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

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

(02:31) - Timeline (02:35) - Mamdani Timeline Reactions (41:43) - Shell in Talks to Aquire Rival BP (55:29) - David Senra is the creator and host of the "Founders" podcast, where he delves into the lives and careers of history's most influential entrepreneurs. Each week, he reads a biography of a notable founder and extracts lessons that listeners can apply to their own ventures. Senra's passion for reading and entrepreneurship has led him to consume over 300 books on the subject, which he discusses in his episodes. In addition to his podcast, Senra has been featured in various interviews and discussions, sharing insights on topics like the importance of storytelling in communication, the value of authenticity in podcasting, and the significance of learning from historical figures. He emphasizes the power of distilling complex concepts into clear ideas and believes in the importance of practice and repetition to enhance clarity of thought and speech. Senra's work has garnered attention for its depth and dedication to understanding the minds of successful entrepreneurs, making his podcast a valuable resource for those interested in business and leadership. (01:23:29) - Yancey Strickler, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, began his career as a music journalist before pioneering the crowdfunding platform that has raised over $4 billion for creative projects. In the conversation, he reflects on Kickstarter's early days, highlighting musician Allison Weiss's 2009 campaign as a pivotal moment that shaped modern crowdfunding practices. Strickler also discusses the evolution of the internet and the creator economy, emphasizing the shift towards creators having greater control over production and distribution, and the challenges and opportunities this presents. (01:56:00) - Joe Weisenthal is an American journalist and financial expert. He serves as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg's digital brands, co-anchors the television show "What’d You Miss?", and co-hosts the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, Weisenthal discusses the recent political landscape in New York City, focusing on Zoran Mamdani's mayoral victory, the role of prediction markets in gauging political outcomes, and the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on urban planning. (02:27:53) - Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, now leads OpenRouter, a platform that optimizes language model usage by routing traffic to the best GPU hosts based on user preferences. In the conversation, he discusses OpenRouter's role as a control plane for language models, enabling users to access various models with optimal performance and uptime. He also highlights the challenges in the AI landscape, such as the fragmentation of model availability across different cloud providers, and emphasizes OpenRouter's efforts to streamline access to these models. (02:40:15) - Michael Moriarty, co-founder of Orca, an energy water company, discusses the challenges and successes of launching their product, emphasizing the innovative clear can packaging that differentiates them in the market. He highlights the difficulties faced in manufacturing the clear cans, which took two years and multiple factories to perfect, as well as the viral marketing strategies employed, such as a nine-minute launch video featuring Corbin Bleu listing road signs. Moriarty also touches on their rapid growth since launching on Amazon in March, the ongoing fundraising efforts, and plans for retail expansion in Southern California. (02:48:22) - Timeline (02:52:21) - NVIDIA Launches Cloud AI Playground (02:54:16) - Nikunj Kothari, a seasoned entrepreneur and investor, has spent over a decade building startups across various sectors, including logistics, networking hardware, and real estate. He recently joined FPV Ventures, a generalist venture capital fund co-founded by Wesley Chan and Pegah Ebrahimi, which closed a $525 million fund focusing on diverse industries from biotech to consumer fintech. In the conversation, Kothari discusses the shift of value to the application layer as large AI models stabilize, emphasizing the importance of unique data and efficiency in building impactful AI applications. (03:10:47) - Alex Kehr, CEO of Superlocal, discusses the development of Superlocal—a personalized map application that automatically logs users' locations to provide tailored recommendations—and its recent acquisition by Foursquare. He explains that Superlocal combines features reminiscent of Google Maps and Foursquare, offering automatic place mapping, check-ins, and persona building based on user preferences. Kehr expresses enthusiasm for the acquisition, noting that it allows Superlocal to continue its operations without the constant concern of financial instability. 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You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, June 25th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let's run you through the headlines right now. Wall Street is panicking over the prospect of a socialist mayor in New York City. The Jane Streets. Jane Stre's boss says he was duped into funding AK-47s for a coup. Happens to the best of us. Shell is in early talks, not late talks, early talks. Not advanced though.

Not advanced talks. Definitely not advanced. To acquire rival British petroleum BP. Nvidia has ruffled tech giants with a move into cloud computing, that's DGX Lepton that we've talked about a few times. Bumble is cutting 30% of its staff. And its stock is up 15%.

As online dating hits an inflection point, I'm sure there's some AI story there. There's a whole bunch of other interesting trends that we'll dig into. China is tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away their passports. Doesn't sound good. And we wanna discuss the future

of venture capital marketing. But if you're- The most important question of them all. Yes it is. It is. But quickly, let me tell you about Ramp. Ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments,

accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have some delicious drinks in front of us today. This is day two of asking. They're not on camera. Oh, they're not on camera. So pick them all up. So day two of asking Chris Williamson to come on the show. Day two, we got five Yerba Matas from Mateina.

That's Andrew Huberman's project. And one new time. It's a five to one ratio. I just shotgunned one of these. You did? Right before the show. Hadn't done that in a few years, maybe a decade. But it's good to be back.

I mean, you mentioned yesterday on the show that you did a dry fast and it was pretty subtext. Reading between the lines, it was pretty clear that you had one too many cheeky pints. Cheeky pints? To dry out. Oh, right, right, dry out, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just eat regularly, just no pints.

No pints, yeah, exactly. That's a dry fast. Yeah, anyway, let's go through the news. Mom Donnie, the entire world is melting down, particularly on tech Twitter. Everyone is very nervous about what Mom Donnie means for the future of New York City because San Francisco kinda got a dry run of this

and it didn't go so well. And now we're gonna see what happens in New York City. So Dave Friedberg breaks it down. Voice of reason. Voice of reason. He says, it is vitally important for America that Mom Donnie get elected mayor of New York City. He can help maximally and swiftly tax the rich,

stand up government runrun grocery stores, eliminate the police force, freeze rents, and make public transportation free. It is unlikely that taxing the rich will cause them to move to other cities, collapsing NYC tax revenue, or that city-run grocery stores will fail to increase fresh vegetable consumption in the inner city, or that the elimination of the NYPD

will cause a rising crime and a decline in quality of life, or that freezing rents will drive landlords to dump properties, collapsing prices, and property tax revenue, or that free public transportation will result in union-led kleptocracy. No way, I'm sure this time, socialism will be different. If Americans don't want to learn the lessons

of socialism's failure elsewhere, we should aim to learn them here as quickly as possible. Let's make sure one or two cities and states fall apart fast so the rest don't have to. Elect Mamdani. After accruing two trillion dollars in student loan debt, that they will never be able to pay down. It is no surprise that the college educated

in New York City are supporting Mamdani 61 to 39. The current system has failed them. But the truth is more government may not be the answer when too much government, indiscriminate federal student loans, regardless of cost or quality of degree or institution, may have gotten them into this moment. A gentle reminder though,

that an articulate ignoramus isn't more correct than his less charismatic, authentic political rival. Facts, data, truth still stand above theory, innuendo and BS. Socialism won't work. If we have to relearn that lesson the hard way, let's do it fast and elect Mamdani. Very interesting, interesting analysis.

Now, sacrificing the capital of capital. Sacrificing New York. The fortress of finance, New York. Yeah, I couldn't, I don't think Ken Griffin was hitting the timeline yesterday, but he certainly was looking smart. Yes, so, I mean, there's a few things in here.

He is interested in taxing the rich. He did, I was listening to Mamdani's interview on The Breakfast Club, and he was talking about taxing, adding a tax to anyone that makes over a million dollars in the city, a 2% tax, they would pay 20K, but obviously that scales up to someone who's making 100 million would be paying much more. And he thinks that that's like a very doable tax.

He has talked about government-run grocery stores, which I think sound like a disaster potentially. I was joking with you about- If he had decade plus of experience running something like Costco, it might be- Yes, that could be possible. Might be bullish. Yeah.

I don't think that he's had a job. Yeah, my riff on it was, imagine if the grocery store was as seamless as the DMV, or imagine if taking the free bus was as smooth as getting through TSA, or imagine if looking for a house was as simple as filing your taxes. Like, that's what the government could bring

to these institutions, and that's always the risk with these things. Now, on the issue of eliminating the NYPD, Mamdani has changed his tune on that. He was saying defund the police five years ago. He has since changed his strategy and his messaging dramatically and is no longer anti-defunding the police and has said directly,

like I do not want to defund the NYPD. But the reaction continues. Cold Healing says, it is still not a guarantee, but Zoran winning feels like the first time that I can see a populist internet left taking the corpse of the collapsing Democrat machine the way MAGA took the corpse of the right in 2016. Don't think they've had any victory this significant.

And I agree, I mean, AOC was the first kind of example of that, but it is interesting that this is very much the Bernie bro left is now actually winning elections and it does speak to the Democrat machine just failing basically. What's interesting is that one of the takeaways from the 2024 election was like the podcast election. It's the podcast election,

you gotta be doing all these podcasts. Mamdani didn't actually do that. Yeah, it was more driven by his TikTok. So I remember we discussed it and I was saying like, the next thing after the podcast election. Didn't he do something with Derek Thompson? Yes. He did Joe Weisenthal.

He did a few, but it feels like he really dominated in short form video. Yeah. And really sort of direct. Yeah, and really sort of direct Yeah, and the viral clips good branding around his sad Policy suggestions and and the viral clips were not from his podcast appearances So even though he went on the Breakfast Club and gave a big talk there He did like a 40-minute interview., like that was not what went viral,

what went viral were his scripted and well edited TikToks basically, and his, the stats that he put up on TikTok were pretty staggering. I was pulling them up, he has almost a million followers and is just absolutely lapping everyone else he was going up against. Yeah. was just absolutely lapping everyone else he was going up against.

Yeah. Yeah, and Cuomo was engaging in a little bit of hubris, right? Oh, yes. Leveraging his network and his sort of various allies to put together this coalition and kind of wanted to ignore the new way in which candidates actually need to run campaigns if they're competitive.

Yeah, it was an odd choice because he was, he had to step down, right? And he was like, he was pretty like racked with controversy and it just feels like that's an odd pick for the Democratic Party to actually go back and like double down on. Should we play one of Mom Donnie's rap songs? You know, he was a rap musician, historically.

He's moved on from that, but if there is a good one. I think playing the clip from his interview that we have, I believe, pulled up would be- Okay, Tyler, I just sent you, you remember Vivo on YouTube? Yeah. He's got one of his songs. He went under the moniker Young Cardamom.

