guys. I'm very happy that to call you friends. We feel the same way. Thank you, David. We love you. All right. I'll see you next week. I'll see you later. I'll see you later. All right. Yeah. Cheers. Bye. But speaking of B2B SaaS, let's tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

1:23:24You can get started for free at adio.com. Should we bring in our next guest, Yancy from Metal Label? Yancy. Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Thanks so much for joining. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the music. Yes, yes, yes. We're trying to be a real newscast here. I would love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself. I wanna go through some of your history, then artist corporations, then we can kinda dig through the more modern era. Yeah, sure. My name is Yancy Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur. Started out as a music journalist and running a tiny record label and being in the world of early digital music.

1:24:05And then was a co-founder of Kickstarter and helped make crowdfunding a thing. uh was a co-founder and then ceo and very much kind of an accidental entrepreneur who started as a creative person whose idea just took the form of a business and kind of crash course and what it meant to make a technology product in a very different area of the internet and what it meant to build like a real marketplace what was the first kickstarter project or the first one that uh like really went big and you kind of watched it unfold and you realized that uh this would work it was it was three weeks in it was a musician from Athens Georgia named Allison Weiss who was like making an EP she had a$2 ,000 goal that she smashed through in eight hours and up until then we didn't show money you raised above the goal because why would anybody might even make more than their goal.

1:25:01Like just hadn't even occurred to us. And she like introduced the first stretch goal that same day. And like really the template that is still what people follow in crowdfunding was like one woman in her dorm room, you know, that really laid the template for how you keep an audience engaged and like what you do when the internet is bringing more love to you than you expected. What do you think the secret of success to that first$2 ,000 fundraise was? Because a lot of crowdfunding these days, or even if you're building an audience on something like Substack or Patreon, it's like you kind of need the audience already there.

1:25:38And then you go and convert it to money with some sort of project. And you're kind of building up all this goodwill. And people kind of expect, oh, they're like, I've gotten so much value. It's rare that you see someone come out of nowhere with a successful project. So what was the story there? it was that where there had been a page template she made it come alive she was funny she was personable she talked to camera like very modern it feels modern at the time you're like whoa like computer is talking to me you know and it it just felt very personable and there's a level of energy that just she just knew what the internet wanted and knew how to create that dynamic.

1:26:18And I really like still as a role model for, for what I think it is to be a creator online, but it also was a different era of the internet where people would share links where, you know, there was that level of generosity and curiosity and it wasn't just like selfies or nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Take me through some of the arrows of the internet. First, I have a good Kickstarter story. A childhood friend of mine, Miles came to me when I was just graduating college and he had this crazy idea for a consumer product and he pitched it to me he'd already like basically taken a loan from his parents a lot of like basically like college debt level loans for this idea that I thought was completely I thought it was a little bit silly a little bit crazy and he was like I'm working on this I'm gonna launch it on Kickstarter you know do you want to help me with it and I'd miles he's always creative and talented but i didn't i didn't get the idea yeah and uh basically like six weeks later he launches on kickstarter and he did like a million dollars in the first day and it was just this amazing story it was so incredible to watch him take this massive risk he had this personal risk because he needed to spend money to get the product to the point where they could launch on kickstarter and did all these deals to make it happen uh and it was just it was just incredible to watch and enable him to build this company.

1:27:42And I think what was magical from the side of the entrepreneur is every launches are such a key part of business. And oftentimes people put too much, they put too much emphasis into launching like a SaaS company because you're going to launch and people don't care that much about SaaS. Maybe you have a good video or maybe your investors talk about it positively. But Kickstarter is just like it felt like it can be this very like binary thing where You just don't know what's going to happen. And consumer products specifically, it is very hard to judge what consumer products will hit before you just put it out there.

1:28:15And the kind of the variable nature of it, I just think is fascinating to watch. So thank you for building the platform. It just has created so many great stories. Yeah. Can you take me through some of the different eras of the Internet? I'm interested to hear about all the different ways that kind of money and funding has changed. You know, you have the Kickstarter era or format or anything to subscriptions on an ongoing basis to even things like the TikTok creator fund where you're getting paid out based on views. How do you think about the buckets? And then what do you think is great? And what do you think maybe needs work?

1:28:58Well, I have zero preparation for this. but I've always I've always want to do like a David Halberstam history of the internet like big picture but yeah I would say like uh I mean there's the bulletin board zone up until like 2000s and I would say 2000 to 06 is like hardcore hard mode yeah that's when we were first trying to make kickstarter and you needed a server room and a dude with a ponytail to like have a blog It was like a high bar to get over. But even during the time we were struggling, like AWS EC2 launched, Amazon Payments launched, PayPal extended its marketplace product. So you started to see the first building blocks where non-technical founders like us could actually make a product and could make a successful business.

1:29:47And those things really came online. Yeah, like 07 to 09, 2010. And then you have, I think, the good old days of 2010 to 2016 of like, we're all exploiting the hell out of the Facebook social graph. And it's, you know, gray, you could gray list the Twitter connect to find every person everywhere. And like the Internet's just this playground of like, what can we do together? uh and then i think 2016 to 2020 was the defection the collective defection where it's like sub stack only fans you know more dark forest like more and less and less mainstream media more and more like i'm going into the rabbit hole of something online like that is where i make money um and then there was just an event that i did with other internet where people talked about this but it ends up that like a room full of 20 year olds called like covet crypto era is just like just scam period and then they call period 2023 on to where we are now as scammer be scammed but like ai crypto sass products like recurring subscriptions all of it is leading to this feeling of like someone's gonna ding your credit card or like rug you or whatever like no matter or what you gotta like be on your toes and do that back at people.

1:31:11My favorite is it's like almost impossible to truly cancel a credit card now because you tell Amex, you tell Amex, like, hey, like I don't want this card anymore, but I wanna keep my service with you. And then they're like, well, here's a new card and a new number, but like we're gonna give it to all the people that you subscribed to like five years ago. And it's just this incredible tax. Well, where are the pockets of positivity on the internet right now in, I don't know if you want to call it the creator economy, but whatever term that is, are you seeing anything that's - Before there, how did you react to the creator economy becoming a popular phrase among venture capitalists?

1:31:54Yeah, venture capitalists kind of discovered, they kind of created the creator economy. You kind of took a - Maybe you laid the groundwork. But let's give it to the VCs. It was better than the passion economy. That one gave me a harder record scratch. So the rebrand, but yeah, I mean, listen, every one of these phrases is a VC talk in their book. Like that's it. You blog your book. That's the move. But I don't think it's wrong. I mean, what's wild is that this job of being a creator, which I'll define as like a full-time self-expresser on the internet, a commercial self-expresser, that's like a 15-year-old profession.

1:32:31And it is also the most desired profession for people under the age of 20. And unlike being an astronaut, everyone can become one. And right now we have this perspective that the creator economy is maybe a bubble and it's some convergence of technology that who knows, it'll probably dissipate. So if you step back a little bit and look at the longer history of the space, it's actually shockingly recent to where even like commercial artistic production, like movies and music and books and the way we think of them now, that industry is less than 100 years old, really, if you look at like a lot of the big players.

1:33:13But even the word and concept of creativity, the concept of creativity was invented in the 1940s by United States Defense Department grants that were trying to find. Let's give it up for the Defense Department. Let's give it up for the military. They created creativity. They created the thing. Yeah, basically. This is why we love them. They coined it. They were looking to find divergent thinkers for the military. Okay. So they studied artists and engineers who would like pull all-nighters. And like what makes them tick? what's their drive and they discovered that there was this innate drive that they theorized was a democratic essence of genius that could be taught to anyone and it was the concept of creativity the word entered the dictionary in 1966 the united states education system was remade in the 60s to become creative so like creative writing programs brainstorming entered the school system so i'm a second generation creative American.

1:34:08But the whole idea of self-expressing as a form of improving things or as a way to create more commercial value is an extremely recent idea, just two generations old. So if you think of the idea of being a creator, that is just building on something that was already there. And what I've come to see is that we're 25 % into the 21st century right now, 2025 and i think the main forces of this century so far are internet phones ai and creativity cultural expression like it takes up more space more people do it and it's just going to grow and a lot of my work now is just thinking like well let's take this seriously and let's treat it as a real industry let's treat it as a real business let's treat it as like a way that people can get healthcare and have real jobs.

1:35:00And so if we take that approach and also take the internet seriously, you know, what's missing? And that's really been what I've been about the last few years. Yeah. There's a bunch of interesting places we could go with this. I want to get to the artist corporation and how these, I don't know, influencers or new creators like scale, But I'm also interested in this idea of what actually has changed. Because this show, we have kind of discovered and done a bunch of different tests and explored the space and changed things a lot. We're obviously deeply leveraging the internet. This will be clipped on X and Instagram and TikTok, and it will go out all over the place.

1:35:44We are using modern distribution tools. but in many ways we keep coming back to this idea that you know we are making daytime television this is a talk show and so we are retreating in many ways to the formats that work and when we find that we go back to what has been you know lindy or discovered or has been around for a while we see that that's what people still want and i and i've thought about this in the context of mr beast he's he's making a game show and game shows have been popular for a long time and he's distributing them in a different way and there's a different style and editing style but like What really has changed?

1:36:17Well, yeah, you know, the big change is that the person, the creative person has full control, not full control, but ownership over the production and the distribution. Yes. Even if you just own the account. Right. So you have an account that you don't really own the production. You don't own the end app. Yep. But you own the account that gives you a lot of range in order to do things. And we've talked about this, like we'll pull up a post from somebody on our stream and that was posted like a minute ago. And like television could never do that because they would have to like, you know, make sure that they had to clear it and do all these different things.

1:36:59So I think that's the biggest change is the creative people owning those two key levers. Just being more entrepreneurial. And then the cost, the cost. We handle that internally. So yeah, I'm super fascinated in like what actually is new, what pieces have stuck around. Well, I think that, and I include us in this affectionately, I think it's the revenge of the losers where in the past, you know, all media was like heavily gatekept and you had to go to whatever school and like the seats were so limited. YouTube was for losers. YouTube is if you couldn't get on real TV, like all, everything on the internet was that Every part of the internet creative stack was like, you aren't good enough.

1:37:40So thus you're here, but there's more of us than there are winners. And, and if you give us the same tools and you give us time, many people are very smart. Many people can, you know, take in a lot of information and create a talk show, like out of, out of your minds and out of a limited set of tools. And the notion of the notion of hierarchy for where we go for things has been erased as a result of this. And, you know, it's it's for all legacy players, it's total havoc and they have no idea what's going on. I think for anyone who's a consumer just coming up now, like the world honestly makes kind of sense.

1:38:18It's pretty wide open. You can find or get access to whatever you want. But like you all are able to generate a lot of attention and drive a lot of things. But what you own is an interesting question, actually. Like you own the your brand IP. Do you own your followers? What of your relationships do you own in which way? It gets fuzzy, but there is for sure a cultural equity that is being built up by this project, equity that because you have sponsors, you can convert into revenue, you can convert into an investment, you can treat as a proper business. And that's what more and more people are finding creatively.

