What’s REALLY going on with those “ads” in ChatGPT | E2220

24:20And you can make that based upon previous searches. So that is what I think will be the winning one. This is called an interstitial in the business. So a lot of times you'll see websites. Now you click on a link and before it lets you go to the link, it shows you a survey or like a box and then you have to hit the X or skip. Those kind of interstitials force you to just consider the advertiser for a microsecond or in, I guess, YouTube's case, it counts down from five seconds. That's what's coming, folks. And why not? If you can get deep research for free, and it takes a couple of minutes anyway, it's kind of a win-win-win.

24:53The advertiser's not putting you out because you're getting the deep research for free. They're going to make a nickel or a penny from Claude. They're going to be able to charge for that. et cetera. So I also think that the consumers are willing to take such an insane ad load in general. Like if you think about the ad mix on professional sports, on Amazon's e-commerce marketplace, on YouTube streaming service, people take a lot of ads and they still use the product. So a lot of money on the floor there. Next up on the docket, we're going to talk about Warner Brothers Discovery, covered it on Friday.

25:22A lot of breaking news. I asked our dear friend Lon Harris, editorial director here at Launch to join us. Lon, where are you at? I'm right here. This is great. The deal's closed as we, it looks like Netflix won and the deal's over. Everybody's very happy about it. The people who competed all said, Hey, great competition. You won. I congratulate you on the win and Mazel Tov. Good luck. We've moved the Stranger Things kids into the water tower next to the Animaniacs. We're all done. Everything is, no, Alex didn't get that one. See the Animaniacs on that old cartoon show, Alex, they lived in the WB water tower in the studio.

26:00So I'm joking. Just old enough to recall Animaniacs, but I wasn't allowed to watch a lot of TV growing up. It was more Jesus. I'm joking that now Netflix is going to jam the Stranger Things kids in there with the Animaniacs because they're owned by the same guy. That might not work out because President Trump has weighed in. Yes, there's there's a lot of resistance going on. I mean, obviously, from the public. There was a lot of outcry. People are very worried. They're not going to be able to see their WB movies in theaters anymore. Their Netflix is going to cancel theatrical distribution for all time.

26:32But it seems that some of these concerns are being shared by our wonderful, terrific, amazing, praiseworthy American president. HOTUS has jumped into the ring and said that he could share some of these antitrust concerns. Here's the quote. I have a lot of respect for him. I think he's talking about Ted Sarandos. I have a lot of respect for him. He's a great person. He's done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies and other things. But it is a big market share. There's no question about it. It could be a problem. And then another quote, they have a very big market share. And when they have Warner Brothers, that share goes up a lot.

27:05I'll be involved in the decision. That's the key part of the takeaway. He said that? Trump said specifically, I'll be involved in the decision. So he's putting himself in the middle of this negotiation. A lot of people are reading that as very favorable to Paramount because, of course, the Ellison family sort of aligned themselves with Donald Trump. So people are saying if he's going to play favorites, he may just throw this to the Ellisons over at Paramount. However, however, if things weren't complicated enough, there's also been some drama over the weekend between our president and the people of Paramount.

27:42He's not happy with them over a 60 Minutes segment that aired. He feels like the real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ. They had Marjorie Taylor Greene on 60 Minutes. Trump did not like that. So he's saying, but he's saying even the real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ traitor, Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was the new ownership of 60 Minutes. Paramount would allow a show like this to air. All caps. They are no better than the old ownership who just paid me millions of dollars for fake reporting about your favorite president. me since they bought it 60 minutes has actually gotten worse oh well far worse things can happen so so now chaos i mean is trump going to side with netflix who he's praising is a great company you forgot you forgot the critical last thing for jason to respond to paramount also today jason launched a 30 per share all cash offer for the whole company not just the part that netflix wants to buy so we have a hostile bid i was gonna get oh they're offering a lot more money is it a lot difference in the deals, if you count.