Okay. And from eight years ago, there's got one of his songs he went under the moniker young cardamom, okay And from eight years ago There's one on so Tyler. Why don't you listen to this and let us know if it's worth you know thrown up, okay? I mean with with regard to Cuomo I think the problem Is his car yeah, you know what he drives Is it was it was it the scat pack? He drives a Dodge Charger? Back widebody

It's a high-performance vehicle. It is but very American. It's not quite there I think he would have won if he'd gone with the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 Yeah, so the scat pack wideT Demon 170. So the Scat Pack wide body, it's up in the 500 horsepower range. It's got a V8, it's not supercharged. And he was getting a little flack for kind of parking wherever he felt like during the campaign. Apparently he got like

seven speeding tickets or something. During the campaign. Yeah, like in the last year or something. He's gotten just like a ton of- Happens to TVP on interns. Yeah, oh, it does. Anyways, I think we got a video ready. He's gotten just like a ton of happens to TVP on interns Anyways, I think we got a video ready it is not the rap song. Yeah, it is interview Let's play it

Dollars a year state budget about 252 billion dollars a year There is money the question is what we spend it. And what I've proposed is that we raise $10 billion to pay for our entire economic agenda and start to Trump-proof our city because we know he'll use federal funding as leverage over this city. And we will do so in two key ways. The first is to match the state's top corporate tax rate to that of New Jersey. We are at 7.25%. They're at 11.5%. Corporations can pay it over there. They can pay it over here. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't just apply

to corporations headquartered in New York City. Because when you say this, people will say, well, they're gonna go to Florida. Wherever you are headquartered, as long as you do business in the state of New York, you are taxable for that corporate tax. We're talking about corporations that are making millions of dollars,

not in revenue, but in profit. And the second is taxing the top 1% of New Yorkers. We're talking about people who make a million dollars a year or more, taxing them just by a flat 2% tax increase. And I know if 50 Cent is listening, he's not gonna be happy about this, tends to not like this tax policy,

but I wanna be very clear. This is about $20,000 a year, it's a rounding error. And all of these things together, they make every New Yorker's life better, including those who are actually getting taxed. Now you also wanna cut. I think It is it is it is funny because during this interview Charlemagne keeps coming at him for the rap thing and

Basically being like like your rap was not good And and so mom does one thing is how they do everything But mom Donnie keeps it keeps having to be like I know you're not a fan of the rap stuff But like let me let me go back to the issues The thing that the thing I got to give him credit for is Zoran Ron is a cool name. It is a cool name. That's that is what I will give him cool name. That's, that is what I will give him credit for. So Polymarket nailed it as usual.

The news breaks on Polymarket beforehand. Signal breaks it down. He says, what's tragic isn't only that Mamdani won, it's that this was the best alternative to the system produced. You don't beat populism with legacy, you beat it with real competence and vision. But instead it was Cuomo, Cuomo, that's malpractice.

Democrats learned nothing from Kamala. And yeah, Cuomo, that's malpractice, Democrats learn nothing from Kamala, and yet Cuomo doesn't seem to have, he didn't seem to break through in any meaningful way. Sophie says hold up, let him cook to Bill Ackman, who says I have a great idea on NYC, I will share it as soon as I can, I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning, but now I am optimistic, and so you know, a banger is coming, long is coming from from Ackman Apple needs to make a

Signature iPhone. Yeah for Ackman. Yeah that can that allows him to see the entire body of text You know while typing on the phone, you know, something like a five foot long iPhone. I think would be the right range be fantastic Zoran Mamdani the young democratic socialist state assemblyman who has waged a surprisingly strong campaign for mayor of New York City, hasn't just frustrated his opponents, he's made them jealous, says Eric Latch at the New Yorker in a very interesting profile that I read last night. I regret not running for mayor in 2021, state senator Jessica Ramos said this month during a televised Democratic primary debate when asked if she had any regrets in her political career I thought I needed more experience. She explained they're talking trash, but turns out you just need to make good videos

He was polling at 1% and then started going on this generational tick-tock run and just Compounding and compounding and compounding and just got escape velocity. If you watch those videos, very well edited, very well executed. Jasmine Sun had a breakdown in her sub stack, which I've really been enjoying. She says, I'm excited for Zoran, even if I don't buy every policy,

we need to elect leaders, especially young people who are affirmatively excited about versus establishment heirs who people hold their nose and vote for without that energy, democracy is dead. And there were a couple of other people that chimed in on this showing that, Lulu was talking about this, it sounds so basic, but he's too likable to lose. Friendly demeanor, smiles with his eyes, seems earnest, being liked outweighs policies, experience nonsensical plans.

I just have a good feeling about that person, can override almost anything. And yeah, I mean, it's like he's clearly not expert in the stuff he talks about, but he's able to play the same notes. And Solana had a good take on this, this idea that Cuomo is making very abstract arguments about Trump and Mamdani was like rent, buses,

like things that people care about for the idea of a mayor. Like what is a mayor even supposed to do about Trump? Like it's so unclear how that would even track as opposed to like the- Well, I think if you saw what happened in LA Yeah, and you're more of it. And if you're in the Karen Bass army, you might think that the mayor does have a responsibility but even then like I Think most people in LA would say the mayor would be more responsible for dealing with like fires than dealing with whatever happened with Trump

Like like I don't know for dealing with like fires than dealing with whatever happened with Trump. Like, like. I don't know. I just think that immigration has become a local issue. Even in New York, they don't have a border with anyone. Like it's got such an odd thing. I mean, I get that it animates people, certainly. Like people, people pay attention to it. And so it definitely grabs like the attention of folks.

But anyway. It was interesting to see the breakdown. Yeah, this was fascinating. If you look at by income. For the New York Times. Under $50,000 annually, Cuomo was dominating. 50,000 to 100,000, Mamdani had six points, and then over 100,000, Mamdani had over 13 points.

The luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs. Narrative violation, a little bit. But not really if you were paying attention. No, no. I mean, this is the Peter Thiel thesis. This is the thesis of who has been failed. It's the people who went to college

and are saddled with that, not necessarily the folks who are working class and grinding their way up. They're actually, you see this in Miami with the Cubans that come over and are anti-communist because they're like, this is, yes, I'm making under 50K, but I'm making more than I did last year and I'm actually upwardly mobile

versus the downwardly mobile. Lamborghini Urus Performantes were never made in communist states. So if that is an ideal that you would want to aim for. I think now is probably a good time to highlight this email from Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Andreessen, and a handful of other Facebook board members in 2020.

So Peter says, there are many themes that could be developed more here. Let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism but when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialists we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why. And from that perspective of a broken generational compact,

there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt, or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time, and or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then they may well turn against it.

And so this sort of explains why there's a certain voting block that is just generally in favor of increasing taxes and they just gravitate towards that. In the sort of feeling like that one directly is Brad Gerstner's Invest America project. Get you on the capital ladder, accumulating assets and investments early in your life, literally when you're born, and then deregulation of housing to build more,

build higher, build bigger, and so that as supply increases, price goes down, not price controls, that never works. Instead, you need to build a ton more, right? And then, yeah, with the, and then there's probably a solution to the college debt crisis in the form of underwriting those loans differently.

So if you're going to try and major in something that's hard to get a job in, it's harder to get a loan to pay for that. But if you wanna pay for it yourself, you can. He did highlight something in one of his videos that I thought was interesting. Apparently the street food vendors oftentimes can't get a permit themselves.

This was good. And so they rent a permit from someone else who just happened to have one. And the permits rent for $17,000 to $22,000 a year is kind of the market rate. And so there's just somebody who's just like rent seeking on a permit that they got a long time ago. And it's purely because of the government is inefficient.

And I like that. Yeah, he called it, he wants to set up a mom and pop czar. Basically someone specifically to go and basically doge all of the local regulation that requires from a single owner operator business in New York City that you wanna do something, you wanna open a store, and it's gonna take you six month or a year just to get started, and then there's huge fees,

and all of those just don't matter, and are just, so I actually love that, and I feel like maybe he tries to do both, maybe he opens the government run grocery store. He learns his lesson. He learns it the hard way and it fails. But then he has a bunch of success. If he actually does that,

the value of the memes that come out of it alone will be incredible. Yeah, but it's like- Potentially priceless. We kind of know the economic logic, like the physics of this system, the physics of the economy to the degree that like, we know it's going to fail,

but some lessons have to be learned the hard way. And so that's kind of what Friedberg is getting at. And so yeah, go and build one government run grocery store, see how that goes, and then go and sleep. Wow, I saved one and a half percent by historical grocery store margins are very, very slim. So you could have a grocery store that's like Trader Joe's except that it's maybe more packed, less well run,

dirtier like most government sort of run things are. You're like we're gonna run it. And then you save 1.5%, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, it's like to pass that 1.5% on to the customer, you have to run it as ruthlessly as the private equity guys that own grocery stores, right? Pretty smart guys. And so they're running their businesses

extremely efficiently, and then they're keeping the 1.5%, so you have to run run it as efficiently and then you can pass on the one and a half percent but that's the best yeah no one's saying that there's 20% to go squeeze out of those things yeah Paki said I will say this if Zoran really can make the city more affordable by simply saying things should be more affordable a lot of mayors are gonna have a lot of explaining to do and maybe Zoran is taking a page out of Trump's book by just saying hey hey guys in the oil markets I'm watching you yes I'm of mayors are going to have a lot of explaining to do. And maybe Zoran is taking a page out of Trump's book

by just saying, hey, you guys in the oil markets, I'm watching you. Yes, yes. I'm watching you. Yeah, also, I mean, there's a little bit of truth zone here, because a lot of people are saying, he will never make the rents go down. But then they're also saying, everyone's going to leave

and rents are going to collapse. And so maybe it's a head fake. Maybe he makes it so unattractive to live there that people leave the Reds actually do fall you had a good you had a good earlier yeah a good bit earlier Zoran is in favor of the congestion tax yes you were saying what if you implemented just a constant it was an hourly fee that you pay from being in the New York City city tax yes yeah on people on anyone so if you go there for, you know, you're paying thirty dollars an hour if you're there for the whole year That's like probably two hundred three hundred K

Just gets up there, but it's gonna it's gonna decrease demand for housing or even totally even stop and buy It's gonna decrease tourism if you just destroy demand then If you just destroy demand, then price will go down. Price will go down. Price will go down. And if that's the goal, maybe something there are different ways you can increase supply or you can decrease demand. And it does feel like he's at least at least we're seeing. I don't I don't actually buy the idea that people are going to be like, yeah, we're moving to Florida or whatever. I think the people that live there are are going to a he still hasn't won, even if he wins,

actually getting the stuff through is gonna be hard. And then also the, also the, yeah. Eric Adams is producing a really high volume of iconic moments that are doing well on social. Not really oriented around policy, as much as just sort of saying funny things, but it's resonating. Yeah. In a way.

