This Week in Startups - Apple AR headset scoops with Mark Gurman + Campbell Baron: Gen Z startup content creator | E1366

Episode Date: January 23, 2022

First, Jason and Molly chat with on the top Apple reporters, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, about Apple's AR headset (2:02). They talk about Apple's strategy, timeline, competitive strengths and more. Then our Producer Rachel chats with Campbell Baron, a 19-year old who sold his TikTok to Workweek, a new startup-focused media company (1:00:25). Campbell created business content and  accumulated millions of views before he turned 18! In the interim, the producers Jason & Molly have a chat about what they are working on, lessons from their early careers and more (35:25). 00:00 Jason & Molly introduce the show 02:02 Bloomberg News' Mark Gurman joins to discuss Apple's headset 06:37 Will Apple enter AR at the expense of iPhone sales? 11:48 Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist 12:58 The next major platform battle 17:37 Expected initial target market for an Apple headset & design cues 21:41 Eight Sleep - Go to https://eightsleep.com/twist to check out the Pod Pro Cover and get $150 off at checkout! 23:11 Expected screen resolution and other features 26:37 Forecasting who will be in the lead in 10 years 33:39 OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist 35:25 Fun banter with Jason, Molly & the This Week in Startups producers 1:00:25 Producer Rachel introduces Campbell Baron 1:08:48 How Campbell sold his TikTok account 1:17:31 Building in public vs. private 1:24:52 Gen Z's way of networking FOLLOW Mark: https://twitter.com/campbelljbaron FOLLOW Campbell: https://twitter.com/campbelljbaron FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_rachelbraun FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, hey, everybody. It's our Saturday show. Enjoy it. We have an amazing, amazing conversation with Mark German, who has the inside skinny on Apple's new goggles, their headset. And we talk about all the competition that the Apple Vision or Apple Reality is going to have. He thinks those are the two possible names for this first set of smart VRXR goggles. And we make some predictions about how big tech and the AR competition will shake out,

over the next decade. Yep, and how soon phones are going to go away. And then Rachel is back with an OK boomer segment where she chats with Campbell Barron, who is just out of high school. He's been making a podcast for two years. He's had guests, including Chris Saka, Jerry Tan, from Initialize Stacey Brown Philpott from TaskRabbit.

I'm going to say again, 18, so many guests, lots of whom you would actually recognize from this show. So you don't want to miss that. Let's get straight to, though. First up, our chat with Mark German. This week in startups is brought to you by. O-Doo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever.

And right now, O-D-U is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at O-D-com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com slash twist. Eight Sleep. The first bed engineer. to improve your sleep through dynamic cooling and heating, detailed sleep tracking and more. Try the pod for free for 100 days at 8Sleep.com slash twist. And Open Phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them.

Open Phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. visit openphone.co slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. We're so excited we have Mark German who covers Apple and all kinds of Apple-related tech for Bloomberg News and who has most recently written about kind of our new favorite topic. The Apple, as Jason is calling them ski goggles, but the potential arrival of the Apple AR VR-BR headset. Mark, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.

Let's just start at the top here. Is this really going to happen? These are absolutely real. This is absolutely going to happen. It's just a matter of when. It's not a matter of what or what it will do or what it will cost or anything like that. It's literally a matter of when. They had been trying to get these out the door already for the last year or so.

They wanted to announce these in mid-2020 and release them early this year. So maybe like around now. And then they sort of postponed that they were going to announce it in June and release it at the tail end of this year. so in about 11 months from now. That sounds like it's going to be pushed back as well. Final decisions haven't been made, but it's looking more likely that these won't be introduced until the tail end of this year or early next year

and then released sometime in 2023. So a little bit of a delay this has to do with some of the features, right? What they're trying to do is they're trying to cram in technology and processors and stuff that you would normally put in a MacBook Pro and have on your deck. if you ever use a laptop, you know they really will burn up your lap, right? And so this is something like you're going to wear on your face. Imagine the liability and the issues if you have something on your face that's going to overheat

that you have to wear for an extended period of time. So those are the kinks they really need to work out in terms of, you know, Apple as a brand and as a company and the money they make, they would sooner never release these than burn one person's face. So the thermal properties are very important to get right. When we look at this device and we look at the history of what Apple's been doing with chips, they started making their own chips. The chips were designed ostensibly to make the battery life of phones longer and to make looking at web pages on your laptop less CPU intensive.

We all know about the spinning wheel of depth and CPUs on Macs. And MacBooks were just known for grinding your machine to a halt when you got to the 25th tab. That's right. Now, with these nice Macbooks, which I just got the latest one, it is extraordinary how long the batteries last. And it's extraordinary how the fans do not turn on and the heat does not happen. So when we look at the arc of them making their own processors, do we think that Apple was looking at the processors and saying, hey, these processors are going to be great for making laptops better? But let's face it, laptops were pretty good. There wasn't like a major problem there.

It was nice to have, but actually it was necessary to make these processors in order to make augmented reality via Apple goggles, which I think will eventually be glasses, possible. Is that what they were planning all along in your mind? Well, I think the original one they were planning for was the iPad. I think the iPad was the original rationale for why they got into their own custom chips. There was a story. I don't remember if this is from Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs or one of the different early Steve Jobs books. But he was in talks with Paul Adelini, the CEO of Intel, around 2008 when they were

really going full seam ahead on the iPad after shipping the first iPhone. And at some point in the development process, they realized they really would not be able to release the iPad at the battery life and the thinness. Remember the big thing with the original iPad was they were touting this 10-hour battery, which had basically been unheard of before. And that $500 price point, I think those numbers would have been probably nearly impossible to hit if they didn't make their own chip. So it started with the iPad. And then if you look at the Apple Watch and if you look at the goggles, right, the glasses, I think they're going to call it Apple Vision, by the way, or Apple Reality for the first one.

Those would probably be impossible to really develop without their custom tech in there. Obviously, Qualcomm and a few other providers, they're trying their hand at XR, AR, VR, specific chips. But obviously, I think Apple is well ahead of most of the chip players at this point, at least for now. Interesting. So what about, so just to back up there, your money is on Apple Vision or Apple Reality. God, Apple Reality is a little on the nose, don't you think? Yeah, reality distortion field. Apple, you will see the world the way we would like you to see the world.

Exactly. I'm doing my Jedi move for those of us who are just listening. Talk to us a little bit about my, so I have this thesis that part of that this is, it's good to know it's not going to come out until it doesn't burn your face. That seems pretty valuable. But is any of this delay also related to sort of figuring out how it doesn't cannibalize the iPhone ecosystem? I have this theory that Apple at this point doesn't do anything unless it helps sell iPhones. And I wonder where you see this fitting into that. Well, I certainly think for the first, you know, several generations, it will help sell iPhones. There will be. an element to it sort of like the Apple Watch where you need to have an iPhone or need to be in the Apple ecosystem for everything to pair. The first several generations of this device certainly won't replace

the phone. Personally, I think the iPhone is here to stay for at least a decade, even if we do get to a point where the Apple Watch is even bigger screen, has 5G capabilities and all these different functions, even when we get to a point in five to ten years where AR glasses are

super present and super powerful, I still think there's going to be a large segment to people who are going to want a phone in their pocket or a phone in their bag or purse and whatnot to have that larger display, the extra processing power that wouldn't be possible, unawarable. Just like laptops and desktops haven't gone away, I don't think phones are going to go away. I think that maybe this next iteration of devices might be more cannibalizing to the desktop

or the laptop and the phone would replace those elements or maybe replace the tablet in some sense. but I don't see the phone going away anytime soon. I think in addition to your point, Molly, in terms of what they're trying to figure out, I think they're trying to figure out use cases, right? I mean, there's a few interesting things they're playing with. One is I would imagine maybe if we were doing this podcast two years from now, maybe we were doing it all in virtual reality through the Apple headset,

maybe through Zuckerberg's Metaverse and such. So I think they're trying to figure out capabilities. They're trying to figure out, you know, 3D content. They have a whole content team in Los Angeles and elsewhere. trying to work on this in virtual reality content, right? So there's a lot to figure out getting AAA game developers on board at some point, right? And obviously we know Apple secrecies. They're needing to walk a very fine line of having content available, having features available,

but not sort of spilling the beans officially early by having their partners really, you know, disclose what's being developed there. Yeah, and for me, it seems very likely if you look at the success of FaceTime and I message, you know, they may not be comfortable with running a social network at scale and all the chaos that that would bring to the Apple ecosystem. But small groups of people, it could be quite delightful.

I think about, you know, my I message groups. I think about my FaceTime groups, right? And then you think about photo groups. They're all kind of melding into private social networks. Imagine you're in your iMessage. and, you know, I don't know if you've had this experience with somebody but dials that hits the FaceTime key on an eye. Everybody's had that happen on a message group.

And all of a sudden there's six people and you're like, wow, this kind of does work. Why don't we ever use this feature? It's like, well, it's a little intrusive. But if we all had our goggles on, and again, instead of using Zoom, I see this as the ultimate Zoom killer. You use the podcasting as a metaphor. I would use a Zoom. We're on a Zoom.

