https://www.listennotes.com/e/7e62c82db90a4994a5d93822b4092486

You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, June 25, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let's run you through the headlines. Right now, Wall street is panicking over the prospect of a socialist mayor in New York City. The Jane Street Hannekins, Jane Street's boss says he was duped into funding AK47s for coup.

Happens to the best of us.

US Shell is in early talks. Not late talks. Early talks.

Not advanced.

Not advanced talks. To acquire rival British Petroleum bp. Nvidia has ruffled tech giants with a move into cloud computing. That's DGX lepton that we've talked about a few times. Bumble is cutting 30% of its staff and the stock is up. As the online. As online dating hits an inflection point. I'm sure there's some. Some AI story there. There's a whole bunch of other interesting trends that we'll dig into. China is tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away their passports. Doesn't sound good. And we want to discuss the future of venture capital marketing.

But if you're the most important question of them all.

Yes, it is. It is. But quickly, let me tell you about ramp. Ramp.com Time is money save. Both easy to use, corporate cards and a whole lot more all in one place. We have some delicious drinks in front of us today. This is day two of asking.

They're not on camera.

Oh, they're not on camera.

So pick them all up.

So day two, I did Williamson to come on the show. Day two, we got five. Five yeramates from Mateina. That's Andrew Huberman's project. And one new tongue. It's a five to one ratio.

I shotgunned one of these.

You did?

Right before the show. Hadn't done that in a few years, maybe a decade. Yeah, but it's good to be back.

I mean, you mentioned yesterday on the show that you did a dry fast and it was pretty subtext. Reading between the lines, it's pretty clear that you'd been hitting one too many cheeky pints.

Cheeky pints.

Dry out.

Dry fast.

Dry out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just eat regularly. Just no pines.

No pines. Exactly.

Lets it dry fast.

Yeah. Anyway, let's go through the news. Mamdani. The entire world is melting down, particularly on tech Twitter. Everyone is, is very nervous about what Mamdani means for the future of New York City because San Francisco kind of got a dry run of this and it didn't go so well. And now we're going to see what happens in New York City. So, Dave Friedberg, voice of reason, voice of reason. He says it is vitally important for America that Mamdani get elected mayor of New York City. He can help maximally and swiftly tax the rich, stand up government run grocery stores, eliminate the police force, freeze rents and make public transportation free. It is unlikely that taxing the rich will cause them to move to other cities, collapsing NYC tax revenue. Or that city run grocery stores will fail to increase fresh vegetable consumption in the inner city. Or that the elimination of the NYPD will cause a rise in crime and a decline in quality of life. Or that freezing rents will drive landlords to dump properties, collapsing prices and property tax revenue. Or that free public transportation will result in union led kleptocracy. No way. I'm sure this time socialism will be different. If Americans don't want to learn the lessons of the lessons of socialism's failure elsewhere, we should aim to learn them here as quickly as possible. Let's make sure one or two cities and states fall apart fast so the rest don't have to elect Mamdani. After accruing $2 trillion in student loan debt that they will never be able to. That they will never be able to pay down, it is no surprise that the college educated in New York city are supporting Mamdani. 61 to 39. The current system has failed them. But the truth is, more government may not be the answer when too much government indiscriminate federal student loans, regardless of cost or quality of degree or institution, may have gotten them into this moment. A gentle reminder though, that an articulate ignoramus isn't more correct than his less charismatic, authentic political rival. Facts, data, truth still stand above theory, innuendo and bs. Socialism won't work if we have to relearn that lesson the hard way. Let's do it fast and elect Mamdani. Very interesting, interesting analysis. Now.

Sacrificing the capital of capital.

Sacrificing New York.

Fortress of finance, New York. Yeah, I couldn't. I don't think Ken Griffin was hitting the timeline yesterday, but he certainly was looking smart.

Yes. So, I mean, there's a few things in here. He is interested in taxing the rich. He did. I was listening to Mamdani's interview on the Breakfast Club and he was talking about taxing, adding a tax to anyone that makes over a million dollars in the city. A 2% tax. They would pay 20k, but obviously that scales up to someone who's making 100 million would be paying much more. And he thinks that that's like a very doable tax. He has talked about government run grocery stores, which I think sound like, like a disaster potentially. I was joking with you about if.

He had decade plus of experience running something like Costco.

Yes, that could be possible.

Might be bullish. I don't think that he's had a job.

Yeah, my riff on it was imagine if the grocery store was as seamless as the dmv. Or imagine if taking the free bus was as smooth as getting through tsa. Or imagine if looking for a house was as simple as filing your taxes. Like that's what the government could bring to these institutions. And that's always the risk with these things. Now on the issue of eliminating the nypd, Mamdani has changed his tune on that. He was saying defund the police five years ago. He has since changed his strategy and his messaging dramatically and is no longer anti defunding the police and has said directly like, I do not want to defund the investigation. Nypd. But the. But the reaction continues. Cold Healing says it is still not a guarantee. But Zoron winning feels like the first time that I can see a populist Internet left taking the corpse of the collapsing Democrat machine the way MAGA took the corpse of the right in 2016. Don't think they've had any victory this significant. And I agree. I mean AOC was the first kind of example of that. But it is interesting that this is very much the Bernie Bro left is now actually winning elections. And it does speak to, you know, the Democrat machine just, just failing. Basically. What's interesting is that one of the takeaways from the 20, the 2024 election was like the podcast election. It's the podcast election. You got to be doing all these podcasts. Mamdani didn't actually do that. Yeah, it was more. More driven by his TikTok. So I remember we discussed it and I was saying like the next thing.

After the podcast, didn't he do something with Derek Thompson?

Yes, he did.

Joe Weisenthal. He did a few, but it feels like he really dominated in short form. Video.

Yeah.

And really sort of direct. And the viral clips, good branding around his sad policy suggestions.

And the viral clips were not from his podcast appearances. So even though he went on the Breakfast Club and gave a big talk there, he did like a 40 minute interview. He like. That was not what went viral. What went viral were his. His scripted and well edited TikToks, basically. And his. The stats that he put up on TikTok were pretty staggering. I was pulling them up. He has almost a million followers and is just absolutely lapping everyone else he was going up against. Yeah, yeah.

And Cuomo was engaging in a little bit of hubris, right?

Oh, yes.

Leveraging his network and his sort of various allies to put together this coalition and kind of wanted to ignore the new way in which candidates actually need to run campaigns if they're competitive.

Yeah. It was an odd choice because he was. He had to step down. Right. And he was like. He was pretty, like, racked with controversy. And it just feels like that's an odd pick for the Democratic Party to actually go back and, like, double down on.

Should we play one of Mom Donnie's rap songs? You know, he was a rap musician historically.

He's. He's moved on from that. But if there is a good one, I think playing the clip from his interview that we have, I believe pulled up would be okay.

Tyler, I just sent you. You remember Vivo on YouTube?

Yeah.

He's got one of his songs. He went under the moniker Young Cardamom.

Okay.

And from eight years ago. There's one on. So. So, Tyler, why don't you listen to this and let us know if it's worth, you know, throwing up.

Okay. I mean, with. With regard to Cuomo, I think the problem is his car.

Yeah.

Do you know what he drives?

Was it the Scat Pack?

He drives a Dodge Charger Scat Pack widebody. It's a high performance vehicle.

It is, but very American.

It's not quite there. I think he would have won if he'd gone with the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170.

Yeah.

So the Scat Pack, wide body, it's up in the 500 horsepower range. It's got a V8. It's not supercharged.

And he was getting a little flack for kind of parking wherever he felt like.

Apparently during the campaign. Got like seven speeding tickets or something during the campaign. Like in the last year or something, he's gotten just like a ton.

A ton of happens to TBVN interns. Anyways, I think we got a video ready. It is not the rap song. It is an interview.

Let's play it in dollars a year.

State budget, about $252 billion a year. There is money.

The question is what we spend it on.

And what I've proposed is that we raise $10 billion to pay for our entire economic agenda and start to trump proof our city because we know he'll use federal funding as leverage over this city.

And we will do so in two key ways.

The first is to match the state's top corporate tax rate to that of New Jersey. We are at 7.25%. They're at 11.5%. Corporations can pay it over there, they can pay it over here. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't just apply to corporations headquartered.

In New York City, because when you.

Say this, people will say, well, they're gonna go to Florida. Wherever you are headquartered, as long as you do business in the state of New York, you are taxable for that corporate tax. We're talking about corporations that are making millions of dollars, not in revenue, but in profit. And the second is taxing the top 1% of New Yorkers. We're talking about people who make a million dollars a year or more.

Taxing them just by a flat 2% tax increase. And I know if 50 Cent is.

Listening, he's not gonna be happy about this. Tends to not like this tax policy. But I wanna be very clear. This is about $20,000 a year. It's a rounding error.

And all of these things together, they.

Make every New Yorker's life better, including those who are actually getting taxed.

Now, you also wanna cut. I think, yeah, yeah, we can cut it there. It is funny because during this interview, Charlemagne keeps coming at him for the rap thing and basically being like, your rap was not good. And so, Mom Donna is how someone.

Does one thing is how they do everything right.

I don't know. But, Mom, Donnie keeps having to be like, I know you're not a fan of the rap stuff, but let me go back to the issues.

The thing I gotta give him credit for is Zo Ron.

Is it wrong?

It's a cool name.

It is a cool name.

That's. That is what I will give him.

So Polymarket nailed it. As usual. The news breaks on polymarket beforehand. Signal breaks it down. He says, what's tragic isn't only that Mamdani won. It's that this was the best alternative to the system produced. You don't beat populism with legacy. You beat it with real competence and vision. But instead, it was Cuomo. Cuomo. That's malpractice. Democrats learn nothing from Kamala. And yet Cuomo doesn't seem to have be. He didn't seem to break through in any meaningful way. Sophie says, hold up. Let him cook. To Bill Ackman, who says, I have a great idea on nyc. I will share it as soon as I can. I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning, but now I am optimistic and so you know a banger is coming. Long post is coming from from Ackman.

Apple needs to make a signature iPhone for Ackman that can that allows him to see the entire body of text, you know, while typing on the phone. You know, something like a 5 foot long iPhone I think would be the right range be fantastic.

Zoran Mamdani, the young Democratic Socialist state assemblyman who has waged a surprisingly strong campaign for mayor of New York City, hasn't just frustrated his opponents, he's made them jealous, says Eric Latch at the New Yorker in a very interesting profile that I read last night. I regret not running for mayor in 2021, State Senator Jessica Ramos said this month during a televised Democratic primary debate when asked if she had any regrets in her political career. I thought I needed more experience, she explained. They're talking trash, but turns out you just need to make good videos. He was polling at 1% and then started going on this generational TikTok run and just compounding and compounding and compounding and just got escape velocity. If you watch those videos very well edited, very well, very well executed. Jasmine's son had a breakdown in her substack, which I've really been enjoying, she says. I'm excited for Zoran even if I don't buy every policy. We need to elect leaders, especially young people who are affirmatively excited about versus establishment heirs who hold their nose, who people hold their nose and vote for. Without that energy, democracy is dead. And there were a couple of other people that chimed in on this, showing that. Yet Lulu was talking about this. It sounds so basic, but he is. He's too likable to lose friendly demeanor, smiles with his eyes, seems earnest. Being liked outweighs policies, experience nonsensical plans. I just have a good feeling about that person can all can override almost anything. And yeah, I mean it's like he's clearly not an expert in the stuff he talks about, but he's able to play, play the play the same notes. And Solana had a good take on this, this idea that like Cuomo was making very abstract arguments about like Trump and Mamdani was like rent buses like things that people care about for the idea of a mayor. Like what is a mayor even supposed to do about Trump? Like it's so unclear like how that would even track as opposed to like the.

Well I think, I think if you saw what happened in LA and you're more of a if you're in the Karen Bass army, you might think that the mayor does have a responsibility involved.

But even then, like, I think most people in LA would say the mayor would be more responsible for dealing with, like, fires than dealing with whatever happened with Trump. Like, I don't know.

I just think immigration has become a local issue.

Even in New York. They don't have a border with anyone. Like, it's got such an odd thing to. I mean, I get that it animates people, certainly. Like people. People pay attention to it. And so it definitely grabs, like, the attention of folks.

But anyway, it was interesting to see the breakdown by income from the New York Times. Under $50,000 annually, Cuomo was dominating 50,000 to 100,000. Mamdani had six points. And then over 100,000 Mamdani had over 13 points.

The luxury beliefs.

Luxury beliefs. Narrative violation a little bit, but not really, if you're paying attention.

No, no. I mean, this is the, this is the Peter Thiel thesis. This is the thesis of like, who has been failed. It's the people who went to college and are saddled with that, not necessarily the folks who are working class and like, grinding their way up. They're actually, you see this in Miami with like the Cubans that come over and are anti communist because they're like, this is like, yes, I'm making under 50k, but I'm making more than I did last year. And I'm actually upwardly mobile versus the.

Downwardly mobile Lamborghini Urus. Performantes were never made in communist states. So if that is, you know, a sort of ideal, then you would want to aim for, I think. I mean, now is probably a good time to highlight this email from Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Andreessen, and a handful of other Facebook board members in 2020. So Peter says there are many themes that could be developed more here. Let me make a few quick points for now, Nick. I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace millennial attitudes. Unreflectively, I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why. And from that perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me. Namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and. Or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then they may well turn against it. And so. So this sort of explains why there's a certain voting block that is just generally in favor of increasing taxes. And they just gravitate towards that.

Yeah.

In the, you know, sort of feeling like that.

This is Brad Gerstner's Benefit Invest America project. Get you on the capital ladder, accumulating assets and investments early in your life, literally when you're born. And then deregulation of housing to build more, build higher, build bigger. And so that as supply increases, price goes down. Not price controls. That never works. Instead you need to build a ton more. Right. And then. Yeah. With the. And then there's probably a solution to the college debt crisis in the form of underwriting those loans differently. So if you're going to try and major in something that's hard to get a job in, it's a loan to pay for that. But if you want to pay for it yourself, you can.

He did highlight something in one of his videos that I thought was interesting. Apparently the street food vendors oftentimes can't get a permit themselves.

This was their cart.

And so they rent a permit from someone else who just happen to have one.

Yep.

And the permits rent for 8, 17, I think to $22,000 a year is kind of the market rate. And so there's just somebody who's just like rent seeking on a permit that they got a long time ago purely.

Because of the government is inefficient. And I like that. Yeah, he called it. He wants to up a mom and pop czar, basically someone specifically to. To go and basically doge all the local regulation that requires from a single owner operator business in New York City that you want to do something, you want to open a store and it's going to take you six months or a year just to get started. And then there's huge fees and all of those just don't matter and are just. I. So, so I actually love that and I feel like maybe, maybe he tries to do both. Maybe he opens the government run grocery store, he learns his lesson, he learns it the hard way and it fails. But then he has a bunch of.

If he actually does that, the, the meme, the value of the memes that come out of it alone will be incredible.

Yeah. But it's like essentially priceless. We kind of know the economic logic, like the physics of this system, the physics of the economy to the degree that, like, we know it's going to fail, but some lessons have to be learned the hard way. And so that's kind of what Friedberg is getting at. And so, yeah, go and build one government run grocery store. See how that goes. And then, and then go in, wow, I saved.

I saved one and a half percent by, you know, historical grocery store margins are very, very slim. So you could have a grocery store that's like Trader Joe's, except, you know, it's maybe more packed, less well run, dirtier. Like most government, you know, sort of run things are.

You're like, we're going to save one.

And a half percent, which is, which is pretty interesting.

To pass that one and a half percent on to the customer, you have to run it as ruthlessly as the private equity guys that own grocery stores. Right.

Pretty smart guys.

And so they're running their businesses extremely efficiently, and then they're keeping the one and a half percent, so you have to run it as efficiently, and then you can pass on the one and a half percent. But that's the best scenario.

Yeah.

No one's saying that there's 20% to go squeeze out of those things.

Yeah. Paki said. I will say this. If Zoron really can make the city more affordable by simply saying things should be more affordable, a lot of mayors are going to have a lot of explaining to do. And maybe Zoron is taking a page out of Trump's book by just saying, hey, you guys in the oil markets.

Yeah, he's not.

I'm watching you.

Yes, yes.

I'm watching you.

Yeah. Also, I mean, disregards. There's a little bit of, like, truth zone here, because a lot of people are saying, like, he will never make the rents go down, but then they're also saying, like, everyone's gonna leave and rents are gonna collapse. And so, you know, maybe it's a head fake. Maybe he makes. Maybe he makes it so unattractive to live there that people leave. The rents actually do fall.

You had a good, you had a good earlier. Zoron is in favor of the congestion tax.

Yes.

You were saying, what if you implemented just a constant. It was an hourly fee that you pay from being in the New York City congestion tax.

Yes, exactly. On people, on anyone. So if you go there for a day, you know, you're paying $30 an hour. If you're there for the whole year, that's like probably 200, 300k just to live up there. But it's going to. It's going to decrease demand for housing or even totally even stopping by. It's going to decrease tourism.

If you just destroy demand, then price will go down. Price will go down.

Price will go down.

And if that's the goal, maybe something.

There are different ways you can increase supply or you can decrease demand. And, and it does feel like he's at least, at least we're seeing. I don't, I don't actually buy the idea that people are going to be like, yeah, we're moving to Florida or whatever. I think the people that live there are. Are gonna a. He still hasn't won even if he wins, actually getting the stuff through. See, the thing.

The thing is Eric.

Yeah.

Eric Adams is producing a really high volume of iconic moments that are doing well on social. Not really oriented around policy as much as just sort of saying funny things.

Yeah.

But it's resonating.

Yeah.

In a way. And so it could be a much tighter race.

Yeah. What is also like the whole freeze direction. People think, People think he's like, like the immediate proposal will be like, all rent will be frozen forever. It's like there are already rent controlled apartments in New York City. He's just proposing to be like more aggressive. So he's like. All he's saying is like, I will be turning the volume knob to the left, but the volume knob is not necessarily going to go to zero. It's not necessarily going to go to 11 with another. With another mayor. And so I think a lot of this is rhetoric. And when, if he gets in office and tries to implement this, some of this stuff, it'll be blended in certain places over time. I would be surprised if there was like a mass exodus from New York City, but maybe it's. Maybe it's time to go long Miami. Who knows? Anyway, Liz Wolf broke down who she saw canvassing for Zoron. She said she talked to a dozen or so canvassers and they were all so sweet. Also, the vast majority of them were white men in their 30s. Literally all of them were childless. Uh, God bless them all. But there's a fair bit of peer pan syndrome. I'm sensing. I don't know exactly what that means. Um, it is so nice that they think they know how best to design and improve all of our lives, but my goodness, very few of them have big boy jobs or families or real standing in the community. You know, Verm Venmo. Ing a mutual aid fund every once in a while. Ain't it, dog? Maybe I'm extrapolating too much and maybe we'll all become close friends in the breadlines. But Liz writes for Reason magazine. But Zoron's campaign is amateur hour on every level, supported by many folks who don't really understand what their fellow New Yorkers want or need or how this works on a macro level. Interesting. Well, it doesn't matter because they came out and voted and he won the primary. So anyway, Ken Griffin got somewhere.