28:45It is more money. It is more money. And they're willing to buy the cable assets. Correct. Here's the quote from Ellison. He told CNBC, we are offering shareholders$17.6 billion more cash than the deal they currently have signed up with Netflix. And we believe when they see what is currently on our offer, then that's what they'll vote for. And then, of course, they're also suggesting Paramount still believes they will have an easier time getting through these regulatory hurdles than Netflix will because their businesses are more aligned and less directly competitive. Paramount Plus isn't the chief rival for Netflix the way HBO Max is.

29:24So that's kind of the overall argument. Got so much to unpack here. I know. To bring it all into the numbers, the Paramount offer,$108.4 billion for all of WVD. The Netflix offer,$82.7 billion just for the Warner Brothers film and TV studio. And those are both enterprise valuations, not - All right. So number one, I'm an idiot because I J-traded Warner Brothers, lost a little bit of money, then sold it to bank the loss last year so that I could offset it against some gains I had. And I missed the Hail Mary and it would have been, I think, a double up for me at the current share price. Could have 2X'd in three years, but I don't invest in companies for Hail Mary outcomes.

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30:41So this feedback doesn't just sit in some email or messaging thread, but it actually helps keep your team moving the ball forward. Find out why Canva, Notion, and Perplexity are already using Interpret to stay on top of what they need to fix or build next. So if you're ready to turn feedback chaos into customer intelligence, head to interpret.com slash twist to book a demo and see it in action. That's E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T.com slash twist. Putting me aside, there is a concept here of an auction. And what should happen next is there should be an auction. And the auction should go to, stick with me here, fellas, because it's going to get complex.

31:24The highest bidder, By definition, that means the person who puts the biggest number up. So we've had a bunch of this back and forth. I'm tired of this story. And this is all meaningless. It's meaningful to people who work in Hollywood who are directly impacted. I get it. But the truth is, you are all rearranging a bunch of deck chairs on the Titanic. Thank you. Or, you know, insert another analogy here, because total minutes on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, dwarf all of this nonsense. This is a bunch of rich people trading magazines 20 years ago. This is a bunch of rich nepo babies. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

32:07I mean, when I say nepo babies, what I mean is people I'm extremely jealous of because I had to build this goddamn chip stack. If I could have started with a$100 billion, if I started with a$100 million chip stack like Trump or this Ellison kid, man, I would be a trillionaire. You weren't playing with Oracle's bankroll. Anyway, I'm extremely jealous of the chip stacks of Nepo babies. But what I will say for the Nepo baby crowd is like, sure, this is exactly what happened. The rich widows, the Nepo babies, they all love to bid on the previous shiny objects. They love to own the Atlantic. They want to buy the Washington Post.

32:50Actually, Bezos bought that, but you get my point. They love to buy the famous restaurant, the famous movie studio. They're always looking in the rearview mirror. Why? We're all status-seeking creatures. Some of us seek status by being blue-collar hard workers who make it, like myself. Other ones are like, I'm going to go buy my daddy's or my mommy's love by buying the thing they love. That's what's happening here, folks. I hate to get all Freudian on you. I do think there's one element we're overlooking, which is Netflix is a much healthier company in 2025. Paramount can make this deal, but they're basically just putting themselves in a very, very deep hole of debt, taking this money from, you know, sovereign wealth funds and Red Point Capital, anywhere they could get it.

33:36whereas Netflix, I mean, they are also taking on loans and they've got banks on board to help them, but they're a company that can afford to just sort of...

33:48Exactly. So I do think that might be part of it. If you were Warner Brothers and you were looking for who can support the long-term health of this TV and film studio, I do think there's an argument for Netflix over Paramount, which is just going to end up probably scrapping everything and selling it off for parts anyway. Here's what I'm going to say. From now on, there should be a 60-day pre-vetting approval process for antitrust. This is when I'm President Jason, and I run for president. I like it. I'm going to lean a con this. And what I'm going to say is, from now on, we're offering for the low, low price of$25 million dollars, your ability to get your deals pre-vetted.

