TBPN - Jeffrey Katzenberg & Kimbal Musk, Dow Jumps as Powell Signals Rate Cut, Crusoe in Talks for $10B Valuation, Inside America's Most Expensive Home | Joe Weisenthal, Jessica Livingston, Zachary Bookman

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

(00:58) - Dow Jumps as Powell Signals Rate Cut (05:46) - Crusoe in Talks for $10B Valuation (15:24) - Inside America's Most Expensive Home (35:46) - Timeline (01:13:47) - Joe Weisenthal, a financial journalist and co-host of Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast, discusses the Federal Reserve's recent policy signals, noting that Chair Jerome Powell's comments suggest a dovish stance, which has positively impacted markets and cryptocurrencies. He highlights the debate over recent labor market data revisions, suggesting that while some view them as signs of economic slowdown, others believe they reflect temporary uncertainties, with potential for acceleration as businesses gain clarity. Weisenthal also touches on the limited role of AI in current economic discussions, indicating that while it's a theoretical concern for central bankers, it hasn't yet significantly influenced policy decisions. (01:31:20) - Jeffrey Katzenberg, a renowned entertainment executive and co-founder of DreamWorks, discusses his investment in Nova Sky Stories, a drone entertainment company co-founded by Kimbal Musk. He likens Nova's innovative use of thousands of proprietary drones to create sky-based visuals to the early days of Pixar, emphasizing its potential to revolutionize storytelling. Katzenberg expresses excitement about collaborating with Musk to develop immersive "Sky Story" experiences, aiming to establish a new era of family-friendly entertainment. (01:56:54) - Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, discusses her observations on the evolving startup ecosystem in San Francisco, noting a significant revitalization and optimism compared to previous years. She reflects on the importance of founders being deeply committed to their ventures, emphasizing that genuine interest and dedication are crucial for navigating the challenges of building a successful startup. Livingston also highlights the value of maintaining a focused and disciplined approach during the early stages of a company, suggesting that minimizing distractions can enhance productivity and increase the likelihood of achieving product-market fit. (02:31:52) - Zachary Bookman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenGov, a company that provides cloud software solutions to local governments and state agencies. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges of modernizing government operations, emphasizing the importance of transparency and efficiency in public administration. He also highlights the need for mission-driven approaches to improve government performance and accountability. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're here watching TVPN. Today is Friday, August 22nd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. And we are in white suits. The technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, because the fortress of finance, the stock market is on fire. Jordie Hayes, ring that gong. Kick us off with a huge gong hit for the market.

Right now, the NASDAQ is up one point. Actually, 2%. Dow Jones is up 2%. Bitcoin's up 4%. You'll love to see. Ben Carlson on X says the stock market. is up on news that the Fed chair thinks the labor market is slowing down. Yes.

So if you want to save time and money, go to ramp.com, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. In one single place. Yes, very weird narrative going on. To actually break down what's happening, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, gave a speech at a conference in Jackson Hole. And so the stock market's ripping today. The Dow's on track for its first record closed this year.

I would have thought that happened earlier because the NASDAQ was setting so many records. But again, it's because of all the tech movement that's been really pushing the NASDAQ higher. The Dow's been a little bit lagging, but that's expected. It's industrials index. But the news is not that the Fed is cutting rates. It's not that Powell said the Fed is going to cut rates. The news that's moving the market, 2% today, is he said that there are risks that inflation will continue rising and that the labor market will keep weakening.

And if that happens, it could prompt the Fed to support economic growth by reducing rates. The narrative earlier this year was that everything computer, the narrative now, everything bullish. Everything bullish. Everything bullish. You got news? Bullish. Bullish.

Yes, yes. Everything's a bullish catalyst. Good morning, Gold Rock. Good morning, Regav. Good morning, everyone. We will have Joe Wisenthal joining us in about an hour. He's in Jackson Hole. Yes.

He was getting paparazzi shots of Mr. Jerome Powell himself. So Powell said the word inflation 55 times during his speech. And the market clearly interpreted that as a signal that the Fed is ready to cut rates if cracks begin to show in the economy. And we talked about this earlier. Just maybe it's not this time is different. There won't be another bubble. There won't be a correction.

Just, you know, no two moments in history are exactly the same. What's particularly unique about this particular setup is that, yes, the stock market's on fire. There are a lot of top signals all over the place. But given that interest rates are high, that gives the Fed a, you know, like a potential tool in the tool chest. If there is a correction, if we do get over our skis on a bubble. And this morning, the odds on polymarket of a rate cut were sitting at under 80%. It popped dramatically after Powell's comments up to a 94% chance of a Fed rate cut in 2025. This is after some of the bigger investment banks have been saying no rate cut even recently.

So let's talk about what was actually going on in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. the official name of this event is labor markets in transition, demographics, productivity, and macroeconomic policy, an economic symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And this was a barn burner. I heard from people on the ground, there were tears, there were gasps, there were people shaking, cheering, standing invasions. It was a huge moment.

People get fired up when they hear about macroeastern. economic policy. Joe Wisenthel is one of them. Let me just read from some of this and just tell me if you get chills. When I appeared at this podium one year ago, the economy was at an inflection point. Our policy rate had stood at five and a quarter to five and a half percent for more than a year. That restrictive policy stance was appropriate to bring down inflation and to foster a sustainable balance between aggregate demand and supply. Mike drop. Wow. Yeah. He went there. He went there. He went there. The labor market is a case in point. The July employment report released earlier this month showed that payroll job growth slowed

to an average pace of only 35,000 per month over the past three months, down from 168,000 per month during 2024. This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially. Get ready to rumble. Another mic drop. Yes, another mic drop moment. I got chills.

So yesterday, if you were watching closely, we had Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe on the show. He called in from a very nicely appointed log cabin. We asked him where he was. He said he was in Jackson Hole. What do you think, Jordy? Do you think he was at this event? Or do you think he was just doing some extreme mountain biking on a Thursday

based on how hard you know he works? Hard question. He does, like everybody loves mountain biking. Exactly. Everybody would love to spend a Thursday mountain biking. I'm guessing given that they were announcing. a major acquisition. I think it's quite possible he was there for something else.

Yes, which is interesting because Crusoe is thought of as a startup. And Jackson Hole, this particular event, is typically for central bankers from other countries, academics, economic researchers, financial industry leaders, and a few journalists. Like, it's not really like startup central. Yeah.

And yet he maybe was there, we don't know. We'll figure it out. $10 billion startup? Well, that's what Bloomberg reported yesterday. Crusoe's allegedly outraising at a $10 billion valuation. We will wait until they announce the round. We would never scoop. We would never preemptively ring a gong for someone.

Yeah, it's bad luck. Yeah, it is bad luck. Yeah. Let them get it done. To hit the gong on a scoop. On a scoop. Exactly. Yeah.

But I had two takeaways from talking to Chase yesterday. The first is that I genuinely do not understand data center technology at nearly the level I would like to. I know the chips are important. Chips got to be big, fast, cheap. The energy is important. The water's important. The racks are important.

The racks is important. I know S.K. Heenix is involved in the memory. And then once you have the memory... I used to think that it was important to have a structure. Yes. But then Zuck put everything in the tent. Everything's changing. Everything's changing.

And Dylan Patel is the only reliable guide in the space. But... And I understand that, like, optimizing K. KV Cash is important. KV. Cash, the key value store where everything goes in the memory, and then the model needs to access the memory, and that's what the acquisition was about. How can you access different models faster on the chips? I thought it was funny that I asked Joe. Yeah.

So you think this has an, is this all like high frequency trading? Oh, you mean Chase? Sorry, not Joe. He's coming on the show at 1215, by the way. Just very excited to talk to Joe in an hour. But you asked Chase. No, but I asked Chase, do you think this is going in the direction of- Like, is there any way that running a neocloud would benefit from having a CEO with some experience in high-frequency trading potentially?

Is there any overlap in skill sets? He's just like, well, I did spend a decade in high-frequency trading. And if you think about it, I mean- It sounded like he had fed you that question. No, no, I totally. It was actually- Yeah, no, I actually didn't know that. I was just wildly unprepared, clearly.

Yes. Shallowly researched interviews. That's what you come to us for. Yes. But- You can get deeply researched interviews elsewhere. There is someone whose whole thing is deeply research interviews, and we're a big fan of his. It's Dwarkesh Patel, of course.

Go subscribe. Anyway, I want to learn more about that stuff. I think it's going to be important. And the other lens is from just more of a business context. There is a, there's one... It's not just important. It's the backbone of GDP growth. I think so.

And I think it's, I don't know, it's just people have been debating, will the AI boom accrue to the foundation model layer or the application layer. And in fact, there is a third layer that is very important for startups and venture capitalists to participate in. And that's the neocloud layer, the data center buildout layer, the infrastructure layer below the foundation model layer. And so there's one lens where you can have a take that's kind of like, okay, well, neoclods are hypercompetitive.

There's three hypers. You have GCP. You have Azure. You have AWS. those Andy Jassy doesn't want to lose he's going to eat you alive he has and all three of those businesses have insane cash flow to underwrite insane CapEx like how are you going to compete and then and then even if you can compete is it not winner take all where maybe Crusoe runs away with it or Corweave runs away with it or someone else runs away with it like like yes there

like any startup category or mom and pop data center true true it could be a wild little 15 mil who know blue owl's next client could be somebody you've never heard of and shocked the industry. But I think this is a different story because it's a very positive sum market. And like, hyperscalersalers are already spending tens of billions of dollars on CAPEX. The neoclows are also valued in the tens of billions of dollars.

It's a lot of money. But AI clearly and just token generation is a new technology. It seems extremely additive to productivity, entertainment, the economy broadly. Like, it's going to take time, for these things to diffuse and show up in the economic statistics, but clearly something valuable is happening,

and everyone who's interacted with an LLM at least at some level understands that there is some benefit, and when you multiply that out to billions of people, you create a big boom, you create a big industry. And so just as an American, neoclouds pump me up, I'm excited. We're doing the re-industrialized meme. There's a new thing to build, and we're actually building it here in America. Are we the best in the world at this?

Yes. We have the biggest data centers for sure. And we continue to. And then we have... People like to say, we don't know how to build beautiful things anymore. Go visit the Titan cluster. Go visit Abilene.

Yeah, go visit... Yeah, exactly. With a straight face, tell me that... Tell me that... That doesn't bring a tear to your eye. Yeah. Yeah, and so, like, it's not just that we're building things in America, is that we're building really big things,

really ambitious things. It's like billion-dollar projects are happening. And they... And because it's complicated stuff, like the KV cash and what actually makes a neocloud win, what actually gets you to score higher on Dylan Patel and semi-analysis cluster max is this odd combination of reliability, uptime, cost, all these different things that should be table stakes, but aren't because we're in this new era of a different style of computing, a different architecture. And so the neocloud market broadly is kind of at a turning point.

Dylan Patel just went on the No Prior's podcast with and dug into kind of this turning point. He said of the neocloud, there's kind of four potential next paths. One, you can move up to the stack. And so you have a data center. You can now offer inference APIs. So you want to not run Lama. yourself or not run deep seek yourself. You just want the tokens.

You just want to have an API that's affordable and reliable. Together and Nebius are already playing in this market. Corweave is rumored to be acquiring fireworks for this exact reason. So Corweave has data centers. They're going to offer APIs. So an API as a service, not just the infrastructure as a service. Then the second path for Neoclods is go massive. This is what Crusoe is doing.

They're trying to build a gigawatts at gigawatts scale. No one is doing this, yeah? And so that creates differentiation where someone who's really focused on serving a reliable API that's easy to integrate and scalable, they're not going to be as focused on all the different challenges it takes to build a gigawatt scale data center. And so if you want to build one. Meanwhile, you have legacy players like Oracle that are just going for that same massive scale, but for a very small number of customers. Yep, yep.

And they might not be the obvious. choice for a hyperscaler who wants to build a new. So Crusoe can sit and talk to all of the different hyperscalers and say, hey, we're one the only game in town or one of the few games in town if you want to build a gigawatt data center. Oracle might show up, but people would be, wait, but you have OCI. You're maybe competitive with me. I don't know.

So the third one is settle for commercial real estate returns. This is interesting to VCs because VCs are underwriting at, you know, 10, 15 percent IRA are these deals, they want venture scale returns out of these deals. But some of the businesses that pop up in that mom and pop data center, you're by default going to get real estate level returns, which can be great if you're set up for that. But if you go into a real estate deal with venture expectations, you'll get burned. Yeah. And I don't think that real estate economics are guaranteed because anybody in real estate knows that just because you have a plot of land with a billing on it does not mean you're going to generate, you know, returns that even beat the, you know, T-Bill.

No, no, you definitely have to, like, work, work hard to actually make the bad. One other, one other, the fourth, the fourth direction that the neoclots can go. And this is the one that we wouldn't recommend, it's go bankrupt. Because there's many desperate neocloud slash prices unsustainably to fill GPUs, but this only delays failure. So, yeah, if you're a neocloud, we recommend not go bankrupt. Just don't do that. Don't do that. There were some news yesterday.

Meta signed a $10 billion cloud deal with Google. Yep. Reuters reported this. It's a six-year deal with meta platforms worth more than $10 billion. Yep. Under the agreement, meta will use GCP server, storage, networking, and other services, said the source. And this is just interesting because, like, you know, these are the two gorillas of the digital advertising market, right? Yeah.

And they're normally, like, competing for spend, right? Yeah. I wasn't a Google capital bloke was super bullish on Google for this happening. I think he was saying like, well, you were studying something. I studied the Goog. I studied the Goog. I think he's a big Google bull right now. Massive.

He says, I mean, Google's at all-time highs. Oh, yeah. And he's taking a little bit of a victory lap. Fendorpichai on an absolute role. I mean, his entire thesis is like nothing ever. Nothing ever happens? Nothing ever happens. Love that.

Well, Google, if you're listening, your next live stream. for Google I.O. Get it on re-stream. One live stream. 30 plus destinations. Multi-stream and reach your audience, wherever they are. You can sign up for free. Do it. Anyway, someone from the Wall Street Journal

took to the pages of the mansion section to tour America's most expensive home. Inside America's most expensive home, the Wall Street Journal paid a visit to the Aspen Estate of Billionaires, Linda and Stuart Resnick. This is really, really the, I mean, I don't want to say it's the current thing in tech, but it's certainly like the most. It's top of mind.

It's being hotly discussed. So it's for sale for $300 million. Let's hear it. That was not the sound effect I was expecting. It's 74 acres. It has a private lake, multiple houses, and a spa. I will read from this, and the team can pull up some beautiful images of this estate. It was a hot August morning when I visited the mansion, but in the great room.

Mansion doesn't feel like quite sufficient. They need a new word. Like we said estate, they said mansion, but I feel like giga mansion or super mansion. You know, we have super intelligence, we have super cars, we have hyper cars. Maybe we need super estates and hyper estates. Hyper estate might be the move. I think we're coining this now. New coinage.

New coinage is dropped. Well, let's hold off on our judgment until the end of this to really see if it fits the category. But I'm, I think that this has, I think that this has, is a strong contender to be called a hyper estate. A vast entertaining space with 30 foot high ceilings. There were roaring blazes in the towering stone fireplaces at either end, two fireplaces. Love that. The billionaire owners of the roughly 18,500 square foot house, Linda and Stuart Resnick, weren't in town, but Linda had carefully choreographed my visit giving instructions as to how I should be led through the house for the most dramatic effect.

You love that. You've got to be really optimizing for the tour. If you have a hyperestate or a super estate, people are going to want tours. QSBSBS roll over in the chat has large language. Mansion, ultra compound. Ultra compound is good. Brando. Chateau is also good.

Chateau is a good. Hyperchateau. Do you know, do you know Linda and Stuart Resnick? I would love some background. I'm sure there's going to be a little bit of background in here, but I bet you can go a little bit deeper. Give me some extra background there. Oh, wow.