Gabius says, who's voting for someone that promises city owned grocery stores?

I don't, I don't get that. What is he saying? I mean, a lot of people are.

Like, yeah, no, no, he, he's just, he's just wondering. I don't think he has any. And maybe if he looked in the last 20 people that he texted. Yeah, nobody wanted to do that. So Dan Loeb says it's officially Hot Commie summer.

Yeah.

And.

And Sophie closes it out with Ken Griffin Godzoran elected to pump his Miami real estate bags. 200 IQ move 5D chess. You love it.

Zach Weinberg says true pro crime candidate and cash bail.

It's crazy. Zach Weinberg is quote tweeting Libs of TikTok. That is what's crazy. These posts are five years old. He's completely changed this. He's. He's changed his policies on all this.

So it is interesting though that this is like s. This is like what SF was like basically run on.

Yeah. During the 2020-2025. Yeah. We ran this experiment, you would think.

But maybe he learned from sf.

Yeah. I mean, it does seem like he's pulling back on almost all of these basically, at least in the, in the current rhetoric.

Netcap girl says Ken Griffin got Zoharon elected to pump his Miami real estate bags. 200 IQ move 5D chess. He is investing $1 billion in a. In a complex in Miami.

But also he was never a New York guy. He was a Chicago guy.

Yeah.

So.

Well, and him when he left Chicago, that, that has done material damage to Chicago's.

Yeah. I figured they still had. I figured they still had like a pretty large operation there and they were more just like expanding and growing and you know, re headquartering but. But like still a huge presence in. In Chicago. But maybe they really relocated the whole firm. I mean these. It's hard to relocate a whole firm. You talk to many of the VC firms that like tried to kind of relocate and you know, it's like, oh yeah, we still have a ton of people up in. Up there or Whatever. Anyway, if you're designing your next move, get on figma.com big. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

You can build a website as fast as you can design one. It is magic.

Anyway, in the high finance world, we have news from Jane Street. Gordon Gekko breaks it down, says all this Zoron news is distracting us from the fact that Jane Street.

Do you notice? He says Zohan.

So yes, maybe misspells it. The fact that Jane street tried to overthrow Sudan. So Jane street boss says he was duped into funding a case for coup. And another account says Jane street tried to overthrow the Sudanese government by supplying Harvard educated rebels with AK47s. And you think Mamdani is going to be able to raise taxes? Lmao. Get real. It's a good point. I'm calling, I'm calling for a complete stop on Jane street until we find out more about what exactly OCAML is doing to the brain. I love that because that's their programming language. And Joe Weisenthal says things you never want to say. Hashtag Jane street boss says he was duped into funding AK47s for coup.

Quantium says obviously Harvard never had the juice. But what an embarrassing L for Jane street that they couldn't even successfully orchestrate a coup in a mid sized African country with a deeply unstable government.

It's wild. Well, the story is in Bloomberg and says the indictment reads like a cinematic plot. A Harvard fellow and another activist allegedly wanted to buy AK47s, Stinger missiles and grenades to topple South Sudan's government. What they lacked was enough cash. Now Jane street co founder Robert Grenieri concedes he put up the money saying he was duped into funding the alleged coup plot. The role played by the wealthy recluse behind a Wall street trading powerhouse emerges from the US prosecution of Peter Ajak, the Harvard fellow who was accused last year of scheming to install himself atop the East African nation. What a what? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it does seem like something out of a. Out of a movie. Grenary is a longtime supporter of human, human, human, human rights causes, his lawyer said in a statement. In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist defrauded Rob and lied about his intentions. The case came to light In March of 2024 when federal prosecutors in Arizona charged AJ and Abraham Keach with conspiring to illegally export arms to their home country. Both have pleaded not guilty. While prosecutors haven't said where the defendants obtained several Million dollars for an attempt to buy military grade weaponry. Ajax lawyers pointed to Granary in a recent filing saying the 53 year old financier was vital to the plan. Without the significant financing that Mr. Grenary couldn't agree to provide, the alleged conspiracy would have been impossible. And somehow George Clooney is involved. We're going to get to that in a second. They wrote in the document late May.

Provide the lubricant, the tequila.

I don't. Yeah, I don't know. Here he is.

Pretty.

Yeah, yeah, we'll get to it. I mean, this is a fascinating story. So the lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two black men, even though support also came from Granary and Gary Kasparov, the chess champion and prominent Russian. Russian dissident. The US hasn't accused either of them of wrongdoing. Well, yeah, I mean that makes sense because like somebody comes to you and they ask you to raise. I'm starting a company, rewire them a million dollars to build that and then they go off and do something completely different with the money. Like you're definitely a victim in that scenario. But I guess the question is like, did they know more? And that's what this article is digging into. But it feels a little, I don't know, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence here. Let's continue to dig in. So Kasparov came to know Ajak when the chess master was the chair of the Human Rights Foundation. He later connected Ajax with Granary, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified. My record and my values are clear and they remain unchanged, Kasparov said in a statement sent by a spokesperson. I have spent much of my life standing up for civil rights and promoting democracy around the world. To industry outsiders, Jane street is probably best known as the former employer of Sang Bangman Free. That's not how people know Jane Street. They know them as the maintainer of ocammel, of course, the programming language, of course. And also a high frequency trading firm. You should know about Jane Street. But yes, sbf also sponsor of Dwarkesh Patel's podcast. That's right. There's so many different reasons to know Jane street besides sbf. That's ridiculous. But I guess SBF is the most like headline grabbing, so Bloomberg needs to write it that way. But across Wall street, the marketing, the market making firm is a source of fascination. Known for turning mathematicians into traders who mint profits generated. It generated $20 billion in net trading revenue last year, helping it leap past the likes of bank of America and Citigroup. Wow. They're making more money than B of A. That is crazy mogged. Despite Jane Street's ascent in the industry, Greenery has kept a low profile. He's got to go on the Door Cash Flow podcast. You know, they're connected.

He's founder's podcast.

I mean, yeah, the new show would be great for that. I mean, there's a bunch of shows that invest like the best he'd be great on. Hopefully he can come out and tell the full story.

He might have to do a press tour.

He should. I mean, he should just to talk about OCaml and he's like, the two.

Was a small bet in a large portfolio and I was misled.

I don't think there's any evidence of that. It's alleged. Alleged.

Alleged pledge. Of course. Anyway, no, I think it's totally believable that he would meet some charismatic young people that have a record of caring about human rights abuse and make some type of donation to them for their cause, and then they could turn around and use those funds for something that he had no awareness of.

Yeah, I mean, it's frustrating.

It makes sense that people that would try to throw overthrow a government would want to drag down, you know, anybody that they could and try to drag them into the mud and start wrestling.

Yeah. I mean, this happens literally all the time. Because once the money's wired into a nonprofit, it's very hard to track. Like, okay, did you hand out the mosquito nets? Or did you buy a yacht? Like, okay, now I need a. Now you wire. Part of what makes Silicon Valley so great is like, you have a handshake deal, you sign a safe, and there's kind of an expectation that I don't need to check up and make sure that you're not defrauding me. It's pretty rare that true fraud happens because Silicon Valley is built on trust. But when you're gallivanting around the world, even if you are trying to invest in humanitarian efforts all over the place, much harder to keep tabs on every single deal you've done or every single donation you've made. It's very hard.

Yeah. And if it was effectively a donation, I don't know the exact mechanic, then he's way less likely to pay attention to it because he thinks he's donating to a good cause.

Yeah, totally, totally.

And he's not trying to generate a return. He might ask, be more inclined to be like, hey, investor update. What's going on?

Yeah, if you're a Seed investor in ftx. And the company grows and grows and grows. And then you're starting to see that, wait, how is Alamedia linked exactly? Like, this is material. This is, you know, this is $500 million to me now. It's not just a fire anymore. You wake up, I need to dig in.

Four years later, you're surrounded by journalists.

Well, Grenary is certainly worried about being surrounded by journalists. He's kept a low profile. He's one of the firm's four founders. I didn't know this. He's the only one still there. He's not featured on the company's website in public photos of him.

We got to figure out what the other three founders are doing because if they're.

Imagine they just made no money and they're just like PMs at big tech or something. They just didn't bast out. Yeah, they just like, yeah, we had a cliff and I didn't hit it. They bailed. Somehow, I don't think that's what's going on. The firm success has allowed Grenary to pour money into other ventures and causes. He helped build the Scarlet Pearl, a casino resort on the Gulf of. On the Gulf coast in Mississippi. What a funny place to park. I mean, it's probably a good business.

It's voted best casino resort.

We gotta go to the Jane Street Casino, get in there, do some high frequency slots. Let's do it. He was a major financial backer for Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and has donated to the Equal Justice Initiative and the Institute for Justice. He also channeled money into causes Kasparov backed around the globe. So he's buddies with Gary Kasparov. South Sudan is slightly larger than France. Became the world's youngest country after seceding from Sudan in 2011 following more than 20 years of civil war. And there's a photo of George Clooney here. The bloody regional conflict. We're getting to George Clooney. We're going to explain how George Clooney is related. So the bloody regional conflict displaced millions of people, drew attention from human rights activists and gained mainstream awareness after actor George Clooney championed intervention in the early 2000s. Despite emerging as an independent nation, stability still eludes its people. Big lesson in there for regime change. Like, this stuff is hard. Like, clearly in this scenario, like there was enough, there was enough momentum to create an entirely new country and they were still actually setting up a robust democracy. It was difficult and they didn't get there. So AJAC aimed to change that. After escaping life as a child soldier in Sudan in the 1990s, he resettled in the United States as one of the Lost Boys. He went to study at Harvard, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government before returning to Sudan as a World bank economist. Pretty sick After South Sudan's independence, Ajak became a prominent opposition activist and political prisoner there, later seeking asylum in the United States. One sticking point in the court case is how much, if anything, the US Authorities knew about Ajak and Kich's alleged plan to topple South Seas. Sudan's government attorneys for both men have signaled in court that they plan to pursue a public authority defense, essentially claiming that US Officials had supported their plan, prosecutors said AJAC was told by the State Department in October of 2023 that it wouldn't fund plans for non democratic regime change. AJ and Keech are accused of forging ahead regardless for that they needed financial backing. The financing took shape early last year amid a flurry of meetings. Some were at the law firm of Paul Hastings, where Ajax former pro bono attorney Renata Paras worked, according to a May filing. Another attendee was public relations specialist Michael Holtzman, who previously advised the State Department.

Is Michael the Is he like the Lulu of overthrowing governments of the deep.

State of the State Department? Something like that, maybe based on the government's indictment of Peter, it would say seem he lied to me and others about his intentions from the outset, holtzman said in a statement. Paris didn't request didn't respond Request for comment the search for cash culminated in a midtown Manhattan condominium building that February, according to prosecutors. That's where Grenary first met Ajak the next day, charging charging documents allege Ajax sent an encrypted message to an undercover agent, writing, we are getting the funding. The financier later transferred $77 million in two stages, according to people with knowledge of the payments. Within a few weeks of the condo meeting, prosecutors say Ajak and Keech inspected a cache of weaponry inside a Phoenix warehouse. They were soon arrested.

That is so gnarly and I'm disappointed that the story is ending here.

I know, I know, I was like but certainly there's six more pages of this story. This is fascinating cliffhanger. Anyway, let's take a break to tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance Manage Risk, Prove Trust Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, there is an M and a bombshell hitting the Timeline that no pun intended. Shell is in turn in early talks to acquire rival British Petroleum bp. But Shell denies the Wall Street Journal's report that it's in talks to acquire bp. So we have a little bit of an update to the story and M and A just in the last 20 months. Morning Brew is breaking it down here. Shell, BP is clocked at maybe 80 billion, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a $60 billion M&A deal. Chevron and Hess deal still pending, but it's a 53 billion D back and endeavor. Don't even know those companies, but $26 billion deal there. ConocoPhil and Marathon at 17 billion and Occidental and Crown Rock at 12 billion. So if you think the AI M&A deals are hot, you got to go over to big oil.

Big Oil, oil and gas, Big tech.

Big oil, Big pharma. These are the industries with the, the big dollars get thrown around. They don't, they don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the, in the decacorn exchanging business.

True.

Pretty interesting. So the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP. BP jumped 7% and Shell dropped 2.6%. I want to know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5% on the day. How is Shell, how is BP doing over the week or the month? This is the week. Okay.

Yeah, they've both kind of retraced since Shell said. Nah, we're not talking at all.

So by market cap, Shell's around 207 billion, BP's around 87 billion. Those are big companies. Big, big companies. Anyway, we can run through the, the Wall Street Journal's report here, but first, if you're planning a complex post merger integration, you gotta get on linear.

John, your commitment to just use linear for everything is.

No, but of course if you're, if you're building, if you're building modern software, if you need to streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps, you gotta get on linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. And plus they got linear for agents. But you know oil and gas companies do.

You're worried about getting paper clipped.

They should be on linear.

If you're worried about getting paperclipped, get your agents on linear. They will thank you for it.

Yeah. So a deal for BP, which has a market value of roughly 80 billion, would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies. Super major is a better term than mag 7. In my opinion. We need that for the tech companies, the super majors. Super majors?

Oh, you're in the major leagues.

I'm in the super majors, so. Good. So talks between company representatives are active according to people who are familiar with the matter. Leak into the Wall Street Journal and BP is considering the approach carefully. Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. It would be a landmark combination of two so called super major oil companies, A group of multinational behemoths that dominate the production of the world's most important energy sources. Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned and a tie up is far from certain. But the discussions are moving slowly. BP is currently valued around 80 billion. Taking into account a premium, a deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the $83 billion mega merger that created ExxonMobil at the turn of the century. It would also be easily the biggest M and A deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by President Trump's antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the.

Do you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon bill?

Yeah, I remember tracking it very closely in the Thunder Horse tracks.

Were you monitoring the situation?

I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading Equity Research reports about BP from the, from the sell side banks and I, and I understood it to the level of knowing that the, that the tract that they were, that they were drilling into was called the Thunder Horse tract, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into.

Crazy. Total costs associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup, fines and settlements reached approximately 65 billion. So nearing their total enterprise value.

Massive moment. Also great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie. Deepwater Horizon.

Is it a documentary?

No, it is a, it is a, it is a, you know, non fiction recreation but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the, on the oil rig and I believe or. It's awesome. It's, it's a really, really great movie. Highly recommend it. A Shell spokesperson said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing validation, the value, capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline and simplification.

Wow. Nice.

Yeah, fantastic. Basically saying like, no comment, but you know, also like we're, we're shilling for Shell over here. We're shilling for Shell.

A TVPN spokesman said, as we have said Many times before. We are sharply focused on capturing the value in TBPN through continuing to focus on performance, discipline and simplification.

John, we should never, you should never decline to comment. You should always just do it. Just do it. Bake it into the LLM.

Switch your business to ramp.com do you have any comments on your intern allegedly you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government. Switch your business.

As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Shell comes into the talks from operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, which like BP is based in the United Kingdom but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than $200 billion. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. It's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters. And so it seems like actually their, their desire, their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business. Oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because like the, the those M and A sell side research reports that I was reading during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the long term impact of that crisis on the stock immediately. So it was priced into the stock very quickly and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off. But then they were kind of set up to kind of rebuild and there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years. And so more recently Elliott Management, which owns more than 5% of BP shares, has pushed for changes at the energy companies.

Interesting though, BP had been performing.

Not.

You know, had basically been down only for since the financial crisis and then Deepwater Horizon hit and it was just.

Down even when asked publicly. Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big deal making would be high. Shell in May announced a multi billion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases. Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and the U.S. the Wall Street Journal previously reported. For Shell, acquiring BP would take years of integration complicated by culture clashes and possibly the sale of overlapping assets. But a deal could give Shell's global trading business greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas like liquefied natural gas. Analysts and investors also see a good matchup in the company's Gulf of Mexico operations, which the US now calls the Gulf of America. That's right. That's right. All the oil companies had to change all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg News reporting, I think it's sticking. Yeah. Until the next election. And there'll be a new EO and it'll go back to something else.

Well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it.

Yeah.

Something other than the Gulf of America.

Well, there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing. I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going. And media is obviously evolving very quickly and I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different, different things. But what I came to was maybe this idea that, that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that like it is not available to everyone. They are in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it. And so that kind of puts it in the same league as, you know, ultra high net worth wealth management products or even high horology Rolexes that are in demand. People, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them at lax. The clocks are Rolexes. Or if you go to an F1 match, you'll see a lot of advertisements.

Yeah, tech will put an ad for the cubitus in an airport.

Every issue of the Economist comes with an ad for basically a holy trinity watch on the back, whether it's Vacheron or AP or Patek. But you can't just go and buy those. And so it's very odd that they're doing this luxury brand building without a product that you can just immediately go buy. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my, my thought was that maybe, maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into.

Well, yeah, let's talk about the current strategy.

Right.

The current strategy is post on X.

Yes.

Go on podcasts.

Yes.

You can start your own podcast.

Yes.

Many people have done that.

Yes.

The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted by making a wide variety of investments and that has to inform, inform their opinion on different markets. And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard because you can't go on there and say XYZ company is clearly dominating. If you look at the data and you look at what customers are saying when you, if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back. And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great media products because of that conflict. Now you can still get around this, right? And there's different ways and there's different approaches. You can do an interview show which allows you to. But that's just like one type of content.

And the problem with that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guest, the other person. So it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe?

Yeah, yeah. So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing, you can't get away from it. It's all marketing all the way down. Now these sort of subcategories I think that are interesting. I've always said that Sam Lesson, right, he's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates, he has a unique media product. In the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord. And some people, it resonates with them. Other people want to dunk, but it is an effective format in order to provide commentary and it's very efficient. Right. He doesn't need a big marketing team to actually pull that off. So I think it's super key to find a specific format. But then the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves, you could do something like what you're talking about.

Yeah. When I think of like the four really great or like a few really great VC marketing examples, I think of Zero to One by Peter Thiel. He's never tweeted, but he's tweeted once and it was a link to his book and that book was such a good outcome that it sold in airport bookshops. Right. And he just dropped an amazing book and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of building his brand. Naval has a similar story where his Twitter posts, the how to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky went so viral. And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book. But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near term thesis or they're not news products, they're reflections on how the world works. Reflections on like timeless principles. Right. Then I think about Paul Graham's blog. It's not on a regular cadence. You know, it's not a weekly substack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on like, how did Steve Jobs run his company? And maybe he'll draw, maybe he'll like pump his bags a little bit by like talking about Airbnb, but he's talking about like what Airbnb did in like 2009 or something. And it's like, it's completely irrelevant and it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm getting a buy rating on the stock right now.