Yeah. And so it could be a much tighter race. Yeah. What is the- Also, like the whole freeze the rent thing. People think he's like the immediate proposal will be like all rent will be frozen forever. It's like there are already rent controlled apartments in New York City. He's just proposing to be like more aggressive.

So he's like, all he's's saying is, I will be turning the volume knob to the left. But the volume knob is not necessarily gonna go to zero. It's not necessarily gonna go to 11 with another mayor. And so I think a lot of this is rhetoric and if he gets in office and tries to implement some of this stuff, it'll be blended in certain places over time, I would be surprised if there was a mass

exodus from New York City. But maybe it's time to go long Miami, who knows. Anyway, Liz Wolf broke down who she saw canvassing for Zoran, she said she talked to a dozen or so canvassers and they were all so sweet. Also the vast majority of them were white men in their 30s. Literally all of them were childless. God bless them all, but there's a fair bit

of peer pan syndrome I'm sensing. I don't know exactly what that means. It is so nice that they think they know how best to design and improve all of our lives, but my goodness, very few of them have big boy jobs or families or real standing in the community, you know, vervenmoing a mutual aid fund every once in a while. Ain't it, dog?

Maybe I'm extrapolating too much and maybe we'll all become close friends in the bread lines. But Liz writes for Reason Magazine. But Zoran's campaign is amateur hour on every level supported by many folks who don't really understand what their fellow New Yorkers want or need or how this works on a macro level. Interesting.

Well, it doesn't matter because they came out and voted and he won the primary. So anyway, Ken Griffin got Zoran. Joe Gabbia says, who's voting for someone that promises city-owned grocery stores? I don't get that. What is he saying? I mean, a lot of people are.

Yeah. No, no, he's just wondering. I don't think he has any, and maybe if he looked in the last 20 people that he texted, nobody wanted to do that. So Dan Loeb says, it's officially hot, commie summer. And... And Sophie closes it out with,

Ken Griffin got Zoran elected to pump his Miami real estate bags, 200 IQ move, 5D chess. You love it. Zach Weinberg says, true pro-crime candidate and cash bail. It's crazy that Zach Weinberg is quote tweeting Libs of TikTok. That is what's crazy here. Legalized marijuana.

These posts are five years old. He's completely changed this. He's changed his policies on all this. It is interesting though, that this is like, this is like what SF was like basically run on. Yeah, during the 2020 to turn 25. Yeah, we ran this experiment, you would think. But maybe he learned from SF.

Yeah, I mean, it does seem like he's pulling back on almost all of these, basically. At least in the current rhetoric. Netcapgirl says Ken Griffin got Zoran elected to pump his Miami real estate bags 200 IQ move 5d chess he is investing a billion dollars in a complex in Miami. But also he was never a New York guy he was a Chicago guy. Yeah. Well, and him, when he left Chicago, that has done material damage to Chicago's business. I figure they still had a pretty large operation there. And they were more just expanding and growing

and re-headquartering, but still a huge presence in Chicago. But maybe they really relocated the whole firm. I mean, it's hard to relocate a whole firm. You talk to many of the VC firms that tried to kind of relocate, and it's like, oh yeah, we still have a ton of people up there or whatever. Anyway, if you're designing your next move,

get on figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can build a website as fast as you can design one. It is magic. Anyway, in the high finance world, we have news from Jane Street.

Gordon Gekko breaks it down, says, all this Zoran news is distracting us from the fact that Jane Street tried- Do you notice he says Zohan? Zohan, yeah. All this Zohan. Zohan, yeah. All this Zohan. He misspells it. The fact that Jane Street tried to overthrow Sudan.

So Jane Street boss says he was duped into funding AKs for coup. And another account says, Jane Street tried to overthrow the Sudanese government by supplying Harvard educated rebels with AK-47s. And you think Mom Donnie is going to be able to raise taxes? LMAO get real. It's a good point. I'm calling for a complete stop on Jane Street until we find out more about what exactly O'Cammill is doing to the brain. I love that because that's their programming

language. And Joe Weisenthal says things you never want to say hashtag Jane Street boss as he was duped into funding AK-47s for coup. Quantium says obviously Harvard never had the juice, but what an embarrassing L for Jane Street that they couldn't even successfully orchestrate a coup in a mid-size African country with a deeply unstable government. It's wild. Well, the story is in Bloomberg and says, the indictment reads like a cinematic plot. A 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 US prosecution of Peter Ajack, the Harvard fellow who was accused last year of scheming to install himself atop the East African nation. What a, yeah, I mean, yeah, it does seem like something out of a movie. Granieri is a long time supporter of 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 Keach 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. Without the significant financing that Mr. Granary could and agreed to provide, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible.

And somehow George Clooney's involved. We're going to get to that in a second. They wrote in the document late May. Did he provide the lubricant, the tequila? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Here he is. 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 Granary and Gary Kasparov, the chess champion and prominent Russian dissident. The 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,

Hey, 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's digging into. But it feels a little, I don't know, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence here.

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. My 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 Sang Bang and Free. 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. Also sponsor of Dwar Kesh. Dwar Kesh Patel's podcast, that's right. There'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. Mocked.

Despite James Street's ascent in the industry, Granieri has kept a low profile. He's gotta go on the DoorCash podcast. We know they're connected. He's one of those friends. Boundaries 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 talk about OCaml. He's like, the Q 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 that have a record of caring about human rights abuse And make some type of donation to them for their cause and then they could turn around and use those funds for something that he had no awareness of. Yeah, I mean, it's frustrating. It makes sense that people that would try to overthrow a government would wanna drag down anybody that they could

and just try to drag them into the mud and start wrestling. Yeah, I mean, this happens literally all the time because once the money's wired into a nonprofit, it's very hard to track like, okay, 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. It's pretty rare that true fraud happens because Silicon Valley's 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. Yeah. He might be more inclined to be like, hey, investor update, what's going on? Yeah, 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 Alameda linked exactly? This is material, this is $500 million to me now. It's not just a flyer anymore. You wake up. I need to dig in. Four years later. You're surrounded by journalists. What's your position? It's not just a fire anymore you wait to dig in four years later

Well, Granary 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 and public We got to figure out what the other three founders are doing because if they're you know, imagine they just made no money And they're just like PMs at Big Tech or something. It's just like just making like a million. It just didn't vast out Yeah, they just like yeah, we had a cliff and I didn't hit it. They 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 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. We gotta 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 Clooney. How did I get dragged into this? We're getting to George Clooney. We're gonna explain how George Clooney is related. 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. Like this stuff is hard. Like clearly in this scenario, like there was enough, there was enough momentum to create an entirely new country, and they were still actually setting up a robust democracy. It was difficult, and they 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 US authorities knew about Ajak and Keach's alleged plan to topple South Sudan's government. Attorneys 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 Ajak was told by the State Department in October of 2023

that it wouldn't fund plans for non-democratic regime change. Ajak and Keach 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 Ajak'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. Is 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 request, didn't respond to requests 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. The financier later transferred $77 million in two stages, according to people with knowledge of the payments. Within a few weeks of the condo meeting, prosecutors say Ajak and Keach 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 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.

Anyway, 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 dollar M&A deal. Chevron and Hess, deal's still pending, but it's a 53 billion D-back and Endeavor don't even know those companies but 26 billion dollar deal there Conoco fella Phil 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 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 deck of corn 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 Shell, how is BP doing over the week? Or 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 gotta get on linear. I'm get linear. John your commitment to just use linear for everything is no but of course if you're if you're building if you're building modern software if you need to streamline issues projects and product roadmaps you gotta get linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products and plus they got linear for agents but you know oil and plus, they 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 Mag-7 in my opinion.

We need that for the tech companies, the super majors. Super major is just really- Are you 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. BEP 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 ExxonMobil 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 Southside Banks, and 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. It was fascinating. So, BP's total cost 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. You should check it out. Is it a documentary? No, it is a non-fiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the oil rig, and 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 like we're shilling for Shell over here. We're chilling for shell BPN 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 we should never you should never decline to comment. You should always do it

Bacon in the LLM this This is just. 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. Shell, 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 of evil 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. So 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 with the energy companies since last February. It's interesting though, BP had been performing, not, you know, had basically been down only for a few years.

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. Shell in May announced a multi-billion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series said that recently the company's bar for big deal making would be high. Shell 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 US, 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 US now calls the Gulf of America. That's right, that's right. All of the oil companies had to change

all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg needs News reported this earlier. That's sticking, right? 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 and 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 like it is not available to everyone. They are in the business of selling money but 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 are Rolexes. Or if you go to an F1 match,

you'll see a lot of, you know, advertisements. Yeah, 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

luxury brand building without a product attack, 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?

The current strategy is post on X. Yes 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 Yes, and that has to a form 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.

Cause you can't go on there and say, XYZ company is clearly dominating. If you look at the data and you look at what customers are saying, if you have another portfolio company over here, that you happen to back. And 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 guy the 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 You can't get away from it. It's all marketing all the way down Now the sort of subcategories. I think that are interesting, I've always said that Sam Lesson, he's got fans, he's got haters, but he has a unique media product in the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord, and some people, it resonates with them, other people wanna dunk, but it is an effective format

in order to provide commentary, and it's very efficient. 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. Yeah. I, when I think of like the four really great or or 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 like 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.

They'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. It's not a weekly substack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on how did cadence. 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. Exactly. Exactly. Some of the early writing. Yeah. I feel like an even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true. Yeah, 100 percent. And it's not and he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or 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 well. Mark 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 like formulated from a team necessarily.

So there's this like, there's kind of this like, I feel like we're gonna see more of like 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, the Waterloo campus newspaper. That should have an ad for a venture capital firm. The Derrick 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, when Patek Philippe sponsors The Economist, they are not trying to shift the Economist's coverage towards being more bullish on Swiss watches. They're just like, we don't even know what you're gonna put in this issue, we're just gonna 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. Yes. Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, 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, that that are like the journals extremely broad in all of business There but there but there really are more narrow products that would work but every time they've gotten there It's been it's been It's been misaligned around

Like like like what the actual coverage is But I don't know maybe we'll see maybe we'll see an f1 team and like 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. That 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, something there. Well, we have David Senner 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 Sentner'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 jam. What's going on? Can you hear me?