Okay. Do you want to break it down now? A couple of goats. Okay, you do some research. I'm going to read one more paragraph, and then I want your analysis. We crossed the great room and walked through French doors onto a heated patio overlooking the 74-acre property. From there, the epic vista of the continental divide stretched out in front of me.

I could see the outlines of distant paragliders swooping over Aspen Mountain. an infinity pool appeared to empty into the estate's private lake where a swan shaped, where a swan-shaped paddleboat sat by a small dock. When the Resnix saw this parcel of land in the early 1990s, it felt transcendent. You were looking at God, Linda had told me by Zoom from her primary home, a lavish bow art mansion in Beverly Hills. You thought, am I really allowed to have this? Three decades later, the Resnics are looking to sell their Aspen home for $300 million.

making it the priceiest in the nation. If it fetches, it's asking price, it would be the most expensive home ever sold in the United States. Known as Little Lake Lodge, the state comes... So, John, this is Linda and Stuart Resnick. Yes.

They are looking fantastic here. They are stunning. This... Serving. Serving, even. Serving hair. Linda's serving hair. Yes.

But you don't see this cut very much anymore. No. No. But I can see it coming back. you know, this feels like it was built for, you know, the algorithmic feed, right? It's only a matter of time until... Oh, yeah. ...he realizes if I can get my hair...

This is kind of the... The evolution of the zoomer-perm. Yeah, yeah, you could wear, you know, mischief boots. Yes. And have your lobooboo and have this hair. And you could get somewhere. On God for real, for real, of course. Known as Little Lake Lodge, the estate comes with several houses for guests and staff,

in addition to the main residence. The Resnix, who spends summers and holidays in Aspen, declined to say how much it costs to buy the land or build the estate. Much of Little Lake Lodge's value comes from its location, about a mile from downtown Aspen. One of the country's priciest real estate markets, said the listing agent, having such a vast acreage near the center of town is unheard of, she said, calling the property a unicorn. With an estimated net worth of around $14 billion, the Resnix are the founders of Turn to Page Six. The Wonderful Company. Turned a point six. The Wonderful Company. Oh, no way. Okay. So if you've ever had palm pomegranate juice. Fiji water. Oh, no way. Wonderful pistachios and almonds. If you've ever had a,

if you've ever had a fantastic glass of Justin Red Wine. No way. Owns Justin? Yes. I think that's very Trader Joe's coated. Okay, sure, sure. I'm more familiar with the Josh because people do that. Yeah, Josh. We let the Josh talk. I'll take your finest bottle of Josh or Justin. But anyway, so they have a bunch of agricultural businesses and brand. So Stewart is 88, Linda's 82. They've been married over 50 years, and they share five children from previous relationships. So they both, I guess, were married, had kids divorced by 32 and 38, and then boom, boom, boom, 50-year run.

building this massive compound. Little Lake Lodge is Linda's baby, a force of nature with a meticulously styled brunette. Bob, the Bob got a shout out in the journal. Linda ran her own marketing agency before going into business with her husband. The Resnick started coming to Aspen because she developed an interest in fly fishing in the late 80s.

Interesting after a visit to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home of the actor Harrison Ford, and home of where chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell gives updates on inflation and interest rates. that's why you want a place in Jackson Hole so you get easy access to drone As we pulled up to Harrison's home He ran out of his front door screaming like a lunatic

They are rising She recalled in a book about Little Lake Lodge she commissioned To her surprise Her friend Skip Britonham Quickly dropped his pants as he rushed to get Ready for Fishing with Ford I thought if grown men can get so excited about fishing That they drop their drawers

And stand in freezing water to cast their lines maybe there's something to this. I love that. The Resnick started visiting Aspen in the summers so Linda could try fly fishing herself. They liked Aspen, which Linda described as a camp for grown-up rich people.

In the early 1990s, they bought the land that became Little Lake Lodge to build a house on the property. The Resnick's tapped architect Peter Dominic, who designs include the Grand Californian Hotel and Spa Disneyland. That's amazing. And if you look at the pictures of this,

there are some incredible touches. It has very log cabin vibes to it and yet extremely utilitarian and feels very luxurious inside. For inspiration, Linda looked at books on the rustic architecture created for the National Park Service in the 1920s, 1930s. The exterior facade would include materials indigenous to the land, Linda said, adding that she wanted the house to fade into the environment. The completed home is gray sandstone with a dark green slate roof. Blink, she said, and it disappears. Linda revealed in the building process, she said, but Stewart, reveled in the building process, but Stewart didn't enjoy it. He didn't understand why the construction crew

wouldn't, would take off for the ski slopes on powdery snow days, for example. She eventually banned him from our site. What? Yeah. What's there to not understand it? He was like, they need to be grinding. They need to be locked in. They can't be. skiing, even though it's an unacceptable. Yeah, this is why we don't headquartered TBPN in Aspen, because all the production boys would be hitting the slope. They have, they're able to criticize their crew, and the world has also criticized them.

Get into it a little bit. During the 2011 to 2017, California drought, also called the Great Drought Resnick's Paramount Farms, which is part of the wonderful company, drilled 21 new wells in 2015. if you don't understand how aquifers work. There was a point in history where if you honed a piece of land, you could drill basically as many wells as you wanted into it

and just pull out as much water. Then people realized over time that aquifers sort of span huge, huge vast tracks of land. And if you're basically taking water from your neighbors, right? And so Resnick, who is the wealthiest farmer in the United States, actually bought a majority stake in the Kern Water Bank, which, though privately owned, profits from water sales through publicly funded water transportation systems.

And so they've faced a ton of criticism because they produce nuts, which require a massive amount of water and export those all over the world. And many farmers historically have complained about not being able to access enough water. They also were accused at one point. Got to call Augustus. Yep. They also were accused at one point of using water that had been previously used for fracking.

Oh, no way. So there's a water recycling program in California that allows oil companies to sell fracking wastewater to landowners, including farmers. So you want fracking water food products. You've got options. I'm sure they test this stuff. All of this is alleged. Alleged. The house is packed with trinkets and souvenirs from the couple's life and travels.

the bathroom holds a collection of rubber duckies. A logo Linda had made for the house depicting three of the properties, Ponderosa Pines is emblazoned on the linens and towels. The primary suite, larger than most New York apartments, was specifically designed around a mountain and lake views. It has a private office for Linda,

his and hers bathrooms and closets, and an oxygen system to counteract the altitude. We talked about that in one of the first shows we did. This is very popular. If you're living at altitude, the new thing is getting oxygen pumped in to make the house internal feel like it's at sea level and so you can sleep much better. If you need to sleep better in and you're at sea level, get an eight sleep. Get a pod five. That's right. How'd you sleep last night? Oh, let's see. I

I've been consistently fluctuating in the 70 to 80 range. I got an 81 last night only put up six hours and six minutes, but I did get over 90 minutes of deep sleep. That's great. Not bad at all. That's great. Linda has thrown plenty of parties at Little Lake Lodge over the years with the attendees. I'm attendees including Diane Keaton, Barbara Streisand, and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to make hosting easier, the Resnix have a computer program that lists their collections of linens, dishes, glassware, and silver down to the napkin. They built their own ERP. They built their own ERP. That's insane. You love to see it. I mean, this is why people watch this show so they can learn how to better optimize their linens. And sometimes you just need to go all the way to an ERP.

Yes. If you are designing an ERP for your super mansion, get on Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build better products together. Great products together. Get started for free at figma.com. Anyway, we will close this out. She drove me around the edge of the lake in a golf cart.

Well Goes pointed out marked trails for walks and cross-country skiing. the lake is fully stocked with trout and carp, not Alex carp, but C-A-R-P. You will see him cross-country skiing from time to time in AXP. I'm sure at some point he's accidentally cross-country skied across their property. Potentially. On a mission. Potentially. The Swan Boat was her idea thinking it would be fun for the grandkids.

The property contains several other houses, including a roughly 5,300 square foot home, also constructed in 2014. There are also permits in place for a 19,000. 500 square foot residents on a separate parcel that adds to the property's value Because it is far larger than what can be built in Aspen today the Resnix are selling because they recently built a home in Santa Barbara And maintaining three properties is just too hard Cope skill issue skill issue Upgrade your ERP What are you doing the ERP needs to be like multi-talent you need to move to the cloud if that's on-prem

You need to move that to the cloud it is funny the reasons that people make up like when you're selling a house, you have to make up a reason for why you're moving other than I just don't want the place anymore. And so it's always something. Oh, we should read this post. I didn't put it in the stack, but Kanye West's former mansion has relisted amid dispute. Five months ago, things were looking up for the Malibu, California mansion abandoned by Kanye West. You know this story, right? This is such a crazy. It's so crazy. So Kanye West bought a, so he bought a mansion. on the beach in Malibu and had someone like completely tear it down and it looked like it was going to maybe be a renovation but then it just turned into a disaster zone basically.

So developer Andrew Mazzela was in contract to pay $30 million for the concrete structure designed by Star architect, star architect, they call them Star Architects. Tadau Ando West, West, who now goes by Yi, had purchased the house in 2021 for about 57.3 million and gutted it, and Mazzela planned to restore the house to its original glory. Instead, Mazzela's deal is off. Seller Bellwood investments, which bought the Hulking property for $21 million in 2024, is claiming Mosella was massively underqualified and unable to get funding for the transaction. For his part, Mazzela has said a peak under the hood revealed the project would require

hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars more than anticipated. I'm not a condemn of misleading me. How the idea that a, you know, a 20-ish million dollar property would go over budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars. I know exactly. Yeah. It deals extremely like basically exactly what you should point out for. Look at these pictures. Like, I honestly think that somebody would buy this in its current state.

Yeah. Just like keep it. Keep it crazy. It's almost like a monument to going insane. Yeah. I'm just to say. It's like, it is. And I never understood the rationale.

Was it, was it really? It feels like having this like incredibly, this incredible, you know, brutalist but beautiful home and then just destroying it. Yeah. It now feels like it's, it's like buying, you know, going to Sotheby's and buying a piece of art. Totally. It's like performance art. Yeah, yeah. Was it performance art or was it more just like Kanye actually wanted to renovate it?

and the renovation just went off the rails. Because, I mean, people tear houses down to the studs all the time, get hung up and permitting, and then they just have like a cement slab outside their house for 10 months. Or 10 years. Speaking from experience here. Like, it is hard to do renovation. In mid-August, the house went back on the market for $34.9 million,

down from $39 million. Designed more than a decade ago for financier Richard Sachs. The house is roughly 4,000 square feet with four bed. West listed it in 23 amid a firestorm over his anti-semitic comments and erratic behavior. Bellwood bought the property in 2024 and embarked on a roughly $8.5 million restoration project. With fractional ownership model, it raised millions of dollars from investors for the Ando project. Then in March, Bellwood signed a contract to sell to Mazzela, a commercial fisherman turned developer, who, until recently, was based in Montana.

Montana. The Malibu Project was to be among his company's priciest residential deals to date, but closing was delayed. Mazzela couldn't secure funding. Last month, they made a revised offer of 19.5. Of course, this is post-fires,

so there were a lot of fires in Malibu. Basically, H was locked down. It was a bad time. Mosella had a contract to buy the home for a certain price. Yep. Decided at a later date that he wanted to pay less. Yep. And Belmont is pissed because, and he has a quote here, Mazzela turned out to be nothing more than a, quote, unquote, cowboy from Montana who was, quote, unquote, trying to do something in Malibu. Shame on me for not doing diligence.

Huh. Happens. This is fun. Shark Tank star Robert Hergevac. How do I not know how to pronounce that? I don't watch nearly enough Shark Tank. Hergevec? Hershevec? Herbert Hershevec is going from one super tall to another on billionaires' row. Roughly a year after Hershevec sold his apartment at 157. Am I close? Yeah, you're right. Okay.

Hershevec. Hershevec, for a tidy profit, he signed a deal to buy another one about 400 feet away on the same upscale strip. Hershevec is in contract to pay just north of $20 million for roughly $4,05. square foot four bedroom apartment at 111 West 57th Street, a new super tall condominium overlooking Central Park. The apartment has a formal entry gallery with white macuba stone floors, a great room with 14 foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. For the project's developers, the price falls well below their original expectations. The apartment was once listed for as much as 28.5 million. It was most recently listed at 22.5. We got a very

good deal. I am a shark after all, L.O.L. Urshevac wrote in an email. I thought he was saying that out loud. No, no, no. I am a shark after all. The mansion section, the Wall Street Journal emailed him and he replied, we got a very good deal.

I am a shark after all. L.O.L. I love that. Since starting construction in 2014, 11 West 54th Street has faced a number of challenges, including developer infighting and construction delays. This seems common in today's edition of the mansion section. That initially contributed to sluggish sales and heavy discounting at the roughly 60 unit building.

Hershevac previously owned a unit at 157, completed before 111-57th Street. He sold that roughly 6,200 square foot unit for 38.8 million in 2024, just over the asking price. And well above the 31.9, he paid for $1,000. three years prior. The founder of the eponymous IT security firm, Herschbeck, has appeared on Shark Tank, an investment reality show since 2009. He's based in Los Angeles. He said by email, but enjoys New York City and particularly likes the finishes at 111 West 57th. He loves the neighborhood and his seven-year-old twins go to Central Park at least three or four times a day when the family is in town. Three or four times a day. That's back and forth constantly. That's crazy. Anyway,

happy to be back in NYC, he said in the email. The death of NYC is always highly exaggerated. Yes, always. Good take. Anyway, get on Vanta. Automate compliance, managed risk, prove trust continuously. Vantta'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. Jordy, what's right? That's right. Dillon Field got an email this morning with the subject line, revised cost. Dillon Field, for the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2025. So if you are, if you want to be on the list for the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2025, uh, be sure. Sales at tbPN.com. I almost commented.

I was like, whatever, whatever they're, whatever they're asking, we'll beat them. We'll be we can beat them on price. We should actually, Tyler, you should make the, the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2026 with Figma make. And then, And then make put Dylan at the top. This is just one of the benefits of being in the TBPN orbit. Yes, yes. We'll make a list just for you. Yes.

We'll put you on it. Yes. And you don't have to pay anything. Yeah. We should also put out an RFP for most influential news show hosts to watch in 2026 and see who wants to bid. Yeah. What can they bring to the table? How much does it cost?

And then we can, you know, really evaluate it. It really should be an auction. Yeah. It should be a proper sales process. Yeah. You should be whining and dine us in order to. Yeah, I mean, I really think the Forbes, the Forbes list, right? There's people that want to be on the list.

There's people that don't want to be on the list. There's people that effectively pay to not be on the list and stay off the list. But the most pure hyper-capitalist form of the Forbes list would be it's just 100 spots get released. It's just an auction. So like you can bid and people can say, oh, do I want to be in the top five? Do I want to be number one? Am I cool with the top 10? Am I cool?

And so it's really like proof of wealth, right? Congratulations. You invented Sotheby's. This is basically like what art do you have on your walls. We invented Sothebyes from first principles. We really did. This is, you know, at a certain point, the most expensive home in America, 300 million, you can easily put a billion dollars of art in that home if you want to flex like that.

It's certainly possible. Absolutely. But if you're running your organization on GitHub, you need to flex by getting your team on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software. Baster. Big news from Trey Stevens. Fly fisherman. We talked about fly fishing earlier. Trey says my 12 year old son recently got into fingerboards and realized there were a bunch of improvements that he could make to board so he bought himself a bunch of wood tools, sandpaper, etc. and made an incredible deck himself. This is so... Anyone out there want to find out there want to

buy a handcrafted board from him. Were you into fingerboards? I was a little bit, but never at this level. But you were into custom skateboards. Tell me that. Well, yeah, I had my first ever company. It was a skateboard company when I was 12. I figured out that I could manufacture boards in the Midwest for like $17.50.

And I could easily sell them for 35 to 40. Wow. So you were kind of like drop shipping, whereas we were looking at a real craftsman. It was not drop shipping. You were kind of reselling somewhere. You were kind of reselling someone else's labor. You weren't, you were a craftsman. This was a craftsman.