All of a sudden, we're all on the Apple campus like they do when they're walking around the Apple campus on their Apple, you know, you know, pitch day, imagine we're all just put our headsets on and we're, you know, doing a meeting, you know, around a table. And that makes perfect sense and would be in line with their Facebook I message and photo sharing. But do you think that they have any intent of building a metaverse

and controlling that in the way that Zuckerberg does? Or do you think they want to leave that to the app developers? I think, Jason, it's going to be exactly what you said. There's going to be specific applications, very, private social network, individual things. I think it's no accident that they released the group base time feature a few years ago. Earlier this year, or sorry, I forgot what you were in. Last year, iOS 15, they did have this thing called SharePlay where you can watch a movie with someone or listen to music with someone, right?

And I think that is a perfect application for virtual reality, being able to watch a movie with another person across the world. So I think it's going to be very individualized. the audio technology on this headset and the clarity of the displays on the headset has freaked people out to the point internally where maybe sometimes they can't tell if they're in the real world or in the virtual world. And for Apple, during development,

that was a little bit of a scary thing. They don't want to develop a product that is going to take people out of the real world. It's really against... curious of the ethos they've been pushing, that's really against their ultimate vision for these headsets when they move, of course, into AR only, right? So augmenting and sort of all-encompassing a few years down the road.

So I think, Jason, there's not going to be some sort of metaverse competitor to Zuckerberg's vision. I think Apple's against that. I think it's going to be pretty specific where you can do all the things you already do in the Apple ecosystem, but in an augmented and virtual reality type of form. Okay, if you listen to This Week in Startups often, you've heard me talk about Odu's incredibly powerful suite of business apps a lot. Well, they're going to give you your first app free forever and a thousand dollars off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's ODO.com slash twist. And here is why Odo is so great for startups. Their suite of business apps helps you run your entire

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going to be the question as these devices start to come out. Right now we have effectively two phone ecosystems with Android and Apple, and that's pretty much it. But if you start to see like Apple come out with a headset that can't necessarily access the metaverse and the metamorph isn't open and then maybe like so. keeps making headsets or HTC or whoever else continues to make these devices that all have a different ecosystem, where does that leave us? Like, where's the open web version of you put on glasses

and you access the internet? I strongly believe that Apple, AR-V-R versus meta, Facebook in the metaverse, is the next iOS versus Android. iOS versus Android is open versus closed. I think you're going to see the same exact thing in virtual reality. Apple will have this more closed off environment that Jason described his vision for it. I think it's going to be very similar to that. Whereas Facebook meta is going to be very open and not privacy-centric and very metaverse

and very next level have literally a different virtual world you're in, whereas Apple is going to be something that more so augments your day, right? I think it's been interesting. So since the beginning that Apple's been talking up these XR technologies, they've only talked about AR. They've basically never talked about VR as something they want to get into. Why? Well, I think because AR is their ultimate vision, right?

I think they want to get to an AR world. However, they need to do something in 2022. You can't do an AR headset, the only headset that they want to do. The technology to have all-day glasses where the whole thing is in the glasses and it sinks wirelessly in 5G and whatever, that doesn't exist today. They can't wait five years, right, until it exists. So they're going to lose- So they plant the flag now, get a little VR going, even though that's not the end game. And they're basically in that way conceding that Oculus 1 VR, but they're saying VR is not the prize.

Because who wants to be in a virtual world all day? Like, even gamers are not interested. Like the top games in VR get how many people playing them every day? $500,000, $500,000. It certainly hasn't taken off like the phone. I think VR is important. And the important thing to know about this headset is that there is going to be an AR element. So it is going to have a bunch of cameras externally and have an AR pass-through mode.

So you will sort of get a sense of what they want to do with AR. Explain to the audience who don't understand VR-A-R pass-through. Sure. So virtual reality is like an Oculus Quest. or if you ever used like a VR racing rig or whatnot. I was actually at the Lucid store at Century City in L.A. And they have sort of this VR racing, or it looks like a VR racing rig, but you can put the VR headset and sort of customize a car.

So that's all encompassing if you ever used one of those. AR is you've literally put on a pair of AR glasses. And you can see what's really in front of you in the real world. But it's very similar to Google Glass. So you get inbound information as well, sort of an overlay information. information. And what a pass-through mode is, it's sort of fake AR in the sense that it's using cameras to replicate your vision of what is actually in front of you because you have screens in front of your eyes, so you can't see through them. So it's basically like a fake AR. And the interesting thing is, is meta announced the end of last year, this new product called Project Cambria. It's basically what Apple's building. It's a high-end VR headset. Apples will be much more powerful and expensive with an AR-passer mode. That's called mixed reality. So the best way to refer to this app, this first Apple headset is a mixed reality headset, whereas the follow-up glasses will be augmented reality.

Apple's never releasing a standalone VR device. Sorry, a VR only device. And like you said, they have to plans a flag. They have to develop an ecosystem of applications, right? What really failed Google Glass, in addition to back then, $1,500 being a high price, I think today, the market has changed significantly because of $1,000 phones, whereas $1,500 for air glasses is no longer, quote, unquote, obviously it's expensive, but it's not like absurd anymore. I mean, it's the cost of an iPhone 13. I mean, the fact that iPhones went from $6,700 to $13,400, we've now boiled the fraud. We're ready to pay $1,500 for these.

Do we really think that price, and this will get back to the Apple headset, do we really think that price is the reason that Google Glass failed because there is still a bit of a social norm question. There's a question about whether people are going to want to wear heavy glasses on their face even if they don't. It was very early. It was very early. And also, to be honest, it's coolest feature. The like facial recognition was a privacy nightmare. I get it. Blah, blah, blah. Right. But I wonder. There are a lot of factors. There are still barriers to adoption. And I wonder if it behooves Apple actually to come out with a sort of like a VR flag that they plant on the moon, even if there aren't great experiences or there aren't great games because doesn't that risk them, you know, building an expensive paperweight like so many

have before? Well, that's exactly right. And that's why they want to do it because what they're going to be able to do over the next three to four years before the glasses shift is they're going to be able to develop an entire VR AR apps ecosystem, right? By the time the glasses come out, there can be tens of thousands of apps that are compatible with it, whereas Google basically had nothing, right? You're going to have glasses that are probably going to be less expensive than this $3,000

headset. So sort of like we're coming in at a lower cost now. And so you're going to have those capabilities there from day one. And then the other big one is consumer education, the privacy centric folks, right? So the thing with Google Glass is nobody had really seen anything like that before outside of Hollywood, right? And people were not used to it. Apple's going to give, is going to have a ton of consumer education just by having those products, those early versions of those products out there. So I think it's a smart decision to sort of split the product line into to and sort of have that, you know, intro a few years. My favorite with Google Glass was, I don't know if you remember there was this woman who

was a bit of a provocateur blogger who decided she would go to like bars in the mission in San Francisco with this on and like walk up to people and talk to them and they would, I mean, basically, I think she got punched or beat up or so. I mean, not that violence has ever condoned, but like literally people were really upset, like get out and then they put up a sign like, please don't wear Google Glass. in here. But these things are not, are going to look like ski goggles. They're going to be for your desktop.

And so for a year or two, it's going to be for the Roberts Goebel and developers of the world and, you know, some gadget or you know, verge riders to play with, right? It's going to be a luxury device for two or three years. I'm going to get one, right? I mean, just to play. I'm all in. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to

live in it, right? But I think the point you just made is really important because these are not going to be out and about and out and about device, right? I would be, well, first of all, I wouldn't be surprised to see people walking around outside wearing them, but I don't think they're going to be designed for that, right? I don't think you're going to want to. Right. It's a home device, right? It's like you don't walk around with a TV and a PlayStation, right? So I think this is something you're going to keep in your living room. I'm curious about battery life,

given the size, right? I'm curious about how this thing is going to charge. If there's going to be a charging case, how you carry it around, it's going to have straps similar to, like Apple Watch rubber band material. So if those are going to be interchangeable, I'm curious about all that. I'm curious that there's going to be a privacy light on the front, you know, to the points of both of you about,

you know, the privacy aspects of this device. So it's going to be really interesting to see how the rollout is done. It should be a blinking red light. I remember that when Zuckerberg knocked off, or it's spectacles were Snapchat's version. He recently knocked those off with Rayband,

and they have like a little light there, I think, but it's not clear. To be clear, these things need a flashing red light. When recording flashing red light on should be the standard, I think. Because it is, but I mean, the Google ones are so big that, like, people walking in with them are going to look ridiculous. Like, yeah. Yeah.

I don't think there's going to be any question what's going on when you walk in with Google. When you, when you walk, sorry, when you're walking with Apple reality. Yeah. The Apple ones are, I mean, the Google ones are ridiculous, too. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. We all know that. According to 8th Sleep, over 30% of Americans struggle with their sleep. And temperature is one of the main reasons. Don't I know it? I sometimes wake up in a sweat. It's too hot. It's too dry. I can't take it. I like it to be nice and crisp sheets, nice and cool. And that's my jam for getting a great night's sleep. And now 8Sleep allows me to do that. And they're going to allow you to do it with their new Pod Pro cover. So if you already have a mattress you love, you don't need to change it. Now you get you. You get a great night's sleep. Now you get you. You're going to do that. Now you get you. by the cover and still experience the full magic of eight sleep. The Pod Pro cover is the most advanced solution on the market for thermo regulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking.