34:36So if you are Google and you want to buy YouTube, if you're Adobe and you want to buy Figma, if you're Adobe and you want to sell Photoshop, if you're Google and you want to sell YouTube, we will tell you who is going to trigger an antitrust deep review and who is not. And we are going to make it easier for these transactions to go through. So you don't need breakup fees. You just need to pay the government to put people on it. And then what we'll do with the$25 million is we'll hire four independent assessors of this who will write four reports for$5 million each. We'll pull them from a pool of 50 possible intelligent people.

35:18We'll collate that. We'll share it with the public because it's got to be in the public's best interest. And Ernst & Young and McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and whoever wants to write these reports can write really thorough reports of what they predict will be in the best interest of consumers. This is a great idea. This is like it's TSA pre-check, but for M &A deals. Yes. Yes. I'm creating clear, clear your deal. TSA pre-check for your deal. Now, what this will do is reduce drama and then it will take out the favoritism because the decision will be based upon a collection of reports by really intelligent people and based on a very simple test.

35:55What will be in the best interest of consumers and competition? That's it. That's it. And some smart person, McKinsey, might say, you know what? When comparing the viewership of this to YouTube, TikTok, and you do the full minutes consumed by generations, they'll say, listen, when these boomers are gone and these Gen Xers are gone, it's not going to look good for these companies. Like, this is not where the competition is. Here's where minutes are being spent. Okay, so that fixes the regulatory thing, which, and we're gonna have an auction. And the auction will have terms to it. It'll go from five bidders to best three bidders to best two.

36:32And we're gonna run an auction process. Winner wins, that's it. Who runs the auction in this model? On this model, you would hire Allen & Company or some bank to run the auction on behalf of - Catalyst or whatever. Okay, you were like, we're gonna have intelligent people, these five, and then you started listing off Ernst & Young and McKinsey and that's where you lost me. I mean, that's giving consultants way too much credit. I just wanted to make a mean college about them. No, no, no. These consultants are actually very good at these kinds of things. This is something where they do a great job because they can look historically and they know inside these businesses really well.

37:06Like they understand the nuances of these existing businesses. Where McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group might be, have a more challenging time is what we do in founder land. Like, hey, we're going to create this disruptive a thing called Robinhood and it's going to, you know, destroy all these, you know, trading companies. They'd be like, wait a second, we don't have the data on that because it doesn't exist. You know, that's where venture capitalists have an advantage. They actually have an advantage on venture capitalists and folks like private equity people do because they understand existing assets so well because they probably have worked with them or in them.

37:37So somebody like BCG has probably been inside of Disney doing 27 different projects in the last 10 years. they've spent they've done 15 projects for Netflix they understand those kind of mechanics so that's where they would actually do a pretty good job and then you could have futurists you could say hey I'm gonna hire Kevin Kelly a futurist and give him and his consulting group a million dollars to do their take on it you can have a lot of fun with that and really do a thorough job that is that takes away it's Lena Khan leaning people towards this or Biden or this you know cobble of you know, liberal lunatics, you know, who are biased, or it's Trump anointing people who, or it's Obama who gave people a Netflix deal, or this person gave Obama a$10 million podcast deal or a$20 million book deal, the Clintons got this deal, or, you know, you know, everybody's getting these deals from the media companies.

38:34We need to make these groups more independent and we need to have them answer not to the executive branch, but to the people. I'm Jason Calacanis. I'm running to be your president in 2028. I hope I have your vote. And I approve this message. There's only one thing left here. The final thing that's left here is President Trump's comments and trying to interpret them. He's going to comment on the failed news any chance he gets. Let's take this 60 minutes. That's just him grinding 60 minutes and, you know, working the refs, whatever, like anybody else does. But he does particularly well, and he does it in a pretty comical way.

39:14Let's put aside that. And let's go to just his very granular comments here. Because I do think people don't give him enough credit for the things he says. And you have to get past some of your biases here, or one's biases towards him that he's just riffing. He's not riffing. There's a couple things embedded here, I noticed. I have a lot of respect for him, Ted Sarandos. He's a great person. He's done the greatest job. He's done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies or other things. Praise, a very influential media channel that he actually knows is going to win this. So he's giving him his praise, giving him his flowers.