It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct.

Exactly.

Some of the early writing I feel like, and even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true.

Yeah, 100%. And it's not. And he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release. He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago. And it's reflective and I think that that works really well. Marc Andreessen. Similarly, the ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op ed is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that, that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be like formulated from a team necessarily.

Yeah.

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

Thompson newsletter.

Yeah, exactly.

But like, but I think aligning with these iconic properties.

Yeah. People who are doing their life's work.

Full page ad in the Journal.

But most importantly, like, like when, when Patek Philippe sponsors the Economist, they are not trying to shoot, shift the economists coverage towards like being more bullish on Swiss watches. They're just like, we don't even know what you're going to put in this issue. We're just going to be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of the.

So, John, a full page color ad in the journal costs around $248,000.

Yes.

Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, like truly great producer for, for their own show. And so is it going to be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the Journal for a day or have your own podcast?

Yeah. And there are more narrow properties too that are like, the Journal is extremely broad in all of business, but there really are more narrow products that would work. But every time they've gotten there, it's been misaligned around like, like, like what the actual coverage is. But I don't know. Maybe we'll see. Maybe we'll see an F1 team. Maybe we'll see JetSuite X the terminal, like sponsored by a VC firm. That would make a lot of sense. Like you got in, in Silicon Valley at the jetsuite X terminal and boom, you're presented with a, an ad for a VC firm. I don't know. We'll see. We'll keep covering something there.

Well, we have David Tenra coming into the studio. We're going to ask him about VC marketing. We're going to ask him about the New York election. We're going to ask him about all the things that you've been just waiting to get senator's opinion on. Because he cares so much about current events. That's all he cares about. Venture capital and current events.

Yep. That's his job.

What's going on?

Can you hear me?

Yeah. Yeah.

The great Malibu blackout of 2025. So I went to our mutual friends and passed esteemed past TP band guest Rob Moore's house. He's lucky enough to let me post up here on my laptop and talk to you guys. So we gotta thank Rob.

Neighbor. Your neighbor.

I was wondering if you. If you were renting a house, how you got so many books lined up already, but it makes sense.

Could you imagine?

No.

I told him we were looking for places to, to set up just now. I was like, dude, you can't beat this background. Like this library that has this house. Incredible.

Yeah.

The only thing I, the only thing I like is when people, they organize their bookshelves by color. It drives me fucking insane. So that's the only thing, whoever designed.

A great job that you don't actually read is just organize it by pretty colors.

It bothers me. They should organize it by Episode number like everybody else does. Like I do in my house.

Yeah, but if not, if you're not making a podcast, what is the logical better way to order? Is it alphabetical? Is it by year?

No, no, no, no. I used to do it by. In order that I read it. And so you kind of see your interests evolve over time.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you have a. And then you have a separate. Separate, like, intake shelf for things that you haven't read.

Yeah, I'm reading the bottom half of my. All my bookshelves is the one that I record at my home. Like the. The studio they use. It's all unread books. So it's like an order by episode number. Then the bottom, like, I don't know, two. One third is just unread books. And then anything out on any bookshelves in the living room is all unread books. I have, like, 600 now. I have to stop buying them.

Yeah. When are you going to start? Are you going to start, like, printing and binding the materials that you put together for the. For the shows, the episodes that you do that aren't based on a single book?

Yeah, I already do that. So I used to put them in binders, and now I actually send them to a print shop, and they actually do, like, a spiral binding. I actually have something. I'll give you a preview. I don't think I've talked about this publicly. When I went to Charlie Munger's house, I knew I was, like, a biography amateur because he made his own biographies. And so I asked him, like, charlie, can I go through your bookshelf? And there's two realizations of why, like, I. No matter how long I do this, I'll never be as good as he was is. He doesn't take notes. So, like, he would have, like, a random, like, word in, like, every, you know, hundred pages where I have to, like, run through all this stuff, but at the very bottom, because he told me that he thought that the. Remember, you always want to have me to come on here and have this debate about who's the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

Goat debate.

The goat debate.

The goat debate. Charlie said that it's obviously Rockefeller and that Standard Oil is the best company ever created. And there was this interview that Rockefeller did at the end of his life, and the transcript of it is, like, 1700 pages long. And Charlie printed it out and put it into binders. And so I actually. A friend of mine who does this podcast called the Rainmaker Pod, he found the 1700 page transcript for me. And then. So if you go to my house right now, it's going to take me months to do this, but I have a 1700 page, essentially 1700 pages of Rockefeller's own words. So that's probably going to be the longest episode of Founders I'll ever do. It's probably, you know, it's probably like five hours long or something. So. Yeah, I already do make them.

Why wouldn't you just break it up into multiple episodes?

Maybe I should. No, I think, I don't think. I think I'd break it up into multiple recordings because sitting down, if you see like if I do an hour long episode, right. That, you know, usually I'll talk for like two or two and a half hours. Like I kind of do like. You ever heard of Rick Rubin's idea of like the Ruthless edit? Yeah, I thought it was like really interesting. He's got this highlight when he went on Lex Friedman's podcast. I thought it was really good where he's working with an artist and he's like, hey, let's say you make 30 songs. Let's just assume we can only fit five, five on the album. What are the five best ones? And so then they put the five on that and I'm like, okay, if we're going to add to these five, maybe number six has to be really good. And so now you have 25 to pick through them. What's the six like the next one that's just as good. And I think going through and like ruthlessly editing everything is really important, especially if you want a high value audience because they just don't have a bunch of time to like just churn through shit. It's just like your job. It's like what you're doing for them.

Yeah, there's something interesting there about like, I don't have all the numbers, but I feel like some recording artists, you'll hear stats like there were 12 songs on the album and they recorded 200 songs before they.

Oh no. So this is actually the episode I want to talk to you guys about, which is Michael Ferreira or Michele Ferreira, but I'm going to use the American, the English translation. I mentioned that in the episode that being prolific is highly coordinated with greatness. Just because you're prolific doesn't mean you're great. But if you're great at what you do, you're undoubtedly prolific. And so I'm reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography right now and there's a lot of crazy stuff in there. Other than like, the thing is like this thick. And he wrote it out by hand multiple times. He wanted to make sure every sentence was like, should be in the book. And so he'd like. The only way to force him to do that is to rewriting, like, what kind of psycho does that? The psycho that's probably, you know, recorded thousands of songs and only published maybe less than 10%. I just read Prince's autobiography, which is the strangest autobiography ever read. I can't even do an episode on it because I don't understand it. But when he died, he had so many unreleased songs in his vault that he could release a new album every year for the next century.

Wow.

So you see this over and over again with like, Michael Ferrero, who essentially, like, I'll just give you, like the high level thing because most people have never heard of him and there's no biographies in English of him. So my friend Cameron Priest, who's another psycho that reads all these other biographies, he translated from Italian for me. And Ferrero owned 100% of his company. The company does $20 billion a year in revenue, no outside shareholders. He worked on it from the age of 19 until he died 89. So he has got 70 years of experience in building his company. He vertically integrated the entire thing. He went to absurd lengths. He wound up monopolizing hazelnut production in the world. So, like one out of every three hazelnuts went to his company, Ferrero. And then he also became the largest not only producer of hazelnuts, but he also sold them to other companies.

But one thing, by the way, it is. It's a great one under discussed.

He. This is the guy that invented Nutella Tic Tacs, Ferrero Roche, the Kinder brand of chocolate. He's like the real life Willy Wonka. He would commute to work by helicopter because he lived in Monaco. Right. This is something it sounds like Jordy would do. Jordy came to my house yesterday and I'm watching Up the Hill and I see this, the tpbn, all black Maybach.

And so Michael Ferreira is pulling into your palatial house.

That part. So the funny thing is this guy lived in Monaco, right? And. And he actually moved because he grew up in rural Italy. He grew up poor, which is really fascinating. But there was all these kidnapping attempts in Italy, so he's worried about, you know, being. He was the richest person in Italy for a very long time. One of the richest people in the world. This, the joke is like, I titled the episode like, oh, Michael Ferrero and his $40 billion, you know, chocolate empire. Because if you Google them, they're like, oh, Ferrero's worth 40 billion? No, it's worth multiples of that. The guy's doing like, it's insane what that company would sell for. And his son still owns all of it. And so anyways, this guy would commute from, he was so obsessed with quality. He would commute from Monaco by helicopter and go to every single one of his factories where the product was produced and insist on tasting the, the like what they're producing that day himself. Because he says, like, you have to control the quality yourself. He was completely obsessed. But the reason I bring up the Prolific part is because in his lifetime he ran tens of thousands of different experiments on different like mixtures of the stuff that he's making. And in one case, like they said, hey, he'd get in the tasting room, which he considered his secret laboratory at like 8 in the morning. He'd stay till dusk. They would cover like they'd run experiments all day on one single, one of their products. And they'd run like 70 to, you know, over 100 experiments on, on one single product each day. So this like idea of being prolific, you see it over and over again. Like how many, how many three point shots Steph Curry put up in practice? How many songs has Bruce Springsteen written? How many different iterations did Steve Jobs do on his products throughout his lifetime? It's, it's just incalculable.

Yeah, the Prolific thing is fascinating. I feel like there's, there's a massive underrated hack in just doing something daily if you can work it into your lifestyle. Like, I'll give you two funny examples. Are you familiar with Beeple, the NFT artist? So he made a 3D rendering every day for the first thousand days. It was like, it was multiple years, it was almost like a decade of work. And then, and then he was, he was at a point where his career was, was taking off. He had been mentioned on Joe Rogan, his Instagram was growing, he was getting a consulting gigs to do motion design and rendering consultancy for like the Super Bowl. So he was like making good money as a, as a commercial artist. But then when his work went, went, went to auction during the NFT Boom, he made $70 million like that. And it was just all the value captured.

69 million.

Yeah, yeah. But he sold some other stuff. So I think he walked away with like 70 million. He famously like swapped it into USD immediately because he was like, not, I don't think he was like a crazy crypto person, but he just realized that, like. Like, I've been building for this forever. This is the time to value capture, and so I'm going to do it. The other funny one is Jake Paul. Jake Paul has that. Has that rap song. It's Everyday bro. Often lampooned online, but it really does. If you. If you flip it around to. Instead of asking the question of, like, do you like Jake Paul's work personally as an artist to just. Why is Jake Paul successful? Why is he. He. The name that we know. It's very clear that he was vlogging every single day for years and got extremely, extremely good at it. And it built up this muscle where he can produce something, and it just got better and better and better and better and better until he was able to just dominate the Internet.

There's a quote, there's a clip going around about Michael Phelps about this, where on his run, when he became the most dominant swimmer of all time, he's just like, any day that I took off put me behind two days. And so there's this idea of just. And he went through, like, his schedule and he's. I forgot he had the numbers. Like, you know, a couple thousand workouts.

Yeah.

Per every. Like, to get ready for Olympics. Like, he count. Counted how many workouts that he did. Yeah. There's actually the idea of being prolific. Have you guys had Jackson Dahl on the show yet?

Not yet. We got him.

We've invited him a couple times. But it. It. We're working on it. Our people are talking to his people.

Okay, perfect. Because he actually has a tweet about this I think is really important. Important. And. And I think Jackson's doing an excellent job. Like, he's one of the best. He has one of the best new podcasts, Dialectic, and I've been talking to him a lot about his podcast as much as possible. I just saw him in New York last week, but he talked about that I'm just gonna read this trope or read this tweet, rather. He says when you never linger anywhere or on anything, you don't get the chance to sink into the feeling of it, to trace the grooves, to notice what little details you love can be improved. And so Jackson, from his posts and his podcast, obviously, he's a very soulful dude. But I think one of the things I took away from Ferrero and any really, like, what I'm trying to do with the podcast is like, hey, they don't write biographies about people's lives that do Something for like a year or two or five years. It's like, in almost any case, at the very minimum, you know, it's two, three, four decades of their lives that they dedicated something. And in Ferrero's case, it's like seven decades. So when he was able to improve, I mean, when I talk about vertical integration, it's like he took it to another extreme where it's like, I'm going to monopolize all the raw materials that my product needs. But then, like, he wouldn't. He. He also had to be one of the first people to. To mass produce chocolate. And so he invented his own machines. And so it starts out like, you don't do that unless you're spending so much of your life thinking about what you're doing and focus. This extreme level of focus. And he applied it to marketing, to distribution logistics, to the machines that he built. And he talked about having a love affair. He thought like the robots he buil.

Soul the way he talked about AGI.

It's really funny because he comes of age and after World War II, right? So he's in his early 20s in post World War II Italy, where there's not even electricity. It's, like hard. There was two machines that the company had that, that could. Had enough power to run electricity. At the beginning. Everything else had to be done by hand. And then when he started talking about this love affair that he has with these robots that make this product that he deeply loves and cares about, I'm like, oh, there's another obsessive guy that came of age after World War II. It's almost the same age that was in Italy and that built one of the best brands in the world and worked until his die. Until he died. It was Enzo Ferrari.

Ferrari, Literally Ferrari.

Yeah. When Enzo built his first car, it talks about in his biography, it's like he couldn't even find electricity. Imagine trying to build the best race car and you don't even access to electricity.

Wow.

It's just incred. It's incredible. And then there's a great post picture on Twitter that I think I retweeted one time where it's like Enzo Ferrari's house that he builds right here. And then around his house is the test track. What work, life, balance does this guy have? He just like, it's. He's in his kitchen and he's my.

My, my favorite thing. You know, people. People hit 30 and they're like, oh, is it too late for me? It's like, Enzo didn't start Ferrari until he was 45.

That's.

Well, he, I don't know if he was a 45.

He was working, he was working in, in racing the brand and start.

Well, the funny part about that is he didn't actually give a. About the cars other than like he cared that they went fast and they won races, but he realized I just have to sell them to rich Americans so I can fund the racing. And so like, there's that. We talked about this a few weeks ago when I was on here. He has that great quote. He's just like, I don't care if the door gap is there. I just care that when the driver hits the gas, he shits his pants because he just wanted to go fast.

Yeah. I want to dig into the idea of focus more. I was, I was texting with someone earlier today and they were, they were asking. I was like, they're like, you have so many opportunities. You could start companies, you could raise funds. Like, why are you just focused on media? And I was like, well, really, like probably David Senra. Like, I've studied all the history's greatest entrepreneurs and just kind of realized that they all focus.

So David Senra studied history. Yes, he told me we can study David Senra.

Exactly, exactly. But, but really. But I felt like I was saying something so stupid and because I was just like, well, it's. The pattern of success everywhere is that there's focus and, and it's like it should be mind blowing and let. And yet we're talking, we're talking about people all day long who like love your podcast but don't actually go in focus and they don't actually do it. And so I'm interested in like the parameters of focus because Michael Ferraro Ferrero did, did branch out into Nutella and Kinder and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs. But it's all within the same empire. And you've seen that with, with Steve Jobs. And so there are areas where you can have multiple products within the same organization, the same focus. But your, but your, your, your impact or the output is slightly different. Yeah. And I think that struggle with that because the people will often justify. Well, like having a, having a fund and a startup and actually like three startups is all part of my focus on my massive empire. And it's like, are you really focusing is always the question.

I mean, I think the person that's built the most impressive company in our lifetime is Jeff Bezos. You know, like, obviously. And I have Starlink in my house and all that stuff. It's just like if we look at like what he started out at, the just financial performance of it, like all the complex logistics behind it and all the different businesses. And so like I just, if you're going to do that, I just think you just, just follow Bezos lead. Literally reread his shareholder letters, which I'm going to do every year. I think I've done four episodes on the now. I think, you know, I think the greatest description of that was just like reading Bezos shareholder letters is like the person like getting like a history lesson from the person that mastered a high growth Internet startup before the playbooks are written, you know, and he kind of like just tells you what he's going to do and then just goes and does it. But for like Ferrero in his case, it's like it depends on your level of ambition. And I don't mean this isn't like a derogatory way at all. Like I'm just happy like building like my little podcast that I'm completely obsessed with now. My business can scale. There's like millions of millions of people listen to it. So like my impact can grow assuming I'm good at and other people tell. But like there's another life where I think Ferrero would be like a Jiro, where he's just like, no, I'm just going to Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I'm going to have a, you know, a 10 seat sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway and I'm going to be the best in the world. But Ferrero had different ambitions where like he grew up poor. He never forgot what it was like to be impoverished. And his, and everybody around him was like, hey, you're dominating Italy. Like why don't you just stay there? And he's like, no, I'm going to build a global brand if we don't. He said this multiple times. He's like, if we don't expand outside of Italy, then we have failed. And he wanted to be one of the, not only the best chocolate company, but he wanted to be one of the biggest. And when he died, the day before he died, actually dies on Valentine's Day, which is, you know, somewhat like ironic maybe is the wrong word. But he, he wind up being the third largest confectionary business in the world the day before he died. And so yeah, I think it just really depends on like what you do now. There's also these, this really interesting thing where like people do a bunch of small things and are, are like they'll do like a bunch of small startups. It just depends on who you are as a person, though. Like, I don't really have an opinion on them other than, like, I am the kind of person that just wants to focus on one thing, work on it seven days a week, think about it when I wake up, think about when I go to bed. I can't. I'm just not interested in working on multiple things. But I think so when people hear my lifestyle and how I try to focus, like, I've heard people have literally told me, they're like, they find it disgusting. Like, that lifestyle.

Like, they literally.

That's the word they use.

Like, this is disgusting. Like, the world's a big place, I have other interests. And I'm like, that's fine. But I'm trying to, like, be narrowly focused and the best in the world at what I do. And so I think if you got distracted, you want to be the best in the world.

If you got distracted and you were. You had a fund and you were spending all this time with LPs, you wouldn't have spent yesterday, part of yesterday, just reading, which is.

Allows you to just every day reading. Like, before I met with Rob just now, like, you know, we picked this time for a specific reason. Because every morning, if you call me in the morning, you know what I'm doing. First of all, it's going right to voicemail because my phone's on DND and I'm reading. My job is very simple. It's just like, wake up every day, wake up, work out, then read one of Biography officials for three to four hours. Then you can have lunch and then reread past highlights in the afternoon and then do it again over and over again seven days a week. It's just like, you couldn't get more simple than that.

Yeah, there's also the element of, like, you probably shouldn't add a second thing or a second project until you've really nailed the first and you're creating something that's great and then you kind of earn the right to work on the second thing. Like, I'm sure that if I go through for the history here, like, it's not like Nutella and Ferrero Rocher and Tic Tacs. Those were all the same year. It's probably that Nutella was, was absolutely an oiled machine, a banger company doing great, and then that earned the right to go kind of add on the second skew and still that's all within the same company.

So let me give for Example, everybody I have this week, last week, two months ago, two years ago, I have all the big publishers in my inbox saying, please write a book, please write a book. Because I also sell at the podcast obviously sells a lot of books. The audience is full of entrepreneurs, investors, entrepreneurs, investors probably read 100 times as much as the average population. The average reputation doesn't read at all. And all the best entrepreneurs and investors are reading all the time. And my idea was just like, I'm never going to write a book because that's not a podcast. Now there's a founder's book being written right now. I can actually tell a story because this has to do with this little company that I know you guys happen to know and are a big fan of called ramp.