1:38:58And so to make a media business or to bring in multiple revenue streams are the things that a modern creator is finding is a different way of operating like a small business or a studio than people have experienced in the past. And we're all sort of speed running this. There's not a lot of communication between groups. Like people are, there's a weird deal. Like there's a lot of weirdness, yeah. The interesting thing, the reason that the creator economy as a venture trend broadly failed and because a large amount of the investment dollars were flowing into building kind of business infrastructure for creators and misjudging that creators are ultimately just businesses and they can use RAMP.

1:39:37They can go to Bank of America and get a bank account. Oh, you're talking about the niche-specific financial products. And so even though the creator kind of wave and trend has just exploded and continues to create all these amazing things, the investment dollars that flowed into the category broadly did not return. Yeah, I'm also interested in the idea of the actual structure. There's a lot of, like on that note, there's a lot of influencer businesses where really, like most of the value accrual is in the actual talent. And they could shut down their accounts and go to Hollywood and get a deal that would pay them directly just as a W-2 employee.

1:40:21And you see that with, you know, folks like, I believe, I was thinking about the example of Jim Cramer, or actually going back through talk shows, Johnny Carson was unique in that he owned his show's IP, but then The Tonight Show and The Late Show are now owned by the networks. And if you watch Jimmy Kimmel, he's essentially a, there might be a production studio that he owns a piece of, but it's mostly just he's on a really high salary from the studio and the network. And that seems to work fine. I mean, Jay Leno never owned his show. He has a huge car collection. He seems to have done very well.

1:40:53But then there are also folks who are building C-Corps and trying to build corporations and they realize that That maybe the best way to monetize attention long term is to launch a product like what mr Beast has done with feastables and it's a it's a new corporation Then maybe that gets spun out and maybe that becomes its own thing and they sell that and and that's less tied to His face and his talent. So there's a whole bunch of different paths walk me through what you think like reasonable cases are or or the good or bad or have i missed anything and then talk to me about the future of where all this goes yeah so right now right now if you're a creative person looking to go more pro or scale what you're doing you know there's there's very different categories like an online creator is a very specific set of like you're probably getting a direct deposit from an ad you know from some ad partnership or something hitting your bank account there's a question of how should you accept those funds.

1:41:51If you're like a visual artist or someone like that, your legal structure will determine whether you can get a grant, you're eligible for certain funds. And like, that is actually the only way to get money if you're that type of artist. So right now people face, there's a couple of decisions. One is, do you orient your career around seeking philanthropic money, which if you're a classical artist is really kind of what's there for you. Or if you're a creator, are you an LLC? Are you an S Corp? Are you trying to properly raise money? Are you a C Corp? And there's a whole big mess in the middle. Where I ran into with a, I'm part of a collective of writers called the Dark Forest Collective.

1:42:30And we published a book together that's done$100 ,000 in transactions, all running through a split that we made on metal labels. So all the money just automatically distributes to each of us as a royalty through Stripe. And I'm running that without any sort of legal structure, which is not the smartest thing, but started thinking about what if I made an LLC for this, like, what should I do? And ended up when I've been talking to artists for a long time about their different needs and saw an opportunity to try to craft a different type of LLC that would give creative people more economic security, better access to health care and the ability to grow wealth and equity.

1:43:07And so to do that, we're structurally making a version of an LLC that will have within it a set of specific provisions around creative purpose, certain rules about governance, certain separation of creative rights and financial rights, setting in how an equity structure would work, including rules about how you can get pooled together to get access to better health care rates with a bunch of A corps together. and just creating a little wrapper shield that allows any sort of creative project to instantly go from, I'm now incorporated with legal protection for a very cheap amount, and I can scale to an investable business using this form up until a certain point.

1:43:51There's two paths to making that happen, and we're pursuing both. One is to pass laws, so you say, hey, let's define what an A is. Let's make it something you could legally register as. We're pursuing that path. The other is most of these things are things you can already do with an LLC. They're just requires lawyers and a lot of like specifics. So the other path is to make it as a software protocol. And so just make a corp in a box in a way that any internet native group of people can begin to build and access collective equity. And so both of the, we're working on both of those at the same time.

1:44:24The ultimate is to get both, but, but yeah, we see it as a way that people to. to graduate. What's the history of these new corporate structures? I remember, I feel like B Corp is relatively new. S Corp also feels somewhat new. Yeah, it's very cool to be like, oh yeah, by the way, you can just create a new entity. Yeah, it's amazing. Not just a new entity, a new type of entity. I feel like LLC and C Corp have been around for probably hundreds of years, but there's a bunch of new ones. What have you studied? What have you learned? And like, what's the actual path? Is this federal legislation? Do you just go to Delaware or something?

1:44:59How does that work? Yeah. S-Corp was the 1950s. There have only been a handful of new corporate forms made this decade or this century, PBCs, certain types of co-ops, L3Cs. But yeah, when I was CEO of Kickstarter, we became one of the first PBCs. And so I just happened to watch that log it made. And it always paid attention to the fact that it was really technical and boring and just worked. And so I just thought about that same playbook and could you do that? So corporate law is passed on a state level. Yeah. And depending on how law is written, people can register and be domiciled, you know, from anywhere in that state.

1:45:39And so we're talking to legislators and the bar associations in a few specific states and sharing with them our draft that our lawyers have helped make and, you know, talking to them about what does it look like to try to put a bill together? And so our target is to have something pass next year and to have first pilot programs. And we'll definitely have this protocol like you can do it with some scan of an LLC that we'll have out sooner. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. One of the ideas that I thought was interesting was this idea that as an artist or a creator, you wouldn't necessarily need to prematurely select a path between nonprofit donations, grant money, tax incentivized donations.

1:46:25I love that. I think that the elites are not funding enough libraries and museums and all of these different things. I think that just making it easy for that to happen is actually a key unlock. But then also I love the idea of somebody being able to actually build up a subscription business on top of it and write regularly and have supporters and earn cash flow and pay employees. I want to get your take on OpenAI structure because it feels like they've done something similar but at a thousand times larger scale with a nonprofit that owns a for-profit and there's a GP, an LP. And that feels like kind of a nightmare scenario.

1:47:10But are there any learnings there? Or are there any areas where you'd be worried about someone potentially abusing a system that allowed someone to take non-profit money and for-profit money? Or it would be confusing where somebody would say, hey, I made a donation, but now you're licensing this into a movie. I wanted you to make a painting or an installation or something. And now Disney's paying you a billion dollars. like I want my share. So yeah, walk me through some of that stuff. Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about open AI or ESG, I mean, I think form follows capital is the lesson. You know, just people are going to shape to whatever is most investable.

1:47:49And like one of our core constituents as we're working through this process are investors. So there will be like an investor advisory board that's like, hey, look at our sheet here. Let's make sure that we're not, you know, we're not screwing something up and that we're actually speaking to the ways you get returns in the way that we create value.

1:48:10But yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, there's infinite ways for things to go wrong. I think that - I mean, people abuse LLCs today, of course. I think, yeah, I've had the attitude of, I like that like the bar to be an entrepreneur is will and it's not qualifications. And I think the bar to be an artist and a creator is about will and not about qualification. so the the way i've tried we try to structure it or think about it is easy to start but as you want to do things that have a financial implication like say take in non-profit funds there's maybe a step you go through before that where you're not a full non-profit but hey like don't abuse this and screw it up for everybody which i think is what happens with you know trust gets earned and spent.

1:48:55And so you're trying to protect it from being spent in the worst ways. But you have to have some of those safeguards. But every option I think about that's about setting a bar. Just deciding the courts, right? Like that's what happens with the other structures is that they get defined and then precedent is set across a whole bunch of different legal filings eventually. You're in New York City, right? And you've been in the New York city tech scene for years, correct? That's right. Can you give me your reaction to the Momdani news? I mean, massive come from behind moment. Did you predict it? What have you been seeing?

1:49:33Are you excited about it? What are you optimistic about or maybe pessimistic about? I don't know. I mean, God bless anyone who's the mayor of this city. Greatest city in the world, hardest thing to govern you know talk about a tough executive job um i'm reading the power broker at the moment actually finishing that's you get a real appreciation for the strangeness of new york city politics oh yeah uh yeah i mean i think it's i i i'm excited to see youth i'm excited to see energy and not old corruption is nice i also think the realities of new york city's political system are like Byzantine even to experts.

1:50:15And I don't know what will actually happen as a result of this. Yeah, yeah. So it's hard. I think probably almost all concerns are overblown and just, but yeah, I don't know. We'll see. Do you think that, we were toying with this idea I'd like to get your feedback on, just that out of the 2024 election, there was this narrative around the podcast election, the idea of like the bro casters that got Donald Trump elected because Trump was much more aggressive or maybe just open to podcast invites from Andrew Schultz and Tim Dillon and Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan. And the Kamala campaign maybe was less aggressive or turned down some of those opportunities.

1:50:59But when I was mathing it out, I was just seeing that the total number of minutes that Americans spent watching each candidate, I think Donald Trump probably outnumbered by 100 to 1 just because there was a four-hour Joe Rogan with him with 20 million views. You math that out. It's a lot more than the 20-minute Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes or whatever. Mamdani feels like he's done some podcasts, but it feels like almost the first iteration of the next next generation of going direct or owned media channels, producing his own content successfully. People have plenty of politicians have put out a tick tock.

1:51:36None of them have actually broken through in the sense that he doesn't have his own podcast. He didn't go on the big podcast. He hasn't done either Rogan or Pod Save America or I don't even know if he's done Chopo or anything. But he has he has he's gotten a ton of attention. And I'm wondering what you think that says about the future of the shape of social media and getting attention and the future of politics. Well, I think you could see, yeah, lots of owned media because what even is other media anymore? I mean, it's such a crapshoot and you can absolutely drive attention that way. There was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple of months ago that talked about how it's like some shockingly small number of the population, 10 % buys 80 % of the alcohol in America.

1:52:24So those numbers are probably wrong, but it's like a small percentage buys almost all of it. And it made me think that like, I wonder if every brand is ultimately like that, that there is like a small percentage of the population that's a hardcore. And that is like the true brand value something. So someone like Trump, who maybe is broadly unpopular, but has like a 38 % like hardcore 10Q rating makes him maybe the most powerful person in culture. And I think that we're seeing with someone like this it's like that it is the high q rating with a devoted minority online that is we keep underestimating how powerful that can be yeah he has the thousand true fans if you want to use that analogy like and that means that those folks will not yes it's only a thousand views but it's a thousand views on every single post and it's comments a thousand comments a reposts and that multiplies to and it might be a hundred thousand true fans for him it might i mean he said he wanted to knock on a million doors he has several hundred thousand i think 800 000 tiktok followers like like that but he has true fans whereas a lot of the other candidates i feel like just like the difference has always been true fans plus the category of people that are saying anybody but cuamo totally yeah and if you like 2024 to me you know all social media is an ad and so podcasts like these these are non-ad spaces they feel like the real spaces so if your brand is only living in like broadcast social like you're just a cpg advertiser basically like you aren't you aren't engaging in a real way and like this is this is people know this is real and then over there in the feed that we're around is like largely bullshit like we all we all know and that's how we're processing everything now.