39:55Why? Got to work with him. Hey, and Netflix is going to give him a documentary series when he gets out, just like they gave it to everybody else. Well, maybe Amazon. Melania's documentary is coming to Prime Video. So there's going to be some bitters. There's going to be some bitters. I know. But what he's doing here is he's prepping Netflix to do a similar thing. Correct. Right? He wants to keep them in the game. Absolutely. Very smart. But it's big market share. There's no question about it. It could be a problem. That's actually accurate. If you're not considering TikTok and YouTube. It is a lot of market share of the old thing, which represents like half the number of minutes now or a third of the number of minutes in some percentage of the revenue.

40:31Their share is going to go up a lot. I'll be involved in this decision. This is the key. He's not supposed to be involved in the decision. Like that creates a legal out for anybody. Like if he were to give it to Paramount and he were involved in it, then you've got the lawsuit of all lawsuits. Netflix can come in and say, listen, he said it right here. By the way, people aren't watching the lawfare going on, but he did a similar thing where he scuttled his own case against Comey and Letitia by saying, we're going to go after them. I don't know what his exact quote was there, but he basically said, we're going to do this.

41:09Now, there is a concept here that we can't have a prejudicial justice system. By saying those things, he's created the ultimate easy way to have a case dismissed. The president of the United in states, the most powerful man in the world, directed the prosecution of Letitia James and Comey? I mean, if you're thinking of that tweet that he sent or that truth social message to Pam Bondi, there's ambiguity. Some people think that he did that accidentally and it was meant to be a direct message. There are no accidents. There was further reporting law that it was actually a mistake. You mentioned it as a deal.

41:46Okay, I don't think it is. I don't believe. I'm by the minute. But I'll say there's no way he makes that mistake. Even if it was a mistake, he said plenty of other things about going after them. He said before the election, I'll be your retribution. We're going to put all these Democrats in jail. And that is why those cases recently got canceled. Like it's the easiest out in the world or it's among the reasons these things got canceled or got canceled because he put it in a lawyer without having them approved properly or whatever. So - Ah, Lindsey Halligan. Yeah, it's all prejudicial kind of situation.

42:19I think he's doing that on purpose here. I think he just wants this thing to be over. He's saying he's going to be involved in it. That basically makes it like, okay, we just got to give this to Netflix, get this thing done. Boom. It's done. It's going to Netflix. There is a family, the Ellison family, who bought from the other family at that private transaction. That family got to make that decision because they were the primary shareholders. In this case, the primary shareholders are not a family. It's the public and pension funds, et cetera, which makes it super easy. High is bidder. Best offer.

42:56And that's what this is going to go to. Now, if the Ellisons have made the best offer, then this could get reconsidered, I guess. I don't know if this is locked up, but. The board opted to go for Netflix, but now Ellison is trying to basically do a hostile takeover, go directly to the shareholders, You're getting screwed. You should go with my deal instead, and we will see what happens. The other possibility is Netflix made this offer. They got that$5.8 billion fee for the breakup. And maybe they realized like, hey, okay, I guess we're not going to get through antitrust. Or maybe there's a chance we're not going to get through this antitrust.

43:33And so, yeah, let him outbid himself and overpay for the asset. There was a Puck News piece that suggested that this is all elaborate game theory by Netflix. They knew they were going to get rejected. They didn't think they were going to make the acquisition go through, but you tie up your main rival in the streaming marketplace for a year and a half, two years while everything goes through. They can't get acquired by anyone else. They can't acquire anyone else. You're sort of freezing them out for a year or two while you continue growing and expanding. There are people in Hollywood who think that's what's going on.

44:06And this is just Netflix throwing a wrench in the work. And if you happen to get it, great. Win-win. Yeah, you either pick up your chief rival or you tie them up for two years, distracting everybody while you grow. Just a clarification. Netflix pays the$5.8 billion if the deal falls apart. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, so they may at some point want to, like, not have to deal with that. So, in other words, in the game theory, they create chaos. They get their top competitor distracted. Exactly. And if the other party wins, they don't have to pay the breakup fee. And if they win. They assume they soak up HBO Max, their chief rival.