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Go to 8Sleep.com slash twist to check out the Pod Pro cover and save $150 off at checkout. That's right, $150 off at checkout. out 8Sleep.com slash twist. The other interesting thing is, is that they really needed all the space possible to put in these screens. I think they're like 8K screens. They're super high resolution. And so what they had to do is they had to make the inside where you put it around

your face super slim to the point where if you wear glasses, sorry, Molly, you're not going to be able to put the headset over your glasses. They're just for reading. I can take them off anytime. No offense. All I was trying to say, all I was trying to say is you're not going to be able to put the apple glasses on top of your glasses, right? Because it's so

thin inside. And so what they've done is they've developed an interchangeable lens system. And so when you buy the glasses, yeah, you're going to have to input your prescription numbers, right? Right. And so what they're going to do is they're going to have lenses that are custom to your prescriptions. So if you do

wear glasses, you'll be able to still use them because the space is so tight. Why can't they do that dynamically? Like, can't they create a lens that dynamically adjust to your prescription? I don't know it's possible at this point that they have shifted to that or they plan to do that eventually. But in terms of what have I heard, like the lens development, the system for creating interchangeable lenses with your specific prescriptions has been pretty complex. And I do wear glasses for driving for what it's worth.

I mean, that's actually an interesting use case. Think about wearing these when you're driving. It could really help you if they are, in fact, pass through. I know this sounds crazy, like kind of a dare double thing, but you could actually have like a sonar-like effect. I mean, if it's foggy out there, you're a pilot, these things become like night vision. What it's able to see versus what you're able to see. You could probably see a deer on the side of the road before you can. Certainly could see that and certainly could tell, you know, if you're what percentage in the middle of the lane you are and just show you like, hey, this is your 16% too far to the right or the left.

This could really change everything for any kind of activity, skiing, driving, running, if it gets light enough, where you're interfacing with the world. I am so into these as a heads-up display for my life. Yes. Like, we need to get, you know, we're all sitting here with this dumb thing and we're like looking down all the time and our necks hurt and it's just, it's an inefficient way to get information that is also socially isolating. Like, that, I want that to be the goal.

Like, I don't need to live in another world. Maybe I will want to eventually. But like, is that, do we think that that's what Apple is headed for here? is this sort of, just give me like an overlay for my life. Yes, but here's my question. So I'm sure we all have iPhones, right? I'm sure a lot of our viewers have iPhones too. In 2017, they released AR kit so you can get apps from the app store that have AR.

Have you ever used it once? Like, I can tell you, I know, because you'll die. Like you're not walking around like this. Right. Hokey Man Go was the only one I ever tried. I did that for about an hour at a party once. And I was like, this is dumb. I'm an adult.

I did that for about three. years. Okay. Well, anyway, as I said, I'm an adult. I'm an adult. I got things I got to get done here in the world. I'm not putting my phone off to catch Pokemon. You walk a lot. It's good for walking. Yeah. No, clearly their, clearly their concept is we don't want you to be isolated and like for this to turn into a Wally, you know, the Wally Pixar version of the world, which Steve Jobs obviously influenced. So I think that that actually speaks volumes to what their vision is here. Let me close with this. Who's going to be number one?

Who's going to be number two? And is there a third dark horse in this race? So one, two, three. Who do you die? So in terms of, market share, you know, and meta is going to be number one, right? Because what Apple's going to do is they're going to come out

with this super expensive product. And people are going to see it. They're going to really want to get their hands on it. Maybe they're not going to be able to afford it. In 10 years. I'm sorry, in 10 years. Let me make a good arc here, not next year, but in 10 years, basically, who wins this platform?

Who's the Microsoft? Who's the Mac? Who's the Android versus OS? Let's explore that question. I think Apple will be number one in AR glasses. I think it'll take them a while to get there. I think meta will probably be number two. And I do have a feeling that Microsoft will figure it out.

obviously they have a lot of HoloLens related technology obviously they're willing to throw money at basically anything at this point so I think Microsoft will figure it out HoloLens has been a done so far but you know sort of the underlying frameworks are there I don't necessarily believe in in SNAP's ability I think SNAP will remain

a very niche player and I don't even know if Google knows what they're doing right they obviously very similar to I think the Apple situation with Siri, whereas with Siri, Apple, I think, was five years ahead of everyone else in terms of when they released the voice assistant, and now it feels like they're five years behind, right?

Google was five years ahead of everyone in AR with Google Glass, but now it feels like they're five years behind. So maybe they'll catch up at that at some point. I know they have great people working on it, but it's to be seen, but I think I would close by saying, I really do believe Apple versus Meta is the next Apple versus Google

or how iOS is in this ranking, Molly. What do you think? 10 years from now we're sitting near based on your knowledge. I mean, honestly, 10 years from now, I would not count out Microsoft. I really wouldn't. I think the HoloLens, I mean, for one thing, it's got a lot of military contracts. So it's just, I mean, it's being actively used in military applications right now. And so I think that that is something that has, that, that just grows its capabilities, right?

Like they get to test it in real world, and it can trickle out to the consumer. And I'm not sure. I mean, to me, it'll come down to what the ecosystems look like. Like, if there's a Metaverse app for Apple's glasses, right? Maybe you start to see that work out. But I would maybe flip it a little bit and say meta and then Microsoft. Ooh. I think it's going to be Apple all the way.

I think Apple's going to dominate this. I think meta is like, I think they're fighting too many wars on too many fronts. Obviously, Oculus was a visionary product with VR and everything, but I just think they've never run like an at-scale app community at Facebook and app developers don't trust them. I think it's not in their DNA. And I have a sneaky suspicion that Google's got something stealthy, ready to go at some point with Android, that, you know, they will join this race. But I have no evidence of that. But I just think this is too big. I'm fully with Mark on that one. Google just is at a loss when it comes to hardware at this point.

It's very strange. Yeah, Pixel's a great product. Yeah, but it's not taking off. And this Pixel 6 was supposed to sort of be their savior. Maybe it was the last for all. Who knows, right? I know they're pretty invested in it, but it's like a complete top to bottom redesign, you know, of the phone, right?

And they're basically throwing everything at the wall at this point. Yeah. Yeah, he's like I got it right here. But Pixel is such a great product. That's such a great product. It's confounding. Right. And it has not, and Google Fi is such a great product.

I don't understand why there's not more a consumer. I mean, listen. You got to focus. You got to focus. Google is no focus. I have the VR and the Apple VR down here, by the way. It's in a special box. Oh, yeah.

Don't get your son. You're going back to my stunt where I said I had the iPad. I remember that. I want to see it. That was a really crazy morning because I woke up. Mark Pegas is calling me 18 times. What did you do? You told them arm bells on the new eye.

iPad and you have it? I was like, I was joking. He's like, open the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. It was a funny. Apple doesn't like those jokes at all. Yeah, nobody, Steve Jobs literally had to put out a statement. Steve Jobs told the Wall Street Journal, I did not give Jason Cockan, and it's an iPad. All right. I'm going to have to look this up. It's a pretty funny, pretty funny moment in the history of the internet. But magically, no, we're in this. And there's been billions poured in. And we didn't even have magic leap is not even, is it? Is it? Is it? Is it? Is it's magically the theranos of this? I like always forget about them and then they kind of drop up

and I'm like, wait, what now? Is it? Yeah, because people who've seen it tell me it's great. And incredible people have told me it's great, but it's like too big. Apple wanted to buy them, right? A few years ago, a few years ago. So, you know, clearly there is some cool technology there. They have a lot of people working on it.

I saw it. We reported at Bloomberg a few days ago, they have some new medical contracts or whatnot. So they are trying. So maybe it'll be a niche player long term. Look up a company called Enreal. I believe it's a company based in Asia and those I've tried those at CES

when was the last time I was at CES two or three years ago Oh I saw these yeah Yeah the year before the pandemic Okay so I last tried them maybe two or three years ago I haven't seen an updated or tried an updated version But I would guess the technology is more advanced there That one I believe it's connected to a little puck as well

And I believe the magic leap idea is a little puck too Apple obviously you have the phone And that would be your puck So I think I think it's going to be fascinating. I would imagine the first few versions of the AR-only classes are phone-specific, but maybe we're at a point in 10 years where you have 5G, you have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, everything in the headset itself

with a strong battery life and you don't even need the phone. And that's when we start talking about you really need the phone. I want to know, I have another big question I have is, how are you going to control these devices? Are they going to be Siri? Or they're going to be touch pads on the side? Are you going to have to have an Apple Watch? And Apple Watch, they have some accessibility features.

they released last year. Right. You're going to have to have the chip. I want the chip. That's funny. Right. Maybe one day we'll have them in our eyes, right? Like contact lenses.

That's what I want. I literally just want a heads-up display for my life. I don't care if it's glasses. I don't care if it's a contact lens. Give me the chip. I'm ready. You're more futuristic than me. I don't know if I would trust the contact lens.

Listen, this has been incredible. Thank you for taking so much time to be on the pod. Pleasure. Thanks for having them all. Thank you. next time you got a big scoop okay just reach out to me and mollie and uh we'll time it with your bloomberg drop

and you know get us in the loop here when you got breaking news okay we'll make it work we'll make it work all right we'll see you next time see you bye bye thanks listen lots of founders are lucy goosey with their personal phone numbers they put it on company documents they use it for sales calls and more and that makes everything messy you don't know who's calling a sales prospect or somebody from your kid's school should you pick up should you not Well, open phone helps you create business phone numbers for you and your team.