Let's go.

So let me tell you a Ramp story and I wish you guys would repost that video you had when you did the Ramp.

Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp.

Ramp soundtrack right here. You want to hear it?

Yes. Can I hear it using Ramp?

Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp.

We'll send you the file. We'll get it on Spotify.

No, no, I, I, you should put it on Spotify. I, I played, I saved the video and I play it for my son. And like for a few days after that, dude, he ran around the house.

Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp.

He doesn't even know what it is. And he knows like Kareem and everybody else. Like, he plays, our sons play together. So the funny part was I'll tell you about the founders book and the issue of Focus is me and Patrick did this event at Ramps headquarters in New York and it's a guy named like Wooter. I can't pronounce his name. Oh, yeah, but he's like this new podcaster guy and he's like, he went and spent like thousands of dollars. He listened to every single episode of Founder, spent thousands of dollars design work, and then flew from like the Netherlands or some shit to New York to hand me the book. He's trying to launch a podcast and like, we, you know, we talk about this all the time. Most people get podcasting are really lazy. This guy, like, tried to do an episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew's like, oh, sorry. He like pushed him off. He's like, oh, I only do it in person. He goes, okay, it's fine. Wooter flies 15 hours, microphone in hand, does that, interviews. Eric gliman writes a 40 page book on the history of Ramp and gives it to him before the podcast. So I think I'm attracted to people that take what they do seriously. And efforts always rewarded. So what happened was he shows up at this event and Patrick now knows what he did. I introduced him to Kareem, and Kareem was there. Eric already knew him. And so after the event, me, Patrick, Kareem and Eric spent time with this young kid. I think he's in his early 20s. They think about the value of like getting Eric and Kareem's time. They're running a $16 billion company. Like, all the crazy shit that's going on. Those guys work seven days a week. And now because you were so, you had so much effort, you have these guys literally like counseling you and giving you advice for free. And so what I told him, I was like, listen, if you willing to make a world class book, I'm talking about like, like what our friend Eric Jorgensen did with the Almanac and evol. That book changed my life. Like, I read that all the time. I hand it out like it's candy. I was like, if you want to build that for the stuff you feel you've learned on founders and it's, you make something I am comfortable reading that I want myself. I will advertise it for you for free on the podcast.

What?

We have to put it for free? Just like, what naval did you put it? Anybody can read it for free online. If you want to buy a copy, you can buy a copy. And any money you make off the book is yours to keep. I don't want to make money off the fucking. I don't care about that. But I am interested in. Because people have asked for it. One, I, I can't be a bottleneck. Two, you're willing to do all the work. And then I want something out there that, you know, it's a tangible, like lessons for the, for the podcast. And I think it'd be cool to help this like, young kid that's really trying to hustle and trying to like, do something with his life and to be like, to the degree that I can be like, hey. And I, I already hear the ad in my head, like, I'll tell the story and just like, if you, you know, have 20 bucks burning a hole in your product or whatever it is, or in your pocket, whatever it is, like, let's support this kid. Like, buy companies, buy them for your entire company. But yeah, that I, I think that's a way to like, get something into the world, but not take away from the focus I must have on, you know what? I feel I was put on this earth to do.

Love it.

FedEx.

Oh yeah, bro, I am so sad. Me and Rob were talking about that like that. I didn't get a chance to meet Fred Smith when he, he passed away. He's got the craziest. I'm gonna. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna re edit. It's episode 151 of founders. When I read Fed Fred Smith's biography, which is one of the craziest biographies you can ever find, it's really hard. The book is out of print. I will read the opening paragraph for your audience real quick because I think it's like worth. It's just people don't understand, like everybody sees the planes, everybody sees the trucks, but they don't understand how difficult it was to build that company. The opening paragraph of this.

When, when, when, when we were reviewing what the initial operation looked like, how capital intensive it was, how, how crazy. Just like managing the, the logistics.

Insane logistics dance.

The idea that you could do that and make money.

The hub and spoke model is the.

The guy that wrote the book. His name is Vance Trimble. He also wrote a biography of Sam Walton. And he wrote Sam Walton first, then Fred Smith. And he goes, oh my God. Like, I thought Walmart was difficult to build, but Fred. But FedEx is like, if you had to build Walmart, you could build one Walmart at a time, then expand. He's like. The analogy he used in the book was like, FedEx is like, if you had to from day one, you had to have a thousand Walmarts or it doesn't work.

Yeah.

Let me just read this opening paragraph because it's so nuts. The guy that does my short form videos, which I think are really, really good, and I think he's a genius, just sent me, literally right before I got on, he texted me one that he did on Fred Smith. So I'll put it out later today. But this is the opening paragraph of the crate. This is still the craziest beginning of any biography that I've ever read. And it says, at age 30, Fred Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father's Greyhound bus millions. He was in Hawk for 15 or 20 million dollars more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also his wife. His own board of directors had fired him as CEO and now the FBI accused him of forging papers to get a $2 million bank loan. And he was. And trying to send him to prison. He thought of suicide. That's the first paragraph in the book. It's such a.

He lost his dad at 4. He's a Vietnam War veteran. He had written about FedEx in college. Got an average grade on it.

Took a decade to get from the paper.

You have people like Michael Dell, who's one of my personal heroes and wrote one of the best biographies I've ever read. And in his. His autobiography, he talks about Fred Smith being a hero of his. Like, it's just insane. And there's another paragraph that says, you know, thinking of suicide's ridiculous. He's much more likely, instead of jumping out a window, he's more likely to throw you out of a window. He was just like a relentless dude that was like, you know, just unbelievable. High tolerance for pain, and just refused to quit on this dream of his. And again, like, I just personally find those stories, like, very inspiring. It's like, dude, if this guy can succeed under those circumstances, surely we can keep going on whatever B2B SaaS app we're building.

That's amazing. You want to wrap it up there? Move on? What are you thinking?

No, that was great.

This is fantastic. We'll see you soon, David.

I'll see you later.

Real quick. I just tell you guys every time I see you, I'm excessively proud of everything you guys have done over the last six months. I absolutely love what you've done with tpbn. I'm going to say it every single time you let me on your show. I think you guys are killing it. And I don't expect to see anything different or any. I expect to see you continue to do that for many, many years, to the future. But I tell you guys privately, I'm really proud of you. But I want to tell you publicly, super proud of you guys and very happy that to call you friends, we.

Feel the same way.

Thank you, David.

We love you.

All right, see you next week.

I'll see you later. I'll see you later.

All right.

Yeah, Cheers.

Bye. Speaking of B2B SaaS, let's tell you about Adeo customer relationship magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free@adeo.com. should we bring in our next guest, Yancey from Metalabel Yancy.

Hey, what's going on?

Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

You.

Thanks so much for joining.

Yeah, thank you, thank you. Thank you for the music.

Yes, yes. We're trying to be a real newscast here, I would love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself. I want to go through some of your history then artist corporations. Then we can kind of dig through the more modern era.

Yeah, sure. My name is Yancey Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur. Started out as a music journalist and running a tiny record label and being in the world of early digital music, and then was a co founder of Kickstarter and helped make crowdfunding a thing. Was a co founder and then CEO and very much kind of an accidental entrepreneur who started as a creative person whose idea just took the form of a business and kind of crash coursed in what it meant to make a technology product in a very different era of the Internet and what it meant to build, like, a real marketplace.

What was the first Kickstarter project or the first one that, like, really went big and you kind of watched it unfold and you realized that this would work.

It was three weeks in. It was a musician from Athens, Georgia, named Allison Weiss who was, like, making an EP. She had a $2,000 goal that she smashed through in eight hours. And up until then, we didn't show money. You raised above the goal because why would anybody make more than their goal? Like, just hadn't even occurred to us. And she, like, introduced the first stretch goal that same day. And like, really the. The template that is still what people follow in crowdfunding was like one woman in her dorm room, you know, that really laid the template for how you keep an audience engaged and, like, what you do when the Internet is bringing more love to you than you expected.

What do you think the secret of success to that first $2,000 fundraise was a lot of. A lot of crowdfunding these days, or even. Even if you're building an audience on something like Substack or Patreon, it's like you kind of need the audience already there, and then you go and convert it to money, you know, with some sort of project, and you're kind of building up all this goodwill, and people kind of expect, oh, they're like, I've gotten so much value. It's rare that you see someone come out of nowhere with, you know, a successful project. So what was the story there?

It was that where there had been a page template, she made it come alive. She was funny, she was personable. She talked to camera like, very modern. It feels modern at the time. You're like, whoa, my computer is talking to me. And it just felt very personable and so there's a level of energy that just, she just knew what the Internet wanted and knew how to create that dynamic. And I really still as a role model for, for what I think it is to be a creator online. But it also was a different era of the Internet where people would share links, where, you know, there was that level of generosity and curiosity and it wasn't just like selfies or nothing.

Yeah, yeah. Take me through some of the eras of the Internet.

First, I have a good Kickstarter story. A childhood friend of mine, Miles, came to me when I was just graduating college and he had this crazy idea for consumer product and he pitched it to me. He'd already like basically taken a loan from his parents, a lot of like, basically like college debt level loans for this idea that I thought was completely, I thought it was a little bit silly, a little bit crazy. And he was like, I'm working on this. I'm going to launch it on Kickstarter. You know, do you want to help me with it? And I love Miles. He's always creative and talented, but I didn't get the idea.

Yeah.

And basically like six weeks later he launches on Kickstarter and he did like a million dollars in the first day. And it was just this amazing story. It was so incredible to watch him take this massive risk. He had this personal risk because he needed to spend money to get the product to the point where they could launch on Kickstarter and did all these deals to make it happen. And it was just incredible to watch and enable him to build this company. And I think what's, what was magical from the side of the entrepreneur is every launches are such a key part of business and oftentimes people put too much, they put too much emphasis into launching like a SaaS company because you're going to launch and people don't care that much about SaaS. Maybe you have a good video or maybe your investors talk about it positively, but Kickstarter is just like, it felt like it can be this very like binary thing where you just don't know what's going to happen. And consumer products specifically, it is very hard to judge what consumer products will hit before you just put it out there. And the kind of, the variable nature of it I just think is fascinating to watch. So thank you for building the platform. It just has created so many great stories.

Can you take me through some of the different eras of the Internet? I'm interested to hear about all the different ways that kind of money and funding has changed, you know, you have the, you know, the Kickstarter era or format or anything to subscriptions on an ongoing basis to even things like the TikTok Creator Fund where you're getting paid out based on views. What. How do you think about the buckets? And then what do you think is great and what do you think maybe needs work?

Love it. I have zero preparation for this, but I've always, I've always wanted to do like a David Halberstam history of the Internet, like big picture. But yeah, I would say like, I mean there's the bulletin board zone up until like 2000s and I would say 2006 is like hardcore hard mode. Like that's when we were first trying to make Kickstarter and you needed a server room and a dude with a ponytail to like have a blog, you know, it was like a high bar to get over. But even during the time we were struggling, like AWS EC2 launched Amazon Payments, launched PayPal, extended its marketplace product. So you started to see the first building blocks where non technical founders like us could actually make a product and could make a successful business. And those things really came online. Yeah, like 07 to 09, 2010. And then you have, I think the good old days of 2010 to 2016 of like we're all exploiting the hell out of the Facebook social graph and it's, you know, gray. You could gray list the Twitter connect to find every person everywhere and like the Internet's just this playground of like what can we do together? And then I think 2016-2020 was the defection, the collective defection where it's like substack onlyfans, you know, more dark forest, like more and less and less mainstream media, more and more like I'm going into the rabbit hole of something online. Like that is where I make money. And then there was just an event that I did with other Internet where people talked about this, but it ends up that like a room full of 20 year olds called like Covid Crypto era is just like just scam, period. And then they call period 2023 on to where we are now as scam or be scammed. But like AI crypto SaaS, products like recurring subscriptions, all of it is leading to this feeling of like someone's going to ding your credit card or like rug you or whatever. Like no matter what, you got to like be on your toes and do that back at people.

My favorite is it's like almost impossible to truly cancel a credit card now because like you tell amex you tell.

Amex, credit card update.

You tell Amex like feature, hey, like I don't want this card anymore, but I want to keep my service with you. And then they're like, well here's a new card and a new number. But like we're going to give it to all the people that you subscribe to like five years ago. And it's just this incredible tax.

Well, where are the pockets of positivity on the Internet right now? In. I don't know if you want to call it the creator economy, but whatever, whatever term that is. Are you seeing anything before there's.

How did you react to the creator economy becoming a popular phrase among venture capitalists?

Yeah, venture capitalists kind of discovered they kind of created the creator economy. You kind of took a bigger VCs.

It was better than the passion economy. That one gave me a harder record scratch. So the rebrand. But yeah, I mean, listen, every one of these phrases is a VC talk in their book. Like that's it. You blog your book. That's the move. But I don't think it's wrong. I mean what's wild is that this job of being a creator, which I'll define as like a full time self expresser on the Internet, a commercial self expresser, that's like a 15 year old profession. And it is also the most desired profession for people under the age of 20. And unlike being an astronaut, like everyone can become one.

Sure.

And the, the right now we have this perspective that like the creator economy is maybe a bubble and like it's you know, some convergence of technology that, you know, who knows, like it'll probably dissipate if you step back a little bit and look at the longer history of the space, it's actually shockingly recent to where even like commercial artistic production, like movies and music and books and the way we think of them now, that industry is less than 100 years old. Really, if you look at like a lot of the big players. But even the word and concept of creativity, the concept of creativity was invented in the 1940s by United States Defense Department grants that were trying to find.

Let's give it up for the Defense.

Department, let's give it up for the military. Industrial creativity.

They created the.

Basically they were looking to find divergent thinkers for the military. Okay, so they studied artists and engineers who would like pull all nighters and like what makes them tick? What's their drive? And they discovered that there was this innate drive that they theorized was a democratic essence of genius that could be taught to anyone. And it was the concept of creativity. The word entered the dictionary in 1966. The United States education system was remade in the 60s to become creative. So like creative writing programs, brainstorming entered the school system. So I am a second generation creative American. And like. But the whole idea of self expressing as a form of improving things or as a way to create more commercial value is a, is an extremely recent idea, like just two generations old. So if you think of the idea of being a creator, like that is just building on something that was already there. And what I've come to see is that like we're 25% into the 21st century right now. 2025. And I think the main forces of this century so far are Internet, phones, AI and creativity, cultural expression. Like, it takes up more space, more people do it and it's just going to grow. And a lot of my work now is just thinking like, well, let's take this seriously and let's treat it as a real industry. Let's treat it as a real business. Let's treat it as like a way that people can get healthcare and have real jobs. And so if we take that approach and also take the Internet seriously, what's missing? And that's really been what I've been about the last few years.

Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting places we could go with this. I want to get to the artist corporation and how these, I don't know, influencers or new creators scale. But I'm also interested in this idea of what actually has changed. Because this show we have kind of discovered and done a bunch of different tests and explored the space and changed things a lot. We're obviously deeply leveraging the Internet. This will be clipped on X and Instagram and TikTok and it will go out all over the place. We are using modern distribution tools, but in many ways we keep coming back to this idea that, you know, we are making daytime television, this is a talk show. And so we are retreating in many ways to the formats that work. And when we find that we go back to what has been, you know, Lindy, or discovered or has been around for a while, we see that that's what people still want. And I, and I've thought about this in the context of Mr. Beast. He's making a game show and game shows have been popular for a long time and he's distributing them in a different way and there's a different style and editing style. But like, what really has changed?

Yeah, you know, the big change Is that the person, the creative person has full control. Not full control, but ownership over the production and the distribution.

Yes.

Even if you just own the account. Right. So you're, you have an account that you don't really own the production. You don't end the own the end app.

Yep.

But you own the account. That, that gives you a lot of range in order to do things. And we've talked about this. Like we'll pull up a post from somebody on our stream that was posted like a minute ago and like television could never do that because they would have to like, you know, make sure that they had to clear it and do all these different things. So I think that's the biggest, the biggest change is that the creative people owning those two keywords, just being more.

Entrepreneurial and then the ads thing, we handle that internally. So. So yeah, I'm super fascinated in like what, what actually is new, what pieces have stuck around.

Well, I think that and I include us in this affectionately. I think it's the revenge of the losers where in the past, you know, all media was like heavily gate kept and you had to go to whatever school and like the seats were so limited. YouTube was for losers. YouTube as if you couldn't get on real TV. Like all, everything on the Internet was that every part of the Internet creative stack was like you aren't good enough. So thus you're here. But there's more of us than there are winners. And if you give us the same tools and you give us time, many people are very smart. Many people can take in a lot of information and create a talk show like out of your minds and out of a limited set of tools and the notion of hierarchy for where we go for things has been erased as a result of this. And you know, it's, it's for all legacy players, it's total havoc and they have no idea what's going on. I think for anyone who's a consumer just coming up now like the world honestly makes kind of sense. It's pretty wide open. You can find or get access to whatever you want. But like you all are able to generate a lot of attention and drive a lot of things. But what you own is an interesting question actually. Like you own the, your brand ip, you know, do you own your followers? Do you own your what of your relationships do you own in which way, like it gets fuzzy but there is for sure like a, a cultural equity that is being built up by this project. Equity that because you have sponsors you can convert into revenue, you can convert into an investment you can treat as a proper business. And that's what more and more people are finding creatively. And so, like to make a media business or to bring in multiple revenue streams or the things that a modern creator is finding is a different way of operating like a small business or a studio than people have experienced in the past. And we're all sort of speed running this. There's not a lot of communication between groups like people are. There's like, there's a lot of weirdness.

Yeah.

The interesting thing, the reason that the creator economy as a venture trend broadly failed and because a large amount of the investment dollars were flowing into building kind of business infrastructure for creators and misjudging that creators are ultimately just businesses and they can use ramp. They can use like they can go to bank of America and get a bank account.

Oh, you're talking about the niche specific financial.

And so even though the creator kind of wave and trend has just exploded and continues to create all these amazing things, the investment dollars that flowed into the category broadly did not return.

Yeah, I'm also interested in the idea of the actual structure. There's a lot of like, on that note, there's a lot of influencer businesses where really like most of the value accrual is in the actual talent. And they could shut down their accounts and go to Hollywood and get a deal that would pay them directly just as a W2 employee. And you see that with, you know, folks like, I believe I was thinking about the example of Jim Cramer or actually going back through talk shows. Johnny Carson was unique in that he owned his show's ip, but then the Tonight show and the Late show are now owned by the networks. And if you watch Jimmy Kimmel, he's essentially a. There might be a production studio that he owns a piece of, but it's mostly just he's on a really high salary from the studio and the network and that that seems to work fine. I mean, Jay Leno never owned his show. He has a huge car collection. He seems to have done very well. But then there are also folks who are building C Corps and trying to build corporations, and they realize that maybe the best way to monetize attention long term is to launch a product like what Mr. Beast has done with Feastables and it's a new corporation. Then maybe that gets spun out and maybe that becomes its own thing and they sell that and that's less tied to his face and his talent. So there's a whole bunch of different paths. Walk me through what you think reasonable cases are or the good or bad, or have I missed anything? And then talk to me about the future of where all this goes.