44:45So it's win-win no matter what happens. They want HBO Max and they want the DC characters. That's my theory. That's the only thing. Well, Harry Potter, there's a lot. There's a lot. Yeah, I mean, Harry Potter's nice, I guess. Yeah. And they're making that new HBO show, The Lone Sopranos. You know, that's a lot of stuff. There's, yeah, Ted Sarandos would like that. They did model, you can tell me if I'm wrong or not, Ron. Did they not model Netflix when they first went out as HBO Prestige? Netflix would cite Casey Boyd's stuff at HBO as like the North Star. And you could tell when you look at, that's like House of Cards, that initial pack of shows, Ozark, they were obviously basing it on prestige TV from HBO, places like AMC.

45:26You know, that was what they were aiming for. How did it become, is that cake? Like, have you seen that show when they have to guess if the thing is cake or not? How did we go? They figured out, and this is, they brought in Bella Bajaria, who now runs content for Netflix. and she was like the real sort of figurehead behind this realization. A lot of people are putting on Netflix in the background while they're on their phone, while they're cleaning, while they're doing other stuff. And that a lot of the stuff that does the best on Netflix is that kind of background viewing. It doesn't, not everything has to be Squid Game.

45:56Some things people just like to kind of leave on while they're doing other stuff. It's very low impact. And those are a lot of the biggest shows. Emily in Paris, Ginny in Georgia, even like Bridgerton. It's like pretty to look at. It's not hard to follow. You can check in and out. And I noticed too, a lot of Netflix original movies and even Stranger Things started doing this. They signpost constantly in the, so every time they get somewhere new, they're like, well, here we are, the state fair, where we said we had to go investigate that clue you found because they know you're kind of checking in and out.

46:28You're on your phone. It's because of dual screen, because of two screen viewing, people playing chess, which I find myself doing, a chess alert comes in. scrolling TikTok. I forget to pause. And then I was doing this with Landman last night. I was taking a bath. My back was hurting. I'm watching Landman and I get a chest alert and I move over and I'm like, oh my God, what am I doing? Like, this is like such a great performance happening in this latest episode of Landman with that old guy, Sam Elliott. And I'm like, I'm missing the Sam Elliott performance of the season. So I basically pulled it back 10 minutes, put my notifications off.

47:01I was like, I need to actually soak this in, so to speak. There's your explanation for like, that's why so much Netflix content is that kind of, is it cake stuff? Oh, so annoying, yeah. This is why I think they should have gotten CNN because you would keep, if you had CNN, they would have it running constantly. They just don't want to touch politics. News and politics. I think especially because of the international, so much of their viewing is overseas, all these different markets. I think they don't want to have to worry about customizing and individualizing that content for all these territories.

47:32That's already been done though. So what they should do is they should figure out who was running CNN back in the day when it was just straight reporting. And they didn't have opinion stuff and roundtables. If they went to straight reportage, hey, we're here in Baghdad. Things are blowing up. BBC has changed a lot. But this used to be BBC, too. In like the 90s, when you'd watch BBC News, it was very like, here's an anchor and here's the news and here's another news story. And it was very matter of fact. Yeah. There was nobody with an opinion. It's expensive to have. You need to have Middle East bureaus and you need to have a bureau in Beirut and you need to have stringers and camera crews.

48:08But you don't need to give Anderson Cooper$25 million. That's true. Or keep sending Stanley Pucci to Italy to wander around for a few months. Well, no, but let's call it what it is. I think actually sometimes you got to zig where people, you got to zig and zag here. When I am running Disney, I'll buy CNN or I'll launch a news network. Presidency first, studio ahead first. Yes. I'm gonna do two jobs. Elon's got two jobs. You will own ABC News Studio when you have Disney. Perfect. I will make ABC News. ABC News will be ABCN. ABCN will have just reportage. Anybody has a personality, GTFO. You could have a little personality.