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Everybody loves, usually it's on, This week, it's on Saturday. It's OK Boomer with Rachel reporting from the big city bright lights with her featured correspondent slot here on this week. It starts with, man, you're living the life, aren't you, Rachel? Absolutely loving it. I love New York already. Now, you've been in New York for two weeks or three weeks?

Two weeks now. Yeah. Really? Really like it. It's cold. Freezing, snowing out. And I live right off of a really major street. So it's really loud, too.

Yeah. Yeah, you'll learn about that. with your next apartment. Sound is key. They show you the apartment on the quietest time. You got to go to see that apartment during rush hour. Yeah, definitely Sunday morning wasn't the best time to do my apartment search. Yeah, they get you with that.

That's a rookie mistake. But that's okay. You made it. You're here. You're in the city. Yeah, really excited. I've already gotten to meet so many people, which is great. I've never actually worked from an office before except for interning because I graduated

during the pandemic. So I got to meet people in real life for the first time that didn't go to school. Wait, you have an office? No, no, no, no, I squatted out of Wii work for a while. Nice, very nice. Which it seems like has led you to a lot of sources, actually. That Wii work has been useful. I don't know.

When people are like, yeah, it's really hard to make friends. You just find somebody to scan into that sucker and stay there for as long as possible until you'll get kicked out and you'll meet some people. This is the thing about I loved about New York and spent my formative years in Manhattan was when you live in Manhattan, you, your apartment's tiny. Everybody's apartment is tiny. Even like rich people are like, I got a huge apartment. Like, how big is this? like 1,500 square feet. I'm like, that's how big my garage is in California.

What? Like, yeah, I have 1,500 square feet. But they still have to leave their apartment. So everybody is out all the time. And when you go out, you're kind of like in the mix. So you just go to a cafe, you go to a bar, and you meet everybody. And everybody talks to everybody. It's pretty amazing.

That is so true. It's really nice. I feel like people actually come up and talk to you a lot more than I thought they would. Everybody said, everyone's going to be so rude. And I haven't had that yet. No. People are rude if you walk slow or you walk for abreast. That is the problem.

Do not like take out your map and go like this and walk around and look at the buildings. Don't take pictures of stuff. If you're walking, you walk fast and don't slow anybody down. And if you're going to get on the subway. No. You generally know eye contact. Yeah. I'll start trying to walk as fast as I talk and hopefully.

There it is. There it is. I hear New York City. You know it's making you're reporting when the sirens go off. We need to make like a intro for Rachel, which is just like a cacophony of like ambulances, like crazy people screaming at each other, somebody screaming at the crazy person, honking their horns, garbage trucks. It's like, yeah, Rachel, reporting from the streets are doing those segments where like you just walk up to people and talk to them.

Actually, that could be the same audio. I mean, we should do. Yeah, we should, well, we have producer Nick's there. We are definitely going to send you to the Apple store, ask people about their like Google phones or something. Yeah. I'm going to my, I wasn't going to tell you this.

I was going to try to do it as a surprise, but I'm going to Miami Hack Week this weekend with the rest of the Gen Zs in New York. And I was going to do like something similar like Miami Hackweek and see if any Genzy want to be taught. All right. Well, here's if you can get a, all right,

if you do a person on the street, it was used to be called man on the street was the technical term in our industry, right, Molly? Yep. Now we say, they on the street. So if you do a they on the street or them, how would we say it?

I think you just say person. I think person on the street. Can I just say person on the street? It sounds kind of weird. Keep it simple. Box pops. That's what you call it in. That's actually what you call in radio is box pops.

And by the way, it's the worst. All right. You do a great vox pops from there. If you have the audacity to do it, and it's good enough to put on air. I'll pay for your plane ticket. Okay. Look out. I'm about to be walking up to every single person.

Done and done. My spirit airline ticket. Whatever. It's three or four hundred bucks. I mean, if you want me to pay for it, there's got to be some content. out of this. We have a segment. Hurry up and upgrade that flight from Spirit to. I think you're a, Spirit Airlines

a lot cheaper than that, but I'll tell you it's that if you want. I didn't say I was sending my plane. So I don't have a plane. You can upgrade to like a Lyme scooter and have a better experience than Spirit. You have to pay for like your carry on on Spirit Airlines. So you can bring like a backpack and that's it or like a canvas tote bag.

So the amount I can fit now in my backpack. I feel like it's a sport. Oh, for me it totally is. My wife is like, I thought you're going for four days. I'm like, yeah, you just have a backpack. I'm like, we'll have the backpack, and I have this other bag. And like, I have everything dialed in.

Boom. And, yeah. It's better that way, though, because then you can just grab and go. Like, I hate waiting for your bag to come around. Like, if somebody like checks, if you're with the group. Check equals death. And somebody has a check bag. Like, check back.

Like, check equals death. And if you got a check bag, I'll see you at the hotel. I'm out. Boom. Yeah. I agree. And nobody got time for that. It's super annoying.

Yeah. So tell us, what do you have today for us on OK Boomer? And congratulations on the big move. Thank you so much. Today I have Campbell Barron on. He was really sweet to talk to. He is a creator and advisor at the media company Workweek. And he's a founder of a company called Sequence. Sequence is a platform that helps make video content for educational purposes. Right. And so this is an ambitious, vicious. Oh, definitely. Yeah. He's 19. He's 19 too. Wait a second. So that's Gen Z out of high school. He's Gen Z right out of high school. Oh, he's 18, actually.

Producer Justin, just let me know. He's 18 straight out of high school. We're going to have to talk to legal about getting a permission slip from their parents or something. If you go any younger than that, I think at 17, we need to get a parental way. No, I don't know. I think to be on air, Molly would know this actually, journalism-wise, to have it. What age would you need to get consent? If it's a minor, you have to get consent.

So 16-and-a-huh? Yeah. This is 16-and-under? Maybe 17. I would have thought 18-100, though. I think any kind of minor, you have to get parental consent. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

That's fascinating. Yeah. So he's 18. He's 18. He has a startup and a podcast. He's a startup. He has a podcast. He is an advisor at Workweek.

So his podcast is really cool. It's called The Ones to succeed. And he spoke to the founders from Headspace, SoulCycle, Figma, just some really awesome guests. And together we got to talk about what that journey was like going from podcasting and just being in the media and the tech space overall as a Gen Z. This is the great thing about podcasts. They're better.

Social media and podcasts are better than a resume. I totally agree. We hired you based on your podcast. And I told you, like 7 of 10, not bad. Thank you. Now, Rachel reporting, 8.5. Thank you. I mean, still room.

I mean, you're not Molly, but 8.5. I think 8.5, you're getting there, right? Awesome. I got a couple decades on you, so like, you're going to be fine. It's kind of great, though, like when we were, when we're not boomers, we call the segment okay boomer, but when Molly and I is Gen Xers, there was a, I took the New York Times quiz. Xennial? Yep.

That means your oldest millennial slash youngest Gen Xers. Nice try. I'm like, right? I took the quiz. The New York Times told me that I'm an ex-enial. Fakeness. That means you can wear your hair like in a side part still and have it be like, like, Completely justified.

Yeah, to split the difference kind of, like, almost to the middle. I'm calling fake news on that New York Times. You are Gen X from your musical taste to everything. Gen X 100. There is no millennium there. I was lucky enough to basically grow up on the internet. I really think the only reason I got that on that quiz was not related to it. I mean, I was born, like, kind of right in the middle of those two, but, like, I'm way closer to Gen X.

And certainly attitude and tastes. Did you use dial up? But I had like internet in high school. Like it was a whole, you know, it's just because I got a job on the internet. That's all. That's all. I have a question for you guys then that I actually spoke to Campbell about where I was like,

how did you get this interested in tech? And he was like, oh, he was just always been around like different devices since I was little like, it was like an iPad kid is like with a joke I made. Do you guys think that you would have, but do you think that being an iPad kid actually has some upsides to it? 100% for sure. Okay.

Yeah. Without a doubt, I mean, honestly, without a doubt. Yeah. I was an Atari 2,600 kid. And so, and even before that, in the 70s, my dad had a bar, and he had one of the first stand-up video games. He had Pong. And so when I was six years old, 1976, 1970, he had Pong. And then he got us an Atari 2,600, which was the first home game console made by Sears.

Atari had Sears making it. And so the fact that I was playing with video games at six or seven years old, and then I got a PC, and I started playing with computers when I was 9, 10, 11, and started coding when I was 12, 13, and using modems when I was 12 or 13. So I was on dial-up. When you have that experience young, you get that confidence, just like making a podcast. If you're making TikToks when you're that young, like a podcast is like arguably easier than a TikTok. Like nothing. Yeah. It's like turn on a microphone and talk to somebody. You just need a guest in a great microphone. That's actually so true. And it's, I mean, it makes perfect sense that, you know, being an iPad kid,

especially like in today, and honestly, we should probably start, OK, Boomer, amazing, and we should probably have a segment just about the creator economy. Like, it is such a massive shift. And you have, and I, there was a woman I talked to years ago who does child psychology. And she was talking about the fact that kids, you know, born basically into the iPad generation, like recognize themselves a lot sooner than it used to be like about 18 months is when it takes. That's how long it takes a baby to sort of be like, oh, I'm the thing in the mirror or whatever.