1:54:14Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Anything else about - This was great. Kickstarter or anything? Yeah, this was fantastic. I think you should lobby Zoron to get 0 % corporate tax on the ACOR. There we go. Could be some way to get some momentum. There's some way to do that. Borrow a page out of big business. Talk to Wiesenthal about it when he's done. We will, we will. Thanks so much for hopping on. Thanks, Yancy. This was great chatting. We'll talk soon. We got to tell the great TBPN nation about FIN. Yes, please. Can we pull up FIN AI? Can we pull up the website? It's absolutely beautiful.

1:54:51We have had OWN on the show. We are excited to formally partner with FIN and the Intercom team. Yes. FIN is the number one AI agent for customer service. It's number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, and it's the number one ranking on G2. Let's go. And own is so confident that thin team is so confident they have a one million dollar guarantee. Whoa. Oh, okay. And it is why companies like Monday.com and thropic and a bunch of other heavy hitters are using the product. So if you are serving customers, which many businessmen and women do.

1:55:56You got to get on Finn yesterday. The legend. The stalwart. Let's go. Future mayor of New York. Are you safe? Are you doing okay? We've heard that there's a cultural revolution going on in New York City. They're coming for the capitalist journalist. Is it Jen and Square? Are there bread lines already? How bad is it? Give it to us straight from directly on the ground. I'm safe because we had Zoran Mamdani on our podcast. So we're one of the good ones. That's good. I'm already doing my work to sort of make sure that I'm on the correct side of the revolution. So I'm safe. I don't know about everyone else in my building here in the office.

1:56:34Is it true that... I think I'm in good shape. You're in good shape. Are the rumors true that Mom Donnie wants to seize all the enterprise sass in the city and make it state and city-owned? I have no idea. I have not heard anything about whether... Is the rumor that he wants to... Bloomberg terminal, whether the Bloomberg terminal will be turned into a, uh, into a public good that everyone has. We can only know he has a one. That's the most hyper-capitalist thing though. Tens of thousands of dollars. It should be universal basic. The most hyper-capitalist policy would be every citizen has a terminal.

1:57:10Universal basic terminal. I'm firmly in favor of that. Healthcare costs are similar to a terminal cost. I'm cautiously optimistic as long as he doesn't ban podcasts that are ad-supported. As long as he doesn't put a hundred percent tax on AI researchers signing bonuses, because at this rate that could generate billions of dollars for the city in a few weeks. Yeah, I think for now, I think, look, he hasn't won yet, but for now I think it's more modest, more modest goals like freezing the rent, but we'll see what happens on some of these more, the more ambitious visions. We're not quite there yet.

1:57:46No, this is, there's a few months where people get very strategic. What apartment do you want to be in? Does your family want to be in for the next hundred years? Yeah, it could be a flourishing market. Get in the right spot, freeze the rent. I mean, I think people are like very jarred by the idea of freezing the rent, but like there are rent controlled apartments in New York City today, right? And so what he's actually talking about is like adjusting the rate of the rent controlled apartments. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there is already a pretty sizable slug of non-market rate housing in New York City.

1:58:17It's actually been frozen at times before. I think Bill de Blasio at one point froze it for about a year, but there's like a board and they have, you know, a certain annual adjustment. And he's just saying there's not going to be any adjustments. And, you know, my guess is that from the perspective of a landlord who has some market rate units and some, you know, rent regulated units, my guess is that they'll increase the rate or the rent on the market regulated ones. Let's give it up for the stalwart. They'll get the money back at the end. The number one landlord on G2. Oh, yeah? Yeah, the stalwart.

1:58:56The stalwart. Well, I own a place here in Manhattan. So if I ever rent it out, I don't think that'd be rent regulated. And I think I can charge whatever I want. There you go. Yeah, I mean, how are people thinking about Mom Donnie? It feels like there's this narrative emerging about like, oh, maybe come from behind. Like his, you know, people were, we were acting like the Democratic primary was the election. But of course it is not the election. But is there a chance here? Yeah, for us California boys, why was that the election? Yeah, I mean, look, generally speaking, New York City is kind of a one-party city.

1:59:34The Republicans keep putting up the same sort of like semi-serious candidate each time who doesn't really launch a real campaign, Curtis Sliwa. Incidentally, he's the Red Beret guy, so someone coming from outside might think that that's the socialist in the race, but he's not, even though he wears a Red Beret. And then our existing mayor, Mayor Adams, didn't run in the primary, but he's going to be in the general election on his own line. And he's been pretty unpopular, but it seems like what's going to happen is a lot of people are going to try to rally behind him. Crime has come down a lot in the last couple of years.

2:00:11He's taken the trash problem seriously. He's taken the rat problem seriously. So I think there will be probably a fairly serious effort to make it a competitive race. But Mamdani's victory was so, you know, such a blowout. It was so compelling just from a numbers standpoint. And it isn't really true. I mean, the expectation was that he was going to do really well in the sort of like liberal educated white areas and then do less well elsewhere. He actually did really well in pretty much the entire city. So even that stereotype didn't really hold true the way people expected. He put a dominant performance.

2:00:46I mean, the expectation was that Cuomo, you know, we have the ranked choice voting, that Cuomo would win the first round and then, you know, they would eliminate candidates. He won the first round. It wasn't even particularly close at all. I mean, it was he crushed him. A lot of people voted. This wasn't like the AOC election. When AOC won, there were not a lot of people who voted in the primary that year and her team was pretty well organized. This was just a much bigger scale, much more impressive victory than that. So political earthquake, whatever cliche you want to use, like is pretty accurate to describe last night.

2:01:19Interesting. One narrative that I've heard is that Mamdani was incredible at focusing on local issues. So rent, grocery prices, things that the buses, like the subway, things that feel tractable for a mayor. Whereas Cuomo was focusing more on the fact that the food cart guys are having to pay some crazy. Yeah, versus Cuomo talking more about national politics and what's going on with Trump. How real do you think that is? And do you think that there's, yeah. Yeah, I think that's very real. And I think, you know, a few things. I mean, one is, I think Mamdani really made gains in the small businesses, the people who own the food carts, the people who own the bodegas, et cetera, really getting into some of these voting categories that are harder to reach.

2:02:09He also, as you said, really direct things related to day to day life living in New York City like rent. And I mean, look, whatever your view on the sort of broader politics are, you have one candidate who is talking about the rent and you have another candidate who is talking about like, you know, you watch the Democratic debate. And the first question was like, well, what is the first country you're going to visit? And a bunch of them raised their hands and said, Israel, regardless of how you think about those politics, you're running for New York City mayor. So you have here's the rent guy and here's the guy that's trying to make the race entirely about Israel.

2:02:45The guy won. I'm not totally surprised that that worked better at a citywide in a citywide election. So I want to talk about like if I was if I were running for mayor in New York City against Momdani and I bought in on the idea that New Yorkers care more about rent. Is it reasonable for me to argue for I'm going to drive the rent prices down by deregulating building or I'm going to subsidize building or give a tax break to builders? Like, what are the other tools? Because the consensus amongst like the economics crowd is that rent controls don't increase, don't decrease the price of rent. They don't increase the number, the supply of building.

2:03:25Yeah, yeah. But what are the policies that you think people, A, what do you think might actually work? And then B, how do you package that? Well, Trump will tell the oil markets to settle down. Yeah, Trump just says settle down. Don't raise prices, I'm watching. And I'm watching, yeah, don't raise rents. So you could say to construction workers, don't even think about raising prices. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Builders? Builders don't even think about it. Yeah, why not? I do think, look, I do think it is really hard for any, someone running for office to sort of make that wonky argument, oh, what we really need to do is deregulate this and then we'll get supply.

2:04:03And, you know, it's not as compelling or satisfying as freeze the rent, right? But to be fair to Mamdani, over the course of his campaign, he's not doctrinaire about the sort of role of market rate housing. And he talked when he was on our podcast and in other interviews he did, he said there is a role, of course, for just sort of expanding supply. And he's talked about upzoning and all of the kind of things that like wonks like to talk about and sort of deregulating. So I think that accomplishes two things. One is he does sort of recognize that there's more to affordability than just sort of government fiat.

2:04:37You can't raise the rent. That's just a small portion. But I think also by talking about some of these other things, I think a lot of people sort of like normie, Democratic liberals who are kind of in the center or whatever, they found him to be really disarming and even charming. They weren't threatened by him. And I think if you, you know, clearly you see in the vote, a lot of people who probably make decent money and probably who themselves don't consider themselves to have radical politics, they might not have ranked him first, although clearly many did. But they weren't like anti him. They didn't feel like it was really important to stop his candidacy with like an anybody but Zoran vote.

2:05:14And so between the sort of young socialist activists who are really powerful in his campaign, and then you just didn't have many people who found him to be like that threatening or that scary. And I think that was sort of the key to victory. The fact that people who sort of think normally things like, yeah, why don't we just make it easier to build? were also sort of cool with him. Yeah. Talk about his media strategy. You're a male podcaster, potentially a brocaster. Manosphere, a popular member of the Manosphere. Did you get him elected by platforming him? Are you the Donald Trump or the Joe Rogan to his Trump?

2:05:52You know, yes, we might be. No, I don't know if we are, but, you know, that episode came out May 23rd. If you look at the prediction markets, it was basically two days later that he started shooting up. i the market kind of thing stalwart i cut i actually i don't know we've been debating this today i'm sort of of the view that we may have played some modest role okay in normalizing him to a certain group who hadn't been that exposed to him before it's hard to say can i prove it yeah but uh yes by entering uh the bro pod the bro podcast that i co-host with tracy of course um i it may have it may have it may have helped and then you did a bunch of media after that i I think that was his sort of first like true, like mainstream one.

2:06:36So, you know, part of Bloomberg. It may have helped. Do you think, what do you think was most, most more important and how would you weight them? Like his, his owned media stuff, his TikToks, his viral videos. That's, that's what I saw first. Yeah. And then once I'd seen those, then I searched his name in Apple podcast, saw odd lots come up and I was like, oh, this is great. I saw he did the, the, uh, uh, the breakfast club with Charlamagne and a few other, and a few other hits. but it felt like it was kind of an inversion of the Trump strategy, which was very podcast first. His strategy seemed native social media owned media first, and then other people's platforms second.

2:07:15Do you think that's the right narrative? I think that's probably correct. His own videos are so good though. And of course, his mother is a famous filmmaker. And his videos, it's not just that they're short form, they're really good. They looked really good. They're shot really well. The color balancing on them was really good. The audio is good. The angles were good. He's a sharp dresser. He's a good looking guy. He smiles. He's really comfortable with himself. Like he's just clearly a generational political talent. And he sort of packaged it up extremely well for social media just seems like a very normal, likable guy.

2:07:54And I think put it all together. I mean, it was a campaign for 2025 and all of the different tools that people use to reach voters. He really had the knack on them. I noticed this during a previous election cycle with a congressman who was running on the second amendment and he, she released this video and the sun was blasting on his face. And I was like, that is violating cinematography 101, which is like, you always want to backlight everything. You want the sun behind you. And it's like, yeah, he just didn't, he didn't find the right person that understood the basic rules of cinematography to understand, like, you need a soft source.

2:08:32You need to be behind you. You need to backlight things. And so, yeah, just actually having those tools, I think that is probably an underrated narrative and something that we might see people actually take seriously and try and solve going forward. Yeah, I think that's sort of true. We're sort of just used to the face, you know, short. Oh, I'm going to do short form video. I'm going to say something. He's looked great. Like the angles are really good on them. And I know that seems like sort of a ticky tag thing to talk about. But it's clear that this is someone who comes from knowledge about how to package media really good.