48:50Yeah, we don't want to hear your opinions. So you just want to hear the news. The most personality allowed would be Alex. And you gotta be under Alex in personality. I don't want any - I'm the Mendoza line for commentary? Yes, yes. I would like them to have less personality than Alex as a rule. Oh, man. Van Jones, you're out the door, man. Sorry. No, Van Jones, forget it. Van Jones is out the door. Enough. He's got insights. He's reconsidered things. I don't want anybody, your opinion is incredible for you to write down in your journal during your morning notes over coffee. And at night, you could namaste, have your chamomile tea and write it down in your journal as well when you're on abcn your job is to report a fact i'm sorry and if the fact changes you report that fact yeah if anybody doesn't and by the way you're all getting paid the same goddamn salary here's the salary structure it's 150 000 a year bust your ass and every year you hear you get six percent more and that's it If you don't like it, GTFO.

49:54MS Now is desk down the street. Go to MS Now. But can you imagine how amazing it would be to turn on news and just have them tell you what's happening? And it's weird that every time a new person goes in to run a place like CNN or CBS News, they always say this is the plan. Like, we're going to get away from all this commentary and talking heads arguing. And we're going to get back to more, like, practical. Here's what's going on. Current events, news you could use. And then it never quite seems to happen. It always just becomes a different person's opinionated perspective. In the same way, Lon, that I think Netflix ends up at, is this cake?

50:33I think CNN's obvious point of denouement is next up on our CNN panel, right? It's because it's easy. It's cheap. There's no prep required. Their new show is Tony Shalhoub traveling around the world tasting bread. This is true. Well, I mean, that's why we have HGTV. No, but Alex is right. If you get four talking heads with different opinions, you have them scream at each other. It used to get ratings. It was a good ratings playbook and it was theoretically cheaper until Megyn Kelly, Tucker, Anderson Cooper. These people became expensive. These people came$25 million a year. I mean, Anderson Cooper, 20 million a year.

51:12Wolf Blitzer was 15. Jake Tapper, 8 million. I just asked producer Claude. No, I think they've all been run down. He's not worth it, man. Erin Burnett, six million. Erin Burnett, six million? Yeah, I mean, she's famous. How about we get, like, I don't know, the next Erin Burnett, and if you're on air, you get paid$150 ,000 a year, and you're on for four minutes. You tell us the facts, and then you hand it up to the next person to tell us the facts. No, no, sounds good. Lon, what are you watching? What's your favorite streamer show right now? Ooh, wow. Tough choice. You know, I've been enjoying the It show on HBO Max, Welcome to Derry, but I don't know.

51:53I feel like they might have lost me this week. It went pretty far outside the parameters, but I am loving Pluribus on Apple TV, the new Vince Gilligan. Well, yeah, in the new year, I asked Lon on the Friday show to come on, and we're going to do a little thing at the end of the show where we go off-duty, and we're going to give you our takes on great media things for your weekend, and Pluribus is my pick as well. Have you watched this now yet, Alex, or you have kids? No, no, but I keep hearing about Pluribus. And so I'm actually, to hear Law and Recommended as well, it's high-pressing. Jason, do you think that it is a metaphor for AI?

52:28Because that's what a lot of people online - I think it is. Simultaneously, I know they said it isn't. It is a metaphor for AI, the singularity, socialism, democracy, and the end of the American empire. All of these things. Wow. Yeah. There's a lot going on. It's a really interesting perspective. But once I started thinking about, is this an allegory for AI? A lot of stuff fits. Like the kind of the way that the humans talk to one another now has a very chat GPT kind of sensibility to it. Logical, sycophantic. Right. They're always like, oh, Carol, we love you so much. That's such a great idea.

53:04We want to help you. That's a great idea. Let's workshop it. Yeah. I mean, it's always the same, you know, AI. It's AI slop. Right. The world has become a form of AI slop in a way. It is AI slop. And like one of the characters is living in the ultimate AI slop, right? In Vegas. It's unbelievable. But I would say the protagonist, to me, represents America. I have a slightly different. I think it represents personal freedom, American exceptionalism, self-determinism, how messy it is. And then the collective represents socialism. I think it's also, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think in a lot of ways, it's just about that feeling of feeling alone.