But because kids now, baby is now, see so many photos of themselves and they see so much media reflected back at them, they're starting to have self-recognition sooner. And they have a lower mental barrier when it comes to fame. Like, you don't, if you grow up now,

you're not thinking that becoming the rock is unattainable because you're looking at Charlie DeMilleo and you're like, that's just like a good dancer with a family, you know? So, like, I think it, is inspiring. And everybody's got their origin story from like Atari to, you know, when you started playing Tetris to when you started seeing media on an iPad.

Or how do AOL or Delphile or whatever you had. Yeah, and then there is the dark side to it, which is you can get consumed by it. And, you know, as we saw with the Instagram and Facebook leaks, like, you know, you could be looking at those pictures and saying, I should be thinner or I should be more pretty or, you know, is that person using a face filter or not? Oh, 100%. Why is my face not perfect? And it's like, is there such a thing as a perfect face?

And who cares if you do have one, you know? Literally goes back to what Molly said. Like, you start recognizing yourself at such a young age, but like, there's definitely downfalls to that. And just looking, I feel like, I don't know if that would necessarily be like the greatest intro to the world. I'm dealing with my 12-year-old because I get recognized. And so at some point, she realized, like, people know my dad more than they know the other

dads. And she's like, are you famous? like when she was like eight or nine years old. And I said, if you start a company, I'm famous, but not for anybody else, only for founders.

And, you know, people stop and ask for a photo. And, you know, she just thinks it's cool. She's so cool. You're so cool to your fans. And, you know, it's like an interesting discussion.

Now she wants to have a YouTube channel. And I said, yeah, you can totally have a YouTube channel. We'll make a YouTube channel and you're ready. So I have totally not, I've demystified it for her.

And I let her watch me do the podcast. And I let her watch the podcast. And she makes fun of me. Oh, look at me. I have a podcast. Look at me. She likes to mock me now. That's funny.

It's pretty funny. Let me know if she wants to be on a segment of OK boomer. Yeah, no. I know. I will tell you, my son who's almost 15, was not impressed at all that I had a national radio show, but he did think it was cool that I had a podcast. Really? Yeah.

I don't think you're very good at orders of magnitude, my child, in terms of audience. Yeah. No, he hasn't done the math yet, but he has not. He doesn't know. Yeah. I have a good title for this new creator economy segment, which I think we should totally do. Creating or waiting. Oh, I like that.

I like that. Because it really is like when you talk to young people, they're like, it was just like group, I think really millennials had this little bit of a hang up or a lot of them did, which is like, pay me and I'll make something. And why am I not getting paid? And then Gen Z is just like, I'm just going to make it. I'm not waiting for you to give me permission. And that's what I encourage everybody. is just create, don't wait. Do not wait for somebody to give your permission.

I look back on my career. The reason I was so successful is not because I was a smartest kid in the class. Far from it. I started a zine when I was 23, Cyber Surfer, and then I started the magazine Silicon Air Reporter when I was 24, 25, 95, I guess, 96. And so those became very big businesses very quickly, and I became very famous. And they said over and over again, like, how did you do it?

And I was like, I got PageMaker, I took pictures of my camera, I put them into a layout, and then I printed a photocopy. And people were just shocked, and I was shocked that, like, but there's a photocopy machine every four blocks in Manhattan. Why didn't you do it, is what I would say to people. And then people were really angry at me at that time who were journalists. I was kind of hated and mocked because they were like, I work at Condé Nast, like I work at Wired.

I work at Mondo 3,000. I work at this publication. You're just a hack. And then obviously I lapped all of them, and I hired a lot of them. And honestly, that exact cycle is now what we're seeing with this creator generation where, you know, you've got these gate, you still have gatekeeper media. And ironically, like some of the blogs became gatekeeper media.

And, you know, they don't totally understand. I mean, I had this conversation with a friend out senior the other day where I was like, your primary competition is TikTok and YouTube. You know, like you've been lapped by who's that, Marcus, that, that, that, tech reviewer, Marquez Brownlee. But 100, so you have, and you, there is this sort of disdain like, oh, well, they're not doing their, you know, research and they don't have like lab metrics for testing these gadgets. And then it's like, dude, it does not matter.

And he's building the lab now, right? Like I saw he was, yeah. Yeah, he's like literally building a lab. I saw him. And I mean, he's now creator establishment, right? There's a whole universe coming up behind him that people are still snobby about. And it's like, no. Marquis Brownlee, MKBHD.

Thank you. I'm not good at details. This is a problem when you do it as a hack and a nobody and you come out of nowhere is you name your channel something crazy because you're like, well, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to name it, whatever. What does MKBHD mean? It's like, oh, it's an HD, really? And then you've got some old exennial on a podcast trying to remember the name. Or it's like it's this week in startups.

And it's like, yeah, it's a seven-day-a-week podcast about tech, media, finance, and everything. Technically, that is the whole week. This week. I feel like for the whole creator economy, though, there used to be like a, barrier to entry. And now there's not a barrier to entry per se, but it's like analysis, paralysis and like actually the fear of trying to create perfect content again, because like these kids have been raised on an iPad. So like Jason said, like, oh, like, is that person edited? And so that's what you want your content to look at. Like, we don't necessarily

have to go out and buy certain things. You can record off of a smartphone if you want. And the producers were just talking about how it's to have a smartphone nowadays. It's like pretty cheap. Like you can find a cheap one. It's just actually getting over the, the perfectionist. aspect of it all, which I feel like it is becoming more and more apparent. When we had the zine, people would come to me and say, look, there's a grammatical error here, there's a spelling error here, like, why don't you edit it and like, what you have a copyrighter? I was like, no, we don't do that. That's how you know this is actually authentic and a zine.

Yeah. It's got spelling errors. It's got, you know, mistakes. Like, this is not meant to be perfect. Done is better than perfect. You know. And you just actually articulated the creator- rate thing.

Justin, the creators are talking. Justin has a podcast. Oh, okay. Democratize. Yeah, Justin has a podcast. Who's been hiding this from me? Producer Justin. I'm here on.

Podcasts going on. We need more voices in this cacophony. We need to get Nick to make a podcast. Bringing in Justin. This is quite an introduction of 20 minutes. Here we go. I just wanted to share for you guys to comment on. I want to show you Marcus Brownlee's just a quick clip from his 100th video.

just to give a sense of just getting started. Yeah, do it. Here we go. Marquise. Right now I have approximately 70-ish subscribers. I'm just looking at, yeah, I have, wait now. If I go to my page, YouTube.com slash Marcus Brownlee, just click on the link over there. I have 74 subscribers.

So I was thinking I would do a some sort of subscriber milestone giveaway, whether it's 200 or 150, whatever seems realistic. I will do a giveaway. I mean, that is so cute. I think he was in a gadget reader. Like, he was in the comments and a gadget at that time. He was the baby. I mean, but that's like, that is,

you literally have articulated creator weight, right? Like, he didn't. And then he just grew into it and now he's bigger. So awesome. Yeah. How freaking savvy he was, too. Like, he's like, I don't care what the milestone is. A hundred subscribers?

Great. I'm going to do a giveaway. Yeah. Like he was just, I mean, the mechanics. Own the numbers. Who cares? Own the numbers. Yeah, just own your little niche in the world.

Incredible. Wait, what is Justin's podcast going to be like a fireable offense? He's not doing something crazy and offensive. No. It's not like Red Scare or something. No, just kidding. No, it's not like that at all. Please.

He'll talk about it if he wants to talk about it, but I'm not going to. Now I've got to go like Google search and find this podcast. What is this podcast about, Justin? Get on camera. This is the problem. I can't keep control of my own staff. Everybody's got side projects. You've got to clear your side projects with HR.

I saw Jason. Jason was creeping on my side project last night. I know. I got this tweet. It's like, Molly's doing a podcast. I was like, oh, what the hell? I assumed it was this weekend startups. I thought you were doing it. And I clicked on it and talking about crochet.

I was like, I'm out of here. I was like, what am I paying Molly for? She's doing a crochet podcast with Tom Merritt. I literally got in there. I heard like 90 seconds. I was like, I'm out. Yeah, you don't have to worry about that one, my friend. Yeah, I was like, I'm not worried.

What, wait, what's the name of that podcast you're doing with Tom Merritt? Well, I love Tom. Merritt. I'm a subscriber to you. How Merit is the best. We've been doing this. He's a sweetheart. I've been doing an It's a Thing thing thing in some form since 2010. I started a Twitter account.

It's called It's a Thing. And so we did the podcast for a few years and then crapped out. And then now it's like the most teeny little artisanal patron thing. It's like a meme thing. Or like creative projects in the world or something. It's just trend spotting. It's literally like things that are a thing. Crochet is big right now.

Crochet is big right now. I'm crochet a balaclava right now. I'll have to show you guys what I'm trying to crocheting it. That's what they were doing. They were doing baclavava. They were crocheting baklava. I'm like, how do you do that? Those are a little sweet treat.

No, bala clavas. Rachel, that was literally the thing that we had identified as a thing last night. What is a balacava? It was like a little, right? Like a little hood, yeah. It's like a detachable hood, basically. You use it for skiing and or robbing banks. You know, this just came up.

I bought a couple of these because I'm skiing. And I saw they were called baccala. Balaclava. Bala clavas, whatever. And, yeah, okay. So people are crocheting those. All right, Justin. What are you crocheting, Justin?

Tell us about your 1970s tribute podcast. Is it about the 70s? No, I don't have that many episodes. It's called The Toolkit, and I started it before I started working here. I actually... Still gotta clear your projects, people. I need to know what's going on. Okay.