Yeah. Yeah. This is the great Malibu blackout of 2025. So I went to our mutual friends and past esteemed past TPBN guest 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.

Your neighbor, your neighbor. I was wondering if you, if you were renting a house, how you got so many books lined up I told him we were looking for places to set up just now. It's 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 You don't actually read is just organized by pretty colors

It bothers me. They should organize it by episode number like everybody else does. Yeah, I do at my house If you're not making a podcast, what is the logical? Better way to order is it alphabetical? Is it by you know? 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. Yeah. And then you have a separate, a separate like intake shelf for things that you haven't read. Yeah. I mean,

the bottom half of my all my bookshelves is the one that I record at my home. Like this, 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, one third is just unread books. And then anything out on any bookshelves in the living rooms is all unread books. I have like 600 now. I have to stop buying them. Are you going to start like printing and binding the materials that you put together 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 sent them to a print shop and they actually do like a spiral binding.

I actually have something I'll give you a preview. I had, 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 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 and like every, you know, hundred pages where I have to like run through all this stuff. But at the very bottom, because he told me that he thought that the, remember you always want to have me to come on here and have this debate about who's the greatest entrepreneur of all time. Goat debate. 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 gonna 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 right, 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? Maybe I should know I think I don't think I think I'd break it up into multiple recordings because sitting down If you see it 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?

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 fit five. We can only fit five on the album. What are the five best ones?

And so then they put the five on there and they're like, okay, if we're going to add to these five, maybe number six has to be really good. And so now you have 25 to pick through them. What's this six, like the next one that's just as good. And I think going through and like 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 like 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. So this is actually the episode I want to talk to you guys about, which is, uh, Michael Ferrera or Michele Ferrera, but I'm going to use the, the, uh, American, 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 I'm reading Bruce Springsteen's 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'd 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%. 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 unreleased songs in his vault that he could release a new album every year for the next century. So you see this over and over again with like

Michael Ferraro, who essentially like I'll just give you like the high level thing, 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 Italian for me. And Ferrero owned 100% of his company. The company has $20 billion a year in revenue, no outside shareholders. 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. He vertically integrated the entire thing. He went to like absurd lengths.

He wound up monopolizing like hazelnut production in the world. So like one out of every three hazelnuts went to his company Ferraro. And then he also became the largest, not only producer of hazelnuts, but he also sold them to other companies. But one thing that you did not, by the way, it is a great one under discussed.

He, this is the guy that invented Nutella, uh, Tic Tacs, bro, Shay, uh, 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 that sounds like Jordy would do. Jordy came to my house just straight and I'm watching up the hill and I see the TPBN all black Maybach. Come on.

And so Michael Ferraro is- Pulling into your palatial house. That's not that part. So the funny thing is this guy lived in Monaco, right? And, and he actually moved because he grew up in rural Italy. He 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. This the joke is like I titled the episode like, oh, Michael Ferro and his $40

billion, you know, chocolate empire, because if you Google them, they're like, Oh, for us 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, he 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 Like mixtures of the stuff that he's making and And in one case, like they said, hey, he did 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 run experiments all day on one single one of their products, and they'd run like 70 to, you know, over 100 experiments on one single product each day. So this like idea of being prolific, you know, over a hundred experiments 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 shots is Steph Curry put up in practice? How many songs has Bruce Springsteen written? How many different iterations did Steve Jobs do on his products throughout 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. Like, I'll give you two funny examples. Are you familiar with Beeple, 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 he 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 as a commercial artist like making good money as a as a commercial artist. But then when his work went to went to went to auction during the NFT boom, he made $70 million like that. It was just all the value capture. 69 million.

But he sold some other stuff. So I think you walked away with like 70 million. He famously like swapped it into USD immediately because he was like, nah, I don't think he was like a crazy crypto person but he just realized that like I've been building for this forever this is the time to value capture and so I'm gonna do it the other funny one is Jake Paul Jake Paul has that has that rap song it's everyday bro often lamp lampooned online but it really does if, 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? It's very clear that he was vlogging every single day for years and got extremely, extremely good at it, 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 how many workouts that he did. Yeah, there's actually, the idea of being prolific. Have you guys had Jackson Dahl on the show yet? Not yet, we got him. No, we've invited him a couple times, but 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. And I think Jackson's doing an excellent job. Like he has one of the best new podcasts, Dialectic. And I've been talking to him a lot about his podcasts as much as possible. I just saw him in New York last week. But he talked about the,

I'm just gonna read this tweet trope or read this tweet rather. 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 podcasts, 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 It's like almost any case at the very minimum You know It's two three four decades of their lives that they dedicated something and in for rose case It's like seven decades So when he was able to improve I 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 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 twenties in post World War II Italy, where there's not even electricity. It's like hard. There

was two machines that the company had that could had enough power to run electricity that 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 built one of the best brands in the world and worked until he died, until he died, Enzo Ferrari. Ferrari. I didn't even say Ferrari. Yeah. When Enzo built his first car, it talks about in his biography, it's like he couldn't

even find electricity. Imagine trying to build the best race car and you don't even access to electricity. It's just incredible. And then if there's a great post, a picture on Twitter 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 just, like, he's in his kitchen. And he sings his songs. My favorite thing, you know, 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 cool. Well, I don't know if he was 45. He was working in racing. Yeah. The brand and start. Well, the funny part about that is he didn't actually give a shit 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 a, 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. 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 asked, I was like, they were like, you have so many opportunities. You can start companies, you can raise funds. Like,

why are you just focused on media? And I was like, well, really like probably David center. Like I've studied all the history's greatest entrepreneurs and just kind of realize they all focus. David center studied history. Yeah. He told me we can study David center. 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. Um, and, and it's like, well, it's the pattern of success everywhere is that there's focus And and it's like it should be mind-blowing and let and yet we're talking we're talking about people all day long who like Love your podcast, but don't actually go in focus and they don't actually do it

and so I'm interested in like the parameters of focus because Michael Ferraro Ferraro did did branch out into Nut Nutella and Kinder and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs, but it's all within the same empire. And you've seen that with, with Steve job. And so there are areas where you can have multiple products within the same organization, the same focus, but your, but your, your, your impact or the output is slightly different.

Um, and I think that people struggle with that because the people will often justify, well, like having a, having a fund and a, and 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. I mean, I think the person that's built the most impressive company in our lifetime is Jeff Bezos. You know, like obviously less base X and I have Starlink in my house and all that 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 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's shareholder letters is like, uh, the person, like getting a, uh, like a history lesson from the person that mastered a high growth internet startup before the playbooks were written. You know, and he kind of like just tells you what he's going to do and then just goes and does it. But for like

Ferrero in his case, it's like, it depends on your level of ambition. And I don't mean this is 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 and grow, assuming I'm good at and other people tell, but like there's another life where I think Ferrero would be like a Giro, where he's just like, no, I'm just going to Giro dreams of sushi. I'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 Ferraro had different ambitions where he 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 dies on Valentine's Day, which is, you know, somewhat like ironic, maybe is the wrong word, but he wanted to be the third largest confectionary 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 things and they'll do a bunch of startups. It just depends on who you are as a person though. I don't even have an opinion on them other than I am the kind of person that just wants to focus on one thing, work on it 70s a week,

think about when I wake up, think about when I go to bed. I'm just not interested in working on multiple things. But I think when people hear my lifestyle and how I try to focus, I've heard people have literally told me, they find it disgusting, that lifestyle. They literally ask the word, they're like, this is disgusting. The world's a big place, I have other interests. And I'm like, that's fine.

But I'm trying to be narrowly focused in the best in the world at what I do. And so I think if you wanna be the best in the world. If you got distracted and 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 allows you to just do-

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&D and I'm reading. My job is very simple. It's just like, wake morning, you know what I'm doing. First of all, it's going right to fucking voicemail because my phone's on DND and I'm reading all my job is very simple. It's just like, wake up every day,

wake up, work out, then read one of biographies, fishes, fishers for three to four hours. Then 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 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 was absolutely Oiled machine a banger company doing great and 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 for 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, it 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. And my idea was just like, I'm never going to write a book because that's not a podcast. Now, 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 ramp. Soundtrack right here. You want to hear it? Yes. Can I hear it using ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp

ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp he ran around the house, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp,

ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp,

ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp issue of focus is me and Patrick did this event at ramps headquarters in New York. Yep. And it's a guy named like Walter, 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. Do he listen to every single episode of founders, but thousands of dollars designed work and then flew from like the Netherlands or some shit to New York to hand me the book. He's trying to launch a podcast and like we, 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's like, push them 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 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 efforts are always rewarded. So the what happened was he shows up at this event and Patrick now knows what he did. I 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 was like, listen, if you are willing to make a world classclass book, I'm talking about like, like what our friend Eric Jorgensen did with the Almanac and Naval. That book changed my life. Like I read that all the time. I handed out like it's candy. I was like, if you could want to build that for the stuff you feel you've learned on founders

and it's you make something I am 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 Neville did. You put it for anybody can read it for free online. If you want to buy a copy, you can buy a copy. And any money you make up 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. One, I can't be a bottleneck to 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 do 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 them for your entire company. But yeah, I think that's a way to like get something into the world, but not take away from the focus I must have on 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 I didn't get a chance to meet Fred Smith when he passed away. He's got the craziest I'm going to. What I'm going to do is I'm going to 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. I will read the opening paragraph for your audience real quick because I think it's worth it.

People don't understand. Everybody sees the planes. Everybody sees the trucks. But they don't understand how difficult it was to build that company. The opening paragraph of this. When we were reviewing what the initial operation looked like, how capital intensive it was, how crazy just like

managing the logistics. This insane logistics dance. The idea that you could do that and make money. The hub and spoke model. 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 and 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 one at a time and expand. He's like the analogy he's 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 to literally right before I got on it, he texted me one that he did on Fred Smith, so I'll put it out later today. But this is the opening paragraph of the create. This is still the craziest beginning of any biography that I've ever read. And it says that 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 has 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 he lost his dad or he's a Vietnam War veteran he had written about FedEx in college got an average grade on it took a decade took a decade to actually build the corporation you have you have people like Michael Dell,

who's one of my personal heroes and wrote one of the best autobiographies 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, thinking of suicide's 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, we're relentless dude that was like, you know, just unbelievable high tolerance for pain and just refuse to quit on this dream of his. And again, like I just personally find those stories like very inspiring. It's like, dude, like this guy, if this guy can succeed in under those circumstances, like surely we could keep going on whatever B2B SaaS app we're building. Like, come on. 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. I 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 to 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 and 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. No, super proud of you guys and very happy to call you friends. We feel the same way. Thank you, David. We love you. All right, I'll see you next week, John. No, I'll see you later. I'll see you later. All right, yeah, call me next time. You guys get off.