53:43The entire world is on board with something and you personally feel like you're not a part of it. I love that too. The rugged individualism of like, hey, I still want to read a book. I want to make my own breakfast. Yeah, but even in a way like the feeling of being depressed or that feeling of being isolated where like the whole world is sort of feel right. Like it's a very human thing. And I think you could almost apply it to any scenario. It's just about that emotional state of feeling alienated. If they stick the landing in the next three weeks, I think this is going to be one of the top five shows of the new century.

54:16It's been spectacular. And it's coming back. We already know it's coming back for season two. Well, it has to come back. I mean, even if they fumbled it like Lost did in the end, but it's kind of like a better version of Lost in some ways. It's a more intellectually rigorous version of Lost, where Lost, they were like, yeah, let's just do something weird. And they're like, what? It's a hit? We thought we were going to get canceled like everything else. They know the ending of this. This is going to be a four series, five series max arc. Yeah, I feel like Gilligan has an idea of where he's going.

54:46Oh, he does. He's not winging it. No, no. I think last thing I wanted to talk about here that I think is kind of interesting is that a PR guru who I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, but she wrote the Go Direct manifesto, which I think actually I get credit for, but okay. I think she probably rewrote my ideas. I don't know when her, let's see when this manifesto came out about going direct because yeah, 24. Yeah. No, she gets no credit for that. Sorry. I created that going direct. Okay. But whatever. But explain to us what's going on here. A PR person, this, I do find this fascinating.

55:26A PR person is starting a venture firm. That's really fascinating. Lulu worked at a large number of large technology companies in a comms role. She eventually left that, did a lot of talking in public, founded her own firm called Rostra, which is named after a part of Rome where they stood on old bits of ships and talked to the public. And her big pitch has been, go direct, don't use intermediaries. Now, what she has done, as Jason just alluded to, is put together a firm, a$40 million vehicle to go along with that, essentially, as far as I can tell, investing in the companies that she works with.

55:58And she told Axios, the quote, storytelling is alpha, investing complements Rostra's work because narrative and capital both compound. And then she says this thing, which I've heard from a lot of other people we'll talk about in just a second. Right now, it's easier than ever to build new things and harder than ever to get people to care. So her argument is that building stuff, a little bit easier than it was. You can code faster. I don't know, vibe code, whatever you want. No, you definitely build startups, but telling the story is like a big part of it, right? Yeah. We all agree. So I was thinking about this story, and I know a couple of other examples that come right to mind.

56:32First one is Day One Ventures. This is founded by Masha Boucher. Actually, I know her back from my San Francisco days. And she has put together a firm from her comms practice. So she runs her own venture firm and has raised not just one, but two, but three funds, Jason, each of increasing size. 20 million, 52, and then 150. Yeah, she was in Truebill at$15 million valuation, sold the rocket for 1.3. So some success there. There's another firm, VSC Ventures. This is part of an arm of VSE, another comms shop. And they also, again, stress the importance of getting attention for products. So not the first, not the second, but the third time we've seen this trend of essentially service providers building venture capital funds.

57:15I like it. It's somewhat interesting. I think it speaks to what we saw in journalism when a bunch of journalists, and specifically a bunch of tech journalists or alma mater, were like, wait, journalism is dying. you know there's no more competition for our services and like this pays better and it's essentially the same job which I think most people would agree I was the pioneer in that but because I was the first to do it after Michael Moritz so it was Michael Moritz me O'Malick M.G. Siegler yeah it was like a it was a good cohort and that job is also you know trying to figure out what the reality or the story is in the PR job it's how to spin the story and to get attention or how to massage the story or how to scale telling the story, all that kind of stuff.

58:02I don't like PR. I don't like PR people generally because it's just exhausting to deal with them. That being said, having one in the building who's really good, that makes sense to me. It makes a lot of sense to me. I have a lot of friends that work in and around the comms industry. And if I was ever in trouble, I know that they're my first call because they've been through it, man, they just know how to handle a crisis. They also, back to your point earlier on the show about being able to do a code red, you know, who's really good at fire drills, comms people, the good ones. But this is the problem.