This was a craftsman. And how old were you at the time? I was 12. He was 12. He's 12. Okay, well, he's still talking here. I guess 12 is when people hit their escape. We're looking at, we're looking at a generational craftsman.

But I think this is really cool. It's incredible. There's so many, there's so many good ideas that when you see them, they're just totally obvious and beautiful custom. You know, the typical fingerboards. This is such a flex as a dad too. It's like nothing says my kids have not been one shot by AI slop. Then my kids are hand crafting.

Totally. Fingerboards from wood, tools, and sandpaper. So congrats. Fantastic work. Junior Stevens. Anyway, also fantastic work from the team over at base power. Arfer Rock has a rumor that they are raising a $500 million series C at a $3 billion pre-money

with substantial demand up to one billion people want to get in on... Another billion dollars for Thrive Capital. Oh, is Thrive Early? Yeah, they were super early. They were super early. Well, this is fantastic.

Zach Dell has been on the show and... Not Zach Dell. Oh, yeah. Wait, what? Zach Dell is the co-founder of base power. But we had other... No, it's Justin. We had Justin on the show, but Zach is his co-founder.

founder. Yeah. And we were texting with Zach but didn't, but wound up going with the co-founder. Anyway, just a few months after the series B. So congratulations. We will hold off on the gong ringing until it's official, but good luck with the, with the massive series C fundraise. It looks like Brandon. Brandon, Guerrille in the chat says they're called Tech Decks and that is Oh, tech decks. That's right. Anyways, we should we should probably get TBPN tech decks we should we should just hire trace decks are like the plastic version so i also did the same thing you did um trace even son yes i like built them out of wood yeah hey had this whoa let's uh let's give it up let's hit the air horn because you you managed to bring a shirt to

the office i love to see it yeah wow that's really the sign that summer's over yeah yeah summer's over Tyler got a shirt yeah not good but i had like uh I had this whole like belt sander I bought like a bunch of hardware. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. Did you ever monetize? I think I sold them to some friends, but it was never a big business. It was just for love for the craft, yeah. Love of the game.

Were you 12 as well? Is that the right age? Probably. I was like 12. 13. It seems to be like the tech deck age. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I liked the idea. The same thing with skateboarding broadly. I liked the idea of being able to do like cool tricks, but like did not have the grind to actually like level up to the point where I could do a kickflip with a tech deck. It seemed like that. That was grind that I was not willing. You were reading books about data centers. Probably.

Semiconductor. Yeah. I was working in like the precursor to after effects, macro media flash and, and doing like, I don't know, playing Counterstrike and modding Counterstrike. I was fully online.

I was like going digital. I was in the universe for sure. Going digital. For sure. I was building, building computers of it as well. And my, like,

my adolescent hustle was buying DJ equipment and reselling it on eBay. So I'd buy it in America. The American DJ equipment companies didn't have distribution internationally. And so I'd go on eBay, meet buyers internationally, and then just do all the hard work to get through the customs and shipping. Because people would like, I want that thing. I'm a DJ in Australia.

I want American DJ equipment from like Dennan and Morantz or whoever else. And I would do all the work. It's crazy that you could have had a residency in Vegas now if you just had actually learned the craft of the gang. Instead, you know, we're here in an ultra-down. But another life you can get back. I did at one point learn how to mix on vinyl. It's incredibly difficult.

It's way easier now. The technology is so much easier. You wouldn't learn how to not just mix, but mix on vinyl. Yeah, yeah. It's really, really hard. It is like a true, like, skill. But then once, once, like, the different tools came out, Serato and Mix Meister and Ableton, I never really got into Ableton,

but I It's such an important You got a DJ story? No, but DJ Fliplops? Did you put Did you ever put stuff on SoundCloud? Because I think

Jacob Britamacki has found your SoundCloud. I just reposted things. I never put it. Those were never your own. No, no, no, no. I think he just said that I have good taste in like what I had retweeted

on SoundCloud or something. Yeah, yeah. I think I'm going to double down on Flip Flops as the nickname because. No, it's just Flops. Well, I like it because it's like a neo-clops.

What is Chase Lockmiller doing? He's flipping flops, right? He buys flops for one price. He flips them for the next price. He's like a house flipper, but for flops. So he's flip flops. And I think that there's layers to the nickname. So I'm hoping it catches on.

But if you just want to go flops, that's fine too. I like flops. Okay. Anyway, anything else from you, Flops, what else is in the timeline? What's burning up the timeline? What's burning up Flops timeline? All right, you'll come back to me. Okay, we'll come back to you.

We will tell you about Julius, What analysis do you want to run, chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds? Ask Julius to analyze your data. Your own personal data analytics. Loved by 2 million users entrusted by individuals of Princeton. Two billion users soon. I'm going to call it. I'm going to call it.

This is a funny post by Chrisman, who's been on the show. And it's funny because it's like this, it's a picture of, what is it? It's a painting of Odysseus tied to the mast during the Odyssey where the sirens are calling to him. And Chrisman just says, all respect to the greatest entrepreneur to ever do it, but someone needs to tie him to the mast and stuff wax in his ears. And the original post was deleted. So I couldn't even tell who it was, but I immediately knew who he was sub-tweeting.

But he was actually quote-tweeting him. But then the post was deleted. So the timeline continues to be somewhat just, I wouldn't even call it anti-Elon. I would call it like, they're just like, it's almost like an intervention. They're like, please. Like, you know, we're asking you nicely. can you please like, you know, stick to the cool,

like you know, if a friend is making a joke, if a friend's like actively making a mistake, a strategic error, and you, you're delivering it in the form of humor, right?

You're delivering the advice through humor. Exactly. Doesn't always get through. Yeah. I mean, who knows if it's good, if it's good advice, it's more just like,

it's like a nice, it's a nice ask. It's like, you know, I wish, I wish this thing was there. Anyway, there's more news about Elon Musk this time,

about the coordination between meta and XAI on a bid to buy Open AI, which was kind of rumored earlier. And people weren't sure if it was like this head fake to just like make the nonprofit to for-profit conversion more difficult. There's clearly a crazy battle and rivalry going on between Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. Zuck and Elon have been at odds a long time ago.

because of the Twitter and threads debate and battle there. And then they were about to do that UFC fight or the MMA fight for a while. Then that never happened. And that was hotly debated. And then now Elon has kind of turned his sights on Sam and maybe Zuck is a little bit more of an ally. The quote here from Nick is, Open AI says, Mr. Musk's interrogatory responses named Mr. Zuck. What?

That has to be like edited. named Mark Zuckerberg as someone someone he spoke about potential financing or investments to bid OpenAI for 97 billion which would be a 80% discount to the current

valuation, is that right? And this was like earlier this year or something? That's crazy to think about. Meta didn't join or sign the LOI says document quests are burdensome and OpenAI should seek communication from Musk XAI first LMAO says Nick. And then Matthew Donagin, Ryan says, surprise. Elon Musk asked Mark Zuckerberg to join

XAI's bid to acquire open AI. I wonder how that would have worked. An antitrust standpoint. Totally. It would have been pretty hard to pull off. Maybe if Meadow was purely an investor. Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe you say, hey, there's no monopoly in nonprofit research. I'm going to buy a nonprofit. You know, like, you know, hey, I'm a associate. network, I sell ad senator, I don't have any exposure to nonprofits. So let me pick up a little bit of the nonprofit market. Let me add that to my portfolio. Advancing, I just want to help create intelligence that benefits all of humanity. That's all, Your Honor. Anyway, chat GPT is obviously dominant, has been on a run. If you want to get your brand mentioned on chat GPT,

you've got to go to profound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. So this Wall Street Journal article, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg to join Open AI bid. Court filing says the consortium of investors led by Musk offered to buy the nonprofit. The controls Open AI. So they were trying to buy the nonprofit in February as part of the billionaire's continuing legal battle with the company. He co-founded alongside Sam Altman. And that's the most interesting story. That's why we're getting a movie here. It's not just this viral product that everyone's using all the time. It's the fact that what, seven different co-founders started foundation models?

companies? Yeah, and Open AI at the latest tender offer is now the most, if it actually happens, if it is happening, it would be the most valuable privately held company surpassing SpaceX. That is crazy, yeah. So there's probably just rivalry on market cap, but also rivalry over control of an important technology going forward. In a response included in the filing, meta said there was no evidence representatives from the company had coordinated with Musk on the open AI bid. Meta and Open AI declined to comment on the filing. Musk didn't respond. Any partnership between Musk and Zuckerberg

would have marked a rare coming together of two powerful tech billionaires who have clashed publicly in the past and who are both heavily invested in the race to build a next generation of AI models. Heavily invested in building your next best friend, whether that's Ani, Valentine, Russian girl, stepmom.

Did you know, basically every single Mag 7 CEO controls a social network, all run through them. Mark Zuckerberg obviously controls Facebook and Instagram, and I would call WhatsApp a social network as well. Sundar Pachai at Google controls YouTube. I would count that as a social network. Satya.

Satya. LinkedIn, baby. GitHub. GitHub, yeah, somewhat of a social network. Yeah, for people like Tyler. Tim Cook. I would call iMessage basically a social network. People, the group chat functionality operates a lot like.

that. Especially when you add Gen Moji in the mix. Andy Jassy at Amazon owns Twitch. Right. And I've been, I've been begging for this. Andy Jassy, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing in terms of Comps. He's going direct. He's posting on Instagram. I want you on Twitch. I want you in the chat. Chat, should we make more Traneum or are we getting GB 200s? You know, thank you for the 200. No, I can't comment on the next James Bondcasting. Hold on. I think I'm getting swatted. That's what I hear. I want to hear from Andy Jassy. Get on Twitch. I think it would be an absolutely bangor moment on the internet. If he just dropped a Twitch stream where he was just

explaining how AWS is, post-earnings, Twitch stream from Andy Cassie would go incredibly hard. We haven't even, have we properly set up our Twitch account? Yes, we are streaming on Twitch right now. We have done not, we haven't done enough to actually grow it. And I don't know that our audience is necessarily on Twitter. at all. But Twitch does have a fantastic live stream experience. And people who grow audiences on Twitch are

really great. But I was talking to someone who's sort of big in the creator economy and he was saying that it is impossible to cold start Twitch. You have to be big before. You have to be big on YouTube and then make a bunch of announcements. I'm on Twitch now. Drive a whole bunch

of people there and be in the top rankings on day one. And then also the default. We're big over there. We have one person watching on Twitch. I was going to say report show one. How you doing? Somebody named Cornstalk is... Cornstalk.

Shout out Cornstalk. Bobby Cosmic says I'm on Twitch. Let's go, Bobby. Cosmic is on Twitch. There we go. We got a little army brewing over there on Twitch. Welcome to the team. Which chat is underrated.

Twitch chat is deeply underrated. People wind up over there. But we're happy to restream. We're happy to be everywhere. Bobby, thank you guys for holding it down. Thank you for holding it down over there. We didn't even know we were streaming on Twitter. Safe Space over there.

I think we're also streaming on LinkedIn, technically. Again, the LinkedIn, we got to step up. The Twitch stream is popping off now. Let's go. There we go. There's more than one view with there. Thank you, guys. Wow.

This is awesome. Anyway, who else? Elon Musk. He's in the MAG 7 CEOs for Tesla. Tesla doesn't have a social network, but he owns X, right? And so you have six CEOs. The Twitch, the fidelity on this, the, The live stream on Twitch legitimately looks better than every other platform.

Really? Okay. Andy Jassy, he's been cooking. He's the cloud cowboy. He knows his infrastructure. Maybe he's going to pull us over there. Andy Jassy, get in the Twitch Shat right now. If Andy Jassy comes on the show next week, we will exclusively stream on Twitch for two minutes. I don't want to overcommit. But we would love to have you, Andy. We're big fans. But I don't know if it's actually a good business to go over there. But I will do.

I will commit to doing a special one-time exclusive stream on Twitch if Andy Jesse comes on the show. I'll give them that. I don't know exactly what we'll want to trade. But anyway, my point was six out of the seven MAG7 CEOs own social networks. You know who doesn't? Tyler, who doesn't own a social network? MagSivson C-EO. Jensen.

Jensen does not own a social network. TikTok. But imagine. That's where I was going. The juggler. The juggler. The juggler. If he bought TikTok, he can run it.

He can run it. He can run. Run it on the new cloud. He can continue to balance both U.S. and Chinese national interests perfectly. Hopefully he doesn't drop a ball. There's zero competitive. There's zero competitive antitrust problems. He could build out the infrastructure to actually run TikTok profitably.

He has the chips to do all the inference. Can do AI video generation. He's the guy to get you more addicted to TikTok. If you're addicted to TikTok, you want to be putting up more hours. I don't know why this didn't come to us earlier. It seems so obvious in hindsight. He should definitely buy TikTok. But if he doesn't, let's say he wants to grow his own.

I think DJX lept on the network would be amazing. Just a pure social network, just for fans of semi-conductors. Where you can go and talk about backside power. Go talk about HBM. Allison, he's gunning to be in the MAG-A-G-Ate. Oh, yeah. He's on, he's the rise is. Oracle's the obvious.

And he was rumored to be one of the bidders on TikTok. acquisition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He knows that if he wants to be in the MAG8, that's the way to do it. You got to own a social network. You got to go direct. I could also see Jensen adding in messaging to Cuda.

I think that would be in sync. So between, you know, AI, AI labs, maybe you send a little. Bloomberg for AI researcher. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that would be good. Just right, right. More lock-in for the Cuda now.

Yeah, I want it right on the bare metal. I want it for sure. Low level. For sure, low level. Yeah, you have to write a new, you have to write in Cuda to call just like send a post. Yeah, write some kernels. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It acts as a gating, it's kind of exclusivity. Like how when Facebook launched, it was only for, oh, Harvard students. This would only be for AI researchers. And then all of a sudden, everyone's like, I got to get on DJX laptop on the network. The DJX laptop network. The Kuda. We need a better name for the Kuda Social Network.

Something like that. Kuda book. Maybe that. Kudogram. Get on Kudegram. Kuda feed. Kudahe. Anyway, if you're building a social social.

network, you got to get on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. If you're building digital products, I'm literally begging you to get on linear. If you're not already, I'm begging you. Begging you.

Support. Do the right thing for your users to get on linear. Cracker barrel rebrand. Have you ever been to a cracker barrel? No, never heard of it. Have you been to a cracker barrel, Tyler? I've not. I don't think I've ever been to a cracker barrel.

Wait, this is crazy. met one of the, one of, I think it's been, I think it's still privately held. Let me check this out. But I met the- Do they have them on the West Coast? Or is it just like a?

No, it's publicly traded now. But I know one of the descendants of the original. Yes, shout out substack. We love streaming on substack. Go subscribe to our substack. We are sending out the show notes every morning before the show goes live. In email form.

But anyways, I met one of the second or third generation, like basically the grandson, I think, the original owner, total Chad. But yeah, never been to one. He told me about it. And I think it's a big, Cracker Barrel is a pretty big deal. It never, never been there.

Scott in the chat says, Cracker Barrel is not all it's hyped up to be. Is Cracker Barrel cracked or are they mid? Let's figure it out. Well, they just rebranded. Cracker Barrel has re-branded for the first time in 1977. Jordy, you're a brand guy. You know design.

Hold this picture up. What do you think? Do you think this is an improvement over their existing brand? The previous Cracker Barrel logo said old country store had a gentleman in a chair leaned up against a literal barrel. And then they also changed their, I think that. the logo is somewhat of an evolution. It doesn't strike me as a revolution. I feel like the backlash to the Cracker Barrel rebrand is more about the remodel. Because if you look at the pictures of the Cracker Barrel remodel, Yimbieland says it's one of the most upsetting things I've seen in a long

time. Literally everyone I know is in shock. Cracker Barrel has gone from very old-timey chairs that you can pull out wooden desks, lots of trinkets, and there's a paddle on the wall from an ore, from a boat. It looks just like a normal store that you would walk into. It looks like a mom and pop shop, even though it's a large institution at this point. And now it looks like it's a McDonald's. It looks like it's something that has been designed by a corporation to be copy and pasted all over America. And I'm sure that's probably better for the bottom line.