Cheers, bye. 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. You can get started for free at adio.com. Should we bring in our next guest, Yancy, from Metalable? 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. Thank you for the music. Yes, yes, yes. Of course. Of course.

We're trying to be a real newscast here. I would love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself. I want to go through some of your history, then artist corporations, then we can kind of dig through the more modern era. Yeah, sure. My name is Yancey 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. And then was a co-founder of Kickstarter and helped make crowdfunding a thing. 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 in what it meant to make a technology product in a very different era of the internet.

And what it meant to build like a real marketplace. What was the first Kickstarter project or the first one that like really went big and you kind of watched it unfold and you realized that this would work. It was three weeks in, it was a musician from Athens, Georgia named Alison 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 make more than their goal? Like just hadn't even occurred to us. And she like introduced the first stretch goal that same day. And really, the template that is still what people follow in crowdfunding

was one woman in her dorm room that really laid the template for how you keep an audience engaged and 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? 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, and 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 just felt very personable. And so there's a level of energy that just, she just knew what the internet wanted and knew how to create that dynamic. And I really like still as a role model 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 self guard or nothing Yeah, yeah, take me through some of the arrows of the internet first first. I have a good Kickstarter story Childhood friend of mine miles came to me when I was just graduating college And he had this crazy idea for 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 So this idea that I thought was completely I thought it was a little bit silly a little bit crazy Yeah, and he was like I'm working on this. I'm going to launch it on Kickstarter. Do you want to help me with it?

And I love Miles. He's always creative and talented, but I didn't get the idea. And 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. And it was just incredible to watch and enable him to build this company. And 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 gonna happen and consumer products specifically? Yeah, it is very hard to judge what consumer products will hit before you just put it out there and the kind of the variable nature of it I just think is is fascinating to watch so thank you for building the platform Yeah, 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 Tik TOK creator fund where you're getting paid out based on views. What, what, how, how do you think about the buckets and then what do you think is great and what do you think maybe needs work? Well, I zero preparation for this, but I've always, I've always wanted to do like a David Halberstam history of the internet, like big picks, but yeah, I would say like, uh, I've always want to do like a David Halberstam history of the internet, like big picks.

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 Oh six is like hardcore, hard mode. 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. You know, 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. And 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, great.

You could grade list the Twitter connect to find every person everywhere. And like the internet's just this playground of like, what can we do together? And then I think 2016 to 2020 was the defection, the collective defection, where it's like sub stack, only fans, more dark forest, less and less mainstream media, more and more like I'm going into the rabbit hole of something online. That is where I make money. Then there was just an event that I did with

other internet where people talked about this, but it ends up that a room full of 20-year-olds called COVID crypto era is where people talked about this, but it ends up that like a room full of 20 year olds called like COVID crypto era is just like just scam period. And then they call period 2023 on to where we are now as scam or be scammed. But like AI crypto SaaS products, like recurring subscriptions, all of it is leading to this feeling of like, someone's going to ding your credit card or like rug you or whatever, like no matter what, you got to like be on your toes and do that back at people.

My favorite is it's like almost impossible to truly cancel a credit card now because you tell AMEX. You tell AMEX. Credit card updater. You tell AMEX. It's the feature. Hey, like I don't want this card anymore, but I want to 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 subscribe to like five years ago Yeah, 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 whatever term that is. Yeah, are you seeing anything before before there? How did you react to? Creator the creator economy becoming a popular phrase among. Yeah, capital. Yeah, but your capital is kind of discovered They kind of created the created economy. Yeah You know, you let the ground that but ground

These 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 talking their book. 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-expressor on the internet, a commercial self-expressor. That's like a 15-year-old profession. And it is also the most desired profession for people under the age of 20. And unlike being an astronaut, like everyone can become one. And right now we have this perspective that the creator economy is maybe a bubble and some convergence of technology that who knows, it'll probably dissipate.

If you step back a little bit and look at the longer history of this space, it's actually shockingly recent to where even commercial artistic, uh, artistic production, like movies and music and books and the way we think of them now, that industry is less than a hundred years old, really, if you look at like a lot of the big players, but 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 Defense Department. Let's give it up for the military. They created creativity. They created the things. Yeah, basically. This is why we love them. They were looking to find divergent thinkers for the military.

OK. So they studied artists and engineers who would pull all-nighters. And 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 sixties to become creative. So like creative writing programs, brainstorming entered the school system. So I am a second generation creative American. And like, but the whole idea of self expressing as a form of improving things or as a way to create more commercial value is a is an extremely recent idea, like just two generations old. So if you think of the idea of being a creator, like that is just building on something that was already there. And what I've come to see is that like 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 gonna 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. And so if we take that approach and also take the internet seriously, what's missing? And that's really been what I've been about the last. Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting places we could go with this. I'm, I, I want to get to the artist corporation and how these, how these, I don't know, influencers or new creators like scale, but I'm, I'm also interested in this idea of what actually has changed.

Because this show, we have kind of discovered, 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. We 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've thought about this in the context of Mr. Beast. 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 what really has changed? Yeah, the big change is that the person, the creative person has full control, not full control, but ownership over the production and the distribution, 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, 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 make sure that they had to clear it and do all these different things. So I think that's the biggest change is the creative people owning those two key levers. Just being more entrepreneurial. And then the cost thing, we handle that internally. I think that's the biggest change is that the creative people owning those two key lovers. Just being more entrepreneurial. And then the cost of 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 gate kept 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.

So that's you're here. But there's more of us than there are winners. And if you give us the same tools and you give us time, many people are very smart. Many people can take in a lot of information and create a talk show out of your minds and out of a limited set of tools. And the notion of hierarchy for where we go for things has been erased as a result of this. And, you know, 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. It'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 your brand IP, you know, do you own your followers?

Do you own your, what of your relationships do you own and which way? Like it gets fuzzy, but there is for sure like 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. And so like 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 lot of weirdness. The interesting thing, 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, they can use like they can go to Bank of America and get a bank account.

Or you're talking about the niche specific finance. 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 and you see that with 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 is 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. But then there are also folks who are building C-Corps and trying to build corporations. And they've realized 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 new corporation that maybe that gets spun out and maybe that becomes its own thing and they sell that 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 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?

If 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 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 or are you an escort? Are you trying to like properly raise money or USC court? And there's a whole big mess in the middle. Um, where I ran

into with a, I'm part of a collective of writers called the dark forest collective, and we published a book together that's done a hundred thousand dollars in transactions, all running through a split that we made on meta-label. 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 healthcare, and the ability to grow wealth and equity.

And so to do that, we're structurally taking a, 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 healthcare 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 like an investible business using this form up until a certain point.

Sure. There's two paths to making that happen and we're pursuing both. One is to like you 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 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. The ultimate is to get both. But yeah, we see it as a way that people to. What is, 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. 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? How does that work? Yeah. S-Corp was in 1950s. There have only been a handful of new corporate forms made

this decade or this century, PPCs, certain types of co-ops, L3Cs. But yeah, when I was CEO of Kickstarter, we became one of the first PPCs. 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 could you do that? So corporate laws pass on a state level. And depending on how a law is written, people can register

and be domiciled from anywhere in that state. And 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 passed 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. I love that. I think that like the elites are not funding enough like 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 cashflow and pay employees. I want to get your take on OpenAI structure because they have, it feels like they've done something similar but at a thousand times larger scale with a non-profit that owns a for-profit and there's a GP, LP, and that feels like

kind of a nightmare scenario. But 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, which is people are going to shape to

whatever is most investable. And like, one of our core constituents, as we're working through this process, our 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 and the way that we create value. But 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 tried 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 nonprofit funds There's maybe a step you go through before that where you're not a full nonprofit, 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. And so you're trying to protect it from being spent in the worst ways. But you, you have to have some of those safeguards. And so every option I think about that's about setting a bar. Deciding the courts, right?

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 mum Donnie like news? I mean, massive come from behind moment.

Did you predict it? What have you been seeing? Are 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. Talk about a tough executive job.

Reading the Power Broker at the moment, actually. Finishing that, so you get a real appreciation for the strangeness of New York City politics. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, 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. And 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, uh, we, we, we were toying with this, this, this idea I'd like to get your feedback on, um, just that out of the 2024 election, there was this narrative around the podcast election, uh, the idea of like the brocasters 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. But when I was mapping it out, I was just seeing that the total number of minutes that Americans spent watching each candidate, I think Donald Trump probably 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 one, 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 TikTok. None 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 Choppa or anything, but 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 crap shoot. 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. Those numbers are probably wrong, but it's like a small percentage buys almost% of the alcohol in America. So 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 10 Q 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. 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 thousand 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 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 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 Cuomo. 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 people know this is real and then over there in the feed that we're around is like largely bullshit. Like we all know. And that's how we're processing everything now. Yeah, 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 Zoran to get 0% corporate tax on the ACOR. There we go.

Could be some way to get some momentum. I mean, there's some way to do that with the donations. Borrow a page out of big business. Talk to Weisenthal about it when he's done. See what he does. We will. We will. Thanks so much for having us on.

This was great chatting. We'll talk to you soon. We got to tell the great TBPN nation about Finn. Can we pull up Finn AI? Can we pull up the website? It's absolutely beautiful. We have had Owen on the show. We are excited to formally partner

with Finn and the Intercom team. Finn 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, the Fynn team is so confident, they have a $1 million guarantee that they can now perform.

And it is why companies like Monday.com, Anthropic, and a bunch of other heavy hitters are using the product. So if you are serving customers, which many businessmen and women do You got to get on Finn. Yeah yesterday. Yeah, let's hit the gong for let's hit the gong for Finn and a one million dollar guarantee Very excited about this. I have we've consistently loved Yeah, and what a journey feels like we need to create a Founder kind of therapy corner because Owen has the ability to just kind of like cut through the noise and we're very

excited to partner with them so fin.ai slash tvpn check it out and with that let's bring in the legend the stalwart. Future mayor of New York. Are you are you safe? Are you doing OK? We've heard that there's a cultural revolution going on in New York City. They're coming for the capitalist journalists.