But it's a toolkit. It was in my, I'd put it in my whatever IP assignment at the start when I was applying. Please. If anything you do, I own. So just be careful if it's not in the IP assignment. I know. I haven't published since I worked here. You're overlaw.

It was just an interview show. I wanted to. Who are you interviewing? You said, this is the worst bitch for a podcast ever, Justin. No, so basically. I've been doing it. I interview people. So basically, I realized.

I wanted to talk to a bunch of people who were successful from my college, mostly. Got it. And I would meet with them and we'd have coffee and it'd be like really interesting. And then I started getting questions from people who were younger than me. And they'd be like, Justin, like, how do I become an investment banker? And I was like, I don't really know. I just intern for one. But can I record an interview with somebody who's actually a managing director or vice president

and then share that? So the only episode I've released this year were, yeah, I talked with a guy. who actually led the round on Yeti. They're a private equity firm that bought a controlling stake in Yeti, the cooler company. And, thanks for the invite. I would love to be on. We'll get you on. I've been focused on this weekend startups exclusively.

That sounds like you should probably acquire Justin's podcast. I'm just saying. It's like, don't I'm going to call on this now? This is resume podcasting. It is resume podcasting. I've got a new term. if you want to be famous or be known or get a job, just start a goddamn podcast, do 10 episodes,

and then whoever you want to work for, have them on your podcast. And they'll be like, because Landon over at Inside does in his 20s, and now he works for me because I saw his podcast. Rachel had a podcast. I hired her. Justin probably wouldn't hire you if I heard this podcast,

but, you know, even still, he might have acquired your podcast. I mean, Brandon is killing it, too. We need to plug Landon. Like, Landon reached out to me. Like, Landon's amazing. I think he just talked to, like,

the mayor of Miami or something absolutely incredible. He talks to some very awesome people. You should have him on OK Boomer. Yeah. Here's the thing. It's people want to talk old people who've made it, want to talk to young people and try to help them. So I actually, the lens of which I do podcast is, can this podcast help me in some way? So like, if Tim Ferriss or Joe Rogan ever invited me on their podcast, I'd be like, yeah, they got a big audit. Sure, I'll do that.

And I'm friends with Tim. And if it was a match for him, sure. and Joe Rogan, I was going to be all. When my book came at, it never happened, but I traded some DMs with him. Somebody had to introduce me. And putting that aside, the other set of podcasts I do is when somebody says,

I'm just starting my podcast. I'd love to have you to have this my first guest, or my hundredth guest or something like that, you know, and I'm just like, okay, I'll do it. I'll support somebody who's up and coming. I know it's meaningful for them if I retweeted, so I'll get them on the board. Because then everybody in between,

it's like, am I going to really help you, like, I got six days a week here. Come on, folks. You know, seven days a week. What was the coolest podcast that you've been on in that sense? I can't remember. Maybe it was, I think I did an early 20-minute VC. Oh, that's cool.

And I did some other ones that were early like that. I'm trying to remember. Acquired I did early. I did the knowledge. I think I was pretty early to the knowledge project. You know, like business fine. And those were older people, too, in some cases. but I do think that's the way to do it,

is to just try to support people. So it doesn't surprise me if you ask 30 or 40 people that, you know, important people that you might get one or two, especially if you're starting with, hey, I'm 19 years old, you know, like your guest today or something, and, you know, 18 years old,

and I'm starting a podcast. It's kind of like, oh, that's charming. Also, I get, what I'm getting a lot of now is I'm doing my senior project. Our senior project is to do an interview with somebody you admire, and I get, like, 50 of these every, you know,

spring semester where people are in business going. I'm like, I know this move. This is a job interview. It's a reverse job interview. Like, you want to feature me? Okay, I got it. It's smart. It's smart.

All right, resume interviews. Speaking of Rachel's guest, he had Chris Saka on when he was 16 and Alex Bloomberg, the founding CEO of Gimlet, when he was 16. Also, so I think it's safe to say he's taking the playbook and killing it. Great playbook.

Now, by the way, if you're listening to this, enough already. No more podcast, people. This marketing channel, this hack has been beaten. Stop it. Okay, come up with something else. I'm a TikTok or whatever. Do something else. Okay, boomer.

Okay, boomer. Enough already. See what I did there. All right, let's get to Rachel reporting her amazing segment with Campbell Brown at long last. The intro's longer than the interview, I bet. That's how much people love this. That's how much people love Rachel. Gonna be amazing.

Well, thank you so much for being on today's show, Campbell. Thanks for having me. Thank you. I'm super excited to have you on, and it's actually funny. I mentioned to Presh, who is another Gen Z on the launch team, that I was having you on. He's like, wait a minute, what? Like, I saw Campbell on TikTok, and I was like, no way, I saw Campbell on TikTok. So I think that is really funny how obviously your reach is very far, and especially

in Canada, and I'm sure it's very far as well, because that's where Presh is. And to give everybody an intro on you, Campbell Barron is an 18-year-old based in Canada who has already made quite the name for himself in the world of reporting. His old news TikTok account was actually acquired by Workweek, and his new TikTok account is documenting the inception of his startup sequence. He also hosted the ones who succeed podcast and had some pretty cool company founders from Figma, SoulCycle, Headspace, and more. And to top that all off, he also reported for CBS Kids News. Did I miss anything? In 18 years, you aren't accomplished. It feels like a ton.

Is there anything else I need to add to the list there? No, I appreciate it. Just one minor correction. It's CBC, which is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I am a fellow Canadian. So, yeah, that was a great intro. I appreciate the kind of words. Awesome.

Thank you so much for being on again. And to start off, I'd like to say that you were actually the youngest guest I've spoken to on OK Boomer so far. You're 18. Are you in college or are you in high school? Give us a lowdown of your life outside of the professional world. Yeah, I am not in college, nor am I in high school. I finished high school a year early.

I went to a alternative school. I switched in downtown Toronto and fast-tracked my way. Just really was never super kind of interested in pursuing more of a formal academic route. And it was really always perhaps a little too distracted by my extracurricular activities, per se, whether that was content creation or startups or what actually turned out to be kind of the mix of both. So not in school, not in college. Super timely that you're saying this because we actually just spoke with Jason on the new segment of today's show, today's January 13th, on how there are so many people not going to college.

And originally, people thought in 2020 the lack of attendance into college was due to people maybe having a pandemic gap year. And it turns out only 2% of those people that they thought, we're having a gap year actually enrolled in college. So I'm sure you're one of many and doing something alternative after high school, I think is growing, growing the important. And honestly, this is, I haven't ever said this before, but I told Molly, Molly Wood is the new co-host on this week in Startup Campbell. And I was talking to her. And I actually almost didn't go to college because I wanted to see if there was actually a benefit for me going at the time. I was really interested in things like video production. And when I was 18, I was like, I don't know if I want to

spend all that money to go. But I ended up going. So it's really cool to see people taking the alternative paths. And I always wonder, I'm like, well, where would I have been if I, if I didn't go to college? And like I said in the intro, you're just killing it in the reporting space. And Jason always tells the producers about how important it is to be a great reporter. And I really wish I started documenting my work and reporting when I was 18. Can you give us a little bit of a description about your journey into the reporting world? For sure. And yeah, no, I think you've landed in quite a good spot. So I would say, you know, not going to college or going to colleges. I think much more of a personal decision than I think the media may make it out to seem.

And so, you know, just with that context, yeah, my journey to, I would say, kind of reporting and content creation really stems from my interest in business and technology and startups. I really just kind of gradually got into it. You know, when I was 10, my family got an iPad and I started making videos on Imovie there, you know, just really kind of messing around, kind of learning the fundamental skills and just got, you know, progressively more and more interested into it in the craft of creating videos. I think where I really started to find my groove and where I kind of always struggled

before was the what, you know, what are we making videos of? So I was like younger, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but then I realized the only problem was I hated watching movies, which is still something that is true to this day. So that didn't really hold up too well. And so, you know, when I became really interested in the actual subject matter of kind of business and startups and technology, and a podcast in particular, this week in startups was one of them, but also the show Startup by Gimlet Media and Alex Bloomberg documented, documenting the exception of his podcasting company. That was really, really inspiring, I would say, and really pointed me in kind of the startup, you know, business,

reporting direction. And so when I was 15, I was kind of had enough kind of sitting on the outside on the sidelines and really wanted to start speaking with founders I respected and really looked up to and kind of turned that into a content creation exercise. So I started a podcast called the Ones You Succeed. I didn't really have too much money at the time and my parents were like very supportive but thought, you know, or said, you know, like this is a great thing for you, but you have to bankroll this. So figure out a way to do that. So I sent a by of cold emails and got Skillshare to sponsor the first season and, you know, reached out to many, many founders, got rejected by many, many founders. But ultimately kind of put together this

initial lineup of 12 kind of A-list guests consisting of Michael Dubin from Dollar Shave Club and Elizabeth Cutler from SoulCycle and Chris Saka, who's been, you know, a guest on Twist many times. And even Alex Bloomberg, who really kind of got me interested in the world of podcasting. And that content creation exercise was so exciting because I was just so into it. I was so into the subject matter. I was so into the creation aspect of it. It kind of came full circle. And then from there, I, you know, download a TikTok and originally downloaded it and started taking it seriously as a means to essentially promote the show. I thought that maybe producing little clips to promote the podcast would be a good idea.