Yeah. So right now, if you're a creative person looking to go more pro or scale, what you're doing, there's very different categories. Like, an online creator is a very specific set of, like, you're probably getting a direct deposit from an ad, you know, from some ad partnership or something hitting your bank account. There's a question of how should you accept those funds if you're like a visual artist or someone like that, Your legal structure will determine whether you can get a grant. You're eligible for certain funds and like, that is actually the only way to get money if you're that type of artist. So right now, people face. There's a couple decisions. One is, do you orient your career around seeking philanthropic money? Which if you're a classical artist, is really kind of what's there for you. Or if you're a creator, are you an llc? Are you an S corp? Are you trying to like properly raise money? Are you a C corp? And there's a whole big, whole big mess in the middle where I ran into with a. I'm part of a collective of writers called the Dark Forest Collective. And we published a book together that's done $100,000 in transactions, all running through a split that we made on Metalabel. So all the money just automatically distributes to each of us as a royalty through stripe. And I'm running that without any sort of legal structure, which is not the smartest thing, but started thinking about, what if I made an LLC for this? Like, what should I do? And ended up when I've been talking to artists for a long time about their different needs and saw an opportunity to try to craft a different type of LLC that would give creative people more economic security, better access to health care, and the ability to grow wealth and equity. And so to do that, we're structurally taking a making a version of an LLC that will have within it a set of specific provisions around creative purpose, certain rules about governance, certain separation of creative rights, and financial rights setting in how an equity structure would work, including rules about how you can get pool together to get access to better healthcare rates with a bunch of a corps together, and just creating a little wrapper shield that allows any sort of creative project to instantly go from I'm now incorporated with legal protection for a very cheap amount and I can scale to like an investable business using this form up until a Certain point, sure. There's two paths to making that happen and we're pursuing both. One is to, like, you pass laws. So you say, hey, let's define what an A is. Let's make it something you could legally register as. We're pursuing that path. The other is most of these things are things you can already do with an llc. They're just requires lawyers and a lot of like, specifics Extra. So the other path is to make it as a software protocol.

Sure.

And so just make a. A corp in a box in a way that any Internet native group of people can begin to build and access collective equity.

Yep.

And so both of those, we're working on both of those at the same time. The ultimate is to get both. Yeah, but, but yeah, we see it as a way that people to.

What is, what's the history of these new corporate structures? I remember, I feel like B Corp is relatively new. S Corp also feels somewhat new.

Yeah, it's very cool to be like, oh yeah, by the way, you can just create a new entity.

It's amazing. Yeah, not just a new entity, a new type of entity. Yeah, I, I feel like LLC and C Corp have been around for probably hundreds of years, but there's a bunch of new ones. What have you studied? What have you learned? And like, what's the actual path? Is this federal legislation? Do you just go to Delaware or something? How does that work?

Yeah, S Corp was the 1950s. There have only been a handful of new corporate forms made this decade or this, this century. PPCs, certain types of co ops, L3Cs. But yeah, it's when I was CEO of Kickstarter, we became one of the first PBCs. And so I just happened to watch that law get made. And it always paid attention to the fact that it was really technical and boring and just worked. And so I just thought about that same playbook and could you do that? So corporate laws pass on a state level, and depending on how a law is written, people can register and be domiciled from anywhere in that state. And so we're talking to legislators and the bar associations in a few specific states and sharing with them our draft that our lawyers have helped make and talking to them about what does it look like to try to put a bill together. And so our target is to have something pass next year and to have first pilot programs. And we'll definitely have this protocol, like you can do it with some scan of an LLC that we'll have out sooner.

Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. One of the Ideas that I thought was interesting was this idea that as an artist or a creator you wouldn't necessarily need to prematurely select a path between nonprofit donations, grant money, tax, incentivized donations. I love that. I think that the elites are not funding enough libraries and museums and all of these different things. I think that just making it easy for that to happen is, is actually a key unlock. But then also I love the idea of somebody being able to actually build up a subscription business on top of it and write regularly and have supporters and earn cash flow and pay employees. I want to get your take on OpenAI structure because it feels like they've done things similar but at a thousand times larger scale with a non profit that owns a for profit and there's a GP lp. And that feels like kind of a nightmare scenario. But are there any learnings there or are there any areas where you'd be worried about someone potentially like abusing a system that allowed someone to take nonprofit money and for profit money. Or it would be confusing where somebody would say, hey, I made a donation, but now you're licensing this into a movie. I wanted you to make a, a painting and, or an installation or something and now Disney's paying you a billion dollars. Like I, I, I want my share. So yeah, walk me through some of that stuff.

Yeah, I mean if you're talking about OpenAI or ESG, I mean, I think form follows capital is the lesson, you know, just people are going to shape to whatever is most investable. And like one of our core constituents as we're working through this process are investors. So there will be an investor advisory board that's like, hey, look at our sheet here. Let's make sure that we're not screwing something up and that we're actually speaking to the ways you get returns and the way that we create value. But yeah, I mean, I think, I mean there's infinite ways for things to go wrong.

I think that, I mean people abuse LLC is today. Of course.

I think, yeah, I've had the attitude of, I like that like the bar to be an entrepreneur is will and it's not qualifications. And I think the bar to be an artist and a creator is about will and not about qualification. So the way I've tried, we tried to structure it or think about it is easy to start. But as you want to do things that have a financial implication, like say take in nonprofit funds, there's maybe a step you go through before that where you're not a full nonprofit. But hey, like, like don't abuse this and screw it up for everybody. Which I think is what happens with, you know, trust gets earned and spent and so you're trying to protect it from being spent in the worst ways. Yeah, but you, you have to have some of those safeguards. And so every option I think about.

That'S about setting a bar, deciding the courts. Right. Like, that's what happens with the other structures is that they get defined and then, and then precedent is set across a whole bunch of different legal filings. Eventually you're in New York City, Right. And you've been in, in the New York City tech scene for years, correct?

That's right.

Can you give me your reaction to the Mamdani, like news, I mean, massive come from behind moment. Did you predict it? What, what have you been seeing? Are you excited about it? What are you optimistic about or maybe pessimistic about? I don't know.

I mean, God bless anyone who's the mayor of this city. Great. Greatest city in the world. Hardest thing to govern, you know. Talk about a tough executive job. I'm reading the power broker at the moment, actually finishing that. So you get a real appreciation for the strangeness of New York City politics. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's, I, I, I'm excited to see youth, I'm excited to see energy and not old. Corruption is nice. I also think the realities of New York City's political system are like byzantine, even to experts. And I don't know what will actually happen as a result of this.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's hard. I think probably almost all concerns are overblown and just, but yeah, I don't know. We'll see.

Do you think that we were toying with this, this, this idea? I'd like to get your feedback on just that. Out of the 2024 election, there was this narrative around the podcast election. The idea of like the brocasters that got Donald Trump elected because Trump was much more aggressive, or maybe just open to podcast invites from Andrew Schultz and Tim Dillon and Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan and the Kamala campaign maybe was less aggressive or turned down some of those opportunities. But when I was mathing it out, I was just seeing that the total number of minutes that Americans spent watching each candidate, I think Donald Trump probably outnumbered by 100 to one just because there was a four hour Joe Rogan with him with 20 million views. You math that out, it's a lot more than the 20 minute Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes or whatever Mamdani feels like he's done some podcasts, but it feels like almost the first iteration of the next next generation of going direct or owned media channels, producing his own content successfully. People have. Plenty of politicians have put out a TikTok. None of them have actually broken through in the sense that he doesn't have his own podcast. He didn't go on the big podcast. He hasn't done either Rogan or Pod Save America or. I don't even know if he's done Chapo or anything. But he has, he has. He's gotten a ton of attention. And I'm wondering what you think that says about the future of the shape of social media and getting attention and the future of politics.

Well, I think you could see, yeah, lots of owned media because what even is other media anymore? I mean, it's such a crapshoot and you can absolutely drive attention that way. There was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple months ago that talked about how it's like some shockingly small number of the population, 10% buys 80% of the alcohol in America. So those numbers are probably wrong, but it's like a small percentage buys almost all of it.

Yeah.

And it made me think that like, I wonder if every brand is ultimately like that, that there is like a. A small percentage of the population that's a hardcore and that is like the true brand value. Something. So someone like Trump, who maybe is broadly unpopular but has like a 38% like hardcore 10Q rating makes him maybe the most powerful person in culture. And I think that we're seeing with someone like this, it's like that. It is the high Q rating with a devoted minority online that is. We keep underestimating how powerful that can be.

Yeah, he has the thousand true fans, if you want to use that analogy. And that means that those folks will not. Yes, it's only a thousand views, but it's a thousand views on every single post and it's comments. A thousand comments, a thousand reposts. And that multiplies to. And it might be a hundred thousand true fans for him. It might. I mean he said he wanted to knock on a million doors. He has several hundred -thousand, I think 800,000 TikTok followers like. Like that. But he has true fans, whereas a lot of the other candidates, I feel like just like the difference, true fans.

Plus the category of people that are saying anybody but quote Cuomo.

Totally. Yeah.

And if you like 2024, to me, you know, all social media is an ad. And so podcasts like these, these are non ad spaces. They Feel like the real spaces. So if your brand is only living in like broadcast social, like you're just a CPG advertiser, basically. Like you aren't. You aren't engaging in a real way. And like, this is. This is. People know this is real. And then over there in the feed that we're around is like largely bullshit. Like, we all. We all know. And that's how we're processing everything now.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Anything else about this was great. Kickstarter or anything? Yeah, this was fantastic.

I think you should lobby Zoran to get zero percent corporate tax on the acor.

There we go.

Could be some way to get some momentum.

There's some way to do that with the.

Borrow a page out of big business.

Talk to Wise and all about it when he's done.

See what he will.

We will. We will.

Thanks so much for hoping.

Thanks, Yancy. This was great chatting.

We'll talk to you soon.

We got to tell the great TBPN nation about Finn. Can we pull up Fin AI, can we pull up the website? It's absolutely beautiful. We have had OHN on the show. We are excited to formally partner with Fin and the Intercom team. Fin is the number one AI agent for customer service. It's number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, and it's the number one ranking on G2.

Let's go.

And Own is so confident. The Finteam is so confident. They have a $1 million guarantee. And it is why companies like Monday.com, anthropic, and a bunch of other heavy hitters are using the product. So if you are serving customers, which many businessmen and women do, you got to get on FIN yesterday.

Yeah. Let's hit the gong for.

Let's hit the gong for fin and a $1 million guarantee. Very excited about this. I have. We've consistently loved. Yeah.

And what a journey.

It feels like we need to create a founder kind of therapy corner because Owen has the ability to just kind of like, cut through the noise. And we're very excited to partner with them. So, Finn, check it out. And with that, let's bring in the legend, the stalwart.

Let's go.

Future mayor of New York.

Are you. Are you safe? Are you doing okay? We've heard that there's a cultural revolution going on in New York coming for the capitalists.

Journalists.

Are there bread lines already? How bad is it? Give it to us straight from directly on the ground.

I'm safe because we had Zoran Mamdani on our podcast. So we're one of the good ones.

That's good already.

I've already doing my work to sort of make sure that I'm on the correct side of the revolution, so I'm safe. I don't know about everyone else in my building here in the office. I think, I mean I think I'm in good shape.

You're in good shape.

Are the rumors true that Mamdani wants to seize all the enterprise sass in the city and make it. And make it state and city owned?

I have no, I have no idea. I have not heard anything about. Is the rumor that he Bloomberg terminal. Whether the Bloomberg terminal will be turned into a, into a public. Everyone has. We can only know that's the most.

Hyper capitalist thing though.

Every citizen dollars every.

The most.

It should be universal basic.

The most hyper capitalist policy would be every citizen universal basic terminal.

I'm firmly.

Health care costs are similar to a terminal costs.

I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic. As long as he doesn't ban podcasts that are ad supported.

As long as, as long as he doesn't put 100% tax on AI researcher signing bonuses. Because that at this rate that could generate billions of dollars for the city in a few weeks.

Yeah, I think for now, for now. I think, look, he hasn't won yet, but for now I think it's more modest. More modest goals like freezing the rent. But we'll, we'll see, we'll see what happens on some of these more the more ambitious vision. Yeah, we're not quite there yet.

This is, there's a few months where people get very strategic. What apartment do you want to be in? Does your family want to be in for the next hundred years?

Yeah, could be a flourish.

Get in the right spot, freeze the rent.

I mean but I think people are like very jarring, jarred by the idea of freezing the rent. But like there are rent controlled apartments in New York City today. Right. And so what he's actually talking about is like adjusting the rate of the rent controlled apartments. Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah. So there is already a pretty sizable slug of non market rate housing in New York City. It's actually been frozen at times before. I think Bill de Blasio at one point froze it for about a year. But there's like a board and they have, you know, a certain annual adjustment and he's filled in a few times. There's not going to be, there's not going to be any adjustments.

Sure.

And you know, my guess Is that from the perspective of a landlord who has some market rate units and some, you know, rent regulated units.

Yeah.

My guess is that they'll increase the rate or the rent on the regulated ones.

The number one, the number one landlord on G2.

Oh yeah, yeah.

The stalwart.

Well, I, I, I, I, I own a place here in, in Manhattan, so if I ever rent it out, I don't think that'd be rent regulated. And I think I can charge whatever I, whatever I want. So there you go.

Yeah. I mean, how, how are people thinking about Mamdani? That feels like there's this narrative emerging about like, oh, maybe come from behind like his, you know, people were, we were acting like the Democratic primary was the election. But of course it is not the election. But is there a chance here?

Yeah. For us California boys. Why is it, why is it, why was that the election?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, look, generally speaking, New York City is kind of a one party city. The Republicans keep putting up the same sort of like semi serious candidate each time who doesn't really launch a real campaign.

Yeah.

Curtis Sliwa, incidentally, he's the red beret guy. So someone coming from outside might think that that's the socialist in the race, but he's not even though wears a red beret. And then our existing mayor, Mayor Adams didn't run in the primary, but he's going to be in the general election on his own line and he's been pretty unpopular. But it seems like what's going to happen is a lot of people are going to try to rally behind him. Crime has come down a lot in the last couple years. He's taken the trash problem seriously. He's taken the rat problem seriously. So I think there will be probably a fairly serious effort to make it a competitive race. But Mamdani's victory was so, you know, such a blowout. It was so compelling just from a numbers standpoint and it isn't really true. I mean the expectation was that he was going to do really well in the sort of like liberal, educated white areas and then do less well elsewhere. He actually did really well in pretty much the entire city. So even that stereotype didn't really hold true the way people expected he put as a dominant performance. I mean, the expectation was that Cuomo, you know, we have the ranked choice voting that Cuomo would win the first round and then, you know, they would eliminate candidates. He won the first round. It wasn't even particularly close at all. I mean it was, he crushed him a lot of people voted. This wasn't like the AOC election. When AOC won, there were not a lot of people who voted in the primary that year. And her team was pretty well organized. This was just a much bigger scale, much more impressive victory than that. So political earthquake, whatever cliche you want to use, like, is pretty accurate to describe last night.

Interesting. One narrative that I've heard is that Mamdani was incredible at focusing on local issues. So rent, grocery prices, things that the buses, like the subway, things that feel tractable for a mayor. Whereas Cuomo was focusing more the fact.

That the food card guys are having to pay some crazy.

This is a great one. Yeah. Versus Cuomo talking more about national politics and what's going on with Trump. How, how real do you think that is? And do you think that.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's very real. And I think, you know, a few things. I mean, one is I think Mamdani really made gains. The small businesses, the people who own the food carts, the people who own the bodegas, et cetera, really getting into some of these voting categories that are harder to reach. He also, as you said, really direct things related to day to day life living in New York City, like rent. And I mean, look, whatever your view on the sort of broader politics are, you have one candidate who is talking about the rent and you have another candidate who is talking about, like, you know, you watch the Democratic debate and the first question was like, well, what is the first country you're going to visit? And a bunch of them raised their hands and said, Israel. Regardless of how you think about those politics, you're running for New York City mayor. So you have here's the rent guy and here's the guy that's trying to make the race entirely about Israel. The rent guy won. I'm not totally surprised that that worked better at a citywide, in a citywide election.

So, so I want to talk about, like, if I was, if I were running for mayor in New York City against Mamdani and I, and I, and I bought in on the idea that New Yorkers care more about rent. Is, is it reasonable for me to argue for I'm gonna drive the rent prices down by deregulating building, or I'm gonna subsidize building or give a tax break to builders. Like, what are the other tools? Because the consensus amongst, like the economics crowd is that rent controls don't increase, don't decrease the price of rent. They don't increase the number, the supply of building. Yeah, but, but what what are the, what are the policies that you think people, A, what do you think might actually work? And then B, how do you package?

Trump will tell the oil markets.

Yeah, settle down. Trump, don't settle down.

Don't raise prices.

I'm watching and I'm watching. Yeah. Don't raise wrenches.

So you can say to construction, construction workers, don't even think about raising prices. Prices.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Builders don't even think about it.

Yeah.

Why not? I do think, look, I do think it is really hard for any someone running for office to sort of make that wonky argument. Oh, what we really need to do is deregulate this and then we'll get supply. And, you know, it's not as compelling or satisfying, as free as the ring. Right. But to be fair to Mamdani, over the course of his campaign, he's not doctrinaire about the sort of role of market rate housing. And he talked when he was on our podcast and in other interviews he did, he said there is a role, of course, for just sort of expanding supply. And he's talked about upzoning and all of the kind of things that, like, wonks like to talk about and sort of deregulating. So I think that accomplishes two things. One is he does sort of recognize that there's more to affordability than just sort of government fiat. You can't raise the right rent. That's just a small portion. But I think also by talking about some of these other things, I think a lot of people sort of like Normie Democratic liberals who are kind of in the center or whatever, they found him to be really disarming and even charming. They weren't threatening by. Threatened by him. And I think if you, you know, clearly, and you see in the vote a lot of people who probably make decent money and probably who themselves don't consider themselves to have radical politics, they might not have ranked him first, although clearly many did. But they weren't like anti him. They didn't feel like it was really important to stop his candidacy with like an anybody but Zoran vote. And so between the sort of young socialist activists who are really powerful in his campaign, and then you just didn't have many people who found him to be like that threatening or that scary. And I think that was sort of the, the key to victory, the fact that people who sort of think Normie things like, yeah, why don't we just make it easier to build? We're also sort of cool with them.