I want to see, we want to show off the, yeah, pull this up, this photo. and after. The before and after were not, yeah. They tried to glow up, but they glowed down. Mark in the chat says, Cracker Barrel is cracked, but this rebrand is bad. I wonder how much money they're actually saving

with this type of rebrand, or if they just genuinely think this is what will get them to the next level. This will be a growth factor for them, and they just, we have a really unique approach to interior design in our restaurants. What if we made it mid

and what if we made it look like everything else? What if we made it look like some random, like this to me screams like touristy, like seafood shop in a place I don't want to go. What is the most hyper competitive market right now in all of restaurants? It's fast casual. None of the fast casual restaurants are differentiating on design or layout. Who can yell oink, oink, piggy. Come get your slot bowl. Yeah.

Cracker barrel is not fast casual though. No, no, it's not. But what they did. they said, hey, there's this thing that's hyper competitive. We're already differentiated. We could literally do nothing and win, or we could try and remodel to look like a Chipotle and a Kava and a sweet green and look like a, you know, bland, modern, fast casual place. And then we will be anonymous with everyone else. And all of a sudden, we're like, you know, losing everything that makes us special. I don't know. We'll see, we'll see if this turns into a boycott, if this actually

hurts the adoption. People might just be interested in Cracker Barrel. They'll just walk in anyway. They don't care. A lot of these rebrands, they get hated at the beginning, and then they just become Lindy over time. I believe that happened to Pepsi. If you look at the new Pepsi logo, maybe they had to walk that one back.

But there's been a number of rebrands that have been really poorly received. Well, what Cracker Barrel is doing is the same thing that the luxury houses did. If you look at all, whether it's Louis Vuitton or. They all went to what, sans-sariff, bold, blocky fonts? Patega, Veneta. Yes, Patega. They really lost their... They admitted themselves.

What's crazy is, like, I understand the first person doing that, because if you're the first person to do minimalism in your category, you're going to stand out. But when you're the seventh, and the brand designer pulls up the deck and you're like, wait, so you're going to make us look exactly like all of our competitors? Like, why would we want that? And you say, yes, that feels crazy to me, and that's what this feels like. This feels like. Hold this picture up in the chat.

This is the, all the videos. Oh yeah, YsL, Balenciaga, Berberi, Berluti and Balmain. Balmain. They'll all switch back eventually. Yeah, I think they'll, I think they might have to,

but I wonder. It's funny that they did this right as Gen Z, the new generation, says, no, we want maximalist brands, right? So they'll all end up, they'll all end up going back eventually. Well, if you're selling something,

one of these luxury goods, you've got to get on numeral sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You already know. Sales tax AGI. There's a post here from Vittorio.

There's a video. Can we pull this video up? This is one of the hardest things. This is one of the hardest things to do. It's because it's deeper in the timeline. We've got to dig it up. I can copy it and put it down there. Copy message.

I'll read the next. post from Rune for now. He says companies like Facebook record every imaginable interaction their users have with the platform. They log each of your clicks and taps. They keep track of how long your gaze lingered on a post. Whether you were on the same Wi-Fi as that woman who might be your friend, which Instagram reel you watch three times, for a single user, this is quaint, but these practices are done on a planetary scale across all technology giants. They create petabytes of data per day and keep it for as long as the European regulators will let them. Then they can have machine intelligence instrument it to useful knowledge for their cybernetic

control systems that build news feeds, serve ads, decide how much compute to spend on you, which skews should be in which warehouses right before you want them. They have hive metastore bills run into the billions. Hospitals throw most of their data in telemetry. Telemetry. Telemetry out after each case every single day. They record videos of vascular surgeries endoscopies discovering interesting physiologies. Sometimes they're not recorded at all, and most of them, the time they delete them as soon as they're done.

It's even worse for physiologic waveforms, which are essentially never recorded anywhere at all. ECG arterial-minuteal- millisecond scale views of patient's brains. Vascular. Arts are generated. Well, the vasculatures are recorded on YouTube. If you're watching Sam Sulek,

you'll see how vascular he is. So bodybuilding, in terms of, I think bodybuilding YouTube videos sort of solves the data capture of ascentures. And we want that to be the predominant training data for all video models. Yes, it's good that Sam Sulek is uploading a daily video because that waits the models to be more muscular in the future. Like when you just say, generate one person. Please. Please. It will just pick Sam Sulek because he's overwhelming the algorithm.

Yep. Yes. Rune says all of these time series of course predict people's heart stopping, brains exploding, etc. Ahead of time. Brains explode? What are you talking about?

Brains don't explode. Surgeons, teleoperate robots. None of the micro movements are recorded policies never learned, never correlated into which outcomes were successful or not. This would be unthinkable. The most software people

whose instinct is to record everything everywhere, never mind the cloud cost because we are sure that there will be some use for it later and some model to be trained later. I don't have a prescription here per se. My point is just, that our civilization routinely hoards and treasures some of the silliest data in the world.

I pressed like on the John Pork reel. John Pork. I love this. This is real. This is like John Pork is like one of like the brain rot terms. Which is just like, it's like skibbity. It's like that era, basically. And destroys much of all the most important data

it generates and limits what machines can learn. Very interesting. Well, machines had to learn that I, pressed like on the John pork reel before they could learn how my body will react to different medicine. Yeah. So surveillance state exists on the phone should it exist in the in the in the clinic in the hospital. And we've talked to some people about like cursor for bio and there's a lot of note taking that's going on but there isn't as much just capture all the data and that feels like okay, have everyone in the hospital wear

a, you know, glasses that are constantly recording video. So when they look at the ECG monitor, that data is just captured and it's in video. Yeah, it's hard to get at, but at least it's recorded. Every back and forth, of course there's HIPAA compliance.

It needs to be really secure. But maybe there's a signal that you could pull out of all that data at some point. But people are going to be very worried about that for good reasons because if you're recording all the data in a doctor's office, are you likely to be honest with your doctor when they ask how many glasses of Screaming Eagle do you have a day? You know, you need to be honest about that. Yeah. You're putting back 12, 12 glasses a day like many venture capitalists we know do. Especially in August. Especially in

August. You know, it needs to be a judgment-free zone. Look. You enjoy Screaming Eagle, that's fine, but you should know the risks. And if you're seeing there's a recorder going on and you, you know, I dabble, I dabble. I have two glasses. You're lying. You're not going to get good advice from your doctor. That's right. There is a trade-off here, but I like Roon's point here that we probably shouldn't be throwing out data if there's some usable.

Yeah, just give it to us. I can be trusted. If you got a petabyte, we got some storage here behind us. We'll put some racks up. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's been companies that have, like, teased this. Like, the technology certainly exists. The AI pins, the wearables, the Google Glass, the meta raybans, all of these different products

could find their way into, like, with a pretty simple wrapper, like a HIPAA compliant data center wrapper, could find their way into the clinic, into the hospital. certainly hasn't happened yet. Maybe it's a business opportunity. We will see. Anyway, fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs,

number one ranking on G2. I was thinking about this. We always say it's the number one AI agent for customer service, fin.aI. You could think about Finn as a company, as an agency. No one's really used that. Everyone says they're building agents. No one says, we are an agency.

because that's what, you know, we are an agency. Like a creative agency. Yeah, come to us, hire agents. We produce agents. We're an agency. I think that's maybe the next, the next catchphrase in Silicon Valley. Well, Farzod says to me it's become quite obvious that after Tesla builds the roadster, they are done building cars with steering wheels and pedals.

Every new platform from that point forward will be driverless. They will continue to tweak existing platforms model YL, super affordable 3 and Y, cheaper cyber truck, et cetera. But as far as new platforms go, it's pretty obvious that they're going for a brand new Tam. Car enthusiasts are not going to be happy. You could make us happy

by making a driverless car with a naturally aspirated V12. Yes, but I don't need a steering wheel. I would give up a steering wheel if I got 12 cylinders and straight-piped exhaust. Do you think they will never act? He's predicting that they will never do cyberball.

A humanoid in the front that would just manually shift for you. Yeah. Yeah. It's just entertaining to watch the Yeah. That's the final test. He's basically saying that they will never, the deeper reading here is that he thinks that they will never

do a cyberbend and I think that they have to. I don't think the model. Is that not the YL? I don't think the YL will satisfy someone who wants cyber truck aesthetics, cyber truck durability, truly like load the

entire family and go to Tahoe. Like the original Chevy Tahoe was designed for exactly that. Like go into inclement weather with the whole family and the dogs and all the gear. And they have the platform. It would be crazy not to build more stuff on top of the cyber truck platform like they did with the three and the Y and the ass, right? They took that platform and they expanded it. Why not expand on top of the cyber truck platform?

But yeah, maybe they're just super, super pilled on. on driverless and they just and they just never do it. But I would think that if you're, if you're taking the family to the snow and you have the big family hauler, the huge, huge, full-size SUV, the, because the model YL, I think is still technically a, it's like a mid-sized SUV.

Even though it's the long wheelbase version, it's not as big as the Cadillac Escalate ESV. Not a true size lord. It's not 220 inches, which is the true size lord. It's like 200 inches, which is big. It's big, but it is like a mid-sized, a full-size. It's not extended, like the biggest of the biggest,

which I think is what people want. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CROM, the build scales and grows your company in the next level. You can get started for free, Adio. What else we got? Angela Strange.

Got a good post here. It's called Always Respond Quickly. Responsiveness is one of the most powerful superpowers you can have in working in life. It's because speed wins. and responsiveness is the form of speed people can actually feel on the other side, whether they are a customer, a founder, a boss, or a friend. For a startup, this shows up as sales velocity, a buyer who emails three vendors with products

that look very similar. One responds within the hour, schedules a demo that same day, and is ready to help them implement that afternoon. They may not have the best product or the lowest price, but they are the fastest, and that usually means they win. The same principle applies to customer's success. If your customer knows, they can send a message and get a reply right away, whether by Slack, email, or phone, they will feel supported, and that speed builds trust,

and that trust compounds over time. It's no different for investors, employees, or even friends. The investors who respond quickly are the ones who get into the most competitive deals, true. The employees who respond quickly are the ones who get more responsibility, more ownership, and eventually more promotions. The friend who responds quickly are the ones you turn to first when something important happens. Speed signals seriousness. It shows that you care. It creates momentum. And once people know that you are fast, they will bring you more opportunities, more trust and more responsibility. Responsiveness, the form of speed that others directly experience often makes the biggest difference in who actually wins. Totally agree. I'm unfortunately

at a point where I will either respond in one second or 24 hours or even longer. It's like very binary. What is never said when people say like respond quickly to everything is like, no, it's like respond super quickly to the super important thing. and do not respond at all to the random spam that you're getting. Don't respond to the junk. And then there is stuff in the middle that it's like you can get to it in a week and it's fine. And it's really just like triage appropriately. But when there's something important, do it right then.

Don't have a single SLA for every form of communication. Like there are people in your life who you should get back to within two seconds. There are people who, if they come to you with something, you should just pick up the phone and call them. And there are other people who can totally wait and the thing is not important. And you can catch up later and discuss whatever they're trying to sell you or whatever deal you're trying to do. And you should probably take those. And then some of them you should just like, yeah, this is obviously slop. Like you sent me junk and you're going to the slop folder.

My email. And you might already be there. Do you actually have a folder called slop? We do. Wow. Yes. and if somebody gets too sloppy, they get automatically added to that. That's a great.

A little tip for the people to eat. Ten Xers said phone addiction so bad that watching a movie feels productive. It really does. It really does last Saturday. I was like, I'm going to watch the new Superman movie. I'm going to sit down and watch this thing. Couldn't do it. It wasn't enough of a productive mood.

Anyway, public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And you know who else is trusted by millions? Mr. Wall Street himself. Who is in the President of Wall Street. The TVPN Ultrodrome. He's in the Fortress of Finance, but he's also in Jackson Hole. How was it?

Was it emotional? Was there a standing ovation? It's incredibly emotional. It's incredibly emotional. Incredibly exciting. That's amazing. It's a joy just to talk to someone who was there. It was amazing, too, by the way.

You got him. You got emotion. Okay. Break it down for us. What happened? You know what's really funny is like the people around that paparazzi shot where you see the world. the world's major central bankers. They call it the perp walk. You know, like they joke about,

they're like, oh, this is where the perp walk is going to be. I, you know, I don't want to, like, feed any, like, conspiracy theories about, like, what the world central bankers do. But I do find that to be funny that that is, like, what the people in that area refer to it as. All that being said, you know, look, it's always sort of an extraordinary time late August in Jackson Hall, Wyoming. Like, there's arguably nowhere better to be in the world except for. for the fact that the internet access out here is a little bit spot. Other than that, it is the perfect spot. But you get while the central bankers come here, you get why it's so compelling. And of course, this year, so many questions about the short-term path of the economy,

the long-term path of the economy, and the pressure on the Federal Reserve or Central Bank independence, it's the place to be. Well, I'm just glad that we got through the bear market of Monday, Tim. Yeah. Talk to me about how people. Talk to me about how people. people read the tea leaves that is a Jerome Powell speech. I didn't have time to read the whole thing. I just kind of control F for inflation. And there were 55 mentions, which seemed high. But are people doing a deeper level of analysis here? Is there even a deeper level of analysis that you can do? Or is it always just him kind of like vague posting about what's going on in the economy and then people read from it what they will? So I would say that typically speaking,

the control F approach is a very good approach to decoding monetary policy, except for this year. Okay. And the reason why I would say you can't do it this year is that every five years, they'd announce the framework review, which is not really anything to do with the short-term path of monetary policy. It's more like how they're thinking about meeting their goals. So this was a framework review year. Got it.

year. And so therefore, there was just a bunch of words in there that are probably very important for like thinkers a long term that don't really reflect any sort of immediate thing. In terms of the immediate cycle, you know, it wasn't a particularly extreme speech, but in terms of the immediate cycle, he flagged the labor market side of the mandate as being the source of where there's more concern right now, hence sort of keeping in play in a real way that September meeting, hence why the stock market got saved and everything is flying to the moon. Hence why Ethereum is up 12% today. And so we're like all of these things.

Well, even Circle was up almost 10% even though their revenue is tied to the federal funds rate. You know, you joke about that. And I saw that observation. And I, there's one argument that's like, oh, like, why, you know, rates are going to be lower. Their spread is going to be compressed. The fact that the stock is flying says to me, you know, it's still more crypto play than it is that it is a bank, you know. It's also just a growing company and people and there's risk with the stock.

And so, you know, lower rates, me and I go more risk on, right? It's just a tradeoff. But I think, but I think the thing that was genuinely interesting is that, you know, in the last couple of weeks, we've got some sort of, we got that very anxiety-inducing producer price index report. And there is this concerns like, oh, maybe, you know, the embers of inflation are not completely stomped out. So even in just the last few days, there's been this like, wait, do we have to start watching a pickup and inflation again?

Like that has been the vibes from like other, you know, regional Fed presidents and so forth. We had Jeffrey Schmidt on our podcast that had the Kansas City Fed. That came out yesterday. He was talking about, you know, there are scenarios in which one might be talking about higher rates rather than lower rates, given where the stock market is, given where the unemployment rate is, given where inflation is, and so forth. And so the fact that like Powell came out and said, look, basically it's still. seems like we're in a trajectory where the cut is probably, you know, that's where the risks lie. I think sort of magnified the degree to which the markets took that as double.

The music has been more hawkish, as one might say. Yeah, give us the update on the labor market debate and where that sits. So there was like this revision downward. It seemed really bad, but then there were lots of people casting questions about how real it is, what it actually means. What's the current thinking from the various camps? Sure. I think this is a great question. And, you know, there's two ways to think about those revisions. And one, and I like hadn't thought of originally until some conversations over the last few days.