2:09:03Totally. What can we do to get Robert Granary, the founder of Jane Street, on OddLots? Oh, I saw that headline this morning about how you're your hashtag not what you ever want to have to say or whatever it was. Yeah. You know, there's all these things, you know, like executives over the years and they get into a scandal and like, oh, I I regret doing X or Y. And they're usually something about, you know, inappropriate. And they said something awful in an email and they have to find an awkward way to apologize. It's really funny to me that Jane Street is this extraordinarily successful trading company that makes billions and billions every year making markets.

2:09:46And now the only two things that the average person would know about Jane Street is that's where Sam Bankman-Fried came from. And now that the co-founder accidentally funded an attempted coup. What are you talking about? We know that they are the maintainer of the OCaml programming language. Oh, yeah. And they are a sponsor of the Dwarkech Patel podcast, which is a fantastic podcast. So I know four things about that. So good causes and maybe less good causes. Yeah, these are the two things that every, or the yin and yang of Jane Street. But yes, to the average person on the street, there is quite a collection of headlines that they are amassing for what is actually like a fairly normal, extremely successful firm.

2:10:29Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is like I read this and they describe in the Bloomberg story, they describe Jane Street as like the place where Sandbank and Freed worked. And I'm like, they don't deserve that heat because Sandbank and Freed was like an intern. He did all the bad stuff later. Like it's not, it should not be a stain on Jane Street whatsoever. And then this article, like we were reading it and we were like, certainly it's going to go on five more pages. It's so intriguing. It's so good. And then it just kind of drops off. And it didn't seem like there was any real wrongdoing. I'm sure the story will evolve.

2:10:57No, yeah. But my big hope is that it winds up with him doing a podcast tour and explaining the actual business of Jane Street, because I would love to hear it, because the firm has been very quiet for a long time. Well, we can compete with you in who gets him first. Oh, it's going to be a tour. If it's going to happen, it's got to be everywhere. He'll do the short form with you and the long form with us or vice versa. That's totally fine. There's enough spoils all around for these guys to do their media tour. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's talk about prediction markets. Sure. I love them. They played a role.

2:11:26There's two Cal, she announced around at two billion today. And then and then the poly market round was like kind of leaking. I don't think it actually got announced, but enough people were sharing it around. They're here. They seem to be mainstream. When when big events are happening, you're on X and you're just constantly, you know, seeing screenshots and things like that. And obviously, you know, we got to get into the Middle East, of course, a little bit. But how how mean it's hard because we're in a bubble. How mainstream do you feel prediction markets have gotten? Well, let's put it this way.

2:12:06Like if you post a chart of any prediction market and there was even one it was I think they had one on the screen in Times Square. And I think there was even a video of Zoran looking up and he's like, oh, gambling is haram. They shouldn't do that. um but they're everywhere and there's a price on literally everything and for my you know i think about when i was you know 30 years ago i guess or maybe 25 years ago if i wanted to you know i would go to the drudge report or something like that because i knew that that was like this really good digest of everything that was moving in the world and polymarket has become this sort of like one of the few websites that actually check as just you know who goes to websites anymore well that's the thing.

2:12:44It's, it's, it's, it's people that are basically making bets, investments, gambling, whatever you want to call it on event, but then it creates a public benefit, which is I've never made a single trade on poly market. Yeah. Any predict, I've never made any type of prediction based trade. Uh, and for both, you know, main reason being that like, it wouldn't be ethical for us to like cover what's happening in prediction markets and then just be betting on them. And so the world gets this benefit of seeing tomorrow's headlines today, which I think is a cool thing. Well, here's the way I think about it.

2:13:19So let's say last week when it seemed like Cuomo was going to win. And most people would have said, yeah, probably Cuomo will win. But you can actually get now, put a price on what that means. Is he a 60 % favorite? Is he 80 %? Is he 90 %? That's useful because the difference between he's 60 % likely versus 90 % likely is sort of useful in terms of gauging that. So actually putting a more specific price on conventional wisdom is useful. You know, one of the criticisms people make is like, oh, prediction markets get things wrong, right? They're like, oh, it didn't actually predict anything. It's just following the polls.

2:13:55Yeah, the crystal ball only works 50 % of the time. Yeah, and that's true. I actually think that's like basically true, but I think that's the wrong way to look at their utility. The way you described it, that even if you're not trading on them, you get some benefit because you can see the price of essentially conventional wisdom right now on anything. I think as a public, look, is it really a public benefit to have people gambling on everything? I don't really know. At some deep level, I guess I'm concerned by the idea that we're betting on literally everything from like, what are the odds that the US is going to drop a bomb on the Iranian nuclear site, which people are betting on, which incidentally started spiking on the morning of the actual bombing over the weekend.

2:14:35You know, how great is it that people are always betting on all this? I don't really know. But from a sort of like, I want to know what's happening in the news, your utility developing. Yeah, there's pure utility that's free. Yeah, polymarket.com. Also, I would like to, you know, throw toss in here that I am, I'm almost positive that the vast majority of volume on prediction markets comes from something that looks a lot less like a gambler and a lot more like a hedge fund. And so a lot of these traders have scaled up. They have pretty mature operations. We saw that with that, the big market moving pro Donald Trump bet.

2:15:11The guy had done his own research and paid for people to go knock on doors and do new surveys. And so I think that the narrative of like, this is as widely distributed, like they're whales, but they're like almost financial institutions less than gambling. And so, yeah, I mean, it still is a question. Like I would not want, you know, the true gambling, like it is this fine line. But I do know that like many of the volume drivers have scaled up their business because they're good at it. They have a more, they're like with the bombing example, they are tracking like the Domino's pizza index, right?

2:15:47Or the Pentagon pizza index. And then what is upmarket of that? They're probably finding another signal that's even upmarket of that. And then feeding that in. And look, there's a reason for it, which is you want to be able to, big institutions, they want to be able to hedge very specific risks. So if they have oil exposure, then they want to be able to hedge out the specific exposure that's going to come from volatility, if there's going to be a wider war in the Middle East that would disrupt flow. So like all of these are like sort of legitimate needs. And then the other thing I would say is that I've said this for a long time.

2:16:20Many legacy financial markets are literally prediction markets, most notably the treasury market. So it's like, you know, a short term treasury market is literally a prediction market on what the 12 members of the FOMC are going to decide about rates over the course of X period of time. And then there are derivatives on those treasuries and so forth. So already event markets are a core part of just sort of TradFi, legacy financial institutions, etc. And this just sort of extends the range of risks that you can isolate and hedge. And so I'm not surprised at all that now that like they're basically, you know, the regulatory aspect is coming into place.

2:16:59The infrastructure is coming to place that for many different instruments, they have value to people. Yeah. Talk about how you were tracking what happened in the Middle East. I my thought would be I'm looking at Polymarket for specific details of will this strike happen on this day. But then I'm looking at the price of oil and maybe just the overall stock market, because if World War three is going to happen, I would imagine the futures would trade down. But how do you process that information? And then what did you see? It's a really good question. I mean, look, to some extent, there's all very sort of linear.

2:17:32And you probably could have gauged risks just by looking at oil futures, which sort of moved along together with, you know, the odds that U.S. enters the war in some way or whatever it is. You know, it was really striking. I mean, so the attack, my brain is so scrambled. I think Saturday night. Saturday, right. That day, that contract, will the U.S. enter into, like, really started spiking that morning. And that could have been because people were sort of, like, reading between the lines of Trump's truths on Truth Social, various other things like that. But it wasn't obvious, you know, and it started moving.

2:18:15And it's like, okay, you know, there was a lot of money riding on this. Reading between the lines of the Theo Vaughn podcast. Yeah, and it's nice on a weekend. And I mean, again, this gets to the thing like, is it really good that people have to that financial markets are 24 seven? And it's obviously going to be very soon that all stocks and everything are going to be 24 seven because you could just have prediction markets on the stock market or prediction markets on a certain stock or a crypto token or whatever. Like all of this is happening. It will all be 24 seven in a fairly short period of time.

2:18:46There probably is use for weekend risk and overnight risk in times when traditional markets aren't trading to sort of be able to put on hedging trades or just gauge, monitor the situation through prices. So, yeah, I think this is here to stay. And as you say, going to get more sort of institutionally real. Yeah. So was everything priced in at the beginning of the year? We've gone through a trade war. Yeah, it was all priced in. No, but the NASDAQ and S &P, they're just flat. They're basically flat on the last six months. months. Nothing's happened. So nothing. Yeah, it's insane. I mean, it blows my mind when I look at that year to date number.

2:19:22And I just think of all of the things that have happened, all of the doge stuff, which people have already forgotten about the cuts, all the uncertainty with regards to the budget. Obviously, the tariffs in the beginning of April, all of which is basically unresolved, aren't really any deals. And the 90 day deadlines are like coming pretty close. Then obviously, the escalation of war in the Middle East. I mean, people have been talking about a possible bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities for decades, I think. So the fact that we've gotten all that in 2025, either it was all priced in or AI is just such a powerful driver of everything right now that that's actually just the story that nothing can slow the AI boom.

2:20:04Well, it's interesting. In all the time that you've been reporting on all this good stuff, has there ever been a period of this much overall stability yet max volatility in the interim? The metric I want to track is number of emergency Joe Weisenthal podcasts. So the number of times that Joe Weisenthal is getting called to appear on TV. That's the new pizza tracker. That's the new metric. We did like 25 episodes in April. And someone made a joke. And I hate the fact that they were correct about this. They're like, oh, we must be near a bottom because the Odd Lots hosts are saying the exact timestamp of when they start the recording.

2:20:42It's like, we are recording this at 1015 on Tuesday. Yeah, they bottom ticked April 8th. Yeah, yeah. And so I was like, shoot, like they really have us dead to sights here. But yes, and one day there will be a prediction market on how many Odd Lots episodes that we do in a month. And that will be a useful derivative to understand some slice of the rest of the picture. Well, it's just interesting how many different. Someone at Jane Street will be making that trade. It's interesting how many different groups benefit from the volatility. So media benefits from volatility because people are going to open CNN.com or the app and be like, what is going on?

2:21:16What did Trump say on true social benefits from volatility? Even Trump benefits because he can say, I tried to do the tariffs and then I had to roll them back a little bit, but I'm still the pro tariff guy or something. And then Wall Street is like, if you can make 20 % one day and ride down a drawdown. I was telling my hedge fund buddy, it's a bull market in the VIX. Yeah, it really is. Go long vol. Like, this is the time because he was kind of like, yeah, the market's kind of up and down and not that good. I was like, it's a great time to be volatility. It's a great time to be in the news business.

2:21:48And we are long volatility in the news business. We are. It's a great time to be in the news business. Yeah. We had one slow news day here. We had our first like, we were like, whoa, it's a slow news day. And we didn't really realize like what that was like. And then fortunately, it hasn't happened since. It's the worst. It's the worst, right? Yeah, and it feels like monitoring the situation has become a national pastime. It has. It really is. It really is. It's basically a new kind of hobby. I've been monitoring the situation my whole career. You know, like I get up. I used to get up. I know, but now everyday Americans can just.