But what ultimately happened was I kind of ventured out, you know, through a series of videos, a series of many months of experimenting, I kind of stumbled upon this almost business, short bite-sized business news format for Gen Z. And it wasn't clear that there was a market for this type of content because I just Gen Z VC or Gen Z startups, I wasn't super familiar with kind of that world in kind of the beginning of 2020 pre-pandemic times. Feels like a different world at this point. But quickly kind of, or not quickly, but over the course of a few months, started to build

like a decent audience. And people started to reach out, you know, saying they kind of enjoy my content and enjoy staying up to date with the industry and I've inspired them to start businesses or podcast or a little bit of both. And that was extremely exciting and very, very, very, very gratifying because the distribution of the TikTok was just far greater than the distribution of my original podcast, though there's certainly a building block to the actual TikTok account. And yeah, in 2020, in the summer, the account got acquired by the media startup work week.

And, you know, I'm helping them transition the account and I'm working on a startup now. So I would say making videos and reporting and becoming interested in the intersection of media and technology, I always thought of those two things as separate. Like I'm either going to do a media thing or I'm going to do a tech thing. And what I realized quite recently was that you actually have to do both. And it's not a this or that. It's kind of this and that. And that's kind of the practice that I'm taking to my latest company sequence.

That's so cool. So it sounds like you were an iPad kid with a short attention spin who didn't like movies and not look at you. So all those parents are saying kids can't have iPads. look, Campbell, you're making a good case. I'm very pro technology, for sure. Right? My parents didn't let me have an iPod touch or like a phone. iPod Touch, I think was middle school and phone, like a smartphone.

It was like a junior in high school. And I always tell them, like, if I'm a slow typeer, it's because of you guys. So that is really awesome. I would love to know more about how a TikTok account gets acquired. We obviously, we hear that term all the time in the world of startups, but I've actually never heard of somebody acquiring a TikTok account. Can you run us through that process? And maybe even what you do today for them, if you can tell us that.

Yeah, it's a very, it's very interesting. And quite frankly, the context I would say kind of leading up to the acquisition was, you know, when you start a tech company, I assume that it definitely crosses the founder's mind that an acquisition could happen if things go well. But you start like, I didn't start the TikTok account for it to get acquired. I didn't even know that was possible. So it was as much of a surprise as it was to me. you know, as opposed to, you know, building a startup where that could be on the roadmap.

Nonetheless, the account was growing. We surpassed 100,000 followers. And I was starting to feel like maybe this tech news thing is interesting, but it will be nice to kind of work on something else soon. And I got introduced to the folks at work week, which was a stealth kind of brand new media startup at the time. Adam Ryan, who's the CEO of the company, this really brilliant media operator, former, you know, president of the hustle.

and then Becca Sherman, who is also a, you know, manager at the hustle and just really smart. They're both really, really smart. Got introduced to them. And it became clear that having a TikTok account to drive distribution is, you know, very helpful when you're building a media company. TikTok does organic distribution really, really well. And the conversation quickly kind of turned to perhaps we use my account as a launch pad to kind of launch, you know, various kind of media projects within Workweek. And what we actually settled on

was a wonderful podcast called Just Raised, hosted by a workweek friend named Joe Sweeney. And he kind of was doing a lot of the same stories, longer firm stories, that I was kind of doing on my TikTok account. It was not uncommon to see a video on my TikTok account that led something along lines of this startup raised X money to do Y type thing, right? Or the startup raised X to do Y. And I would say like that is basically what Joe's podcast was doing. So the synergies became very clear. So we rebranded the account. And I'm sticking around at Workweek as an advisor, kind of helping them transition the account. We're making more videos with more work recreateers. So I'm not necessarily going away. It's kind of, we're just kind of increasing the content load, which is nice for the audience,

because they're going to get to see more videos. And nice for me, because I get to be part of something bigger than myself as it pertains to a TikTok account and a personal brand, which is just really difficult as a creator to build something bigger than yourself. So that was obviously nice. And it will be cool to see the account kind of live on in a way that that doesn't eventually necessarily involve me 100% of the time. So yeah, that's kind of the backstory. You sound so wise for someone that is 18. I think that is an amazing opportunity. And did they approach you separately with this offer? Or was this not the first thing that was on the table? I got introduced to work week through a mutual friend who I knew in the industry, who is involved in work week and, or, you know,

kind of just on the sidelines, I would say, like assisting them, helping them out type thing. And, you know, the original idea was maybe do I work for work week? And at the time, I was, you know, really in the early days of starting sequence. And so I was like, well, I probably don't want to go full time because I really want to, really want to build sequence. And so the conversation kind of, it just, quite frankly, naturally progressed. It was not a one-day thing where they were like, this is the price and this is what's going to happen. Sign here and it's done in 24 hours.

It actually took months and months of kind of figuring out, well, what does this mean? What does this look like? And quite frankly, we're still figuring it out post-acquisition, kind of the nitty-gritty details. I think that's totally reasonable. But, no, they've been great. The accounts, you know, we have like big ambitions for it. And, yeah, it was certainly a gradual process. Very awesome.

So now I guess I want to pivot. You have mentioned your startup a few times on here. Fresh mentioned it to me. He said, if you can get him to talk about the startup, you better, you better hop on that. So now that you already mentioned it, can you tell us a little bit more about sequence? What do you guys do? I've seen your TikTok account, but if you guys, if you feel comfortable, even talking about your TikTok account on that end and what it's like to build a second account after already creating one crazy successful, give us the details on that. Well, not crazy successful, moderately successful in the world of startups.

And shout out to Prash. I love the twist Canadian representation. So, you know, as it, so yeah, so the idea for Sequence was, start in the summer. I was really excited about this idea of, you know, media tools. So again, my interest had been like the intersection of media and technology. And I think this is around the time when I started to kind of think, hmm, like form opinions, perhaps, that maybe they were kind of the same thing. You needed media to build, to drive, you know, users to technology.

and you needed technology to create value where peer media companies could struggle. And so the idea was to kind of intertwine the two. And in the summer, I kind of played around with this tool of working on narrative presentations. And I built a very scrappy kind of MVP. This was really on the side. I was kind of just finished up the TikTok deal and was kind of looking to figure out what to do next. And we sent that out to a few people. And the feedback was really interesting, whereby a lot of people kind of reached out.

A few people tried it. A few people liked it. A few people didn't like it. But a small fraction of those people, you know, it became clear that there was this interesting use case where this could be something helpful for folks in the education space, creating courses. And specifically the mechanism of creating lessons, creating video lessons for courses. It's typically really hard to make engaging videos.

It's something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about as it pertains to my work on the podcast and TikTok and just like the many years of editing before. So perhaps I became a little numb to the fact that making video, engaging video for most people is relatively challenging. And if you think of an area, a focus where creating engaging video matters the most, it's education. And yet what we see on many online courses created by people who aren't necessarily masterclass per se are these kind of really long screen recorded videos that aren't necessarily super engaging. And so it was this kind of realization. We kind of got introduced to a few course creators and I teamed up with my co-founder Nils and a startup studio here in Toronto.

And we just started speaking with course creators and just started talking to them and asking them like, you know, what is your process for creating videos? How do you create videos? Is it something you struggle with? And what we learned was that overwhelmingly the answer was yes. Creating videos is very difficult. There's a big opportunity. And so in December, we kind of wrapped up our interview series and started building.

And our product is coming out in a few weeks. It's called Sequence. And we aim to essentially build the easiest video creation platform for course creators. So imagine if creating an engaging lesson is as easy as creating a presentation. So that's kind of the little longer-ish elevator pitch for Sequence. But I'm very excited and it feels very natural to kind of work on a tool that helps people create more engaging videos when that's basically what I've been doing my whole life. That is incredible.

Again, today, on today's news segment, January 13th, Jason was mentioning how ineffective remote education has been, especially in the school system for people looking for higher education. I personally loved online learning. I didn't necessarily do it because of the pandemic. I actually started before the pandemic. I was at Penn State, and then I took a lot of classes at. University of Maryland global campus, I believe it's called. And they were phenomenal. They were six weeks long. And because they were a shorter duration, I felt like I could learn so much more.

And then a following semester at Penn State, when we went remote, are professors that I've never taught a remote class before that taught in the semester setting. I found it so difficult to pay attention because it was no longer in that six week, almost like crunched up segment. So that is really awesome. I've definitely had issues with that before. It's another reason why I love Coursera, rather than taking a class in college because I find that learning off of something that is like incredibly engaging is so helpful. And you don't get credit for Coursera classes.

You know what I mean? So that'd be awesome if teachers, especially ones in the traditional like school community could start creating content that isn't so dry for lack of a better term, I guess. And you were building this in public, which must be a little bit scary as a founder. Do you think it's necessary?

now with how much we are putting on the internet to build in public, or do you think that it's okay to build something and then once it's completely done and once it's announced, only show the final product on places like TikTok and Twitter, and then jump off from there? Is the jumping off point, I guess, way earlier than it has been in the past? Yeah, I think there are pros and cons to both. And I'll say, like, I'm still figuring it out,

so I don't want to present as if I have all the answers. But what I can say is from startups that I've been exposed to that do this really well. One comes to mind a company called Levels Health, which is started by, you know, one of, I'm very familiar with the team. I've worked with them in the past. They're an A-list team. And they are extremely transparent. They show their own documents.