Yeah. Talk about his media strategy. Yeah, you're A, you're, you're a male podcaster, potentially broadcaster.

Did you get a popular member of the manosphere?

Did you get him elected by platforming him? Are you the, the Donald Trump or the Joe Rogan to his Trump?

You know, yes, we might be. No, I don't know if we are. But, you know, that episode came out May 23rd. If you look at the prediction markets, it was basically two days later that he started shooting up I.

The market.

I actually, I don't know, we've been debating this today. I'm sort of of the view that we may have played some modest role.

Okay.

In normalizing him to a certain group who hadn't been that exposed to him before. It's hard to say. Can I prove it?

Yeah.

But yes, by entering the bro pod, the bro podcast that I co host with Tracy Ellaway. Of course, I. It may have. It may have. It may have helped. And then he did a bunch of media after that. I think that was his sort of first, like true, like mainstream one, so, you know, part of Bloomberg.

Do you think, do you think. What do you think was most, most more important? And how would you weight them? Like his, his owned media stuff, his tiktoks, his viral videos. That's. That's what I saw first. And then once I'd seen those, then I searched his name in Apple podcasts, saw odd lots come up and I was like, oh, this is great. I saw he did the Breakfast Club with Charlamagne and a few other hits. But it felt like it was kind of an inversion of the Trump strategy, which was very podcast first. His strategy seemed native social media, owned media first and then other people's platforms second. Do you think that's the right narrative?

I think that's, I think that's probably correct. His own videos are so good, though. And of course his mother is a famous filmmaker. And his. Yeah, and his videos, it's not just that they're short form, they're really good. They looked really good. They were shot really well. The color balancing on them was really good. The audio is good, the angles were good. He's a sharp dresser, he's a good looking guy. He smiles, he's really comfortable with himself. Like, he's just clearly a generational political talent and he sort of packaged it up extremely well for social media. Just seems like a very normal, likable guy. And I think put it all together, I mean, it was a campaign for 2025 and all of the different tools that people use to reach voters. He really had the knack on them.

I noticed this during a previous election cycle with a congressman who is running on the Second Amendment. And she released this video and the sun was blasting on his face. And I was like, that is violating Cinematography 101, which is like, you always want to backlight everything. You want the sun behind you. And. And it's like, yeah, I just didn't. We didn't find the right person that understood the basic rules of cinematography to understand, like, you need a soft source, you need to be behind you, you need to backlight things. And so, yeah, just actually having those tools, I think that is probably an underrated narrative and something that we might see people actually take seriously and try and solve. Solve going forward.

Yeah, I think that. I think that's really true. We're sort of just used to the face, you know, short. Oh, I'm gonna do short form video. I'm gonna say something. His look great. Like the angles are really good on them. And I know that seems like sort of a ticky tack thing to talk about, but it's clear that this is someone who comes from knowledge about how to package media. Really good.

Totally. What can we do to get Robert Grenieri, the founder of Jane street, on odd loss?

I saw that headline this morning about how Jane street is funny.

You're hashtag not what you ever want to have to say or whatever it was.

Yeah, you know, there's all these things, you know, like executives over the years and they get into a scandal and they're like, oh, I regret doing X or Y. And they're usually something about, you know, inappropriate and they said something awful in an email and they have to find an awkward way to apologize. It's really funny to me that Jane street is this extraordinarily successful trading company that makes billions and billions every year making markets. And now the only two things that, like, the average person would know about Jane street is that's where Sam Bankman Fried came from. And now that the co founder accidentally funded an attempted coup.

What are you talking about? We know that they are the maintainer of the OCAML programming language.

Oh, yeah.

And they are sponsor of the Dwarkesh Patel podcast, which is a fantastic podcast. So I know. I know four things about that.

So good causes and maybe less good causes.

Yeah, these are. These are. These are the two things that every. Or this. The. The yin and yang of Jane Street. But yes, to the average person on the street, there is quite a collection of headlines that they are amassing for what is actually Like a fairly normal, extremely successful firm.

Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is like, I read this and they describe, in the Bloomberg story, they describe Jane street as like the place where Sam Bankman Fried worked. And I'm like, they don't deserve that heat because Sam Bankman Fried was like an intern. He did all the bad stuff later. Like, it should not be a stain on Jane street whatsoever. And then this article, like, we were reading it and we were like, certainly it's gonna go on five more pages. It's so intriguing. It's so good. And then it just kind of drops off and. And it didn't seem like there was any real wrongdoing. I'm sure the story will evolve, but. But I. But my big hope is that it winds up with him doing a podcast tour and explaining the actual business of Jane street, because I would love to hear it because the firm has been very quiet for a long time.

Well, we could compete with you in who gets him first.

Oh, it's gonna be a tour. If it's gonna happen, it's gotta be a tour.

He'll do the short form with you in the long form with us, or vice versa. That's totally fine. There's enough spoils all around for these guys to do their meeting.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Let's talk about prediction markets.

Sure.

I love them.

They played a role. There's two Kalshi announced around at 2 billion today. And then. And then the poly market round was like kind of leaking. I don't think it actually got announced, but enough people were sharing it around. They're here, they seem to be mainstream. When. When big events are happening, you're on X and you're just constantly, you know, seeing screenshots and things like that. And obviously, you know, we gotta get into the Middle east, of course, in a little bit, but how main. It's hard. Cause we're in a bubble. How mainstream do you feel prediction markets have gotten?

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

Well, that's the thing. It's, it's, it's, it's people that are basically making bets, investments, gambling, whatever you.

Want to call it, on event.

But then it creates a public benefit which is I've never made a single trade on polymarket. I've never made any type of prediction based trade. And for main reason being that it wouldn't be ethical for us to cover what's happening in prediction markets and then just be betting on that until the world gets this benefit of seeing tomorrow's headlines today, which I think is a cool thing.

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

Yeah, the crystal ball only works 50% of the time.

And that's true. I actually think that's like basically true. But I think that's the wrong way to look at their utility. The way you described it, that even if you're not trading on them, you get some benefit because you can see the price of essentially conventional wisdom right now on anything. I think as a public look, is it really a public benefit to have people gambling on everything? I don't really know. At some deep level, I guess I'm concerned by the idea that we're betting on literally everything from like, what are the odds that the US is going to drop a bomb on the Iranian nuclear site, which people are betting on, which incidentally started spiking on the morning of the actual bombing over the weekend. You know, how great is it that people are always betting on all this stuff? I don't really know, but from a sort of like I want to know what's happening in the news developing.

Yep, yeah, there's pure utility that's free.

On polymarket.com also I would like to toss in here that I am almost positive that the vast majority of volume on prediction markets comes from something that looks a lot less like a gambler and a lot more like a hedge fund. And so a lot of these traders have scaled up. They have pretty mature operations. We saw that with that the big market moving pro Donald Trump bet the guy had done his own research, paid for people to go knock on doors and do new surveys. And so I think that the narrative of like this is as widely distributed like they're whales but they're, they're like almost financial institutions less than gambling. And so yeah, I mean it still is a question like I would not want you know, the true gambling like it is this fine line. But, but I do know that like many of the volume drivers have scaled up their business because they're good, they have a more, they, they're like with the bombing example they are tracking like the Domino's Pizza Index. Right. Or the Pentagon Pizza index. And then what is market of that? They're probably finding another signal that's even up market of that and then feeding that in.

And look, there's a reason for it which is you want to be able to big institutions, they want to be able to hedge very specific risks. So if they have oil exposure that they want to be able to hedge out the specific exposure that's going to come from volatility if there's going to be a wider war in the Middle east that would disrupt flow. So like all of these are like sort of legitimate needs. And then the other thing I would say is that, and I've said this for a long time, many legacy financial markets are literally prediction markets, most notably the treasury market. So it's like, you know, a short term treasury market is literally a prediction market on what the 12 members of the FOMC are going to decide about rates over the course of X period of time. And then there are derivatives on those Treasuries and so forth. So already event markets are a core part of just sort of Tradfi, legacy financial institutions, et cetera. And this just sort of extends the range of risks that you can isolate and hedge. And so I'm not surprised at all that now that like they're basically, you know, the regulatory aspect is coming into place, the infrastructure is coming to place that for many different instruments they have value to people.

Yeah, Talk about how you were tracking what happened in the Middle East. My thought would be, I'm looking at polymarket for specific details of. Of will this strike happen on this day. But then I'm looking at the price of oil and maybe just the overall stock market, because if World War III is going to happen, I would imagine the futures would trade down. But how do you process that information? And then what did you see?

It's a really good question. I mean, look, to some extent it is all very sort of linear and you probably could have gauged risks just by looking at oil futures, which sort of moved along together with, you know, the odds that US enters the war in some way or whatever it is. You know, it was really striking. I. I mean, so the attack. God, my brain is so scrambled. I think Saturday night, the nuclear Saturday, right. That day, that contract, will the US enter into, like, really started spiking that morning. And that could. Because. Could have been. Because people were sort of like reading between the lines of Trump's truths on truth, social, various other things like that. But it wasn't obvious, you know, and it started moving and it's like, okay, you know, there was a lot of money riding on this.

There was no between the lines of the podcast.

Yeah. And it's nice on a weekend. I mean, again, this gets to the thing like, is it really good that people have to. That financial markets are 247 and it's obviously going to be very soon that all stocks and everything are going to be 24 7, because you could just have of prediction markets on the stock market or prediction markets on a certain stock or a crypto token or whatever. Like all of this is happening. It will all be 247 in a fairly short period of time. There probably is use for weekend risk and overnight risk in times when traditional markets aren't trading to sort of be able to put on hedging trades or just gauge, monitor the situation through prices. So, yeah, I think, I think this is here to stay and as you say, going to get more sort of institutionally real.

Yeah, I feel.

So was everything. Was everything priced in at the beginning of the year? We've gone through a trend. No, but, but the NASDAQ and S and P, they're just flat. They're basically flat on the last six months happened. So nothing.

Yeah, it's insane. I mean, it blows my mind when I look at that year to date number and I just think of all of the things that have happened, all of the Doge stuff, which people have already forgotten. About the cuts, all the uncertainty with regards to the budget, obviously the tariffs in the beginning of April, all of which is basically unresolved. There aren't really any deals and the 90 day deadlines are like coming pretty close. Then obviously the for the escalation of war in the Middle East. I mean people have been talking about a possible bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities for decades, I think. So the fact that we've gotten all that in 2025, either it was all priced in or AI is just such a powerful driver of everything right now that that's actually just the story that nothing can slow the AI boom.

Well, it's an interesting. In all the time that you've been reporting on all this good stuff, has there ever been a period of this much overall stability yet? Max volatility in the interim?

The metric I want to track is that's a great number of emergency the Joe Weisenthal podcast. A number of times that Joe Wiesenthal is getting called to appear.

That's the new pizza truck.

That's the new metric.

We did like 25 episodes in April.

Yeah.

And someone made a joke and in reg and I hate the fact that they were correct about this. They're like, oh, we must be near a bottom because the odd lots hosts are saying the exact timestamp of when they start the recording. It's like we are recording this at 10:15.

Yeah. They bought they bottom tick to April 8th.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I was like, shoot, like they really have us dead to sight here. But yes, you get. And one day there will be a prediction market on how many odd lots episodes that we do in a month. And that will be a useful derivative to understand some. Some slice of the.

Well, it's just interesting how many different.

Someone at Jane street will be making that trade.

It's interesting how many different groups benefit from the volatility. So media benefits from volatility because people are going to open CNN.com or the app and be like what is going on? What did Trump say on True sun, you know, true social benefits from volatility.

Yeah, even Trump benefits because he can say I tried to do the tariffs and then I yeah, I had to roll them back a little bit. But I'm still the pro tariff guy or something.

Yeah. And then Wall Street, Wall street is like if you can make, if you can make 20% one day and ride down a draw.

I was telling my hedge fund buddy it's a bull market in the vix. Go long volume. Like this is the time because he was kind of like, yeah, the market's kind of up and down, not that good. I was like, it's a great time to be volatile.

It's a great time to be in the news business. And we are long volatility in the news business. And it's a great time to be in the news business.

Yeah, we had one slow news day here. We had our first like, we were like, whoa, it's a slow news day. And we didn't really realize like what that was like. And then fortunately it hasn't happened since, but worse, right?

Yeah. And it feels like monitoring the situation has become a national pastime. It has, it really is, it really is. Like, it's basically, it's a, it's a new kind of hobby.

Right.

I've been monitoring the situation my whole career. You know, like I get up, I.

Used to, but now every day everyone.

Is doing, yeah, you're professional.

Yeah, I got to, I got to find new source of edge now that we're all situation.

Yeah. And then, and then the other thing, you know, with, with Tesla, the funny thing is, you know, we didn't even talk about the, you know, that just the Trump Elon blow up that going over and then Tesla is still down year to date, 13%. But given what's actually happening with the car business and then the Elon Trump blow up, you would think you'd be bigger than that, right?

Oh, wow.

There's something to be said. You know, the alternative view of this is yes, it is a great time for volatility and there's plenty to trade. It's also been a good time for the sort of buy and hold people who actually have a life because they, you know, the, it's like, oh, buy, make your investments and maybe check in once a year or every six months. That could. Unfortunately those people who are very obnoxious when they say that because I certainly don't do that, but they're very, it's very obnoxious when people say that. Unfortunately they keep getting vindicated, that actually you should just have a life and not check in on the market every five minutes. Unfortunately they're right. And that is sort of also the weird part which is that they keep the passive. The passive bros are still doing, are still doing well.

I mean you probably saw the Lakers $10 billion, biggest sports franchise ever. But if you look at the rate of return over the 30 year period, it just didn't quite beat just the average of the S and P. That's the thing.

There's so just buying and holding the S and P and literally do nothing continues to be such an insanely good people. But all I sometimes wonder. I've asked this question on the podcast. Why does the financial industry exist? The answer is not entirely obvious to me. Because there's all the. No, for real. Like, because there's all these people and all they do is spend all this time getting learning the minutiae of every stock, this or that or whatever. And yet you could do just fine. In fact, better than fine. Some incredible returns by essentially doing none of that. It's still not obvious to me why any of us really have any.

It was a simulation created for Jane street to win at.

Yeah.

And just dominate. Yeah, exactly right. How any are you getting? Who do you think is really smart on trying to understand the impact of autonomous vehicles? Robo taxis. We are in this interesting dynamic. We saw the Austin rollout. Was it Sunday or. I think it was Monday morning. We had a guy call into the show from a robo taxi. Seems to be working in a limited area. And then the potential there, you know, Waymo's vehicles are $200,000. They're Tele operated today. We don't really know what's going on under the hood at Tesla, but still it just feels like something that can have this enormous impact on different aspects of the economy. And it doesn't feel like this feels.

Like, I would say like autonomous vehicles. Seems like one of those things. I was comparing it a little bit to the state of the mobile Internet in like 2004.

Right.

We're like, where we all sort of knew that it was coming, but it was kind of janky and remember, you know, oh, do you get. Do you get access to 3G here or what? Remember, there used to be competing standards. We didn't really know and it was sort of a bad. Now the user experience going into UEMO is obviously a religious experience, but it's patchy and you don't know and you. Can you get to X or. Yeah, but then it changed the world, right? So then fast forward 10 years later from 2005 to say, 2015, and it's clear that the mobile Internet literally just changed the entire world in a way that'll never be the same. I think that's the same with AVs where it's like, okay, oh, that's interesting. What they're doing in San Francisco. That's interesting. Okay, Austin is. And then in a few years from now, we're going to have to just completely rethink how Cities are structured because of autonomous vehicles. It feels like actually, for as much hype as they're getting, they probably should be getting more because in my mind, they could like potentially rethink everything about how we structure a city or how we do commutes or how far out from your job you're willing to live if you're able to be on your phone the entire time of the drive. So bigger, I think it's going to be almost a bigger deal than people currently appreciate, even with all the hype it's getting.

Last question from my side. We've seen Meta making some crazy talent acquisition deals, spending, being willing to spend $100 million for somebody that will never have a public face. Right. You know, a researcher all the way up to billions of dollars for individual talent. Is there much precedent for that? Have hedge fund deals gotten into the billion dollar territory at any point? We've heard about.

So you do? Yeah, there are, you know, the. It's actually interesting to my mind, Emily Sundberg, who you've had on the show before, had a really interesting thing talking about the media and how media is becoming like sports, where individuals who have a big name are, you know, signing these big deals or leaving their firms and going independent, et cetera, it feels like this is going to be the story of all industries, right? So whether we're talking about hedge funds, whether we're talking about AI researchers, whether we're talking about journalists, et cetera, where there's just going to be this even further extreme bifurcation where individual talent is just going to get paid so much because they can accrue so much value, it feels like that is the story of our time. Like what? Tim Cook can't even. Isn't that happening?

Well, Tim Cook can't even crack 75 million a year.

Poor Tim.

Poor Tim. We're talking about this all the time.

Well, it's a good time to be in the news business then. It's a good time.

It's a great time.

It's a great time. And thanks for joining anytime, anytime soon. This is so much fun.

My favorite minutes on the show.

It's the best.

Thank you so much. I love it.

Talk soon, Joe.

Bye. If you're looking to get in on the action in the finance world, which maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, maybe you just want to go long. The S&P 500 get on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multiple seriously, industry leading yield. They're trusted by millions. And next up, we have Alex Atala from Open Router on the show talking about foundation models. Who's using what. How you doing, Alex? Great to meet you in person. You might not know this, we went through the same YC batch. YC Winter 16.

Which company?

Lucio, Lucy Nicotine. Yeah. Similar to what you were building back then. It makes sense. But I remember seeing your pitch and I remember everyone kind of thinking like, oh, that'll never be a thing. Like most YC things.

Is that the same company or different company?

That was the previous company.

Okay, cool.

OpenSea. OpenSea, which became the dominant NFT marketplaces and absolutely took over the world.

How did I miss that?

Yeah, and so it's.

You can tell how much research we do on guest appearances. It's great to have you on Alex.

It's great to be here. Thanks for hosting me.

Yeah. Why don't you kick us off with. I'm interested in the introduction on OpenRouter, but specifically the business model because it's a fascinating place to sit in the AI infrastructure stack and I can imagine a bunch of ways value will accrue. But how are you either currently or planning to make money?

Yeah. So you can kind of think of us as a control plane for language models. Like a Stripe meets Cloudflare for language models. So like both of those companies, we orchestrate and route traffic to the best GPU host for you based on the type of model that you want, your price preferences, your performance needs, where you are in the world. And so it's kind of like a one stop shop for all the models where you get like the most models, the best prices, best performance, highest uptime. A lot of these models are down a lot of the time, so load balancing is just needed. Intelligence goes through like intelligence brownouts like harpavi has been saying. And so you need some way of keeping the utility lit up. A lot of apps will just rely on 100% available intelligence.

Sure.

So users pay us directly. We sometimes do volume with different providers so that we can get good volume economics on the supply side and we kind of make money mostly there.