2:22:18Yeah, you're a professional. Yeah, I got to find a new source of edge now that we're all situation monitoring. Yeah, and then the other thing, you know, with Tesla, the funny thing is, you know, we didn't even talk about the, you know. Robo-taxing? No, just the Trump-Elon blow up. Oh, yeah. That going over and then Tesla is still down year to date 13%. But given what's actually happening with the car business and then the Elon Trump blow up, you would think you'd be bigger than that, right? Oh, well. There's something to be said. You know, the alternative view of this is, yes, it is a great time for volatility and there's plenty to trade.

2:22:55It's also been a good time for the sort of buy and hold people who actually have a life. because they, you know, it's like, oh, make your investments and maybe check in once a year or every six months. Unfortunately, those people who are very obnoxious when they say that, because I certainly don't do that, but it's very obnoxious when people say that. Unfortunately, they keep getting vindicated that actually you should just have a life and not check in on the market every five minutes. Unfortunately, they're right. And that is sort of also the weird part, which is that they keep the passive bros are still doing well.

2:23:28I mean, you probably saw the Lakers,$10 billion, biggest sports franchise ever. But if you look at the rate of return over the 30-year period, it just didn't quite be just the average of the S &P. That's the thing. Just buying and holding the S &P and literally do nothing continues to be such an insanely good. People would all – I sometimes wonder. I've asked this question on the podcast. Why does the financial industry exist? The answer is not entirely obvious to me. because there's all the, no, for real, like because there's all these people and all they do is spend all this time learning the minutia of every stock, this or that or whatever.

2:24:03And yet you could do just fine. In fact, better than fine. Some incredible returns by essentially doing none of that. It's still not obvious to me why any of us really have anything to talk about. It was a simulation created for Jane Street to win at. Yeah. And just dominate. Yeah, exactly right. Are you getting, who do you think is really smart on trying to understand the impact of autonomous vehicles, robo-taxis. We are in this interesting dynamic. We saw the Austin rollout. Was it Sunday? I think it was Monday morning we had a guy call into the show from a robo-taxi. Seems to be working in a limited area.

2:24:36And then the potential there, Waymo's vehicles are$200 ,000. They're tele-operated today. We don't really know what's going on under the hood at Tesla, but still it just feels like something that can have this enormous impact on different aspects of the economy I mean, it doesn't feel like it. It just feels like, I would say, like, autonomous vehicles seems like one of those things. I was comparing it a little bit to the state of the mobile internet in, like, 2004, right? Where, like, we all sort of knew that it was coming, but it was kind of janky. And remember, you know, oh, do you get access to 3G here or what?

2:25:13Remember, there used to be competing standards. Oh, yeah. We didn't really know. And it was sort of a bad. Now, the user experience going into Waymo is obviously a religious experience. But it's patching. You don't know. And can you get to X or Y? But then it changed the world. Right. So then fast forward 10 years later from 2005 to, say, 2015. And it's clear that the mobile Internet literally just changed the entire world in a way that will never be the same. I think that's the same with AVs where it's like, OK, it's interesting what they're doing in San Francisco. That's interesting. OK, Austin.

2:25:44And then in a few years from now, we're going to have to just completely rethink how cities are structured because of autonomous vehicles. it feels like actually for as much hype as they're getting, they probably should be getting more. Cause in my mind, they could like potentially rethink everything about how we structure a city or how we do commutes or how far out from your job you're willing to live. If you're able to like be on your phone the entire time of the drive. So bigger, I think it's going to be almost a bigger deal than people currently appreciate, even with all the hype it's getting.

2:26:13Last question from my side, we've seen Meta making some crazy talent acquisition deals, you know, spending, being willing to spend$100 million for somebody that will never have a public face, right? You know, a researcher all the way up to billions of dollars for individual talent. Is there much precedent for that? Have hedge fund deals gotten into the billion dollar territory at any point we've heard about? So, you do. Yeah, there are. You know, it's actually interesting. To my mind, Emily Sundberg, who you've had on the show before, had a really interesting thing talk about the media and how media is becoming like sports where individuals who have a big name are signing these big deals or leaving their firms and going independent, et cetera.

2:26:56It feels like this is going to be the story of all industries, right? So whether we're talking about hedge funds, whether we're talking about AI researcher, whether we're talking about journalists, et cetera, where there's just going to be this even further extreme bifurcation where individual talent is just going to get paid so much because they can accrue so much value. It feels like that is the story of our time. The question is, what industry isn't that happening? What industry isn't that happening? Well, Tim Cook can't even crack 75 million a year. Poor Tim. Poor Tim. We talk about this all the time.

2:27:32Well, it's a good time to be in the news business then. It's a good time to be. It's a great time. It's a great time. And thanks for joining. Anytime. Anytime. This is always so much fun. Some of my favorite minutes on the show. It's the best. Thank you so much. I love it. We'll talk soon. Talk soon, Joe. Bye. If you're looking to get it on the action in the finance world, which maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, maybe you just want to go long the S &P 500, get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Think I'm multi-asset investing. You better take it seriously. Industry-leading yield.

2:27:57They're trusted by millions. And next up, we have Alex Atala from Open Router on the show, talking about foundation models, who's using what. How you doing, Alex? Great to meet you in person. You might not know this. We went through the same YC batch, YC Winter 16. Which company? Lucy. Lucy Nicotine. Yeah. Similar to what you were building back then. It makes sense. But I remember seeing your pitch. And I remember everyone kind of thinking like, oh, that'll never be a thing. Like most YC things. Is that the same company or different company? That was the previous company. Okay, cool. OpenSea. That was OpenSea.

2:28:32Which became the dominant NFT marketplace and absolutely took over the world. How did I miss that? Yeah. And so it's fantastic. You can tell how much research we do on best appearances. is. It's great to have you on, Alex. It's great to be here. Thanks for hosting me. Yeah. Why don't you kick us off with, I'm interested in the introduction on OpenRouter, but specifically the business model, because it's a fascinating place to sit in the AI infrastructure stack. And I can imagine a bunch of ways value will accrue. But how are you either currently are planning to make money? Yeah. So we're, you can kind of think of us as a control plane for language models, like a Stripe meets Cloudflare for language models.

2:29:17So like both of those companies, we orchestrate and route traffic to the best GPU hosts for you based on the type of model that you want, your price preferences, your performance needs, where you are in the world. and so it's kind of like a one-stop shop for all the models where you get like the most models the best prices best performance highest uptime a lot of these models are down a lot of the time so load balancing is just needed intelligence goes through like intelligence brownouts yeah like Karpavi's been saying and uh and so you need you need some way of of keeping the utility lit up. A lot of apps will just rely on 100 % available intelligence.

2:30:04So users pay us directly. We sometimes do volume with different providers so that we can get good volume economics on the supply side. And we kind of make money mostly there. Talk to me about what Microsoft is doing in the category. Sachin Nadella at Build was talking about something around model routing, and they also have this unique deal with OpenAI, where it seems like they will be able to hold on potentially to that as an API on the cloud infrastructure side. And we might not see OpenAI, GPT-4, CPT-4.5 vended through, say, AWS or GCP. how is that relationship or do you sit on top of all of that are you kind of indifferent to it or or how or how is it playing out there yeah so unlike most other resources and software ai is pretty unique it's it's a battleground with lines being drawn around the models and and the models are just not available in all clouds like gemini is only available in google cloud obviously and then you have anthropic which is available in aws and google cloud but not azure and then you have grok which is available in azure and directly from x but not google cloud and like nobody can keep this these things in like on the top of their head and no one can track them we track them and we sort of allow you to like orchestrate across all of the clouds sure um so so that you can get all the models in one place.

2:31:45So I see this continuing, where basically the war draws these lines around the models and no one cloud will have them all. Yeah, what companies should I understand in order to understand this business? I feel like if I was throwing something out, I would say Snowflake, but I don't know if that's at all relevant, so feel free to steer me in a different direction. but I'm interested in this idea of a company that sits across the hyperscalers and does not necessarily just load balancing, but actually you mentioned Cloudflare, but it feels like Cloudflare has a lot of their own infrastructure, their own data centers.

2:32:27I'm interested in a company that has built a large, durable business on top of GCP, Azure, AWS, et cetera.

2:32:37Yeah, good question. I don't know of an exact analogy that fits that. We're a bit of a unique player. But Cloudflare, I mean, started as only a layer on top of all the clouds. Okay. It was like a plug-and-play safety net to prevent you from, like, denial-of-service attacks and to turn on, like, security for, like, any web app. And Open Router started in a different way, like as a way of just amplifying supply and choice for people. But in a similar fashion, we add like more complexity to the compute layer that we provide before it hits the clouds themselves. Are there things that you're, I want to know about the different models, capabilities, what the different labs are working on.

2:33:34And I'm wondering if there's a, like, what are the important design criteria or what do you need to think through if you are doing this type of load balancing? Like, I'm imagining if I'm serving an app that's built primarily on, let's call it Claude, and then all of a sudden it fails and there's a brownout and it rolls over to Grok, and all of a sudden, like, I'm now in, like, the anti-woke world and, like, the flavor of the model has changed. I could probably do some prompt engineering to kind of get them on to a similar standard or Looking at if I'm using a million token context window With Gemini and then I'm falling over to something with a hundred thousand Token context window I might need to do some chunking then and so what on the engineering side are you seeing people doing either with prompt engineering or Just throwing a for loop around something to kind of actually make the different products identical from an end user perspective?

2:34:34So we, we very rarely see people fall back to a completely different model. Okay. Usually the load balancing that we do is for a specific model. Got it. We kind of orchestrate between like between two and sometimes 20 different providers for different vendors of those. That makes sense. Right. But the second half of the question that you asked is much more interesting to us because there are, even for one model, there are providers that provide all different kinds of context lengths, max output constraints, features. Some support tool calling, some don't. Some support structured outputs with a JSON schema allowed.

2:35:17Some only allow you to output a JSON object, but no schema is allowed. It's like a really crazy Wild West that we're just trying to tame in one spot. So we have, I would say, the fundamentals live with a lot more to come, which basically just allows you, if you send a really big prompt, then we only send you to the providers that support big prompts. If you want a ton of output, we only send you to a provider that can actually fit that much output in your request. And if you want both of those things and JSON and some crazy features that nobody supports, we can do a heads up that it's not going to go anywhere.

2:35:56Got it. So more to come to help with that. But that is like our bread and butter. That's what we're good for. Can you give me kind of your state of the union on how the different labs are positioned? You know, some people think of Anthropic as the safety focused one. And, you know, it seems like Zuck is kind of in a rebuilding phase with the Llama project. Grok's been showing a lot of promise, maybe not on the cutting edge, but this very interesting stalking horse for the other labs. OpenAI seems to be running away with it on the consumer side, but B2B is a little bit more of a bidding war. So how do you see the market right now?

2:36:34What are you recommending to different entrepreneurs that are building on these services? You guys have probably one of the most interesting data sets in AI, and you publish a lot of it yourself. Some companies opt into sharing their data. So I'm interested to hear even about disconnects between attention that certain companies are getting and maybe valuations and then the realities of usage. Right. So like one of the most popular companies on open router right now is Klein, which is a coding agent. And I'd never actually heard of them. We haven't had them on the show yet. And so that that was kind of a surprise.