Is it general 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 Zeron Mamdani on our podcast. So we're one of the good ones. That's good. I've 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. Is 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 I have no idea I have not heard anything about is the rumor that he wants to Bloomberg terminal whether the Bloomberg terminal will be turned into a into a city operated everyone has yes we can only know that's the most every citizen dollars every most it should be universal yeah the most hypercapitalist thing though. Tens of thousands of dollars. It should be universal basic. The most hypercapitalist policy would be every citizen has a terminal.

Universal basic terminal, I'm firmly in favor of that. Health care costs are similar to a terminal cost. I'm cautiously optimistic as long as he doesn't ban podcasts that are ad supported. We're ad supported. As long as he doesn't put a 100% tax on AI researcher 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 goals like freezing the rent. But we'll see what happens on some of these more, the more ambitious vision. Yeah, the freezing the rent thing. We're not quite there yet. No, this is the 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 100 years? Yeah, could be a flourishing market. I mean, I think people are like very jarring, 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? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So there is already a pretty sizable slug of non-market rate housing in New York City. It'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 a certain annual adjustment. And he's just saying there's not going to be, um,

there's not going to be any adjustments. And you know, my guess is that, uh, from a, the perspective of a landlord who has some market rate units and sums, uh, you know, rent regulated units, my guess is that they'll increase the rate or the rent on the market regulated ones. And they'll get the money back at the end. The number one landlord on G2.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, the 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. So there you go. Yeah, I mean, how are people thinking about Mom Donnie

that feels like there's this narrative emerging about, oh, maybe come from behind? Like, people 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, but of course it is not the election. But is there a chance here? Yeah, for us California boys, why is it, why is it, why was that the election? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, generally speaking, New York City is kind of a one party city. The 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's I 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. He'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 this 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. See, he put it as a dominant performance. I 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. Interesting. One narrative that I've heard is that Mamdani was incredible at focusing on local issues. So rent, grocery prices, the buses, like the subway, things that feel tractable for a mayor, whereas Cuomo was focusing more abstractly on national. Or the fact that the food cart guys are having to pay some crazy taxes. This is a great one, 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 a few things. I mean, one is I think Mamdani really made gains. 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. He 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 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, 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. The guy won. I'm not totally surprised that that worked better at a citywide in a citywide election. So So I want to talk about like if I was if I were running for mayor in New York City against mum Donnie, and I and I and I bought in on the idea that New Yorkers care more about rent, is is it reasonable for me to argue for,

I'm gonna drive the rent prices down by deregulating building, or I'm gonna subsidize building or give a tax break to builders? What are the other tools? Because the consensus amongst the economics crowd is that rent controls don't increase, don't decrease the price of rent,

they don't increase the supply of building. 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 can say to construction workers, don't even think about raising prices. Prices.'m watching yeah, don't raise rent so you can say the construction workers don't even think about raising prices prices 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 and you know what we really need to do is deregulate this and then we'll get supply and 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. Any talk 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, you 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 are, or kind of in the center, whatever, they found him to be really disarming and even charming. They were threatened by him. And I think if you, you know, clearly and 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. And 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 normie things like, yeah, why don't we just make it easier to build? We're also sort of cool with them. Yeah. Talk about his media strategy. Yeah. Europe Europe, your male podcaster, potentially brocaster. Manosphere, a popular member of the Manosphere. Did you get him elected by platforming him? Are you the Donald Trump, the Joe Rogan to his Trump? You know, yes. We might be. No, I don't know if we are.

But that episode came out May 23, if you look at the prediction markets. It was basically two days later that he started shooting up. The market mover, the stalwart. 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 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? But yes, by entering the Bro podcast that I co-host with Tracy all the way, of course. It may have helped. And then you did a bunch of media after that. I think that was his sort of first like true

like mainstream one. So, you know, part of Bloomberg. It may have helped. Do you think, what do you think was most more important and how would you weight them? Like his owned media stuff, his TikToks, viral videos that's that's what I saw first 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 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. Do 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.

Oh, I know, yeah. And his videos, it's not just that they're short form. They're really good. They looked really good. They were 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 package packaged it up extremely well for social media, just seems like a very normal, likable guy. And 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, oh, yeah, I always want to backlight everything, you want the sun behind you, and it's like, yeah, I just didn't, we didn't find the right person that understood the basic rules of cinematography to understand, like, you need a soft source, you 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 over I'm gonna do short form video. I'm gonna say something. He's looked great. Like the angles are really good on them. And I know that seems like sort of a tiki tag thing to talk about. But it's clear that this is someone who comes from knowledge about how to package media really good. Totally. What can we do to get Robert Granary, the founder of Jane Street on odd loss? I saw that headline this morning about how, it's so funny.

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 they're like, oh, 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. And now the only two things that like the average person would know about extraordinarily successful trading company that makes billions and billions every year making markets. And now the only two things that like 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. These are the sponsor of the Dwark Hach Patel podcast, which is a fantastic podcast. So I know four things about them. 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. Yeah, 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 we're saying Benjamin Fried worked. And I'm like, they don't deserve that heat because he was like an intern, he did all

the bad stuff later. Like, it 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 gonna 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. 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 going 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. There's two.

Kal-She announced a round at $2 billion today. And then the Polymarket round was 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 big events are happening, you're on X and you're just constantly seeing screenshots and things like that.

And obviously, we got to get into the Middle East, of course, in a little bit, but it's hard because we're in a bubble. How mainstream do you feel prediction markets have gotten? Well, look, let's put it this way. Like 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.

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. It's it it's, it's, it's a,

but people that are basically making bets, investments, gambling, whatever you want to call it. But then it creates a public benefit, which is I've never made a single trade on poly market. Any predict, I've never made any type of prediction, like base trade. Uh, and for both, you know, main reason being that like, it wouldn't be ethical for us to cover what's happening in prediction markets and then just be betting on them. 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.

Let's say last week when it seemed like Cuomo was going to win and the ever most people would have said, yeah, probably Cuomo will win. But you can actually like get now you know, there's like put a price on what that means. Is he a 60% favorite? Is he 80%? Is he 90%? Like that's useful because the difference between he's 60% likely versus 90% likely is sort of useful in terms of gauging that so 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, et cetera. Yeah, 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. You know, how great is it that people are always betting on all this stuff? I don't really know, but from a sort of like, I wanna know what's happening in the news. I wanna know what's developing. Yep. There's pure utility that's news here utility developing. Yep. Yeah, there's pure utility. That's free

Yeah, poly market.com. Also, I would like to you know Thrust 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. The 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? Or the Pentagon pizza index. And then what is up market of that?

They're probably finding another signal that's even up market of that. And then feeding that in. And look, there's a reason for it, which is you wanna be able to, big institutions, they wanna be able to hedge very specific risks. So if they have oil exposure that 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, many 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, the 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 poly market for specific details of will this strike happen on this day,

but then I'm looking at the price of oil. Yeah. And maybe just the overall stock market because of World War Three is gonna 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 and you probably could have gauged risks just by looking at oil futures, which sort of moved along together with, um, you know, the odds that US enters the war in some way or whatever it is. Um, you know, it was really striking. I mean, so the attack, God, my brain is so scrambled.

I think the nuclear Saturday, right. That day, that contract will the US enter into, like really started spiking that morning. And that could because, 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 and it's like, okay, you know,

there was a lot of money riding on this. There was no oil. And it was nice. And look, yeah, and it's nice on a weekend. 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 crypto token or whatever like all of this is happening. It will all be 24-7 in a fairly short period of time. There 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 I think this is here to stay. And as you say, going to get more sort of institutionally real Yeah, I feel so was everything was everything priced in at the beginning of the year. We've gone through a trade war We've gone no, but the Nasdaq and S&P they're just flat. They're basically flat on the last six months happened. So nothing Yeah, it's insane

I mean it blows my mind when I look at that year-to-date number and 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. There aren't really any deals and the 90 day deadlines are like coming pretty close. Then obviously the for 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. Which is also possible. Well, it's interesting interesting in all the time that you've been reporting 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 that's a great number of emergency Joe Weisenthal

podcast. So a number of times that Joe Weisenthal is getting called to appear. That's a new pizza. That's the new metric. That was actually someone, we did like 25 episodes in April. Yeah. And someone made a joke and in reg- and I hate the fact that they were correct about this. They're like, oh, we must be near a bottom because the Outlawed hosts are saying the exact timestamp of when they start the recording. It's like, we are recording this at 10 15. Yeah, they bottom, they bottom recording this at 10.15.

They bottom ticked it, April 8th. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, shoot, they really have us dead to sites 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 rolling 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 gonna open cnn.com or the app and be like, what is going on?

What did Trump say on true social benefits from volatility? Even Trump benefits because he can say, I tried to do the tariffs. And then, yeah, I had to roll them back a little bit. But I'm still the pro-tariff guy or something like that. Yeah, 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.

And we are a 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'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. And it's basically a new kind of hobby, right?

I've been monitoring the situation my whole career. You know, like I get up. I used to get up. I know, but now every day Americans can just do it. Yeah, you're professional. I got to find a new source of edge now that we're all situation monitoring. And then the other thing with Tesla, the funny thing you know we didn't even talk about the you know

No, they're just the Trump Elon blow up That going over and then Tesla is Still down year-to-date 13 percent 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? That's it there's something to be said, you know the alternate view of this is yes It is a great time for volatility and there's plenty to trade It's also been a good time for the sort of buy and hold people who actually have a life because they know They clearly it's like oh buy it make your investments and maybe check in once a year or sick every six months. They can unfortunately, those people who are very

obnoxious when they say that, because I certainly don't do that. But they're very, 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, the passive bros are still doing, are still doing well. I 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. Just buying and holding the S&P and literally do nothing It used to be such an insanely good people but 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 enough for real like Because there's all these people and all they do is spend all this time getting learning the minutia of every stock this or that Or whatever and 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 it. It was a simulation created for Jane Street to win at.

Yeah. Just dominate. How any 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 that 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. And 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. And it doesn't feel like anything. I would say autonomous vehicles seems like one of those things. I was comparing it a little bit to the state of the mobile internet in 2004,. Right? We're like, we all sort of knew that it was coming, but it was kind of janky. And remember, you know, oh, do you get, do you get access to 3G here or what? Remember, there used to be competing standards.