Talk to me about what Microsoft is doing in the category Satya. Nadella at Build was talking about something around model routing. And they also have this unique deal with OpenAI where it seems like they will be able to hold on potentially to that as an API on the cloud infrastructure side. And we might not see OpenAI GPT4 CPU 4.5 vended through say AWS or GCP. How is that relationship? Or do you sit on top of all of that are you kind of indifferent to it or how. Or how is it playing out there?

Yeah. So unlike most other resources and software, AI is pretty unique. It's a battleground with lines being drawn around the models and the models are just not available in all clouds. Like Gemini is only available in Google Cloud, obviously. And then you have Anthropic, which is available in AWS and Google Cloud, but not Azure. And then you have Groq, which is available in Azure and directly from X, but not Google Cloud. Nobody can keep these things on the top of their head and no one can track them. We track them and we allow you to orchestrate across all of the clouds so you can get all the models in one place. So I see this continuing where basically the war draws these lines around the models and no one collab will have them all.

Yeah. What companies should I understand in order to understand this business? I feel like if I was throwing something out, I would say Snowflake, but I don't know if that's at all relevant. So feel free to steer me in a different direction. But I'm interested in this idea of a company that sits across the hyperscalers and does not necessarily just load balancing. But actually you mentioned Cloudflare, but it feels like Cloudflare has a lot of their own infrastructure, their own data centers. I'm interested in a company that has built a large durable business on top of gcp, Azure, aws, et cetera.

Yeah, good question. I don't know of an exact analogy that fits that we're a bit of a unique player. But Cloudflare, I mean, started as a. As only a layer on top of all the clouds.

Okay.

It was like a plug and play safety net to prevent you from denial of service attacks and to turn on security for any web app and open router. Started in a different way as a way of just amplifying supply and choice for people, but in a similar fashion, we add more complexity to the compute layer that we provide before it hits the clouds themselves.

Are there things that you're. I want to know about the different models, capabilities, what the different labs are working on. And I'm wondering if there's a. Like, what are the important design criteria or what do you need to think through if you are doing this type of load balancing like I'm imagining, if I'm. If I. If I'm serving an app that's built primarily on, let's call it Claude, and then all of a sudden it fails and there's a brown out and it Rolls over to Grok and all of a sudden like I'm now in like the anti woke world and like the flavor of the model has changed. I could probably do some prompt engineering to kind of get them onto a similar standard. Or looking at if I'm using a million token context window with Gemini and then I'm falling over to something with 100,000 token context window, I might need to do some chunking then. And so what on the engineering side are you seeing people doing either with prompt engineering or just throwing a for loop around something to kind of actually make the different products identical from an end user perspective.

So we very rarely see people fall back to a completely different model.

Okay.

Usually the load balancing that we do is for a specific model.

Got it.

We kind of orchestrate between like between two and sometimes 20 different providers for.

Different vendors of those models. That makes sense.

Right? But the second half of the question that you asked is much more interesting to us because there are, even for one model, there are providers that provide all different kinds of context lengths, max output constraints, features, some support tool calling, some don't. Some support structured outputs with a JSON schema allowed, some only allow you to output a JSON object, but no schema is allowed. Yeah, it's like a really crazy wild west that we're just trying to tame in one spot. So we have, I would say the fundamentals live with a lot more to come, which basically just allows you, if you send a really big prompt, then we only send you to the providers that support big prompts. If you want a ton of output, we only send you to a provider that can actually fit that much output in your request. And if you want both of those things and JSON and some crazy features that nobody's. That nobody supports, we give you a heads up that it's not going to go anywhere.

Got it.

So more to come to help with that. But that is like our bread and butter. That's what we're good for.

Can you give me kind of your state of the union on how the different labs are positioned? You know, some people think of anthropic as the safety focused one and you know, it seems like Zuck is kind of in a rebuilding phase with the LLAMA project. Grok's been showing a lot of promise. Maybe not on the cutting edge, but this very interesting stalking horse for the other labs. OpenAI seems to be running away with it on the consumer side, but B2B is a little bit more of a bidding war. So how do you see the market right now. What are you recommending to different entrepreneurs that are building on these? What services?

You guys have probably one of the most interesting data sets in AI and you publish a lot of it yourself. Some companies opt in to sharing their data. So I'm interested to hear even about kind of like disconnects between attention that certain companies are getting and maybe valuations and then the realities of sort of usage. Right. So like one of the most popular companies on open router right now is Klein, which is a coding agent. And I'd never actually heard of them. We haven't had them on the show yet. And so that was kind of a surprise. But anyways, kind of interested to get your take on all that at a high level.

Yeah. So Klein is for those who don't know, it's similar to cursor, but it allows you to bring all open router models to it and they invest a lot in making all models work really well. Our approach to helping people choose models is kind of a do it yourself DIY research approach. For the most part we have a router that you can use that will pick the model that we think your prompt is best suited for. But right now what we see most people doing is going to our rankings page or go into that, the homepage. When you mentioned that Klein is one of the top apps, those are all apps that have opted into being shown publicly. You can just click on one of those apps like Klein. Click on right now and you can see Sonnet 3. 7 is the top model this month, followed by Sonnet 4, followed by 2point Gemini, 2.5 Flash. As you can just see what users are doing. And in practice, what this means is you're seeing what power users are doing because power users consume exponentially more tokens than everybody else. So the principle here is to let people learn from power users because power users are just investing the most time and money into this. This is why tokens, I think are a good way of measuring now because it's both a measure of time and money that users are investing into models. So to answer your first question.

We.

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

Makes a ton of Sense. I would love to have you back on when there's another big model release. I'm sure you are an endless source. I mean, imagine even like hedge funds would reach out to you for like, hey, is this model getting adopted quickly? I'm sure a lot of the data open source so you can grab it, but this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. We'll have to have you back to chat more models. Have a good one. We'll cheer you later. Really quickly, let me tell you about AdQuick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And breaking news, TVPN will have a few billboards going up in Manhattan very, very soon.

And so campaign rolling out with Ad Quick over the summer. Very summer campaign. Very exciting first billboard campaign.

Well, we have our next guest in the studio. Clem from Conduit. Welcome to the stream. And there's someone with you. Would you mind both introducing yourself? How you guys doing? I think you're live.

I think we're mixed up here. They're the next guests. They're the next guests. Oh, this is the Orca team.

Oh, okay.

I was like, are these guys in the same place? Sorry, let's just do it live.

Yeah, we're booking these folks.

You guys are here. Let's go. Let's give it up for the Orca team.

Thank you. This is the Orca team. We have had. We've talked about you multiple times on the show. Goaded marketers. We've both worked in consumer packaged goods. Very excited to talk about the product. Why don't you give us the update, introduce the company, introduce yourselves and break us down for how things are going.

Yeah.

So I'm Michael. This is Nash. We make Orca. It's an energy water packaged in this. Oh, wow.

Stunning.

Yeah. We started because we were solving a problem with energy drinks, which is that they all tasted like candy to us and really sweet.

And after drinking them every morning for.

Years, we were like, why can't we just take all the caffeine and put it in water?

And so that started us on our.

Journey two years ago.

It took us a really long time to put it in this can, which we've covered on Twitter, and it's gone kind of viral. The Wall Street Journal wrote about us. I think that's how you guys find.

Out about us, probably.

We launched on Amazon finally in March of this year and things have gone a lot better than we anticipated, a lot quicker than we anticipated. So now we're in the middle of a fundraise and sort of looking to hit the ground running here. That's amazing.

Isn't it strange with consumer packaged goods, you're like, the company's ripping, but you're like, wait, why are we, like, why does it feel like we're going broke? Because we need to buy so much inventory, it's tough getting paid returns.

Supplier will be in Cub.

Give us a quick backstory on making. Making it. I. I feel like you people love the packaging and then you've also caught heat for it online for yourself. Yeah.

Did you invent this in a cave with a box of scraps?

Yeah. A lot of people that have never.

Built anything standing on the shoulders of giants. They hate standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah, we, from the offset, we knew that the product had to be in clear packaging because we wanted to show the consumer what was inside compared to our competitors. And when we saw the clear cam, we were like, this is it.

It's perfect.

It's shaped like an energy drink. You can see what's inside it. It tells the story of the product, like, right off the bat. And we had started actually teasing it online before we launched and, like, saw that it was going viral. And so when we had all these manufacturing issues and, like, spent a full year and tons of money and time trying to figure it out, that was our North Star. We knew, like, if we can. If we can figure this out, it's the perfect packaging.

And so. Yeah, yeah. So you stayed away from. I imagine there were off the shelf clear bottles available from, like, you know, Fiji or Dasani. Like, there's probably an industrial complex for just clear plastic bottles.

Just regular bottles of water.

Yeah, just regular bottles of water. But you wanted something that fit the energy drink kind of shape and dimensions. Is that were you thinking about, like, if you get into a convenience store, you need to slot into the same form factor as like Red Bull and Celsius, because I feel like it's always hard when you come in. We have a really cool square can.

You want to innovate but not too much.

Exactly. Yeah. I think a lot of it was just identifying what category, like the category placement from the beginning. And we kind of think of ourselves as creating a new category, which is energy water. And so when we were thinking about the packaging, we thought that, well, we knew we wanted it to be clear. We thought that a normal water bottle would Be too far in the water direction. A normal can would be too far in the energy drink direction. So this was, like, the natural, perfect.

Middle ground that, like Nash said, just you see it and get what the.

What the product is. Yeah. You also don't want confusion if somebody picks up it and they think, oh, this is just a nice, refreshing bottle of water. Like, they might. People might be okay if, like, oh, it's sparkling. But if there's 100 milligrams of caffeine in there, you're like, what the.

Yeah. Talk about the marketing strategy today. I remember seeing one. One of your campaigns, which was this was the guy just reading off the signs. Right. Am I right there? Is that Corbin Blue?

Not just any guy.

Not just any guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, that was the wildest campaign. Yeah. Break that down. How'd that come together? Give us all the numbers? Like, what was the result? If you could share, like. Yeah. Anything about that, we'd appreciate that.

Yeah.

I think we're just kind of trying to do stuff differently from a marketing standpoint. And so, like, when we. When we were thinking about the launch video and did research on, like, what makes a successful launch video, it was, like, very short, to the point, optimized for conversion, whatever. And we're like, all right. Like, well, what would the exact opposite of that be? And it would be having Corbin Blue list road signs for nine minutes. So, yeah, we're.

Have you guys won any awards for that yet?

Yeah. I feel like this could be, like, ad week or, like, some sort of, like, ad.

Yeah, big ad. Probably hates you guys because you're tearing up the rule book. You know, you're throwing it out.

It's great. Similarly, on our Amazon page, if you go to our Amazon and just scroll.

Down, instead of, like, a.

Like, a brand section, it's just a full exploration of Napoleon's withdrawal from Moscow. That's awesome. We've been meeting with, like, Amazon agencies that we're about to bring on, and.

They'Re like, you know, love what you're.

Doing here, but maybe not the most optimal. Like, we. This is hilarious. Wow.

Like, you don't understand. We're playing on it. Playing on a different level. Yeah.

Pull it up right now.

So what. So what you guys cooking? I mean, it's. It's, like, great. When you go viral, you have a good idea, it hits, and then the attention fades. You kind of just have to figure out how to keep. Are you guys, like, working on building that muscle of. Of. How do we do this kind of thing multiple Times a year. What does that look like?

Definitely. And a big part of the raise is building revenue we can scale. So, like online advertising. So like you said, we don't have to hope that we go viral every week and then launching into retail here in Southern California.

Speaking of muscle, who's that behind you? Where are you guys? That's such a funny mural. We are. We're in the attic. Okay.

Our house.

We've got three roommates. Nash lives downstairs.

I sleep in that bed.

This is an influencer named Jake Shane. We sent influencer gift packages. We sent a case of Orca and then like an AI photo of their dad. Jacked.

We sent him jacked, but he was out of town.

And so we just kept it. We're like, we kept it. That's great. Breaking through.

Good, good.

Yeah. Most people think, oh, yeah, use AI to market. And it's like, oh, you chopped up your B roll a little bit. This is.

What were you guys doing before this?

Yeah, we were both in tech.

We were.

We were buddies at Georgetown.

Yes. Let's go, let's go. Let's give it up for big tech. You said. But buddies where?

Georgetown. College.

Nice.

Amazing. Well, we got to get some here in the studio. We've been. I mean, this is the amount of caffeine. I mean, we want to consume.

We were on the show before you tasted it. Because I appreciate it.

You're.

But you're unbiased. But I know that that can play a factor.

Well, now we're biased because we like you guys.

Well, yes, we're going to have to. He's returning to the fact that that mate, yerba mate tastes like it was made by someone.

Yeah. This is the only. This is the only category of like partner that we don't have exclusives on.

We don't.

We just. We're connoisseurs of energy.

Yeah, energy. It's kind of like how the economists. The back of the Economist is a different high horology, a different watch brand. Every single. Every single edition. Every single show should have a different energy drink percolating through the show. We love it. But thanks so much for coming on, guys. We will talk to you. Yeah, good luck with the fundraiser. Good luck with distribution.

Hopefully see you guys around LA sometime.

Yeah, we'll see you soon.

Thanks, guys. Later.

Bye. We are working on bringing on more people, but let's go to the timeline and let's could do some ads. Let's tell you about wander.

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I have a funniest story.

Please.

This is 100% the truth. My first thought this morning was you reading the Wanderette.

Really?

It's so drilled into my brain that I just woke up and I and my first thoughts was find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dream beds, tucked to clean. You know, it really runs in my dreams at this point. You're saying it so fast. And I was talking to yannick over@public.com and he was like no one can read ad reads faster than John because I read them really really fast now and I was like tell me like show me a man who says that they skip the TVPN ad reads and I'll show you a liar because I think it's impossible.

By the time you get to your.

Phone, you have your finger on the trigger. I will be done before the finger hits the glass.

And then you skip real content.

And then you skip real content and you lose. Like, like speaking of real content, Nvidia hit an all time high. Let's hear it for Nvidia the Goat. He's been to conferences, he's done deals all over the world. He's bringing AI factories to different countries, he's selling GPUs to gamers, he's selling GPUs to foundation model companies and he's at a new all time high. We'd love to see it. We wanted to go through the archives. Jensen Huang visited Greg Brockman and brought the first Nvidia DGX H200 in the world. Hand delivered to OpenAI and and dedicated by Jensen to advance AI computing.

And hype is brutal.

Oh yeah, I guess. Yeah. And then the other news around Nvidia is that they've launched DGX Lepton cloud which now connects Europe's developers to global GPU compute. It's kind of like a technology win for Europe. Yeah, but. But Lepton is you know, at one lower level abstraction than open router. So open router is routing you to all the models but if you have a model you need to serve it on GPUs. How can you get that? How can you get GPU capacity all over the place? This is one of the options now.

And it's semi analysis has story today at GTC Paris, Jensen Huang announced DJX Leptin with the goal of effect to have effectively commoditizing inference compute at global scale. This means customers Will be able to automatically shift their inference workloads through different clouds while in theory maintaining the same software user interface, interface and experience. If DJX Leptin is successful, they will created a standard user experience value and performance across all NEO cloud which will lead to Neo clouds being in a rat race on pricing. They will effectively turn NEO cloud margins.

Into ultra low commodity.

You know how semi analysis is, you know how it's handwritten.

Yeah.

There's always he throws in some grammatical.

Errors, let you know to let you know.

It's handwriting crafted.

Yeah, I mean obviously we're seeing with the neoclouds a lot of different strategies around. Are they going after energy or are they going after stranded energy like what Crusoe does? Or are they really focused on just building capacity faster? And so yes, DGX Lepton is trying to be the aggregator of supply and then be the front door. But this is a story that is evolving. The Wall Street Journal has some story here covering it, saying it's ruffling tech giants. Nvidia is ruffling the tech giants with move into cloud computing.

Things are getting off feather ruffling sound. Yes, this will do.

In the meantime for cloud incumbents, as the AI chip giant eyes their turf, cloud computing generates big profits for Amazon.com, microsoft and Google. We know this from AWS, Azure and GCP. Now that cash cow faces a nascent threat with the rise of artificial intelligence, cloud specialists and a new industry power broker, Nvidia AI chipmaker Nvidia launched its own cloud computing service two years ago called DGX Cloud. But they've been improving, has also nurtured upstarts, competing with the big cloud companies and investing in AI cloud players Core Weave and Lambda. We've had Lambda on the show, we've had Chase from Crusoe on the show. Got to get Core Weave on the show at some point. Maybe all of them at once for a big neoclad day. That'd be fun. These moves have yet to make an enormous dent, but a competitive shift is easy to imagine if computing demand continues to shift toward AI and Nvidia remains the sector's principal arms dealer.

Dylan's also saying AMD is making big moves and winning over the neocloud ecosystem through their balance sheet. At the same time, Nvidia is alienated, many with DJX leptin. MI355 is great per performance per TCO against HGX, but it is not rack scale unlike GB200.

Yeah, he's kind of summarizing four different stories there. But the AMD thing is interesting because if AMD says, hey, we just make the chips and Nvidia is over there, like, yeah, we'll sell you the chips, but we're also going to try and beat you at your own game. Well then maybe as a cloud provider, as Neo Cloud, you want to start figuring out how to get on AMD before Nvidia eats your lunch in the actual cloud provide provision, right? At the same time, aws, gcp, there's a ton of other services, they all have their own inference chips too. And so Nvidia is getting squeezed by the TPU. And so GCP Google has the TPU that competes with the H200, right. And that's why there's a big, big model context from Google. And then now Nvidia is going and saying, hey, we got a GCP competitor in many ways. And so those businesses are limited by their narrow focus on AI computing, referring to the Neo clouds. And they pale in comparison to the more than $107 billion in sales Amazon's market leading cloud business generated last year. Let's hear it for Amazon generating $107 billion in sales for AWS. Let's hit the gong in the gong. Well, we have our next guest in the studio.

We have our next guest with a major trade deal, major trade deal coming on.

Let's hear it.

TVPN to discuss. It's great to finally have you. Yeah, great to finally have you on the show.

We've printed your posts, we've reacted to your posts and now you're finally here. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself though?

Thank you so much for having me. It's been my claim to fame is being your first under 100 followers and following your journey. So yeah, and so it's been an honor honored to come on here and yeah, I'm Nikunj. I spent 10 years building startups, everything from logistics, networking, hardware, real estate. And I just joined a new fund, joined this fund called FPV Ventures with two gps with Wes Chan and Pega, who are the two GPS here. And yeah, very excited to be here after, you know, dipping into my investing foray at Coastal Ventures for a year.

Very cool. What does FPV stand for and what is your focus at the fund?

Yeah, so FPV stands for founders point of view. I think that's what kind of like really drew me into joining this fund. We mostly just care about like what they the founders are doing. We're a generalist Fund. We just raised our fund to $525 million. Just closed a few months ago. And then we have a. Thank you. We have a billion dollars.