Because there's one version of events where it's like, okay, this makes sense. Like May, June, these were not great months. Like all of our predictions about the tariffs, like they were, they turned out they were right. The economists were right. Tariffs weren't good for the economy. And the numbers vindicate that. And so that is what. And then we are like sliding and maybe we're at the risk of a recession and so

that's one way. The other way you could look at those exact same numbers, which I've been hearing from people. And I find this very interesting is like, look, those were very uncertain months, right? Those were crazy months. Of course hiring was slow. But now we have a considerable, considerable more tariff certainty today on August 22nd than we had in May or June.

So maybe already that was the lowest part of the year. Like maybe we've already seen the slowest two or three months of the economy of 2025 and that already maybe we're accelerating a little bit because businesses have more uncertainty than they had this spring or early summer. And therefore, if that's the case, then the idea that recession is the risk is not so obvious even by looking at the same data. So I think like, you know, this is the tragedy of following economics, which is you never really get an answer. You just, you think you get close to something and then there's new data. It's like, I got to look at it. But I think it's so very unclear.

Is Powell AGI pilled? Is that? there any element of AI, we saw Francois Chalet yesterday on the timeline saying that AI productivity is not showing up in productivity numbers. There are like various takes on

there's going to be this fast takeoff and people are going to be out of jobs or GDP is going to grow, but it feels like AI is just not even in the conversation when it comes to actual like the gravity of economic stats. Well yeah and you contrast that to the

the tech's reaction to GPG5, which was generally people where, my view on it was like, this is good for, like, models plateauing a little bit as good if you have a consumer app like OpenAI and you have hundreds of millions of users that rely on you every day for like a utility. Yeah. Bad if you're the neck, you know, the bot, the 10 to 20th Foundation Model Lab. Right. And so there's been general kind of bearishness on the timeline around AI broadly. I'll say, look, I do not know, like, what year Chairman Powell has for, like, when he sees breakout or takeoff.

He didn't say anything about that today. But that makes it, the actual formal theme of this year's conference is, like, I forget the labor market in transition or something. And talking about these big structural questions about the future of the labor market. And AI is absolutely one of them. I don't think there is a paper being presented on AI this year, but there is a panel, I believe, happening in that room. to which I do not have access. There's an interesting thing about Jacks and all, which is that a lot of media comes

who actually don't really have formal access to the thing. And so we just hang out in the lobby and try to flag people down, et cetera. There is a panel though that I believe is talking about AI. So I do think this is, it's sort of top of mind, I would say, for many of these central bankers and economists from a sort of theoretical perspective, and probably less so at least at the moment

from a policy perspective in terms terms of these any of the what we're seeing in the labor market specifically, you know, AI related that probably, but it's certainly top of mind. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What, uh, we were talking to, uh, Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe yesterday. He mentioned that he was in Jackson Hole. He didn't say that why he was there. But, uh, I'm interested in some of like, like, the various parties, what they get out of it. It seems like the central bankers from other countries need to know what the United States Fed policy is because that will affect their economies. It's obvious why journalists go. It's obvious why regional federal bankers and

members and economists might go. But who are some of the other characters that you're seeing? And what are they getting out of this particular event? So I'll say two things. One is that part of the financial crisis was in 2008, I think you actually had more characters. I believe that you actually had like some of the top economists from wall street were formally invited to the event and then there was a backlash and so i don't think they got invites after 2008 2009 so like the actual it's actually narrow but i also i sort of hinted at this at the top i don't think i could stress enough that like the actual like late august in wyoming if you like fishing like when you're like what do people get out of this i do in in no joking manner at all does it have

have to do with like I could take a work trip to Wyoming in late August and go fishing. Get out of the end of the idea. This is a catalyst for more stable global markets because if you're a power player in the financial world and you blow up the global economy, you're not going to get invited to Jackson Hole. And so you need to bring the Vicks down. You need to bring down volatility. You need to prevent the next recession. So if you're out there thinking about causing the next global recession. Yeah. Don't do it.

You want to be spending your summer. Don't do it. Don't miss your chance to like get a chance to. Yeah, don't do it. It's that simple. You're going to get to go fly fishing. Come on. Yeah.

It's that easy. It's that easy. What else is on the economic calendar for the rest of the year that we should be looking forward to? When's the next Jackson Hole? Well, the next Jackson Hole is going to be next August. You know what the funny thing is the other regional. So this is the Kansas, formerly, it's the Kansas City Fed Monetary Policy Symposium. Again, the other.

Regional Fed prisons, they actually have theirs that nobody ever talks about. There's an Atlanta Fed one that happens in Florida. I don't think you've probably ever heard of it. There's a Boston one. No, one ever really talks about it. There are so those happen. The big thing is going to be the next jobs report, you know, the August jobs report that we get in early September and the September Fed meeting. I mean, those, September is a very live meeting in terms of we genuinely don't know which way is going to go.

Is the, how much of the August jobs report will be the result of their approach to that report over the last year versus, are we expecting changes in terms of how it's put together given the, given the, I forget the person who was fired over. Yeah. Yeah. What's the story there? I mean, look, I think the widespread expectation is that it is, way too soon to imagine that something could change with the methodology prior to, certainly prior to the August report. I mean, the new guy who has been nominated E.G. Anthony, he hasn't been confirmed yet or anything. I think the widespread assumption, and maybe the assumption is mistaken because of

2025 and we live in a world where a lot of assumptions are wrong. Like the widespread assumption is that for better words, whatever like this sort of challenges of collecting this data under the existing approach, it's not going to change anytime soon. It's certainly not going to change by the August report. Now, if there's something else going on and everyone's wrong, look, I guess that's possible. But I haven't really heard anyone think that this soon we could have some scenario where there's uncertainty about that.

We really got to get the other feds to step up their conference game. They should be going to Aspen, Vail, Park City, Big Sky. They can just go all around. Just the Hamptons. Why not? The Hamptons? Why not? Hawaii.

Really, really pulling the heavy hitters. And he includes that incentive to not blow up the economy. Is there any concern on Wall Street with how levered up all these massive data center projects are, right? We've been, we joked off. We joked off there. It's like, this is the first time that tech, is this the first time that tech is levered up to this extent. Yeah.

And it feels like like the next, the next tech, the next backlash against tech could very well be that tech blows up the goal, the global economy. Yeah. This is real. This is, look, I would say three things about that. Please. One is, you know, tech got really levered up in a sort of classical debt sense in 1999 with the telecom.

So we do have, look, and that blew up. Yeah. And it, you know. But, but in the more recent era, the, you know, mobile, et cetera. Yeah, no, yeah. that we're not as used to that. Two, just the sheer volume, you know, I would say there's probably more, less anxiety

about the sort of levering up part, like, or borrowing money to finance these data centers, even though that is the case. And there's probably more anxiety about just how levered the entire economy is to the stock market itself. And the stock market is both this engine of consumer spending, fueling this volatile, but also an engine of investment impulse,

because if you keep getting rewarded in the stock market for just like more AI activity, that fuels it and that fuels this sort of like, you know, potentially snowball effect. And so I think that the anxiety is like, yeah, there is just a lot riding on the stock market. But then also setting aside financial market, setting aside debt, setting aside stocks, there's just a lot of dollars being spent into the economy in this one area. And when you look at other parts of the economy, it's like caring for old people, caring for old people and data centers.

And those three things. It's like one. That's what's dragging the dialysis. Dialysis and the GDP is just dialysis. And it's growing. Like all these things are like every year like, yeah, it's insane. And so like you look at like the most recent jobs report. The only sector is 73,000 jobs added and like it was like 48,000, 40,000 in health and 25,000 in social services.

So basically all basically 73,000 jobs in caring for an aging population. So it's aging population and data centers. And that sort of feels like the growth. of the U.S. economy right now. And that doesn't feel insanely, that doesn't feel insanely stable, given how much everything else is sort of rioting on the wealth effect from the stock market. Well, how much longer are you in Jackson Hole? I go back to, I go back tomorrow. Tomorrow. Okay. So 24 hours to stabilize the global economy. Talks and sense into people.

Get it done. Get it done. No excuses. Get it done. Thank you for joining. Get back. Thanks for having to you. Good time. Thanks for having me. Have a good. Bye. Bye. If you're looking to visit Jackson Hole, why don't you find your happy place? Find your happy place.

Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And Tyler, Flops, did you find anything on your timeline? We do have some breaking news in the chat. H.E. 18N. asks, do we read live chat? Yes, occasionally we can see it. We do read it every once in a while. We saw some breaking news in here that Apple is planning to integrate Google's Gemini AI into Apple Intelligence.

We talked about this a lot, and now there's new article out about it. It makes a lot of sense that Tim Cook doesn't want to build out all the infrastructure to train and serve models. Seems like a reasonable strategy. Do you have anything else on Apple Intelligence or Google? I mean, Gemini is a great model. They're on the parade of frontier, and it's probably easier to get a deal done. And Apple's had a relationship with Google on the search side for a long time. Yeah, it feels very natural.

But another post I sense in the X group, Daniel Tenrero, he has this image. The committee will continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook. But it's like in this funny, hopefully we can pull it up. Oh, you put it in the group? Yeah. on X. I'm not seeing it. Anyway, I'm seeing something from junk bond salesman. Oh, did it just come through?

No, not saying it. Anyway, good things come to those who wait, says Ben. The KNOB1 has become shipping out of out for those who pre-ordered. Thank you so much for believing in my vision for this keyboard. It's a dream come true. So Ben built a keyboard and shipped it. Very cool. You can go pick one up if you're interested.

Anyway, we have our next. guests, we have two folks coming into the TBPN Ultrudeaume. We have Jeffrey Katzenberg and Kimball Musk. Welcome to the show. How are you guys doing? Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Hey, happy to be there. How are you guys? Happy Friday. Happy Friday. It's a good day in the market. We are wearing white suits to celebrate the markets. Rives. We need a white. We need a hat. And we take for wearing the white hat. Obviously, you know, you probably saw that this is happening. Came prepared. We have something to celebrate on our side, too. So it's great.

Please. Yeah, we're super excited to hear about it. Kick us off. What are you sharing? Well, Jeffrey and I have been getting to know each other over the past couple of years, and I've been building a company called Nova Sky Stories, which builds stories in the sky using drone art, so light drones that tell 80 to 90-minute stories,

like a movie or like a Broadway play. And there's just no one better in the world that I could imagine joining as a strategic advisor, board member, and investor to Nova Sky Stories. Help us build an ex-brand and family entertainment and have a lot of fun doing it. Yeah, I remember Palmer Lucky was posting about the fact that there are only like three businesses in the entire United States that do just skywriting. Like, it's an incredibly uncompetitive space if you can figure out how to how to do something in the sky.

And it's just something that no one thinks about. And yet, you know, you could imagine what his point. was like, what's the next version of this? And this is clearly, yeah, it feels like very, it's techno-optimist entertainment. I remember the couple days after the fourth this year in Malibu, we had the worst air quality. It was like India-level air quality because of the fireworks that had been going off. You walked outside, it felt like you just looking around, it looked like you were in a cloud. And I was just thinking, we have drones. You can put them in swarms, and you can provide this incredible entertainment. And this has come up recently, too. We've, we've told

a number of friends companies that they should do drone advertising in the sky and we don't have a vendor and and there's no does not a not a great vendor but yeah walk us through what these will these shows will look like in in practice kind of what what what what the actual experience of seeing yeah so so before we do i just want to because it's kind of fun and i know there's a chance that this will um uh catch you off here. Please. You know, I have that ambition.

So, Kimball and I met at Burning Man. No way. Oh, yeah. See, there you go. What time a day was it? Was it like 2 a.m.? It was really? Yes, it was, actually.

Two years ago, Kimball did this light show at Burning Man. And it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. It was art in the sky. It's not fair to, you know, sort of look at this through the lens of, you know, fireworks or promotion or marketing because this was genuinely a very brilliant deployment of this technology that was just at a whole other level. So anyway, we first got to know each other just a little bit then. and then he's gone off and done this extraordinary job of very organically building out the business. You know, fundamental to it is just a state-of-the-art technology around drones. You know, everybody now just thinks, well, everybody has drones and anybody can put them up in the air.

Maybe just not these drones. These are, you know, very precision built. They're the design of them. There's all sorts of interesting things I'm learning about them that, allow them to swarm together, as you said, Jordy, you know, in a way that can create very, very, very strong imaging and choreography and programming and the application of AI to design programming around it. And so the analogy that I've sort of come to feel, you know, is analogous for me at least, is in 1990 I saw a little short film called

Luxor, the Lamb, which if you remember, was the very first piece of CG animation created by John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. And out of that came the partnership with Disney and Toy Story and Pixar and all of the amazing things. It's just transformative because it wasn't just a tool. It actually created a new form of storytelling. And I believe that what Kim is very successfully created already today is a platform to create something that is going to be as innovative and I think as impactful and important as CG animation was 30 years ago. That's how unique this is and how powerful I think it will be as a storytelling platform to create branded family entertainment in very large venues, global, all of those things.

creating characters, creating original IP, and also being able to work with the greatest IP in the world to create shows around it. But anyway, that's a lot to... Yeah, I mean, the thing that's so exciting to me is just like the wonder that you can inspire in a kid. You know, imagine I walk outside, it's night. And in the sky is this, you know, it could be some character from frozen or something like that where there's... You imagine Tinkerbell just flying through the sky. The other thing about the drones, they can start out the size of two or three football fields cubed. I mean, that's literally bigger than your mind can possibly imagine.

And then they can come down to the size of your hand and come land on your hand. That's crazy. That is insane. How, like, when you think of these like sort of fleets, I don't know if that are, worms, if that's exactly the right world. How many, you know, if you guys are going to do a show at something like a festival or a carnival or something like that, how many individual drones would go into something like that? Is it hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?

It's a real physics problem. So the way to look at it is you're trying to evoke emotion, you're trying to make sure you connect with the audience, but you also have to match it to the venue. So if you have the Rose Bowl, you can do 10,000 drones and, I mean, just completely melt people's minds in the most epic ways. And it's really fun to do that. I've done that a few times. We'll do that again sometime soon.

But you can also actually do it with a smaller number too. You can get down to four or five hundred, six hundred drones and still convey the emotion and get the character across, get the connect with, but the goal is to connect with the with the audience. The audience is definitely a ticketed audience. If people are paying, see a show that is 80 to 90 minutes long or maybe 45 minutes with an intermission

and another 45 minutes so that you can more like a Broadway play. But it can be really any size. Of course, when it's great, it's pretty great. I imagine. There have to be limitations to, like, to like the storytelling, though, right? because you have to physically move the drones from one place to another, so you can't exactly

do the Kula Shava effect? You can't exactly have a cut, a hard cut? Or can you do that? How do you solve that? Actually, yeah, because there are, and that's what's so exciting about it, I think, and why we're going to get some of the greatest storytellers in the world excited about creating for this new medium as opposed to sort of just retelling something else. because you can think of this as one dimension, which is a screen.

Yeah. And if you have a screen with 10,000 pixels, right? That's a pretty high diff. Very closely, you know, choreographed together. You can, and remember, these things, it's not just a light in this in it. These are sophisticated. Oh, right. It's not like a single bulb, right?

Yeah. You can have effectively a tiny screen on each, on each drone, right? literally and lasers and effects and all sorts of things. They, because that's what, you know, he's been investing in and building and they, you know, that they, these things are patented and he's the only company in the world that builds them. And so this is not like taking a, you know, military drone or, you know, from, you know. I mean, typically the ones that CR are these warehouse of military drones that are repurposed. Yeah.