58:33As a former journalist, you became friends with PR people. This is always the trap. Like the PR people know how to ingratiate themselves and spend time with journalists, et cetera. When I ran all of our pubs, we wouldn't talk to journalists. I ban the engagement reporters. Do not, I'm sorry, from talking to PR people. yeah just do not talk to PR people just go to the subjects talk to them directly if PR people call you and want to talk to say we don't talk to PR people same thing I do here at this week in startups all in PR people email us we have a little sentence thank you so much for your interest we don't take pitches please remove us from your list and PR people hate me but they respect me because they know like and then I would always have like clever people well how do people do get on the show I say we pick them how do you pick them well I pick what I think's interesting oh okay well I'd love to tell you why this is interesting like oh no we don't take pitches I don't want you to tell me what I think is interesting.

59:23My job is to be informed. Yeah. And I made, Molly, and I think I instructed you to do the same thing with This Week in Startups. I hope I did at some point. Like, just use this snippet. I want them to think there's no way to get on the show. And it's like a little uncomfortable at first to write that. I don't know if you found it uncomfortable. I've had to say it on a lot of phone calls. Like, people are like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, how you doing? I'm like, oh, good. They're like, hey, we got a guy. But when I first joined, everyone thought that I joined All In. And so they're like, can we get on the show?

59:52And I'm like, I'm not on that show. I don't even know. Sure, maybe you can, but not through me. And eventually people figured it out. And then they stopped trying because I kept saying things like, no, and we don't do that. And also, we don't want to fake interest in somebody. I don't want to have someone come to the show and be like, I'm not compelled by this, Jason. Let's talk to them for 15 minutes. The only thing that can happen is sometimes like somebody's like, I do Michael Dell's book. And I'm like, well, Michael Dell's a hero, whatever. And I'm like, yeah, just tell Michael to reach out.

1:00:21And they're like, okay, well, he doesn't do that. I'm like, and then I just said, okay. And they're like, okay, so he's going to be on the show. I'm like, no, I just told you if Michael Dell wants to come on the program, tell him to ping me. He knows how to get me. And like, of course, like, what are we doing here? Like, if you're pitching me a friend of mine or somebody who's been on the show, like, you didn't even know they've been on the show or that we have a relationship? Like, what are you doing, PR people? PR people are just, 90 % of them are just dumb. They're just low IQ, 90%. Alex is like, sure.

1:00:54Well, I mean, I don't know. What am I going to do? Interrogate that and argue that's 75? I mean, no matter what, I look like an asshole. I want to point out though, that everything you're saying underscores Lulu's philosophy. She thinks that you should go around intermediaries, be they PR people or - She cribbed my go-direction manager. Other notable venture capital firms started by non-traditional folks. Harry Stebbins and 20VC. Sure. As invested in Poolside, Emerge.dev, a couple of Twist 500 companies. And then there's a lot of other smaller ones that I found. So WPP, the big advertising conglomerate.

1:01:25Yeah, that's a corporate. It's adjacent, but that's like a corporate VC arm. Yeah, yeah. Corporate VC arm isn't like, I'm leaving PR, PR sucks, or I'm leaving this and going to that. But yeah, it's adjacent. It's adjacent. I found some like breadcrumbs about other PR firms, starting firms, starting funds that didn't really kind of make it and the websites weren't up anymore. And then if you want to go further afield to non-traditional venture capital firm founders, there's a number of celebrities, Serena Williams, Ashton Kutcher, Snoop Dogg and Kevin Durant come to mind. Yeah, that's another angle to get into VC is to use a chain smoker, is to use your celebrity to get access to deals and then use your platform to then go promote stuff.

1:02:03And it can work. It's worked out for Serena, obviously, a national. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in to This Week in Startups. We'll be back on Wednesday. Bye-bye. All right, everybody, tomorrow on the show, Alex will interview on Tuesday a couple of Twist 500 companies coming at you. And Wednesday, I'll be back for the News Roundtable. Bye-bye.