It's great.

Yeah. And it's a generous fund which means like, you know, and they, they put the money people, the money where, where our mouths are. We've done everything from biotech to all the way to consumer fintech to rag infrastructure to, to anything you can kind of think of. And I think as I was kind of figuring out what I want to do next, the world is very exciting and kind of like both atoms and bits. AI is affecting kind of every small detail and, you know, excited to be here and be a small part of the team.

Yeah, I love a typical generalist. Fund says, yeah, we're generalists. We invest in enterprise software and AI, usually at the intersection.

I mean, speaking of that, do you think the ship has sailed for the investments in the foundation model companies? Is the game over and now we're in the vertical AI application layer. AI, consumer AI. Is that where the most interesting companies are getting started and scale today?

I think as the large models are kind of stabilizing, like a lot of the value is in the application layer because now you can kind of build on top of that. A lot of the infrastructure was been built and so now every company, every enterprise is kind of being like, okay, we can automate large percentages of work that can't be done. Do I think like a large model is kind of the ship has sailed Unless you have completely new architectures. I do think so. Like if everybody, if you're just building on the transformer side, it's hard for me to be excited given the data. And from a money perspective too, you're just kind of outbid. But I'm seeing like a lot of small models kind of come up and more application focused models come up. I used to work a company called Meter. I know you had Anil on the podcast a couple of days ago. They just raised their large round. Part of one is to build a networking model which they control the infrastructure for. And they're partnering very closely with Microsoft. That kind of data is not available anywhere else.

Right.

You can't get packet data. And so I get more and more excited about that. Is there like unique data that you're capturing and then can you translate that to efficiency? I think that's where bets can still be placed and you can see outsized value. Otherwise, I think on the large model side, it seems a little bit hard unless there's a Brand new architecture and I'm really excited. I've been reading technical papers trying to figure out is there a new architecture, is there a new transformer model that will come up?

Totally. How do you think about the convergence of every company into being an app builder? You highlighted I think in to post sometime in the last 24 hours. Now you have Replit, Bolt, Figma, Lovable. There's a bunch of different players. Basically. If a big company is doing a launch around AI, you can guess that maybe there's a 50% chance that it'll be some type of prompt based software builder. Do you think a lot of that makes sense in a lot of different contexts, but at the same time it feels like there's some FOMO element companies seeing this tremendous growth from some new players and saying maybe we should have a horse in that race. But how are you looking at that market?

Yeah, I mean Airtable announced theirs as well. If you look at Retool, they announced theirs as well a week ago. Our portfolio company, Canva has one. I think there's some companies who are doing it for defense because they're seeing the replace and the boards kind of coming at it and taking a lot of their business away. Especially if you have like, you know, you can build internal tools then like why would you use. And so I think some, some of it is coming from defense, but some of them are coming from offense because they see that they can go deeper into the workflows. From my perspective, a lot of it is for context also. Right. Like if you're able to pull in context from all these different sources, it increases your attention. You can have people do more things on there. It makes it easier for you to highlight them in one place. And I think we, I think we all agree we're in the era of bundling. More and more companies like more and more enterprise want like one solution. They don't want to pay for like five different solutions. And so you're able to see all of that kind of combined there. It is wildly interesting to see on the sidelines. I have no predictions on kind of how it goes that the rise of like Lovable, Replete and Bolt all doing such insane revenue numbers is probably like what's causing some people to play defense. But it just means software is just going to keep growing and growing and spend on software is just going to go parabolic in the next five years.

Totally. How do you, how do you think about how are you looking at application layer opportunities in the context of companies like OpenAI just want you know, having this tremendous appetite for data. Right. You know we talked about on the show, Clulee has this sort of interesting experience of this sort of pat being able to get the power of LLMs passively. Right. Just sort of in an interview or you know, putting, putting our intern on Clulee so he can answer random questions that we have. That feels like something that OpenAI will eventually, you know, if it works, they'll want to roll it out. How do you think of that? The kind of competitive dynamic between kind of upstart application layer companies and some of these bigger labs.

I think it's the question like, kind of like every decade you can pick up dominant incumbent and ask what if X does this? So like, you know, everybody. The difference this time though is the pace is just staggering. Like in the last few months, OpenAI has launched like a meeting with recording notes and pulling in context. And so I think that's what's scaring people. But I do think like building horizontal and vertical at the same time with deep workflows, it's just hard. It's like how many things can you do? And then the interface becomes like a jumbled mess. And then how do you kind of do that? And so there is a lot of depth in each application, each job, each vertical. There's so much to do. I don't think like OpenAI or a single company can capture all the value. OpenAI is uniquely positioned where they have a dominant consumer company in ChatGPT and also market leading APIs. But there's Claude that has incredible APIs for Code Gin as well. But yeah, I think there's plenty of depth. I do think companies that are on the edge of productivity or just building small wedges or features that they don't have the founders who don't have the depth to think through, how does this go in the next few years? I think those as in the past will continue to get decimated by incumbents. But I still think there's so much value to be had. I mean the size of the pie is too large for one company to own it. And I'm OpenAI is big and span, but I still think there's plenty to do.

How are you thinking about go to market for new AI products either in consumer or B2B? It feels like there's multiple strategies. Right now you see that cursor chart and it's just, it's aligned directly straight up because they just got to hundreds of million. Are they at 500 million now or something? 500, 500 million?

Yeah. We had Amjad from Replodon Yesterday going from 10 to 100 in a matter of months.

So fast. And then you see the clulies of the world. And avi@friend.com did another strategy which was very virality driven. And so there's, there's kind of two, two strategies that I'm seeing pop up with the new products. One is kind of like build silently, let the product kind of just grow into this behemoth and then everyone starts talking about it because of the growth. The other is, is take over the timeline, become popular ahead of growth and then use that to convert into subscriptions or revenue growth. Are you looking at both types of deals? Do you see one is kind of more of a positive signal than the other. How are you thinking about how the next generation is growing their businesses after they build something?

It depends on who they're targeting. I think it is being a media arm of a company is important now. I think it's hard to like get away from the noise unless you are showcasing your product in some way. That's why we're seeing our timeline flooded with launch videos. But that's also getting saturated now. So I think more and more what I've been probing for, these bottoms up of companies that are trying to go after like the individual is understanding, like, hey, where are you spending your time? Are there any channels? If you're just doing yet another Twitter launch video, then maybe that's like, you know, oversaturated. Like what are other channels? Do you go multi prong? Are you like, you know, are you doing local events or like local communities where you can kind of own it and just build such a good product that people will do so. Virality in PLG has been there for 10 years. It's not new. I think virality on Twitter is just the newest element of it. And then on the enterprise side though, and this is one of the reasons I joined fpv, like Pega on our team, she's incredible at really working with the team and understanding who's the icp, what's the org chart looks like? How do you break in? Is this like a bottoms up play in the enterprise side? Are you top down? Do you need the decision maker? How do you get them in a room? Is this a burning problem? Is this not a burning problem? Where are they actually evolving? Is this in budget? Is this not in budget? I think those are the questions people need to ask. Very few companies like Cursors or of the world are able to break through like Cursor kind of grew from the bottoms up to the point where enterprises had to come knocking to them and said like, hey, can you build us an enterprise plan? I don't think they even had one, but that's more of a rarity. And sometimes I think people take hype on Twitter or just like everything needs to be PLG as the gospel, which I don't buy that that's the only way to do business.

How are you seeing the PM role evolve? Do you have any predictions or. One way to make a prediction would just be to kind of identify what's happening today. So I'm curious what you're seeing.

Yeah, so one, I never treated my PM role as a PM role. I always took a GM responsibilities wherever I joined. So even at meter, I had P and L responsibilities at Opendoor. Like, you know, growth was my last job there and I took, tried to take as much PNL responsibility. And I think if you were just like being a product manager and just want to project manage and kind of just like, you know, not do sales or not do marketing or not just kind of like, you know, I'm a product manager and a product owner, I think that job is that I think you are going to be out of a job very quickly. I think it's all become a yes and you kind of have to own multiple things and kind of treat your job as like, like, hey, I'm going to sell this product. I'm going to figure out what the marketing copy is. I'm going to work with everyone. I do think the role of an orchestrator is what all of us will do. I think all of us are going to have, we already have. I was playing with Claude Claude Yesterday. I had 5 instances running and I was watching TVPN. I was just building a 12 tool.

Yeah, Nikunj said TVPN clips are perfectly timed with running.

Basically so bullish for us.

Yeah, I wrote a long piece on this. I actually think, Sorry, slight tangent, but I actually think entertainment is going to have a massive upswing because what do you do for 15 minutes? That's why X's numbers are actually through the roof. I can't, like, I, I, I can't. They don't have any like stats from them, but it's like, well, you're writing, you're having an agent do the work for you.

What do you do?

You need a dopamine rush. You go to X or you watch tvpn. And so I actually think that's the future. But going back to the PM side, like on the orchestration side, PMs are extra excellent orchestrators. You kind of have to keep all of these things handing. So I think the PMs who are like up leveling themselves, learning what sales is, trying to figure out what marketing is, doing some of the wipe coding, prototyping themselves and then being the core orchestrator, I think they'll do phenomenally well because I think like most engineers you talk to, most marketers you talk to, they don't want to deal with like people problems, they want like an orchestrator. But if you're like a PM who just wants to hold onto like I have a PRD and I'm a project manager, the work behind the work is dead. That is just going to die a slow death in the next three to five years. It'll take a while to trickle down to the larger companies. And I'm seeing it in startups. No startup is coming to me and saying like, hey, I want a pm. Everyone's like, cracked engineer, cracked marketer, cracked salesperson. That's all they want. Nobody's asking me for a PM today. At least 50 people.

What about pricing? Are non AI companies getting valuations lift just by nature of raising at the same time as this AI boom? Are you seeing that when you're kind of looking at opportunities in other categories.

Was the question are AI native companies just seeing a massively.

No, no, no. So it's very clear that AI native companies are getting this massive valuation just lift. Do you think that's benefiting sort of non AI businesses by just nature of. Of investors being like, well, I just did a seed round at 60 posts.

My grocery store is making 1.5% profit, but with AI could 10x that? Who knows?

Yeah, I'm just curious. Let's say you look at some company that's doing farming focused biotech, are they just naturally getting a slight lift or maybe it's too anecdotal?

It really depends. I know that's a bullshit answer, but I think it's. Some of it is kind of like how much data do you have? Like, you know, if you've been working on. A good example is casetext, right? Like Casetext spent eight years figuring out the perfect casetext law and GPT 3.5 came in and they just like skyrocketed. And so I think a lot of investors are trying to look outside of purely AI native, mostly to understand are there things are there like built in brand reputation, data reputation, things you've done in the past that allow you to Then kind of layer AI on top as an accelerant and I think those could be good to go invest in and sometimes help bring in the talent that can help do them. Or it's like, you know, the atoms world, physical world still has a lot of alpha still out there. I think like, you know, I think software as that gets democratized, there's a lot of things happening. That's why in bio and robotics, in like manufacturing, supply chain, like robots in the field, you're going to see a lot of people, a lot of excitement there because they see that's the next world that's kind of incoming. But the problem is venture is momentum backed and so as a venture investor you want to see that inflection points. And sometimes if you're not AI native, one of the hard discussions is like, well they're a great company. We're seeing some inflection but we're not sure yet. And if you're not going to see the inflection then it's hard to be a venture backed company today that's showing up in the series a debt or I don't like the word, but the zombie corns that we're seeing from the last few years.

Yeah, totally.

Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Yep.

And thanks for helping get Alex on who's coming on next.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

And congratulations. I'm super excited for you in the new role.

Thank you.

Back on soon. Cheers.

Really quickly, let me tell you about bezel. Get bezel.com Shop over 25,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. And let's bring in our next guest. Alex. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

How are you Alex?

Good to you.

Sorry that I was trying to get a hold of.

Yeah, yeah. You're like the most online founder yet. For two hours there you must have been doing some regular work.

It's a flex leaving you unrated.

Congratulations on the acquisition. Give us some quick background on you and Super Local and then, and then the deal and then I'm sure we'll get into a bunch of stuff.

I guess I built Superlocal for a while.

We build a bunch of products.

I mean initially it was just me working on one thing totally unrelated, but in sort of like the last iteration, Super Local was or is a very personalized map. So you can kind of imagine it like Google Maps in ChatGPT had a baby with some OG Foursquare vibes sprinkled in and I mean, that basically means it does three things. Like it has. It automatically maps all the places you've been. So your map just populates without you doing anything. You can also check in, like, that's.

The OG four square part.

And then that sort of builds you a Persona or like the automatic stuff builds you Persona, like where we understand who you are by the places you go to. Like, my map knows that I don't really like Starbucks. I'd rather go to Minati's in Venice. So it knows that's my personality. So when I search for places, it takes that into account.

Awesome. How did the four square deal come about? Had you known the team for a while? Was it the kind of thing where you were friendly with the CEO and it just made sense at some point? What did that look like? Yeah, I mean, I've known them for.

A while, then it just came up and I thought it was a good idea.

Nice. And so you're continuing to scale Superlocal.

Are we happy about the acquisition? Are we ringing the goal? Oh, yeah. That's like obsessed. I was obviously obsessed with Foursquare since I dedicated, like, the last five years. There we go. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah.

So how does. How does. How does Super Local fit into Foursquare's overall strategy going forward? You're continuing to operate it independently?

Yeah, I mean, we're just operating exactly like we used to. I mean, that's like the current thing. I just building what I was building before, but without, like, the constant fear of potentially always dying as a company.

Amazing. What, what. What are the. What are the business models that work here now? The story Foursquare was like, it's going to be the next Facebook and it's going to be just an ad network. Then there were stories about, you know, targeting for advertising. That seemed like a good model, obviously, that you could just pay for the app and subscribe. There's a whole bunch of different business models. What do you think is most promising over the next few years in this category?

I mean, I know, like, they're. They're mainly focused on their B2B stuff.

Yeah.

So I don't know as much about, like, the B2B side. So I'm basically just focused on growing our consumer app.

And what. Yeah. What are you bullish on the consumer side? Like, because some. I mean, this is happening in the context of AI. Like, there's a lot of people on the $20 plan. First ChatGPT. A lot of people use the free version. Some people are on the $200 plan. Google has a $500 plan, so there's clearly a willingness to spend on consumer AI apps that are just on your phone at the same time. Advertising is undefeated. It's one of the greatest business models ever. And if you can get to scale, that makes a lot of sense. So how do you see this playing out for you?

I mean, I feel like PlaySearch actually has maybe, like, some of the easier monetization in general because, like, if we have, like, hotel search, things like that, there's like, pretty good ways to make money from, like, Expedia by booking people out. I mean, we.

We've done stuff with subscriptions and it's.

Actually done quite well. But that was actually before we had any AI search things in it. It always did rather well. Just your, like, little gamification features. So I don't know. That'd be a cool thing to scale. Yeah, things like that.

I think it's kind of like, how are you thinking about the cost side of the business? I feel like the reason that we wound up in the paradigm of like, $20 ChatGPT subscriptions is because the GPUs are on fire. And we talked to George Hotz and he was like, I OpenAI is losing money on me because inference cost is actually material as opposed to, you know, database queries, which are essentially free, you know, for an individual user. Has. Has your AI bill ever been stressful? No, not really.

But I guess it's also another advantage of place search. It's not like you need a new place every day. So it's like, like, I would never, like, view. Our app technically is like a just purely, like, DAU app. I feel like it's probably like, weekly, monthly, whenever you actually need a place. And that's, that's not that frequent. I mean, I think it depends on, like, the city. Like, I'm sure in New York City people look for places more than la.

Things like that, but Foursquare is a pretty famous New York company. Are you moving out there? Are you in LA now?

Oh, no, I'm gonna move to San Francisco.

San Francisco?

What are you going to do without Erewhon?

I know. I even have my Erewhon water right here from this morning.

There we go.

He's committed. Committed. I would always run into him when I. When I lived in Venice. Yeah, yeah, see him all the time. That's awesome, dude. Well, congratulations. And yeah, I want to see, like, over time, the feature on super locals, like, you basically can, like, remove the fog from the world, so you can basically See like how like a video game basically.

I know, I know the guy who posted that, Aiden, he posted that original viral image that went super viral of the fog of war on Google Maps and people were talking about building it.

Yeah, we had it before that actually.

You did.

That was super random feature we built like we were like at Butcher's Daughters and one of our engineers brought up. He just made it over the weekend and it just crushed it.

That's amazing.

Unexpected thing that did really well.

I love that. Yeah. Bringing in like almost a little bit of like the wonder of Pokemon Go and kind of IRL virtual experiences.

Like that's actually crazy how little the map would change because we.

Oh yeah.

Leave home.

Yeah.

Go to work, go to the gym, come back, get breakfast, go to the studio, go home. Let's just do that over and over and over.

Just. The fog of war is just like the pipe on the one freeway that we go on and come right back.

Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us. Congratulations and hope to have you on again soon.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. How did you sleep last night? I put up decent numbers. I think I might have you beaten. I'm up from yesterday. Remember Yesterday was an 82 for me. Today 87. I did get that Ashton hall sound effect ready. 87 for John.

I did terribly.

93% quality, 81% consistency. 6 hours and 51 minutes. How'd you do? Well, give us the number. Don't hide it. Don't hide.

I gotta.

You're trying to dodge it. Oh, well, it hasn't showed today. I thought you put up a great show.

I thought you really brought up a great show. I didn't let it get in the way.

That's good.

It was funny this morning because the. My son decided at 4am that sleeping was over. Basically got in bed. But then the issue is my side of the bed was heating up as like the heat alarm clock.

Oh yeah.

Which is just once you use it.

Go to 8sleep.com use code TBPN and.

But he started realizing that like my side of the bed was just like really warm.

Oh, cozy. Yeah.

And so he just like kicked me off the bed until I was like.

Okay, I told you. My four year old. I had to text Mateo, the CEO of Faint Sleep make. My four year old has demanded Nate sleep. I'm not kidding. And hopefully there's news to share there soon. But I might get him one, a big one and just wrap it around the edges because he's a huge fan of it. And he's very excited. He wants a third zone in the middle because he says, that's where I sleep. We're like nobody. That's not where you sleep.

Well, I have a post to pull up.

Yeah. Which we close out with.

So this is a post from Pool Tay, the US Director of Federal housing. He said, after significant studying and keeping in line with President Trump's vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the Great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage.

No way.

And there is a great post here if we can get this pulled up. Guys, stacking sats. You're going to rob Poe and says these mortgages are solely collateralized on fartcoin.

That will happen.

That will happen. That will happen. I'm sure they will value meme coins slightly differently, hopefully than the majors.

Hopefully.

Anyways, super fun show today.

Yep, I think that's pretty much it. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

And if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you're listening there, put an ad for your business in the review. We'll read it on the show. And thank you so much for watching. Have a beautiful afternoon and evening. We'll see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow. Bye.

Cheers.