This is a division of Intel and we're innovating on it for 10 years. First of all, safety. When you're flying 10,000 drones, I mean, something will go wrong unless you are absolutely dedicated to safety. And we're proud to say 10 years of Intel and three years with Nova, 100% safety record, very proud of that. So you have to really think about safety. And then there's a little bit of sophistication just gets,

that's where the fun comes in. And you can play with fire. I mean, we're actually, our drones could carry their own fireworks of all different kinds of shapes and sizes, not just like a typical firework. That is... You can actually have a dragon breathe fire. Wow. It's real fire, yeah. Yeah, so even just thinking about what you can do with fireworks if you have a delivery mechanism into the sky where, like, it's pinpointed.

You see the fireworks go up and sometimes they have shapes, but it's still very random. It's not exactly as choreographable as you think if you had more precise control. Yeah, no, we're able to get a firework. to go off with a five centimeter cube in space. It's just incredible. Yeah, I remember seeing. Where do you, where do you, uh, uh, you don't have to docks the exact location, but how do you, how do you, how do you properly, you know, test this product when, uh,

imagine you have to go far. We do have a secret location in Colorado, we're based in Colorado, deep in the Rocky mountains and it has to be pretty darn deep in there. Yeah. Because, uh, some of the shows we do will be 3,000 drones and no one's allowed to see it. Oh, sure. Because if they see it kind of runs a surprise, we really want to... Well, and somebody, some hiker at some point will walk over a hillside and think that.

Some other drone pilot will be like, I'm going to fly my drone over and take some video. Well, yeah, somebody's going to think it's a UF, you know, UFO. You're going to need counter UAS for protection. Would you guys ever, we love advertising here, we're big fans of advertising. Would you ever consider partnering with the right company? Is that a vertical that you care about at all? We do sponsors shows. No, we do, we do sponsorships all the time.

So someone will sponsor a show. Sometimes that simply means, you know, it's a thank you to them. Other times it is, you know, their logo in the sky. It just needs to match the audience approach. But it's, but it's, we're all kind of figuring it out here. What we're learning with advertisers, they want to do the right thing for the audience as well. Sure. They want to be recognized for it.

They want to build their audience or their brand. well, what's the right way to do this? Well, it's all kind of new. So, you know, sometimes we go over the top and sometimes we're not doing it enough, but we're getting me. The thing you want to do is you want to learn from what people have done successfully in the past, but also mistakes that have been made in the past. And, you know, one of the things I think we would all agree about today is, you know,

I continue to love movies, love going to movies. I think it's a singular great experience, go into a, you know, with a couple of hundred other people and get on that roller coaster ride. of a movie is very special, but honestly, sitting there for 25 minutes of trailers and commercials before it is beyond annoying. I mean, it just... Yeah, it incentivizes you to show up late, right? Yeah.

Totally right. So, but let me just, we should share with you a little bit, like, you know, what's the ultimate goal here? And there's a little story that I've been retelling here the last couple of days because it does, you know, sort of give me a perspective on this, which is, is that I remember going to see Elton John for the first time at the Trubidor. And then I remember 20 years later going and seeing Elton John at Dodger Stadium. And today, you can see Kimball's dream at the Trubidor. And it's pretty amazing and pretty spectacular and you can see the talent and the potential of it and five years from now

it's not going to dodger stadium and you know during you know seventh inning stretch having a drone show for 10 minutes it's going to dodger stadium to see a great nova experience there a something with a great story to it huge production value to it and as kimball said something that has hard and emotion, something that the whole family can enjoy together. And if you think about it, today, there are really two principal uses of the big stadiums around the globe, soccer stadiums, football stadiums, baseball stadiums. There's sporting events and they're concerts. And our goal, our, that we look at is, is that five years from now, there's going to be a third vertical there. and it is going to be these types of shows

that come through on a regular basis because once you create a show and design a show, it can be in any language, you can travel around, you know, like a concert. Yeah, it feels like something that can be as immersive as the sphere, but it doesn't cost billions of dollars to set up somewhere new, right? You know, it's really interesting because when the camera came on here and I saw you guys dressed in white,

the first thing I thought about is he must be. be going to see the back street boys. We're always ready. We're always ready. You're okay, these guys are going to the sphere to see the back street. You got the right uniform. We do. We're always ready.

I saw some videos in the Backstreet Boys. Are you guys, what's the, well, I have a couple questions. One, how do you think about form factors in the long run? Is this something 10 years from now would I be able to hire? some local company to set one of these up for like my son's birthday? It's quite different. No, it's quite different. So the think about us, we are already operating in 40 countries.

We go do events that are more, right now we're filling, you know, 3,000, 5,000 person event venues. So all ticket. And then eventually we'll get to Dodger Stadium or like 50,000 people. But the folks that will do something more for a one-off event, which will probably get easier over time right now. It's still very hard to do this. You have aviation approvals and so forth. It'll be someone else.

Our goal is to build the next Pixar. We want to, we want to create a... Although, on the other hand, Jordy, I mean, you know, given the track that you're on, you know, five years from now, you could hire out and jump on play a birthday party at your house. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I just, we all have mutual friends that might say it's. it's worth it for me to hire Novo for my kids' birthday party. I'll give you guys, you know, five million bucks. I spoke too soon. Yeah. As I understand, everybody does private.

Yeah, everybody. Everybody. What do you guys have planned? What do you guys have planned for for Burning Man this year? I'm assuming you're both going back. I'm going to make it out next week. Enjoy the week. It's my 27th year. So I'm going to go out. In a row? I work with a lot of the artists and love the event. I did it for the art. It's just so wonderful. Have you guys gone?

I've never been. Never been. Never been. Might have to go if this is going to be there. We could be the first guys to, I mean, we can't be the first, the first guy. We fit in with white suits like this on the playa? I think they get pretty dirty. They get too.

Everyone is still covered in dust. Everybody's in this. You could go there dressed in this. And within an hour, it will look like that because the dust just covers everything. Doing the show, doing the show live from the plio, I think would be deeply at odds with the ethos. But there would certainly be some funny interviews. I'd love to interview guys at 2 a.m. after you first met. So what are you guys going to work on together?

I have more questions. Yeah. What's going on? So I'm interested in kind of like what technology the business is focused on building, Pixar, obviously had to invent a lot of CGI technology, and then some of that wound up spinning out and people made other graphics

CGI movies. Pixar created render man. That became its own kind of product. I imagine that the software to let an artist actually create on a fully three-dimensional canvas, but not just pixels on a screen,

actually a physical canvas of drones flying around. There are limitations. There are physical simulations that need to run. I imagine that you'll need to build a system for that. Is that internal? Are you going to partner with someone on that? Yeah, so our version of Render Man is called Genesis. Okay. And so what animators do, and we're recruiting, so shout out to all the animators out there, we're recruiting the best animators in the world. We know how good you are and we want you to join our team. And our

version of Render Man is called Genesis. So what our animator will do is they might use some of the tools that are more familiar with, like Scyma 4D or something, to get started. And then they upload their ideas and animations into Genesis, our version of Render Man. And it converts the whole piece into drone, managing the physics of the drones. And a lot of AI in this process to figure out where do the drones go? Literally, how long do the drones get to move? Like if you're thinking about Mickey Mouse in an animation, it can move like this, and it's just a problem.

Oh, well, no, hold on. Drones actually physically move. so the actual animation changes from like this, like this, it might move it a little slower. And then if you do need to move it fast, you'll actually move the LED lights instead of the drones. And it'll actually be an illusion of the drones moving very, very fast. But that's all part of our Genesis tool.

So that part is internal to Nova, and we continue to develop that, and we do have ambition for it to make that level of a difference like Rinderman has done for animation. movies that's great on on the hardware side what lessons are you taking from your experience with Tesla to this business well the thing that i know i know so much with Tesla i do work with AI a lot there but it's the spatial AI so full self-driving is not it's not LLM it's a completely different approach to to to learning models yeah and it's actually very very similar to

to drone to moving drones in space doing them around in in the air and um the the lessons that i'm learning about being able to uh this might be a little inside baseball on a i but uh using the transformer technology to do to do predict a video and you learn from tesla and then the the scale of the hardware which has gone from you need something the size of this room to something that that can you know be the size of an ipad to something that for when it gets to be for drones would be you know something that would be you know half the size of an iPhone. I'm able to watch that happen.

And then, of course, once you get there, then you can imagine what can happen. You can even design for it, but the actual hardware has to get small enough. And once you get there, then you just start to imagine the magic. That's possible. This is a question maybe for both of you.

One of the actual goals I have with our drones is to be able to speak to the drones and have the drones react to you at a scale of 10,000 drones. That's actually possible. You just need inference engines on the drones that are, we're just not at that hardware scale yet, but we'll get there.

In terms of market structure. By the way, that, that, I mean, people, people have been experimenting this with various models, this idea of like, you know, generative imagination. So just imagining something, talking about it, and just having the sky reacts would feel like, thousand draws it will actually form in a way that responds to you. It's all possible without the hardware is not sold yet, but the hardware is just getting smaller and smaller and

smaller. My worry is that you guys are going to get the reach that achieve this vision internally and then become so addicted to just sitting back and watching your own creation. The beauty is that you can literally touch you can literally touch grass while watching one of these. Exactly. You can do it outside life. It's a drive-in movie theater. It's fantastic. It solves a problem. You can enjoy the screen while touching grass. That's the best. On market structure, I'm interested to know right now it feels like the company is extremely vertically integrated.

You own the drones, you develop the IP, you might work with someone, but eventually you're building the software. You're running the shows. You're taking in the ticket revenues. In the long term, do you see that there will be like an AMC or a Lowe's or a theater chain or an owner operator or a franchisee? Is there some world where your focus narrows? Yeah, our focus is on content and technology. So we want to be the Pixar. Yeah.

We are very excited to work with ticketing partners or with, you know, Dodger Stadium. We'll have probably Ticketmaster, and that's fine. Yeah. We work with Theaver, which is a fantastic promotion partner around the world. We are focused on content and technology. The venues have been built. Yeah, of course. You don't need to build.

You don't need to build. movie theaters or own movie theaters to be in the movie business and you're at the whim of whoever controls the ticketing for that venue so you do you do have to work with whoever that is and we're agnostic we're some with someone that are better than others but at the end of the day we we love all of them and we want to we want to work with all of well you guys partner with uh cruise ships have you thought about that potential you're far out at sea we have some very very interesting uh innovations is happening on the cruise ship side, but it'll be unveiled probably about a year from now. Makes sense.

Anything else, Dr. No, this is super, super exciting. Thank you guys for coming on and sharing. Thank you so much. I just want to ask, make sure to be careful flying these over the Amazon. There's some uncontacted tribes. If the first thing... I don't know where that idea came from.

If the first thing that they see is a Nova Sky Story, I think it would be difficult to recover. Anyways, great, great chatting with you guys. Come back on anytime. So send us a selfie from the Backstreet Boys tonight. We will. And send us a selfie from the Playa. Yes, yes, right. We'll talk to you soon. Awesome. Cheers, guys. Have a good. Have a good one. That is just wild. I honestly am so excited for those to be everywhere. For sure. I want Sky's stories everywhere I go.

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If you actually want to do a drone show right now, AdWack. AdWack can help you get set up with it. Yes. A drone billboard in the sky. Somebody's got to do it. Run some out-of-home ads. Elon says join XAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macro Hard.

Microsoft Macro Hard. It's a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real in principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI. He's really taking shots at Microsoft lately, coming for Satcha. Hopefully this did not that I see get a Sotja reply, but when Satcha Times... I was so good. When Sacha, it claps back with the corporate

speak that just hits super hard, I'm so there for it. I'm cheering. It's a fun little Neo and Morpheus are fighting on the timeline moment. Anyway, we have our next guest, Jessica Livingston, from Wicominator, of course, coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream, Jessica. How you doing?

Finally. Hi, am I talking to you now? We're live. We're live. We're live on the internet. We are on X, YouTube, Twitch, we figured it out. We're on Substack. Even on LinkedIn. Substack, a YC company.

I love it. Twitch also a YC company. Hi, how you doing? Hey, it's happening. I'm good. I'm so happy to be on the show and see it. Long time to see, John. Yes, it's been years.

We probably ran into each other. YC 2018, I went through the batch, and we were at a couple, overlapped at a couple dinners. Are you up in the bay right now? I am. I am at Y Combinator's office right now. Normally I live in England.

Yes. And so I'm here for a couple weeks this summer. Paul and I are back. Give us the vibe check on San Francisco and YC. You've seen so many ups and downs as trends have come and dissipated and people have talked about moving. What's your current opinion or take on just San Francisco and YC as a place to start and build a business? Well, so I come back to San Francisco sometimes just once a year, usually a couple times, two or three times.

So I've only just seen little snippets of it. I was very depressed a few years ago. I came back, gosh, it was like three years ago when I went to a bunch of big YC startups, like Reddit and Twitch and all these, just to go say hi to some of the founders and to get a tour. And it was really grim in San Francisco. Like I never walked around. We were like in the car the whole time. And we went into these startups and no one was there.

Everyone was still, you know, working remotely. And I remember leaving thinking like, what is happening? Like it was so weird because it was very sudden for me because I hadn't been there during the pandemic. You know, so it was all of a sudden the snapshot was one that felt so foreign to me. And now I feel like it is just vibrant and alive. And there's so much crazy stuff going on in the world. But in this area, the Bay Area and San Francisco, it seems so optimistic and exciting. And why Combinator is just flourishing.

Because I'm on the board. So, you know, we keep tabs on it that way. We don't come back all the time. but we try to come back for a dinner, a session. And now there are four sessions a year or batches. So I think we're going to have to come back four times a year and, you know, talk at the dinners and things like that. But it's still, it's great. I could not be more positive.

Yeah. Yeah. No, we like to call it the NFL combine of technology where everyone who's joining the league, once they leave Ycombinator Demo Day, they have a serious business and they need to be evaluated by the scouts. And the literal venture scouts and sometimes the venture. capitalists who kind of play a role of scouting the next public. I'm hoping to come to, I haven't been to Demo Day in a lot, in a couple years, you know, years.

I'm hoping to come to the next Demo Day, not the one in September, but the one in December. You'll have to come. We live stream from Demo Day now and be prepared. We bring a lot of confetti. We bring a lot of very air horns. Gongs. And if you're not prepared, very loud. One venture capitalist friend of ours came in and Jordy, like, launched a can

of confetti all over him, and he was very surprised, but it was great. That's so cool. You live stream from Demo Day? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I'm going to watch it in England in September. People have said it's the best way to experience Demo Day from England. Yes, yes. Yeah, we'll send you the previous streams.

You can watch. We go back to back with founders as they come off and have much more unstructured interviews. It's a complete the opposite end of the spectrum from the prepped Demo Day pitch, which has a particular veneer to it and is meant to deliver information in a certain cadence. Our interviews are all over the place. We'll talk about what people are wearing,

what they did before, what they want to do next. We do go into the companies, but we have a lot of fun with the founders. What do you think your role is in terms of being on the board of YC, continuing to help steward the company, but having so much space from both San Francisco and even the business, right?

I feel like when you can create that space, in this case, it's a physical space. It can help you have a perspective that is unique and valuable, even if you're not in the office every day, like someone like Gary. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of space. We moved to England in 2016, and it was only meant to be a year, and I took a sabbatical that year from YC. Paul had already retired. Sam was running it. and it just kept going. The sabbatical was like endless.

I never went back. So I've had a lot of distance, you know, both mentally and physically. And I think it, I was really tired when I left. I mean, having started Y Combinator and it was growing and then I had kids at the same time, like that barely took any maternity leave. I was just really burnt out. And so I think I love that I have this space because I feel like I have so much energy and love for startups, but it's not all the time. So it feels like this special thing.

Like when I do one of the reasons. Yeah. Going on vacation to San Francisco. Going on vacation to the Bay Area, totally. And I've, you know, we've been having, but it's a vacation that's very strenuous because I've been having more, I'm busier here than I am at home. And we have meetings. I just toured the Open AI office right before I got on the show. And it's just, that's why I think I'm on such a high because it's just all so exciting.