We didn't really know. And it was sort of a bad, now the user experience going into a way mode is obviously a religious experience, but it's patchy and you don't know and you 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 they'll never be the same. I think that's the same with AVs where it's like, okay, it's interesting what they're doing in San Francisco.

That's interesting. Okay, Austin is and then in a few years from now, we're gonna 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 because 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 be on your phone the entire time of the drive. So I think it's going to be almost a bigger deal than people currently appreciate, even with all the hype it's getting. Last question from my side. We've seen Meta making some crazy talent acquisition deals, 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 in the hedge fund deals gotten into the billion dollar territory at any point? We've heard about. So you do. Yeah, there are. You know, the it's actually interesting to my mind. Emily Sundberg, who you've had on the show before, had a really interesting thing, talking 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.

It 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 researchers, whether we're talking about journalists, et cetera,'re talking about a researcher, whether we're talking about journalists, etc. 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. Like the question is what what industry is that?

Yeah, what is that happening? Well, Tim Cook can't even crack 75 million a year. Yeah Poor Tim or Tim we talked about this all the time. Yeah. Well, it's good time to be in the news business That it's good time. It's a great time. It's a great time and thanks for joining Anytime and I'm back soon. This is my favorite minutes on the show. It's the best. Thank you so much. I love it Well, it's actually talk soon. Bye favorite minutes on the show. It's the best. Thank you so much. I love it. Take care. Talk soon, Joe. Bye. If you're looking to get in 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 about multi-ass investing. You better take it seriously. Industry leading yield. They're trusted by millions. And next up, we have Alex Attala from OpenRouter 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. Was that the same company or a different company? That was the previous company.

Oh, okay, cool. OpenSeat. That was OpenSeat. Which 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 the best appearances. 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 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, uh, needs cloud flare for language models. So like both of those companies, we orchestrate and route traffic to the best GPU hosts for you based on the best GPU host 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. Intelligent goes through like intelligence brownouts, like Harpavi has been saying.

And, uh, and so you need, you need some way of, of keeping the utility. Like lit up. A lot of apps will just like rely on a hundred percent available intelligence. Sure. Um, so we, you can pay you like users pay us directly. Um, we sometimes do volume with different providers so that we can get good volume economics on the supply side and, uh, and then, um, and we kind of make money mostly there.

Uh, talk to me about what Microsoft is doing in the category. Satya 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 how is it playing out there? Yeah, so unlike most other resources and software, AI is pretty unique. It's a battleground with lines being drawn

around the models, and the models are just not available in all clouds. Like Gemini is only available in Google Cloud, obviously, and you have Anthropic, which is available in AWS and Google Cloud, but not Azure, and then you have Grok, 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 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. So that you can get all the models in one place. So 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. Uh, I'm interested in a company that has built a large durable business on top of GCP, Azure, AWS, et cetera. Yeah, good question. I don't know of an exact analogy that fits that word a bit of a unique,

uh, player, but theflare, I mean, started as only a layer on top of all the clouds. It was like a plug and play safety net to prevent you from denial of service attacks and to turn on security for 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 more complexity to the compute layer that we provide before it hits the clouds themselves. Are there things that you're, I wanna know about the different models capabilities, what the different labs are working on. And 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 it brothers a brown out 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 onto 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 100,000 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? So 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 more is much more

interesting to us. Cause we, 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 scheme allowed. Some only allow you to output a JSON object, but no schemas 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 like fit that much output in your requests. And if you want both of those things and JSON and some crazy features that nobody's that nobody supports, we give you a heads up that it's not going to go anywhere. Got 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 stocking horse for the other labs. Open AI 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? What 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 in to 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. So 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 was kind of a surprise. But anyways, kind of interested to get 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 go into our rankings page or go into the homepage. When you mentioned that Klein is one of the top apps, those are all apps that have opted into being shown publicly. You 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 the, what the, what users are doing. And in practice, what this means is 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.

So to answer your first question, we generally don't directly recommend, We generally don't directly recommend. But we'll work with some customers and understand their ideas and recommend models that way. And it's usually very specific based on the kind of workload, the amount they want to spend, their tolerance for performance and speed. But what a lot of people do is they just check our rankings page, they look for apps that are similar, and then they pick the ones that are trending or popular.

It makes a ton of sense. I would love to have you back on when there's another big model release. I'm sure you are an endless source. I mean, imagine even like hedge funds reach out to you for like, hey, is this model getting adopted quickly? I'm sure a lot of the data's 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.

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Very excited for that. 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 guests. They're the next guests. Oh, whoops. This is the Orca team. Oh, okay. I was like, are these guys in the same place?

Sorry, sorry. Let's just do it live. Yeah, we're booking these folks back. You guys are here. Let'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. Goaded marketers.

We're both goaded 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 package in this. Oh, wow. Stunning. Yeah. We started because we were solving a problem with energy drinks, which is that they all tasted like candy to us and really sweet. And after drinking them every morning for years, we were like, why can't we just take all the caffeine and put it in water? And so 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 it. I think that's how you guys find out about us probably. 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 at hit the ground running here. That's amazing. Isn't it strange with consumer packaged goods, you're like the company's ripping,

but 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. It's tough. Yeah, getting payment terms from a supplier will be important. Give us a quick backstory on making it. I feel like people love the packaging

and then you've also caught heat for it online for people that are like. Did you invent it yourself? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you invent this in a cave with a box of scraps? Yeah, a lot of people that have never built anything have opinions. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

They hate standing on the shoulders of giants. Yeah, 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. And 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 like 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. 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. Regular bottles of water. Yes, regular bottles of water. But you wanted something that fit the energy drink kind of shape and dimensions.

Is that what 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, oh, we have a really cool square can. You want to innovate, but not too much. Yeah, 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 people might be okay if like, oh, it's sparkling. But if there's a hundred milligrams of caffeine in there, you're like, what the hell is happening? 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. Yeah. That was the wildest campaign. Yeah. Break that down. How'd that come together? Give us all the numbers. Like 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 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? This is where it would be having Corbin blue list road signs for nine minutes. So, yeah, we're you guys want any awards for that yet? Yeah, I feel like this could be like Adweek or like some sort of like ad ad.

Yeah, big ad probably hates you guys because you're tearing up the rulebook. 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 expert exploration of Napoleon's withdrawal from Moscow. And so we'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, we can see hilarious. Wow. Like you don't understand. We're, we're playing on a different level. Yeah. Pull it up. This is hilarious. Wow, you don't understand. We're Going on a different level. Yeah, pull it up. 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? How do we do this kind of thing multiple times a year? What 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 and then launching into retail here in Southern, California Speaking of muscle, who's that behind you? Where are you? Is that such a funny mural? We are We're in the attic. Okay, our house. We've got three roommates national is downstairs. I see them out that 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 That we sent him jacked, but he was out of town. And so we just kept it Breaking through good good. Yeah, most people think oh, yeah use AI mark to market and it's like, oh you Chopped up your b-roll a little bit

This is a while. What were you guys doing before this? Yeah We were both in tech. We were we were Yes Yeah. We were both in tech. We were buddies at Georgetown. Yes. Let's go. Let's go. Let's give it up for big tech. You said buddies where? Georgetown, college.

Nice. Amazing. But we've got to get some here in the studio. I mean, this is the amount of caffeine. I mean, John consumes. We were on the show before you tasted it. Because I know you're unbiased. But I know that that can play a factor. the show before you tasted it because I know you're about your unbiased But I know that can play a factor now. We're biased because we like you guys

These are turning to the fact that that Mataina your Ramata tastes like it was made by someone. This is the only is the only category Like partner that we don't have exclusives on you don't we just we just were connoisseurs of energy Yeah, energy kind of like how the economist the back of the economist is a different high Horology a different watch brand every single every single edition every single show should have a different energy drink Percolating through the show we love it, but thanks so much for coming on guys We will talk to you good luck with the fundraise good luck with distribution. Hopefully see you guys around LA sometime Yeah, we'll see you soon

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 dating and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. I have the funniest story. This is 100% the truth.

My first thought this morning was you reading The Wanderer at. Really? It's so drilled into my brain It's incredibly drilled. that I just woke up and I, and my first thought was find your happy place, book a wander with

inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dream beds, top-definition cleaning. You know, it really runs in my dreams at this point because I say it so fast. And I was talking to Yedek 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. And I was like, show me a man who says that they skip the TBPN ad reads and I'll show you

a liar because I think it's impossible by the time you get to your phone, if you have your finger on the trigger, I will be done before the finger hits the glass and then you skipped real content and then you skipped real content and you lose like, like speaking of real content and video hit an all-time high The 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. It looks like a picture of us. Oh yeah, Greg's a big dude, I guess, yeah. And then the other news around NVIDIA is that they've launched D picture of us. Oh yeah, Greg's a big dude, I guess, yeah. And then the other news around Nvidia is that they've launched DGX Leptone Cloud,

which now connects Europe's developers to global GPU compute. It's kind of like, you know. A technology win for Europe. Yeah, but Leptone is, you know, one lower level abstraction than OpenRouter. So OpenRouter's routing you to all the models, but if you have a model, you need to serve it on GPUs, how can you get that, how can you get GPU capacity

all over the place? This is one of the options now, and it's a spiting against near clouds. Today at GTC Parish, Jensen Huang announced DJX Lepton with the goal 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 Lepton is successful, they will 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 neocloud margins into ultra low commodity level pricing. So it's unclear. You know how semi-analysis is, you know how it's handwritten? Yeah. There's always, he throws in some grammatical errors. Let you know that it's not AI.

To let you know it's handcrafted. Yeah, I mean, obviously we're seeing with the neoclouds 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. Nvidia is ruffling the tech giants with move into cloud computing. Things are getting awkward. We need a feather ruffling sound effect. 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. It has also nurtured upstarts competing with the big cloud companies investing in AI cloud players,

CoreWeave and Lambda. We've had Lambda on the show, we've had Chase from Crusoe on the show. Gotta 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. At the same time, Nvidia is alienating many with DJX Lepton. MI355 is great performance per TCO against HGXB200.

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's over there like, yeah, we'll sell you the chips, but we're also gonna try and beat you at your own game. Well then maybe as a cloud provider, as NeoCloud, you wanna 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, they all have their own inference chips too. And so Nvidia's getting squeezed by the TPU. And so GCP, Google has the TPU that competes with the H200, right?