They show investor updates. They share every Friday at a forum meeting they do at the end of the week on YouTube. And when I got exposed to kind of that style of company building, no question was very foreign, right? It was very, almost a little intimidating. because the number one fear I used to have when kind of working on project is, is someone going to steal my idea, right? And it's probably a fear that's been propelled by the social network film,

where that's a very prime example of someone really stealing an idea. But what I kind of learned when I got more exposed to levels and quite a few, you know, micro-acquires and other ones, just other companies that are building in public on Twitter or via, you know, Notion Docs or videos, you know, the idea that if all the, all it takes to kill your company is someone replicating the idea, then, you know, you're probably not doing it right, right? It's that that's, you're probably not differentiated enough. And so, from my perspective, there's certainly a line of what you can share and what you can't. And like, I'm still figuring out what that line is. And I'm sure, you know, occasionally I may share too much.

I'm sure occasionally I may hold back too much. But the idea of building in public has been, you know, something that I've wanted to do for a while. And when I started this company and, you know, as per the deal, being able to create my own TikTok account that is kind of more of a personal brand that isn't related to kind of the latest current events as it pertains to startups. And is much more focused on the journey of building. I think the positives far away the negatives. And I've already had tons of course creators and people interested in using our product, reach out and sign up for a wait list.

I met my co-founder through TikTok. You know, some early hires are through TikTok. I've had people reach out. I've had investors reach out through TikTok. It's just, it's, there's something really wonderful about having a group of people who are interested in what you're doing kind of follow along the journey. And I say this being very interested and like fully understanding that like there have been people who have been building in public way before it was something that was way before building in public was a thing. Like Alex Bloomberg when he was building, you know, Gimlet Media and the startup podcast, which I refer to a lot, but it had a huge impact on me personally. Like that was a great example of building in public.

Casey and I sat with Beam was kind of like the ultimate example of building in public. So there are a bunch of different kind of examples of building in public in the form of, on Twitter and via podcasts and, you know, and even on TikTok too. Like I'm certainly not the only one. There are a lot of people who are kind of creating really engaging videos and it's benefiting their startups too. And I think that's great. And I'm kind of like very excited to be part of that community.

That is so awesome that you mentioned. Microacquire, because that's one of my favorite Twitter accounts, actually specifically Andrew, the CEO and co-founder. They also advertised on twists, so we're big Microacquire fans, but I find that his method of building a public

and kind of posting those one sentence blurbs is easily digestible for somebody that wants to break into the startup community. And it's also just really cool how public he is on pivoting and how often he iterates on his work. I really, really look up to him as somebody that creates content online as a founder.

And Casey Neistadt was actually on the speaking startup. And it was one of my favorite episodes ever. I wasn't on the show when it happened. But Nick, producer Nick was on the show. So that is cool that you mentioned both of them. It's something that it's crazy to think about the internet too where Casey Nice stat was on. If you think about it, like you're on the same show that Casey was on. The same show, you know, that like Mike required, Jason mentions them all.

time because they're a twist advertiser, how close the, you know, the world of startups is, is incredible now because of podcasting, because of the media. And you're totally right. Like, there really is such a small difference between media and tech now. I think Jason is an incredible example of the intersection between media and tech. And I guess, for my last question, I do want to pivot a little bit because I do want to talk about being a Canadian founder because is Prasch and I bonded over you so much. What is it like in the Canadian startup setting as a Gen Z founder? So we're really, we lost half the audience.

No, I'm kidding. You know, I think I can't speak for every Canadian Gen Z founder. Certainly not. But I would say that there are a few tailwinds that are very interesting and that made the promise of building a large Canadian company or a global company that happens to be based in Canada more possible, I would say. So the first one is certainly remote work. It just matters, quite frankly, where you are less.

I think that's kind of universally true. I'm not saying anything new. J.Cal talks about it all the time. I would say the second is the rise of Shopify. Shopify is extremely well respected in the Bay Area and happens to be a company in Ottawa, Canada, which is not Toronto, and yet that has not held them back in any way. They are very, very prosperous. And so I would say those two kind of forces, right, having a large company that you could look up to that's internationally respected and having the location where you call home, where you work just less relevant.

I think those two kind of factors come together and yield this really interesting ecosystem where you have a bunch of programs and a bunch of interesting young founders or young Gen Z startup folks becoming interested in the space because they're able to look up to Shopify. and they're able to follow their favorite people on Twitter. And they're able to listen to podcasts because they don't need to make their way down to SF to go to in-person events. And so the distribution of information via the internet has made, you know, becoming interested in startups a lot easier. And quite frankly, you know, Toronto is not a small city. There are a lot of people interested in tech in Toronto.

There are a lot of people interested in tech all over Canada. And I think having, you know, I've a lot of, I have plenty of friends who are Canadian, who either live in cities in the U.S. or Oliver Canada who are interested in, interested in startups and technology. And I would say that wouldn't be, I think it just wouldn't be as prominent if it weren't for the rise of remote work and the prominence of Shopify. So that's just my take. But there are a hundred different people to talk to about this topic as it pertains

to kind of Canadian startups. But, you know, I think it's just, it's really inspiring. It's great to see. And, you know, again, when I downloaded TikTok in February of 20, I barely knew anyone in tech that was young, right? Like, I think the youngest person I knew maybe it's like 25. And now that's just not the case. Now there's so many young people in tech who are choosing not to go to college,

choosing to take their education to their own hands, get jobs, getting employed by amazing startups. And I think that's really awesome. I look up to kind of the Canadian Gen Z community in startups for sure. A Shopify is definitely just made. waves in Canada. I spoke to Tech with Tim before I came on to The Speak and Startups on my own podcast, who is a YouTuber that does tech tutorials. And I believe he interned at Shopify. And he was like one of the best programmers on the internet on YouTube at the time that was around our age.

And then we also had Toby from Shopify on the Speak of Startups, episode 11, 184. And his story is obviously incredible. I highly recommend checking that up. Or is that written down in front of No, that one actually, so when I look up, like, you know, when you type, like, start typing in YouTube and like a video just automatically comes up because when you go to the most, Toby's is the one that goes to the most because, and it's speaking of Canadian founders, I was a fellow at Dynamo Ventures doing a six-month fellowship in venture capital, and we focused on the supply chain and logistics space. And there were so many founders coming out of Canada for that realm of work because of Shopify and so much of its influence over there. So he's, I just, I just, have a lot of respect for him as a founder. And I really just think he was kind of the first to do what he does, especially being from somewhere that isn't necessarily a super sexy city for startups. That was incredibly difficult before remote work. And thank goodness, like the Twist team really embraces remote work. I'm a huge fan of it. I have been able to meet so many people. I've been able to talk to people like you. I don't have to go into a studio or go all the way up to Canada to speak.

So I definitely agree with you. I think Gen Z is benefiting a lot from this change in remote work, especially as we're starting to break into the workforce in general. It came out a very good time for us, and hopefully it continues. Yeah. I would say some of the closest relationships I have were majoring the pandemic and are with people that I actually haven't met in person, which is insane to think about.

I just met the first OK Boomer guest yesterday, two days ago. I met Emily Herrera in person for the first time. And I was like, this is crazy. I've been at this weekend startup for over six months now. And she was the first guest I've ever met in real life. And you're right, internet friendships. It's funny. I was mentioning the other day how, like, you know, when we were younger,

your parents were always like, don't meet people on the internet, especially like don't get in their cars. And now we're taking Uber's to, you know, meet people in real life that we like first started conversing with on Twitter. And I think that is, I don't know, I'm a big. fan of it and I think it's incredible and being able to meet a diverse group of people, especially in the startup community is something that I value a lot and they weren't for remote work, you know, who knows who would be in our network?

100%. I spent a month in New York in October. So awesome. It's one of my favorite cities. I actually grew up there. I lived there for six years when I was younger. Oh, very cool. But I haven't been back because of, you know, due to COVID for like two years, which was usually a longer time for me. So I have a lot of like pre-COVID friends there. And I also have a lot of like post-COVID friends and just nonstop, you know, every day after every day at like 9 p.m. I was exhausted because I was just meeting so many people on Twitter. It was amazing. It was really awesome. But, you know, certainly like tiring. I forgot, you know, how, how, you know, time consuming in person meetings are after kind of hopping from one zoom to another. And even that is, it's kind of draining on its own. So no, it's, I'm a big fan of, I'm a big fan of the, you know, what Twitter can do to actually like meet interesting people. And certainly. I met many, many people online in person and continue to do so. Yeah, there's one thing for Zoom fatigue,

but then there's another for like meetings in real life fatigue. I feel like it takes a lot more like energy to do in real life. Like I got to keep like that elevated, elevatedness about you when you're doing like the in-person meetings. I like the remote ones first. And it also, I think, gets me a little bit more like warmed up to the person because I feel like always in-person meetings. It's always a little bit awkward on the first, first go.

but now that everybody's super hip to Zoom calls and things, you were able to jump on here real quick. And it wasn't super awkward when we first started talking. We didn't need to talk for five minutes before we got into the details. Like, I feel like we wouldn't have had to do if we met in person. Totally. Very much agree. Well, thank you so much for being on the show.

This was really, really cool talking to you. I'm super excited to see where your startup goes. And I hope you keep showing up on my For You page. Thank you very much. And I appreciate the invite. big fan of the show and keep it up. Awesome. Thanks, Kimball.