And not that it feels novel, but it just feels so different than, you know, having sheep in my yard in Oakland. But it's great to come back. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. On YC, can you help me understand the different eras of what made, YC outperform other groups or investors. I've heard this, someone pitched this narrative of like the original brilliant insight of YC was that a new grad who was talented could not just walk into Sand Hill Road and get a meeting

and raise money. And so there was this unique opportunity to take risk on younger and earlier stage founders. And then the second era, not really. but second unseen opportunity that everyone else was missing was helping connect international founders to American capital markets and bring companies and there's a huge amount of companies in the YC portfolio where they built a business somewhere else the founders grew up there they're connected there but coming to YC got them accelerated in the American business context do those two stories resonate with you or those is that go is that

it completely apocryphal storytelling or is there something there? How would you kind of noodle on that? Well, the first part of it, 100% is true. That was our raison d'etra. I mean, we started Wycombinator in the beginning of 2005 in Boston. So there were not many angel investors. And so if you wanted to raise money, you had to have a business plan and you had to go in and pitch VCs who, of course, only wanted to invest millions of dollars in you, there wasn't really an easier, efficient way to say, hey, I really just need like $50,000 to pay the rent, quit my job, and sort of experiment with what I'm working on. Also, remember at that time, you know, server costs were coming down. You kind of just, if you wanted to do a software company, you just needed a computer.

And so, you know, Paul and I thought, you know, we're in Boston here. MIT and Harvard, there's all these young super-duper programmers, and they could easily start a startup now if they just had a little bit of money to cover their expenses. And someone gave them advice and someone helped them with the like really scary business things and legal things like incorporating the company. Because Paul himself was a startup founder, and he could handle, you know, the big idea of creating a web-based application. But the thought of incorporating the company, paralyzed him kind of thing. And so we did all that stuff.

And it was also a time where traditionally VCs would install like a seasoned CEO. You know, they'd get the product going and say, well, you need someone to come in and run your business, which leads me to what I want to talk about later is the founder mode series that I've just launched like half an hour ago. Amazing. They'd bring in a seasoned CEO to run the company. And we kind of thought, well, why can't the founder run the company? You know, back in 2005, we should just train them on the businessy stuff.

So that's how we started. And for many years, it was run with that in mind. You know, help the programmers. Our target audience was always programmers. And we just brought in people to say, here's how you run the business and get product market fit and all these different things. We had all the guest speakers that would come in. Second part of your question about the international people, I mean, we always did fund some international people.

The point is we always said, in order to benefit from YC, you need to come to the Bay Area. You need to experience it. Even if you move back after the three months batch is over, you need to come here because the ecosystem here is like nowhere else in the world. Even if you lived in Chicago, we'd say, come. you have to come and be present at a Y Combinator. Yeah. Did you guys ever explore, were you motivated to try to, like, that I can't think of the, the YC of the UK, right?

And you guys are there. I'm sure you have reasons why that maybe doesn't exist, or maybe it does exist. It just never broke out in a way. But was there always a commitment to San Francisco and not wanting to fragment meant kind of the magic of the bay after you moved there? Or was there any? Yeah. I mean, what we always got was, yeah,

why don't you have the YC of other cities, especially like New York? They always thought we were going to come to New York or Boston. Remember, when we first started, Paul and I were by coastal. So we do summer sessions in Boston and Cambridge and winter sessions in Mountain View. And we did that for three years.

And then when we had our first child, we had to choose. so we chose Silicon Valley, so we were always then in Mountain View. Why don't we branch out, why don't we do YC in other cities? Because we want people to come to Silicon Valley or to San Francisco. Because like I just said, the ecosystem here is like no other. And, you know, they can do a startup in London. There are some startups that are doing very well in London.

But I don't think we need to be in Silicon. We need to be in San Francisco. I keep saying Silicon Valley because I'm so. old school and I lived down there. But I'm sorry, it's San Francisco now. Yeah. Do you think things have changed with the mountain view to San Francisco switch? I remember when I

first went through YC in 2012, I was actually part of Imagine K-12, which then kind of merged in, and I was living with another proper YC company, and we lived in Sunnyvale in a rundown house. It was pitched to me. The pitch was amazing. They were like,

it's just like the house in the social network. It's got a pool. It's got a jacuzzi. It technically had a pool. It was filled with algae. It technically had a jacuzzi. It was full of leaves. But what this gave us was the opportunity to basically just spend all day working. Because there was nothing else to do. So we never were we weren't throwing pool parties. We were just grinding. And I learned Python and I learned C and I taught myself a bunch of programming language and built a bunch of products. Everything flopped. It was a disaster. Eventually I learned to, you know, do other stuff. But but there was something about the monastic. building in in Sunnyvale that I really enjoyed. And I'm wondering if there's some sort of like defenses that next generation of founders who might be in San Francisco where they get funded with more money up front and they can afford a more distracting lifestyle. Like is there any advice that you'd give for someone who can snap their fingers and be living in a nice apartment and have time to throw pool parties on the weekend? No one would ever take my advice. We've been

telling for three years, like just stay down in Silicon Valley. Yes, it's boring, but you will get so much work done and you'll be so focused. And I think people who've gone through YC in the old days would agree. But what did they do after the three months? They got funding and got an office in San Francisco and moved to San Francisco. You can only, you know, we're not going to be able to stop people. San Francisco is so much more fun and everyone wants to live here. And certainly all the young people want to live here. Literally, as soon as we raised money, we actually moved to LA, but we got a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and we're throwing pool parties constantly. It was a mess.

Well, you shouldn't be doing that. I know. It was a mess. I'm now confused. How many startups did you do through YC? I remember So Soilent went through in summer 2012. I was part of an Imagine K-12 team that merged in. So I became a co-founder of that C-Corp and added to that cap table and board, but we didn't

go through YC again. Sam said, like, you could go through again, but we were like, we could just raise a seed round. So we built that business. And then I started a second YC company, Winter 18, and went through again properly. So now I'm like officially a YC founder, not this like retcon fake YC founder that got aqua hired in and given the, given the title of co-founder later on. It was very messy status. You're going to have to come on the social radars then because I feel like I'm sitting here talking to you guys, but I have a lot of questions about your guys' lives. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, you're, well, come on. We've only done one podcast.

this year with... Yeah, odd lots. That was it. Yeah, we'd be happy to. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you're live three hours a day, it's really, really hard.

And also, we both have young kids. And so the schedule requires, like, turning down just a ton of events, which has been frustrating. But I'm sure you're in the same boat where people invite you to stuff in your... How do you... I just turn down everything. Yeah, of course. Would you have predicted back in 2005 that being a founder would one day be high status, something

that young people... thought would be the cool thing to do? Or was that not on your radar given, at least at that time when it was hard enough to incorporate your business, much less built something successful? I think Paul might have envisioned it. I don't, joking aside, I don't think so.

I mean, it was such a narrow thing. Doing a startup was not the norm. Everyone either got a job in finance or went to graduate school or got like a real job. It was only sort of the weirdo sort of people who didn't fit in hardcore programmers that did startups. It just wasn't the normal option. And actually, and then when we came to Silicon Valley, there were more people that did it. And so there was this, then all of a sudden it didn't seem so weird.

And when we first started, as you guys probably know, we only had eight startups in the batch. It was tiny. But it grew consistent. over the years. And as more startups got going, more people heard about them. And then I remember specifically it was like when the social network movie came out. I don't know what year that was. Was it like 2011 or something?

Yeah, 2010, 2011. Somebody should try to do an analysis on how much economic, how much EV that movie created. Probably a lot. Because it has to be in the, I would have, it could easily be in the hundreds of bills. Even though it's sort of the wrong reason to do a startup. Lots of people just did it anyway and built businesses. No, because parents, and of course, Facebook itself was made startups more popular. And parents, I mean, we used to have parents who sort of disapproved of their kids doing YC because you got into Stanford grad school.

Why on earth aren't you choosing that over what's this Y Combinator? And then all of a sudden, startups became seen as like this interesting thing that people actually did. I mean, I'd like to say why Combinator had a bit of an impact on the number of startups that got started because we hopefully made it really easy to do. So people who wouldn't have started them did. But yes, that movie I do believe had a big effect, at least had a big bump in the YC applications. Also, just the press machine, some of Paul's writing around how to do PR, some of the internal resources, that also made it more acceptable. one of my co-founders dropped out of a PhD program at Caltech. Both of his parents are professors, so that was a big negotiation.

But fortunately, like, TechCrunch was there and had written about us. We were profiled in the New Yorker, and the business just felt a little bit more real. But in the early days, even going through YC, you tell someone I'm doing a startup, it's actually kind of real, like, I'm in this YC thing. People would be like, what are you talking about? Like, you are crazy. Why don't you go work at a bank or consulting firm? Yeah, people didn't get it.

And so we just happily and quietly, like, did our thing, appealed to the small group of users that loved us and just kept growing every year. Yeah. And now, like, everyone's doing it. The flip side of this is, I'd love your thoughts, both as a founder and a mentor to entrepreneurs and also a parent potentially on this concept of get your bag culture or this idea that Gen Z founders are potentially optimizing for short-term economic gain at a higher rate than previous generations? Do you disagree with the premise? Do you think there's an antidote?

What's your thinking about that concept? What is, what kind of culture did you say? This is how out of touch I am. So they explain it like the cool kids refer to it as get your bag culture. A bag of course is a bag of money and getting the bag is a liquidity event typically reserve for IPOing a generational company. And so you can compare this to like the origins of YC, which is maybe more hacker culture, people that were in it to just tinker and build. Build the product and satisfy the user. Or maybe build something for themselves.

And now there's a category of founders that I think people rightly categorize as people that are purely in it to make, to try to make quick money. I call them carpet baggers. Carpet baggers. Yes. That's like a really old term. It still uses the term bag, so I like it. Yes.

Okay. I think, I don't think that it's sustainable if you're after the money. You can't start a startup sort of just to make money unless you're really good. You need to have some sort of genuine interest in what you're building because they're so hard. that in order to get to that whatever kind of liquidity event you can get, in order to get there, you have to go through so much difficulty and stress and hard times that it's, I think it's hard to do. I think people have done it, but I don't think it's not as easy as it sounds to like, oh, go get that funding. And it's a long haul.

It's like, I tell people you got to at least be ready to devote the next decade of your life to this. I mean, maybe you can have a liquidity event earlier than that, but I don't believe in that. How have you thought about like sort of protecting the YC brand over the years? Because YC has this interesting challenge where... Always orange, never red, never yellow. And I don't, yeah, I don't mean visual, but in the sense of YC now accepts hundreds of founders in every year that get the opportunity to be a part of this program and the community and the institution that is YC. and that ultimately creates people that

love the brand, that promote the brand and all these positive things and become part of this community that is part of the value. But you also have to reject thousands and thousands of people every single year, right? People that don't make it in. That's the hardest part of YC, by the way. The dynamic that I've witnessed is

almost every time I see somebody talking poorly about YC, it is somebody that won't overtly say that they were rejected. But I know deep down, it's like you applied a couple times and you were rejected. And this is you kind of lashing out rejecting this institution. And it's never the founders that actually went through it, right? I've literally never, you know, a founder could go through it and say, oh, my, I, you know, I went through YC, but it wasn't the reason that my company worked.

Maybe you could make that argument. Or I went through YC and I didn't necessarily fully connect with my group partner. but I love the community, right? Like there's always, they always get something out of it. But it's this hard challenge of having to ultimately reject people that are part of the community and the industry that you're in. Well, you're making a good point. We always want people to think good things about us.

And certainly if we reject you, we want you to apply again. If you're still going, it's not like, oh, we don't like you and we never want you to come back. Maybe we just thought your idea seemed bad and you wind up pivoting and reapplying. I honestly think I think we do a really good job advising everyone. Even the startups that are failing, I mean, sometimes I used to kid Paul, like he was so devoted to the startups that even the ones that were like clearly failing and needed to just call it a day on their startup, he'd be like, no, we can make this work. Have you tried this? I really think our advice is exceptional, and anyone who goes through the program will think, even if my startup failed for whatever reason, it was still a valuable use of my time.

And I learned so much, and I'm part of this amazing community, which just gets better and better because more people join. We can't do anything about the people who, like, say bad things. They're mostly people who have never been through the program, and so, or people who have rejected. You're right. Yeah. Are there particularly red flags that pop up for people who see YC as a resume bullet point to add? I'm laughing because the answer is yes. A lot of people and, you know, one of the YC partners who looks at all the applications now,

I don't look at the applications really anymore, but you can definitely tell people who are like building their resume and just want to put it on like their. LinkedIn. And in fact, I think we had to like do something to prevent people from saying like, like, um, YC founder on LinkedIn. We had like as in like a type of education. Yeah. You know, it doesn't go in the education section. It's an investor. It goes, it goes in the investor list of your company, which you will continue to build forever, hopefully. But I mean, that's also, that's also what every brand would hope is people value our money so much that they, they, they put it as, part of their education. Yeah, it's an interesting trade-off. Yeah, it's a good problem to have, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I have a friend who I went to high school with and like phenomenally

tracked individual, perfect SAT scores, Ivy League education, rejected from where I see like 10 times, I think literally 11 times, got in, starts a company, an AI company before the chat GPT moment and is just absolutely taking off and has been doing fantastically and has turned it into his whole life's work, which is fantastic. Oh, I love that story. He was rejected 10 times? It might have been 11 times. I need to, I'll text him and confirm the exact number, but it was, it was way over five.

And it was, this was back when YC was only doing two batches. So this was a five plus year process of facing rejection and continuing to build and getting through. And so, yeah, to the people that think that they want to take to their anonymous. X accounts and talk some trash, I would say, just continue to apply. Apply the 11th time. Yes. Yeah.

And then talk some trash. Apply the 11th time. Absolutely. I was rejected. Well, even I was so, so my last company, I was, I was rejected. And I was even after we had raised from, I was, no, but I get to cover demo day now with John. Jordy.

I feel guilty. No, no, no. No, it was for good reasons. The exact reasons that Michael laid out in the rejection were the reasons that my company, my last company, like our hardest moments were all, like he saw it, like he had a crystal ball. Yep. And he saw the struggles that we were going to run into. We eventually pivoted. Yep. But it was, uh, I appreciated the advice. Yep. And then I still feel like YC is great because you just, you, you, you, not to turn this into, uh, just a, you know, praising, uh,

YC the whole time. But, uh, all of the, the core, uh, lessons are just all available online. Yeah. Right. And if you actually, if you don't just read them, but you actually, actually, but you actually apply them. I mean, the lesson that, the lesson that I think a bunch of companies right now are going to learn, scaling headcount rapidly prior to true product market fit, right? You have all these early stage companies, seed series A companies. When you, if you get up to 30, 40, 50 employees with like some market poll, but not true product market fit, good luck going through a real pivot, like a bet the company pivot with 50 people on your team. Like it's just so much harder than if you, I think YC's standard advice is keep it like if you,

if you have like, you know, under seven-ish people, if I can remember. A two pizza team can potentially pivot. Once you're at 50, it's going to be really, really hard. I don't know. And you should always stay small what before so you can serve money. Because if you don't have product market fit, what if you have? have, yeah, what if you have to pivot? You can't do it as a big organization very easily. Yeah, can you talk a little bit more about finding product market? The other thing I will say that from the from the 2021 era was that there was advice from investors broadly, and this is like due to just like this pressure around delivering markups, but there was this advice broadly of like,

if you want to raise money, you need to have best in class growth, which means that if you're a seed stage company. You need to go from, you need to get to a million dollars of ARR. This was the 2021 era of like, that's what gets your series A done. And you need to basically do it in less than a year. And like there's this extreme pressure to do that. And I think that was at odds with with YC's philosophy, which was, it's not about how fast you get to like the company that gets to a million dollars in ARR, the fastest is not the one that gets to a billion, the fastest. Right. And I just, time and time again, when I talk to early stage founders that aren't in YC, I just say, go, like, read everything you possibly can that has been created from the people that have been

part of that. Study the blade. Sorry, that's going to be another game. That's another meme. Study Jessica's blade. I gotta get up to speed on these memes, you guys. God, memes for old people. We throw them past and fast.