2:37:15But but anyways, kind of interested to get your your take on all that at a high level. Yeah, so Klein is, for those who don't know, it's similar to Cursor, but it allows you to bring all open router models to it. And they invest a lot in making all models work really well. Our approach to helping people choose models is kind of a do-it-yourself DIY research approach, for the most part. We have a router that you can use that will pick the model that we think your prompt is best suited for. But right now, what we see most people doing is going to our rankings page or going to the homepage. When you mentioned that Klein is one of the top apps, those are all apps that have opted into being shown publicly.

2:38:08You can just click on one of those apps like Klein, click on right now, and you can see Sonnet 3.7 is the top model this month, followed by Sonnet 4. followed by Gemini 2.5 Flash. As you can just see what users are doing. And in practice, what this means is you're seeing what power users are doing because power users consume exponentially more tokens than everybody else. So the principle here is to let people learn from power users because power users are just investing the most time and money into this. This is why tokens, I think, are a good way of measuring now because it's both a measure of time and money that users are investing into models.

2:38:53So to answer your first question, we generally don't like directly recommend, but we'll like work with some customers and understand their ideas and like recommend models that way. And it's usually very specific, um, based on like the kind of workload, the, you know, the amount that want to spend the, their tolerance for, for performance and speed. Um, but what a lot of people do is they just check our rankings page. They look for apps that are similar. Um, and then they pick the ones that are trending or popular. It makes a ton of sense. Uh, I would love to have you back on when there's another big model release.

2:39:35I'm sure you are an endless source. I mean, I imagine even like hedge funds would reach out to you for like, hey, is this model getting adopted quickly? I'm sure a lot of the data is open source so you can grab it. But this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. We'll have to have you back to chat more about all the different models. Have a good one. We'll talk to you later. Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

2:40:07And breaking news, TVPN will have a few billboards going up in Manhattan very, very soon. And so - Campaign rolling out with AdQuick over the summer. A little summer campaign. First billboard campaign. Well, we have our next guest in the studio, Clem from Conduit. Welcome to the stream. And there's someone with you. Would you mind both introducing yourself? How are you guys doing? I think - You're live. I think we're mixed up here. They're the next guest. They're the next guest. This is the Orca team. I was like, are these guys in the same place? Let's just do it live. We'll flip-flop. You guys are here.

2:40:41Let's go. Let's give it up for the Orca team. Thank you for having us. Thank you. This is the Orca team. We've talked about you multiple times on the show. Goated marketers. Goated marketers. We've both worked in consumer packaged goods. Very excited to talk about the product. Why don't you give us the update? Introduce the company. Introduce yourselves and break us down for how things are going. Yeah. So I'm Michael. This is Nash. We make Orca. It's an energy water. packaged in this. Oh, wow. Stunning. Yeah. We started it because we were solving a problem with energy drinks, which is that they all tasted like candy to us and really sweet.

2:41:15And after drinking them every morning for years, we were like, why can't we just take all the caffeine and put it in water? Because that started us on our journey. Two years ago, it took us a really long time to put it in this can, which we've covered on Twitter and it's gone kind of viral. The Wall Street Journal wrote about us. I think that's how you guys found out about us probably um we launched on amazon finally in march of this year and things have gone a lot better than we anticipated a lot quicker than we anticipated and so now we're in the middle of a fundraise and sort of looking to hit the run running here that's amazing isn't it strange with consumer packaged goods you're like the company's ripping but you're like you're like wait why are we like why does it feel like we're going broke because we didn't buy so much inventory yeah it's uh it's tough yeah getting payment terms from a supplier will be in key give us a quick backstory on making making it i i feel like you people love the packaging and then you've also caught heat for it online for people that are like yourself yeah did you invent this in a cave with a box of scraps yeah a lot of people that have never built anything standing on the shoulders of giants they hate standing on the shoulders of giants yeah we uh from the offset, we knew that the product had to be in clear packaging because we wanted to show the consumer what was inside compared to our competitors.

2:42:29And when we saw the clear cam, we were like, this is it. It's perfect. It's shaped like an energy drink. You can see what's inside. It tells the story of the product right off the bat. And we had started actually teasing it online before we launched and saw that it was going viral. And so when we had all these manufacturing issues and like spent a full year and tons of money and time trying to figure it out that was our north star we knew like if we can if we can figure this out it's the perfect packaging um and yeah yeah so you stayed away from i imagine there were off the shelf clear bottles available from like you know fiji or dasani like there's probably an industrial complex for just clear plastic bottles just regular bottles of water yeah just regular bottles of water uh but you You wanted something that fit the energy drink kind of shape and dimensions.

2:43:23Is that, were you thinking about like, if you get into a convenience store, you need to slot into the same form factor as like Red Bull and Celsius? Because I feel like it's always hard when you come in, we have a really cool square can. You want to innovate, but not too much. Exactly. Yeah. I think a lot of it was just identifying what category, like the category placement from the beginning. And we kind of think of ourselves as creating a new category, which is energy water. and so we were thinking about the packaging we thought that while we knew we wanted it to be clear we thought that a normal water bottle would be too far in the water direction sure a normal can would be too far in the energy direction so this was like the natural perfect middle ground that like nash said just you see it and get what the what the product is yeah you also don't want confusion if somebody picks up it and they think oh this is just a nice refreshing bottle of water like they might people might be okay if like oh it's sparkling but if there's 100 milligrams there was a caffeine in there.

2:44:14You're like, what the hell? Yeah. Talk about the marketing strategy to date. I remember seeing one of your campaigns, which was, this was the guy just reading off the signs, right? Am I right there? Is that a Corbin blue? Not just any guy. Yeah. Yeah. Like that was the wildest campaign. Yeah. Break that down. How'd that come together? Give us all the numbers. What was the result? If you could share like, yeah, anything about that, we'd appreciate that. yeah i think we're just kind of trying to do stuff differently uh from a marketing standpoint and so like when we when we were thinking about the launch video and did research on like what makes a successful launch video it was like very short to the point optimized for conversion whatever and we're like all right like well what would the exact opposite of that be and it would be having Corbin Blue list road signs for nine minutes.

2:45:08So yeah, we're, we're, have you guys won any awards for that yet? Yeah. I feel like this could be like ad week or like some sort of like ad, ad, uh, yeah. Big ad probably hates you guys because you're tearing up the rule book. You know, you're throwing it out. It's great. Similarly on our Amazon page, if you go to our Amazon and just scroll down and stuff like a, like a brand section, it's just a full export exploration of Napoleon's withdrawal from Moscow.

2:45:34we've been meeting with like amazon agencies that we're about to bring on and they're like you know love what you're doing here but maybe not the most optimal like we can this is hilarious wow you don't understand we're we're playing on a different level yeah pull it up this up right now this is great so what so what um what you you guys cooking i mean it's it's like great when you go viral you have a good idea it hits and then the attention fades you kind of just have to figure out how to keep, are you guys like working on building that muscle of, of how do we do this kind of thing multiple times a year?

2:46:04What does that look like? Definitely. And, and a big part of the raise is building revenue. We can scale. So like online advertising. So like you said, we don't have to hope that we go viral every week. Um, and then launching into retail here in Southern California. Uh, speaking of muscle, who's that behind you? Where are you guys? That's such a funny mural we are uh we're in the attic okay our house we've got three roommates Nash lives downstairs I sleep in that bed this is an influencer named Jake Shane we sent influencer gift packages we sent a case of Orca and then like an AI photo of their dad jacked we sent him jacked but he was out of town and so we just kept it we're like we kept it that's great breaking through good good yeah most people think oh yeah I use AI to market and it's like oh you chopped up your b-roll a little bit uh this is a world what were you guys doing before this yeah uh we were both in tech we were we were uh buddies at georgetown yes let's go let's go let's give it up for big tech you said but buddies where georgetown college nice uh amazing but we got to get some here in the studio we've been i mean this is the amount of caffeine i mean we want to We were on the show before you tasted it.

2:47:23Cause I know you're unbiased, but I know that that can play a factor. Now we're biased because we like you guys. He's returning to the fact that, that Matayina Yerba Mate tastes like it was made by someone. Yeah. This is the only, this is the only category of like partner that we don't have exclusives on. We don't. We just, we're connoisseurs of energy. Yeah. Energy. It's kind of like how the economist, the back of the economist is a different high horology, a different watch brand every single edition. Every single show should have a different energy drink percolating through the show. We love it.

2:47:58But thanks so much for coming on, guys. We will talk to you soon. Yeah, good luck with the raise. Good luck with the fundraise. Good luck with distribution. Hopefully see you guys around LA sometime. Yeah, we'll see you soon. Thanks, guys. Later. Bye. We are working on bringing on more people, but let's go to the timeline. And let's do some ads. Let's tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation i have the funniest story please this is 100 the truth my first thought this morning was you reading the wander at really it's so drilled into my brain incredibly that i just woke up and i and i and my first thoughts was find your happy place book a wander with hotel great amenities, top-to-cleaning.

2:48:47It really runs in my dreams at this point because I say it so fast. I was talking to Yannick over at public.com and he was like, no one can read ad reads faster than John because I read them really, really fast now. I was like, show me a man who says that they skip the TVPN ad reads and I'll show you a liar. It's impossible. I think it's impossible. By the time you get to your phone, it could be across the room. If you have your finger on the trigger, I will be done before the finger hits the glass. And then you skip real content. And then you skip real content. And you lose. Like, speaking of real content, NVIDIA hit an all-time high.

2:49:24Let's hear it for NVIDIA.

2:49:29The GOAT. He's been to conferences. He's done deals all over the world. He's bringing AI factories to different countries. He's selling GPUs to gamers. He's selling GPUs to foundation model companies. and he's at a new all-time high. We'd love to see it. We wanted to go through the archives. Jensen Wong visited Greg Brockman and brought the first NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen to advance AI computing and humanity. The hype-mogging here is brutal. Oh, yeah, Greg's a big dude, I guess. And then the other news around NVIDIA is that they've launched DGX Lepton Cloud, which now connects Europe's developers to global GPU compute it's kind of like technology win for Europe yeah but but lepton is you know at one lower level abstraction than open router so open routers routing you to all the models but if you have a model you need to serve it on GPUs how can you get that sir how can you get GPU capacity all over the place this is one of the options now and it's a semi analysis story clouds today at GTC Paris Johnson Huang announced djx leptin with the goal of effect to of effectively commoditizing inference compute at global scale this means customers will be able to automatically shift their inference workloads through different clouds while in theory maintaining the same software user interface and experience if djx leptin is successful they have created a standard user experience value and performance across all neocloud which will lead to neoclouds being in a rat race on pricing they will effectively turn near cloud margins into ultra low commodity.

2:51:09You know, you know, you know, you know how it's unclear. I mean, analysis is, you know how it's handwritten. Yeah. There's always he throws in some. Oh, yeah. Dramatical errors. Let you know that it's handcrafted. Yeah. I mean, obviously we're seeing with the Neo clouds a lot of different strategies around. Are they going after energy or are they going after stranded energy like what Crusoe does? Or are they really focused on just building capacity faster? And so, yes, DGX Lepton is trying to be the aggregator of supply and then be the front door. But this is a story that is evolving. The Wall Street Journal has some story here covering it, saying it's ruffling tech giants.