And that's why there's the 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 Neo clouds, 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.

Well, we have guests in the studio. We have our next guest in the studio. We have our next guest, Nikunj, 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?

Following your journey. Wow. Yeah, and so it's been an honor. Order to come on here. Thank you. And yeah, I'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. The two GPs, West Chan and Pega, who are the two GPs here. And yeah, very excited to be here after, you know, dipping into my investing for a at Coastal Ventures for a year.

Very cool. What does FPV stand for and what is your focus at the fund? Yeah. So FPV stands for Founders Point of View. I think that's what kind of like really drew me into joining this fund. We mostly just cared about like what the founders are doing. With our generalist fund, we just raised our fund to $525 million. Just closed a few months ago.

And then we have a, thank you, we have a billion dollar investment. 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 a rag infrastructure, to anything you can kind of think of. And I think as I was kind of figuring out what I wanna do next, the world is very exciting and kind of like both atoms and bits, AI is affecting kind of every small detail

and excited to be here and be a small part of the team. Yeah, 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. And 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 on the on the vodcaster a couple of days ago. They just raised their large round, part of one is to build the networking model which you know 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? I think that's where bets can still be placed and you can see outsize value. Otherwise, like 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. I'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 it 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. Companies 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 are doing it for defense because they're seeing the replicates and the boards 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. From 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 all agree we're in the era of bundling. More and more companies, more and more enterprise want one solution. They don't want to pay for five different solutions. And so you're able to see all of that combined there. It is wildly interesting to see on the sidelines. I have no predictions on kind of how it goes.

The rise of like lovable, replet and bold all doing such insane revenue numbers is probably like what's causing some people to play defense, but it just means software is just gonna keep growing and growing and spend on software is just gonna 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 having this tremendous appetite for data? We talked about on the show Clueli has this sort of interesting experience of being able to get the power of LLMs passively, right? Just 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 open, 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. And so I think that's what's scaring people. But I do think building a horizontal and vertical at the same time with deep workflows, it's

just hard. It's like, 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 depth in each application, each job, each vertical. There's so much to do. I don't think OpenAI or a single company can capture all the value. OpenAI is uniquely positioned where they have a dominant consumer company in the chat GPT and also market leading APIs. But there's Claude that has incredible APIs

for core gin as well. 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. But I still think there's so much value to be had. I mean, it's just, it's the size of the pie is too large for one company to own it. And I'm opening up against time, but I still think there's plenty to do. How are you thinking about go to market for new AI products, either in consumer or B2B? It feels like there's multiple strategies right now. You see that cursor chart and it's just, it's a line directly straight up because they just got to hundreds of millions. Are they at 500 million now or something?

500 million ARR. Yeah, and we had Amjad from Repload On yesterday going from 10 to 100 in a matter of months. So fast. And then you see the Clueless of the world, and Avi at friend.com did another strategy, which was very virality driven. And so there's 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? How 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 the individual is understanding, like, hey, where are you spending your time?

Are there any channels? If you're just doing yet another Twitter launch video, then maybe that's overs, 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 in 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, 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, what's the org chart looks like, how do you break in?

Is this like a bottom-up play in the enterprise side or are you top-down? 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 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 or like of the world are able to break through. Cursor kind of grew from the bottoms up to the point where enterprises had to come knocking to them and say like, hey, can you build us an enterprise plan?

I don't think they even had one, but 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 Meta, I had PNL responsibilities, had open door, like, you know, growth was my last job there,

and I tried to take as much P&L responsibility. And 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 that. 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 gonna sell this product, I'm gonna figure out what the marketing copy is, I'm gonna work with everyone. I do think the role of an orchestrator is what all of us will do.

Like I think more all of us are gonna 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 to, and I was just so- Nacoon said like TVPN clips are perfectly timed

with like, you know, running basically props. 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 ups thing because what do you do? You're for 15 minutes. That's why X's

numbers are actually through the roof. They don't have any stats from them, but it's like, you're having an agent do the work for you. What do you do? You need a dopamine rush, you go to X, or you watch TVPN. And so I actually think that's the future. But going back to the PM side, on the orchestration side, PMs are excellent orchestrators. Like maybe you kind of have to keep all of these things handy. So I think the PMs who are like 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. They want like an orchestrator. But if you're like a most marketers you talk to, they don't wanna deal with people problems. They want an orchestrator.

But if you're a PM who just wants to hold on to, I have a PRD and I'm a project manager, the work behind the work is dead. That is just gonna die a slow death in the next 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,

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 a valuation lift

just by nature of raising at the same time as this AI boom? Or, you know, are you seeing that when you're, when you're kind of looking at the same time as this AI boom? Are you seeing that when you're looking at opportunities in other categories? I was the question, are AI native companies just seeing a massively high valuation? No, no, no. So it's very clear that AI native companies are getting this massive valuation to just lift.

Do you think that's benefiting non-AI businesses by just the 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, I'm just curious. Let's say you look at some company that's doing

farming-focused biotech. Are they just naturally getting a slight lift, or maybe it's too anecdotal? It really depends. I know that's a bullshit answer, but I think some of it is kind of like, how much data do you have? If you were 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 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. Or it's like, you know, the atoms world, physical world still has a lot of alpha still out there.

I think like, you know, I think software as that gets democratized, there's a lot of things happening. That's why in bio and robotics, in like manufacturing supply chain, like 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 coming. But the problem is venture is momentum backed. And so as a venture investor, you want to see like that inflection points. And sometimes if you're not AI native, and one of the hard discussions is like, well, they're a great company, we're seeing some inflection, but we're not sure yet.

And if you're not going gonna see the inflection, then it's hard to be a venture-backed company today. That's showing up in the series A, that, you know, I don't like the word, but the zombie concept 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. Amazing. 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. I appreciate it. I'll come back on next. It was amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. And congratulations. I'm super excited for you in the new role. Thank you. I appreciate it. Come back on soon.

Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel, getbezel.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. How are you doing? How are you?

Alex. Good to meet you. Sorry that I started you. No, Are you Alex? Yeah, sorry that I Know yeah, yeah, you're like the most online founder yet for two hours there you Regular words, it's a flex leaving you under it Congratulations on the acquisition break break give it give us some quick background on you and super local and then and then the deal And then I'm sure we'll get into a bunch of stuff. Yeah.

I mean, I guess I've built Super Local for a while. We built a bunch of products. I mean, initially, it was just me working on one thing, totally unrelated. But in sort of like the last iteration, Super Local is a very personalized map. So you can kind of imagine it like Google Maps in Chetchu Tea had a baby with some OG Foursquare vibes sprinkled in. And 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 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. I'd rather go to Monadis and Venice. So it knows like that's my personality. So when I search for places, it takes that into account.

Awesome. How did the Foursquare deal come about? Had you known the team for a while? Was it the kind of thing where you were, you know, friendly with the CEO and it just made sense at some point? What did that look like? Yeah, I mean, I've known them for a while. Then it just came up and then I thought it was a good idea.

Nice. And so you're continuing to scale super local. Are we happy about the acquisition? Are we ringing the go? Yeah Obviously I've set up for square since I dedicated like How does how does how does super local fit into four overall strategy going forward, you're continuing to operate it independently? Yeah, I mean, we're just operating exactly like we used to. That's like the current thing.

We're just building what I was building before, but without 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 gonna be the next Facebook and it's gonna 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. What do you think is most promising over the next few years in this category? I mean, I know like they're, 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, what do you bullish on the consumer side? Like, cause some, I mean, this is happening in the context of AI, like, uh, there's a lot of people on the consumer side? Like, because some, I mean, this is happening in the context of AI.

Like, there's a lot of people on the $20 plan first, chat GPT. 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 at 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 Play Search actually has maybe like some of the easier monetization in general, because 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. I mean, we've done stuff with subscriptions and actually done quite well. But that was actually before we had any AI. AI searched things in it, it always did rather well. Just here like little gamification features.

So I don't 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 Hots and he was like, I open eyes losing money on me because inference cost is actually material as opposed to, you know, database queries,

which are essentially free at, you know, for an individual user has, has your AI bill ever been stressful? No, not really. But I guess it's also another advantage of place search. It's not like you Has your AI bill ever been stressful? No, not really, but I guess it's also another advantage of Play Search. It'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. 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. Four Square is a pretty famous New York company. Are you moving out there? Are you in LA now? Oh no, I'm gonna go to San Francisco. San Francisco.

What are you gonna do without Arowan? I know, I even have my Arowan water right here from this morning. There we go. It'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, Dubell. Congratulations. Congrats. And yeah, I want to see over time the feature on Super Locals. You basically can remove the fog from the world. So you can basically see how a video game, basically. I know the guy who posted that. Aidan, 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. I think- Yeah, we had it before that actually. You did? That was a super random feature we built. We were at another benefit place. We were at Butcher's Daughters

and one of our engineers brought it up. He just made it over the weekend and it just crushed it. That's amazing. I expected and it 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 actually crazy how little the map would change

because we leave home. Yeah, go to work. Go to the gym. Come back. Get breakfast, go to the studio go home awesome well thank you for joining Alex congratulations and hope to have you on again soon yeah we'll talk to you soon 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 get that Ashton Hall sound effect ready 87 for John 93 percent quality 81 percent consistency six hours and 51 minutes I love my son. How'd you do? Well what give us the number don't hide it don't hide Well show today, I thought you put up a great show Didn't let it get in the way, that's good. I It was funny this morning because the my son decided at 4 a.m. Yeah that that sleeping was over

my son decided at 4 a.m. that sleeping was over. He 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 what you use it. Go to eightslick.com, use coTVPN. But he started realizing that like 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 like, okay. I told you my four year old, I had to text Matteo, the CEO of Aidsleep, make, my four year old has demanded an Aidsleep, I'm not kidding. And hopefully there's news to share there soon, but I might get him one, 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. And we're like, no, buddy, that's not where you sleep. Well, I have a post to pull up before we wrap. So this is a post from Poole Tay, the US 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 world today I ordered the great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count Cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage no way and there is a great post here if we can get this pulled up guys Says these mortgages are solely collateralized on fart coin. Oh no.

That will happen. That will happen. That will happen. I'm sure they will value meme coins slightly differently. Hopefully. Than the majors. Hopefully. But anyways, super fun show today.

I think that's pretty much it. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 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. Thank you so much for watching. Have a beautiful afternoon and evening. We'll see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow. Cheers.