We'll make YC for memes. Yes. You can come through it. We'll accept you. On product market fit, talk about what product market fit looked like in the first batch. And now I want to apply some of those takeaways from like, we're in this weird era. There's a current discussion around AI inference reselling as a potential way to spike revenue growth. That is not a true example of product market fit because you are a first.

effectively selling a dollar for 90 cents, and people will just take that all day long, and that's not actually product market fit. And I want to know how you tussle with that in the various companies that you saw early on, like false signals for product market fit. Well, we didn't have that much product market fit in the first batch. I think the only one was Reddit. And even that was sort of slow going with maybe some fake accounts and things. But, I mean, I always think of it, and I am probably not the best person to talk.

you know, deeply about product market fit. But what always sticks with me is something Paul Bukite used to say, which is it's better to make like a small group of people love you than a whole bunch of people just like you. And I think if you can make that small group of people love you, you can, you usually always can expand that group of just avid users. If they just like you and are just coming to your site now and then or won't pay for something, those people aren't going to stick. You can't.

That's not something you can build a long-term business off of. And I think, you know, YC, we're always just like find people who love this product and will pay you for it. That's the best way to determine if they love you, right? Because a lot of people will say, oh, we're starting this idea. Our friends, you know, say they'll use it. We're like, really? are they just, are they really going to use it? Or are they just saying they're going to use it because they're your friend?

You know, like, they really want to know what local events are going on in their neighborhood that night? No. They think they do, maybe, but they won't actually use it. Yeah. Talk about your new series. Founder mode. Oh, yes. Founder mode.

Okay. So very briefly, literally just launched it like in the last hour. So Carolyn Levy, who's our legal counsel here, we're co-hosts of the social radars, which is a podcast, and we interview lots of YC founders about anything. It's very, sometimes very random. Sometimes we talk about how they got started. Sometimes we talk about what's going on now.

It's very unscripted. You'll even interview like a non-profit CEO too. Yes, we've had Edith from Nora Health was on it. Of course. Yes. So the only thing is we try to do YC founders. Sure. Although Tyler Schultz, the whistleblower at Theranos, was not a YC founder, but his episode is so interesting.

But anyway, so we're interringing YC founders. So last week, Gary hosted a Y Combinator founder mode retreat up in Sonoma Valley. And what did you just do? We have a soundboard. And one of the soundboard cues is founder mode in a very serious quake three or do. video game voice. Sorry to interrupt. Sorry to interrupt.

No, I love that. So he had the founder mode retreat. And so Carolyn and I said, since everyone's there and we're thinking about founder mode, let's grab people and do very short interviews, like 15 minutes each about what does founder mode mean to you and when have you had to do things like that? Because it all started a year ago when Brian Chesky gave this famous talk at our other retreat from last year. and I mean I left with my mind blown.

You just sat there for an hour like with your mouth open listening to him just go on and on and this happened and that happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, talking about how he was gas lit and all this stuff and it was fascinating. And every founder in that room was like, gosh, I sort of have been secretly worried about these same things. So Paul then wrote an essay called Founder Mode. He defined what that means. He defined what that means. meant, but we need to collect examples. So that's what Carolyn and I are doing. You're making me laugh with that. We're collecting examples. So we have like 10 different episodes coming out with a bunch of different YC founders. Today we launched Brian Chesky, Gary Tan, and Paul Graham. And then we'll

dribble them out over the next couple of weeks. But it was really fun hearing these stories because there's themes that are similar, but everyone has their own different stories. Well, we like to collect KPIs around here. We have a tradition where we ask our guests to give us a number, maybe the number of years they've been in business, total amount of money they've raised, total downloads, or number of episodes that you've done for the show. Any number, and then we ring the gong for numbers. Is there anything you can share with us that can quantify your career? Anything, any number that sticks out to you. Can be anything, any number at all. Yeah. I mean, I'd have to say 20 because we founded Y Combinator in 2005.

There we go. Best year yet. All right. Thanks, you guys. It's not all digital sound board. We also embrace the We're all going to go listen to the founder mode series. We encourage the audience too as well. And all that we ask is at some point in the future, come and do the demo day stream with us.

We would love to have you on the demo day. It's a quick interview. If I'm here, I'll stop by in December. That'd be fantastic. talk to you more. Have a great rest of your day. Great to chat. Great to chat. You're a great rest of your trip to San Francisco. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much. Bye, guys. Bye. Let me tell you about Bezell, getbezzle.com. Your Bezzle concierge is available to source

you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And our next guest is already ready. He's in the restream waiting room. He's coming into the TVPN Ultradome. We have Zach Bookman from OpenGov. Let's bring in Zach. How are you doing? What's going on? I'm, hey, Jordy. How you doing? What's happened? I'm fantastic.

It's Friday. It's Friday. We're close. I feel Monday's right around the corner. I'm so excited. Yeah, Monday's right around the corner. Can I just get real with you guys for a second? It's, it takes a lot of stamina to build a company and to lead and to be a CEO.

And like, what you're doing must take so much stamina to. How do you? It's a daily marathon. It's the entire secret. How do you do this hours a day? performing. Yeah, we joke. Anyone is welcome to compete with us. Just be willing to produce 20 hours a week of live content. Be willing to spend a meaningful amount of your waking life live on the internet. And on Diet Coke, which is a feature prominently. Yes, yes, yes. We've

been rotating them out a little bit, but yeah, Diet Coke's the current day. Yeah, I mean, the real secret. He's got the Matayina. Andrew Huberman's Yerba Mata, Matayana. Oh, that'll jack you up. I drink two of those before the show every day. Yeah, that's right. That's how John warms up. I call it a podcast in a can. It's a podcast in a can. So you're asleep like half the weekend. Oh, yes. That's exactly what happens. That's the biggest. We're on like insane caffeine levels Monday through Friday. And then on the weekend, our wives will be like, what's going on? Like, wake up. Like, you're dead. I finally was like the secret is stock energy drinks and then I'm ripping. Yeah. At least 500

Melligeron Saturday and Sunday. Well, you're getting the most exciting guests, too. So it's the adrenaline with no performance even, you know, yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, can you kick it off with an introduction on yourself? I'm familiar with the story of the company, but I'd love to just introduce it to the audience. Sure. I'm Zach Bookman. I'm co-founder and CEO of, and it's an enterprise software company called OpenGov.

Yeah. It's vertical software. So we sell, we sell software to software. modernize all of our nation's cities and counties, state agencies. Yeah. This has, so I started the company with Joe Lonsdale and two amazing young Stanford engineers. 13 years ago. Overnight success.

Who's Joe, Joe, uh, who's Joe, uh, Joe, uh, Joe, who's Joe, Wieslandtall for those. Uh, no, no, yeah, Joe's co-founder, okay, okay, co-founder of volunteer, buddy of yours. Um, hey, your audience's getting so big. There's people not in the valley here, okay, so. They've been living under a data center. It's true. I don't know, if they don't know, Jeff. 13 years, incredible run.

Yeah, I felt like... 13-year overnight success. Of course. And I feel like the company kind of came out of nowhere. Is that, was that intentional? Were you building, like, behind the scenes? Or is that just the function of the market? Well, a little bit of both.

Well, and there's a third one, which is called the long series of painful mistakes. So those don't know, we sold the company last year for $1.8 billion to a very large of family. It was dripped over there. It was the largest, I think, private software

transaction of the year and maybe one of the largest of the last few years. I just keep going. This is fun. You're on a roll. We designed the soundboard for this kind of interview

and you're really great. Hit him the action. You got a hoarse noise. We saw all these governments using like green screen software, you know, more than a decade ago. This is after the Great Recession. There were three cities that went bankrupt, 12 that were predicted to go bankrupt. And we were like, we're going to pay taxes for the next 50 years. Where's our money going to go?

We saw the state of California using an accounting system that ran on COBOL. And they entered into a $100 million agreement with Oracle and Accenture, which ballooned into a billion dollar deal that was seven there was seven years let's give it up for the shareholders taxpayers I'm a california taxpayer just write the check to larry ellison next time and and we saw that the the city of palo alto was running an ERP system that was delivered on 20 discs and had green screens from a german software conglomerate sEP and they paid 10 million bucks for it. And we were like, there's, we, we have to be able to do good for our communities, our country. It was super mission driven. Our mission is to power more effective and accountable

government. And we thought there's a pretty good business here. And it turns out there's a, your investor audience would know there's a company called Tyler Technologies. Most ordinary people haven't heard of it. They do about two billion in revenue on software and services for state and local governments. And they are the, I think, 10th best performing stock of the last 20 years. They're on the S&P 500. They print like well over a quarter billion dollars in cash a year, probably three, four hundred. And so we got out of the gate, had a little bit of hype. Yours truly made basically every entrepreneurial mistake in the book, built the wrong products and the wrong order, hired the wrong people, raised too much money, spent too much money,

had to learn enterprise selling on the job. And we managed to get some. outstanding star-studded investors and board members. Mark Andreessen was on the board, John Chambers, obviously Lonsdale, Catherine August, who helped build First Republic. And, you know, folks like Lorene Jobs and Scott Cook. So people were very attracted to the mission. I used to have hair down to here. So maybe, you know, there's like the long-haired and crazy founder thing. And with all these mistakes, it was hard times from like literally probably 2015 to 2019, almost not raising around, you know, Uncle Joe rescued us once or twice. And, you know, Mark would joke with me.

He's like, you know, and then it kind of started to work. And he'd be like, this is like little engine that could. And this is in, you know, then it turns into like 2021, ZERP. Every company's growing like 80%. And my shareholders like bored, right? They're like, we're just like a good little company. And literally right up until I could see they were a little tired. And right up until the sale, we were people thought we were worth about half,

what we were worth. So things had really started to work. Cox was diversifying their 125-year-old family business. They do, you know, a couple dozen billion in revenue and are trying to move away from cable, automotive, and other businesses. And they said, you know, we like government software. And we built a relationship over three or four years. And the company's actually accelerating now. So it's getting exciting. Incredible. What's like, what are some high level kind of, I don't know, contrarian insights or unexpected things that you could share about, like, lessons from the way the government runs. Maybe everyone thinks it's because of this, but it's actually something deeper.

Just the way people understand the government, they understand it in one way. How is your perspective change? Because you sit in such a unique position. One obvious, almost contrarian take is folks like us in particular, we love to sit around and bash the government. Oh, yeah. And, you know, where's the money going? These idiots, the $10,000 toilet. Like many years ago, I did this with Calacanis, and he went off on it.

And I said, look, I said, what's ironic is we are the government? Yeah. He's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, you can raise your hand and go sit on the town council. Yep. Why don't you? It's a lot easier to just to complain. And the reality is the people running our nation's state and local governments aren't all idiots.

They're not all wasteful, fraudulent, and crooked. many of them are accountants, lawyers, professional managers. They're actually working really hard day in and day out. They do it. They could get other jobs. They do it because they want a mission and they want to help and they like being involved. And the problems are very complicated. And they're regulated like heck by you and me.

Every time there's a little scandal, and there's plenty of scandals in companies. We know this. But every time there's a scandal in the public sector, we put more regulations on them. So we complain about procurement. we complain about their actions, and yet we govern them. And they have to follow the rules that we set. And so what we're actually complaining about is our political culture. It's not the administrators and bureaucrats that are in our government.

So that's one contrarian take. Another is few people think about how important these entities are. We want to talk about federal government or international relations or security or what have you. And the reality is most of your services are done by. by local and state governments. Literally, the roads you drive on, the water you drink, you flush the toilet, the flick the light switch on. All of this stuff is typically done by local and state governments.

And we rarely think about who we're gonna call in the middle of the night if someone's breaking in. And are they well resourced? Are they well trained? Are we interacting with them? Are we governing them correctly? So I don't know if that's another contrarian take, but it's like, this is really important stuff.

It's super mission driven and it's gotta be right. They operate in glass houses, and we all get to throw stones at them all day. Could you imagine running a company if you had to every little piece of software you wanted to buy? You needed to have it approved by your board. That's an example of the rule. We put on our local government. If it's over 25K or 50K, make sure we get to approve. It's hard enough to get your board to look at your board deck.

Barking recent would laugh me out of the room if I was like, I need to upgrade Salesforce. And, you know, can I have 80 more K to give me a break? are you the CEO or not, but we don't give those authorities. How have you thought about maintaining this, maintaining, you know, the culture of open gov, which feels like, you know, it's Silicon Valley take on the category. How have you thought about maintaining and kind of like figuring,

you know, because I think you went in, I'm sure early days, bright-eyed into this business being like, we're going to fix all this stuff. It's going to be like, we're just going to move fast and make things. And then I'm sure you were kind of battle-hearted by the reality of building and selling into these types of companies. But now, post-exit, you want to maintain that original kind of like spirit.

Yeah. There's a couple things. I mean, we started early, and there were a few important insights. One, we're apolitical. Our customers can do the politics. They got to fight in the arena. We provide technology. So we, you know, we're here to support.

We make them the heroes. Number two, we never play victim. It's a very hard business. It's a get rich slow scheme, as I sometimes joke. And if we, you know, can't get a sale over the line or something, you know, a wrench is thrown in, it's very easy to be like these people are idiots. They're so dumb. They don't get how good we are. And we just cut, I cut that off at the knees, like literally in 2012.

We don't play victim. We go back to work. we build a better product. We build a better go-to-market. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We're going to win because of the quality of our products and services and so on. And we've kind of held strong to that. The culture is getting stronger than ever.

By the way, we came back to the office. And that's hard for a lot of people. But like, I don't know what I was thinking, staying remote, virtual, and distributed for so long through the COVID crisis. But you recommend it to your competitors, right? I would I'll do anything to help my competitors be fully remote

virtually distributed fully distributed in fact maybe I should write a handbook on how to make the announcement at your all hands and say move to the beach, move home with your parents, keep your salary, we support you because we're so inclusive this is my hot take you've got to write a book

the 20 hour work week and sell it to as many people as possible yeah just like 20 hours how to win how to win selling into the government, the 20-hour work. Yeah, just run your whole company on Slack and email. Exactly. You don't have to talk to people.

Maybe do it from the putting green too. So culture-wise, we're very hard charging. We call it like donuts and doorbusters. We'll like, we show up with donuts and we'll kick down the door in the local government and sell literally door to door. This is very high energy, high evangelism. We're literally trying to make change among these old. old line bureaucratic entity drag themselves into modernity and into an AI first future. Well, I want to talk more, but John has to get.

My plane's leaving in 40 minutes, and I have to get to Burbank, so I have to run. I'm going to San Francisco. You want to hang out a little bit? I'll be there in a couple hours. Well, next time you come up, come by OpenGub. I'll give you a tour and we'll hang out. Sounds awesome. Come back on anytime.

I really enjoyed this. you're our new local government correspondent and expert. I'm in. The space has gotten hot, guys. I'm sure you hear about, you know, all the PE firms like hovering and VCs are trying to, you know, and white combinator are trying to figure out how to kill it. I don't want anyone else bringing AI to my local government except Zachary Bookman. It makes me sick to think that other people think they can compete in your category.

Competition is good. Yeah, yeah. It's all good. although I think a lot of people are in for more pain than they might realize. Yeah, yeah, anybody's welcome to compete if they're willing to slog it out for a decade. Anyway, great hanging. We'll talk to you soon. Great hanging.

Good honor. See you guys. Good luck. Have a great weekend. Thanks for joining. Bye. And that's our show. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

And thank you for watching. Get to the airport. Only three days till Monday. Only three days till Monday. Everybody wish, John. Good luck getting to his flight is a good show. I think I'm going to be in a white suit on the plane. That's right. See you later.

Have a great weekend, folks. Bye. Bye.