2:51:48NVIDIA is ruffling the tech giants with move into cloud computing. Things are getting awkward. We need a feather ruffling sound effect. Yes, ruffle ruffle. This will do in the meantime. For cloud incumbents as the AI chip giant eyes their turf. Cloud computing generates big profits for Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Google. We know this from AWS, Azure, and GCP. Now that cash cow faces a nascent threat with the rise of artificial intelligence cloud specialists and a new industry power broker, NVIDIA. AI chip maker NVIDIA launched its own cloud computing service two years ago called DGX Cloud, but they've been improving it.

2:52:26It has also nurtured upstarts competing with the big cloud companies and investing in AI cloud players, CoreWeave and Lambda. We've had Lambda on the show. We've had Chase from Crusoe on the show. Got to get CoreWeave on the show at some point. Maybe all of them at once for a big NeoCloud day. That'd be fun. These moves have yet to make an enormous dent, but a competitive shift is easy to imagine. If computing demand continues to shift toward AI and NVIDIA remains the sector's principal arms dealer. Dylan's also saying AMD is making big moves and winning over the NeoCloud ecosystem through their balance sheet.

2:52:58At the same time, NVIDIA is alienating many with DJX Leptin. MI355 is great performance per TCO against HGX B200. But it is not rack scale unlike GB200. Yeah, he's kind of summarizing four different stories there. But the AMD thing is interesting because if AMD says, hey, we just make the chips. And NVIDIA is over there like, yeah, we'll sell you the chips. But we're also going to try and beat you at your own game. Well, then maybe as a cloud provider, as a NeoCloud, you want to start figuring out how to get on AMD before NVIDIA eats your lunch in the actual cloud provision, right? At the same time, AWS, GCP, there's a ton of other services.

2:53:40They all have their own inference chips, too. And so NVIDIA is getting squeezed by the TPU. And so GCP, Google has the TPU that competes with the H200, right? And that's why there's a big model context from Google. And then now NVIDIA is going and saying, hey, we got a GCP competitor in many ways. And so those businesses are limited by their narrow focus on AI computing, referring to the NeoClouds. And they pale in comparison to the more than$107 billion in sales Amazon's market-leading cloud business generated last year. Let's hear it for Amazon generating$107 billion in sales for AWS. Let's hit the gong.

2:54:20Hit the gong. Well, we have our guest in the studio. We have our next guest, Nikuj, with a major trade deal. Major trade deal. Coming on. Let's hear it. TBPN to discuss. It's great to finally have you. I've been wanting to have you on the show for months. We've printed your posts. We've reacted to your posts. And now you're finally here. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself, though? Thank you so much for having me. It's been my claim to fame as being your first under 100 followers. What? And following your journey. Let's go. Yeah. And so it's been an honor.

2:54:58I'm Nikunj, I spent 10 years building startups, everything from logistics, networking hardware, real estate and I just joined a new fund. Joined this fund called FPV Ventures with two GPs, Wes Chan and Pega, who are the two gps here um and yeah very excited to be here uh after you know dipping into my investing foray at costa ventures for a year so very cool what does fpv stand for and what is your focus at the fund yeah so fpv stands for founder's point of view i think that's what kind of like really drew me into joining this fund um we mostly just care about like what the founders are doing um with generalist fund.

2:55:43We just raised our fund to$525 million just closed a few months ago. And then we have a, thank you, we have a billion dollars. That's a lot of money. That's great. Yeah. And it's a generalist fund, which means like, you know, and they put the money, we put the money where our mouths are. We've done everything from biotech to all the way to consumer fintech, to rag infrastructure, to anything you can kind of think of. And I think, I think as I was kind of figuring out what I want to do next, the world is very exciting and kind of like both atoms and bits, AI is affecting kind of every small detail and, you know, excited to be here and be a small part of the team.

2:56:22Yeah, I love a typical generalist fund says, yeah, we're generalists. We invest in enterprise software and AI, usually at the intersection. I mean, speaking of that, do you think the ship has sailed for the investments in the foundation model companies? Is the game over and now we're in the vertical AI, application layer AI, consumer AI? Is that where the most interesting companies are getting started and scaled today? I think as the large models are kind of stabilizing, like a lot of the value is in the application layer because now you can kind of build on top of that. A lot of the infrastructure has been built.

2:57:01And so now every company, every enterprise is kind of being like, okay, we can automate large percentages of work that can't be done. Do I think like a large model is kind of the ship has sailed? Unless you have like new, completely new architectures, I do think so. Like if you're just building on the transformer side, it's hard for me to be excited given the data. And from a money perspective too, you're just kind of outbid. But I'm seeing like a lot of small models kind of come up and more application focused models come up. I used to work a company called Meter. I know you had Anil on the podcast a couple of days ago.

2:57:36Tejas raised a large round. Part of one is to build a networking model, which they control the infrastructure for, and they're partnering very closely with Microsoft. That kind of data is not available anywhere else, right? You can't get packet data. And so I get more and more excited about that. Is there like unique data that you're capturing? And then can you translate that to efficiency? see, I think that's where bets can still be placed and you can see outsized value. Otherwise, I think on the large model side, it seems a little bit hard unless there's a brand new architecture. And I'm really excited.

2:58:09I've been reading technical papers trying to figure out, is there a new architecture? Is there a new transformer-like model that will come up? Totally. How do you think about the convergence of every company into being an app builder? You highlighted, I think, in a post sometime in the last 24 hours. Now you have Replit, Bolt, Figma, Lovable. There's a bunch of different players. Basically, if a big company is doing a launch around AI, you can guess that maybe there's a 50 % chance that it'll be some type of prompt-based software builder. Do you think a lot of that makes sense in a lot of different contexts, but at the same time, it feels like there's some FOMO element.

2:58:55companies seeing this tremendous growth from some new players and saying, maybe we should have a horse in that race. But how are you looking at that market? Yeah, I mean, Airtable announced theirs as well. If you look at Retool, they announced theirs as well a week ago. Our portfolio company, Canva, has won. I think there's some companies that are doing it for defense because they're seeing the replets and the bolts kind of coming at it and taking a lot of their business away, especially if you have, like, you know, you can build internal tools, then, like, why would you use? And so I think some of it is coming from defense, but some of them are coming from offense because they see that they can go deeper into the workflows.

2:59:35From my perspective, a lot of it is for context also, right? Like, if you're able to pull in context from all these different sources, it increases your attention. You can have people do more things on there. It makes it easier for you to highlight them in one place. And I think we I think we all agree we're in the era of bundling. More and more companies, like more and more enterprise want like one solution. They don't want to pay for like five different solutions. And so you're able to see all of that kind of combined there. It is wildly interesting to see on the sidelines. I have no predictions on kind of how it goes.

3:00:07The rise of like Lovable, Replit, and Bolt all doing such insane revenue numbers is probably like what's causing some people to play defense. but it just means software is just going to keep growing and growing and spend on software is just going to go parabolic in the next five years. Totally. How do you think about how are you looking at application layer opportunities in the context of companies like OpenAI just want you know having this tremendous appetite for data. We talked about on the show, Clue Lee has this sort of interesting experience of this sort of being able to get the power of LLMs passively, right?

3:00:46Just sort of in an interview or putting our intern on Clue Lee so he can answer random questions that we have. That feels like something that OpenAI will eventually, if it works, they'll want to roll it out. how do you think of that, the kind of competitive dynamic between kind of upstart application layer companies and some of these bigger labs? I think it's the question, like kind of like every decade, you can pick up dominant incumbent and ask what if X does this. So like, you know, everybody, the difference this time, though, is the pace is just staggering. Like in the last few months, OpenAI has launched like a meeting with no recording notes and pulling in context.

3:01:30And so do think like building a horizontal and vertical at the same time with deep workflows it's just hard it's like how many how many things can you do and then the interface becomes like a jumbled mess and then how do you kind of do that and so there is a lot of lot of depth in each application each job each vertical there's so much to do i don't think like open ai or a single company can capture all the value open ai is uniquely positioned where they have a dominant consumer company in like chat gpt and also market leading apis but there's claude that has incredible apis for cordjin as well um but yeah i think there's like plenty of depth i do think like companies that are on the edge of productivity or just building small wedges or like features that they don't have the founders who don't have the depth to like think through like how does this go in the next few years i think those as in the past will continue to get like decimated by incumbents.

3:02:27But I still think there's so much value to be had. I mean, it's just it's this the size of the pie is too large for one company to own it. And I'm opening up against that. But I still think there's plenty to do. So how are you thinking about go to market for new AI products, either in consumer or, or B2B? There, it feels like there's multiple strategies right now, you see that cursor chart and it's just, it's aligned directly straight up because they just got to hundreds of millions. Are they at 500 million now or something? 500 million. 500 million ARR. Yeah, we had Amjad from Replodon yesterday going from 10 to 100 in a matter of months.

3:03:08So fast. And then you see the Cluleys of the world and Avi at friend.com did another strategy which was very virality driven. And so there's kind of two strategies that I'm seeing pop up with the new products. One is kind of like build silently, let the product kind of just grow into this behemoth. And then everyone starts talking about it because of the growth. The other is take over the timeline, become popular ahead of growth, and then use that to convert into subscriptions or revenue growth. Are you looking at both types of deals? Do you see one as kind of more of a positive signal than the other?

3:03:47How are you thinking about how the next generation is growing their businesses after they build something? It depends on who they're targeting. I think it is being a media arm of a company is important now. I think it's hard to like get away from the noise unless you are showcasing your product in some way. That's why we're seeing our timeline flooded with launch videos. But that's also getting saturated now. So I think more and more what I've been probing for these bottoms up companies that are trying to go after like the individual is understanding like, hey, where are you spending your time?

3:04:21Are there any channels? If you're just doing yet another Twitter launch video, then maybe that's like, you know, oversaturated. Like, what are other channels? Do you go multi-prong? Are you like, you know, are you doing local events or like local communities where you can kind of own it and just build such a good product that people will do? So virality and PLG has been there for 10 years. It's not new. I think like virality on Twitter is just the newest element of it. And then on the enterprise side, though, and this is one of the reasons I joined FPV, like Pega on our team, she's incredible at really working with the team and understanding like, you know, who's the ICP?

3:04:55What's the org chart looks like? How do you break in? Is this like a bottom-up play in the enterprise side? Are you top-down? Do you need the decision maker? How do you get them in a room? Is this a burning problem? Is this not a burning problem? Where are they like actually evolving? is this in budget? Is this not in budget? I think those are the questions people need to ask. Very few companies like Cursors of the world are able to break through. Cursor grew from the bottom up to the point where enterprises had to come knocking to them and say, hey, can you build us an enterprise plan? I don't think they even had one.

3:05:29But that's more of a rarity. And sometimes I think people take hype on Twitter or just like everything needs to be PLG is the gospel which I don't buy that that's the only way to do business. How are you seeing the PM role evolve? Do you have any predictions or you know one way to make a prediction would just be to kind of identify like what's happening today so I'm curious what you're seeing. Yeah so one I like I never treated my PM role as a PM role. I always took a GM responsibilities wherever I joined so even at Meter I had P &L responsibilities at Open Door like you know growth was my last job there and I tried to take as much P &L responsibility.

3:06:09And I think if you were just like being a product manager and just want to project manage and kind of just like, you know, not do sales or not do marketing or not just kind of like, you know, I'm a product manager and a product owner. I think that job is dead. I think you are going to be out of a job very quickly. I think it's all become a yes and. You kind of have to own multiple things and kind of treat your job as like, hey, I'm going to sell this product. I'm going to figure out what the marketing copy is. I'm going to work with everyone. I do think the role of an orchestrator is what all of us will do.

3:06:39Like, I think more all of us are going to have, we already have, like, you know, I was like playing with Claude Claude yesterday. I had five instances running and I was watching TVPN. I was just like building a call tool. Yeah, Ngunj said like TVPN clips are perfectly timed with like, you know, running basically prompts. This is so bullish for us, yeah. I wrote a long piece on this. I actually think, sorry, it's like tangent, but I actually think entertainment is going to have a massive upswing because what do you do? for 15 minutes. That's why X's numbers are actually through the roof. They don't have any stats from them.

3:07:10But it's like, well, you're having an agent do the work for you. What do you do? You need a dopamine rush. You go to X. Watch TVPN. And so I actually think that's the future. But going back to the PM side, like on the orchestration side, PMs are excellent orchestrators. You kind of have to keep all of these things happening. So I think the PMs who are up-leveling themselves, learning what sales is, trying to figure out what marketing is, doing some of the wide coding prototyping themselves and then being the core orchestrator, I think they'll do phenomenally well. Because I think like most engineers you talk to, most marketers you talk to, they don't want to deal with like people problems.

3:07:44They want like an orchestrator. But if you're like a PM who just wants to hold on to like, I have a PRD and I'm a project manager, the work behind the work is dead. Like that is just going to die a slow death in the next like three to five years. It'll take a while to trickle down to the larger companies. And I'm seeing it in startups. No startup is coming to me and saying like, hey, I want a PM. Everyone's like cracked engineer, cracked marketer, cracked salesperson. That's all they want. Nobody's asking me for like a PM today. At least there are like 50 people. What about pricing? Are non-AI companies getting valuation lifts just by nature of raising at the same time as this AI boom?

3:08:24Are you seeing that when you're kind of looking at opportunities in other categories? i i was the question like are ai native companies like just seeing a massively no no no so it's very clear that like ai native companies are getting this massive valuation just lift yeah do you think that's benefiting sort of non-ai businesses by just nature of investors being like well i just did a seed round at 60 posts my grocery store is making 1.5 profit but with ai could 10x that who knows but yeah yeah i'm just curious like you let's say you look at some company that's doing you know farming focused biotech are they just naturally getting like a slight lift or or maybe maybe it's too anecdotal it really depends i know that's a bullshit answer but like i think it like some of it is kind of like how much data do you have like you know if you were been working on a good example is case text right like case text spent eight years figuring out the perfect case text law and gpt 3.5 came in and they just like skyrocketed and so i think a lot of investors are are trying to look outside of purely ai native mostly to understand are there things are they like built-in brand reputation data reputation things you've done in the past that allow you to then kind of layer ai on top as an accelerant and i think those could be good to go invest in and sometimes help bring in the talent that can help do them um or it's like you know the atoms world, physical world still has a lot of alpha still out there.

3:09:54I think software, as that gets democratized, there's a lot of things happening. That's why in bio and robotics, in manufacturing, supply chain, robots in the field, you're going to see a lot of people, a lot of excitement there because they see that's the next world that's kind of incoming. But the problem is venture is momentum backed. And so as a venture investor, you want to see that inflection points. And sometimes if you're not AI native, one of the hard discussions is like, well, So they're a great company. We're seeing some inflection, but we're not sure yet. And if you're not going to see the inflection, then it's hard to be a venture-backed company today.

3:10:27That's showing up in the Series A that, or in, you know, I don't like the word, but the zombie coins that we're seeing from the last few years. Yeah, totally. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Yep. And thanks for helping get Alex on, who's coming on next. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. And congratulations. I'm super excited for you in the new role. Thank you. Awesome. Come back on soon. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Get bezel.com shop over 25 ,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts and let's bring in our next guest alex Welcome to the stream.

3:11:01How are you doing? Alex? Sorry that I don't get all of it No, yeah, yeah, you're like the most online founder yet for two hours there you Yeah Some regular works. It's a flex leaving you under it um congratulations on the acquisition break break give it give us some quick background on you and super local and then and then the deal um and uh and then i'm sure we'll get into a bunch of stuff yeah i mean i i guess i built super local for a while we built a a bunch of products i mean initially it was just me working on on one thing totally unrelated um but in sort of like the last iteration super local is or is a very personalized map so you can kind of imagine it like Google Maps and Chachuti had a baby with some OG Foursquare vibes sprinkled in.

3:11:50And I mean, that basically means it does three things. Like it has, it automatically maps all the places you've been. So your map just populates without you doing anything. You can also check in, like that's the OG Foursquare part. And then that sort of builds you a persona or like the automatic stuff builds you a persona, like where we understand who you are by the places you go to. Like my map knows that I don't really like Starbucks, but I'd rather go to Monati's in Venice. So it knows like that's my personality. Uh, so when I search for places, it takes that into account. Awesome. How did the four square square deal come about?

3:12:25Had you known the team for awhile? Was it the kind of thing where you were friendly with the CEO and it just made sense at some point? What did that look like? Yeah. I mean, I, I've known them for awhile. Uh, I don't know. Then it just came up and then I thought it was a good idea. Nice. And so you're continuing to scale Superlocal? Are we happy about the acquisition? Are we ringing the bell? Oh, yeah. No, it's like... I was obviously obsessed with Foursquare since I dedicated the last five years of my... There we go. Oh, yeah. Congratulations. Yeah, so how does Superlocal fit into Foursquare's overall strategy going forward?

3:13:05You're continuing to operate it independently? Yeah, I mean, we're just operating exactly like we used to. I mean, that's like the current thing. We're just building what I was building before, but without like the constant fear of potentially always dying as a company. Amazing. What are the business models that work here now? The story of Foursquare was like, it's going to be the next Facebook and it's going to be just an ad network. Then there were stories about targeting for advertising. that seemed like a good model. Obviously you could just pay for the app and subscribe. There's a whole bunch of different business models.

3:13:43What do you think is most promising over the next few years in this category? I mean, I know like they're mainly focused on their B2B stuff. So I don't know as much about like the B2B side. So I'm basically just focused on growing our consumer app. And what do you, yeah, what are you bullish on the consumer side? Because some, I mean, this is happening in the context of AI, like there's a lot of people on the$20 plan for ChatGPT. A lot of people use the free version. Some people are on the$200 plan. Google has a$500 plan. So there's clearly a willingness to spend on consumer AI apps that are just on your phone.

3:14:19At the same time, advertising is undefeated. It's one of the greatest business models ever. And if you can get to scale, that makes a lot of sense. So how do you see this playing out for you? I mean, I feel like PlaySarch actually has maybe like some of the easier monetization in general, Cause like if we have like hotel search, things like that, there's like pretty good ways to make money from like Expedia by booking people out. Uh, I mean, we, we've done stuff with subscriptions and it's actually done quite well. But that was actually before we had any AI search things in it. It always did rather well, just your like little gamification features.

3:14:52So I know that'd be a cool thing to scale. Yeah. Things like that. I think it's kind of like, How are you thinking about the cost side of the business? I feel like the reason that we wound up in the paradigm of like$20 chat GPT subscriptions is because the GPUs are on fire. And we talked to George Hotson. He was like, OpenAI is losing money on me because inference cost is actually material as opposed to, you know, database queries, which are essentially free, you know, for an individual user. Has your AI bill ever been stressful? No, not really. But I guess it's also another advantage of place search.

3:15:28It's not like you need a new place every day. So it's like, I would never like your app technically is like a just purely like dau app i feel like it's probably like weekly monthly whenever you actually need a place and that's that's not that frequent i mean i think it depends on like the city like i'm sure in new york city people look for places more than la things like that but foursquare is a pretty famous new york company are you moving out there stay are you in la now oh no i'm gonna go to san francisco what are you gonna do without air one i know i even have my air one water right here from this morning There we go.

3:16:02He's committed. Committed. I would always run into him when I lived in Venice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see him all the time. That's awesome, dude. Well, congratulations. Congrats. And yeah, I want to see like over time the feature on Super Locals. Like you basically can like remove the fog from the world. Yes. So you can basically see like how, like a video game basically. I know the guy who posted that, Aiden. He posted that original viral image that went super viral of the fog of war on Google Maps. and people were talking about building it. Yeah, we had it before that actually. You did? That was a super random feature we built.

3:16:37No way. We were like at Butcher's Daughters and one of our engineers brought up. He just made it over the weekend and I just crushed it. That's amazing. I expected it. I did really well. I love that. Yeah, bringing in like almost a little bit of like the wonder of Pokemon Go and kind of IRL virtual experiences. Like that's really cool. It's actually crazy how little the map would change because we leave home, go to the gym, get breakfast, go to the studio, go home. Let's just do that over and over and over. Just the popcorn is just like the pipe on the one freeway that we go on and come right back.

3:17:14Awesome. Well, thank you for joining Alex. Congratulations and hope to have you on again soon. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. The rest of the day. Cheers. How did you sleep last night? I put up decent numbers. I think I might have you beaten. I'm up from yesterday. Remember yesterday was an 82 for me. today? 87. I did terribly. Get that Ashton Hall sound effect ready. 87 for John. I did terribly. 93 % quality. 81 % consistency. Six hours and 51 minutes. How'd you do? Give us the number. Don't hide it. I got a 67. Well, it hasn't showed today. I thought you put up a great show. I didn't let it get in the way.

3:17:55That's good. It was funny this morning because my son decided at 4 a.m. that sleeping was over, basically got in bed. But then the issue is my side of the bed was heating up as like the heat alarm clock, which is just once you use it, you can't go back. Go to 8sleep.com, use code TBPN. But he started realizing that my side of the bed was just like really warm. Oh, cozy. Yeah. And so he just like kicked me off the bed until I was He's like, okay. I told you my four-year-old, I had to text Mateo, the CEO of 8Sleep. My four-year-old has demanded 8Sleep. I'm not kidding. And, you know, hopefully there's news to share there soon.

3:18:37But I might get him a big one and just wrap it around the edges because he's a huge fan of it. And he's very excited. He wants a third zone in the middle because he says, that's where I sleep. We're like, nobody. That's not where you sleep. Well, I have a post to pull up. Yeah, which we close out with. So this is a post from Poole Tay, the U.S. Director of Federal Housing. He said, after significant studying and keeping in line with President Trump's vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage.

3:19:16No way. And there is a great post here, if we can get this pulled up, guys. You've been stacking sats. Rob Poe says these mortgages are solely collateralized on fart coin. That will happen. That will happen. I'm sure they will value meme coins slightly differently than the majors. Anyways, super fun show today. I think that's pretty much it. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you're listening there, put an ad for your business in the review. We'll read it on the show. And thank you so much for watching. Have a beautiful afternoon and evening.

3:20:03We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Bye. Cheers.